When Hughes spoke in the House of Representatives on 10 September, 1919, he told the members:
We went into this conflict for our own national safety, in order to ensure our national integrity, which was in dire peril, to safeguard our liberties, and those free institutions of government which, whatever may be our political opinions, are essential to our national life, and to maintain those ideals which we have nailed to the very topmost of our flagpoles – White Australia, and those other aspirations of this young Democracy.
He went on to pose the question, ‘Now, what have we got?’ To which he supplied the answer: simply, national safety, White Australia, and freedom from communism. ‘Australia,’ said Hughes, ‘is safe.’ The age of the survivors had begun.
The main political parties accepted this definition of aim, though they differed in emphasis and methods. The Nationalist Party was deeply committed to the promotion of capitalist society and the fight against communism, but many members were somewhat embarrassed by the virulence and fanaticism with which Hughes flogged the ideal of White Australia. The Nationalist Party was committed, too, to maintain the Australian standard of living by the traditional methods of protection to native industry and by arbitration. The one cloud on the political horizon was not the challenge from Labor, for Labor had not recovered from the split of 1916–17, but the rise of the Country Party.
Until 1917 the country interests had exercised influence by their own sectional organizations, such as the pastoralists’ associations or the farmers’ and settlers’ associations. Between 1917 and 1920, however, the country interests, the wool growers, the wheat farmers, dairy farmers, orchardists, and professional men in country towns, formed their own parties in all States and the Commonwealth. One wing of this party was composed of pastoralists and successful farmers, who were deeply conservative and fanatically opposed to radicalism, IWW-ism, socialism, communism and bolshevism, and even branded democracy as a poison because one man, one vote meant the domination of the hard-working pastoralist or farmer by the city ‘gas-pipe loafer’. The other wing, composed of the small farmers, farm labourers, petty bourgeoisie, and working classes of the country towns, was a radical group within the party that clamoured for the cutting up of the large estates and toyed with the single tax and similar radical ideas. At the same time they supported the country myth about the city – that through city influence the farmer and the country town dweller lived in squalor; that the high basic wage was encouraging the spread of prickly pear and other pests over the Australian countryside; and that the wealth of Australia was not brought about by hard labour, but by borrowing from overseas.
The entry of the Country Party into the politics of the Commonwealth in 1920 meant a return not only to three political parties, but to the probability that the Nationalists would lose their majority in parliament and would thus depend on the Country Party to remain in office. It was this role of the corner party, the ability to squeeze concessions for country interests in return for support, that the leaders of the Country Party exploited with great skill over the next forty years. They employed the tactic of supporting protection for secondary industry in return for the protection of country interests. For they, too, saw themselves as survivors and as such entitled to a share in the high standard of living.
Labor, too, wanted the workers to have a just share of the cake, though they were bitterly divided on how this could be achieved. From the beginning of the Russian Revolution in November 1917 until 1920 the radicals, the militants, and the doctrinaire socialists continued their uneasy association with the Labor Party, or joined more extreme movements such as the Victorian Socialist Party. With the formation of the Australian Communist Party in October 1920 these groups broke finally with the Australian Labor Party, the members of which thundered against the wickedness of the Bolsheviks with as much zeal as the leaders of the bourgeois parties. The New South Wales Labor leader, J. Storey, said in March 1919:
We stand for the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community, the securing of monopolies, and the extension of the industrial and economic function of the state and the municipality.
Labor remained safe for reformism and its share of the cake.
At the Brisbane conference of the Australian Labor Party in October 1921 the majority voted in favour of a new objective: ‘The Socialisation of Industry, Production, Distribution and Exchange.’ This meant different things to different members of the party. To the radicals the new objective would release the workers from ‘the bonds of wage slavery’, and release Labor in power from the farce of administering ‘the capitalistic system’. Others within the party confessed they did not know what it meant, while others said that it meant the eventual control of industry by the state, and that the change must be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
For the decade 1919–29 political power remained with the Nationalist Party and the new Country Party. In the election of 9 December, 1919, the Nationalists won thirty-five seats, the Labor Party twenty-six, and the Country Party ten; independents won four, all but one generally voting with Labor. In the Senate the Nationalists had thirty-five members and Labor one. Hughes again formed a government pledged to tariff protection, White Australia, the preservation of the Australian standard of living, and the suppression of the Communists. The Tariff, Arbitration, and the Immigration Restriction Acts remained the instruments for such purposes. To reward those who had brought Australians safely into the green pastures of peace, the Hughes government passed acts to enable returned soldiers to buy blocks of farmland at low prices and reasonable mortgages, so that they might reasonably be expected to make a good living should prices and seasons be propitious.
The suppression of the Communists was pursued with the same zeal as the exclusion of Asians. Hughes brought down amendments to the Immigration Restriction Act that empowered the Commonwealth to declare as prohibited immigrants or to deport any persons who advocated the overthrow of the existing government of the Commonwealth by violence. The Crimes Act passed in 1920 also contained a clause declaring any person who advocated the overthrow of the existing government of the Commonwealth by violence to be guilty of a crime punishable by imprisonment. The Hughes government proposed to withhold the Australian standard of living and the Australian way of life from Asians and Communists.
Hughes did not continue for long to lead Australians into the green pastures of peace. After the election of December 1922 the Labor Party had thirty seats, the Nationalists twenty-eight, the Country Party fourteen, the Liberals two, with one independent, while in the Senate Labor had twelve, the Nationalists twenty-three, and the Country Party one. The Nationalists could not form a government without some sort of understanding with the Country Party. By that time Hughes had alienated members of his own government and party by his overbearing pride and arrogance, which had swollen to monstrous proportions after his social successes in London in 1916 and his gaining a reputation as a world figure by his wit, tenacity, and victory at Versailles in 1919. With the passage of time he had become somewhat careless in concealing his contempt for the low calibre of other members of his cabinet. So, despite the public tributes to his achievements in London and at Versailles, other leaders of the Nationalist Party began to plot with the leaders of the Country Party to bring down Hughes.
When Earle Page, a doctor from Grafton in northern New South Wales who had become leader of the Country Party in April 1921, revealed that his party would not work with Hughes but was prepared to work with another leader, Hughes resigned in February 1923. Page then immediately negotiated with Stanley Melbourne Bruce to form a coalition government.
Bruce was born in Melbourne in 1883 into a patrician family and was educated at Melbourne Grammar School in the classics, which strengthened his natural tendencies of temperament to believe in the government of society by a benevolent and high-minded elite. From Melbourne Grammar he went straight to Cambridge. He entered the bar in 1907, and on the outbreak of war took a commission in the Worcester regiment, in which he served with distinction till wounded while fighting with the British army at Suvla. He was invalided back to Australia in 1917, entered the family business of Paterson, Laing and Bruce, and was elected to the House of Representatives as member for Flinders in 1918. Not by birth, education, or temperament did he ever feel any sympathy with the bush myth of mateship and equality, or the larrikin tradition of the towns. Naturally aloof by inclination, he advertised his difference from the democratic tradition by the Englishness of his clothing (he wore spats), by his English rather than Australian accent, and by his English manners of speech when speaking to the working classes (he always addressed a member of the Labor Party in the lobbies of the House by his last name only). So in 1923 an urbane patrician, a fine flower of transplanted English civilization in Australia, formed a coalition with a shrewd country doctor for the government of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Their aims were the same as those of Hughes. They wanted to maintain the White Australia policy, to preserve the Australian standard of living, and to ensure the national safety. Their policies differed from those of Hughes in their conception of how this could be achieved. Bruce, with support from the chambers of manufactures and commerce, believed in more protection for native industry, in incentives to English investment, in increase in population, and in the search for markets for Australia’s surplus produce. Page, with support from the pastoralists’ associations, the farmers’ and settlers’ organizations and the dairy farmers, saw the solution in schemes of protection in primary industry and in improvements to country life that would bring the creature comforts of electric light, more entertainment, and better roads. Both agreed that communists, bolsheviks, anarchists, militants, and the survivors of the IWW movement must be removed to places where they could not do harm.
Between 1923 and 1928 the government administered its stimulants to production and distribution. A retail price for sugar was fixed by the government, and the producer was protected from foreign competition. A bounty was paid to grape-growers when the price fell below a certain amount. The canned-fruits industry was given a subsidy to enable it to compete in overseas markets. The home consumption price of butter was raised, and the difference between the agreed price and the natural price was used to pay a bounty again to enable the exporters to sell in London in competition with New Zealand, European, and American dairy farmers. To encourage immigration, special assistance was offered to immigrants from Britain, for Bruce and Page, like Fielding’s Tom Jones, were men of heroic ingredients who confounded the future of civilization with the welfare of the Protestant religion and British institutions. Between 1921 and 1929, just over two hundred and twelve thousand migrants arrived in Australia. To encourage their settlement in the country as well as to ease the rural slump, the Bruce-Page government made extensive grants to the State governments for the building of roads. To make possible a more equitable and efficient distribution of government revenues between the Commonwealth and State governments, Page persuaded parliament and people to endorse a financial agreement between Commonwealth and States in 1927.
In the meantime, as part of the policy of encouragement to public works and development, the government pushed on with the building of Canberra. By 9 May, 1927, all was in readiness for the opening of parliament in Canberra by the Duke of York. On that day thirty to forty thousand people gathered outside Parliament House in that small city of undulating plain and open sky to watch the arrival of the Duke and Duchess. As they stood on the steps of the new white building, Dame Nellie Melba sang ‘God Save the King’. A solitary Aborigine demanded to see the ‘whole plurry show’, but as he was deemed to be inadequately clad for the occasion, a policeman led him away. From the steps the Duke urged the people to listen to the voices of the noble army of the dead and march in step with them towards a glorious destiny. At the official lunch to celebrate the occasion only one toast was drunk – to His Majesty – and that in fruit cup. No intoxicants were served, and speeches were taboo. Again Labor leaders were suspicious of the junketings and the worship of social class. ‘The Canberra turn-out,’ wrote the Labor Call in Melbourne, ‘seems to have been a bit of a frost.’
The government was preparing plans to come to the aid of those who were in any way afflicted or distressed in mind, body, or estate. Even before he became Prime Minister, Bruce had moved for the appointment of a royal commission to inquire into national insurance as a means of making provision for casual sickness, permanent invalidism, old age and unemployment. In its first report in 1925 the commission reported in favour of sickness, invalid, and maternity payments, and in its second report recommended a scheme of national insurance for unemployment. In 1928 Bruce brought down a national insurance bill for a first reading, but before the House could discuss it adequately the government itself suffered shipwreck through its handling of what it believed to be another sickness of capitalist society – the activities of the militants and Communists.
In 1925 and 1926 seamen and waterside workers brought the waterfront to a standstill by a series of strikes. Believing the unionists to be the dupes of Communist agitators such as Tom Walsh and Jacob Johnson, Bruce amended both the Navigation Act and the Immigration Restriction Act to give the government the power to break strikes in shipping or to deport the extremists amongst the union leaders. In this way White Australia became the instrument for a politically pure and respectable Australia. But the scheme misfired; for at the end of 1925 the High Court quashed the attempt to deport Walsh and Johnson, while the repressive legislation and the casual remarks dropped in the heat of controversy made the moderates and the rank and file of the Labor Party suspect that Bruce was aiming to grind the workers into the dust.
Bruce rather hastily decided that the source of some of this industrial unrest lay in the overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions of the Commonwealth and State arbitration systems, and he submitted proposals for reform to the electors in November 1928. The coalition of Nationalists and Country Party won forty-two seats, but Labor increased its representation by eight seats to thirty-one, with two independents, while in the Senate the Nationalists had twenty-four, the Country Party four, and the Labor Party seven. Bruce unwisely interpreted this as approval for his measures of repression. In August 1929 he introduced the Maritime Industries Bill, which in effect abandoned the field of industrial regulation to the States. Hughes, who had been waiting for an opportunity to revenge himself on Bruce for the treachery of 1923, accused Bruce of proceeding ‘from stunt to stunt’, and then in the committee stage of the bill brought a motion that toppled the government by one vote. Exultant, Hughes waited for the call from Labor and a reconciliation with his old ‘mates’, but such was not to be. The only satisfaction for Hughes was the empty one of the defeat of the Bruce-Page government in the election of 1929, and the defeat of Bruce in the electorate of Flinders. When James Scullin formed his government, there was no suggestion of a reconciliation with the ‘Little Digger’. The policy of undying hostility to political traitors was followed implacably, and Hughes remained in the political wilderness, known to Labor as the man who had split the party asunder, and to the Nationalists as the man who had brought down the Bruce-Page government.
But Labor in 1929 had little more to offer than the ability of its members to administer the bourgeois state. Torn by faction fights all through the 1920s, the tiny band of idealists who had proudly announced their intention in 1891 to enter parliament to make and unmake social conditions had developed into a group more and more concerned with the means of capturing political power and less and less concerned with how to use it. Labor had held office in Queensland from 1915 to 1929, and in New South Wales from 1910 to 1916, 1925 to 1927, 1930 to 1932. There was little to distinguish a Labor from a non-Labor administration, except the emphasis on social welfare and the creation of state enterprises. In Queensland the government owned and controlled sheep stations, butcher shops, a fishery, a cannery, a hotel, coke-works, smelters and mines. They had abolished the legislative council in 1922. The government of New South Wales had shipyards, brickworks, metal quarries, pipe and reinforced concrete works and coal mines. The motive was state control of capitalism rather than the use of the state to build a new society. For the purpose of these enterprises was to promote competition between the state and private enterprise, to increase the quality and quantity of goods available, and to keep prices down rather than destroy private enterprise. In their administration of the education system of the States Labor governments were reformist rather than revolutionary. Labor used its power to reward its followers with the key positions in the civil service and the judiciary.
The mantle of radicalism had fallen on the shoulders of the Communist Party, which was pledged to the destruction of the bourgeois state and the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In other ways, too, the Communists were more radical than Labor. Although the Labor Party had adopted the slogan ‘The Unity of Labor is the Hope of the World’, on White Australia it remained loyal to its race rather than its class. At the third meeting of the Pan-Pacific Secretariat at Vladivostok in 1929, the Australian union delegates accepted the proposition that White Australia was a theory based not only on the fear of economic competition from lower paid labour, but also on the false doctrine of the superiority of the white race, a doctrine that was deliberately being fostered by the imperialists in their own interests, and in preparation for coming imperialist wars. The leaders of the Labor Party were furious. The Australian Worker in January 1929 denounced the earlier Shanghai conference of the Pan-Pacific Secretariat as a meeting where ‘coloured gentlemen’ decided that the Australian labour movement must be ‘undermined and wrecked with the object of upraising the communist party on the debris’.
Yet the Communists failed to gain a following amongst the working classes. Their leaders were drawn from the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and renegades from the Catholic Church, while the rank and file of the party were drawn as much from the middle-class intellectuals as from the working classes. It was as difficult for the Communists in Australia to convert people to the overthrow of the existing society as it was for the missionaries in Tahiti to convince the natives of original sin. Their upright if stiff-necked loyalty to the doctrine of increasing misery did not help them to convince the masses that they knew how to remove the causes of human conflict and create material well-being for all. Their loyalty to all the changes of tactics and policies in Moscow exposed them to the charge that they were not masters in their own house.
The Scullin Labor government then, sworn in at Canberra in October 1929, differed from its predecessor in degree rather than kind. The minority in the Labor Party who thought of the socialization pledge as a commitment to a new society were frustrated by their lack of support in the party, by the absence of constitutional power, and by the lack of a majority in the Senate. But Labor was the party of Australian nationalist sentiment as well as of social reform. When Lord Stonehaven retired as Governor-General, Scullin put forward the name of Isaac Isaacs, a cultivated Jew with a political past as a Deakinite liberal, and a long and distinguished career as a judge of the High Court. George V was not impressed. He asked rather sharply through his secretary, ‘Who is Isaac Isaacs?’ Scullin stood firm, and George V had no alternative but to announce with as good grace as possible the appointment of the first native-born Australian as Governor-General of the Commonwealth.
Scullin, however, was firmer in his nationalism than in his social and economic policy. Immediately after his assumption of office in October 1929 he was faced with a budget crisis for the six State governments as well as for the Commonwealth. Early in 1929 sharp falls in the prices of wool and wheat, the withdrawal of English capital, and the fall in export prices by 50 per cent, began a severe financial crisis. Between the financial years of 1928–29 and 1929–30 the national income declined from 640 million to 560 million pounds. Unemployment increased sharply: by 1933 nearly one-third of the bread-winners were unemployed. In all the capital cities the unemployed clamoured for work or relief; the conservatives preached hard work and sacrifice; the financial cranks preached Douglas Credit; the priests and the clergy mumbled in their pulpits and prayer-desks that the depression was a sign of Divine displeasure at their sins; one clergyman shouted they were dancing their way to damnation; the Communists sardonically predicted that the crisis of capitalist society would grow graver daily.
The Labor government had no firm answer to the crisis. Within the government were men such as Scullin and J. A. Lyons who were influenced by Catholic social teaching and the melancholy history of the Irish, men such as E. G. Theodore who were flirting with financial credit, and men such as Frank Anstey who were tempted to believe the depression was the work of wicked capitalists driven on by their greed and their class hatred to grind the faces of the poor. Scullin rather tamely accepted the arguments for retrenchment at the first Premiers’ Conference to discuss solutions in October 1929. Early in 1930, with national income figures and prices still falling and the number of unemployed swollen, Scullin invited Sir Otto Niemeyer of the Bank of England to Australia to meet the premiers. Niemeyer arrived in June and by August was ready to present his analysis of the Australian situation to the premiers.
Niemeyer recommended further retrenchment. As he saw it, the Australian policy of protection of native industry and heavy borrowing abroad had created a standard of living that bore little relation to the Australian level of production. This was to call into question the fundamental assumptions of Australian political and social life. What concerned Sir Otto was the absence of any firm foundation for the high standard of living. He was not concerned with Australia’s moral right to, or the expediency of, such a high standard while her neighbours in Asia lived in squalor and wretchedness. Under the influence of Niemeyer the premiers undertook to balance their budgets, and not to use borrowed money for unproductive purposes.
Then the leader of the Labor Party in New South Wales, J. T. Lang, began a campaign in his newspaper, the Labour Daily, in which he represented Niemeyer as a malevolent tool of the English bondholders who were determined to squeeze the last penny out of the simple-minded, hard-working Australians. Again the Englishman was represented as sinister, complex and corrupting, while the Australian was represented as the paragon of those new-world virtues of simplicity and innocence. Lang’s campaign showed the effects of his years in party machine politics in New South Wales. Born in 1876 in Sydney, he worked first in an accountant’s office and then established an estate agency in Sydney; he entered the legislative assembly of New South Wales in 1913, and was elected leader of the Labor Party in 1923. In his first term of office as premier from 1925 to 1927 he had put on the statute book the Labor reformist conception of the shape and direction of New South Wales society. He created public enterprises to force private enterprises to be more efficient and just, he brought order and efficiency out of chaos and inefficiency of public transport in Sydney, he introduced measures of relief for the sick and needy.
Somewhere between his first assumption of office in 1925 and the State elections in the middle of 1930, however, the man who had proved that Labor could provide as efficient a team as the bourgeoisie to run the State became corrupted by the power he wielded within the party. He began to demand blind obedience to his will in a party that prided itself on being the voice of the people in the making of its policy. He became a demagogue; street hoardings proclaimed ‘Lang is right’, or ‘Lang is greater than Lenin’; at huge public meetings in the Sydney Domain crowds cheered to the echo as he ranted against the English bondholder. But of policy, or political doctrine, or plans for the future of society the man was completely bankrupt. All that he could say was that the chief exponents of socialism were imported politicians. ‘Australian-born members of the movement,’ he wrote later, ‘have never been socialists. We are far too practical for empty theories.’ In October 1930 he became premier of New South Wales for the second time after the victory of the Labor Party in the State elections.
In the meantime faction fighting was leading the Scullin government to its destruction. Lyons and J. E. Fenton had been shocked at the charges against E. G. Theodore of corruption in the Mungana goldmining case, and were dismayed when this man, as soon as the flush of scandal faded from his cheeks, began to advocate a policy of repudiation of overseas debts. Joseph Aloysius Lyons was born in Tasmania in 1879 into a family of staunch Irish Catholics. In his early days as a schoolteacher in Tasmania he was moved by a desire to win a career for the members of his own group as well as that infinite merit before the most high God. On the surface he had all the virtues of a simple country boy, and that benevolence and affection for all men of which the Galilean had spoken with such passion before the fateful journey to Jerusalem. At a deeper level he had the cunning and the skill of a people who for hundreds of years had been striving for survival against a more powerful foe.
After entering the Tasmanian house of assembly in 1909 Lyons quickly won a reputation for efficiency, which gave him office in the Labor government of 1914–16 and the office of premier of the State in 1923. In 1929 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he came into contact with men who were concerned not just with making things work, or rectifying an ancient wrong while they waited for the resurrection of the dead, but with the reconstruction of capitalist society. Lyons was horrified. He resigned from the Scullin government and toyed with the idea of talking things over with the leaders of the opposition. One night in May 1931 he went to the Canberra railway station and boarded a train for Melbourne. A friend in the Labor Party ran alongside the train as it gathered speed and called out, ‘For God’s sake, Joe, don’t do it.’ But he did do it, and in Melbourne he formed, with the Nationalist Party, the United Australia Party, pledged to decency, honesty, respectability, and the slogan ‘All for Australia and the Empire’.
The UAP promised to restore credit and enterprise by restoring confidence in the integrity and honest administration of government finance; to honour national obligations; to reduce governmental and other public expenditure; to introduce a sound tariff policy with preference to Australia’s best customer – Great Britain; to re-employ people by encouraging active enterprise; to give a fair deal to every section of the community; to suppress communistic and seditious organizations and all publications that advocated the disturbance of industrial or civil peace; to wipe out communism by the only method it understood – vigorous abolition; and to maintain preference to returned soldiers. The Australian Worker described the actions of Lyons and those who followed him out of Labor’s camp as one of the most cynical betrayals of the working class in Australia’s history. The United Australia Party, they went on, the Country Party, the financial institutions, the federated employers, the capitalist press, and the numerous secret agents in the service of Big Business, were planning to deliver a combined attack upon the labour movement.
In March 1931 the Lang faction within the Labor Party had resigned from the Scullin government. With his government and party crumbling at the edges, Scullin met the premiers in Melbourne in June. The result was a Premiers’ Plan by which the Commonwealth and the States undertook to reduce government expenditure by 20 per cent, to convert the internal debts of the governments by reducing interest rates, to reduce bank rates of interest on deposits and advances, and to increase taxation. Lang accepted the plan, though with that sullen resentment with which the man who has talked big generally submits to the measurers and the economists. When Theodore introduced into the House in November a scheme to provide Christmas relief for the unemployed, the government was defeated. In the ensuing elections in December there was a landslide against Labor. After the elections the United Australia Party had thirty-seven seats in the House of Representatives, the Country Party had seventeen, and Labor sixteen, while in the Senate the United Australia Party had twenty-two, the Country Party four, the Labor Party eight, and the Lang group two.
Lyons was sworn in as Prime Minister and Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia. It seemed as though the forces of conservatism and respectability had won a resounding victory. At the Victorian State elections of April 1932 the Anglican archbishop of Melbourne published a letter in the Church of England Messenger in which he told upright and Protestant Melbourne that they had an opportunity to save the rest of Australia from financial collapse if they, as Christians and churchmen, displayed their stand for honesty by voting for the United Australia Party. By then tempers were running high. In January Lang had defaulted in his payments to the London bondholders. To the conservatives, Labor, or a section of Labor, represented lying, repudiation, and disloyalty.
On 19 March, 1932, over 750,000 people gathered in the streets of Sydney to watch the ceremonial opening of the bridge across the harbour. Representatives of the churches blessed the new bridge, though not together as might have been appropriate. A ribbon was stretched across the bridge at its southern end, but before Lang could cut the ribbon Captain de Groot of the New Guard (a neo-fascist private army), mounted on a horse, charged the ribbon at a gallop, hacked it with his sword, and declared the bridge open on behalf of the decent and respectable citizens of New South Wales. As he put it later, this was to show Lang and his mob that decent and respectable people could not be pushed around. After the ribbon was hastily retied, Lang cut it on behalf of the people of New South Wales.
From that day events moved swiftly. The Lyons government rushed through two acts to force Lang to honour his promises under the Premiers’ Plan. When Lang refused to pay, the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, dismissed Lang for breaking the law. Crowds gathered in an angry mood at Parliament House in Macquarie Street, but Lang, who had incited the people by his inflammatory language and his irresponsible talk about bondholders and the rapacious English bankers, did not appeal directly to the people against the forces of law, order, and respectability that were arrayed against him. Lang went as quietly as did the Commonwealth Labor government. With the victory of the UAP in the elections in Victoria and New South Wales, the conservatives had temporarily won their battle for survival. But it was a hollow victory, for in the world outside Australia events had happened that robbed them of any chance of enjoying that victory in peace and security.
In the years 1932 to 1937 the Lyons government concentrated on the objectives of financial stability, reduction of unemployment, and the destruction of the Communist movement. Budgets were balanced, imperial preference, as defined in the Ottawa Agreement of 1932, was continued, and Communists and fellow-travellers were hounded by what their supporters called the six acts against civil liberty. Once again, as so often in human affairs, some politicians who were afraid of political radicalism, believing that the corruption of conventional morality prepared the mind for conversion to communism, attempted to prohibit the importing of all books, pamphlets and newspapers that were likely to deprave or corrupt. So works of stature such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned, while comics glorifying violence and pulp magazines guaranteed to rouse the passions of the icy were not banned. In the zeal to defend an old order the government was beginning to lose its way.
In the meantime the urbanization and industrialization of Australia were proceeding rapidly. In 1906, 35.49 per cent of the population lived in the capital cities; in 1921, 43.01 per cent; and in 1940, 47.5 per cent. For despite the croaks and promises of disaster from the moralizers the movement of population to the cities continued. Bad railways, bad roads, bad education, the absence of creature comforts in the home, and lack of entertainment in the country towns, were part of the reason for the migration. The most powerful cause, however, was the growth of secondary industry. In 1901 just over 26 per cent of the work force was employed in industry, and 32.5 per cent in primary production. By 1933 just over 27 per cent was employed in industry, and nearly 17.5 per cent in primary production. By 1947 over 33 per cent was employed in industry, and nearly 14.5 per cent in primary production. On the eve of the depression in 1929, 56 per cent of employees in Australia belonged to unions, a percentage that fell to 43.5 per cent by 1934, and climbed back to nearly 50 per cent at the beginning of the war with Japan in 1941.
With urbanization, mass entertainment and mass information came to influence more and more Australians. The silent films had almost driven such earlier forms of entertainment as the minstrel show and the variety concert from both city and country by 1930. In 1928 the first talking picture was shown in Sydney and Melbourne, and though the defenders of the old order sneered at the American accent as ‘nauseating, nasal, and inane’, very soon the ‘hits’ of the talkies were to be heard in every dance hall in the country, as young and old urged each other ‘Don’t bring a frown to old Broadway, for you must clown on Broadway’. This spread of mass culture was speeded on by the development of radio broadcasting. The first regular broadcasts began in 1923, and from 1924 till 1932 licences to broadcast were let to private companies by the Postmaster-General’s Department. In July 1932 the Commonwealth government created the Australian Broadcasting Commission, which was instructed to create national broadcasting stations that would transmit ‘adequate and comprehensive programmes … in the interests of the community’. They were also instructed to form ‘groups of musicians for the rendition of orchestral, church and band music of high quality’. So a public corporation was given the responsibility of raising public taste in music, drama and education.
At the same time the Postmaster-General’s Department continued to grant licences to commercial stations from which by day and by night the ears of listeners were flattered by advertisements at one moment, and at the next by Rudy Vallee’s voice reassuring them that ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries. Don’t take it serious, it’s too mysterious’. The portable gramophone and the sale of cheap gramophone records also strengthened the spread of this culture. So by 1939 the beaches of Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart, and the lovely hinterland of those cities, began to hear Charlie Kunz play Irving Berlin’s ‘What’ll I do?’ The more esoteric people sipped brandy crusters at Palm Beach or Portsea to Duke Ellington’s ‘Solitude’ or Louis Armstrong’s ‘Shine’. As a supplement to the talking pictures, the wireless and the gramophone, American musical comedies dominated the commercial stage from 1920 to the beginning of the war with Japan. In the first of the decades ‘No, No, Nanette’, ‘The Desert Song’ and ‘The Student Prince’ had their first runs, while the second decade was devoted to revivals. So songs such as ‘Lucky in Love’ and ‘Deep in My Heart’ for the sentimental, or ‘Tea for Two’ for the brittle and the frivolous, were added to mass culture, while the local artists, playwrights, scriptwriters, and musicians complained that cheap canned American culture was sucking the lifeblood out of the local culture. One man of comic genius, Roy Rene or Mo, kept alive in vaudeville shows the image of the Australian as the innocent exposed to the corrupting influences of the English and the Americans. During the same decades the Australians continued to receive their news of the outside world from English sources. Overseas news reports from places as far apart as Tokyo and New York were funnelled through London. So the motor car, the aeroplane, the cable, the wireless, the talking pictures, the gramophone, and the mass-circulation newspaper brought all hearts and minds under the same influences. This was happening in a country whose past had already imposed certain uniformities and conformities of behaviour on its people.
In the nineteenth century, Protestant Christianity and Irish Catholicism had strengthened the grip of the puritan and the philistine on local culture. Industrialization added a habit of conformity and uniformity. The intellectuals were provoked by this strength of the puritan and the philistine. Responses differed from group to group and indeed from city to city. In Sydney, the financial and social centre of the pastoral interest, as well as the capital for the ‘ancient nobility of New South Wales’, one group – Christopher Brennan, a poet, Norman Lindsay, an artist, and John Anderson, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney – under the influence of Nietzsche, preached culture for the ‘great souls’ as their antidote to the puritanism and philistinism of the many. As one of their followers wrote in the first number of the journal Vision, which began publication in May 1923:
We would bring the Goddess to Poetry, Music and Art. Here is the eternal search of spiritual youth, and if we can sing a few songs fragrant with this desire we shall have proved our youth and freedom as no chants about bullocks and droughts can prove it. That febrile disintegration of mind called Primitivism must disappear before the first laughter of the gods. In Gaiety and Beauty the gods descend to earth, and those who build that bridge have done more for their countrymen than any ballad monger or realist can do.
By contrast other groups, mainly centred in Melbourne, were less concerned with killing the twin giants of Australian puritanism and Australian philistinism than with providing happiness, culture, and material well-being for all. They saw themselves as the inheritors of what they termed those democratic traditions of the Australian people: the mateship and equality for which their predecessors had paid in blood at Eureka in 1854, at Barcaldine in 1893, and in the Kalgoorlie goldfields at the turn of the century. They agreed with the poet Bernard O’Dowd, who wrote:
That culture, joy and goodliness
Be th’ equal right of all:
That greed no more shall those oppress
Who by the wayside fall.
That each shall share what all men sow:
That colour, caste’s a lie:
That man is God, however low –
Is man, however high.
They agreed, too, with Joseph Furphy’s confession of faith in Such is Life, which was first published in 1902, though it was not until the 1920s and the 1930s that his vision was absorbed by the ‘future of humanity’ men: ‘Collective humanity holds the key to that kingdom of God on earth, which clear-sighted prophets of all ages have pictured in colours that never fade. The kingdom of God is within us; our all-embracing duty is to give it form and effect, a local habitation and a name.’ The group did not despair of their power to build this ‘kingdom’ in their ‘local habitation’. Daunted neither by the reports in the capitalist press of brutalities and murders committed in Russia to manure the soil for the future harmony of mankind, nor by the atrocities committed by both sides in the Spanish Civil War, they clung tenaciously to their belief that bad conditions rather than innate depravity were the cause of human evil. Their one disagreement was on the methods to be used to achieve their goal: some, perhaps the majority, looked to the day when the Labor Party, purged of its careerists and opportunists, would proceed to build the ‘kingdom’; others, certainly the minority, believing Labor to be ineluctably reformist and corrupt, looked to the Communist Party to destroy the institutions of the bourgeois state and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat to guide mankind into the ‘kingdom’. But by 1937 those who cocked an occasional ear or eye toward Europe or Asia knew that the old dream of creating a ‘millennial Eden’ in Australia, where men were free from the corrupting influence of old civilization, had gone beyond recall. For by then this debate on the future of humanity between the defenders of an old order and the advocates of a new was swallowed up in a new struggle for survival.
The storm clouds came from both Asia and Europe. Since the days of the defeat of the Russians by the Japanese in 1905, a few in Australia had predicted that the day would come when the Japanese would threaten the survival of European civilization in Australia. Before 1914 that day seemed far off, or even avoidable by encouraging the Japanese to expand westwards into the mainland of China. The behaviour of the Japanese during World War I and at Versailles confirmed the darkest fears of their future expansion into the South Seas. The Tanaka memorial of 1927, which put Australia on the list of areas to be conquered by Japan, the Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931, and the police incidents at Shanghai in 1937, kept these fears alive. In 1936, when the Australian government adopted a trade diversion policy that discriminated against the Japanese to protect British textile interests in the Australian market, the discerning predicted that such policies might convert the Japanese from economic to military expansion.
The main political parties differed in their opinion on how to resist Japan. The United Australia Party believed it was impossible for the Australians by their own forces to defend themselves against a determined aggressor. Australians, as they saw it, in the last resort depended on the British fleet at Singapore. Australia could not maintain its White Australia policy through its own strength. Besides, they argued, Australia did more than half its trade with Britain, and so had a community of interest as well as being materially dependent on Great Britain. For that reason they saw themselves as imperialists as well as Australians. The Country Party agreed with this sentiment, though the increase in wool and other primary produce exports to Japan made them anxious not to offend their new customers. By contrast the Labor Party was suspicious of all imperialist actions, whether by Britain, America, or the Japanese, and was opposed to conscription for military service overseas. Where the United Australia Party looked at the Singapore naval base as their bastion against the Japanese, the Labor Party proposed to build a strong air force for defence against the warships of an invader. The Federal Labor Party adopted this new defence policy at their conference in Canberra in 1937.
At the same time both parties addressed more and more of their attention to the gathering storm in Europe. Like all conservative parties, the United Australia Party was divided in its attitude to the Nazi government of Germany. Frightened on the one hand by the noisy talk of wars of revenge against France and England, and angered by the bestial persecution of the Jews, yet attracted on the other hand by the promise to defend western civilization against communism, the United Australia Party confined itself to promises of support should the Nazis attack Great Britain. On that score sentiment and material interest were stronger than any vague hopes that the old order in Europe could be propped up by the whip, the concentration camp, and the gun. Labor, too, had its agonies. For while the Party taught that Fascism and Nazism menaced the trade unions and the labour movement, the Catholic and moderate elements within the Party were reluctant to push the argument too far lest they be driven into the arms of the Communist Party.
These anxieties and divided loyalties were epitomized in the way of life and the values of the new leaders of the two main political parties. When Lyons died in April 1939, Robert Gordon Menzies was elected leader of the United Australia Party. Menzies was then just forty-four years old. He was born in 1894 in Jeparit, a small country town in the wheat belt of northwestern Victoria, the son of an erstwhile member of the Victorian parliament with radical leanings, and the grandson of a president of the miners’ union in that colony. He was educated at state schools in the country, where he early displayed his great intellectual promise by heading the scholarship examination for the whole State. Later at Wesley College in Melbourne, to which he won a scholarship, and at Melbourne University where he studied law, prizes and honours were conferred on him for his learning, his wit and his oratory. He entered the Victorian bar in 1918, where again success in the world came easily to him, though, as at the university, he was not quite so successful in getting on with the world. For this he was tempted to blame the envy of demos for the men of distinction, while the victims of his brilliant mockery pointed to the overweening pride and arrogance of the man. After ten years at the bar he entered politics in 1928 as a member of the Legislative Council of Victoria, then transferred to the Legislative Assembly in 1929, where he quickly rose to prominence as minister for railways and deputy premier. In 1934 he was elected as member for Kooyong to the House of Representatives in Canberra, and took office as Attorney-General in the Lyons government, a post he held till April 1939, when he became Prime Minister.
The man was driven by three consuming passions. One was that spur to fame that had taken him so quickly to the top in his home country; during this rise to power, incidentally, he conceived such contempt and disdain for his associates that he alienated himself from most of the people with whom he worked. More and more he felt the need to be surrounded by men and women who came to admire and laugh when he paraded his great gift as a raconteur.
The second ruling passion of his life was the veneration – indeed, almost superstitious respect – he developed for British institutions, something he probably acquired as a student of Professor Harrison Moore, the dean of the faculty of law at the University of Melbourne. He believed passionately that the British had created the highest civilization and greatest degree of liberty known to man. It was this sense of mission and high purpose that conferred a dignity and stature on his life. That stature was impaired by the use of his great powers for the defence of an order doomed to decay.
The third ruling passion of his life was to ridicule all who offered a way forward, who wanted ‘progress’. He wanted the grandeur, the pomp, the ceremony, the wit and the urbanity of the London of the Edwardian age at a time when that great achievement of humanity was crumbling to its ruin. The inner man searched feverishly not only for the snows of yesteryear, but also possibly for the innocence of his years at Jeparit. This quest conferred a tenderness and a loneliness which roused sympathy and won the affection of those who were privileged to peer behind the mask of worldly success and glory. But in 1939 he believed passionately that all was not lost – that British institutions and the British way of life were synonymous with civilization. All who did not share this view were the deluded victims of a superstitious barbarism.
By contrast the new leader of the Labor Party was a man who had once entertained a vision of a way forward for humanity. He was John Joseph Curtin, who was born in Creswick, Victoria, in 1885, the son of a police sergeant from Ireland. As a youth, under the influence of the rationalists and the socialists, Curtin abandoned his Catholic hopes in the resurrection of the dead and substituted instead the Utopian socialist dream of the perfection of man on earth. He joined the Socialist League in Victoria. He also took a leading part in the campaign against conscription, in which loyalty to his own people and an acquired hatred of imperialism were happily combined. In 1916 he accepted the editorship of the Westralian Worker and moved to Perth. From that year until 1928, when he entered parliament as member for Fremantle, the years of labour in the political wilderness, and his own struggles with alcohol, so soured him that a bitter droop formed at the two extremes of the mouth that a decade earlier had responded so enthusiastically to the hope of better things for mankind promised by the Russian revolution of 1917. Then in 1935, when his victory over alcohol was complete, he was elected leader of the Australian Labor Party. So a man who was by birth and conviction suspicious of all policies pursued by British governments, and who believed that men should love and comfort one another for the loss of eternal life, but who was vague and muddled on how this was to be achieved, confronted from March 1939 in parliament a man who believed the British to be the paragons of civilization, a man who looked with a lofty disdain on those comforters that had sustained Curtin in childhood, youth and middle age.
This difference was underlined in their responses to the outbreak of war with Germany on 3 September, 1939. Menzies spoke with dignity of his melancholy duty to inform Australians officially that as Germany had persisted in her invasion of Poland, Australia was now at war. Truth, he concluded, was with us in the battle and that truth must win. ‘May God in his Mercy and compassion grant that the world may soon be delivered from this agony.’ For him the war began because the German chancellor had lied, broken promises, and not behaved as an upright man. He did not touch on the crimes of the Nazis against democracy and human dignity. By contrast, Curtin stated simply that the Labor Party could be relied upon to do the right thing in the defence of Australia and of the integrity of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Menzies then turned to prepare Australia for war. As he saw it, Australia’s duty was to assist the mother country, which she could best do by sending supplies and foodstuffs to Great Britain, by maintaining the lifelines of the British Commonwealth, and by suppressing all Communists, fellow-travellers, and saboteurs of the war effort. The government immediately took steps to increase the production of war equipment and to raise, train and equip an army to serve with the British army overseas. Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Blarney was appointed to command the Sixth Division, which was recruited for service either at home or abroad. In November the government introduced compulsory military training for home service. At the end of the year the government sent the Sixth Division to Palestine to be trained before joining the British expeditionary force in France. In April the Seventh Division was recruited and dispatched to the Middle East for training. But the entry of Italy into the war in June 1940, and the collapse of France in the same month, made it necessary to step up training.
From September 1940 to July 1941 Australian forces went into action to resist an Italian and later a German attack on Suez along the north coast of Africa. In April 1941 Australian forces tried in vain to halt the German advance into Greece; then came their heroic but doomed defence of Crete in May 1941, where some of the flower of Melbourne youth were drowned. In June and July of 1941 the Seventh Division fought a successful though costly campaign in Syria against the Vichy-controlled local forces. In the intervals between these campaigns the men relaxed in the houses of entertainment in Egypt and Palestine, much as their fathers had done in 1915–18. While a few walked in awe over the ground on which the holy feet had trod, some roared with laughter when one of their number shouted in a cafe in Jerusalem: ‘I’m so hungry I could eat Christ’s shinbones.’
While Moscow radio was informing the whole world in its short-wave language broadcasts that the crisis of capitalism was becoming graver every day, Menzies saw it all as a threat to what he held most precious – British civilization. All through June 1941 there were rumours of German troop concentrations on the Russian frontier. On 21 June the Melbourne Age informed its readers that the riddle of Russia remained unsolved and that Stalin was living up to his reputation as ‘Inscrutable Joe’. At 4 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, 22 June, the German army invaded Russia. At 5.45 a.m. Dr Goebbels announced on the German radio that German planes had bombed Kiev, Sebastopol, and Kaunas. Later that morning Hitler informed the German people – and the world – that since Jewish Bolsheviks wanted to set the whole world on fire, and since the Jews with their centre in Moscow wanted to spread their domination, he had ordered the German forces to oppose this menace with all the might at their disposal. The German people, he went on, were fully aware that they were called on not only to save their native land, but to save the entire civilized world from the deadly danger of Bolshevism, thus clearing the way for true social progress in Europe. So the madman spoke, and the German armies marched to their destruction.
In London Churchill declared, ‘We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of his Nazi regime.’ It followed therefore that Britain would help Russia and the Russian people. But for Churchill this was a gesture of expediency: for him the Nazi regime was indistinguishable from the worst features of communism. In Australia the German attack on Russia provoked similar reactions. In Catholic churches the faithful offered up Novenas for a just peace; in the Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne a bishop lamented the spiritual power of the followers of anti-God. The political Left hailed the event as an opportunity to convert the war from a conflict between empires into a people’s war of liberation from oppression.
Menzies would have none of this. For him this was another example of Germany breaking her most solemn obligations. ‘If any additional proof were needed,’ he added, ‘of the fact that to Germany a treaty is a mere piece of paper, and in no sense a contract, here it is.’ History seemed to be passing him by. By then Menzies was too engrossed in provincial politics to perceive the universal significance of what had happened. Ever since the election of 1940 his government had had to work with a slender majority in the House of Representatives. Within the government and amongst the members of the two government parties in both houses of parliament there was dissatisfaction with Menzies as a leader. He never had suffered fools gladly, and in the heat and passion of war and party politics the numbers who had been wounded by his tongue increased.
At a cabinet meeting in Canberra on the night of 28 August the dissidents persuaded him to resign. The man who had seen himself as a vessel for the salvation of British civilization walked out of Parliament House despised and defeated. But with the dignity and courage he always could muster in the hour of adversity, he prepared the way for the recovery of his reputation and his honour. The next day he had the satisfaction to read a statement by Mr Arthur Coles, the member for Henty in Melbourne, that ‘those wretched people’ had brought down a great man. For on the previous evening, disgusted by the treachery and place hunting, Coles had walked out of the party room of the United Australia Party, declaring he was resigning from the party from that moment.
This meant that Arthur Fadden, the leader of the Country Party, whom the anti-Menzies faction had chosen as the next Prime Minister, had to depend on the support of two independents, Coles and Wilson, to remain in office. When the budget was brought down in October, first Coles and then Wilson announced his intention to vote against the government. The Labor Party took over the government. In a moment of enthusiasm the Labor members milled around their leader, John Curtin, in the party room in Parliament House and sang the words: ‘The workers’ flag is deepest red …’ So John Joseph Curtin, ex-Catholic, erstwhile socialist, a man who had once had in his heart the vision of that day when men would neither hurt nor destroy, became the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia.
He had with him other men who had lived through the days of unleavened bread, the bitter days of the depression, and the anguish of the hopes roused by 1917 bearing the bitter fruit of the treason trials in Moscow. He had with him Joseph Benedict Chifley, who like Curtin had been brought up to believe in the Nicene creed and Rerum Novarum; Herbert Vere Evatt, an intellectual, who thought of Labor as the means to the fulfilment of the Enlightenment; and Jack Beasley, who had learnt his politics in the rough-and-tumble of the Trades Hall of New South Wales, and who was a stranger to that ‘light on the hill’ that beckoned to Curtin and Chifley. These men were just as determined that the depression and all the suffering it entailed to the working classes should not return as that Australia and her allies should win the war. But before their plans could mature the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941. By that time the German army was outside the gates of Moscow. Labor had first to win the battle for national survival before committing itself to the deeper question of whether to patch up the old order, or return to its dream of building a new.