Until a few years ago it was possible to stay in the perfectly preserved Canberra hotel room where a former Australian prime minister succumbed alongside his secret mistress almost seven decades earlier.
The dark Australian hardwood wardrobe and simple bed remained. So, too, the fading wallpaper and fraying, grey linoleum floor.
Drifting off there, guests might wonder if the great, nation-building ex-prime minister Ben Chifley — by then the opposition Labor Party leader — knew he was dying when he suffered a heart attack in bed just after 10pm in June 1951.
Did the 65-year-old, long-married leader imagine the next day’s headlines recording that he had company?
He need not have worried — too much. Reporting his demise, The Sydney Morning Herald opaquely informed readers: “One of his typists, Miss Phyllis Donnelly, who had taken in some newspapers, was with Mr Chifley when the seizure took place. He asked Miss Donnelly not to call a doctor, but she insisted.”
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They were different times, protective of philandering men who formed relationships with less empowered underlings. The pipe-puffing Chifley’s liaison with his younger typist was tightly concealed in staid 1950s Canberra.
Australia has been consumed in recent weeks by tales of sex involving its politicians. A married minister’s affair and subsequent blacklisting of his press secretary lover; a historic rape claim against the attorney-general; a rape victim silenced by superiors after being assaulted in a minister’s office; staffers filming sex acts on a female MP’s desk; orgies in parliament.
This was not apparent to me during my years as a political correspondent, though colleagues said they had enjoyed carnal pleasures within parliament’s infamous “meditation room” and upon the Speaker’s chair.
Oddly for a western parliament, and astonishingly for Australia’s, there is no non-members bar. It was shut decades ago, ostensibly to save costs, and is now a children’s centre. The result is that almost every parliamentary office maintains a generous alcohol stash. Noisy corridor parties are legendary.
After the longtime Labor prime minister Bob Hawke was sacked by his colleagues a week before Christmas in 1991, he emerged demanding “a bloody cup of tea”. A train of trolleys laden with alcohol appeared. The party went on until dawn. Hawke stayed sober and mercilessly unloaded on the inebriated he believed had worked against him.
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The night in 2015 when the same fate befell the prime minister Tony Abbott, the party resulted in the smashing of an Italian marble table and injuries. One MP needed a wheelchair the next day.
The strangeness of Canberra is its very existence. Known to Australians as the “bush capital”, the city of 400,000 was planted on scrubby sheep country in the foothills of the Australian Alps. It was there to satisfy the need for a new national capital at least 100 miles from Sydney upon the federation of Australia’s six colonies in 1901.
The city’s domineering feature is the equally isolated, vast national parliament, constructed within a hill and covered with grassed roof; its designers intended a vision of a democracy arising from the landscape.
It might instead be argued that the remoteness of the city has allowed a foreign culture to thrive — a building marooned in place and time and controlled by the men who occupy 70 per cent of the 151 seats in the House of Representatives.
“For most of its history parliament has been a boys’ club and boys’ clubs are not in the business of going into voluntary liquidation,” wrote Kate Ellis, the youngest person ever to become an Australian government minister, in her exposé of the parliament’s misogynistic culture, Sex Lies and Question Time, released last month.
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She reveals an early question from a now senior government MP: how many men did she sleep with to get into parliament?
