A friend cracked me up today, pointing out “so the only person taken up by The Rapture was Bob Gould.”
Now the reminiscing begins. Irascible, indefatigable, irritating. I arrived in Sydney in 1992 and soon worked out who he was, but his glory days were in the 1960s, during the Vietnam moratoriums. Quite incredible that for nearly 50 years he managed to always stand outside left wing discussion venues, and never stopped standing up and hurling questions and accusations at the speakers.
Last year at an Our ALP forum, which I chaired as a final act of faith in the rotting party I was a member of, I had the great pleasure of cutting his second rant of the day short and telling him to sit down. He looked genuinely surprised. Nobody had done that to him for a long time. I had wanted to do that for 20 years, but today I feel a little regretful. The old warhorses of the left are now few, and Bob takes a lot of memories with him, and it will be quiet without his calling for the values we all were supposed to believe in.
I have resigned from the ALP, but Bob Gould never did. Indefatigable indeed.
