A Bookshop in Wartime [1 ed.] 9781922454867, 9781922454126

Citation preview

Jenny Horsfield is a Canberra writer with a special interest in the stories of the region where she lives. Her previous book Voices Beyond the Suburbs was a study of the Soldier Settlers of the Tuggeranong Valley in Canberra. A Bookshop in Wartime is Jenny’s seventh book.

© 2020 Jenny Horsfield First published 2020 by Arcadia the general books’ imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051 Tel: 03 9329 6963 / Fax: 03 9329 5452 [email protected] / www.scholarly.info ISBN 978-1-922454-12-6 All Rights Reserved Cover image: Frank Hinder, Canberra Cyclists, 1945, watercolour on paper © Enid Hawkins, Frank Hinder Estate, Odana/Bloomfield Cover design: Amelia Walker

For Owen, a reader

Contents

Preface.................................................................................ix 1: Concerning Bookshops................................................1 2: Canberra 1939...........................................................15 3: ‘Here We Have No Permanent City’..........................30 4: On Government Service.............................................46 5: The War Comes Closer..............................................67 6: To the North..............................................................81 7: Art in a Time of War............................................... 103 8: Jungle Warfare......................................................... 118 9: People of Note......................................................... 137 10: ‘A Pool of Conspicuous Talent’..............................156 11: ‘The Nicest Little Bookshop in Australia’.............. 175 12: Endings..................................................................192 Notes................................................................................204 Bibliography..................................................................... 211 Index................................................................................ 215

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Preface

Verity Hewitt left behind a large collection of documents which her son, Geoff Fitzhardinge, carefully sorted and collated before depositing them at the National Library. Geoff kindly gave me permission to access the collection. This helped me to understand Verity’s full and interesting life and served as a background to the story of the bookshop which she founded and ran, and which was always associated with her name. Robert Lehane’s biography of Verity Hewitt also proved of invaluable help. Both Geoff and Robert gave me detailed and helpful suggestions after reading an early draft of the book, for which I thank them sincerely. Most of the material about the bookshop comes from Trove, on the NLA website, which provides access to newspapers of the era. Verity Hewitt’s bookshop ran regular advertisements in the Canberra Times from the shop’s opening in 1938 and right through the war years. These allow one to build up a good understanding of the books she was selling and of the reading habits and interests of her customers. The advertisements also give an insight into the preoccupations of people, Canberrans in particular, during the war years.

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Other sources consulted are listed in the Bibliography. Janet Lothian provided the black and white images of the Penguin and Pelican books at the start of each chapter. Janet is the granddaughter of Thomas Lothian, who founded a publishing company in Melbourne which had a licence to publish copies of Penguin paperbacks in Australia, mainly for the armed forces, during the war. My thanks to Janet for her friendship and enthusiastic support. The images were photographed in the Petherick Room at the National Library, as part of the library’s special collections, and I am grateful to the staff of the Petherick Room for their help and advice. My warm thanks to Jan Trask for her helpful suggestions after a close reading of the final draft. The cover image Canberra Workers 1945, by Frank Hinder, and held at the National Gallery of Victoria, has been made available courtesy of the Frank Hinder estate.

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ONE

Concerning Bookshops ‘I have always felt that booksellers were very fortunate people, handling something which someone has worried over for months or years … it’s someone’s very life they are holding in their hands’.1

This is a story about Verity Hewitt’s bookshop and about the people who visited it in wartime Canberra. Like all good bookshops, it was a comfortable and interesting place to be, welcoming readers, browsers and itinerant visitors, and in time transformed itself into a meeting place for booklovers as well an art gallery and a library. Scientists, artists, diplomats, servicemen and women, public servants, writers, adventurers and immigrants all visited the shop from its beginnings in 1938 through to the end of the Second World War. So this is also a story about Canberra during those years, which witnessed its slow change under the pressures of war, from a country town to a reluctant and still unformed capital city. 1

A comprehensive biography of Verity Hewitt already exists, so why revisit her story? I have done so because bookshops and booksellers inspire their own literature. Penelope Fitzgerald, who later won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore, wrote The Bookshop about a woman’s attempt to set up a shop in a remote Suffolk town. The Bookseller’s Diary and its sequel Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell record his year’s work in a second-hand bookshop that is now the largest in Scotland. London’s Charing Cross Road—home to so many in the trade—is the setting for Helen Hanff’s correspondence with the staff of a London bookshop in the post-war years. George Orwell worked for a while in a Hampstead shop called ‘Booklovers Corner’ and later wrote a wryly comic memoir about the place. One of his comments, written in the middle of the Great Depression, was that bookshops had always been some of the few places ‘where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money’.2 In early 1938, Verity Hewitt decided she would like to open a bookshop in Canberra. She dreamt that it might come in time ‘to take its place beside some of the famous bookshops of England’. Perhaps she also had in mind a famous French establishment, ‘Shakespeare & Co’, set up in the 1920s by the American expatriate Sylvia Beach, and well known in literary circles for its promotion of new European and American literature, including the controversial publication of the works of James Joyce. Verity certainly knew of Joyce’s work, and stocked his book Finnegan’s Wake, though it is doubtful if it had many readers in Canberra as it was widely considered to be incomprehensible. Joyce’s most well-known book, Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in Australia in 1929 on the grounds of ‘obscenity’ and though

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released in 1937, it was banned again in 1941 after pressure from church groups. It was unlikely that Verity would have stocked copies. In a small town it was important, especially during the war, to keep on good terms with all one’s neighbours and to keep the goodwill of the wider community. Verity’s son, Geoff, recalled that there was a copy of Ulysses in the family home, probably acquired hot off the press from Angus & Robertson who imported it from England. Verity’s notion of the trade was centred on creating a pleasant space where customers could browse at their leisure, even spending a winter’s afternoon ‘rooted to the spot reading a volume (and coming back the next day to purchase the book—or even a few books’.) An advertisement in the Canberra Times in June 1939 promised ‘a cheerful interlude in a dull winter’s day: half an hour among books and pictures in a warm, bright, upstairs room’. Her advertising always made a point that the periodicals on display were there to be read by everyone, with no obligation to buy. ‘If you have missed the bus at Civic Centre you will find it pleasant and convenient to spend the interval [browsing at the shop]’. These plans were both brave and optimistic, given that in 1938 Canberra was a country town of about 10 000 people (smaller than Goulburn) consisting mainly of Commonwealth public servants relocated from Melbourne in connection with parliamentary business or employed in a few select government departments, including Treasury, Patents and Attorney-General’s Department. There was also a scattering of settlers from the local district plus building and construction workers, and technical, professional and tradespeople connected with the normal lines of business in a country town. A cosmopolitan and sometimes raffish addition to Canberra life was provided by the presence of

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journalists running the ‘Canberra desk’ for the major national newspapers and for Australian Associated Press [AAP]. Photos from the era, and written anecdotes, reveal a frenetic routine of news gathering, intrigue, heavy drinking and long card playing sessions in smoky rooms in Parliament House. Some of the institutions which were to play such a proud role in the national story—CSIRO (originally known as CSIR), Mt Stromlo Observatory, the School of Forestry, the Australian National University—also had their beginnings in those years, and helped shape the character of the future city. Some of the people associated with these places would play a role in the story of the bookshop during the war. Verity Hewitt had been a schoolteacher before her marriage in 1936 but resigned from the NSW Department of Education in 1934 and had no wish to return to school teaching. Her husband, Laurie Fitzhardinge, was employed at the National Library, at that time an arm of the Parliamentary Library. It was an interesting job for a bookish man like Fitzhardinge. The couple rented a small cottage in Reid, where Verity occupied herself playing the piano and arranging musical evenings where friends dropped in for singalongs and chat. For some months in 1937, she found part time work collecting information for Who’s Who in Australia; its editor was the Canberra bureau chief of the Melbourne Herald. Family letters from the time make clear that Verity was often restless and miserable during the early years of her marriage. She was still recovering from a failed love affair with an English farmer, Lacey Lee, whom she had met some years before in New Zealand where he had settled. She kept Lee’s life and welfare close to her heart and still corresponded regularly with him.

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The

boredom

and

loneliness

brought

about

by

underemployment had Verity searching for a challenge to occupy her days and engage her emotions and intellect. In deciding to open a bookshop, she had some useful capital. Her husband had purchased a large stock of antiquarian literature related to early Australiana when he was reading for an undergraduate degree and then a B.Litt at Oxford in the early ‘30s. During the Depression booksellers had been anxious to off-load their stock and there were many bargains to be had for the keen collector. Laurie returned to Sydney in 1934 with six large tea chests of books. At that stage the Customs people had not yet developed an interest in ‘dirty books’ and did not bother to inspect his cases (though Laurie recalled that he had a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in his luggage, acquired cheaply in France. Lawrence’s book was banned in Australia at that time.) Laurie’s plans to establish a bookshop did not materialize and the stock was stored in Sydney waiting for a home. Verity also acquired a selection of current books from Angus & Robertson, most of them titles imported from England. In April 1938, Verity Hewitt’s bookshop opened for business in a small set of rooms upstairs in the Sydney Building, one of a set of two colonnaded white buildings facing each other at the end of Northbourne Avenue in what was called the ‘Civic Centre’ of Canberra. In 1938 the buildings were occupied by the post office, some solicitors’ and doctors’ rooms, insurance companies and a few retail shops. Nearby, facing London Circuit, all the major banks had their premises. The Civic buildings were separated from small housing developments to the north by grassy paddocks crisscrossed with bike trails. Mothers laden with shopping bags and pushing prams took short cuts across

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the grass on the way home from the post office or bank. The Civic theatre and Hotel Civic were not far away and would have provided custom and customers for the bookshop at various stages. A couple of blocks away lay a busy light-industrial enterprise, with the premises of the Canberra Times, a steam laundry, bakeries and car mechanics workshops. But in early photographs of the Melbourne and Sydney buildings a sense of artifice remains; it was a place waiting to be truly peopled and brought to life. Their stylish facades, based on Italian Renaissance architecture complete with loggias and roundels, still stood isolated from other development, though sealed roads had been laid and the infant tree plantings that were to mark the Garden City were beginning to put on growth. Kingston, to the south of the meandering Molonglo River, was still the main shopping centre for Canberrans, and was connected to Civic by a single slow bus service. For ten shillings a week Verity leased rooms above an establishment known as ‘Leo’s White Gate Café’. Leo Sakillaridis was one of the many Greek immigrants who found employment between the wars in Australia’s growing cities and provincial towns, in a life that seemed to offer better prospects of success and prosperity than their homeland. (There was a bustling café in Kingston, the ‘Highgate’, run by Leo’s compatriot, Harry Notaras, and altogether there were about a dozen Greeks working in the trade in Canberra in the war years.) Leo had been employed as a pastry cook at Adams Hotel in Sydney. In the early 1930s he came to Canberra, shortened his name to Leo Sakel and opened a café in Civic. There he did his best to bring some life and colour to the premises. Verity recalled that he was ‘a very hospitable man’. He announced the opening of

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his business with a cheerful fanfare in the Canberra Times in November 1931: ‘Good Tidings! Leo is here! (Leo, the wellknown RESTAURATEUR!)’ It certainly seemed, by Depressionera standards, an attractive place (though the café’s wire screen door ‘to protect you from flies’ reminds us of the ‘blowfly pest’ that plagued residents). There was fresh fish available every week, oysters and lobsters for ‘late night suppers’, home-made cakes and pies, a window laden with fresh fruit and vegetables at good prices, acquired on Leo’s weekly runs to the Sydney markets. And each Christmas season Leo advertised special Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners; perhaps there was a market for this among the many single and transient people working in the town at that time. If Verity hoped her proximity to a popular café would immediately attract business, she was disappointed. She had placed an initial advertisement in the Canberra Times and a supportive profile also appeared in the paper just after the shop opened. On the first day, her only customer came up the stairs about closing time. ‘Is this a bookshop? Do you buy books?’ an elderly, slightly intoxicated lady asked her. Verity began advertising the shop; she took flyers around to the five Canberra hotels and started taking out regular small advertisements in the Canberra Times. Word would have spread about the shop because that’s how Canberra was: everyone knew their neighbours and what was going on in town. Laurie had a wide circle of contacts and acquaintances through his work at the National Library, which in those days was also Canberra’s public lending library. Verity and Laurie also had a wide network of friends who shared their love of bushwalking in the mountains to the south and west of

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the territory. From the start the bookshop stocked a range of natural history publications with a special focus on life in the bush capital, plus local maps and paintings of the district. There were also local histories by John Gale and Dr Frederick Watson. Verity was well known from her days as a teacher at Telopea Park School. She taught there from 1930 to 1934; it was her second teaching post after teacher training and a BA at the University of Sydney. At the shop an early purchase of some Japanese prints was made by parents of one of her former pupils. Other friends and patrons of the shop included Martha and Fred Whitlam, whose son, Gough, had been taught by Verity. Fred Whitlam had been appointed as Assistant Crown Solicitor in 1927 and moved to the fledgling capital from Sydney. Whitlam loved Canberra. Unlike many public servants, brought here against their will, he had an absolute commitment from the start to its development, both as a capital city and also as a community, whose early clubs, societies and institutions he supported. His wife Martha mourned the loss of their Sydney life and according to their daughter, she wept for much of the train journey down to Canberra at the start of 1928. If never fully reconciled to the place, Martha eventually settled into the peaceful life of the capital, making a hospitable and comfortable home for her family and sharing the popular Canberra passion for gardening. Theirs was a very bookish household, one that nurtured the precocious intellect of the future Prime Minister. Verity’s shop, stocking a wide range of current overseas and local journals as well as imported and a few local books, was intended to cater for the interests of such families, who were coming to Canberra in increasing numbers during the war

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years. A well-known lawyer, Stan Phippard, and his wife were good friends of Verity and her husband. Stan and Laurie used to converse with each other in Latin as an amusing exercise. Phippard was a great reader and a good friend of the bookshop, owning an extensive library himself. He was well-known in Canberra as a colourful member of the Repertory Society, (a group not lacking in eccentrics) and directed some of their productions including the more bloodthirsty Greek and 17th Century dramas. Starting off in a single room with a small stock of Laurie’s secondhand books, the shop soon expanded into a second room which was to be used as a picture gallery, with prints for viewing and sale, acquired through agencies in Sydney. The shop was open every weekday and Saturday morning, which were the normal business hours for shops and banks, and for government departments during the war. It was also open on Friday nights, and Verity recalled Friday teas at Leo’s café with classical music playing in the background—‘badly recorded’ it seemed to Verity’s trained ear. No doubt Leo saw the music as adding class and colour to his establishment. The shop’s first exhibition, in April 1938, was notable for a display of woodcuts by Lionel Lindsay and ‘other wellknown Australian artists’. Lindsay by that stage of his career was considered one of Australia’s most accomplished etchers and engravers, and his works had a wide attraction for the public. Lindsay’s own hostility towards the new artistic movements of the age and modernism generally, was well-known and eventually found expression in a strident anti-Semitism. In his book Addled Art, published in 1942, Lindsay condemned the post-war art world and its creations as the work of Jewish art dealers, critics

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and collectors. Such views were no drawback to public honours in those days, and Robert Menzies recommended him for a knighthood which was conferred in 1941. Further exhibitions followed that winter. In quite a coup, Verity was able to acquire a few hand-coloured lithographs from John Gould’s beautiful bird studies. Also on sale that month were collections of William Hardy Wilson’s fine drawings of old Colonial Sydney, printed in collotype, a nineteenth century photographic process that made fine art photography possible. The main drawcards for any bookshop in that era were the Penguin paperbacks, which since 1935 had provided the British and overseas reading public with good quality books for less than the price of a packet of cigarettes. A clear and stylish design was part of the success of the Penguin brand: orange and white for general fiction; green and white for crime fiction; cerise and white for travel; dark blue and white for biographies; grey and white for world affairs, all with the striking Penguin icon on the cover. These books sold in their hundreds of thousands throughout the pre-war and the war years in England and abroad. Bob Maynard, in charge of Penguin production at the outbreak of war, compared the initial impact of Penguin to a gold rush. It was ‘as if books had been hidden underground and now were suddenly discovered’. 3 Allen Lane, who founded Penguin books, launched Pelican books in 1937. These had pale blue covers and a striking Pelican image on the cover. They were a non-fiction imprint for lowcost books on subjects as diverse as sociology, politics, history, economics and popular science. Bob Maynard kept a touching letter he had received from a Welsh coalminer in the early days of Pelican books: ‘Every Friday I spend sixpence on a green

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Penguin. Last Friday they only had a pale blue one. I bought one called Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H.Tawney. It made me think. Could I have a list of others please.’4 George Orwell noted, ‘One phenomenon of the war has been the enormous sale of Penguin books, Pelican books and other cheap titles, most of which would have been regarded as impossibly highbrow a few years back.’5 Pelicans featured strongly in Verity’s shop and she would regularly advertise when she had new titles in stock. These books had a wide appeal for the Canberra public who in many cases were educated people with a hunger to connect to a world beyond the quiet suburban streets of their town. Pat Tillyard (later Pat Wardle), a family friend, recalled that the bookshop was ‘tremendously important’ to Canberrans as a meeting place and as a source for interesting books and journals. 6 Housewives with some time to spare while waiting for the bus would browse among the shelves, and professional people came in their offduty hours. Dr John Cumpston, head of the Commonwealth Department of Health, came regularly to the shop for a supply of detective novels which helped him get to sleep after a long and stressful day. Verity was keen to promote Australian writing, especially books with local themes. In the spring of 1938 Warren Denning’s Capital City: Canberra today and tomorrow appeared in newsagents and on the bookshop shelves. It was said to be ‘the first book on Canberra as a living capital’ and one that ‘was arousing controversy in every part of Canberra’. Warren Denning was a journalist with long years of experience in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, representing variously the Sydney Labor Daily, the Melbourne Argus and

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the country news agency Australian United Press. Always a staunch Labor man, a stance strengthened by his own moral and religious convictions, Denning was keenly interested in what he saw as the great democratic experiment of Federation, and Canberra’s potential as its new capital and symbolic centre. ‘I took to myself the dream of a national capital and tried to write intelligently and constructively about it.’7 But what he observed of life in Canberra disheartened him, for he had a keen eye for the human foibles and petty snobberies on show in this country town as it underwent conversion into the semblance of a capital city. He described a town where people’s housing and suburban address defined the rank they held in the public service; where departmental officials laid down decrees about the height of hedges and turned off the street lights at midnight; where segregation of the sexes was strictly observed in the hostels housing young public servants; and where, in the early years when prohibition was in force, many people made a mad weekend exodus over the border to pubs in Queanbeyan and bootleg liquor was brewed up by desperate men in the workers camps. Denning was discouraged by the ‘lack of an intelligent democratic spirit’ in so many people, who seemed happy to accept oversight of their lives by Commonwealth bureaucrats and to pay taxes but have no voice in parliament. He also noted that a ‘timidity and reticence’ characterized many public servants in a town whose fertile soil for gossip and scandal led people to avoid radical or unorthodox opinions or behaviour. Denning expressed the hope that as the capital city grew and matured, a more independent civic culture would arise. Denning was a regular visitor to Verity’s shop. As a young man growing up in the Depression without access to higher education, he had

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‘a longing for an educated mind’. He recalled in later life that his reading of cheap Penguin paperbacks had opened a new world for him.8 It’s understandable that Denning’s book would ‘arouse controversy’ given its observations. It must have been a steady seller in the shop, though Verity’s interest in it was not just mercenary. She knew Warren Denning and admired his work. During the war the bookshop was to publish a second, revised edition of his book. Denning had another remarkable, probably unique, connection to Canberra. In March 1944, while enjoying a brief leave from the Canberra Press Gallery in the lull before the opening of the Second Front in Europe, Denning decided he would like to ride a push-bike from Sydney to Canberra, finding out on the journey about the early settlement history of the region. At that stage of the war there were very few cars on the road so the journey, from Macquarie Place in the city to Canberra was on roads largely free of traffic. Denning was not athletic—photos show a portly man with owlish glasses—but he completed the whole journey in six days, pushing his bike up any steep inclines and taking his chances about finding accommodation at any small hotels in settlements he passed through. As 1938 drew to a close and armies gathered in Europe, Canberra residents looked forward to a summer holiday and Christmas celebrations. Many Australians had close connections to Britain and still thought of it fondly as ‘home’. In October Verity, advising early posting to catch the English Christmas mails, advertised ‘Australian gifts for overseas’, including signed etchings by popular printmaker Sydney Long and hand-printed Christmas cards made in Canberra.

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It was the last peacetime Christmas for six years. The Canberra Times announced that 1000 administrative officers from the Department of Civil Aviation were to be transferred to Canberra from Melbourne in 1939, 3 Squadron RAAF was to be stationed at Canberra’s airport and two wireless stations to serve the Navy were to be erected in fields outside the town, Canberra being chosen as a strategic site whose distance from the coast rendered it safe from attack. But war was a distant and unreal threat. A more immediate sense of danger confronted Australians that summer as the worst bushfires since white settlement began took hold in the eastern states.

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T WO

Canberra 1939

The year opened, in Europe, with thousands fleeing Franco’s troops over the snow-bound passes into France, bringing tales of horror that were received by a largely indifferent world. In Australia, January unleashed disastrous fires that overtook Victoria and set most of the state alight. The month also brought bad fires to NSW and the Australian Capital Territory, in a season of drought and scorching heat. Fires that broke out early in the month to the west of Canberra burnt on a 45-mile front for two weeks, eventually subsiding to smouldering ruins. No people died, but stock losses (and native fauna losses) were heavy, and farmers lost thousands of acres of grass and miles of fencing. On 5 January, an important science congress opened in Canberra, with papers on a diverse range of topics including control of soil erosion, physical training in schools and protection of threatened fauna species. ANZAAS [Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science] had been 15

a part of the region’s intellectual life since 1888, holding annual meetings in either Australia’s or New Zealand’s major cities. The wide scope of the association was reflected in the range of scientific subjects they addressed. Verity Hewitt’s bookshop held a stall at the conference, with stocks of many Australian publications of scientific interest; both Verity and Laurie took a keen interest in the proceedings of the conference. Public interest centred on the presence of an overseas visitor, the author H. G. Wells. In his address, ‘The Poison of History’, Wells condemned the ‘race and nation stuff’ that was taught as history, as a pernicious and outmoded doctrine that was leading the world into a new Dark Age. Civilization was being ‘torn to pieces by old ideas armed with new and frightful weapons’ and ruthless forms of nationalism were all competing for power. He could, at that time, imagine ‘no more dreadful position in the world today than being an intelligent Jew’, stateless in a world where the State was all-powerful.9 Verity’s diary for those days contains a long and scribbled summary of Wells’s talk, which she found perplexing and disturbing. Most Australians were not sure what to make of Wells and very few appreciated his nightmare visions. The week after his Canberra address, the Minister for the Interior, John McEwen, had responded to a request by a committee of Italian Jewry seeking to establish a self-supporting colony in the country. He made quite clear that ‘under no circumstances would alien colonies be established in Australia’.10 Australians had a long history of treating non-British arrivals with suspicion or hostility. They feared the threat to their living standards and their jobs if large numbers of ‘aliens’ (people not of British stock) arrived in the country. Papers like The Bulletin

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also warned against the dangers of importing communism into Australia. In the early 1930s, as it became clear that German Jews could not live safely under Nazi rule, the Australian government was approached by prominent Jews in England to consider Australia as a place of refuge for these people. The government however, decided that it would maintain its strict conditions under which ‘aliens’ had been admitted to Australia since 1930. Only aliens with £500 landing money, or dependent relatives of aliens already residing in Australia, were to be allowed to enter. While these conditions were relaxed somewhat in 1936 (landing money being reduced to £50) there was still strict control over the flow of refugees into the country. The invasion of Austria in early 1938 saw great numbers of Austrian, Czech and Polish Jews desperate to escape Europe. In March, Australia House in London received over 100 enquiries a day, but government policy remained unchanged. Then came Kristallnacht in Berlin, in November 1938, and an appalling wave of violence against German Jews following the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris. In response to growing international concern and pressure, the Australian government decided to increase its quota of refugees and admit 15 000 over a period of three years, a move that was welcomed in international circles. Populist papers like Truth, Smiths Weekly and The Bulletin expressed anti-foreign and anti-Jewish sentiments, warning of the threats to ‘nationhood and standards’ these people posed. Even the established Jewish communities in Australia gave the refugees a hostile reception, seeing them as a threat to the high social and civic status enjoyed by Australian Jewry at this time. Australian professional groups like doctors

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and dentists also voiced their opposition to an influx of Jewish refugees, fearing competition from these educated groups. Shortly after war was declared, those Jewish refugees who had arrived immediately before the war from Germany and her allies, were labelled as ‘enemy aliens’, no consideration being given to the fact that they were themselves victims of the Nazi regime. All enemy aliens were required to report regularly to police, and some were also interned. The story of some of these people has connections to wartime Canberra and will be told in a later chapter. The outbreak of war in September 1939 stopped all refugee immigration, and the quota of 15,000 was never filled. In early 1939, these dramatic events had had little impact on Canberra, and if noticed at all it was mainly as foreign news bulletins on the front page of the Canberra Times, while the rest of the paper concerned itself as it always had, with local politics, entertainments, sporting and community events. When war did break out, it was on a front 10 000 miles away in Eastern Europe, and Australians found little in these conflicts that seemed relevant to them. Any first-hand accounts of the struggle took six weeks to reach Australia and life had already moved on by then. In April 1939, a small book was published in England by the Cresset Press and made its way to bookshops in Australia in a Penguin edition. Reaching for the Stars was written by an American Quaker, Nora Waln, who lived in Germany from June 1934 to April 1938 while her husband studied music there. Nora, who was a well-travelled journalist and talented linguist, had warm friendships with many Germans and a passionate devotion to German literature, music and culture. Her book contains eloquent descriptions of the unspoilt beauty of the landscape, the

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strong Lutheran faith of many of its inhabitants and the warmth of family and community life in towns and villages. Yet over all the book lies the shadow of National Socialism and evidence of the way it was eroding personal liberties and moral sanctions. In fact the book is a disturbing chronicle of the steps, one after the other, by which Hitler took control of the minds and hearts of so many Germans, who then gave up all their liberties in exchange for a Führer and his promises. Verity Hewitt advertised the book for sale in May, noting that it was a ‘moving chronicle of life in modern Germany.’ That week, German troops were demonstrating in Danzig as part of Hitler’s territorial demands on Poland. The book was still being advertised at the shop in November after the war had started, and in fact by that time had gone into its sixth impression. For readers world-wide—for it was a bestseller in many countries— it must have given a chilling insight into the enemy they were now fighting. In 1942, in the middle of wartime rationing of newsprint, Penguin books put out a ninth impression of the book. One of these is in the author’s possession, a tattered and fragile book on very poor newsprint. It must have found its way into many Canberra homes during the war years. Once it seemed likely that Australia would be called upon to play its part in the global conflict, people became hungry for news of the wider world, and radio was the coming medium. Dramatic events across the world could be broadcast with a degree of immediacy not available to the printed word. A striking example of this was when Japanese aircraft attacked and destroyed two British battle cruisers, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, off the east coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941. An Australian Broadcasting Commission [ABC] journalist in London at the

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time heard the news and was able to relay it immediately back to Australia. Chief Editor Frank Dixon decided to run the story without elaboration, just the bare facts as in the communiqué: ‘The Japanese Imperial Naval Headquarters has announced that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk off the coast of Malaya at 2pm’. This startling news was followed, in a note of jarring insensitivity, with the playing of the music Life on the Ocean Wave. The ABC had been inaugurated in 1932 as a national broadcaster. But it had no independent newsgathering capacity, newspapers jealously guarding their control over this profitable side of their work. The ABC was only allowed to take news from the metropolitan papers plus 200 words per day of cabled (international) news. In 1939 Prime Minister Lyons invited the Commission to appoint a Canberra representative to supply news stories to the ABC. Lyons had been unhappy with what he saw as distorted and inaccurate reporting on government policy by the press; he wanted an impartial, national network such as was represented by the BBC. Warren Denning, who had worked in the Press Gallery for nine years, was appointed and remained with the ABC in Canberra throughout the war years, serving for a couple of hectic years as its sole representative and gathering news quite independent of newspapers sources: he provided a summary of every important news story that broke. It wasn’t until 1947 that legislation finally confirmed the independent news-gathering status of the ABC, but before that, informal news gathering was happening. Denning’s daily private conversations with Prime Minister Menzies gained him some exclusive stories, much to the chagrin of the press reporters.

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As well as his work for the ABC, Denning became involved in a brave publishing venture at the time, in an enterprise that Verity Hewitt was also to join. This was the publication of a Canberra based periodical called the Australian National Review. One of its founders, Dr Robin Tillyard, was a distinguished scientist who had written the authoritative text Insects of Australia and New Zealand. He and his family had come to Canberra in 1928 when Tillyard took up the position as Chief Commonwealth Entomologist with the CSIR. He and his wife Patricia knew Verity and Laurie Fitzhardinge and Verity taught their daughter Hope at Telopea Park School. Their eldest daughter, Patience (Pat), was close to Verity’s age and a good friend; she had been at Women’s College with Verity in Verity’s last year at the University of Sydney. The first edition of the National Review in January 1937 was jointly edited by Tillyard and a well-known Canberra journalist, William Farmer Whyte. The periodical, which was to come out monthly until August 1939, was intended to engage Australians in vigorous debate about their world and encourage free and frank discussion of politics, religion, economics, science, philosophy, literature and the arts. It was a remarkable publication really. Based in what was only a large country town, it achieved a circulation that included overseas subscribers and that received favourable mention in the Times Literary Supplement and a leading article in the Sydney Morning Herald about its opening number. The striking modernist cover (William Gunn of Swinburne Technical College won the Review’s design competition) set the tone for the journal in its desire to ‘create a positive, active mode of thought towards the problems of the age’ and to create a new medium for the expression of a

21

distinctive Australian culture. From the first edition, contributors numbered some of Australia’s most prominent citizens: scientists, lawyers, academics, church leaders, artists and poets. In the first edition, former Prime Minister Jim Scullin wrote a plea for more government support for Australian literature and an enlargement of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Charles Lane Poole, head of the new Commonwealth School of Forestry, spoke in defence of Australia’s great forests and an end to the ‘licensed butchery’ of unchecked clearing and burning. Further issues dealt with themes that still strongly engage us eighty years later: the problem of soil erosion; engagement with the Asia-Pacific region; education to combat ‘the stupider kinds of nationalism’. From the start the Review promoted Australian literature. Miles

Franklin

reviewed

Xavier

Herbert’s

new

novel,

Capricornia, A. D. Hope submitted some early poems and Mary Gilmore was a regular contributor. The young Judith Wright submitted two of her very early poems. Her pleasure in seeing them published was dampened by her conviction that war was not far off. Since returning from a 1937 trip to Europe she could think of nothing else, remembering ‘the posters in Munich, the hushed apprehension in Vienna, the rally in Nuremberg, the Blackshirts in London…’11 Very few Australians shared her apprehensions at this stage. After the success of the first issue of the Review—the print run of 4000 sold out and a further 1000 copies were printed— the appearance of the second issue was marred by tragedy. Dr Robin Tillyard was killed in a car accident as he travelled to Sydney to deliver the issue to the printers. It was to contain the second part of his geological history ‘The Age of the Earth’, the first half having appeared in the first issue. After his death

22

Farmer Whyte continued as sole editor and Tillyard’s widow, Patricia, filled the vacancy on the board of management. As 1938 progressed it became clear that the early forecasts of sales and circulation were too optimistic, and the periodical was struggling financially. On 1 June Verity wrote a letter to the editor of the Canberra Times appealing to the Canberra public to support the Review at a forthcoming public meeting. The meeting took place on 20 June. Among those who attended were Prime Minister Lyons, former Prime Minister and regular contributor Jim Scullin and Opposition leader John Curtin: a reflection of the respected profile the periodical had gained in Canberra’s political circles. Curtin had a great love of reading, especially the poetry and novels of late nineteenth century England and socialist texts. Veteran Canberra journalist Alan Reid recalled wartime conversations with the then Prime Minister who recommended Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man and Spengler’s The Decline of the West as essential reading for the times. The outcome of the public meeting was the appointment of some prominent Canberra businessmen to the board of the Canberra Publishing Company, including the editor of the Canberra Times, Arthur Shakespeare. A decision was made to raise capital and seek more subscriptions. At that stage Warren Denning joined the editorial team and for some issues he and Arthur Shakespeare edited the journal while Farmer Whyte was overseas. Whyte was sixty by that time, an ageing, rather out of touch ‘Edwardian’ figure according to Laurie Fitzhardinge, and ‘not much use’ according to Verity. She joined the board in an administrative capacity but both she and Laurie were occasional contributors, and the bookshop became the site for

23

board meetings. The journal continued to be published at a high standard until the coming of war brought an end to the Review. Its last issue was August 1939. A regular feature of each issue had been the commentary on current affairs, increasingly dominated by events in Europe where most Australians still hoped peace negotiations would prevail. In keeping with the Review’s policy of ‘open and free discussion’ there were several contributions that were controversial. The October 1937 issue contained an address that Dr Hans Luther, President of the Reich Bank and formerly Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, gave to an audience of businessmen and politicians at the ‘Millions Club’ in Sydney. He explained Germany’s great need for raw materials and hence its need to expand her frontiers. He also spoke of Germany’s desire for international trade including the purchase of Australian wool. In May 1939 Torao Wakamatsu, Japanese Consul General in Sydney since 1936, wrote an article for the magazine defending Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy against ‘Bolshevik influence in Asia’. He assured the reader that Japan earnestly desired peaceful relations with Australia and continuation of trade, especially Australian pig-iron to help develop Japan’s industrial capacity. Wakamatsu was later discovered to have pursued active espionage while in the country, sending regular reports back to Japan about the city’s port facilities, industrial works and shipping activities. When war was declared on 3 September 1939, Japan was still an active trading partner of Australia and remained so until Pearl Harbour. Pig-iron was still loaded at Port Kembla and shipped to Japan despite strong opposition from trade union groups and

24

waterside workers, a policy that earned Prime Minister Menzies the scornful tag of ‘Pig-Iron Bob’. John Holroyd, a Melbourne bookseller, had a story about the crew members of one of the ships that used to visit Melbourne on the way to load pig-iron at Port Kembla. The officers and men from the ship would visit one of the big Melbourne bookstores, go upstairs to the technical department and walk away with armfuls of army survey maps of the coastal regions. When the management found out about this, maps were withdrawn from sale.12 The Japanese connections to Australia (and to Canberra) remained strong until the very start of the Pacific war. John Latham was appointed as first Australian Minister to Tokyo in August 1940. In May 1939 Mr M. Akiyama replaced Wakamatsu as Consul General and was warmly welcomed when he arrived in Sydney. He hoped to negotiate a new trade deal with Australia. Many large Japanese businesses had offices or agencies in Melbourne and Sydney and were optimistic about future peaceful relations. Akiyama and his staff were present, along with every notable Canberra resident, at an official reception for the newly appointed United States Minister, Clarence E. Gauss, a career diplomat with wide experience of the Far East, who was welcomed at Parliament House on 27 November 1940. Australia had just appointed Richard Casey as Australian Minister in Washington and plans were afoot to build an imposing residence to house the American legation in Canberra. Tatsuo Kawai was appointed as Japan’s first Minister to Australia in January 1941 and welcomed at a Commonwealth luncheon at Parliament House on 19 March, where both host and guest spoke of the importance of ‘preventing war in the

25

Pacific’. Kawai’s residence was a palatial home in Auburn in Melbourne. Meanwhile his Consul General Mr Ayikama made a number of visits to Canberra in search of a suitable house for the Commercial Secretary Taijiro Ichikawa, finding a pleasant mock-Tudor house in Red Hill. Ichikawa was another man whose undercover work involved preparation for war. He had been gathering useful intelligence since his arrival in Sydney in 1939. In Canberra he assembled labour reports, details on gas vehicles and publications about northern Australia and New Guinea. As late as November 1941, as Japanese officials were withdrawing large sums of money from their Australian bank accounts, and as Japanese troops moved into Thailand and Malaya, Commonwealth publications were still being forwarded to the Red Hill legation with the full assent of government departments. In June 1941, George Knowles, Secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, had been ‘happy to supply five copies of the Manual of National Security legislation’ to Ichikawa.13 Miss Dore Hawthorne, senior sales assistant at Verity’s bookshop, was a well-established artist and a close family friend of Verity and Laurie. (Her story is told in Chapter 7, Artists in Wartime.) In July 1941, Hawthorne wrote to the Crown Solicitor, reporting that she had supplied Ichikawa with many books like Our Great Open Spaces, New Zealand from the Air and British Fighter Planes. She had recently resigned from her position at the shop ‘as she couldn’t share the impartiality of the management’ on this matter.14 She had greatly resented the insolent manners of the Japanese gentleman who had purchased the books. (This may well have been a misreading of the reserved and formal manners of Ichikawa, a style foreign to Australians

26

at that time; it also illustrates Dore Hawthorne’s strong reactions when a matter of principle was involved.) Tatsuo Kawai, Japanese Minister to Australia, is a complex figure of great moral ambiguity. Like his colleagues, he was devoted to the idea of a wide Japanese sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. As spokesman for the Foreign Ministry before the war he had been actively promoting Japan’s influence through education, propaganda and diplomacy. He travelled widely, being welcomed and feted in Germany in 1940 by senior members of the Nazi party, and he was also close to men who were to be tried later as Japanese war criminals. Yet many who met him in Australia, including John and Elsie Curtin, found him a kindly, scholarly man who talked of the future, and of growing friendship between the two nations. In his spare time, Kawai wrote poetry—the traditional tanka and haiku forms of Japanese literature - and cultivated bonsai trees. One of these, a dwarf pine, he had promised as a gift to Zara, Lady Gowrie, also a lover of gardens and gardening. Once the Pacific war started, Lieutenant-Colonel Hodgson of the Department of External Affairs vetoed the gift, though Lady Gowrie herself would have been happy to accept it: ‘trees are international,’ she remarked.15 From his arrival in Australia in March 1941 Kawai developed a close friendship with John Curtin, whom he first met at the official welcome to Kawai at Parliament House when Curtin was leader of the Opposition. In old age, Taijiro Ichikawa recalled that his minister ‘had been charmed by the character of Curtin, his honesty and open-mindedness’.16 Curtin, Prime Minister from 7 October 1941, saw many advantages for Australia in keeping peaceful trading and diplomatic contacts with Japan. He saw in Kawai a man he judged to be similarly

27

devoted to peace in the region. For Kawai, peaceful relations with Australia primarily meant more trading opportunities for Japan, a chance to access Australia’s rich mineral resources to aid Japan’s own industrial development and modernization. Professor Walter Murdoch, a Western Australian academic and friend of Curtin, believed that Curtin sustained his friendship with Kawai to the very outbreak of the Pacific war in the hope that Kawai would have a moderating influence on the growing power of the militarists in Japan. In July 1941 Kawai visited John and Elsie Curtin in Perth, as Japanese troops moved into southern Indo-China. He sent a congratulatory telegram to Curtin when he became Prime Minister, and on 11 November, 26 days before Pearl Harbour, at the official opening of the War Memorial, Kawai was given precedence as Dean of Canberra’s small diplomatic corps, and sat next to Attorney-General Evatt at the ceremony. Both Curtin and Evatt continued to hope for a salvaging of the peace talks between the United States and Japan, though neither appreciated at that stage how far advanced Japan’s plans for war were. Gavin Long, who was later to write the official history of the war, interviewed Curtin at his desk in Parliament House in April 1942. Curtin spoke of the days leading up to Pearl Harbour: ‘Kawai sat in that chair nine days before the war began and said, “I’m afraid it has gone too far; the momentum is too great”. Not long after that, I knew that they were burning papers at the Japanese Minister’s office.’17 In Canberra, reporters saw smoke coming out of the Legation’s incinerator for days leading up to the outbreak of war. All Japanese officials and staff were put under house arrest and were repatriated in August 1942. They were held in

28

comfortable conditions with loose security and continued to collect reports on conditions in Australia to take home with them. Shortly after Pearl Harbour, Ichikawa made a last visit to Verity Hewitt’s bookshop under the guard of two military police. He was allowed to purchase a large collection of books to keep with him during his incarceration. His Australian counterparts held in captured Japanese territories were not so fortunate; Vivian Bowden, the Australian Representative in Singapore, was murdered by soldiers in February after the fall of Singapore. After the attempt on 31 May 1942 by three midget submarines to enter Sydney Harbour and the deaths of all on board, Kawai asked if he was allowed to take the ashes of the young submariners home to Japan on his repatriation in August. Before leaving Australia, Kawai spoke of his struggles to avert war; he hoped after the war ended ‘cultural relations will bring us closer.’ Thinking of Curtin, Kawai recalled years later, ‘I made my departure from Australia silently praying for his good health and a brave fight.’18 In Japan, Kawai quietly withdrew from diplomatic life but after the war was briefly appointed Head of Information for Japan’s national media during the American occupation. He revived the dormant Japan-Australian Society of which he was still president, and began writing to Elsie Curtin, exchanging family photos, gifts and Christmas cards for a number of years. In 1959 he returned to Australia for a trade fair and visited John Curtin’s grave. He had planted a flowering gum tree in his Tokyo garden in memory of Curtin, with seed sent from Canberra.

29

T HREE

‘Here We Have No Permanent City’19

War brought many changes to Canberra. It had always been a town of comings and goings but the upheavals of war brought a new influx of people: journalists, public servants, the military. They saw themselves as there for the short term. Canberra had always been a place people were glad to leave once their service was over. There were still very few who called themselves ‘Canberrans’, though as time went on families put down roots here, grew to love and defend the place and be committed to its future. Early Commonwealth politicians did not warm to Canberra. Why would they? Their families lived elsewhere, and their electoral interests were not local. Most bitterly resented the move of Federal Parliament from Melbourne to Canberra, and commuting involved a tedious and uncomfortable train journey when Parliament was sitting. In Canberra, most politicians stayed at the Hotel Canberra or the Hotel Kurrajong, both glorified

30

hostels, officially ‘dry’ until the local referendum of 1928 overturned King O’Malley’s territory-wide liquor ban. The town in the early 1930s had none of the amenities that most politicians felt entitled to: expensive shops, good restaurants, established theatres, and the gracious parks and Edwardian buildings and mansions that provided such an effective backdrop in Melbourne for a busy social life with their wives and colleagues. ‘Always, everywhere there are the same faces’ lamented Ernest Crutchley, Acting British High Commissioner in the 1930s, one of many gloomy observations he made about Canberra.20 Jay Pierrepont Moffatt, American Consul General to Australia between 1935 and 1937, visited Canberra in the summer of 1936 from his comfortable base at Darling Point in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. He dined with Attorney-General Robert Menzies and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas White, Minister for Customs, and confided in his diary: ‘Both men hate Canberra, stay there the minimum time possible and count the hours till they go back to Melbourne’. Considering the possibility of a legation in the new national capital, Moffatt wrote: There is not a single suitable house in Canberra, except the Lodge and the house allocated to the British High Commission. All the rest are bungalows, with one maid’s room - frequently pretty, always surrounded by a charming garden but scarcely designed for space or comfort. What a legation would do is beyond me. Except when Parliament is sitting, there is never a quorum of ministers in residence.21 Intelligent women, following their husbands to Canberra

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on wartime postings and unable to pursue careers themselves, often found the small-town ambience of the place boring and uncongenial. Women, with a few notable exceptions, had no place and no voice in the affairs of government. They did not always want to join the morning teas, charity committees and social gatherings for tennis and golf that were the leisure pursuits of middle-class women. For some wives, the isolation proved too much, and they went back to Melbourne to await their husband’s retirement. Their menfolk found it easier to settle well in Canberra. They had the company of their fellow office workers and good sports facilities at the weekends. Mothers with young children generally had a special focus, and the Mothercraft Society helped bring valuable services to the many women with young children who were coming to the town with their husbands. For children, the Canberra environment provided all kinds of freedoms. They could ride their bikes on empty roads, swim in the Molonglo or fish for yabbies and even venture out to the Cotter River or Murrumbidgee if they were older. There were long games of cricket at twilight in the paddocks, and the excitement of bonfires on frosty May nights to celebrate Empire Day. Verity Hewitt often referred to the ‘limited’ opportunities for women in Canberra and welcomed them into her shop. ‘There was always her smiling presence … you were invited to go in and browse and have a cup of coffee,’ Pat Wardle remembered.22 As one of four children in a very bookish family (her parents were Robin and Patricia Tillyard) she would have been a familiar presence from a young age in the bookshop, her head buried in the latest volume. We know that she admired aspiring writers and would have been delighted when—in the only short story

32

competition the Australian National Review was able to run, in June 1939—she won first prize for her ‘ghost story’ set in an outback Australian town. Before war broke out, the bookshop was already advertising membership of the Readers Union for Canberrans who wanted access to a stimulating and economical range of books that would connect them to the wider world. The Readers Union had been established in England in 1937, in a country just emerging from the Depression but with a million and a half unemployed and Fascism advancing in Britain and Europe. Even in those dark years, the founders of the Union retained a belief in booksellers’ mission to society, because ‘to be a reader was to change utterly one’s relations with the world’.23 Readers Union selected an important book of general interest each month of the year and made it available at two shilling and sixpence, about a tenth of the book’s retail price. This was possible because of economies in publishing and accurate calculation of sales. The big publishers, though at first alarmed at the competition, soon became supporters of the Union, receiving a small royalty which they shared with the author for each book published. The Union printed and bound the books themselves - always hardback—with quality design and style, though of course the paper was of poor quality during the war. Among the list available to subscribers were books by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Mann. Verity Hewitt advertised the new title each month. During the war some of the titles available to Canberra readers were T. H. White’s newly published The Sword in the Stone, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.

33

When war came the Readers Union staff kept an office in London and picked their way to work each morning through the smoke, broken glass and rubble of the Blitz. Staff were called up into the forces or into government service but the Union carried on, never missing a month’s publication, with hundreds of thousands of copies finding their way in a world at war to Dominion countries. In some ways it was ‘a golden age for books’. People living on the edge of danger and without many creature comforts were hungry for the deeper knowledge and consolation that books provided, not just fiction, but poetry, history and philosophy. In September 1940 the Association of British Book Publishers appealed to the Dominions to continue buying English books, to provide much needed revenue but also to support ‘Britain’s fight for freedom.’24 Paper was rationed in England as it was to be in Australia from 1940. The British government ensured that stocks were available, in reduced quantities, for the publication of books. If their enemy was burning books, they were surely fighting to defend the written word as essential to their culture. Wartime stock carried the imprint, ‘Book Production War economy standard’ and was on very thin paper with very tight typography. All imports to Australia were affected by the outbreak of war, with priority being given to goods deemed essential to the war effort and to conserve precious foreign exchange. But Prime Minister Menzies announced on 30 March 1940 that books would continue to be imported into Australia on their existing basis, despite severe restrictions being placed on other imports. So in 1940 Verity’s bookshop continued to stock the beloved Penguins and Pelicans, to receive regular (belated) copies of the Readers Union lists, and to stock a wide range of the beautiful

34

‘Everyman’ hard cover books, which retailed at three shillings each. The Everyman library was founded in 1906 by a master bookbinder turned publisher, Joseph Dent. He had a fervent belief in books and their place in civilized society. They represented ‘infinite riches in a little room’, as he put it. The books were pocket sized, with beautiful end papers and title pages influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. Every title carried the motto ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide. In thy most need be by thy side’ a reference to the medieval morality play where the character Knowledge accompanies Everyman on a long and dangerous journey. Verity did warn customers, especially as Christmas approached, that stocks were ‘limited’ and couldn’t be replaced. Shortly after the outbreak of war, while it was still unclear what would be required of the country, Prime Minister Menzies exhorted Australians to carry on with ‘business as usual’, to work hard and keep up morale whatever might be ahead. The business community welcomed this approach, seeing it as a promise of a buoyant economy with money continuing to circulate. In November 1939, the Canberra Times initiated a ‘Business as Usual’ campaign where people were encouraged to support local businesses and support ‘a determination to maintain services despite upsets due to war or whatever difficulties lie ahead. You can beat profiteering. Buy advertised goods at advertised prices and beat the Profiteer.’ Canberra businesses were invited to add their voice to the campaign and insert an advertisement in the paper. Woodgers & Calthorpe, the popular real estate and land agents, had a space, as did the Canberra Steam Laundry and Reg Maloney, ‘Exclusive Men’s Outfitters’. The bookshop got

35

a whole column of text under the heading, ‘Canberra’s leading bookstore’. The text bears the hallmark of Arthur Shakespeare who had a sympathy for Verity’s cultural and business project and had worked closely with her on the board of the Review: ‘ A good bookshop is a university that is available to everyone.’ And quoting Carlyle, ‘the bookseller’s shop should become a centre of literary interest and enlightenment.’25 Arthur Shakespeare, eldest son of the founder of the Canberra Times, T. M. Shakespeare, wanted to carry on his father’s legacy and make the paper a quality production that could proudly support the masthead ‘to serve the national city and through it the nation’. As a schoolboy Arthur had attended the naming ceremony of Canberra in 1913 with his brothers and father. T. M. Shakespeare at that time was a seasoned country journalist, who as an ardent federalist was inspired by this founding of the Commonwealth’s new capital and harboured plans to eventually establish a national newspaper here. He appreciated that a newspaper for Canberra would be a more complex affair than running a country paper. It would have to have a national outlook, to embrace the fact that Canberra was designed to be the centre of parliamentary and executive government and the home of people who were interested in Australia’s relationships with the wider world. At the same time the paper would still cover the local interests of the community and be supportive of its needs. As early as 1931 the paper’s editorial had proclaimed, ‘Canberra and its people needed an articulate voice, and this they have been afforded.’ The Shakespeare family became well-known, loved and respected throughout the region for their support over the years of Canberra societies, organisations and civic groups.

36

Arthur Shakespeare’s service on the board of the Australian National Review provides an example of this man’s commitment to a wider national vision. The Mort St premises—the first commercial leases in the new territory—had been acquired by Mr T. M. Shakespeare in 1924 and within six months of its first weekly edition in 1926 the paper became a daily. But in the 1940s it was still operating on a shoestring. Still owned as a family enterprise, the Depression had cut its resources to the bone. Arthur was the editor, his brother Clarence and cousin Alf were reporters and Jack managed plant and machinery. Jack would be there all night printing the paper and then delivering it early mornings to the newsagents. Laurie Fitzhardinge recalled dropping into the office one morning and finding Jack fast asleep slumped over the compositor’s stone. *** Australia wakened slowly to war. The first signs of it were the call-up of militia (part-time volunteers) in successive drafts of 10,000 men to serve for 16 days training and protection of vulnerable sites along the coast and inland. The government had started a recruiting campaign in early 1939 to increase the strength of the voluntary forces, and the various states competed eagerly to meet recruitment targets. In November 1939 Menzies announced that a full-time conscript militia would be raised, to have a strength of 75,000 men. From 1 January 1940 the first quota of compulsory militia (unmarried 21-year-olds) were drafted for three months service and began streaming into camps. The new conscript militia could only be used for the defence of Australia on Australian soil. The memory of the

37

conscription wars of 1916–17 was still fresh; the government explicitly assured parliament that there would be no conscription for overseas service. In September 1939 the government also announced the decision to form a special infantry division, to be known as the 2nd AIF, for service at home or abroad as required. This was to be the 6th Division, to be followed by the raising of the 7th Division in March 1940. An extensive list of reserved occupations was declared as manpower requirements were forecast to be one of the biggest challenges for the country, maintaining essential services and supply of goods when men were leaving their jobs to enlist. It wasn’t until the middle of 1940 that Australians began to understand the magnitude of the Allied defeat in Europe. With July came the first large-scale air attack on Britain, a place still close to the hearts of so many Australians. At home, men were beginning to appear in uniform and leave for overseas. At the time of the fall of France, in July 1940, the 6th Division was in Palestine in training; the 7th Division was training in Australia, and the 8th Division being formed. The bookshop, Verity recalled, was a place where young men in uniform often dropped in, perhaps to buy last-minute gifts for their loved ones. Once Australian forces were posted overseas there was a great demand from the public for books that would give families some background to this changing world: books on the fall of France, books about their own fighting forces, and travel books, particularly about the Middle East. Forces in training camps in Egypt and Palestine requested ‘good stuff for singalongs’, as Verity’s friend Lacey Lee wrote, and also collections of verse, one favourite being A. B. Paterson’s

38

‘The Man from Snowy River’. During the weeks spent in desert camps before the possibility of action, the men had to contend with tedium and boredom, and campfire singalongs were a popular way of unwinding. Verity’s younger brother, Geoff, joined the part-time militia in May 1939 and a year later enlisted in the 20th Brigade of the 7th Division. Corporal Geoff Hewitt left Sydney for the war in North Africa in October 1940. En route to Egypt the brigade transferred to the newly formed 9th Division, formed in the Middle East from regiments stationed there and in England. Young men were also flocking to join the RAAF, which was advertising a new course for recruits and would be sending men to Canada as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme. This arm of the services had the attraction of new technology and waged a smart campaign which drew in many more applicants than were accepted. Books on aeronautics and aerial navigation were popular with young men intent on enlisting with the RAAF and wishing to study for the entry exams. Canberra as the national capital would in theory be the focus of wartime planning and administration. But the stringent economies of the Depression had left Canberra with little new infrastructure and without the capacity to absorb large numbers of new workers, with or without their families. Unmarried workers found accommodation in government-run hostels, though even there, the Canberra Times reported in early 1939, there was increasing difficulty in finding accommodation for girl ‘typistes’ and young men on low salaries in the public service. Young married families shared accommodation or stayed in hotels while awaiting word of a house; they might be months on the waiting list. William Dunk, already a high-ranking bureaucrat

39

in Melbourne, was appointed as Secretary to the Department of External Affairs in 1945, and waited two years for a home for his family, meanwhile boarding at the Hotel Canberra during the week and returning to Melbourne at weekends. The town, under the strains of war, took on a makeshift appearance. Boarding houses, hotels, business premises, a disused hospital were all commandeered to provide office and living quarters. But unless its empty paddocks were to be filled with ‘wood, iron and asbestos hutments’ in Paul Hasluck’s words, Canberra would remain unable to operate as the centre of war administration.26 In 1921 the Federal Capital Advisory Committee had effectively abandoned Griffin’s design for ‘a city like no other’ and laid the blueprint for a much more modest capital city plan. Griffin’s vision was grand—and expensive. It had included wide boulevards lined with the nation’s cultural institutions; busy urban thoroughfares; long vistas leading south across a formal lake to the centres of administration; and below Capital Hill, Parliament House, the crowning symbol of a young democracy. Instead, Canberra had a provisional Parliament House lower down on the hill, flanked by two small administrative buildings known as East Block and West Block, all looking north across the dusty paddocks of the Molonglo Valley to the small business centre of Civic and a scattering of suburbs. There was very little office space available in Canberra for the thirteen new Commonwealth agencies being created to meet rapidly expanding national priorities. A permanent Administrative Block had been designed in 1927 but building stalled during the Depression and then war intervened. Instead, these new agencies were located in rented premises in Sydney

40

and Melbourne. Among them were the Departments of Army, Navy and Air, Defence Co-ordination, Munitions, Labour and National Service, Transport, War Organisation and Industry, Information, Social Services and Aircraft Production. From the start, Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks was the centre of military planning and Melbourne, with its busy commercial and industrial sectors, remained the essential focus of Defence administration throughout the war. Essington Lewis, General Manager of BHP, was appointed Director of Munitions Production, with wide powers and directly responsible to the War Cabinet. The business of government was being carried out in three widely spaced cities, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, which meant incessant and exhausting travel for those involved: politicians, senior administrators and journalists covering the progress of the war. In the first eighteen months of war, the War Cabinet, established by Menzies for ‘detailed prosecution of the war’, held 36 meetings in Canberra, 14 in Sydney and 73 in Melbourne. Parliament itself met less and less frequently as the war progressed and the urgencies of decision-making turned it into an ‘executive’s war’. Especially in view of the relative isolation of Canberra, parliamentary attendance put a great strain on the small band of ministers responsible for organizing a continent at war. The challenge posed by this incessant travel was brought home to the country on a day of tragedy and drama on 8 August 1940, when a plane from Melbourne carrying three ministers of the War Cabinet (Henry Gullett, Geoffrey Street and James Fairbairn) and the Chief of General Staff Sir Brudenell White, stalled and crashed on the approach to Canberra airport, killing all aboard including other staff and the air crew; Fairbairn himself may have been at the controls of the aircraft. The Prime

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Minister only avoided being among them because he caught the Spirit of Progress from Melbourne, preferring train to air travel. For Menzies it was devastating personal blow. ‘This was a dreadful calamity, for my three colleagues were my close and loyal friends; each of them had a place not only in my cabinet but in my heart. I shall never forget that terrible hour, I felt for me the end of the world had come’. 27 Many Australians must have wondered what lay ahead for the country, some of its most senior leaders dead as it headed deeper into the uncharted territory of the war. Menzies’ own personal grief must have been compounded by the knowledge of his coalition government’s uncertain hold on power. Other, larger tragedies soon dominated the news, especially as bombs rained down night after night on London. But very few Australians had as yet been personally touched by death or bereavement from the war. The first casualty lists did not appear in the press until January 1941. Intimations of change for ordinary people came in various forms. The price of tea, Australia’s national beverage and drunk all day and with meals, was likely to go up as Britain had acquired all the tea stocks from Ceylon and India. The first hints about petrol rationing appeared, with a prohibition on the importation of ‘supergrade’ petrols. In March 1940 the Canberra Times was forced to purchase newsprint from Canada as Britain had placed an embargo on the export of newsprint. A War Savings Certificate scheme was introduced in March 1940. This was designed for the small investor with one, fiveand ten-pound denominations. They functioned in effect as a loan to government, redeemable with interest in seven years’ time. The appeal was always patriotic: ‘Hard cash is one of the

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greatest weapons in modern war.’ ‘Men are marching. Back them up with war savings certificates. Ensure the future security of your family and your country.’ The year 1940 opened with more drought. By March the Molonglo River had ceased to flow and local streams were dry. Verity’s bookshop, picture gallery and reading room offered a quiet oasis to visitors. In May and June there was a display of paintings by Sydney artist Enid Cambridge, whose quiet domestic interiors and landscapes would have won her many admirers. It was gently modernist art that spoke of a sunlit, peaceful world. Among the new attractions on the bookshelves was a detective book, The Patience of Maigret by the Belgian author, Georges Simenon. His Maigret books—scores in all—were to prove enormously popular worldwide. Verity claimed him as a ‘French Edgar Wallace’. Numerous paperback copies of the series were to find their way onto bookshop shelves during the war years and would have found a place in the homes of many Canberrans, including tired senior public servants seeking escape for a few hours from the pressures of their day-time jobs. Many of the popular magazines that filled the shelves of local newsagents were to disappear for the duration of the war. Under the government’s drive to restrict imports and save cash reserves, periodicals like Vogue, Popular Aviation, Readers Digest, and Amateur Radio, as well as many comic books, disappeared from the shelves. Australians had developed a keen appetite for American imports (though not books—an ‘imperial’ publishing agreement meant that Australia could only import books, at least first editions, published in Britain). Australia’s impressions of America were largely derived from comics and magazines and also of course from the movies. Australians between the

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wars watched an enormous number of movies, mostly American imports, and this had continued during the war. In Canberra there were weekly matinees and evening shows at the Civic and Capitol theatres and across the border in Queanbeyan at the Palace. Stars like Norma Shearer, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Carol Lombard and Spencer Tracy were household names during the war, and the glamorous, adventurous world they portrayed provided Australians with their only impression of American life, uncomplicated by any deeper understanding of the country. The movies that were popular in Canberra in the war years included Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca and Rebecca, all with their fair share of high drama, romanticism and fantasy. A small group of Canberrans preferred more high-brow gatherings. Fred Whitlam, good friend of Canberra and the bookshop, was involved in a number of these community initiatives. He was secretary of a Canberra University College discussion group, which in May 1939 was discussing ‘Literature and Social Change’ and ‘The Art of Thinking’. The next year discussion groups of eight or ten residents were invited to meet regularly and discuss a topic from material prepared by the University of Sydney. The papers were available for five shillings per course at Verity’s shop and reflected the high-minded ideals of the British Fabian Society on which they were no doubt based. The courses ‘were designed for the man in the street and provide an entertaining and beneficial way to spend winter evenings. (Courses free for the unemployed man and his wife.)’ Canberra houses of that era were not well-heated and people would face a frosty walk or bike ride home afterwards, so those who attended would have had physical stamina and a keen spirit. Topics at

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these evenings included ‘Democracy and its rivals’, ‘Man’s place in Nature’ and ‘What is Civilisation?’ The bookshop sold Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs which provided background on current affairs for those wishing for a learned perspective on the troubled world picture. Two pamphlets that probably arrived in Australia after the war began were Julian Huxley’s essay on ‘Peace in Europe’ and an assessment of Mein Kampf. Verity’s bookshop gained the rights to stock all the university texts for the college. She would advertise at the beginning of each term when these were available. The Canberra University College was run in association with the University of Melbourne to provide undergraduate degrees in Arts, Law and Commerce. The courses were mainly aimed at public servants whose education in Melbourne had been disrupted and who wished to gain further qualifications. Men and women hungry for selfimprovement after the hard years of the Depression could also enrol in courses as Warren Denning did. In later life Denning looked back at his part-time study under the ‘inspiring’ Professor Leslie Allen, lecturer in English and classics at the University College, as some of the best years of his life.28

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FOUR

On Government Service

In December 1938 the Federal government established

a

Financial

and

Economic

Committee whose task was to advise the government on the economic consequences for Australia of an outbreak of war. It became the responsibility of Treasury once war broke out. Three distinguished economists formed the committee: Professor Lyndhurst Giblin as Chair, Commonwealth Statistician Roland Wilson, and Leslie Melville from the Commonwealth Bank. Once war was declared other economists including Douglas Copland from Melbourne University and Dr H. C. Coombs from the Commonwealth Bank joined the committee, and it became the government’s chief source of advice on managing the war economy. Within a few days of the outbreak of war, Giblin was on a train to Sydney from Melbourne with Prime Minister Menzies and the War Cabinet, thence to Canberra for the Federal Budget and Premiers’ Conference. These long hours of travel set a pattern for senior bureaucrats throughout the war and added considerably to the stresses and strains of their work. 46

Faced with the prospect of constant travel to Canberra from Melbourne, Giblin and his wife, Eilean, moved to Canberra in August 1940 for the duration of the war. They were fortunate enough to be offered a six-month lease on a home in Manuka. By all accounts Lyndhurst Giblin was a remarkable man. When he came to Canberra at the age of 46 he had already lived a full life. He was born in Tasmania into a long-established and distinguished Tasmanian family; his father was the first nativeborn Premier of the colony. Giblin received a state government scholarship to study in England at University College London and Kings College Cambridge. After completing his degree in maths and science, Giblin went adventuring with a friend in North America, searching for gold in Alaska and then working as a lumberjack and hunter along the Yukon River. He later worked his passage home to Australia on a sailing ship, sailed a steamer around the Solomon Islands, tramped through the jungle with head-hunters, discovered a goldmine and contracted fever. Back in Tasmania he taught for a while at his old school and became an active member of the Australian Labor Party, elected to the state’s House of Assembly in 1913. Treasurer Joseph Lyons, later to be Prime Minister, called on Giblin’s expertise in statistics and finance to deal with the state’s long-running economic depression. A distinguished war service on the Western Front saw Giblin awarded both the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for a number of acts of valour and leadership. In 1919 Giblin was appointed as Government Statistician and advisor to the Tasmanian Government on financial and economic matters. In 1929 he took up a newly established position as Ritchie Professor of Economics at the University of

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Melbourne, where both his research and his teaching were to leave a profound impression on the young economists under his guidance. It was later said that he had a ‘meteor-like’ impact on the economic policy of the government during the war and afterwards. Laurie Fitzhardinge came to know him in Canberra; he called him ‘an extraordinary man’.29 Diplomat Richard Downing had been Giblin’s research assistant in Melbourne in 1933. ‘I loved him, not just for his teaching, but for his kindness and gentleness,’ he wrote.30 Douglas Copland, colleague of Giblin in Melbourne and later Chancellor of the ANU, wrote, ‘No-one commanded so much respect and affection in the public life of Australia as did Giblin. He was one of the greatest Australians of his generation’.31 At a time, in Warren Denning’s words, when the civic culture in Canberra was marked by ‘timidity and reticence’ and when there was much concern in social circles for status and appearance, Giblin and his wife seemed unorthodox figures. They were not interested in social gatherings and neither of them featured in the social pages of the Canberra Times, though they had their own small circle of friends who gathered for frequent dinners at their home with music and intense discussion. Their radical views on many social issues—on the role and status of women, for example—and their strong Socialist sympathies marked them out in what was still a cautious and conservative society. This included notions of dress and what was expected of senior public servants. Both Giblin and his wife were indifferent to these protocols. When dressed for public occasions Giblin wore ‘homespun trousers and jacket, improvised tie, stout boots dubbined rather than polished’32 Giblin was to be the guiding spirit for the new school of

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economists who were to prepare the Australian economy and society for the testing and uncharted time of total war, and then to shape the country for the period of reconstruction following the war. As such, they played a vital role in the story of Canberra during those years. Both Giblin and Copland took part in the ANZAAS Congress held in Canberra in January 1939. They tried, without success, to persuade their colleagues in the Economics section of the Congress to approve a resolution advocating a bigger public works program in the states to help improve the efficiency of the economy in what they both saw clearly was the coming war—even the probability, so little faced up to at the time—of total warfare. As well as being a brilliant mathematician and economist, Giblin was a keen reader of history, novels and poetry. He loved Jane Austen, Shakespeare, E. M. Forster. He supported the growth of a genuine Australian literature and in 1935 wrote a forward to Rex Ingamells’ poetry collection Gumtops, making a brave call for Australian poetry to shun the English literary / pastoral traditions which by then belonged to a vanished world, and to forge a new language of individuality and distinction suited to the young nation. Giblin was also a vocal critic of Australia’s rigid censorship laws in the 1930s, when works likely ‘to overthrow civilized government’ were restricted or forbidden entry. In 1934 Giblin spoke at a meeting in Melbourne to protest at the banning of Aldous Huxley’s works Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza. He condemned the ‘blind and dense unreason of a Minister’s intelligence’, and the general indifference of Parliamentary leaders to the importance of intelligent literature to a democracy.33 The campaign brought results, with both Huxley’s works being released for sale in Australia. The books,

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in striking publications by Chatto & Windus, were always to have a place on the shelves in the bookshop. Up to their arrival in Canberra Eilean Giblin had led a life of active intellectual engagement, having helped establish the Women’s College at the University of Melbourne and having been involved in international conferences to advance the political and economic status of women. Arriving in August 1940, Eilean was taken by the beauty of Canberra, by its position in a mountainringed landscape. During the war years spent in Canberra she came to love the place: the drama of the changing seasons, the wide upland skies, the abundant bird life. And as a gardener, she found much to intrigue and interest her in this garden city as its plantings (and her own garden) matured. As the war progressed and Eilean read accounts of the chaos and ruin being inflicted on English—and later, German cities—she reacted at times against the peaceful and orderly neighbourhood around her, with its rows of blossoming ornamental trees and its quiet night skies. She was also depressed by the social atmosphere in the young capital. Evening gatherings with neighbours or Giblin’s work colleagues generally saw women gathered on one side of the room discussing family and domestic issues while the men talked politics or other affairs on the other side of the room. There were soirées where Eilean confessed to her diary that ‘she left early’. She found a new purpose and interest in her rather solitary life (her husband working late or often away in Melbourne on government business) by taking up her earlier hobby of potting. In her search for suitable clays she ventured out in her car, often alone, or with a friend or sometimes her husband if he was free at weekends, to settlements like Captains Flat or Bungendore, to

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abandoned quarries, derelict sawmills or eroded gullies where she had been told she might find suitable clay. She was also directed to the site at Acton where the new hospital was being built and found good clays there. Later she found a good deposit of clay in her suburb, behind the Presbyterian church of St Andrew. Once she had a kiln set up and its initial problems sorted out she looked forward very much to her hours spent at the potting wheel in the garage (after disposing of household chores as soon as she could). Her growing skill and creative flair led to sales of her work in Melbourne, and she also donated pieces for fundraising activities in Canberra. Some women friends and neighbours expressed interest in learning the basic skills and she took on several pupils during the war years. Her most successful student and a woman who became her closest friend in Canberra was Yseult Bailey, the wife of Professor Kenneth Bailey who came to take up a senior position in the Attorney-General’s Department. Yseult had gone to the same school in England as Eilean and shared her artistic interests, having studied sculpture at the Slade School in London. Eilean and Yseult eventually worked side by side as potters and sold pots to raise money for Yseult’s special project, the creation of pre-schools and nursery schools in Canberra. Eileen Giblin’s story has many connections to that of the artist Rosalie Gascoigne, who was also based at Canberra during the war years while her husband, Ben Gascoigne, was engaged in the optical munitions program that had been set up at the Mt Stromlo Solar Observatory. During the war years there was an active community life for the men who were employed there and lived at Mt Stromlo with their young families. There were tennis matches, cycling competitions, chess games, regular

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summer picnics at the Cotter Reserve and Christmas gatherings. Ben Gascoigne’s colleague, Cla Allen, makes frequent mention in his diary of social visits to Ben and Rosalie and their young children, and shared baby-sitting arrangements. For all that, Rosalie Gascoigne did not feel at home on the mountain. Their house, facing south, was always dark and very cold in winter. Tied to the domesticity of a housewife, Rosalie turned to the natural world for consolation, her artistic bent first finding an outlet in creative flower arranging and making quilts. She went on solitary walks and drives around Mt Stromlo and further out to the Monaro Plains and later developed an interest in making art from the discarded materials of that austere rural landscape. In the post-war years she gained public recognition for her work and was the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1982. *** Young people coming to Canberra for a job in one of the new Commonwealth bodies—especially the School of Forestry, CSIR and the Solar Observatory—saw the town as offering interesting jobs and opportunities for friendship and outdoor adventure. Clabon Walter Allen, always known as ‘Cla’ Allen, embodied this positive approach to what the town and territory had to offer. In 1926, 22-year-old Allen, a science graduate from Perth, accepted a position at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory under its director, Dr W. G. Duffield. Allen was awarded the first research scholarship at the Observatory, where his work involved a range of studies of the sun and solar activity. He was in effect, a public servant, an employee of the Department of

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Home Affairs which was responsible for the Observatory. ‘I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I had a good job and it was an interesting place. There were so few people, we all knew each other. I didn’t feel anybody was ‘above’ or ‘beneath’ me. The ones in their twenties just got on with life here, not like the Melbourne people who were transferred without much say’.34 There was already a large telescope at Mt Stromlo, the nineinch telescope donated to the Commonwealth by James Oddie, and part of Cla’s weekly routine involved rostered hours of observations in the purpose-built concrete dome that housed the telescope. He would pass the solitary hours in the company of his mouth organ, for he was a keen, largely self-taught musician. He lived with a number of other young employees in the Bachelors Quarters on the mountain, where the young men looked after a vegetable garden, fruit trees and chickens and undertook cooking and cleaning rosters when their ‘help’ either resigned, fell sick or failed to turn up. Cla Allen was to become a close friend of both Verity Hewitt and her husband Laurie Fitzhardinge and a supporter of her bookshop venture, being an avid reader himself. (His early diaries for these years mention George Eliot’s novels, Anna Karenina and some of Dickens, read while he was engaged in a heavy program of research.) Cla met Verity before her marriage through a common interest in bushwalking and enjoyment of the bush and mountain landscapes visible beyond the settled boundaries of Canberra. These distant ranges were well known to surveyors and graziers but only a few Canberrans had ventured out there by the early 1930s because access was largely limited to bridle trails or rough bush tracks. Fairly good maps of the federal territory were available; the border and the Cotter

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River region had been thoroughly surveyed because they were so crucial to the planning of the future city. Dr Robin Tillyard, moving to Canberra from New Zealand in 1928, found the dramatic mountain ranges an inspiring sight and lost no time in identifying on a map all the named features on the Tidbinbilla and Brindabella mountain ranges. His own demanding schedule of work, which included planning and editing the first edition of the Australian National Review, left him little time to personally explore these regions before his death in 1937, but at least two of his daughters, Hope and Patience (Pat), became keen skiers and bushwalkers. Dr John Cumpston, Commonwealth Director of Health, Canberra resident and habitué of Verity’s bookshop, had a close affinity with the mountains to the west. Part of his interest was that they were the source of Canberra’s water supply. In January 1931 Cumpston and two of his sons walked virtually the whole length of the Cotter River in four days, a pioneering effort along stretches of rugged and challenging country. In the summer of 1932 the Cumpston family camped for ten days near Yaouk Gap, to the south of Canberra, and systematically climbed all the mountains within reach: Murray, Bimberi, Scabby and Sentry Box, all now part of Namadgi or Kosciuszko National Parks. Cla Allen soon found that Mt Stromlo offered a convenient starting point for exploration of the rugged land to the west. At first he spent weekends exploring the northern reaches of the Tidbinbilla Range alone or with a friend, camping overnight by a creek, fishing, and shooting rabbits. Cla, a sociable and energetic young man, gathered an informal group of friends together with a common interest in the outdoors, many of them with a scouting background. He became patrol leader of the

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local Rover Scouts, an all-male group but one where women were made welcome on hikes. The Forestry School in Westridge (now Yarralumla) was another centre for outdoor activity. Its Director, Charles Lane Poole, was keen to encourage skiing in the winter months on Mt Franklin and helped several young people start the Canberra Ski Club. Using his extensive forestry skills, he taught them how to shape wood and make their own skis. Cla Allen and a group of young people made a trip to Kosciuszko in the winter of 1932 where they stayed in a hut near the Hotel Kosciuszko and with many spills and tumbles, taught themselves to ski. In July 1933 they explored the Kiandra region on their home-made skis, venturing further and further into the remote back country in search of good snow cover. Cla Allen married Rose Smellie in 1937 and a house was built for them at the Observatory, for Cla was earning a reputation as a distinguished researcher. The work he was doing on the emergence of light from the sun’s atmosphere was ‘easily the most important work carried out at the Observatory during the 1930s’.35 Two babies followed in the next few years but his connections to the Canberra community stayed strong. He helped organize regular meetings for his Rover Scout group to discuss issues of public interest; in March 1938 they had a discussion on the rise of Hitler, with Laurie Fitzhardinge, already a keen historian, giving ‘an international perspective’ on the topic. In May that year Laurie gave a talk to the group on the rise of Fascism in Europe. Harry Mouat spoke to the group in May 1939 about his work surveying the territory border and in September that year the group met to discuss J. M. Keynes’s economic theories. Cla Allen was a man of wide interests and talents. He was in

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demand at local dances and church services to play the organ or piano; he played violin with the Canberra Philharmonic Society at concerts at the Albert Hall, and in chamber recitals with Dr and Mrs Duffield’s ensemble, which they called ‘The Stromberra Quintet’. Music-making in homes, songs around the piano or impromptu dances on verandahs, church halls or at the Cotter Kiosk, were an important part of Canberra social life in the years between the wars, though visitors looking for more urbane or sophisticated entertainments had little time for these homegrown affairs. Young women were gaining a greater degree of independence after the war, but they were generally from middle class homes. There were plenty of impoverished families in Canberra in the early 1930s, and their daughters would have been fully engaged in helping mind younger children, caring for parents in poor health or finding part-time work (mainly as ‘domestics’) to support a family whose father was unemployed. But young women like the Tillyard girls, Lane Poole’s daughter and other girls whose fathers were in the public service, joined their friends in clubs like the YWCA, enjoyed swims at the new Manuka Pool, and took part in overnight camps, ski trips to Mt Franklin and Kosciuszko, and strenuous, often adventurous bushwalks. Verity Hewitt was part of this circle. One memorable trip that she joined in October 1932, with Cla Allen as leader, involved a drive to Mt Franklin and a scramble down through thick bush and fallen logs in the dark to find a campsite near Ginini Falls. One of her friends injured her foot and had to be carried up through steep mountain scrub after Cla improvised a stretcher. After her marriage in 1936 Verity and Laurie joined Cla on a number of overnight bushwalks. They climbed Tidbinbilla Mountain one

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August weekend in 1937, returning next day through the high Alpine Ash forest with lyrebirds calling their songs and mimicry. In November that year they walked along the Tidbinbilla Range and had a picnic above Pierce’s Creek Falls. Verity found the wide landscapes around Canberra both liberating and exhilarating. Since her country childhood she had been a keen horse rider and while working as a young schoolteacher in Canberra in the early 1930s she was able to explore the region on horses borrowed from friends. Coming back to Canberra in the winter of 1934 she wrote to her future husband Laurie, ‘Oh for a sight of the Canberra wattle! How I should like to be riding this weekend against a cold bright headwind, with the green and red of Westridge behind me and the green of Stromlo and the blue of the hills ahead.’ It is no surprise to find that when Verity opened her bookshop in 1938, she stocked the shelves with local maps and books on natural history, including books on insects, birds and native plants. In 1942 the bookshop took on its first publishing venture, a small volume by Gregory Mathews entitled Birds and Books, the story of the Matthews ornithological library. Gregory Mathews was a wealthy English-born ornithologist and bibliophile who had devoted a large part of his life to the production of fourteen folio volumes of Australian birds. Towards the end of his life he decided to donate his vast library of rare books about birds to the Commonwealth, his collection of bird skins being sold to the Rothschild family. He presented the library to Australia in 1939 and spent the war years in Canberra cataloguing all the five thousand volumes of his collection, which were housed temporarily in the Parliamentary Library in Parliament House. Laurie Fitzhardinge, whose chief job at the library was accessing

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and cataloguing ‘Australiana’, worked alongside Mathews on the project. At some stage in their collaboration Mathews formed the idea of writing a memoir, a project which Laurie greeted enthusiastically. Birds and Books, the slim volume that resulted, was set up and edited by Laurie and printed by Arthur Shakespeare’s Capital Printing Press under the imprint of Verity Hewitt Bookshop. Mathews dedicated his book ‘to my friend Laurie Fitzhardinge, to whom my thanks go willingly’. In 1940 Mathews’ gift of his vast library was formally received by Kenneth Binns, the Chief Librarian of the National Library, who later wrote an eloquent preface to Mathews’ memoir. He referred to Mathews’ early days in Australia and his experiences working on cattle stations in North Queensland where he discovered the rich diversity of Australia’s bird life. These became ‘the bush companions of his mining and droving years. To him they were joyous companions whose vibrant life he intimately shared’.

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This, to the modern reader, seems an

idealized view of Mathews whose ‘favourite pastimes’ in his own words, were ‘fox hunting, grouse shooting and salmon fishing’ on wealthy estates in England. Given the times he lived in and his cultural background, these were quite orthodox pursuits. There is no doubt that Mathews was a passionate collector— of dead birds—obtained through a large network of contacts in Australia. He devoted a lifetime to examining all important bird collections in Europe and America and consulted all the collections in the British Museum in order to write his 14-volume work, which contained hand-coloured figures of every single species of bird listed. His memoir came out in a limited edition of two hundred copies, on sale at Verity Hewitt’s bookshop.

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A footnote to his story: In September 1942, Gregory Mathews and C.E.W. Bean paid a visit to the Parliamentary Library which was to house both their monumental collections, Mathews’ vast library of rare books and his 14-volume The Birds of Australia, and Bean’s 12 volumes of the Official History of the War 1914– 1918. The last volume of the official history appeared in 1943. Mathews’ work is now seen as containing ‘extremist ideas … mistrusted by established ornithologists’37 and the elaborate and beautiful volumes are probably not often consulted. By contrast, Bean’s volumes, in their original Angus & Robertson covers, ‘the colour of dried blood’,38 were to be found in many homes between the wars, where they were valued and revered (even if not widely read). These volumes still provide a standard reference for anyone seeking to understand the Great War, despite the different cultural and social framework from which we view those times. *** On 1 July 1941 at Mt Stromlo Observatory, Cla Allen recorded in his diary that ‘two German internees have arrived to do some optical work’. A dramatic story of hardship and injustice lay behind these words. The two men were refugees, just two among the many who had fled Nazi Germany before the war for the safe haven of England, where they settled and, in many cases, had a successful profession or trade. With the outbreak of war, tribunals were set up in England to classify such ‘enemy aliens’, as there was widespread public fear that Austrians and Germans living in England could become a ‘fifth column’ and in the event of

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invasion could provide aid to the enemy. ‘Enemy aliens’ were classified as ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C,’ the first two categories subject to internment or surveillance, with ‘C’ class being left entirely alone with the label ‘refugees from Nazi oppression’. In May 1940, as the threat of invasion grew and with it a growing sense of panic and unease in the public mind, all male Germans and Austrians in coastal areas were indiscriminately rounded up and interned, and a virulent anti-refugee campaign began. The government decided to transfer numbers of these ‘enemy aliens’ overseas and in June 1940 Australia was asked to accept 2700 men for the duration of the war. Many ‘C’ class men were interned at this stage including doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, artists and musicians. On 10 July 1940 the troopship Dunera embarked at Liverpool carrying these men as well as 200 Italian Fascists and 251 Nazi prisoners. They were shipped out of the country in appallingly crowded and insanitary conditions, in the care of brutal military guards who harassed the prisoners and often pilfered or destroyed their personal belongings. The commander of the troop ship, Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott, made no attempt to discipline or restrain his men and their brutal regime. When the ship reached Sydney the popular press greeted the arrivals with hostility, and there was little effort to understand that most of these unfortunate men were ‘refugees from Nazi oppression’. Scott and his men were greeted warmly and fêted as heroes in Sydney, while the Dunera inmates were taken by train to the internment camp that had been set up at Hay in far west NSW, a treeless landscape of extreme heat and dust storms. Many men had suffered badly during the voyage and been denied access to mail or news, their few precious possessions destroyed

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or stolen by the guards, and with no clear idea what the future held for them. The Australian government was adamant that it was accepting these people only for the duration of the war, and there was no suggestion that any of them would be able to find permanent residence in Australia. Some Australians, including the Society of Friends [Quakers], learning of the plight of these men, tried to help them. An interchurch committee pressed for a tribunal to investigate the many documented complaints of the internees, but the government resisted this. The British government was more responsive, for the British public had become aware of the scandal of the voyage and the ill-treatment of the internees through the publicity of the Manchester Guardian and other liberal newspapers. Julius David Layton, a Jewish barrister and stockbroker in London, was sent out to Australia in January 1941 to try to bring some resolution to the affair and arrange eventual repatriation of the men to Britain. He persuaded the Australian government to allow internees to join works projects with the militia and also to release men, if they had special skills, for work of national importance. In June 1941, Layton accompanied the new Director of the Commonwealth Observatory, Dr Richard Woolley, to the camp at Hay, where there were many men with special skills to offer as tool makers and optical instrument makers. Four men were eventually released from the camp and brought to Canberra to work at Mt Stromlo under Woolley’s personal supervision. Georg Fröhlich and Hans Meyer came in July 1941 and Ernst Fröhlich and Gustav Krestler arrived later that year. William Simpson, Commonwealth Director-General of Security, placed a four-mile limit around the district to restrict the movements of the men,

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until Layton intervened and threatened to send the men back to England unless Simpson withdrew the order, which he did. The men became an important part of the Mt Stromlo team, but Georg Fröhlich died in September 1942, his funeral taking place at Mt Stromlo. The other men stayed on after the war, contributing their skills and talents to post-war Australia. Ernst Fröhlich became a successful businessman in Canberra and an enthusiastic supporter of cultural and artistic life in the young capital. Hans Meyer, having become a trusted member of the Mt Stromlo community, had been given permission to reside at the Canberra suburb of Griffith from November 1943. He was also allowed to take holiday leave ‘at the sea coast’. In April 1945 Hans Joachim Meyer, of German nationality, born in Berlin, applied for Australian citizenship. He is lost to the records after that, but a ‘Mrs Meyer’ does feature prominently in Canberra tennis tournaments in 1949; it’s pleasant to speculate that Hans married an Australian girl and they settled into the peaceful life of the post-war Canberra suburbs. There are no records about Gustav Krestler after the years at Mt Stromlo. Cla Allen’s diary refers to ‘a farewell to Frohlich and others’ as the closing down of the optical munitions program approached in November 1944. *** The dramatic stories of the Dunera men made little impression on the general public in Australia. One Canberra woman who followed their story closely was Eilean Giblin, who had been told by friends of the plight of one of the internees, an eminent Viennese pianist, Peter Stadlen. Eilean made a long train

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journey to Hay in the midsummer heat of December 1940 to visit Stadlen, to take useful gifts and offer what help she could to get him released. Her efforts to enlist sympathy and support in the Canberra community were generally met at first with either suspicion or indifference. She approached the British High Commissioner, Sir Geoffrey Whiskard, for help but he washed his hands of the affair, saying it was a matter for the Australian government to handle. Many Canberra people, with their own sons now enlisting in the armed forces, supported the government’s harsh treatment of these ‘aliens’. All Germans were ‘Huns’ in the eyes of many Australians, who had at that stage little knowledge of the horrors that German Jews were facing. Even Robin Tillyard’s widow, Mrs Pattie Tillyard, was initially unsympathetic, warning Eilean of the dangers of ‘fifth columnists’. Later, when confronted with evidence of injustice, Mrs Tillyard became more receptive and offered to arrange collections of clothing to be sent to the camp at Hay. Peter Stadlen was eventually repatriated to England in November 1941 and within weeks of his return he was performing in public in London, playing a program of Schubert’s music before a large audience at the National Gallery. He became a British citizen in 1946 and resumed his international concert career. During his internment at Hay, Peter Stadlen formed a choir of 75 male voices and arranged a concert performance of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt, as well as performances of Mozart’s C Major Mass and the Prisoners’ Chorus from Fidelio. There were also performances of Schubert lieder and sections of Mozart’s Requiem. Stadlen had managed to bring piano transcripts with him on the voyage and was able to transcribe orchestral parts by hoarding precious toilet paper.

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All this enterprise had a heartening effect on morale among the men; he was ‘a constant source of cheer’ to fellow prisoners.39 More than that, these acts affirmed the survival of the men’s creative and intellectual life, when internment and a hostile political climate had tried to stifle it. Berthold Wolpe, of German/Jewish parentage, was a wellknown graphic designer in London where he had lived for five years before being classified as an ‘enemy alien’ and deported to Australia on the Dunera. He was allowed to return to London in 1941 and immediately found work with the publishers Faber & Faber. His elegant and striking typographical designs, using his own ‘Albertus’ typeface, were to be a feature of Faber books from then on for the next 34 years and were to give Faber a look as distinctive and recognizable as Allen Lane’s Penguin books. Verity Hewitt was proud to stock Faber authors, for by the late 1930s the firm was truly a ‘literary powerhouse’.40 T. S. Eliot was one of the firm’s directors and was influential in the decision to publish a new and radical generation of poets, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. All their collections were on sale at the bookshop during the war. The Faber catalogue for Louis MacNeice’s Poems (published 1935) is eloquent and unlikely to be bettered by modern catalogue copy: ‘The most original Irish poet of his generation … intensely serious without political enthusiasm, his work is intelligible but unpopular, and has the pride and modesty of things that endure’.41 Other authors in the Faber list included Robert Graves, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake appeared on the bookshop shelves in 1939. Faber would have liked to publish Joyce’s Ulysses but rightly feared prosecution (and possible jail

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for the director, Geoffrey Faber) which would have spelt financial disaster for the publishing firm. Faber published T. S. Eliot’s own work, including Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, his first Collected Poems 1909–1925, and each of the four poems that was to make up the Four Quartets. These were on sale in the bookshop and appeared in Verity’s regular advertisement in the Canberra Times. The last poem in the quartet, Little Gidding, was published in the autumn of 1942. Like other Londoners, the staff of Faber had been on fire duty during the months of the Blitz in 1940 and ’41, on a roster to watch at night for incendiary bombs from the roof of their headquarters in Russell Square. Geoffrey Faber and Eliot often shared these cold and long night watches, from where they watched raids over the city and a rain of destruction falling among a sea of fire and clouds of smoke. For all the religious themes that permeate the Quartets, it is the sense of those long hours on fire duty that give some of the most vivid meanings to Little Gidding: The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror… And further: In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Has passed below the horizon of his homing…

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In 1943 Canberra readers could buy a copy of Little Gidding, a ‘war economy issue’ on poor paper, its spine sewn with string, but still featuring Berthold Wolpe’s strong and elegant typeface, the book a proud survivor of a city and culture under siege.

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FIVE

The War Comes Closer

By mid-1940 it was clear that supplies of military equipment from Britain could no longer be guaranteed. Australia would need to turn to local production for many items that had previously been obtained from Britain. The newly formed Department of Munitions had the task of ensuring that the armed forces had whatever equipment and logistic support they needed. Laurence Hartnett, manager of General Motors Holden, became Director of Ordnance Production within the department, and soon discovered one urgent need: telescopic sights for anti-tank guns, then being manufactured in Australia. Without such sights the guns would be useless, but the manufacture of optical glass was a highly specialized science and such an industry did not exist in Australia. The Solar Observatory at Mt Stromlo was one of twelve government agencies asked to research and design optical instruments for use on artillery pieces and anti-tank guns. By this stage the observatory’s director was the respected South African astronomer Dr Richard Woolley. 67

In October 1940 Cla Allen was in South Africa to observe a total solar eclipse. He returned to the observatory to find the place dramatically changed; under the urgent demands of war, it was to be devoted solely to optical work and its name changed to the ‘Commonwealth Observatory’. His own research projects and those of Richard Woolley were put aside and an intensive program of optical research was adopted, including the making of glass lenses. By 1942 the observatory had been transformed into an optical munitions factory, where bomb and gun sights and other optical equipment for the armed forces were manufactured. At its peak the factory employed up to 70 people who travelled out daily to Mt Stromlo from Canberra on a special bus. These included women who were employed in a variety of technical roles. Cla Allen was one of a formidable team of physicists, research assistants and optical technicians who were involved in this work, learning to make lenses for a range of instruments. Busy at the best of times, Cla’s life now included family and domestic responsibilities, helping to look after two growing boys whose adventurous spirit often got them into trouble on their mountain-side home. One day Cla and Rose found their toddler Clabon, ‘investigating the mountain’, after he wandered off from the house down to the Oddie telescope. At another time all available Stromlo staff were needed to safely extricate the boy from a drain where his leg was trapped. Throughout the war years Cla acted as guide for large numbers of visitors to the observatory. These included visitors to the ANZAAS conference every summer, numbers of Air Force men stationed in Canberra, politicians, scientists and dignitaries.

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The Governor General Lord Gowrie and Charles Lane Poole, Director of Forestry, brought some guests out in November 1941 shortly after the official opening of the War Memorial on Remembrance Day. There were also regular visits from the Optical Munitions Panel, a committee of Australian physicists established to advise the government on war-related scientific matters. The panel met every two months in Melbourne but also travelled widely to visit the firms and institutions who were engaged in the optical munitions program. Cla Allen continued to take an active interest in the proceedings of the Canberra University Association (set up to plan a future university for the new capital city). He also regularly attended the meetings of the Royal Society of Canberra, a monthly gathering of like-minded people to hear talks by guest speakers on a range of social and political issues. Cla’s diary over the war years records such speakers as Dr Dickson (head of Plant Science at CSIR) on ‘Science and Superstition’, Sir Robert Garran on ‘Australia and America’, and Dr John Cumpston on ‘The Medical Profession and the Nation’. Another local interest group, founded by Fred Whitlam, was the Men’s League. In May 1940, Whitlam gave ‘a thought-provoking address on war, and the need for a moral settlement after it had finished’. And Lyndhurst Giblin, Copland’s ‘great Australian’, addressed the group in October 1941 on ‘National Credit’. Giblin made an impression on Cla, who later recorded having ‘an interesting yarn’ with him at a gathering in November that year. The bookshop provided literature to provoke or nourish intellectual enquiry for those who wanted it. Most books and journals were imported from England and so had a strong

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British or European focus; many of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club publications found a home on the shelves. In February 1939 Cla Allen wrote that he had just read a Gollancz book, John Strachey’s Why you should be a Socialist which was on sale at the shop throughout the war years. Cla must have a been a regular visitor and customer at the bookshop because there were weekly shopping trips into Canberra from Mt Stromlo, though this became a challenge to organize once petrol rationing was introduced. Not all the purchases were highbrow. Cla loved ‘thrillers’ and like John Cumpston, found they helped him relax after a difficult day at work. Agatha Christie’s books were great favourites and often kept him company on broken nights of sleep when watching over sick children. He spent some hours ‘reading in Verity Hewitt’s bookshop’ while waiting to visit his wife in hospital where she was staying after the birth of her first child. *** During the war years the thoughts of many Australians turned increasingly to England and its ordeals. So many had close family connections to the place or had in fact been born and lived there. Eilean Giblin, who was born and grew up in London before emigrating as a war bride to Australia, recorded her anguish at the toll of lives lost in the Blitz: …one’s eyes fall on some news [such as the bombing of Coventry] and one says to oneself, ‘These things don’t happen, they are incredible’, and then comes realization that they are happening, and not to people of a different nation, but to one’s own kith and kin.42

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Books were being written that reflected that attachment. One best seller was The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross, published by Hodder & Stoughton in November 1939 as a fund-raising effort for the Red Cross and on sale in Canberra in January 1940. Its contents were contributed by 50 British authors, many of them household names throughout the English-speaking world: A. A. Milne, Georgette Heyer, Gracie Fields, Walter de la Mer, Daphne du Maurier. An unexpected inclusion was T. S. Eliot—cerebral, ‘difficult’ poet, post-war intellectual—who contributed two children’s poems that were later to feature in Faber & Faber’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (the basis of the Cats musical of the 1980s, whose success rescued the publishers from threatened insolvency.) Another contributor to the collection was the author E. M. Delafield, (her real name was Esmée Dashwood) whose series of books beginning with A Provincial Lady were enormously popular in England and the Dominions. In a series of amusing episodes, they portrayed an upper-middle-class English lady coping with life and raising a family in a Devon village. A Provincial Lady in Wartime was written, it is said, at the suggestion of Harold Macmillan, Conservative MP and junior partner in Macmillan & Co. He was a great fan of her books and requested one that was set in England at the start of the war, to provide people with some light-hearted entertainment. It was published in 1939 during the ‘phoney war’. Verity Hewitt was advertising it for sale in the bookshop in August 1940, when such escapist comedy provided a distraction from news of German advances in Europe and the threat facing England. Another Red Cross fundraiser was The Story of the Red Cross, a book written and compiled by the artist Darryl Lindsay

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and his wife Joan Lindsay (more-well known for her book Picnic at Hanging Rock.) Verity offered to handle sales of the book in Canberra from January 1942, with all profits going to the Red Cross. In October 1940 the amended scheme for the rationing of petrol supplies began, after many delays to the scheme through the lobbying of the motor trade who did their best to obstruct the plan. Even before Japan had entered the war it was clear that Australia’s supplies of imported fuel were threatened by the lack of shipping space and the need to hold on to foreign reserves. The technology of producing alternative fuels was well known in the 1930s and taken up with renewed interest when war broke out. For example, in August 1940, a shale oil plant was opened at Glen Davis in the Lithgow area. It was established by private interests but in 1942 the government took over the company as its oil production was a vital part of the war effort. In August 1941, Professor Eric Ashley, Professor of Botany at the University of Sydney, gave a talk to the Royal Society in Canberra about the possibility of producing ‘power alcohol’ by distilling alcohol from sugar cane and wheat. (Such fuel was already widely used in North Queensland with the ready availability of sugar cane but elsewhere in Australia it was not much used). ‘Producer gas’ used either charcoal, coal or even wood or sawdust to produce a combustible gas for use in the engine. Such technology was cumbersome and potentially dangerous (not least in Australia’s hot dry summers where sparks could ignite grass fires) but a country reliant on imported fuel for transport, agriculture and industry was ready to experiment. While private cars were often taken off the roads for the duration of the war, many enterprising individuals were keen to try their own form of

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fuel production. In August 1940 a very timely book appeared on the shelves of the bookshop: Producer Gas for Motor Vehicles, by J. & M. Cash, published by Angus & Robertson. The book was a detailed manual on how to build and install a producer gas unit on the back of a car. The book must have seen strong demand, especially as war came to the Pacific, as a second edition appeared in April 1942. (It has since appeared in a facsimile edition in America, showing the quality of the book.) During the war hundreds of government-controlled charcoal kilns were set up to produce fuel for producer gas units. In NSW, the NRMA equipped its country inspector with a charcoal gas unit so he could travel country roads on a minimum of petrol to service country people’s needs. In Canberra the public buses were to be powered by producer gas and in December 1941 units were fitted to the trucks being used for public works and also on ministerial cars. In early 1942 the Canberra Technical College ran a series of lectures and practical classes on driving heavy vehicles fuelled by gas producers. In a sign of the changes war was bringing to Australian life, the classes were open to both men and women and in fact many who passed the course were young women who were keen to be actively involved in the war effort. One of the Tillyard daughters, Pat, was an early graduate from the course. The manufacturers of bicycles did a very good trade, with cheerful advertisements in the Canberra Times promoting the health-giving benefits of cycling. ‘We don’t miss the car a bit,’ confesses a housewife whose family all ride Malvern Star bikes. Another large advertisement, appearing on 19 October 1940, just after the introduction of rationing, shows a doctor advising his overweight, middle-aged patient, ‘Petrol-rationing will be a

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God-send to you, and provide you with the mild exercise you need.’ Eilean Giblin couldn’t refrain from noting in her diary some chatter among women she had overheard: they were having to alter the buttons on their husbands’ trousers since they’d been cycling to work! *** During the first eighteen months of the war the Allied armies had suffered one severe defeat after another. In May 1940 the Germans had swept into Belgium and the Netherlands and a month later France fell and Italy entered the war, keen to expand Italian colonies in North Africa. Egypt, and Britain’s gateway to the East, the Suez Canal, were now threatened. In September 1940 Australia’s 6th Division were moved from their training in Palestine to Cairo, in preparation for the coming desert campaign where they would join British and Dominion troops in attacking Italian posts and pushing them west across the Libyan desert, the area known as Cyrenaica. By 12 December, Italian forces were being bundled out of Egypt by a much smaller British force and their allies. They continued to push west with the Italians retreating before them until they reached Bardia, a small seaport in Cyrenaica on the Mediterranean coast, where the Italians dug in. The British chose the 6th Division for the drive against Bardia, which took place on 3 January 1941. Within a day the enemy’s defences had collapsed. The 6th Division, this ‘volunteer army’ and its commanding officer, Iven Mackay, ‘… were now the toast of the free world’.43 In Australia, flags were to be flown for the victory on all Commonwealth offices.

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One after another, strategic points along the Libyan coast fell to the Allies: Tobruk, Dernia, Benghazi. The Italians were in full retreat. But Iven Mackay had already sounded a note of clear foreboding in the midst of these victories. ‘… the Germans cannot possibly keep out of Africa now’.44 His words were prophetic. By early March, General Erwin Rommel already had in Tripoli his highly trained and hand-picked Afrika Korps as well as large motorised and armoured divisions and great armadas of fighter planes. There was to be a determined German offensive to take over Egypt and the Suez Canal. Tobruk, with its port facilities and water distillation plants made it a necessary base for any army planning to advance east into Egypt. From Tripoli, Rommel’s divisions pushed the Allied troops back through Benghazi and other towns they had captured only weeks before, and troops withdrew in planned stages to Tobruk. In March the newly arrived 9th Division relieved the 6th who were sent to Greece at Churchill’s insistence, to help its defence against the coming German invasion. The 9th was ordered to dig in and hold Tobruk with the support of British tanks and artillery. The 18th Brigade of the 7th Division were also part of this defensive operation. Tobruk was besieged for eight months, from April to November 1941. General Archibald Wavell, Commander in Chief in the Middle East, said the town must be held at all costs until his Eighth Army had been assembled on the Egyptian frontier for the planned invasion of Cyrenaica. The 9th Division was newly formed and inexperienced, and these months were to be its trial by fire. These men, trapped in a besieged garrison surrounded by the vast resources of Rommel’s army, became the ‘Rats of Tobruk’, Berlin Radio’s demeaning sobriquet that they were to wear as a badge of pride.

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Although holding Tobruk was a defensive task it was held by offensive tactics from the very first day of the siege. The 9th Division commander, Leslie Morshead, ordered active daily patrolling of no-man’s-land, the continuing strengthening of defences in the face of enemy shelling and bombing, and regular raiding of enemy posts. On the night of 30 April, Verity’s brother, Corporal G. V. Hewitt, led a patrol of six men from his battalion into no-man’s-land. They ambushed and put to flight about 50 Germans heading towards the defensive wire. As they fled, the Germans discarded equipment and ammunition, and one of the prisoners later revealed that they were moving up to prepare the way for tanks to advance. The next day the Germans captured 15 posts on a three-mile front, including the only hilltop in the area, and forced a breach in the defences known as a ‘Salient’. They held this area for the rest of the siege and from then on kept up a relentless program of shelling and bombardment of the perimeter of the Fortress (as Tobruk came to be known) until the siege was finally lifted in December 1941. Australians read of these events with close interest and for many of them, including Verity Hewitt and her family, there was a painful sense of involvement in these desolate places in North Africa. Eilean Giblin recorded in her diary, ‘… mothers of sons in the fighting forces rush about and fill their days with committee meetings and bridge parties and service at canteens, in the attempt to stifle the anxiety gnawing at the core of their existence’.45 Verity had large-scale maps on sale at the bookshop which allowed people to identify locations: the once-elegant Italian-built port of Tobruk, now reduced to a battered shell, its harbour strewn with wrecks; the coastline from Mersa Matruh near Alexandria, from which small boats and British

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and Australian naval ships ran the gauntlet of German fighter planes, taking supplies, mail and ammunition to the garrison; Bardia, scene of the 6th Division’s triumph but now in German hands; Tripoli, the base from which Rommel began his advance east. Pamphlets on the Middle East campaign were also on sale at the bookshop, supplying an informative context and background for families at home hungry for further details about this inhospitable region where their men were fighting. In May 1942 Verity sent her father a copy of Active Service: with Australians in the Middle East, published by the Military History and Information Section, a unit attached to the 9th Division. Her father was glad to receive it but noted that ‘there was not much information in it’ as wartime censorship was operating. Published in May 1941 and intended for distribution on the home front, part of the book’s role would have been to boost Australian morale and patriotic spirit at a low point in the fortunes of the Allies. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, Wind, Sand and Stars, the account of his adventurous life and flights over desert regions, was published in an English translation late in 1939. Readers Union subscribers were able to collect a beautiful hard-cover edition of the book from Verity’s shop in January 1941. The author’s account of his dramatic rescue from a plane crash in the desert between Benghazi and Cairo gained special resonance in the anxious months of early 1941 as Australians traced their own connections to the region. Geoff Hewitt met his death at Tobruk, on 25 June 1941, one of the men of the 2/13th Battalion to be killed by heavy mortar fire during the period of active patrolling of no-man’s-land. His death destroyed the hopes his parents had held that he would

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one day be able to take over the running of their small farm near Glen Innes in the New England region. The year brought .

another grievous loss. In late November Verity heard that her New Zealand friend, Lacey Lee, had been wounded in an attack on Rommel’s forces to the east of Tobruk. He died of his injuries in January 1942, bringing to an end an intense and unorthodox friendship, though Verity’s grief over his death was to last for a lifetime. *** Other battlegrounds were in the news in the northern spring of 1941, as German forces invaded northern Greece. This was a land steeped in heroic story and myth; even Australian schoolboys had heard of Mt Olympus and the pass at Thermopylae. Will Durant’s book, The Life of Greece, one of his Pulitzer Prize series on ancient civilization, was displayed on the bookshop shelves at this time. Verity called it ‘a book for the present time’. But there were to be no heroic narratives in the story of the Allied defeat in Greece, in which Australia’s 6th Division was involved at great cost in men killed, wounded and taken prisoner. As the German forces swept down through north-eastern Greece in April 1941, they swiftly overwhelmed the defence. In the confusion and chaos of retreat, many Australians lost touch with their officers and units and made their way singly or in small groups towards the coast, joining a stream of Greek refugees fleeing their farms and villages on bike, on foot or with possessions loaded on a cart and donkey. The Allied forces were evacuated from the mainland on British and Australian warships and British transports. Of those taken to Crete, many became

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prisoners of war after the airborne invasion of the island in May. Several small isolated groups and individuals were left behind on both the mainland and in Crete, either to be captured or hidden and eventually helped to escape the country by courageous local people. The occupation of Greece was a tragedy for the civilian population, its industry, agriculture and forests destroyed, its people subject to deportation, starvation or cruel reprisals for helping Allied soldiers. The small community of Greeks in Canberra were in mourning for their homeland. Verity’s diary of 7 April 1941, as German forces prepared to cross the frontier, has some detailed notes she had made about Greece’s turbulent and tragic history, the country under Turkish occupation for centuries before gaining its independence and now once again to fall under foreign rule. That month the greengrocers at the small shopping centre of Kingston proudly hung the Greek flag and the Union Jack on their wall. Eilean Giblin talked to a young woman behind the counter on 29 April, as news came of the continuing retreat of the Allies and the loss of Athens, where the swastika flag now waved above the Acropolis. ‘“Yes it is terrible, terrible”,’ she said, her blank face masking tears’.46 *** On Remembrance Day in 1941 the Governor General Lord Gowrie officially opened the Australian War Memorial. A man with a long and courageous military record, he spoke about the destructive power and futility of the Great War. ‘It caused universal destruction, desolation and distress without bringing any compensating advantage to any one of the belligerents.

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It was a war which settled nothing; it was a war in which all concerned came out losers.’47 He then expressed heartfelt hope that the present war might prove to be worth the enormous sacrifices involved. Gowrie’s words must have reached into many a grieving or anxious heart in the gathered crowd. Some, embittered by their loss, might have seen the event as one more empty display of officialdom. Verity was among that number. In a letter to Lacey Lee she wrote ‘I hate Armistice Days and Anzac Days—national griefs too soon become pomposities’. The war exacted its own toll on Lord Gowrie and his wife. Their son, Patrick, was killed on active service in North Africa, in a commando raid on Tripoli on 24 December 1942, as the long struggle against Rommel’s forces was finally turning in favour of the Allies. A book of Patrick’s poetry, The Happy Warrior, was published in 1943 by Angus & Robertson, with a forward by Lady Gowrie, and was for sale in the bookshop in October that year. The writing is steeped in the romanticism of A. E. Housman and Rupert Brooke, poems where chivalry, high adventure and the glad embrace of death all play their part. Perhaps they offered comfort and inspiration to the families who read the collection, which Patrick’s parents and widow had decided to share ‘with those thousands of wives and parents who grieve’.

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SI X

To the North

When Pearl Harbour was attacked on 7 December 1941 and Japan began its swift progress through South-East Asia, the deep and urgent reality of war came home to many Australians for the first time. The surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942 sent the 8th Division—about 17000 servicemen - into three years of captivity and in one stroke removed from active service almost a quarter of the Australian expeditionary forces. The main strength of the AIF was tied up overseas, fighting Allied battles in North Africa and the Middle East. The home forces, the militia, were limited in training and poorly equipped, and Australia’s own air and sea defences were inadequate to meet any threat of invasion. The 6th and 7th Divisions were to be brought home. They sailed from Egypt in several different convoys from 30 January to April 1942. (The 9th Division were still fighting in the Middle East and did not come home until the beginning of 1943.) As the British objective was to hold Burma at all costs, Roosevelt and Churchill decided on the transfer of the 7th Division for 81

the immediate support of British troops in Burma. Australia’s Advisory War Council had initially agreed in January to a transfer of the 6th and 7th Divisions to defend the Netherlands East Indies, but then the fall of Singapore, the evacuation of the government of the East Indies, the Japanese landings in New Guinea and the beginning of air raids on the Australian mainland brought different and urgent priorities for the country. Intense diplomatic pressure was put on Curtin to accede to the diversion of troops to Burma. Churchill warned Curtin that ‘very grave effects in Washington would follow if Australia refused to let its troops close the gap that they are actually passing…’48 Roosevelt, assuring Curtin that the U.S would protect Australia’s flank, urged him to order the 7th Division to move with all speed to support British forces in Burma. Prime Minister Curtin, in correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, made clear his demands: ‘We have the right to expect the AIF to be returned as soon as possible to Australia, in view of the services we have rendered in the Middle East.’49 He feared Australian troops being embroiled in another costly defeat, with the loss of forces in Greece and Crete fresh in his mind, and Australia left defenceless in the face of the Japanese advance. Curtin’s firm stand against Churchill and against what he saw as British neglect of Australia’s interests, is seen as a turning point in Australia’s international relations and a recognition of a changing world order. His words, in an article on 27 December in the Melbourne Herald, are still widely quoted: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

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Those who were close to Curtin saw the toll these heavy decisions took on their leader. There are many stories of Curtin’s sleepless vigils in the gardens of the Lodge as he waited for news of the safe return of the troops, thousands of men packed into ships crossing the hostile waters of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps, like many mythic stories, these have grown in the telling. But these were unprecedented times for Australia and for its leader. Curtin remains the only Prime Minister to have led the country through the threat of invasion and the contemplation of its devastation by a foreign army (even if later historians proved that Japan had not planned to occupy Australia). In such times powerful stories are created, and Curtin became the focus of many of them. Alan Reid, one of a select group of journalists who followed Curtin’s progress throughout the war and travelled with him, recalled an overnight train trip to Brisbane. Waking up during the night, he bumped into Curtin in the corridor, staring into the blackness through the train window. He’d had a nightmare: a convoy of Australian ships ablaze and men jumping into a burning sea. ‘If anything happens it will be because of my decision,’ he muttered.50 The troops made it home safely. The first troopship, Mt Vernon, arrived in early March 1942 and other ships soon followed, but a high proportion of the AIF remained elsewhere. Some troops of the 7th Division travelled to Java where they were captured. Two of the brigades of the 6th Division remained in Ceylon with the British naval build up and stayed there until July 1942. All returning troops were given home leave; the men of the 7 Division, arriving at a time of crisis in the country, only had th

a week’s leave before heading for jungle training in southern Queensland in May 1942. The 6th Division arrived in various

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stages between April and July 1942. After three years’ service overseas they had two weeks’ leave and then left immediately for Papua/New Guinea. The 9th Division returned in February 1943 and after three weeks’ leave were reorganized in Queensland for jungle warfare. Men were welcomed home by families for a brief time, then there were more leave-takings for a war much nearer home, its threat now palpable. Observers commented on the nonchalance of these battle-hardened troops, observations which served to some extent to calm the apprehensions of families and the general community. There were also new accents and uniforms evident in the cities. By April 1942, 60,000 American troops and hundreds of aircraft were already in Australia or en route to the country as part of America’s plan to make Australia its base in the south-west Pacific. In March 1942 President Roosevelt informed Curtin that General Douglas Macarthur had arrived from the Philippines to assume command of all Allied forces in the region. Macarthur was initially based in Melbourne, from where he issued his first major directive on 18 April, assuming command of all land, sea and air forces in the newly defined South-West Pacific Area, which included Australia and all its territories, the Solomon Islands, Timor, Ambon and New Guinea, and the sea to the south and west of Australia. There were no American bases or military installations anywhere near Canberra, so the capital never experienced that strange mix of curiosity, excitement and resentment that other cities’ residents were to experience as they saw these troops monopolise local accommodation, spend money lavishly and attract the attention of local women with their smart uniform,

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confident manners and easy charm. There were certainly Americans in uniform in Canberra but they would not have been regular troops. Their officers would have had many occasions to visit the national capital on war business, including making arrangements for General Macarthur’s Parliamentary dinner in April 1942, and for Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit in September 1943. Other Americans, medical men and nurses, occupied the new Canberra hospital made available to receive U.S troops wounded in the Pacific. The hospital functioned as an American base from September 1942 until the end of the year, when all medical facilities moved north to be nearer the Pacific theatre of war. During that time, no military patients were treated but a number of the doctors offered their services as visiting medical officers at the old hospital where local people were treated. At the end of 1944 another American unit turned up; the 7 Fleet, serving under Macarthur in the South-West Pacific th

Area, sent down a radio training school, whose men were put into Acton Guest House. The Americans entered a team in the local rugby competition. One schoolboy, Stan Goodhew, remembers Americans speeding round the place in six-wheel drive Studebaker trucks.51 The bookshop was certainly known to some Americans. There were not a great range of places to pass a few empty hours in this town, which must have seemed such a quiet backwater to men from New York, Washington or Chicago. Verity Hewitt mentions a visit from the ‘well read’ nephew of the Chicago novelist Theodore Dreiser, and commented on other ‘American visitors’ during those years. The men shopped for souvenirs: books, cards and paintings featuring Australia. (A Melbourne bookseller remembered that American troops there ‘bought

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nearly all our Australiana’.)52 If they were hoping to catch up with the latest American journals they would have been disappointed. There was no direct air link between Australia and the United States so American newspapers and periodicals were hopelessly out of date by the time they reached newsagents, shops and libraries. And there would not have been many American books on the shelves of Verity’s shop. Australians, even welleducated ones, had not had much contact with contemporary American literature. In schools and universities there was still a strong emphasis on Britain and the Empire and very little study of American history. A few books coming in were beginning to break the mould. Verity was proud to stock and advertise Richard Wright’s ground-breaking story of a black American, Native Son, in September 1940, only a few months after it appeared in its first American edition. A few other American books widely read by Australians at the time were Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Verity Hewitt recalled the visits of many ‘lonely Australian soldiers’ to her shop during their brief leave. Canberra’s winter climate was bleak, especially for men returning from service in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and there were few of the pleasures and dynamics of city life: no night clubs, big sporting events or the coast and surf that Sydney and other cities offered. Verity had hoped to get permission to open the shop on weekends as a rest hut, but she was not allowed to vary the lease in this way, probably because such facilities had already been set up. A rest hut for the armed services opened in Canberra at Manuka in March 1941, with Lady Gowrie one of the driving

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forces behind its creation. In fact, the club became known as the Lady Gowrie Services Club and stayed open throughout the war. Hundreds of women from Canberra and the region volunteered there and helped ensure its success. It was a place where service personnel from any units or nationalities visiting or stationed in Canberra, could come for a meal, enjoy concerts or a game of billiards, take part in a twice-weekly dance or catch up on reading newspapers or journals. One of the Tillyard girls (who became Pat Wardle) was in charge of all the volunteers at the club. She said the American visitors were not always welcome as their expectations were different and often extravagant: one officer ordered six eggs with his meal! Some AIF men from interstate chose to spend their short leave in Canberra, making a tour of the national capital and making the services club their headquarters between bus trips round the city. Those who came for the Christmas period of 1942 were disappointed to find that public places of interest— the War Memorial, the Institute of Anatomy and Parliament House—were closed over the Christmas period. By 1942 there were a variety of service personnel who made use of the club. A bomber squadron of Dutch pilots was stationed in Canberra at Fairbairn air base from April to December 1942. The squadron’s air crew were mainly men who had been evacuated from the Netherlands East Indies after the Japanese invasion. Most of the ground crew were Australian but the RAAF also provided aircrew for the squadron which was under RAAF operational command. The squadron’s B25 bombers, obtained from the United States through the Lend Lease program, were a familiar sight over Canberra during those months of 1942, as they headed over to patrol the east coast on

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submarine watch. Stan Goodhew and his schoolboy friends had many memories of the daredevil antics that the Dutch pilots got up to, including skimming low and ‘victory rolls’ over the quiet suburban streets and shops of Canberra.53 The squadron was sent north to Darwin for other surveillance and combat duties in 1943. The Dutch crew and their wives were quartered in a Queanbeyan hotel. There were no houses to spare; the acute housing shortage lasted throughout the war years. The Netherlands Embassy also opened in Canberra in 1942. Gough Whitlam, with only one year left of his legal studies, registered for service with the air force the day after Pearl Harbour. He was called up in June 1942 and after a period of training was commissioned as a pilot officer and navigator with the RAAF’s Squadron 13, logging hundreds of hours flying missions over Northern Australia, Timor and the Netherlands East Indies for the rest of the war. For some months in 1943 his squadron was based at Fairbairn and he visited the Services club, though his crew members were more attracted to the renowned home cooking of the elder Mrs Whitlam at Gough’s family home in Forrest. Gough’s father, Fred Whitlam was to play an influential role in the development of post-war reconstruction policies in the coming years. Other visitors to the service club included the naval crew— men and women—based at the Harman and Belconnen radio stations, and also local air force trainees living in primitive huts in the yards near Kingston railway station. They attended technical classes at night in the Telopea Park School. *** 88

In general, the physical reality of the war passed Canberra by. There were no trains heading north with guns, no convoys rumbling though the streets, no searchlights tracking the night sky, no busy railway stations crowded with troops coming and going. Certainly the building of slit trenches, sand bagging of windows and walls, the blackout (or more accurately, the ‘brownout’) at night and air raid duties were a routine part of life in the capital in the crisis year of 1942. The official history dryly notes that ‘typists were rattling away in Government departments’ copying important documents in the event of the government having to move further south.54 Cla Allen wrote in his diary in March 1942 that the Chief Librarian, Kenneth Binns, and his colleague Laurie Fitzhardinge came up to Mt Stromlo to deposit a selection of early Australian documents for safekeeping in the steel and concrete fastness of the Reynolds dome. But all these urgent measures had an air of unreality about them after the threat of invasion receded and the war effort moved further north. The main impact of the war in Canberra was felt when rationing and curtailing of essential goods and services were introduced, but even this caused general inconvenience rather than hardship. Prime Minister Curtin had made quite clear, shortly after Japan entered the war, that the role of government was about to change: ‘The organization of a non-military people for the purpose of complete war must necessarily effect a revolution in the lives of the people’.55 This was indeed revolutionary to a people who had always resented government interference in their domestic lives or social arrangements, but on the whole the restrictions were accepted with little complaint at this stage of

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the war. From the end of 1941 transport services were curtailed, including summer holiday road and rail services. Shop window displays, advertising signs, night tennis and greyhound racing were all prohibited. There was to be no late-night shopping from December 1941 and a regulation prohibited production of nonessential commodities. The petrol ration, introduced in October 1940, was cut by a further 20% in December 1942. In March 1942 the navy was given power to immobilize all small craft which might be commandeered by an invading force. The shortage of petrol, rubber and spare parts meant there were very few private vehicles on the road. Canberra in 1942 reminded a senior public servant of his posting in New Delhi, the roads crowded with cyclists going to work or about their daily business. Verity Hewitt acquired a horse, ‘Bonnie’ and a sulky which she kept in the paddock near their home. They came in handy for social outings; Cla Allen wrote that Verity’s horse and trap were the first to arrive at the annual Mt Stromlo Christmas party in December 1941. Laurie also had a horse which he regularly rode from Reid to his work at the library. A young journalist, Paul Hasluck, seconded to the Department of External Affairs in 1941, rode his horse ‘Edythe’ to the office at West Block, tethering her on the nearby hillside. One day someone ‘borrowed’ the horse and it proved impossible to replace for a long time. Local schoolboys discovered their bikes were always at risk from local airmen seeking transport. Secretary of the Treasury, Roland Wilson, built himself a battery-powered electric car to get to work. ***

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In July 1941, Verity took on another venture connected with the bookshop, going into the library lending business. Mrs Mary Cox, who had run a library from her own home in Ainslie since 1927 approached Verity, persuading her that they should join forces and relocate the library to the bookshop. Mrs Cox’s taste ran mainly to romance, crime and westerns and these continued to be popular loans (The Saint books by Leslie Charteris were always in demand) but Verity added Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which were also on sale in the shop. Other additions to the library included Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, the first book in her powerful trilogy of novels about colonial Australia, and T. H. White’s The Ill-Made Knight, part of the series The Once and Future King. As well as differing in their library choices, the two women may have had clashes of personality or temperament. By June 1942, Verity’s mother-in-law was writing, ‘you will be rather glad to get rid of Mrs Cox won’t you’. By that stage Verity was running the library service as an extension of the bookshop and was making her own decisions about how it fitted into the larger business. From March 1942 Verity arranged to deliver and collect library books every Tuesday for subscribers who lived on the south side of the river and who had no transport. Her horse and sulky became a common sight around Canberra at that time. By late 1942 she had two small boys in tow: Charles, born May 1941 and Geoffrey, born September 1942. Her mother’s letters expressed anxiety about how she was coping physically and emotionally with so much on her plate, and suggested she try to find a manager for the shop or consider selling it. Neither of

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these eventuated, though by October 1942 Verity tried to reduce her workload at the shop, as is clear from an advertisement in the Canberra Times. She explained that she would be reducing the book and picture section of the shop, not replacing existing stock once it sold and from then on only ordering books written in Australia or available directly from publishers’ stocks. Before that she had always made a point of helping customers track down and order unusual or hard-to-get books. However, by November that year new arrangements had been put in place: she had moved the lending library out of the main bookshop into the former picture gallery. (Perhaps there were altercations between bookshop and library users? Who knows? Booksellers have plenty of stories to share about difficult customers.) Now she ‘had room as never before to display books, pictures and cards. There is now plenty of room for browsing, and we welcome visitors whether they intend to purchase or merely to read. They will now find stock they have never known before that we had.’ George Orwell would have approved of this pleasant space where ‘you could hang around without spending any money’. Verity certainly hadn’t shown any signs of slowing down. Perhaps she shared the need of many women at the time to keep very busy in order to ward off feelings of grief and loss, even as she welcomed her two sons into the world. One overlooked reality of bookselling is the physical labour involved. Someone has to unpack the new (or second-hand) boxes of books, move them around the shop, arrange them on shelves and put out the latest journals for display. Mounting and descending step ladders, carrying weighty parcels, searching for missing or mislaid books, packing up customers’ orders—all

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these were everyday tasks as well as book-keeping, minding the till and the regular banking of the day’s or the week’s takings. It was not work for the fainthearted. Once the children were born Verity was sometimes able to get a reliable woman to mind them but more often than not the two infants accompanied her in a pram to the shop where they were parked by a sunny window for an hour or two. Verity had a number of different helpers in the shop, ranging from ‘two young girls’ to her sister June who came down from Sydney from time to time. In early 1942 Verity took on another war-related commitment, one that involved her love of horses and riding. With motor fuel so scarce for civilian purposes and given the shortage of manpower, she offered to help organize a ‘Horse Management class’ for girls and young women, with the aim of equipping them with the skills to feed, groom and harness a horse and then drive it in harness. This would enable them to drive delivery or produce carts, deliver mail to urban and rural areas and care for stabled horses and packhorses. The idea for the class came from Mrs ‘Bobby’ Llewellyn, who ran the Llewellyn Riding School at Acton and who was a good friend of Verity. Verity helped run the first class in January 1942, which ran for ten weeks on Saturday afternoons at Mrs Llewellyn’s stables at Acton. There were 38 girls, 16 years and over, who registered for the course and its success encouraged the two women to run a second course in April that year. A gymkhana was held in March as the finale to the first course of lessons, and a crowd of friends, families and onlookers enjoyed watching the girls saddling a horse, driving a sulky through a narrow course and tackling gate opening and obstacle courses. Afternoon tea was served by the Women’s Voluntary Service,

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one of the many bodies set up by Australian women as an expression of their desire to contribute to the war effort. The horse management course had been run under their patronage, but Verity hoped that the second course could gain a wider profile under the national body, Women’s Australian National Services [WANS] which had been set up in NSW to co–ordinate the work of hundreds of different voluntary groups. Its founder, Lady Wakehurst, wife of the governor, hoped that WANS would prepare women to take real jobs in the services if the government ever opened enlistment to women. Ruth Lane Poole, wife of the Director of Forestry, was the area patron for WANS. She welcomed Verity’s enthusiasm but explained that enlisting in the service involved more than the horse management course had allowed for: there were compulsory classes in First Aid, Home Nursing, Physical Fitness, Squad Drill and Signalling for Air Raid Precautions. After passing the course, women were drafted into specialised units where they practised map-reading, rifle shooting or some other useful skill. Only women who successfully completed the courses were allowed to join WANS and wear the uniform. First Aid instruction may well have been part of the second Horse Management course. At the beginning of April 1942 the bookshop placed an urgent request for ‘sound, used copies of the British Red Cross First Aid Manual to buy at 2/6 or hire or borrow for a period of about four weeks’. There were other calls for volunteer effort in Canberra at the time. Verity was on call to do ‘sky spotting’, according to a worried letter from her mother who felt she was seriously overdoing her voluntary efforts when she had a young child to care for and another on the way, born September that year.

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There was deep unease, and even panic, among many civilians in the crisis months of 1942. Some families living on the coast bundled their children off to stay with relatives in the country or sent their children to country boarding schools, if they could afford it. According to her son, Geoff, Verity had a plan that if the Japanese were to approach Canberra, she would pack her newborn baby and toddler into the sulky used for library deliveries and head off to live concealed in the ranges which she knew well. *** Canberra was not exposed to the same threats of bombing as the coastal cities and the centres of heavy industry, but the sense of imminent danger was still real. The government’s flood of stern warnings, morale-boosting campaigns and austerity drives was aimed at all Australians. In June 1942 Curtin broadcast nationally, appealing for subscriptions to the second Liberty Loan: ‘I say flatly that it is possible that Australia can be lost. The Russians experience invasion; they withhold nothing; neither must we.’56 In the face of Japanese victories, the government could not afford to have a complacent or half-hearted population when it was clear that citizens needed to stretch every resource to the limit in their support for the troops fighting to the north. Jim Brigden, prominent economist, government advisor and close friend of Lyndhurst Giblin, looked back at what he called ‘the ordeal of ’42’ with a sense of the impact it had on all Australians.57 Supposing that a bookshop reflects the preoccupations of its readers at any one time, it is interesting to look at what was on sale at Verity Hewitt’s in May 1942. The St John Ambulance book First Aid to the Injured was in steady demand, with

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new supplies coming in. There were also manuals on Air Raid Protection and handling of small arms. Pamphlets included ‘Towards Economic Reconstruction’ by the economist F. R. Mauldon, Bishop Ernest Burgmann’s ‘Providence and Judgement in the affairs of Men’ and ‘God and Human Suffering’ by an unnamed author. There was a biography of Churchill, and Paul Richey’s Fighter Pilot, his own account of the war in the air. A collection of Hitler’s speeches My New Order, published in 1941, was advertised, and also I Paid Hitler, the memoirs of a prominent German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, whose giant steel industry supported the Third Reich until his late conversion to an anti-Hitler stance. In 1942 readers interested in the Third Reich would have had a very different sense of its significance to that available to modern readers. In fact, throughout the 1930s many Australians quite approved of National Socialism as they heard of its developments in Germany. It was seen as a bulwark against Communism and as offering an orderly and prosperous life to Germans. Verity Hewitt’s younger brother Bill was one of many people who expressed fascist sympathies, though these may have changed once war started. They were certainly not views shared by his gentle and kindly parents or by Verity herself, who was a passionate supporter of liberal thought. If danger heightened people’s sense of the fragility of their peaceful life, it also got them thinking about special places and the meaning of attachment to the land. Bernard O’Reilly’s book Green Mountains, published in 1940, appeared on the bookshelves at this time. His account of the family’s pioneering life in the Macpherson Ranges of Queensland was to be reprinted many times in the years to come and remains a book beloved by many Australians.

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That year there were regular advertisements in the Canberra Times for stocks of ‘black out paper’, available from the Times office and which could be purchased in bulk. The paper issued a stern warning: Brown Out in Canberra is compulsory, not optional. Another advertisement appeared in May 1942 in the paper. A jeweller and watchmaker in Kingston was promoting ‘Silver Identification Disks’ engraved with a man’s name and unit. To the modern reader this seems an unusual and somewhat macabre item. Identity discs or ‘dog tags’ as the Americans called them, were a way of identifying bodies on a battlefield. All the men of the AIF were required to wear them on a cord around their neck. There were two metal discs, one circular and one octagonal, and they were engraved with a man’s name and service number. In the event of death, one of the discs was buried with the body and one retrieved, to be returned to the soldier’s family with his personal effects. The jeweller was advertising a silver rectangular disc on a chain, which would have been modelled on the kind worn by American troops; no doubt he was cashing in on the interest and fascination with all things American at the time. Perhaps such an item would have been purchased by a wife or girlfriend as a parting gift as her man headed up north. It would have been an unauthorized addition to his gear however. *** By this stage of the war, Russia had joined the Allied struggle against Hitler. For many Australians, if they thought about Russia at all, it was with a wary suspicion. The Communist

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party, which Menzies had tried to ban in 1940, still had a political presence in the country, but those who supported it, and through it supported the cause of Russia’s fight, were deeply suspect in the eyes of many citizens. Bishop Ernest Burgmann, head of the Goulburn diocese of the Church of England, was one public figure who did so, and this would have earned him many enemies in the established church. Another Canberra man who spoke out in support of Russia was Dr Lewis Windermere Nott, Superintendent at the Canberra Community Hospital. Lewis Nott was a much loved and respected figure in Canberra’s story. He knew first-hand the horrors of war, having served in the Royal Scots Regiment throughout 1916 on the Western Front. Returning to Australia with his young family after the war, he came to Canberra during its formative years. He worked as a doctor and also served on the Advisory Council (a local body advising the government about Canberra matters) through the 1930s and ’40s. In 1949 he became Canberra’s first federal member of parliament, standing as an Independent. He was always a supporter of the development of theatre, music and the arts in the young capital, and was also involved in countless ways in quietly helping the unemployed, the homeless, the elderly, and those victims of both war and Depression who found themselves in need of a helping hand. Arthur Shakespeare, who had been closely associated with Dr Nott as a member of the Advisory Council for fifteen years, spoke of his friend after Nott’s death in 1951, as ‘one of the small band of enrichers of human society’.58 In July 1941, after Germany invaded Russia, Nott had offered to raise funds and lead an ambulance and hospital unit to Russia. Menzies had poured cold water on the idea, but Nott persisted with the plan. Cla Allen attended a meeting on 21

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October 1941, a couple of weeks after Curtin became Prime Minister. This ‘Aid to Russia’ meeting at the Albert Hall roused an enthusiastic audience with the plan to lead a medical unit to the embattled nation. The entry of Japan into the war diverted attention and funds to battles nearer home, but a small group of supporters in Canberra continued to raise funds in support of Russia. Verity Hewitt had long been interested in Russian literature and history; as a student she had seen Pavlova dance in Sydney in 1926. She began taking Russian language lessons from the wife of a diplomat, Mrs Zaitzev in 1943. People from the Soviet embassy in Kingston, opened in March that year, still attracted casual curiosity from passers-by who for so many years had only seen people in their own image in the streets and shops. For Verity, the embassy staff were probably the first Russian people she had been able to meet socially. In September 1943 the bookshop was selling Russian– English vocabularies and English–Russian dictionaries, so other Canberrans must have shared Verity’s interest in the language. The shop also advertised Two Stories by Tolstoy in both Russian and English. Verity would not have been alone in an awakening curiosity about this nation, so little known at the time apart from through its rich musical and literary inheritance. People were discovering the exotic attractions of the Russian ballet through the performances of the Ballet Russes, a touring company that, stranded in Australia with the outbreak of war, extended their tour for five months and were seen and enjoyed by a wide crosssection of Australians exposed for the first time to forms of Central and Eastern European culture.

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Russian composers also enjoyed particular acclaim during the war. Corporal T. A. Pope, serving abroad with the 2/7 Field Ambulance, wrote to Verity in November 1943, having heard a radio broadcast of the first Australian performance of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Sir Bernard Heinze conducting. Deeply moved by the power of this work and the story of its composition in besieged Leningrad, Pope wrote, ‘it must surely be one of the greatest works to come out of the war’. As a friend of Verity and Laurie, he guessed that they would also have been listening to the ABC broadcast of this symphony that came to stand as a memorial to the millions of people who died in the besieged city. The concert was broadcast nation-wide from the Sydney Town Hall on the ABC on 24 August 1943, the second anniversary of the start of the siege. Profits were to go to Russian Medical Aid and Comforts Committee. Pope told Verity in the same letter that he had just read Reaching for the Stars, Nora Waln’s account of life in Nazi Germany. By November 1942, as news came though of the horrendous battles taking place on the Eastern Front, the bookshop was advertising new pamphlets on Soviet Russia and an atlas of the USSR. Other signs of the times: on the shelves were booklets in the ‘March of Time’ series, American Air Power, American Armies and American Sea Power. *** From 1936 Laurie Fitzhardinge’s workplace moved from Parliament House to a new administrative building on Kings

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Avenue, which housed a public library on the ground floor and book stacks on the other floors. There was an office for library staff among the stacks, ‘very hot in summer and perishing cold in winter’ according to Laurie.59 The building was intended to be a repository for books but not a permanent national library. (It was demolished in the 1970s and the new library opened in 1968.) The Australian section of the Parliamentary Library was transferred to its new home, but ‘political’ books tended to stay at Parliament House. In either case, the library staff could send books across to Parliament House when required by ministers or their staff for reference purposes. By 1939 Laurie Fitzhardinge had already established a solid reputation as an Australian historian. He was one of the first academics to take a serious interest in the history of his own country. In 1938 he was asked by the Anglican bishop, Ernest Burgmann, to write a booklet on the church of St John the Baptist in Canberra, and Laurie used this as an opportunity to write a wider social history of the pastoral settlement of Canberra. The book, published by St Johns Parish Council, was on the shelves at the shop and had a wide readership because the old church had a fond place in the hearts and lives of many people in the district. Laurie was working on a biography of the federal politician Littleton Groom when war broke out. It was published by Angus & Robertson in 1941 and displayed in the bookshop. From 1942 he was involved in war-related work of an unusual kind, researching information about the south-west Pacific and Papua/New Guinea for General Macarthur. In this research Laurie worked with colleagues from the Mitchell Library in Sydney, their coordinator a young man from Macarthur’s

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headquarters in Brisbane. The research was an attempt to assemble all sources of information about the Japanese-occupied islands that might be of use to an invading or occupying army: the habits of the natives, local geography, weather, footpaths in use, food supplies and preparation and so on. A wide range of journals and books had to be consulted and Laurie taught himself some rudimentary Dutch so he could access journals about Dutch New Guinea [West Papua] as there was little current Australian knowledge about the region. The work of the Allied Geographical Section was viewed as an important task by Macarthur and he welcomed the resulting bibliography. Towards the end of the war, Laurie Fitzhardinge was given a new task, to design and teach Australian and European history to the cadets coming into the newly created Department of External Affairs. But that is a story for a later chapter.

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SE V EN

Art in a Time of War

In May 1940 Verity Hewitt made an arrangement with Macquarie Galleries in Sydney to hold an exhibition of paintings every three months. (She had staged exhibitions before that, acquired through other agencies.) At times, her gallery would exhibit the work of a single Australian artist, and at other times an assortment of work obtained from the Redfern Galleries in London, whose Australian agents were the Macquarie Galleries. These works might include Australian watercolours and oils, overseas prints, woodcuts and etchings. The exhibitions generally ran for a fortnight and gave Canberrans an opportunity to see and buy good examples of current Australian art and prints and etchings from overseas. The gallery was always a popular and attractive adjunct to Verity’s bookshop. She describes the space as ‘warm and bright’ and it must have been a pleasant place to while away an hour or two browsing for a purchase, perhaps with a gift in mind. One advertisement in May 1942 had a simple and lovely brevity: ‘on winter afternoons … the picture gallery’. 103

Some visitors to Canberra would have looked with a jaundiced eye on this venture, seeing it as one more example of the provincial nature of this bush capital. Of course, a small country gallery had no opportunity to exhibit any of the latest European works of art, most of them not even yet available as prints or as reproductions in art books. There had only been one exhibition of modernist European art to date, and that was held in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in 1939. The ‘Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art’ had been initiated by Keith Murdoch and financed by his paper, the Melbourne Herald. Among the artists represented were Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and Chagall. The Victorian Art Gallery was reluctant to stage the exhibition, many of the works on show being considered ‘perverse’ or ‘degenerate’ and so it was held at the city’s Lower Town Hall. The exhibition in Melbourne attracted record numbers of the public, curious to see first-hand these striking and controversial works, 217 paintings in all plus a smaller number of sculptures by Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Joan Miro. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of NSW refused to provide gallery space, so the exhibition was shown on the upper floor of David Jones department store, whose owner was a keen follower of modern art. Canberra never had a bohemian flavour (unlike Melbourne) and its people veered on the side of tradition and conservatism. Landscapes, especially familiar ones, were still the favourites: ‘you either had sheep at the side and gum trees in the middle or gum trees at the side and sheep in the middle’, as artist Sali Herman described this school of painting.60 Yet for all the banality of such paintings to a modernist, urban artist like Herman, the Canberra pastoral landscape attracted some serious artists in the inter-war years and afterwards.

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Many of the artists whose works were on show and for sale at Verity’s gallery had studied contemporary art in Europe as well as viewing the great ‘Masters’ in their original settings. What they saw of the new movements in art profoundly influenced their own understanding and practice. Many were inspired to move away from an academic and strictly literal representation of their subject, instead trying to express its ‘inner life’ through colour, the play of light on the canvas and experiments with abstract form. Verity’s first exhibition in May 1940 displayed 19 canvases by Enid Cambridge, of which 12 were of Canberra. Enid Cambridge was a central figure in the Contemporary Art Society in Sydney, and she exhibited with them every year until the society disbanded in 1959. Tied to Sydney, where she cared for an elderly mother, Enid was the senior art mistress at the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School from the 1930s to 1968. She was a watercolourist, experimenting in her own way with light and impressionist effects. Her work was highly regarded. In 1947 one of her paintings was included in an ‘Exhibition of Contemporary Australian Art’ at Australia House in London, and before that at the important UNESCO conference in Paris. Her painting hung alongside pieces by Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend and Sali Herman. Grace Cossington Smith, probably the most significant woman artist in the Modernist movement between the wars and into the 1960s, wrote a moving introduction to an exhibition of Enid Cambridge’s work in 1977, the year after Enid died: Everyone loved Enid. She was my dearest art friend … a shining personality. Her superb watercolours are the expression of a love

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and understanding of Nature and are of high distinction among Australian watercolours.61 Both women had had works hanging at Government House in Sydney in October 1932, in aid of the Bush Nursing Association. Having come to adulthood in an earlier Australia, a place of imperial loyalties, cultural isolation and limited opportunities for women, these two women had both found through their art an independent life and a creative career. Enid Cambridge made her first trip to Europe in 1959, where she studied for a month under the radical German Expressionist, Oskar Kokoshka, at the International Academy of Art in Salzburg. The most prolific artist in Canberra in the war years, and a popular exhibiter at Verity’s gallery, was Douglas Dundas, Head of Painting for many years at the East Sydney Technical College. He and his wife, Dorothy Thornhill, had become good friends with Leslie Allen, professor at the Canberra University College, and every year from 1940 for years Dundas and his wife came down to spend the summer vacation painting in the Canberra region. He loved the landscape, its clear light, its open valleys leading the eye to long mountain ranges, its variety of natural forms and its connection with past farming activity. Dundas had lived and painted in Italy, so an appreciation of a rural, farmed landscape permeated many of his paintings. During the summers he and his wife stayed in Allen’s house, one of the timber houses at Acton built for senior public servants in the 1920s, while Allen and his daughter were staying on the south coast. The house offered uninterrupted and spacious views south and west, across the Molonglo River to the old farmhouse of the Kaye family and beyond that to the rugged blue outlines of the mountains fringing the capital to the west. In later years

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Dundas spoke of those summers he and his wife spent painting in Canberra as ‘the great joy [of] the 1940s’.62 Dundas had studied in Europe in the 1920s under a Society of Artists’ scholarship and began exhibiting with the society in the 1930s. At that stage it was the most progressive and important art society in Australia and promoted the work of significant Australians like Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, Will Ashton and Grace Crowley. Yet the revolutionary movements taking place in European art were still largely unacknowledged by those in authority in the art world, including those running the state galleries and other arbiters of public taste. Bernard Smith wrote that the 1920s art scene in Sydney was ‘heavy with the arrogance and respectability of old men’.63 There was desire, underlined by nostalgia for the Heidelberg School of painting, to keep Australian art healthy and sane by rejecting the modernism and complexity of European art. Howard Ashton, the art and music critic of the Sydney Sun, was a vehement critic of any form of modernist expression: ‘it smells of drains’ he wrote.64 And Lionel Lindsay used his prominent position in the establishment to condemn contemporary art, and in the process, vilify the Jewish artists prominent in the field. Modern art, to Lindsay, ‘was the outward visible symptom of a spiritual malady’ in national life.65 Dundas himself was not an innovator; he wished to be remembered ‘as an artist who had honestly tried to record his reactions to the beauty and to the character of nature’.66 His fellow artist and critic, James Gleeson, spoke of him as ‘a man of the utmost integrity, he remained true to himself throughout his creative life, painting fine and valued works within the framework of the traditions he had inherited’.67

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Dundas had his first one-man show at the Macquarie Galleries in 1929/30, and his work was to feature in several of the exhibitions Verity held at her small gallery during the war years. Among Canberrans who appreciated his work were Richard and Maie Casey who took one of his paintings for their residence when Richard was appointed as Australian Ambassador in Washington in 1940. Amos Peaslee, the American Ambassador in Canberra in the 1950s, also acquired one for his private collection and hung it later in his home in Washington. Dr H. V. Evatt, Minister for External Affairs from 1941 to 1949, acquired several Dundas views of Canberra for display in overseas missions. Evatt and his artist wife, Mary Alice Evatt, had significant connections to the new capital in the war years. Doubtless there were a few works by Dundas hanging in Canberra homes in those years, for public servants, diplomats and scientists all frequented the gallery from time to time. A reference in the Canberra Times in May 1940 to a gallery function mentions among others, Dr Cumpston, Director General of Health, Dr Richard Woolley, who had just been appointed Director of the Mt Stromlo Observatory, Mrs Patricia Tillyard and her daughter Pat, and Arthur Shakespeare’s wife (always referred to as Mrs Shakespeare). Douglas Dundas was often accompanied on painting excursions round Canberra by a close friend, Hector Gilliland. Gilliland was a survey draftsman in Sydney, studying art parttime at East Sydney Technical College. During the war years he was exempt from military service for medical reasons but was able to get work in Canberra with the Department of the Interior using his drafting skills. Like Dundas, he was attracted to the qualities of the Canberra landscape:

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Whatever spare time I had was spent walking around the farming areas, river banks, over the hills, riding out to the mountains … I was devoted to the landscape itself, to light, to qualities of place.’68 He could also appreciate the strangeness of Canberra’s claim to be the national capital. It was still, in effect a sheep run. In spring, ‘thousands of sheep might be seen close-packed near the old Department of Interior buildings, and the occasional drover might be seen galloping past Civic Centre with his dogs at heel’.69 Gilliland produced many beautiful paintings in Canberra during the 1940s. He generally exhibited them at Society of Artists exhibitions in Sydney or at the Masonic Hall in Canberra as a member of the Canberra Society of Artists. Verity’s gallery would have been too small a space for the annual Society’s exhibitions; like many Canberra groups, they found the Masonic Hall a useful if uninspiring venue. Another artist who did feature in Verity’s gallery was Jean Appleton. Jean was teaching art at the Girls’ Grammar School for two terms in 1940, but then had to return to Sydney to support her mother whose two sons were both serving with the AIF overseas. Jean Appleton had much in common with Verity Hewitt. They were born within a few years of each other at the end of the Edwardian decade, and both grew up in settled and loving families. Both were exposed to a world of ideas and creativity as young women, Jean at East Sydney Technical School and Verity in the Arts Faculty at the University of Sydney. An independent and adventurous spirit led them both to set out alone overseas in the inter-war years. Taking passage on cargo ships, Jean

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headed for England and Europe to study art, Verity travelled to California in search of new scenes and adventure. One deeper tie linked their stories: both women lost a brother on active service, killed while serving in the same 2/13 battalion. Geoff Hewitt died at Tobruk in June 1941. Frederick Appleton was to see many more days of bitter campaigning after Tobruk; he was killed during a seaborne landing north of Lae, in New Guinea, on 22 September 1943. Jean’s younger brother, Ronald, serving as a pilot officer in 158 Squadron with the Royal Air Force, was shot down on a bombing raid over Europe and was a prisoner of war for four years. The war years were ones of deep grief and anxiety for Jean and her mother. However, Jean’s paintings of those years do not refer to the war, and in fact her interiors and landscapes are sunlit and peaceful, with a focus on colour as a major means of expression. Another woman artist who had connections with Canberra for a brief time during the war was Heliodore (‘Dore’) Hawthorne. Dore had taken evening classes at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School in the 1920s and became a dedicated exponent of modernism in Australia. She had long-held friendships with the artists Grace Crowley and Dorritt Black and co-edited a publication Undergrowth: a magazine of youth and ideals, which was an important forum for modernists and emerging writers. Douglas Dundas was one of the contributors. While studying at the University of Sydney Verity Hewitt got to know both Dore Hawthorne and her co-editor Nancy Hall and contributed several poems and short stories to their magazine. In 1928 Verity boarded with Nancy Hall and her parents in Sydney for several months.

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Dore Hawthorne spent time in Canberra in 1941, renewing her friendship with Verity. Like many of her contemporaries in post-WW1 Australia, Dore never married. She was in her 40s when she came to Canberra and no doubt glad of the opportunity for some paid work in the bookshop, where she managed much of the shop business in the months leading up to and after the birth of Verity’s first child. She lived frugally, an austere lifestyle that suited her strong social conscience; her resignation from the bookshop in July 1941 was on a matter of principle—an episode described in Chapter 2. Between 1942 and 1945 Dore Hawthorne worked at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, fitting precision gauges to components of the Bren gun. This setting provided rich material for her art, and she sketched and painted her fellow workers, the machines and buildings, her lodgings and the town. At the end of the war, munitions workers, many of them women, were retrenched as the need for munitions abated and positions were made available for returning servicemen. Dore Hawthorne now turned her attention to making forty oils and watercolours, a series she called ‘Factory Folk’, which was exhibited in Lithgow and then at the Studio of Realist Art in Sydney in 1946. Laurie and Verity purchased some of the ‘Factory Folk’ paintings and always regarded Dore Hawthorne as a friend. The only artist connected to Canberra in the war years whose work directly references the world of military combat was Frank Hinder, who worked in Canberra for two years with the newly formed Department of Home Security as a ‘camoufleur’. This word described the work of artists and technicians who were experimenting with camouflage methods to be used in protecting military and civilian installations and men in combat

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situations. Hinder, who had studied, taught and travelled in America, became one of Australia’s most respected artists after the war. He was always interested in the potential of abstract art and its ability to convey the dynamism of modern life through colour and design. In the conservative art scene of Sydney in the late 1930s, Hinder had championed the cause of modernism; he felt Australians faced an impoverished future if they continued to ignore the major cultural developments of the era. He and his wife Margel, a sculptor, organized Exhibition 1, a brave showing of contemporary art in Sydney, but the times were against it. It was opened by H. V. Evatt in September 1939 just before war was declared. Only one piece was sold before the exhibition closed; Evatt and his wife purchased a sculpture by Margel Hinder called ‘Mother and Child’. Before the outbreak of war Frank Hinder had been part of the Sydney Camouflage Group, an informal association of about 30 men in the arts and sciences who were keen to contribute their various skills to the study of protecting civilian and military targets from attack. They produced a booklet in 1941 called The Art of Camouflage for use by both civilian and military groups. When war broke out Hinder enlisted in the militia and joined the Department of the Interior research team at Georges Heights on Sydney Harbour, working on projects to camouflage aerodromes, fuel tanks and other vital installations around Sydney. In June 1942 he was seconded to the Department of Home Security in Canberra under Professor William Dakin, whom Menzies had appointed as Technical Director of Camouflage, responsible for the Australian mainland and the South West Pacific. Dakin was an academic, a respected Professor of Zoology

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at the University of Sydney. He had a particular interest in animal camouflage and its application to the pressing needs of protecting a country at war. Under his leadership the team set up workshops at the Technical College based at Telopea Park School, but moved after a couple of months to the School of Forestry, where the Director, Charles Lane Poole, gave helpful advice on timbers to be used in camouflage construction. Later the team moved again, to larger premises at the Canberra Grammar School. The camoufleurs employed in this unit were quartered initially at the Hotel Canberra, then in shared house accommodation. Frank and Margel Hinder eventually moved into a small cottage in the suburb of Turner. Margel also joined the team as a modelmaker. Verity Hewitt’s son, Geoff Fitzhardinge, remembers them as people with ‘fond memories of the bookshop’. It’s unlikely that they attended any of the gallery openings at the shop; judging by Hinder’s diary, they had a heavy workload and many deadlines to meet when working under Dakin. Hinder seemed to spend part of every day tearing round Canberra on a bicycle, checking out the government printers at Kingston, over to the Forestry workshops at Yarralumla, and then to Duntroon for inspections of military vehicles. For longer trips, to Jervis Bay for example, he and the professor collected petrol coupons and drove down and back in the unit’s truck. The Hinders found the work busy but interesting. For Frank, it involved his own creative interest in abstract art, because many of the camouflage techniques made use of ‘disruptive patterning’ to confuse the eye of the viewer and disguise the object being viewed or create a sense of ambiguity. Pablo Picasso had made a remark during World War 1, when viewing camouflaged trucks in Paris, that they had borrowed the techniques of cubism from him!

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In 1943 and 1944 Hinder worked on a wide range of projects, recorded in his daily diary entries. He designed netting to disguise planes on the ground, pronounced ‘a success’ when tried at Canberra aerodrome. He researched paints resistant to infra-red light and he and the professor painted the petrol tanks out at Queanbeyan. Much time was spent designing model corvettes for the navy, to find what colours and silhouettes worked best. The models were built by Margel and sailed and photographed on a small dam in North Canberra. Other projects drew on Hinder’s graphic arts background and involved designing striking posters for use in military establishments to highlight the importance of camouflage as a security measure. Booklets were also completed for distribution to government departments. William Dakin was a committed scientist who believed strongly in camouflage as a vital military strategy that could help Australia in the Pacific war. General Macarthur endorsed this view. After seeing the work of the Camouflage Unit in August 1942 he instructed all Allied Commanders in the South West Pacific Area to ‘regard camouflage as an instrument of war’.70 Many of the military hierarchy in Australia were, however, dismissive of the idea of camouflage, which they considered a ‘weak’ response to conflict; it implied an avoidance or deflection of attack whereas military doctrine favoured a more aggressive approach to the enemy. The camoufleurs were never given much recognition by the military and not until 1943 did they receive accreditation from the RAAF with an insignia patch on their shoulder. Their work has not been often acknowledged but some of Australia’s most well-known artists, including Max Dupain and William Dobell, worked for the program.

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Frank Hinder had what he called ‘a good war’. It was interesting work in a civilized environment, with his wife as co-worker, and his job allowed him to further his own artistic techniques and interests. He did not have much time for his own art while working in Canberra although two of his most striking works were actually created during those two years: Canberra Workers 1945 (reproduced on the cover) and Bomber Crash which was painted in 1943 with a second version printed some years later. If Hinder had a mainly safe and comfortable war, there was nevertheless one event that brought him very close to death. In November 1941 he was sent to Rabaul on the island of New Britain off the northern coast of New Guinea to advise on camouflaging the local airstrip. His Hudson bomber, for viewing the site from the air, crashed only seconds after take-off. Flames engulfed the cockpit, with Hinder and the crew trapped inside until the navigator found the safety catch and they escaped. Minutes later the aircraft blew up. This horrifying event left its mark on the artist, who produced many preliminary drafts of the main work, trying to capture in ordered and geometrical shapes the explosive flames engulfing the fuselage. Hinder stayed on after this incident to complete his assignment. Comments in his diary in November and December reveal the poor state of military preparedness on this Australianrun territory as the Japanese continued their move south: Things somewhat chaotic. No camouflage nets at Rabaul, no hessian, no camouflage paint. Powder colours not available. Untrained militia—rifles scarce. Lots of boys have never even fired a shot.

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One company to defend 900 square miles, including airport. Air Force alerted to attack on Pearl Harbour by me! I heard the news on BBC and went to base to see about possible plane to Australia. Told CO— unbelieving.71 Rabaul was occupied by the Japanese on 23 January 1942, followed by atrocities committed on unarmed or disarmed captives, and with much suffering endured by those men who managed to hide and then escape across the island to eventual safety. *** One final artist needs to be mentioned in connection with the war years in Canberra. Mary Alice Evatt was the Americanborn wife of Dr Herbert Vere [Bert] Evatt, who became Minister for External Affairs in Curtin’s wartime government. The Evatts were lovers of the arts at a time in Australia, and the labour movement, when the arts were considered effete and irrelevant to the larger issues of social justice and reform. Yet Bert Evatt was to leave his mark on both these areas of Australian life. Wealthy, well-educated and well-travelled, the couple acquired many important pieces of art for their own and also for public collections. They bought and donated many works by contemporary Australian artists, including works by significant numbers of women finding a place in the art world, among them Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and Grace Crowley. While Bert Evatt, then a judge of the High Court of Australia, was on leave in Paris in 1938, Mary Alice Evatt had studied

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under the influential teacher André Lhote, and she continued her studies in Sydney and Melbourne, with residence in both cities while her husband was at the High Court. She became an accomplished painter in her own right, influenced by all that Claude Cézanne and his followers had contributed to visual art. In 1943 Mary Alice and a committee of her fellow trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW developed a travelling art exhibition in response to the 1940 report by the War Art Council and the Encouragement of Art movement. Exhibitions were sent by rail to forty regional towns, including Canberra (still considered, reasonably enough, as a regional town). The exhibition included works by Grace Cossington Smith, Roland Wakelin and Frank Hinder. In Canberra the exhibition was staged at the Masonic Hall, one of the only public buildings with a large room suitable for such an event. The hall was also regularly used for scout meetings, local dances and church services by the Christian Scientists. It was plainly not a purpose-built gallery; an exhibition of paintings by Mrs Phillips Fox in September 1944—landscape paintings of Canberra and its people with proceeds going to the Red Cross—saw the paintings mounted on chairs as there were no facilities for hanging them. The travelling exhibition, which opened in Canberra on 28 November 1944, would have been generously funded and more professionally staged, as it was a showcase for the Art Gallery. The exhibition was officially opened by Senator Collings, the Minister for the Interior, and Bert Evatt spoke to the assembled guests about the importance of contemporary art, urging them to view these works with an open mind and receptive imagination.

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EIGH T

Jungle Warfare

With the invasion of Rabaul in January 1942 and the swift occupation of the northern part of Papua New Guinea, fighting in tropical and jungle conditions began that was to tie up most of the Australian army for the rest of the war. That great island to their north—so close to the mainland—was alien territory to most Australians even though their government had administered the south-eastern part, Papua, since 1906, and the north-eastern part, New Guinea (the former German colony now mandated to Australia) since the 1920s. Papua New Guinea, which had been marginal to Australian concerns, was now in the news every day. For the first time white Australians, including people in Canberra, were brought face to face with stories of invasion, disease, imprisonment, suffering and loss on a scale they had not heard of before and that often involved their own people. The campaigns in Papua and New Guinea and the Pacific islands took Australians into a world which had little connection with their previous experience. In the Middle East the men had 118

trodden in the footsteps of the 1st AIF, whose traditions they proudly believed they had inherited. Many of their own fathers would have talked about Egypt and Palestine, the heat, dust and flies, the exotic sights of an alien culture, the tedium of the long desert marches and patrols. Then the campaigns in Greece and Crete, though failures, still connected the men with sights, sounds and people that had been a part of their childhood, figuring in schoolboy lessons. But in Papua and later in New Guinea, in Bougainville and Borneo, nothing was familiar and the environment for men fighting a war was a hostile one. Jungle warfare depended on intense and constant patrolling by small, platoon-sized groups of men seeking out an elusive enemy who might ambush them at any time on the edge of swamps or swollen rivers, in thick scrub and jungle. This was a war that became ‘a series of bloody struggles between frightened and sick men up and down a country of primitive terror’.72 This was especially the case on the Kokoda Track, where the route north over the Owen Stanley mountain range was often deep in mud, climbing and dropping almost vertically in giant steps hewn from the side of cliff faces or winding over the roots and buttresses of giant trees. The men were to advance over this terrain towards their enemy, burdened with weapons and ammunition, frequently hungry and exhausted and increasingly weakened by malaria, dysentery and dengue fever. Canberra’s own connection with the forces was particularly with the 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion (named ‘Werriwa’ after the local Aboriginal name for Lake George), a militia (part-time) force recruited from the Canberra and Goulburn region with headquarters at the Drill Hall in Acton. By 1941 some members of the 3rd Battalion had enlisted in the AIF or the RAAF, but the

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men who remained were called up for full-time duty in October 1941. Compulsory military training for duty within Australia and its territories (which included Papua New Guinea) had been introduced shortly after the outbreak of war. John Curtin had been leader of the Opposition then, and had strongly opposed such a move, in the process reaffirming the Labor Party’s traditional and longstanding policy against conscription. However, by 1943, as Prime Minister, he saw the country’s needs in a different light, for the world was a very different place by then. American conscripts had helped defend Australia in the critical days of 1942, and there was a strong argument to be made that Australia should now be conscripting men for service overseas. The Defence (Citizens Military Force) Act of February 1943 extended the area where militia would be required to serve overseas, an area that included Borneo, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The Act also allowed the transfer of militia units to the AIF if 65% or more of their personnel had volunteered for overseas service. The 3rd Battalion spent six months on guard duty and training near Newcastle before sailing for Port Moresby in May 1942. On 22 June the battalion was put on notice to defend the Kokoda track, but many were so disabled by malaria and other tropical diseases that the 39th Battalion was sent instead, and became the first Australian unit to face the Japanese on the Kokoda track. The 3rd Battalion, recovering their strength by September 1942, were sent up over the Kokoda track as reinforcements in the face of the continuing Japanese advance on Port Moresby. Men from all walks of life joined the 3rd Battalion: labourers from cottages at the Causeway, bus drivers from Kingston,

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sons of senior Commonwealth public servants, office clerks, road, forestry and farm workers. Militia units had none of the prestige associated with the battle-hardened divisions of the AIF, especially those coming back from active service in North Africa. The militia were known contemptuously as ‘chockos’, ‘chocolate soldiers’; but the men who went to Papua were to share to the full the ordeals of that campaign, as their individual histories testify. From September 1942 the 3rd Battalion saw almost continuous fighting for the next three months, over the Owen Stanley Range to the village of Kokoda and down through the malarial plains and coastal swamps to Gona where the Japanese were entrenched. The battalion fought alongside the 2/3 Battalion, part of the AIF’s 6th Division. By then seven of the 3rd Battalion’s men had been killed in action but many more had been evacuated with sickness and wounds. Papua’s diseaseridden battlefields were to haunt the survivors for years and leave the legacy of recurrent malaria for many men. The short entries on the ACT Memorial website profile the men, over three-and-a-half thousand of them, who enlisted from this area in either the militia, the AIF, the RAAF or the Navy. A few brief profiles from the 3rd Battalion are printed below to help us imagine how their experiences affected the community back in Canberra of which they were a part. William John Worthy, a bus driver from Ainslie, served with the 3rd Battalion, fighting at Imita Ridge and Iowabaima on the approach to Kokoda. He was killed in action at Gona in November 1942. His wife in Canberra learnt of his death from a card under the door, directing her to a telegram which she had to collect from the post office a two-mile walk away. William’s twin brother died of illness in training camp in March 1942.

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William ‘Ted’ Young was a public servant who joined the 3rd Battalion and was commissioned as a lieutenant. In June 1942 he helped in a reconnaissance of the Kokoda Track, one of two officers of the Australian army to make the trek. He earned a Military Cross for bravery at Gona. He lost both legs in operations along the track and eventually returned to live in Canberra with his family. Robert Taylor, clerk in the Prime Minister’s Department, enlisted in the 3rd Battalion and was killed in action at Gona in November 1942. Bill Dullard, who had been Dux of Ainslie Primary School, attended Telopea Park School and was a member of the Canberra Amateur Swimming Club. He was commissioned as a lieutenant with the 3rd Battalion and was killed in action on Imita Ridge in September 1942. Throughout Canberra, as in many other country towns, memorial plaques were put up after the war in churches, schools and sporting clubs to which local servicemen and women had belonged. Canberra even then had a reputation as a town of comfortable public servants whom the war had barely touched; but families living here bore the burdens of grief, anxiety and loss as much as in any other town in Australia. Local men who had enlisted in battalions in the 8th Division became prisoners of war after the fall of Singapore. Many died on teams building the Thai–Burma Railway, or on forced marches from Sandakan in Borneo. Geoffrey Vellacott was imprisoned in Changi after the fall of Singapore. He resigned his commission as chaplain at the prison to go with the 8th Division Signals as a medical orderly, to work alongside the men on the Thai-Burma Railway. He died of sickness in December 1943.

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A number of men from Canberra died when their ship, the Montevideo Maru, carrying prisoners of war, was torpedoed by a US submarine in June 1942. Mona Tait, a nurse in charge of the X-ray unit at Canberra Hospital before the war, was one of the last 65 nurses evacuated from Singapore on 12 February 1942. She was executed by the Japanese after her ship the Vyner Brooke had sunk and the survivors had struggled ashore. Cla Allen, at Mt Stromlo Observatory, recalled in later life the deaths of some of his hiking companions, young people whose energetic engagement with life and work in Canberra had been cut short by their wartime death. Among them was Wally Hall, a bank clerk, Rover Scout and bushwalker, who died at Kokoda in October 1942; Wally James of the CSIR, shot down over Ambon in 1942; and May Hayman, a nurse, killed at a mission station in New Guinea in 1942. Cla Allen’s closest friend and bushwalking partner, Tim Ingram, lost his brother Ian, who enlisted in the RAAF in January 1941 and was shot down over Tunisia in November 1942. *** Verity’s bookshop was a port of call for Canberrans at a time when so many families had sons serving overseas, many known to be prisoners of war or ‘missing in action’. Everyone tuned in for the nightly ABC news broadcasts, but people still sought out books. In the war years, Australians and New Zealanders bought more books per capita than any other country.73 Suddenly the region to the north and the wider Pacific area became of immense importance. Maps of New Guinea were in great demand and new stocks came in regularly. The shop also

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sold ‘good sheet maps of the Pacific Ocean, Europe, India and Burma’. In August 1943 Verity advertised for back copies of the Australian National Review for August 1939. This was the last edition of the Review to be published. Its new interest for Canberrans lay in an article, ‘Recent Literature on New Guinea’ by an Australian geologist, C. A. Stanley. Stanley described the research of a retired Dutch geologist and mining engineer, Dr W. C. Klein, who in three learned volumes, documented the geography, resources, administration and society of both Dutch and British New Guinea. His final comments were prescient. He referred to ‘the obvious geographical importance of the island … it is a natural nodal point, of great strategic significance’.74 There was a hunger in people to understand and find connections with the territories where their loved ones were fighting. What they learnt of the Papuan campaign however was always filtered through official censorship, and it is doubtful that many men returning from the war would have shared the realities of their experience with their families. Indeed, for many men ‘what happened in Papua was best erased from memory’, according to the author of a classic study of the 2/2 Battalion.75 Still, books and thoughtful journals could provide a perspective on the war that enlarged people’s understanding. A biography of John Curtin by Alan Chester was launched in Canberra in July 1943 and was prominently displayed in the bookshop; Verity called it ‘a biography of the man of the hour’. Chester was a journalist from Western Australia and known personally to the Prime Minister. He also had past connections with Warner Bros and the American film industry and was keen for his book to be published in America, though there is no evidence that he was able to do so. The book was without

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doubt a partisan celebration of Curtin’s life thus far, and on that account divided the reading public, with conservative papers contemptuous of its bias and Labor-leaning papers praising it enthusiastically. After the war, and Curtin’s death in 1945, Chester wrote on the dustjacket of the National Library’s copy: This book was written just after the conclusion of Australia’s most critical years, when John Curtin expended himself in a way that contributed in no small measure to his untimely death. He was a very great Australian and the friend of many Australian writers. It is fitting that this—the only book so far written about him—should repose among the books of men and women for whom he did so much.76 Books about the war with a wide appeal included Tobruk 1941 by Chester Wilmot, an Australian war correspondent for the ABC and BBC, who reported from the front line in the North African campaign, and whose popular book gave people at home a vivid sense of the experiences of their men in that part of the war. Another popular book was Ian Morrison’s Malayan Postscript, a short, personal account of the British campaign in Malaya and the battle for Singapore. Morrison later covered the fighting at Buna and Gona in Papua. Malayan Postscript was published by Faber & Faber in 1942 and had the striking cover design which made Faber’s brand so recognizable, with the typeface designed by former ‘enemy alien’ Bernard Wolpe. Other books of current interest on the shelves in 1943 included Japan: A World Problem by H. J. Timperley, an Australian journalist working as China correspondent to the

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Manchester Guardian. Timperley’s earlier book, What War Means, published by Victor Gollancz in London in 1938, was a powerful record of first-hand accounts of the Japanese occupation of Nanking in the winter of 1937. The book confronted people with the brutal reality of Japan’s power as a military autocracy. Timperley’s book Japan: A World Problem, was published in America by John Day in 1942 and reprinted later that year by Robertson & Mullens in Melbourne, in an austere war economy issue. John Latham, Chief Justice of Australia and until late 1941 first Australian Minister to Japan, wrote an introduction to the Australian edition. He had a long acquaintance with the author, ‘one of the most profound students of the Far East in our time’ and commended his qualifications in writing about the background to Japanese militarism and in seeking to explain the country’s hostility to the west. At that critical stage of the war, Latham’s sober introduction reminded people of the ‘life and death’ struggle in which they were engaged. Many soldiers serving abroad also read the book, as it was one recommended by the Army Education Service, which organized an extensive series of libraries for men on active service. Journals and conference papers provided an assessment of current affairs for scholars and academics in Canberra; the small city was home to a substantial number of these. In March 1943 Verity was advertising copies of papers from the Institute of Pacific Relations Conference in Quebec in December 1942, whose theme had been ‘Problems of war and peace in the Pacific’. A book by Professor Julius Stone, Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney, appeared in the bookshop in August 1943. The Atlantic Charter: New Worlds for Old was the inspiring title of a book that was written for the general

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public to explain the significance of the Charter ‘in terms of our experience of the old world which is still with us’. The Atlantic Charter, issued in August 1941 at a meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt in mid-ocean, set out common American and British goals for a new world after peace was established. Its aims were noble and far-reaching and in fact became the basis of the foundational aims of the United Nations. In summary, they set out the rights of all peoples to choose their own form of government; the restoration of rights and self-government to those places that had been deprived of them through war or colonization; access to international trade and raw materials for all states; the need for international collaboration to secure improved standards of living and economic security for all peoples; and freedom from fear and want through a general disarmament and renunciation of war. The Charter had little legal validity, but that did not detract from its value, coming as a message of hope to occupied countries and to the embattled Allies at a low point in their fortunes. Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, H. V. Evatt, who was to be one of the leading architects in the creation of the United Nations in the coming years, saw the Charter as pointing to a world of better opportunity and equality: ‘the age of unfair exploitation was over’, he affirmed, in September 1942.77 *** In the middle of 1943 Verity moved from the pleasant rooms above Leo’s Café in the Sydney Building to a ground floor shop in Alinga St between J. B. Youngs Hardware and the Registrar’s Office, near the Blue Moon Cafe and right opposite Hotel Civic.

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The small lane adjacent to the shop is now known as Verity Lane in recognition of the bookshop and its place in Canberra’s story. The upstairs bookshop and library were closed for a weekend in June to allow for the removal to take place. This came at a particularly stressful time in Verity’s life; her second son, Geoffrey George Lacey Fitzhardinge, was born in September 1942, and she was trying to balance the care of a toddler and baby, housework, the lending library and the demands of the business. Her sister June came down for a visit in April to help out, and Verity employed a married lady as part-time housekeeper. There were frequent anxious letters from her mother with suggestions about hired help. Domestic service had little attraction for women and many had flocked to well-paid jobs connected to the war, including radio work at the Harman naval base and clerical jobs at the Post Office and government departments left vacant by men enlisting. Paul Hasluck recalled the exodus of experienced men into war service from the Department of External Affairs, leaving it at half strength. ‘The records room was left with the medically unfit and a number of local housewives (of primary school education) who had taken on war work’.78 An advertisement appeared in the Canberra Times on 13 August 1943: ‘Wanted: woman for light domestic duties and to care for two children, Civic Centre 10–2pm daily’. Her mother wrote that week suggesting that she contact the ‘Deaf, Dumb and Blind School’ in Sydney. ‘A “dumb” girl could hardly get into the services but would be useful in the house,’ she thought. There were times when Verity had to manage it all, pushing the pram and the two infants into the shop from their house in Reid and parking them there for the day, or taking them both in the horse and buggy across the river on her library rounds. One

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morning Verity arrived late and flustered to open the shop and found an irate gentleman waiting on the doorstep. It was Henry Halloran, a well-known businessman in Canberra in the interwar years, who had made his name through scores of successful land development schemes in Sydney and other parts of NSW including Queanbeyan. In 1943 Halloran would have been 75 years old but was still engaged in business and in a wide variety of organisations including the Royal Australian Historical Society. Remembered for a sprightly and energetic manner and fond of long walks, Halloran may well have walked into the Civic Centre from Queanbeyan that morning, to browse among Verity’s books and instruct her on the importance of punctuality in business. By September 1943, Verity’s mother was pleased to hear that she had various women who were able to help with children and housework and also help in the shop. Still, her mother was saddened by what she saw of her daughter’s life: ‘My dear I wish you hadn’t got it—the shop I mean—the laddies need your full attention.’ Other letters suggest that Verity scaled back her ambitions for the shop that year. A friend wrote in April 1943, ‘I am sorry to hear you’ve had to let the bookselling business slide. I guess the artistic side has had to take a back seat now—but I guess the hand that rocks the cradle can’t operate a cash register.’ In a reminder of the fact that civilian life was continuing as usual in Canberra in those times, Verity was advertising ‘Exam aids’ in September 1943 for school students preparing for matriculation from Canberra Boys Grammar School and Canberra High School. She had stocks of the Leaving Certificate exam papers as well as copies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and

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copies of translations of Virgil’s poetry and Caesar’s Invasion of Britain. For some of these young people, study for exams and excitement about future careers would have been clouded by family grief or worries. Many had older brothers serving in the forces, some already killed, missing in action or prisoners of war. A glimpse of a larger world came with the visit of Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt to Canberra in September that year. The president’s wife had decided to visit the Pacific region on behalf of the Red Cross and went ahead with the gruelling five-week tour against the advice of the U.S. War Department. The main purpose of her tour was two-fold: to visit American servicemen in the region, including on the embattled island of Guadalcanal; and to see what Australian and New Zealand women were contributing to the war effort. Her strong belief in the capacity of women to help shape a better post-war world was a theme in many of the speeches she gave, which also stressed of course the growing importance of the ‘special relationship’ between Australia and the United States. Verity was invited to the official reception and luncheon at Parliament House, though no doubt the invitation came to her husband as an official in the Parliamentary Library. She was introduced to Mrs Roosevelt whose idealism, courage and capacity for hard work must have made an impression on Verity. Eilean Giblin and her husband were also at the reception, but their antipathy towards social occasions and celebrities saw them cut short their visit. In fact Lyndhurst Giblin, standing in the long reception queue said, ‘I cannot stand this—I am off’. Eilean stayed to shake hands with Mrs Roosevelt but left shortly afterwards. Her diary comments, ‘Really I am getting a bit tired of Mrs Roosevelt; the newspaper correspondents

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record every detail of her movements and what she says to Jim or John, who may be small boys who have pushed through to get autographs.’79 This comment was less a reflection on the visitor but on the behaviour of Canberra people when an international visitor arrived in their town, and their fascination with the trivia of the occasion. One of Mrs Roosevelt’s official duties was to formally open the new United States embassy and plant a pin-oak in its grounds. The oak grew and flourished but was destroyed in a storm in Canberra in 2015. *** Nettie Palmer was a prominent intellectual who emerged in the 1920s as an influential journalist, public speaker and literary critic. She and her husband, Vance Palmer, were both committed to the development of a genuine Australian literary culture, one not beholden to the old world of Europe or imperial Britain. They spoke of the country’s need for writers whose function was ‘not necessarily to create classics but chiefly to open windows and enable people through the medium of the imagination to lead fuller and richer lives’.80 She encouraged young Australian writers like Eleanor Dark, who at that time had just published the first volume of her trilogy The Timeless Land. This book, beloved by so many readers since that time, described a landscape and world many people recognized—the rugged sandstone escarpments of the Blue Mountains and the inlets of Sydney Harbour—as a setting for a story of the First Fleet and its destructive impact on Aboriginal society. Australians living in London in those years said that reading an Eleanor Dark novel ‘had the same effect on

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them as burning a handful of gum leaves in the open fireplace: sensuous memories of Australia overwhelmed them.’81 Verity Hewitt promoted her works and had the first English edition, published by Collins, on sale in the shop in 1941, the year of its publication. It was actually taken up first by the American firm, The Macmillan Co., but books from America could not be imported directly into Australia. Nettie lectured for the Commonwealth Literary Fund, and she came to Canberra to give two lectures at Canberra University College for this purpose in October 1943. Verity was asked, or offered, to show Nettie around the young capital from her base at the Hotel Canberra, in the company of an elderly aunt of Laurie’s, Miss Fitzhardinge. The outing was probably in the Fitzhardinges’ ancient car Annabelle. After her visit to the Civic Centre Nettie was asked by the Canberra Times journalist for her impressions: ‘Canberra reminded her of Barcelona … the Civic Centre resembled Port Sudan’, comments that were politely neutral.82 A letter to Verity after the event was more spontaneous and referred to ‘the beautiful day you gave me … I was able to see Canberra and its past as I could never have seen it unaided’. *** There are no accounts of gallery openings at the bookshop in 1943. Another constraint on the shop’s activities was the increasing scarcity of new books arriving from England. The bookshop advertised each month that good prices would be given for second-hand fiction (Cloth or paper binding) in good condition. Readers Union, faithful to its mission to keep sending books to the Dominions through the war, continued to publish

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a new title every month. In March 1943 Verity wrote, ‘Readers Union is at the present time one of the few ways of getting an assured supply of good reading. We have vacancies for a few new members. For list of forthcoming books please enquire at the shop’. Fewer Penguins and Pelicans were arriving however and an Australian company, Lothian, reprinted 71 Penguins, Penguin Specials and Pelicans from copies available in Australia. Among them were 37 Crime titles (always in demand), and five Pelicans. They were printed in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth in editions of 10,000. In February 1940 a Penguin Special had appeared in England, one of hundreds of books on current affairs being printed during the war by the publisher in response to the public’s desire for thoughtful background material on the crises facing the world. The book looks confronting at first: it is called Unser Kampf— Our Struggle, and is obviously a reference to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The author, Sir Richard Ackland, was stridently opposed to appeasement and hoped after the war to establish an idealistic new political party and a new ‘Commonwealth’. Australian supporters of Ackland may have promoted the idea of reprinting the book in Australia and arranged their own printing of it. It was certainly successful; over 10,000 copies sold in Australia in August 1940 and there was a second printing. The publisher’s note to the edition said all royalties were being waived. After this, Lothian began printing Penguins themselves. Verity did not refer to having any locally produced Penguin books in stock, and it is likely that many of them were intended for soldiers. After the war the remaining books were pulped. Books and the armed services made for interesting

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connections. Books certainly played an important role in the American forces during the war. Millions of young soldiers were drafted into the army and spent tedious months in camps and training depots. In 1943 the Army’s Library Section proposed the concept of ‘books for the soldiers’ and this evolved into the Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperback books chosen by a panel of literary experts across the range of classics, bestsellers, humour and poetry. Over 70 publishers and a dozen printing houses collaborated on the production of these books, which provided them with a profitable market but which could be also seen as part of the national mobilization for war. ‘Books are weapons in the war of ideas,’ was the motto of the ‘Council on Books in Wartime’ which organized the publication and distribution of the books. From 1943 to 1947 some 122 million copies of more than 1300 titles were distributed to American servicemen and proved enormously popular, in many cases shared and re-read until falling apart. The project ‘democratised the pleasures of reading, making literature, poetry and history available to all’.83 Books were important in the Australian services as well. A report from the New Guinea forces in January 1943 declared ‘books and more books are our urgent need’.84 The main voluntary bodies, the Australian Red Cross, Australian Comforts Fund and the YMCA all sent books, magazines and periodicals to the forces. In 1940 the Victorian Division of the Red Cross sent 6521 new Penguins and similar books to be included in Christmas boxes for men serving at home and abroad. A senior medical officer in New Guinea thanked the Red Cross for sending boxes of comforts to his hospital. ‘In particular the reading matter was welcomed for it creates a feeling of mental well-being in

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the patients by allowing them to forget for a while the dreadful conditions and experiences they are enduring, and is, in my opinion, an important step towards their eventual recovery’.85 The YMCA kept a recreation centre open at Tobruk which earned the reputation of being ‘the most bombed and shelled YMCA section in the world’, maintaining a canteen, games, classes and religious services throughout the siege.86 The former British army barracks at Singapore which became the Changi POW camp, had the best facilities of any prison camp: a library was created out of the already existing British army library. In the library one book would be read hundreds of times so a binding staff was created. The books were bound with scraps of material, backs of blinds, gum made from rice and cotton from old hosepipes. In 1941 the Army Education Service was established to provide lectures, films, music recitals and correspondence courses for millions of soldiers. In 1943 they purchased 17,000 ‘Forces Book Club’ Penguins for distribution to troops in New Guinea and the islands. Thousands more Penguins were distributed to troops in the Pacific in March 1944 through the Army Amenity Fund. That same year the Commonwealth Literary Fund supported a move by the AES to create the Australian Pocket Library, which were reprints of a range of out-of-print Australian books. The Department of War Organisation rationed supplies of paper during the war but Chief Parliamentary Librarian Kenneth Binns, a member of the Commonwealth Book Sponsorship Committee which advised on paper supplies for books, was influential in his support of the Pocket Library concept and ensured it went ahead. The series proved very popular, with print runs of 25 000 selling out quickly. Books by Vance Palmer, Kylie Tennant

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and Frank Clune were among those selected. Classics like ‘The Man from Snowy River’, C.E.W. Bean’s On the Wool Track and Henry Lawson’s short stories were reprinted in this series. Insect Wonders of Australia by Keith McKeown was a popular natural history book published by Angus & Robertson in hard cover in 1935; it always had a place on the bookshop shelves. It reappeared in paperback form in the Pocket Library series. Many of these modest little productions had a valued place in the bookshop and made welcome overseas gifts from families, for men and women on active service yearned for familiar stories and missed deeply the sights and sounds of the Australian bush. Another popular book on the shelves was Days of our Years, printed initially in America and reprinted in Australia in 1942. It was a story of pre-war Europe by Pierre Van Paasen, a foreign correspondent working in Palestine between the wars. A prisoner of war in Java, Ray Denning, served as a medical orderly in a hospital where the men managed to find and share books. While there Denning read Van Paasen’s book, H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, some Shakespeare plays and Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele. His camp library was ‘a stimulating oasis for the mind even though our bodies shrank and showed signs of malnutrition’.87 Books provided support and company for many prisoners of war in Europe. The Red Cross recommended books in the Everyman’s Library for families to send to these camps because they were cheap and sturdy and provided good solid reading. Robert Kee, a British POW in Germany, stated that ‘we could not have lived without books. They were the only sure support, the one true comfort’.88

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NINE

People of Note

In 1943 the bookshop was advertising copies of Rum Rebellion by Bert Evatt. He wrote this book and published it in 1938 while he was a judge of the High Court and before entering federal politics. This difficult, combative man’s ambition, intellectual energy and strong self-belief would see him rise to a position of even greater influence in Australian political life during the war years and after, though he was a man who made many enemies and few friends. His intellectual gifts were never in doubt, but Evatt had a suspicious and manipulative side to his character that was to seriously impair his working relationships and his career. Many in government and the public service distrusted him; he never attained his goal of leading the Labor Party in government and retired from politics at a low point in its fortunes. Yet he was to help give Australia a proud standing internationally through his work with the founding of the United Nations. He has a place in this story; Verity’s husband, Laurie Fitzhardinge, worked under his ministerial direction for a time during the war. Both he and 137

Verity read his books, promoted them at the shop, listened to important speeches he gave and followed his controversial career, for they knew of its significance to contemporary Australia. Bert Evatt was not from a privileged background. His widowed mother brought up her four children on her own resources, determined for them to have access to a good education and its promise of a more secure life. Bert Evatt was a brilliant scholar at Fort St High School and at the University of Sydney, where he made his way by winning prizes and scholarships to cover his tuition and college fees. He began his legal career as associate to the Chief Justice of NSW and was admitted to the Bar in October 1918. Later he worked as a barrister for a legal firm. Evatt and his contemporary Robert Menzies were recognized early on as the ‘coming young barristers’ of their respective hometowns of Sydney and Melbourne. They became lifelong and bitter rivals. They were men who used their great talents for very different ends: Menzies to support Imperial interests and Anglo-British culture; Evatt from the early days a supporter of the labour movement and what it stood for. Evatt’s legal work prospered, much of it in support of union and labour causes. In 1930 at the age of 36 years he was appointed the youngest ever Judge of the High Court of Australia, based at that time in Melbourne. It was during the decade he spent at the High Court that he developed an interest in the League of Nations and the reasons for its failure, and in how a new international order might promote a peaceful world with economic security for all people. While at the High Court Evatt published four books, researching and writing them while standing at his desk during the night hours before returning to the High Court and its formidable demands. His small book,

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Injustice within the Law, written in 1937 and later republished as Tolpuddle Martyrs, was about the unjust persecution of a handful of agricultural labourers in nineteenth-century England. It was an eloquent study of the way the law could be used in a society for cruel ends and the repression of minority groups. Evatt wrote the book in 1937, as Germany and Italy turned trade unions into docile instruments of the fascist state. He saw how easily hard-won human rights for such groups could ‘perish overnight in a holocaust of terror and force’.89 Two of the other books were close studies of notable Australians: Governor William Bligh and John Macarthur in Rum Rebellion, and Australian Labour Leader, a biography of W. A. Holman. Both were partisan works, the writings of a man who had a strong sense of the drama and conflict in public and political life. Evatt saw Bligh as a man unjustly persecuted by John Macarthur and his friends in the New South Wales Corps who had a monopoly on the rum trade and wielded enormous power in the colony. The book was the first Australian publication to portray Macarthur as anything but the heroic founder of Australia’s wool industry. The Holman biography portrayed a man who abandoned the Labor Party in order to support Billy Hughes in the conscription debates of 1916/17. Evatt saw Holman as a tragic figure who lost everything by breaking with the party he had helped create. All these books made their mark among serious readers; the influential writer and critic Vance Palmer referred to ‘the immense historical importance’ of the Holman biography.90 It was always on the shelves at the bookshop, advertised as ‘a study of the toils of NSW and Federal politics’. In 1940 Evatt decided to re-enter politics, having briefly held

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the Labor seat of Balmain in NSW in 1925. His own personal ambition and a strong belief in his capacity to unite and lead a faction-ridden Labor Party drove him back into the federal sphere, and he was encouraged to make this move by his close friend Ernest Burgmann, the radical Church of England prelate who is also part of this story. Evatt had taken sabbatical leave to Europe in 1938 and while there became very aware of the rise of fascism and Australia’s lack of preparedness to deal with the threat it represented. At the election on 21 September 1940, Evatt won Barton with a big majority, taking the seat from Menzies’ United Australia Party. In his first speech to the House of Representatives on 22 November as a member of the Opposition he said ‘the future of us all is dependent on two things. First, the outcome of the war, and secondly, the kind of society that should follow the war’.91 By that stage he and his wife Mary Alice Evatt had set up house in Canberra, though they were never to be settled in any one city for long in those turbulent years. They were both present at the reception Lord and Lady Gowrie gave on 20 November at Government House to mark the opening of the new Parliament; MPs and Senators and their wives mingled with members of the small Diplomatic Corps and a few other distinguished guests. Against the background of continuing German advances in Europe and the air attacks on Britain, Lord Gowrie spoke of Australia’s commitment to prosecute the war to its conclusion. That week the Advisory War Council was formed as an all-party body to advise the Menzies government, with John Curtin and his deputy Frank Forde members, but not Evatt. At this stage, the war was very far away from Australia. On the day after parliament opened Mrs Curtin hosted an afternoon

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tea for the wives of Opposition members at Parliament House. The floribunda roses would have been looking their best in the parliamentary rose garden that spring, and it is unlikely that the women would have felt the need for anything but genteel and light -hearted chatter with their friends and new acquaintances. Mary Alice Evatt had a very different background to the other women. She was American-born, with inherited wealth; universityeducated, a traveller and practising artist who had met Picasso in Paris and studied under the Melbourne bohemians of the ‘Heidi School’. Mary Alice and her husband were already collecting and donating major works of art to Australian galleries. This was to become one more field where Evatt and Menzies clashed. Menzies had tried while in office to establish a National Academy of Art to protect and foster established standards in art, while Evatt and his wife were promoting modernist art and its challenge to the established order. Evatt had opened Frank Hinder’s exhibition in Sydney just before the outbreak of war; but he also aligned himself with the Contemporary Art Society and opened its inaugural exhibition in Melbourne in June 1939. Hinder remembered Evatt saying he would have preferred the arts to law, hence his interest in the art world and modernism. His taste in literature, however, was conservative; his biographer John Murphy suggested that modern literature demanded the sort of introspection and self-examination that Evatt wanted to avoid. When Labor won power in October 1941, Curtin appointed Evatt as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs. He was known publicly as ‘Doc’ Evatt; he had a doctorate at a time when university education was very uncommon among Labor politicians. Many of these men of course had never had

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the opportunity to further their education, with the Depression not many years behind. The Department of External Affairs before Evatt’s time was a small and distinctly homely place according to journalist Paul Hasluck, who was seconded to the department for six years from the beginning of 1941. The staff at the Canberra office had been reduced to less than half by the opening of diplomatic posts abroad and by enlistment in the armed forces. The Secretary of the department was an ex-army man, Lieutenant-Colonel William Hodgson, who brought his dog into the office, where it drank out of one of the tea-pool’s saucers. Then there was a handful of officers and clerks, with the records room ‘manned by a cheerful, friendly, obliging and imperfectly educated band of youths’ who, later in the war, turning 18, were called up and replaced by a group of housewives. The records room consisted of a casually supervised series of files, the files index being ‘a much-thumbed hand-written journal’.92 At that stage of the war, very few outsiders had been brought into the public service in Canberra. There had always been strong support for the employment of ex-servicemen, with their association pressing the government to give preference to these men over more qualified applicants for jobs. As a consequence, many of the public service departments were seen as conservative, resistant to change or new ideas and suspicious of educated ‘experts’. Many of their men were also nearing retirement and considered the public service a place they could see out their last working years without too many demands being made on them. Canberra also suffered from the sense of being isolated, removed as it was from the big cities and industrial and manufacturing centres, from the busy ports and harbours of

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the east coast, and from the real centre of military planning, Melbourne. The War Cabinet secretariat was based in Melbourne, as was the Department of Defence and its associated agencies. When Evatt became Minister for External Affairs in early October 1941, ‘the department was elated at the prospect. It would be good to have a minister with brains.’93 On his second day in office Evatt told his staff that he intended to make Canberra his headquarters so he would be readily available to staff. He wanted a bigger, more professional staff to deal with the complex international issues that now faced the nation. Part of this move would be to recruit a regular annual intake of young, educated men (and women) into external affairs work. He wanted recruitment to be drawn from men who had recently seen active service. Three of the twelve places were to be reserved for women, the latter move in response to urgings from feminist Jessie Street. Three of the young people who were selected for this scheme illustrate the changing face of public service recruitment, though it was at this stage restricted to the Department of External Affairs. Ric Throssell came from a distinguished West Australian family. His father Hugo Throssell won a Victoria Cross on Gallipoli in 1915 and his mother was the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard. After service with an AIF signals unit in New Guinea, Ric joined the first intake of cadets for the diplomatic service in 1943. After his training, his first posting was to Moscow in 1945, and in the later 1940s he was to be an advisor to Evatt in his capacity as President of the United Nations General Assembly. His mother was a lifelong member of the Australian Communist Party and this association, together

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with Throssell’s own connections with Russians in Australia, was to taint his career and hinder further advancement in the Diplomatic Service. Julia Drake Brockman also came from a prominent West Australian family, her father a decorated Anzac and her mother the novelist Henrietta Drake Brockman. Julia joined the initial cadet intake when she was just 18. After her training she was appointed as Third Secretary to the Australian delegation to the United Nations in 1946, but was forced to resign from this promising career when she chose to marry; she was bound by the Public Service Act which required women to retire from the service on marriage. Donald Horne was serving as a gunner with an AIF artillery unit in North Australia when he heard about the new diplomatic cadet scheme. In Darwin, officers and other ranks sat for the same exam in a hut set aside for the purpose; Australia-wide, well over one thousand men and women applied for entry to the scheme. Horne was successful and joined the scheme in the second intake of cadets in May 1944, for what was to be a twoyear period of training in Canberra. Horne, who’d spent time at the University of Sydney editing the student magazine and enjoying a youthful bohemian lifestyle, looked on Canberra with the baneful eye of a young man condemned to exile and cheated of a promising future. It was a place devoid of any social or intellectual excitement for him; he loathed its boarding house culture and escaped to Sydney whenever he could. The only attractive feature of the diplomatic course for him was the series of history lectures given by Laurie Fitzhardinge. Fitzhardinge had been referred to Evatt by Kenneth Binns of the National Parliamentary Library. Evatt wanted teachers

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of high intellectual calibre for the new cadet course. A first class course in economics and politics would be presented by men like Kenneth Bailey, consultant to the Attorney-General’s Department, and Lyndhurst Giblin, chief advisor to the Commonwealth on economic war policy. Both these men were living in Canberra and were able to give part-time lectures in those subjects at Canberra University College which at that stage of the war was based at the Acton Hotel. Evatt wanted the cadets to be versed in Australian history which was not yet taught at any universities. The Parliamentary Library released Laurie on a part-time basis to organize two courses: one called ‘The History and Political Thought of the Western World from the Greeks to the French Revolution’. The other course was one on Australian history—as he conceived it; there were no set guidelines. For Laurie, the study and writing of history was a life-long passion, and he must have conveyed to the cadets something of what it meant to him. Donald Horne certainly spoke well of this ‘scholar of gentle temperament.94 Donald Horne was not to stay with the diplomatic service; he resigned before the end of the course to enter the world of writing and journalism, a world more suited to his ironic, iconoclastic spirit. Julia Drake Brockman saw her entry into the diplomatic service as the exciting beginning of her adult life. She began keeping a personal journal from the day of her arrival in Canberra. In it she pasted scores of newspaper cuttings about the three young women chosen for the course—such a newsworthy item in a public world devoted to men’s affairs. There were two, poignant personal letters in her scrapbook, one from two militia men stationed at Towcumwal barracks. They had seen her ‘very

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beautiful’ photo in the Sun and respectfully asked for a signed copy of the photo; they also wished her ‘much success’ in her new appointment. Another letter came from a lonely schoolteacher languishing in a transport unit in Canungra in Queensland, enclosing a poem for her and suggesting they become penfriends. There were also letters of congratulations from the Feminist Club in Sydney and from a family friend, Miles Franklin: ‘It’s just what I should have liked when at your age, had there been such an opportunity’.95 Canberra offered new faces and friendships. She and her fellow cadets had dinner with Lieutenant-Colonel Hodgson and Doc Evatt, checking with her mother on the protocol of ‘thank you’ letters after the event. She went ‘mountaineering’ which probably meant a ski trip or bushwalk with the Lane Poole family, who were friends of her mother. Ruth Lane Poole, ‘a chain-smoking woman of great determination and energy’ was making her mark in Canberra as one of the few married women pursuing a professional career.96 As an interior designer she had been commissioned in 1926 by the Federal Capital Commission to design and furnish the Prime Minister’s Lodge and the Governor General’s residence at Yarralumla. No doubt Julia met Cla Allen and his adventurous friends, and Verity, through the bookshop. She was entranced by the clear winter landscape and imagined the future city with its long vistas towards the surrounding hills. Unlike so many newcomers, she was attracted towards the unformed state of the city. ‘Canberra is very lovely, because so much is still an idea, rather than in spite of it,’ she wrote to her mother.97 Boarding house life, however, proved depressing. Before long, the excited entries in the scrapbook ceased and an undated,

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unattributed newspaper article summed up her growing sense of futility. ‘Workers’ Tough Times in Canberra’ must have given exact expression to what Julia and other young single public servants were experiencing: a town where no cafes were open after eight, where wartime working hours and infrequent night time buses saw them trudging back late at night to the cheerless regime of the hostels. The floating population, on weekends, ‘go for walk, brushing off Canberra flies or take a bus, visit the War Memorial, swim, read, sleep and play cards’. If this article reflected Julia’s growing demoralization, it did not address its real cause, her disappointment with the workplace. She was assigned dull clerical work, and within six months she told her parents she was ‘fed up’ and threatened to resign. However, she did complete the two-year course, and in 1946 was appointed Third Secretary to the Australian delegation to the United Nations. After a quiet wedding to a fellow diplomat, John Moore, Julia was determined to stay on in the service and kept up what she described as a ‘strenuous’ schedule of work and official engagements in New York. In Canberra, the Public Service Board insisted she resign and be re-engaged as local staff without diplomatic rank and on a lower salary. With the support of her husband, Julia petitioned Doc Evatt and Paul Hasluck who was head of mission in New York. But neither man at that stage, whatever their private sympathies, were prepared to defend her position. Meanwhile, Julia was continuing her work with the United Nations. In November 1946 she represented Australia on the UN Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee and helped secure the resolution that all member nations grant women equal rights. Later she worked alongside Jessie Street on the Commission on the Status of Women. When the couple returned to Australia

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in late 1947, Julia accepted the fact that she would not be able to continue her career. Both of the other women appointed as cadets with Julia had also married by then. Julia had featured in the social pages of the Canberra Times in January 1945 as a bridesmaid for her fellow cadet, Bronnie Taylor, who married Rhodes Scholar Captain Alan Treloar at St Johns Church. He was about to take up duties at the University of Melbourne; his wife resigned from her role in the department. Ric Throssell stayed in Canberra. He found a friend and mentor in Paul Hasluck to whom he was assigned to research ‘Post Hostilities Planning’ in the department. The two men shared a love of theatre; Hasluck had been chief drama critic for the West Australian for several years. Hasluck became the new president of the Canberra Repertory Theatre which had been in recess since the start of the war, and both he and Throssell did much to revive its profile in the town, playing leading roles in Repertory’s first production at the Albert Hall in 1944 and attracting a large new membership. During 1945 Hasluck had to resign from the presidency because of work commitments and was later succeeded by Dr Richard Woolley, the director of the Mt Stromlo Observatory. Ric Throssell remained an active member; he produced his first full-length play, Valley of the Shadows, for Repertory after the war. To mark Anzac Day in 1945, he produced a radio play, Anzac; the cast list included Julia Drake Brockman. While some newcomers to Canberra hated its hostel life during the war, there were others who relished the challenges and novelties that opened up with their move to Canberra. Most were young, energetic people with tertiary qualifications, with an interest in the arts, and in theatre in particular. For those

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living in hostels, there were no domestic chores and plenty of time to join groups they were interested in, like the Repertory Theatre. Brian Hill was one of the intake of diplomatic cadets in 1944, and unlike Donald Horne, he found a strong sense of energy and purpose animating life in the young capital. ‘It was a very exciting small society in which to live.’98 Verity was a great supporter of Repertory, always advertising the coming productions and selling tickets at the shop. She catered for the interest in play reading and drama productions among this enthusiastic coterie. In 1943 the script of Douglas Stewart’s ‘prize-winning play Ned Kelly’ was on sale at the shop. In 1944 she promoted the productions of Doris Fitton’s Sydney company which performed Death Takes a Holiday and Noel Coward’s The Marquis at the Albert Hall. *** When Doc Evatt published his small book on the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1937, it included a foreword by his friend Ernest Burgmann, Bishop of the Goulburn Church of England diocese: ‘Neither church nor court rise much above the prevailing opinion of the times, and that is why the spirit of truth and justice must whisper in the ear of individuals who will listen and respond.’99 Who was this radical cleric who spoke so eloquently against the prevailing conservatism of both the church and the law? Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson considered Burgmann, like Evatt, to be one of the great thinkers of the inter-war years. Laurie Fitzhardinge, who knew Burgmann well, recalled that in Burgmann’s company, ‘he knew he was in the presence of greatness, but could never quite pin down why.’100

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Burgmann did not fit the usual clerical mould. He was the son of a small selector from the central coast forests of NSW, and he earned his way as a logger in his youth before leaving to study for an arts degree at the University of Sydney. He wanted to become a priest and was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1911 and sent out to work in country parishes in Goulburn and the Upper Hunter. As a young man he was already formulating a version of Christianity at odds with the established church. Rather than preach about individual piety and the need for salvation, Burgmann was challenging the governments of the day to do more for the unemployed, to rid the cities of slums, to help embattled country people living in poverty without access to essential services. More radically, he criticized the church and government for interfering with people’s civil rights and for encouraging insular, racist attitudes in Australians rather than engaging with the emerging societies of the Asia-Pacific region. Burgmann saw education as the key to change, and to this end, in 1925 he took up the post of warden at St John’s Theological College in Morpeth, a rural village in the Hunter Valley. Here he established a successful centre for educating a new generation of clergy. His quarterly journal, The Morpeth Review, mirrored the work of the Australian National Review as a respected journal of ideas in the inter-war period. It was designed for those on the borderline of institutional religion. Well-known Christians were invited to contribute articles on economics, science, anthropology, literature and theology. Doc Evatt, never a friend of the established church, took out a subscription in 1933, and Burgmann asked him in return for an article on the Federal Constitution. Burgmann used his public standing to inform, educate and

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lobby. He wrote articles for the Newcastle Morning Herald, gave lectures to the Workers Educational Association in Newcastle and during the Depression years of 1933–34 he spoke regularly to the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in the district, making clear his support for more church and state aid for them but also rallying them to continue agitation. Burgmann and his Morpeth colleague, Roy Lee, were both on the ‘blacklist’ of the quasimilitia group the New Guard, to be ‘targeted’ if they ever came to power in NSW The Morpeth Review became a sounding board and a way to lobby experts in public life, like Bertram Stevens, NSW Premier, with whom Burgmann corresponded regularly on domestic and foreign policy issues. He was unsuccessful in having the dole payment doubled, because the government was intent on cutting all public expenditure during the Depression. Burgmann was ordained Bishop of Goulburn diocese, which included Canberra, in 1934. It seemed an anomaly to put a man given to such radical dissent in charge of a large and conservative rural diocese, but Burgmann had earned a reputation as a man who could bring new life and growth into the shrinking and ageing church. Verity Hewitt had a long entry in her diary in June 1938 about a meeting she had attended in Canberra where Burgmann talked of the need for renewal of the church and the nation at a time when civilization itself seemed to be failing humanity by not meeting so many people’s basic needs. She would have known about him before, through Laurie, and he was to be an important contributor of articles to their Australian National Review. Goulburn’s parochial church circular, Southern Churchman, became in Burgmann’s hands another place where serious social

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questions could be aired, some pieces finding their way for wider circulation in newspapers around the country, even into federal Hansard. Burgmann also talked widely on the ABC, about soil erosion, bushfire control and water conservation. In 1942 a series of his talks for the Melbourne diocese, the Moorhouse Lectures, were reproduced as a pamphlet, The Regeneration of Civilization, and promoted on the shelves of the bookshop. That was in December 1942, at a time when people’s fear and anxiety about the future prompted them to take a serious interest in the big issues. Burgmann’s lectures argued for a renewal of democratic life through the sharing of wealth, progressive public education, free medical care, productive employment and urban renewal. He was not alone in seeking answers for the crises facing their world. At the same time the war historian C. E. W. Bean was making a case for education reform, urban planning, full employment and job security, and the establishment of an international court of justice. His book was called War Aims of a Plain Australian and was on sale in the bookshop in 1943 ‘for those who are Australian minded’ as Verity explained. Burgmann talked often about the origins of communism, which he saw in its basic form as a fight to redeem humanity from poverty and suffering. He was greatly interested in Russia’s attempts to establish a new society, though he condemned totalitarianism in any form. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Burgmann became president of the Soviet Friendship League, which had support from a wide range of people including former Governor General Sir Isaac Isaacs, the author Frank Dalby Davison, noted sportsmen and women and leaders from immigrant communities. The League’s first conference, in Melbourne in August 1941, was attended by delegates from 92

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different organisations including the Council for Civil Liberties, the Church of England Men’s Society, the Workers Educational Association and the Mothers Union. It was by no means a radical collection of Australians, but it did represent those who saw that, for the duration of the war at least, Russia’s cause was also their cause. At that stage Germany had 110 divisions on the Russian frontier; if Russia folded, those divisions would be turned against Britain. As well, many people were moved by the stories of great suffering coming out of the country. Messages of support for the conference were sent from Dr Lewis Nott in Canberra, at that stage trying hard to arrange a medical unit to be sent to Russia, and from Bishop Burgmann, who supported the conference’s move to call on the Australian government to establish a diplomatic mission in Russia. (The government announced an exchange of ministries in late 1942, and the Russian legation was established in Canberra in March 1943.) In 1936 Burgmann founded the Legion of Christian Youth which, true to his mission to link Christian belief and action for social justice, pressed for community and political interest in slum clearance and better housing programs. Burgmann was to be a friend of Evatt for the next two decades, and at meetings at the Evatts’ home Bert and Mary Alice discussed the problems of the world with Burgmann and his group of young Christian Socialists. Burgmann’s young friend Allan Dalziel, a committed Presbyterian layman, became secretary of the League. Possibly through his friendship with Burgmann, Dalziel was appointed as Evatt’s electoral secretary for the federal seat of Barton in 1940, and later became private secretary to Evatt as Attorney-General. Evatt prompted Burgmann, through Dalziel, to involve himself

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in civil liberties campaigns against government censorship and the move to ban the Communist Party. Burgmann, in turn, interceded with the Attorney-General on behalf of conscientious objectors and refugee immigrants who came to him for help after the war in what was an increasingly suspicious and securityconscious country. Refugee immigrants came to Verity’s shop, a place they could frequent with no demands on their time, their money or their allegiances. Verity recalled ‘many refugees from fascism and Nazism’ who came to the bookshop. Helmut Kaulla was one such man, a learned academic who could only find employment as an examiner in the Patents Office. Geoff Fitzhardinge remembers Helmut and his wife and daughter as good friends of his parents; they may even have shared accommodation with Verity and Laurie and their children in Reid for a while. There are various references in Verity’s letters to other immigrants. Ben Asman was a Jewish refugee from Poland, ‘a nice little chap, with a very varied background, but very delicate’. Hans Nossal was an Austrian Jew, whose parents had come to Australia before the war as part of the planned intake of 15,000 European Jews. They worked in a leather goods workshop in Sydney but it was closed down because the owners didn’t have a licence. Hans was studying accountancy in Sydney and both he and his parents were classed as ‘enemy aliens’. In the early part of the war Hans must have had a certain freedom to travel and to visit and stay in Canberra, but by 1942 with the increased alarms about invasion, enemy aliens of fighting age were called up to serve in labour companies. Hans was angered at what he saw as unjust treatment; in England ‘class C’ aliens had freedom of movement and the right to volunteer for the armed forces; in

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America they were treated as prospective citizens. Hans wrote that he did not object to manual labour if all members of the community were treated the same way, but the labour camps he saw as degrading and unjust; he was not an enemy of Australia! ‘I would prefer to go to jail than submit to this treatment’. He would be grateful if Verity could show his letters of appeal to her friend the Crown Solicitor Mr Whitlam, to investigate the nature of his appeal. Starting with her interest in learning Russian in 1942, Verity developed a network of friends among Russian immigrants after the war. In the hostile climate of the 1950s both Laurie and Verity were seen as ‘persons of interest’ with a security file in the Commonwealth Archives, tracing their family connections, their movements and suspected communist allegiances including membership of a social group the ‘Pushkin Circle’. A secret report of 10 October 1951, refers to Verity and contained a mild defence of her recent history, pointing out that she was ‘an Arts scholar fluent in Russian’: On opening the bookshop in 1936 [sic] Mrs Fitzhardinge acquired a reputation for good taste in the selection of books, prints, paintings and curios in which she dealt. The atmosphere of her shop was one of propriety with a slight whimsical note … her subsequent association with the Pushkin Circle could be related to a genuine interest in Russian literature.101

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T EN

‘A Pool of Conspicuous Talent’102

A small room ‘at the sunny corner at the top of West Block’, one of the government offices near Parliament House, became the place where much of the social and economic policy of wartime Australia was worked out. It was the office of Professor Lyndhurst Giblin, Chair of the government’s Financial and Economic Advisory Committee. Its members were considered by many observers to be ‘the public intellectuals of the decade’.103 When war was declared the Commonwealth Bank seconded its leading thinker and strategist, H. C. Coombs, to Treasury, where he became Treasury’s link to the powerful committee. Richard Downing, the young economics graduate who had been Giblin’s research assistant in Melbourne, came to Canberra in 1941 to work as assistant economic consultant to Douglas Copland, Commonwealth Prices Commissioner. Downing found the work environment stimulating but he always said he

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hated Canberra; it lacked the urbanity he cultivated in his life in Melbourne. By the end of 1942 he had ‘escaped the horrors of the Hotel Kurrajong’ and moved into an apartment in Barton, a short walk from West Block.104 He shared the apartment with Copland and at various times with other members of the ‘official family of economists’ including Coombs and Copland’s Assistant Secretary Lennox Hewitt; even senior bureaucrats did not have the luxury of choosing their own dwelling at a time of such acute housing shortages. Eilean and Lyndhurst Giblin were good friends and shared social gatherings over dinner with the group, with gramophone recordings of music from Europe and intense political discussion. Downing also enjoyed going on expeditions with Eilean Giblin in search of potting clay. As well as their day jobs, some of the senior economists also taught at the Canberra University College at night, lecturing to young public servants who were studying out of interest or for advancement at work. In 1944 Downing gave lectures in the new diplomatic studies course with Laurie Fitzhardinge. They would all have been familiar with Verity’s bookshop, even if only to pick up the textbooks required for the courses, or to purchase copies of the New Statesman and The Economist, both respected and long-established British publications that were widely read by Australia’s intellectual leaders and policy makers. (Current issues of course would be at least six weeks out of date.) This influential band of economists, numbering around 30 or 40, who lived and worked together in the young capital during the war years, changed the nature of the public service which began to see promising young graduates step into roles of influence over older men. Giblin had long been critical of the government’s indifference to the quality of the public service;

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when he persuaded Treasury to appoint his star pupil, Roland Wilson (a Rhodes Scholar) as economics advisor, the appointment was received with much hostility by old hands in the Bureau of Census and Statistics where he was sent. Steeped in the economic theories of G. M. Keynes, these men (and the occasional woman) all believed the government’s necessary intervention to control the war economy could, in the post-war world, continue into the civic realm to create a more equitable distribution of wealth and better social conditions for all citizens. They shared a belief that after the war it would be important to construct economic and social conditions that enabled a new generation to inherit a genuinely better world. The Financial and Economic Committee met every few months in Canberra during the war. They were assigned to write papers on a growing variety of topics which were circulated between meetings and then discussed, concluding with options for the government to consider; Giblin would then formulate a consensus to present to senior government officials. Hardly a meeting went by without the committee discussing a paper by Coombs, many of them addressing the urgent issues facing government: how to finance the war and the problem of curbing private consumption. Rationing had been considered too difficult politically by Curtin’s predecessors. Menzies told Curtin on 6 November 1941, ‘I don’t believe that any government will, in the present temper of public opinion in Australia, successfully attempt rationing’.105 Nevertheless, Curtin’s government resolved that same month to ration certain goods—clothing in particular—in order to release labour from the industries making, wholesaling and retailing these goods.

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In February 1942, with the Japanese taking Singapore and bombing Darwin, Curtin announced a National Economic Plan with unprecedented government powers of regulation. Prices of all goods and services were pegged as were wages; speculation on commodities was prohibited; interest rates were controlled; control of manpower was tightened and absenteeism made illegal for both employers and employees. By April 1942 Curtin decided to appoint a Director of Rationing and chose Coombs for this difficult job. The Labor government now had the formidable task of convincing Australians that these stringent economic measures, especially rationing, were in the interests of the whole nation and of every individual. The Menzies government, in its wish to limit wage rises, divert labour, change working conditions and discourage strikes, had failed in its efforts to forge a ‘social contract’ with the trade union movement. Labor under John Curtin started from a position of strength; Curtin was one of their own, used to addressing delegates at Labor conferences. Then Russia’s entry into the war in June 1941 brought the Communist Party behind a determined prosecution of the war. Curtin’s government never resolved the continuing unrest in the coalmining industry, but as the war went on, strikes were, on average, settled more quickly. Beginning work on 16 April 1942, Coombs worked long hours, sometimes 16-hour days, to ensure that coupon books were ready on 13 and 14 June to be issued through post offices, commandeered churches and public halls, to every adult in Australia. Out of Coombs’s nine months (April to December 1942) as Director, only eight or nine weeks were taken up with developing the coupon book and assigning every conceivable retail item its coupon ‘worth’. The remaining seven months he

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spent justifying and adjusting the ration scale in the light of public opinion, gained through meetings with retailers, manufacturers, unionists and housewives’ associations in the capital cities (but not Canberra). Coombs benefited from the retailing experience of one of the three Commissioners for rationing under which he worked. Arthur Coles had founded the Coles chain stores which were changing the nature of people’s shopping habits in the interwar years. Asked about prosecuting black marketers who cheated the system, Coles advised Coombs to ignore small refractions. He argued that giving people a chance to ‘beat the system’ made the whole rationing business less absolute and therefore more acceptable. Rationing became a humdrum fact of life for Canberrans (and all Australians) for the rest of the war, grumbled about but at least in the early years accepted by most people as part of the ‘total war effort’. Everyone had stories about its place in day to day life. Cla Allen noted each year in his diary when the family’s ration books were collected. Planning a family trip to the coast in October 1944, he called at the Department of the Interior for some more petrol coupons; ‘wasted an hour for about one gallon’. Verity Hewitt kept the ration cards issued for her children’s clothing; whether it was for sentimental or historical reasons isn’t clear. Eilean Giblin noted in her diary what foods were missing or unavailable from the shops: ‘no treacle or golden syrup … no marmite, tea rationed and coffee very short. No dried fruits such as prunes or apricots, although we hear the troops get so many that they are sick of them’.106 She attributed the shortage of coffee to the amount drunk by the American troops. Paul Hasluck viewed the human comedy of the times as he and his friends faced rationing in Canberra:

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… getting the tip that such and such a shop was going to get a new assignment of something became part of the zest of life on the civilian front. The triumph of obtaining a pair of shoelaces became one of the big events of suburban life.107 Rationing and the larger impacts of war were being felt in the book trade, though very few consignments of books were lost through enemy attacks on shipping. One notable exception was a special English edition of Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never Never; the whole consignment was lost when the London wharves where it was stored were bombed. Throughout 1943 and 1944 the bookshop continued to offer good prices for second-hand books in good condition. New books from Britain continued to arrive but at irregular times and in much smaller numbers. By the end of 1941, 25% of books in print in 1939 were unobtainable. Publication of Australian books was increasing as firms like Angus & Robertson in Sydney and Robertson & Mullens in Melbourne took up the opportunities presented by the decline in the British trade, for the public’s hunger for books had not lessened. Angus & Robertson published scores of books by Australian authors and Australian editions of books written overseas. But in Australia the trade generally was badly affected by increasing labour and paper shortages. In 1942 the printing industry made an appeal for the right to appoint female labour especially given the shortage of book binders. Despite gloomy reports on a national scale about the struggles of booksellers, Verity reported that ‘sales were brisk’ in 1944 and she decided to take on another publishing venture, a

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second edition of Warren Denning’s Capital City. While the first edition of the book had been published and printed in Sydney, the second edition came out in Canberra under the Verity Hewitt imprint, with printing done at the Canberra Times. The second edition bears the stamp of Verity’s critical eye; she had deleted some of Denning’s ‘purple prose’, removing old fashioned phrasing and adopting a crisper style. She also deleted a whole chapter of lush prose entitled ‘A pageant of beauty’, in praise of Canberra’s garden and natural attractions. The growing cultural influence of America in Australian lives is reflected in the range of books advertised in 1944, some of them books that inspired films Australians had been watching. These included Eric Knight’s hugely popular Lassie Come-Home (voted American Young Readers’ Choice in 1943) which was made into a film the same year; and Mrs Parkington by Louis Bromfield, made into a popular film in 1944 starring Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon. These two stars had already featured in the 1942 American film Mrs Miniver, a highly sentimental and patriotic film about a family living in rural England during the Blitz. Every Canberran would have seen this film, which screened for eight nights in a row and five matinees in November 1942. (It was also very popular in screenings for troops at army bases.) Greer Garson had certainly made her name in patriotic tear-jerkers; Goodbye Mr Chips, with her costar Robert Donat, screened in Canberra in September that year. Australians also saw locally produced films for wartime distribution with overtly patriotic themes. These included Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen, a fictional account of the Desert Campaign in World War I, a story with obvious emotional resonance for many Australians. Chauvel’s

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film was extremely popular and set new box-office records. It was screened at Canberra’s Civic Theatre three weeks after the film’s world premiere in Sydney in January 1941. A 1942 dramatized documentary, 100,000 Cobbers, was made by the Cinesound company for the Department of Information to boost recruitment. Eilean Giblin mentioned going to see this ‘official film on the life and training of the AIF’ in Canberra. There were also official British war-propaganda productions seen in Canberra, notably In Which We Serve, starring Noel Coward and directed by David Lean. An important part of a night’s outing to the cinema was the Cinesound newsreel screened before the main feature. These newsreels were a vital part of government propaganda and communication, channelled through two commercial newsreels companies, Cinesound and Movietone News. Director Ken G. Hall worked in collaboration with photographer Damien Parer on a number of these films at the request of the Department of Information. Sparrow Force, a documentary of September 1942 filmed by Damien Parer on location and in re-enactments, brought to audiences at home the story of the operations of Australian guerrilla forces in Portuguese East Timor, where the men worked with local people to conduct successful hit-and-run campaigns against the Japanese occupying the island. A Cinesound newsreel of March 1943 portrayed the Spitfire fighter aircraft in action against Japanese Zero fighters near Darwin. This newsreel provided significant support for Bert Evatt who had been credited with the successful mission to persuade Churchill to dispatch three squadrons of Spitfires to Australia.

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Damien Parer’s and Ken Hall’s best-known Cinesound film was Kokoda Front Line! This was released in September 1942 to great acclaim and public interest. It showed the troops of the 39th Battalion in their operations in the sodden jungle and muddy tracks of Papua as they advanced towards Kokoda. It brought home to Australians for the first time the nature of the warfare that their men were engaged in. It is a powerful example of wartime propaganda, made especially effective by the appearance at the end of the young photographer Damien Parer, superimposed on the screen and appealing directly to the audience to support the war effort to the full, as their men were doing. This cinematographer who had earned such a reputation for skill and courage in the performance of his hazardous wartime career, was killed in action in 1944 at the age of 32. Australia’s first Oscar was awarded in 1943 to Cinesound’s chief director Ken Hall for Kokoda Front Line! It remains the only newsreel from any country to have ever won an Academy Award. It shared the award for Best Documentary with three other war documentaries, including John Ford’s The Battle of Midway. *** At Verity’s shop American war correspondents’ books were always popular, partly reflecting Australians’ continuing fascination with their new ally. There was Quentin Reynolds’ story of the Russian and North African campaigns, The Curtain Rises, and journalist Willard Price’s book, Japan’s Isles of Mystery, based on his years living in Japan and seeing its rise in militarism. A nostalgic American view of pre-war France, Memories of Happy

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Days by Julien Green, published in 1942, was selling in its first English edition in the shop in 1944. American texts including books by the noted American writers Karl Shapiro and Edmund Wilson were probably aimed principally at Arts students. This suggests that the Canberra University College was beginning to take an interest in contemporary American literature. A few British books got through and were eagerly sought out by readers. These included a new thriller, Colour Scheme, by the popular New Zealand crime writer Ngaio Marsh; copies of the childhood favourite Dr Doolittle books, and The Crocodile Album of Soviet Humour, published in London in 1943 as Soviet Russia grew in status as an ally. Pipeline to Battle was of great interest to Australian families whose men had served in North Africa. It was an account by Major Peter Rainier, a sapper in the Eighth Army, of building a pipeline to bring vital water supplies across the desert for the campaigns in North Africa. This book came out as a Penguin paperback in 1944. Harold Ingram, a British colonial administrator who served in Aden, Mauritius and parts of Saudi Arabia, wrote a book called Arabia and the Isles, published in London by John Murray in 1943. An Australian publication by the artist and architect John Drummond Moore has connections to the story of Canberra. Moore was based in Sydney and during the war was deputy director (under Professor Dakin) of the NSW Camouflage Unit. He had also designed a cathedral for the Roman Catholic diocese in Canberra, but this was never built. As an artist he was considered a ‘modernist’ like Margaret Preston, with a fresh approach to painting the Australian landscape, and he staged a number of exhibitions over the years at the Macquarie Galleries.

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In 1944 his book Home Again was published by Sydney Ure Smith and argued for a rational rather than ‘fashionable’ approach to designing homes, in keeping with the Australian landscape and environment. *** Australians gave a resounding endorsement of Curtin’s leadership in the federal elections of August 1943, which resulted in a landslide win for Labor. The election cry of ‘Victory in war, victory for the peace’ was a ringing appeal, made clearer by the absence of any compelling call from the Opposition. For Curtin it was a personal triumph; his vote in the seat of Fremantle was four times the size of his next opponent. Canberra journalist Warren Denning was very close to Curtin. He wrote that ‘Mr Curtin is probably the finest speaker the national parliament has produced since its transfer to Canberra [in 1927]. He spoke entirely without passion or emotion’, Denning recorded, ‘but with great power’.108 One aspect of his leadership attracted controversy, one that related to censorship and the release of information. Curtin had a strong sense of the need to maintain morale and a fighting spirit among civilians, even after the crisis year of 1942 had passed. His own austere moral code became the standard by which he judged others. He wanted Australians to be fully committed to the war effort to the very end, and he was affronted by what he perceived as the frequent apathy and self-indulgent spirit of some in the community. For this reason he kept a tight hold on information to be released to the public; every effort was made, in the interest of wartime morale, to ensure that no unfavourable

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press coverage appeared, though he did always support the independence of the ABC. There were regular meetings from June 1942 to January 1945 with a dozen or so journalists, senior members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery; Warren Denning was among them. Curtin had been part of their world and still wore his Australian Journalists Association badge on his watch chain. The men met in Curtin’s parliamentary office in Canberra for daily briefings but also went with him as he travelled by train, often on all-night trips between Canberra, Victoria Barracks in Melbourne and the other state capitals. Curtin’s press secretary Don Rodgers arranged these gatherings to provide top secret briefings to the men who in turn, could pass the confidential information on to their editors, converted to news items for the public if Curtin placed it ‘on the record’. ‘Off the record’ conversations could not be written or commented on in editorials. Curtin was effectively the ‘supreme propagandist’ of the war, ‘shouldering the burden for conceiving, coordinating, articulating and managing news and information in the interests of a sustained national war effort’.109 The press briefings were to ensure that as far as possible government information was put before the press in a way that would avoid the spread of damaging rumours and inaccurate information. On 24 February 1943 there were rumours that ‘a plane over Sydney’ was actually a scare, a stunt by Chifley to assist him fill his War Loans. This rumour was repudiated with disgust by Curtin at his next press briefing. As the war progressed and major security scares receded, a controversy erupted, with the Australian Newspaper Proprietors Association expressing outrage at what they regarded as

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needless censorship, in particular an order aimed at the Daily Telegraph. The censorship order was withdrawn after the Telegraph promised to abide by censorship regulations. On 16 April 1944 the Sunday Telegraph front page carried two blank columns with a bold print paragraph reading ‘A Free Press?’ Commonwealth police visited the premises and impounded remaining undistributed copies; other major Sydney papers joined the battle and were also suppressed. The matter went to the full bench of the High Court who restrained the Commonwealth from preventing publications relating to the censored material. They resolved that censorship ‘shall be imposed exclusively for reasons of defence security’ and ‘not merely for the maintenance of morale or prevention of despondency or alarm’.110 *** By 1944 the war in the Pacific was being dominated by American forces under General Macarthur; Australia was now a very minor player. In the early years of the Pacific war, Evatt had been successful in Washington and London in having more aircraft allocated to Australia, and he argued strongly for a greater Australian voice in the conduct of the war, but his presence on the Pacific War Council did not swing or shape higher strategy. By 1943 Macarthur was planning the invasion and conquest of Japan and its occupied territories, which was intended to be an American affair. Australia’s role would be a secondary one of ‘containment’ and ‘mopping up’ of Japanese forces still holding out in Bougainville, New Britain and Aitape in Northern New Guinea. The 9th and 7th Divisions would eventually see action near the end of the war in Borneo.

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But before these final campaigns, all three AIF divisions experienced a long, dull and trying hiatus from early 1944. American exploits in the Pacific now filled the news; the men of the AIF felt forgotten, based in training camps on the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland. Contemporary writings resound with a sense of frustration and disappointment. The old regimental loyalties were breaking up too, because as original members went on home leave or sick leave new men replaced them who had no shared memories of the war in North Africa, Syria or Greece. Canberra’s 3rd Battalion was withdrawn after their distinctive role fighting on the Kokoda Track and at Buna and Gona on the north coast of Papua. In 1943 the battalion returned to Australia along with the rest of the 30th Brigade and disbanded in July, its personnel absorbed into the AIF 2/3 Battalion. These men joined other units from the Australian divisions for what was meant to be a period of regrouping, recovery and jungle training on the Atherton Tableland. *** For some Australians, earning good money in munitions factories or construction works, the war by 1944 seemed very distant now that the threat of a Japanese invasion had passed and America controlled the sea and air space to the north. For John Curtin, the burden never lifted; he took on himself ‘the whole weight of care of a nation at war’.111 From the start of the Pacific war he talked to Australians about the need for the subordination of self for the greater good of the nation. ‘Let us think about them [their men fighting and dying] and think about ourselves a little less.’112 That

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was from a talk in Brisbane on 19 August 1942. The following week as part of arrangements for raising a War Loan of £100 million on the home market, an Austerity Campaign was launched that would ‘strip away anything that resembles a peacetime way of living’. The campaign had been launched on 3 September 1942, on the third anniversary of the outbreak of war. The measures restricted dog and horse races, hotel and restaurant hours, raised entertainment taxes and put checks on black-marketing. Curtin read out an emotional pledge in six short paragraphs which he asked every Australian to make: a promise to fight and work as never before, to ‘throw everything into the struggle’.113 Australians went along with the austerity campaign; they had no choice, though there would always be people who did their best to ignore or flout its rules. Some sceptics saw the campaign as Labor ‘softening up’ the country for socialism. Money and influence had their own corrupting potential. Paul Hasluck refers to ‘patches of dirt’ disfiguring the national scene. He knew of a case where, in a time of severe travel restrictions, a whole carriage of the Sydney to Melbourne train was taken over by bookmakers travelling to the Melbourne Cup.114 The restrictions on alcohol did little to dent Australian drinking habits, and drunkenness in public places by both civilians and servicemen continued to be a feature of city life throughout the war. It was less of a problem in Canberra because there was no large concentration of men on leave, and there were not the racial and social tensions so evident in Sydney and Brisbane where American troops made their presence felt, and where ‘wayward girls’ often just out of school, were attracted to the company of servicemen on leave, to be picked up by policemen and escorted home ‘after being given advice about their behaviour’.115

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Most Australians were doing the right thing, as Hasluck knew well: They listened with emotion to the Prime Minister’s broadcast and in the quietness of their homes resolved to do more. They had men in New Guinea or in prison camps in Malaya and Burma. Sometimes, having written letters to their men, some of them would write letters to the Prime Minister telling him he was in their thoughts and prayers.116 One way Australians could materially show their support for the war effort was by subscribing to government loans such as the Liberty Loans and in 1944 the Victory Loans. Cla Allen refers in his April 1943 diary to ‘taking £30 from my savings book for the third Liberty Loan’. There were large newspaper advertisements for all these loans, appealing both to Australians’ patriotism and their wish for a secure future for their family. As early as 29 April 1941, an emotive advertisement in the Canberra Times showed a photo of a young war orphan in Europe with the warning, ‘This could be your little girl. To prevent this our boys have gladly taken their place in the armed forces. It’s up to us to help fund their mighty effort. Buy War Loan Bonds.’ Other advertisements were more matter-of fact: ‘Support the government by lending all you can; invest in War Savings certificates.’ By August 1944, the tone of the advertising was more upbeat: ‘Save all you can—lend all you can, to put the weight into the final assault’. By early 1944 restrictions were being relaxed: race meetings were permitted once a month; lights were on again; the

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newspapers had a 5% increase in newsprint ration. By the end of 1943 the War Cabinet had decided to end the camouflage of oil and petrol storages. Frank Hinder and his wife returned to Sydney where they were to become significant and respected figures in the post-war art world. *** For Australian troops embarking again for New Guinea and the islands, there was little cause for optimism or excitement. In November 1944 five Australian brigades, over one and a half militia divisions, took over from U.S forces on the island of Bougainville, to the east of Papua/New Guinea. The Americans, who had built air bases after occupying the coastal region, were departing for the landings in the Philippines. The Australians were to ‘mop up’ what they were told were starving, dispirited and ill-equipped Japanese troops. The U.S. intelligence reports were in error. There were almost 40,000—not 20,000—of the Japanese XVII Army left on Bougainville and they were adequately equipped and living off an organized system of local crops and gardens. Many of the Australian battalions were made up of young reinforcements, mostly volunteers, half of them not yet twentyone, who had completed jungle training courses at Canungra in Queensland and had been posted to veteran militia battalions just returned from the New Guinea campaign. Their offensive on the island opened in December 1944, some 25,000 Australians opposing 40,000 Japanese. It was another war in the shadows: rifle companies patrolling through tangled jungle, wading through rivers and

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coastal swamps, always alert for ambush, and losing many of their number to a hidden enemy well-armed with machine guns, grenades and mortar bombs. The men were still bogged down in this bitter campaign in August 1945 when Japan surrendered. There was no wild rejoicing among the men. They had lost many of their mates in what they regarded as a useless and unnecessary campaign, because by late 1944 the war had moved north to Borneo and the Philippines. They begrudged every casualty, and their bitterness was compounded by the fact that neither the public nor the government seemed interested in this remote campaign. Other Australians were sent to the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The three brigades of the 6th Division, together for the first time since the failed campaign in Greece, relieved the American 43rd Division in October 1944, in what was virtually ‘conquered territory’ along the northern coastline. Following their defeats at Lae and Salamaua in 1943 and early 1944, the Japanese, 35,000 strong, had retreated westward, dispersing their troops widely in the mountainous and heavily populated Aitape–Weewak region, living off the countryside and digging in to fight to the bitter end. The Australians found the Aitape–Weewak area uniquely challenging: equatorial rainforest, swamps, thickets of bamboo, torrential rain and flooded rivers, and the constant enemy of malaria and other diseases. The 6th Division had 16,203 sickness evacuations in the operations which only ended with the Japanese surrender in August 1945, and which, like all the fighting in the Pacific, was defined by small groups patrolling through difficult country against an unseen enemy. As in Bougainville, this campaign raised many doubts in the

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minds of soldiers and of some in public life, as to its military or political necessity. Why had Australian leaders allowed ‘mopping up’ operations in the Pacific ‘back areas’ when the Japanese defeat was a foregone conclusion? A Canberra Times article of 10 January 1945 gave expression to some of these doubts, and the ensuing controversy forced General Blamey to have to outline his policies and practices on a radio broadcast. The editor, Arthur Shakespeare, was not one to back away from controversy when he saw the interests of ordinary Australians under attack. He took up the complaint of General Vernon Sturdee, head of the Australian 1st Army, who wrote to General Blamey, ‘The Australian public must be wondering whether we are still in the war.’ No news of Australian operations in either New Guinea or the Solomons was appearing in General Macarthur’s communiqués, which meant that correspondents’ reports could not be released by the censor. Even after the war finished these campaigns in the islands never became part of Australians’ understanding of the Pacific war. For many Australians the campaigns were a disappointing way to end the war. After the tedium of the Atherton Tableland many men had looked forward to being engaged in active operations, only to find that they were faced with an obviously needless task, but one for which many men paid dearly with their health or their lives. Except among their families, their experiences received little attention.

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EL E V EN

‘The Nicest Little Bookshop in Australia’117

The Governor General, Alexander Lord Gowrie and his wife Zara, Lady Gowrie, were in residence at Yarralumla from 1936 to 1944. Gowrie’s term of office was to have ended in September 1939 but with the outbreak of war his appointment was extended. Then in 1942 the couple were persuaded to stay another two years, despite Gowrie’s ill-health and their desire to see their grandchildren in England. Despite their patrician background and Imperial connections, the Gowries were warmly regarded by Canberra residents. Lady Gowrie especially earned wide affection and respect for her engagements in many community projects and her assiduous fund-raising efforts during the war. The grounds of Government House were thrown open for fetes and other public occasions and she helped organize musical events in the grounds and at the Albert Hall. Lady Gowrie was herself a trained musician.

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She is remembered especially for her support of the Canberra Services Club; she was active in raising funds for this project and took a personal interest in its construction. Her other abiding interest was in the provision of nursery schools in cities throughout Australia. Conscious of the problems the present generation was passing on to the next, she wanted to see young children given every chance to lead a stable, happy and productive life. Gowrie knew Verity’s bookshop well; he must have spent time browsing there and certainly took visitors to the shop. Verity wrote to her mother very pleased to say that it was his ‘favourite bookshop’. She had heard him say to a friend in a quiet aside, ‘this is the nicest little bookshop in Australia’. The Gowries were connected in many ways to the Canberra community and this was reflected in a heartfelt speech to them at a farewell concert on 24 April 1944, one which Gowrie himself was unable to attend because of ill-health. C. S. Daley, the Civic Administrator and their personal friend, spoke: You have given your active personal support in every worthy movement in this city. You visited our institutions, including all our churches, attended club and society meetings, sporting functions and gatherings of every kind. Our schools, both public and private, have benefited from your consistent interest. You have truly shared our joys and sorrows and enriched our social experience.118 Canberra people recognized that for the Gowries, returning to England would bring them grief as well as consolation; their

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grandchildren had lost their father, Patrick, killed in action in late 1942. Many Canberra people knew now, themselves, what loss the war could bring. Their son’s posthumous collection of poetry was on sale at the bookshop in 1944. Before she left Canberra Lady Gowrie arranged for a small fountain to be built in a quiet corner of the gardens of Government House. The fountain, surmounted by a lead stature of a dancing child by Hungarian sculptor Arthur Fleischmann, was erected in memory of her son. *** On lonely weekends, his wife Elsie still living on the other side of the continent, John Curtin used to visit the Gowries at Government House. A warm friendship developed and Lord Gowrie was to give Curtin staunch support during the darkest days of the war. Knowing that Gowrie’s term of office was coming to an end, Curtin had sounded out Jim Scullin as a successor, though the appointment of a Labor politician to vice-regal office would have been controversial. However, in November 1943 Curtin announced the appointment of the Duke of Gloucester to the position, to take up office later in 1944. It was a political move on Curtin’s part and a way to encourage British participation in the Pacific war. In July 1944, shortly before the Gowries left for England, Curtin returned to Canberra from London where he had been attending a British Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference. After his return he announced to Parliament the government’s post-war employment objectives, policies which revealed the influence on him of the kind of large-scale allocation of

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resources and manpower taking place in England under Ernest Bevin. (Bevin was a trade unionist who had been appointed as Minister for Labour and National Service in Churchill’s all-party coalition government.) Curtin, however, had been thinking about the economy and its role in times of national crisis ever since the 1920s, when wide reading about economics and society informed his activities as a trade unionist, a member of the Labor Party and then as editor of the Labor newspaper Westralian Worker. The views he formed then would later be the key to his role as prime minister. He frequently pointed out the contrast between what capitalist governments were able to do in war and what they claimed was impossible in peace. It followed that war could be a good time to make radical changes; for one thing people were more ready to accept large-scale government intervention at a time of national crisis. Curtin was elected to Federal Parliament as the Labor Member for the seat of Fremantle in the general election of 1928, just as Australia was to enter the Depression. Curtin was just a back-bencher in the government, but he developed and wrote wide-ranging analyses of the crisis, believing the government must stimulate the economy by providing credit through a central banking system, not by cutting both wages and government spending, which was the orthodox practice at the time. Curtin was elected Leader of the Opposition after the general election in September 1934. He was to remain in that role for the next seven years until he was asked to form government in October 1941 when Prime Minister Arthur Fadden lost the support of two independents who held the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Once in office Curtin moved

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swiftly to implement his program, seizing the authority for the Commonwealth that it had been denied during the Depression. Able to freely invoke the constitutional defence powers, Curtin ‘had more power than any other Australian prime minister in history’.119 Within weeks of taking office he transformed the Commonwealth Bank into a true central bank under the direction of the government, with authority over the trading banks on the issue of credit. Equally rapidly, Curtin gave the Commonwealth a monopoly of income taxing power. Both these moves would have been extremely difficult to carry out in peacetime. In time the Commonwealth also took on the programs of social welfare from the states, providing age pensions and unemployment relief and in 1943 introducing the beginnings of a National Welfare Scheme. Ben Chifley, treasurer in the wartime government, was Curtin’s strongest ally and trusted helper. Both men had at heart the same conception of a post-war Australia where the welfare of everyone in society became a concern of the federal government. Chifley was appointed as Minister for the new Department of Post-War Reconstruction in December 1942. His post-war goals were ambitious: rehabilitation of primary industry, housing projects, slum clearance, better nutrition for Australians, decentralization, and large national projects including water conservation and enlarging the electricity grid. These projects would depend on the exercise of strong Commonwealth powers. Chifley chose H. C. Coombs as his Director General, releasing him from his post as Director of Rationing. When Coombs had first been seconded to Treasury from the Commonwealth Bank in 1939, he and his family had moved down to Canberra from

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Sydney, to life in suburban Forrest. It was a short walk across the sheep paddocks to the Treasury offices in West Block, and Coombs often made the trip in the company of Fred Whitlam who lived nearby. Fred Whitlam, Crown Solicitor for the Commonwealth, had an outlook broadly sympathetic to the reforming spirit of Curtin and Chifley. He was always known in Canberra as a man with a deep commitment to his community, assisting in a wide range of cultural and educational activities in the young capital. He was largely responsible for preparing the documentation for the 1944 referendum on Commonwealth powers. He was also to accompany the Australian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 and put the case for Evatt’s ambitious proposal for an international human rights court. Coombs remembered him as a man with ‘as deep a commitment to social reform as his son’.120 Coombs’s wife, Lallie, hated Canberra. She was an accomplished musician who had travelled in Europe with her husband in the early ‘30s from their base in London where Coombs was studying at the London School of Economics. Lallie found Canberra a grim place, ‘a ghastly town’.121 Instead of composition classes at Sydney Conservatorium, she could now join a sock-knitting group or play bridge ‘with other stranded wives’. Her words echo the sense of alienation expressed by women like Rosalie Gascoigne in the bleak isolation of Mt Stromlo, and of Eilean Giblin when she first moved to Canberra. Both women were to find creative outlet and consolation through their artistic pursuits. Verity Hewitt, also, found life in Canberra as a married woman lonely and tedious until she discovered intellectual purpose with the opening of the bookshop. Lallie Coombs chose escape to a more congenial city,

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Sydney, where she set up the family home in Cremorne, to be joined there infrequently by her husband. During the war senior Commonwealth officials had little connection with family and domestic routines as wartime administration was divided between Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Sydney was the base of the U.S Lend-Lease mission, which played a vital role in the conduct of the war from 1941 when the U.S. government began assisting foreign governments with essential goods and services required for war purposes. In Australia they provided war materials, machinery and tools, petroleum products and transport equipment, with Australian reciprocal aid taking many forms including construction of camps and aerodromes, aircraft and shipping repair, post and telephone services and rail, sea and air transport plus huge contracts for food supplies once American troops arrived. For Coombs and his colleagues, it was not unusual to have meetings in all three capitals in one week. While based at PostWar Reconstruction, Coombs lived at a hotel in Canberra. It was very much a man’s world. Eilean Giblin, active feminist, public figure and intellectual in her own right, felt on the fringe of things when her husband gathered his colleagues for wartime meetings at their house. Policy-making, stimulating discussions and informal gatherings of like-minded people generally were restricted to men by the very nature of the workplace, though Coombs made special efforts to include women in administrative and research roles in his department. From 1940 to 1942 both Coombs and Giblin, senior figures in the wartime oversight of the economy, made it their business to bring together young, recently recruited social science graduates in Treasury and the Bureau of Statistics for informal evening

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gatherings to discuss and present papers on important books related to their discipline and to government policy-making. The theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes were central to their discussions. Coombs called the publication in 1936 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ‘the most seminal intellectual event of our time’.122 John Curtin believed ‘there is no more interesting person in the world of economics’ than Keynes.123 Keynes had been deeply critical of the British government’s austerity measures during the Depression, and he argued that governments, at such a time, needed to accept a budget deficit and extend credit to keep the economy moving and stimulate employment. This theory, which became mainstream for many governments during the post-war period, challenged the orthodox economic view that placed full faith in market forces to sort out unemployment and falling demand. Keynes was not a socialist (though hostile American critics believed he was). He believed managed capitalism, freedom of trade and an international monetary system were the keys to future world prosperity and peace. Keynes was to be influential in the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. The people gathered around Coombs in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction took these theories seriously. For Coombs, Keynes inspired a sense of mission: a possibility ‘to face the war without despair, believing that if we survived we could set mankind fair with following wind on the way to a new society’.124 The Labor Party had resolved in 1942 to persuade the country to accept constitutional change that would allow the Commonwealth to take on powers hitherto wielded by the

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states. In November 1942 Attorney-General Evatt convened a special Constitutional Convention of Commonwealth and state parliamentary leaders of all parties to consider the question; the states having rejected this a referendum would have to be called, the date to be in August 1944 after Labor’s resounding win in the 1943 election. The referendum would address fourteen powers to be transferred to the Commonwealth. These included national health, family allowances, air transport, marketing and foreign investment, employment and national infrastructure. Many of the powers included limitations to safeguard against the abuse of legislative power. These powers would be given to the government for a period of five years after the end of the war. Curtin took little part in the referendum but for Coombs it offered the chance to sound out the public on what they saw as important as the war neared its end. It was also a chance to canvass public sympathy for Labor’s vision of government. In 1943 Coombs initiated commissions of enquiry into housing, rural reconstruction and secondary industry. He believed that people’s hunger for housing programs after the dire shortages of the war could be turned into a mandate for the government. The bookshop did its bit in the role of public education. A small government pamphlet The Referendum Explained was on display at the shop from July 1944. In a cautious liberal spirit the official pamphlet set out the case for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in equal measure. Supporters of the ‘Yes’ vote raised the spectre of unemployment, inadequate housing, economic chaos after the war and neglect of returning servicemen if the referendum failed. Their opponents argued that a ‘Yes’ vote would bring further social regimentation, nationalization of industries and the tightening noose of bureaucracy.

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People had had enough of bureaucratic control through rationing and the many other wartime intrusions into their lives. Paul Hasluck, official historian of the war years in Australia, believed that ‘after the war there was a resumed tendency towards provincialism and local loyalties away from a national sense of Australia’.125 Evatt—unwisely as it turned out—decided that the referendum would be a simple ‘Yes/No’ format in response to the fourteen different changes that were being planned. If the referendum had been designed differently there might have been more positive results. The Canberra Times commented on 13 September, ‘had the electors been permitted to give a separate decision on each of the fourteen post-war powers, there would have been overwhelming acceptance of some of the points’. The referendum was defeated, only two states, Western Australia and South Australia, returning a majority ‘Yes’ vote. The armed forces, however, returned a majority ‘Yes’ vote, perhaps reflecting their greater willingness to see change and to see increased Commonwealth support for returning servicemen and women. Vance and Nettie Palmer, great advocates for Australia and with their own vision of its destiny as a democratic nation, had been engaged in work for the Council of Civil Liberties during the war. After the failure of the referendum, Nettie Palmer wrote to the American writer Hartley Grattan: ‘Too many powers were asked for a single Yes/No question—the vital powers should have been clearly stated. Suppose Curtin had put it, Do you want air power split up between the states?’ The Palmers had worked on the referendum campaign, but ‘we had the old familiar sensation of working with a few for a lost cause’.126 People living in the Australian Capital Territory were in the

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anomalous position of not being able to vote in the referendum as they did not have an elected member in federal parliament. Men like Arthur Shakespeare and Dr L.W. Nott had been arguing fiercely for years in favour of a proper franchise for Canberra residents. Cla Allen commented ruefully in his diary on the referendum date: ‘Canberrans not able to vote’. This educated and engaged population had no say in one of the most significant issues to confront post-war Australia. *** The bookshop continued to serve Canberra’s residents, students and visitors in the latter part of the war. The art gallery was no longer there but in 1944 Verity gave support and advice to a Melbourne artist, Athol Matson Nicholas, an ex-serviceman and a family friend. Nicholas had a much older brother, George Matson Nicholas, a decorated officer who had been killed in action on the Western Front in December 1916. Athol himself was invalided out of the 1st AIF with severe mental illness. He held an exhibition in Melbourne of oil paintings of Canberra landscapes which were favourably reviewed by the influential critic George Bell. He planned another show in Canberra in November 1944 in aid of the Australian Comforts Fund. Would Verity be able to help? Her premises were too small but she was able to arrange for the exhibition to be staged at the new 2CA Theatrette. Geoff Fitzhardinge remembers his parents having quite a lot to do with Athol Nicholas, and they owned several of his prints and paintings. Verity confessed that the shop never made much money, but there was always enough to pay for child minding and domestic

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help. In November 1944 she advertised for a ‘temporary housekeeper, over 45, live-in preferred, and a laundress-cleaner one day a week’. She also needed extra help in the bookshop’s lending library: a girl with Leaving Certificate pass in English preferred, but ‘fondness for reading, accuracy and a pleasant manner are the chief requirements’. Some books were still arriving from England, including the popular Readers Union books which had a regular following in Canberra throughout the war. Other English books were about the war one way or another. Popular travel writer H. V. Morton, in his book I saw two Englands, wrote of the summer before the war and then his travels around the country after war broke out. His book Atlantic Meeting, published in 1943, also featured on the shelves. Morton had been invited to accompany Churchill and his entourage to secret meetings with Roosevelt on a ship moored off Newfoundland in August 1941. These meetings, while not persuading America to join the war, produced the Atlantic Treaty which played a key role in developing war and post-war planning. John Gunther’s Flight into Conflict, published in London in 1945, described an eleven-week tour of North Africa and the Near East during the invasion of Sicily by the Allies. Hong Kong Aftermath, published first in New York in 1943, was Wenzell Brown’s story of the fall of Hong Kong and the experiences of the author in the Stanley Prison Camp. Many of the books available to readers now bore the imprint of Australian publishers like Angus & Robertson. The Australian Pocket Library, with its reprints of Australian classics, was also in demand. A number of small firms published books within a few months of the end of the war to capitalize

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on the public’s interest in war memoirs. The Mikado’s Guests by Arthur Bancroft and R. G. Roberts, was published by Patersons Press in Western Australia in 1945. It was the personal account of the work of POWs on the Burma Railway by two men who had been captured after the sinking of HMAS Perth. Edwin Broomhead wrote Barbed Wire in the Sunset about life in German and Italian prison camps, having kept a diary throughout his imprisonment. This was published by the Melbourne Book Depot in 1944 so one assumes Broomhead was able to send his diaries home for publication. William

Noonan’s

book

The

Surprising

Battalion:

Australian Commandoes in China, was published in Sydney in 1945. It was the story of a group of Australian commandoes who volunteered to go to Burma and China where they trained Chinese guerrilla forces for covert action against the Japanese. The work of two well-known Australian war correspondents featured prominently in the bookshop. Alan Moorhead, though Australian-born, won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The End in Africa, published by Harper in 1943, was a journal of his experiences in the Western Desert under General Montgomery. Wilfred Burchett was an Australian journalist based in London. He travelled to the Chinese capital of Chungking via the Burma Road and sent reports of the brutal Sino-Japanese war to London’s Daily Express and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. He was dismayed by what he saw of the corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek and America’s support for it. With the start of the Pacific war, Burchett was appointed Chungking correspondent for the Express, and from there he covered the rout of the British forces in Burma. Bombs Over Burma, on sale at the bookshop,

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was an account of this time. It was published in 1944 by F. W. Cheshire, a Melbourne firm that had made its name through the profitable printing of school textbooks. Burchett’s first book, Pacific Treasure Island, was the firm’s first trade publication. The firm’s owner and director, Frank Cheshire, became increasingly uneasy with Burchett’s pro-communist views and did not publish his later works. In 1944 the Express sent Burchett to the Pacific theatre to cover General Macarthur’s campaigns. He was the first Australian journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped and the first to publicly report the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout. This visit hardened Burchett’s hostility to American military power and he became a supporter of emerging communist regimes in South-East Asia after the war. Burchett was always a controversial figure in Australia. Menzies refused to give him a passport to visit the country. So many of these books looked back to the war and some of its defining and most horrific events; but people also needed words that spoke of the future and mapped out hopeful pathways the country might follow now that the end of the war was in sight. Elyne Mitchell, an author beloved for her children’s Silver Brumby series, wrote many non-fiction books urging Australians to learn about and care for their own country. Her book, Speak to the Earth, published by Angus & Robertson in 1945, was about Australia’s soil and water resources and the urgent need to manage and protect them for future generations. Charles Fletcher, who had served as editor for the Sydney Morning Herald for twenty years, wrote Water Magic: Australia and the Future, in 1945, to explain the possibilities and achievements

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of water conservation—one of the issues that would be central to Labor’s post-war reconstruction. Both these important books were promoted in the bookshop. Hartley Grattan was a distinguished American journalist and historian. He first visited Australia in 1927 and became absorbed in its story, regarding it as a fascinating ‘experiment’ in democracy. In 1929 his book, Australian Literature, earned the immediate interest of Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard. His next visit to Australia was from 1936 to 1938, made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. He met and became friends with a circle of artists, writers and thinkers, members of the serious minority culture of their time: men and women who were seeking to define a new sense of national character and who hoped the arts and social sciences would play a role in creating a more enlightened and just society. At that time Grattan forged links with the Australian Institute of Political Science and published influential articles in their quarterly journal. Grattan again visited Australia for two months in 1940, to report on wartime conditions in Australia and New Zealand. Introducing Australia, published in New York in 1942 and in Sydney in 1944, was written as a result of both his tours. The book was widely read. It introduced Australians to America, but it also served to give Australians a new and deeper look at their own country. He thought Canberra ‘a singularly beautiful place. One has a sense that on some tomorrow this will be not only a superb site for a city but actually the site of a superb city’.127 In November 1944 Verity was urging Canberrans to read the book. It must have met with wide interest among Canberra readers because ‘at last good supplies of the book’ had arrived in the shop.

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Grattan has been called ‘Australia’s most thoughtful foreign observer, with a deep and abiding attachment to the country’.128 Dr A. G. Butler, a long-time Canberra resident, had many connections to its history and its people. The bookshop was proud to promote his last work, published in 1945 a few years before his death. Butler was well-known to Verity and Laurie; he became godfather to their second son, Geoffrey. Arthur Butler had a distinguished war record that included seven months service on the Gallipoli peninsular and work at advanced dressing stations during the worst of the campaigns on the Western Front in 1916–17. In 1918 he was based in London helping assemble the War Records material which was to form the basis of the War Memorial’s collections. Butler returned to private medical practice after the war but in 1923 was asked to write the official history of the Australian Army Medical Services, a monumental task that was to occupy the next twenty years of his life. The ADB claims these three volumes, which were published in 1930, 1940 and 1943, ‘are among the most distinguished war history texts of the English-speaking nation’.129 Laurie Fitzhardinge gave Butler much assistance while he was writing Volume III of the history, which is acknowledged in the preface to that volume. Butler was well-known in the Canberra community. He was an active member of St John’s Church, the Canberra Horticultural Society and returned servicemen’s groups. He wrote The Digger: A Study in Democracy as a series for a Queensland returned servicemen’s journal in 1943, but later expanded it into a book. Angus & Robertson published it in August 1945, just as the war came to an end, with illustrations by the war artists Will Dyson, George Lambert and Ivor Hele.

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During the years of composing the medical histories he worked closely with C. E. W. Bean, visiting him first at the country homestead of Tuggeranong where Bean and his staff were working in the 1920s. Butler’s years of service on the grim battlefields of Europe sharpened his perceptions of the beauty of the quiet valleys that lay around the federal capital. On a walk one fresh spring morning from the Tuggeranong railway siding down to visit Bean at the homestead, Butler was moved by ‘a profound sense of the glamour and beauty of Australian scenery’ as the mountain-ringed Tuggeranong Valley spread out before him.130 Like some of the artists and other thoughtful observers who came to Canberra in those years, Butler developed a strong attachment to the special qualities of this place and its lightfilled landscape.

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T W ELV E

Endings ‘Under the influence of the war, with its isolation-shattering and complacencydisturbing

consequences

…

the

national capital has grown up’.131

The middle of the year saw Victory in Europe [VE] Day on 8 May and the Pacific war ending with the announcement of Japan’s surrender on 15 August. There was uncertainty about the future of the bookshop. Laurie Fitzhardinge had applied unsuccessfully for a lecturer’s position at Canberra University College for the 1945 academic year. He then applied for a lectureship in Classics at the University of Sydney and was to take up the position in March 1945. That meant the family would be leaving Canberra. Nina Hewitt perhaps echoed her daughter’s own feelings when she wrote in February, ‘a thousand pities that Laurie missed out on the Canberra University lectureship as I’m sure neither of you will like Sydney or its climate after lovely Canberra’. Nina Hewitt remained ambivalent about her daughter’s 192

commitment to the shop. At times she had felt ‘haunted’ or desolate at the ‘impossible’ life path Verity had chosen that had allowed so little time for family gatherings or relaxation over the years. Yet there was pride there as well: she knew the bookshop had made a name for itself in the federal capital during the wartime years. In March she wrote to her daughter, ‘If you sell the bookshop you must leave your name to it as a monument to your endeavour.’ Verity Hewitt’s name was always linked with the bookshop in the minds of Canberrans: ‘There was always her smiling presence’, recalled Pat Wardle.132 By March, with Laurie already in Sydney and looking for a home for the family, Verity was making various overtures about selling the shop. There were enquiries, including one from Sydney but nothing came of them. Meanwhile the work of the shop went on: managing staff, advertising new stock, ordering from English and Australian catalogues for the winter season. Towards the end of 1944 a young friend of Verity’s sister June, Theodora Chaffers-Welsh, came down from Sydney to help in the shop and agreed to stay to manage it after Verity left for Sydney in July 1945. June Hewitt was to leave her job at the State Library in Hobart and take over management of the shop towards the end of 1946, by which time it would have moved to larger ground-floor premises in the Civic Centre. It became known as Verity Hewitt Booksellers and was incorporated as a company with Verity and Laurie as the two shareholders. *** Just before the war ended the bookshop advertised copies of the government’s White Paper, ‘Full Employment in Australia’, a

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paper prepared by Coombs and his colleagues at the direction of Curtin and his employment minister John Dedman. Curtin was already very ill with only months to live, but this document gave expression to his life-long commitment to a fairer economic system. Those who were shaping post-war employment policy remembered the Depression years and the profound misery and hopelessness of those times for people without work. Coombs had been a young casual teacher in London’s East End while studying at the London School of Economics in 1933–34. The suffering and deprivation he saw there intensified his concern about the economic system that had failed these people and was ‘not operating fairly or even efficiently’.133 L. F. Giblin believed that after the war ‘Australians more than anything else wanted a prevention of unemployment’.134 At the height of the Depression well over 25% of Australians had no jobs. Curtin’s Treasurer, Ben Chifley, recalled ‘the days when hundreds of thousands of men were on the dole’.135 The White Paper was ‘the most important and wide-ranging public document issued by the Curtin and Chifley government. For the first time, the government of a democratic country had formally committed to pursuing a policy of full employment.’136 This document laid a framework that would lead to 25 years of full employment in Australia. The country would also engage in negotiating a rule-based system of global finance and trade. Curtin’s speech to the 16th Commonwealth conference of the Labor Party, held in Canberra in December 1943, had spoken of the principles of the Atlantic Charter, and clearly accepted Australia’s obligation to apply this charter both through international cooperation and national policies.

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One of Coombs’s roles during the war was as spokesman for Australia at international conferences, urging other countries to support the policy of full employment for their people as the best way to honour the principles embodied in the Atlantic Charter. Coombs led the Australian delegation to the Food and Agriculture Conference at Hot Springs in Virginia in May/ June 1943, to consider how the ‘United Nations’ could establish international standards of nutrition and economic stability, so necessary in creating that desired world ‘free of fear and want’. The conference led to the creation of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation [FAO] in October 1945. Australia was a member of the International Commission that produced this outcome. Australia was to be an active member of both FAO and the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency [UNRRA] both international bodies created to help a war-ravaged world recover. Australia’s engagement with world affairs came to a wartime climax at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, held at San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. Bert Evatt is always associated with the achievements of this conference. Since early 1942, as Minister for External Affairs, he had been directing its work with a focus on a future ‘world organisation’. In September 1944 Evatt had given a long statement to Parliament on the emerging post-war world and what he called ‘a last opportunity for the democracies of the world’ to create a new international organization which would include peace-keeping powers and a permanent international court of justice. 137 A few days after Evatt’s speech, Richard Boyer, soon to be Chair of the ABC, wrote to him, ‘Your speech has quickened the hope of many of us, and we are very grateful’.138 The Australian delegation to San Francisco went well

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prepared by prior discussion and furnished with a wealth of documentation and the services of expert advisors. By gaining election to the Executive Committee of 14 and helping prepare the final draft of the Charter of the United Nations, Evatt proved that Australia, a small nation, was capable of making a significant contribution to the post-war world. Evatt himself was still a divisive figure; people scorned or revered him. Paul Hasluck’s judgement in the official war history was biting: ‘There may have been Australians who were more admired but none who had ever been more noticeable at an international gathering’. He noted that Evatt had worked ‘frantically and demonically’ for the three weeks of the conference.139 The young journalist Michael Foot remembered his awe at ‘the gravel-voiced Australian’ who emerged to dominate the San Francisco Conference, leading a successful fight against the Soviets for the right of smaller nations to debate issues without a veto from the Security Council.140 The New York Times hailed H. V. Evatt as the ‘epitome of power exercised through the force of ideas, argument and intellectual effort’ against the heavy national muscle and coercion of the main players.141 Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson called Evatt ‘a chief architect of the world’s most important institution. His genius is present in the UN Charter and his influence is reflected in the Geneva Convention and the Declaration of Human Rights’, a document which Eleanor Roosevelt described as ‘The Magna Carta for mankind’.142 Evatt received this document as President of the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948.

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*** As the war drew to a close, people were in a reflective mood, though how they viewed the past five years depended on their own experiences, with contending emotions of grief and thankfulness. A letter came from Verity and Laurie’s English friends, Mary Barker and her husband. The Barkers ‘had shared the nightmares of 1940 to 1942’ in England with two friends who were exiles from Europe and who had fled the Holocaust after losing family members. Now the Barkers were living in Sydney and had contacted their friends who had also come to Australia. They marked VE Day in Sydney: We weren’t exuberant—just glad it was over and we four alive and together again. All the Czech and Austrian refugees I know want to leave Australia. Do try to get people to stay. They all want to work hard and have the possibility of making some security for their children, and it is made almost impossible for them economically and socially. All those I speak of have valuable professional skills and integrity. In fact, the post-war years were to bring many changes to Australia’s immigration policy and a labour-starved economy would recruit thousands of immigrants from war-torn Europe, though it would be years before Australians really welcomed ‘foreigners’ into their midst. In September, after the ending of the Pacific war, Verity heard from an American friend, Henry Early, of New York City. Henry, one of the many ‘lonely servicemen’ who visited the shop,

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had been stationed for just three months at the Acton Hospital site in 1942, before heading north to campaigns in northern New Guinea at Finschhafen. Like many men who had seen years of active service he was apprehensive about peacetime. He wrote now about facing his ‘most gruelling campaign—a return to civilian life’. He hoped he would be able to build a constructive life through involvement with the healing of veterans at a workshop where they could make and sell craft work. He remembered Canberra with nostalgia and asked Verity for a colour photograph of ‘Canberra’s beautiful roses in bloom’.

Postscript Verity Hewitt remained an independent and adventurous woman all her life. On Laurie’s appointment in 1950 to the position of Reader in the Sources of Australian History at the new Australian National University, the couple returned to Canberra for good. Verity’s love of the land and her farming background saw them purchase a lease on an apple orchard, which Verity managed in what is now the suburb of Narrabundah; later they took up land east of Canberra where she bred Devon cattle. Verity’s interest in Russia led her to a mastery of the language, the writing of an MA on Russian travellers’ visits to colonial Australia, and eventually to a PhD on the North-West Frontier in Afghanistan. She visited Russia on her own and, as a middleaged unescorted woman travelled in the wilder parts of Iran and Afghanistan near the Russian border. At home in Canberra she provided a welcome to many refugees and newcomers and was always actively and publicly committed to the best ideals of the

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Labor Party and a program of social justice. Verity returned briefly to the bookshop in 1968 and attempted unsuccessfully to revive its fortunes at a time when it was facing competition from large booksellers. She died in Canberra in 1986 at the age of 77. Pat Wardle, her friend since university days, remembered her as a woman who had led a ‘vigorous, interesting and kindly life’.143 *** Cla Allen, Verity’s friend from pre-war days of bushwalking in the hills near Canberra, had a distinguished record of research during his years at Mt Stromlo. After the war Allen worked closely with the solar group at the CSIR radio physics laboratory in Sydney, a team studying radio emission from the sun. From 1951 Allen and his family were based in England where he had been appointed Professor of Astronomy at University College and Director of the University of London Observatory. During the two decades he spent in England he held a number of positions in the Royal Astronomical Society and published an authoritative book on astrophysics. In 1972 he retired and the family returned to Canberra where he stayed actively involved in community life. In March 1974 Verity Hewitt visited the Carillon, Britain’s gift to mark Canberra’s 50th anniversary in 1963. She listened to a recital that included two pieces composed by Cla Allen. The Carillon, whose bells sounded across the newly created expanse of water that was Lake Burley Griffin, reminded her of the thrill of hearing the Carillon at the University of Sydney as a poor student, and ‘the marvellous clangour that shattered the still air’.144

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Allen is considered ‘one of the finest Australian scientists of his day’ and is also remembered for a small book, Hiking from Early Canberra, his account of adventurous bushwalks in the region between the wars.145 He died in Canberra in 1987 at the age of 83. *** Ernest Burgmann, always a supporter of Labor’s reconstruction policies, never abdicated the role of social and church critic while he was Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn. Evatt, with whom he had a mutually respectful friendship, appointed him to the Australian delegation of the 1948 United Nations Assembly in Paris. Burgmann was also active in the campaign against Menzies’ attempt in 1951 to ban the Communist Party of Australia. His great wish was to see a collegiate library built in Canberra to stimulate advanced theological research by postgraduates. St Marks Anglican Memorial Library was opened in 1957 and is now a respected research centre at the heart of St Marks Theological College, which offers advanced courses through partnership with Charles Sturt University School of Theology. All his life Burgmann was a prolific writer of essays and booklets on social reform as well as scriptural interpretations. He loved books and was a gifted storyteller. His passion for education is remembered in the naming of Burgmann College at the Australian National University and Burgmann Anglican School. Burgmann died in Canberra in 1967 at the age of 82.

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*** H. C. Coombs remained Director General of Post-war Reconstruction until 1949 but still had ahead of him many years as an influential public servant and public intellectual. This included positions as Governor of the Commonwealth and Reserve Banks, Chair of the Australian Council for the Arts, Chair of the Australia Council and Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. In 1979 he launched the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, calling for a formal treaty between Australia and the Aboriginal people. From 1977–79 Coombs was President of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He witnessed with dismay the breakdown in the 1970s of the post-war Keynesian consensus and its replacement by neoliberal doctrines of wealth creation at the expense of the common good. He turned increasingly in later years to a concern with protecting Australia’s environment and advocacy for Aboriginal land rights and heritage. Coombs died in Sydney in 1997 at the age of 91. *** Eilean Giblin kept a wartime diary while living in Canberra. From the start of her diary in 1940 she was conscious of the opportunity she had to observe and record a nation at war from the viewpoint of the nation’s capital. She had hoped to have the manuscript published but the first volume covering 1940–41 was rejected by Angus & Robertson, who wrote that that the paper shortage would not allow for ‘speculative publishing’; Australian-made paper was in ever-growing demand to cope

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with the huge expansion of government publishing. One obvious reason for the manuscript’s rejection was that the first volume did not cover the start of the Pacific war and thus would have seemed strangely out of date and out of touch to readers. Discouraged by this response, Eilean did not send her second diary, covering the dramatic days of 1942 and ’43, to any publisher, and the diary ceased abruptly in October 1943. Eilean and her husband returned to their former home in Hobart after the war but Lyndhurst Giblin returned to Canberra in 1947 to finalise his work for the Financial and Economic Committee which was being disbanded. Soon after, he began his last major work, writing the history of the Commonwealth Bank, for which he was based in Sydney. He died in Hobart in 1951 at the age of 78, a man universally praised for his clear thinking and intellectual honesty, a ‘great Australian’ to many who knew him. Eilean died in 1955 at the age of 71 after returning to be near her extended family in England. A talented and emancipated woman who had been instrumental in establishing the Women’s College at the University of Melbourne, she received very little recognition for her achievements during her lifetime. *** John Curtin, the man who came to define and symbolize the war years in Australia, did not live to see its conclusion. He died at the Lodge on 5 July 1945, having, in Hasluck’s words, ‘laid on himself heavier burdens than he asked others to bear’.146 After his death, Lord Gowrie wrote of him as ‘one of the most selfless men I have ever met’.147 Ernest Burgmann called him the ‘authentic

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voice of Australia’.148 Menzies recalled, ‘It was possible and from my point of view necessary, to attack on political grounds John Curtin’s policies or his public administration; it was impossible and unthinkable to attack his probity, his honesty of purpose, the man himself’.149

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Notes

1 The Golden Age of Booksellers: Fifty Years in the Trade, Abbey Press, Sydney, 1981, 38. 2 George Orwell, ‘Bookshop Memories’, Collected essays, journalism and letters, vol. 1, 274. 3 Geoffrey Dutton, A rare bird: Penguin Books in Australia 1946– 1996, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996, 2 4 Ibid. 5 Jeremy Lewis, Penguin Special, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2005, 156. 6 Pat Wardle, interviewed by Alec Bolton, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1988. 7 Warren Denning, interviewed by Pam Mitchell, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1974. 8 Ibid. 9 Canberra Times, 17 January 1939, 2. 10 Ibid., 1. 11 Judith Wright, Half a Lifetime, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, 143. 12 Golden Age of Booksellers, 101. 13 National Archives of Australia, A981/PUB 43, ‘Publication request by Japanese Minister’. 14 Bob Wurth, Saving Australia: Curtin’s secret peace with Japan, Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2006, 88. This book quotes NAA A981/4/JAP20, incorrectly. 15 Ibid., 189. 16 Ibid., 88.

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17 Ibid., 122. 18 Ibid., 215. 19 Words on gravestone at St John’s Church Canberra. 20 Jim Gibbney, Canberra 1913–1953, Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), Canberra, 1988, 166. 21 Diaries of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Mfm G7251, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 22 Wardle, 1988. 23 John Baker, Low cost of bookloving; an account of the first twenty-one years of Readers Union, Readers Union, London, 1958, 8. 24 Telegraph, Qld, 28 September 1940, 7. 25 Canberra Times, 10 November 1939, 7. 26 Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939–1941, vol. 1, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1952, 476. 27 Robert Menzies, Afternoon Light, Coward-McCann, New York, 1968, 18. 28 Denning, 1974. 29 Laurie Fitzhardinge, interviewed by Bill Tully in Australia 1938 oral history project, Canberra, 1983. 30 Nicholas Brown, Richard Downing: economics, advocacy and social reform in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2001, 43. 31 Douglas Copland (ed.), Giblin: the scholar and the man: papers in memory of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1960, 4 & 75. 32 Neville Cain, ‘Giblin, Lyndhurst Falkiner’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981. 33 W. Coleman, S. Cornish & A. Hagger, Giblin’s Platoon: the trials and triumphs of the economist in Australian public life, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2006, 142. 34 Clabon Allen interviewed by Amy McGrath, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1980. 35 Tom Frame & Don Faulkner, Stromlo: an Australian Observatory, Allen &Unwin, Crows Nest, 2003, 59. 36 Gregory Mathews, Birds and Books, Verity Hewitt Bookshop, Canberra, 1942. 37 Tess Kloot, ‘Mathews, Gregory Macalister’, Australian

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Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986. 38 K.S. Inglis, C.E.W Bean, Australian historian, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1970, 20. 39 Patricia Clarke, Eilean Giblin, a feminist between the wars, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, 122. 40 Toby Faber, Faber & Faber: the untold story of a great publishing house, Faber, London, 2019, 64. 41 Ibid., 101. 42 Clarke, 141. 43 Peter Rees, Desert Boys: Australians at war from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2011, 386. 44 Ibid., 387. 45 Clarke, 142. 46 Papers of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin, MS366, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 47 Canberra Times, 12 November 1941, 4. 48 Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1970, 82. 49 Ibid., 83. 50 The Bulletin, 29 January 1980, 371. 51 Panorama, Canberra Times, 20 June 2020, 8. 52 Golden Age of Booksellers, 58. 53 Canberra Times, Ibid. 54 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 125. 55 Ibid., 10. 56 Ibid., 168. 57 Giblin’s Platoon, 198. 58 Canberra Times, 29 October 1951, 4. 59 Laurie Fitzhardinge, 1983. 60 Australian Financial Review, 30 March 1978, 10. 61 Enid Cambridge ephemera, National Gallery of Australia library, Canberra. 62 Brian Stratton (ed.), Douglas Dundas Remembers, Sydney, Brian Stratton, 1974, 106. 63 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1970, Oxford

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University Press, Melbourne , 1971, 195. 64 Renee Free & John Henshaw, The Art of Frank Hinder, Philip Matthews, Sydney, 2011, 88. 65 Lionel Lindsay, Addled Art, Angus& Robertson, Sydney, 1942, ix. 66 Douglas Dundas 1900–1981: a retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 1982, 12. 67 James Gleeson, The Inaugural Douglas Dundas Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, 1983, 1. 68 Hector Gilliland interviewed by Hazel de Berg, National Library of Australia, 1965. 69 Douglas Dundas 1900–1981, 14. 70 Frank Hinder, Diaries, Australian War Memorial, PR88/133. 71 Ibid. 72 Margaret Barter, Far above battle: the experience and memory of Australian soldiers in war, 1939–1945, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 1994, 178. 73 A rare bird, 4. 74 C.A. Stanley, Australian National Review, August 1939, 50. 75 Barter, 253. 76 Alan Chester, John Curtin, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1943. 77 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 456. 78 Hasluck, Diplomatic Witness, 4. 79 Clarke, 171–2. 80 Canberra Times, 25 November 1942, 4. 81 Humphrey McQueen, Introduction to The Timeless Land, Imprint Classics, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1990, vii. 82 Canberra Times, 6 October 1943, 4. 83 < http//: www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09> 84 Amanda Laugesen, Boredom is the enemy: the intellectual and imaginative lives of Australian soldiers in the Great War and beyond, Ashgate, Farnham, England, 2012, 158. 85 Ibid., 141. 86 Ibid., 143. 87 Ibid., 236. 88 Ibid., 222.

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89 Geoffrey Robertson, introduction to H.V. Evatt, The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Injustice within the law, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2009, xii. 90 Vivian Smith (ed.), Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer, 1915– 1963, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1977, 164. 91 Kylie Tennant, Evatt: politics and justice, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972, 128. 92 Paul Hasluck, Diplomatic Witness, 4. 93 Ibid., 39. 94 Donald Horne, An interrupted life, HarperCollins, Pymble, 1998, 415. 95 Miles Franklin to Julia Moore, Papers of Lady Julia Moore, National Library of Australia, MS 7459. 96 Pat Wardle, 1988. 97 Julia Moore, Ibid. 98 Anne Edgeworth, The Cost of Jazz Garters: a history of Canberra Repertory Society, Canberra Repertory Society, Canberra, 1995, 50. 99 Ernest Burgmann, foreword to The Tolpuddle Martyrs, xxi. 100 Peter Hempenstall, The meddlesome priest: a life of Ernest Burgmann, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 1993, xi. 101 National Archives of Australia, A6119, 876, ‘Laurence Frederick and Verity Hope Fitzhardinge’. 102 Hempenstall, 164. 103 Coleman et al., 121. 104 Brown, 91. 105 Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: a reforming life, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2005, 93. 106 Clarke, 154. 107 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 277. 108 John Edwards, Curtin’s Gift: reinterpreting Australia’s greatest Prime Minister, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005, 111. 109 Clem Lloyd & Richard Hall (eds) Backroom briefings: John Curtin’s war, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1997, 16. 110 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 413. 111 Ibid., 272.

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112 Ibid., 270. 113 Ibid., 271. 114 Hasluck, Diplomatic Witness, 76. 115 Canberra Times, 15 March 1944, 3. 116 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 277. 117 Canberra Times, 10 January 1945, 2. 118 Jennifer Horsfield, Building a City, Ginninderra Press, Canberra, 2015, 191. 119 Edwards, 123. 120 H.C. Coombs, ‘Whitlam, Harry Frederick’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 16, Melbourne University Press, 2002. 121 Rowse, 159. 122 Brown, 56. 123 Edwards, 92. 124 Rowse, 145. 125 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 447. 126 Palmer letters, 182–3. 127 Hartley Grattan, Introducing Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1949, 189. 128 Laurie Hergenham, ‘Grattan, Clinton Hartley’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14, Melbourne University Press, 1996. 129 C.M. Gurner, ‘Butler, Arthur Graham’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 7, Melbourne University Press, 1979. 130 Jennifer Horsfield, ‘Bean at Tuggeranong’, in Peter Stanley (ed.) Charles Bean: Man, Myth, Legacy, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2017, 48. 131 Warren Denning, Capital City: Canberra today and tomorrow, Verity Hewitt, Canberra, 1944, 59. 132 Wardle, 1988. 133 Rowse, 65. 134 National Archives of Australia, ‘Land of Opportunity’ Research guide, 128. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid.

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137 John Murphy, Evatt: a life, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2016, 223 138 Ibid. 139 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 507. 140 Robertson, xiii. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., vii. 143 Robert Lehane, Verity Hewitt: a remarkable life, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2018, 327. 144 Verity had been enthusiastically involved in fund-raising for the Sydney University War Memorial Carillon when she was an undergraduate. In response to a public appeal for suggestions when the Canberra Carillon was installed, she sent in a thoughtful list of recommended music. 145 S.C.B. Gascoigne, ‘Allen, Clabon Walter,’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 17, Melbourne University Press, 2007. 146 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 590. 147 Geoffrey Serle, ‘Curtin, John’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, Melbourne University Press, 1993. 148 Ibid. 149 Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, vol. 2, 590–1.

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Hasluck, Paul, The Government and the People, 1939–1941, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1965 Hasluck, Paul, The Government and the People, 1942–1945, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1970 Hasluck, Paul, Diplomatic Witness: Australian foreign affairs, 1941– 1947, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1980 Hempenstall, Peter, The meddlesome priest: a life of Ernest Burgmann, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1993 Hinder, Frank, Diaries, Australian War Memorial, PR 88/133 Hocking, Jenny, Gough Whitlam: a moment in history: the biography, vol. 1, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2009 Horne, Donald, An interrupted life, Harper Collins, Pymble, 1998 Horner, David, High Command: Australia’s struggle for an independent war strategy 1939–45, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1992 Johnston, Mark, The silent 7th: an illustrated history of the 7th Australian Division 1940–46, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005 Johnston, Mark, That magnificent 9th: an illustrated history of the 9th Australian Division 1940–45, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005 Johnston, Mark, The proud 6th: an illustrated history of the 6th Australian Division, 1939–1945, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2008 Laugesen, Amanda, ‘Boredom is the enemy’: the intellectual and imaginative lives of Australian soldiers in the Great War and beyond, Ashgate, Farnham, England, 2012 Lehane, Robert, Verity: a remarkable woman’s journey, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2017 Lewin, Ben, The Dunera boys, Thomas Nelson, South Melbourne, 1991 Mathews, Gregory, Birds and books: the story of the Mathews ornithological library, Verity Hewitt Bookshop, Canberra, 1942 Medcalf, Peter, War in the shadows, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000 Murphy, John, Evatt: a life, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2016 Orwell, George, ‘Bookshop Memories’, Collected essays, journalism and letters, vol. 1, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968 Rees, Peter, Desert Boys: Australians at war from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2011

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Rowse, Tim, Nugget Coombs: a reforming life, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2002 Rutland, Suzanne, Edge of the diaspora: two centuries of Jewish settlement in Australia, Collins, Sydney, 1988 Tennant, Kylie, Evatt: politics and justice, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1970 The Golden Age of booksellers: fifty years in the trade, Abbey Press, Sydney, 1981 Throssell, Ric, My father’s son, William Heinemann Australia, Richmond, 1989 Tink, Andrew, Air disaster Canberra: the plane crash that destroyed a government, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2013 Waln, Nora, Reaching for the stars, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England, 1942 Wilmot, Chester, Tobruk 1941, Text Classics, Melbourne, 2017 Winch, Ron, ‘Books and Bookshops in Early Canberra’, Canberra Historical Journal, new series, no. 17, 1986 Wright, Judith, Half a lifetime, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2001 Wurth, Bob, Saving Australia: Curtin’s secret peace with Japan, Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2006 Young, Sally, Paper emperors: the rise of Australia’s newspaper empires, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2009

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Index

AIF Divisions 6th 38, 74–75, 77–78, 81–83, 121, 173 7th 38–39, 75, 81–83, 168 8th 38, 81, 122 9th 39, 75, 76, 77, 81, 84, 168 Allen, Cla 52–56, 59, 62, 68– 70, 89–90, 98, 123, 146, 160, 171, 185, 199–200 Appleton, Jean 109 Atlantic Charter 126–127, 194–195 Australian Broadcasting Commission 19–21, 100, 123, 125, 152, 167, 195 Bean, C.E.W. 59, 136, 152, 191 Binns, Kenneth 58, 89, 135, 144 Blitz 34, 65, 70, 162 Bougainville 119, 168, 172–173 Burgmann, Ernest 96, 98, 101, 140, 149–154, 200, 202 Butler, A.G. 190–191 Cambridge, Enid 43, 105, 106 Canberra 1–9, 11–16, 18– 21, 23,

25–26, 28–33, 35–36, 39–41, 44, 46–57, 61–63, 66, 68, 70–73, 79, 84–91, 94–95, 98– 99, 101, 104–119, 121–124, 126, 129–132, 140, 142–148, 151, 153–154, 156–158, 160, 162–163, 165– 167, 169–170, 175–177, 179–181, 185–186, 189–192, 194, 198–202 Canberra Services Club 176 Canberra Times 3, 6, 7, 14, 18, 23, 35, 36, 39, 42, 48, 65, 73, 92, 97, 108, 128, 132, 148, 162, 171, 174, 184 Canberra University College 44, 45, 106, 132, 145, 157, 165, 192 Chifley, Ben 167, 179–180, 194 Coombs, H.G. 46, 156–160, 179–183, 194–195, 201 Coombs, Lallie 180 CSIR 4, 21, 52, 69, 123, 199 Curtin, Elsie 27–29, 177 Curtin, John 23, 27–29, 82–84, 89, 95, 99, 116, 120, 124– 125, 140–141, 158–159, 166– 167, 169–170, 177–179, 180, 182–184, 194, 202–203

215

Denning, Warren 11–13, 20–21, 23, 45, 48, 162, 166–167 Drake Brockman, Julia 144– 145, 148 Dundas, Douglas 106–108, 110 Dunera 60, 62, 64 Eliot, T.S. 64–65, 71 Evatt, H.V. 28, 108, 112, 116– 117, 127, 137–145, 153, 163, 168, 180, 184, 195–196, 200 Evatt, Mary Alice 108, 116–117, 140–141, 153 Everyman’s Library 136 Faber & Faber 64, 71, 125 Fitzhardinge, Geoffrey 113, 128, 154, 185, 190 Fitzhardinge, Hope Verity 21, 53, 155 Fitzhardinge, Laurie 4, 21, 23, 37, 48, 53, 55, 57–58, 89, 100– 102, 137, 144, 149, 157, 190, 192 Giblin, Eilean 47–48, 50–51, 62, 70, 74, 76, 79, 130, 157, 160, 163, 180–181, 201 Giblin, Lyndhurst Falkiner 46–51, 69, 95, 130, 145, 156– 158, 181, 194, 202 Gilliland, Hector 108–109 Gowrie, Alexander, Lord 69, 79–80, 140, 175– 177, 202 Gowrie, Zara, Lady 27, 80, 86–87, 140, 175– 177 Grattan, Hartley 184, 189–190

Hasluck, Paul 40, 90, 128, 142, 147–148, 160, 170–171, 184, 196, 202 Hawthorne, Dore 26–27, 110– 111 Hewitt, Geoff 39, 77, 110 Hewitt, Nina 192 Hewitt, Verity 1–13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 29, 32–36, 38–39, 43–45, 53–58, 64–65, 70– 72, 76– 80, 85–86, 90–96, 99–100, 103, 105–106, 108– 111, 113, 123–124, 126–130, 132–133, 137–138, 146, 149, 151–152, 154–155, 157, 160– 162, 164, 176, 180, 185, 189, 193, 197–199 immigrants 1, 6, 154–155, 197 Kawai, Tatsuo 25–29 Keynes, J.M. 55, 182 Lane Poole, Charles 22, 55, 69, 113, 146 Lane Poole, Ruth 94, 146 Lee, Lacey 4, 38, 78, 80 Lindsay, Lionel 9, 107 Llewellyn Riding School 93 Macarthur, General Douglas 84–85, 101–102, 114, 168, 174, 188 Melbourne 3–4, 6, 11, 14, 25– 26, 30–32, 40, 42, 45–51, 53, 69, 82, 84–85, 104, 117, 126, 133, 138, 141, 143, 148, 152, 156–157, 161, 167, 170, 181, 185, 187–188, 202

216

School of Forestry 4, 22, 52, 113 Shakespeare, Arthur 23, 36–37, 58, 98, 108, 174, 185 Shakespeare, Thomas 36–37 Solar Observatory 51–52, 67

Menzies, Robert 10, 25, 31, 34–35, 37, 41–42, 46, 98, 112, 138, 140–141, 158–159, 188, 200, 203 Militia 37, 39, 61, 81, 112, 115, 119–121, 145, 151, 172 Mt Stromlo 4, 51–54, 59, 61– 62, 67–68, 70, 89–90, 108, 123, 148, 180, 199

Telopea Park School 8, 21, 88, 113, 122 Tillyard, Patricia 11, 23, 32, 56, 63, 73, 87, 108 Tillyard, Robin 21–22, 32, 54, 56, 63 Tobruk 75–78, 110, 125, 135 Throssell, Ric 143–144, 148

National Library 4, 7, 58, 101, 125 New Guinea 26, 82, 84, 101–102, 110, 115, 118–120, 123–124, 134–135, 143, 168, 171–174, 198 Nott, Lewis Windermere 98, 153, 185

United Nations 127, 137, 143– 144, 147, 195–196, 200

Palmer, Nettie 131, 184, 189 Palmer, Vance 131, 135, 139, 184 Papua 84, 101, 118–119, 121, 124–125, 164, 169, 172 Parliament House 4, 25, 27–28, 40, 57, 87, 100–101, 130, 141, 156 Pearl Harbour 24, 28–29, 81, 88, 116 Penguin books 10–11, 19, 64, 133

Wardle, Pat 11, 32, 87, 193, 199 Werriwa (3rd) Battalion 119– 122, 169 Whitlam, Fred 8, 44, 69, 88, 180 Whitlam, Gough 88 Whitlam, Martha 8

Rabaul 115–116, 118 Readers Union 33–34, 77, 132– 133, 186 Referendum 31, 180, 183–185 Roosevelt, Eleanor 85, 130, 196 Russia 97–100, 152–153, 155, 159, 165, 198

217