In the beginning of the war the Australians, the Indians, the British and the Americans were as chaff before the Japanese wind. The Fifteenth Japanese Army landed at Kota Bharu in northern Malaya on 7 December, 1941. Three days later Japanese planes sank the British capital ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the east coast of Malaya. Two bastions of Australia’s defence were rotting, useless, at the bottom of the sea. On the same day the Japanese occupied Guam; on 23 December they occupied Wake Island; and on 26 December the British and Canadian garrison at Hong Kong surrendered. The Japanese army was advancing so swiftly down the peninsula of Malaya that by the end of December they had reached the province of Johore and were preparing to cross over to the island of Singapore.
In the meantime the mood of the Australians changed from complacency to anxiety and, in some cases, panic. Rumours spread in the cities of Japanese plans to land on the Australian coast. On 29 December Prime Minister Curtin told Australians in a New Year message:
Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom … We know … that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go, and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its key-stone, which will give our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy.
The Australian government’s policy, he added, was based on two facts: first, the war with Japan was not a part of the struggle with the Axis powers, but was a new war; second, Australia must go on to a war footing. The stature of Curtin began to grow as he confronted the crisis. But others were not so swift to discard the traditional patterns of thought. Hughes, who had taken over the leadership of the United Australia Party from Menzies, said it was suicidal and false for Australia to think of Britain’s support as of less importance than that of other countries. The British navy, he added, was the most powerful and most potent of all navies.
While the party politicians wrangled, darker news was reported from the war fronts. On 23 and 24 January 1942, the Japanese began their advance on Rabaul, New Britain; Kendari, Celebes; and Balikpapan, Borneo. On 15 February, 1942, the British forces on Singapore formally surrendered to the Japanese; 15,384 Australian troops became prisoners of war, while 1,789 died as a result of the campaign and 1,306 were wounded. On 19 February Japanese planes bombed Darwin in the Northern Territory and Broome in Western Australia. Just over a fortnight earlier, when surrender seemed inevitable in Malaya, Curtin told a meeting of people at the Fremantle Town Hall that he was too busy now to consider any ‘… blue print of a new social order after the war. We have to concentrate on the one supreme task which the enemy has imposed on us – we have to defeat him or die.’ It is no use, he added, preaching the precepts of the Apostles to the enemy – the whine of bullets was the only epistle the enemy would understand.
By that time the whine of bullets was coming closer and closer to the Australian mainland. On 3 February the Japanese bombed Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea. On 17 February the Australian war cabinet rejected the request of the Pacific War Council in London that the Seventh Australian Division, now sailing towards the Pacific, should serve in Burma. Both Churchill and Roosevelt urged Curtin to reconsider the decision, but Curtin refused. So on 22 February Churchill replied with some heat: ‘We could not contemplate that you would refuse our request, and that of the President of the United States, for the diversion of the leading Australian Division to save the situation in Burma.’ But still Curtin stood firm: ‘Australia’s outer defences are now quickly vanishing and our vulnerability is completely exposed.’ So Churchill, grumpy and irritable, instructed the convoy for the Seventh Division to proceed to Australia. On 8 March the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua on the east coast of New Guinea and began to advance overland along the Kokoda Trail towards Port Moresby. In the following month Japanese expeditionary forces sailed under naval cover from Truk in the Solomons, intending to make a landing at Port Moresby. On the night of 7 May Curtin, his face deathly pale, interrupted a debate in the House in Canberra to tell members that the Australian and American planes based on the Queensland coast had intercepted this force in the Coral Sea. A day later the Japanese force returned to its base after an engagement later known as the Battle of the Coral Sea and regarded as a turning-point. South New Guinea and the east coast of Australia had escaped the ravages of an invader.
Meanwhile Japanese land forces had moved swiftly over the mountain barrier dividing north from South New Guinea, and by July were within striking distance of Port Moresby. But from that month Australian forces, which had landed near Lae and Salamaua, harassed the Japanese bases, while at Milne Bay, to the east of Port Moresby, Australian forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the Japanese. The fear of invasion and of the destruction of European civilization in Australia began to give way to the long agony of driving the Japanese out of the conquered territory in New Guinea, the Solomons, the Indonesian archipelago, Malaya, Borneo, Guam, Wake Island, the Philippines and Hong Kong.
At the same time the war in Europe and Africa moved through a similar sequence of events. All through 1942 German armed forces penetrated deep into Soviet territory, reaching the outskirts of Leningrad in the north, and coming close to Moscow in the centre and to Stalingrad in the south. In Stalingrad at the end of 1942 several hundred thousand men, the flower of the German invading army, were trapped by the Soviet army and forced to surrender. Just as the Coral Sea, the Kokoda Trail, Milne Bay, and Wake Island opened the way for the defeat of the Japanese, so Stalingrad changed the war in Europe from a desperate fight for survival into a struggle for total victory.
The Australians, as their government saw it, could make three contributions to that victory. They could act as a granary for countries in the front lines such as the British Isles; they could help drive German and Italian forces from the north coast of Africa; they could help to drive the Japanese from conquered territories in the Pacific. At the end of December 1941 the Australian forces succeeded in raising the siege of Tobruk after two hundred and forty-two days. But in the first six months of 1942 disaster overcame the British forces in Africa as swiftly as the disasters in the other theatres of the war. The outbreak of war with Japan had, of course, weakened the allied forces in Africa: supplies intended for the Middle East were diverted to the Pacific.
In the first six months of 1942 German and Italian forces drove the depleted allied forces back to El Alamein, where in June the opposing forces were locked in a series of indecisive battles. All through July and August Rommel’s forces struggled to break through to the Nile delta. In the meantime the allied Eighth Army under the command of Montgomery, which included the Ninth Australian Division, began a decisive engagement with the Germans and the Italians at El Alamein, which rumbled on through October and November till the Axis forces fell back towards Tripoli with the Eighth army hot in pursuit. In this engagement 4,863 Australians were killed or wounded and 946 taken prisoner. On 13 November the allied army reoccupied Tobruk; on 23 January, 1943, they entered Tripoli, and on 12–13 May all Axis forces remaining in Africa surrendered to the allies.
The Australian forces were contributing to the expulsion of the Japanese from the conquered territories in the Pacific. But this was a slow business, for during 1942 the allied commanders had adopted a policy of containing the Japanese until such time as the war in Europe had been won. The Australian government was not entirely happy with this policy, and no one less so than the Minister for External Affairs, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt. By birth and conviction he belonged to that legal intelligentsia that had played a greater part in shaping British Labour than Australian Labor politics, for in Australia Labor was traditionally suspicious of the intellectuals as representatives of the class enemy. Evatt was born in 1894, educated in state schools in Sydney and the University of Sydney, where he became a child of the Enlightenment rather than a believer in the Kingdom of God. Under the influence of John Stuart Mill, who taught him the right of the individual to decide for himself, of Dicey, who taught him the might, majesty, and power of the law, and of the socialists, who inspired him with their dream of a day when man was liberated from his oppressors and gaolers, Evatt became not only a believer in the perfectibility of mankind, but a man with a creed. He believed in individual liberty, in the day when human minds would be freed from priestcraft and superstition, in international rather than national or provincial loyalties, and in culture as a comforter for mankind. He saw evil as the result of an unfavourable environment, for he accepted the view held by the radical intelligentsia that just as bad conditions were the cause of evil, good conditions would make men good.
Yet the gods or chance had so fashioned his clay that under strain he behaved in ways quite different from the vision that sustained him. After a brilliant university course in arts and law, in which prizes were showered on him, he entered the bar in Sydney, became secretary to W. A. Holman, another bourgeois intellectual who became an early Labor premier of New South Wales, had a brief spell in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, and became a judge of the High Court in 1930, from which position he resigned in 1940 to enter the House of Representatives. When Labor formed a government in October 1941, the caucus elected him to the cabinet and Curtin offered him the portfolios of Attorney-General and External Affairs.
While other ministers were concerned with the day-to-day administration of their departments and the problems of war, Evatt was engaging in that never-ending quest of the intellectual to detect a pattern in the chaos. With the assistance of some gifted Australians who were graduates of the London School of Economics and who shared his faith that material well-being and happiness for all could be produced by economic planning, Evatt gradually worked on a plan for the future. His first move was to persuade men in high places in Washington that more aid for the war against Japan was not incompatible with their policy of winning the war in Europe. In 1942–43 he led the Australian missions to Washington and London. He was not successful, for he ran into the problem of all provincials when confronted by metropolitans. All through 1943 and 1944 the war in the Pacific remained a war of attrition, while the Soviets armies gradually drove back the Germans. When the Soviets pursued the retreating German army out of Russia and Poland, and the Western allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 to open up the second front, anxious if not strident voices of alarm and prophecy began to be raised again in Australia about the threat of communism to western civilization.
No such anxieties crossed the minds of the Labor leaders as they worked on their plan for the future of Australia. As they saw it, the task of government was to prevent the repetition of the two evils of unemployment and Japanese expansionism. Their answer to the former was the welfare state. Until 1943 lack of political strength and the grave state of the war had forced them to hold their hand. But a landslide victory in the elections of 1943, in which they won forty-nine out of seventy-five seats in the House of Representatives, and a more favourable war situation, gave them their opportunity. Child endowment, hospital benefits, invalid and old age pensions, maternity allowances, unemployment and sickness benefits, and widows’ pensions were either improved or begun. Able sons and daughters of necessitous parents were given scholarships to enable them to take a university or technical college degree. In 1946, when doubts were raised of the constitutional power of the Commonwealth to legislate for social services in peacetime, the Labor government held a referendum to amend the constitution accordingly.
To give Australia permanent security against Japan, the Labor government signed an agreement with New Zealand in January 1944. This was known as the ANZAC pact. With that gift for discerning the historical significance of all he was doing, Dr Evatt compared the signing ceremony in Canberra to other meetings of allied leaders. His enemies snorted and raged at the theatricality of the occasion and the absurdity of the claim, but missed the tragedy of a man whom chance had swept into a moment of prominence only to expose his party’s limited vision on the issues of the day. For when Evatt justified the pact to parliament, he spoke with pride of how a screen of islands would protect Australia and New Zealand, and how a program of welfare for the people to the north of Australia would so strengthen their material power that never again would the Japanese scatter the friends of European civilization in the South Pacific as chaff before the wind. By consultation between Australia and New Zealand, Evatt argued, the two would ensure that their voices were not only heard but heeded in London and Washington. With even less insight into the issues of the day, the opposition leaders sneered at the histrionics of Evatt, or warned about the dangers of offending America and Great Britain. This was not the time, the opposition declared, for Australia and New Zealand to be inventing their own Monroe Doctrine for the Pacific. The pact, they said, reeked of isolationism. For they, too, were unaware that events in China and eastern Europe would ever give them the chance to resume their role as the defenders of western civilization against the Communists.
The war in Europe was drawing to a close. Government and opposition leaders hailed the Soviet and allied victories with enthusiasm. A minority in Australia, writing at that time in such periodicals as the Sydney Bulletin or the Catholic Advocate in Melbourne, raised the cry that civilization was in danger from communism. But in the flush of final victory in Europe in May 1945 they were forced to bide their time. The one dark incident in that hour of victory was the death of Curtin in Canberra in July, at a time when his party’s policies on defence and welfare seemed to be sweeping all before them.
On 6 August an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on 9 August another American plane dropped a second atomic bomb at Nagasaki. In Australia the comment on the occasion was confined to an estimate of the immediate consequences. The new Prime Minister, Joseph Benedict Chifley, predicted the war would last for another twelve months. Despite the use of atomic bombs, he said, time passed rapidly in war. The president of the Australian Council of Churches was pleased that Americans rather than the Germans or Japanese were able to use the terrible weapon first. Unless the righteous powers, he believed, retained control, an evil power could extinguish humanity. In Europe the Vatican sounded warnings to posterity; the Archbishop of Canterbury had the courage to speak of the defilement of those who had used a weapon with a potency to take one million lives. But the leaders of opinion in Australia kept off the wider horizons.
At nine on the morning of Saturday, 15 August 1945, the Prime Minister announced that the war with Japan was over. Sydney plunged headlong and full-throated into celebration; people shouted and shrieked and sang and danced in the streets; sirens wailed; bands played ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. In Melbourne the wistful, the joyous, the sad and the sorrowful sang and shouted their relief that the war was over. Amid a great din of sirens, bells, whistles and voices, the city of ‘sodden rectitude’ burst into ‘whoops of joy’. The next day over 200,000 attended a thanksgiving service at the Shrine of Remembrance to celebrate the victory for the democratic cause. In Canberra smaller groups gathered in Civic Centre to celebrate the occasion.
With the high-mindedness and industry they had displayed through the dark days of the struggle, the Labor ministers turned their energies to prove that peace had its victories no less renowned than war. In the fighting against Germany and Italy, 9,572 Australians were killed or died as prisoners of war; 17,501 were lost in the fighting against the Japanese. Of the 22,000-odd in the army, navy, and air force who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese, 7,964 did not survive the terrible privations and humiliations to which they were subjected: the emaciated bodies and tortured eyes of those prisoners who returned to their native land told a tale to which neither tongue nor pen could do justice. At the same time other men in the services were demobilized and trained at the expense of the government for their re-entry into civilian life. Some were subsidized to enable them to study at a university; others completed trade courses or received instruction in farming to equip them to take up a block of land under the soldiers’ settlement scheme.
It was the age of the planner, and in the flush of victory over Germany, Italy and Japan a note of confidence and enthusiasm was in the air. At the universities of Melbourne and Sydney the students, leavened by returning servicemen, caught on to the prevailing faith that by political action it would be possible to remove the causes of human evil and suffering. High-minded, hard-working and dedicated secular humanists and Fabians worked together for a common end. The heroic achievements of the Red Army, the imminent victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war, the defeat of reaction and obscurantism in eastern Europe, and the victory of Labour in the British general elections of 1945, fed their elation and hope for the future. So despite the warnings of the priests that human beings could not achieve happiness on earth, despite the sneers of liberals and conservatives at those who talked of a ‘light on the hill’ for humanity, the whole labour movement, large sections of the intelligentsia, and religious groups at the universities were caught up in this optimistic and forward-looking mood.
By a great stroke of fortune Prime Minister Chifley was endowed with the power to win the affection of those with whom he worked and the respect of the idealistic. His life, personality, and tastes seemed to sum up the history and aspirations of radicalism in Australia. He was born in 1885 at Bathurst, New South Wales, into one of those Irish Catholic families that had placed their stamp on radicalism in Australia. He was educated briefly at a Patrician Brothers’ school in Bathurst, where he imbibed the teaching of the Church on man and society. At seventeen he joined the railways, where he rose to be a first-class locomotive driver at twenty-four. He also succeeded in union politics. During those years he added some of the hopes of the secular humanists to his view of the world. From that time his faith in the future of humanity was expressed in images that appealed to both the religious and secular-minded in his party. Both groups saw their own hopes fulfilled in Chifley’s ‘light on the hill’. He was also endowed by nature with a toughness that enabled him to survive the Tammany Hall flavour of Labor Party politics in New South Wales in the 1920s and 1930s without losing either his reputation for integrity or the affection of the idealists. In 1928 he won the Macquarie seat in the House of Representatives, lost it in 1931, and then fought a campaign against the Lang faction. In 1940 he was elected again for Macquarie, and in October 1941 he became treasurer in the Curtin government. By the time of his election as leader of the Labor Party he had endeared himself more firmly to the minds and hearts of the labour movement by his lovable behaviour. He fought shy of the pomp and ceremonies of bourgeois society: when etiquette demanded dress clothes, he wore a plain suit or stayed away. He was frugal by nature, if not tinged with the puritanism that pervaded Irish Catholicism and, through it, the Labor Party.
For a period Chifley and other leaders in the Labor government conceived schemes to match their vision. In 1946 and 1947 the government announced plans to encourage migration from Europe. They decided to offer assistance not only to British migrants but also to displaced persons from eastern Europe who were idling in refugee camps in Germany. At times this scheme was defended for its contribution to the economic and defence needs of Australia. At times, too, the minister responsible, Arthur Calwell, was careful to remind the House that for every foreign migrant the government proposed to bring out ten from the United Kingdom, so as to protect the British predominance as well as to shield the foreigner from the veiled hostility of the native-born. But at other times the minister spoke of Australia’s duty to the victims of religious, racial, and political persecution. For his part he would not turn away anyone who had the will to become a good Australian citizen. For it was never doubted that anyone who came to this country would become a ‘dinkum Aussie’.
All through the debate the survival theme peeped through both the high-mindedness and the provincialism. ‘We have not,’ said Calwell in November 1947, ‘unlimited time to build our strength or plan our future. Our decisions now must be the right ones, else our Australian nation might not survive beyond the lives of the children of this generation.’ Between June 1947 and June 1959 assisted British migrants numbered 360,156 and the other European migrants 341,685. Between June 1959 and December 1968 British migrants numbered 658,236 and the European 468,275, to which Italians, Greeks, Dutch, Germans and Yugoslavs were the main contributors.
By 1967 the estimated population was 11,928,889. Of these, at the preceding census 3,877,473 classified themselves as members of the Church of England, 1,103,969 as Roman Catholic, 1,932,161 as Catholic, 1,124,310 as Methodist, and 1,043,570 as Presbyterian, while 1,138,900 exercised their right to give no reply, and 94,091 said they had no religion. The members of religions other than the Christian or the Jewish numbered 13,112.
By 1969 the European minorities were influencing not only the eating and drinking habits, but also the mental horizons, of the ‘dinkum Aussie’. In 1947 Immigration Minister Calwell said: ‘The days of isolation are over.’ Perhaps he was expressing a hope rather than making an observation. By the 1960s the migrants from Europe, and the revolution in communications, had broken down the cultural isolation, left the bush culture as a historic survival, liberated some from the dead hand of their puritan past, and prepared Australians to confront the universal problem of man in the age of plastics, chromium, and the bomb.
The developments in civil aviation produced the greatest of the revolutions in transport and communication. Before World War II civil aviation had been developed by private enterprise. In 1929 C. E. Kingsford Smith and C.T. P. Ulm, both pioneers in aviation in Australia, formed a company to fly regular services between Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Tasmania. After the company ran into financial difficulties in 1931 the Holyman brothers started in a modest way with a service between Launceston and Flinders Island and succeeded so well that in 1936 they registered the new company as Australian National Airways in Melbourne, and began to drive other interstate companies out of business. By 1939 they were running services between all the State capitals.
In 1945 the Chifley government introduced legislation to nationalize all civil airlines and to create the Australian National Airlines Commission, which was empowered to provide for the establishment and operation of national airline services by the Commonwealth. But when the private airline companies brought a case before the High Court, the court ruled that the Commonwealth did not have the power to establish a monopoly. So Trans Australia Airlines, the trading name of the Australian National Airlines Commission, began its first flight on 9 September 1946, between Sydney and Melbourne in competition with the private airline companies, especially Australian National Airways. By the end of 1946 Trans Australia Airlines was operating services between all the States.
No sooner had Australian National Airlines escaped expropriation by government than it faced a takeover by another company. R. M. Ansett had begun in business with a passenger car service between Hamilton and Horsham, Victoria. By 1936 he had accumulated a fortune from his fleet of passenger bus services and ancillary hotels. In that year he formed Ansett Airways. With the profits from a prosperous tourist industry in the post-war boom, Ansett began to make inroads on both intrastate and interstate air traffic. In 1958 the company took over Australian National Airways and flew under the name of Ansett-ANA. By 1962 passengers, freights, and mail were shared evenly between the government airline and the private companies. So in internal civil aviation the state competed with private enterprise to the advantage of the consumer and the material profit of the private investor.
By contrast, the tendency in Australian international civil aviation was towards government ownership and control. In 1931 Qantas Empire Airways, a private company registered in Queensland, carried air mail and passengers between Darwin and Sydney on the England to Australia route. In 1934 they took over the Darwin to Singapore section of the route. During the war Qantas kept the route to London open by flying from Perth to Colombo via the Cocos Islands, and in April 1946 re-opened the route through Singapore. In the following year the Commonwealth government acquired the remaining shares in Qantas. In December 1947 they began a service to Japan, in June 1948 to Hong Kong, and in November to South Africa. In 1945 Pan American World Airways began a service from San Francisco to Sydney, in 1946 British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines began a similar service, and in 1949 Canadian Pacific began flying from Vancouver to Sydney. Between 1951 and 1969 Air India, Air New Zealand, Alitalia, BOAC, Lufthansa, KLM, South African Airways, UTA and others began flights to Sydney.
At the same time the Labor government took steps to turn into reality those schemes, dating from the 1880s, for diverting the waters of the Snowy River to irrigate the plains of southern NSW, and generate electricity with the water that flows off the snow-capped mountains in the Australian Alps in the south-east corner of the State. In 1949 the government introduced into Parliament the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Bill which outlined a project that would generate 1,720,000 kilowatts as against the 2,056,000 kilowatts of the Tennessee Valley scheme in the USA. This electric power was to be delivered to the cities of Melbourne and Sydney at about half the cost of production of electricity by thermal stations burning coal or oil. ‘From the point of view of defence,’ the minister introducing the bill added, ‘those matters are of the greatest significance.’ A bonus of the plan was that, after the water had passed through the turbines, it would be diverted through tunnels in the mountains to the inland, where the irrigation authorities could use it for food production on payment of a fee that would help to pay the cost of generating the electricity. The minister envisaged a future when the inland cities in the valleys of the Murrumbidgee and the Murray would carry a population of 1,000,000. This, he concluded, was an act of faith.
To carry out the master plan, engineering, electrical, tunnelling and dam-building firms from America, Italy, France, Norway and Japan were given contracts. The manual labour and the driving of the trucks and the huge machines were done in the main by migrant labour. So Europe, with its great civilization, its joys, and its anguish, as well as its sense of the tragic fate of a man, moved into a part of the country where hitherto only Stone-Age men, men steeped in the wrongs of Ireland, and the English and the Scots, had barely scratched a sign to show those who came after them that they had been there.
In 1946 the government created the Australian National University in Canberra. The intention of the government was that the university should specialize in research in physics, medicine, the social sciences, and Pacific studies. Again, as in so much of what the Labor government did, the note on survival was tucked away amidst the idealism. We Australians, the minister argued, must do research in the Pacific ‘if our future is to be safeguarded, and if we are to make our full contribution in the Councils of the Nations’. For Labor was just as preoccupied with the old nationalist aim of what the minister called ‘our proper place in world affairs’ as with the advancement of learning.
This sense of Australia as a social laboratory, as a pathfinder in humanity’s march towards brotherhood and peace, as well as the conviction that the horrors and degradation of the depression must never return, lived side by side in Labor’s post-war social welfare legislation with the motives of defence and national aggrandizement. From 1946 to 1949 the government extended and improved its welfare coverage. The victims of chance, economic vicissitudes, or other human misfortunes were protected. Humpty Dumpty could still fall, but this time on to the cotton wool of the welfare state rather than the cold, hard bricks of a laissez-faire capitalist society.
But by 1949 the Labor government was presented with two questions to which it had no answer. Was it using economic planning as the prelude to the introduction of socialism? Or was it using a form of state capitalism to protect the weak against the rigours of uncontrolled capitalism? If it had no plans or intentions to move from a capitalist to a socialist society, then, it was argued, some of its controls imposed in the stress of war were impeding economic development. The bank nationalization proposals of 1947, the continuation of fuel rationing, and the increase in the number of public servants in Canberra, created the suspicion that these men had become planners without any coherent social ideology. At the same time a series of strikes on the coalfields, on the waterfront, and in the shipping industry presented the government with a terrible choice, as the conservatives pounded them to maintain law and order, and the radicals abused them as storm troopers and agents of monopoly capitalism when they disciplined strikers. When Chifley ordered the troops to work the mines during the coal strike of 1949, the right wing of the party and their supporters in the electorate became frightened, while the left wing became disillusioned or disgusted. By that time the front bench men were exhausted by eight years of office. The loss of men of the imaginative drive of Curtin or the administrative skill of Beasley depleted their ability as well as their power to judge those ground swells in the electorates that in time engulf every government with an achievement as great as theirs. The same dilemma confronted Labor in its foreign policy as the world for which the ANZAC pact was designed melted away like a snow drift. When the Indonesians revolted against the Dutch in 1947, the anti-imperialist tradition of the party, together with the general left-wing enthusiasm of the post-war years, pushed the government towards support for the Indonesians. When the wharf labourers refused to load ships carrying supplies to the Dutch forces, the government refrained from coercing them. At the United Nations their public statements were anti-colonial, while their backstairs intrigues and formal notes were more cautious. The revolt raised awkward questions such as the future of White Australia, to which Labor was still passionately attached. Besides, how could anyone be sure that anti-colonialism in Indonesia would not move on to anti-capitalism and even to communism?
It was the success of communism in eastern Europe and China that exposed the divisions within Labor and its spiritual bankruptcy. By 1948 there were communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The communist parties were increasing in strength in Italy and France. On 1 October 1949, the People’s Republic was proclaimed at Peking. Was the Labor government to recognize it as the legal government of China? The communist world hastened to recognize it; America refused. What was the Labor government to do? The right wing of the Party and the Catholics said No; those who were vote-conscious in an election year urged recognition after the elections in December; the radicals and the left clamoured for recognition. The vote went for delay, and in December Labor was soundly defeated by a Liberal and Country Party coalition, which at least had no inhibitions or agonies of mind on the communist issue.
This revival of the fortunes of the Liberal Party was in part a triumph for the political skill and courage of Menzies, who successfully exploited the divisions within the Labor Party, and in part a symptom of the division of the world into communist and anti-communist camps. After the crushing defeat at the elections of 1943, the fortunes of the non-Labor parties were at their lowest ebb. Faction fighting within the United Australia Party, ill-feeling between the United Australia Party and the Country Party, the personal bitterness generated by the political assassination of Menzies in 1941, and electoral failure, had brought both groups close to public ridicule and disgrace. With the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944 under the leadership of Menzies some of these wounds were healed. From 1945 to 1948 a band of young idealists, supported by the manufacturers, the traders, and the pastoralists, painted a rosy picture of possibilities if Australia could rid itself of the economic planners and the menace of communism. At the elections of 1946 the new party won seventeen seats in the House of Representatives. At the elections of 1949 they won fifty-six seats, the Labor Party forty-seven, the Country Party nineteen, and one seat went to an independent in a House enlarged from seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-three.
World events seemed to be playing into the hands of the Liberal Party. Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950, and on 26 June President Truman denounced the North Koreans for unprovoked aggression and said that in response to the call of the UN Security Council he had ordered United States air and sea forces to help the Korean government. On 29 June the Australian government announced that it had put a naval squadron at the disposal of the United States for use in Korean waters, and on the following day the RAAF fighter squadron stationed in Japan was also put at their disposal. On 6 July Prime Minister Menzies called on Australians to enlist in the army, navy and air force for service in Korea: ‘We are,’ he said, ‘with all our imperfections, a Christian nation, believing in man’s brotherhood, anxious to live at peace with our neighbour, willing to go the second mile to help him if he is less fortunate than we are.’ So once again Australians volunteered for service overseas – some in the belief that they were defending Christian civilization against atheistic communism, some for adventure, some to escape their wives, and some for something to do. Up to the time of the signing of the armistice at Panmunjon in July 1953, two hundred and eighty-one Australians were killed or missing in Korea.
The demand for Australian primary products, especially wool, increased so steeply during the war that the Australian economy was swept up to new heights of affluence. Woolgrowers who had slaved for years to reduce their overdrafts bought luxury cars, labour-saving devices for their wives, stuffed their cellars with magnums of champagne, and went for expensive journeys overseas. The Korean war also strengthened the hand of the Menzies government against communism.
While Australia moved into a new era of affluence, the Menzies government accepted the American view that the salvation of civilization lay in the containment of communism both abroad and at home. On 12 July 1951, the United States, Australia and New Zealand initialled the draft of a security treaty that was to be called the ANZUS pact. At Manila in October 1954 France, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines signed a treaty that formed the basis of the South East Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO, by which they agreed to take common action against what they believed to be the most pressing threat to their own security and progress – namely, communist expansionism. The treaty covered not only overt aggression, but also subversion – the hope being to ensure that what the communists could not get by armed attack, they could not get by less obvious means. So Australia committed herself to the United States policy to resist what the Australian government called ‘the aggressive policies of international communism’. The free world, they argued, had an interest in checking the growth of communist tyranny.
The Australians also had a moral as well as a self-interested motive to reduce poverty, disease and ignorance in Asia. On these questions, as the Menzies government saw it, the dictates of humanity and the desire to survive suggested some form of material aid to the countries of South-east Asia. So when ministers of the British Commonwealth countries met at Colombo in January 1950 the Australian delegation, ably led by Percy Spender, the Minister for External Affairs, put forward a plan to achieve both political stability and economic progress. This came to be called the Colombo Plan. At the next meeting in Sydney in May 1950 the governments of Australia, Canada, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom each agreed to subscribe eight million pounds over three years to train people from South-east Asia and to send instructors, expert missions and equipment to countries needing them. In September the Australian government announced its intention to spend 31,250,000 pounds over six years.
The United States joined in 1951, and the Philippines and Japan in 1954. By the end of that year over six hundred students from South-east Asia had received Colombo Plan grants to study at Australian universities, and seventy-nine Australian experts had served in the countries of South-east Asia. By 1968 Australia had sent more than 1,500 experts, and received 9,400 students or trainees from Africa, Asia and the Pacific under the auspices of the Colombo Plan. By these methods the Australian government contributed a mite towards bridging the gap between the European and Asian standards of living that was, they believed, an ever-standing reason for the people of Asia to fall into the clutches of the communists. SEATO remained the final line of defence against the spread of communism in South-east Asia. So with one hand the Australian government offered welfare, and with the other a sword.
On the domestic front the Menzies government prepared for a war to the death against the Communist Party. On 27 April 1950, Menzies introduced into the House of Representatives the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, which declared that since the Communist Party was seeking the violent overthrow of the established government of Australia, that Party was illegal and dissolved. On 19 October the Communist Party and ten unions brought an action before the High Court to declare the act illegal. When a majority of the judges declared the act invalid in March 1951, Menzies asked for a double dissolution, and, after the elections, introduced the Constitution Alteration Bill in July to amend the constitution to enable parliament to pass laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to communism. Before the campaign got under way Chifley died suddenly on 13 June, and Evatt became the leader of the Australian Labor Party. To assurances from the Right that civilization was in danger, and warnings from the Left that liberty was in danger, the Australian people cast 2,317,927 votes for and 2,370,009 against the proposal at a referendum on 22 September 1951. The Left hailed the result as a victory for Australian democratic traditions: what the Right thought was not made clear, though some whispered they were relieved to find a constitutional pretext for the traditional conservative policy of masterly inactivity.
With the death of Stalin in 1953 and the end of the Korean war in the same year, the ashes of the cold war became less and less warm. In Australia they were suddenly fanned into rather sulphurous flames by the Petrov affair. On 3 April 1954, Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov, a third secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, asked for political asylum. On 20 April his wife also asked for political asylum after a melodramatic flight in an aeroplane from Sydney to Darwin during which an Australian security man and Soviet diplomats fought for the possession of her soul. In a dramatic episode in the House of Representatives Menzies announced the appointment of a royal commission to examine espionage in Australia. In the heat of the moment there were promises of revelations more damaging to the Soviet Union than those made by Kravchenko in Canada.
Dr Evatt announced that he would represent men denounced by Petrov before the royal commission. Evatt, the intelligentsia of the Left, and the Communist Party were quite convinced that the Petrov affair was a plot between the Australian security service and the Australian government to slander and defame the Labor opposition, and a desperate move to use the anti-communist bogy in the forthcoming elections. The commission began its hearings on 17 May 1954, digressed briefly to consider and reject the Evatt charge that the Petrov case was a conspiracy and a forgery, and continued to hear evidence till March 1955, when the three commissioners began to work on the report that in its conclusions had little more to say than what the man in the street took for granted – namely, that Soviet representatives conducted espionage in Australia.
By then the heat was out of the Petrov affair. By an odd irony its most permanent effect was to bring to a head the faction fighting within the Labor Party. Ever since the disastrous defeat in the elections of 1949 the party had been licking its wounds. So long as Chifley lived, the charismatic powers he exercised and his own conviction that the unity of the Party was essential to the salvation of Labor prevented a split. But after he died in June 1951 the election of Evatt as leader aggravated the faction fighting. Then, Labor’s crushing defeat in the elections of May 1954 caused both sides to look for a scapegoat. The left wing of the Party was not happy about Australia accepting the American thesis on foreign policy. As they saw it, this meant an alliance with corrupt, reactionary and inefficient governments in Asia; it exposed Australia to the danger of being on the losing side in a world war; it aligned Australia with those who seemed to be attempting to delay the liberation of the peoples of Asia from centuries of poverty and oppression; it alienated India, whose leader, Pandit Nehru, symbolized the groping of this section of the Labor Party for a third force, midway between communist Russia and China on the one hand and reactionary capitalist America and Chiang Kai-Shek’s army on the other. This group wanted to recognize Communist China, to withdraw from military alliances with the United States, and build up a neutral position that owed allegiance neither to Moscow nor to Washington. On the other hand the right wing of the Party was deeply committed to a crusade against communism, both in the international field and in the unions. In the early 1950s they had supported the Industrial Groups, a right-wing labour organization that aimed to free the unions from communist domination.
After Dr Evatt announced his intention to appear as counsel before the Petrov Commission, events moved swiftly. At an angry meeting of the Party in Canberra the right wing called Evatt ‘a disgrace to the Labor Party’. The left wing retorted that if the right wing saw Evatt walk on the waters of Galilee they would swear that the communists were holding him up. Things had got out of hand. A few weeks later, on 6 October 1954, Evatt, pushed further left by the savagery of the right-wing faction, announced in the press that a small group of Labor members, particularly in Victoria, had become increasingly disloyal to the labour movement. This group, he said, had adopted methods that resembled those of the communists and the fascists, and was deflecting the movement from established Labor objectives and ideals. It seemed certain, he concluded, that the activities of this small group were largely directed from outside the labour movement. The group to whom Evatt referred retorted that he was a millstone around the Labor Party’s neck, and that his only friends were communists and ex-communists.
At the twenty-first conference of the Australian Labor Party in Hobart in March 1955 the centre group dominated proceedings. On the one hand they approved of an earlier decision of the federal executive to remove political recognition of the Industrial Groups. On the other hand they reaffirmed their complete opposition to communism and all forms of totalitarianism, and emphasized that only a strong, united labour movement could prevent the growth of those evils. On the one hand they affirmed their conviction that co-operation with the United States in the Pacific was of crucial importance and had to be maintained and extended. On the other hand they passed resolutions that were thinly veiled criticisms of United States policy in the Pacific. ‘Indo-China,’ they maintained, ‘was typical of those cases where inexcusable delay in recognizing a genuinely nationalist anti-colonial movement in Asia resulted in communism gradually capturing the nationalist movement.’ Labor wanted more of welfare for the people of Asia, more assistance to relieve those suffering from poverty, disease, and lack of educational facilities, and less of the mailed fist. Labor wanted SEATO to devote attention to the work of peace. Labor wanted Austria, Bulgaria, Ceylon, China, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Korea, Libya, Portugal and Romania admitted to the United Nations to make it a genuine world organization, truly representative. But Labor still had no alternative to SEATO, nor could it sketch a society pitched midway between the ideologies of Moscow and Washington.
To the outsider it seemed that the compromisers had won yet another battle. After stormy scenes in Victoria, when the clash between the factions was exacerbated by the influence of two powerful Catholic personalities, Dr Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, and B.A. Santamaria, a leading Catholic layman, the Industrial Groupers in Victoria formed the Anti-Communist Labor Party in April 1955. In New South Wales one section of the Groupers formed the Democratic Labor Party in 1956, and in 1957 the Anti-Communist Labor Party and the Democratic Labor Party merged to form the Democratic Labor Party. As a party they were pledged to make Australia and the world safe from communism, to purify Labor from careerism, opportunism, and corruption, and to create industrial democracy. In fact they succeeded in making Australia safe for the Liberal-Country Party coalition. For by attracting 9.41 per cent of the vote in the Commonwealth elections of 1958, including 14.75 per cent in Victoria and 5.59 per cent in New South Wales, and by instructing their supporters to give their second preferences to the Liberal-Country Party coalition, they exposed themselves to the charge that, however high-minded their intentions, their political contribution was on the side of conservatism rather than the liberation from party tyranny to which they aspired.
Nor were the leaders of the Liberal and Country parties any more successful in affirming a faith for the future. All through the years after 1945 the faith of Prime Minister Menzies in British institutions and British civilization never wavered. When he announced the death of George VI in the House of Representatives on 6 February 1952, he was so deeply moved that his voice broke, and he found it difficult to continue. After he had told the House with a becoming dignity that he was quite incapable of saying what ought to be said, he slumped into his chair, rested his elbows on the table, and pressed the knuckles of his clenched fingers into his mouth.
By 1962 the great gifts of the man, the eloquence, the wit and the urbanity, were being used to defend a world that was crumbling before his very eyes. When the government of the United Kingdom proposed to enter the European Common Market, his political allies, the Country Party, sensing adverse effects on their pocketbooks, shouted loudly of the material conditions under which they would be prepared to consent. But for Menzies – and, indeed, for all Liberals who had some notion that the body was more than raiment – Britain’s entry would mark the end of the great dream of the beneficent and civilizing effect of the British way of life. For here at the very beginning of a new decade those Australians who believed in the stand against communism had to face the prospect that the price of such loyalty might be the end of the British Commonwealth of Nations. So Menzies and his followers found to their disquiet that their loyalty was to a class, rather than to a country or an empire.
Over the same decade the intellectuals and artists were confronting this same choice between the two worlds. They, too, were confronted with a new world. That affluent society produced in part by the rapid industrialization during World War II, the technological changes in production and communication, and the sudden increase in demand for Australian primary products during the hysteria of the cold war, was producing a material standard of living comparable with that of the United States of America. Each year the factories turned out more and more of the creature comforts and means of mass entertainment. The number of motor cars, motor mowers, electric stoves, refrigerators, hot-water jugs, toasters, electric shavers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, telephones, radio sets, and TV sets per head of population compared favourably with the United States and Sweden. with the increase in material well-being, and with the end of economic and cultural dependence on the British Isles, and to a lesser extent on Europe, there developed a new confidence – not that brash, boastful, cheeky and larrikin confidence of the 1890s, but the confidence of those who no longer needed to comfort themselves with the delusion of being ‘new world’. When Bertrand Russell left Australia after a short tour in 1950, he commented that Australians were pioneers ‘not only in the development of Australia, but in pointing the way to a happier destiny for man throughout the centuries to come’.
The publicists then were preparing to celebrate a coming of age. But the grounds for this confidence escaped the poets, the novelists, and the painters, and some of them turned to those questions on the nature of man and his destiny that have been posed by all civilizations in their time of flower. They probed the origin of evil and the causes of human suffering. They asked whether God or man is responsible for human pain; they asked, too, whether human beings ever could communicate with each other; they wrote of the tenderness and compassion that flower in people who have the courage to face the horror and tragedy of human life. Others argued that this preoccupation with evil and the counselling of resignation symbolized the spiritual sickness of bourgeois civilization. For them, only the destruction of bourgeois society could liberate the creative gifts of the people and restore to their literature and their art the hope and confidence of men who knew the way forward for humanity. So once again in its history Australia stood between two worlds.
The war in Vietnam forced Australians to say where they stood between the capitalist world led by the United States of America and the communist world led by the Soviet Union and China. In 1954 the French and Chinese governments had agreed to divide Vietnam between North and South at the seventeenth parallel, the North being under the communist government of Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, and the South, after 1956, under the dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem. In May 1959, to a background of a clash between Catholic and Buddhist factions, the spread of terrorism, and the threat of anarchy, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of North Vietnam called for the creation of a united Vietnam through all appropriate means. In July that Party announced its intention to liberate South Vietnam from its capitalist oppressors. By January 1961 a national liberation front, the Viet Cong, had been formed in the south to join forces with the communists of the North to destroy what they called the ‘US-Diem clique’.
So in December 1961 President Kennedy, after referring to the ‘communist program of assassination, kidnapping, and wanton violence in South Vietnam’, went on to say that the United States was prepared to help the Republic of Vietnam ‘to protect its people and to preserve its independence’. In the eyes of some, the United States was fighting to resist a communist attack on South Vietnam. In the eyes of others, the United States had come to the assistance of conservative, if not corrupt, reactionaries in a civil war.
At that time the case for Australia assisting to prevent the spread of communism to South Vietnam, Thailand, and the Malay Peninsula seemed overwhelming. The victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war, the close relations between the Soviet Union and China, and the even more alarming talk of an understanding between Peking and Jakarta, pointed to the need for some military action to prevent the countries of South-east Asia falling under communist control one after another like dominoes once the defences of the opposition had been destroyed. In April 1955 Menzies had announced that Australia intended to send troops to Malaya as a contribution to the defence of the SEATO area. The following December he had announced that these troops could be available for use against communist terrorists. In 1964 he announced the introduction of a selective system (choice by ballot or lot) of conscription for military service in which those selected for two years’ training could be sent for military service overseas.
Then to a background of an atomic explosion by China in October 1964, rumours of military disasters in South Vietnam, and alarming reports of the imminent collapse of all government in that country, Menzies announced on 29 April 1965, the government’s decision to send a battalion of troops to South Vietnam as ‘the most useful additional contribution which we can make to the defence of the region at this time’. In 1965, after an episode in the Gulf of Tonkin, about which eyewitness accounts varied, President Johnson announced the momentous decision to bomb military targets in North Vietnam. The Australian battalion of 1,500 men arrived in Vietnam in May and June of 1965 and was located at Bien Hoa as part of the United States 173rd Airborne Brigade. By June 1966 the battalion had been replaced by a task force. In the following year the air force and the twin jet Canberra bombers of No. 2 Squadron of the Royal Australian Navy guided-missile destroyer Hobart began to assist United States forces in South Vietnam and in the demilitarized zone. By 1967 the strength of the Australian force was 6,300, of whom 40 per cent were national servicemen and the rest volunteers.
When the decision to send troops to Vietnam was first announced in April 1965, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Arthur Calwell, opposed it bitterly, partly because that decision was based, he believed, on the erroneous view that the war had been begun by a communist invasion from North Vietnam. Calwell insisted it was a civil war. He also believed the government had misunderstood the nature of the communist challenge and was dangerously denuding Australia of her pitiful supply of troops by sending some of them out of the country. By tradition Labor was suspicious of expeditionary forces, even when dressed up in the modern language of ‘forward defence’. Labor believed in a policy of welfare rather than guns for South-east Asia, though Calwell was hard put to it to say just what it would do to stop the spread of communism in that area.
Outside the Labor Party, the Communist Party, some committed radicals, and high-minded improvers of mankind, the warnings of Calwell had fallen on deaf ears. Down to 1966 the Australian electorate returned to power the Liberal-Country Party coalition which was committed to the small expeditionary force, as the simple remedy against communist aggression, and to the promise of greater wealth by free enterprise. As the goods rolled off the production line, as metal mines were opened in the great Australian desert, as machines ripped the iron ore out of the earth, or plunged into the bowels of that earth and even into the mighty deep in search of oil, and as trade with Japan, the United States, West Germany and the United Kingdom boomed, it seemed as though the whole continent was to be brought under the influence of bourgeois civilization.
It seemed as though from Darwin to Hobart and from Broome to Brisbane suburbia was to be the last fate of a country which in previous generations had produced a William Charles Wentworth with his dream of a new Britannia rising beside the majestic waters of Sydney Harbour; a Ned Kelly with his dream of a life that was fearless, free and bold; and a Robert O’Hara Burke with his sense of all the tragic grandeur in the human situation. For there had been giants in the land before the levelling and conformist flood of industrial society ushered in the age of the neon sign and the contraceptive pill. Material well-being for all was stripping away even the need for the great comforters of the past – the promise of happiness in the life of the world to come, or the promise of happiness on earth, or the poetry and music which had ministered in the past not just to delight but also to give the strength and the courage to endure. It looked as though the government had understood the spirit of the age: to provide all the creature comforts of suburbia and to foster the values of a people aiming for two cars in a family, a thirty-hour week, never-ending titillations on the television screen, and the opportunity to ride the boards at Bondi Beach in return for a token force in Vietnam.
By 1967 the voices of disquiet again began to be heard. The new Labor Party leader, Gough Whitlam, speaking like one of those prophets of old who had been nurtured in a harsh, dry land, warned that Australia had ceased to be an English farm and was now a Japanese quarry. Some were disturbed by the quantity of Japanese and American investment in Australia. Some were disturbed by what they called the corrupting and degrading influence of the American mass civilization – the pornography in the magazines and the violence in the television serials. Some were disturbed by the blank cheque the government seemed to have handed to Washington. In January 1966 Menzies in his own season of the sere, the yellow leaf, had retired full of honours. The development of Canberra and the expansion of the universities were the lasting monuments he handed on to posterity.
He had been replaced by Harold Holt as Prime Minister. Holt who was sustained in his private life by a commendable vision of all men being brothers, and in his public life by the dream of educating Australians to the need for closer association with the peoples of South-east Asia, was driven by an odd quirk of fate not only to announce during that year an increase in the Australian force in Vietnam but to put forward as a slogan expressing his government’s enthusiasm for the American alliance the words ‘All the way with L.B.J.’ (President Lyndon B. Johnson).
Events in 1967 caused many of the articulate members of the community to question the wisdom of such a policy. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the end of the Peking-Jakarta axis, and the ever-sharpening tension between China and the Soviet Union, seemed to provide a pause during which the question of Australia’s security came up for review. Two events quickened the need for such a review. One was the announcement by the British government of their intention to withdraw their military forces from South-east Asia at an unspecified date in the early 1970s. The other was increasing disquiet at the drift of events in Vietnam.
Some argued that with isolationism bound to grow in strength in America after the terrible experiences in Vietnam, and with the British out of South-east Asia, Australia should emulate the example of Israel or Sweden and pursue a policy of armed neutrality. Some who were nauseated by the spectacle of a huge military machine pounding to dust large areas of a small nation took up the words of the Holy Father – ‘I beg of you in the name of Christ to stop.’ Some were nauseated by the ghastly, hideous emptiness of what the Americans and Australians were offering as an alternative to communist conformism and greyness of spirit in Vietnam. Some were alarmed lest Australia be on the losing side in Vietnam. The Australian Labor Party reminded the electors that civilized values were being destroyed by western forces attacking jungle villages with napalm, phosphorus bombs and fragmentation bombs. Some, influenced by past traditions and political creeds which had denounced all wars as products of class hatred or imperialist ambitions, and mindful of the old radical tradition in Australia of championing the underdog, found to their undying pain that this great Australian myth of mateship and social equality was in danger of being laid to rest on the battlefields of Vietnam.
The decade drew to a close on a note of anxiety. On 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Holt, who had lived through that terrible anguish of wanting men to be nice to each other only to find that he had come into his own in a time of hardening of hearts, was reported missing, believed drowned. When world leaders gathered in Melbourne to pay their last respects to him – for as a man he was much loved – the prophets of impending doom for Australia noted that, except for the President of the United States, Australia was host to those forces in Asia and Europe which belonged to the dustbin of history rather than to those shaping the future of mankind. When President Johnson announced in December 1968 that peace talks on Vietnam would begin in Paris, the relief was tempered by that undying source of disquiet: what was the future of the ‘dinkum Aussie’? Would the price of survival as a people be the shedding of that attempt to preserve a European society? Was this that fourth or fifth generation which would be ‘visited’ for the racial insolence and pride of their forefathers?
It seemed, too, as though the age of the kings of the human spirit was drawing to a close, to be replaced by that age of courtiers in which the courtiers consume their substance looking for kings. It had been a decade of strange paradoxes. There had been at long last some great achievements of the human spirit in Australia. Patrick White wrote his novels; Alec Hope wrote his Ode on the Death of Pius the Twelfth; Douglas Stewart and Judith Wright sang in their poems a great hymn of praise to life; Sidney Nolan painted his Riverbend in celebration of the golden tree of life. The tinsel of opulence glittered more brightly than ever in city, town and country. The moral authority of religious and political creeds declined apace. The decade drew to a close with at least one great question left unanswered: how long could this affluence be enjoyed before Australia was swept by the great storm raging to her north? There was perhaps another question: just as Samson after being shorn of his hair was left eyeless in Gaza, was this generation, stripped bare of all faith, to be left comfortless on Bondi Beach?