During the decades I lived in and wrote about Canberra, perhaps the most intriguing person I came across was Gamilaroi and Darug man Alfred – “Alf” – Stafford.
When I say I “came across” Alf, I mean that I encountered him archivally, thanks to his granddaughter, Michelle Flynn, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which gave me access in 2015 to his extensive collection of correspondence, photographs, voice recordings and ephemera.
When I was first asked if I wanted to write about a little-known Aboriginal man who’d been a personal driver for 11 Australian prime ministers, opened for a cricket team that listed Donald Bradman further down the batting order and who became a lifelong confidant to our longest-serving PM, Robert Menzies, I couldn’t quite believe such a person had existed.
But Alf Stafford had. And he was a one-off. Larger than life. But he was so discreet and so modest that history – and its first drafters, journalists – seemed to overlook him when gazing at the penultimate office of Australian power.
Appropriately, on 5 September, a park at Canberra’s Kingston foreshore will be formally named in Stafford’s honour. This results from a significant effort by Alf’s granddaughter and others to have his remarkable – though always discreet and humble – contribution to Australian public and political life more widely recognised.
“It’s wonderful recognition for my grandfather and his part in the political life of this country and also his contribution to this city, Canberra. He was a modest man but he would be proud,” Flynn says.
In recent years, Stafford has been progressively written into history as the driver for prime ministers Joe Lyons, Earle Page, Arthur Fadden, John Curtin, Frank Forde, Ben Chifley, Robert Menzies (during two stints), Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton and Gough Whitlam.
It’s clear from some guarded comments later in life that he perhaps personally regarded some PMs more highly than others, but none more so than Menzies – perhaps improbably, to an outsider, given the latter’s waspish, patrician sensibilities and demeanour.
But then Stafford and his children saw another side of Menzies.
When Stafford’s first wife, Edith, became ill with cancer in the 1950s, Menzies created a temporary job for him as a “cabinet officer” so he could spend more time with his young children. After Edith died, Stafford and his two youngest children periodically lived in the PM’s Canberra residence, The Lodge. When, in 1956, he married one of the Menzies’ housekeepers, Heather Nesbitt, the prime minister and his wife, Pattie, threw them a reception at The Lodge.
All of this is anecdotally wonderful, of course – the stuff of great history and “story”. But as Australia faces a pivotal reckoning with the question of Indigenous constitutional recognition, there seems something symbolically salient – if not prescient – about the personal presence of an Aboriginal man, deeply in touch with his identity and heritage who was so close to, and perhaps gently influential of, the epicentre of Australian politics for 35 years.
After poring over Stafford’s archive and amid numerous discussions with his children, granddaughter, the Menzies’ daughter Heather Henderson and archivists, I put it this way in a long article for Meanjin: “The growth of Australian industry and burgeoning middle-class satisfaction throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s coincided with the advent of the Indigenous rights movement that led to the successful 1967 referendum, which gave the federal parliament the power to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
“Given that Stafford’s service to prime ministers from Lyons to Whitlam points to a largely hitherto unrecognised Indigenous presence at the epicentre of Australian federal political life for a significant proportion of the twentieth century, it’s reasonable to ponder whether he used his influence to try to further the lot of Indigenous Australians. But even among his own family, Stafford exercised great discretion, so we may never know.”
Stafford was a first-grade cricketer for St George and the Australian Capital Territory. He was Menzies’ adviser on team selection for the yearly Prime Minister’s XI matches at Canberra’s Manuka Oval, beginning with the match against the West Indies in 1951.
In the 1920s, left-handed batsman and leg-break bowler Stafford opened the batting for St George. Bradman was at number three.
The closest he ever came to publicly appraising Bradman was in a community radio interview Stafford gave late in life: “I was an opening batsman and my boys, when they were about eight or 10, they reckoned I must’ve been better than Bradman because I went in before him.”
Alf Stafford died in 1996 at the age of 90. Towards the end, he said, “They used to say, ‘Prime ministers come and go but Alf Stafford goes on forever.’ I wish it were true.”
His granddaughter Michelle Flynn muses on this.
“And now his name really does go on forever.”
• This article was amended on 29 August 2023 to remove an incorrect paragraph stating that Donald Bradman did not sign a bat that Alf Stafford brought to subsequent Prime Minister’s XI matches. The bat was a one-off prize won by Alf Stafford and Bradman did not sign it for unknown reasons.
