Chapter Two

Rebels, Villains, and Heroes

In March 1956 a parcel of books arrived at Melbourne from an address in Indianapolis, in the United States. The parcel was addressed to a young married man in a small Victorian town. There was, on the face of it, nothing untoward about the parcel, with one exception: it contained a novel entitled The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. An eagle-eyed customs official in Melbourne detected a whiff of subversive intent about the book and promptly confiscated it. It was passed on to the Book Censorship section of the Customs and Excise office for review. The novel, which centred on the 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, was first published in July 1951. It had been an instant commercial success, but for the next few years it languished. There was little critical discussion of its content: Holden seemed to have had his moment.1 The book had been available in Australia for some time, but suddenly, without anyone really knowing why, it appeared to have become notorious.

The customs clerk, Mr E.F. Dixon, observed:

This book attempts, not without success, to express the intimate thoughts of a young man of sixteen who has been expelled from school and who decides to spend a few days ‘lying low’ in New York. It is an extremely readable novel written in a refreshing style and punctuated with humour, pathos and wise commentaries on our society.

So far, so good. In many ways, Mr Dixon had done a fine job of providing a brief review of the central character and the novel itself. But then: ‘However, it contains references which, it is thought, are indelicate, indecent and almost blasphemous, not to mention others that are merely crude.’ Mr Dixon went on to make a point about literature itself: ‘While these references may have a basis in reality, that is, that people really do think such things but perhaps do not always say them, nevertheless, there is a limit to their expression in literature. In the present case it is submitted that this limit has been exceeded …’2 The book was held ‘for review’, and its intended recipient notified. America’s most famous literary teenager was banned in Australia.

Book banning was something of a feature of the Australian literary scene. Many publishers tried to circumvent an anticipated ban by getting to contentious international titles and making discreet changes before they were released in Australia. The books were then called ‘Australian editions’. Many of the titles banned were the pulp detective magazines or racy murder mysteries, including Hotel Wife, Road Floozie, and The Housekeeper’s Daughter (‘She was curvy and careless and lived down the hall …’). The banning wasn’t just pulp titles: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were off the shelves too. Australian censors apparently felt they had some responsibility to uphold a morality they perceived to be at the heart of the Empire, a kind of common understanding of what was obscene and prurient among the world’s more civilised types. There was also an old-fashioned sense of social control about the decisions, an implied anxiety that no one could be sure of the consequences of such material finding its way into Australian society.3 Inevitably, this enthusiasm extended to magazines, such as Playboy, which was banned from 1955 to 1960, but not to Alfred Kinsey’s major works on sexuality, on men (1948) and women (1953).

The 1953 Kinsey Report marked a generational shift in attitudes to sex between older and younger Australian women. ‘The problem of married life with so many disappointments and frustrations are to be expected if we understand the vows we make on our wedding day, and we do not want any help from Dr Kinsey’s nonsensical reports and misleading statements,’ one Manly housewife wrote to her local newspaper.4 But for younger Australian women, the report became a resource for changing attitudes to intimacy. Now was the time when Australians could actually concentrate on their private lives — the wars were over, the Depression a fading memory, and there was a sense that, finally, relationships had the time to develop and flourish.5 On a four-month tour of the nation in 1956 the National Marriage Guidance Council of Australia (in association with The Australian Women’s Weekly) identified a marked change in Australian women’s attitudes to sex, and some of it was attributed to the Kinsey Report.

The tour revealed that many young women believed the idea of chastity was no longer desirable. (The contraceptive pill was still five years away.) ‘The case against chastity, I was informed is being presented to young people much more forcibly than the case in favour of it,’ wrote Dr David Mace, the British academic with an expertise in human relations who ran the tour. ‘If there is a case in favour of it, said some young people, those who should be putting it are strangely silent.’6

This change in attitude was also captured in the nation’s marriage numbers: there had been a steady decline in marriage from 8.25 per 1,000 population in 1951 to 7.92 per 1,000 in 1956. Possible reasons for the decline were many and varied: some said it was inevitable after the wartime and post-war peak in marriage. Others claimed it was to do with the increased number of women in the workforce, many of whom were reluctant to leave their position for marriage and a potentially diminished income. And then there was the cost of buying a home and filling it with the consumer goods that were becoming the basic family requirements.7

The number of working Australian women had steadily increased from 717,200 in 1947 to 845,400 in 1954. And single or separated working women outnumbered married working women in 1954 by more than two to one.8 In 1956 the Victorian Education Department made news when it allowed married women to continue their careers as teachers. Twenty years later, the Commonwealth Public Service followed suit.9 There was, however, a consequence for all these working mothers, according to society’s moral guardians: ‘latch-key children’. These kids, whose parents both worked, had no one at home to look after them at the end of the school day, the argument went, so they went out to make their own fun — or cause mischief. They were, in fact, a little like Holden Caulfield.

*

Nobody could be sure what impact the new medium of television would have on newspapers. The overseas experience suggested newspapers remained an essential part of people’s lives when TV came along, but there was no telling if that would hold true in Australia. Newspaper owners felt the hot breath of new competitors on their necks. What no one knew was that by 1956 Australian newspaper circulation had reached its high-water mark. Newspapers were buoyant during the bad news days, such as during the war and its immediate aftermath. But as Australia drew away from its days of austerity, circulation relative to the size of the newspaper-buying population went south. It became more pronounced as the suburbs, especially in Sydney, spread out, and as motorcars, rather than public transport, became the preferred means of getting to and from work.10

The Herald, an afternoon broadsheet in Melbourne, was selling well over 439,000 copies a day in 1955. Melbourne had three daily papers — The Argus, The Age, and The Sun — but it was The Herald that was preferred by commuters hurrying home from work, or sports fans keen to check the football, racing, or cricket results. Every state had afternoon papers — Sydney had two, The Daily Mirror and The Sun — but none came close to The Herald’s circulation or reputation with its readers. It was also the newspaper at which a young Bruce Howard believed he could fashion a career.

Howard’s family had seen the impact of the Great Depression up close. His father, Tom, had experience in the milk delivery business and decided in 1932 to set up a dairy, at the bottom end of Ascot Vale, just over the Maribyrnong River. Tom Howard was optimistic that the worst of the Depression was over — after all, the Wall Street Crash was three years in the past. He believed the milk business was the key to a prosperous future for his family. Within a year, though, the business was broke, a victim of the Depression’s long reach. It took Tom Howard nine years to find a full-time job, finally securing a role at a Maribyrnong munitions factory in 1941; in the interim he’d survived on a combination of three part-time jobs.

The difficult circumstances meant that everyone in the family — Bruce Howard’s sister, older brother, and him — had to contribute, and that meant earning pocket money. Bruce washed a car in Moonee Ponds once a week and sold The Herald outside the train station when races were held at the Moonee Valley track. In time, Bruce became a messenger boy at The Herald, and for a time dreamt of being a journalist, until a particularly savage assessment of his writing skills from his school English teacher convinced him otherwise.

Howard switched to photography, and by 1952 he was a cadet photographer learning the trade. He spent most of his daylight hours in The Herald’s darkroom, mixing developing chemicals, watching the pros, and learning what he had to do to take publishable photographs for the biggest-selling afternoon daily in the country. Three years later, Howard, just 19, was on the road, a handsome young man with dark, wavy hair and a gentle demeanour that hid a determination to find his niche in an industry full of seasoned older men.

Just as he was starting to make inroads, Howard was called up for national service. The decision to introduce national service in 1951 was another reminder of Australia’s vulnerability, and of Menzies’ desire to make sure the nation was prepared for any eventuality. Most 18-year-olds had to register for 14 weeks of national service training and 42 days in the citizen military force over three years. ‘I hated the idea in advance. I thought it was going to cost me my career,’ Howard said.11

After one stint without his camera, Howard returned to the Puckapunyal training camp with his gear. He noticed that his former Essendon High School mate Ron Clarke was in another battalion. Clarke was a champion teenage athlete whom Howard had already photographed at University Oval. This time, Howard took some photos of Clarke on the rifle range, and sent them back to The Herald. One picture was published, confirming to Howard’s bosses that he could spot a news picture with popular appeal. More importantly, it demonstrated the young man’s initiative.

Sport was vitally important to the newspapers, especially in Melbourne, where the pink twice-weekly Sporting Globe provided additional coverage of local and national events. Newspapers that didn’t give sport prominence were not catering to their audience’s interests. In the days before television, the newspaper photographer’s images became the moment in time that framed thousands of sporting memories. Howard had been a promising footballer and cricketer at Essendon High, and now he was about to become a recorder of the vast sporting dramas that unfolded throughout the Olympic year. As he explained:

I felt I had to have a great interest in sport. As the lowest photographer [in the hierarchy], I’d get the lowest job. On Saturdays, it was football, cricket, horseracing. I had to show an interest in sport. [But] it didn’t just stop at the major sports. There had to be an interest in all sports — soccer, hockey — I had to have an understanding of the Games if I was going to cover it. I just thought it was essential.12

On Saturday 10 March Howard was at Olympic Park in Melbourne for the men’s national athletic championships. The meeting would help decide the Australian men’s Olympic track team. The venue was full, with 22,000 spectators, many of them enticed along to see the men’s mile race between Clarke, the precocious junior world record holder at the distance, and John Landy, one of the greats in the event. Landy had broken the fabled ‘four-minute mile’ and been a world record holder for the distance. He was a role model for the sport, supremely talented and without ego. As a boy, Clarke had also been inspired by the first man to break the four-minute mark, Roger Bannister, to take on what had become a glamour event, as the world’s best milers duelled to shrink the time it took to run four laps. Here was a contest that pitted the legendary Landy against the youthful Clarke.

Howard, like most press photographers, took up a spot near the finishing line. It meant that he was as far away as he could have been when one of the most extraordinary moments in Australian sport occurred.

A lap and a half into the race, and with some of the runners starting to break from the pack, Clarke lost his balance momentarily, and Landy, immediately behind him, clipped his heels. Landy leapt over Clarke as the younger athlete fell to the ground, but his spikes collected Clarke’s arm. Landy stopped, jogged back to help Clarke and apologised for what had happened. Clarke yelled at him that he was all right. ‘Get going, John!’ he shouted. Landy thought he had ‘half-killed Clarke’, and was horrified to see the rest of the field now some 50 metres ahead. ‘When I got going again, I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he later said.13 But he kept running, smoothly accelerating into his trademark easy and efficient stride, and began reeling in the rest of the field.

Howard got ready to take the picture. Sure enough, Landy hit the front and crossed the line first. That was the traditional picture, but the real drama had been elsewhere on the track: Clarke, who had picked himself up, hurt, cut, and bruised, struggled on to finish fifth. One of Australia’s finest athletic coaches, Franz Stampfl, described Landy’s actions as the ‘most gallant thing I have seen in a lifetime of international athletics’.14 The episode only heightened Howard’s sense of anticipation for the Olympics.

*

In the seven years since the Rome triumph that gave Melbourne the Games, Sir Frank Beaurepaire had faced his share of difficulties as he navigated the realities of organising an Olympic Games. The first problem occurred within 12 months of Melbourne winning the bid, when Sir Frank lost the presidency of the Victorian Olympic Council to Wilfrid Kent Hughes. The newspapers were initially intrigued and then shocked that the man who had been central to the winning bid was being sidelined for a man who had had no role in Rome. Kent Hughes might have fancied himself as a defender of the amateur ethos, but his faith in the Olympics seemed questionable. At the height of the controversy about Japan’s participation in the Games, Kent Hughes was quoted as saying: ‘The Olympic Games are, in themselves, relatively unimportant …’15

Sir Frank, though, had put a number of the Victorian Olympic Council offside and managed to generate remarkable hostility among some of his colleagues. ‘[He] has been a complete failure as a chairman,’ one confessed. ‘He has antagonised … often by being very rude and he has not achieved our objectives … I think Frank Beaurepaire’s individualism and a certain circumlocutory approach to problems tripped him up.’16 The most obvious issue was Sir Frank’s support for the Melbourne Showgrounds as the site for the Games. Most of the VOC executive were opposed to the idea, dismissing the venue as being surrounded by some of the city’s smelliest industries and being accessed by rail through a series of eyesores that would do the city’s reputation no good.17 Kent Hughes favoured the MCG, a venue that wasn’t at all likely at that stage of deliberations.

Sir Frank didn’t attend the meeting in June 1950 that sealed his fate, already aware that his claim on the job was a lost cause. The vote was a comprehensive win for Kent Hughes, 13 to 2, and a rejection of Sir Frank’s robust commitment to the Showgrounds proposal. There was a sense that the energetic modernising influence that Sir Frank had brought to the bid was being marginalised, in favour of a return to the tweed suits and amateurism that was the hallmark of the VOC.

For the time being, Sir Frank remained chairman of the Olympic Games Organizing Committee, in addition to wrangling his business interests. Such a prominent position meant he was still caught up in the controversies, delays, political battles, and Olympic sparring that eddied around the Games. It all started to become too much for him. A heart specialist told him that he was risking his life to continue his high-pressure work on the Games, his business, and in politics. Something had to give.

Sir Frank’s antipathy to physical frailty nagged at him, but he knew that resigning from the Organizing Committee could ease his physical and mental burden. For a time he tried to keep his ill health a secret, but eventually, in January 1951, he attached a doctor’s certificate to his resignation letter from the chairmanship of the Organizing Committee, perhaps to remind everyone that he would still be in charge, if he were able.18 Kent Hughes took that role too.

Despite these setbacks, Sir Frank refused to be idle, and as the Olympics grew closer, he increased his lobbying of his employees to make the most of the opportunities offered by the Games. Just after Christmas in 1955, Sir Frank wrote to his employees:

I am sure it will have occurred to all representatives of companies in the Olympic group that each of us will need to be fully informed about many interesting aspects of the Games. With a name-association [sic] such as ours, it is a responsibility to become thoroughly acquainted with the whole subject.19

This was followed three weeks later by a memo from Sir Frank’s advertising manager at Olympic Consolidated Industries, Graham Lomas, to all the business’s executives:

Occasionally one hears or reads incomplete or inaccurate accounts of the part played by our chairman [Sir Frank] … in getting the Games. To ensure that the members of this organisation are informed of the facts, press notes listing the major events are being distributed. Your personal copy is attached. These notes have been circulated to newspapers and periodicals throughout Australia. Any serious case of misstatement will be acted upon by this department, which would welcome our help in identifying such instances and being informed of them, if such are printed in local newspapers etc. If verbal misstatements are within your hearing, correction is needed only if the person is prominent in local affairs.20

Lomas was a loyal employee, and in no doubt about Sir Frank’s claim to fame, but it seems clear that Sir Frank’s firm hand was actually directing the memo’s contents and intent. He could not be there personally, but no one was permitted to overlook or forget his role in bringing the Games to Melbourne.

Sir Frank also ensured that his company put out regular Olympic bulletins with Games-related content and images that newspapers could use for free. There was, of course, a rider attached to such largesse: an acknowledgement that Olympic Consolidated Industries was the source of the information. The bulletins contained a range of insights and materials, and covered diverse topics: such as the logistics of the radio coverage of the Games, trainees who were using radio equipment, and the progress of the building of the athletes’ village in Heidelberg. Lomas diligently ensured that the materials were circulated within the company, and was keen for feedback from his sales reps, or from journalists who used the material.

There was little doubt among some members of the Olympic organisations that Sir Frank deserved every plaudit; there was even talk of naming the new Olympic pool after him. And then, in what seemed a final endorsement of his role in getting the Olympics, Sir Frank managed to secure the lord mayoralty for the term that included the staging of the Games. It was a coup to hold such a prestigious position at the city’s most important time. Whether Sir Frank was well enough to take on the honour did not appear to be a consideration. It was almost as if he had been biding his time for the final assault on the job, able to remain untouched by the controversies, missteps, miscalculations, and errors that had dogged the organisers between 1951 and 1955.

Sir Frank made no secret of his pleasure at his looming honour: ‘I first thought of getting the Games for Melbourne in 1920. It took me a long time to get things moving, but thanks to those two great sportsmen, Sir Raymond Connolly [sic] and Sir James Disney — my dream came true and Melbourne won the 1956 Games.’21 So it was Sir Frank’s dream after all.

*

No one in Rome in 1949 had bothered to question Sir Frank and the bid team about just who was an Australian, or even what that meant. It was not a question that occurred to many Australians, so why would it be relevant to the International Olympic Committee? The whole idea of ‘an Australian’ was, on a superficial level, embodied in the 9.42 million white, largely English-speaking people who settled mostly on the nation’s coastal fringes. But at a deeper level, it was a far more complex question of national identity, tied up with the White Australia policy and the deep racism that it signified.

If it was hard enough to define what ‘Australian’ meant, it was even more difficult to conceive of an ‘Australian way of life’, a term that took on greater currency during the early 1950s. A distinctive Australian way of life owed more to protecting what the nation had than to enlarging its view of itself. This was particularly true as the Cold War became more intense, and the priority from Menzies down was to defend the idea of Australia, whatever that idea looked like.22

Nothing appeared to be more relevant to the Australian immigrant than the nation’s way of life: it was what migrants supposedly aspired to embrace, the incentive to become a member of their adopted nation, even if the welcome mat was discriminatory. If anything was known overseas about Australia, it was the White Australia policy. Six weeks before the bid deliberations, there were reports in some British newspapers about Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell defending the White Australia policy from being undermined by the courts.23 And then there was the controversy in the Filipino parliament, which pointedly criticised the policy’s impact on Australia’s Asian neighbours.

The White Australia policy came into being during the nation’s first federal parliament in 1901 and was predicated on three important planks: that the native Aboriginal population would die out, most likely in the cooler areas of the country; that immigration from non-European nations was to be prevented; and that appropriate white colonists should be encouraged to settle in Australia.24 It remained largely unquestioned through the first part of the century, and was emphatically endorsed by the high rates of migration from England and Ireland after World War I. But once England decided that its own birth rate was too parlous for it to continue its migration arrangements with Australia, the steady stream started to dry up.

Assisted migration from Britain was in steady decline in the lead-up to World War II: only 3,538 assisted migrants arrived in Australia in 1938–39.25 In 1930 the federal government had decided to ban all European migrants, unless they already had relatives in Australia or could pay the extraordinarily high £500 ‘landing fee’. The other way migrants could get into Australia was by passing the notorious dictation test, which became infamous after the Czech linguist and socialist Egon Kisch was examined in Scottish Gaelic to guarantee his exclusion.

On the eve of World War II almost one in two migrants to Australia were British, a further 48 per cent were white non-British migrants, and only 4 per cent came from Asia.26 It was on the back of this that Andor Mészáros left Budapest in 1939 to make his way to Australia. He had cobbled together £500, so there would be no dictation test for him.

Mészáros was a trained architect and sculptor. An aesthete, a man steeped in the rich artistic history of his homeland and the transmission of ideas and inspiration between like-minded souls, he was not the kind of migrant who would quickly fit in. Yet he had come to Australia because the rumble of another European war had convinced him and his family that disaster was imminent. In the first war Mészáros had been a Hussar in the Hungarian Army, a dashing young cavalry officer, who towards the end of the conflict found himself heading to the Ukraine to defend one of the last outposts of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire. Twenty years later, Mészáros’ wife, Elizabeth, reminded her husband that his officer status in the Great War was likely to see him called up again. It was time for them to get out, to find a new home far from what was about to come.

Mészáros had previously spent two years in Paris, where he’d met Pablo Picasso, discussed ideas, refined his thinking, and developed his skills, before returning to Hungary. This time, he was reluctant to leave his homeland, to give up his nationality and deprive his children of their cultural inheritance — the poets, artists, and writers of Hungary. ‘[B]ut the adventurous spirit overwhelmed me and I went to the British Embassy,’ Mészáros said.27

Mészáros had already spoken to the Canadian embassy, where he’d been shown an image of what he thought were ‘bearded, illiterate Rumanian peasants’. Canada wanted pioneers, brave men with adventure in their hearts and the skills to tame the wilderness, not artists or architects. Thirteen days after he visited the British embassy, Mészáros received a ‘landing permit’ to go to Australia. Elizabeth and their young son, Daniel, would remain in Hungary until Mészáros was settled.

Mészáros’ journey was one that thousands would later make, but his route to a new life took him first to Vienna, and then to Germany. ‘History got hold of all of us; nations are turned upside-down, human rubbish governed Europe and I sat enclosed in the dark that brought me to the origin of all evil, to Germany,’ Mészáros wrote of his arrival there.28 It was mid-April 1939, and the threat of war hung heavy across Europe. In the middle of May, with £5 in his pocket, Mészáros left Tilbury dock in London, bound for Australia. His first stop was Perth, and with this initial glimpse Mészáros started to think that he would stay only for a little while before returning home when Europe had settled down. By the time Mészáros arrived in Melbourne, he was, like many other new migrants, struggling with the choice he had made. ‘A feeling of dryness, futility, loneliness pervaded us all,’ he wrote, ‘the future was never more blurred, a kind of barrier between us and the world of Australia, a strange, hostile world, where as future proved, we were the underdogs — the bloody aliens, second-class citizens.’29 It was not an auspicious first impression.

Mészáros got off the ship in Port Melbourne and tried in vain to find the ‘city’. He found himself near Flinders Street Station, and had to ask a passer-by where the city was. It was a Sunday and Melbourne was as quiet as a church, largely because that was the only activity that occurred on the day.

Things didn’t improve. There were the nagging difficulties of being a migrant, the creeping ignorance, the barely disguised intolerance and often the rudeness: one woman derided Mészáros’ choice of cheese at the Myer food section as ‘foreign muck’; doors were closed on him regularly as he searched for a place to live. Mészáros tried two or three jobs. His European qualifications weren’t recognised and his artistic sensibilities seemed alien in this new country. ‘It’s a cultural desert,’ he grumbled.

In one office where Mészáros found work, the boss told him he was going to cut his salary in half because his English wasn’t good enough on the telephone. Mészáros resigned on the spot and went home to tell his family he would make his living as a sculptor. His predicament was common to many migrants, who found that even if they were granted equal pay with their Australian colleagues, they would never share in the employment security, access the better jobs, or participate in the camaraderie that were available to locals.

Mészáros’ career choice would be precarious, but at least he was doing what he loved. Elizabeth Mészáros was multilingual and found work as a translator for the ABC to ensure a regular income.30 Andor decided to pursue a niche area — portrait sculpture — that no one else in Australia was doing. He cultivated professional men — academics, lawyers, doctors — and offered to do small portraits of them for nothing. If the sitter didn’t like the work, they didn’t pay. Only two people among the dozens of whom he created portraits failed to honour the deal, and the quality of Mészáros’ work was soon well-known.

In 1941 he held his first exhibition of medallions, small bronze portraits of men he knew, delicately created, with memorable likenesses. The exhibition was well attended but he sold only one medallion. The outcome provided him with a rare insight into his new country: ‘I did not know then that an Australian does not honor a live fellow Aussie — a dead one is a different matter.’31

A decade later, Mészáros won the highest international award for medallion artists, the SIDEM, and international commissions followed, as well as three large sculptures on the grounds of Sydney’s King George V Hospital. Mészáros was now an internationally recognised artist working in a distinctive form. Not surprisingly, he caught the attention of Kenneth Luke.

Luke was a self-made millionaire, the owner of a silverware and trophy manufacturing business, a successful farmer, racehorse owner, philanthropist, and vice president of the Victorian Football League. He was also a member of the Olympic Games construction committee. He contacted Mészáros with an offer: would he design the Olympic medallion that would be given to everyone associated with the Games, from athletes to torch relay runners?

In the conversation that followed, Mészáros realised that he was the only artist Luke had approached, and the lucrative £500 contract was his if he wanted it. Mészáros started work on the design in the middle of 1954. The plan was to send the medal dies to London and strike the first 300 medals there. The rest of the 12,500 medals would be made in Australia. It was, by any measure, a massive undertaking. But it would also be an extraordinary souvenir.

*

The national economy groaned through the first few years of the decade. Inflation reached 20 per cent in 1951–52, driven by the Korean War, the rising wool prices, international inflation, a rise in industrial action, and increased domestic demand fuelled by an expansive immigration policy. Two credit squeezes helped reduce the inflationary impact, but by 1956 the strike bogey was back. Waterside workers went on strike and then the shearers, who stayed out for four months. Affluence was elusive. Home comforts were far from universal. A quarter of homes in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane still had no refrigerator in 1956. Two-thirds of homes in those three cities had no hot running water in the bathroom, and three-quarters of them had no hot water in the laundry.32

The Menzies government’s economic problems at the start of the year were significant, and directly related to Australia’s hunger for overseas goods. The affluence that had started to become noticeable across middle Australia was built on its growing demand for imports. Menzies’ trade minister, John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, alerted the country to the balance-of-payments problem that was, in large part, being driven by booming consumer demand and investment spending. Inflation had become a bogey that had to be reined in, and McEwen wanted to boost exports to redress the balance, without endangering the nation’s prosperity.

Menzies’ view was that if Australia was to be prosperous, there had to be sacrifices. After convening a panel of economic experts, which included departmental secretaries, bankers, a retailer, and a National Farmers Union representative, Menzies delivered a mini-budget on 14 March that increased the tax levied on the imported goods that had been central to the increased consumer demand — cars, jewellery, gramophone records, cosmetics — and raised company tax. Menzies explained his government’s motivations: ‘What we are trying to do is to prevent some elements in our prosperity from aggravating an inflation, which could, if left alone, undermine our prosperity.’33 He told parliament: ‘In the short term, the most effective immediate way to relieve the pressure is to reduce the volume of purchasing power, which creates it.’34

In practice, this meant cigarettes would go up 3d for a packet of 20, jewellery sales tax would increase from 16.23 per cent to 25 per cent, and petrol would rise by 3d a gallon. But the biggest slug was kept for cars, which were hit with a sales tax of 30 per cent, almost double the old rate.

Menzies tried to head off the grumbles. He stressed that cars were ‘one of the great and growing industries’, and only some ‘temporary restraint’ was needed. When it came to the fashionable practice of hire purchase, cars were the dominant category. In just two years, new car registrations in Australia had increased by almost 90,000, to 245,271 registrations in 1954–55. But where it all made an impact was when it came to imports: in the previous financial year, cars and all their spare parts made up almost a fifth of the nation’s total import bill.35

This was a tough call for Menzies to make, but he knew that while Australians’ love affair with their vehicles wouldn’t stop with a bigger sales tax, it might slow things down a little.

The broader balance-of-payments issue pointed to a rapidly growing Australian embrace of what the rest of the world had to offer. It confirmed that some of the old notions of what Australia was and what drove its prosperity were changing: the sheep’s back now had four wheels and drop earrings. McEwen had been agitating for almost three years that it was time Australia ended its discriminatory trade arrangement with Japan, and he finally received cabinet approval to pursue a trade deal that would secure Australian exports of wool, wheat, barley, and sugar to Japan. McEwen’s determination was far-sighted and recognised that Great Britain, Australia’s major trading partner, was not likely to remain in that prime position as the world changed. Japan was a non-communist buttress in the region, but memories of the war were still strong and there was resistance in parliament and the community to the final deal, which would eventually be signed in 1957.

Comfortable with the new budget measures that were in place, Menzies prepared to head overseas for the regular Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. He left just one issue ticking in Victoria: what would happen with beer to rise by 2d on a ten-ounce glass in the midst of a referendum on the state’s drinking hours?

*

The early forecasts of the number of American tourists who would come to Melbourne for the Olympic Games were not promising. ‘They couldn’t have picked a worse place to hold the Games,’ one New York travel agent complained. ‘The way conditions in Melbourne stand today I would be very surprised if more than 500 people from the United States make the trip.’ One of these ‘conditions’ was that it was impossible to get a drink in Melbourne after 6 pm, unless you ordered food. A tongue-in-cheek piece of US reporting summed up the problem: ‘Gin rummy, charades, spin the bottle (empty naturally) … All this is legal in the cool of the evening in Melbourne. But one for the road? No sir.’ The American journalist went on: ‘The primitive liquor laws won’t bother the Olympic athletes, but for the travelling man, it’s a privation he’s just not buying …’36

Everyone associated with organising the Olympics in Melbourne knew it was an issue. What compounded it was the deadly dull weekends that went with it. The city was practically closed on Saturday afternoons, save for football in the winter. And Sundays were a write-off — if you weren’t going to church, there was nothing to do: no shopping, no cinemas, no Sunday newspapers. The city might have been charming, with its impressive array of Victorian architecture and the elegance of Collins Street, with its nod to the fashion capital of Paris. The city’s first coffee lounge had opened in St Kilda in 1954, but apart from that there simply wasn’t much else.

The six o’clock swill was so well-known that artist John Brack’s 1954 painting ‘The Bar’ captured workers’ grim determination to guzzle as many beers as possible in the hour after they clocked off for the day. Queues of men clamoured for one, two, three, or more beers before the pub’s doors slammed shut for the night. For some drinkers, it was the quickest way to get drunk. For others, it wasn’t worth the battle to get to the bar. The early closing was initially introduced as a temporary measure during World War I but was made permanent in 1919. Other states had already abandoned it, but Victoria had held firm.

What would overseas visitors make of it — those who came from cosmopolitan European cities or energetic American capitals? Some local MPs couldn’t care less. One Liberal man thought the Olympic Games was ‘an international plot to alter the Licensing Act’.37 Other conservatives, including country MP John Hipworth, wanted to change the law ‘to avoid the State becoming the laughing stock of the world when the Olympic Games were held’.38 With the Olympics looming, Victorian Liberal premier Henry Bolte decided to find out what the public thought about the six o’clock swill, and ordered a referendum to be held on Saturday 24 March 1956.

If anyone thought it was going to be a low-key affair, they were sadly mistaken. The United Licensed Victuallers Association, which represented the hotel industry, claimed that the Victorian population saw the sense of extending hotel trading hours from 6 pm to 10 pm, so it wouldn’t be worth spending a great deal of money on its campaign. Its opponents, running on the slogan ‘Stick to Six’, refused to believe the result was a foregone conclusion. The temperance movement was still alive and kicking — and donating. ‘In 1930 we spent more than 50,000 pounds [on a similar campaign],’ the Reverend Robertson McCue said. ‘Donations are pouring in and one gift alone of 1000 pounds of printing means one million leaflets will be distributed this month.’39

Reverend McCue was an experienced campaigner who understood that by mobilising the churches, he was engaging the resistance. Across the burgeoning suburbs, churches were finding congregations that were built on young families who were keen to be part of a church community.40 They were receptive to the message that men didn’t need any more encouragement to drink. Children would be neglected if their parents went out drinking, one woman told The Argus. A man said there was already enough money spent on alcohol and there didn’t need to be any more.

The Argus conducted a straw poll on the eve of the referendum, testing the opinion of 200 people in Bourke Street: 73 supported the status quo, including 52 women. But 67 men and 41 women favoured 10 pm closing.41 On that evidence the six o’clock swill was sunk.

What the straw poll inevitably couldn’t survey were the thousands living in Melbourne’s suburbs, including the women who dutifully waited for their husbands to come home from the pub to have dinner with their family. Many publicans refused to support the campaign for a new closing time, reckoning that they were doing good business from the swill. On referendum eve ULVA president Mr J. Kellaway found his voice and attacked the ‘heretics, Quislings, saboteurs and disloyalists’ among the publicans who had done nothing to push for change.42

When the vote was done, only six of Victoria’s 66 state electorates returned a majority ‘yes’ result, and all were city seats. The Six O’Clockers’ argument won by 300,000 votes. It was a thumping endorsement of the status quo. After Kellaway had attached some of the blame for the result on Menzies’ budget increase to the beer price, he made a more withering observation that Victorians had delivered a ‘no confidence vote in themselves’.43

The head of the Olympic Civics Committee, Maurice Nathan, tried to twist Premier Bolte’s arm to allow some flexibility for hotels during the Games, but Bolte was having none of it. ‘The people have determined the liquor issue by their vote and I will respect their wishes even during the Games,’ Bolte replied.44

It might have been canny politics, but what would it say about Melbourne when the international visitors started to arrive later in the year? Bolte was prepared to wear the opprobrium. He would spend the next ten years working behind the scenes to liberalise the law once and for all.