CHAPTER 3

Aggression everywhere
Appeasement and war

ALOOF FROM THE WARS OF THE WORLD

When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in late 1935, the world was so divided and hapless in its response that tyrants could take heart. The international reaction was a confession that the League of Nations in Geneva had become emasculated. The Italians, having acquired Eritrea in the Horn of Africa as part of the great European carve-up of the late nineteenth century, had always had an eye on Abyssinia, not yet allocated to any European power. But in 1896 the Abyssinian army had beaten the Italians off at Adowa, on the Eritrean–Abyssinian border. In 1934 there were border incidents between Abyssinian and Italian troops and their African allies, which Mussolini was happy to build into a justification for a coming invasion. By early 1935, the Italian government and armed forces were already preparing to take Abyssinia with mechanised Italian legions, although the invasion would not occur until October. On 2 November 1935, the League voted to prevent weapons exports to Italy and Abyssinia; to prohibit financial dealings with Italy on both an individual and an institutional level; and to ban imports from Italy and exports to it.

Britain was the chief driver of these sanctions, since the British public were offended by the sense of entitlement Mussolini demonstrated in invading the empire of Haile Selassie. Many Britons believed that there should be military retaliation, but their conviction was undermined by the fact that the French did not. In fear of Germany, the French had made a pact with Italy and professed themselves appalled by British talk of military sanctions against Mussolini, including the blockading of Italian ports. Mere trade sanctions seemed to the British government a far more desirable option than confronting Mussolini directly, and in that spirit Australia voted for them also.

The Australian politicians of the 1930s, on both sides of politics, felt that they had enough to deal with domestically and internationally and were dedicated appeasers. Joe Lyons had already been a strong advocate of the appeasement of Japanese in Manchukuo (Manchuria). He reported that he had reassured the Japanese of Australia’s friendship and expressed hopes that nothing would upset the relationship between the two countries. Now he did go so far as to mention to the US consul-general in Australia, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, that he ‘could never forget that Australia might someday find herself in the plight of Abyssinia’, but that was as big a reason not to intervene as it was to take action.

The Australian government, like many individual Australians, hoped that Britain under the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would not intervene, and were relieved to find Baldwin had no intention to. The courtly Stanley Melbourne Bruce, former Australian prime minister, was Australian high commissioner in London, and at that moment held the rotating position of president of the League of Nations Council. Bruce had had a great deal to say to the British government about the imposition of trade sanctions. With almost saturnine reasoning, Bruce assured Australian Prime Minister Lyons that the League Covenant’s clause demanding military intervention did not apply unless a sanctions-imposing state was itself attacked. If this position was rather technical, it was welcomed in Canberra, as in many other capitals. Lyons believed in the League, and in world and national government by consensus, and was such a kindly fellow that he was bewildered as to why humanity as a whole was not bent on getting along. The League was the organ of world consensus, and Honest Joe, who—despite the Depression—attracted much affection amongst Australians, was, like other statesmen, unable to see that appeasement would destroy the League.

As for a blockade of Italian ports, Bruce argued that it was not even remotely likely that America would respect a British and Australian blockade of Italian ports, or that the British could turn back ships loaded with American goods. Nor could the British close the Suez Canal to Italy without hurting themselves, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand economically. The situation was further complicated by the fifty thousand Italian troops in Libya, Italy’s Northern African possession on the Mediterranean, next door to British-controlled Egypt. Mussolini had armies on both flanks of the Suez, the western flank in Libya, and the south-eastern one in Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and, potentially, Abyssinia. From Australia House on its oblique corner in the Strand, Bruce, however, went so far as to suggest to both Australia and the British Cabinet that the crisis showed up the vulnerability of both countries, which must now begin to rearm, given that their militaries were too puny to stop Mussolini in any case. Meanwhile, the Canadians wanted an oil embargo against Italy, but Bruce was against it.

The weakness of the League was that, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s early trumpeting of the organisation, America had never joined it, for fear that it had the power to undermine American sovereignty and neutrality and drag it into wars. It now seemed unlikely that the League had the required unity and moral strength to drag any country into armed conflict. By now, Japan had also walked out of the League, over criticism of its military activities in Manchuria—not that the League had taken any firm action. By 1933, Germany, under Hitler, had also departed. By letting the Japanese establish an empire in Manchuria, and standing by as Mussolini prepared his Ethiopian attack, the League of Nations, in its Palace of the Nations, looking out from its vast, inoffensively modernist headquarters across parkland to tranquil and neutral Lake Geneva, was reducing itself to irrelevance.

Lyons’ government, in its fear of an advancing Japan, had by the time of the Abyssinian crisis begun a modest rearmament program; however, it was discussing not only how to appease Italy but even looking at establishing links with the other great Pacific nation, the United States, to balance any coming threat from Japan. The reason this latter radical—and to some heretical—idea had been even spoken in the little capital, Canberra, was the fear that any European war would take the attention of the British fleet, and might mean that the naval base at Singapore, commenced in 1923, could not be held. Lyons had met Roosevelt in mid-1935 and felt he could work with him. He had also met Mussolini on 27 June 1935, on his way home to Australia from London, before the Abyssinian crisis but while it was threatening, and like many others at the time he had been impressed by Mussolini’s energy and his supposed respect for diplomacy over military action. Back in Australia, Lyons told a press conference that ‘the influence of such a man on the destinies of Europe is immense’.

On the opposition benches, Labor’s position was also very confused. Generally it did not want any military activity against Italy. The party came under the leadership of the Western Australian John Curtin the day before Mussolini began his attack on Abyssinia in October 1935, and Labor had its attention fixed on dealing with its breakaway Lang Labor rebels in both the Federal Parliament and in New South Wales. Curtin was also conscious that the Labor Party had a powerful tribe of Catholics both within it and behind it, and that some of them felt tolerant towards Mussolini because of his recognition of the Vatican state and Pius XI. An isolationist, Curtin did not seek any sanctions at all against Italy: ‘The distinction between economic sanctions and military sanctions appears to be doubtful,’ he warned. Once drawn into the one, it was hard not to be drawn into the other. Australia should stay ‘aloof from the wars of the world’. He was not even in favour of the modest military actions Lyons had taken in putting two Australian cruisers, the Australia and the Sydney, at the Admiralty’s disposal. Neither was Lang, who wrote in Labor Daily: ‘Sanctions mean war. War means conscription. Conscription means a foreign grave for your husband, brother or son . . . beware the Sanctioneers.’

But many Labor members were in favour of sanctions as long as they did not undermine the economy, and agreed with the Lyons government’s arguments for modest sanctions to be imposed on Italy by Britain and Australia. These consisted of refusing to export to Italy items such as gold or textiles but did not extend to oil and coal. Lyons declared that the British Empire and the unity of the League of Nations were Australia’s ‘sword and buckler’ in a dangerous world (a buckler is a small shield). Total neutrality, argued Lyons, was a constitutional impossibility without seceding from the Empire itself. And since we needed the British base in Singapore to protect us from Japanese thrusts into the Pacific and Indian oceans, seceding from the Empire was unthinkable. So the majority in the Australian Parliament backed Lyons and the British in voting that if Italy did invade Abyssinia, trade sanctions should be imposed and Italy would be condemned as an aggressor. These were threats that barely delayed Mussolini.

Hughes, Lyons’ Minister for Health and Repatriation, broke ranks and published a book entitled Australia and War Today, which appeared on the eve of the second reading of the Australian Sanctions Bill. In it he railed against the British Empire’s lack of military response and advocated massive and urgent rearmament in the United Kingdom and in Australia. He declared that League decisions not backed up by force ‘are not only futile but mischievous . . . all effective sanctions must be supported by adequate force’. This position was, however, an embarrassment to most of his ‘sanctions-only’ colleagues.

The League decided on sanctions which were to apply from mid-November 1935. The Abyssinian invasion, despite the tanks-against-spears nature of the war, was taking a little longer than Mussolini had hoped. The most effective sanctions would have been a ban on oil supplies to Italy, who had only three months’ reserve to finish their campaign on. But in February 1936, the Standard Oil Company of New York totally undercut any idea of oil sanctions by making a contract with the Italian navy to supply it with oil via Germany and Brazil. Only Roosevelt’s ‘moral embargo’ was left in place. As for coal, Germany was pleased to sell it to Mussolini.

On 5 May 1936, the Italians marched into Addis Ababa. Lyons had hoped the Abyssinian spring rains would fall and slow the Italians down, but as so often, they did not come on time. Now that Abyssinia was lost, Lyons not only pushed Bruce to argue for the lifting of British sanctions, but also suggested informal talks between the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy to strengthen the League by attracting Germany back into the international family. ‘We think it essential,’ Lyons told Bruce, ‘that action for reform of the League should be contemporaneous with removal of sanctions and that preliminary conversations be commenced now.’

On 18 June 1936, Lyons made a statement to the Australian press in which he said that the Italian victory had been too fast to allow sanctions to do any good. Yet to get fifty nations to agree to impose them, he argued, was nonetheless a ‘great moral advance’.

In mid-May of 1936, Robert Gordon Menzies, the young Melbourne lawyer who, by his force of personality and ambition, would ultimately take the prime ministership after Joe Lyons’ death, was in Britain with Earle Page. Page was the Grafton surgeon and gifted Country Party leader who had been Bruce’s deputy and Minister for Commerce through the 1920s, and who was now a very effective deputy for Lyons. He had had the extreme and crippling misfortune of losing his son, also Earle, to a lightning strike on the family’s Clarence River Valley farm, but he was now back in Parliament and world affairs after his year’s mourning. Page and Menzies advised Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Minister, that the government of the United Kingdom should lift sanctions on the grounds that they had done nothing for Abyssinia, and that continuing them would make the League look ridiculous and would only serve to encourage the Italians to greater aggression.

Sanctions were lifted in July 1936. The world, despite its sentimental affection for the exiled Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie, settled itself to regard Abyssinia as Italian, as were Eritrea and Libya. Lyons would be pleased to be able to acknowledge Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia in late 1938. Many of his fellow Australian Catholics took a similar view to Lyons: Archbishop James Duhig in Brisbane argued that just as Australia had been ‘black and barbaric’ in 1788 but was now British and civilised, so Italy was only trying to achieve the same for Abyssinia.

Australian trade with Italy resumed in 1938. It was chiefly in wool—Italy was usually Australia’s fourth or fifth best customer. The overall balance of trade was massively in Australia’s favour, with £4.6 million worth of exports in 1934, which dropped to £1 million in 1935, but jumped back to £5.3 million in 1937. For that reason, too, Australia did not want to be too severe on Mussolini.

VIVA CRISTO REY

Two significant encyclicals were issued in 1931—Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year: On Reconstructing the Social Order) and Non Abbiamo Bisogno (We Do Not Need to Acquaint You: Concerning Catholic Action). Quadragesimo Anno was seen by Catholics as second only to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in its importance as a Catholic social document. It generated the idea of Catholic action—lay Catholic organisations that sought to live by and spread Catholic teachings but also to combat the twin monsters of ‘blighted capitalism and the godless materialism of Socialism’. It urged that groups of activist Catholics be trained, and at the same time wanted Catholic groups to take action in the world without having political ambitions. These ideas were attractive to an adolescent student at St Kevin’s Christian Brothers, then in East Melbourne. B.A. Santamaria was the son of a greengrocer from the Aeolian Islands. His life would show that Catholic action inevitably led to political results, but that was not an issue in the mid-1930s, when he was studying Arts and Law at Melbourne University. He opposed both Fascism and rampant capitalism, but he was torn about Mussolini, for whom he had sympathy until his alliance with Hitler. He believed, however, that British policy drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler, of whom Santamaria never approved in any way.

The question for Santamaria and other Catholics was, who do you back when it comes to a fight between Fascism and Communism—especially if it is a case of Fascism in a traditionally Catholic country?

The Spanish Civil War brought frontal conflict between Catholicism and Communism in a way that the invasion of Abyssinia did not. This struggle between two massive forces occupied every Catholic mind, and indeed not only of Catholic consciousness, for decades. In the case of Spain, most Catholics would prove to be anti-Communist and in favour of the rebel general, Franco, who would in the end crush the radical forces that fought for the elected Socialist government of Spain. The author remembers being told of the heroic siege of the Alcázar in Toledo, the attempt early in the Spanish Civil War by the forces of the Spanish Republic to capture a fortress and magazine of that name from a rebellious Catholic force. The siege lasted until September 1936, when General Franco’s forces arrived in Toledo from North Africa. The relief of the Alcázar was a triumph for, as the Spanish said, Cristo Rey (Christ the King) and ‘Viva Cristo Rey’ became a war cry not only of Franco’s forces but of Catholics the world over.

In the same year that Japan invaded Manchuria, republicanism swept the Spanish elections and King Alfonso XIII fled the country. The Church was disestablished. From those elections of May 1931, army officers and monarchists began plotting against the Republic, and the primate of the Spanish Church, Cardinal Segura, issued a pastoral letter condemning the Republic.

The Carlist (that is, monarchist) Party began receiving arms from Mussolini and in return sent its officers to Italy for training. The conservatives allied with the Carlists and in power initially under the republic were involved in suppressing a miners’ strike in Asturias in north-western Spain. Moorish troops from Spanish Morocco and Spanish legionaries loyal to the republican government were sent in, and 1335 strikers were killed and nearly three thousand wounded. This almost guaranteed a left-wing government would come to power in the elections in early 1936.

Before the elections of February 1936 were held, anti-Republican plotting by the young General Franco and General Godet was intense. But the government elected was the radical Popular Front, the republican left. Basque and Catalonian separatists were also part of the ruling coalition. These elections and their results provoked strikes and church burnings by Popular Front followers.

On 11 July 1936, a plane chartered in London with the help of English Catholic supporters of the rising by Franco, piloted by an Englishman and carrying English passengers to allay suspicion, took off from Croydon airport to collect Franco from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, to which he had been exiled, and fly him to Morocco to take command of the Army of Africa, a Spanish force garrisoned there. The army sailed under Franco for the Spanish west coast and landed south of Portugal. Cadiz, Seville and Córdoba fell to them, and by October the Franco forces in the north and south had connected with each other and threatened Madrid.

Nettie Palmer, the Melbourne writer and socialist intellectual, had been living since May 1936 with her husband Vance in Montgat, a Catalan village fourteen kilometres north of Barcelona along the coast. Vance was working on an abridgement of Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life. Nettie was writing on the defence of Western culture, but now became the woman on the spot and declared in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘My first news of the insurrection in Barcelona came from the village milkman, who drove round as usual early in the morning . . . “There’s a revolution. Don’t you hear the guns?”’ The Palmers were concerned for their daughter, Eileen, a Melbourne University graduate, twenty-one years old, who had become an interpreter in Barcelona for the French team at the Olympiada Popular, the People’s Olympics, an anti-Fascist attempt at holding a games to rival Hitler’s Berlin Olympics.

It was apparent by 19 July that the firing they heard was from a revolution, which Vance called ‘Fascist-militarist’. These rebels were as yet far from Franco’s front line and were destined not to flourish. Vance found that the local people were definitely on the side of the leftist government—‘the people [are] out in the streets and burning the Church’. The next day he found Roca, the owner of a grocery store in the village, forthcoming. Fiercely anti-clerical, Roca declared, ‘Every church and monastery is a Fascist barracks, but after this they’re finished.’

Geoffrey Hutton, an Argus journalist who was in Spain as a tourist, had described the pre-election scenes in Madrid’s main square, where the police sided with the crowd against the republic’s conservative government. Brian Penton, a journalist for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and its future editor, had published a novel named Land Takers, which had appeared in 1934 and sold well, and was in Spain working on his second novel. He reported that the hungry people of Torremolinos, a little fishing village nearly thirteen kilometres from the republican village of Málaga, had been deprived of ballot boxes by the rightist political bosses in Madrid, and reacted by shooting the priest, the tax collector and the landlord’s representative. After the Popular Front won, he saw the people burn down the church.

HMS London appeared off the Mediterranean coast to pick up Britons, and the Palmers were amongst those who got on board, having faced the fact that they were running out of charcoal, and cooking would soon be impossible. They had not been able to change travellers’ cheques and thus had no money for food. The Palmers’ daughter Eileen was indignant when Vance told her she was to go too. The Games Eileen was working for, however, would never take place. She would nevertheless stay on.

Writing for the Communist Daily Worker in London on 1 August 1936, Vance declared: ‘The Left Front [the Popular Front] was a living reality, its courage and decision had swept into the ranks of middle class elements that might have wavered or even gone over to the enemy.’ In his view, an unarmed and unprepared people had had to face an uprising by an organised, paid and fully equipped army.

The Tasmanian Catholic and able journalist Noel Monks was already on London’s Daily Express staff when the Spanish war began. He had a family friendship with Prime Minister Lyons, also a Tasmanian, and that had helped him land a job with the British paper. To him, Franco was fighting for the church in which Monks had been brought up.

Two South Australians, H.M. (Bill) Seppelt and B.R. Gee, had been in Barcelona on a working holiday to study the wine industry. In Badajoz, a city on the Portuguese border which had fallen to the rebel Nationalists—that is, the Franco forces—they witnessed terrible slaughter. Survivors of the battle were put in a bull ring and several men were shot dead. Near the cemetery they came across three hundred republican bodies piled up to make a bonfire, but a priest told them that the dead had deserved what they had got.

The Australian press didn’t quite know what to make of these events, or of this war, which would drag on until early 1939, when Madrid and Barcelona both fell to Franco. Some ABC journalists expressed concern that Franco was being supported by Hitler and Mussolini. John McCallum’s judgement was heard on the ABC on 23 June 1937: ‘Win or lose, General Franco’s rebellion has brought frightful misery to Spain.’

On her return to Australia, Nettie Palmer became a great promoter of the Spanish republican cause. Soon after her return, she produced a pamphlet, Spain! The Spanish People Present Their Case. She would become the president of the Spanish Relief Committee, and was much helped by the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, the Reverend Farnham Maynard. The committee initially sent off four nurses, including the formidable, diminutive Mary Lowson. Lowson had been nursing in the Lidcombe State Hospital and attended a meeting on 26 August 1936 at which a Red Cross unit was proposed to represent Australia. Two weeks later, three more nurses from Lidcombe, and one from elsewhere, booked their passage.

Lowson was less than five feet tall, born in Hobart, orphaned early, and had been a teacher before she took up nursing. The Depression forced her into less preferred work at Lidcombe State Hospital and its attached dumping ground for destitute men. The poverty of the inmates caused her to seek a radical solution and she joined the Communist Party. She was forty-one years old when she volunteered.

May McFarlane, at twenty-six years, was the youngest of the contingent. She had considered being an Anglican missionary but was influenced by Lowson’s view of the inequalities of society. Una Wilson was a theatre nurse. A fourth nurse, Edith Curwen, a Catholic, was persuaded by her parents to withdraw. A replacement was Agnes Hodgson, daughter of a commercial traveller and Digger, who had been killed on the first day of Gallipoli. She had earlier travelled in Spain, and had tried unsuccessfully from Australia to get a post nursing in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s invasion.

When it was reported that volunteer nurses were proposing to go to Spain, Hughes, the Minister for Health, was asked in Parliament if he could prevent them from leaving Australia. He replied that he could not but that he had his own opinion of Lowson and her fellow nurses. By imputation, it wasn’t a good one. Hughes further said that he wasn’t concerned about their going and would offer them inducements to stay in Spain if he had his way. Yet the Commonwealth Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General’s Department was asked to report on the nurses and found that they were not Communists, not even Lowson. The Attorney-General’s Department was asked whether the nurses could be forced to stay in Australia under the British law that prevented citizens fighting in wars in countries with whom Britain was at peace. The answer was that the nurses were not combatants and couldn’t be prevented from going.

From March 1937, Lowson was attached to the English-speaking section of the Foreigners’ Division in Spain. She received a pass to France and went there to buy supplies. She also sent back to Nettie Palmer and the Spanish Relief Committee a plan for reorganising republican health services.

Returning to Australia, her skill as a publicist was evident from the moment she stepped off the ship at Fremantle on 28 September 1937 to begin a lecture tour devised by the Foreigners’ Division to raise money. Amongst the messages she brought was a letter she had received from Una Wilson: ‘Mary and I have seen hardships . . . we heal their wounds and back they go to the trenches to be shot to bits.’ Lowson addressed the Labor Women’s Conference in Perth, the Trades Hall and railway workshops in Adelaide, as well as a public meeting in the Botanic Gardens, and then on to Melbourne. She declared that many of Franco’s forces were defecting to the legitimate government, and described aerial bombardment and the amazing spectacle of people going to work as bombs fell. She expanded on the subject of food shortages and called Franco’s rebellion a revolt against a new social revolution. She recounted the frontline experiences of her fellow nurses. She was farewelled from Sydney at the Paddington Town Hall on 21 March 1938, after raising some hundreds of pounds—£352 by the end of 1937, quite a feat in the midst of a Depression.

The Spanish Relief Committee sometimes cast up some strange bedfellows. Not all of the Protestant clergymen associated with the committee joined it for purely humanitarian reasons. They were pleased to see the Republicans attack the Catholic Church. Some were activated to support the Republic for that reason. In any case, Nettie Palmer took help where it was offered, and worked relentlessly in Melbourne. Her Melbourne secretary was an Anglican, Helen Bailey, a woman of independent means who worked with the Australian Aboriginal League and particularly served those families living in the slums of Fitzroy.

The nurses collected donations in Melbourne, Adelaide and, with the help of the novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, Fremantle.

A leaflet was signed by the heads of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican churches in Victoria appealing for funds. The two sets of operations and fundraising seemed to work well. The collection of funds for the Joint Spanish Aid Council was not as fast as it was for the Spanish Relief Committee.

But the main Australian concerns manifested themselves in the issue of godless Communism versus Franco’s rebel forces of Light and Christianity, and then, above all, the preservation of world peace. Spain was even further away than Abyssinia. An International Non-Intervention Committee was formed in 1936 by the French and British to ensure that no other countries would be sucked into the Spanish vortex. Ironically, as well as France and Britain, the Non-Intervention Committee included the Soviet Union, who would supply aid to the Republicans, and Italy and Germany, who would support Franco’s rebels in even more significant ways. The League of Nations seemed impotent as it watched the Non-Intervention Committee go through its surreal paces.

Lyons’ government and Curtin’s opposition approved of the committee. There was still the World War I anti-conscriptionist heart beating in Curtin, the belief that no more Australian boys should be asked to die far from home. The Bulletin was passionately anti-interventionist. Inky Stephensen and W.J. Miles, in the spirit of the Bulletin, brought out their Loyal to Australia First monthly to encourage isolationism. But F.R. McIlwraith would write in Smith’s Weekly—McIlwraith was the Smith’s Weekly man in London—‘If the facts of the war in Spain were presented as they should be to the people of Australia . . . they would enter a wild cry of protest, and compel their timeserving politicians to make representations to Downing Street.’ McIlwraith’s son, Warren, was also accredited by Smith’s as a war correspondent also and set off for Barcelona with a typewriter and £10 in cash.

Some of the opposition to Franco’s rebels arose from a racial regret to see Moorish (North African Muslim) troops back in Spain from which the Moors had been driven in the fourteenth century. The remarkable Mary Gilmore, survivor of Bill Lane’s nineteenth-century attempt to build a socialist New Australia in Paraguay, and who would become more and more vocal in her support for the republic, was one of them. She wrote to her friend, the poet Hugh McCrae, ‘No doubt the Moors are as good as we are, but not in Spain.’ Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane, however, a devout Franco supporter, had no trouble with the issue.

Influential in the debate in Sydney was Professor John Anderson, a Scot who taught Trotskyist Marxism and a radical scepticism that marked the course of Sydney’s intellectual life. Anderson gave a lecture on ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, which was packed out. Yet also influential was the anti-interventionist Inky Stephensen, who was at the time editing Capricornia, Xavier Herbert’s radical, pro-Aboriginal novel. Other intellectuals were concerned about the prospect of a Fascist Spain with debts to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. A possible future Franco–Mussolini–Hitler alliance rightly scared them.

But from Prime Minister Lyons down, sentiments were non-interventionist. Lyons was in fact pleased at the success of the Franco forces. Not even the bombing of Guernica on 28 April 1937 changed this. The journalist Noel Monks had arrived there on Anzac Day. Far from being anti-Catholic, he noticed the republican Basques had been at Mass for part of the day. On the day of the bombing, at four in the afternoon, Monks beheld, several waves of German aircraft, Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts, dropped incendiary, high-explosive and shrapnel bombs for three hours on Guernica. Because the Daily Express in London inadvertently ran articles under his name which had not been submitted to the Republican censor, Monks was arrested and expelled from Spain. But he returned by sea to the Republican northern city of Bilbao, on which rebel forces were advancing.

Monks returned to the town of Guernica and walked amongst the ruins. Franco defenders had a hard time explaining why there had been no attacks on the church in the Basque areas, attacks on churches by the Communists being part of the justification for the raid. So there was a tendency to deny that the bombing had occurred or to assert that it had been the work of the Republican forces themselves. It was a period when massed bombardment was still a new and horrifying experience, and so both shock and denial were likely reactions. Guernica had been blown up by the Reds, argued many supporters of Franco. Other Catholics acknowledged that it had occurred; Monks knew it had.

On a hot March night in 1937, a large audience crowded into a sweltering theatre at Melbourne University to debate the subject ‘The Spanish Government Has Been the Ruin of Spain’. B.A. Santamaria and Nettie Palmer were involved in organising the event, and one of the debaters on the pro-Republican side was the extraordinary Dr Jerry O’Day, raised a Catholic but now a Communist. He had abandoned his lucrative medical practice and made his services either free or very cheap for the poor of Melbourne. This was certainly a meeting that transcended the usual Australian indifference to Spain. Cries of ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’ drowned such speakers as O’Day and led to fighting in the corridors. Fire hoses were commandeered by the pro-Franco sections of the audience and turned on the Republican side. Some men also climbed onto the roof of the theatre and stamped so loudly that the speakers could not be heard. Catholic action had perhaps gone too far.

Franco and Mussolini supporters organised a concert of support for Franco’s side in the Sydney Town Hall where the visiting Italian tenor, Tito Schipa, gave the Fascist salute five times at the start of his performance. The audience clapped and stamped.

In July 1936, at the beginning of the war, all but three Australian bishops had signed the Spanish bishops’ joint letter to the ‘Bishops of the Whole World’, in which they damned the Republican government and justified the war as Christian and just. The Reverend Father Leo Dalton told an audience in Croydon in New South Wales, ‘I have uncontestable evidence of fiendish and lustful torture inflicted by the Communists on nuns, priests and all who tried to bar their way in Spain.’

In response to apologists for Franco, Communist Party members had, during the luncheon adjournment of the fifth cricket Test in February 1937, unleashed at the Melbourne Cricket Ground large banners and leaflets that declared, ‘It is the first stage of the Second World War—outlaw bodyline in world affairs.’ * Meanwhile, though it is hard to tell how many Australians fought in the Spanish war, some fifty-two were known to have volunteered for the Republican side, of whom, ultimately, sixteen were the much-sneered-at nurses. Nugent Bull was, as far as can be told, the only Australian who fought on the Franco side. Perhaps ten Australians were drowned amongst the hundred in the City of Barcelona, a Republican troopship taking volunteers from Marseilles in France to Barcelona. The ship was torpedoed close to its name city by an Italian submarine and sank in little more than seven minutes. A witness mentioned ‘one poor guy who couldn’t swim standing right on the point, and then that went down too’. Those who dived overboard could see the screaming faces of men trapped at portholes.

One Australian who fought in Spain was Charles Walters, son of a Sussex game warden, who emigrated to Australia at seventeen, worked as a rabbit trapper in South Australia and was secretary of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Tasmania. Another was Ted Dickinson, brought by his mother to Australia in 1907 at the age of three. He educated himself through Workers’ Educational Association classes and was drawn to the Wobblies. Jim McNeal had a vocal Irish father who inveighed against tyranny. He was educated by the Christian Brothers at Balmain. Sam Aarons was a second-generation Communist, something of a rarity in Australia; his mother had travelled to the USSR in 1932. These were amongst the first Australians to take part in a shooting war since World War I. Aarons would return to Australia in 1938, McNeal and Walters in 1939, and Dickinson would be killed in the fighting.

Another irrepressible rebel was Ron Hurd, apprentice jockey, boxer, and member of the Communist Party since 1929. In 1932, after a year of agitation amongst the unemployed during which he was arrested twice, he tramped to Adelaide and stowed away on a ship to England. He became an organiser of the International Seamen’s and Harbour Workers’ Union, based in Liverpool. ‘Ron Hurd looks what he says he is, an Australian, a seaman, and a defender of democracy,’ the Workers’ Star said admiringly on his return to England from Spain. ‘The workers of Kalgoorlie like him. Ron calls a spade a spade and a Fascist a Fascist.’ In October 1936, Australian Blue Sampson—real name Jack Sampson—wrote from Barcelona, ‘It would be impossible to explain just how it makes one feel to see the workers patrolling the streets fully armed and keeping order and discipline.’ He had been out of Australia since 1934, when he was arrested and charged with striking a policeman during an eviction of the unemployed.

Jack Stevens of Western Australia had declared, ‘Adolph [Hitler] the Butcher has got right under our skins.’ It would be a few years before he got under the skin of other Australians. Stevens was killed in 1938. A correspondent from Spain, quoted in the West Australian, reported that ‘he fell mortally wounded during a daring and successful assault on Villanueva de la Cañada. This was the commencement of a sweeping offensive on the North-Western Madrid front’. Stevens was a member of the International Brigade. The newspaper declared that he ‘more than upheld the glorious tradition of the Anzacs at Gallipoli’.

A passionate pro-Franco man and a believer in Catholic action was Nugent Bull, former star batsman of the St Joseph’s College cricket team. He belonged to a notable Catholic dynasty of undertakers. Bull’s great influence was Brother Gerard, a famous rugby coach and director of the Hunters Hill school. ‘Still we have won,’ Bull would write to him from Spain, ‘and the new state is being built around the Church, as it is in Portugal. Iberia will be strong in the Church and now in arms.’ He had sailed on the Esquilino in October 1937 to join Franco’s Nationalist forces, and travelled to Talavera near Toledo where, thanks to the French he’d studied at St Joseph’s, he found himself amongst the St Joan of Arc (Juana de Arco) battalion. With the Joan of Arc and other companies of the Spanish Legion he advanced on the Aragon front.

Eileen Palmer would be at the front lines for two years in Teruel in Aragon, not so far removed from Bull. The British writer Winifred Bates met Palmer and wrote of her, ‘She comes in looking very rosy and well; dressed in corduroy trousers, muddy boots, and an enormous old sheepskin coat; she reminds me of one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.’

Amongst the Republican soldiers ultimately taken prisoner at Teruel in February 1938 was Jack Alexander of Brisbane, an officer in the British battalion. The town changed hands but Bull was amongst the forces that finally recaptured the town. He wrote to Brother Gerard, ‘They have refused to return to Teruel and . . . that I think is the general condition of the Red Army.’ Alexander had been buried by a shell burst and dug out semiconscious, taken to a village close by and lined up with others to be shot. He was saved by the arrival of a staff car bearing an order that they were to be taken prisoner for use in exchanges. They were driven to Saragossa but many men died on the way. Alexander’s wounds healed slowly in an overcrowded prison camp located in a convent. Its six hundred International Brigade prisoners had only three taps for water and were infested with lice, but in 1938, at a camp run by Mussolini’s Italian forces, though sentenced to death, he was fortunate instead to be amongst the first exchange prisoners to be repatriated. On a bridge near San Sebastien he was swapped for an Italian POW formerly captured by the Republicans. From Saragossa, Bull wrote to Marie Salisbury, a young Melbourne girl with whom he had been friendly during the journey from England to Spain, ‘Dear Marie, I am not dead yet—very best Catholics don’t die. The war is practically finished now—another month will see it through. Don’t get married yet—I can’t afford a present.’

By 15 April 1938, Franco’s troops reached the Mediterranean, and Republican Spain was cut into two sectors. But the war saw the year out. In December 1938, Bull was amongst the forces assembling in north-west Catalonia for a final offensive on Barcelona. It worked so well that a terrible exodus occurred into France, in which were caught up the young Australian journalists Alan Moorehead (soon to be a renowned author) and Mary Larsen.

Moorehead wrote of Franco’s African troops trying to halt the fleeing Spanish at the border, of people ‘carrying children, bedding and scraps of household goods which they have snatched from their houses . . . Normally the train from Barcelona runs through the tunnel. Together hundreds are wedged together in the darkness there, afraid to go back and unable to push on to the safety of France.’ Such scenes created horror in the imaginations of people at that time, though they would become more familiar in the world war about to be waged. Larsen would make it to Perpignan in southern France where she worked as a nurse in a hospital for Spanish refugees.

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was appalled on 24 March 1938 by the bombing of Barcelona and made a protest to the Spanish Nationalists; that is, to Franco’s government. Protests came to Joe Lyons, such as a cable from the Melbourne Spanish Relief Committee—‘Australian people joined world expressing horror ruthless bombardment refugees protest in name humanity’. Lyons replied that the Australian people were against interfering in the Spanish dispute.

The last Australian left alive in Spain by February 1939 was Bull. Franco’s troops entered Madrid on 28 March, Bull marching with the Spanish Legion, one of 120,000 ‘warriors in perfect formation whom Franco addressed, welcoming them to “martyred Madrid”’. After the march, Bull travelled with the Spanish Legion to Morocco, where he was given an honourable discharge in July 1939. It would not be long before he was back in conflict, this time fighting against his former German allies.

Another war in Europe was about to begin and, if the reader will forgive us for jumping forward to cover the full tragedy of Nugent Bull, it would claim Bull too. After his transfer with his fellow legionaries to North Africa and his discharge, Bull was unable to get work in Morocco and so left for London just in time for the first blackouts and, from a pew at Mass, to hear the air-raid warnings of World War II. He often went to Lyons teashops on weekdays, he reported. The chain of teashops were good places for tea, but then he found out that the Lyons were a Jewish family and gave them up. At last he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and trained—like Harvey Buttonshaw, an Australian who’d fought on the other, Republican side in Spain—as a gunner in Bomber Command. Over Berlin he reported his plane skimming ‘up and down [the boulevard] Unter den Linden for 30 minutes and plastering the Siemens factory with over one and a half tons of bombs’. In September 1940, Bull’s Lancaster, which had just raided Boulogne, had an engine burst into flame. The crew parachuted out but Bull was never rescued. At home, hatred for the side he had taken in the Spanish war turned up in a cruel letter to the Bull family: ‘That he should be killed fighting those he fought with in Spain is a just fate,’ some of it read.

Jack Alexander also enlisted in the RAAF in December 1941, having made his way home as a deckhand, and spent eighteen months flying in Brisbane wearing both the insignia of a flight sergeant and that of the International Brigade, which had supported the Republicans in Spain. He would survive the Second World War.

The Spanish Civil War, which many Australians considered none of their business and others felt passionately close to, might seem a separate event to many. But despite the fact that Spain, bled dry, opted out of World War II, it could be argued that World War II began long before it was formally declared, and that the Spanish Civil War was simply part of its overture.

Ken Coldicutt had been appointed national film organiser for the Spanish Relief Committee (SRC) on a salary of two pounds a week and persuaded the SRC to buy one of the few sound projectors in Australia. In February 1938, he took the films—Defence of Madrid and They Shall Not Pass—to Sydney and the SRC was staggered by their success. Coldicutt would become an extremely important film commentator. He had earlier been film manager for the Friends of the Soviet Union, and in 1936 imported what were said to be the first prints of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World. He knew that Defence of Madrid was ‘anything but a masterpiece’ but that it had great impact. He had been contemplating joining the International Brigade to fight the Fascists in Spain, but when Defence of Madrid was shown, he abandoned these thoughts because he believed that raising money and awareness for the SRC was more important. He would be responsible for the showing of a number of 1937 films on the Spanish Civil War. In early 1938, he set off on an east-coast tour, going as far north as Cairns and Townsville, where the films were received with much enthusiasm by the Italian, Spanish and Yugoslav cane cutters, who donated large sums of money. He exhibited the films to twenty-five thousand people and raised £500 for the SRC.

Coldicutt was one of the creators of film societies in Australia and the author of a famous essay in Proletariat entitled ‘Cinema and Capitalism’. He was critical of commercial cinema. He lugged the heavy equipment off trains and into halls, made speeches, projected the films, took up the collections, announced the result and then packed up everything, ready for the next town. Before going to bed after each screening he typed up a financial report for the Melbourne and Sydney SRC. A large taxi fare to Molloy on the Atherton Tablelands was queried. The manager of the Molloy Theatre had assured Coldicutt that his voltage was 110 watts and Coldicutt had therefore freighted the 56-pound (25-kilogram) transformer on to Townsville by train. At the theatre, Coldicutt discovered the voltage was 240, and he took the taxi to pursue the goods train to Kuranda and retrieve the transformer.

JOE GOES

For ordinary Australians, as the world went to hell, the terms of their existence were still bitter. As the Australian writer Dorothy Hewett wrote of Depression charity:

Dole bread is bitter bread,
Bitter bread and sour.
There’s grief in the taste of it,
There’s weevils in the flour.

For Sydney wharf labourers, the Hungry Mile, at the eastern end of Darling Harbour, was still a place of degradation, but there were such sites all over Australia. Albert, a wharf labourer looking for work on the Mile, saw the foreman pick his favourites and then throw the remaining twelve to fifteen work tickets in the air for sport. ‘You’d be like dogs. Your mate would become your worst enemy. You might get one on the ground and go to pick it [up] and somebody would stand on your hand.’

Joe Lyons’ childhood had been influenced by Irish politics, the politics of want. Since his parents were Irish, Lyons had supported Home Rule, often considered a sign of Irish Republicanism by the Establishment. Yet even as Tasmanian premier, he had consulted conservative economists and worked amiably with the Country Party and the Tasmanian Nationalists. As an orthodox fiscal manager, he was appalled by Jack Lang’s behaviour. With Keith Murdoch’s powerful support, Lyons became the leader of the new United Australia Party in 1931, the conservative coalition that included the former Nationalist Party, and in less than a year he would win the prime ministership, helped along by his wife Enid, who would in 1943 be the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. Lyons was immensely popular, and did whatever his economic principles and advisors allowed him—such as releasing money to allow the states to offer employment. The hard yakka of building the road to the top of Mount Wellington in Hobart was financed first by Scullin, then by Lyons. Throughout the Depression, though, there was never a coherent federal assistance agency to promote employment. And in terms of trade, he passed up other opportunities so that Australia could go on trading with Britain, sincerely believing that this was the best way out.

Like Hughes, Lyons was an aviation enthusiast, but there was little to spend on the RAAF. In the 1931 election campaign, he was piloted around Australia by Charles Ulm in the aircraft named Faith in Australia. For the 1937 election he travelled 9600 kilometres to hold forty-three meetings in as many days. Dame Enid was equally popular, and probably helped garner women’s votes. In return she was herself helped by her husband’s amiable but rather avian-faced presence.

As prime minister, Lyons stood against inflation, and for debt conversion. This suited his Melbourne business backers, and the London bankers. In 1938, Charles Hawker, South Australian pastoralist, member of Parliament, and Minister for Repatriation and Markets, disagreed with Lyons on the matter of national service and lack of defence spending. He was said to be on his way to challenge Lyons’ leadership, but was killed when his plane crashed on Mount Dandenong.

Lyons’ lack of will to move on national insurance after the 1937 election caused Menzies to resign altogether. Lyons’ inability in the late 1930s to keep his government together meant he was unlikely to win another election. The stress on him had been prodigious, as he tried to retain the loyalty of the Country Party and of his ministry. He told Enid that in this third term he returned to Canberra with dread. He had won three elections—1931, 1934 and 1937—but his credit with his followers was running out. Mortality claimed him before his colleagues did. He died in Sydney Hospital in April 1939 of a coronary occlusion. The Melbourne lawyer Robert Menzies would be his successor.

THE ABORIGINAL FIGHT

The 1920s and 1930s would see an emergence of a new politics amongst Australia’s indigenous peoples.

The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) was founded in Sydney in 1925 by Fred Maynard from western New South Wales, the child of an Aboriginal woman and an English labourer who lived and worked there, but its focus was the mid-north coast of New South Wales and Aboriginal communities in towns such as Kempsey and Bellbrook. Maynard had been influenced by his experience as a young drover and stockman, and later as a wharfie and an active member of the Waterside Workers’ Union, as well as by members of his family who had lost land when it was leased to white farmers. He was assisted by the humanitarian Elizabeth McKenzie-Hatton, the only non-Aboriginal member of the organisation. McKenzie-Hatton took on the Aboriginal Protection Board over the issue of so-called ‘incorrigible Aboriginal girls’ who had absconded from employers, often for good cause, and for whom in 1924 she set up a house in Homebush, in defiance of the board. One of the incorrigibles she had rescued from perceived misuse at Nambucca Heads. McKenzie-Hatton was subjected to considerable police harassment during the two years she ran the house.

Maynard also travelled, holding meetings of Aborigines in country towns and hearing in particular of the seizure of Aboriginal reserve lands. The AAPA was also concerned with the other large practical question: the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. It sought citizenship rights for Aborigines but grounded these claims in their Aboriginality, asserting their status as Indigenous Australians and proclaiming a pride in being Aboriginal. It made an appeal to the Federal government on these issues after failing to get a reaction from the New South Wales government or from its petition to George V. An appeal would also be made to the imperial monarch when, in 1933, King Burraga (Joe Anderson), a western Sydney Basin (Dharug) man, led a movement to settle Aborigines at Salt Pan Creek camp in south-western Sydney, where Aborigines fleeing the control of the Protection Board on the north and south coast gathered from the mid-1920s onwards. These appeals were based on the idea that Aboriginal reserve lands had been granted to them by Queen Victoria, which meant that imperial monarchs had the authority to step in and protect them when they were resumed by the state government, which had happened in a number of places on the New South Wales coast, including Tea Gardens.

In 1937, another organisation, the almost identically named Aborigines’ Progressive Association (APA), founded by William Ferguson and Jack Patten, two men from the far south-west of New South Wales, argued that Aborigines should have the same rights as other Australians, but rather than Aboriginality it emphasised the importance of integration to bring about change. Ferguson and Patten were sick at heart at the breaking up of many reserves and the crowding of Aborigines into remaining ones, the terrible conditions of water supply and housing on these reserves, the dictatorial control by white reserve managers, the poor schooling, the denial of social welfare benefits, the removal of children from their parents, and the colour bar in country towns. But by mid-1938 the APA had split into two bodies, one led by Patten and getting support from Australian near-Fascists such as the editor and writer Inky Stephensen and W.B. Miles. The other APA, led by Ferguson and the indomitable South Sydney woman Pearl Gibbs, was concerned very much with Aboriginal problems in Dubbo and other western New South Wales communities. Its support came from the Australian Workers’ Union, the Unemployed Workers’ Union, feminist organisations and the Communist Party of Australia.

When nationalist supporters withdrew their backing for Australian Abo Call, a monthly newspaper, Patten’s APA lost much of its force, and it was disbanded in 1939.

There was little such political activity in Queensland, with its repressive state regime. Under the ‘Queensland Act’, the body of law governing Aborigines, they were powerless to form political organisations. The Protection Board there was headed by Protector J.W. Bleakley, former boilermaker, a man whose compassion became apparent to many individual Aborigines but whose overall administrative manner was one of paternalistic authority. The board oversaw workers’ wages through trust funds, controlled the large reserves or compounds, and removed Aboriginal children from their kin. Troublemakers were sent to the notorious Palm Island, off the coast of North Queensland.

Bleakley was obsessed with the ‘half-caste question’. Like many others of the time he was concerned with categorising Aboriginal people according to their degree of native heritage, and drew distinctions between full-blooded Aboriginal people down to people who were only one-eighth Aboriginal, whom he called octoroons. The lighter the skin, the more civilised and intelligent the board considered the person to be.

In South Australia, the Aboriginal voice was represented by several mission-educated men, most notably David Unaipon, whose story will be told later. Various forms of protest, public meetings and concerts, petitions, deputations and testifying in government inquiries took place. The tone of these representations was, in the spirit of Unaipon’s own temperament, extremely polite. There was a relationship between the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, which was made up of politically conservative missionaries and their friends, and one of the mission stations, Point McLeay, where Unaipon had spent his boyhood. Aborigines on other reserves frequently appealed to Constance Cooke, the convenor of the Aboriginal Welfare Committee of the South Australian Women’s Non-Party Association. Cooke was one of a number of white campaigners on issues such as loss of land, overcrowding on reserves, the right of Aboriginal representation on the bodies governing their lives, and the removal of children. One journalist reporting such an incident in 1924 used the term ‘stolen children’.

In Western Australia one of the interwar leaders was William Harris, a farmer in the Morawa district who had denounced the treatment of his fellow Aborigines in the area since 1906. He had been educated at the Swan Native and Half-Caste Home in Perth, and while working on cattle stations in the northwest of the state had seen the misuse of his people. Now he attempted to form a Native Union, along with his nephew Norman. One of their platforms was opposition to the authority of the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, on whose orders a considerable number of children were taken from their parents. They were also aggrieved at what they described as ‘imprisonment’ on reserves such as Moore River or Mogumber. Harris passionately protested against the massacres of Aborigines by punitive expeditions in the north of the state. His nephew noted that it was hard to maintain a political organisation ‘under the Act’, and the Native Union was short-lived, but Norman Harris and other members of the Harris clan continued to play a role in campaigning against Neville’s regime, giving evidence to a 1934 royal commission about the removal of children from their parents.

‘AS A RESULT’

On the first day of September 1939, late at night, news broadcasts and cables reached Australia that Polish cities had been bombed and that the German army had crossed the border. Prime Minister Bob Menzies had been at a speaking engagement at Colac in Victoria, and when he returned to town by car, the Cabinet, previously summoned, met in the Commonwealth Offices in Melbourne. The date clicked over, for the first meeting ended at 3 a.m. Menzies recorded a cautious broadcast at the ABC studios saying there was no official confirmation of events being reported by radio from Europe—that Polish cities had been bombed by the Nazis, who had demanded the return of the Free City of Danzig, and that German armed forces had crossed into Poland.

There existed a War Book, created by a special section of the Department of Defence after the Imperial Conference in 1930. It covered the procedures to be followed if war broke out, and secretary of the Department of Defence Frederick Shedden and Menzies now studied the section dealing with precautionary stages. If the British went into the precautionary stage, and remembered to send Australia a telegram, then the Australian Cabinet would meet again and put their own precautionary procedures into play. These included the beginning of an intelligence plan for the war, the immediate warning of shipping, the placing of permanent naval forces and other forces ‘on a war footing’, and the assumption by government of extraordinary powers, under the Defence Acts, to conscript workers for the war effort—a process that would come to be called Manpower. The government would also be empowered to censor newspapers, intern aliens, and call on the citizen forces to be available for war service. Postal censorship would be immediately imposed.

Waiting for further intelligence, Cabinet members had a few hours’ rest and met again at the Commonwealth Offices on Saturday morning, 2 September, where they were presented with the latest information from the British government. The Australian Cabinet included Sir Henry Gullett, the former official correspondent attached to Australian forces in Palestine and Syria in World War I, now Minister for External Affairs. Also present was Menzies’ urbane rival for national leadership, Richard Casey. The Cabinet contained three Military Cross winners from World War I. They finished their deliberations at 1 p.m; as they dispersed, Menzies told them that they must be available for further meetings at short notice. They rested as best they could, and that afternoon they ordered Australia into precautionary mode, commanding all citizens’ forces to be called out and made available for disposition by the military, air and naval boards. The Australians learned that Lord Halifax, British Foreign Minister, a former enthusiast for Hitler’s suppression of the German Communists and a less than full-blooded enthusiast for the war, had been instructed by his prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to order the British Ambassador in Berlin to deliver an ultimatum to Hitler, demanding he withdraw his forces from Poland by 8 p.m. eastern Australian time.

The trams that night ran as crowded as usual on their way to the city’s dance halls and cinemas. The Caulfield Cup that year was much discussed in a nation in which horseracing had a far more pervasive hold on society than it does now. (It would be won by Rivette.) Melbourne had won the footy that day and were on their way to grand final success over Collingwood later in the month, a game which, when it came, war or not, would be played before a crowd of seventy-eight thousand. In Sydney, Balmain and Eastern Suburbs were flexing muscles for their grand final, and the breath of war could not diminish the crowd one whit. Menzies and Cabinet and his secretariat, led by the public servant Shedden, were like a island of anxiety in a country in which many citizens were doing their best to forget international politics, and the bitter want, still not vanished, of the past decade.

Not everyone was gallivanting that night. Many were at home, radio listening. But not everyone from the farms and suburbs possessed a radio or had the price of a restaurant meal or a jaunt to the flicks. Menzies and his government were in fact worried that the Australian harvest would earn inadequately in the world market that year, that prices would be low, shipping hard to come by, and unemployment figures likely to rise again to the pernicious levels of around 30 per cent. Mateship was at a low ebb. The secret armies were largely gone, but classes still looked at each other with a bitterness restrained only by the ethos of good manners that characterised Australia then.

The government knew too that on a recent journey to Britain, Menzies had expressed his admiration for Germany, not only by showing sympathy by going along with British Prime Minister Chamberlain in appeasing Germany, and its desire to take Czechoslovakia over, but also by declaring that the Reich was not all bad—‘there were credit entries in the Nazi ledger . . . There is a good deal of really spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State.’ To be fair to Menzies, he was not the only conservative in the world uttering such sentiments in that period of concessions before the war. Lord Halifax had made many similar statements. This Polish thing could be smoothed over in the same way Hitler’s Czechoslovakian seizure had been. Poland was a long, long way from the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The ultimatum would expire at 11 a.m. British time the next day, 3 September in Britain, but at 8 p.m. on Sunday night, 3 September, in Eastern Australia.

It was the shortwave-wireless listeners—Menzies and his staff amongst them—who picked up the broadcast from England that Chamberlain had declared war on Germany. Ministers met again at the Cabinet offices in Melbourne. No official telegram from Britain had arrived. The question arose: was the broadcast authentic? Menzies and his ministers decided to accept the wireless broadcast and Prime Minister Chamberlain’s inimitable voice as the equivalent of notification. The first official communication from London had in fact already arrived at the Navy Office in Melbourne—a cable from the British Admiralty announcing the commencement of operations against Germany—and an officer was sent with a copy to show Menzies.

At 9.15 p.m., as soon as the radio equipment and technicians could be gathered in the room of the postmaster-general at the Commonwealth Offices, Menzies sat before the microphone and announced, over every national and commercial broadcasting station in the Commonwealth, Australia’s declaration of war. Menzies recounted the background of the onset of this conflict as he declared war on Australia’s behalf. The form of his declaration has been a subject of debate ever since. ‘In consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and . . . as a result, Australia is also at war.’

In Canada and South Africa, the decision to go to war was first debated in the parliaments. The speed and almost automatic nature of Menzies’ declaration left Australians of a later generation—and even some Australians then—convinced that his British reflex was stronger than his Australian. The defence for his summary decision to take Australia to war was inherent in that phrase ‘as a result’—a phrase offensive to nationalists but understandable to constitutionalists. For to Menzies it was supremely evident that Australia’s declaration of war was inherent in Britain’s. Chamberlain had declared war on behalf of King George VI, George VI was head of state and sovereign of Australia, and ‘as a result’ Australia was obviously involved. Nor had the Australian government, unlike those of Canada and South Africa, yet ratified the Treaty of Westminster that had awarded the dominions self-governance in defence and foreign policy.

Niall Brennan was a university student from Melbourne whose father had been a member of the House of Representatives from the days of Deakin, Cook and Fisher right up to the Labor defeat of 1931. Brennan senior had served for two years as attorney-general under Jim Scullin. Naturally, the Brennans—Irish, Labor—found the voice of Robert Menzies smug, and the father jumped up from the couch at the phrase ‘as a result’ and cried, ‘That’s constitutionally wrong.’ Niall thought that the ‘as a result’ declaration was one of the stupidest things that Menzies ever said.

But if John Curtin, Labor opposition leader and former pacifist, had doubts about the matter, he did not express them, either because it would have been politically inadvisable or, as it actually seems, because it did not occur to him that Australia would not be at war. Western Australian, but son of an Irish-born policeman and later publican in Kyneton, Victoria, Curtin had risen from an entirely different background and political heritage than Menzies, but declared in Parliament a few days later that there was ‘no alternative but for this dreadful affliction to come to mankind’. Australia’s prosperity had always depended on British control of the seas—the capacity of thousands of cargo ships laden with Australian produce to reach Britain across secure waters. Thus it was not only Hitler’s ambitions in Europe that Australian politicians were reacting to, but his intentions perhaps in North Africa and eastwards, his Alexander the Great-like ambition to spread the boundaries of the Reich towards India. In the Federal Parliament there was no voice raised against going to war.

For the time being, even the Communist Party, given Hitler’s savagery towards German Communists, gave support to the proposition. Poland fell rapidly to the German forces, and on 23 September, Stalin and Hitler surprised the world, and not least world Communist parties, by making a pact allowing Germany to continue to occupy Poland without Russian intervention. As a quid pro quo, Russia would receive back the parts of Eastern Poland that it considered traditionally its own. From that point, the Communist parties of the world, including the party in Australia, were told to oppose the war as an imperialist exercise, and to celebrate the liberation of a section of Poland by Soviet forces. Some Communists refused to do so—Guido Baracchi, the Melbourne activist who had been expelled from the party in 1925, had lived in Russia for fifteen months in 1933–34 together with his partner, the young Sydney playwright Betty Roland, and had regained membership in 1940, now resigned over it, or else was pushed out because of his support of Trotsky. But Sam Aarons, who had gone to France and crossed the Pyrenees to fight with the International Brigade against Franco, and many other true believers, stuck firm, despite the shock of Stalin’s alliance with the naked fascism Sam had earlier fought.

Japan was also undeniably an unnamed and a phantom party to the Australian declaration of war against Germany. Across the Commonwealth, photographs of slaughtered children and women lying on steps, of decapitated Chinese heads arranged in ranks for the camera at some time during the weeks of horror that followed the capture of the city of Nanking (Nanjing) in central China by the Japanese army in late December 1937, had appeared as a warning of what the Japanese army might do after other victories. The images of smiling and enthusiastic Japanese soldiers using living targets as bayonet practice and standing, glutted with vengeance, amidst piles of corpses, were harbingers for Australia. Any footage of Japanese advances in China brought to cinemas a hush that only Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda or Cary Grant in The Awful Truth could dispel. There were press reports of the rape of girls under ten and women up to and beyond the age of seventy, and of burials alive. ‘They’re on their way here, you know,’ people said. It was this supposition that ironically made it more, not less, advisable that Australian troops should be immediately recruited and perhaps even sent to Europe. The equation was that loyalty to Britain in a European war would earn loyalty from Britain to Australia in a war in East Asia.

As well as the reaction in the Brennan house there was an extraordinary range of attitudes to the declaration of war. Margaret Maxwell, a schoolgirl in Swan Hill, Victoria, did not understand quite what was happening when Mr Menzies spoke on the radio but saw both her parents in tears. Margaret Holmes, a pacifist, who lived in Sydney, felt ‘absolutely terrible’. Ted Hartley, another pacifist, who was at a service at a Congregational church at the time when he heard, believed that this was ‘like the end of the world . . . it was as though the world had gone mad’. Bob Bahnsen, a farm labourer in New South Wales, was in bed in a shearer’s hut he shared with one of the farmer’s sons, and at 9.30 p.m. the boy came in and gave him the news: ‘“They declared the bloody war.” And I just couldn’t believe it—that Hitler would be such a maniac as to launch the world into war.’ For German-born Australians and Australian residents it was a frightening hour. On the coast north of Sydney, Irmhild Beinssen had German guests over that evening. The party broke up very soon after the declaration, and when the guests got back to their houses, the authorities—police and military—were in some cases already there to send them to internment.

Some young Australians, after a restless Sunday night, rushed straight off to the main barracks in their cities to enlist. Charles Janeway, a schoolboy in Mount Gambier in South Australia, said that his father had nightmares that night and was up walking the house, and that the next morning there was a gathering at their farm of his uncle, a cousin and two or three World War I ex-servicemen. ‘And oh! What they wouldn’t have done to those Germans!’

Merv Lilley, a rural labourer and bush poet, said that ‘thousands and thousands of characters on the dole and the breadline knew they’d get a job in the army . . . when you joined the army you met them all, and they were all in there for the three square meals . . . and five bob a day—big money’. A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald read: ‘Today I am unemployed, and when the war broke out, like many another man in a similar position, I hoped that a chance of enlistment would arise and take me off food relief, and give me a chance to become a useful citizen again.’ The Age soon reported that on coming into the Army Pay Office for his first week’s pay as a recruit in what would become the 2nd Australian Imperial Force, one man took the envelope and made a Nazi salute while shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Asked by the officer what he was doing, he said, ‘This is the first blinkin’ pay I’ve had in two blinkin’ years.’ It was a gift arising from Hitler’s aggression against Poland. Niall Brennan claimed (with obvious exaggeration) that 95 per cent of the first AIF volunteers were unemployed. Certainly Patsy Adam-Smith, a future author who as a child lived in Warragul, Victoria, remembered that the boys of the town, including her future brother-in-law, were jumping on the trains, hiding themselves under the tarpaulins covering grain, to get to Melbourne to enlist and put an end to unemployment. But, she noticed, there was also a peculiar excitement in their eyes.

Handsome Russell Braddon, who was then at university in Sydney and who would ultimately write a famous memoir of his years as a prisoner of the Japanese, enlisted within days and for the traditional reasons. ‘I joined the Army because the King was in danger and the Empire was in danger and the Nazis were unspeakably wicked and I wanted to go and kill Germans—it’s as simple as that. Very schoolboyish.’ He was a tough young man and was sure that he could defend himself if his homosexuality ever became a subject of derision. A young man named Alan Lowe wrote, ‘My mother had gone through the First World War with two young children while my father was away for four years, and he’d been hospitalised and wounded and she had a vivid memory of this . . . and she wasn’t happy at all about me going in.’ But even with their fathers to warn them off, men still enlisted. The horrors of 1914–18 could not be conveyed verbally. Young men were doomed to want to taste of those bloody springs for themselves.

GIRDING LOINS

On 13 November 1939, Menzies announced the appointment of Australia’s first Minister for Air and Civil Aviation, James Valentine Fairbairn, a grazier from the western district of Victoria who had served in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I and had spent the last fourteen months of the war as a prisoner of the Germans, undergoing treatment in a German hospital for an arm injury whose effects would remain for the rest of his life. On his station, Mount Elephant, near Derrinallum, he built an airstrip at some time in the 1920s. He would be one of the initiators of the Empire Air Training Scheme, under which air crews were given their basic training in Australia and then sent to Canada to be trained en masse with flyers from all over the Commonwealth. By Menzies’ consent, and without any complaint from Curtin, the Australians sent to defend Britain would come under the general aegis of the RAF, though still wearing their own national shoulder patches. Eventually some would find themselves flying in all-Australian squadrons, but many Australians also flew in mixed British, Polish, New Zealand, Canadian and South African squadrons. From the very start, RAAF flyers already in England on exchange or for training were incorporated in the RAF. But 10 Australian Squadron, already in England at the start of the war to take delivery of nine Sunderland flying boats, immediately prepared to go into the air as an Australian squadron.

Since Fairbairn was still in Canada working on the scheme when he was appointed, he took his oath of office before the Governor-General of Canada, the novelist John Buchan of Thirty-Nine Steps fame. Menzies was accused of displaying his Empire-first bent and his Anglocentrism by appointing an Englishman, Lieutenant-General E.K. Squires, first to review the Australian army pre-war and then to stay on as Chief of the General Staff. (Due to ill-health, Squires would soon be replaced by the Australian Vernon Sturdee.) It would be unfair to depict Squires as a Colonel Blimp, however—the Australian generals liked him for his tact and good sense. Before the war, he had of course been inspecting the framework of an army, an on-paper command that would be filled in time of war with the bodies of young Australians. For Chief of the Air Staff, Fairbairn wanted the Australian veteran, Richard ‘Dicky’ Williams, a long-serving officer from Moonta in South Australia, and fought Menzies over it. The result was that the Englishman Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett was appointed. Burnett was insistent—against the wishes of those Australian officers who remembered serving in specifically Australian squadrons in the Great War—that the RAAF should be fed via the Empire Air Training Scheme into a general RAF force, without which, he claimed, the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, could not be beaten. The Australian officer corps knew that this would diminish Australian chances of promotion and that Australians would be lost in the mass. The later emergence of specific Australian fighter squadrons and similar squadrons in Bomber Command would only partly soothe their concerns. Meanwhile, the serving chief of the Royal Australian Navy was the British admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin, diplomatic, approachable and a man of intelligence and wit. The ships were already at sea, guarding the proximate sea routes off the New South Wales coast. Many had been out there since daylight on 3 September, when the war news was still indefinite. The Canberra, commanding a squadron of destroyers, patrolled the east coast. Vampire and Hobart kept station between Gabo Island and Cape Otway. Vampire was searching for the Italian steamer Otranto, because it was not certain whether Italy might enter a new war or not and it had been decided that the ship should be shadowed until that was determined. Australia was still sat in dock, but off the Western Australian coast, Sydney cruised.

Flight Lieutenant Brough of the RAAF, ultimately a squadron leader, was probably the first Australian combatant of the war, and it was propaganda warfare he was engaged in. On 4 September 1939, he flew a bomber in 99 Squadron RAF, dropping leaflets over Germany. Other Australians in heavy bomber squadrons made winter flights from bases in Scotland looking for German ships in the North Atlantic. Flying Officer J.T. Lewis of Artarmon in Sydney was killed on his first sortie, on 18 December 1939, when six bombers from his squadron were intercepted by up to fifty German fighters, who shot down all but one of the planes in the formation. Australians in Fighter Command were impatient for action. One of them, R.B. Lees, was squadron leader of 72 Squadron of the RAF. On 7 December, he was in a group of five Spitfires that flew into the path of five Heinkel bombers over the Firth of Forth in Scotland. The Spitfires shot down two bombers and caused the others to flee.

Flying Officer L. Clisby of South Australia was flying in 1 Squadron of the RAF. He clung to his old RAAF uniform, which was in disrepair. ‘It will see me out,’ he argued. In it he shot down eight enemy planes in five days. He had the attitudes of a World War I pilot, and on 10 May 1940, having shot down a Heinkel bomber and forced it to land in a French field, he landed, chased a German crew member and tackled him. Four days later he himself was shot out of the sky by five German fighters. It was said over his grave that he had shot down sixteen of the enemy.

Another Australian ace, Pat Hughes, attacked a Dornier bomber during the Battle of Britain, and when it exploded he lost control of his own Spitfire and died in the crash. A number of Australian regular air-force officers fought in the failed struggle for France and in the air battle for Britain. Flying Officer Charles Gordon Olive flew Spitfire missions during both the evacuation of Dunkirk, when the British were driven out of France in late May and early June 1940, and in the subsequent aerial Battle of Britain. He was a slightly built man but, as one of Australia’s 495 airmen in England when war began, had broken the RAF javelin record in 1939. In September 1940, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, and later, at just twenty-four years, became the leader of 456 Squadron, the RAAF’s only night-fighter squadron.

It became increasingly axiomatic with air officers from wing commander down that fighter pilots never survived to grow old. Yet Olive escaped harm and went on to higher rank. The schoolboys of Australia were already reading copies of the comic paper, The Champion, featuring the exploits of a Spitfire pilot and boxing champion named Rockfist Rogan. However, in the popular literature of the time, flyers always survived crashes and always escaped the Nazis.

Amongst all the burned and mangled bodies of the young, a most remarkable escape was accomplished by Keith Chisholm of the plain Sydney suburb of Petersham, an Australian ace of 452 Squadron who was shot down in October 1941 during a raid over Boulogne and picked up by a German air-sea rescue launch. In the prisoner-of-war camp at Lamsdorf (today Łambinowice), a German-named city on the Polish–Czechoslovak border, he met Australian Sergeant A.R. Stuart, and they swapped places with two Allied soldiers working in a railway repair party and escaped. Chisholm was recaptured and sent to Gleiwitz on the Polish–German border (this being in fact the town where Hitler provoked the invasion of Poland by staging the assassination of ethnic Germans by supposed Poles). From Gleiwitz, Chisholm escaped again, entered Poland, and hid on farms around Oświecim work camp (on its way to heinous renown as its German name, Auschwitz), and was then called to Krakow and on to Warsaw by the resistance organisation that protected and hid him there until July 1943. After many abortive attempts, and after throwing a Polish policeman inspecting his forged papers into the Vistula River, he boarded a train to Belgium via Berlin, where, in the enemy capital, he spent time Rockfist Rogan-wise going to the cinema and dining. Chisholm and a Dutch companion reached Brussels, connected with the underground, and Chisholm was guided to Paris on 10 May 1944. Billeted with the family of a French policeman, he then joined the French Forces of the Interior—that is the Maquis or underground—and fought in the streets of Paris during the uprising that preceded the Allied occupation of the city. He returned to England on 30 August 1944, after the fall of Paris to the Allies. He had remained on the loose for the better part of three years.

This remarkable tale of escape was not characteristic: death or capture was the norm.

There were ultimately seventeen exclusively Australian squadrons, numbered 450 to 467. Number 450 Squadron, for which there were innumerable volunteers since so many Australian adolescents wanted to be flyers, came into existence at Williamtown in New South Wales, and its young men began training in April 1941 and would be shipped off to Canada in November that year. They were fretful to get there, those mothers’ sons, most of whom had never flown and many of whom could not drive a car. When 450 Squadron ultimately went into action, flying Kittyhawk fighters in the Western Desert campaign in North Africa, they dubbed themselves the ‘Desert Harassers’ after being described by Lord Haw-Haw—at that stage the Germans’ Irish-raised, English-language broadcaster William Joyce, much listened to by troops—as ‘Australian mercenaries whose harassing tactics were easily beaten off by the Luftwaffe’. Number 451 Squadron was sent into action in the desert in ageing Lysanders and then zippier Hurricanes. It had a high rate of loss from deaths, some of its flyers’ crash-landings ending in capture by the Germans.

Number 452 Squadron would be the first Australian squadron to become operational in Britain, on 22 May 1941, flying Marine Spitfires. Eamonn Fergus ‘Paddy’ Finucane, an Irishman attached to the Australians, would achieve national glory in Australia, command the Australian squadron and become the youngest wing commander of his day before dying in the Channel at the age of twenty-one after an operation over Étables on the French coast in 1942.

Australia would suffer a quarter of its war dead in that long air conflict over Europe and Africa. Victoria’s Bluey Truscott became, like Finucane, a national figure—indeed, he already was a name for having played for Melbourne all through the 1939 premiership season. He would return an ace to Australia in 1942 and play with Melbourne while he was at home, mustering further volunteers. Truscott had played for Melbourne in a winning grand final and thus in Australian terms represented the complete warrior. The names Bluey Truscott and Paddy Finucane became so famous in Australia that kids playing dogfights in backyards competed to assume them. These young men (even the Irish Finucane) were doing what they had enlisted for—directly protecting British cities, towns and villages, ‘the Home’ of which people back in Australia spoke, from barbarous assault.

Truscott later crash-landed while strafing the Japanese at Milne Bay in New Guinea, and survived without substantial injury. He would die flying a training run over the ocean off Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia, doing a practice roll that proved fatal. He was proof—if one were needed—that aircraft were perilous to the health of young men even when no enemy shared the skies with them.

When seeing his father off from Sydney Central bound for Melbourne and a troopship, the author of this narrative saw a group of very young men clustered together, jubilant, but surrounded by women who were close to keening. ‘They’re fighter pilots,’ my mother said. ‘Their mothers are scared they won’t see them again.’

By 1941, many of the Australians who had fought as individuals in British squadrons the year before were dead. In a classic British churchyard in Warmwell, Dorset, a gravestone marks the burial place of Wing Commander John Kennedy, a professional pre-war RAAF flyer, who had attacked a German Dornier bomber over Chesil Beach, and had then been descended upon by a number of fighters. His plane shot to ruin, he tried to crash-land, stalled, and was lost.

The Air minister Fairbairn would himself by now be an aeronautic victim. Fairbairn, dubious about so many pilots and aircrew leaving Australia, had shown great energy flying from airbase to airbase in Australia in his own Dragonfly aircraft to confer and advise. In August 1940, he travelled up from Melbourne in a bomber with his Cabinet colleagues Gullett, Menzies’ polished and cultured Minister for Scientific Development; Geoffrey Street, Minister for the Army and Rehabilitation, a man of few political ambitions, an Australian citizen-politician who was genuinely interested, within the limits of Cabinet policy, in the defence of the near north of Australia; and with admirable General Brudenell White, who had run the AIF under the often titular leadership of General Birdwood in World War I. The aircraft crashed and exploded on its approach to Canberra. For Menzies it was a frightful loss of talented and calm advisors, and for Australia it meant the death of men who might have seen more clearly through the artful Churchill’s sleight of hand and the proposition that went: Send your young men to protect British interests in Europe and the Middle East and then, should Japan strike, we will send forces to protect you and to hold Singapore.