Curtin's Empire 0521146224, 9780521146227

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‘Bless my soul if it isn’t Honest John Curtin and Bert Evatt’ (Bulletin, 31 May 1944).

Praise for Curtin’s Empire ‘An original and compelling contribution to Australian historical knowledge. In this book James Curran sheds new light on the Labor party and its relationship to Britain and the Empire. Drawing on a rich vein of previously unseen archival material, he explains how John Curtin, in facing up to the post-war world, reconciled his anticonscription and anti-imperialist past to the need for a common defence and foreign policy for Greater Britain, one that would never allow another Singapore disaster. In so doing, Curran has filled an important gap in our understanding of this iconic Labor prime minister. ‘He also complicates the popularly accepted picture of a decisive Australian move in 1941 to the United States as Australia’s principal ally. That change awaited later developments. The story of the 1940s was a quiet drift back to Empire defence.’ Kim Beazley Ambassador to the United States of America ‘Curran’s fine book shows how Curtin’s complex ideas of Australia and Empire were driven not by a mythic choice between loyalty and independence, but by the strategic imperative to find whatever means would best secure Australia in a fast-changing Asia. In doing so it sheds much light on the big strategic choices we face today.’ Hugh White Professor of Strategic Studies and Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Curtin’s Empire John Curtin remains a venerated leader. His role as Labor’s wartime supremo is etched deep in the national psyche: the man who put Australia first, locked horns with Churchill, looked to America and became a national saviour. For many he remains the epitome of an anti-British Australian nationalism. This book breathes new life into the Curtin story by revealing a dimension of his leadership that, until now, has been largely ignored – his vision for Australia’s place in the British Empire: an Empire that he wanted to see endure in the post-war world. This British world vision was not imposed from abroad, rather it animated him from deep within. Since entering politics, Curtin had fought with many inside and outside his party over issues of loyalty and national security. At stake was how Curtin and Labor related to the core idea of Australian politics for their times: Britishness. James Curran is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (2004) and the co-author, with Stuart Ward, of The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire (2010).

Other titles in the Australian Encounters series (Series editor: Tony Moore) Tim Soutphommasane Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-building for Australian progressives Milissa Deitz Watch this Space: The future of Australian journalism Rodney Cavalier Power Crisis: The self-destruction of a state Labor Party Joanne Faulkner The Importance of Being Innocent: Why we worry about children

Curtin’s Empire James Curran

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521146227
C James Curran 2011

This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Designed by Adrian Saunders Typeset by Aptara Corp. Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Curran, James, 1973– Curtin’s empire / James Curran. 9780521146227 (pbk.) Australian encounters. Includes bibliographical references and index. Curtin, John, 1885–1945. Prime ministers – Australia – Biography. Politicians – Australia – Biography. Australia – Politics and government – 1901–1945. 994.04092 ISBN 978-0-521-14622-7 Paperback Reproduction and communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact: Copyright Agency Limited Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street Sydney NSW 2000 Telephone: (02) 9394 7600 Facsimile: (02) 9394 7601 E-mail: [email protected] Reproduction and communication for other purposes Except as permitted under the Act (for example a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above. Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. The book has been printed on paper certified by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). PEFC is committed to sustainable forest management through third party forest certification of responsibly managed forests.

For Priscilla, Pia and Ella

Contents

Acknowledgements

page x

1

‘Citadel for the British-speaking race’: Introduction

1

2

‘Loyalty howlers’: War and peace, 1914–1928

26

3

A ‘deranged world’: Leading Labor in the 1930s

57

4

‘Practical Empire patriots’: London, 1944

84

5

‘Partial eclipse’: Legacy and memory

117

Notes

135

Bibliography

147

Index

154

ix

Acknowledgements

I have accumulated many debts in writing this book. First, the research could not have been carried out without the financial assistance from the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, the United States Studies Centre and the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University. In particular, I would like to thank Robert Aldrich, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Geoffrey Garrett and Duncan Ivison for their generous support over the last three years. Some of the early thinking about this book originated from my appointment as the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Visiting Scholar in 2004. In that regard, I am grateful to Kandy-Jane Henderson for her unstinting encouragement and enthusiasm for my work at that time. I would also like to thank librarians and archivists at the National Archives of Australia (Canberra), the National Library of Australia, Fisher Library at Sydney University, the National Archives in London, the British Library, the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington DC. When much of the research material from NARA was stolen from the Hotel Russell in London in early 2010 – surely every researcher’s worst nightmare – archivists at NARA assisted me on a subsequent visit to ensure its speedy recovery. I am also grateful to the staff of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington DC, especially Marie Champagne and Alan Tidwell, for their warm welcome and assistance as the book was entering its final stages. At Cambridge University Press, Tony Moore commissioned the book and has championed it from the beginning. He also offered many helpful insights and suggestions as the book was being written. On the production side, Susan Hanley, Jenny Symons and Jodie Howell have been the very models of professionalism throughout x

the process, while Bree DeRoche has been a meticulous copyeditor.

In particular, I thank Frank Bongiorno, Matthew Jordan, Neville Meaney and Stuart Ward for their helpful and probing comments on previous drafts. Advice on source material was also provided by Mads Clausen, Simon Potter and some constructive questions from an audience at the British World Conference in Bristol in 2007. Special thanks are also due to my research assistant, Philippa Macaskill, for her tireless efforts in assisting the project. Needless to say, the flaws in the book are mine and mine alone. Finally, I record the deepest and most enduring gratitude to my family: to my mother and father, Bernie Curran and Jeannie Addision, for their continued inspiration in all things; to Elwyn and Silvana Elms for their ongoing support, but especially to my wife Priscilla and my two gorgeous girls, Pia and Ella, who have had to put up with a distracted and often absent husband and dad while much of the research and writing was done for this book. They will be rightly relieved to see the curtain brought down on Curtin. That this book has been completed is testament to their love and forbearance, and it is to them that I dedicate this work. James Curran Washington, DC November 2010

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

xi

Chapter 1

‘Citadel for the British-speaking race’ Introduction

In June 2008 Julia Gillard, then deputy prime minister, addressed a gathering of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Washington DC. Speaking in the lavish State Department dining room that overlooks the Lincoln Memorial, Gillard drew on the familiar rhetoric of shared values and common interests that define the relationship between Australia and the United States. The occasion was widely seen as her debut on the foreign policy stage – a chance to show the supposed ‘movers and shakers’ of the alliance and the Washington power elite that she had the necessary mettle to handle international affairs. When Gillard took over from Kevin Rudd as prime minister two years later, it was the text of this speech to which many journalists and analysts turned to try and discern what her prime ministership might mean for the direction of Australian foreign policy. 1

Gillard’s speech traversed the traditional terrain of cultural exchange and shared military sacrifice. She recalled the cooperation between Australian and American soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War, and emphasised that Australia had been the only country to fight alongside America at every major conflict since. But her words were securely anchored to the memory and legacy of a Labor hero, the former party leader and prime minister, John Curtin. Gillard was keen to point out that the ANZUS alliance, though officially signed in 1951, ‘reflected the judgments – clear, accurate, brutally frank judgments – of an Australian Labor Prime Minister a decade earlier’. Conceding that her audience would be all too ‘familiar with John Curtin’s declaration in December 1941 about the need for Australia to “look to America”’ for its national security, Gillard instead quoted the words he had spoken on the day following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. She recalled that during an evening broadcast on 8 December 1941, the prime minister had explained to the people of Australia the imperative to defend the continent ‘“as a place where civilisation will persist”’.1 Gillard’s speech was apparently well received by those present, and it attracted warm endorsements from the Australian press. Paul Kelly declared that the deputy prime minister had been ‘inducted into the political culture and rituals of the alliance’ and could now be counted one of its ‘true believer(s)’. The Herald’s Peter Hartcher joined the chorus of celebration: Gillard’s ‘Curtin call’ was an ‘excellent debut’, proving that she ‘has come a long way since the Victorian Socialist Left’.2 One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief amongst the commentariat: if the leading

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light of Labor’s left-wing could utter such statements, the alliance

2

was in safe hands. But what went undetected by journalists was that Gillard’s depiction of Australia as a ‘place where civilisation will persist’ was only the tail-end of a much longer quote from Curtin’s speech – a speech in which he had famously declared that Australia was at war with Japan. In the section of that momentous broadcast from which Gillard drew inspiration, Curtin had actually said:

We Australians have imperishable traditions. We shall maintain them. We shall vindicate them. We shall hold this country, and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race, and as a place where civilisation will persist.3 It was a fiery address in which the Labor leader, who for the previous 20 years had regularly voiced his abhorrence of war, sounded his ‘tocsin’ to the ‘Men and Women of Australia’. He depicted a Pacific Ocean ‘reddened with the blood of Japanese victims’ and foreshadowed an attack on Australia if the Japanese had their ‘brutal way’. At the close of his remarks that evening, Curtin had reached for verse from a work by the 19th century English poet Charles Swinburne, ‘The Eve of Revolution’, beckoning his Australian listeners to ‘Hasten thine hour and halt not, till thy work be done’. The missing words from Gillard’s speech say much about the way the legend of John Curtin has been inoculated against any association with Australia’s once fervent identification as a ‘British’ country. On the face of it, an omission of this kind was understandable. Gillard clearly could not draw on the outdated language United States. But in one fell swoop the entire meaning of Curtin’s original speech had been changed, and changed utterly. Gillard’s ican ear, one that would be more receptive to the language of

speeches – he was depicting Australia as a trustee and guardian for British civilisation in the Pacific. In the face of an external enemy he, like many of his contemporaries, had no hesitation in defining his country in these terms. The point is not to expose the routine cutting and pasting of the modern speechwriter – though this is a particularly egregious

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Curtin referred to ‘civilisation’ – as he often did in his wartime

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universalism and the struggle against a totalitarian foe. But when

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stress on ‘civilisation’ was no doubt carefully pitched to an Amer-

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of Australian Britishness in speaking about the alliance with the

reportage. Gillard is by no means the first political leader to draw

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selectively on the words of former party icons: it is in the very

3

example of the practice – or the excitable nature of some media

nature of political rhetoric that the embarrassing sentiments of the past will be quickly and quietly shuffled aside. It is simply to stress that Curtin’s particular concept of the British Empire is barely recognised or acknowledged today. This part of the former prime minister’s worldview and policy record has been airbrushed from history, fit neither for domestic nor international consumption. Gillard joins a long list of Labor leaders who have invoked Curtin as a means of channelling powerful party and national myths. Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd all summoned the memory of the wartime leader at various points in their prime ministerships. For Whitlam, Curtin was at heart a great reformer forced to put aside his social vision and instead lead the nation in war; for Hawke, he was the epitome of ‘consensus’ leadership, a man who could bring the country together in a time of existential crisis; for Keating he was the ultimate symbol of Australian resistance to British duplicity; the perfect foil for bourgeois Australian Anglophiles with their ‘compromised nationalism’. For Kevin Rudd, Curtin was the ticket to a Labor tribalism that his own past and political career so clearly lacked.4 In popular culture too the presentation of Curtin’s legacy to a new audience has only amplified the claims that his period in office has something profound to say about Australian ‘nationalism’. The director of a recent ABC telemovie about Curtin’s wartime leadership (Curtin, 2007) was moved to say that he couldn’t ‘think of a more profound story about a more complex character in a more complex time in our history. There’s nothing so big, not even Whitlam. And this is pivotal to who we are’. The actor William

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McInnes, who played the role of Curtin, opted for a more straight-

4

forward assessment of Curtin as ‘the guy who took Australia away from England and looked to America . . . it was a seismic shift in the way Australians see themselves and what they were’. Geoff Morrell, starring as Ben Chifley, looked to the period to bring some perspective to the Howard Government’s commitment of Australian troops to the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. He felt that there was ‘an interesting parallel to present-day politics.

At that time we really were just the providers of fodder for the protection of the Empire. To have a prime minister who stood up to these foreign leaders and who genuinely had the interests of the people at heart, that really does bring into perspective some of the stuff going on today’.5 Ultimately, however, the telemovie was more revealing of the ongoing tug-of-war over Curtin’s memory than the inner psyche or political philosophy of the man himself. These are only the most recent manifestations of how Curtin’s period as prime minister continues to exercise a powerful grip on the way in which some Australians understand that period in their history and its implications for the nation’s identity, the question of its ‘independence’ and how Australia ought to act in the world. In a land that has seen no civil war or engaged in no act of military rebellion against the ‘mother-country’ to act as the baptismal font for a self-sustaining national mythology, the Curtin story offers a tale rich in the vital ingredients of nationalist drama and human experience. Yet there is by no means a consensus concerning the Curtin story. Indeed few Australian prime ministers, save perhaps for legacy. On the one hand, it is the painful tale of a reluctant warlord. In this reading the Labor leader is viewed primarily as a paciof crisis; a nervous, angst-ridden man who would pace the moon-

defend Australia against the Japanese advance. On the other hand, it is the stirring epic of a decisive leader, prepared to put Australia first, lock horns with Winston Churchill, forge a new alliance with the United States and thus become the ‘Saviour of Australia’.6 But the tension between Curtin the resolute commander-inchief and Curtin the worried, wavering leader too often means that

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the safety of Australian troops returning from the Middle East to

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lit grounds of the prime minister’s Lodge in Canberra fearing for

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fist forced to take on the mantle of national leadership in a time

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Robert Menzies or Gough Whitlam, have left such a contested

rather than a singular political phenomenon. In his 1999 biography

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the historian David Day even created a balance sheet of Curtin’s

5

we receive a picture of the man as a sum of his tortured parts

contradictions, depicting a torn leader who ‘heightened Australia’s sense of nationalism by standing up to Churchill in 1942 and yet . . . later went against Labor Party policy to approve the appointment of a British-born governor-general’; and who ‘looked to America free of any pangs as to Australia’s traditional relationship with Britain and yet was soon holding America at bay and seeking to resuscitate the discredited system of imperial defence’.7 Here the two worlds of Australian nationalism and loyalty to the British connection are inherently contradictory: two tectonic plates of the national firmament grinding uneasily against each other. It is as if Curtin’s celebrated nationalism is seen as being fundamentally at odds with his periodic lapses into imperial patriotism. Because there remains such a need to hold Curtin up as the great hero of Australian ‘independence’ – in effect, to ennoble him as Australia’s George Washington – his commitment to Britain is often depicted as a strange anomaly.

A ‘new approach to empire government’ In August 1943, however, in preparation for his visit to London the following year for a conference of Commonwealth prime ministers, Curtin announced to the Labor Party and the Australian people his vision for the post-war British Empire. Speaking to the United Commercial Travellers Association he called for a ‘new approach to empire government’. It was simply no longer sufficient for Britain ‘to manage the affairs of Empire on the basis of a government sitting in London’.8 At the core of his thinking was the need to create a permanent imperial secretariat or ‘Empire Council’ that would

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oversee the introduction of a new era in imperial affairs once the

6

war was over. Curtin wanted this new machinery to ‘provide for full and continuous consultation’ between Britain and her overseas dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. He envisaged more frequent prime ministers’ conferences that could be held in all parts of the Empire, not just London, with a secretariat of high-level officials to provide advice on matters of common interest. As Curtin himself put it, such a body in its ability to meet

at all corners of the Empire would represent ‘everything inherent in Dominion status’ and thus symbolise the ideal of organic imperial unity – an Empire truly representative of its constituent parts, not confined to the corridors of Whitehall but a ‘movable venue’, equally at home in Ottawa and Canberra, Pretoria and Wellington, and therefore equally attentive to the needs and interests of all parts of the British world.9 Curtin was trying to find the means by which the British peoples around the globe could face the world as one. These aspirations for the nation’s role in the British Empire have been given short shrift by Australian scholars and political leaders. In both cases there has been a great reluctance to believe that Curtin’s heart and soul were in this call for greater imperial unity in the post-war world. Day dismissed Curtin’s vision as a cunning electoral ploy to win over the hearts and minds of the Australian people in a federal election year. Curtin thus had ‘little to lose from posing as an imperial convert’ and had simply ‘wrapped the party in the Union Jack to win the 1943 election’.10 Day also struggled to come to terms with why Australia ‘rushed back into the arms of the mother country’ following the fall of Singapore in 1942. Surely folly of their traditional reliance on Britain for defence and charted a more ‘independent’ future. From that act Day divined again a was no revolution, no upheaval of the toiling masses yearning to be

Paul Keating provided the foreword to the third and final volume of Day’s study of Anglo-Australian relations during the Second World War, Reluctant Nation. Keating, a prime minister who saw himself as the agent of a more distinctive ‘nationalism’ for Australia in the early 1990s, agreed with Day’s lament that Australians had failed to grasp their ‘possible independent destiny’ as a result of

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powerful political imprimatur in 1992 when Labor Prime Minister

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free from the yoke of an imperial master’.11 His views were given a

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deeper truth about the nature of Australian nationalism, that ‘there

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after that debacle, he reasoned, Australians should have realised the

‘that Australia belonged to a British family of nations, and for her

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material, cultural, spiritual and military benefit should never leave

7

the Second World War. ‘The idea took hold’, Keating bemoaned,

the fold’.12 Both Day and Keating were giving voice to a view of Australian history as a tale of arrested development – the conviction that a true, distinctively Australian nationalism had been constantly thwarted by an outdated and irrelevant attachment to Britain and the Empire. An alternative assessment has been to classify Curtin’s proposal as merely the expression of a strategic need for a ‘great and powerful friend’. Thus, as the threat of a Japanese invasion receded and as American forces began to look northward to the Philippines and Tokyo, Australians came to the view that they could not rely on the United States in the post-war era and therefore had no other option but to reaffirm their commitment to Britain and the concept of imperial defence. Peter Edwards has suggested that Curtin’s proposals for an Imperial Secretariat followed a frank assessment given to him by General Douglas MacArthur, the American Commander-in-Chief of the South West Pacific Area. According to Edwards, Macarthur told Curtin ‘bluntly that Australia had no other choice. It should certainly not look to Uncle Sam as a protective big brother’.13 Such treatments of Curtin’s desire for a common foreign policy fail to appreciate that this episode connects to fundamental concerns that Australia had about its relationship with Britain and the British Commonwealth from the end of the 19th century down to the 1960s. They also do not treat Curtin’s worldview as a serious expression of his idea of Australia. The proposals for an imperial secretariat that he took to the party and the people were connected to a long-standing tradition in Australian foreign policy – that of

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desiring closer cooperation with Britain inside a united Empire.14

8

This gave expression to the Australians’ own sense of being British and also their need for defence against Asia, especially Japan. This book, then, offers a different interpretation of John Curtin’s ‘worldview’ and the way in which he understood Australia’s identity and its place in the world. It aims to show how he came to see himself as the architect of a new form of Empire and why he thought that this new phase of imperial cooperation was

an ‘inevitable development’. The chapters that follow trace out the deeply laid and culturally rich sources of Curtin’s proposal for a more closely integrated concept of Empire in the post-war era – as one way of illustrating the centrality of Britishness in Australian ideas of selfhood at this time. As a Labor man of Irish Catholic descent who had been an anti-conscriptionist leader in the First World War, Curtin is an excellent anti-intuitive subject for this purpose. Moreover, the book demonstrates that his attitude to Britishness and Empire were not the eccentric initiative of a maverick but a response to the world drawn from widely held beliefs about national identity. Curtin’s ambition for an Empire Council was no will-o’-the-wisp effort. It was not a proposal he picked from the bureaucratic shelf merely to have something to say about Australia’s post-war position and its relationship to the Empire. As prime minister he expended a great deal of time and energy in giving form and substance to these ideas, not least in taking them to his party and the Australian people for endorsement. For his party, this in itself was remarkable. Over the previous the bitter conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, when the party had split and its credibility on questions relating to international question. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many in Labor ranks

their conservative opponents ruthlessly exploited Labor’s internal divisions and tagged the party as ‘disloyal’ to Britain, a label that undermined the party’s claims to be defender and protector of the national interest. Despite these frictions and fissures, however, Labor’s political troubles on these international questions never developed into a full-blown platform of anti-Britishness, and separa-

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war in which the Australian people would have no say. As a result,

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nurtured deep suspicions of being entrapped in another ‘imperial’

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affairs, especially its attitude to Empire, had been brought into

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two decades Labor had been living with the aftershocks arising from

republic was never placed on the party platform. It is testament to

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the deep currents of British race patriotism in Australia’s political

9

tion from the ‘mother-country’ via the inauguration of an Australian

culture at this time that no leader or senior figure in the federal parliamentary Labor Party could hope to be elected in adopting such a stance.15 It also helps to explain why Curtin, when setting out his policy for the Empire’s future, could give it a history of its own. He told a Labor Party conference in late 1943 that his new ‘Empire Council’ would come to occupy an important chapter in ‘the history of the British race’ and that it would be seen as a vital stage in the ‘British race’s great experiment in a British Commonwealth’.16 Curtin’s reading of the history of the Empire would ultimately prove to be at odds with those of his Commonwealth colleagues, particularly those in Canada and South Africa. In the 1920s, Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King and South Africa’s Jan Smuts had pushed hard for the bonds of Empire to be progressively loosened, for Britain to allow her dominions to enjoy greater autonomy and independence within the Empire. This was due neither to the flowering of a novel vision of nationhood in these societies, nor because Smuts and King saw any domestic political advantage in presenting themselves as lukewarm on imperial ties. Rather, it demonstrated a conviction that as a result of their sacrifices for the Empire in the First World War, they had earned the right to a greater say in the making of policy and the freedom to determine their own affairs – to sign international treaties in their own right and to be free to decide whether or not to join in any future war involving Britain. Viewing these events as an editorial writer for a labour newspaper in Western Australia, Curtin predicted that Australia too would ultimately traverse what he called the ‘more “breakaway”’ low New Zealand, which he claimed ‘had no aspiration to get rid of its Downing St nurse’, ‘declines to assume the status of an adult’ and instead wishes ‘“never to grow up”’. It was unlikely, Curtin

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path taken by Canada and South Africa, and that it would not fol-

minister, however, Curtin would have to come to terms with a very

10

different history, in which Australia and New Zealand had shown

thought, that Australia would ever ‘adopt the servile attitude’ of its friend and ally across the Tasman.17 By the time he became prime

much less enthusiasm than their fellow Britons overseas for moving out of the imperial nest. It is the tension between these competing views of Empire across the dominions that would resonate all the way to Curtin’s attendance at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London in May 1944, the forum in which he hoped his ideas would come to fruition.

Looking to America . . . anchored in Empire Nevertheless, before looking in more detail at the origins of Curtin’s ideas for the Empire and their reception at home and abroad, it is worth revisiting that moment in the Second World War that continues to have a stranglehold on Australian folk memory: the New Year’s statement that he published in The Herald (Melbourne) on 27 December 1941. The message contained the Australian Government’s plea for American support in the face of a rampant Japanese imperial army sweeping down through South-East Asia. The strategic circumstances of the war at this time seemed to presage what Australian politicians and policymakers had long feared – that when Australia against a military invasion by an Asian power. Curtin did not mince his words, writing that

traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom. We know the constant threat of invasion. We know the dangers of dispersal of strength, but we know, too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on.18 The words have become a mantra for those who have promoted the idea of Curtin as a leader fired by the spirit of nationalism. As the

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know the problems that the United Kingdom faces. We

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that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our

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Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear

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Britain was engaged in a European war, it would be unable to defend

Prime Minister grappling with the most terrible emergency in our

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history could have written off the entire British connection in a

11

historian Noel McLachlan put it, ‘Probably only an Irish-Australian

single no-nonsense sentence’.19 Gareth Evans and Bruce Grant, in explaining the evolution of an ‘independent’ Australian foreign policy, depicted Curtin’s war leadership as having awoken a slumbering national spirit: ‘The Australian nationalism of the 1890s’, they argued, ‘was still awaiting its expression in the Australian nation-state when war brought home to all Australians how precarious our dependence on British power had become’.20 But it is a long time since anyone claiming specialist expertise on the subject has asserted that Curtin’s statement remains the precise moment when Australia finally grasped the nettle of nationhood. Contrary to the generally accepted view, Curtin’s ‘look to America’ was not an epiphany of Australian independence and a rejection of the nation’s Britishness but an expedient call for help at a time when Australia was facing the prospect of a Japanese invasion. Writing in the late 1960s, Neville Meaney pointed out that prime ministers Alfred Deakin, Joseph Lyons and Robert Menzies had all previously appealed to the Americans to come to the defence of Australia. Curtin’s message, although pronounced in far more dramatic circumstances, was entirely consistent with the orthodox Australian foreign policy doctrine of searching for security in the Pacific.21 Indeed, Curtin was adamant that the Pacific should not be treated as a ‘subordinate part of the general conflict’ and declared that the ‘Australian government therefore regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies’ fighting plan’. More recently, even David Day has conceded that by war’s end the statement ‘seemed to have left no lasting mark on Australia’.22

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At the time, however, Curtin’s words were seen by many as

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nothing less than a serious affront to the idea of a ‘British’ Australia. The response was visceral. It seemed to confirm for many their deepest suspicions, still raw from the conscription debates of the First World War and Labor’s isolationist stance on international affairs in the 1920s and 1930s, that the party could not be trusted with the conduct of the nation’s defence and foreign policy. Even more, it seemed to crystallise the view that Labor was disloyal

to the British connection. Curtin’s political opponents lined up to pour scorn on the statement. Robert Menzies countered that ‘Mr Curtin has made a great blunder if he thinks that the ties between this country and Great Britain are merely traditional. They are real and indissoluble’. Percy Spender labelled it an ‘egregious blunder’, while the leader of the Country Party in NSW went for the jugular: ‘Why is it that Mr Curtin and some of his followers are always so ready to cast a brick at the Old Country and the people in it? . . . Australia is nearly 100 per cent British, and we will not stand for the kind of talk we are getting’.23 The Secretary of the National Defence League of Australia lamented the message as ‘deplorable’ and condemned Curtin’s ‘execrable choice of words’, and a special meeting of the Royal Society of St George was called to discuss the ‘serious implications’ of the prime minister’s message. The RSL simply declared that for its part, it was ‘British: and aggressively so’. It had ‘no intention of standing passively by while attempts are made to weaken the link with the mother-country’.24 Newspapers published numerous letters from agitated readers. Others were more sanguine, even if they concealed it behind leader of the United Australia Party, thundered that it would be a ‘suicidal and a false and dangerous policy for Australia to regard great countries with which we are associated’. But, ever alert to the

that Australia’s voice should be heard in the councils formulating the Allied Pacific defence policy. Warming to the occasion, he left his listeners in no doubt as to where he thought post-war military strength and power would continue to lie. America had a fine fleet but its primary job was to safeguard the Atlantic and its own Pacific coast; its air force at that time was not comparable with those of the

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war cabinets or other top decision-making bodies, Hughes agreed

T H E

problems of Australia being excluded from the inner sanctum of

F O R

Britain’s support as being of less importance than that of the other

‘ C I T A D E L

a verbal tirade. The former prime minister, Billy Hughes, then

adamant that ‘it was Britain who had protected Australia up to the

R A C E ’

present’. Getting then to the heart of the matter he reaffirmed

13

‘old world’ and its army was ‘in its embryonic stages’. Hughes was

the principle that had acted as a kind of talisman for much of the time that he had been prime minister, namely that ‘In all discussions the defence of the empire should be regarded as a whole problem’, that is they should include the whole British world and provide equal security for all parts of that world.25 Thus, Hughes, despite his characteristic fulmination about anything that sniffed of anti-Britishness, and his ongoing suspicion of America’s credentials as a ‘world’ power, nevertheless had put his finger on the problem: he understood that Curtin was seeking a place at the table where policies that had direct implications for Australia’s security in the Pacific were being made. Seeing the ‘defence of the empire’ as a ‘whole problem’ meant more frequent consultation between Australia and her great power protectors, and thus greater coordination of policy. Two days after the appearance of Curtin’s message, the Labor leader convened a special press conference in an effort to assuage his critics. In doing so he set forth his own view of Australian Britishness: There is no part of the Empire more steadfast in loyalty to the British way of living and British institutions than Australia. Our loyalty to His Majesty the King goes to the very core of our national life. It is part of our being . . . I do not consider Australia a segment of the British Empire. It is an organic part of the whole structure. But I do not put Australia in the position of a colony. Australia is a Dominion.26

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These comments are, of course, barely remembered. But they were

14

an emphatic reaffirmation of Australia’s British ties. They also gave expression to a deeply ingrained Australian view of the nation’s place in the British world. Curtin’s concern to stress Australia’s position as a ‘Dominion’ in an organic whole was predicated on the view that all British peoples were equal and that all should contribute to the creation of a policy that would provide equal and absolute security for all the peoples of ‘Greater Britain’. This explanation went

some way towards mollifying his critics. Hughes acknowledged it had ‘removed the uneasy feeling in the minds of the people that he regarded the Empire as of secondary importance’, and the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, the Most Rev JWC Wand, lauded Curtin for his ‘handsome amends . . . His expression of indignant horror at the suggestion that we were drifting in the slightest degree from Britain was as well-timed as it was forceful’. After all, Wand declared, Australians were ‘come weal or woe . . . forever a British people’.27

The forgetting of Empire in Australian history At the core of Curtin’s response to the crisis of the Second World War was a long-standing argument that Australians, by being British, should be connected more effectively, efficiently and intimately to the British world. That his argument for Empire has not attracted much attention is yet another casualty of a wider process of the forgetting of Empire in Australian history and historiography. Since the breaking of ties with Britain in the 1960s and 1970s rassing, unfortunate dynamic; an imposition from abroad and one that needs to be quickly dispatched to the sidelines of national life. the Empire has ‘quietly dropped through the trapdoor of history,

former white settler colonies of the British Empire, especially in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Southern Africa.29 In recent years, however, there has been a great deal of scholarly attention devoted to exploring the various political, institutional, cultural and economic dimensions of the ‘British world’. This is not to chart a uniform experience of Empire across the old

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a peculiarly Australian phenomenon, but one repeated across the

T H E

without any heroic anti-imperial struggle’.28 This is by no means

F O R

As Stuart Ward and Deryck Shreuder have argued, it is as though

‘ C I T A D E L

there has been a certain tendency to treat Britishness as an embar-

phy and demography on the various ideas and manifestations of

R A C E ’

being British. While the imprint of Empire remains so close to the

15

red-coloured globe, but to interrogate the impact of local geogra-

surface of national events in many of these societies – in debates over official ‘apologies’, the treatment of indigenous peoples or the commemoration of war and conflict – the broader questions about how the Empire worked, or how it was imagined as a ‘global’ community, are barely audible amidst the din of partisan political point scoring. Here the fault lines are clear. Where protagonists on one side equate any mention of Empire with rampant and ruthless colonialism – especially of the land and its indigenous peoples – allowing for little or no lingering benefit of the British heritage, its defendants have no trouble extolling the ‘achievements’ of British settlement but are less forthcoming in admitting its failures and blemishes. Whatever the flaws in both these positions, in the globalised multicultural world of the late 20th and early 21st century, the idea that these societies once defined themselves as British peoples clearly does not provide a history that suits the needs of the present. As James Belich has noted, it is as if the ‘one-time Dominions share a shameful secret – a protracted adolescence, decades long, spent firmly tied to the mother’s apron strings – which is best forgotten’. But, as Belich is quick to add, ‘forgetting important phenomena simply because they embarrass some in the present is not an option for historians’.30 In dealing with the legacy of Empire, the aim is not to produce a history of the British world where the story of its former colonial possessions inevitably centres around ‘distinctive development and ultimate separation’ from the imperial centre: this triumphalist historiography inevitably positions the British link as the stubborn obstacle to the realisation of ‘true’ nationhood. Rather, the task

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is to carefully piece together the political context in which the

16

Empire evolved and furthermore to look at what historian John Darwin describes as the ‘almost continual debate over the terms of association by which the various member states were bound to the British system’. Instead of seeing the Empire as a model of clinical and calculating efficiency, the very concept of a ‘British world’ was premised on the question of what place the settler dominions would occupy in the imperial system, how much say they should

have in the framing of policy, and whether the burdens of Empire were being shared equally.31 Politicians in Australia, New Zealand and Canada never tired of declaring their countries to be ‘British nations’ – but the Empire was not ‘an alien overlord’, writes Darwin, it was ‘a joint enterprise in which they were, or claimed to be, partners’.32 It is this crucial aspect of the imperial system – the much debated balance between independence and equality, autonomy and unity, or what WK Hancock called ‘empire and liberty’, that holds the key to unlocking the way in which Australian leaders from the end of the 19th century understood the dynamic of the British imperial system. Their goal, simply stated, was to make the Empire work properly. They wanted to ensure that Australian views and interests were taken into account in the making of imperial defence and foreign policy. The assertion of influence at the heart of the Empire lay at the very core of this wider sense of ‘Britannic nationalism’.33 The concept of a wider ‘British world’ was a product of the modernising forces of the late 19th century. Although the English radical politician Charles Dilke could write in his 1869 travelogue, ‘grandeur of the race’ was ‘already girdling the earth’, the impulse to build a network of ‘better Britains’ abroad gained a new impetus phenomenon of mass nationalism was beginning to demand a new

Under nationalism the tendency was for each people to assert the superiority of its own racial inheritance and cultural values. It was in this period, writes Duncan Bell, that the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ came to be seen as an ‘“organic unity”’. The most crucial part of this development was a ‘cognitive one, involving a transformation in the way that people imagined the empire’.34

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encouraged self-aggrandisement and the flattering of a people’s ego.

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way of defining the ‘people’, one which fused race with culture and

F O R

in the late 19th century. This was around the same time that the

‘ C I T A D E L

Greater Britain, that the British were a ‘world people’, where the

fertile soil for the growth of this British nationalism. Not only was it

R A C E ’

one of the most urbanised countries in the world, but also one where

17

The Australia of the late 19th century provided a particularly

parliamentary democracy had given a voice to the demand for popular sovereignty. Indeed, the traditions of Westminster adapted to a new land were held to be part of the genius of the British race. Ideas of republicanism – once held to be the natural progression of the colonies – were pushed to the margins of the political culture. Indeed, the colonists’ identification with the powerful sentiments of British race patriotism were given an added intensity as a result of Australia’s particular geopolitical anxieties. Being a European outpost on the edge of an alien Asia meant that Australians were particularly susceptible to the need for an intense idea of community that would bind them to Britain and all the other white peoples in the British Empire.35 Geopolitical anxieties intensified this identification with the British race myth. Towards the end of the 19th century, the colonists’ long-entrenched security fears began to focus on what Henry Parkes called a ‘new awakening Asia’. Stuart Ward has shown that the perception of mounting Asian dangers coincided with the time when ‘an imperial civic culture was taking root in Australia’. Although affection for Britain as ‘home’ and respect for her institutions and values was longstanding in the colonies, Ward stresses that ‘it was only during the late-Victorian atmosphere of looming crisis that colonial identities became securely anchored within a pan-British ethnic framework’. The rise of the imperial federation movement, the transformation of Queen Victoria into the symbol of the British race, the inauguration of Empire day and the sending of colonial contingents to the Sudan and Southern Africa became part of the ‘cause of the British peoples all over the

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world’.36

18

Both sides of Australian politics embraced this myth of ‘British race patriotism’. Some of the most renowned comments of national leaders in the first years of the new Commonwealth spoke to the essential Britishness ingrained in the national consciousness. In his 1905 address on Imperial Federation, Alfred Deakin articulated the kindred nature of the relationship between Australians and a worldwide community of Britons: ‘The same ties of blood, sympathy

and tradition which make us one Commonwealth here make the British of today one people everywhere’.37 Whilst Deakin used the word ‘nation’ seven times in this address, only once did it refer to Australia. He mostly implied a British nation – which included Australians. Andrew Fisher’s 1914 pledge to fight to ‘the last man and the last shilling’ and Billy Hughes’ 1921 declaration that Australia was ‘a nation by the grace of god and the British empire’ were the types of statements that led WK Hancock to express in the late 1920s the classic assessment of Australia’s dual loyalties, that ‘among Australians pride of race counted for more than love of country’. Australians ‘could be in love with two soils’. As Meaney has stressed ‘it will not today derogate from Australian dignity or self-worth to contemplate the possibility that in the nationalist era’, that is from the 1870s down to the 1960s, ‘Britishness was the dominant cultural myth in Australia, the dominant social idea giving meaning to the people’.38 Although some Australian historians of the 1940s and 1950s discerned a longer narrative of a distinctive Australian nationalism triumphing over a fading and irrelevant British connection – from late 19th century to the diggers at Gallipoli – this teleological story of national development never acquired the power or resonance times of crisis they did not look to such a history to define their

as a means of salving communal pain. Although the frontier myth spoke to a deep sense of affection for the land and an enthusiasm for its well-being, it did not gain the same emotional purchase on the collective Australian imagination as the British race idea. Indeed, it was more a folk story than a national myth. Moreover, there was a sense that Australians not only defined

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national grief or commemoration did they draw on bush imagery

T H E

people and rouse them to action. Nor at moments of profound

F O R

of the British race myth. When Australian leaders rose to speak at

‘ C I T A D E L

the convicts to the Eureka rebels, from the bush balladeers of the

be purer than that found at ‘home’. There was the chance to build

R A C E ’

a new British society free from the inadequacies and shortcomings

19

themselves as Britons, but that they believed their Britishness to

of the old world. The differing roles of the monarchy in Australia and Britain had important consequences for this idea of Australia as a better branch of Britishness. In the new land the crown had in many ways shed its associations with aristocracy and become a symbol of unity for colonists of different backgrounds, providing a ‘human and reassuring link to home, to a great civilisation and the power which was needed to protect them’.39 This idea of Australia as a land of ‘better Britons’ found its ultimate expression in the opening pages of Charles Bean’s Story of Anzac. The Australian war correspondent and passionate proselytiser of the Anzac Legend, Bean argued that the four British strains comprising Australian life – English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh – had in Australia ‘been blended by intermarriage into a people completely British’. Bean’s analysis of the composition and settlement of the Australian population was telling: although Australia is in extent slightly greater than three-fourths of Europe, if four men were taken respectively from its four uttermost corners, each of them would be practically indistinguishable in type from any one of five million other Australians whether in Sydney, Melbourne or any other town or district of the continent. There is often far more difference between the natives of English counties twenty miles apart – Essex and Kent, Devon and Cornwall – than between Australians who live at a distance of two thousand miles from each other.40 In other words, a British nationalism was clearly more complete in

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Australia than in Britain itself. Here Bean had implicitly pointed

20

to the inherent limits and complications of the idea of ‘Britishness’ in the British Isles, and in so doing had underlined the way in which Australians came to see themselves as a more uniformly British community. In the Australians, he added, the ‘characteristic resourcefulness of the British was perforce developed further’.41 At the end of the First World War, Bean had the blood-stained proof that his warrior tribe was comprised of ‘better Britons’, and

this conviction had been extolled with even greater pungency by Billy Hughes in September 1919 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference. Hughes was of the view that the separate representation accorded to Australia at that diplomatic gathering had been the foundation moment of Australian nationhood: ‘By this recognition Australia became a nation and entered into a family of nations on a footing of equality,’ he told the parliament. Justifying his defence of the White Australia policy – the Japanese delegation had wanted a racial equality clause inserted into the League of Nations covenant – he affirmed that Australians were ‘more British than the people of Great Britain’. In England, he noted, one could travel from ‘one county to another’ and find ‘men speak with a different accent’ and ‘that if you go a few miles men speak with a different tongue’. But in Australia this was not the case: ‘You can go from Perth to Sydney, and from Hobart to Cape York, and find men speaking the same tongue, with the same tongue . . . We are all of the same race, and speak the same tongue in the same way’. Hughes added, ‘We hold firmly to the great principle of the White Australia, because we know what we know’.42 subservience or blind obeisance. The problem of Australian nationalism can only be unravelled if it is appreciated that whilst ‘Auspatriotism’ rather than a distinctive national culture, Australians

self-government. Such insistence was most clearly evident in their willingness to federate as one nation, but their absolute determination not to support the idea of Imperial Federation, for fear that a London-based parliament for all the Empire would trample over hard won rights and relegate distinctively Australian interests to the background. While a few in Australia saw London as the imperial

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of their political affairs.43 They guarded jealously their rights to

T H E

insisted they should maintain exclusive control over the direction

F O R

tralia’s first response in terms of sentiment was to British race

‘ C I T A D E L

But this attachment to Britain should not be mistaken for lazy

great majority adhered to an ‘organic’ concept of Empire in which

R A C E ’

all dominions were equal and all contributed to the discussion and

21

centre, with the right to direct the Empire’s affairs as it saw fit, the

direction of the Empire’s foreign policy. Australia might not have had the formal machinery of a foreign office until the mid 1930s, but that did not mean it did not have a foreign policy of its own. Thus, since the late 19th century Australian politicians and policy-makers had looked out on the world and identified foreign problems that threatened their own security. In meeting these challenges they tried at first to influence their great power protectors – Britain and the United States – but when this did not work they became frustrated and annoyed. Being so far from Britain and so close to Asia had given them a unique set of national interests, and a different view from the British of world problems and politics and the threats to the Empire. They saw the role of Britain as being to cater equally for the defence of all the British peoples. Australians were wont therefore to voice their disagreements with British officials in Whitehall if they felt their views and interests were not being taken into account in the formation of policy. But Australian leaders did not like to air the dirty laundry of Anglo-Australian disagreement. Rather, they put their faith in efforts to achieve greater consultation in the making of the Empire’s foreign policy. Curtin’s ‘Empire Council’ was by no means the first – and certainly not the last – Australian attempt to secure a place for Australia at the high table of world diplomacy. The chapters that follow seek to explain the origins of this Australian view of the Empire and to chart how previous Australian prime ministers, especially Andrew Fisher, Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes, went about the task of trying to secure a common foreign and defence policy for the British race. In Chapter 2, Curtin’s early

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thinking about international relations is considered – especially his

22

views on war and peace, monarchy and republic, imperial relations and Anzac remembrance. As a young activist in the labour movement he first came to think about foreign relations only in so much as it impacted on domestic politics. Rebutting the conservatives’ charge that Labor was disloyal to Empire, and ensuring that the country would not become entrapped in another imperial war, shaped his initial approach to international affairs. His views in this

period offer a microcosm of a Labor Party struggling to put together a credible foreign policy stance in the wake of the tumult of the First World War and the debates over conscription. As Curtin entered federal parliament in the 1930s, he faced first a worldwide economic crisis and then a sustained period of instability in international affairs. Chapter 3 explores in more detail his trials and tribulations in managing the party’s stance on foreign affairs and the British connection from the time he assumed the Labor leadership in 1935 until he became prime minister in 1941. Facing a world of troubles, Curtin also had to manage a fractious party which remained divided along religious, factional and ideological lines: a party which in many respects wanted to look away from the world. During this period, Curtin questioned whether Australia could rely for its defence on Britain sending a fleet to Singapore. At the 1937 election, he took to the people a policy of continental defence, arguing that Australia should instead build up its land and air capabilities. But Curtin won no plaudits for what ultimately stands as a prescient view of the strategic situation: instead his critique of the abiding faith in the capacity of the British party exposed to the charge that they remained weak on Empire. Although that in itself showed that the conservatives too remained shown for Curtin at the ballot box.

isters’ Conference. Proclaiming that Australians were ‘practical Empire patriots’ he sought to give shape to his proposals for the post-war British world. Here too the British, New Zealand, South African, Canadian and American impressions of Curtin and his imperial ideas are examined, as is the way in which his proposal

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1943 until his visit to London in May 1944 for the Prime Min-

T H E

Chapter 4 follows closely Curtin’s efforts as national leader to sell his vision of Empire to his party and the people from June

F O R

trapped in the mindset of 1916–1917, there was little consolation

‘ C I T A D E L

Royal Navy to come to Australia’s aid again left both him and his

future of the Empire. Following the conference Curtin returned to

R A C E ’

Australia and declared that the ‘empire’s house was in order’, but

23

contributed to a wide-ranging debate in London circles over the

whether or not this implied a unanimity amongst his prime ministerial colleagues about the post-war Empire was very much an open question. The ideas that Curtin put forward in London were not quickly forgotten: he was by no means a Labor oddity in attempting to fashion a new vision of Empire. The final chapter shows that into the late 1940s his views continued to be a reference point for his Labor successor, Ben Chifley. But with the ascension of the Liberal Party at the December 1949 elections Labor again found itself on the back foot on matters of Empire, with Menzies continually disparaging Labor’s handling of the British connection. That meant 23 years in the political wilderness for Labor, and by the time it returned to office in 1972, the nation’s political culture and outlook had undergone profound change. It required a new interpretation of the Curtin story, one which successive Labor leaders were only too ready to offer. None of the findings here detract from Curtin’s record, his reputation or his undoubted achievements as a wartime prime minister. The book is not designed to come to a conclusion about whether Curtin was the best or greatest prime minister, a true Australian nationalist or an obsequious British sycophant. The Australian response to nationalism from the late 19th century down to the 1960s rarely allows for such sharp categorisation. To dismiss Curtin as an insoluble puzzle or as a contrived politician due to what on the surface appear to be contradictions in his worldview or his approach to Britain is to disown the unique way in which leaders of his ilk approached the Anglo-Australian relationship and under-

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stood Australia’s place in the world. While Labor leaders might

24

have been less prone to speak of Britain as ‘home’, or to become dewy-eyed about the ordered hedgerows or quaint village lanes of rural England, they were no less concerned than their conservative colleagues to ensure that Australia secured her rightful place at the hub of Empire. Curtin was a creature of his culture and, as such, saw an Empire of equals as an unequivocal good for Australia’s international standing. This book explores how this prime minister

and leader of the Labor Party – a party which is often identified with the expression of a unique and distinctive nationalism in Australia – came to promote the idea of closer imperial unity as the ultimate answer to the most serious crisis that the Commonwealth had yet faced.

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25

Chapter 2

‘Loyalty howlers’ War and peace, 1914–1928

There is another aspect of the Royal visit which Labor regrets. The Australian of radical and democratic ideas who sees the coming of the Duke and Duchess made the occasion for the glorifying of snobs seeking tinsel titles, of degrading intrigues about invitation lists and social precedence, cannot but be revolted. Those who for this reason decide to have nothing to do with the whole affair neither mean nor intend any discourtesy. They stay away because others have set a style in manners which is too blatant to be endorsed. Accident of birth no more justifies ill-will towards those born in the purple than it justifies fulsome snobbery. Labor would greet the Duke and Duchess as the occupants of a distinguished place in the world; it would welcome them courteously and humanly [sic], and hope that their visit has been pleasurable and of value.1 These were the views expressed by John Curtin around the time 26

of the 1927 visit to Australia by the Duke and Duchess of York

to open the new Parliament House building in Canberra. Written as the lead editorial in the Westralian Worker, they give voice to a powerful stream in Labor’s brand of Britishness – a deep-seated disdain for the trappings and trimmings of imperial loyalty and the privileges of an imperial aristocracy. Here the urge of some in the country to genuflect towards their royal guests or to fuss over the order and opulence of officialdom is derided as deeply offensive to Australia’s egalitarian, democratic ethos. By throwing themselves so completely at the regal feet, these Anglophiles were denying the distinctiveness of Australian social ideals and mores and perpetuating the inequalities of the old world in a new land. Curtin clearly found such symbols of class pretension repugnant to his idea of an Australia that stood on its own two feet. But this was no denunciation of Australia’s ties to Empire. Curtin had begun the editorial by affirming that while the newspaper had never ‘made any profession of belief in the necessity of monarchy’, neither had it ‘occupied much space in discussing the virtues of republicanism’. Loyalty to Britain did not need to become a competition or test of national character – it was simply an accepted part of Australia’s national and international life. The Duke and Duchess were to be welcomed but they were not to be fawned upon. What particularly upset Curtin and many around him was their political opponents’ claim that there was only one way of expressing commitment to Britain and the Empire – that is by an ‘insistent declamation about the throne’. ‘They imply,’ he added, ‘where they do not audaciously assert, that support for their politics and frequent chanting of the National Anthem (then part of the Commonwealth, or to the association of peoples known as the British empire. Only troglodytes would maintain such an

the decade following the First World War such distaste for royal

H O W L E R S ’

assertion’.2

‘ L O Y A L T Y

‘God Save the King’) is an essential of loyalty to the State as a

regalia, and for those who saw the monarchy as the head of a

27

Curtin’s dismissal of imperial pomp and ceremony would have found an appreciative audience in Labor circles in the 1920s. In

class-based society, gained a new intensity following the animosity and acrimony unleashed by the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917. As a result of the passions unleashed during that period, Labor was viewed by many as suspect on the question of loyalty. Consequently, their commitment to the monarchy as the symbol of the British race came under intense scrutiny. But the party did not question the legitimacy of the monarch as a symbol of the nation’s Britishness, rather it challenged the motives of those who showed themselves to be overzealous in proclaiming their loyalty to the throne and who seemed intent on using the Crown as a political weapon against the labour movement. Indeed, for a Labor leader or luminary of this period, to wear the charge of having been ‘duchessed’ by the royal family – code for having succumbed to the spell of the palace – was tantamount to heresy and treated as a betrayal of the party’s faith in the notion of a common humanity. Sensitive to this mood, some previous Labor leaders had been wary of the outward frills of Empire. On the occasion of the coronation of George V in London in 1911, the Labor prime minister Andrew Fisher refused at first to wear court dress. Even after being persuaded to do so by his wife and British officials, Fisher still turned up at the ceremony with no lace trimmings.3 Sartorial protest was one thing: suffering dizzy spells in the presence of a royal was quite another. In his memoirs, the former NSW Premier Jack Lang recorded his contempt for those of his party who he believed had been given the ‘treatment’ while in London, the implication being that British flattery and influence had prevailed over the pursuit of Australian self-interest.

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Lang’s typically scathing reflections on the visit of the Prince of

28

Wales to Australia in 1920 revealed the contempt he felt for some of his colleagues, who on account of their zeal in getting close to the royal person, had given the impression that Labor was ‘just a bunch of sycophants’. Even the most ardent of socialists, he noted with alarm, were eager to press the flesh with the prince, thus challenging his deeply ingrained assumption that Labor stood for ‘Aggressive

Australianism’. Yet Lang himself was perfectly comfortable telling the Prince privately that ‘The future of the Empire is in the dominions’ and that ‘the monarchy is stronger because it stands for the people’. It was a compelling insight into the Labor position: the idea of a ‘new Britannia’ and the achievement of political reform under the crown could animate even the most seemingly ‘anti-British’ of Australian politicians.4 This incredulity at the desire of some to cuddle up to royalty exposed the deep scars left by the experience of the First World War. Lang himself had been called a ‘disloyalist’ when addressing anti-conscription rallies in 1916 and 1917, a label that cut to the very core of Labor’s electoral credibility. It showed why, as Labor premier in the mid 1920s, he resisted the equation of Anzac Day with the moral confirmation of Australian Britishness. At the dedication of the memorial in Martin Place in August 1926 his speech hailed the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as ‘crusaders in the cause of peace’, while their legacy to surviving generations was the responsibility to make in ‘this world a peaceful brotherhood of man’. The speaker who followed Lang, Sir Harry Chauvel, a hero of the Boer War and Gallipoli, instead stressed simply the ‘importance of this day to the British empire’.5 Labor had no choice but to find a language which showed they would not be browbeaten into accepting their political enemies’ view of loyalty. The memories of the conscription crisis cast a long shadow over Labor’s ability to handle the debate in the 1920s over the defence of Australia and the nation’s obligations to the imperial defence scheme. The trauma of the war on the home front and the party of imperial authority. It bred an intense resentment at the way in which conservative politicians used the ‘loyalty’ card British faith. It was into this maelstrom of sentimental torment and domestic turbulence that Curtin found himself pitched in the 1920s.

H O W L E R S ’

to cast Labor as the enemies of Empire and the naysayers of the

‘ L O Y A L T Y

its domestic political repercussions led to a deep suspicion within

29

‘War is hell’ Curtin’s responses to the world during his early career in the labour movement and as a journalist derived from a particular social and cultural setting: the anti-capitalist, socialist milieu in which he first became politically engaged. The issues that were his bread and butter were those of poverty and the interests of the working class. It was against this background that Curtin formed his initial attitudes to Britishness and to nationalism. Working at the edges of the labour movement, he came to think about foreign affairs only in so far as it affected domestic politics. He was preoccupied not with the need to develop a coherent or sophisticated framework for how Australia might act in the world, but with how his party could articulate a language of loyalty so that it could win political office. Nevertheless, Curtin could not remain indifferent to the great international questions of his time. Indeed the pre-war years when he first became active in the Victorian Socialist Party coincided with the period in which Australian policymakers and the wider community were starting to become ever more alarmed at the threat they saw emanating from Japan. Curtin’s thinking about the wider world was thus being shaped during a profoundly important period in the making of Australian foreign and defence policy. Initially, at least, Curtin was the most sceptical of observers. Like many of his colleagues, and especially his mentor, the Victorian and later federal Labor politician Frank Anstey, he was first and foremost implacably opposed to militarism in all its forms. He saw war as a capitalist conspiracy against the working class and the socialist

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cause – the great enemy of democracy and civilisation. Following

30

Japan’s victory over Russia in the war of 1905, the first victory of an Asian power over a European one, the fear that had animated Australian security anxieties since the late 19th century reached fever pitch. For Curtin, however, this was a distraction from the pursuit of Labor’s social mission. While Labor supported the creation of a Citizen’s Defence Force, it would not authorise the creation of an ‘army for foreign aggression’. Curtin deemed such ‘war scare’ to

be a creation of ‘capitalist extremity’ in which the ‘barrackers for Australian Defence’ were not only the ‘servants of capitalism’ but also the ‘enemies of the people’.6 When Andrew Fisher established the Royal Australian Navy in 1909 he was similarly dismissive. All it had proved was that the prime minister and his minister for defence, George Pearce, were the captives of rapacious businessmen. ‘Australian defence policy’, he wrote, ‘was part and parcel of the international war policy played by the international gang of capitalists’.7 Curtin duly pleaded with labour organisations around the country not to join any ‘paean of praise’ for their political representatives but rather to bemoan the fact that the Australian and the other governments around the globe were clamouring for armaments instead of improving the lot of the worker. In the shaping of Curtin’s world view and his ideas about Australia and its place in the Empire, the trauma of the First World War was formative. In the midst of this international crisis his political passions burst into the public domain: it was towards the end of the war that he moved to Perth and took up his editorial pen for the Westralian Worker. Thus, from February 1917 until he entered parliament at the 1928 election his was an influential voice in the labour movement in Western Australia, and he had the ideal forum in which to set down his views on war and peace, socialism and capitalism, nation and Empire. Through his weekly editorials he gave voice to his vision for the party, the nation and the future of the British race. At the war’s outset the young firebrand was consistent in lamenting what the conflict had done to Labor’s social and economic Melbourne Trades Hall Council in June 1914 he moved a version of the Hardie-Vaillant resolution (passed at the 1910 Socialist Inter-

since ‘it emphasises the oneness of the interests of the workers of

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national) which called for a general strike in the event of war being

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agenda, which aimed to raise living and working standards. At the

all countries as against the interests of the capitalist exploiters of

31

declared. Speaking on the proposed motion Curtin declared that it was ‘the most effective way of preventing war between nations’

any country’. The motion was carried.8 When the Fisher Labor Government promised to aid Britain to ‘the last man and the last shilling’ in August 1914, Curtin sided with the declaration of the Victorian Socialist Party, which recognised ‘the historical fact that militarism has always been an obstacle in the way of working class advancement and the realisation of universal brotherhood’.9 Indeed Curtin was of the view that the international labour movement, had it been better prepared, might well have been able to prevent the conflict, and he argued that the war made internationalism ‘even more appealing’.10 In Curtin’s eyes the policymakers’ social and moral responsibility should be first and foremost to the people and especially those in need. As price rises started to bite, so Curtin’s despair deepened, and the gulf between his beliefs and the world situation widened: ‘All the potential energy of the nation is requisitioned to protect the community against German bullets and German shrapnel. Why do we not act with at least equal organisation and determination to safeguard the population against destitution, exploitation and social disaster?’ The international threat of war paled in comparison to the scourge of those at home who were assaulting the ‘common weal’, a development which prompted Curtin to invoke the words of Abraham Lincoln: The government of-all-the-people, for all-the-people, should intern the enemies of the people, confiscate the food they hold, and generally treat them as foes more unscrupulous than any to be met at Ypres or Suez . . . land

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holders who do not use the land as it should be used, should

32

be calmly dispossessed . . . Every assault on the common weal must be repelled, and whether it come in the form of sword and bayonet, or famine and destitution, the obligation of the government is to meet the emergency.11 There could be no clearer indication of where Curtin’s priorities lay at this time: it was not on the distant battlefields of Europe, but with those suffering from the economic malaise and the impact

of the war on the domestic economy. To support the war was to betray Labor ideology. It was the stance of a ideological purist. For Curtin such suffering ‘would not exist – if only the party of Labor would remember who and what it is, and the purposes for which its creation was designed’. The fact that his party was in power at the federal level and in three states, and yet lending its own rhythm to the drumbeat of war, only added to his pessimism. But it should not be taken from this that the labour movement refused to identify with the cause of the British race in this world crisis, or that it did not contribute its fair share to the war effort in terms of enlistment. Nor did the mainstream of the movement ever call for Australia to withdraw from the war or sever the ties of Empire.12 Curtin never rejected the concept of the war as a fight for British liberty: We have, it is true, to fight for our liberties – the full right to think and to speak – on the foreign fields of battle. But there is also need to fight for them nearer home. And, indeed, unless our liberties are respected and secured right here in Australia, there is grave danger that they may be lost forever both here and abroad.13 In 1916 a confluence of factors was starting to gnaw at popular confidence in how the government was handling the war. The increasing militarisation of civilian life, raids by defence authorities on trades halls, censorship of labour newspapers and the prosecution of labour and socialist writers and speakers all fed a mood of deepening disaffection. The situation was only worsened by cost of living and its failure to spread the costs of war more equitably. In this climate the cause of anti-conscription became merely the tip of a

military officers, conservatives and professionals. They made loyalty

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much ‘broader spirit of discontent’.14

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increases, the government’s abandonment of its reform program

to the Empire the central issue of the first referendum held in

33

Conscription for overseas military service became the source of a bitter battle. Aligned in the ‘Yes’ camp was a phalanx of employers,

October 1916. The divide was stark, the language poisonous and the atmosphere rancorous. The mayor of Brunswick in suburban Melbourne, for example, refused to allow Labor Party members to organise public meetings against conscription, claiming that they were ‘disloyal to the British empire and to our noble men who have died for us’.15 For those opposed, Hughes’ proposals were despised as nothing less than an unprecedented expansion of state power over ordinary people and a direct challenge to the voluntary principle that had been enshrined in the Commonwealth Defence Act of 1903. Those advocating a ‘No’ vote could thus take their stand on the grounds that they were safeguarding the policy of the Federation fathers.16 Curtin was one of the most vocal opponents of the growing pressure for conscription and watched at close quarters how it tore at the fabric of the party and its social aspirations. His call for workingclass solidarity was an appeal to protect the hard-won gains of the labour movement: ‘Refuse to be bullied . . . or voted into the slavery of Military Control, under which your progress – the admiration of a world – will be stayed and your life made unendurable’. He enjoined his fellow workers to remember that ‘Trade Unionism is your trenches, Emancipation is your flag’.17 In the wake of the first referendum, Curtin had been gaoled briefly for his refusal to obey a proclamation issued by the federal government that all single men present themselves for enlistment. That conviction was dropped after he had served only a few days in prison, but its impact on Curtin was sealed. Henceforth, he would be dismissed by Hughes and his pro-conscriptionist supporters as ‘anti-British’ and a traitor

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to the imperial cause. In their eyes Curtin and his ilk were putting

34

in danger the survival of the British race: a charge that would plague Curtin and indeed roil domestic politics well into the next decade and beyond. Curtin, however, was not to be deterred. He refused to be bound by the assumption on Hughes’ part that conscription was the new test of civic loyalty.18 The brief imprisonment did not hold him back from playing a major role in the second referendum in December

1917, where he raised the tempo in his opposition to Hughes and his proposals. Curtin was convinced that the prime minister was deliberately overstating the numbers of recruits required to maintain the Australian divisions on the Western Front. He said that he despised conscription as ‘the most absolute and the most degrading form of slavery’.19 The language was passionate and indignant, but it also showed that anti-conscriptionists had no alternative myth to that of British Australia with which to meet the charge of ‘disloyalty’. Not surprisingly, his writings and public statements again brought the attention of the authorities and he was fined for allegedly ‘disloyal’ statements: it was reported that at one rally he had called for a ‘revolution’ in the event of the referendum being carried. To many who heard it, it had sounded like a call to arms. That forced a clarification from Curtin, who maintained that he had not talked of revolution as the ‘necessary solution’ but that ‘Revolutions in despotic countries have been their historical methods of defending liberties’. It was an unconvincing riposte. Ultimately, he was not forced to pay the fine.20 It was hardly surprising, therefore, when Curtin reached the conclusion that ‘War is Hell!’ After the Labor Party had split over conscription, with Hughes joining the conservatives, he faced a new contest: the growing tendency of his political enemies to question Labor’s capacity to govern in war as effectively as it had done during peace. But Curtin maintained: War is not a reason for handing the nation over to the capitalists. They are not more patriotic or capable than we govern in war time is to abandon every claim that Labor has to rule . . . Just as we were the party of progress before the war, so we are the party of security during the war.21

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are ourselves . . . [To] accept the thesis that Labor cannot

sequences on the home front. He was in some ways anticipating

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the difficulties that Labor would face over the next two decades in

35

Though defensive, the comments showed a certain adjustment in Curtin’s thinking to the international realities and their con-

securing credibility on the question of national security. Thus, by April 1917, in the midst of a federal election, Curtin had shelved his vehement attacks on the conflict itself and called for a greater war effort: ‘The way to win the war’, he trumpeted, ‘is to hurl men and munitions at the German trenches’. To refute the claim that Labor was ‘disloyal, treacherous and pro-German’, he reminded readers that Labor’s federal budget – prior to Hughes walking out on the party – actually proposed greater spending on the war than Hughes himself, and would thus have allowed Australia to play ‘a glorious part’.22 This shift in tone and temperament even caused him to support enlistment in the name of protecting socialism, since ‘Bayonets, rifles, with Anzacs at the Business end, will WIN THE WAR . . . if the Allies lose, Australia as we know it is doomed, the Trade Unions, the Socialism of Australia will be shattered and destroyed’.23 It might have been a defence of his ideological integrity rather than a rallying call for Empire, but it showed his understanding of what was at stake. Curtin seemed ever careful to point out to audiences that his opposition to war and conscription was not motivated by pacifism – a position he once described as ‘inherently fallacious’ since force had and always would ‘rule the world’.24

‘Manacled . . . to the blatant screamers of loyalty’ As the war clouds began to clear Curtin hoped that the focus of governments in Australia and around the world would return to the domestic hearth. Only days after the armistice in November 1918 he looked forward to a ‘tomorrow’ that ‘must assuredly be

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a better and fairer day’.25 It was time to rekindle socialism’s mis-

36

sion, and he envisaged the worldwide labour movement becoming the ‘supreme spiritual force in world politics’. Although these sentiments brought with them the frequent declarations of respect for a common humanity, nevertheless Curtin always remained a committed advocate of the White Australia policy, not only on the grounds that the European and Asian races could not live in

harmony together, but because an influx of the ‘yellow races’ would lower Australian living standards and divert Labor’s primary social struggle away from the economy and towards matters of race.26 In the immediate aftermath of war Curtin was also given a brutal lesson in the rough and tumble of electoral politics. In the 1919 federal election he stood unsuccessfully for the conservative seat of Perth, and during the campaign his anti-conscription record was used against him. An internal party report following the rout – Curtin gained barely a third of the vote in the seat – noted that the ‘war flame was fanned and misrepresentation and abuse heaped upon the Labor organisations and candidates’.27 This kind of political crossfire would prove near impossible for the party to avoid until the next world war when it formed government. These were dark and difficult years for federal Labor: out of office until James Scullin’s win at the 1929 election. At successive party conferences following the war, Labor resolved that Australia was not to be committed to warlike activities outside the country without the absolute and established consent of the Australian people. Its leaders were disturbed by the fear that Australia remained liable to be caught up in European conflicts at London’s behest. Deep anxieties remained within the party that London remained in control of Australia’s foreign policy and would exploit Australian manpower and resources for its own purposes. Again, however, these views were less a sign of an emerging anti-Britishness than a reflection of the way in which the conscription crisis continued to shape Labor’s view of the world. Labor placed its hope in the and argued that the defence program being proposed by Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce was wasteful and unnecessary. another global conflagration. This was something of a turnaround for Labor. Before the war, its idealism had been heavily qualified by fear of Japan and an appreciation of the realities of power politics,

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It felt that only international working class solidarity could prevent

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League of Nations, believed that Japan’s disposition was peaceful

37

and the party, particularly under Andrew Fisher, had established strong defence credentials.28 But Curtin’s faith in internationalism had been dashed by both the operation and the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. He resented the punitive policy pursued by Hughes of making Germany pay for reparations and annexing its colonial possessions in the Pacific. All that such a policy could hope to achieve, Curtin felt, was to ‘needlessly penalise the whole world, victors and vanquished alike, and bring the nations together as foes athirst for blood’.29 Believing that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia presaged socialism’s ‘day of golden opportunity’, he combined his calls for peace with a proposal for a ‘United States of Civilisation’ that would eliminate the need for national borders altogether.30 These hopes dissipated amidst ongoing economic crisis and the gradual realisation that his socialist dream would remain elusive. In the years that followed the war he was to become a bitter critic of the League – especially the weaknesses he depicted in its covenant. Once he recognised that the great powers had managed to retain their dominance, he came to dismiss it as a once ‘grandiose project for the future prevention of wars’ that had instead become ‘merely the instrument of the dominant powers’.31 He was not surprised that the American people rejected what their president, Woodrow Wilson, brought home from Paris, since it was the ‘mangled and hopelessly deformed product born of the foul womb of European chicanery and intrigue’.32 Yet the League did bring him first-hand experience of international machinery for cooperation. Curtin was chosen by Prime

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Minister Bruce to represent the labour movement at the 1924

38

International Labour Organisation Conference in Geneva. Held under the auspices of the League, it was his first experience of the wider world. He participated in committees that discussed, among other subjects, workers’ compensation and the establishment of leisure facilities for employees. Curtin was annoyed that the government’s chief representative, the former prime minister, Joseph Cook, attended hardly any of the conference sessions, but his report

to Bruce commented on the ‘spectacle of delegates from 40 countries meeting on a common platform to consider proposals for the more humane regulation of industry’. For Curtin, these were matters of ‘moral significance’ and of ‘immense value to civilisation’.33 His overseas visit had also been an opportunity to witness first-hand the state of labour parties in Europe, and following the conference he managed to see Britain for several weeks, holding meetings with British Labour counterparts, visiting the reading room of the British Museum and taking in some cricket at Kensington Oval. It is not clear what Curtin made of this initial visit to London and to Britain. Unlike Menzies, he left behind no obvious trail of personal impressions or reflections on his first sighting of the ‘mother-country’. But there can be no doubt that from time to time he was turning his mind to the questions of imperial cooperation and coordination and how Australia and the labour movement might position itself within the Empire. He was prompted to do so not by any desire to shape a grand strategy, but by the need to craft a viable Labor response to the charge that it was suspect on Empire. It was the spectacle of royal tours and the convening of Imperial Conferences – the very moments when his political opponents (and some in his own party) revelled in the royal limelight – which brought Curtin’s attitude to Britishness at this time to the fore. The arrival of the Prince of Wales in 1920 showed that the wounds of the war, however, had barely had any time to heal, and he depicted the visit as a shameless exercise in waving the Union Jack. Curtin saw the Prince as a ‘Missioner’ for the ‘One Big Empire promoters’ and his presence in the country as ‘a definite part of the deem useful’. Once again, he voiced his distaste for the ‘glitter of epaulettes’ in the form of senior Australian military personnel that

ing, or ought to work. The Prince’s tour of Australia took place

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seemed always to hover at the Prince’s side.34

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psychological propaganda after the war Imperial re-constructors

against the backdrop of renewed speculation about the possibility

39

But underneath his barely contained disdain for the ‘imperialist claquers’ was a serious statement about how the Empire was work-

of Imperial Federation, and Curtin was deeply suspicious of the renewed call by Lord Milner for an ‘Imperial Constituent Assembly’. He was not going to let a royal visit pass without making his views clear on ‘this far-reaching development in Imperialism, and incidentally, far-reaching contraction in Dominion autonomy’. Though neither the parliament nor the people had yet expressed a view, Curtin left readers in no doubt that The Empire is sufficiently cohesive as things are to meet all the requirements of the public good. Any innovation in the shape of a super Imperial legislature, called by whatever name its protagonists regard as most alluring, cannot but function as an overriding authority, whose interferences with popular self-government anywhere must inevitably disintegrate what is at present an unwritten alliance of potentially free Commonwealths.35 It was not new for an Australian commentator to express the fear that Imperial Federation would erode the hard-won rights of selfgovernment. These were to be stoutly defended, and, as Stuart Ward has shown, the idea could never overcome the ‘nagging doubts’ concerning London’s ability to legislate for a vastly different and dispersed British world.36 But the essence of Curtin’s position was clear: in so far as the Empire constituted a ‘public good’, he believed it was working properly. Moreover, he discerned that the centrifugal forces arguing for more autonomy and independence, those that burnished the ‘desire to “cut the painter”’, were much less audible in Australia or New Zealand than in India, Egypt, Ire-

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land and South Africa. These countries, he claimed, had suffered

40

much more ‘Imperial interference’, although he did not elaborate on this history of antagonism. From Curtin’s perspective the matter of imperial organisation had but one central concern: its implication for the domestic debate over loyalty. He felt that ‘Loyalty does not demand that we consent to any expansion of the Imperial authority, nor to any diminution of our own rights of free and unfettered self-government’. When

the Prince was hurt in a railway accident some weeks later, Curtin rushed into print to clarify his views on the Crown: ‘Our position towards the throne is that so long as it exists by consent, it is not only to that extent safe, but irrespective of theories, will not be savagely assailed in practice’.37 His argument was not with the monarch as the symbol of the race: rather he wanted the royals to be aware that they gained their legitimacy through popular sovereignty and that they had to respect the autonomy and equality of the dominions. Above all, however, the war had ruptured Labor’s sense of its own historical mission – not only in terms of social reform but also in the task enshrined in the party platform – ‘the cultivation of a distinctively Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity’. Even at this time, Labor, as the oldest continuing national political party in the country, had a deeply internalised narrative about the country and its identity. This held that from 1900 to 1914, either in government or in cooperation with the other parties, the party had made Australia the envy of the world with its socially progressive legislation – including the institution of the basic wage, women’s suffrage, the introduction of old age and widow’s pensions and maternity payments. The decision made by the labour movement to abandon the picket line for parliament in the 1890s had reaped its richest reward: the party carried the mantle of reform and was the agent of national progress. To the depiction of the war as a betrayal of all that the party had held dear since its origins, Curtin added a new lament. In the course of decrying Australian economic reliance on Britain, he bemoaned the destructive effect of the crisis on the country’s cultural integrity:

a pup of Great Britain. Once we had dreams of a nationality

what destiny had in store for us . . . Our artists, literati and

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of our own; of developing our customs and institutions; of

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Australia isn’t Australia any more since the war. It is merely

public men were beginning to be comparable with all that

41

individualising ourselves in harmony with true ideas of progress; of battling our own way onward and discovering

the older civilisations could boast of, not, we admit, in the finished product, but in what was being shadowed forth; in the promise of the future if not in the present. We were developing a patriotism of a natural and rational kind. We loved Australia for many reasons . . . it was our homeland. To the true Australian there was ever – and still is – the glamor of mystery and attraction covering our great plains, our hills and our gullies clothed with the noble eucalypts, our wide stretched deserts barren of vegetation, but often rich in useful minerals, and the long wash of the Australian seas – these all woke echoes of an affection which is the genesis of true patriotism.38 It was a remarkable illustration of how Curtin viewed the destructive effects of the war on the national psyche. The love of the land and its distinctive characteristics had been compromised when the bugles of war beckoned Australia to the battlefield, and the country had effectively been forced to relinquish any hope of articulating its own voice in the world. The country had been plunged into an ‘abyss of hell’ in which national vitality was drained into the muddy trenches of Europe. Curtin was giving expression to an interpretation of Australian history as a tale of thwarted nationalism, an interpretation put most pungently by one of his successors as prime minister, Paul Keating – that the war had snuffed out ‘the radical nationalist sentiment which had been so strong at the turn of the century’.39 For Curtin the conflict had led to a ‘rapid weakening of that splendid Australian feeling for Australia

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as our homeland, of this very country as the object of an ideal

42

without admixture’. It showed that his ‘true patriotism’, which was entirely consistent with this adherence to a ‘White Australia’, was located primarily in the characteristics of a unique land and its physical features rather than in the idea of Australians as a unique people. But Curtin’s hope for a ‘nationality of our own’ was not only pitched well into the future, it now struggled to gain any sort of

emotional purchase amidst the burgeoning architecture of Australia’s imperial connection: The very atmosphere now reeks with talk of ‘mandates’, of ‘Imperial conferences’, of our ‘perpetual dependence on Britain’, of vast schemes for defence, of armies and navies, of constant flittings of Australian politicians to London; London has become the capital of Australia; Imperial Federation is in the air. Nothing important can be done without reference to Britain – why? Not because of a quite natural and justifiable friendship with England, but, rather, because of the stranglehold that Britain has on Australia from the political and economic standpoint.40 Even more repugnant, however, were those who took this attitude to excess. His was a quiet Britishness, one that could acknowledge ‘friendship’ with Britain but which was determined that Australia be accepted as an equal partner rather than a colonial dependent. But the real political venom he reserved for the ‘loyalty howlers’, those who he deemed the ‘representatives of everything that is opposed to what is essentially Australian’: To these people, everything British must take precedence of everything Australian. To them Australia is still a ‘colony’ and Australians ‘colonials’. Every suggestion of radical advance made by the true Australian savors of rebellion and disloyalty. These are the people who promote organisations that foster sectarianism; trusts and syndicates that who are foremost in promoting ‘closer relations with the mother-country’, which, when interpreted, either disclose as to gratify their jingoistic instincts. These people prefer English ale or foreign wines to the local brand, imported governors or clerics to the home product, refer to British politicians as the standard in statesmanship. When they take

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schemes for their own self-aggrandisement or else are such

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monopolise the resources of this country. They are those

43

a holiday, it means to them six months away from Australia, not a holiday in the Australian Alps, or tours over our beautiful ranges, or through sassafras gullies. Not at all, Australia is good enough to make money in, otherwise it is a country to despise, both it and its really patriotic people. If they had their way they would like to make Australia a second-hand copy of England.41 It would be hard to find a more complete manifestation of the view that an independently minded Australian national feeling had been betrayed by a powerful group of bourgeois, forelock-tugging Anglophiles. Curtin’s editorial scythe sliced through the national fabric, revealing a sharp distinction between true working-class Australians on the one hand and wealthy imperial patriots on the other. Here the fault lines were dramatic and deeply felt – with one group having faith in the country, its culture, civic life, physical and geographical splendour and potential – while the other clung to a misguided and overweening imperial subordination. As Frank Bongiorno has pointed out, it was not uncommon for radical nationalists to view the ‘local ruling class . . . as essentially an imperial fifth column within Australia’.42 Again, however, Curtin was not expressing the anger and anguish of a republican separatist. He was trying to find a language that would answer the conservatives’ attempt to use ‘loyalty’ against Labor. Moreover, he was claiming his enemies’ language of loyalty didn’t always mean what it appeared to mean. The conservatives’ desire for ‘closer relations’ with Britain was instead depicted as a smokescreen for jingoism and

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self-regarding flattery. What disturbed Curtin the most was the sug-

44

gestion that Australians were somehow a lesser breed. There could be no meeting of minds with those who forever rendered the country as a cheaper replica of Great Britain. Another reading of Curtin might suggest that whatever Australian nationalism existed before the war was easily harnessed to an imperial and conservative cause. There can be no question that in the years leading up to the outbreak of war Labor embodied

a more progressive, reformist ideal of domestic politics. But the Labor party between 1901–1914 needs to be viewed not simply as ‘socialist’ or ‘nationalist’, but one that embodied a liberalism that identified with human progress and the ideal of the brotherhood of man. Labor’s attachment to Empire at this time did not overflow with the sentiment of ‘race patriotism’ or the ‘instinct of blood’ – it looked to shared ideals and the inheritance of British institutions.43 The Labor Party’s ‘radical nationalism’ – of which Curtin was a classic exponent at this time – was an internal party tradition, not an alternative story of the nation. It sought above all to be treated on equal terms with the ‘mother-country’, not to be split asunder from it. Amidst the doom and gloom of Labor’s federal woes and the constant drain of fighting off the accusations of disloyalty, Curtin did manage to bask in the odd ray of political sunshine: the success of other labour parties around the world. The election of Ramsay MacDonald in Britain and the defeat of the Poincare Government in France showed that the ‘people’ were ‘tired of war’ and the ‘Machiavellian diplomacy of capital’. Following these events the Westralian Worker announced ‘Labor’s moral conquest of the world’ and celebrated the selection of the first ever British Labour cabinet. In its editorial following the election, the Worker quoted MacDonald’s Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, who had spoken to the labour movement in Western Australia around the same time: ‘I have the honor’, Thomson had said, ‘to belong to a party which to many . . . is somewhat suspect because of its alleged lack of imperial spirit, but no one should be afraid about the Cablove of the British race. Laborites want to see the race grow and expand, and to see the Anglo-Saxon civilisation spread throughout

need not be spooked by the accusation of being weak on Empire.

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the world’. Though a minority government which lasted less than

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inet and the Labour party from the viewpoint of patriotism and

As the Westralian Worker concluded, ‘In the narrower sphere of

45

a year, British Labour were not only reviving the flagging spirits of their antipodean soul mates, they were showing them that Labor

Imperial and Dominion politics . . . the British nations have come to realise that denunciation of Labor is mostly the frothing of privilege’. Because of its attachment to the principle of equality for all, ‘so long as it remains true to that principle the Movement will continue to progress, not only within the Empire but throughout the civilised world’.44 In this reading, there was no tension between the ideological and policy goals of the labour movement and Australia’s Britishness.

‘Imperialitis’ Curtin’s fear of ‘mandates’ and ‘imperial conferences’ reflected the increasing activity in the decade following the war over how the Empire was to be organised.45 During the war, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had established an Imperial War Cabinet made up of the prime ministers of the dominions as part of his efforts to marshal the resources of the Empire to win the war. He proclaimed that it should become a permanent institution for the purpose of shaping a unified imperial policy. Lloyd George hoped that it would become a peacetime imperial Cabinet and ‘an accepted convention of the British Constitution’.46 Thus, it appeared at first to be the very model of imperial cooperation that Australians had for so long wanted.47 But their hopes were dashed early. When Hughes, in November 1918, found himself excluded from the British Government’s discussions over an Armistice based on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points he labelled this new form of imperial policy making a ‘farce and a sham’. Under the lesser pressure of the peace and strong opposition from Canada, South Africa

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and even British constitutional experts, this Imperial Cabinet idea

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fell by the wayside.48 But in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, interest in coordinating foreign policy for the Empire as a whole waned. The different views held by the dominions about their role in the Empire and thus the role and function of imperial gatherings inevitably brought tensions to the fore, especially in 1921 over the question of renewing the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the contributions that

each dominion would make to the British Navy. It was becoming clearer that the respective geopolitical and geocultural differences could not be contained within a body that could meet and formulate a common defence and foreign policy for the Empire. Where the Canadian and South African leaders pushed for equality and autonomy the Australians and New Zealanders declared for equality in unity.49 Moreover, domestic tensions within the dominions over the meaning of the Empire had been mounting since the latter stages of the war. As RF Holland observed, the ‘more pressing the demands of an imperial war became, the more tangled were the internal configurations’.50 The post-war changes in the relations between the dominions and the ‘mother-country’, and the respective domestic disputes over how the relationship with Britain was best managed, were thus an increasing focus of debate in Australia and the wider British world. Australian leaders, however, were less inclined to ‘fend off the Imperial embrace’ than they were to ‘keep open the channels of influence to Imperial policy’.51 Before the 1921 Imperial Conference, Hughes implored Lloyd George to find a more effective means of achieving an imperial foreign policy, confident that ‘machinery could be devised to make this practicable’. But the essence of Hughes’ idea was better communications so that the dominions could be in constant touch with London at key moments during a crisis. At the conference Hughes was determined to scuttle South African Prime Minister Smuts’ push for a declaration of constitutional rights of the Empire, which was intended to give formal recognition to the autonomous status of the dominions. Hughes’ view that the old Empire of one kindred people was being transformed into a new organisation comprised of diverse races, cultures

excoriated the prime minister for leaving the country while

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and creeds.52

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tribalistic view of imperial unity rubbed uneasily against Smuts’

unemployment, falling wages, growing public debt and other

47

Curtin’s editorial blast at Hughes before he left for the conference was symptomatic of Labor’s post-war worldview. He

economic pressures were combining to ‘degrade the victory of the soldiers to the level of the schemes of the great Capitalists’.53 For the ‘nation as a nation’, Curtin added, the war had merely brought ‘a blister of some £40 000 000 a year payable to the bondholders’. The fear of being caught in a vice-like economic grip by London only further fuelled Labor concerns about the inherent dangers of ‘dependence’. Curtin looked askance at these imperial summits. They were a threat to what little, and precious, degree of independence that Australia enjoyed in matters of international policy. Indeed, when Prime Minister Stanley Bruce called for an Imperial Conference in early 1923 Curtin portrayed it as a sign that Australia no longer had a foreign policy of its own. His arguments were blunt: if Billy Hughes had signed the 1919 Paris peace treaty, and George Pearce the Disarmament Agreement at the 1923 Washington Conference ‘for and on behalf of Australia – a nation’, why did it need to subject itself to the dictates of yet another Empire gathering? In this reading of events, Hughes and Pearce had struck a blow for national ‘independence’; Bruce instead was reasserting a more traditional subservience to British officialdom in London. For Curtin and his colleagues, the cardinal rule was that Australian foreign policy should be ‘decided by its own Federal parliament’ not by ‘more conferences of empire’. He wanted to see the rise of a truly independent foreign policy which would foster ‘national sentiment’ and ‘pride of country’. As Curtin put it emphatically, ‘to be an Australian in future will be to declare one’s equality in a truly national and international sense’.54

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This emphasis on equality in Curtin’s writing about Anglo-

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Australian relations again shows the distinctiveness of Labor’s view of Greater Britain. Even though he was preoccupied with Australian events, Curtin kept a close eye on the circumstances propelling his fellow Britons overseas to push for more say in the making of policy and a greater autonomy within the Empire. In an editorial at the time of the 1923 Imperial Conference, Curtin quoted approvingly

from speeches given by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, both of whom were pushing for the bonds of Empire to be loosened. During the 1921 elections in South Africa, Curtin reminded his readers, Smuts had promised the people that if they returned him to office it would be a mark that ‘we are now a separate, independent, international sovereign state, and we shall formulate our own foreign policy’. Answering the proposition that a vote for Smuts would mean that ‘we shall be drawn into European affairs and have to acquiesce in British foreign policy’, Smuts had answered unequivocally: ‘No it does not’.55 Much like Curtin, Smuts had denounced the secret diplomacy that had plunged the world into total war. He supported open covenants and sought a unified British Empire within the League of Nations.56 But Smuts’ vision of dominionhood was also being challenged by a vigorous Afrikaner nationalism led by JBM Hertzog, whose secessionist and republican ideology was opposed to the imperial and Commonwealth connection.57 In a similar vein, Curtin recounted how the Canadian leader Mackenzie King had proclaimed during a speech in Montreal in February 1923 that ‘one part of the British Empire should not interfere to aid another in trouble unless it was itself concerned, and only to the extent to which it was affected’. King was well-known for his ‘paranoid suspicion of the “centralising” aims of the London government’. But here too the delicacy of Canadian domestic politics trumps the claim that King was striking a blow for independent nationhood. The Canadian leader was heavily reliant on support from French-speaking Quebec – and outbursts of imperial jingoism his long-term political survival. It was why he essentially moved ‘as close as possible to an isolationist position within the British to send a military contingent to assist Britain in the Chanak crisis – in which the Turks threatened to attack British and French troops guarding the Dardanelles – but King maintained that he would not

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system as he dared’.58 In September 1922 Canada had been asked

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or calls for greater imperial cooperation were potentially fatal to

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commit troops unless he had the approval of the Canadian Parliament. The crisis passed before parliament reconvened, but when King attended the 1923 Imperial Conference he stressed that it was not a ‘Cabinet shaping policy for the British empire’, and again maintained that his country would not provide advance commitments to support British policies.59 While Curtin conceded that Australia’s attitude was ‘not as positive as Canada’s and South Africa’s’ there can be no doubt that he had been inspired by their push for greater autonomy. Australia, he believed, had also ‘put her hand to the plow [sic], and Prime Minister Bruce may have some difficulty in persuading her to turn back’.60 In some ways, Curtin was right. At the conference, Bruce had conceded that the ‘present method of consultation is weak’, but he did not press for greater imperial consultation and unity because he saw that the Canadians and South Africans could not be deterred from their demands for greater independence. Instead, Bruce pushed for the attachment of an Australian Liaison Officer to the British Cabinet Office. As JH Thompson has stressed, the Empire that emerged from this conference ‘was perhaps not decentralised enough’ for the leaders of South Africa and the Irish Free State, and ‘perhaps a little too decentralised for those of Australia and New Zealand’. But it suited King perfectly.61 The voices arguing for a looser concept of Empire were proving impossible to silence. Before his departure for the 1926 Conference, Bruce expressed his anxiety that the demands for defining and codifying dominion autonomy would lead to the disintegration of the wider ‘British nation’.62 Proclaiming that Australia’s ‘princi-

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pal task’ was to ‘create the machinery that will enable us to have a

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real voice in the foreign policy of the empire’, he failed, however, to propose a practical solution that would realise this ambition. The 1926 Balfour Declaration represented all that Bruce had feared. It set down in explicit terms the dominion’s autonomous status. The Imperial Conferences were merely instruments of consultation, and each dominion was free to have its own foreign policy and by implication to join or not in Britain’s wars. Under the ensuing Statute of

Westminster of 1931 they were classified as ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown’. Simon Potter has shown how this outcome also ‘reflected the changing attitudes . . . of the British policy-making elite, who due in part at least to the debate of the past decades, had already abandoned the idea of a common foreign policy for the empire’.63 But Australian leaders continued to operate as if the Statute did not exist. Where the Irish Free State, Canada and South Africa all adopted the Statute – in each case local circumstances and sensitivities ensured their national leaders took the view that ‘failure to define the principle of equality . . . was equivalent to an abandonment of the principle’ – the Australian and New Zealand governments were in no rush to embrace a form of words that for them seemed to signal the cold hard reality of separation.64 Curtin was greatly troubled by this question of dominion ‘status’. Although he conceded that it was a ‘foggy subject’, once the mist of the 1926 conference cleared he perceived its true meaning for the country: the crushing weight of the financial ‘burdens’ imposed by Australia’s ongoing commitment to imperial defence. For Curtin this went directly to the much broader question of who owned the Empire: To whom does this Empire we hear so much about belong? Certainly it does not belong to Australia . . . The simple fact is that we ourselves are a debtor nation: a payer, not a the inhabitants of Britain itself, for almost all of them have no larger share in the Empire than had the Romans of the time of Tiberius Gracchus, who were called ‘masters of

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receiver, of tribute. It can hardly be said even to belong to

Curtin only had one answer to this question: the owners were a

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‘a few rich men to be found mostly in London . . . the only persons

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the world while they had not a foot of ground in their possession.65

who have any real right to be afflicted by the disease of ‘imperialitis’ and therefore the ‘people who should pay for its defence’. If Britain was unable to rely on the dominions to shoulder the burden of waging war, it might be more circumspect in the conduct of its foreign policy. It all meant that in time of peace, the ‘status’ question amounts to nothing. In times of war comes its testing. If we are free to decide, as the Imperial conference affirms, then we will be free to remain neutral, if so disposed, in case of Britain engaging in war. But if Britain’s enemy saw the slightest military or economic advantage in ignoring our neutrality he would do so. We should then have to choose between abandoning our neutrality or of declaring our complete independence in order to preserve it. Either step proves equality within the empire to be a myth.66 Throughout these developments in high imperial policy Curtin clung steadfast to the view that Australia was still liable to become entangled in European conflicts at London’s behest. In his ‘Empire Day’ editorial for the Westralian Worker in 1928 he argued that the new designation of ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ was simply the ‘sugar coating on the pill of militarism’: the mixture of flattery, as represented by assurances about our ‘independent Dominion status’, and of humiliation, by reminders that our country is a mere province of a distant Empire, grows more irritating, more especially when we see

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that behind it all is an Imperialist determination that we

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shall be irrevocably committed in advance when the ‘Empire’ sees fit to stage the ‘the next war’.67 It was this type of conspiratorial language that showed that the fears about being ‘committed in advance’ to war continued to dominate Curtin’s understanding of the British connection. His annoyance at British indifference to Australia’s status within the empire was

predicated on a certain appreciation of how the Empire should work. The nation’s essential Britishness, therefore, was assumed.

The ‘great lessons’ of Anzac Nevertheless, the evolving liturgy of Anzac Day presented Labor leaders with something of a dilemma. How were they to remember the war and pronounce on its meaning for the nation and the Empire? Throughout the 1920s, Labor politicians were rarely asked to preside over the dedication ceremonies of the vast numbers of war memorials erected in the cities and towns across Australia. While much of that absence can be explained by the fact that Labor was out of office federally from 1917 to 1929, Ken Inglis suggests that ‘even when Labor governed a state, committees would find someone else preferable to a premier or minister’ since ‘the division over conscription had removed from the party most of the people who could speak comfortably the words required at a war memorial’.68 The addition of a monarchical presence to proceedings – Inglis called it the ‘magic of monarchy’ – made the matter even more complicated for Labor. During his visit in 1920, the Prince of Wales unveiled a war memorial in Gympie and a commemorative arch in Ballarat. Amidst this climate, it was little wonder that Curtin had seen fit to dismiss the visit as propaganda for the ‘One Big empire promoters’.69 In his Anzac Day editorials around this time, Curtin generally retreated to his anti-war views. He could not accept that the raising of defence forces and the amassing of armaments was a proper response to the horror of the war. He resented the role played by the apologist’: justifying the rush to war, encouraging its continuation and giving insufficient attention to the voice of international arbitraat the altar of popular patriotism’. On the eve of Anzac Day 1926 Curtin feared that once again the churches would hide beneath the ‘cloak of remembering the dead’ to ‘glorify war’. The combination

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tion. In short, the clergy had ‘generally sacrificed their convictions

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churches, believing they had too often been the ‘militarist’s greatest

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of an intense Britishness hitched to the moral authority of the clergy was a painful memory: Western Australia’s patriotism in those days was in many respects more intense than most other parts of the Empire. Our men of God were more truculent and militaristic than any of our swashbuckling men of war, and there is no diminution yet in favour of that militarism.70 Just to make the point he quoted from a sermon by a minister from the United Free Church of Scotland, in which the speaker had maintained that the ‘true memorial to the honoured dead is not Cenotaphs and Unknown Warriors’ tombs, but the dedication of our lives in an honest endeavour to keep faith with those who sleep where poppies grow in Flanders fields’. The following year Curtin editorialised that the ‘great lessons’ of Anzac were ‘still unlearned’. He had no doubt that the Australian soldiers had ‘made an imperishable record in history’. While from the military point of view the landings on 25 April 1915 had been a failure, nevertheless it was ‘an undying success so far as the valor of the men who took part in the storming of the Gallipoli heights was concerned’. Once again he took umbrage at the ‘war-mongers’ – not the troops who had tackled the challenges of war ‘without making any fuss over it’ – but those who sought to use the occasion to remind people of the likelihood of another war. It led him to repeat the definition of peace by the American writer and satirist Ambrose Pierce, that it was ‘a period of cheating between two periods of fighting’. Nevertheless, there remained the fact that the talk of the 1914–1918 conflict

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being the ‘war to end all wars’ was now rarely heard. For Curtin

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this was the greatest betrayal. The Anzacs were being remembered not as the emissaries of peace but as the centurions of an evolving warrior tradition: each anniversary as it comes around provides occasion for much public speaking and preaching from pulpits. But the lesson which should have been learned from the war is as

yet unlearned. If anything should have been absorbed by now it is that it was time there was a practical application of the doctrines of peace on earth, and goodwill towards men. The speeches and sermons, however, still glorify war and warlike deeds. The fact that the Anzac fought for the sake of ensuring peace to the world is overlooked. Their sacrifice was not to the god of war, but to the fairer goddess of peace, and while they remember the day it is because of memories of pals who died, and not because they desire to perpetuate war or any remembrance of it.71 Curtin’s intellectual wrestle with the problem of remembrance and commemoration showed that while the Labor Party was able to show its basic acceptance of Anzac, it regretted that the experience was not harnessed towards greater efforts at striking a more lasting peace. Thus, as Curtin prepared to enter federal parliament in 1928, he brought with him a set of ideas about his country, the Empire and the world that would come to be tested against the increasingly fragile economic and strategic environment of the 1930s. As an independent Australian Briton, he gave voice to a deep pride in his country. He was in love with his native soil and a champion of White Australia. But the national feeling that he felt had characterised the early years of the new Commonwealth had been carried away to the foreign fields of war. With it went many of his socialist aspirations and hopes that Australia would continue to lead the world on social policy and political democracy. Having split over The result was a party that turned inward, beleaguered by its war experience, wary of being dragged into another European quagmire not an uncommon occurrence across the Empire. The conflict had left the British world ‘exhausted and introspective compared to the exuberant outbursts that had once characterised the Imperial generation of 1914’.72

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and burdened by the accusation of ‘disloyalty’. But this too was

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conscription, Labor was then tossed to the electoral wilderness.

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Yet Curtin had no truck with separatist sentiment. Australia was a ‘British nation’ which accordingly had a ‘quite natural and justifiable friendship’ with the mother-country. The labour movement’s best hope for reform was ultimately to pursue it within the Empire and through the parliamentary process. He resented not only the ‘turgid oratory for which “Empire Day” provides the excuse’73 but the pretentiousness of those who deferred to the British Government – especially a conservative one – in the making of decisions affecting Australia and its interests. Curtin sought an Empire of equals where each country would be free to make its own foreign policy – this and this alone would give Australia respect on the world stage. Accordingly, he questioned the need for Australian contributions to the scheme of imperial defence. In the Anzac story he divined a record of undeniable heroism and courage, yet he looked to it not as the blood oath of the country’s British character, but as a searing experience that conferred a sacred trust on world leaders: to avoid the folly of another war. The world he looked out on was seemingly against him: he saw only the malevolent tentacles of capitalist greed and watched as the fortunes of internationalism sank. Putting his faith in international arbitration, in the end he had to accept its limitations. The real ‘time of testing’ for his own views, and indeed for those of his party towards Australia’s place in the

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Empire, was still to come.

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Chapter 3

A ‘deranged world’ Leading Labor in the 1930s

Our view, based upon an acute realization of all that has happened to Australia in the last 25 years, is that the wise policy for this dominion is that it should not be embroiled in the disputes of Europe. John Curtin, 27 September 19381

As John Curtin embarked on a career in federal politics in the early 1930s, he faced not only serious international instability but also a fractious labour movement that wanted to ignore the world. In the worsening economic and strategic climate, the tensions that had surfaced in party ranks in the aftermath of the First World War came under even greater strain. Although in the early years of the decade the severity of the worldwide depression inevitably focussed Curtin’s attention on the domestic misery associated with high unemployment and the rapid collapse in Australia’s export trade, neither he nor his party – however much they might have

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wanted to – could turn a blind eye to the troubles besetting Europe and East Asia. As imperial Japan flexed its muscles in Manchuria, Nazi Germany violated the resolutions of the Paris Peace Conference and Fascist Italy defied the League of Nations, Australians began to see once again the gathering clouds of another world war and with it the dreaded prospect of Britain being engaged in a simultaneous war in Europe and the Pacific. On the cusp of becoming Labor leader in 1935, Curtin said that he could see only a ‘deranged world’ where ‘all of the visible portents are of evil’.2 In this period, while Curtin was acclimatising himself to the role of parliamentarian and attempting to present himself as an alternative prime minister, he had to find a new language to deal with the problem of national security and national community – initially to hold his party together, then to give it respectability in handling world affairs. As part of this process he began to use the phrase ‘British-speaking people’ to define Australians and their place in the world. The phrase was to become a distinguishing mark of Curtin’s idea of the nation. No conservative leader spoke of Australia’s relation to Britain and the British Empire in this way. Both he and Ben Chifley came to use the phrase in their speeches, both in Australia and in Britain. Curtin spoke freely of the country’s ‘British-character’ and the need for it to be maintained. ‘Australians’, he said, desired ‘not only to be one people but that we shall be kindred from a common stock, that we shall, in fact, be a white people predominantly of British origin’.3 This was the language of nationalism and an unqualified commitment to a white, British Australia. With Labor under persistent attack for its supposed lack

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of commitment to the Empire, such words could easily be seen as

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a convenient and contrived means of protecting Labor’s flank on the question of ‘loyalty’ – but they were central to Curtin’s idea of Australia and at the core of his slow, cautious attempt to frame a defence and foreign policy that would stand the test of international crisis. What he remained thoroughly opposed to, however, was the assumption on the part of the conservatives that there was only one true doctrine of Empire – and Empire management. He

was claiming that Labor, in contrast to the conservatives, would not unquestioningly follow the lead of the British Government but seek to remake the Empire into a partnership of equals all working together for the good of the race. Curtin’s path was riddled with the potholes of ideological friction and factional disunity. To achieve his goal he had to navigate his way through the shoals of internal labour differences on questions of international relations, while continuing to rebut the Lyons Government’s criticisms of Labor’s isolationism. All the foreign policy issues on which he had commented from inside the industrial labour movement in the previous decade – war and peace, armament and disarmament, the strengths and weaknesses of collective security – were now being played out dramatically on the world stage. In this swirling cauldron of snarling nationalisms, the new and inexperienced leader had to try and craft a unified Labor position that would respond to naked military aggression, the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a means of averting war, and the viability of imperial defence. This was no easy task. For a party that counted among its ranks liberal internationalists who supported the League of Nations, international socialists who saw in the Soviet Union a model of world leadership, Catholics who hated communism as the enemy of religion and many isolationists who wished to turn their back on these great external problems, the course of world events threatened to open old wounds and render it unelectable in the eyes of the Australian people. The need for party unity on these questions was essential if Labor was to win office.4

the shadow of World War One, perhaps of the 1890s’. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that a ‘Labor’ policy on international affairs in this period was barely discernible.5 Curtin brought with

the reflections on Australia’s place in the world that he had writ-

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him to Canberra the reputation he had gained as a leading oppo-

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Labor at this time that its thinking on defence was ‘still under

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Curtin’s first biographer, Lloyd Ross, correctly observed of

ten about in the Westralian Worker during the 1920s. Amongst the

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nent of conscription during the 1916–17 referenda campaigns and

labour movement in Victoria in particular, Curtin’s name was one to ‘move mountains’, and the party faithful there remembered him as the ‘young hero’ of the anti-conscription campaign.6 David Day has also emphasised that Curtin’s return to parliament at the 1934 election (he had lost his seat with the downfall of the Scullin Government in 1931) provided him with the opportunity to demonstrate his proficiency in speaking not only on ‘the traditional Labor questions of social reform and industrial relations but also about the increasingly important questions of defence and international relations’.7 Nevertheless, as some other scholars have suggested, while Curtin was ‘more aware of foreign affairs than many members of the Labor party’, he needed time to reconsider these problems as the leader of a shadow government and to gain the confidence and support of the labour movement across the country. There can be no question that as leader Curtin had to overcome the stubborn isolationism that had dominated the party in the 1920s. The antagonism generated by the Empire ‘loyalists’ during the conscription crisis had made the Labor party deeply suspicious about cooperating in imperial defence and supporting the British Government’s actions in dealing with military aggression in Europe. Curtin would have to endure two election defeats – in 1937 and 1940 – before he could bring the labour movement to treat these questions in their own terms and so achieve his moment in the electoral sun. This was to be a very slow and painful political journey for Curtin and Labor – but the same could be said from a different perspective for the conservative parties in trying to fathom their way through the theless, it was an important, transformative phase for a leader and a party that would ultimately have carriage of the country in a time of war.

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fog of a world lurching once again towards military conflict. Never-

The shattering of a fragile peace

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tion to enter the federal parliament. Shortly after he won the seat

At the end of the 1920s Curtin had achieved his long-desired ambi-

of Fremantle at the 1928 election, the Bruce Government fell and in the ensuing general election Labor was returned to office for the first time since 1916. During this first experience of parliamentary politics, though his mind and energies were primarily focussed – like those of most of his colleagues – on the economic crisis at home rather than the growing troubles abroad,8 he nevertheless did not altogether ignore the wider problems of war and peace. His first speech on international affairs to the parliament was directed at the London Conference of Naval Armaments, held in April 1930, at which the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy signed a treaty limiting the rate of warship construction. Although Curtin conceded that the meeting had resulted in a limitation of armaments, it was for him a false dawn. He saw an unbreakable nexus between economic depression, falling employment rates and the clamour for military hardware. ‘The will to peace’, he noted, ‘seems to slacken in the presence of circumstances which appear to make necessary the employment of people on the development of warlike equipment’. Only if the League of Nations acted to ensure that the manufacture of arms would cease to be a source of profit to private enterprise could peace be possible. This treaty was hardly a realistic panacea for the world’s problems. Curtin believed that such conferences – given that they were taking place outside the purview of the League – would inevitably result in the forming of group alliances. In his view that carried with it the prospect of a dangerous reversion to the ‘pre-war practice of dividing civilisation into two camps’. In the 1920s he had accepted much of the Wilsonian

arrive at a basis upon which it is possible to preserve peace’. Curtin continued to give voice to his dismay that the United States had failed to join the League, claiming that America ‘does not exhibit

like those signed in London were not endorsed by the League, they

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anything like an international concept’. Its absence had had ‘an

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macy was held ‘in the open light of day, the sooner will the world

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doctrine of liberal internationalism, including that the more diplo-

were ‘ephemeral in their effect, because they impose no obligations

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unfortunate effect on the cause of world peace’. Since agreements

on countries which do not participate in them’. On the other hand, he added: the meetings of the Assembly of the League of Nations have an important effect, because more than 50 countries are under contractual obligation to be represented at them. Insofar as statesmanship and international wisdom can do anything to avert war, it can do it most effectively, in my opinion, through the instrumentality of the League of Nations.9 But while the League had provided a forum in which the general objectives of collective security, arbitration and peace could act as a means of preserving some sort of imperial unity, the events of the 1930s made that increasingly harder to achieve.10 Curtin said he wanted not a division of the world into a number of ‘Kilkenny’ states, but the preservation of the ‘existing great seats of power – half a dozen great empires, with their tremendous economic resources, rather than 50 or 60 different nations each endeavouring to assert its national independence’. It was code for abiding by the status quo – an international order that at least offered the hope for a tolerable world – and for preserving the peace. For Australia, that meant a sense of security conceived within a wider orbit: I trust that Australia will always recognise that its defence policy should be considered as part of the defence policy of the British Empire. I can see no possibility of Australia being able, within measurable time, to secure itself, out of its own

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resources, against danger of attack. We have a coastline

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which, if extended in a straight line, would stretch from Melbourne to Plymouth, and it is absurd to suggest that we, with our population of 6,000,000 can provide adequate naval defence for our continent.11 Curtin would not have subscribed to this view of imperial defence in the 1920s. While it shows some evidence that a new sense of realism was informing his assessment of the world situation, it did

not mean an unquestioned faith in the capacity of the British Navy to provide for Australian security. Indeed, the comments tap into a longstanding concern of Curtin’s – that Australia needed to concentrate more of its defence spending on a viable air force. Nor should these comments be taken to mean that Curtin had shifted in any way from his analysis of the causes of war and the need for Australia to keep clear of old-world disputes. But whatever confidence he retained in the League of Nations as an effective instrument for keeping the lid on aggressive intent would be progressively diminished as the decade wore on. Curtin took over as leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party on 2 October 1935. In doing so he pledged himself to ‘revive the spirit and unity of the Labor movement, to renew and vitalise its sobriety and commonsense’ so that it could once again win the support of the people ‘in an era in which the portents of evil are grave and numerous’. The economic malaise had brought with it long dole queues, conflict between the Commonwealth and the states over constitutional powers and functions, and industries beset by ‘depression debt and market derangements’. But it was the international situation that brought with it the heaviest responsibility and the most serious of challenges. ‘Above all’, Curtin stressed in his first words as leader, Labor ‘must have preparedness against foreign aggression’.12 It was to prove a most arduous assignment. Only a day later he faced his first foreign policy test. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935 dealt yet another blow

Japanese takeover of Manchuria, the inability of the League’s yearlong effort at attempted conciliation with Mussolini was widely perceived as further proof of its weakness in deterring military

and an overwhelming demand for swift and firm action by the

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aggression. The invasion caused widespread revulsion abroad –

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of Nations. Having failed to challenge in any effective way the

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to the doctrine of collective security as embodied in the League

international community. In May 1935 the League had agreed to

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some even comparing it to Germany’s attack on Belgium in 1914 –

impose economic sanctions on Italy, a policy which the Lyons Government, acting in cooperation with Britain, supported. As Attorney-General Menzies put it at the time, Australia was part of the British Empire and therefore could neither consider itself ‘a detached or independent entity in world affairs’ nor declare its own neutrality in wars beyond its borders. The Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the subsequent Statute of Westminster had not in any way detracted from ‘our common allegiance to the Common Crown’. How is it possible, Menzies asked, ‘with one king who makes peace or war, for the Crown to be at war in relation to Great Britain, and at peace in relation to the Commonwealth of Australia’?13 But the Labor Party could not accept this conservative view of Australia’s world role. Curtin had inherited a policy of nonparticipation from his predecessor as Labor leader, Frank Forde, who had maintained that ‘the control of Abyssinia by any country is not worth the loss of a single Australian life’ and that the party wanted ‘no war on foreign fields for economic treasure’.14 Curtin did not fundamentally alter that position, but he did try to find a balance between being more resolute in opposing aggression while still seeking to remain aloof from the conflict. That tension was apparent when he told parliament that although the labour movement could neither wash its hands of the dispute nor be ‘indifferent to the fate of Abyssinia’, it could not escape the reality that Australia was a ‘minor power’, a ‘small nation, remote from the great centres of international convulsion’. The imposition of economic sanctions was thus dismissed by Curtin as a ‘warlike act’. Such measures, he added, were rarely effective

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given that ‘international oil interests’ and ‘armament trusts’ were

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the ‘real enemies of world peace’. In his speech the Labor leader also marshalled the rhetorical support of former Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs in the Nationalist Government, Sir John Latham, and British politicians from both ends of the ideological spectrum – Labour’s Sir Stafford Cripps, and two highprofile conservatives – the then foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and former prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. All had agreed that

economic sanctions were the inevitable prologue to military action. But here the labour movement in Australia was out on a limb – both British and New Zealand Labour supported sanctions against Mussolini. Joseph Lyons, by pledging to assist the ‘mother-country’ in her hour of need, again turned the screws of ‘loyalty’ on his political opponents. The commitment to sanctions fast became yet another test of Labor’s ‘British’ credentials. In addition to those on his own side of politics who held anti-imperialist or pacifist views, along with those who were more generally against foreign entanglements, Curtin had to deal with the legacy of the First World War and the wounds that the conscription issue had left on the party – scars that had by no means healed.15 Thus, his response epitomised Labor’s quandary not only on the Abyssinian question, but on foreign policy more generally in this period: despite a forceful and powerful argument for standing back, Labor was unable to offer any practical suggestions for the resolution of the problem. Curtin felt that support for the sanctions would ‘plunge Australia into the perilous vortex of European conflicts’. Summarising his position he stressed that Australia is different and distinctive in character from countries of the old world, and we should occupy a distinctive place in the conflicts of the world. My party and I will oppose this measure because it embroils Australia in European disturbances and conflicts, and makes us a party to whatever war may rage in Europe, irrespective of its origin. We should not be dragged willy-nilly into every

What he was effectively saying was that the war was no concern of Australia’s and that in any case Australia should not automatically

exposed, for, as one historian has remarked, the party either ‘equiv-

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fall into line with British policy. It showed the difficulty for Labor

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what we should and should not do.16

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European dispute. We should be the sovereign judges of

ocated, retreated in a haze of emotional slogans or refused to say’.17

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when their lack of a viable policy on key international issues was

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 brought to the fore the ideological, religious and isolationist differences within the movement over how best to deal with the international crisis. When a Republican Government in Spain introduced reforms that aroused the ire of the Catholic Church, the wealthy and the military, General Franco led a group of right-wing rebels to oust it and the ensuing civil conflict became a symbol for a clash of ideologies. The rebels were supported by the German and Italian fascists, the Republican Government by the Soviet Union and an international brigade comprised of radicals from around the world. In Australia too communists, socialists and some liberals united in the movement against war and fascism and organised support for the republican cause – 40 of them joined the International Brigade and fought in Spain.18 The Catholic Church and some of its lay bodies, however, looked kindly on Franco’s uprising and many Catholics in the Australian Labor Party were reluctant to take a stand against Franco, or indeed Hitler, since they were more concerned by the possible spread of communism in Europe and hoped that the fascist powers might act as a barrier against its further expansion. Following the British example, the Lyons Government maintained a policy of ‘strict neutrality and non-interference in the internal affairs of another country’. Labor for its part was riven by disagreement and disaffection, between Catholics who supported Franco, anti-fascists backing the republic and those clinging to the party’s traditional isolationism. The League of Nations had failed to keep the peace and though Curtin might have had republican sympathies, he knew that to plunge into this cocktail of ideological and religious ferment would

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risk splitting the party asunder. Thus, he himself kept quiet, and

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Labor members of parliament did not debate the issue in the House of Representatives. Ross McMullin has argued that Federal Labor ‘responded to the supreme issue for many idealistic radicals in the 1930s by having no policy on Spain at all’, but on this case the general indifference of the Australian population and the isolationism running through the government’s own policy to some extent shielded Labor from any serious political fallout. As Menzies had

remarked in September of 1936, ‘We have no very great concern whether communism defeats fascism in Spain or vice-versa. Each system of government, while it may be admirable for Spain, is, I believe, of no possible value in a British community’.19 Even for the conservatives it was the implications of a far-away conflict for Australia’s Britishness that was cast as the barometer for whether or not the nation should be involved. These external crises, conflicting domestic pressures and the memories of Labor’s First World War travails weighed heavily on Curtin’s mind. It underlined yet again just how fraught the subject of defence and foreign policy was for the party in the 1930s and how it brought up old fears and phobias: the belief that capitalism in and of itself caused war, that war meant conscription and with it the loss of Australian sovereignty to imperialist control.20 Nevertheless, the tide of events in Europe and the Pacific, where the rise of Germany and the expansion of Japanese power proceeded at an alarming speed, caused Labor to move step by step towards a more positive policy. In the three years following his coming to power in 1933, Hitler had blazed a menacing diplomatic trail across Europe, repudiating the arms limitation agreements of the Treaty of Versailles, initiating a plan for German economic self-sufficiency and overseeing a program of unabated rearmament, involving the creation of a massive land army, and by 1936, a navy that was already one-third the size of Britain’s. In the same year he remilitarised the Rhineland, the supposed security buffer between Germany and France. Japan, which had annexed Manchuria in 1931, spent more

buttress its security against the Soviet Union.21 That ended with the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in 1936. A year later Italy became the third signatory. The march of these

In common with the government, Labor at first did not consider

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events hastened on Curtin’s determination to find a way to meet

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States, and in the middle of the decade had begun to seek allies to

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on defence from 1933 to 1938 than either Britain or the United

that German revisionism constituted a threat to the interests of the

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the danger to Australia while holding the Labor Party together.

west and the British Commonwealth. The Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Prime Minister Lyons and RG Casey, then Treasurer, did not believe that these events made war inevitable, and they had no hesitation in putting that case to the British.22 Casey in particular was sympathetic to German desires to destroy the treaty system that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference, writing to the Secretary of the British Cabinet Maurice Hankey after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland that ‘the sooner all the shackles are removed from Germany the better’.23 It was not surprising therefore that at the 1936 Federal Labor Conference, his first as leader, Curtin ensured that party tradition held sway. As it had declared at similar gatherings in the 1920s, Labor maintained that all the Commonwealth’s efforts were to be directed towards the maintenance of ‘adequate home defence against possible aggression’. The conference reaffirmed its opposition to compulsory military training and service, and despite the efforts of the party executive to delete the clause which stated that there was to be no participation in war ‘except by the decision of the people’, conference voted to retain it. Curtin, however, soon afterwards found a way to challenge the conventional thinking on Australian defence and foreign policy in a way that would be acceptable to his party. He questioned whether the nation could rely for its defence on Britain sending a fleet to Singapore. In taking this position he was not acting out of a desire to be independent or to assert a separate national identity but rather was tapping into a debate occurring among a small number of people of Australia’s national security community who were

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starting to consider the implications for Australia if Britain were to

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be involved simultaneously in a war in Europe and the Pacific. In 1935, EL Piesse, a former director of military intelligence, called for a ‘radical revision’ of defence policy given the likelihood that neither the League of Nations nor the Royal Navy would be able to help Australia in the event of a southward thrust by Japan. The Chief of the General Staff, Colonel John Lavarack, and the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, WR Hodgson, had,

independently of Piesse, also arrived at this conclusion.24 During parliamentary debate on the Lyons Government’s defence estimates in 1936, Curtin echoed these arguments, attacking the continuing reliance on the British Navy and calling for an increase in spending on the army and the air force, that is on continental defence. In parliament he asked how Britain, if engaged in a European war, would be capable of dispatching sufficient numbers of ships to the Pacific to deter Japan. Delivering a stern rebuke to those who maintained their faith in the Singapore strategy he declared that ‘The dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard on which to found Australia’s defence policy’. When a government MP interjected that ‘Great Britain has never failed us’, Curtin simply replied that ‘History has had no experience of the situation I am visualising’.25 Despite their public statements Lyons and his senior ministers shared Curtin’s doubts about the Singapore strategy and at the 1937 Imperial Conference they sought British assurances that Australia could depend upon it for their defence. During the conference Lyons also tried to interest the British and the Americans in a Pacific Pact proposal, an idea he had first raised with them a couple of years previously. It was to be a ‘regional understanding and Pact of Non-Aggression by the countries of the Pacific conceived in the spirit of the principles of the League’ of Nations. It was put forward with Japan primarily in mind – Lyons was proposing that the League accept Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. He did not

a Pacific security system and so engage it even if peripherally in Australia’s defence. But he was rebuffed by both powers: Britain was reluctant to adopt any policy on East Asia which might endanin Europe, while America, determinedly neutral at the time, was not disposed either to enter into an entangling alliance or abandon its moral sanctions against Japan.26

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ger their chances of gaining American goodwill in the event of a war

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therefore towards Australia, and he hoped to draw America into

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want to provoke Japanese hostility towards the British Empire and

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At the conference, Lyons received rather qualified British guarantees concerning the Singapore base, the senior Whitehall officials advising the Australian leaders that the Admiralty might well have a problem in sending a fleet to Singapore should there be a war in the Pacific with Japan at the same time as with Germany in Europe. Even if this were not the case the First Sea Lord, Lord Chatfield, stressed to the Australian Minister for Defence, Sir Archdale Parkhill, that strategic planners would have to allow for ‘70 days elapsing between the first Japanese act of war and the arrival of the British Main Fleet’.27 In London, Lyons called on the dominions to unite in support of Britain and its policy of seeking friendship with Germany and Italy. The ‘main thing to do’, he announced, was to ‘inform the world that the whole empire stood firmly with Britain and believed implicitly in her policies’.28 Though the British response had been surrounded with grave reservations, Lyons, on his return to Australia, was not ready to give up such a useful electoral stick with which to beat the Labor Party – something that seemed to unnerve Curtin. Added to the strategic dimension was the fact that the Imperial Conference had coincided with the Coronation of King George VI, an event to which the Opposition leader had been invited but declined to attend on account of a by-election in the rural NSW seat of Gwydir. At the time of Edward VIII’s abdication, Curtin had expressed his regret at the circumstances, since the King had ‘made himself probably the most prominent and conspicuous symbol of the unity of the British-speaking people’.29 A few days after the coronation Curtin angrily dismissed the suggestion that Lyons might return to Aus-

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tralia to call an election amidst the royal fanfare. Such a possibility

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brought back old fears that Labor would be hopelessly marooned on the wrong side of the ‘loyalty’ divide – and he was quick to dismiss the suggestion circulating in the Australian press that the government would make an early appeal to the people ‘on patriotic issues’. This, he said, would be a ‘contemptible evasion of real issues which Australia has to tackle’. Such an attempt, Curtin added, would be seeking to ‘capitalise on the undoubted and unreserved loyalty of

the Australian people to the ‘Throne and the British Empire’. Well might Curtin sound a high and mighty tone: the reality was that he could not contemplate an election being fought on the issue of loyalty. For all his bluster about the ‘undoubted’ attachment to King and Empire, his comments betrayed yet again a lingering sensitivity at being portrayed as lacking credibility in managing the links with Britain.30 But this was only the first phoney shot in a wider political war to be played out at home. Upon his return to Australia, Lyons told parliament that the base at Singapore remained the ‘keystone of Empire defences in the Eastern Hemisphere’ and that ‘its capacity to fulfil its function should be undoubted’. Moreover, he stressed that the conference had shown that a ‘great Empire, composed of many different races, speaking different languages, widely separated, yet united by many ties of tradition, sentiment, and mutual good will and understanding, and above all, by a common allegiance to the Crown, could establish a harmony of aims and policy’.31 For Curtin this implied questioning of Labor’s loyalty was like a red rag to a bull. He did not take issue with the idea of striving for a harmony of aims and interests within the Empire – rather he took umbrage with the assumption that the Empire as a whole was coordinating a united foreign policy without the prior input of the Australian Parliament and the people. It violated the unquestioned Labor principle that the respective parliaments of the British Commonwealth should be free to determine their own defence and foreign policy. In his response he claimed that the defence policy

the message to emerge from London remained the same since the Imperial Conference of 1923: that it was ‘the sole responsibility of the several parliaments of the Empire to decide the

the scheme of imperial defence, spending per capita more than six

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nature and scope of their own defence policy’.32 Moreover, he

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agreed upon at the Imperial Conference’. For the Labor leader

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that Lyons had outlined ‘was put forward as though it had been

times that of South Africa and four times as much as Canada. This,

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stressed that Australia was already contributing its fair share to

he felt, ‘should impress even the most ultra imperialist as being, not only large, but also relatively greater than that of our sister dominions’.33 The problem for Curtin and Labor, however, was that even these financial facts and figures could not override the stigma of ‘disloyalty’ that seemed to haunt almost their every utterance on foreign policy. It was little wonder that Curtin seemed almost desperate for a debate free of the emotional trammels that had plagued him and his party over the previous two decades. In almost all his speeches on international affairs at this time he expressed a deep frustration at the way in which his opponents sought to maximise his party’s political embarrassment. At times, he even felt the need to begin his speeches by emphasising the ‘unswerving allegiance of the Opposition to the British Commonwealth of Nations’, as if the very repetition of it would prove the sincerity of Labor’s Britishness. He wanted parliament to be able to deliberate ‘without honourable members opposite hurling across the chamber charges of lack of Empire spirit’ and was resentful of the practice whereby those who questioned the government’s ideas on defence were ‘suspected of a lack of loyalty to the country’.34 But Curtin himself contributed to the problem. He might have wanted a level playing field in the debate on international relations, yet he himself remained firmly fixed in his convictions about the causes of war and the diversion it presented to what he saw as the real business of government. As he told the parliament in August 1937, ‘We can not get away from the fact that trade and economic conflicts are still the chief causes leading to war’. Echoing the views he expressed at the Westralian less for social reform measures such as invalid and old-age pensions: ‘ . . . we must exercise the greatest care that we do not depress our social standards unduly in order for us to find the money necessary

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Worker, he observed that greater defence expenditure would mean

on barren ground. Labor’s questioning of imperial defence immedi-

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ately attracted the charge of ‘disloyalty’, a theme which Lyons used

for defence’.35 Not surprisingly, Curtin’s pleas for an emotion-free debate fell

to great effect during the 1937 election, depicting Curtin’s ‘policy of isolation from Great Britain’ as ‘suicidal’.36 This language in itself showed that the conservatives as much as Labor were caught up in the miasma of the conscription crisis in debating defence policy. Speaking in Curtin’s home town of Creswick on the Saturday before the federal poll, Lyons posed the choice: ‘Australia has to decide . . . whether she will remain a member of the British empire or whether she is going to strike out for herself on a course of national independence’. But ‘independence’ here was code for one of the dirtiest words in the national lexicon at the time: isolationism. It spoke volumes that the very concept of ‘independence’ in Australian political debate could be so easily equated less with the aspiration for constitutional separation from the ‘mother-country’ than with the allegation that the alternative government was insufficiently ‘British’. Lyons missed no opportunity to prolong Labor’s discomfort, announcing that his ministry ‘stands for the Empire’, and that a vote for his government represented a vote for Australia’s ‘continuance as one of the members of the Empire’. Labor policy, on the other hand, was ‘one of independence and isolation from the Empire, and the consequences of such a policy are so grave’.37 The Sydney Morning Herald agreed with the prime minister’s diagnosis: against the government’s ‘comprehensive defence policy based upon free cooperation with the rest of the Empire’, Labor offered ‘a purely insular approach to the problem based upon a retreat into self-imposed isolation’. Just in case readers had missed the point it reminded them that A

to keep our coasts inviolate and our vital overseas communications intact in the event of war again breaking loose upon the world, Mr Curtin would leave the seas open Great Britain and her navy, and wait for invasion to prove that a fool’s paradise is only the ante-chamber to a wise man’s hell.38

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to our enemies, deprive us of the right to any succour from

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Whereas Mr Lyons would strain every nerve and tendon

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Nevertheless, Curtin held doggedly to a policy of continental defence. In his election policy speech he insisted that Australia’s geographic position meant that it could not ‘exercise any decisive influence, either as a police or as a salvage corps, in the problems of Europe’. Thus, he determined that self-reliance was the best contribution Australia could make to the ‘defence of the British Commonwealth of Nations’: By ensuring the safety of Australia we ensure the safety of nearly seven million British subjects. When we defend Australia, we defend not only these seven million British subjects, but also three million square miles of British territory and one thousand millions of British investments’.39 This was a far cry from Curtin’s earlier denunciation of Britain’s ‘imperialist determination’. He was now depicting Australia as a trustee for British civilisation and British economic interests in the Pacific. At the polls the Australian people returned the Lyons Government to office, thus accepting the prime minister’s criticism of Labor’s loyalty deficit and endorsing his attitude towards Britain and her military capabilities. Some historians have seen in this campaign the seeds of a major transition in Curtin. As the Labor leader insisted on ‘beating the defence drum’ during the election, he has been charged with forsaking his attachment to the ideal of a socialist utopia and instead wholeheartedly embracing the cause of nationalism. According to David Day, Curtin had apparently ‘sensed there might be a new crusade worth pursuing in place of the socialist

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crusade. If the Australian people could not be roused to join the

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socialist crusade, they surely could be roused to join the nationalist crusade that would defend them against outside attack and keep their society pristine and pure’.40 But this view again highlights the problem of nationalism and how it has so often been misunderstood in Australian history. Whilst Curtin’s nationalism is expressed in terms of local defence and an appeal to White Australia, Day assumes, first, that the insistence on providing for Australia’s own

defence was a rejection of a British identity and, second, that the people would readily acknowledge Labor’s leadership role in shaping an exclusive Australian nationalism which separated Australia from the ‘mother-country’. Day was forced nevertheless to concede, however, that ‘most Australians declined to fall in behind’ Curtin, and that ‘they would require much more convincing before they would be willing to give up their traditional dependence on Britain for their defence’.41

‘The international crisis has passed’: Labor and the Munich Agreement At the 1937 Imperial Conference the dominions had accepted the British Government’s attitude towards the rise of Nazi Germany, summarised in the phrase ‘appeasement as the road to peace’. Curtin was quick to endorse the Lyons Government’s policy position that the Commonwealth should emphasise economic stability and disarmament as the means to stave off total war – a position which the Labor leader felt to be ‘reasonable and clear’.42 But for how much longer could such a position be sustained? In 1937 Italy had joined the other two aggressor nations in the Anti-Comintern Pact, and in March of 1938 Hitler marched his forces into Austria to enforce the Austro-German reunification or Anschluss. When Lyons, in line with British policy, proposed more expenditure on defence in April 1938, Curtin argued that Europe was ‘less inflammable than it was two or three months ago’ and questioned whether there were sufficient grounds to justify ‘war hysteria’ in

First World War and he was adamant that Australians must not be recruited ‘as soldiers in the battlefield of Europe’.43 In mid 1938 when Hitler demanded the return of the Sude-

over such a matter. Curtin, however, continued to increase the

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tenland from Czechoslovakia, Lyons and Curtin were agreed that

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attitude towards war: the nation had paid an ‘awful price’ from the

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Australia. Once again he was falling back on his tried and tested

pressure on Lyons, pointing to mounting evidence in the press – he

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neither the Empire nor Australia should go to war with Germany

cited editorials from The Herald in Melbourne as well as the views of the Times military correspondent, Basil Liddell Hart – that Australia could ‘not afford to dissipate our strength in the struggles of Europe’ and that small powers had to rely entirely on their own resources.44 He was expressing again his doubts about imperial defence and his fear of Japan. On the day before British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met the leaders of Germany and Italy at Munich, Curtin remained adamant that Australia should not involve itself in European conflicts. But his statement to the parliament only underlined the growing gulf between these domestically generated Labor principles and the increasing volatility of the international situation: Although we are a party which adheres to the pursuit of high ideals, we claim to be realists. We face facts; and we make no apology for facing them from the viewpoint of the safety and security of this nation, having primary regard to the welfare and happiness of our own people. This is the simplicity of common sense . . . the wars of Europe are a quagmire, in which we should not allow our resources, our strength, our vitality, to be sunk almost, it may be, to the point of complete disappearance.45 The only sane path he could see as a means of resolving such disputes was through ‘peace by negotiation’. He held fast to Labor policy, affirming that the ‘positive and calmly considered view of the Australian Labour party’ was that ‘no men must be sent out of Australia to participate in another war overseas’.46 As the

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developments at the Munich Conference filtered back to Australia,

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Curtin held that the ‘claims for extra territory which appear to be implicit in Herr Hitler’s proposals . . . do not justify resort to force in Europe’. He had no hesitation in ‘going so far as to say that should war in Europe result over this matter it will be a war that Australia would regret . . . Australia should not be involved in it’.47 It should be noted here of course that Curtin was in very good company in making these types of assessments of the international

political crisis. Among many of those who had lived through one world war and wished at all costs to avoid another, euphoria at the signing of the Munich Agreement was understandable, if not, as some have argued, ‘pardonable’. Many saw it as the vital first step towards an eventual settlement.48 What made Curtin’s task all the more difficult was the ongoing division within his own ranks about how to respond to this disturbing world environment. Thus, his optimistic assessments of the Munich Agreement continued. When he moved a no-confidence motion against the government in early November 1938 Curtin declared that the ‘international crisis has passed’ and that the Munich Pact had ‘lessened the probability of a European war in the near future’. It meant that any attempt by the government to increase defence expenditure appeared to him as an ‘utterly unjustifiable and hysterical piece of panic propaganda’.49 While it is difficult to disagree with the conclusions reached by some scholars that the scars Curtin carried from the First World War, his own socialist beliefs and the fragility of internal party politics made it almost impossible for him to advocate greater spending on defence, and that he ‘clutched too quickly at any signs that war might be averted by agreement’,50 what has gone largely unnoticed is the attempt he made at the same time to stress an alternative view of the British Empire and Australia’s role within it. What he objected to was not the Empire itself, but the conservative deference to London and the militarist patriotism that went with it, a factor that had only made more difficult the chances of Labor getting clear air on questions of defence and foreign policy. Though he

leader unafraid to express his view of how the Empire might work better for the protection of Australian, as well as British, interests. Curtin gave voice to some of these frustrations after the sign-

ical climate was not conducive to a more rational consideration

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ing of the Munich Agreement. Noting that ‘the German people

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on foreign affairs, these comments nevertheless again show a Labor

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might have conceded to being a prisoner of the party’s difficult past

of foreign relations. He was disdainful of the view that criticism

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cheered Mr Chamberlain’, he lamented that the Australian polit-

of the government’s policy should be equated with disloyalty to nation and Empire. ‘Too long in Australia’ – the weariness in his language was almost palpable – ‘has a sober, critical outlook on Australian foreign policy or its defence methods been prevented by the stupidity which treats anything which at all criticises Government policy as evidence of treasonable intent’.51 But of course it was simply not enough to assume a statesmanlike posture in the parliament. When he was pushed by a member of the government to state whether Labor would involve itself in a European war to ‘safeguard the heart of the empire’, Curtin’s response was weak – he could only give the evasive answer that at the core of Labor’s approach to national security was a concern to promote ‘the development of Australian industries, the payment of decent wages, and the ensuring of good conditions’. Not only would this enable the country to attract migrants from England, Ireland and Scotland in order to maintain the ‘British character of this nation’, but it would also help to instil in the people at large a ‘sense of patriotism about Australia’. The emphasis on a domestic program might have been music to the ears of the fractured and bickering party that lay behind him, but it showed yet again that Curtin’s idea of ‘patriotism’ was one that reinforced the country’s essential Britishness. Curtin was clearly trapped between two worlds here – between the language of his fiery socialist background and the moderation and careful diplomacy required of him as a potential prime minister. When taunted as to whether he supported universal military service – an issue on which the conservatives believed they could continually wedge Labor owing to the lingering bitterness of the

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conscription crisis – Curtin was quick to hit back. It proved in

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his eyes that aside from their efforts to distort Labor’s policy, the government ‘have nothing except the worked-out generalization: They believe in the British Empire’. But this, in Curtin’s eyes, was ‘merely blather about the flag and the Empire’. He claimed that Labor believed in the British Commonwealth of Nations ‘far more soundly’ than its political opponents.52 Here again was a key point of difference between the two parties. For Curtin ‘Empire’ carried

connotations of subordination while ‘Commonwealth’ indicated a sense of the equality of the dominions with the ‘mother-country’. Disassociating himself from the conservatives, he maintained that loyalty to the Empire should be measured less by the frequency of pledges of fealty and faithfulness to the flag and the throne than by arguments for the protection of Australia’s national interest. This stress on autonomy meant in practice that Labor continued to abide by the principle that membership of the Commonwealth ‘did not automatically commit Australia to participation in war’. Thus, in May 1939, while celebrating the fraternity among the dominions and their ‘common interest in the safety and security of the English speaking race’, he maintained that it was the ‘governments of the dominions, responsible as they are to those portions of that British race in their respective geographical situations . . . [that] must themselves decide, in the light of circumstances, how and to what extent they will be participators in a war’.53 But when the international situation reached a critical point that threatened the likelihood of British involvement in war, it became harder for Labor to keep faith with these principles. By March 1939 Hitler had marched his troops into the remaining territory of Czechoslovakia, thus destroying the very basis of the hopes that had supported the Munich Pact – that it would satisfy German territorial ambitions. In these circumstances Labor left behind a policy shaped by domestic party politics and declared its first priority to be the ‘maintenance of Australia as an integral part of the British Commonwealth’. Australia, it went on, would ‘adequately play its

becomes inevitable that we be dragged into a war, then inevitably we will have to play our part and shape our position as it arises’.55 Four months later, in September 1939, he faced what he had

‘that the memories of the previous war would have been sufficiently

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long feared – the reality of another world war. At its outbreak he

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party’s Federal Conference in May 1939, ‘if in the end of things it

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part in Imperial Defence’.54 As Curtin explained to delegates at the

vivid’ to avert the conflict. Nevertheless, he emphasised that the

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repeated Labor’s traditional abhorrence of war and his faded hopes

British cause was ‘just’ and further that ‘there was no alternative to the course that has been followed’. Proclaiming again his commitment to ensuring the ‘safety and integrity of the British Commonwealth’ he pledged to do all he could to ‘safeguard Australia’. Even at this moment, however, there were differences between Labor and the government, with Curtin reaffirming the party’s opposition to conscription and the sending of an expeditionary force to Europe. ‘Of what avail would it be to Britain’, he contended, ‘if our man-power having been sent abroad, she lost this great storehouse of grain, wool and manufactured products’. Though burdened by the memory of 1914–1918, Curtin nevertheless demonstrated that he had learnt from it. Labor would lend the war effort its total support, but only if the government implemented it ‘with the very minimum of interference with the civil liberties of the people’. He emphasised again that his party remained staunchly opposed to conscription and profiteering – and echoing his editorials at the Worker he stressed that ‘there must be no suffering in Australia among men, women and children because of the greed and selfishness of certain persons . . . who will, inevitably, take advantage of the national crisis if they are permitted’. As Ross McMullin noted, the statement demonstrated his skill in ‘compiling a manifesto broadly acceptable to the diverse strands in his party’.56 Even Jack Lang, who for most of the decade had been a strident isolationist causing Curtin continual problems, was now saying that the government should do all it could for Britain at the moment of crisis. By the time of the Labor Party conferences in Sydney and Melbourne in late 1940, Curtin, despite having to fend away a ‘Hands off

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Russia’ move from communist influenced factions within the party,

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ensured that the party declared its ‘complete and indissoluble unity with the allies’.57 Labor supported the deployment of Australian airmen to the Empire Air Training Scheme and subsequently the sending of the Second AIF to Europe and the Middle East. There can be little question that from the time he became leader in 1935 until he became prime minister in October 1941, Curtin presided over a slow and gradual evolution in Labor’s attitude

towards foreign and defence policy. But at every stage he was shackled by internal feuds and fights within his own party, beleaguered by the bitter legacy of the First World War, and beholden to his own powerful convictions about the effects of war and military conflict on his socialist ideals. While his growing interest in foreign affairs and concern for Australia’s security may have struggled to gain traction against his own abhorrence of war and the stubborn refusal of many in his party to accept a world hurtling towards another major conflict, it nevertheless proved crucial in leading his party to a realistic and respectable response to the mounting international tensions. Keeping the party together was crucial. In effect, that meant that Labor was unable to provide a genuine opposition to the Lyons Government. Curtin’s voice redefining Australia’s relationship to the Empire – that it should be based on London’s respect for the sovereignty of the dominion parliaments and their assessment of their own geopolitical interests – was but a whisper amidst the domestic political debate and a world of contending powers. But he had shown considerable political courage in questioning the orthodox view on Singapore and the concept of imperial defence, when he must have known that the Lyons Government would be merciless in depicting his position as a virtual abandonment of Australia. Still, it can be argued that by 1939 Labor had held its nerve and finally, if belatedly, come to terms with the reality of the world crisis that threatened Australia’s very survival.

in October 1941, Curtin did not set about reversing the existing Australian war strategy. Although, like Menzies, he had initially opposed the sending of Australian troops to the Middle East in

Middle East. Consistent with his assurance to Churchill that Labor

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1939, Curtin showed no intention of adopting an ‘Australia-first’

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It is equally telling that, when he assumed the prime ministership

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‘Continuity to the Anzac tradition’: John Curtin, Prime Minister

would ‘cooperate fully’ with the British and dominion governments

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policy or calling for the immediate return of the AIF from the

to provide for the ‘welfare of the Empire’, the Australian War Cabinet promised to maintain the Menzies and Fadden governments’ military commitments. Paul Hasluck noted that in late November 1941 the War Cabinet agreed to send further reinforcements to the AIF in the Middle East, even though the possibility of war with Japan loomed ever larger.58 Ironically, one of Curtin’s first official duties after becoming prime minister in October 1941 was to deliver a speech at the opening of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. His words were brief but carefully chosen. On a deeply symbolic national occasion, he found himself presiding over the dedication of a monument to a war which he had stridently opposed. Ken Inglis’ contention that it was ‘unlikely that any returned soldier present . . . thought this anti-conscriptionist, gaoled briefly in 1916, the ideal embodiment of the nation on this platform’ is puzzling – given that more than 40% of the First AIF had voted against conscription.59 It is noteworthy, however, that Curtin mentioned neither Gallipoli nor the Western Front in his address. The speech showed the new prime minister trying to articulate a Labor language of Anzac commemoration. Given his longstanding commitment to the primacy of the parliament in determining whether a nation goes to war, it was not surprising that his remarks drew attention to the location of the memorial itself: The Australian War Memorial contains the complete record of the first great crisis in Australian history. There are in the Memorial the accounts of innumerable acts of heroism;

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there is the story of an unquenchable faith; and there in

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itself can be said to exist the true sanctuary of Australian tradition. It is . . . extraordinarily appropriate that the place where this tradition is housed should be in sight of the building which is the seat of all our government. The Parliament of a free people deliberates by day and cannot but be inspired and strengthened in the performance of its great duty by the ever present opportunity to contemplate

the story that has gone before them of the deeds that helped to make the nation, and of the unifying purpose which links the ordered ways of a free people with that matchless courage which inspires its sons to maintain it.60 Here he was sounding a mystic chord between Australia’s inheritance of parliamentary democracy and those who had spilt blood for both nation and Empire. Curtin’s nervousness in delivering the speech was apparent when he noted that ‘it does not appear to be necessary to say very much today’ other than to acknowledge that the building would incorporate as much the record of the war in which the people were then engaged as it would the ‘records of what happened 25 years ago’. It was as if he could barely bring himself to utter the word ‘war’. Nevertheless, the speech sanctified the broader connection between Anzac sacrifice and Australian Britishness. ‘The memorial’, said Curtin, ‘would give continuity to the Anzac tradition’ and ‘uninterruption to the basic impulses of the nation’. Its symbolism, he affirmed, ‘is associated with the very basic ways of life of the people of Australia and of the whole British race’. The language was a world away from his scorching denunciations of war and conscription that fuelled his political activism in 1914– 1918 and filled his editorial space at the Westralian Worker in the 1920s. But they speak eloquently of the remarkable transformation that had overtaken Curtin and the Labor Party now that they were leading the nation in a time of war.

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4

‘Practical Empire patriots’ London, 1944 In this war, as you well know, the backbone of the nation is in the workshop and the factory. The workers of Australia have made that backbone a very real thing and they have done so because they have a wholesale conviction of the justice of Britain’s cause. They are with you in this struggle because they are assured that everything they regard as being worthwhile is at stake. Bone of your bone, the workers of Australia are kindred. They are of your stock. Their forbears came from England and from Ireland, and from Scotland, and from Wales. They inherit the ties of blood and grace and tongue that have joined British people together for centuries. Australia is a British land of one race and one tongue. It is a land in which people come from the British Isles to carve out, in freedom and equality, an opportunity to make for themselves 84

and their children a better and freer life.1

In April 1942 John Curtin made one of his many broadcasts to the people of Britain, a call of solidarity from the leader of a loyal dominion to the war-weary population of the ‘mother-country’. In this ‘comradely message of united endeavour’ from the Australian labour movement to its British counterpart, he drew on the imagery of Britannic nationalism, invoking a shared language and lineage, history and heritage. The workers of Australia were as one with their ideological soul mates in the United Kingdom, and the ‘British land’ of Australia remained the beacon for a ‘better and freer’ Britain. The broader message was simple and irrefutable: when the war challenged Australia to define itself in a world of nations, Curtin replied at once, defining Australians as a British people and the nation as a proud and integral part of a united Empire. A fortnight later, he remarked in another broadcast that ‘We are practical Empire patriots, and practical democrats’. By laying the stress on the ‘practical’ he was giving voice to a language of Britishness that Labor could make its own, one which underlined the benefits to Australia and avoided the flowery imperial oratory for which he had no patience. He even lauded the fact that Australia had been ‘the first Empire people to send their men away from their shores to fight for the Empire’,2 words unthinkable for a Labor leader to have even contemplated uttering in the 1930s. Over the course of his wartime prime ministership, as he an even more definitive form to this idea of practical imperial fraternity. At the time of this broadcast the country and its leaders had come face to face with what they had long feared: an attack by a Curtin’s British race patriotism. He said that he ‘felt intensely the

These were stirring words for dark and foreboding times. As the

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horror of a Japanese invasion because of the incompatibility of race

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hostile Asian power. The coming of the Japanese crisis had fired

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wrestled with the demands of office, John Curtin sought to give

Australian correspondent for the Round Table observed, the story

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and blood’.3 The fall of Singapore in February 1942 represented ‘Australia’s Dunkirk’ and he declared open the ‘Battle for Australia’.

of Australia in the first half of 1942 was that of ‘a people painfully adjusting itself to an unimagined danger’.4 The transition from party leadership to prime minister amidst such challenging circumstances was not an easy one for Curtin. Towards the end of his first year in office he confided to Nelson Johnson, the American Minister in Canberra, that ‘no one who could have foreseen the burdens and the disasters that fate had in store would have willingly undertaken government leadership’. Writing to President Franklin D Roosevelt following this discussion, Johnson observed that Curtin’s entire adult life had been dedicated to the problems and politics of Labor, a career absorbed by ‘the internal problems of Australia’. It was ‘doubtful whether he [was] yet conscious of the enlarged opportunity which Australia and its people are destined to play in the future, either as part of the British Empire or as a member of a great group of freedom-loving peoples in the theatre of the Pacific’. Curtin, he added, had never been a ‘happy warrior’, noting that in his speeches he tended to ‘chide and threaten, rather than lead’.5 There is much to be said for Johnson’s portrait. Having done all he could to avoid entangling the country in ‘European quagmires’, Curtin now found himself with responsibility for leading the war effort. As ever, he still had to keep one eye on a party that remained prone to discord and disunity. That it was also a time of great tension and strain in relations between the Australian Government and British leaders cannot be underestimated, and the much celebrated ‘cable battles’ in which Curtin locked horns with Churchill over the deployment of Australian troops have been well documented.6 Where the British

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prime minister wanted some of the Australian troops stationed

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in the Middle East to reinforce British efforts in Burma, Curtin insisted on them being brought back to defend Australia. Out of these events sprung much of the mythology of Curtin as ‘Saviour of Australia’ – to use the title of Norman E Lee’s populist 1983 biography. Still, however, these protracted and bitter conflicts over the prosecution of the war prompted no serious talk in Australia of separation or republicanism. Only two months after the clash with

Churchill, Curtin was telling an audience in Perth that ‘We are in the South what the motherland is in the north’.7 Or, as he put it another way during a broadcast over the BBC, ‘Australia is a great Bastion of Empire . . . We represent you here . . . Australia is proud of its sonship to the Motherland’.8 Curtin’s political opponents, however, took these sentiments of imperial affection with a grain of salt. They were depicted as merely the nervous twitchings of an inexperienced and unworldly Labor administration trying to find a surer grip on the reins of government. Paul Hasluck recalled the Labor ministry had been ‘in a state of jitters when the bad news came’ concerning the fall of Singapore, while Owen Dixon, Australia’s Minister to the United States, had told Hasluck in early 1943 that the government were ‘a pusillanimous crew’.9 But for sheer spite neither could outdo the former prime minister, Robert Menzies. Speaking confidentially to the American Consul General at the Australian Club in Melbourne in March 1942, Menzies made no secret of his contempt for Labor and its ‘British’ credentials. Asked about the progress of the war effort in Australia he conceded that he would be much happier about the war if Australia was not being run by the present government. ‘They are scum – positive scum’ . . . one trouble with Curtin is that at heart he is an isolationist and wants to defend Australia that whereas a year and a half ago only 5 per cent of the people of Australia were anti-British, now over 50 per cent are anti-British. British blundering in Malaya and British

It is tempting to see this outburst as little more than a case of a

request of the government – to make to a foreign diplomat. But his

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high-profile politician letting off steam in an unguarded moment.

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inability to come to the aid of Australia, are the causes.

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only, letting the rest of the Empire go. He (Menzies) said

extremism knew no limits: Menzies proceeded to say that ‘if the

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Even so, it was an extraordinary statement for an Australian politician – especially one serving on the Advisory War Council at the

Japanese invaded a part of Australia’ the Labor Government would ‘revolt against Britain, declare their independence, and try to make Australia a second United States. The Labor group has this in the back of their minds’.10 Much of this excitable windbaggery can of course be attributed to Menzies’ prolonged difficulties in accepting his own political demise, as well as the conviction that only his side of politics could manage the affairs of state and Empire. Yet this was merely a more unvarnished version of what he wrote weeks later in the British press about the rumoured disquiet in Australian political and public circles concerning the events at Singapore: that there was much ‘whispered anti-British agitation of a poisonous kind . . . going on’. Such grumbling, however, he dismissed as a ‘skin irritation, a sort of eczema of war’.11 But this attempt to infer that habitual disagreement was part and parcel of Anglo-Australian relations fell short. It could not disguise the hysterical rantings of a wounded and dejected political beast. By the middle of 1943, as the country prepared for a federal election, it was clear that the tide of the war had turned for the better, to the point where Curtin was being forced to rebut accusations that he had been overstating the dimension of the crisis facing the nation.12 He now had the chance to take on the role of statesman and give serious attention to the role that Australia would play in the post-war world. It was during this period that his thinking about foreign affairs, while still having to tread carefully around party sensitivities, could carry with it a certain prime ministerial authority. Moreover, he had at his disposal the expertise and experience of the public service professionals. In short, it was perhaps

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the first time he could deal with national defence and foreign pol-

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icy on its own terms and shape the agenda in his own distinctive way. In doing so he became part of a broader debate occurring in London and other Empire capitals about how Britain was going to maintain its post-war power and influence alongside that of the United States and the Soviet Union. Richard Toye has shown that Churchill viewed the concept of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ as ‘one way to preserve British influence in a world in which growing

American power was a reality’.13 Thus imperial unity of the kind that followed the outbreak of war in 1939, and the material and psychological support that the dominions afforded to Britain in the 12 months following June 1940, was thus thought by some to constitute the lynchpin of Britain’s claims to be one of the ‘Big Three’. Or, in the words of British conservative politician Duff Cooper, the British Commonwealth was the epitome of interdependence, the very model of ‘binding together a vast community of peoples’. Other Empire enthusiasts in London were giving speeches emphasising that a more united, more closely integrated Empire was a prerequisite for Britain maintaining a powerful voice in world affairs.14 As John Darwin has concluded, the ‘renewed talk amongst British leaders of imperial unity and a common foreign policy’ around this time ‘may have owed something to Curtin’.15 For the Labor prime minister the idea of an Empire Council – a body that would provide for full and continuous consultation between London and the dominions, and which would circulate around the Empire – seemed to be the only and obvious answer to the problems thrown up by the war. He could not believe that the Empire should be able to accomplish the protection of all parts of the British world if only the right policies and processes were adopted. In speeches and statements from June to December 1943 Curtin repeated British invitations to come to London for a Prime Ministers’ Conference. British officials even began to use Curtin’s own arguments for closer imperial cooperation in encouraging him to accept their invitations.16 The Australian prime minister was no overseas absences could be detrimental to his political health at

Lord Cranborne, in October 1943, ‘I have to proceed some distance

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home. But over and above these concerns, Curtin needed more time

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great fan of flying, and he was all too aware of the fact that long

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steadily built a case for his proposals. During this period he refused

further in Australia before I can consider myself able to speak with

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to sell his new policy for the Empire to his domestic constituents. As Curtin told the British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs,

authority for the Australian people’ on the shape that possible new imperial machinery might take.17 For Curtin a central part of this process was convincing some in his own party that the days of isolationism were over. He had already proceeded some distance in changing the party’s mindset on these questions. Against much vociferous internal opposition, Curtin was successful in introducing conscription for overseas service in the South Western Pacific theatre in January 1943. Speaking to the NSW Labor Party Conference later that year, Curtin told his colleagues that ‘The world can never be the same in the years to come . . . in problems of defence and security – as it was in the year before this war started . . . for all the years to come, so long as this land remains free, it can be free only by Australians being willing to be a policeman in the Pacific. We must be a Pacific power for our own security’.18 But, as Curtin would later add, it was also about being a Pacific power for the purposes of safeguarding Australia as a trustee for British civilisation in that part of the world. Australia had to ‘have available the advantage of concerted Empire policy if she is to be a power to stand for Democracy in the South Pacific’.19 American diplomats in Canberra were intrigued by this ‘upswing’ in Australian sentiment for the Empire and Great Britain. In their political reporting to Washington they ascribed it to a combination of the circumstances of the war, the rhetorical repertoire of a federal election and a reaction to the presence of large numbers of American troops in Australia. According to this assessment, British victories in North Africa had ‘wiped out the anti-British feeling felt in many quarters after the fall of Singapore and reverses

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in Libya and Egypt’; the election had resulted in a ‘surge of ora-

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tory’ by candidates wishing to show themselves as loyal citizens of the Empire; and the ‘violent enthusiasm’ which had greeted the arrival en masse of American troops to Australia in 1942 had now subsided. But while each of those factors were undoubtedly important, the Americans were closer to the mark when they judged that Australian Britishness – they called it ‘a partly submerged loyalty which always existed’ – was ‘re-emerging’.20 Far from suggesting a

loyalty that ebbed and flowed with the vicissitudes of the war or the theatrics of a federal poll, here was yet further proof that the underlying currents of British race patriotism remained intact. The American officials did not have to wait for too much longer to see this ‘submerged loyalty’ come to the fore. When Curtin provided a confidential briefing to Australian journalists on his plans for an Empire Council, he placed it firmly within the context of rebuilding British honour and credibility in Australia’s part of the world: British prestige suffered a bad knock in the Far East. I not only regret that but I want to retrieve it . . . The British Commonwealth of Nations has got to have economic strength as well as the unity which the throne symbolises. We have got to keep in mind all the time the sovereign symbol with autonomous rights. What I have in mind is the development of common ideas so that these sovereignties will understandingly promote joint welfare without sacrificing their own interests and position. I want to develop a practical fraternity among constituted members of the Empire for dealing with the world at large and with themselves. Perhaps that sounds a loose sort of show, but the fact is that the ties which unite the British Commonwealth are of that nature and are no less weak because that is the case.21

of sentiment and self-interest that had characterised the history of Anglo-Australian relations from the late 19th century. It was also another more precise indication of what he meant by defining was his desire to make the Empire work better for Australia and

mechanism for bringing the Empire closer together would detract

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to show that this could be done in a way that would not make

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himself and his people as ‘practical Empire patriots’: its essence

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By ‘practical fraternity’ Curtin attempted to marry the two worlds

neither from national sovereignty nor autonomy. But the comments

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the country subordinate to Britain. Curtin was making it very clear that the restoration of British pride in the ‘Far East’ and any

also suggested an emerging difficulty for Curtin in making the case for greater cooperation. This tension between the respect for the sovereign rights of individual nations and a desire for the cultivation of ‘common ideas’ for the Empire would prove difficult to resolve. Like those before him, Curtin seemed to think that the creation of new machinery was a fait accompli. His contention that ‘Machinery to give effect to what I am sure will be recognised as an inevitable post-war development, would appear to be easy to devise’ showed that he had not looked at past experience and as a result did not foresee the difficulties that would arise from his proposals.22 Many other Commonwealth leaders and commentators would view it as neither ‘inevitable’ nor ‘easy’. For them Curtin’s plan defied the pattern of developments in the British Commonwealth during the 1920s and 1930s which stressed the right of all dominions to have their own foreign policy. At the same time that he was setting out his plans for the post-war Empire, some of Curtin’s decisions at home were pushing the party’s patience to the limit. When it was announced in midNovember 1943 that the King’s own brother, the Duke of Gloucester, was to be Australia’s next Governor-General, the appointment was greeted with almost universal applause in the national press. The prime minister who in his earlier life had deplored conservative fawning over visiting royals might even have allowed himself a wry smile at the editorial advice offered by The Age to the incoming viceroy. Given the need for austerity in a time of war, the Melbourne daily asked that the Duke and Duchess fulfil their duties in an ‘unassuming way’. It was felt that ‘a glamorous replica of

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stately ceremonials in dress, styles, ranks and appurtenances would

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run counter to the general taste and sentiment’.23 In Britain, the Yorkshire Post speculated that by ‘casting overboard an old Australian labour tradition’ of selecting only Australians for the post, the government had ‘effectively dispose[d] of fears that Australia may cast in her lot with the United States’.24 But any attempts to invest the announcement with its own geostrategic significance failed to convince. In some Labor circles,

disbelief and derision was the order of the day. The president of the Victorian ALP carpeted the prime minister for violating the party’s constitution which held that an Australian citizen should be chosen (as former Labor prime minister James Scullin had done by appointing Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian to hold the post, in 1931), while the Australian Worker lamented it as a ‘sad disappointment to thousands of Australians whose loyalty to the Throne is unquestionable but who also have a profound affection for their own country, for their people and for their own democratic constitutions’.25 Curtin had apparently not even consulted Cabinet on the appointment, a tactic which only added fuel to the fire. Evatt supported Curtin’s decision in public – calling the King’s brother a ‘symbol in Australia of the whole Empire’ – but he told his colleagues privately that it was a ‘lousy’ appointment.26 Arthur Calwell unburdened himself to the First Secretary of the American Legation in Canberra, speculating that Curtin had only appointed the Duke because he thought ‘the presence of a member of the Royal Family would influence the despatch of British divisions and equipment to the Pacific’. He believed that the Duke would only last two years before being recalled to London, thus allowing an Australian to be appointed. Calwell himself had already told the incumbent Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, that it was ‘Gowrie’s duty to inform the King that his brother had the reputation among Australians as being a drunkEmbassy’s view of Calwell as ‘violently anti-English’, but they also recorded Calwell’s musings on the post-war world, where he considered that

third-rate Power. [Calwell] said he did not see why England did not retire gracefully and submit to the center of gravity

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if the war lasted two more years England would be a

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ard and a sadist’. These comments only confirmed the American

Even in the midst of a seemingly ‘anti-English’ rage, Calwell could

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give voice to the idea that the future of the British race was in the

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of the British Empire being established somewhere else, such as in Canada or Australia.27

dominions. The suggestion therefore that this vice-regal appointment was an example of Curtin ‘hosing down the nationalism that some of his colleagues wished to foster’ does not stand up to scrutiny.28 Indeed, Calwell was on the receiving end of another rebuttal from Curtin – in December 1943 the prime minister had permitted him, as Minister for Information, to allow cinemas to play ‘Advance Australia Fair’ ‘or any other anthem if he thinks it will help build morale’. But he was quick to add that he did not officially recognise ‘Advance Australia Fair’ because he ‘did not know of any anthem, other than the national anthem, “God Save the King”, which has been adopted as the Australian anthem’.29 Curtin’s approval of Calwell’s request was not a mark of his Australian nationalism. ‘Advance Australia Fair’, in any case, was a hymn to Australia’s Britishness and its ‘British’ soul.

Steering a ‘safe course’ in Empire cooperation In giving form and substance to his ideas for an Empire Council, Curtin relied heavily on Sir Frederick Shedden, Secretary of the Department of Defence. As his principal defence and foreign policy adviser, Shedden enjoyed Curtin’s full confidence.30 If Curtin himself had only been a distant observer of the Commonwealth’s evolution throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Shedden had lived and breathed it. Indeed his views on the Empire and imperial defence policy had been shaped during his studies at the Imperial Defence College in London in the late 1920s, where he gained a reputation for tackling his work with ‘acuteness and zeal’.31 It was during this

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time that Shedden established a close and lasting friendship with

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the Secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey – indeed, Shedden modelled himself to such an extent on this British civil servant that he was subsequently nicknamed the ‘pocket Hankey’.32 Hankey for his part had been a long and vocal proponent of greater cooperation in imperial defence, and within this framework Shedden had been a consistent advocate of the need to put in place machinery that would allow Australia to play

a greater role in shaping imperial strategy. As David Horner has shown, these ideas guided Shedden for much of his professional career and constituted ‘the template against which he tendered advice to the government’.33 Hankey himself wrote in 1946 that Curtin’s ‘practical proposals’ on closer imperial cooperation were ‘all much in my own line of thought’.34 Paul Hasluck was dismissive of Shedden’s views of imperial defence and thought them relics from the era of the old imperial conferences.35 Hasluck was not far wide of the mark. Indeed, given some of the suspicions about imperial cooperation which Labor had expressed in the years following the conscription antagonisms, it might have been reasonable to expect that the Labor Party would have had more sympathy with the attitudes that Canada and South Africa were putting forward in the 1920s. But it was Curtin’s address to the Federal Conference of the Australian Labor Party in December 1943 that represented the highpoint in his campaign to win popular and party support for his plan. Drafted by Shedden, it formed the basis of the proposals he took to London in May 1944. Shedden’s detailed briefings to Curtin prior to the conference provided a justification for his vision of the future Empire and the close cooperation which he felt this machinery would ensure. It served to give the prime minister as much an education about the world – and Australia’s place in it – prime minister with a rather limited lesson. In his advice to Curtin, Shedden set out what he saw as the primary purpose of the speech: to enable the prime minister to ‘steer a safe course in the matter of Empire Cooperation’. In laying out grasp that the security of the nation was intimately connected to

tralian community. First and foremost – and here Shedden was

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‘three safeguards, each wider in its scope than the other’: national

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how Curtin might approach the task, Shedden wanted him first to

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as it did a blueprint for the policy. In effect, Shedden furnished the

no doubt looking to engage Curtin’s partisan instincts – came the

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defence, Empire cooperation and the system of collective security. He then outlined the various foreign policy camps within the Aus-

‘isolationists’, who were ‘not enthusiastic about Empire or world cooperation because of the fear of unknown commitments’; second, there were ‘imperialists’ who had ‘looked on the growth of Dominion autonomy as the disintegration of the Empire’. Next came the ‘internationalists’, who would ‘subordinate national sovereignty to a world organisation’. Lastly, Shedden characterised the ‘bulk of the people’ who were largely pragmatic and therefore needed to be won over through a synthesis of these safeguards. Accordingly, Shedden encouraged Curtin to adopt a ‘blended method of approach’ to ensure a measure of support from each of the various camps. But this was more of a rhetorical expedient to make it appear that Curtin could be all things to all people. If the prime minister was to keep on the ‘safe course’ of Empire cooperation, it was imperative that he ‘not frighten the isolationists with the fear of a blank cheque for overseas commitments’ while also showing that ‘Empire cooperation is not antagonistic to international cooperation, but in harmony with it’.36 This advice showed that Shedden did not want the emerging debate on the shape and form of the new post-war order to shroud the core purpose of the speech – the advancement of Curtin’s ideas for an imperial secretariat. Referring to his ‘long study and experience of the working of the machinery’ of Empire and international cooperation, Shedden then urged Curtin quietly but firmly – he labelled it ‘a private plan for your own guidance’ (Shedden’s emphasis) – to ‘seek as your first objective greater cooperation within the British Commonwealth’.37 Shedden’s arguments were grounded in the language of British race patriotism and a commit-

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ment to the Empire as an international way of life. Because of the

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‘greater ties and affinities of interest’ that existed between the peoples of the British Commonwealth than the peoples of the world at large, he put it to Curtin that progress on imperial cooperation was ‘more easily achievable than in the international sphere’. Shedden added that Australia’s voice carried more weight in the Empire than in world councils. As he put it to Curtin subsequently, ‘unity’ expressed through a ‘common policy’ in foreign affairs and defence

is ‘vital if the British peoples are to present a united front and be influential in world affairs’.38 Shedden’s brief survey of Canadian, South African and New Zealand views on the Empire’s future was equally instructive. He depicted Canada’s proximity to the United States as the reason why it was habitually more prone to internationalism, while South Africa, with its Dutch population and Republican element, were ‘wary of commitments in Empire cooperation’. New Zealand, while supportive of Curtin’s ideas, could not be expected to give the lead to the other dominions. Yet the conclusion Shedden reached was not to forewarn Curtin of the potential hurdles he faced in winning wider support for his plan; it was on the need for Australia to take the lead. ‘Any initiative’ on imperial organisation, he argued, ‘must rest with Australia’.39 Shedden’s long experience in these matters was leading him to fall back on the ideas and proposals that he knew best and with which he felt most comfortable. This was the only world he knew. But Shedden could not twist the history of the Commonwealth entirely to suit Curtin’s purposes. He explained that the ‘genius of the British race’ in matters affecting relationships within the Empire had been its reliance on a process of evolution rather than the imposition of hastily created machinery. This had been reflected in the Balfour Declaration. And he reminded Curtin of the unaniWard’s 1911 proposal to create an Empire Advisory Council, a response ‘not surprising in view of the evolution to self-governing status that was proceeding and was ultimately defined by the resolution of 1926’.40 When some British parliamentarians began to rial federation, he urged that ‘the details of [the] proposals . . . be

stymie any Australian push for greater imperial cooperation, and

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outlined as soon as possible, in order that it will be clear that your

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associate Curtin’s statements with Lionel Curtis’ plans for impe-

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mous rejection that greeted New Zealand prime minister Sir Joseph

that South African Prime Minister Smuts preferred more frequent

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ideas are not to be associated with proposals of this nature’.41 Shedden also warned Curtin that the Canadians were again likely to

meetings of the prime ministers rather than new machinery. But it was equally clear that in steering Curtin down this path Shedden himself had refused to accept the implications of the 1920s and 1930s for the British Commonwealth. Nowhere, for example, did he mention the trials and tribulations of Fisher, Deakin, Hughes and Bruce in their efforts to secure a common foreign policy for the Empire. Either he could not bring himself to acknowledge that Curtin’s plans would have no hope of working, or he was trying not to dampen expectations about the proposals on the cusp of them being presented to the Labor conference. On that score, Shedden perhaps knew that what Curtin needed most was a usable Labor foreign and defence policy tradition on which he could build. In the concluding sections of his advice, therefore, Shedden was not addressing Curtin as a prime minister trying to grasp the fundamentals of the post-war world, but Curtin as the leader of a political party that had a credibility problem on the matter of its commitment to the Empire. He wanted to give Curtin at least the appearance of continuity in making his case. Shedden thus put it that the ‘most notable contributions to Australian Defence in peace were made by the Fisher Government’ which brought the Royal Australian Navy into being and instituted compulsory military training for home defence. For Shedden, it meant that Fisher’s vision ‘extended to broad horizons of Empire co-operation’ which were not incompatible with the autonomous control of its own policy and the development of national defence forces. But he did not shy away from telling Curtin that ‘the absence of any reference to British Commonwealth Cooperation in the Defence policy

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put forward by the Labour party at the 1937 elections was one of

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the main causes of its defeat’. He suggested, with the somewhat feigned deference of the supposedly impartial bureaucrat, that ‘it would be a notable thing for the future of the Labour party’ if it were to pass a resolution relating to greater imperial cooperation at the forthcoming conference. Well might he have emphasised the noteworthiness of such a prospect. In his speech to the party conference Curtin did not

appeal to the Fisher legacy but he did adopt – word for word – the history that Shedden had given him. Hasluck remarked that the speech showed ‘unmistakably the mark of Shedden’, and that the prime minister’s use of history read ‘more like the standard texts than like a speech by Curtin’. Hasluck had noted the ‘tentative’ quality of Curtin’s earlier statements on the subject and expressed doubt that Curtin ‘had made himself thoroughly familiar with all aspects of the problem at that stage’. There can be no doubt that Hasluck’s views were tinged with the bitterness of the bureaucrat spurned – his central criticism of the proposals was that Curtin had sidelined both the External Affairs Minister, HV Evatt, and his departmental officials from the policy process, and he described them as ‘out of keeping with departmental thinking in Canberra’.42 But this only highlighted the extent to which Curtin as prime minister was in control of the imperial secretariat idea. In a much broader sense, it showed that even with the rapid growth of a formal Australian foreign affairs machinery in the late 1930s, it was the prime minister who remained in the driving seat in the making of policy, especially policy that affected relations with Britain and the future of the British Commonwealth. Addressing his party colleagues Curtin began the speech with a review of the current situation before turning his attention to the shape of the post-war world. But it did not take him long to hold society of nations’. It had, he said, ‘exemplified to the world how autonomous nations can collaborate on matters of mutual interest’. For Curtin, the pre-war fascination with ‘national experiments’ – Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the New Deal of the British race’s great experiment in a British Commonwealth

were in the midst of transition to a new stage of empire. The first

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based on a free association of nations’ had been overlooked. He then

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in the United States – had meant that the ‘significance and interest

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up the British Commonwealth as the model for any future ‘world

British Empire, he said, ‘related to the early days of colonisation

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laid out his interpretation of the history of the British Empire as it had evolved to the early 1940s, claiming that the British peoples

and came to an end with the revolt of the American colonies’. The ‘Second Empire’ lasted until the Great War; and the ‘Third Empire’ was defined by the Imperial Conference of 1926. But in Curtin’s history the British peoples were on the cusp of a ‘Fourth Empire’, in which the ‘trend’ was ‘to augment an association of independent sovereign peoples by a common policy in matters that concern the Empire as a whole’.43 Curtin wanted to position himself as the architect of the ‘Fourth Empire’ which would finally resolve the question of how the disparate British people could face the world as one and agree on a unified foreign policy for the whole race. It may be that in setting out the plan for his party, Curtin felt the need to put forward a long and detailed case in support of his plan. In addition to his narrative of the ‘Four Empires’, he went to great lengths to lay out the various landmarks in the development of empire cooperation. Throughout this mini-history, Curtin trod a careful path between acknowledging the dominions’ growing responsibilities for self-defence and the corresponding growth in imperial collaboration. Beginning with the decision in 1909 to place the defence forces of each dominion under the control of their own governments, he moved swiftly to the period of the First World War, when the Imperial War Cabinet ‘established the right of the Dominions to participate in the direction of Empire policy’. Curtin did not mention that the 1923 and 1926 conferences had undone the Imperial foreign policy idea that had been embedded in the Imperial War Cabinet, but stressed that they had reaffirmed that the provision of local defence was to be the primary responsibility

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of each part of the Empire. He finished by noting that during the

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‘present war’, dominion prime ministers had been able to participate in the work of the British War Cabinet.44 This responsibility for local defence needed to be combined more effectively with cooperation inside the organic unity of the Empire for the protection of common interests and the security of all. To achieve this latter aim, the essence of Curtin’s new proposals lay in their insistence that Australia’s views should be taken into

account right from the outset in the making of imperial policy. Although existing arrangements to that time provided for regular consultation between the Dominion High Commissioners and the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, there was no formal body that had as its purpose the task of ensuring dominion views were considered before decisions were made. ‘It was this gap’, Nicholas Mansergh notes, ‘that the Imperial Council was intended to fill’.45 Curtin wanted a ‘permanent secretariat’ staffed by ‘men as expert in the problems of peace as those who are expert in war’. It would ‘normally be located in London, but it would be an ambulatory body . . . responsible for seeing to the preparation and presentation of information on subjects to be considered by the [imperial] conference from time to time’. It would also ‘provide the conference with an agency for continuity in its detailed work, which is important, in view of changes which occur in Governments and Prime Ministers’. Implicit in this arrangement was the hope that this intense process of consultation would ensure a common position for the Empire in world affairs. In line with this lengthy account of the history of the British Empire, Curtin asked delegates to the conference to support the following resolution: Participation in the further development of cooperation among the members of the British Commonwealth, the particular, should be subject to the sovereign control of the policy of Australia by its own people, Parliament and Government.

‘delightful example of Curtin’s political draftsmanship’ since he

ger Australian interests and that a common imperial policy had to

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‘asked for authority to cooperate by proposing that cooperation

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Hasluck noted that the wording of the resolution provided a

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nations of the world at large, and the Pacific nations in

be subject to Australians’ consent. It was designed to address the

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should be subject to control’.46 But this wording was aimed primarily at assuring conference members that nothing would endan-

misgivings of the Labor Party arising out of the conscription crisis of 1916–1917 and the subsequent defence policy enshrined in the party’s platform. Curtin adopted Shedden’s draft speech seemingly without reservation. For him it seemed both natural and obvious, and he showed little hesitation in presenting this view of history to his Labor colleagues, despite it being at odds with the evolution of the British Commonwealth since the First World War. Even the most ardent enthusiasts for this kind of imperial unity had given up the cause as hopeless – in fact they had positively embraced the Balfour formula and the status of independent dominion nationhood.47 Yet Curtin saw increased imperial cooperation as ‘inevitable’. Curtin’s proposal received the overwhelming endorsement of his party, with barely a ripple of disagreement in the conference ranks.48 For a party that had torn itself apart over conscription in the First World War, and which had adopted an ‘isolationist’ policy in the 1930s and taken to the 1937 election a policy of continental defence, this was significant. Indeed, for Labor it might be seen as something of a transmogrification. While Curtin was in a stronger political position following his win at the 1943 election, nevertheless he had been giving voice to his British Empire argument prior to that poll and without serious dissent from his party. Curtin’s ideas, the very same that Labor had rejected when Hughes had earlier expounded them, were now seen as a credible means of emphasising the equality of all Britons and their capacity to act as one people in the world. The suggestion that Curtin crafted this speech to win popularity

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has no substance. All the evidence points to the conclusion that he

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had totally embraced Shedden’s view of a ‘Fourth Empire’. Indeed, he was advocating the sorts of plans that would normally have been associated with Labor’s domestic political enemies. Labor’s ‘Empire Spirit’, as political correspondent Ross Gollan noted in his conference review, needed to be taken seriously. ‘As an addition to conventional Labour doctrine of 1917–1939’ the resolution had to be ‘considered a new and shining revelation – a winning post in

the road away from isolationism’. He added that ‘enough shades of Labour thought were represented among delegates to make it clear that any other representative Labour conference would have carried an identical motion’. Only ‘one-tiny working class wing’ had trouble in ‘swallowing the fact that in peace as in war Australia’s destiny is that of a member of the British Commonwealth’.49 Nevertheless, that opposition, in the shape of Jack Lang, the former NSW Premier and long-time Curtin critic, had no hesitation in denouncing Canberra’s ‘new imperialism’. Lang had opposed Curtin’s Empire Council plan from the very moment it was mooted, arguing that it was ‘woolly’ and ‘alien to Labor’s traditional policy to Britain’.50 Following the conference Lang declared that Curtin had ‘walked out on Australia’ and that Labor delegates had more or less ‘swallowed doctrines of imperial conservatism’ that they simply didn’t understand. Then he produced the orthodox Labor critique of such plans, namely that the Empire Council plan (along with Curtin’s decision to ‘abolish the anti-conscription pledge’) was merely a stalking horse for Imperial Federation: The Imperialists welcome this as a golden opportunity to get their long wanted Imperial Federation. Never has an Australian Government been in such a sycophantic mood. Whenever a Kittyhawk flies over Canberra, Officialdom fervently murmurs ‘God Bless America’. On the mutter ‘God Bless England’. Should anybody be heard to say ‘God Bless Australia’ he is scowled at as a heretical isolationist. An anachronism from the horse and buggy age.51

Australian’ and should henceforth call themselves the ‘Imperial

difficult it was for some to accept that the war, far from stimulating

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Labor Party’. But the former premier’s characteristic blend of

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For Lang, Curtin and his party had become ‘ashamed of the name

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rare occasions when a Spitfire appears they just as fervently

a Labor-inspired rush towards ‘independence’, had instead forced it

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unyielding spite and radical nationalist ridicule itself offered no solutions to Australia’s post-war situation, and instead showed just how

to shift back towards a reinvigorated concept of imperial defence.52 In other columns of the Labor press, the mood was one of sullen resignation, as one diplomatic observer noted, the party newspapers were ‘not over enthusiastic – their editors do not like seeing their idols broken so rapidly and with so little ceremony’. After the conference the Sydney Standard, the ‘Weekly Organ of the Australian Labor Party’ carried supportive articles about Curtin’s ‘statesmanship’, but it also published the reactions of a ‘Special Writer’ who outlined an article which ‘he said he had intended to write should the conference have gone the way he hoped’. According to officials in the American Legation in Canberra, ‘in it the writer said he would have argued for an Australia free from all organic links with other countries, an Australia proudly self-reliant without imported Governors and Governors-General, an Australia, moreover, bent upon the creation of a culture not so derivative from distant lands’: I would have ventilated the view . . . that our imperial ties should not be tightened by the provision of new and ‘permanent’ machinery, but rather should be loosened and gradually reduced until only love and the spirit of kinship bound us to the mother nation overseas.53 It was hardly the clarion call of independence, but it does suggest that Curtin’s plan rankled with certain sections of the party, who saw in it an abandonment of independence. The point remains, however, that this particular grievance did not make it into print. Elsewhere the mainstream press came mostly to praise Curtin. The Sydney Morning Herald argued that the prime minister was on Commonwealth has been away from constitutional rigidity . . . it may be that this process has gone as far as it can safely go, and that, under the impulse of the war and faced with the problems of a new

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the right side of history, judging that whilst the ‘evolution of the

taken great heart from this assessment, but he might also have

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noted the editorial’s warning that ‘the pace cannot be forced’.

world, we are about to witness a reaction towards a more closely knit and cooperative British Commonwealth’.54 Curtin would have

Still, as it watched Curtin’s proposals develop, the Australian press routinely noted that he was ‘deadly earnest’ in pursuit of them, and that his advocacy proved that his ‘thinking on external relationships has advanced rapidly during the critical years of his national leadership’.55 In the wake of his speech to the Labor conference he was praised for his ‘sound history’, ‘practical realism’ and for lifting Australian politics ‘on to the plane of a spacious Commonwealth outlook’. Curtin’s arguments for closer imperial cooperation were being greeted as a welcome and timely product of his leadership of the nation in war. In this view, the conflict and the pressures of office had made him see with dramatic clarity that Australia, in the words of a Herald editorial, ‘can hope to survive as a small white nation on the fringes of Asia only by close cooperation with the other members of the British Empire’.56 That most newspapers expressed ‘surprise’ at Curtin’s ‘conversion’ itself says much about the way in which, despite his repeated assertions to the contrary, he had remained to some extent suspect on the question of imperial loyalty and his commitment to Empire. Given the ALP’s position on defence matters since 1918, there was perhaps good reason for these ongoing doubts. The Opposition leader, Robert Menzies, was not so much sceptical as incredulous. He could not treat Curtin other than as an impostor in the world of high imperial politics – a veritable ‘Johnnyconference speech as ‘nothing new’ and a ‘complete disappointment’. He could not view the proposals as anything but a cynical attempt by Curtin to recast himself as an Empire statesman. In Menzies’ eyes, all Curtin had done was ‘re-state at great length for many years’. But Menzies no more understood how loyalty to

comed the secretariat proposal, Menzies concluded that Curtin was

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Britain was the culture of Labor than that his own side’s assertive

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the principles upon which empire relations had been maintained

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come-lately’ to the art of imperial cooperation. He dismissed the

merely ‘theorising’ about these matters – thus depicting them as

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and sometimes uncritical embrace of British leadership was itself a partisan expression of Britishness. Therefore, even though he wel-

lacking proper respect for and belief in the ‘mother-country’. For him the habits of consultation and collaboration were both natural and well established: ‘our relations with Empire countries had for many years been based upon the view that there should be a full exchange of information, and that wherever possible knowledge should be obtained in time to express opinions before decisions were taken’. Menzies seemed to assume that this had been the case, when clearly it was not.57 Evatt, however, continued to be kept very much at arms length from the process. When Shedden briefed Curtin before the signing of the ANZAC Agreement in January 1944 (in which Australia and New Zealand asserted their rights to act as principals for the British Commonwealth in the South West and South Pacific, without advising either Washington and London beforehand of their intentions), he proposed that Curtin refrain from giving too much away about his broader ideas for the Empire. Shedden confessed to Curtin that his ‘main concern’ was to ‘keep the initiative on Empire Cooperation in the widest sense with you and give you something specific to submit to the Imperial Conference’.58 This, of course, was as much a tactic for gaining support at the forthcoming London conference as it was about keeping the topic off the table in discussions with the New Zealanders and away from Australian External Affairs officials. Shedden, in any case, felt that the advantages of any support from New Zealand could be offset by criticisms from the other dominions. But it again showed the insistence on Shedden’s part to maintain the prime minister’s place as the driving force of the nation’s foreign and defence policy, especially in its relations

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with Britain and the Empire.59

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The Empire’s response British officials were initially receptive to Curtin’s policy. But because they had seen them so many times before, they were more interested in how these ideas might make Australia more useful for British purposes and interests than they were in focussing on the precise proposals at hand. In particular, they saw the ideas as

a useful window onto Australia’s attitude to how Britain would fare alongside the United States in terms of Australian interests and affection. In London, where an intense debate was taking place about the nature of British power in the post-war world, Curtin’s ideas were seen as an indication of growing dominion impatience with American arrogance. Cranborne noted that Curtin’s stance showed ‘how important it is for us to adopt a sympathetic attitude towards the Dominion’s proposals for more effective machinery of Inter-Imperial collaboration’. He judged that the dominions were ‘all becoming exasperated by the autocratic attitude of the United States, and this may well be the psychological moment to attach them closer to us’.60 The former foreign secretary and then British Ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, went a good deal further than his bureaucratic masters in London. In a speech in Toronto in January 1944, which he did not clear with the Imperial War Cabinet, he showed much sympathy for Curtin’s position. Halifax argued that despite the trend in the Commonwealth being towards equality of status, ‘equality of function’ – and by this he meant equality in decision making – lagged badly behind. He held that the dominions had to have a greater share in the making of imperial policy.61 This situation had to be fixed because he saw that Britain’s status as a great power was at risk. But Halifax’s call too fell flat on Canadian and South African ears. They did not want equalSmuts might have agreed on the need for new measures to sustain the Commonwealth in the post-war period, but he was far more concerned with how the Commonwealth could be used to shore up Britain’s weakening power.62 Only New Zealand prime minister of the Curtin proposals. But even he noted that there were already

High Commissioner to Australia, Major General Victor Odlum,

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daily consultations with Britain on all matters of importance.63

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Peter Fraser offered what seemed to be unqualified endorsement

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ity in decision making because they did not want a common policy.

wrote Curtin a personal note from his new post in Chungking,

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As for the Canadians, it did not take long for Curtin to see that they too would be opposed to his proposals. The former Canadian

heaping praise on him for ‘giving the lead’ to and ‘setting the pace’ on the question of a ‘British Empire Council’. But these were the sweeteners before the medicine. He then stressed that Curtin needed to ‘answer one critical question’ for his proposals to make headway, namely ‘what is to be the authority of the [Empire] Council over the Dominions?’ For good measure, he underlined the point that, although Canada was determined to remain within the Empire, ‘she has no intention of being told by others, even though they may be members of the same family, what she is to do unless she has previously agreed that she will accept the direction’. This was why the Canadian Government had backed the demands for autonomy and backed away from the idea of a common imperial policy.64 Of course Curtin, and Shedden for that matter, had avoided this difficult question. Curtin could only reply by stating that the body he envisaged would possess no such authority, being ‘merely consultative’. But he again made the connection between his present arguments and the reaction which greeted his 1941 appeal to the United States: I may say to you that had there been such a Council in existence, my appeals to the United States would not have been subjected to the misunderstanding in Australia and in Great Britain which marked them because the facts would have been better within the knowledge of Canada and of the United Kingdom for instance than appeared to have been the case.65 What he meant was that if this ideal system had been in position

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at the time, by its nature each side would have understood what

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the other was doing and would have reacted sympathetically. There would have been a realisation that such an approach to a foreign power was not a danger to the unity of the Empire. The significance of this source cannot be understated. Previously, Australian scholars have only had Curtin’s public statements refuting the misreading of his ‘Look to America’.66 Here, in private, he was saying that it had all been a complete ‘misunderstanding’.

Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King made no secret that he was satisfied with the existing arrangements for consultation. He noted that there was already a ‘continuing conference of cabinets of the commonwealth’ dealing with matters of common concern, and the Dominions Office was already carrying out many of the functions of the proposed secretariat. One Canadian editorial, sensing in Curtin’s plan the longstanding Australian desire for a common foreign policy, described Curtin’s plan as a ‘step along the road to yesterday’.67 King also had Canada’s relationship with the United States uppermost in his mind. The Australian High Commissioner in Ottawa, Sir William Glasgow, had already pointed out to officials in Canberra that Canada would likely offer scant support for Curtin’s plans, since Canadians were ‘very unwilling to take any steps which may be interpreted by the United States as a “gangingup” against it by the United Kingdom and the Dominions’. For Canada, the Commonwealth should not be seen to be competing with Washington but cooperating with it. Glasgow reminded Canberra that Ottawa had opposed the idea of an imperial secretariat as proposed at Imperial Conferences in 1907 and 1911 on the grounds that such a body might begin to acquire executive functions. He concluded that ‘the same fears still exist’.68 Thus, by the time he arrived in London for the Prime Ministers’ Conference in April 1944, Curtin would have been well It is perhaps for this reason that the British High Commissioner to Australia, Sir Ronald Cross, depicted Curtin before his departure from Canberra as being only ‘hopeful of progress’ and ‘not at all expansive’ on his forthcoming visit. Curtin had apparently told isters was the desirability of having greater imperial contact and

Churchill and Smuts. Moreover, Cross claimed that Curtin ‘has

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consultation in the formulation of policy’. Cross felt that the lack

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Cross that ‘“all” he had to “put up” to the meeting of Prime Min-

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aware that his vision was unlikely to attract widespread support.

probably not habitually thought much about the sort of things he

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of confidence he discerned in Curtin stemmed from a nervousness as to how he would stand up alongside statesmen the calibre of

will be called upon to discuss in London, and he probably lacks the confidence that comes from knowledge and definite opinions.’69 The War Cabinet’s Committee on Preparations for the London Conference had been studying Curtin’s public statements and recognised that the Australian prime minister’s essential objective was to ‘secure for Australia a more effective voice in the framing of the policy’. It understood that Curtin’s emphasis was ‘ensuring, as far as possible, the Australian view is listened to and accepted’. Noting the contributions to the debate by King and Smuts, it foresaw that there would likely be ‘no general acceptance’ of Curtin’s suggestions. But, being good bureaucrats, the Committee suggested a compromise which ‘while not wholly unacceptable to Mr MacKenzie King, might go some way to meet Mr Curtin’s points’. These included a regular annual meeting of foreign ministers and formalisation of the meetings between the Dominion High Commissioners and the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs. As for Curtin’s proposed permanent secretariat, British officials were not entirely opposed, but they recognised that it had failed in the past and was likely to fail this time as well. There was a tone of embarrassment that such ideas had to be rejected yet again. Accordingly they proposed to have up their sleeve the suggestion that the dominions attach officials to their High Commissions with the function of maintaining close liaison with the Foreign Office, Cabinet Offices and the Joint Planning Committee of the Chiefs of Staff. Although Australia already had such officers – and other dominions had been offered similar arrangements in 1942 – the British judged a renewal of the offer would at least demonstrate

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their ‘goodwill’.70

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But the British still wanted to be prepared for possible attacks by one or more of the dominion prime ministers regarding Britain’s ‘alleged failure on occasion to consult Commonwealth Governments before taking important decisions here’. In this it saw Curtin as ‘the most likely aggressor’. Whitehall officials were well aware of Curtin’s displeasure at not being consulted before the issuing of the communique´ arising from the 1943 Cairo Conference,

where British and American leaders had failed to consult Australia on decisions relating to the Pacific, especially where this concerned the conduct of the war against Japan. But they cited the January 1944 ANZAC Agreement as one way of rebutting any ‘plain speaking on our alleged shortcomings’, since it had been ‘publicised without prior consultation with us’. They interpreted the complaints made by Australia’s High Commissioner to London, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, at being excluded from a recent decision concerning British policy on Siam, as ‘a typically small and unimportant incident of a kind which recurring from time to time tends to create in the slightly suspicious heads of Dominion Governments a feeling completely divorced from reality that we are neglecting them’.71 Curtin arrived in the UK on 29 April 1944 after an official visit to the United States where he had discussions with President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.72 En route to London, he stopped briefly in Limerick, Ireland, remarking in a letter to his wife that he was only ‘60 miles from where my parents were born’. On his first day in wartime London, though tired and suffering from a cold, he toured the bombed areas, including around St Paul’s Cathedral, and observed that the ‘scarred city has a queer impression’. In the afternoon he and Shedden drove to Maidenhead on the upper reaches of the Thames where he ‘saw the winding the sunshine’.73 Amidst all the meetings, conferences, press conferences and speeches, Curtin’s time in Britain contained all the classic ingredients of an Australian prime minister’s visit to the ‘mothercountry’: dinners and lunches at Buckingham Palace with the Roywith Churchill and cricket at Lords. Curtin apparently told his staff

Elizabeth’.74 In addition to being sworn in as a Privy Councillor –

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that he was particularly impressed that ‘His Majesty had brought

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als, lunch with the Lord Mayor of London, weekends at Chequers

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hedge-bordered lanes, the grass, the blossoms & the people out in

only Deakin before him had rejected this honorific – he received

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along his family to meet leaders of the Empire family’ and was reportedly ‘most impressed by the unaffected charm of Princess

the Freedom of the City of London and also had conferred on him an Honorary Degree by the University of Cambridge.75 Although Curtin is widely believed to have eschewed opportunities to mix with the British rank and file, one press report maintained he was ‘known to millions of British people, thanks to the happy impression created by his few public speeches’.76 Although he may have tried to play down much of the red carpet treatment, it was part of the very fabric of such visits, and cannot but have made an impact on him. But it most certainly did not deflect him from the task at hand. At the Prime Minister’s Meeting Curtin reminded his British hosts of the crisis that his country had faced in meeting the Japanese threat. In his opening statement he made no apology for asking for American assistance when Australia had been ‘seriously threatened’ by Japan. The result was that a ‘Continent which was an integral part of the British Empire, and was occupied and defended by British people, had been held through a period of grave peril’. The acceptance of this assistance from the United States had ‘in no way affected the Australians’ deep sense of oneness with the United Kingdom’.77 But there was a lesson to be learnt for Australians from this moment of ‘peril’, one which Curtin hoped to underline in presenting his memorandum on closer imperial cooperation. When that time came, however, his proposals were met with a studied indifference. Churchill and Smuts were not even present at the session in which Curtin presented his memorandum, having been summoned to a briefing for the Normandy landings that would

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take place just over a month later. Hankey believed that Curtin was

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‘so hurt’ by their absence that ‘he did not develop his full case on the proposals, and the discussion degenerated into a barging match between him and Mackenzie King’.78 King certainly stonewalled Curtin from the outset, arguing that these were not decisions that could be taken while the war was still in progress, and that he could not support any changes without the backing of the Canadian Parliament. He had already told Smuts early in the conference that

he thought any talk of imperial unity was a ‘damn nonsense’, while at a dinner hosted by Churchill at Downing Street for the visiting prime ministers Smuts had reciprocated – telling King that ‘all this business of Empire, unity etc . . . was a thing of the past . . . it did not belong to this particular time’.79 When it came to the crunch even New Zealander Peter Fraser offered only lukewarm support. But the minutes of the meeting show that Curtin largely stuck to his script. He again emphasised that the present system of consultation was not ‘ideal’, pointing to the decision taken by the British and Americans in December 1941 to ‘provide for the defeat of Germany first’. This had only been conveyed to Canberra in March 1942. By that time, Curtin stressed, Singapore had fallen and the Japanese were in New Guinea. Referring explicitly to Australia’s request for a greater role in the formulation of policy upon the outbreak of war with Japan, and that ‘certain steps should be taken to this end’, Curtin went on to point out that ‘without full knowledge of the essential facts it was impossible for the Australian Government to take stock of its own obligations, and of the distribution of its own war effort’. Furthermore, if the government made requests for assistance, ‘and such assistance could only be given by the sacrifice of an essential requirement elsewhere, the Australian Government were entitled to know this in advance’. This was ‘a matter which successive Governments in plain-speaking way of making his case for unity of policy. Curtin did show some awareness of the opposition to his proposals, dropping his use of the term ‘Empire Secretariat’ – since he recognised that it had aroused ‘anxiety’ and created ‘misunderstandings’. agreement from London that, in addition to the daily meetings that

The rest of his proposals were quietly interred in that most bureau-

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Dominion High Commissioners had with the Secretary of State for

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But it was all to no avail. Curtin left London only with the

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Australia had agreed upon’.80 It was a long-winded but nevertheless

cratic of graveyards – a technical committee.81 He returned to

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Dominion Affairs, they should have a monthly meeting with the prime minister – yet even that practice too soon fell into abeyance.

Australia via the United States, where one British official noted he was in a state of ‘acute disappointment’ at his failure to achieve anything meaningful on his proposals.82 A few weeks later in Ottawa, Mackenzie King gloated to the American Ambassador that the conference had been a ‘great source of satisfaction’ to him, since ‘Mr Fraser, Mr Curtin and himself, and, indeed, much to his surprise, General Smuts, all had very much the same view – the Empire had died with Rudyard Kipling’.83 American intelligence analysts in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA, were more sanguine in their appraisal of Curtin’s aims: Mr Curtin is not aiming at Imperial Federation, which appears to be Ottawa’s impression. His scheme, as the London Times points out, does not necessarily presuppose a common foreign policy for the Commonwealth. But it does afford those Dominions desiring it the hope of a more effective voice in the shaping of policy . . . Mr Curtin was probably thinking in terms of power politics. He may well have hoped that the degree of Imperial centralisation and unity which he envisaged would operate to create a British imperial power bloc comparable to the Russian and American colossi. Conceding that such ideas might well have appealed to Churchill and Smuts, the OSS analysts noted, however, that neither of the two leaders ‘thought it wise to emphasise publicly Imperial considerations based on power politics’.84

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The rebuttal did nothing, however, to weaken Curtin’s pas-

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sionate commitment to Empire. Even in the face of great disappointment at seeing his proposals effectively shelved – Curtin showed once again that for Australian leaders, the powerful urgings of British race patriotism made it difficult for them to bring their disagreements with Britain into the open. In his Empire Day speech, broadcast from London only days after the conference concluded, Curtin said:

Numerically, because Australians are over 90 per cent British stock – and in every other aspect, the Australian people are a replica of Britain and the way of life in Britain. In the southern hemisphere 7 000 000 Australians carry on a British community as trustees for the British way of life in a part of the world where it is of the utmost significance to the British-speaking race that such a vast continent should have as its population a people and a form of government corresponding in outlook and in purpose to Britain. He then affirmed that the Prime Ministers’ Conference had put the Empire’s ‘house in order’.85 In a report to parliament upon returning to Canberra Curtin stressed that ‘it is as an integral part of the British Commonwealth that Australia can most influentially express itself in the world organisation’.86 The British Ambassador in Canberra, Sir Ronald Cross, was perhaps overly effusive in his judgements of Curtin’s political standing following his return from the conference. Where he once saw Curtin as being unsure of his stature in the ranks of Commonwealth leaders, he ascertained that he ‘now feels that he is in every sense one of this brotherhood and he rejoices in the fraternal personal relations that it has brought him’. It led Cross to tell London that it could ‘confidently . . . expect that cooperation in the future will be smoother, more sympathetic and visit to London ‘new elements of understanding and cordiality’ had been brought into Anglo-Australian relations. After the discord and rancour of 1942, it was the diplomatic despatch that Cross had longed wished to write. The tone was one almost of jubilation: regarded Curtin ‘as British as Churchill’, and he noted that ‘Mr

British share on the Western Front and gave too much space to that

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Curtin’s first act on resuming the reins of office was to assemble the

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members of the Canberra press gallery had told him that they now

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pliant than it has been in the past’ and that as a result of Curtin’s

of the USA’. Curtin, for his part, told Cross that he felt he was no

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press representatives in Canberra and give them a good drubbing on the ground that their papers gave insufficient publicity to the

longer in Churchill’s ‘black books’ in light of the ‘Look to America’ statement – he had ‘“had it out”’ with the British prime minister and the ‘hatchet had been buried’.87 Of course, some remained unconvinced. On Empire Day 1944, the artist Ted Scorfield poked fun at Curtin’s imperial embrace. In a cartoon published in the Bulletin (which forms the frontispiece for this book) he depicted Curtin and Evatt paying homage to a statue of Queen Victoria. Perched high on her regal pediment, the monarch looks down in sheer disbelief at the two Labor figures – Curtin bowing, Evatt saluting, and both carrying Union Jacks – before pronouncing: ‘Bless my soul if it isn’t Honest John Curtin and Bert Evatt’. The affirmations of Australia’s continued prestige within a wider British world cannot hide the fact that like Deakin, Hughes and Bruce before him, Curtin too had failed in his attempt to acquire for Australia a more intimate place in the councils of imperial decision making. Though he had his own history of the British Commonwealth’s evolution that convinced him such a development was both natural and inevitable, he too became a captive of that past

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and, indeed, added another chapter to it.

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Chapter 5

‘Partial eclipse’ Legacy and memory

For many years after the end of World War II the memory of John Curtin was dimmed and his reputation suffered a partial eclipse . . . The gap is gradually being filled. Bob Hawke, April 19831

John Curtin remains an iconic figure in Australian political history. Were there ever to be an Australian equivalent to America’s Mt Rushmore – the monumental sculpture on the South Dakota mountainside that features the faces of four American presidents carved in stone – Curtin would arguably be the first face hewn from the rock. Alone among 20th century Australian prime ministers, with the possible exception of Gough Whitlam, he has become a venerated leader. The words chiselled into the simple obelisk that sits atop his grave in Karrakatta Cemetery, Perth – His Country was his Pride, His Brother Man his Cause – proclaim a simple and moving record of his service to party and nation, as if the visitor or

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passer-by is being summoned to honour Curtin: Australian patriot and tribune of the people. As the Westralian Worker put it following his funeral in July 1945, ‘Every Australian who believes in his country has lost a friend’.2 That he died in office has only added to the Curtin mystique: a politician who put ideology aside to lead the nation in war; an alcoholic who turned sober; a timid, nervous individual who became master and commander; and ultimately, a leader who became a casualty of the war itself. In the speeches of his admirers and adorers, the transformation in Curtin is easily transferred to the nation – in changing himself, so runs the myth, he changed Australia. Hence, the continued attachment to the idea that the 1940s represents a golden age in Australia: inaugurating a new departure in its relations with the world and the assertion of a more authentically robust national image.3 Curtin’s record as an Australian ‘nationalist’ remains the most powerful impulse sustaining his place in the collective memory. The assumption that he not only initiated Australia’s exit from its British orbit but also founded the alliance with the United States – establishing ‘nothing less than a charter for the next half-century’4 to quote Bob Hawke – has a tenacious grip on the Labor imagination. And it is likely to stay that way. But as this book has tried to show, there is every reason to treat this version of history with a considerable degree of scepticism. Curtin’s efforts to create new machinery for imperial cooperation might have failed to energise his Commonwealth colleagues abroad, but they won the overwhelming endorsement of his party, assuaged any fears that a Labor Government would again retreat towards

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isolationism and coincided with an emerging debate in London

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about the Empire’s post-war future. Furthermore, his proposals evolved out of a longstanding debate about how Australia’s interests within the wider British world were to be protected, one which was intimately connected to the idea that Australians had of themselves as a ‘British’ people. From the end of the First World War until he became prime minister, Curtin sought to find a language of loyalty and a concept of Empire that Labor could accept. He

refused to be bound by the conservative prescription that there was but one way of identifying with the British world. Spurning the ‘blather’ of Empire day rhetoric, he gravitated towards the position of ‘practical imperial patriotism’, which aimed for the equality of all British peoples. In the Labor view, the true idea of Empire was to be found among the Australian people, not in the glow or ‘glitter of epaulettes’ or the ephemera of class pretension. The political struggle over loyalty in the years following the conscription referenda, the tussle within the labour movement over attachment to nation and Empire, and the plan to make an Empire Council the centrepiece of Australia’s post-war foreign policy therefore have profound significance for understanding John Curtin, the Labor Party’s approach to foreign and defence policy in the 1940s, and Australian Britishness. Although so many of the sources at the time suggest Curtin had undergone some sort of Pauline conversion in promoting closer Empire cooperation, there is nothing to suggest that Curtin himself saw it this way. On the contrary, the combination of events and the responsibilities of high office brought to the fore some very powerful notions of community, identity and belonging that had previously been ingrained. The events of the Second World War and in particular the crisis sparked by Japan’s downward thrust to Australia, far from encouraging the Australians to give up on the concept of imperial defence, convinced them that they should urgently revitalise it.5 For Curtin himself, this was no quick-fire solution to the problems of the post-war peace. Nor was it an expedient political fix aimed at giving his party credibility in international affairs and safe newspaper remarked not long after the 1943 election, ‘it wasn’t flung out in the . . . campaign as a sop to electors who had been warned against the isolationist outlook of the ALP’.6 If Curtin had

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haven on the question of loyalty to the British connection. As one

tained efforts to create a new Empire Council reflect his deep,

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continuing attachment to the community of Britishness, and shows

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any sort of conversion, it was to the concept of imperial defence, a scheme he had strongly criticised in the 1930s. But Curtin’s sus-

that this cultural identification implied an ongoing acceptance of British world leadership. That in turn influenced the shaping of Australia’s policy, even where it had seen that its interests often diverged from those of the ‘mother-country’. As the post-war public service supremo Nugget Coombs pointed out, ‘there was nothing in Curtin’s war-time statements which suggested that he contemplated a continuing relationship in which the United States would dominate Australian policy or have special privileges’.7 Menzies’ spiteful bluster about Labor turning the country into ‘a second United States’ was more a case of sour grapes than a serious piece of political analysis.8 As Curtin told a gathering in Melbourne at the height of public advocacy for his plans, the Empire remained ‘an instinctive association, which has been sanctified by blood, promoted by intellectual agreement, enriched by a conception of duty founded on agreement and consent and ennobled by a higher perception of duty to the world’.9 No statement could better encapsulate Curtin’s British-centred view of the world. Curtin was no Labor renegade in this regard. The party engaged in no instinctive self-correction to a distinctive Australian ‘nationalism’ following his death. Ben Chifley, according to his biographers, harboured no pretensions to be an ‘Imperial statesman’ and like his predecessor was believed to abhor the rhetorical flights of ‘Imperial after-dinner oratory’.10 Setting out Labor policy in the 1946 election, he too defined the country as ‘the great bastion of the Britishspeaking race south of the equator’, giving credit to Curtin’s ‘distinctive foreign policy’ which had confirmed Australia as ‘a guardian of British interests in the Pacific area’.11 Moreover, Chifley backed

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these sentiments with significant financial clout, presiding over the

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provision of economic assistance to a war-ravaged Britain. He kept Australia firmly embedded in the sterling bloc, negotiated longterm bulk purchasing agreements for Australian primary products – in order that wheat, butter and cheese might be sold to Britain at a price lower than that on the world market – and continued to give top priority to Empire cooperation in global and regional defence arrangements.12

Chifley too had a historical picture of the Empire’s evolution. In a report to the nation in 1948, following the admission of India, Pakistan and Ceylon to the Commonwealth, he referred not only to the Balfour Declaration, the Statute of Westminster and the Ottawa conference of 1932 (where the system of imperial preference was established) but also to Curtin’s 1944 Empire Council proposals. That might seem nothing more than a deferential nod in the direction of the former leader’s policy, but Chifley had continued to refer to the proposals in his communications with British prime minister Clement Attlee.13 With the Cold War fast taking shape, Curtin’s vision continued to resonate as a viable means of preserving and promoting Australia’s voice in world affairs. In its Empire Day editorial of 1947, the Sydney Morning Herald argued that ‘the time is now surely ripe’ for the ‘reconsideration’ of Curtin’s ‘statesmanlike suggestions for an Empire Secretariat charged with the task of working out a common policy’. Despite an ailing British economy and ‘reduced resources which have necessitated a curtailment of foreign commitments’, the Herald predicted that a ‘new Imperial prospect, no less glorious than that which is passing, opens before us’. Only a stronger, more closely knit British Commonwealth could act as an ‘equipoise’ between the Soviet Union and the United States. British strength emanated from her leadership of the ‘greatest association of free nations in the history of the world’, but there remained the problem of how such ‘latent power can be fully integrated and mobilised’.14 But it was the same answer to the same problem: rhetorically, the case for closer imperial cooperation was an easy one to make. Practically, it continued to run aground on the familiar evolution and ignoring the broader implications of geopolitics.

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shoals of national interest, cutting against the grain of the Empire’s

Bob Hawke argued that the ‘partial eclipse’ of Curtin’s reputation

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in the post-war period was due to an ‘understandable desire on the

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His ‘finest hour’: Curtin and post-imperial Australia

part of the Australian people to put the war years behind and concentrate on the task of rebuilding Australia’.15 But it might have had more to do with the fact that Labor was out of office from 1949 to 1972, thus depriving them of the power of incumbency to nurture Curtin’s legacy. More likely, however, is the increasing anachronism of Curtin’s Britishness as the Empire itself crumbled under the weight of changing domestic and international circumstances in the 1960s. Against the background of global decolonisation, and along with Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community and its military withdrawal from East of Suez, it is not surprising that the worldview of an entire generation of political leaders faded quietly into obscurity – barely visible in the pages of Australian history let alone the annals of the labour movement. By then, Evatt’s internationalism and championing of the United Nations as the forum in which smaller to middle powers like Australia could make a difference offered a more palatable foreign policy tradition on which Labor could build. The question that Donald Horne asked of Menzies and his ilk – ‘What use is Britishry to you now?16 – had its own repercussions for Labor leaders like Gough Whitlam. Australia’s British-centred past offered a history and a legacy that no party wanted to own in the new circumstances, as leaders rushed headlong in the other direction to embrace a new ‘multicultural’ idea of community. The disappearance of Curtin’s British race vigour and vision was yet another casualty of the eclipse of Empire in Australia and the unravelling of the White Australia policy that lay at its core. But as with much of the postimperial landscape, the question remained as to what might take

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its place.17

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In the wake of Empire, therefore, no leader has been as misunderstood as Curtin, and no prime minister has been subjected to the same degree of what WH Oliver has termed ‘instrumental presentism’, a ‘historical mentality less concerned to recapture past reality than to embody present aspiration’.18 Since the 1970s Curtin has provided the historical ballast for any number of Labor policy ambitions: ‘consensus’ leadership, constitutional

reform, a liberal internationalist foreign policy, an anti-British myth of Australian nationalism, even economic globalisation. At times, the rifling through Curtin’s past for progressive policy benediction verges on the credulous. In 2003 Marilyn Lake praised Curtin for his post-colonial and anti-racist sensibilities – even suggesting that he had achieved ‘distinction as an early advocate’ of ‘decolonisation and indigenous land rights’.19 As the historian Marcus Cunliffe once observed of George Washington: the legend of the public figure has become ‘like a cairn to which each passer-by adds a stone . . . pamphlet, speech, article and book; pebble, rubble, stone and boulder have piled up’.20 And so it has with Curtin. That should come as no surprise: the legacies of all past political leaders are somewhat malleable, and politicians will seek to assume the mantle of party icons and heroes when it suits them. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern three distinct periods in the shaping of a post-imperial Curtin myth, each in some way symbolising its own distinct phase in Australia’s ambivalent emergence from Empire. The first, corresponding with the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972, saw Curtin invoked not as the hero of an anti-British narrative but as a frustrated social and constitutional reformer. In his efforts to rid Australia of its ‘colonial relics’ and update the trappings of Australian nationhood, Whitlam was hardly inclined to invoke Curtin’s defence of ‘God Save the King’ as Australia’s only national anthem or his appointment of a member of the royal family to Yarralumla. But Whitlam often traced the source of his own political activism to his service in the RAAF during the Second World War. The young flight navigator had campaigned 1944 Fourteen Powers Referendum, in which Curtin had sought to continue the enlarged wartime controls of the Commonwealth Government into peace. Although the referendum had failed, from the time when John Curtin was prime minister . . . from that moment I determined to do all I could to modernise the Australian Constitution’.21

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Whitlam reflected that his ‘interest in constitutional matters stems

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passionately within his squadron to advocate a ‘yes’ vote at the

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Along with his speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, Whitlam shared an appreciation for Curtin and what his political legacy symbolised for Labor’s agenda in the 1970s. At times, even nature itself could be conscripted in service of collective party remembrance. Describing Whitlam’s speech in April 1974 at the laying of the foundation stone for John Curtin House, the new Labor Party headquarters in Canberra, Freudenberg recalled that while the ceremony began in the rain on ‘a cold and grey Canberra autumn day’, when the moment arrived for Whitlam to speak ‘a fitful sun came out’. Whitlam’s message though was decidedly gloomy: For all the lustre of his achievements, for all the grandeur of his leadership of this nation in its most perilous years, it cannot be disguised that the story of John Curtin was essentially tragic. It was a story of noble failure. If ever a man was born to lead this nation in times of peace . . . he was John Curtin. If ever a man was born to apply his vision of what Australia at peace could be, his vision of what Australia at peace should become in his time, he was John Curtin. And yet his place in history is as our wartime leader [Whitlam’s emphasis]. He did not choose his time. He was enslaved by the times: and for him, time was a cruel master. He was slave to his own destiny . . . a pacifist who had to lead his country in war. It was a melancholy and foreboding portrait: a story not of triumph but of tragedy. Whitlam identified most of all with the idea of a

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Labor leader being frustrated by the constraints of his times and

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the circumstances he faced. No future Labor leader would quite so easily play down Curtin’s war record in this way. In the speech he went on to praise Curtin’s vision for post-war Australia and his championing of constitutional reform: ‘so far as the dry and confining language of constitutional and legal statements can convey, John Curtin’s vision is expressed in the 1944 referendum proposals. He won the war, but he lost that battle’.22

Whitlam famously lost his own battle with the Constitution 19 months later. Only then did he seek to invest Curtin with a ‘nationalist’ legacy. In 1976 he spoke of his deliberate attempt to channel Curtin’s memory in the election campaign following his dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. He drew particular attention to his own use of Curtin’s iconic salutation ‘Men and Women of Australia’ to begin election campaign speeches, affirming that the wartime leader ‘did express a feeling of Australian nationalism which had not been expressed by anybody previously, except Billy Hughes’. Yet here again this ‘nationalism’ was defined not by reference to Curtin’s idea of the people, but by the truculent assertion of ‘independence’ against the nefarious ‘great and powerful friends’, especially Britain.23 The second period of a post-imperial Curtin mythology lasted from the election of Bob Hawke through to the Keating Government of the early 1990s. Here Curtin became a symbol of Australian national unity in a time of economic ‘crisis’, an inspiration for ‘consensus’ style politics, and the focus of a bitter internal battle within the Labor Party for the leadership. Hawke saw himself as Curtin’s ‘privileged successor’24 and described his ‘profound admiration’ for Curtin not in terms of hero worship but as ‘emotional and cerebral’.25 More than any other Labor prime minister since the war, he invested enormous emotional and political energy into ensuring that his government, and his leadership, traced its genealogy directly from Curtin. In his memoirs Hawke confessed that when he came to office he had been ‘keenly aware’ that he stood on the shoulders of Labor greats, singling out Curtin as the leader Australia’s national development’.26 He gave at least one speech in Curtin’s name in each year that he was in office – testament itself to his own efforts to overcome the ‘partial eclipse’ which

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who had ‘fashioned consensus and unity at a critical juncture in

minister he had united the country behind the war effort and initi-

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ated the alliance with the United States; as a Labor leader he had

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he believed had cast a dark shadow over Curtin’s record. Hawke’s reading of Curtin had many dimensions: as an Australian prime

overturned party opposition to conscription in order to provide for the defence of Australia; and as a visionary statesman he had established the basis for post-war reconstruction. The temptation to link Curtin to a tradition of great wartime leadership – and reach the requisite soaring rhetorical heights – sometimes proved irresistible. During his final speech in the Old Parliament House in 1988, as he surveyed the history of the building and its occupants, Hawke claimed that the moment the Curtin Government came to power in October 1941 was the ‘finest hour’ that building had seen – a Churchillian touch.27 But it was the moment when Curtin’s credentials as a ‘great’ leader were called into question by Hawke’s deputy, Paul Keating, that provided the most vivid and dramatic illustration of Hawke’s position. In an off-the-record speech to journalists at the National Press Club in December 1990, Keating, then treasurer and prime ministerial aspirant – dismissed Curtin as a ‘trier’. The speech is remembered primarily for Keating’s identification with the Italian opera singer Placido Domingo, and his attack on Bob Hawke’s leadership style of ‘going through shopping centres, tripping over TV crew cords’. But he also used the occasion to make a more general point: that Australia had never produced a ‘great leader’ to rival George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Don Watson recalled that it was not the ‘slur on his own leadership that Hawke recalled, but the slur on Curtin . . . to call Curtin a “trier” was heresy’.28 Keating scored a direct hit: the comments enraged Hawke, and became the subject of an intense disagreement between the two men about who best understood Curtin’s legacy –

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the real contest, of course, being about who could claim to know

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Australia better. In a three-hour conversation in the privacy of the prime minister’s office, the two of them argued passionately about the leadership of the party and Curtin’s place in the Australian story. Afterwards, Hawke told journalists that he had ‘persuaded’ Keating of Curtin’s significance – he ranked his achievement, leadership and inspiration ‘at least with Roosevelt’ and dismissed his treasurer’s assessment as ‘grossly inadequate’.29 During personal

interviews after each had left office, the temperature had barely cooled: Hawke maintaining that the ‘Langite’ Keating had wantonly and unfairly demeaned Curtin and that he had come to ‘regret’ his comments;30 Keating adamant that he had always held Curtin in high regard and that Hawke had ‘tried to pretend in that Placido Domingo speech that I in some way blackguarded Curtin’.31 When Keating became prime minister it was the ‘nationalist’ Curtin who took centre stage. Keen to prove his love of country was more than a match for Hawke’s, Keating projected an aggressive Australianism and hailed Curtin as the hero who brought the troops home from the Middle East to defend Australia. Here the cable battles with Churchill over the deployment of Australian troops played the lead role. ‘John Curtin was right’, he declared in an Anzac day speech in Papua New Guinea, and his subsequent ‘look to America’ was hailed as a redefinition of the Anzac legend ‘to mean that Australia came first – that whatever the claims of Empire on the loyalty of those who died in the Great War, the pre-eminent claim had been Australia’s’.32 It showed that Keating, perhaps more than Hawke, felt deeply the ongoing legacy of the bitter contest over ‘loyalty’ that plagued Labor in the decades that followed that first world crisis. During the last 15 years, Australian academics and culture makers, following their British and American counterparts, have shown a great deal of interest in national leaders. In this third period, public interest has been made evident by the emergence of centres devoted to John Curtin in Perth and Bob Hawke in Adelaide, and even more significantly by the establishment of an Australian Prime Ministers to a new status in the national pantheon: Founding Father. The economist John Edwards, for example, expressed understandable frustration that stories about Curtin’s ‘sleepless vigils’ or attempts

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Centre in Canberra. That has witnessed the elevation of Curtin

the Curtin story than saying no to Churchill and Roosevelt and

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somewhat less to that refusal than we commonly suppose’.33 But

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to canonise him as ‘Saint Jack’ had for too long clouded assessments of his performance in office: ‘There is very much more to

Edwards himself was eager to invest Curtin with a new aura – as harbinger of Australia’s embrace of international finance and creator of the ‘foundations of the modern Australian Commonwealth’. According to this interpretation, the fact that the negotiations over the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade began towards the end of his prime ministership means that Curtin can be credited with a crucial role in shaping ‘Australia’s attitude towards and influence over economic globalisation’.34 But however much Curtin continues to attract a Christ-like reverence in the Labor Party, so too have conservatives sought to chip away at the legend, focussing on his weaknesses and frailties. In 2005 Alexander Downer used the Labor Party’s stance on appeasement in the 1930s to brand it as the authors of an isolationist ‘little Australia’ foreign policy that had held sway for the remainder of the 20th century. Ranging over Labor’s response to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War and the Munich crisis, Downer claimed that Curtin’s leadership of the party during these years was ‘characteristic of the left’s approach to international politics’.35 The speech drew a withering response from Labor luminaries. Keating remarked with his characteristic venom that ‘Dolly Downer’ was ‘delirious again . . . when he is not sticking pins in the effigies of Labor leaders’ he ‘is trying to rewrite the history of the Second World War’. Party stalwart John Faulkner seemed suspended in a state of disbelief: ‘surely someone like Downer attacking a great Australian like Curtin is a pygmy attacking a colossus’.36 Kevin Rudd, then Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman, was keen to enter

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the fray in an attempt to shore up his tribal Labor credentials. He

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used a column in The Australian to accuse Downer of ‘playing battleships in his bathtub’ before going on to defend ‘Curtin’s national leadership, as opposed to Menzies’ subservience to the British’.37 The speed and ferocity with which the party faithful rallied to the ramparts of the Curtin citadel illustrated once more that mystical connection many see between Labor and a distinctive stream of Australian nationalism.

Kevin Rudd continued in this vein during his short prime ministership. In March 2008, during a press conference in Washington with American President George W Bush, Rudd recounted how he had been shown John Curtin’s signature in the guest book at Blair House, the residence across from the White House reserved for visiting VIPs. Almost dewy-eyed, Rudd said that sighting Curtin’s autograph on the morning of his official talks with Bush underlined to him ‘how much this alliance has been the product of common nurturing by Presidents and Prime Ministers for a long time’.38 Most American scribes would have been hard pressed to even know of Curtin’s existence, let alone grip the full implication of Rudd’s statement, namely that the alliance had been forged by the Labor leader amidst the crisis of the Second World War. Whilst the remarks contained a generous dose of bipartisanship, they were also code for emphasising Labor’s alliance management credentials. This was Rudd’s way of not only staking a claim to his party’s history and heritage, but saying to the Americans and his audience back home: Labor has the history to best handle the relationship. Australian political commentators were eager to bestow bouquets on Rudd’s statecraft during the visit. The Australian’s foreign affairs editor labelled Rudd’s trip an ‘excellent adventure in the US’ and declared that he ‘stands squarely in the tradition of John Curtin and Bob Hawke in understanding the unique importance, and essential benevolence, of the US’.39 That Rudd exceeded the expectations of the gallery perhaps said more about the lingering concerns as to how relations with the United States would fare in the post Bush–Howard era – itself widely perceived as heralding a an American president – than it does about any landmark decision or statement to emerge from the visit. Rudd’s language also calmed the nerves of many alliance watchers who had been stung

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new level of intimacy between an Australian prime minister and

Yet Rudd’s efforts to bask in the warm glow of the Curtin myth

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went beyond the autograph hunt. He wanted to leave his own mark

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by the occasionally strident criticism of US policy enunciated by his predecessor as Labor leader, Mark Latham.

on the civic cultural landscape. Inside his first year as prime minister he inaugurated the ‘Battle for Australia’ Day – to be marked every 3 September hence – as an occasion that aims to ensure that the nation’s role in the Pacific War, and by implication Curtin’s leadership, are accorded the same mythic significance as Gallipoli and the Western Front. As Rudd told those assembled at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to mark the inaugural commemoration, Curtin, ‘like Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt . . . was an outstanding leader of a democracy who rose to the occasion when he needed to serve the nation’. He had ‘poured himself out in the defence of our nation’, and this new addition to the country’s commemorative calendar would allow the people to remember ‘the spirit of Curtin and all of those who served in this nation’s defence in the Pacific during our nation’s darkest time’. The nation might have been born at Gallipoli, Rudd intoned, but at the ‘Battle for Australia, our nation stood up and confirmed that we as a nation, would endure’.40 Rudd himself seemed ever keen to anchor his leadership in the language and rhetoric of war. When he was not talking about the formation of ‘war cabinets’ and ‘war councils’ to address pressing social problems, he likened the collapse of global financial markets in 2008 to ‘the economic equivalent of a rolling national security crisis’.41 In doing so, Rudd was doing much more than trying to shape a narrative for his government as that which would ‘save’ Australia from the icy blasts of worldwide economic turmoil. Implicitly he was acknowledging that governments tested – and not found wanting – in the cauldron of ‘crisis’ are those afforded greater

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electoral legitimacy and a more cherished place in the hearts and

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minds of the nation. By the end of his second year in office, the rhetorical strategy seemed to be working. Crowned by The Australian as its ‘Australian of the Year’ for 2009, the paper declared that ‘with the exception of wartime prime minister John Curtin, few Australian leaders have faced a more daunting crisis in their first term of office than that which confronted Kevin Rudd’. Here was a ‘leadership’ that had been ‘forged in the financial fire’.42 Ironically,

when the party’s factional heavyweights steamrolled him out of the Lodge only a year later, it was his lack of ‘true’ Labor credentials – in short, his lack of tribalism – that was considered as much a weakness of his leadership as the plummeting polls and poor policy judgements. Only one Labor leader of recent times, Kim Beazley, has refused to be seduced by this nationalist mythology. In his view, both Churchill and Curtin were right in the wartime dispute over whether to bring the Australian troops back from the Middle East. As Beazley saw it, it was a simple case of different strategic priorities: for Britain, beating Hitler first; for Australia, protection from the threat of Japanese invasion. ‘It is possible,’ he told a journalist in 2001, ‘that your principal ally has a strategic interest that does not contain your strategic priority. Your fundamental strategic priority is the survival of your nation . . . So you had Churchill, for very good strategic reasons, contemplating with equanimity the survival or otherwise of Australia. That could never be valid for Curtin’.43 Not for Beazley the undignified whine of the embittered Australian nationalist – in essence he was saying that the historical problem had to be examined in its own time and its own context, free of the emotional trammels that had plagued its discussion in the post-imperial era.

Frozen in time To return then to the original problem: why has John Curtin’s particular view of Australian Britishness been so consistently overthe author of the ‘Look to America’ statement of December 1941 and the assertive leader that refused to be bullied by Churchill. But the awkward contortions of some historians and commentators, in

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looked or dismissed? It is as if Curtin has been frozen in time, forever

to having ‘no lasting effect on the Australian population’ suggests a

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belated recognition that the Curtin story is more complex than the

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which the supposedly hallowed rhetoric of that statement has been twisted from a ‘turning point’ to a ‘half-turn’, from a ‘seismic shift’

heart-warming tale of an Irish Catholic nationalist kicking a great power in the shins.44 Indeed such a reading, as this book has tried to show, obscures one of the defining features of the nation’s political culture in the 20th century: its overwhelmingly ‘British’ character. Moreover it fails to acknowledge that the imperial idea struck distinctive roots in the Australian experience, one that proved in many respects to be at odds with the prevailing views of the meaning and purpose of Empire in Britain and elsewhere. Britishness was not only at the heart of Australian foreign policy; both sides of politics agreed that it was at the centre of their national existence. Indeed, they believed that ‘Britishness’ itself was both more pervasive and pure in Australia than in Britain itself. Where they differed was on how that idea should be expressed and who was better placed to articulate Australia’s interests within the Empire. Those might well have been ‘differences . . . of degree, not kind’,45 but they show that from the end of the 19th century down to the 1960s, each party voiced their own distinctive variants on the rhetoric, symbolism and ritual of the imperial ideal. The effect of that distinction was significant: it not only cast Labor as the outcasts of ‘loyalty’, thus putting them on the defensive for nearly two decades, it meant that neither side of politics could treat foreign policy on its own terms. Curtin’s imperial sensibilities were home-grown, but the Empire was no spectre that taunted him from afar – it was an idea and a philosophy that animated him from within. He might not have grown up imbibing the stories of imperial heroism contained in WH Fitchett’s Deeds That Won the Empire, but he could quote at will

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from English poets, speak eloquently of the need to defend British

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liberty, and envisage a productive trade union movement working within the Empire. That story in itself is remarkable: Curtin cut his political teeth in the rough and tumble of the labour movement: his eyes for so long firmly fixed on the bread-and-butter issues of improving the lives and lot of the ordinary Australian. Yet as a national political leader he came to promote the idea of closer Empire cooperation, giving voice to a distinctive rhetoric of

Australia as a bastion of the ‘British speaking race’. On the opening day of the Prime Ministers’ Conference in May 1944, the Times of London could not have put it more succinctly: ‘Mr Curtin’s convictions concerning the place of the British Commonwealth in the world are the deeper for having been acquired not from textbooks on British political institutions but in the hard school of political experience’.46 Throughout his time in representative politics, it was one thing for Curtin and Labor to disagree with the policies of successive conservative governments in Britain; quite another to suggest that Australia opt to break free from Britain entirely. Curtin and his party never seriously entertained such a prospect. Indeed standing side by side with Britain as a proud dominion in the face of totalitarian evil was a story that Labor could be proud of. It was a form of cooperation they wanted to see continued, albeit one where Australia’s equality was formally enshrined in a new form of imperial organisation. By the end of 1943 Curtin had won the unanimous support of a federal Labor conference for his post-war vision of Empire – a feat unthinkable at the time he took over the party leadership eight years previously. It was indeed an ‘astonishing transformation in Labour’s thinking’.47 Curtin’s arguments for an ‘Empire Council’ thus tell quite a different story about the lessons that Australian political leaders and policy makers took from the Second World War crisis. As Curtin himself reminded his prime ministerial colleagues in London in May 1944, the Australian people had ‘faced the stark realism of a perilous situation’ and were ‘determined that everything possible shall be done to prevent a recurrence of a similar danger’.48 His they emerged from the Pacific War was not one about the need for national emancipation. Rather, it was that Australia was part of a wider, dangerous world, and that as a ‘British’ people they ought to

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efforts in this period suggest that the key lesson for Australians as

The reality, however, was that both political parties for too

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long pursued an illusion, believing that Britain would naturally and

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be able to find their security through a common Imperial defence and foreign policy.

inevitably acquiesce to Australia’s desire for a greater say in how the Empire was run. But it was not to be. Australians were forced to acknowledge that an enlightened concept of the Empire’s affairs sometimes burned brightest at the periphery, and not in the imperial centre. It would take nothing less than the post-war collapse of British power around the globe and the rapid decline of the British Empire for Australians to begin in earnest the task of resetting the coordinates of their foreign policy and the process of remaking their

C U R T I N ’ S

E M P I R E

national image.

134

Notes

Chapter 1: ‘Citadel for the British-speaking race’: Introduction 1

The Hon Julia Gillard MP, Response to Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, State Department Dinner for the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, Washington DC, 24 June 2008, http://mediacentre.dewr.gov.au/mediacentre/gillard/ releases/responsetodeputysecretary, accessed 2 July 2010.

2

The Australian, 3 April 2008, 28 June 2008; Sydney Morning Herald, 27 June 2008.

3

Broadcast by the Prime Minister, Digest of Decisions and Important Announcements made by the Prime Minister (hereafter DDA), no. 10, 8 December 1941, pp. 19–21.

4

For the uses of Curtin by Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, see James Curran 2004, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, chapters 2, 3 and 5.

5

‘Curtin raiser’, Sydney Morning Herald, ‘The Guide’, April 16–22, 2007, p. 4.

6

For a recent example of Curtin as a nervous, unsure and even frightened leader see John Hirst, ‘Was Curtin the Best Prime Minister?’ in Hirst, Looking for Australia; Norman E Lee’s 1983 biography, with a foreword by Prime Minister RJ Hawke, carried the subtitle Saviour of Australia.

7

David Day, John Curtin, p. 585.

8

Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 1943.

9

Curtin, Press Statement, 6 September 1943, Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937–49 (hereafter DAFP) vol. VI, p. 501.

10

David Day, John Curtin, pp. 544–5.

11

David Day, Reluctant Nation, p. 315.

12

Hon PJ Keating MP, Foreword to Reluctant Nation, p. iii.

13

Edwards, ‘Another Look at Curtin and Macarthur’. It should be noted, however, Edwards emphatically rejects the view that Curtin’s turn to America was a crucial turning point in Australian foreign policy. Indeed, he notes that Curtin’s 1944 proposals were ‘echoing a favourite refrain of . . . Deakin and Bruce’. Nevertheless, in this earlier study Edwards was not centrally concerned with accounting for the emergence of Curtin’s proposals or explaining their significance. See Edwards, ‘1941: A Turning Point in Foreign Policy?’, Teaching History (August 1975), p. 22.

14

Neville Meaney 2001, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The problem of nationalism in Australian history and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 116 (April), p. 83.

15

See Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, especially pp. 183–204.

16

Curtin, ‘Speech to the Triennial Federal Conference of the Australian Labor Party’, 14 December 1943, in DDA, no. 71, 13 December 1943 to 4 January 1944, pp. 8–16.

17

Curtin, ‘More Conferences of Empire: Has Australia a foreign policy?’, Westralian Worker, 2 March 1923.

18

The Herald (Melbourne), 27 December 1941.

19

McLachlan, Waiting for the Revolution, p. 247.

20

Evans & Grant, Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s, p. 21.

135

1 2 – 3 1

Meaney, ‘Australia’s Foreign Policy: History or Myth’, Australian Outlook, 23 (August 1969), pp. 173–80.

22

David Day, ‘27 December 1941: Prime Minister Curtin’s New Year Message: Australia “Looks to America”’, in Crotty and Roberts (eds), Turning Points in Australian History, p. 138. Similarly, John Hirst and Carl Bridge have all played down the significance of the statement in the light of Curtin and Chifley’s subsequent foreign policy. See Hirst, The Sentimental Nation, p. 322; and Bridge, ‘Poland to Pearl Harbour’, pp. 38–40.

23

Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1941.

24

‘British: And Proud of It!’, 1942, in John Arnold, Peter Spearitt and David Walker (eds), Out of Empire: The British dominion of Australia, p. 73.

25

Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1941.

26

Ibid., 30 December 1941; Bailey, ‘Australia in the Empire’, pp. 5–18.

27

Ibid., 31 December 1941; Wand, Has Britain Let Us Down?, pp. 7, 24.

28

Schreuder & Ward, Australia’s Empire, p. 2.

29

See, for example, CP Champion 2010, The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968, pp. 7–15.

30

Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 473.

31

Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 7–8.

32

Ibid., p. 11.

33

Ibid., p. 147.

34

Cited in Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the future of world order, pp. 9, 31.

35

Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity’, p. 81.

36

Stuart Ward, ‘Security: Defending Australia’s Empire’ in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (eds) 2008, Australia’s Empire, pp. 240–1.

37

Deakin, Imperial Federation.

38

Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity’, p. 79.

39

John Hirst 1978, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, p. 79.

40

CEW Bean, The Story of Anzac, p. 4.

41

Ibid., p. 5.

42

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 10 September 1919, p. 12175.

43

Meaney, Search for Security in the Pacific 1901–1914, p. 5; ‘Britishness and Australian Identity’, p. 83.

Chapter 2: ‘Loyalty howlers’: War and peace, 1914–1928 Curtin, ‘The Duke and the Duchess’, Westralian Worker, 20 May 1927. Ibid.

T O

1 2

N O T E S

P A G E S

21

3

As Neville Meaney notes in Australia and World Crisis, p. 10.

4

JT Lang, I Remember, pp. 179–80.

5

Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1926.

136

6

Curtin, Socialist, 24 April 1908, in Black, In His Own Words, p. 10.

7

Curtin, Socialist, 1909, quoted in Geoffrey Serle (1993), ‘Curtin, John (1885–1945)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, Melbourne University Press, pp. 550–558.

8

Curtin, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 181. I am grateful to Frank Bongiorno for this reference.

9

Cited in Black, In His Own Words, p. 10.

10

Curtin, Timber Worker, 9 April 1915, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 190.

11

Ibid., 10 February 1915, cited in Black, In his Own Words, p. 15.

12

Although it should be noted that by the time of the ALP National Conference in Perth in 1918, the party passed a unanimous resolution calling for a negotiated peace. Ian Turner has pointed out that some delegates from NSW wanted to ‘put teeth’ into the general peace resolution by attaching conditions to continuing support for voluntary recruitment (such as having a clear statement by the Allies of their war aims), but a group of parliamentarians from NSW and Victoria campaigned against it, arguing that a conference vote against military recruitment would be a ‘distinct break of faith with the electors and a base desertion of our troops’. See Ian Turner (1979), Industrial Labour and Politics, pp. 176–7.

13

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 19 April 1918.

14

Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914–1923, p. 168.

15

Cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 225.

16

Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914–1923, p. 168.

17

Leaflet signed by Curtin, October 1916, National Executive of the Australian Trade Union Anti-Conscription Congress, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 228.

18

Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914–1923, pp. 190–1.

19

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 30 November 1917. Anstey had described the First World War as a ‘a war of rival capitalists . . . its inevitable outcome the enslavement of labour’.

20

Cited in Ross, John Curtin, pp. 61–2.

21

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 16 March 1917, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 240.

22

Ibid., 27 April 1917.

23

Ibid., 4 May 1917.

24

Ibid., 10 May 1918, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 257. Ibid., 15 November 1918, cited in Black, In His Own Words, p. 30.

26

Ibid., 18 January 1924, in Black, In His Own Words, p. 65.

27

Day, John Curtin, p. 265.

28

LF Crisp 1955, The Australian Federal Labor Party, 1901–51 p. 103.

29

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 26 January 1923, cited in Black, In His Own Words, p. 73.

30

David Day, John Curtin, p. 257.

Ibid., 8 February 1924, in Black, In His Own Words, p. 75.

33

Curtin, cited in Day, John Curtin, p. 286. Curtin, Westralian Worker, 2 July 1920.

35

Ibid.

36

Ward, ‘Imperial Identities Abroad’, p. 235.

37

Curtin, Westralian Worker, ‘The Prince and Last Monday’s Accident’, 9 July 1920.

3 1 – 4 1

34

P A G E S

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 1 June 1923, in Black, In His Own Words, p. 74.

32

T O

31

N O T E S

25

137

38

Curtin, ‘An LSD Dependency of London’, Westralian Worker, 6 May 1921.

39

Paul Keating, ‘Foreword’ to David Day, Reluctant Nation, p. iii.

40

Curtin, ‘An LSD Dependency of London’, Westralian Worker, 6 May 1921.

41

Ibid.

42

Frank Bongiorno, ‘British to their Bootheels too: Britishness and Australian radicalism’, Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture, King’s College London, 2006.

43

See, for example, Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific 1901–1914, p. 228. ‘Labor’s Moral Conquest of the World’, Westralian Worker, 13 June 1924. The challenge of how to organise the empire had its own history. Since the first Colonial Conferences had been held in London in the late 19th century the emphasis had been on the very informality of such gatherings. Those who at various stages proposed to formalise the informal were quickly put back in their place. Thus, at the 1897 conference when British Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain called for a ‘Great Council of the Empire’ the prime ministers in attendance gave him little encouragement. When he repeated the call in 1902, emphasising that in exchange for sharing the burden of empire the dominions would receive their fair share in the making of Empire policy, the prime ministers and colonial statesmen again poured cold water on his plans. Cooperation and consultation, not centralisation, were held to be the order of things. The problem was not one of sentiment but the inevitable clash of interests. See WK Hancock 1937, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs 1918–1939, p. 30; H Duncan Hall 1971, Commonwealth: A history of the British Commonwealth of Nations, p. 23.

46

Lloyd George, cited in Simon J Potter, ‘Richard Jebb, John S Ewart and the Round Table, 1898–1926, p. 120.

47

At the Colonial Conference in 1907, for example, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin supported the idea of a new Imperial Department to assume the Colonial Office’s responsibility for dominion affairs. Deakin envisaged it having a permanent secretariat to execute the department’s decisions and keep members informed between meetings. He stressed that it would be financed and controlled jointly by all the self-governing members of the empire. What Deakin wanted was to circumvent the Colonial Office – which he felt to be continually obstructive of Australia’s views and interests – and in its place put a secretariat that would form a direct link between London and the dominion governments. Deakin was feeling his way towards a new idea of the Empire, seeking ‘institutions which would combine the rights of self-governing colonies with a co-operative empire of coordinate parts’. But he could not overcome the opposition of Canadian liberals who feared that any new imperial machinery might imply imperial executive control and commitments. And the British, in a deft bureaucratic shuffling of the decks, only agreed to create a new dominions section within the Colonial office. They did not wish to lose sole control over imperial policy. Australians, however, were not the only ones to feel the cold draughts of Colonial office rejection. When New Zealand prime minister Sir Joseph Ward proposed the creation of an Imperial Council before the 1911 Conference, the Colonial Office ensured that it was rejected long before it came before delegates. See Meaney, Australia and the World, pp. 169–70; The Search for Security in the Pacific 1901–1914, p. 142; Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 1918–1939, p. 49; Hall, Commonwealth, 64–5; La Nauze, Alfred Deakin, vol. II, pp. 503–4.

48

Hall, Commonwealth, 153; Meaney, Australia and the World, pp. 252, 260. Hughes was particularly incensed given that Japan had been invited to the Inter-Allied conference to determine Armistice terms, and Australia had not. See also Simon Potter, ‘Richard Jebb, John S Ewart and the Round Table, 1898–1926’.

49

Neville Meaney, Australia in World Crisis 1914–1923, p. 489.

50

RF Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918’, in Judith Brown & WM Roger Louis (eds) 1999, The Oxford History of the British Empire, p. 119.

N O T E S

T O

P A G E S

4 2 – 4 7

44 45

138

51

John Darwin, ‘The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’, in Judith Brown & WM Roger Louis (eds) 1999, The Oxford History of the British Empire, pp. 68–9.

52

Hall, Commonwealth, p. 394.

53

Curtin, ‘On the Eve of Anzac Day’, Westralian Worker, 19 April 1921.

54

Curtin, ‘More Conferences of Empire: Has Australia a Foreign Policy’, 2 March 1923.

55

Ibid.

56

Darwin, The Empire Project, p. 405.

57

RF Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918’, p. 119.

58

Darwin, The Empire Project, p. 397.

59

King, cited in JH Thompson 2008, ‘Canada and the “Third British Empire”, 1901–1939’, in Buckner (ed.) OHBE Canada volume, Canada and the British Empire, p. 99.

60

Curtin, ‘More Conferences of Empire: Has Australia a Foreign Policy’, Westralian Worker, 2 March 1923.

61

JH Thompson, ‘Canada and the “Third British Empire”’, p. 99.

62

Bruce, CPD, H of R, 3 August 1926, 4772–6; in Meaney, Australia and the World, pp. 356–61.

63

Simon J Potter, ‘Richard Jebb. John S Ewart and the Round Table, 1898–1926’, pp. 128–9.

64

WJ Hudson & MP Sharp 1988, Australian Independence: Colony to reluctant kingdom, pp. 84–8; Darwin, ‘The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’, p. 69; WK Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 1918–1939, pp. 50–1.

65

Curtin, ‘Bruce Loads us with “Corresponding Burdens”, Westralian Worker, 3 December 1926.

66

Curtin, Westralian Worker, 3 December 1926.

67

Ibid., 1 June 1928; 3 December 1926; 2 March 1923 and 6 May 1921 in David Black (ed.) 1995, In his Own Words, pp. 70–1.

68

Inglis 2008, Sacred Places: War memorials in the Australian landscape, pp. 193, 197.

69

See p. 39.

70

Curtin, ‘Anzac Sunday’, Westralian Worker, 23 April 1926.

71

Curtin, ‘Anzac Remembrance: Its Great Lessons Still Unlearned’, Westralian Worker, 29 April 1927.

72

RF Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918’, p. 136.

73

Curtin, ‘Annual Infliction of Empire Day Palaver’, Westralian Worker, 1 June 1928. N O T E S

CPD, H of R, 27 September 1938, p. 237.

2

CPD, H of R, 8 April 1935, p. 961. Curtin, quoted in West Australian, 14 December 1935.

4

Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill, p. 197.

5

Lloyd Ross, John Curtin, p. 105.

6

Ibid., p. 150.

7

Day, John Curtin, p. 339.

4 7 – 6 0

3

P A G E S

1

T O

Chapter 3: A ‘deranged world’: Leading Labor in the 1930s

139

On Curtin’s response to the Great Depression see especially John Edwards, Curtin’s Gift, Chapter 6.

9

CPD, H of R, 7 August 1930, p. 5622.

10

RF Holland 1981, Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1918–1939, p. 182.

11

CPD, H of R, 7 August 1930, p. 5623.

12

Cited in Ross, John Curtin, p. 151.

13

CPD, H of R, 9 October 1935, p. 579. See also AW Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 170.

14

Forde, cited in Ross McMullin, Light on the Hill, pp. 196–7.

15

Macintyre, The Reds, p. 293.

16

CPD, H of R, 1 November 1935, pp. 1268–9.

17

EM Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement in Australia, p. 51.

18

Macintyre, The Reds, p. 298.

19

McMullin, Light on the Hill, p. 197; Macintrye, The Reds; Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement, pp. 77–96.

20

Ross, John Curtin, p. 166.

21

Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 478–9.

22

Twomey, ‘Munich’, in Bridge (ed.), Munich to Vietnam, p. 23.

23

RG Casey, cited in Twomey, ‘Munich’, p. 23.

24

Piesse, cited in Neville Meaney, Under New Heavens, p. 415; See also Meaney, Fears and Phobias, pp. 40–3.

25

CPD, H of R, vol. 152, 5 November 1936, pp. 1547–53.

26

Meaney, Australia and the World, p. 24.

27

Cited in RG Neale, Documents on Australian Foreign Policy (hereafter DAFP), 1937–49, vol. 1, 1937–38, Canberra: AGPS, 1975, pp. 101–10.

28

Minutes of the Tenth Meeting of Principal Delegates to the Imperial Conference, 1 June 1937 in R Neale (ed.), DAFP, vol. 1, pp. 96–8.

29

CPD, H of R, 11 December 1936, p. 2902.

30

Canberra Times, 15 May 1937.

31

CPD, H of R, 24 August 1937, pp. 30–1.

32

Ibid., 25 August 1937, p. 103.

33

Ibid., p. 105.

Ibid., p. 109. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 1937.

37

The Argus, 20 October 1937.

38

Sydney Morning Herald, ‘The Hour of Decision’, 23 October 1937.

P A G E S

Ibid., pp. 105, 107.

35 36

T O

34

39

Ibid., 21 September 1937 in Neville Meaney, Australia and the World, pp. 433–5.

N O T E S

6 1 – 7 5

8

40

Day, John Curtin, p. 358.

41

Ibid., pp. 358–9; 426.

42

CPD, H of R, 27 April 1938, pp. 543–4.

140

43

Ibid., pp. 543–4.

44

Ibid., 5 October 1938, p. 395.

45

Ibid., 27 September 1938, p. 237.

46

Ibid., p. 238.

47

Ibid., p. 326.

48

Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 487–90.

49

CPD, H of R, 2 November 1938, pp. 1093, 1095.

50

Day, John Curtin, p. 364.

51

CPD, H of R, 5 October 1938, p. 393.

52

Ibid., p. 395.

53

Ibid., 9 May 1939, p. 200.

54

Official Report of the Proceedings of the 15th Commonwealth Conference of the Australian Labor Party, held at Canberra on 1 May 1939 and following days, Carlton: 1939, 3, 58, in Meaney, Australia and the World, pp. 451–2.

55

Curtin, cited in Black, In His Own Words, p. 151.

56

Curtin, statement of 6 September 1939, cited in McMullin, The Light on the Hill, p. 200.

57

Lang, quoted in Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 200–01.

58

Hasluck, The Government and the People, vol. 1, p. 544.

59

Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 345.

60

Address by the Honourable the Prime Minister, The Hon John Curtin MP, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 11 November 1941, AWM 93, 2/5/25/4.

Chapter 4: ‘Practical Empire patriots’: London, 1944 John Curtin, ‘Address to the British People’, 17 April 1942, in James Inglis (ed.), Fighting Talk 2008, Sydney: Pier 9, pp. 244–5.

2

Curtin, ‘Broadcast to the people of Britain’, quoted in Canberra Times, 29 April 1942.

3

Cited in David Day, John Curtin, p. 518.

4

‘Australia: Adjustment to danger’, Round Table, vol. 32, no. 127, June 1942, p. 416.

5

Correspondence, Johnson to the President, 12 October 1942, RG 84, Classified General Records, 1940–1958, Box 6, NARA.

6

See, for example, three works by David Day, Menzies and Churchill at War, The Great Betrayal and The Politics of War, also John Edwards, Curtin’s Gift, Chapter 3. Curtin, The Times (UK), 19 May 1942, cited in Darwin, The Empire Project, p. 521.

8

DDA, no. 27, 29 April 1942, pp. 11–12, cited in Black, In His Own Words, p. 201.

9

Hasluck, Diplomatic Witness, pp. 43–4.

11

Menzies, Daily Express, 7 April 1942, cited in Andrew Stewart, Empire Lost, p. 98.

12

See, for example, his statement of 18 June 1943 in Black, In His Own Words, p. 226.

13

Toye, Churchill’s Empire, p. 240.

7 5 – 8 9

Memorandum of Conversation, Mr RG Menzies, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Mr Dickover, Melbourne, 24 March 1942, in RG 84, General Records US Embassy Canberra, 1940–1962, Box 13, NARA.

P A G E S

10

T O

7

N O T E S

1

141

Stewart, Empire Lost, pp. 107ff.

15

Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 516–20.

16

DAFP, vol. VI, Doc. 314, Cranborne to Curtin, 26 October 1943.

17

Ibid., Doc. 323, Curtin to Cranborne, 30 October 1943.

18

Curtin, Speech to the NSW Labor Party Conference, Sydney, 6 June 1943, transcript.

Political Report for June 1943, 17 July 1943, in RG 84, General Records 1940–1962, US Embassy Canberra, Box 27.

21

Curtin, Briefing of 7 September 1943, in Clem Lloyd and Richard Hall, Backroom Briefings, pp. 167–8.

22

Curtin, press statement, 6 September 1943, DAFP, vol. VI, p. 501.

23

The Age, 16 November 1943.

24

Yorkshire Post, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1943.

25

Australian Worker, 24 November 1943, cited in Johnson to Secretary of State, Political Report for November 1943, US Embassy Canberra, General Records 1940–1962, RG 84, Box 27.

26

Evatt, cited in Day, Reluctant Nation, p. 164; see also Record of Conversation, John Minter, First Secretary, Canberra Legation, with Arthur Calwell, Minister for Information, Canberra, 9 December 1943.

27

Record of Conversation, John Minter, First Secretary, Canberra Legation, with Arthur Calwell, Minister for Information, Canberra, 9 December 1943, RG 84, US Embassy Canberra, Classified General Records, 1940–58.

28

Day, John Curtin, p. 523.

29

Curtin, Press Statement, 6 December 1943, DDA No. 70, 24 November – 13 December 1943.

30

David Horner 2000, Defence Supremo, pp. 158–9.

31

Ibid., p. 22.

32

Horner, ‘Sir Frederick Geoffrey Shedden’, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/ A160264b.htm, accessed July 2007.

33

Neville Meaney, Under New Heavens, pp. 415–6; Horner, Defence Supremo, pp. 188–202.

34

Hankey, Diplomacy by Conference, 1946, cited in Hasluck, The Government and the People 1942–45 1970, p. 475.

35

Hasluck, Diplomatic Witness, p. 137.

36

Shedden, Minute (SECRET) to The Prime Minister, ‘British and World Commonwealth Cooperation’, 10 December 1943, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), A 5954/69, 1153/3. Ibid.

38

Shedden, Minute (Most Secret and Personal) to The Prime Minister, ‘British and World Commonwealth Cooperation’, 15 January 1944, NAA A5954, 1153/3.

P A G E S

Curtin, Press Statement, 6 September 1943, transcript.

20

37

T O

19

39

Shedden to The Prime Minister, 10 December 1943.

N O T E S

8 9 – 9 7

14

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid., 13 December 1943, NAA, A5954, 1153/3. The Australian chapter of the Round Table, in a ‘fit of misplaced enthusiasm’ also linked Curtin’s proposals to Curtis’ imperial federationist ambitions. Leonie Foster 1986, High Hopes, p. 110.

142

42

Hasluck, The Government and the People 1942–45, pp. 474–6; Diplomatic Witness, p. 138.

43

Speech by the Prime Minister on External Affairs, Triennial Federal Conference of the Australian Labor Party, 14 December 1943, in DDA, 13 December 1943 – 14 January 1944.

44

Curtin, Speech to Triennial Conference of the ALP, 14 December 1943.

Darwin, ‘The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’, p. 69.

48

Official Proceedings of the 16th Triennial Commonwealth Conference of the Australian Labor party, Sydney, 13–15 December 1943, transcript.

49

Ross Gollan, ‘ALP’s Empire Spirit – Conference in Retrospect’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1943.

50

Century, 10, 24 September 1943.

51

Ibid., 17 December 1943.

52

WK Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 1918–1939, p. 35.

53

‘Special Writer’, Sydney Standard, 23 December 1943, quoted in ‘Comment on Triennial Conference of Australian Labor Party, American Minister Canberra to Secretary of State, 4 February 1944, RG 84, US Embassy Canberra General Records, 1940–62, Box 33, NARA.

54

Sydney Morning Herald, 16 August 1943.

55

Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 1943; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 December 1943.

56

Sydney Morning Herald, 15 December 1943.

57

The Argus, 16 December 1943; The Age, 16 December 1943.

58

Shedden to the Prime Minister (Most Secret and Personal), 15 January 1944, NAA, A5954, 1153/3.

59

The Curtin Government’s position towards Irish neutrality in the war is also worth further study. In March 1944 the United States asked Irish Prime Minister Eamon De Valera to expel German and Japanese diplomatic representatives from Dublin. When Curtin was questioned about the matter he revealed that he had refused a request from De Valera to intervene and have the US request withdrawn. Moreover, Curtin stressed that he had not sought advice from the British Government on how to react to the Irish demarche. This earned Curtin a stinging rebuke from Daniel Mannix, Catholic ´ Archbishop of Melbourne, who argued that Curtin had failed to respect the integrity of Irish neutrality. Mannix believed that the prime minister did not ‘speak for Australia’ in making such a decision and further that the prime minister had not cleared it with his party or the Cabinet. He had ‘taken sides’ on the issue. Curtin’s response was simply to defend the decision as one taken ‘by the Australian Government’. See Johnson to Secretary of State ‘Attitude of Commonwealth Government Towards American Request that Eire Expulse Axis Diplomatic Representatives’, Canberra, 24 March 1944, Records of the US Embassy Canberra, General Records, 1940–1962, RG 84, Box 34, NARA; for Mannix, see Argus, 18 March 1944.

60

Annotations by Cranborne of 5 November 1943 on a note to Sir E Machtig, attaching record of conversation between British officials in Washington and Australian Ambassador to the United States, Sir Owen Dixon, DO 35/1487, TNA.

61

Speech by Rt Hon Earl of Halifax to the Toronto Board of Trade, 24 January 1944, in Mansergh (ed.) 1953, Documents and Speeches on British Commonwealth Affairs, pp. 575–9.

9 9 – 1 0 7

47

P A G E S

Hasluck, The Government and the People 1942–45, p. 476.

T O

Nicholas Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 1958, p. 168.

46

N O T E S

45

143

For Fraser’s response see Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 1918–1939, p. 171.

64

Correspondence, VW Odlum to Curtin, 23 October 1943, NAA M1415/320. Correspondence, Prime Minister to Odlum, 27 November 1943, NAA M1415/320.

66

See chapter 1, pp. 11–15.

67

King, Speech in the Canadian House of Commons, 31 January 1944, Mansergh, Documents and Speeches, 579ff. See also King quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 1944.

68

Sir William Glasgow, Cablegram to Canberra, 4 October 1943, NAA A2908 E44.

69

Cross to Cranborne 13 April 1944, DO 35 1477, TNA.

70

War Cabinet: Committee for Preparations for Meeting with Dominion Prime Ministers, 7 April 1944 ‘Cooperation in the British Commonwealth’, Cranborne, DO 35 1488, TNA.

71

Minute to Secretary of State from JD Greenway, 29 April 1944, FO 371/42678, TNA.

72

On that part of Curtin’s visit abroad see Stephen Casey, ‘A Missed Opportunity: the Curtin-Roosevelt meetings and Australia-America Relations’, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Lecture, 8 May 2008, http://john.curtin.edu.au/events/speeches/ casey.html, accessed July 2008.

73

Correspondence, Curtin to Elsie Curtin, London, Sunday 30 April 1944, http://john. curtin.edu.au/diary/primeminister/fulltext/fulltext%20prime%20minister 1944 6.html, accessed 20 July 2010.

74

The Argus, 3 May 1944.

75

Details of Curtin’s diary in London from John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, http://john.curtin.edu.au/diary/primeminister/1944.html, accessed 20 July 2010.

76

The Argus, 30 May 1944.

77

DAFP, 1937–1949, vol. 7 (1944) Canberra: AGPS, 1988, Minutes of Meeting of Prime Ministers, 3 May 1944, 263.

78

Hankey, diary entry, 25 May 1944 in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of secrets, 1974, p. 592.

79

Mackenzie King, Diary, 5 & 9 May 1944 at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/database/king, accessed 10 July 2010.

80

Minutes of Meeting of Prime Ministers, 15 May 1944, NAA A6712.

81

Churchill to Curtin, 20 May 1944, DO 35 1490, TNA.

82

Correspondence, Stephen Holmes (British Embassy, Washington DC) to Sir Eric Machtig (Dominions Office), 29 June 1944, DO 35/1476, TNA.

83

Memorandum of Conversation, Rt Hon Mackenzie King and Mr Ray Atherton, Ottawa, 25 May 1944, in RG 84, General Records US Embassy Canberra 1940–62, Box 13, NARA.

84

‘The Conference of Dominion Premiers in London, May 1944’, Office of Strategic Services (Research and Analysis Branch), 20 July 1944, RG 84, Box 13, NARA.

85

Curtin, Empire Day Broadcast, 24 May 1944, DDA, no. 81, 20 April – 26 June 1944, 74.

86

Curtin, CPD, Hof R, vol. 179, 17 July 1944, pp. 38–41.

144

87

Cross to Cranborne, 1 July 1944, in DO 35 1476, TNA.

1 0 7 – 1 6

65

P A G E S

63

T O

Field-Marshal the Rt Hon JC Smuts, Speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association, 25 November 1943 in Mansergh (ed.), Documents and Speeches on British Commonwealth Affairs, pp. 568–75.

N O T E S

62

Chapter 5: ‘Partial eclipse’: Legacy and memory 1

Foreword to Norman E Lee, 1983 John Curtin, Saviour of Australia.

2

Westralian Worker, 13 July 1945, cited in David Black, In His Own Words, p. 255.

3

See, for example, John Edwards, Curtin’s Gift, p. 157.

4

RJ Hawke, Speech at the Launch of the John Curtin Centre Appeal, Curtin University, 6 October 1991, transcript.

5

Stuart Ward 2008, ‘Security: Defending Australia’s Empire’, in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (eds) Australia’s Empire, p. 249.

6

Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 1943.

7

HC Coombs, ‘John Curtin – A Consensus Prime Minister?’, Arena, no. 69, 1984, p. 57.

8

See Chapter 4, pp. 87–8. It is also worth noting that in late January 1945 Curtin was criticised by the Australian Natives Association (ANA) for failing to issue an Australia Day message. To the ANA President, it seemed odd that the government had requested Australians to celebrate Empire Day, American Independence Day and Red Army Day, and yet said nothing on January 26, making ‘their silence respecting [these] celebrations fall strangely on the people’s ears’; Canberra Times, 27 January 1945.

9

Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1943.

10

LF Crisp, Ben Chifley, p. 275; Day, Chifley, p. 431.

11

Chifley, 2 September 1946, DDA, no. 119, 2 September 1946–28 September 1946, pp. 161–2.

12

See also Ward, Australia and the British Embrace, p. 17; Curran, The Power of Speech, pp. 36–42.

13

See, for example, Correspondence, Chifley to Attlee, 21 September 1945, in WJ Hudson and Wendy Way (eds) 1989, DAFP, vol. VIII: 1945, Canberra: AGPS, pp. 428–30.

14

Sydney Morning Herald, ‘A New Imperial Destiny’, 24 May 1947.

17

See James Curran & Stuart Ward 2010, The Unknown Nation.

18

Quoted in Ewan Morris ‘History Never Repeats? The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History’, History Compass, 1(2003) p. 8. I am grateful to Stuart Ward for drawing my attention to this reference.

19

Marilyn Lake, ‘John Curtin: Internationalist’, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Visiting Public Lecture, 9 October 2003, at http://john.curtin.edu.au/events/speeches/ lake.html, accessed 27 September 2010.

20

Marcus Cunliffe 1958, George Washington: Man and Monument, p. 3.

21

Whitlam, Curtin Memorial Lecture 1961, ‘Socialism within the Australian Constitution’, in Whitlam, On Australia’s Constitution, p. 47.

22

Speech by the prime minister, Mr EG Whitlam QC MP, at the laying of the Foundation Stone for John Curtin House, Canberra, 28 April 1974, Whitlam papers, NAA M163, Item no. 23A, Box 3.

23

‘Whitlam admits using language of Curtin’, The Australian, 24 May 1976. Hawke, John Curtin Memorial Lecture, Perth, 28 September 1983, NAA, M 3851/1.

25

Hawke, News Conference, Parliament House, Canberra, 11 December 1990, DPMCL.

26

Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, p. 161.

27

Hawke, Valedictory Speech for the Old Parliament House, 3 June 1988, transcript.

1 1 7 – 2 6

24

P A G E S

Donald Horne ‘Republican Australia’, p. 90.

T O

RJ Hawke, Foreword to Norman E Lee’s John Curtin, Saviour of Australia.

16

N O T E S

15

145

1 2 6 – 3 3 P A G E S T O N O T E S

146

28

Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, pp. 21–22.

29

Bob Hawke, news conference, Parliament House, Canberra, 11 December 1990, DPMCL.

30

Bob Hawke, Interview with author, Sydney, 25 June 1999, transcript.

31

Paul Keating, Interview with author, Sydney 26 March 1998, transcript.

32

Keating, Speech at Ela Beach, Port Moresby, 25 April 1992, transcript.

33

Edwards, Curtin’s Gift, p. 12.

34

Ibid.

35

Alexander Downer, Speech to the Earle Page College’s Annual Politics Dinner, University of New England, Armidale, 17 May 2005, transcript.

36

Keating, Faulkner, ‘Downer blasted over slur on Curtin’, The Australian, 19 May 2005.

37

Rudd, ‘Our True Heroes’, The Australian, 19 May 2005.

38

Rudd, Press Conference with President George Bush, Washington, 29 March 2008, transcript, www.pm.gov.au, accessed 30 March 2008.

39

The Australian, 3 April 2008.

40

Rudd, Speech to Battle of Australia Commemoration, Canberra, 3 September 2008, transcript, www.pm.gov.au, accessed 6 September 2008.

41

James Curran, ‘Rudd’s wartime roleplay is his link with history’, Spectator (Australia), 1 November 2008, pp. iv–v.

42

Weekend Australian, 23–24 January 2010.

43

Beazley, quoted in Geoffrey Barker, ‘The History Man’, Australian Financial Review Magazine, 2001.

44

See Peter Edwards, ‘1941: A turning point in Australian foreign policy?’, Teaching History, August 1975; Evans and Grant, Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s; Day, ‘December 1941’; See also Chapter 1.

45

Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity’, p. 91.

46

The Times (UK), 1 May 1944.

47

Ibid.

48

DAFP 1937–49, vol. VII: 1944; p. 319.

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153

Index

Abyssinia, Italian invasion 63–5 ‘Advance Australia Fair’ 94 Advisory War Council 87 ALP see Australian Labor Party ALP conferences Federal Conference 1936 68 Federal Conference 1939 79 Federal Conference 1943 95, 98–106 National Conference 1918 137 NSW Labor Party Conference 1943 90 Anglo–Australian relations and Australian right to self-government 21 changing views of Curtin over time 10–11 desire for equality in unity 47, 48–53 following 1944 Prime Ministers’ Conference 115 following Statute of Westminster 51 and forgetting of Empire since 1960s 15 from Federation to 1960s 8 Anglo-Japanese alliance 46 Anstey, Frank 30 anti-British sentiment 87 Anti-Comintern Pact 67, 75 ANZAC Agreement 111 Anzac Day 29, 53–5 ANZUS alliance 2 Armistice 46 Australia Day 145 Australian Britishness as a better branch of Britishness 19–21 Curtin’s view 14–15, 85, 131–2 as a defining feature of political culture in 20th century 132–4 re-emergence in 1943 90–1 Australian Labor Party Anzac Day remembrance and commemoration 53–5 approach to national security 78 attitude to Empire 9–10, 27–9, 78 conscription debates 28, 29, 33–5, 37, 65 defence and foreign policy in 1930s 67–75, 81 154

disdain for imperial pomp and ceremony 27–9 endorsement of Curtin’s proposal for Empire Council 102–4, 133 ideological friction and factional disunity in the 1930s 57–60 impact of First World War on Labor identity and mission 41 invoking of Curtin’s legacy by Labor leaders 4, 122–31 isolationism 57–60, 73, 90 and League of Nations 37 liberalism 45 opposition to Australians fighting in overseas wars 76 question over loyalty to Empire and Monarchy 29, 71–4 radical nationalism 45 selection of Australians as Governor-General 92 stance on international affairs in 1920s and 1930s 12 struggle for legitimacy over capacity to govern in war 35–6 support for involvement in Second World War 80 worldview following First World War 47–8 see also ALP conferences Australian nationalism and British race myth 19–21 and British race patriotism 18–21, 85, 91, 96, 114 and Curtin’s legacy 4–6, 11–12, 74–5, 118, 124, 125, 128 and loyalty to Empire 42–5, 58–9, 77–9 Australian Natives Association (ANA) 145 Australian War Memorial, Curtin’s dedication speech 82–3 Baldwin, Stanley 64 Balfour Declaration 50, 64, 97 ‘Battle for Australia’ 85, 130 ‘Battle for Australia’ Day 130 Bean, Charles 20 Beazley, Kim 131 Bell, Duncan 17

Britain attitude to rise of Nazi Germany 75 debate over how to maintain post-war power and influence 88–9 first Labour government 45–6 response to Curtin’s proposal for greater imperial cooperation 106–7, 110 British Empire Colonial Conferences 138 Colonial Office 138 Curtin’s proposal for Empire Council 6–11, 89–90, 94–106 Curtin’s proposal for greater cooperation 96–7 debate over terms of association of member states 16–17 development of Empire cooperation 100 development of foreign policy 22 difficulty of case for greater cooperation 92 evolution of Empire 99 evolution of relationships between members 46–53, 97 legacy in former dominions 15–16 organisational challenges 138 Prime Ministers’ Conference 1944 109–16, 133 response to Curtin’s proposals 106–16 Ward’s proposal for an Empire Advisory Council 97, 138 see also Imperial Conferences; Imperial Federation; Imperial War Cabinet British race patriotism 18–21, 85, 91, 96, 114 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne 37, 48, 50, 98, 111, 116 Bruce Government 61

I N D E X

Cairo Conference (1943) 110 Calwell, Arthur 93–4 Canada relations with Empire/ Commonwealth 10, 47, 49–50, 51 views on greater imperial cooperation 97, 107–9, 112–13 Casey, RG 68 Chamberlain, Joseph 138 Chamberlain, Neville 76 Chatfield, Lord 70 Chauvel, Harry 29 Chifley, Ben 58–9, 120–1 Churchill, Winston 86, 88, 112, 116

Citizen’s Defence Force 30 Colonial Conferences 138 Colonial Office 138 Commonwealth Defence Act 1903 34 conscription Curtin’s opposition 34–5, 59, 80 impact of debates and referenda 1916–17 9, 28, 29, 33–5, 37, 65 introduction in 1943 90 Cook, Joseph 38 Coombs, Nugget 120 Cooper, Duff 89 Cranbourne, Lord 107 Cripps, Stafford 64 Cross, Ronald 109–10, 115–16 Cunliffe, Marcus 123 Curtin, John assumption of prime ministership 81–2 attacks on his legend by conservatives 128 on Australian Britishness 14–15, 85, 131–2 British-centred view of the world 120 British race patriotism 85, 114 broadcasts to people of Britain 84–5 commitment to Empire 114–16 concern over dominion status 51–3 contested legacy 5–6 contradictions 6 defining Australia as ‘British-speaking people’ 58–9 on development of Empire cooperation 100 ‘disloyalty’ to Empire 34–5 doctrine of Empire and Empire management 47, 48–53, 58–9, 77–9 early views on defence and foreign policy 30–6 editorial writings for Westralian Worker 10–11, 27, 31, 52, 53–5, 59, 83 election to federal parliament 60 evolution of defence policy in the 1930s 62–3, 71, 80 first visit overseas 39 as ‘Founding Father’ 126, 127 as frustrated social and constitutional reformer 123–5 his nationalism 74–5, 118, 124, 125, 128 on history of British Empire 99 on impact of First World War on national psyche 41–2 on imperial cooperation and coordination 39–41

155

I N D E X

156

Curtin, John (cont.) imprisonment 34 on independence of Australian foreign policy 48 influence of First World War 31–6 on invasion of Abyssinia and economic sanctions against Italy 64–5 on keeping Australia out of European conflicts 75–6 leadership of Federal Parliamentary Labor Party 63 on League of Nations 61–2 legacy 4–5 on lessons of Anzac 53–5 on looking to US for national security 2, 11–15, 108, 112, 116, 120 nationalism and ‘loyalty’ 42–5, 58–9, 77–9 on need for unity of policy in Commonwealth 113 opposition to conscription 34–5, 37, 59, 80 opposition to militarism 30–1 place in Australian political history 117–18 post-imperial myths 123–31 on ‘practical fraternity’ among members of Empire 84–5, 91 ‘practical imperial patriotism’ 84–5, 119 Prime Ministers’ Conference (1944) 109–16 proposal for Empire Council 6–11, 89–90, 94–106, 119–20 response to outbreak of Second World War 79–80 on role of Australia in post-war world 88–92 as ‘Saviour of Australia’ 86 on Singapore strategy 68–75 as symbol of Australian national unity 125–7 transition from party leadership to prime minister 86 unifying Labor in the 1930s 57–60 on White Australia policy 36 Curtin Government Advisory War Council 87 opposition criticisms of relations with Britain 87–8 position on Irish neutrality 143 strained relations with British leaders 86–7 support for Britain in Second World War 81–2 Curtin (telemovie) 4 Curtis, Lionel 97

Darwin, John 16–17, 89 Day, David 5, 7–8, 12, 60, 74–5 De Valera, Eamon 143 Deakin, Alfred 12, 18, 98, 116, 138 defence policy of ALP in 1920s 37 of ALP in 1930s 67–75, 80 Curtin’s early views 30–6 debate in 1920s 29 evolution in 1930s 62–3, 71, 80 need for independence from imperial policy 48, 71 security in the Pacific 12, 90 Singapore strategy 68–75, 85 Dilke, Charles 17 Disarmament Agreement 48 Dixon, Owen 87 Downer, Alexander 128 Duchess of York 26–7 Duke of Gloucester 92–3 Duke of York 26–7 Edward VIII (King of England), abdication 70 Edwards, John 127–8 Edwards, Peter 8 Empire Air Training Scheme 80 Evans, Gareth 12 Evatt, HV 93, 99, 106, 122 ‘The Eve of Revolution’ (poem, Swinburne) 3 fall of Singapore 85 Faulkner, John 128 First World War Australian support for Britain 32 impact on ALP identity and mission 41 impact on national psyche 41–2 influence on Curtin’s worldview 31–6 see also conscription Fisher, Andrew 19, 28, 31, 38, 98 Fisher Government 32, 98 Forde, Frank 64 foreign policy Curtin’s early views 30–6 Curtin’s proposed Empire Council 6–11, 89–90, 94–7, 106 direction under Gillard 1–2 isolationism in ALP 57–60, 73, 90 national interest and imperial policy 22 need for independence from imperial policy 48, 71 various camps in Australian community 95–6

Fraser, Peter (New Zealand prime minister) 107, 113, 114 Freudenberg, Graham 123–5 George V (King of England), coronation 28 George VI (King of England), coronation 70 Germany see Nazi Germany Gillard, Julia 1–4 Glasgow, William 109 Gowrie, Lord 93 Grant, Bruce 12 Greater Britain (Dilke) 17 Halifax, Lord 107 Hancock, WK 17, 19 Hankey, Maurice 94, 112 Hardie-Vaillant resolution 31 Hart, Basil Liddell 76 Hartcher, Peter 2 Hasluck, Paul 82, 87, 95, 99, 101 Hawke, Bob 4, 121, 129 Hertzog, JBM 49 Hoare, Samuel 64 Hodgson, WR 68 Holland, RF 47 Horne, Donald 122 Horner, David 95 Hughes, Billy at Paris Peace Conference 38, 48 attack on Curtin over loyalty to Empire 34–5 British race patriotism 19 conscription debate 34 on Curtin’s ‘looking to the US’ 13–15, 19 defence of White Australia policy 21 exclusion from discussions over Armistice 46, 116 view of imperial unity 47, 98

Japan attack on Australia 85 military expansion 67 occupation of Manchuria 69 Johnson, Nelson 86 Keating, Paul 4, 7–8, 42, 126–7, 128 Kelly, Paul 2 King, Mackenzie (Canadian prime minister) 10, 49–50, 109, 110, 112–13, 114 Labor Party see Australian Labor Party labour movement, electoral success in post-war Britain 45–6 Lake, Marilyn 123 Lang, Jack 28–9, 80, 103–4 Latham, John 64 Latham, Mark 129 Lavarack, John 68 League of Nations covenant 21 economic sanctions against Italy 63 failure to deter military aggression 63 and international cooperation 38 see also Paris Peace Conference Lee, Norman E 86 liberal internationalism 61 Lincoln, Abraham 32 Lloyd George, David 46 London Conference of Naval Armaments (1930) 61–2 Lyons, Joseph 12, 65, 68, 69–71 Lyons Government 64, 66, 74, 75 MacArthur, Douglas 8 MacDonald, Ramsay 45–6 McLachlan, Noel 11 McMullin, Ross 66, 80 Mannix, Daniel 143 Mansergh, Nicholas 101 mass nationalism 17 Meaney, Neville 12, 19, 21 media, mainstream press response to Curtin’s proposed Empire Council 104–5 Menzies, Robert contempt for Labor’s ‘British’ credentials 87–8 contested legacy 5 on imperial defence policy 64, 66 response to Curtin’s proposed Empire Council 105–6

I N D E X

Imperial Conferences 1921 47 1923 48 1926 50 1937 69–72, 75 Imperial Federation 18, 40, 97, 103 Imperial War Cabinet 46, 110 Inglis, Ken 82 instrumental presentism 122 international affairs ALP stance in 1920s and 1930s 12 see also defence policy; foreign policy International Labour Organisation Conference (Geneva 1924) 38–9

Irish Free State 51 Isaacs, Isaac 93 Italy economic sanctions 63 invasion of Abyssinia 63–5

157

Menzies, Robert (cont.) on Spanish Civil War 66 on ties between Australia and Britain 13 Milner, Lord 40 Munich Agreement 75–9 national anthem 94 National Defence League of Australia 13 national security Japanese threat 30, 37 Labor’s approach 78 perceived Asian threat 18 Shedden’s three safeguards 95 see also defence policy; foreign policy nationalism 17, 74 see also Australian nationalism; Britannic nationalism; British nationalism Nazi Germany Britain’s initial response 75 invasion of Czechoslovakia 78 military build-up under Hitler 67–8 New Zealand relations with Empire/ Commonwealth 10–11, 47, 51, 138 views on greater imperial cooperation 97, 107, 113 Odlum, Victor 107 Oliver, WH 122 Paris Peace Conference 21, 38 Parkes, Henry 18 Parkhill, Archdale 70 Pearce, George 31, 48 Pierce, Ambrose 54 Piesse, EL 68 Poincare Government (France) 45 popular culture, presentations of Curtin’s legacy 4–5 Potter, Simon 51 Prince of Wales, 1920 visit to Australia 28–9, 39, 53

Rudd, Kevin 4, 128, 129–31 Russo-Japanese War (1905) 30 Scullin, James 37, 93 Scullin Government 60 Second World War American troops in Australia 90 anti-British sentiment in Australia 87 Curtin’s response to outbreak 79–80 Labor’s support for deployment of Australian servicemen 80 Shedden, Frederick 94–9, 102, 106 Singapore strategy and Fall of Singapore 85 questioning of 68–75 Smuts, Jan (South African Prime Minister) concern over Britain’s weakening power 107 on death of Empire 114 desire for more frequent meetings of prime ministers 97 push for greater autonomy within Empire 10, 47, 49 response to Curtin’s Empire Council proposal 110, 113 South Africa Afrikaner nationalism 49 relations with Empire/ Commonwealth 10, 47, 49, 51 views on greater imperial cooperation 97, 107, 112, 113 Spanish Civil War 66–7 Spender, Percy 13 Statute of Westminster (1931) 50–1, 64 Story of Anzac (Bean) 20 Swinburne, Charles 3 Thomson, Lord 45 Toye, Richard 88 Turner, Ian 137 US–Australia relationship 1–2, 120, 129

I N D E X

Victorian Socialist Party 30, 32

158

Reluctant Nation (Day) 7 Ross, Lloyd 59 Royal Australian Navy, establishment 31, 98 Royal Society of St George 13 royal visits to Australia 1920 – Prince of Wales 28–9, 39, 53 1927 – Duke and Duchess of York 26–7 RSL 13

Wand, JWC 15 war memorials, dedication ceremonies 53–5, 82–3 Ward, Joseph (New Zealand Prime Minister) 97, 138 Ward, Stuart 18, 40 Washington, George 123 Washington Conference 1923 48 Watson, Don 126, 127

Westralian Worker, Curtin’s editorials 10–11, 27, 31, 52, 53–5, 83 White Australia policy Curtin’s committment 36 Hughes’ defence 4 nationalism and patriotism 41–2 unravelling 122

Whitlam, Gough 4, 5, 123–5 Whitlam Government 123 Wilson, Woodrow 38, 46, 61 World War I see First World War World War II see Second World War

I N D E X

159

Australian Encounters series Cambridge University Press Australia, in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, presents the provocative new series Australian Encounters. Combining original scholarly research and elegant, accessible prose, this series engages with important Australian issues that span current society, politics, culture, economics and historical debates. The essence of the series is to bring new thinking and fresh perspectives to these issues that are so vital to Australian society.

Series Editor Dr Tony Moore is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University. He has a distinguished list of publications, including academic journals, research monographs, books and book chapters, and has researched, produced and directed several social and historical documentaries for ABC television. Dr Moore’s career has spanned policy research in the community and public sectors, current affairs journalism, documentary making and book publishing, as well as teaching history at the University of Sydney.