CHAPTER 1

War’s after-shadows
From the secret armies to the Reds

SECRET ARMIES TO SAVE AUSTRALIA

In the midst of all the arguments of artists, novelists and playwrights, ‘the unacknowledged legislators’ (to quote Shelley) of Australia, the world of mercantile and pastoral power reacted against Red and anarchist threats. The Irish nationalist party, Sinn Féin, the Irish uprising in 1916, and Australian–Irish resistance to conscription seemed also dangerous forces to be opposed. In the early 1920s, the forces of right continued to take a variety of forms, self-defined by their leaders. Most of these the Nationalist government of William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes was willing to support or at least tolerate. They were a necessary manifestation of patriotic impulse in these new days of Bolshevik threat.

For example, at the Sydney Town Hall in August 1920, the King and Empire Alliance was launched by an enthusiastic crowd and quickly became a leading organisation to do with promoting loyalty to the Empire against Irish republican erosions on the one hand, and communistic elements on the other. Such was the alarm that the fabric of Australia might not hold that the Alliance had nearly ten thousand members by June 1922. It had a strong following in rural New South Wales and affiliations in other states. In March 1921, Prime Minister Hughes despatched a cache of arms and ammunition to Sydney from Melbourne, still the seat of the Federal government, with the intention that such paramilitary forces as the King and Empire Alliance would store them in disused railway tunnels.

Fear about the future had derived from a May Day 1921 march and demonstration by trade unionists. The crowd, listening to Jack Kilburn of the Bricklayers’ Union speaking in the Sydney Domain, was attacked by returned soldiers. With the Union Jack in hand, the soldiers had tried to make their way to the speaker’s platform and pull down the unionists’ red flag. Their own Union Jack was seized, torn up and shredded by the angry audience. This was seen by many as representing the depths to which unionists would sink in civic sacrilege. As a result, a ‘Monster Loyalty Meeting’ at the Sydney Town Hall in 1921 was followed by a march to the Domain of between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand from all parts of the city, suburbs and country. The broad mateship of the trenches had vanished in the great ideological conflict of the age.

The Domain was a place, like London’s Hyde Park Corner, for orators of all stripes, and what they said was more than mere entertainment. The platforms of the Socialist Labor Party, the Communist Party of Australia and even the Returned Soldiers’ section of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) were rushed by loyalists. Ernie Judd of the Socialist Labor Party—who incidentally abhorred the then newly formed Communist Party—drew a revolver at the first charge by loyal citizens, then put it away and was pulled from the platform, punched and kicked. Attempts were made, he later said, to ‘tear out his lower organs’. The police arrived, Judd was charged with assault, and the crowd persuaded to disperse.

Tubercular novelist D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda arrived in Australia late in the autumn of 1922, describing it as a land that looked ‘as if no man had ever loved it’ and made it a ‘mother country’, before travelling east towards Mexico and their intended final destination of Taos, New Mexico. At a boarding house she ran in Darlington in Western Australia, he met the writer Mollie Skinner and encouraged her in the writing of her successful novel The Boy in the Bush. When the Lawrences reached Sydney, it was the issue of secret armies that attracted their attention. They rented a cottage at Thirroul on the New South Wales south coast, where Lawrence began to write his 140,000-word manuscript Kangaroo. In its pages, not always easy reading, the journeying English couple, the Somers, encounter a secret army named the Maggies. It has been argued that Lawrence may have come in contact with a group of former officers associated with the King and Empire Alliance.

In Lawrence’s novel, Jack Callcott, an Australian officer of the Great War, explains to Somers, ‘There’s quite a number of us in Sydney—and in the other towns as well—we’re mostly diggers back from the war—we’ve joined up into a kind of club . . . and we’re sworn to obey the leaders, no matter what the command, when the time is ready.’ Elsewhere Somers recalls that he had been told by Jack that ‘in New South Wales the Maggies . . . numbered already about fourteen hundred, all perfectly trained and equipped. They had a distinctive badge of their own: a white, broad-brimmed felt hat, like the ordinary khaki military hat, but white, and with a tuft of white feathers.’ After finding Australia a place of incipient strife, the Lawrences moved on to be feted in Mexico City and then to live harshly for a time on a New Mexico ranch.

Another group, the Farmers’ Army, formed as early as 1917 and favoured with the patronage of Billy Hughes, was in the process of blending into the post-war bush army called the Old Guard, in which returned soldiers were enlisted. Edward Sherwood, for example, mayor of Scone in New South Wales, would later be head of the Old Guard in that town. The novelist Patrick White’s family at their property at Belltrees near Scone were involved in the Old Guard, as were the relatives of the poet Judith Wright in New England. These bodies, led by the most distinguished pastoral and professional men in the bush, were more than tolerated. One of the leaders was Sir Samuel Hordern, the famous Sydney emporium owner whose catalogue was called ‘the bush bible’. He was a grandee of Bowral, a man of spacious political, nation-building and even sporting dreams—his horses won the Melbourne Cup thrice. Known as ‘H’ in Australian intelligence reports, he attracted the following note from an agent of the Federal Investigation Branch: ‘H has more than once been dissuaded—gently and firmly—from excursion into matters he is not constituted to touch.’ The extent of these matters remains a mystery but no doubt dealt with the necessity of his class’s taking over or forcing emergency powers on the federal authorities.

In the midst of the campaign to halt the manifestations of Red rebellion, Australia was still faced with the results of the war waged on the Empire’s behalf by young Australian men.

THOSE IRISH AGAIN

World War I, instead of repelling Australians from the arms of the Empire, drove them more firmly into it. Apart from the undeniable convictions of the great majority, this was also for the sake of a White Australia. The prospect of an ever-ascendant Japan frightened the Commonwealth to various degrees throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and Australians believed their security was dependent on the Imperial connection. There was also a psychological drive in Imperial patriotism—if Australia had sacrificed its sons on behalf of the Empire, that fact consecrated the connection even more. If not, it was hard to justify the war and console the families of the fallen. The Empire gave meaning to the immolations of Gallipoli and France.

Irish Catholics were identified as dissenters from this holy nexus, though they had given plenty of sons to the war also. Their attitudes were more a matter of emphasis—their Australian self-definition had less of Britain in it. Elsie Coyle, a woman from Kempsey, New South Wales, remembered that when her convent school class was marched to Kempsey Showground for Empire Day in 1919, the Irish Catholics like her marched under an Australian ensign and the public-school children under the Union Jack. She had, like many of her peers, been given a Ned Kelly-style version of the history of Empire, a dark tale of bloodshed and hunger in the Land of Saints and Scholars. Yet an uncle and a number of cousins had just got back from serving in France and entertained her by showing how to wrap up a puttee, and one of her cousins died in the port of Melbourne of Spanish influenza on a returning troopship. Her father was an engine driver who, on the Bathurst–Sydney run, had enjoyed the company of future treasurer and prime minister Ben Chifley as his fireman (Chifley having been demoted for his part in the 1919 railway strike), and who characteristically chafed at having his Australianness questioned by mainstream fellow workers in the railway barracks of Bathurst and Grafton.

Immediately post-war, the Irish were still believers in Irish Home Rule, in the whole of Ireland becoming a dominion, a resolution Britain had implicitly promised in 1914 in return for Irish involvement in the war. But at the higher levels of society and in Australia’s Orange Lodges, Home Rule was abominated as if it were a bomb thrown at Empire. Home Rule would put the considerable Protestant, loyalist minority in Ireland under the power of the priest-ridden majority. These different views, even over such a modest proposal as that Ireland become a dominion like New Zealand or Australia, created a society-wide rift. Indeed, the loyal majority in Australia believed that Australian Irish, despite their willingness to sing ‘God Save the King’ on Australia Day, secretly wanted a full-fledged Irish republic. Home Rule would be achieved for twenty-six counties (the Free State) in 1922, after half a century or more of activism and bloodshed, but six counties in Ulster remained British. Both sections remained under the Crown. (For the South of Ireland, the republic would come later.)

The majority of Irish Australians were happy with the new arrangement. Living in a Crown dominion had been no intrusion on them, and economic and trade union issues were closer to their hearts. It was true that some Irish republicans—those who would accept nothing but a republic for the whole of the island of Ireland—came to Australia escaping the new Irish Free State government. Some worked in gangs on the New South Wales and Victorian railways. But despite suspicions to the contrary, republicanism would never be the majority position of Irish Catholics. And when a civil war broke out in Ireland in 1922 between the Free State majority who were willing to abide by the treaty Michael Collins had forged with the British, and those who refused to accept it, and there was mutual bloodshed worthy of that committed by the British army and Black and Tan auxiliaries previously, most of the Irish in Australia lost interest in Irish politics. Instead they chose to see their background as a heritage of Irish history (frequently inaccurately rendered by Irish grandparents, religious brothers and nuns) and culture, expressed in song, the oratory of Robert Emmet, and the uprising not of 1916 but of 1798.

Sectarianism rolled on, fuelled by Australia’s Orange Lodges on one side, and on the other by Catholic absolutism and the determination of the Knights of the Southern Cross, the Hibernians and other Irish organisations. These men not only wanted Irish validity to be recognised, but also wanted to demonstrate that their sense of Australianness was as good as anyone’s.

The divide remained. The sentiment, ‘He’s a Catholic but he’s a good bloke’, was echoed on the other side by ‘He’s a Protestant but . . .’ There were, even before World War I, places Catholics could not get jobs. Sanitarium Health Foods had an overt no-Catholics policy. But in other places it was a matter of unspoken practice. The situation was not helped by the fact that the Catholic clergy, who wanted their flock to be accepted into the community, nonetheless came down hard on Catholic–Protestant ‘mixed’ marriage, requiring the Protestant partner to abandon the Protestant tradition for the children of the marriage, and allowing the ceremony to be performed only behind the church altar.

The old furies had a considerable time to burn yet, and the clergy, generally, were not helping.

THE FEARFUL AFTER-SHADOW

In late March 1921, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) ceased to exist and the responsibility for the treatment of the war’s mental patients was taken up by the Department of Repatriation. This department, not always generous in its attitudes to former Diggers, was to deal with the after-shadow of the war, the plaints of soldiers’ women, the symptoms of the men. Government help was needed because civilian friends were not always understanding of the shell-shocked or men suffering from war neurosis. Civilians could not understand why soldiers did not want to forget the trenches and dedicate themselves utterly either to the urgent politics of the day or to the atmosphere of prosperity and hedonism of the early 1920s.

But psychiatric symptoms had not vanished with the onset of peace. At the time of the outbreak of the war there were in Australia no specialist clinics or psychoanalytic institutes such as existed in Britain and on the continent. It was common at the start of the conflict for physicians to respond to symptoms of the shock of war by blaming the patient for moral inferiority in the face of modern battle. Even when war ended, some physicians on the home front still held the same views. Yet, as historian C.E.W. Bean said of young men coming out of the lines of Pozières, ‘They were like men recovering from a long illness.’ They were not what people called ‘mad’ but many confess in their journals how close they came to it. Some of those faces Bean saw might carry the disease latently, only to explode years later, a bomb at the kitchen table.

Returned soldiers’ groups and regimental associations exerted pressure to see that there would be no military stain attached to those Diggers who had become mental patients under the shock of battle. They did not want their former comrades either stuck with the labels of civic mental disease or certified and written off into the civilian mental health system.

Colonel Eric St Clair, a leading Australian psychiatrist, wrote to Major-General Richard Fetherstone, Senior Military Medical Officer in Australia, a man short in stature but decisive in action, a gynaecologist not a psychiatrist, but a doctor who had seen the mayhem of both Gallipoli and the Western Front. Fetherstone declared that former soldiers sent to military hospitals appropriate for shell-shock treatments should be admitted ‘by the usual transfer without certificate of any kind’. The certificate was a record that might be used against a mental patient in later life.

At least the mental health problems of Australian ex-servicemen were not treated with the same contempt as they were in the United Kingdom. A post-war medical assembly held in Brisbane in 1920 and involving many psychological specialists, led by the remarkable, wiry Melburnian Dr Springthorpe, made sure of that. Springthorpe was, by this time, in his early vigorous sixties, a husky little physician who had had a fashionable practice in Collins Street. When he returned home in 1919 from his service in France, Belgium and the United Kingdom it was to continue his work with the shell-shocked, and he resumed his post of visitor to metropolitan asylums as well as recommencing private practice. (One of the panel’s secondary aims was to get psychiatric instruction incorporated in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Thus psychiatry became a profession in Australia.) Dr Springthorpe complained that many medical boards appointed to look into the claims of returned soldiers for help had had no experience of the Front, and had refused to grant some of the shell-shocked and disabled a pension, under suspicion that they were malingering. Springthorpe, by contrast, remained a potent voice for men whose wounds were not always visible.

A War Pension Act had been passed as early as 21 December 1919, and by 1924 there were nearly eighty thousand war pensioners in Australia, but only 4 per cent were ‘mental cases’. In 1926, Smith’s Weekly, a populist magazine founded by Sir James Joynton Smith in 1919, and considered to be the voice of the Digger, claimed that eight thousand veterans were dying each year, at an average age of forty-five, some as a result of mental illness. It nicknamed the Repatriation Commission the ‘Cyanide Gang’, since its rulings were strict, and rejection of disability claims led some former Diggers to suicide. The Australian Worker contrasted the praise for the Digger by public officials at their departure for war with the niggardly treatment afterwards.

An example of ‘disability shell shock’ was Private H, who had served in France in 1917 and 1918, been wounded twice and burned by gas. He kept asking ‘foolish questions’ and had shown some violence. His father said his son had been ‘queer’ since his return from the war. Another characteristic case was that of B.H. Wright, a law student who turned suddenly violent in late 1919 and received twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour in Grafton Gaol in New South Wales. He had been wounded in 1917, took four months to recuperate, returned to the Front, been blown up and buried alive, and, in March 1918, gassed. On his return to Australia in April 1919 he complained of loss of memory and started drinking. His family used the same phrase so many others did—he was ‘not the same man’.

The mental state of returned soldiers was a crisis for their wives and families. In one case, a soldier, Charlie Clifton, broke a bottle over his wife’s head. She then killed him by slitting his throat with a razor. She gave evidence of persistent attacks upon her, and her situation and that of her victim were so well understood by the court that she was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. There were many reports of impotence and marriage breakdown, and also of crises arising from war experience but surfacing years after the war ended. ‘James’ was a thirty-five-year-old former soldier who was admitted to Broughton Hall psychiatric clinic in Sydney as late as April 1930 suffering from delusional melancholia. He had been beside an explosive blast in France in 1918 and was now obsessed with the memory and ‘depressed, burst into tears easily’. ‘Joseph’, a wagon builder admitted to Broughton Hall in December 1925, had been working on a vehicle in France when a bomb from a German plane fell near him. His immediate response at the time was to become very frightened and to run about crying. Yet he survived the war without being treated. Seven years after, he still could not sleep properly, and when he did sleep, he always woke startled. ‘Dennis’ was thirty-two and had been earning a living as a plasterer when admitted to Broughton Hall for seven months in 1927. He had been complaining of headaches for the previous eight years and his mother wrote, ‘I can only say that my son has complained of his head ever since he returned from France . . . he was under arms from 11 August 1914 . . . since his return he has been irritable and argumentative.’ Dennis had seen four doctors and three specialists and been to a sanatorium three times but without improvement.

‘Fred’ was a former officer who had been wounded and concussed in a raid in France in 1916. He was unable to sleep, he had fits of rage, pains throughout his body, regular lapses of memory and terrifying nightmares, and by 1923 was so depressed he could not work. A gunner, ‘Jack’, a former deep-sea diver, was admitted to Broughton Hall at the end of the war after being wounded at Passchendaele by fifty pieces of shell, with two wounds to the back of his head and the loss of both eyes, one of them knocked out by the explosion. By 1922, though blind, his rages were difficult to control. ‘H’ of the 7th Field Engineers, a thirty-two-year-old carpenter repatriated to Australia in March 1917, was the sole survivor of a group of ten men blown up during an artillery barrage. At Broughton Hall he told his doctor, Major Campbell, that he had no memory of France except when he dreamed. They were, reported his doctor, ‘very distressing dreams’.

As with some of the cases above, not all soldiers manifested their psychic damage immediately. In June 1920, a young returned officer named Eli Bugby hanged himself from the rafters of his home in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Double Bay. Bugby’s wife told the coroner that her husband was ‘gassed and sustained shell shock at the war and had been distressed because his employers would not reinstate him’. He was on a partial pension of two pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, barely more than half the average wage. Mrs Bugby was now left to raise their child without any pension at all, since the Repatriation Commission decided that her husband’s suicide was not related to his war service.

As late as August 1929, Mrs Elizabeth Moffatt wrote to Victoria’s Inspector-General of the Insane about placing her father, Peter Henty, a veteran of both the Boer War and World War I, in a mental hospital. In battle he had suffered head and side wounds. Throughout the 1920s, his mental health declined, and his daughter was certain his alcoholism was due to the impact not only of the physical wounds of battle but also of the mental ones. He was admitted to the Royal Park Mental Hospital in a depressed and lost state and the doctors declared it very difficult to get ‘anything intelligible’ out of him. Again, like other relatives of soldiers, though Moffatt had written in desperation to the Inspector-General, she did not want her father in a civil insane asylum, but instead in the Mont Park Military Block in Melbourne, which dealt with former soldiers displaying similar symptoms.

Fred Jacoby, an entrepreneur in Perth after whom a famous city park is named, was a notable advocate for his soldier son, Fred junior, who lived through the 1920s in the military ward of Perth’s Claremont Hospital for the Insane. Jacoby was the leader of the Mental Soldiers’ Parents of Western Australia. He campaigned against the mixing of military patients with civilian asylum patients and advocated having a parent of a shell-shocked young man on the Board of Visitors, the body that assessed psychiatric hospitals. He was not intimidated by the public distaste for, and prejudices against, mental trauma.

In these and sundry other ways then, the Western and Eastern fronts resonated in the suburban kitchens and living rooms of Australia, and the Repatriation Board made the 1920s bitter for many heroes. The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (RSL) founded a Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers in Sydney in 1921, the only one in the country, supervised by a single doctor, a formidable organiser and chain smoker, Katie Ardill Brice, daughter of an energetic Baptist social reformer. After graduating in medicine from Sydney University in 1913, she had been a one-woman volunteer medical corps in military hospitals in the Middle East, France and England during the war. As well, the Red Cross created in 1919 a holiday centre at Narrabeen, in northern Sydney, as a means of relieving the extreme stress on families.

As the children squealed in the Narrabeen surf, medical boards decided their families’ futures. One of the saddest cases was that of Gordon Floyd, a father of a family, who had been initially reluctant to enlist because he had had rheumatic fever as a child, and its effects were lingering. He had finally enlisted, however, after being presented with a white feather, an accusation of cowardice often handed out by young women in the streets and even in the dance halls of Australian towns and cities, or else sent through the post. In 1919 he received a small disability pension for damage to his leg, his arthritis and heart problems. But he was denied a fuller pension because of a letter his brother had written to the Department of Defence during the war in an attempt to prevent Floyd’s acceptance by the recruiting board. A letter written out of love was now used to prove that he had pre-existing health problems. Floyd’s family was never able to regain the level of prosperity they had known before the war.

Under the Soldier Settler Schemes, run with the best of intentions by the various states—South Australia passing its legislation as early as 1915—about forty thousand returned men throughout Australia were given soldier settler blocks. The project was meant as a blessing and an act of beneficence since, despite the ambiguous results of land reform laws in the nineteenth century, most Australians still attached a redemptive glow to the idea of the independent small farmer. As well as providing income, the land would offer the soldier a bracing therapy for the events he had been through and any wounds he bore, and was therefore welcomed as an appropriate reward by the soldiers themselves.

In Victoria, according to the files of the Closer Settlement Board, which ran the scheme in that state, 40 per cent of all soldier settlers were disabled in some way, and this figure should have given the authorities pause. By 1922, John Watson, who farmed 55 acres (22 hectares) at Dandenong under the Victorian scheme, was admitted to repatriation hospitals in Melbourne and Bendigo suffering after-effects of battle wounds. His wife Mary had now to support eight children aged between five and eighteen years, and reported that she could not carry on the farm on her own, but leaving it would mean that she would be saddled with the farm debt of £550. Mrs Watson was relieved of her debt but had to walk off the farm with her eight children, broke, and bewildered as to where to go.

The wives of soldier settlers, especially those soldiers on marginal land or those who were partly disabled in war, often had to become the true farmers when their menfolk were stricken, and they often laboured with a clear sense of the ultimate futility of their struggle. In 1927, a Mrs McMahon suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling to maintain her sick husband’s block in Korumburra in Victoria. Because of her collapse and his incapacity to work, the lease was cancelled and the couple moved back to Melbourne.

Even apart from the suspicions of the Repatriation Board, men of that war generation had a spiky pride and found it difficult to take help from charities such as the Red Cross. In the trenches and rest areas, the Red Cross parcels had been welcome, but post-war charity was different. When in 1926 George Goodwin applied to the Tubercular Soldiers’ Aid Society asking for help, he wrote, ‘God how the word “charity” stinks in my nostrils.’ Like Goodwin, many soldiers had been invalided home with tuberculosis. In 1915, Patrick Rouan was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis while fighting in Gallipoli. He was nursed in England, where he married an English girl named Dora, and was invalided home in 1917, Dora and their child following him on. In 1920, Patrick’s boot-repair business failed because of his ill-health, but he was fortunately granted a full pension. By 1923, his four young children had all been infected with the disease. Patrick took to sleeping in a tent outside the home to give himself maximum exposure to fresh air and to try to quarantine himself. Pitching a tent in the backyard was a frequent option for tubercular soldiers who believed that fresh air would help them. The tent was particularly favoured by men whose houses lacked back verandas.

Mrs Iris Mead, whose husband had been put into a sanatorium for tuberculosis, spoke for an entire class of impoverished Diggers’ families in writing to the Tubercular Soldiers’ Aid Society: ‘We are not having proper food—I have dispensed with the weekend joint for weeks now trying in all ways to lessen expenses—but it is all too big an undertaking . . . the children are needing warmer clothes.’

KISS ME, YOU FOOL

For girls unburdened by the care of a damaged husband, the 1920s flickered with the promise of a new freedom. Until the Great War, schoolboys had frequently been expelled for walking on the same side of the street with a girl on the way to or from school. A training guide, Australian Etiquette: All the Rules and Usages of the Best Societies in the Australasian Colonies of 1888, was still read in the early twentieth century and told young women that they should not be ‘demonstrative of affection’ even after a proposal of marriage: ‘Over-demonstrations of love are not pleasant to be remembered by a young lady, if the man to whom they are given by any chance fails to become her husband.’ For girls in 1914, late adolescence was supposed to be a period of meek near-invisibility.

Such strictures came under challenge in the early 1900s, but particularly after the war, and there arose in Australia as elsewhere a new anxiety about young white women’s moral fitness to be the mothers of the future. Polite people were alarmed by the increasingly less formal and more ‘forward’ behaviour even of girls from good families. The anxiety was also created by the greater number of working-class girls taking jobs in factories, and the way these industrial girls spent their free time, often in the company of larrikins, irreverent loutish young men, runners for bookmakers, thugs, or unwilling labourers. The term ‘larrikin’ possessed then none of the approving colouration it would take on gradually, in part due to C.J. Dennis’s 1916 verses—supposedly the utterances of an engaging Melbourne larrikin named Ginger Mick.

After the war there were complaints about a new stridency and boldness in young women, all under the influence of new entertainments, including the ‘flicks’ and the rise of public dancing. Even during the war, older folk and the press were appalled by the open way young women and soldiers met and talked in city streets. Soldiers were warned that there were Australian factory girls in the streets of the Australian cities, and around Australian military headquarters in Horseferry Road, London, who were not professional prostitutes but ‘amateurs’, and who would infect soldiers with venereal diseases (VD) picked up from earlier transactions. Many authorities were sure that the spread of VD in Australian society was a result of factory girls and other girl employees being on the streets after work. One commentator declared that too many girls absorbed ‘the moral tone of the man of the world and regarded sexual satisfaction as a right’.

And it was not only working-class girls. After the war, the middle-class single girl, who might have got ideas from working in voluntary bodies or in offices, and who had got used to the freedom of not being chaperoned, was now possibly that latest of creatures, ‘a flapper’. The ‘flapper’, characterised by the arm-flapping motion of the dance named the Charleston, was an American creation, growing out of a background of prep schools and university where educated girls chose to consider themselves men’s equals, to drink like them, to smoke like them, to listen to jazz, and to display a blatant interest in flirtation and ‘petting’ (so asserting their own right to sexual pleasure). The flappers’ inchoate declaration of liberty was reflected in their fashions. They often went bare-headed and wore their hair bobbed, their foreheads circled by Red Indian–style headbands, their dresses above the knee and their stockings rolled down, the tops visible on their thighs as they danced. They even drove cars.

Factory girls adopted the style of the flapper to the extent that they could afford it. The manifestation was seen as decadent by feminists such as the remarkable Edith Cowan, the first woman member of any Australian Parliament, in her case in Western Australia in 1921. She had been fighting for society to take women seriously since the 1890s. The ‘flapper’ vulgarised women and was undermining what had been achieved, Edith Cowan believed.

Some could see benefits in the new woman, however, whoever she was. In Melbourne, the president of the Young Women’s Christian Association, Nell Martyn, a therapeutic masseuse who had worked on soldiers’ damaged limbs, had taken over her father’s Melbourne steelworks and run them with great success. She reported in 1924 that girls were no longer ‘fettered by traditions nor bound by conventionalities’. Martyn was a devout Methodist but knew women could not be brow-beaten out of what they were becoming: ‘How can we hope to give an abundant life [to young women] by a process of restriction and prohibition . . . our girls have a right to the opportunities for meeting, knowing and understanding men . . . a Christian Association will fail in its purpose if it does not provide for this side of a girl’s nature.’ Martyn was willing to condone dancing, generally condemned by non-conformists and by members of the Scottish Free Church.

Since the flapper reached Australia by way of the flicks, there was no country town that was not affected by the phenomenon. Not all young women were flappers anyhow, but they were in one way or another influenced by the expression of freedom for which flappers stood. A girl from the bush trying to imitate the worldliness of the flapper might lack the sophistication to carry it off. Many ordinary girls felt confused about where the boundaries of behaviour lay. Sometimes there were tragedies, and young women found the official world did not accept the new freedoms.

Molly Meadows, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who worked at the Bunbury Rose Hotel in Western Australia, was one who had seen the change in the behaviour of girls in Australian and American movies, and who clumsily tried to imitate the glib smartness of the new woman. In April 1922, Molly was sexually assaulted in the sand hills of the back beach of Bunbury. The young man accused of assaulting her was twenty-year-old circus employee Joseph McAuliffe from Perry Brothers’ Circus, then performing in Bunbury. As the press report said, ‘Her protests were unavailing’, and she ‘was treated in a most brutal fashion, a branch or root of tree being pressed across her neck’. A doctor later confirmed that she had been ‘outraged’. McAuliffe was a large young man and it had taken two policemen to hold him once bystanders heard Molly’s protests and calls for help. The matter of Molly Meadows would raise in Australia the new post-war, Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties question of whether a woman could behave with the new freedoms and still consider herself immune from assault.

Bunbury was a characteristic Australian coastal town, remote in terms of the day. It was five hours’ rail journey south of Perth and had a population of about four thousand. It supported, as did many towns that size then, two newspapers, as well as its own brewery, timber yards, butter factory, fish company, brickyard and tannery. The cinema was—like hundreds of others across the nation—named the Lyric.

One hundred and twenty-three Bunbury men had died during the Great War conflict, and many others had come home disabled. But on 11 November 1918, the day the Armistice was signed, as in so many other towns in Australia, the municipal band played from the balcony of the Rose Hotel and led a thousand people in the street in the singing of ‘Rule Britannia’, while children blew tin whistles and beat kerosene tins.

Despite the remoteness of Bunbury in the scheme of the world, since coming to town from her parents’ farm, Molly, like other girls at the time, must have seen the movies of Theda Bara, daughter of a Jewish immigrant to America from Poland. Bara was the original ‘vamp’ of the silver screen and her silent films have to this day an extraordinary voiceless eroticism. They were of great concern to civic leaders and clergymen when they appeared; even in Hollywood there was a feeling that she should be excluded to allow more virtuous-seeming female characters onto the screen. In her 1915 film A Fool There Was, Bara whispered the famed line ‘Kiss me, you fool!’, easily lip-read in the cinema dark by millions of young women. It was an utterance that lodged in the imaginations of women and men across the world. Bara’s other films to which the young flocked were the 1919 Siren’s Song and When Men Desire, robust titles in themselves. Besides Bara’s influence, through the newsreels, Molly had seen real-life flappers dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom at the Palais de Danse in St Kilda.

Molly had been away from home for only three months when she first began working at the Rose Hotel. The circus arrived in mid-April 1922 and set up at Queen’s Gardens. Molly went to the circus with her friend and fellow waitress, Sybil Wickender. Wickender had met Mr Perry, the circus owner, and introduced him to Molly when the show ended. They met up with Joseph McAuliffe and the group of four left the circus tent. In the backyard of the hotel, Molly listened to McAuliffe’s tales of the circus and permitted mutual caresses. After circus rehearsal the next day, by previous arrangement, Perry and McAuliffe took the two girls strolling to the beach. McAuliffe and Molly dawdled behind and she suggested that they should sit down. That was when the assault was believed to have taken place.

Here was a situation in which a naïve country girl wanted to know what the much-touted process named ‘dating’ meant. It meant something more glamorous than ‘courting’. It was something new, something that broke away from bush greyness. She admitted that she had allowed McAuliffe to kiss her and—as she innocently confessed—had ‘playfully’ threatened that she would bite him. McAuliffe’s argument was the classic sexual assault defence that she had led him on. He said, ‘I thought this arrangement was as good as a promise.’ As he rolled her onto her stomach and pulled down her drawers, she screamed, and even when a surfer and two fishermen came running to intervene, McAuliffe was so certain of his right to conquest that, when he was dragged off her, he called out, ‘I’ll meet you on the corner tonight, Molly.’ The question was whether the judges would, in a new age, recognise Molly’s ‘modern’ right to flirt, and then still say no.

Just one week after the attack, the trial of Joseph McAuliffe opened in the Bunbury Court of Quarter Sessions before three police magistrates. First was the question of whether carnal knowledge occurred; next, that of Molly’s consent. Molly gave her evidence. She said he had penetrated her twice: ‘My head was down and covered with weeds . . . I was half unconscious from struggling and fright.’

McAuliffe said it was Molly who’d suggested they sit down on the sand hills. She had opened her legs freely. ‘She was a consenting party up to the time I penetrated her.’ He had told the police, ‘I tried but whilst I was trying I shot my mutton . . . I could not stop, no man could then.’ Howard S. Bath, McAuliffe’s lawyer, must have hoped that McAuliffe’s statement about how he was unable to stop in mid-passion would mean something to male judges and jurors. Bath wanted to portray Molly—however unfairly—as a teasing, promiscuous young woman who went out at night unchaperoned. The Crown Prosecutor argued, however, that everything about the girl and her clothing indicated that she had fought to prove to McAuliffe that she had not given consent.

So were young women like ‘modern’ Molly Meadows entitled to set limits to their sexual adventures? It seemed as if a crucial issue of women’s rights depended on what the Bunbury magistrates decided. In previous similar cases, the girl’s flirtatiousness could be relied on to acquit a man. But Magistrate Wood said the jury was to make a legal distinction between ‘flirtation’ and ‘encouragement’. If Molly’s spooning in the shadows of the hotel backyard the night before the rape constituted the former, then McAuliffe was a rapist, but if there were encouragement, then McAuliffe was a man ‘legally’ entitled to sexual release.

The twelve men of the jury retired at 8 p.m. and came back after only seventeen minutes with a verdict of guilty. Magistrate Wood sentenced the prisoner to five years’ hard labour. McAuliffe, whose lawyer was astonished by this revolutionary verdict, spent the next months inside Western Australia’s notorious maximum security gaol, a surviving institution of the convict system in Fremantle.

But there was a great deal of male sympathy for McAuliffe. A fund was set up to finance his appeal, which was heard on 1 September 1922 before three judges of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. The Crown Prosecutor argued what the magistrates’ bench had decided: that women were entitled to call off an encounter when they wished. The defence pursued again the traditional line: women were either chaste, and hence any assault on them came without encouragement, or they were ‘tough girls who were open territory’, as Howard Bath the lawyer put it.

Chief Justice MacMillan opted without further legal analysis for the position of the defence. Justice Thomas Draper, a scholar, bird watcher and former attorney-general of Western Australia, who had lost his seat in 1921 to Edith Cowan, was also on the bench. He agreed with MacMillan. The third justice was Robert Bruce Burnside, son of the former chief justice of Ceylon and devout Swan River yachtsman, known to have a ‘rousing and sometimes earthy sense of humour’. Nonetheless, he too seemed shocked by the easy intimacies that Molly permitted soon after meeting McAuliffe, and by the fact that she had agreed to meet him the next day.

So a new trial was awarded McAuliffe. The case came up before a jury and the yachtsman bon vivant Justice Burnside in October 1922. It went swiftly—the witness testimony took up the first day, and the lawyers’ addresses and judge’s charge the next morning. Justice Burnside told the jury that if Joseph McAuliffe had extracted consent from Molly Meadows ‘by intimidation, by force, or by fraud’ there would be no justification for the sexual act. But there had been no necessity for McAuliffe to resort to such tactics. Burnside went to the length of saying he was deeply shocked by Molly’s ‘libidinous behaviour’ and suggested that such women had no right to claim a lack of consent: ‘For a young woman to be sitting in a backyard at midnight with a man whom she has met only a short time before, and kissing him; if that is innocence, then the word has changed its meaning.’

The jury came back two hours later to declare McAuliffe not guilty. What Burnside had decided was that the would-be flapper could not cry wolf without deserving to be devoured, and that the war had not changed the common law definition of rape. It was not yet safe to experiment, however tentatively, at being a new kind of woman and at the same time expect immunity from sexual assault.

MORE BUSINESS WITH ‘AVIATING’

To many, Billy Hughes’ post-war political career would seem erratic, with the meetings of Cabinet seeming strange, volatile affairs, and with the Country Party refusing to join him in government because of his apparent socialism in having his government buy into a Commonwealth Shipping Line, the Commonwealth Oil Refineries and Amalgamated Wireless. He would fall from office after the 1922 elections, the Country Party agreeing to give their weight to the Nationals only if the Melbourne businessman and Gallipoli hero (fighting with the Royal Fusiliers) Sir Stanley Melbourne Bruce took over the leadership.

But the volatile little Welshman had many flashes of prophetism and declared himself ‘a fanatic on aviating’. He saw—as would be proven to the cost of young Australians then a-growing and likely to reach maturity by the end of the Depression and in the following war—that ‘the air, that new element which man has now conquered, is but the sea in another form, and it is on the sea and in the air that we shall have to look for our defence’. But he saw too, accurately, that ‘no country afforded better scope for commercial purposes’ than Australia.

In 1924, two military flyers, Wing Commander Stanley Goble and Flying Officer Ivor McIntyre, made the first aerial circumnavigation of Australia, and civil aviators such as Charles Kingsford Smith were beginning to emerge. Kingsford Smith had embarked for Gallipoli in February 1915 as a member of a signal company, served during that doomed campaign, and then became a despatch rider in England and France before transferring to the Australian Flying Corps. Shot down and wounded in August 1917, he was awarded the Military Cross. He had been barred from participating in the 1919 England-to-Australia air race, won by his namesakes Keith and Ross Smith, because it was believed he lacked navigational experience, but after piloting joy flights in England, he went to the United States to attract sponsors for a trans-Pacific flight, and was briefly a stunt and joy-ride flyer in California. Back in Australia in January 1921, he made a living with another joy-riding organisation, the Diggers’ Aviation Company—a sign that, despite the missions he and others had flown in the Great War, society did not know whether flying was an enlargement of the world or merely a circus attraction.

Kingsford Smith acquired or leased Bristol Tourers and carried freight from Carnarvon in Western Australia to other remote towns. In 1927, with Charles Ulm, ardent and sportive flyer and fellow Gallipoli survivor, he founded the Interstate Flying Services, which tendered unsuccessfully for an Adelaide–Perth mail run. Even so, at least in Kingsford Smith’s case, he performed long-distance flights for their inherent excitement. The first Kingsford Smith and Ulm demonstration flight occurred in June 1927 when they circuited Australia in ten days and five hours. For a trans-Pacific flight they planned, the New South Wales government subscribed £9000, and Sidney Myer, the Melbourne emporium owner, and a Californian oil magnate named G. Allan Hancock matched it.

In a three-engine Fokker plane, the Southern Cross, with Ulm and two American crewmen, Harry Line and Jim Warner, Kingsford Smith took off from Oakland, California, on 31 May 1928, and flew via Hawaii and Suva to Brisbane in eighty-three and a half hours. Next they took on a non-stop flight from Point Cook in Melbourne to Perth, and then from Sydney to New Zealand to show the feasibility of passenger and mail services across the Tasman. Like Melbourne’s Smith brothers, he was knighted. But his repute was not unchallenged.

During a flight to England with Ulm in 1929 to place orders for planes, he made an emergency landing at the Glenelg River estuary in the Kimberley. Two aviators searching for him, Keith Anderson and Robert Hitchcock, crash-landed in Central Australia and died of thirst and exposure before they were found. The rumour circulated that Kingsford Smith and Ulm had engineered the event so they could claim that while waiting for rescue they had drunk and been buoyed by Coffee Royal, a brand of coffee and brandy that had sponsored the flight.

But Kingsford Smith, above all other Australians, seemed the risky harbinger of a potential future for civil aviation. His airline, Australian National Airways, began operations in January 1930. The standard, scheduled flight did not satisfy his needs, however. The age of exploration had ended elsewhere on earth and at sea, but not in the air. Even so, it offered a narrow window of glory. The more accustomed air services became, then the less derring-do remained in aviation. In June that year, he piloted the Southern Cross on an east–west crossing of the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland, and received an enthusiastic welcome in New York. He had many an entrepreneur’s fear of socialism, and had by now joined a not-so-secret, near-Fascist unofficial army, the New Guard. But the Depression drastically reduced the demand for air travel, and his airline came close to bankruptcy. One of its planes, the Southern Cloud, disappeared over the Australian Alps and would not be found until the 1950s.

In any case, Kingsford Smith was only partially an entrepreneur, since the entrepreneurial spirit is not always congenial to risk-taking. He was chronically restless and yearned for new challenges. It was the very nature of the aircraft that it covered very swiftly distances that would have taken classic ground-breakers like Lewis and Clark, Dr Livingston, and Burke and Wills years of peril and struggle. The risk of undertaking endeavours in the sky took place over days or even hours, and the available exploits to be entitled ‘the first man to’ were being grasped by a growing world of flyers. Glory, which had once lasted a lifetime, now lasted months. A fury to excel and be recognised drove Kingsford Smith, and all challenges were welcome, even as the Depression struck Australia. When in 1931 one of his planes had problems and was grounded in Malaya with a load of Christmas mail for Britain, he flew a replacement plane, and collected and delivered the mail in time. In October 1933, he flew solo in just over seven days from London to Wyndham, Western Australia, in a Percival Gull aircraft named Miss Southern Cross; the Commonwealth government awarded him £3000 for the achievement. In 1935, a trans-Tasman airmail service began, and on the first flight, aboard the Lady Southern Cross, one of the crewmen Bill Taylor had to climb out of the cockpit and transfer oil from the sump of a dead motor into the other. (This would be reproduced superbly in Ken Hall’s classic 1946 film, Smithy.) Most of the cargo was jettisoned and Kingsford Smith brought the Lady Southern Cross back to Sydney.

He now had the Lady Southern Cross flown to England, and followed it by ship, since doctors had ordered that he must rest from his frenetic schedule. From England he took off in November 1935 to make one more record-breaking flight to Australia. Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot J.T. Pethybridge disappeared on that flight. It is believed that they crashed into the sea somewhere off the coast of Burma while flying at night towards Singapore.

Kingsford Smith had an extraordinarily obsessive approach to aviation and to the urgency of its development. It would be an irony that four years after his death, when war began, Australia would be left with only the less advanced or obsolete aircraft, such as Ansons, and the Australian training fighter the Wirraway, to put into the sky. Aircraft would prove to be so scarce that the 7th Australian Squadron waited eighteen months from 1940 to 1941 to be equipped with them. And this despite the patient and continuous work throughout the 1920s and 1930s of the underfunded Sir Lawrence Wackett, former pilot and engineering innovator on the Western Front, head of the underfunded Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Experimental Section, and the officer who gave his name to the Wackett training aircraft, to provide something better.

MANAGING THE NEW WOMAN

To part-manage and part-exploit the new freedoms of women, Charity Queen events, to honour girls who combined beauty and charitable endeavour, came into being. So did the beauty contest, which was less based on traditional feminine virtues and less tolerable both to feminist organisations and to the establishment. During 1922, while Molly Meadows endured her lashing at the hands of judges, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmanian newspapers held photographic competitions to find the most beautiful girl in their respective states. In September 1925, Sydney’s Smith’s Newspapers, of which Robert Clyde Packer was chief executive and managing editor, decided to initiate a swimsuit parade. Packer announced a Miss Australia contest, to be held in various picture theatres, the winner of which would be taken to the United States to compete in the Miss America quest, which had commenced in Atlantic City in 1921.

At the end of June 1926, Miss Beryl Mills of Western Australia was chosen as the first Miss Australia. The contest had provoked great resistance. Edith Jones of the Women Citizens’ Movement in Melbourne implied the competitions came from a suspect and racier source, New South Wales: ‘This is the first year they have been held in Victoria, and next year, if no action is taken, they will be held in twice as many theatres.’ There was pressure for politicians to intervene. But in fact the selection events were well run, and so popular with such a range of women that the legislatures could see little reason for interfering. In both 1926 and 1927, the contestants who reached the finals in the Miss Australia quest were chaperoned by their mothers or another older woman, and the chaperone was paid to travel with the winner to the United States and, in later years, to Britain and Europe. Women doctors were present at the judges’ interviews of finalists, and inspected the girls for healthy weight and general well-being. Contestants were not allowed to wear cosmetics, there were strict rules about the bathing costumes to be worn, and the judges were claimed to be artists, sculptors and doctors. The organisers liked to point to the ‘good stock’ that made up their finalists. The idea of ‘stock’ and ‘good blood’, taken up manically by an as yet small German party called the Nazis, was a common concept of the period. These finalists were the daughters of solid folk, and in 1927 Miss Victoria was a physical culture teacher, Miss Queensland a telephonist, Miss South Australia a dancing teacher, Miss Western Australia a nurse, Miss Tasmania a secretary (to her own father) and Miss New South Wales an art student.

In 1926, Beryl Mills, the first girl-triumphant, was a nineteen-year-old final-year art student at the University of Western Australia. She came from ‘good pastoral stock’, had won scholarships to Perth Modern School and the university, and was an accomplished pianist, swimmer, diver and hockey player. Miss Australia 1927 was similarly laudable: Phyllis van Alwyn, of Launceston in Tasmania, also of ‘good pastoral stock’, descended from the Scottish Highland Black family of Victoria’s Western District. Her father managed McRobertson’s Confectionary in Tasmania. She had qualifications in shorthand and typing, and asserted her super-modernity by driving her own car. Such girls, though still condemned in some quarters for entering the contests, actually bespoke competence and confidence rather than degeneracy.

The skills of dressmaking and cooking that both Beryl Mills and Phyllis van Alwyn possessed allowed them to be depicted as future mothers, as solid subscribers to women’s biological duty. This national duty of the beauty queen was confirmed during Phyllis’s American trip when the Mayor of San Francisco told a large audience that they had with them that day a sister of the Anzacs of imperishable fame, and a future mother of men of that ilk.

ART, DOCTRINE AND MAKING A LIVING

Beauty queens might occupy the popular imagination, but the cusp of the 1920s was still a struggle for Australian artists. Paintings that embraced the Australian landscape and milieu were still of interest only to a minority. It had been so since the nineteenth century.

For a considerable number of notable artists, including Julian Ashton (who came to Australia in hopes of curing his asthma) and Max Meldrum, who had emigrated to Australia as a Scots-born adolescent travelling with parents, art was a crucial arena and—as elsewhere in the world—there was a hope that within that stadium the issues of ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is Australian art?’ would be settled. As always, there was no one finally to settle it, but there were plenty of contenders.

Australians, like the two Victorian-born gold rush artists, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, were forced overseas, in part by curiosity but also by poor pickings in Australia. Charles Conder, the tall, personable English surveyor who had come to Australia to work in the Lands Department of New South Wales, and then shared a Melbourne studio with Tom Roberts, left for Europe after ten years in Australia, but did not observe French artistic society as a visitor. He would instead quickly find his place in it. Conder had a gift for acquiring patrons, and in the early 1900s the hard-working young Australian Will Longstaff, living close to the bone in squalid accommodation, saw him in the ‘congenial society of young Frenchmen at Montmartre who speedily learned to idolise him’. Conder had been a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, who included his form in paintings of the Moulin Rouge.

This inside running evaded other artists in exile. Roberts was away from 1903 to 1923, part of that time spent working as a facial-restoration orderly at Wandsworth Hospital in London. He had taken his big unfinished painting of the opening of Federal Parliament to England with him. Lacking a patron during his long English years, Roberts made his living from portrait painting. Streeton, considered a quintessentially Australian artist, was absent from 1898 to 1924, George Lambert from 1900 to 1921, E. Phillips Fox from 1901 to 1915. John Russell, friend of the sculptor Rodin, and of Matisse and van Gogh, and Rupert Bunny, spent just on forty and fifty years respectively overseas before returning in their old age—Bunny returning in 1933, after the death of his French wife, to find that Russell had already died in Sydney in 1930.

Australian painters, like writers and others then and later, looked to the northern hemisphere to anoint them, and it rarely did. According to the art historian Bernard Smith, ‘perhaps the European venture ceased too quickly from being part of a lifelong process of self-discovery and became, for most of them, a step on the road to success and public acclaim’. That is, like many travelling Australian artists and writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were looking for European success to underpin success in Australia. But such judgements by scholars often take little account of the force of economics upon hard-up artists such as Tom Roberts, and in any case, success and public acclaim evaded so many of the gifted, the British having their own talented artists to celebrate and the French theirs. But the pattern of the Australian artist having to go overseas for nurture and instruction and a key to success had become established, and would continue throughout the twentieth century.

Even if Australian public response to its artists was limited, in Australia in the 1920s, schools of art and competing dogmas about how to paint flourished with the same passionate abomination of each other that characterised Europe and the United States. The result would be significant in national myth-making, the way Australians saw themselves. Meldrum was one of the principal sources of argument. He had come to Melbourne as a fourteen-year-old with his mother and father, the latter a chemist. At seventeen he was enrolled in the National Gallery School in Melbourne and was one of the artists of the exclusive—at least in its own eyes—Prehistoric Order of Cannibals club. In 1899 he won the National Gallery of Victoria’s travelling scholarship and went to France to study at the Académie Julian and Colarossi. He married there the sister of the painter Charles Nitsch, Jeanne Eugenie, a singer at the Opéra Comique, and while living in Rennes exhibited at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1904 and 1908, and received a commission to paint murals in the local chateau. He seems to have been more successful in France than his Australian contemporaries, who went to Europe half-timidly to peek at the masters.

Meldrum returned to Melbourne in 1912 after an absence of thirteen years and acquired a studio. In 1919 he published his argumentative, assertive book, Max Meldrum: His Art and Views, which included the essay ‘The Invariable Truths of Depictive Art’. He argued that painting was a pure science of optical analysis or what he called ‘photometry’, by means of which the artist could carefully see and analyse tone and tonal relationships, to produce an exact reproduction of the thing seen. ‘The superficial area occupied by one tone’ was the basis of art, he dictated, and colour was the least important component. He believed that the lack of tonal analysis in modern art, and an increased interest in colour, were signs of the decline of civilisation. Besides that, sketching of the kind Julian Ashton taught in his school in Sydney was futile; it introduced lines that didn’t exist in nature. Again, tone was all. Meldrum, diminutive and full of generosity and furious conviction, was the most doctrinaire of all Australian artists, and influenced many painters.

Indeed, his theory became the orthodoxy of painting in Melbourne, and from the 1930s his ideas were made popular in the United States by his former student Percy Leason, at the Staten Island Institute of Art and Science. On the one hand, the artist Norman Lindsay disliked him for his lack of flexibility and humour, called him ‘the mad Mullah’, and depicted him as a dogmatic artist named McQuibble in his first novel, A Curate in Bohemia (1913), set in artistic Melbourne. On the other, Meldrum’s strong opposition to the buying of modernist work for the National Gallery of Victoria, a struggle that had been raging since the gallery acquired a Pisarro in 1905 under the influence of the newspaperman Keith Murdoch, attracted the approval of the equally anti-modernist Lindsay. Despite his contempt for sketching, Meldrum won the Archibald Prize two years running, in 1939 and 1940.

Parallel to Meldrum, Norman Lindsay had emerged as a force of nature, though more the sort of nature encountered in Greek and Roman classics than that of gumtrees. Lindsay’s father had been a surgeon from Northern Ireland and his mother was the daughter of a Wesleyan missionary. Lindsay would inherit nothing of Wesleyism. During the summer of 1897 to 1898, he placed classical Greek and European figures in the landscape of Charterisville near Heidelberg outside Melbourne, and did line and wash drawings for Boccaccio’s Decameron, for whose raunchiness any young bohemian had to be an enthusiast. Reading Nietzsche gave Lindsay an enhanced abhorrence of wowserism and the churches. In Melbourne, he made a living as an illustrator and lived as a bohemian, a spirited member of the arts circle, the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals. The work that spoke most directly for what he believed at the time was Crucified Venus, in which a monk nails a naked woman to a tree while an ugly host of clerics and wowsers applaud.

Newly married, Lindsay came to Sydney from Melbourne in 1900, and he showed some of the Decameron drawings to A.G. Stephens, literary editor of the Bulletin, who said they were ‘the finest example of pen-draughtsmanship of their kind yet produced in this country’. At the Bulletin, and through other forms of publication, Lindsay would become Australia’s illustrator-in-chief. Julian Ashton, after seeing the Decameron drawings, offered to raise £300 to enable him to study in Europe, but Lindsay refused, believing it would be ‘disastrous to every Australian who had submitted himself to the corrupting influence of [modern] European movements in art’. He was not afraid of classical painting but of the moderns. And his work for the Bulletin and for his brother Lionel’s journal, Lone Hand, expressed irreverent nationalism and respect for the classic forms as they manifested themselves in ordinary Australians. He combined all this with racial prejudices against Asians, Jews and Aborigines. He also continued to illustrate classic texts.

His wife Kathleen went to live in Brisbane because of Lindsay’s intimate relationship with his young model Rose Soady. In 1909 he did go to England, not to see the latest in painting but with new sketches for The Memoirs of Casanova, which he wanted to see published in a new edition. Trying unsuccessfully to find a publisher for the Casanova drawings, he saw post-Impressionist paintings and was appalled by them, calling the artists ‘a mob of modern Hottentots’. From then, hostility to modern art became his credo. In London he sold 250 drawings for the Satyricon, the chaotic but profane Roman quasi-novel in which an ex-gladiator named Encolpius travels with his beautiful young male companion, the slave Giton. Rose joined him for a time and they lived in a flat in Hampstead. But he profoundly disliked the Old World and returned home in 1910 to work for the Bulletin again. In 1913, his first novel, A Curate in Bohemia, was published. Throughout World War I his feelings coincided with Bulletin policy, which was pro-war, unlike its stance towards the Boer conflict at the turn of the century. He drew recruiting posters, drafted some ferocious anti-Irish drawings after the Dublin Easter Uprising of 1916, depicting the Irish there and in Australia as enemies of civilisation and supporters of Germany—not least, in the Australian case, for supposed Irish opposition to conscription. He depicted the Germans even more savagely, since his younger brother Reginald had been killed on the Somme and Norman had been given Reginald’s blood-spattered notebook.

Because he was suspected to suffer from tuberculosis, Lindsay and Rose Soady moved to Springwood in the Blue Mountains, where he continued a high output through the post-war years. He had acquired a ouija board through which he tried to communicate not only with Reginald but with Shakespeare as well. In 1918 he published his children’s classic, The Magic Pudding, but then, more crucially for artists, went on to restate his Dionysian beliefs—that is, uninhibited and joyously sensual but above all anti-modernist bias—in two tracts, Art in Australia (1920) and Creative Effort (1924). Australian artists must react to the world, wrote Lindsay, by ‘a profound response to life, by the expression of a lyric gaiety, by a passionate sensuality, by the endless search for the image of beauty, the immortal body of desire that is Aphrodite’. As the young poet Judith Wright would complain, ‘It was all false, the dream of a place in which women had no part except as “the foil to a man’s physical robustness”.’ One of his friends in the 1920s was, however, a young poet-journalist, Kenneth Slessor, whose early work played with modernism and which he illustrated.

Lindsay was fortified in his convictions and in the war he fought against the wowsers and killjoys when in 1923, Sydney Ure Smith and Julian Ashton arranged a large exhibition of Australian art at the Royal Academy in London, and a deputation to the British Minister for Public Instruction unsuccessfully tried to prevent the inclusion of Lindsay’s racy works. Some critics, however, simply did not admire his work. They found him simply a bad artist. In 1931, he sailed with Rose for New York, where he found himself widely acclaimed because of the success of Every Mother’s Son, the American edition of his novel Redheap. A depiction of life in a country town in all its oddity and hypocrisy, Redheap had got him into trouble at home—the book, a British edition, was banned in Australia, and sixteen thousand copies were returned by bookshops to the publisher for pulping.

By April 1932, Lindsay was back in Sydney and nearly out of funds but rich still in opinions. So again he rejoined the Bulletin staff and talked the then editor, Samuel Prior, into establishing the Australian Book Publishing Company with, as the editor, Inky Stephensen, the eccentric man of letters from Queensland who would favour in his time a range of ideologies, from Communism while at Oxford, then Labor then extreme isolationism in the 1930s, the latter of which would see him publishing Hitler’s speeches with approval, and would ultimately land him in a World War II detention centre. The Australian Book Publishing Company published twenty highly significant titles, including Lindsay’s Saturdee, part of the Redheap trilogy, but then closed. Meanwhile The Cautious Amorist, Lindsay’s raunchy first novel written twenty years before, and concerning a girl on a desert island who happily has liaisons with three men, was published in New York, but again Australian customs seized copies entering the country in people’s luggage and saw it banned by the federal advisory board on literary matters.

This turbulent and talented man was judged later by the famed critic Robert Hughes as symptomatic of Australia’s cultural problem: ‘Lindsay is the star example of a problem which is peculiar to isolated cultures like Australia’s; he had no sense of history whatever, but he disliked and distrusted the present.’ And increasingly, all around him, Australian artists embraced the modern.

Nonetheless, throughout a long life that ended in 1969, Lindsay’s contempt for modern European art and literature, and his influence on others, was potent but gradually diminishing. By World War II, the new generation of artists, typified by the young Melbourne (Irish) working-class artist Sid Nolan, took no note of him, nor much note, it seemed, of Meldrum. Nor indeed had Lindsay delayed the modern Australian painters of his own generation. These included Roy de Maistre, friend and mentor to the young Patrick White, who had devised a system called ‘colour music’, which grew from experiments in treating shell-shock victims of World War I with colour therapy; Grace Cossington Smith, who lived on the edges of Sydney but celebrated the city itself (and, in the early 1930s, the unfinished bridge growing from either shore of Sydney Harbour); and New Zealand-born Roland Wakelin, shy, amiable and given to amateur music evenings. They were all influenced by the Impressionists and Cézanne, and experimented with Cubism, to Lindsay the last word in barbarity.

THE WAR CLAIMS POMPEY ELLIOTT

One of the most notable post-war victims of war trauma was General Harold Edward Elliott, known to everyone by the nickname ‘Pompey’. He was beloved by the men of the 15th Brigade AIF, even though some of them had tangled with him towards the war’s end over the amalgamation of casualty-reduced battalions and various disciplinary matters. Because of Elliott’s humanity and his willingness to be in the front line, his repute was pervasive amongst the soldiers of the entire AIF. His capacity to speak his mind in graphic terms to senior officers might have damaged his chances of promotion, for he was sometimes the 15th’s father and gang leader as well as its commander.

The son of a Victorian farmer, Elliott was tall, his spirit rugged, and he was the sort of young man upon whom, in terms of temperament, health, intellect and physical power, the gods had smiled. He had interrupted his law studies to serve in the Boer War, but returned to be called to the bar of Victoria and of the Commonwealth. Like his ultimate chief General Monash, he was a student of military texts and history.

Elliott had landed at Gallipoli on the first day, commanding the 7th Battalion. He was wounded and evacuated, then returned in early July, and was with his men in the fighting for German Officers’ Trench. He fought at Lone Pine. Sensitive to the havoc, Elliott developed a dislike of and contempt for the fixed views of professional soldiers that would by war’s end become an obsession. In March 1916, he was given the task of incorporating the 15th Victorian Brigade into the newly formed 5th Division, and promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. At the opening foray at Fromelles his two assaulting battalions suffered 1452 casualties in less than twenty-four hours. Elliott had protested against the uselessness of the assault before it had even occurred, and had taken a major of the British staff to show him the stretch of no-man’s land his men would have to cross if the assault went ahead. He was in the front line at zero hour and later in the day went forward again to visit his front troops before they were pulled back. Arthur Bazley, who worked with C.E.W. Bean, saw him greeting the remnants of his brigade: ‘No one who was present will ever forget the picture of him, the tears streaming down his face, as he shook hands with the returning survivors.’

Later in the day, the martinet General Mackay, Elliott’s divisional commander, found Elliott and General Pope, Commander of the 14th Brigade, drinking together in a dugout and, according to some, tipsy. When Mackay harangued them, Elliott told him, ‘If you had seen what we have in the last day, you’d be drunk too.’ Elliott’s aim from then on was to preserve his soldiers. He visited his front line daily before dawn. He began to enjoy their achievements and to revel in the ground they captured in 1917 and 1918, and was astonished and humbled by the trust they put in him.

Yet, during his time in France, Elliott had received the grievous news that Glen Roberts, his partner in H.E. Elliott and Company, his firm of solicitors, had embezzled a considerable amount of money. ‘Goodness knows what I am liable for,’ he wrote to his wife. His business collapsed and he all at once had a debt of £5000. His brigade’s counter-attack in April 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux was triumphant, but by August 1918 he was wounded, and eroded by resentment that the ‘professionals’ would not give him a divisional command.

On his return home, Elliott revived his business, stood for the Senate as a Nationalist (that is, a conservative) in 1919, and was elected, then re-elected, and served in Parliament for the rest of his life to argue for the constituency of soldiers and their families. He was concerned by the fact that the grandiose wartime promises made to young men were not reflected in the way they were treated after. By 1921, unemployment rates had jumped to 11 per cent due to the lower demand for food and wool in Europe, and ex-Diggers were put off. Often, even in good times, the disabled soldier was the last to be employed—deafness and partial blindness often disqualified him, and so did disfigurements of the face. Men who had suffered shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the hands, injuries they probably greeted on the battlefield as blighties (wounds that reprieved them from the lethal grind of trench horror), now found their capacity for being craftsmen reduced. Conservative governments under the two refugees from Labor—mercurial Hughes and his successor, the by-the-book former officer Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a forerunner of Menzies for his aura of command but with little of Menzies’ vivacity—were reluctant to legislate to force employers to take such men, and so instead merely encouraged them to give former soldiers preference.

It proved a pious hope. Even if employers gave men jobs, they sometimes illegally deducted from the wages the amount of the partial war pensions the men received. Disabled Diggers found some income as lavatory attendants, street hawkers, buskers, dingo and buffalo shooters, and beggars. In the streets, blind soldiers sold their poetry printed on postcards. The Red Cross set up some sheltered factories in weaving, pottery and furniture. Blind soldiers were encouraged to repair boots but were replaced by machines by the end of the 1920s.

All such cases gnawed at Pompey Elliott. In 1920, the royal commission on the basic wage had recommended that a family of four required five pounds, sixteen shillings ($11.60) to live in a ‘reasonable standard of comfort’. In that same year the Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act set the full war disability pension rate at four pounds, two shillings and sixpence per week for a comparable household. But well over two-thirds of the disability pensioners received less than half the full amount, even if symptoms remained—loss of power over limbs, the ‘dragging’ pain of gunshot injury, and afflictions of the chest due to gassing.

In arguing these questions, Elliott did not show himself a natural politician. His feelings ran close to the surface, and like many former soldiers he was stunned by how quickly the world had moved on from the war. Convinced like many conservatives that Red revolution was a likelihood in the suburbs and the bush, he continued to serve in the militia but was still passed over for divisional command. He took to attacking the Australian professional soldiers, particularly generals Birdwood and Brudenell White, whom he saw as servants of the British High Command. In 1925, he was at last appointed a major-general, but his wife and children continued to listen to harangues about how belated this was. ‘The injustice,’ he wrote, ‘has actually covered all my post-war life.’

The Depression brought a spiritual depression for Elliott. Once again, having been a Digger counted for nothing to employers, and veterans began to lose the jobs they had found so hard to get when they returned from the war. Elliott grieved for his men. ‘I am at my wits’ end at the present time in finding the opening for the man who gets out of a job,’ he wrote. Nightmares and flashbacks, symptoms of damage done to him years before, plagued him. He also began to fret about the junior officers he had sent out on dangerous missions and who had perished. Acute depression, of the kind that had sometimes afflicted him during the war, now returned. Unveiling the main Ararat War Memorial in August 1930, he wept during his speech. In early 1931, still a member of parliament, he had to be admitted to Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital after what the press called a mental breakdown, but what was in reality an attempt at suicide by putting his head in front of an oven and turning on the gas. His wife and daughter had saved him.

In hospital, everything sharp was taken from him except, by some oversight, his shaving gear. He was found in the small hours of 23 March 1931 with a razor’s blade embedded in an artery in his left elbow. Elliott’s funeral attracted a massive crowd of former soldiers, who knew that he was also one of the fallen.

PLAY TIME

In the arts there remained unfulfilled an Australian desire to surprise the world with something built to the scale of Australia’s newness and uniqueness. The soldiers had wanted to achieve that in Gallipoli and France and Palestine. Artists dreamed of it. One influence the dreaded Irish had on Australian writers was in the emergence of ‘a national Irish literature’, created and catalysed by William Butler Yeats, his longed-for Maude Gonne, and the playwright J.M. Synge (all of them members of the Anglo–Irish establishment but seamlessly Irish in their ambitions). The theatrical headquarters of the Irish Revival had been the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and some Australians asked why a national Australian theatre could not emerge in some similarly humble venue in Australia.

Not that Australians lacked theatre in general. Robert Helpmann, South Australian son of a stock and station agent, discovered by the visiting British actor Margaret Rawlings when he acted in a pantomime in Melbourne, and ultimately a dancer and actor of international renown, said of his arrival in London in 1932, ‘I had already seen most of the great stars of drama, musical comedy, opera and ballet, all of whom had visited Australia for the Taits—and when they imported a “star”, you could be sure it was a star!’

The Tait brothers and J.C. Williamson were seen as the enemy by those who desired a national theatre. They did encourage (some would say exploit) some local stars, such as the soprano Gladys Moncrieff. As a child in the 1890s and early 1900s, Moncrieff had toured Queensland with her parents by Cobb & Co coaches, coastal boats and trains to entertain remote communities as ‘Little Gladys—the Australian Wonder Child’. Now she began her adult career in the chorus, supporting English principals. A visiting British actor, Seymour Hicks, declared in 1925, ‘The managers here seem afraid to encourage their own people. They prefer to pay expensive fares and inflated salaries to, in most cases, very second-rate English and American artistes.’ The adored Adelaide comedian Roy Rene (real name Henry Vande Sluys), who would work for a number of managements in Melbourne and Sydney and, like Moncrieff, extend his gifts into radio, was another native who got a start just before World War I at such venues as Bain’s Theatre in Railway Square and at Fuller’s National Theatre, both in Sydney. J.C. Bain had earlier given him an apprenticeship touring country towns with ‘tent shows’, troupes of singers, dancers, jugglers, comedians and conjurors that delighted bush audiences, including, on a hot night in Wauchope, New South Wales, the author himself.

Even so, when it came to drama, the complaint was that there was no ‘Australian theatre’; that is, one that celebrated and gave honour to national idiom and the realities of Australian life. To see the origins of the aspiration for a national theatre, as with the artists, we must go back a little in time. Thomas Louis Esson, Edinburgh-born, Melbourne-raised, was the spokesman for such a theatre. When he spoke of national idiom, he did not mean it in some populist, merely picturesque, Sentimental Bloke way. He meant giving Australia its full space and voice in the same way that the writers and institutions of the Irish Revival—again and in particular Yeats and Synge and the Abbey Theatre—had done. In 1908, Spencer Brodney, son of the crusading journalist of Table Talk, would write, ‘Many of us are almost in despair when we see how little relation the theatre in Australia has to the national life of the country. There is no Australian dramatist earning his livelihood by writing for the Australian stage.’

In 1905, Esson, in many ways an unworldly young man, and Brodney had travelled to Europe to look into that question. In Dublin, Esson met Synge, the playwright of The Playboy of the Western World, who urged him to start such a national theatre in Australia. Certainly Brodney and others had been involved in the establishment of such organisations as the Australian Theatre Society, founded in 1904. But there was no focused venue.

Esson and Brodney met Yeats too, and as Brodney would later say, Yeats told them that the Irish Revival had been created by ‘a little band of writers and players gathered together, determined to put Irish life on the stage’. That, said Yeats, was what must be done in Australia: ‘No imitation of English melodramas or Paris farces, no rehash of cloak and dagger plays, no aping of Pinero or Bernard Shaw.’ The Irish had had the same problem as Australia: the theatres owned by outsiders or else by managements were indifferent to the local voice. The Abbey Theatre had shown them what for.

At the same time as he applied himself to the matter of the Australian theatre, Esson was as engaged as any politician in the question of Australia’s vulnerability to Japan, a country he had also visited in 1908. He had earlier written a fine bush poem entitled ‘The Shearer’s Wife’, but in 1910 he joined the Victorian Socialist Party as a foundation member, and moved away from the Bulletin school of nationalism and sentimental invocations of stockmen and shearers. His ‘Brogan’s Lane’ was a verse about inner-city squalor and peril. And if the swagman was to have a place in his writing now, it would be as a man outfacing the ill-will of pastoralists.

They booze to bring joy, they sin to numb pain,
But there’ll come a stretch at the end of the lane,
Brogan’s Lane, Brogan’s Lane,
The river and morgue shadow Brogan’s Lane.

Esson returned to the well of Dublin in 1911, and at the Abbey Theatre, Synge exhorted him again, ‘You ought to have plenty of material for drama in Australia. All those outback stations with shepherds going mad in lonely huts.’ Yeats said, ‘Keep within your own borders. The Greeks kept within their own borders, and they were the greatest artists the world has ever seen.’ Yeats also told Esson that it was ‘no disadvantage that we [the Australians] had no conventionally romantic past to draw on’.

Esson’s first full-length play, The Time Is Not Yet Ripe, staged in 1912, was—despite Yeats’ advice—influenced by Shaw, but it was set in Melbourne and involved a federal election, city socialists arguing with conservatives, women’s rights, all conveyed with regard for Australian idiom. Esson knew that in Australia the idea of a national theatre, even to the few who ever heard about the proposition, generated a resonating indifference. But in 1913, he married a woman who was a true believer, a young doctor, an early woman graduate of the University of Melbourne medical faculty, Hilda Wager Bull, who shared his enthusiasm for the theatre and whose work gave him financial backing as a writer. Esson was rejected for military service and, like Les Darcy, the Irish–Australian boxer, the couple left for New York. Beyond New York, they saw the limitations of American civilisation writ large across the prairies, yet American theatre was strong in New York.

In 1921, they returned to Melbourne reinvigorated and ready to give birth to an Australian national theatre, without excuse, without holding back. They renewed their friendship with the prodigiously cultivated critic Nettie Palmer and her husband, the writer Vance. Nettie, a Victorian whose family was affluent enough to allow her travels in France, England and Germany on the eve of World War I, had met the Queenslander Vance Palmer in England early in 1914 and married him. Vance Palmer was a personable man of letters who, in his youthful travels in Europe, had known such figures as Katherine Mansfield and Ezra Pound. He told Nettie that his most important experience at Ipswich Grammar School was meeting cricketer Victor Trumper. But he had also begun to read extensively, European novels and plays he borrowed from the Ipswich School of Arts library. (Indeed, one must face the fact that without schools of arts and their libraries, so important before the days of municipal libraries, the entire temper of Australian life, brusque and brash as it was, would have been of an even lower order.) On their return to Australia, Vance Palmer wrote for Steele Rudd’s Magazine and Rudd published his article ‘An Australian National Art’.

Nettie was a socialist who nonetheless taught at the Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne, handsome, a friend remembered, without taking any care to primp herself up, and published in the Bulletin and elsewhere. Neither she nor Vance was rich, and so the couple had need to be industrious writers, but their work promoted rather than created a national literature.

The couple were socialists who suspected Marxism; and having campaigned against conscription, Vance felt—despite the fact that he and Nettie had two infant daughters—that he must make up the numbers on the Western Front. He enlisted, but arrived in France three days after war’s end. He was disillusioned by Australian politics, and by the signs of conflict emerging between trade unions and private armies, which would be a feature of Australian political life from World War I until well into the 1930s. The pastoralists and businessmen behind these sinister armies were an elite who were proud of their lack of cultural refinement. Palmer saw the suburbs and their mindlessness as bringing death to the values of Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903), the rough socialism of the shearers’ camps.

Vance and Nettie, who loved the theatre, became engaged in the search for a national voice. With the Essons, they formed in Melbourne the Pioneer Players, a theatre without any premises, dedicated to performing Australian plays. Their first performance, in 1922, was of Esson’s The Drovers, an admirable one-acter that dealt with an old Australian preoccupation but in a non-Bulletin manner. Their last production was Esson’s The Bride of Gospel Place in 1926. The experience of the Pioneer Players left Louis Esson demoralised by the small audiences and the lack of support from the well-heeled Melbourne establishment. Esson’s strong-minded wife was not so easily vanquished, but she did go with him into rural exile at Mallacoota, before they moved to Sydney, where Esson would die in 1943, the father of a brave but failed dream.

There has been a convention to blame the demise of the theatre of the Palmers and the Essons, and that of other ‘national theatre’ attempts, on the limited talents of participants. But the Irish had established their national theatre above all on the shoulders of Yeats, a great poet but questionable playwright, whose plays primarily survive today not in their own right but as obligatory relatives of his poetry, and on one overriding dramatic genius, Synge, and indeed one overriding play, The Playboy of the Western World, booed off the stage when first performed in Dublin. Though there arose no Australian Synge, the Essons and the Palmers deserve to be seen as figures in Australian mythologies of brave defeat similar to that associated with Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills, Gallipoli, and failed prospectors and ruined selectors.

THE OGRE IS BORN

To the ultimate and excessive horror of the general populace, but without anyone particularly noticing at the time, the Australian Communist Party was founded by a modest group of radicals, many of them in drastic disagreement with their brethren, in Sydney on a Saturday in October 1920, while much of the city’s populace was distracted by the spring racing season at Randwick.

On the streets of Sydney and other Australian cities that Saturday, despite often tragic unemployment amongst returned soldiers, despite the slums, the landlords, the urban and industrial squalor, there was a gleam of consumerism in the eyes of young people. Only the Broken Hill miners were pursuing industrial action at the time. The Labor Party, out of office at the federal level, Hughes having become a National Party prime minister, was devoting itself to reform within the capitalist system, and the majority of workers were happy with that proposition and did not look beyond an improvement of wages and a guarantee of dignity, preferring that to the overthrow of the state.

So it was a small number of interested parties who gathered in a grim hall in Liverpool Street. The group carried within the seeds of the doctrinal splits soon to occur in Russia itself, and in all the European and American Communist parties. But as yet, all was fraternity. It was the Australian Socialist Party (ASP) of Liverpool Street, Sydney, who sent out some sixty invitations to create a party that would be a home for all those ‘who stand for the emancipation of the working masses’. Since the ASP would be playing on their home ground, they hoped they could dominate the strands of opinion and organisational concepts people would bring. The potential inner rebels came from the breakaway Victorian Socialist Party, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, now in decline since some of them had set sabotaging fires in Sydney during the war), the Trades Hall Reds (radical trade unionists) from Sydney, and so on. The triumvirate who ran the Australian socialists, the chief bloc, were Arthur Reardon, a blacksmith intellectual who trained apprentices at Sydney’s Clyde railway works; his wife Marcia Reardon, who could make vivid speeches full of outrage at specific examples of the human misery of Australian households; and the ASP’s newspaper editor, Ray Everitt.

There were a number of other remarkable attendees, but none more so than Tom Walsh, Irish rebel, head of the seamen’s union, whose followers were called ‘the Walsheviks’, and his gentrified wife, Adela Pankhurst Walsh, the five-foot-tall daughter of Emmeline, famous founder of the British suffragette movement. Before coming to Australia, Adela Pankhurst had worked as an organiser for her mother’s movement in Yorkshire. Despite being an asthmatic, she had been imprisoned a number of times for suffragist protests. She had then split with her mother and her sister Christabel over doctrine and more personal matters, and had sailed to Australia in 1914, distressed by her mother’s growing conventional patriotism as war drew near. At the Melbourne home of her friends the Rosses—who had raised Tom Walsh’s two children since his first wife had died—she met her future husband. Adela’s belief was in communal kitchens, architect-designed workers’ housing, free books. While Adela was on remand at the time of her marriage, Hughes made an offer to her that she would be released on the condition she no longer spoke in public, but Adela refused and was sent to gaol in October 1917 to serve four months. She and Walsh were intellectual but not social equals, and there is a story that she married Tom as a way to avoid deportation by Hughes for her opposition to the war. Even so, by the time she and Walsh attended that first meeting they had five children; indeed, at that first meeting in 1920 she was nursing their infant daughter, Sylvia, and had to leave when the baby started crying.

By 1925, Adela and Walsh would have abandoned the Communist Party, in part over doctrine, in part for its ineffectuality. Communism had to be a force for sexual purity, Adela argued, which would liberate women from the tyranny of lust and the degradation of labour. Communism had given no priority to that. She had always been suspected in any case for ‘talking posh’, at least by Australian standards, and thus for being a bourgeois in disguise. But at that first meeting in 1920, they were hopeful devotees.

Another notable attendee was a former clergyman of the Church of Christ, the Scots-born Jock Garden, teetotal and anti-gambling, who did not see Marxism as very different from the teachings of ‘the lowly Nazarene’, that is, Christ. He remained a deacon of the Church even after being elected to the Labor Council and becoming leader of the Trades Hall Reds. His style of oratory was as coruscating as that of John Knox, founder of Presbyterianism.

William Earsman, the eccentric Scot from Melbourne (who wore spats, just as Stanley Melbourne Bruce did), was a member of the Victorian Socialist Party who attended the Sydney meeting that first day along with a notable group of Melbourne radicals. Within a short time he was already disparaging the ASP bloc within the party and saw its three members elected to the provisional executive as ‘dangerous individuals’.

The ASP faction in the new party felt precisely the same way about Earsman and the Victorian Socialist Party. They felt threatened by strident Victorians like Earsman’s lover Christian Jollie Smith, one of the earliest women lawyers in Victoria and, according to her friend Adela, in her spare time the first woman taxi-driver in Melbourne. (Adela felt great gratitude to Smith because she had stolen the prosecutor’s files for the wartime deportation case against Adela.) Earsman and Smith wanted to take over the ASP’s weekly newspaper and make it into the organ of the new Communist Party. But the ASP was only willing to agree if it had greater representation on the Communist Party council. As well as the Liverpool Street hall where that first meeting took place, the ASP owned the printing press, and did not want to hand control of its assets over to a new organisation represented by only three ASP members.

After the founding of the Australian Communist Party that October day, three years after the Bolsheviks had seized power in St Petersburg, branches were endorsed in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Townsville, Newcastle, and Newtown and Balmain in Sydney. Earsman, and Garden from the Trades Hall Reds, found they had a minority of followers amongst the various small branches, compared to former ASP members, but more power on the council. Tom Glynn was on Earsman’s side. He was a former Wobblies man who had done time in Pentridge for conspiracy, and was now appointed editor of the proposed newspaper to be printed on the ASP press. The ASP group, feeling threatened in its ownership of its own resources, condemned that dominant section of the executive who, as Arthur Reardon said, ‘represented no one but themselves’ and were trying to destroy unity.

One night in 1921 the ASP withdrew its representatives, denouncing Garden and the Trades Hall group, packed up the press and other property, and moved it all to new premises in Sussex Street. The tiny Communist movement now had rival newspapers and executives, each believing they were the genuine inheritors of Marxism, and dressed up their quarrels, personal and territorial, in accusations that the other side did not have a proper grasp of Marxist doctrine. The ASP men and women in Sussex Street immediately adopted the title ‘United Communist Party of Australia (the Australian Section of the Third International)’, and printed on its own press a newspaper, the International Communist. From the office in Liverpool Street, Earsman produced a rival newspaper called Australian Communist. Would Liverpool Street or Sussex Street inherit the revolution and achieve anointment from Russia? It was no small question for the participants. World revolution was imminent, they were sure, and ultimate power over Australia’s Marxist identity, and it was all happening for now in the white-hot ardour of a small number of people in close-by, unfashionable streets in Sydney.

While many Russian exiles supported Earsman’s Liverpool Street party, Peter Simonoff, Soviet Russia’s representative in Australia, formerly a Tsarist prisoner who had escaped to Brisbane then moved south to be more effective, approved of the Sussex Street group. However, in 1921, Simonoff had been moved out of Sydney by police harassment to settle in Brisbane, and was so closely watched by police there that he could now do very little. A new emissary from Moscow arrived in Australia, perhaps American-born, possibly Hungarian, Paul Freeman, alias Cox. Expelled from Australia earlier as an illegal alien, he had gone to Russia where he met up with Artem Sergeiev, a personable Bolshevik who, like Simonoff, had also spent some years as an exile in Brisbane, and who had now risen to power in the Central Committee.

In rivalry with British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who as a youth visited the goldfields, and with William Smith O’Brien, Irish nobleman and political prisoner in Van Diemen’s Land, Sergeiev might have been one of the most powerful political figures to spend time in Australia. He was a handsome and likeable fellow in his thirties, a former rail worker and devoted Bolshevik, who had been in trouble with the Tsar not least for leading the strikers of 1905 in Kharkov before the strikers’ final stand was blown apart by Russian army artillery. After radical organisation of railway workers led to his further arrest in 1907, he made an extraordinary escape from Siberia and reached Japan and then Shanghai, where he drew expat European anger for doing ‘coolie work’—delivering bread to houses in the French Quarter. In Brisbane he had involved himself in the general strike of 1911, when the Brisbane Tramways Company had begun sacking drivers and conductors who wore their union badges to work. He had sent for publication in a St Petersburg socialist magazine a warning to Russian intellectuals that Australia, despite Queensland’s having had the first Labor Party government in the world, was not the ‘Lucky Country’. He complained, like other Marxists, that the Labor Party and most of the trade unions were only interested in improving workers’ conditions by small increments, rather than by overthrowing the whole rotten edifice. To him the existence of an Australian militia had bespoken British militarism. Yet in his Brisbane days he had been very fraternal towards the Australians, and above all to any of his fellow Russian exiles, whatever their politics—Agrarian Socialists, Social Revolutionaries, Anarchists, Mensheviks or Social Democrats. He had created a Russian newspaper, a lending library, and a Russia House in South Brisbane for those cane cutters and railway workers who came to town for Russian Christmas and other reasons. He had also campaigned for freedom of assembly, and against conscription, and spent time in Boggo Road Gaol for deliberately involving himself in illegal assembly and other purported crimes.

After the fall of the Tsar, Sergeiev had returned to Russia in time to be elected to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks in their St Petersburg headquarters at the Smolny Institute, and to take an active part in the overthrow of the provisional government and the achievement of a Bolshevik revolution. By 1921, Sergeiev had campaigned as a leading political commissar in the ferocious civil war with the Whites, and had been allied with the young Koba, soon to adopt the name Stalin, in the defence of the crucial city of Tsarytsin (the future Stalingrad) on the Volga. The civil war ended, the Third Communist International Congress was to meet in Moscow. Sergeiev was living a settled life in the Kremlin with his young intellectual wife and baby son, but was anxious to get some of the Australian radicals he had met to attend this Communist International (Comintern for short). It was for that reason that he had recruited Paul Freeman to go to Australia carrying the Central Committee’s mandate to invite Australian delegates to the Third Comintern in mid-1921. Freeman was also to recruit trade union representatives for the Red International of Labor Unions which was to follow the Comintern.

Freeman landed in Adelaide with a false passport, and on reaching Sydney wrote articles for the International Communist. At once, Arthur Reardon of Sussex Street wrote to the executive of the Comintern, of which Sergeiev was the chairman, pushing for recognition of Sussex Street as the true Australian Communist Party. Sussex Street, he said, met all the criteria; all that was needed to begin the revolution in Australia was a grant of £3000. Similar letters were being written by fledgling, divided Communist parties all over the world, asking for Moscow’s blessing as the true heirs. The French Communist Party had split; so had the German, the Italian, the American. Often the split was over the matter of whether trade unions should be the focus of Communist endeavour and whether they would need to exist after the revolution. But there were other divisive and obscure nuances of difference as well.

At Liverpool Street, Earsman, Glynn and Smith made the best they could of Freeman’s apparent approval of the people around the corner in Sussex Street, and Comrade Freeman had agreement to become the accredited Sussex Street representative in Moscow.

Assured that the Comintern would reimburse them for their travel expenses, delegates from both factions set out for the Communist Mecca to receive its blessing for their faction. Earsman departed Australia on the SS Themistocles, having been given a job on board as a stoker through the kind assistance of the Seamen’s Union. An Australian unionist named Jack Howie was also signed on as a crew member. Earsman found the rations appalling, the living quarters squalid, and the sailors they were forced to share with totally lacking in class consciousness and morality. Earsman told Howie, ‘Every one of these bastards should be taken out and shot.’ Howie fitted in with the seamen, however. Earsman’s consolation was reading Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, an attack on the concept that unions would be unnecessary in the Soviet state. Upon his arrival at the British Communist headquarters in London, Earsman found the attention of the UK Communist executive riveted by a national lockout of coal miners. Earsman was brusquely told that his mode of hat, spats and other oddities of dress made him too conspicuous.

In the meantime, a Sussex Street delegate, Jim Quinton, was arrested at the docklands in Hull under the severe precautionary laws then in operation, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. One opponent gone for Earsman! Earsman and Howie travelled on to Germany, and then caught the train to Moscow. There it must have been apparent to them how harsh the new Russia was for most city-dwellers. But of course, the anti-revolutionary forces—the Whites—and the British, French and American governments, who had thrown their power behind the Whites, were considered largely to blame.

The Third Comintern Congress in June–July 1921, with five hundred delegates, was the largest formal gathering yet of international Communists. The delegates stayed in the Hotel Lux and were served good imported food. From the Politburo, Lenin called on them for an end to the splits that had reduced the Communist parties of the world into ineffectual little rumps. Nonetheless, Earsman immediately began lobbying for Liverpool Street. He introduced himself to the European Communists, heard Lenin speak, listened to Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, to Zinoviev and Bukharin, wrote reports on the Australian situation, attended the Red Army parade to inaugurate the Congress, and had a chat with Trotsky himself. He wrote to his beloved Christian, but at the same time romanced a young German Communist. Smith’s polite background was however very useful. In fact, Moscow’s communications with Liverpool Street were to be delivered by way of Miss C.J. Smith, LLB, c/o Reverend T. Smith, The Manse, Coppin Street, East Malvern, Victoria. Earsman was disappointed, however, that others, including Freeman, managed to get full delegate mandates to the Congress. His own was a mere consultative one, and he had to work hard to get the Comintern executive to upgrade it.

Earsman felt threatened when Freeman began telling Sergeiev and others that the Scot was a mere anarchist syndicalist (that is, no more advanced than a Wobbly or trade unionist), and that Christian Jollie Smith was a bourgeois. Indeed, all Liverpool Street, Freeman reported, were merely a branch of the Wobblies, believers not in Marxism but in One Big Worldwide Union.

Earsman was even more worried when Freeman was elected an alternate member of the overall Comintern executive, that is, someone who would on occasion take his seat at the senior table and be able to speak publicly on resolutions. Earsman was saved from the threat of irrelevance when, on 24 July, Sergeiev, the tall former Queensland Russian, who had as a refugee helped build the railway to Warwick and had always had a political interest in railways, now dressed in white peasant smock, knee boots and cap, took a number of delegates for a ride in an experimental monorail train driven by a propeller. The train was boarded and moved off from the town of Tula, not far from Moscow. Rounding a bend, it jumped the tracks. In the smash, Sergeiev was killed and Freeman fatally injured. Sergeiev was buried beneath the Kremlin Wall with the full honours of the Soviet State, and Freeman was buried near him. Two other Sussex Street delegates were seriously injured in the crash. Suddenly, those who would resist Earsman’s legitimacy were decimated. He was elected to the executive committee of the Comintern.

Earsman now jumped on a group of newly arrived, unaligned Australian trade unionists and with some success tried to sign them up for Liverpool Street. At a preliminary meeting of Australian delegates, chaired by a senior Russian, the decision was reached that unity between the two parties should occur by January 1922. Earsman was converted to unity very quickly, and believed his Liverpool Street branch could control it. At the Congress, he had depicted Sussex Street as imposters, ‘a sect who surround themselves with a halo arising from the Marxian platitudes which they give lip service to’. Now he could make brothers and sisters of them.

All this fury and earnestness was based on the belief that world revolution was imminent and that Australia must have its own Lenin. Earsman was willing to be that man. But on the way home, in the United Kingdom, he was told by British Customs that an Australian government ban existed against his re-entry to Australia. He went back to Moscow and taught English at the Soviet Military Academy for a year, and then moved to England in about 1924 and worked for a company that exported machine tools to the USSR. In 1927, when he married an Irishwoman in the Catholic Church, he began to lose faith in Marxism because of the lack of progress of the revolution in Russia, and then joined the British Labour Party. John Curtin, amongst others, tried but failed in the 1930s to have the Australian ban against him lifted. After a career in local government, for which he accepted an OBE, Earsman was one of the founding councillors of the Edinburgh Festival, and died in that city in 1965.

But in the meantime, in July 1922, the bitter unity conference, as ordered by Moscow, occurred in Sydney. Conference branch members were unruly. Moscow would write to the Communists of Australia: ‘Your Party is still weak, your experience of class struggle as a Party still inadequate, your preparedness for taking a lead in the future intensified class fights is still deficient.’ But at least there was now one Communist Party, and though Earsman would never return to become the general secretary of a ruling regime, the party would have a growing impact on Australia’s industrial history.

At the national conferences of the trade unions, motions which called for one big union were put forward by the Wobblies, and motions for nationalisation of all industry were also tabled by the stricter socialists in the Labor Party—including, at that stage, James Scullin. There was a strong belief within Labor, however, that Communism was not the answer for Australia. E.J. Theodore, Queensland Labor premier, former miner, son of an Irish mother and Romanian father (Teodorescu was the true family name), had not gone to the Nationals with Hughes yet was one of the pragmatic Labor men. He complained at the 1921 ALP conference that some of the delegates were ‘enamoured with the proletariat in Russia and with the sentiment of the IWW [the Wobblies]’, and that they harboured ‘ideals and dogmas that did not belong to Australia’. He spoke for a majority in arguing this way. There was something in Australian society that favoured practical reform over doctrinal revolution.

Despite Labor’s willingness to cooperate with capital, conservative governments would reign in Australia throughout the 1920s and, with a brief interval for Scullin’s Depression-destroyed Labor government of 1929–31, until six weeks before Australia entered World War II. The struggle for votes itself made the Labor Party back off from any earlier espousal of strict socialist doctrine.

TWO IMPERFECTLY REMEMBERED POLITICIANS

The prime minister under whom Pompey Elliott chiefly served in Parliament was the lawyer and businessman Sir Stanley Bruce, whose government, after early adventures with ideas, became one of stodgy, conservative policy. (Bruce would be the first prime minister to serve in Canberra, when Federal Parliament at last moved there in 1927.) James Scullin, the talented Labor leader, replaced Bruce in 1929 but was blighted by the Depression, by industrial conflict on the coalfields, and by sharing the party of the rebellious New South Wales premier Jack Lang. Scullin and Bruce, both Victorians, both sticklers for grammar and syntax and the proprieties of oratory, had little else in common. Red-haired Scullin was a former Ballarat journalist and a violin-playing grocer in Richmond. The child of Catholic parents from Derry, he believed in Irish Home Rule, which Bruce, with his high Ulster background, considered a disastrous idea. Scullin’s inherited sense of Irish grievance was very strong and in the early 1920s helped fuel in him a militant socialism, but like other children of the Irish he was chastened when the Irish themselves fought a fierce civil war from 1922 to 1923 over the treaty that excluded Ulster, where his parents had grown up, from the settlement. His socialism moderated itself as, throughout the 1920s, he transformed himself into Labor’s taxation expert. His passion for a form of ‘responsible’ social justice was based not on Das Kapital but on the competing and vigorous social justice encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Matters), the 1891 work of Pope Leo XIII, who knew that as a matter of morality as well as a means of keeping his flock, wage justice and social inequality would need to be addressed within the context of Catholic theology. Rerum Novarum became the founding text for many Irish–Australian politicians.

By contrast with the Richmond grocer, Bruce had an honoured place at the heart of the industrial and merchant establishment of Melbourne, and entered Parliament more or less as its champion. A Cambridge graduate, he was a member of the victorious Cambridge rowing eight of 1904. Bruce had trained as a lawyer and applied these skills on behalf of the family firm, Paterson, Knight and Bruce. He was well married—his wife, Ethel, was a woman of determined interest in theatre and travel, and an excellent companion—and he had fought with the Royal Fusiliers in the Great War, being wounded in the knee and awarded the Military Cross in the Gallipoli campaign.

Bruce’s prime ministership was marked by a fear of socialism and even Communism, and by conservative economics. Pompey Elliott considered him far too parsimonious when it came to recompensing ex-soldiers. But he was a sleek and gifted negotiator and leader, and his manner was marked by old-fashioned courtesy and reasonableness. In any contest for high colour and a place in history, a prime minister in an era of relative prosperity but who presented no great plans to build national projects could not compete with the volatile, whimsical, vivid character of Billy Hughes, and on that basis Bruce is virtually lost to the popular Australian imagination.

There was a sense in which Bruce was a servant of the Country Party. Discontented with Hughes and what they saw as his pro-city, pro-manufacturing policies, which drove up prices for farmers, the Country Party, led by the amiable and chatty Grafton surgeon and landowner Earle Page, had given Bruce power. Thus he granted the Country Party five portfolios out of eleven. Scullin opposed Bruce’s reduction of tax on land, which suited the primary producers, and came to believe in 1923 that the Country Party wanted all land tax abolished: ‘The government will relentlessly pursue the small tax payer who is in arrears, but when a million or two is involved those who are liable are to be relieved of their obligation to pay.’

In 1924, Bruce went to the polls on a campaign aimed against industrial strife. The election—the first in which compulsory voting operated—was a bad defeat for Labor, which, with twenty-three seats, made up less than one-third of the new House. The following year, Bruce introduced three laws that Scullin ferociously opposed. One was the power to deport union leaders from Australia—Tom Walsh, one of the founders of the Australian Communist Party but by now expelled from it, was a target. The second was to undermine working conditions on ships running coastal routes, by suspension of the Navigation Act; and the third was the creation of a uniformed Commonwealth police (a force that until then had been plain-clothed). Scullin saw the uniformed Commonwealth police as a force that would be levied to attack union members: ‘The party opposite wishes to show that it has a strong Government, and that there is a Mussolini in Australia prepared to do things that no other Prime Minister has been ready to do.’

Bruce agreed with Labor on one thing, though: the idea that the Federal government should acquire more power, however indirectly, by making the states its dependants. In 1926, it passed a Federal Aid Roads Act to increase its tax on petrol so that it could pay £2 million a year to the states for roadworks, as long as the states contributed three-quarters of a pound to every pound the Federal government granted.

Bruce was always anxious to increase Australian cooperation, although the Chanak affair shook his faith. This was a 1922 crisis that developed while Hughes was still prime minister, when the Turks, fighting against the Greek army to retrieve land lost in the Great War and to drive the Greeks out of cities and towns within Turkey granted to them by the Treaty of Versailles and reacquire the European side of the Dardanelles (including Istanbul, which had been declared a neutral zone by the Allies), reached the Dardanelles at Çanakkale or Chanak. The British and French built up the garrison defending the town; after the French ordered the withdrawal of their troops, the British prime minister, Lloyd George asked for Australian and Canadian troops to reinforce the British there. The possibility of a new war arose, and the chance that Australian graves at Gallipoli would be violated. Hughes, however, would not countenance any more Australian deaths, and so did not accede to Lloyd George’s request. Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, was similarly dubious. At last Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish leader, signed an armistice with Britain, to the relief of the soon-to-be prime minister Stanley Bruce.

Bruce was also a believer in the League of Nations. But until 1939 he was opposed to the creation of an Australian diplomatic service to pursue Australian imperatives, because he thought that the British Foreign Office should be trusted to represent the interests of the entire Empire.

One of his initiatives, and perhaps the chief one, was the creation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, later CSIRO), whose job was to find scientific solutions for the problems of both farming and industry. He took a personal interest in recruiting British scientists to work for this organisation.

Scullin himself is a largely forgotten prime minister, and lost to memory as well seems the handsome Matthew Charlton, a former miner from Lambton near Newcastle and leader of the Labor opposition from 1922. A moderate, Charlton was rather embarrassed by the Labor Party’s socialist platform, the nationalisation of all means of production, exchange and supply. But in the great leakage from Labor ranks during and after World War I, he stayed firm. He had plans for national development, but they did not win him elections. Anxious about the vulnerability of Australia and the belief that a conventional army was not an answer to Australia’s size and huge, ice-free coastline, at a meeting of the League of Nations in 1924 he attempted to introduce the Geneva Protocol, which would make military conflicts subject to judges exercising international law, and which involved a universal mutual defence pact. But the British did not like the idea and neither did Bruce’s side of politics. The idea lapsed.

In 1928, respected by both sides of the House, Charlton resigned, and Scullin inherited the chance of leading a federal government, the first Catholic to do so.

Despite Bruce’s late-blooming though genuine desire for ‘great expenditure upon social amelioration’, strike conflict centred on the waterfront, and an increase in unemployment brought him down. Scullin was enthusiastically elected in 1929, winning forty-six of seventy-five seats. Crowds saw Scullin and his wife Sarah off from Melbourne; crowds laden with tributes and bouquets greeted them at Canberra station. With some aplomb, Sarah distributed the floral offerings she had received around the hospitals of Canberra. The modest Scullins—they did not yet own a house of their own—lived in the Canberra Hotel rather than spend money at the Lodge, where cooks and servants would need to be employed.

Scullin, entering office, was frightened by the scale of Commonwealth debt. Unemployment was already at 12.5 per cent when Scullin was sworn in, two days before the Wall Street crash of 29 October. He faced also a series of bitter miners’ strikes, and in December 1929, at Rothbury in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, police were brought in by rail to deal with miners. These were not strikers but desperate men who had been for some months locked out of the mine for refusing to accept a 12.5 per cent reduction in contract wages and an end to pit stoppages and union meetings. It was a situation similar to that of the shearers’ strike of the early 1890s, since colliery owners had formed their own alliance to fight the miners in an organised way. A new Illegal Assembly Act was passed by the Conservative New South Wales state government of Thomas Bavin, and in December, Bavin ordered four hundred police into Rothbury to block a march of protest at the lockout and at the colliery owners’ use of scab labour. The march took place, there was hand-to-hand fighting, and at last the police drew their revolvers and shot dead a young bystander named Norman Brown and wounded more than two dozen miners.

Meanwhile, Scullin’s impulses of generosity to those suddenly unemployed because of the Depression were tempered by the scale of Commonwealth debt. He was not able to take a pump-priming, public-works-to-employ-the-masses approach as did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in America. He could not raise the money he needed. He was suddenly like a man inheriting an over-mortgaged house. The time of anguish was upon him and the people.

CENTRE AND NORTH

Asians, and the formerly indentured cane and agricultural workers, the South Sea Islanders called the Kanakas, had by the 1920s been largely expelled from the north of Australia, and now it was the white man’s preserve and the white man’s burden. How was that burden of work there were no longer non-whites to do to be taken up?

A new phase of the national argument arose, one on which unrealistic sentiments will never cease to be uttered, about whether northern Australia and the Centre could somehow be transformed by irrigation or population or both. It was not yet time to accept that, even with all that landmass, Australia might be destined to be inhabited by a modest population. The English geologist J.W. Gregory of the University of Melbourne, a scholar of amiable diffidence but determination, wrote The Dead Heart of Australia, published in 1906, engraving the term ‘Dead Heart’ like a sentence of desolation and a mark of shame on the Australian imagination, but not on Billy Hughes’ nor on Alfred Deakin’s, the visionary early prime minister. In the 1890s, Deakin had predicted a populous hinterland, and a national population like America’s, and so did Hughes in the 1920s.

A young Australian geographer, Griffith Taylor, who as an expeditionary team member had survived with honour the two winters on McMurdo Sound leading to the discovery of Scott’s body on the Ross Ice Shelf, produced a thesis entitled A Geography of Australasia in 1916. It was considered so negative on future population that in Western Australia, to which its thesis particularly applied, it was banned from schools and the university. In 1923, Taylor compounded his sins against Australian hope by presenting a map that showed Central Australia labelled ‘Useless’, and much of Western Australia ‘Almost Useless’. The words might have been more tactfully chosen, but again the map offended against much Australian aspiration. It was as if Taylor were guilty of environmental treason, and even at Sydney University, his place of work, he was snubbed. He attracted double opprobrium by arguing that the sooner Australians intermarried with Asians, and thus helped to neutralise the ‘Asian threat’, the better.

After the controversy, Taylor moved on to new areas of his discipline, including what he called ‘cultural geography’, but his battle over the Dead Heart would be lifelong. His intermarriage proposal was obscene, people argued, and so how could the Yellow Peril be combated unless the Centre and north were subjected to a process of population? The Sun newspaper in May 1924 called Taylor’s theories ‘anti-Australian propaganda’. Also in 1924, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer in his mid-forties who had written bestsellers on the Arctic (The Friendly Arctic, The Northward Course of Empire and My Life with the Eskimo) and believed in its future as a place for concentrations of population, came to Australia and was invited by the Bruce government to tour Central Australia and report on its potential. Unsurprisingly, in tune with his attitude to the Arctic, on his return from Central Australia he declared he could see no country that could truly be called desert. He recommended the area be aggressively populated.

Laborites had their grievances against poor Taylor too, depicting him as a privileged fellow trying to keep small farmers out of the cattle kingdoms of the Northern Territory. In particular, Harry Nelson, the Labor member of the House of Representatives for the Northern Territory, who had driven a train at Pine Creek and led (white) drovers in industrial struggles on the Vestey stations in the Northern Territory, agreed with Stefansson, and urged Prime Minister Bruce to send a copy of Stefansson’s tabled report to Taylor. The brothers against whom Nelson was in particular conflict, William and Edmund Vestey, had founded an enormous international company, including huge pastoral runs in Brazil and Venezuela as well as Australia, but Nelson managed to get their attention. Now here was this Griffith Taylor proclaiming a thesis that the enormous properties of people like the Vesteys, and the power they exerted, could never be eroded by new waves of smaller landholders and by the growth of townships. Nelson knew the north would boom and provide the little man with a home, and so Taylor was a menace.

In fact, Nelson’s animus against Taylor became so intense that in the mid-1920s he decided to ride from Alice Springs to Darwin by motorbike to prove that the country was quite negotiable. He set out one torrid day with the best wishes of the Alice Springs villagers, but failed to arrive in Darwin. A native tracker picked up the zigzagging marks of his motorbike tyres. He had used all the water he had with him and then drunk lubricating oil. In a desperate state when found, he nevertheless lived.

Taylor could feel vindicated; the land itself had offered Nelson its answer. Taylor thought so, but Nelson didn’t see it. Others, too, including the Aboriginal advocate Daisy Bates, still attacked Taylor for downgrading Australia as a prime field for virtually unlimited immigration. His enemies called him an ‘environmental determinist’, prevented his promotion to full professor, and ultimately provoked him into accepting in 1928 a chair at the University of Chicago.

The year before Taylor’s departure, the Queensland government received the report of three commissioners appointed to address the ‘urgent problem’ of Queensland’s empty north. They declared that northern Queensland did not give any hope for ‘grandiose settlement schemes’. Greeks were settled there, declared chairman of the commissioners Thomas Ferry, but they were not the kind who should be encouraged, given that they merely ran cafés and boarding houses and even less satisfactory places. As a home for Britons and British Australians, north Queensland would not serve.

Even as Taylor left Sydney by steamer, the victim of Australian demographic hopes, people still believed that Australia would support at least one hundred million people if only the Centre and north were ‘opened up’. It became a national obsessional pastime to dream of solutions to the dryness of the interior. Ion Idriess, a Gallipoli veteran, Light Horseman and prolific writer, proposed that water should be conveyed by tunnels from the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland and into the river system that ended in Lake Eyre. John Bradfield, the civil engineer who designed and built the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, agreed with this project. In 1938, he proposed a hydro scheme to the Queensland premier, Scots-born Forgan Smith, a believer in large public works. The plan would use the massive water supply from the coastal rivers by way of water tunnels and was capable, Bradfield claimed, of covering 80 square kilometres to a depth of twenty metres. Though the scheme would cost £30 million, Bradfield said the outlay could be recovered in water rates. Dealing in their various ways with the Depression, and the economic restraint they had promised the Bank of England, state and federal politicians both ultimately rebuffed the idea.

Taylor was not the only dissenter from the expectation of a large population. By now, some academics and humanitarians had a sense of what had happened to the indigenes since 1788, and believed that the North and Central regions should remain an Aboriginal zone. The University of Adelaide’s Board of Anthropological Research consisted of many medical scientists, and its chairman was a professor of pathology, J.B. Cleland. Cleland, appointed in 1920, was an extraordinary Renaissance-style South Australian who was forensic scientist, botanist and anthropologist. He had interestingly posited that the cause of his fellow university professor Douglas Mawson’s near-death—and the actual death of Mawson’s companion Dr Xavier Mertz—while travelling in Antarctica in 1912 was a toxic excess of vitamin A brought on by devouring their sled dogs’ livers. Arguing for segregation of the remaining original Aboriginal groups of the north, Cleland proposed Australians recognise how admirably Central Australian Aborigines were adapted to the desert, and went so far as to declare that hunting and gathering were the best possible uses that could be made of Central Australia. Segregation, he said, was the only feasible means of ensuring Indigenous survival: ‘There can be no question that the native population—in our North West corner [of South Australia] alone probably numbering 500 or so—are making a much better use of this country than we ever can, and that the density of their population is many times that of any possible white one.’

Not all the Indigenous commentators agreed with Cleland. They wanted to be included in the Australian nation, and already a cry for citizenship had begun, notably from the secretary of the Melbourne-based Australian Aborigines’ League, William Cooper, a survivor of the Coranderrk Mission along the Murray, and self-educated, in part through his participation in the Australian Workers’ Union. To him, northern development was not a disaster for his people but a platform for their elevation. Already in his sixties, he attacked the segregationist schemes promoted by Cleland and his fellow anthropologist Norman Tindale in the 1920s and 1930s, and declared, ‘We don’t want to be zoological specimens in Arnhem Land.’ His view of progress for Aborigines accorded with that of the majority society, and he, too, was taken by the ideal of the yeoman farmer, but in his case a black yeoman rather than a white one. The region was ‘unsuited to white labour, and particularly to white women’, he declared, and many whites agreed with him on that point. Cooper believed that the main problem of the desert and the tropics was climatic; yet ‘it is all the natives have ever known and from it . . . they have won their livelihood’. He asked why it had never occurred to white minds to link the Aboriginal question with the problem of the north and the Centre. Here was an Australian population already in place, already willing to remain and work. In his seventies he was still pushing the message out, arguing with white society and elements of his own people.

He had more than earned the right to promote the idea of full Australian citizenship. His son Dan had been one of a number of Aborigines to serve in the AIF and had died in action in France. There had been forty-two Aboriginal Victorians in the Australian ranks in the Great War, of whom eight were killed and two won the Military Medal. The right to die for Australia had not, however, resulted in the right to be considered an Australian citizen.

William Cooper was a half-caste child. His father was James Cooper, a white labourer, and William’s views were no doubt influenced by the memory of his youth, since, like so many half-castes, his experience was the same as that of his full-blooded brethren. He had been born, as far as is known, in 1861, and had seen his people, the Joti-Jota or Yorta Yorta, farming on land at the junction of the Murray and Goulburn rivers, succeeding, indeed, to an extent that meant there was pressure on the colonial government to give the land to white settlers. He was a party to the normal equation between Aborigines and white society: if Aborigines succeeded somewhere, the place in which they had flourished was suddenly desirable; when they were then moved to marginal land, they were blamed for their failure and disintegration, so that society came to believe disintegration was their inevitable destiny. Cooper never seemed embittered by this reality. After a time at the Cummeragunga Aboriginal station, he worked as a labourer on a number of properties and was later employed as a coachman in the Melbourne home of Sir John O’Shanassy, an Irish-born Victorian politician and an ally of famed nineteenth-century premier of Victoria Gavin Duffy.

Cooper moved to Footscray in 1932, aged seventy-one, and became eligible for the Australian pension, a fulfilled ambition of his and one not achieved by many Aborigines. Later, in early 1937, he pursued his treatise with the Minister for the Interior, John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, telling him that ‘in the Aboriginal you have all the manpower required for the development of Australia’s unsettled parts . . . and its peopling by a [Aboriginal] population not merely European in culture but British in sentiment and loyalty would be a bulwark of defence’. To help his argument, Cooper marshalled the normal suspicion of white Australians of his time towards Italians and Greeks: ‘We claim that it is not British stock that is wanted for the Territory, certainly not some European, but Aboriginal, British–Australian Aboriginals.’ He informed Black Jack in February 1938, ‘We are capable of producing a yeomanry that can open up and develop the outback better than anyone else.’ Cooper was still advising and lobbying Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1939 about amending legislation granting full rights to Aborigines ‘who have attained civilised status’, and asking that Aboriginal affairs be taken over by the Federal government instead of being left to the patchwork of state legislations.

When he died in 1941, both the question of Aboriginal rights and the other issue on which he had campaigned—what to do with the north and Centre—were unresolved, and would remain so for some decades.

LABOR AND THE REDS

The Communist Party of Australia, a tribe of bitterly divided clans, whose numbers and influence would always be overestimated and endowed with satanic skills by the majority of its opponents, became the subject of bewildering shifts of doctrine and policy from Moscow. In 1923, in one of these policy changes, the Communists were ordered by Moscow to make friends with the Labor Party. In terms of Communist objectives this made some sense. The expected revolution had not occurred outside Russia. Now a certain level of collaboration would show Labor how limited its philosophy was.

H.E. Boote, the young Curtin’s father figure, a man who had been involved in Labor politics since 1889 and had edited the Gympie Truth for early ALP Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, attacked the attempted Communist infiltration of Labor in the pages of the Australian Worker, saying that their obedience to the Comintern in Moscow was not much different from the head-bowings of formal religion. The Labor Party, he said, repudiated ‘with loathing the principles of terrorism when deliberately inculcated as a method of government’. By this stage the recently concluded Russian Civil War and the ‘collectivisation’ of Russian farms, which meant a fall-off in the Russian harvest, had brought the famine that became fuel for anti-Communist opinion and shocked some Communists themselves.

To combat the Moscow directive, the ALP confirmed at state and federal conferences in 1924 that no individual who retained Communist Party membership could be a Labor member. The Communist from the Trades Hall, Jock Garden, attacked the decision, but his Labor friend Jack Lang was unrepentant. Garden declared that the ‘loot men’ of Labor chose corruption, ballot-rigging and intrigue over the betterment of working people.

Rebuffed by Labor, Communists began as small regional groups to penetrate the ranks of mining union and other union executives, and there they would ultimately achieve a national significance. But for now, as one of the Communist unionists, the ideologue from Orange, New South Wales, Lawrence ‘Lance’ Sharkey, put it, the Marxist window of chance had passed: ‘the Russian revolution had receded and capitalism had achieved its temporary relative stabilisation’.

Sharkey had been raised a Catholic in the bush and claimed that it was by way of encountering Wobblies amongst itinerant bush workers (that is, swagmen) that he came to oppose the war and ultimately made his way into Communism. After the poor performance of Communists in the 1925 New South Wales elections, Guido Baracchi, an affluent Victorian who had also been a member of the German Communist Party and edited their English-language newspaper for a time, had proposed liquidating the party, though his motion to that effect was safely opposed. He was expelled from the party for ‘right-wing deviationism’, and was thus unaligned when he was left a fortune on the death of his father, an enterprising astronomer. In 1926, Garden also left the party, because he believed it had no future, and he and his Trades Hall Reds joined the Western Sydney real estate agent Jack Lang’s faction of the Labor Party.

Tom Wright, another Scot, younger than Garden and general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia, had by now asked the Comintern for help and went to Moscow to confer with its general secretary, Nikolai Bukharin. They discussed Australia’s development as an independent capitalist country, the White Australia Policy and the relationship between the Communist Party and the ALP. Bukharin told Wright, ‘If time is not yet ripe for revolutionary mass actions . . . revolutionary propaganda and agitation must be made the centre of gravity for the Communist Party.’ Stalin had proposed an industrial build-up of the Soviet Union to produce ‘socialism in one country’, the USSR, an admission that world revolution was off the agenda for now. Bukharin, who had shared exile in Switzerland with Lenin and other famed intellectuals of the Communist movements, was one of the creators of the new ‘one country’ strategy, but he was still urging a united front between social democrat parties and the Communist Party. He was out of step with Stalin, who saw social democrats such as the Australian Labor Party as ‘social fascists’, and who would ultimately not only destroy Bukharin ideologically in 1929 by removing him from the Politburo, but then also have him purged with a bullet through the head nine years later.

Back in Australia, the justifiably confused Wright found that Bukharin’s model still prevailed at the 1927 annual party conference in Queensland. The Australian Communist Party was still hoping that the left wing of the ALP would break away from the Queensland Labor Party led by William McCormack, who had supported the use of scab labour during a four-month sugar industry strike. To the great surprise of many Labor folk, railway workers who had refused to handle ‘black sugar’ were locked out of the railway yards by the same government. But the defection of the Labor left did not occur, although the Communist Party resolved to support left-wing ALP candidates in some constituencies. In all other constituencies a campaign was to be conducted against the McCormack Labor Party, and Labor Party candidates were to be worked on so that they would support working-class demands. Three or four Communist candidates were to stand in carefully selected constituencies.

This plan was at odds with Stalin’s ‘social fascists’ line. By December 1928, after attending the fourth congress of the Comintern, Esmonde Higgins, editor of the Workers’ Weekly, came back with a new doctrine—that the party should openly struggle against all Labor Party reformism. Higgins was a remarkable fellow, having opposed conscription but then enlisting himself to save some worker’s son. He ‘read’ history at Oxford, got second-class honours while working for the British Communist Party, and refused to complete the formalities to receive his degree. What had been decided on in Queensland, said the charming and witty Higgins, should not be the way for the Communist Party to operate throughout Australia. The reason was, as Stalin confusingly announced, that the Third Period of Communism was imminent. It would involve increasing conflict between the nations of the West to hold on to power and crush colonial uprisings in such places as India, combined with an enlisting of all social democratic parties (in Australia, the Labor Party) by capitalism to crush workers and lower wages.

In the spirit of the Third Period, in 1929 the Communist Party of Australia changed leadership and got rid of ‘right-wing deviationists’ who had flirted with Labor. Sharkey, who had been expelled earlier, came back now to expel as rightists those who had expelled him. The Communist Party of Australia looked forward to the opportunities of discontent that would arise from any global recession. Indeed, one monstrous recession was on its way.

In the meantime, there had been not only expulsions but also defections, such as Garden’s. The truth is that it was not secret armies that saved Australia from the limited revolutionary powers of the Gardens, Walshes and Pankhursts, but the change in their own opinions over time. During the late 1920s, Tom Walsh and Adela Pankhurst became gradually more conservative. By 1929, Adela preposterously founded the Women’s Guild of Empire, raising money for slum-dwelling children but under that previously hated banner of ‘Empire’. Walsh began to doubt the wisdom of militant confrontation—such as delaying ships’ sailings until men’s demands were met, a method he had used to effect earlier in the decade. Adela spoke at factories and workplaces on the need for industrial cooperation, sometimes breaking strikers’ picket lines, and when the Depression came she believed like a good market economist that the answer was to increase efficiency and raise productivity.

The family lived humbly on what Walsh could earn from journalism, though the Women’s Guild of Empire provided Adela with a motor car to enable her to get her message to a wider audience. Throughout the 1930s, they were sympathetic to Japan’s efforts to industrialise and to secure a share of the China market. They visited Japan from late 1939 to early 1940 as guests of the Japanese government, and returned to Australia with assurances that the true Japanese ambition was peace in the Pacific. This belief would lead Adela into the Australia First Movement, an isolationist group led by Inky Stephensen.

Queensland-born Stephensen was an old Red too, a founding member (with Graham Greene, amongst others) of the Oxford University Communist Party, and ghost writer of all the popular author Frank Clune’s many books. During the 1930s, Stephensen and his Australia First followers grew increasingly conservative, anti-Semitic and sympathetic to Fascism. Australia First would attract Australia’s attention to the extent that Stephensen and his followers, including Adela, were in friendly contact with Japanese officials in Australia and Japan up to the outbreak of the Pacific War. The Australia First people were interned at Liverpool on the outskirts of Sydney for varying periods during World War II. Indeed, Stephensen was moved to such camps as Tatura in Victoria and did not emerge until two days after the victory against Japan in 1945. When Walsh became ill and Adela wanted to be at home with him, she went on a hunger strike, a tactic learned from her fellow suffragettes, and was released in October 1942. Walsh died in April 1943, and Adela retired from public life, after a notable career as an English naïf at large in a hard-headed country.

SUCCESS IN THE WEST

The eve of the Depression was the centenary of Western Australian settlement, and in Perth, the remotest city on earth, the professor of English at the University of Western Australia, the great essayist Walter Murdoch, was set to judge three hundred odes written to honour the state. One hymn to the state declaimed:

Hail, beauteous land! Hail bonzer west Australia;
Compared with you, all others are a failure.

Boom times for Western Australia had begun in the 1890s, during the collapse of the economies of the eastern states. British investors were attracted to the west because of great mineral promise and a lack of strikes. Western Australian wheat became a more and more important business as a result of William Farrer’s experiments in breeding new varieties for a low-rainfall country. The wheat of the world owed a great deal to that English-born agronomist who, on his farm at Lambrigg near the present site of Canberra, cross-pollinated and cross-bred wheat varieties. The Western Australian wheat lands were also heavily dosed with fertiliser to guarantee crops. As the visionary premier Sir James Mitchell put it, ‘Gold brought these men to Western Australia, and superphosphate will keep them here.’

Between 1907 and 1910, many once-unemployed labourers and former public servants were settled on wheat-growing blocks in the area of Yorkrakine, east of Perth. They were supported by the Agricultural Bank, founded by Sir John Forrest in 1895 to help wheat farmers establish their farms. The bank would even advance mortgage money, because it knew its clients intimately. The first head of the bank was a Pinjarra landowner named William Paterson, native-born, formed by the experience of having run a cattle station in the Kimberley, who now travelled round on horseback visiting his customers. He wore himself out trying to service their various needs, was beloved throughout the countryside and much mourned when he died in 1920. The new managing trustee was E.A. McLarty, of similar character, who came from a pioneering Pinjarra family, and again was not a professional economist or financier.

The Agricultural Bank had also been kind to soldier settlers after World War I; because of this, soldier settlement in Western Australia was probably more successful than elsewhere, even though neither gold nor timber looked as promising as they had earlier, and so government felt unable to extend as much capital to the wheat farmers as it had before. Nonetheless, the acreage under wheat trebled in the 1920s, and fed Premier Mitchell’s optimism. A farmer’s son himself, he positively asserted the great (though perhaps flawed) dictum that there are no bad seasons, only some with more rainfall than others.

Under the Labor man Philip Collier’s government, from 1924 to 1930, support for the wheat industry continued. Collier was a T’othersider from Victoria but was forgiven his damnable origins for his charm, literary bent, hatred of Communism, and generosity of spirit. Under him, state aid to farmers increased. Light narrow-gauge railways were pushed into country districts, and the interest bill on British capital borrowed for railway construction mounted. So the Collier government put more and more emphasis on the much-fancied Western Australian wheat. The gold industry was not as significant as in the past. The mines employed an increasing number of southern Europeans. It was not politically popular to spend public money for their benefit. Agricultural investment attracted government funds, and the first group settlement for unemployed miners was opened near Manjimup in March 1921.

Mitchell and Collier were subscribers to the same enduring Australian myth—the myth of the holiness of the bush and farmers—that had influenced earlier Australian politicians. The belief in sturdy pioneer farmers would in the end contribute to the troubles of the 1930s, but in the meantime Mitchell and then Collier favoured immigration and were adherents to the principle of group settlement, placing all arriving immigrants from the same convoy of steamers on farms located in the same region. The Queensland government had sponsored similar agricultural settlements in the 1890s. One Western Australian immigrant farmer liked it because ‘it’s as near socialism as you can get in a capitalistic system of society’. But when the whole set of schemes ran into difficulties during the 1930s, it would be attacked as a foredoomed form of state Communism.

Under the group settlement plan, immigrants would, on arrival, be selected in groups of twenty or thirty families to form a community. Six or seven members of the group were sent in advance to erect slab and iron huts, which in time would be replaced by cottages. The British press baron Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail and Evening News praised Mitchell and Western Australia, for group settlement was one of Northcliffe’s passions too, and he would spend money on a scheme near the Western Australian town that would bear his name. Yet the 1923 plan to settle six thousand suitable immigrant families on group settlements had flaws. Too many migrants were sent out too quickly. Some were settled on places like the Peel Estate south of Fremantle—swampy, poorly drained, the soil leached of all nutriment. Most of the farmers sent to that area failed. In other areas of the south-west, the settler on timbered land was required to clear some of the hardest wood trees on earth—the jarrah, the karri, the tuart—invaluable and cherished timber which, once cut down, lay where it fell, for there was no means to lift and move the enormous trees. Again, the overworked immigrant farmer, often enough a former British city-dweller, found that the timberlands did not always provide the wonderful pasture and agricultural land they had been promised. One man from the West Country in Britain declared, ‘Some weeks we were working in water up to our knees slashing down Scrubb, Mullocking Roots out, best we Could, Cold Soaked into the Skin, go back at Night to our Old Shack, all waterlogged, cold, shivering.’ There were foremen on these settlements who decided where people would live, and as anxiety mounted, so did feelings that the foremen did more favours for some than for others.

The Group Settlement Board oversaw all the schemes but had to be informed of all livestock sales and purchases and any substantial change to the farm. They had power to evict the failing farmer, but came up against farmer solidarity. In 1925, a field supervisor from the Board discovered that whenever a settler was evicted from his holding for inefficiencies, the other ‘groupies’ threatened the evictors and ostracised any newcomer who took up the block.

Helen Woolmer, the wife of a British World War I veteran who had found it impossible to get work in post-war London, arrived with her husband in 1924. After they left the quarantine station at Albany they were sent to Northcliffe. They lived in a tin shack until land was cleared and cottages erected. Many cottages had to be shared. There were no toilets and the only water was from the creek. Women and children lay on the bare earth floor covered with sacks while the men slept out in the bush. No roads, only a bush track, led into Northcliffe. There were no doctors or hospitals, no beds or blankets, no milk and no fruit. The settlers dug rough latrines but the children became ill with dysentery. The foreman told Helen Woolmer to feed hard lumps of red gum to her baby daughter and son. Then ‘barcoo rot’ began, a dietary disease that covered the children with sores. Woolmer also found that the family hut had been built over a stream that flooded in rain, and the shack had to be dismantled, taken some distance off and re-erected. Her husband was ill for four months, and though there was a sickness benefit fund to which all the settlers contributed, there had been so much sickness that it was now used up and ‘we were at starvation point, except for odds and ends donated by the [other] settlers’. She appealed to the Red Cross in Perth, and in the subsequent terrible months, she said, the Red Cross saved them with money and pharmaceuticals.

The typical immigrant woman in the bush, observer Frank Larter said, longed for simple British things such as the ringing of church bells, the cries of fishmongers and coal men, of cat-meat sellers and milk vendors, and the bells of the muffin and crumpet man. The men missed the warm local pubs, the factory sirens, the music halls and the football clubs. They even reminisced about the war with a kind of longing, since there had been greater hope then.

Mrs Reg Goldsmith and her family also arrived in Western Australia in 1924, and after a hard start at Kendenup, during which they lived on a diet of wheat and carrots, found group settlement excellent. In Group 21 at Jardee, to which the Goldsmiths moved, the range of foodstuffs had expanded and social life was very strong. There was even a government hospital nearby, and cows and poultry were available, as well as apples and pears from the local orchard. This was a golden interlude, since the Goldsmith wheat farm failed in the Depression.

The scheme was temporarily suspended in 1924, and holdings were amalgamated as more and more settlers gave up under the economic hardship of their lives. But the government was still locked into financing the scheme, even though by 1929, Mitchell, on his way to returning to power, was beginning to question the cost of it all. ‘We are drifting along,’ he said, ‘making some progress, but so little for the money we are borrowing.’

A Loan Council was founded by Prime Minister Bruce after the proposal to create one was passed at the 1928 referendum to enable it. Under it, the public debts of the Commonwealth and the states were amalgamated, and the Commonwealth agreed to help states in difficulty with loan repayment. All states would contribute an agreed sum towards interest payments and to a sinking fund. Individual states could, however, no longer levy loans from overseas investors except by way of the Loan Council.

This was an arrangement that cut into Western Australia’s pride in innovation and its belief in its especial needs and destiny. In the coming crisis it would seem to many Western Australians one reason amongst many to separate from the Commonwealth.