Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship (Studies in Commonwealth Politics and History, No. 8)

STUDIES IN COMMONWEALTH POLITICS AND HISTORY No. 8 General Editors: PROFESSOR W.H.MORRIS-JONES Institute of Commonwealt...

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STUDIES IN COMMONWEALTH POLITICS AND HISTORY No. 8 General Editors: PROFESSOR W.H.MORRIS-JONES Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London PROFESSOR DENNIS AUSTIN Department of Government University of Manchester

AUSTRALIA AND BRITAIN

ABOUT THE SERIES Legatee of a vast empire, the Commonwealth still carries the imprint of its past. And in doing so it may be said to have a collective identity which, in a very varying degree, each of its members exhibits. This, we believe, can sustain a collective inquiry into the political history and institutions of countries w hich were once governed within the British Empire and we note signs of a revival of interest in this field. In recent years ‘area studies’ have been encouraged, but there is also a sense in which the Commonwealth is itself a region, bounded not by geography but history, and imperial history in particular. Seen thus the region cannot exclude areas into which empire overspilled as in the Sudan, or areas now outside the Commonwealth such as South Africa and Burma, or the unique case of Ireland. No account of the dilemmas which face the government of Canada or Nigeria or India—or indeed of the United Kingdom—which examines the present in relation to the past can be complete which omits some consideration of this ‘imperial dimension’. Without in any sense trying to claim that there is a ‘political culture’ common to all Commonwealth countries it is certainly the case that some of the institutions, some part of the political life, and a certain element in the political beliefs of many Commonwealth leaders, can be to derive from the import of institutions, practices and beliefs from Britain into its former colonies. Nor is the Commonwealth merely a useful category of study. It is also a community of scholars, many of them teaching and writing within the growing number of universities throughout the member countries who share an interest in the consequences of imperial experience and have common traditions of study. The present series of books is intended to express that interest and those traditions. They are presented not as a guide to the Commonwealth as a corporate entity, but as studies either in the politics and recent history of its member states or of themes which are of common interest to several of the countries concerned. Within the Commonwealth there is great variety—of geographical setting, of cultural context, of economic development and social life: they provide the challenge to comparative study, while the elements of common experience make the task manageable. A cross-nation study of administrative reforms or of legislative behaviour is both facilitated and given added meaning; so also is an examination of the external relations of one or more member states; even a single country study, say on Guyana, is bound to throw light on problems which are echoed in Sri Lanka and Jamaica. The series will bring together—and, we hope, stimulate—studies of those kinds carried out by both established and younger scholars. In doing so, it can make its distinctive contribution to an understanding of the changing contemporary world. While attention is always easily drawn to the more striking changes and dramatic developments, significant alterations of an unobtrusive kind are too readily ignored. This is outstandingly the case with the relations between Australia and Britain: here changes, by no means slow in recent years, have

iii

taken place almost unnoticed, certainly with little by way of general and systematic examination. (The volume edited for this series by Dr Peter Lyon on Britain and Canada examined a not dissimilar case.) The present set of essays approaches Australia and Britain partly by looking at snapshots of the relations between the two countries at different periods, partly by reflections on facets of Australian national life in which the British element has undergone various, continuing transmutations. Diversification and Australianisation are no doubt keynotes in the experience but our authors, each a recognised authority on his subject, reveal the fascinating subtlety and interplay within the movement. This book, as an exploration of the two countries in their emerging present, will be of interest to all who have a concern for the way they shape their futures. The dedication of the book to the memory of Trevor Reese gives added satisfaction to the General Editors of the series who were privileged to have known and enjoyed Trevor as colleague at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. List of books available in the series No. 1 D.A.Low Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism No. 2 R.S.Milne and K.J.Ratnam Malaysia—New States in a New Nation No. 3 Dennis Austin and Robin Luckham, eds. Politicians and Soldiers in Ghana: 1966–1972 No. 4 Peter Lyon, ed. Britain and Canada: Survey of a Changing Relationship No. 5 Keith Panter-Brick, ed. Soldiers and Oil: The Political Transformation of Nigeria No. 6 James Jupp Sri Lanka: Third World Democracy No. 7 W.H.Morris-Jones and G.Fischer, eds. Decolonisation and After: The British and French Experience No. 8 A.F.Madden and W.H.Morris-Jones, eds. Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship

AUSTRALIA AND BRITAIN Studies in a Changing Relationship Edited by

A.F.MADDEN AND W.H.MORRIS-JONES With a Foreword by

THE LATE PROFESSOR SIR KENNETH WHEARE

FRANK CASS in association with INSTITUTE OF COMMONWEALTH STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

First published 1980 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED Gainsborough House, Gainsborough Road, London, E11 1RS, England This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED c/o Biblio Distribution Centre 81 Adams Drive, P.O.Box 327, Totowa, N.J. 07511 Copyright © 1980 Institute of Commonwealth Studies ISBN 0-203-98820-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 714 63149 3 (Print Edition) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited in writing. Photosetting by Thomson Press (India) Limited, New Delhi

IN MEMORY OF TREVOR RICHARD REESE 1929–76 BA (Sheffield) PhD (London) Research Officer, London School of Economics (1955–6) Lecturer, University of Newcastle, Australia (1956–9) Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney (1960–2) Leverhulme Fellow in Commonwealth Studies, University of Hull (1962–4) Senior Lecturer (1964–9) and then Reader, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London Author of: Colonial Georgia: a study in British imperial policy in the eighteenth century (1963) Australia in the Twentieth Century (1964) The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868– 1968 (1968) Frederica: Colonial Fort and Town of Eighteenth Century America (1969) Australia, New Zealand and the United States: a survey of international relations, 1941–1968 (1969) Founder and editor of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

CONTENTS

Dedication

vi

Foreword by the late Professor Sir Kenneth Wheare

ix

Editors’ Preface

xiii

Contributors

xiv

London and the Governors: Relations in Eastern Australia, 1825– 45 A.G.L.Shaw

1

The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872–1902 K.S.Inglis

20

The Rise and Fall of the High Commissioner: S.M. Bruce in London P.G.Edwards

37

The Australian Expatriates: Gilbert and Hubert Murray Francis West

54

Anglo-Australian Partnership in Defence of the Malaysian Area T.B.Millar

68

‘an Empire that don’t care what you do…’ J.D.B.Miller

86

‘British’ Immigration to Australia W.D.Borrie

97

The Evolution of British Political Institutions in Australia R.S.Parker

113

Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition Alan Lawson

130

Law and the Courts Garfield Barwick

140

viii

British Influence on Australian Education in the Twentieth Century W.F.Connell

157

Changing Economic Relations J.O.N.Perkins

174

Index

185

FOREWORD by the late PROFESSOR SIR KENNETH WHEARE Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration, Oxford, 1944–57 Rector of Exeter Gollege, Oxford, 1957–72 President, British Academy, 1967–71 A collection of essays such as this which seeks to probe certain facets of the changing relationship between Britain and Australia is a valuable and timely contribution to our self-knowledge, not least in revealing the unreality of some of the mutual assumptions made over antipodean distances. As one born and educated in Australia, who has spent two-thirds of his life living in Britain and educating Britons and others (including Australians) in Oxford, I welcome this book. As an expatriate Australian political scientist—what has been called at times an export reject—I have found two of the essays in this collection of particular interest. The first is Professor R.S.Parker’s ‘The Evolution of British Political Institutions in Australia’. This strikes me as a penetrating and clear-headed analysis of the subject: one of great interest for a political scientist who seldom has an opportunity of seeing an experiment actually going on in his laboratory. But the second essay which I found particularly evocative was W.F.Connell’s on ‘British Influence on Australian Education in the Twentieth Century’. My interest in Professor Parker’s essay comes from my own study over many years of the Cabinet form of government. But that in W.F.Connell’s essay arises from the fact that for the first twenty-one years of my life from 1907 to 1928 I was a recipient of Australian (or more accurately Victorian) education. I thought then that it was a good system (in so far as a schoolboy or a student has any opinions about the system under which he is educated) and I have continued to think so since. But I did not know how much discussion and thought had gone into the decisions taken. My interest in Connell’s essay comes from experience; that in Professor Parker’s from study—the former is at first hand, but the latter perhaps only at second. I was educated at state primary schools in Victoria, in Warragul in Gippsland and in Stawell ‘the gateway to the Wimmera’, as they called it, though Ararat, twenty miles away, disputed the title. And after obtaining the qualifying certificate at Stawell state primary school I went on or ‘up’, as we said, to Stawell High School and thereafter to the High School at Maryborough, another gateway town—this time the gateway to the Mallee. As Connell explains, these country high schools were selective grammar schools. There was a choice in Stawell of the high school or what was called, from its history as a goldmining

x

town, the School of Mines which in Maryborough was called the Technical School. These schools were mixed boys and girls both at the primary and secondary level. My school days at Stawell state primary school were in the period of World War I, 1915 to 1918. We children took a great interest in the war. We never doubted that we would win—that ‘the Empire’ would win. On a Monday morning we saluted the flag and repeated the words, which I remember to this day: I love God and my country I will honour the flag I will serve the King And cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws. We raised the right hand as we repeated the words. The flag which we honoured was the Australian flag which was run up the flag staff in the school grounds. It was not the Union Jack. We sang many patriotic songs in these years and we went to many recruiting meetings where patriotic appeals were made for recruits and we had a wonderful day out on Empire Day when there was a demonstration in Central Park and we made a map of Australia with boys and girls dressed in white. But although we enjoyed our war—for there were few restrictions on food or anything else in those years in Australia—we were very glad when the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918 and we all rang the fire bells in the town. After the war I was a pupil at Stawell High School. I remember at that time that a great deal of our time was given over to English literature. We had as one textbook a collection of poems entitled ‘The call of the Homeland’ published in England and edited (if I recall aright) by Henry Newbolt. From this book I learned a great deal of English poetry by heart. The only Australian poets we knew were Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson. A great distinction in a small country town was to have been on a ‘trip home’. One of our teachers at the primary school at Stawell, just after the war, had made such a trip and we listened enthralled to the account of what she had seen and done. We spoke always of ‘The Old Country’ and of going ‘home’, though as a second generation Australian my home was Australia—or more exactly Victoria. Other states were almost like going abroad. My family moved to Maryborough and we lived there from 1920 to 1923 and (as I have said) I attended the High School there and finally obtained the intermediate certificate. Maryborough High School was a brand new school recently opened, whereas Stawell High School had been a former Higher Elementary School which had been up-graded. We had at Maryborough purposebuilt science laboratories and the school was laid out in a quadrangle. There was a tennis court and a great deal of organized sport from which alas I abstained much to my parents’ regret.

xi

In the state primary schools corporal punishment was always a possibility or rather a probability. In the high schools it was seldom used. We children regarded it as something to be avoided. But we did not realize that it was an affront to our personal dignity (such concepts had not yet been discovered). Discipline in primary or secondary schools in my experience was strict; I cannot recall any case where a teacher could not control a class. The teachers were men and women and they were in my experience all good teachers. At Maryborough High School the boys and girls were forbidden to converse together at school. This was a new rule to me. It had not been applied in Stawell. It was, of course, impossible to enforce out of school hours, and no attempt was made to do so. We accepted the rules without difficulty. We were not hostile to our teachers. We simply regarded them as a race apart. We did not make friends with them. I was educated up to the age of sixteen in state schools. Among our subjects were ‘nature study’ as it was called, and ‘hygiene’, a mixture of anatomy and physiology which nobody took seriously. It was not a subject that we were examined in and so it did not matter. Religious instruction was given at the beginning of the day once a week when visiting clergymen from the town came and took classes. Catholic children were separated and in any case attendance was voluntary. The state primary schools catered almost exclusively for Protestants. There were Catholic primary schools in both Stawell and Maryborough. At the secondary or high school stage Catholics and Protestants were together. This was the usual practice in country towns in Victoria. There had been a good deal of controversy about the place of religious instruction in state schools and the compromise agreed upon in Victoria in the years from 1914 to 1929 was that of the clergy being permitted to visit the school and give talks. In 1923 I moved to another part of the educational system which Connell has described. We moved from the country to Melbourne and I was sent to Scotch Gollege, a secondary school run by the Presbyterian Church of Victoria. There were six principal schools of this kind in Melbourne called ‘public schools’ each controlled by a religious denomination; they were fee-paying and all except one, Geelong Grammar School (Church of England), were predominantly day schools. British (not English) influence was strong at Scotch College. The Principal was a Scot from Aberdeen and so also was the VicePrincipal. Religious instruction was provided by a chaplain (a Presbyterian) and the curriculum was like that of a Scottish Academy—a mixture of literary and scientific subjects to a high level. Most of the boys (it was boys only) had some affiliation with the Presbyterian Church or were of Scottish descent. Discipline was strict, but we were more friendly with the masters than had been the case at the state schools. This was the greatest difference I noticed in moving from the state system to an independent school. I noticed also a greater freedom was allowed to us all at Scotch College though the strict discipline in the background was concentrated upon the person of the Principal with whom rested the power of corporal punishment. We had a great affection and veneration for him. From Scotch College I obtained the

xii

leaving certificate which entitled me to enter the University of Melbourne which I attended in 1926, 1927 and 1928 and obtained the degree of BA in a combined school of Greek and Philosophy. (I had taken up Greek at Scotch College. It was not taught at a country high school.) In the University of Melbourne too British influence was considerable, chiefly perhaps because many of the staff had been trained in Britain either originally or at some stage in their academic career. Former Rhodes Scholars who had been at Oxford had a good deal to do with this. We looked to British universities for our ideas and our textbooks. It was extremely rare to have a visitor at the university from Canada or the United States. It never occurred to me that I would receive any education anywhere other than Australia or Victoria until out of the blue I found myself chosen in November 1928 to be the Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 1929. Within twentyfour hours I found myself committed to Oxford University—about which I knew nothing. It was difficult to get used to the idea that I had to take another degree. But there were many Oxford graduates at the University of Melbourne at that time and they reassured me. It has always seemed to me that an important source of British influence on Australian education comes from the institution of the Rhodes Scholarships. So many former Australian Rhodes Scholars have had distinguished careers in education in Australia at all levels that it is not surprising that some British influence should have been transmitted by them to the Australian system. Indeed there have been times in British universities when there has been comment upon the extent of the Australian influence on British education, so extensive had been the penetration of Australian scholars into the British university system. It is not too much to expect that for so long as the Australian states choose Rhodes Scholars, men and women, in the future of the calibre that have been chosen in the past (if one may say so with humility!), and for so long as Oxford University is willing and able to receive them and give them the training they require, for so long will a British influence be present in Australian education to the mutual benefit of Britain and Australia alike. Indeed, what is required is that there should be more such schemes of scholarly interchange which are expressly concerned to enable men and women in both my countries and elsewhere to share the differing academic emphases with which over these great distances we pursue our common themes.

EDITORS’ PREFACE

This book was conceived with a view to commemorating Trevor Reese, whose life was an expression of the relationship between Australia and Britain, and it has been prepared in the belief that others will find value in studies of this relationship. We have to thank all the authors who so readily agreed to contribute to the volume and we are also grateful to Dr Robert Holland and Miss Yvonne Crawford for their assistance in the preparation of material for publication. We are particularly grateful to the late Sir Kenneth Wheare for his nostalgic Foreword—the last piece of writing, apart from the odd review, that he did. On one of Dr Madden’s fairly regular visits to him Professor Wheare was told of the project of this book and showed interest, while being unwilling to commit himself to a contribution. When, however, he read some of the articles he did very diffidently offer to write an autobiographical piece to illustrate the changes he, an Australian who spent most of his life in Great Britain, had seen in his lifetime. A.F.Madden W.H.Morris-Jones

CONTRIBUTORS

W.D.BORRIE, formerly Professor of Demography, Australian National University SIR GARFIELD BARWICK, Chief Justice, High Court of Australia W.F.CONNELL, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Sydney and Fellow, Faculty of Education, Monash University P.G.EDWARDS, Master of St Mark’s College, University of Adelaide K.S.INGLIS, Professor of History, Australian National University ALAN LAWSON, Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland A.F.MADDEN, Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College and Reader in Commonwealth Government, University of Oxford T.B.MILLAR, Professorial Fellow in International Relations, Australian National University J.D.B.MILLER, Professor of International Relations, Australian National University W.H.MORRIS-JONES, Director, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London R.S.PARKER, Professor of Political Science, Australian National University J.O.N.PERKINS, Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne A.G.L.SHAW, Professor of History, Monash University FRANCIS WEST, Planning Dean in Social Sciences and Professor of History and Government, Deakin University, Geelong

A.G.L.SHAW

London and the Governors: Relations in Eastern Australia, 1825–45

‘Our ancestors’, declared Herman Merivale in his lectures on colonization in 1840, when Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, ‘cared little or nothing about the internal government of their colonies’; though they tried ‘to derive certain supposed commercial advantages from them’, their local affairs were their own business. In part this could not be helped. ‘Colonial governors…were too far away…to make any effective supervision of their own actions or policies possible’, wrote Helen Taft Manning in 1956, and this state of affairs had continued into the nineteenth century. It was ‘almost impossible to draw up instructions in this country with any confidence that they will be applicable to the actual situation in the colony’, admitted Goderich in 1831, when Secretary of State. ‘My instructions were drawn up from the latest information received, and they contemplated a state of things exactly the reverse of what I found to prevail’, explained Sir William Denison when he arrived in Hobart as Governor in 1846.1 Power was just as great a problem as ignorance, for it was difficult to act in opposition to strongly expressed local opinion. In 1828 James Stephen thought that in Canada resistance could be ‘pregnant with mischief’, and his then superior, R.W.Hay, noted at the same time that attempting to legislate too much in detail for the colonies was ‘a fault into which this country has often fallen, and never with impunity’.2 But though the staff in the Colonial Office might recognize in theory the futility of trying to dictate on matters of local concern, reference to American colonies after 1763 would show that despite Merivale’s assertion its definition of ‘local’ did not always coincide with that of the colonists. At that time Great Britain had wanted to raise revenue from her dependencies; between 1830 and 1850, she

1

Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies, 1861, repr. London 1967, p. 78; Helen Taft Manning, ‘Who ran the British Empire—1830–1850?’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. V, 1965, p. 89; Goderich to Bourke, 29 September 1831, Historical Records of Australia (hereafter HRA), XV, p. 383; William Denison, Varieties of Vice-Regal Life, 1870, Vol. I, p. 18. 2 James Stephen, CO 323/45, 199, quoted P.Kanplund, James Stephen and the British Colonial System, Madison 1953, p. 267; R.W.Hay, GO 201/195, p. 345, quoted J.J.Eddy, Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1818–1831, Oxford 1969, p. 23.

2 AUSTRALIA AND BRITAIN

wanted to use their resources, and at both periods she was concerned to assert her legal paramountcy. Lord Grey might admit in 1853 that ‘it would undoubtedly be in the highest degree absurd to attempt to govern from Downing Street’, but like others he had often attempted to do so, and although Lord Glenelg might write in 1835, when Secretary of State, that Parliamentary legislation on any subject of exclusive internal concern to any British colony possessing a representative assembly is, as a general rule, unconstitutional’, it was unfortunate that many controversial subjects, such as land, immigration, slavery, the church establishments, and others, seemed to be not of ‘exclusive internal concern’.3 Certainly in the Australian colonies there was no elected assembly, but there was both a vocal press and powerful colonial spokesmen ready to criticize hotly policies the Governors had been told to carry out; in these circumstances, should the latter try to modify their instructions, or mollify public opinion, or do neither and obey their orders without demur? Much would depend on the character of the Governor concerned. Professor Creighton has noted that between 1818 and 1831, in the development of the dispute in Lower Canada which culminated in the risings of 1836–7, ‘five governors and one lieutenantgovernor had a hand in the solution of the financial question; their personalities, their characteristics, their blunders, and even their successes had an influence upon the development of the quarrel’; contemporaneously Stephen underlined their importance on the one hand when he criticized, in 1829, the ‘very indiscreet use of the power of the Executive’, and on the other, when on the eve of the rebellion, he declared that, ‘a resolute stand by a resolute man a few weeks ago would have subdued this violence… To see such a game lost merely from the want of one vigorous effort made in due time would indeed be enough to put to flight the patience of Job himself’.4 But if personal initiative was possible, or desirable, responsibility was necessary too. A governor might be inefficient, arbitrary or unjust, and the Colonial Office had to be ready to act as a judge, since complaints against abuse of power seemed never-ending, and it was difficult to persuade Parliament to interfere, apart from the objections of those concerned. ‘We governors should not desire to see any encouragement to the formation of Committees of the House of Commons to overhaul our proceedings’, wrote Sir Richard Bourke from Sydney to his colleague Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, in this echoing an earlier

3 See, for example, Ian R.Christie and B.W.Labaree, Empire or Independence, Oxford 1976; Earl Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, 2nd edn, 1853, Vol. I, p. 19; Glenelg to Head, 5 December 1835, instructions, Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1836, [113], Vol. XXXIX, p. 60. 4 D.G.Creighton, ‘The Struggle for Financial Control in Lower Canada, 1818–1831’ in Ramsay Cook (ed.), Constitutionalism and Nationalism in Lower Canada, Toronto 1969, p. 47; Stephen, mem., 13 January 1829, CO 42/218, quoted H.T.Manning, The Revolt of French Canada, 1800–1835, London 1962, p. 273; Stephen to Arthur, 22 November 1837, Arthur Papers, Vol. 4, Mitchell Library, Sydney (ML), A 2164.

LONDON AND THE GOVERNORS 3

complaint from Sir James Kempt in Canada, that if such investigations were to be held ‘no man who values his character and honour will accept a Colonial Government’.5 So it fell to the Secretary of State to praise him, defend him, reprimand him, or recall him, as occasion demanded, although the Governor might be restrained to some extent in the colony by the Executive Council or by the local legislature. Since in the Australian colonies the principal government officers sat in the Legislative Council, this raised the question of their duties. Should they support the Governor in public in the case of difference of opinion? Should there be a sense of ‘collective responsibility’, or should Councillors defend their opposing opinions to the extent of hindering the carrying out the Governor’s policy? In practice, the Colonial Office tended to exalt the Governor at the expense of both his subordinates and local opinion while down-grading them in relation to itself, as if it wished him to become primarily an administrator, carrying out the instructions of his superior, however unpopular or unsuitable they might be. It decided what policies should be determined locally and what in London, and was ready enough to ignore local critics, even when they appealed to friends and allies at home. All six governors in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land between 1825 and 1845 were involved in bitter local dissensions, and though these were sometimes aroused by their personal activities, more often they were due to their attempts to follow policies dictated by the Secretary of State. During this period the longest-serving governor was George Arthur, who commanded in Van Diemen’s Land from May 1824 until October 1836.6 Puritanical, somewhat self-righteous and autocratic, extra-ordinarily conscientious and high-minded, undoubtedly a slave to duty though ever eager for ‘approbation’, he firmly believed that colonial interests should be subordinated to those of the mother country, though admitting that colonial prosperity itself was one of these. Most importantly, he looked at his colony ‘in the light of an extensive Gaol to the Empire’, and developing his policy in the interests of the penological requirements of the United Kingdom, he told Goderich that ‘almost every measure of local government is formed with reference to convict discipline’.7 He developed the system, which his predecessors had begun, of assigning prisoners to private service, and prescribed very detailed rules for their treatment, regarding this as the normal method of dealing with the convicts, while trying to reform them by religious instruction and rewards for good conduct, controlling them by an expanded police force and

5

Bourke to Arthur, 31 January 1836, Arthur Papers (ML), Vol. 8, A 2168; Kempt to Sir Herbert Taylor, 10 October 1828, quoted D.M.Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1961, p. 106. Sir Richard Bourke was governor of New South Wales from December 1831 until December 1837. 6 Technically he, like his successors, was Lieutenant-governor, but I refer to him as Governor for brevity.


watchful magistracy, and punishing them by periods in chain gangs on public works, or less frequently, at the penal settlements. In these details he was subjected to no great interference from home, though British ministers were concerned that the convicts in assigned service were treated too leniently, and consequently that the transportation was not a sufficiently deterrent punishment, and no amount of despatch writing could convince them otherwise. ‘You will not believe I am capable of misleading His Majesty’s government’, he protested in 1834. ‘I have a better practical knowledge of this question…[than] persons, giving full scope to their imaginations, [who] expatiate…on the inefficiency of transportation’; but he was not believed, and like the New South Wales governors, he was told again and again to be more severe. Certainly occasional remarks in his despatches could justify such an attitude, and his discussion in October 1832, of the advantages of a period of ‘rigid discipline’ on the roads, before assignment, might have been partly responsible for the Secretary of State ordering, next August, that designated bad offenders should be sent to a penal settlement or worked in irons for long periods after they arrived. This he opposed strongly, as being too severe, and destroying all hope of reformation, but since the instructions were found to be illegal, the debate on their merits was cut short. 8 On most details, such as employing the men on public works, and not taxing either the masters of assigned servants or convicts with tickets-of-leave, he got his way, but he suffered a major defeat over the Treasury’s decision that the colony should pay for its police and gaols. This raised the question of who controlled the colony’s finances, and in so far as that is the basis of all government, and expenditure involves taxation, it is not surprising that Australians, like the colonists in Virginia and New England in 1765 and in French Canada after 1820, strongly opposed this charge imposed from outside. Certainly it should not have come as a surprise, for when the British government had agreed in 1827 to meet all convict and military expenditure, as Arthur had suggested as a means of balancing the colony’s budget, Goderich had said that the cost of the police and gaols, though ‘intimately connected with the convict system’, would ‘eventually become chargeable upon the Colonial Treasury…as the growing prosperity of the Colony may augment its receipts’, and Darling, at that time governor of New South Wales, had suggested that that colony should even then pay at least half.9 But this had been largely forgotten when, in November 1834, the Treasury noticed an accumulated surplus at Sydney and, under-estimating the costs involved, urged

7 Arthur to Bathurst, 21 April 1826, HRA, III, v, pp. 152–3; to Goderich, 8 September 1831, CO 280/30, p. 20; for his penal policy generally, A.G.L.Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, Melbourne 1966. 8 Arthur to Stanley, 4 February 1834, CO 280/46, p. 183, and 10 October 1832, CO 280/ 36, p. 33; Stanley to Arthur, 26 August 1833, CO 408/9, p. 410, and to Bourke, 21 August, HRA, xvii, p. 198; Bourke to Stanley, 10 January 1834, HRA, xvii, p. 315.


that the transfer should be made; without consulting the governors the Secretary of State agreed, and although for the moment he was willing to allow them to appropriate any surplus land revenue, he emphasized that this was ‘not to be taken as divesting the government of the full and uncontrolled power of applying the Crown Revenues, in part or in whole’.10 From Sydney, Bourke protested that this would interfere ‘very injuriously with other objects of public utility which it is most desirable to promote’, but he did what he was told, and in 1835 forced the estimate through the Legislative Council by the unwilling vote of the official members. In Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur expressed the fear that the charges ‘might well arouse a determined or general spirit of opposition’ to the whole convict system, which in time they certainly helped to do, and postponed including them in his estimates for two years, in the hope that his protests would be heeded; but this was a vain hope, and on the eve of his departure he was peremptorily ordered to do as he was told.11 Like Bourke he had official votes to carry the appropriation through the Legislative Council, but the incident showed the limitations on the ability of even a highly regarded governor to influence policy at home. He was equally unsuccessful on the land question, as the British government took over specific control of policy on a subject which it regarded as being of Imperial, not local, concern. In 1825 Arthur and Darling had been ordered to carry out a general survey of their colonies, to reserve one-seventh of the land to endow a Church and Schools Corporation, to sell crown land on certain conditions, to grant 500,000 acres to the Australian Agricultural Company and 250,000 to the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and to make individual grants only in proportion to the capital of the applicant and specifically liable to quitrent, but the underlying idea of reproducing features of English landed society, with a landed gentry, aided by an established church, at the head of rural communities of ‘respectable’ tenantry, was not suited to Australian conditions, and the huge estates of the two companies and of the Church and School Corporation were uneconomic. The impossibility of satisfying all claimants, and efforts to stop land-jobbing and uphold the rights of the Crown made land administration a ‘torment’. Inevitably there were accusations of favoritism, and though on the whole these seem to be unjustified, complaints were perennial, since patronage was still a common practice and an occasional politically-

9

Arthur to Bathurst, 3 July 1825, HRA, III, iv, p. 286; Goderich to Darling, 30 July 1827, HRA, xiii, pp. 470–3; Darling to Hay, 16 December 1826, HRA, xii, p. 770, and to Goderich, 5 October 1827, HRA, xiii, p. 537. 10 Spring-Rice to Bourke, 15 November 1834, encl. Baring (Treasury) to Sir G.Grey, 23 September, HRA, xvii, pp. 577–80; to Arthur, 17 November, CO 408/10, p. 116; Glenelg to Bourke, 10 July 1835, HRA, xviii, pp. 21–2. 11 Bourke to Aberdeen, 12 August 1835, HRA, xviii, p. 73; Arthur to Spring-Rice, 21 April 1835, CO 280/56, p. 243; Glenelg to Arthur, 29 February 1836, CO 408/12; Arthur to Glenelg, 20 September, CO 280/67, p. 341.


inspired refusal aroused antagonism, though in these respects Secretaries of State were as much to blame (if blame is called for) as the Governors; however, to end this, to check uneconomic ‘dispersion’, and to increase land revenue, Goderich, with the ardent assistance of his Whig Under-Secretary Lord Howick (the future third Earl Grey), in January 1831 announced a revolutionary change of policy, again drawn up without specific consultation with the Governors. Henceforward, wrote Goderich, land grants would cease, and all crown land was to be sold by auction at a minimum price of 5s. per acre. Concurrently, the government would assist emigrants to go to Australia.12 From New South Wales, Bourke’s only complaint was that ‘he was almost wholly deprived of those means of influence which in former times were exerted with effect for the support of authority’, but in Van Diemen’s Land, where the policy was less suitable, Arthur disliked it. He thought it would slow down rural expansion, and so the employment of assigned convicts; he sought permission to make small grants again, but this was naturally refused. He did not try to evade his instructions, as has often been alleged, and though he honoured past promises, as he had been told to do, the grants he made in 1831 were such as might be expected when compared with previous years, or with New South Wales. He referred doubtful cases to London, and a later inquiry into alleged abuses could find none.13 Arthur disliked the idea of assisted immigration too, thinking it would upset his convict system. He complained often and bitterly of the quality of those sent out, and protested vigorously against the colonists being ‘taxed’ to pay for their passages. At first he had no success. ‘I desire you to adopt some arrangement without delay’, wrote Goderich in 1833, but the governor kept up his criticism of depraved, profligate and idle arrivals, and eventually a new Secretary of State admitted that ‘the colony cannot be expected to pay the costs these sort of people entail’.14 This was one gubernatorial victory, but Arthur was not very interested in the migration programme, despite its apparent value to the United Kingdom, and took little further action about it; in New South Wales, where the labour shortage was more acute, Bourke was more anxious to improve it. The Colonial Office approved his proposals for improving the selection and treatment of those coming out under government auspices, and for paying a bounty to private individuals who brought out immigrants on their own account; within such semiadministrative matters, a governor’s initiative could be effective, for he was essentially an administrator, not a policy maker.

12 Arthur to Bathurst, 10 and 11 August 1825, and 3 March 1827, HRA, III, iv, pp. 311– 16, and v, p. 537; Goderich to Darling, 9 and 23 January, and 14 February 1831, HRA, xvi, pp. 19, 34 and 81. 13 Bourke to Goderich, 24 August 1832, HRA, xvi, p. 723; Arthur to Goderich, 9 July 1831, CO 280/29, p. 184, and 27 October, CO 280/30, p. 224; S.C. on Disposal of Lands in British Colonies, Report, PP, 1836 [512], Vol. XI, pp. 499, q. 1763 ff., and 1931 ff.


As such, both Arthur and Darling were extremely efficient. But were somewhat authoritarian in temper, stiff and formal in manner. Both were serving officers when appointed, and had previously governed colonies where their opponents were not ordinary political critics, but smugglers and slave-runners, who tried to use libertarian pleas to justify their nefarious activities.15 Both worked very long hours, and suffered in health in consequence. Both found what Darling described as ‘confusion and disorder, unparalleled and inconceivable’, but succeeded in ordering their establishments.16 Both watched their expenditure with great care, though regularly criticized by the Colonial Office for extravagance, Arthur even being warned that he might have his salary mulcted for spending more than £200 without previous approval, contrary to orders which at the time he had not received. Both tried, with some success, to improve the state of their capitals. Both improved the magistracy and the police. Neither could appoint officials directly, and were sometimes frustrated when they tried to promote men who had proved efficient, but both were accused of favoritism when they did so, and of nepotism when they recommended their relatives— though these were much to be preferred to the incompetents which the British government thrust upon them. Of these, several had to be dismissed, and they swelled the ranks of those aggrieved, thoroughly as they deserved their removal, but there was more substance in complaints that the governors took official notice of criticisms of themselves by civil servants which would have better been passed over in silence. Both were criticized for using their control of assignment to penalize their opponents, necessary though this normally was for convict discipline, but though Darling on one occasion was reprimanded for this by the Secretary of State, Arthur was able to rebut the charge when it was made against him. Both were attacked for trying to control the press, though in this they were obeying their instructions. Finally, both were recalled, ostensibly because of the time they had held office, but in reality because of the complaints made against them—though in Darling’s case this was to allay colonial dissensions and in Arthur’s the recall was, it was claimed, founded on English public opinion’. Both were highly offended at what they regarded as a slur on their reputations, but

14 Arthur to Goderich, 9 July 1831, CO 280/29, p. 168, Goderich to Arthur, 23 March 1833, CO 408/9, p. 132; Arthur to Goderich, 24 September 1832, CO 280/35, 241, and 24 August 1833, CO 280/42, p. 294; to Stanley, 24 January 1834, CO 280/46, p. 121; SpringRice to Arthur, 9 November, CO 408/10, p. 110. 15 Arthur was superintendent of British Honduras from 1814 to 1822. Darling was actinggovernor of Mauritius from February 1819 to July 1820. 16 Darling to Hay, 2 February 1826, HRA, xii, pp. 148 ff., and to Huskisson, 10 April 1828, HRA, xiv, p. 124; Darling to Arthur, 23 December 1825, Arthur Papers (ML), vii, A 2167; J.W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, New Haven 1970, pp. 67 ff.; Peter Eldershaw, ‘Guide to the Public Records of Tasmania’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, Vol. XV, 1968.


both received unstinted praise for their services, and knighthoods as soon as the inquiries into the accusations against them were completed.17 Sir Richard Bourke, who succeeded Darling and governed New South Wales during the last five years of Arthur’s term at Hobart Town, was another veteran of the Napoleonic war, but he had retired for some time on half-pay before serving as acting-governor at Cape Town, and later proceeding to Sydney. More urbane than his predecessor, he did not try to prosecute or silence his outspoken (conservative) press critics, and as he supported the introduction of civilian juries, a matter which the British government had left the colonies of decide, and pressed for the introduction of some form of popular election for the Legislative Council, he has won a reputation for liberalism. He tried to see that magistrates obeyed the law, defined their powers, and removed errant justices from the bench; although he was hotly criticized for this, the legislation he introduced and his instructions to the superintendents at the penal settlements and the chain gangs showed little evidence of an over-lenient attitude.18 To improve convict discipline, he favoured the extension of the chain gangs, and even requested discretionary authority to order any convict to be worked in irons. He recognized the economic benefits of assignment, and the possibilities it had for reforming the prisoners, but he rightly criticized its tendency to ‘brutalise’ masters and their families, and argued that for this reason transporation should be gradually stopped. Like Arthur, he wanted to give state aid to all churches and to all schools, and together they persuaded Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State from 1835 to 1839, to support them; but on this subject, Bourke’s ideas conflicted with those of several members of his Executive Council, who were official members of the legislature, and this raised the then undecided question of the proper relationship between a governor and his senior colleagues. The subject had emerged in a confused way when Arthur had suspended his Attorney-General, J.T.Gellibrand, in 1826. The governor had accused him of some shady practices, but what had seemed more important was Gellibrand’s ‘publicly exhibiting his intimacy’ with a known press critic of the government. This, he complained, would ‘inevitably destroy that entire confidence’ which should exist between the governor and his principal legal officer, for although ‘in the transaction of public business, gentlemanly habits and acquirements, although most desirable, may be dispensed with’ (and in this case, had to be), ‘so much depends on sincerity and good faith, that no attainments…can possibly supply the absence of these qualities, of which, I may affirm, Mr. Gellibrand is 17

Darling to Goderich, 23 June 1831, HRA, xvi, p. 286, and 21 June 1832, CO 201/229; Goderich to Bourke, 15 April and 26 December 1832, HRA, xvi, pp. 612 and 834; Glenelg to Arthur, 10 January 1836, CO 408/12, p. 58, Arthur to Glenelg, 4 May, CO 280/66, p. 41; Stephen, draft, 12 August 1837, and minute by Sir G.Grey, CO 280/84, pp. 308–14; Glenelg to Franklin, 1 January and 11 May, CO 408/12, pp. 169 and 206. 18 Cf., Hazel King, Richard Bourke, London 1971; A.G.L.Shaw, Heroes and Villains in History—Darling and Bourke in New South Wales, Sydney 1966.


wholly destitute’.19 The Secretary of State confirmed the dismissal, but the case returned to life when Gellibrand later appealed for compensation. Opposing this in 1832, Stephen insisted that it was an ‘entire misapprehension’ to think that an officer could be dismissed only for ‘delinquency’; as well as being ‘upright and competent’, he must ‘be acceptable also’; however, at that time both Hay, the permanent Under-Secretary, and Goderich refused to consider what this might involve, and left it to be inferred that Gellibrand had been dismissed for malpractice.20 When the conflict arose between Bourke and his Colonial Secretary, Alexander McLeay, there was no question of the latter’s integrity, but at the crucial moment Stephen was promoted to succeed Hay, and was in a stronger position to press his views. In 1828 he had written of the anomalous position of the Secretary in the Legislative Council, where normally the Governor might have been expected to count on his vote: It being the appropriate duty of his Office to act under the direction of the Governor, and in a character entirely subordinate to his, the incongruity of rendering him in Some Sense the Colleague of his Official Superior, and of enabling him in his Legislative Character, to counteract the very resolutions which, in his official character, he is bound to carry into effect, might not improbably prove the germ of discord. But despite these misgivings, McLeay was there, and he opposed and helped to force amendments to Bourke’s proposals for jury reform in 1833, a marriage bill in 1834, a bill to control franking (which would have saved public money possibly at the expense of officers like himself) in 1835, and finally, in 1836, the Governor’s plans for a system of national schools.21 Apart from this, Bourke had not found him very efficient, and by the end of 1834 had apparently decided to remove him when he could. His opportunity came next August, when McLeay’s ill-tempered remark that he would soon be retiring allowed the governor to tell the Secretary of State that his resignation was imminent, and to take steps for the appointment of a more acceptable successor, pointing out that It must be obvious to your Lordship that the successful administration of the Affairs of a Colony, and the reputation and personal ease of the

19

Arthur to Bathurst, 11 February 1826, HRA, III, v, pp. 104–13; to Hay, 15 August, HRA, III, v, p. 327. 20 Bathurst to Arthur, 22 June, HRA, III, v, p. 296; Stephen and Hay, minutes on Arthur to Goderich, 14 January 1832, CO 280/33, pp. 15–20; Goderich to Arthur, 19 July, CO 408/9, p. 113.


Governor are much influenced by the ability of the Colonial Secretary and the confidence that subsists between that officer and the Governor.22 In February 1836, after receiving this despatch, Glenelg told Bourke he could ask McLeay to resign ‘in a moderate and reasonable period’, if he had not already retired voluntarily, and at the end of the year the Governor told him to go.23 The right to dismiss officers simply for voting against the government in the legislature had already been asserted in Upper Canada in 1833, and in December 1835, in his instructions to the new Governor there, Sir Francis Bond Head, Glenelg had told him that any official who opposed him and did not resign should be suspended. Howick had then proposed that the tenure of certain offices in Canada should be specifically said to be no longer regarded as permanent, and next year the Gosford Committee of Inquiry recommended that the Governor should have the right to dismiss his Executive Councillors whenever he might see fit.24 When McLeay protested at his treatment, he was told that his office was not held ‘upon such a tenure as would prevent even the removal of the Party holding it, however unexceptional his conduct may have been, when the interests of the Public Service require such change’, and Glenelg reiterated this view to Gipps in 1838: It cannot be too clearly understood that every man in public life must be free to support that system of policy, which he conscientiously regards as most conducive to the public interests…but the Government also must be free to dispense with the services of any man, when the public interests require it.25 Certainly in the cases of both Gellibrand and McLeay other considerations than differences in policy were present. There was a strong suspicion that the former had evaded paying his debts, and in his private legal practice (which was permitted) he had represented clients in cases against the government which he was supposed to be serving, which was enough to justify a charge of

21

Stephen to Horton, 27 March 1825, HRA, IV, i, p. 598; Bourke to Stanley, 12 September 1833, HRA, xvii, p. 215; Bourke to Glenelg, 24 December 1835, and 8 August 1836, HRA, xviii, pp. 240 and 475. 22 King, Bourke, pp. 233–4; S.G.Foster, ‘A piece of sharp practice?…’, Historical Studies, Vol. XVI, 1975, pp. 407–8; Bourke to Aberdeen, 1 August 1835, HRA, xviii, p. 57. 23 Glenelg to Bourke, 26 February 1836, HRA, xviii, p. 297; Bourke to Glenelg, 3 January 1837, HRA, xviii, p. 637. 24 Foster, ‘A piece of sharp practice?’, p. 410; Glenelg to Head, quoted in Knaplund, James Stephen, p. 62; Howick to Glenelg, 10 December 1835, Grey Papers, in Foster, p. 413; Gosford Commission, 3rd Report, 3 May 1836, PP, 1837 [50], Vol. XXIV, para. 35.


delinquency. McLeay was old (68), and was receiving, from the colony’s land revenue, a pension for past service at the Transport Board, of which Stephen was very critical; but executive harmony was important, and Glenelg admitted to Bourke that he was moved ‘above all by ‘the necessity of fortifying you by the most effective assistance’.26 But if Bourke got his way over McLeay, he failed to do so when he sought to remove from the Executive Council the Treasurer, Riddell, ‘long known and distinguished as an opponent’ of his government. On this case, Glenelg declared firmly that it is the duty of every subordinate officer under your command, whose functions are such as to place him in a very close and confidential relation with you, to make his choice between a cordial and zealous support of your administration or a resignation of the office entrusted to him… A general concert and unity of action between yourself and those officers of your government who sit in the Executive Council is indispensable, and if unattainable by other means, must be ensured by the retirement of any Councillor who cannot act in harmony with a Governor whom it may be H.M.’s pleasure to sustain in that office; but despite this, and Bourke’s explicit statement that he would resign if Riddell were not removed, the Secretary of State refused to remove him, pleading that the Treasurer was an ex officio councillor, and that (surprisingly) his conduct did not merit dismissal from that office.27 Rather than sit with him in Council, Bourke resigned, and this, considering Glenelg’s attitude on the McLeay case, left the relationship between Governor and Councillors still somewhat uncertain, though possibly his decision was not uninfluenced by a feeling that as with Darling, in view of the dissensions in New South Wales, it was better that Bourke should leave, for all the praise he bestowed on the Governor’s ‘zeal, energy and enlightened views’.28 The question of official opposition soon cropped up again in Van Diemen’s Land, when in 1839, Arthur’s successor, Sir John Franklin, objected to his treasurer, John Gregory, who had already opposed his school policy, speaking against a revenue bill in the Legislative Council. The Governor, Gregory was told,

25

30 December 1836, quoted in Foster, p. 414; Glenelg to Gipps, 11 October 1838, HRA, xix, p. 607. 26 Arthur to Bathurst, 11 February 1826, (n. 19); Foster, p. 412; Glenelg to Bourke, 26 February 1836, HRA, xviii, p. 297. 27 Bourke to Glenelg, 2 December 1835, HRA, xviii, p. 223; Glenelg to Bourke, 11 August 1836, HRA, xviii, pp. 480–3, and cf. 22 August, p. 504.


does not impute blame to you for giving your vote in favour of an opinion of which you approved, but for having endeavoured to influence other members in support of such opinions, and for having pressed your objections to the proceedings of the government with a tenacity and strength of language which clearly indicated a determination…to thwart a measure in respect of which His Excellency had informed you that he looked for your support.29 The result was dismissal, following the insistence of Lord John Russell, then Secretary of State, that it was the duty of a member of the government to support the measures of his chief; but when in 1842 Franklin recommended the dismissal of his Colonial Secretary, John Montagu, for insubordination, Lord Stanley, Russell’s successor, sharply reproved the Governor and soon afterwards recalled him.30 Montagu had by then gone to the Cape, but many people still in Hobart had supported him, and were bitterly hostile to the Governor; though Stanley was probably influenced by Franklin’s handling of the new convict system, the quarrel, soured by conflicting personalities, had badly divided opinion in the colony, and the Secretary of State was right to think that once again, to heal dissensions a new broom was needed. Unfortunately the new broom was not a good one. Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, like his predecessor, had little administrative experience, and since he had to supervize the new convict system that Russell had adumbrated and Stanley thought he had perfected, the latter might have been well advised to have selected someone whom he had not just described as a ‘muddle-brained blockhead’, even if, as chairman of the Warwickshire Quarter Sessions, he had shown a mild interest in juvenile delinquency; but whether or not there was a hint of jobbery here, his difficulties were insuperable.31 The trouble sprang from the misguided conviction of the British government and many penal reformers in Parliament that transportation with assignment to private service was too lenient a punishment, and therefore that assignment should be abolished. That this ran counter to colonial opinion was irrelevant; neither the despatches of Bourke, Arthur and Franklin, nor the evidence, especially that of Arthur, given to the Molesworth Committee on Transportation could shake opinions founded not on facts, but on a lively imagination. The ‘certainty of a given quantum of punishment’ in gangs would have to replace ‘the uncertain coercion which is the consequence of assignment’, Sir George Grey

28

Bourke to Glenelg, 30 January 1837, HRA, xviii, pp. 661; Glenelg to Bourke, 3 July 1837, HRA, xix, p. 4; King, Bourke, p. 240. 29 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania, 1837–1843, Melbourne 1949, pp. 211–13, quoting Gregory’s memorial, 28 September 1839. 30 John West, The History of Tasmania (ed. A.G.L.Shaw), Sydney 1971, pp. 169, 487 and 498; Fitzpatrick, Franklin, pp. 326 ff.


told Arthur, on his return in 1837.32 Franklin was to put the convicts into gangs, not merely before they were assigned, as he had suggested, but for their entire term of punishment until they were due for a ticket-of-leave. The Governor had wanted the prisoners to be ‘pioneers of the colony’, performing useful work in clearing or road-making, but the Secretary of State forbade their employment in settled districts, where their work would be useful. The latter did not send the extra superintendents Franklin asked for, and he ignored the latter’s concern that too many convicts were coming, following the ending of all transportation to New South Wales. On his return to the Colonial Office, Stanley re-iterated his predecessor’s refusal to allow the men to be employed on useful works, unless the colony paid for them. If it could not ‘purchase the labour we have to sell at the price it is worth our while to accept’, it could not have it, he minuted; the colony could not afford this, so the labour was wasted, and the men employed uselessly. The convenience and interests of the colonists were ignored.33 Wilmot was soon overwhelmed by the number of prisoners arriving for the gangs, but his reports were so vague, and his criticisms so mildly worded that they managed to convey the impression that with minor exceptions the new system was working reasonably well. He fought with the newly-appointed Bishop of Tasmania over the control of convict chaplains and over the state system of non-denominational schools, but though this led (as usual) to complaints in Whitehall, and inadequate explanations from the governor, locally it was less important than his struggle with the Legislative Council over finance.34 This showed the wisdom of Russell’s refusal to accept Franklin’s suggestion of giving it ‘something of an elective character’; but even as it was, the opposition, focusing on the long-contested charge for the police and gaols, proved to be not entirely helpless. In 1841, the Legislative Council had protested that the Police and Gaols expenditure was ‘impolitic and unjust—unjust because it is forced upon the Colony for purposes purely beneficial to the Mother Country, and impolitic because, being unjust it tends to destroy that confidence that ought to subsist between the governed and their rulers and weakens that attachment that should bind the Colony to the Parent State’. When this caused a substantial deficit, the colony was told to increase its taxation, but in the depression after 1842, this was not easy. Wilmot thought the charge seemed ‘greatly disproportionate to our population and revenue’, but Stanley was unsympathetic.

31 Stanley to Peel, quoted in W.P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, Oxford 1930, p. 389; John Eardley-Wilmot, Letter to the Magistrates…, 1827, p. 13; M.Roe, ‘Sir John Eardley-Wilmot’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. I, 1966, pp. 145–8. 32 Shaw, Convicts, pp. 268 ff.; John Ritchie, ‘Towards ending an unclean thing: The Molesworth Committee and the abolition of transportation, 1837–40’, Historical Studies, Vol. XVII, 1976, pp. 144 ff.; Grey to Arthur, 23 March 1837, CO 408/13. 33 Shaw, Convicts, pp. 274ff.; Franklin to Glenelg, 15 February and 11 March 1839, CO 280/106 and 107; Stanley to Wilmot, 31 August 1844, quoted, Shaw, Convicts, p. 300.


‘You may dismiss from your mind all expectation’ that the British government would help, he wrote.35 This attitude, though typical enough of Stanley, could be thought to be surprising, for in 1832, Goderich had said that the non-official members were intended ‘to secure to the inhabitants the proper degree of influence over measures of the local government, more especially in all matters relating to taxation and expenditure’, but when they opposed the government on this subject, as they had been doing for nearly ten years, their opinions were ignored —and Wilmot even went so far in 1845 as to describe their opposition to his proposals as ‘unpatriotic’, and the members ‘radical, in fact Jacobinal’.36 In a sense they were, for in October the Governor’s estimates were in effect defeated by the withdrawal of the non-official members from the Council, leaving it without a quorum, thus using their power to coerce the administration. After this, the ‘Patriotic Six’ resigned, amidst enthusiastic popular support, and it was five months before Wilmot could reconvene it, with new members. It then passed the Appropriation Act with the votes of the official members, but two of the new unofficial Councillors then resigned, as they objected to helping the government carry out London’s ‘unjust and oppressive’ orders. Next year, the British government at last agreed to meet two-thirds of the Police and Gaols expenditure, but by then its stubbornness had destroyed the position of a not very competent Governor, whom it recalled at the very moment of making this concession. His stand in publicly defending Whitehall had alienated the colonists, though in private, he had annoyed the Colonial Office, and the twenty-seven despatches sent between March 1844 and February 1846 which had to be answered in ‘terms of disapprobation’, so irritated Stephen as to cause him to press successfully for the Governor’s recall. This was not unjustified, but if Wilmot had failed to protest sufficiently strongly against the shortcomings of the convict ‘probation’ system, the Colonial Office could hardly expect satisfactory relations with a colony whose interests and opinions it ignored or over-ruled. No governor could have prevented a crisis in such circumstances.37 However, Wilmot’s troubles with his legislative Council were scarcely worse than those of Sir George Gipps, who had succeeded Bourke in Sydney in February 1838. Again like his predecessors there, he was a veteran of the Napoleonic wars; unlike them he was an engineer and had been only a junior officer. He had had administrative experience in the West Indies, and had learned

34 Shaw, Convicts, pp. 297 ff.; West, History of Tasmania, pp. 161–2, 167, 601, n. 52, and 603, n. 72–3. 35 Fitzpatrick, Franklin, p. 221; W.A.Townsley, The Struggle for Self-government in Tasmania, Hobart 1951, pp. 73 ff. 36 Goderich to Bourke, 4 March 1832 (circular, CO 324/105), quoted in A.C.V.Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, Brisbane 1963, p. 170, and Roe, ‘Eardley-Wilmot’, p. 346.


about the problems of colonial government though his membership of the Gosford Commission inquiring into the affairs of Canada. This increased his efficiency, but good administration did not necessarily endear him to the colonists. From the moment of his arrival he faced problems connected with land policy, which had been decided in London by men who understood little of colonial conditions, but which was criticized locally as much out of self-interest as because of its genuine shortcomings. Trouble centred around grazing rights for ‘squatters’ on unsold Crown land, for the pastoralists could not afford to buy all the land they needed for their flocks. ‘Sheep are erratic animals’, Bourke had explained. ‘They must wander or they will not thrive, and the colonists must have sheep or they will not continue to be wealthy’. He had induced the Colonial Office to recognize the unauthorized but established settlements at Port Phillip and Portland; but if these had forced Glenelg to conclude that ‘the principle of counteracting dispersion…must be narrowed’, the question of squatting tenure had not been settled.38 Both Darling and Bourke had allowed grazing outside the prescribed ‘limits of location’, with no objection coming from London. In 1837 Glenelg sanctioned the act Bourke had persuaded the Legislative Council to pass providing for a system of temporary occupation licences for persons depasturing stock outside the boundaries, apparently thinking of it as a measure to control squatting rather than facilitate it, and in 1839, it made no protests against an amending act, strengthening its provisions, which Gipps sponsored. ‘I do not know any authority in this Country capable of giving so good an opinion as to its probable effect as the Local one’, minuted the Under-Secretary; unfortunately such an attitude had not always been taken in the past nor would it be in the future.39 Despite reiterated objections from both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, in August 1838, the Secretary of State ordered the minimum price of land to be raised to 12s. an acre, and in 1840 to £1. Franklin (rightly) foresaw that this would stop all sales but in his colony they were by that time few. Gipps, on the other hand, was ready to defend the policy, though he had not advised it. He wanted, as was his duty, to husband an Imperial asset, and he insisted that although it was undoubtedly true that not all Crown land was worth this price (and in the very depressed year of 1844, only 4,000 acres were disposed of), when it was worth less it would not be sold until colonial development increased its value. He saw ‘no reason to conclude that the Proprietor of Sheep, which are fed upon any Land, ought to be the proprietor also of the Land itself; what was important was the colonists’ ‘right of depasturing their Stock on Crown Lands without purchasing them’, for ‘the high price of Land and the squatting system

37

West, History of Tasmania, pp. 189 ff., and p. 609, n. 41; Shaw, Convicts, pp. 307–9. Bourke to Spring-Rice, 19 February 1835, and 11 March 1836, quoted in King, Bourke, pp. 183 and 187; Glenelg to Bourke, 13 April 1836, HRA, xviii, p. 380. 38


seem naturally to go together’.40 But how should the latter be controlled?—a question the more urgent because the then partly elective Legislative Council was unlikely to renew the local squatting act when it expired in 1846. Gipps and the Colonial Office were both concerned that the large squatters were not contributing sufficiently to the land fund, and therefore to the costs of assisting the immigration of that labour of which they were the greatest users; but Gipps was also worried about the squatters’ tenure. He recognized their need for security, if they were to develop their properties and the squatting areas were not to remain ‘beyond the influence of civilisation’, but he did not want them to gain possession of their runs either by prescription without purchase, or by holding them in perpetuity at ‘a nominal rent’. In these circumstances he proposed first to raise the fees for squatting licences, in order to increase the revenue, and to this the squatters who would have to pay violently objected, seeking to give their opposition an appearance of rectitude by raising constitutional cries about the injustice of the Imperial government or its representative determining land policy, and about an ‘autocrat’ imposing taxation, ignoring the fact that rent for land is not a tax. The governor’s second suggestion was that the purchase (at auction, for at least £1 an acre) of 320 acres of a run should give security over the rest of it (12,800 acres) for eight years, but as this left open the possibility that the squatting occupiers might be outbid for the essential 320 acres, they complained against this too, claiming that the security was not enough, even with compensation for their improvements. They wanted a pre-emptive right to purchase, though if this were granted, it would be almost impossible to remove them from an estate which would have become virtually their property for a song.41 Stanley at first appeared ready to support the Governor, but before long propaganda in England began to have its effect. In response to the squatters’ argument that they could not afford to purchase any of their run, he proposed a system of leases, which should be bought at auction; then he conceded that they be acquired without auction, and the squatter was to have the right of preemption when they expired. Thus, he would have security of tenure, but it would be impossible to remove him. Gipps’ ideas were abandoned and Lord Grey, when he became Secretary of State in 1846, showed how little he understood the problem. He authorized long leases with pre-emptive rights, cutting across the policy of preventing dispersion by restrictive land sales, which he (as Lord Howick) had played a large part in introducing in 1831, and which he still argued

39

Darling to Hay, 17 February 1831, HRA, xvi, p. 89; Bourke to Stanley, 14 September 1836, HRA, xviii, p. 538; Glenelg to Bourke, 29 August 1837, HRA, xix, p. 72; Gipps to Glenelg, 6 April 1839, HRA, xx, p. 90, with minute, quoted in Peter Burroughs, Britain and Australia, 1831–1855, Oxford 1967, pp. 157–8. 40 Franklin to Glenelg, 12 February 1839, quoted in Burroughs, Britain and Australia, p. 214; Gipps to Stanley, 17 January 1844, HRA, xxiii, pp. 338 ff.


fervently for in the despatch which elaborated his views. He preserved a high minimum price for Crown land, allegedly in the interests of future settlers, while making it impossible for such people to dislodge the squatters who occupied the land; he maintained the theoretical right of the mother country to determine land policy, while giving in to those who protested most loudly.42 Squatting critics of the land policy were naturally vocal in the Legislative Council which had been reconstituted by the New South Wales Act of 1842. Before that, the older council had not been a success. According to Bourke, it was ‘not possible to govern with advantage by means of a Council as is here established’, and Gipps found that it ‘neither affords to the Governor…the assistance which he has a right to expect from it, nor does it give to the acts of his government the support with the people, which the sanction of such a body ought to carry with it.43 But though Bourke had proposed in 1833 that two-thirds of its members be elected, which was the arrangement made in 1842, by that time he thought this too little, all the more because the act restricted its powers.44 The permanent provision (£81,600) for certain vital expenditure meant that the government would not be ‘reduced to a state of inaction or utter helplessness’, as Gipps put it, by a refusal to vote supplies (as had happened in Lower Canada); without this, he did ‘not see how the authority is to be maintained, which the Supreme Government has a right to exercise over every Dependency of the Empire’, but this was regarded as ‘an infringement of the constitutional privileges of the representatives of the people’, and he could not convince the Council that it was necessary.45 It wanted power to appropriate all moneys, although in fact Gipps’ need for additional funds gave it much of the power that it was theoretically denied, and apart from that it objected to the ‘great evil’ of having a Governor controlled by minute instructions from the Colonial Office. It objected to the latter’s insistence on its right to control the spending of the land revenue, having, as Merivale noticed, ‘a strong desire to have a fund, so convenient, so abundant, so easy to be got at, entirely at their own disposal; to make it serve to fill up all the deficiencies which the reluctance of settlers to submit to taxation…may occasion’.46 Above all it objected to the colony having to pay in full the cost of the police and gaols. This, declared Gipps, was ‘the never ceasing cause of nearly all the abuse which is heaped on Her Majesty’s Government and myself, and apart from generating ill-will, with protests

41

Gipps to Legislative Council, September 1842, quoted in Burroughs, Britain and Australia, p. 297; Gipps to Stanley, 18 April 1843, HRA, xxii, p. 667, and 17 January and 3 April 1844, HRA, xxiii, pp. 340 ff. and 510 ff. Cf., Burroughs, Britain and Australia, Ch. 9. 42 Stanley to Gipps, 30 January 1845, HRA, xxiv, p. 218; Gipps to Stanley, 2 August, HRA, xxiv, p. 426; Gipps to Stanley, 10 and 12 January 1846, HRA, xxiv, pp. 685 ff., and 698 ff.; Grey to Fitzroy, 29 November, HRA, xxv, p. 272. 43 Bourke to Hay, 1 February 1836, HRA, xviii, p. 286, and to Arthur, n.d., quoted in King, Bourke, p. 215; Gipps to Glenelg, 1 January 1839, HRA, xix, p. 719.


abounding in an annual conflict over the estimates (as in Van Diemen’s Land), it caused both the old and new Councils to reject proposals for local government, fearing that they would create bodies which would levy rates to meet this charge. 47

The Colonial Office was also unable to control the policy to be adopted towards the Aborigines. Despite their instructions, and sometimes their predilections, the governors found themselves accepting the colonists’ viewpoint that the natives must be removed and their outrages suppressed, though the latter, regrettably, were ‘not entirely unprovoked’.48 Arthur could not stop the atrocities of the settlers, and despite their best endeavours, both Bourke and Gipps had similar lack of success. Certainly in 1838, those who perpetrated the massacre of Myall Creek, were arrested, tried, found guilty and executed, but this was only a flash in the pan; generally, events displayed the limits of the Governor’s power to act in opposition to the strongly held views of the bulk of the community.49 The dissensions which engulfed Gipps arose primarily from his attempts to obey his instructions and to preserve the rights of the mother-country. In 1826, Arthur had told Horton that ‘No Governor can protect the property of the Crown and be popular’, adding three years later that he would suspect himself ‘if my Administration be ever a more popular one’. Gipps had no reason for such suspicion. The Sydney Morning Herald declared he was ‘the worst Governor New South Wales ever had’, but that was his misfortune and not his fault.50 Like the other governors, he did not make policy, but had to try to carry it out. All had to face criticism as best they could. On what seemed minor matters, and under weak Secretaries of State, the Colonial Office might either ignore disobedience or prevarication, whether wilful or deliberate (as for example towards the Aborigines), or it might leave the colonies a free hand—as on religion and education; but if it chose to stand firm conflict was as inevitable as it had been in the American colonies before 1775, and timely concession alone prevented more serious struggles. But if not policy makers, the governors were administrators, and if they could not avoid conflict, they could be efficient, and by their administrative ability they could distinguish themselves. In this regard, the four

44

Bourke to Stanley, 25 December 1833, HRA, xvii, p. 306; Bourke to Monteagle, 7 July 1842, quoted in King, Bourke, p. 225; 5 and 6 Vic., c. 76. 45 Message to Legislative Council, quoted in Melbourne, Constitutional Development, p. 291; Gipps to Stanley, 28 October 1843, and 1 January 1844 (separate), HRA, xxiii, pp. 199–200 and 310. 46 Gipps to Stanley, 28 October 1843 and encl. mem., 25 October, pp. 205–7, and 21 December 1844, HRA, xxiv, p. 143; cf. Stanley to Gipps, 29 March, HRA, xxiii, p. 505; Merivale, Lectures, p. 412. 47 Gipps to Russell, 17 July 1840, HRA, xx, p. 712, and cf. Shaw, Convicts, pp. 264 and 290; Stanley to Gipps, 5 September 1842, HRA, xxii, pp. 242–3; Gipps to Stanley, 27 July 1844, HRA, xxiii, pp. 707–8; Melbourne, Constitutional Development, Part IV, Ch. 6.


men with military backgrounds proved immeasurably superior to the two without, and within the narrow limits laid down, they showed conspicuous ability; but they could neither prevent nor overcome colonial hostility to a control from the mother country which denied, or strictly limited, the local selfgovernment which its spokesmen so often proclaimed, for it seemed that the British government would not abandon its desire to make use of the colonies to benefit the British, not the colonial, population, and to promote its own view of what their ‘internal good government’ should be, unless it was threatened with some degree of violence.51

48

Glenelg to Bourke, 26 July 1837, HRA, xix, p. 48; Darling to Bathurst, 6 October 1826, HRA, xii, pp. 608 ff.; cf. Correspondence…re Military Operations…against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, PP, 1831 [259] XIV, p. 175 (repr., ed. A.G.L.Shaw, Hobart 1971); West, History of Tasmania, Part viii; R.W.Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, Sydney 1974. 49 King, Bourke, pp. 192 ff.; Gipps to Glenelg, 25 and 27 April, and 19 and 20 December 1838, HRA, xix, pp. 396–8, and 700–6; cf. S.C.McCulloch, ‘Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. XXXIII, 1961, pp. 261–9. 50 Arthur to Horton, 16 January 1826, HRA, III, v, p. 48; to Hay, 26 January 1829, CO 280–19: Sydney Morning Herald, quoted in ‘Gipps’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. I, p. 452. 51 Grey, Colonial Policy, Vol. I, p. 17; cf. Merivale, Lectures, pp. 622–9; A.G.L.Shaw, ‘Violent Protest in Australian History’, Historical Studies, Vol. XV, 1973, pp. 548–51.

K.S.INGLIS

The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872–1902

Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime, And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’ RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’, in ‘A song of the English’.1 On the evening of 15 November 1872 nearly three hundred men assembled at the Cannon Street Hotel for a banquet arranged by the Royal Colonial Institute.2 ‘The hotel was decorated with flags’, their historian writes, ‘ladies filled one gallery overlooking the dining hall, and the band of the Honourable Artillery Company filled the other as it played music for dinner, during which a large number of toasts were drunk with cumulative enthusiasm’.3 For a body devoted to strengthening imperial connections it was a grand occasion, and for Trevor Reese, writing 100 years later, it was an event to savour: his subjects had met to celebrate the opening of telegraphic communication with the colonies of Australia. The first toasts, proposed from the chair by Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary, were ‘Telegraphic Enterprise’ and ‘The Integrity of the British Empire’. Telegraphic enterprise actually brought wires into the dining hall, and before the company sat down Kimberley sent a message on their behalf to the governors of the Australian colonies, ‘rejoicing at this fresh bond of union between the

1 Verses 1887–1896, Vol. XI of The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, London 1898, p. 208. 2 This essay has benefited from discussion of seminar papers I gave at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Australian National University. For information and ideas not acknowledged in footnotes I am grateful to Geoffrey Blainey, Noel Butlin, John Eddy, Allan Martin and Deryck Schreuder. Trevor Reese chaired the seminar in London, on 19 February 1976, with his usual grace. Trevor knew of a recent study I should have used and had not; characteristically he told me of it not at the seminar table but quietly, over sherry, in the common room. 3 T.R.Reese, The History of the Royal Commonwealth Society 1868–1968, London 1968, pp. 27–8.

THE IMPERIAL CONNECTION 21

different members of the Empire’.4 These words, tapped in Morse code by a man from the post office and relayed by other operators along the line, travelled by overland wire to Falmouth, by submarine cable via Lisbon to Gibraltar and Alexandria, overland to Suez, by cable to Aden and Bombay, overland to Madras, by cable to Penang, Singapore and Batavia, overland to Banjoewangi, by cable to Port Darwin, and overland to Adelaide, terminal of the imperial line, from where it was sent through domestic telegraph systems to Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane. A map on the wall showed diners the route taken by their greeting. ‘The list of the various lengths into which the whole wire is divided’, wrote The Times next morning, ‘is a list of the successive advances made by British political and commercial energy.’ A reply from the governor of South Australia made the return journey of 12,650 miles to the hotel before the company had drunk the last of the toasts. ‘Your message received. All passed off happily.’ That message referred to a banquet held in Adelaide the same evening at which Charles Todd, South Australia’s postmaster-general and superintendent of telegraphs, was an honoured guest. Todd had taken charge of the men and horses and bullocks needed for the job of putting poles and wires across the continent, and among the first messages across them was a command from Windsor Castle that he be made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. The company in Adelaide exchanged cablegrams with diners at another banquet, in Sydney, where the Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, the Premier, Henry Parkes, and other leading men made speeches. Sir Hercules Robinson declared that no other event since the establishment of the colony was so important to it as the opening of telegraphic communication between Australia and the mother country and the rest of the civilized world. Alexander Campbell, merchant and politician, thought it ‘the greatest, and by far the most wonderful event…in the history of this country’.5 Their superlatives were not provoked merely by the dinner: editorial writers in newspapers which printed the first news by wire from London expressed a similar excitement. Sir Hercules Robinson was among the first governors to experience the effect of the telegraph on imperial relations; Alexander Campbell, as a leader of the Sydney stock exchange, was well placed to judge its commercial significance; and the journalists sensed that it was about to transform their product. News from home in the continent’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, published on 5 March 1803, was ten months old. By 1850 news was usually four months old when it arrived. The fastest sailing ships of the 1850s—the clippers— could make the journey in less than three months; and from 1852 the Peninsular

4 ‘Account of the Dinner held at the Cannon Street Hotel on Friday, 15th November 1872’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, Vol. III, 1872. Other references to the occasion are from this source. 5 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1872, has a full report.


and Oriental Steam Navigation Company carried newspapers and other mail by steamship to Alexandria, overland to the Red Sea, and by steamship to Australia, in a little over two months. When the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, mails could travel from London to Melbourne in forty-four days. Some news could go faster than the mails. Ships steaming via Suez might pick up on their way out some items that had come along the cable laid to India in 1870; and ever since the three largest Australian cities were connected by wire in 1858, newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney had couriers in Adelaide who intercepted the mail steamers and raced on horseback to the telegraph office, Sydney Morning Herald against Empire, Age against Argus, rushing to make their paper the first on the streets with news several weeks old from England. By 1870 the monthly news from England was about twenty days old when it reached eastern Australia. Then the British and Australian Telegraph Company, formed by the English entrepreneurs who had lately come to dominate international telegraphy, undertook to make a line from Singapore to Port Darwin; the South Australian government built the overland telegraph; and information could travel between England and Australia in a few hours, if it were deemed urgent and nothing went wrong. The average time between London and Melbourne in the first months of operation was between fifteen and twenty hours.6 It seemed miraculous. For people who had grown up accepting as a fact of nature that information travelled no faster than men could ride on horses or signal to each other on hilltops, or than pigeons could fly, electric telegraphy was a marvellous phenomenon. Their education left its working a mystery. ‘The undefinable and invisible fluid called electricity’, said a group of colonial business men in 1872, ‘is far above the knowledge of science.’7 (They were petitioning the parliament of New South Wales to reduce charges for telegraphic messages, partly on the ground that as the fluid cost almost nothing it should be sold cheaply.) Orators at telegraphic banquets liked to quote the boast of Shakespeare’s sprite: ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes’; they liked to speak, as Kimberley’s under-secretary E.H.Knatchbull-Hugessen did, of ‘the practical annihilation of time and space’, and to say as Sir Hercules Robinson said that it was ‘difficult at first for the mind to realize the magnitude of the achievement…’. Like human beings in earlier times contemplating fire or the wheel, nineteenth-century men found it almost impossible to imagine any further progress in technology: one could scarcely hope, said Kimberley, ‘that any innovation could be made which should bridge over the ocean more completely than the system of telegraphs’. To Henry Parkes, speaking at the banquet in Sydney, the achievement was a ‘magical business…uniting us hand in

6

Telegraphic communication. ‘Report of Select Committee’, NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings (NSWVP), 1872–3, Vol. II, p. 132. 7 Telegraphy, (Petition for reduction in charges—bankers, merchants and others), NSWVP, 1872, Vol. I, p. 1233.


hand as it were with the parent land’. Carvings on Sydney’s splendid Post Office, opened in 1874 when Parkes was Premier, depicted Mercury and his magic wand, and a customer who looked up before going into the telegraph section could see Jupiter and his lightning, Britannia to one side of the god and Australia to the other. The cable was a boon for exporters of wool, wheat and other primary products, and for importers of manufactured goods. ‘In the single item of the price of wool in the London market,’ wrote Anthony Trollope, ‘the Australian telegraph will be of inestimable value to the colonies.’8 Trollope, visiting a son who raised sheep in New South Wales, found woolgrowers uncertain, when they depended on news by sea, whether to sell or hold on. ‘The markets for Australian wool and wheat appear to have been in a satisfactory state…’, producers would read in the summary of news from England printed after the mail steamer arrived. A good time to sell? But the report went on: ‘…and to have given promise of further improvement’.9 Better then to wait? A wool broker in Geelong, dealing with the squatters of Victoria’s western district, sold only one-third of the wool in his catalogue for 1867–8 because growers set reserve prices based on optimistic gambles about the market in London.10 After 1872 Australian producers knew what buyers in London had been offering twenty-four hours earlier for wool, wheat, tallow, preserved meat, copper, leather, tin, and whatever else they were growing or making or mining for export. Merchants in colonial cities could import goods far more efficiently. ‘It is not long since’, wrote an English commercial journal celebrating the telegraph, ‘that a large consignment of English pale ale was made to one of the Australian ports, and when it arrived there, was found to be a drug in the market which was too much stocked already. The liquor had to be sacrificed, as it could not be reshipped to England except at a loss exceeding its value.’11 In Sydney the softgoods firm of Prince, Ogg and Co., doing a business of between £500,000 and £600,000 a year, reduced the value of stock held on the premises from £260,000 by about £100,000 once they could telegraph to London for supplies.12 David Fowler, principal of the largest wholesale grocery in Melbourne, moved to London in 1873 to direct purchasing, and in the same year the Melbourne firm of Michaelis, Hallenstein and Co., importers and exporters, opened a branch in London.13 By serving the needs of importers so well, the telegraph must have worked against the interests of colonial manufacturers of goods that competed with imports, reducing the protective power of time and distance. For good and ill, the new connection tended to make Australia’s economy more international and especially more imperial. 8 A.Trollope,

Australia and New Zealand, London 1873, Vol. II, p. 238. Age, Melbourne, 5 June 1871. 10 See entry on C.J.Dennys in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. IV. 11 Bullionist, quoted in ‘Account of the Dinner’. 9


The telegraph enabled money as well as goods to move more quickly across the world. Fast and regular news from Australia encouraged British investors to speculate for the first time in mining shares on colonial stock exchanges.14 The government of New South Wales judged it worth while telegraphing its treasurer’s financial statement to London, at a cost of more than £1,300 a time, to give potential investors fresh news of the latest opportunities waiting for them out in the colony.15 The willingness of bankers to act on telegraphic advice transformed commercial dealings between England and Australia, as it had done already for India, and had effects beyond commerce: in the London dock labourers’ strike of 1889, money from Australian sympathizers arrived the day after it was collected in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, at just the right moment to rally the strikers against their employers.16 Commercial users of the cable pressed governments and the telegraph company to reduce charges; ten shillings a word, they complained, was an inhibiting price. Codes were invented to save money, and the ciphers used encapsulate the state of oceanic trade in the 1870s. ‘Belbin Forlands’, sent from Sydney to London, meant:’ Assuming all you say to be correct, endeavour to obtain good freight.’ One word meant ‘oil and tallow steady’, another ‘flax is abundant’, another that hides were fetching so much a pound. The London agent for one Sydney company had a single word meaning: ‘We have not offered your wools which arrived in time for these sales, having deemed it better to hold them over for the next series.’17 Users complained also of errors and interruptions. Mistakes in transmission were made by operators along the line who misread words or misused the code of dots and dashes into which words were transformed. At best their lapses teased the mind. What did Prince, Ogg and Co.’s London office mean by ‘one sold 74, wool from’? ‘We puzzled over it for some time, and at last made it out. It meant this,—“Ore sold 74, wool firm.”’18 Other mistakes were not evident, and could do damage: a report that the price of copper in London was £79 a ton caused the value of shares in the Peak Downs mine in Queensland to fall heavily before a message came through that the figure should have been £82.19 The correction took five days to arrive, for the line had broken. Within Australia the overland posts and wires were vulnerable to

12 H.M.Franklyn, A Glance at Australia in 1880, Melbourne 1881, p. 344. On commercial consequences of the cable for Australia see G.Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne 1966, pp. 224–7. 13 See Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. IV, for David Fowler, and Vol. V for Moritz Michaelis. 14 Blainey, Tyranny, p. 226; A.R.Hall, The London Capital Market and Australia, 1870– 1914, Canberra 1963, p. 113, n. 57. 15 G.Storey, Reuter’s Century 1851–1951, London [1951], p. 120. 16 P.F.Donovan, ‘Australia and the Great London Dock Strike: 1889’, Labour History, No. 23, November 1972, pp. 17–26.


Aborigines, white ants, climbing frogs and lightning. The cable could be broken by submarine volcanic eruption, or rubbing against coral, or some other hazard. Man and nature offered further threats across India and the Middle East. The telegraph was interrupted more often than mail ships were wrecked, and the breaks were more troublesome. In 1876 the line was working properly for less than half the year; in 1879 it was out for forty days.20 A partner in Prince, Ogg and Co., waiting on the postmaster general with other members of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce in 1878, gave evidence of ‘serious inconvenience and losses on large financial transactions when there were interruptions to the line’. 21 The loss was more than pecuniary, for a continuous supply of information was like a new sense; to be deprived of it was like having to do without a bodily organ. During one break the Sydney Morning Herald observed that it was as if merchants and other citizens had suddenly become blind or deaf.22 They demanded a second line to England as soon as the first was open. Politicians in all colonies haggled with each other and with the telegraph company about routes and costs. A submarine connection between New South Wales and New Zealand in 1876, and an overland line from South to Western Australia in 1877, added to the number of customers who found the service indispensable and frustrating. In 1879 a second cable was laid between Port Darwin and Java, all Australian colonies except Queensland (whose government wanted a line from Singapore to Cape York) agreeing to pay the company a subsidy for twenty years. The section across Java was cut out in 1880 when a cable was laid under the sea between Banjoewangi and Singapore. In 1889 a cable was laid from Banjoewangi to Broome in Western Australia, from where an overland wire ran to Perth and thence into the eastern network. There were now alternative routes south-east from Java, one of which avoided the unreliable line through the Northern Territory.23 The average time taken for a message between London and Melbourne was now less than six hours.24 A cable laid from Bundaberg to Noumea in 1893 expressed Queensland hopes for an international connection, but never reached beyond New Caledonia. A line under the Pacific ocean, promoted by Canadian commercial interests from the 1870s as an ‘allBritish’, or ‘all-Red’, route, was eventually supported by Joseph Chamberlain at

17 Telegraphic communication. ‘Report of Select Committee’, NSWVP, 1872–3, Vol. II, pp. 120–1. Ciphers were used also to safeguard privacy. All but one of the examples here are from a published book, and the last is from a private code. 18 Ibid., p. 123. 19 Ibid., p. 114. 20 Cable Conference. Report, NSWVP, 1876–7, Vol. V, pp. 512–13; Australian Handbook for 1881, Melbourne 1881, p. 509. 21 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 January 1878. 22 Ibid., 3 July 1888, cited in R.B.Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803–1920, Sydney 1976, p. 203.


the Colonial Office and undertaken as a public enterprise by the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.25 The English company which owned all existing lines to Australia, hoping to head off the Pacific project, offered to lay a cable from Western Australia to the Cape of Good Hope (connected with London since 1879), and had it working by November 1901, a year before the Pacific line was ready. The cost of sending ordinary messages remained close to ten shillings a word from 1872 to 1891. Governments and newspapers were granted lower rates from 1880. Colonial politicians yielded at last to commercial petitions in 1891 and agreed to give the English company half of whatever revenue it lost by reducing the ordinary rate to 4s. a word. The loss was heavy, and in 1893 the rate was raised to 4s.9d. In 1900, faced with likely competition from the Pacific line, the company reduced the rate again to 4s. a word, then to 3s.6d. in 1901 and 3s.— exactly matching the ‘all-Red’ charge—in 1902.26 The lines between Australia and England were now cheaper and surer. The name of Banjoewangi fad’ed from Australian minds, while Fanning and Cocos, islands housing cable stations in the Pacific and Indian oceans, became more familiar. Makers of newspapers in Australia, as elsewhere, proclaimed that they were using the new medium: between 1860 and 1880 daily papers named the Telegraph were founded in the capital of every colony except Western Australia. Once the line to England was opened, the Victorian correspondent of The Times told readers at home, ‘we all turn first to the columns headed “Direct telegrams from Europe”… The wire which has fastened us to the great world seems to have made us a part of it, and we have suddenly become cosmopolitan. In England our sense of newly-enlarged life can scarcely be realized’.27 The South Australian Register judged the establishment of the telegraph ‘by far the most memorable event that has yet occurred in the history of news-catering in the colony. Our readers will, over their breakfast tables today, be in a position to discuss events happening on the other side of the globe only a few hours ago’.28 It was indeed a momentous innovation for newspapers; but the consequences for a newspaper reader were to be more complex than the exhilarated journalists of 1872 could convey to him. Those direct telegrams from Europe amounted at

23 A technical account of imperial telegraphs in 1898 described the section overland from Port Darwin as still ‘extremely inefficient…a cause of constant telegraphic delays’. C.Bright, Imperial Telegraphic Communication, London 1911, p. 11 n. 24 Australian Handbook for 1890, p. 552. 25 An illuminating account is given in G.N.Savory, ‘Golonial Business Initiatives and the Pacific Cable: A study in the role of private enterprise in the development of imperial communication’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Washington, 1972. 26 Offical Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1901–1909, Melbourne 1910, pp. 776–7.


first to only fifty words a day. The Times man’s reflections on them travelled to London by sea, forty-eight days elapsing between writing and publication. At ten shillings a word, editors at each end of the line had to buy frugally. The press rate went down to 6s.5d. a word in 1880, 2s.8d in 1885, 1s.10d. in 1891, 1s.4d. in 1900, and 9d. when the Pacific line opened in 1902. Usage of news by telegraph increased steadily as the rate fell, until in 1908 the average daily paper in Australia was said to be taking 700 words a day; but proprietors pressed for still lower charges, and an authority on imperial telegraphy supported them, believing that they ‘might, with cheaper rates, do so much to bring the Empire into closer touch’.29 The brevity enforced by expense was a source of error. The very first message by telegraph from Melbourne to The Times reported inaccurately that Sir James McCulloch was to be Agent-General in London for all the Australian colonies.30 Three days later the mistake was corrected: he was to be Agent-General for Victoria only. The correspondent had saved ten shillings by leaving out the name of the colony; someone in London, not knowing that the Australian colonies were quite separate from each other, made the wrong guess. Putting flesh on the skeletal news that travelled by wire—deciphering telegraphese (a new word, coined to describe a new style)—was a tricky skill, and remained so even when press rates were lowered; for although messages became longer, they remained elliptical. ‘Cable intelligence published one morning is sometimes contradicted the next’, Nat Gould wrote of Australian newspapers in 1896, ‘and at times it takes three or four different messages to arrive at a correct solution.’ He blamed mainly senders ‘who condense to such an extent that the deciphering of a cable is almost as difficult as reading the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian mummy’.31 Gould thought, moreover, that some English correspondents for Australian papers were not proficient at deciding which news, of the vast supply available in London, to include in the daily ration.31 Newspapers suffered as other users did from errors in transmission. The journey across Java was especially dangerous, for between Batavia and Banjoewangi operators knowing little English mutilated words so badly that interpreters in newspaper offices could only guess at what they had been when they left London. In messages received by the Melbourne Argus in December 1876, ‘Kabinck’ had to mean ‘Cabinet’, but what was ‘This serimous conflict M’Mahon left indeed’? In other messages to the Argus that month, ‘speech’ became ‘special’; ‘population’ became ‘pow’; ‘commander’ ‘collander’; ‘maintain’ ‘mountin’, and ‘recently’ ‘revny’. These mistakes, ‘and other errors too numerous to mention’, were reported at a conference to strengthen the case 27

The Times, 26 December 1872. South Australian Register, 23 October 1872. 29 Bright, Imperial Telegraphic Communication, p. 52. 30 The Times, 22 October 1872. 28


for laying a cable that would cut out the line through Java.32 That cable, opened in 1880, reduced mutilation but did not end it; and in telegraphese the tiniest slip could lead to a large inaccuracy. London papers reported one morning: ‘Lady Kennedy, wife of the Governor of Queensland, has given birth to twins, the elder being a son.’ Breakfast must have cooled uneaten on the tables of readers who knew Sir Arthur Kennedy, for he was an elderly widower. The message sent from Brisbane had been ‘Governor Queensland turns first sod’ —on a new railway line —and three letters had somehow been changed, to make the report arrive as ‘Governor Queensland twins first son’.33 A related source of error introduced, or at least enhanced, by telegraphy, was the demand by editors that news be up to the minute. R.W.Dale, the Congregational minister from Birmingham who visited Australia in 1887, admired the colonial press in all respects but one. ‘The least satisfactory columns in the great newspapers’, he told readers at home, ‘are those which contain the English and other European cablegrams. Correspondents on this side of the world, in their eagerness to transmit interesting news at the earliest possible moment, sometimes make grave mistakes, and sometimes forget the difference between prophecy and history.’34 The correspondents shared that eagerness with men of the press in many countries; it was part of the ‘new journalism’ which Matthew Arnold had lately characterized as being full of novelty, sensation, speculation and other modern things. But errors, prophetic and otherwise, could be hardier at the end of a long and fragile line than at home. Among the first messages from London to Adelaide in 1872 was an announcement that England and the United States were about to go to war. Then the wire went dead for several weeks, while English newspapers refuting the report were travelling out in the mail steamer. The race to send news by telegraph from the mail steamer at Adelaide to the papers of Melbourne and Sydney ended once the line from England was open.35 Summaries were still sent east from Adelaide, and after 1877 from Albany in Western Australia, but they were despatched without urgency once they merely supplemented news some weeks old. By the late 1880s the Sydney Morning Herald’s agent at Albany was telegraphing no more from the mail steamer than a list of the first-class passengers booked to eastern cities.36 To fill their columns, however, editors had still to print more matter that came by ship than they received by the telegraph. ‘The meagreness of the daily telegram…’ as the Age said in 1874, ‘renders the detailed news brought by each mail steamer far more interesting than it would be otherwise.’37 Even by 1900,

31 N.Gould,

Town and Bush, London 1896, pp. 258–9, 262. Correspondence concerning the transaction of business on the Java lines, NSWVP, 1878–9, Vol. V, p. 811. 33 Storey, Reuter’s Century, p. 120. 32


when the papers could afford a few hundred words a day by wire, that was still meagre compared with the supply of words by sea. The ideal reader of an editor’s imagination could always assess the information he got from telegrams in the light of the richer evidence that reached him weeks later. But did actual readers do so? Faced with fresh news and stale for breakfast, as with hot toast and cold, which did colonists choose? The mail steamer was still awaited eagerly for the letters and parcels that postmen would deliver in the few days after it reached every port, but after 1872 its approach no longer caused excitement on account of the public intelligence on board. There was ‘now little interest manifested in the arrival of the European mail’, an observer said of Melbourne in 1873, ‘all important news being received by telegraph’.38 As the first items came off it, The Times’ correspondent in Melbourne offered a striking prediction: ‘One result of knowing European affairs more quickly is that we shall know them less thoroughly. Now that we are daily fed on telegraphic essences we shall have little appetite for the matter from which they have been extracted when served up for us two months afterwards. We shall no longer receive history fresh in interest and full in detail; day by day, we shall study its characters and situations less closely than before.’39 History moved on while slow news was on the water; and in the meantime a citizen might well have committed himself to opinions—about imperial policy towards Fiji, for example, or about a measure affecting Ireland—on the strength of reports which had come by telegraph. To have the essence of news arriving in a few hours, while amplification, qualification, analysis and reflection came weeks later, was not the most rational way of briefing anybody to assess events on the other side of the world. People in Australia may well have been less adequately informed about, say, the eastern question in 1878 than about the American civil war. To be sure, some of what they knew in 1878 was more up-todate; but first news of each stage in the war between the states, though less fresh when it landed, was both fuller and more diverse, reports sympathetic to the southern cause coming around the Cape of Good Hope from England and stories from northern sources coming across the Pacific. News by wire was not only terse but narrow. The cost of cablegrams provoked a movement towards combination among owners of colonial newspapers, which compelled their readers by 1900 to rely on a single source of news from the rest of the world. One group of papers, formed

34 R.W.Dale,

Impressions of Australia, London 1889, p. 262 Telegraphic communication. ‘Report of Select Committee’, NSWVP, 1872–3, Vol. II, p. 69. 36 Walker, Newspaper Press, p. 203. 37 Age, 17 January 1874. 38 Telegraphic communication. ‘Report of Select Committee’, NSWVP, 1872–3, Vol. II, p. 132. 35


on the initiative of the Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald, bought rights to all news from Reuter’s agency in England; another group, including the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the Age in Melbourne, formed a rival association. In 1895 the competition ceased, and the entire newspaper press of Australia—and New Zealand—depended on one cable service. The principal papers all belonged to it, and their unanimous consent was necessary before news could be supplied to outsiders or new members could be admitted. Any interloper would have to bear the entire cost of his own telegraphic news—‘a charge which in practice would prove really prohibitive to a new venture’, as the president of the company owning the Sydney Daily Telegraph reflected comfortably in 1905.40 One large consequence of the telegraph, unforeseen in 1872, was to create a monopoly in fast news from abroad. Official messages had right of way on all the wires, heralded by the words: ‘Clear the line, clear the line’.41 J.W.Cell has suggested that once the telegraph was in use, ‘Not regularity but jerkiness came to characterize the process of imperial decision making’.42 In the Colonial Office of the 1860s, as Cell sees it, the telegraph was a toy. B.L.Blakeley shows it being used seriously after 1870. Under Kimberley, all telegrams of any importance had to be taken at once to the Secretary of State himself. Having travelled all those thousands of miles so magically fast, the telegram could not be allowed to lie waiting at its destination; preceded by that brisk imperative, the electric message now cried: ‘Read me at once!’ and even ‘Reply at once!’ Its pace was the enemy of coolness. ‘The calming effect upon the most excited despatch of lying unread for a month in the darkness of a mailbag was lost’, as C.W.de Kiewiet puts it.43 The very language, stark and spare, signalled impatience, importunity, even aggression; and as in the press, so in imperial relations, the boiled-down prose could generate ambiguities unknown in the written despatch. The speed of reception within the Office could cause inadequate briefing; Blakeley observes that clerks and assistant undersecretaries had little time to look up previous correspondence and make suggestive notes, as was the practice when despatches and letters came in by mail, before a cablegram was carried to the secretary of state. Imperial officials, like newspaper readers, found that rapid communication did not necessarily enhance understanding. Would administrators stop using the mail steamers? Sir George Bowen, Governor of Victoria, put it to Carnarvon in 1874 that the telegraph ‘must now render despatches and letters, and any specullations which they may contain, comparatively uninteresting’.44 But Bowen did not act as if he quite believed it,

39

The Times, 26 December 1872. The Press in Australia, Melbourne 1964, p. 28. The movement to association has been little studied. For a pioneering account, see Walker, Newspaper Press, pp. 205–7. For a survey of similar forces at work elsewhere see H.A.Innis, ‘Technology and Public Opinion in the United States’, in his The Bias of Communication, Toronto 1951. 40 H.Mayer,


for he went on writing very long letters to successive ministers. For the rest of the century, indeed, the cable was used sparingly as a means of communication between governments and the Colonial Office. In 1885 a total of sixty-one telegrams from all the Australian colonies and New Zealand reached the Office; in 1887, eighteen.45 The most common topics in 1885 were New Guinea, Samoa, the Sudan, the danger of war with Russia, imperial defence in general, and the bill for a Federal Council; in 1887 the principal subject was the scheme of naval defence proposed that year. By 1893 the Colonial Office was receiving from all over the world an average of no more than six telegrams on each working day, compared with 138 letters and written despatches.46 The telegram was used rarely except for matters thought to be urgent; and even then it could not be wholly trusted when users knew that messages might be mangled and the line might break, as happened during wars in Perak (1875) and the Transvaal (1880– 1).47 Ships were getting faster and more reliable; telegrams were unreliable and expensive. Within the Office they seemed to lose potency as their novelty wore off. By Chamberlain’s time the flurry of Kimberley’s day had gone. Only if a message was judged to be of special urgency was it sent straight in to the minister or the permanent head; all other telegrams were handled now as normal correspondence.48 More telegrams were received at the Colonial Office than sent from it. The permanent officials in charge at Whitehall were apt to be more parsimonious than elected ministers in Macquarie or Spring Streets, and less impetuous, having a stronger preference for regularity over jerkiness. Silence from London could itself be a message of rebuke, as when Sir Robert Meade advised the Earl of Ripon in 1895 that the tone of a telegram from George Reid, premier of New South Wales, ‘prevents any answer being sent’.49 Responding by sea could also be a reproach, as Lord Derby and his advisers chose to do in 1883 when the government of Queensland pressed impertinently by wire for the annexation of New Guinea. R.V.Kubicek suggests, with South Africa and Malaya in mind, that ‘the telegraph gave the local administrators the opportunity to create a sense of the immediacy and urgency of a problem or crisis’.50 The politicians of Queensland were trying to do just that, with the help of fraternal shouting from their neighbours. (‘Consider this crisis Australian history’, James Service of Victoria telegraphed to London.51) But the men at the centre refused to be

41

P.M.Kennedy, ‘Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870–1914’, English Historical Review, Vol. LXXXVI, 1971, p. 739. 42 J.W.Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, New Haven 1970, p. 43. 43 B.L.Blakeley, The Colonial Office, 1869–1892, Durham, N.C. 1972, pp. 65–6. 44 Bowen to Carnarvon 25 March 1874. Carnarvon Papers, PRO, 30/6/25/85. 45 Telegrams to and from the Australasian Colonies. Confidential Print, PRO, CO881/6, No. 118; 881/8, No. 159.


hectored into acquiescence. Derby disowned the Queenslanders’ ‘act of so-called annexation’ in the House of Lords on 2 July 1883. They heard the news next day from their agent-general and from Reuter’s; but Derby’s own despatch conveying the formal decision did not leave the Colonial Office until 11 July, and travelled to Brisbane by sea.52 When the administrators of empire wanted colonial soldiers for a war, on the other hand, they employed the telegraph liberally. The war between Prussia and Austria in 1866 was over before anybody in Australia knew that it had begun.53 The telegraph put an end to such innocence, and opened up vast new possibilities for imperial participation in warfare. ‘The affairs of Greeks and Romans’, Archibald Michie told fellow-colonists in 1859, imagining the consequences of telegraphy, ‘may hereafter appear commonplace compared to the events yet to come, when millions of British citizens may any morning be mustered by the wires for defence of any part.’54 A few hundred colonial soldiers were mustered in 1885, when reports by telegraph of Charles Gordon’s death in Khartoum caused a spasm of outrage all around the empire. Two days after the news reached Sydney the acting Premier of New South Wales, W.B.Dalley, sent off a cablegram to London offering troops to fight in the Sudan. It was the first time a colonial government had ever made such an offer. ‘Reply at once’, the message ended.55 An English visitor, J.A.Froude, felt tension in the air of Sydney as three days went by without reply. Then a telegram arrived, accepting the offer. It had been delayed by a fault in the line on the Persian frontier. Froude guessed that if the trouble had taken longer to fix, the colonists’ impulse would have faded and there would have been no expeditionary force from New South Wales. ‘But the wires were replaced quickly, and brought a warm and grateful assent.’56 Those breaks in the line were themselves a source of anxiety. Whenever it went dead, some people found it easy to conclude that an enemy must have cut it. In Victoria on 2 July 1888 subscribers to the Age read these headlines: ALARMING WAR SCARE. GUNBOAT ALBERT SENT TO THE HEADS. VICTORIAN FLEET READY FOR ANY EMERGENCY. THE TWO EUROPEAN SUBMARINE CABLES CUT. 46

R.V.Kubicek, The Administration of Imperialism: Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office, Durham, N.C. 1969, p. 31. 47 Blakeley, Colonial Office, p. 67. 48 Kubicek, Administration, pp. 30–1. 49 Meade to Ripon 30 May 1905. Ripon Papers, BM, Add. MS 53558, f. 134. It also counted against Reid that he had already published the text of the telegram in Sydney. 50 Kubicek, Administration, p. 32. 51 D.C.Gordon, The Australian Frontier in New Guinea, 1870–1885, New York 1951, p. 185.


A COUNCIL OF WAR HELD AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE. Lord Carrington, Governor of New South Wales, wrote in his diary that the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Loch, ‘seems to have gone off his head and imagines that the Russians have cut the cable and that we are at war’.57 It was two weeks before the line was restored, bearing news that both cables between Darwin and Java had been broken, accidentally. Worries about an enemy destroying the connection subsided after 1902, when the line through Port Darwin was supplemented by those cables to South Africa and Canada, lying under oceans dominated by the Royal Navy. Some thousands of Australian soldiers were mustered for the war in South Africa at the end of the century, governments having been induced to send them by skilfully deployed cablegrams from the Colonial Office, and they themselves having been provoked to go by what they read in the newspapers. On 3 July 1899 Chamberlain sent secret messages to colonial governments asking if they would send contingents ‘in the event of a military demonstration against the Transvaal’. 58 Governors explored the question with their ministers, and commandants of colonial military forces—imperial officers on loan—stirred their part-time soldiers to think of volunteering and encouraged politicians to think of offering them. At first it seemed that the governments might not give the right answer. ‘They do not rise to the occasion’, the Colonial Office told the War Office. But in Queensland the commandant appears to have persuaded the premier, who sent a telegram to London offering 250 men. Chamberlain welcomed the offer in a public and fulsome cablegram. ‘Wait and see whether the action of Queensland will change their attitude’, Sir Edward Wingfield, permanent head of the Colonial Office, wrote on a telegram from the Governor of New South Wales. It did. Soon messages were reaching the Office that members of the defence forces in other colonies wanted to go to South Africa if there should be a war. On 3 October a telegram from Chamberlain to Australian governors expressed appreciation ‘for the patriotic spirit exhibited by the people of Australia in offering to serve in South Africa’ and set out details of the force Her Majesty’s government would ‘gladly accept’. This message was published in the Australian papers on 5 and 6 October, and the war began on 11 October.

52

The story is told from an aggrieved Queenslander’s standpoint in A.C.V. Melbourne, ‘The Relations between Australia and New Guinea, up to the Establishment of British Rule in 1888’, Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings, Vol. XII, 1926, esp. pp. 309–14. 53 Walker, Newspaper Press, p. 201: 54 A.Michie, Colonists: Socially, and in their Relations with the Mother Country, St Kilda 1859, p. 27. 55 Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 1885. 56 J.A.Froude, Oceana; or, England and her Colonies, London 1886, p. 148.


The contingents were proposed to colonial parliaments by ministries which had already undertaken to raise and send them. Some members in every legislature opposed them; But as the Secretary of State had already thanked the people of Australia for the offers, it was not easy to express misgivings about the enterprise without sounding disloyal. ‘Our honour is concerned’, wrote the Brisbane Courier on 6 October, ‘in making the reply to yesterday’s cablegram complete… Dissent may be uttered in private by some, but a genuine regard for the colony’s honour will keep all unkindly feeling down’. The newspapers did their loyal best for the British cause not only by thinking imperial thoughts but by offering carefully selected imperial facts; their columns of telegraphic news, like their leading articles, gave a uniformly partisan view of what was happening in South Africa. Critics of the imperial connection, such as the makers of the Sydney Bulletin, rightly saw the telegraph as a powerful weapon in the hands of their antagonist John Bull. At the time of the Jameson raid, in 1896, a correspondent in the Bulletin wrote: ‘Isolated here at the Antipodes, and dependent for their information concerning international questions upon “Cockney” cables which convey the kindred sentiments of the Colonial office, the West-end military clubs, and the pewter-pot patriotism of East London music-halls, Australians may be, and often are, easily bulldozed into espousing the wrong side of any dispute or quarrel in which England is concerned’.59 In fearing that a public opinion so formed would be ‘ready to applaud and condone any effort or any atrocity against Dutch freedom in Africa’, the writer was foreshadowing a judgement made a few years later by beleaguered critics of the war. In Melbourne Henry Bournes Higgins, opposing the despatch of a contingent from Victoria, said in parliament that the Boer side of the controversy had not been put by a press which got its information from a single source. ‘I felt keenly’, he wrote later, ‘that our kindly, warmhearted people were being misled by perverted accounts deliberately propagated through the newspaper press.‘60 In Sydney Professor G.Arnold Wood shared Higgins’ sense of impotence against a steady stream of distorted news. ‘All the Australian journals get their cables from one source’, he lamented, ‘—a source apparently in connection with the most sensational section of the London Jingo press.’61 Higgins and Wood, like their allies in England, had no idea how far the news reaching London papers from South Africa was being controlled during 1899 by the British High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner.62 But in England there were at least some alternative sources of information, and there was one major morning paper, the Manchester Guardian, opposed to the government on the war. Higgins and Wood read their Guardians when the postman delivered them in bundles

57

Lord Carrington, manuscript diary, 30 June 1888. Mitchell Library. L.M.Field, ‘The Forgotten War. Australian Involvement in the South African Conflict of 1899–1902’, unpublished MA thesis, Australian National University, 1973, p. 14. The rest of the paragraph draws on this thesis. 58


five, six or seven weeks old, and did their best to interest people in the facts and opinions they found there; but with little success. Did Australian critics of the war have a liberal illusion about how people would have responded to more diverse news about South Africa? Would Queen Victoria’s colonial subjects have been just as enthusiastically hostile to the Boers however scrupulously briefed on their grievances? Perhaps. But at the very least, the papers equipped readers with a reassuringly simply view of the issues. As the first troopship sailed away, the Sydney Morning Herald reflected with satisfaction on what news was doing to public opinion. ‘As the result of the full light which has recently been thrown on the true condition of affairs in the Transvaal; as the result, too, of the exposure of the high-handed manner in which freeborn British citizens have been treated by Mr Kruger’s Government, the number of those who are prepared to uphold the Boer side of the quarrel is, we have reason to believe, getting smaller every day.’63 Richard Jebb, looking back on that public opinion after the war, concluded that in the colonies—in Canada as well as Australia and New Zealand—‘the points at issue in South Africa were less widely understood than in the mother country, owing to the deplorable poverty of cable intelligence’.64 When the fighting began, quick news of it helped induce men to volunteer and strengthened imperial sentiment. The Governor of Victoria, Lord Brassey—a connoisseur of the cable, his father having invested in the line under the Atlantic —recalled to an English audience in 1902 the atmosphere in Melbourne during the first weeks of the war. ‘Men stood together in the streets; they scanned the telegrams of disaster posted up at the offices of the newspapers; they asked each other, “Shall we stand here and do nothing?”’ The telegraph, said Brassey, was ‘a great Imperial binding force’.65 The spirit of Mafeking travelled undiluted along the wires to Melbourne, where the Argus wrote on the Queen’s birthday in 1900, celebrating the raising of the siege: ‘the deep-sea cables have linked the whole British race together’.66 The morning after the banquet of 15 November 1872, The Times offered sober counsel on what the electric connection did and did not do. ‘It gives…both to the Colonies and to the Mother Country better means of maintaining a good understanding between them; but that under standing itself must depend upon

59 ‘J.N.’ in Bulletin, 8 February 1896. The initials, the sentiments, and the taste for alliteration (‘“Cockney” cables’, ‘pewter-pot patriotism’), suggest that the writer may be the larrikin radical journalist, John Norton. 60 H.B.Higgins, manuscript autobiography, National Library of Australia, p. 112. 61 R.M.Crawford, ‘A Bit of a Rebel’: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood, Sydney 1975, p. 219. 62 A.N.Porter, ‘Sir Alfred Milner and the Press, 1897–1899’, Historical Journal, Vol. XVI, 1973, pp. 323–9. 63

Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1899.


stronger supports than a few wires.’ Lord Kimberley noted coolly in his journal that although the company ‘were very enthusiastic in favour of the “integrity” of the Empire’, there was a striking contrast between such ‘“tall” talk’ and ‘the action of the colonial governments especially the Australian, whenever home & colonial interests come or seem to come into conflict’.67 P.M. Kennedy finds ‘little evidence to suggest that differences of opinion between British and colonial politicians were in any way eased, let alone removed, by the use of the telegraph’.68 On some issues, indeed—above all, on the possession of islands in the Pacific—the telegraph was used to make differences of opinion more vivid. Kimberley and others nevertheless meant it when they said that the line was a powerful agent of imperial unity. In Kipling’s fancy the deep-sea cable’s whispered message ‘Let us be one!’ was not made inaudible to the English race by mere family squabbles among their politicians. Later observers, looking back across greater technical marvels, could easily ignore the mental effects of the telegraph on the generation that was the first to use it. Thanks to the cable, declared the journalist Arthur Patchett Martin in 1889, ‘it is something more than a mere post-prandial phrase that Australia is as much a part of the Empire as Yorkshire’. Martin, now settled in England, had been in Victoria, and working in the post office, when the telegraphic connection began. The days before Australia was ‘in direct hourly communication with the Motherland by means of the magic submarine cable’ seemed to him already another era; it was ‘like the division between ancient and modern colonial history’.69 To propose 1872 as beginning a new period in Australian history may help us to interpret, among other things, the absence of immediate successors to Adam Lindsay Gordon and Marcus Clarke as makers of a national literature; Gordon and Clarke, wrote Francis Adams in 1893, ‘formed but the brilliant dawn of a cloudy, colourless day. Mail steamer and cable have brought England too close’.70 More generally, it may illuminate the persistence of imperial sentiment among an increasingly native-born population.

64 R.Jebb,

Studies in Colonial Nationalism, London 1905, p. 110. Bright, Imperial Telegraphic Communication, pp. 29–30. 66 Argus, 24 May 1900. 65

67 The Earl of Kimberley, ‘A Journal of Events during the Gladstone Ministry 1868–74’, E.Drus (ed.), Camden Miscellany, Vol. XXI, 1958, p. 35. 68 P.M.Kennedy, ‘Imperial Cable…’, p. 750. 69 A.P.Martin, Australia and the Empire, Edinburgh 1889, pp. 63, 220–1. 70 F.Adams, The Australians, London 1893, pp. 83–4.

P.G.EDWARDS

The Rise and Fall of the High Commissioner: S.M.Bruce in London, 1933–451

There has long been an assumption prevalent among scholars, in the media and in the general community that the position of an ambassador in the twentieth century is very much less significant than that of his predecessors of a century or two ago. In the era of shuttle diplomacy, summit meetings and split-second telecommunications, it is argued, the ambassador has become little more than a dignified clerk obeying instructions. The more extreme versions of this argument have been ably debunked by Lord Trevelyan and others,2 but one would seldom expect to find an ambassador these days in a central, focal position in the policymaking process, with the possible exception of a temporary, bilateral crisis. This perhaps accounts for the surprise with which Australians, professional historians and laymen alike, are discovering from recently released documents that their High Commissioner in London from 1933 to 1945, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, was a very much more active, assertive and influential, in some senses powerful, figure than the standard accounts of Australian diplomacy would suggest. He is almost totally ignored, for example, in Sir Alan Watt’s Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy.3 Sir Paul Hasluck’s official history of Australia in World War II states succinctly that Bruce was not only ‘an effective representative of Australia’ but ‘in an unusual way, an influential participant in the conduct of war’.4 He does not explain, however, what this ‘unusual way’ was, and the brevity of the reference leaves the impression that Bruce’s role had little to do with Australian political history, including foreign policy, which his two volumes record.

1

This paper is based principally on the official Australian and British documents seen when I was a member of the editorial team responsible for the series of volumes of Documents on Australian Foreign Policy. Some material from the collection of Bruce Papers in the Australian Archives, Canberra, was used in the preparation of those volumes, but this paper was written before that collection became fully available to public researchers in August 1977. An earlier draft of this paper was read to a seminar in the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, in December 1976. I wish to thank the chairman, Peter Lyon, and members of the seminar for helpful comments. 2 Humphrey Trevelyan, Diplomatic Channels, Boston 1973, esp. Ch. 2, gives a wellbalanced account of the modern ambassador’s work. 3 Alan Watt, The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965, Cambridge 1968.


Two books have been written, both significantly by former subordinates of Bruce, which have emphasized the importance of his work in London, but neither seems to have altered the usual Australian assessment of Bruce as a willing collaborator with the British ruling class, of which he was indeed an honorary member. Both books may be seen to a large degree as primary rather than secondary sources, for the principal strength of Cecil Edwards’s biography is in the quoted extracts from Bruce’s wartime papers and from his reminiscences in interviews in the 1960s;5 while Alfred Stirling’s book reads largely like its presumed source, some sort of diary of the man who saw himself as external affairs counsellor to Bruce during most of the High Commissionership.6 The Bruce who is emerging from the documents, constantly meddling in Whitehall and challenging the British government from within on diplomacy, strategy and the conduct of the war, is therefore something of a revelation. This paper does not seek to relate Bruce’s activities or to emphasize their importance: that can be left to the books just cited and to the documents now being opened by the Australian Archives and in part published by the Department of Foreign Affairs.7 Rather it seeks to analyse the extraordinary position which Bruce created for himself, particularly in the central years of his long tenure, approximately from 1936 to 1942. It argues that he was simultaneously filling three essentially separate and discrete roles and that it was his ability to combine these roles which gave him his unique importance. Edwards and Stirling both attribute Bruce’s prominence almost entirely to his personal qualities. While certainly not seeking to minimise the force of his personality, this paper is an attempt to outline some of the elements of the political context which made it possible for him to rise to this position and to wear three hats at once, and those factors which subsequently tended to diminish his influence during the latter years of the war. What were the three roles? Firstly and most obviously, Bruce was the representative of the Australian Government in London. Australia’s perception of her own position in the imperial system, especially as it affected international affairs, was far from clear at this time. She abstained from ratifying the Statute of Westminster and declared her adherence to the principle of the diplomatic unity of the British Empire, never more clearly than in a speech by R.G.Menzies as late as October 1938;8 yet she was simultaneously equipping herself to conduct an independent foreign policy. In 1935 the Department of External Affairs was completely separated from the Prime Minister’s Department and in the next few

4

Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People 1942–1945, Canberra 1970, p. 227. Cecil Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne: Man of Two Worlds, London 1965. 6 Alfred Stirling, Lord Bruce: The London Years, Melbourne 1974. 7 Department of Foreign Affairs, Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937–1949, Canberra 1975–, (hereinafter DAFP). Bruce’s role is particularly prominent in Volume III (1 January to 30 June 1940) to be published in 1979. 5

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER 39

years the foundations of the diplomatic service were laid and diplomats were sent to posts overseas, at first attached to a British Embassy and then, from 1940 on, at fully independent Australian legations. Essentially the situation by the end of the 1930s was that Australia was still acting through Britain in the international arena, but under the pressure of the growing threat from Germany, Italy and Japan was more willing to challenge British policies, more eager to press Australian views and priorities on the United Kingdom Government, than at any time since Versailles. At the same time, the London government, under similar pressures and conscious of the need for the military support of the whole Empire-Commonwealth, was compelled to give the Dominions more information than before about its policies and at least to appear to heed their reactions. From the Abyssinian crisis onwards, the Dominions were apparently taken into consultation, mainly through the medium of regular meetings between the Dominion High Commissioners in London and the Secretary of State for the Dominions. The general trend of recent research has been to suggest that the influence of the Dominions on British foreign policy was, at most, limited to supporting initiatives already decided upon;9 but a forum was created which developed by the early years of the war into what the participants liked to think of as ‘the junior war cabinet’.10 For an unusually active High Commissioner, supported by his government, there were unprecedented opportunities to gain access to the British Cabinet. Australian High Commissioners before Bruce had had little or no influence on international affairs or the foreign policy of the British Empire. In part this was because they did not have the requisite combination of energy, experience and interest in foreign affairs, but at least equally important was the fact that successive Australian Prime Ministers showed great reluctance to entrust their High Commissioners with any scope for such activity, no less so because three of Bruce’s four predecessors were, like Bruce himself, former Prime Ministers. In the early years of Federation, the Deakin and Fisher governments had consistently pressed for a greater say in imperial policy-making, but when at the 1911 Imperial Conference it was suggested that regular attendance by the High Commissioners at the Committee of Imperial Defence might be an appropriate means of achieving this end, Fisher shied away from the idea.11 Just as he, a Labor Prime Minister, was unwilling to give any substantial authority to Sir George Reid, the former hunter of socialist tigers, so Fisher was in his turn shut out by W.M.Hughes. Bruce himself as Prime Minister from 1923 to 1929 had little more faith in either Sir Joseph Cook or his own appointee, Sir Granville

8

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 157, pp. 428–33, 5 October 1938. David Carlton, ‘The Dominions and British Policy in the Abyssinian Crisis’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1972, pp. 59–77; Ritchie Ovendale, ‘Appeasement’ and the English Speaking World, Cardiff 1975. 10 Vincent Massey, What’s Past is Prologue, Toronto 1963, p. 298. 9


Ryrie: instead, he appointed R.G.Casey as liaison officer between himself and the most sensitive offices in Whitehall, with instructions to keep himself quite separate from the High Commission, creating a dual system of Australian representation in London. Thus by the time Bruce was appointed in 1933, the High Commission had come to be regarded as a suitable place for awkward or tired former Prime Ministers (or Ministers) to be put out to pasture, with dignity and honour but without power or influence. In 1933 few would have predicted Bruce’s subsequent interest and activity in international affairs. His appointment of Casey was well known but what was (and indeed still is) seldom mentioned was the fact that, as Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs in the late 1920s, he encouraged the Director of External Affairs, Dr Walter Henderson, in a plan to establish a diplomatic service and a foreign office worthy of the name for Australia. The fall of the Bruce-Page Government in 1929, with the loss of Bruce’s own seat, and the subsequent dismissal of Henderson by the Scullin Labor Government meant a delay of nearly a decade before another start was made. The development of Bruce’s interest away from financial affairs towards greater concentration on international politics has been told by both Edwards and Stirling and need not be repeated here, except to note the importance of the meetings of the League of Nations in Geneva as the school for Bruce’s diplomatic skills. The High Commissioner was usually the principal Australian representative in Geneva, and Bruce, unlike Cook or Ryrie, began to earn a reputation as a skilful operator there. As no other part of the Australian bureaucracy had developed a lasting interest in the League, Bruce had virtually a free hand. He was also able to overcome the traditional reluctance of Australian Governments to be represented by the High Commissioner at the Committee of Imperial Defence. This was a further source of confidential information and a means of access to the most important British policy-makers. While Bruce was developing his talents in foreign affairs, he, unlike his predecessors, had the benefit of the support and confidence of his Prime Ministers. J.A.Lyons, the former Labor Premier of Tasmania become conservative Prime Minister, belonged more to the Watson-Fisher-Cook tradition of Prime Ministers who concentrated on domestic, especially economic, matters than to the Deakin-Hughes school of Prime Ministers with an active interest in imperial and foreign affairs. His interventions in international politics, especially around the time of the Munich crisis of 1938, generally reflected wellintentioned but naive bewilderment. He seldom tried to instruct or even guide Bruce, but gave him virtually carte blanche. Menzies was of a rather different

11 Minutes of 113th meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, 30 May 1911, CAB 2/ 2/2, Public Record Office, London. The present writer is currently engaged on a study of the making of Australian foreign policy from 1901 to 1949 in which this and other issues touched on in this paper will be discussed more fully.


calibre with a long-standing interest in foreign affairs and a judgement which, fortunately, improved greatly after his accession to the Prime Ministership in April 1939.12 He and Bruce respected each other’s qualities and usually agreed on policy matters. Menzies kept control of external policy in his own hands as far as possible, but was not afraid to entrust sensitive issues to Bruce’s discretion. The traditional assumption about Bruce has been that he was too British in background, style and outlook to be an effective advocate of Australian views. In fact the evidence shows that he vigorously challenged the British on rearmament, strategic issues in Europe as well as the Far East (including, most sensitively, the Singapore strategy), the politico-military conduct of the war, war aims and peace aims, the information given to the Dominions—in short, everything on which the Australian and United Kingdom Governments differed, a list we now know to be far longer than previously thought. The attitude of the permanent head of the Foreign Office, that the Dominion High Commissioners, Bruce above all, were ‘undependable busybodies’ with not enough work to do, may be taken as confirmation of his ability to insert unwelcome advice and opinions into the Whitehall machine.13 As mentioned earlier, it is not the present purpose to relate these actions, but one or two further comments on Bruce as Australian representative should be made here. Australians, particularly in the Labor party, have long had a fear, going back at least as far as Hughes in 1916, of their leaders visiting London and being ‘duchessed’, that is to say, being seduced by the honours and flattery of the British establishment into advocacy of British and imperial rather than truly Australian views. Bruce, it was thought, was ‘an English gentleman, born in Australia’ and therefore duchessing would have been superfluous.14 An episode in 1942 conveys a different impression. Reflecting the Australian government’s strong desire to participate in Allied policy-making at the highest level, Bruce was seeking to be treated in practice, and not merely in title, as a member of the U.K. War Cabinet. When the Minister for External Affairs, Dr H.V.Evatt, came to London to press Australia’s case on this and other issues in person, Bruce had a long memorandum prepared setting out the War Cabinet situation. Evatt arrived, was taken by Churchill on a speaking tour to Leeds, had membership of the Privy Council and the Freedom of Leeds conferred upon him—and then, despite further pressure from Bruce, declined to press the issue with Churchill. Thereafter it was Bruce who kept up a barrage of attacks on Churchill, while Evatt stressed the need not to antagonise the great war leader.15 Someone as secure as

12 For an example of Menzies’s fallible judgement in 1938, see DAFP, Vol. I, No. 237; for a discussion of his foreign policy as Prime Minister, see P.G.Edwards, ‘Menzies and the Imperial Connection 1939–1941’ in Cameron Hazlehurst (ed.), Australian Conservatism (to be published in Canberra in 1979). 13 D.Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938–1945, London 1971, p. 216.


Bruce in his personal self-confidence and his social credentials could hardly be ‘duchessed’; Evatt, the ambitious son of a publican, was perhaps the more vulnerable. The Britishness of Bruce’s style did not mean that he had ‘gone over to the English’, as Evatt alleged: it was an excellent cover under which he could advocate Australian views in the heart of the Empire. The assumption that Bruce was too British implied that, because he publicly extolled the British Empire, he automatically supported the policies of the British government. With many Australian political leaders, such criticism was perfectly valid, but to Bruce (as to Deakin and Hughes before him) being ‘pro-Empire’ had a different effect. The more highly they esteemed the British Empire and Commonwealth, the more inadequate seemed the members of the United Kingdom government, individually and collectively, to be its governing trustees. This helps to account for the way in which Bruce, though a fervent supporter of the Empire as he conceived it, did not acquiesce in British policy but challenged Chamberlain and Churchill, fought with the Foreign Office and frequently passed acerbic comments on successive Dominion Secretaries and other members of the U.K. Cabinet. Bruce was not merely an executant of Australian foreign policy: to a degree that has not generally been recognized, he helped to initiate and formulate it. He did not, of course, have the executive authority to decide policy issues: that lay in theory with the Minister for External Affairs and Cabinet, but more commonly in fact with the Prime Minister, and during the early part of the war with the War Cabinet and the bi-partisan Advisory War Council. But Bruce’s contribution as adviser was one of very great influence. In large part, his was an initiatory role. As mentioned earlier, Australian foreign policy was essentially a matter of seeking to challenge, or to modify, or even to reinforce British policies. It was frequently Bruce who, to use an appropriate American expression, put new items on the agenda. London was not only the heart of the Empire but, a major, perhaps the major, diplomatic capital. In addition from September 1939 to December 1941 it was the centre for the military and diplomatic conduct of the war. Thus the issues on which Bruce was reporting and making recommendations were not merely bilateral or imperial in scope, but global and his work was especially notable during the first two years of the war. Two examples I have discussed elsewhere and need only be referred to here. It was Bruce who, in May 1940, first suggested an appeal by Australia and the ‘young, democratic Dominions’ to President Roosevelt, setting a precedent for John Curtin’s later, more celebrated ‘turning towards America’ statement.16 He also instigated the debate between the British and Australian

14 See the description of Bruce by Frank Anstey in Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne., pp. 191–3. 15 Stirling, Lord Bruce, 256–67. The memorandum from Bruce to Evatt of 27 May 1942 is in the ‘War Cabinet’ file, Evatt papers, Flinders University of South Australia.


governments over war aims and peace aims, and from a very early stage of the war—far too early to have the desired political impact—was making detailed proposals about the peace settlement and the shape of the post-war world.17 Furthermore, it was Bruce who, even before the outbreak of war, was behind the growing if belated realization by the Australian Government that their faith in the Singapore strategy as the very keystone of Australian defence might be misplaced.18 On numerous other issues—the conduct of the war in relation to Scandinavia, Finland, Italy and Japan are prominent examples—a similar pattern can be discerned. Bruce would become aware of a problem or detect an unsatisfactory situation in the conduct of the war; he would then send a lengthy telegram to Canberra, outlining the problem in some detail and setting out the options, with the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ for each; and he would then frequently recommend a course of action by drafting a suggested telegram back to himself, instructing him to take up the matter with the British Prime Minister, or the Foreign Office, or the Chiefs of Staff or other appropriate authority, urging a certain policy on them. Usually, but not invariably, Menzies, like Lyons before him, would send the telegram precisely, or very largely, as Bruce had drafted it. 19 Bruce was therefore not only a diplomat but was acting as if the permanent head of a Foreign Office, making recommendations on policy issues that covered the globe. To so advise on an almost unlimited range of issues would not have been possible without a substantial degree of bureaucratic support. Bruce created for himself a sort of miniature Foreign Office, with three separate categories of advisers. In the first place there was the liaison office, renamed in the 1930s the External Affairs Office, which as already mentioned Casey had set up in Whitehall on Bruce’s instructions in 1924, quite separate from the High Commission. With the active assistance of Sir Maurice Hankey, Casey had established a small office within the Cabinet Offices, from which he and his successors reported at first to the Prime Minister personally, then to the External Affairs Department, on developments in British policy. They had access to Foreign Office and Committee of Imperial Defence documents, amplified by discussions with FO and CID officials, including Hankey himself. The basic assumption behind the creation and operation of this office was that information would be entrusted to the highest levels of the Australian government through it which would not be vouchsafed to an Australian High Commissioner and the growing bureaucracy at Australia House. What Prime Minister Bruce had put as under, High Commissioner Bruce now proceeded to join together. As the 1930s

16 P.G.Edwards, ‘R.G.Menzies’s Appeals to the United States, May–June 1940’, Australian Outlook, Vol. 28, No. 1, April 1974, pp. 64–70. 17 P.G.Edwards, ‘S.M.Bruce, R.G.Menzies and Australia’s War Aims and Peace Aims, 1939–1940’, Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 66, April 1976, pp. 1–14. 18 See, for example, DAFP, Vol. I, No. 189, and Vol. II, No. 37.


progressed into ever deepening international crises, Bruce spent more and more of his time working in the small External Affairs office in Whitehall rather than in Australia House, reading the Foreign Office cables and the reports which the External Affairs officer, Alfred Stirling, and his assistant were sending back to Canberra, based on their rounds of the political desks of the Foreign Office and, less importantly, the Dominions Office. Stirling, whose attitude to Bruce verged on hero-worship, was happy to regard himself and his assistant as respectively counsellor and first secretary to ‘Ambassador’ Bruce and the collaboration was effective. Bruce was thus able to use the Foreign Office’s information and analysis, as well as his personal contacts with members of the Cabinet, to challenge their own policies—or what he frequently regarded as an inexcusable lack of policy. Secondly, Bruce had a similar channel of advice on military matters. The Australian services maintained offices in Australia House for liaison between the respective military authorities in Melbourne and London. Bruce turned the three senior officers into his ‘service advisers’ and kept closely in touch with them and thus with thinking in the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Office. From June 1942, when Bruce officially became Representative of Australia in the War Cabinet in London, he also had at least weekly joint meetings with them as a Services Committee.20 From quite early in the 1930s it had become customary for the senior army representative to see the material being received in, and despatched from, the External Affairs office in the Cabinet Offices.21 Bruce at some point developed this channel further, for by August 1943 he had a member of the Australian military mission, Colonel Rourke, reporting directly to him and not to the senior military adviser, General Smart. As Bruce described it in a personal letter. [Rourke] really is my Ismay, in the sense that he covers the Army, Navy and Air and is responsible to no one except to me… The way this situation operates is that Rourke is with me in the Cabinet Office and has established the most admirable relations with the whole Chiefs of Staff organisation and has the closest contact with it, particularly with the Joint Planners. In this way I probably have more information with regard to strategic and operational questions than any of the members of the War Cabinet with the exception of the Prime Minister himself.22 With Rourke covering the Chiefs of Staff and Stirling the Foreign Office, the Dominions Office and, more intermittently, the Cabinet Secretariat, Bruce could recommend that Australia criticize British strategy as well as foreign policy on the basis of exceptionally extensive information.

19

See, for example, DAFP, Vol. III, Nos 11–13.


The third leg of Bruce’s advisory tripod was Frank McDougall, officially his economic adviser but in fact the source of a constant stream of ideas on social and political questions as well. McDougall saw himself as a progressive influence on Bruce and indeed his constant pressure on such themes as the need for a more just distribution of food and other resources between nations was probably responsible in large measure for the transition of Bruce, referred to elsewhere,23 from an apparently undeviating conservative politician to a spokesman for idealistic internationalist views in foreign affairs (even while remaining a staunch capitalist in domestic policy). The interaction of Bruce, McDougall and Sir John Orr did much to lay the foundations of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Unlike previous High Commissioners, who had presided vaguely over a loose congeries of offices at Australia House, each conscious only of a responsibility to its parent department in Australia, Bruce had therefore brought oversight of political, economic and military representation into his own hands, an unprecedented and probably unrepeated degree of co-ordination. Evatt’s bitter question of Stirling and Brigadier Wardell, the military adviser, in May 1942 —‘Do you consider yourself on the High Commissioner’s staff?’ —underlined the significance of Bruce’s actions :24 Evatt could recognize only too well a powerful source of policy advice that might conflict with his own. It might also be noted here that Keith Officer, the Australian Counsellor at the British Embassy in Washington from 1937 to 1940, and Richard Casey, the first Minister when the Australian Legation was established in 1940, might both be termed Bruce protégés, notwithstanding Bruce’s denial, since both were introduced to international affairs during Bruce’s Prime Ministership. Too much could probably be made of the fact that all three were products of Melbourne Grammar School, but Officer long continued to write to Bruce as ‘My dear Chief and Bruce assisted both wherever possible in their respective diplomatic and political careers. Particularly in 1940, it was noticeable that Casey and Bruce frequently exchanged cables which were not always repeated immediately to Australia, in effect discussing the situation before making a joint recommendation to Menzies in Canberra.25 Thus the creation of Australian representation in Washington did not lead to a position in any sense rivalling Bruce’s in London, but rather to an augmentation of his sources of information and an extension of his influence. There is evidence that Bruce was highly

20

Stirling, Lord Bruce, p. 268. Ibid., p. 84. 22 Bruce to Keith Officer, 6 August 1943, MS 2629/1/920–28, Officer papers, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Major General Hastings Ismay was Deputy Secretary (Military) of the U.K. War Cabinet Secretariat and Churchill’s representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee. 23 See n. 17. 21


regarded by many senior American policy-makers and his name was on the State Department’s list of potential candidates for the position of first SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations.26 The importance of Bruce as adviser on policy also reflected the weakness of the constitutional source of such advice, the Department of External Affairs. Both domestic critics and overseas diplomats in Canberra frequently noted the inadequacy of the department for its rapidly growing duties. Between November 1937 and October 1941 it had no less than four ministers—W.M.Hughes, Sir Henry Gullett, John McEwen and Sir Frederick Stewart. The combination of brevity of tenure, political turmoil, the pressure of other ministerial commitments and in one or two cases inexpertise made it difficult for any to come satisfactorily to grips with the department’s problems, as well as the fact that Menzies displayed a marked desire to keep personal control of external relations. At the administrative level, the demands made by the opening of new posts overseas left the Canberra office struggling to cope. There is also evidence of divisions within the department, as well as of hostility from some sections of the longer-established departments, suspicious about the kind of men being recruited to found a diplomatic service. When the department did begin to grow in influence, it was largely by developing expertise on regional matters, especially the islands to the north and east of Australia. Under Evatt’s direction, it also placed an emphasis on the problems of the post-war settlement which proved most fruitful at the 1945 San Francisco Conference. In the meantime, however, the department could not match Bruce for advice on the major international issues. This is not say, of course, that Bruce’s counsel was always wise or that his criticisms of British policy were always fair. His constant advocacy of appeasement of the dictators, sometimes more emphatic even than that of the Chamberlain Government, makes unpleasant reading today, even when balanced with his pressure for rearmament; while during the war years he often seemed to be better at diagnosing problems than at prescribing solutions. The point was, however, that he almost always had a view on every issue, expressed with force and usually with clarity: he could always give a lead and Australian governments before 1941, torn by internecine disputes and lacking strong sources of alternative advice, were generally content to follow. For the third of Bruce’s roles, one may look first at a comment by his Canadian contemporary, Vincent Massey, who described the Dominion High

24

Stirling, Lord Bruce, p. 266. Examples may be found in the files of the Australian Legation at Washington, Series A3300, Australian Archives, Canberra. 26 Foreign Relations of the United States 1945, Washington 1967 Vol. I, p. 1439; see also McDougall to Officer, 11 February 1943, MS 2629/1/897–900, Officer papers, National Library of Australia. 25


Commissioners as ‘not quite ministers but more than diplomats, in fact a kind of combination of the two’.27 That is to say, they were more than diplomatic representatives of their own dominions and almost of ministerial importance in the United Kingdom political process. Massey also noted enviously that the Australian government, unlike the Canadian, made use of their High Commissioner :28 but it would be equally true to say that Bruce was making use of his own government, for in addition to the two roles already described, those of government representative and policy adviser, Bruce was playing an independent part in the United Kingdom political process, taking advantage of his position and his influence with the Australian government, although the policy he was advocating was often his own and not necessarily one approved by the government in Canberra. The best known example of Bruce acting nominally as the Australian representative but in fact as a power in his own right, was during the abdication crisis of 1936. His ‘decisive’ intervention which ‘helped to end the period of almost painful indecision’ by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin has been recorded at length elsewhere.29 It is worth noting here, however, his opening gambit in his private talk with Baldwin on 15 November.30 He evidently opened the discussion by saying that it had just occurred to him that the King might be contemplating marriage with Mrs Simpson and that he therefore felt obliged to raise the matter with Prime Minister Lyons. ‘Before doing so,’ he continued, he wanted to discuss it fully with Baldwin, which he proceeded to do, portraying the results of such a marriage as utterly devasting to the throne, the Empire and the government of the United Kingdom. Although it transpired that Lyons’s own views were no less vehement than Bruce’s, the obvious deduction is that Bruce was giving Baldwin advice, which proved to be of decisive importance, on his own initiative, not on instructions from Lyons, and before he had even discussed all the ramifications of the situation with his own government. One can see the same technique in his conversation with Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain, in December 1937.31 Again Bruce sought the interview completely on his own initiative, stated that he wished to discuss the subject of rearmament before he reported to the Australian government, and proceeded to launch into a monologue on the position of the defences of the United Kingdom, by comparison with those of France and Germany. The theme, reiterated frequently and with emphasis, was that Britain should give absolute priority to her air defences over both naval and army expenditure. He had, so far as I can discover, no authority from the Australian government so to argue with respect to United Kingdom defence policy. Bruce reported this conversation to Lyons by sea mail. Soon after his letter arrived he drafted a telegram from Lyons to Chamberlain which Lyons, with

27 28

Massey, What’s Past is Prologue, p. 306. Ibid., p. 259.


typical compliance, immediately despatched.32 Although it only stated that Lyons confirmed ‘that Australia will be prepared to cooperate with the United Kingdom to the maximum extent of her power and financial resources in any further defence preparation your Government may decide is necessary…’, Bruce took this as giving blanket endorsement to all his views and proceeded to embark on discussions with a number of Cabinet Ministers and senior officials, stressing the need for rearmament, especially in the air, and advocating that this take priority even over financial considerations. These latter discussions were never, so far as I am aware, reported to Australia. If he had been asked how his arguments squared with Australia’s traditional emphasis on the naval component of imperial defence, Bruce might well have argued that the security of the United Kingdom was essential to Australian defence and that he was therefore acting in Australia’s interests: his own advocacy of stronger naval forces in the Far East was vehement enough. The point was that Bruce, in addition to carrying out the instructions of the Australian government, whether drafted by himself or another, saw himself as having the right to intervene in the decision-making process on United Kingdom policy, using his title and influence as Australian High Commissioner to open doors in West-minster and Whitehall. To cite one more instance, Bruce raised the question of Palestine in a conversation with Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in December 1938 and told him ‘the Australia’s views were very definitely that we must not arouse the hostility of the Arabs in trying to pacify the Jews. Australia considered that the existing balance of population namely 2 Arabs to 1 Jew should not be upset’.33 There seems to be no evidence that such specific advice was anything other than Bruce’s own personal views, expressed at a time when the United Kingdom government was reconsidering the highly sensitive Palestine problem. As more and more evidence becomes available from Australian and British archives and from Bruce’s own papers, it becomes clearer that Bruce’s inclusion in the U.K. War Cabinet in June 1942 was an innovation only in the constitutional sense: in practical politics, he had been acting in quasi-ministerial fashion for about five years, seeking to influence British policy and strategy in a number of fields, with a significant proportion of his activities never being reported to Australia, let alone being carried out on instructions. Indeed not even all of the information he picked up from his various confidential sources was passed on to Australia. As he told Keith Officer in 1943, after describing how Stirling and Rourke acquired political and military intelligence from Whitehall sources, ‘I need hardly say that I use a very great discretion as to how much of

29 Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography, London 1969, Ch. 34. The quotation is from p. 991. 30 Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne, pp. 251 ff. 31 DAFP, Vol. I, No. 123. 32 Ibid., Nos 124–5.


what I know I pass on to Australia in view of the confidential manner in which the information has been obtained’.34 Five years earlier, in summing up his behind-the-scenes activities during the Munich crisis in a letter to Lyons, he said virtually as much to his Prime Minister.35 The same letter gives further instances of Bruce intervening at extremely delicate states of the crisis, vigorously proferring advice which he no doubt considered to be in both Australia’s and Britain’s interests, but which was based essentially on his personal assessment of the situation rather than that of the Australian govern ment. In this case, of course, there was often insufficient time to seek instructions from Canberra, had he so wished. To explain this independent role in British politics requires more than just reference to Bruce’s personal qualities, although it would certainly not have been possible without his complete selfconfidence, energy, determination and a curious mixture of abrasiveness and tact. The political factors already outlined in this paper are clearly relevant, but there are some additional elements that should be mentioned. Massey referred on more than one occasion to the ‘special influence’ that Bruce derived from being a former Prime Minister.36 It is certainly true that the operation of the imperial system conferred great prestige and potential power on the Prime Ministers of the Dominions: the imperial conferences (which later evolved into Prime Ministers’ conferences) and the place of the Dominion Prime Ministers in intra-imperial communications gave them vis-à-vis their respective Cabinets a quasi-presidential authority in imperial and foreign affairs which was seldom vouchsafed to the United Kingdom Prime Minister. Bruce, however, unlike Reid, Fisher and Cook, managed to carry this prestige with him to the very different position of an ex-Prime Minister become High Commissioner. Bruce himself referred in October 1938 to the importance of the Privy Council and the oath that binds us all. Because I was a Privy Councillor it enabled me to be told of and consulted with regard to matters which if I had not been could not have been disclosed to me even as the Representative of Australia.37 Again this does not completely explain how Bruce was able to play a role which his predecessors, three of whom had been Privy Councillors, had not. It does suggest, however, that he was more imaginative in employing arguments which would allow him to gain and retain access to those in power. If a door in Whitehall might be closed to the Australian High Commissioner, then perhaps it would be opened to S.M.Bruce, Privy Councillor and former Prime Minister of one of His Majesty’s Dominions.

33 Ibid.,

No.328. See n. 22. 35 DAFP, Vol. I, No. 304, esp. p. 497. 34


Probably of greater importance was the support given to Bruce by significant politicians and officials in London, the degree depending on their various assessments both of the importance of listening to the Australian High Commissioner and of Bruce’s personal judgement. Successive Dominions Secretaries were of necessity the most frequently badgered by Bruce, as by all the other High Commissioners. Malcolm MacDonald seems to have done his best to meet the demands placed upon him by Bruce and the others, but his successors, no doubt interpreting accurately the wishes of Neville Chamberlain and more especially Winston Churchill, were as much buffers as conduits. More important was Bruce’s ability to gain direct access to Baldwin, Chamberlain, Halifax and his parliamentary under-secretary R.A.Butler, Sir John Simon and other senior members of the British Cabinet. Since his purpose was generally to criticize one aspect or another of British policy, it is likely that their reactions to his visits were at best mixed, but they continued to listen. During the 1930s Anthony Eden, both as Minister for League of Nations Affairs and then as Foreign Secretary, frequently made use of Bruce’s ‘almost inexhaustible good sense and patience’.38 In Canberra it was said that Bruce was Eden’s chief confidant and that ‘Eden scarcely takes a step without at least talking it over with Mr. Bruce’. League activists in Australia feared, probably correctly, that his advice was much too effective, serving to weaken British policy in the Manchurian and Abyssinian crises.39 Certainly on one point Bruce’s advice to Eden was rejected, for Bruce, when consulted, recommended that Eden decline the offer of the Foreign Office after Sir Samuel Hoare’s resignation.40 Nonetheless it can be said with confidence that Eden turned frequently to Bruce for advice in the 1930s, especially during League meetings in Geneva. Another significant ally in Whitehall was Sir Maurice Hankey, the secretary to the Cabinet and to the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose mother was Australian and who, unlike most of the British politicians who paid lip-service to the idea, genuinely desired participation by the Dominions in imperial policymaking. It was he who made possible Bruce’s privileged access to political and military information through the channels mentioned earlier. In August 1939, when Chamberlain consulted Hankey about the possible formation of a small War Cabinet, Hankey unsuccessfully proposed the inclusion of Bruce.41 (Although Chamberlain disparaged Bruce’s judgement on this occasion, it was he who had offered Bruce the chairmanship of the BBC in 1937.42) Later, in what his biographer calls his ‘constructive critic’ phase, Hankey worked with Bruce in trying to counter some of the effects of Churchill’s one-man rule. In August 1942, when dissatisfaction with Churchill’s conduct of the war was at its peak and the possibility of his being replaced was being widely discussed, the main obstacle being the lack of an adequate successor, Hankey wrote in his diary that

36 37

Massey, What’s Past is Prologue, pp. 260, 298. DAFP, Vol. I, No. 304 at p. 497.


‘I believe that he [Bruce] might make a possible PM’.43 There is no indication that Bruce himself entertained such ambitions: he seems to have seen his role rather as a critic within the system, goading the Foreign Office and the military planners into re-thinking policies and formulating solutions to likely problems, while trying to keep Churchill’s ability and enthusiasm in the most productive channels. To make any firm assessment of Bruce’s role in the British political process is extraordinarily difficult. Advice whispered in the corridors of power is much harder to document than a voice in the wilderness, but may be more significant. One must observe, however, that views expressed by Bruce often emerged, some time later, as the policy of the British Government: even if Churchill and others never acknowledged his part, one is left with the strong suspicion that on many occasions post hoc was at least partly propter hoc. Perhaps it is relevant that the viscountcy he was first offered in 1945 and finally accepted in 1947 was recommended, not by any Australian government, but by the British Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who had been Dominions Secretary as well as Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition and had thus seen a good deal of Bruce’s behind-the-scenes work. Hasluck has stated that Bruce’s membership of the British War Cabinet was Australia’s most successful bid to take part in the higher councils of Allied policy-making.44 By comparison with Australian participation in the Pacific War Council in Washington, this is a valid assessment: but it is likely that Bruce’s role, and Australia’s influence, were in fact greater during the five or six years before his formal inclusion in the War Cabinet in June 1942 than in the years following. The last years of the war were largely years of frustration for Bruce and the reasons for the decline in his impact again illustrate the theme of this paper, that is was as much political factors as personal qualities that dictated the scope of his activities. Bruce’s energy and assertiveness were in no way diminished and his judgement improved with experience, but he found it ever more difficult to achieve the results he desired. Developments in both Britain and Australia were in train that would make it impossible for him, or indeed anyone, to play the triple role that he had at the peak of his influence.

38

Earl of Avon (Anthony Eden), The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators, London 1962, p. 30. 39 Diplomatic Journals of J.P.Moffat (U.S. Consul-General in Sydney 1935–7), Vol. 37, P. 281 and Vol. 38, P. 722, Moffat papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 40 Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne, p. 237. Cf. the account in Eden, Facing the Dictators, p. 315. 41 S.Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, London 1974, Vol. III, 1931–63, p. 414. 42 Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne, pp. 255–6.


In London the problem could be summed up in two words: Winston Churchill. To Bruce’s frustration, the whole War Cabinet permitted Churchill to by-pass them and take all important wartime decisions either by himself or in the Defence Committee (Operations), which he easily dominated. Bruce even found it impossible to ensure that he was invited to all the meetings of the War Cabinet that he felt entitled to attend. Churchill consistently made it clear that the last people with whom he wished to share decision-making were the representatives of the Dominions; and he almost certainly regarded Bruce in particular as too closely identified with the pre-war appeasers, whom he was steadily removing from positions of power and influence in London. Nor did Bruce have the friends and allies of earlier times. Lord Hankey, Minister without portfolio in the War Cabinet, was much less important than Sir Maurice Hankey of the Cabinet Office and CID Secretariat had been; the successive wartime Dominions Secretaries either would not or could not succeed in gaining Churchill’s ear for Dominion submissions; and Bruce’s relations with Eden seem to have become more distant. The same trend could be seen at the official level: Bruce and Stirling found it much harder, for example, to get information from Hankey’s successor at the Cabinet Office, Sir Edward Bridges. In large measure, Bruce was paying the price for his earlier successes: his constant goading and prodding in Whitehall and Westminster were now proving counter-productive. At the Australian end, the situation was more complex. When Labor came to power in October 1941, Bruce welcomed the appointment of Evatt as Minister for External Affairs, believing that he would be able to work well with him.45 He was rapidly disillusioned. Evatt’s extra-ordinary suspiciousness, especially marked in the case of individuals who had, or were believed to have, connections with his political opponents, was soon directed towards Bruce and there seems little doubt that he tried to have Bruce removed from the London post. Prime Minister John Curtin, on the other hand, seeking to establish a non-partisan diplomatic service and respecting Bruce’s advice, renewed the appointment throughout the war. Bruce was caught in the growing conflict between the two. Because the High Commission came under the Prime Minister’s jurisdiction and not, like all the other overseas posts, that of the Minister for External Affairs, Bruce was able to retain his post and some degree of influence, but as Evatt sought to bring external policy into his own hands and to eliminate any alternative sources of advice, it became harder for Bruce to speak with confidence on behalf of Australia or to give a lead to the government in Canberra. In any event, Bruce’s unusual position was only possible at a particular stage in the evolution of the Empire-Commonwealth. As events at the 1944 Prime Ministers’ Conference indicated, neither the majority of the Dominions nor the

43 44

Roskill, Hankey, p. 563. Hasluck, Government and the People, pp. 630–1.


United Kingdom was any longer interested in schemes designed to co-ordinate foreign policy by con sultation.46 The opportunity for a High Commissioner to act as a quasi-minister in London therefore diminished rapidly: henceforth he would simply be the representative of one Commonwealth country in the capital of another. Because Bruce had been an unusually effective representative of the Australian Government in London, he came to be able frequently to dictate the policy he was to advocate: and because he manifestly carried such weight in Australia, the United Kingdom political leadership listened to him, both as the High Commissioner and as S.M.Bruce. In the waning as in the waxing, the three roles were mutually supportive: diminishing influence in Canberra meant less authority in London and vice versa. By 1945 there were probably few in high office in either capital who were fully aware of the nature and extent of Bruce’s activities at the peak of his influence a few years earlier, when he had occupied a position not only unique among Australian High Commissioners but rare in twentieth-century diplomacy.

45 46

Stirling, Lord Bruce, pp. 207, 258.

On the reaction to Prime Minister Gurtin’s proposal of a Commonwealth secretariat, see Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, London 1969, pp. 292–4.

FRANCIS WEST

The Australian Expatriates: Gilbert and Hubert Murray

The expatriate, the man or the woman who leaves his or her own society to live in one better preferred, is a common enough figure. Any number of Englishmen or Americans have made their home in France or Italy. The islands of the South Pacific, especially Tahiti, have a well-known expatriate literature. In Australia the use of the word ‘home’ to describe Britain indicates a sense of separation from patrial society. That sense of separation, however, is characteristic of the exile involuntarily separated from home, rather than of the expatriate who voluntarily separates him or herself from patrial society. The expatriate may have regrets that separation is necessary, but the separation itself is still a choice made for a variety of reasons. Often these reasons can be summed up in Sir Keith Hancock’s phrase ‘country and calling’: the tension between professional or career interests which can only be successfully pursued in a society other than one’s own, and the links of childhood, custom and kinship with one’s own. Nevertheless, the reasons for expatriatism are more complex than ‘country and calling’. How much more complex can be seen by taking particular examples. Two are the topic of this essay. The Murray brothers were both, in different ways, expatriates. Gilbert Murray, although he stressed his Australian origins and background, chose to live the whole of his life in Britain.1 Hubert Murray stressing his Australianess even more than Gilbert, chose to live neither in Australia nor in Britain but in Papua.2 Since both were men close to each other in age, background and education it is instructive to explore the reasons for their different choices, especially as they bear upon the perception both men had of Australia and Britain. The Murray brothers’ common background was first generation Australian. Their grandfather, Captain Terence Murray, was an Irishman and a Catholic who had, by the intercession, the family believed, of Mrs Fitzherbert with King George IV,3 been granted a commission as a paymaster in the Brigade of 1

George Gilbert Aime Murray, An Unfinished Autobiography, London 1960, pp. 104–16 contains chronological notes on his career, but it may be useful to note here the salient dates: Fellow of New College, Oxford 1888–9; Professor of Greek, Glasgow, 1889–99; private life in Surrey 1899–1905; Fellow of New College 1905–8; Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford 1908–36; OM, 1941; died 1957.

THE AUSTRALIAN EXPATRIATES 55

Guards. He had served with Wellington in the Peninsular war; he may have been at Waterloo. In 1817 he transferred to the 48th Regiment of Foot and served for eight years in the colony of New South Wales. When he sold his commission in 1827 he returned to the colony to take up a grant of land, extended it by purchase, and at his death had 30,000 acres in two stations: Winderradeen, near the little town of Collector at the northern end of Lake George, and ‘Yarralumla’ in the valley in which Canberra stands. (Part of the orginal house on Yarralumla is incorporated in the present residence of the Governor General.) That considerable property passed to Murray’s elder son, Terence Aubrey, who had come to Australia from Dublin with his father in 1827. The Murrays became Australian landed gentry. Terence Aubrey married into the society of New South Wales when he wed Mary, daughter of Colonel Gibbes, the Collector of Customs, a man variously said to be the child of George IV and Mrs Fitzherbert or alternatively the illegitimate son of King George’s brother, the Grand Old Duke of York.4 Murray went into politics, held ministerial office, became Speaker of the lower House and in 1862 President of the upper. He was knighted in 1869. Sir Terence married again, after his first wife died, Agnes Edwards, a cousin of W.S.Gilbert, and Gilbert and Hubert were the children of this second marriage, the latter born in 1861, the former in 1866. The Murrays were one of the prominent families of New South Wales, even after Sir Terence lost his land and most of his money in 1865, and within the family there were stories of a distinguished ancestry which, in one version, traced their descent from a Milesian king of Ireland.5 The Murray boys were brought up as gentlemen, although the Irish family tradition, with its stories of resistance and rebellion against English governments in Ireland, inculcated both ‘manly’ virtures and suspicion of authority. Moreover, Sir Terence’s catholicism, liberal to the point of eccentricity in the colony of those days, did not insist on regular religious observance and his will left the spiritual fortunes of the children to his Anglican wife.6 Sir Terence, however, was also an educated man. Himself privately educated in the classics in Dublin, he had won a prize for his Greek iambics and he had brought a library to Australia to which he regularly added, a library which

2

John Hubert Plunkett Murray left some unpublished memoirs, held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. His salient dates are 1886–92 private practice, Sydney Bar; 1892–5 Parliamentary Draughtsman, N.S.W.; 1895–1900 Crown Prosecutor, N.S.W.; 1900 Boer War (Lt. Col. Australian forces; Major, British Army); 1901–4 Crown Prosecutor, N.S.W.; Chief Judicial Officer, British New Guinea (Papua) 1904–6; Acting Administrator, Papua 1907–9; Lt. Governor Papua 1909–40; CMG 1914; KCMG 1926; died 1940. 3 F.West (ed.), Selected Letters of Hubert Murray, Oxford 1970, p. 154. (Hubert’s letters are held in the National Library, Canberra.) 4 Ibid., p. 165. 5 Ibid., pp. 165–6.


included most of the ‘classics’ of modern history, political thought, philosophy and poetry. Thus the Murray boys, brought up as gentlemen with the ‘manly’ virtues of physical courage and endurance, grew up in a household full of books and of the spirited conversation of their mother. Sir Terence died in 1873, and Agnes Murray, a cultivated and lively woman, maintained a close and affectionate family milieu while at the same time she provided for her children by running a school for young ladies. She made sure that her sons had a good education. Hubert, at the Sydney Grammar School, had a distinguished scholastic and athletic record; Gilbert, at Southey’s school at Mittagong, received a good preparatory education. Lady Murray, however, as an expatriate Briton, believed that New South Wales was a cultural desert,7 and in 1877 she took Gilbert, at the age of eleven, to England to school at Merchant Taylors, and in the following year brought Hubert, at seventeen, to an English public and then a German private school before his going up to Oxford university in 1881. Gilbert in turn went up to Oxford in 1884. Both read ‘Greats’. Both took ‘Firsts’. Both demonstrated considerable athletic ability. Then, with this common and close family background and a similar education, they went different ways to expatriatism. No doubt part of an explanation is difference of character. Sir Terence was fifty-one when Hubert was born, still a rich pastoralist and a ‘fine figure of a man’ to use Agnes Murray’s words.8 His crash in 1865 deeply affected him. Melancholy and depression, evident in earlier times of difficulty, took hold.9 Hubert, then a child of four and living at home with his parents, could hardly have been uninfluenced, and indeed when he went to preparatory school in Melbourne his first surviving letter to his mother contains no reference to his father.10 Later, at the Sydney Grammar School, his appearance was gloomy and aloof, and from his father’s diary it is clear that he communicated little even of his successes to Sir Terence.11 The signs are that, with the contrast between his father’s emphasis on ancestry and actual family circumstances, he developed a mask of indifference to an unpredictable and hostile world. There is his brother’s later testimony that the only real influence upon him was his mother,12 for whom Gilbert was her ‘darling baby’.13 Gilbert, not yet born at the time of his father’s crash, had no direct knowledge of Sir Terence’s earlier prosperity and demeanour.14 His memories of his father were of the greatest man in the world, and his mother shielded him from the direct knowledge which his eldest brother had. Gilbert had a memory of a succession of smaller and smaller houses in Sydney,15 but there were always servants, if not extensive lands, and the Murray household was still 6 G.Wilson,

Murray of Yarralumla, Oxford 1968, p. 300. Ibid., pp. 307–9. 8 Ibid., p. 273. 9 F. West, Hubert Murray: The Australian Pro-Consul, Oxford 1968, p. 15. 10 West, Selected Letters, pp. 1–2. 7


a social and political centre in Sydney. The diffference in the brothers’ growing knowledge of the world is perhaps clearest in relation to alcohol. Hubert, at the age of eight, began to drink the remnants of liquor which, after dinner parties and on other occasions, he found about the house.16 Gilbert was shocked when, in 1892, he heard from a close friend of Sir Terence that his father had drunk to excess.17 Such differences in their awareness of family circumstances account in part for the character of each of the two brothers, but one other aspect deserves attention. Both brothers were physically active, athletic boys and men, but where Gilbert had a spare grace Hubert was big and overtly powerful. While Gilbert played cricket, tennis and walked, Hubert boxed, rowed and rode. Gilbert was not averse to a school fight over some such incident as bullying or cruelty to animals,18 but he never, as did Hubert, avenged an insult by a heavy blow nor used his strength simply for the sake of doing so, as did Hubert when he won the Amateur Heavyweight Championship of England or knocked out a schoolmaster who had called him a ‘wild Irishman’.19 Those who knew or saw both brothers were struck by physical resemblances, but they were apt to describe Hubert as a coarser version of Gilbert. Lady Murray, looking at her elder son, thought him as fine a figure of a man as she had thought his father, but his arrogant saunter set him apart and made him un approachable to many people, unlike Gilbert whose charm became legendary.20 Neither boy’s character and personality, still less his education, was well adapted to Australian society, even if their mother had held different views. She used the adjective ‘colonial’ as a word of disparagement:21 ‘intellectual life would starve’; ‘you must never think of this country for your career—break your heart and waste your talents’; ‘life here is utter stagnation’.22 Sydney she regarded as the home of the Philistines. Lady Murray’s views were not concealed from her two sons, both of whom admired her, but to heed her advice required opportunity to live elsewhere than Australia. Gilbert had that. Hubert, for long, did not. Nevertheless, their perceptions of Australia and of Britain illustrate neglected aspects of the relationship between the two countries. 11

West, Hubert Murray, p. 20. Unfinished Autobiography, p. 76. 13 Ibid., p. 24. 14 F.West, Biography as History, Sydney 1973, p. 12. 15 Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, p. 33. 16 West, Hubert Murray, p. 20. 17 Gilbert to Lady Mary Murray. (Gilbert Murray’s papers are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I quote from them by permission of the late Arnold Toynbee who, as Literary Executor, invited me to write Gilbert Murray’s biography.) 18 G.Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, pp. 55–6. 19 West, Hubert Murray, p. 22. 12 G.Murray,


In each brother’s life there were points at which their perceptions of Australia and Britain were brought sharply into focus. Two points they had in common: first arrival in Britain, first return to Australia. When Gilbert, at eleven, arrived in London, what first struck him was the cold, the lack of sun, and the absence of a house garden.23 He also found a lot of strange relations who all expected formally to be addressed as Aunt or Uncle or Cousin So-and-So, unlike his mother’s brother William in Sydney who was just plain ‘Bill’. Gilbert found England depressing and reacted, in his own later account, with a certain amount of ‘colonial blow’.24 Hubert, aged eighteen when he arrived in England, had the same physical revulsion: cold, sunless, dirty narrow streets. To this he added an exageration of his Irishness against the ‘murdering’ English; the schoolmaster whom he knocked down described him as a ‘wild Irishman’ not as a ‘wild Australian’. The reaction of both brothers to England was initially dislike, but thereafter the difference in their ages took effect. Hubert remained a ‘loner’. At Oxford he made few friends and his associates were athletes and ‘hearties’ who were far from being his intellectual equals.25 Gilbert, at Merchant Taylors and then at Oxford, was not a gregarious man but he developed friendships with his teachers and with a few brilliant contemporaries; with Arthur Sidgwick, David Margoliouth, Herbert Fisher, Charles Gore, Walter Ashburner, Leonard Hobhouse.26 And as the most brilliant classical undergraduate (with the right, radical Liberal opinions) of his day in Oxford, Gilbert was taken into the aristocratic Whig circle of Lady Carlisle at Castle Howard and in London; indeed he married the Lady Mary Howard, eldest daughter of the ninth Earl and Countess of Carlisle. From his initial reaction against a terrace house in London he moved into a life which, however austere because of Lady Carlisle’s principles, was nevertheless life on a grand scale: the movement between great houses such as Castle Howard, Naworth Castle, the Carlisle’s London house in Palace Green (decorated by the Earl’s friend, the well-known pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones) and seasonal sojourns on the continent, Gilbert entered this world of high principled, aristocratic obligation where the enjoyment of easily afforded material comfort was always regarded as a betrayal of the highest ideals which any right-thinking man or woman should hold, if they were to be welcome in Lady Carlisle’s circle. Gilbert remained in Britain and returned only once to

20

G.Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, pp. 171–8, 216–17. Agnes to Gilbert, 19 March 1889. 22 Ibid., 24 April 1889. 23 G.Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, p. 73. 24 Ibid. 25 West, Hubert Murray, pp. 23–4. 26 G.Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, p. 89. 21


Australia as a visitor. Hubert, never at home in English society nor with his equals, returned to Australia after he had been called to the Bar in 1886. It would be easy to explain Hubert Murray’s alienation from Australian society by his failure after his return. After a brief period in the chambers of a busy Crown Counsel, he and a young colleague set up in practice on their own. In 1889 Hubert’s income for the year was thirty-five pounds and, as he put it to Gilbert, ‘rapidly approaching vanishing point’.27 It is a proverbial commonplace for young barristers to struggle in their early years, but Hubert’s failure was more than that. As his mother observed, the lordly manner which had fitted Sir Terence at the top of the tree, in his son discouraged solicitors and clients: ‘how are you to go up to a young fellow like that?’28 Hubert himself ascribed his failure to the positive disadvantage of an Oxford education which was resented as superior by Australian clients: ‘people here all regard me as an ass—an exasperating, and, I may say, a novel position for me’.29 Ass or not, Hubert nevertheless married into a prominent Sydney family when he wed Sybil, the daughter of Dr Jenkins, a family friend of the Murrays. Though Sybil had a private income, Hubert accepted the post of parliamentary draughtsman at £700 p.a. to meet his new responsibilities; nevertheless he feared that it meant permanent ‘shelving’, and that the work would drive him into lunatic asylum.30 Marriage did nothing to relieve the monotonous and uninteresting existence which Hubert complained was his lot. There were no classical books to be had: ‘When you ask for them the booksellers think you are joking’.31 Even when, in 1894, he acted as Crown Prosecutor, the most he could find to say of his circuit through the country towns of New South Wales was that ‘it is at least a change from that living death in Macquarie St’.32 Hubert’s alienation from Australian society was directly observed by Gilbert in 1892. The latter, at the young age of twenty-three, had succeeded Richard Jebb in the chair of Greek at Glasgow University in 1889. After three years of strenuous work, his health had collapsed and to recover, on his doctors’ advice, he took the long sea voyage back to Australia. In Albany, the first Australian port-of-call, Gilbert was seized by the feeling that this ‘was really my home, my native surroundings’; ‘the aromatic breath of the eucalyptus made a tingling in one’s veins’.33 But this pleasurable reaction did not long survive Australian society. Reaching Melbourne and dining in the Melbourne Club, he disliked ‘the rich and unfeeling’ members he found there: ‘oh, how their rich dishes and red and blue footmen stick in my throat’.34 When he arrived in Sydney and met Hubert—‘shy, farouche, fascinating’ as he described him—he found his brother 27

West, Selected Letters, p. 8. Agnes to Gilbert, 5 November 1889. 29 West, Selected Letters, p. 8. 30 Ibid., p. 9. 31 Ibid. 28


very bitter about his failure at the Bar, and Sybil patient, tactful and loving although no real companion for Hubert in the way that the Lady Mary was for him.35 Noting that Hubert had become dependent on alcohol ‘to a terrible extent’, although he could carry his liquor and was indeed even kinder to Sybil under its influence, Gilbert blamed the company his brother kept: Armstrong, his colleague, and Edmund Barton, then a member of the New South Wales government, who were heavy drinkers and clubmen before whom his brother was ‘a miserable coward’.36 To suggestions that he might take the Pledge, Hubert took the high line: ‘do you doubt my strength of character?’ Gilbert did, but he blamed the society of New South Wales for what it was doing to his brother: frustrating his undoubted talents and ability because of its materialism and lack of high ideals. He blamed it still further when he noticed a suspicious knowledge of Catholicism in Hubert, and the visits of a parish priest, ostensibly to call upon a servant, but actually, Gilbert suspected, in search of higher game. What Gilbert saw in Australia in 1892 convinced him that his home was elsewhere. The country was beautiful but what he saw of society offended every one of the principles of plain living and high thinking which he and his wife’s family shared: temperance, women’s rights, anticlericalism, and radical politics. What he heard in the next few years from Hubert of the sectarianism and low public standards of New South Wales politics, the depressed economic state of the colony which made it necessary to send money to support Hubert and his family, and the boredom and frustration of his brother’s professional life confirmed his mother’s warnings not to return to his native land: ‘break your heart and waste your talents’. As Hubert himself wrote to Gilbert: ‘one blank fool in the family is enough’.37 Nevertheless, Hubert, embittered though he was at a society which frustrated him, tried to help himself. In 1896 he became a Catholic. He also joined one of the volunteer militia corps, the New South Wales Irish Rifles with whom he trained regularly and seriously. Through this corps he escaped from the ‘living death’ he judged his life to be when he sailed in January 1900 in command of the troops in the SS Moravian for South Africa and the Boer War. The Australian colonies had earlier sent troops to the Sudan, but the South African war was the first occasion upon which a major and substantial military commitment was undertaken. An interesting book remains to be written on the effect of this war upon Australian national feeling and attitudes. Publicly there was great enthusiasm. Hubert Murray, with his Irish Catholic family tradition of sympathy for the underdog, was bitterly opposed to the war, but he claimed that his duty to 32 Ibid.,

p. 10. Gilbert to Lady Mary, 18 November 1892. 34 Ibid., 22 November 1892. 35 Ibid., 23 November 1892. 36 Ibid., 16 November 1892. 33


his regiment to gain as much military experience as possible led him to volunteer.38 There can, however, be no doubt that the war also seemed to him to offer relief from the tedium of his life, engendered by failure, of which he so often complained. Yet, the excitement of war in prospect vanished in the event. The voyage itself began to pall before the ship reached Cape Town, and after landing his first posting was to Victoria West, a railway communication centre, ‘a dreadful hole’ in Murray’s view.39 There was nothing to do except to ride in the morning and watch trains in the afternoon or vice versa. Stories of action nottoo-far-away frustrated him; ‘it would be too absurd if I had to go back after spending all my time in a tent at a railway station’.40 Even after leaving Victoria West in April 1900, Hubert was largely concerned with camp supervision which he found equally undemanding and dull. Eventually he succeeded in seeing some fighting at the battle of Diamond Hill, and thereafter was among the troops in pursuit of de Wet. At the beginning of September, he was in command of a small detachment whose duty it was to burn Boer farms and take prisoner the farmers, a task he hated.41 The war, in short, had a brief spell of excitement but was otherwise dull and distasteful. Nevertheless, for Hubert Murray it had an important consequence in his view of England and Australia. When Murray landed at Cape Town, he began to form a very unfavourable impression of British officers. The first colonel he met had not the faintest idea of who the Australian troops were and wished to put Hubert in charge of a railway station, remarking that ‘he liked the look of me and that I was just the man to look after the entraining of troops’.42 The second colonel wanted to assign Murray to the Canadian Artillery but finally accepted a counter suggestion of the Tasmanian Infantry. It was with that regiment he was posted to Victoria West because, he believed, no one knew where the rest of the Tasmanian troops were. Towards the end of April, he succeeded in gaining a transfer to the N.S.W.Mounted Infantry—‘all the fighting seems to be done by mounted men’ —but was then detached to join the Queensland Mounted Infantry in mid-May and back again to the New South Wales unit in early June.43 This confusion caused Murray to hold a low opinion of British military organization and its officers, especially when it meant that he did not receive his mail, and moreover it seemed to him that it was the Mounted Infantry which did all the fighting. The cavalry he despised: the 12th Lancers had refused to charge; the Household Cavalry also refused until shamed into going by a Mounted Infantry detachment which arrived to do the work for them.44 In August, when he went with a relief column to Elands River Port where some N.S.W. and Queensland Bushmen had 37

West Selected Letters, p. 8. Ibid. pp. 14–15. 39 Ibid. p. 18. 40 Ibid. p. 21. 41 Ibid. pp. 28–9. 38


been besieged, he described their defence as heroic ‘though they were shamefully abandoned by their Imperial Officers, who have, of course, got all the credit’.45 Not surprisingly, with this Australian attitude, Murray talked of the ‘inevitable’ quarrel between the English and Australian officers just beginning.46 Whatever the national effects of the Boer War upon Australian attitudes, at a personal level through the eyes of Hubert Murray it produced an attitude of contempt for English officers: they regarded themselves as professionals and as superior to colonials, but they were incompetent, no match for another colonial, the Boer general de Wet. This image was not Murray’s alone. When he returned to Australia in 1901, the Bulletin was expressing an Australian nationalism in respect of British administration in New Guinea which had just been transferred, as the territory of Papua, to Australian control. The campaign was against ‘the imported Johnny’, often an ex-officer, who was arrogantly incompetent where Australians could do better.47 Hubert Murray shared that view from his experiences in South Africa and it was soon to be reinforced by his experiences in Papua, but it did not inhibit him from sending his elder son, Terence, to Beaumont, an English Catholic school, with a view to entering the British army. Hubert’s low opinion of British officers in South Africa did not entail a correspondingly high opinion of all Australian soldiers. In the three years after his return from the war, Murray resumed his legal duties as Crown Prosecutor and the work seemed even more tedious than before. The ‘war craze’ died out slowly but in 1902 a man Murray prosecuted at Dubbo for kicking a man when he was down and cutting his head open with his spurs defended himself by pleading that he was a returned soldier and that the man he kicked was pro-Boer.48 The jury found him guilty of common assault with a recommendation to mercy and the judge let him off with a fine of five pounds. Murray’s view was not the undiscriminating one of black and white between English and Australian; but the impression he had formed of British officers he took with him to Papua when, in 1904, to escape the boredom of life in New South Wales and at the same time the better to support his family, he accepted the post of Chief Judicial Officer at £1, 200 p.a. The territory was in a kind of limbo. Britain had handed over the colony to Australia by Royal Letters Patent in March 1901, but the Commonwealth did not formally assume control until the Papua Act was proclaimed in Port Moresby on 1 September 1906. When Hubert arrived in September 1904 there was already 42

Ibid., pp. 17–18. Ibid., p. 22. 44 Ibid., p. 25. 45 Ibid., p. 27. 46 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 47 West, ‘The Beginnings of Australian Rule in Papua’, Political Science, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 44. 43


division in the public service, and he diagnosed that division as British versus Australian. The Administrator was Captain F.R.Barton, formerly of the West India Regiment, a close friend of the previous Lieutenant Governor, now Governor of South Australia, Sir George Le Hunte, who was believed to have engineered his appointment. To Murray Barton seemed a very nice fellow but an incompetent administrator whose chief idea was to preserve the territory as curiosity shop of native life and to keep Australians from coming into it.49 Moreover, Barton divided his officers into two classes: those in favour and those not. That division was indentical with the British ‘Colonial Office’ party and the ‘Australian’ party. The former, thought Murray, regarded Australian democracy with horror.50 The latter wished to develop the colony. There was a genuine disagreement over policy between the two parties, but Hubert saw the same differences which had led to quarrels during the South African war: ‘I find that Englishmen and Australians never agree if they are working together. I think it is because Australians are too masterful for the English taste’.51 Such a view of the differences between Australia and England, between the societies which produced different types of men who had difficulty in working together, explains in large part why Hubert Murray could not live in England. Even after he had described Papua as ‘a beastly country—I can not explain how I hate it’,52 the idea of life in England never crossed his mind. When he contemplated leaving Papua, as he did briefly in 1911 and 1912, it would only be as British colonial governor of an Australian state.53 But this suggestion of living in Australia was a rare one. For, whatever the merits he saw in Australians as opposed to British, he never relished the prospect of life in Australia any more than he did in England.54 In his period as Acting Administrator, from 1906 to 1908, he had grown disgusted with Australian politicians and Australian public servants who were unable to make up their minds about his appointment as the first Lieutenant-Governor of Papua under Australian rule. When he became Lieutenant-Governor, his opinion of Australian ministers responsible for Papua and of the permanent head of the public service department and his junior officers who handled Papuan affairs was also in general low. The senior public servant, Atlee Hunt, was ‘a commonplace bounder, fat both of body and of brain’. The former senator, Staniforth Smith, his second-in-command in Papua was ‘an ex-politician who, discourses on all subjects with equal facility and ignorance’.55 Successive ministers were ‘hostile’, ‘timid’, ‘unreliable’, ‘hysterical’. Such adjectives reflected Hubert’s contempt for Australian political society which had emerged in his view of Sir George Reid in New South Wales in the 1890s and continued in his view of Billy Hughes’ campaign in the general 48

West, Selected Letters, p. 31. Ibid., p. 34. 50 Ibid., p. 37. 51 Hubert to Gilbert, 11 December 1906. 49


election of 1919 which was sordid—‘open bribery on both sides… The alarming thing is that it does not seem to shock the political conscience of the community —every one takes it as a matter of course’.56 To this contempt and dislike for Australian political life, Hubert Murray added an even greater detestation of its society. He wanted his children to be educated neither in Australia nor England but in Germany57 where they would actually receive a good education and not be ruined by the trivialities of life in Australia nor by the affectations of Britain. His elder boy, Terence, he sent to Beaumont, a Catholic school which was, in his opinion, better than any English public school, and then because he was to enter the Army to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in preference to Sandhurst. His younger boy, Patrick, after education at Riverview, an acceptable Catholic school in Sydney, and Sydney University, had a brilliant academic career in Australia and then went to Oxford. With every prospect of a distinguished scientific career, his father never encouraged his return to Australia for ‘I have always backed you to be a winner’,58 but he had doubts as to the recognition of Patrick’s merits among ‘the murdering English’. As for his daughter Mary, Murray feared that she was being ruined in Australia: ‘she is too good for the giggly lot of flappers she has to associate with’.59 This view of the triviality and inanity of Australian social life was confirmed by his disastrous second marriage, after his first wife’s death in 1929, to Mildred Vernon who expected her husband to take the social place his title made possible, to join the social life of the ‘Ascendancy’ which he rejected in both Australia and Britain. Hubert made a positive choice to stay in Papua until he died. Gilbert Murray, after his visit to Australia in 1892, made a choice never to return to the land of his birth to live. He made a point of his Australian birth, but it had no practical consequences beyond his recollections and story-telling and as a measure of how far ‘the little boy from the bush’ had come.60 He often used to say that he had not a drop of English blood in his veins: his father was Irish, his mother Welsh, his ancestry was therefore Celtic, not English. Still, he lived in England—apart from his ten years in Glasgow—very much as an Establishment figure and yet as a stranger. For, Gilbert no more approved of a good deal of English life than did his brother Hubert of Australian. Gilbert had married into one of the great Whig families which had, with related families such as the Stanleys and the Russells,61 been prominent in British politics. At the time of his marriage, that Whig dominance in the Liberal

52

Ibid. p. 87. Ibid. pp. 60–1, 64–5. 54 Ibid. p. 49. 55 West Selected Letters, p. 49. 56 Ibid. p. 106. 57 Ibid. p. 50. 53


party was under attack, while the Home Rule issue had split the Howard family itself. In that political division, Gilbert and his wife stood with the radical Countess of Carlisle. Regarding themselves as the true heirs of Mr Gladstone they disapproved of his successor Rosebery and of Asquith and Grey, the ‘Liberal imperialists’.62 The Leader they would have followed, had he been able and willing, was Morley.63 Or, perhaps Gilbert himself? Lady Murray, indeed, toyed with the idea of seeing her son as Prime Minister of England.64 Lady Carlisle had at least the influence to put Gilbert into politics if that was what he wished. He was tempted. He was invited to accept candidature in 1891, 1897 and 1899 but declined, though in 1899 he did seriously consider the offer from Leeds. As he told his mother-in-law in 1900 he would not mind an Irish seat if he could sit as an extreme radical, but he would be ‘worried to death as an English Liberal’.65 Gilbert recognized that in English politics his were distinctly minority views which made a successful political career impossible. Indeed, in 1908 he feared that these views might have prejudiced the offer to him by Asquith of the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford and so have set back his career as a Greek scholar.66 Although he allowed his name to be included in Asquith’s list of names for the peerage in the parliament crisis of 1910–11, he was never a supporter of Asquith until the declaration of war in August 1914, when he was converted not by Asquith but by Grey’s speech in the Commons. He was suspicious of Margot Asquith’s ‘set’67 and had reservations until Asquith’s replacement by Lloyd George. Thereafter he was associated with the still smaller minority which wished to see Grey as leader of a Liberal centre party in British politics. Gilbert in England, like Hubert in Australia, was, after 1916, an isolated and disapproving figure of public political life; and for the same reasons. Seeing themselves as men of principle who supported public men of principle, they alike deplored the betrayal of principle and the venality which they detected in such dominating political figures as Lloyd George and Billy Hughes. Yet, in England Gilbert regarded himself primarily as a man of letters rather than as a political figure. The most accomplished Greek scholar of his Oxford generation, he was ‘averse, as you know, to mere learning… Greece has a profound and permanent message to mankind…it is human and rational and progressive and affects not only Art but the whole of life… I have got a faith and a message…and I want to speak them out’.68 The English theatre and the English 58

Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 87. 60 West, Biography as History, p. 12. 61 Bertrand Russell, a cousin of Lady Mary’s has left a vivid description of these families in his edition of the Amberley Papers, ii, p. 504 and in his Autobiography, i, pp. 34–5. 62 Gilbert to Lady Mary, 20 January 1899. 63 Agnes to Gilbert, 10 July 1889. 64 Gilbert to Lady Mary, 18 January 1899. 59


publishers of his rhymed translations of Greek drama offered him quite literally the stage from which to do so. England also offered him a group of like-minded people—the modern Athenians holding up the torch of civilization in the surrounding barbarian darkness—as good company in a political and social environment from which he always felt detached but which nevertheless he hoped to influence. With this desire to speak out his message to an audience, in the theatre or through his books and articles, one major reason for Gilbert’s expatriatism is clear. It was not simply that Australian society and politics were repugnant to him —many aspects of English life were also—but that British society was large enough to provide a group of congenial like-minded companions in the fight for good causes. In that sense Gilbert Murray’s expatriatism was a function of the size of the Australian population; it was simply not big enough to sustain a plural environment in which he could achieve what he wanted to do in life. For his type of expatriatism, the growth of Australian society—in size and in quality as judged by European criteria—might be expected to provide increasingly less justification. That kind of change in Australian society altered therefore the relationship with Britain, and tested it by expatriatism. Nevertheless, it is equally clear with the Murray brothers that the possibility of an audience and a congenial circle within it was only one part of the reasons which led them to be expatriates. Hubert, for example, lived in an even smaller society in Port Moresby, always in search of congenial companionship which he had to look for among visitors to, rather than residents of, Papua. A man of letters, like Gilbert Murray, had greater need of a sufficient audience than a colonial governor, like Hubert his brother. Nevertheless, in this as in other aspects of their characters and lives, there was a more important reason for their expatriatism. Gilbert said it of Hubert: it was only when he had a position of clear and unquestioned authority that his full powers of character and intellect came out unhindered. For what irked Hubert about Australia and about Britain was his failure to achieve such a position. In Papua, as governor, there could be no question that his was the authority, especially when Australian governments were uninterested. Gilbert might, however, have applied a similar judgement to himself. Charming and courteous as he was, he could be formidable, a man of authority. A man of letters, of the theatre and of scholarship, had little or no opportunity to exert authority and influence in Australia. In Britain he could. Gilbert Murray exerted, and knew he exerted, a great influence on significant sections of British society. He was a famous public figure, a ‘great man’ in the words of E.R.Dodds. That was power. Not the formal power of a colonial governor, but nevertheless the ability to influence events, 65

Gilbert to Lady Garlise, 8 February 1900. Gilbert to Lady Garlisle 8 June 1908. 67 Ibid., 21 August 1908. 68 Ibid., 31 January 1900. 66


sometimes decisively, and always with the awareness that this influence was exerted at the centre of things. What the expatriate Murray brothers rejected was Australia as the periphery. What both sought, in different ways, was to be at the centre of their own worlds, in a position of power or at least of influence. In the relationships between Britain and Australia, the expatriate men of power are one of the most enduring features.

T.B.MILLAR

Anglo-Australian Partnership in Defence of the Malaysian Area

By the end of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, the British Empire had changed beyond recall and almost beyond repair. India, the ‘jewel in the crown’, a major source of imperial power and reason for imperial communications, moved rapidly to its divided independence. Burma left the Empire and Commonwealth altogether. In Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, notions of independence were flourishing, inseminated by British liberal ideas, encouraged by American messianism, stimulated by Japan’s humiliation of the European powers, urged in places by communist revolutionary fervour, and made more effective by Britain’s near exhaustion of resources after six devastating years of war. Australia had suffered far less in the war, had nevertheless contributed significantly in most theatres, and had emerged as an identifiable member of the international community, vigorous in its diplomacy, demanding recognition and status and a voice in the councils of the allies. Only at the San Francisco conference were these objectives even partially realized. In other respects the post-war world was shaped by the major powers. The Australian Labor government resented its lack of influence, and staked a claim for special responsibilities in its own region. As early as January 1944, with a diffident New Zealand in tow, Australia declared that pending the inauguration of a general system of security, ‘it would be proper for Australia and New Zealand to assume full responsibility for policing or sharing in policing such areas in the South West and South Pacific as may from time to time be agreed upon’.1 Of the major powers, only Britain was prepared to afford Australia the status to which its political leaders so greatly wished to become accustomed. Britain acquiesced in (or was worn down by) thrusting Australian diplomacy so that an Australian general became Commander-in-Chief of the British Commonwealth

1

Australian-New Zealand Agreement (ANZAC or Canberra Pact) of 16 January 1944, para 15. Percy Spender, when Minister for External Affairs, said that ‘within the zone contemplated by the Anzac Pact, there was not any area which is now within the dominion or control of the Republic of Indonesia’. House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 207, p. 2236, 9 May 1950. This would seem equally to exclude the area that subsequently comprised Malaysia.

ANGLO-AUSTRALIAN PARTNERSHIP IN DEFENCE 69

Occupation Force in Japan (BCOF), and an Australian professor became Commonwealth representative on the Allied Council for Japan. British and Australian forces co-operated in the prolonged and unpleasant process of ensuring the return of Netherlands administration to the East Indies. When the British Commonwealth prime ministers met in London in April-May 1946, Australia’s J.B.Chifley told the gathering that Australia must in future make a larger contribution to the defence of the Commonwealth, and that this could best be done in the Pacific by agreement first between Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and subsequently with the United States and other nations having possessions in the area.2 Precisely what form the contribution would take, or with what kinds of situation it might be expected to deal, was never made clear. In Malaya and Singapore Britain took up again the reins of empire so rudely snatched from her by Japan, reoccupied the great base, and resumed control of her extensive investment, including much of the peninsula’s tin and rubber production. But she could not start simply where she had left off in February 1942. Many Malays had been well-treated by the Japanese and given positions of responsibility. Malay nationalism was provoked by ill-judged British attempts to create a single colony out of the federated states, Penang and Malacca. Malay Chinese, many of them communists, who had formed the core of anti-Japanese resistance, now moved to combat (by paralysing economic recovery) the reimposed British rule and (by terrorism) the British-Malay alliance based on evolving institutions of self-government. When the peninsular states were constituted into a federal political structure, an insurgency based on communist Chinese erupted, in June 1948, with the murder of Europeans and Kuomintang Chinese. A state of emergency was declared in both Malaya and Singapore. The control of BCOF had been vested in a group known as Joint Chiefs of Staff, Australia (JCOSA), comprising the Australian Chiefs of Staff and representatives of the Chiefs of Staff in Britain and New Zealand, and (until Indian independence in August 1947) of the British Commander-in-Chief in India. At the end of 1947 the three countries, apparently at Australian urging, agreed on the principle that ‘each should be capable of acting as agent for the British Commonwealth, either in peace or war, in respect of forces assigned to its Government’.3 They decided accordingly that JCOSA would be abolished, and that Australia should assume responsibility for the control and adminis tration of BCOF, which was now almost wholly Australian in its personnel. Each government was to be represented in the defence machinery of the other two through its high commission if necessary and by joint service representatives and staff accredited to the respective defence department or ministry.

2

Report by Chifley to Parliament 19 June 1946. House of Representatives Debates Vol. 187, p. 1560. 3 The words are those of the Australian Minister for Defence, Mr J.J.Dedman, on 15 July 1948. Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 8, August 1948, pp. 516–19.


But the Australian government, with memories of the war so fresh, was greatly occupied with the wider problems of security and the prospects of influencing the policies of friendly powers. The United States was unwilling to enter any kind of defence agreement; the only option for Australia therefore was to work with Commonwealth partners, in effect to enlist Britain more formally in the defence of Australia’s neighbourhood through institutions in which Australia had a leading role. In May 1948, the three governments, doubtless on Australia’s initiative, authorized ‘strategic planning to be developed on the official level through the Australian defence machinery in conjunction with representatives of the United Kingdom and New Zealand for the regional defence of the SouthWest Pacific area, the boundaries of which include Malaya’.4 Such planning presumably had barely begun when the Malayan emergency erupted, and in any case Australia was careful to ensure that any planning would be only at an official level and of a tentative nature, and (as Menzies later said approvingly) would ‘not involve any commitment with regard to government policy, except where approval was specifically sought and obtained’. The Malayan insurrection was probably not seen intially as a strategic matter, but Britain did seek help from Australia and New Zealand to cope with it. The precise nature and timing of this request and of subsequent ones will only be known when the files are opened, as what is made public as request and response is usually only what is finally agreed.5 Chifley told the Australian parliament on 30 September 1948: As the result of requests from the Malayan Union through the United Kingdom Government, Australia offered to supply small arms and even military equipment that was available [in Australia] for the maintenance of law and order in the Malayan Peninsula…but we have not considered sending any forces to that area.6

Even the public record hints at continuing British pressure on Australia and New Zealand, but the Chifley Government saw the emergency as Britain’s responsibility and indeed within the Labor government there was some sympathy for the insurgents as nationalists throwing off the colonial yoke. New Zealand

4

These are the words of R.G.Menzies on 31 May 1950. House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 208, p. 3465. The Labor government never publicly referred to this decision. 5 This is clear from the questions on this issue left unanswered by the British Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Mr Patrick Gordon-Walker, on 20 April 1950. House of Commons Debates, Vol. 475, Cols 290–292. 6 House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 198, p. 1027. The government apparently sent a small quantity of sub-machine guns, ammunition, and walkie-talkie radio sets, ibid., pp. 942–3.


did send a service element to the area, but in a different cause. On 18 August 1949, The New Zealand (Labor) Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, announced that a Dakota transport flight of the RNZAF would be based at Singapore ‘to assist and afford relief to the United Kingdom Air Force in Hong Kong’. Three naval frigates would also go to Hong Kong if required.7 Only very indirectly was this gesture related to the situation in Malaya. It was much more relevant to the communist success approaching its climax in China. The aircraft were to be available if necessary for the evacuation of Hong Kong. The conservative governments that came into power in both New Zealand and Australia in December 1949 continued the quest of their predecessors for a Pacific security treaty backed by the United States. They were not at first successful. Both governments were apprehensive of communist military activities in South-east Asia. At his first major address to Parliament on foreign affairs, the Australian Liberal Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, expressed the doubt that Vietnam, Burma, Thiland, Malaya and Indonesia, one after the other, could withstand communist pressures. On 20 April 1950, Spender referred to Malaya as being ‘of vital concern to the security of Australia’.8 A Liberal back-bencher, R.Swartz, spelled out the basis of what was to become the government’s defence policy in the Malay archipelago for the next twenty years. He listed the sources of instability and insurrection in the various countries, including Malaya. The significance of Malaya to Australia lies in the fact that it is the forward security line for this country, and our foreign policy should be framed with this in mind. Malaya lies astride our main air and sea routes with other parts of the British Commonwealth. The matter of prestige is also involved in the Malayan trouble. Malaya is part of the British Commonwealth. It is British territory, and events there will vitally affect British prestige throughout the whole of the Far East.9 Malcolm McDonald, British Commissioner-General in South-east Asia, visited Australia in mid-May, and asked for military help to combat the increasingly serious communist insurgency. In answer to a parliamentary question on 17 May, Prime Minister Menzies said that communist planning in Asiatic countries ‘in a south-easterly direction’ constituted ‘a grave threat to the safety of

7

New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 286, p. 1381. House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 207, p. 1685, On 23 September 1948, referring to the Malayan Emergency, Spender had said: ‘We cannot but view with alarm the possibility of Russia making a thrust down through the Malayan archipelago to the very fringes of Australia’. Ibid., Vol. 198, p. 839. 9 House of Representatives Debates, vol. 207, p. 2266, 9 May 1950. Mr Swartz had been a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in Singapore, Malaya and Thailand. 8


Australia’.10 On 26 May he announced the withdrawal of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (predominantly Australian) from Japan.11 On 30 May he saw the events in Malaya as part of ‘the global pattern of imperialistic Communist aggression’, directed by the Soviet Union. The Colombo Plan Consultative Committee had just met in Sydney, and Menzies stated that the Plan’s economic aid programme in Malaya would require a parallel improvement in internal security. The defence of Malaya was ‘a part of the regional defence problem in the Pacific, which must be shared by Australia with the United Kingdom and other countries with interests in this area’.12 The following day he announced that the Australian government had agreed to a British request, and would provide a transport squadron of Dakota aircraft for supply dropping and general transport services in Malaya.13 If this seems a good deal of labouring to bring forth a very modest addition to the British forces in Malaya, it was still a departure for Australia to station forces of any kind overseas in peacetime to help with internal security, although the Boer War, the Boxer uprising, BCOF and the Berlin airlift provided precedents of a kind. (During World War II Australia had reluctantly sent forces to Malaya, losing 17,000 as prisoners of war after the fall of Singapore.) Less than a month later, on 25 June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The Australian government’s first reaction was to give further support to British operations in Malaya, in the form of a squadron of heavy bombers. ‘The immediate problem of Korea’, Menzies said on 27 June, ‘must, if it is to be dealt with at all, be dealt with by the Great Powers.’ He saw the attack as part and parcel with other communist activities in Asia. Australia had a capacity to help in Malaya, and an interest in doing so, as the preservation of British authority there was ‘vital’ to Australia’s security. We cannot regard the task in that country as solely one for the United Kingdom, nor would the Australian people desire us to. It must be made clear to Communist Movements everywhere that if they promote aggressive campaigns for the acquisition of new territory they will find no division among the British countries of the world, who know that all their vital interests are in common, and will therefore, at all times, be prepared to help each other by such means as lie within their capacity.14

10

House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 207, p. 2741. Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 1950, p. 352. 12 House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 208, pp. 3350–1. 13 Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 1950, p. 354. 14 Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 6, June 1950, pp. 420–1. 11


To the cynical observer, this action and rhetoric may have seemed an attempt to forestall a greater call for Australian forces in Korea. Whether or not Menzies had that in mind, within three days Australian naval ships in Japanese waters, and a fighter squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force located in Japan, had been placed at the service of the United Nations through the United States authorities in support of the Republic of (South) Korea.15 At the end of July, following Britain’s lead in meeting an American request, an Australian battalion in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan was committed to the United Nations Force in Korea.16 The Australian aircraft and crews17 were a useful but minor contribution to the war in Malaya. The hard, slogging work of defeating the terrorists was left mainly to the army (about three-fifths British plus Malays, Borneo Dayaks, Gurkhas, Fijians, and King’s African Rifles), the police, home guard units, a local militia and the villagers. It was a major combined military and civilian operation. Strategic defence planning between Britain, Australian and New Zealand in Singapore was in operation by 1949, and subsequently became known by the initials ANZAM, representing Australia, New Zealand and (British operations in) Malaya, or the Malayan area. Initially, it appears that such planning was limited to sea and air communications, with co-ordination conducted at Service levels.18 On 11 October 1949, the Australian (Labor) Minister for Defence, John Dedman, told Parliament that the Australian government had ‘entered into an undertaking with the Government of the United Kingdom to make a far greater contribution to the defence of the British Commonwealth of Nations than Australia has ever made before’.19 Nothing has emerged since that time to explain what this commitment amounted to. The allocation of transport and bomber aircraft in mid-1950 was the first practical gesture; it gave Australia some basis for a voice in the councils at Singapore, and ANZAM planning was extended to cover the external defence of Malaya.20 From this time, ships of the Royal Australian Navy began to operate in waters of the Malay archipelago with greater frequency. The negotiations in 1951 that led to the security treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States have been discussed elsewhere.21 The British (Labour) government of the time would have preferred

15

Statements by Menzies 29 and 30 June 1950, ibid., pp. 424, 426. Menzies had opposed the despatch of Australian ground troops, but his Cabinet took the decision while he was travelling between Southampton and New York. 17 This article does not deal in detail with the New Zealand contributions, which tended to be of the same kind as the Australian, though somewhat smaller, for obvious reason. 18 Royal Institute of International Affairs, Collective Defence in South-east Asia, Oxford University Press, London 1956, p. 20. 19 House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 204, p. 1147. 20 Collective Defence in South-east Asia, p. 20. 16


that there be no such treaty, but accepted it with reasonable grace. The Churchill Conservative government that came to power in October 1951 felt offended at being ‘excluded’ from ANZUS, but the treaty gave Australia and New Zealand a sense of security which enabled them to contemplate greater involvement in regional defence activities, especially after the end of the Korean war. Before that occurred, Australia contributed once again (mid-1952) to the defence of the Middle East and Commonwealth interests there by stationing two fighter squadrons at Malta. They remained until after the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of July 1954, under which Britain withdrew all her forces from Egyptian territory. With the Suez bottleneck now undefended, there was little point in Australia’s helping to secure the same imperial artery in the much less vulnerable and more distant Mediterranean. In October 1952, the first of several military staff talks was held in Washington between representatives of the United States, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand, to consider the security problems of South-east Asia. Subsequent talks were held at Honolulu, Singapore and Washington. Britain would have liked to see these develop into a ‘Five Power Staff Agency’, but (as with ANZUS) the United States saw no reason for involving itself, even at the level of discussion, in the defence of British colonial territories.22 The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, visited Australia in October 1953, and in conference with British, Australian and New Zealand representatives, discussed the strategic problems of the three countries in East Asia and the Pacific. Early the following year Britain, Australia and New Zealand held military staff talks on the problems of defending Malaya, the Commonwealth island territories, and Australia and New Zealand, It seems likely that on both these occasions Australia was encouraged by Britain to contribute to the anti-terrorist operations, and expressed willingness to do so, but world attention shifted as the situation in Vietnam deteriorated leading to the fall of Dien Bien Phu in late April 1954 and the Geneva conferences on Indo-China and Korea. Britain, France, the United States, Australia and New Zealand all signed the South-east Asia Collective Defence Treaty at Manila in September, and committed themselves, in principle, to the defence of Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and—on request or by consent—to the three Indo-China states. The Manila Treaty provided (Article IV.I) that in the event of ‘aggression by means of armed attack in the Treaty Area against any of the Parties’ or against a designated state, each would ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional practices’. The Treaty Area was defined (Article VIII) as ‘the

21

See especially, Sir Percy Spender, Exercises in Diplomacy. The ANZUS Treaty and the Colombo Plan, Sydney University Press, 1969, pp. 13–190. 22 T.B.Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister. The Diaries of R.G.Casey 1951–60, Collins, London 1972, pp. 105–6.


general area of South-East Asia including the entire territories of the Asian Parties, and the general area of the South-West Pacific not including the Pacific area north of 21 degrees 30 minutes north latitude’ (i.e. it excluded Hong Kong and Taiwan). Prior to and at a meeting in London in January 1955 of Commonwealth Prime Ministers, Britain, Australia and New Zealand reconciled their involvement in Malaya and their commitment under SEATO (the Treaty came to be known by its organization) by designating Malaya an important part of the Manila Treaty Area. The claim was thin, but not specious. Although the Treaty was designed primarily to keep communist military forces north of the 17th parallel in Vietnam, were Malaya to fall to communist insurrection the security of Thailand and of non-communist Indo-China would be reduced, and the whole Western defence position in the region seriously affected. By this means Australia also reconciled the pressures upon her by Britain to help in Malaya and by the United States to be prepared to help in Thailand or Indo-China. The Australian government was reluctant to divert funds from development to defence, and met its newly-assumed obligations by withdrawing its battalion from Korea (despite U.S. protests) and sending it to Malaya, along with naval and air units, as part of a combined British-Australian-New Zealand brigade group.23 (New Zealand also sent a battalion, and a British battalion was allocated from the divisions already serving in the area in counter-insurgency operations.) The whole force was designated the ‘Commonwealth Strategic Reserve’. It was only a small part of the total British and Commonwealth defence capacity in Malaya and Singapore, the rest under British command continuing to combat, with increasing effectiveness, the communist terrorists. The creation of the Strategic Reserve, about which the British government appeared non-committal and the Australian government appeared confused, would seem to have served several purposes. First, it enabled the three Commonwealth governments to assure SEATO that they had a joint force in being, located in the area, and available if necessary for SEATO operations. Second, it enabled the Australian and New Zealand governments to dissociate themselves in a degree from the imperialist aspects of the counter-insurgency operations and to emphasize the broader question of defence against aggressive communist military activities in general. Menzies deferred in public the question as to whether the force would be used against the terrorists: the subject was given for consideration to the ‘ANZAM Defence Committee’ (see below). He raised the question of a larger commitment in the event of overt war in South-east Asia, and optimistically said Australia’s would ‘probably be of the order of two divisions’. Third, it was a gesture of support and encouragement to Britain by 23

As announced by Menzies on 1 April 1955, the additional Australian forces comprised two destroyers or frigates, an aircraft carrier on an annual visit, and additional ships in an emergency; an infantry battalion with supporting arms and reinforcements; and an air force fighter wing of two squadrons, a bomber squadron and an airfield construction squadron. Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 4, April 1955, pp. 279–80.


Australia and New Zealand and in fact their units were used against the terrorists, although they were debarred from intervening in civil disturbances. It also gave Australian and New Zealand officers opportunities for service in a much larger operational command than was available at home. In what must have appeared to the British as a regrettable lack of fortitude and confidence, Menzies insisted at the London meeting on trying to get the support of the United States for Australia’s modest new venture and what it might lead to. On his way back to Canberra, he called on President Eisenhower. I raised the question whether in the event of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand undertaking to station substantial forces in Malaya, we could be assured that the United States would be prepared to give us effective cooperation… I was informed that though the tactical employment of forces was a matter which would have to be worked out in detail on the Services level, the United States considered that such effective co-operation was implicit in the Manila Pact.24 Menzies also obtained an assurance that the United States would remedy some of the deficiencies in Australia’s military equipment. There would seem to be two possible reasons for this curious piece of diplomacy. Menzies does seem to have been genuinely alarmed that communist military activities could lead to war in East and South-east Asia, in which event he wanted the United States committed (as it was not in 1941–2) to the defence of Malaya and Singapore. Or, he may have believed that to have a public American endorsement of Australia’s new intervention in Malaya would quiet some of his Australian critics and reassure the apprehensive. But the endorsement must have been considerably less warm than he would have liked, and no more than he ought to have expected. The United States could underwrite neither a British colonial situation nor Australia’s support of Britain with it. By this time—mid-1955—the insurgency in Malaya and Singapore had eased considerably although incidents continued. The people were demonstrably not on the side of the insurgents, several thousand of whom had been killed or captured or had surrendered. The first national election in Malaya was held in July leading within two years to independence, but it was 1960 before the government could formally declare the Emergency at an end. Commonwealth forces were needed for internal security until that time. The Soviet Union had given almost no help to the communist terrorists, and China had given very little. Yet most of the terrorists were Chinese, many were born outside Malaya, and China was widely considered to be the major threat to the peace of South-east Asia. All this instilled a sense of vulnerability to external attack within the

24

House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 6, pp. 52–3, 20 April 1955.


Malayan government, and shortly after independence a treaty was signed with Britain (known as the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement, or AMDA) by which (Article I) the United Kingdom government undertook ‘to afford to the Government of the Federation of Malaya such assistance as the Government of the Federation of Malaya may require for the external defence of its territory’. Britain was given the right (Article III) ‘to maintain in the Federation such naval, land and air forces including a Commonwealth Strategic Reserve as are agreed between the two Governments to be necessary for the purposes of Article I…and for the fulfilment of Commonwealth and international obligations’. An exchange of letters between the Australian and Malayan governments in March-April 1959 confirmed that these arrangements applied to the Australian forces. They were thus legally in Malaya but had no formal obligation to defend the Federation. The defence of Singapore was a British obligation until independence in 1959, but British and Commonwealth forces remained there without a formal treaty until Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. The Strategic Reserve was employed under the general direction of the ANZAM Defence Committee, which theoretically comprised the Chief of Staff Committees of the three states.25 These committees were never all in the one place at the one time, but representatives of them could and did meet in all three capitals. The group meeting in Canberra became known as the ANZAM Defence Committee. It comprised the Australian Chiefs of Staff and members or representatives of the British and New Zealand Chiefs of Staff, and was chaired by the Secretary (civil service head) of the Australian Department of Defence. Under the authority of the three governments, this committee issued general directions to the Reserve, which came under the operational control of the British Commander-in-Chief Far East, who was also directly responsible to the British government for the British component of the Strategic Reserve and for those much larger forces in the area which were not part of the Reserve. He was authorized to deploy Reserve units for training purposes without reference to the ANZAM Defence Committee, and for operations against communist terrorists as covered by his directive. Wider or different use of the Reserve would entail seeking a new directive. No operations were undertaken in Malaya after independence without the concurrence of the Malayan government. When that government declared itself, somewhat incongruously, to be ‘non-aligned’, it imposed restraints on the movement of British and Commonwealth forces directly to the support of SEATO, so that they were required to transit through Singapore, as happened in May 1962. Officers of the three nations served together in the headquarters of the Reserve’s 28th Commonwealth Brigade, and in the various British headquarters

25

This information was obtained by interviews with serving officers and defence officials in Singapore and Canberra. It was recorded in T.B.Millar, Australia’s Defence, Melbourne University Press, 1965, pp. 69–76.


staffs.26 They had done the same in BCOF and in the Commonwealth brigade and division in Korea. The training, doctrine, organization,27 and outlook of the three national groups had so much in common that service together and under one another’s command raised no significant problems. With the end of the Emergency in 1960, it might have been expected that the British and Commonwealth forces would be repatriated. This did not happen. Britain wished to retain the Singapore bases for the security of its communications east of Suez. It needed to be able to protect those bases. It also had a further and equally delicate piece of decolonization to effect—that of bringing self-government and independence to British North Borneo, Sarawak, and the tiny sultanate of Brunei, a British protectorate. The Malayan government, edging towards a federation that could include Singapore and north Borneo territories, felt vulnerable and weak. It did not want the British forces prematurely withdrawn. The Singapore government saw the value—not least the economic value—of the presence of British and Commonwealth forces. For its part, the Australian conservative government had adopted a policy of defending Australia ‘as far north as possible’, in the company of ‘powerful friends’.28 The deteriorating situation in Indo-China raised fears for the peace of the region, reflected in successive SEATO Council communiques. In July 1961, Iraq threatened to invade and take over Kuwait, and was prevented from doing so by prompt British action from a commando carrier and other ships deployed in the area. This success, a welcome credit after the lingering debits of Suez, would seem to have influenced the British Chiefs of Staff and the British government, with support from the new Kennedy administration, towards recasting Britain’s global role to that of restorer of the peace through minor interventions where needed and sought in Africa and Asia. 29 Opportunities soon presented themselves. In May, aircraft were sent to Thailand as a gesture of support against a threat from the Pathet Lao. In October and later, aid was given to India against the Chinese invasion in the North-East Frontier Agency area. During the period December-February, British forces from Singapore put down a rebellion against the Sultan in Brunei. This rebellion provided an incentive and a rationale for Indonesia to announce in January 1963 its ‘confrontation’ against the proposed federation of Malaysia, which it saw as a form of ‘neo-colonialism’, and for the Philippines to assert its claim to that

26 I have been told by an Australian officer who served on the British staff that instructions or information from London marked ‘U.K. eyes only’ were passed to him as a matter of course, it being assumed that while he was on a British headquarters he was effectively a British officer. 27 Even during the brief period when Australia experimented with the ‘pentropic’ division based on five enlarged battalion groups, the Australian units in Malaysia remained on the old tropical establishment similar to the British. 28 Menzies used these phrases in his statement (see above) of 1 April 1955. This remained his philosophy during his record sixteen consecutive years as Prime Minister (1949–66).


portion of the old Sulu sultanate that lay in British North Borneo (renamed Sabah). Indonesia began a fluctuating war of words and of diplomatic activity against Malaysia, with provocations against Malayan fishing boats and with raids across the border in Sabah and Sarawak.30 The negotiations between the parties to the proposed new federation were prolonged and difficult. If anything, ‘confrontation’ gave them an added incentive to come together for joint protection. The agreement to form the new federation, with Brunei ultimately opting to remain outside it, was signed in London on 9 July, to come into effect on 31 August. This date was postponed until 16 September 1963 while a United Nations mission ‘tested’ opinion on the Borneo states. The mission found strong support for Malaysia, which duly came into being. President Soekarno of Indonesia refused to accept the UN finding or to recognize the new state, and encouraged by the Indonesian Communist Party he stepped up verbal, economic and military pressures to ‘crush’ Malaysia. A mob attacked and then burned the British embassy in Jakarta. Most British houses in Jakarta were destroyed and looted, and their cars burned, whereas Australia’s and America’s were not touched. In the last half of September, Indonesian forces made six invasions into Sarawak, by groups numbering between 60 and 90 men.31 The British units had difficulty in coping with them. With an army twice the size of Britain’s, modern American, British and Soviet military equipment, and Soviet naval vessels partly manned by Russians, Indonesia appeared a serious threat to Malaysia, to Britain, and to Australia.32 Under Article VI of the Malaysia agreement signed in July, AMDA was extended to apply to the new federation, including Singapore. In the two days after Malaysia came into being, the Malaysian and Australian governments exchanged letters which associated Australia with the extended agreement. Then in a carefully-worded statement to Parliament on 25 September, Menzies supported the formation of Malaysia and served notice on Indonesia and the Philippines where Australia stood: I, therefore, after close deliberations by the Cabinet, and on its behalf, inform the House that we are resolved, and have so informed the Government of Malaysia, and the Governments of the United Kingdom 29

This is discussed by Phillip Darby, British Defence Policy East of Suez 1947–1968, Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London 1973, pp. 218–27, and confirmed by the White Paper Statement on Defence 1962, Cmnd 1639. 30 For an analysis of the diplomacy and politics of this period, in which Britain was extensively and Australia occasionally involved, see J.A.C.Mackie, Konfrontasi. The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute 1963–1966, Oxford University Press for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Kuala Lumpur 1974. 31 Ibid., p. 210.


and New Zealand and others concerned, that if, in the circumstances that now exist, and which may continue for a long time, there occurs, in relation to Malaysia or any of its constituent States, armed invasion or subversive activity—supported or directed or inspired from outside Malaysia—we shall to the best of our powers and by such means as shall be agreed upon with the Government of Malaysia, add our military assistance to the efforts of Malaysia and the United Kingdom in the defence of Malaysia’s territorial integrity and political independence.33 The British forces in Malaya and Singapore were expanded to cope with confrontation. After so forthright a statement, Australia might have been expected to take the same action, but it did not. On the contrary, it was extremely reluctant to become involved in the small war that now developed, and determined not unduly to offend Indonesia, which would be an important neighbour long after Britain had left the region. Australian naval vessels were given patrolling duties in Malaysian waters, but ground forces were kept out of the fray, being sent to patrol the Thai border area. The Australian government once again felt the need of reassurance that if it became too deeply committed to the conflict, it would have American backing. On returning from a SEATO Council meeting in mid-April 1964, the Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, told a press conference that the United States understood that the ANZUS Treaty expressly covered Australian military personnel, aircraft or ships in the Pacific, including Borneo.34 This was not a very specific assurance, and appeared even less specific under parliamentary questioning. As some 65, 000 member of Commonwealth armed forces were now engaged in the support of Malaysia, it may have seemed at least superfluous for Australia to seek American backing. What its government was also doing in effect was to warn Indonesia that if it made any attacks on the Australian mainland or on the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, it could face reprisals from the United States. In this same month (April 1964), Australian army engineers were sent to Borneo for road and bridge construction, but not until October were Australian infantry used on the peninsula against Indonesian infiltrators,35 and not until the following February, after Menzies had visited London for Churchill’s funeral and seventeen months after his robust assurance of military aid, did Menzies agree that the Australian battalion in the Reserve should take its turn for duty in Borneo.36 As in 1955, he had two pressures to reconcile—one British, one American—but this time he could not manage it with a single action. At almost

32

Less than two years earlier, after military demonstrations against the Dutch, Indonesia had acquired West New Guinea and thus shared a border with Australia (in Papua). 33 House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 40, p. 1139, 25 September 1963. 34 Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 1964.


exactly the same time that the battalion was committed to Borneo, another was promised for service with American forces in Vietnam. Political and racial tensions were endemic within Malaysia, especially Malay fears of Chinese dominance. On 9 August 1965, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman, forced Singapore out of the federation. This did not affect the operations against Indonesia but it did raise the question whether all the effort that had gone into the preservation of Malaysia from external attack was worthwhile when it could be so easily destroyed by animosities within. In fact defence cooperation between Singapore and the Federation continued very much as before, and the provisions of AMDA applied to Singapore without a formal treaty. Then on 30 September an attempted left-wing coup in Indonesia was crushed by the army, there was an extraordinary massacre of several hundred thousand PKI members, supporters, relations and others, and confrontation wound down during the political manoeuvres that led to the ousting of Sukarno, the creation of a military government, and the re-establishment of normal relations between Indonesia and Malaysia on 16 August 1966. The Labour government which came to power in Britain in October 1964 had been determined to reduce defence spending and began to work towards retrenchment,37 but it could do little about reductions in Malaysia while confrontation continued, and came under heavy pressure from the United States to remain committed to the security of South-east Asia. In 1966, the United States with some South Korean, Australian and New Zealand support, was still heavily involved in the war in Vietnam. Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore also wanted to see Britain retain a strong military presence in the region. The February 1966 British Defence White Paper served notice (presumably to Australia and New Zealand) that the defence burden east of Suez must be ‘more equitably shared’, and that forces in Malaysia and Singapore would be reduced as soon as conditions permitted. The February 1967 White Paper38 went a stage further. Referring to the conflict with Indonesia, the government declared (para, 26): ‘Our aim is that Britain should not again have to undertake operations on this scale outside Europe’. This meant a run-down of British bases outside the European theatre, and the end of the imperial system of communications. As so little was left of the Empire itself, this was not illogical. In July, a Supplementary Statement on Defence Policy39 set a timetable for withdrawal: ground forces out of Aden and the rest of southern Arabia by the time of their independence in January 1968; the withdrawal of most ground forces 35 I recall about this time, a British diplomat in Canberra, in a private conversation, congratulating Australia on the sporting successes of its troops in Malaysia, although he confessed that British units might have done better if they had not been busy fighting in Borneo. 36 In the meantime, the overstretched British forces had had to cope with terrorist activities in Aden, and support of the new governments against mutinying troops in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika.


from Malaysia and Singapore by the early 1970s, and total withdrawal of all armed forces and associated civilians by 1976. Britain still wanted to be able to deploy military power in the area, either by naval and amphibious vessels cruising there, or the quick movement of strategic reserves located in the U.K., or perhaps by using facilities in Australia and/or making a new staging airfield in the British Indian Ocean Territory. The Supplementary Statement said Britain would continue to make a substantial contribution to the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve (it did not say how, or for how long), to honour its obligations under AMDA (presumably in the expectation that very little call would be made) and to honour its obligations under SEATO (which had always been vague and which in any case Britain had always avoided). In January 1968 the British government telescoped the timetable, to have all British forces out of Malaysia and Singapore by March 1971, but under special pleading from Singapore this was extended to December of that year, the point being that an election was due in Britain before that time and a Conservative government could be expected to be more sympathetic. As it turned out, Labour moved slightly towards the Conservative position in 1969–70, in deference to British public opinion. The Australian government was strongly opposed to the British withdrawal, and made every available kind of representation to prevent or defer it. Having contributed little and late to both the Emergency and the defence against Indonesia, it now apparently took the view that the Australian colonies had taken on the withdrawal of the imperial garrison (‘redcoats’) in 1870: that Britain still had an obligation to defend Australia. In 1968 this was seen partly as a due reward for Australia’s imperial contributions in the Boer War and two world wars. But the proposal that was canvassed to station British forces in Australia40 was received there with no enthusiasm. The Australian government in 1968 did not want the redcoats back. It still wanted to be defended as far forward as possible. In fact, all the evidence suggests that the proposal was not a serious one, but a gambit by the British Minister for Defence, Denis Healey, perhaps to give Australia something else to think about while the British forces beat their final retreat. The Australians actually did have something else to think about: by 1968 they had some 8,000 men of the three services on operations in Vietnam. Australia now had to decide, for the first time in its history, whether it would maintain forces overseas without the company and support of either the United Kingdom or the United States. John Gorton, who had succeeded Harold Holt as

37

See United Kingdom Defence White Papers of February 1965 (Cmnd 2592) and February 1966 (Cmnd 2901). 38 Cmnd 3203. 39 Cmnd 3357. The implications of this Statement are discussed in T.B.Millar (ed.), Britain’s Withdrawal from Asia. Its Implications for Australia, Australian National University, Canberra 1967


Prime Minister in January 1968, was known for his rather strident Australian nationalism, for a reluctance to continue with the foreward defence policy, and for an inclination towards defending Australia within the continent. But his speech on 25 February 1969 revealed none of these attitudes. The governments of Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand, as well as his own senior public servants, had apparently won him over to a policy of continuing to maintain forces of all arms in Malaysia and Singapore. ‘Our advice’, he said, ‘is that the greatest threat to stability and security arises from the possibility of insurgency in South East Asian countries which could ultimately expose us to threat by the spread of Communism in an insecure and unstable Asia.’ Australia could not turn its back on the region as regards providing military assitance, he said. If it did, it would discourage smaller countries in the region from protecting themselves, and adversely affect the policies of larger countries towards a threat to the peace in the region. Should larger Australian forces be needed in South-east Asia at some future time, they could more easily and effectively operate and any Australian promise of help would be more believable if Australian bases were already located there. Gorton said that a two-battalion force would be maintained in conjunction with New Zealand, most of the force being located in Singapore, plus air and naval units. The troops would not be used to maintain civil law and order.41 The 1970 British election returned the Conservative government of Edward Heath, which believed rather more strongly than the Labour Party in maintaining British forces outside Europe. Like the Australian government, the British were troubled by the growing Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean. But no British government could now offer Malaysia the guarantees of support contained in AMDA. Prior to the election, the five countries concerned had set about negotiating a replacement to AMDA and the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve, and this continued under Heath. The result was the Five Power Defence Arrangements, based on an agreement reached in London in April 1971, which came into effect on 1 November. There was no formal public treaty, but a communique and a series of exchanges of letters, with detailed annexes. The communique included the following undertaking (para. 5): The Ministers also declared in relation to the external defence of Malaysia and Singapore, that in the event of any form of armed attack externally organised or supported or the threat of such attack against Malaysia or Singapore, their Governments would immediately consult together for the purpose of deciding what measures should be taken jointly or separately in relation to such attack or threat.42

40 The public record does not make clear what form the proposal took. British V-bombers had made occasional use of the Royal Australian Air Force Base at Darwin.


Each of the three governments provided a battalion group, plus naval and air units, the whole force being known uneuphoniously as ANZUK. There were also a Joint Consultative Council representing the five powers, an Air Defence Council, an integrated air defence system, and a Joint Maritime Operations Centre. The ANZUK Force comprised about 7,000 men, of which 3,300 were Australians, 2, 550 British, and 1,150 New Zealanders.43 Despite joint exercises including an impressive movement of troops from Britain, the Five-Power arrangements never had the aura of permanence. They depended on there being conservative governments in both London and Canberra. (In Wellington, both major parties supported the New Zealand force in Malaysia.) They depended on Malaysia and Singapore having confidence in their partners, but Malaysia saw the arrangements as temporary and began promoting the concept of a zone of ‘peace, freedom and neutrality’. William McMahon, who succeeded Gorton, was not a convincing leader, and the Singapore Prime Minister indicated he had little respect for the Australian government or its force. 44 Canberra changed its government first, with a Labor Party victory in December 1972 after twenty-three years in opposition. Prior to the election, Labor had indicated it would withdraw all Australian forces from Malaysia and Singapore, but in office it did not do so. Against New Zealand’s wishes, it withdrew by early 1974 most of the battalion (which Gough Whitlam saw as a ‘garrison’) and of the military logistical elements on which the force depended. The two Australian squadrons of Mirage fighters remained at Butterworth air force base, near Penang, with a detachment at Tengah in Singapore. This was the beginning of the break-up of ANZUK. The British and New Zealand forces now had two national commands. Britain elected a Labour government in March 1974. By the end of the year, it had decided to withdraw its forces other than a small group in the integrated air defence system, and ANZUK was no more, although the Five Power arrangements continued as a consultative process and Australia retained its air squadrons in the area. Throughout the quarter-century of their co-operation in defence of the Malaysian area, Britain and Australia had different motives and carried different burdens. For Britain, the operations that began in securing colonial territories and ended in defending two independent states were part of the wind-down of empire, a rearguard action covering the retreat and protecting both the infant states and the established investment. In using military conflict against the British presence

41 House of Representatives Debates, Vol. 62, pp. 33–7, 25 February 1969. Subsequently Gorton indicated, undiplomatically, that Australian forces might not be available for service in Sabah and Sarawak. 42 Current Notes on International Affairs, Vol. 42, No. 4, April 1971, pp. 184–5. The bilateral exchanges of letters had the status of treaties. The Joint Consultative Council subsequently issued documents on the working of the Integrated Air Defence System. 43 The Times, 2 November 1971.


in Malaysia, Indonesia made that presence more necessary and delayed the retreat briefly. ‘Commonwealth’ considerations were important in Australia’s decisions to help in Malaya: British pressures carried an additional weight of kinship; Malaya and Singapore were still part of the family. Of equal importance were their strategic situation at gateway between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and Malaya’s resources of rubber and tin. But overshadowing all this was the Australian government’s fear of communist military and political aggressiveness, in Europe but more imminently in Asia where great and powerful friends were needed—and might need by participation to be encouraged to remain—to stand between Australia and the communist threat. The United States appears to have stiffened the resolve of both Britain and Australia to stay in the region—a resolve that also had an element of inertia or momentum about it. Once there, to retreat might be seen as a public gesture of no-confidence or faint-heartedness. Both Britain and Australia have been overcome by geography and retreated to their own near neighbourhood. Although joint defence exercises and exchanges of personnel between them will continue for some years, we may well find that the defence of Malaysia and Singapore was their last combined military operation of any significance. The first was in the Sudan over ninety years ago; then in the Boer War, the Boxer uprising, World War I, World War II, then Korea and Malaya/Malaysia. Despite the many problems, including the differences in national temperament, it is a remarkable record of shared objectives and common endeavour.

44

McMahon, who succeeded Gorton as Prime Minister, did not help matters when (as reported) he said that one of the purposes of Five Power was to prevent Malaysia and Singapore from fighting each other. Straits Times, 16 October 1972.

J.D.B.MILLER

‘an Empire that don’t care what you do…’

There is a view of the relations between Britain and Australia which has long been popular amongst Australian radicals, and which has recently been extended to relations with the United States. It is put in terms of dominance and protection: just as the United States now protects Australia, so Britain used to.1 The details of the relationship are, in each case, largely subordinated to the central concept of a small population disturbed by its proximity to Asia, and anxious that its security should be guaranteed by a major power. Once upon a time Britain was sufficient; then the United States was; now, perhaps, after the Vietnam war, the United States has ceased to be sufficient, though it may still be necessary, and may still wish to dominate. The economic as well as the military relationship between Australia and larger powers is often interpreted in similar terms. Britain used to be able to provide markets and investment, but can do so no longer. Today Australia’s external economic dependence is split, as it were, between the United States and Japan; and one can see similar views being developed about both. From the standpoint of the radical intellectual, the attitudes of politicians in these situations of dominance/protection are essentially subservient: the Deakins, Fishers, Hugheses, Bruces, Lyonses, Menzieses, and Holts not only crawl to their protectors from overseas, they also enjoy what they are doing. They are the prisoners who love their chains, the captors who believe that their gaolers are protecting them from unnamed horrors outside the walls of the prison. In the case of the United States, this alleged subservience is explained by way of international capitalist pressures, which reinforce Australian capitalists’ desire to preserve their profits against growing Asian power. In the case of Britain in the past, the same explanation is normal, but is strengthened by the notion that Australian politicians were victims of filial piety, of that notion of ‘kith and kin’ which enabled British politicians and business men to entrap them. Much can be made of the royal connection, of the power of ceremonial, of the influence of the London season and of attendance at Lord’s, of how the hazy prospect of a Lord Wardenship or a directorship might stimulate the affections to a point at which Australia seemed inseparable from Britain. Sir Robert Menzies, ‘British to the bootheels’ and ‘the last of the Queen’s men’, is the archetype of this prevailing

AUSTRALIA AND BRITAIN 87

image; and his speeches and writings offer a thousand quotations for those who wish to further it. Yet such a structure of description and interpretation will hardly do. The stridency with which it is sometimes proclaimed alone makes it highly suspect. Relations between Britain and Australia, or the United States and Australia, consist of a variety of aspects, as this book indicates in the case of Britain, and as scholarship is increasingly describing in the case of the United States. Politicians are not the simple men that their speeches suggest they are. Filial piety is capable of a variety of expressions; protection is an ambiguous term; dominance is never complete between states. It is worth following out some of the special features of contact between Australian and British governments, in order to see how they functioned both bilaterally and within the framework of the Commonwealth. The emphasis must lie on Australian governments of the Right, since these are much the most frequent. One could, of course, begin with politicians’ statements. To do this, however, might seem to strengthen rather than weaken the strident account which has already been rejected. For many years, especially between the two wars, the stock in trade of non-Labor politicians in Australia was what they called ‘loyalty’. Loyalty was, in effect, what the Labor Party had not shown during World War I, by opposing conscription and later turning towards the idea of a negotiated peace. Loyalty was insisting on ‘God Save the King’ as the Australian national anthem, and on standing up for it when the movies were over; deploring the tentative movements towards national independence of Canada, South Africa and Ireland; flying the Union Jack and covering the table with it at election meetings; calling England ‘home’; insisting that governors and governors-general come from Britain; buying British whenever it was politically practicable; trusting in the Royal Navy; and repudiating the notion of an independent Australian foreign policy. It chimed with the social inclinations and connections of the people who provided money and support for the non-Labor parties, and it served as a rallying-point for those who either could not fashion for themselves a sense of Australian nationalism, or resented the crude assertions of nationalism which came from the Labor party. One cannot say how effective it was in terms of votes. Australian swinging voters have notoriously proved more concerned about economic conditions than about anything else. What the emphasis on loyalty did between the wars (and in earlier periods, especially in the Boer war and in World War I itself) was to rally and reassure the faithful. Australia’s wars, undertaken alongside Britain, were potent symbols of kinship, comradeship, gratitude, dependence and fidelity. Indeed, it is not often stressed how many Australians found the memory of World War I a sufficient basis for

1

A moderate expression of this point of view is to be found in Bruce Grant, The Crisis of Lolyalty, Sydney 1972, Chs 1 and 2. It shows little awareness that Australian ministers ever did what the British did not tell them to do.

88 ‘AN EMPIRE THAT DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DO…’

political belief between the wars. At many a political meeting of the Nationalist, United Australia and Country parties it was sufficient to recall the sacrifices of Gallipoli and the Somme, and to contrast them with the selfishness to which trade unions and the Labor party were said to pander, in order to convince many decent Australians of vaguely middle-class character that their future was in safe keeping. It would have been a self-inflicted wound for a politician of the Right to suggest that Britain was mistaken and should not be followed—except in respect of those directly economic issues in which British habits of free trade collided with Australian protectionism, and it became necessary to assert Australia’s need for employment and high prices. ‘Loyalty’ was thus a combination of popular impulse and politicians’ advantage. Many of the politicians in question had themselves served in the war; there is no reason to believe they were insincere when their rhetoric and their political interests coincided. Thus, to take the rhetoric at face value would be to perpetuate the notion that dominance/protection had its victims in its toils in something like the situation of sexual bondage. ‘Though he slay me, yet shall I love him’ might prove to be a valid interpretation. But this is subject to the same criticism as its related interpretation, that these men were the victims of capitalist pressures and a basically capitalist ideology. It is too complete. When we look at what politicians of the Right did in their relations with Britain, as distinct from what they said, the story is different. Respectable Britain-loving politicians in the colonies in the latter part of the nineteenth century brought down tariffs against British goods, to the great grief of John Stuart Mill,2 who had expected that the kind of franchise which operated in Victoria would ensure that men followed the right (i.e., free trade) economic doctrines. The problem was a recurring one throughout succeeding years. When the British Economic Mission came to Australia in 1929, it reported in both sorrow and anger the protectionist propensities of the Australians, warning that no lasting progress could occur under such conditions. Hardly had the Ottawa agreements of 1932 come into force, with their provision, in the case of Australia, for a Tariff Board which would advise against unwise protective tariffs, than British manufacturers were complaining that the Board was no real defence against the Australians’ proclivities. Throughout the period since World War II, the same complaints have been made. There was, and is, an urge towards protectionism which Australian governments of the Right, dependent to an increasing extent on manufacturing interests for support, have rarely resisted with any determination, in spite of the counter-pressures of farmers and trading interests. (Farmers themselves have, of course, been amongst the most protectionist of Australian interest groups, determined to keep out competing products from such imperial areas as New Zealand, Canada, and Fiji; but this did

2 See Hugh S.R.Elliot (ed.), The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol. II, London 1910, pp. 117, 154.


not become a matter of dispute between Britain and Australia, since Britain was not an exporter of farm products, except in processed forms.) Another economic issue over which it could hardly be said that Australian governments of the Right were ever properly disciplined in English terms was imperial preference. Everyone is familiar with the pressures of Australian politicians for ‘men, money and markets’, with Australia as an especially favoured area, in the 1920s; but it is worth noting that, long before this, politicians like Deakin and Hughes had been happy to mount the stump in Britain itself (or, to put it more genteelly, speak at the Mansion House and on platforms throughout the country) in order to put the case for preference for imports from the Dominions over those which might be cheaper but came from unimperial sources such as Russia. The Ottawa conference of 1932 represented the apogee of Australian effort in this regard; and the British negotiators, including Neville Chamberlain, were put out by the nature of the Australian advocacy—though not so much as by that of another pillar of imperial orthodoxy and public loyalty, R.B.Bennett of Canada.3 The Australian pursuit of special favours in the British market was continued until Britain entered the European Economic Community, and still exists, if only in vestigial form. The long record of Australian conservatives’ indiscipline in respect of protectionism and preferences cannot be shrugged aside when one is considering the radical thesis of protection/dominance. British capitalists made it quite clear from the 1840s onwards that their interests lay in cheap imports and in open markets overseas. Cheap imports of food and raw materials reduced demands for higher wages in Britain and increased profits generally; open markets overseas, in economies which had not already developed their own manufactures, enabled British manufacturers to beat local competition in addition to that which they might experience from French or German or American competitors. Moreover, British investors in mineral and pastoral developments preferred, other things being equal, a situation in which local wages responded to the needs of British companies rather than to the demands of strong local trade union movements and the decisions of wage-fixing authorities. The effect of Australian protectionism was to reinforce the rigidifying factors in the Australian wage structure, and, more important, to encourage a general assumption that wages could be based on socalled ‘needs’ and not on what free-trade economists regarded as natural economic tendencies. In effect, one Australian conservative government after another (not to speak of the occasional, almost furtive, Labor government) affronted the declared interests of British capitalism, and did so while demanding, almost as a matter of right, that the British investor continue to put his money into Australian public works. This was hardly dominance, in spite of the placatory and apparently submissive remarks of Australian ministers at City dinners.

3

See Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, London 1946, pp. 214–15.


There are examples of a not dissimilar kind in Australia’s record in both world wars. Loyalty precluded objections by Australian conservative (and Labor) governments to the fact of war, or to the need for Australian support; but there were persistent and sometimes passionate objections to the conduct of the war— to the use made of Australian troops by British commanders, to the strategic conceptions favoured by British governments, and to the seeming neglect of Australian interests in respect of enemy-owned territory. Neither Hughes in 1917–18 nor Menzies in 1939–41 was against the war, but both were concerned lest Australia’s interests (as they formulated them) be lost to sight by British cabinets intent on the situation in Europe. Like Hughes at the Paris Peace Conference, they wanted to use the forms of British government and diplomacy for their own purposes, but were prepared to disagree if they thought that vital interests were being endangered. Much of this kind of situation is only now being revealed in full detail, although the official war histories contain a good deal on it, albeit at times through hints and circumlocutions. It has been characteristic of Australian governments that they under-play their differences from their protectors in public, when those are concerned with defence and security, and over-play them when they are economic in origin. This is presumably because of the different publics being appealed to. On security issues, the loyal members of the National, United Australia, Country, and Liberal parties would only have been shocked by being told that their representatives were questioning the British (or, in more recent times, the American) approach to war or the prospect of war. On economic issues, by contrast, it has always been necessary for the Country party, in particular, to satisfy its rural constituency by abusing major powers which would not open their markets in ways that suited the Australian producer. One does not need to maintain that Australian conservative governments outfaced British governments as a matter of course, in order to show that the notion of unquestioning obedience, of the prisoner delighting in his chains, is untrue. Often there was a mixture of motives and attitudes, with much difficulty in deciding what should be done—even when the public utterances of the politicians in question were couched in terms of unflinching co-operation with Britain, whatever might befall. Menzies at the outbreak of World War II is a case in point. What is certain, however, is that there has been a persistent strain in Australian governments of the Right, demanding that Australian interests be served, but frequently unsure of just what Australian interests might be. For example, it was difficult at the time, and it is still difficult, to decide whether the Menzies-Fadden government should have allowed the British government to send Australian troops in such numbers to the hopeless defence of Greece and Crete in 1941.4 It is now clear that Churchill and Eden wanted to use them for political display, rather than for military security. The position could not be held, but it was felt that demonstrating a determination to hold it would bring political advantage—and the Australians and New Zealanders were the troops most immediately available for a display of resolution. It was not so difficult for the


Curtin government to reject Churchill’s demand that Australian troops be diverted to Burma on their way back from the Middle East to fight in New Guinea. In each case there were both a general allied interest and a specific Australian interest. In each the general interest lay in setting troops to a forlorn hope, in order to show that the determination to resist was undimmed. In the Burma case, however, the specific Australian interest was the defence of Australia itself, whereas in the Greece and Crete instances it had been simply the lives of the men who were to be sent to fight. In Britain, it used to be customary to blame instances of apparent Australian disloyalty on one or more of three malign influences. The first of these was the Irish element in the Australian community. Irishism being equivalent to disloyalty in British politics, whether it expressed itself in Fenianism, Parnellism or the 1916 Rebellion, it could naturally be blamed for unsteadiness amongst Australians—since those of Irish origin constituted at least one in four of them. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a strong sectarian tone to Australian politics, with the Protestants tending to the conservative side and the Catholics to the radical. Moreover, Irish extremists were as liable to call for Australian independence as for Irish independence. The baleful figures of Archbishop Mannix, manifestly so ‘anti-British’ a symbol, was in itself almost a sufficient explanation from 1916 onwards: someone who joined the fledgling Dominions Office in 1929 told me that his was the name most often mentioned as likely to cause Australia to deny its obligations to Britain. Along with the Irish element went organized labour. Especially after the conscription split, Labor was widely regarded as opposed to British interests; but this was only a shift in emphasis, since British companies in Australia, and British investors, had long feared the activities of the trade unions as leading to increases in costs, and had seen Labor governments as (in this respect at least) the creatures of the unions. They feared the same effect from unions and labour parties in other countries, of course; but, since the rise of organized labour had been so spectacular in Australia, and since its effects appeared to increase rather than diminish (as in Canada), an explanation in terms of labour influence was plausible. The third influence, liable to be referred to between the wars more than in some previous periods, was that of the United States. A.P.Herbert once published verses in Punch to the effect that Australians’ loyalty could not be great since they bought cars from America rather than Britain. To a surprising extent the negotiations between Britain and Australia over rearmament in the 1930s revolved around whether the United States should take any part in the creation of an aircraft industry in Australia.5 It is still not uncommon for British people to say that Australians are different because they have been ‘Americanized’, the unspoken assumption being that there have been only two models on which they

4

See Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People 1939–1941, Canberra 1952, Ch. 8.


could base themselves, and that, to a regrettable degree, they have chosen the wrong one. No doubt there were times when one or all of these influences was paramount in deciding an issue between the governments of Britain and Australia, especially since the very size of the trade union movement (attributable in large part to the system of compulsory arbitration) has caused every sort of government to take account of it. Yet one can explain an urge towards protectionism in terms of the managers and investors as well as the workers; and it is a very long time since an Australian parliament passed resolutions about the state of Ireland.6 What is more to the point is that, while each of these influences may have been present at any given time, it could not explain the persistence of specifically Australian demands, indicating the gradual delineation of specific Australian interests in the minds of politicians. To say that a distinctive Australian nationalism developed from, say, the 1880s onwards is commonplace. What is worth saying, perhaps, is that this nationalism was not narrow but many-sided; that it was not confined to radical movements; and that, to a considerable extent, it was expressed through imperial institutions (even imperial symbols), rather than through denunciation of them. In ‘A Friend of the Family’, one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Debits and Credits, published in the 1920s, there is a scene in a masonic lodge composed of ex-servicemen from World War I. An Australian responds to the question, ‘Have you started that republic of yours down under yet?’ with: ‘No. But we’re goin’ to. Then you’ll see’. However, on being told, ‘Carry on. No one’s hindering’, he scowls and says: ‘No. We know they ain’t. And—and-that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you’. Then he throws back his head and laughs: ‘What can you do with an Empire that—that don’t care what you do?’. Kipling visited Australia only once, but he was much taken by Australians (especially by their ruthlessness in the Boer War), and he seems to have begun to realize, after World War I, that there was not likely to be the closer union of the Empire which he had hoped for earlier. The incipient republicanism to which he refers (a point —perhaps the only one—on which he agreed with D.H. Lawrence) can be disregarded: it represents that ‘bolshy’ attitude amongst Australian troops in World War I, to which the sacking of Durban, the adverse vote from the trenches on conscription, and a general disrespect for British officers can be attributed, but which disappeared almost as soon as the troops came home. It could not be resurrected, in spite of earnest radical efforts, during

5

See John McCarthy, Australia and Imperial Defence 1918–1939, Brisbane 1976. The British government agreed with A.P.Herbert: much of its resistance was due to the fear that Americans would become established in the Australian motor vehicle market. 6 See Geoffrey Sawer, Australian Federal Politics and Law 1901–1929, Melbourne 1956, pp. 52, 120 and 148 for federal parliament’s resolutions, and p. 207 for its welcome to the 1921 agreement.


the Great Depression ten years later. Kipling’s Australian can be regarded as standing for that sense of mingled exasperation and affection with which Australians are still likely to view the English, but also for the approach of Australian governments to the imperial—later Commonwealth— institutions which lay to their hands. It is symptomatic that Australia was either the last, or almost the last, Commonwealth member to give up using the term British Commonwealth of Nations. (New Zealand is the other case in point.) To some extent this was due to the possibility of confusion between the Commonwealth of Nations and the Commonwealth of Australia, but it had deeper origins. There should be a British Commonwealth, a body owing allegiance to the Crown, opined Sir Eric Harrison (a very archetype of the Australian conservative politician) when he was High Commissioner in London in 1956;7 and I have myself been treated to lectures by Australian ministers about the spinelessness of the British government (a Labour government, and no wonder, in their view) in giving in to Indian and Pakistani susceptibilities in 1947, when the word ‘British’ was tacitly dropped. Such a sentiment combined two related attitudes. One was the ‘kith and kin’ notion, the feeling that Australians were, in the last resort, or even earlier, British people, and that Britishness ought to be advertised, not suppressed. The other was the feeling that, if the Commonwealth was to be no longer called either British or an Empire, then the interests of newer Commonwealth countries might well be regarded by the British government as more important than those of the Old Dominions, particularly Australia. In conservative circles in Australia there were caution and concern over the entry of India, Pakistan and Ceylon into the Commonwealth, coupled with a certain admiration at British success in solving the problem of nationalism in these countries. As time went by, and particularly after the entry of so many African countries, the caution and concern were accentuated, while the admiration was reduced to almost nothing. The result was, by the end of the 1960s, an attitude of near-contempt for the new Commonwealth structure which had arisen. Fortunately, this attitude has now been replaced by the Fraser government’s full acceptance of the present-day Commonwealth as a valuable institution, both in itself and as an instrument of Australian external policy. It is significant that ‘British’ aspects of the Commonwealth play little or no part in the Fraser government’s approach. It is the fact that there are other countries than Britain in the Commonwealth that makes it useful to Australia in the 1970s; this is the major contrast with earlier decades, when the presence of others detracted, if anything, from the utility of the Commonwealth as a means of influencing Britain to pursue Australian interests. This latter point, which is vital to an awareness of how Australian conservative governments operated in those earlier years, can be illustrated from

7 See

J.D.B.Miller, The Commonwealth in the World, 3rd edn, London 1965, p. 273.


the example of the 1937 Imperial Conference.8 The Australian government, with a Defence department highly influential in Cabinet and possessing the Prime Minister’s ear on imperial matters, prepared for the Australian delegation a formidable brief based upon the presumption that past declarations about joint responsibility, consultation, etc., should be taken seriously. The Australian government presented a plan for joint defence which assumed that all members perceived a common threat and all were prepared to meet it, the main responsibility, as always, falling on Britain. It found that this kind of argument was not taken seriously by Canada or South Africa, nor, more importantly, by the British government, at least in the context of the Commonwealth. British policy for many years had been based on the assumption that the Commonwealth must be kept together, lest British prestige in the world at large should decline; and this entailed great respect for the susceptibilities of Hertzog and Mackenzie King, even if it could not be stretched so far as full acquiescence in the destructive activities of de Valera. De Valera was not present at the 1937 conference, but Hertzog and Mackenzie King were. In both cases their domestic political support would be endangered if they agreed to a full-throated programme of rejuvenated imperial defence. Australian representatives came away disappointed. In their minds the indentification between their own country’s interests and those of ‘the Empire’ was complete; only because of the selfish attitudes of others were these interests not being pursued. Other instances would not be difficult to find. One could take Hughes’s disingenuous bafflement at the desire of the leaders of other dominions to define more closely the link between Britain and the dominions; or the ‘boots and all attitude of Australian negotiators at Ottawa in 1932 ;9 or the demands for a curtailment of British assistance to British farmers in the later 1930s. In such cases the dominant feature was the conviction of Australian governments that their own interests were equivalent to imperial interests, and that, since it was the duty of a British government to uphold imperial interests, it should do what the Australian government told it to do. A sense of self-righteousness, combined with a latent fear that British protection might not, in the last resort, be available, drove these politicians to view the attitudes of other Commonwealth governments as lacking in ‘loyalty’ (as indeed they were; but ‘loyalty’ was not what the Commonwealth game was about, after the Statute of Westminster), and to upbraid British politicians when they put British interests, including the preservation of the Commonwealth, before those of the Australian government of the day. Such an approach was, of course, not new. As indicated above, the Deakins, Hugheses and Bruces had been happy to try to influence British public opinion in

8

Relevant comment and detail are in Hasluck, The Government and the People, pp. 55– 72, and James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada: Appeasement and Rearmament, Toronto 1965, pp. 53–61.


the direction favoured by their governments, and to use whatever closet influence they could amongst the British political elite. The difficulty was, however, that the invocation of imperial interests was always a two-edged sword, in the sense that, if they were invoked by Australians in their own interests, they could also be invoked by the British government, whose concept of imperial interests would, in the last resort, be that which prevailed. If the British would not consult, it had to be accepted. If the British would not buy dear food from the dominions instead of cheap food from Europe or Argentina, that had to be accepted.10 If the British would not guarantee that capital ships would be stationed permanently at Singapore, there was nothing that could be done about it. If the British seemed to think that Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State were more important than Australia and New Zealand, that was unfortunate; but what could one do? The British were, after all, paying the piper, in the sense that they paid for naval defence and they constituted the market essential to Australian rural interests; and they could call the tune. Such a situation was bound to cause ambivalence. It had much to do with the exasperation of Kipling’s Australian: if the Empire (i.e., Britain) didn’t care what you did, in the sense that it didn’t mind if you made a fuss, what could you do about it? The man in the story, in spite of his scowling and his apparent fervour for the republic, is shown at the end to be settled in Britain and running a successful business. Perhaps he had embraced dominance and protection; his manner suggests, however, that he has fitted in nicely with people who accept him. This was, in many ways, the final attitude of many of the politicians whose actions have been discussed here. None of them was a republican; but neither, almost certainly, was the man in the story. Each was annoyed when his demands were not fulfilled. Each felt, however, that Britain was essential; and each found that he could modify British policy on certain occasions and get away scot-free. The Empire did care sometimes, it seemed. Their major difficulties arose in the political and economic spheres when they found that Britain was more concerned about the survival of the Commonwealth as a whole, than about equating Australian interests with that survival. It is this latter point that holds the key to Australian official reactions to the Commonwealth in the 1960s, and to the quite different reactions now. The Menzies, Holt, and Gorton governments still regarded Britain as important to Australia, and wanted the Commonwealth to operate in ways that suited Australian interests. They were accordingly distressed when the British 9

See Bruce’s own account in Cecil Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne, London 1965, pp. 209– 11. 10 Sometimes it did not have to be accepted. In 1936 Earle Page, as Minister for Gommerce, persuaded the British government not to make a deal about meat with Argentina, since ‘Australia had poured her men and her resources into the common fighting pool during the war, while the Argentine had stood on the sidelines and made hard bargains for her products.’ (Earle Page, Truant Surgeon, Sydney 1963, pp. 243–4).


government seemed to pay more attention to the African members than to the Old Dominions, and when Commonwealth institutions were used to suit the Africans’ interests rather than their own. After an interval, the Fraser government has come to welcome the Commonwealth as a means of spreading Australian influence in Asia and the Pacific, and Commonwealth institutions as likely to further Australian policy. In this latter situation, Britain matters hardly at all. It is a wry but logical conclusion that Australian conservatives’ appreciation of what they strove to call the British Commonwealth should reach its highest pitch when Britain does not seem to care what they do, and they do not seem to care about Britain.

W.D.BORRIE

‘British’ Immigration to Australia

Policy Objectives and Ethnic Mix Australians are being reminded in no uncertain terms that they belong to a multicultural society. Official immigration policy has been non-discriminatory in terms of race, colour and ethnicity since 1973, when the Labor government buried the last remains of the ‘White Australia’ policy which had its origins as an immigration control mechanism for the whole continent of Australia with the introduction of the federal system in 1901.1 The echo of this policy change is heard in a statement of the recently-established Australian Ethnic Affairs Council. Our goal in Australia should be to create a society in which people of nonAnglo-Australian origin are given the opportunity, as individuals or groups, to choose to preserve and develop their culture—their languages, traditions and arts—so that these can become living elements in the diverse culture of the total society, while at the same time they enjoy effective and respected places within one Australian society, with equal access to the rights and opportunities that society provides, and accepting responsibilities towards it.2 There seems to be a tacit assumption here that, multicultural as all-Australia might be, all Anglo-Australians are homogeneous. If ‘Australians’ are defined as Australian-born and the ‘Anglos’ as those born in the British Isles, these together comprised about nine out of ten Australians at the census of 1971, with the ‘Australians’, as defined, being still four out of five of the total population. Yet this oversimplifies the picture, because many of the Australian-born are the children of wholly or partly non-Anglo-Australian parents and may be as much ethnic as Australian in culture. Some of those born in the British Isles but now in Australia could also be Asian or West Indian ethnics rather than ‘Anglos’. The ethnic composition game can be played in various ways, almost to the point of proving that the real Australians, born of Australian parents who were themselves born in Australia, are almost an ethnic minority in their own country.


A plausible conclusion which does seem to follow from an examination of the ethnic diversity of the very large immigration flow to Australia since 1945—a flow which has been responsible for more than half the growth of the nation from approximately seven to fourteen million people—is that Australia is a good deal more multiethnic that it has ever been. Yet despite all that diversity brought by Italians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, Yugoslavs, Turks, Indians, Chinese, and so on, the other certain conclusion is that, so far, the post-war settlers from the British Isles have far outnumbered any other single national group, and indeed have almost equalled all non-British settlers considered together. But these British settlers are themselves ethnics who have adjustments to make, despite a common language, before they either fully understand Australia or can be fully understood by Australians. The term ‘Pom’, whether an expression of endearment or not, is a mark of differentiation, and it only took some rather tactless and caustic remarks in the spring of 1977 by the Minister of Primary Industry in the Fraser Government about his view of the strike-prone activities of British shop-floor stewards3 to raise the cry from the Federal Commissioner for Ethnic Affairs (an appointee of the previous Labor government) about racial discrimination. In short, Anglo-Australianism is itself a myth. Yet Australia surely still has its roots firmly in its Anglo-Saxon past, whatever it may become in the future, and no one who examines the demographic aspects of nation-building in Australia could conclude otherwise.4 The Nineteenth Century The British Isles clearly played the dominant role in the peopling of Australia until Federation in 1901. Even before the gold rushes of 1851 free immigrants5 had outnumbered the convict settlers:6 they took the lead in the decade 1831–40 and, as convictism was phased out, the inflow of free immigrants continued to expand.7 Convicts and free settlers combined had brought 332,000 persons to Australia between 1788 and 1850, and 56 per cent, or 187,000 of these were free settlers, almost all from the British Isles.

1

For an account of the emergence of the new policy see C.A.Price and Jean I.Martin, Australian Immigration, A Bibliography and Digest, Department of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra 1975. 2 Australian Ethnic Affairs Council, Australia as a Multi-Cultural Society, Submission to the Australian Population and Immigration Council on the Green Paper, Immigration Policies and Australia’s Population, Canberra 1977. 3

The occasion arose out of a bitter controversy relating to the pay claims of workers in the Victorian Electricity Commission in the La Trobe Valley. Among the leaders pressing the claims were a number of British workers: their accents gave them away every time they opened their mouths!

‘BRITISH’ IMMIGRATION TO AUSTRALIA 99

Table 1: Convicts and Free Immigrants to the Australian Colonies, 1788–1850

1788–1830 1831–40 1841–50 1788–1850

Convicts

Free Immigrants

Total

63,000 52,000 30,000 145,000

14,000 65,000 108,000 187,000

77,000 117,000 138,000 332,000

‘Free Immigrants’ were those who came voluntarily, but many of them would never have made that long sea voyage had it not been for another principle that has characterized immigration to Australia— passage assistance. With only a few minor exceptions, such financial assistance was to be granted until after World War II only to settlers from the British Isles. Initially the funds for such assistance were raised from revenue from land sales but later, after the gold rushes, the costs of assisted passages were covered from general revenue. From 1829 to 1850 no fewer than 114,000 persons, or 64 per cent of a total immigration of 177,500 were assisted immigrants. Until 1850 immigrants, almost all of them from the British Isles, had been responsible for three-quarters of the total growth of the Australian colonies. Although marital fertility was high and mortality relatively low compared with European standards,8 the sex ratio was not conducive to high levels of natural increase. Australian society in 1850 still had a large surplus of males, with only 70 females for every 100 males. The ratio was as low as 56 in Tasmania where convicts had predominated, and was highest in South Australia (77 per cent) where family immigration had achieved its greatest success. Even in the oldest settlement of New South Wales, where a major purpose of assisted immigration

4

For accounts of the history of British immigration and its role in population growth in Australia see W.D.Borrie, Immigration, Australia’s Problems and Prospects, Sydney 1949; F.K.Crowley, ‘The British Contribution to the Australian Population 1860–1919’, University Studies in History and Economics, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 55–83, University of Western Australia 1945; W.D.Forsyth, The Myth of Open Spaces—Australia, British and World Trends of Population and Migration, Melbourne 1942; C.A.Price, Australian Immigration, A Review of the Demographic Effects of Post-War Immigration upon the Australian Population, Research Report No. 2, National Population Inquiry, Canberra 1975.

5

For a history of pre-gold free-immigration see R.B.Madgwick, Immigration into Eastern Australia, London 1937, reprint Sydney 1969. 6 For the history of convict settlement see A.G.L.Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, A study of penal transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire, London 1966, reprint Melbourne 1977. 7 For a review of immigration history to the Great Depression see H.Burton, ‘Historical Survey of Immigration and Immigration Policy’ in F.W.Eggleston et al. (eds), The Peopling of Australia (Further Studies), Melbourne 1933, Ch. I.


had been to encourage the flow of female settlers, there were still only 72 females per 100 males in 1850. Thus the Australian colonies were firmly established colonies of Britons by 1850. Then the eastern colonies received a tremendous boost from the Gold Rushes. The combined population of all colonies grew from 405, 400 in 1850 to 1,145,600 in 1860. In this decade over 601,000 settlers arrived in Australia, over half of them in Victoria. While there was some diversification of nationalities in the gold seekers, the overwhelming majority were again of British origin. Furthermore, passage assistance again played a very significant role, continuing to account for well over half the total immigration in this decade (Table 2). Table 2: Estimated Immigration from Overseas 1851–60 Colony

Assisted

Unassisted

Total

New South Wales Victoria South Australia Western Australia Tasmania All Colonies

71,600 88,000 48,300 5,000 16,600 229,500

66,000 225,000 20,300 600 60,000 371,900

137,600 313,000 68,600 5,600 76,600 601,400

The Gold Rushes of the early 1850s were followed by three decades of rapid growth.9 While several thousands of the gold-rush immigrants left Australia, many of these going to the goldfields of New Zealand after 1860, the majority remained, spreading across Australia as the gold was worked out. Gold was again to attract many new settlers from overseas, as well as many earlier settlers from other Australian colonies to Queensland and Western Australia in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the most striking feature of immigration between 1861 and 1900 is the wide variability in decadal movements. For example, estimates of net immigration gains based on intercensal analysis indicate a violent oscillation in Victoria from a gain of 114, 000 in 1881–90 to a loss of 111,000 in 1891–1900. New South Wales showed major gains in 1871–80 and 1881–90. Queensland showed a very high gain 1881–90, as did Western Australia in 1891–1900. A considerable part of these high peaks in the net immigration of individual colonies, and conversely of their net losses at other times, was the result of intercolonial movement. In 1901 10 per cent of the Australian-born population were living outside their colony of

8

L.T.Ruzicka and J.C.Galdwell, The End of Demographic Transition in Australia, Australian Family Formation Project Series, No. 5, Department of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra 1977, Ch. I.

9

For a summary of immigration to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, see the entry ‘Immigration’ in the Australian Encyclopaedia, Sydney 1956.


birthplace. Intercolonial movement particularly affected Victoria, where it was a major factor in cutting back its net immigrant gain for the forty years to only 28, 000. In terms of net immigration from all sources, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia were the front runners. In terms of assisted arrivals from overseas, Queensland led the field by a wide margin: it made a great leap forward in 1881–90 when other colonies were abandoning assisted passage schemes as their economic situations deteriorated. As the depression deepened, all colonies abandoned assisted schemes, which were not to be revived on any scale until shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Table 3: Estimated Net Gains from Immigration, and Assisted Arrivals from Overseas, Australian Colonies, 1861–1900 Estimated Net Gain, in thousands, of Immigrants from all sources (including intercolonial movements)

New South Wales Victoria Queensla nd South Australia Western Australia Tasmania Total

Assisted Immigrant Arrivals

162

1891– 1900 21

Total 1861– 1900 330

1861– 1900 77

• 11 59

114 115

• 111 14

28 256

52 200

17

43

• 26

• 15

19

46

6

—

12

116

134

7

•4 168

•3 191

6 383

— 25

•1 767

5 388

1861–70

1871–80

1881–90

45

102

36 68

The total of 767,000 for all colonies represented the total net gain from overseas for Australia as a whole, as all intercolonial movements were cancelled out in this total. Assisted arrivals, at about half the total net gain, had clearly continued to play an important role in the peopling of Australia. Before the gold rushes, the Irish had comprised about one-half of the assisted immigrants. This proportion dropped to about a third between 1861 and 1900, when over half came from England and Wales and about 12 per cent from Scotland.10 Despite the emphasis in assisted schemes upon female immigration and the movement of

10 See W.D.Borrie, ‘Australia’ in O.Handlin et al., The Positive Contribution by Immigrants, UNESCO, Paris 1955, Ch. III


family units, these still did not bring about an even balance of the sexes in all immigration. In the total net flow in the latter half of the century, the ratio of females to males was approximately 66:100, but as the colonial-born were over half the population by 1871, and 77 per cent by 1901, the sex ratio of the total population was rapidly assuming more even proportions. Natural increase had supplied about three-quarters of the growth of Australia between 1861 and 1900, and by the latter date the ratio of females to males in the population had been reduced to 90:100. Throughout the nineteenth century, immigration sustained the overwhelmingly British composition of the population. In 1861 there were 39,000 Chinese in Australia, but these numbers were whittled away as ‘the great white walls’ were built. In 1891 the main non-British groups in the colonies were the German-born (46,000) and Scandinavian-born (16,000). But in 1891 Australia as a whole was slightly more British-born (i.e. born in Australia or in other British territory) than it had been in 1861. The whole non-British-born component in 1891 was only 5 per cent. Grand Planning for Imperial Redistribution The long wave of immigration which collapsed with the recession after about 1890 was not revived until just before World War I, with the flow substantially primed again by passage-assistance schemes. From 1906 to 1915, 162,000 immigrants were assisted, which was 83 per cent of the total net gain of 194,000 during these years. The war of 1914–18 cut off the flow again, but before the war ended the United Kingdom’s Dominions Royal Commission had produced its final Report, in 1917, which expressed the view that efficient use of imperial resources required the large-scale transfer of manpower from the heart (i.e. U.K.) to the peripheral countries (the Dominions). The flow was to start with special facilities for ex-servicemen and their families, and then to be followed by emigration of a more general character.11 The ideal was, in Churchill’s words, a redistribution of the white population of the Empire. Further support came from the Imperial Conference on Immigration in 1921, and Great Britain prepared the basis of the scheme in the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, by which the governments of Great Britain and any Dominion would share equally the cost of schemes mutually agreed upon, provided that the British contribution would not exceed £1,500,000 in the first year of operation, or thereafter £3,000,000 a year. The Act placed special emphasis upon land settlement in the Dominions and the governments of Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria entered into agreements with the Australian Commonwealth and Great Britain to establish British settlers on the land. The schemes, involving the expenditure of

11

See G.F.Plant, Oversea Settlement, Migration from the United Kingdom to the Dominions, London 1951; also Forsyth, The Myth of Open Spaces.


£14,000,000, were incorporated in 1925 in the more ambitious £34,000,000 agreement between the Australian and British Governments. The object was to settle 450,000 assisted British immigrants in Australia in ten years, but the ambitious scheme failed dismally, although the whole concept of population distribution did help to stimulate the assisted immigration of approximately 200, 000 persons between 1921 and 1929.12 Economic recession then ended immigration and caused the abandonment of assisted schemes. The system seemed to be reviving with the renewal of the Empire Settlement Act between Britain and Australia in 1938, but then World War II intervened and out of it emerged a whole new set of demographic, economic and international realities to which Australia has been trying to adjust ever since; but while the grand concept of redistributing the white population of the Commonwealth had gone for ever, the British immigrant, assisted by the Australian taxpayer, remained a significant part of the most ambitious and diversified immigration flow in Australia’s history. In 1946 the long upward swing of immigration began: it was to continue for almost thirty years. The New Era: 1947–75 The events of World War II had both revived optimism about Australia’s economic potential and emphasized its vulnerability to aggression from within the Asian region. A much larger population was considered an urgent necessity by both Labor and non-Labor parties. Furthermore, Australia was desperately short of skilled manpower to cope with the reconstruction of the economy after the war: new entrants to the workforce were decreasing as a result of the low birth rates of the ’thirties, and the output from higher secondary, technical and university institutions was still at a very low level. The remedy clearly seemed to lie in the revival of immigration.13 Initiated by the Chifley Labor Government in 1945, the new scheme had two basic facets: the revival of the traditional passage assistance for British immigrants; and the encouragement through government instrumentalities, for the first time in Australia’s history, of large-scale non-British immigration. This approach was no doubt influenced by the final report of the U.K. Oversea Settlement Board which had issued a warning in 1938 that because of Britain’s own declining birth rate, with the implied threat of ultimate depopulation, the Dominions could not expect to drain the British tank indefinitely but would have to look at other sources as well as Great Britain if they still wanted settlers of

12

Borrie, Immigration. For a study of population thought and theory in Australia and for an analysis of demographic trends since World War II with respect to both immigration and fertility, see National Population Inquiry, Population and Australia, A Demographic Analysis and Projection, Canberra 1975. 13


European origin.14 Australia was certainly aiming high, with target figures set by Chifley’s Minister of Immigration at a yearly net gain from immigration of one per cent of the population, or 70,000 settlers. With natural increase also expected to be around one per cent, this would lead to a doubling of the population in about thirty-five years. The goal was to raise the population, then about 7.5 millions, to 20 millions as soon as practicable.15 The rush of prospective British immigrants exceeded Australia’s capacity to ship and house them. By July 1947 more than 200,000 British immigrants had registered for passages to Australia. Faced with this situation, the Australian Government established a system of priorities, which gave preference to single persons and married persons with skills which were urgently required for the implementation of post-war plans of economic development. Meanwhile a new element had appeared on the scene—the displaced persons of Europe. At first Australia was cautious, with an offer to take 12,000 of these, but this was raised to 20,000 and then the limit was abandoned as transport problems eased. The stream became a flood, with over 170,000 displaced persons arriving from Europe from 1948 to 1951. This flow was also accompanied by approximately equal numbers of other non-British immigrants. But in addition to these new areas of recruitment, the traditional British source was continuing its role. The proportion of British immigrants in the total flow had decreased, but the reason was the large new influx of non-British immigrants, not the decrease in the numbers of British settlers. From October 1945, when the new policy was implemented, until December 1952, when a sharp economic recession temporarily reduced immigration from all sources, almost three-quarters of a million permanent new arrivals (i.e. intending to settle for a year of more) had come to Australia. The composition of this astonishingly large inflow is illustrated in Table 4. Thus, in the early post-war years, immigrants of British origin were Table 4: Major Components of Immigration, October 1945-December 1952

British Non-British Displaced Persons Others Total Non-British

14

Assisted

Unassisted

Total

191,100

168,700

359,800

170,400 38,800 209,200

— 152,800 152,800

170,400 191,600 362,000

U.K. Oversea Settlement Board, (final) Report, Cmd. 5766, 1938. For a history of post World War II immigration policy and of its results in population gain see Price, Australian Immigration. See also C.A. Price (ed.), Australian Immigration, A Bibliography and Digest, No. 2, Department of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra 1970. 15


Total Permanent Arrivals

Assisted

Unassisted

Total

400,300

321,500

721,800

still just on half the total inflow, even in spite of the massive influx of refugees, and, with the exception of the ’fifties, following the recession of 1952, this proportion was sustained until the final collapse of this long post-war cycle of immigration after 1974.16 Some of these ‘British’ settlers came from other Commonwealth countries or from non-British regions as second-time immigrants, but by far the majority were from the British Isles. In his balance sheet of the components of post-war immigration from July 1947 until June 1974, Price estimated that in a total of 3,208,100 settler arrivals, 1,279,600, or just on 40 per cent, came from the British Isles.17 He further estimated that about three out of four of these settlers had remained in Australia. Allowing for emigration, the total net gain of foreign-born from overseas migration 1947–74 was 2,562, 100 persons. Of this, 1,164,600, or 45 per cent, were of British nationality (1947– 61) or of British birthplace (1961–74), and over a million of them (1,005,700 or 39 per cent of the total net immigration) originated from the British Isles. The British Contribution These are impressive figures indeed. This massive net gain exceeding a million persons from the British Isles over these 27 years may be compared with the total net gain from all sources (but predominantly British) over the last 40 years of the nineteenth century and the first 40 years of the present century, respectively 790,000 and 1,036,000. Analysis based solely on proportional contributions of British and non-British elements in net immigration entirely misses the point that, in terms of absolute numbers, the British contribution to the population growth of Australia has been greater since World War II than over any similar earlier period. Australia may not have been emptying the tank, as the Overseas Settlement Board feared in 1938, but the country was certainly taking a major slice of available emigrants from the British Isles. Lumped together, the non-British element in net immigration exceeded the British, and this was the new force in Australian immigration policy. But no national group or regional area came near to matching the British contribution. The largest national contribution (1947–74) came from Italy (271,600), followed by Greece (173,700), but Southern Europe as a whole only contributed half as much as the British Isles. Eastern Europe’s contribution, with Yugoslavs predominating with 141,900, was also considerable, at about a third of the British

16 For a study of the British contribution to Australia in the earlier post-war years to 1958 see R.T.Appleyard, British Emigration to Australia, Canberra 1964. 17 Price, Australian Immigration, Appendix Table A.


figure. These two regions counteracted the quite small net gains, and in some cases net losses, from Northern Europe after the ’fifties. The other ‘region’ that has become increasingly important in recent years is Asia. The broad ‘regional’ contributions of net immigration between July 1947 and June 1974 as assessed by Price are summarized in Table 5. Table 5: Regional Contributions to Net Immigration, July 1947-June 1974

U.K. and Eire Southern Europe Eastern Europe Northern Europe Asia Other Net Migration Total of Foreign Born

Numbers

Per cent of Total

1,005,700 534,900 337,800 286,000 163,800 233,900 2,562,100

39 21 13 11 6 9 100

Post-war immigrants and their offspring born in Australia have been responsible for over half Australia’s growth from 7.6 millions in 1947 to just over 14 millions today, and clearly the ethnic mix arising from the new immigration policy has increased the heterogeneity of Australian society. Just how heterogeneous the inhabitants themselves to be is not really known: most naturalized overseas-born would presumably claim to be Australian; those unnaturalized would probably declare themselves by their pre-migration nationality or birthplace. Some Australian-born children of overseas-born parents would probably declare themselves to be Australian, while others would adhere to their parents’ nationality. As emphasized earlier, the ‘origins’ game can be played many different ways, and if taken to the point where anyone with one parent born overseas is considered to be of foreign extraction, a considerable proportion of the population can be classed as non-Australian. But by the test of birthplace as declared in the census, there is no question about the predominance still of the Australian-born; and if those of British birthplace are accepted as having basically a similar culture (e.g. language, political institutions, legal systems, religions), the Anglo-Saxon predominance is even more pronounced, encapsulating about nine out of every ten persons in Australia. The distribution by birthplace at the 1971 census was: Australian-born Born in the British Isles Other Foreign-born

79.8 8.5 11.7

Total

100.0


The integration of migrant and non-migrant is always a difficult process, even where cultural backgrounds are broadly similar. The process of integration is also affected by differences that may exist in terms of social class or occupational qualifications. Opponents of immigration frequently point to the tendency of some ethnic groups to be highly concentrated in the lower skilled occupations or in low income and congested residential areas, or to remain segregated from their surrounding non-migrant communities because of cultural differences, inadequate command of the English languages, religious differences and so on. All these matters lie at the core of a successful after-settlement policy which must be an integral part of any major immigration flow. However, few of these matters need be any significant barrier to the British settler. Differences in language, culture and religion are not such as to inhibit immediate and easy contact with Australians. What of occupational or class differences? Here again the British immigrants have been more like the Australian-born than any other major immigrant group. They were also by far the major nonAustralian source of professional and skilled labour which remained in such short supply in Australia through the ’fifties and ’sixties. They have been the most diversified immigrant group in their settlement patterns, although the proportion settling in major urban areas has been somewhat higher than for the Australianborn.18 The relative similarity between British-born and Australian-born in urbanbased occupations on the one hand, and the marked difference between these and the major non-British birthplace groups on the other hand, is illustrated in the following figures in Table 6 derived from the census of 1971. Table 6: Occupation of Major Birthplace Groups: Per Cent Distribution and Total Numbers of Employed Persons Aged 15 years and Over, Census 1971 Occupations

Professional, technical Administrative, executive, managerial Clerical workers Sales workers Farmers, fishermen, hunters, timber getters, etc. Miners, quarrymen, related workers Workers in transportation and communication Tradesmen, production process workers, labourers etc. Service, sport and recreation Members of armed forces

18

Population and Australia, Ch. IV.

Birthplace Group Australia

U.K. and Eire Italy

10.6 6.9 17.5 8.5 9.2 0.7 6.1 27.6

11.2 6.7 15.7 8.1 2.9 0.7 5.0 36.5

1.8 4.2 4.6 5.5 8.2 0.4 3.5 57.2

7.0 1.4

8.6 1.4

7.2 0.2


Occupations

Birthplace Group

Occupation inadequately described or not stated Total: Distribution per cent Numbers (000’s)

Australia

U.K. and Eire Italy

4.5 100.0 3836.6

3.2 100.0 540.9

7.2 100.0 170.2

The major difference between British and Italian immigrants is the relatively high proportion of the former in professional administrative executive and clerical groups, and the very high proportion of the latter in the ‘tradesmen, production process and labourers’ group. This high figure was due primarily to the higher proportions of Italians, compared with either the British or Australians, in unskilled occupations. This difference is even more accentuated with other southern and eastern European groups. This is apparent from the following classification of the occupational skills declared by male settlers on arrival in Australia in recent years, as illustrated in Table 7.19 The Future? The fading away of the United Kingdon as an emigrant zone has been predicted for a long time now, but the outflow still seems to go on. However, the story of the last thirty years is very different from the vast outpouring of emigrants from the British Isles (and from many other Table 7: Occupational Skills of Male Settlers as Classified on Arrival, 1967/8, 1971/2/3 (Selected Birthplace groups and all male immigrants) Birthplace

Professional, Administration

Per cent

Nos

U.K. & Eire Italy Greece Yugoslavia All immigrants

22.2 7.8 6.1 3.4 19.8

Skilled Crafts

Semi Skilled

Unskilled

Total

34.5 31.8 10.8 14.9 29.1

33.5 14.9 8.1 20.0 27.0

9.8 45.2 75.0 61.7 24.1

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

96,574 17,039 12,646 19,384 226,644

European countries as well) that occurred in the nineteenth century.20 In this more recent period Britain has been both an immigrant and an emigrant country, with periods of net gain as well as an overall net loss. The bulk of the immigrants have come from the West Indies, the Indian sub-continent, and from Africa; but increasingly significant (and almost certainly to be further encouraged by the

19

Adapted from Price, Australian Immigration, p. 13.


Fred Lakers of this world) has become the vast shuffling of people both ways for periods ranging from a few weeks to a year or more, not with the intention of settling permanently, but for vacations, study, temporary employment and experience, and so on. About 1.5 million people now go from and come to Australia each year. Australia may also be assuming the role of an exporter as well as an importer of people, for over the past ten years the country has lost about 339,000 people on international movements, other than migrants arriving and former migrants leaving Australia on a permanent basis.21 This means that many people who have left Australia with the declared intention of staying for only a year or less have in fact settled overseas, or have at least extended their stay well beyond a year. If this loss continues, Australia will require an input of some twenty to thirty thousand settlers each year just to break even from all international movements. The affluence and mobility of people in the developed world has increased the complexity of the whole pattern of international movements to the point that it has become increasingly difficult to define an immigrant or emigrant. For example, is a person who decides to move from one country to another for a limited period, to gain experience, to live with relatives, or merely for pleasure, any less an emigrant or immigrant than a life-time mover? The doors towards such ease of movement seemed to be opening permanently through the ’fifties and ’sixties. The Commonwealth countries became notably relaxed in this regard. In Europe, too, the barriers to movement were relaxed in both EFTA and Common Market countries. Indeed, in the case of the latter, the Treaty of Rome virtually guarantees the rights of movement and the search for employment and residence throughout the Common Market countries. The booming economies of Europe were also havens pulling temporary workers from southern and eastern Europe into their employment nets—the vast ‘guest worker’ schemes which were particularly prominent in the Federal Republic of Germany and in France. But the bubble has burst with the economic malaise that has afflicted almost all the developed countries since 1973. The ‘guest workers’ of Europe have dug in or gone home. Britain has applied its patrial legislation to restrict the rights of work and of residence of people entering its portals. Citizens from the old Dominions of the Commonwealth are no longer exceptions to the rules. Similarly, in reverse, the application of non-discriminatory legislation by the ‘Dominions’ has in fact imposed restrictions upon immigrants from Britain and eased the right of entry of those without white skins. All have to meet the 20

For an account of the great migrations of the nineteenth century see W.D.Borrie, The Growth and Control of World Population, London 1970, Ch. V. Two excellent studies of the economic motivations of these migrations, with particular reference to the British role, are Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth, Cambridge 1954; and Julius Isaac, Economics of Migration, London 1947. 21 Australian Population and Immigration Council, Immigration Policies and Australia's Population, A Green Paper, Canberra 1977, p. 6.


economic creiteria now applied, or fall within the relatively narrow categories covered by ‘family reunion’ (i.e. spouses, dependent children and dependent parents), or to have skills which are in national need, to get entry for permanent settlement. The ‘Great White Walls’ of Australia, as Price has described them,22 began to crumble after World War II, when refugees and Chinese in Australia under temporary permits were allowed to stay in Australia. Then, after 1966, ‘highlyqualified and distinguished’ persons of non-European origin were permitted to enter the country. The permitted categories were then widened to include skilled technicians and teachers. In 1964 restrictions against part-Europeans had also been eased and they became eligible for pensions and other social services. But non-Europeans were still liable to differential treatment regarding naturalization, requiring five years residence compared with three for Europeans. Then in 1973 the new Whitlam Labour Government swept away all remaining restrictions and opened the way for non-European immigrants to receive assisted passages, nationalization and all other rights on the same basis as any European persons. All were subject to the same restrictions on entry and naturalization which an Australian government might choose to impose. Yet the door has not been left wide open—far from it—but it could no longer be shut on the grounds of race, birthplace, ethnicity, colour. The controls universally applied have become basically economic. Under this new policy, it was to be expected that the immigrant flow would become increasingly diverse. To some degree this has been so, but the economic malaise that has affected Australia as well as other developed countries has reduced its pull for new settlers and has caused governments to keep a very tight ceiling on the admission of settlers. At present this is screwed down to 70,000 a year which is likely to yield a net immigrant gain of around thirty to forty thousand, with a worker content of ten to fifteen thousand (the rest being dependants).23 In terms of proportional distribution by country of last residence, this increasing diversity is apparent, with rising proportions of non-Europeans and a marked fall in the proportions from the United Kingdom and Eire. Consider the distribution since 1971–2 in the figures given in Table 8.24 Table 8: Settler Arrivals by Country of Last Residence, Australia 1971–2 to 1976–7 (Total numbers and percentage distribution each year) Year

U.K. & Eire Other Europe

Per cent

Nos

1971–2

42

22

28

Middle East*

Other Asian Other Total

6

7

17

100 132,700

C.A.Price, The Great White Walls are Built, Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia 1836–1888, Canberra 1974.


Year

U.K. & Eire Other Europe

Per cent

Nos

1972–3 1973–4 1974–5 1975–6 1976–7p

45 41 43 33 27

24 22 19 17 23

Middle East*

Other Asian Other Total

6 8 7 11 23

7 8 10 14 14

17 21 21 25 23

100 100 100 100 100

107,400 112,700 89,100 52,700 70,200

p = preliminary * = Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, U.A.R.

In interpreting these figures it must be recalled that they represent the collapse of that long-term swing of immigration which culminated in 1969–70 with a massive intake of over 185,000 settler arrivals, and the distributional change by country of last residence reflects more the reduction in the numbers of European settlers than any massive increase in the numbers of non-European settlers. The present very restricted categories of entry effectively prevent the substantial expansion of any birthplace or ethnic group. Whether British immigration will revive again to its earlier numbers is a difficult question to answer. The new Australian policy certainly offers new scope for non-British immigration, particularly from many parts of Asia; but against this, the British-born in Australia exceed a million people, and with the new emphasis on family reunion, with the technological facilities now available for travel which bring Australia within two days from Britain, and with the increasing capacity of people to afford the use of these facilities (despite the present recession), there seem few good grounds for concluding that the Australian-British migration nexus is about to be broken. With birth rates down all round to replacement, and temporarily at least below replacement level, there may be some revival of the British cry about ‘emptying the tank’, but it is not heard yet; and in any case, the same demographic trend in Australia could revive the cry here about the need to ‘fill the tank’. Nor can we say which of the respective economies will revive first. If oil does fulfil the optimists’ expectations in the United Kingdom, there may be very little of the ‘push’ factor left to induce people to leave British shores. If minerals and its abundance of other resources do generate another Australian boom, the ‘pull’ of Australia may increase, and if the British are not pulled there are likely to be many others from

23 The net yield sought in 1979 has been raised to 70,000, requiring a total of settler arrivals of some 90,000 a year. 24 Australian Population and Immigration Council, Population Report I, Canberra 1977, p. 5.


non-British countries who will respond, particularly if entry categories are windened. In all, then, the future composition is difficult to predict, but a British flow seems likely to persist, though perhaps no longer dominate. What cannot be gainsaid is the major role which British settlement has made to nation-building in Australia, not least during the thirty years, 1946–76.

R.S.PARKER

The Evolution of British Political Institutions in Australia

The theme of this essay lies somewhat apart from the main concern of the present book with ‘a changing relationship’. Once the British parliament had conferred self-government on the Australian colonies between 1850 and 1890, and enacted the Australian federal constitution in 1900, political development in Australia became largely autonomous, and owed little to direct relationships with Britain. That little included the increasing—but never complete—approximation of the role of Australian Governors and Governor-General vis-à-vis the executive and parliament to that of the British sovereign. It included the emancipation— also not complete—of the Australian judicial system from British authority, and intermittent steps toward Australian independence in the management of external relations. These developments have been thoroughly canvassed by historians, constitutional lawyers and students of Commonwealth relations—and some of them are discussed elsewhere in this volume. In political evolution, then, the two countries have generally gone their separate ways. Some of the Australian parliaments have sent their officers to study House of Commons procedures, and occasionally incorporated Commons procedural reforms in their own standing orders. British precedents have periodically been cited in the conduct of Australian parliamentary skirmishes. Australian governments have taken note of British administrative innovations, for example in improving the management of cabinet business, in the formulation of central policy advice, and in the refinement of administrative methods (such as ‘O. & M.’ studies) and of budgetary processes. Such influences were nearly always in the one direction; they are not significant for the basic shape of government and politics. Of course much of the law of the two countries forms part of a single integrated system extending beyond both—but that is another subject. British and Australian governmental institutions are, however, related in another way. At their origin some of the central Australian institutions were deliberately copied, so far as possible, from what were thought to be the corresponding British structures and practices at the time. If this cannot be a study in relationships it can ask how the Australian political system, inheriting important elements from Britain, has evolved in a different historical, geographical and social context. How durable have the borrowings been? Have


they been as important as borrowings and innovations from elsewhere than Britain? Do they work very differently in Australia, and if so why? Taking inevitable British changes also into account, how do the two systems compare today? Such questions have been asked many times.1 What follows can be no more than a sceptical review of the main answers, and some new suggestions. What the original Australian institutions of self-government incorporated from Britain were the essential elements of ‘the Westminster model’. These can be summarized as: the fiction that the executive acts of government were performed by a constitutional head of state; the assumption that in all but exceptional circumstances he would act upon the advice of a ministry drawn from and enjoying majority support in a popularly elected house of parliament; the assumption that ministers were individually and collectively ‘responsible’ (whatever that might mean) to that house for what they contemplated and achieved, or failed to achieve, through those parts of the administration under their charge; the belief that as much of that administration as possible (excepting the judiciary and local government) should work in ordered fashion under individual ministerial control; the agreement that administrative officials would be the loyal, confidential and therefore anonymous advisers and servants of the ministers of the day, though holding independent and permanent tenure and selected by non-political bodies on grounds of ability and expertise. The Australian constitution-makers followed the British model to the point of leaving unwritten, while taking their operation for granted, what at Westminster were the unwritten ‘conventions’ for ensuring ‘responsible government’. The first Australian governments were carefully schooled in their application by the British Governors of the day. Before the 1880s and the dawn of political parties, the only Australian modification of British assumptions lay in the demonstration by colonial politicians that they could in fact work the Westminster system tolerably well without the aid of a ‘principled’ (two-) party system on Burkean lines.2 To this day the canons of Westminster are the professed guidelines of Australian ministers and private members, are inculcated in the formal routine training of public servants, are the starting point for most academic texts on Australian parliamentary systems. Within those systems, as one text explains: Parliamentary procedure…is, in the main, the same as at Westminster. Erskine May is the Bible of Australian parliaments, as of the British. There

1

The conventional wisdom about relevant Australian social and political differences had already reached its now generally accepted form in Bryce (Modern Democracies, 2 vols, Macmillan, London 1921) and Hancock (Australia, Benn, London 1930). It was elaborated and consolidated by S.Encel in Equality and Authority, Cheshire, Melbourne 1970, Chs 5, 10–11. The pioneering essay on the specific subject of the present chapter was Thomas Penberthy Fry, Australian Contributions to the Evolution of Parliamentary Government, University of Queensland Papers, Faculty of Law, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1947. Other discussions of differences are cited in later notes.

BRITISH POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN AUSTRALIA 115

are a Speaker and a Chairman of Committees with his deputies; there is a leader of the House, and a leader of the Opposition; there are front benches, both government and opposition, and back-bench members who are known as such; bills are taken through first and second reading, committee, and a final reading before being sent to the other House; parliament has power to summon offenders for contempt, and privilege is maintained on much the same basis as in Britain; a Hansard is published, except in Tasmania.3 Durability of the Westminster core was to be expected. Zealously reproduced at the beginning, it was sedulously nurtured by generations of influential politicians, leader-writers and parliamentary officials (those influential initiators of parliamentary neophytes and guardians of legislative tradition), cultivated by public servants whose career interests it preserves, and supported by elites of overwhelmingly British stock and culture, in stable and prosperous polities. To these props must be added the inertia of any set of established institutions—in this case the inner logic of the whole Westminster complex, a mutual dependence and mutual reinforcement of its constituent elements. Visitors familiar with the Westminster tradition have no difficulty in recognizing its influence in Australia today. For the Englishman, David Butler, on his first visit here, ‘comparative government’ worked with Britain and Australia, as he had not found it to work with Britain and America. ‘I could talk to clerks in Parliament House, or to civil servants in the Commonwealth Club, or to party officials in Melbourne or Brisbane, and find myself speaking in very much the same terms that I might have been using with their opposite numbers in Westminster or Whitehall or Birmingham or Glasgow.’4 For the American, Leon E pstein, ‘Australian politics can be understood mainly as an adaptation of the Westminster model’, and ‘Australian…parties behave in parliament much like those of Britain [and Canada, he adds], and for essentially the same reasons’.5 Some Australian scholars have bridled at comparisons like this. Anxious to show that Australians have put their unmistakable stamp even on imported institutions, they have gone so far as to suggest that Westminster institutions

2 See P.Loveday and A.W.Martin, Parliament, Factions and Parties: The First Thirty Years

of Responsible Government in New South Wales, 1856–1889, Melbourne University Press, 1966. On the early history see also: K.H.Bailey, ‘Self-Government in Australia, 1860– 1900’ in Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. 7, Part 1, Cambridge University Press, 1933, Ch. 14, pp. 395–424; W.J.V.Windeyer, ‘Responsible Government— Highlights, Sidelights and Reflections’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 42, 1957, pp. 257–312. 3 J.D.B.Miller and Brian Jinks, Australian Government and Politics: An Introductory Survey, 4th edn, Duckworth, London 1971, p. 94. The work goes on here, and elsewhere, to discuss ‘substantial and important differences’ from Britain. 4 David Butler, The Canberra Model: Essays on Australian Government, Cheshire, Melbourne 1973, p. 7.


have become unrecognizable in the process. S. Encel, who has worked hard to identify characteristic Australian political attitudes, once allowed himself to declare that ‘[t]he parliamentary executive, as embodied in the seven written constitutions of Australia, is little more than a simulacrum of cabinet government. Political institutions cannot be transplanted.’ Encel could not have meant this literally, since a few pages further on he wrote that’ “Cabinet government” remains an accurate label for the formal structure and the functioning of executive authority in Australia’. He really wished to warn against an attitude that could still be found over a decade later, in a textbook observation that ‘we will find British standards sometimes useful in helping to clarify how the system is supposed to work’.6 For Encel, ‘[t]he important point’ was ‘whether the divergences that do indisputably occur are to be regarded as (regrettable) lapses from the British norm, or whether they are to be interpreted as the outcome of a political system which, though derived from Britain, has its own inner logic’.7 Thus, even for such writers as Encel, the Westminster structure and assumptions remain at the core of Australian institutions of government. Those institutions could no more be understood by anyone unfamiliar with the Westminster system than by anyone unacquainted with Australian history, mores and manners. A comparative study of the state of Westminster institutions in Australia and Britain today would note that some were, by nature, never exactly reproducible in Australia even at the beginning. It would then try to specify subsequent divergences in the others, and to explain them. When objectively examined the divergences might turn out to be less important today than ardent Australian analysts have made out. This is partly because no-one has put forward convincing measures of the ratio of heresy to Westminster orthodoxy in Australian political behaviour, and partly because the analysts have overlooked much more important changes affecting Australia and Britain alike. Again, adequate explanations of differences would probably question the emphasis hitherto given to Australian social attitudes and ‘political culture’ (see n. 1). A glance at other polities of British origin would shatter many claims to the uniqueness of Australian adaptations, and direct attention to more mundane influences: the primarily developmental role—hence utilitarian characterization—

5 Leon D.Epstein, ‘A Comparative Study of Australian Parties’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 7, 1977, pp. 1, 19. 6 H.V.Emy, The Politics of Australian Democracy: An Introduction to Political Science, Macmillan, Melbourne 1974, p. 259. However, Emy did not wish to ‘deny that variations can legitimately exist in a different cultural and historical environment’, and he systematically discussed the Australian variations. 7 Encel quotations in this paragraph are from his Cabinet Government in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1962, pp. 2, 15–16. He omitted the ‘simulacrum’ passage from the 2nd edition, 1974.


of government in all colonies of settlement in largely empty lands; the impact of imported non-British institutions (notably federalism in Australia’s case); and short-term party expediencies and political accidents. The present essay offers examples to suggest the plausibility of these guesses; the research needed to test them remains to be done. When the Australian governments, colonial and later federal, received their self-governing constitutions, it was not possible to duplicate entirely the desired British models. This applied most conspicuously to the constitutional chief executives and to the second chambers. The Australian constitution-makers took both institutions for granted as functionally indispensable—the Governors and Governor-General as the one continuing political link with Britain and the repository of conventional and emergency powers, the second chambers in the colonies as a curb on unbridled democracy, and in the federation as both a house of review and the protector of the smaller federating states. Appointed Governors with limited terms could not reproduce the role of the hereditary monarch, nor could second chambers in the Australian context be anything like the House of Lords. Governors and the Governor-General, as the sovereign’s representative, had to be appointed in London, at least in form. That remains the case, although the Governor-General has since 1930 been appointed by the sovereign on the advice of Australian federal ministers, while state Governors are still appointed on the formal advice of the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Even state Governors have long ceased to receive directions from British ministers on the performance of their constitutional functions, and during the present century have come to be appointed, in effect, on the advice of state premiers.8 Thus all the chief executives are appointed, and hence appear to be removable, at the will of Australian governments. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Governors have occasionally been ‘recalled’ at the request of state governments, though it is still not certain that either they or the Governor-General are subject to automatic recall on such advice in all circumstances. In general, however, the foregoing facts, coupled with the apparent political emasculation of the sovereign in Britain and the strengthening of ‘democratic’ assumptions, have encouraged a common Australian belief that the role of their own chief executives has been reduced to the purely ceremonial, or at most to that of ‘advising, encouraging and warning’. Paradoxically, the appointive and limited tenure of the chief executives has simultaneously confirmed some fundamental differences between their position and that of the hereditary

8

The Queensland Premier said in 1977 that the British Labour government had refused in 1976 to convey to the Queen his repeated recommendations that the current state Governor’s term should be extended. In 1975 the Governor had publicly criticized the federal Labor government’s management of the economy. On the other hand, he had said in 1976 that he did not want an extension of his term, and the British government could have been aware of this (Sydney Morning Herald, 4 February 1977).


monarch. For example, in so far as the head of state is still regarded as the symbol of national unity and the focus of national loyalty, these attributes continue to be ascribed in Australia to the sovereign and not to the gubernatorial incumbents. The popular belief that Governors and Governor-General could be nothing but figureheads flew in the face of a wealth of opinion to the contrary in textbooks on government and constitutional law (not to mention the writings of recent Governors-General), and seemed to overlook the state Governor’s dismissal of a New South Wales ministry in 1932. Naturally that belief was rudely shaken by the federal constitutional crisis of October-November 1975, when the GovernorGeneral of the day dismissed another Labor government with a clear majority in the popular house. The formal legality of both dismissals was never questioned. Their constitutional propriety was bitterly questioned in relation to the particular circumstances of each case. But not all of the informed critics, at least, maintained that, in slightly different circumstances or with more judicious handling by the vice-regal representatives, such interventions would necessarily be constitutionally improper. The fact is that the present structure of the Westminster system still allows certain contingencies to arise in which the constitutional head of state is not merely in a position to intervene legally without or against ministerial advice, but cannot avoid doing so—other motives aside—if he conceives it a prime duty of his office, when there seems to be no available alternative to his intervention, to try himself to ensure that constitutional democratic government is preserved and carried on in an orderly and lawful fashion. There is a mass of evidence and precedent for such a view of his duty. Constitutional lawyers seem broadly agreed that there can be four classes of the contingencies in question: where it is necessary to find a new premier from a parliament in which there is no clearly ascertainable majority (when helpful advice may be lacking); where a premier seeks a dissolution purely for personal or party advantage, or unreasonably soon after an election, or without being able to provide supply for the election period (when the head of state may reject advice to dissolve); where a government is breaking or threatening to break the law (when the wise head would try to get the matter referred to the courts); and where a government’s course of action threatens a breakdown in the public services or a subversion of democratic government (when the object would be to bring the matter to the judgement of the electorate). It is common ground that when acting in any of these ways the head of state must try to avoid the actuality and the appearance of political partisanship—an almost impossible feat. Beyond that there is the notorious difficulty that neither in Britain nor in Australia has the law defined what precise circumstances would fall within the foregoing definitions, or what would be the appropriate action in each case.9 In Australian discussions of the 1975 crisis a number of issues tended to be confused. Republicans called for breaking the nexus between the Australian and


British head of state—a change which by itself would make no perceptible difference to the political roles of Governors and Governor-General, nor to any other aspect of Australian politics. Some critics proposed to deprive the Governor-General of all powers. One proposed to combine his office, will all its powers, with that of the Prime Minister. Others suggested putting the office into commission. Any of these changes would have made a substantial difference, at least on occasions of crisis. Critics also made invidious comparisons between the actions of Sir John Kerr and what they took to be the politically supine role of the British sovereign over the past century, or more. However, as the above discussion suggests, the Westminster system still holds much the same potentialities for the British monarch, in similar contingencies, as for Australian heads of state (though possibly with less threat to the future of the office). For example, there is formidable authority for the view that the sovereign is bound to refuse a dissolution to a prime minister who has lost majority support in the Commons, and on other grounds also, as long as there is an alternative majority leader in the house.10 The crucial difference between British and Australian government in this matter is simply that for a long time the British sovereign has not been put in the position of having to contemplate the use of the ‘reserve powers’, whereas there are aspects of Australian politics and institutions which make that contingency somewhat more likely. One of those aspects consists in the structures and powers of the Australian second chambers, so different from those of the House of Lords. Those of New South Wales and Queensland were from the beginning nominated houses, and here at least the periodical inter-house struggles, leading to pressure upon the Governors for ‘swamping’ a recalcitrant upper house, and the Governors’ conscientious scruples about complying, were reminiscent of former crises involving the Lords. However, Queensland’s parliament became unicameral in 1922, and in 1933 the New South Wales Legislative Council was reconstituted (under the influence of the Bryce Committee report of 1917 on House of Lords reform). The new arrangements in New South Wales were unique. The sixty Councillors had a twelve-year term, one-quarter being elected

9 On the 1975 crisis and its antecedents, see Gareth Evans (ed.), Labor and the Constitution: The Whitlam Years in Australian Government, Heinemann, Melbourne 1977; Geoffrey Sawer, Federation under Strain: Australia 1972–1975, Melbourne University Press, 1977. The classic discussion of the head of state’s powers under the Westminster system, advocating legal definition of the contingencies, is H.V.Evatt, The King and His Dominion Governors, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1967. 10 See Anthony King, ‘The Queen and the Politics of Dissolution’, The Times, 10 May 1969, for some intriguing speculations on the point. For some of the wilder reactions to the 1975 crisis, see Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), Republican Australia?, Sun Books, Melbourne 1977; and Sol Encel, Donald Horne and Elaine Thompson (eds), Change the Rules! Towards a Democratic Constitution, Penguin Books, Melbourne 1977.


at three-year intervals by the combined membership of both houses, and there were elaborate provisions for the resolution of deadlocks, with ultimate resort to a popular referendum. In addition, a referendum was required to approve any alteration of these arrangements, which were otherwise ingeniously entrenched by virtue of an almost forgotten clause of the (British) Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865. The political effect of the arrangements was to ensure an Opposition majority in the Council for up to ten years after a change of government, if the new government survived so long. However, all of the parties, long disillusioned by certain unsavoury aspects of the operation of Council elections, ultimately agreed on a compromise proposal to have the Council popularly elected, which was adopted at a referendum during 1978. Originally the other four state second chambers were all elected on franchise qualifications requiring the ownership or occupation of landed property or membership of learned professions. There were also special property and age requirements for membership. All of the most disruptive state inter-house conflicts occurred in the states with these elective second chambers, which were never reduced to the degree of impotence of the House of Lords, and the Labor parties have long struggled for their abolition or reform. The latter, in the form of full adult suffrage and removal of the special qualifications for membership except higher age and residential requirements, was ultimately achieved in Victoria (1950), Western Australia (1963), Tasmania (1969) and South Australia (1974). But staggered elections, longer terms, and a different distribution of constituencies from that for the lower house, remain.11 The most unusual second chamber from the British point of view, and at present the most controversial, is the federal Senate, shaped on the American model, with equal representation of the states irrespective of population. Though the Senate quickly became primarily a house divided on party lines, it was endowed for federal reasons—the defence of the interests of the less populous states—with unfettered power to reject money bills including those for ordinary annual appropriations, raising the possibility of bringing down a government by withholding supply. The deadlock provisions, culminating in a full dissolution of both houses, included time delays which made them scarcely adequate for resolving deadlocks over supply. In Australian political circumstances, the probability of an Opposition majority controlling the Senate was increased after 1948 by the adoption of the single transferable vote version of PR for Senate elections. As some of the founding fathers had foreseen, the implications of the Senate’s powers for the Westminster principles of responsible government were profound, but their worst fears were not realized until 1974, when the Senate Opposition’s threat to refuse supply precipitated a double dissolution, and 1975, when its withholding of supply led (perhaps not inevitably) to the dismissal of a government with a popular house majority. These events illustrate only one of the ways in which Australian federalism— copied from American institutions—is responsible for quite the most important divergences from the British system of government, including the Westminster


model. Seven parliaments —none of them legally subordinate to another, and at least two competing for resources and support in each state; the liability of their statutes to invalidation by the courts as ultra vires a written constitution alterable only after a referendum; the complexities of federal financial relations; the overlapping of legislative powers and therefore of administrative activities in common fields; the multiplication of elections: together these things comprise a range of differences and problems that as yet can only be dimly envisaged in a Britain contemplating ‘devolution’ to two of its sub-national regions. The need to consider regional representation in the composing of federal cabinets is a minor effect of federalism on the working of Westminster. As we have seen, the powers of the Senate can negate Westminster notions of responsible government. According to many authorities, those notions have also been frustrated under federalism by the creation of intergovernmental agencies and arrangements (such as the Australian Loan Council and the Offshore Oil Agreement of 1967, to mention only two) by which binding policy and administrative decisions may be made for which in some cases Commonwealth, in others state, ministers cannot be held answerable in their respective parliaments.12 Federalism was the product, not of a unique Australian political culture, but of the country’s geography and political history. The size of the continent determined the establishment of six separate self-governing British colonies around its shores, and possibly justified the creation of a federal union which in any case was as far as the jealous, hard-bargaining colonial governments of the day would go. No ethnic, linguistic or cultural divisions influenced the choice of federalism. Purely geographical and historical factors are also probably responsible for a number of other Australian divergences within the ambit of the Westminster structure. A small population in a large area with a large number of legislatures accounts for the small membership of each. This alone may largely explain a number of features of their operation. For example, in a small house organized by party every vote counts, and this has not infrequently included the Speaker’s. It is likely that this is a reason—as it is said to be in other small parliaments of the Commonwealth of nations—for the facts that Speakers have nearly always changed with a change of government, have not enjoyed the electoral immunity accorded to their Westminster counterpart, and have at times been seen leaving the chair to debate for their party, voting in divisions, and attending party meetings. Small houses, again, have less need, capacity and desire for the Commons type of specialized standing committees to consider legislation (hitherto rejected in Australia, though

11

Recent discussions of the state second chambers will be found in W.A.Townsley, The Government of Tasmania, University of Queensland Press, 1976, and the companion volumes on the other states by Jean Holmes (Victoria), 1976, Dean Jaensch (South Australia), 1977, R.S.Parker (New South Wales), 1978, and Colin A.Hughes (Queensland) and G.S.Reid (Western Australia) both forthcoming, all published by University of Queensland Press.


currently under cautious scrutiny in the Senate), and less tolerance for the attenuation of party loyalties that committee work can foster, and for such selfdenying Commons practices as appointing Opposition chairmen of the committees on public accounts and statutory instruments.13 Some individual features of political systems are due to nothing more dramatic than the strategic calculations of party governments, anxious to strengthen or consolidate their side’s political chances, and ready to resort for this purpose to the inventions of well-meaning experts and reformers. Electoral devices are a case in point. It has never seemed likely to pay the dominant British parties to abandon the simple plurality system of vote-counting which so effectively handicaps other aspirants for an effective voice in parliament. Australia, on the other hand, is remarkable for the diversity of its experiments with voting systems. Since the first departure from ‘first-past-the-post’ (Queensland, 1892) practically every device has been tried: proportional representation on the Hare-Clark and other patterns, the second ballot, optional and compulsory preferential voting (the alternative vote), the list system, and variants on some of these. Experiments with multi-member constituencies, and with different qualifications and facilities for enrolment and voting, had begun even earlier. This variety is due partly to the number of elected legislative chambers on the continent. Beyond that it would be rash to generalize: among the motivations for electoral experimentation party calculations have jostled with more general concerns to prevent abuses, ensure ‘fair’ representation, and maximize participation. Labor parties have hoped to benefit from ‘absentee’ voting, non-Labor parties from ‘postal’ voting, Country (and sometimes Labor) parties from weighting distributions in favour of rural areas. Preferential voting was adopted at the federal level (1918) and in New South Wales (1926) under Country Party pressure, but it had long existed in at least two other states. Tasmania adopted PR (1907) to represent worthy minorities, not for party purposes. Electoral methods also provide examples of institutions themselves modifying the operation of political systems—though their consequences are not always those intended or expected. Australia offers no examples of electoral systems helping to shape or transform the structure of party systems. Compulsory enrolment and casting of ballots have not stimulated political interest or rational voting, but played into the hands of party strategists, minimized the burden on all parties of ‘getting out the vote’, and made life easier for pollsters and psephological pundits. On the other hand, the single transferable vote for Senate

12 The fullest discussion of this problem is in the Report of the Senate Select Committee on OffShore Petroleum Resources, Commonwealth Government Printing Office, Canberra 1971. 13 For evidence that Australia is not unique in these and other divergences from Westminster practice see Alexander Brady, ‘Introduction’, in Sydney D.Bailey (ed.), Parliamentary Government in the Commonwealth, Hansard Society, London 1951.


elections has greatly increased the power and influence of that house and the probability of deadlocks; the preferential system has made it somewhat harder for parties to discipline maverick parliamentarians, and somewhat easier for independents and minor parties to win seats in the parliaments; it helped one minor party, in dog-in-manger fashion, to keep Labor out of federal office on more than one occasion.14 In so far as Australia’s particular social structure and political attitudes have an influence on government, it is most likely to be found in the political parties, in bureaucratic styles, and in the inner working of the parliamentary and cabinet systems. The two-fold tension between rural and metropolitan, employer and worker interests has shaped the party structure, with a separate Country (now generally re-named National Country) party operating in most states and at the federal level, though nearly always in alliance, when in government, with the main non-Labor (named Liberal) party—both facing a strong and durable Labor Party based in the trade unions. But federalism also has influenced party structures, so that each consists primarily of powerful organizations at state level, represented in relatively weak national organizations which, for example, do not control the vital functions of candidate selection and endorsement. In styles of management, attitudes to leadership and modes of policy formation the Liberal Party is nearest (but not really close) to its British counterpart, the Conservatives; the Country Party has no counterpart; the Australian Labor Party least resembles any of the British parties.15 The conventional wisdom in Australia (see n. 1) is that all show the influence of a society egalitarian in temper, lacking deference to tradition, with a more fluid and elusive class structure but sharper class antagonisms than in Britain, and viewing government primarily as an agent of economic development and as a servant of organized interest groups. What differences do these characteristics of Australian society make to the operation of the transplanted Westminster system? The scholarly consensus is that, whatever the causes, premiers are less fully in command of their ministerial teams, ministers less fully in command of the bureaucracy, ministries less punctilious about the conventions of collective and individual responsibility and more subject to extra-parliamentary pressures, while parliaments are more parochial, less insistent on financial and administrative responsibility and more lax about canons of political integrity, bureaucracies are less hospitable to an elite of generalists, and there is altogether a greater preference for practicalities over principles, than in Britain. To guess at possible explanations for these differences requires a separate glance at each.

14 See Joan Rydon, ‘The Electoral System’ in Henry Mayer (ed.), Australia’s Political Pattern, Cheshire, Melbourne 1973; and her ‘Electoral Methods and the Australian Party System, 1910–1951’ in Colin A.Hughes (ed.), Readings in Australian Government, University of Queensland Press, 1968.


It does seem likely that the absence in Australia of an accepted ‘governing class’, providing leaders in both parliaments and bureaucracies who share common traditions and social values, contributes to a number of the differences. Along with this, the facts that Australians created their own governing institutions (even if by imitation) and did not inherit them from previous generations, that Australian govern ments except the federal (and that only recently) have not been responsible for the fundamental functions of foreign relations and defence, and that politics (for all these reasons) has never been the preeminent career, all contribute, no doubt, to a lack of deference for any historical or metaphysical notion of the State, and for philosophical principles of government. But this also owes much to the mere historical necessity for Australian governments to concentrate on the economic development and service roles, and those roles, too, largely explain why Australian parliamentarians—like those in other new nations —have been more anxious to see governments spending than practising financial economy. Looking to government to prime the parish pump and regulate the distribution of wealth and income also combines, it would seem, with indigenous social attitudes to explain the greater restrictions upon leadership at all levels of Australian political systems. The main examples of this are familiar. The Labor parties have been the most conspicuous in their avowed determination to make their parliamentarians responsive and answerable to extra-parliamentary party organizations through the control of endorsements, through the ‘pledge’ to ensure solidarity in parliament and loyalty to party policies, through the parliamentary ‘caucus’ election of ministers when in office, through the putative answerability of Labor cabinets to caucus for their day-to-day policies, and through attempts by the outside organs to ‘direct’ their parliamentarians on specific issues, even—or especially—when in office. But the Country parties have sometimes attempted similar controls—for example, over joining coalitions and choosing their own ministers in them—and all the non-Labor parties, without using Labor’s formal sanctions, except that of endorsement, have secured a similar solidarity and adherence to externally-framed policies among their parliamentarians. Thus the autonomy of Australian parliamentarians within their sphere of daily action is challenged in ways still regarded as unparliamentary at Westminster, even in the Labour Party. Australian conditions, again not solely ‘cultural’, have affected the operation of cabinet government and administration. As in Britain—and for much the same reasons—the dominance of Australian first ministers over their party, the ministry, the parliament and the administration has become clearly established and has steadily increased. But it is less assured in Australia. The range of the

15

See James Jupp, Australian Party Politics, Melbourne University Press, 1964; Louise Overacker, Australian Parties in a Changing Society: 1945–1967, Cheshire, Melbourne 1968.


premier’s patronage is narrower than in Britain. His departmental resources do not yet match those of the British Cabinet Office and personal staff. If Labor, he cannot select or (normally) dismiss his own ministers—that is the prerogative of caucus; if non-Labor, his freedom of selection can be narrowed (especially at the federal level) by regional considerations, and in most parliaments by having to share it with his coalition partner. Australian premiers do not have the British prime minister’s influence over party pre-selections and at the federal level they may have to contend with recalcitrant state party branches.16 Caucus election of Labor ministers and the prevalence of non-Labor ministries in coalition form are more directly prejudicial to ‘Westminster’ notions: they tend to weaken the bonds of collective responsibility. Finally, Australian federal ministers, at least, are less in touch with, in less control of, and therefore must be less ‘responsible’ for the actions of, their departmental officials. Most of the reasons are ‘non-cultural’, relating to the size of the continent and hence the brevity of parliamentary sittings, hence also the more limited presence of ministers in Canberra, and to the fact (itself the result and symbol of executive dominance of the legislature) that when there, most work in offices in Parliament House, not in their departments. But there are also the effects of the relative intellectual quality and experience of ministers and of the modern Commonwealth bureaucracy.17 This essay has so far argued, first, that most of the political institutions of Westminster were successfully and lastingly transplanted to Australia but one or two were incapable of transference from the outset; second, that Australian political culture was only one of the influences tending to modify the operation of Westminster institutions in this continent—geography, historical accident, institutional interactions and short-term political expediencies were at least as important, and some of the ‘Australian’ modifications can be found in other parliamentary democracies of British origin. A third contention is now added. Whatever differences Australian factors have made to the working of the Westminster system, they are probably less important in their impact on that system than developments that have affected Australian and British government alike and reduced the alleged differences between them to relative insignificance. As Butler has commented, ‘current British government too is a variant of the nineteenth-century Westminster model on which Australian government was originally based. It is indeed arguable that Australia has moved a smaller distance from the original than has Britain’.18 What have usually been taken for granted as modifying forces in Australia are better described as tendencies and aspirations, whose net results are very difficult to measure. For example, the prevalence of coalition governments 16

The only detailed studies of the office remain unpublished: Carol Jean Morgan, ‘The First Minister in Australia: Studies of the office in crisis situations, 1920–1941’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1968; and Robert M.Scoble, ‘Prime Ministerial Power: An Analysis of the Postwar Consolidation of the Australian Prime Minister’s Control over Cabinet’, BA thesis, University of New South Wales, 1971.


alternating with elective ministries has produced in Australia a tendency away from strict adherence to the principle of collective responsibility, in that public disagreements among ministers in the same government are no longer rare (though they are far from the general rule), and the precept of cabinet solidarity has at times been used to protect a minister from the enforcement of individual responsibility. But these things have happened in Britain too; if they are more frequent in Australia they are more readily tolerated, and in neither country have they seriously impaired the stability of governments. Similarly, Labor party organizations have aspired to control their parliamentarians and sometimes to direct Labor ministries, and party orthodoxy on these matters would be heresy at Westminster. But determined efforts to enforce the orthodox tenets in literal fashion have more often than not been disastrous for the party, and successful attempts to ‘direct’ Labor governments, from the party room or from outside parliament, have been pretty rare. The logic of the Westminster institutions, the premium they place on loyalty to the leadership and the power they confer on ministers and especially on premiers, have generally frustrated the party’s aspirations.19 Therein lies a paradox that leads on to the final point. The Westminster model is supposed to be epitomized in the notion of ‘responsible government’, of enforceable limitations on ministerial power, yet it is built on a governmental system traditionally centred in an exceptionally strong executive. If the differences between British and Australian government are related to the presence or absence of a governing class, of obeisance to an awesome idea of the State, of deference to authority and leadership, of strict adherence to conventions, of prime ministerial selection of cabinets, of government monopoly of spending proposals, of firm ministerial control of the bureaucracy—then on every count the Australian aspirations and tendencies are on the side of weakening the executive, of making government more responsible. In this sense Australia seems nearer to the underlying doctrine of Westminster than Britain—with the one great difference: where the British model is based on a theory of government answerability to an undifferentiated mass of parliamentarians, the Australian aspirations are to make governments amenable to the influence and control of their political party, in and out of parliament. This seems at least the more realistic theory, and how far it conforms to a ‘Westminster model’ is a matter of less moment. Recent Australian commentators, however, have meant something different, though overlapping, when asserting that the Westminster model was inapplicable or had become unrecognizable in this country. Without apparently realizing it

17 See Butler, ‘Ministers and their Departments’, in The Canberra Model This and other aspects of the subject of this essay are illuminatingly discussed in L.F.Crisp, Australian National Government, 3rd edn, Longmans, Melbourne 1961. 18 Butler, The Canberra Model, p. 7.


they were taking a line quite familiar in Britain since the days of Belloc and Chesterton, Sidney Low and Ramsay Muir: that the rise of the modern party system, aided by the expanding functions of government, had made a mockery of the central assumptions of the Westminster model.20 According to the local critics, the decay of Westminster in Australia has now reached an advanced stage. Solid party majorities give governments complete control of parliaments. Modern electioneering and the mass media make premiers the masters of governments. The size and complexity of government prevent both effective party control of ministers and ministerial control of the bureaucracies. Ministers control access to the information necessary for public and parliamentary criticism and restraint. Question time does not elicit information except to publicize or establish a party viewpoint. The supposed conventions and sanctions of the Westminster model are increasingly impotent: ministers solemnly justify their refusals to accept responsibility for departmental errors; they can rarely, if ever, be forced to resign; cabinet secrecy and solidarity are often flouted. Some of the critics have seen these trends as an Australian decline from British standards. More typical of recent polemic are assertions that the Westminster model is ‘outmoded and unworkable…an outdated quasi-legal dogma’, and that it has no significant application to Australia: ‘If only the whole terminology could be sent back to Britain and the politicians began using words which the voters, and they themselves, could understand’.21

19

See, for example, D.W.Rawson, Labor in Vain: A Survey of the Australian Labor Party, Longmans, Melbourne 1966, Ch. 3, ‘The Place of the Politicians’; Jupp, Australian Party Politics, Ch. 3, ‘The Australian Labor Party’. As for collective responsibility, it is doubtful if Australia can offer any example of its abrogation as dramatic as the British cabinet’s ‘agreement to disagree’, by a vote of 14 to 7, over the referendum on remaining in the EEC. It has also been observed that in Britain the ‘collective responsibility of ministers has been dispersed among the various Cabinet committees which settle policy and the membership of which is decided by the Prime Minister’: Mark Bonham Carter, ‘Governing Principles’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 January 1976, p. 106.

20 Anyone who doubts the long familiarity of this perception of the decline of responsible government in Britain might well glance back at Sidney Low, The Governance of England, Unwin, London 1904, rev. edn, 1914; Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System, Stephen Swift, London 1911; Ramsay Muir, How Britain is Governed: A Critical Analysis of Modern Developments in the British System of Government, Constable, London 1930, 4th edn, 1940. 21 The ‘outmoded’ phrase is from Bruce Juddery, Canberra Times, 3 October 1975, reviewing the lengthy (and relevant) report by Hugh Emy on ‘The Public Service and Political Control…’ for the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, extracted in Appendix Volume 1 to the Commission’s Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1976, pp. 16–63. The longer quotation is from David Solomon, Canberra Times, 17 October 1972. This article precipitated a lively exchange in newspapers and academic seminars on the current condition of ‘Westminster’ in Australia and Britain. See also Canberra Times, 24 October 1972


Counter-arguing, in this debate, that the obsequies were premature, David Butler rightly pointed out that ‘most of the current disagreement turns on degree’, that is, on how to measure the extent of Australian divergence from supposed Westminster norms.22 There has been no serious attempt to measure and, difficult as that must be, its total absence leaves the question an unsatisfactory mélange of dogmatic ‘judgements’. The picture presented above is certainly overdrawn, but this essay is here concerned with a different issue. The significant fact, neglected in the Australian debate, is that long-standing assertions of British government’s divergence from the norms match the Australian ones point by point. To whatever extent the assertions on both sides may be justified, this suggests a convergence of British and Australian political institutions in fundamental respects. And convergence is only to be expected, because of the common factors shaping these and other parliamentary institutions in the modern world. Over a quarter of a century ago, with misgivings ever more sharply repeated in political commentary in Britain today, Alexander Brady wrote: As the Dominions share a common parliamentary inheritance with Britain, so also they confront the dangers which menace it in the homeland. Such above all are those which derive from the widening functions of the state, with the consequent growth in executive power and administrative discretion, fostering fresh and stronger bureaucratic tendencies. It is only too obvious that the whole pattern of parliamentary government throughout the English-speaking world has been assuming a new and different shape from that which it possessed in nineteenth century Britain. 23

He continued with a diagnosis on precisely the same lines as that just outlined in the preceding paragraph.

(Solomon), 19 and 27 October 1972 (D.E.Butler); G.S.Reid, ‘David Butler’s Ministerial Responsibility’, Work-in-Progress Seminar, ANU, Departments of Political Science, 7 November 1972; David Butler, The Canberra Model, Ch. 7, ‘Ministerial Responsibility’, reprinted as ‘Ministerial Responsibility in Australia and Britain’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 26, 1973, pp. 403–14. For earlier assertions of the decline of responsible government in Australia, and comparisons with Britain, see F.A.Bland, ‘The Working of Parliamentary Government in Australia’ in Bailey (ed.) Parliamentary Government, pp. 73–82; J.D.B.Miller, ‘Parliamentary Institutions in Australia’ in Australian Government, pp. 83–94; G.S.Reid, ‘Australia’s Commonwealth Parliament and the Westminster Model’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, Vol. 2, 1964, pp. 89–101, and Parliamentary Politics’, Politics, Vol. 2, 1967, pp. 76–90; and John H.Howard, ‘Question Time—Myth or Reality?’, Public Administration (Sydney), Vol. 31, 1972, pp. 363–75. 22 The Canberra Model, p. 63.


Australia and Britain have converged in other ways too. While Britain, for example, has experienced a decline in empire, wealth and influence, a growth in egalitarian sentiment, a sharpening competition for power between organized capital, labour and government itself, a loss of confidence in the governing class, and a relatively greater preoccupation of government with the development and social distribution of resources, so in Australia the polity has grown and matured, its politics and administration have become more sophisticated, the internal and external responsibilities of government have become more subtle and complex, and political principles and conventions are debated with growing concern. In this light it seems less profitable to consider the future of parliamentary institutions in Australia in terms of contrast with the British model, than by way of comparative study of governmental problems common to these and similar polities, and of their experience in confronting the challenges of change. professions seem united in criticisms of our institutions of government and of our lawmaking process’; ‘Blowing up a tyranny’, The Economist, 5 November 1977: ‘These pages are concerned less with the jaded cries for electoral reform as such than with the undignified, inefficient, and undemocratic and, above all, unparliamentary government that is Britain’s today’. An admirable recent discussion (with many relevant references) of the meaning of responsible government and its application to central relations with local government and public corporations is Professor G.W.Jones’s inaugural lecture, Responsibility and Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977.

23 Bailey (ed.), Parliamentary Government, p. 7. From the voluminous evidence of British loss of complacence about Westminster (and Whitehall), these recent examples give typical summaries of the indictment: Mark Bonham Carter’s review of the first volume of Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Times Literary Supplement, 30 January 1976 (and of course the Diaries themselves): ‘…our constitutional arrangements…are now in need of drastic reexamination and repair’; Sir Peter Rawlinson (a former Conservative Attorney General), two articles on parliamentary reform, The Times, 12, 13 September 1977: ‘Industry, Commerce, the City, and the

ALAN LAWSON

Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition

In the developing (or rather, changing) awareness of the forms of the Australian self-image and particularly its literary manifestations we have reached a very important stage. The problems which are now clearly apparent are characteristically colonial ones. These problems have caused discrepancies between image and experience and discontinuities between culture and context, the range and dimensions of which are now being recognized. The most general problem is a familiar colonial one. Our cultural, historical, educational, and literary preconceptions have been moulded, inevitably and often unconsciously, by an imported English education. Political imperialism was brought to an end in Australia relatively early and surprisingly easily (too easily, as Taban lo Liyong once shrewdly remarked) but cultural imperialism is never so easy to resist. Its results are inevitable and indelible; they inescapably and permanently affect our ways of thinking and seeing. The effects of that imperialism are not limited to the much-patronized ‘colonial’ poets nor, I would suggest, even manifested by them except in a few superficial, overrated and otherwise-explicable forms. More important and more recent though has been the recognition of the pervasive relevance of colonial elements to explanations of the Australian experience. ‘Colonial’ can be an enlightening descriptive word for many aspects of the present and of the recent past, not merely an expression of condescension towards the distant past. Australian literature is a literature written in English outside of England, and separated in time, distance and experience from the properties of the English literary tradition. It is a colonial literature. The second, more particularly literary, problem which has assumed a new importance has to do with the other standard colonial characteristic—the urge to create a distinctive national image. It was recently remarked that our national cultural values, our image of our national self and of our literary characteristics, have been largely derived from books most people have not actually read (is the Australian myth ‘not so much a myth but a rumour’?1): the Bulletin; the criticism of A.G.Stephens, and Vance Palmer; the poetry of Paterson; the stories and poems of Lawson; and even important analyses by Russel Ward, A.A.Phillips

1

The phrase is borrowed from my colleague, Dr Jane Novak.

ACKNOWLEDGING COLONIALISM 131

and Donald Horne (each of whom has contributed a phrase to the composite national image—‘the Australian legend is a cultural cringe in the lucky country’). 2 Versions of their distinctive messages, their important nationalist perceptions, have been transmitted through successive generations of critics, glossing each other’s remarks like the medieval classical commentators. The clichés about the supposed Lawson-Paterson view of ‘the bush’ were confidently repeated and then plausibly confirmed by repetitive anthologizing. Although the older, standard version of the Australian literary tradition has not been argued comprehensively for some years it is still surprisingly prevalent as a basic premise in so many discussions and as a standby when a generalization is needed. There is even, on occasions, a rearguard vehemence which demonstrates that national images in a post-colonial society have a crucial psychological importance. Many of the reviews of Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970), John Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites (1974) and Manning Clark’s Henry Lawson (1978) reveal an intensity of involvement and a degree of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that might seem perverse if the traditional views challenged by those books were ‘merely’ literary. At the inaugural conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in May 1978 John Colmer put the case for more sophisticated cultural analysis and the developing of cultural models; Brian Kiernan argued that Henry Lawson was less naive, more self-conscious of the literary act and not an inevitable promoter of ‘the bush’. To each of their propositions too there were some suitably polite, but similarly hostile responses. One could observe, I believe, the alleged Australian antipathy towards intellectualizing and a protective reaction towards the fragile innocence of the national tradition. There survives in some Australian criticism and in the popular vision it has spawned a diluted-Romantic preference for artists who are unsophisticated, unselfconscious people of ‘the folk’, primitives like the characters they are supposed to have described. Henry Kendall, John Shaw Neilson, Henry Lawson and even Henry Handel Richardson have suffered by being forced into this Procrustean bed. It is worth asking why Australians have needed to feel sorry for their writers. It seems less a reflection of a sentimentalized Romantic vision of the artist as sufferer than an a priori excuse for the deficiencies of his/her creations—‘he did his best, poor chap, but after all he was nearly blind/deaf/had a drunken father/received little education’. Cheering for the underdog has an inbuilt insurance in case of failure—the ready-made excuse. It’s a colonial posture.

2

Ward’s book which traced the formation of the ‘typical’ national characteristics was The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1958; ‘the cultural cringe’ is Arthur Phillips’ brilliant phrase for a fundamental colonial inheritance; Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country carried its title ironically, a fact of which most of those who use the phrase seem blissfully unaware.


The traditional image of Australian literature was characterized by an intrinsic underrating of its intention and achievement (not understating: that is very different and is practised in another place). That underrating habit is again manifested in the set of common colonial features which were described as making our literature uniquely Australian. Australian literature was said to be conservative rather than experimental (innovations being made elsewhere, at the centre of world culture). It was said to be concerned with corporate (male) life rather than with individual experience; with learning a correct and appropriate vocabulary and terminology for an exotic landscape rather than with making metaphoric or symbolic use of the landscape; with the unsophisticated, even inarticulate, people of the bush rather than with the life of the cities. The two judges, and hence the two leagues into which the contestants could be placed, were the national and the international. And underlying all of these (because there’s a sense of inferiority in all of them) was a notion of ‘progress’, a growth to literary ‘maturity’, of ‘development’ through a succession of stages culminating in a sort of literary twenty-first birthday party to which the international critics could be invited (and for which Alfred Nobel presumably forged the key). There are many reasons for the long survival of this descriptive model of Australian literature. In a new nation which has only recently acquired a definition of its distinctiveness there is little pressure to challenge the definiton. Moreover the socio-political ideals which were prevalent at the time of Federation and which were found in the works of those writers central to the tradition (whose Australianness was thus enhanced) were also those admired by the most influential critics of a later generation. But perhaps the most important reason for its persistence was that there was a good deal of evidence to support it. Thus critics could refer plausibly (if selectively) to its elements, and anthologists could find (usually in other anthologies) works which were recognizably Australian because they manifested at least some of the distinguishing features. Australian literature could be recognized if (in Frank Moorhouse’s wonderful phrase) it was ‘sympathetic to the working class and kind to kangaroos’. But a literary tradition like other conceptual or perceptual models can become circular and exclusive. As the initial provisional half-truth becomes an axiom writers and works which do not conform seem less interesting and less Australian and are omitted from anthologies, critical discussions, reading lists, and publishers’ catalogues. The first gene ration of critics and readers excludes them, the second ignores them, the third simply doesn’t know about them: the perpetuation of an incomplete vision gets easier as the contra-evidence becomes less accessible. Of course, as Vincent Buckley for example observed over twenty years ago, good Australian writers had never been afraid to experiment. But their innovative work was frequently passed over, omitted from anthologies in favour of their more conventional work, or misinterpreted by criticism which ignored its experimental nature. Richardson and Furphy, for example, were praised as


naturalists: their experiments with structure, language and symbolism were apparently unnoticed. Similarly the poets Harpur, Kendall and Neilson are represented in selections and anthologies by poems which seem to confirm their place in the native tradition. Harpur’s ‘The World and the Soul’ was generally inaccessible until Adrian Mitchell’s selection of his work in 1973,3 but ‘Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’ was ubiquitous. Kendall was notorious for his dingles, dells, and bell-birds until A.D.Hope wrote about his satirical poems in 19724 and G.A.Wilkes re-examined his ‘nature’ poems in 1975.5 For John Shaw Neilson’s image even more extensive renovations are being made possible by the work of J.F.Burrows and Clifford Hanna.6 The conventional view of Lawson has been the most deepseated and persistent of all and although A.A.Phillips7 long ago initiated the challenge to it, Brian Kiernan’s selection in the Portable Australian Authors Series8 was the first which seriously presented the evidence for a ‘different’ or at least a more diverse Henry Lawson. And because the tradition emphasized the rural, cummunal, and male elements works concerned with urban situations (Louis Stone, Ada Cambridge, Henry Lawson), solitary experience (Barbara Baynton, Lawson again), or women (Baynton, Cambridge, Lawson, Rosa Praed) went largely unnoticed. Having gone unnoticed for so long their existence was doubted: there have been any number of assertions that ‘there are no Australian city novels’. Nevertheless it comes as no surprise to find a preference for rural subjects in an emerging nation. The common nationalist strategy runs something like this: if we are to be a Nation then we must be different from other nations, we must be distinguishable; cities are much the same everywhere so we must look for the distinctive (the ‘typical’ rather than the ‘characteristic’) in the bush; therefore a moral value is attached to bush activities and a bush-city conflict established in which the true national values are those of the bush (the resulting literature will of course be ‘national’ rather than ‘international’). Late nineteenth-century Russian populism (the narodniki) and recent Welsh nationalism for example each presented similar arguments. The Australian version was bolstered of course by a long pastoral tradition in European poetry and by the Western ambivalence towards the

3

Adrian Mitchell (ed.), Charles Harpur, Melbourne 1973. ‘Kendall: Dialogue with the Past’, Southerly, Vol. 32, 1972. 5 G.A.Wilkes, ‘Going over the Terrain in a different way’, Southerly, Vol. 35, 1975. 6 J.F.Burrows et al., Southerly, Vol. 32, 1972, pp. 118–44; Vol. 33, 1973, pp. 313–33; Vol. 35, 1975, pp. 276–93 discuss the wider range of Neilson’s poetry made available by their extensive work with the manuscript notebooks. 7 A.A.Phillips, ‘The craftsmanship of Henry Lawson’, reprinted in his The Australian Tradition, Melbourne 1958. 8 Brian Kiernan (ed.), Henry Lawson, Portable Australian Authors, University of Queensland Press, 1976. 4 A.D.Hope,


delights of civilization which had most recently displayed itself in European reactions to primitve societies in the South Seas, but it is distinctively an expression of colonial identity-seeking. In the ‘old’ tradition writers tended to be approved in so far as they reflected a set of socio-political values. While the exclusiveness which this brought is to be opposed it ought nevertheless to be acknowledged that there are inevitable sociopolitical elements in the literature of a new nation. These elements cannot be obscured by any amount of organicist ivory-towerism or by any appeal to internationalism (a colonial, and a political, gesture in itself). So while a revisionist tradition seeks to interpret literary works more accurately it cannot deny the essential effects of the colonial or the post-colonial context. Comparisons with other colonial literatures make this feature abundantly clear. Yet, notwithstanding my disclaimers, the current revaluation of Australian literary history does derive in part from such appeals to internationalism and to academic respectability. The watershed can be identified in the period from 1955 to 1965. Within a few years there were three books which seriously proposed diverging hypotheses about the nature of Australian literature; Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties (1954), Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), and A.A.Phillip’s The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture (1958). In Canada, a decade earlier a similar flurry of hypotheses (from A.J.M.Smith, E.K.Brown, John Sutherland and Northrop Frye) effectively created the discipline of Canadian literary studies. The Australian pattern contained several other contributing factors. In 1955 and 1957 White’s novels The Tree of Man and Voss were published; in 1960 and 1961 the first two major literary histories appeared;9 several serious journals concerned with Australian literature were founded within the decade (including Overland, Westerly, Quadrant, Australian Letters, Australian Book Review and Australian Literary Studies); and in 1961 the first Chair of Australian Literature was established, at the University of Sydney. I do not have the opportunity in such a short article to analyse in detail the separate contributions of each of these phenomena, or the interplay between them. Nevertheless it is clear that the question begged by the public appeal to fund a Chair of Australian Literature (‘is there any?’), and by the earlier moves particularly in Brisbane and Canberra to introduce it as a university subject (‘is it academically respectable?’) were partly answered by those other events. Now while it may have sufficed for some time to be able to point to White to prove that literature by Australians could be academically respectable, that in itself posed yet another question. It had been said in a couple of reviews (and more often in private) that White’s books were not really Australian literature. One response to this objection was the flight into internationalism. The other took

9

Cecil Hadgraft, Australian Literature: A Critical Account to 1955, Melbourne 1960; H.M.Green, A History of Australian Literature, 2 vols, Sydney 1961.


much longer but it has been justified by the results, and also by White’s own subsequent work. This was the proposition that White’s novels were Australian literature and that it was our image of what constituted Australian literature that needed refining. In short, White’s work enabled us to recognize what was already there. It was the catalyst for a retrospective reordering of our literary vision. Brennan, Richardson, Boyd, Stead, White and Stow—six of Australia’s finest writers and none of them seemed to fit comfortably into the old model of Australian literature. For some time then the tradition, perhaps even the notion of a tradition, was abandoned although there were some important early attempts by Vincent Buckley, H.P. Heseltine, J.P.Matthews and Judith Wright to replace it.10 The idea that certain people had their place in a tradition proved uncomplimentary to many authors. Embarrassingly it omitted many fine writers altogether, and only accommodated some others by trimming them of what now seems like some of their more interesting work. So the revaluation of the literary history is having two principal effects: the discovery of ‘new’ authors; and new ways of looking at familiar ones. In some respects the latter is the more challenging. Even if we have discarded the ‘old’ tradition we still have to account for Lawson, Kendall, Neilson et al. One strategy is to read ‘other’ Lawson stories, ‘other’ Kendall poems, ‘other’ Neilson poems and it is now usually acknowledged that each of these is a writer of much greater range than hitherto suggested. Lawson’s ‘Crime in the Bush’, say, can be used to qualify the images of laconic good-natured mateship, You might be mates with a man in the bush for months, and be under the impression that you are on the best of terms with him, or even fancy that he has a decided liking for you, and yet he might brood over some fancied slight or injury—something you have said or done, or haven’t said or done —anything, in fact, that might suggest itself to an ignorant, morose, and vindictive nature—until his alleged mind is in such a diseased condition that he is capable of turning on you any moment of the day or night and doing you to death. or of happy bush communities, Respectability only intensifies the awful monotony of these wretched bush townships—till the women are forced to watch for dirt and holes in a neighbour’s washing hung out on the line, and men to gossip and make mischief like women. Shortcomings in a neighbour are talked about and

10

Buckley, ‘Utopianism and Vitalism’, Quadrant, 1959; Heseltine, ‘Australian Image’, Meanjin, Vol. 21, 1962; Matthews, Tradition in Exile, Melbourne 1962; Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Melbourne 1965.


exaggerated—and invented. Even a tragedy is secretly welcomed — notwithstanding the fact that the whole community is supposed, in doublecolumn head-lines, to be horrified. Careless remarks are caught up, disturbed and magnified. No respectable girl can leave the township on an innocent visit without something discreditable being discovered to be connected with her departure from the wretched hole. City spielers attach themselves to local pubs, and prey with little or no disguise on idiotic cheque-men; bush larrikins—who are becoming more contemptible and cowardly than their city prototypes—openly boast of their “successes” and give the girl’s name. or of his plain style, Mischief breeds mischief; malice, malice; and the tongues of the local hags applaud and chorus, and damn and exaggerate and lie, until the wretched hole is ripe for a “horror”. Then the Horror comes. Another of his less familiar prose-pieces, ‘In a Wet Season’, quotes the muchmaligned and obsessively-debated remark by Marcus Clarke on ‘the dominant note of Australian scenery’ and avers that ‘there is scarcely a part of the country out west which looks less inviting or more horrible than any other part’. Lawson’s opposition to Paterson’s more romantic view of the bush (expressed in their famous verse-debate in the Bulletin) needs to be emphasized. He could write of the bush as ‘no place for a woman’, ‘the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds’ and, as we are reminded by that concluding sentence from ‘Crime in the Bush’ quoted above, Lawson’s vision of it is sometimes extraordinarily close to Barbara Baynton’s. Although many readers initially find Baynton’s work a marked contrast to Lawson’s they are then enabled by their reading of Baynton to recognize similar elements in Lawson. Partly because Lawson was so central to the old tradition the changing image of him is crucial to the development of the new one. The stress on the plurality of Lawson’s attitudes to ‘the bush’ has surely at last signalled the end of the apparently monistic conception of ‘the bush’ which has misinterpreted Lawson and disqualified Kendall, Cambridge and (at times) Paterson. The monotony of the Australian landscape has been reiterated so often that the entire continent is assumed to be invariable. But of course not only is the bush variable but so are the writers’ perceptions of it and so are the literary and visual traditions within which they work. There is nevertheless a need, especially in an unfamiliar landscape or at least one not already abundantly supplied with verbal and visual images, to test a writer’s (or painter’s) perception against some assumed common empirical reality (typical landscape). These images are vitally important components of a people’s possession of a place, of their competence in it. Oscar Wilde once observed that ‘there was no fog in London until Whistler arrived’. In the Australian context a comparable observation is likely to include a


condescending judgement of the artists who didn’t paint the fog. They would be seen as limited forerunners. This evolutionary fallacy is perhaps the most damaging of all the defects in earlier views of Australian literary history. It seems to be based on the assumption that because the literature has so recently attained distinction it must be characterized by an inexorable progress. The work of each decade is better than that of its predecessors; the literature ‘develops’ and ‘grows’ towards ‘maturity’. And if the proclamation of ‘maturing’ has been very recent then the earlier work must have been particularly poor. So in Australia the early poets were commonly underrated, the levels of culture in the nineteenth century underestimated, and the descriptive accuracy and symbolic effectiveness of poets and novelists alike unremarked. But the symbolic possibilities of the Australian landscape were accepted by Clarke, Lawson, and Harpur (surely ‘Creek of the Four Graves’ is a major epic of discovery, naming and possession via contact with the spirit of place). The use of the landscape as an image of the experience of being Australian has always been a preoccupation of Australian writers. It is not a stage arrived at after generations of ludicrous ineptitude. A.D.Hope’s ‘Australia’ (1939) is in a long tradition which includes Harpur and Clarke, White and George Johnston, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Randolph Stow. David Lowenthal has observed of the United States that when history is seen to be so short, it is replaced by a concern with nature.11 To put it another way, the sense of space becomes more important than the sense of time. It is a New World phenomenon and it is widely observable in Australian literature. In Australia the concern with time has been combined with the concern with space in the voyager/ wanderer/explorer tradition. In 1960 Douglas Stewart anthologized six Voyager Poems and they have been discussed frequently; more rec ently Thomas Shapcott and Leonie Kramer12 have suggested some extensions to Stewart’s presentation of the genre. But it seems to me that the figure of the voyager is much more widespread in Australian literature. It is a major component in our literary tradition and it is too diverse and complicated to deal with comprehensively here. The figure of the wanderer is a striking image for a people without a confident place in the world. Odysseus is the colonial’s archetype. Indeed the Odyssey is referred to in Australian literature perhaps more often than any other single clasical myth. As V.S.Naipaul observed in The Middle Passage, ‘for the colonial the journey never ends’: transportation is only half the journey. What remains is ‘the way home’ and that, as Henry Handel Richardson made clear, is an ambiguous voyage. That kind of ambiguity is also important to Martin Boyd, George Johnston, Christina Stead, Patrick White, and to Henry James, Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon, and George Lamming. But other kinds of voyages are

11 Lowenthal, ‘The place of the past in the American landscape’ in David Lowenthal and Martyn J.Bowden (eds), Geographies of the Mind, New York 1976, pp. 89–117.


important to White, Stow, Brennan, Furphy, Lawson, Peter Mathers, and Barry Oakley, to Margaret Atwood, Herman Melville, and Wilson Harris. ‘So Cook turned West/So men write poems in Australia’—Slessor’s lines can seem obvious, they can seem jingoistic but they carry a vital burden of truth. It is because of the model of questing, the provision of a heroic searching figure that some men (and women) write poems in Australia (many of the nineteenth century poems about explorers were by women). In dealing with the images of historical discovery this tradition jointly focuses on time and space. George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing (1969) describes a journey in space which is vitally important as a journey in time, and as a journey into a personal past as well as a mythical, historical and national past. It is therefore an archetypal colonial novel. The use of historical exploration of space as an image for personal exploration of self is of course common to many of the writers mentioned earlier. The preoccupation with personal pasts (involving exploration of time) has also been a striking feature of the post-war Australian novel. Even without the use of historical situations the voyager/wanderer/explorer genre involves a concern with time because the picaresque form which is often adopted emphasizes chronology. There has been, however, in Australia a much more direct preoccupation with the past than in the United States. Different attitudes to the past characterized European thought at the time of Australia’s founding and there was much less emphasis on newness in Australia. History was not rejected because no secure place for Australia was imagined outside of History; this New World was not exempt from the evils of the Old—it was its legatee. Furthermore, because Australian society changed so rapidly in the nineteenth century, the early development of a nostalgic vision was not only possible but felt to be important even before Federation. The nostalgic vision is a major impulse in Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (1896), as it is in Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903)—which could be called Such Was Life—and as it is in Frank Moorhouse’s The Americans, Baby (1972). Each of these, one should observe, is what Moorhouse calls a discontinuous narrative. The discontinuity emphasizes the backwardlooking nature of the narrative by interrupting its forward chronology. To a certain extent there is in these an identifiable nationalist political element as there is in the ‘sagas of parched bucolic dynasties’13 by Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Mary Durack, and Vance Palmer (though probably not Colleen McCullough). The ‘search for a usable past’ that Van Wyck Brooks identified in American literature can also be observed in many Australian writers. New World nations have brief histories and it is up to creative artists as much as

12 Shapcott, ‘Developments in the Voyager Tradition of Australian Verse’ in Chris Tiffin (ed.), South Pacific Images, University of Queensland: SPACLALS, 1978; Kramer, ‘The Sense of the Past in Australian Poetry’ in Peter Quartermaine (ed.), Readings in Australian Arts, University of Exeter, 1978.


historians to provide them with images of a past, to sort the past and make it available, even to create a past when the history is felt to be inadequate. The colonial is insecure in time as well as in place. The convict period is a past frequently selected and it has given rise to the feeling expressed by R.D.FitzGerald that ‘our years are built at tragic cost’ or, more neutrally, the idea that we are projections of the past. But it’s more complicated than that. ‘We are inescapably the creatures of the past we have come through, including its own attitudes towards previous pasts.’14 Because past traditions of Australian literary history have given us our images they are a necessary subject of study and not merely obstacles to be cleared away.

13 14

I am indebted to Dr Chris Tiffin for this phrase. Lowenthal, ‘The place of the past’, p. 109.

GARFIELD BARWICK

Law and the Courts

The factors which, during the period since the settlement of Australia, have induced changes in the relationship between Great Britain and Australia in other areas have not been as operative in the sphere of the common law and of the legal system. Generally speaking, the relationship of the two countries in these respects has remained fairly stable until very recent times. Then, oddly enough, the impetus to divergence came from within the British system rather than from an assertive nationalism on the part of Australia or from the need or desire to accommodate the common law to some divergent social or economic situation in Australia. It has been otherwise in the field of statutory law. So much of the law of England as was suitable to the then condition of the initial colony of New South Wales—from which Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland were carved later—was made operative in the colony from soon after the founding and formally from 1828. English law was introduced into South Australia and Western Australia at the time of the institution of those colonies, and as it then obtained in England. Changes effected by statute in Britain in that law subsequent to the date of its introduction into the colony did not operate in the colony unless by express Imperial enactment. The power of the Imperial Parliament to effect such operation was ultimately curtailed in relation to the Commonwealth of Australia by the Statute of Westminster when adopted, though somewhat paradoxically it remained in relation to the constituent States. In the meantime, the colonial legislatures either had need or found it convenient by their own legislation to effect the same or comparable changes as were from time to time made in British law. The British statutes were accepted, in whole or in part as was thought desirable, bearing in mind local conditions. The early tendencies in this connection were merely to adopt British statutes, albeit sometimes belatedly, and to express the counterpart local legislation in precisely the same language as that employed in the British statute. But the different geographical and social circumstances of Australia and the influence of a pioneering society have led to substantial innovation in some legislative areas. In addition, and particularly in federal legislation, there has developed an independent approach to technique in the drafting of statutes. To trace those aspects in which British and Australian statute law has diverged and adequately

LAW AND THE COURTS 141

to illustrate the development by reference to particular statutes would be well beyond the scope of this contribution, though the exercise would be both informative and interesting, particularly if correlated to the various stages of the developing Australian society and economy. But, generally speaking, the example of British legislation has remained strong, though since the end of World War II a more independent approach to what changes are needed for local conditions has developed. For reasons of space this paper will be confined to a somewhat abbreviated account of the relationship of the two countries with respect to the common law, though this must include discussion of statutory interpretation, the legal system, including the relationship of Australian courts to the Privy Council, and the organization of the legal profession. The common law and its development being largely in the hands of the judiciary, and being grounded so much on the observance of precedent, any discussion of the relationship of the two countries in these connections must involve consideration of the force of precedent and a reference to the attitude of judges to what I may call ‘creative decision’ or, as it has been termed, ‘judicial activism’. Decisions on the common law given in Britain subsequent to the date on which the law of England became operative in a colony did not alter, but in legal theory merely declared, the common law as it must be supposed always to have existed. But whether or not such declarations of the common law became operative in the colony depended in the last resort, and certainly after the grant of responsible government, on the acceptance of those decisions by the courts of the colony. Self-government granted to a colony emphasized that its judiciary was independent of the British courts, subject to correction by the Sovereign in Council. But this consequence was either not fully appreciated or was not sought to be asserted until later times. The growth of the willingness to exert this independence marks in reality the change in relationship of the two countries in the sphere of the law. I turn now to trace the growth of that change. The Australian colonies began as colonies in the classical Graeco-Roman sense. They were constituted by emigrés from the metropolitan country, none the less so because of the involuntary nature of the migration by some of them. They were not composed of people of alien origin subjected to rule as the result of conquest or some manner of oppression. Thus, the later, more pejorative use of the term ‘colony’, or the application to the process of settlement of Australia of the word ‘colonization’ as it is used for example in the counsels of the United Nations, is quite inapt in relation to the inauguration or government of the Australian colonies. They were composed of Englishmen, using that description in a broad and generalized sense of people of the United Kingdom as it was constituted before the grant of Home Rule to Ireland. It is of course true that the institution of the colonies involved the displacement of an indigenous population. This is not the place to pursue what has become a controversial topic; here it is sufficient to say that the indigenes in general remained outside the colonial community. The greater part of that community considered itself,


and was content to be considered as, part of the Empire, an attitude which persisted well into the twentieth century. Indeed, the Statute of Westminster, passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1931, was not adopted by Australia until 1942; and then not without opposition, though that opposition was to some extent based upon and expressive of party politics and local political differences. The transplanted Englishmen of the nineteenth century expected to be accorded by law those rights which had by that time come to be regarded as part of their birthright. These included the protection and enjoyment of the common law. Increasingly, it was believed to include the right to participate, however indirectly, in government. Though the first colony was founded well before the first Reform Act, the feeling for representative government was early apparent amongst the free settlers, but the predominance of felons in the population not unnaturally retarded the enjoyment by the free settlers of those advantages. However, within forty years of the commencement of settlement—a very short time, given the nature of the beginnings and the problems of the terrain of the settled area—the desire for courts of law as distinct from military tribunals was being satisfied. By 1828 provision for the erection of a Supreme Court had been made and all the laws of England appropriate to the circumstances of the colony declared to be in force. In a further twenty years, responsible government was granted, there having been some measure of representative government meantime. The Australian Colonies Government Act 1850 provided power for the colony to adopt its own constitution. Responsible government emerged with that constitution, not really at the instance of the colonists but by the insistence of the British Government. By 1856, only sixty-eight years from the arrival of the first fleet and only little more than thirty years after any substantial migration of free settlers, the colony achieved responsible government under a constitution according it internal autonomy, including control of the lands accruing to the Crown from settlement. These aspects of settlement help to explain the slowness with which divergence in the law developed between the Australian colonies and the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the extreme geographical separation of the colonies from Great Britain. There was no indigenous law available to the settlers which had to be accommodated. Because these settlements were colonies in the classical sense, and because the transplanted Englishmen demanded what they regarded as traditional rights, a legal system and responsible government were only delayed until the circumstances of the colony, including its economic capacity to support such institutions, made their enjoyment possible. George Arnold Wood, Professor of History at the University of Sydney in the years 1891 to 1928, has written: Australians had not to fight; they had only to ask, and to argue. There were mistakes and delays and friction; but in general, Australia got the full privileges of British citizenship as soon as Australia was ready to use them with advantage to herself. Our story had not been the story of a people


striving to be free. It has been the story of infant society gradually growing into the freedom that was recognised to be its natural birthright. It was the the discovery of gold and the resultant improvement in the financial position of the first colony which made the grant of self-government possible. The colony was then for the first time financially equipped to grant the Crown a civil list, that indispensable price of responsible government. The society which developed was a British society manifesting the manners and customs of the United Kingdom. Only time and the diversity of a dry land of great extent and with a variable climate, along with geographical and cultural isolation from Europe, have conduced to the emergence of a distinctive Australian society. But rarely, if at all, has the nature or circumstances of that society resulted in a modification by judicial decision of the common law, though, as I have indicated, considerable modification has been effected by statute accommodating the inherited law to the conditions of the colonies. Although the later settled areas, in contrast to the initial colony, began with established constitutions and legal systems, the attitude of the settlers as people of the Empire was, I think, common to all. I have alluded to these historical facts to explain the fundamental difference between the Australian judicial tradition and that of the United States of America. The Australian colonists were not in revolt however much the colonists complained of tardiness on the part of the British Government in the advance towards self-government. The whole process was a continuum with no break with relevant British attitudes. Consequently, the Australian courts developed as exponents of the common law and of its statutary modifications. They conformed in general to what is called an oracular function. In high contrast the American colonies were in revolt and, as a result, severed the link with the monarchy. No longer would power and authority devolve from the Crown. The revolutionary doctrine of all power and authority deriving from the people was accepted. In consequence, American courts tended to set themselves up as arbiters between the legislature and the people providing a bulwark against encroachment upon what were conceived as basic rights of the people, akin to what we might now consider to be human rights, though there was varying relative emphasis on proprietary rights and on personal rights. Thus, American judicial tradition has lent more to the creation of law than to its mere exposition. Bearing in mind these colonial origins, it is understandable that the courts and lawyers of the colonies looked to the courts of the United Kingdom for authoritative exposition of the laws of England and that they were willing to preserve the common law and its attitudes. Technically, the colonial courts on their establishment became part of a juristic unit of which the Crown in Council was the head and ultimate authority. They did not become part of that other internal juristic unit formed by the courts of England and Scotland with the House of Lords as the final appellate tribunal. But the technical distinction between these juristic units was either not observed or disregarded. In any case it


seems to have been blurred in the minds of judges in Britain as well as in Australia. The colonial courts were willing to regard themselves and to be regarded as part of a judicial system of the Empire. Instances of this attitude may not be out of line. In 1877 the Supreme Court of New South Wales placed a construction on a local Gaming and Betting Act (s. 8 of 14 Vict. No. 9), in terms indistinguishable from the English Gaming and Betting legislation (s. 18 of 8 & 9 Vict. c. 109), contrary to that placed on the English section by the Court of Appeal in Diggle v. Higgs (1877), 2 Ex. D. 422. By this construction the colonial court denied a plaintiff the recovery from a stakeholder of an amount deposited on account of an intended but countermanded bet on a horse race. The persistent plaintiff brought an appeal to Her Majesty in Council. There he succeeded. Their Lordships of the Privy Council, in their advice expressed by Sir Montague Smith in Trimble v. Hill (1879), 5 A.C. 342 at pp. 344–5, said this: Their Lordships think the Court in the colony might well have taken this decision as an authoritative construction of the statute. It is the judgement of the Court of Appeal, by which all the Courts in England are bound, until a contrary determination has been arrived at by the House of Lords. Their Lordships think that in colonies where a like enactment has been passed by the Legislature, the Colonial Courts should also govern themselves by it. The judges of the Supreme Court, who differed from the Chief Justice, were evidently reluctant to depart from their own previous decision in the case of Hogan v. Curtis, 6 Sup. Court Rep. 292, but they might well have yielded to the high authority of the Court of Appeal which decided the case of Diggle v. Higgs, Ex. D. 422, as the English Court which decided Batty v. Marriott, 5 C.B. 819, would have felt bound to do if a similar case had again come before it. Their Lordships would not have felt themselves justified in advising Her Majesty to depart from the decision in Diggle v. Higgs unless they entertained a clear opinion that the construction it has given to the proviso in question was wrong, and had not settled the law; since in their view it is of the utmost importance that in all parts of the empire where English law prevails, the interpretation of that law by the Courts should be as nearly as possible the same. Technically the colonial court was not bound in precedent by the decision of the Court of Appeal. But it was bound by the direction of the Privy Council. In time the colonial (later the State) courts reached the position where the appellate courts of the colonies (later the States—the Supreme Courts sitting in banc— came to be regarded as co-ordinate with the English Court of Appeal. None the less, in general, they continued to follow the decisions of that Court as if bound by them. The influence of the decision in Trimble v. Hill was indeed lasting. But, apart from the particular influence, there was the general desire to maintain


uniformity of decision in the Empire, which long continued to be a motivating force in Australian judicial decisions. These remarks refer to the substance of the law. Its application to proved facts may be in a different case. No doubt in the application of accepted principles of the common law to the local facts, local attitudes of mind and the exigencies of local circumstances played their part, opening the door to some divergence in ultimate judgment from what might in similar circumstances have been decided in Great Britain. But, in the indentification of relevant principles of law, the colonial and State courts, apart from the influence of the High Court of Australia and its decisions after its formation in 1903, generally followed the decisions of the House of Lords and of the Court of Appeal. Viscount Dunedin, speaking for the Privy Council in giving advice in Robins v. National Trust Company Limited (1927), A.C. 515 (an appeal from a Canadian province), said (at p. 519): when an appellate Court in a colony which is regulated by English law differs from an appellate Court in England, it is not right to assume that the Colonial Court is wrong. It is otherwise if the authority in England is that of the House of Lords. That is the supreme tribunal to settle English law, and that being settled, the Colonial Court, which is bound by English law, is bound to follow it. Equally, of course, the point of difference may be settled so far as the Colonial Court is concerned by a judgment of this Board. One may doubt the technical accuracy of their Lordships’ pronouncement but its effect could scarce be disregarded by a colonial court except by some very courageous group of judges. The Courts of New Zealand appear to have taken the stand that they were bound by the decisions of the House of Lords: R.V.Seaton & Anor. (1933) N.Z.L.R. 548, even in preference to an earlier decision of the Privy Council: Corbett v. Social Security Commission & Anor. (1962) N.Z.L.R. 878, though this was said to be an exceptional course, only to be taken if it was concluded that the Privy Council would in turn follow the decision of the House of Lords. By contrast the Supreme Court of New South Wales a little later took the view that, not being in the same juristic unit as the House of Lords, it ought not itself to prefer the decision of the House of Lords to a prior contrary decision of the Privy Council, and in doing so decide for itself that the Privy Council would later follow the House of Lords. Such a decision was thought inappropriate to be made by the Supreme Court. But where the Privy Council had given no judgment which the colonial or State courts were bound to follow, they followed the decisions of the House of Lords. This stemmed in no small part from the esteem in which the local lawyers held the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and the desire to maintain uniformity of decision within the Empire and later within the British Commonwealth.


In 1900 the colonies federated and a Supreme Court, to be known as the High Court of Australia, was set up by the Australian Constitution. No right of appeal was provided from the High Court to the Privy Council: but the power of the Crown to grant special leave to appeal was preserved by the Commonwealth of Australia Act, except in cases involving the respective constitutional powers of the Commonwealth and State or of the States as between themselves. The High Court early took the stand that it was not bound by decisions of the Court of Appeal but thought it expedient to follow them ‘under ordinary circumstances’; Brown & Anor.v.Holloway (1911), 10 C.L.R. 89 at pp. 98 and 102–3. The consequence of the difference in the juristic units was expressly observed upon: The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is by Imperial Statute placed, as to matters within its jurisdiction, in effect at the head of the judicial system of every British possession outside the United Kingdom, and as to all matters within its jurisdiction we are bound by its decisions. Apart from those tribunals there is no Court in the Empire whose decisions we are on any ground obliged to follow. But throughout the pre-federation colonial days and indeed well into present times, a very influential consideration, particularly evident in the decisions of the High Court, has been the desire to maintain uniformity of decision throughout the Empire, and in due course the British Commonwealth, or at least between Australia and the United Kingdom, as to the common law, as to the interpretation of statutes in common form, and as to principles of statutory construction. This has been sufficiently powerful to cause the High Court on more than one occasion to set aside its own precedents and to follow a subsequent decision of the English courts. Webb v. The Federal Commissioner of Taxation (1921–2), 30 C.L.R. 450 at p. 469: Davison v.Vickery’s Motors Ltd. (In Liquidation) (1925– 6), 37 C.L.R. 1 at p. 13: Sexton v. Horton & Ors. (1926–7), 38 C.L.R. 240 at p. 244: Waghorn v. Waghorn (1941–2), 65 C.L.R. 289 at p. 292, are examples of this course of decision. In Piro v. W.Foster & Company Limited (1943–4), 68 C.L.R. 313, Sir John Latham C.J. said, at p. 320: This Court is not technically bound by a decision of the House of Lords, but there are in my opinion convicing reasons which lead to the conclusion that this Court and other courts in Australia should as a general rule follow decisions of the House of Lords. The House of Lords is the final authority for declaring English law, and where a case involves only principles of English law which admittedly are part of the law of Australia, and there are no relevant differentiating local circumstances, the House of Lords should be regarded as finally declaring the law: see Robins v.National Trust Co. Ltd. (1927) A.C. 515, at p. 519. As was said in Trimble v.Hill (1879) 5


App. Cas. 342 at p. 345 (a decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council): “It is of the utmost importance that in all parts of the Empire where English law prevails the interpretation of that law by the courts should be as nearly as possible the same”. As late as 1953 the Privy Council said, in Commissioner of Stamp Duties (N.S.W.) v. Pearse & Ors., 89 C.L.R. 51 at pp. 63–4: Their Lordships note that it is the practice of the Australian courts in questions of law and equity common to both countries to follow the decisions of the Court of Appeal in England where the decisions of the Court of England appear to have settled the law. Their Lordships think that this practice is to the advantage of both systems of law since it will enable the courts of either country to refer to the decisions of the other country for guidance in any field of law or equity common to both countries. But the High Court had reserved for itself the right to depart from English decisions: this made its concessions to the maintenance of uniformity of decision all the more noticeable. However, in 1948 it exercised its ability to decide for itself: it followed its own earlier decision in preference to a subsequent contrary decision of the Court of Appeal per Dixon J. in Wright v.Wright (1948–9), 77 C.L.R. 191 at p. 210: For myself, I have in the past regarded it as better that this Court should conform to English decisions which we think have settled the general law in that jurisdiction than that we should be insistent on adhering to reasoning which we believe to be right but which will create diversity in the development of legal principle. Diversity in the development of the common law (using that expression not in the historical but in the very widest sense) seems to me to be an evil. Its avoidance is more desirable than a preservation here of what we regard as sounder principle. But there is great difficulty in being sure of what has been finally settled in England. It is important to note that there is here no rejection of the desirability of uniformity of decision; the point being made was that the reason for not following the decision of the Court of Appeal was that there was real doubt as to whether it could be regarded as finally definitive of the relevant law in Great Britain. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that the effect of the Law Schools of the Australian universities has became increasingly apparent over the years. Law has been there taught directly and, in earlier times, largely by practising professionals. Barristers and solicitors have trained together and students increasingly depend upon the Law Schools rather than upon reading in chambers or upon the experience of articles of clerkship to gain their knowledge of the law. My inclination is to think that the teaching of the universities has tended to


encourage close analysis of decisions in point of principle and to have discouraged a bland or uncritical acceptance of judicial decisions, even of decisions of long-standing. In this, the Australian temperament, developed through pioneer effort which has created a noticeable self-confidence, has had its manifestation in the practice of the law. It is appropriate here to say that the colonial judiciary, and in turn the State judiciary, has in general accepted the limitation upon the exercise of their office which Lord Halsbury came to lay down and upon which Lord Simonds was so insistent. Being subordinate to the Privy Council, perhaps there was little room for any other attitude than such judicial restraint. But, also, as I earlier mentioned, the British judicial tradition has been followed. Thus the position by 1961 was that the courts of the States were bound by the decisions of the Privy Council, but if there were no apposite decision of that tribunal, then by the decisions of the High Court: if there were no decision of the High Court on the point, they were to follow the House of Lords and Court of Appeal. The High Court itself, though not bound in point of precedent, generally accepted decisions of the House of Lords and of the Court of Appeal, though with reference to the latter the High Court had to be convinced that its decision had indeed settled the relevant law. But in 1961 a dramatic change began to take place. In that year the House of Lords decided Director of Public Prosecutions v.Smith (1961), A.C. 290. An accused in capital murder was visited with the natural and probable, though unintended, result of an unlawful act. Before the Parliament reversed this decision by s. 2 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1967, the High Court decided Parker v. The Queen (1963–4), 111 C.L.R. 610. Sir Owen Dixon, at p. 632 of the report, said: In Stapleton v. The Queen, 86 C.L.R. 358, we said: “The introduction of the maxim or statement that a man is presumed to intend the reasonable consequences of his act is seldom helpful and always dangerous” (p. 365). That was some years before the decision in Director of Public Prosecutions v. Smith, which seems only too unfortunately to confirm the observations. I say too unfortunately for I think it forces a critical situation in our (Dominion) relation to the judicial authority as precedents of decisions in England. Hitherto I have thought that we ought to follow decisions of the House of Lords, at the expense of our own opinions and cases decided here, but having carefully studied Smith’s Case I think that we cannot adhere to that view or policy. There are propositions laid down in the judgment which I believe to be misconceived and wrong. They are fundamental and they are propositions which I could never bring myself to accept.


These remarks of so learned and so powerful a Chief Justice as Sir Owen have brought about a considerable change ‘in our relation to the judicial authority as precedents of decisions in England’. In Skelton v. Collins (1965–6), 115 C.L.R. 94, the High Court again refused to follow an English decision. It was said (at p. 104): The position of this Court in relation to decisions of the House of Lords does not seem to me to need clarification. The Court is not, in a strict sense, bound by such decisions, but it has always recognized and must necessarily recognize their peculiarly high persuasive value. Moreover the reasoning of any judgment delivered in their Lordships’ House, whether disssenting or concurring, commands and must always command our most respectful attention. The Court is, of course, bound by directly apposite decisions of the Privy Council. Other Courts in Australia are bound by such decisions of the Privy Council, and, subject to that, are bound by decisions of this Court. I should perhaps add, though it has become obvious enough in recent years, that nothing in the judgments in Piro v. W.Foster & Co. Ltd, can have the effect of a general charter to Australian Courts to act upon an assumption that this Court will treat itself as if technically bound by decisions of the House of Lords, or should be treated as having in any degree diminished the binding force of decisions of this Court. And, again (at p. 135), Sir Victor Windeyer said: And we, in this Court, need not, in exercising our functions as an appellate tribunal, be deterred by expressions of opinion in their Lordships’ House in old cases or new cases. Nevertheless I believe that we must not only give respectful attention to whatever is said there, but that the decision of the majority of their Lordships on questions of common law will ordinarily be followed in this Court, leaving it to the Australian legislatures to correct the result if they think fit. But all judgments of the House of Lords are not equally persuasive and all statements in all speeches of their Lordships are not equally acceptable. This Court must consider the question for itself; and all the more so, it seems to me, if the decision in England was reached after reference only to English decisions, not to the state of the law elsewhere, and seemingly to meet only economic and social conditions prevailing in England. Here the desire to maintain uniformity remains evident though power to diverge is emphasized. Moreover, it will be noted that in these cases the High Court departs not from the Court of Appeal but from the House of Lords and, further, it is done not on the basis of uncertainty as to what is finally definitive but rather on the ground that the House of Lords’ decision was not acceptable.


But an even more decisive step in the rupture of ‘Imperial’ uniformity of decision was taken not by the High Court but by the Privy Council itself in Australian Consolidated Press Ltd. v. Uren (1969) A.C. 590. The High Court in an appeal in a defamation action refused to follow a decision of the House of Lords in Rookes v.Barnard (1964), A.C. 1119, as to punitive or exemplary damages: but, for other reasons, it set aside a verdict and ordered a new trial. The Privy Council gave special leave to appeal, merely to decide the proper direction as to the measure of damages applicable in the new trial: there appeared no ground to set aside the order made by the High Court. There was thus presented to their Lordships the opportunity to affirm Rookes v. Barnard in relevant respects as the law applicable equally in the United Kingdom and in Australia, thus maintaining uniformity of decision. But, in the result, their Lordships did not take that course. On the contrary, they affirmed the decision of the High Court, saying, at p. 644: The issue that faced the High Court in the present case was whether the law as it had been settled in Australia should be changed. Had the law developed by processes of faulty reasoning or had it been founded upon misconceptions it would have been necessary to change it. Such was not the case. In the result in a sphere of the law where its policy calls for decision and where its policy in a particular country is fashioned so largely by judicial opinion it became a question for the High Court to decide whether the decision in Rookes v. Barnard compelled a change in what was a well settled judicial approach in the law of libel in Australia. Their Lordships are not prepared to say that High Court was wrong in being unconvinced that a changed approach in Australia was desirable. I do not propose to consider whether this was a true analysis of the issue before the High Court. If the common law was the source in each country, the question was simply what in truth did the common law provide. Their Lordships decided that the common law need not be the same in the two countries. But, in consequence, the common law for Australia came to differ from that in England, not because of any divergence in social circumstance, but simply because of a course of decision which, if it had been so minded, the Privy Council could have avoided, either by overruling the High Court or by differing from the House of Lords as to what was the common law, i.e. treating it as being the same in Great Britain and in Australia. Thus came to an end the long years of endeavour to maintain uniformity of decision, albeit of the common law itself, throughout the United Kingdom and the Australian colonies and States. Henceforth it could be said that the common law was not necessarily identical in the several jurisdictions which had inherited it from Great Britain. In addition, some countenance was given by the decision of the Privy Council to the view sometimes expressed but ordinarily judicially denied in Australia, that only decisions of the Privy Council given in Australian


appeals were binding on Australian courts. According to this view decisions in appeals from other parts of the Commonwealth, even if relevant, do not bind. Once the quality of binding precedent is removed and decisions of a tribunal are allowed to be no more than persuasive, the tendency to decide independently is greatly strengthened. This tendency has become more evident in the years following the decisions mentioned above and will doubtless strengthen as the years go by. The removal of the appeal to the Privy Council from the High Court will be likely to accelerate this tendency and to that event I now turn. Whilst the courts were thus engaged in working out the relationship of English decisions to Australian courts, the Australian Parliament began to respond to national sentiment and a desire for a more manifested national independence. The maintenance of the Privy Council as the ultimate, if limited, court of appeal for Australia carried the obvious disadvantage that it appeared to make less credible Australia’s assertion of her complete independence, an assertion alreadly received with some scepticism by some other countries on account of the monarchy centred in London and the use of the Union Jack by the States and its presence in the Australian flag. Also, an incipient Australian nationalist sentiment felt that the time had arrived for Australia to decide its law for itself— if need be, to make its own judicial mistakes as it makes its own legislative errors. It was understandable that a political decision should be taken to minimize, if not to remove, these politically embarrassing features and to reflect a growing popular sentiment. At the same time, the High Court of Australia, through a succession of able and distinguished Justices, had obtained a considerable reputation in the world of the common law and in the minds of the Australian profession and public as an authoritative and acceptable exponent of the law. Section 77 of the Commonwealth of Australia Act had enabled the Australian Parliament to invest any State court with federal jurisdiction. The Parliament did so as early as 1903. All State courts within their own limits of jurisdiction were invested with all the authority which was constitutionally given or which constitutionally could be given to the High Court, except such part of it which was made exclusive to the High Court. Thus State courts have administered federal laws, exercising federal jurisdiction in so doing. Early federal legislation ensured that appeals could not be taken to the Privy Council from decisions of State courts exercising federal jurisdiction (s. 39, Judiciary Act, 1903). But the Parliament’s first attempt to limit appeals to the Privy Council from the High Court was in 1968 by the Priyy Council (Limitation of Appeals) Act of that year. The Act was based on the power given to the Parliament by the third paragraph of s. 74 of the Constitution: ‘The Parliament may make laws limiting the matters in which’ special leave to appeal from the High Court may be asked. The 1968 Act was confined to appeals in matters of federal jurisdiction except with respect to questions inter se of the constitutional powers of the Commonwealth and of the States, and even then only upon a certificate of the High Court that the question is one proper for decision by Her Majesty in


Council. Such a certificate has been granted only once, in 1912 in The Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd. & Ors. v. The Attorney-General for the Commonwealth & Ors. (1912–3), 15 C.L.R. 182 but is unlikely over to be granted in future (The State of Western Australia v.Hamersley Iron Pty. Ltd. No. 2 (1969), 120 C.L.R. 74). The validity of the Act of 1968 was unsuccessfully challenged in 1976 on a petition to the Privy Council from a decision of the High Court which was within the terms of that Act (see Kitano v. Commonwealth of Australia (1976) A.C. 99. Federal matters comprise all matters (i) arising under any treaty; (ii) affecting consuls or other representatives of other countries; (iii) in which the Commonwealth, or a person suing or being sued on behalf of the Commonwealth, is a party; (iv) between States, or between residents of different States, or between a State and a resident of another State; (v) in which a writ of Mandamus or prohibition or an injuction is sought against an officer of the Commonwealth: and any matter (i) arising under this Constitution, or involving its interpretation; (ii) arising under any laws made by the Parliament; (iii) of Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; (iv) relating to the same subject-matter claimed under the laws of different States. Appeals to the Privy Council from the courts of the States in State matters, i.e. matters arising exclusively under State laws, including the common law, at this stage remained. But it may be observed that many questions of common law and of Statute law and its construction may arise for decision in cases between resident of different States—the ‘diversity jurisdiction’: in cases in which the Commonwealth is a party or in cases in which a State is sued by another State or by a resident of another State. The identity of the parties and not the subject matter of the case is the source of federal jurisdiction. Thus, the elimination of appeals to the Crown in Council in federal matters covered a very wide field indeed. The High Court, however, is a general court of appeal from State courts in all matters including those involving only State law, both inherited and statutory law. Thus, even after the passage of the 1968 Act, appeals could be taken to the Privy Council from the High Court as well as from State courts in matters of purely State jurisdiction. In 1975 the Parliament enacted the Privy Council (Appeals from the High Court) Act, 1975, which terminated all appeals to the Privy Council from the High Court in virtually all matters. The exception as to inter se questions remains. On 11th April 1978 a petition for special leave to appeal from a decision of the High Court involving only State law was lodged in the Privy Council in the matter of T.C.Whittle Pty. Limited v.T. & G.Mutual Life Society Limited, 18 A.L.R. 431. Thereafter the Australian Government commenced a suit in the High Court for a declaration that the 1975 Act was valid and for an injunction to restrain proceedings on the petition of the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Australia & Anor. v. T. & G.Mutual Life Society Limited & Anor. The High Court decided (15 June 1978, as yet unreported) that the Act was valid but


refused the injunction. At the time of writing, the further fate of the petition is not known. Thus the two federal Acts of 1968 and 1975 have the consequence that even in a case which turns exclusively on State law no special leave to appeal from the High Court may be granted by the Privy Council. It was considered that the Australian Parliament lacked the power to put an end to the ability of the Crown in Council to entertain appeals, or to grant special leave to appeal, from State courts in matters exclusively within State jurisdiction, though apparently at an earlier time a Government was of a mind to do so. Appeals may therefore still be taken to the Privy Council direct from State courts in matters depending solely on State law. For various reasons such appeals (even appeals from the decision of a judge sitting alone) have now become more frequent. A litigant in a matter involving only State law who appeals from a State court to the High Court may not appeal thereafter to the Privy Council. But such a litigant may instead of appealing to the High Court appeal either as of right or by special leave, as the case may be, to the Privy Council. Throughout the years, there have been occasions when colonial judges have been critical of decisions of the Privy Council in Australian cases, sometimes upon the ground of lack of knowledge on the part of the members of the Board of the local scene in Australia. Sometimes the constitution of the Board itself has given rise to disquiet. Prime Minister Menzies, during his term of office, intervened to obtain the concurrence of the Lord Chancellor of the day to the convention that five Law Lords should form the Board in all appeals from the High Court of Australia. On the other hand, a commonly expressed ground for retention of the appeal to the Privy Council has been the assertion that, beign remote from the local scene and the prejudices it might engender, the Privy Council was better suited than a local court finally to decide at least some cases. But the mainspring for the legislation of the Parliament has not been dissatisfaction with the work of the Privy Council but rather a desire to satisfy national sentiment and an increased confidence in the work of the High Court. It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that the Australian Parliament has not an acknowledged power finally to end the appeal from State courts to the Crown in Council. Had it the power, and exercised it, the result would probably meet the wishes of the majority of Australians. As things stand, however, the partial termination of appeals to the Council, effected by unilateral action on the part of the Federal government without consultation with or the concurrence of State governments, has left what is perhaps an intolerable situation of potential uncertainty. State governments have so far not taken any definitive steps in the direction of ending appeals to the Privy Council in matters of State jurisdiction, partly at least because the retention of the appeal is thought to be symbolic of their ‘sovereignty’ as States. How long appeals from the state courts in matters involving only State law will continue therefore remains a question. Such appeals can have no constitutional significance and their continued availability raises problems of considerable concern, particularly in relation to principles of


law upon which the High Court has given or might give a decision. The risks and inconvenience of thus leaving the courts of the States bound con-currently both by decisions of the Privy Council and of the High Court of Australia have been the subject of an address to the Law Council of Australia (Australian Law Journal, Vol. 51, p. 480). The result of the two Acts of the Parliament—Privy Council (Limitation of Appeals) Act, 1968–73, and Privy Council (Appeals from the High Court) Act, 1975—is that, in all matters of federal jurisdiction, the High Court is the final Court of Appeal (except in cases involving questions inter se) and in such cases and in all cases brought before it in State jurisdiction its decision is final and unappealable. The High Court hereafter will not consider itself bound by any decision of the Privy Council, whether given before or after the passage of the above mentioned Acts: see Viro v. The Queen, 18 A.L.R. 257. From the point of view of the topic of this essay, a marked change has now taken place, both in relation to the substance of the common law and in relation to the legal system. It is to be stressed, however, that in those instances in which the High Court has not in the past followed decisions of the House of Lords or of the Court of Appeal, the divergence has not been due to any demands of the local environment, social or economic, nor because of any assertion of national independence: but, simply because the High Court has felt convinced that the decisions it would not follow were wrong. A good illustration of the point is the decision of the High Court upon the effect on the onus of proof of the ‘facts themselves bespeaking negligence’ (res ipsa loquitor) in a claim for personal injuries: The Nominal Defendant v.Haslbauer, (1967) 117 C.L.R. 448. Although the need to seek conformity of decision in matters governed by the common law no longer obtains, the great respect entertained for opinions of the Law Lords, particularly when expressed in the House of Lords, is likely to remain and still to have a considerable influence in maintaining a high degree of uniformity of decision between the two countries. The growing tendency of English courts to take note of decisions of the High Court will doubtless also be a factor in this regard. There will develop in Australia, I think, a tendency to have regard to the decisions of the American courts. So far such decisions have had little effect on decisions on the general law and, latterly, but small effect on decisions in constitutional matters. Earlier, more reliance was placed on them in this field than is now the case. But while it is possible that the High Court may feel freer to take advantage of American jurisprudence than it has formerly done, it will no doubt carefully observe the extent to which American decisions, particularly when the product of judicial activism in the American judicial tradition, reflect local, i.e. American, conditions and local philosophy: for these factors may make them inappropriate in Australia, particularly having regard to the way in which the common law has been maintained and developed by Australian courts. Finally, I should say something of the structure and standards of the legal profession. When civil courts first came to the first colony, no distinction was


made in the legal profession between the two branches—barristers and solicitors —characteristic of English practice. But very soon it was made. Since then, in the eastern colonies and States there has been, in law in New South Wales and Queensland and in practice in Victoria, a separation within the profession. In the other colonies (now States) a fused profession was set up by statute. But, of recent years, with increasing complexity in a growing population in those States, a de facto separation has appeared in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. Although admitted to practise both as barristers and solicitors, some practitioners set up chambers and practise exclusively as barristers, being briefed in the traditional way by practitioners who practise in both capacities, though predominantly in the work of a solicitor. This tendency to separation is on the increase and appears to be responsive to public demand and to give public satisfaction. Throughout Australia the standards of the profession, both of barristers and solicitors, remain modelled on those of Britain. Until recent times, the need of a member of the Inner Bar to be supported by a junior was universal in civil litigation and its desirability not seriously under challenge. However, as in Britain, dissatisfaction with the practice has developed and the whole question is under review. There are murmurings in some political quarters in New South Wales in favour of outright fusion in law and in practice of the two traditional branches of the profession. In summary, it can be said that because of the inherited nature of the common law, the kinship with the people of Britain of the early settlers and the consciousness of the desirability of uniformity in the common law governing both peoples, those of Australia and those of Britain, there has been no impetus within Australia to diverge from the decisions of British courts. Where difference has occurred it has not been because of a need to accommodate the common law to any local conditions: but rather because the local court has preferred its own view of what the common law is. The concept of a common law for Australia different from that of Britain emanated from Britain rather than from Australia. But that concept having been developed and the jurisdictional link with the Privy Council having been to a large degree cut, the tendency to ‘separate development’ of the common law in Australia is likely to proceed, though the judicial respect for the decisions of British courts and particularly for those of the House of Lords will operate to retard the tendency and to confine divergences to those dictated either by a strong conviction of the error of British decisions or by some emerging and insistent requirement of local conditions. The traditions of judicial integrity and independence and of the integrity and competence of the members of the legal profession as inherited from Britain are, I would think, certain to remain. Those who deal in the chapters of this book with the relationship of the two countries in social and political life will be able to speak of considerable substantial differences which have developed. But, in the area of the law, there has been no general movememt away from British concepts and practices.


Hereafter, for the reasons I have indicated, the divergence of Australian general law from that of Britain may be greater, though the judicial movement in that direction will be slow, going through tentative rather than dramatic periods of decision.

W.F.CONNELL

British Influence on Australian Education in the Twentieth Century

English Traditions In 1941 The Education Gazette of the New South Wales Department of Education reproduced for interested teachers an article on English traditions of education by Sir Fred Clarke, the director of the Institute of Education of the University of London.1 Clarke, who was one of the most perceptive of English educational theorists in the 1930s and 1940s, managed to disentangle four traditions. The first, the ‘Public School’ tradition, expressed the outlook of a dominant social class. It showed a decided interest in character development, in which service to one’s country and established society was emphasized; it expressed an elitest conviction that priority should be given to providing a first rate education for those selected as best qualified for it; it showed a concern for training in welldisciplined leadership; it had an attachment to a general education which permitted specialization but not vocational education; and it was marked by an amateurishness in understanding, managing, and defending educational ideas and practices. A decade earlier, Cyril Norwood, headmaster of Harrow, had written a classic statement on the purposes of English Public Schools under the title The English Tradition of Education in which he stressed particularly the ideals of service and leadership. Both Clarke and Norwood were well aware that the tradition to which they referred was not a static one, and that it was a fairly recent development. What was regarded as the tradition in the 1930s has not been formulated in the 1830s except as a vague notion of the kind of education that might best become a gentleman. The Public School tradition to which Clarke and Norwood referred was a product of the work and ideas of Arnold and Thring and their associates in the nineteenth century, and of the changed circumstances of the twentieth century. Where Clarke and Norwood differed was in the degree of importance they attached to the tradition. Norwood saw it as central to English

1‘English

Traditions in Education’, The Education Gazette, N.S.W., 1 November 1941 (reprinted from The Schoolmaster, London).

158 BRITISH INFLUENCE ON AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

education, Clarke as one of several valid and significant traditions, a product of a powerful fringe group not wholly representative of English culture. The second tradition was called by Clarke the ‘Dissenter’ tradition. It was one which had come into the mainstream through the dissenting academies of the eighteenth century. It had a tendency to be democratic but not overenthusiastically so. It was interested in individual development and prepared to use the resources of the State to further that end. And, above all, it demanded relevance and realism in the school curriculum; hence it had been more interested in science, mathematics, and the social sciences than in the classics. In Clarke’s view the dissenter tradition was in control ‘in the United States and in the Dominions’. It could also be said that a similar tradition was a strong element in Scottish education, and that much of its impact on Australian education came from Scottish sources. The elementary tradition was the third on Clarke’s list. In some ways the obverse of the Public School tradition, it, too, had a basis in social class distinction. It represented the view that for most people what was required was a basic education in morals and the 3Rs with elementary natural and social science, followed by vocational training in technical classes. Elementary school did not lead to a secondary school which was in the mode of the Public School or Dissenter traditions, but to a possible short upward continuation of the elementary kind of education or to lower level vocational training. Clarke saw the elementary and the Public School traditions as either end of the scale. He looked forward towards some way of reconciling them in the post-World War II period: ‘The formidable job of integrating both of them in one rich common structure affords some measure of the task before us.’ Finally, there was the ‘folk’ tradition, the ‘simple nature culture’ of songs, tales, dances, and games of the common rural people that was vanishing with the growth of urbanization. The folk tradition was rarely to be found in schools. It was an informal heritage of family and community associations, a declining educational force which once had enriched and bound together the local communities of England. Australian Education About 1900 In Australian education at the beginning of the twentieth century Clarke’s four English traditions were clearly recognizable, and were obviously of considerable significance. Secondary education was provided almost exclusively by independent schools in the English Public School mould. Their students moved on to the four existing universities which were part of the some tradition and sought respectability by looking to Oxford and Cambridge for guidance; at the same time the utilitarianism of the dissenter tradition was is evidence in the development within them of schools for professional training in engineering, medicine, and law. For most of the Australian urban population elementary schools followed, in curriculum, methods, and architecture, the pattern of


English schools even to the extent of maintaining a close approximation to the payment by results system. In each of the States a technical college for trade and commercial training provided post-elementary courses, mostly part-time, on the English model. The English folk tradition was well to the fore in the nursery rhymes, songs, and games taught informally at home, and to the younger children at school. Children going to St Ives met the man with seven wives, they played Oranges and Lemons to unknown bells, disapproved of Dr Fell without reason, laughed when Dr Foster stepped into a puddle on the way to Gloucester, and went with the mouse-hunting pussycat to visit the Queen—to Australian children a strange, detached, and little understood folklore. During the course of the century both the intensity of the impact on Australian education and the kind of influence coming from Britain changed considerably. The history of British influence on Australian education is largely the history of the changing impact of Clarke’s four traditions, particularly in the light of the changes that occurred in Britain in the traditions themselves. AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES AND BRITISH TRADITIONS University education showed distinct evidence of a change early in the century. The tradition of leadership and service to the community that the Australian universities professed in the latter part of the nineteenth century was given a distinctly practical bent in the first decade of the twentieth. The recently founded University of Tasmania, publicly under attack as a ‘costly toy’, was defended by quoting the president of Johns Hopkins to the effect that there was a direct connection between the industrial condition of a country and the country’s attitude towards university work, and by enumerating the university’s contributions towards Tasmania’s economic welfare. The training of mining engineers, surveyors, and assayers for the current mining boom on the west coast in particular was mentioned as a major contribution made by the university. In 1909 the establishment of a university in Queensland was recommended by a Royal Commission on the ground that it ‘will give the highest instruction in all those scientific principles which are necessarily applied in the industrial arts’. It was expected to ‘guide the directive energies of the future captains of industry and commerce’, resembling, in the words of one commentator, ‘a sort of superior technical college.’ Similarly, in 1911, the University of Western Australia was founded for ‘the prosperity and welfare of the people’. In it there was to be no chair of classics but a decided leaning ‘to modern subjects and to practical work.’ This trend in academic thinking was not peculiar to Australia. It was part of the general pre-World War I climate in most western countries. It was apparent in Britain in the foundation of the red-brick universities late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, and it underlay the establishment of the American land-grant universities of the same period. In Australia it accompanied the rising national feeling and accelerated economic growth of the early


twentieth century, but it was obviously also a response to overseas trends. The president of Johns Hopkins was not the only authority cited by Australians. A Royal Commission report in 1910, which preceded the establishment of the University of Western Australia, took special note of the activities of Cornell and Wisconsin universities. Nevertheless it was the example of the ‘modern universities’ in Britain that J.W.Hackett, the chairman who was to become the university’s first chancellor, found most fruitful. He visited and reported on them at length, and the commission commended their general spirit and academic programme in its report. The university began with six chairs in various branches of science and engineering, and two in the humanities. To fill them the university relied heavily on the recommendations of an interviewing committee in England, and, of the initial appointments to the staff, roughly half came from Britain. The utilitarianism of the new universities was prominent also in the newer branches and departments of the older established ones. Staff for these new ventures were seldom to be found locally, and most of the appointments went to better qualified applicants from Britain. In 1918 a Senate committee reported that no Australian had been elected to a chair in the University of Melbourne for the past twenty-five years. It was to be almost another twenty-five years until 1940 before it could be said that there was a majority of Australian professors in the university. The constant and substantial recruitment of British academics to posts in Australian universities kept British influences alive in them even while their policies and functions were changing. The older Oxford and Cambridge tradition had been an important influence in the pre-twentieth century years of Australia’s early universities, but it had never been an exclusive influence. Utility had always been part of the Australian academic scene, and in the early twentieth century it grew in significance. As it did so, the sources of English influence changed from Oxbridge to the provincial universities. When, in due course, science and technology found a secure lodging in the ancient universities and attracted outstanding teachers and researchers, the centre of influence on Australian academic life moved in some measure back to them. The steady but varied influence from British academic sources on the general tenor of Australian university life in the twentieth century has been both direct and indirect. Direct Influences Britain has been a continual source of models to imitate, precedents to follow, and standards to adopt. In the post-World War II period, for example, it became clear that universities would need considerably more money and that it would have to come from the central government. To consider the role of the universities in the Australian community and to assess financial needs and ways of providing for them in order that the universities might be able to fulfil their role, a federal government committee was set up. It was headed by the vice-


chancellor of an English university who found that existing federal government support was insufficient and inadequately organized. The example of the mechanism of the English University Grants Committee was to hand, was recommended, and was duly adopted in the form of an Australian Universities Commission. By the 1960s the expansion of tertiary education and the continuing demand for it were such that in Britain the Robbins Committee was established in 1961 to provide a general review of the situation and proposals for long-term development. Australia was quick to follow, setting up the Martin Committee with a similar brief in the same year. Both went about their tasks in a similar manner and produced similar recommendations; the Australian which appeared a year later than the British, reinforcing its arguments with appropriate quotations from the Robbins report. Two significantly new ideas emerged in both reports. It was the first time that the whole of the tertiary sector, university, technological, and teacher-education institutions, had been considered together and an effort made to articulate them into some sort of a system. For the first time, also, in such a report, education was seriously looked at as an economic and social investment made by the nation, the Martin report expressly stating: ‘Education should be regarded as an investment which yields direct and significant economic benefits through increasing the skill of the population and through accelerating technological progress’.2 Subsequent to each report the establishment of new universities and upgrading of other tertiary institutions which had already started was greatly accelerated. An important outcome of the expansion in Britain was the inclination in many of the new or renovated foundations to experiment with academic organization and the content of courses. Keele, founded immediately after World War II, became the subject of much discussion in Australia, and, in the 1960s, other innovators, such as Sussex, Lancaster, and the new technological universities were a source of lively interest. The same tendency developed also in other kinds of tertiary institutions. Teachers’ colleges, as a consequence of the Martin report, gained their independence from state departments of education, and began to show more initiative in designing their own courses. Their staffs found much to interest them in many English colleges which also were beginning to be more adventurous particularly in the design of the new four-year undergraduate BEd degree that the Robbins Committee had encouraged. Modifications of British Influence The patterns and examples provided by British practices were seldom accepted without adjustment. British influence, especially in the post-World War II

2

Tertiary Education in Australia, Report of the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia, Vol. 1, Commonwealth of Australia, 1961, p. 1.


period, was seen as providing a resource for consideration and a stimulus to discussion. What was taken up was not a direct copy but an adjusted pattern. The modification took place in a variety of ways. Expatriate British academics have often continued in Australia the discussion on ideas or practices in which they may have participated before migration, or, at other times, they have raised for debate in Australian universities issues over which their former colleagues were becoming exercised in Britain. General principles concerning the function of universities have been brought forward in this way particularly in times of reconstruction. On less broad questions relating to new lines of thought or techniques within a particular subject, British influence has been made apparent in a similar way. For debates in the 1930s on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, in the early 1950s on the respective merits of classical and nuclear physics, in the 1960s on the principles of literary criticism, the zoologists, physicists, and English scholars would get ammunition from British academics in Australia and from British journals, and it would be converted into an Australian debate related to courses offered in Australian universities and research undertaken in the appropriate areas within Australian institutions. Until about World War II British ideas would, in most subjects, have been regarded as reasonably authoritative. At all events, where there was debate on a question— and it is hard to think of a proposal which was not subject to debate among university academics—the issues of the debate and its limits were usually thought to have been established in the British context. After the 1940s an expanded Australian immigration policy introduced other European academics and influences more substantially into Australian universities. At the same time Australian academic life was opened up more extensively to American influence. A strong flow of post-graduate students began to American universities. For example, in the period 1955 to 1975, from the Department of Education at the University of Sydney there was at least one post-graduate student each year studying for a PhD degree in an American university, usually at the University of Illinois; over the same twenty-year period there would have been no more than a total of five who took their doctoral work in Britain. University staff, especially in the social sciences, was recruited more extensively than before from American academics or from Australians with American experience. Currently, in all the social science departments at the University of Sydney, there are twenty-six academics with doctoral degrees from American, twenty-six from British, and thirty-six from Australian universities. In all other departments throughout arts, science, and the professional faculties British doctorates far outnumber American ones. Another important post-World War II development with a bearing on the impact of British influence in Australian universities was the enlargement of facilities in Australian universities at the post-graduate level. The PhD degree was introduced in the 1940s, and, in the 1950s, Australian universities, hitherto almost exclusively undergraduate institutions, began to build up respectable graduate departments. There was no consequential drop in the number of post-


graduate students studying overseas, but there was a great increase in the number of those studying in Australia. In 1978, on the staff of Australian universities, those with Australian doctorates outnumber those with overseas ones by more than two to one. This phenomenon was associated with the growth in Australia of a greater regional consciousness. World War II for Australia was largely a Pacific war, and in the post-war period Australian’s interest in the Asian and Pacific neighbourhood deepened through trade, travel, and cultural contacts. In the universities the changing orientation was reflected in the development of departments of Pacific studies, the study of Indonesian, Malayan, Chinese, and Japanese languages and culture, and in the introduction of more Asian and Pacific elements into courses in history, anthropology, law, music, government, and education. In some of these areas British scholars had already been working and their contribution widened the range of possible British influence on Australian scholarship. But in many of these new ventures, expertise was not to be found in traditional British sources. For an increasing part of university studies it was found that British influence was not particularly pertinent. In consequence, Australian academics turned in these areas more to Asian and American sources and began also to rely more solidly on their own research and experience. Indirect Influences In these various ways British influence on Australian academic life in the second half of the twentieth century became less obvious and direct than earlier in the century. It retained, however, a remarkably pervasive power. In two important ways it continued to underpin Australian academic thinking. British academics and their writing not only provided their own ideas for Australian consumption, they also mediated other sources of thought and practice to Australians. Logical positivism, for example, came to Australian universities through the minds and language of British philosophers; Piaget entered Australian psychological and educational circles initially through interested British scholars and subsequently through American interpreters; the sociological dimension in education which developed strongly after the 1950s got its start through Clarke and his German protégé, Mannheim, in London. For new developments in many of the disciplines taught in Australian universities, British scholars were the midwives responsible for delivering the baby and providing their own particular style of swaddling clothes. The new ideas en route to Australia, from wherever they came, whether originating in the British network or merely passing through it, were subject to British influence in the course of the relay. But, secondly and more fundamentally, there was a kind of ingrained influence that has never waned. The work of British academics has always been and remains for most university disciplines a standard of reference. The Australian academic is pleased to have his work accepted for publication in British journals. He tends to think that the best quality of writing and the


soundest views in his subject are expressed by some of the academics in British universities. In making appointments, selection committees probably will prefer the opinion of a well-known British referee to one from any other country. Implicit in these kinds of attitudes is the feeling that Britain is the home of solid and enduring scholarship and dependable judgement in academic matters. A desire to be in communion with that company has always been at the back of the mind of a significant number of Australian academics. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION Peter Board, the first Director of Education in New South Wales, looking back at the condition of secondary education before 1900, wrote that it had been almost entirely provided by schools established by churches or individuals on the English pattern. The schools were organized and conducted very largely on the model of the English public schools, and the curricula, moral standards and educational ideals of the English public schools mainly determined the character of their output. There can be little doubt that the peculiarly British character and outlook of the Australian people, so frequently commented on, with their readiness to adopt British precedents and their adherence to British customs and traditions, may be traced to the influence of schools that had taken as models those schools which had placed their distinctive mark on British public life.3 Primary education, too, had been closely modelled on English ideas and practices. It was designed as a separate and complete elementary education; a system apart from secondary education and not meant form a sequence with it. The elementary one was mainly governmental and the other mainly independent. Elementary education was intended to provide a minimum compulsory education for the lower orders at the least expense. To ensure this outcome most of the States had adopted the English payment by results scheme, and, although the practice was discontinued early in the century, they clung to much of the spirit of it by means of an inelastic inspectorial system up to about the period of World War II. Textbooks and teaching materials reinforced the pattern of the English elementary school in Australia. The lack of a strong Australia book publishing industry then and through most of the present century, was a great handicap to the development of a wide range of Australian materials for schools. Throughout the quarter century preceding World War I a general ferment developed throughout Western education which eventualty brought about a considerable change in the theory and practice of primary and secondary education. The Herbartians, expanding the ideas of the early nineteenth-century German philosopher and psychologist, Herbart, and the Progressives inspired by Dewey in America, Decroly in Belgium, and Montessori in Italy, substantially


altered the educational world. Social, economic, and technological changes induced a rethinking of the nature of secondary education, stirred up a greater interest in technical education, and raised questions about the function and content of primary schooling. Pre-World War I Reform and British Influence Australian education did not avoid the general contagion. With respect to prevailling British influence there were three effects. Because the sources of contemporary educational inspiration seemed not to lie in Britain, Australian educators began to look seriously elsewhere. ‘Germany’, wrote Frank Tate, the Director of Education in Victoria, ‘has of late won many markets, and she has won them virtually in her schools’; and the premier of Western Australia declared that the State in undertaking secondary education ‘should have a thorough examination made as to the best method of applying it based on German and American standards.’4 Several commissions of inquiry and educational administrators in the pre-World War I period visited America and continental Europe, as well as Britain to study at first hand the new developments in education. A second effect of the new ferment was a tendency to question the British heritage, not merely to question its applicability to the Australian situation and perhaps seek to adjust it, but to question the validity of its basic ideas and the worth of its established practices. Some educators began to voice their doubts about the British tradition that they had been accustomed to follow. In 1907 the head of the Department of Education in Western Australia, C.R.P.Andrews, in his annual report, divided secondary schools into two types: the grammar with a classical tradition, and the modern school teaching modern languages and science. Every secondary school in Western Australia, he wrote, was of the grammar school type and not one possessed a science laboratory. In 1911 he was able to open the first government high school in the State, a modern school equipped to teach science, modern languages, and commerce. But by then educators in Britain, too, were highly critical of established educational theories and practices. As they became more professionally sophisticated, rnore affected by the current movements of thought, and more aware of the needs and aspirations of the society of the early twentieth century, British educators began to rethink and reorganize. Out of this process came the 1902 Balfour Act, the 1918 Fisher Act, a substantial recasting of the elementary school curriculum, a reorganization of secondary education, the publication of much stimulating educational literature from Scottish and English writers, and the beginning of a number of interesting educational experiments. As Australians became aware of

3

P.R.Cole (ed.), The Education of the Adolescent in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1935, p. 1.


current British performance there was a revival of interest in the British contribution to education. It was a new tradition, with much of Clarke’s dissenter tradition in it, that was in the making, and Australian educators could see the pertinence of it to their own situation. The third effect was associated with the second. The source of many of the new ideas was not to be found in Britain but in Germany or America. British educators expounded these views, argued over them, and interpreted them into a British idiom and British situation. Because of the established connection with Britain, and because the interpretation was often lucid, practical, convincing, and comprehensive, Australian educators began to absorb the new wisdom through British eyes. British educators became the principal mediators of nonBritish educational ideas and practices, and it was the construction which they put on them and the adaptations which they made to them which tended to become current in Australia. Thus, Australians learnt about Herbartianism principally through the writings of John Adams, discovered a practical reconciliation of Dewey and Herbart through the widely-prescribed textbooks by J.J.Findlay, and studied Montessori’s ideas through the publications of her London headquarters and the writings of British teachers who had tried out her ideas. Reforms in both primary and secondary education accompanied the agitation of the period in both Britain and Australia. In England, the curriculum and general tone of elementary school went through a distinct change. The Code of 1904 and the 1905 Handbook of Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers established the new picture. The school was no longer a grudging charity for the lower orders, it was to be a place where children could obtain the best intellectual and moral education that they could cope with. The 3Rs were supplemented by the sort of curriculum the Herbartians were arguing for: a social science group, possibly correlated—history, literature, and civics; and a natural science group—geography and nature study. To these subjects were added art, handicrafts, and education in health which within a few years was to be supported by a school medical service. Australian primary education moved in the same direction. Each of the States made reforms to syllabuses and methods of teaching that widened and liberalized the curriculum. Schools began to think more of children’s needs and interests. The New South Wales Director of Education even declared, a little prematurely, ‘Education is Child centred’.5 Education was to be brought closer to the child’s environment and he would be taught both as an individual and as a future citizen. Health too was an important subject, and school health services developed in all States.

4 C.Turney (ed.), Sources in the History of Australian Education, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1975, p. 317.


The parallel with British primary education is remarkable, but not surprising. In this period of reform a number of key educators in the various Australian States were British educators. For example, in Western Australia the heads of the Department of Education from 1897 to 1929 were Cyril Jackson, who returned to England to become chief inspector for the Board of Education, and his successor C.R.P.Andrews, who left a post in the Battersea Training College to start the first teachers’ college in Western Australia. In New South Wales in the same period, while Peter Board was Director of Education, his chief inspector and right-hand man was James Dawson, a Scot; when an inspector was needed to launch the new secondary schools, W.J.Elliott was brought from England, and when the teachers’ college was started, A.Mackie, another Scot, was appointed to the principalship. In 1907 a federal conference of educators throughout the British Empire was held, and in 1911 it was formalized into a four-yearly Imperial Education Conference. It helped to cement even closer the relations with British educators, became a useful vehicle for the exchange of views on current problems, and developed into a forum for the discussion of schemes, such as the exchange of teachers, of mutual advantage to participants. State secondary education in the early twentieth century developed in England along two lines. Traditional public schools and endowed grammar schools continued to flourish, and beside them there grew up a number of new selective secondary schools maintained by the Local Education Authorities. The 1904 Regulations made it clear that the new schools were to be ‘based wholly on the tradition of the Grammar Schools and the Public Schools.’6 A second group of post-primary schools was also in the process of development. Central schools, higher elementary schools, and junior technical schools provided full-time education parallel with the first three or four years of the secondary grammar schools. These schools provided further general education beyond elementary school and some introductory vocational education. They remained a part of Clarke’s elementary tradition, separate from and of lower prestige than the other secondary grammar group. Australia reproduced the same pattern. The new high schools that commenced operation just before World War I were selective academic institutions probably owing as much to the dissenting Scottish as to the establishment English tradition, but, nevertheless, distinct in curriculum and purpose from other postprimary schools. For the other pupils who wished to prolong their education beyond primary level, there were the same sorts of schools with even the same names as in England. New South Wales, for example, in addition to High Schools, provided Central, Junior Technical, Commercial, Intermediate High, and Domestic Arts schools, and supplementary grades 7 and 8 in the elementary schools.

5 A.R.Crane and W.G.Walker, Peter Board, Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne 1957, p. 37.


In both systems, as in England and Scotland, the courses were tied closely to external examinations and their terminology was taken from British usage. Leaving and Intermediate certificates guarded the standards of the five-year high school courses; a qualifying certificate marked the end of six years of primary, and a merit certificate in some States could be taken in the eighth grade of the non-high school system. Responses to the Australian Environment Notwithstanding the similarity of educational theory, curriculum, methods of teaching, and even architecture and nomenclature of schools between Britain and Australia, there were differences in emphasis that widened year by year. A pamphlet issued by the Victorian Department of Education in 1922 described in rather grand style the background of the pupils: Day after day, year after year, from Casterton to Mallacoota Inlet, and from the Murray to the sea, the Stream of Youth sets in to the school-house. They come on foot, or in buggy or on horse-back—sometimes two, even three, to the horse; on sled or in boat; on train or tram. They come in all weathers, facing the scorching summer winds of the Murray plains, the cutting winter winds of the Wimmera, the rain-storms of Gippsland, the sleet that drives hissing along the mountain tracks deep in mud. They come out of houses and huts and tents. Out of fossickers’ camps in lonely gullies, and from clearings deep in the bush, they break through the forest tangle to the tracks that meet at the school-house gate. They run along city streets, where the seasons are marked by the fruits and flowers in shop windows—and they saunter along country roads, when each month is heralded by a new wildflower, or butterfly, or bird-note. The patter of their feet to the city school is lost in the street noise, but, in the morning quiet of the country road, their shouts and greetings are heard a mile away.7 The passage describes a situation for which there was no provision within the British tradition. It deals with a different kind of experience. Isolation, precariousness, lack of sizeable settlements outside the main cities, and undeveloped social and cultural resources were factors in the lives of many Australians. British practice in the twentieth century allowed for a considerable degree of local flexibility in the administration of education and in the conduct of the schools. The Australian response to ‘the tyranny of distance’ and the inequalities in social and cultural experience was to establish a central bureaucracy in each State to control education. In Britain the administrative

6 Board of Education, Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Education (‘Spens Report’), HMSO, London 1939, pp. 66–7.


emphasis was placed on the local authorities. Their officers were professional educators with genuine responsibility to develop education effectively in their area. Central administration had few professional functions to perform. In Australia it has been the central administration that has made the professional decisions on matters such as educational policy, school staffing, curriculum, and examinations. Two consequences have followed from this. Australian education has become prudent and cautious in all its activities. It has been chary of experiment, and reluctant to encourage innovators. This has increased its dependence on outside influences to supply it with new ideas developed and tested in other places. Britain has, therefore, continued to be regarded as a source of innovation. This was particularly to be seen in the 1920s and 1930s the heyday of ‘progressive education’. The various reformers in Europe and America who developed the activity school and the rich and stimulating range of ideas associated with it had scarcely any direct effect on Australian education. A few progressive schools developed in the inter-war period but they were mostly short-lived and of little effect. The one substantial experiment was the introduction of the Dalton Plan of individualized teaching. It was developed in the early 1920s in Massachusetts and spread rapidly throughout the world, becoming, for a while, quite a hit in England. It was from England that Australian educators learnt of the new approach to teaching. In most of the States several state and independent schools set up classes along the lines of the Dalton Plan, using English advisers, visiting England to observe the Plan in action, studying descriptions and explanations put out from English sources, and adapting assignments and techniques developed in English schools. While enthusiasm lasted, it was a remarkable example of the way in which British educators have managed to mediate the practices and ideas of other counteries, even English-speaking countries, to Australian audiences. In 1937 the progressive education area was responsible for another example of the same function operating with a different method. The director of the Australian Council for Educational Research, established in 1930 through the efforts of American and Australian educators and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was interested in arranging a conference of leading progressive educators, and became responsible for organizing a New Education Fellowship Conference in each of the State capitals in that year. It was one of the great events of Australian educational history attended by many thousands of teachers interested to discuss progressive ideas with some of their leading exponents. The NEF had its headquarters in London and put together an outstanding group of twenty-one speakers from ten countries of whom five were leading American educators and ten, British. The effort was essentially a joint British-AmericanAustralian venture under British sponsorship. To consolidate British influence a

7 G.S.Browne

(ed.), Education in Australia, Macmillan, London 1927, p. 102.


number of other British educators, with no necessary connection with progressive education were added to the team. Through such contacts and by studying reports and sometimes actual practices of progressive educators, most frequently through a British interpretation, Australian educators gradually absorbed modified versions of progressive ideas and incorporated them into Australian schools. The other consequence of the Australian tendency to centralize educational administration was an inclination to overvalue organizational change. Much thought and effort has frequently been put by the bureaucracy and by committees of enquiry into ways of reorganizing some aspect of administration, readjusting the examination system, or recasting the general pattern or internal organization of the schools. When all such changes have eventually been carried through, the educational process in the classroom has sometimes been found to have been little altered. A tendency has developed to think of organizational change as educational change and not to look more deeply into ways in which the teachinglearning processes can be changed for the better. During the expansion of secondary education in the inter-war period and immediately after World War II, Australian educators evolved an organizational change of considerable significance socially and of some educational importance. The vast rural distances, the scattered nature of the settlement, the smallness of country towns, and the homogeneity of the population made it uneconomical to provide the variety of post-primary schools that were available in large urban centres. In many States, therefore, comprehensive high schools were developed to cater for all secondary education throughout the country districts. Thus administrative convenience and the circumstances of the Australian rural environment combined to solve, at the secondary level, Clarke’s problem of integrating the elementary and the Public School tradition into a common structure. It was a potential solution that the British public was to agonize over for many years. In Australia, however, it was an organizational answer to the problem that, educationally, was never thought through completely. The single high school open to all comers in the country areas was, very largely, a city high school in curriculum, organization, staffing, and equipment. The Public School-dissenter tradition was modified structurally, but educationally remained very much in control. British Influence on Post-World War II Education in Australia In the post-World War II period, British influence was no longer as decisive in Australian education as it had been in the formative pre-World War I era but British educational activity remained a source of great interest to Australian educators. It was for Britain a time of considerable social, economic, and educational readjustment, and the spirited discussions and reports that issued from the United Kingdom were well attended to in Australia.


During this period informal links between British and Australian educators were greatly strengthened. The ACER, and the State and Australian governments sponsored visits from time to time by various British educators, some of whom built up strong personal relationships with Australian counterparts. The Institute of Education of the University of London developed an extensive graduate school and attracted a continuing stream of students from Australia for advanced work; it also offered facilities for study to senior scholars and administrators who might wish to visit for briefer periods. There was extensive recruiting of teachers from Britain for all Australian States, Tasmania, for example, accepted an average of thirty teachers a year over the period from 1959 to 1976, a substantial supplement to the staffing of the smallest State. These often brought with them knowledge and experience of the more promising British practices, and some of the recruits within a short time moved into positions of responsibility. Reports on aspects of British education written from time to time by special committees were an important source of ideas and information. The consultative committee reports—Hadow and Spens—of the 1920s and 1930s had been studied carefully in Australia and had become common currency among educators; the post-war ones were similarly regarded. The Crowther, Newsom, and Plowden Reports, for example, were widely read, summarized, and commented upon, were used in teacher education courses, and were much quoted in local articles, speeches, and reports. Two British developments of the post-World War II period were of particular interest to Australians: the debate on and development of comprehensive secondary schools and the revolutionary ferment in primary school curriculum and methods. The establishment, by some local education authorities in Scotland and England, of comprehensive secondary schools was a fundamental challenge to the grammar school tradition. The grammar schools in the 1940s and 1950s had absorbed the living and relevant elements of the Public School-dissenter traditions. They could be regarded at their best as selective institutions demanding from their pupils the exacting performance of high quality academic work in both traditional and modern subjects, and evincing the traditional concern for the development of character. The comprehensive schools were a social and educational protest against selective education and an endeavour to produce a more wide-ranging curriculum. The challenge which they posed was strenuously resisted, and met with indifferent success. In the primary area, the forces for change were more successful. The image of the primary school, within that period of a quarter of a century, changed, from that of a somewhat austere but reasonably pleasant institution designed to teach the fundamentals, to that of a warm and interesting community growing up through a variety of stimulating and demanding activities. The change discernible in the reforms at the beginning of the century had come to fruition. By 1970 the British elementary tradition had been transformed. The many foreign observers who came to study it were very conscious of the transformation. The American Ford Foundation, for example,


established an Anglo-American primary education project to provide for American teachers a series of publications describing British practices. Australians reacted to the secondary school development with interest but without much excitement. The establishment of comprehensive schools was ground they had already covered in the development of country high schools. They still, however, had to face the problem in the urban areas where half the nation’s population lived. British experience and British arguments were therefore studied carefully to garner from them ammunition for the struggle that was taking place in the cities. The primary school transformation, on the other hand, offered fresh ideas and convincingly successful examples of attractive educational practice. It was observed closely by many Australian visitors and it was carefully studied in the ample literature to which it gave rise. British teachers and administrators in the primary field were welcome visitors to Australia, and some were able to exercise considerable influence on the attitudes and practices of teachers in some of the States. Another great movement of interest from the mid-1950s on to the 1970s was an extensive reform of the secondary school curriculum. The initial impetus came from the United States with the redesign of maths and science programmes. By the mid-1960s reform in Britain had gathered momentum, and for the next decade many experimental programmes were tried out in all subjects of the curriculum. Australian educators studied and adopted a number of American programmes and were heavily influenced by the work done in the U.S.A. When, however, British research was well established it stimulated considerable interest in Australia. By the 1970s a number of locally developed curricula and materials were available for Australian teachers and many schools were beginning to use the products of British experimenters, alongside and sometimes in preference to American materials. The Impact of a Changing British Tradition By the 1970s British influence in Australian primary and secondary education had passed through somewhat the same stages from the beginning of the century as it had in tertiary education. At the beginning of the century while primary education was seeking a new content and a new rationale, and secondary education was in the very process of formation, British influence was substantial. It was a basic model for both theory and practice, and it was a selective sieve through which ideas from other countries were transmitted to Australia. Nevertheless, it was not unquestioned. Some of its traditional forms were queried and rejected both in Britain and Australia. What was welcomed and adopted were the adaptations that British education itself developed in the pre-World War I period. These largely became the structural foundations which Australian primary and secondary education developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century.


In the inter-war period considerable adaptation to the British pattern took place in Australia. Non-British contacts contributed to this process, but the principal factor was the nature of the educational task, particularly in the rural areas, of Australia. As direct imitation of British models decreased, the importance of Britain as a mediating agent of her own and others’ ideas increased. She became the channel by which many of the stimulating educational ideas of the 1920s and 1930s reached Australian educators. She had the principal but not, however, the sole agency in this matter. American educators were also of particular interest to Australians. In the post-World War II period Australian primary and secondary education expanded and some of its structure and content was recast to cope with the new demands. In the course of this development British experience was noted and referred to but was no longer regarded almost automatically as a model. It was a useful background reference to which one readily turned for supportive evidence or ideas, for stimulus in particular areas of expertise, or for comparison with new suggestions and practices coming from America. Where it could be seen, however, as in primary education, that British educators had managed to produce a striking and valuable transformation in their own traditional ideas and practices, the new contribution became a powerful influence on Australian education. In such situations British education moved in the Australian consciousness from background up to foreground. By renewing its educational tradition Britain was able effectively to renew its influence.

J.O.N.PERKINS

Changing Economic Relations

Over the period since World War II the geographical diversification of Australia’s international economic relationships across a wider range of countries, and to a relative extent away from Britain, has been evident in each of the main areas of international economic transactions. It has, moreover, speeded up considerably since Britain entered the European Economic Community in 1973. These developments have been associated to some extent with the relative decline of Britain in world trade and output; but they have also—and probably to a much greater extent—been the result of the removal of previously existing artificial factors (notably tariff preferences) and of the introduction of new artificial factors associated with Britain’s entry into the EEC—especially the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In this chapter we shall consider first the changes in the pattern of Australia’s merchandise trade; then those in invisible transactions— services and the earnings of international investment—and those in capital account transactions; and then the relationship with sterling, including the place of sterling in Australia’s international reserves.1 VISIBLE TRADE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Throughout the history of European settlement in Australia, and right up to the end of the 1950s, Australia’s trade was dominated by transactions with Britain. The overwhelming dependence on trade with Britain that characterized the period up to World War II continued even as late as the Korean War of 1950–1, when Britain supplied about half of Australia’s imports. But by the mid-1950s countries other than Britain had become of greater relative significance; yet even then Britain still took one-third of Australia’s exports and provided over twofifths of her imports. No other country was of anything like a comparable importanc e in terms of its share in Australia’s trade, for Japan and the U.S.A. each took

1

Transactions between the two countries during the 1950s have been analysed in more detail in J.O.N.Perkins, Britain and Australia: Economic Relationships in the 1950s, Melbourne University Press, 1962.


less than a tenth of Australia’s total exports, and the U.S.A. (the second largest supplier) provided only just over a tenth of total imports, whilst Japan still supplied considerably less than that. But by the beginning of the 1960s the rapid economic growth of Japan, and the liberalization of imports from the U.S.A. from discriminatory controls, had begun to change the picture radically. Britain supplied in the early 1960s no more than a third of Australia’s total imports and took about a quarter of Australia’s exports; whilst the U.S.A. now supplied about half as large a share of imports as did Britain, and Japan took about half as large a share of Australia’s exports as did Britain. From Britain’s viewpoint, trade with Australia was of considerable significance in the immediate post-war period. Indeed, in the early 1950s Australia was Britain’s largest single market, taking about a tenth of total exports, though that share had approximately halved by the end of that decade (as the very tight controls over imports from North America into Australia were removed). Britain’s imports from Australia during the Korean War boom in commodity prices were also nearly a tenth of Britain’s total imports, and that proportion also had halved by the end of the decade. During the second half of the 1960s the U.S.A. and Japan both overtook Britain in terms of their total visible trade with Australia, the U.S.A. becoming the largest single source of imports for Australia, and Japan the largest export market. The 1970s saw the shares of the U.S.A. and Japan stabilize—each of these countries supplying at that time about a fifth of Australia’s imports, and Japan having become by far the largest single market, taking a third of the total, with the U.S.A. taking about a tenth and Britain less than a twentieth. Meanwhile, the original six EEC countries maintained a fairly steady share in Australia’s total imports (at about an eighth) over the 1960s and 1970s, but continued to decline in relative importance as a market—from over a fifth in the mid-1950s to about a tenth in the later 1970s. On the other hand, trade with a wide range of other countries (taken as a group)—including the countries of rapid growth in South-East Asia—rose in relative importance, so that by the later 1970s this broad ‘other’ group provided over a third of Australia’s imports and took over two-fifths of her exports. These changes could to some extent be viewed as an inevitable part of Britain’s declining share in world trade and output generally. The decline in Britain’s share was, however, especially marked in trade with Australia, partly as a result of the overwhelming dominance of Britain in earlier periods, coupled with the high degree of complementarity of the Australian economy with the relatively near, and rapidly expanding, economy of Japan. The removal of the wartime and immediate post-war restrictions on imports from the U.S.A. also played an important part in reducing Britain’s role as a source of supply; and then, in the later 1970s, Britain’s entry to the EEC carried the process of Britain’s relative decline (as both exporter and importer) much further.

176 CHANGING ECONOMIC RELATIONS

Over the course of the 1970s it was not merely that the relative importance of visible trade between the two countries continued to decline, but that Britain’s importance as a market fell very much faster than did Britain as a source of imports. To some extent this had been true throughout the post-war period. Throughout the period Britain had been more important as a source of imports than as a market for exports, and her share as a market had fallen faster than her share in Australia’s imports: during the 1950s Britain was about 50 per cent more important as a source of imports than as an export market; by the beginning of the 1970s she had become nearly twice as important as a supplier than as a market; and by the later 1970s, after the effects of entering the EEC (and, in particular, the CAP) had become clear, Britain had become three times as important as a supplier of imports to Australia as she was as a market for Australia’s exports. Australia’s Exports to Britain From taking over a third of Australia’s exports in the first half of the 1950s, Britain’s share fell to about an eighth by the late 1960s, and then to less than a twentieth in the later 1970s. The preferences granted by Britain under the Ottawa agreement during the 1930s to Australia’s exports—mainly to food exports—raised Britain’s share in Australia’s total exports to about half. Many of these preferences were ‘specific’ (that is, a fixed money value per unit by weight or volume), so that the inflation of the war and post-war period reduced their real value. The meat agreement between the two countries kept up Britain’s share in the immediate post-war years, but by the mid-’fifties it had fallen to about a third. But the main fall in Britain’s share occurred after she entered the EEC and applied the Common Agricultural Policy; for this resulted not merely in Australia losing her preferences in the British market, but in the erection of an ‘anti-preference’ against non-EEC countries, so that by the end of the 1970s Britain had ceased to be a significant market for Australian butter, cheese and sugar, after having been the largest market for them as recently as the 1960s. But Britain remained Australia’s largest market for preserved fruit, and shared with Canada the position of leading market for fresh and dried fruits. But, in all, Britain took only about 2 per cent of Australia’s food exports by the late 1970s, Japan taking nearly a quarter and the U.S.A. nearly a fifth. Whereas most of the fall in Britain’s share in Australia’s foodstuffs could be attributed to the loss of preferences and Britain’s adherence to the Common Agricultural Policy after Britain had entered the EEC, the fall in Britain’s share in wool exports was due to the decline in Britain’s importance as a wool-textile producer. By the end of the 1970s, Britain was a market for Australian wool of about the same significance as Belgium or Poland, with Russia and Japan taking over half the clip between them.


By the late 1970s, exports of mineral-based products had become by far the most important exports of Australia to Britain, making up no less than threefifths of the total (compared with only about a third of Australia’s exports to all countries). Non-ferrous metals alone made up two-fifths of all Australia’s exports to Britain and metal ores another third, with coal exports, at about a tenth of the total, representing nearly as much as did wool. Britain’s Exports to Australia From nearly half of Australia’s imports in the early 1950s, Britain’s share had fallen to just over a tenth by the later 1970s. This fall was partly associated with the reduction in Britain’s share in world output and manufactured exports, but that factor alone would appear to have accounted for rather less than half the reduction over that period in Britain’s share. During the 1950s, when Australia was applying tight import controls (which tended to protect the established suppliers), and especially during the first half of the 1950s, when very tight controls were being imposed on imports from North America, Britain’s share was relatively well maintained. But it fell sharply—even more than did Britain’s share in world exports of manufactures—during the 1960s, after the general import controls had been removed at the beginning of the 1960s, and imports from North America liberalized. These factors were largely responsible for the fall from about a third in the late 1950s to about a fifth in the late 1960s—by which date some of the preferences accorded to Britain had been reduced; and Britain’s share halved again by the end of the 1970s, as many (though not all) preferences were eliminated after Britain entered the EEC. INVISIBLE TRANSACTIONS The wide range of transactions for various forms of services and investment income usually attract far less attention than those involving merchandise trade. These ‘invisible’ transactions are aptly named, for to ascertain the significance of these transactions between the two countries one has to examine the details of Australia’s balance of payments statistics; and only for the most recent decade have the statistics of these transactions been analysed in sufficient detail by country to enable an accurate estimate to be made of their role in economic relationships between the two countries. For the 1950s and the 1960s, however, these figures are available in less detail, but they are adequate for reasonable estimates to be made of these transactions between Britain and Australia for those earlier years. The two countries have played proportionately larger roles in the total invisible transactions of each of them than they have played in each other’s merchandise trade throughout the period since World War II (and one supposes that this was still more true during the earlier periods, for which the data are not available). In the 1950s Australia’s invisible payments to Britain represented


about half of the total of such payments by Australia to all countries; whereas her imports of merchandise from Britain represented only about a third to two-fifths of the total. Similarly, Australia’s invisible receipts from Britain amounted to something like a half to two-thirds of those from all countries, whereas her merchandise exports to Britain during that decade constituted no more than about 30–40 per cent of the total. In the most recent year for which data are available, 1976/7, Britain’s share in Australia’s invisible payments was as much as a quarter of the total, whereas her share in Australia’s merchandise imports had fallen to only just over a tenth; whilst Britain’s invisible payments to Australia amounted to over a fifth of the total of all such receipts by Australia, whereas her share in Australia’s merchandise exports had by then fallen to less than a twentieth. Of Britain’s total invisible receipts from all countries, invisible credits accruing from Australia appear to have represented about 6–7 per cent of the total, even as recently as the middle and later 1970s, whilst only 3–4 per cent of the total of Britain’s visible exports went to Australia in those years. The decline in the importance of merchandise trade between the two countries since the early 1950s—in terms of both value and volume for Australia’s exports and in terms of volume for her imports—was accompanied by a rapid rise in invisible transactions between them. (Of course, this rise in invisible transactions was in large measure the result of inflation.) The result was that whereas in the early 1950s invisible trade had accounted for only about a quarter of all current account transactions between the two countries, in 1975/6 and 1976/7 (the two most recent years for which data are available) invisible transactions between the two countries had actually come to exceed in value those relating to merchandise trade. This remarkable transformation in the structure of current account transactions between the two countries seems to justify in the present context devoting more attention to these invisible items than might otherwise have been appropriate. The two most important invisible items by way of payments by Australia to Britain (each of them accounting for about a quarter of Australia’s invisible payments to Britain) throughout the period were those for transportation and the investment income accruing to Britain (including the unremitted profits of British firms in Australia). Transportation credits to Australia—largely by way of charges to British ships in Australian ports—were consistently the main item in the other direction, followed closely by ‘private transfers’, much of which consisted of the funds brought with them by British migrants to Australia. Payments to Britain connected with travel were also an important and growing item in the mid-1970s and were probably still more important in 1977/8 and 1978/9 (for which years figures are not available at the time of writing) in view of the rapid recent expansion in air travel from Australia to Britain. As with merchandise trade, however, invisible payments by Britain to Australia fell sharply by comparison with payments in the other direction. Just as Australia’s merchandise trade deficit with Britain expanded greatly over the


course of the 1970s (from some $A200–300 million in the early 1970s to over $A600 million by the later 1970s), so the invisible deficit that Australia had always run with Britain rose from just under $A400 million at the start of the decade to no less than $A900 million in 1976/7 (and presumably a good deal more in the two subsequent years). In contrast to the relative insignificance of Britain as a merchandise trade partner for Australia in the later 1970s, Australia’s invisible payments to Britain, even in the late 1970s, remained larger than those to any other country (although by then total invisible payments to the U.S.A. were not far behind those to Britain). Moreover, despite Britain’s small share in total exports to Australia she still earned more on total current transactions from Australia than did any other country in 1976/7 except the U.S.A. (despite Japan’s considerably larger merchandise exports). About a fifth of Australia’s total current debits to other countries accrued to Britain even as late as 1976/7, and about a tenth of all Australia’s current account credits accrued from Britain. Clearly, then, despite the dramatic fall in the relative importance of merchandise trade between the two countries, invisible transactions between them remained so much more significant in size than their merchandise trade that total current transactions between them remained in the later 1970s of appreciably greater relative significance than that of visible trade alone. Of Australia’s total current account debits in 1976/7, about one-sixth accrued to Britain; whilst about one-twelfth of all Australia’s current account credits in that year were on transactions with Britain. CAPITAL ACCOUNT TRANSACTIONS As with invisible transactions, capital flows from Britain to Australia have come in recent years to represent a much higher proportion of total transactions between the two countries than in earlier decades. In the latest year for which full figures are at present available (1976/7) the flow of private investment from Britain in Australian enterprises (including ploughed-back profits) represented nearly a quarter of Australia’s receipts from Britain by way of all private transactions (current and capital). By contrast, in the 1950s the inflow of capital represented only about a tenth of Australia’s total receipts from Britain, and in the later 1960s about one fifth of the total. Like invisible transactions, capital flows from Britain to Australia had thus been very much better sustained than had merchandise trade between the two countries. At the same time, just as Britain’s share in Australia’s current account transactions fell markedly over the post-war period, so Britain’s share in the total inflow of capital to Australia during the 1970s was very much less than in earlier years. During the 1950s the share of North American capital had begun to rise, though it was still only about half as great as the annual rate of inflow from Britain. During the first half of the 1960s, however, the proportion coming from


North America overtook that coming from Britain, and in the second half of that decade it substantially exceeded the inflow of British capital, partly as a result of the controls imposed by Britain (for the first time) on the flow of capital to sterling counties, including Australia, from 1966 onwards. The advent of the Australian mineral boom in the late 1960s saw a very sharp increase in lending by Britain by way of fixed-interest loans to finance the development of major mineral projects, a good deal of these loans being repaid in the first half of the 1970s. The U.S.A. also participated on a large scale in financing these mineral developments: and direct investment in Australian companies by North American firms continued during the 1970s to rise faster than that from Britain. Whereas in the 1950s Britain had provided about twothirds of the longterm capital entering Australia, and in the first half of the 1960s it had provided about half, in the later 1960s and the 1970s Britain provided only about a third of the total. The flow of direct investment from Britain to Australia has been significant in the context of Britain’s own total direct overseas investment, having been of the order of an eighth of the total in the period since World War II. As a member of the sterling area Australia benefited from the absence of controls over the flow of capital from Britain to sterling countries until 1966, but from the later 1960s the mineral boom in Australia proved a sufficient attraction to British capital for this flow to continue for some years at about the same relative significance to Britain as in earlier years: Britain’s earnings from direct investment in Australia in the 1970s were also about an eighth of Britain’s total earnings on direct investment from all countries. In addition, the earnings on the fixed-interest loans from Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s added further substantial amounts to Britain’s total earnings from investment in Australian enterprises in the 1970s. Investment in Australia by Industry It is not possible from published data to analyse by industry the flow of investment from Britain to Australia: but such an analysis is available for the total inflow of capital into Australian enterprises from all countries overseas, and the broad changes in the direction of these flows by industry give a reasonable indication of important changes from the mid-1960s onwards in the industrial distribution of British investment in Australia. Whereas in the 1950s and the earlier 1960s it had been overwhelmingly in manufacturing and services, from 1964/5 onwards the proportion of overseas investment in Australia going into minerals began to rise sharply; it had been less than a twentieth of the total up to 1964/5, in which year its share doubled, and by the early 1970s it had risen to about a third. An almost equally remarkable—but almost unnoticed—change was that, whereas from the late 1960s onwards the level of overseas investment in Australian manufacturing industry began to fall (even in terms of current


values), investment in ‘other’ industries (that is, broadly speaking, the services sector) began to exceed substantially the inflow into manufacturing, and even in certain years of the 1970s that in mining. Of the services industries, banking and commerce attracted the largest amounts of overseas capital. In 1976/7 investment going into these industries even exceeded that into mining and manufacturing taken together; and it seems likely that this was true also in 1977/ 8 and 1978/9. By the end of the 1970s, this sector had come to represent about 45 per cent of the cumulative total of all overseas direct investment in Australia. Naturally, this change in the direction of capital by industry affected also the level of earnings of overseas investment in different Australian industries. The mineral developments began to yield a substantially higher income to overseas capital during the first half of the 1970s, but even in 1976/7 this still accounted for less than a quarter of all earnings on direct overseas investment in Australia, whereas earnings on manufacturing still made up as much as two-fifths of the total. But the rapid rise in earnings from the services sector—notably oil distribution and commerce—raised earnings from these industries even above those in manufacturing in 1975/6. British investment has presumably participated to a full extent in the relatively rapid growth of overseas investment (and the earnings on it) in mining and services industries in Australia during the 1970s, and in the relative slowing down of overseas investment in Australian manufacturing. Even so, Britain’s earnings on investment in Australian companies rose very much less rapidly during the 1970s than did those accruing the U.S.A. Government Overseas Borrowing The total of the outstanding value of Australian government securities repayable in overseas currencies changed relatively little during the 1960s and early 1970s, and was therefore falling substantially in real terms. Throughout this period Australia’s needs for overseas capital were being met by the substantial inflow of direct (and later also fixed-interest) capital into manufacturing, and, especially in the later years, into mining and services. But there was a sharp net outflow of private capital in 1974/5, 1975/6 and 1976/7, associated with the end of the mineral boom and the coming of the world recession, as well as with fears about the exchange rate of the Australian dollar. The gap in capital inflow was filled from 1976 onwards by very large government overseas borrowing from a number of countries, including West Germany; but there continued to be net repayments of Australian government debt outstanding in London. In contrast to the role of the United Kingdom capital market in providing capital for Australian governments in earlier periods of Australia’s history, therefore, Britain was not a source of capital for the Australian government in the post-war period; and, indeed, net repayments of Australian loans outstanding in London have taken place fairy regularly during the years since World War II. Income payable to Britain on Australian public


securities accordingly fell by the end of the 1970s to an almost negligible figure; the largest flows of these interest payments had by then come to accrue to the U.S.A., West Germany and Switzerland, which between them earned about ninetenths of the total in the later 1970s, whereas only something under a tenth accrued to Britain. AUSTRALIA AND STERLING Up to the early 1970s one of the most important economic links between Australia and Britain was Australia’s membership of the sterling area, one principal element in which was that Australia held most (indeed, until the 1960s nearly all) of her international reserves in the form of sterling in London, mainly in British government securities. On the other hand, Britain refrained from imposing controls over payments to the other sterling countries (until 1966, when so-called ‘voluntary’ controls were imposed) although controls had been imposed on the flow of capital to non-sterling countries throughout the war and post-war period. In the course of the 1960s, however, when the exchange rate for sterling was under increasing suspicion, Australia, like other sterling countries, gradually diversified her reserves. This was done (at least so far as Australia was concerned) with commendable circumspection, unobtrusiveness and gradualness; so that it could not reasonably be argued that Australia was placing undue stress on sterling by any massive and rapid movement into other currencies. In contrast to the arrangements whereby Britain gave an exchange rate guarantee of certain claims on her held by the other members of the European Monetary Agreement, it was pointed out by Australians that Australia received no sort of exchange rate guarantee against the windfall loss that would be sustained in terms of other currencies if sterling were devalued.2 Menzies apparently pointed this out to Macmillan—but the upshot was only a revision of the European Monetary Agreement in such a way as to virtually remove the guarantee—instead of an amendment of the sterling area arrangements in a way that could have strengthened them. If the more logical alternative of a reasonable exchange-rate guarantee had been built into the sterling system earlier in the 1960s, the subsequent large-scale movement out of sterling by many holders of that currency might have been avoided; and the justification for the opposition within Britain to the use of sterling as an international currency would have been thereby diminished. For what British observers were really—and rightly— concerned about was the fear of large and rapid withdrawals or conversions of sterling by major holders. Indeed, so long as sterling was firmly held, the use of sterling as a reserve could only benefit Britain; for most of it represented a fairly long-term loan to her, much of it at shortterm rates of interest. When, at last, after massive withdrawals of sterling by a number of countries in the late 1960s, Britain agreed to the introduction of an exchange rate guarantee, this occurred only under pressure from a group of non-sterling


countries, from whom lines of credit for Britain were being negotiated. But by then it was too late to do much more than gradually wind up the sterling area. A considerable diversification of the form of Australia’s international reserves took place gradually over the course of the 1960s, when sterling was under increasing suspicion. In 1968 (after the 1967 devaluation of sterling had precipitated a rapid further movement out of sterling by some sterling countries) a set of formal agreements between Britain and the other sterling area countries gave the holders of official sterling some degree of protection against the possibility of future devaluations of sterling against the US dollar, on condition that they each held at least a stipulated proportion of their reserves in the form of sterling. For Australia this proportion was 40 per cent (and somewhat less than this after the initial creation of Special Drawing Rights—a new type of international reserves in the form of claims on the International Monetary Fund— in 1969/70). Australia received payments under these agreements up to and including 1973/4. These agreements expired in that year, after which there seems to have been a further sharp reduction in Australia’s sterling reserves (to judge from the interest payments accruing to Australia from Britain in the middle years of the 1970s, for which reasonably close estimates can be made from published data). (The figures for the sterling holdings in Australia’s total reserves are not published for the years since 1973/4.) By 1976/7 US dollar holdings represented over a third of Australia’s total reserves or over half of the foreign exchange component of them; whereas sterling probably represented about a tenth of the foreign exchange holdings—with the rest being spread over a number of other currencies. Gold, which had represented less than a twentieth of the reserves as recently as the early 1970s, had come to represent nearly half of the recorded value of the total reserves by the later 1970s—the proportion rising sharply when it was first revalued at close to market prices in mid-1976. Even before this, gold reserves had come to represent about a tenth of the total. The upshot of the gradual reduction in Australia’s holdings of sterling in the 1960s, and the dramatic reduction of them in the 1970s after the ending of the sterling area agreements, was thus that sterling had by the later 1970s become only one among many currencies held by Australia—with gold and US dollars between them making up the majority of the country’s reserves.

2

See R.I.Downing and J.O.N.Perkins, ‘Australia’ in the symposium on ‘The Future of the Sterling Area’, Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Statistics, 1959, pp. 262–3. The point is argued more fully in J.O.N.Perkins, The Sterling Area, the Commonwealth and World Economic Growth, Occasional Paper No. 11, University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 85–9. The arrangements that were subsequently established are appraised in the 2nd edition of the same publication, published in 1970 (pp. 121–6).


Migration as a Source of Human Capital Over the years since World War II the large numbers of migrants from Britain to Australia provided Australia with a considerable amount of human capital—at the cost to Australia of the limited amount of official financial assistance provided for some of these immigrants (most of it in the earlier years of the period). The costs incurred by Britain in the education and rearing of these immigrants thus effectively provided Australia with considerable amounts of human capital equipped to add to the output of goods and services, with relatively little by way of cost to Australia for their further training, and a minimum of difficulties (linguistic and other) in the course of their assimilation. This flow of human capital is not really analogous to a financial flow of capital, in that it does not yield a return to the country of origin—apart from the relatively small sums by way of subsequent immigrants’ remittances, against which might be set the flow of funds brought with the immigrants. (Total private transfers to Australia from Britain have usually been about twice as large as transfers in the opposite direction—which include immigrants’ remittances.) Of course there are intangible benefits to the country of origin by way of the cultural and family ties that result from such migration; and these may take a more tangible form if they influence the migrants’ preferences for British goods and services as against competitors’ products. But such possible benefits to Britain probably dwindled after the years of heavy migration and their immediate aftermath. Conclusion By comparison with the past, Britain’s economic ties with Australia had dwindled to relatively low levels by the later 1970s. But by comparison with Britain’s share in world output or trade they were still considerable, and capital flows and invisible transactions were still growing fairly strongly. The artificially favourable factor of preferences had almost vanished—and neither country needed to be unduly concerned about that. But it had been replaced by a new artificially unfavourable (and, in itself, unquestionably harmful) factor for both countries, in the form of the substitution in Britain’s import bill of high-cost foodstuffs from Europe for lower-cost foodstufis from Australia. In other respects, however, the growing range of Australia’s economic ties with countries other than Britain were both natural and welcome. As in other aspects of international relationships between the two countries, perhaps this new pattern of trade and other payments could thus be reasonably seen as facilitating smoother and more equal relationships between the two countries.

INDEX

Aborigines, 18–19, 147 Administrations, 117, 118, 128, 130, 132, 133; see also Colonies, govern-ment Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA), 80, 83, 84, 85, 87 Arthur, Sir George, 3–9, 12, 13 Australia-New Zealand Agreement or Canberra Pact (ANZAC), 71 Australian, New Zealand and British operations in Malaya (ANZAM), 76, 79, 80, 81 Australian, New Zealand, British Joint Force in Malayasia and Singapore (ANZUK), 87–8 Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A. Security treaty (ANZUS), 76–7, 83

Colonialism, 135–9, 142–4, 146, 148, 149 Colonies, 1–38, 57–64; government, 1–20, 32–5; courts, 145–51; legislatures, 3–5, 8–9, 12–16, 145; revenues, 2, 4, 5, 6, 14, 16 Commonwealth (‘British’), 55–6, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 88, 91, 96–100, 109, 114, 151; see also Empire Commonwealth Strategic Reserve, 78, 80, 81, 87; see also BCOF Communism, 72, 75, 79, 80, 85, 88 Convicts, 4–5, 6, 8, 13, 103, 144 Courts, system of, 117, 125, 147–50; Court of Appeal, 149–53; High Court of Australia, 150–60; House of Lords, 149–56, 159, 160, 161; Privy Council, 146, 149–56, 156–9; see also Law, Legal pro-fession

Bourke, Sir Richard, 3, 5–10, 13, 15 British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), 72, 73, 81 Bruce, Lord, 39–56, 99 ‘Bush’, 136, 139, 140–2

Darling, Sir Ralph, 5, 7, 8, 15 Defence, 32, 34–7, 42, 46–7, 50–1, 64–5, 71–89, 94–5, 98–9; see also AMDA, ANZAC, ANZAM, ANZUK, ANZUS, BCOF, SEATO Deference, lack of, 128, 129 Diplomatic Service, Australian, 42, 49 Dominions Office, 41, 44, 46, 47, 52

Cabinets, 117, 118, 125, 126, 128–32, 147; British War Cabinet, Austra-lians in, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54–5 Canada, 1, 2, 4, 10, 15, 18, 27, 37, 49, 91, 98, 139, 150, 182 Casey, R.G., 42, 46, 48 Catholicism, 59, 63, 64, 95 Chifley, J.B., 72, 73, 74, 107 Churchill, 44, 53, 54, 55, 95, 106 Colombo Plan, 75 Colonial Office, 1–20, 32–4, 35, 66

Eden, Sir Anthony, 53, 95 Education, ix–xiii, 135, 162–79; pri-mary, ix, x, 170, 172, 177, 178;

185

186 INDEX

secondary, x–xii, 169–71, 173–4, 177; university, x, 153, 164–9; re-ligion in, xi, xii, 13, 95; ideas and research, 170, 172, 175; adminis-tration, 174–7; Oxford, ix, xii, 59, 61, 62, 68; Oxbridge, 164, 165 Elections, 126–7, 147 Empire, x, 3, 21, 31, 32, 34–8, 41, 44, 55, 71, 91, 96–7, 99–100, 106, 147, 148, 149, 151; see also Commonwealth European Economic Community, 114, 180, 181, 182, 183 Evatt, Dr H.V., 44, 48, 49 Exports (from Australia), 24, 93, 94, 180–3 Federalism, 121, 125, 126, 128, 130, 156–9 Foreign/External Affairs, Depart-ment of, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48 Foreign Office, British, 43, 46, 47 Foreign policy, Australian, 39–56, 71–89, 91, 94 Fraser, Malcolm, 98, 100 Gipps, Sir George, 11, 15–19 Glenelg, Lord, 2, 9, 10, 15 Goderich, Lord, 1, 4, 6, 7, 14 Gold, 104, 148 Governor-General, 1–20, 117, 118, 121–4 Grey, Lord, 2, 6, 17 Hankey, Lord, 46, 53–4 High Commissioner, Australian in London, 39–56, 97 ‘Home’, see ‘Mother country’ Hughes, W.M., 42, 67, 94, 99 Imports (into Australia), 24–5, 92–3, 180– 2, 183 Indonesia, 82, 83, 84, 85, 108 Investment (in Australia), 25, 93, 94, 186– 8 Invisible transactions, 183–5 Ireland, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 68, 91, 95, 96, 105

Japan, 71–2, 90, 168, 181–3, 185 Kendall, Henry, 136, 138, 140, 141 Kimberley, Lord, 21, 24, 32, 38 Korea, 75, 76, 180, 181 Land policy, 2, 5, 15–18, 147 Law, common, 145–61; statute, 145–6; appeals, 156–9, 161; key cases, 149–58; uniformity of de-cisions, 150–6; see also Courts, Legal profession Lawson, Henry, 136, 138, 140–1 Legal profession, 62–3, 66, 153, 160–1; see also Courts, Law Lyons, J.A., 43, 45, 50 Mails, 23, 30, 32–3 Malaya, 71–89, 168 Menzies, Sir Robert, 41, 43, 45, 48, 73, 75, 76, 79, 81, 83, 84, 91, 94, 95, 158 Migration, British, 6, 101–16, 146, 168, 190–1; non-British, 106, 108–9, 110, 111, 112; from Australia, 113; within Australia, 104–5; assisted passages, 103–4, 106–7; sex-ratios in, 103, 106 ‘Mother country’, x, 3, 14, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 57, 61, 63, 68, 70, 91 Murray, Gilbert and Hubert, 57–70 Nationalism, Australian, 96, 135–9, 142–4, 145, 148, 156 Neilson, John S., 136, 138, 140 New Zealand, 26, 27, 31, 32, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 87, 97, 104, 150 Pacific, 32, 38, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78, 83, 88, 168 Papua New Guinea, 32, 33, 58, 65–8, 71– 2, 84 Parliaments, 117, 118, 119, 126, 128, 129, 156–9; see also Second Chambers Parties, political, 118, 119, 126–32

INDEX 187

Press, 2, 8, 22, 23, 27–31, 36 Referendum, 124, 125 Republicanism, Australian, 97 Richardson, Henry H., 136, 140, 143 Russell, Lord John, 12, 13, 14 Second Chambers, 124, 125–6, 127 Senate, see Second Chambers Shipping, 23, 33, 185 Singapore, 43, 45, 72, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85–6, 88, 99 South Africa, 35–7, 64–6, 89, 91, 98 South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 77, 78, 81, 83, 85 Stanley, Lord, 12, 13, 14, 17 Statute of Westminster, 41, 99, 145, 147 Stephen, James, 1, 2, 9 Sterling area, 186, 188–90 Telegraphic communications, 21–38 Trade, 24–6, 180–3; see also Invisible transactions, Imports, Exports U.S.A., 45, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 96, 148, 160, 165, 168, 181–3, 185, 186, 188, 190 Vietnam, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85 White, Patrick, 139, 140, 143 Wool, 15, 24, 183 World War I, x, 89, 91, 92, 97, 106 World War II, 40, 43, 45, 75, 89, 94, 95, 107

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