CHAPTER 2

The Great Crash and Fascism’s rise
Happy valleys and flirtations with extremes

THE VILLAIN OF THREADNEEDLE STREET

After the nosedive of stocks on Wall Street in 1929, credit was almost impossible to get, goods did not sell, and workers were sacked in considerable numbers, leading to a climax of Australian neediness in 1932, when unemployment reached 32 per cent. But even before the ‘Great Crash’, as people would call it, there was over 10 per cent unemployment in Australia, the ultimate outfall from sinking prices for wool, wheat and minerals. In early 1930, at the height of the Australian summer, Labor Prime Minister James Scullin knew that he was facing ‘a financial depression without parallel in the thirty years’ life of the Commonwealth’. Unemployment was already at 13.1 per cent and increased to 14.6 per cent by midyear. There were clashes in Sydney between the police and those out of work, ‘led by Communists’, as the Sydney Morning Herald of 27 February 1930 said. Many wage cuts occurred, some accepted without protest. In Queensland the shearing rate per hundred was reduced by five shillings to forty shillings. But the coal miners would not accept lower wages, and went on strike.

Under Bruce, roads and grain elevators had been built, but much of that was due to pressure from the Country Party rather than agreement with English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories US President Roosevelt would put into operation in the New Deal to help mute the impact of the Depression in the United States during the 1930s. Scullin, elected to solve the unemployment problem, and unwilling to visit remoter towns and cities by the chancy medium of aircraft, began using the radio to reach and reassure people. His talks were rather formal, and concerned with economic concepts and information on the short-term loan situation in London, topics that many of his listeners may have had trouble grasping. It was a short-term lack of jobs that riveted people’s attention. But one of Scullin’s plans was to try to prove Australia’s economic buoyancy by sending London the largest repayments on World War I and 1920s borrowings that federal and state governments could manage, and to do this as a means to encourage investment in Australia. It would be a hard act to pull off, and Jack Lang, Labor premier of the largest state, New South Wales, simply did not believe in Scullin’s repayment plans.

Scullin’s treasurer, the Queenslander Ted Theodore, saw ‘big spending’ on national projects as the answer. Scullin was sympathetic. On his journeys to and from Canberra, he looked out of the train and saw beggars in the streets of Sydney, harrowed-looking men tramping along roads. It was all complicated by the fact that the number of old-age and invalid pensioners rose by a larger number of people in 1930 than in any previous year because those who had until now been supported by relatives had to find other means of support when their family members lost their jobs. The good omen was that it would be a year of high wheat and wool production.

Sir Granville Ryrie, Australian financial representative in London, and Treasurer Theodore made a statement to the British money market declaring that Australia would not postpone its interest payments and pointing out that the Commonwealth had never failed to meet its obligations. This caused a temporary rallying of Australian stock prices in London.

Perhaps the most significant of Scullin’s radio appeals to the populace was made on the evening of 4 March 1930, when he launched his ‘Grow More Wheat’ campaign. He said that Australians needed to increase their production of exportable goods. The industry that could best do this was the wheat-growing industry. To growers who performed this ‘urgent national service’, he offered prospects of an increase in their prosperity, supported by government-guaranteed prices, and assurances of businesslike marketing through a wheat pool. By contrast, the Americans intended to reduce their sowings of wheat by 10 per cent as a means of maintaining the price. But Australia should look after the problem by simply producing more. In answering his call, wheat growers were taking a risk—what if their wheat wasn’t bought after all? Some amongst them drove to town, asked banks for money to expand their crops, and found they did indeed suffer a loss, even under the government guarantee. Though Scullin had never intended this result, it was a failed policy for which the country intended to punish him.

When the Depression started, the government-owned Commonwealth Bank acquired all the trading banks’ gold reserves as the first step in meeting the demands of the time. It found that the gold reserves were not enough, however, to make up for the disastrous falling off in exported goods. There were two sources of finance left—the depleted British sterling reserves Australia had earned from the sale of Australian exports to Britain, and the receipts of the Australian trading banks. During January 1930, Scullin had initiated negotiations for an issue of £5 million Australian bonds to be sold in Britain and elsewhere, but the bond market had imploded too, and in any case it did not want to buy Australian bonds.

In the first third of the century, from 1900 to the Depression, the population had grown from 3.7 million to 6.5 million. There were far more people to feel the misery than there had been in the 1890s depression. As the catastrophe of 1929 extended its misery into 1930 and thereafter, some moralists took a dour satisfaction from these events. Younger Australian families of the 1920s had spent so much on consumer goods, they fulminated, from motor cars to player pianos to gramophones and refrigerators, that it was merely appropriate they should now see many of their treasures carried off by bailiffs. Lower wages would bring the economy back into balance, some experts believed, without thinking of the fact that lower wages meant fewer people to buy the motor cars, player pianos, gramophones and cabinet radios. If the manufacturers could not sell enough of those goods, they would have to sack still more of their employees.

It struck many Australians powerfully now that in the Soviet Union every adult who wanted to work had a job. This hopeful view of Stalin’s horrific Soviet Republics went uninformed by knowledge of the famine of the early 1920s or, during the 1930s, starvation in the Ukraine and elsewhere, which would lead to a combined loss—by Stalin’s own admission—of ten million. In any case, the demand, whether from Communists, socialists or simply desperate men and women, was for the justice of a job. The appeal, uttered in parks, on the streets, or even from within the steel-mesh cages inside which the radical orators of the Domain in Sydney locked themselves as a means of defying arrest, increased in the establishment a belief that atheistic Communism was finding its voice on Australia’s streets. For even a noted clergyman, the Reverend W.C. Chandler of Lithgow, a town now full of unemployed miners, declared that ‘the present order of society has been tried and found wanting, and it must be replaced by evolution or revolution’.

As the Depression progressed it did indeed seem that the order of things was breaking down. The New South Wales Government Savings Bank closed down in 1931 after crowds of people gathered in Martin Place, Sydney, to withdraw their money. Since its closure seemed indefinite, many of its clients were forced to sell off their deposit books to speculators for half the value of what they had actually deposited in the bank. People now stormed the Commonwealth Bank in Castlereagh Street, and the bank governor had to stand on top of the counter and tell them there was no need to extract their money since the Commonwealth of Australia guaranteed their deposits. The Commonwealth Bank eventually amalgamated with the state savings banks to cover further panics, but banks generally were in such bad odour for rebuffing depositors who tried to withdraw their deposits that it was common for people to throw bricks through their windows.

Despite the reassurances, there was a chance now that the Commonwealth Bank would collapse, because it held less and less export money. The bank pointed out to the amiable and hapless Scullin government that, considering all possible sources of funds, there would not be enough to fulfil the government’s obligations to pay wages to public servants and the interest on its considerable overseas debts up to 30 June 1930. Out of its own reserves, the bank was able to finance only until 31 March 1930 those governments that banked with it, that is, the federal, South Australian and Tasmanian governments. (The other states had done their raising of funds through the Westminster Bank and the Bank of England, and would be faced with similar problems.) The Commonwealth Bank suggested that the British government be approached to postpone the half-yearly interest payment of £2.77 million due on Australia’s world war debt on 31 March.

Britain itself was under pressure now to repay US banks the war loans it had taken out in America. The Westminster Bank was already alarmed at having to provide ‘substantial accommodation’ of repayments, as well as reluctantly lending the Australian states £9.75 million at the beginning of February. It said it could no longer agree to increases in overdrafts asked for by the suddenly hard-up New South Wales, Victorian and Western Australian governments, who were in the hopeless situation of trying to borrow money to meet their repayments.

Early in February 1930, Treasurer Theodore told a meeting of the Commonwealth Bank and the trading banks that £13 million would be needed before 30 June. The banks must help out all governments who defaulted, he said, because Australia could not depend on British bankers to help. The Australian trading banks refused. So now the Commonwealth Bank approached the British Chancellor of the Exchequer himself to arrange temporary deferment of the March war-debt payment. The chancellor referred the matter to the governor of the Bank of England, the institution whose nickname was ‘the old lady of Threadneedle Street’. The Bank of England’s financial controller, Sir Otto Niemeyer, asked for more information about the debtor, the Commonwealth of Australia, about the total value of the 1929–30 wool and wheat exports, and how much of both had been sold. Niemeyer had been Controller of Finance at the British Treasury and a member of the Financial Committee of the League of Nations before transferring to the Bank of England in 1927. If he was satisfied that everything was being done in Australia to meet the emergency, Niemeyer—depicted in Australia as a slim and bloodless automaton—could be prepared to help find the £25 million that would meet government commitments for nearly a year, up to 31 January 1931, and would recommend postponement of the war-debt payment. But when the Scullin government’s answer came, Niemeyer declared himself unsatisfied with it. He was not comfortable dealing with a Labor government anyhow, and was alarmed by the fact that many members of the Labor Party were in favour of political control over the printing and issuing of banknotes and wanted Scullin to order such a printing. Niemeyer was already particularly concerned in any case about Australia’s attitude to the gold standard, by which the value of paper money was underpinned by holdings of gold. She had exported a considerable proportion of gold reserves to pay debts, yet had made no attempt to reduce her banknote issue. Someone must go and straighten out the Australians and remind them of their obligations!

The Bank of England did not want to give the impression that whomever it sent to Australia would be interfering with Australian domestic affairs. The emissary: Sir Otto Niemeyer himself! Scullin agreed to welcome Niemeyer, but to Scullin’s battler constituency, prim Niemeyer would become one of the great Satans of Australian history, a banker robot who put loan repayment above the sufferings of the Australian populace. Niemeyer’s own lack of human colouration would feed into the concept of his vampire-hood.

But the knowledge that Niemeyer was coming to Australia brought an immediate improvement in government bond prices in London and encouraged Scullin and Theodore greatly. Scullin hoped the idea that the great Niemeyer was coming to straighten out the Australians would also relieve the pressure on states who dealt with the Westminster Bank. But in fact the pressure only increased, and the Commonwealth Bank had to lend some Australian money to pay interest due to the Westminster Bank at the end of June 1930. This reduced to a dangerously low level the Commonwealth Bank’s assets.

Niemeyer arrived in Perth in July 1930, accompanied by T.E. Gregory, Professor of Banking at the University of London, and R.N. Kershaw, an Australian on the staff of the Bank of England. After only three weeks, which he spent mainly in meetings and social gatherings with bankers who were disgruntled with the government, he met the Loan Council to give his preliminary verdict on the Australian crisis. Niemeyer had been in Australia barely a month when, at a meeting in Melbourne, he issued his judgement on the state of things to Scullin and the premiers. Between 1911 and 1927–28, per capita productivity had increased by a mere 1 per cent, he lectured them. Thus the country, with its borrowings by federal and state governments, was living beyond its means: the standard of living was too high. Its tariff levels, which protected the prices Australian manufacturers asked for their products, were also too high: ‘I assume that everybody in this room is in agreement that costs must come down . . . there seems to me to be little escape from the conclusion that in recent years Australian standards have been pushed too high relatively to Australian productivity and to general world conditions and tendencies.’

Chastened premiers (except for Lang of New South Wales) and Prime Minister Scullin agreed with Niemeyer’s terms, and undertook to balance their budgets in 1930–31. In that room in Melbourne, Niemeyer was dragging a desperate set of politicians towards policies very different from Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt was not only a force of nature but also had a vast manufacturing base, if presently in a flaccid condition, and was in a stronger position to deal with offshore banks through his borrowings from American ones and through bond issues. Australia was—and this proved it yet again—not America. In any case, the premiers who gave their pledge to Niemeyer secretly knew that their books could not be quickly balanced, and that to try to do it at the expense of all aid to the unemployed was political suicide. A pledge to balance budgets was a gesture they had to make to satisfy the overseas banks and perhaps encourage them to be more lenient and more forthcoming. As well as that, Niemeyer and the head of the Commonwealth Bank Board, Sir Robert Gibson, must have themselves known that budgets could not be balanced in such a short time. They were all, said Gibson later, the Englishmen and the Australians, trying to ‘achieve the necessary atmosphere’. They were doing a fiscal tango.

Niemeyer departed, but his advice led to a meeting of Commonwealth and state governments in Melbourne in mid-August, whose object was to restate the necessity for balancing all budgets. Until external debt was dealt with, any further loan money would need to come from Australian sources. A special account was to be opened at the Commonwealth Bank by the Australian governments solely for the payment of interest on loans. And the Commonwealth and state treasurers would publish monthly, in Australia and overseas, a brief summary showing revenue and expenditure, the position on short-term debt, and debt repayment generally. And all this would be aimed at increasing Australia’s bona fides and attracting British credit and investment.

Could matters have been handled differently? Were the Australians mere subjects whipped into shape by Niemeyer? Whatever the judgement of experts, for the Australian working class, Sir Otto Niemeyer was an imperial villain who snatched bread from their children’s lips.

MARMITE JAR YEARS

Before looking at Jack Lang’s rebellion against the so-called Premiers’ Plan, it is appropriate to see what this situation was doing to the mass of unemployed. If a person wanted a job then he had to accept lower wages—that was ingrained conservative economic thinking. Phyllis Ackland and her husband would have willingly done so, and had—like many others—taken to the road looking for such ill-paid employment. They had gone to Temora in New South Wales where Phyllis’s husband looked for work. Phyllis was six months pregnant and had a baby with bronchitis. The family slept in the park—‘overcoats for blankets and nothing else. We didn’t even have a spoon for the baby.’ A man who had worked with her husband gave them a spare room, but they lay on the bare boards. And yet there was pride and necessity at work in that time. People, said Phyllis, ‘made blankets out of corn bags which they would dye green, and curtains out of chaff bags, and the kids’ clothes out of flour bags’. Phyllis said that after they moved to Port Kembla, her husband could get only occasional work and ‘it took us seven years to pay off the grocer’s bill’. ‘We didn’t recover from the Depression, ever! . . . we ended up drinking out of Marmite jars.’

Eddy Harmer of Wonthaggi in Victoria was laid off in 1932 with 480 other miners and became dependent on the state’s dole: ‘It was a terrific shock and humiliation for me to think I was lowered down so far that I had to form a queue, along with the missus, to put these dole tickets over the counter. At first, for a man, wife and a child, it was eleven and sixpence worth of dockets [per week].’ There was a three-shilling docket which could go to pay for groceries, another three-shilling docket for bread and another three shillings for meat, together with two and six for the child allowance.

The indignities of queuing and handing over tickets to storekeepers affected the Harmers, and Eddy helped form the Wonthaggi Workers’ Unemployed Union and became its secretary. The Unemployed Union’s aim was to do away with the docket system and get money in its place. They eventually won that concession from Victorian premier Sir Stanley Argyle. But the government also gave the power to distribute the money to councils, who were to allocate work to justify the handouts.

People like Harmer, the unemployed activists, were sent by the council to work at what he called Siberia, an area where night soil was buried. He believed he was put there to keep him from agitating amongst those working on the roads, since he was, like other former Wonthaggi miners, considered a Red, even though he was not a Communist. Hence there was tension between Harmer’s need to be able to feed his family without molestation, and his desire at the same time to take part in the union and activate his fellow workers. At Wonthaggi Town Hall, the town clerk told Harmer that his dole payment had not come through. ‘I sat in the old park there, near the Post Office, and asked myself: How the devil can I go home to my wife without the money?’ When he went to see Idris Williams, president of the Miners’ Union, Williams became excited and declared he’d been waiting for a case just like this, a miner out of work who was refused the dole because he had taken a militant line. That was all very well for Williams, Harmer thought, but what do my wife and kids live off in the meantime?

So Harmer returned for one more confrontation with the town clerk, and told him that Williams would call a public meeting on Sunday and let all the people in Wonthaggi know what had happened. Faced with this threat of turbulence, the town clerk went into a back office and found that Harmer’s money had in fact just come through. He even gave Harmer some clothing. Harmer could not help being delighted, but Williams was infuriated. ‘You sacrificed the struggle for thirty-four and sixpence and a pair of boots and a couple of shirts,’ he declared.

Harmer continued with the struggle, however, and was involved in organising a march on Parliament House in Melbourne. The Country Party’s Dunstan government increased the dole by four and six, but many conservative people who saw or heard about the march took it as yet another sign of Red revolution on the hoof.

Lang meanwhile had made his own inroads into unemployment. Newly re-elected as premier in New South Wales in 1930, Lang was a workers’ hero. He had set out, using steamrollers and machinery borrowed from councils, and picks and shovels borrowed from the army, to build what workers called ‘Gallipoli’—the Parramatta Road between Homebush and Lidcombe. To pay for it, and also to raise the money to subsidise what hard-up farmers got from their wheat, he floated a loan within Australia with the help of journalists from the Sun and the Evening News. One farmer wanted to invest a prize bull in the loan.

Generally the Depression was hell for farmers too. Bill Entz was a soldier settler in Far North Queensland, on the Atherton Tablelands, where he had been given 69 acres (28 hectares). He and his family walked off the land without telling anyone, carrying their suitcases, the children trailing. ‘Left everything, completely broke! I worked out west until the disease known as Barcoo spews got me.’ As his son, also Bill, remembered, his father had, like many, ‘shot through’ and left his debts. ‘And he never forgave Mother [that] she advised him to.’ The children’s mother came from Kent, ‘a lovely, green, civilised area . . . [In Australia] she lived in bag humpies with dirt floors, and a dirt floor means that everything in sight is dirty too. She got a house with a floor in it when she was fifty.’

And after its great success, the west became an arena of tears. A Western Australian woman named Vera had found, as had many others throughout the Commonwealth, that the hard times had begun in the mid-1920s. Her father was a returned soldier and the bank owned their twenty-acre (eight hectare) property. The father could not get any pension from the Repatriation Commission. Things became worse as his health failed and there was less of a market, as the Depression struck, for the biscuits Vera and her mother made and hawked around the businesses and doctors’ offices of St Georges and Adelaide Terraces in Perth.

The state government involved itself in help for the unemployed only when the task became too great for private charitable organisations and municipal councils. The Lord Mayor of Perth’s Fund, for example, had provided meal and bed tickets, but ran out of money by July 1930. Other voluntary organisations still operational included the Salvation Army, the Silver Chain and the Ugly Men’s Association (a peculiarly Western Australian charity), along with the RSL. The RSL proposed a meeting for unemployed ex-servicemen, and over four hundred turned up, skilled workers who wanted not sustenance but jobs.

In Western Australia, the state’s sustenance allowance was seven shillings a week for a single man, fourteen shillings for a married couple and seven shillings for each child under fourteen, up to a maximum of five children. For single men, two-sevenths was in the form of cash, and the rest came as orders or dockets for food, meals or accommodation. But no Western Australian male could claim this dole until he had sold all his assets apart from his home, if he owned one. People called going on welfare ‘going on sus’, and struggled to avoid it.

One of the problems was that Western Australia lacked genuine plutocrats. The old pastoral dynasties such as the Lee-Steeres, the Lefroys and the Wittenooms might have owned a couple of sheep stations and a wide-verandaed townhouse in West Perth or Peppermint Grove, but they were more affluent than opulent. They were nothing like the members of the Adelaide or Melbourne Clubs, or of the Union Club in Sydney. Those who had made a lot of money in Western Australia—the cattle kings such as Sam Copley and Isadore Emanuel—were living in London. Seventy-year-old Harry Boan was the owner of local department stores, a man who began by selling goods out of a suitcase on the goldfields. He now became a prodigiously generous provider to the unemployed. A similar story was that of Sir Charles McNess, a seventy-year-old Scots Presbyterian-cum-Anglican who had arrived in Western Australia in 1876 and opened a small hardware store, and made his fortune from there. Approached by the gifted state public servant Louis Edward Shapcott and asked to funnel money to the unemployed through one of the boards Shapcott ran under state government aegis, the State Gardens Board, McNess agreed. A great deal of McNess’s money was in this way spent topping up the dole of men put to work on a town-building project at Yanchep, north of Perth, for which Shapcott acquired the machinery by borrowing it from various state government departments. The men working for the dole at Yanchep found that they received three days’ work at award wages, and were thus doing better than their fellows working elsewhere. Shapcott also received a further £5000 from McNess to help the state government build a number of new houses. This project became larger still when the state government threw in £15,000 given to it out of federal relief money. All these funds were stretched by Shapcott so that some men were able to be kept in work for a year. McNess, like his fellow septuagenarian Harry Boan, was also donating money to the Lord Mayor’s Fund. He and his wife Annie lived frugally, honouring that great Scottish virtue, thrift. Simply through his housing trust, his ultimate donations amounted to £90,000, an unprecedented act of benevolence by any standards in that era. Before the Depression was over, Lady McNess died, and Sir Charles donated £11,500 to construct the Lady McNess Memorial Drive in the Darling Ranges—another project providing work for the unemployed.

The government plan to send unemployed single men to the former military camp at Blackboy Hill was at first resisted, but Blackboy became a viable farming operation and soon some men were applying to go there, putting their names on a waiting list. Those who resided at Blackboy Hill worked in a nearby national park at the foot of the Darling Ranges.

Meanwhile, many local relief committees, such as that in Geraldton, were reduced to giving unemployed young men five shillings to go and look for work elsewhere. There was a powerful sense that young unemployed men, milling together, were trouble of one sort or another, and certainly could make political trouble, and were better moved on. When Perth workers went to country towns in the hope of finding work on the harvests that Premier Mitchell had spoken about so positively, they found themselves accommodated in public halls but without blankets—the metropolitan demand for those items was so intense that Perth had none left to send to the bush.

Throughout Australia, men who were moved on from town to town were often surly or rebellious. In many cases, towns provided only one-night stays to those looking for work. Non-residents who presented themselves at Fremantle for public accommodation or sustenance were sent back to where they had last come from.

It was not the age of universal human dignity.

At the start of his second stint in government in November 1930, New South Wales premier Lang passed legislation in favour of those hit by the Depression. To the poor, Lang seemed to be the only person standing up for them, and they were willing to celebrate him for that fact. ‘We are great Lang people here,’ said Phyllis Ackland. ‘Over our fireplace for years we had written up J.T.L.—Justice, Truth and Liberty. We called him Justice, Truth and Liberty Lang.’ He had framed an Anti-Eviction Bill restraining landlords from auctioning tenants’ possessions to recover rent. He planned to legislate to postpone the date for the repayment of the principal of mortgages and other loans, and to ensure that guarantors of loans were no longer held responsible for payment of defaulted loans. He put in place a state lottery to assist hospitals, and an increased unemployment relief tax. ‘Should the men who had done the fighting,’ he asked in his combative manner, ‘now go without the necessities of life in order that the international money ring should have its pound of flesh?’ There was some measure of anti-Semitism in his oratory, and Otto Niemeyer’s Jewishness played to that as well; Lang spoke of ‘London Jews with their fat rake-offs’.

The Federal Labor Conference of May–June 1931 occurred in a land where unemployment was well on its way to the official 29 per cent it would achieve in the following year, higher than that of the United States, Britain and Canada. The impact on diminishing wages for workers and the income of small farmers and shop owners was massive. And now Jack Lang, returned to the premiership of New South Wales, had parliamentary disciples in the federal House and amongst delegates to the federal conference. He wanted to destroy Scullin and Theodore, who had both succumbed to Niemeyer. The conference opened in Canberra on 26 May, and Scullin’s chief opponents were the inflationists like Lang, who wanted more money printed, and who favoured defaulting on loans. Theodore, Scullin and Tasmanian member of parliament Joseph Lyons spoke dutifully about the economies they had made in their spending, but their sense of social justice did not allow them to cut pensions and the program of child endowment. Yet by now, Scullin had had it reinforced by the Bank of England and the Commonwealth Bank that he really must cut his social justice program, in which he believed not only on the political plane but theologically. Again, as for other Catholic politicians, his social justice text was Rerum Novarum, Catholicism’s answer to Marx.

The conference knew that Lang had begun defaulting on state loans, and he was expelled with the entirety of ‘Lang Labor’ from the federal ALP. For, as civilised leaders, Scullin and most premiers believed, they would all have to honour debts. Lang in turn expelled from the New South Wales branch New South Wales members who supported Scullin. Labor was fatally torn apart. ‘That was the basis of our dispute with the Scullin government,’ said Lang. ‘They were prepared to carry out the dictates of Sir Otto Niemeyer. We were not.’ It would be five years before the branches were reunited under John Curtin.

At a Premiers’ Conference in June 1931, the same fiscal and social pieties were invoked and a Premiers’ Plan forged. There seemed no way out for Scullin. What he was trying to achieve could only be done by reducing the entitlements of the poor and the affluent, of both the pensioner (whose payment was reduced by 20 per cent) and the bondholder (22 per cent). Savings interest was also cut. The Premiers’ Plan slogan was ‘Equality of Sacrifice’.

Lang, the vinegary real-estate agent of Granville, was not willing to buy into the Premiers’ Plan. He flayed the financial institutions like an Old Testament prophet, and Niemeyer was once more his target. Niemeyer was a bailiff sent by the British to garnish Australia’s finances! The philosophy behind the Premiers’ Plan of 1931, Lang argued, was that unemployment was not a fault of the capitalist system but rather due to unreasonable union or workers’ demands. Lang would not accept that argument. He was aware that America had agreed to reduce interest rates payable by Britain on her World War I debts, and extend the repayment period to sixty-two years. Why could not Britain do likewise for Australian debt, particularly given their relationship and Australia’s help in saving the Empire in World War I?

Lang attacked the other premiers’ commitment to the cut in expenditure, and when an economist laughed at him, he said, ‘The man who suffers doesn’t laugh at all; he just suffers . . . you hear a lot of economists telling us what we ought to do. It is like their confounded impudence.’ Lang urged that ‘immediate steps be taken by the governments State and Federal to abandon the gold standard of currency, and to set up in its place a currency based upon the wealth of Australia, to be termed “the Goods Standard”’. This would allow more printing of money without undermining its value, he argued. Above all, Lang’s dissent from the Premiers’ Plan was his intention to refuse to meet loan-interest payments.

Again, in the streets and around bare tables, Lang’s fury was applauded.

Lang’s first move in his economic rebellion was a refusal to repay £737,000 owing to the Westminster Bank on Treasury bills, a debt that the bank was refusing to renew. His next move was to introduce in the New South Wales Parliament a Reduction in Interest Bill. It failed to pass in the Legislative Council. But financial institutions were in a ferment about Jack Lang.

UNHAPPY VALLEYS AND EVICTIONS

On 17 June 1931, the police were sent to Brancourt Avenue in Sydney’s Bankstown to carry out an eviction order against the tenant family who lived there. When they arrived, they found the house barricaded. The riot that followed was considered one of the most serious clashes the state had seen.

Tenants were in trouble everywhere, and some were allowed to stay by compassionate landlords, or else landlords who did not want their property damaged by organised supporters of evictees. Many of those evicted, however, lived in shanty camps, called ‘happy valleys’, at La Perouse, Milperra or Clontarf. The Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM) which, amongst other things, applied itself to the question of evictions, was founded on May Day 1930, in part through the activism of the Communist Party. It expanded beyond the control of the Communists, however, for men and women did not need to fall back on doctrine to work out that they could not pay the rent. Soon there were branches of the UWM all over Sydney, for it was an idea and a structure of brotherhood to which people could turn to soothe their sense of utter and lonely helplessness. In the year from May 1930, the UWM staged a series of what in a later generation would be called ‘sit-ins’, to prevent the eviction of out-of-work tenants.

The first of the UWM’s anti-eviction sit-ins occurred in Glebe in Sydney on New Year’s Day 1931. A widow living with her children in a one-room cottage owed three weeks’ rent. The gas and electricity supply had been cut off by the time members of the Glebe UWM met with the owner outside the cottage. Whatever pressure the local UWM put on him, the landlord agreed to allow the woman and her children to remain there rent-free. It was a satisfactory and morale-raising success for the union, which considered any threats it might employ in its cause negligible when compared to the crimes of capital and landlordism.

In February 1931, a Greek family in Surry Hills was served with an eviction notice for £5 in arrears. The notice came from the Permanent Trustee Company, which owned their cottage and many others in Surry Hills. The UWM moved in to occupy and guard the premises, and local shopkeepers and others kept them supplied with food throughout February. The little house became an occupied fortress, though the strikers were not armed. Several attempts by bailiffs to evict the Greek family were repulsed by persuasion, forceful or otherwise. Eventually, magistrates gave police the power to remove trespassers from private rental property, and the house was repossessed peaceably by bailiffs and police.

During March and April 1931, UWM members averted an eviction in Donnelly Street, Balmain, and another in Booth Street, Annandale. Two eviction notices served in Rozelle were withdrawn when the UWM turned up. A UWM occupation of a rented house in Granville persuaded the landlord to retract his eviction order. Sixty UWM members resisted an eviction in Lakemba in May 1931; two of the family of eight who were renting the Lakemba house were a father and son who had served in World War I. Indeed, in many cases former Diggers cooperated with the UWM in preventing the evictions of veterans. In the Lakemba case, too, the family was permitted to stay.

In May 1931, a house in Douglas Street in Redfern, which had been rented for many years by prompt rent payers the MacNamara family, became a target for eviction. After Jack MacNamara had lost his job as a boot machinist in a factory closure in December 1929, he had managed to keep paying the rent until December 1930. By May 1931 the MacNamaras were £25 in arrears. When the landlord sought their eviction, the MacNamara family locked themselves in with five UWM members, barricaded the windows, and hung a red flag from the veranda. At the end of the month, the police, sick of negotiating, arrived—fifteen in number—and smashed through the front door and beat several of the UWM members. With revolvers drawn, the police ordered the crowd that had gathered outside to vanish, and the MacNamaras were on the streets, discussing their limited options.

Evictions were occurring all over Australia. The Unemployed Melbourne Men’s Group had been evicted from terraces in Fitzroy and as a protest dumped their pathetic furniture on the tramlines outside Parliament. The same group fought unsuccessfully against an eviction in South Melbourne.

In Sydney, increasing numbers of UWM members attended evictions, and so did police. Seventy police had to be used to break into a house in Starling Street, Leichhardt, defended by a crowd of two hundred UWM supporters. The Brancourt Avenue, Bankstown, anti-eviction occupation by the UWM was likely to attract special force from the authorities. Bankstown was at the limits of Sydney, and by 1930 more than 60 per cent of Bankstown males were out of work and 40 per cent of its houses were empty. Evicted homeless families were living on vacant land near the Chullora Railway Workshops in shacks made of hessian bags, kerosene tins and saplings. Life here was of the most rudimentary kind, says Tom Galvin, who lived in the original Happy Valley near Botany Bay. His family lived in a shanty six metres by three, on a sand floor covered with hessian bags. Cooking could be done on a primus stove or on a fire outside. Until a pipe was put in, the inhabitants walked a kilometre and back again to fetch their water from the golf course. Politics were argued in the Botany Bay Happy Valley, but inevitably no one blessed the angels of capital. Nonetheless, Galvin remembered a councillor named Wilson who owned a store in Anzac Parade from which he dispensed furniture to the inhabitants; the Chinese market gardeners sold their less perfect fruit and vegetables very cheaply; and a woman named Mrs Herbert Field laboured like a modern-day aid worker in these internal refugee camps.

But in Bankstown, the house in contest was owned by a war widow, Isabelle McDonald, and was let to Alfred Parsons, an ex-Digger and itinerant labourer, married and with two young daughters. Parsons failed to pay the rent from April until mid-May. After a policeman delivered the eviction notice to him, Parsons invited the UWM to occupy the house, for he had been attending UWM meetings which were held outdoors on Friday nights near the Bankstown Railway Station. Now Parsons and his UWM friends sandbagged the walls, surrounded it with barbed wire, and over the front door painted the words ‘Remember Eureka!’

In the delay between eviction notice and the act itself, the UWM members and the Parsons family enjoyed each other’s fraternal company. In the evenings, on a nearby vacant site, the UWM would hold sing-alongs, with a seventeen-year-old fiddler named Alexander Makaroff and a tenor named John Corbett. Seventeen men, including Makaroff the fiddler, slept on the floor of the house and took their turn as sentry. On the morning of the eviction there was a UWM meeting at Bankstown Railway Station which was attended by more than three hundred people. One speaker said that what was happening in Bankstown ‘was only the beginning of the revolution’.

At 6.45 on the morning of 17 June, a force of more than thirty police cars and three Black Marias (police vans) surrounded the house. Possibly as many as 120 police advanced from the vehicles, throwing stones at the windows and onto the tin roof. Pistols were turned on bystanders, who were warned to keep away. The seventeen defenders were arrested one by one at gunpoint. Only one of them, John Bowles, had a record of activism—he had joined the Communist Party at Broken Hill when he was a miner. Nine of the seventeen were returned soldiers, survivors either of Gallipoli or of the Western Front.

The police version was that as they forced their way in through the back door they were attacked by those inside wielding piping and pick handles. Inspector White claimed that he had been struck on the head with a large stone by Richard Eatock, an Aboriginal brickyard labourer, and suffered a fractured skull. But according to two of the arrested, Eatock, after being shot in the thigh, was then batoned and kicked into unconsciousness. Murray Lavender had a bullet graze on the head and was beaten with batons. Some of the other defenders were also severely beaten and were carried out unconscious. Prisoners made sworn statements denying the police version. John Arthur Terry, a survivor of nearly three years on the Western Front, said he had never seen ‘such bestiality’. Lawyer Clive Evatt, defending those arrested, set out to question the police account but was prevented from doing so.

Events took an even more intense form. A day after the Bankstown eviction, the UWM were engaged in resisting an eviction in Union Street, Newtown. As the police took away UWM members ‘almost insensible’ in the Black Marias, they were jeered and threatened by a crowd of almost a thousand people. The men arrested there and charged with riot joined the seventeen from Bankstown on remand in Long Bay Gaol. In July 1931, the Newtown defendants were tried, and a hung jury could not reach a verdict. A second trial began in September 1931, also ending in a hung jury, and a third trial took place in November 1931. Defence discovered that the police had evicted the inhabitants of the house a day before the warrant came into effect. This gave no ultimate help to the defendants, however. Sixteen men received sentences of between three and eighteen months. One UWM man, Andrew Dunbar Thompson, was sent to gaol for six months. The UWM described these men as ‘international class-war prisoners’. The UWM came to the conclusion that turning every house into a fortress of barbed wire and sandbags would not be as effective any more as bringing out the mass UWM membership in protest against the evictions. It was as a result of a UWM march, or certainly after it, that Premier Jack Lang froze rents; still an active estate agent himself, he hoped that this measure would cause the UWM’s anti-eviction demonstrations to diminish in number.

NAMING AN AUSTRALIAN

Amidst the Australian misery, James Scullin had one triumph. It occurred at the Imperial Conference in 1930. He would be away from Australia, wisely or not, from August 1930 to early 1931. With Scullin in London for the conference, the deputy premiership went to James Fenton, a Victorian journalist who would, in November 1931, vote against the government on a no-confidence motion, and join the United Australia Party led by Joe Lyons.

Many of his supporters in Australia thought Scullin should have excused himself from the Imperial Conference, and he himself declared the mission he was attempting was probably too big for any one man to encompass. At Fremantle, suffering from bronchial infection, he had told unionists who visited him in his cabin aboard the ship to London that he was appalled that the hostile Senate had thwarted him in all his planned legislation to help the unemployed, and he hoped soon to be able to relieve the sufferings of Australians.

This was no joy trip for Scullin. On the way, he suffered from congestive illness and pleurisy, even as he kept in contact with ministers by ship’s radio, and he fell sick again in Colombo, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). He could not do much when he first arrived in England, having to stay aboard the steamer for his health’s sake, but he was determined to address the League of Nations in Geneva on armament reduction and visit the International Labour Organization, so he stayed aboard as the ship made its way to Toulon. He ultimately reached London in late September, to be greeted by ministers of Ramsay MacDonald’s British Labour government. Scullin was horrified to find articles in the London press declaring that Australia would repudiate its debts. He perhaps did not fully understand that many Labor members were now publicly talking about this option back in Australia.

In any case, to him, this at once seemed to justify his presence in Britain. He would calm the press, the British government, the banks. Scullin was sure he was doing the right thing by demonstrating Australia’s perhaps unreal confidence and buoyancy, and taking the opportunity to speak to the British government (without a lot of success, admittedly) about Australian exports and why Britain should prefer them and throw up a barrier of duties against non-British dominion products. He was thinking particularly of wheat, the same wheat he had urged farmers to grow. He also tried to prevent a slackening off on the building of the naval base in Singapore, but was informed by the British Ministry of Defence that war was unlikely to break out in the next ten years and that ‘Japan, in particular . . . was unlikely to disturb the peace’.

Scullin did not yield to any British government pressure on White Australia, and voted for the proposals that would underpin the Statute of Westminster, passed by the British Parliament the next year, which basically got rid of all legal and constitutional inequalities between the government of the United Kingdom and the governments of the dominions, and gave them the absolute right to pursue their own policies in foreign affairs and defence. Canada and South Africa would quickly pass laws to give the statute effect in their countries, but it was not until 1942, when the idea of Empire-wide defence and foreign policy collapsed in Australia under the threat of Japan, that Australia would legislate it. A reasonable symbol of Scullin’s mixed success in England came when he met British aeronautical industry leaders to discuss connecting Australia and the United Kingdom with a regular air service (something that would eventually occur). The issue was aborted when the experts Scullin had spoken to were all killed in a dirigible crash in France.

But he did have one unqualified success. He had been involved in a constitutional issue that had little to do with the stricken and the threatened but was nonetheless significant. The question had arisen of who was to replace Lord Stonehaven as Governor-General. Stonehaven—Johnny Baird—was an Etonian conservative, former British Minister for Transport and the first Governor-General to reside in Canberra instead of Melbourne. Scullin considered two men suitable to replace him, both from Melbourne and both of them, remarkably, given the attitudes of such journals as the Bulletin, Jewish. One was General Sir John Monash, who was in poor health by then, and the other was Sir Isaac Isaacs, the energetic and outspoken Federationist, a man now in his mid-seventies who had been a justice of the High Court since 1906. The issue had arisen earlier than Scullin’s arrival in Britain; indeed, before he left Australia. Towards the end of the fraught March of 1930, Scullin had advised King George V to appoint Isaacs. George objected to a sole Australian nominee being elevated to the post, and declared that the Australian government had no right to force a particular individual upon him. The British Labour government agreed. The appointment was stood over until Scullin reached London for the Imperial Conference.

Towards the end of the Imperial Conference the King made it clear that he would not accept the Australian government’s recommendation for Governor-General, and that he was used to being given the courtesy of a choice between a number of names. For a man renowned for tact, Scullin now showed an unaccustomed stubbornness. He told MacDonald that ‘he would be unable to return to Australia if the appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs were refused’. One wonders if that was true, given that most Australians were focused on economic matters. His stubbornness in this constitutional area is therefore interesting. Scullin told the King’s secretary, Lord Stamfordham, ‘Presumably had we nominated an Englishman personally acceptable to the King you would not have raised the question that only one man was nominated.’ He told the Palace that he was willing to hold a referendum on the matter and fight an election on the question of whether an Australian, because of his birth, was to be barred from the office of Governor-General.

At a meeting at the Palace, the King told Scullin, according to Scullin’s own version of events, ‘It is now thirty years since I opened the Commonwealth Parliament in Australia. Since then we have sent many Governors, Commonwealth and State, and I hope they have not all been failures.’ Scullin replied that none of them had been failures (though in fact some had been) but that his desire was now to nominate an Australian. The King assured Scullin he did not want a referendum or public controversy. He said he had the highest regard personally for Sir Isaac Isaacs. The King’s final declaration, according to Scullin, was, ‘I’ve been for twenty years a monarch and I hope I have always been a constitutional one, and being a constitutional monarch I must, Mr Scullin, accept your advice which, I take it, you will tender me formally by letter.’

So, with George V’s grudging consent and approval, Isaacs was installed as the first Australian to hold the governor-generalship. The Labor Call in Australia saw this as Scullin’s triumph, in so far as he was able to ‘show the world Australians are equal, if not superior to, any imported poo-bahs’. Lord Stamfordham minuted the King: ‘It seems to me that this morning’s incident was one of the most important political and constitutional issues upon which Your Majesty has had to decide during Your twenty years of reign.’

THE END FOR SCULLIN

During Scullin’s absence in England, Australian politics went into crisis. Not only was Jack Lang making defaulting noises in New South Wales, but at the same time the amiable, middle-of-the-road Tasmanian schoolteacher Joe Lyons was already considering leaving Labor and joining the opposition. Scullin and Lyons had been young radicals together, strong orators and socialists. For now Lyons was suspended, he would later say, like Muhammad’s coffin, partway between heaven and earth, and lacking a true political home anywhere. He had assumed the duty of acting treasurer, replacing Theodore when scandal struck as discussed below. Looking at the documents put before him, he believed Australia would have to make more significant economies still, but he knew Labor would not let him. He defected, too, because of Scullin’s restoration of Theodore to the Cabinet while the outcome of an investigation into his shareholding was still not issued. Labor would later depict Lyons as a rat, but it was not without some agony of soul that he would leave the Labor Party and join the opposition Nationals in January 1931, a fortnight after Scullin’s return from Britain. He would soon become Opposition leader.

The shadow over Theodore would loom large with voters. In October 1929, the conservative Queensland government had appointed a royal commission to investigate the sale of Mungana, a silver–lead mine in north Queensland in which Theodore had holdings, to the Theodore state government earlier in the decade. After the sale, Mungana was found to be near worthless. ‘Red Ted’ Theodore was an unlikely swindler—an august, well-dressed fellow who did not hang around in fraternal groups of politicians and who spent his spare time reading and in the contemplativeness of fly-fishing. As premier, at the famous Federal Labor Conference of 1921 at which the socialist platform for the ALP was voted through (that is, the nationalisation of all means of production, distribution and supply), Theodore was the less doctrinaire leader who moved to get Communists out of the party. Theodore came to treat the unions with some dismissiveness, as if they were fretful children who didn’t know what was good for them. He had also raised land taxes, and the commercial and pastoral powers of Queensland had it in for him. He refused to appear before the royal commission, which brought its report down in early July 1930 and accused Theodore of fraud. It also condemned his friend, the former Labor premier William McCormack, for holding a secret half-share in the mines before their sale to the Queensland government. The commission found Theodore and McCormack guilty of ‘fraud and dishonesty’.

Theodore immediately resigned from the front bench until he faced criminal proceedings. He declared himself innocent and said he would demand a judicial investigation. In later times Australian parliaments would face similar scandals, but up to that era nothing like Theodore’s case had ever been brought to its attention. Thus its unprecedented nature was very damaging to the repute of Scullin’s government. It was also true that Theodore’s wealth was notable, that he dressed like a consummate gent, and many of more modest condition on the opposition benches resented all that.

Theodore was acquitted of the criminal charges in August 1931, but Scullin had reappointed him treasurer the former January, outraging Acting Treasurer Lyons and giving the pro-Lang rebel group of seven led by teetotaller Lang’s friend from New South Wales, Jack Beasley, yet more reason to be turbulent, since they considered Theodore one of Lang’s chief enemies.

Theodore had an ambition, beyond what he and Scullin were doing—to finance large projects in the manner of Roosevelt—but he could only do that by printing more money, as he couldn’t raise loans. He supported the so-called ‘Gibbons resolution’ in Caucus, a proposal that the Commonwealth Bank should in effect cover the shortfall between government tax and loan revenues and a public works program of up to £20 million. This was such a departure from Scullin’s more orthodox policies that it was thought Theodore was girding himself for a challenge to Scullin’s leadership. But in January 1931, when Scullin got back from London, Theodore changed tack and supported Scullin’s idea that Commonwealth Bank lending be directed to the private sector rather than into the hands of government. Believing that the rest of the world would soon ‘reflate’, Theodore assured the young John Curtin that he only adopted the plan as a strategy for delay, but his plans to soften the impact by making jobs had come to an end.

The reward was that Theodore was now given back his Treasury portfolio. His Central Reserve Bank Bill of April 1930, which was aimed at stabilising prices in the manner Keynes had proposed, by increasing the money supply, was defeated purely for political reasons.

At the Premiers’ Conference in February 1930, Theodore and Scullin had become exercised by this issue of price levels and how to keep them down, because they now believed a cut in real wages was unavoidable. A wage cut would generate more credit which would then ease the downward pressure on wages. Australian bondholders would not be paid a bonus yet—they must share in the hard times imposed by world events. From the sidelines Lang proposed that not only should local bondholders suffer by a reduction of interest but that payments to British bondholders should stop totally.

However, Theodore’s scheme was rejected by the bankers, whose message was like Niemeyer’s earlier: that loan repayments should trump support for the unemployed. It was also beaten down in the Senate. Then Theodore tried to release gold for shipment to the government’s account so that he could print more money for unemployment relief works and farm assistance, and also tried to abolish the requirement that the government hold a reserve of gold to back its printing of money. This proposal, too, was thwarted.

Foreseeing a forthcoming no-confidence vote against Scullin, it was thought by the diverse forces of the United Australia Party that the amiability, compassion and responsibility of Joe Lyons made him the face to lead Australia.

It was as Scullin’s destruction was planned that Jack Lang was elected back into power in New South Wales at the end of 1930. Having fallen from office in 1927, he now won his way back by pillorying Niemeyer and those who had acceded to his diagnosis and cure.

In February–March 1931, Lang’s plan on loans became the cause of a split between the New South Wales and federal executives. Federal Caucus expelled the Lang Labor faction, which included five sitting members of the House of Representatives. The Lang group were needed to keep Scullin in power, and for the moment they stuck with him, an internal opposition.

Theodore himself was expelled from the New South Wales branch of the ALP, but remained a member of the federal party. Now the Federal government had to find the money to pay for Lang’s defaults.

In Labor’s rout in the federal elections of December 1931, which was precipitated by Beasley’s pro-Lang group crossing the floor to vote with the United Australia Party, now led by Lyons, Theodore received only 20 per cent of the vote in his own Sydney electorate. He walked away from Parliament condemning Lang, the banks, and the reaction of Labor voters to it all. He went into business with huge success, but in a kinder era he might have made a prime minister, a Labor version of Menzies—though without Menzies’ flamboyance.

SACK JACK

When Lang did not meet the interest payment on his state’s debt, the Commonwealth, in late April and early May 1932, took legal steps to garner New South Wales taxes and to access part of its transport revenues. Proclamation Number 42 of 1932 ordered New South Wales public servants to deal with monies received by them in a manner directed by the federal treasurer. By then New South Wales was in default to the Commonwealth for over £2 million.

Lang recruited unemployed members of the Timber Workers’ Union to guard the state Treasury, and had begun recruiting potential special constables. To his enemies this meant that he was about to make ‘a ruthless militaristic attempt at Sovietism’. While conservative commentators reminded the New South Wales police that their first loyalty was to the King and not to the state government, throughout April, large squads of workers drilled in the early morning at suburban parks and ovals, and on 29 April fifteen hundred of them marched, supposedly in support of Lang, through the streets of Sydney. Lang’s rhetoric was that the police should defend New South Wales from ‘Federal bushrangers’. In reaction to the formation of the secret conservative armies, a Workers’ Defence Corps (WDC) was founded, and an Australian Labor Army, made up of members of various factions, including the Labor and Communist parties. Lang’s army was larger than the secret conservative armies that had been drilling for some years, and indeed his was the only serious attempt in Australia to rally a leftist corps to face off with the conservative ranks. The Federal Intelligence Branch believed that the WDC was in communication with the Red Army Council in Moscow and had close relationships with the Sinn Féin Irish republican organisation; one of the Australian branch of Sinn Féin’s leaders, known as ‘Irish Paddy’, spoke of a range of activities that would be called ‘terrorist’ by today’s standards. The leader of the Balmain branch of the WDC was a German who claimed to have been employed by the Russian Anarchist Association, while some of the Irishmen involved proudly implied that they had assassinated or ambushed police in Ireland.

But in fact the WDC did very little except fight evictions and take part in May Day rallies, and the Australian Labor Army was equally loud in its promises but frail in its performance. The conservative Old Guard’s structure was a far more serious-minded thing, and its members were better drilled, by former World War I officers. And Old Guard leader Lieutenant-Colonel Frederic Hinton, a pastoralist from Canowindra, considered that there was ‘every possibility of Lang quickly putting us under a Labor dictatorship with thousands of his supporters sworn in as specials and armed’.

The Old Guard was rather less populist and less involved in gestures than the breakaway New Guard. Its chief centre was Sydney, where the lines of organisation coalesced, and it was led by established pastoral and commercial figures. These were often related by marriage, and lived in the more fashionable reaches of the eastern suburbs or on the north shore, in Pymble and Wahroonga. They played together at Royal Sydney Golf Club. They were, in practice or by temperament, decidedly Anglican, which again meant that they were less frenzied than the evangelistic Eric Campbell, a country lawyer who had left them to form the New Guard. The Old Guard’s party of choice was the United Australia Party (UAP), which had been formed largely out of the old National Party and some Labor men, including the new prime minister, the Tasmanian schoolteacher and Catholic, Joe Lyons, who had left Scullin and gone to the conservative side. But some of the Old and particularly of the New Guard believed that parliamentary democracy had gone to seed and Australia needed a new order such as Mussolini had brought to Italy.

Philip Goldfinch, Chairman of Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR), ran the Sydney headquarters office of the Old Guard out of the CSR offices in O’Connell Street, and one of the company’s warehouses in Pyrmont was used to stockpile arms and ammunition. Brigadier General George Macarthur-Onslow was a leader, as was James Heane, ‘Cast-Iron Jimmy’, Gallipoli veteran and leader of the Second Brigade in France, and who lived at an orchard he owned in West Pennant Hills. The Old Guard ran another office in Pitt Street, one made available by Sir Mark Sheldon, Chairman of the Australian Bank of Commerce. In the country the leading figures included Lieutenant-Colonel Hinton of Canowindra, Major Albert Reed of Crowther, near Young, and Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Cameron of Aberdeen, near Scone. Members of the squattocracy such as the Whites of Belltrees, the family of the future Nobel prize-winning novelist, were involved, as were the Fagans of Mandurama. Indeed, there was in the Old Guard a respect for law. They believed their intervention in affairs should begin only when the law broke down. One Old Guard document declared that breaches of the peace should be avoided: ‘In English-speaking communities it is almost impossible to establish, or maintain a Government by force in opposition to the wishes of the majority.’

The Old Guard in the bush was made up not only of pastoralists but also, in the country towns, by doctors, solicitors, accountants, bank managers, and stock and station agents. The proprietors of the refreshment rooms at Narromine baths and of the cinema at Cumnock were members, as were garage owners at Canowindra, Blayney and Manildra. Don Whitington, a future eminent press-gallery journalist, was typical of those who were required by their employers to be involved; as a jackaroo at Keera Station, working for the Munro family, he was put in charge of a sudden supply of .303 rifles that appeared in the harness room, and which he was required to clean and keep in good order. All other Keera employees had jobs to do with the Old Guard as well. Jackaroos practised with Mauser pistols supplied by the management on many Riverina stations. The station hands were easily led by appeals to their patriotism, and by their fairly automatic allegiance to the station on which they worked.

The Old Guard were nonetheless willing to be tough on their opposition. In the country towns, the Old Guard made it uncomfortable for Labor-leaning people. In a rare display of its overreaching, two progressive-minded schoolteachers in Cowra—Charles Hanks and Hedley Gross—were targeted by the Old Guard-influenced Parents and Citizens’ Association, and were transferred to other schools. There was a confrontation when former Communist Jock Garden, considered the éminence grise of Jack Lang, came to speak in Cowra at River Park. The Old Guard wanted to throw him in the Lachlan, but two hundred Labor Army men, made up of local Labor Party branches in Cowra and Wyangala, turned up to protect him. Throughout the west of the state, vigilance committees, also known as Citizens’ Committees or Citizens’ Defence Committees, threatened working-class militants. A night-time meeting occurred in November 1931 at Dubbo, held in the open air in the lights of an encircling number of cars, and which led to the mayor being called on to expel Dubbo’s ‘Scummunists’ and ‘human dingoes’. The mayor himself, Dr Gordon Fitzhill, was a member of the Old Guard. He had already banned members of the state ALP and the Unemployed Workers’ Movement from meeting in Dubbo. After forty-eight hours had elapsed, about a thousand citizens met in the main street of Dubbo to ensure that Fitzhill’s ban on meetings was adhered to. The Dubbo UWM tried to defy the ban, a spokesman declaring that ‘if any of the so-called Dubbo White Guard [a common name for the Old Guard] interfered with this body there would be bloodshed’. There was not, however, a confrontation, and a few days later, reinforcements were called in from surrounding towns to make sure the expulsion took place. Cars came to town from Trangie, Narromine and Gilgandra, prepared to enforce the expulsion, and assembled with local automobile-owning worthies in Church Street. As the clock struck 5 p.m., they moved off to enforce the ridding of Dubbo’s streets of Laborites and UWM members.

The Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, an establishment British officer with a passion for the Royal Air Force and himself a pilot, was under great pressure from that part of society represented by the Old and even the New Guard to remove Lang, whose refusal to pay interest on debts was seen literally as criminal. The Federal government was also one of Lang’s enemies, since they had had to pay the loans he defaulted on.

Game was no Niemeyer; he was a flexible and likeable man who, like Scullin, would have preferred to hold his post in more amiable times. He received constant advice from newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, and from nearly every conservative he met (and he met many), to dismiss Lang. A gentleman told Game, ‘You should go to the Union Club to hear yourself discussed.’ All this had an impact on the man, even though he was a British liberal and had sympathy for Lang’s compassion. Under pressure, he yet decided to give Lang more time. He was in many ways less frightened of Lang’s rebellion than he was of the way the near-fascist New Guard under Eric Campbell were becoming more dangerously militant, and by reports that the New Guard were planning measures—including Lang’s kidnapping—which were in themselves criminal.

When the volatile but charismatic Eric Campbell had left the Old Guard for its perceived lack of militancy and formed the New Guard, one of his gestures was to gather those who left with him, as well as men he was accused of having picked off street corners by bus, to fight a bushfire near Cobar. The equipment they brought with them to the town was useless. The mayor of Cobar, J.T. Maidens, was a Labor man, and said that, if he could, he would get these vainglorious men out of town. On their first night in Cobar, stones were thrown into the New Guard camp. And when they left town, defeated by their own ineffectuality, they had run up a bill of £266 that the local graziers, chiefly Old Guard, chose not to meet.

On 13 February 1932, seven hundred New Guardsmen drilled at Sydney’s Belmore, then performed a transport exercise at Lansdowne Bridge and, in northern New South Wales, at Coffs Harbour. At a Sydney Town Hall New Guard Monster Rally on 18 February, all the thousands present raised their right arm in a fascist salute, while taking a solemn oath of allegiance to the New Guard and its determination to crush Communism. Game refused to accept a petition to Jack Lang signed by thousands of New Guardsmen, though the rejection, it was feared by some, might have caused Campbell to plan and execute a putsch, an attempt at a takeover of New South Wales. At Chatswood in Sydney, Campbell told his guardsmen, ‘It is anticipated your services will be required before the end of the month [May 1932].’ Plans were finalised to arrest the state Cabinet and imprison them in Berrima Gaol, or else in disused hulks moored off Ku-ring-gai Chase. An alternate plan, designed for 19 March, the Harbour Bridge opening day, was to kidnap Lang, strip him naked and escort him to the Bridge opening ceremony dressed as a beggar. The plan was all blather.

Nonetheless, on 19 March, a north shore antiques dealer, Dublin-born Captain Francis de Groot, attended on horseback the opening of the Harbour Bridge, spurred his horse through the crowd, and cut the ribbon (which was to have been cut by Lang) with his sword. Ken Hall of Cinesound News had heard that some such stunt was to occur and had cameras in place to catch the action. Cinesound Newsreel people also had a camera crew outside Lang’s house in Auburn, in case the New Guard tried to besiege him there. When de Groot’s trial was held at Central Police Court on 1 April 1932, there was a violent encounter between the police and members of the New Guard’s mobile unit. Campbell was sure that the New Guard’s numerical superiority to the police would enable them to shoulder the police away. But on the morning of the trial, Police Commissioner Mackay urged his policemen to ‘go out and belt their bloody heads off ’. In fact that was what happened. On 21 April, there was further New Guard drilling at Killara, and on 6 May, Jock Garden was bashed at his home in Maroubra by eight members of the Fascist Legion, an elite group within the New Guard who wore Ku Klux Klan-like hoods and gowns. A more respectable member of Campbell’s group, who blamed Campbell for the unnecessary violence, declared to businessman and notable figure of the Old Guard, Philip Goldfinch, the next day, ‘No more **** New Guard for me.’

The new prime minister, Joe Lyons, was aware of how close to civil catastrophe New South Wales was. On 5 May 1932, naval personnel were armed and placed outside various federal establishments such as the GPO, the 2BL studios and the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place. Were they guarding uprisings by the New Guard or by the Lang’s forces made up of his police force and supporters? It seemed that Lang loomed in Lyons’ mind as the greater peril. Wing Commander W.D. Bostock at Richmond air base told his men that the prime minister had concerns ‘about how the New South Wales Police Force might act in the event of an eyeball to eyeball confrontation between Commonwealth and State’. Improbably, tanks began to roll through the backstreets of Randwick. Earlier, in April, a direct military telephone link had been installed between Victoria Barracks, Garden Island and Customs House in Circular Quay to aid with troop deployments to sites of unrest. Now troops of the 7th Light Horse stationed in Bungendore and Canberra were detailed to exercise near Parliament House, Canberra, and, by implication, defend it. The plan was that when the Old Guard was mobilised to protect society, its members would become peace officers under the Peace Officers Act of 1925. There were plans too that members of the Light Horse and of the Old Guard were to proceed to Sydney to take the money due to the Federal government that Lang was retaining.

Had Game received in time the advice drafted for him in London, he would have seen that the Secretary of State for the Dominions expected him to let the matter of Lang’s alleged crimes be tested in the courts by the Federal government. He might have waited. He was certainly conscious of working-class, and particularly Irish–Catholic, support for Lang and did not want to alienate an entire segment of the population. He later referred to ‘my assassin’s stroke’ and was uncomfortable with the pats on the back that resulted from what he had done when he sacked Lang.

Game warned Lang by letter on 13 May 1932 that Lang would have to resign if he could not carry out essential services without taking illegal measures, such as refusing to pay debts. But Lang gave no undertaking to change his policy, and that evening Game met with him, then dismissed him, and called on the leader of the Opposition, Bertram Stevens, to form government. ‘You probably hardly realise what relief it has given to the whole of Australia,’ wrote a supporter, ‘and, if the election goes all right you will have definitely saved the country of Australia.’

The state election that followed saw a swing to the United Australia and United Country parties. But around the humbler kitchen tables of New South Wales, there was an assumption that Game acted on behalf of the banks, the bondholders and their economic and political tyranny, and it is obvious that he had other options. J.T. Tully, Lang’s recent Minister for Lands, told an audience in Queanbeyan that the dismissal was unconstitutional and that the party had not been defeated on the floor of the House on any question. He said that Game’s action was a challenge against democratic government.

In January 1935, Game left Sydney, probably with relief, and in the same year took over the commissionership of the London Metropolitan Police. In that office he encountered and needed to deal with the British equivalent of Eric Campbell in the person of the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

With Lang sacked, Campbell’s New Guard members began to suspect the intentions of the Fascist Legion, located mainly in the eastern suburbs, which saw part of its duty as being to spy on possibly disloyal members of the New Guard organisation itself. This helped bring about many aggrieved resignations. It also became increasingly obvious that only a very small, radical proportion of the New Guardsmen would actually follow Campbell if he took on the police. Many of the membership wanted reunion with the Old Guard.

When, on 7 May, Campbell delivered a short speech to the ‘other ranks’ of the 36th Field Battery, and said he could see that the old AIF spirit still prevailed, there were raspberries and cries of ‘Get fucked!’ By May 1932, the New Guard was largely a spent force. Campbell’s chief hope remained that when a clash came between state and federal forces he might be able to use the confusion to his advantage. It would prove inadequate. Campbell’s army would diminish. He would write a pro-fascist tract, survive an attempt to take away his licence to practise law, and resume work as a solicitor in Young, surviving accusations of fraud and going on to practise law until 1971.

OUR ICE

By 1933, far across the Southern Ocean, lay the ‘Australian claim’, consisting of two vast wedges of Antarctica, the sole continent indifferent to the Depression. The two great Australian claim areas were separated from each other by the thin French slice of the Antarctic pie named Adelie Land. The Australian sectors added up to just under six million square kilometres of the Antarctic continent. It was (and remains) the biggest claim to that continent of any nation in the world, and yet, oddly—given Australians’ taste for being ‘first’ in anything—its existence made no impact on Australian popular perception.

The scale of the claim was largely the work of a Yorkshire-born geologist named Douglas Mawson, whose parents emigrated and settled at Rooty Hill outside Sydney when he was still an infant. As a student at Sydney University he would come under the influence of another remarkable geologist who would become associated with Antarctica, Welsh-born Edgeworth David, a man whose painful politeness was at odds with his exploratory toughness. It was said that David could not enter a door without first standing back to usher all others through, and when on a journey as part of Shackleton’s first expedition to locate the Magnetic South Pole, before asking Mawson to pull him out of a crevasse he had fallen into, he cried first, ‘Are you busy at the moment, Mawson?’

David’s work on the geological surveys of New South Wales coalfields had earned him in 1890 the Chair of Geology and Palaeontology at the University of Sydney. He was a world expert, particularly on the impact of ancient ice ages upon geology, and he visited the alpine regions of New South Wales for research purposes and learned to ski for the pure joy of it. Soon, however, this purely recreational ability would become a more essential tool for survival. Ernest Shackleton, the Irish explorer, invited David to go to Antarctica with his expedition for the summer of 1907–08 in Shackleton’s famous ship, Nimrod. David took with him two former students, Douglas Mawson (now a lecturer at the University of Adelaide) and Leo Cotton. The excitement of the task overcame them all and they decided they would stay in Antarctica longer than the summer if they could.

In McMurdo Sound, on Ross Island, cemented to the mainland by ice, stands the magnificent volcano Mount Erebus, a serious mountain of 3800 metres. In March 1908, David, Mawson and a few others first climbed it, a journey that looks easy in Antarctica’s strangely foreshortening atmosphere but which involved serious mountaineering of some days. Beneath the volcano, David turned fifty, and winter struck and the Australian contingent settled down with the rest of the expedition in the prefabricated house Shackleton had built on volcanic earth and ice on Ross Island. Over the winter, Shackleton decided that come the spring, David would be sent out with Mawson and a young Scots physician named Forbes Mackay to locate the Magnetic—as distinct from the Geographic—South Pole. The geographic pole was the ultimate prize but was in fact arguably of less significance than the magnetic pole, the place where the earth’s electro-magnetic fields all coalesced, somewhere across McMurdo Sound.

When day returned and the time came, the party had to man-haul sledges from the sea level of the sound up crevassed ice to a height of over 2000 metres. They located the magnetic pole by using the latest electromagnetic equipment, but on their way back towards McMurdo Sound and the ship Nimrod, David, exhausted and sick from man-hauling, had to hand over command to the twenty-six-year-old Mawson. The party was malnourished too, surviving on hardtack biscuits and the compacted meat and lard called pemmican. A shortage of even this food delayed their return, and hearing the rocket distress signal from Nimrod, the party wrongly interpreted it as the ship’s need to leave before it was iced in. According to his account, Mawson rushed ahead to delay it, fell into a crevasse, and had to be rescued by some of the Nimrod crew. By the time the magnetic pole party were all back to base, they had dragged their sledges over 2000 kilometres.

Though Shackleton’s team failed to reach the South Geographic Pole, David returned to Sydney in March 1909 a hero. In World War I, despite his age, he would enlist and achieve the rank of major in the mining battalion. His work on the Western Front involved advising on groundwater and the siting and design of trenches and tunnels. He was seriously injured when he fell 24 metres down a well near Vimy Ridge in northern France. He never fully recovered from the injuries he sustained there, though he lived until 1934. Mawson took up the Antarctic momentum David had created.

In 1909, the young academic Mawson returned to Adelaide and his university work. Robert Falcon Scott, British naval officer and doomed to perish returning from the Pole was planning his second expedition. Scott was approached by Mawson, who wanted to join the expedition as leader of a second team to work on the coast west of Cape Adare, which crowns the western side of the Ross Sea. There is now argument over all this, however. Some say Scott invited Mawson to join his South Pole sledging party, others that Mawson was chagrined not to be offered leadership of the scientific team. Mawson at least saw that to an extent reaching the South Pole was a stunt that validated the input of sponsors’ money into the expedition. He stated he wanted to attend to some serious science along the coastline beyond Adare. Out of politeness he waited until Scott had finished his fundraising in Australia and New Zealand before launching an appeal for his own Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE).

The Mawson expedition sailed in December 1911, and in the spirit of its scientific purpose it established three bases, one of them on Macquarie Island. This base was, amongst other things, to be a radio relay station—Mawson wanted to broadcast from mainland Antarctica. He also brought with him an aircraft, though it would prove hard if not impossible to deploy in that climate. The main base, on that enormous coast of what would become Australian Antarctica, was at a place Mawson named Commonwealth Bay. Mawson would later admit that this was a terrible place because of the katabatic winds that blew at 250 kilometres an hour down off the Antarctic Peninsula. The other party was put on the Shackleton Ice Shelf to the east. Mawson’s expeditionary ship, the Aurora, was captained by the eccentric but experienced John King Davis, who approached Commonwealth Bay through ferocious seas and one of the densest ice packs he had ever seen, having made a number of Antarctic journeys. In all Mawson’s parties there were meteorologists, geologists, cartographers, students of the aurora and geomagnetism, and biologists, and Captain Davis himself conducted much marine-science exploration from Aurora’s decks. This expedition was certainly a matter of serious inquiry rather than an Antarctic dog-and-pony act.

After the winter at Commonwealth Bay, Mawson took off to the west with a young British officer, Belgrave Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers, and the Swiss Doctor of Law, mountaineer and dog handler Xavier Mertz. Only Ninnis had skis. Five hundred kilometres to the south-east of the hut at Commonwealth Bay, Ninnis with his entire sledge and dog team plunged through the ice lid of a crevasse and could not be seen or heard, let alone retrieved. With the provisions they had left, Mawson and Mertz began their return but had to shoot their dogs and use them for food. Professor J.B. Cleland would later suggest, the dogs’ livers, however, were so overloaded with vitamin A that they were potentially not life-saving but toxic. Mertz died after twenty-five days. According to the latest Mawson biographer, the deaths of Ninnis and Mertz were partly due to Mawson’s ambition and lack of experience.

Mawson now discarded all his geological specimens and records—for him, a gesture that betrayed the severest danger of imminent death. After cutting his sledge in two he dragged it the last 160 kilometres, over rough and dangerous ice, at an average of about five and a half kilometres a day. As he neared Commonwealth Bay he saw the Aurora departing through the ice, but a small party had stayed on to search for him, and they nursed him through the non-stop winds and blizzards of a further winter and, as Mawson recuperated, through an early summer, until the ice melted sufficiently for Captain Davis to return. Scientific work continued through that winter, and Mawson was able to broadcast an account of the previous summer’s scientific work and begin writing The Home of the Blizzard, an Antarctic classic, published in 1915. The various parties of Mawson’s expedition had done extraordinary work, having explored some 6500 kilometres in Adelie Land, George V Land and Queen Mary Land. They defined the geology of the country traversed and mapped the coast. They identified the contour of the Antarctic Continental Shelf. They were able to send weather information from Macquarie Island and Commonwealth Bay by radio.

The survivors of various Antarctic expeditions, Australian (Mawson) and British (Shackleton), returned to their homes either just in time for war or in the midst of it. For various reasons, including his debilitating experience in Antarctica, Mawson did not serve in World War I. He had been knighted in 1914, despite criticism that he and Mertz should have taken skis with them to help them haul the heavy sledges, and during the war worked for the British Ministry of Munitions in London, becoming embarkation officer for shipments of high explosives and poison gas from Britain to Russia. His hope was to create production of high explosives in Russia itself, but the Russian Revolution of October 1917 put paid to that idea.

Post-war, he continued his work on pre-Cambrian rocks in the Flinders Ranges, travelling by horseback, truck or camel, taking fortunate students out there, who found him amiable company. At the 1926 Imperial Conference it was decided that Mawson be invited to lead a British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) over the summers of 1929–30 and 1930–31. The expedition did not intend to create home bases as occurred in expeditions before World War I, but to make researches at a number of sub-Antarctic islands and along 2500 kilometres of coastline between 43 and 179 degrees east longitude. For that purpose and for mapping, the expedition also made use of a light aircraft. The little biplane was assembled at Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean, the engine lubricants were treated with heat, and Flying Officer Stuart Campbell took off and saw, from a height of 2000 metres, land to the south that Mawson named MacRobertson Land in honour of his sponsor, the chocolate maker Macpherson Robertson.

The mapping of the coast showed that it was continuous from the Ross Sea at Cape Adare around to Enderby Land and beyond. This work gave accurate geographic data for the creation of the full Australian Antarctic Territory, a region from just west of Cape Adare, the massive prong of land at the entrance to the Ross Sea, around to a point in line with the Horn of Africa. This huge sweep of desolation was legislated in Canberra by the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act 1933, which came into force in 1936, and would later be given a dormant legitimacy by the International Antarctic Treaty in 1959.

FOR FEAR OF JAPAN

As the Depression approached the end of its second year, a resurgent Japan invaded Manchuria, a gesture of expansion that, given the times, people wanted to ignore. But there was, under all the want and sense of emergency, an awareness of Japanese peril.

Soon after World War I the British had appointed Lord Jellicoe to write a report on Australia’s naval defence. When presented, it warned clearly that Australia could not depend on a British fleet for protection from a threat in the Pacific if there was war in Europe at the same time. Jellicoe’s recommendation was that a Far Eastern fleet be jointly financed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and that it be permanently based at Singapore. Despite the reality that disarmament was all the fashion at that time, and given that the priority was to scuttle ships rather than build them, Jellicoe’s recommendation that Singapore be turned into a naval base to look after Britain’s interests in the Far East and to provide protection for Australia was accepted. Work began on the fortress and naval base at Singapore in 1923, but the pace was not hectic. The question of whether Australia could be protected from Singapore, even if the base could impede a feared Japanese incursion into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, was unsettled. Many Australian men and women, most of them children in 1923, would pay for Singapore, for the fact that in the Australian mind, Singapore became the golden guarantee of security, even though the base would not be in full operation until the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and even though it would be notable for its lack of ships.

As early as the 1923 Imperial Conference in London, when Leo Amery, a genial Anglo-Hungarian and a notable Conservative, assured the Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, that Singapore and Britain could protect Australia, Bruce himself said he was not as clear as he would like to be on how the impregnability of Singapore would be assured.

Defence spending in Australia was low in the 1920s and 1930s, with a skeleton military staff that ran a larger part-time citizen force. In 1928–29, expenditure on defence was a mere 0.89 per cent of national income. In the Depression years it sank as low as 0.61 per cent, though it jumped in 1936, as the intentions of Italy in Africa, Germany in Europe, and the Japanese in China became apparent. By 1933, Japan had already invaded China from its base in Manchukuo (Manchuria). So there was much to spur an enormous country like Australia, populated by fewer than ten million people, to a greater defensive effort. But even so, much of what was allocated in the late 1930s went unspent, and despite a high level of fear of Japan in the community, spending money on the military was not popular with Australian voters. Military works could well have been a fruitful source of labour for the unemployed, but that option was not considered. In any case, given Australia’s massive coast, it could be argued that a colossal expenditure would be needed to defend it, and so governments might as well underspend as otherwise.

Britain itself, also underspending on its forces, and also becoming wary of the Japanese after their invasion of China, felt that a heavy investment of its ships in the Pacific would stretch its navy, and began to look to the American Pacific fleet as its potential policeman in that ocean. The Americans would have been offended to be looked upon in that light, as Britain’s mere henchmen, but given the Brito-centrism of the Empire, such thinking was endemic in the Admiralty and even in Canberra. The fact was that British sea power was on the wane, but without eroding the Empire, Britain could not afford to tell the Australians as much; and without exposing themselves to panic, neither could the Australians admit it. It would later become Australian mythology that Singapore was a British con job, but if so Australia fell for it willingly. Australians were anxious to see Singapore as the pledge that allowed them to progress as a white dominion. There was in fact in many Australian minds at the time, and later, an unfounded belief that the mind of the British government was focused upon their future. Of course, it had more important issues—one of them being to hold on to India if the Japanese should attack, or defending France and England if Germany did. Like individuals, nations possessed an appetite for self-delusion, and in this the Australian governments and commentators in the 1920s and 1930s, on all sides of politics, were as notable as any other population in the world.

Singapore featured far more in the Australian mind than did the great American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Indeed, it would be seen by the behaviour of British statesmen and generals in World War II that the Americans were considered, after the official enemy Japan, something of a sub-enemy—anti-Imperial, hungry to dominate the Pacific commercially, and particularly agitated about the need for Indian democracy and independence. They were a rival to the very Empire whose continued existence Australia believed it needed for its economic health, its psychological solace, and its safety.

In his 1935 book, Australia and War Today, rambunctious seventy-three-year-old Billy Hughes warned the Australian people that they had been ‘living for years in a world of dreams . . . The dove of peace has fled to regions unknown. Mars once again in the ascendant smiles sardonically at Geneva. Yet Australia in an armed world is almost defenceless.’ Australia, he argued, must provide for its own defence, and the best way to defend Australia, he said, was from the air. Because of its ability to consume distance, the aeroplane was to Australia a ‘gift from the Gods’. Australia must have an aircraft industry, he shouted in vain.

There were other heretics who thought like him. A number of Australian military commentators, professional soldiers whose names would become known in another, coming world war, such as Wynter and Lavarack, believed that Japan would attack when the British were preoccupied in Europe, and that Singapore would fall before the British navy could arrive.

Henry Douglas Wynter, a Queenslander and son of a dairy farmer, had served as a staff officer with General Birdwood during World War I, and remained in the small permanent army afterwards. As early as September 1926 he had told the United Service Institution of Victoria that ‘if war [involving Australia] were to break out with a Pacific power, it would be at some time when Great Britain was involved in war in Europe’. Colonel Wynter’s view of the coming conflict, including his emphasis on air defence, had a great influence on John Curtin. Despite his isolationist hopes, Curtin was wise enough to know a threat was coming.

On 5 November 1936, Curtin used Wynter’s more recent speech to United Service Institutions in Melbourne and Sydney as the basis of an attack on government policy. So abominable was talk of sophisticated air defence considered that Sir Robert Parkhill, Minister for Defence, vengefully argued that an article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph written by Wynter’s son, Philip, contained information the son could only have got from his father. Henry Wynter was refused a court-martial to respond to the accusation, sent in March 1937 to serve in the 11th Mixed Brigade in Queensland, and demoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel with reduced pay. When Parkhill was defeated at a general election in October 1937, Wynter was again promoted to colonel and in July 1938 became commandant and chief inspector of the newly created Command and Staff School above Balmoral Beach in Sydney. A career in World War II as a lieutenant-general would be cut short by his illness and death.

The 1930s were above all a period in which Australia attempted to shelter within the self-sufficient economic bloc of the Empire, and in which it similarly attempted to shelter under what it thought of as a cosmic umbrella of British power. Both these shelters were to fail.

The state of military aviation in Australia gave little comfort to Wynter, Curtin and the ageing Hughes. Despite the adventurousness of Australian civil flying in the 1920s and 1930s, the RAAF continued to fly obsolescent planes during their extraordinary survey and rescue works around Australia. It was a force which, because of the immensity of the country, deserved better aircraft than the Wapitis and De Havilland Dragon Rapides often assigned it. The Wapitis were general-service biplanes, old-fashioned two-seaters. The Dragon Rapide was larger, enclosed, two-propeller, and generally used as an airliner. They would seem of another age, however, from the aircraft which, within a few years, would be required for survival in the air over Europe and Asia. On 27 March 1939, the Wirraway Number 1 had been rolled out of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factory and was taken for a test flight over Melbourne. Geoffrey Street, the Minister for Defence, greeted the emergence of this aircraft and said it would be good for scouting, fighting and night-bombing. Though part of a government upgrade of the air force, it would prove futile.

At the beginning of war in 1939, the permanent air force consisted of 246 aircraft, of which only 164 were operational. Australia would early in the war have on order Beaufighters, which Robert Menzies, having succeeded Joe Lyons, would divert to British defence, leaving Australia looking forward to the arrival in 1941 of a ill-omened plane named the Brewster Bermuda.

Civil aviation was in a much better situation. Already, in 1934, Qantas Empire Airways, using entirely appropriate Douglas aircraft, had begun flying the Brisbane-to-Singapore sector of the Australia-to-England air route. It initiated a weekly service in February 1935, and Lyons, characteristically for a politician of the day, saw this as a boon for Empire, not just for Australia: ‘We can be proud that the Commonwealth, in assuming responsibility for the operation of the section of the Singapore–Australia section of the chain of Empire Air Services, is the first of the British Dominions to operate an international air transport service.’ A Labor politician would not have put it any differently.

But no such impetus was reflected in funding for the RAAF.

ON THE AIR

There exists in the Museum of Victoria a photograph that shows Florence ‘Dot’ Cheers listening to a crystal set radio in the backyard of the family home in Brunswick on Christmas Day 1923. Dot was seventeen at the time and the set had been made by her brother Ronald when he was twenty. Radio captivated Dot, there, in that photograph. She would become a radio announcer known as ‘Aunty June’ at Melbourne’s 3JR and would marry the cowboy singer Smoky Dawson during World War II.

Listening to her crystal set, Dot is in theory breaking the law. When the first stations were licensed by the Federal government in 1923, the scheme was that the broadcaster would make and sell their own receivers to the public. The earliest stations were commercial, Sydney’s 2FC being the first, and 2SR (later 2BL) the second. The following year two stations were opened in Melbourne. The government’s idea of people buying a ‘sealed set’ devoted to one station was a failure, only fourteen hundred such sets being purchased. In the suburbs and nearer country towns, people subverted the arrangement with primitive wireless apparatus with a crystal diode in them and by modifying devices to receive a range of stations.

A new plan was devised, a system by which there were A-class stations that were supported by radio licence fees, and B-class, which would support themselves by advertising. By the end of the decade, stations had proliferated across Australia, and the populace had a huge taste for broadcasting.

The new prime minister, Joe Lyons, due to a number of influences (including the success of the BBC, founded ten years earlier), inaugurated the government-funded ABC on 1 July 1932. Coverage included Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Newcastle, Corowa, Rockhampton and Crystal Brook, a town north of Adelaide where an A-class station had been operating.

Opening-day programs included the first Children’s Session with Bobby Bluegum (Frank Hatherley), a broadcast from the Randwick races, British wireless news received by cable from London, weather forecasts, stock-exchange reports and shipping news. There was also an inaugural ABC Women’s Association session and a talk on goldfish and their care, as well as morning devotions and music.

Outside broadcasts were soon attempted but needed to confront tough conditions. The first outside broadcast in Perth was a concert for three hundred violins. Only one microphone was available and it was in use in the studio: the announcer told listeners that they would be crossing to the concert in the Exhibition Hall soon; he then took the studio microphone by way of tram to the hall, and so the broadcast began.

ABC News was taken from newspapers rather than gathered independently, although the first ABC journalist was appointed in 1934. In 1936, a news editor, Frank Dixon, was appointed and began to argue for an independent ABC news service. By the 1930s, women were on the air as announcers and were working in radio production. Such women as Queenie Ashton, Ethel Lang and Grace Gibson were getting renown as producers, directors, writers and performers.

It would not be until World War II that the independent news service was achieved. Although on the eve of World War II a Canberra correspondent was appointed, this was at the request of the government, who felt that the ABC was relying on inaccurate reporting by newspapers. Ray Denning, the appointee, was told to shadow the prime minister wherever he went.

In 1935, pre-recorded programs were laid down on gramophone records and copies sent from the major states to the remoter ones, particularly Tasmania. Sport was always a major part of ABC radio programming, and cricket Test matches in Britain were described, ball by ball, by reconstructing the information on cables telephoned through to the ABC studio after every over. The tapping of a pencil on the mike made a very convincing sound mimicry of bat on ball. Race commentaries were delivered via public telephone from the track to a studio presenter.

Programs such as the Hospital Half Hour, Harry Pringle and Wilfred Thomas were staples for the children and adults who heard them. Serials such as Singapore Spy were absorbed whole, without questioning or any critical distancing between the radio wave and utter belief. The Children’s Hour ran from 1935 and again possessed magical narrative power; school broadcasts were also immensely popular, particularly with teachers, whose curriculum they enriched.

During the Depression, not all families could afford to own a radio or pay the licence fee. The radio set itself was, after all, crafted and contained in beautifully wrought wooden cabinets, standing on legs, a glory of household furniture as well as a new voice, a companion, a modulator of culture and opinion. In 1934, Glebe Council in Sydney commissioned the construction of a ‘wireless house’, a public listening place in a park. It allowed large crowds to gather and listen to daily programs, and operated until the early 1950s. Department store chain Grace Brothers donated the radio to the wireless house.

In 1939, Dr C.T. Madigan, the geologist and Antarctic explorer, a man who harboured amongst his possessions a bitter but as yet politely unrevealed diary about the flaws and vanities of Mawson, led the first major expedition across the Central Australian desert, which he would name the Simpson Desert, in honour of the president of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. Madigan gave a series of talks during this trek which were broadcast first by means of a pedal receiver to the postmaster general’s office at Yunta, then by landline to Adelaide, from where they were broadcast nationally. It served as a last, enthusiastic tale of exploration, almost in the tradition of John McDouall Stuart, that graced Australian imaginations before the second great world disaster struck.

An overseas short-wave program began in World War II, and Australia Calling, a tiny, two-kilowatt service that was called the ‘tin whistle of the Pacific’, became the forerunner to Radio Australia.

FASCIO

For Italian Australians, the uncertainty and torment of the Depression made Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s Italy look suddenly enviable. As well, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s Fascist government of Italy had funded and promoted within Australia a network of business organisations and political–social clubs named Fascio and dopolavoro (after-work) societies, and Italian schools for first-generation Italian–Australian children. It has to be remembered that a number of Australian conservatives had, before the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, openly stated their admiration of Mussolini, and groups of Italian veterans of the Great War marched under Fascist banners in Anzac Day marches in towns such as Innisfail and Cairns.

The Australian Security Services would break up this infrastructure after Italy’s declaration of war on Britain in 1940, but it is hard to assess how far the Italian Australians who used Italian social clubs in the 1930s were actually devoted to Mussolini and Fascism. Daria Burla, a Queensland wartime detainee protesting against his internment in February 1941, wrote: ‘If I had made an application to belong to some Fascio it was for business reasons, because the Consul had promised to give some [business] consideration to the Italian community.’ There was a measure of truth in such an argument as the detainee put forth. In Queensland in the 1930s there had been Italian consular vigilance of the Italian community, taking in part the form of threats that Italians who did not harbour the correct sentiments towards Mussolini would suffer commercially. So for many in business in the cities and larger towns, to be a member of the local Fascio and wear its badge was to have preference in procuring import licences on Italian goods.

That did not mean there were no true believers at all. In the 1920s in Sydney, Franco Battistessa, a hardline immigrant of great charm and energy, claimed that the Italian consular and party representatives in Australia, including Antonio Grossardi, Consul-General in Sydney from 1920 to 1932, were not devout enough ideological Fascists but had joined the party for the sake of their careers. It was true that the urbane Grossardi had joined the Italian Fascist Party only after it became a requirement of his job. Grossardi saw his main hope not as raising Fascist cohorts in the Australian bush but as fostering a connection between Australia and land-hungry Italy. He believed the weedy proletariat of factory workers Australia kept importing from Britain were ill-equipped to penetrate and settle the interior, unlike the hardy Italians. One of the symptoms of this unfitness was, in his mind, an obsession with sport. The Depression was a corrective to the excess of experiments in social democracy of which Australia had been recklessly guilty, he argued. Now the newly formed, conservative United Australia Party led by Joe Lyons might well become, in its alliance with secret armies such as the Old Guard, a basis for Fascism.

A later consul-general, Paolo Vita-Finzi, an Italian Jew wary of Fascism, nonetheless saw Australia, even in the Depression, as living in a dream world, unaccustomed to the sort of strenuous thought and action that might produce a truly progressive state. He criticised its ‘carefree jumping about and playing, the enjoyment of nature and life, while pushing into the recesses of conscience that small jab of fear for the sharks that one day may suddenly jump out of the placid waters’. Visiting Canberra in 1935 to inform the Australian government of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Vita-Finzi was appalled to find the Foreign minister, Sir George Pearce, former sidekick of Billy Hughes during World War I, in a near-empty building and wearing shirtsleeves. Vita-Finzi complained that there was not a barber or a newspaper in sight. ‘It appears impossible in this vast and silent vastness to think of wars and conflict. Europe and its revolutions, Asia and its struggles appear distant, mythical, from another world.’ He could not understand why Australia was so bound to Britain when the trade competition Britain deliberately fostered between Australia and Japan drove down Australian commodity prices.

There were some genuine Fascisti or camicie nere (Blackshirts) in Australia, and they were much comforted by the appointment to Sydney in early 1938 of Amadeo Mammalella, one of Mussolini’s early followers, as consul-general. But still, with most Italian immigrants, there was confusion about what Fascism actually meant. Carlo Trucano, a foundation member of the Fascio in Cairns, believed that Fascism was anti-Communism. He had seen Communist riots in Turin at the end of World War I and did not like the idea that government could be overturned in that manner. To him, Mussolini and the Fascist Party had saved Italy from revolution and destruction. Dr Giovanni Battaglia, the founder of the Brisbane Fascio, saw Fascism in Australia as a benevolent movement, working in conjunction with the Italian consul to bring relief to poorer Italians. Others may even have joined Fascist groups because they saw the new Italy as giving credibility to themselves, their religion and their language, in the face of anti-Italian hostility.

The first Fascio in Queensland had been founded in 1929. The head of the Innisfail Fascio, Aldo Signorini, belonged to a minority of Italian Australians that would still show unquestioning allegiance to Mussolini even after Italy declared war on Australia. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, in the Catholic churches Italians attended with other worshippers, there was a growing tolerance of Fascism. It derived in part from the 1929 Concordat between the Italian government and the Vatican, which opened diplomatic relations between Mussolini and the Pope. Now many Catholics, not only Italians, were able to applaud Mussolini more openly. Through the Concordat, Fascism and Catholicism were twin forces for good on earth. Bishop McGuire in Townsville and Limerick-born Archbishop James Duhig in Brisbane expressed that idea of church and patria marching together. Fascist rhetoric, however, urged the Italians to resist assimilation, and keep their language and heritage wherever they might live, and this worsened the hostility directed at them by the general Australian community.

Hundreds of Italian cane cutters at Mourilyan and at Hambledon, and hundreds from elsewhere, demanded that the cane be burned before being cut to prevent Weil’s disease (leptospirosis), a serious infection (lethal in some cases) caused by cuts from green cane. The landowners asked for government intervention and police protection. But the strikers took their case to court, and from late 1934 the cane was burned as they had desired. In Innisfail in 1935 and 1936, there were fights between Italian leftists and the pro-Fascists in the streets during the cane cutters’ strike against the Colonial Sugar Refinery, a strike that broke out over the many cases of so-called Weil’s disease among workers in the sugar fields. The anti-Fascists were supporting the strike, the Fascists trying to end it.

All this had, of course, a history. The anti-Fascists included an anarchist named Francesco Carmagnola, born in Italy in 1901, a former Melbourne resident who had founded in Spring Street in 1927 the Matteotti Club to honour a young socialist member of the Italian Assembly who had been assassinated by Fascists. The club was a centre for anti-Fascist Italians, and pro-Fascists sometimes threw bricks through its windows. Italian immigrants would come in from the bush to the Matteotti, play cards, eat, and attend a Saturday-evening dance where one accordion supplied the music. The visitors from the bush also collected the groceries the club secretary had bought for them during the week. The club was so popular it soon had to move to new premises near the Trades Hall where there was room for a thousand people and a courtyard for the playing of bocce. The Scullin government (ironically more frightened of Italian socialists than of Fascists) reluctantly permitted it to publish a club newspaper. Even the director of the Investigation Branch thought the criticism of the club by the Italian consulate authorities was ‘rabid’.

Carmagnola had denounced Labor as a party of ‘socialisti da caffe latte’, even if café latte was by no means the favourite drink of Australian Laborites. He also condemned the Australian Communists as ‘Red Fascists’. But Italians of all political stripes—as long as they were anti-Mussolini—used the Matteotti Club. In Melbourne, however, the Italian scene was intense. Italian anarchists started to visit clubs, restaurants and boarding houses, armed with knives and knuckle dusters and sometimes pistols, looking for fights with pro-Fascists. The anarchists would rip the Fascist badges from the coats of Italian supporters of Mussolini. Even consuls were not exempt from this treatment; Count Gabrio di San Marzano, Italian consul in Brisbane, had the badge ripped from his lapel while attending a reception in Ingham. Three thousand copies of the Melbourne Matteotti Club’s newspaper, La Riscossa, came out every fortnight to meet the demand from anti-Fascist Italians. The newspaper advertised dance nights and rallies to raise money for political prisoners held in Mussolini’s prisons and for their families. On May Day 1931, Carmagnola addressed seven thousand workers by the banks of the Yarra and asked them to cry out with him, ‘Death to Mussolini!’ They did.

After the Depression wiped out the Matteotti Club, Carmagnola was himself involved in the cane cutters’ strikes in Queensland. When the Italian warship Armando Diaz came to Australia on a goodwill trip in 1934 and put into Cairns, the anarchists, including Carmagnola, went to work amongst the sailors, one of whom was won over by them, deserted, and was saved from arrest until the warship left Cairns. But after all his activism, Carmagnola found it difficult to get work. At the end of 1935 he went to Sydney where he found most anarchists either growing vegetables on the outskirts of the city or banished to various parts of the bush.

In the end, Italian Fascism would never manage to focus Italian Australians into a political movement, any more than the suavity of Count von Luckner, soon to be encountered, could create a Hitlerite unity of purpose amongst the German community.

COOKING AND NAZISM

In 1926, Australian–German diplomatic relationships were opened again, and the first post-war consul-general, Hans Busing, was appointed. He found hostile opinions everywhere about German society, and had the job of reviving in the German–Australian community some pride in their nation of origin. In 1932, Dr Rudolf Asmis was appointed to Sydney, and during his consulate Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power. Asmis transformed himself from a spokesman for the democratic Weimar Republic to become a promoter of—or at least an apologist for—the ‘new Germany’ under Hitler. Deutschtumpolitik was the new policy. The German Australians, Auslandsdeutschen, had to be reminded of their racial purity and the successes of Hitler’s Germany. Many German–Australian itinerant workers and small farmers were suffering in the Depression along with the general community of battlers, as the apparently successful Nazi regime of the 1930s—publicly applauded by many observers, including Robert Menzies—sought to spread Deutschtum, or Germanness, throughout the communities of the New World, as part of the Nazi revolution. German Australians, too, were to be co-opted into the Nazi policy of Volkstumpolitik, a form of cultural politics. In this effort the Sydney-based Nazi newspaper, Die Brücke (The Bridge), first published in 1934, was to be a potent instrument. Asmis, who remained German consul-general until 1939, and co-founded Die Brücke, was concerned by the ‘entombment’ of German–Australian Deutschtum by Australianness. Though not necessarily a zealous Nazi himself, Asmis wanted to arouse a German sensibility even in the Germans of the remoter bush. He knew, however, that he must be careful in making direct appeals to Germanness of the kind that would render the authorities uneasy. As an opening gambit, German Australians were exhorted by Die Brücke to return to the traditions of the cuisine from the hearths they had left behind in Germany.

The spectrum of Australian produce did not make this easy, and in any case the first German-speaking immigrants to arrive in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, and along the Murray in Victoria and New South Wales, were Alt Lutheran or Old Lutherans, whose tables were proudly austere, and whose food was simple. The indigenous Peramangk people of South Australia had in the 1840s taught the Hahndorf settlers, in those harder, early times, to dig for edible buttercups, and the Germans had recourse to wild dogs, native birds and crayfish; one Prussian settler mentions a meal of ‘kangaroo roasted with bacon and garlic’. The desert quandong (native peach) of South Australia, relished by Indigenous people, became a speciality of the Barossa Germans. Native currants also made excellent jams.

Everywhere from Queensland to the north coast of New South Wales to South Australia, German settlers integrated or married into Anglo-Celtic Australia, and their traditional cooking disappeared under the weight of Australian beef and mutton. Bavarians who had fled Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s, which they had seen as an attack on their Catholicism, and had settled on the north coast of New South Wales, intermarried with the Irish who attended the same churches, had Australian children, and made bad cases for Nazi redemption.

Nonetheless, Nazi Stützpunkten (small party branches) were founded in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane between 1932 and 1934, some of them before Hitler even came to power. It was hard for the Australian Nazis to find committed members, and by 1937 the Australian party had recruited only 160 members. German emigration to Australia had declined in the 1920s and early 1930s. Among the fifty to a hundred thousand Australian citizens of German birth or descent, there was apparently little enthusiasm for doctrinaire Nazism. But the Stützpunkten were able to create organisations that had broader appeal, such as the German Workers’ Front and the Working Committee of German Women Abroad. These brought in a large number of general sympathisers with a regime that in the mid-1930s was, like Mussolini’s Italian state, attracting much conservative approval generally.

Asmis himself established the Deutschtum cultural organisations in Australia and New Zealand as umbrella organisations encompassing various German organisations and clubs. In Die Brücke, German Australians were urged to live in a suitably German home with German art on their walls, German books on their shelves, and German food on their plates. Die Brücke pushed German recipes in its editions—recipes for Pfeffernüsse mit Guss (iced honeyball cookies) and Christbaum-feingebäck (Christmas-tree biscuits). Following a movement initiated by Dr Goebbels in Germany in 1933, Australian women were encouraged to make Eintopfessen, or ‘one-pot meals’, for the poor. The Eintopfessen charity held a get-together in 1936 at the German Concordia Club in Sydney—an event which attracted, Die Brücke declared, probably the greatest number of Germans to have met in a hall in Australia. The audience, said Die Brücke, ‘delivered the best proof not only of this feeling of belonging together, not only in the German colony of Sydney, but also of the ties of the inner heart with the old homeland’. The Nazi-instigated Working Committee of German Women Abroad, under the leadership of Frau Herta Schmidt of Sydney, were credited with directing the Eintopfessen preparation of lentils and smoked meat. A poetic prologue was spoken by a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Australia, Ruth Cramer. The donations offered by those who ate the one-pot meals would be used for suffering German Volksgenossen—needy folk—in Australia in the midst of the Depression. Three Sieg-Heils were raised to the Führer and the people in the Fatherland, and two German national hymns were sung.

News of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and others later in the decade undermined Asmis in his endeavour to show Germany as a revitalised great power in which German Australians could take pride. Asmis and his assistants, however, encouraged trade missions to Germany and promoted Hitler’s favourite Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the famed documentary on the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Count Felix von Luckner, famous World War I commander of a German raider, and an orator, arrived in 1938 on his own yacht on a world tour to talk up the Reich. Like Amis, von Luckner did not want to be seen as an advocate of Hitler’s ambitions but preached that the German and British empires would march together into the future. Von Luckner’s goodwill visit took in speaking at events in Albury, Henty, Walla Walla and Jindera, where the German communities of the Murray area were concentrated. He could do tricks—bend coins, tear up phone directories—but on more serious ground he dealt with the ‘regrettable tension between the English and German people’. After the Count’s short tour of Australia there was an increase in Nazi Party membership, though within a year its members would all be behind the wire of internment camps.

Far fewer Germans and German Australians were interned between 1939 and 1945—about eleven hundred—than Italians, five thousand of whom would be interned. Asmis himself escaped that fate, since he was on home leave when World War II broke out. The Tweed and Snowy River shires, however, pressed for the internment of his constituency. The Defence Department was calmer than it had been during the previous war about weighing the worth of information. Johannes Stolz, the Lutheran pastor in Walla Walla, had attracted adverse reports in the mid-1930s. He was believed to have celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but in reality his interest in Nazism was based on its anti-Communism, and he became an opponent of the regime in 1936 once Hitler created a Reich church, a Lutheran church under Nazi control, led by a puppet bishop named Ludwig Müller. Stolz would support the Allied war efforts through his editorship of the Lutheran Herald. So it was decided that his arrest might alienate Germans who were as yet loyal Australians.

Stolz’s brother-in-law, Pastor Muetzelfeldt, was of Jewish descent and had fled Germany with his family in 1934. He was critical of the pro-Nazi sympathies of some of the instructors at the Immanuel Lutheran Seminary in North Adelaide. It was with the beginning of the war with Japan that, like other German-born, Muetzelfeldt was required to sell his car, and give up his driving licence and petrol consumer’s licence to the government. Reclassified as a refugee alien in 1943, he received his motor vehicle back.

THE EAST IS TO BLAME

By mid-Depression, the idea of seceding from the whole Commonwealth mess had become an attractive one to Western Australians. They knew that Western Australia had joined the Federation mainly on the votes of ‘T’othersiders’, easterners who had fled the depression of the 1890s in Victoria and New South Wales to work on the goldfields of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Now eastern Australia was again drawing Western Australia into grief. Shortly after the state election of May 1930, a meeting was called to re-establish a secessionist organisation, the Dominion League of Western Australia. The meeting was chaired by Premier Sir James Mitchell himself. The driving force became H.K. Watson, a thirty-year-old accountant who now managed the proposition skilfully and passionately. He pointed furiously at tariffs introduced by the Federal government, which seemed to discriminate against Western Australian farmers and Perth merchants. The secessionists argued that Western Australia, as a primary-producing state dependent on export, was injured by Commonwealth policies designed to protect the factories of Melbourne and Sydney. The price of importing even state-government stock, locomotives for example, was rendered high by the Canberra-imposed tariffs.

In November 1930, an inauspicious representative of the Sugar Industry Defence Association travelled across Australia, including Western Australia, drumming up support for Commonwealth tariffs and bounties protecting the Queensland sugar industry. ‘In this man, the secessionists saw one of the evils of Federation in human form,’ writes Dr E.D. Watt, one of the promoters of secession. The new victory in 1930 of the supposed ‘Red’, Jack Lang, in New South Wales, also made them feel nervous of the toxic east.

The primary producers warmly supported secession, though the ALP was against it, as was the RSL, given that its membership had fought as Australians and were subject to the Federal Repatriation Board for any compensation for the damage they had suffered in that conflict.

The perceived need for secession attracted and absorbed much of the Western Australians’ discontent. Canberra became a popular focus for blame, rather than the capitalist system itself. Sir Otto Niemeyer, who had appeared as a stylish avatar of the Bank of England, had made the Federal government fall for him, but the popular Western Australian premier Mitchell, a decent, identifiably Australian human being, had been seen to have been patronised by him—and indeed was. Feeling was so high afterwards that the Dominion League was able to ask Mitchell for a referendum on secession. Mitchell told them that he was an ardent secessionist and wore the badge of the Dominion League, but he hedged on a referendum. Cabinet was divided. Powerful business figures weighed in with the unhelpful idea that either Western Australia should secede, or else that the Western Australian government should be entrusted to a commission of five experienced businessmen.

The latter idea was not conducive to parliamentary democracy. Premier Mitchell had indeed attempted to get a bill passed in August 1931 to empower a referendum, but the Legislative Council, both its Labor and conservative members, put on it conditions unacceptable to Mitchell. He tried with better success in December 1932, when the mess in the east was even more apparent. Once a referendum was decided on, two questions would appear on the ballot. First, ‘Are you in favour of the state of Western Australia withdrawing from the Federal Commonwealth established under the Commonwealth of Australia Constitutional Act (Imperial)?’ Second, ‘Are you in favour of a convention of representatives of equal number from each of the Australian States being summoned for the purpose of proposing such alterations in the Constitution of the Commonwealth as may appear to such convention to be necessary?’ This second, alternate question had been added to satisfy the Labor Party and to persuade them to pass the legislation.

During the campaign leading to the vote, opposition to secession came from the Unity League and the Federal League of Western Australia, but they were overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the Dominion League. On the day, 8 April 1933, almost two-thirds of the electorate voted for secession, that is, for question 1. The second proposal was rejected overwhelmingly. Only the gold-mining districts, with residual connection to the east, voted against secession. Ironically, the Labor Party, which had opposed secession, was elected at the next state ballot.

Faced with a popular voice favouring secession, the state government had to present a petition to the Imperial Parliament in Westminster to amend the Constitution Act and thus make Western Australia an independent dominion. There was another possibility, and that was to seek an Australia-wide referendum on the Constitution through Section 128, a referendum in which all the citizens of the other states would have to vote. But a majority of ‘yes’ votes in a majority of states was not a possibility, even if Canberra allowed such a referendum to take place. That is, Australia wouldn’t voluntarily let Western Australia go. In February 1934, the state government announced it was proceeding along the route of a petition to the Parliament in Westminster, for the Australian Constitution was an enactment of that Parliament. Western Australia enacted an initial Secession Act of its own in June 1934. The Dominion League was very confident that the Westminster petition would be kindly and promptly received and acted upon after its presentation in November 1934. But it was February 1935 before a joint select committee of the British Parliament was formed to decide whether Western Australia could secede.

Since Federation, and after the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the United Kingdom wanted less and less to enact legislation regarding the affairs of dominions unless requested to do so by the dominion in question. Since 1931, indeed, no Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom could be passed affecting a dominion unless that dominion requested and consented to it. But the lawyers from Western Australia, led by Professor J.H. Morgan, advised the Imperial Parliament that it had the power to act unilaterally if it decided to do so. The Statute of Westminster did not compel the Imperial Parliament; it was ‘declaratory’, that is, it was etiquette, a non-binding protocol. Besides, Australia had not yet adopted the Statute of Westminster (and would not do so until world events in the early 1940s made it advisable).

The select committee did decide promptly, and the secessionists did not like what they decided. Even though Western Australia was not mentioned in the general preamble to the Constitution that referred to uniting ‘in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown’, it was mentioned in Preamble 3: ‘after the passing of this Act, the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, and also, if Her Majesty is satisfied that the people of Western Australia have agreed thereto, of Western Australia, shall be united in a Federal Commonwealth’. Here, unlike the opening of the Preamble, that Commonwealth was not described as indissoluble. Western Australia had accepted the Commonwealth as a marriage of 1901, but had believed it could leave at will. They had ‘agreed thereto’, which was the only condition placed on them, and assumed they could later agree to the opposite. The select committee, however, decided that the word ‘indissoluble’ covered Section 3 of the Preamble. The bad news for Western Australia was that its entry into the Commonwealth was no different from that of the other states: Western Australia was as bound in as was, say, Victoria. Whereas the US Constitution had mentioned a voluntary union, the Australians, influenced by the American Civil War, had emphasised the term ‘indissoluble union’ as the founding utterance of the Preamble. Therefore ‘the [WA] petition was not receivable’. The committee did not have jurisdiction to recommend enacting the request unless it contained ‘the clearly expressed wishes of the Australian people as a whole’. That is, there would need to be a federal referendum specifically to modify the indissoluble idea, and a majority of Australians and a majority in a majority of states would need to vote for them to be allowed to depart. The Western Australians knew this option was impossible.

Prime Minister Lyons was delighted with the result. The Labor premier of Western Australia, Philip Collier, who had succeeded Mitchell in April 1933, was relieved also. The Dominion League was appalled, and vowed to continue to work for secession, but there was obviously no further option open to it now, and the idea withered away. The Commonwealth Grants Commission, newly established by the Lyons government in response to the strong support shown for Western Australian secession, began to investigate the financial difficulties of smaller states so that special assistance grants could be offered. It recognised that a great part of Western Australia’s financial problems stemmed from federal tariff policy that favoured industries in New South Wales and Victoria but drove up prices for the wheat and sheep producers of Western Australia. Lyons agreed to look into all this. Amidst the budget-straitening, Western Australia gained a little. Many of its citizens were now too desperate and too far removed from the trickle of funding to notice, however.