Chapter One

A Dame Is Born

Every night, whether it was at a town hall, a local cinema, or a mechanics’ institute, the troupe of actors would be thanked for their performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The vote of thanks would often come from a prominent local woman — a headmistress, a lady mayor, a representative of the Country Women’s Association or the Ladies’ Auxiliary — before a supper feast would be unveiled. The next day, on the bus that would take the actors to their next Victorian town, a young Barry Humphries, with his distinctive flop of dark hair and his pitiless capacity for capturing the character of middle Australia, was improvising a routine that sounded just like the vote of thanks from the night before, deploying ‘a flutey falsetto’ to echo the ‘speech of gratitude’. The actors, including Zoe Caldwell and director Ray Lawler, loved the parody. Humphries was just 21 and in his first year of acting. He was a university dropout and an employee of record company EMI, where he occasionally shattered old 78 rpm records with a hammer. In 1955, in regional Victoria, cultural performances — whether Shakespeare or opera — were of great moment, received with a kind of yearning for what many patrons believed were the sounds of England and Empire. Shakespeare in particular was the high-water mark of culture, a night’s entertainment that was highbrow but familiar, epic but appropriate.

Humphries rejoiced in being miscast as Duke Orsino in the production, but his work at the back of the bus was evolving into something more substantial. As the tour progressed, Humphries’ character became more nuanced and more absurd. Several months later, the actors were preparing the end-of-season revue and Humphries was searching for inspiration. Lawler, soon to become famous with his drama Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, which featured working-class characters in an unashamedly Australian setting, urged Humphries to give a shape and a name to the ‘woman’ he heard at the back of the bus. Humphries decided to call her ‘Edna’ after a kindly nanny he once had.1 Humphries was reluctant to play the part and suggested to Lawler that Caldwell play Edna and Humphries could even do the voice off-stage. ‘No, you be Edna,’ Lawler replied. ‘Do it like a pantomime dame …’2

The time and place for Edna’s debut was fixed for 19 December 1955, at Melbourne’s Union Theatre. The subject was the Olympics, and the need for Melbourne householders to open their suburban homes to the expected thousands of visitors who would come to the city during the Games. Thousands of Victorian households had already volunteered to host visitors, but ‘Operation Hostess’ was still short of its 30,000-bed target. One panicky Olympic official had urged all housewives to offer hospitality as soon as possible.3 Lawler nudged Humphries: ‘Wouldn’t [Edna] be just be the kind of person who would offer her spare bedroom to a Latvian pole-vaulter, provided of course, that he was spotlessly clean and didn’t hang his jockstrap on her rotary clothes-hoist in full view of the neighbours?’4 So Mrs Norman Everage, of 36 Humoresque Street, Moonee Ponds, volunteered to do her bit.

The stage direction describing Mrs Everage was explicit: ‘She is a middle-aged, middle-sized woman wearing a charcoal grey suit embellished with a large chartreuse cabbage rose in her revere. She wears “Mrs Trabert” earrings in appropriate 1956 formation.’5 That was a statement of Mrs Everage’s style. The reality of opening night was somewhat different — Humphries wore his own shirt under a blue cardigan and floral skirt, and a pointed yellow felt hat. There was no make-up, no stockings, and the shoes were black brogues. Mrs Everage tells the Olympic Games officer Leslie Hopechest (originally played by Noel Ferrier) that she has several bedrooms and could accommodate three athletes comfortably, ‘counting Valmai’s sleep out’. All of Edna’s family gets a mention — husband Norm, daughter Valmai, and sons Bruce and ‘little’ Kenny, who wants the family to host a ‘Red Indian’. There is much to-ing and fro-ing between Mr Hopechest and Mrs Everage about which nationality would be most appropriate for Moonee Ponds, and Edna asks to use Mr Hopechest’s telephone to check with her mother about what she thinks. Edna’s mother reminds her that it might not be suitable to host an athlete after all. Edna confesses to Mr Hopechest:

You really are going to be cross when I tell you this, but Mother’s just remembered that Fran and Tom are coming from Tassie to do the Games and she says if we’ve got to have anyone in the house, Aussies will do her. And you’ve got to admit she’s right, you know, remember the [White Australia] policy!

Edna was, in this early stage of her ‘life’, a unique way of revealing middle-class Australia to itself. As Humphries later acknowledged, ‘Edna’s simpering genteelisms and her post-war, house-proud rhapsodies had a thrilling novelty’6 for local audiences. Her first appearance provoked ‘the whoosh of laughter’ that denoted recognition and understanding. Edna was also a means of exploring what Humphries saw as the dull hand of Australian suburbia, where homes on quarter-acre blocks represented a noble ambition that was, as Edna portrayed it, a succession of acquisitions and effects. In particular, it was the interior decorating — ‘sand-blasted reindeers on the glass’, ‘the genoa velvet couch … the burgundy Axminster squares’ — that captured a way of life for many Australians in the 1950s. Most importantly for Humphries, he had found something that was uniquely his: ‘I found that I’d discovered something I could write about, not by putting the telescope to my eyes and trying to write something in the manner of [Noël] Coward or Alan Melville but by just looking through the venetian blinds on to my own front lawn.’7 This was new territory: Humphries could make audiences laugh but also feel uncomfortable at seeing something so recognisable. Edna was a breakthrough on the eve of Australia’s momentous year. She would be back before 1956 was finished.

*

The national mood at the start of 1956 was more than the usual cheery expectation of better days ahead. There was a determination to be optimistic and make the most of the nation’s growing prosperity. The Australian Women’s Weekly made it clear to its thousands of readers that the year was going to be different:

Materially, Australians of 1956 can hardly fail to have a good New Year. The long years of plenty show no signs of ending. Though there are individual failures and disasters, the country as a whole is flourishing. Business is good. Jobs are plentiful. Wages are high. Opportunity is practically banging on the door for anyone who cares to grasp it. All of these things are very good. No one could wish them otherwise or want a return to the lean years of poverty and depression. For no matter what the gloomy prophets of doom may say, poverty and happiness rarely go hand-in-hand.8

The message from the soon-to-be Olympic host city was equally sunny. ‘So here’s to us,’ The Argus trumpeted, while predicting that 1956 would be Victoria’s most exciting ‘12 months ever’. Ten new skyscrapers were scheduled for Melbourne, a continued greatest share of the migrant stream would make its way to Victoria, there would be a successful referendum to end the six o’clock swill, and some brand-new electric trains and ‘a forest of TV aerials’ signalling the arrival of television were forecast to be part of the Olympic year. ‘We are in for a year of great progress,’ the paper declared.9

As it is for every optimist on New Year’s Eve, the reality of the 12 months ahead would not match the expectation. What did happen was a more challenging, heady, confronting, and illuminating 12 months than anyone could have predicted.

Nine days before Mrs Everage made her theatre debut, Robert Menzies won his fourth federal election as Liberal leader. The pretext for Menzies’ calling the 1955 election just 18 months after the previous poll was to bring the two houses of parliament back into alignment. The timing enabled Menzies to take advantage of a deeply divided Labor opposition that was caught between the evils of communism and the salvation of Catholicism. Menzies had been on the communist case for years, trying to ban the party and narrowly losing a referendum on the issue. But the defection of Soviet diplomat and spy Vladimir Petrov in 1954 had caused an uproar that was still echoing 18 months later. For much of the 1950s Menzies’ domestic politics were shaped by the shifting international situation: national security, defence, trade, and Australia’s economic wellbeing were fundamental considerations that Menzies turned into vote-winners. At the 1955 election the Coalition increased its majority by 11 seats, to 28, and effectively condemned the bitterly split Labor Party to another two terms in opposition. It also gave Menzies an iron grip on the parliament and the nation’s political life.

The young Menzies had fallen in love with a Britain that filled the books he read and studied. His first trip, in 1935, brought the words to life, filling Menzies with a deep regard for what he believed made Britain what it was: its law, its parliament, its institutions, its cricket, its Commonwealth leadership, and the royal family. As prime minister, Menzies adopted a more pragmatic approach, recognising the importance of the United States to Australia’s defence, especially as communism became a greater regional threat. Even so, he never surrendered the prime place Britain held in his affections to any other nation.

Menzies came to believe that another world war was possible, and with the encouragement of his two best diplomats — Percy Spender and Richard Casey — he supported regional initiatives that were designed to build Australia’s regional alliances. In 1951 Australia initiated the Colombo Plan with Sri Lanka to strengthen ties across Asia and deliver aid to other nations needing help, with the goal of providing political and economic stability to the region. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was born in September 1954, and brought together the United States, France, Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Australia as a regional buffer against communism. Menzies had signed the ANZUS Treaty with the United States and New Zealand, sent Australian troops (and ships) to the Korean War, and been part of the armed response to the Malaya insurgency. Part of the anxiety driving these commitments were the memories of World War II, and the lingering concerns that Japan may well re-arm, but more important was the threat of China, which became communist with Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949. The Empire was shifting and breaking, and Australia could no longer rely on Britain alone for help with regional threats.

The end of the war had provoked a crisis of faith in capitalism and imperialism among many Australians. About 23,000 joined the Communist Party, believing that the new world promised more than could be found in the ruins of the old.10 Some would retain their hopes for a communist-led revolution, but many others found that the steady drip of information about Stalin’s atrocities in the Soviet Union was enough to end the flirtation. By the time Menzies returned from a trip to England in 1950, it was clear that the Soviet Union and the spread of communism were the biggest threats to the peace in the Western world. The Korean War was underway, and the course of events was unpredictable. Menzies made sure Australians were under no illusions about the seriousness of the situation. ‘If we are to be involved in a third world war in the next few years, it will be as the result of attack by international Communism … Korea is a sort of preliminary: a test out of our strength,’ he said.11

Menzies had an opportunity to demonstrate the practical response to such fears in September 1950, when British prime minister Clement Atlee approached Menzies with a request for the United Kingdom to use some of the supposedly uninhabited areas of Australia as a testing ground for its nuclear weapons. Canada had turned Atlee down, but Australia wouldn’t: without consulting his cabinet, Menzies agreed. His elevated sense of secrecy underlined the suspicious mood of the times. Leaks were tantamount to betrayal. The fewer people who knew, the better. Trust was a priority. Silence was priceless.

The British government was keen to develop its nuclear arsenal, especially after the Soviets released their own nuclear bomb in 1949. Menzies’ agreement to allow British testing might have given Australia the opportunity to develop its own nuclear capability, but that turned out to be a false hope. It did, however, provide the Australian government with some leverage, should it need to get under the United Kingdom’s security blanket in a time of need.12 For Menzies, the United States might be the new acquaintance he needed to cultivate, but sometimes old friends were still the best.

In the flush of his dominant electoral victory in 1955 Menzies commanded the Australian political landscape like no one before him. He had identified his core constituency — the ‘forgotten people’ — in his wartime radio broadcasts, and now he relied on their good sense and innate conservatism to support him. Menzies characterised them as noble, altruistic, family-focused Australians who were the backbone of the nation. ‘I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses,’ Menzies said in the broadcast in which he first discussed these Australians.

It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and how, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.13

Recognising the unrecognised, identifying their wisdom and diligence, and celebrating their contribution to the nation was a powerful political tool for Menzies. Perhaps the most successful element of his appeal to the middle class was Menzies’ timing: out in the suburbs, the nation was starting to wake from its wartime slumber and feel the benefits of prosperity and security. The Cold War was a potent threat to this new view, and Menzies was determined to prevent the changing world order from disrupting his still fragile and evolving vision of modern Australia.

On 7 January 1956 Robert Menzies summoned his old confrere and cabinet colleague Wilfrid Kent Hughes to a meeting in Canberra. It would not end well for Kent Hughes. He had spent the past three years wrestling with Menzies, Sir Frank Beaurepaire, Victorian Labor premier John Cain, various influential Melbourne civic identities, and Avery Brundage about the state of Melbourne’s Olympic preparations. Kent Hughes was chairman of the Melbourne Olympic Organising Committee, a role that demanded patience, foresight, and, unfortunately for Hughes, a decent dose of diplomacy, mixed with an inexhaustible optimism that Melbourne would be ready. Brundage had bullied Kent Hughes about Melbourne’s lack of progress, taunting him with the threat of taking the Games away, even suggesting he had a telegram in his pocket from another city pleading for the chance to replace Melbourne as the host city. There was some relief from the badgering when Menzies pledged that the federal government would pay half the overall cost of the Games, and the Victorian government and Melbourne local council a quarter each. The deal, struck almost three years earlier, had eliminated any residual fears about Melbourne being able to afford the Games but did little to reassure Brundage that Melbourne could deliver the Games. Menzies, though, wasn’t interested in talking to Kent Hughes about the Olympics.

The careers of both Menzies and Kent Hughes grew out of the Young Nationalist group, which had brought about dynamic change in Victorian state politics. Menzies was senior by only six months, and both had been eligible to enlist in World War I. Menzies didn’t, and it became a criticism that dogged his public life.

Kent Hughes, who was known to his friends as Billy, was more likely to speak his mind, rather than surrender to strategic silence or political expediency. Often, his statements took on the flavour of a man trying to protest about the march of progress. Despite being a 1914 Rhodes scholar, Kent Hughes lacked Menzies’ gravitas and his willingness to display his intellectual horsepower. And then there was Kent Hughes’ dalliance with fascism, which in 1933 he described as capturing the ‘spirit of the age’. He even admitted he was a fascist ‘without the shirt’. It was illustrative of a man who had passing enthusiasms, plus a propensity to speak his mind, neither of which endeared him to Menzies. Both men started their political careers in the Victorian parliament. Kent Hughes, having become deputy premier, resigned in the lead-up to the 1949 federal election in order to move to Canberra, with Menzies as prime minister.

For all of that shared history, Menzies and Kent Hughes never became firm friends. Part of the reason was that Kent Hughes had a habit of making political faux pas, and his time as the minister charged with developing Canberra — a task close to Menzies’ heart — was routinely disparaged in the capital. At one stage Kent Hughes had to deny claims that he disliked Canberra, while adding: ‘If to dislike a system of subsidies to individuals and clubs who can well afford to be ordinary Australians is to dislike Canberra, then I plead guilty.’14 It was hardly an iron-clad denial. Kent Hughes’ cabinet colleague Paul Hasluck observed some years later that his colleague was an inefficient administrator:

At times it seemed to me that he found some satisfaction for himself at being ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’. The tragedy of his political life, however, was that he was not a ‘voice’ crying in the wilderness to foretell the coming of a new era but a ‘voice’ that was nostalgic for an era that was disappearing.15

Menzies meeting with Kent Hughes in January had all the hallmarks of trying to deal with the consequences of Kent Hughes’ ministerial failings, including his continued inability to get on top of his portfolio and his comments on a recent trip to Japan, during which he had contradicted Menzies’ position on Formosa (now Taiwan). The meeting was destined to end in only one way. Menzies’ dispatch of Kent Hughes from his cabinet was ruthless if a little imprecise. Menzies began the meeting by outlining his need to enact a reshuffle that would inject some younger talent into his Cabinet. ‘I am very sorry, but you are one of those who has got to go out,’ Menzies told him.

Kent Hughes pressed for reasons why, but Menzies demurred.

‘I feel I am definitely entitled to something more than has been said,’ Kent Hughes replied. ‘I have given you all the loyalty I could. Do you consider my work has been unsatisfactory?’

Menzies attempted candour: ‘I do not consider your administration has been very efficient.’ When Kent Hughes asked for details of his deficient administration, Menzies declined.

Not surprisingly, Kent Hughes felt he was entitled to more than that from a man he had known for almost 30 years. ‘I go out without a word of thanks. I know exactly where I stand,’ Kent Hughes told Menzies as he left the room.16

There was a subsequent exchange of letters, but nothing assuaged Kent Hughes’ anger and disappointment. In a parting shot, he let the prime minister know that the Australian Olympic Federation had approached him to become its president, but he had insisted Menzies was ‘the logical and proper choice’.17 Menzies accepted the role.

*

Robert Menzies didn’t particularly like television. In 1952 he had grumbled to the BBC: ‘I hope this thing will not come to Australia within my terms of office.’18 Perhaps his suspicion had something to do with his earlier treatment by US television journalists. He had been approached to appear on a US current-affairs program, Meet the Press, and was politely asked before the show was recorded what questions he would not like to answer. When the time came to do the interview, the questions Menzies didn’t want to answer turned out to be the only questions he was asked.19

Australia was giving Britain 20 years and the United States almost a decade when it came to introducing television. The BBC began broadcasting high-definition programs in 1936, although by the time television shut down because of World War II there were only 20,000 sets in the country. The United States waited until after the war, and by 1947 commercial TV was up and running.

Menzies’ tardiness on television might also have had something to do with his suspicion that the technology was not going to have a civilising or culturally enriching influence on Australia. He also remained wedded to the power of the radio. He had delivered more than 80 radio broadcasts during the war, when he was opposition leader, reaching directly into the nation’s lounge rooms and kitchens as families gathered around the wireless. There were no filters, and no one trying to interpret or second-guess his messages. Underlying Menzies’ embrace of ABC radio was his view that it had an important public function to perform, and so could mirror the BBC’s role in British public life to entertain, stimulate, and engage.20 But perhaps Menzies’ most practical consideration about introducing television to Australia was that the post-war world posed a myriad of complex challenges for any government; television was, in comparison, a secondary issue. But whatever Menzies’ priorities, there was one man who was determined that the prime minister would commit, sooner rather than later, to bringing television to Australia. His name was Colin Bednall.

Bednall was a mercurial character, a gifted journalist, and one of Sir Keith Murdoch’s protégés. Bednall’s wife, Marion — the daughter of Charles Abbott, former administrator of the Northern Territory and home affairs minister in the Stanley Bruce Coalition government — later described life with her husband as ‘difficult … but never dull’. Bednall started his working life as a journalist, becoming a copyboy at The Adelaide News at the age of 14. He left St Peter’s College, one of Adelaide’s oldest establishment schools, to take up the job. In a vivid glimpse of the man he would become, in 1932 the teenage reporter secured a spot for himself on an anthropological expedition in search of Indigenous Australian communities in the red heart of Australia. But the expedition leaders threw him off the trip when Bednall’s newspaper rivals, The Adelaide Advertiser, underwrote the expedition.

Undeterred, Bednall hired an Indigenous tracker called Albert, a Swedish tourist, and a haycart, and followed the expedition to the MacDonnell Ranges. Albert kept Bednall informed about what the local Indigenous communities thought of the expedition and the academic assortment who crossed their path. Miles from anywhere, without any form of communication, and instructed by his Adelaide bosses to send his stories to Alice Springs, Bednall decided to write the story on toilet paper and attach it to carrier pigeons. All was going well until Bednall released the pigeons: out of the vivid blue sky a peregrine falcon emerged, swooped down on the neat quartet of pigeons, and turned them into a cloud of feathers.21

Bednall’s career prospered and he became one of a famous group of Australian war correspondents that included Chester Wilmot, Osmar White, Alan Moorehead, and Noel Monks. Bednall was the aviation correspondent for London’s Daily Mail, where his reputation was burnished by surviving the notoriously dangerous raids over Europe in Lancaster bombers.

‘I flew only when the top brass saw a need for publicity, which was often enough,’ Bednall said. ‘I did have myself trained as an air gunner. I found it better to have control of a turret or a waist gun than just to sit miserably contemplating the prominent possibility of death.’22 Bednall understood why his newspaper gave his stories prominence: ‘Probably because no other paper, British or American, had a flying reporter who survived.’23 It was a bleak analysis and too self-deprecating.

Bednall was justifiably highly regarded in the centre of British journalism, Fleet Street. Bednall had another admirer, though, closer to home: the proprietor of The Herald and Weekly Times, Keith Murdoch, with whom Bednall had developed something of a filial bond when he had worked for Murdoch before the war. It was to Murdoch that Bednall turned when he took the Daily Mail job. ‘Hope you approve,’ Bednall telegraphed.

‘Certainly. Splendid. Regards Murdoch,’ came the reply.24

And it was Murdoch who provided Bednall with a post-war job back home, running the Brisbane Courier-Mail. It was there that Bednall started to get a feel for the new medium of television.

Bednall had no desire to actually be on television. He understood that he was not cut out for a visual medium: his mop of curly hair and his thick, black-framed glasses were, even in the 1950s, not the best attributes for an on-screen career. But behind the scenes was another thing. Bednall saw television’s potential and began a systematic campaign to bring it to Australia.

His Damascene experience happened during a trip to New York during Bednall’s Brisbane tenure. Bednall was on an early-morning train trip when he looked out the window and saw ‘weird designs in hardware on house roofs’. When he asked what these were, Bednall was told they were television antennas. Not only that: sometimes, if a family couldn’t buy or hire a TV, they put up something resembling an antenna to suggest they weren’t missing out.

The newspaperman in Bednall saw beyond the obvious story of a new consumer entertainment option. Here was something else altogether. ‘As far back as I can remember a fear that some new media of mass communication might arise as a threat to newspapers had lurked in the minds of newspapermen and a consuming interest in television began for me,’ Bednall explained.25 He gleaned something else about television during that New York trip: its ability to reach a broad audience. ‘Then I began to notice that the poorer and the more densely populated the district, the more the television antennas. This suggested a medium of communication truly for the masses, and reaching the masses was my business.’ The Americans told him the new medium not only brought families together, but ‘brother, does it sell soap!’. It would even find out lying politicians, because it was impossible for anyone to lie on television.26 Bednall was converted. He began lobbying the government with unstinting fervour.

The Courier-Mail was under Bednall’s management when Menzies was campaigning ahead of the 1949 election. The paper’s support for Menzies was so pronounced that Labor’s Arthur Calwell bitterly promised to send Bednall to Korea when Labor next won an election.27 Menzies was delighted with the paper’s continued support some years later, and wrote to Bednall: ‘No government could have asked for its case to be better or more enthusiastically presented.’28

Bednall leveraged that support to invite Menzies to a meeting at the Lennon Hotel, in Brisbane, to discuss how television should be introduced to Australia. Bednall talked with a mixture of urgency and passion, outlining the need for the Menzies government to show some initiative and establish a commercial television service. There were dangers aplenty in Labor’s state monopoly television service that Chifley had promised in 1949.

Menzies listened but knew there were would be debates within his cabinet about television. Harold Holt’s father was a cinema manager, and there was concern in that sector about the impact television would have on audiences. The Country Party needed to know how its constituents would access a technology that looked to be designed only for city folk. And how would you structure the television industry in Australia? What role would the newspaper moguls play? How would the interests of radio stations dovetail with those of television stations? And where would the ABC fit in? It all needed thought, tact, and political acumen. Menzies tried to counsel Bednall that if he felt so strongly about television, he should write about it. But Bednall was not satisfied with that, and warned Menzies that Australia would become ‘a hill-billy country’ without television.

There was no doubt that Bednall’s goals were commercially self-interested. If television was going to come to Australia, the content providers, such as The Courier-Mail (and, by extension, The Herald and Weekly Times), needed to have a presence on the landscape. Bednall was a vigorous prosecutor of his case and made sure the interested parties knew of his efforts. He even wrote to Keith Murdoch’s son, Rupert, then at Oxford, to let him know his plans: ‘For the last two years I have been fighting hard behind the political scenes for recognition by the Federal government of the right of existing newspaper-radio interests to participate in T[elevision] …’

Rupert, ever sensitive to the opportunity of building a bridge to a potential influencer, let alone his father’s protégé, responded: ‘The government’s television proposals seem to be in large part a great personal triumph for you … We have a great chance here and I pray that we will be able to take it.’29

On Friday 16 January 1953 the Menzies cabinet decided to hold a royal commission into the introduction and operation of television in Australia. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Menzies announced that there would be six royal commissioners. One was Colin Bednall. His course to the arrival of television in 1956 was set. Bednall would be there when the lights went up.