Peace and its discontents
The people want; the people fear
NUCLEAR ENDING
In June 1944, a detachment of some hundreds of American and Australian prisoners of war were brought to Japan in a cargo of sugar and pumpkins on the Tamahoku Maru. Off the coast of the island of Kyushu it was torpedoed. Two Tasmanians, Peter McGrath-Kerr and Allan Chick, were amongst the minority of seventy-two Australian survivors. Of the nearly eight hundred prisoners, 213 in all were rescued. Picked up in their drenched rags, they were trucked to an enclosure in Nagasaki that had once been a cotton factory, and worked in the foundry next door to the camp on propellers and cylinder blocks for marine diesel engines.
Chick wielded a mallet, and McGrath-Kerr cleaned out the sandy cores in preparation for a new casting. If there was a weakness in the casting, prisoners often took the opportunity to widen it. They were surprised to find, amongst the scrap metal prisoners had to deliver to the furnace, a number of pieces marked NSWGR (New South Wales Government Railways), part of the notorious and controversial pig-iron shipment to Japan before the war.
Sometimes they worked with elderly Japanese and women, and volunteer schoolboys and schoolgirls, so reduced was the labour force. The prisoners would also often see American bombers overhead, B29s and A36s, their bomb bays opening and spewing incendiaries. Prisoners were no more immune from the detonations and fires than anyone else, and from sharing shelters with Japanese workers, they got a strong sense that if Japan were invaded, people would fight, however haplessly, with petrol bombs and sharpened poles. The prisoners wondered if they would survive the imminent confrontation.
Pneumonia was a great killer of POWs. In the prison dormitories, men slept on the floor on tatami mats with a hard blanket, an unbleached calico sheet and a small canvas pillow filled with sawdust. A typical meal was a bowl of rice, a little barley, coarse corn, a cup of miso soup and some pickles. A dead horse brought to the foundry on one occasion was treated as a bounty from the gods.
Vague rumours of a bomb used on the city of Hiroshima, an explosive of a new order, reached the POW camp in Nagasaki. Australian POWs Les Prendergast, Bert Miller and Murray Jobling therefore started to run hard for the camp dugouts when on 9 August 1945 they heard a plane drone over and recognised it as American. McGrath-Kerr took his time, putting down his book on his mat and standing. In the next instant he was buried in the ruins of the former cotton factory. Chick, working on the roof of a storehouse with an Indonesian POW, was aware of the huge flash of light before he passed out. When he came back to consciousness, he lay on the ground and the storehouse was gone. Dust from the bomb was blocking out the sky. Another prisoner, Jack Johnson of the RAAF, was sure he had seen three white parachutes—the ones from which the bomb was suspended—moments before the dazzling light. Johnson now pulled the injured McGrath-Kerr out of the wreckage. After the sinking of the Tamahoku Maru, Johnson had pulled McGrath-Kerr onto an upturned lifeboat, so there was a pattern.
In the aftermath and in a blasted and vacant landscape, bemused Japanese guards cried, ‘Go, go, go!’ The Australians headed towards the Inasa Bridge, on which some of them had been working, and on towards Inasa Mountain to the west. Astoundingly, Chick found on the far side of the bridge a horse and cart, and loaded it up with Red Cross parcels lying about as thick drops of black water began to rain down from the heavens. The road up into the hills was blocked by fallen trees, and new guards turned up and joined them to a larger group of POWs making their way up the slopes. Below them lay the flattened city.
The prisoners sat in a bamboo grove that night watching fires burning in the city. Army trucks turned up from the less damaged southern part of the city, took away the wounded and rounded up the prisoners to take them back down to their camp. The scope of destruction astonished them. Their position was much altered but different—no longer prisoners, no longer free. They themselves set up their makeshift camp in the ashes of the onset of the nuclear age, in the world where they had been slaves, which had been transformed by physics.
On 14 August, the POWs were moved to a dormitory south of the city that they shared with Mitsubishi workers and mobilised students. They saw that some of the Dutch prisoners who had been working out of doors on the day of the bomb and whose chests were terribly burned were now mortally sick. By 29 August, a number of the Dutch had died.
The remaining prisoners were now put on parade and told that from this time on, Japan was joined with the rest of the world in the pursuit of peace. The war was over and they could all go home. There were no cheers. American planes began to drop relief supplies. US reporter George Weller arrived at the camp with a Red Cross representative and suggested that the men get to Kanoya in the south where there was a great airbase now being used by the Americans. He said that planes were coming in every day with equipment and supplies and leaving empty.
The Australians, including McGrath-Kerr and Chick, found their way to Nagasaki station and caught the train to Kanoya. They carried in their satchels and on their laps containers with the ashes of their comrades, retrieved from the foreigners’ section of the Sakamoto cemetery. They were airlifted to Okinawa and Manila, and after treatment in hospital, were put aboard the aircraft carrier Formidable with other Australians, and began their journey home. McGrath-Kerr would return to Japan with the Australian contingent of the occupation force. He served at Kure, the Australian occupation zone not far from Hiroshima. There he married a Japanese wife, Haruko, and took her back to live in St Helens in Tasmania. For Haruko, it must have been like a journey to Mars, its reference points hard to grasp. But her husband had lived through the same bewilderment.
BLACK SAVIOURS?
Australian Diggers’ attitudes towards the Americans were in part influenced by the fact that the GIs were so well paid compared to the citizen forces or militia that they were stripping the shops of merchandise as well as driving up the price of clothing, jewellery and small luxuries. Often enough, these goods became gifts for Australian girls.
But in White Australia, there were other GIs far from the emporiums of the city, and they were suspect for race reasons. It is fair to say that the same prejudices operated in many white GIs, sometimes even more ferociously than in any Digger. On a May evening in 1942, soldiers of the 11th Australian Battalion took up defensive positions along a road outside Townsville. Locals had reported the sounds of Thompson submachine guns being fired near the new Kelso airfield. They didn’t know what was happening or who was doing the firing, but there were black US troops stationed out there. Captain Harry Duddington had issued ammunition to his Bren gunners, and ordered powerful anti-aircraft searchlights mounted on nearby trucks to be switched on to light up the bush road. Seven kilometres away, members of the 26th Battalion were being rushed up by truck towards a roadblock near the Ross River. They were in full battle kit and had live ammunition.
What the Australian soldiers could hear was a riot by black American troops of the 96th US Engineers (Colored) in their Upper Ross River bivouac. Details of the riot that night are sketchy—the chief press censor would ensure that. But from the start there had been, throughout White Australia, considerable suspicion of black American servicemen. For Curtin’s government it was easier to deal with the problem because American units weren’t racially integrated. Segregation prevailed in the army, as it did in the southern United States. That made it easy to deal with the ‘coloured’ units.
The first contingent of black American troops, fortunately for their own sakes rerouted from the Philippines, had arrived in Melbourne in 1942. Customs officials had actually wanted to refuse them entry, but the War Cabinet was forced to countermand that decision. There were no racially segregated units in the AIF, and the early ban that had tried to keep Aborigines out of the armed forces was diluted under the Japanese threat. By September 1945, about three thousand Aborigines had served in the AIF.
But the Australian government had initially utterly opposed the deployment of black troops at all. Lieutenant General George Brett, the commander of American troops in Australia until MacArthur arrived, reported that the presence of black troops could ‘adversely affect relationships between Australians and Americans and nullify any military value derived from their use’. The United States army was dependent on coloured troops for much of its labour, however, and MacArthur was unwilling to exclude them. Officers were told to take note of Australian ‘susceptibilities’ on the matter.
Hence the Japanese threat brought a temporary suspension of White Australia. But people wanted the chance of miscegenation in the cities, interracial love, to be avoided, and the United States army did what it could to pander to that anxiety. American general Patrick J. Hurley would write in June 1942, ‘I have never seen the racial problem brought home so forcibly as it is over here in Queensland.’
Arriving in Brisbane on 8 April 1942, the 96th US Engineers (Colored) had been kept aboard ship for hours, because there had already been trouble with ‘Negro soldiers’ in that city. Eventually they were allowed to go on hikes in the hills around Brisbane but they were not permitted the freedom of the city. The American military police (MPs) were heavy-handed and often beat black GIs in public. While on leave in Melbourne, AIF soldier Roland Griffiths-Marsh said ‘g’day’ to a black American GI looking in a shop window in Bourke Street after midnight. He had not gone more than thirty paces when he turned around to see three tall white American MPs standing over the bruised black soldier with long wooden truncheons hanging from wrist thongs around their right hands. A black American GI was shot dead outside the Argent Hotel in Mount Isa, Queensland, in late 1942, and another was shot dead in Cairns, in full view of witnesses, and apparently by military policemen.
The novelist Ruth Park claimed to have seen the murder of black soldiers by American MPs on two separate occasions in Sydney. Jack Richardson, an Australian officer, saw a white GI stab a black American soldier in the back after being knocked over in the foyer of a crowded Townsville cinema. A black GI was reported to have been shot dead near the Eternal Flame in Anzac Square, Brisbane, for crossing over to the north side, which was off-limits to blacks. And Captain Harry Duddington, deployed on the night of the riot to defend Townsville, had needed to wrest a pistol from the hand of a white American officer who had been accidentally jostled by a black American courier in a Townsville pub, and who intended to take vengeance.
Captain Hyman Samuelson, a white officer of the 96th Engineers (Colored), took a subtler view than most of the misuse of black soldiers. He declared on 17 April 1942, ‘It is a dirty shame the way white American soldiers treat our boys. The Australians are wonderfully tolerant, but the Americans, especially the southern boys, are a problem. The only solution will be to send our battalion away from any town.’ These observations were provoked by an experience on the afternoon the 96th first arrived in Townsville, when Samuelson found a hundred of his men loaded into the back of a truck and guarded like POWs by white GIs with fixed bayonets. A corporal threatened Samuelson when he attempted to unload the men. There were edgy reactions from American MPs and locals as African Americans went looking for entertainment and a drink, and from the black GIs themselves when they became aware of the limits as to what they could do or where they could go. They had come all this way to find themselves living in an antipodean version of the South. Jack Richardson had a conversation with black American soldiers in Townsville in which they expressed a sincere fear that when they had finished their work for the Allies they would be put on a ship which would then be torpedoed by the United States navy.
After a local brawl in Townsville, with locals and MPs on the one side and black GIs on the other, Samuelson noticed the black troops’ morale collapsing. They were totally banned from Townsville now and confined to their camp on the Upper Ross with a scant ration of beer and old, grainy movies for entertainment. Three days before he was shipped to Port Moresby as advance supply officer for the battalion, Samuelson wrote, ‘They want to be free, to be with a woman.’ But that was precisely what most worried white Australians. Rumours arose that the US army was staffing brothels with local white women to serve black Americans. White women who went to the Doctor Kava Club, a black American servicemen’s recreational centre set up in South Brisbane in 1943, were interrogated by the Vice Squad. In reality the majority of Australian women in centres such as the Doctor Kava Club were Aboriginal, the rare city-dwelling indigenes who were not confined to remote missions by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act of 1939. They lived in poor inner-city neighbourhoods, which were the only ones where black GIs were permitted.
Meanwhile, the segregation and discrimination suffered by the 96th Engineers particularly irked black soldiers who had been told that they were engaged in a global struggle for democracy. The famous Jackie Robinson, who would become the first black American to play Major League baseball, probably spoke for the 96th Engineers when he declared during his own military training in the US south, ‘They want to send me ten thousand miles away to fight for democracy when a hundred feet away they’ve got stools I can’t put my black butt on to drink a bottle of beer.’
The Allies, having done their best to create alienated black troops, were concerned that agents provocateurs or Communist agitators would stir up the resentments of the black soldiers in Australia. When there was a brawl between black GIs and military police in Ingham in 1943, the Queensland security service asked the Americans whether Axis sympathisers had caused it. The Americans acknowledged that there was probably ‘a Communistic element’ amongst the black soldiers. The brawl had in fact been caused by a ban on black servicemen attending dances. A black soldier had asked a cordon of military police, ‘Why shouldn’t we go to dances with white people? We are as good as, if not better than, the white race.’ So began a further free-for-all.
As for any Communist influence, even the Communist Party newspaper in Brisbane, the Worker, declared, ‘Crimes by Negros, particularly sex offences against white women, are causing considerable concern in those Australian areas where Negros are located.’ In fact, there seems to have been little statistical evidence of sex offences. But the Worker continued, ‘Women who frequent the Domain [in Sydney] draw them in their hundreds—an ugly sight in a white man’s country.’
In late April 1942, when half the 96th was ready to be shipped to New Guinea, Captain Samuelson had already left. The remaining companies were to perform tedious and exhausting labour on remote roads and airfields. Under the command of a Major Yoder and a Captain Behrens, the men of the 96th became rebellious. Locals would say there was a rumour that a white officer had struck a black American GI. In any case, between eight and nine o’clock that May evening, a rebellion began. The rumour spread in town and amongst the garrison that the blacks had shot some of their officers and that other officers were firing back with Thompson machine guns. Further rumours said that the blacks were drunk and victorious, and heading for town in trucks. Captain Duddington thus found himself defending Australian society against people who were strongly perceived not as Allies but as aliens.
While Duddington’s unit held their position, a white American officer appeared and offered to go into the 96th’s camp, talk to the men and help them see reason. He asked that Duddington and the others give him an hour. ‘And then he walked up the road, all by himself. I’ll never forget that image.’ Somehow this single man was able, through force of character and reason, to reassure and pacify the mutineers. The night quietened. The ferocity was absorbed by the Australian bush through the sanity and eloquence of a man whose name we do not know.
The details of the mutiny were suppressed, as was the question of whether an amnesty was offered that night to the black soldiers.
Post-war, in 1948, the US army would become desegregated.
REMAKING THE WORLD
There were meetings in mid-April 1945 in London to do with the Commonwealth countries’ stance at a world-renewing meeting to occur in San Francisco later that month. The party that set out from Australia included Chifley, who would not continue to San Francisco after discussions in London but would return via Asia to Australia. Frank Forde and Herbert Vere Evatt were to be Australia’s delegates in San Francisco.
The party had originally flown across the Pacific and a mourning United States to Washington for the funeral service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had died in offfice, on 14 April, Curtin himself being too ill to make the journey. Then, on a record-breaking trans-Atlantic flight during which they needed to wear oxygen masks, which heightened Evatt’s fear of flying, they had continued over to London to discuss the coming San Francisco event.
In London, Evatt forthrightly told the British that he found the Dumbarton Oaks draft drawn up earlier a suitable basis for discussion. The first serious drafting of the United Nations organisation had occurred at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the United States in August 1944, Dumbarton Oaks being a grand house associated with Harvard University and capable of accommodating many delegates. Australia had not, however, been party to the great powers conference there, and so the Australian government’s response to the drafts arising from these meetings would take on great importance when they were presented at San Francisco. During 1944, Curtin and Evatt had worked on their coming participation at San Francisco, setting out their own hopes for the United Nations, and also their visions for Australia’s role in its region and in the post-war Commonwealth. They were inhibited by two factors—attachment to White Australia and to the British Empire, the latter being the sort of institution which, according to Dumbarton Oaks, should pass. In London, Evatt told the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden that he intended to ask for amendments to the proposals of the Big Five (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China), and that Australia would oppose above all the veto power demanded by the Soviet Union, a device by which it could negate resolutions of the envisaged United Nations. This was the message as, white-knuckled, he took a plane back to New York and then went by train to San Francisco.
The great meeting of the world powers and states, attracting amongst others forty-four Foreign ministers, occurred on Anzac Day 1945. By then Berlin was encircled, the position of Germany and of its people grievous, and Japan was not yet defeated but its fast-won, fast-lost empire was dwindling before massive enemy forces. The most alluring prospects for humanity glimmered in San Francisco, where the attendees included Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign minister, and Andrei Gromyko, Russian Ambassador to the United States; Cordell Hull of the United States, and Edward Stettinius, who had succeeded him as Secretary of State; Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax and the Labour leader Clement Attlee of Britain; Mackenzie King of Canada; Field Marshal Jan Smuts of South Africa; the representatives of Nationalist China; and the Australian delegates, Forde and Evatt.
Field Marshal Smuts had the highly visible matter of anti-black discrimination to deal with, and Evatt too sought universal dignity and fraternity but not domestically in Australia, which—it was taken for granted—would remain unapologetically white. The British were embarrassed by both these issues, but had the unresolved question of having reclaimed Asian colonies, of still holding India, and of resistance to African desires for independence to hamper them in their utterances about the ideal coming world—though they never felt as hampered or repentant as the Americans wanted them to feel.
Evatt had travelled to San Francisco with his wife Mary Alice, and depended on her calmness in the face of flying. He had smarted when Curtin appointed Forde the head of the Australian legation, but it did not seem to matter as much when the drafting of the World Organization charter began there, in that bay city on Anzac Day of what would be the last year of the war, and in the shadow of Roosevelt’s death. It was dizzying company to be in, and goodwill seemed at first to be the pervasive characteristic, with a little grandiosity—to which Evatt was no more averse than Menzies—thrown in. For example, Henry J. Kaiser, the US former paving contractor who had become king of shipbuilding, had already organised for each of the two Australian delegates to be invited to launch a battleship in his San Francisco yards, the twin events occurring in quick order, first with Forde and then with Evatt, the choir scampering from one dock to the other to sing the same civic hymns. The Australians on Evatt’s staff maliciously spread a story about Forde, that in naïveté or self-regard over ship-launching, he had called room service in the delegates’ hotel and declared, ‘This is the Honourable Francis Michael Forde speaking, Deputy Prime Minister of the Australian Government and Leader of the Australian Delegation to the Conference on the United Nations. Send me up a hamburger.’
Evatt had great visions to deploy. If Billy Hughes had gone to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I as the profound cynic, Evatt went to San Francisco as an ardent visionary. The Soviet delegation was shut up in their hotel suites and said little, and the delegates of other nations were wary too. It was Evatt, representing a small nation and thus with everything to gain, who was willing to speak to press conferences, not least about the balance of decision-making between the Big Five, who he suspected would want to own the game totally.
At this stage Evatt was admired by pressmen of every country for his conviction concerning the new organisation. At the first press conference, on a sweltering spring day, patriotically wearing a suit of Australian wool, he drove home his arguments by smacking his fist against his palm. He advocated a system of international law, a permanent Court of International Justice, a connection between world peace and economic justice, and an assertion that the dominions would speak in their own, not Britain’s, interest. ‘So we are on the eve of San Francisco,’ he declared on radio. ‘The nations must not fumble this second chance to create a system of international cooperation within which they can live together as friends.’ A French journalist asked him whether Philadelphia could be the future capital of the United Nations, and in reply he asked how they could dare fix the capital of the world in a town whose two baseball clubs were so far behind the champions.
Perhaps Evatt tried too hard with his baseball metaphors, especially when he applied them to the troubles in Palestine. But some questions he answered so forcefully that he received rounds of applause. About the power of veto Russia sought, he said, ‘There is no reason why one great power should be able to veto an attempt to settle a dispute through negotiation and arbitration, particularly when that dispute might be in an area outside the power’s sphere of influence.’
An American journalist wrote of him, ‘Virtually everything about Evatt is big . . . he has a big head, heavily matted with crisp, iron-grey hair. He has a big voice that seems to spring not from his throat, but from his boots. His neck appears too full for his collar, and he gives the occasional intimation that he wears his altruism, both personal and national, on his sleeve.’
For ten weeks Evatt pounded away at the idea that Australia and other smaller nations should be able to decide international issues with the same vigour and rights as the larger powers. He attacked the proposition of those who thought that Australia was a southern county of the United Kingdom. ‘General MacArthur told correspondents in Manila the other day that by winning the first land victories of the war over the Japanese, Australian troops turned the tide of Japanese aggression and made possible the Allied triumphs in the Philippines.’ (This was an echo of the past World War I Billy Hughes argument.)
But then Evatt stated on behalf of Australia a new principle that many Australians had not thought of or countenanced: ‘We in Australia believe that the social conditions of the millions of people living in South-east Asia and the neighbouring islands should be such that they can have the benefit of the goods they need but in their present economic condition cannot buy . . . Depression or reduced purchasing power in any area is felt everywhere.’ He celebrated the fact that the smaller nations—not the empires or those who, though empires, tried to deny that they were—were now emerging as the spokespersons for social and economic progress. ‘Australia is raising the question of full employment from which the big nations are shuddering away.’
At the closed sessions on the United Nations Charter, particularly the trusteeship chapters, he proposed that the charter be amended ‘to lay down the principle that the purpose of administration of all dependent territories is the welfare and development of native people’ and that this involved a duty on the part of trustee nations to report to the United Nations on their own behaviour. To traditional diplomats, this sounded either presumptuous or naïve. It also made Australia’s mandate over New Guinea look justifiable. But above all, his reason for arguing that there should be a reporting and justifying process was that he knew the Dutch would take over Indonesia again—even MacArthur had as good as promised that. He supported his argument by his oratory. ‘For more than three years the peoples of South-East Asia and Indonesia have been under Japanese military overlordship . . . they will need help and guidance for their material and moral rehabilitation . . . their goodwill must be fostered, not only because their cooperation is essential to good administration and their own interests, but because they inhabit a vital strategic area.’
But the truth was that the great powers had come to trade the earth with each other to create some kind of liveable balance, not to make the new world Evatt envisaged. Lord Cranborne of Britain scorned the idea of formal international oversight of territories, particularly in territories of the British Empire. Evatt argued in return that those with mandatory powers (Australia, Britain, but especially Japan) had done pretty much as they pleased with the peoples under their control since the mandates and dependencies had been confirmed or handed out at the Peace Treaty in Paris in 1920, and now they should be accountable.
The European war ended at midnight on 8 May 1945, which was 9 May in Australia. Curtin had had a wretched time with his health over past months. The previous September, he had written to his friend Yatala Ovenden (one of the Bruce sisters of Melbourne) that he was ‘feeling flat and sad and overburdened . . . very tired after a few hours’ concentration’. He told Ovenden that one thing must never happen and that was that she should fail to forgive him his transgressions.
Shocks rattled him profoundly. When in October 1944 HMAS Australia became what was said to be the first warship to be hit by a kamikaze, killing the captain and others and wounding Vice-Admiral Collins, a Labor member of parliament found Curtin in his Perth office weeping. A heart attack followed. He was delayed in Melbourne by ill health for nearly two months and was not released from Melbourne’s Mercy Hospital until 27 December 1944.
In January 1945, Elsie was at the Lodge in time for them both to greet the new Governor-General, the Duke of Gloucester. The argument was beginning about the government becoming the biggest manufacturer in Australia, its continued involvement in the economy through its aircraft, shipbuilding and ammunition factories. It was obvious that after the war, Curtin intended to retain a dominant place for government in manufacturing. The attempted nationalisation of civil aviation increased the nervousness of Australian businessmen, and the idea of endowing the Commonwealth Bank with some of the attributes of a civilian bank was also much criticised.
In March, Curtin was kept at home in the Lodge by a throat infection. His heart condition was declining. Roosevelt died on 12 April, a few weeks before the war in Europe ended. Parliament reopened on 18 April, and Curtin made a speech of condolence to the American people, having written personally to Eleanor Roosevelt. On 21 April, he was forced into hospital with congestion of the lungs. He was thus still in hospital when Chifley announced the end of the war in Europe. People were beginning to comment on his long absence, and a public servant complained to Labor PR man and Curtin’s friend Lloyd Ross in the bar of the Canberra Hotel, ‘Almost—almost—one could be glad he’s dead so we can do things.’
Curtin returned to the Lodge on 22 May. He read the horse-racing pages of newspapers to fill in the time and gave tips to his driver, Ray, with whom he’d once gone to the Canberra dog show to see how Ray’s own hound went in the contest. In late June it became apparent Curtin might not recover, and Elsie asked Reverend Hector Harrison whether he would conduct the funeral when the time came. Curtin wanted no intervening church service, just a burial in Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth.
Harrison was uncertain about Curtin’s religious orientation and sought advice from Fred McLaughlin, the aide who had prayed with Curtin while the Australian convoys were on the high seas at the mercy of the Japanese submarines. The Reverend Harrison knew that Curtin was too ill to be approached at the moment but that he had made many surmises upon the existence of God, including a reference to that twenty-four-hour flight across the Atlantic to Ireland in April 1944, of which he had told Harrison that survival had been ‘dependent upon these four engines, those men and the Almighty’. Elsie was by origin a Presbyterian and so she was favourable to Harrison. But Curtin’s siblings, who had arrived at the Lodge, urged him to see a priest. Scullin, former prime minister and devout Catholic, also tried to lead Curtin back to the church. A Catholic priest came to the Lodge during those final days and was turned away.
Given his bad health prospects, should he resign? Chifley for one was against it. In any case, Curtin’s deputy, Forde, was in San Francisco now, at the United Nations Charter meetings with Evatt. As he lay dying, there was no guarantee that the Pacific War would end in 1945. Japan still held Malaya, Indochina, much of China, and the Japanese mainland. Yet visitors assured Curtin that his work was done. Harrison held his hand on the night of 4 July, then went home to his wife and said, ‘He’ll die tonight . . . his hand was ice cold.’ Before Curtin was given his sedative for the night he told Elsie, ‘I’m ready now.’ Four hours later, on 5 July, she was called back to the room for his final moments.
His memorial service at Parliament House on 16 July saw Chifley, his successor, his former Treasurer weeping above the coffin. Harrison conducted the service, which was broadcast by ABC radio, and the casket was taken by gun carriage to Canberra airport where it was loaded onto a Dakota for the flight to Perth. In Cottesloe it proceeded through streets where twenty thousand people wept for its passing. Chifley declared, ‘I simply couldn’t go,’ and so stayed away.
EVATT FIGHTS ON
In San Francisco, Evatt worked frantically on the charter, scuttling from office to office, attending committees until 10.30 at night, then working with his aides till 2 a.m., before retiring and rising again at eight o’clock.
Gromyko, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was difficult to talk to, until that skilful conversationalist Mrs Evatt, sitting beside him at a banquet, found out that he was fascinated by concrete and by the proposed Snowy River scheme and wanted to know how Australia’s preferential voting worked.
If the British wanted no interference from the United Nations in their colonies and territories, it was all the more true of the Americans. The Americans wanted to include in the charter a special reference to the recently signed Act of Chapultepec by which mutual assistance amongst the nations of the western hemisphere was to be provided by the US against ‘local’ aggression—a heavily opposed clause allowing massed military opposition against any rising by the population against a government approved of by the United States, or useful to them. Evatt was one delegate of many who disliked the proposed enshrining. A compromise was reached that the western hemisphere nations were to inform the United Nations Security Council of any intention to enforce Chapultepec. In return for its support, the Latin-American countries voted, however, in line with the United States, that the Security Council be limited to six non-permanent members together with the Big Five.
America’s sleight of hand caused Evatt to issue a long press statement, in which he claimed: ‘If this kind of thing goes on in San Francisco, the World Organization will inevitably be subverted.’ He was aware of how, after all Woodrow Wilson’s promotion in 1919 of a League of Nations, the Americans had decided in the end not to join it. ‘Pan Americanism is valuable, but unless the authority of the Central Security Council is maintained, it may develop into a form of [American continental] isolationism which is calculated to destroy the World Organization at birth.’
But the veto issue also recurred. There must be no member in the Security Council, big or small, Evatt came to argue, who was not willing to act in the interest of world security. The sole purpose of any veto, he argued, must be to ensure that the great powers would act with unanimity to quell disturbances. It was there to promote security, he argued, but not to make it’s application impossible. ‘We don’t mind a veto on a shooting match, because the big powers have to carry the burden of shooting. What we object to is a veto on a talking match’—that is, the exclusion of lesser voices from the discourse of the great powers.
A quarrel that arose out of France’s attempt to take over Syria again in the face of Syrian independence brought delegates face to face with the fact that under the previously agreed Yalta peace veto formula the new peace machinery could neither investigate the quarrel between France (one of the Big Five) and the Arabs, prevent French shooting Arabs, nor tell the French to stop doing so unless the French themselves wanted to be prevented or scolded. At the Yalta Conference, held in Crimea in February 1945, the United States, Britain and Russia had agreed to admit France as a permanent member of the Security Council, and that any of the permanent members would have veto power over any decision of the Security Council. At Yalta, where the Soviet Union had agreed to join the fight against Japan, it seemed cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union would continue into the age of peace, and the Allies agreed that in reward for the Soviet Union’s efforts, the Eastern European nations it had liberated would be considered ‘friendly to’ it. (The manner in which ‘friendly to’ was transmuted into ‘dominated by’ was well known.) What Evatt and other representatives of smaller nations wanted to change about Yalta was not that proposition—after all, there was no guarantee when the war against Japan would end. It was the veto rule they wanted to change. Amongst the protests of small nations against the veto, none were louder than those of Evatt. Stettinius, Molotov and Halifax might have the numbers, but Evatt had the public sympathy. Stettinius, US Secretary of State, made a national broadcast in which he said that the criticism was not justified but Evatt’s position was logical. It would be appalling if, although ten of the eleven members of the Council might anxiously desire to attempt conciliation of a conflict, one single power, by exercising its veto against those very peace-making desires, could permit ‘a dispute between two other states . . . [to] drag on indefinitely’.
There was a ditty—written, it is believed, by Evatt himself—on the subject of Britain, the United States and Soviet Union and their desire not to give way on veto powers:
We must not alter Yalta,
It would not please the Russ.
We must not alter Yalta,
Joe would make a fuss.
What Yalta means is doubtful,
But Joe must have his way.
His view must be accepted
Or he’ll take his bat away.
And when it came to fighting the Japanese, his bat was potentially very potent indeed. The Soviet Union had at least yielded to Evatt’s argument that the veto should not apply to the banning of free discussion of international quarrels. So the discussion of a situation could proceed despite the veto. But though Evatt attempted to have an interview with the Big Five representatives at the Fairmont Hotel, he could not shake them. One wonders if he was naïve in taking the trouble. The instances of major powers giving up power voluntarily are not plentiful. He spent all of a June Sunday contacting other delegations in an effort to win their support for a new strategy. But the other delegations had already come to terms with the veto—some were realistic, some were cautious. Was even one of the non-Russian Soviet republics likely to vote against Russia; would a South American nation dependent on US investment or trade choose to fight its great patron? There was the one final debate on Monday without any result and then the diplomats and ministers began packing up.
What did Evatt achieve at San Francisco? As the Christian Science Monitor reported, Australia submitted thirty-eight amendments but Evatt’s favourite was probably the enshrining of the right to work, that is, of full employment. Failing in persuading others, he was reduced however to asking the United Nations General Assembly, ‘Will anyone in favour of unemployment stand up?’ To him, his most satisfactory achievement was the chapters on trusteeships which gave non-self-governing countries protection against abuses and imposed on the governing powers an obligation to report regularly on the economic, social and educational development of the subject peoples.
Twenty of the amendments, some of them procedural and concerning the process of Security Council and General Assembly debates, were wholly or partly incorporated in the new United Nations Charter. To achieve this, Evatt fought and kicked against and argued with everyone who stood in his way, including Stettinius, Gromyko, Halifax, and Wellington Koo, the representative of Nationalist China, which had only four more years of existence left on the Chinese mainland before the Communist Revolution. But here again, the shadow of White Australia made the Australian delegation vulnerable. Speaking to Koo on immigration, Evatt used the same argument against explicit racial equality clauses Billy Hughes had on racial matters: ‘You have always insisted on the right to determine the composition of your own people. Australia wants that right now. What you are attempting to do now, Japan attempted after the last war and was prevented by Australia. Had we opened New Guinea and Australia to Japanese immigration, then the Pacific War by now might have ended disastrously and we might have had another shambles like that experienced in Malaya.’
Even so, as a reward for his efforts, Australia was made a non-permanent member of the Security Council. Evatt was made head of the International Atomic Commission, and at the second session he chaired the committee on the future of Palestine. He was thus instrumental in creating settlements that allowed for the emergence of Israel, but Israel did not like the carving up of Jerusalem into sectors, which was Evatt’s idea to honour the diverse sacredness of the city. He would be in time (1948) president of the Security Council and in that role would persuade Britain to let Ireland leave the Commonwealth without any penalty or vengefulness operating. (Britain already felt rancour towards Ireland for its neutrality in the war, even if tens of thousands of citizens of the Irish Free State had served in the British forces.)
But to return to the framing of the United Nations Charter, and its acceptance in June 1945, the New York Times said on 27 June: ‘When Dr Evatt came here he was a virtually unknown second-string delegate, with the background of a professor and Labor politician. He leaves, recognized as the most brilliant and effective voice of the Small Powers, a leading statesman for the world’s conscience, the man who was not afraid to force liberalization of the League charter, and who had sense enough not to press his threat so far as to break up the conference.’ The British, led by the cynical Lord Halifax, considered Evatt’s desperate earnestness and his passion that in the United Nations Australia should operate on its own, not Commonwealth, terms, ‘bad form’. Just the same, in the last session of the Steering Committee of the United Nations Charter, a special resolution was moved thanking Dr Evatt. It was passed by acclamation and with applause.
Lord Cherwell, a sinister influence on Churchill in many areas, including that of the Bengal famine of 1943–44, meanwhile poured scorn on the idea of the United Nations and on Evatt’s ‘postures’. In Canberra, the Country Party’s Black Jack McEwen similarly wrote off Evatt’s efforts in San Francisco as showmanship. McEwen had been in San Francisco too, and had been appalled by what he claimed was Evatt’s misuse of staff in working them relentlessly and making them attend meetings late at night. McEwen had attended some early sessions of the San Francisco conference but soon left, uncertain of the benefit of the United Nations to Australian farmers.
Evatt attracted the rage of the left because of his attacks on the Soviet Union, and the contempt of the right for his supposed posturing as a world figure. Later Foreign minister Paul Hasluck, who as a public servant had worked with Evatt in San Francisco, would come to believe that there was no chance of unanimity of purpose amongst the great powers, but that had not been so apparent a few months after Yalta, when Evatt went to the conference.
Evatt had at least established, in his role of champion of small nations, the idea that great and small powers might face international judgement for their crimes against the human race.
AFTER THE SKY FELL IN: AUSTRALIA AND THE BOMB
Professor Mark Oliphant, an Australian-born physicist based in England, in 1941 advised the Australian Minister in Washington, Richard Casey, about British work on uranium, and the potential of nuclear energy for military use. But the imminence of nuclear destruction did not become evident until May 1944, when the British government, acting on advice from Oliphant, asked the Australian government to contribute uranium for military purposes. Uranium had been mined since 1906 at Radium Hill and since 1910 at Mount Painter, both in South Australia.
Now the Australians hoped that assistance in supplying uranium might be exchanged for access to information about atomic research. But the amounts at Mount Painter were not adequate for Britain’s needs. In fact, access to atomic information was only one of several areas of Allied decision-making in the early stages of the war from which Australia was excluded. Australia nonetheless shared with the American population a determination to punish Japan, and to ensure that a capacity to wage war was permanently destroyed.
At Potsdam on 26 July 1945, the leaders of the three great powers, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, issued an ultimatum to Japan, calling on it to surrender or suffer ‘utter destruction of the Japanese homeland’, but also promising an ultimate place for a renewed and democratic Japan amongst the nations of the world. On 28 July, Japan rejected the ultimatum, and the next day Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, Evatt, launched the first of several verbal attacks on the Allies’ decision-making process. Some peace terms outlined in the ultimatum did not reflect Australia’s wishes, as they appeared to be more lenient than those imposed on Germany, despite what Evatt described as the ‘outrageous cruelties and barbarities systematically practised’ by the Japanese authorities. He did not know what horror was about to be unleashed.
On 6 August, the first atomic bomb was dropped, on Hiroshima. On 8 August, the Soviet Union at last honoured Yalta by declaring war on Japan, and on 9 August a second bomb was dropped, this time at Nagasaki. The following day, Japan announced that she would accept the Potsdam ultimatum on the understanding that the prerogatives of the Emperor were preserved. In response to a request for its views, the Australian government stressed that the Emperor should assume full responsibility for Japan’s aggression and war crimes. By the time these views were communicated by the Australian mission in Washington, however, the United States government had already decided on the terms of surrender. The Japanese Emperor was to be subject to the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, Douglas MacArthur.
On 14 August, the Japanese accepted the terms, and the next day the Emperor broadcast to the Japanese people the decision to surrender. Evatt again deplored the tendency of the great powers to ‘relegate Australia to a subordinate status, allowed no consultation at all, only ratification after the fact’. For the next two years, Evatt would continue to assert his view that the Emperor should be tried as a war criminal, despite the argument that the Emperor’s execution would lead to instability within Japan itself and within the Asian region.
While Evatt was anxious that the United Nations should take up responsibility for the control of the new and devastating bombs, he seemed to have very little doubt as to whether they should have been dropped on Japan. Chifley made the point that Evatt’s position was endorsed by the Australian government, influenced as all Australia was by the first newsreel and press images of the liberation of the Asian POW camps, the skeletal young soldiers and civilians who had endured Japanese imprisonment. None of this was calculated to evoke compassion in Australian hearts for the Japanese nation.
For a brief and ecstatic season, with servicemen and civilians celebrating the end of conflict in squares and streets all over Australia, it was hard to see that the phenomenon that had struck the Japanese would soon enough—and perhaps forever after—come to dominate the imaginations and concerns of all humans. On 9 August, three prominent members of the Methodist Church in New South Wales had issued a statement warning that if the United Nations persisted in using the atomic bomb, they would ‘inflict a devastating blow on their claim to the moral leadership of the world’. But at first hardly anyone disapproved of the dropping of the Hiroshima and then the Nagasaki bomb. News of the bombing of Nagasaki tended to take second place in the press behind the Soviet Union’s declaration of war and new invasion of Manchuria. And far more letters to the editor supported the use of the atom bomb than opposed it. An Australian Gallup poll taken in September 1945 showed that 83 per cent of Australians thought the use of the bomb against Japan was justified. As for servicemen, there was solid support for the bomb from them. ‘Few serving Australian sailors, soldiers or airmen could shut their minds entirely to the possibility of death on some Japanese beach.’
For the hibakusha themselves (the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings), their experience seemed to be completely outside the limits of others’ understanding and imagining. It took mere hours before others came to agree with them. A number of journals, including the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, declared the bomb ‘as difficult for the imagination to envisage as it is for the unscientific mind to comprehend’. Argus correspondent and novelist-in-waiting George Johnston visited Hiroshima a month after the bombing and stated that the city bore no resemblance to other war-destroyed areas. The Sydney Morning Herald declared in an editorial that ‘the impulse to rejoice over the prospective shortening of the Pacific War is tempered at once by consciousness of what this epochal and affrighting discovery must mean to the future of mankind’.
The issue of radioactivity was not taken up very much at the time. Wilfred Burchett, an Australian who had helped smuggle Jews out of Europe and to Australia, was the first Western media representative to enter Hiroshima—without permission—after the bombing. At Hiroshima Hospital, Burchett saw people dying from what he later realised was radiation sickness. Doctors were at a loss as to how to treat them. Believing at first that the victims were suffering from general debility, they had given them vitamin injections, with horrific results. The flesh around the puncture marks rotted and the patients died. Burchett published in the London Daily Express on 6 September an article headed, ‘The Atomic Plague: I write this as a warning to the world.’
American authorities reacted swiftly and claimed that the bomb had exploded high enough over Hiroshima to avoid the risk of residual radiation. Burchett was taken away to undergo medical tests, only to discover on leaving the hospital that his camera and its pictures of Hiroshima had been stolen and his press accreditation withdrawn. In the Cold War, he would bear the stigma of being pro-Communist, and at least some of the character assassination he suffered was based on his condemnation of the bomb.
At the end of the war Australians were still only beginning to hear of atrocities against prisoners and assess the survival rate amongst them. For example, the matron-in-chief of the Australian Army Nursing Service, Colonel Annie Sage, veteran of nursing in the Middle East, flew to Sumatra in September 1945 to meet surviving nurses. She was appalled to find that of the sixty-five nurses who had escaped Singapore on the Vyner Brooke, only twenty-four had come through: eight died in captivity, twelve in the sinking of the ship, and twenty-one in the Banka Island massacre described elsewhere. ‘Where are the rest of you?’, asked Annie Sage plaintively. One of these survivors, Pat Gunther, had been taught drawing by a fellow prisoner, a Dutch nun, and had sketched details of the punitive camp in Palembang in which she spent nearly three years. Nor was survival rate the only issue. When Betty Jeffery, captured in Singapore, was literated from Muntok Island, she weighed only thirty kilos and suffered from turberculosis.
What was true of women prisoners was reflected in the condition of liberated male prisoners and in their camp survival rate as well.
The provisional United Nations had set up a War Crimes Commission in August 1943, even while the organisation itself was a mere concept. Even earlier, in 1942, the Australians had founded a Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees to collect evidence on atrocities. A section of the directorate was established specifically to bring Japanese responsible for war crimes to justice. Those Australian POWs repatriated from the European theatre would ultimately give evidence of German atrocities, evidence the Australian directorate sent on to the UN War Crimes Commission. Interestingly, no such commission, Australian or international, had been founded to deal with World War I atrocities.
Sir William Webb, a much-respected and genuinely august Queenslander, another of those scholarship boys who became a Supreme Court of Queensland judge, was appointed to begin investigation in June 1944 as War Crimes Commissioner, and General MacArthur agreed to make US army witnesses available to the Australians. Webb began his work in Brisbane, where he examined information made available from army sources. Then, in Newcastle, Townsville, Rockhampton and New Guinea, he began to interview survivors and escapees, and thus witnesses of crimes. Early in 1945, Webb accepted responsibility for liaising with Australian and other prisoners who were liberated by the advancing Allied armies. In April 1945, he was able to begin the questioning of civilians freed from the Philippines. A Japanese prisoner of war named Kunio Yunomi, held in the POW camp at Murchison in Victoria, was arrested in connection with the murder of an Australian soldier and two natives in New Guinea. Moved ultimately to Rabaul, the region in which his crime had been committed, he was tried after the war by an Australian military court and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Yunomi’s was not the first post-war trial, however.
With the collapse of the Japanese empire in August 1945, investigations expanded enormously, and commanders in the field were asked to make preliminary interviews of freed Allied personnel. All records found in Japanese POW and internee camps were retrieved and examined. A team of investigating army officers was created to inquire further into war crimes, and a War Crimes Act was passed by the Federal government.
On 26 November 1945, the first trial of a Japanese suspected war criminal was held before an Australian military court at Wewak in New Guinea. Trials were also ready to commence at Rabaul, at Labuan in North Borneo and at Morotai, where the 2nd Japanese Army had surrendered to General Blamey and war atrocities were reported to have been committed. On Morotai, 148 war criminals were tried, of whom sixty-seven were acquitted. Twenty-five sentences of death by firing squad were imposed. At this stage, 1045 Japanese suspected war criminals had been arrested by the Australian military forces, and administrative and investigative war crimes sections were created at army headquarters in Singapore and in Tokyo, at the headquarters of the 8th Military District, and elsewhere in Japan. In Tokyo, an Australian military forces officer from the directorate was appointed as liaison officer to General MacArthur’s headquarters.
War criminals held by the Australian military forces included Category A, those suspected of and charged with the commission of a war crime solely against Australian nationals; Category B, those suspected or charged with the commission of a war crime against both Australian and Allied nationals; and Category C, those charged with the commission of a war crime solely against Allied but non-Australian nationals.
The evidence presented against those who faced the military courts were war crimes questionnaires, statements, affidavits, diaries and reports from recovered prisoners of war and internees. Further evidence came from war graves personnel, who were exhuming headless bodies; from the RAAF, who were looking into crimes against their own personnel; and from captured official and private enemy documents. Sometimes there was photographic evidence as well. A great number of Japanese were named and accused of war crimes by various parties. In many farms and suburban houses across Australia, returned POWs signed their affidavits of witnessed atrocity for investigating officers.
In October 1945, Judge Kirby of the New South Wales District Court, then a member of the War Crimes Board of Inquiry, agreed to remain in Singapore to assist in the investigation and prosecution of war crimes there, and to protect Australian interests. He worked with the Number 1 Australian War Crimes section of Singapore, which would later move to Hong Kong.
So the extent of investigations covered Malaya, the Burma–Thailand Railway and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesian) areas. In Singapore alone the Australians tried sixty-two men accused of war crimes, of whom eleven were acquitted. Fifty-one were convicted, and death by hanging was imposed on eighteen of those. In Japan no Australian military courts sat but intelligence was gathered. Investigations in Java were dangerous because of the war between the Dutch and the Indonesian rebels and the peril of investigators being caught in the cross-fire. Flight Lieutenant McDonald of the RAAF, who was with the Number 1 War Crimes Section and was travelling to collect evidence, was shot to death by the Indonesian rebels in Java.
The headquarters of the Timor section of the 8th Military District (itself headquartered in Japan) finished its last war crimes trial at Darwin in April 1946. The 8th Military District was the only Australian military formation (apart from the Number 1 Australian War Crimes Section at Singapore) outside the mainland of Australia that had the necessary staff and organisation to investigate war crimes and to arrest and try war criminals.
The court the accused faced generally consisted of a lieutenant-colonel as president, assisted by a major and a captain. The accused was entitled within fourteen days of the end of the court proceedings to submit a petition against the finding or sentence, or against both.
The work continued for years. In 1950, Cabinet gave approval for an Australian War Crimes section to be set up on Manus Island, and ninety-three Japanese suspected war criminals, together with a Japanese defence team and a number of Japanese witnesses, were moved from Japan to Manus, where trials would run for ten months.
In all, just under a thousand Japanese were tracked down by investigators. Many of them were passed over to the British-led Army of India or, when Britons themselves were involved, to the British authorities. At Labuan, seven Japanese were condemned to death amongst the 128 sentenced. At Rabaul, eighty-seven out of 266 convicted were executed by shooting or hanging. In Darwin, one convicted war criminal was shot. In all, 644 Japanese were sentenced by Australian military forces courts.
Amongst those sentenced to death were Lieutenant-Colonel Kazuo Masuji, who had ordered the execution of three RAAF personnel in Java; Lieutenant-Commander Nadomi Suzuki, who had ordered the shooting of Australian nationals at Ocean Island, west of the main Gilbert Islands; and Lieutenant-General Masao Baba, who had ordered the Sandakan death marches.
THE RETREAT OF WOMEN
Were women’s opportunities as cancelled by the onset of peace as is generally argued? Australia’s participation in World War II led to a wide-scale mobilisation of ‘manpower’ with an effort to woo and then conscript women into industrial labour. To deal with the grudging attitude of trade unions about suitable levels of wages for women, the Curtin Labor government had established the Women’s Employment Board in 1942 to regulate the wages and conditions of those women doing work for ‘the duration’ only.
A number of women benefited under the new guidelines and received double the income of those who were stuck in traditional female jobs in the textile or clothing industry. With higher wages, and fulfilling men’s work while male relatives were away at the war, young women felt a new sense of independence and self-governance. Clarice, a writer in the Labor Digest in 1945, likened these women to ‘the lion that tasted blood’.
Judge Alfred Foster, chairman of the Women’s Employment Board, wrote, ‘To all of us it was an amazing revelation to see women who were yesterday working in beauty salons or had not previously worked outside their own homes or who had come from the counters of retail stores or a dozen other industries . . . who now stood behind mighty machines operating with a skill and mastery that was little short of marvellous!’
It is generally taken as a given that, the war over, women were pressured to return to traditional roles, just as advertising was offering them a new kind of domesticity, one far removed from either the misery of the Depression or the dourness of continuing post-war rationing and—in the case of loyal wives of absent soldiers—enforced celibacy.
Advertising was by now in its frank modern phase in which men and women were promised consumer goods as a path to sexual attractiveness and pleasure. So, if women were to yield the factory floor to returning soldiers, they were not going home to become quite the same women their mothers had been. The Women’s Weekly close to explicitly instructed them on how not to be. The movies also promoted this image of the woman who is mother, wife and temptress and who is never a frump. Myzone, for example, was a pill marketed as ‘beauty tablets’, but its purpose was to prevent menstrual cramps. The chirpy girl got the job and then the man. Betty Bright, a modern business girl, was depicted as being able to keep her job, thanks to Myzone. Femininity was synonymous with youth and the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics company ran a sinister slogan that went, ‘Pretty women die twice. The rose dies in its fading, as well as in its fall.’ Even as early as the end of the 1930s, Stay-Blonde shampoo advertisements claimed, ‘Recent scientific tests show that light fair-haired girls have 47 per cent more sex appeal than the dark “fairs”.’ As for Odo-Ro-No: ‘Just the girl that I’ve been waiting for!’ men thought when they first saw Marion. They would cluster around for introductions but they’d rarely dance more than one dance. For though Marion carefully bathed and dressed, she neglected the simple precaution of deodorant and trusted a bath alone to keep her safe from underarm odour. ‘Fatal error!’ said the advertisers.
By war’s end, women were concerned to limit the number of children they had. An invitation from the National Health and Medical Research Council asked girls to say why they wanted it thus. One answer cited ‘the desire to retain the companionship of their husband and the happiness of married life, and the desire to see that the two children are properly equipped for their later life’. One woman frankly declared, ‘I believe a happy marriage is based on a happy sexual life between husband and wife.’ Some young women feared ‘the disfigurement’ that came with pregnancy.
Dame Enid Lyons, in a radio debate in 1944, regretted that sex had become the objective, not the child. But young women saw the feminism of Dame Enid, of those who campaigned for the government provision of childcare, and the Women for Canberra movement whose aim was to increase women’s numbers in the parliament—all of these being superbly motivated movements—as old-fashioned and unglamorous. The National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the United Associations of Women were not much listened to by these young women who had once ‘made love’ to Yanks for the novelty of it but were now seeking to found an Australian home. Young married people who had been promised such fulfilment in the women’s magazines often had to live with parents, or occupy a tent or shed on their land while the building materials slowly became available to make an occupiable house.
THE POST-WAR NIRVANA
Dr Kevin Fagan’s prognostications about the condition of former prisoners of war and their fitness to re-enter society did not quite apply to Gunner Russell Braddon. First, Braddon had been appalled when in Darwin the pay books stained with blood and sweat from the Burma Railway, which he had kept for the families of men who had died there, were taken away and burned by the military authorities. His mother had remarried during his imprisonment and now lived in Brisbane, and so that was the city to which he returned. On his way in a convoy of ex-prisoners through cheering crowds, he saw fifty or more four-year-olds ‘lined up on the pavement, shouting a shrill welcome and waving with their children’s clumsy wrists. Every trace of our composure vanished. Here was a part of Australia we had not seen before—the new generation; healthy, wholesome, guileless and guiltless.’ For some reason that caused a profound grief, a painful nostalgia.
Braddon’s repatriation, and that of other former POWs, was in the hands of the Rehabilitation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees Commission, a somewhat more compassionate body than the post-World War I repatriation authority. Ultimately he would more or less successfully yet joylessly attend Sydney University, and endured three years of depression and bewilderment. Like many others he had to reaccustom himself to sleeping in a bed rather than on the floor as the camps had conditioned him to.
Back in Sydney, in residence at St Paul’s College, studying law, Braddon had time for a prank. He dressed himself up and acted the part of a member of a visiting ‘Iranian Barter Commission’ occupying a suite at the Australia Hotel. Yet he was plagued by recurring malaria, felt disengaged from the world, and even perhaps felt himself an internal exile because of his homosexuality. His academic career was undistinguished and like many a former prisoner he felt that he was being helped along to a degree. He became the sub-warden of St Paul’s but, he said, ‘disintegrated as a person’.
So he attempted what was then the statutory crime of suicide. He took an overdose of pills but was found before they took his life. He was comatose for four days. The results were punitive. He was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Concord Repatriation Hospital. Here he found many of his fellow former prisoners stumbling through the corridors, and discovered that in spite of the public’s respect for POWs, here they ran the risk of being treated as miscreants. Those men who resisted the psychiatric regime were threatened with electro-convulsive therapy. Former prisoners suffering shock and out of their mind, temporarily or permanently, were thrown into padded cells where they would howl and yell, ‘straitjacketed in their own filth’. An orderly asked Braddon to fellate him and threatened that he would be put on the shock-treatment list if he didn’t comply. Braddon characteristically threatened to ‘bite it off ’, and also informed a medical officer. Finally he signed an undertaking not to attempt suicide again and was released.
His former fellow prisoner Syd Piddington, and Piddington’s wife Lesley, had left for England. After an impoverished beginning, Piddington—who had practised telepathy in Changi—embarked on a series of radio shows for the BBC, transmitting phrases and concepts into the mind of his wife and of other people. Braddon arrived in 1949 and became something of an agent for the operation, particularly after the couple decided to take the show on the road to variety theatres throughout Britain. Piddington must have been one of the most famous ex-prisoners of war in the whole of Britain. In one spectacular show he transmitted concepts from a studio at the BBC to his wife Lesley, who was locked inside a room in the Tower of London. Braddon continued with the Piddingtons until he began a successful writing career, his first work being a biography of the Piddingtons, and his classic the 1951 account of imprisonment, The Naked Island. He had survived by fiction and showbiz. Other ex-POWs did not always have such exotic recourse.
BRETTON WOODS AND ALL THAT
Chifley had not attended the event but was keen to press his colleagues into ratifying the Bretton Woods Agreement. The momentous agreement, signed in July 1944 by Western nations at bosky Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on a cosy rural laneway named Crawford Notch Road, would have Australia and other nations join the newly formed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later to be called the World Bank. Bretton Woods established the US dollar as the standard of currency, but Australia responded indirectly by keeping its primary relationship to the British pound and, via it, to the dollar. Chifley was attracted by the idea that an IMF and a World Bank would stabilise markets and forestall world depressions. Never did such a massive world restructure arise from such a backwoods locale.
There was considerable opposition within the Labor Caucus to the agreement, so Chifley delayed first broaching Australia’s approval until late 1946. Eddie Ward, that nuggety and acidic tramway man from inner Sydney, had been particularly vitriolic in his denunciation of the agreement, having already claimed in a radio broadcast in March 1946 that it gave up too much power to the IMF and threatened the ‘very sovereignty of Australia, and would allow for its domination by international financial interests’. Bretton Woods would, according to Ward, ‘enthrone a world dictatorship of private finance, more complete and terrible than any Hitlerite dream’. It is up to later generations to decide if in fact this arguable point of view is correct. Bretton Woods, argued Ward further, would destroy Australia’s democratic institutions, ‘pervert and paganise our Christian ideals’, and endanger world peace. Ward’s criticisms had some public credibility because they accorded with long-held Labor views about the so-called ‘money power’ of the Federal government, its power to print more money to allay hardship, even if it did drive up prices; which had become entrenched doctrine during the 1930s Depression.
However, Chifley saw that Australia had to align itself with the rest of the world. He believed Bretton Woods, and its worldwide management of economic forces, would end depressions like the one of the 1930s. In the meantime, Australia would show itself to be an outward-looking country that engaged with the world through trade diplomacy and economic aid, and an exporting country, not only to traditional markets and not only primary products but manufactured products as well. He also believed that Bretton Woods could stabilise currency markets, promote full employment and raise living standards, even though he was wary of the Wall Street capitalists and their concentration on those ‘dollar profits’ which Ward and others claimed were the sole motives behind the Bretton Woods International Monetary Agreement.
It was possible in those hopeful days for the idealist Chifley to see the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as based, as he said, on ‘brighter and more humanitarian’ objectives. But the Caucus at first managed to prevent Australia from agreeing to Bretton Woods, and it was only in November 1946 that Chifley narrowly convinced the Federal Executive they should go ahead. After the summer break, though Eddie Ward and Arthur Calwell dissented, the close vote in Cabinet showed that Chifley would have an even tougher time in Caucus.
To argue the proposition through, Chifley asserted that international financiers should not take all the blame for Australia’s depression in the 1930s. Part of it belonged to the Commonwealth and its failure to use the monetary machinery it had available. He admitted there were some risks associated with joining the IMF but believed the advantages far outweighed them, since the organisations were ‘an attempt for the first time in history to grapple with world economic problems by concerted action on a world scale for the common good’. Members of Parliament, he said, had to put aside any misgivings and place their faith in such organisations if they were to ‘free future generations from the terrible happenings of the last thirty years’. He saw the IMF and the World Bank as Keynesian, pump-priming bodies, not as the instruments of erosion in social spending they would become in later decades.
In fact, in March 1947, through Chifley’s calm insistence, Caucus accepted Bretton Woods by nine votes. Bretton Woods was finally ratified by Parliament that same month after Chifley had consoled his colleagues with an announcement of tax deductions and pension increases. All this took place in the midst of unruly and severe strikes whose radicalism was turning people towards the more anti-Red rhetoric of the now seemingly unstoppable Robert Gordon Menzies.
WHO WILL TAKE THE JEWS?
In 1933 there were only twenty-five thousand Jews in Australia, hardly enough to satisfy the Bulletin-style anti-Semitism. About nine thousand refugees from the Third Reich arrived between 1938 and 1940, and seventeen thousand survivors, many of them Holocaust victims, arrived between 1946 and 1954 from Europe and Shanghai. The pre-war community nearly trebled to over sixty thousand. But Jews constituted only 0.5 per cent of the overall population, and despite their persecution by the Nazi regime, the numbers were exaggerated by suburban sages and hostility expressed towards Jewish immigration. Even after 1945 there was daubing and damage to property owned by Jews in Melbourne. One could argue that all immigrants were attacked, and the extent to which general xenophobia and anti-Semitism were mixed, and what percentage of each there was, is impossible to discern. A survivor of the German rescuer Oskar Schindler’s camp, Edek Korn, meeting his wife Leosia after their first day of factory work in Sydney, heard her say in wonder, ‘They hate the Polish Catholics as much as they hate us!’
Nonetheless, the record of acceptance of Jews showed robust anti-Semitism. Frank Clarke, president of the Victorian Legislative Council, had said without embarrassment in May 1939 of the Jewish refugees that they were ‘hundreds of weedy East Europeans . . . slinking, rat-faced men, under five feet in height and with a chest development of about twenty inches’. These men worked in ‘sweating’ factories in Carlton and other localities. ‘One group here attempted the supply of 100,000 articles of women’s silk underclothing at seven and a half penny each. No Australian factory could compete with such prices and pay awards.’ Weedy, degenerate, avaricious and satanically industrious—Clarke’s description of Jews could well have run in the Nazi paper Der Stürmer. It was feared that Jewish immigrants would form ghettos in Sydney, especially in Kings Cross and Bondi, and in Melbourne, especially in Carlton. In 1939, the Sydney Sunday Sun complained that ‘the situation that so many people said would occur has come to pass in Potts Point. Refugees from foreign persecution have taken it over like Grant took Richmond.’
After the war, the struggle between Jewish settlers in Palestine and the British Mandate forces provided further fuel for those who were against Jewish immigration. The bombing in June 1946 of the King David Hotel—the British administrative and military headquarters in Palestine—an act of Zionist extremists, was used to paint all Jewish immigrants as associated with terror.
One of the most vocal opponents of Jewish refugees was Henry Gullett, Liberal member for Henty, Victoria—not the far more distinguished Gullett who was killed in the plane crash early in the war. Gullett astoundingly declared, ‘Neither should Australia be a dumping ground for people whom Europe itself in the course of 2000 years, has not been able to absorb.’ He alleged that Jewish immigrants were setting up sweatshops, cornering housing and evading income tax. Oblivious to the liberties for which the Allies claimed to have fought, Ken Bolton, president of the New South Wales branch of the RSL, advocated an end to Jewish immigration from 1946 onwards. The Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly depicted Jews as incapable of assimilating, of creating sweatshops, of being moneylenders, and as controllers of the banks and the media.
All this influenced the government to introduce quotas restricting Jewish immigration to Australia both before and after the war. After the Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria under Hitler in April 1938, a further 180,000 Jews came under Nazi rule, and the Australian High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, recommended the quota be doubled to thirty thousand over three years. The government decided against his recommendation and on 1 December 1938 reconfirmed that Australia would admit just fifteen thousand refugees over the next three years. The government took no action on a proposal by the Jewish Freeland League to create a Jewish colony in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, and despite the efforts of famed Zionist leader Dr Isaac N. Steinberg, who arrived to promote the idea in 1939, the proposal was ultimately rejected in 1944.
When news reached Australia of the years-long massacre of Jews in Poland, the United Jewish Emergency Committee was formed in Sydney by Dr Jonah M. Machover, while in Melbourne the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund was formed under the presidency of Polish-born textile manufacturer Leo Fink (who would lobby Arthur Calwell with great patience) to raise funds and collect goods to assist Jews in Europe.
Jewish refugees reaching Australia from Austria or Germany in the late 1930s were interned when war broke out, initially at Hay in New South Wales and later at Tatura in Victoria. Here they joined 2400 young male Jewish refugees who had been sent from Britain on the ship Dunera, and other internees from Singapore and parts of Asia. The Dunera had been despatched from England with, as well as the group who would call themselves ‘the Dunera Boys’, two hundred former Italian Fascists and about two hundred German prisoners of war, mostly seamen. The majority of the passengers were C-class aliens; that is, classified as the least dangerous. Since the Dunera had been built for only sixteen hundred passengers, it was an appalling journey with impossible sanitary arrangements and inedible food. The Jewish refugees distracted themselves with lectures, Torah studies, and writing a constitution for their group. About one thousand of the Dunera internees remained after the war. Most of them, released towards the end of hostilities, had volunteered for service in the Australian military forces.
In Australia House, London, after the war, the Immigration Sub-Committee had actually recommended an end to the pre-war plan for admitting fifteen thousand Jewish refugees over three years. It was felt that those already admitted were not desirable, since as much as 80 per cent of them ‘settled in Sydney and Melbourne and soon became conspicuous by a tendency to acquire property and to settle in particular districts, such as Kings Cross, Sydney’. The subcommittee claimed that professional and university-educated Jewish refugees had greater difficulty adjusting to Australia than the artisan class. In addition it felt that the Polish Jews who had arrived before 1938 and who mainly worked in the textile industry in Melbourne ‘could not be regarded as desirable types of migrants’.
Calwell had been appointed Australia’s first Minister for Immigration in July 1945, and for the first time in Australian history non-British immigrants were considered viable and welcome as potential labour. The first secretary of the department was Tasman Heyes, who shared the anti-Semitism expressed by the Melbourne Club, of which he was a member and from which Jews were excluded. After Calwell’s appointment, Heyes met with Jewish community leaders Alec Masel and Paul Morawetz to discuss a memorandum on humanitarian Jewish immigration. The formula arrived at was that two thousand survivors of the concentration camps with family sponsors in Australia would be admitted in the twelve months from August 1945. The announcement of this agreement caused an outcry, and Calwell introduced measures to limit the proposed numbers. Charles Glassgold, the American Joint Distribution Committee representative in Shanghai, summed up their essence in 1949: ‘I have to transmit to you some information that should by now not be shocking to any Jew but which nevertheless still horrifies one. From a most unimpeachable source there comes to me a statement made by the new Australian consul in Shanghai that casts the pall of futility over the prospect of Australian immigration. The consul said to my informant substantially the following: “We have never wanted these people in Australia and we still don’t want them. We will issue a few visas to those who have relations there as a gesture.”’
There was as well a 25 per cent limitation on Jewish passengers on all ships, and in 1948 the quota was extended to planes. Only a few hundred Jews were permitted to emigrate to Australia from Shanghai after July 1947, following a top-secret report of the Australian consul-general, Major-General O.C.W. Fuhrman, painting Jews as the criminal element of Shanghai.
In January 1949, the quota for Jewish immigrants was set at a mere three thousand per annum and the quota system on ships and planes was eased. But an Iron Curtain embargo in December 1949 excluded Jews who originated from countries under Soviet rule. There were also special discriminations against Jews of Middle Eastern and Indian origins, considered less desirable than the Ashkenazian Jews of Europe.
Under the International Refugee Organization Agreement of July 1947, Calwell consented to admitting workers from the displaced persons’ camps in Europe on a two-year work contract, and 170,000 displaced persons arrived in the next four years from 1947, with a further 29,000 under personal sponsorship. Married Jews were virtually excluded from the program—only young, single Jews were permitted and they needed to sign an undertaking to work in remote areas of Australia. The definition for being a Jew was based on racial and not religious grounds, and as a Jewish member of the selection team commented at the time, ‘Hitler could not have done better.’
The Australian Jews were anxious about what happened to their brothers and sisters after their surviving this regimen. A Jewish welfare official met every boat. In Sydney, they were taken straight to the Maccabean Hall and issued with instructions that stressed: ‘Above all, do not speak German in the streets and in the trams. Modulate your voices . . . Remember that the welfare of the old established-Jewish community in Australia as well as of every migrant depends on your personal behaviour.’
In a community atmosphere of hostility which—for once—united Catholic and Protestant, employees and leaders of Jewish welfare in both Sydney and Melbourne were thus themselves edgy about the newcomers. No government funds were to be spent on Jews because of the fear of political repercussions. Boats were nonetheless met by Jewish stalwarts, immigrants were helped with finding employment or set up in business through interest-free loans, and there were two schemes, Save the Children and the Jewish Welfare Guardian Scheme, to assist orphan survivors of the Holocaust. Melbourne Jewry, with its stronger Eastern European origins (Sydney’s Jews having historically come in the main from Germany), was more proactive in assisting survivors.
The businessman Leo Fink of Melbourne, who had come from Poland in 1928 with nothing and by the beginning of World War II was a textile and carpet manufacturer, as president of the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund established to receive Jewish survivors of the European mayhem, persuaded Calwell to set aside the 25 per cent Jewish quota in the case of the Johan de Witt, which put into various Australian ports to off-load the six hundred sponsored Jewish survivors amongst its seven hundred passengers. In Sydney, the young Jewish politician and gifted organiser, Sid Einfeld, arranged the reception of the Sydney contingent, even though some more conservative Jews were uneasy about the impact of such strange newcomers on a not entirely benign public opinion about Jews. Einfeld was a champion to the arrivals. He travelled from suburb to suburb visiting individual families, looking to their wants and regularly going to Canberra to persuade ministers he knew from his prominence in the New South Wales Labor Party to ease the restrictions placed on Jewish immigration. He had the benefit of being a most amiable figure in the Jewish and wider community, including the gritty fraternity of the ALP.
The bulk of Holocaust survivors, six out of ten, settled in Melbourne, while Sydney became home to the majority of the others. Indeed, the leaders of the Perth Jewish community, meeting ships with Jewish immigrants aboard, often persuaded the newcomers to travel on to Melbourne or Sydney, cities more accustomed to a Jewish presence, offering greater opportunities and established Jewish institutions.
There is a telling number. Because an increasing number of refugees, especially Jewish refugees, had qualifications, in 1938 a restrictive quota of only eight foreign doctors were to be registered annually in New South Wales. This quota was still in place post-war. Thirteen European Jewish doctors completed the final three years of their medical studies at Australian universities in 1950, only to find that not all of them could be registered. Some Europeans who had hated the Jews in the old world would have agreed: too many, too threatening, too smart.
COMMUNISTS: FRIENDS? ENEMIES?
Throughout the war and in the early days of the peace, there were shifts in Australia’s attitude to its Communist Party. After the fall of France in 1940, at a time when Stalin’s pact with Hitler was still in place, Menzies banned the Communist Party of Australia under a National Security Act regulation guided through the House in June by Henry Gullett, who in a few months would die in a plane crash in Canberra. The states had done their best to quash the Communist Party too, as in the case of New South Wales banning the display of Communist flags in the Domain, the open ground behind state parliament where public orators spoke on rostrums on Sundays. A number of local councils prohibited Communist meetings. Arrests and prosecutions for Communists gathering illegally increased for a time.
By 1942, however, when the Soviet Union was a cherished ally absorbing a massive amount of the shock of Germany’s assault on Europe, and when in Australia all help was welcome, Labor saw that the war effort could benefit in terms of production and military numbers from the cooperation of Communists, and the Communist Party ban was lifted by Curtin’s government in 1942.
After informing Archbishop Gilroy that the government was about to lift Menzies’ ban on the Communist Party of Australia, Evatt wrote to the Apostolic delegate, Archbishop Panico, asking that the bishops make no immediate public statement on the decision. He explained that the Communists supported the war effort now and the ban had merely driven them underground. Neither Britain nor the United States had placed such a ban. Evatt insisted that lifting the ban did not mean the Labor Party supported Communism: ‘The Communists are often our bitterest critics.’ Evatt hoped that church authorities would wait some months before warning against Communist doctrines. But the 1942 lifting of the ban aroused considerable debate.
Gilroy did not accept this. He decided to make his September 1942 statement opposing the lifting of the ban. He produced a forty-six-page draft pastoral letter. It said: ‘We spurn the outstretched hand of Communism. It reeks with hypocrisy and treachery. Dripping with the blood of scores of thousands of Catholics—priests, religious and laity—steeped in profanation and sacrilege, it is a thousand times over the hand of Cain.’ But the statement was also almost as strong in its condemnation of capitalism. It said that few Australians ‘had any real share’ in the wealth of Australia or ‘in the ownership and management of the industries’. It regretted that policies of ‘race suicide’ had forced the wives of servicemen into industry ‘to augment the family income’. This was a ‘crime against humanity’, it said. In the end, despite Gilroy deciding not to release the statement, Archbishop Duhig from Brisbane wrote to him asking for a joint letter from the bishops opposing the lifting of the ban. He considered that Evatt was ‘the most dangerous man in Australia . . . Evatt is an out and out Communist in sympathy’. Duhig then went on fantastically to say that Evatt wanted to be the ‘Stalin of Australia’.
Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, had meanwhile—surprisingly in view of later history—written to Dr Evatt that he was of the opinion that since the ban had never been effective, its removal would make no difference. Gilroy was startled by Mannix’s position. Mannix claimed that Panico accepted Evatt’s view that the lifting of the ban might be politically necessary but suggested the bishops issue a joint pastoral letter on the dangers of Communism without actually referring to the ban. In any case, the lifting of all prohibitions took place.
The war ended, and the June 1945 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Congress voted that five out of ten members on the executive should be elected by the Congress itself and its heavy Communist membership. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that Communists had taken control of the ACTU. By 1945, the Victorian Industrial Groups (of which more later) believed that Communists ‘controlled practically every key trade union in Australia’. Communist influence was undeniably substantial, but it was often exaggerated by both Communists and their opponents as a means of rallying their respective forces. The political scientist Lester Webb believed that the Australian Communist Party’s success in trade unions was explained by the energy and tactical skill of certain Communist trade-union officials, ‘and scarcely at all to acceptance of Communist ideology by the rank and file’.
In fact, there was a leakage in progress in membership of the Communist Party. The Communist leader and Yorkshire migrant Ernie Thornton, brought to Australia under one of the child-immigration organisations, the Dreadnought Scheme, became head of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA), but returned from a trip to the United States not only supporting closer cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West, but also suggesting Communist parties should be dissolved, as the American party had voluntarily dissolved itself, becoming an educational body, the Communist Political Association.
These propositions were rejected by the 1945 Australian Communist Party congress. Since the Australian Communist Party had returned to a rigid central control in 1943, many members, especially intellectuals, resigned in 1945, in part in protest, in part as the public mood turned from seeing the Soviet Union as ally to seeing it as the next enemy. Official membership dropped from twenty-three thousand to just over sixteen thousand. Communist authoritarianism became evident in the way the FIA’s federal executive tried to suppress a revolt in its Balmain branch. The Balmain ironworkers resented the party’s centralised control, for, as the founding branch, Balmain prized its independence, and in early 1943 had rejected the Communists in elections by a two-to-one majority. Thornton was also resentful of their attitudes, given his success in building the FIA under his earlier presidency during the war from twenty thousand to a peak of more than sixty-two thousand.
A small group of Trotskyists within the Communist movement considered themselves the true Communists; like Trotsky, they opposed the bureaucracy Stalin had erected after 1924 between himself and the true proletariat, and dissented from Stalin’s idea of building ‘Socialism in One Country’, the Soviet Union, rather than working for world revolution. The Trotskyists were led by Nick Origlass and Laurie Short. Short had joined the Communist Party of Australia and the FIA in 1931 but contested in court, on the basis of ballot-rigging, the FIA election which returned Ernie Thornton. Short ultimately became a Labor man and new leader of the FIA.
The 1949 public perception of a man like Short, and that of hardline Communist Lance Sharkey, however, was that they were cut from the same cloth, that they were comrades together—even though doctrinally they abominated each other.
A central figure of the anti-Communist fight was the FIA’s Frank Rooney. The New South Wales Trades and Labour Council was very worried about the power of the Communists, and in 1945 the New South Wales ALP agreed to form what became known as the ALP Industrial Groups. The ALP gave party authorisation to contest infiltration of the labour movement and provided a militant role to Catholic anti-Communist groups of unionists. B.A. Santamaria, the Italian grocer’s son from Melbourne and leader of the Catholic Action Movement, later insisted that the Groups were his idea and that he discussed the proposal with the Victorian premier Jack Cain, who helped organise ALP approval for them in 1947.
With ASIO’s establishment in 1949, the Labor government had put in place all the major policies that the Menzies government was to use in its Cold/Class War. The notion that the December 1949 elections were a watershed at which anti-Communism took a new turn seems to be something of a myth when one is presented with these realities.
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
Ben Chifley was a man of great national ambitions. But his capacity to spend the dollars we earned was limited by the agreement Commonwealth countries observed through their membership of ‘the sterling bloc’ that traded in pounds sterling. In the sterling bloc crisis beginning in 1947, the value of the pound sterling fell against the American dollar by 30 per cent or more, and since our currency was tied to sterling through commerce and in other ways, our currency also fell. This would have been good for exporting farmers and miners, except that seasons of lower production began and the price of imports rose over 9 per cent in 1947–48.
Chifley had to meet some of the demands of the labour movement, of which the organisations run by Labor men were still militant, let alone those run by Communists. Labor possessed superior bargaining power. The unions believed there would be a depression of the kind that had followed World War I and which saw former Diggers selling pencils in the streets. They felt they had to make their gains before the economy dipped. For the moment the shortage of workers to manufacture the goods people wanted and to process bumper crops meant that in any direct conflict with Chifley the unions would win.
Chifley had a tough, measured, calm and determined soul. His parents were Irish immigrants, and poverty and mental conflict meant that he lived with his grandparents at Limekilns near Bathurst, sleeping on a hessian bed and attending school two days one week and three the next. Yet he’d read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the time he was a teenager and went on to George Bernard Shaw and, of course, Keynes. He was conscious that, as he said towards the end of his life, ‘I’m the descendant of a race that fought a long and bitter fight against perjurers and pimps and liars’. He had taught himself economics, not the first or last Treasurer to do so. His wife, Lizzie, was shy in the manner of Elsie Curtin, and made the care of her ninety-three-year-old mother the reason for her continuing to stay in South Bathurst. So rather than moving to the Lodge, Chifley stayed on at the Hotel Kurrajong, still in the company of his secretary Phyllis Donnelly. A young member of the House, Fred Daly, saw him often walking from the Kurrajong to Parliament House, reflectively smoking his pipe before entering the House ‘to belt the Opposition’ not with fury but with preciseness. He was not as good an orator as Curtin, but would produce one of Labor’s rallying symbols, ‘the light on the hill’, in 1949: ‘We have a great objective, the light on the hill, which we aim to reach by working [for] the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we can give a helping hand.’ He had none of Curtin’s bipolar extremes of being a bastion of the nation one week and an invalid the next. But he did fret that inflation from both the sterling bloc problems and the demands of unions would result in a falling off of investment and so in the end a lack of jobs. He had failed in his attempt to make state and local governments shift their banking to the Commonwealth, which would have given him greater financial support for his projects, when the High Court declared part of the Act to compel the states to do so invalid.
The advice of his economists reinforced Chifley’s conviction as both prime minister and treasurer that advances in wages and working conditions must be gradual. So how was he to tamp down the demands of the labour movement and still lead a Labor government? He was respected by the citizenry; however, they were anxious for housing and the good life, and rationing scarcity still remained in many areas, in part to preserve those dollar reserves by not importing too much, in part because of the collapse of the pound.
Cold War and conservative rhetoric depicted the high incidence of strikes at this time as part of a Moscow-organised Communist conspiracy to wreck the economy. The Australian Communist Party believed that capitalism was on the brink of crisis and that the time had arrived for the party to take leadership of the labour movement away from the ALP. By now Communist Party officials controlled the Australian Miners’ Federation (unlike when Curtin had pleaded with the same union), the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Seamen’s Union and the Federated Ironworkers’ Association, and they were seen as traitors not only by Coalition—Liberal and Country Party—voters but by Labor voters too, and in particular by those from the Catholic tradition. Punitive measures aimed at these unions were presented by Chifley as a crucial aspect of the war against Communism. Because coal mining was essential for electricity and stevedoring industries to commerce, strikes took on a desperate character, and most people saw them as part of the worldwide Communist plot. The language of everyday industrial relations was so influenced by the Communist issue that it was impossible to see any union grievance as purely industrial. Chifley provided two special tribunals to settle disputes for these bottleneck industries—the Stevedoring Industry Commission and the Coal Industry Tribunal.
Chifley was handicapped by the lack of constitutional powers to regulate wages after the wartime emergency regulations lapsed, and the 1948 price control referendum, in which he asked the people to give him control over prices and rents, was defeated by a clever, anti-socialist, ‘What will they try to control next?’ campaign.
Ted Roach, assistant general secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation since 1942, would become a casualty of the trade union war against Communism. Roach had a place already in Australian history as the leader of the Port Kembla pig-iron dispute in 1938, when unionists tried to stop a cargo of pig iron the government of the time wanted consigned to Japan (hence Menzies’ nickname Pig Iron Bob), but this time, as poster boy for Communism, he was going to receive a twelve-month gaol sentence.
In 1947, Chifley gave new powers to Conciliation and Arbitration commissioners, who were to help parties in industrial disputes to reach settlements. Employers resisted these moves for fear that appointments would be biased towards Labor and even include Communists. Some moderate unionists were appointed to the commission, but so was the RSL president in South Australia.
As for matters the commissioners did not manage to settle, these were referred to the Arbitration Court, which could enforce anti-strike ban clauses in arbitration awards. Normal rules of evidence were not applied in the Arbitration Court and the onus of proof was on defendants. The accused also did not have the right to refuse to give incriminating evidence. Four judges out of the seven had been appointed by previous conservative governments, and Judge A.W. Foster, who had been appointed in 1944 by the Curtin government, would say in 1947 that ‘the awards of the Arbitration Court are legislation and not adjudication’. Foster had once been a revolutionary socialist, but now he too was ready to gaol trade unionists who broke anti-strike bans. These Arbitration Court judges may have felt a certain insecurity in that they ranked lower in the judicial hierarchy and received lower salaries than judges who sat in the ‘real’ superior point courts of record. Their tendency would be to treat defiant unionists as criminals.
The same could even be said of R.C. Kirby, Chifley’s 1947 nominee, a barrister in the Sydney trade union and Labor Party orbit. The conservatives included E.A. Drake-Brockman, formerly a Nationalist senator and president of the Employers’ Federation, who was senior judge. ‘The Drake’, as unionists called him, had become more flexible in his awards as the war went on, and he and Foster favoured but were defeated for the time being on a prescriptive 75 per cent of the male awards being paid to women workers. This was considered progressive for the times. On his death in 1949 he was replaced by R.C. Kelly, one of the founders of the National Catholic Rural Movement, and thus also a devout anti-Communist.
In 1949, a Communist unionist, L.J. McPhillips, assistant secretary of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and a member of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was gaoled for trying to bypass the court and give employers an ultimatum he would negotiate only outside it. McPhillips’ argument was, ‘This issue will be determined outside the Arbitration Court. We do not trust the people in charge of the court to play the game.’ He was charged with contempt and after a two-day hearing was found guilty and sentenced to one month in Long Bay Gaol.
More significant was the 1949 trial of Lance Sharkey, general secretary of the Communist Party, who had, it was believed, urged the Malayan Communists to rise up their insurgency and said that if Soviet troops entered Australia the Australian workers would welcome them. He was subject to continual surveillance from the newly formed Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the stress of that was believed to have added to his drinking binges. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for sedition, a harsh sentence that nonetheless reflected the life-and-death feelings of the time. On appeal the term was reduced to thirteen months, and when it ended he went on a national speaking tour and visited Russia, where he sought treatment for heart problems.
Wharfies had a long tradition of taking action on political issues, and when on 28 March 1949 they held a two-hour stop-work meeting to protest against Sharkey’s trial for sedition, Kirby used his casting vote to prevent penalties being imposed by the court. But when the federal executive of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) called on members to strike for twenty-four hours on 11 April to protest against the gaoling of McPhillips, Kirby moved to impose discipline. He demanded undertakings from the leaders, Jim Healy and Eddie Roach, that they would abide by their State Industrial Council’s (SIC) decisions. Chifley declared that he was not against a union’s right to strike but was against wharfies being misled by Communists with ulterior motives. Despite the influence of Industrial Groups, made up of Catholic Labor men within the WWF, the federal executive unanimously reaffirmed the basic trade-union principles of the rights to strike and to elect its own representatives, and it confirmed the appointments of Healy and Roach. One of the Groupers, Paddy Kenneally, former Timor commando, warned Roach and Healy that if they kept on strangling the waterfront it would bring about the end of the Australian shipping industry. Nonetheless, the meeting also endorsed the federal executive’s directions to stop work over Sharkey and McPhillips, though only by ten votes to nine. Chifley’s Cabinet supported Kirby’s ultimatum that Healy and Roach should support the SIC decisions. Since they hadn’t, Cabinet dismissed them from their union positions. When the WWF refused to nominate replacements, Cabinet abolished the SIC, and Evatt passed its powers to the Arbitration Court.
In June 1949, volatile elements of the Cold/Class War interacted to produce the momentous coal strike. The Miners’ Federation had a long history of militancy and was labelled a ‘Communist union’ even though it had a mixture of officials. But the general president and the vice president were Communists, and there were other Communists at district level who would play leading roles in the strike. Depiction of the miners and their WWF counterparts as Communist puppets must have felt demeaning to many men, and there were a number of unauthorised local stoppages of miners and wharfies that happened without union executive input. The coal strike that began in June 1949 was seen as a war between Communism and the nation. In fact, the union shared the widespread fear amongst unions that the present favourable conditions would not last, so they would now pursue claims for a thirty-five-hour week (which made considerable sense in terms of miners’ health) and long service leave. Negotiations stalled before the Coal Industry Tribunal, and the Miners’ Federation decided to call stop-work meetings that would consider a recommendation to strike on 27 June. The chairman of the tribunal issued a no-strike order and threatened to prosecute the officials, while the president of the Miners’ Federation, Idris Williams, warned that ‘we will never sell out the right to strike . . . the trade union would become non-existent if we sold that right’.
The strike began, and the Labor government, through Chifley, vowed to fight them ‘Boots and All’. On 29 June, ministers rushed through Parliament the National Emergency (Coal Strike) Act. Its purpose was to deny financial support for the miners and their families, and it gave the Arbitration Court power to issue injunctions to ensure compliance with the Act. On Saturday, 2 July, in a special session of the Arbitration Court, Chief Judge Kelly issued an injunction prohibiting four unions from disposing of funds withdrawn from banks for strike purposes, including support for strikers’ families, and on 5 July he followed up with an order requiring the unions to pay the monies to the court’s registrar. Kelly himself fell ill and was replaced by Foster. Foster sentenced seven officials to twelve months’ gaol and McPhillips to six months, and also fined five officials and three unions—the fines for the Miners’ and the WWF were £2000 for each union.
When Healy and Roach appeared before him, Foster rejected the submission that each of the accused had the right to a separate trial. In defending his refusal to pay over the funds to the court, Roach declared, ‘I’m not prepared to accept the right of anybody to interfere in the domestic affairs of a trade union.’ He said that unions were the fighting organisations of the workers who, throughout history, had had to resist bad laws. Foster cut this short—he wasn’t interested in whether it was a bad law or not. ‘It is the law,’ he said, to which Roach answered, ‘It is a law to starve miners into submission.’
When Roach claimed the right to argue why his liberty should not be taken away, Foster pre-empted him by sentencing him and Healy to twelve months with ‘light labour’. The unionists had already been brought into court in handcuffs, and in Long Bay Gaol they were treated as normal criminals, not political prisoners.
The coal strike continued, and produced unemployment widely in factories that could not depend on power and brought social and economic disruption. In hospital for pneumonia at the end of the war, the author made the acquaintance of a young man who had contracted polio in childhood, now studying for the Leaving Certificate while encased permanently in an ‘iron lung’, a coffin-like, electrically driven ventilator from which only the head protruded and in which changes of pressure enabled his lungs to inhale and exhale. The long power failures associated with the coal strike killed him. This tragedy was but one small corner of the strike’s impact. Chifley, the man who as punishment for being a striker had been demoted from locomotive driver to fireman, sent in troops on 1 August to work in open-cut mines. Coerced by the government and with division spreading within their ranks, the miners capitulated and agreed to resume work on 15 August. Applications were made to the Arbitration Court so that the gaoled union leaders could be released, which occurred on 24 August.
Roach and the others, to get out of gaol, had to affirm their acceptance of the orders Foster had made as in accordance with the Coal Strike Act, which had supremacy over union rules. They accepted that large proposition. The miners’ defeat was a success for Chifley. But remarkably it had been Evatt, with his record of upholding democratic rights, who as Attorney-General had enacted the Coal Strike Act and crafted the formula by which the troops were brought in.
It was under pressure from these emergencies, and from the Americans who told him they would no longer be sharing intelligence with him, that Chifley founded ASIO, whose work was to locate Soviet spies and to advise on Communist ambitions for upheaval and influence in Australia. He refused, though the Liberal Party urged him, to winnow supposed Communists out of the public service. ASIO was an organisation Menzies would soon make extensive use of.
SNOWY
Nelson Lemmon was the crusty minister appointed by Ben Chifley as Minister for Works and Housing to oversee the building of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme between 1946 and 1949. His chief conflict was with John Joseph (Joe) Cahill, the Labor deputy premier of New South Wales. When Lemmon was working on the housing scheme for the project, Cahill declared that he wouldn’t listen to a wheat grower from Western Australia telling the sovereign capital state of New South Wales how to build houses. Lemmon therefore went to Chifley and said, ‘There’s only one way to handle this . . . put the whole thing under the Defence Act . . . and we’ll be boss.’ Chifley answered, ‘WHAT! Your name’s Nelson Lemmon, not Ned Kelly.’ But Chifley conceded they might get away with it if they could get Evatt to agree.
Lemmon was aware, though, that the Commonwealth did not have the power to compulsorily acquire land for the scheme—that was the state’s function. Playing on the rivalry between Evatt and Jack Dedman, the Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, Chifley made plans to put the Snowy scheme under the aegis of the Defence Act and declared, ‘Of course, Jack Dedman said you can’t use the Defence Act for things like this.’ Immediately Evatt announced that the option should be explored as a hopeful lead. So Lemmon introduced into Parliament a bill to set up an authority ‘with adequate power to construct the largest public works undertaking ever conceived in the history of our country’.
Under the scheme, the Snowy River and a number of other eastern watercourses were to be channelled westwards by means of tunnels to ungate the interior and generate electricity on the way. The scheme was envisaged as having two distinct sections—the Snowy–Tumut development in the north of the mountains, and the Snowy–Murray development to the south. The Snowy–Tumut section entailed the diversion of the Eucumbene, the Upper Murrumbidgee and the Tooma rivers to the Tumut River—itself a tributary of the Murrumbidgee. The Snowy–Murray development involved the diversion of the Snowy River to the Swampy Plain River, a tributary that then flowed into the Murray.
The scheme, developed in rough and precipitous terrain, would require two main water storages, Jindabyne and Adaminaby dams (Adaminaby Dam would later become Eucumbene Dam), and from them accumulated waters would pass through a system of tunnels and reservoirs, and by falling from higher to lower levels, would generate energy to be tapped by power stations built at various stages of the scheme. In all, it was estimated that the scheme would require the construction of 225 kilometres of tunnels, pipelines and aqueducts, sixteen smaller dams, seven major dams and seven power stations (most of them underground), and 800 kilometres of race lines to intercept subsidiary mountain streams.
There were several applicants for the post of managing the scheme. Bill Hudson, New Zealand–born, was chosen. Hudson had built dams in Scotland, and in Sydney he had worked for the Water Board. Also in his favour was the fact that he was willing to be based in the Snowy Mountains, where others wanted to run the process from Sydney and visit the projects once a month. However, Lemmon thought that before appointing him ‘the trade union blokes’ should be asked about him. According to Lemmon, he was told, ‘He’ll listen to you. He won’t be like some tin pot boss.’ Dedman, war’s Mr Austerity, disliked the way Lemmon had managed to retain control over the Snowy scheme, even though it had originally got through under the auspices of Dedman’s former portfolio of Defence. Now, in the selection process for chief engineer, Dedman complained that there should be three nominees, not just one. Lemmon, who like the others had not seen Hudson yet, passed the prime minister a piece of paper with ‘Hudson, Hudson and Hudson’ written on it. So Hudson was appointed.
Lemmon’s subsequent first impression of Hudson was that he was a little frail, carrying himself to one side. He confessed to Lemmon that he had a ‘sleeping appendix’ and it was one of his bad days. ‘But if I’d told you I was crook, you probably wouldn’t want to see me anymore.’ He quickly showed Lemmon a map of Cooma and indicated where the headquarters could go. Lemmon insisted he have his appendix out as a condition of his holding the post.
Prime Minister Chifley, according to his hopeful visions, predicted that Cooma or Tumut would be transformed into ‘a Quebec arising in the south eastern corner of our Continent’. He emphasised the defence aspects, for the Snowy Mountains scheme would be less vulnerable to attack than the industrial plants on the coast. The official ceremony to mark the beginning of the scheme took place on 17 October 1949, before invited guests in a deep gorge on the Eucumbene River. The entire population of nearby and soon-to-be-drowned Adaminaby turned out for the occasion. No member of the parliamentary Liberal Party attended the opening, but a few months later Menzies would inherit it. Lemmon, who would lose his Western Australian seat, would be so depressed that he ‘was in bed for a month later . . . I’d worked too damned hard pushing it [the scheme] through’. But at least he had hired the major administrators and engineers on high salaries with the deliberate intention that ‘if they [the Liberals] tried to toss it out, they’d have a mighty lot of money to pay out!’
The scheme in itself was extraordinary in scope, but would not fulfil Chifley’s or Lemmon’s predictions of utterly transforming the interior. However, as an adventure in absorbing newcomers into a nation of eight million Anglo-Saxon/Celts, it would have a startling impact. It is a little surprising to find that only some one hundred thousand people worked on the Snowy Mountains scheme, but the immigrants who worked there, the ‘wogs’ and ‘reffos’, made an impact on the popular imagination because they were new people.
In May 1950, Roy Robinson, a young engineer with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority, was sent to Europe with instructions to select over six hundred tradesmen and as much of the top engineering and surveying talent as he could muster. The bulk labour needs were being met from three areas—displaced persons from the refugee camps of post-war Europe, assisted migrants from Europe, and Australians. In a refugee camp in Italy, where he had lived for three years, Ivan Kobal, a Slovenian, rushed with others to sign a two-year contract to work on the scheme: ‘We were so wrapped up in the desire to get away, it wouldn’t have mattered [what it was]. We were prepared to agree to anything.’
Kobal owed his chance to the remarkable Sir Robert Jackson, former Australian naval officer and, from 1945 to 1947, the senior deputy director-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) the body that looked after the displaced persons’ camps and futures. Jackson was one of the most influential and noble-hearted Australians of his generation. He had powerful associations, as his letters held at Columbia University show, and they included Fiorello La Guardia, who served as head of UNRRA for most of 1946; Anastas Mikoyan, Soviet Minister for Foreign Trade; and Sir Frederick Morgan, appointed in 1943 Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander before the Supreme Allied Commander himself was appointed. (The Supreme Allied Commander was envisaged to be British but was in fact always a phantom. This did not reflect on Morgan’s work, though, and he was UNRRA head from 1945 until in 1951 he accused others of diverting funds to the Zionist movement, whose aim was the creation of the state of Israel.)
Born in Melbourne on 8 November 1911, Jackson had served in the Australian navy from 1929 to 1937, when he transferred to the Royal Navy in Malta. He planned the Malta Combined Defence Scheme and was involved in planning the delivery of food supplies to the civilian population. Then he was appointed director-general of the Middle East Supply Centre and principal assistant to the UK Minister of State from 1942 to 1945, coordinating civilian supply operations as well as military ones. He helped the British organise their aid supplies to Russia. By 1945, still only in his early thirties, he was in charge of UNRRA’s operations in Europe, including care for 8.5 million displaced persons.
Henry van Zile Hyde, an American official, worked for Jackson at the headquarters of the Middle East Supply Centre in Cairo, which determined civilian requirements for every country in the region, and licensed the import of supplies. Van Zile Hyde described the director of the supply scheme as ‘a very remarkable 35-year-old Australian, then a Commander in the British Navy . . . He was able to keep on top of every detail of that vast operation, while at the same time concerning himself with its impact upon the post war economy in Europe, America and the rest of the world.’ The general commanding the Middle East at the end of the war had received a cable saying, ‘Do anything Jackson asks. Signed Churchill.’ Van Zile Hyde wrote, ‘I had the opportunity of working under a man I consider a great man.’
Jackson later recalled the chaos in Europe at the time. ‘At the end of the war, apart from the tragic survivors of the concentration camps in Germany, we had eight and a half million Displaced Persons—you know, flotsam and jetsam of the war. We managed to get about six million of them back to their homes in Europe and the Middle East, but we had the best part of three million who did not want to return, and no government would take them. So I went to see Mr Chifley.’ Chifley asked how many they wanted Australia to have and Jackson said, ‘Well, Sir, can you take 100,000?’ Chifley asked why Australia should take a hundred thousand and was told that whoever took them would get the cream of the crop. But he did also say, ‘Hold on though, not too many Poles! We don’t want another Buffalo City over here.’ So Jackson said, ‘We needn’t take too many Poles, there are plenty of Balts as well.’ Chifley said he would have to convince Calwell, the Immigration minister.
In fact, 170,000 displaced persons came to Australia between 1947 and 1952, bearing their United Nations displaced persons/refugee identity cards. According to Jackson, Chifley’s alacrity in accepting displaced persons had global repercussions. Jackson attributes the eventual solution of the refugee crisis in part to ‘Mr Chifley’s immense contribution at that point’.
Though by the mid-1950s the ‘Populate or Perish!’ principle honoured by Calwell had attracted a further two million assisted migrants, they all ran the risk of being spoken of as displaced persons (DD), since the term DD bulked so high in the Australian imagination. Few people could say exactly how many of the new ethnic arrivals, considered by many traditional Australians to be threats, belonged to the ‘displaced’.
But the displacement was real. Some of them had been drafted to Germany as forced labour during the war and did not want to return to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Some were ex-POWs, and there were even some who were afraid to return to their homelands because of possible retaliation for supposed or real collaboration with the Germans. To be welcomed by Australia, the displaced had to be healthy and politically acceptable, which in a small margin of cases meant former pro-Fascists crept into the mass. The year 1948 was one in which a lot of people arriving at Australian ports had either lost or discarded the names they were born with. Some had chosen to anglicise their Eastern European names, which in many cases had in any case been transcribed incorrectly by officers of the International Refugee Organization or the mobile Australian migration selection teams who moved around the displaced persons camps of Germany and Italy. Some refugees gave false names deliberately, shedding old identities to slip into the camps in war’s chaotic aftermath.
Mark Aarons, a writer who would become chief advisor to a future Labor premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, has argued that there were significant numbers of displaced persons who had sided with the Nazis—such as Ukrainians, anti-Communist Balts, Poles, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Scandinavian Quislings (Nazi collaborators)—and not a few demobbed German soldiers and their families. Konrads Kalejs of Latvia was one of the Nazi collaborators allowed into Australia at the end of World War II. Kalejs, it was claimed much later, was the commander of a Latvian killing unit that murdered at least thirty thousand Jews, gypsies and Communists between 1941 and 1945. He belonged to the Latvian Auxiliary Security Force, also called the Latvian SS. Much later, in 1987, Rudolf Soms, another member of the commando unit to which Kalejs had belonged gave Latvian authorities a statement in which he described how Lieutenant Kalejs had led an attack on Sannaki, a Russian village, ‘burnt it down and annihilated the inhabitants’. This was one of three villages Kalejs was accused of torching. He became commandant of the Nazi slave labour camp at Salaspils, south-east of Riga in Latvia, where some twenty-five thousand Russian Jews, undesirables and Soviet soldiers were shot or starved to death. Kalejs went to Britain after the war, but anti-Communist authorities there sent him to Australia since it was believed Australia would not pursue him for his crimes. He would take Australian citizenship in 1957.
Years later, Andrew Menzies QC would report to the Federal government that between July 1947 and December 1951, ‘it is more likely than not that a significant number of persons who committed serious war crimes in World War Two had entered Australia’. Menzies would give the government the names of seventy suspects.
Since men like Kalejs had to share immigration camps in Australia with many Jews and others, it would be interesting to know what their inner feelings were like. Amongst Kalejs’s co-immigrants at Bonegilla migrant camp in Victoria was a man named Ivanovic, a Croatian who was a block supervisor in the camp. When in 1950 the Yugoslav government requested his extradition as a war criminal, the Australian government refused to hand him over and this gave a Communist regime, Tito’s, a victory. The Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) informed the government that Ivanovic had admitted to being the under-secretary for Transport and Communication in the Nazi-controlled administration of Yugoslavia from May 1942 to the end of 1944. The CIS had reported soon after his arrival in Australia that Ivanovic ‘is very anti-Communist’ and ‘claims to have worked with the Intelligence Services of England and America while domiciled in Austria’.
In 1951, ASIO’s director-general, Brigadier Charles Spry, advised the Federal government not to hand over two well-known Yugoslav Fascists, Milorad Lukic and Mihailo Rajkovic, because of their capacity to report on left-wing Yugoslav immigrants. ‘They are unceasing in their campaign against Communism and can and do assist ASIO to the limit of their ability,’ wrote Spry.
Former Fascist leaders also helped supervise mass labour forces on construction programs such as the Snowy Mountains scheme. For example, Lyenko Urbancic, a Slovenian Nazi collaborator, was protected by the British authorities from Yugoslav government requests for his extradition in 1946. He was accepted for immigration under Australia’s Displaced Persons Scheme just eighteen months later, though he did not work on the Snowy River.
Immigration minister Calwell received bitter complaints from working-class refugees, including liberated slave labourers, that they had discovered Nazis on their refugee ships and in their migrant camps. When the CIS reported to him that some displaced persons were indeed former SS men, Calwell described it as nonsense. His head of department wrote to the CIS instructing it that SS tattoos, or the existence of scars where they’d been erased, were not grounds for rejecting potential immigrants. Calwell was forced to say that the lie had already been given to claims made about a ship named the Volendam, which had transported displaced persons to Australia. He accepted the word of Captain Kleyn, the master, that he had heard no report of the presence of a supposed thirty-three former SS officers on the ship. The captain also denied rumours that a fight broke out on the ship between displaced persons who were former concentration camp prisoners and former Nazi guards. A man who had identified a fellow passenger as a Nazi guard claimed that there had been five hundred other former Nazi guards he had seen at one time or another in displaced persons camps.
But overall the displaced were genuine cases and often came from a number of European countries that had been subsumed into the Soviet Union through Russia’s military successes in the east. Some of them came from Estonia, a country of 1.25 million; one of the Estonian refugees, Ksenia Nasielski, lamented, ‘On the new maps, it doesn’t exist anymore.’ She had a fairly characteristic displaced-persons background and reason to escape the Soviets—both her parents had been sent to Siberia.
Latvia and Lithuania were subsumed also. Many Latvians were shipped out to other Western countries by the Soviet Union as early as 1939 and replaced within their former countries with Russians. In the winter of 1944, one of the worst of winters, further Latvians set out westwards towards Germany, escaping the Russians. With his mother and his siblings, eleven-year-old Ivars Freimanis travelled in railway trucks beneath Tiger tanks being shunted back into Czechoslovakia and on into Germany, near Thüringen. They tried to reach Switzerland, and managed to get within ten kilometres of the border. For four years, from 1945 to 1949, they lived in a refugee camp run by UNRRA at Ravensburg near Lake Constance. At last they were offered the option of Venezuela or Australia. Freimanis turned fifteen on the boat to Australia, which meant that he could still attend school instead of fulfilling the two-year work requirement.
Joe Morgan was an assisted migrant to Australia, a Pole whose name had previously been Joseph Blyszczyk. He and his family had been taken to the Soviet Union forcibly in 1939. Following the invasion of Russia in 1941, Morgan was able to get out and join the Free Polish Army, and he fought in the Middle East and at the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. He spent fourteen months as part of an Allied occupation force in Italy and then went to Britain where he worked for a year in a coal mine. One Sunday morning, a friend saw an ad in the paper stating that single men were wanted for Australia. ‘We applied for immigration, and two weeks later got our papers to go.’ He was a migrant rather than a displaced person, but the contract was about the same for both.
Jan Klima had fought for the partisans in Czechoslovakia; after the area in which he was engaged was taken over by the Russians, he was attracted by the Communist message, though Czechoslovakia was still independent. In 1945 he joined a prestigious military academy in Moravia to train as an officer. But by 1948 the Communist and pro-Soviet line was beginning to sour for many Czechs. The Communists within the army and the national government, however, took over the country, with the Russians standing by to help if necessary. Now Klima’s academy received Russian advisors. Klima graduated as an officer in 1949 and spent a lot of time watching old people and young being rounded up for re-education, including members of his family. He heard from a fellow officer that he was slated for re-education, which for army officers generally involved working in uranium mines. It was easier for Klima and some of his colleagues to escape than for a civilian, since they had permits to be in the border area and a friend of Kilma’s had provided him with a timetable of patrols. They were able to cross the border and turn themselves in to a German border officer. Klima began to look around for emigration opportunities. Farmers went to Argentina, said Klima, blacksmiths to Brazil, and Sweden took the ones with TB. Canada was looking for forestry workers and so Klima registered, but the Canadian doctor didn’t consider him husky enough for timber felling. ‘Australia didn’t ask for any skills—once you were medically fit, they marked you down as a labourer on your papers from that day on.’
Stephanie Stajkoff came from an ethnic German family in Silesia, a province then in eastern Germany that at various times before the war had belonged to Poland. When the Red Army invaded Silesia and began taking frightful vengeance against the Germans, ‘we had to leave everything and just run’. In Germany, they lived in one room. ‘It was tough in the beginning, but maybe it was a good schooling for us: when we came to Australia and found we had to start from nothing it wasn’t quite as hard, because we’d been living on the black market for a few years, exchanging a linen tablecloth maybe for two pounds of butter . . . even our German people weren’t very nice to us . . . My mother never wanted me to go [to Australia]. She said, “You’ll be the coolie for the people there.” I wouldn’t believe her—you see all Germany was in ruins—what future did we have? When you’re young and you see a whole country in shreds . . .’
They waited in Bremen for a ship to Australia with two other families, in one living room with blankets as partitions.
Once in Australia, her father, Wassil Stajkoff, served some time instead in a butter and then a tiling factory. He was then given a job as a draughtsman in the Snowy Mountain scheme instead. Within eight months he was approved as a member of the Institution of Engineers and was upgraded to Engineer Grade One.
Miroslav Svelha recalls that escaped Czechs like himself were subjected to rigorous questioning by the Americans to see if they were actually Communists intending to infiltrate Western countries. Other refugees who worked on the Snowy also observed that the political screening in the West was aimed more at protecting Australia from Communists than at detaining Fascists. Hans Fisher and Otto Blank were two of the plant operators selected by Roy Robinson without reference to their having been enemy soldiers. Fisher was, however, a social democrat, and that was on record since the Nazis had stopped him leaving Germany. Two other former German soldiers were carpenters Heinz Jeromin and Karl Paul. All were from East Germany and had fought in the war, although Blank, Fisher and Paul were still only teenagers when it ended, whereas Jeromin was twenty-eight. He was pleased the madness had ended.
‘The Snowy sounded funny to us,’ said Jeromin, ‘because in Australia we expected sun.’ He had lost his father, mother and brothers in the war and didn’t care where he went as long as it was away from the disaster of Germany.
The scale of devastation in Italy too was prodigious. Pino Frezza, who was from the south of Rome, wrote, ‘Italy was in a state of panic, not work, and there was a lot of damage after the war, so it was hard to find a job.’ Although Ireland had remained neutral during the war, the late 1940s and early 1950s brought a severe economic depression. Malta, meanwhile, was still a place of rubble when Paul Gresh and his three brothers left for Australia in 1949 to become diamond drillers on the Snowy. Greece was also a ruin; Michael Vgengopoulos had a brother in Australia who sponsored his passage and got him a job in the tunnels of the Snowy.
On the SS Skaubryn from Bremerhaven in May 1951, there were twelve hundred people. Their composition was characteristic of the ships bringing migrants and displaced persons to Australia: 302 Germans, 274 Yugoslavs, 186 Polish, 103 Russians, seventy-four Latvians, seventy-three Hungarians, fifty-six Czechs, eighteen Lithuanians, fourteen Estonians, fourteen Ukrainians, twelve Romanians, nine Bulgarians, nine Spanish, eight Polish/Ukrainian, five Austrian and ten described as ‘stateless’, and others. On ships to Australia and in the refugee centres, the Australian film The Overlanders, starring Chips Rafferty, Australia’s John Wayne, was shown. One wonders what the migrants from Europe made of it—the immense spaces over which cattle were moved to save them from the grasp of the Japanese.
The tradesmen going to work on the Snowy were required to repay their passage—about £160—out of their earnings of ten pounds per week. Some immigrants resented the fact that they had to put up with the same food and conditions as the displaced persons, who were travelling for free. The migrants, so recently famished during and in the wake of war, were still appalled by the food, the lamb chops floating in fat. On one boat, the Germans actually went on strike for better conditions.
The displaced persons and the migrants arrived at the holding camps of Bathurst, Bonegilla and Greta—though the German recruits for the Snowy were bussed straight off to Cooma. Jim Jones of Glasgow, already at work, noticed the German carpenters when they arrived. ‘They’d black corduroy suits, wide at the bottom and with three little Mother of Pearl buttons down the front and a bloody Homburg hat on with it. It was amazing—a little bit of Germany right there in the Snowy Mountains.’
There seemed to be a pattern in the Snowy scheme by which particular nationalities took certain jobs. Australians tended not to work underground, while the Irish were prominent as plant operators and construction workers. Electric power transmission—the connection of power from pole to pole across precipices—was done by the Italians, that is, after the Italians began to arrive in the early to mid 1950s. Bob Ampt, an electrical engineer who worked on the Snowy from 1949, remembers that the Italians and Spanish had a great feel for the work, and possessed great balance as they walked—without any apparent panic or vertigo—across a six-inch (fifteen-centimetre) steel rod on an electrical tower. Italians also tended to predominate in any form of masonry work, and worked in the tunnels, while Poles, Ukrainians and people from the Baltic states tended to work on the surface. The Germans were skilled craftsmen, and the Yugoslavs took jobs as miners and semi-skilled tradesmen or else worked in the bush in the investigation division. Hydrography, which necessitated long hours of skiing in winter, attracted many Czechs.
Ulick O’Boyle, an Irishman, wrote, ‘Living in the [work] camps—I loved it, because you met people from all over Europe—German counts and ex-SS men, one Italian commander who’d been fighting in the 8th Army in North Africa, Poles, Yugoslavs—all kinds of fascinating bloody characters.’
Australian Albury Hosking had been a POW of the Japanese and despite his sufferings had become interested in the scale of some projects and gave up the law degree he’d been studying towards before the war to become an engineer. ‘The Snowy was just starting then—it was the biggest thing in Australia and I thought “I’ll be in that!”’
And Ivan Kobal spoke for many migrants when he said, ‘War was destructive and the [military] camps were without sense . . . as soon as we saw a project like the Snowy, we started to live.’ He wrote a poem:
On the world’s map a dish of barren sand,
Yet full of life, sun-soaked, birds’ paradise.
Ena Berents, a Vladivostok-born doctor, was the physician in Cabramurra township, which was constructed to house workers on the scheme. She had come to Australia via Shanghai. She had studied medicine in the United States, specialising in pathology, returned to Shanghai and married a Norwegian. After the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the Berents went first to Oslo, where they heard about the Snowy, and came out to Australia with ten pounds in their pockets.
There were others who served the project in indirect ways. Bill Holmes, a detective based in Cooma for most of the Snowy’s construction years, would meet the Sydney train every day, and as unsavoury candidates got off he would screen them, rightly or wrongly, and put some of them on the return train. His colleague Bev Wales said that every warrant issued in Sydney for ‘wife starving’ (lack of maintenance payments) seemed to arrive in Cooma with ‘believed to have gone to the Snowy’ stamped across it and wife starvers were a particular concern of Holmes, and he tried to track them down.
Many newly engaged young men went ‘down the Snowy’ for six months or a year to build up a deposit for a house. So did students raising money for university. But ‘old’ Australians consisted of only about a third of the overall workforce, and so the Australian workers experienced what it was to be a minority. Yet they set the tone; as a young journalist named George Johnston would say, the newcomers were accepted by the Australians if they were willing to try to honour Australian mores, including standing their shout like a man.
Roy Robinson, the Snowy scheme recruiter, had hired a German engineer called Walter Hartwig, who became his interpreter and advisor as he moved from Berlin to Hamburg and Hanover to gather the core of skilled tradesmen and professionals to supplement those at home in Australia. ‘The Australian military mission in Berlin arranged with the German authorities to place ads in the press and on radio. We must have seen nearly 3000 people who’d already been sifted in some way before they came to us.’
The Allies had already supposedly checked the background of all the displaced persons.Robinson had to ensure he didn’t recruit‘ any one who had Nazi sympathies or had been part of the Nazi side of politics’. This was easier said than done. But the Allied military had captured nearly all the dossiers on citizens in Germany and so the names were submitted to the joint military occupiers, the Americans and British, to get a clearance. There were a few, he admitted, who turned out to be not of the kind he would have recruited if he’d known their true backgrounds. ‘I believe the international authorities whom these people had helped rewarded them by giving them good clearances so we’d take them to Australia.’ Robinson estimates that a maximum of ten or twelve such people may have got through the screening process. Two men were later deported.
Pat O’Dea, who headed the security force on the Snowy, remembers of one immigrant that when he had a few drinks, ‘he would openly come out with photographs he’d taken during the war of people that he’d executed himself. These were Russian soldiers . . . but farmers and peasants were also amongst them, and he stood there amongst the bodies.’ The man eventually ‘disappeared’. O’Dea also recalls one instance when it was formally alleged that a Snowy worker was a war criminal; though the allegation was never confirmed, that man also disappeared.
Ultimately the failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956 brought a new wave of refugees to Sydney and the Snowy. A sixteen-year-old apprentice, Frank Gyorgy, walked from Budapest to the Austrian border, as did many others, dodging Russian patrols and depending on the local people to guide them around the minefields and the check points. An interesting motive mentioned by a number of immigrants was also expressed by Gyorgy: ‘I chose Australia because I knew least about it at the time.’ If they had heard little about a nation, it meant that it must be safe, boring even.
To the long-established Australians in whose suburbs and towns these displaced persons appeared, there was no interest in the story of their extraordinary escapes. It was their strangeness that occupied and outraged the locals. Stephanie Stajkoff said that some Australians tended to think every German was a Nazi, but noticed that antipathy towards Germans died out in two to three years.
A number of the displaced persons were doctors on the Snowy, but as one of them was dispiritingly told, ‘It will take you ten years and £10,000 to become a doctor in this country,’ the man so addressed, a Latvian physician Jonathan Baksa with a German medical degree, managed to pass that test, and in less than ten years. After first labouring the required two years for the government, he repeated three years of study at Sydney University, working night shifts in a factory to pay for it.
The death rate from the scheme would prove significant. The cost from loneliness and suicide was high, and the scheme’s economic and environmental costs would ultimately be argued to have outweighed its benefits. The irrigation it enhanced would greatly damage the Murrumbidgee and Murray river systems. But at the time it was praised as a supreme national engineering accomplishment. And ever since, the Snowy scheme has been seen as the cockpit in which Australia became multicultural.
More than a hundred thousand men and women from thirty countries worked on the scheme. The scheme’s Bill Hudson declared, ‘You’ll be neither Slavs nor Balts but men of the Snowy.’ ‘You’re Australians now!’ cried a peacemaking overseer to former World War II enemies, Polish and German, brawling in a pub.
A documentary, Strangers in a Strange Land, shown on British television in September 1961, took a less sentimental and more disapproving look at the scheme. The Snowy River Authority’s London representative was offended by the depiction of Cooma as a wild town overrun by ‘boozing, gambling, sex-starved continentals’ who received high wages for their work and were crazed, in a sparse environment, by a lack of choice to spend them on. They could not depend on the established Australians for company. Nearly every one of the new arrivals interviewed said that the Australians were not friendly to them. They swore therefore that they would never become naturalised Australians (though in fact many thousands did).
There were, however, notable gestures towards assimilation. In Cooma in 1959 the Avenue of Flags was erected to celebrate the nations working together on the scheme, and German ex-soldiers were invited to participate in the annual Anzac Day march. And immigration officials and others used the Snowy as a model for how immigrants should behave: look at the rapid assimilation into Australian society of the migrants who worked on the scheme, follow their example, and you too, the new migrant, can also expect to be accepted at work and on the street.
WHEN CHINA GOES RED
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the Chinese people in the West were considered not only yellow, but also Red. Reaction against Chinese Americans was very intense as the United States revived the Trading with the Enemy Act from World War II treating Chinese Americans in ways similar (if not so extreme) as those in which the Japanese had been treated during the war. Surveillance and repression of the Chinese in Australia was not as severe, for only a few thousand Chinese lived in Australia, mainly in the Sydney and Melbourne Chinatowns, or in isolated country towns. But the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent Pacific War had galvanised the small community.
The Chinese Youth League (CYL) and the Chinese Seamen’s Union (CSU) in Australia were two late 1930s radical organisations designed to struggle against Japanese militarism. They did not believe in the Nationalist Chinese societies of the dominant merchant class in Chinatown. Many Chinese workers were drawn to the cause of more radical Chinese nationalism. Before the Pacific War, the radical organisations had formed links with the Australian Communists, and undermined the authority and patronage of the pro-Nationalist or Kuomintang merchant class. The CYL supplied truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables to striking Port Kembla wharf labourers and their families during the 1938 pig-iron dispute. Like the wharfies, they believed that the scrap iron loaded on the cargo steamer Dalfram would be converted into bullets and bombs to advance the Japanese invasion of China.
The CSU now fought for better wages and working conditions for Chinese crew members on merchant vessels in Australian waters and in Pacific war zones. They also organised work gangs to help build the Warragamba Dam and grow vegetables on Sydney’s western outskirts, and worked in the construction of amphibious landing craft for the US army at the Bulimba dry dock near Brisbane.
At the end of the Pacific War, many Chinese from the Pacific islands, New Guinea, the Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya who had taken refuge in Sydney from the Japanese were repatriated by the Chifley government. Stranded Chinese mariners chose either to return to China and fight with the Red revolutionary forces against the nationalists or to remain working in Sydney. In 1949, many Chinese sailors who refused to leave Australia were imprisoned and later transported by the Chifley government to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Chinatown became a haven for radical Chinese workers and displaced Chinese families who wanted to go on living in Australia.
In 1946, the Indonesian independence movement called upon the Australian labour movement for support, and Chinese and Indonesian seamen walked off Dutch-chartered ships in Sydney and Brisbane ports. The Australian Maritime Union, opposing Holland’s effort to regain colonial control of Indonesia, declared the Dutch ships ‘black’; that is, the Australian wharfies refused to load their cargoes. When Dutch officials ejected sixty Indonesian patients from Holland’s Turramurra TB Clinic in Sydney, the CYL and the CSU gave them food, shelter and companionship from their Dixon Street offices. The refusal by Indonesian and Chinese seamen to man the Dutch ships inspired Indian seamen to join the boycott. But throughout the boycott the Chifley government arrested and deported a number of militant Chinese, Indonesian and Malayan seamen.
The Australian government, after the debilitating coal strike, was frightened of anti-Communist reaction in Australia, so it did not recognise the new Chinese government. On the Haymarket streets early on the Double Tenth (the new national day of Communist China), 10 October 1949, a number of Chinese assembled below a makeshift flag of the new China to proclaim its birth, and then travelled to the Royal National Park south of Sydney to celebrate the day with a picnic.
But now, with the intensification of the Cold War as a result of Communism’s capture of China, Chinese radicals in Australia became increasingly isolated as the Kuomintang merchants of Sydney and Melbourne turned against them. Louis Wong, former CSU secretary, feared that if he became too active he would be deported as an undesirable alien. The Cold War paradox was that ASIO gave sanctuary to former European Nazis and Fascist collaborators amidst the mass migration of Europeans to Australia in the first decade of the Cold War, but Chinese radicals were denied Australian residency and threatened with deportation. ASIO recruited Chinese informants to spy on ‘Chinese politicals’. In 1950, when the CYL and the CSU founded the San Lian Club, which screened films from the new China and conducted Mandarin and Cantonese language classes, influential Chinese merchants appealed to the government to get these organisations evicted from their rented rooms.
In the Australian Communist Party, a Chinese section was formed that would be known as the ‘Direct Branch’. In 1950 it comprised only ten members, three of whom were market gardeners. The threat of deportation made it an unattractive proposition for most Chinese. The 1953 campaign against the ‘Piglet System’ again brought the radical Chinese up against the merchants and major restaurant owners of Chinese communities in the larger cities. Anti-Communist Chinese businessmen were given preferential treatment to sponsor the migration of poor Chinese workers—known as ‘piglets’—from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. All their documents remained in the custody of their employers, and they worked in excess of eighty hours a week, slept on the floors of their employers’ businesses and were paid one-fifth the basic wage of Australian workers. They were compelled to sign fake wage books and time sheets.
Founded in March 1952, the New South Wales Chinese Workers’ Association took up the living conditions and wages of the piglets, and successfully sought the support of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Australian Seamen’s Union and the Restaurant Workers’ Union. ASIO mounted various raids on the CYL, but the seamen had already disappeared into the community under assumed names. ASIO believed that the CYL and its fraternal organisations acted as spies for the People’s Republic of China. Many Chinese seamen brought films and literature from revolutionary China to the CYL office in Chinatown and this as good as proved to ASIO their sympathies with Communist China.
Mok Kuan was a fourteen-year-old female piglet employed in Sydney by the Consul of the Republic of China, that is, Taiwan. She was often beaten by her employers and was paid pocket money and had very little freedom to walk abroad. She wrote to a relative in Sydney, who passed on her note to the Chinese Workers’ Association. A large body of Chinese workers demonstrated outside the consular residence against Mok’s slave conditions. Eventually she was released, cut and bruised, and with no money or accommodation. The Australian Immigration Department granted her temporary residence.
After the Mok Kuan case, many piglets came forward and joined the ranks of Australian unions. Sit-down strikes and go-slows by piglets occurred in Sydney at the Modern China Restaurant, the Sun Sai Gai restaurant, the Hong Kong Restaurant and several large Haymarket warehouses, and at Chinese market gardens at Botany and Rosebery. After negotiation with their employers the workers gained the wage levels to which they were entitled and were helped by the Chinese Workers’ Association to find accommodation in Chinatown. In the wake of the struggle against the piglet system, the Menzies government rescinded the deportation orders and gave Chinese seamen, refugees and students permanent residency. In 1956, the wartime Refugee Removal Act was repealed, and the Chinese in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia no longer had to fear deportation.
The idea of Chinese visiting China or bringing family to Australia became impossible during the early years of the Cold War, and most Chinese kept their opinions about revolution in mainland China silent. It is hard to know how much they reacted to news of Mao’s Great Leap Forward later in the next decade, and the millions it killed by famine. The community remained active in the Australia China Society from 1950 and, through the CYL, hosted various delegations to Australia from China. Chinese seamen acted as couriers for information about the new Chinese society the CYL sought to gather. When several CYL members established the Wu Hop Trading Company exporting seafood to China, it was seen by ASIO as ‘a front for the exchange of intelligence’.
The split between Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China in 1961 broke the unity between the Communist Party and the Chinese radicals. Except for one man, Albert Leong of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Chinese radicals adopted the Beijing line of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, rather than Moscow’s policies of detente and peaceful coexistence.