Robert Milliken

Since our mutual friend Hamish McDonald sent news that Inside Story contributor Robert Milliken had died on Sunday morning I’ve been thinking about how best to write a short piece — an appreciation rather than an obituary — sketching his life and career. The task is complicated by a paradox. As well as having a great gift for friendship Robert was in many ways a very private person.

It’s twenty years since John Howard launched Australia’s policy of sending boat-borne asylum seekers to Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Australia has since detained almost 6000 people there, many of them for years. By some estimates, the policy has cost Australia $26 billion.

Like their Sydney-based Rugby League counterparts, the twelve Australian Rules clubs that made up the Victorian Football League, or VFL, were rooted in local loyalties and intense emotional attachments. But by the early 1980s rising player payments, steep transfer fees and poor management had pushed perhaps half of them to the brink of insolvency. They were ripe to be swept up in the corporate spirit that characterised the decade.