Sometime after midnight on a freezing morning in August 2002, 24-year-old Jim Chalmers swum the length of the fish pond at University House at the Australian National University. Chalmers was an ANU alumnus, completing a PhD on the leadership of Paul Keating. Back then, he worked as a researcher in Labor’s national secretariat and had just wound up work on a party review spearheaded by Bob Hawke and Neville Wran. He went to the pub. A few beverages in, someone mentioned Hawke had swum the length of the University House fish pond half a century before. Fortified by brash laddishness, history and beer, Chalmers waded in and performed a re-enactment.
Twenty years later, Chalmers returned to the ANU as the federal treasurer and shared this anecdote with a group of elite scholars. Youthful hijinks were repackaged as a story with a moral. Chalmers told the group it was great to mirror your heroes, but people who wanted to make the world a better place needed to offer more than homage or mimicry. They needed to “walk further, and forward” – a theme he’s played with since his first speech to parliament. Michael Cooney, a close friend since their ANU post-grad days, says Australia’s treasurer is one of the few people of his acquaintance with the brio to dive into a fishpond in the dead of Canberra’s winter “and the poise to make such good use of it”.
