The 'Whig' View of Australian History and Other Essays (Academic Monographs)

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Author: A.W. Martin

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The ‘Whig’ View of Australian History and other essays

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The ‘Whig’ View of Australian History and other essays

by A. W. Martin Introduction by John Hirst Edited by J. R. Nethercote

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2007 Text © A. W. Martin 2007 Edited by John Nethercote Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2007 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Copyedited by Caroline Williamson Designed by Phil Campbell Typeset in Utopia by J&M Typesetters Printed in Australia by the Design and Print Centre, University of Melbourne National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Martin, A. W. (Allan William), 1926–2002. The ’Whig’ view of Australian history and other essays. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 9780522853872 (pbk.). ISBN 9780522853889 (e-book). 1. Menzies, Robert, Sir, 1894–1978—Political and social views. 2. Australia—History—19th century. 3. Australia—History—20th century. 4. Australia— Politics and government—19th century. 5. Australia— Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. 994.05

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Contents Preface Beryl Rawson Introduction: Allan Martin, Historian John Hirst Abbreviations

vii ix xvi

1.

The ‘Whig’ View of Australian History: A Document

2.

The Changing Perspective on Australian History

28

3.

Australia and the Hartz ‘Fragment’ Thesis

53

4.

Henry Parkes: In Search of the ‘Actual Man Underneath’

74

5.

A New Middle Class? A Note on the 1950s

101

6.

Menzies the Man

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7.

Menzies and Appeasement: Understanding Provenance in Reading Historical Documents

139

An Australian Prime Minister in Ireland: R. G. Menzies, 1941

155

R. G. Menzies and the Murray Committee

176

8. 9.

1

10. R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis

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11. Speech is of Time

239

Bibliography of A. W. Martin’s Writings

260

Index

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Preface Beryl Rawson, Professor Emerita, Classics Department, Australian National University This collection presents some of the writing of my husband Allan Martin which seems to be of enduring significance and which reflects something of the range of his work, including some of the less accessible pieces. The collection reflects the development of some of his ideas, over a period of forty years, about Australian historiography and society, and is thus a window onto Australian historical debates of that period. Allan’s wide interests, collegiality and generosity made him willing to contribute to other people’s collections and seminars, even when publication was not in mainstream outlets. It was to a teachers’ journal that he finally gave ‘The “Whig” View of Australian History’. Having briefly been a secondary school teacher himself, he knew the importance of including teachers in the lively debates of his profession, and of stimulating curiosity and debate about Australian history amongst school teachers and students. A similar passion to convey an understanding of Australian history to a wide, popular readership drove the general editors and volume editors of the Australian Bicentennial project which resulted in the multi-volume Australians: A Historical Library in 1987. The editorial and writing work took its toll of many, and it delayed Allan’s making any effective beginning to his projected biography of Robert Menzies. The only piece here which is associated with the Bicentennial project is the working paper ‘A New Middle Class?’, which is of continuing relevance to our own society but which is not as easily accessible as are the chapters of the major publication, Australians. Publication of the piece on provenance, ‘Menzies and Appeasement’, was delayed by his concern for audience. He despaired of what he saw as a dishonest beat-up in the popular press of an incident concerning Menzies and the mood on the eve of the Second World War. He wanted to provide the public with the documentation and the context to understand those matters better. Controversy and

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conflicting views would remain—that is the stuff of a lively intellectual climate—but he strove to have that based on proper use of evidence and context and an honest wish to understand. These principles guided his life as a teacher, administrator and scholar. I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who suggested and encouraged this project and helped in various ways. Thanks are due to the editors and publishers who held copyright of some of the original pieces, who all generously granted permission to republish here. Stephanie Hancock ably arranged scanning of the contents and preparation of copy for this book. Edith Binkowski likewise shouldered responsibility for preparing the index. Thanks are also due to Melbourne University Publishing, with whom Allan had a long publishing history, for their commitment to this volume and for making the process a pleasure. Most of all, my deep appreciation is due to John Nethercote for his friendship with Allan and his professional judgment and expertise in editing this volume.

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Introduction: Allan Martin, Historian John Hirst, Scholar Emeritus, La Trobe University As a citizen Allan Martin was a quiet supporter of the Labor Party; as a scholar he worked to downplay its role in Australia’s history. He would not have seen anything odd in this because as a social scientist he took his task to be simply to get the history right. With his political sympathies unchanged, he ended his career by writing a biography of Sir Robert Menzies with the support and assistance of Menzies’ daughter. Allan had the Labor Party in his sights in the title essay of this collection, ‘The “Whig” View of Australian History’. Here he declared his unwillingness to believe that ‘some readily identifiable class or party or cause can mysteriously hold in its keeping the only truth essential for understanding the whole society’. It is hard now to imagine, but when Allan started to write history it was a commonly held view that the Labor Party was the first and only true political party; that before its formation in 1891 politics was a wasteland, and that it alone was the vehicle for realising Australia’s progressive destiny. Allan’s lasting mark on Australian historiography was the demolition of these views. The ‘Whig’ approach to history was first identified in the writing of English history. The Whigs emerged as a parliamentary grouping in the 1670s in the time of King Charles II. The King had no legitimate children; after his death the throne would pass to his brother James, who was a Catholic. The Whigs wanted to exclude James from the throne; opposed to them were the Tories who thought it was no part of parliament’s role to choose the monarch. The Whigs failed to exclude James, but on his coming to the throne he realised all their fears, and within three years he was forced into exile. His Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William were installed in his place and made subject to the control of parliament. To those writing English history in the nineteenth century, the Whigs seemed to have the future in them; they were supporters of the cause that led to England becoming eventually a liberal and then a democratic state. But the Whigs of the seventeenth century were far from being liberals

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let alone democrats. To ignore their changing motivations and to identify them simply as the party of progress that was realising England’s destiny was to write very poor history. This was the Whig fallacy that was nailed by Herbert Butterfield in his book, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). ‘The “Whig” View of Australian History’, given at seminars around the country in the 1960s, was the most influential paper Allan wrote. He undermined Labor’s privileged place in the historiography by linking it to an approach that had been identified and discredited in England. But as always with Allan, it was a gentle demolition. He praised the historians he was attacking. He did not want to deny the importance of the Labor Party; rather he wanted to take the whole world in which it emerged seriously. The other parties and groupings could not be ignored. He refused to accept that a strong Labor Party was to be explained by the absence or weakness of a middle class. There was too much evidence of the presence in society of a middle class for it to be overlooked in the accounts of politics. Support for progressive legislation came from its ranks as well as from the working class. Allan learnt his history at the University of Sydney. His first substantial research, conducted for his MA (1952), was an examination of New South Wales politics during the government of George Reid, who was premier from 1894 to 1899. By the very choice of this subject, Allan was putting himself outside the mainstream. To the historians of the Labor Party, Reid owed his position to the Labor Party, which held the balance of power, and any progressive achievements were put down to Labor’s influence. To the historians of Federation Reid was a traitor because of his lukewarm support for that cause as typified in his famous ‘Yes–No’ speech at the first Federal referendum in 1898. Reid was a free-trader and hence in Victorian eyes, to whom protection was the radical cause, he must necessarily be conservative or at best unreliable. It has often been said that Victoria created the Commonwealth and imposed its policies on it; the historians followed in this path and imposed a Victorian view on the history of the Federal movement. This left only a dishonourable place to George Reid, and his natural concern as to whether free trade could survive in the Commonwealth was not appreciated.

x

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Allan’s study of Reid showed him to be a masterful politician, relying on Labor support but not beholden to that party, and crafting his own bold programme of radical reform. Free trade had become a shibboleth in New South Wales, but in practice the government still levied some customs duties to garner revenue. Reid was a complete free-trader; his plan, which he could not quite accomplish, was to abolish duties altogether and make Sydney a free port. To compensate for the loss of revenue he planned to levy direct taxes on land and income for the first time. This was fiercely resisted by wealthy people and by the protectionists whom Reid typed as the conservative party—a reversal of the Victorian scene and one that Allan savoured. Reid was obscenely fat, earthy, worldly, and unemotional about Federation; he was the polar opposite to Alfred Deakin, the ascetic, high-minded Victorian, who treated Federation as a religious cause. Having digested Reid, as it were, Allan was well equipped to see Australian history differently. His doctoral study at the Australian National University (1955) brought Labor’s role into question from another direction: what was politics like in New South Wales before Labor appeared on the scene in 1891? From self-government in the 1850s until the 1890s there were no organised parties and many short-lived governments. This instability seemed to give some credibility to the claim that Labor had brought order and cohesion to politics. Allan discovered the order in politics before 1890, not as the work of parties, but of factions. They had clear leaders and a constellation of both firm and unsteady supporters, and vied with each other and competed for the allegiance of independents in order to gain office. By the 1880s the social circumstances that supported this system were breaking down; more permanent social divisions were emerging, which led to the emergence of two parties, the freetraders and the protectionists. This was a highly significant finding, for it removed Labor’s claim to primacy and novelty. When Allan published his findings a furious debate ensued over whether the parties of the 1880s were truly parties. Allan’s conclusions were drawn from a study of the politics of the 1870s and 1880s. Simultaneously at the University of Sydney Peter Loveday was working for his doctorate on the politics of the 1850s and 1860s. They combined forces and together produced the

Introduction

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book Parliament, Factions and Parties: The First Thirty Years of Responsible Government in New South Wales (1966). It was the survival of the correspondence of Henry Parkes, the master manipulator, that had allowed the mysteries of the faction system to be uncovered. Allan was fascinated by Parkes and the opportunities offered by that ‘hall of mirrors’, the Parkes correspondence. He resolved to master it—a huge labour—and produce a biography. Henry Parkes appeared in 1980. Allan was the first doctoral student to graduate in history from the Australian National University. He had a strong sense of being a pioneer, of working in a new field where there were ‘great uncharted areas’. He recognised the power of the inspired guesses of the historians who had preceded him, but he looked forward to a time when we would do without them and all conclusions would be based on thorough research. Hence Allan’s own reluctance to pronounce definitely when the work remained to be done; he offers, as the readers of these essays will discover, what he calls ‘notes’ or a ‘brief, selective and simplistic overview’ with any speculation being signalled as such. He refused for a long time to allow ‘The “Whig” View of Australian History’ to be published. It circulated in manuscript, copied and recopied on that shiny, slimy and unstable paper which the first photocopiers used. I saw and devoured a copy as a postgraduate student in Adelaide. In Allan’s words this paper was a ‘Thinks piece’ which did not meet his rigorous standards of demonstration and proof. Nor did he want it to be used to type him as a ‘right-wing’ historian opposed to the Left. He finally allowed a journal for teachers to publish it, but insisted that it be labelled ‘A document’, to indicate that it was an occasional piece of no enduring worth. However, Allan was far from being what is labelled a mindless empiricist, a historian who thinks the answers will emerge when all the evidence is in. His first wife was a sociologist and he thought of himself very definitely as a social scientist. He looked to theory for guidance on social, political and individual behaviour, but always warily and properly so, for if theory always had the answers there would be no need for historians to uncover particularities of time, place, person and chance. He was also alert to the insights comparative studies can bring. His respectful critique of Louis Hartz’s book The Founding of New Societies is included in this collection.

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Allan’s characteristic mode of working can best be seen in the essay on the middle class of the 1950s, a new field for him which he entered to make a contribution to the Australian Bicentennial project organised by the Australian National University. He starts with the hard evidence, the census, which turns out not to be an unproblematic guide. He knows Michael Young’s work on the rise of the meritocracy, but he quickly brings forward evidence which contradicts it in the Australian case. He is at his most devastating when he examines a study of the professions in Australia which has references to sixty-seven works, ‘but only four of these deal explicitly with Australia, and only two of that four report actual research findings’. He puts the dilemma he and his colleagues face in moving into a new field in this way: ‘We have to ask what ways there are of avoiding mishmashes of speculation and impressionism on the one hand or, on the other, resort to abstract theory tenuously censored by hard evidence.’ The answer lay through the middle, in more real research, and until that was done Allan was happy as ‘an old-fashioned historian’ to respond to questions with ‘I dunno’. In preparing to write the Parkes biography, Allan read deeply in psychological theory and conducted an honours seminar at La Trobe University in which the theory and the problems thrown up by the Parkes material were argued over. In those halcyon days in the department that Allan founded, other staff were free to sit in on the class. Inga Clendinnen reports in her inaugural Allan Martin lecture that this seminar was ‘the most sustained intellectual adventure’ of her life. Allan’s explorations into how a life should be understood are recorded in the essay ‘In Search of the “Actual Man Underneath”’. Allan himself regretted that the biography he produced was much closer to an orthodox life and times than he had originally planned. In part he was driven in this direction because he was a pioneer. In England, as he explained, a bold reinterpreter of a leading historical personage can assume that the life is well known. Even in outline Parkes’ life was not well known, and until Allan had worked through all the evidence the details were completely unknown. So the careful social scientist thought it was his first duty to lay out the life. Others, he hoped, would later give bold or speculative interpretations. What he did not say is that the comprehensive account that he has provided will be an effective reality check on such

Introduction

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productions. His conclusion on the use of theory for a biographer was that it can offer sensitisation rather than system. How Allan saw himself and his profession in mid-career is well conveyed in the essay written in 1974 ‘The Changing Perspective on Australian History’. He knows all the important books; and he sees himself and his colleagues working jointly to deepen understanding on a more or less agreed agenda for the study of Australian society. That agreement was about to dissolve. There was the new interest in gender and race and the growing lack of interest in high politics in favour of social history and the capturing of the experience of ordinary people. More damaging to Allan’s social science project was the open declaration by the Young Turks that objectivity was a mirage and that all history was disguised ideology. In the second half of his professional life Allan had to deal with scholars who made claims based on only partial use of evidence and sometimes on very little evidence at all. As a supervisor and collaborator in joint enterprises he maintained his high standards, gently pushing the ideologues back to the evidence. In private he was sometimes angry and despairing at the unsubstantiated claims made about Parkes and Menzies. He prepared a response to work of this sort just before he died. It is printed here for the first time as ‘Menzies and Appeasement: Understanding Provenance in Reading Historical Documents’. The great work of his last years was the two-volume biography of Menzies. Allan was not particularly interested in Menzies but when offered access to all his papers he saw a great opportunity for he suspected that a good deal of what was said or believed about Menzies was probably false or only partly true. Menzies, as a recent figure, was well known, and the book’s quiet achievement is to show a far more varied man than the stereotypes allowed, who is allowed to emerge in this account because of the biographer’s commitment to ‘patience and generosity in judgment’. How brilliant is Donald Horne’s characterisation of Menzies as ‘a frozen Edwardian’, but can that judgment stand when we learn from ‘An Australian Prime Minister in Ireland’ that Menzies liked De Valera and that his final judgment on British– Irish relations was: ‘They are mad in Dublin, madder still in Belfast, and on this question maddest of all at Downing Street’. I first knew Allan at the University of Adelaide in the mid 1960s when he was the supervisor of my PhD thesis. He read that and

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everything else of substance that I wrote. I began to trespass on his turf when I wrote on Parkes and New South Wales politics and on Parkes and Federation. He was most generous when my interpretations differed from his own. He did not agree with all I wrote, but when I had assembled what he judged to be compelling evidence he cheerfully gave up his own view. He remained true to his calling. It was always his opinion that I valued most.

Introduction

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Abbreviations AIF—Australian Imperial Force ANA—Australian Natives’ Association AVCC—Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee BMA—British Medical Association CIA—Central Intelligence Agency CPD—Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates CRO—Commonwealth Relations Office FO—Foreign Office MJA—Medical Journal of Australia ML—Mitchell Library NAA—Australian Archives NLA—National Library of Australia PC—Parkes Correspondence, Mitchell Library PRO—Public Record Office SMH—Sydney Morning Herald WEA—Workers’ Educational Association

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1 The ‘Whig’ View of Australian History: A Document

This elderly piece appears here simply as a document; its text (even down to the lack of footnote references) is precisely as first written in 1962 for oral delivery to Section E of that year’s ANZAAS conference. It was prepared as a discussion paper in response to an invitation from the organisers of the Section and was never intended for publication. But it acquired subsequently a somewhat spurious notoriety, some pirated versions were circulated, and it is still sometimes vaguely referred to in discussions of Australian historical writing. Ageing historians’ juvenilia can be embarrassing, and this paper is no exception. It may, however, have some quaint interest in its implicit reflection of the distance Australian studies have travelled in the last twenty years; and for that purpose an accurate text is better for the record than the ambiguity of shadowy unpublished versions. Political history is now unfashionable, and the debate to which I initially addressed myself—how the emergent Labor movement of the nineteenth century should be ‘located’—has been bypassed, or at least decently laid to rest.1 That debate was a product of the postwar flowering of what is now called the ‘old left’ historiography, and was conducted primarily in terms of that ‘positivist–empiricist orthodoxy’ Address to ANZAAS Conference, Section E, 1962. Published in Teaching History, vol. 16, no. 3, 1982, 7–25.

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in which—as younger historians have forcibly told us—my generation had been too carefully trained.2 Behind this paper there is a tinge of indignation at having been labelled ‘counter-revolutionary’, or ‘bourgeois’, merely because one wished to ‘get the record straight’, a reaction which today would be regarded as impossibly naive. Naive too, in these post-Thompson, post-Connell & Irving days, now seems my crude pseudo-Parsonian discussion of class and of the kind of social history that needed to be ‘done’ before politics could be ‘properly’ understood. The emphasis has changed and sophistication has grown mightily. We have seen in the last decade or two the rise of new types of social history whose advances already far outstrip many of the puny recipes one was able to propose in 1962. That is what gives ‘the “Whig” View’ its most dated air, and that, too, is what promises exciting possibilities if historians—surviving empiricist dodoes and new theorists alike— should ever be tempted to turn back and look again at the nineteenthcentury political story. Whether we can talk usefully about ‘the Whig view of Australian history’ is doubtful. I certainly do not wish to start an endless and profitless argument on this point. It might be possible, though, to speak of some ‘whig’ interpretations, if we begin by taking this ambiguous phrase in its broadest sense—to refer to certain received or established notions about a given historical field. In the Australian case, one might arbitrarily identify—on different levels of generality— three types of interpretation that might qualify for the title ‘whig’. I shall discuss them in descending order of generality, and dismiss the first two very briefly—it is with the third that we shall be chiefly concerned. There is, in the field of general Australian history, that bias Professor La Nauze summed up in a sentence in 1959—‘any general account of Australia still seems more or less off-centre to any student outside N.S.W. or Victoria’. It had seemed for so long that a definite pattern had been discerned in the brief history of European settlement in Australia: though emphases naturally varied, the themes treated by a line of interpreters from Sir Keith Hancock to Professor Greenwood and his collaborators were much the same. But now our colleagues in the west and south are sharply reminding us that there has been significant experience beyond Sydney or the bush. Hence,

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for example, the warm greeting that a fellow Western Australian gave to Dr Crowley’s Australia’s Western Third: So many of the themes regarded as more or less basic to Australian history are somehow muted or entirely absent in the west. Capital versus Labour, for instance; after the first lumpers strike in 1899 was settled by a committee of local clergy, trade unions were recognized and arbitration machinery granted without demur by John Forrest’s soundly conservative government. No disputes between squatter and farmer about unlocking the land, no Irish problem, no sectarian rancour bedevilling the issues of education and military conscription. How bucolic, how unsatisfying in its failure to conform to eastern Australian generalisations, how easy to write off this narrative as a chronicle of provincialism! Though we in the east always did think of South Australia as a rather strange place, it has come as something of a shock to learn from Dr Inglis how strange it is, and from Professor Pike how extraordinary— in terms of the received Australian stereotypes—its origins and early development were. How these newer foci of interest will bear upon general history is not surprising when scholars like Mr Morrison and Dr Bolton strip the wrappings off Queensland. But new bearings certainly are evident: who but a man writing in Adelaide would have thought of calling a history of Australia The Quiet Continent, or have tried to open our eyes by firmly setting self-dependent families beside Labour parties in accounting for the peculiar tone of contemporary Australian society? The accumulating material on the separate communities of this continent constitutes, in fact, something of a nightmare for the potential general historian. He must ask himself, for example, how far it is any longer just to speak of an Australian society or tradition. If he does believe he can talk this way, his crucial problem becomes that of explaining the mystery of unity within diversity: at what points, by what ways and under what pressures, the separate colonial societies have tended to gravitate towards a commonality. This is not the crude old problem of nationalism—it is something far more

The ‘Whig’ View of Australian History


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subtle . . . in such matters the inadequacy of eastern (shall we say ‘whiggish?’) themes as levers of explanation is patent enough. But if we admit the eastern blinkers and narrow the focus, we come to a second kind of received view. It is defined for us by Dr Gollan. ‘Australians of the late 19th and early 20th century’ he writes, assumed that the history of Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century was a record of democratic and political advance. By and large this picture was accepted by the historians who, in the years before the second world war, laid the foundations of Australian historiography. But today it is becoming fashionable to question this idea. In part the questioning is the Australian version of English criticism of the Whig interpretation of British history, based on the more detailed examination of the facts than was possible for earlier historians. Dr Gollan tells us that he has written his Radical and Working Class Politics ‘in the belief that the earlier historians were not so very wrong’. It is difficult to identify the writings which call into question the plain fact of this political advance—towards wider democracy and a greater degree of social justice—it is, as Dr Serle has put it, one of the great central facts of Australian history, ‘which only the eccentric can deny’. Strictly within Dr Gollan’s terms of reference, indeed, one would be hard put to contest even the more colourful assertion Mr Fitzpatrick made last year: ‘Recent discussion of Australian historiography does not seem to me to have invalidated the concept of progress which the visiting inspectors from France and America, Albert Metin and Victor S. Clarke, made out fifty or sixty years ago, and which Childe and Evatt and other Australian scholars could still detect later on.’ It has certainly been very properly pointed out that there were limits to this progress, and that it was progress that may have been bought at a high cost. Nor have scholars been lacking to remind us that other themes jostle this one for the centre of the stage—the drama of men’s efforts to tame an intractable environment, or the new encounter on this ancient continent between rival conceptions

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of man’s nature and destiny. But such themes could be admitted by Dr Gollan, without necessarily corrupting his central argument as he defines it in the statement I have quoted. Radical and Working Class Politics, however, exhibits in fact another sort of ‘Whiggism’ not made explicit in Dr Gollan’s prefatory remarks. The outline of political progress reaches its climax in the account of the years between 1891 and 1914. For now the emergent working class builds its Labor party, and in an atmosphere of freshening social conflict, the pace of reform speeds up. Though its class base remains, the new party passes over into the twentieth century softened into a confederation of interests and beliefs, ‘no more and no less than a complex of radical democratic and nationalist aims that were acceptable to the majority of the Australian people’. Just as ordinary Australian working men became in the 1880s the bearers of a strident nationalism compounded of collectivism, racialism and a transmogrified bush ethos, so now the political party becomes the epitome of a positive and distinctive form of Australian democracy. This treatment of this grand climax to the nineteenth century, as you know, is more subtle than this crude outline suggests—but I want here to emphasise the main elements stressed by Dr Gollan. Though it is more sophisticated than that of his predecessors, the model he sets up of political and social development in this period is the received model. It is not too much to say that this model makes the ten years on either side of 1900 for most historians the pivotal point in Australian political history. This ‘halcyon period’, as it has been called, offers the norm by which to assess what came before and after. Thus, Dr Evatt describes how the Labor party ‘gave significance and some coherence to the political life of a country which before 1890 had been controlled in the main by opportunists and demagogues’; though more subtly, Professor Nairn argues much the same way: the coming of the Labor party in New South Wales brought in effect a ‘new political system’, reflecting changed social realities, and therefore essential for the proper working of responsible government. And in discussion of the vicissitudes of twentieth-century politics, the same theme has been uppermost. C. H. Northcott wrote in 1918: The sociological history of the last quarter of a century is therefore the logical development of that of the previous



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century. It is the history of the struggle of a social ideal to manifest itself. That ideal became an impulse to the political organization of a new party and a resolvent of previously existing parties. It formed the watchword of the new party, and gradually, partially and perhaps sullenly secured the grudging acquiescence of other parties. This was a crude foretaste of the illuminating ‘initiative–resistance’ hypothesis sketched out by Sir Keith Hancock. Between that hypothesis—suavely elaborated since by a long line of historians—and the warm-hearted declaration of faith made in 1940 by Brian Fitzpatrick, there is a difference of degree, but not of kind: I take the view that the effort of the organized working class has been—perhaps could not but have been—beyond its class ends an effort to achieve social justice, whereas the possessing classes that have opposed Labour have not, according to my reading, attempted to reform society. My belief is simply that the Labour effort . . . happens to coincide with an effort towards social justice, whereas the effort against Labour has been in opposition to the advancement of society; at least, that is how history has worked out during the last 50 years. We are now dealing with something much more like a ‘Whig’ view of history—in the full Butterfieldian sense—than what Dr Gollan merely calls ‘progress towards democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century’. It seems to me that behind the various views I have just sketched, and implicit in the way they are elaborated in the work of the writers concerned, there lie two assumptions: 1.

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That it is possible to discern in a society’s history some crucial single line of progress, which can be identified by looking for the seeds of the present in the past, and ignoring past events, people, or movements which do not appear to have contributed significantly to this line of progress. Butterfield thought that, in English history, a dominant school of historians had created an orthodoxy in which the content of this line of progress was seen

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to be a particular form of constitutional development. In the Australian case, the established orthodoxy seems sometimes to see a particular form of advance towards social justice and political democracy as constituting the crucial line of progress. 2.

That a certain group or body or movement acts historically as the bearers or agents of the line of progress. Other groups or bodies or movements scarcely count in the story, unless it be either as sounding boards for the agents of progress or as temporary obstacles whose resistance or blindness has to be overcome.

I am concerned here not to attempt to judge these assumptions theoretically, but merely to identify them in order to suggest why it seems appropriate at all to call the usual treatment of radical and labour policies in our pivotal period of Australian history a ‘Whig’ approach. I wish to be understood at this stage to be using the term ‘Whig’ for purposes of definition, not of criticism. It would be idle— perhaps impertinent—not to pay tribute at the outset to the solid research and scholarly sophistication that lie behind the work of contemporary and earlier historians who have concerned themselves with the history of Labor in Australia. If there are parts of their interpretation that sometimes worry one, there are many other parts to which one warms gladly—and certainly no responsible person could contemplate trying to demolish a whole tradition of historical writing by smart manipulation of a theoretical argument about assumptions. Even if that were possible, it would in this case be tipping the baby out in the bathwater with a vengeance. A recent circumstance happens to make it particularly necessary for one to say this. I refer to the publication of a book called Australian Civilization. In the first chapter of this work a ‘Whig’ or ‘standard radical-leftist interpretation of Australian history’ is sketched out and it is said that a counter-revolution, or frontal assault on this interpretation is currently in progress in Australian historiography. As one of those said to be involved in this movement, I expect I am entitled to say that we counter-revolutionaries look to me a rather mixed bunch. Some, I suspect, may not be very happy at being linked by a label with the others, few would be prepared to claim that their primary purpose was to attack the ‘Whig’ position, most would



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admit that, even if there is a counter-revolution in progress, its exponents—with one or two exceptions—have yet to give sustained demonstration of the colour of their money. It would be more accurate to suggest that some modification of the received stereotype is implicit in the questionings of historians interested in areas of society and politics other than the working class and the labour movement—just as such modification may also be implicit in new horizons foreshadowed by the recent establishment of an Association for the Study of Labour History. All would agree that in Australian studies we still look out over great uncharted areas whose exploration may be expected to call into question some old clichés. Consistently, I trust, with what has already been said, I shall in the rest of this essay concern myself principally with one sample area of late nineteenth-century Australian history, and try to suggest ways in which some softening of standard ‘Whig’ interpretations appears to be called for. The main focus of interest will be the circumstances in which Labor emerged as a coherent force in the last decade of the century, and the role it has been taken to have played in the political and social life of that time. Within these general limits, I prefer to talk more particularly about New South Wales than the other colonies. As Dr Gollan has abundantly demonstrated, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to talk coherently, in the pre-Federation period, about Labor in all the colonies at once—a fact too often forgotten in the past, and one whose careful reiteration constitutes one of many important refinements Dr Gollan himself adds to the received canon. As a simple preliminary statement of my main theme, I could do no better than to quote with approval a passage recently written by Mr Bruce Mansfield: Historians of the movement for social reform in late nineteenth century Australia have been operating on too limited a front. They have tended to concentrate on the domestic history of the Labour movement and have overlooked how numerous and diverse the initiatives for social reform were at that time. Almost without discussion a model of our past has been created according to which

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the Labour movement wrested reform from a passive or reluctant community. It is an imperfect model because it fails to do precisely what history exists to do, to situate a movement or act of innovation in its time; to give, as it were, the context for the text. The question to be asked is: what kind of community was it out of which the Labour party came? In one sense, of course, as Mr Mansfield himself goes on to say, conventional accounts partly situate the Labor party—by giving extended treatment to radical and socialist ideas which affected the nascent Labor movement, to the growth of unionism, to the strikes and other events which were so important in moulding it. But most of these accounts leave one with a blurred image of the background— i. e. of other ideas current in the 1880s and 1890s, of the shape of politics before Labor’s appearance, of the nature of social groups other than working men, of tensions not to be readily subsumed under the all-important categories of Labour and Capital. Even in the most extended and sophisticated accounts there are sometimes curious hiatuses. Leaping deftly from colony to colony in search of a stream of radical ideas before the 1880s, Dr Gollan, for example, succeeds in identifying a whole galaxy of middle-class thinkers and politicians as the torchbearers of colonial democracy. But once the analysis of unionism and working-class politics begins in the 1880s, this older breed of men slips imperceptibly out of the story, only to reappear mysteriously as an essential part of the machinery of lib–lab combinations from the 1890s onward. These misty non-Labor politicians flit in and out of many versions of late nineteenth-century politics, but no-one seems to be able to explain very clearly who they were, what sections of public opinion they represented, or what—other than Labor pressure— impelled them, until, passing over into the federal sphere and acquiring a leader who can no longer be ignored, they or their heirs become Deakinite Liberals. It may be unfair to complain of these omissions where historians are primarily concerned with the Labor movement—the limits of one’s enquiry have after all to be defined somewhere, and historians may plausibly object to being criticised for neglecting matters that



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fall more properly within the province of those with other fields of interest. But this is sometimes only part of the story. Another distinguished historian of the Labor party has recently taken Dr Gollan to task for having admitted to his story a few of the findings of what are called ‘reactionary’ historians—i. e. those who, having begun work on non-Labor political elements in the 1880s and 1890s, have ventured to suggest, of these elements, ‘that their apparent futility had some grain of method in it’. This is one expression of a tendency among some historians of Labor to take over as the norm for their own judgments the attitudes of admired leaders of the 1890s. The position taken by these leaders arbitrarily becomes the test for judging what is significant in the past: there is, it seems, an immaculate core of Labor principles, and implicitly success and survival are of prime importance in identifying it. From this position it has been possible for one recent writer to cut down George Reid—the brilliant free-trade tactician to whom Labor owed so much—with one well-aimed blow . . . Reid, it is said, was no real radical, because he once voted against the eight-hour principle. Or again, on similar grounds, the drink and sectarian questions, which seem to have been important to so many New South Welshmen for so long, are dismissed cavalierly as ‘futile and anachronistic questions’. Here, it seems, is the purest milk of historical whiggism. Adequately situating the Labor movement must surely involve taking a broader perspective than this—admitting the variety and complexity of life in the period, and permitting humanity and purpose to people unfortunate enough not to belong to the chosen race. Such a larger perspective imposes on the historian two interlocking responsibilities. One is the need to identify or revalue non-Labor political and social organisations and ideas which demand for their proper elucidation hard work and sometimes a strenuous effort of empathy. The other is the need to tread warily when easy generalisations about social class seem to offer ready hypotheses for explaining political change. In fact, an adequate and systematic analysis of social class in this period is one of the most serious gaps in our present armoury of historical tools. In the case of New South Wales, it happens that recent research has given us some preliminary insights into the first of these matters. Historians like Ward, Mansfield, Gollan, O’Farrell and Blackton have

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abundantly documented the ferment of radical political ideas abroad in the colony during the 1880s. The connections between these ideas—partly indigenous but mostly imported—and the growth of unions and ultimately of the Labor party are now fairly well understood. Other research is also suggesting that a more moderate spirit of reformism seems at this time to have been permeating broader areas of society. This spirit found expression in a great variety of ways. But one of its most significant vehicles came to be the new political parties which emerged in the colony during the last half of the decade. There has been some semantic quibbling about whether these bodies—the Freetrade and Protectionist parties—strictly qualify for the name political party, but this is beside the point here. The facts briefly are that each of these political organisations was—in Duverger’s phrase—of ‘extra-parliamentary or electoral origin’; in the first place electoral machines created by men who felt dissatisfied with existing channels of access to political action through the good offices of established parliamentary faction managers. Each drew on long-established techniques of electoral manipulation and each operated efficiently enough outside parliament to squeeze the old parliamentary elements into a new two-party mould. Each was founded in response to a series of temporary problems thrown up by the sharp economic recession of the mid-1880s, and each represented initially a constellation of particular pressure groups. Thus the protectionists at first directed their attention to farmers, manufacturers, miners and artisans, and used existing organisations controlled by these groups as the nuclei from which to build a broad-based political machine. Merchants, and idealists concerned to protect the colony’s free-trade heritage, responded by founding a network of Freetrade Associations—and, despite covert hostility from the parliamentary free-traders, rapidly developed a pyramidal party edifice with its roots in the constituencies and its apex in Parliament. By 1889 this party had rechristened itself, to become the Liberal party, and had adopted a constitution which provided for an annual conference of constituency and parliamentary delegates, a permanent executive, party rules and a pledge, as well as a broad platform in which pure fiscalism now played a minor part. Detailed analysis has shown that the pressures that went into the making of these parties were diverse; no simple description of



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their class or interest composition is possible. Nor—after recent protests—would one try to press too far the almost irresistible impulse to see them—organisationally at least—as forerunners of the Labor party. But at least this can be said certainly: that each in its way created a reformist tradition—almost an ideology—which, projected into the next decade, acted as a political leaven of considerable importance. Each machine, once in existence, required an attractive public image to win support and ensure survival and in the bosom of each a hard core of idealists stood ready to transform fiscal tags into broader platforms. Under the influence of propagandists like E. W. O’Sullivan protectionists evolved a radical programme which Mr Mansfield has been able to describe as ‘Populist’, and which he finds to have been almost identical with that ultimately formulated by the early federal Labor party. Free-traders, less intent on capturing a sectional following, took over and remoulded the colony’s old liberal tradition—a tradition that had been born in the anti-transportation movement, had blossomed in the constitutional struggles of the 1850s, and had survived in the 1860s and 1870s to provide a dominant political ethos to which almost all politicians had subscribed. Vigorous development of the colony, good government, personal independence: these were the three watchwords of the New South Wales Liberal, to whom it had always seemed possible that, regardless of his personal background and interests, the wise lawgiver was capable of devising measures to advance the interests of the community as a whole. Liberal theorists of the late 1880s found ways of reshaping these old principles to fit changing social reality. To men who had always accepted the paternalistic role of the state it was not a long step to see that concern for the general good could encompass legislative action to secure a measure of social justice. Thus the Liberal platform of 1889 incorporated as its central plank the then radical objective of direct taxation—in the words of one free-trade reformer, ‘as a means of bringing the poorer classes more nearly on a level with all the classes in the distribution of the comforts and necessities of life’. Some traditionalists baulked at ideas more daring than this, but a left wing of the party flirted enthusiastically with schemes for radical land reform, for moderate constitutional changes, even for regulation of hours and wages in certain industries. In the 1890s, Labor pressure and

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economic depression quickened the reformist impulse, but the seeds were already there to be nourished. Though the Liberal organisation of 1889 disintegrated unaccountably before 1891, the tradition it had created survived. Under George Reid, this tradition served as part of the ideological foundation for a revitalised Freetrade party whose partnership with Labor made the period between 1894 and 1899 so fertile in progressive social legislation. No-one would wish to claim for the parties I have just sketched a historical role analogous to that which is sometimes attributed to the Labor party, or to pretend that the adherence even of a majority of their members necessarily expressed solidarity in defence of the fields the parties professed. Each was, in fact, cynically manipulated at times by careerist politicians, each represented a motley collection of groups and interests. The Liberals, for reasons quite separate from their official ideology, tended to attract the protestant, the temperance, the mercantile and the urban middle-class vote; protection was believed to attract a large Catholic support, and publicans, farmers, miners and some artisans. A world of pressures, ideals and group activity offers itself here for exploration—to write off these parties because they do not fit the tidy ‘Whig’ pattern is to miss one of the most obvious channels through which investigation of the complexity of New South Wales society at this time could take place. But beyond that, the reformist currents picked up and moulded into ideologies by these parties demand more investigation. If the party image did not always accord with party reality, it was still an image in effect demanded by a section of the electorate as part of the price of political success. To evaluate fully the implications of this fact, we should certainly need—as Mr Mansfield suggests—to take account of a climate of opinion moulded by Rerum Novarum as well as by utopian socialism; affected not only by Marx and Morris, but also, perhaps, by that contemporary New Liberalism in England which Hobson called ‘a movement along the lines of the strongest human feeling’. We should want, too, to reconsider the extreme claim that social reform came in the end primarily through the initiative of a single social class, either leading or forcing a reluctant community onwards. We should want to explain how it was, after all, that the multi-class Protectionist party came so close in the 1880s to discovering that ‘complex of radical democratic and nationalist aims



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acceptable to the majority of the people’ which Labor finally settled for almost twenty years later. Intertwined with the question of revaluing nineteenth-century political parties and ideas is the second problem mentioned earlier— that of social class. Practically everyone (including myself ) who speaks about class in this period speaks either with ambiguity or oversimplicity. This is disturbing where historians tend almost instinctively to look for class factors when they set out to explain political or social change. The troublesome thing has always been the apparent tendency towards classlessness in Australian society. Nineteenth-century observers knew that social stratification of some sort certainly existed in the colonies, despite the appearance of uniformity, but they searched in vain for a way of defining it in familiar old-world terms. Missing subtle distinctions, they grasped at a simple key to the definition of class—Twopeny spoke concisely for them all in 1883: ‘wealth is, of course, the predominating factor here, as rank in London’. Historians have tended to follow this lead, adding, where they needed it, another simple test: relationship to the means of production, and sometimes putting occupational classification into the mixture. For broad historical analysis this combination of concepts has proven useful and, for many purposes, accurate enough. For example, Australian historians in general would probably accept in outline the picture sketched by those who see as central to the history of late nineteenth-century Australia the fact of the frustration of the old migrant dream of economic independence in a new land. By 1891, it is pointed out, 76 per cent of Australians were wage-earners, with little practical hope of winning independent status. This fact more than any other has seemed crucial in explaining a series of dramatic developments which gave shape to the period: the growth of nationalism, the new unionism, the strikes, and finally the coming of the Labor party. It offers a main clue to these things on the assumption that, broadly speaking, the mass of Australians were now being confirmed in their working-class status—that ossification of class was a general structural change of profound importance in this period. Those who have read Dr Gollan’s book will know how subtly and convincingly this theme can be treated and again, perhaps, only an eccentric would quibble. It is, however, important to avoid drifting

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into the belief that this was the whole story; that is to say, that class was the only or even the main clue to complex movements—like nationalism; and that, anyway, when we have divided the colonists into wage-earners and others, there is little more to be said. Let me elaborate what I am trying to suggest first by making a few somewhat wild generalisations about nationalism (no wilder, though, than some others that have passed into common currency); second by discussing generally some of the hiatuses in our understanding of social class in this period. Nationalism, it is often asserted, was inextricably interwoven with class issues during the last part of the nineteenth century. It was then that the bushman image was discovered—an image that appealed even to townsmen for (to quote one historian) ‘political democracy had existed for a generation and social stratification had never been accepted by more than a tiny minority . . . the idealized way of life was that of the common people who had become by the [1880s] a working class’. Nationalism was more than a discovery of Australianism; it was an assertion of the will of the common people to keep this continent free from the injustices of the old world. It was therefore anti-British, for the upper classes, who threatened to oppress the democracy, were as much British as Australian. ‘The squatters and their allies were not, like the great mass of immigrant settlers and their children, compelled by circumstances to break their connections with England and accept Australia as their only home. They went to and from one hemisphere to another, often they ended their days in England, and sometimes they sent their sons to Oxford and Cambridge.’ The importance of this form of nationalism, in New South Wales in particular, has been demonstrated amply, and is beyond discussion. But its explanation always fires off a whole series of questions in one’s mind. Belief in the ‘un-Australian’ character of the not very clearly defined ‘upper classes’, for example, has worn well, though not because it has been closely examined. Notorious Anglo-Australian individuals were certainly easy to identify. But what evidence is there beyond the claims of radicals to suggest that more than a tiny minority were educated in and retired to England? And certainly not all of those who did go to Oxbridge succumbed to the sinister charms of English civilisation. The sons of Margaret Kiddle’s squatters



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complained of English snobbery and wrote home in nostalgic anticipation of their return. The professions in New South Wales were studded with men who had trained abroad and returned happily to careers at home, some of them, like B. R. Wise, bringing back advanced social ideas and a nationalism fertilised by contact with the old world. Again, how just is the proposition that hostility to Britain—or even a lack of interest in things British was a function of being compelled to break one’s connections with England and ‘accept Australia as one’s only home’? In the bush that proposition might hold; but in 1891 about two thirds of the people of New South Wales were townsmen, one half of them concentrated in Sydney. Of Sydney G. B. Barton wrote in 1889, with all its charms, the old place is just like a quiet seaport town in the mother-country, many miles away from the great metropolis, to which it looks for its literary supplies as regularly as it does for its news, its fashions, its political sensations, and everything else that makes up the excitement of city life. Francis Adams, visiting Sydney in the 1880s, was struck by ‘the appalling strength of the British civilisation—everywhere, the thumbmarks and the great toe-marks of the six-fingered six-toed giant, Mr Arnold’s life-long foe, the British philistine’. And everybody knows the Bulletin’s glum description of Sydney society, ‘limping in apish imitation of London manners and morals’. Coghlan attributed the expansion of seaport towns in Australia largely to the ‘tendency of immigrants to remain at the place of their landing’, and it can certainly be shown that the British-born section of the population was higher in Sydney than in the country. We do not therefore necessarily need to attribute the outward-looking, pro-British orientation of the city to the sinister influence of the upper classes. Beyond that, even recent immigrants usually had to ‘accept Australia as their only home’: if this did not make them anti-British, are they to be considered any the less Australian for that? In fact, of course, the veneer of Britishness hid the subtle elements of the new culture-patterns: even Adams caught the ‘Middle-class and the People of Sydney’ at play on

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their harbour, and found himself reflecting on ‘the actual or inherent melody and beauty of the Sydney life’. Less lyrically, Twopeny marvelled at a new urban society in which servants were cheeky, cricket was the career open to talent, and that little monster, the Australian baby, was suckled coram populo at the Exhibition. Extremists thirsting for symbols of dramatic national distinctiveness looked beyond the suburbs and found the bushman. Perhaps they missed much sober truth that lay at their feet. A whole area of cultural history cries out here for further investigation. Whence came that other nationalism, reflected in bodies like the Australian Natives’ Association, that spoke so sharply at the Imperial Conference of 1887, and that was destined at length to inform so much of the policy of the Labor party itself—a nationalism which warmly acknowledged the English family connection, but gave firm notice that the child had grown up? It is difficult, on present evidence, to see this brand of nationalism performing any precise function in a class struggle. Blackton’s work suggests that it drew strength from the towns, and perhaps chiefly there from the middle classes. If he is correct, it could be one emanation of an urban Anglo-Australian cultural amalgam; duller perhaps, but no less unique or Australian than the way of life forged in the bush. To turn now more soberly to social class. The usual assumption that by the 1880s in New South Wales the rural wage-earning classes were freezing into something like a proletariat does not seem open to serious question. It should be noted, though, that no-one has yet explored systematically the kinds of openings offered to small entrepreneurs by the steady growth of country towns in the half century, while the social implications of the great rise in agricultural production during the 1880s and 1890s still remain something of a puzzle. Further, Coghlan’s census figures show that, by 1891, in the colony as a whole, 52,500 people were employers or worked on their own account in the agricultural, pastoral and mining industries while 70,000 were wage-earners. These are crude figures, but they do suggest some need to refine the received model of the rural class structure, which is characterised by a wide working-class base topped with a narrow stratum of independent men. But on other tests, and especially those dealt with by Russel Ward, there can be no doubt that limited economic mobility, lack of fertile social and cultural



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contact with other groups, perhaps even geographical isolation, bred in the mass of rural workers a sense of separateness, of social and cultural solidarity that can be reasonably called class-consciousness. It is therefore not surprising that with miners, who occupied a parallel social position, they formed the base of the new unionism of the 1880s, and the central point of conflict with capital in the 1890s. But when we turn to the city, the picture becomes rather more blurred. It is here, in particular, that inadequacies become apparent in loose statements which identify wage-earners as members of the working classes, or which even speak of occupational categories as if they were classes. Tests of these kinds serve to identify strata—to rank the population according to some single principle, but they do not necessarily lay bare a class hierarchy. Identification of a stratum does not permit us to assume anything about other characteristics of class, like shared value systems, a common style of life, a sense of group solidarity. These, if they exist, must be established independently. Dr Ward’s work is one superb example of how this can be done—his ‘nomad tribe’ qualifies, on any set of tests, to be called a class. In the city, there were undoubtedly strata which would quite readily be shown by similar methods to have been—in the full cultural sense—classes: one thinks for example of seamen and certain grades of unskilled labour. As organisation is the most obvious indication of group solidarity, the fact of unionisation helps to identify these classes—though of itself is not necessarily enough . . . a distinctive way of life and consequent social distance from other classgroups were also important. This has to be remembered when other unionised groups are under consideration. Once we look beyond these obvious class groups, we become adrift in ambiguity. The central problem here, of course, is that of the middle classes. Everyone—including myself—who speaks of this period has only vague things to say about the middle classes. Some even imply that there was no effective middle class at all. Hartley Grattan’s old claim that the Australian middle classes were merely a weak buffer between the working class and the oligarchic tendencies of some ill-defined upper class has been repeated very frequently. There are writers who treat the history of the 1890s in simple terms of the struggle between capital and labour, completely neglecting the

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existence of people identified at the Commission on Strikes as ‘a body outside the vortex of the strife’. Francis Adams’s not unbiassed judgment of 1893 is often endorsed: ‘the trend of things is relentlessly towards huge monopolies of capital and labour, and these petty intermediate classes, striving to combine a little of both are foredoomed to failure and ultimate extinction’. One recent historian has even been able to argue that much of the social legislation of the 1890s and early twentieth century reflected a recognition that an effective middle class had to be created if the capitalist system was to be stabilised and preserved in Australia. Yet none of these suggestions quite squares with the impressions of contemporaries, few of whom seemed to doubt the existence of very effective middle-class groups. Such groups were roughly identified and described in many different contexts. Twopeny considered, for example, that the Anglican Church had been ineffective in Australia because its clergy ‘have been labouring under the misfortune of being unsuited to the people and circumstances amongst whom they live and work. Their sphere has lain almost entirely amongst the upper and lower classes, and it is neither of these that governs Australia. Where they come into contact with the middle class, the power in the land, they have been placed in the position of the round man in the square hole’. Contemporary newspapers are full of explicit recognition of a class stratification which included distinct middle-class elements. It would be fascinating to follow up the implications of this classification given in 1891 by a Sydney Morning Herald comment on one election: Around the South Sydney hustings there was perhaps a larger gathering than in any of the city electorates. It is a large district and the working as well as the middle classes are well represented in it. It is not, like East Sydney, composed almost entirely of the bourgeois element, nor is it, like West Sydney, inhabited principally by the proletariat. It contains something of both elements. After the electoral reforms of 1893, some of the new divisions puzzled reporters more: Fitzroy, for example, hopelessly taxed their descriptive powers. The Herald called it ‘the largest and most



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heterogeneous of the Sydney divisions, including probably every class in the community’, adding: ‘The denizens of the palatial establishment of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay Heights are compelled, by the unconscious irony of electoral reform, to vote cheek by jowl with the unwashed of Woolloomooloo’. Sir Robert Garran’s memories of Sydney Grammar School at the end of the 1870s give another vignette. ‘I have none but pleasant memories of my schooldays . . . The Boys came from a wide range of the middle classes, and there were no social distinctions. It was not a rich man’s school. None of us, so far as I can remember, had much pocket money to spend. My own father was coping with a large family on what would seem today a very modest salary, but living was cheap, and so was education. ’ Neither wealth, nor independence, one observes, enters this implicit definition. Complexity increases when, having recognised salary earners as potential middle-class people, we consider how far down the scale we ought to go. It would certainly seem legitimate, in the case of New South Wales, to follow the reasoning Laslett uses in identifying English middle-class people at this time. Laslett writes of people like clerks, shop-assistants and even servants being effective members of the middle classes through ‘mimesis’, or imitation of the style of life of their social superiors, and through the aspiration for upward social movement. Almost half of the 52,000 wage-earners listed in the 1891 New South Wales census as following commercial pursuits were clerks and shop assistants. ‘Clerks’, Twopeny had written in 1883, ‘are said to be a drug on the market; but that is a mere façon de parler, expressing the fact that they are the worst-paid class in Australia’. In the Centennial Magazine in 1890, E. J. Brady castigated the New South Wales clerk for greeting with apathy or distrust every suggestion that he should unionise. ‘This’, observed Brady, is largely owing to the fact that he looks forward to becoming someday an employer himself—he succeeds in about one case in a thousand. His life is not to be envied by the manual labourer. He must dress better, live in better lodgings and support the dignity of his position on wages that a workman would scarcely be induced to accept.

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There is plenty of evidence to suggest that similar middle-class aspirations were shared by shop-assistants. As late at 1898 W. M. Hughes, who had vainly tried to organise these people into unions, complained bitterly: ‘I have been at shop-assistants’ meetings and noted that they clapped the loudest when a crusted conservative was speaking’. Even on the servant fringe of society, ‘mimesis’ caused its problems. One writer asked in Sydney once a Week: ‘is there not just at present a desire in the units of each class to live in the style and after the fashion of the class or caste higher than their own by two or three removes?’ A correspondent to the paper gladly endorsed this explanation of the current shortage of servants: as he put it, servants were hard to get because parents ‘raise their children to aspire to a higher class than themselves—every girl, nowadays, is going to be a nursery governess’. Most of these references to the middle classes and to middleclass aspirations—however much they reflect real attitudes—are hazy and impressionistic; it is little wonder that so many historians have glossed over their implications. At first glance it would seem that this is one area of our social history where novelist—or the historian using the novelist’s techniques—must have the field to himself. The danger is that this approach will yield mere descriptive gossip— gossip, in our present context, to confirm the old tendency to look for the sources of dynamism in more easily identifiable groups. Australian historians will need to experiment with new techniques if they are going to understand the more amorphous and elusive classes in colonial society. One possible way out of the difficulty is through the examination of organised group behaviour. Historians of the Labor movement instinctively assume organisation to be evidence of solidarity: traditionally, and correctly, the development of unions has been taken as a symbol of emerging working-class consciousness. There is every reason for expecting to find other types of organisations similarly reflecting group cohesion, as well as performing (as trades unions do) distinct social functions of another order. The great multiplicity and variety of non-working-class associations operating in New South Wales in the 1880s and 1890s seems so far to have been beneath the notice of historians. I have recently made a sample count of associations which were in the habit of meeting monthly or more



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frequently and whose meetings were reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in June 1891. Excluding unions, political bodies, and churches, the tally came to twenty-five. The range varied from the learned Australian Economic Association, through philanthropical and temperance bodies, to the Sydney Owl Club. The Royal Society of New South Wales heard a paper on the sheep death rate in counties infected with Cumberland diseases: Dr Antill Pockley lectured the Ladies Sanitary Association on ‘our Eyes and How to Care for them’. Gracious charity filtered down from the aristocratic Queen’s Jubilee Fund Council: more rugged self-help, one suspects, was reflected in the Devonshire Street First Day Adult School Mutual Improvement Association. These twenty-five were only the bodies which came to the august notice of the Herald—how many others were there? Historians used to dealing with the obviously dramatic activities of trades unions, strike committees and Labour Electoral Leagues might perhaps curl their lips a little at the prospect of examining these apparently trivial organisations. Yet like trade unions they existed to fulfil felt social needs; like trade unions they served to relate their members to the larger society. They therefore deserve the closest scrutiny. This is one area where historians might learn from the sociologists, who are concerned to put their fingers on the undramatic routines and perennial organisations that underpin social structure. Studies of contemporary associations have revealed the patterns of recruiting members and controlling behaviour by which these associations reinforce or modify the social system. Some are single-class associations, functioning to confirm class solidarity and assert exclusiveness. Others straddle two or more classes, tend to contain in their membership a microcosm of the segment of the hierarchy they cover and may act as channels for the social training and acceptance of upwardly mobile individuals. In all cases, rules, debates and activities offer clues to the shared value systems which hold the groups in question together. Even the most cursory glance at my twenty-five New South Wales Associations suggests some correspondence with these patterns—much might be revealed if someone made a really intensive study of a complete collection of Societies operating in Sydney at this time. It should also be remarked here that associations are not only useful for probing social class. Their overt purposes have also to be

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valued as reflectors of the issues that vitally concerned some men in the past. Such valuation is necessary to avoid those lapses in empathy caused by the Whig fallacy of judging past causes by the test of survival. Mr Bollen’s recent article on the temperance movement in New South Wales is a relevant example here. It is an interesting comment on the state of Australian political historiography that his analysis of temperance associations and their important role in early twentiethcentury politics can be prefaced with these remarks: The temperance movement in N.S.W. has in the present generation lapsed into obscurity. Perhaps it is because of this that the temperance cause as it lived and thrived in Australian society at the turn of the century is largely forgotten, or at best, is regarded as an historical backwater leading nowhere and of no abiding significance. I have been talking so far only of the identification of social classes in late nineteenth-century New South Wales —suggesting that a central problem still untouched is that of studying the middle classes, and that a promising approach lies in the analysis of the web of associations which provide one overt manifestation of middleclass interests and activities. This is not, of course, to suggest that the associational approach is the only feasible one, nor that the middle class is the only social group we still need to look at in a more systematic way. Nor is class identification more than a beginning to the task of exploring the social hierarchy. Two interrelated matters which still require extensive study are relations between classes, and class mobility. It is hard to think of discussions about class relationships in this period that break free of the assumption that the labour–capital conflict sums up everything. Even within this context, historians have tended to be confined in a mental straitjacket. Where, for example, beyond reiteration of the assertions of the interested principals, are we to find discussion of the attitudes of the majority of people not directly involved in the strikes of the 1890s? Again, one wonders why someone has not thought it worthwhile to examine the social influence of nonconformist religion in the upper echelons of the working class, or to work out the implications of the well-recognised fact that in the 1870s and



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1880s many artisans were becoming property owners. ‘The working classes’, observed the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1870s, ‘are purchasing largely of suburban lands for building purposes, and if they require money to complete their homes, it is readily obtained—the desire to become freeholders is not without importance in a national point of view. The workman who possesses property is more conservative than those of his class who have no permanent stake in the country.’ How widespread was this tendency and were the results as ‘beneficial’ as respectable people hoped? Contemporary observers like C. H. Pearson were noting at this time how religion and the urge to possess property acted in Victoria to moderate extreme democracy; no-one has asked how far these factors were similarly operating in New South Wales to soften class conflict. Beyond this, it may well be asked whether their obsession with social and economic conflict has led historians to undervalue the degree of inter-class consensus in this period. The practical impotence of tiny fringe groups like republicans and extreme socialists, who challenged the basis of existing society, is one measure of this consensus. So, too, is the general apathy which in effect endorsed Henry Parkes’s ruthless suppression in 1887 of Sydney’s noisy little secularist organisations. And what, one wonders, might be the implications of examining occasions of national celebration (like the public festivities associated with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee) not necessarily as quaint displays organised by an Establishment, but as ceremonial expressions of social solidarity that overstepped class barriers? Sociologists like Edward Shils show clearly enough that much remains to be said about ceremonial in complex societies— their frame of reference might profitably be borrowed by historians searching for new questions to ask. And finally, it has to be said that the whole question of social mobility in late nineteenth-century Australia remains an unexplored field. It is surely not enough to quote fragmentary evidence of declining opportunity as population and economic complexity grew, then speak of class ossification, and leave it at that. Some contemporary observers, like Twopeny, thought that the so-called ‘levelling tendency’ of Australian life was to be explained chiefly by the existence of considerable social mobility. ‘The lower middle class’, he wrote, ‘and the upper middle class are much less distinct than at

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home, and come more freely and frequently, indeed continually into contact with each other . . . In the generation that is growing up, the levelling process is going much further. The small tradesmen’s sons are going into professions, and the professional men’s sons into trades.’ Perhaps, as Mr Crook has observed, middle-class writers like Twopeny necessarily took a roseate view of colonial conditions; it was convenient certainly to close an eye to distress in particular enclaves of the working class, and to claim—as Twopeny did—that ‘if after he has been some time in the colonies a working man does not become one of the capitalists his organs inveigh against, he has only himself to blame’. Still, as anyone who has to make biographical surveys of prominent men of the time soon finds out, Twopeny’s type of virtuous workman certainly existed. A few samples even appeared before the Royal Commission on Strikes in 1890, and in its report that Commission identified, as one of the largest bodies of employers in New South Wales , men ‘who are struggling upwards, who have little capital of their own, but work largely on credit’, and to whom ‘small gains are of proportionately greater importance than they are with large employers’. Impression cuts both ways: on the question of social mobility there can be no substitute for careful cohort analysis to trace in detail the fortunes of samples of the colonial population. Until this intensive work is done, talk of a closed frontier of social opportunity as an explanation of the conflict between labour and capital must remain approximate and general. We seem to have drifted some distance from our original talking point. But what I have been trying to suggest is that ‘situating’ the early Labor movement is part of a wider task which historians of late nineteenth-century Australia are increasingly called upon to face: that of reconsidering—primarily in empirical terms—the whole question of social class and social relations. As Dr Inglis observed not long ago, Australian historians have long been busy pegging out and fencing in their field—it is time for them to turn inwards and examine the ‘tone and texture’ of Australian society. Painstaking and detailed work will be involved here—work which to be fruitful will need to be informed by a readiness to examine unobtrusive patterns of adjustment as well as great conflicts, to see society as a complex web of group and individual relationships, each of them legitimate in explaining texture and change in the structure as a whole.



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To adapt a point of Professor La Nauze’s: it will undoubtedly take a great deal of this kind of historical research and writing to produce work which may properly be called History. If and when it is produced, that History will certainly reiterate many of the themes already postulated by Australian ‘Whigs’, though giving these themes body and conviction by setting them in a richer framework. It is also possible, one supposes, that a change of perspective implicit in broader and more systematic social analysis might lay bare equally significant themes hitherto undervalued, or quite unsuspected. The one thing that does seem certain to me is that neither of these results can be looked for where new research is prejudged by the assumption that some readily identifiable class or party or cause can mysteriously hold in its keeping the only truth essential for understanding the whole society.

Notes 1

2

For one account of this debate see G. P. Shaw, ‘A Counter Revolution in Australian Historiography?’, in John A. Moses (ed. ), Historical Disciplines and Culture in Australia, University of Queensland Press, 1979, 101–16. See e. g. Stuart Macintyre, ‘Radical History and Bourgeois Hegemony’, Intervention, no. 2, 1972, 47–73; John Merritt, ‘Labour History’, in G. Osborne and W. Mandle (eds), New History: Studying Australia Today, George Allen & Unwin, 1982, 113–35.

Editor’s addendum Among the books and articles referred to in this essay are: Francis Adams, Australian Essays, W. Inglis, 1886. Francis Adams, The Australians: A social sketch, T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, Jacaranda Press, 1963. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, G. Bell, 1951. Peter Coleman (ed.), Australian Civilization, Angus & Robertson, 1962. F. K. Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, Macmillan, 1960. Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Rawson’s Bookshop, 1940. Sir Robert Garran, Prosper the Commonwealth, Angus & Robertson, 1958. R. A. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1880–1910, Melbourne University Press, 1960. C. Hartley Grattan (ed. ), Australia, University of California Press, 1947. Gordon Greenwood (ed.), Australia: A Social and Political History, Angus & Robertson, 1955.

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W. K. Hancock, Australia, Ernest Benn, 1930. J. A. La Nauze, ‘The Study of Australian History, 1929–59’, Historical Studies, no. 33 (1959), 1–11. Bruce Mansfield, ‘Party Organisation in the N.S.W. Elections of February 1889’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, vol. 41, 2 (Sept. 1955), 61–76; see also Australian Democrat: The Career of Edward William Sullivan 1846–1910, Sydney University Press, 1965. D. A. Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, Longmans, Green, 1957. Douglas Pike, Australia: The Quiet Continent, Cambridge University Press, 1962. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, 1958.



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2 The Changing Perspective on Australian History

At the end of the 1920s, W. K. Hancock remarked on the pride with which the Australian democracy was inclined to consider itself: Product of the present only Thinking nothing of the past. Though to a degree inevitable in a ‘new’ society, such an attitude could scarcely recommend itself to a historian. Hancock’s reaction to it was mirrored in his Australia, a book in which, as half-expatriate, he set out to examine his own country—as he subsequently explained—both sympathetically and critically, both at close view and in the perspective of history. What he saw as the ‘fecklessness’ of the boom years then coming to an end gave a special edge to the inquiry. Hancock sensed with deep unease that a tradition bequeathed to Australians by his parents’ generation was in danger of being squandered. A book written by such a man in such a spirit First published in W. S. Livingston and W. R. Louis (eds), Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands since the First World War, University of Texas Press, 1979. Essay written in 1974. Although I have added selected references to materials published after that date, I make no claim to have covered the subsequent literature comprehensively.


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could scarcely be unimportant. In fact, as we can see, it marked as nearly as possible a first watershed in Australian historiography.1 Many others had written before this, sometimes with considerable distinction, on aspects of Australia’s past and changing present. It would be tedious to list their names, invidious perhaps to try to make a selection among them on grounds of interest or excellence.2 But, in the nineteenth century, early writers, such as James Macarthur and John Dunmore Lang, and later historians, such as G. W. Rusden and H. G. Turner, had recorded events—particularly political events— in their respective colonies with a sense of structure, a fluency, and an often all-too-evident bias which made their work transcend mere chronicle. In Australia, as in most English-speaking communities during that period, the creative writers caught best the flavour of society, though the natural curiosity of strangers about a land which fascinated—first through its physical peculiarities and then through the unusual societies it came to support—supplemented indigenous writings with a constant stream of visitors’ reports, impressions, and criticisms. Writings of this kind reached a proximate apogee in the years just before and just after the turn of the century, when outsiders briefly saw Australia as the world’s social laboratory. They celebrated in effect a new kind of democracy which had produced both the first Labor party and an advanced liberalism—two forces which acted jointly to produce social legislation clearly far ahead of its time. Federation of the six colonies, effective in 1901, added the spice of nationalism to the solid fare of democracy, and it was primarily this combination which came thirty years later to be the object of Hancock’s quest. The new nation had by then been through the strange experience of war at a distance—the First World War—which at once ‘blooded’ it and split it more terribly than ever before or since. At the Peace Conference of 1919, Prime Minister William Morris Hughes claimed a hearing on the basis of sixty thousand dead, a tragic sacrifice for a people of barely five million to have made in a war at the other end of the earth. No-one could ever know what the loss of so many young men would mean for the quality of life in the society they had left; but the legacy of the other sad happening of those years—the division of the nation over conscription—was clear enough. Pride in the fact that Australia’s troops were by late 1916 the



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only purely volunteer forces in the war was more than merely sentimental: it seemed to many the very symbol of the peculiar quality of Australian democracy. But Hughes, though Labor’s leader, thought by then that Australian losses in Europe made conscription necessary, and in two referendums he proposed its introduction. He was defeated on both occasions, in passionate struggles which revealed the real complexity—and fragility—of Australia’s democratic consensus and resulted in Hughes’s leaving the Labor party with a group of followers, to join their conservative opponents in forming a new Nationalist party. After the war the Nationalists repudiated Hughes’s leadership and, under S. M. Bruce, embarked on that hard-headed pursuit of material advancement which came to trouble men like Hancock. There were some voices to claim that continuities bridged the agony of 1914–18. One of the most notable was that of C. E. W. Bean, official war historian, who had lived close to the troops. In a new kind of campaign history, he wrote of the fighting as seen from the trenches as well as from strategists’ headquarters.3 Before the war, Bean had reported vividly on life in the bush, and in the Australian soldier—the Anzac—he saw a new exemplification of a national type which he and many earlier writers thought of as having been moulded in the stress of frontier pioneering. Tough and self-reliant, comradely, impatient of pretence, and sceptical of the claims of authority, this legendary Anzac, as Heather Radi succinctly puts it, ‘bridged the gap between pioneering and the present, by giving to the people of the city the right to the qualities of the outback.’4 At war’s end Bean wrote In Your Hands, Australians, a little tract in which he appealed to his compatriots to preserve and develop the Anzac tradition as the one sound basis for future social health and as a trust bequeathed by those who had been sacrificed for the nation. Bean thus summed up and idealised an important strand in the Australian experience, though he no doubt exaggerated the generality of its acceptance. There were many Australians who saw the war in a different light and who, if they thought of future social wellbeing, looked for its coming through conflict (particularly class conflict) rather than through a consensus based on shared values. Still others—and in overwhelming numbers—thought not at all about such things. As historians have reiterated to the point of tedium, the

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1920s and 1930s in Australia were, culturally and morally, ‘mean’ decades. Professional history, however, came to birth in those years, stimulated partly by teachers in the young history departments of the universities (Ernest Scott in Melbourne and G. Arnold Wood in Sydney were the most notable) and partly by the necessity of providing material about Australia for students eager to study their own society in adult classes organised at that time by the Workers’ Education Association. Scott and Wood were fascinated with the story of Europeans’ discovery and subsequent exploration of Australia; a pair of younger academics, S. H. Roberts and Myra Willard, wrote respectively on the spread of settlement in the nineteenth century and the origins of the drive to create a ‘White Australia.’ Constitutional development had its chroniclers and analysts in Edward Sweetman and A. C. V. Melbourne. R. C. Mills’s pioneer work on immigration to Australia during the 1830s had appeared during the war. In 1918 T. A. Coghlan, retired statistician of New South Wales, published his four-volume economic chronicle, Labour and Industry in Australia, 1788–1901,5 a work supplemented by the most notable of the first WEA productions, J. T. Sutcliffe’s pioneer study of the trades unions. Writings such as these reflect the natural curiosity of the first professional historians in origins, exploration, economic growth, and the establishment of political institutions. As K. S. Inglis once put it, they were pegging out their territory, laying guidelines for the study of who the white Australians were, how they came, how they made a living, and how they governed themselves. An epitome of the pioneer historians’ work appeared in the early 1930s, a special volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Though published in the shadow of the Great Depression, the text of this work belongs to the late 1920s—a chapter discussing ‘Australia since the War’ ends in 1928. The tone of the work is celebratory, its central theme the success with which the ‘planting of English stock in the South Pacific’ had been achieved. Theorists of settlement like Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the editors said, ‘dreamed great things for Australia and New Zealand, yet none more splendid than have come from the anvil of time.’ Exploration by sea and land, immigration and the extension of settlement, the wool trade and the gold discoveries, the establishment of responsible government, constitutional



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development, federation, imperial relations, and the Great War were the staple topics treated. Arranged with an overlapping chronology and accompanied by discussions of politics and economics, the articles gave some sense of a developing society. A massive bibliography, heavily British and destined incidentally to remain for many years the major published list of source material, indicated beyond doubt that Australian history could indeed be a respectable subject for scholarly investigation. Notwithstanding its theme of progress, the Cambridge volume ended on a sour note. Writing of the Australia of 1928–9, Fred Alexander deplored politicians’ reluctance to shoulder ‘the obligations of that nationhood upon which war had set its seal,’ expressed pain that ‘personal jealousies, party animosities, provincial pettiness all played their part’ in retarding progress, and explained the country’s social and industrial ills in patrician vein. ‘The levelling democratic structure of Australian life was unrelieved by the presence of a socially or politically dominant caste, inspired by a tradition of public service, sensitive to outside thought and looking beyond the immediate question of material gain or loss.’6 As we have seen, Hancock’s Australia, also written at the end of the 1920s and published in 1930, expressed equal disquiet at the temper of the times. But Hancock’s emphasis was radically different. His central concern was for the future of Australia’s particular brand of democracy, which he approved and which he associated politically with the Labor party, ‘the most emphatical product of Australian sentiment.’ Democracy and Labor, he sensed, must soon confront a severe crisis. Labor won federal office in 1929, to face almost at once economic troubles which, as it turned out, heralded the Great Depression; in Hancock’s mind there was a question as to whether the party, ‘designed to enforce orthodoxy at the expense of leadership,’ would prove flexible enough to handle economic difficulties imaginatively and forge new goals ‘which it can pursue with the old zest.’ It is thus easy to sense behind the writing of Australia an urgent wish to provide the democracy with self-knowledge and a desire to articulate the spirit which Labor symbolised and to put it in its proper explanatory historical and physical setting. Not all Hancock’s ideas were new, nor were the historical sections of Australia the product of close empirical research. The

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book’s achievement came from Hancock’s mastery of existing historical materials, his sensitivity to the tone of Australian society, and his genius for seeing woods as well as trees. Therefore, in his account past shaded effortlessly into present, and many of the ideas that emerged came to be of permanent importance, constituting, indeed, something of a straitjacket from which subsequent historians have had to struggle to escape. Among the more important of these ideas were that in Australia an inhospitable continent allowed only sparse settlement, ‘a big man’s frontier,’ and the growth of the state as ‘a vast public utility’; that disappointment of the smallholder bred a collectivist social ethos and a nationalism rooted in rural experience and radical in tone; that Australian politics came to be polarised around two forces—Labor parties of ‘initiative’ and non-Labor parties of ‘resistance.’ And behind these observations stood an implicit agenda for Australian historians—their chief tasks being to explore the nineteenth century themes of development (mastering a continent), democracy (framing a polity), and nationalism (forging an identity). The 1930s saw the realisation of many of Hancock’s fears. Assailed by the problems of the economic depression, the Labor party lost unity, office, and its sense of direction. Economic recovery proved slow and painful; unemployment remained a chronic problem; and governments formed by the parties of ‘resistance’ were cold to the idea of social experimentation. Brian Fitzpatrick, the most important historian of that decade to take up Hancock’s themes, wrote from an avowedly left-wing point of view, picturing the nation’s economic growth as a story chiefly of exploitation by British capitalism. To him the political and industrial struggle of the Australian working class against capitalism had been ‘beyond its class ends an effort to achieve social justice.’7 Fitzpatrick and the other great historian of those years, Eris O’Brien, set new scholarly standards in their use of source materials and their insistence on relating Australian events to the wider world. Their writings were consequently of lasting significance. O’Brien’s The Foundation of Australia8 remains a standard work on the origins of the convict system, and Fitzpatrick’s picture of economic development in Australia reigned without serious challenge for twenty years. More important still, Fitzpatrick, especially through his eloquent reiteration



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of the old tradition which saw Labor as a vital source of creativity in Australian society, was to prove a key influence in inspiring and shaping much of the historical research and writing that followed the Second World War. An oddity in this context was C. Hartley Grattan’s Introducing Australia, published in 1942: a book of present description mixed with shrewd historical comment, seeking to capture Australia, so to speak, in the round, for the benefit principally of fellow Americans who—thanks chiefly to the war—were now discovering its existence. Grattan’s own discovery had begun in 1927. Travel, talk, and study soon turned that discovery into affection and erudition. Those two qualities, seconded by his synoptic skills and his talent for lively writing, made Introducing Australia a book of considerable influence in Australia itself. It was fresh and timely—outside the main currents of local writing because it was broader in scope—and it marked its author as the natural editor for the Australian volume in the United Nations series—an important book which the University of California Press published in 1947. War and its immediate aftermath meantime confirmed for many Australians themselves what might be loosely called the Bean– Hancock–Fitzpatrick vision. The Anzac tradition acquired new meaning and, after the ruling political parties of the 1930s fell apart, Labor governments from 1941 directed the nation through the most serious crisis of its history and then proceeded with reconstruction plans. Those plans could optimistically be interpreted as picking up reformist threads that had been lost, except in fits and starts, since the early years of the Commonwealth. For some writers the heady excitement of those years survived Labor’s fall from office in 1949, paradoxically perhaps, since the triumph then of the parties of ‘resistance’ reflected developing cold war tensions and, when the chips were down, the essential conservatism of the electorate. But, as the country moved into twenty years of non-Labor rule, the shape of politics as traditionally interpreted became progressively less illuminating as a shorthand guide to what was happening to Australian society. It has truly been observed that ‘the two decades to 1970 comprised years of such profound change in Australian experience as to allow a confident prediction that future historians will see them as a watershed comparable only perhaps with the gold

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decade of the 1850s.’9 Elements of the change—a doubling of population since the 1940s, reception of European immigrants in great numbers, unprecedented economic development and affluence, attenuation of British influence, and a new sense of involvement in the mainstream of world affairs—could be perceived readily enough. But their meaning, in terms of culture and the ways in which contemporary Australia differed from the provincial society of prewar years, came quickly to be interpreted variously, spilling untidily out of the old conceptual frameworks. Most of the existing body of serious historical writing about Australia is the product of those postwar years. Inevitably, it has been affected by changing conceptions of relevance, but this has not been the only or, arguably, the most important source of shifting interpretations. The pioneers of whom we have spoken pointed the way and sometimes illuminated special patches of the field, but historians writing after 1945 found that they were in most areas working from scratch. The progressive accumulation of their findings, and the new questions thus raised, have been a principal source of historical reappraisal in Australia. The rapid growth of historical research is, of course, itself a reflection of cultural sophistication bred of affluence. Though modest by American standards, the expansion of Australian universities took up much of the slack of the educationally austere years of the 1920s and 1930s. A proliferation of history departments progressively provided historians with incentive, training, and audiences. Staff numbers offer a raw index of change: in 1949 about fifteen full-time professors and lecturers taught history in six Australian universities; by 1973 there were sixteen universities and more than three hundred permanent posts. The multiplication of scholarly journals from one in 1955 to six in 1966 shows more graphically and proximately the growing volume of historical writing.10 Surveying historical monographs in 1959—most of them originating in universities—J. A. La Nauze likened recent production to an ‘industrial revolution.’11 Four years later, in another assessment, J. M. Ward described the progress of that revolution by arguing that ‘the day of the brilliant pioneers, who took quick looks at large subjects and reported their findings in general terms, has given way to the day of the meticulous scholar . . . patiently searching for the truth, accurately determined and precisely



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stated.’ Ward was convinced that Australian historiography was at a point of transition in that contemporary writers ‘know both too much and too little. Knowing what they do, they cannot easily indulge in the bold hypotheses that lent brilliance and distinction to the works of predecessors less encumbered by other men’s researches. Knowing more than they do, they might have the materials and the confidence for enlightened judgments of real scope and authority.’12 In 1963 Hartley Grattan and Manning Clark each published important new histories of Australia. In the previous ten years, no less than four other such works had been produced—three by individual scholars (R. M. Crawford, A. G. L. Shaw, and D. Pike) and one by a group of authors working under Gordon Greenwood’s editorship.13 As one reviewer sardonically remarked at the time, of the writing of general histories there seemed to be no end. No doubt the tight clustering of such works in that period signified an urge for selfunderstanding in a community aware of the onset of deep change. The problem was—as Ward’s remarks implied—that, individual quirks and specialties aside, those historians inevitably drew on a common body of research. Furthermore, none could escape the influence of Hancock; although they commanded infinitely more detail than had been available to him, their material seemed to seep into moulds he had fashioned. Of course, some important new bearings were evident. Crawford, for example, wrote at length on Aboriginal culture and set the beginnings of history in Australia well before the coming of white persons. Later, in examining the development of an exploitative European society, he detected the influence of an ‘aristocratic’ element not previously treated by historians. Again, Pike pressed for closer examination of variety in Australian experience, suggesting in particular the importance of smallholders who had in parts of the country developed traditions of independence which cut sharply across the collectivist ideal. And Clark sought in the lives and aspirations of representative figures a way of symbolising the various strands of faith which he saw as the shaping elements in the Australian story, particularly the encounter in a virgin land of those three great European creeds, Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment. One significance of those general histories is that their preoccupations, as well as their timing, put them astride two reasonably

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distinct phases of La Nauze’s historiographic ‘revolution.’ In the first of those, which dated roughly to 1960, the outstanding interpretative works were written by historians pursuing Hancockian themes, particularly radicalism. Fitzpatrick, stressing capitalism’s ravages and the creative political role of the working class, had already pioneered that tradition, which by 1960 found its most influential expression in the work of Robin Gollan. Gollan identified consistent radical themes in the history of nineteenth-century Australia and depicted their flowering in the emergence of a powerful nationalistic Labor movement which became the driving force in the critical reformist years between 1890 and 1914.14 And in 1958 Russel Ward offered a view of the connection between radicalism and nationalism reminiscent of Bean’s, arguing persuasively that a mythic Australian self-picture, ‘discovered’ in the 1890s but originating in the experiences of convicts and bushworkers even before 1850, validly reflected a set of democratic attitudes central to the Australian ethos—stoic resourcefulness, distrust of wealth and status, and collectivist egalitarianism encapsulated in the ideal of ‘mateship.’15 The demonstrable centrality of the radical theme in Australian history made its early pursuit natural for historians of generous sympathies. They worked from a background of idealism generated by Labor’s policies of postwar reconstruction and later of disillusion at the reaction which, in the cold war climate of the 1950s, split the Labor party and ushered in a long period of pragmatic bourgeois politics. The heroic origins of social and political reformism were in that atmosphere a natural focus of study. At the same time, interest in class themes received powerful support from the prevailing orthodoxy which was largely derived from Hancock. To quote S. J. Butlin: Australian economic history is the major part of all Australian history; from the beginning economic factors dominated development in a way that should gladden the heart of any Marxist. What is true of any particular strand of economic growth—land settlement, labour relations and labour organisation, immigration, secondary industry—is also true of each major stage in the development of the community as a whole: each is characterised by economic changes which conditioned political, social and cultural changes.16



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But, by the early 1960s, other work was coming to fruition, and some new bearings were evident. The establishment in Sydney in 1960 of a Journal of Religious History was one straw in the wind (‘the religious history of Australia,’ the editors wrote sadly in the first issue, ‘is only very imperfectly known’). Two years earlier K. S. Inglis had with force and elegance reminded historians that in Australia the Catholic church had a notable historiographic tradition which deserved re-examination and extension.17 Such an interest was bound to raise queries about the dictum that ‘economic history is the major part of all Australian history.’ In two books of documents18 published in the late 1950s, Clark had challenged that assumption, and his first volume of A History of Australia (1963) developed a tragic vision of early New South Wales in which religious themes were of central importance. Catholic historians working in less apocalyptic vein were soon writing afresh of the church’s internal politics and growth and of its encounter with Australian society.19 The history of Protestantism advanced more slowly, though Michael Roe depicted it as beside, and in some senses as a part of, a quest for ‘moral enlightenment’ that before 1850 appeared in eastern Australia as the dominant urban lower- and middle-class ideology—and, incidentally, an important cultural strand to be set beside Russel Ward’s bush ethos.20 The appearance of such writings was seen by some as the beginnings of serious intellectual history in Australia—an attempt, as Paul Bourke put it in 1967, ‘to use public and private talk heuristically . . . as a way of discovering certain features of the social and individual contexts in which such talk has occurred . . . to establish the pre-dispositions, ideas and concepts of past generations and discover their uses.’21 That sense of variety which some of the general historians had felt was also being documented through the writing of regional history. At least eight major studies published between 1960 and 1973 offered soundings in depth, principally for the nineteenth century, on an arc stretching round the perimeter of the continent from northern Queensland to Western Australia. Their revelation of extensive differences in community, environment, and experience cut across many received generalisations. Themes prominent in eastern history—the conflict between labour and capital or religious disputes over education, for example—were muted or absent in F. K. Crowley’s account of Western Australia.22 J. B. Hirst, considering the peculiar

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social and political interrelationship of Adelaide and the country, depicted South Australia as a virtual ‘city state’ rather than as a colony whose ‘ample government’ was generated by problems of distance and sparse settlement.23 In western Victoria Margaret Kiddle explained the growth from modest and chiefly Scottish origins of a pastoral aristocracy which thwarted radical land legislation and evolved a mode of patriarchal social relations unusual in Australia.24 Gordon Buxton showed by contrast how in the Riverina districts of New South Wales the ‘free selection laws,’ contrary to earlier historians’ beliefs, created rural communities of small and medium farmers and graziers, populist in tone, and centred on service towns where lively social and political life mediated that rural–urban dichotomy conventionally stressed as a feature of Australian history.25 The thirst for property was seen to modify the ‘big man’s frontier’ in environments as different as those which created the small sugar growers of northern Queensland and the migratory farmers of South Australia.26 On a broad scale it was becoming clear that in Australian history geographic determinism, though given a brilliant new twist by Geoffrey Blainey in The Tyranny of Distance,27 would not survive unscathed in the face of detailed study in particular settings of the interplay between human and environment, particularly where scholars were working with dynamic conceptions of ecology and trying to allow for the effects on the land itself of changing patterns of human knowledge and technology.28 Biography, hitherto a weak growth in Australian studies, was also advancing in the 1960s, the most notable achievement being the establishment early in the decade of a cooperative scholarly enterprise, centred on the Australian National University, for planning and producing an Australian Dictionary of Biography. The first five volumes of this work, published between 1966 and 1974, provided new and colourful evidence of variety, especially as they included not only the eminent but also less notable individuals chosen ‘simply as samples of the Australian experience.’ Organised by time periods, the Dictionary offered a series of cross-sectional pictures of Australian society in evolution and aroused new curiosity—particularly about the significance of types of people who previously have not found a place in historians’ conventional pictures. Its potential as a revisionist influence must thus be considerable.



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But the great revolution of the 1960s was in economic history itself. ‘Economists’ economic history’—informed by theory, highly technical, and based on massive accumulations of statistics—bore its first fruit in Australia; Fitzpatrick’s work was eclipsed, at least in its guise as the ruling empirical account of Australia’s economic growth. The centrepiece of the new work was N. G. Butlin’s Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861–1900, an exhaustive examination of the processes of capital formation in Australia’s most remarkable period of nineteenth-century expansion. Butlin concluded that Australian history fell into four distinct periods—‘an inauspicious convict beginning,’ half a century of ‘pioneering trials,’ forty years of ‘massive effort to control the resources of the Australian continent,’ a final ‘three quarters of a century . . . preoccupied with the deliberate fostering and perfection of . . . urbanised society’—and wrote with lyricism of his findings about the third of them: In 1860 the Australian colonies made up a loosely connected group of economies. No stable society, no effective social order, no sustained utilisation of available new resources . . . no substantial capital equipment and no national capital accumulation had been achieved . . . Thirty years later the foundations of an enduring western society had been established and the social and productive assets of a coherent efficient economy and of a wealthy society installed. This transformation was a prodigious effort . . . product of a rate of expansion paralleled only by the United States.29 Butlin’s exploration of such themes had profound implications for almost every aspect of social and political history in this period and beyond. It dealt with the dynamics of growth; it provided a new context for the stories of pastoral expansion, of the state’s emergence as what Hancock had called ‘a vast public utility,’ and of the depression of the 1890s. It linked the character of development in the twentieth century to an overproduction of social capital in the nineteenth. Above all, it underlined with startling clarity a fact with which Australian historians had never come to grips, the leading role of urbanisation in the economic growth.

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In one sense Butlin’s work was hardly needed to emphasise the importance of urbanisation in Australia. That importance often had been commented on in the nineteenth century and had been highlighted in the famous study of 1899 in which Adna Weber, comparing urban growth internationally, thought it ‘remarkable’ that, after barely one hundred years of settlement by Europeans on a continent which they developed chiefly for rural production, a third of Australia’s people should be clustered in the colonial capitals. The twentieth century, as anyone who heeded census findings knew, saw a great acceleration of the trend toward concentration. By 1971 nine major coastal urban areas accounted for almost two-thirds of the entire Australian population of 12.7 million, 44 per cent of whom lived in one of the two great conurbations centring on Sydney and Melbourne. And yet, as one writer recently observed, in Australia ‘historians have asked very few questions about the process and politics of urban growth, [or] the nature and quality of the urban life that most Australians have experienced.’30 We may set down this neglect partly to the relative youthfulness of Australian historiography, remembering as well that even in Britain and the United States urban history is a recent growth. The bush or rural legend also played its part, given its association with a particular tradition of Australian democracy and its importance to artists and publicists long obsessed with the urge to assert Australia’s uniqueness. The development in recent years of a more sophisticated culture and of a sense of close involvement in the problems of a wider world community has helped turn Australian attention more toward the city environment, where in any case the issues of pollution, redevelopment, and planning—though often neglected in the past—seem no longer avoidable. So in the 1960s urban studies became a burgeoning field for town planners, economists, and sociologists, in the process arousing inevitable curiosity about the past. A few pioneer urban historians were already at work and, as others took up the interest, it became clear not only that reappraisals of a variety of received historical interpretations might be in store but also that innovative historiographic techniques, involving cross-disciplinary work, might be developed.31 Urbanism is, of course, only one of a number of issues with historical dimensions brought to attention by changing circumstances.



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Others cluster, for example, around the results and implications of recent immigration. The movement of Europeans (only 45 per cent of them British) to Australia between 1947 and 1973 produced a direct net gain to the country of two million people who, taken together with their Australian-born children, accounted over the same period for 59 per cent of the total population growth of 5. 6 million. Immigration on such a scale (Australia’s population in 1947 was 7. 5 million) and of such diversity has dramatically changed the age and ethnic structure of the population. Fewer than half of today’s Australians personally experienced life in the insular and parochial society of the years before 1945. Despite much speculation on the ways in which the immigrant wave has affected Australian styles of life (eating and drinking, sport, musical and literary taste), hard evidence is rare in these matters. But study of the problems faced by minority groups and of the adaptations they have made to the host society is further advanced. This work, together with a growing official tendency to replace the ‘assimilationist’ attitudes evident in the early days of the immigrant programme with franker recognition of the fact of ethnicity, underlines the pluralistic character of modern Australian society.32 Some historians wonder how new this phenomenon really is and what fresh light might be thrown on the Australian experience by the study of minority groups in the past. The work of scholars like Charles Price (on southern Europeans in the early twentieth century and on Asian groups in the nineteenth) seems to make the point.33 So too does the interest displayed, particularly by religious historians, in the Irish in Australia. Above all, there are the Aborigines, that minority whose condition most disturbs a prosperous society whose complacency is upset by having to recognise in its midst the direst poverty and the opprobrium of being guilty of one of the deadliest sins of modern times—racism. In Population and Australia (1975), the first report of the National Population Inquiry, W. D. Borrie observed: On every conceivable comparison, the Aborigines . . . stand in stark contrast to the general Australian society, and also to other ‘ethnic’ groups, whether defined on the basis of race, nationality, birthplace, language or religion. They probably have the highest growth rate, the highest birth

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rate, the highest death rate, the worst health and housing, and the lowest educational, occupational, economic, social and legal status of any identifiable section of the Australian population. Yet less hard data is [sic] available about the Aboriginal population than about the most recent migrant groups . . . it is a measure of the inequality of the Aborigine’s position in Australian society that in a country whose population and social statistics rank among the best in the world, there should exist a group for whom the statistics are as poor as those of most developing countries.34 What anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner has called ‘disremembrance,’ or the ‘Great Australian Silence,’ long muffled the facts of Aboriginal conditions and the place of the Aborigines in Australia’s history.35 An estimated three hundred thousand Aborigines inhabited the continent when soldiers and convicts established the first British settlement in 1788; but demographic collapse over the next hundred years reduced those numbers to the point where it seemed inevitable that the race would disappear. This outcome of white settlement, however sad, seemed unavoidable to most Europeans during the heyday of social Darwinism. There were arguments about the impact of exotic diseases, about ecological change, even about a curious psychological ‘loss of will to live,’ which served consciously or unconsciously to mask the brutal reality of the violence to which the indigenes had been subjected. As mentioned earlier, Crawford’s Australia (1952) had a lively chapter on the Aborigines, but for the most part the general historians were content to repeat Hancock’s brisk dictum that ‘in truth, a hunting and a pastoral economy cannot coexist within the same bounds’ and hence to treat the Aborigines as a kind of melancholy footnote to Australia’s history.36 Stanner’s description of this approach is apt enough: ‘A view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.’ But, in any case, the prophets of doom were wrong. Aboriginal birth and death rates steadied in the 1880s, and the Aboriginal people began to hold their own in the demographic sense. By the 1940s their numbers were rising rapidly, and in 1971 demographers were predicting that the



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Aboriginal population, then 106,000, would double before the end of the century. In the 1950s and 1960s a virile movement—strongly influenced by black stirrings overseas and championed by many students and other white Australians—began to assert Aboriginal rights and to protest Aboriginal injustices. It was not fortuitous that anthropologists and prehistorians at work on Aboriginal culture began at this time to receive public recognition, the most notable event being the establishment in 1961 of a government-funded Institute of Aboriginal Studies. In less than a decade, the work which the institute made possible in biology, prehistory, linguistics and anthropology added incalculably to knowledge of the Aboriginal past and present. While prehistorians pushed back the date of the Aborigines’ arrival on the continent—once thought to have preceded the coming of whites by only a few hundred years—to a barely imaginable thirty thousand years ago, students of modern history were seeking in a variety of studies to trace the unhappy history of the Aborigines after their dispossession by Europeans began. The major single project was sponsored by the Social Sciences Research Council and led to the production by 1973 of ten volumes. The project’s director, C. D. Rowley, presented a comprehensive picture in the three-volume Aboriginal Policy and Practice.37 Besides opening to a wide public the fruits of accumulating scholarly research, those works could be expected to insure that no future general historian should find it possible to ignore the place of Aboriginal culture and experience in Australian history. The Aborigines form Australia’s only significant—and therefore ‘troublesome’—‘coloured’ minority. This results from restrictions which the individual colonies imposed on immigration in the nineteenth century and which the new Commonwealth adopted as ‘settled policy’ in 1901 to keep Australia ‘white.’ For more than half a century, few seriously questioned the morality of this policy, but there is self-consciousness about it now. The contemporary revulsion against ‘racism’ is one source of unease; Australia’s heavy dependence, for trade and security, on friendships in Asia is another. The restrictive immigration legislation still stands, though softened since 1966 by blander administration. Despite the agitation of reformers, Australia is a great distance yet from deciding to free immigration to

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a point that would allow the development of that multiracial society which some visionaries dream of and some down-to-earth people occasionally think of as inevitable. Meantime, self-questioning has been evident in an urge to re-examine the origins and the working of the restrictive machinery. Though here, as in writings on ‘racism’ and the Aborigines, there appears much breast-beating (usually anachronistic and pious or shallowly sardonic), important new light has been shed on Australian social attitudes, and local scholarship has been given a salutary push in the direction of comparative study.38 In the most important of the new works on White Australia, for example, Charles Price noticed that in British Columbia, California, Oregon, and New Zealand the history of restriction has been similar. Scholars ‘peered and pottered and wondered at local minutiae, sometimes becoming lost in intricate and heated debate about origins or procedures,’ while failing to notice what was happening elsewhere and how seemingly local oddities might in fact be manifestations of wider trends. ‘Australian scholars, for instance, might have spent less time arguing whether economic, nationalistic or racial motives were predominant in creating and maintaining the White Australia policy had they concerned themselves not only with Australian egalitarianism and pastoral origins but with why virtually identical policies emerged elsewhere at the same time.’39 The meticulous research and sensible conclusions which Price developed on those premises threw new light on the origins of Australia’s restrictive policies. His work was also important in a wider sense because of its methodological implications. For few historians have in the past thought it profitable to compare Australia with other societies that display likenesses in origins and experience, though elsewhere the fruitfulness of that method has long been understood. Price’s work may be expected to support an interest belatedly stirred among some Australian historians by Louis Hartz’s provocative Founding of New Societies (New York, 1964). Though the substance of Hartz’s treatment of Australia in this work does not always please specialists, the comparative framework within which it is couched has stimulated lively discussion and at least one seminal essay. That is J. W. McCarty’s ‘Australia as a Region of Recent Settlement in the Nineteenth Century,’ which takes cues from Hartz and from Marc Bloch to suggest pitfalls in a conventional wisdom



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that emphasised Australia’s uniqueness and neglected a range of crucial questions which comparative study might bring to light.40 It would be misleading to suggest that those and the many other new departures that one might list in a more extended essay have spelled the death of interest in the old radical tradition. That interest has remained alive and well, having received a particularly important fillip at the beginning of the 1960s through the establishment of an Association for the Study of Labour History, whose journal, Labour History, quickly became the main forum for discussion in the field. Monographic literature after 1960 continued to expand the range of scholarly understanding of particular phases of Labor’s development, and the Fitzpatrick vision of Labor’s heroic role in the Australian ‘class struggle’ remained a lively debating point.41 Historians of more pragmatic bent were seeking to locate the earlier Labor movement in a broader social and political context which gave weight to other, often neglected, reformist impulses or to investigate the contrast between Labor’s ambiguous working-class rhetoric and its actual populist composition and performance.42 And, from both ‘conservative’ and ‘new left’ standpoints, the suggestion was being made that, in Australia’s essentially bourgeois society, Labor might better be understood historically as promoter of consensus than as vehicle of class consciousness. Thus, in his significantly titled Civilising Capitalism, Bede Nairn pictured nineteenth-century Labor leaders in New South Wales as a kind of creative minority dedicated to improving a capitalist society whose essential contours they accepted unquestioningly, while Humphrey McQueen has written of Australian workers as fundamentally petit bourgeois in attitude, ‘fog-bound within capitalism,’ their false consciousness long articulated by the Labor party.43 In 1974, forty years after the appearance of the Cambridge history and twenty years after Greenwood’s Australia, a group of professional historians under the editorship of Professor F. K. Crowley produced A New History of Australia,44 a book avowedly designed as ‘a new overview’ of the country’s history and, perhaps even more than its two multi-author predecessors, an epitome of the research of the previous twenty years. Over six hundred pages long and arranged in twelve chapters which lack titles but divide the years from 1788 to 1972 into more or less even chronological slabs, it is a

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formidable encyclopaedic work. Although there are some omissions (the story begins, for example, with the coming of white men and women in 1788, neglecting the ancient Aboriginal occupation of the continent), most of the preoccupations we have been discussing are evident in the text. There is a concern to capture regional diversity, to take proper note of religion, to confront racialism, to recognise the existence of the cities, even at times to break through the politicoeconomic crust and give glimpses of a real society underneath. The density of the treatment, that is to say, has thickened as the writers— particularly those concerned with the nineteenth century—draw on specialist studies their predecessors did not have and strain after methods for depicting society in the round and explaining change in structural terms. No doubt the silent influences here were those historians whose great contribution to the revolution of the last few decades has been to suggest ways of looking holistically at past Australian communities—economics limned in the manner of Noel Butlin, for example, or cultural fabrics recreated in the semi-anthropological style of some of the regional historians, in particular that of Geoffrey Serle.45 The accumulation of data reported in the Crowley volume and the proficient and frequent insight with which it was assembled mirrored the great distance Australian historical scholarship had traveled by 1974. Yet, despite brave words in its preface about ‘radical rethinking of traditional interpretations,’ much of the story seemed familiar. The editor’s decision to leave the twelve contributors ‘free to apply their own view of the nature of general history, and to emphasise those aspects of their periods which gave them character or ethos’ meant that the book was essentially a collection of essays and not a work with consistent and developing themes. In detail, of course, it reflected within particular periods those shifts in perspective which followed the accumulation of ‘meticulous scholarship’ to which J. M. Ward referred in 1963. Although many old themes persisted, they appeared muted or overlaid or placed in a more reasoned and more detailed human context. But, considered as a whole, A New History, fine epitome of Australian scholarship though it is, still left it open for someone to tell us what the shape of Australia’s past looks like in long perspective from the vantage point of the last quarter of the twentieth century.



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The general historians who wrote after the Second World War laid down a structure of periodisation which took economic growth, ‘democracy,’ and the development of nationhood as central themes. Politics was a main clue to the working out of these themes, and five dramatic events—the gold rushes, two depressions, and two world wars—were the critical markers for defining the main periods to be treated. That perspective, which tempts historians to deal with the quarter century after 1950 as a kind of postscript to the main story, is becoming more and more unsatisfactory, particularly to those who came to maturity in that period. As memories of depression and war receded, as the study of politics lost much of its traditional content, as problems of social justice assumed new forms, and as concern for the quality of life took precedence in many people’s minds over the imperatives of ‘development,’ the incentive to break—sometimes radically—with traditional approaches to the past was strong. Thus, for example, some suggested that Australian history might be fruitfully rethought as a whole if the character and evolution of the class structure were chosen as the central issue to be investigated and as a possible clue to a new periodisation which might bring to the surface rhythms and explanations of change hitherto lost to view.46 Similar effects are hoped for from the growth in Australia of that kind of social history (now well developed in Britain) which is concerned to discover such facts as the patterns of birth, marriage, death, household, and kinship and to investigate the changing nature of culture (in the anthropologists’ sense of the word) and of ideas as treated by those whom the French call historians of mentalités. That is the kind of history which, as R. J. Tawney would have it, explores the ‘life of society’ rather than a series of events. It is a history to ‘widen the range of observation’ from the experience of a single generation in order to encompass systematically that of its predecessors.47 It is needed by a community beset by a consciousness of change, even of rootlessness, and looking urgently for new interpreters.

Notes 1

2

48

W. K. Hancock, Australia, Ernest Benn, 1930; Australasian Publishing Co., 1945; idem, Country and Calling, Faber & Faber, 1954, 121–2. The literature of Australian historiography has been discussed in detail in a number of essays. Three are particularly to be recommended, and the information they contain is broadly assumed in what follows in this essay:

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18

19

J. A. La Nauze, ‘The Study of Australian History, 1929–59’, Historical Studies, no. 33 (1959), 1–11; J. M. Ward, ‘Historiography,’ in A. L. McLeod (ed.), The Pattern of Australian Culture, Oxford University Press and Cornell University Press, 1963; K. A. MacKirdy, ‘Australia,’ in R. W. Winks (ed.), The Historiography of the British Empire–Commonwealth, Duke University Press, 1966. C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, 6 vols., Angus & Robertson, 1938–42. Heather Radi, ‘1920–29’, in F. K. Crowley (ed.), A New History of Australia, William Heinemann, 1974, 395. T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, 1788–1901, 4 vols., Oxford University Press, 1918. The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 7, 1, Cambridge University Press, 1933, 625. B. C. Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Rawson’s Bookshop, 1940. Also British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833, George Allen & Unwin, 1939; and The British Empire in Australia, 1834–1939, Melbourne University Press, 1941. Eris O’Brien, The Foundation of Australia, Sheed & Ward, 1937. W. J. Hudson, ‘1951–72’, in Crowley (ed.), op. cit., 504. The figures are taken from Geoffey Serle, ‘The State of the Profession in Australia,’ Historical Studies, no. 61 (1973), 686–702. La Nauze, op. cit., 8. Ward, op. cit., 231, 250. R. M. Crawford, Australia, Hutchinson, 1952; A. G. L. Shaw, The Story of Australia, Faber & Faber, 1955; D. Pike, Australia: The Quiet Continent, Cambridge University Press, 1962; Gordon Greenwood (ed.), Australia: A Social and Political History, Angus & Robertson, 1955; C. Hartley Grattan, The Southwest Pacific to 1900 and The Southwest Pacific since 1900, 2 vols., University of Michigan Press, 1963; C. M. H. Clark, A Short History of Australia, Mentor Books,1963. R. A. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1880–1910, Melbourne University Press, 1960. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, 1958. S. J. Butlin, Foundations of the Australian Monetary System, Cambridge University Press, 1953, 1. K. S. Inglis, ‘Catholic Historiography in Australia,’ Historical Studies, no. 31 (1958), 233–53. C. M. H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, Angus & Robertson, 1955; idem, Sources of Australian History, Oxford University Press, 1957. See W. Phillips, ‘Australian Catholic Historiography: Some Recent Issues,’ Historical Studies, no. 56 (1971), 600–11. Important monographs include T. L. Suttor, Hierarchy and Democracy in Australia, 1788–1870, Melbourne University Press, 1965; P. O’Farrell, The Catholic Church in Australia: A Short History, 1788–1967, Nelson, 1968; J. N. Molony, The Roman Mould of the Australian Catholic Church, Melbourne University Press, 1969;



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20

21

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30 31

32

33

34

35

36

37

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J. Waldersee, Catholic Society in New South Wales, 1788–1860, Sydney University Press, 1974. J. D. Bollen, Protestantism and Social Reform in New South Wales, 1890– 1910, Melbourne University Press, 1972. Paul F. Bourke, ‘Some Recent Essays in Australian Intellectual History,’ Historical Studies, no. 49 (1967), 97–105. F. K. Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, Macmillan, 1960. J. B. Hirst, Adelaide and the Country, 1870–1917, Melbourne University Press, 1973. Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834–1890, Melbourne University Press, 1961. G. L. Buxton, The Riverina, 1861–1891: An Australian Regional Study, Melbourne University Press, 1967. G. C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, Jacaranda Press, 1963; D. W. Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869–1884, Rand McNally, 1962. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Sun Books, 1966. See especially Meinig, op cit. ; T. M. Perry, Australia’s First Frontier, Melbourne University Press, 1963; W. K. Hancock, Discovering Monaro, Cambridge University Press, 1972. N. G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861–1900, Cambridge University Press, 1964, xiii, 3–4. Leonie Sandercock, Cities for Sale, Melbourne University Press, 1975. See in particular the articles by J. W. McCarty, S. Glynn, and G. Davison in Urbanisation in Australia, special issue of Australian Economic History Review, X (1970). W. A. Bate, A History of Brighton, Melbourne University Press, 1962, is the pioneer work in this field. Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities, Griffin Press, 1970, is the most stimulating historian’s book on current urban problems. The best guide to the relevant literature is C. A. Price’s periodically updated Australian Immigration: A Bibliography and A Digest, Australian National University Press, 1966, 1970, 1975. Part 2 of the 1975 issue is a bibliography of immigrant education in Australia, 1945–75, and is prefaced with an important essay by Jean I. Martin on the change from assimilationist to pluralist policies. C. A. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, Oxford University Press, 1963; idem, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia, 1836–88, Australian National University Press, 1974. W. D. Borrie, Population and Australia: A Demographic Analysis and Projection, AGPS, 1975, vol. 2, 455. W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, Sydney, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969, 18 ff. Though it should be noted that in Discovering Monaro (1972), Hancock saw the Aborigines in a very different light. C. D. Rowley, Aboriginal Policy and Practice; vol. 1, The Destruction of

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38

39 40

41

42

43

44 45

46

Aboriginal Society; vol. 2, Outcasts in White Australia; vol. 3, The Remote Aborigines, Australian National University Press, 1970–71. On Aboriginal antiquity see D. J. Mulvaney, The Prehistory of Australia, Thames & Hudson, 1969, revised 1975. Geoffrey Blainey’s Triumph of the Nomads, Sun Books, 1975, is a popular epitome of the main work in the field. See P. Corris, ‘Racialism: The Australian Experience,’ Historical Studies, no. 61 (1973), 750–9, for a critical guide to the literature. The administration of the ‘White Australia’ policy is examined in A. T. Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia: The Background to Exclusion 1896–1923, Melbourne University Press, 1964, and A. C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy, Melbourne University Press, 1967. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built, ix. J. W. McCarty, ‘Australia as a Region of Recent Settlement in the Nineteenth Century,’ Australian Economic History Review, X (1970), 107–37. Among numerous works note especially Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900– 1921, Australian National University Press, 1965, and D. J. Murphy, Labour in Politics, University of Queensland Press, 1975. The literature here is extensive. But see especially B. E. Mansfield, Australian Democrat: The Career of Edward William O’Sullivan, 1846–1910, Sydney University Press, 1965; P. Loveday and A. W. Martin, Parliament Factions and Parties, Melbourne University Press, 1966; D. W. Rawson, Labour in Vain: A Survey of the Australian Labor Party, Longmans, 1966. N. B. Nairn, Civilising Capitalism, Australian National University Press, 1973; H. McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin Books, 1970; J. Playford and D. Kirsner, Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique, Penguin Books, 1972. F. K. Crowley (ed.), A New History of Australia, William Heinemann, 1974. Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861, Melbourne University Press, 1963; idem, The Rush to be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, 1971. See R. W. Connell, ‘The Shape of Australian History,’ Labour History, no. 28 (1975). Connell is critical of mainstream empirical historiography and is working with T. H. Irving on a historical analysis of class in Australia. His Ruling Class, Ruling Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1977, is a collection of important essays setting out some of his key ideas and, incidentally, suggesting the special usefulness of a ‘class’ approach after the Liberal ‘coup’ in federal politics at the end of 1975. The burgeoning field of women’s studies is a special aspect of the new social history. See especially Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda, Penguin Books, 1976; Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann, Nelson, 1975; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin Books, 1975; A. Curthoys, S. Eade, and P. Spearritt (eds), Women at Work, Canberra, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1975; K. Daniels, M. Murnane, and A. Picot, Women in Australia: An Annotated Guide to Records, 2 vols, AGPS, 1977.



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47

52

See E. J. Hobsbawm, preface to J. F. C. Harrison, The Early Victorians, 1832– 51, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; F. B. Smith, ‘Recreating the Life of the Common Man,’ in D. Duffy, G. Harman, and K. Swan (eds), Historians at Work, Hicks Smith, 1973. K. S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History, 1788–1870, Melbourne University Press, 1974, the first of four volumes ‘exploring’ Australian society from its beginnings to the 1970s, is the most important work in this genre.

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3 Australia and the Hartz ‘Fragment’ Thesis

The Founding of New Societies is a remarkable essay in comparative history: a series of parallel studies of European communities abroad, informed and made coherent by an over-arching theory which concerns the processes said to have commonly been set in motion when Europeans left the homeland to establish new colonies of settlement. In its general bearings, this theory is an extension of ideas which Hartz applied to one national history in his Liberal Tradition in America. That earlier work also offers a glimpse of the genesis of the ‘fragment’ concept—the pivot of the argument of New Societies. The context is instructive for the revelation it offers of Hartz’s principles and purposes in turning to the comparative method, and should at the outset be noted. The issue of comparative inquiry comes up early in The Liberal Tradition, at a point where Hartz feels it essential to forestall critics who may object to his treatment of American liberalism as a ‘single factor’ analysis of history and politics. Already the hard core of his main argument has been sketched out. ‘Born free’, America was destined to become the bearer of a monolithic liberal orthodoxy. Extricated, as it were, from the European matrix just as Enlightenment ideas flourished, she simultaneously threw off the constrictions of a First published in Australian Economic History Review, vol. 13, 2, 1973, 131–47.


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feudal past and escaped future experience of those revolutionary impulses yet to be born in the parent culture. In this schema, the timing of the break is crucial . . . and this point is suddenly illuminated by calling to witness, for the first time, another colonial society: ‘The escape from the old European order could be accompanied by other ideas, as for instance the Chartist concept which had some effect on the settlement of Australia.’1 That contrast points up the relationship between comparative study and the rationale of the single factor hypothesis. It is of course correct, says Hartz, to reject claims of ultimate causality implicit in theories like those, say, of Marx and Hobbes, for there is no ‘secret’ or ‘key’ to the historical process. ‘But we must not, because of this, brand as fruitless any attempt to isolate a significant historical variable and to study it by consistently comparing cases. If we do, we shall have thrown out, along with the bathwater of false monisms, the very baby of scientific analysis.’ An important footnote clarifies and drives home the point: What is needed here is a comparative study of new societies which will put alongside the European institutions left behind the positive cultural concepts brought to the various frontier settings . . . Veblen, in a sentence he never followed up, caught some of the significance of the problem when he said that ‘it was the fortune of the American people to have taken their point of departure from the European situation when the system of Natural Liberty was still “obvious and simple” ’, while other colonial enterprises ‘have had their institutional point of departure blurred with a scattering of the holdovers that were brought in again by the return wave of reaction in Europe, as well as by these later-come stirrings of radical discontent that have questioned the eternal fitness of the system of Natural Liberty itself.’2 Here, in embryo, is the idea that emerges full-blown in The Foundation of New Societies. The isolates which Veblen glimpsed are defined there by the term ‘fragments’: parts ripped from wholes, the offspring societies assume a new identity, and in the shaping of this identity the nature

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and timing of the exodus is crucial. Fragments, it appears, have broken away from Europe during each of three successive phases: the feudal, the liberal and the radical—and Latin America and French Canada, the United States, English Canada and South Africa, and Australia are called forth in turn as witnesses. Though the fragments naturally differ greatly, they have one important thing in common: the experience of liberation from the European past and future. Their world shrinks, a new conservatism makes absolute the ideas which preside over their birth, and extrication from what is called ‘the European battle’ permits an unfolding of potentialities impossible in the old world. This is a theme that lends itself to almost apocalyptic elaboration: ‘The story here is marvellous,’ writes Hartz, like a succession of Cinderella dreams, Bossuet, Locke and Cobbett, miserable men abroad, all wake up in worlds finer than any they have known. When the revolution hits France, French Canada clings to the spirit of divine right . . . When the masses organise in bourgeois fragments, whether English Canada, the United States, or Dutch South Africa, the tortured European Jacobin becomes a mighty man . . . The fulfilment of radicalism in Australia speaks for itself. After the depression and the great strikes of the [1890s] the Labour Party mastered the Australian scene with an ease unheard of in the annals of European socialism. In every case the conservatism of the fragments unlooses the drama, the embryonic telos, that Europe has contained and stifled. The world has shrunk, but precisely for that reason, it has blossomed as well. 3 Naturally there are variations of detail even in similar settings; in the liberal group, for example. Hartz detects greater relaxation in the bourgeois spirit of the Dutch Reformed Church in New England Puritanism or Canadian Anglicanism; there is a mitigated capitalist ardour in South Africa, a Tory touch in English Canada. But the similarities are nevertheless overwhelming: the all-pervading ethic of individualism; the failure to develop a major socialist movement because the revolutionary movement is weak, unlit by that revolutionary flame that served to fuse socialism in Europe.



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But more important, there is everywhere a curious conservatising process which fixes the fragment character. On the one hand, fragmentation is psychologically intolerable, and the part must become a whole; on the other, the obverse side of unchallenged freedom to develop is fulfilment of ideological potential that is, by definition, limited. These quite disparate tendencies converge in the formation of substitute nationalisms, whose flowering comes to mark the end of creative political thinking. By ‘boot-strap necessity’, the foundation ethic is enthroned: Puritanism is thus universalised into Americanism; in a later and more radical setting, Australians discover themselves in the national legend of ‘mateship’. The new nationalisms provide the reference points for cultivating consensus and resisting unwanted echoes from a European struggle the fragment does not experience. So French Canadian clergy appeal to the spirit of New France to shut out the Enlightenment, and Senator McCarthy invokes Americanism to resist Marx. It is the end of ideology, a crippling intellectual cosiness: ‘With the past gone, the future closed off,’ writes Hartz, who can deny the even tenor of things? And yet it is a fact, obvious in the whole shrinking process of fragmentation, that that evenness, that security, was purchased at the price of a larger vision. It is no accident that none of the fragment cultures . . . produced a major tradition of social philosophy. Where life is fixed at the point of origin, how can philosophy flourish? Where perspectives shrink to a single value, and that value becomes the universe, how can value itself be considered?4 I seek here merely to catch at the flavour of this book, and to bring to mind the outline of its central argument. No précis can of course properly report the refinements Hartz gives to that argument, nor do justice to the erudition, the wit, and the magisterial style with which he elaborates it. There is, furthermore, a climax which we shall largely—perhaps unjustly—ignore: a discussion of the crises which in our own day assail each of the fragments, as the future, so to speak, crashes in upon them, and they face ‘a world they cannot out of their own experience understand and for which they cannot out of their

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own experience prescribe’.5 Hartz’s leaping vision nowhere more generously piles layer upon layer of meaning than in this section, and one is aware—a little uneasily—that the mood is not altogether empirical: it is prophetic too. Indeed this climax suggests a new angle from which the whole argument could be seen: here threads come together, and there is a feeling that much of what has been said has at its heart a strain almost of Hegelianism—as if we have been reading a history of ideas whose unfolding reflects a set of inner truths, rather than of empirical observations, about the fragment experience. But if the work is multifaceted, the claim for scientific analysis has been made, and impertinent historians’ questions have to be asked, at least in so far as the theory claims to explain what ‘actually happened.’ On the one side we might, for example, ask, as Professor Loewenberg has done, how correct it is simply to take a European cultural unity as given; or to question some of the generalisations which support the European ideology as it is presented to us—to ask, that is, whether the social and political ideas assumed to be the ruling concepts were in truth the dominating symbols in which the drives of men were fixed.6 Though they need to be noted, I shall not discuss problems of this order. Here I wish to concentrate more particularly on the fragment itself—on the area of the argument where the most specific characterisations are made in the theory—and to ask the simplest of empirical questions: does the theory fit the ‘facts’; and is the theory useful for historical study? And with these questions as implicit points of reference, I wish to consider the case of the specific fragment, Australia. Australia has a special place at the high point of the ‘fragment’ argument: it exemplifies there the new society founded in a ‘radical age’. Feudal remnants, we are told, all the forms of Whig liberalism, are left behind; even the spirit of Jacobinism is muted. Cobbett and the Chartists will flourish here, for the foundation ineffably sets a permanent tone: as Hartz describes it, ‘the proletarian spirit which came out of the early convict establishment and the subsequent waves of radical migration, both British and Continental’.7 We may note in passing that in the detailed chapter on Australia, Rosecrance is more ambiguous: ‘More than any other frontier countries perhaps’, he writes,



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Australia was isolated from the main streams of European culture; in consequence, it was destined to find its political and social tendencies in the foundation population. Foundation, of course, was not a solitary act. The ‘founding’ of Australia continued for three-quarters of a century, and the ethos of the population was not fully formed until after the goldrushes of the eighteen-fifties. But the Australian social adult of today is prefigured in the social embryo of yesteryear.8 But on the character of the early migrants, he is unequivocally at one with Hartz: three-quarters of those who came to Australia in the 1830s and 1840s, he tells us, were assisted migrants, creatures of the British social and industrial system. Though unable to afford even the modest cost of a passage to America, they were nevertheless people who ‘succeeded in escaping the British cul de sac—but they had no vision of a self reliant life in Australia’.9 The stage is thus set for the unfolding of a spirit variously, and sometimes confusingly, labelled as radical, proletarian, or collectivist. There is of course resistance here and there: as happened in America, for instance, Australia experiences a brief and abortive Whig reaction. Wentworth and the squatters of New South Wales dream at mid-century of establishing a landed aristocracy, but, as in America, that dream fades because real feudalism is absent, and in Australia the Whig defeat is the more devastating because it is inflicted by ‘a democracy dedicated much less to the capitalist dream than to mateship’.10 Where in America the Whig could relate through his capitalist individualism to the mass, and sustain himself via the Horatio Alger promise and the Republican party, the Australian Whig finds himself excluded by the collective spirit, an outsider doomed soon to be confronted with the Labor party. And here, indeed, we have the collectivist spirit made manifest, for Labor, once fused by the crises of the 1890s, seizes the nationalism of the fragment and ‘masters the Australian scene with an ease unheard of in European socialist annals’.11 Through Labor the socialist ideal triumphs, and Labor henceforth determines the context of Australian politics: but then a curious thing happens—socialist theory atrophies. Marx, as it were, never stalks the land: even the paler theoretical discipline of the

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Webbs and Laski is not to be found. And why? Let Hartz himself give the answer: In large measure this has been owing to what Australian radicalism did not have to fight, feudalism and a powerful bourgeoisie: again the ‘future’ shrinks because the past has been left behind. For it is the continuing pressure of these older forces which renews the doctrinaire passion of European radicalism, renews its utopias. The easy triumph of the Labour spirit in Australia, like the easy triumph of liberalism in the bourgeois fragments, robs it of the Jacobin, the doctrinaire, edge. Indeed, in both cases, that ease leads to a distrust of the theoretical mind, not merely because self-evident truth required no expositor, but because the intellectual, or the ‘tall stoop’, as he is sometimes known in Australia, represents an elite outside the triumphant mass.12 We have here a neat construct, an excellent sample, it would seem, of the deterministic operation of single factor logic within the fragment, and a convenient model against which we can set the ‘facts’. But some of the ‘facts’ are, unfortunately, a trifle awkward. To illustrate, we may scrutinise some well-known features of Australia’s development in the nineteenth century particularly as they affect the three most important elements of the model: foundations, the environment in which the telos unfolds, and the political outcome—that reformism said to be symbolised by the triumph of the Labor party. We must begin by noticing that it is difficult for us to talk of Australia as a fragment—if that word is to have any meaning— at least before Federation in 1900, and by then, according to the theory, the tone was well and truly set. There were in fact six separate foundations, and only two of them were convict colonies. In New South Wales, the larger of these, convicts could have been proletarians at heart but this does not seem to have prevented most expirees from accepting the government land grants normally offered to them up to the 1820s, nor did it dissuade others from establishing themselves, sometimes most successfully, in Sydney’s lucrative commercial life. The unassisted free immigrants who came in from the 1820s onward



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seem to have been mostly farmers, professional men, and retired naval and military officers, who brought modest capital and sought a competence in agriculture or commerce, or who won a stake in the pastoral boom that developed after 1830. The mass of assisted free immigrants who followed in the 1830s and 1840s were indeed poor, but the poverty was of resources, not spirit, and all the evidence adduced by scholars like Roe, Kiddle and Nadel indicates—contrary to Rosecrance’s view—that their common dream was the dream of independence. Many succeeded and more failed, but still the radical note was slow to emerge. It did explode briefly in Sydney after the depression of 1842, only to fade rapidly away. ‘You are too early and too violent’, wrote a friend to one of the loudest of the radical leaders. ‘True, it is bad, but pismires, as we are, cannot eat elephants.’13 The ‘elephants’ were Hartz’s Whigs: old colonial officials, landed gentry (sometimes with large tenanted estates) and squatters (some of them ex-convicts). Burkeans all, these men showed their hand most clearly in the mid-1850s, when the colony responded to Britain’s invitation to make its own constitution. In the debates that followed, the Whigs spoke with trepidation of ‘His Majesty the People’.14 1848 in Europe was fresh in their minds, and they had Tocqueville and Calhoun to quote on the perils of democracy in America. To prevent democracy ‘ruling the roost’,15 they used their present power to construct a constitution with limited franchise and a nominated Upper House, a House designed in the first flush of enthusiasm eventually to be filled by a future Botany Bay aristocracy. The props were of course soon knocked from under all these hopes. In less then five years constitutional amendment brought manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts and secret ballot, and the passage of radical land legislation in 1861 at once smashed the power of the Upper House and chopped at the squatters’ grip on Crown lands. But the men who achieved these democratic victories were hardly the proletarian rabble conjured up in fevered Whig minds. They called themselves ‘Liberals’; their leaders were Sydney professional men, merchants and traders, and in the 1850s they moulded a powerful political movement whose early victories set the tone for New South Wales politics for the next quarter century. It is a safe bet that none of these men had ever heard the word ‘mateship’. They wanted free trade, stable government, equal political rights and an

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open field for enterprise in developing the colony’s potential. They would have been very happy, one suspects, in early nineteenth-century America. If we turn southward to Victoria, we look in vain for early proletarian collectivism, though there is no lack of the capitalist spirit. Foundation in 1836 was a pastoral operation, sufficiently fast and free to build in the fifteen years before the gold discoveries a flourishing commercial centre at Melbourne, and to create with immense speed a young, upstart squatter–merchant oligarchy. Then, in the 1850s, gold multiplied the population seven times—virtually a second foundation—with probably the most vital migrants Australia has ever had. These men wanted independence too, and reacted brusquely against the pretensions of the leaders of the older pastoral society. So again the drama of Whig–democratic conflict was played out, only here the would-be oligarchs were tougher, more cunning and less doctrinaire. In the late 1850s they conceded manhood suffrage in the lower chamber of the new legislature, but by then they were well barricaded in an Upper House elected on a restricted franchise and there, in a naked twenty-year struggle, they resisted step by step the demand of a furious gold-bred bourgeois democracy for control of the state apparatus to advance economic opportunity. It would be tedious to travel round the continent to visit the smaller colonies: South Australia, with its Wakefield establishment of independent farmers; Western Australia, the tiny languishing foundation of a colonisation company; Queensland, originally a convict outpost, but rapidly swamped by the northward push of the New South Wales pastoral frontier. Sufficient to note the tonal differences of each setting—and yet how weak in general the convict and proletarian imprint. And everywhere, the capitalist spirit, evident, as R. M. Hartwell has shown, even in tiny off-shore Tasmania, the most desperate sink of convictism the country knew.16 There are problems then, about the foundation, even if we are generous enough to extend its timing over more than half a century. In a moment we shall pick up again some of the relevant threads of class and ideology, but a few observations must also be made about the middle of Hartz’s argument: the ‘break from the future’ or, more mundanely, the milieu of isolation in which the foundation spirit is said to unfold. In practice, Hartz is too good a historian to be really



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adamant about this; there are clearly degrees of isolation, and he specifically notes the ambivalence of Australia’s relationship with Britain, though regrettably, its mitigating effect on the fragment’s freedom to unfold remains unexplored.17 In fact, the tie with Britain was always tight: the Australian colonies were directly ruled by the Colonial Office until the 1850s; the British governors stayed as imperial representatives, and British control of defence and foreign policy lasted virtually into the twentieth century; and symbolically Australia’s reluctance to invoke the Statute of Westminster is notorious. Overwhelmingly British investment, trade and migration put steel threads in the silken cord. Australian reaction to this relationship historically ranges all the way from the conviction of late nineteenth-century radicals that Australia must cut the chains binding her to the ‘leprous carcase’ of British privilege to the heady Anglophilism of Imperial Federationists. In this setting a variety of ‘nationalisms’ appeared at the end of the nineteenth century; of these, the anti-British, proletarian ‘Australian Legend’ type taken by Hartz to have been general was only one. The moderate position held by the Australian Natives’ Association was undoubtedly more widely supported. It was a position which at the propaganda level sometimes rose little higher than lauding colonial wines, proving that the antipodean nasal speech was less offensive than the British aristocrat’s drawl, and damning Britain for having given Australia the pests of convicts, rabbits, thistles and globetrotters. But the A. N. A. did become the most powerful force behind the Federation movement and it bred a line of those ‘independent Australian Britons’, as Hancock has so aptly called them, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were hammering out, with Britain, the first principles of a practical concept of equal partnership. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century travellers who could ignore the heat and dust beyond the big cities always knew they were in a British country. It was not hard to be struck, as Francis Adams was in the Sydney of 1890, by ‘the appalling strength of the British civilization . . . everywhere are the thumb-marks and the great toe marks of the sixfingered, six-toed giant, Mr. Arnold’s life-long foe, the British Philistine!’18 About the same time, G. B. Barton wrote of Sydney that ‘with all its charms, the old place is just like a quiet seaport town in

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the mother country, many miles away from the great metropolis, to which it looks for its literary supplies as regularly as it does for its news, its fashions, its political sensations, and everything else that makes up the excitement of city life’.19 As these observations imply, isolation does not necessarily mean insulation, and no-one who knows the heavy English political content of contemporary Sydney and Melbourne newspapers, or who has worked through the papers of nineteenth-century Australian politicians, can fail to be aware of the eagerness with which men of affairs followed English events. The point is tenuous, but needs to be made: must we deny in the fragment’s history, significance to vicarious sharing of the political battle in the old country? It is a point which gains strength when we remind ourselves that there was, simultaneously, contact in another sense. What is to be made of the steady infusion of migrant population, fresh from the realities of the old society, tending, as all research shows, to concentrate in the cities, and, in Australia (and here the contrast with much American immigration may be significant), homogeneous in culture finding familiar language and institutions whose workings they understood? It is a notable fact, for example, that between 1890 and 1910 migrants were prominent in the leadership of the new Labor parties of New South Wales and the early Commonwealth. Most of these men seem to have been recent arrivals who had grown up in the union movement in England. Whatever their contribution to the Australian radicalism of their day, it can hardly be thought of simply as a development of indigenous ideas inherent in the foundation of the colonies. The British mould into which Australian politics had been poured may well have stimulated processes of cross-fertilisation— though there were of course a few who thought that the old country itself had much to learn from the colonies. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who visited Australia in 1898, were, predictably, among these. They were of course appalled by society in Australia: it is just a slice of Great Britain and differs only slightly from Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and the suburbs of London. Bad manners, ugly clothes, vigour and shrewdness . . . exactly as they characterize the lower and upper middle class folk of the old country.20



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But they were impressed with Australian public life. ‘Altogether the British genius for democratic self-government shines out in these colonies’, wrote Beatrice; and Sidney nodded approval: ‘personal integrity runs through all Australian politics. Australian civil servants are as honest as our own. Australian Premiers all die poor. Australian Legislatures, imperfect as they are in many ways, are absolutely unAmerican in this respect’.21 But of course there was much more to it than that. The Webbs caught Australia at that exciting moment when the first of the legislation was banking up which was soon to give her, briefly, the reputation of being the world’s social laboratory. This was indeed real democracy, and they knew it. But Sidney’s explanation of how it had happened was mechanistic, all on the surface. In October 1898 he wrote from Melbourne to Graham Wallas: Australia is utterly and completely unlike America in every respect . . . Not that this place is advanced, it is very much what England was in 1870. But owing to their having copied the real English constitution of 1850–60, instead of the nominal English constitution of 1789, you have here a genuine Democracy, the people really getting what it wishes to get. The politicians and the newspapers are in fact the best product of Australia; and they are very good indeed. The trouble is that the people are an exceptionally Individualist graft from our Individualist epoch (1840–1870), and they are all of them gambling profit-makers, keen on realizing the Individualist ideals of the lower Middle Class of 1840– 70 . . . I don’t find that the Australian Democracy was or is based on any abstract ideas or arbitrary psychology . . . What it lacks is intellectual leadership.22 The Webbs cautiously commended the Australian labor movement, but scarcely fathomed its earthy pragmatism and certainly did not see it as the motor of change. On the other side, while appreciating more vividly than most the spirit of independence manifest in the powerful colonial middle classes, they were too saturated with English political assumptions to see the real paradox of Australia: individualism and collectivism, hand in hand, creating a semi-socialist

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order. Others, who really knew their Australia, saw at least one aspect of the paradox clearly. For a straightforward statement of what is meant here, we can do no better than to go to that ‘Professor of Democracy’, Charles Henry Pearson, whose bittersweet National Life and Character drew in 1893 upon the impressions of twenty years in Australia, and looked with moderate confidence towards the future. Noting what he called ‘the tendencies of the age’, he wrote: Now the history of the English colonies in Australia and New Zealand is particularly instructive, because it shows what the English race naturally attempts when it is freed from the limitations of English tradition. The settlers of Victoria, and to a great extent of the other colonies, have been men who carried with them the English theory of government: to circumscribe the actions of the State as much as possible; to free commerce and production from all legal restrictions; and to leave every man to shift for himself, with the faintest possible regard for those who fell by the way. Often against their own will the colonists have ended by a system of State centralization that rivals whatever is attempted in the most bureaucratic countries of the Continent. The State employees are an important element of the population; the State builds railways, founds and maintains schools, tries to regulate the wages and hours of labor, protects native industry, settles the population on the land, and is beginning to organize systems of State insurance . . . Planted in Australia, the Englishman, to whom St. Simon and Fourier are names of derision, if they are even names, is rapidly creating a State Socialism, which succeeds because it is all-embracing and able to compel obedience, and which surpasses its continental State models because it has been developed by the community for its own needs, and not by State departments for administrative purposes.23 What Australian alchemy had wrought this transformation? We are back, as it were, to Hartz again, but now with a restatement of the problem that adds some intriguing twists. Collectivism is not



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immanent in the foundation; the settlers in fact bring with them a spirit of individualism, and a workable state socialism is something they develop to meet their needs, often against their own will. Nor does it occur to Pearson to explain the transformation by reference to ‘mateship’ or proletarian aspirations, or to Labor’s mastery of the political scene. How could it? For he is writing when the first Labor party has only just appeared;24 and he is writing, moreover, principally from his intimate knowledge of Victoria, not only the most practically socialistic, but also the most bourgeois of all the Australian colonies. We may fairly say, I think, that to pose the problem in this way is to make of it a riddle that seems intractable in Hartz’s terms; for now we have a reversal and not a logical working out of a foundation ethic, and a reversal, moreover, which takes place in a setting where, as we have seen, geographical remoteness does not necessarily mean insulation from currents of thought in the old country. But we must, of course, beware of getting caught here in a semantic labyrinth. ‘Colonial socialism’ as Pearson describes it really falls into two distinct categories: state investment and managerial activity, and state action to secure a measure of social justice. There is no mystery or paradox about the growth of the first: the physical circumstances of settlement in Australia, as is generally accepted, demanded no less. State socialism of this kind was inherent in the early paternalism of pragmatic British administrators, and it flowered in the work of legislatures peopled after 1856 by Sidney Webb’s ‘exceptionally individualist graft from our individualist epoch’. This socialism never competed with private initiative. On the contrary, it was created by politicians prepared to see developmental works carried by the state so that individual enterprise could be liberated for more profitable tasks. But it is more of a problem to explain how state socialism carried over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into the welfare field. Pressure from the new Labor parties was of course important, but few historians would want now to endorse that oldfashioned view which pictures Labor—as the bearer of a particularly indigenous brand of proletarian collectivism—triumphantly wresting social improvement from apathetic or resistant communities. In all colonial parliaments, as in the early Commonwealth period, liberals

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pioneered many of the first reforms, and worked hand in hand with Labor to effect them. But the tone of this alliance varied significantly from colony to colony, and again we are reminded that Australia was in reality more than one ‘fragment’. In New South Wales and Queensland, for example, where liberalism had tended to ossify in its mid-century form, where the bush and seamen’s unions had their strongest base and where class tensions broke in the great strikes of the early 1890s, disciplined and aggressive Labor parties acted as the most powerful stimulus to reform; though, even so, independent stirring among middle-class politicians had already produced in the 1880s new liberals with whom Labor was to find it could work—men variously inspired by Populist thinking, liberal Catholic social impulses or that new English liberalism which Hobson called ‘a movement along the lines of the strongest human feeling’. But in Victoria—the most urbanised and economically the most powerful colony—reformism had come earliest and had proceeded furthest, though the Labor party that emerged there was late, weak, and content to remain to the end of the century as a minor group under the wing of the Liberal party. Liberalism in Victoria had its roots in the long democratic struggle of the 1860s and 1870s to overturn the pregold oligarchy, a struggle, fundamentally, for open economic opportunity and effective political democracy, which sharpened idealism and fused opinion over a wide social spectrum in favour of progressive policies. By the 1880s Victoria had produced an exceptionally able and idealistic ruling class of politicians: businessmen and journalists who were the bearers of a distinct and almost unanimously supported liberal-democratic ethos. Their modern historian, Dr G. Serle, recently pointed out that in the 1880s these men, with rare exceptions like Deakin, were nearly all still the young migrants of the 1850s. ‘They were more urban middle-class in origin’, he writes, ‘intellectually more provincially English than the ruling class of any other colony; the society they created was more metropolitan-dominated, more industrially developed, more closely in touch with the currents of English feeling . . . than [that of the] other [Australian] colonies’.25 These were the men who in the 1870s and 1880s established protection, wages boards and factory legislation, who pushed on after the depression of the 1890s to further welfare programmes, who led the movement for Federation, and whose heirs, in the early



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Commonwealth, provided under Alfred Deakin the real dynamic for constructive non-Labor politics. These men probably hold the key to understanding the riddle of how individualism could be transmuted to serve humanitarian ends. At least it must be said that they hardly fit comfortably into the categories sketched out for Australia by Hartz. It would be tedious to go on in this vein: enough has been said to point to two kinds of obvious worries about Hartz’s Australian model. In the first place, there is the historian’s inevitable complaint that somehow subtlety and complexity have evaporated, magicked away by the terms of reference which a single factor hypothesis sets. We are involved here in an old difficulty: that where theory points to one set of factors as decisive, others may too easily be either ignored or reduced to the conditional framework within which the prime factors operate. Secondly, one is uncomfortable at the ambiguities which surround the use of concepts relating to class and ideology: like ‘radicalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘collectivism’, ‘Jacobinism’; the ‘Labor’, the ‘capitalist, the ‘proletarian’ ‘spirits’. What was called earlier the symbolic, even poetic, strain in Hartz’s writing explains, even justifies, such ambiguity on one level, and the argument at this remove may well be powerful and provocative. But it is by the same token an argument that is extraordinarily difficult to come to grips with in empirical terms, and in trying to assess it one is in constant danger of slipping into a wrangle about semantics rather than historical facts. The first point is not easy to discuss in terms that do proper justice to the ‘fragment’ hypothesis, given especially that insistence on complexity and uniqueness can too easily be the historian’s refuge from the challenge of theory. Still, it is evident that even when we keep discourse on a level of considerable generality, there are important facts which refuse to fit comfortably into the theory; facts, moreover, for whose satisfactory explanation we may need actually to contradict the theory. As we have seen, one of these was Australia’s peculiar diversity within an apparent unity, a diversity made all the more difficult to analyse by the very featurelessness of her history. A second was Australia’s continuing relationship with Britain, through ties of culture, immigration, trade and investment: ties which always mitigated the force of the so-called ‘break from the future’. And thirdly, and

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perhaps most importantly, there is the problem of understanding that section of society which seems always to baffle historians of Australia—the colonial bourgeoisie. In this matter, indeed, Hartz seems to come very close to endorsing the views of that school of historians who once argued that Australia has never had an effective middle class at all—only an insignificant petit bourgeois group which has acted as a weak buffer between the working-class mass and some ill-defined capitalist upper class.26 This theory of class structure used to serve to explain the emergence and apparent success of the Labor movement, whose leaders appeared as a kind of Toynbean creative minority, the real bearers of progress in Australian history. It was a theory that neatly sidestepped the difficult task of analysing either middle-class individualism in nineteenth century Australia or the bourgeois values contemporaneously evident in the lifestyles of many urban workingmen and strong in the practical policies of the Labor movement itself. Few would now deny that Australia’s collectivist, radical mask hid in the late nineteenth century a firm bourgeois reality. From that reality, I believe, stemmed on the one hand a liberalism which shaded into, and sometimes interpenetrated, the more readily definable radicalism of Labor, and, on the other, a conservatism which always acted as a moderating political influence—powerful, not because it rested on big capital or social privilege, but because it drew its real strength from those very groups which had spearheaded the main nineteenth-century drive for political democracy. In Victoria, C. H. Pearson identified these men at the beginning of the 1880s as democratic capitalists, and, in illustration of the type, enumerated miners, who were accustomed to invest freely in shares throughout the mining districts, workers in Melbourne who bought and sometimes speculated in suburban lots, farmers who took up selections under the land regulations, petty urban traders and entrepreneurs—men whose sense of their own dignity as small possessors of property made them resentful of the privileged groups they were then fighting in the Upper House, but also set limits to the distance they were prepared to travel along the democratic road.27 Such democratic capitalists had parallels in the different colonies and everywhere, both then and since, the strength of this type acted to counterpoise and at times infiltrate the spirit of proletarianism.



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In this perspective, it is tempting to argue that Australian political history might well be explained largely by reference to an uneasy and hence varying balance between the inbuilt democratic and conservative propensities of a major stratum of Australian society: that diverse middle class which has shaded off into the working class, and which has always been a dominant element in the community, or at the very least a powerful mediator between labour on the one hand and big capital on the other. If we begin with a realistic hypothesis of this kind, we are released from the tyranny of the single factor; for what we are trying to understand now is why the balance tips either way at any given time, and explanation of that must take into account a complexity of factors—factors that might range all the way from fluctuating economic circumstances, through the interaction of technology and physical environment, to the clash of ideas and sentiments, both indigenous and imported. In such a modest schema, no telos could, alas, blossom, nor could Marx’s unhappy fate in the antipodes be laid at the door of a missing feudalism. But at least our account of what happened could be firmly rooted in reality, and we might find our frame of reference flexible enough to explore oddities which are very difficult to encompass in the Hartz model: opposites, for example, like the high spirit of idealism that marked the early Australian Commonwealth, and the stodgy social and political order to which it gave place in the long years from 1917 to 1939. To put it plainly, then, the Hartz Australia is not my Australia, for I cannot believe—with those Australians whom Hartz seems to follow—that our national history is to be explained primarily as a success story of working-class radicalism. But if there are other, more fruitful models to be constructed, even if, in this particular case, the theory of fragmentation, unfolding and crisis be in its pure form found wanting, that of course does not mean that Australian history cannot be illuminated by the histories of other societies originating as offshoots of Europe, and vice versa. I think, indeed, that the real strength of The Founding of New Societies lies less in its central hypothesis than in its exciting display of lights and shadows that can be etched in when a scholar of Hartz’s brilliance cares to range imaginatively across the details of more than one fragment history. To set the Australian Whigs against their American counterparts of half a century before is to spark off questions which might scarcely occur

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to historians merely concerned with Australian and British history in isolation. To observe the feelings of creoles who, despite their aggressive Hispanicisin in Latin America, find themselves painfully alienated when they finally visit Spain stirs thoughts of those sons of Australian anglophile squatters who complained from Oxbridge of English snobbery and wrote home in nostalgic anticipation of their return to the antipodes. There are even moments when it hardly matters that Hartz has got one set of facts in his equation wrong, or has dared a flight of fancy that would make a less adventurous historian’s blood run cold. One can stifle, for example, astonishment if he says with poker face that Australian democracy had seriously once to defend itself against a convict past, because such a suggestion so graphically emphasises how much Jefferson and Jackson could assume about reactions to democracy in America. And at a pinch one can even accept Hamilton or Jackson torn from the American context and unceremoniously deposited in the Transvaal, New South Wales, or Latin America, if that serves startlingly to demonstrate what stuff such men were really made of. But there is no balking the fact that at points like these—however stimulating and fetching they are— historical comparison dips close to metaphor, and one is reminded again of those two worries about the Australian model: the problem of comprehending complexity and the ambiguity of definition. To point, finally, to these difficulties seems to raise the most important methodological issue posed by The Founding of New Societies. As has just been suggested, this work offers, on one level of judgment, fine exemplifications of how, as C. Vann Woodward has put it in another connexion, ‘comparative reference can illuminate historical discussion after the manner of an imaginative and disciplined use of simile, metaphor or analogy’.28 But while the virtues of such illumination are not to be underrated, the limits of metaphor have also to be clearly recognised. Metaphor can certainly help to strike off those suggestive sparks which give historians new questions to ask of their material. It can also give body and flavour to that part of the comparative equation which the historian knows intimately and is primarily concerned to discuss. What I would call Hartz’s use of Australia to illuminate his account of American history, is perhaps, a fair enough example of what is meant by this. But when, so to speak, all elements of the comparison are of



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equal concern—when general or theoretical ends are in view—metaphor has surely to give place to something more rigorous. If we wish, for example, to isolate and consider per se the role of the frontier, or of urbanisation, or of democracy in a number of new societies, we need to be able to understand the meaning of each of these terms in the full historical context of each of the societies being compared. We need, in other words, techniques to provide forms of comparison which involve juxtapositions of patterns, or syndromes, rather than single factors, and which at the time free us from the tyranny of labels by enabling us to examine the meaning and function of apparently common elements in the specific contexts in which they occur. One of Tocqueville’s homely warnings is relevant here: ‘An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed.’29 In the light of our earlier discussion, is it being too metaphorical to suggest as a sample application of this adage that, say, ‘liberalism’ may be a box with too well-hinged a bottom usefully to hold of itself a variety of ideologies called by that name in Europe, America and Australia?

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

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Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, Harcourt, Brace, 1955, 20–1. Ibid. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, 9. Op. cit., 23. Ibid., 46. B. J. Loewenberg, reviewing Founding of New Societies in American Historical Review, vol. LXXII, No. I (October 1966), 122–3. Hartz, ibid., 41–2. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 42. P. Loveday and A. W. Martin, Parliament Factions and Parties, Melbourne University Press, 1966, 20. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 15. R. M. Hartwell, The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land, 1820– 1850, Melbourne University Press, 1954. Hartz, op. cit., 231.

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18 19

20 21

22 23 24

25

26

27

28

29

Quoted, Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, London, 1964, 231. G. B. Barton, ‘The Status of Literature in New South Wales—II: How the Publishers Look at It’, Centennial Magazine, September 1889, 90. A. G. Austin (ed.), The Webbs’ Australian Diary, Pitman, 1965, 108. Ibid., 114; Beatrice’s remark is from a letter to her sister, Kate, 17 September 1898, the text of which was kindly given to me by Professor A. G. Austin. Ibid., 115–16. C. H. Pearson, National Life and Character, Macmillan, 1894, 17. Ibid., 19. Pearson wrote his text in 1891, noting the existence of the Labor party and its possible effect as an accelerator of some of the trends he was discussing. ‘There is every indication that the so-called “Labour Party” will be stronger in future parliaments than it is (1891), and will force the State more and more into what is known as the organisation of industry.’ Geoffrey Serle, ‘The Victorian Government’s Campaign for Federation, 1883–1889’, in A. W. Martin (ed. ), Essays in Australian Federation, Melbourne University Press, 1969, 53. See especially A. Barcan, ‘The Development of the Australian Middle Class’, Past and Present, 8 (1955), 64–77. See J. Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 1830–1894, Oxford Don and Australian Radical, Melbourne University Press, 1968, 92–3. Dr Tregenza has pointed out to me the particular importance, in the elaboration of this view, of Pearson’s ‘Democracy in Victoria’, Fortnightly Review, May 1879, especially 692–3. C. Vann Woodward (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History, Basic Books, 1968, 15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York, 1966, 450.



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4 Henry Parkes: In Search of the ‘Actual Man Underneath’

It has become a cliché of Australian history, nourished from the first by men who saw him in action, that Henry Parkes was probably the most consummate actor ever to walk the boards of the colonial political stage. In the most celebrated obituary to appear on Parkes’s death in 1896, the journalist William Astley correctly depicted his subject as an enigmatic figure and asked how students in the future could hope to make a just assessment of his life when ‘we who are close to him, who knew him in the breathing and aggressive flesh, have assuredly failed to understand him’. But Astley was certain there was one clue at least: If his genius is to be classed and labelled . . . then the one imperative epithet is Histrionic . . . in public he was always the mime; in private not seldom so . . . His life can only be welded into consistency with itself upon this theory.1 Merely to ‘label’ genius thus was not, however, to offer a very profound explanation, and there were dimensions to the actor image Revised version of paper read to Section 26 of ANZAAS, Perth, August 1973. Published in Historical Studies, vol. 16, No. 63, 1974, 216–34.


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which men more sensitive than Astley instinctively glimpsed. In illustration, we may recall that famous sketch which Alfred Deakin drew of the Parkes who appeared as the presiding genius of the 1890 Federal Conference: all the Deakinite descriptive stops out and then, at the end, a punchline of mystery. First and foremost of course in every eye was the commanding figure of Sir Henry Parkes, than whom no actor ever more carefully posed for effect. His huge figure, slow step, deliberate glance and carefully brushed-out aureole of white hair combined to present the spectator with a picturesque whole which was not detracted from on closer acquaintance. His voice, without being musical and in spite of a slight woolliness of tone and rather affected depth, was pleasant and capable of reaching and controlling a large audience. His studied attitudes expressed either distinguished humility or imperious command. His manner was invariably dignified, his speech slow, and his pronunciation precise, offending only by the occasional omission or misplacing of aspirates. He was fluent but not voluble, his pauses skilfully varied, and in times of excitement he employed a whole gamut of tones ranging from a shrill falsetto to deep resounding chest notes. He had always in his mind’s eye his own portrait as that of a great man, and constantly adjusted himself to it. A faraway expression of the eyes, intended to convey his remoteness from the earthly sphere, and often associated with melancholy treble cadences of voice in which he implied a vast and inexpressible weariness, constituted his favourite and at last his almost invariable exterior. Movements, gestures, inflexions, attitudes harmonised, not simply because they were intentionally adopted but because there was in him the substance of the man he dressed himself to appear. The real strength and depth of his capacity were such that it was always a problem with Parkes as with Disraeli where the actor posture-maker and would-be sphinx ended or where the actual man underneath began.2



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Deakin melts the dichotomy between actor and man underneath because, on the one hand, a natural role-theorist well ahead of his time, he senses the role as the man in the act of its performance and, on the other, he keenly appreciates the seeming hopelessness of understanding in any life the delicate interplay of self-image, personality and circumstance. For we must recall also that it was Deakin who wrote in that passage which his own biographer takes as chastening headpiece: . . . the effect of my life experience is to discredit most of the personal estimates of history and many of its interpretations of times . . . though—when men have done or written or said much—their orbits can be fairly estimated, their endless variations of mood and temper, of credulity and scepticism, and the cross currents of influence to which they have been subject, are so numerous [that] no man knows himself thoroughly, or anyone else more than superficially except by accident or inspiration.3 For the biographer these are chilling words, a salutary reminder that the man he presents to his reader will ever be a construct rather than a recreation. Nonetheless, artistic imperatives, not to speak of the biographer’s responsibility to his subject, demand that this construct display internal consistency and embody as careful a probing of the seeming dynamics of the life as evidence and theoretical understanding permit. The ‘actor’ image has limited usefulness here. For it is the product of a dubious distinction which Erving Goffman has in another connexion called ‘a vulgar tendency in social thought to divide the conduct of the individual into a profane and sacred part’, the first a world of social roles and external action, the second an inscrutable realm where, regardless of his public mask, a man reveals ‘what kind of a guy he is’ underneath it all.4 So far as he thinks it useful to accept this division, the biographer’s interest naturally focuses more on the traffic than on the distinction between these two worlds. But the worlds themselves can arguably be so artificial in conception as to impede rather than advance understanding, and the question arises whether a different concern, for processes more than for categories, might not help to dissolve the sterile contrast

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between actor and man underneath and permit freer-flowing exploration of personality and action, considered as a totality. What follows is to be thought of as an attempt to illustrate some difficulties and possible advantages of such a perspective, by way of an impressionistic narrative of one critical phase of Parkes’s life, seen largely from the inside. There are some implicit thoughts here on two issues of central importance to the biographer: personality and identity. These receive brief discussion at the end.5 *** Parkes’s life was long and eventful: it is necessary at the outset to locate the five years which form our main interest here and to set this phase briefly against the architecture as a whole. We are speaking of a man born in 1815, who emigrated from Birmingham to New South Wales in 1839, and who died in 1896, having been by that time active in the colony’s political life for over half a century and, after 1872, five times its premier. In his last and greatest phase Parkes was, in the words of The Times, ‘the most commanding figure in Australian politics’. In his first phase he rose from the status of poverty-stricken bounty migrant to that of successful journalist and ‘coming’ politician. In between, during his mid-forties, he passed in agony through a stage of intense crisis and self-questioning. Our concern here is more directly with Parkes the man than with Parkes the politician, but it is appropriate, while we are speaking in generalisations, to observe a curious coincidence between the main phases of his life and the contours, broadly considered, of political development in New South Wales during his time. Parkes first emerged as political activist at the end of the 1840s, an organiser of Robert Lowe’s 1848 ‘democratic’ candidature for the Legislative Council, then agitator and orator in successive radical campaigns against transportation and Wentworth’s Constitution Bill. In the early 1850s he was thus prominent among those radicals who joined Sydney’s mercantile politicos to develop a liberal movement, directed against the conservative pretensions of squatters, some landowners and the colony’s old officials, and dedicated to a programme whose pivotal features were a demand for democratic institutions and for free-flowing development of the colony’s resources, human and economic. It was chiefly in the service of this programme that, at the end



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of 1850, on extended credit, Parkes founded his Empire newspaper, which for eight years served under his direction as mouthpiece for the liberal cause and ideological censor of the movement’s more opportunistic leadership, under Charles Cowper. Parkes won in 1854 a seat in the old Legislative Council and subsequently joined the Legislative Assembly set up by the Constitution Act of 1856. There, as a prominent and progressively independent liberal member, he became noted for his energy, his consistency of principle and his special concern with the cause of social amelioration. The liberals’ first great victory—in the achievement of which Parkes played a significant part—was won in 1858, when their Electoral Act established manhood suffrage. Late in the same year, the Empire collapsed in bankruptcy and Parkes, his political and business career suddenly shattered, moved into a five-year phase of personal crisis which is the chief interest of this paper. During that time liberal cohesion—always tenuous—faltered in new parliaments democratised by electoral reform, though it lasted long enough to achieve in 1861 a further victory in Robertson’s Land Acts, those measures which struck decisively at squatter hegemony and whose passage revealed the ineffectualness of a nominated Upper House as a bastion of privilege. Parkes was absent in England during the final phase of this liberal struggle, and he returned in 1863 to a colony where the terms of political conflict were changing radically. With liberalism’s first goals achieved and the force of the old conservatism spent, New South Wales was passing into a long period when factions were to serve as the basis for ministerial formation, when principle—at least as formerly understood—was at a discount, and when ‘development’ and sound administration were the watchwords of government. It was in these years, and in this atmosphere, that Parkes came to achieve his greatest power and prominence. So much by way of immediate political background: we should note, returning briefly to the 1850s, the remarkable character of Parkes’s achievement by then, and the deep significance of the Empire in his personal scheme of things. Unlettered but skilled artisan, he had been during his youth in Birmingham a determined self-improver, student at the Mechanics’ Institute, follower of Attwood’s Political Union, and, in his ambition for independence and respectability, a perfect type of the socially aspiring workman whom

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Briggs and Tholfsen have described in their studies of early Victorian Birmingham.6 Early marriage (in 1836 to Clarinda Varney) was followed by an attempt to set himself up in business at his trade of ivory turner, and the failure of that business was the real impulse to emigration.7 From New South Wales he wrote hopefully home of finding a means to provide ‘respectability, if not [a] competence’, so that ‘the time shall come when all who know us at Birmingham shall acknowledge that we are honourable’.8 We may note how clearheaded he was about the essentials of respectability: money and acceptance by social superiors. ‘I am now very anxious about getting money’, he writes somewhat baldly in May 1841, ‘not being at all content to come here for no purpose . . .’,9 and shortly afterwards, in a letter to his sister advising how she might best place a nephew to learn a trade and make a little money, he explodes in parenthesis: ‘nothing like getting money; nothing can be done without it. I know the value of money now! Money! Money! is my watch-word in future.’10 On the question of recognition, there is his wife Clarinda’s little note from London, in 1839, after Hetherington had published in the Charter some of Parkes’s verse, under the pathetic title ‘A Poet’s Farewell’: Your brother has got quite in favour here. He is quite idolized by the old ladies where we live, and he is called ‘a poet’ by The Charter of yesterday . . . One old gentleman made him a present of an ivory tablet, a set of reading books, and a shoelift, and paper knife, worth twelve or fourteen shillings . . . Should we not like to hear his song sung by some great man at some public dinner!11 In New South Wales it was a while before he was recognised as a poet, but by 1841 he could assure his sister that he was meeting ‘with respect and kindness’ from more than the lowlier classes of his ‘fellow-creatures’. One of the most influential men in the colony, a member of the Legislative Council, and a descendant from one of the most illustrious families in England, has not thought me undeserving his kindness, and I have lately sat down to table with some of the most respectable merchants in Sydney.12



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It was, perhaps, not without justification that Daniel Deniehy was later to tell Dunmore Lang that the republicans of New South Wales could look for little comfort from Parkes, less because of weakness in his democratic instincts than because he had ‘too much, not of the Englishman in him, but of “Englishmanism” about him. . .’13 The drift into politics brought more substantial confirmation of personal worth: real qualities of intelligence, energy and natural talent lay behind his discovery in the later 1840s of a flair for political organisation, oratory and journalism. Against this background the early success of the Empire had a many-sided significance for him. Its establishment on credit represented the confidence and recognition of wealthy men, and its conduct seemed at first to promise business success: ‘The Empire’, he wrote in 1853, ‘is carrying away all obstacles before its career of success—I am sure it will soon be worth £10,000 a year. If I only have my health for a few years I shall make a fortune in spite of everything.’14 It was not merely that: the paper was in addition a form of business which nicely reconciled desire and duty. Just before its establishment his political preoccupations had begun to interfere with attention to his shop and intermittently to bring remorseful vows to Clarinda that he must set aside other ambitions to concentrate energy on proper breadwinning activities.15 Now he could abandon himself to politics and fling all his energy into what he was later to call a ‘darling object’: that of making the paper a real fourth estate, ‘an independent power to vivify, elevate and direct the political life of the country.’16 It did come close to that, for the liberal–radical outlook bred in Birmingham was extraordinarily well-tuned to conditions in mid-century New South Wales, and Parkes had the energy and dedication to give it life. He was ‘intoxicated with the hard and exciting mission of a propagandist’. He wrote much of the copy himself, sitting up night after night when Parliament ended, and coming home with the dawn to snatch breakfast and fitful sleep.17 In the circumstances, and given that at no time was it ever clear of crushing debts, it is astonishing that the paper quickly attained a quality and influence unrivalled in the colony. Equally, it is not surprising that for Parkes himself it was a critical source of pride, integration and potential power, whose collapse, when it came, abruptly knocked away the props on which a new life had come to rest. Let us now look a little more closely at what happened to him then.

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*** The last issue of the Empire came out on 28 August 1858. Within a week, Parkes had sequestered his estate and resigned from the Assembly as an insolvent. In private mourning, one of the Windeyers committed to ‘verse’ the sentiments of many: The patriot vision fades away The work of love is o’er This is our dark and silent day The Empire speaks no more.18 But press and Parliament greeted the catastrophe with stony, perhaps embarrassed, silence. For Parkes himself it was the end of a career, ‘an epoch in my life’: At forty three years of age & after a residence of nineteen years in this colony I am just about to begin life afresh with a wife & five children to support, a name in a commercial sense ruined, and a doubt of the practical character of my mind evincing itself even in the consolations offered by my friends.19 Almost at once, Premier Gavan Duffy wrote from Victoria urging him to move, start a new journal in Melbourne, perhaps accept a government position which ‘bye and bye’ would certainly come his way.20 Others urged study for the Bar: appealing to John Dunmore Lang for advice on books, Parkes reported how an unnamed friend had ‘volunteered to find me the means of support while I am reading for examination’. ‘You will perhaps regard me as a Quixote but my mind is made up—the thing is to be done and I will do it.’ For the moment his course seemed clear: he must abandon all connexion with press and business, while yet finding a way of indulging ‘my desire to mix with political life’.21 In a diary begun in October— started, he said, after reading Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men—he noted his new circumstances: domiciled in a dwelling the size of the outbuildings of my former house and made out of what was built for the stable



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and coachhouse of my next door neighbour’s. I have converted a small room with unplastered stone walls & a stone floor into a comfortable looking library & . . . from today I may date the commencement of my study of law in this little room.22 The cottage was at Kissing Point, near Ryde, and close to a school conducted by the Rev. T. Aitken, from whom he hoped to get private tuition in Latin and Greek. The diary, which he now kept assiduously for five months, vividly records the wilting of this initial determination, as delayed shock at ‘the calamitous failure of the great project of my life’ combined with loneliness to induce a sense of lost identity and of personal insufficiency. The material to be mastered was voluminous and selfdiscipline, he knew, his critical need. On 25 October he drew up a plan to read 148¹⁄³ pages a day taken from five textbooks, all of which would thus be finished by February 1859; there were also to be daily readings from the scriptures and the newspapers, and works on logic, philosophy and history, and the exams would be successfully faced by mid-1859. He fought manfully to keep to the programme, carefully recording times of rising and going to bed, cataloguing his achievements and excusing his failures: 26 October saw him sleeping in until 7.30, though with ‘some excuse,’ he writes, ‘having been much disturbed all night by the toothache’. There was less excuse the next day when he simply ‘wasted two or three hours from uncontrollable lassitude’. A week or so later he resolved, as he put it, after some days’ deliberation, not to drink wine spirits ale or other intoxicating liquor in my own house or on any occasion, except only public entertainments, for twelve months, reasons 1 2 3 4 5

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Use of them bad example It sometimes creates unpleasantness It causes a waste of time It is expense It does no good and may produce evil.23

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A visit to Sydney to consult the legal firm of Norton and Barker elicited the opinion that he was not intellectually fitted for the Bar: ‘Well’, he wrote indignantly, ‘though I have not the stupendous powers of mind of a Norton or a Barker we shall see. Went straiht [sic] from Norton and ordered Mr Deeper to get me out a ten-guinea wig!’24 He resolved anew to give over his time completely to study, but there were many lapses: ‘Have read a good deal,’ he records at the end of December, ‘but of a desultory character and in a slovenly manner. Have much neglected the course of study laid down for my legal project; still find myself too unsettled. Hope to begin the new year in a better spirit & with a firmer resolution.’ Soon his long-suffering family was roped in as instrument of discipline: on 9 January, Read aloud to children and wife from 6 till 7 letters 1 & 2 Cobbett’s Grammar & letters 1 and 2 Fonblanque’s “How we are governed”. Walked in garden & wrote till ½ past 8 then Clarinda read aloud Alison’s His. [sic] of Europe till ½ past 9 then Robert read 1st chapter Acts of the Apostles. This scheme failed too after some days’ trial; another hope dawned when barrister J. B. Darvall agreed to lend him books and meet him regularly in his chambers to discuss cases.25 Assiduously, for almost a month, Parkes travelled on working days from Ryde to Sydney—a proper regimen at last—until on 6 April Darvall, more tactful than Norton and Barker, nudged him towards a sense of reality. ‘Mr Darvall today observed to me that he would advise me not to abandon political life in which my prospects were good. Law was all very well & must be of use to me but he would strongly impress upon me not to abandon politics.’ Four days later the diary ends; in the weeks that followed the law project flickered uncertainly away, and two months later—still lacking any regular source of income—Parkes stood successfully for a seat in the Assembly. Over these critical months, lassitude and indecision had been symptomatic of trauma rather than incapacity; the very keeping of the diary—never a normal habit with Parkes—clearly represented an attempt at self-analysis essential to the process of personality reconstruction. His failure was a measure not merely of the significance to him of a collapsed dream: it was also symptomatic of the destructive



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effects of prodigious energy suddenly left directionless. Self-esteem suffered further as bankruptcy proceedings dragged on inconclusively, a veritable ‘pickle’ because key trustees refused to surrender to the official assignee the principal Empire assets and no judgment could be made by the court to clear Parkes’s name.26 Meanwhile, penury, the difficulties of study and the irksomeness of accepting charity created a continuing atmosphere of malaise, laced with alternate moods of despair and sudden, fantastic hope. He told young William Windeyer how he was ‘struggling in a sort of dreamland of my own’: I am making some progress but I find by experience that my time of life is not quite so favourable for a dry course of study as I at first hoped. … The realities of existence are too palpable all around me ever awakening some memory of the past or throwing some changeful shadow over the future. It is difficult to keep the power of thought within the prescribed bounds— to relapse into the necessary state of passiveness for receiving with due docility the fetters of discipline.27 When the electric telegraph to Melbourne was opened at the end of October he read reports of the celebrations, recalled his own work in the old Legislative Council and the first Parliament to promote the project, and noted bitterly that the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘retrospective summary of the rise and progress of the work’ bore ‘of course no allusion to me’.28 He learnt with chagrin that a ‘co partnery’ consisting of W. Hanson, the Government Printer, and ‘a Mr Bennett of the Herald Office’, was planning to purchase and revive the Empire, and visited trustees S. D. Gordon and J. Dickson to broach the possibility of ‘starting afresh’ with the paper himself. They were cautiously encouraging, but he lacked real enthusiasm, deciding in the end that it would not be in his interest ‘to have any further connection’ with the paper after ‘what had taken place’.29 But he earned ‘daily crusts’30 writing for provincial papers at Bathurst and Maitland, and the old journalist’s itch died hard. So, over these weeks, he toyed excitedly with several plans to establish a new paper; but always enthusiasm, which tended to centre on what the publication should be called

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(Tribune, Federal Flag, Vanguard?) rather than on how it could be financed, quickly evaporated.31 More disturbing, John Robertson, then Secretary for Lands and Works, asked him on 2 December whether he would accept the collectorship of customs, soon to be vacant, if Premier Cowper saw fit to offer it to him.32 It was a post worth £1,200 a year, and therefore not to be refused lightly by a man who—as he put it himself—had ‘to borrow money to buy bread and cheese’. Friends T. Betteridge and W. Harbottle urged him ‘to jump at it’: though, clearly, ‘the object of the ministers was to “pot me”’, two or three years in the post would enable him to ‘secure a position of pecuniary independence’ and there would, after all, be satisfaction, having once ‘filled one of the humblest situations in the customs’, in going back ‘over the heads of all the old officers to the very highest’.33 But Windeyer demurred when asked his opinion and self-questioning began: what if acceptance were ‘held as conclusive evidence that I had all along been an adventurer?’ The Bar still beckoned and he reflected that ‘the only thing I have left from the wreck of my fortunes is my political reputation which still stands high’, which might ‘be destroyed by acceptance’ and which offered ‘almost certain opportunities of taking office as Minister of the Crown perhaps as Chief’ within the foreseeable future. He took the case to Clarinda with loaded arguments and she, faithful girl, at the end ‘declared emphatically that I must not take it—no, we would live on bread, and water first. Ask her, however, to think the matter over for two or three days and she agrees not to decide now but looks very determined . . .’ Politics retained its fascination and ambition, however clouded over by self doubt, could not die. Parkes talked with friends about current developments and in his writings for the provincial press agonised over the problem posed by the dying second Parliament and the prospects of a third elected under manhood suffrage: how men were to be found ‘combining popular opinions with the requisites of character and education . . . to sustain the Legislature at a high moral and intellectual standard’.34 He could report (as he did to his sister in Birmingham, in January) being ‘much sobered and changed in my estimates of many things in this life. If this feeling continues . . . it will take strong inducements to draw me back into a public position’.35 He tried to turn his face against the temptation of



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becoming involved again: Stephen Gleadall visited him in February, talked over electoral prospects and intimated that he and his friends planned to nominate Parkes for East Sydney, but ‘I told him I did not wish to go into the Assembly and explained various reasons for remaining in private’.36 Yet the faith of ardent admirers was hard to resist. Windeyer, sympathising in November at the ennui of study, recalled how he had once himself ‘laid my head on my books and almost cried from restlessness and vexation of work’. He understood how a man like Parkes, who had ‘so worked and sweated in the battle must . . . feel so cabined cribbed and confined quietly sitting down to the pages work of brightening up the antique armour’ and expressed his faith that the ‘terrible drill’ which Parkes had undergone ‘at God’s hand’ would ultimately fit him ‘to govern this country and to lay the foundation of a nation whose institutions lasting on the principles of truth and justice shall bear the image and superscription of their founder and remain the records of his wisdom’.37 Others, if less effusive, were equally warm. W. B. Dalley wrote kindly and in January there were visits from Edward Butler, with whom Parkes ‘talked over private affairs and prospects’ and John Black, who stayed all night and discussed until 2 a.m. the ‘present state of politics’.38 In Sydney he called on his merchant friend, J. L. Montefiore, who had for some time been out of the colony, to explain ‘the course of events in relation to the “Empire”’, stayed the night with Butler ‘talking over old times when he was writer and law reporter on the “Empire”’, and ‘had a long chat with Dalley on the state of matters in the Assembly and the position of the Government’.39 Despite continued gloom and days such as the one when ‘the principal thing I do is saving the lives of a family of chickens that were all but drowned in torrents of rain’,40 he was quickly drifting back into the political swim. By May 1859 Darvall’s advice and the importunities of friends were proving irresistible. After a long evening meeting with Dunmore Lang he made up his mind: he would re-enter the Assembly, standing for East Sydney as an ‘independent radical’, rejoicing in the ‘innocent vanity’ of being again pitted against Kemp (‘the personification of the Herald influence’) whom he had ‘thoroughly thrashed in 1854’ and, though friendly to the present Cowper Ministry, determined to force it to follow a ‘sound liberal policy’.41 By June he was campaigning, approved tentatively by a revived

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Cowperite Empire for his new conciliatory tone and the coolheadedness of his advocacy of liberal principles.42 Nominated at the hustings by Montefiore—old friend, Empire creditor and undoubtedly one source of his present livelihood—he gave the speech of the day: ‘like Mr. Parkes’, as the Empire reflected, ‘plain and unadorned’, but full of ‘thought and weight’.43 At the poll he easily took one of the constituency’s four seats. Impassively reporting the election to his sister in Birmingham, he wrote: ‘I am still living at Ryde doing nothing but I hope to be admitted to the Bar before the close of the year’.44 Of course, he never was. But the crisis, it seemed, was over—he had a role and he threw himself into it. True, in the next year and a half, the intricacies of the colony’s burgeoning faction politics denied him the office he craved psychologically and needed financially. But he was recognised on all sides as the coming man and so, in happier moments, he saw himself: skilled parliamentarian, powerful speaker and manipulator of men, still consistent in his principles—the liberals’ conscience. And yet, behind the public front, all was not well. Penury dogged him, bankruptcy proceedings dragged on amid press vilification,45 his public armour offered slender defence against the barbs of political enemies. Malaise deepened again into crisis at the beginning of 1860: a letter to sister Sarah in February admits the fading of Bar ambitions, reports himself ‘idle and somewhat undecided as to my future course’, and talks of being ‘seized with some desire to visit England’ if an appropriate public post, ‘Emigration Agent, for instance’, should turn up.46 A few weeks later, the Forster government collapsed, and there was a sudden hope of gaining office.47 But he was not approached by those negotiating a new ministry, and when Cowper became premier again, Parkes collapsed into despair. Letters to Windeyer complained of the subservience of public life ‘to ends of personal aggrandisement’, harked wistfully back to the lost greatness of Empire days, and prayed to God that no conduct of Windeyer’s would ever be ‘pronounced upon . . . by the soul-shaking voice of bitter reproach which seems to have blasted mine’. He complained of the lack of ‘a definite plan to my future life’, toyed again with legal studies, talked of moving to Melbourne.48 Windeyer replied in alarm. Parkes must stay at his post. In an affectionate effusion, the young man contrived a colourful analogy: the colony’s ship of state was in



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perilous waters, with pilot and crew drunk and all passengers asleep. Was Parkes to escape in a lifeboat rather than stay aboard and wait to take the helm and save them all? That was a thought not to be entertained: I cannot and I will not believe that you have passed through this furnace of affliction all for nothing . . . You yet have worthy work to do . . . I have looked forward to the teaching of your experience . . . in public life that I might be useful in my generation and show the gentlemen of the country that education and refinement [are] compatible with the respect and love of a democracy; but if you should leave us where shall I find that Pericles that I sought?49 Such ardent faith helped to sustain Parkes in recurring moods of near-paranoia. In May 1860, after the Assembly rejected recommendations made in his Select Committee Report on the Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis—an enquiry which he thought of as his most important work in this period—he wrote telling his sister that there have been desperate and powerful attempts made— arising out of circumstances of a public nature which it is impossible for me to explain to you on account of their magnitude and complication—to tread me under foot altogether . . . Against all this I have had to battle as it were single-handed, though there are thousands looking on, apparently passive now, who will rejoice at my ultimate triumph.50 But he managed to maintain his outward equanimity and political effectiveness, held his seat comfortably in the exciting ‘free-selection’ election of December 1860, and appeared again in the first months of 1861 as the Cowper government’s most dangerous censor. Two events in October 1860 had done something towards reviving his spirits: release came at last from the bankruptcy court, and he took a new initiative in the old struggle to support his family. In mid-August Parkes found, near Penrith, ‘Werrington’, a ‘stonebuilt storied home’ to lease with 460 acres of ground. He took it

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for five years, moved the family in during the October parliamentary recess and there amid what he described as ‘a perfect wilderness of roses, honeysuckle [and] English lilac’ a new bucolic dream was born. They soon had the place in ‘nice comfortable order’, well stocked with animals and hope. ‘We already bake our own bread and make our own butter’, Parkes wrote to Sarah, ‘and we intend to grow our own corn and kill our own beef and mutton. Clarinda is quite a farmer and is deep in the mysteries of poultry and pigs.’51 But the hope of salvation was not to be realised so easily. Travelling to and fro to unremunerated parliamentary duties taxed health and resources and the farm could produce only limited income. In May 1861, defeated at last by what he called his ‘needy circumstances’,52 Parkes accepted a government appointment as one of two lecturers to work in England for a year on salaries of £1,000, to encourage emigration to New South Wales. The Ministry had ‘potted’ him at last. As the Sydney Morning Herald sardonically put it: Mr. Parkes, lately a determined opponent of the government—a few weeks ago armed with a resolution which would have demolished one member of the ministry at least, if not the cabinet of which he is a member—more lately silent upon political topics—is now in the service of the Crown under the auspices of Mr. Cowper.53 Actually, the posts had been established by resolution moved in the Assembly by Parkes himself. ‘When I moved that resolution’, he averred later, ‘the thought of going myself never entered my head.’ The most charitable interpretation of this claim would be to think of it as evidence of his immense powers of self-deception.54 Parkes left for England in May 1861 and was away until January 1863. Against the travail that had gone before, these eighteen months constituted something of a personal moratorium. The lecturing came easily and gave a steady income; the imperatives of political ambition no longer tormented and distance blunted the cares of family responsibility. Clarinda, endlessly exhorted to be brave, stayed on at ‘Werrington’, to fend off creditors, manage the farm, discipline and educate six children and then in quiet resignation to bear a seventh— not even ruffled when Parkes wrote professing surprise at its



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coming.55 From afar he played with zest the role of lordly paterfamilias, writing to brush aside Clarinda’s ‘little trials’, to order portraits, vaccination and healthful holidays—blandly ignoring hardship sometimes so severe as to stop the family writing to him for want of postage.56 Meanwhile, vivid letters recorded his joy at reunion with sisters in Birmingham and the revisiting of old haunts—chops and green peas and red currant tart at an eating house near the Bullring, Coventry’s spires and deer in the park at Stonleigh Abbey.57 Fellowlecturer Dalley told of being dragged all over Birmingham, even to the Edgbaston Church where ‘Mr. Parkes tasted once more the fluttering sensations of his bridal day’, and confessed to despair at the task of calling Parkes ‘out of the world of early manhood into that of mature age in which he and I are to labour’.58 But present reality soon brought harsher things. In September sister Sarah, ‘mother to me in my childhood’ and, after Clarinda and the children, ‘the dearest creature that remained to me upon earth’, died before his eyes— of cancer.59 Work’s savour changed to cheerlessness and with surviving sister Maria he suffered ‘fits of moping, fish-out-of-waterlike’.60 There were premonitions of approaching old age, and a sense of being ‘ill at ease’, with ‘an irrational impatience of life . . . which in spite of my better sense enslaves me’.61 Countervailing intimations of personal worth helped for a time: he wrote proudly to Cowper of success in ‘making influential friends’ (nearly twenty Members of Parliament) and successfully cultivated such idols as Mill, Carlyle and Thomas Hughes . . . the last-named perhaps his special coup: I have a note from him on my table now in which he says ‘Pray don’t forget to let me hear the minute you return to town and let me see as much of you as you can manage!’ That is kind from such a man now, isn’t it? And I am sure it will make you happy to think that your husband, after all his buffettings, is thus valued by the choicest spirits in the world .62 But after April 1862, as the year’s commission (and so the moratorium) neared its end, melancholy self-doubt grew.

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I am beginning to feel anxious about returning to the colony [he writes to Windeyer] where I mean to spend the rest of my life in quiet industry, if it is only cultivating maize and pumpkins. The conceit of public reputation has lost its charm and my hopes of public usefulness are in a manner stricken in the dust.63 Clarinda pleaded with him not to give way to despondency—‘there are people in the world who can apreciate [sic] my dear Husband as he deserves to be appreciated’—and daughter Menie, a deeply Christian girl with decided literary flair, at once elaborated on the consolation of religion and entertained with satiric accounts of its misuse, like the Wesleyan sermon she had heard at South Creek: contradictory arguments delivered ‘in the various tones of sniffle, whine and roar, to support a noble Christian truth that, if it did not stand firmly on its own foundation, would surely be shaken by such assistance’.64 He could rally manfully, writing enchanting accounts of the countryside he passed through, gritting teeth with a determination to come home and ‘turn over a new leaf altogether’.65 But there were moments of terrible self-doubt: . . . the future hangs over me like a gloomy cloud; I cannot decide what I am to do. I feel humiliated by my own indecision which I know is weak and foolish; but the strange conditions of my existence seem to entangle me like a cobweb.66 The English landscape locked in with his melancholy mood: How glorious [a country this] is for trees and flowers and variety of scenery . . . And I am growing quite fond of the old historical ruins of England and have mounted the ivied walls of Tintern Abbey and have given rein to my fancy where Milton’s Comus was performed in Ludlow Castle— with a strange mixture of feelings, half veneration and half a sad, scornful sense of the ghostlined grandeur of all man’s handiwork.67



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But such a drift could not last: by June 1862 silence from New South Wales indicated that the government was unlikely to extend the commission, and Dalley, more realistic, set about arranging his homeward trip. At last, on 18 June, official word left Sydney that the appointment had ended.68 The news triggered frenetic action. Parkes fired off a long letter to Clarinda, firmly endorsed ‘not to be read before the children’: ‘Almost the only true happiness I know now consists in hearing that you are comfortable, and I derive some consolation . . . in knowing that by coming here I saved you from an amount of discomfort of which you probably never dreamed.’ And at last, he said, he had decided what to do about the future. The solution harked back to a letter written 10 months before, admitting finally the impossibility of success at the Bar, and half-heartedly broaching the idea of establishing an importing businesss in ‘choice goods—old and rare books, scarce elegances that would attract persons of money and taste and command a price, combined with good useful articles of general use’. Now the business was to be set up, partly on the basis of a small legacy Clarinda had inherited on the recent death of her father, partly from funds she was to raise by selling Parkes’s library at ‘Werrington’. Hypothetical calculations showed wonderful profits: the only rub was that he, though ‘dashed by a cruel sorrow’ at the thought, must stay on in England, and she must seek no help or advice. ‘Trouble no-one for assistance. The last twelve months has proved pretty conclusively that we have few friends’,—a theme embroidered on more sharply to Menie, whom he ordered, in italics, ‘not to go much among my old friends, not to talk of what I intend doing nor of my affairs in any way. If anyone asks when I am coming home, say you do not know’.69 A wave of letters followed in quick succession, full of plans, consolations and admonitions: Try to look on the best side of things; let you and Menie and Mary cheer each other and bear this trial like true women. Shun all political talk affecting me. Let the idiots and liars say what they will, turn from it with a quiet scorn, with the assurance that all will go well with us yet.70 But even before this barrage reached her, the patient Clarinda was at last in revolt. In July she had written letters (alas, no longer extant)

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which, Parkes thought, breathed ‘a feeling of blame and reproach towards me’ which ‘very much pained me’.71 Plans to stay on in England wilted before her inability to accept more loneliness and privation; he put sister Maria in charge of the English end of the new business and sailed reluctantly for home. On the eve of embarkation he wrote the final epitaph to a year and a half of searching for himself: ‘my future lot is fixed—it is to work on quiet and go down to an obscure grave.’72 He was consoled by having spent one of his last English Sunday evenings with Carlyle, ‘who gave me his portrait with his autograph underneath—a very rare thing for him to do’.73 Back in Sydney in January 1863 Parkes found Clarinda seriously ill and Menie ‘in quite a pitiful state of weakness’—strangely uncommunicative and obsessed (as she put it) with a religious ‘inner life’. He wrote jocularly of being ‘nearly melted in this horrible country of yours. Can’t you make it cooler?’, and fussed about muslin curtains for his room and the irritation of fleas at ‘Werrington’.74 Meanwhile, the faithful Gleadall organised what the Sydney Morning Herald described as a ‘not numerously attended’ meeting at the Temperance Hall, to prepare an address exhorting Parkes soon to ‘give his services to the legislature’.75 The initiative lapsed when Parkes objected: obscure businessman was indeed to be his role. Weeks lengthened into months and business seemingly absorbed all attention, until, in August, abrupt surrender to renewed political temptation wrote a last bitter chapter to five years of lonely self-doubt. Parliament had been in recess since his arrival: now at the opening of another session, Premier Cowper took into his cabinet as Attorney-General J. B. Darvall, Parkes’s old legal tutor and comforter in the dark days of 1858. The new Minister required the formal endorsement of re-election to his seat of East Maitland. Pressed by former political associates and agents in the area, Parkes took the unusual course of standing against him. Darvall wrote in pained astonishment to remind Parkes of friendship’s obligations, and the Sydney Morning Herald wondered sardonically ‘what it must have cost a man of such refined sense, open to all the gentle emotions of the poetic mind’ to oppose one who had ‘once shown him an amount of kindness rarely exampled’.



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How great must be the strength of Mr. Parkes’ affection for the country to induce him . . . to combat his benefactor on the hustings and through him to demolish a ministry which bought him off, and which he himself supported by his absence and his silence for several years.76 The contest was short, bitter and personal. Darvall broke open old wounds: the bankruptcy, Parkes’s political ambitions, the ‘job’ of the emigration lectureship. Parkes showed none of his old political aplomb and conviction, and strained nerves gave way at the declaration of the poll. There Darvall, triumphant, quietened a shouting crowd just long enough for them to hear from Parkes the sustained outburst of a broken man: He believed he had done good; he built up the power that now rules the country and it was hard after a life of irreproachable character that, meeting with misfortune, they should all turn round and endeavour to crush him. He would tell them what he would ask them to do: in another country and another time if a man did not pay what debts he owed, the penalty was death; and if they thought he had not tried all in his power to pay his liabilities, when he left this building, let them hound him to death—stone him and take his life.77 It was a disaster: to which he himself, in cooler mood two months later, wrote the ambiguous postcript. ‘Every day’, he told Maria, I have less desire to be again mixed up with politics . . . In a former letter I wrote you that I thought I should join the Government. Had I been elected for East Maitland, I should have in all probability been entrusted with the formation of a ministry in the change that has just taken place. But my defeat was one of those trifling incidents which give a new direction to the course of life, just as a stone falling in a particular way may give a new course to the stream. I may never again be in Parliament which indeed would be I verily believe a lucky thing for me.

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And in the same letter he elaborated fantastic plans for a new masterstroke to solve all his problems at once. There was ‘no reason’ why the importing business should not turn over £50,000 by 1865. I want to make sufficient money in the next five or six years to provide for the rest of our lives and I am sure it is to be done . . . Recollect always that in trade I do not look to establishing a secure or a permanent business but that my only object is to make money. I would as soon sell Dung as Divinity if I could only make money by selling it.78 *** So Parkes’s life went on, now as in past and future a strange point– counterpoint: divergent ambitions and identities held in fluctuating tension. He was to move back to politics, to weather fresh bankruptcy, win office and fame, and, living always on the brink of destruction, in the end to serve both himself and his colony as its grandest old man. That later story is beyond our present scope, except to note how the years we have discussed might offer both prelude to and concepts for its probing. We may say that in the halfdecade after 1858 Parkes passed through a prolonged experience analogous to Erikson’s ‘identity crisis’, a time of suffering when toleration of negative self-conceptions faltered, when ‘the unruly part of total identity’ could not be contained and so induced despair, rage and personal ineffectualness.79 This is not, of course, to be overdramatised. At the end we can posit no Luther-like self-discovery: tension endured because it was multi-faceted, no cathartic experience could save, and the climb out of deep crisis was never quite complete. The record suggests that adjustment, such as it was, had many dimensions. The years of suffering bred, for example, a new hardness—betrayed in random remarks (‘it is only of late years that I have come to understand the hard world with which I have to struggle and which through my ignorance always got the better of me. [But] I think I shall gain the upper hand in future’)80 and evident in insensitivities like the contest with Darvall. Such hardness doubtless proved a positive asset in mastering a political world where administrative style was replacing ideological



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commitment, or in maintaining self-respect while living off others. Again, the faith—sometimes sycophancy—of close associates, and acceptance at further remove by ‘choice spirits’, had in the darkest hours shored flickering confidence in talents and worth: there is no mystery why exaggerated thirst for recognition was a trait in the coming man. We could extend this catalogue, but in speaking thus we have as well to guard against too careless and glib an approach to the rest of the life. For one needs also to observe in the documents we have discussed the manifold hints that a life might fruitfully be conceived in more dynamic terms—from the inside a range of self-identifications held in fragile tension, personality a process rather than the unfolding of a given core of self-hood, and action the fruit of a traffic between circumstance and these unseen worlds. It may be that such a perspective could melt the discrepancies between actor and man underneath, to merge the two and reveal in the individual’s struggle for their reconciliation the sources and character of motivation—and hence, for the outside observer, important keys to explanation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

8

96

William Astley, ‘Within an Ace of Greatness’, Bulletin, 9 May 1896. A. Deakin, The Federal Story, Melbourne University Press, 1963, 26–7. J. A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin, Melbourne University Press, 1965, vol. 1, xv. E. Goffman, Encounters, Allen Lane, 1972, 134. The perspective hinted at here is best called a cast of mind, not a formulated theory. Of the numerous influences in shaping my thoughts on this subject the following should be given special acknowledgment: A. F. Davies, ‘The Tasks of Biography’, in Essays in Political Sociology, Cheshire, 1972, 109–17; E. H. Erikson, ‘The Problem of Ego Identity’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 4, no. 1, 1956, 56–121; A. F. C. Wallace and R. D. Fogelson, ‘The Identity Struggle’, in I. Boszormenyi-Nagy and J. L. Framo (eds), Intensive Family Therapy: Theoretical and Practical Aspects, Harper & Row, 1965, esp. 380–6; G. W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality, Yale University Press, 1955. A. Briggs, ‘Social Structure and Politics in Birmingham and Lyons, 1823– 1848’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1, March 1950, 67–80; T. Tholfsen, ‘The Artisan and the Culture of Early Victorian Birmingham’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, vol. iv, 1953–4, 146–66. A. W. Martin, ‘Henry Parkes: Man and Politician’, Melbourne Studies in Education 1960–61, Melbourne University Press, 1962, 12–13. H. Parkes, An Emigrant’s Home Letters, Angus & Robertson 1896, 137 (no date), 120 (23 Jan. 1842).

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9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32

33

Ibid., 109 (21 May 1841). Ibid., 112 (8 Aug. 1841). Ibid., 72 (24 March [1839]). Ibid., 98 (24 May 1841). D. Deniehy to J. D. Lang, 6 June 1854, Lang Papers, Mitchell Library (ML), vol. 7, A2227, 60. H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 19 Nov. 1853, Parkes Correspondence (PC), ML, A1044. See, for example, H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 14 Oct. 1850, PC A934. H. Parkes to W. C. Windeyer, 11 Nov. 1860, PC A1050. H. Parkes, Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History, Longmans, Green 1892, 84, 94. Windeyer Uncatalogued MSS, ML, set 186, item 3, endorsed ‘Verses on Poor Old Parkes, written by my very dear sister Annie when the Empire became insolvent’. H. Parkes, Diary, 19 Oct. 1858, PC A1011. G. Gavan Duffy to H. Parkes, 8 Sept. 1858, PC A921, 13. H. Parkes to J. D. Lang, 15 Sept. 1858, Lang Papers A2242, 6. Diary, 19 Oct. 1858. So far as is known, Parkes rarely kept a diary. A few fragmentary diaries do survive, but these cover short periods and generally appear to have been written to help sort out personal or political problems. Ibid., 1 Nov. 1858. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1858. Ibid., 8, 16 Feb. 1859. G. Thornton to Parkes, 1 Dec. 1858, PC A929, 45. H. Parkes to W. C. Windeyer, 25 Nov., 17 Dec. 1858, Windeyer Family Papers (privately held by Sir Victor Windeyer, who kindly made letters quoted in this article available to me). William Charles Windeyer, first graduate of the University of Sydney and admitted to the Bar in 1857, was at this stage a newly married man of 24, who had worked on the Empire as a law reporter and was one of Parkes’s most ardent admirers, who felt—as Parkes put it— ‘justified in standing by my reputation with something of the faith of young martyrs’. (Parkes to Mrs. W. C. Windeyer, 6 Sept. 1858, Windeyer Family Papers. ) Diary, 30 Oct. 1858. Ibid., 28 Oct., 3 Dec. 1858. His words, ibid., 27 Nov. 1858. Ibid., 31 Oct., 28 Nov. 1858. In a rather distrait letter to Windeyer on 1 December he observed that ‘a good name should be symbolical rather than representative, but emphatic and comprehensive—better vague than definite in its meaning to the popular mind’. He thus thought the very best title for his new paper would be The Sheet of Bark. Ibid., 2–3 Dec. 1858. My account of this incident is drawn from these two long entries. He had been a tide waiter for several years in the early 1840s. It appears not to have been a very demanding position: ‘I spend most of my time on



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34

35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53

98

board ships, where I have a good deal of leisure to write poetry—I have enough already to fill a book’ (22 Sept. 1840. An Emigrant’s Home Letters, 93). H. Parkes to J. D. Lang, 11 Jan. 1859, Lang Papers, A2242, 14. Six of his letters to the press on this subject were republished in pamphlet form in March 1859, under the title The Electoral Act and How to Work it. H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 25 Jan. 1859, PC A1044. Diary, 12 Feb. 1859. Gleadall, a stonemason, is described here by Parkes as ‘a working mechanic who has taken an active part in public matters in Sydney for some years past’. He had written for the Empire ‘on subjects connected with the social and political condition of the working classes’ and was admired by Parkes for ‘his natural good sense and his painstaking efforts at self-improvement’. Gleadall became one of Parkes’s electoral organisers and perhaps his most important link with Sydney’s politically minded artisans. W. C. Windeyer to H. Parkes, 26 Nov. 1858, PC A990. W. B. Dalley to H. Parkes, 3 Feb. 1859, PC A921, 151; Diary, 12, 13 Jan. 1859. Dalley, Butler and Black were active politicians on the more radical wing of the liberal movement. Ibid., 7 Jan., 17, 27 Feb. 1859. Ibid., 14 Feb. 1859. H. Parkes to J. D. Lang, 14 May 1859, Lang Papers A2242, 10. Empire, 25 May, 4 June 1859. Empire, 7 June 1859. H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 12 June 1859, PC A1044. See, for example, Empire, 17 June, 4 July, 24 Sept. 1859; C. E. Lyne, Life of Sir Henry Parkes, George Robertson, 1896, 134–5. In June Chief Commissioner Purefoy issued a report granting Parkes a certificate of release from the bankruptcy court. One creditor appealed to the Supreme Court against this judgment, and in September won his case. Parkes did not receive his final release until October 1860. H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 13 Feb. 1860, PC A1044. T. Betteridge to H. Parkes, 8 March 1860, PC A919, 910; C. G. Duffy to H. Parkes, 2I March 1860, PC A881, 111. H. Parkes to W. C. Windeyer, 11, 13 March 1860, PC A1050. W. C. Windeyer to H. Parkes, 18 March 1860, PC A913, 451. H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 12 May 1860, PC A1044. R. C. Lethbridge to H. Parkes, 15 Aug. 1860, PC A893, 151; H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 15 Oct., 21 Nov. 1860, PC A1044. By November, the ‘stock’ consisted of 7 cows, 3 calves, 2 pigs, 2 horses, 2 geese, 38 fowls, 4 ducks, 2 dogs and 1 cat. Lyne, op. cit., 160; Parkes, Fifty Years, 131. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 16 May 1861. The resolution referred to was Parkes’s request for a select committee to investigate the management of the Department of Public Works; in effect a resolution of censure. It was on the notice paper from February to April, being repeatedly postponed, then was finally—and without explanation—withdrawn by Parkes himself.

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54

55

56

57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64

65 66 67 68

69

Parkes’s statement from Lyne, op. cit., 160. The thought of going to England specifically as emigration lecturer had privately occurred to him on at least two occasions (Diary, 5 Dec. 1858; H. Parkes to S. Parkes, 13 Feb. 1860, PC A1044). The arrangement was made with Parkes before the Government put the offer in writing (Windeyer to his mother, 10 May 1861, Windeyer Uncatalogued MSS, ML, set 186, item 7; H. Parkes to J. Robertson, 13 May 1861, PC A1050). Ten days after the appointment, the Herald carried an editorial which put brutally what was in everyone’s mind: ‘The appointment itself, and all the circumstances under which it was made, points out its true character. Mr. Parkes has been the most formidable opponent of Mr. Cowper, but he has been compelled to surrender, like many a strong fortress, under the pressure of starvation. Mr. Cowper, being in better quarters, and having the resources of the country at his back, could have carried on this war for some months longer. Mr. Parkes was fairly exhausted . . . The case was clear. He moved for a grant of £5,000 for the appointment of lecturers . . . Mr. Cowper accepted the terms, and the appointment was made. Thus in the course of a few days one of the most prominent and consistent of the radical party, a man who, whatever his faults, did more to secure its organisation and consolidation and early triumphs than all the rest put together, was removed from the scene. It is in vain to look to immigration as the object of this compact . . . The whole thing combines in itself the characteristics of a job, and it is a job.’ SMH, 23 May 1861. Italics in original. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 25 Nov. 1861, PC A1044 (‘The intelligence of another baby certainly took me by surprise. I am sorry that this trial should come upon you in my absence but when the trial is over I shall be glad to hear that we have another arrow in our quiver’). H. Parkes to C. Parkes 9, 24 Aug., 25 Dec., 1861 (‘little trials’), 24 May 1862, ibid. C. Parkes to H. Parkes, 17 Oct. 1861, PC A933. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 5, 9, 23 Aug. 1861, PC A1044. W. B. Dalley to C. Parkes, 19 Aug. 1861, PC A1045, 197. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 2 Sept. 1861, PC A1044. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 26 Sept., 24 Oct. 1861, ibid. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 16 Dec. 1861, ibid. ; H. Parkes to W. C. Windeyer, 15 Dec. 1861, PC A1050. H. Parkes to C. Cowper, 17 Nov. 1861, Cowper Correspondence (ML), 0677; H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 19 Nov. 1861, PC A1044. H. Parkes to W. C. Windeyer, 19 April 1862, Windeyer Family Papers. C. Parkes to H. Parkes, 19 Jan. 1862; Menie Parkes to H. Parkes, 19 March 1862, PC A933. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 20 April 1862, PC A1044. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 24 April 1862, ibid. Emphasis in original. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 24 May 1862, ibid. Fitzpatrick (Under Secretary for Lands) to Parkes and Dalley, 18 June 1862, PC A1026. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 20 Aug. 1862, 18 Oct. 1861; H. Parkes to Menie Parkes, 22 Aug. 1862, PC A1044. Emphasis in original.



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70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80

H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 26 Aug. 1862, ibid. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 25 Sept. 1862, ibid. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 27 Oct. 1862, ibid. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 25 Sept. 1862, ibid. C. Parkes to ‘sister’, 21 Jan. 1863, PC A1045, 205; H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 28 Jan., 4 Feb., 19 May, 1863, PC A1044; Menie Parkes to H. Parkes, 26 March 1863, PC A933. SMH., 5 Feb. 1863. J. B. Darvall to H. Parkes, 4 Aug. 1863, PC A923, 897; SMH, 7 Aug. 1863. SMH, 14 Aug. 1863. H. Parkes to M. Parkes, 24 Oct. 1863, PC A1044. E. H. Erikson, ‘Autobiographic Notes on the Identity Crisis’, Daedalus, vol. 99, no. 4, Fall 1970, 733. H. Parkes to C. Parkes, 20 April 1862, PC A1044.

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5 A New Middle Class? A Note on the 1950s

Whatever the general rubric ultimately adopted for this volume of the history [Australians from 1939], I take it as given that one inescapable task will be to attempt accurately, empirically and insightfully to account for and examine the implications of the great increase Australia experienced over the thirty-odd years after the Second World War—in common with other advanced societies, both capitalist and communist—in the numbers of people engaged in professional, semi-professional, special technical and white-collar occupations. That is a cliché: so too is the further point that that task will involve considering from a special angle the interaction of a range of other developments: most notably growth in the size and sophistication of manufacturing and tertiary industries, in the Commonwealth and State bureaucracies, in the education system, in the size and complexity of the population. I ought to say at once that for this task the second sub-theme of the Sydney working party’s document—the sub-theme somewhat tendentiously called ‘meritocracy, culture, professionalism and education—the new middle class?’—seems to me a useful point of departure. I would like, however, to underline the working party’s last First published in Australia 1939–1988: A Bicentennial History Bulletin, no. 2, 1980, 15–32.


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sentence on this section of their document: ‘We expect responses which quarrel with questions as well as those which attempt to supply answers’. It would be nice to have both types of comment, and for this as a result to be a truly constructive discussion. I ought also to say at once what will soon become apparent enough: that my own introductory remarks will be those of an almost complete tyro—a fugitive historian of nineteenth-century politics who has faute de mieux agreed to ask some questions—questions which I hope many of those present will be able to take up with proper expertise and reshape in useful ways quite beyond my present range. Australian Workforce: Occupations, 1947 Male Female Total (rounded) Rural, fishing and hunting 444 176 21 908 466 000 Professional & semi82 429 80 927 163 000 professional Administrative 139 201 33 986 173 000 Commercial and clerical 409 423 273 051 682 000 Domestic and protective 151 432 118 357 270 000 service Craftsmen 497 602 16 311 513 000 Operatives 514 065 145. 374 659 000 Labourers 159 505 560 160 000 Indefinite 81 436 26 688 108 000 2 479 269 717 269 3 194 000

% 14. 6 5. 1 5. 4 21. 4 8. 5 16. 1 20. 6 5. 0 3. 3 100. 0

(Source: Census Report)

The crude dimensions of the phenomenon we want to talk about seem to be glimpsable from census figures on occupation, though when one wishes to talk about the 1950s a difficulty arises from limitations in the comparability of the classifications used in 1947 on the one hand and in 1961 and subsequent censuses on the other. The census-takers adopted in 1947 an eight-category occupational scale, scaled mainly from a conception of levels of skill; the 1961 census was based on the international standard classification of 1958, which categorised the work-force according to industry and function, with further sub-categories which permit breakdowns to allow for skill. The accompanying tables present only the main categories, on the broad assumption that for 1961 and 1966 orders 0–3

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Source: Census Reports

* Includes: nurses; medical workers and technicians (pharmacists, optometrists, physiotherapists, x-ray operators, chiropodists, dieticians); teachers; accountants; social workers; librarians; economists; draftsmen and technicians; artists, entertainers, writers and related workers.

+ Includes: architects, engineers and surveyors; physical scientists; biologists and agronomists; medical practitioners and dentists; clergy; law professionals.

1966 Female Total (rounded) No. % No. % 6 398 182 071 188 469 13. 6 449 700 9. 4

0. Professional workers (traditional)+ Semi-professional workers* Total professional 1. Administrative, executive and 254 544 8. 1 43 338 4. 2 297 900 7. 1 268 067 7. 9 36 572 2. 7 304 600 6. 4 related workers 2. Clerical workers 241 245 7. 8 306 820 29. 5 548 100 13. 2 285 289 8. 5 428 259 30. 9 713 500 14. 9 3. Sales workers 188 043 6. 0 134 675 13. 0 322 700 7. 7 196 285 5. 8 179 182 12. 9 375 500 7. 9 4. Farmers, fishermen, timber433 295 13. 8 36 887 3. 6 470 200 11. 2 397 876 11. 7 71 175 5. 1 469 100 9. 8 getters and related workers 5. Miners, quarrymen and related 33 168 1. 0 15 0. 0 33 200 0. 7 31 816 0. 9 48 0. 0 31 900 0. 6 workers 6. Workers in transport and 243 783 7. 8 25 836 2. 4 269 600 6. 5 260 041 7. 7 34 068 2. 5 294 100 6. 2 communications 7/8. Craftsmen, production-process 1 358 945 43. 5 175 114 16. 9 1 534 100 36. 9 1 495 229 44. 0 228 109 16. 4 1 723 300 36. 1 workers and labourers 9. Service, sport and recreation 130 513 4. 3 167 187 16. 1 297 700 7. 3 140 888 4. 1 220 090 15. 8 361 000 7. 5 workers 10. Armed services 42 226 1. 3 1 780 0. 2 63 100 1. 1 54 833 1. 6 2 460 0. 1 57 300 1. 2 Total Workforce 3 123 712 100. 0 1 038 264 100. 0 4 162 000 100. 0 3 391 527 100. 0 1 388 432 100. 0 4 780 000 100. 0

Australian Workforce: Occupations, 1961 and 1966 1961 Male Female Total (rounded) Male No. % No. % No. % No. % 72 531 5 921 80 725 125 419 140 691 180 478 197 950 6. 4 146 612 14. 1 344 600 8. 3 261 203 7. 8

encompass most of the people we are at the moment interested in, and that 0 and 1 implicitly indicate a relevant level of skill—though it seems useful to try in the professional and technical case to suggest the differences between the traditional and the aspiring (or sub, or para) professions. Though one cannot compare the 1947 and 1961 figures in detail, they do serve to suggest a notable growth of the professional and managerial groups in the 1950s, in terms both of crude numbers and proportion of the work-force. This growth takes on especial significance when one recalls the estimate Hughes and Rawson made in 1960 on the basis of earlier census figures—that between 1921 and 1947 changes in the composition of the work-force had been trivial. Omitting primary industry, the proportion of manual workers had remained almost constant during that period, the growth of whitecollar occupations had been small, and the professions, at approximately 3. 5 per cent of the work-force, had scarcely varied.1 I have added the 1966 figures beside the 1961 figures for interest—though out of the period we are concerned with, they do suggest how the more significant trends were continuing . . . the fall in the ‘administrative, executive and managerial’ group is the one aberration—explicable, as Encel pointed out, almost entirely by a fall in the proportion of women: the reasons for this change, he says, are obscure, and may relate to tax avoidance rather than occupational shifts.2 Whether what we are confronted with here could be called a rising ‘meritocracy’ or a ‘new middle class’ is perhaps a semantic question with almost poetic overtones. Sol Encel is happy, at least, to use the word ‘meritocracy’ in reference to one fragment of it—that elite which emerged from what Caiden called the ‘revolution’ that took place in the Commonwealth public service between 1939 and 1961.3 The features of this revolution will be well enough known: in twenty-odd years a threefold increase in the service—stimulated initially in the 1940s by the demands of war and postwar reconstruction and then checked in the 1950s less by Menzies’ attempted retrenchments than by shortages of suitable recruits—caused chiefly by demographic factors. In the upper echelons lateral recruitment, largely of graduates from outside the ordinary career structure, raised standards and was the prelude to the Boyer Committee’s

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recommendations near the end of the decade for improved recruiting procedures generally and the restructuring of the second division of the service as a corps of top administrators and managers. A careless Michael Young looking back from a putative 21stcentury meritocratic society might be tempted to think of the Commonwealth public service of the 1940s and 1950s as a landmark on the long haul to his modern times4 . . . after all, cases of crack second division men like Coombs the schoolteacher and wharflabourer, or Crawford the miner’s son, plus a disproportionate presence of Catholics could suggest in the service a beginning of that openness to talent that The Rise of the Meritocracy is all about. Cooler judgement comes, however, from Encel, who found that in one sample of 131 graduates recruited to the service in the 1950s twothirds had been educated at private non-Catholic secondary schools5 . . . so that Young’s ‘cleverness’—the only test for entry to his meritocracy—was heavily overlaid by the prior effects of an educational system which for historical and social reasons discriminated against State and Catholic school children in opening the path to the universities. The numerous studies that have been made of this phenomenon and its persistence in Australia make one feel that ‘meritocracy,’ at least in Young’s strict sense, is an inappropriate description for whatever Australian intellectual and professional elite existed in the 1950s. In the period itself much lip-service was of course paid to the need to discover and mature natural talent, particularly in the scientific and technical fields. Unquestioned assumptions about the priorities of economic expansion mingled with panic—exacerbated by the cold war and Sputnik—at the shortage of trained personnel. The technological received heavy emphasis: New South Wales got her University of Technology in 1949, conceived then as the apex of an expanding system of technical colleges, and by the mid-1950s scientists, industry leaders and professional organisations like the Institution of Engineers were engaged in a powerful campaign for a second Victorian university. The Melbourne University Appointments Board published figures to highlight the crisis: in 1954, for example, fifty-two engineers were available for 461 jobs, seven mathematicians for 124 jobs, five chemists for 114, six bacteriologists and biochemists for 33.6 In 1956 the secretary of the Employers’ Federation called



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on the State government to take immediate action to establish a Victorian university of technology,7 and Sir Mark Oliphant came home from a trip to Russia to assure Australians that ‘there is no drafting there of young people into careers in pure and applied science—not even a dictator can select those best suited for such work’—what operated in Russia was what was needed here: powerful differentials in reward.8 Meanwhile Professor Harry Messell of the University of Sydney toured Australia and gave 600 lectures in a oneman crusade to deplore the fact that only 20 per cent of university students were in science and engineering. ‘What are we trying to do in this country’, he asked, ‘trying to raise a nation of invalids, or trying to develop a nation’?9 And in 1956 even the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) editorially endorsed the opinion of S. H. Roberts, Sydney’s then vice-chancellor, ‘that no young person in the community who desires to have a university education should be debarred by social or economic reasons from obtaining it’: though the MJA was also sceptical of Roberts’s view that society would be well served if all young people intellectually capable of university work (Roberts guessed the figure at 15 per cent of each age group) became undergraduates. For if that happened, said the MJA, ‘we should soon have a lop-sided community. Trade and commerce have to be served . . . [and] many a commercial figure is an educated, enterprising and valuable member of the community, though much of his wisdom has been acquired in the school of experience. So, too, a skilled tradesman, such as a lynotype operator, who keeps his wits about him, who absorbs knowledge from his work as a piece of blotting paper takes up ink, can display mental qualities that a graduate might envy’.10 Meritocratic dreams, perhaps, but certainly not Michael Young’s. What these types of contemporary rhetoric meant in social terms and how they affected policy-making, especially on advanced education, are clearly themes which ought to be explored in our volume. One senses in the emphasis universally placed on poor financial incentives and on the physical limitations of training facilities a still inadequate—perhaps indeed suppressed—appreciation of other factors relevant to the graduate shortage: like the collapsed birthrate of the depression generation, or social inequalities that made the school system so inept in ferretting out and maturing

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talent. The Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme of the later 1940s and the new Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme of the early 1950s certainly pushed new toes into the university door, but they could affect none of the grosser distortions below matriculation level. The timing of the Murray Committee, near the end of the decade, and of university expansion over the following ten years, suggest a picture of the 1950s as a transitional period—a time of planning and agitation when the making of operative assumptions and the relationship of those assumptions to a changing body of social knowledge seems of central importance. Who constructed that knowledge, and how, is as important to the inquiry as the effects of its application. Meantime, at the other level of education, what will have to be made of the effects of immigration and the movement into the school system of wartime babies, two influences which in combination raised the population of primary and secondary schools from 1,300,000 in 1950 to 2,200,000 in 1960?11 This is a drastic change squarely in the 1950s. What studies exist, and what are needed, of how the system coped, of what debate there was, of how and why governments did or did not respond; and what explanation—beyond growing affluence—is there for the increasing trend for secondary schools to hold their pupils? Educationists, please respond. On the matter of the professions and professionalisation three key questions to be investigated are the social roles and power of the established professions—medicine and law prototypically—the growth of the aspiring professions, and the implications of increased employment of professionals in government service. Two preliminary and unconnected general points. Can we avoid getting bogged down in the quagmire of definition? Everyone must know those inventories which sociologists often accept from the professionals themselves as the basis of definition. I prefer not to argue about all that but still to suggest the uses of E. C. Hughes’s side-stepping approach: ‘in my own studies’, he writes, ‘I passed from the false question “Is this occupation a profession?” to the more fundamental one, “What are the conditions in which people in an occupation attempt to turn it into a profession and themselves into professional people?”’12 Also—the second point—may one register a certain



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unease at the danger, in the absence of much hard local evidence, of Australians being too easily hypnotised by the overseas literature? A remark made by Erica Bates and Andrea Mant is to the point here: ‘our health scene obviously has much in common with the British and American health scenes, but there are many times when examples cited in British and American tests are glaringly different from what we know happens in Australia.’13 One is reminded of Halmos’s protest from Keele at the frequent acceptance in Britain of what he calls ‘the more prestigeful American sociology of our time’, whose ethnocentric bias gets forgotten in the rage to accept American pronouncements as ‘the model-ground [on which] to track down the archetypal and prototypical characteristics of the personal service professionals’.14 Maybe there is something of a parallel here in the one recent general book we have: Boreham, Pemberton and Wilson’s The Professions in Australia: A Critical Appraisal, which portentously announces a crisis in the so-called ‘helping professions’. . . a crisis allegedly characterised by the offering of what are called ‘demonstrably’ ineffective services—services, moreover, administered in a socially discriminating fashion, and neutralised by something called ‘the revolt of the client’. The keynote chapter which argues these points is heavily documented—with references, to be precise, to sixty-seven works . . . but only four of these deal explicitly with Australia and only two of that four report actual research findings.15 The case for a local crisis, that is to say, seems to be hardly demonstrated. Nor, one might add, is the book’s chief theoretical presupposition—that professionalism and professional ethics act to shore up the status quo (i.e. the capitalist system) exactly news . . . To my amateur knowledge precise research on the structure, socialisation, inner dynamics and politics of the Australian professions—such research, i. e. , as one associates with names like Anderson and Western, or Scotton and Deeble—begins in the 1960s and 1970s, not the 1950s. If this is correct, ignorance may partly explain one’s inclination to think of that decade (the 1950s), with its shortages of trained personnel, its affluence, its burgeoning optimism and its full employment, as a time when the peak professions were able to reassert without challenge their traditional claim to independence, status and authority. The BMA, for example, fresh from having demolished in the previous decade Labor’s

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pharmaceutical benefits legislation, established after 1949 what Graycar has called ‘relatively harmonious relations’ with the Menzies coalition government,16 whose Minister for Health, Earle Page, had long since been described by Chifley as ‘the agent in this [the federal] parliament of the British Medical Association’.17 Page’s National Health Act—which he himself described as a scheme to ‘provide an effective bulwark against the socialisation of medicine’18 - reflected legislatively the profession’s political clout, just as, in the same period, its skill in enforcing that time-honoured trades union principle—the closed shop—was demonstrated by the exclusion of [Displaced Persons] doctors from practice. Kunz’s exposé of this unsavoury story—The Intruders—depicts the Australian medical profession of the 1950s as underspecialised, undermanned, and quixotically dedicated to a system dominated by general practitioners. The BMA’s Federal Council asserted in 1951 that The special geography of Australia, with relatively long distances from access to consultant practice, has established the need from the earliest days of settlement onwards for a high grade general practitioner type. The systems of training in Australian universities have been framed with respect to this need . . . In general it may be stated that the population distribution of Australia is such that specialist practice cannot be carried on economically except in the cities and larger country towns provided with base hospitals . . . The requirements of numbers of medical practitioners in the future will therefore be concerned primarily with the available numbers of the high grade general practitioner type referred to above.19 The fact that the 1954 census showed almost 80 per cent of Australia’s population living in what were classed as urban areas and 37. 7 per cent in cities of l. 5 million or over made this an extraordinarily fatuous statement—fit memorial to an old-fashioned concept of medical service that was in reality already passing rapidly away. Between 1947 and 1965 the proportion of GPs among registered medical practitioners fell from 79 per cent to 44 per cent, and in the 1960s the AMA, in the face of growing public criticism, initiated studies of



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Australian under-specialisation and the degree to which GPs were carrying out financially lucrative surgery and other procedures thought of outside Australia as specialists’ work. This was the prelude to a policy change towards support of specialisation . . . which in turn divided the profession and led to the breakaway formation of the General Practitioners’ Society. These divisions and others of greater significance that were later to follow (most notably, the development of the Doctors’ Reform movement) appear to emphasise by the fact of contrast the solidity, not to say stolidity, of the profession in the 1950s, and raise uninvestigated questions about how far expansion and differentiation came later to modify its monolithic character. Though the theoretical literature’s sour picture of medicine—which of course stresses the power that accrues to the profession from its freedom from scrutiny and its assertion of a legal, moral and intellectual mandate to independence20—is not to be gainsaid, it would still be illuminating to know what indications exist of internal criticism and external pressure modifying the profession’s power of definition in certain crucial social areas. I know of some tiny straws in the wind: like a recent study of how migrant health has been perceived, which shows an Australian-centred medical monopoly of definition, dating back to the 1950s, beginning to be modified by the intrusion of a variety of non-medical professional and research workers trained in social work, sociology and psychology, so that new, more discriminating and more migrant-centred definitions are emerging.21 How far, in other words, the development of the new professions and a generally better educated clientele acts to erode or modify older intellectual monopolies is an important question requiring investigation for this volume. On the legal profession, for example, Julian Disney and John Basten of the University of New South Wales law school observed a few years ago that burgeoning external and internal criticism made it ‘likely that the next few years will see more substantial reforms than have occurred within the profession for a century.’22 The reforms they had in mind ranged from promoting public accountability by including lay observers or members on the councils and committees of professional associations, to reductions in the range of the lawyer’s monopoly, especially in conveyancing, divorce and minor criminal advocacy . . . simplification or

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demystification being desirable to reduce costs, extend the range of lay or at least paraprofessional competence, and allow for the development of new specialisms, particularly in the area know as ‘poverty law’. Government initiatives aside, one question to ask is whether the relative youthfulness of the profession’s current members works to promote reformism (between 1954 and 1975 the total number of university law students in Australia increased sixfold . . . a consequence was that in 1975 half the profession had less than ten years experience in practice),23 or whether we must assume the relatively conservative origins, socialisation, and associations of the profession, have remained unchanged—a brake on reform. Of course, we must assume nothing: we must do some work, remembering Basten and Disney’s invitation: The most compelling need is for the legal profession to be ‘opened up’ to the community. This bespeaks substantial numbers of non-lawyers on the bodies which control various aspects of the profession’s activities and it also means that there must be extensive research into, and analysis of, these activities. Thus far, very few academic lawyers, social scientists or other ‘outsiders’ have sought, or been permitted, to make thorough investigations in this area. It is essential that there be independent research and analysis to supplement contributions from inside the practising profession.24 What of the aspiring semi-professionals in the 1950s? Census figures attest to increasing numbers, though what slender qualitative evidence I know of suggests limitations in self-awareness—perhaps, again, we are in a transition period. Accountants and engineers seem the most obviously aggressive. In the Chartered Accountant in Australia, e. g., an article headed ‘Professional Status and Standing’ argued in 1952 that accountancy has such a skilled technique, such an important function and such an intimate client relationship that for these reasons alone it must be a profession’.25 There were problems, however: the ‘public’ (not defined) had to confer professional status: ‘All men, from the highest to the lowest, will consult a medical practitioner if they are sick—[and] the same applies to lawyers,



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whose services are available to all to ensure justice . . . this does not apply to architects or engineers, and it certainly does not apply to us. Accountants are all too often assumed to be acting for employers only . . . it is our duty to overcome this somehow, because until our advice and service is of some use to all sections of society, then the esteem in which our profession is held will not be as high as medicine and law’.26 The Australian Accountant ran during 1956 a series of articles under the rubric ‘Accountants, Tradesmen or Professionals?’27 and in the same year printed a forceful paper from the president of the Australian Society of Accountants, arguing for Commonwealth legislation to enforce registration of accountants, ‘as a means of protecting the public from untrained laymen . . . [and] improving the status of the profession through enforcement of a code of ethics and the insistence of standards of competency for all registered accountants.’28 Accountants exemplify well the urge which employment by government or private corporations seems to have imposed on some occupational groups to claim professional status. As the secretary of the Institution of Engineers put it rather naively to the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, ‘should not engineers in the public service be encouraged to think of themselves primarily as members of a profession and to regard their employer as their professional client? Will the public service (or any other bureaucratic employer, public or private) accept the client role or will the professional employee be treated simply as a highly skilled worker who is expected to do what he is told?’29 Encel cites a Melbourne University Appointments Board survey of 1956 to show how extensive the employment by government of some professional groups had already become at that stage—if one took the public sector to include such instrumentalities as public hospitals, as well as ordinary Commonwealth, State and local government employees, 68 per cent of Australian engineers, 68 per cent of agricultural scientists and even 33 per cent of medical practitioners were in government employ.30 The engineers’ well-known use of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to establish de facto professional status came, it will be remembered, at the end of this decade: significant wage increases won in 1961 by the Association of Professional Engineers on the ground that low salaries prevented the professional engineer from

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occupying the ‘honoured place in the community which was his right and entitlement’.31 Fifteen years later, however, it was repeatedly represented to the Coombs Royal Commission that salary differences were not everything and that professionally qualified people were still being employed on work appropriate to what were called technical grades. Significantly the Commission’s report recommended work reviews to design restructuring which might involve what was called ‘employment of para-professionals in operational management, the transfer of man-management responsibilities from professionals to para-professionals, the adoption by professionals of functional relationships with, rather than supervisory control over, para-professionals’.32 In these matters it is perhaps to be observed that engineers (about whom, in the telecommunications field, the above remarks were made) offer a more clear-cut case for work review in bureaucracies than most other professionals: a hypothesis which in fact requires a closer look is the one that Professor Moorehouse put to the Victorian Institute of Educational Research in 1962: ‘where professional men are employed in large organisations their progress, if they are successful, is such that their activities become more and more administrative and managerial in their nature and less and less “technical”—using the word in its broadest sense—as time goes on’.33 And, indeed, F. H. (later Sir Frederick) Wheeler, Chairman, Public Service Board, 1961–71, speaking in 1964 about the responsibilities of the administrator in the public service, observed that We do not deny that there may be a place for a highly paid expert with a relatively narrow advisory role, within the senior ranks of the Commonwealth public service. Such a specialist would not have administrative or management responsibilities, but would act as a technical adviser to the administrators concerned with the formulation and management of policies. However, this type of position has been little used in the Commonwealth service and, though we have left the question open, given the normal context of the Commonwealth service we would not expect to see often a situation in which a senior officer would operate entirely as an expert.34



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Not entirely fatuous and unconnected is one speculation about administration that might deserve testing: Peter Gilmour and Russell Lansbury’s suggestion, in their Ticket to Nowhere, that, if there has been anything like a managerial revolution in postwar Australia, it has largely been confined to the public service . . . ,35 a suggestion that might be strengthened by paying some attention to the work of Sol Encel and Michael Baum on business management in the early 1960s, which Baum claimed was ‘the most poorly serviced vocation in Australia . . . [made up from] the leftovers of the professions’.36 Social workers in the 1950s appear from the writing of R. J. Lawrence37 and others a particularly interesting case of an emergent profession . . . interesting in the way they were attempting through organisation, implicitly with a rising standard of admission, to secure status and self-definition in a calling whose boundaries were never as clear-cut as, say, other personal service professions like teaching and nursing. The Australian Association of Social Workers, formed in 1947, decided in 1950 to register as a trade union with the Commonwealth Arbitration Court and did so in 1955—defined as an organisation of persons ‘usually employed for hire or reward in or in connection with the industry of social work’. As Lawrence explains, the incentive was only partly for ordinary industrial protection of social workers’ interests—registration would also prevent the inclusion of social workers in other inappropriate unions—as had happened when almoners in New South Wales were threatened with absorption into the Homes and Hospitals Employees Union or when social workers employed in the Commonwealth public service found they had to join a union to obtain full salary rights—even though there were no such bodies with the appropriate interests and status. Registration, in other words, was another form of self-definition. The formulation of a code of ethics, in 1957, is presumably to be interpreted in the same way. Membership figures—300 in 1949 and 360 in 1958—speak less of exclusiveness than of the profession’s infancy, which is not unimportant in another connection: the limited interest of social workers, as a body, in social action. ‘Many and diverse factors at different times held their collective social action in check’, writes Lawrence, ‘the continued concentration on casework in their training and practice, . . . fear of political involvement, identification with employing

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agencies rather than with professional groups, fear of losing cooperation in social welfare and professional circles, lack of a tradition for social policy makers to use specialist opinion, especially when it came from women.’ If the profession was haltingly establishing itself in the 1950s, growth and engagement came later, especially during the period of the Labor government in the 1970s. June Huntington thought in 1974 that social work in Australia had by then gone through the first of what she called the two classical phases in the professional stakes—that of securing from society a mandate to practice in the solution of a particular task or problem area, as defined by the society—and was well into the second—that of becoming part of that group in society which defines the task or problem to be tackled. In so doing, she observed, it was accordingly challenging the hegemony of other occupation systems, most dramatically that of medicine. ‘This is implicit in many social workers’ attacks on the dominance of the medical model in what they see as essentially social problems—they argue that a whole area of social life is wrongly defined, so that inappropriateness in services and personnel results’.38 Wheeler’s words on administrative versus specialist experts notwithstanding, a not unimportant question remains about the role of experts in other, the functional, echelons of bureaucracies. It is a question indirectly suggested by June Huntington’s remarks about social workers’ urge to define the situations they have to deal with. How far had Australia in our period moved over the threshhold of what Alan Davies once called ‘A Knowledgeable Society’? ‘A society’, writes Davies, may be called knowledgeable when it has a preponderant investment of people and resources in knowledge industries; when its leading institutions rely heavily on the new “technology of knowledge” in their decision-making; when the “knowledge explosion” discommodes man by man most of its professional people; or when scientific knowledge can and does contribute substantially to the shaping of public policy.39 The literature, ranging from Young to Bell, sets up the model Davies is talking about, with its political tendency as the decline of ideology



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where commonsense laymen or obstinate ideologues (as Davies puts it) can neither contribute to, nor subvert, the muted shorthand of professional colloquy, and with its thrust towards technical efficiency in pursuing agreed goals. While the cogent argument of the radical critique is that the chief ‘agreed goal’ will inevitably be in these circumstances the maintenance of the existing system, proponents of gradual change (the Hugh Stretton of Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment is one) would agree with Davies’ contention that knowledge discovered, organised and communicated creates its own sense of direction, of intelligent and effective choice, a sense that evolving capacities and plans will move forward hand in hand. New findings about infant mortality, about juvenile delinquency, about this or that sort of housing or teaching are pressures even without pressure groups, and without reference to any ideology. They set up uneasiness, an urge to repair and improve.40 The notorious unconcern, even hostility, of Australian non-Labor governments for social research shows ideology—of the most negative kind, but ideology nevertheless—far from being at an end, but whatever one’s preconceptions it seems to me that historians have valid questions to ask, on the 1950s and later, about the role of professionally organised knowledge in foreshadowing change, or even undertaking—as Davies sees it—what is conventionally looked on as the work of the agitator. He would claim that weak and disadvantaged groups—the Aborigines, for example—have been sometimes helped by officials to organise and demand more of society . . . awareness of a problem, he says, may first come to the authorities and the victims may have to be told that it is there, and remediable. What is involved here is not grand policy-making at the level of conventional parliamentary politics, but rather the operations of those people whom Wilensky has called a new political type—the radical professional in flexible relation to administration: In many a corner of the bureaucratic machinery of modern society one finds the ‘programme professional’— the specialist in depth (expert, e. g., in social insurance,

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rehabilitation, public assistance, public finance, housing, race relations, labour disputes settlement), whose professional competence and commitment are beyond question, but whose commitment to particular programmes (e.g., health insurance) is just as strong. By virtue of his technical prowess he makes himself indispensable as a policy adviser. In his job moves—between government, private agencies, civic organisations, foundations, universities—he follows the programmes to which both his skills and his social philosophy are bound . . . End products of broad movements of social reform, these men combine professional standards of work with programmatic sense and constitute an important link between professional culture and civic culture, the man of knowledge and the man of power.41 Were men and women of this type evident and effective in Australian bureaucratic structures by the 1950s, and, if so, how does one discover them? The ‘programme professional’, operating broadly according to Wilensky’s formula, is certainly readily to be seen in one or two spectacular cases of people in senior positions—Cunningham Dax in the Victorian mental health authority is undoubtedly the outstanding example in the period.42 This example of professional leadership in redefining mental health and convincing government and public of a need for drastic change bears on one question in the working party’s document with which I do not find it easy to come to grips—the suggestion that ‘the emergence into the political agenda of “social problem” areas (changing policies on migrants, Aborigines, women, the redefinition of certain illnesses) might be linked to the development of an educated constituency’. Presumably it might, but one wonders how, in terms other than impressionism: and how to be balanced, furthermore, against the evident influence of experts both constructing new knowledge and at grips with the advances of understanding in their specialities elsewhere, so much of their professional knowledge being international. In these circumstances, ‘education of the constituency’ may have to be understood at least partially in terms of popularisation and heightening of awareness—processes into which the work both of sensitive individuals and of the media have somehow to be locked as well.



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It is on ambiguities of this sort that, in my view, we most need discussion at this stage: the professions, the bureaucracy et al. are after all palpable enough for conventional analysis; but in other realms, like culture, communication, and indeed the very definition of what is meant by ‘middle class’ we have to ask what ways there are of avoiding mishmashes of speculation and impressionism on the one hand or, on the other, resort to abstract theory tenuously censored by hard evidence. When we remember, to take one random and simplistic example, that the 1950s was the decade of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, of the launching of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, and of the untimely death of Rex Ingamells, we are confronted with the working party’s question no. 6: ‘can the various expressions of cultural nationalism . . . be seen as linked to the growth of an educated middle class; are the critics’ attempts to formulate and protect a “national heritage” a cultural expression of this emergent meritocracy?’ My personal reaction, as a quite old-fashioned historian, is to say ‘I dunno’, to ask what is possible and to pine for the impossible—like data which would allow us to judge the social composition of the audiences which in those days endlessly flocked to performances of The Doll. Not very working-class, presumably (though how do we really know?), but what of the balance between education and affluence across the occupational scale between professionals and sales workers? How do we cope with the related balance, whatever it was, between aspiration, education, and money? And we need, desperately, help from scholars skilled in judging another dimension, the methods and the power of the media in constructing taste. For alas, the simple historian rarely stumbles on fortuitous evidence about the apparent social composition of audiences like that seemingly offered in an experience of my own one evening early in 1976, when at vast cost my wife and I went to the Sydney Opera House to listen to Joan Sutherland singing Lakme. On that night, a massive police presence unexpectedly signified to us the coming of other, rather more elevated opera lovers than ourselves—and when Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General, and party entered the auditorium a few scattered, if vehement, hisses brought more than three quarters of the audience to their feet to turn towards the latest arrival, and to cheer and clap him.

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Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15

16

17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25

26 27

28

29

Helen Hughes and D. W. Rawson, ‘Collective Bargaining and the WhiteCollar Pay Structure’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 2, 1960, 78–82. S. Encel, Equality and Authority, F. W. Cheshire, 1970, 118. Ibid., 268ff. ; G. E. Caiden, Career Service, Melbourne University Press, 1965, 23, 27, 429–30. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033, Thames and Hudson, 1958. Encel, Equality and Authority, 79. Melbourne Herald, 1 Oct. 1956. S. M. Gilmour, Melbourne Age, 24 Sept. 1956. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Nov. 1956. Brisbane Courier Mail, 14 June 1957. Medical Journal of Australia, 10 March 1956, 411–12. Ian Cathie, The Crisis in Australian Education, Cheshire, 1967, 2. Quoted by John B. McKinlay, ‘On the Professional Regulation of Change’, in P. Halmos (ed.), Professionalisation and Social Change, University of Keele, 1973, 66. Erica Bates and Andrea Mant, ‘Introduction to the Sociology of Medicine’ (roneoed). Halmos, op. cit., 9. P. Boreham, A. Pemberton, P. Wilson (eds), The Professions in Australia, a Critical Appraisal, University of Queensland Press, 1976, esp. ch. 1, 15–41. A. Graycar, ‘Health and Politics’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 6, 2, July 1971, 110. Egon F. Kunz, The Intruders, Canberra, 1975, 127. Graycar, op. cit., 110. Kunz, op. cit., 34. The material in the next paragraph is also based on Kunz, 35–9. See e. g. McKinlay, op. cit., 61–84. Jean I. Martin, The Migrant Presence, Sydney, 1978, ch. 5, ‘Defining Migrant Health’. John Basten and Julian Disney, ‘Aspects of the Australian Legal Profession’, unpublished discussion paper for seminar on the professions, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, 1976. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 24. K. L. Milne, ‘Professional Status and Standing’, The Chartered Accountant in Australia, June 1952, 734. Ibid., 729. R. Adamson, ‘Accountants . . . Tradesmen or Professionals?’, The Australian Accountant, Sept. 1956, 371–3. G. E. Fitzgerald, ‘The Case for Registration of Accountants’, The Australian Accountant, June 1956, 251. Eric Storr, ‘The Criteria for a Profession’, Journal of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, Nov.–Dec. 1975, 20. See also ‘Semi- Sub- or Para?’, Australian Engineer, Oct. 1970, 33–7; L. E. Pyke, Indicators for the



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30

31 32

33 34

35

36 37

38

39

40 41

42

Profession,’ Journal of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, June 1973, 13–15. S. Encel, ‘Professional Occupations in a Changing World’, Architecture in Australia, Sept. 1965, 132. Ibid., 135. Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (Chair: H. C. Coombs), Report, A. G. P. S., 1976, 250. Australian Journal of Education, June 1962. F. H. Wheeler, ‘The Responsibilities of the Administrator in the Public Service’, Public Administration, 23, 4, 1964. Peter Gilmour and Russell Lansbury, Ticket to Nowhere: Training and Work in Australia, Penguin, 1978, 128. S. Encel, Equality and Authority, 415. R. J. Lawrence, Professional Social Work in Australia, Canberra, 1965, from which this paragraph is constructed. June Huntington, ‘Social Work and the Sociology of Occupations’, Australian Social Work, 24, 4, Dec. 1974, 10. A. F. Davies, ‘Politics in a Knowledgeable Society’, in his Essays in Politica1 Sociology, Cheshire,1972, 3. Ibid., 6. H. L. Wilensky, ‘The Professionalisation of Everyone?’ American Journal of Sociology, 1964, 158, quoted by Davies, Essays in Political Sociology, 15–16. See Eric Cunningham Dax, Asylum to Community: the development of the mental hygiene service in Victoria, Melbourne, 1961.

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6 Menzies the Man

In August 1958 Menzies sent the historian A. L. Rowse his thanks for a gift of the latter’s book, The Later Churchills. Reflecting amateurishly on the historian’s task and the different varieties of historiography, Menzies confessed that, ‘having been for half my life engaged in public affairs, some of which will form some part of history, I have long since come to the conclusion that Diogenes was right and that at all stages and under all circumstances we must look for a man’. He was characteristically vague about how this was to be done, dismissing conventional sources like Hansard and newspapers but remarking rather complacently that he thought people like himself, ‘who have had even a small contact with great men and great events, should if possible record some impressions of them’, since ‘it is the occasional sidelight on a man or an event, quite unscientifically recorded, which may some day help the historian to get his people into the round’.1 A trouble with ‘occasional sidelights’ is that they often tend to cancel each other out. This has to a degree been so in Menzies’ own case. Nor has understanding been helped by the extreme care with Published in Scott Prasser, J. R. Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: a Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Hale and Iremonger, 1995,17–32.


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which Menzies always insisted on closing from the public view some parts of his personal world: relaxation enjoyed in unusual clubs to which he belonged and, most especially, his family life. How, and whether, matters of these kinds bore on and interacted with his political role has still largely to be explored. Meantime the passions which some of his political actions aroused in the period of his greatest power live on, often in exaggerated, almost mythical form. Janet McCalman, I think, is close to being correct when she writes of the conventional attitudes: Menzies remains the most admired Australian of his generation among middle-class Australians aged sixty or over; equally he is perhaps the most vilified by those younger and better educated. A biographer’s problem is voice and credibility. The audience is too easily partisan—either appalled at any further damage to his reputation, or constitutionally incapable of finding any good in the man … Menzies is remembered as less liberal and democratic than he really was.2 I take it that a prime object of this volume is implicitly to test generalisations like this, to look again at Menzies’ ‘era’ of power, 1949 to 1966, and to ask in what ways the judgments we have had of it from people as far separated as, say, Cameron Hazlehurst, Sir John Bunting, Donald Horne and Paul Keating’s speechwriter, approximate to the ‘truth’, whatever that is. What a limb to go out on! My task, to write about Menzies the man, is hampered by a number of difficulties additional to those already mentioned. For example, Menzies kept no diaries, beyond three which were confined to recording visits to England in 1935, 1941 and 1948. All predated his second prime ministership, by which time Menzies had become quite down-putting about diaries. He told Governor-General de L’Isle that he did not trust people who kept diaries3 and he once angrily ordered Canberra’s most notorious diarist, R. G. Casey, who was given to circulating among friends and colleagues many of his versions of daily events, to desist (‘if we all proceeded to send documents to each other saying what we said in some particular cabinet discussion, then I am afraid all team work would disappear’).4 And in 1961

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he told a political scientist to whom he granted an interview that he ‘violently disapproved’ of prime ministers keeping diaries. To do so effectively, he averred, would take an hour or two every day, and no prime minister worth his salt had that much time to spare. Besides, the only diaries that I’ve read in modern times . . . are full of self-justification. The man doesn’t really write down what he thought—he writes down what he thought hours after he had said something, perhaps quite differently, you see, but he’s rationalising it. He’s so to speak beginning to interpret himself to history.5 Returning to his own diaries in the later 1960s to help in the writing of his memoirs Menzies professed to be appalled at what he found, particularly in his 1941 appraisals of men and events during his brief time in the British War Cabinet. He concluded that the main usefulness of a diary was as a reminder of past error: I was, of course, many years younger than I am now, and consequently more prone to intolerance and hasty judgements. ‘My salad days, when I was green in judgement’. My executors will do me a good service if they use the incinerator freely.6 From the vantage point of 1967, after retirement from his long second prime ministership, the self of a quarter of a century before may well have appeared to Menzies as an almost callow stripling. Hindsight was inescapable too: as Menzies himself and many others came to explain, some curbing of the brashness of that young man, the development in public of a seemingly more human personality, had been essential to his recovery from the disastrous ending of his first prime ministership. And it is critical to remember that the ‘stripling’ of 1941 was a man who had been in Parliament for twelve years, most of them as a minister, and had won the prime ministership at the age of forty-four. He was an experienced parliamentarian and administrator, many of whose permanent social and political views were by now formed. Moreover, for a highly gifted barrister Menzies had what seems to me a curious, almost obtuse attitude to diaries as historical

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sources, thinking of them primarily as fallible warrants for information on the doings and sayings of their subjects rather than as documents between whose lines subtleties about values and attitudes may often be read. No-one who has enjoyed reading the diaries Menzies wrote in his ‘salad days’ can other than regret that in the long period of power that began for him in 1949 he had neither time nor inclination to keep a private record of any daily happenings. Detailed analysis of these diaries is beyond our present scope, though we have to note how vividly they reflect the importance to Menzies as a test of self-worth, even identity, of his first encounter with England. A provincial braving the metropolis, he managed to prove himself in 1935 as lawyer, government negotiator and public speaker, recording his experiences and triumphs with almost schoolboy gusto. In 1936 and 1938 he made further trips to England, on government business, as attorney-general, and these are documented in long diary-type letters to his family. They show Menzies quickly developing a relaxed circle of friends among British businessmen, senior civil servants, professional men, politicians and minor aristocracy. The experience confirmed the assumption natural to his generation and class, that to be Australian was to be British. The legend that this automatically meant obsequiousness is negated by Menzies’ robust disgust in 1936 and 1938 at the rapacity of English businessmen, not to speak of his bitter war-time criticism of Churchill. In opposition after 1941, Menzies could not afford to go to England until 1948. Once there he again kept a diary, but this one records no anxiety about his reception. On the contrary, it is full of the pleasure of reestablishing relations with old friends. To find in 1948 that time had not diminished the ease with which he was able to slip into the world of affairs in England proved a reassuring preparation for the many and frequently difficult visits which Menzies would have, as prime minister, to make after 1950. It was, among other things, hardly surprising that in due course he should achieve a universally accepted role as the Grand Old Man of the Commonwealth. And there can be no doubt that the English experience played an important part in the transition at home from the self-doubt of 1941 and the middle years of that decade to the easy self-confidence of the 1950s.

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The conventional wisdom is that Menzies was a somewhat different political animal in his two periods of office. I like Bruce Miller’s semi-facetious expression of the spirit of this difference: Even if he was not deeply learned, he sounded as if he knew everything. He was a father-figure (which helps to explain why he was so much less successful with public opinion when he was young; he felt fatherly before his time, as it were) and the older he became, the more his being a fatherfigure seemed right and proper.7 Seeming differences in the two periods require exploration, but it is also evident that we are dealing with a man who, as Miller implies, changed little in essential ways. Indications are numerous. At one level are the descriptions of him, in both periods, as a hearty outgoing personality, ‘well pleased with himself in the manner of the ordinary male animal’.8 At another is the characteristic noted in 1941 by Hugh Dalton, a Labour party minister in Churchill’s coalition government. Dalton entertained Menzies at a dinner to meet important men in his entourage; a group Menzies jocularly called Dalton’s ‘Brains Trust’. There was much lively talk about politics. Dalton recorded in his diary that: My attendant sprites [Gladwyn Jebb and Hugh Gaitskell] … thought that Menzies winced slightly and did not rejoin in like language when I used certain strong words [a marginal note explains that the words were ‘bloody, bastard, bugger’]. ‘It may have sounded rather too much as though you were showing that you knew the patois’.9 Menzies’ wince simply registered genuine distaste. It was a facet of something much larger: the essentially moral view of life cultivated by Menzies’ strict Protestant upbringing, his schooling, and the stern Melbourne middle-class environment in which he trained in and practised the law. Alertness to such constants, especially as reported by those who knew him well, has important things to tell us about the man. Close observers like Hasluck, Spender, Watt and Killen, for example,

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detected in Menzies what would have surprised many outsiders: a basic shyness, which remained steady and had a variety of effects. Aggressive self-assertiveness was the most obvious in his younger days, becoming entangled with his remarkable intellectual and forensic gifts to produce impatience and difficulty, both as lawyer and politician, in suffering annoyances offered by people who were his inferiors. (Though the situation was never clear-cut: principally as a result of his wife’s advice Menzies came in time to appreciate that certain conventions which he had learned in the legal profession—the use of surnames when addressing colleagues, intellectual cleverness and lack of verbal inhibition in banter—could be highly offensive in the political world. ) On the other hand, Hasluck has remarked upon a special kind of self-protectiveness, which paradoxically became one of Menzies’ strengths. ‘He had’, wrote Hasluck, ‘a fence around what he regarded as his private property, and he opened the gate to very few people’.10 Others who worked closely with Menzies agree. Secretaries, official drivers, civil servants, politicians and ministers admitted to this circle (they included a young Labor-inspired public servant transferred in 1950, to his initial chagrin, from the Department of Post-War Reconstruction to the Prime Minister’s Department and who uses the same ‘fence’ metaphor as Hasluck—‘within six weeks I loved the bastard!’) found him the kindest and most spontaneous of men. As Sir Walter Crocker correctly remarks, to have so effectively captured the affection and respect of those obliged to serve him most closely is a reflection of superior human qualities in the man.11 Menzies’ approach to the life of politics was primarily moral, in the sense that he depicted good government as honest administration and policy formation in what was judged to be the interest of the community as a whole. This essentially Burkean vision of the political process stemmed from his conviction of the perfection of the British form of government, which he saw as hallowed both by its evolution over centuries through the inductive process and its mystic association, as propounded by his hero Stanley Baldwin, with the very countryside of England.12 That, over the years, Menzies so obviously enjoyed power and could on occasion show himself a pragmatic and even ruthless politician does not alter the fact that he genuinely believed the theory that men with the right talent had a

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duty impartially to serve the community as legislators and administrators. This was a theory arising originally from the disillusion he and other young men of his class felt in the 1920s about the seedy quality of Victorian politics, in which they saw the Country and the Labor parties as predatory pressure groups whose principal aim was to get for their clients the biggest possible cut of the State’s largesse. They were convinced that the alternative party, the Nationalists, could, if revitalised with dedicated young legislators, clean up and carry out the proper work of government. Menzies himself first contested a seat in the Victorian Legislative Council because he genuinely felt that, as a successful lawyer and citizen, he ought now to do ‘a little bit of public work’. That belief was, as he bitterly told Keith Murdoch in 1947, to see him through ‘many years of thankless public work’, keeping at bay the temptation to return to a profession ‘in which, had I remained at it, I should have been relatively well-off and immune from malice and abuse’.13 This was in part rationalisation: even in the worst of times Menzies enjoyed the cut and thrust, the ceremony and the power, which political life involved. But, to the end, the sense of duty, of the virtue of devoting his considerable talents to the work of government and administration, remained strong in him. Corollaries of this approach to government and constitutionalism included respect for the gravitas, etiquette and authority of parliament, a clear conception of how the public service must operate, and a special concern for excellence in public speaking. The core of Menzies’ approach in these and related matters was what Hasluck has called ‘a sense of professional rectitude’: Menzies had a precise understanding of the powers and functions of the various components of government and … had clear views on the correct relationship between them. He himself was carefully correct about the relationship between himself as prime minister and the governor general, the Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition . . . and, in public, was formal in that correctness. With the public service he was equally correct, taking the Westminster view (as opposing leaders—with the exception of Evatt—also did in

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that era) that officers’ professionalism made it possible for them to work equally well with successive governments. (As it happened this was to be one of the great strengths of Menzies’ second prime ministership when, in the teeth of opposition from his more conservative colleagues, he insisted on retaining the core of experts recruited by the Chifley government. In particular, he saw to the completion of Labor plans already in hand to wind up the Department of Post-War Reconstruction and form from it the nucleus of an expanded and refurbished Prime Minister’s Department.) Writing of Menzies’ relationship with public servants Hasluck has said: I think his tendency to keep them at a distance was due to his respect for their distinctive role in government. To make any public servant appear to be a ‘Menzies man’ would mean that officer would not be able to continue to serve acceptably a Labour government. I know that he was contemptuous in private of some of those public servants who created with the press an image of themselves as ‘the power behind the throne’.14 Menzies considered good speaking essential to the health of parliamentary proceedings, which he thought could too easily be reduced by the exigencies of party discipline to a predictable charade. Though a tough party fighter, Menzies was also enough of a constitutionalist to insist (and this well before parliamentary broadcasts began in 1946) that what happened in parliament was more than a pantomime. So he critically monitored the performance of his opponents and tried to educate his followers. In March 1944, for example, when Leader of the Opposition, he wrote to his son (then in the AIF) of the illness of Labor’s Prime Minister Curtin, and how in his absence ‘the government has been forced to rely upon Forde, Evatt and Calwell’. None of them impressed: Forde’s speeches represent nothing so much as the crackling of thorns under a pot . . . Evatt is an execrable debater who loses his temper and is almost a genius for the disorderly presentation of a case. Calwell is under the impression that

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vulgar personal abuse couched in the coarsest and most extravagant language is a sign of virility.15 Menzies briefly thought that his own following was doing better, but soon bemoaned ‘a sad falling-off of manners, much to my regret, because I feel that whatever comes or goes people of my party ought to set a good example in courtesy and dignity of debate’. Besides, The longer I go on in parliament the more struck I am by the scarcity of true debaters. There are plenty of people

who can talk, particularly when some previous speaker has in effect told them what to say. There are some who can prepare a set speech and plough through it with magnificent indifference as to what has gone before. But the man who can seize hold of the point made by his opponents, destroy or brush it aside, and proceed to make a lively counter-attack with relevance and reasonable brevity and with sufficient personality to hold the interest of the House, is indeed a rare bird.16 Menzies was in reality talking here about the secret of his own debating mastery, in which analytic skills honed in practice of the law combined with an uncanny capacity for catching swiftly and accurately at the essence of the matter in hand and expressing his conclusions in clear and simple English. Though the quiddity of these gifts might be unteachable, other things could be conveyed, like the dangers of over-elaboration, the uses of intonation, the importance of tailoring utterances to a targetted audience’s capacity to understand and absorb. Menzies’ talks with preselected candidates at occasional training conferences like those held at Bundanoon in 1946 dwelt on these matters, and after the Liberals came to power in 1949 he took a kind of fatherly interest in followers prepared to take advice from him. Gordon Freeth, for example, who served as a minister in the later Menzies governments, has said that he learned most of what he knew about ‘the art of good speech-making’ from the prime minister. Freeth has a beguiling memory of how four or five ministers would often sit down with Menzies for a nightcap in the cabinet anteroom, listening through a loudspeaker to the debate

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still progressing in the House. Menzies’ custom was to provide a running commentary on what was going on. Freeth particularly remembered, as typical, a remark about Snedden: ‘You’d think after his years in parliament he would have found out the value of using an occasional pause!’17 Menzies’ leadership of the Liberal party was not clinched until 1947, when he dramatically portrayed resistance to Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the private banks as the opening of a long fight against socialism. Success in that fight would require unswerving loyalty to a leader, he told his party. Since he felt he did not have that, he resigned and pledged himself to support any other person the party chose. In fact, there was no real challenger, the party unanimously re-elected him, and he went on to lead with new confidence the campaigns against bank nationalisation, the powers referendum of 1948 and ultimately the fight that brought electoral victory in 1949. This success story should not be allowed to hide the fact that the path to 1947 had had some rocky patches. The old saying that ‘the Liberals can never win with Menzies’ rumbled on in a section of the party (particularly in New South Wales) and was also sedulously cultivated by Labor propagandists. On the other hand, before the election of 1946—the first which the new Liberal party faced— Menzies developed a strangely unrealistic conviction that there was a good chance of winning. He was buoyed up by the excitement of events surrounding the Liberal party’s formation, surprised at the good reception he received in areas (especially around Sydney) where he had hitherto been unpopular, and cheered by what he saw of Liberal candidates who would contest the election. At the same time he lamentably underestimated the electorate’s appreciation of the Labor government’s wartime achievements and the appeal of its postwar planning. When the election caused only minor dents in Labor’s ascendancy, Menzies collapsed into uncharacteristic despair, and came very close to leaving political life altogether. In a bleak conversation over dinner in their club he told his legal mentor and friend, Owen Dixon, that he was returning to the Bar. He knew he was ‘the subject of dislike and hostility throughout the community’ and that the Liberal party ‘could not win under his leadership’. Parliament was ‘a thing of the past as a force or live institution’, and the Liberal party might well

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‘become an irrelevancy’. The real division of the future in Australian politics looked like being between Communism and traditional Labor.18 How Menzies survived this crisis has yet to be explored, though when it came to the crunch—as we have seen—no alternative leaders with gifts comparable to his offered, and party members had also begun to enjoy that new self-restraint of arrogance and cleverness that came to be the important characteristic of his second period of power. Indeed, before the disappointing election of 1946 there had been a happening which, while raising false hopes for the immediate future, suggested a longer-term relationship of great importance. In the run-up to the poll the party organisation had staged two two-day conferences at Bundanoon, to instruct Liberal candidates preselected for New South Wales seats in policy and tactics. Menzies led all discussions and the transcript of the proceedings (it was kept in shorthand by Menzies’ press secretary, Meeking) wonderfully documents the easy relationship of confidence he was setting up in the Liberal party, partly through his personal warmth, but also through his patent experience as a long-term professional politician. What he provided in response to a barrage of questions were explanations of what the Liberal party’s policies implied, what constitutional limits there were to the promises that might be made to voters, and a range of matters of that kind; but, above all, simple pragmatic advice on such questions as how, in the real world, one wooed voters. At the end Menzies spoke enthusiastically of all he had himself gained from the conference ‘in the clearing of my mind’, and declared that he was leaving ‘feeling extremely confident of the prospects of this state’. The party president, Ritchie, told the conference that they had received the answer to ‘What about Menzies?’ and declared that Labor’s ‘whispering campaign’ must be defeated: ‘Let us go out and sell him!’19 The spirit of the Bundanoon conferences seems to have lived on, perhaps as one of the elements that quietly helped Menzies to overcome the urge to leave politics in 1946, and certainly as an important factor in explaining his strength and elan after the 1949 election. That election, as Menzies happily told S. M. Bruce, resulted in Liberal backbenches crowded with young, keen members’,20 a high proportion of them (70 per cent) returned servicemen. Years later one of these ‘forty-niners’, Gordon Freeth (ex-RAAF pilot, 1942–5),

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remembered the Menzies of his early days in parliament as ‘very friendly and kind’, a leader who knew his backbenchers and their problems well, and who would sometimes ‘just drop in at Parliament House for an evening meal’ with party members instead of going back to the Lodge.21 It is evident that Menzies continued to take care to curb his tongue (at least to his victims’ faces), but whether he was more than nominally gregarious (and whether that in fact mattered) is doubtful. H. B. Gullett, for a time Liberal whip, declares that Menzies ‘did not want to be on terms of hobnobbing’22 and, if the memories of Jim Killen and Malcolm Fraser are to be trusted, the occasions on which, by the mid-1950s, Menzies appeared in the members’ bar to socialise with his supporters were infrequent.23 Ordinary Liberal members could expect in turn to be entertained at the Lodge. In Fraser’s remembrance the principal obligation of such a member at dinner there was to attend to the interesting but dominating talk of the prime minister himself. Menzies was punctilious in his treatment both of party and cabinet meetings, making a point of always arriving precisely on time and—witnesses are unanimous on this—making sure that anyone who had something important to say had every chance to say it. He himself was a careful listener to both politicians and senior public servants. Hasluck vehemently denies the common allegation that Menzies was averse to taking advice from public servants: My experience was that his impatience was with ‘advisers’ of the kind that tried to tell him what to say instead of letting him, as an experienced advocate, master his own brief after considering all the information and opinion that could he supplied to him. He was intolerant towards any officer who cast himself in the role of ‘adviser’ but he certainly was a good listener to anyone who had relevant material to offer and he would read closely the written departmental submissions.24 Senior civil servants who have written accounts of their experience of working with Menzies confirm this view and add tributes to the speed and efficiency with which he dealt with the routine of administration. Sir Alan Watt, for example, remembered how Menzies,

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when he took on the responsibility of External Affairs, never fussed over files. He asked the public servant who was his adviser what the problem was, what the background was and what action seemed appropriate. Throughout he listened carefully, then quickly ordered that a letter or telegram should be drafted for his endorsement along certain lines.25 Alan Renouf, who tells much the same story, observes how corresponding characteristics go far to explain how ‘he knew how to manage and lead a team, one of the rarest qualities in Australian prime ministers’: ‘There was never any doubt about who was the boss, but there was never any doubt either that everyone else could have his “say” and that simply to say “you’re so right, Prime Minister” would not score any points.’26 In both cabinet and party meetings Menzies’ great strength was his capacity clearly to sum up and to present the issues that had to be decided. This was a skill displayed over the years in dozens of different contexts. Hasluck has observed that Menzies seemed to dominate party and cabinet meetings simply because he was the best man there: ‘his authority came primarily from the recognition of his bigness . . . reinforced by the respect he always gave to cabinet responsibility’.27And his easy political nous was always on display: ‘he had a longer political experience than most of us and . . . his experience had been absorbed into his store of knowledge rather than being just a stack of memories to justify likes, dislikes or prejudices, as was sometimes the case for a man like John McEwen’.28 Jim Killen catches well the almost jocular spirit of the party room after the election of 1955, when Menzies was already a kind of icon, and a rather complacent one at that. Killen writes of a party room buzzing with laughter and chatter, to which the whip, Hubert Opperman, announced the imminent arrival of the prime minister: The level of noise lowered, the door opened, and in came the great man. Clapping and cheering broke out and reached a crescendo as the large Menzies frame moved like a pageant towards his seat at a table at the top of the room. Menzies looked around and smiled at old and long-known colleagues. He raised his right arm, the palm opened as though he was giving his own distinctive blessing upon all

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of us, when all he was doing was asking for silence. He got it. He began speaking, slowly and deliberately. At the end, ‘Well’, said Menzies, ‘I suppose we must have a leader. Who is there who is available?’ As he looked around the room the laughter increased. ‘What, no takers? Well, it looks as though, poor mutt that I am, I’ll have to be your leader of sorts’. The applause was deafening.29 There were, it goes without saying, various downsides. Menzies could still be, as the British High Commissioner once put it in 1953, ‘alarmingly frank’ about his colleagues. In 1978 Lord Garner of the Dominions Office remembered how Menzies had over the years made a point of getting to know closely the galaxy of senior officials in the Office and ‘never failed to cross the road from 10 Downing Street after the end of every [Prime Ministers’] conference and celebrate with appropriate cordials’ in the rooms of Liesching, the Permanent Under-Secretary. ‘On these occasions he could be devastatingly frank. He was always down-to-earth and showed both humour and a sense of mischief . . . he had no inhibitions of any kind and, whatever his cares may have been, always seemed to be relaxed and entirely at ease’.30 That such prime ministerial pizzazz had limits in Australia was a natural cause of chagrin to some local journalists. As one of them wrote of Menzies in 1963: one occasionally hears stories about him; fascinating glimpses of a man of wide experience with an incomparable zest for living. He is alleged to be a splendid mime, at dinner table stories about, say, the Prime Ministers’ Conference in London can suddenly become Harold Macmillan, accent, flopping hand, moustaches and all, and Mr Nehru, eyes narrowed and mouth tight drawn.31 It is also clear that Menzies increasingly enjoyed relaxing with congenial staff members and ministers whom he entertained with legal and other reminiscences, usually over drinks in the cabinet

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anteroom. Some who took part reported the development in him of a certain garrulousness and repetitiveness. Primmer critics noted this as a weakness but saw it as a form of necessary relaxation from the relentless pressure of office—Crocker, for instance, has remarked on how ‘telling anecdotes became more and more a means, as that behaviour or reflex did with Abraham Lincoln, to unwind tension’.32 In 1956 Brendan Bracken, in a typically larrikinish letter to W. S. Robinson, lampooned the Menzies then attending the Prime Ministers’ Conference in London: Almost all the happenings of previous conferences were repeated. Bob’s jokes, hallowed by antiquity, received the same delighted applause, mainly because the Asiatics didn’t understand them, Huggins is stone deaf, Strijdom doesn’t understand ‘Ostrylian’ and St. Laurent is wholly preoccupied by political troubles in his own country.33 On the other hand many thought of Menzies as ‘a wise old owl’,34 and found the relaxed talks in the cabinet anteroom ‘absolutely fascinating—a unique blend of reminiscences and political wisdom [which] taught all of us a great deal’.35 As masterful a man as Sir William Slim, the Governor-General whose period of office was not free of tensions with an equally masterful prime minister, could write as he left Australia: I shall never forget the good fortune I had in having only one prime minister during my term—and such a prime minister. I learnt much from your wisdom, strength and tolerance during those talks, which I enjoyed more than anything else in Australia, and which I shall now miss beyond words.36 Menzies’ papers contain many letters of this kind, and evidence is not wanting that a number of colleagues (E. J. Harrison and Hubert Opperman are prime examples) became lifelong devotees. Such attachments are not reconcilable with the furphy that Menzies never had close friends, a furphy which in any case takes no account of relationships as various and intense at times as those with Lionel Lindsay, Staniforth Ricketson and Gordon Rolph.

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In conclusion, I would like especially to draw attention to some words written by an often severe critic of Menzies, whom we have already met: Sir Walter Crocker. In his book, Travelling Back, Crocker takes Menzies to task for an alleged failure to exercise all his gifts fully. He concludes, however: But no questioning about Menzies, inevitable questioning as he would have been the first to understand in the case of a man with so high a standing in our history, can alter the fact that he towered above his colleagues in endowment, especially in endowment for all the arts of party politics, and not merely the verbalisms and the make-believe. And if he made some mistakes there was never a hint of dishonesty or impropriety or gross inefficiency while he himself was a sane and decent as well as a highly gifted man . . . For me the best of Menzies was in his personal life. He was a devoted husband and father, and to the world at large he was more often kind than not . . . He could have made a fortune at the Bar but he had no lust for money. Such was his robustness that he never lived on his nerves: not for him the pills. The last time I saw him was when he was in the geriatric hospital after his stroke, inhabiting a small bare room and giving time to painful exercises to overcome paralysis and to quiet reading and reflection. I noticed a copy of Boswell’s Johnson at the top of the small heap of books—he praised it highly—and what looked like a Bible. The Scotch fibre was there all right.37 Manning Clark, in one of his celebrated judgments, stigmatised Menzies as a ‘hollow man’. His evidence was a portrait by the artist William Dobell, whose actual contact with Menzies was confined to several brief, crosslegged sketchings, and who is not known to have done any documentary, or other, research to test the views he is supposed to have built into the painting. Clark looked ‘greedily’ at the face of Menzies as Dobell depicted it and ‘suddenly realised’ that ‘what Dobell wanted people to see was that there was nothing behind the facade or mask Menzies presented to the world: that Menzies, as a representative leader of our public men, had become a hollow

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man’.38 ‘What Dobell wanted people to see’ is hardly a warrant for the empirical correctness of what is being claimed and in fact tells us more about Clark than Menzies, or even Dobell. Nor is it clear what being a ‘hollow man’ means. ‘Lack of an inner life’ is often touted as the desideratum such a victim suffers, but again clear definition is usually absent. In a study less poetic in mode than Clark’s, Judith Brett recently concluded sensibly that, with Menzies, ‘the public man is the real man and that the task is to read his life and his character where we find it—in the shape of the public life.’ This seems to me to be absolutely correct. Whatever else may be said about the arguments of detractors anxious to condemn Menzies of opportunism or worse at various points, dedication to public service was an impulse that always drove him on. It could be that what made this possible is best suggested in other simple words of Sir Walter Crocker, comparing Menzies with Evatt: ‘Sir Robert Menzies was somewhat less than perfect, but there was no . . . immaturity in his face, just as in his inner life there was a quiet centre of sanity and happiness’.39

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15

Menzies to Rowse, 25 August 1958, National Library of Australia (NLA), MS 4936/2/82/389. J. McCalman, ‘Review of A. W. Martin Robert Menzies: A Life, vol. 1’, Journal of Australian Studies 39, December 1993, 79. Personal interview, Tonbridge, 18 February 1987. Menzies to Casey, 15 October 1956, NLA, MS 4936/1/20/172. Menzies, discussion with T. W. L. MacDermot, 21 July 1961, NLA, MS 4936/1/21/175. R. G. Menzies, Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, Cassell, 1967, 44–5. J. D. B. Miller, ‘Thinking about Menzies’, in Scott Prasser et al. (eds), The Menzies Era, Hale and Iremonger, 1995, 55. A. L. Rowse, Memories and Glimpses, Methuen, 1986, 51. B. Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, Cape, 1986, 27 Feb. 1941. Personal letter, 13 January 1988. Personal interview, Adelaide, 5 December 1989. A. W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, vol. 1 1894–1943, Melbourne University Press, 1993, 162–3. Menzies to Murdoch, 5, 16 September 1947, NLA, MS 4936/1/20/172. Personal letter, 13 January 1988. Menzies to Ken Menzies, 6 December 1944, Menzies Family Papers.

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16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid. NLA Oral History Collection, TRC 400–89. Diary of Sir Owen Dixon, 28 January 1947 (by courtesy of Mr James Merralls). Report on the Bundanoon convention, August 1946, NLA, MS 4936/14/418/63. Menzies to Bruce, 27 February 1950, NLA, MS 4936/1/5/38. NLA Oral History Collection, TRC 400–89. Ibid. , TRC 121/I. D. J. Killen, Inside Australian Politics, Methuen Haynes, 1985, 19; personal interview with Fraser, 6 September 1994. Personal letter, 13 January 1988. A. Watt, Australian Diplomat, Angus & Robertson, 1972, 169. A. Renouf, The Champagne Trail: Experiences of a Diplomat, Sun Books, 1980, 60. Paul Hasluck, Sir Robert Menzies, Melbourne University Press, 1980, 15. Personal letter, 7 October 1988. D. J. Killen, Inside Australian Politics, Methuen Haynes, 1985, 7. Institute of Commonwealth Studies Conference, 14 June 1978, ‘Sir Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister and Commonwealth Statesman’, typescript, 9. ‘Sir Robert Menzies’, Bulletin, 30 November 1963, 13. Personal letter, 1I July 1994. There are in Menzies’ correspondence a number of exhortations like that of Sir Sydney Rowell who hoped in 1954 ‘that you don’t flog yourself too hard in the merciless business of public administration.’ Rowell to Menzies, 9 December 1954, NLA, MS 4936/1/27/220. Bracken to Robinson, 6 July 1956, Melbourne University Archives. Burnham to Menzies, May 1955, NLA, MS 4936/2/64/241. NLA Oral History Collection, TRC 400–89. Slim to Menzies, 5 February 1960, NLA, MS 4936/1/28/230. W. Crocker, Travelling Back, Macmillan, 1981, 187. J. Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Pan Macmillan, 1992, 195–6. W. Crocker, ‘The Riddle of Herbert Evatt’, Overland, 94/95, May 1984, 73.

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7 Menzies and Appeasement: Understanding Provenance in Reading Historical Documents

In September 1939 two letters passed between R. G. Menzies and S. M. Bruce. These letters, thanks primarily to deceptive selection, were the subject of an assault, in April 2001, on Menzies as ‘appeaser’ in World War II. The incident, it will be recalled, provoked yet another of a series of ridiculous and ignorant attacks on Menzies by Paul Keating. In commenting on this correspondence, which is reproduced below, I have decided also to make some remarks to clarify my own position as biographer of Menzies, the which I have until now considered to be nobody’s business but my own. This matter was originally raised when a section of the press reported that Dr John Edwards, who had written an account of Keating’s earlier life and of later events inside his kitchen Cabinet, had ‘discovered’ correspondence which appeared to suggest that, even after the outbreak of war, Menzies is to be thought of as an ‘appeaser’. This was ‘revealed’ in the Sydney Morning Herald on Paper drafted in April–May 2001 but Allan Martin did not submit for publication before his last illness. Correspondence between R. G. Menzies and S. M. Bruce published with permission of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.


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19 April under the inaccurate headline ‘Trust Hitler and don’t give a damn about Poland: Menzies’—‘inaccurate’, because, as the simplest check with the letter shows, Menzies did not use these words. (The Herald did not print a letter which I faxed to it to point this out: so much for censorship by the press!) And by what can only be described as the most extraordinary coincidence, the Financial Review carried on the same day a long article headed, even more misleadingly: ‘Revealed: how Menzies proposed to appease Hitler’. It is by one Andrew Clark, presumably anxious to shore up the hackneyed fantasy of Menzies as the passé defender of what has been called ‘the Old Dead Tree’. The article is replete with a portrait of Hitler and a picture of Mussolini walking with that legendary ‘appeaser’, Chamberlain. The relevance of these illustrations is unclear, other perhaps than to create a spurious dramatic atmosphere. But the text of the article at least contains some accurate quotation from the actual letter itself, especially that part of it that had already been published.1 However, Menzies’ explanation of the mood which occasioned its writing is not noted; nor are his remarks about the amazing unity of political opinion, both in Great Britain and here. In Australia, nobody doubts the justice of our action, though I am sure that the chief passion in anybody’s heart is one of bitterness at Hitler and his satellites for having so wantonly induced a war . . . The part of Menzies’ letter not hitherto published begins at the twelfth paragraph (‘I have now been in office for four and a half months . . . ’) and is a simple account, for an old friend, of the state of local politics, as Menzies saw it. One can understand that the editors of Documents in Australian Foreign Policy felt this a little too humdrum to be reproduced with the other important documents they were printing. For some reason, however, Clark found it an ‘astonishing . . . claim’ for Menzies to write that Curtin ‘has privately made it clear to me . . . that his own greatest ambition is to remain Leader of the Opposition for the duration of the war’. Why ‘astonishing’? It is perfectly consistent with the picture David Day gives, in his biography, of the Curtin of this period, although Day also lays little stress on the courtesy and good-fellowship between Curtin and Menzies at

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this time. Edwards solves Clark’s riddle by assuming that on this matter Menzies was simply lying about Curtin! No evidence warrants this assumption, nor is it possible to see what Menzies would gain by misrepresenting the issue in a private letter to a political friend. These are, however, relatively small matters: what I found really surprising was to read an article from David Day in the Sydney Morning Herald of 30 April: ‘Political partisans have missed Menzies’ point’. Given that Day has long cultivated, in season and out of season, a kind of cottage industry for the denigration of Menzies, it was at first glance rather cheering to find in this article a quite sharp slap on Keating’s wrist for questioning Menzies’ courage. But the follow-up was a disappointing reassertion of Menzies’ ‘continuing support for appeasement’. Indeed, that claim was an occasion for the altogether unacceptable insinuation that, in not mentioning the letter to Bruce, my motive as Menzies’ biographer had been ‘to keep it out of the public memory’. Earlier in the article I am reported as ‘springing to Menzies’ defence’, and I can only presume that Day classes me as one of the ‘political partisans’ who allegedly missed Menzies’ point. I am certainly not such a partisan, and for three reasons. First, before I even knew that an issue was about to be raised by Edwards and Clark, I was rung up by a Sydney Morning Herald reporter and asked did I know about the letter and, if so, why did I leave it out? My answer was ‘yes’, I knew about it, and I left it out because I did not believe it reflected anything other than temporary private musings. I referred to other parts, already published, of the letter which justified this; to the reporter’s credit some of these were quoted—which only made the paper’s headlines seem more ludicrous. And I could hardly be claimed in the circumstances to have been ‘springing’ to Menzies’ defence! What I was claiming, however (and this is my second point), was in effect my right as a biographer to judge what was relevant for my picture of the man. In this respect I must again underline a fact too often ignored by others: that mine was in no sense an ‘official’ biography. I was under no compulsion either to include everything I found or to gloss over warts if I thought I discovered any that needed remarking. My books were written principally out of an historian’s curiosity; to try to find out what sort of a man Menzies really was. In the process I think I scotched some widely accepted myths about him and his policies, though it would be easy to

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name a few of these which will undoubtedly linger on; the many antiMenzies partisans are certain to make sure they do not die. However, I hope that my sense of curiosity is informed, as far as is humanly possible, by the caveats of which that sensitive historian, Inga Clendinnen, recently wrote when considering Robert Manne’s essay on the ‘stolen generations’: Politically, I am on Manne’s side, but I don’t like adversarial history, and I don’t like adversarial politics either. (When did you last change your mind because you lost an argument?) There has always been an impulse among certain kinds of politicians to reduce complicated matters to slogans in a familiar expression of contempt for the intelligence of ordinary people. In intellectuals the characteristic flaw is moralism, which discourages both subtlety in analysis, and patience and generosity in judgment.2 And this is my third general point: that though there will inevitably be failures, we all have a responsibility to strive for patience and generosity in judgment. Among the more mundane considerations needed here are those of placing all documents in their correct timeframe, being wary of guesswork in appraising motivation, or at least taking into proper consideration, unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, an historical actor’s explanation of what he or she is up to. Care has also to be taken in defining the judgmental terms we use: in this case, for example, ‘appeasement’, which is an emotionally charged word whose significance—to mention only the most obvious point—is very different today from what it was in 1939. It has to be remembered, too, that our historical actors are people, often under great emotional pressure, who deserve from us a high degree of respect and understanding. *** As Dr Edwards himself has written in another connection, ‘one reason we have friends is to be unguarded and silly and vulnerable’3 and in his letter to Bruce of September 11, 1939, Menzies makes the same point: ‘Looking over this letter, I can see that it is a miserable narrative and perhaps misleading . . . But as somebody once said, “it

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is better to expound yourself to a statua or a brick wall than to suffer your thoughts to pass in smother”, and on this principle I have blown off a little steam to you, who are neither a statua nor a brick wall, but a great servant of the Australian people who have been through the mill and know intimately the kind of problem I am encountering’. This is in reality a sad letter, written just after the war has broken out, by a man hungry for information (it is clear from the context that at the time of writing he was still unaware of the outcome of Germany’s invasion of Poland, though he knew it had happened), and temporarily overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility that, as Prime Minister, he was carrying for the well-being of his people. In the weeks between his accession to the prime ministership in May and the outbreak of war in September 1939, Menzies frequently expressed the hope that peace would prevail in Europe but emphasised the unity of the British Commonwealth, and after Britain and France in March guaranteed assistance to Poland in the event of aggression did not waver in his support.4 When that aggression did occur Australia, through Menzies, declared war. Menzies made a radio broadcast summarising Hitler’s record of perfidy, took the declaration of war to Parliament, laid on the table of the House of Representatives a White Paper setting out the text of the documents exchanged between Britain and Germany in the ten days leading up to the declaration of war, and asked for, and received, general support as the government faced what he called ‘the awesome responsibilities now cast upon it’. These were hardly the actions of an ‘appeaser’. The letter to Bruce on 11 September can only reflect a moment of shock and self-questioning at what had happened. His real steadiness was in the broadcast he made to the nation on the evening of war, 25 August 1939: It may very well be that Germany still has some grievances which would be all the better for ventilation and unprejudiced discussion. But if, instead of entering into discussion, instead of going into friendly conference, instead of recognising that there are, after all, two sides to most questions, the attitude of Germany is to be ‘We will take whatever our military strength will permit us to take and we will not negotiate with our military inferiors’, there is obviously an end of all law and order among the nations, and



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the absorption of Poland would lead to attacks upon other smaller European countries, upon one ground or another, until a vast domination of force has been established.5 There were occasional lapses into near cynicism but to the coming of Curtin’s prime ministership two years later much else of a positive kind was to happen. Through it all Menzies maintained that Australia’s prime objective was to win the war: other matters, like what the precise shape of the postwar world would be, could come later. What mattered then, he hoped, would be that some settlement should take place to ensure that there should be no repetition of the crises of 1939 in Europe. An instructive example of the falsity of the notion that Menzies was a mindless appeaser came in October when the final downfall of Poland was clear. On the 6th Hitler told the Reichstag that the Poland of the Versailles Treaty would never rise again. He urged the United Kingdom and France, against whom he had no further territorial claims, to accept the new order in Central Europe and avoid further bloodshed. Menzies answered a request from Bruce for any Australian input to a reply to Hitler from the United Kingdom government with the words: We have no detailed comment to offer on Hitler’s speech. But in general we regard it as in no way altering the circumstances in which we are at war with Germany or as providing grounds for peace. Hitler’s proposals appear to us to carry no assurances whatever of any lasting change in either the aims or the methods hitherto pursued by the present German Government.6 Bruce remained High Commissioner in London, even after the Labor party came to power. It takes some stretch of the imagination to claim, as some do, that he and Menzies continued as ‘appeasers’ as the war proceeded. Most of their discussion was about ultimate war aims and, while Menzies clearly hoped for a wartime settlement which would mean that his children and his children’s children would never face such suffering as his generation had known, he always made it clear that the war had first to be won.

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Critics who place great weight on the recently ‘discovered’ letter to Bruce need to remember that it was another two years before Curtin came (perhaps reluctantly?) to power, and throughout that time the transition of Australia to a war footing and the conduct of the war was in Menzies’ hands. In some quarters his work in these matters has been denigrated, but never seriously studied. There is no doubt, however, that his trip to England in 1941 shows him as a very forceful prime minister, and his downfall, in 1941, was certainly not fore-ordained.7 It is thus as difficult to agree with Dr Edwards that because of his remarks to Bruce the demise of Menzies was fortunate for Australia, as it is to see Curtin’s initial wish to eschew prime ministerial ambitions as ‘cowardice’. The lecture is interesting, perhaps pathbreaking, in the main thrust of Dr Edwards’s argument that Curtin’s priorities happened to mark out, or coincide with, the direction of Labor’s future economic policy. Perhaps the business about Menzies being a failed and naive appeaser was only included as icing on the cake. If so, it hardly succeeds. Though no one could be more appreciative than I about the fine work Curtin would do for Australia, I doubt whether he himself would have been pleased to be elevated by shabby arguments about Menzies.8

Mr R. G. Menzies, Prime Minister, to Mr S. M. Bruce, High Commissioner in London, 11 September 1939 My dear Bruce The object of this letter is to put before you in a rambling and personal way something of what I have been thinking in the last few days about the War and its future. It seems almost a certainty—in fact it will no doubt have happened before this letter reaches you—that Poland is going down the drain quite completely, and that the effect of this upon Russia, Rumania and Hungary, to say nothing of the other Balkan and Middle Eastern countries, may be disastrous. Given a landslide among these people, both Italy and Japan may very well decide that the time has come to carve up Great and Greater Britain. I feel quite confident that Hitler has no desire for a firstclass war, and that until the Polish debacle is complete he will not be disposed to assume the offensive against either France or Great Britain.



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It seems to me that when he has finished with Poland he will say to Great Britain and France—“Well, it is all over now; I have beaten the Poles and you haven’t been able to do anything about it and you cannot do anything about it now; but I am a magnanimous fellow. I don’t propose to annexe Poland. I will simply re-take the Corridor and Danzig and, for the rest, I will be prepared to be a guarantor with yourselves of the integrity of Poland proper”. At that stage we will have a choice: We can either say ‘Yes’ or we can say ‘No’. If we say ‘No’ we must settle down to a war in which Germany’s defensive position is incredibly strong, in which, in the long run, millions of British and French lives will be lost, and in which the economic force which will be our ultimate weapon will tend to affect us almost as severely as it does Germany. How is this war to be sustained?—Not by the cry of ‘Protect Poland’ because, ex hypothesi, Poland will have been defeated; not by the cry of ‘Revenge Poland’, for nobody really cares a damn about Poland as such; not by the cry of ‘Down with the Nazi Government’ for it is really quite indefensible for us to be dictating to the German people what sort of government they shall have. The cry then must be, in effect, “law and order and an end of terrorism in Europe”. I don’t underestimate this cry, because I believe it is a true and a good one. But I have a horrible feeling that by the time we have sustained three years of carnage and ruin, law and order will tend to be at a discount in every combatant country, and our last state may be worse than our first. These are gloomy observations, and no doubt they all need qualification, but the point that is really clear in my mind is that some very quick thinking will have to be done when the German offer arrives, and I think that considerable diplomatic activity will need to be shown on the Italian and Balkan fronts if we are not to be completely outmanoeuvred. Frankly, I have not been impressed with British diplomacy of late. We looked just like a lot of fools over the Russian Pact with Germany. For British military experts to be conferring solemnly with the Russians in one room, while Papa Stalin and Von Papen double-crossed them in another, is enough to make everybody laugh at us. Again, I feel that if France had been spoken to in language they could understand, at the right time, Franco/Italian relations might have been better and the truculence of Hitler might have been diminished.

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As to Japan—I have had a growing feeling for some time that though the Far East is a major problem to us, it is a relatively minor one to Whitehall, and that the British Government is more engaged in hanging on in China, hoping for something to turn up, than in any clear process of thinking about the future. Even now I would not hesitate, if I were responsible for British foreign policy, to offer a joint mediation with America in the Sino/Japanese dispute, and to accompany it by a statement that it is recognised that extra territorial rights on the part of foreigners in China are admitted to be anomalous, and that those rights would be progressively abandoned over a period of, say, 10 years. So far as Italy is concerned—I would buy her allegiance by giving her a couple of places on the Suez Canal Board and doing something rational about Djibouti and Tunis. What on earth is the use of France being intransigent on these matters when 3 or 4 strokes of the pen might put both France and Great Britain on an almost intolerable defensive? What positive action could be taken in relation to Poland I admit I do not know. All I know is that I feel profoundly disturbed because Germany has always seemed to me to have an almost unanswerable case in relation to the Corridor. Woodrow Wilson invented this wretched Corridor and put it among his 14 points. Seeing that America in this way pushed this thorn into Europe’s side, what about suggesting to Roosevelt that he should now make reparation by calling a conference to extract it? If Germany conquers Poland and then puts up the proposition I have anticipated above, what is the possibility of having that proposition broadened out to provide for a re-settlement of the whole map of Europe with joint and several guarantees all round? I know that you know more about these matters than I do, but I know that you feel much the same as I do, and I know that there is probably no answer to it all—except just to go on fighting until the other country goes down into a state of starvation and riot in which the seeds of another war, in which my grandchildren will fight, are sown. But at the same time I see no sanity in it. Meanwhile, there is amazing unity of political opinion, both in Great Britain and here. In Australia, nobody doubts the justice of our action, though I am sure that the chief passion in anybody’s heart is



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one of bitterness at Hitler and his satellites for having so wantonly induced a war, but at the same time nobody has any illusions about it. Those who think about it all feel sick about it—and those who don’t want to feel sick, don’t think about it. I have now been in office for 4½ months. Page gave me an unexpectedly good start by making a martyr of me, though he did not think so at the time, and I certainly thought that his attack upon me would discredit me sufficiently to end me politically. My term of office has, of course, been extremely difficult, but we have worked like beavers, and I think I can say that today my Government has a better public than any government has had for the last four years. The Cabinet is united and loyal, though for obvious reasons my own work and responsibilities are incessant. In point of fact, I have had one day off in the whole 4 ½ months, and though I am reputed to be as strong as a horse, I know that this cannot go on indefinitely. Page has been angling recently for a coalition government or— as Rowley James inadvertently called it the other day—a “collision government”. But I made it clear to him that whatever happened I could not have him in the Cabinet, because I thought that mutual loyalty and respect were essential to good government, particularly at a time of crisis. He has now publicly stated that he will put his resignation into the hands of his Party—whether with a view to having it accepted or not, I do not yet know. If McEwen becomes his successor I might be able to do business with him though there are really no more than two or three of the Country Party who are at all fit for Cabinet responsibilities. But if Archie Cameron wins—as he well may—it will be more difficult. Cameron, as you probably know, is not without brains and drive, but he is completely irresponsible, intensely vain, and much given to intrigue, and I would feel ill-disposed to pay much of a price for having him associated with me. In point of fact, Curtin has privately made it clear to me that his people will not put me out to put the Country Party in, and that his own greatest ambition is to remain Leader of the Opposition for the duration of the war. Keith Murdoch’s newspapers have been a little difficult. They

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are already demanding an Expeditionary Force—completely overlooking the fact that while there is uncertainty about Japan’s position (and there always will be unless she declares war on our side)— public opinion would never consent to any substantial loss of trained manpower in Australia, though I think I can at the right time secure approval for relieving the British garrison at Singapore with Australian troops, and possibly performing a similar service in India or Egypt. I may also encounter trouble with the primary industries over the sale of our surplus production to Great Britain. The other day in the House, on the Foreign Affairs debate, Page made what I thought was a scandalous suggestion—that all our contracts with Great Britain should be so framed as to permit us to follow upward changes of price—a suggestion of profiteering on the necessities of Great Britain and France which I thought more worthy of a benevolent neutral than a participating British country. I have publicly stated that while I think it proper that any price arranged should be related to the Australian cost of production, there can be no question of taking advantage of British scarcity. When I remember that in the last war the Country Party was born in Victoria out of the grievance of wheat farmers that they had been paid 6/6 a bushel for wheat when they might have received 7/6, I am under no illusions as to how my announced policy will be received. At present, however, I appear to be ace-high with the outside public, a number of my recent speeches and broadcasts having been extremely well received; and in consequence I am not really frightened of the Parliamentary position or of the prospects of an election. Should the war, so to speak, settle down, and should the Dominion Prime Ministers be asked to confer with the British Government in London, I would immediately have a real difficulty, because I honestly don’t know who could run the show, particularly in Parliament, in my absence. Billy is the senior Minister and, quite frankly, he is impossible. He has become a pathetic and futile figure in the House, and in Cabinet, although he can be vastly diverting and cleverly destructive, he has no positive contribution to make on anything. Dick is working very hard, though perhaps a little meticulously, at Supply, but it is an open secret that he would like to get the Washington appointment.



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Street, though a most charming fellow, is largely a mouthpiece for the Chiefs of Staff, whose recommendations he is not prepared to criticise. You and I have, I think, the same ideas about the so-called ‘military mind’and I badly need a Defence minister who shares them. Looking over this letter, I can see that it is a miserable narrative, and perhaps misleading, because the truth is, of course, that I have never made a practice of taking my troubles around with me, and, in any event, my personal worries are very trifling compared with those of people who have the responsibilities of office in other countries nearer to the seat of war. But as somebody once said, “it is better to expound yourself to a statua or a brick wall than to suffer your thoughts to pass in smother,” and on this principle I have blown off a little steam to you, who are neither a statua nor a brick wall, but a great servant of the Australian people who have been through the mill and know intimately the kind of problem I am encountering.

S. M. Bruce, High Commissioner, London, to R. G. Menzies, Prime Minister, 4 October 1939 I was extraordinarily glad to get your letter of the 7th September and to hear some of your views on the mess we have got ourselves into, and some of the trials and tribulations you are faced with in carrying on the horrible job of being a Prime Minister. I have been going to write to you many times in the last month but have always been discouraged by the fact that there is so little that one can say of what one is thinking in any communication that is subjected to the dangers of transit in times of war. The only possible method by which I could convey to you some of the explosive things I should like to say is by the method of handing a letter to the Captain of a British ship, to be handed to you at the other end with strict instructions that it was to be destroyed if there was the slightest apprehension that it might fall into enemy hands. This, however, involves a delay of anything up to two months under war conditions and with the pace at which events are moving it is too cold blooded and ghastly a job to sit down and dictate anything, knowing that it will not be read for 2 months. Thank heaven it is possible to say something by means of the recyphered cables and I have no doubt

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that you have read a good deal between the lines of what I have sent to you by this method. In this letter there are, however, some things I can possibly say without too palpable an indiscretion. I will, at all events have a try at doing so although I have rather a feeling that when I have finished I will come to the conclusion that I will have to supplement it with a communication which you will get some months hence if in fact you ever get it at all. I cordially agree with the first two pages of your letter in which you deal with the war situation. Events have turned out very much as you visualised them in the second paragraph of your letter. Although the Soviet–German agreement has altered the line which they have taken, it has, in my view, in no way altered the singularly unpleasant possibility you suggest as eventually arriving. The situation has developed almost exactly down the lines you visualised in your third paragraph with the added complication of Russia’s action, and the fact that she occupies a great part of the late Polish territory. This has considerably complicated the position and increased the necessity for the quick and clear thinking that you refer to in your fourth paragraph. How far that has been forthcoming you will have gathered from my cables. With the last sentence of the 1st paragraph of page 2, I am in more than cordial agreement. I have constantly urged, since my return from Australia, upon the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary the course which you indicate. I went over to Paris specially to try and stir Phipps, our Ambassador there, up on this very point. The line of action I am urging was the one set out by you in the third paragraph on page 2. With your second paragraph, page 2, I am also in complete accord and have been working along the very lines you indicate. I have been urging the necessity for the frankest conversations with a view to the joint mediation you suggest, having for its object a wide settlement followed by joint action for economic and material rehabilitation with the two big countries affording the necessary financial assistance. With regard to paragraph 4, I entirely agree with your view and I went through many anxious moments before the war started apprehending unreasonableness in the negotiations. What you visualise in the 5th paragraph on page 2 is now the



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very position with which we are faced, and which will have to be determined over the next two or three weeks. With regard to the 6th paragraph, the new point that has to be added to it as a result of the German–Soviet Agreement is the possibility of the spread of communism throughout Europe. After dealing with these various matters in cryptic terms and with reference to the paragraphs of your letter, I realise there is nothing for it but to send you something by the sea route as discretion imposes too many restrictions on an air mail letter. Turning to subjects where one has not to be so discreet, I have been tremendously interested in your fortunes over the past five months. There is no doubt that Page was your fairy god-father, if you had the slightest desire to be a Prime Minister. Apparently he had a considerable objection to your becoming one and promptly took the only possible course which would make the job a sitting certainty for you. The working of Page’s mind is still a complete mystery to me notwithstanding my considerable experience of its vagaries. I see that Cameron has now succeeded him. This I should imagine destroys any possibility of a working arrangement between you and the Country Party. I have the clearest recollection of my first conversation with him when he disposed of Lyons, you, Earle Page and Casey as possible Prime Ministers and then, as an after thought, cleaned me up in case I had any misguided leanings in that direction. McEwen, I should have imagined, would have been a very much better choice and from what I saw of him when I was in Australia, I should have thought it might have been possible to work with him. The fact that you could not make an arrangement with the Country Party might have caused you considerable difficulties in maintaining your position if the war had not come. Now that it has, it would appear inevitable that you have to look forward to being a Prime Minister for the duration. This is a ghastly prospect to look forward to, but you are the one man and you will have to see it through. You appear to have done a good job up to date. Your broadcasts, which have had great publicity here, have been admirable and have created a tremendous impression. Stick to it, take your own line, and do not be worried by the sniping of the press or the yelping at your heels of those whose own selfish interests you are compelled to cut across. I see from your letter that Keith Murdoch has already been

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troublesome. He will, no doubt, give you a lot more before we are through, but do not let that worry you. A real hurdle you have to face is the one you mention in your letter as to who you are to leave in charge when, as it is imperative you should, you come over here to an Imperial War Cabinet. Billy makes me shudder, and the only alternative, one can think of at the moment as being at all possible, is Dick, but by the time you leave Australia it is quite possible he will be either in London or Washington. Perhaps the matter will resolve itself by the somewhat versatile Mr. Cameron having disappeared as the leader of the Country Party and your having been able to arrange a Coalition with them, which opens the way to McEwen, if he turns out to be good, doing the job in your absence. Of the War Cabinet, the Government, the Departments of the general War organisation, I could write you reams, but I fear it would not be discreet for me to do so by this method of transport. No doubt if I get down to the job of writing you something by the sea mail a good deal on these subjects will appear. Whenever you feel the necessity of blowing off steam, write to me. I have some understanding and am not as inhuman as many people think.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

R. G. Neale (ed.), Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937–49, vol. 2, AGPS, 256–8. Inga Clendinnen, ‘First Contact’, in Australian Review of Books, May 2001, 26. John Edwards, Keating: The Inside Story, Viking, 1996, 390. The message he sent to Chamberlain on 18 August was typical: ‘You can rely on the support and co-operation of myself and my government in connection with any efforts made to effect a settlement of outstanding differences. Nevertheless I strongly hold the view that pressure upon Poland should not be carried to a point which might awaken in Hitler’s mind any thoughts that the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland in the event of aggression was in the least doubtful of fulfillment’. (Neale, op.cit., 173–4). Op. cit., 186. Op. cit., 314. For the English trip see my Robert Menzies: A Life, vol. 1, chapters 14- 16; A. W. Martin and Patsy Hardy (eds), Dark and Hurrying Days: Menzies’ 1941 Diary.



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8

I am grateful for the courtesy of having been able to read the text of Dr Edwards’s lecture, given at the Curtin University of Technology, 19 April 2001, thanks to Mr John Nethercote.

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8 An Australian Prime Minister in Ireland: R. G. Menzies, 1941

In this paper I reflect upon a happening which, understandably perhaps, has attracted the serious attention of neither Irish nor Australian historians: a brief semi-official visit which the Australian prime minister then in office, R. G. Menzies, made to Ulster and Eire in 1941. Other serving Australian prime ministers have of course visited Ireland but, as far as I know, Menzies was, apart from R. J. Hawke in recent times, the only one of non-Irish lineage to do so. It was scarcely likely that Menzies, a good Presbyterian and sturdy Australian–Briton of Scots descent, should be driven at least to Southern Ireland by any sentimental call of race and religion. His purpose in going there was in fact very practical: to provide, as he saw it, a kind of statecraft needed at a time of desperate danger and suffering for Britain. How this came about, and what Menzies took to and brought away with him from Ireland make a small, but intriguing, story of the unexpected. It has significance both for its reflection of Menzies, the man and for the glimpses it gives of the wider politics of war in 1941 Britain. Published in F. B. Smith (ed), Ireland, England and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh, Australian National University and Cork University Press, 1990,180–200.


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*** Menzies was in England between February and May 1941, having braved the perils of a four-week wartime flying boat trip which took him to London via Singapore, Bangkok, the Middle East and Lisbon. At each stop he had discussions with local notables and resident British officials, and in North Africa he visited the site of the recent drive to Benghazi, talking proudly to the victorious officers and men of the Sixth Division, AIF. The most important members of his little official party were Frederick Shedden, head of the Defence Department, and John Storey, commissioner of aircraft production. Their presence signalled the two central objects of the mission: to fight British sluggishness about the effective arming of Singapore, and to get British aid and advice on manufacturing aircraft in Australia. For these Australians, other strategic and human aspects of the war were not very sharply focussed as they left home. Fortunately for the historian, however, Menzies kept a diary of the whole trip.1 Among its many uses, this document shows how and why issues at first hardly noticed from the distance of the antipodes acquired salience once the Australian prime minister experienced London in the Blitz and sat—as established courtesy had it for a Dominion minister of his status—in the British War Cabinet. One of these issues, of course, was Ireland. Menzies had raised the Singapore matter with the British government, in vain, on a number of occasions after becoming prime minister in 1939 and tried in 1940 to press it—again in vain—by delaying the despatch to the Middle East of the first contingent of the second AIF.2 Now, passing through Singapore, he was horrified by the actuality he found there. The latest commander in chief, Air Marshal Brooke-Popham, in a curious sense symbolised it all. BrookePopham, Menzies recorded, ‘has borne the white man’s burden in many places from Kenya to Canada, and it has left his shoulders a little stooped’. He received us at the landing stage, wearing a pith helmet, a bush shirt of khaki, the tail outside the trousers in the manner of a tunic, and shorts. So complete a type was he that I had much ado not to say ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’.

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Courteous and pleasant throughout their talks, Brooke-Popham nevertheless left Menzies, as he put it, with a vague feeling that his instincts favour some heroic but futile Rorke’s Drift rather than clearcut planning, realism and science . . . Winston Churchill had lunched him in London before he came out to this appointment, and he was boyishly pleased that Winston’s farewell exhortation to him had contained more than a hint of the forlorn hope (‘Hold out to the last, my boy, God bless you. If your grandfather had not broken his neck playing polo at Poona, he would be proud of you this day!’). Menzies flew out of Singapore angrily determined to trounce British turpitude: We must . . . tell Japan ‘where she gets off’. Appeasement is no good. The peg must be driven in somewhere. I must make a great effort in London to clarify this position. Why cannot one squadron of fighters be sent out from North Africa? Why cannot some positive communication be entered into regarding naval reinforcement of Singapore? At this stage, misty generalisations will please and sustain the Japanese and nobody else.3 *** It would, of course, be hard to imagine a less propitious time to be going to Britain on such a mission. In the Middle East, on the last stage of his trip, Menzies recorded mixed elation and foreboding as he travelled round the bivouacs and garrisons of the troops who had recently routed the Italians. ‘It is a moving thing,’ he wrote, ‘to speak to thousands of young men, mere boys, in the flower of their youth, many of whom will never see Australia again. War is the abomination of desolation, but its servants are a sight to see. ’4 In fact the brief achievement of the troops he thus celebrated was the only significant military victory the Allies could claim since the very beginning of the war; and it would soon be tragically true, thanks to the disasters of

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Greece and Crete, that many of the men whom Menzies had addressed would indeed never see Australia again. Meantime, in England, six months after France’s fall the danger of seaborne invasion still loomed; in the air the battle for Britain still raged and— above all—staggering shipping losses in the Atlantic threatened strangulation. Between July and October 1940 245 British vessels were sunk and in November, the worst month of the year, 73 (totalling 304,000 tons) went to the bottom. February 1941, the actual month in which Menzies reached London, saw the greatest single monthly loss since the beginning of the war—79 ships.5 On Menzies’ first day in London, the Australian High Commissioner, S. M. Bruce, gave him a courtesy luncheon at the Savoy. There Menzies met or renewed acquaintance with a notable gathering: Hugh Dalton, Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Lord Woolton, Oliver Lyttleton, and Maurice Hankey. Dalton, who records the occasion in his diary, found Menzies ‘very hearty, amusing and intelligent. [In our conversation] he reminds me of “a classical exchange of compliments” between me and him when I dined with him at the Athenaeum Club in Melbourne in 1938. After a good evening he said, “I am delighted and astonished to meet a member of the British Labour party who has a sense of humour. ” I replied “I am equally delighted and astonished to meet an Australian Conservative who has some intelligence”. ’6 For his part Menzies found the company ‘very easy and informal . . . if there was any ice to break I did not know it’. On the matters discussed he has only one comment: ‘Very free talk about Southern Ireland. All present are plainly anti-RC. Bevin convinced that some Federal Scheme the only way out (probably right!) and that now is the time for a commission from the dominions, chaired by the USA, to offer to settle the matter’.7 Next day, Saturday 22 February, Menzies travelled in falling snow through the Buckinghamshire countryside to Chequers for his first weekend with the Churchills. Ireland again came up quickly and forcefully. Winston, zippered in siren suit, swept dramatically into the Long Gallery. Menzies was at first overwhelmed: What a tempestuous creature he is, pacing up and down the room, always as if to dart out of it, and then suddenly

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returning. Oratorical even in conversation. The master of the mordant phrase and yet, I would think, almost without real humour. Enjoys hatred, and got a good deal of simple pleasure out of saying what he thought of de Valera, who is (inter alia) a murderer and a perjurer.8 Here, albeit in cruder terms, was a rerun of yesterday’s lunch-time conversation. Menzies ruminated: There is a growing passion on the subject here, and we may as well get ready for squalls. After all, why should the British people (and the Australians) be prejudiced and perhaps defeated, by this fantastic Southern Irish neutrality? Winston awaits American action, after the passing of the lease and lend bill, but I endeavoured vainly to get his mind on the question of the ultimate solution of Ireland. War? Federal Union? Should the Dominions offer to intervene?9 The intensity of feeling in London on this matter took Menzies somewhat by surprise. His mind was on other things, and his first observations were not those of a man well-informed on the recent Irish past. Nor need he have fretted about Churchill seeming offhand on the Irish question: on the contrary, the man was obsessed by it. What most maddened Churchill was of course the self-inflicted British wound of having foregone in 1938 the use of the five Irish port facilities originally retained under the 1921 Treaty: harbours at Berehaven, Cobh and Lough Swilly, fuel storages at Haubowline and Rathmullen. De Valera is said to have regarded the negotiation of the Agreement which embodied this renunciation as the greatest of all his achievements, though it is doubtful whether it would have been possible without the bargaining prowess of Chamberlain’s adroit and conciliatory Dominions Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald. R. F. Foster has recently stressed that the ports were handed over with curiously little deliberation on the British side. ‘In some ways,’ he writes, their upkeep was seen as a liability, and there was a general expectation (not to be fulfilled) that in the time of war they might be made available again. The Chiefs of Staff



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acquiesced in this gesture of Chamberlainite appeasement as regrettable but inevitable; the infuriated Churchill was in a small minority.10 It says something about the climate of the Commons debate on the treaty that what Churchill warned about was depicted as the unthinkable: that the ‘dark forces in Ireland’ so far kept in check by de Valera with great difficulty might in the event of war force him into neutrality. Therefore I say that the ports may be denied to us in the hour of need and we may be hampered in the gravest manner in protecting the British population from privation and even starvation. Who would wish to put his head in such a noose? Is there any other country in the modern world where such a step would even have been contemplated?11 In the early days of the war, after this terrible fear had in fact been realised, Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty called for reports on what he referred to as the ‘so-called neutrality of the socalled Eire’,12 speculated about the possibility of Irish malcontents operating in the inlets of Western Ireland (‘if they throw bombs in Ireland, why should they not supply petrol to U-boats?’),13 and urged that ‘on no account must we appear to acquiesce in, still less to be contented with, the odious treatment we are receiving’.14 Then in mid 1940 Dunkirk brought the chilling prospect of neutral Ireland as easy meat for a Germany seeking a back door to Britain. Wild rumours were rife: of German soldiers embarking at Naples for Cadiz, whence they were to be sent to attack Ireland; of German plans worked out in detail with the IRA for an immediate descent on the country.15 Churchill momentarily revelled in these dangers, telling the Chiefs of Staff that German invasion could bring ‘various advantages to us’—the foremost being the excuse to ‘take Berehaven for our own use’.16 When the invasion did not materialise Churchill nevertheless ordered preparation of a plan (it was codenamed ‘alcohol’) to occupy the Irish ports ‘in the event of a worsening of the naval situation’.17 Chamberlain meantime got Churchill to agree to Malcolm MacDonald going back to Dublin to see what he

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could do with de Valera. In Churchill’s 1940 cabinet MacDonald had in effect been demoted to the Health Ministry—kept on, he thought, only for tactical party reasons. Churchill, as Sir Alexander Cadogan once reported it, regarded MacDonald as ‘rat-poison—on account of his connection with the Eire ports’. The historian Robert Fisk cannot be too wide of the mark when he observes that Churchill ‘must have obtained some vexed satisfaction as he watched the “appeasers” trying to regain what they had lost in their “act of faith” in 1938’.18 Despite their mutual respect, de Valera and MacDonald could reach no agreement. Irish unity with neutrality was de Valera’s sine qua non. The mounting British Atlantic losses stirred Churchill in the autumn of 1940 to a Commons speech which touched off a violent press campaign in London demanding seizure of the ports. ‘The fact’, Churchill said, ‘that we cannot use the southern and west coasts of Ireland to refuel our flotillas and aircraft, and thus protect the trade by which Ireland as well as Great Britain lives, is a most heavy and grievous burden which should never have been placed on our shoulders’.19 We now know that a major factor in the Atlantic losses was an appalling lapse in security which enabled German intelligence to break British naval codes and pinpoint for the U-boat packs the exact location of Allied convoys.20 It was nevertheless true that bases like Berehaven would have significantly reduced the length of the convoy route, would have given Britain a wider range for anti-submarine operations in the Atlantic and would have provided convoys with better protection. By 1941 the Luftwaffe had perfected tactics which added new ravages to those of the U-boats. Focke-Wulf Condor bombers regularly preyed on the mainstream of traffic up the Mayo coast to Malin Head. The big four-engined aircraft flew from French airfields at Brest over to the west coast of Ireland, to run back, when their tanks were low on fuel, to bases at Stavanger in German-occupied Norway. At the port of Berehaven, where British fighters and aircraft batteries might have been, local people watched these planes fly past, undisturbed, every morning en route for the Atlantic convoy lanes. As Fisk writes, in the emotional climate of that time ‘the Irish government could not escape the accusation . . . that dead British seamen were being washed up on Eire’s shores because of her policy of neutrality’. Louis MacNeice’s bitter poem, ‘Neutrality’, caught at the mood:



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But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin, While to the west off your own shores the mackerel Are fat—on the flesh of your kin.21 His early days in England were particularly disturbing for Menzies. On the Sunday evening of that first weekend at Chequers, Churchill raised with him the question of military assistance to Greece, then threatened by the Germans’ southward drive. Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Anthony Eden, negotiating on the spot and hopeful that, if the Greeks held, Turkey might be cajoled into an Allied alliance, pressed for urgent action. But such action must involve Anzac troops, the major component of existing British forces in the Middle East and likely to remain so, given the stark demand for soldiers to defend fortress Britain. For his diary, Menzies called the discussion with Churchill ‘momentous’: ‘this kind of decision, which may mean thousands of lives, is not easy. Why does a peaceable man become a prime minister?’22 Next day, 24 February, he attended the British War Cabinet for the first time. As it happened, this was the meeting at which the Greek expedition was agreed to. It was Menzies’ first experience of Churchill’s style. When the Greek matter came on, ‘Winston, plus cigar, says . . . You have read your file, gentlemen, and [the] report of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The arguments are clear on each side. I favour the project’. Churchill then ran round the table; nobody except Menzies ‘said more than three or four sentences’. The whole matter was discussed in three-quarters of an hour: it would only have taken ten minutes, Menzies thought, had he himself not asked about air support, equipment, shipping and time. ‘I was the only one to put questions, and feel like a new boy who, in the first week of school, commits the solecism of speaking to the captain of the School. ’ Churchill used the occasion to spell out his view of the overall strategy now required. The war, he said, ‘turned on our—(1) holding England, (2) holding Egypt, (3) retaining command of the sea, (4) obtaining command of the air and (5) being able to keep open the American arsenals. The enterprise in Greece was an advance position which we could try to hold, without jeopardising our main position’. Those present—the ministers, Chiefs of Staff and Foreign Office

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representatives—all accepted this scenario without caveat.23 If Menzies sat there wondering where the Far East fitted in he was soon to be enlightened. On 26 February, with Bruce and Shedden, he went to a meeting at the Foreign Office to discuss this question with Cadogan, permanent secretary to the Foreign Office, and the parliamentary undersecretary, R. A. Butler; and next day the Menzies delegation conferred with the British service ministers and their chiefs of staff on the same issue. Both meetings were, from the Australians’ point of view, dismal failures. At the first of them, Menzies found the British approach to the Far East ‘hopelessly disappointing’. Cadogan’s attitude was ‘one of remoteness and indifference . . . I said with some bitterness of spirit: “Well, the only conclusion I can reach is that you have no policy in relation to these matters at all”. ’24 The policy of the Foreign Office, he wrote that night, was, simply, ‘Drift’.25 Cadogan, who also recorded the meeting in his diary, took the occasion there to dismiss the Australians with a lordly sneer: ‘What irresponsible rubbish these Antipodeans talk!’26 At the discussions with the service chiefs next day, Menzies pressed for air cover for Singapore, and demanded in vain a clarification of Churchill’s vague promise of naval aid if Australia were attacked by Japan. After the meeting he wrote furiously: ‘Clear thinking is not predominant here . . . What does “cutting our losses in the Mediterranean and going to your assistance” mean? Nobody knows’.27 In fact, by the time Menzies set out for home, three months later, still nobody knew. Singapore could rejoice by then only in the arrival of some near-obsolete Brewster Buffalo aeroplanes. Menzies’ request for Hurricanes had been rejected as too expensive.28 All the strategic priorities were those Churchill had sketched out. But as time moved on, anyone who had to sit in the War Cabinet and listen to the daily litany of disasters must have come to see Churchill’s priorities as inescapable, especially given Britain’s desperately limited resources. Even for a Menzies it was hard to argue otherwise. On the day he wrote his sad account of Foreign Office ‘drift’ Menzies sat through a particularly gloomy War Cabinet meeting. In readiness for the expected German invasion, plans were approved for evacuations to thin out the civilian population along a coastal strip between Great Yarmouth and Littlehampton. Military officers, said Churchill, must visit the area and explain to people that, in the



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event of invasion, ‘those who stayed behind would not be allowed to clog the roads by attempting to leave at the last moment’. Meantime in the Mediterranean there had been a destructive raid on Malta by ninety German aircraft and in the Atlantic an outward-bound convoy had suffered heavy losses.29 ‘Another Convoy beaten up’, Menzies wrote that night. ‘The shipping strain is enormous, and represents our only real chance of defeat. ’30 Next weekend, at Chequers again, he recorded the inevitable repetition of Churchillian psychology: The PM in . . . conversation will steep himself (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war (e. g. tonight shipping losses by Fokker Wolf planes and U-boats—the supreme menace of the war on which with Dudley Pound, 1st Sea Lord, we have had much talk), only to proceed to ‘fight his way out’ until he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes.31 Maybe Churchill was practising for a dramatic performance he would make in Cabinet several days later. As Menzies describes that: War Cabinet—Winston present . . . PM commences with a short but impressive statement on war position. ‘Refers to battle of the Atlantic’. I expect results, gentlemen. Then a brief expression of faith. Very simple but effective. Discussion very brief.32 In a curious way, all this was unwitting preparation for a crucial experience Menzies was to have when at Chequers the following weekend. An American, Colonel Donovan, called to see Churchill and then had a long chat with Menzies. William J. Donovan, ‘Wild Bill Donovan’, subsequently the founder of the CIA, was at this time F. D. Roosevelt’s roving ambassador, on his way back to America to report on the present state of Britain’s morale and war requirements. A Catholic of Irish descent, Donovan was a World War I hero, had run a prosperous legal practice specialising in anti-trust prosecutions, and in the 1930s had travelled extensively in Europe acting as a useful informal adviser to US government agencies. He went to London in mid-1940 at the invitation

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of W. S. Stephenson, chief of the British secret service organisation in the Americas. Hosted in London by the head of MI6, Colonel Stewart Menzies (no relation to the Australian prime minister), Donovan was given every access to military installations and carried back to the US the word that Britain could survive but that equipment was urgently needed. Roosevelt asked for more evidence and ordered another trip to London. Stephenson cabled MI6 that ‘if the PM were to be completely frank with Colonel Donovan, the latter would contribute very largely to our obtaining all that we want of the US’. So Churchill gave Donovan carte blanche, and between December 1940 and March 1941 he went as a privileged observer through Malta, Greece, and Turkey, sweeping back to London via Cyprus, Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal and—most significantly for Robert Menzies—Ireland. Menzies knew nothing of Donovan’s secret service connections: he would have been surprised, perhaps affronted, had he known that, after meeting everybody who was anybody in the Middle East, Greece and Turkey, Donovan had been deeply involved in the confidential on-the-spot British discussions which led up to the decision to recommend the fatal intervention in Greece. Churchill, for his part, gushed over Donovan’s exploits: ‘I must thank you’, he wired Roosevelt, ‘for the magnificent work done by Donovan in his prolonged tour of the Balkans and Middle East. He has carried with him throughout an animating, heart-warming flame. ’33 On that Sunday at Chequers Donovan also impressed Menzies: ‘this is a good man;’ he wrote, ‘easy, composed, comfortable looking, with a good blue eye; an orderly mind and quiet speech. I would readily take his opinion on men and affairs’. That was important: Donovan had just ‘been over to De Valera’. He ‘thinks’ wrote Menzies, that the core of the problem is the pressure of the RC minority in Ulster, led by Cardinal McCrory [sic]. Qualifies De Valera’s mental honesty by saying that Dev readily rejects a course of action which may imperil his tenure of office. Thinks D is worried and troubled of conscience for not having made clear to his own people the real moral issues of the war. Donovan thinks there should be (a) an avenue of personal contact between Dev and Churchill (b) some encouragement to the local people (Catholics) who think



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as J. M. Dillon does (c) some attempt to get rid of any pinpricks against RC’s in the North. The Irish farmer is beginning to discover that neutrality is not profitable, and altogether there are possibilities.34 This encounter gave birth to an idea which seems steadily to have developed in Menzies’ mind over the next week or so. Why could not he, as an influential outsider, untainted by any previous association with Ireland, step in and do something about de Valera? On 24 March, War Cabinet received a report on the results to date of a policy adopted in January, at Churchill’s insistence, of restricting Irish trade and shipping. Already the first steps in this policy had had drastic effects: in Ireland private motorists’ petrol allowance had been cut by 75 per cent, the two-ounce tea ration was halved and the absence of wheat imports meant the end of white bread.35 Now Cabinet learned that supplies of oil, fat and sugar had also been stopped and only enough coal was being shipped to keep gasworks going, without reserve stocks. Cabinet decided that the policy of restricting supplies to Ireland should not be relaxed. ‘This policy’, the minutes record, was ‘consistent with our own needs, and ostensibly it should continue to be based on those needs. At the same time it [is] important from the political point of view that the pressure on Eire should be fully maintained. ’36 Menzies’ diary records: ‘The Irish position becomes intolerable. Winston turned up—“700 years of hatred, and six months of pure funk”. There is some truth in this: they are terrified of attack, for which they have no preparation or defence, if neutrality is not strictly observed. ’37 At this Cabinet meeting Menzies dropped his bombshell: he would visit Ireland himself. The meetings Donovan had had with de Valera had no doubt been valuable, he said, but they had been confidential and had not been followed by any public statement. He was himself trying to arrange an interview with de Valera, ‘and he thought it might be of assistance if this talk was to be followed by some public statement of his views on the Eire position’.38 We have no direct evidence of Churchill’s reaction to this. But Menzies claimed years later that Churchill said to him: ‘Never with my approval will you visit that wicked man’.39

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In the few days before Menzies left for Ireland events conspired to strengthen his sense of mission. For one thing, on 26 March Churchill summoned a top-level meeting at 10 Downing Street to discuss the Atlantic crisis. ‘He is pale, unpleasant, and strained’, noted Menzies, who was there. ‘All Ministers and service heads look and sound like 6th form boys in the presence of the headmaster. The battle of the Atlantic looks lousy, and privately I wish I had more real faith in the navy. ’40 Then, on 28th, Menzies lunched with Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, Director-General of the BBC, and Herbert Asquith. ‘Subject’, he recorded, ‘Ireland. This country must not just drift into an Irish war. ’41 Unfortunately we do not know more precisely what was talked about though it is likely that Ogilvie, who had come to the BBC in 1938 after four years as Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s, briefed Menzies at least about Belfast. And perhaps it was not an accident that a day or two later when he was actually in Belfast, Queen’s conferred an honorary doctorate on Menzies. He flew from Hendon to Belfast on 3 April, a cold and blowy day, ‘across a wind-tossed and bitter Irish sea’. Received by the prime minister, J. M. Andrews, he inspected the shipyards in the morning and visited the university in the afternoon. In between, lunch at the Ulster Reform Club was a triumph. ‘They acclaim my speech in extravagant terms’, he noted,42 and so they did: moving the vote of thanks, Andrews said they had just listened to a very great speech— ‘one of the greatest ever heard in the Club’. Menzies had begun with jocular remarks hardly tactful for a man due in Dublin the next day: he felt quite at home in the Ulster club, he said, for the best Northern Irelanders were like the best Australians: improved Scotsmen. But his main theme, clearly directed at Eire, was that of loyalty to the Commonwealth’s one King: ‘when that . . . King makes war and makes it, as on the present occasion, most justly, then I have never felt inclined as a representative of my own country to sit down and engage in vague speculation as to whether or not I should declare war’.43 That evening he held a relaxed press conference. ‘Installing himself in a chair at the head of the tables in the Senate Room of Queen’s’, reported the Belfast Telegraph, ‘he got a briar pipe going well and then invited questions from all and sundry’. Menzies parried queries about the treaty ports, rejected any suggestion that he



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brought messages from Churchill to de Valera and said his visit to Dublin was being made entirely on his own initiative, to have a general talk with de Valera, convey to him the greetings of the Australian people, see Ireland, and get a first-hand view of her problems.44 Next day he travelled down to Dublin by train: ‘countryside quite lovely’, he noted, ‘the white washed cottages making quite a picture in the greenery. In Dublin life goes on and there is no blackout—it seems queer!’45 At the Amiens Street station he was met by Joseph Walshe, Secretary to the Irish Department of External Affairs, and given a police guard of honour. The Dublin Evening Mail reported ‘some handclapping from the small crowd which had gathered as the tall, immaculately clad figure of the Australian Prime Minister stepped from the carriage’, and it and the Dublin Evening Herald carried front-page pictures of Menzies, with Walshe at his side and homburg hat in his hand, inspecting the policemen drawn stiffly up in line on the platform.46 Menzies spent the morning and then lunch alone with de Valera in what he calls a ‘long conference’. His diary entry is terse, impressionistic and emotional: Long, long grey black frieze overcoat, broad brimmed black hat. An educated man. Personal charm. Allusions to history, but not all ancient. He and all his ministers have ‘done time’ as rebels, and family blood has been spilt in the streets. We must remember this—‘You have not died on the barricades’. In the afternoon Sean O’Kelly, the deputy prime minister, and Father Costello, ‘a worldly priest’ took Menzies to see the Wicklow mountains and what he records as the ‘lovely ruins and lakes of Glendalough’. Next morning he was taken for a drive around Dublin by one Beeton of Irish External Affairs—‘a bigot’, says Menzies. This, presumably, because of Beeton’s terse ‘he was not an Irishman’, as they looked at the Nelson column and the withering answer he gave to Menzies’ triumphant observation at Wellington’s equestrian statue: ‘Ah, there is Wellington, you can’t say he wasn’t an Irishman . . . for, dammit, he was born in Dublin’: ‘And wasn’t it Wellington himself who said that to be born in a stable does not prove you are a horse?’

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Then there was a press conference and an official luncheon. Afterwards, ‘Dev sees me off at the aerodrome. Rough journey in a Rapide to Liverpool and to Hendon. Pilot thinks we are pursued in Irish Channel. We grope our way [in] through fog and balloons. ’47 So ended the great adventure. Before he left Ireland, journalists in Dublin got as little satisfaction out of Menzies as had their brethren in Belfast. Again he refused to be drawn on the treaty ports and would not say what he had talked to de Valera about. He was unsympathetic on supply shortages: ‘Our shipping problem is much more serious than yours’. Complaints about sugar and tea rationing left him cold: ‘Everybody here seemed to live a full life’. And brown bread, it was well known, was far better for one’s health than white.48 Back in London, Menzies got at once to work on his report, a long memorandum for the War Cabinet. He submitted it on 9 April and it was briefly discussed in Cabinet on 10th. The Times had meantime printed a summary of his speech to the Ulster Reform Club and a short paragraph noting that he had visited Eire and talked with de Valera.49 The English press (and particularly The Times) were by now giving Menzies good exposure—routinely seizing upon any public statement he made. But, although he had deplored the silence about Donovan’s visit to Ireland, Menzies himself now had nothing to say. The content of his memorandum, and its reception, explains why. This report is the work of a man untutored in the subtleties of Irish political history but as lawyer and experienced pragmatic politician skilled in the arts of observation and digestion. It also reflects a native sensibility, a strange glimmering of instinctive empathy with a man and a cause utterly alien to his own instincts and loyalties. It is not surprising that, as we shall see, it was not a document pleasing to Churchill.50 It rehearses discussions which Menzies had in Belfast and Dublin and concludes with a series of recommendations drawn from these talks and other impressions. Menzies’ natural prejudices were challenged at the very outset: There is a very strong, and indeed bitter, feeling in Ulster about Eire. Though the whole of my own instinctive bias is in favour of Ulster, I was occasionally a little disturbed to find myself wondering whether the Ulster attitude is entirely a reasoned one. Just as there are some Protestants whose



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Protestantism is an expression of hostility rather than of faith, so there are undoubtedly Ulstermen whose loyalty to Great Britain seems chiefly founded upon a dislike of the south. That ‘discovery’ recorded, Menzies goes on to make useful comments on the industrial, employment and recruiting problems he has observed in Ulster, and the impossibility, in present circumstances, of Ireland being united. It is a rational, if lifeless account. But when he turns to Eire, ‘this “distressful country”’, as he calls it, the discussion takes on a new animation. A real live person appears on centre stage: de Valera. He interested me very much. He is at first sight a somewhat saturnine figure, particularly when he sallies abroad in a long dark frieze overcoat and a broadbrimmed black hat. Personal contact with him, however, indicates that he is . . . I think sincere, and with a mind in which acute intelligence is found to contain many blind spots occasioned by prejudice, bitter personal experience, and a marked slavery to past history . . . He has a large and fanatical following in Dublin. He is the ‘chief’. The very clerks in the offices stand promptly to attention as he strides past. His Ministers speak with freedom in his absence, but are restrained and obedient in his presence. Some of these Ministers are possessed of more flexible minds than his, and I found them merry fellows, but in the last resort I am sure that his view will prevail. On the whole, with all my prejudices, I liked him and occasionally succeeded in evoking from him a sort of wintry humour, which was not without charm. Menzies proceeds to ‘attempt to state’ de Valera’s views, ‘not as he precisely formulated them . . . but as I inferred them, I think accurately, from hours of discussion, discussion which was confidential and as to the terms of which I would, therefore, desire not to be quoted’. The explanation that follows is dense and carefully teased out. But we can summarise its thrust simply enough. Menzies says that de Valera sees the British cause in the war as a just one, which 80

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per cent of the population of Southern Ireland would agree with. But de Valera is equally convinced that the present British government is hostile and unsympathetic to Ireland, and he is angry about supposed injustices to Catholics in Northern Ireland. Menzies thinks that these are in reality ‘shadowy’, whipped up by men like Cardinal MacRory, Primate of All Ireland. As to Ulster, de Valera recognises when brought ‘face to face’ with the fact, that Great Britain cannot possibly throw Ulster into Eire. When asked to explain what he means when he speaks of ‘the passionate desire in the Irish heart to be neutral in the war’, de Valera, Menzies found, ‘slipped easily and skilfully into a discussion of past history’. But he also came back ‘with some regularity’ to another reason which struck me as much more comprehensible and much more capable of being dealt with. That reason was that ‘Ireland is defenceless’, that ‘Dublin has practically no air force’, and that ‘the army is without modern equipment’. In other words, I am quite sure that De Valera’s [sic] neutrality policy is founded not only upon a traditional distrust of Great Britain, but also and perhaps principally upon fear of German attack, particularly from the air. . . I was left, after many repetitions, with a very definite feeling that, as this fear of attack is the principal obsession, the possibility of removing it by some material assistance on the munitions and aircraft side should be promptly explored. The encounter clearly had its bizarre side. The wily de Valera left Menzies with an impression of almost childlike innocence. ‘He stands in front of the map and cannot understand why naval bases in Ireland should be of the slightest importance to Great Britain. I found it necessary to explain to him the importance of air bases as a platform for fighting aircraft. He did not appear to have appreciated the immense significance of even a hundred miles in the zone of operations of fighters. I think he would understand these things much better if he had some of his own’. Other examples were at hand to support the theme of de Valera’s innocence, and it is evident that, despite his stern ‘improved Scottishness’, Menzies was not immune



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from Irish blarney. That, and his antipodean and lawyer-like tendency to assume that rationality could overcome history, led him to a set of final conclusions which he sensed even as he wrote them would not be welcome in London. Still, he did not pull his punches: The paragraphs I have written above contain, as I realise, much exasperating information . . . [De Valera] has in my opinion, some fine qualities. His fixed ideas, like those of his people, cannot be removed by aloofness or by force. They can be removed only by a genuine attempt to get at their foundations by enquiry and, wherever possible, by understanding. To the outsider, like myself, and particularly to one who travelled seventeen thousand miles to confer with his colleagues of the British Government, it is fantastic to be told that De Valera and Andrews have never met, and that I have had more conversations with De Valera than any British Minister has had since the war began. I therefore suggest very strongly that the whole question of the defence of Eire should be looked at, that the Secretary of State for the Dominions should pay an early visit to Belfast and Dublin, and that if he receives the slightest encouragement he should invite De Valera and a couple of his colleagues to come to London for discussions with the Prime Minister and other members of the British Cabinet. I know that such a meeting would be welcomed by some members of the Irish Cabinet who are beginning to realise that neutrality has its defeats no less renowned than war; and I would be by no means pessimistic about the outcome . . . As I have noted above, this paper came before Cabinet on 10 April. Menzies’ diary tersely notes its reception. ‘War Cabinet re Ireland. Winston describes my paper as “very readable”—a most damning comment. Beaverbrook, Sinclair and Greenwood rather approve, but Winston and Kingsley Wood exhibit the blank wall of conservatism. There is triangular prejudice in this matter. Winston is not a receptive or reasoning animal. ’51 The minutes of the War Cabinet note that Menzies’ opinions ‘met with a considerable measure of support’, but that Cabinet in the end endorsed the

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contrary view that it was unlikely that de Valera could be persuaded to come to London, and that if he did no significant results could be expected to follow. ‘He already knew that if Eire was prepared to abandon its neutrality (a) we were ready to share our air defences with them; and (b) we would be ready to set up a Defence Council for All-Ireland, in the hope that a united Ireland might spring therefrom. There was nothing more which we could tell them. ’52 That, of course, was Churchill’s voice, emanating from what Menzies used to call, sometimes enviously, Britain’s one-man Cabinet. For Menzies himself a public statement was now out of the question. All that was left was the grain of comfort he could draw from a conversation he had at Cliveden at the end of that week with Astor and J. L. Garvin. Garvin ‘declared my memorandum . . . “the most penetrating account of the Irish position he had ever read”. ’53 Unfortunately for Menzies, few others ever had the chance to read, let alone pass an opinion on, the document. As a War Cabinet paper on a touchy subject, it was classified ‘secret’, with the conventional legend ‘to be kept under lock and key’. In 1986, when I looked for it in the Public Record Office, I found that it is still unavailable there, having been closed in 1941 for fifty years. In the light of this, there is an irony which Menzies himself might have enjoyed in the fact that an Australian official publication, Documents in Australian Foreign Policy, volume IV, printed it in 1980, taking it from Australian Archives! But if in 1941 public expression and defence of his views on the Irish condition were denied to Menzies, he has unwittingly left for posterity a neat, acid little summary of them—untutored, perhaps, but the instinctive judgment and last word of a humane outsider: I had a short and interesting visit to Ireland, about which I cannot write at length, but which I am quite sure you will enjoy hearing about on my return. On the whole I rather like De Valera (though you must tell this to Mother and Father with great discretion), even though I, of course, disagreed with almost everything he said. Personally, I think the Irish problem is soluble, and I have made an elaborate report on it to Cabinet here. But the greatest difficulty is the prevailing lunacy. They are mad



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in Dublin, madder still in Belfast, and on this question perhaps maddest of all at Downing Street. Blind prejudice, based on historical events, is the most intractable and almost the most dangerous thing in the world.54

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

The diary is in the Menzies papers in the National Library of Australia (NLA): MS 4936, series 13, box 397. (Subsequently referred to simply as Diary.) [Published in 1993: A. W. Martin and Patsy Hardy (eds), Dark and Hurrying Days: Menzies’ 1941 Diary, National Library of Australia, 1993.— Ed. ] P. G. Edwards, ‘Menzies and the Imperial Connection’, in Cameron Hazlehurst (ed.), Australian Conservatism: Essays in Twentieth-Century Political History, ANU Press, 1979, 196–8. Diary, Wed., 29 Jan. 1941. Ibid., Tues., 4 Feb. 1941. Robert Fisk, In Time of War, Philadelphia, 1983, 247, 260. Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, Cape, 1986, 163. Diary, Fri., 21 Feb. 1941. Ibid., Sat., 22 Feb. 1941. Ibid. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972, Penguin, 1988, 554. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, fifth series, vol. 335, 1103. Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941, Heinemann, 1983. Fisk, op.cit., 98. Gilbert, op.cit., 43. Fisk, op.cit., 160. Gilbert, op.cit., 433. Ibid., 574. Fisk, op.cit., 163. The other points about MacDonald are from the same source. MacDonald has an interesting personal account of his relations with de Valera in his Titans and Others, London, 1972, chapter 3. Fisk, op.cit., 247–8. Ibid., 250. Quoted by Fisk, op.cit., 252. Ibid., 259–60 is the source for the Luftwaffe tactics. Diary, Sun., 23 Feb. 1941. There is a good, short account of Dill and Eden’s negotiations and recommendations in R. Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, 248–53. The critical stages can best be glimpsed in the War Cabinet Minutes for 5–7 March 1941: CAB 56/18/13, 15, 19; CAB 65/22/23ff, Public Record Office (PRO), London.

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23

24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54

War Cabinet Minutes and Confidential Annex, CAB 65/17/73 and CAB 65/21/26, PRO. Quoted in David Dilkes (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938– 48, Cassell, 1971, 359n. Diary, Wed., 26 Feb. 1941. Dilkes, op.cit., 359n. Diary, Thurs., 27 Feb. 1941. War Cabinet, ‘Strategical questions and objectives in strength’, 2 April 1941, CAB 99/4, PRO. War Cabinet Minutes, 27 Feb. 1941, CAB 65/17/7, PRO. Diary, Thurs., 27 Feb. 1941. Ibid., Sat., 1 March 1941. Ibid., Tues., 4 March 1941. Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the C. I. A., Aletheia Books, 1981, 23–39; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan, Times Books, 1982, 147–55; William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler, London, 1989, 14–17. Diary, Sun., 9 March 1941. Fisk, op.cit., 254. War Cabinet Minutes, 24 March 1941, CAB 65/18/45, PRO; Fisk, op.cit., 254. Diary, Mon., 24 March 1941. War Cabinet Minutes, 24 March 1941, CAB 65/18/45, PRO. Menzies, Afternoon Light, Cassell, 1967, 37. Diary, Wed., 26 March 1941. Ibid., Fri., 28 March 1941. Ibid., Thurs., 3 April 1941. Belfast Telegraph, 3 April 1941. Belfast Telegraph, Irish Times, 4 April 1941. Diary, Fri., 4 April 1941. Dublin Evening Mail, Evening Herald, 4 April 1941. Diary, Fri., 4 and Sat., 5 April 1941. Menzies has a lively account of the tour with Beeton (called ‘Mr X’ there!) in: Afternoon Light, 43. Saturday Herald, Dublin, 5 April; Irish Times, 7 April 1941. The Times, 4, 5 April 1941. Copy no. 12 of the memorandum is in MS 4936, series 1, box 5, folder 36, NLA. See also W. J. Hudson and H. W. Stokes, Documents in Australian Foreign Policy, 1937–49, AGPS, 1980, vol. iv, 549–54. The quotations in what follows are from these sources. Diary, Thurs., 10 April 1941. War Cabinet 38(41), 10 April 1941, CAB 65/18, PRO. Diary, Sun., 13 April 1941. R. G. Menzies to Pat Menzies, 23 April 1941. (Letter in the possession of Mrs P. Henderson, who has kindly permitted its publication here.)



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9 R. G. Menzies and the Murray Committee

On the evening of 28 November 1957 R. G. Menzies tabled in the House of Representatives the report of the Murray Committee’s inquiry into the Australian universities. After eloquent introductory remarks on the role of the universities, he briefly summarised the findings of the report, and announced the Commonwealth government’s substantial acceptance of them. ‘Some matters’, he said, ‘have yet to be finally dealt with; but we considered that there should be no delay in dealing with the main recommendations, having regard to what the Committee has described as “the need for immediate action in 1958, 1959 and 1960 if the position [of the universities] is not to be catastrophic”’.1 *** Next morning one academic, an historian, wrote perhaps the most spontaneous of the many letters which were to come to Menzies in the following days. It rehearsed the writer’s commitment to his ‘richly satisfying profession’ and went on,

Published in F. B. Smith and P. Crichton (eds), Ideas for Histories of Universities in Australia, Division of Historical Studies, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1990, 94–115.


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Amongst all those who will be writing grateful letters about your last night’s statement on the universities, I feel that I have special and personal reasons for thanking you for making my trade more fruitful and creative than it has ever been in this country. So I join with everybody else in thanking you for this noble revolution, which by itself would be enough to get you pages of praise in the history books (and that at least I am peculiarly able to promise, as one sure and permanent result of the Murray report).2 The writer was a man not given to hyperbole or insincerity. He was the Dean of Arts in the University of Adelaide, Professor Hugh Stretton. Stretton, as a matter of fact, still sees what happened in 1957 as having indeed been a revolution. ‘Very stable opinions I have, over 33 years’, he recently wrote to me on this subject, and in earnest of that he sent an extract from his recent Wurth lecture, ‘Life After Dawkins’. These are sad lines, which look back to happier times and recall how … in about twenty years from the onset of the Menzies reforms our universities were transformed, and contributed noticeably to transforming our society. They became respectable members of the international league and substantial contributors to our own economy and culture. We should not forget who contrived that: a Liberal Prime Minister decided to revolutionise the universities. He commissioned three excellent teachers, researchers and academic administrators to tell him how to do it. And he did what they advised.3 I begin with these Strettonian pieces because they catch with elegant simplicity at two central notions in the conventional academic wisdom: that Murray heralded a revivification and expansion of Australian universities on a scale hitherto unimaginable, and that the chief architect of the revolution was R. G. Menzies. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely, though in different ways, at some aspects of these two assertions, not seriously to contest either, but to suggest some gentle refinements for a better understanding of each.



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I am interested, in the first matter, briefly to piece together a story already well known in its outlines: the story of the steps by which the critical element in the transformation—the entry of the Commonwealth into the field of university funding—came about. In the second and for my purposes more important matter—Menzies’ role—I want to consider what I shall be calling the heroic view of that role. To introduce this part of the paper I shall very briefly say something about Menzies’ attitudes to the university world over the years before his second term of office. The substance of what then follows falls into two consecutive sections: a first, on how the decision to appoint the Murray Committee came to be made; and a second, on how the Menzies government handled the report. For a beginning, let’s sidestep any detailed treatment of the state of Australia’s universities in the years before the Second World War. Generalisation will do: it is accepted that they were small, poor and for the most part treated with indifference by a society hardly renowned for its concern about things of the mind. And as Melbourne University’s vice-chancellor, Sir John Medley, observed in the late 1940s: The two main handicaps to development in the past were poverty and isolation. They were alike responsible for two striking features—the homogeneity of type of university, and the limited amount of staff and student migration between them. There has not been enough money for bold experiment or enough competition to encourage variation in pattern.4 For their finances, the universities relied on fees, endowments and State grants, in proportions which varied according to local circumstances. Education being one of the ‘residual’ powers which the Federal compact left to the States, it was generally considered inappropriate, and constitutionally and politically out of the question, for the Commonwealth to contribute to university finance. A first trickle of Commonwealth money, however, reached the universities in 1936. It was a grant agreed to by the then Treasurer, R. G. Casey for such university research as the CSIR (being a Federal research body) had a special interest in. The CSIR director, Sir David

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Rivett, was, however, not happy that he and his officers should seem to be telling university scientists what to do, and through what Sir Frederick White has called ‘skilful maladministration’ got the grant through to the universities with few strings attached.5 The committee of vice-chancellors of the Australian universities (AVCC) happily carved it up between themselves.6 The grant was subsequently made annually, was routinely distributed in the same way, and increased modestly, to reach £100,000 by 1949. In that year, Professor Copland, vice-chancellor of the newly established Australian National University (ANU), observed in a memorandum to his fellow vicechancellors, that It is frequently asserted that the Commonwealth has a definite interest in research work and that it can constitutionally make funds available to the universities for that purpose. Undergraduate work, however, is regarded as exclusively a State responsibility. This is an entirely artificial distinction. The Commonwealth cannot achieve its objective in fostering the training of research students without considering the position of the Universities in respect of their obligations for undergraduate teaching. It is impossible to place the two things in separate departments.7 To say this in 1949 was really just a polemical clearing of the ground. The distinction had by then already broken down. At the beginning of 1943 the wartime Labor government established under national security regulations a Universities Commission, whose broad charter was ‘to ensure, in cooperation with the Directorate of Manpower, that the flow of trained personnel from universities and other approved institutions would be sufficient to meet the needs of Australia during the war and postwar periods’. Its main tasks were to work out a scheme of means-tested financial assistance for university students, and to advise the government on manpower issues which affected university students. Later in 1943 the Commission was given the additional responsibility of supervising a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS), which provided government funding for ex-servicemen and women who wished to undertake university courses. Then in 1945 an Education



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Act made the Commission permanent and set up a Commonwealth Office of Education, whose director would also be ex officio chairman of the Universities Commission.8 Wartime needs thus provided the first important precedents for Federal action to support universities. Under CRTS the Commonwealth not only paid trainees’ fees and gave them a living allowance but also, through the agency of the Universities Commission, made special grants to cover the extra cost for buildings and equipment notionally caused by the new, ex-service students. In 1945, 981 CRTS students were enrolled for degree courses; by 1949, 8239 had either graduated or were still enrolled. Apart from fees, the universities received from the scheme an overall total of £3,200,000 for equipment and buildings.9 But, though helpful, the aid earned through CRTS in reality went only a small way towards meeting problems caused by long years of poverty, the stress of wartime deterioration of buildings, shortages of staff, and the rising demand for university places. By 1946 enrolments were double what they had been in 1939.10 CRTS numbers began to taper off in the later 1940s and so the most significant source of Federal funds was drying up. ‘Crisis’ became the word most frequently used when those in the know talked about the universities’ prospects. Those most in the know were of course the vice-chancellors. By the beginning of 1949 the AVCC was pressing for a Commonwealth inquiry into the universities’ immediate and long-term needs and discussing the case to be put to it. Copland produced a detailed paper urging that the universities’ central aim for the next decade must be to develop graduate studies. For this, Commonwealth funds were essential, to strengthen undergraduate teaching by increasing staff and making time for teachers to take on new responsibilities for graduate training. ‘The whole academic structure could thus be strengthened’, he wrote, ‘and a really bold attack . . . made on the main weakness at present’. The one problem would be to keep intact the tradition of academic independence, on which, Copland said, the States had a good record. As a safeguard there would need to be some intermediate body to administer Commonwealth aid and ‘move cautiously in close association with the universities’ for (as he put it in prophetic words) the ‘tradition [of independence] will be much more seriously threatened if . . . grants from the Commonwealth are

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increased and their administration brought more and more under the control of some departmental authority responsible primarily to the Commonwealth Treasury and the Commonwealth Government’.11 On 18 February 1949, two days before Copland brought this paper to the AVCC for discussion, Chifley announced in parliament that he and Dedman, the Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, having ‘given a great deal of consideration to the matter of granting additional assistance to universities throughout Australia’, had decided, subject to agreement by the State governments, to set up a committee of three to ‘examine all the factors associated with university control and management’.12 The AVCC at once declared support for the move and despatched Medley and Copland to interview Chifley and explain to him that the universities should not be regarded as importunate beggars, but as institutions of vital and increasing importance to the future of the community which are merely asking for the means to enable them to do their job’.13 Further Commonwealth action was delayed awaiting the completion of an inquiry which the New South Wales government had instituted into the finances of Sydney University. But then, in October 1949, a premiers’ conference accepted Chifley’s initiative. He and Dedman at once, on 24 October, entertained all members of the AVCC at Parliament House and handed each a copy of a press statement to be released next day. Cabinet, it said, had decided that a committee would be constituted to ‘examine the finances of universities, including their sources of income, existing and forecasted future commitments, their staffing position and the relation of expenditure on research to teaching costs’. The committee would consist of three members, but, as required, a representative of each university would be coopted. The three members were to be Professor Mills, Commonwealth Director of Education, as chairman, a senior public servant, H. J. Goodes of Treasury, and an engineer, F. G. Thorpe.14 The Chifley government fell less than two months after this, before the committee could begin its work. Would the new Liberal government accept their predecessor’s initiative? Early in February 1950 Medley, just ending his stint as chairman of the AVCC, interviewed Menzies to urge that he confirm the appointment of the Chifley committee.15 Shortly afterwards, on 21 February, the new



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AVCC chairman, Currie of Western Australia, with his deputy, Copland, interviewed Menzies and heard the good news that the committee would indeed be commissioned to carry out the inquiry, though with a slight change in personnel to make it ‘less departmental’ by adding a man ‘well experienced in university teaching and administration’.16 Subsequently Copland was appointed and Thorpe eased out. Menzies asked for a short interim report within three months: he did not wish the committee to write a book about universities, he told Currie: the financial needs were obvious and simple. What he wanted was advice for necessary action.17 How time and a particular self-image can sift out the fine detail of a sequence of events like this is nicely illustrated by the account which Menzies wrote twenty years later of the genesis of this committee. It is in his memoir, The Measure of the Years, and is my first sample of what I call the ‘heroic’ view of Menzies in action. After noting the difficulties universities were facing when he came into office in 1950, Menzies writes: At this time I looked over the scene, and became actively concerned . . . State finances being considerably less flexible than those of the Commonwealth . . . it was, I thought, not reasonable that they alone should carry the university burden. Indeed, I did not see how they could! So it was that my government, as early as March 1950, appointed a Committee made up of Professor Mills, Sir Douglas Copland and Mr H. J. Goodes of the Commonwealth Treasury. Their terms of reference were . . . Needless, perhaps, to say, these terms of reference were the same as those originally set out by the Chifley government.18 It happens that Currie kept confidential notes of his and Copland’s interview with Menzies. The Prime Minister told the two vice-chancellors that he believed that Australia, in order to become a first-class nation, had to have first-class universities. Since the States had financial problems which prevented them from financing the universities adequately, the Commonwealth should help them out. He had already warned Cabinet about the financial needs of the universities:

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. . . There were two questions—the immediate needs, and later possibly yearly grants. His own view was that the British tradition of autonomy in the universities must be preserved at all costs. Freedom to expend their funds as they thought fit should be at the absolute discretion of the governing bodies. . . Block grants should be made which would leave at the universities’ discretion the proportional allocation of moneys to research and teaching. He saw no reason for the Commonwealth asking that governing bodies add Commonwealth nominees to their number just because funds were granted. Here were the words of a man, it seemed, who really knew his university world—how universities worked, what they traditionally did and how precious their autonomy. In retrospect it seems indisputable that this understanding is a key element in explaining what happened to the universities now and in the later 1950s. They were lucky: I find it hard to think of another Federal politician at the time—with the very important exception of H. V. Evatt—who more revered, understood and often in an old-fashioned way romanticised, the ideal of a university. *** Menzies’ main personal experience was of course of his own university, Melbourne, from which he graduated with first-class honours in 1916. In a student body of a little over a thousand he had been prominent as a speaker, a leading member of the law students’ society, active in the students’ representative council and editor of the Melbourne University Magazine. For him the university had been a first proving ground of his intellectual, political and oratorical abilities; and he preserved his association with and affection for it. In 1931, by then a leading Melbourne barrister and prominent member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, he was elected to Melbourne University Council as a convocation representative. That, in accordance with the relevant statute, he was expelled in October 1934 for missing meetings over a period of six months probably does not reflect a loss of interest in the university: this was the time when he had moved into Federal politics and had to spend weeks in Canberra.



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The registrar anyway apologised for not warning him that he was breaking the rules and took pleasure in informing Menzies that he was about to be renominated by the Standing Committee for a casual vacancy. Menzies ‘reluctantly’ declined. ‘I am afraid’, he wrote, ‘that in future it will be even more difficult’ to attend.19 In 1933, as Victorian Attorney-General, Menzies piloted through the Legislative Assembly, and in the teeth of Labor hostility, a measure authorising the appointment of Melbourne’s first full-time vice-chancellor. The State grant to the university, set in 1923 at £45,000, had been reduced under the Premiers’ Plan to £36,000, and despite Menzies’ repeated assurances that the vice-chancellor’s salary would come out of this grant, Labor members denounced the move as an attempt to get more money for the university. It was, said George Prendergast—reflecting, no doubt, a widespread attitude to the university—an attempt to expend money ‘on certain classes instead of the masses’ . . . ‘a case of appointing someone of the Government’s own class’ to a lucrative position in the university. Menzies pointed out in reply that the universities of Sydney and Western Australia now had full-time vice-chancellors, and Melbourne’s growth over the last twenty years had outstripped its existing administrative system. Despite the setbacks of the Depression student numbers had increased from 1,100 to 3,300 and the university’s annual revenue from £60,000 to £76,000.20 The first vice-chancellor, R. E. Priestley—scientist, Antarctic explorer and seasoned Cambridge administrator—proved a dynamic and high-minded reformer who was shocked by the conditions he found at Melbourne and set out both to reform the university internally and to raise its profile in the community. He spoke on many local platforms, particularly in country areas, about the purpose and the needs of the university. He was successful in raising money for some of the projects most dear to his heart, but in the end he resigned in 1938 in protest at the government’s refusal to increase the university’s grant.21 In a typical address in 1937, ‘The Place of a University in a Democratic Community’, Priestley made observations whose thrust would find an echo twenty years later in the Murray report. Speaking of the coming sexcentenary of the invention of the printing press, he sadly observed how

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Yet today, 600 years after printing provided us with books, we still herd our students together in hundreds and dictate notes to them; Melbourne University still has to put up with a library that can only give seating accommodation at one time to 200 out of over 3000 students. We need a library that shall be a worthy centre of University learning and research. We need to develop . . . informal teaching in groups of three or four. We need to make a feature of the graduate seminar where student mind sharpens student mind . . . Our job—the job of a University—is not to fill its students’ minds with facts. We need to teach them to think and give them time to think and read; to encourage them to criticise and use their brains; to show them how to weigh evidence; . . . how to handle men and situations as well as things.22 Priestley’s arrival in Melbourne coincided with Menzies’ first trip, at the age of forty-one, to England, in 1935. That trip proved to be for Menzies a kind of romantic odyssey: British institutions and scenes which his upbringing and education had made part of his being became palpable as—in his own words—he came ‘home’ to a land he had never seen. The ancient universities were central to this experience. Oxford in particular overcame him. He lunched there at All Souls (‘a window through which Oxford looks out on the world and through which the world looks at Oxford’), entertained student sons of friends and colleagues at the Mitre, and at Rhodes House gave a gathering of dons and undergraduates an address on the empire and foreign affairs. ‘Peace in Oxford’, he told his diary on his last night there, ‘with the occasional sound of a bell, and the drip of a light rain on the garden outside, and a spirit upon me which it is worthwhile travelling thousands of miles to experience’.23 Oxford was a far cry from Melbourne, but its ‘spirit’, at least as he sentimentally interpreted it, left Menzies particularly ripe for the more down-toearth formulation of the university ideal he would hear from Melbourne’s new vice-chancellor. After Menzies got back, the two talked and corresponded: Menzies clearly soon came to admire Priestley and saw him as an influence Melbourne badly needed.24 In



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1939, after Priestley had resigned, Menzies was asked to give the annual commencement speech at Canberra University College. He chose for his subject a real Priestley title: ‘The Place of the University in the Modern Community’. The tone and the central message were both pure Priestley: that the university’s fundamental task was to serve ‘as a liaison between the academician and the good practical man’.25 Later, as opposition leader in the House of Representatives he would speak warmly in 1945 of the need to bring university problems ‘to the very forefront of our educational thinking’.26 And in 1946, in the debate on the Labor government’s bill to establish the ANU, he was eloquent and well-informed on the relationship of research to teaching, and on the role of the humanities in fostering the production of civilised graduates.27 His ideas might be conventional and sometimes over-emotional, but he remained a university man. *** The Mills committee, as Menzies asked, produced an interim report by August 1950. The government accepted its immediate recommendations, but decided to leave the long-term aspects in abeyance and the committee in the end did not proceed to a final report. What resulted was a kind of ‘band-aid’ treatment of the immediate problem. Each university was to receive, on the basis of what were called ‘weighted student numbers’, a ‘first level’ Commonwealth grant, the only proviso being that its State grant should have reached a stipulated level. After this, up to a stated ceiling in each case, the Commonwealth would provide £1 for each £3 received above its qualifying income by a university from fees and State grants. The legislation authorising the scheme, the States Grants (Universities) Act, 1951, was to be current until the end of 1953: under it the Commonwealth’s special grant for each of the three years would be a little over £1,000,000.28 Though welcome, these extra funds barely met the universities’ immediate needs and by the beginning of 1952 were in any case seriously eroded by inflation—in March of that year the AVCC estimated that costs had risen 40 per cent since early 1950. Two AVCC deputations thus asked early in 1952 for a review of the grant and completion of the larger inquiry, but without success. Copland, who was in both delegations and had of course also been on the original

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government committee of inquiry, was incensed to find that the mandarins, chiefly from Treasury, had managed to have the inquiry treated as a departmental committee rather than a public investigation, which excused the refusal to publish its findings and put Copland, as a member of the delegations—to use his own words—‘in a very difficult position as he was not free to discuss all aspects of the enquiry’.29 Unknown to the AVCC, university finance was, however, discussed at the premiers’ conference in July 1952, when Menzies said that ‘future Commonwealth policy was actively under discussion and a decision would be reached very soon’. Meantime he asked all State premiers to send him a report on the position of their universities.30 But there was no sign of a decision by February of the next year, 1953, when the AVCC met in Sydney. Copland reported ‘having heard’ that the Prime Minister was exploring the possibility of increasing the second level grant, but that was all. In some desperation the vice-chancellors resolved to send a telegram to Allen Brown, the formidable head of the Prime Minister’s Department, asking for the Prime Minister’s views on the notion of setting up a long-term committee of inquiry into the universities’ position, and asking for an immediate answer because most vicechancellors were about to leave for a conference in England. They got a reply by telephone that, in view of ‘weighty problems to be discussed’ at the forthcoming premiers’ conference, the matter of university finance would have to stand over for the time being. Thus rebuffed, the meeting authorised a strongly worded letter to Menzies demanding that in view of the imminent expiry of the emergency legislation of 1950 an inquiry on the long-term needs of the universities be set up.31 More telling was the intervention at this point of the influential chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross. A Sydney graduate, Clunies Ross was invited to deliver the oration at the centenary celebrations of Sydney University in August 1952. He took the occasion to speak on ‘The responsibility of science and the university in the modern world’, and contrived to turn an elegant outline of the traditional role and meaning of the university into an urgent appeal for help: I would emphasise that action must be taken now. We have not yet experienced the full effects of the scientific age, the



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age of specialisation; indeed, it may be said we have scarcely felt its impact if we consider what it will involve ten or twenty years hence. We are living on borrowed capital which is running out, the capital of an older generation . . . Clunies Ross felt deeply on this matter and determined to use his oration as a weapon against official apathy. He sent copies to people who might be able to put pressure on Menzies: Owen Dixon, Casey, Boyer (chairman of the ABC), Campbell (editor-in-chief of the Melbourne Age), and Fairfax (of the Sydney Morning Herald).32 In January 1953 he sent a copy to Menzies himself, with a personal letter in which he wrote: There do seem to be . . . so many University issues which will come before your Government in the near future that I venture to press the recommendation contained in my Oration for the setting up of a Commission of the greatest prestige and authority to redefine not only the material needs but the true purpose and function of the Universities. ‘In my more lightheaded moments’, he added, ‘I had in mind as the Chairman of such a Commission: Owen Dixon. And to match him, on the scientific side, someone like Sir Henry Tizard, and someone [is needed] of equal distinction in the Humanities’. For ‘The more I see of Universities and the preponderating influence of science and technology, the more do I feel it necessary to attempt to re-state the basic purpose of University education—namely the production of educated men and women’.33 If Menzies was impressed, he did not show it. At a meeting of Commonwealth and State ministers in August 1953 the States pressed for more assistance for universities. A slightly jocular exchange between Galvin of Victoria and Menzies nicely sums up Menzies’ current state of mind. Galvin: ‘The Commonwealth derives a great benefit from the Universities, and has assisted them, I do not deny that. Consider what the Melbourne University has meant to the great Commonwealth. Mr Menzies, it has given us your good self’. Menzies, dryly: ‘The Melbourne University did so . . . without a Commonwealth

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grant’. State ministers like Galvin were pressing for a £ for £ arrangement in the second level grant. ‘I do not encourage you to think that much good will come of your submission’, said Menzies. And he made no mention of an inquiry.34 But one initiative early in 1954 showed that the outside drive for an inquiry had not abated, and indirectly triggered a slight shift in official attitudes. At the beginning of March 1954, the Australian National Research Council (the predecessor of the Academy of Science) held a high-powered symposium in Canberra, under the chairmanship of Sir Owen Dixon, to discuss the plight of the universities. Its most important outcome was a unanimous resolution that ‘the time has come for a thorough investigation of our Universities, which are labouring under many handicaps’. A. P. Elkin, the president of the Council, conveyed the resolution to Menzies on 3 March. Some weeks later he received the reply: I will be happy to consider the proposal which you have outlined but in view of the complexity of the problem and my heavy commitments in the immediate future, I do not see much prospect of my being able to reach finality for some time.35 The commitments were indeed heavy: a royal tour was in progress, an election loomed and though Menzies may or may not have known it, the Petrov affair was about to break. The ANRC resolution, however, had two important immediate effects: it started discussion within the Federal bureaucracy on the question of an inquiry; and it triggered a first approach to Menzies by a man whose nuisance-value I believe to have become a vital element in changing the attitudes of Menzies and his departmental officers. This was A. P. Rowe, vice-chancellor of Adelaide University. Though Menzies’ note to Elkin had been temporarily offputting, it was clear that a further response would eventually have to be made, and to begin gathering relevant information Allen Brown or one of his deputies asked the Director of the Office of Education, Jock Weedon, to comment on the ANRC proposals. In a long memorandum dated 13 April 1954 Weedon observed that two kinds of enquiry might be envisaged: one into ‘the academic side of



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universities[,] . . . covering their function, structure, teaching methods and development’, and the other a quite separate examination of university finances, to determine their immediate needs. ‘Commonwealth action to initiate’ the first type of enquiry, he wrote, ‘might be thought ultimately desirable but is considered dangerous at present’. But the second kind of enquiry was essential this year, and should be carried out by what he called a ‘committee of Commonwealth representatives’, with additional State participation where appropriate. It was, in other words, a job for the mandarins. To contain the situation, an interim pat on the collective academic head would not hurt. In the meantime, perhaps the Prime Minister would like to reply to Professor Elkin to the effect that he is well aware of the problems related to the development of the needs of the Australian universities and that he is considering ways in which the Commonwealth, under the constitution, can act in the matter. The files contain no evidence that this last message was ever approved or sent. But Weedon’s unease at the thought of a wideranging enquiry, outside the control of public service officials, was a significant first pointer to the cautious bureaucratic attitude soon dominant in Education and Treasury. Rowe wrote a personal letter to Menzies on 30 March—‘personal’, because although he was about to become chairman of the AVCC that was still a week away, and he believed it to be urgently important that before taking any action on the ANRC resolution, Menzies should seek the views of the Vice-Chancellors’ committee. ‘I remember in 1947 (and before I had any thought of joining a university)’, he wrote, … telling Mr. Chifley that I did not see much hope for Australian defence science until the universities were put on a proper basis. His reply was that the universities would not pull together and that the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee was of little use. Much has happened since then. Commonwealth government aid has been forthcoming

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and the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee has become an influential body. The Committee does, however, need your faith in it and I therefore hope you will use the Committee to the full. Rowe asked for an early opportunity to meet Menzies to talk these matters over, but was told that he would have to wait till after the election. However, Menzies did fasten, no doubt with some relief, onto Rowe’s request that the AVCC be used to the full. There is one comment that I can make now on Professor Elkin’s suggestion. On a fairly hasty consideration of his letter, it strikes me that the questions he raises are more matters for investigation by the universities themselves. I am anxious not to involve the Commonwealth Government in the internal affairs of the universities, and an enquiry such as that suggested by Professor Elkin would inevitably do so. Again, the question of coordination—which you refer to— is, I think, a matter for the universities to work out for themselves. Rowe thanked Menzies but was not easily put off. The Prime Minister was due in Adelaide on 20 May, presumably on the election trail, and Rowe asked for a brief interview: ‘I have been given the unenviable task of writing a report for the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee covering all Australian Universities. It is in this connection that I would so much value a few words of advice’. Allen Brown wired on 14 May that this was not possible. But some time soon after this, Menzies sent Rowe a message through K. C. Wilson, the Liberal member for Sturt and a prominent Adelaide identity, to ask for his views on the matter in question. Rowe was also in touch with Lord Bruce, then chancellor of the ANU. On 18 May Bruce wrote from London, having just arrived home after a trip to Australia, to say he was sorry not to have seen Rowe as he passed through Adelaide on the return voyage. Bruce had been in Canberra (for the opening of University House) and ‘had long talks [there] on the whole question of university education in Australia’. The talks seem to have been chiefly with L. G. Melville, now ANU



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vice-chancellor, and they left Bruce with a vivid picture of crisis in the universities. What was to be done? Theoretically the vice-chancellors could take some action but, wrote Bruce, it was felt that they were ‘so preoccupied with rising costs and housekeeping problems’ that it was doubtful if they could work out an overall solution. An alternative suggestion was to put the whole position frankly to the Prime Minister asking him to take the lead and appoint ‘a representative committee embracing leading citizens other than academicians to . . . report as to the action necessary to be taken to rationalise the whole of our university system’. On 2 June 1954, spurred on no doubt by this letter, Rowe took up his pen again and wrote Menzies a long and—in view of what he had written two months before—slightly surprising letter. The vicechancellors, he said, had asked him to draft a five-year plan for the universities but he could not do so ‘until I know at least your personal views on a matter I regard as the key to the problem’. It was a mistake to assume that the universities’ problem was only one of money: ‘Few want to see the universities over-organised but money will be wasted if they act independently and without regard to Australian education as a whole’. After six years’ membership of the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee and a few months of chairmanship ‘I am convinced that the universities will not coordinate their affairs without the guidance of some outside body similar to the University Grants Committee in the United Kingdom’. He thought the main reason why there was no parallel committee in Australia was that ‘people in the Treasury fear such a body would do little more than ask for more money’. Nevertheless, he urged Menzies to set up an inquiry on the need for an Australian UGC, and concluded with precise advice and a clever political exhortation: If you were to ask me, what would you do in my shoes, I would reply that I would note that the University Grants Committee in the United Kingdom had worked to the general satisfaction of the Treasury and that the Committee had safeguarded both the public purse and academic freedom. I would seek personal advice from the British Treasury on the name of one man who could be invited from the United Kingdom to examine whether a University

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Grants Committee on UK lines would work here and generally to make recommendations to the Commonwealth Government on what should be done. Forgive me for putting, perhaps in a blundering fashion, a political point. Both in Australia and the United Kingdom there is a general belief among university men of all political creeds that universities prosper under Labour governments. I believe the reason to be a series of historical accidents. When major moves have become urgent, it has happened that Labour governments have been in power. If a Liberal government formed a University Grants Committee in Australia it would go far to correct the impression that a Labour government is the more sympathetic to universities. There is no obvious explanation for the disillusion Rowe was now showing towards the AVCC, though later developments were to expose inter-university rivalries which at this stage he only politely hinted at. It is also likely that his apparently abrasive style had not made the first two months of Rowe’s chairmanship easy. (I draw what views I have of Rowe from my reading of his autobiographical account of his experience of Adelaide University—If the Gown Fits— an account from which he emerges in my mind as a reformer, so far as his principles were concerned, not unlike Priestley of Melbourne; but perhaps lacking the Priestley tact. ) Rowe received no answer, wrote on 12 July (1954) to find out why, and Menzies’ secretary, Yeend, discovered that the letter had been mislaid somewhere in the office. On 3 August Yeend wrote to apologise to Rowe and say that Menzies would write ‘as soon as possible’. He does not appear to have done so; and for a time the whole matter seemed to be in abeyance. But behind the scenes Rowe’s letter repeatedly became a reference point for what were a series of new moves. In September H. J. Goodes of Treasury sent his minister, Fadden, a memorandum to say that Menzies wanted to consult with him (Fadden) on the question of a further inquiry into the needs of the universities. Treasury advice, with which Fadden concurred, was that such an inquiry was not necessary; Commonwealth financial assistance for 1955 and later years could be simply provided on a



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similar basis to that of 1951–54. The danger was, Goodes said, that ‘if a special committee appointed by the Commonwealth makes a further inquiry, the Government might find it difficult not to give effect largely to its findings’. About the same time (the memorandum is undated) the Prime Minister’s Department sought from Menzies his reaction to the questions raised in Rowe’s letter. Menzies replied: ‘I would like Mr Brown’s view. Treasury is reluctant, because of possible commitments, but my own feeling is that the only alternative is a series of purely ad hoc claims for money’. Brown’s response was shrewd and pragmatic. It is reflected in a letter which he got A. D. McKnight, his first assistant secretary, to write in January 1955 to E. J. Bunting, then official secretary at Australia House. ‘Dear Jack’, it ran, One of our more embarrassing problems is that of Commonwealth aid to universities. What with the rather obdurate Treasury views and university expansion compounded together with a dash of philosophic dogma about academic freedom, embarrassing is rather an understatement. Allen Brown is thinking in terms of trying to get some middle body which will have enough sense to suppress the excesses of the vice-chancellors and yet be practical and sensible enough to have the confidence of the government. McKnight and Brown thought the UK UGC seemed to function rather like this, and asked for details of its structure and behind-the-scenes workings. Within the month Bunting provided a six-page memorandum on the Committee, stressing the confidence it had built up both with the Treasury and the universities and explaining how the ‘Committee has moved from the position of being an advisory body in the first instance to being, in fact, an executive body, with considerable power. It is the way in which this power has been administered which has led to harmonious relationships with the universities’. While this information was being gathered in the Prime Minister’s Department, the vice-chancellors were fulfilling Rowe’s direst predictions. At a meeting in October 1954 they decided to start planning again by setting up a committee to prepare a coordinated scheme for future university development; Rowe’s work so far on the

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five-year plan he had been asked for would be incorporated in the new report.36 As Professor Burton of CUC, who moved for the new inquiry, put it: He felt that a readiness on the part of the universities to adopt, on their own initiative, plans for development which would avoid undesirable duplication of facilities, and thus economise the use of financial resources, would favourably influence the Commonwealth Government in supporting university development.37 As AVCC chairman, Rowe was to chair the committee. Its eight terms of reference were most precise and ranged from advising on the optimum size of a university to deciding which departments or faculties were too expensive to be duplicated. At the next meeting, in February 1955, Rowe put before the committee a draft report, prepared by his assistant, Henry Basten. There was disagreement on some items and it was decided that no final decisions could be made because all universities were not represented at the meeting.38 Subsequent negotiations produced further disagreement and the whole matter lapsed. Then, at the meeting of October 1955, another fresh start was ordered: Paton of Melbourne, authorised to coopt whatever assistance he needed, was asked to prepare a paper on the coordination of university development, as the basis for new discussions at the next meeting.39 But already, in September 1955, on the eve of his handing over of the AVCC chairmanship to Hytten of Tasmania, Rowe had written despairingly to Menzies, pointing to a variety of weaknesses in the present university system and declaring that there was no possibility that, through the AVCC or any other existing machinery, these could be cured. The United Kingdom was spared such evils because of the University Grants Committee. On the same day, Rowe wrote confidentially to Allen Brown, sending a copy of his letter to Menzies, and adding: ‘I do hope you can do something to persuade the powers that be to take action on a problem of increasing gravity. Some people have wrongly got it into their heads that this is merely a question of more money for the universities. This is certainly not true and, indeed, one of my objects in raising the whole matter is to prevent a



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waste of money’. Menzies’ reply to Rowe, the draft of which Brown would have had to approve, was all bromide: ‘As you know a number of people here have given close attention to the suggestion that an advisory committee be set up for all Australian universities. Your views on the matter will be of great assistance’.40 At the next AVCC meeting, early in March 1956, the Committee’s bankruptcy as an instrument of planning became painfully clear. Contrary to his instructions from the previous meeting, Paton failed to produce a document on university coordination. Instead, he argued that, as the universities would have to look to the Commonwealth for future financial assistance, there was ‘a need for a review of university requirements by a special committee, taking into account the demand for graduates, the increase in student numbers and the necessity of the development of university facilities’. At the end of the meeting the vice-chancellors finally decided, as their minutes put it, ‘to suggest informally to the Prime Minister the establishment of a committee, possibly with an overseas chairman and local members, to make a full enquiry into the future of universities from a national viewpoint’. The wheel had turned full circle—they were back to Rowe’s proposal of June 1954.41 On the evening after this decision had been taken, 7 March 1956, Menzies joined the vice-chancellors at dinner and afterwards talked over their problems. Allen Brown had briefed him beforehand, especially on the proposal which ‘for some time now we have been looking at’: the setting up of a committee on the needs of the universities. I do not think it has ever been envisaged that we would follow completely the precedent of the United Kingdom Committee but in my own mind I can see quite an advantage for the Commonwealth in having an advisory body on University matters which has some standing with the Universities themselves. Brown reminded Menzies that Rowe had written suggesting that as the universities were not wholeheartedly behind the idea of setting up an advisory body, the government should itself do so. But Brown considered it useless to establish a committee without the full

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approval and cooperation of the universities. ‘As the matter now stands some universities do not favour the setting up of such a committee. While Rowe worked very hard to achieve full backing for the scheme during his term of office he did not succeed and discussions are still going on.’42 But at their after-dinner meeting with Menzies the vice-chancellors were—as their chairman, Hytten, put it—‘unanimous’ in asking the government to set up a body to inquire into the future of university development, and ‘greatly heartened and encouraged’ when they found that the idea appealed to Menzies. In later correspondence Hytten referred to the proposed body as the ‘ad hoc’ committee to investigate how best the universities may serve Australia’.43 ‘Ad hoc’ is the key phrase here: this was to be a one-off committee, finally dispelling the confusion in many minds—including, I think, Brown’s—about the distinction between a permanent advisory body like the British UGC and a body to carry out, for once and for all, the investigatory and planning job which the AVCC wanted but had been unable themselves to execute. Menzies’ support was wholehearted, and represented a significant shift in his thinking. It is of course impossible fully to catalogue the influences that had brought this about, though important parts had undoubtedly been played by Clunies Ross, Rowe and Brown. Menzies not only agreed to the appointment of a committee, but asked the vice-chancellors for suggestions about a chairman. Sir Keith Murray, chairman of the British University Grants Committee, was their first choice; Sir Phillip Morris, Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University their third. In London Menzies met Murray, at the Savoy, on 5 July. ‘I was so impressed by his earnestness and concern’, Murray wrote later, ‘that I accepted his invitation on the spot’. Murray particularly recalled how in their discussion Menzies made three points: that the terms of reference should be widely cast ‘as he wanted me to have a free hand’; that he wished Murray to keep the State governments in the picture when visiting the universities; and that the committee should be attached to, staffed from and report to the Prime Minister’s Department. The last-mentioned, Murray thought, ‘was, for me, the most significant as it convinced me of his personal interest’. Murray wanted Morris on the committee, so the vicechancellors got two of their nominees straight away.



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Over the next five months, in Murray’s words, ‘the terms of reference were drawn up in Canberra and agreed with me; the membership of the committee. . . and the detailed arrangements and procedures for the work of the committee were discussed with officials of the Department, mainly Sir Allen Brown and Mr A. L. Moore, who happily became the committee’s secretary . . . At no point did any problem arise’.44 At a distance Murray was presumably not fully aware that, in the Department, Dr Ron Mendelsohn, Moore’s superior, played a most important part, particularly in negotiations about the committee’s membership. Menzies of course had the final say: by the end of November he had approved the appointment of the other committee members: Clunies Ross, J. C. Richards, assistant general manager of BHP, and A. J. Reid, chancellor of the University of Western Australia, a former State Treasury official and a member of the Commonwealth Grants Commission.45 Thus everything was cut and dried and approved by Murray when on 19 December 1956 Menzies signed a letter formally inviting Murray, ‘as foreshadowed in our discussions in London’, to chair the committee. On the same day (19 December 1956), a long memorandum went under Menzies’ name to his Treasurer, Artie Fadden, detailing, as if for the first time, the vice-chancellors’ representations to the Prime Minister, his wish to implement the proposals they made, and his approach to Murray while in London. In puzzlement Fadden sent a copy to Roland Wilson, head of Treasury, observing that it looked as if no action was called for but, to be sure, asking Wilson ‘what you consider the Prime Minister expects me to do in response to his communication’. Equally at a loss, Wilson asked Assistant Secretary Goodes for a short background paper to explain what had been going on. In this, Goodes noted that in November (i.e. four months after Menzies’ oral invitation to Murray), officials from the Prime Minister’s Department had informed him that the ‘Prime Minister was considering appointing a committee and that he would be getting in touch with the Treasurer about it’. Goodes subsequently had discussions with Mendelsohn about a couple of potential committee members, but ‘when I reported these discussions to you in early December you said the Treasurer had not so far discussed the matter with you’. Armed with this information, Wilson wrote acidly back to his minister:

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I do not think the Prime Minister really expects you to do anything in response to his communication, which has all the hallmarks of being a somewhat belated acknowledgement that the Treasurer has a distinct interest in the setting up of a committee on such a subject as this, and one in which, in the Prime Minister’s view, financial matters will be a principal subject for discussion. On the whole I would think it too late to do much about it, . . . the matter has gone too far to be greatly affected by any comments at this stage.46 Given this exchange, one important passage in The Measure of the Years seems, to say the least, somewhat puzzling. There, after elaborating on the deteriorating state of the universities and the need for a ‘basic and far-reaching inquiry’, Menzies writes of his English trip in June–July 1956: So I decided to aim high. If I could get the Chairman of the British University Grants Committee, Sir Keith (now Lord) Murray, to preside, I would do well. As I was, in 1956, about to make one of my official visits to England, I spoke to the Treasurer, my colleague Arthur Fadden, and warned him that I was initiating an enterprise which could not fail, in the result, to be vastly expensive. Now Arthur (or ‘Artie’) Fadden was not a graduate of any university, nor would anybody (as he would be the first to concede) have taken him for an academic type. But he had a good Australian outlook; he knew that this matter was almost an obsession with me; and he was my friend. So he gave me the all clear; without which subsequent events might well have not happened.47 How are we to interpret this quintessentially ‘heroic’ picture of Menzies in action? Fuzzy memory? Self delusion? Cover-up for a coup pulled on Treasury? Or did the crucial conversation on the eve of Menzies’ departure for England really take place and simple, unacademic Artie had no recollection of it, through forgetfulness, maybe even induced by a few of Menzies’ famous martinis?



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*** Properly to discuss the actual work of the Murray inquiry—its methods, the evidence it took, the relations between its members, and the evolution of its conclusions—would of course require a separate paper. Here I apply only the broadest of brushes: my narrow interest is primarily to notice how its findings were handled. In less than three months—July to September 1957—the committee visited all the ten Australian universities and took a mass of oral and written evidence. Menzies kept aloof from the inquiry. He met Murray once half-way through, questioned him, over drinks, and expressed confidence in his judgment. At the end, when Murray came to Canberra on 20 September to hand him the report, Menzies, before reading it, passed Murray a sheet of paper and asked him to write down the essentials of the committee’s conclusions. ‘I noted’, Murray records, ‘four or five of our recommendations on the universities’ immediate financial needs in the coming three years. Though these proposed capital and recurrent grants would increase the Commonwealth Government’s responsibilities by some £24 million over the three years . . . he did not appear unduly perturbed’. Menzies asked that Murray agree to a delay in the release of the report until November, so that the government could at the same time announce how it would be implemented. ‘He then made the amazing statement that he thought he could promise to meet in full the essential proposals that I had noted on his piece of paper. I question whether any chairman of any government committee in any country ever had such an immediate and such a generous response’.48 Writing the same day to Clunies Ross, Murray reported that Menzies told me that the only thing that would now upset his plans would be any premature discussion outside the Cabinet which might start up prejudice and antagonism. Could you therefore sit very tight on our report? This would not of course preclude you taking the line that I took in my broadcast so long as we don’t go so far as to say whose responsibility it is to put things right and how much it is likely to cost.49

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The report presented a masterly account of the history, present conditions, problems and future prospects of the universities; an account which, with its extended discussion of the place of universities in Australian society of the late 1950s, makes it a sociological document of the first importance. But in immediate political terms the practical issue was the set of conclusions to which these inquiries led. The most important were singled out in a Cabinet submission which Allen Brown and his colleagues drafted and presented to Menzies on 19 November 1957: ‘it is in your name and I believe is consistent with your views’. There were two major points: that the government accepted the committee’s recommendation that a University Grants Committee be set up to advise the States and Commonwealth on university finances and developmental policy; and that, during the lead-time for the establishment of this body, there should be an emergency three-year injection of government funds into the system. On the financial side the submission fully accepted the Murray recommendations. For the first time (at least since CRTS days), the Commonwealth would provide grants for capital expenditure, on a £ for £ matching basis with the States up to just under £8 million. The recurrent grant would be increased by 10 per cent, with an additional sum of over half a million to finance a sharp rise in academic salaries, and an emergency grant, which the States did not have to match, of £4.5 million. All told, these proposals meant that, over the three years 1958–60, the Commonwealth would spend on universities approximately £13.5 million additional to the estimated £15 million it would otherwise have spent (and of course, since matching grants were required from the States as a condition for most of this expenditure these figures expressed only a little over half of the additional finance that the universities would receive).50 The Prime Minister’s submission went to Cabinet on 22 November. Menzies did not discuss it beforehand with Fadden who, as Treasurer, was the minister most affected. Fadden in fact had reservations about the Murray report and had asked Treasury officials for a commentary on it. They, predictably, disliked it too, partly for the lavish expenditure it proposed, but chiefly because of the danger, as they saw it, of setting up a universities grants committee. If such a committee were established, wrote one official (probably assistant



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secretary R. J. Randall), ‘Universities would be in the unique position that, although State bodies, they would have direct access to a Commonwealth body constituted to deal with their financial requirements. Other State bodies would not be slow to press for the same privilege.’ And if constituted in the way Murray proposed (with a full-time chairman and seven part-time members, of whom five would be academics) the committee would be ‘heavily weighted in favour of university objectives’. It would, by concentrating wholly on university affairs, have neither the opportunity nor the incentive to look at university problems in a wider financial perspective. On the morning of the crucial meeting, 22 November, Randall gave Fadden for use in Cabinet a page of tersely stated objections. He also wrote privately to Athol Townley, minister for immigration and one of Menzies’ few close associates, to denounce the Murray recommendations.51 Whether any other minister was so lobbied is not recorded, but it appears to have been expected in the Prime Minister’s Department that the submission would not have a smooth passage. Brown’s deputy, Bunting, instructed Moore, who had been secretary to the Murray committee, to be available throughout the meeting in the Cabinet ante-room. During the debate Menzies sent out a number of questions for Moore to answer and at one stage briefly ordered him into the Cabinet room to explain particular points about the Murray committee’s procedures.52 There is of course no record of the Cabinet debate, but in the upshot the Prime Minister’s submission got through unscathed, to form the basis of that parliamentary statement of 28 November with which I began this paper. It seems reasonable to believe that Menzies’ authority and commitment to the reform was the major factor in this outcome. A full explanation of the timing and character of the Murray committee’s appointment, its recommendations and the reforms to which they led would obviously involve a number of matters beyond those I’ve looked at. Above all, the story I’ve been tracing cries out to be given a proper economic and political context, to clarify the limits of the possible at different points of time, and to widen our perspective by considering the universities’ needs within the whole range of competing demands on government. But however limited, an account of the debate among university leaders, of their ultimate

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inability to agree, of their pressure on Menzies and of the related discussions within the Commonwealth bureaucracy, does shed important light on the heroic view of Menzies as saviour of the Australian universities. He was not, as he liked in his later years to imply, the originator of Commonwealth support for the universities, nor (again as he was prone to suggest) did he invent the idea of a Murray-type inquiry—indeed, for a time he was opposed to it. But as that idea developed, partly as a result of discussions among officials in his own department, he showed interest in it and came ultimately to make it his own. Once that had happened he used all his imperious power in Cabinet and party to push the idea through, to have a good committee appointed, and to see that its recommendations were implemented. Why? He is hardly likely to have imagined that in the Australian electorate there were many votes in a pro-university policy. Perhaps there is no escaping the conclusion that, as a university man through and through, and as a declared believer in humane rather than merely technological education, Menzies genuinely saw the solution of the universities’ postwar crisis as a cause critical to the nation’s future and, moreover, to the preservation of that traditional British and classical culture he so revered. Perhaps, too, he was not unmindful of Rowe’s cunning (and, we might add, largely inaccurate) assertion that academics habitually think of Labor parties as the friends of universities. Maybe it is also possible that Murray had sensitively gauged something important in that last encounter he had with Menzies: I shall never forget his parting words. ‘I have been almost thirty years in Australian politics; I have not found them very rewarding, but if I leave the Australian universities in a healthy state it will have all been worthwhile’. It was said with such a note of sincerity, and also of emotion, that I was convinced once again of his deepseated devotion to the universities’ welfare and to scholarship in general.53



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Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), Representatives, vol. 17, 2694–702. H. Stretton to R. G. Menzies, 29 November 1957, National Archives of Australia (NAA), CRS A 463/17, 1957/6541. H. Stretton to A. W. Martin, 9 April 1990. Quoted in the Australian Universities Commission’s Report on Australian Universities, 1958–63 (Canberra, October 1960), 1. Sir Frederick White, ‘Robert Gordon Menzies’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 25 (1979), 460. Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC), minutes of meeting ‘to make decisions in respect of a grant of £30,000 which the Commonwealth Government proposed to make available to universities through the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research for training research workers and for research in subjects connected with the Council’s functions’, 27 October 1936. D. B. Copland, ‘Memorandum on Universities and Research’, AVCC minutes, 21 February 1949, 41–2. This account is based on the Universities Commission’s submission to the Murray Committee, ‘Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme’, NAA CRS A571, 1957/153, part 1. AUC, Report on Australian Universities, 1958–63, 5. Ibid., 6. Copland, ‘Memorandum on Universities and Research’, 42. NAA CRS A 463/17, 1956/115. AVCC minutes, 21 February 1949. Ibid., 24 October 1949, NAA CRS A 463/17, 1956/115. Medley to Menzies, 13 February 1950, ibid. Currie, ‘Notes of an interview between the Prime Minister and the chairman and deputy chairman of the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee’, on 21 February 1950, ibid. Ibid. R. G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, Cassell, 1970, 82. NAA CRS CP 450/7/1, bun. 1, F8. Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 1 August 1933, vol. 191, 565, 638, 642. Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1957, 149–51. Australian Quarterly, vol. 9 (1937), 27–8. R. G. Menzies, overseas diary, 1935 trip, National Library of Australia (NLA) MS 4936, series 139, especially entries for 22 April; 11, 17–19 May. For example, on 28 June 1937, Priestley sent Menzies a copy of one of his addresses, ‘Problems of the universities of the English-speaking world’. It was accompanied by a long letter on the University’s needs, and comments on Menzies’ idea that a society of Friends of Melbourne University might be formed ‘to beat around for funds’. NAA CRS CP 450/7/1, bun. 6, f. 280. R. G. Menzies, The Place of a University in the Modern Community, Melbourne, 1939, 22.

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26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34

35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45

46 47 48 49

50

51

52 53

CPD, vol. 184, 26 July 1945, 4612ff. Ibid., vol. 187, 5 July 1946, 290ff. H. J. Goodes to Roland Wilson, 2 January 1957, NAA CRS A 571, 1957/153. AVCC minutes, 5–7 March 1952. L. W. Galvin, in ‘Report of Conference of Commonwealth and State ministers’, 10–11 August 1953, NAA CRS A 571, 1957/153, part 2. AVCC minutes, 20 February 1953. White, op. cit., 451. Clunies Ross to Menzies, 22 January 1953, NLA MS 4936, series 1, box 27, folder 219. Galvin, in ‘Report of Conference of Commonwealth and State Ministers’, 10–11 August 1953. NAA CRS A 463/17, 1957/423 Part 1. All references until footnote 36 are from this file. Recollected in AVCC minutes, 17–21 October 1955. AVCC minutes, 6–8 October 1954. Ibid., 7 February 1955. Ibid., 17–21 October 1955. NAA CRS A 463/17, 1957/423, part 1. Rowe had recently met Brown at a Canberra University College function. AVCC minutes, 7–8 March 1956. NAA CRS A 463/17, 1957/423, part 1. A. Brown, ‘note for the file’ on discussions after the Vice-Chancellors’ dinner, and Hytten to Menzies, 21/3/56, ibid. From an undated account, in Murray’s handwriting, of his ‘five meetings with the Prime Minister’ (Murray manuscript). It was sent to me on 26 September 1984 by the late R. W. Baker, a close personal friend when Murray was Rector of Lincoln. Weedon to Brown, 22 June 1956; various memoranda by Mendelsohn, November 1956, NAA CRS A 463/17, 1957/423, part 1. These exchanges are in NAA CRS A 571, 1957/153, part 1. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, 84. Murray manuscript. NAA CRS A 463/17, 1957/423, part 6. Murray’s ‘broadcast’ was a ‘Guest of Honour’ talk on the ABC, on 22 September, in which he spoke vividly of the universities’ ills, said an injection of funds was needed, and left it at that. Menzies had seen the text before the broadcast. NAA CRS A 463/18, 1958/416. Murray was presumably merging State and Commonwealth contributions when he told Menzies (see above) that his proposals would cost ‘some £24 million over three years’. Fadden to Menzies, 21 November 1957; R. J. Randall to Fadden, 22 November 1957, R. J. Randall to Townley, 22 November 1957. NAA CRS A 571, 1957/153, part 2. Interview with A. L. Moore, 2 May 1990. Murray manuscript.



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10 R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis

President Nasser announced Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956, in a speech delivered in the main square of Alexandria, to mark the fourth anniversary of King Farouk’s forced abdication. It was a well planned if rather melodramatic coup: when they heard in the speech a prearranged code-word (‘de Lesseps’) Egyptian officers opened sealed instructions, martial law was proclaimed in the Canal Zone, and troops seized the Suez Canal Company’s offices and installations. The Canal, said Nasser, would continue to operate normally, but henceforth under Egyptian management, shareholders would in due time be paid off; and the Canal’s revenues would be earmarked for the building of the Aswan High Dam. Less than a week before, in a thinly disguised political decision, the United States and Britain had withdrawn from negotiations to finance this dam. Six weeks earlier, on 23 June, the last British troops had left the Canal Zone, ending an occupation of seventy-four years. The evacuation had been agreed to in 1954, following sometimes violent anti-British agitation stretching back to 1952. The Articles of this agreement were the culmination of a largely personal diplomatic victory won by Anthony Eden, when Foreign Secretary, over the Published in Australian Historical Studies, no. 92, 1989, 163–85.


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prejudices of Churchill and other old-fashioned Empire men. All British forces would leave by stages over the ensuing twenty months; thereafter, it was agreed, the Canal base would be maintained for seven years by British civilian contractors, during which time—in the event of any armed attack on Egypt—it could be reactivated, and reoccupied by British troops.1 The causes and intensity of the wave of indignation that swept Britain, France and America at the news of Nasser’s action are beyond my concern here, but I should very briefly draw attention to the importance of trying to understand the reaction of at least one of the main actors: Anthony Eden, now British prime minister. The antiNasser obsession which Eden quickly developed has often been thought of as a species of madness. If it was, I like the de facto formulation of it made by Eden’s most recent biographer, Robert Rhodes James. His central argument is that Eden, to the end, was sane and responsible. ‘Eden’, he says, had seriously jeopardised his domestic political position and reputation over the Base withdrawal, and he had shown an understanding of the realities of Egyptian nationalist feeling that was wholly opposite to the ‘colonialist’ attitude of which he was accused by Nasser. If to personalise one’s politics is a deficiency, it is one that Eden has shared with most statesmen . . . in Eden’s eyes, what Nasser had done was a callous betrayal of his solemn pledges and agreements, which was despicable in itself . . . He now posed a grievous threat to British and Western interests that was intolerable. As all close to him quickly realised, Eden [became] consumed with a real personal hatred of Nasser and all he represented. As he wrote in the foreword to Full Circle, ‘the lessons of the ’thirties and their application to the ’fifties . . . are the themes of my memoirs’. Like the French, from the outset of the Suez Canal crisis he was determined to destroy this new Mussolini. On 27 July, the day after Nasser’s announcement, the British Cabinet appointed a committee of five ministers, under Eden, ‘to formulate plans for putting our policy into effect’. This was the

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beginning of the so-called Egypt Committee, which at once became a kind of inner cabinet, responsible for military plans which, by a convention soon established, it never reported in detail to the full Cabinet. The Egypt Committee immediately instructed the Chiefs of Staff to prepare plans and a timetable for military operations against Egypt. Within 24 hours decisions were made to call up 12,000 reservists, post a new artillery regiment and two extra fighter squadrons to Cyprus, and to concentrate British troops then in Libya along the Egyptian border.2 At this point Menzies was on his way home from a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London, planning to travel via Canada, the United States and Japan. On 29 July a message from Eden caught up with him in Chicago: ‘We cannot allow Nasser to get away with this act of appropriation’. The chance, said Eden, must he seized to put the Canal permanently under international management, through political pressure if possible, ‘but in the last resort . . . force may have to be used’.3 On the 31st Menzies was in Washington. ‘In days gone by,’ he told Makins, the British ambassador there, ‘military action would have been the appropriate reply to Egypt but in the present circumstances resort to it would split the western world . . . it should be kept in the background and not talked about.’4 In effect, political pressure had already begun in a joint communiqué issued by France, Britain and the United States, calling for a conference of maritime powers to discuss ways of ensuring international management of the Canal. Force was, indeed, as Menzies said it should be, in the background, though it was naturally impossible for him to know in what form. In secret the Egypt Committee was uncompromising. As their minutes for 30 July record it: ‘While our ultimate purpose is to place the Canal under international control, our immediate concern is to bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian government.’ Britain’s aim should be to limit the function of the conference to the approval of a declaration of policy . . . to form the basis of a Note to the Egyptian Government which we would be prepared, if necessary, to despatch on our own responsibility and which would be a virtual ultimatum. If Colonel Nasser refused to accept it, military operations could then proceed.5 Menzies decided to cancel his visit to Japan, wired Eden to ask what level of representation was envisaged for the conference and

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added that he ‘felt strongly inclined to attend . . . myself’.6 Eden replied that the sponsoring powers had agreed on representation at Foreign Secretary level and he therefore assumed that Casey, the Minister for External Affairs, would come from Australia. But ‘we shall be delighted also to see you here at any time. The sooner the better. If you come I hope you will join our councils.’7 From Canberra the Australian Cabinet consulted Menzies and agreed that he should return to London. In conveying this news to the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), the British High Commissioner in Canberra, Stephen Holmes, intimated that Menzies would attend the conference only for a day or two and then Casey would carry on alone. ‘We understand’, he added, that consensus of opinion at today’s cabinet meeting [this was 7 August] was that UK’s . . . handling of crisis had been absolutely right so far—including precautionary military measures. Some ministers (including, we gather, Casey) were inclined to be apprehensive of possible adverse effects of above measures but they were immediately talked down … We have been warned that cabinet’s views are being put to Mr Menzies and that he may water them down in speaking to UK Government.8 Two days after this, on 9 August, the Foreign Office requested from the CRO a survey of the attitudes to be expected from the various Commonwealth countries at the forthcoming conference. The officer who supplied it, Miss J. M. D. Ward, thought the attitudes of South Africa, India and Pakistan were all likely to be unsatisfactory, and the Canadians had already formally intimated that if Britain used force it would not have their support. New Zealand, Miss Ward reported, ‘is the most likely to support us over military action’. The Australians might be favourable but ‘their wholehearted support is likely to be dependent on winning over Mr Menzies who arrives in London on Friday; Mr Casey personally is however unlikely to adopt a robust attitude’. Miss Ward thought that Menzies would be pulled in two ways: on the one hand he was ‘one of the staunchest friends we have’; but on the other, ‘with every year that passes Australia is becoming more determined not to get out of step with the United States on



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international issues. Mr Menzies when in Washington at first eliminated the use of force. He may wish in London to avoid facing up to the issue . . . He will, however, wish to know the nature of our military plans.’9 On both these last predictions, no doubt to the Foreign Office’s relief, time was to prove Miss Ward absolutely wrong. Though of course invited, Nasser refused to come to the London conference, denouncing the suggestion that the Canal be put under international control as ‘collective colonialism’.10 Two days before the Conference opened, and a day before Casey arrived in London, Menzies attended at Eden’s invitation a meeting of the Full Cabinet and there he spoke robustly about the need to resist Nasser, whose actions, he said, ‘followed the pattern of all military dictators . . . The Australian Government were united in support of the stand taken by the United Kingdom, and he was taking steps to ensure that public opinion in Australia was fully aware of all the dangers.’11 After the meeting Menzies wired home to Fadden, the Acting Prime Minister, a report of the grave view the British Cabinet was taking of the crisis: ‘I would like it to be well realised by our colleagues that the chances of armed conflict are very substantial and that in such circumstances our own involvement would be extremely probable.’12 On the first day of the conference, John Foster Dulles gave the keynote speech, putting forward resolutions whose substance would, as it happened, be finally agreed upon with the approval of eighteen of the twenty-two nations represented. Their essence was that the Canal should be operated by an international board, on which Egypt should have a prominent place and of whose revenues Egypt should receive a fair share. Late that day, Menzies had a long conversation with Home, the Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, which Home afterwards carefully recorded for Eden’s confidential information. Menzies, wrote Home, was extremely pleased with the day’s proceedings, particularly Dulles’ proposals, which he thought if adopted would offer the ideal solution to the crisis. But supposing, Home asked, Nasser turned down the proposals and Britain decided to use force to press them. Would Australia be prepared to contribute? Mr Menzies said Australia would certainly be in this with the United Kingdom . . . It was doubtful if they could send troops, but naval and air help might be possible although

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much depended on the timing of operations as to how effective the help might be. But this would of course be the ultimate step: the proposals must first be put to Nasser. How would this be best done? Menzies said he ‘favoured presentation by a few on behalf of the Conference’, and added: He had to return to Australia some time next week and would not be very happy with Casey representing Australia if the latter should be one of the countries suggested. Casey was on the whole sound, but he would begin to try and adjust formulae with Nasser whereas what was wanted was to face Nasser with a definite plan. (This remark was much to Eden’s taste: on Home’s report he minuted, in red, ‘I agree’.)13 Unaware of this conversation, Casey visited Menzies at his hotel next morning. Knowing ‘from my knowledge of the area’ that there were grave military difficulties about attacking Egypt, and convinced that an attack would have disastrous consequences for British prestige, he asked Menzies to speak personally to Eden against the use of force. He also pressed Menzies to demand from the British a full appreciation of their military plans, of which, as he pointed out, ‘we are entirely in the dark’.14 There is to my knowledge no evidence that Menzies took either request seriously, and it was left to Casey himself to beard Monckton, the British Defence Minister, to ask, as he put it, to be ‘let in’ on the military appreciation of the Suez Canal problem. ‘He said’, Casey records, ‘that only two other ministers beside himself know about it and that the cabinet as a whole did not, so that he would have to get Anthony Eden’s clearance before he made us aware of it.’15 Casey asked Monckton to do this: but if he did, the request seems to have borne no fruit. The matter continued to rankle. By 27 August, for example, Tory of the Canberra High Commissioner’s Office was reporting: ‘the Australian chiefs of staff have been surprised at our failure to give them any indication of our military thinking, having regard to the fact, of which they are only too conscious, that shooting might begin at any moment and that they would certainly be involved’.16



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When the London conference ended by endorsing the Dulles resolutions and agreed that a committee of five should take the proposals to Nasser, Eden and others assumed that Dulles would head the delegation. But, as Dulles’ biographer, Townsend Hoopes, acidly puts it: Although he had invented, presented, argued for and dragooned others into accepting what became the majority proposal, Dulles now wished to slip away from further responsibility . . . He cabled Eisenhower, saying, ‘I think it is preferable that we should become less conspicuous’, and returned home.17 Throughout the Conference, Menzies, the only prime ministerial participant other than Eden, had in effect been the real Australian representative. In a confidential report to his superiors, the CRO’s delegate to the Conference said that Menzies had played a major part in guiding the Conference to its conclusions: ‘his interventions were few but always impressive and his moderation did much to set the atmosphere’, while Casey, ‘whose attitude . . . was a good deal more ambiguous than that of Mr Menzies, played a very small part’. When Dulles withdrew, Menzies ‘almost automatically’ seemed the man to lead the Cairo delegation.18 Under British and American pressure, and after enthusiastic encouragement also from Fadden and the Australian cabinet, he agreed reluctantly to do so.19 Under Menzies’ vigorous chairmanship the committee of five met regularly and worked hard. Between its formation in mid-August and its disbandment in mid-September, it met at least fourteen times, nine of them in London, before going to Cairo on 2 September. The summary minutes of these meetings tell of two major preoccupations: to get prior agreement on what should be the procedures for and limits of negotiation; and to become informed on the technicalities, costs and profits of the Canal’s operations.20 On the first matter, Menzies firmly made the running. His businesslike attitude surfaced again in an insistence that ‘if the President intended to make an agreement it could be done in a matter of days … prolonging negotiations would only make the delegation look foolish’. More uncompromisingly still, at the Committee’s Cairo

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meeting on the eve of the first contact with Nasser he warned against ‘the misapprehension that they were there to negotiate a treaty. That was not the case. They were there only to put forward, explain and discuss the proposals.’ The procedures they had agreed on were all designed in accord with that fact. On the operation of the Canal, the committee took evidence from the General Council of British Shipping and examined one expert witness, an engineer who had had much experience in the Canal Zone. Menzies also reported the outcome of conversations with an old friend, Lord Hankey, once famous as British Cabinet Secretary and a long-time director in the Canal Company. The evidence gleaned from these sources not unexpectedly confirmed for the committee one of the ruling assumptions behind the push for internationalisation: that the Egyptians could be expected neither to work the Canal effectively nor to refrain, via customs, visa and other regulations under their control, from harassing anyone else who could. There was one matter which the Committee did not examine at all. Its minutes betray no concern to study Egypt’s political or social condition: no concern, that is, to take to Cairo some understanding of the situation and sentiments of the people with whom the negotiations were to take place. Possibly the only delegates with any special knowledge of the Middle East were the experienced American, Loy Henderson, and Dr Ardalan, the Iranian Foreign Minister, but neither they nor outside experts were asked to brief the Committee. Menzies himself displayed an almost complete lack of curiosity about the Egyptians: a lack of curiosity for which there were a number of explanations, not least of them the overwhelmingly legalistic view he took of the mission. Points of law and logic for him took centre stage, and as in a court, the sentiments of the people who had to accept them were hardly relevant. This approach, one suspects, was reinforced by irritation at Casey’s constant and uninvited efforts to advise him. Thus we find Casey, on the eve of the first London meeting of Menzies’ Cairo Committee, visiting the Prime Minister at his hotel: to impress on him my personal view . . . that infinite patience and tolerance had to be displayed by our side. I



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explained the extreme fanaticism of the Egyptians, which I thought was beyond that of any race that I knew. The issues at stake were very great. The Egyptians were quite capable of pulling the house down about their ears rather than submit to being rough handled. Those who ‘negotiated’ with Egypt would have to contemplate a much longer period of time for discussion than seemed to be envisaged at present.21 It is instructive to put beside this passage a parallel—but qualitatively greatly different —judgment that Menzies had himself made when in Cairo a few years before this. It was mid-1950, and though Farouk was still on the throne, his radical ministers were—in Menzies’ words—‘making today’s Egyptian slogan “The British must evacuate. The presence of their troops is an affront to our sovereignty”.’ After interviewing the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sala El Din Bey, Menzies confided to his diary an exasperated observation that would have had ironic overtones if read again in 1956: To illustrate the state of mind of these wretched creatures, a round statement by me in the course of the conversation, that it was ‘most unlikely that Australia would ever be neutral in a British war’, was seized upon to justify a remarkable answer ‘well, then, you will come to the rescue in the event of war; therefore all British forces can be safely evacuated now!’ These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, mouthing the slogans of democracy, full of selfimportance and basic ignorance. Two bombs dropped on Cairo, and their only grievance would be that the British troops didn’t come back fast enough.22 Occasional correspondence with traditionalists like Hankey reinforced the stereotype. Nor, as his disregard of Casey most spectacularly showed, was Menzies amenable to informed advice. The Cairo expedition brought this out very strongly. It was, for example, with amused irony that he described the American of the delegation, Loy Henderson, as being ‘somewhat cluttered up with a number of expert advisers’:

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The American expert adviser is of a race apart. He loves sitting in committees to draft documents . . . and he exercises considerable ingenuity in the elaboration of proposals … Whenever Henderson has come to a meeting after a long session with his experts, the marks are heavy upon him. When he speaks for himself, without such well-meaning help, his views are wise, clear and experienced.23 This, of course, was the Menzies ideal: to rely on personal wisdom, and what he liked to call a meeting of minds. The Australian party in Cairo included two senior civil servants, Allen Brown of Prime Minister’s and Arthur Tange of External Affairs, but neither seems to have taken part in the negotiations or to have been invited to discuss them with Menzies. Reporting to his minister, Casey, at the end of the talks with Nasser, Tange wrote tersely: ‘About the future I cannot speculate. The P. M. will go to London and see the Cabinet. I do not know his mind. He is unlikely to discuss the subject with me.’24 Menzies and his Committee were in Cairo from 2 to 9 September. ‘Egypt has not made a false move,’ Tange reported: ‘no mobs, no press leakages, no discourtesy, no propaganda battle’.25 Parallel courtesies were evident in the meetings with Nasser. Menzies disliked the blare and razzamatazz of his public welcome at the airport and in the streets—these to him were the distasteful trappings of dictatorship— but he did his best to treat Nasser seriously and would in his later writings describe him as ‘a patriotic Egyptian who had a strong sense of responsibility and of the gravity of the issue’. In fact, by temperament and culture, the two men were bound to pass like ships in the night. Lighter moments in Heikal’s account of their meeting symbolise the distance between them: Nasser, surprised at Menzies’ affability, could all the same only be politely uncomprehending of the Australian’s after-dinner conversation and mimicry of Churchill and Shaw.26 On his side, Menzies wrote for Eden a confidential description in which one senses the lingering presence of his 1950 caricature of the Egyptian type: I was told that Nasser was a man of great personal charm who might beguile me into believing something foreign to my own thought. This is not so. He is in some ways a likeable



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fellow but so far from being charming he is rather gauche . . . I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence. He lacks training or experience in many of the things he is dealing with and is, therefore, awkward with them . . . like many of these people in the Middle East (or even in India) whom I have met, his logic doesn’t travel very far; that is to say, he will produce a perfectly adequate minor premiss, but his deduction will be astonishing.27 Menzies’ approach to the negotiations was that of a barrister presenting a pat brief. As emissary of the London Conference, he said, he was not in Cairo to discuss the legality or otherwise of nationalisation, nor to contest the question of Egyptian sovereignty. He was there simply to offer a scheme whereby the proposed Canal Board, virtually a tenant, should in effect rent the Canal from Egypt, run it, and guarantee the users’ key requirements of keeping the Canal an open waterway, and operating it free of politics and on a sound financial basis. In this case, as in any other form of tenancy, the tenancy did nothing whatever to diminish the fact of ownership—Egypt’s ownership of the Canal.28 It quickly became clear that this was an argument which Nasser could never accept. To him the tenancy analogy was deeply flawed: in the real world, as he saw it, international control made ownership an empty word and inevitably diminished Egyptian sovereignty. This sticking-point exasperated Menzies: ‘With frightful reiteration’, he wrote to Eden, Nasser kept coming back to slogans: … to ‘sovereignty’, to our desire for the ‘domination’ of the Canal … I exhausted my energy and almost wore out my patience in explaining to him that … what we were seeking was an agreement; and any scheme for the actual control and management of the operations of the Canal, while leaving Egypt’s sovereign rights untouched, was the kind of working arrangement which was an exercise of sovereignty and not a derogation from it. But one man’s definition is another man’s slogan, and pathos and satire laced the tortured argument. Menzies, Nasser exclaimed, did not understand Egyptian psychology:

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We have a complex on this matter. The small nations are more touchy about sovereignty than great ones. Great Britain may find it not inconsistent with her sovereignty to have American bases established in Great Britain, but that is only because Great Britain is a great nation and is not sensitive about sovereignty. The Menzian solution was, predictably, unhelpfully rational: It is good sense and also, I believe, good medical theory that the right way to get rid of a complex is to set out all the facts quite plainly in a sensible way and thrash out a logical conclusion.29 The talks had broken down by 5 September, killed by Eisenhower, who at a press conference on 4 September made it plain that America would only allow a peaceful solution to the Suez issue. The night before, according to his own account, Menzies had in a private talk with Nasser gone so far beyond his brief as to warn the President, ‘in the friendliest way and in no sense as an agent’, that it would be a mistake for him ‘to exclude the possible use of force from his reckoning’. An aide-memoire which Menzies wrote just after this interview recorded how: Much to my surprise, Nasser took this very well and said: ‘I realise the truth of what you say . . . I do not confidently treat the talk of force as mere bluff. It all adds to my feeling of responsibility on this difficult matter.’ I am glad to hear this statement which [is] the first forthcoming statement that Nasser has made. It suggests to me that he will be anxious to secure a settlement though I most deeply doubt whether he can eat his own words sufficiently to make a settlement along lines which we could possibly agree to, under the terms of our authority. Reporting this conversation to his colleagues in the delegation, Menzies told them that the odds against success had maybe shortened from 1,000 to one to 100 to one.30 But then Eisenhower spoke.



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A few days later, Menzies wired home to Fadden, personal and top secret: You know the result, not of course unexpected. Fortunately, there are no complaints about the way we did our job. It is all very well for people to denounce the idea of force, but in a negotiation of that kind with an Egyptian it is good to keep him guessing.31 By the time, a decade later, that Menzies wrote ‘My Suez Story’ for his memoirs, Afternoon Light, he had learnt enough to sense that the last sentence of this message could hardly be published in its original form. So it became: ‘it is all very well for people to denounce the idea of force, but in a negotiation of this kind, it is good sense to keep the other man guessing’.32 Menzies returned to London on 10 September. At the airport he told reporters, correctly, that ‘Egypt will have nothing to do with any peaceful solution of the Canal problem which does not leave Egypt sole master of the Canal’.33 That day, a Times editorial congratulated Menzies on his conduct of the mission and added that ‘firmness and care’ must be Britain’s watchwords as a new stage in the crisis opened: ‘nothing has occurred to alter the view that the use of force cannot be ruled out if other means of persuasion are seen to have failed’.34 From Australia, Fadden telegraphed a message of appreciation and even the Sydney Morning Herald, hitherto very critical of Menzies for not returning sooner and giving the nation the leadership it needed, complimented him on the ‘ability and dignity’ with which he had discharged his mission.35 Menzies saw Eden in London, reported to the Queen at Balmoral, and flew out from Prestwick on 13 September, bound for Australia via the United States. In Canberra on the 18th, he received a spate of congratulatory messages. One old admirer, Ken Bailey, told him that he had become ‘a world figure in a new and splendid sense’, and Dallas Brooks, the Governor of Victoria, invited him to dinner ‘in thanks for the major contribution you have made towards a solution of the present ugly world scene. Nasser must be a real Egyptian crook—a really nasty piece of work.’36 For his part, as he told his friend Lionel Lindsay, Menzies was confident that the ‘Cairo jaunt’ had made him completely au fait with all sides of

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the Suez problem’.37 In this mood he prepared to meet his Cabinet, to get their endorsement for the statement on Suez he would now make to Parliament. Stephen Holmes, the British High Commissioner in Canberra, considered that the Cabinet ‘had been through a difficult time with Mr Menzies absent and communications from him very few’. Fadden, Holmes reported to the CRO, had handled a potentially troublesome situation very adroitly and loyally.38 Holmes knew what he was talking about. Few Cabinet happenings were not leaked to him: ‘we have been told in the strictest confidence that . . .’ is a recurring set of words in his despatches. Thus London learnt of Casey’s messages to Menzies (including one sent to Cairo on 7 September) pressing awkward questions about the British line on force, and then, after Casey got back from London, of the ineffectiveness of alleged attempts by him to ‘infect’ ministers ‘who had previously endorsed the more robust majority Cabinet view’.39 Once Menzies returned, the need to depend on leaks from anonymous sources disappeared: at times, indeed, Menzies was franker with Holmes than with some of his own colleagues. After his initial Cabinet meeting he gave Holmes, for transmission to London, full details of all decisions reached on the Suez issue and provided an advance copy of the speech he was about to deliver in the House. ‘Inevitably’, Holmes reported, ‘we spoke of the divisions in the Australian cabinet over the [Suez] issue during his absence’, but Menzies seemed unperturbed about that now. Casey and McBride, he said, were ‘very much in the minority’, and ‘as it was, what he was going to say would, of course, prevent Casey from taking any weaker line in the debate’.40 Menzies delivered his speech on 25 September and a new phase of controversy over Suez began in Australia. Before that—and during the couple of weeks that had elapsed since Menzies left London— there had been important new developments in the crisis. Three are of special relevance for this story. First, as a result of another of Dulles’ brainwaves, a second London conference—of eighteen nations—convened on 19 September and agreed to establish a Suez Canal Users’ Association (SCUA) whose own pilots would be employed to conduct ships through the Canal, and which was to collect Canal dues and pass on to the Egyptians what SCUA considered ‘their fair share’. It is hard to



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believe that anyone thought Nasser likely to accept this scheme. Hawks on the Egypt Committee saw it more realistically, in Macmillan’s words, ‘as a step towards the ultimate use of force; to serve to bring the issue to a head’.41 Nasser predictably rejected SCUA out of hand and brought in pilots from eastern Europe, and before long the Egyptians were running through as many ships a day as before nationalisation. Second, on 23 September the British and French, in exasperation, and to forestall Russia doing so, decided to refer the Suez dispute to the Security Council. This was a move which (as Holmes reported from Australia on 28 September), ‘mystified and perturbed’ Menzies. He did not think the reason advanced was at all a good one . . . He had wanted the Users’ Association to have a chance to operate and if necessary to have the vessels under its aegis turned back; in fact he thought it was understood that we should not be going to the Security Council until a situation of that kind had arisen.42 Third, the Egypt Committee, reminded of Menzies’ assurance to Home of Australia’s readiness to help if force were needed, discussed the idea of asking for Australian warships. They found, as the record puts it, ‘no valid arguments of military necessity’ but agreed that a request for help was justified ‘squarely on the political requirement’. So Monckton drafted a message which Eden signed, asking for a token contribution: say, a frigate, to go to Aden and release a British ship for the Mediterranean. ‘The important thing would be not what you would have sent . . . but the fact that you have sent it and thus demonstrated to the world that we have Australia with us.’ Holmes handed this message to Menzies on 22 September.43 Menzies had not replied to it when he made his statement to Parliament on the 25th. That statement began as a lawyer’s brief, arguing the illegality of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Canal, denouncing Egypt as a police state and depicting the seizure of the Canal as Nasser’s first step in a bid to unite Arab countries and ‘make the people and economies of Great Britain and western Europe depend literally . . . on one man’s whim’. He spoke of the benefits Egypt might have reaped if Nasser

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had accepted the proposals he had himself taken to Cairo, expressed his hope that SCUA might work, and concluded with what he saw as the three crucial matters now before them: the question of force, the position of the Soviet Union and the import of the Suez ‘confiscation’ on Australia. The first question arose because of the dangers implicit in the last two. The Soviet Union might not want war but was willing to foment trouble in regions where the western democracies could be weakened—and already in Egypt arms had been provided and economic aid foreshadowed. The special danger for Australia in Nasser’s intransigence was that traffic in the Canal might be impeded: . . . an open Canal is essential for British prosperity: a closed Canal could mean mass unemployment in Great Britain, a financial collapse there, a grievous blow at the central power of our Commonwealth and the crippling of our greatest market and our greatest supplier. In these circumstances, he said, it would be suicidal to renounce the possibility of ultimately using force to restore international control of the Canal. Holmes telegraphed the full text of the speech to London and Eden wired to Menzies his warmest congratulations ‘on your lucid and forceful exposition of our problem’.44 Up to this point, the Labor Opposition in Australia had been quiescent. During Menzies’ absence Fadden publicly expressed appreciation for Evatt’s responsible attitude to the crisis, and he and Casey privately met Evatt and Calwell on a number of occasions to explain events and avoid public controversy. On 18 September, the day Menzies arrived back in Canberra, Casey noted in an aide-memoire how ‘I saw Bert Evatt for twenty minutes this morning and gave him some of the appropriate recent telegrams on the Suez matter. Then I went out to meet R. G. M. at the RAAF station.’45 On the previous day, Holmes had asked Casey how long he thought Evatt would ‘remain sweet on the Suez issue. He said till Menzies got back.’46 As it turned out, Casey was only too correct. Menzies’ defence of the use of force, especially when the Suez issue was about to be discussed in the Security Council, enraged Evatt, and fierce scenes followed in the House. Reporting these,



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Holmes sombrely foreshadowed in Australia the deep division of opinion now becoming evident in Britain: Australian public opinion, usually indifferent to External Affairs, is alive to the Suez crisis without full understanding of the issues involved. Menzies and the press have cleared some of these but it is doubtful whether the man in the street would be ready to give wholehearted support to the use of force even if the situation suddenly deteriorated.47 In the same despatch of 28 September, Holmes reported having asked Menzies again about the RAN ship for Aden. Menzies told him that ‘he had not felt this to be a matter he could usefully or wisely raise with his colleagues until we knew the result of the reference to the Security Council’. But he would broach the matter privately ‘with the service minister particularly concerned . . . with a view to seeing whether there were any unobtrusive arrangements which could be made “as in the ordinary course of movements”.’ I have been unable to ascertain whether any such action did take place: it is, however, obvious that ‘unobtrusive’ arrangements would be hardly likely to achieve the British aim of announcing that ‘we have Australia with us’. For the moment, Menzies was stepping carefully. The next month seemed a time of stalemate: while shipping passed normally through the Canal, discussion of the crisis in the Security Council alternated with negotiations under Hammerskjold’s aegis in New York, and behind closed doors, between Egyptian, British and French representatives. On 13 October Eden told the Conservative party’s annual conference that no settlement which would leave the Canal in the unfettered control of a single power would be acceptable and that Britain would continue her military build up in the eastern Mediterranean, because ‘to relax now before a settlement is reached would be fatal’.48 In Canberra Menzies chafed lest, as he told Holmes, ‘there would be negotiation . . . for the sake of negotiation’, allowing Nasser to ‘walk off with the booty’. Menzies was particularly alarmed when Casey (now in New York) reported that the British might under pressure amend their resolutions at the Security Council to include an undertaking not to use force except at the

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Security Council’s direction. That, he told Holmes, ‘would be going much too far’.49 Menzies need not have worried: nothing was further from the minds of Eden and his colleagues than to renounce force. Behind the scenes they pressed on with their military plan codenamed ‘Musketeer’, which acquired new significance when the French drew the British into a plot they were hatching with the Israelis. This was the so-called ‘Plan’. It was sealed on 22 October at a secret meeting at Sèvres, just outside Paris. The most succinct summing up of its import was that of Pineau, the French Foreign Minister. Israel would start military operations against Egypt, which she was fully entitled to do; Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum to Egypt and Israel demanding their withdrawal from the Canal area; When Egypt refused, the RAF would destroy the Egyptian air force and airfields, and an Anglo-French force would seize the Canal.50 Eden never revealed the existence of the Sèvres agreement to his full Cabinet: the closest he came to suggesting what was in store was his telling them on 24 October that ‘the military operation which had been planned could not be held in readiness for many days longer’. Commonwealth governments were not given even that hint.51 The outline story of what followed is well known: how the Israelis attacked Egypt on 29 October, how Britain and France issued a twelve-hour ultimatum calling on both belligerents to withdraw, and on Egypt to allow British and French forces temporarily to occupy key points in the Canal zone, and how British aircraft in surprise raids on 1 November virtually wiped out the Egyptian air force. The Egyptians sank block-ships in the Canal and engineered the blowing up of the vital Syrian oil pipeline; Anglo-French paratroops landed on 5 November and seaborne assault forces on the morning of the 6th. That afternoon the British Cabinet, to the intense anger of the French, accepted a UN cease-fire call, the UN having resolved on the formation of an international police force for the area and— much more important—the Americans having refused to help halt a disastrous international run that had begun on sterling. Meantime,



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in Rhodes James’s words, ‘in Britain so all-pervading was the crisis that no one seemed capable of talking or thinking of anything else. Like Munich, it divided families and broke long friendships. Dinner parties became hazardous, and frequently broke up in acrimony . . . Normal political alliances were shivered into fragments.’52 On the eve of the air assault on Egypt, the CRO sent telegrams to British High Commissioners in Canada, India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to be handed next day to the respective governments to explain why the action had been undertaken. Each, signed by Eden, was in substance a rehearsal of the argument about to be presented to the world: that the British government, with French agreement, had warned Israel and Egypt of their determination not to allow a war to block the Canal. Such a war had in fact now occurred, and must be stopped. This was the official ‘police action’ line: ‘our concern in this grave matter is to stop the fighting and ensure the safety of the Suez Canal, on which so many nations’ lives depend. We expect to raise all this at UNO in the most appropriate way.’ The messages to each government were almost identical, except in the Australian case. Menzies alone received two crucial final paragraphs, which set down, obliquely, the real object of the action: to overthrow Nasser. ‘During our many talks while you were here,’ they began, you and I were agreed that this Suez business was unlikely to be settled properly unless Nasser’s ambitions were curbed. The longer the negotiations have gone on and the nearer we have appeared to get to a negotiated solution the more apprehensive Israel has become. They see in that kind of settlement a certainty that their extinction will be brought nearer through a Nasser who has gained prestige and influence in the Arab world. I would have much preferred that the incident which has provoked this showdown could have been based on wider considerations which would have had a wider appeal. But it was inevitable that sooner or later Egyptian intrigue . . . would produce a crisis. We must take things as we find them. And, for your own private ear, all recent indications suggest that Nasser, far from adopting a milder tone, is preparing for more extensive seizure of power . . .53

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The Australian Cabinet (minus Casey, who was in London) met urgently and Menzies got approval for a statement he would make in Parliament on the evening of 1 November.54 He gave a detailed summary of this in advance to Holmes, who wired it to the CRO with Menzies’ authorisation to use it freely after 8 p. m. Australian time that night.55 But ahead of that Menzies sent a long personal reply to Eden’s message. It bore traces of puzzlement about ‘points on which we lack clarity’ but affirmed support for the action Britain was taking. Menzies of course knew nothing of the Plan and the Sèvres plot; and for the historian it is sadly ironical to observe in this document his loyal efforts to find an explanation for the inexplicable. The thought that Eden might have deceived him would never cross Menzies’ mind, especially just now when it must have seemed to him that he had in fact been made Eden’s confidant. Israel, ran Menzies’ message, may well have made an error by mounting a large-scale invasion of Egypt, ‘because this kind of thing shorn of pinpricking tactics by Egypt itself can so easily be represented as an aggression’. Did the Israelis perhaps think that a movement into Egypt ‘would by exposing the vulnerability of that country tend to reduce Nasser’s delusions of grandeur’? This was, surely, ‘in a world sense’, a tactical error; but still, ‘facts of life must prevail’ and the prompt step Britain and France had taken was the only one possible. Predictably enough, Menzies had unknowingly taken the Sèvres bait: hook, line and sinker. But Menzies and his colleagues were worried about the open breach in the Security Council which had become apparent between Britain and the United States and wondered whether it could have been caused by some kind of breakdown in communication, so that the ultimatum had been issued without consulting the United States first. Menzies told Eden that he had suggested to his Cabinet that the British must have thought that if the United States were consulted, ‘dilatory proceedings in the Security Council would at once have been advocated and the ultimatum would have come too late to have any practical effect. I would be glad’, he added, ‘if you could let me know whether this speculation is correct.’ Finally, however, I would like to add for myself that nobody has more clearly understood difficulties that you have had to deal with since you became Prime Minister. I greatly



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admire your courage and resolution in dealing with them … You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country. Having said that I would express hope that you would make it your personal business to do everything possible to secure some broad basis of agreement with the United States having regard to the fact that our common enemies would regard a serious cleavage in democratic ranks as one of their greatest successes in the cold war.56 When this message arrived a grateful Eden had a copy sent to, among others, the Queen, and wired his thanks back at once, promising a reply to Menzies’ questions but clutching eagerly at the chance of obtaining an influential public statement of support. It would help me greatly if you would authorise me to indicate that Australian Government fully understands our action, or of course any stronger indication you feel possible . . .57 By the time he got round to answering Menzies’ queries, Eden had received the summary of Menzies’ House of Representatives speech, than which he could not have asked for more. ‘Dear Bob’, he wired, ‘I cannot tell you how much your message has heartened me. Personally I think that opinions will steady as events unfurl themselves.’ Responding to Menzies’ questions, he avoided lying about Israel’s motives simply by not mentioning the subject; and, ‘as regards communications between the United States and ourselves, I told the President myself of what we had in mind just as soon as we reached a decision’.58 In fact, the British message to Eisenhower on this matter had been sent only three hours before Eden announced the ultimatum in the Commons: there were deciphering delays, and Eisenhower learnt the news for the first time when Dulles obtained it from the Press Association teleprinter. It was, therefore, disingenuous, to say the least, for Eden to telegraph as he did to Menzies. For one thing, by the time he did so, more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had received from the President a bleak message which began: ‘Dear Prime Minister, I have just learned from the press

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of the 12 hour ultimatum which you and the French government have delivered to the government of Egypt . . .’59 In his speech on 1 November, Menzies told a packed and silent House of Representatives that the Australian government considered the Anglo-French action ‘proper’ and that the failure to consult other British countries in advance was ‘no fault at all. The circumstances were those of great urgency. Hostile forces were approaching each other and extensive combat was imminent.’ Britain and France were not seeking to usurp the rights of the Security Council, but it had already been demonstrated in the case of Israeli ships that a Security Council resolution could be set at nought by either side in the absence of strong executive action. He made it clear that these were the agreed views of the government. ‘They had not been asked’, he added, ‘to make any commitments themselves nor had they made any.’ Though perhaps literally true of the present, specific action, that was a decidedly disingenuous statement.60 That morning the Executive of the Federal Parliamentary Labor party had met and unanimously adopted a series of resolutions which condemned the use of force, demanded immediate reconsideration of the present ‘disastrous’ situation by either the Security Council or the General Assembly, and declared that the Labor party would ‘oppose any attempt by the Menzies government to involve Australia in the Suez war’. When Evatt replied to Menzies in the House, Menzies frequently interjected and, in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘the enmity between the two leaders at once flared into a bitter exchange’. When Evatt said that the United Nations should deal with the crisis, Menzies interjected, ‘What do you mean by “deal with?”’ and Evatt, white-faced, leaned across the table and snapped back: ‘Do you want to cross-examine me?’ Menzies smiled and rubbed his hands, and, gesturing wildly, Evatt shouted that he had plenty of questions to ask Menzies.61 In the Commonwealth, just as out of it, there was little to justify Eden’s conviction that ‘opinions will steady as events unfurl themselves’. Sir Roy Welensky of Rhodesia and Nyasaland announced that his country ‘supported the Anglo-French action’,62 but all other Commonwealth leaders except Menzies expressed either hostility or acute embarrassment. As Holland of New Zealand complained in a secret message to Eden:



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We now find ourselves in the distressing predicament of wishing to stand by the United Kingdom, however great our misgivings on the wisdom of the present course of action, and of not wishing to jeopardise our relations with the United States, upon whom our security in the Pacific largely depends.63 It was thus little wonder that in London great store was set on Menzies’ outspoken views. On 4 November Menzies told the acting UK High Commissioner in Canberra, Tory, that he had given ‘very firm instructions’ to External Affairs ‘to tell Walker [Australia’s representative at the United Nations] to keep closely in step with Dixon [the British representative]’. Reporting this to the CRO, Tory opined that ‘Casey and the Department of External Affairs have in fact been passengers since the beginning of the crisis’. He noted that the Australian Cabinet, in deciding to support the UK action after 1 November, had been ‘solid behind Mr Menzies with the single exception of McBride [Acting Minister for External Affairs, Casey being abroad], working strictly to a departmental brief’: Mr Menzies has been magnificent throughout, never for a moment showing any doubt about the rightness of our action. . . He has gone to extraordinary lengths to help us. As an example, you should know that when his statement to the House of Representatives was being considered in draft by the Cabinet he arranged for it to be passed out sheet by sheet to me sitting in a room beside the cabinet room with a stenographer so that I could dictate a summary of it on its way to be fair copied, all in the interests of getting the text to the Prime Minister in time for use in the Commons debate.64 Two days later, on 6 November—the morning of the seaborne landings—CRO officers drafted for Eden a telegram to tell Menzies ‘how grateful I am for all your help and encouragement during these difficult days’. To the typescript draft Eden added in handwriting ‘You are a true friend and I can never forget it’. The draft included the sentence: ‘You will have heard that the latest news is good and I am now

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beginning to believe that we are over the hump’. Eden added: ‘The paratroops have been brilliant’.65 Menzies was understandably nonplussed when, on the afternoon of the same day, Eden announced the ending of the British operation and the acceptance of the UN ceasefire order. In a flurry of telegrams he urged that a ceasefire must not mean withdrawal, and in speeches and urgent messages to Eisenhower and Dulles began what was to be his chief preoccupation over the next weeks: to try to talk the Americans into seeing the merits of the British case and into a joint effort to secure a general Middle Eastern settlement. This aim was the main theme of a speech he made to parliament on 8 November . . . but ‘unfortunately’, as he put it in a report to Eden, Evatt had followed this speech with a bitter attack on the British government, an attempt ‘to exacerbate American feeling by complaining that you had treated the President very badly. I can only hope that such vapourings do not receive undue publicity in America because they do not represent Australian opinion.’66 Despite the intemperate tone of his attack Evatt had in fact come close to the truth. Britain and France, he said, had broken the 1950 Tripartite Act with the United States by not telling Eisenhower of the action they were about to take because, ‘having been warned, he would have taken steps to prevent . . . this operation of war against Egypt’. More important still, ‘it was clear that deep penetration of Egypt by Israel and the decision of the UK and France to act with their forces against Egypt were associated’, though he quickly backed off from the extreme interpretation: ‘I am not saying it was prearranged’. 67 As early as 1 November the Sydney Morning Herald reported the rumours of collusion then abroad in Washington and criticised ‘the recklessness with which Britain and France have acted’: . . . one of the worst results of their unconcealed haste had been the circulation of the ugly story that Israel was ‘put up’ to the attack by Paris and London in order to secure a pretext for the reoccupation of the Canal Zone. Such a shabby and dishonourable plot would be so repugnant to any friend of Britain that it is difficult to believe the story has any basis.68



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This is no doubt precisely why Menzies, and many people in Australia, if they heard it, could not take the rumour seriously. On the other hand, logic drove others—Nehru and Evatt, for example—as close to the truth as it was politic to come. In the denouement, Eden’s frail health collapsed once the exaltation of 5 November was over. On the 23rd he flew off to Goldeneye in a bid for recovery—to Conservative dismay which had its nastiest expression in Randolph Churchill’s comment in the Manchester Guardian that the only parallel to the position of British troops now in Egypt was Hitler’s refusal to withdraw his army from Stalingrad: ‘But even Hitler did not winter in Jamaica’.69 British refusal to withdraw until a United Nations force was on the ground was the sticking point which produced, on the day after Eden left for Jamaica, and after what Casey (who was there) called ‘a sour and unpleasant debate’, a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly censuring Britain and France and demanding the immediate withdrawal of their forces from Egypt.70 The voting was 65 to 5. Canada and South Africa abstained. Those who voted against were Britain, France, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. Menzies’ English friend and Savage Club colleague, A. P. Herbert, regaled him with an appropriate piece of doggerel: Expect no gratitude from any man, From India, say, or Pakistan: Under the wing of Nasser and the Russ I hope they prosper as they did with us, Though Allah knows why they suppose a pal The man who stole, and stoppered, their Canal. Forget, forgive: but then, a mighty hand To two who did not doubt the Motherland! In all the turbulence, the fools, the frenzies, One rock of sanity was Robert Menzies. As usual, Australia was there— New Zealand too—God bless the faithful pair!71 On 3 December Selwyn Lloyd told the Commons of Cabinet’s decision to withdraw all British forces from Egypt. From Canberra the High Commissioner wired:

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It is clear that Mr. Menzies is unhappy about step we are taking. He has been such a staunch friend that you will I am sure bear in mind importance of giving him personally (even if to no other Commonwealth Prime Ministers) fullest and frankest background to our decision. We gather that there is a further cabinet meeting on 5 December and it is still conceivable that Mr. Menzies may issue some helpful statement after that.72 Home wired back authorising the High Commissioner to give Menzies ‘the full background you have been given’ and from Jamaica came a personal message from Eden expressing again appreciation for ‘the wisdom and leadership you have shown to a free world that refuses to face disagreeable realities . . .’73 But events had run their course and there was little that even Menzies could say. On 4 December Casey issued a statement, which Menzies endorsed, describing the British decision to withdraw as ‘wise’. Cabinet met on 5 December and afterwards Menzies issued a new declaration which reasserted the importance of the British and French action in stopping the spread of hostilities in the Middle East. But, beyond saying such things, he said, ‘it is now more useful to contemplate the future than to continue a fruitless argument about the past’. In wiring the text of Menzies’ statement from Canberra the High Commissioner added: We are told that although unhappy about step we have taken he [Menzies] recognises its inevitability . . . and places blame not repeat not in any way on United Kingdom [but] squarely on United States . . . I understand that in cabinet today Casey reported that Indians in New York had accused Australia of backing United Kingdom entirely out of sentimental and family loyalty. Cabinet strongly repudiated this and deliberately reaffirmed, for our information, that their support had been based on full agreement with what we had done.74 In December Eden returned to London where, on the 20th, he declared under pressure in the Commons the ultimate lie: ‘There



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were no plans to get together to attack Egypt . . . there was no foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt.’ Pushed to the wall, he had held faithfully to the terms of the Sèvres agreement: come what may, it must remain to the end a secret. And anyway, he was very ill. Those not in the know about Sèvres (and of course only very few were) sensed unspoken depths and tragic personal conflict. ‘The mood of the House’, writes Rhodes James, ‘was dismissive rather than hostile.’75 Less than a month later, on 9 January, Eden resigned, protesting—correctly—his shattered health. A few weeks later Eric Harrison, Menzies’ long-time political henchman and recently appointed High Commissioner in London, reported to his chief: ‘With regard to Eden, when I saw him he looked a very sick man, nervous hand movements to the face, walking up and down and repeating rather pathetically that history would prove that he was right.’76 In the twenty years still left to each of them, neither Eden nor Menzies wavered in this belief: that history would condemn a pusillanimous United States and vindicate Britain’s actions in Egypt. Like most of those who agreed with them (and there were many), they shared a conception of Cold War strategy shaped by the vision they had formed of the world when they and Britain were in their prime, in the 1930s and 1940s. Both also had a tendency to facile historical analogies, strengthened in Menzies’ case by impatience with expert advice and in Eden’s by the prejudices of older associates in the Foreign Office.77 Thus, as we have seen, Nasser was for both of them the new Mussolini: the safety of Western democracy demanded his overthrow. It was a simplistic thought, readily adaptable as time brought unpalatable changes elsewhere. As Eden put it to another Australian friend in May 1961: You will not be surprised at my conviction that if Nasser had not been allowed by the United States to ‘get away with it’ at the time of the seizure of the Canal, there would be no Castro now. The appetite of hungry dictators grows with what they feed on.78 The crucible of 1956 clearly turned what had been a congenial political association, which began when Menzies first met Eden in

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1935, into a mutually sustaining, affectionate friendship. To the end of their lives the ageing men corresponded, and the Edens’ door was always open to the Menzies when the latter paid their frequent visits to England. ‘Do you remember saying to me once at Fyfield’, Eden wrote in 1975, ‘that “the trouble with you and me, Anthony, is that we are a couple of old Commonwealth sweats”? How true that was, and I have always been proud of it!’79 They exchanged notes and permission to quote each other as they wrote their respective memoirs and, after publication, approved each other’s accounts of the Suez affair.80 Neither (in Eden’s Full Circle, 1960, and in Menzies’ Afternoon Light, 1967) mentions Sèvres or the Plan, nor did the subject ever come up in any of the extant Eden–Menzies correspondence that I have seen, even after Anthony Nutting (in No End of a Lesson) finally let the cat out of the bag in 1967.81 On Eden’s side that was consistent: if prepared to hoodwink and use Menzies throughout the actual crisis, why should he not maintain the fictions of November 1956 to the end? What is, at first glance, more puzzling is why, once the revelations were made, Menzies appears to have shown no sign of wishing to discuss them, even privately. During an interview in November 1967 the BBC’s Kenneth Harris remarked to Menzies that his ‘Suez Story’ (in Afternoon Light) does not mention ‘this famous word “collusion”. Why is that?’ ‘Well’, Menzies replied, that’s because I know nothing about it. I must be an entirely simple-minded fellow, but if you’re referring to some recently published statements that there was collusion between Britain and France and Israel, then all I can say is that’s not a matter within my scope or knowledge. My book is purely at first hand. I’m writing about the things that I know about.82 The stress on ‘matters within my scope or knowledge’ is significant. It is inconceivable that a man of Menzies’ intelligence, position and access to information could not have been aware at least of wellfounded rumours long before Nutting’s book appeared. As early as December 1956, for example, Percy Spender, Australia’s ambassador in Washington, reported to External Affairs a private dinner



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conversation he had just had with Dulles at the latter’s home. Dulles told Spender that: Lloyd [the British Foreign Secretary] on 14 October had given him no indication of any kind that anything was in the wind. A few days thereafter Eden sees Mollet [the French Prime Minister] and is told by him of the contemplated Israeli action. There had been complicity between the French and Israelis which Mollet had not been at any great pains to conceal. The United Kingdom had not been involved in that complicity but when informed by Mollet of the projected Israeli action had not opposed it and so presumably acquiesced in it. The regrettable fact was that not a word was said to the United States when it seemed clear that the general plan for UK–French intervention must have been worked out then.83 Given his ambiguous relations at this time with External Affairs it is possible that Menzies did not see this despatch. But in any case, it may not have disturbed him unduly. We shall probably never know whether, face to face, he ever discussed Sèvres with Eden. But maybe that is not important. The kernel of the matter is suggested in Menzies’ dismissive exchange with Harris: ‘And you knew nothing about collusion?’ ‘No, nothing whatever. And if I had, I don’t know that it would have affected my mind very much …’ This last remark has a significant echo in a recollection of Peter Henderson’s. It is à propos the Cairo mission in particular, but it bears on Menzies’ memory of the whole Suez story. ‘At some much later time I asked my father-in-law why, to use an American expression, he had let himself be the “fall guy” over Suez. His answer was very simple: when your friends are in great difficulty and ask for help, you don’t let them down.’84

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Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

There are many accounts of this sequence of events. D. Hofstadter (ed.), Egypt and Nasser, vol. 1, 1952–6, Facts on File, 1973 is perhaps the clearest. On the ‘political’ decision of Britain and the United States not to finance the Aswan High Dam, see especially R. Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, 446–52. Ibid., 457, 461–2, 467. 30 July 1956. PREM 11/1094, UK Public Record Office (PRO). Sir R. Makins to Foreign Office (FO), 1 August 1956, ibid. Menzies’ remark caused a flurry in London. ‘Please explain to him’, Home at once wired Makins, ‘that we . . . must think the thing through to the point of considering what courses of action will be open to us if Nasser is stubborn’, ibid. Rhodes James, op. cit., 469. From Washington on 5 August Spender reported a starker version: Harold Macmillan had told John Foster Dulles that if the United Kingdom had to die as a first-class nation, they would prefer to do so ‘with their boots on’, A5462, 118/2/4/II, National Archives of Australia (NAA). Menzies to Eden, 5 August 1956, DO 35/6315, PRO. Eden to Menzies, 6 August 1956, ibid. Stephen Holmes to Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), 7 August 1956, ibid. Fadden’s report of this Cabinet meeting accords with Holmes’s: Casey and McBride were the two who ‘criticised Britain’s attitude on military preparations’, A5462, 118/2/4/I, NAA. Miss J. M. D. Ward to D. S. Laskey, 9 August 1956, PREM 11/1094, PRO. In refusing to attend, Nasser proposed a conference, under Egypt’s sponsorship, of the signatories of the 1888 Suez Convention, Hofstadter, op. cit., 150–1. Rhodes James, op. cit., 497. Menzies to Fadden, 15 August 1956, MS 4936 (Sir Robert Menzies), series 16, box 423, folder 11, National Library of Australia (NLA). ‘Record of Conversation between the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and The Prime Minister of Australia’, 16 August 1956, PREM 11/1094/157, PRO. T. B. Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister: The Diaries of R. G. Casey, 1951–60, Collins, 1972, 240 (17 August 1956). Ibid., 241 (20 August). Tory to Snelling, 27 August 1956, DO 35/6315/135A, PRO. Quoted by Rhodes James, op. cit., 502. Secret report of H. A. F. Rumbold, 30 August 1956, DO 35/6315/135B, PRO. R. G. Menzies, Afternoon Light, Cassell Australia, 1967, 155–7. The summary minutes of all these meetings are in A1838 163/4/7/3/3F, NAA, and the discussion which follows draws on them. Millar, op. cit., 242 (22 August 1956). Diary, 12 July 1950, MS 4936, series 13, folder 39, NLA. Menzies, op. cit., 160. A. H. Tange to Casey, 8 September 1956, A1838/163/4/7/3/3 pt. 7, NAA. Sir



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25 26

27

28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39

40 41 42

43

Arthur Tange spoke to me of Menzies’ views on expert advice and ‘meetings of minds’ at an interview on 7 August 1987. Of course, given Menzies’ understanding of the views of Casey to whom be would expect that Tange would be reporting, it is not surprising that he did not seek Tange’s advice. Tange to Casey, loc. cit. According to the account of M. Haykal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail: Suez Through Egyptian Eyes, Andre Deutsch, 1986, 149–50. W. Maley has asserted to me in private conversation that from discussion with Egyptian diplomats in Canberra he concludes, on the contrary, that Egyptian lawyers, advisers of Nasser, admired Menzies as a lawyer, and his mission was taken very seriously. Menzies to Eden, 9 September 1956, MS 4936, series 16, box 423, folder 9, NLA. Ibid. Also aide-memoire of 25 August 1956: ‘It will be for us to take it out of the atmosphere of slogans and into the atmosphere of practical working arrangements designed to recognise Egypt’s rights as a landlord to give the tenant an opportunity to carry on the leased business in the most secure, efficient and permanent way.’ Ibid., folder 7. Menzies to Eden, 9 September, loc. cit. Aide-memoire of 4 September 1956, ibid., folders 5–6; Menzies, Afternoon Light, 164–5. Menzies to Fadden, 11 September 1956, CRS A4926/XMI, vol. 13, NAA. Menzies, op. cit., 165–6. Rhodes James, op. cit., 503. Times editorial, ‘Firmness and Care’, 10 September 1956. Fadden to Menzies, 11 September 1956, MS 4936, series 16, box 423, folder 1, NLA; cables to Dash (Menzies’ press attache) in ibid., folder 2. Bailey to Menzies, 18 September 1956, MS 4936, series 1, box 3, folder 16, NLA; Dallas Brooks to Menzies, 19 September 1956, ibid., box 5, folder 37. Menzies to Lindsay, 2 October 1956, MS 9104/1648, La Trobe Library. Holmes to CRO, 18 September, PREM 11/1094/6, PRO. Holmes reported on 19 September that Casey had told him forcefully that the ministers ‘had been getting nothing from Mr Menzies’, DO 35/6315/215, PRO. ‘We have been told in the strictest confidence that on 7 September Casey telegraphed to Menzies in Cairo . . .’, DO 35/6315/139, 19 September 1956, PRO. Holmes to CRO, 19, 28 September 1956, DO 35/6315/182/216, PRO. Rhodes James, op. cit., 511. Holmes to CRO, loc. cit. At the CRO the faithful Miss Ward, upset by Menzies’ ‘pessimistic frame of mind’, drafted for Eden’s signature a long telegram explaining the Security Council appeal. But it was never sent: officials in Eden’s immediate entourage composed a substitute which offered no explanation and reported favourably negotiations under way in New York. J. M. D. Ward to F. A. Bishop and associated documents, 11 October 1956, PREM 11/1095, PRO. Egypt Committee, 29th and 30th meetings, 17 and 19 September, PREM

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57

58 59 60

61

62

63

64

65 66 67

68

11/1508, PRO. Holmes to CRO, 27 September, PREM 11/1511, PRO. The speech and Eden’s message are in PREM 11/1095, PRO. Millar, op. cit., 243, 245 (4, 18 September). Holmes to CRO, 19 September, DO 35/6315/215, PRO. Holmes to CRO, 28 September, loc. cit. Hofstadter, op. cit., 199. Holmes to CRO, 11 October 1956, PREM 11/1095/40, PRO. Rhodes James, op. cit., 527–9. Ibid., 534–7. Ibid., 552. Eden to Menzies, 30 October 1956, PREM 11/1096/172, PRO. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 1 November: the meeting had lasted until 11.30 p.m. Holmes to CRO, 1 November 1956, DO 35/6336/20, PRO. Menzies to Eden, PREM 11/1096/142, PRO. This copy bears in Eden’s handwriting the people to whom ‘No.10’ should send the letter: the Queen, the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, the Cabinet Secretary. Eden to Menzies, 1 November 1956, PREM 11/1096/137, PRO. Endorsed:. ‘This message is being despatched before any reports have reached us of what Mr. Menzies has said today.’ Eden to Menzies, 1 November 1956, DO 35/6336/16, PRO. Rhodes James, op. cit., 543. The speech was fully reported in Holmes to CRO, 1 November 1956, loc. cit. ‘Fortnightly Summary’, 8 November, ibid. SMH, 2 November 1956. The CRO was informed on 1 November of the official Labor position, as set out in a public statement by Evatt, Tory to CRO, DO 35/6336, PRO. UK High Commissioner, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to CRO, 2 November 1956, PREM 11/1096/99, PRO. Holland to Eden, 1 November 1956, PREM 11/1508, PRO. The New Zealanders were also nervous about the possibility of a cruiser of theirs, the Royalist, becoming embroiled in any action against Egypt. The Royalist, on indefinite loan from Britain to New Zealand, had undergone a £3 million modernisation, and was at this time completing trials with the British Mediterranean fleet. Tory to CRO, 7 November 1956, DO 35/6336/78. The statement referred to was Menzies to the House of Representatives, 8 November. Eden to Menzies, 6 November 1956, PREM 11/1096/36. PRO. Menzies to Eden, 8 November 1956, DO 35/6336/65, PRO. The UK High Commission, Canberra, to CRO, 9 November 1956, ibid., folio 58, reports this speech in detail for British edification. SMH, 1 November 1956, quoted four ‘leading and responsible American correspondents’ on ‘official feeling in Washington . . . that Britain and France may have engineered the Israeli invasion of Egypt’. The UK High Commissioner sent the relevant SMH cuttings at once to CRO, DO 35/6336/10, PRO.



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69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76 77

78

79 80

81

82

83 84

Rhodes James, op. cit., 583. Millar, op. cit., 256 (25 November). A. P. Herbert to Menzies, MS 4936, series 1, box 15, folder 131, NLA. Holmes to CRO, 3 December 1956, DO 35/6336/1222, PRO. Home to High Commissioner, Canberra, 4 December 1956, ibid., f. 134, PRO. UK High Commissioner, Canberra, to CRO, 5 December 1956 (two despatches that day cover this paragraph: ibid., f. 136 and f. 138), PRO. Rhodes James, op. cit., 592. Harrison to Menzies, MS 4936, series 1, box 14, folder 119, NLA. For an interesting example of some Foreign Office mandarins’ reactions to Nasser, see E. Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, London, 1986, especially 360–1. Eden to W. S. Robinson, 15 May 1961, W. S. Robinson Collection, box 4, folder 39, Melbourne University Archives. Eden to Menzies, 10 June 1975, MS 4936, series 1, box 2, folder 15, NLA. Typical of a series of these exchanges is Eden to Menzies, 20 April 1959, asking permission to quote in Full Circle the latter’s private letter of 9 September 1956, reporting on his mission to Nasser (see note 29 above). Menzies agreed (10 June) ‘assuming as I do that it is not grossly defamatory of anybody I would not wish to defame’ but when Eden sent him the draft he included, among minor corrections, the comment: ‘I think it might be prudent to omit the phrase “like many of these people in the Middle East (or even in India) whom I have met” ’ (28 June). Ibid., folder 14, NLA. On 1 November 1956, on the eve of his resignation from the Eden ministry, Nutting had told an incredulous Shuckburgh ‘the whole story from the beginning’. Shuckburgh, op. cit., 364. Broadcast, Sir Robert Menzies and Kenneth Harris, 9 November 1967, film no. 199, Script Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. 29 December 1956, A5462 118/2/4 part 5, NAA. P. Henderson, Privilege and Pleasure, Methuen Haynes, 1986, 148–9.

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11 Speech is of Time

1994 has been a great Menzies year, with TV and radio programmes, and with seminars and orations, most of them serious attempts to re-value the central figure of the so-called ‘Menzies Era’. Disinterested scholarship has not accounted for all of this historical scrutiny. For many people, the search for what they think of as Menzies’ ‘secrets’ has had special contemporary relevance. What, they ask, has gone wrong with the political party of which he was the virtual creator and what, if anything, could a better understanding of him and his work as person and leader do to help today’s Liberals? I hope you will be relieved to hear that I do not intend to discuss such weighty matters. I want, rather, to talk about a question which you or I might consider more lighthearted: Sir Robert’s attitude to public speaking and his performance at it. Mind you, Sir Robert himself would have been horrified if he knew that we were tempted to think of this subject as a lighthearted one. He cared greatly about the art of speaking, whether in parliament, to international gatherings or to more homely audiences, like those of Pleasant Sunday afternoons. He was eagerly sought after as an opener of factories, hydroelectric works, lakes, fetes, shows and sporting events, and was in incessant demand as an after-dinner speaker. Though a master of Edited text of 1994 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture.


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what he thought of as the science of government, Menzies also saw politics as an art, and talked of speaking as the acme of that art. He had a profound respect for the gravitas and etiquette of parliament. He considered good speaking essential to the health of parliamentary proceedings, which he thought could too easily be reduced to a predictable charade by the exigencies of party discipline. In his view (and this well before parliamentary broadcasts began in 1946) what happened in parliament was more than a mere pantomime. Menzies flourished in the days before political images could be created by quick doorstop television grabs. It is not hard to imagine his lordly horror if he could see today’s politicians being made or damned by the clever, or stupid, things they say in response to journalists’ often inane questions at the doorway of Parliament House. Speech is of Time you will know as the title Menzies gave to a small collection of his own speeches and essays which he published in 1958. The phrase, as the book’s flyleaf reminds us, comes from a somewhat enigmatic passage in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: ‘Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; or as I might rather express it: Speech is of time, Silence is of Eternity.’ Why did Menzies take his title from these words? Partly, I think, because he wanted to contribute his own mite towards defeating Carlyle’s ‘silence of eternity’. For in his Preface, Menzies remarks on the innumerable speeches he has made, and writes of his desire ‘to have some of them given a degree of permanency’. Of course the few he could fit into his little book would be but a drop in the ocean of words of his that were in fact already preserved—in newspapers, Hansard, pamphlets, printed articles. But this, we may say, was undifferentiated preservation. By making his own selection from this mass Menzies was providing a personal focus. In the process he also gave the phrase ‘Of Time’ a second, more obvious meaning. His choice of speeches for the book must have been made in 1957, the year after the crisis over Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Menzies, it will be recalled, had played an important and somewhat controversial role in condemning this action and later in defending the use of force against Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. Of the sixteen pieces he chose to

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preserve in Speech is of Time no fewer than seven—or almost half— were speeches he had made explaining his case on the Suez Canal issue. The remainder of the book showed no similar concentration. It ranged widely over subjects from ‘The English Tradition’ to ‘Politics as an Art’, from ‘Churchill at Seventy-Five’ to ‘Modern Science and Civilization’. The speeches on Suez are precise, detailed and scholarly—no academic historian of this period or subject could afford to neglect them. But it is doubtful whether a general reader after, say, a decade or so, would have found them as understandable, or as interesting, as the other speeches in the book. More than that, I venture to think it possible that if Menzies had been making his selection in, say, 1967 instead of 1957 he would not have included anything about Suez at all. By then time and many other preoccupations would have blurred the edges of his and his readers’ memories, to put the events of 1956 into a quite different perspective. In other words, the attention to speech is contingent. Especially where subject matter is concerned, recovered speech seems indeed to be of time. The Menzies of Speech is of Time is of course the mature Menzies, halfway through his second, long prime ministership, and recognised on all sides as Australia’s most experienced and best public speaker. In this lecture our main concern will be to consider some of the principles and gifts which made the mature Menzies the speaker he was. But before embarking on that discussion I would like to offer a few glimpses of the evolving younger Menzies as speaker, and that for two principal reasons. First, I think we should notice how the environment from which he came and in which he developed his powers did so much to shape his ideas and practice about public speaking. And second, in what at first seems a somewhat unrelated matter, I want to draw attention to the way in which, on his first trip to England, he found himself in 1935 facing up to what he saw as an almost cathartic test of his speaking skills. How he saw this test and what it did for his self-confidence are important matters for our understanding both of him and of his subsequent attitude to the art of speaking. Menzies studied Law at the University of Melbourne and was admitted to the Bar in 1918. Debating, addresses to the Historical Society and fulfilment of his duties on the Students’ Representative

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Council (he was president in 1916) gave him a taste of public speaking and, naturally, his legal studies involved development of the forensic art. We have a picture of him as he entered the legal world from his friend and fellow-lawyer, Percy Joske: Menzies’ strength at the Bar and subsequently in politics lay in his personality. He had an incredible degree of charm and good looks. His personality was forceful and determined, and like many another Scot he would ride roughshod over his opponents. He employed his cutting tongue without hesitation. As he always spoke with great authority and was readily quoted, his talk could and did cause harm to the unfortunate at whom it was aimed … [He had] a fierce determination to succeed, which made him cause offence to others, often thereby doing himself harm. There was a special sense in which Menzies could be said to have grown up in a political atmosphere. He was a favourite of his maternal grandfather, John Sampson, who had been in his younger days president of a miners’ union, and who, at over seventy, still had what Menzies once called ‘the divine facility of not talking down to children’. Grandfather Sampson took a most active interest in contemporary Labor politics. As a schoolboy in Ballarat Menzies went to see him regularly, and read and argued about material which the old man gave him from the Sydney Worker. Then there was Menzies’ uncle, Sydney Sampson, editor of the Warracknabeal newspaper, who between 1906 and 1919 represented the electorate of Wimmera in the Commonwealth House of Representatives. Young Bob saw much of Uncle Sampson whom he credited, among other things, with leading him at an early stage in his career to take a special interest in constitutional matters. Finally, there was Menzies’ own father, James, articulate, intelligent and public-spirited, who in the small-town world of Jeparit was a natural leader: lay-preacher, Shire Council President, involved in a variety of endeavours from sports to cultural activities, and eventually representative in the Victorian State Parliament of the local electorate, Lowan, from 1911 to 1920. James, too, did much to bring the

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world of politics and the idea of public service into the home in which his son grew up. But perhaps more important than that, we must observe the mature Sir Robert’s assertion in his reminiscences that reaction against his father’s speaking style was an important factor in shaping his own. In Afternoon Light Menzies reflects on the fact that his father was, as he puts it, ‘eloquent but over-emotional’. He broke down, ‘a mass of nervous energy’, in his maiden speech to the Victorian Legislative Assembly: ‘he had no originating humour, and so took everything in the House too much au grand sérieux’. That fitted a judgment the son had long since made. As Menzies recalled it in the same memoir: … although I have always had a lot of emotion in me, I learnt to distrust its public expression. When my father was in full spate at some meeting, and drew tears from his audience, I am ashamed to say that I used to shrink back in my seat and say to myself, ‘I wish Father wouldn’t do that!’ In effect, in my own later public and political life, I distrusted emotion, and aimed at a cold, and as I hoped, logical exposition. It was years before I ever exhibited emotion either in the House or on the platform. Menzies made his first political speech in 1926, when he was persuaded, probably by lawyer friends, to join in a movement protesting against changes to the arbitration system which the then Prime Minister, S. M. Bruce, put forward at referendum. It was a time of considerable industrial unrest, and the government envisaged fighting the unions more effectively by winning constitutional change to increase Federal arbitration powers at the expense of those of the States. A ‘Federal Union’ was formed in Melbourne to fight the proposal, and Menzies was one of a galaxy of volunteer speakers at the formal launching of the Union’s campaign in the Prahran Town Hall. His Uncle Sydney Sampson came to listen to him. Twenty years later, Menzies still vividly remembered what happened after the meeting. He went out and joined his uncle in the car, and said, rather tentatively, ‘Well, Uncle, how did it go?’ Uncle Sampson looked at him for a moment, then said quietly:

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My dear boy, as an argument to the High Court of Australia it was admirable; as an address to the electors, it was hopeless. The art of political advocacy is the art of judicious and varied repetition. Until you can learn to repeat yourself with skill, you will never make a politician. ‘I have observed this canon’, Menzies added, ‘but with some moderation’. The correspondent to whom he gave these confidences was no other than his old rival, Billy Hughes. Strictures like those of Uncle Sampson no doubt helped concentrate the mind, but this was in any case a period when young middle-class and professional Melbourne men were showing a remarkable interest in State politics, and especially in the public speaking associated with it. To many, Victorian politics and administration seemed to have reached in the 1920s a low level of grubbiness and sheer ineptitude, and cried out for a new breed of young politicians, who would be efficient and dedicated to a high conception of public service. Symptomatic of this feeling, for example, was the rapid development of a Constitutional Club which boasted a wide range of training activities. They included debating groups and a model parliament which met each week; classes in public speaking, and study groups on public finance and industrial relations. It was in this atmosphere that Menzies decided in 1927 to stand for the Victorian Legislative Council. His reasoning was simple. It was reproduced by Alan Dawes, a journalist who drafted a biography not in the end published, but which drew most of its material from conversations with Menzies. ‘Well here you are’, Menzies is supposed to have said to himself, ‘you are practising your profession; you are earning a lot of money;’—as money was thought of in those days—‘and you’ve got an enormous amount of work to do. But isn’t it rather a narrow sort of existence? Isn’t it about time that you cut out of this, and did a certain amount of public work?’ Thus in 1928 Menzies first entered parliament. But not only that, he was one of three activists who established what they called the Young Nationalist movement—as a ginger group within the main non-Labor party organisation. Their aim was to raise political consciousness and to train political speakers, and for this work they recruited some key members of the older Constitutional Club. The influence of the Young Nats grew rapidly, and in 1931, in what seemed

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to foreshadow a takeover, their leader, Menzies, was elected president of the National Federation, the Nationalists’ extra-parliamentary organisation. In his first presidential address to a conference of party delegates, Menzies declared (in words curiously relevant in 1994): I believe that a large majority of the public today is perfectly ready to give its adherence to a party which will display political principle and political courage . . . We have suffered far too much from people who have no political convictions beyond a more or less genteel adherence to our side of politics. That kind of adherence is worthless. We must have people who believe things, and who are prepared to go out and struggle to make their beliefs universal. It was this refurbished State organisation which was soon to merge into the new Depression-created United Australia party, and which Menzies, by then deputy leader of the Victorian parliamentary party, left in 1934 to take the Federal seat of Kooyong. Almost at once he became Prime Minister Lyons’ Attorney-General. By then he was on all sides recognised as one of Australia’s most accomplished parliamentary debaters. But not only that. He was also becoming a much sought after speaker on a variety of platforms outside parliament. He enjoyed the easy rapport he found he could establish with most audiences, and he felt a genuine sense of mission as the advocate of democratic values as he saw them—especially in the face of the growth of Nazism and Fascism. He was particularly apt at finding arresting ways to pose what he saw as the most vital questions. In December 1933, for example, he asked a large UAP rally at Camberwell: ‘Can anyone here prove that we are Hitler-proof or Mussolini-proof, or that the parliamentary system in Australia has an immortality denied in other parts of the world?’ On another occasion, to one of his favourite audiences, the Methodist Pleasant Sunday afternoon, he wove his talk around a subject very apposite at the time: shirts. He took his text from the slogan of a Melbourne shop: ‘Our shirts are wide in the body and long in the tail’. The world, said Menzies, had developed a peculiar interest in shirts, ‘not in the width of them or in the tails, but in their colour and association … in many ways we have come to associate

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all forms of aggressive nationalism with the adoption of the shirt as a symbol’. He was referring, of course, to the Nazi Brown Shirts, Mussolini’s Black Shirts, even Mosley’s English Blue Shirts. And he went on to elaborate eloquently on the terrible threat private semimilitary shirt organisation posed to the traditional British ideal of a rational, contract-based, free society. It would be easy to multiply examples of the verbal dexterity Menzies had clearly mastered by the mid-1930s, and the remarkable rapport he could by then establish with an audience. But he was, after all, a big fish in the relatively little pools of Melbourne and Canberra. How would he rate in a setting where expectations of excellence were higher and the competition keener? And for him, of course, that could mean only one place: the imperial metropolis, London. He had his chance to find out in 1935, at the age of forty-one. In that year, he was one of a party of Australian ministers who accompanied Lyons to London. Inter alia they went to take part in the Silver Jubilee celebration of George V’s reign, and a great associated conference of the Empire Parliamentary Association. This being his first visit to England, Menzies, fortunately for posterity, kept a detailed diary of his doings and feelings. This diary is in my view one of the most spontaneous and fetching documents in the whole Menzies archive. Not least of its many fascinations are the intermittent remarks it records about public speaking. At the beginning of the visit, there was a degree of self-doubt mixed with a note of disillusion, as the British seemed not, after all, to be exemplars of the great art. In the first few weeks Menzies himself spoke not at all, mainly because he was never asked, but also out of courtesy, to avoid competing with his chief. At the first official luncheon Lyons, who spoke for the Australians, ‘makes most admirable speech! He is doing famously and I may be well content to be in the background while he does as he is now doing’. But Lyons was not at a banquet given by the Empire Society a week later, and Menzies, who was, noted: ‘on the whole the speeches bad, and I longed to make one’. A little after that he attended a Caledonian Society banquet but it produced what he recorded as ‘the usual collection of dull speeches. . . I could have made a speech about Scotland’s living place in the world but, perhaps fortunately, I was not asked’.

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Visiting the Commons Menzies listened to Chamberlain giving a budget speech. ‘Excellent and delivered from scanty notes’, he recorded. But Churchill displeased him: ‘I perceive that the idol has feet of clay. His language is good, but his expression hesitating, and he practically reads what he has to say. Moreover, his theme is a constant repetition of “told you so”, and first-class men don’t usually indulge in this luxury’. On the night of the Jubilee ceremonies the British government dined Dominion visitors at Claridges’ but, writes Menzies, ‘Ramsay MacDonald’s speech misses a great opportunity— all “wuds, wuds, wuds”, and Bennett’s [Canadian PM] reply remarkable only for an American accent and pointlessness. I become more and more gloomy—where are the after-dinner speakers? Perhaps the quality of such speeches is in inverse ratio to the quality of the wines, which here are always excellent’. But by this time his own performances had begun: a luncheon address at the Constitutional Club (‘performance fair’), a speech at the Devonshire Club (‘for the first time I satisfy myself’), an address to a luncheon at the London Australian Society (‘well received’). Then at a dinner at the Canada Club to honour Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan), who had just been appointed Governor-General of Canada, Menzies replied to the toast to the guests, late in the evening ‘to an audience’, as he remembered, ‘grown very restive and, in the case of some, slightly alcoholic, and to my pleasant surprise I get away with it—the greatest ovation I’ve ever had!’ It must have been quite an evening: ‘I had a sort of levee afterwards; and was elected an Honorary Canadian a couple of dozen times’. The press was now describing him as ‘a remarkable speaker’. ‘He is’, said the Sunday Times, ‘a model of urbanity … His speech at the dinner to Lord Tweedsmuir … could hardly have been bettered. Mr Menzies is Australian-born, but he speaks precisely in the manner of a cultivated Englishman’. By the time of the Empire Parliamentary Association conference Lyons had had to return to Australia, and Menzies’ ballooning reputation made him virtually the inevitable Dominion spokesman on ceremonial occasions. The greatest of these was the luncheon of welcome which the Speaker of the Commons gave to overseas delegates in Westminster Hall. There, before a distinguished gathering of 500, the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, delivered the key

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oration, and Menzies was given the honour of replying on behalf of the guests. What happened is best told in his own words: A red letter day. I speak with Baldwin in Westminster Hall; possibly the first Dominion Minister ever to speak in this historic spot. We lunch first, and I am terrified to be sitting with the Speaker, Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain. . . A great occasion, and I have for once written out my speech so that I shall not collapse in the presence of the shades of Edmund Burke and Fox and Sheridan. Baldwin speaks magnificently; he has vigour, eloquence, a rich historical imagination and an immense prestige. My heart sinks. He, contrary to the practices here, does not read his speech; so I put mine on the table and commit myself to the mercy of providence. I think of Mother and Father listening in 12,000 miles away and trust not to dishonour them and get to my feet, and mirabile dictu, get away with it. A magnificent audience gives me an ovation at the finish, and I am deluged with congratulations. Tonight, at the Imperial Institute, I am quite excited to find my speech, so to speak, the talk of the room. Even the Duchess of York (sweet creature) has heard of it. He did not exaggerate. Next day more congratulations came in, and The Times hailed the speech with a leading article and a verbatim report. Well, what did Menzies in fact say? Fifty years on, in a vastly changed world we can expect to find it difficult to empathise fully with the undoubted contemporary impact of this speech—here, perhaps, is a classic illustration of one sense in which speech is of time. Baldwin had called the spot where they were meeting ‘sacred ground’: the hall of Rufus, nursery of the English common law and parliament. Menzies took up this theme: the English parliamentary system would endure because ‘its roots were deeply set in the history and character of the British people’. No-one in his audience, except perhaps his wife, Pat, could know how much this speech drew on the words of the emotional

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diary he had been writing as he gulped in English scenery and historical sites, almost as if the phrasemaking of those writings had been rehearsals for public performances. He spoke of his feelings as he stood before Hampden House and how, for him, the rafters of Westminster Hall still rang with the voice of the past. Freedom in England, he said, was ‘no concession granted either by a mob or by a dictator: 800 years of history made English institutions like the grey stone villages he had lately seen in the Cotswold Hills’. He understood the Prime Minister [Baldwin], that great lover of the English countryside, better when he had seen them. Far beyond the activities of the ribbon-builder and the subdivisional expert, they stood as the lovely embodiment of a pact of mutual assistance between the old stonemason and the landscape on which he built. They seemed to him to illustrate most perfectly the harmony which was the essence of the best things which England had given to the world. The analogy between the Cotswold villages and the harmony and long evolution that English institutions represented had already appeared in the diary. It was a conceit which would reappear in many articles Menzies wrote and speeches he gave on his return to Australia. I think it true that for Menzies the experience of England in 1935 was of great significance. He had quite consciously aspired to try himself out there as a speaker. With the exception, perhaps, of Baldwin, he had found the English disappointing, and himself not wanting. In a sense, it was for him an important confirmation of self. And however secure he might already feel about his speaking power at home, the English successes could only enhance that security. Naturally the English experience bore chiefly on the set speech, whether on formal occasions, like the Westminster luncheon, or more informal appearance, like those of the after-dinner circuit. Performances of the same kind were of course required in Australia, but another feature of political speaking salient at home, skill in debate both in parliament and on the hustings, was scarcely relevant to the performances which now, and in the future, gained Menzies great renown abroad. On visits to England in 1936 and 1938 he was again in demand as a speaker. But he kept no diary on these trips, so his experiences and his reactions to them are not documented.

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However, on a visit to wartime England in 1941 Menzies did keep a careful diary, which shows an active and continuing concern about his performances as speaker. In his addresses informal talks to Australian troops in North Africa and to munitions workers in Britain are listed side by side with more formal speeches to clubs, dinners and societies. In recording all this Menzies carefully gives a number to each speech, however humble: altogether there are eighty-one, delivered over a period of five months. He also carefully notes the merits or blemishes of many of them. In other words, he still cares deeply about his performances. His most moving rewards came on the way home, when he was asked to address the Canadian House of Commons and the United States Congress. Members of the former, in an unprecedented display of excitement, hammered loudly and continuously on the desks in front of them, in appreciation of the speech he gave them about the beleaguered Britain he had just left. Members of the latter spontaneously rose and cheered after he addressed them. The American press hailed Menzies as the other voice of the British Empire, the equal, that is, of Churchill. *** These triumphs were followed by disaster for Menzies in domestic politics, when later in 1941 he was forced to resign his prime ministership—the prime ministership which he had originally won after the death of Lyons in 1939. In the complex story of that fall, no deficiency in public speaking had a part. Indeed, with rich overseas experience and twelve parliamentary years behind him, Menzies was now reaching the height of his powers as a speaker. To get the framework clear, let us remind ourselves that Menzies’ party, the UAP, was devastated by Labor in the election of 1943, and that it was from that defeat that the idea emerged in 1944 of forming a completely new non-Labor, or Liberal, party. Menzies became its leader, and therefore Leader of the Opposition, between 1944 and the election of December 1949. The Liberal victory in that election of course opened the way to the long prime ministership which only ended when Menzies stepped down in January 1966. In the earliest days of the Liberal party we have some intriguing glimpses of Menzies’ feelings about parliamentary speaking, through letters he wrote to his son, Ken, who was at the time on service with the AIF. This was during the

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run-up to the Federal election of 1946—the election, that is, between the debacle of 1943 and the Liberal triumph of 1949. The letters discuss the quality of speakers on whom the then Labor government had to depend, the expectations Menzies had of the new Liberal opposition, and his general worries about the standard of debate in the House of Representatives. At the time (it was in 1945) Prime Minister Curtin was ill. (Though of course Menzies could not know it then, Curtin was in fact in his final tragic decline. ) In Curtin’s absence, Menzies judged the government to be ‘hopeless’ (his word) as a debating force. It had to rely on Forde, Evatt and Calwell. Menzies found none of them very impressive: Forde’s speeches represent nothing so much as the crackling of thorns under a pot, and nobody takes him seriously. Evatt is an execrable debater who loses his temper and is almost a genius for the disorderly presentation of a case. Calwell is under the impression that vulgar personal abuse couched in the coarsest and most extravagant language is a sign of mental virility. In the previous session of parliament—their first—his own followers were, he thought, superior, but lately they had disappointed him: There is not a sufficient disposition to study bills closely. There is a sad falling off in manners, much to my regret, because I feel that whatever comes or goes people of my party ought to set a good example in courtesy and dignity of debate. The longer I go on in parliament the more struck I am by the paucity of true debaters. There are plenty of people who can talk, particularly when some previous speaker has in effect told them what to say. There are some who can prepare a set speech and plough through it with magnificent indifference to what has gone before. But the man who can seize hold of the point made by his opponents, destroy or brush it aside, and proceed to make a lively counter-attack with relevance and reasonable brevity and with sufficient personality to hold the interest of the House, is indeed a rare bird.

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It is worth pausing at this point to notice that what Menzies was really talking about here was the secret of his own debating mastery, in which analytic skills combined with an uncanny capacity for catching swiftly and accurately at the essence of the matter in hand. There are many witnesses to the natural and cultivated gifts involved here. I like, for example, the explanation for Menzies’ long ascendancy in Australian politics offered by Jo Gullett, who from boyhood knew Menzies, who served under him as Liberal party whip, and who was something of a rebel backbencher before finally leaving politics in 1955. ‘It is difficult,’ Gullett has written, to exaggerate the pre-eminence enjoyed by Menzies for over a quarter of a century in the federal parliament. He had many natural gifts, of which the greatest lay in the quality of his mind. His capacity to absorb and retain information, facts, opinion, prejudices, was most unusual. He had a particularly logical mind, so that even in his conversation, let alone his set speeches and arguments, his remarks were always in sequence. Whether he was drawing on his memory, or making up his mind as he went along, each point he made reinforced the others and added to a logical and rounded whole. He spoke like this because it was the way he thought. Friends and enemies both remarked constantly on the related gifts which made this logical mind so effective: the clarity of Menzies’ language and his extraordinary speed in grasping the inwardness of a matter. Frederick Shedden, the Defence Department Secretary who worked closely with Menzies in both of his administrations and accompanied him to England in 1941, was one who saw lucidity as the secret of Menzies’ success as a speaker in all settings. ‘His crystal-clear mind and beautiful English’, wrote Shedden, ‘explain difficult things that worry the ordinary citizen, in such a manner that he [the citizen] feels they are the very things he has been feeling but unable to express himself.’ The opinionated political journalist Alan Reid, who made much of what he alleged to be Menzies’ lack of original ideas, nevertheless conceded that Menzies ‘had one of the fastest minds I have ever

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encountered for identifying the central . . . factor in any issue or problem, for resolving the problem on the basis of what was fundamental, and for explaining and exploiting the central issue in beautifully chosen and easily understood words.’ On Menzies’ quickness of mind, Roland Wilson, a by no means uncritical fan, still cherishes the memory of a number of occasions on which he watched Menzies decimate opponents at a Canberra meeting, or make a stunning speech in London, using a few technical points which he, Wilson, handed to Menzies on a piece of paper at the last minute. And no less a person than Billy Hughes told Jo Gullett that though he thought Menzies lacked the gift of moving or inspiring great crowds or bodies of troops (a gift, of course, which Hughes believed he himself had in abundance) ‘when it comes to Parliament I truly consider that Menzies is not only the best debater I have ever heard, but in my judgement the greatest who ever lived. And I have read Burke, Cicero, Randolph, Churchill, Pitt and Fox’. That might sound extravagant, but Hughes was not given to extravagance in praising others, especially a man whom he had over a quarter of a century considered a rival for party leadership. The gifts that made Menzies this kind of debater (the kind, that is, whose rarity in parliament he had bemoaned to his son) were perhaps unteachable. But there were other things that the plodders might learn. I mean things like the dangers of over-elaboration, the uses of intonation, the importance of tailoring utterances to a targeted audience’s capacity to understand and absorb. On such matters Menzies in his later years took a kind of fatherly interest in instructing followers prepared to take advice from him. Gordon Freeth, for example, who served as a minister in the later Menzies governments, has said that, like a number of others, he learned all he knew about what he calls ‘the art of good speech-making’ from Menzies. Freeth has a beguiling memory of how Menzies might invite a few of his people for a night-cap in the cabinet anteroom, to sit down with him and listen through a loudspeaker to the debate still going on in the House. Menzies’ custom was to provide a running commentary on what was going on. Freeth particularly remembered, as typical, a remark about Billy Snedden. ‘You’d think, after all his years in parliament, he would have found out the value of using an occasional pause.’

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We must, however, return to the 1946 election and there, in preparation for the poll, we can see Menzies taking a role rather like that later described by Freeth. In looking at this period one is also reminded of an observation Sir Paul Hasluck made of a later period but which was certainly true by the mid-1940s: that time had developed in Menzies a special political nous. ‘He had a longer political experience than most of us and . . . his experience had been absorbed into his store of knowledge rather than being just a stack of memories to justify likes, dislikes or prejudices, as was sometimes the case for a man like John McEwen’. The best glimpse we have of Menzies as political teacher at this earlier stage is at two conferences which the then new Liberal party organised at Bundanoon, to instruct in policy and tactics candidates selected to contest seats in New South Wales. Menzies led all discussions and the transcript of the proceedings (kept in shorthand by Menzies’ press secretary) wonderfully documents the easy relationship of confidence Menzies was setting up in the new party, partly through his personal warmth, but also through the distillation of his by now extensive experience as a professional politician. What he provided, in response to a barrage of questions, were explanations of what the party’s policies implied, what constitutional limits there were to the promises that might be made to voters, and a range of matters of that kind; but, above all, simple pragmatic advice on such matters as how, in the real world, one wooed voters. Here he is, for example, at his most down-to-earth: One of the real dangers of every new candidate is that he tends to get himself mixed up in far too many details, too many different items of policy. We have all been through it. Someone says, ‘my vote will depend on what you say on so and so’, and you wonder about what you are going to do about it. Nine times out of ten that cove will vote against you anyhow. Actually, you win or lose the election on a limited few major matters. A few matters are at the heart of your campaign, and if you talk about these your audience will think about them, and most of your questions will have relation to them. But if you try to fill up your policy with a myriad of little instances and smaller matters . . . you will

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let the fellow down the street take charge of your campaign and you will be like the fellow who mounted his horse and galloped off madly in all directions. Though soundly based on experience, advice on this and other points did not have the desired effect when it came to the election. Excited by the promise of the new party, Menzies and some of his colleagues had developed unrealistic expectations of its immediate success. These expectations were dashed as the 1946 poll was counted—the Labor government’s majority was barely dented. Menzies and the Liberals had badly underestimated that government’s prestige in the electorate as a result of its war effort and its idealistic postwar reconstruction plans. In uncharacteristic despair after this defeat, Menzies came close—perhaps the closest in the whole of his political career—to leaving politics altogether. He told his friend and mentor, the great jurist Owen Dixon, that he could no longer take parliament seriously, and that in any case his party could never win with him as leader. And the two agreed on seeing a coming scenario, which in hindsight must surely take the prize for political bizarreness, that the principal division in Australian politics would soon be between the Labor party and the Communist party, with the Liberals a sideline irrelevancy. But the itch for public service, and Menzies’ own sheer enjoyment of public life, could not be quelled. The crisis passed, and he went on as an increasingly effective opposition leader. There were some incipient rumblings about his leadership, but no serious challenger appeared, and by 1947–48 his position was unassailable. Not least of the reasons for this was his leadership in the fight against Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the private banks, a fight which Boris Schedvin, the official historian of the Reserve Bank, has correctly observed marked something of a turning point in the fortunes of Menzies and the non-Labor parties, in that it enabled them in politics to take the high moral ground for the first time since 1939. We noted earlier Menzies’ distrust of emotion in public speaking, partly in reaction, as he himself said, against his father’s style. But the passage I quoted, in which Menzies speaks of trying for what he calls ‘cold, logical exposition’, has an instructive tailpiece. ‘I could never become emotional by design,’ he writes,

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such a technique, which I have occasionally heard employed, strikes me as cheap and theatrical. But every now and then, if you make speeches and do not read essays [he is referring here to the difference between a speaker who speaks spontaneously and a ‘speaker’ who reads his speech], a strong feeling will leap into your heart and mind, and then it happens. To pinpoint occasions when, as Menzies says, ‘it happens’ is, I think, a very instructive exercise indeed for anyone interested in developing an understanding of him. We obviously cannot go into this matter in any detail here. But let me scratch the surface in one sample instance: the key speech in that process I have just spoken of—the use of the bank nationalisation issue to seize the high moral ground. Let us observe Menzies opening the opposition case against the second reading of the nationalisation bill, in October 1947. On this occasion much was expected of his performance in the House of Representatives. Hundreds were turned away when the doors of the public gallery were opened, and the press and diplomatic galleries were packed. Of his perspiring nervousness before so important a performance, Menzies later wrote to his friend Lionel Lindsay that ‘if somebody had smacked me on the back I would literally have splashed’. He spoke to a silent and tense House for an hour and twenty-three minutes. ‘I rise to speak tonight,’ he began, with a very heavy sense of responsibility. It is my duty, and I do not mind saying, my pride, to open the debate against the most far-reaching, revolutionary, unwarranted and unAustralian measure introduced in the history of this Parliament . . . It will wantonly destroy the system of trading banking which has been intimately associated with the whole of the economic development of Australian business and production. It will create in the hands of the ruling political party a financial monopoly, with unchecked power to grant or withhold banking facilities or bank accommodation in the case of every citizen . . . This bill goes far beyond banking. . . This bill will be a tremendous step towards the ‘Servile State’, because it will set aside

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normal liberty of choice, and that is what competition means, and will forward the idea of the special supremacy of government. That is the antithesis of democracy. Meticulous analysis of the details of the proposal followed, and at the end he declared: This debate, we passionately believe, begins a second battle for Australia, a battle in which victory will go to those who are not only brave, but alert and vigilant. As the great John Milton said in his essay on ‘the Second Defence of the People of England’, ‘Unless that liberty, which is of such a kind as arms can neither procure or take away . . . shall have taken deep root in your minds and hearts, there will not long be wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery what you have acquired by arms.’ Friends and supporters thought this one of the best speeches Menzies had ever made. He received a host of congratulatory letters on what Lionel Lindsay called ‘your clear and scornful revelation of the Chifley heresy and Spoliation scheme’. Professor Douglas Copland, then ambassador to China and about to return to Australia to take up the first Vice Chancellorship of the Australian National University, wrote: I am not supposed to be mixed up in politics, as you know, but I am going to break the rule and send you a message of congratulation on the speech you made on the banking legislation. I thought it was one of your best—clear, cogent and convincing to those who were prepared to bring an impartial mind to the problem . . . it is the sort of speech which one can read and re-read, and I suppose that is the ultimate test. In the speech in question, strong feeling, some might say emotional exaggeration, breaks through principally in the opening and conclusion. In what we might call the meaty middle part careful logic prevails. That is why Copland, a hard-headed economist, could write

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that the speech passed the test of reading and re-reading: as well as expressing deep feeling, it had something coldly logical and meaningful to say. The pattern evident in this speech—elements of emotion, particularly at the beginning and the end, with careful reasoning in between—appears often enough in other major speeches on matters about which Menzies cared deeply, like the threat he believed he saw in Communism, the sanctity of contract as the basis of a stable society, respect for the British monarchy and British institutions as the core of Australian government and freedom. I have neglected to talk about the various precepts on public speaking that Menzies formally advanced in places like his essay ‘Politics as an Art’, in Speech is of Time, or the chapter on the science and art of politics in The Measure of the Years. Please look at both for the pleasure of tasting a master craftsman reflecting on his trade. I would only conclude by underlining his contempt for politicians who employ speechwriters—he himself always had what he once called ‘an obstinate objection to having other people’s words put into my mouth.’ Besides, he preferred to speak from notes—he disliked and avoided whenever possible the act of reading a speech even though it always happened that he was the sole author. A speaker’s object, he once wrote, is to move the audience in front of him. To do this most successfully he ‘must project his own personality in words which at least appear to come fresh from the mind and lips. He must be himself. People are roused and stimulated not by the reading of an essay, but by the passion and persuasion of a human being.’ Whatever the mood and subject of his disquisition, audience was, with Menzies, everything. His very real power to set up a living relationship with his hearers was one of the greatest gifts cultivated over his long years of public life. We should not be pompous about this. He could seek to instruct, but equally there was in him the goodhumoured readiness to entertain. His election meetings normally drew big crowds, not necessarily because everyone there supported him, but because they enjoyed the fun. It would be wrong of me to conclude without reminding you of this, and I do so by quoting a marvellous description which the political scientist Don Rawson made of him in the election of 1958. If present testimony counts, it is close to the Menzies I myself seem to remember:

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Urbane but tough-minded, with a powerful but not wideranging intellect, and an ample store of what may be described as either moral courage or arrogance, he exemplifies many of the qualities of the Australian managerial and professional classes. His voice, with its well-articulated consonants and full vowels, could nevertheless be the product of no other country than his own. He is never seen in a more characteristic setting than at an election meeting, when his superb lucidity and powerful but restrained irony will suddenly be interrupted while the Prime Minister crudely and bitterly taunts some luckless interjector. It is a combination of qualities which many Australians find attractive. The lecture concluded with a tape of the early part of a speech in which Menzies addressed a meeting of the Sydney University Liberal Club in October 1953.

Speech is of Time


259

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Bibliography of A. W. Martin’s Writings Books 1959

1966

1969 1977

1980 1983 1987 1993 1993 1999

(with P. Wardle), Members of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, ANU Social Science Monograph 16, Australian National University, 249. (with P. Loveday), Parliament Factions and Parties: the First Thirty Years of Responsible Government in New South Wales, Melbourne University Press, 207. (ed.), Essays in Australian Federation, Melbourne University Press, xi + 206. (with P. Loveday and R.S. Parker, joint editor and contributor), The Emergence of the Australian Party System, Hale and Iremonger, xviiii + 536. Henry Parkes: A Biography, Melbourne University Press, xiii + 482. (ed.), Letters from Menie: Sir Henry Parkes and his Daughter, Melbourne University Press, xix + 192. (with A. Curthoys and T. Rowse, editor and contributor), Australians from 1939, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 474. Robert Menzies: A Life, vol.1 1894–1943, Melbourne University Press, xiiii + 440; pb. 1996. (ed., with Patsy Hardy) Dark and Hurrying Days: Menzies’ 1941 Diary, National Library of Australia, x + 177. Robert Menzies: A Life, vol. 2 1944–1978, Melbourne University Press, xx + 596.

Articles, Chapters, Pamphlets 1953 1954 1955 1956 1958 1958

1962

1962

‘Economic Influences in the “New Federation Movement”’, Historical Studies 6. 21: 64–71. ‘Free Trade and Protectionist Parties in New South Wales’, Historical Studies 6. 23: 315–23. ‘William McMillan: A Merchant in Politics’, Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society, XL. iv: 1–28. ‘The Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 1856–1900’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2. 1: 46–67. ‘Henry Parkes and Electoral Manipulation, 1872–1882’, Historical Studies 8. 31: 268–80. ‘Electoral Contests in Yass and Queanbeyan in the Seventies and Eighties’, Journal and Proceedings, Royal Australian Historical Society, 43. iii. ‘Pastoralists in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, 1870– 1890’, in A. Barnard (ed.), The Simple Fleece, Melbourne University Press: 577–91. ‘Sir Henry Parkes and Public Education in New South Wales’, in E. L. French (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education, 1960–61, Melbourne, 3–47.


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1964 1968 1971 1972

1972 1973 1974 1974 1976 1977 1979

1980 1982 1983

1983 1984

1985

1986

1987 1987 1987

Henry Parkes, Oxford (Great Australian series), 30 pp. (with P. Loveday), ‘The Politics of New South Wales, 1856–89. A Reply’, Historical Studies, 13. 50: 223–32. ‘A Note on the Attempted Assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh, Sydney 1868’, La Trobe Historical Studies, 1. 1: 23–42. (with R. Goldman), ‘La Trobe: A Case Study of a New Australian University’, in W. Roy Niblett and R. Freeman Butts (eds.), Universities Facing the Future, London: Jossey-Bass: 220–34. Victoria, One Society?, Meredith Memorial Lecture, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 16 pp. ‘Australia and the Hartz “Fragment” Thesis’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 13, no. 2: 131–47. ‘Henry Parkes: In Search of the “Actual Man Underneath”’, Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 63: 216–34. ‘Parkes, Sir Henry’, Australian Dictionary of Biography 5: 399–406 ‘Henry Parkes and the Political Manipulation of Sectarianism’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 9, no. 1: 85–92. ‘Drink and Deviance in Sydney: Investigating Intemperance 1854– 5’, Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 68: 342–60. ‘The Changing Perspective on Australian History’, in W. S. Livingstone and W. R. Louis (eds), Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands since the First World War, University of Texas Press: 9–31. ‘A New Middle Class? A Note on the 1950s’, Australia 1939–1988: A Bicentennial History Bulletin, no. 2: 15–32. ‘The “Whig” View of Australian History: a Document’, Teaching History, vol. 16, no. 3: 7–25. ‘Australian Federation and Nationalism’, in R. L. Mathews (ed.), Public Policies in Two Federal Countries: Canada and Australia, Canberra: Australian National University: 27–46. ‘The Rural Reconstruction Commission, 1943–7’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 29, no. 2: 218–36. ‘Elements in the Biography of Henry Parkes’, in James Walter and Raija Nugent (eds), Biographers at Work, Institute for Modern Biography, Griffith University, Brisbane. ‘Vietnam and the First Vietnamese Refugees’, in J. Ly and F. Lewins (eds), The First Wave: the Settlement of Australia’s First Vietnamese Refugees, Allen & Unwin, 1–19. ‘Henry Parkes’, in L. Kramer et al. (eds.), The Greats: The 50 Men and Women Who Most Helped to Shape Modern Australia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson. ‘Politics’, in G. Davison, J. W. McCarty and A. McLeary (eds), Australians 1888, Sydney: 383–401. ‘The People’ and ‘The Country’, in A. Curthoys, A. W. Martin and T. Rowse (eds), Australians from 1939, Sydney: 59–76, 99–117. ‘Fighting the War’, in A. Curthoys, A. W. Martin and T. Rowse (eds), Australians from 1939, Sydney: 20–4, 26–8.

Bibliography


261

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1987

1989 1990 1990

1990

1993 1995

1995 1998

1999 1999

2000 2000 2004

2004

‘H. C. Coombs’, ‘R. G. Menzies’, and ‘Henry Parkes’, in G. Aplin, S. G. Foster and M. McKernan (eds), Australians: A Historical Dictionary, Sydney: 93–4, 266–8, 313–14. ‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis, 1956’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 92, 163–85. ‘Parkes and the 1890 Conference’, Papers on Parliament 9, pp. 18 ‘An Australian Prime Minister in Ireland: R. G. Menzies, 1941’, in F. B. Smith (ed.), Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh, Canberra: Australian National University and Cork: Cork University Press: 180–200. ‘R. G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’, in F. B. Smith and P. Crichton (eds), Ideas for Histories of Universities in Australia, Australian National University, 94–115. ‘Writing about Robert Menzies’, The Sydney Papers 5. 4: 52–61. ‘Menzies the Man’, in S. Prasser, J. Nethercote and J. Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Melbourne: Hale and Iremonger: 17–32. ‘New Light on the Petrov Affair: Evatt’s Absence from the House’, Quadrant 39. 6: 46–50. ‘Lyons, Joseph Aloysius’, in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press. ‘Speech is of Time’, in A. Gregory (ed.), The Menzies Lectures, Melbourne: Sir Robert Menzies Lecture Trust: 274–93. ‘The Politics of the Depression’, in R. Manne (ed.), The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation, Text Publishing: 80–118. ‘Sir Robert Gordon Menzies’, in M. Grattan (ed.), Australian Prime Ministers, Sydney: New Holland, 174–205. ‘Menzies’, Australian Dictionary of Biography 15: 354–61. ‘Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon (1894–1978)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 37. 831–35 (incl. ‘Dame Pattie Marie (Pat) Menzies (1899–1995)’). ‘Parkes, Sir Henry (1815–1896)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 42. 774–6.

Reviews, including: 1967

262

‘Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, 1788–1850, A–H (1966)’, in Historical Studies 12: 584–6

Bibliography


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Index Aborigines, 36, 42–5, 47, 116, 117, 142 academic freedom, 180, 192 accountants, 111, 112 Adams, Francis, 16, 19, 62 Adelaide, 39, 191 administration, 44, 78, 104, 114, 126, 181 administrators, 104, 113, 127 affluence, 35, 107, 108 agriculture, 17, 60, 112 America, 54, 58, 72, 108, 158, 159, 162, 207, 217, 250; see also United States Americans, 34, 54, 56, 108, 223, 229, 250 anthropologists, 44 Anzacs, 30, 34 appeasement, 139–54 arbitration system, 3, 243 architects, 112 aristocracy, 36, 39, 58, 60 artisans, 11, 13, 24, 78 associations, 21, 22, 23, 111 Aswan High Dam, 206 Australia, 38, 72, 101; colonies, 40, 62; description, 32, 34; experience, 30, 34, 36, 39; government, 210, 258; historiography, 4, 7, 14, 23, 29, 36, 41; history, 28–52; nineteenth century, 24, 25, 59; paradox, 64, 65; people, 5, 143; society, 3, 8, 14, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35, 39, 42, 45, 47, 58, 63, 70, 201; volunteer forces, 30; warships, 220; watershed 1950s–1970s, 34 Australian Cabinet, 209, 225, 228 Australian National Research Council (ANRC), 189, 190 Australian National University (ANU), 39, 179, 186 Australian Universities Commission, Report on Australian Universities 1958–63, 176–205

Australian workforce: occupations 1947 (table), 102; occupations 1961, 1966 (table), 103 AVCC, 179, 180, 181, 186, 187, 190–7 Baldwin, Stanley, 126, 247–8, 249 bankruptcy, 78, 84, 87, 88, 94, 95 banks, nationalisation of, 130, 255, 256 Bean, C. E. W., 30, 37 birth, patterns of, 42–3, 48, 106 Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance, 39 Bolton, G., The Quiet Continent, 3 Borrie, W. D., Population and Australia 1975, 42 bourgeoisie, 19, 46, 55, 59, 69 Britain, 41, 240; aircraft, 158, 223; assistance to Poland, 143; Atlantic losses, 161; civilisation, 16, 62; decision to withdraw, 230, 231; foreign policy, 62; government, 224, 225, 227, 229; importance, 171, 231; institutions, 248–9, 258; military operations, 222, 223; monarchy, 258; naval codes, 161; parliamentary system, 248; settlement in Australia, 43; social system, 58; shipping losses, 158; ultimatum, Egypt, 223 British Medical Association (BMA), 108, 109 British Cabinet, 207, 210 British High Commissioner, 134, 209, 211, 219, 224, 230–1 British War Cabinet, 156, 162, 163, 166, 169, 172, 173 Brown, Sir Allen, 187, 189, 191, 194–8, 201, 202, 215 Bruce, S. M. (later Lord), 30, 131, 139, 141–4, 150–3, 158, 163, 191–2, 243; letter to Menzies, 150–3 Bunting, Sir John, 122, 194, 202 bureaucracy, 101, 113, 116–18, 190

Index


263

2/5/07 11:24:06 AM

Burke, Edmund, 248, 253 bush ethics, 5, 38, 41 bushmen, 15, 17, 30, 37, 60 business management, 67, 79, 80, 92, 93, 95, 114 Butlin, N. G., 41, 47 Cabinet responsibility, 133, 201, 202, 219, 223 Cairo delegation, 212–13, 215, 217–18 Calwell, Arthur, 128–9, 221, 251 capital, 3, 9, 18, 19, 25, 60; expenditure, 40, 201 capitalism, 19, 33, 37, 46, 58, 69 Carlyle, Thomas, 90, 92, 240 Casey, R. G.(later Lord), 122, 178, 188, 209–14, 219, 221, 222, 228, 230, 231 Catholic Church, 13, 36, 38, 105 census figures, 17, 41, 102, 104 Chamberlain, Neville, 140, 159, 160, 247, 248 Chartists, 54, 57 Chifley, J. B., 128, 130, 181, 190, 255, 257 Churchill, Winston, 124, 157–69, 172, 173, 207, 247, 250, 253 city life, 19, 41, 47, 63, 117 civil service, see public service Clark, Manning, 36, 38, 136–7 class: concepts, 15, 37, 61, 68; conflict, 24, 30, 67; consciousness, 18, 46; structure, 12, 17, 18, 19, 23, 48, 69; see also middle classes; social class; working classes Clunies Ross, Ian, 187–8, 197, 198, 200 Coghlan, T. A., 17, 31 Cold War, 34, 37, 232 Coleman, P., Australian civilization (ed.), 7 collectivism, 5, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68 collusion, 229, 233–4 commerce, 60, 106 Commons, see House of Commons Commonwealth Arbitration Court, 114

264

Commonwealth government, 200, 203 Commonwealth grants, 180, 186, 188–9 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, 208 Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS), 107, 201 Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), 110, 209, 212, 219, 224, 228 Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, 107 Communism, 130, 255, 258 community development, 12, 20, 29, 36, 37, 38, 48, 65, 127 Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, 112 conscription, 29–30 consensus, 30, 56 conservatism, 24, 55, 69, 70, 222, 230 Constitution, 11, 12, 60, 64; Act 1856, 77, 78 constitutional development, 7, 12, 31–2 convict system, 33, 37, 40, 43, 57, 59, 60, 61, 71 Coombs, H. C., 105 Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, 112, 113 Copland, Douglas, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186–7, 257–8 Country Party, 127 Cowper, Charles, 78, 85–8, 90, 93 Crocker, Sir Walter, 126, 135, 136, 137 Crowley, F. K., 38, 47; Australia’s Western Third, 3; A New History of Australia (ed.), 46 CRTS, see Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme CSIR, 178 CSIRO, 187 cultural history, 17, 18, 47, 118 culture-patterns, 16, 41, 48, 63, 68, 101, 118, 203

Index


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Curtin, John, 128, 140–1, 144, 145, 251 Dalton, Hugh, 125, 158 Darvall, J. B., 83, 93–5 Davies, Alan, 115–16 Day, David, 140–1 De Tocqueville, A., see Tocqueville, A. de De Valera, Eamon, 159, 160, 161, 168, 169, 170–3 Deakin, Alfred, 67, 68, 75–6 death, patterns of, 43, 48 debating, 121, 129, 241, 244, 249, 251 democracy, 4, 15, 29, 30, 32, 33, 48, 58, 64, 69, 70, 72; America, 71; Australia, 4, 5, 6, 7, 28, 67, 71; bourgeois, 61; colonial, 9; moderation, 24; tradition, 41; values, 245 demographers, 43 Depression: 1890s, 40, 48, 55, 67; 1930s, 31, 32, 48, 184, 245 development, 5, 33, 37, 40, 48, 78 diaries, historical sources, 122–4 Disney, Julian, 110, 111 Dixon, Sir Owen, 130, 188, 189, 255 Dobell, William, 136–7 doctors, 109, 110 Documents of Australian Foreign Policy, 140, 173 Dulles, John Foster, 210, 212, 219, 226, 229, 234 Dunmore Lang, John, 29, 80, 81, 86 ecology, 39, 43 economic changes, 24, 37, 70 economic depression, 13, 33 economic growth, 17, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 48, 61 economic history, 37, 38, 40 economics, 32, 47 Eden, Anthony, 162, 206–38; Eden– Menzies correspondence, 233; Full Circle 1960, 233 Education Act 1945, 179–80 education system, 20, 101,105, 106,

118; see also school system; universities Edwards, Dr John, 139, 141, 142 egalitarianism, 37, 45 Egypt, 224, 240; air force, 223, 224; government, 200, 208, 227; military difficulties, 211; movement into, 225, 229, 230; ownership of canal, 216; peaceful solution, 218 Egypt Committee, 208, 220 Egyptians, 213, 214, 219 Eire, 160, 169, 170, 172, 173 Eisenhower, Dwight, 217, 226, 229 electoral reform, 11, 19, 60, 78, 133, 138, 258, 259 Elkin, A.P., 189, 190, 191 Empire (newspaper) 1850, 78, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87 Empire Parliamentary Association, 246, 247 employment, 108; employees, 112; employers, 17, 25 Encel, Sol, 104, 105, 112, 114 engineering, 106 engineers, 111, 112, 113 England, 6, 15, 16, 87 Enlightenment, 36, 38, 53, 56 entrepreneurs, 17, 61, 66, 69 environment, 4, 38, 70 Europe, 55, 72; culture, 53, 57, 58; future, 55; ideology, 57; institutions, 54; order, 54; past, 55; settlement in Australia, 2; struggle, 56 Evatt, H. V., 4, 5, 11, 27, 128, 137, 183, 221, 227, 229, 230, 251 experts, 115, 117, 128 External Affairs, Department of, 133, 228, 233, 234 faction politics, 78, 87 factory legislation, 67 Fadden, Arthur, 193, 198–9, 201, 202, 210, 218, 219, 221 farmers, 11, 13, 39, 60, 61, 69, 89 Farouk, King of Egypt, 206, 214

Index


265

2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

Fascism, 245, 246 federal arbitration powers, 243 federal bureaucracy, 189 Federal Conference 1890, 75 federal election 1946, 251, 254, 255 federal politics, 183 Federation, 29, 32, 50, 62, 67 feudalism, 53–4, 55, 58, 59, 70 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 6, 33, 37, 40, 46 Fitzroy, electorate, 19–20 force, use of, 208, 221, 222, 227, 240 Forde, F. M., 128, 251 Foreign Office, 163, 209, 210, 232 foundations, 56, 58, 59, 61, 66 Fox, Charles James, 248, 253 fragment hypothesis, 53–73 France, 229, 230, 240; agreement, 224, 225; assistance to Poland, 143; communique, 208; government, 227; indignation, 207; plot, Israelis, 223; ultimatum, Egypt, 223 free selection laws, 24, 39, 88 free-traders, 10, 11, 12, 13, 60 Freeth, Gordon, 129–32, 253, 254 frontiers, 39, 54, 57, 72 Garran, Sir Robert, 20 General Assembly, see United Nations General Assembly general practitioners, 109–10 gentry, landed, 60 George V, Silver Jubilee celebration, 246, 247 Germany, 143, 160, 161 Gleadall, Stephen, 86, 93 gold discoveries 1890s, 31, 34–5, 48, 58, 61 Gollan, Robin, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 37 Goodes, H. J., 181, 193, 198 government employment, 81, 89, 112 governments, 12, 31, 33, 60, 107, 126, 128, 181, 200, 202, 243 graduates, 104, 180 Grattan, C. Hartley, 18, 34, 36 graziers, 39

266

Great Britain, see Britain Great Depression, see Depression Greenwood, Gordon, Australia (ed.), 36, 46 growth rates, 33, 40, 42 Gullett, H. B. (Jo), 132, 252, 253 Hancock, Sir Keith, 2, 6, 30, 36, 37, 40, 43, 62; Australia, 28, 29, 32–3 Hankey, Lord, 213, 214 Hartz, Louis, The Founding of New Societies, 45, 53–73; The Liberal Tradition in America, 53 Hasluck, Sir Paul, 125, 126, 127, 132, 133, 254 Henderson, Loy, 213–15 Henderson, Peter, 234 Herbert, A. P., 230 Hirst, J. B., 38–9 historians, 10, 29, 33, 35, 37, 38, 45, 47, 48, 71, 141; new techniques, 21; pioneer, 31; questions, 116; regional, 38, 47; religious, 42; work, 7, 8, 121 historical analysis, 14, 34, 71, 72, 232 historical documents, 33, 35, 139–54 historical interpretations, 35, 41, 47, 48 historical research, 26, 34, 35, 54 historical writing, 35, 239 historiography, 121 history: American, 53; Australian, 70; comparative, 53; departments, 31, 35; eastern, 38; general, 36, 47; perspectives on, 28, 46; professional, 31, 38 Hitler, Adolf, 140, 144, 230 Holmes, Stephen, 209, 219–22, 225 House of Commons, 247 House of Representatives, 176, 186, 251 housing, 43, 48, 117 Hughes, W. M., 21, 29, 30, 244, 253 humanities, 186, 188 hypothesis, single factor, 54, 68 Hytten, Tasmania, 195, 197

Index


2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

idealism, 11, 36, 70 ideology, 13, 38, 61, 68, 72, 115–16 illnesses, 117 immigrants, 14, 16, 35, 58, 59, 61, 63, 67, 110, 117 immigration, 31, 37, 42, 44, 57, 62, 68, 79, 89, 107 independence, 12, 14, 17, 20, 36, 60, 61, 64, 108, 110 individualism, 55, 58, 64, 66, 68, 69 industrial struggle, 33, 35, 58, 114, 243 industries: secondary, 37; tertiary, 101 Inglis, K. S., 25, 31, 38 Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 44 Institution of Engineers, 105, 112 investment, 62, 68 Ireland, 155–75 isolation, 18, 58, 61, 62 Israel, 223–6, 229, 232, 240 Israelis, 223, 227, 234 James, Robert Rhodes, see Rhodes James, Robert Japan, 157, 163 Jeparit, Victoria, 242 Joske, Percy, 242 Keating, Paul, 122, 139, 141 Kiddle, Margaret, 15, 39, 60 Killen, Sir James, 125, 132, 133 kinship, patterns, 48 knowledge industries, 115, 116 Kunz, E., The Intruders, 109 La Nauze, J. A., 26, 35, 37 Labor governments, 34, 115, 128, 130, 179, 186, 251 Labor movement, 6, 8, 9, 21, 25, 37, 46, 69, 71 Labor party, 3, 5, 9–14, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 55, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 108, 127, 130, 144, 203, 221, 227, 250, 255; consensus, 46; creativity, source of, 34; fall from office, 34; history, 7, 8; partnership 1894–99,

13; performance, 46; populist composition, 46; rhetoric, 46; spirit, 32, 59, 68 Labour–capital conflict, 3, 18, 19, 23 Labour movement, see Labor movement Labour party, see Labor party land grants, 59; legislation, 39, 60, 78; reform, 12, 69; settlement, 24, 29, 36, 37, 39, 60 law, 107, 111, 112 Lawler, R., Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, 118 lawyers, 110, 111, 243 leadership, 61, 64, 69 legal profession: reforms, 110, 111; studies, 87, 242 legislative action, 12, 61, 64, 127 Legislative Assembly, NSW 1856, 78 Legislative Council, NSW, 77–9, 84 Liberal movement, 12, 55, 77, 78 Liberal party, 11, 130, 131, 181, 250 Liberal policy, 12, 53, 86 liberalism, 29, 53, 57, 67, 69, 72 Liberals, 13, 60, 66, 67, 255 Lindsay, Lionel, 135, 218, 256, 257 Lloyd, Selwyn, 230, 234 London Conference, 216, 219 Lyons, Joseph, 245, 246, 247, 250 McCalman, Janet, 122 MacDonald, Malcolm, 159, 160–1 MacDonald, Ramsay, 247, 248 McEwen, John, 133, 148, 152, 153, 254 managerial activity, 66, 104, 114 manhood suffrage, 60, 61, 78, 85 manual workers, 104 manufacturers, 11, 101 marriage, patterns of, 48 Marx, Karl, 13, 54, 56, 58, 70 mateship, 37, 56, 58, 60 medical practitioners, 111, 112 medicine, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115 Medley, Sir John, 178, 181 Melbourne, commercial centre, 61, 81, 87

Index


267

2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

Melbourne University, see University of Melbourne mental health, 117 Menzies, James, 242–3 Menzies, Ken, 128, 250 Menzies, Pat, 248 Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon, 121–38; admitted to Bar 1918, 241; Afternoon Light 1967, 233; anniversary of birth 1994, 239; and appeasement, 139–54; cabinet anteroom, meetings, 129–30; correspondence, Eden, 233; debating mastery, 129, 252; diary kept on trips, 156, 246, 248–9, 250; emotion, distrust, 255–6; letter to Bruce, 145–50; logical mind, 252; The Measure of the Years, 199, 258; and Murray Committee, 176–205; myths, 141–2; opposition leader, 186, 255; paper on Ireland, 173–4; personality, 242; political experience, 131, 133, 254; pragmatic advice, 254–5; prime ministership, 124, 128, 241, 250; public speaking, 239–59; rapport with audiences, 245, 246, 258; speech against nationalisation, 256–7; Speech is of Time, 258; and Suez Canal, 206–38; visit to England 1935, 185, 241, 246; visit to England 1941, 145, 250; visit to England 1956, 199; visit to Ireland 1941, 155–75 merchants, 11, 13, 60 meritocracy, 101, 104, 105, 118 metaphor, 71, 72 middle classes, 13, 16–21, 23, 24, 64, 67, 69, 70, 101–20 Middle East, 157, 162, 213, 229, 231 migrants, see immigrants migration, see immigration military operations, 162, 208, 209, 211 miners, 11, 13, 18, 69 mining industries, 17, 69

268

Murray report (Committee), 107, 176–205 Murray, Sir Keith, 197–203 Nairn, Bede, Civilising Capitalism, 46 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 206–38, 240 nationalisation, 206, 216, 220, 240, 256 nationalism, 3, 5, 14, 15, 16, 17, 30, 33, 37, 56, 58, 62, 127 nationhood, 32, 48 Nazism, 245, 246 neutrality, 161, 171, 172 New South Wales, 2, 8, 10, 13, 38, 77 New Zealand, 31, 229, 230 newspapers, Sydney and Melbourne, 63, 64 non-Labor parties, 34, 68, 116, 244, 255 occupational groups, 14, 101, 104, 112, 115 officials, colonial, 60, 77 oligarchy, 18, 61 Opperman, Hubert, 133, 135 Page, Earle, 109, 148, 149, 152 para-professionals, 111, 113 Parkes, Clarinda (nee Varley), 79, 85, 89–93 Parkes, Sir Henry, 24, 74–100 Parkes, Maria, 90, 92, 94 Parkes, Menie, 91, 92, 93 Parkes, Sarah, 90 Parliament, 78, 81, 85, 93, 127, 143, 240 parliamentary broadcasts, 240 parliamentary proceedings, 128, 240 pastoral society, 17, 43, 60, 61 Pearson, C. H., 24, 65, 66, 69 pharmaceutical benefits legislation, 109 pioneering, 30, 40 Pitt, William, 253 Pleasant Sunday afternoons, Methodist, 239, 245

Index


2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

Poland, 140, 143–7, 151 policy formation, 44, 45, 67, 101, 106, 113, 116, 126 political change, 4, 10, 14, 37 political conflict, 78 political ideas, 56, 57 political institutions, 31 political life, 8, 39, 95 political parties, 6, 11, 14, 22, 31, 34, 244 political speaking, 244, 245, 249 politicians, 9, 10, 13, 32, 64, 67, 126, 169, 244 politics, 5, 7, 8, 32, 37, 40, 48, 53, 60, 85, 240, 243, 258 population, 18, 24, 35, 42, 43, 58, 101 Populists, 12, 67 ports, treaty, 159–60, 167, 169 postwar reconstruction, see reconstruction, postwar poverty, 42, 60 Price, Charles, 42, 45 Priestley, R.E., 184–6, 193 primary industry, 104 Prime Minister’s Department, 128, 187, 194, 197, 198, 202 professional ethics, 108, 117 professional groups, 60, 104, 105, 110, 112, 113, 115 professional status, 107, 112, 117 professionalism, 101, 108, 128 professions, 16, 25, 104, 107, 108, 114, 118 proletarianism, 17, 19, 59, 61, 68, 69 property, 24, 39, 69 protection, 13, 67 Protectionists, 11, 12, 13 Protestants, 13, 36, 38, 169–70 public accountability, 110 public finance, 117, 192, 244 public hospitals, 112 public opinion, 9, 222 public policy, 12, 115 public service, 32, 104, 105, 112, 113, 114, 127, 243, 244 public speaking, 127, 239–59

Queen Victoria, Jubilee, 24 Queensland, 39, 61 race relations, 117 racism, 5, 42, 44, 45, 47 Radicalism, 37, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 68, 70, 77, 115, 214 Rawson, Don, 258–9 reconstruction, postwar, 37, 104 recruits, 104, 105 reformism, 11, 12, 13, 34, 37, 44, 46 Reid, George, 10, 13 religion, 23, 24, 38, 42, 47, 91 Republicans, NSW, 24, 80 resources, 40, 60, 77 respectability, 78, 79 Rhodes James, Robert, 207, 224, 232 Riverina district, NSW, 39 Roe, Michael, 38, 60 Ross, Ian Clunies, see Clunies Ross, Ian Rowe, A. P., 189–97, 203 Rowley, C. D., Aboriginal Policy and Practice, 3 vols, 44 Royal Commission on Strikes 1890, 19, 25 rural communities, 18, 33, 39, 41 salaries, 20, 113, 114, 201 Sampson, John, 242 Sampson, Sydney, 242, 243, 244 school system, 106, 107 science, 105, 106, 187, 188 seamen, 18, 67 secret service, 164–5 Security Council, see United Nations Serle, Geoffrey, 47, 67 servants, 20, 21 servicemen, returned, 131, 179, 180 settlements, 15, 31, 33, 39, 41, 53, 144 Sevres agreement, 223, 225, 232, 234 Shedden, Sir Frederick, 156, 163, 252 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 248 shipping, 164, 169, 222 shirts, 245–6 shop assistants, 20, 21

Index


269

2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

silence of eternity, 240 Singapore, 156–7, 163 skills, levels, 102, 104 Snedden, Billy, 130, 253 social action, 114 social change, 5, 14, 37 social class, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 23, 43, 69, 106, 110 social conflict, 5, 24 social contact, 17–18 social history, 6, 21, 40, 48 social ideas, 6, 16, 57 social improvement, 66, 78 social insurance, 116 social justice, 4, 6, 7, 12, 33, 48, 66 social legislation, 13, 19, 29 social life, 8, 29, 39, 48, 115 social mobility, 20, 24, 25 social philosophy, 45, 56, 117 social reform, 8–9, 13, 33, 37, 115, 117 social research, 26, 116 social roles, 39, 107 Social Sciences Research Council, 44 social scientists, 111 social solidarity, 18, 24 social terms, 106 social welfare, 5, 30, 115 social workers, 110, 114, 115 socialisation, 111 Socialism, 24, 55, 58, 66, 68, 130 societies: capitalist, 101; collection, 22; colonial, 3, 25, 54; communist, 101; developing, 32; European, 36; material, 31; multiracial, 45; new, 54, 57, 72; wealthy, 40 sociologists, 22, 41, 110 soldiers, 30, 43 South Africa, 55 South Australia, 3, 39, 61 South Pacific, 31 sovereignty, 216, 217 Soviet Union, 221 Speaker of the Commons, 247, 248 speaking, see public speaking Speech is of Time, collection of speeches, 240, 241

270

speeches, permanency of, 240 Spender, Percy, 125, 233–4 squatters, 3, 15, 58, 60, 77 State: government, 106, 197; grants, 178, 186; investment, 66; organisation, 245; Socialism, 65, 66 States Grants (Universities) Act 1951, 186 statistics, accumulations, 40, 43 Stretton, Hugh, 116, 176–7 strikes 1890s, 9, 14, 22, 23, 55, 67 student numbers, 184, 186 Students’ Representative Council, 241–2 suburbs, 17 Suez Canal, 206–38, 240, 241; Suez Canal Users’ Association (SCUA), 219–20, 221 sugar growers, 39 surgery, 110 Sydney, 2, 16, 60, 62, 79 Sydney Grammar School, 20 Sydney Morning Herald, 19, 84, 86, 89, 93, 141, 218, 227, 229; in the 1870s, 24; 19 April 2001, 139–40 Tange, Arthur, 215 Tasmania, 61 taxation, 12, 104 technical advisers, 113, 116 technical colleges, 105 technological education, 203 technology, 39, 70, 105, 188 telecommunications, 113 temperance groups, 13, 22, 23, 93 theory, 40, 53, 68 Thorpe, E. C., 181, 182 Tocqueville, A. de, 60, 72 towns, country, 17 townsmen, 15, 16 trade, 44, 60, 62, 68, 69, 106 trade unions, 3, 11, 21, 22, 31, 114 tradesmen, 25, 106 traditions, 28, 38, 65 training conferences, Bundanoon, 129, 131, 254

Index


2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

Treasury, Australia, 192, 193, 194, 198, 199, 201 Tripartite Act 1950, 229 troops: Australian, 29, 30; British, 206–8, 214 Twopeny, writer on colonial history, 14, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25 UAP, see United Australia Party UGC, see University Grants Committee UK, see Britain Ulster, 167, 169, 170 undergraduates, 46, 179 unemployment, 33 unionism, 9, 14, 18 United Australia Party (UAP), 245, 250 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations: ceasefire, 223, 229; United Nations General Assembly, 227, 230; United Nations Security Council, 220–3, 227 United States, 40, 41, 55, 208, 225, 226, 228, 229, 234, 250 universities: Commonwealth Inquiry, 176–205; development, 35, 107, 194–5; education, 106; finances, 178, 181–2, 183, 187, 190, 200, 201; Universities Commission, 179, 180, 188; University Grants Committee (UGC), 192, 194, 195, 197, 199; University Grants Committee, Australia, 193, 201 University of Melbourne, 178, 184–5, 241; Appointments Board, 105, 112 upper classes, 15, 18, 19, 69 Upper House, 60, 61, 69 urban growth, 17, 41, 109 urbanisation, 40, 41, 72

value systems, 18, 22, 30, 56 Varney, Clarinda, see Parkes, Clarinda (nee Varney) Vice-chancellors, 180, 184, 187, 194, 196 Victoria, 2, 24, 39, 61, 66, 67, 244 Victorian Legislative Assembly, 183, 184, 243 Victorian Legislative Council, 127, 244 wage-earners, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 67, 112 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 31, 61 war operations, 30, 143, 144, 224, 229 Ward, J. M., 35–6, 47 Ward, Miss J. M. D., 209–10 Ward, Russel, 17, 18, 37, 38 Watt, Sir Alan, 125, 132–3 wealth, 14, 20, 37 Webb, S. & B., 59, 63–4 Weedon, Jock, 189–90 Werrington, 88–9, 92, 93 Western Australia, 3, 38, 61 Westminster Hall, 247, 248, 249 Wheeler, F. H. (Sir Frederick), 113, 115 Whig interpretations, 1–27, 58, 60, 70 Whiggism, 5, 10 White Australia policy, 31, 44, 45 Wilson, Roland, 198–9, 253 Windeyer, William, 84–8 wool trade, 31 work-force, 69, 102, 104 working classes, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 23–5, 37, 69, 70 World War I, 29, 32 World War II, 34, 48, 101, 104, 139 Young, Michael, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 105, 106

Valera, Eamon de, see De Valera, Eamon

Index


271

2/5/07 11:24:07 AM

The 'Whig' View of Australian History and Other Essays (Academic Monographs)

Histories of Australian Sociology (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays

The History of Political Theory and Other Essays

Revolution And Other Essays

Toleration and Other Essays

Toleration and Other Essays

Religion And Other Essays

Darwinism, and other essays

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays

Opportunities Beyond Carbon (Academic Monographs)

Climate Change and Social Justice (Academic Monographs)

Time and the Other and Additional Essays

Squaring the Circle and Other Monographs

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature

Old Age and Other Essays

Real Materialism: and Other Essays

Bowerbirds (Australian Natural History)

Hebrew Humour and Other Essays

Tropical Nature and other Essays

Ontological relativity: and other essays

Revolution, and Other Essays 1910

The 'Whig' View of Australian History and Other Essays (Academic Monographs)

Histories of Australian Sociology (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Waiting (Academic Monographs)

Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays

The History of Political Theory and Other Essays

Revolution And Other Essays

Toleration and Other Essays

Toleration and Other Essays

Religion And Other Essays

Darwinism, and other essays

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays

Opportunities Beyond Carbon (Academic Monographs)

Climate Change and Social Justice (Academic Monographs)

Time and the Other and Additional Essays

Squaring the Circle and Other Monographs

The Cambridge History of Australian Literature

Old Age and Other Essays

Real Materialism: and Other Essays

Bowerbirds (Australian Natural History)

Hebrew Humour and Other Essays

Tropical Nature and other Essays

Ontological relativity: and other essays

Revolution, and Other Essays 1910

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