From early morning on 1 January, 1901, trains, trams and ferries carried thousands of people to the great city of Sydney. The sun burst through the overhanging clouds at ten in the morning, and an invigorating southerly breeze tempered the terrible heat. At eleven a procession set out from the Domain to march to Centennial Park. Led by the shearers and followed by floats illustrating aspects of Australian life, the procession wound its way through the streets past crowds of cheering people and under arches bearing slogans that breathed the spirit of unity and brotherhood. Swarthy Maoris sat on great, lean horses like statues; Indians paraded in gorgeous costumes; dragoons and lancers swept past to thunderous applause from the crowd; the heads of all religious bodies, except the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, contributed a note of solemnity and dignity. But in general, according to an eye-witness, the people laughed and cheered and kept on cheering, while some wiped away tears that began to flow freely in the general excess of patriotism, loyalty, and kindly feeling.
At Centennial Park, in the presence of seven thousand invited guests, the imperial troops, a choir of fifteen thousand voices, and sixty thousand spectators, a slight and interesting figure, Lord Hopetoun, came on to the arena to loud and sustained applause. After the choir sang ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’, and the Anglican primate recited the prayers set down for the occasion, E. G. Blackmore, who had been clerk to the federal convention of 1897–98, administered the oaths of office as Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia to Lord Hopetoun. The choir sang a Te Deum, which because of the terrible heat wafted fitfully around the arena; the flag of the new Commonwealth was hoisted, and the artillery thundered as cheer after cheer ran round the great arena. Then in loud, clear tones Lord Hopetoun read messages of congratulations and hope from the Queen and from the British government. Again cheers resounded round the arena, only to be drowned by the playing of the national anthem, after which the official party retired. So ended the ‘bright and brilliant’ inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia.
The day before, Lord Hopetoun had commissioned Edmund Barton, a Liberal Protectionist whose political experience had been gained in the legislative assembly of New South Wales, to form the first government of the new Commonwealth. The bourgeois press used the occasion to express their optimism and their confidence. It was a matter of good omen for the cause of Australian industry, wrote the Melbourne Age, not only that there was a thoroughly protectionist ministry in power, but that it was to be confronted by a free-trade leader whose ragged reputation handicapped his party in advance. For, the Age went on, in spite of some ability of a certain kind, Mr Reid stood hopelessly discredited by political trickery and deceit. So Melbourne, the seat of government till the move to Canberra in 1927, began to impose its rectitude, its uprightness, and its philistinism on the new Commonwealth.
Labour opinion was equally optimistic, though for a different reason. The Commonwealth of Australia, as the Brisbane Worker saw it, sprung up free of most of the superstitions, traditions, class distinctions, and sanctified fables and fallacies of the older nations. Australia stood on the threshold of the future with its fate in its own hands. On the other hand the more extreme nationalists and radicals were not happy about the events on inauguration day. The foreign troops, the Bulletin noted, marched into the reserved enclosure; the Australian troops remained outside. A few trade-union representatives were admitted inside the arena, while thousands of ‘society people’, the privileged classes and the sycophants, were seated near the pavilion of ceremony. To them the Governor-General looked puny and wan, as if in his own person he figured the wan and puny basis of the idea of monarchy. To an Australian, the Bulletin added, it was appropriate that the British representative should come at the tail, because he was the least necessary and the most insignificant of all the procession’s components.
After the festivities the political parties prepared for the first elections to parliament. Broadly, three parties entered the field. The Conservative Free-Traders were distinguished by what they opposed rather than by what they affirmed. They were committed to such political commonplaces of the day as a White Australia and material well-being for all, but were opposed to any use of the state that might infringe the liberty of the subject. As freetraders they were committed to a policy of laissez-faire. So they spent their campaign dissociating themselves from the proposed methods of their opponents rather than stating how they proposed to achieve their aims. They drew their support from the pastoral areas, traditionally devoted to free trade, the more opulent suburbs in the capital cities, the chambers of commerce, and the large importing firms.
The other bourgeois party, the Liberal Protectionists, were also committed to a White Australia, the career open to talent, and material well-being for all, but were prepared to use the state to ensure a minimum standard of living and to protect the weak against the strong. They differed from the Labor Party both in the extent to which they were prepared to use the state, drawing in their propaganda a vague distinction between state capitalism and state socialism. To the Liberal Protectionists the Labor pledge violated liberty of conscience and destroyed the responsibility of a member to his constituents by forcing the members to obey the commands of the annual conference of the party. From the beginning there were two groups within the Liberal Protectionist Party, a conservative group, supported by the chambers of manufactures and the professional classes, and a radical group, supported by the petty bourgeoisie and the working classes in the towns. In time the party lost the former to the conservatives and the latter to Labor, but from 1901 to 1909 the interests of manufacturers and liberal idealists seemed to harmonize in Australia as they did in Great Britain and France.
In the beginning, Labor was a reformist rather than a radical or revolutionary party. Putting itself forward as the party of the working classes it was careful to include in its program points that appealed to other classes in the community, while at the same time eschewing any general revolutionary aim that would drive the moderates into the arms of the Liberal Protectionists. When the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party was formed in 1902, it was committed to a series of ‘planks’. Then at the 1905 federal conference of the party, when the radicals clamoured for a socialist aim and the reformists fearfully opposed any such radical declaration, the decision was for this compromise:
This summed up neatly the aspirations of the main articulate groups within the party: the Catholics, influenced by the publication in 1891 of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, the radical secular humanists, and the nationalists. It was this claim by Labor to be the nationalist party that persuaded the economic nationalist, the local manufacturer competing against imported goods from England, Europe, America and Japan, to support Labor, thus widening its electoral appeal and diluting the power of its radical fringe.
The Catholic influence was equally moderating. From 1891 to 1905 a series of pronouncements by members of the Catholic hierarchy in Australia had distinguished between European socialism – which proposed to overturn the present order of society, concentrate men’s aims on their earthly welfare alone, and leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows and those who sought to redress the wrongs and to alleviate the miseries of the labouring classes from motives of Christian charity. Christ himself, the bishops reminded the faithful in a pastoral letter in 1905, said in the wilderness to the hungry thousands about him, ‘I have compassion on the multitude.’ In so far as these were the motives of the Labor Party in Australia, the bishops could see no reason why a Catholic should not vote Labor.
By 1905 circumstances had pushed the Catholic voter into the arms of the Labor party. There were many reasons for this. As the Freeman’s Journal, a Catholic weekly published in Sydney, pointed out on 8 November, 1902, a party that aimed at the material elevation of the masses could not be antagonistic to a church that aimed at the spiritual elevation of these masses. In the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy the Conservative Free-Traders and Liberal Protectionists were Protestant parties, deeply committed to the secularization of Australian public life, and in their eyes secularization always followed the Protestantizing of society. The Catholic leaders had supported federation because increasing the strength of Australia would reduce English domination, and anything that upset the English from the seat of the mighty appealed strongly to the Irish Catholics. So from 1902 on the Catholic press urged their readers to join a branch of the Labor Party. The capture of the party by the Church had begun, and with it the voice of the radical within the party was weakened.
The first leader of the Australian Labor Party was J. C. Watson, who was born in Chile in 1867 and educated in New Zealand, where in the printing trade he began to hear of the hope of better things for man, and of the virtues of moderation and reformism. The moderation of Labor, and the progressive liberalism of men such as Barton, Deakin and Kingston, made possible a working association between Labor and the Liberal Protectionists.
The state of the parties in the first Commonwealth Parliament made such agreement inevitable. Indeed, from 1901 to 1910 none of the three parties was able to win an absolute majority in the House of Representatives. In the first election in 1901 the Liberal Protectionists won thirty-two seats, the Conservative Free-Traders twenty-seven, and Labor sixteen. In the Senate the Liberal Protectionists won eleven, the Conservative Free-Traders seventeen, and Labor eight. With promise of Labor support the Barton government had a working majority in both houses to carry out its policy of White Australia, protection, arbitration, and social service legislation.
On the policy of White Australia the members of all parties, except two doctrinaire free-traders in the Senate, were in agreement. This wish to preserve a predominantly European society in Australia by prohibiting the immigration of Asiatics and Pacific Islanders, deporting the kanaka labourers on the sugar fields of Queensland, and discriminating against Asiatics and Pacific Islanders (including Maoris) resident in Australia, had a long history. The idea was first tossed up in response to the squatters’ attempt to use coolies to replace convicts in the 1840s, and appeared again as a result of the antagonism between the Europeans and the Chinese on the goldfields. Experiences between 1860 and 1900 strengthened the demand for exclusion and discrimination. The American Civil War seemed to prove the folly and evils of using slave or semi-slave coloured labour. Political equality and the career open to talent were incompatible with a plantation economy in which the base of the social pyramid always consisted of one class. European domination in Asia was taken to illustrate the teaching of Darwin on the survival of the fittest. The Asians and the Pacific Islanders, it was argued, were doomed for the wall, while the Europeans must avoid the fate of Humpty Dumpty. The workers were convinced that the use of coloured labour threatened their standard of living and their privileges. The middle classes were afraid of the threat to European civilization and to British political institutions, as well as of the evils of miscegenation.
So the Immigration Restriction Bill was introduced into the House of Representatives in 1901 by Deakin, a good bourgeois liberal, upright and high-minded, who spoke with dignity of how the national manhood, the national character, and the national future were at stake. The heritage of political freedom must be passed on to their children and the generations after them undiminished. Watson, the Labor leader, spoke with dignity of White Australia as a necessary condition of a high standard of living for the working classes. Outside the House restraint and discretion were thrown to the winds. The Brisbane Worker wrote:
Australia is to be saved from the coloured curse, to be relieved from strikes, to be famous for having no paupers or poor houses, to be a government of, by, and for the people. Or else to be a mongrel nation torn with racial dissension, blighted by industrial war, permeated with pauperism, and governed by cliques of lawyers and bankers and commercial and financial adventurers.
The Bulletin wrote later of Australia as the only pure white nation to be found outside Europe. Australia, they wrote, proposed to show the world for the first time since the days of the primeval ape a whole continent under one flag, one people, and one government. A few feared the long-term consequences of insulting the people of Asia and wondered whether Australia would have the power to survive should the children of future generations have to resist retribution for the sins of the fathers. But the believers in the brotherhood of man and equality of all in the sight of God were silent. So the men who believed that the unity of labour was the hope of the world united with the apostles of Christian civilization to preserve Australia for the white man.
The method was simple. Under Section 3 of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, any person who failed to pass a dictation test of fifty words in a European language could be declared a prohibited immigrant. Any immigrant resident for less than five years could also be given the test and, on failure, be deported. By an amending act in 1905 the words ‘prescribed language’ were substituted for the word ‘European’ to avoid giving offence to Japan and India. In the same year students, tourists and businessmen from India and Japan were permitted to enter for a maximum period of five years, and in 1912 this concession was extended to the Chinese. Under the Pacific Island Labourers Act passed in 1901 all Pacific Island labourers who had migrated to Queensland were to be deported by 1905. An amending act in that year allowed those in a few categories to remain on compassionate grounds, or to avoid the death to which they would be sentenced should they return to their native island.
In addition both Commonwealth and State legislation discriminated against Asiatics, Pacific Islanders and Aborigines. By Section 16 of the Commonwealth Posts and Telegraphs Act of 1901 no contract or arrangement for the carriage of mails was to be entered into on behalf of the Commonwealth unless it contained a condition that only white labour was employed in such carriage. Under Section 4 of the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa, or the islands of the Pacific except New Zealand was entitled to have his name placed on the electoral roll unless so entitled by Section 41 of the constitution, which conferred the Commonwealth franchise on all entitled to be enrolled in their State. Section 16 of the Invalid and Old Age Pensioners Act of 1908 excluded Asiatics (except those born in Australia) and aboriginal natives of Australia, Africa, or the islands of the Pacific from a pension. Under the New South Wales Shearers’ Accommodation Act of 1901 the Chinese were to use different living quarters from the whites. The constitution of the Australian Workers’ Union excluded Asiatics, Aborigines, and half-castes from membership. So by immigration restrictions, deportation and discrimination the aim of Australia for the white man was to be achieved.
The governments that held office between 1901 and 1909 were determined to raise the white man to a high level of material civilization. Protection was but one means to that end. The motives of the first tariff were as much to raise revenue as to protect native industry against European, American and Asiatic competition. But in the second tariff the motives were to promote regular employment, to furnish security for the investment of capital, to render stable the conditions of labour, and to prevent the standard of living of workers in industry from being depressed to the level of foreign standards. That was the ‘old’ protection. In 1908 the Liberal Protectionists, prodded and encouraged by Labor, introduced the ‘new’ protection, by which the manufacturer was guaranteed exemption from outside competition to enable him to pay fair and reasonable wages, provided the industry was not impaired and its capacity to supply the local market not reduced. The High Court, which had been created by the Judiciary Act of 1902, declared that parliament had no power under the constitution to legislate for wages, let alone fair and reasonable wages. So the ‘new’ protection lapsed for want of constitutional power, but the ‘old’ protection, the protection of native industries, remained and became an article of faith for radicals and nationalists and a source of profit for manufacturers.
At the same time the idea of ‘fair and reasonable’ wages was not lost sight of. By an Act of 1903 parliament created a Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, one of whose tasks was to conciliate and arbitrate in industrial disputes extending beyond the borders of a State. When H. V. McKay, on behalf of Sunshine Harvester Company, brought the attention of the court to a dispute between his company and the union over the minimum wage in 1906, the chief judge of the court, H. B. Higgins, a Deakinite liberal who had had the courage to say in public that the British behaviour in South Africa was morally indefensible, declared that the task for the court was to decide what were the normal needs of the average employee. He proceeded to answer his own question by saying that parliament meant to secure to the workers something they could not get by the ordinary system of individual bargaining with employers, namely, a wage sufficient to provide them with proper food and water, proper shelter and rest, proper clothing, and a condition of frugal comfort estimated by current human standards. Higgins confined himself to figures for a family’s rent, groceries, bread, milk, fuel, vegetables and fruit, and did not include expenditure on savings, benefit societies, insurance, fares, school requisites, amusements, holidays, intoxicating liquors, tobacco, unusual contingencies, religion, or charity. As he saw it, all those were outside the minimum needs of a civilized human being.
For the Liberal Protectionists and Labor were more concerned about protecting the weak against the strong than about creating a new civilization. In a sense White Australia was one gigantic act of protection. Old age and invalid pensions were a similar manifestation of the same impulse on a smaller scale. Under the Invalid and Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 old age pensions were payable to all native-born and naturalized British subjects who reached the age of sixty-five years, provided the latter had resided in the country for a stipulated number of years. All native-born and naturalized British subjects who were invalids were also entitled to a pension on proof of their disability. To the Liberals and Labor both pensions were evidence not of their desire to take down the mighty from their seats, or to cut off the heads of tall poppies, let alone redistribute wealth, but rather to improve the lot of labouring people and to make Australia a civilized nation able to occupy a high place among the nations of the world and fulfil the great promise envisaged by its founders. But again the promise and the material well-being were reserved for the white man, since Asiatics, and aborigines of Australia, Africa, and the islands of the Pacific were specifically excluded from the right to receive a pension, while the residential qualifications were then such that only ‘Dinkum Aussies’ not ‘Pommies’, or ‘Dagos’, or ‘Huns’ could qualify.
By the end of 1908 the fundamental ideas of the Liberals and Labor had been written into the statute book. Australia, as they saw it, was to be a liberal, bourgeois society in which the materially weak, the aged, the halt, the lame and the blind were to be protected against the laws of supply and demand by a benevolent though austere and frugal state. By that time the Liberal Protectionists believed they had moved as far as their principles would allow in the use of the state to warm the icy spots in capitalist society. They were uneasy, too, at the loss of their vote to Labor candidates in the industrial suburbs, which were developing rapidly in response to the Liberal and Labor policy of protection. In 1908, for example, the electorate of Corio, with its centre in the rising industrial town of Geelong, was lost by the Liberal Protectionists to Labor. At the same time the more conservative wing of the party, who either had a vested interest in protection, or felt indifferent to the vision that sustained Deakin, were becoming more and more alarmed at the long-term implications of the ‘monopolies’ declaration by the Labor Party. Another cause for anxiety was the political instability caused by the fact that there were three major parties, so that between 1901 and the election of 1908 no party was able to command a majority in the House of Representatives.
In this state of alarm caused by their declining popular vote, the fear of the radicals within the Labor Party, the instability of the three-party system, and some immediate if rather ephemeral anxieties about Labor’s proposals for defence and the distribution of the surplus revenue of the Commonwealth, Deakin entered into negotiations with the leaders of the Conservative Free-Traders for a union of the two parties. The result was a fusion of the two into the Liberal Party with Deakin as leader in May 1909. The objective was the union of all liberals throughout the Commonwealth, to secure in parliament liberal legislation for the development of Australia on a democratic basis. In the platform there was reference to their intention to uphold the federal union, to maintain the policy of effective protection, to establish a White Australia, to develop the Australian naval and military forces by means of universal training, to achieve the assumption by the Commonwealth of the public debts of the States, to promote economy in the public expenditure and efficiency in the public services, and to assert the principle that all representatives of the people should be directly and solely responsible to the people for their votes and actions. Liberalism had abandoned its role as a pioneer in social reform and committed itself to the defence of the status quo.
The bourgeois press hailed the agreement with enthusiasm. ‘Standing as it does,’ wrote the Melbourne Age, ‘midway between the extremes of Conservatism and Labor, the Liberal party has a vitally important duty to perform.’ The Labor press was sour and scurrilous: ‘Office is his vice,’ wrote the Australian Worker about Deakin’s role in the fusion, ‘and is as indispensable to him as opium to the Chow, and grog to the drunkard.’ When Deakin walked into the House of Representatives in Melbourne in May 1909, a few days after the announcement of the fusion, some cried Judas, and Hughes on the Labor side, who knew in his heart all the wretchedness of treachery and dishonour, jeered that Judas at least had had the decency to go outside and hang himself. To his dismay, Deakin found that all those with whom he had laboured to lay the foundations of a liberal, bourgeois state were on the opposite side of the House, while his erstwhile opponents had become his political friends.
By an odd irony the immediate political result of the fusion was an election in which one party obtained a majority for the first time in the House of Representatives. But it was the Labor Party and not Deakin’s new Liberal Party that achieved this distinction. For in the general election of 13 April, 1910, Labor won forty-one seats to thirty-one for the Liberal Party in the House of Representatives, while after the election Labor had twenty-two in the Senate and the Liberals fourteen. So on 29 April Deakin resigned, and the leader of the Labor Party, Andrew Fisher, became Prime Minister of Australia. Deakin’s fears of Labor extremism were not fulfilled by Labor’s use of its power, for the new government behaved with the restraint and respect for vested interests of a reformist rather than a radical party.
With the firmness befitting its claim to be the party of Australian national sentiment, it proceeded to choose Canberra, a pastoral centre one hundred and ninety miles south-west of Sydney, as the site for the national capital. Despite the suggestions by its more self-conscious devotees of culture to call the capital Shakespeare, the majority in the government stood firmly for the Aboriginal name. So out of the sordid rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne and a chance swing of the political pendulum, Australia acquired a capital in a district of great natural beauty. Fortune, too, continued to smile on the building of that city, for in a world-wide competition for a city plan, the winning entry was submitted by Walter Burley Griffin, an American architect with an eye for beauty of design and a rebel against the messiness and ugliness of late-Victorian architecture. That was in 1911. In the same year, the Labor government announced that no ‘stagger juices’ would be sold in the Australian Capital Territory, for Labor was puritanical and more committed to making the bourgeoisie behave, and making the working classes respectable, than to the making and unmaking of social conditions.
Their contribution to social welfare legislation between 1910 and 1913 was meagre. They passed an act to create the Commonwealth Bank that, after the froth and bubble talk of a people’s bank had been skimmed off, was the old pale brew. The existing system of banking was to be made more efficient by introducing competition between private and state enterprise. The Land Tax Act of 1910, with its aim of forcing landowners either to use or to dispose of large tracts of unused land, sprang from their belief that breaking monopolies rather than attacking the inner citadel of economic privilege was the road to social progress. They found themselves virtually unable to legislate on such social and economic subjects as wages, prices, and the ownership of the means of production because of constitutional limitations, and so they turned some of their energies towards amending the constitution. When their leaders spoke or wrote in public to justify such proposals, their words had the vagueness and woolliness of men who were bankrupt of theory if not of principle. When Hughes published The Case for Labour articles in the Daily Telegraph in 1910, Louis Esson wrote in the International Socialist that Hughes had not written The Case for Labour, but for the Labor Party. ‘In the matter of the book,’ Esson wrote, ‘we find no statement of principle – no economics, no philosophy – we find no suggestion of any far off diverse event to which Mr Hughes and his followers are supposed to move.’
In its first term in office with a majority, then, Labor was distinguished for its selection and planning of the national capital, and the creation of a national army and navy, rather than for its ideas and actions on the shape and future of Australian society. After the election of May 1913 the Liberal Party had a majority of one in the House of Representatives and was in a minority in the Senate. Their new leader, Joseph Cook, formed a government that survived till June 1914, when the Governor-General dissolved both houses after the Labor majority in the Senate twice rejected the Government Preference Prohibition Bill. But by the end of July the provincial issues in Australian politics had been swept into the maelstrom of world affairs. On 28 June the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been murdered at Sarajevo. All through July Australians took up themes that had touched them deeply in their history. Dr Mannix, the new Catholic Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, rejoiced that the opening of Newman College at the University of Melbourne would fit Catholics to fill the higher places in the public, professional, and commercial walks of Australian life. The first airmail flight between Melbourne and Sydney was made; and Melbourne shivered in the rain and sleet of its late July weather. But on 28 July the report of the terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia shocked them out of their provincial complacency.
When the press announced on 30 July that Austria, Hungary and Russia had mobilized, Mr Fisher, speaking for the Australian Labor Party at Colac, Victoria, on 31 July said: ‘But should the worst happen after everything has been done that honour will permit, Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’ Thunderous applause greeted his remarks. On 3 August the Prime Minister, Joseph Cook, announced the government’s decision to place Australian vessels under the control of the British Admirality and to offer the imperial government an expeditionary force of 20,000. On the last Sunday before the war, priests and clergy asked their congregations to pray for peace, while in one Labor paper one writer said, ‘If Europe is to get drunk with blood, there is all the greater reason why Labor should keep a clear head.’ But when Great Britain declared war on Germany at midnight on 4 August, crowds sang the national anthem in the streets, bands played ‘Rule Britannia’ in the cafes, and crowds cheered and sang in the theatres. A mob got out of hand in Melbourne and raided the Chinese quarter of Little Bourke Street, and at the University of Melbourne on the following day the students sang ‘God Save the King’ at the end of lectures.
All through August the Cook government went on with preparations for war and for elections. At these elections, which were held on 5 September, the Labor Party won forty-two seats in the House of Representatives and the Liberal Party thirty-one, with one independent, while in the Senate the Labor Party won thirty-one and the Liberal Party five. Andrew Fisher again became Prime Minister of Australia, while Hughes took the portfolio of attorney-general and soon began to dominate cabinet and caucus by the force of his personality.
William Morris Hughes was born of Welsh parents in London in 1862 and educated partly in Wales and London for the profession of schoolmaster; but in 1884 he decided to emigrate to Australia. After turning down an offer to teach at a Queensland school back of beyond, he took various positions as stone-breaker, boundary-rider, drover, and seaman. He then moved to Sydney, where he worked as a pantryman and actor in Shakespeare, bought a bookshop, and began to study the history of society and labour conditions with an ardour that drove him into the affairs of the Waterside Workers’ Union, the Political Labour League of New South Wales, and the legislative assembly of that State, which he entered in 1894. In 1901 he was elected to represent West Sydney in the first Commonwealth parliament.
It may be doubted whether he loved any man. Endowed by nature with a short, almost dwarfish frame, and made deaf by his harsh experiences in the western lands of Queensland, his affections for his fellow-man were deadened by the pitilessness he had experienced in his own struggle for survival. He brought to politics the cunning and the determination of a man who had graduated in a hard school. His early political career in Sydney was concerned with tricks with ballot-boxes, absconding from howling mobs, and mixing it on the waterfront, rather than with schemes for the future of mankind. For the man had no faith in human beings. Humanity, he believed, was too mean-spirited to work for any but selfish ends. Although from 1890 to 1910 he was tempted to believe that some of the human vileness from which he suffered was the product of the capitalist system, he did not carry his inquiry to its logical conclusion. His first marriage (his wife died in 1906 after bearing four children) had further soured him against mankind. So Hughes became a pessimist about human nature. While giving the appearance of wanting to take down the mighty from their seat and send the rich empty away, he was utterly devoid of any view of what to put in their place. The experiences during the war were to uncover dramatically his role as the servant of the bourgeoisie rather than of the working classes.
All through August and September the Cook government first, and then the Fisher government, prepared for war. On instructions from the imperial government, small expeditionary forces from Australia and New Zealand occupied the German colonies in New Guinea, the Solomons, and Samoa. At the same time the government called for volunteers to make up the expeditionary force of twenty thousand men promised to Great Britain. Wagons, harness, and uniforms were manufactured, ships were refitted to carry troops, food was requisitioned, and medical equipment was prepared, while the volunteers trained at Liverpool, near Sydney, and Broadmeadows, near Melbourne. By the end of October twenty-six Australian and ten New Zealand transports had gathered in the deep waters of King George’s Sound on the south coast of Western Australia, and on 1 November, under an escort of British and Australian warships, the convoy steamed out on to the high seas bound for the Middle East. En route the Australian cruiser Sydney engaged and sank the German raider Emden at the Cocos Islands.
By December the British General Staff had conceived the plan of weakening Turkey by forcing a passage through the Dardanelles and bombarding Constantinople. This would also relieve Turkish and German pressure on the Russians on the eastern front, who were by then suffering from the defeat at Tannenberg. It was a plan for romantics, a plan for those who believed a rich prize outweighed the suffering, cruelty and losses. For the heights of Gallipoli were steep, and defended by a well-equipped and heroic force trained to a fighting edge by the German military adviser to Turkey, Liman von Sanders. In the meantime the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force trained for war at their camp near Cairo, or relaxed and pursued pleasure in the cafes and low dives of Cairo, unaware of the ordeal being planned for them by the men in black in London.
On 1 April, 1915, the Australians and New Zealanders were informed that all leave had been cancelled. On 3 April the force entrained from Cairo to Alexandria, where they boarded the convoy bound for the Dardanelles. Before dawn on 25 April the advance party rowed for the shore in small boats. But nature was as unkind to them as that chance of fate that had first made them the sport or playthings in a design of such grandeur. The current swept their boats away from the bay where the incline on the cliff was gradual, to a bay where the incline was as steep and forbidding as on the cliffs off the south coast of Australia. When the men scaled the heights, they were met by merciless fire from Turkish guns. But they hung on, dug their trenches, and prepared to attack, while their fellow Australians, New Zealanders and British and French troops began their part in the assault on the Dardanelles, and naval guns pounded the Turkish lines.
From April to December the allied forces held on till the order came from London for the withdrawal. On 19 December the Australians and New Zealanders embarked on the ships of a convoy instructed to take them to Egypt. By then 7,600 Australians and nearly 2,500 New Zealanders had been killed; 19,000 Australians and 5,000 New Zealanders were wounded. The French casualties were as high as those of the ANZACS, the name adopted for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the British lost nearly three times as many. The grand design of a swift end to the war in the Middle East ended in a military disaster. The soldiers, if not the people to whom they belonged, were in part apotheosized by the ashes of defeat, for from that year the landing at Gallipoli became Anzac Day. For some it symbolized the noblest aspirations of the people. For others it was the bond of those who had been through the fiery furnace and been uplifted by it, not beyond good and evil, but beyond the mean, the petty, the trivial and the unworthy.
Early in 1916 the General Staff in London decided to move the Anzacs from Egypt to the western front in France. By 19 March the first troops arrived in Marseilles, where to the tune of the ‘Marseillaise’ from the regimental bands, tin whistles, shouts, cheers, and profanities and obscenities, the troops entrained for the western front. To the relief of their officers, who had expected pandemonium to break loose when the Australians landed on French soil, the behaviour was exemplary. ‘Not a single case of misbehaviour or lack of discipline has been brought to our notice,’ wrote the British commandant at Marseilles. This was a record. By May the troops had taken up their positions near Armentières on the western front to prepare for the blood-baths, the mud, and the privations soldiers of all the armies had suffered since the madness began on 4 August, 1914.
In the meantime the government in Australia geared the economy to serve the war, which greatly increased the role of the state in economic life and the power of the Commonwealth in relation to the States. Prices were fixed, and when a baker named Farey in Glenferrie, a suburb of Melbourne, questioned the power of the Commonwealth to fix prices, the High Court in 1916 ruled against him. The government created systems for state control of the marketing of wool, wheat and other primary products, and bought ships to supplement the small numbers available for the English-Australian trade. The war speeded up the development of secondary industry, too, as the demand for foodstuffs, clothing, boots, weapons and ammunition gathered momentum. To meet this demand, as well as to replace British products, the iron and steel works of Broken Hill Proprietary Limited were opened at Newcastle in April 1915. So by an odd coincidence the war not only contributed to the deepening of the Australian tradition at Gallipoli, but provided the economic setting for the development of an industry that in time would carry the industrialization of Australia to a point where its uniqueness and its bush lore disappeared. The iron rails tethered the bush to the world.
The war was also destined to end the vision that had sustained the high-minded amongst the Liberals and Labor at the end of the century. In October 1915 Fisher accepted the position of High Commissioner in London, and Hughes became Prime Minister. As British casualties in France rose towards the million mark and German submarine warfare cut supplies from overseas to England, the British government looked to the colonies and dominions for replacements. To examine the plight of the mother country at first hand, Hughes accepted the invitation of the British government to visit England early in 1916. In the heat and passions aroused by a country at bay, Hughes put himself at the service of those who shared his own craving for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He stormed up and down England shouting to audiences caught up in the hysteria of war, ‘Wake up England!’
As the standards of civilized behaviour were crumbling around him, Hughes jeered at Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, who had been the models of English liberalism. Intoxicated by his success as a mob orator and feted everywhere by the men who had prospered from the war, Hughes went on in triumph to the western front, where the soldiers hailed him affectionately as the ‘Little Digger’. By then he was convinced that Australia must increase its supply of men, munitions and food. He was also convinced that the only way Australia could provide the 16,500 soldiers per month – the figure set by the Imperial General Staff – was to introduce conscription for service overseas. In return the British promised Australia a voice at the peace table when the victors carved up the spoils of war.
But Hughes was the leader of a party pledged to oppose conscription for overseas service and deeply suspicious of all imperialist wars. From the moment he landed at Adelaide in August 1916 the crisis over conscription began to split the country into two opposing camps. At every station on the train journey from Adelaide to Melbourne crowds gathered to sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ and the national anthem to the ‘Little Digger’. At Melbourne crowds cheered or shouted ‘Hullo, Billy’, and when Hughes told them he hoped later to say some words on a serious matter, a soldier warmly grasped his hand and called on the crowd to give three cheers for conscription. But within his own party Hughes was received with the iciness and hostility that men reserve for traitors to a cause. The Political Labour Leagues of New South Wales and Victoria reaffirmed their opposition to conscription. When Hughes announced his intention of holding a referendum of the people on the question, the Sydney Political Labour League expelled him from the Australian Labor Party.
During the campaign for the referendum feeling ran high. Hughes took his stand on the facts. ‘We,’ he wrote in his manifesto to the electors, ‘boasting our freedom, are called upon to prove ourselves worthy to be free.’ To do that Australia must supply 16,500 men each month to the army. This the voluntary system had failed to do. With an appeal to solidarity with the soldiers who, Hughes asserted, were calling to them to come and stand by them, he adjured every man and woman in the Commonwealth in the name of democracy to vote ‘Yes’ on 28 October. A section of the Labor Party had their doubts. They urged their fellow-Australians to vote ‘No’ to keep Australia a white man’s country, because the voluntary system was supplying enough recruits, because conscription, if applied in Australia, should be applied to the whole of Australia, because no man should decide the fate of another, because conscription threatened unionism, and because conscription had been rejected by every Labor organization and a vast majority of unionists. So Labor Party propaganda raised the bogy of White Australia and class solidarity.
Sectarian loyalties were also roused. The Anglican synod in Melbourne declared that the war was a religious war and that the voices of the allies were being used by God to vindicate the rights of the weak and to maintain the moral order of the world. They passed without discussion a resolution in favour of conscription and, in an outbreak of rectitude and patriotic fervour, rose to their feet and sang ‘God Save the King’. Bishop Mannix saw it in quite a different light. The war was, he believed, a sordid trade war and, though he believed it would be desirable for the allies to win, Australia had made sufficient sacrifices. It was possible to do their duty and to do it nobly without conscription. The pulpit, he added, was not the place for a priest to become a recruiting agent. At the close of his speeches the crowd sometimes rose and sang ‘God Save Ireland’.
On 28 October, 1916, the electors were asked to answer the question: ‘Are you in favour of the Government having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military service, for the term of this war, outside the Commonwealth, as it now has in regard to military service within the Commonwealth?’ ‘Yes’, voted 1,087,557, and 1,160,037 voted ‘No’. From the voting figures by electorates, the voting was in the main on party lines – despite the sectarian sound and fury and the savagery of the propaganda by both sides. The Labor Party then turned to deal with Hughes as a man who had broken the pledge, for by one of those ironies the man who had so wittily and brilliantly defended the pledge in The Case for Labour was about to become one of its most memorable victims.
On 10 October Hughes had boasted in a speech at Ballarat, Victoria, that ‘… in a little while we shall separate the wheat from the chaff. We shall prove how much of the labour movement is worthy to survive – how much must go.’ Cheers greeted these words, but it was a hollow victory, for it was not given to Hughes to determine the future of the labour movement. When the parliamentary members of the party met in the party room at Parliament House, Melbourne, Mr Finlayson moved: ‘That the Prime Minister [Mr Hughes] no longer possesses the confidence of the Party as Leader, and the office of Chairman be and is hereby declared vacant.’ In a rage, Hughes asked his supporters to follow him from the room. Four ministers and twenty-six of the rank and file walked out of that room with him. ‘Labor,’ said the Melbourne Argus, ‘had blown out its brains.’
But the surviving Labor members saw it in quite a different light: they had removed the chief of the conscriptionists from the leadership of an anti-conscriptionist movement. They had purged their ranks of traitors. The split so weakened the Labor Party that it remained in the political wilderness for thirteen years. It strengthened the Irish Catholic influence in the party. The weakness of the political wing of the movement, breached as it had been by the chauvinism of Hughes and his followers, provided the occasion for the militants to capture the unions. So from 1918 on the Industrial Workers of the World, the Syndicalists and the One Big Union movement influenced the attitude of the unions to strikes, to co-operation with the employers, and to the tactics of the labour movement.
After his dramatic walk-out in Melbourne, Hughes immediately began negotiations for the formation of a national government. The new Labor leader, Frank Tudor, snubbed the offer, but the leader of the Liberal party, Joseph Cook, responded to the overtures. The result was not only the formation of a national government (from November to January Hughes headed a government with Liberal support) in January 1917, but the formation of the Nationalist Party, which was a fusion of the Hughes group with the old Liberal Party. They pledged themselves to victory, democracy, and White Australia, but abandoned all pretence of the liberal idealism or the radical sentiments that had been held by their predecessors.
Against a background of news of further blood-baths on the western front, Hughes decided to hold a second referendum on conscription on 20 December, 1917, when the voters were asked: ‘Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Australian Imperial Forces overseas?’ This time feeling ran high. Dr Mannix in a speech at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne called Hughes a ‘little Czar’. Hughes retaliated with talk of deporting the Archbishop; eggs and tomatoes were thrown at the Prime Minister when he arrived at Warwick in Queensland; Hughes retaliated by having pages of the Queensland Hansard in which the Irish Catholic Premier Ryan had denounced Hughes as a trickster and a liar expunged from the book. While Australia was torn in two by sectarian and provincial rivalries, the Bolshevik party stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd. On 7 November Lenin told his followers in the Smolny building in that city: ‘Today has begun a new era in the history of mankind.’ On that day workers in Queensland were pelting Hughes with rotten eggs, while mobs sang ‘God Save the King’ or ‘God Save Ireland’. On 20 December 1,015,159 voted ‘Yes’, and 1,181,747 voted ‘No’.
In the meantime the war on the western front was approaching a critical phase. The troops were chafing under the strain of heavy casualties, sniping, gas warfare, new and terrible weapons such as tanks and bombs delivered by aeroplanes, and rumours of an impending German offensive. The news of the successful revolution in Russia, and Bolshevik slogans of peace, bread and land contrasted sharply with the imperialist slogans of a war to the finish. The Germans struck in March 1918 and at one point penetrated to within thirty-five miles of Paris, but the allied armies, now reinforced by the American army, contained the threat, and then drove them back till the German retreat degenerated into a rout. Austria-Hungary sued for a separate peace on 28 October. The German navy mutinied at Kiel a day later. Early in November an almost bloodless revolution occurred in Germany. The Kaiser abdicated, and a social democrat, Ebert, became chancellor in time to accept the armistice terms offered by Foch on behalf of the victorious allies. At 11 a.m. on 11 November the firing ceased. When the news of the armistice was announced in Australia, flags were unfurled, the bells of the churches tolled, bands played, and people embraced in the streets.
Of the 416,809 who entered the services during the war, 331,781 had taken the field. Of these, 59,342 were killed, 152,171 were wounded. The cost of the war between 1914 and 1919 was assessed at 364 million pounds; and between 1919 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the consequential cost in pensions, repatriation, care of the wounded, interest on war debts, and aids to returned soldiers was about another 270 million pounds.
With the tenacity and flamboyancy that had characterized his whole political career, and his passionate conviction that the weak go to the wall, Hughes arrived in London and announced publicly that Australia would not be bound by the idealism in Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
When the peace negotiations opened at Versailles in January 1919, Hughes resisted pugnaciously the proposal of the Big Five to hand over the German colonies to be administered under a mandate that would permit freedom of migration. Under these provisions, Hughes realized, the Japanese would be able to migrate to New Guinea. Here was one of those battles for survival that he relished. As he said later, ‘The soldiers died for the safety of Australia. Australia is safe.’ He meant that Australia, by his efforts, was saved from the Japanese, for under the compromise suggested by a member of the Australian delegation at Versailles, the nation to whom the territory of New Guinea was mandated could apply its own immigration laws to the area. Hughes was just as pugnacious and effective in ensuring that the covenant of the League of Nations did not contain a clause that would bind all members to promise equality of treatment to all other members. From such behaviour the delegates might have inferred that the aim of the war was to keep Australia white rather than to achieve those high-minded aspirations summed up in the Fourteen Points. Hughes was just as rapacious in his handling of the reparations question. He wanted a large war indemnity: he wanted the Germans to pay towards the 364 million pounds Australia had spent on the war. But this time the ‘Little Digger’ had to settle for half and turn for home.
When Hughes stepped out of the train at Melbourne on 31 August, the soldiers greeted him with deafening cheers. Someone clapped a digger’s hat upon his head and swathed him in an Australian ensign. As his car wended its way slowly from the Spencer Street railway station to the town hall, there were similar scenes of enthusiasm. At the hall the diggers seized him bodily from his car and carried him up the stairs, while the crowds cheered and shouted ‘You beauty’ and ‘Little Digger’. Some wept for joy in that moment of victory and achievement. When Hughes spoke the following night at Bendigo, he spent most of his time jeering at the visionaries who were deluding the people that there was some short cut to paradise. When he rose to his feet in the House of Representatives on 10 September, he spoke with emotion of how Australia had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, how they could lift up their voices and thank God that through the sacrifices of their soldiers they had been brought safely into the green pastures of peace. ‘There is,’ he added, ‘no way of salvation save by the gospel of work. Those who endeavour to set class against class, or to destroy wealth, are counsellors of destruction.’