CAIRNS AND MOROSI

Back in 1976 –in the early days of my tenure as editor of the Sydney Sun newspaper – an intrepid and passionate reporter named Toni McRae burst into my office and issued a lunch invitation.

It was imperative, she said, that I have lunch with a woman named Junie Morosi. I was aware of the exotic Eurasian beauty and her rumoured, powerful relationship with the former Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns.

I had been living in America at the height of the heady Cairns years and his leadership of the anti-American Vietnam War street demonstrations.

Lunch with the sultry Morosi was intriguing. She turned up wearing sort of gaucho gear and a poncho. Later we were joined by her husband, David Ditchburn, who started to tell this total stranger about his wife’s prehensile sexual talents.

It was a bizarre lunch and to this day I do not know why we broke bread together.

But it was in my newspaper that McRae broke the story – and I wrote the headline – about Jim Cairns and his “special kind of love for Junie”.

Of course they later denied it. For twenty-five years they denied it and even won money in a defamation case when a newspaper printed a story about their relationship.

Both, apparently, lied under oath. Cairns only publicly admitted the affair after his wife Gwen died.

And now Jim Cairns is dead. A true Labor believer. A true pacifist. A former Acting Prime Minister when Gough was abroad who quit his beloved party when he felt the light on the hill had gone out.

He became a familiar, even sad, figure selling his books from a card table at the Camberwell and Prahran markets.

Cairns engendered great loyalty even when his blinkered adoration of Morosi ruined his political career. She was to him what Wallace Simpson was to the Duke of Windsor. They both gave up their thrones.

One of his best left-wing mates, and former POW, Tom Uren, said Cairns was a courageous and compassionate Australian.

“Jim Cairns belongs in the same mould as Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh and Xanana Gusmao”.

He did much in his life. Sadly, he could have done more.

Monday, October 13, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002