During his visit to London in 1924, Curtin had made a pilgrimage to the reading room of the British Museum, where Karl Marx and other socialist writers had laboured on their massive critiques of capitalism. It was a momentous time for Curtin. The British Labour Party had just come to power for the first time and the postwar revolutionary upsurge across Europe had come to an end. He returned to Australia convinced that the climate for revolution had passed and that the collapse of capitalism would probably not occur in his lifetime. The following year, he made his first serious attempt to enter the federal Parliament, the institution that he had disparaged earlier as an ‘upholstered gas-works’. Ten years later, he was elected as leader of the Australian Labor Party.
Twenty years after his visit to the British Museum the now aged Prime Minister, with premonitions of his own mortality, made a pilgrimage of a different kind. On his first full day in England in 1944, Curtin was driven to the village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, made famous by Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard,1 and where Gray himself was buried. It was no idle visit. Each Sunday, Curtin would devote at least an hour to reading poetry which, in the absence of religious belief, provided nourishment for his soul.2 One verse of Gray’s memorable work, written two centuries before and learnt by generations of schoolchildren, would have had particular resonance for Curtin as he walked among the tottering headstones of the St Giles churchyard:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.3
Not that Curtin had ever sought the pomp of power for its own sake. Indeed, he was a reluctant politician who only assumed the burdens of office for a wider purpose. Curtin had shown after the 1940 federal election that he was more than content to return to a quiet life of reading and reflection in Cottesloe. But it was not to be. Despite the initial predictions of the press, the election saw him narrowly returned to parliament. The subsequent disintegration of the conservatives and the ambitions of his colleagues had then propelled him into the prime ministership just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had not shrunk from the burden of his office. The irony, and even tragedy, of John Curtin’s life is that he is remembered principally as a wartime prime minister, the political leader who stiffened the resolve of the Australian people to resist the prospect of a Japanese invasion. Yet, as he confided to Yatala Ovenden, he had not trained to be a war leader.4 Quite the opposite.
Curtin had grown to adulthood during the first flush of post-Federation optimism, when the advent of the new century coincided roughly with the return of economic prosperity after a decade of depression. Anything seemed possible for this federation of self-governing colonies, with its population of nearly four million people inhabiting an expansive island continent. Youth was in the ascendant, and so too was the organised working class, which was concentrating on achieving its advancement by political action after the limits of industrial action were brought into sharp focus in the 1890s.
The impoverished circumstances of Curtin’s family, and the disappointed hopes of his Irish-immigrant parents, predisposed Curtin to accept the aims and ideas of the labour movement. Although he became a member of the Labor Party, most of his youthful energy was directed into the activities of the Victorian Socialist Party, under the leadership of the socialist showman Tom Mann. He learnt how to write, how to argue a case patiently and logically and, on so many Melbourne street corners, Yarra Bank platforms and crowded city theatres, he perfected the art of public-speaking. Curtin was in the vanguard of the revolution that was about to come. Or so he thought.
As the secretary of the Timber Workers’ Union, and the editor of its newspaper, Curtin prepared for the day when the masses would rise up and overthrow capitalism. However, instead of a revolution, there was a world war that threatened the aspirations of working-class Australians. Undaunted, Curtin became a leading opponent of conscription for overseas service and was almost destroyed by the struggle. But staunch friends and supporters like Frank Anstey stood by him, sorted him out and eased him into a new life and career as a newspaper editor in far-off Perth. They saw his potential for greatness and, by their unswerving support, they reinforced that sense of destiny that had probably first been instilled in Curtin by his parents.
It was in the more pragmatic political atmosphere of Perth in the early 1920s, and following his visit to England and Europe in 1924, that Curtin came to accept that the imminent collapse of capitalism in Australia was unlikely. The ‘mob’ were not about to rise up in revolution. If he was going to help achieve a better Australia, he would have to use the existing institutions, both parliamentary and industrial, to achieve limited reform. For this reason. preserving the unity and strength of the labour movement was essential. The split in the Labor Party during the First World War, and the ‘ratting’ by Hughes and his supporters, had shown the damage that could be done to Labor’s hopes through disunity.
His chance, and that of the Labor Party, seemed to come with the election of the Scullin Government in 1929. But Curtin was passed over for a position in the ministry and the Government was beset with an economic depression that forced it to abandon the policies that Labor had waited so long to introduce. Dejected by this sudden turnaround in the party’s fortunes, Curtin did what he could to keep the party true to its principles and to keep alive the hopes of its supporters . He could be seen in the parliament mounting a strong, but ultimately fruitless, attack against the arguments of those who sought to shift the burden of the Great Depression onto those least able to bear its strain. And he could be seen too with his disillusioned mate, Frank Anstey, knocking back whiskies as they bemoaned their party’s fate.
Curtin had not sought his election to the leadership of the Labor Party in 1935. Despite concerns about his addiction to alcohol, he was nominated by colleagues who were keen to stymie the leadership hopes of Scullin’s deputy, Frank Forde. It was a close-run election that saw Curtin win by the narrowest of margins. Any sense of personal triumph that he harboured would have been tempered by the knowledge of being chosen from among such a depleted and dispirited team. Moreover, the 50-year-old Curtin felt that he was too old for the task of reuniting and reinvigorating the party. He believed that his best years were behind him. How wrong he was. With his oratorical skills, Curtin was able to pull the party in behind him as he attempted, with limited success, to alert the Australian electorate to its potentially calamitous defence position. At the same time, his ability to chart a middle course between apparently irreconcilable positions saw the Lang Labor MPs rejoin Labor’s ranks.
The outbreak of the Second World War raised the spectre in Curtin’s mind of the Labor Party imploding, just as it had during the previous war. Curtin had accepted the leadership of the party more from a sense of duty to a movement to which he had devoted his life rather than from any sense of personal ambition. Indeed, he had seemed more than content to walk away from the possibility of such leadership when it appeared he had lost his seat of Fremantle in the 1940 federal election. Hauled back into the fray, he extended such cooperation to the politically embattled government of Menzies that it seemed Curtin would do anything to avoid taking on the burden of government. Yet, just as he answered the call of his party in 1935, so did he answer the call of the Australian nation in 1941.
Although not seeking the role of war leader, he was conscious that his hopes of achieving a better Australia would be destroyed by a Japanese invasion. Not only did the threat to Australia have to be repelled, but the threat to the unity of the Labor Party that was posed by the war also had to be faced. Hence his overriding determination to steer the party through the shoals of war in such a way that its hard-won unity would not be imperilled. He was not expected to last as leader. Yet he confounded the expectations of the many doubters who were convinced that he was not up to the task. Just as he had drawn the party in behind him, now he drew the nation in behind the party.
Curtin’s term as prime minister lasted for just the final four years of his life, yet it is doubtful whether he would have seen his destiny as being to lead his country through the terrors and dangers of war. Curtin is best remembered as the man who turned to the United States in December 1941 and who stood up to Churchill in 1942. Yet his famous New Year’s message was mostly not of his own composition and he quickly disavowed its anti-British sentiments when it caused an uproar among conservative circles. Although often credited with recalling the Australian troops from the Middle East, it was Churchill who first suggested that some of them be sent to face the Japanese, albeit in Singapore or the Netherlands East Indies and, later, Burma. While Curtin did insist that Churchill not send Australian troops into the hopeless defence of Burma, he did agree to thousands of Australians being used as temporary garrison troops in what would have been the hopeless defence of Ceylon, had the Japanese ever attacked that island.
Curtin warmly welcomed the arrival of MacArthur and readily agreed to the American general’s appointment as Supreme Commander. Although he has been criticised for too readily handing over authority to MacArthur, and thus infringing Australian sovereignty, such criticism of Curtin fails to take into account the desperate outlook for Australia at that time. The dominions’ military advisers were predicting a Japanese invasion within weeks and public morale was low. MacArthur’s appointment boosted morale while also assuring Australia of American assistance. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed Curtin to lift from his shoulders the ultimate responsibility for military decisions that now became MacArthur’s. Indeed, before MacArthur’s arrival became known, Curtin had sent an urgent instruction for Blamey to return from the Middle East so that he could assume that burden.
At crucial times during the war, Curtin was laid low by illness. His cabled disputes with Churchill took a heavy toll on his health, and as Japanese bombs rained down on Darwin Curtin found himself in a Sydney hospital with gastritis. When scheduled to meet top American officials in Washington, he was confined to bed with neuritis and high blood pressure. Sometimes his ill-health was mental, brought on by the depression that caused him to lock himself away or to disappear on long walks into the bush around Canberra. At other times, it was contrived to allow Curtin to escape from obligations, such as the Perth by-election of December 1940 and possibly the referendum of August l944, or to avoid pressures from his sometimes restless caucus.
His heart attack in November 1944 was real enough, the culmination of years of stress, heavy smoking, alcoholic binges and a simple but poor diet. Although he never properly recovered from that first attack, Curtin refused to resign, even though he knew his days were limited. For months, the government was hamstrung by this decision. Yet such was his position in the party and the parliament that nobody, least of all his steadfast friend and acting Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, was going to force his hand. He was allowed to hang on in the hope that he might live to see out the Pacific War.
At the time of his death, Curtin had served for nearly ten years as Labor leader. He had taken charge of a parliamentary party that had been almost destroyed by the Great Depression and the disunity in its ranks that followed. There have been suggestions that Curtin was fortunate to die when he did; that he would not have been able to cope with the postwar challenges facing Australia. It seems unlikely that the postwar challenges would have been any more testing than those of the war, when Curtin was leading a minority government under pressure from his testy colleagues, dealing with a conservative Opposition that gave him less quarter than he had given it during his time in opposition, and coping with the pressure placed on him by Churchill and Roosevelt during 1942.
Curtin enjoyed an authority built partly on his powerful oratory and command of parliamentary forms and procedures. In contrast to the well-modulated speech of Menzies, Curtin’s voice was pure Australian. Despite the early efforts of the Christian Brothers in his education, a spade was still a ‘spaide’. It was not so much the words that he used, which sometimes did not read impressively on the page, or his unabashed Australian accent, but his clear honesty of purpose that won over even the most critical of audiences. It was his patent integrity and humility which helped to clothe Curtin with a hard-won moral authority. This was the true secret of his political success and which so frustrated his less-inspiring opponents.
Curtin’s adroit handling of the press, helped as he was by Don Rodgers, was also an important element of his political success. He displayed his AJA badge on his watch chain and maintained his membership until his death. He presented himself at press conferences as a journalist, rather than as a politician, and once began a press conference in London by addressing the assembled journalists as ‘fellow workers’. During the first year of his prime ministership, when Australia daily faced the possibility of an invasion and Curtin was leading a minority government dependent upon the support of two independent MPs, his careful management of the press was crucial in maintaining public morale and the survival of his administration.
There are many testaments to Curtin’s stature, often from the conservative side of politics. In the immediate wake of his death, an official of the Australian Constitutional League suggested to Menzies that Curtin’s electorate of Fremantle should be named Curtin in honour of his ‘sincerity of purpose’ and ‘his faith in this country’s future’. ‘TRIPE!’, scribbled Menzies disparagingly, suggesting that Curtin was no greater than Joe Lyons, who had also died in office, and that it would only advantage the Labor Party in the 1946 election.5 Other conservatives were more generous in their praise. Paul Hasluck observed him at close quarters for more than twenty years and later summed up Curtin as
an honourable, devoted, self-sacrificing and, at the end, an anguished and very lonely man – a man deserving of deep respect, of admiration for his discipline and his restraint, of sympathy for his suffering: a man who reached nobility through humility, a man who came to know disappointment with some of those persons and institutions on which his political faith had been based and who felt the anguish of wondering if he himself had done well enough.
All told, wrote Hasluck, ‘there was no better man in the public life of Australia in his time’.6
Curtin’s success as prime minister was assisted by the calibre of some of his ministers; in particular, Chifley, whose political and emotional support was crucial to him. At the same time, his reluctance to sack non-performing ministers led to him bearing some of the burden of their work and taking an unnecessarily close interest in the minutiae of government. On the other hand, his government was strengthened by his readiness to draw on the expertise of leading businesspeople to organise the war effort, by his inspired selection of some public officials, and by his use of some conservative appointees such as Shedden and Bruce, whose advice he might otherwise have been expected to ignore. Perhaps his greatest triumph as prime minister was the relationship of cooperation that he developed with MacArthur, one that was based on apparently genuine feelings of friendship and admiration, as much as mutual self-interest.
Although Curtin has been hailed as the ‘saviour of Australia’7, this is a rather overblown claim. Curtin did not save Australia any more than MacArthur did. There was no Battle of Australia along the lines of the Battle of Britain. Curtin’s great contribution to the defence of Australia was to recognise the flaws in the Singapore strategy and, immediately upon becoming prime minister, to develop closer defence ties with the United States and later to welcome MacArthur as Supreme Commander. His insistence on the return of Australian troops to defend Australia, despite strong pressure from both Churchill and Roosevelt to have sent them to Burma, also stands to his enduring credit. It remains a matter of debate whether Menzies, who had resisted closer ties with the United States, would have agreed to MacArthur’s appointment had he remained as prime minister. He almost certainly would have buckled under the pressure from Churchill to send Australian troops to Burma.
If it was possible to ask Curtin to nominate his greatest achievement as Prime Minister, he might well have answered that it was retrieving the mantle of nationalism that the Labor Party had lost during the First World War. He carried the Labor Party through the war, not only unscathed but triumphant. By his protestations of loyalty to the empire, he had avoided the charges of disloyalty that had almost destroyed the Labor Party during and after the First World War, and he successfully sidestepped the accusations of isolationism that had so damaged Labor’s chances under his leadership at the 1937 election.
There remain many contradictions in his prime ministership. He heightened Australia’s sense of nationalism by standing up to Churchill in 1942 and yet he later went against Labor Party policy to approve the appointment of a British-born Governor-General. He looked to America free of any pangs as to Australia’s traditional relationship with Britain and yet was soon holding America at bay and seeking to resuscitate the discredited system of imperial defence. Despite this, Australia was exercising much more independence by the end of the war: it had diplomatic representatives across the world; it had ratified the Statute of Westminster and thereby severed one of the final constitutional links with Britain; and it had declared war against Japan independently of Britain’s declaration.
Don Rodgers, who had accompanied Curtin to London, thought that the ‘Boss’, as Curtin was called by his staff, had begun to die during that trip and had seemed anxious to ensure his early return to Australia. Several months after his arrival back, he suffered his first heart attack and thereafter, according to Rodgers, seemed to lose the will to live.8 He had taken up the pressures of office and did not know how to set them down while there was life still in him.
In 1931, Curtin had written an obituary for Bob Ross. According to Curtin, his old friend from the Socialist Party had ‘loved and worked for all men and all women’, which is how Curtin would also like to have been remembered, since there was ‘no greater kinship with the God of everything than that a man should fight and work for his fellows’ so that he could prove ‘that he was in deed and thought a lover of all mankind’.9 Some would say that he had succeeded.