Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns 0522850022, 9780522850024

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k eeper of the faith

keeper of the faith A BIOGRAPHY OF JIM CAIRNS

PAUL STRANGIO

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS PO Box 278, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2002 Text © Paul Strangio 2002 Design and typography © Melbourne University Press 2002 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher. Designed by Pages in Action Typeset by Melbourne University Press in 10 point Giovanni Book Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Strangio, Paul. Keeper of the faith: a biography of Jim Cairns. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 522 85002 2. 1. Cairns, Jim, 1914-.2. Australian Labor Party—History— 20th century. 3. Politicians—Australia—Biography. I. Title. 324.29407092

Publication was assisted by a grant from the Australian Historical Association on behalf of the National Council for the Centenary of Federation.

To my parents, Vincent and Mary

CO NTENTS Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1 ‘The victim of a great wrong’, 1914–1931 2 ‘An intellectual seeker’, 1932–1947 3 Political Apprentice, 1948–1955 4 The Member for Yarra, 1956–1964 5 Vietnam: The Great Moral Crusade, 1962–1967 6 ‘A symbol of participatory democracy’, 1968–1970 7 ‘feelings of profound disillusionment’, 1970–1972 8 A ‘New Jim Cairns’? 1972–1974 9 Ruin and Liberation, 1974-1975 10 ‘Some wacko theory’, 1976-1990 Epilogue Notes Select Bibliography Index

ILLUSTRATIO NS

Unless specified, photographs are courtesy of the Cairns family. following 48 Starting school on horseback, Melton, 1921 Letty and Jim, aged fourteen Jim as a school-leaver, early 1930s Constable Cairns, Easter 1935 The aspirant Olympian leading the field, 1938 A whirlwind romance: Jim and Gwen, 1939 Barry and Philip Cairns, aged four and five, 1939 Cairns graduating as Bachelor of Commerce, University of Melbourne, 1948 Gwen Cairns at Kenilworth House, South Yarra, late 1940s Jim Cairns, Gwen Cairns, Louise Miller and Barry, mid-1950s Jim Cairns, the newly elected Member for Yarra Barry Cairns, Jim Cairns, Elizabeth Ford nursing Michael, and Letty Cairns, late 1950s Gwen and Jim, late 1950s following 80 Addressing anti-Vietnam War meeting, Richmond Town Hall, May 1965 Communist Party of Australia Collection, University of Melbourne

Archives With Gwen in Fiji, 1966 With Indonesian President Sukarno and Clyde Holding, mid-1966 In talks with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia, 1966 Meeting Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, 1966 Gwen Cairns announces Cairns’ intention to contest the Labor leadership, April 1968 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection The Labor leadership team: Whitlam and Lance Barnard, 1969 National Archives of Australia Battered and bruised: after the bashing at Wattle Road, August 1969 The mobile electoral office: campaigning for Lalor, 1969 following 240 With a young fan, first Moratorium march, 8 May 1970 In familiar pose addressing a Moratorium meeting, 9 May 1970 Addressing the multitudes in Bourke Street, first Moratorium march, 8 May 1970 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection Flashpoint: second Moratorium march, 18 September 1970 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection As Vice-Chairman of the International Commission of Inquiry into American War Crimes in Indochina, Oslo, 1971 With Tom Uren and Charles Jones, swearing in of the full Whitlam ministry, Government House, December 1972. National Archives of Australia

following 272 Being sworn in at the opening of the twenty-eighth Commonwealth Parliament, 27 February 1973 Courtesy of the Cairns family and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Gwen Cairns at Wattle Road, 1973 Leading trade mission to the People’s Republic of China, May 1973 With Gwen at official banquet, China, May 1973 The Australian trade mission sightseeing in Peking, China, May 1973 Signing trade agreement with the Chinese Minister of Foreign Trade, Pai Hsiang-kuo, Canberra, July 1973 In talks, China, May 1973 The Whitlam Government ministry with Queen Elizabeth II, February 1974 Campaigning for Labor’s re-election, Moorabbin Town Hall, May 1974 John Ellis Collection, University of Melbourne Archives With Whitlam and Sir Christopher Soames, Parliament House, September 1974 National Archives of Australia facing 336 Junie Morosi Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection Jim Cairns, Acting Prime Minister, 1975 The reshuffled Whitlam ministry, Government House, 6 June 1975 National Archives of Australia 337

Answering media questions after his sacking from the Whitlam ministry Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection Promoting Morosi’s Sex, Prejudice and Politics, November 1975 John Ellis Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Counter-culture philosopher: Down to Earth Confest, Berri, April 1979 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection 368 At the new family home, Narre Warren East, 1982 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection A familiar Melbourne sight: Cairns’ bookstall, Prahran Market, 1988 Herald & Weekly Times Photographic Collection 369 Twentieth anniversary of the first Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, Melbourne Town Hall, 11 May 1990 John Ellis Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Jim and Gwen celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, February 1999 Jim, Gwen and great-grandchildren, February 1999 Awarded life membership of the Victorian Labor Party, June 2000

ACKNO WLEDG EMENTS

I H AV E I N C U R R E D

many debts in the long process of writing this biography. The book owes its existence, at least in the form it takes, to the co-operation of Dr Jim Cairns. From the time I first approached Dr Cairns in 1990 with the idea of a study of his life and ideas, he has been unstinting in his co-operation. As well as granting me more than a dozen lengthy interviews, he willingly authorised me to obtain access to records relevant to his life story. At no stage has Dr Cairns sought to influence or veto what I have written. I am also grateful to the late Gwen Cairns for welcoming me into the family home and extending me hospitality. My sincere thanks also to Barry and June Cairns, particularly for allowing the reproduction of photographs from the Cairns family collection. In locating research material for the book, I have been assisted by a large number of people. I wish to acknowledge the efficient and courteous assistance provided by the staff of the Australian Archives (Canberra), the Baillieu Library (University of Melbourne), the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne Archives. Senior Sergeant Tony de Ridder of the Victoria Police Freedom of Information Office expedited my access to the police service file of Jim Cairns. I would also like to thank the late Dr Geoffrey Serle who kindly extracted from his own private papers material useful to my project. Paul Ormonde was a great help. In May 1991 I visited him at his home to discuss his biography of Cairns, when he unexpectedly pulled out a large suitcase of tape-recordings of the interviews he had conducted for his book. He generously allowed me to transcribe those recordings—a time-consuming but tremendously fruitful task. My appreciation also to those who allowed me to interview them as part of my research: the late

Gordon Bryant, Barry Cairns, the late Gwen Cairns, Jim Cairns, June Cairns, Moss Cass, the late Lloyd Churchward, the late Manning Clark, Frank Crean, the late Fred Daly, the late Sam Goldbloom, Clyde Holding, Alan McBriar, Junie Morosi, George Schmidt the late Geoff Serle, A. G. L. Shaw, Tom Uren and E. G. Whitlam. This biography started life as my doctoral thesis. While working on the thesis I was guided by several supervisors. Professor John Rickard of the History Department Monash University, offered valuable advice during the embryonic stages of the project. Professor David Walker of the School of Australian and International Studies, Deakin University, made many perceptive comments on the first draft, and Dr Michele Langfield of the School of Australian and International Studies, Deakin University, provided timely encouragement in the final stages of my candidature. The most consistent input came from Dr Stephen Alomes of the School of Australian and International Studies, Deakin University. He has been a source not only of scholarly counsel, but also of friendship. The examiners of my doctoral thesis, Professors Stuart Macintyre and Peter Spearritt and Dr John McQuilton, were both wise and encouraging. I am especially indebted to Professor Macintyre for his continuing interest in, and generous support for, the project. Dr Peter Love is another scholarly colleague who retained a keen interest in my progress. In transforming the thesis into book, I have been in the fortunate position to draw upon the expertise of the team at Melbourne University Press. Teresa Pitt has been an enthusiastic supporter, and Melissa Mackey and Gabby Lhuede were always helpful. I am grateful to Jenny Lee for reading the manuscript at an early stage and offering many valuable suggestions. Janet Mackenzie was a skilful and meticulous editor. The book made it to publication thanks to generous grants from the National Council for the Centenary of Federation and the Australian Historical Association, and the Deakin University Faculty of Arts Research Committee.

Countless others have given me support in a variety of ways—too many to list. However, I must particularly thank my friends Marcus Beer, John Clements, Peter Fortune, Kerry Munnery, Maureen and Shane Neaves, and Luke Williams who have followed the project with special interest. Tony Strangio supplied some very practical assistance. My parents, Vincent and Mary Strangio, have been a constant source of strength and encouragement: without their support I would never have been in the position to complete this book. My children, Jack and Gemma, while too young to read the manuscript, have given inspiration of a different nature. Finally, I owe the greatest debt to Aileen Muldoon, not least because of her generosity of spirit and for never losing faith in either the book or its author. PAUL STRANGIO

ABBREVIATIO NS ABC

Australian Broadcasting Commission (later Corporation)

ACCL

Australian Council for Civil Liberties

ACTU

Australian Council of Trade Unions

AICD

Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament

AIDC

Australian Industry Development Corporation

AIF

Australian Imperial Force

ALP

Australian Labor Party

ANZUS

Australia, New Zealand, United States (treaty)

ASIO

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

CHEP

Community Housing Expansion Program

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CICD

Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament

CPA

Communist Party of Australia

DLP

Democratic Labor Party

DTE

Down To Earth

EWC

East-West Committee

FPLP

Federal Parliamentary Labor Party

GM-H

General Motors–Holden

IAC

Industries Assistance Commission

MULC

Melbourne University Labour Club

MUSA

Melbourne University Staff Association

OECD

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

RSL

Returned Services League

SOS

Save Our Sons

VMC

Vietnam Moratorium Campaign

WWF

Waterside Workers’ Federation

introduc tion

I N N O V E M B E R 1999 , shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday, Jim Cairns

launched what he vowed (not for the first time) would be his final book. As its title, On the Horizon: A Cultural Transformation to a New Consciousness, implied, the book confidently forecast the dawning of a new era in human affairs, in which patriarchal capitalism would be replaced by a society based on the values of co-operation, affection and tolerance. Despite Cairns’ best efforts to fire the collective imagination of those who had gathered in the Richmond Town Hall to hear him speak, the atmosphere was overwhelmingly nostalgic. The predominantly elderly audience was liberally sprinkled with family friends, and a small number of former associates of Cairns from the peace movement and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) had also turned out. He had invited current ALP politicians to the event, but none had shown up. Mary Delahunty, Education Minister in the newly elected Victorian Labor government, had agreed to launch the book, only to renege at the last moment. For Cairns, it was a sadly familiar scenario. In 1996, the leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP), Kim Beazley Jnr, had backed out of a commitment to launch his previous book.1 These snubs deeply hurt Cairns. They were a sharp reminder of his eclipse as a figure of any significance within the contemporary ALP and, most painful, a message that anything he had to say was considered irrelevant to the ideological direction of the party. There was a time when it had been different. After leaving school during the Great Depression, Cairns progressed along a career path that led him from the Victoria Police to the world of academia by his early thirties. As a lecturer in Economic History in the late 1940s, Cairns’

maturing views on the social order were translated into growing political activity—one manifestation of which was his decision to join the Labor Party in 1947. After capturing the seat of Yarra at the 1955 federal election, Cairns quickly rose to a position of influence within the ALP. Throughout most of the 1960s and 1970s, among the ranks of Labor MPs, he was second only to Gough Whitlam in terms of public prominence: the two men were towering figures on the Australian political landscape, as well as intense ideological and political rivals. Cairns was widely regarded as the chief theorist and spokesman of the Labor Left. His leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement carried him to extraordinary heights, placing him at the head of the wider movement for social change that gripped Australian society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a period he seemed to become a voice for the many in society who were restless, questioning and yearned for some form of change He went on in 1974 to reach the position of Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer in the Whitlam Government, possibly the most radical politician to have achieved such high office in Australia. The following year, however, his career collapsed controversially amidst the death throes of the Labor government. By 1977, disillusioned with both the Labor Party and the institution of parliamentary democracy, Cairns cut his ties with formal politics. His interest in radical social change, though, was undiminished. In the more than two decades that have passed since, during an era in which political and economic debate in Australia has been monopolised by free-market ideas, Cairns has preached a doctrine of individual liberation anchored in psychology and anthropology. In that time he has written eight books elaborating upon his research and theories of social change, all of which he has self-published. He has become a familiar sight around the markets of Melbourne, seated at a card table stacked with copies of his latest book, discussing his ideas with anyone who is interested. The reactions to his presence are mixed. In the eyes of some he is a tragic fallen hero, a slightly uncomfortable reminder of their own loss of idealism and innocence. Others, less

flatteringly, view him as a pathetic and eccentric figure, while an increasing number of young Australians have, at best, only the vaguest idea of who he is. In the light of his marginalisation over the past two decades, a primary objective of this book is to reassess the part Cairns has played in shaping Australian public life. In an interview in 1994 Cairns bitterly observed that the events of 1975 had ‘washed out’ in people’s minds all that he had achieved over the previous twenty years. The same year his friend and another former Labor Left stalwart, Tom Uren, noted in his memoirs that ‘Cairns has never been assessed fairly for the contributions which he made to the ALP and to the nation’. 2 Cairns has already been the subject of two biographical studies. A slim 1971 volume by Irene Dowsing, which offered a broadly descriptive account of his political career up to that point, was a hagiography. Dowsing made no attempt to disguise her purpose, stating that her account was neither ‘comprehensive, nor is it in anyway critical’.3 One decade on, Paul Ormonde’s biography of Cairns, A Foolish Passionate Man, was a far more substantial piece of work and offered an often compelling study of Cairns’ life. He emerges from the pages as a morally courageous yet vain man, blind to his own limitations and weaknesses; a dreamer who, in the final analysis, was unsuited to the demands of politics and whose political destruction was made inevitable by the flaws in his character. Junie Morosi is identified as the agent of that destruction, the one who brought those flaws to the surface. Ormonde’s study is, therefore, a riposte to Dowsing’s ‘great man’ view. It is ultimately a story of failure. As Ormonde writes: ‘By his late sixties, his [Cairns’] only sure achievement was that he had changed himself’.4 It is perhaps natural that the Ormonde biography, begun in 1974 and completed in the aftermath of the fall of the Whitlam Government, should have projected Cairns in this way. Writing at a time when the embers of those turbulent events were still warm, Ormonde

neglects to locate his narrative in a broader context. Engrossed by the immediate drama, he overlooks the wider political, economic and ideological forces that shaped Cairns’ public career. He sheds little light on the ideological conflict that was always at the heart of Cairns’ involvement in mainstream Australian politics and the Labor Party. This book, by contrast, is written in the belief that the vicissitudes that characterised Cairns’ political career become explicable only through an exploration of that conflict. It therefore elevates to centre-stage a study of Cairns’ ideological evolution from the 1940s to the present time.5 There are other important reasons for this focus. In his 1996 book Reshaping the Future, Cairns wrote: ‘My life has been a search—a search for ways to bring about social quality’.6 In this brief sentence he neatly sums up the defining feature of his activity over the past half-century. Through his various incarnations as university lecturer, Labor politician, anti-war crusader, senior government minister and prophet of personal liberation, the quest to find the key to fundamental social change has preoccupied Cairns. In the course of that quest he has produced a substantial body of thought. He has published sixteen books, numerous articles and pamphlets, as well giving a vast number of speeches and addresses. To understand Cairns and his place in post-war Australian society, it is essential to illuminate his struggle for social change. This requires a delineation of his developing ideas; an analysis of their origins, principal tenets, continuities, changes and contradictions. What follows, however, goes beyond a narrow intellectual biography of Cairns. Cairns has strived for a unity of theory and practice. His ideas have always been an injunction to action. The powerful ethical imperative that has provided the crucible of his theorising has guaranteed this. Interwoven in the discussion of Cairns’ theoretical journey is also a narrative of his prodigious activities. There is no neat demarcation between public and private life. Ormonde claims that his biography of Cairns is characterised by ‘an unusually detailed psychological

dimension’.7 When it was published Ormonde’s claim had some weight, but recent trends in psycho-biography render his use of the tools of psychoanalytical theory to discover the ‘inner’ Cairns insignificant. 8 This is not to suggest, however, that this book offers a fully fledged psychobiography of Cairns. Such an approach would have jeopardised the objective of giving this study of Cairns the type of broader context that is missing from Ormonde’s account. In any event, the absence of private p a p e r s 9 militates against the construction of a comprehensive psychological profile of Cairns, though this problem is partially offset by the wealth of information on his life scattered through a range of other sources, both primary and secondary. Among this is a large amount of interview material, including that conducted by the psychiatrist Dr John Diamond as part of an early experiment in political psychology in 1968.10 On the occasions this book does delve into Cairns’ psyche, it is largely to further understanding of his ideological journey. Graham Little, one of the pioneers in Australia of the application of psychology to the study of politics, points out: ‘The source of our ideas is not only the outside world, but our inner selves’.11 In this sense, it does become important to explain what it was in Cairns’ childhood and subsequent personal development that has contributed to forging his particular view of the world. There is, in addition, an irresistible logic and symmetry in applying some degree of psychologically based analysis to Cairns for the very reason that late in his life he has arrived at a theory of social change steeped in that discipline. By concentrating on Cairns’ ideological evolution, this book also challenges the lingering orthodoxy that Australian politics has in some way been devoid of ideas.12 It is true that Cairns’ consistent concern to infuse his action and pronouncements with some form of theoretical content made him a rarity in Australian politics. But his path in politics and his ideological battles illuminate some of the major currents of thought that have shaped Australia’s post-war political landscape. What

emerges is a story not of theoretical sterility but of considerable vitality. Finally, because most of Cairns’ public life has been spent fighting for social change within the confines of the Labor Party, an examination of his ideological odyssey inevitably throws open a window on the changing ideological character of the ALP over the past fifty years. Probably more than anyone else in the post-war era, Cairns acted as a conscience within the ALP for the view that the party’s raison d’être was to offer an alternative to the marketplace and its values of competition, individualism and acquisitiveness. In this respect, his gradual disillusionment with the Labor Party as an agent of social change was not simply a product of the erosion of his faith in state collectivism. That disillusionment also occurred within the context of Labor’s post-war retreat from a commitment to substantive intervention in the market. Indeed, Cairns’ estrangement from the ALP may be read as a reflection of the dulling of any residual anti-capitalist sentiment within the party.

1 ‘the v ic tim of a great wrong’ 1914–1931 [CAIRNS] WAS A WRONGS RIGHTER—A MAN WHO HAD BEEN THE VICTIM OF A GREAT WRONG, WHO ELEVATED THE CURING OF HIS OWN WOUND INTO A NATIONAL CAUSE. BUT I NEVER KNEW WHAT THAT WOUND WAS. I STILL PONDER WHETHER PERHAPS HE DID NOT KNOW, OR, IF HE DID, THAT IT WAS TOO PAINFUL FOR HIM TO TALK ABOUT . . . Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, p. 155.

T H E F U T U R E M A N O F P E A C E arrived in war. The only child of James

John Cairns and Letitia Cairns (née Ford), James Ford Cairns was born in a terrace house at 22 Drummond Street Carlton on 4 October 1914. Only two months had passed since the commencement of hostilities in Europe —not enough time to diminish the tide of imperial patriotism that had swept up the bulk of Australians. The nation was transfixed by the news of the fighting on the Western Front in Belgium and Northern France. The day before Cairns was born, the Argus commented: ‘All men are talking war and hearing war talked, thinking war, and dreaming war, and reading war. The war picture fills the mind to the exclusion of everything else . . . [it] has dislocated all the regular annual output of thought and ideas’.1 Although Cairns was only four years of age when armistice was

declared in November 1918, his life was irrevocably stamped by the events of World War I. His father, James Cairns, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 5 July 1915.2 He was described in his enlistment papers as having a fresh complexion, blue eyes and brown hair, physical features that his son inherited. After training with the 59th Depot Company at Seymour, James Cairns was deployed to the 29th Battalion, 8th Infantry Brigade. On 10 November 1915 he embarked for the Middle East aboard the Ascanieus. He never returned. According to his AIF service record, James Cairns was stationed in Egypt for several months. In March 1916 he was promoted to corporal and transferred to the 5th Divisional headquarters at Tel el Kebir on clerical duties. In June he embarked for France, where the 5th Division was to be committed to the Somme campaign on the Western Front. The following March James Cairns was selected to attend a training course at the Officers’ Cadet School at Cambridge in England. While there he received ‘special mention’ in Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches of 9 April 1917. He returned to France in August and was appointed as adjutant to the 31st Battalion, stationed in the field on the Western Front. His star continued to rise, and he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in November 1917. When hostilities ended, James Cairns remained with the 31st Battalion in France. Soon after, the troubles began that were to ruin what up until that point had been a successful, if unspectacular, service record. In January 1919 on leave in Belfast, where he was visiting his sister, he was arrested by military authorities for drunkenness. He was released after several days, officially censured, and sent to rejoin his unit. This was a minor misdemeanour and hardly unusual in the context of the AIF’s reputation for unruly behaviour away from the battle front. Nonetheless, for an officer it was probably regarded as an incident of considerable dishonour. Worse was to come. In May 1919 James Cairns was reported absent without leave in France and declared an illegal absentee. On 5 August 1919 he surrendered himself to military authorities in London and was

placed under close arrest. The next month he was tried by General Court Martial on four charges. The first three alleged that he had misapplied regimental money for ‘his own use with intent to defraud’ on three separate occasions between 20 March and 2 May 1919. The amounts involved totalled 5535 francs and 85 centimes, equivalent to almost two years’ pay for an AIF private. 3 The final charge related to his absence without leave between 9 May and 5 August. James Cairns pleaded guilty to all four charges, and was sentenced to be cashiered and his pay stopped until he had made good the money that he had defrauded. He was due to embark for Australia aboard the Aeneas on 22 November 1919. He failed to do so, and an entry in his service record bluntly states that ‘no further action will be taken to arrange his passage to Australia’. On 15 March 1920, on the letterhead of the steamship Llanstephan Castle, he wrote to the AIF requesting an official statement of his service record and asking whether he was entitled to any medals in respect of his period of service. In a postscript he added that he was ‘not quite sure of my final destination but a letter addressed to me c/o this steamer at Durban [South Africa] should find me sooner or later’.4 From there the trail goes cold. As Paul Ormonde discovered when researching his biography of Cairns in the mid-1970s, there was great reticence within the family about James Cairns’ fate. Until her death in 1964, Letitia Cairns appears to have maintained the pretence that her husband was killed in the war. Jim Cairns did not learn otherwise until he was middle-aged. He too has often seemed reluctant to acknowledge that his father abandoned both himself and his mother, and is remarkably vague about what happened to him after the war. The most reliable account is that James Cairns was killed in a car crash in Kenya in 1927, although Cairns claims to have heard dozens of other versions.5 The reason James Cairns did not return to Australia in 1919 seems less mysterious. His decision to head for Africa was probably motivated by a desire to find a place to start life afresh, where he would not be

haunted by the stigma of the events of the preceding twelve months. Yet this may be only part of the explanation. Born in Hillhead in Glasgow in Scotland, James Cairns had been in his early thirties when he arrived in Australia aboard the one-class ship, the Benalla, in May 1913. According to Jim Cairns, his father had been ‘part of the establishment for the greater part of his life’. It is true that James Cairns sprang from a conservative and comfortable middle-class family. He was the eldest son of a Glasgow police inspector and had apparently received a public school education. After leaving school, he found secure employment in the Town Clerk’s Office in the Glasgow Town Hall. He remained there for some eighteen years and had reached the grade of senior clerk when last listed as an employee of the City of Glasgow in 1912.6 What prompted him to come to Australia the following year is unclear. Possibly it was a sense of wanderlust and adventure, or perhaps he was escaping something. The reason behind the Ford family’s decision to emigrate to Australia is far more obvious. The Fords were ‘poor farmers’ from Lancashire. Letitia’s father, John Thomas Ford, had started work at a cotton mill when he was nine years old. He and his wife, Elizabeth Ann, and other members of the family later worked as tenant farmers on a small dairy holding not far outside Blackpool. In 1912, weary of the family’s continuing economic struggle, John Ford decided to begin a new life in Australia. After sailing from Britain, he spent a brief spell working in Western Australia, then arrived in Victoria, where he found a job as manager of a pig farm in Keilor, 20 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. He sent for his wife and daughters, Eleanor, Letitia (Letty) and Sara. It was on the voyage to Australia aboard the Benalla that 19-year-old Letty met James Cairns.7 Despite their disparate social backgrounds and substantial age difference, romance blossomed between James and Letty. Shortly after their arrival in Melbourne the Fords moved into 22 Drummond Street, Carlton, while James Cairns found lodgings nearby in Victoria Parade,

East Melbourne. James and Letty continued to see one another, and early in 1914 Letty fell pregnant. Although fundamentally tolerant and generous spirited, John and Elizabeth Ford conscientiously abided by a puritan Methodist ethic; they believed in the virtue of hard work and austerity, and shunned the sins of the flesh. The discovery that their middle daughter had become pregnant out of wedlock must have come as a shock and a source of anguish. On 30 April 1914 James and Letty were married in a simple ceremony at the home of a Baptist minister in East Melbourne, with John Ford and Letty’s elder sister Eleanor as witnesses. 8 James Cairns moved into the Ford home in Carlton, but predictably it was not long before tensions surfaced between the Fords and their new son-in-law. In September James Cairns secured a position in the Melbourne Town Hall Clerk’s Office with a handsome starting salary of £200 per annum. Because his duties included the organisation of social functions and official entertainments, as his son later explained, he ‘was at dinners, banquets, parties and so forth a great deal’. In effect, James Cairns’ job afforded him the opportunity to mix in Melbourne social circles and indulge his taste for the high life. His weakness for alcohol created special consternation at home. Referring to the reticence that had surrounded his father’s memory, Jim Cairns noted one reason was that ‘at more than one stage of his life he drank too much. My mother and grandparents didn’t drink at all. I think they were more than a little ashamed of it.’ 9 It is conceivable, then, that another factor behind James Cairns’ desertion of his family was that once the initial flush of romance between him and Letty faded, and their social differences became more apparent, he no longer saw the marriage as a compelling reason to return to Australia after the war. While there is no evidence that he had actually been coerced into the marriage after Letty became pregnant, it is feasible that the war offered him a way out of a domestic situation he had

inadvertently stumbled into.10 If this is speculation, the crucial impact of James Cairns’ abandonment of his wife and son in determining the nature of Jim Cairns’ upbringing is beyond question. The first consequence of his father’s absence was that Cairns was not raised in a conventional nuclear family. Not long after James Cairns departed for the war, Lefty’s parents leased a property known as Victoria Farm on Macedon Road, Sunbury. For the next four years or so the farm was home to John and Elizabeth Ford, Letty Cairns and her baby son, Eleanor and Sara Ford, their cousin Mattie Smith and the Fords’ domestic Lizzie Salthouse. Life in this extended family was to be a consistent pattern of Jim Cairns’ childhood and adolescence, although he was too young to remember much about the years at Victoria Farm. His mother remained the centre of his universe and his principal recollection of this period was of being physically close with her.11 When Cairns was about five years of age the family moved to Melton, where his grandfather had leased a property called Nook Farm. It was not long after this that Cairns was told his father was dead. He claims the news made little impression on him. Cairns later explained this muted response, saying: ‘He [his father] was never there, a thing has to have been before you can miss it’. He insisted that, throughout his childhood and adolescence, he felt little sense of loss at not having a father. The most distinct impression Cairns had of his father was as he appeared in photographs in his army uniform. Cairns remembers he looked ‘impressive, something to be proud of’. When about fifteen he read some of the letters James Cairns had written to Letty while serving in France. He was struck by his father’s ‘beautiful handwriting’ and the descriptions of trench fighting, which he claims left him with an enduring sense of the futility and irrational nature of war.12 Whether the news that his father would not be returning affected Cairns far more strongly than his memory permits him to admit is

impossible to know For Letty, however, the realisation brought not only great heartbreak, but also concern about the future for both herself and her son. Soon after receiving the news she began seeking work to help supplement the family’s income. Although the war had led to an influx of women into the paid workforce, opportunities were still limited. When Letty eventually found work in October 1921, it was as a cook at the Sunbury Mental Hospital.13 Letty’s job at ‘The Hill’, as it was commonly known, required her to live in. She was able to return to the farm only every second weekend. With no husband to support her and little hope of alternative employment, she was to continue working at ‘The Hill’ for the remainder of the 1920s. Thus, from the time he turned seven, Jim Cairns had to come to terms with regular and lengthy separations from his mother, which were painful for both mother and child. In 1996 Cairns noted: ‘[the] saddest experience for me was on Sunday nights when she drove back to work in a jinker and I sat on the gatepost gazing long after she was out of sight’. Interviewed by Dr John Diamond in 1968, he recalled that his mother enjoyed being on the farm and resented having to return to the hospital. He also remembered wishing that his mother had ‘been able to give up work altogether and not be involved in that routine . . . I would have preferred her to have been out in the open air in the country like I was, rather than having to go off every Sunday night to work in this machine for another fortnight.’ Pressed by Diamond about whether he came to feel that ‘the system’ was depriving him of his mother, Cairns agreed.14 Inevitably, these regular separations changed the relationship between Cairns and his mother. The physical closeness that he remembered from the period at Sunbury came to an end. Cairn sums up the change: ‘I became a little man. So our relationship was a talking one . . . Whenever my mother and I met, we shook hands.’ Letty impressed on him that ‘little men never went beyond shaking hands’. Another factor lay behind the physical barriers that she erected between her and young

Jim. It was more of the negative inheritance of James Cairns. Letty had contracted syphilis from her husband and feared passing it on to her son. The disease, initially undiagnosed and then apparently untreated for many years, remained another of the dark secrets of the family. Cairns did not speak publicly about it until he was aged in his mid-eighties. Along with the physical estrangement between mother and child came an emotional distance. Cairns admits that his relationship with his mother was not close. Asked in a 1990 newspaper interview whether he had loved his mother, Cairns shied away from the word, preferring to say that he had respected and admired her.15 With both his mother and Aunt Eleanor living in at the Sunbury Mental Hospital, Cairns was left in the company of his grandparents, Sara Ford, Mattie Smith and Lizzie Salthouse. The same physical and emotional reserve that now existed between him and Letty appears to have characterised his interaction with the other members of the household. Cairns again identifies respect as having been the key element of his relationship with his grandparents, and explains that it was ‘a relationship of communication by words’. His dealings with Sara, Lizzie and Mattie were little different. He played cricket with Mattie, but insists that he wasn’t close to anyone in particular. ‘It was all similar’, he notes, ‘we always talked. That was the extent and limit of it. It was conversation. It wasn’t doing things together’ 16 Eleanor Ford also attests to the emotional and physical remoteness of the family. Ormonde quotes her observation that young Jim was ‘obedient, attentive and courteous to his elders, but never one for a lot of kissing’. She added: ‘We might be a funny family, but we don’t let our emotions run away with us’. Cairns himself hesitates at the suggestion that from about the age of five his interaction with family members was conducted primarily on an ‘intellectual’ basis, claiming this to be too ‘high and esoteric’ a description. Nonetheless, he agrees that those interactions were measured and rational, rather than spontaneous and

emotional. He concedes, too, that this pattern of dealing with those around him in a non-demonstrative and analytical manner became a fixed element of his character.17 Although he received little emotional succour as a child, Cairns’ intellectual development was nurtured. No doubt sensitive to their own lack of formal education, Letty and the other members of the family were determined to instil in young Jim a thirst for learning. From an early age his growing sense of inquiry was given serious attention. He was encouraged to ask questions and never ‘talked over’. Similarly, when he misbehaved, such as the time he stole a visitor’s watch and chain, these occasions ‘were not taken just as something for punishment, they were incidents that had to be explained’. The emphasis on Cairns’ intellectual advancement bore fruit. Even before beginning school he made considerable progress towards mastering the skills of reading and writing. Indeed, according to Cairns, by the time the family moved to Melton he could read and explain things better than most of the other members of the household. This ability appears to have been a source of pride within the family and was actively encouraged. The result was, as Cairns claims, he became a ‘teacher by the age of four or five’. Moreover, he believes, quite plausibly, that his subsequent predisposition to both teaching and theorising had its origin in the way he was cast into that role so early within the family. As Diamond observed in 1968, that role was another direct consequence of his father’s absence. If James Cairns had returned from the war, he, not young Jim, would have been the family ‘educator’, as well as its breadwinner and leader.18 In April 1921 Cairns began his formal education at Melton State School. He has few memories of the three years he spent there. Attendance at school brought with it his first substantial encounter with the world that existed beyond the farm gates. It was not a particularly happy experience and he soon concluded that he preferred being on the farm. At school his opinions and questions did not receive personalised

attention.19 Even more unsetding was the ‘strange world’ with which he was confronted when he rode his pony into Melton, and later Sunbury, to attend school. His grandparents, with their strong Christian beliefs, had built a vhome environment based on the values of sharing and cooperation. In The Untried Road Cairns writes: No-one was paid anything on our farms. The needed food, and there was plenty of it, was always there. When I needed a pony, at first, one was givenc [sic] us by a neighbour then one was bought for me. It was the same for everyone. But no-one wanted very much.

The outside world was different and bewildering: ‘Before, everything seemed to be given, now it was exchanged. Before, whenever you saw anyone you spoke to them. Now nobody spoke.’ 20 It is difficult to assess how much Cairns’ version of life on the farm is an idealised one. What is dear, though, is that he would spend a large part of his adulthood trying to translate that image into reality in the outside world. By the middle of the 1920s Australia was enjoying a period of peace and relative prosperity, a brief interlude of optimism between World War I and the Great Depression. This optimism was reflected in grand schemes for nation building. The conservative parties dominated the federal political stage as Labor, debilitated by the 1916 split over conscription, struggled to reinvigorate itself. The Nationalist-Country Party coalition government, led by Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Earle Page, enunciated a vision of Australia as a land with unlimited potential for growth. Bruce’s message to the Australian people was that ‘Men, Money and Markets’ were required to realise this potential and that these would be best acquired through a closer economic partnership with the British Empire. For a time the economic policies of the Bruce–Page Government appeared to be on course.21 Australia’s manufacturing sector expanded, encouraged by higher tariff protection, and rural output increased. More than 250 000 immigrants arrived from Britain during the 1920s, most of

whom were assisted. Schemes for land settlement largely failed, however, and there was a substantial shift in population away from rural areas to the capital cities and industrial centres. Large amounts of public capital were spent on the construction of roads and bridges, electricity and telegraph installations and water and sewerage facilities. With the electrification of the suburbs, simple electric consumer durables began to find their way into many Australian homes. But there was a darker side to this economic picture. Unemployment averaged around 8 per cent throughout the decade, and wage rates for unskilled and female workers lagged well behind other employees. The result was that a significant section of the community was excluded from the fruits of material progress. In 1924 in an action that reflected the mood of prevailing confidence, Cairns’ grandparents, John and Elizabeth Ford, took out a loan to buy Ettrick Bank, a 160-acre dairy farm on the MelbourneBendigo Road, 5 kilometres out of Sunbury. For the Fords, the purchase must have been accompanied by a sense of satisfaction that their hard work since arriving in Australia a little over a decade earlier was beginning to bring its reward. The family’s move back to Sunbury meant a change of school for the 9-year-old Cairns. His transfer to Sunbury State School did little, though, to increase his liking for school. He made few friends during the five years he spent there, partly, he thinks, because he was rarely in a position to fraternise with his fellow students outside school hours: ‘I rode my pony in the morning and as soon as school was over I got on my pony and rode him away again three miles out of town’.22 But perhaps there was another reason. As an only child, brought up with adults who were usually busy with the various duties necessary to run a farm, Cairns had grown used to his own company and developed a reticence in dealing with other people. He was happy to stay on the farm engaged in solitary activities rather than seek company in Sunbury. At Ettrick Bank Cairns amused himself with pastimes common to any Australian child growing up on a farm in the 1920s. He would go out

shooting or trapping rabbits, and sell both the bodies and skins. At the age of about eleven he was given his first gun, a second-hand 12-gauge shotgun. His mother was apprehensive, but his grandmother expressed confidence that he could handle it. Another of Cairns’ passions was horse-riding. When he was about twelve his grandfather bought him a black pony named Jimmie at the Sunbury yards. Previously he had owned an old white horse called Artist and a bay called Tess. Cairns rode Jimmie in competition at the Sunbury show. When it was warm enough Cairns would go swimming in the creek that ran through the property. When someone was available to bowl at him, he would play cricket on the pitch he had made at the front of the house. Like so many other Australians of that time, Cairns’ imagination was captured by the nation’s sporting heroes. Bill Ponsford, the record-breaking Test opening batsman, was an idol. For a time he wanted to become a wrestler and avidly listened every Saturday night to the radio broadcasts of the wrestling.23 The large amount of time Cairns spent alone helped to shape him into a serious-minded and contemplative child. He remembers that ‘the questions of right and wrong worried me. I couldn’t understand why so much that was said to be right was wrong and why so much [that] was right was said to be wrong.’ These anxieties were in the main generated by the discrepancies he continued to observe between what went on in the outside world and the way he thought things should be: ‘Alone at night and away in the paddocks I had many hours of sadness and pessimism because I could not solve this problem of why so much was wrong’.24 The values with which he viewed the world in his early years were essentially Christian. Cairns is adamant that the Christian teachings at home were gentle and undogmatic. His grandmother, the most devout member of the family, frequently quoted from the Bible, including reciting the Ten Commandments. Elizabeth Ford firmly believed in the existence of hell and made it patently dear this was the place you ended up ‘if you sinned and didn’t repent’. Yet despite her talk of damnation,

Cairns indicates that his grandmother was more concerned with introducing him to simple Christian truths than filling his mind with strict orthodoxies. Although a keen churchgoer, John Ford was even less inclined to impose religious doctrine on his grandson. It was not in his nature to force his beliefs on those around him. Cairns describes him as an ‘easy-going, unauthoritarian bloke’. Cairns’ mother and his aunt Eleanor, while committed to basic Christian teachings, had turned their backs on organised religion. According to Cairns, they thought the church was ‘hypocritical and humbuggish’.25 Cairns was aware that his grandparents liked him to accompany them to service at the local St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, but his attendance was not demanded and he rarely went. He claims that during those years he arrived at a ‘commonsense’ attitude to the church and religion. By this Cairns appears to mean that, like his mother and Aunt Eleanor, he came to reject organised religion and its associated dogma, yet remained convinced of the merit of Christian values. The sectarian divisions evident within the Sunbury community in part prompted his early disillusionment with religion. He was disturbed to find that Protestants and Catholics ‘seemed to hate one another’. There was hostility between the children going to the state school on one side of the road and those attending the Catholic school on the opposite side. To the young Cairns this sectarianism was the antithesis of the concept of Christianity he had picked up at home. From his grandparents he had learnt that Christian behaviour involved loving one’s fellow humans regardless of their creed or race. He was taught that to be a good Christian required sharing things, being ‘brotherly’. Cairns observes that he emerged from his childhood with the simple understanding that ‘a Christian was a generous kind of person who put others before himself’.26 Looking back at his childhood, Cairns believes that the values he imbibed and the way they were taught, by example and explanation rather than compulsion, were the consequence of being raised in a household where the ‘practice and theory of male dominance’ did not prevail. ‘I

hardly even knew a patriarch in all that time’, he remarks.27 His grandfather, a quiet and passive man, appears to have displayed few traits of a conventional patriarch. Women—his grandmother, mother and Aunt Eleanor—were the dominant members of the family and exerted the greatest influence on his development. This aspect of Cairns’ upbringing is perhaps important because it is commonly understood that in a typical family unit it is the adult male, usually the father, who plays the chief role in moulding a male child’s nascent ideology. 28 More contentiously, some writers in political psychology have argued that the values the child absorbs from the adult male are, more often than not, essentially masculine. Graham Little, for example, has identified Australia’s political culture as being predominantly derived from fathers and, therefore, ‘biased towards the economic, the exploitative, the aggressive. That is, towards the values of ultra-masculinity.’ 29 The absence of a traditional male role model from Cairns’ childhood may, then, help to explain why these ‘ultra-masculine’ values are largely missing from his adult political outlook. Conversely, applying the same admittedly controversial logic, the dominant presence of women in his early years is reflected in his espousal of a doctrine that, with its stress on the construction of a caring, peaceful and co-operative society, exhibits a marked ‘feminine’ quality.30 While Cairns depicts his childhood as one in which he enjoyed considerable intellectual freedom, he is also conscious that, from another perspective, he grew up in an atmosphere that was quite repressive. Australia’s experience of the glamour and gaiety associated with the ‘Jazz Age’ of the 1920s was at best muted. 31 The spirit of wowserism and drab respectability still ran deep. Even so, Australia was not totally immune to the overseas trend towards the relaxation of social mores. Its people embraced the new forms of popular entertainment such as radio and the portable gramophone, and flocked to picture palaces and dance halls. None of these diversions made an impression at Ettrick Bank. To a

degree this was a matter of necessity. Struggling to meet the repayments on their mortgage, the Fords had little money to spare. However, their spartan lifestyle also reflected the influence of the Methodist ethic of hard work and austerity. Alcohol was frowned upon and was never permitted in the house. Female members of the family never wore makeup and would not have dared to smoke. In addition, there was no dancing, nor was there any music to listen to. Not surprisingly for the times, the issue of sex was not discussed, but Cairns came to understand that intimacy with females was unacceptable: ‘I learnt never to show any interest in girls or especially in what might go on between girls and boys if they touched one another’.32 Brought up in an isolated environment in which bodily and material pleasures were regarded with suspicion, Cairns developed a strong sense of self-denial. He learnt to persuade himself that if he could not get something, whether it be a cricket bat or anything else, he did not need it.33 Later, when he left school and moved beyond the cloistered lifestyle he led on the farm, he found himself embarrassed and uncomfortable in many social activities. In his 1976 book Oil in Troubled Waters Cairns noted that his reaction to this awkwardness was to become ‘self-regulated and repressed’. With remarkable candour he added: ‘The result was an austere, inward-looking kind of self denial which made people think I was unselfish and sincere and this became for me a favourable political image’.34 As Cairns entered his teens he began to take an interest in contemporary political and economic issues. He was a keen reader of the daily newspapers, both the Age and Argus.35 By this time the news on Australia’s economy was discouraging. Economic growth had faltered and the nation started to drift into recession, with unemployment climbing towards 10 per cent by the end of 1927. Industrial output was stagnant and, more ominous still, rural prices were in decline and London financiers were issuing warnings about Australia’s ballooning foreign

public debt. As its plans for a period of sustained national economic development soured, the Bruce–Page Government decided that high labour costs were to blame. In 1928–29 a series of bitter industrial disputes erupted as the government tried to force down wages and resorted to draconian measures to deal with recalcitrant trade unions. Public disquiet over this industrial turmoil, and the government’s apparent assault on living standards, combined with the worsening economic climate to bring about the defeat of the conservative coalition at the elections of October 1929.36 According to Cairns, these issues, and politics generally, were only sparingly discussed at home. Nonetheless, he was aware that his family’s political sympathies rested with Labor. In England his grandfather had been a supporter of the Liberal Party, but in Australia he found that Labor’s policies corresponded most closely with his political views. It was Cairns’ aunt Eleanor, though, who was the most overtly political member of the family and ‘a positive Labor supporter and Labor voter’. The Fords particularly admired Labor’s Reg Pollard, who became their local member in the Victorian Legislative Assembly when he won the seat of Dalhousie in 1924.37 Cairns’ developing interest in politics and economics coincided with his increasing consciousness of the vast gulfs in wealth that existed in the surrounding community. The most immediate example was the contrast in circumstances between the Ford’s closest neighbours, the Bourkes, and the Clarkes of Rupertswood. The Bourkes were a large, impoverished family who lived in an old broken-down house. One of the children, Billy, was roughly Cairns’ age, and they sometimes went rabbiting together. Billy did not regularly attend school because he was without a pony on which to travel into town. He also went without shoes and socks and wore tattered hand-me-down clothes. By comparison, Rupertswood was the stately manor home of one of Australia’s most wealthy and influential pastoral families. A landmark in Sunbury, it had been built in 1874 by Sir William Clarke, the first baronet of Rupertswood. Later it became home

to his son, Sir Rupert Clarke, whom Cairns’ grandfather had worked for briefly when they were still at Victoria Farm. Growing up in Sunbury Cairns neither saw nor heard much of the Clarkes, but their wealth and privilege left their mark on him. When interviewed by Diamond, he singled them out as the primary target of any feelings of resentment and hostility he harboured in those years.38 By 1928 Cairns was in his final year at Sunbury State School, in the class of the headmaster John Rogers. Of Cairns’ various school teachers, Rogers stands out as having influenced him most. Unlike previous teachers Cairns had encountered, Rogers actively encouraged students to ask questions and discuss issues. The contributions Cairns made to these classroom discussions attracted Rogers’ attention. He started to take a special interest in this quiet and earnest student, and went out of his way to talk to Cairns gently and let him know that the opinions he expressed in class were both intelligent and valuable. In hindsight, Cairns came to believe that Rogers played a vital part in building up his self-esteem. Late in the year Rogers took Cairns aside and presented him with a copy of William Morris’ utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere (1891). It was a significant moment for Cairns and remained fixed in his memory. On handing him the book Rogers ‘told me I already was a Socialist and, I had no choice but to continue to be one, and, therefore I better be a competent one’.39 At that time Cairns had only a rudimentary idea of what being a socialist involved. He thought a socialist was someone who had a good social attitude—who put others first and was neither greedy nor individualistic. In other words, it was an understanding that neatly dovetailed with the Christian values he had already embraced. But Cairns was also dimly aware that socialism, unlike the church teachings he had come across, promised to change society then and there, rather than in the next life. He sought to learn more. Morris’ utopian novel failed to offer the cogent explanation of socialism he was after. He asked about

socialism at home, but discovered there, too, nobody had more than vaguely heard of the word. However, he gathered that his family felt that, although socialists ‘were not bad . . . Christians were better and that Socialists would never get anywhere’.40 At the end of 1928 Cairns left Sunbury State School with his Merit Certificate. He sat the entrance examination for Melbourne High School but did not gain admission and enrolled at Northcote High School. Located in one of Melbourne’s northern inner working-class suburbs, Northcote High was the closest secondary state school to Sunbury in terms of travelling time.41 The school principal insisted that Cairns be found accommodation nearby rather than make the approximately 70kilometre round journey from Sunbury each day. During the first term of the 1929 school year Cairns boarded with an English working-class family who lived only a short walk from the school, but it was a miserable few months. Away from home for the first time he felt completely lost. He missed his family and the horses, dogs and rabbits that were all part of his life on the farm. His stay also marked his introduction to alcohol. His response to that initiation starkly illustrated the puritanical environment in which he had been reared: ‘The first time they induced me to drink wine, as soon as I could I went to the bathroom and washed my mouth out’. Cairns’ unhappiness reflected in his school work, and by the end of the term his results were so poor that he was ranked twenty-seventh out of a class of around thirty. At this point his grandmother intervened and persuaded the principal to allow Cairns to live at Ettrick Bank and commute to school daily. The journey from the farm to Northcote High was long and involved. Cairns would leave home around 7 a.m. and ride his pony to the Sunbury railway station to catch the train to North Melbourne. He would then complete the journey by tram, usually arriving at school after 9 a.m. when classes had already commenced. Of an evening he would rush from school as soon as classes were over and walk to the nearby Merri railway station. He then travelled to Spencer Street where he would catch the train back to Sunbury, often

not arriving home much before 8 p.m.42 In a by now familiar pattern for Cairns, this onerous schedule proved an obstacle to the formation of any close friendships at his new school. In his first year at Northcote High he remained an outsider, always rushing for a train while his fellow students stayed back to talk and play games. As Cairns approached the end of his first year at Northcote High, the Australian economy was in a tailspin. The recession of 1927–28 was deteriorating into a full-blown depression.43 The prices for Australia’s major exports, wool and wheat, slumped steeply in mid-1929. The nation’s vulnerable trade position was thus eroded further, with the trade deficit reaching unsustainable levels by the September quarter. This development compounded Australia’s already parlous financial condition. To finance its huge external debt Australia was heavily reliant on a continuing inflow of foreign capital, together with a healthy world economy to keep export prices high. By 1929 not only were export prices tumbling, but the inflow of capital from overseas, especially London, was drying up. The effects were quickly felt in the domestic economy. Many public works projects were halted and there was an accompanying cycle of declining production, employment and income. Unemployment jumped, with 13.1 per cent of trade union members out of work by the final quarter of 1929.44 It was the unenviable task of the newly elected Scullin Labor Government, sworn in just as news arrived in Australia of the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, to deal with the crisis. For two years the government lurched around in a desperate search for an effective strategy to arrest Australia’s slide into an ever more calamitous economic position. In the end, though, it was itself consumed by the crisis. Edward Theodore, the Scullin Government’s most capable economic thinker and Treasurer for most of its term, had offered Labor the most credible alternative to the conservative orthodoxy of deflation and mass unemployment. He rejected the view that the government had no

legitimate role to play in reviving the economy, apart from cutting costs and balancing budgets. Instead, Theodore proposed a complex set of measures formulated to stimulate production, reduce unemployment and restore prices to their 1929 levels.45 Ultimately, Theodore’s plan was stymied by the non-Laborcontrolled Senate and an unsympathetic Commonwealth Bank Board that effectively dictated government finance. 46 Yet it had also encountered resistance from within some sections of the government and the wider labour movement. Conservative-minded members of the Scullin Government, headed by the former Tasmanian Premier Joseph Lyons, accepted that Labor must chart a deflationary course, however unpalatable. In January 1931, alarmed at what he considered as the irresponsible nature of Theodore’s economic prescriptions, Lyons resigned from the Scullin Ministry. Three months later, followed by several other former members of the Labor government, he defected to the Opposition and shortly after became leader of a refashioned conservative party, the United Australia Party. At the other end of the spectrum, Labor radicals were seduced by a scheme for economic recovery hatched by the New South Wales Premier Jack Lang. It, too, was expansionary in approach, but lacked the sophistication of Theodore’s plan. In fact, as some historians have suggested that, rather than a serious economic strategy, the scheme was best understood as a political rallying point for Lang in his long-time power struggle with Theodore for control of the New South Wales Labor Party.47 By the winter of 1931 the rate of unemployment among trade unionists had soared to over 25 per cent.48 With the Theodore plan derailed, and its remaining polity options limited, the Scullin Government succumbed to conservative pressure and endorsed a broadly deflationary strategy. Known as the Premiers’ Plan, its cornerstone was a cut in all adjustable government expenditure, including wages, salaries and pensions.49 Discredited in the eyes of its supporters, the Scullin

Government staggered on until November 1931 when the Lang Labor group, which had split from the ALP the previous March, voted with the Opposition parties to bring it down. At the elections the following month Labor was annihilated as the United Australia Party swept to power with Lyons at the helm. Although still in his mid-teens, Cairns was a keen observer of the economic debate that raged in Australia in 1930–31. His interest was not merely abstract. By 1930 his family was threatened with financial ruin. Milk prices had tumbled and the Fords were struggling to meet their loan repayments on the farm. Looking back on this period, Cairns states that his grandparents did their best to disguise their anxieties, making every effort to insulate him from the growing hardship at Ettrick Bank. He was always provided with a proper meal, a good suit to wear to school and a small amount of pocket money. Nonetheless, Cairns was conscious of the economic difficulties that were being experienced both on the farm and in the wider community. The newspapers were full of stories of economic gloom and of the conflicting plans for national recovery. In Sunbury many people had lost their jobs and nearly everyone appeared to be short of money.50 From the newspapers and his own personal observations Cairns came to support the view that the most appropriate solution to the depression rested in some form of expansionary economic policy. To him this seemed to be common sense, and he could not understand the opposing demands for spending and wage cuts. Cairns had an opportunity to voice his opinion in a school debate during 1930. He suggested the topic, which was ‘Prevention of Depression Requires More Money to Spend Not Less’. Cairns spoke for the affirmative and fondly recalls that at the conclusion of the debate when a vote was conducted among the students his side was declared a decisive winner. Understandably at that age Cairns did not fully appreciate the differences between the various expansionary schemes being enunciated. He felt simply that ‘Theodore was right’ and ‘Lang was right’. He does indicate, however, that

Theodore’s proposal to provide an assistance package to wheatgrowers attracted particular attention at Ettrick Bank. His grandparents and other dairy farmers in the area hoped that they might receive similar help.51 As 1931 dawned, the Fords’ dream of economic independence lay in waste. Aged in their sixties and wearied by years of hard toil, they had to stand by while the National Bank foreclosed on their home. Typically, the profound distress the Fords must have felt at the loss of the farm was kept tightly controlled. They approached their predicament with little outward emotion, displaying instead a quiet stoicism. Cairns remembers his grandparents being sad, but adds that ‘he never heard a complaint. . . never heard any bitterness or any anger’. Upon leaving Ettrick Bank in the early months of 1931 John and Elizabeth Ford, Lizzie Salthouse and Cairns briefly moved to the Melbourne beach suburb of Elwood. Letty and Eleanor Ford, who had been transferred from Sunbury Mental Hospital to Royal Park Hospital in Parkville a year earlier, joined them on weekends. Soon after the Fords shifted to other rented accommodation in the next suburb of St Kilda before settling in the inner south-eastern suburb of Ripponlea in a house Eleanor had managed to buy. 52 The family’s financial position remained precarious and was further undermined when the pension the Fords had been receiving since their eviction from the farm was reduced as a result of the Premiers’ Plan.53 Cairns professes to have little recollection of his response to the news that Ettrick Bank had gone broke. This may be another instance of Cairns blocking out a painful memory. There is enough evidence to suggest that the loss of the farm was a seminal event in implanting in Cairns an inchoate sense of opposition to the social order. He was filled with a feeling of injustice at the ‘tight fisted’ behaviour of the ‘monied people’. His childhood resentment of the Clarkes of Rupertswood evolved into a more general distrust of the wealthy. Cairns admits that he emerged from this period of his life with the outlook that he ‘didn’t like people who had money’, adding that he was ‘beginning to see what I

objected to and I was getting confidence about objecting to it’. One specific target of his anger was the buyer of the milk in the Sunbury area, a man called McMahon. Cairns observes bitterly that McMahon ‘squeezed us as he squeezed everybody else in the district. . . paying us sixpence a gallon when people who were able to carry their milk further were able to get eightpence and even tenpence’.54 The nature of events in the political arena in the first half of 1931 contributed also to Cairns’ growing perception that society did not operate in accordance with the values he had been taught to cherish. He was irritated when conservative politicians and banks demanded policies that he considered would hurt people. The Scullin Government’s disintegration and subsequent capitulation to those very policies left Cairns bewildered and angry. He was appalled at Labor’s ‘willingness to give up the fight’. His strongest disgust was reserved for Joe Lyons and the Victorian Labor Premier, Ned Hogan. He believed Lyons was a ‘rat’ and ‘completely corrupt’, a man who had cast aside principles for ‘money and position’. He was similarly appalled by Hogan, who during 1930–31 was more than once censured by the Victorian ALP Executive for his unwillingness to resist conservative demands for wage and pension cuts and was eventually expelled from the party after his minority Labor government was crushed at the polls in May 1932. Hogan’s faintheartedness dismayed Cairns, especially because his motivation appeared to be a desire to cling to power.55 Cairns’ hostility towards Lyons and Hogan was both passionate and enduring. When John Diamond asked Cairns about his memories of the Depression, he was surprised to discover that reference to these two men still evoked intense emotion.56 Why did the normally phlegmatic Cairns develop such an emphatic antipathy towards Lyons and Hogan? The most obvious reason is that to him they symbolised Labor’s lack of strength during the Depression and, more specifically, its failure to defend people like his own grandparents against the greed and selfishness of the rich.

But there is perhaps something more to his anger. What seems to have upset Cairns particularly is that he felt both men had acted without moral integrity. Cairns’ early years had taught him to view the world through a well-defined ethical code. He had learnt to regard ideals and values as important, even sacrosanct, while temporal pleasures were to be treated with suspicion. To see the Labor men he had trusted sacrifice principles for what he perceived to be cheap individual gain was deeply repugnant to the teenage Cairns. Cairns’ disquiet at what had taken place on the political stage during the Depression stalled the development of his rather precocious interest in the Labor Party and politics generally. In 1930 he had written to the Labor MLA for Northcote, John Cain Snr, asking him how he could join the party. Cain advised Cairns that he must join the branch nearest to his residence. Cairns discovered that the Sunbury branch, consisting mainly of employees from the Sunbury Mental Hospital, had folded. He made a renewed attempt to locate an active Labor Party branch soon after he moved to Melbourne in the early months of 1931. By that time, however, his growing disenchantment with the performance of both the Scullin and Hogan Governments was rapidly eroding his enthusiasm for Labor. Hence when he could find no branch nearby he let the matter rest.57 It would be another sixteen years before he finally became a member of the ALP. Disillusionment was not the sole reason Cairns abandoned his efforts to join the Labor Party. By 1931 Cairns was pouring most of his time and energy into athletics. The previous October he had won four events, including the long jump, in the intermediate section of Northcote High’s annual athletics carnival. These victories gave Cairns a new-found recognition and popularity at school. In his words he had ‘jumped to fame one afternoon’.58 Spurred on by his success, Cairns dedicated himself to athletics. He started staying back at school to train and built a long jump pit at Ettrick Bank so he could practise on the weekends. Late in 1930 his commitment and talent were rewarded when he received an invitation to

join one of Melbourne’s premier athletic clubs, Melbourne Harriers. 59 His academic performance for the 1930 school year was not as outstanding. High marks in English, History, and Commercial Principles placed him fifth in his class at the end of the second term, but his growing preoccupation with athletics caused him to neglect his studies. History was the only subject in which he retained an interest. At the endof-year Intermediate certificate examinations he obtained a solid but unspectacular result with passes in English, History, Arithmetic, Geography, Commercial Principles and Commercial Practice.60 Although Cairns’ academic work fell away in the final term of 1930, there is no indication that either his mother or his grandparents expressed any disappointment. To the contrary, they took enormous pride in his performance in both the classroom and the sporting arena. It would appear that, with the devastating blow of the loss of Ettrick Bank, Cairns’ achievements were one of the few sources of solace within the family. As their own aspirations faded, John and Elizabeth Ford and Letty Cairns increasingly lived vicariously through young Jim and focused their hopes on him. The emotional barriers between him and the others remained, but Cairns was left in no doubt regarding his worth as he became the subject of an almost unnatural form of adulation. By his final years at Northcote High he was openly deferred to as the most knowledgeable member of the family: ‘I’d been to school and I’d learned a lot from their point of view. I knew more than they did, and they always told me. Almost on everything that I knew anything about I was treated as the one who knew.’ Within the family circle Cairns was shown more than just confidence. He was regarded with implicit faith. He told Diamond that at home he was the ‘white-haired boy’ who could do no wrong. More recently Cairns observed that if something was not right at school, his mother and grandparents ‘would always blame the school and not me’.61 In 1931 Cairns’ ambition was to join the air force. He stayed on at Northcote High to take Intermediate Physics and Chemistry, which were

prerequisites for entry. In addition, he studied Leaving English. School records reveal, however, that after a promising start to the year his commitment to his academic work tapered off and he was not credited with completing any subjects. The truth was, as Ormonde points out, Cairns’ obsession with sport left him little time for serious study. 62 At the beginning of the year he had been named as a school prefect and captain of Darebin, one of four school houses. The house master wanted him to play tennis, cricket and football and compete in athletics. Cairns obliged, demonstrating prowess in all four sports. His performances on the football field earned him selection in the Victorian State High School team. Athletics, though, remained his chief passion. He again dominated events in his section of Northcote High’s annual athletics carnival, and at the speech night in December received the prize for the school’s open athletics champion.63 Cairns enjoyed his final year at Northcote High. He thought his athletics was ‘great’ and so absorbed was he with sport that it worried him little that he was frittering away his time academically. Only later did he come to lament that, as he put it, ‘I graduated in athletics, that is all’.64 In 1931 Northcote High, and more precisely its sporting fields, provided Cairns with a refuge from the economic woes of both his family and the wider community. But as the year ended, Cairns faced the grim prospect of looking for work, competing with the ever-swelling ranks of the unemployed.

2 ‘an intellec tual s eek er ’ 1932–1947 THE ‘INTENSE POLITICAL CONVICTION ON THE ETHICAL CASE FOR SOCIALISM’ HAS CERTAINLY GONE FROM THE LABOR PARTY AND LIKEWISE ARE GONE ITS ‘YEARS OF THE GREAT AGITATORS’ . . . J. F. Cairns, ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, Meanjin, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1947.

W H E N J I M C A I R N S L E F T S C H O O L at the end of 1931, the jobless rate

was still rising; it would peak in the second quarter of 1932 when 30 per cent of trade unionists were without work.1 For several months Cairns endured the loss of self-worth and demoralisation that went hand in hand with the search for employment. It was an experience that seared into his consciousness. More than three decades later he recalled: I felt after a while I had no reason for existence . . . Dozens and dozens of places turned me down as though I were just a bit of dust in the road. It’s impossible for someone who hasn’t been through it to know what it was like. It knocked me about turned me inwards.2

In truth, Cairns was rather fortunate. His period of unemployment was relatively short-lived. While looking for a permanent job, he obtained casual work in a wood-yard near the Fords’ home in Ripponlea.

He also briefly found work with a small radio shop in Northcote selling locally manufactured Precedent radios. But after a fortnight during which not a single customer entered the shop, the proprietor advised Cairns that the business was to close and he was not able to pay Cairns for his time there. In the early months of 1932 Cairns responded to a number of job advertisements in the newspapers without result. His fortunes changed, however, in the middle of the year when he successfully applied for a position as a junior clerk with the produce firm Australian Estates and Mortgage Company.3 Cairns spent about two and a half years there.4 Although aware that he was lucky to be in work, he soon grew to loathe the job. The company’s Melbourne office was located in the central business district and Cairns worked in the basement of the building in the rabbit skin department, rarely venturing upstairs, where senior staff worked. He later recalled with a tinge of bitterness: ‘I don’t know what they did up there. They were the important people.’ Cairns’ main duty was to record details of rabbit skin sales. The work was tedious, the pay meagre and the hours long. His starting salary was nineteen shillings for a 65-hour working week that included Saturday morning. Cairns’ dislike of the job was intensified by the punctilious attitude of his immediate supervisor.5 What Cairns resented most about the position, however, was that the long hours left him with little time for athletics training. If anything, his passion for athletics had become even more consuming since leaving school, an offset to the feelings of frustration and worthlessness inspired by his work. His performances on the athletics track were impressive. During the 1932–33 track season Cairns established a new club record for Melbourne Harriers in the 440 yards hurdles and, as well as being named club champion in this event, won championships for both discus and shot put.6 His status as a rising star in Victorian athletics was confirmed the following season by his selection to represent Australia in the Centenary Games held in Melbourne.7

Late in 1934, by chance, an opportunity arose for Cairns to change jobs. While receiving treatment for a torn thigh muscle from Granville Dunstan, a city masseur, Cairns complained about his inability to find time to train properly. Dunstan suggested that his friend General Blarney might be able to help. A highly decorated veteran of World War I, Blarney was at that time in the final stage of a turbulent eleven-year term as Chief Commissioner of the Victoria Police. The next evening Cairns was again receiving treatment from Dunstan when he was approached by Blarney, who asked him if he would like to join the police force. In the following days Cairns saw Blarney several more times at Dunstan’s rooms. Blarney’s biographer, John Hetherington, writes: ‘Everything about him [Blarney] impressed Cairns; his bearing, his economy of language, his accent’. Years later Cairns simply recalled that Blarney gave him the impression that if he joined the police ‘I would amount to something’.8 Cairns jumped at the idea. Not only would it afford him more time for athletics training, but the work promised to be more interesting and the pay greater. The last consideration was important because by this time his mother’s health was in decline. Afflicted by what the family vaguely described as a spinal problem caused by lifting at work, Letty was forced to resign her position as a cook at Royal Park Hospital in 1935 and remained largely bedridden for the rest of her life.9 That vagueness— redolent of the way the family long dissembled about the true fate of James Cairns—may suggest that Letty’s condition had another cause, the syphilis she had contracted from her husband, which had gone untreated for some years. Whatever the reason for Letty becoming an invalid, it shifted the burden of financially providing for both mother and son on to Jim. For the 20-year-old this responsibility, coupled with his aspirations in athletics, outweighed any doubts he may have had about joining an institution designed to uphold a social order towards which he had developed an incipient hostility.

Cairns was appointed as a constable in the Victoria Police on 14 January 1935. After six months training at the police depot, he was assigned to foot duty at police headquarters in Russell Street. One year later, on 14 June 1936, he was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) on ‘special duty’. Cairns had been selected to become a member of a newly created shadowing squad, which was to conduct surveillance and report back to the CIB on the movements and activities of criminals and suspects.10 In the shadowing squad Cairns quickly won a reputation as a diligent officer of outstanding potential. He also showed enormous physical courage. On 5 November 1936 he and a fellow officer, Alfred Guider, apprehended a murder suspect, William John Cody, after a gunfight in the Exhibition Gardens.11 Both officers were commended by the Chief Commissioner ‘for outstanding courage displayed in the execution of their duty by effecting the arrest of an armed criminal’. It was only one of several occasions when Cairns received commendation for his work in this period. His service file shows that on 5 May 1937 he was ‘highly commended’ for ‘vigilance, perseverance and ability’ in carrying out duty ‘which resulted in the arrest and conviction of two men for factory breaking’. A month later he was again commended by the Chief Commissioner, and on 19 September 1937 the Superintendent of the CIB noted: ‘Trustworthy and very energetic . . . [Cairns] has performed valuable surveillance work regarding notorious criminals and I feel satisfied that he will make a good criminal investigator’.12 There was a less savoury aspect to work in the shadowing squad. By 1936 the already uneasy relationship between Chief Commissioner Blarney and Melbourne’s major daily newspapers had degenerated into open hostility. In May the press got hold of a story of an apparent coverup by Blarney of circumstances surrounding the shooting of a senior police officer. The ensuing scandal prompted the Victorian Government to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the incident. In the midst

of this scandal Blarney ordered Cairns to keep a watch on certain journalists. For about one month Cairns shadowed the journalists, reporting back to Blarney every four to five days. Nothing, it seems, came of the reports. Shortly after, in July 1936, Blarney was forced to resign as Chief Commissioner when the Royal Commission found that he had not being totally frank in his evidence.13 Cairns was uncomfortable with the idea of shadowing the journalists. It was the first time he had cause to seriously question the ethics of what he was required to do in the police force. The longer he remained a police officer, the more his doubts intensified. In 1936, however, and indeed for the rest of the 1930s, he managed largely to suppress those doubts. As Ormonde suggests, Cairns generally found life in the police force, particularly in the shadowing squad, stimulating.14 Meanwhile, outside working hours, he continued to devote himself to athletics. After finishing third in the hop, step and jump event in the Victorian track and field championships of 1936, Cairns broke through to win the Victorian titles for both the broad jump and the decathlon in 1938. In winning the broad jump title he established a new State record of 23 feet 9⅜ inches, a mark he improved upon the following season. By that time Cairns harboured legitimate aspirations for the 1940 Olympics.15 In February 1938 Cairns met his future wife, Gwendolyne Olga Robb. The second of three children, Gwen had grown up on a cattle and horse property near Nimbin in northern New South Wales. Later she and her family had moved to Brisbane and there, as a nineteen-year-old in 1932, she rushed into marriage with the debonair and deliriously named James Tallis Froggatt-Tyldesley. According to the information he supplied for the marriage certificate, Froggatt-Tyldesley, who was fifteen years older than Gwen, was the scion of a medical practitioner and had been born in Dunedin, New Zealand, but these details were just part of a web of deceit. The union produced two children, Malcolm James Philip in

May 1933 and Barry Tallis in July 1934, before Gwen learnt the awful truth that she had been the victim of a bigamist marriage—Froggattiyidesley had a wife in the United Kingdom. The marriage was annulled in 1935, and sometime after Gwen went to live in Sydney where she worked as cinema usherette to support her two sons.16 It was while attending an athletics competition at Olympic Park during a holiday in Melbourne that Gwen (or ‘Katie’ as she preferred) was introduced to Cairns by mutual friends, Len and Sylvia Curnow. It was a whirlwind romance. On the evening of their first meeting, Cairns offered to drive Gwen home from a dinner at the Curnows. When he pulled the car over on the Yarra Boulevard, Gwen feared the worst. ‘Here we were again—the same old thing—a fast worker.’ To her pleasant surprise, however, they just talked, and when Cairns eventually dropped her off at her hotel he shook her hand. Two evenings later Cairns took Gwen to dinner and then drove down to the wharves, where the Empress of Britain was docked. While they sat there talking, Cairns proposed marriage. Gwen accepted, her instinct that the decision ‘felt right’ overruling the doubts she must surely have had at committing to another marriage to another handsome stranger.17 The Fords were less easy to convince. They were doubtless shocked that the eminently sensible Cairns had acted so impulsively—all the more so because his betrothed had two children from a failed marriage. Gwen’s vivacious personality and her habits of smoking and wearing make-up further guaranteed that her relationship with the Fords was initially strained. Letty, whose short-lived marriage to James John Cairns gave her more in common with Gwen than she was prepared to let on, was particularly disapproving. She made it known to Gwen that she would prefer to see Jim marry a family acquaintance who was a Sunday-school teacher, a woman described by Gwen as ‘the dowdiest thing you have ever seen in your life’. Gwen suspected that no one would have been good enough for Jim in the eyes of the Fords. She was taken aback at the way in which he was idealised by his family. She used the word ‘besotted’ to

describe their attitude adding that in their eyes he ‘was perfect. He was all they had.’ Letty and the rest of the family underlined their disquiet at Jim’s choice of wife by refusing to attend the marriage ceremony at the Melbourne Registry Office on 7 February 1939.18 Ormonde characterises the marriage as one of opposites: ‘Jim studious, undemonstrative, intellectual, superficially unemotional, an outsider; Gwen affectionate and fun-loving, someone who delighted in having people around her, but who never fully shared Jim’s intellectual pursuits’. Interviewed in 1990, Cairns cast a similar light on the marriage. Asked whether it had been a ‘good marriage’, he replied that it had had its ‘ups and downs’. He continued: Gwen was very different from me. She wasn’t really interested in politics. Or in my theories and ideas on politics and human behaviour. Gwen doesn’t like to accept the idea that human behaviour has causes and can be explained. She thinks there are good humans and bad humans. So she is very, very interested in people. So, they go through her life. Some stay others go. But as to explaining their behaviour. . . which I spend all my time doing well that’s a bore. And therefore I’m a bit of a bore. But she admires me and thinks I don’t get the recognition I deserve.19

For Cairns, marriage to Gwen also brought with it responsibility for fathering Philip and Barry, then aged five and four. This responsibility was formalised in 1944 when he was granted legal guardianship of the boys. According to Cairns, his relationship with the children was essentially the same as with everyone else in his life, that is, of a largely intellectual nature. In return, Philip and Barry were devoted to and heroworshipped him (they assumed he was their natural father until well in their teens). Barry Cairns remembers him as ‘very gentle. He wasn’t a man that showed a lot of affection, but you knew it.’ To the disappointment of the Fords, especially Letty, Jim and Gwen did not have children of their own. It was a disappointment Cairns professed, at least publicly, not to share, telling Diamond: I don’t regret it at all. . . I don’t think there is that much difference between a child that

would be my own and somebody else’s. In a sense, I don’t care who the child is as long as I can communicate with them, as long as I can teach and talk to them.20

For Cairns, however, there were other regrets from this period. Looking back at his life in the second half of the 1930s during the Diamond interviews, Cairns’ reflections were tinged with a curious element of guilt: I was enjoying myself like it seems to me many people do . . . very much taken up in athletics, training and competing. I was thinking of further successes. I think my shadowing was a sort of game that in a similar way to the athletics gave me satisfaction of application . . . You had to allow them to get right onto the job in order to catch them properly. I’ve been there when we’ve actually switched the lights on suddenly to see a chap pushing gelignite into the key-hole of a safe. We got them as red-handed as that. . . The point I am making is that it seemed to be somewhat similar to the athletics . . . I was thoroughly taken up in just being myself, doing things I wanted to do for selfsatisfaction. I wasn’t curing any ills, simply catching people over and over again doing the same things without being able to affect to the slightest extent what caused them to do these things.21

It is implicit in this statement that, even while ‘taken up in just being myself’, Cairns was wrestling an impulse that demanded he look beyond the horizons of his own individual gratification. As a child he had learnt to be wary of personal indulgence and had been inculcated with a strong sense of responsibility and duty to others. Although he found the thrill of pursuing and catching criminals diverting for a time, this role was not enough for him. Broader questions about what caused criminal behaviour and the legitimacy of the laws and social system he was being asked to uphold pressed upon him. Cairns could never abandon himself to a life of hedonism, or find personal fulfilment in the narrow pursuit of temporal pleasures. Nor could he be merely a disinterested social observer or passive participant. Cairns dismisses the time from when he left school in 1931 to the beginning of the 1940s as a ‘dead letter period’ as far as his intellectual development was concerned, but this does not do justice to the

intellectual curiosity and desire for self-improvement he displayed in those years.22 While still employed at Australian Estates, Cairns undertook accountancy studies by correspondence. In 1934 he successfully studied the Leaving Certificate level subjects Commercial Principles and Commercial Practice. The following year he studied Leaving English and History, but his police duties prevented him from sitting the examinations. His education was further broadened by the training he received within the Victoria Police. Of enduring value was his introduction to careful observation of human behaviour, a skill honed during the many hours he spent following criminals and suspects while assigned to the shadowing squad. This function of observing and ultimately striving to understand human behaviour was the one constant between his work in the police force and his subsequent incarnations as academic, politician and prophet of a new social order. Cairns showed a remarkable aptitude for the training he undertook with the Victoria Police, and senior officers had high expectations of him. His service record is dotted with comments like ‘a man of superior education’ and ‘one of the most promising of the young men’. Cairns lived up to these expectations. In 1939 he graduated from the Detective Training Course with the fourth-highest grades ever achieved. The following year he gained record marks in both the practical and theoretical examinations for promotion to the rank of first constable.23 Debating provided another intellectual outlet for Cairns. Upon entering the force he joined the Victoria Police debating team, which competed in interstate police debating competitions. An accomplished debater, Cairns was invited to take part in a number of the Heckle Hour debates regularly broadcast on the Melbourne radio station 3DB. Before each appearance, however, he was required to obtain permission from the Victoria Police hierarchy. On some occasions it was refused. One example was a debate scheduled for early 1944 on the topic ‘That the medical profession should be socialised on the Soviet plan’. Authorisation was withheld because the topic was judged to be too

‘political’. Cairns accepted such knock-backs as part of ‘the limitations’ of his job, but these displays of narrow-mindedness by senior officers helped to make him conscious of the intellectually repressive environment in which he worked. At other times Cairns was asked to provide his superiors with a precis of the argument he intended to present in the Heckle Hour debates. A copy of the precis he prepared for the affirmative case on the topic ‘That the expenditure of individual effort in achievement is justifiable’ survives in his service file. Revealingly, in it he distinguished between selfish and unselfish individual effort, arguing that it was the latter that was justified. He signalled, too, his faith in the progressive evolution of the social order. This evolution, he wrote, ‘is a continual progression to something closer to perfection and that although the progression has been retarded each succeeding peak is higher than the former’.24 In 1937 Cairns read his first substantial work on political economy, Progress and Poverty (1879) by the North American land reformer Henry George. A book that had aroused much interest in the Australian colonies around the time of the birth of the Labor Party, it identified land ownership as the root cause of all that was wrong with industrial capitalism, particularly the huge disparities in wealth. To remedy this situation, George proposed a graduated tax on unimproved land values. In common with earlier generations of Australians, Cairns was initially seduced by the simplicity of George’s scheme. He found Progress and Poverty ‘logical, correct ethically and practical’, offering a vision of society that was ‘a big improvement on the way things were’. Although he soon concluded that a land tax was unlikely to provide a universal social panacea, Progress and Poverty served for Cairns as an intellectual bridge to further inquiry in the areas of social theory and political economy, as it had for many others before him. About this time Cairns also acquired a copy of Principles of Economics (1890), the major work of the influential late Victorian Cambridge University economist Alfred Marshall, and the standard economics text in universities throughout the

English-speaking world in the first half of the twentieth century. For Cairns the book was a revelation: ‘a mine of complexity and information’.25 It is not clear why Cairns began delving into these works of political economy. Cairns refers vaguely to a ‘concern to know what was wrong and how it could be put right—this social question’. In an address to the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society in 1970 he alluded to what first stimulated this interest in the ‘social question’: I always felt that I was on the side of the underdog. . . that is how I began to look at political questions, began to look at what was happening in the police force, began to look at what was happening in the community around me. It was this almost irrational sense of wanting to identify with the underdog.26

Certainly by the end of the 1930s the doubts Cairns had previously held in check about his work with the police began to boil to the surface. He wanted to know ‘why some people were criminals and others were not’, and recognised that most offenders hailed from a deprived economic background. He was frustrated that little was done to rehabilitate offenders in prison. Remarkably, Cairns did what he could to compensate for the criminal system’s shortcomings. Both Gwen and Barry Cairns recall ex-prisoners, whom Cairns had helped put in gaol in the first place, calling in at the family home to thank him for having assisted their reentry to the outside world. That assistance included material support— one grateful ex-prisoner received his overcoat while Cairns also commenced a lifetime habit in those years of visiting gaol to teach and talk with inmates.27 Cairns’ disquiet about the value of his police duties was compounded when he was transferred to the Special Branch shortly after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. He was assigned to shadowing German and Italian aliens and Japanese who were alleged to be spying. Although Cairns received an official commendation from the

Chief Commissioner for his conduct of this work, he regarded it with distaste.28 His disenchantment intensified after the Menzies Government decided to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in June 1940. He and fellow officers were ordered to carry out raids on the homes of suspected communists, and report on and impound subversive literature. As Ormonde writes: ‘Cairns felt a certain futility about investigating people who did not seem to be doing anything more harmful than reading volumes from the Left Book Club’.29 One by-product of Cairns’ growing disaffection with the police force was his decision in late 1940 to apply for entry into the Diploma of Commerce at the University of Melbourne. Cairns’ motivation was twofold. First, he hoped that a university qualification might open career avenues to him outside the police force, or at least enable him to move into a more palatable field of duty such as company investigation. Second, Cairns saw enrolment in the course as a means of furthering his reading on economics. Cairns was accepted as a part-time student for the Diploma of Commerce in 1941, and he took two subjects that year, Accountancy I and Commercial Law I. Because of his lack of academic background and long and irregular working hours, Cairns had very modest expectations. In the light of these handicaps, it was a triumph when he achieved third-class honours in each subject. The following year he did even better, obtaining second-class honours in bofh Economic Geography and Economics I.30 The results showed that Cairns had a talent for academic study and nurtured his conviction that his future no longer rested with the Victoria Police. Despite his satisfaction with these results, Cairns derived little intellectual stimulation from his initial studies for the Diploma of Commerce. He found the course material dry and uninspiring, and nothing in the reading related to the broad social and economic themes in which he was interested. Nor did university life make an impact on him; his visits to the campus were fleeting and he rarely ventured beyond the

Commerce building. As had been the case for most of his schooling, Cairns was an outsider, his presence at the university purely instrumental. What Cairns saw of the Economics and Commerce Faculty in the early 1940s failed to impress him. It struck him as a drab place with few signs of intellectual vitality. Like most other areas in the university, the Economics and Commerce Faculty had had its intellectual lifeblood drained by the war. The dominant figures of the previous two decades, Professors Douglas Berry Copland and Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin, had both departed to take up senior positions with the Commonwealth. The faculty was left with a skeleton staff and student enrolments had more than halved.31 Frustrated by the narrow scope of the Diploma of Commerce, Cairns supplemented the course reading during regular visits to the State Library of Victoria. It was in this way that he first came across The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) by John Maynard Keynes. Arguably the most influential book written on economics in the twentieth century, Keynes’ magnum opus was fundamentally a response to the Great Depression and, more precisely, the abject failure of classical economics to find a solution to that crisis. The Keynesian revolution in economic thought offered a strategy to reconstruct and renew liberal capitalism. It promised to rid capitalism of its inherent instability and its accompanying tendency towards persistent mass unemployment—a flaw that Keynes predicted would spell the system’s inevitable doom if it were not corrected. The General Theory challenged the classical school’s view that the position of equilibrium in a free market economy was necessarily one of full employment.32 Rather, as the Depression had so graphically demonstrated, the economy could naturally adjust into stable equilibrium at a point of mass unemployment. Central to Keynes’ thesis was the idea that the primary determinant of activity and employment in the economy was the level of aggregate demand for goods and services. Keynes set out to show that free market forces alone were not capable of maintaining

demand at a level sufficient to produce stable full employment. Consumption and investment demand in any period had a tendency to fall short of potential supply or capacity to produce. It followed that, as demand fell, supply had to adjust downwards to bring it back into symmetry with demand and, consequently, to a position of equilibrium short of full employment. As Keynes’ biographer, Robert Skidelsky, notes: ‘The revolutionary thought was that people could be unemployed due to a “lack of effective demand”, and not because they had “priced themselves out of jobs”’33 As well as diagnosing the reasons for capitalism’s failure to provide full employment, Keynes also proposed a cure. Given the free market’s inability to keep demand sufficiently high to supply jobs for all those seeking work, Keynes concluded that government had to provide the outside stimulus sufficient to secure a level of investment and demand corresponding to full employment. This could be achieved by measures such as reducing interest rates, cutting taxes and deficit budgeting to fund public spending. Here, the General Theory provided the model for a mixed capitalist economy. The government and market would work in partnership to realise the potential of capitalism and to bring abundance within the reach of all. About the time Cairns was trying to fathom the intricacies of the General Theory, Keynesian economics was making a crucial contribution to the Curtin Labor Government’s post-war reconstruction plans. Basic to those plans was the ideal of full employment, given practical expression in the government’s 1945 White Paper, Full Employment in Australia. In conjunction with the raft of social welfare initiatives introduced by the Curtin Government in 1942–45 and legislation to extend the Commonwealth’s control of the banking and monetary system, the White Paper signalled an intellectual shift and a departure in policy from the pre-war ascendancy of laissez-faire economics.34 It was replaced by an economic paradigm that assigned a significant role to government in

economic management and planning, within the broad framework of the liberal capitalist state. This shift in economic thinking and practice was not solely a product of the impact of Keynes’ General Theory. It was the result of a confluence of factors. For example, inspiration was found in the economic and social measures of other English-speaking governments, particularly those in Washington and London. The classical view that the state must not proceed beyond a passive role in economic and social life had also been challenged by the successful wartime mobilisation of the economy. For those in government and the bureaucracy there seemed no reason why this experiment in collectivism which had worked so successfully during the war could not be emulated in peace-time. Perhaps more than anything else, though, the change in thinking favouring an interventionist state was due to a less tangible but pervasive feeling that there must be an alternative to the mass unemployment and poverty of the inter-war years: capitalism must be modified. Notably, this view was not exclusive to the Labor side of politics.35 So, the Keynesian revolution in economic thought did not alone provide the impetus for Labor’s post-war reconstruction agenda. Yet the assimilation within Australia’s political and intellectual circles of the main ideas contained in the General Theory remains critical to an understanding of the post-war reconstruction period and, indeed, the record of economic and social policy in this country until the mid-1970s. For mainstream Labor the decline of classical economics and the associated dominance of the Keynesian economic model were particularly auspicious. As had been underscored during the term of the Scullin Government, the ALP had previously been torn between the conflicting imperatives of conforming to the demands of economic orthodoxy and fulfilling its stated objective of using the state to improve the lot of the masses. By sanctioning state intervention in the economy, Keynesian theory promised a way out of this impasse. As Peter Love writes, ‘reformist Labor had at last found a respectable theory. . . The

Keynesian model offered the prospect of governments striking a balance between capitalism’s productive energies and destructive effects, the very problem that had long exercised the minds of Labor moderates.’36 For radically inclined Laborites of the post-war era, Cairns among them, the Keynesian inheritance was more ambivalent. On the one hand, it promised to alleviate the worst excesses of capitalism, and anything that rendered capitalism more humane and rational was surely to be welcomed. On the other hand, it stopped well short of fundamental change to the capitalist system; in fact, as Keynes had explicitly professed, it was specifically designed to preserve capitalism and render it immune to radical challenge. The critical judgement, therefore, for socialists like Cairns was whether the Keynesian economic model would in the long term bring them closer to the type of society they wished to achieve, or instead make that goal less realistic. Certainly the ascendancy of Keynesian economics seemed likely to strengthen the hand of Laborites whose inclinations were labourist and social democratic at the expense of those in the party who remained committed to an assault on the structural inequalities of capitalism. When he first read the General Theory in the early 1940s, this dilemma was not yet apparent to Cairns. Like others who came to the General Theory with only limited formal training in economics, Cairns found he was attracted to the less technical sections of the book. Even later, after he became conversant with the technical side of economics, Cairns never came to be a student of the mathematical and abstract elements of the General Theory. For him the book’s value always lay in its broad implications for economic and social policy. In the 1980s when he listed some of the ‘books which have most changed my attitude to life’, the General Theory was prominent. The central idea Cairns drew from it in the early 1940s, and which for him always remained the work’s essence, was that ‘in a market economy, the market generally is severely deficient in effective demand to clear output profitably. It is only through government spending that the deficiency can be made up.’37

State intervention in the economy was a key theme of the subject Public Finance that Cairns took in 1943. The prescribed reading for it included Keynes’ How to Pay for the War (1940), and he found the subject more stimulating and relevant than his previous studies in the Diploma of Commerce. By that time Cairns was becoming more confident in his academic abilities. He performed well in Public Finance and the other subject he undertook that year, Industrial Organisation, recording second-class honours in both.38 It was in 1944, however, that he began to excel academically, studying Economic History I and Money and Banking. The former was taught by the newly created Department of Economic History and was the first subject to capture Cairns’ imagination. A synopsis provided in the opening week of the course gives an insight into its theoretical approach: Every student of economic history is confronted with the necessity, at some time or other, of making up his mind about a theory of history known as the Economic Interpretation of History. This theory (which was stated in its most challenging form by Karl Marx) can be stated thus: The clue not only to the outward activities of mankind, but also to its inward possessions and experiences—religion, art, literature, science, music, philosophy, morality, etc—is to be found in the material conditions of the moment. . .39

His introduction to the economic interpretation of history was a seminal point in Cairns’ intellectual development. In 1970 he noted that Economic History I and History of Economic Theory (which he took in 1946) suggested to me that there was more to it than the question of the underdog, the haves and have-nots, the snobs and the outcasts . . . I began to see . . . that the existence of man depended upon his ability to sustain himself, and that economic life is the fundamental thing in sustaining him. The art of sustaining himself is not an individual act, but a social art and takes place within a social structure in which the fundamental part was the means of production. Man could be more or less satisfied that the social relations that were established were the results of the functioning of the means of production. I saw that economic causes were the main causes of the changes in structure of society. . .40

More recently, elaborating upon the impact of Economic History I, Cairns observed that the subject demonstrated that economic structures were ‘ever-changing’. There had been a feudal stage, followed by an agrarian revolution and the rise of mercantilism; then came the advent of industrialism which was also evolving with, for instance, increased levels of state intervention and growing monopolistic tendencies. For Cairns this dynamism raised questions of where the process of change was heading. Was there a limit to state intervention in the economy, or would it continue to grow inexorably? Would socialism be the end result of this trend? If so, would it emerge through social democratic action or revolution?41 Although not figuring in the prescribed reading for Economic History I, Marxist theory cast a shadow over the subject. Cairns dates his earliest forays into Marx’s writings to this time. He still recalls his excitement when he first came across the famous passage from the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859), in which Marx encapsulated his statement of the materialist conception of history. Cairns never succumbed to the kind of rigid economic determinism denoted in this passage that was embraced by many Marxists. He always remained convinced that the constraints imposed on humans by their material environment could be transcended. To Cairns the course of human history was open and could be shaped by the combined forces of reason and morality. Nonetheless, Marx’s writings had a formative influence on Cairns’ thinking. In 1985 he affirmed his intellectual debt to the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and Theses on Feuerbach (1845), listing them among the most important things he had read in his life.42 Cairns obtained first-class honours in Economic History I and second-class honours (division A) in Money and Banking. 43 Equally importantly, he left a strong mark on Herbert Burton, the lecturer in

Economic History and sub-Dean of the Economics and Commerce Faculty, and A. G. L. Shaw, who tutored him in both subjects. Shaw was impressed by Cairns’ remarkable capacity to absorb each week’s reading. Cairns was, he recalls, ‘extremely hard-working . . . always well prepared . . . He wasn’t simply, however, a rote learner—he certainly had ideas.’ Shaw adds that Cairns had an ability to stimulate tutorial discussions. Burton noticed this quality too, commenting that Cairns’ ‘natural ability and maturity’ made him a ‘leader’ among his fellow students.44 Paradoxically, in the same year Cairns was winning such high opinions at the University of Melbourne his previously impeccable reputation within the Victoria Police was sullied. Between 1941 and 1944 Cairns’ dissatisfaction with his work in the police force intensified. After a year in the Special Branch he was transferred to the Consorting Squad, whose main function was to go around hotels and other public places checking whether persons with criminal convictions were associating together. If so, they could be charged with the offence of consorting. Cairns regarded this law as unjust and discriminatory: ‘people have certain rights even if they have been convicted, and one of those rights is to be able to move about in public with friends and associates . . . If you have been convicted you are unlikely to be moving around with a judge or university professor.’ There were other irritants for Cairns. Blarney’s replacement as Chief Commissioner, Alexander Duncan, poured cold water on his hopes of a move into an area such as company investigation, dismissing his commerce studies as a waste of time. Finally, he was appalled by an incident he witnessed in 1943. While helping to apprehend two unarmed men attempting to break into a factory in East Brunswick, he saw fellow officers fire on the men, wounding both of them. Cairns told Diamond that the shooting ‘broke my loyalty and attachment to the police force. It was so cruel and unfair.’45 Despite his diminishing enthusiasm for his police duties, senior officers continued to hold Cairns in high regard. In 1942 he was described as a ‘zealous and persevering detective who is proving a capable

investigator’, and in May 1943 he received another official commendation.46 In April 1944, however, an incident occurred which tainted Cairns’ reputation within the police force. By that time Cairns was back working as a detective in charge of the shadowing squad. On 15 April the Superintendent of the CIB, J. H. Magener, sent a memorandum to the Chief Commissioner expressing concern over possible corrupt activities within the squad. A service station proprietor, Ian Coutts, had alleged that a ‘known criminal’, Louis Stirling, had tried to extort £100 from him on 3 and 4 April. 47 Accompanying Magener’s memorandum was a report by Detective-Sergeant McGuffie that accused Cairns and two other officers from the shadowing squad, Detective William Cole and Constable Bryan Moloney, of being engaged with Stirling ‘in a conspiracy to extort 100 pounds from Mr Coutts’. McGuffie’s report cited as evidence of Cairns’ involvement his presence ‘in a private car in the vicinity of the service station about the time the money was to be picked up and his unsatisfactory explanation coupled with the incorrect entries in his diary’. The report further stated: ‘Detective Cairn’s [sic] actions are very suspicious in view of the fact that he is on very friendly terms with Stirling’. Nothing came of this allegation, and documentation in Cairns’ service record suggests it had little substance. In their respective statements Cole and Moloney acknowledged visiting Coutts’ service station on the relevant dates in the normal course of making inquiries about forged petrol ration tickets. In his statement Cairns denied having instructed Cole and Moloney to conduct inquiries at the service station and claimed he had not learnt of their visit until after the event. Moreover, although confirming he had known Stirling for several years, Cairns pointed out that their acquaintanceship was based on Stirling’s role as a valuable informant. While no charges were laid against Cairns, Cole and Moloney in relation to Coutts’ complaints, all three were charged with misconduct

following an investigation into their activities of early April. Cairns faced three charges—one of having made a false report requesting the issue of two gallons of petrol, and two counts of having made false entries in his police diary on 3 and 4 April. 48 Cairns pleaded guilty to the charge of having made a false entry in his diary on 3 April. He had omitted to note his absence from duty while attending a lecture at the university, a discrepancy that emerged in the statement he gave in the course of the investigation into Coutts’ complaint. The two charges to which he pleaded not guilty were heard before a police board of inquiry on 1 August 1944. These charges were dismissed, as were the charges against Detective Cole and Constable Moloney. On 28 August Cairns appeared before Superintendent Magener to face disciplinary action arising from the false diary entry. He was fined one pound and informed he was to be transferred to uniform duty. The next day Cairns wrote to Magener threatening to resign from the police force and noted of the previous day’s proceedings: I explained that there was no intention on my part of concealing that I had attended a lecture at the Melbourne University. . . and that I had made the [diary] entry at a time when I had for the moment completely forgotten that I had attended the lecture. Further that I had frankly admitted the attendance as soon as I was asked about it. . . Considering the nature of the charge and the explanation given the penalty may be considered excessive. It may be that the official attitude in general to me has been influenced by facts and suspicions, which appear to have become almost inextricably mixed up, which are related to the incidents on April 3rd and April 4th at the service station in Prahran operated by a man called Coutts.49

Cairns’ suggestion that his treatment by Magener had been prejudiced by continuing suspicions stemming from the Coutts incident was well-founded. In an earlier memorandum Magener explicitly expressed his doubts about the integrity of Cairns, Cole and Moloney. ‘I have lost all confidence in Detectives Cairns and Cole’, he wrote, and declared that Moloney was unsuitable to shadowing duty as members of the squad ‘should be worthy of complete trust’. For Cairns—who from

childhood had been instilled with a keen sense of his own virtue and, as his political career shows, not only possessed great moral courage but had an unerring faith in his own moral authority—these lingering doubts about his integrity were intolerable. On 4 September he went to see Chief Commissioner Duncan. According to a memorandum written by Duncan, Cairns’ ‘object in seeking me was to indicate that he was of the opinion his colleagues in the C. I. Branch would consider he was transferred on account of suspicions and incidents which occurred in connection with a service station’. Duncan denied Cairns’ transfer had anything to do with Coutts’ complaint and assured him that his record would ‘not be adversely affected’ by his conviction over the incorrect diary entry. He also remitted the one pound fine in view of Cairns’ previous good conduct.50 But Cairns was not assuaged and on the day after his meeting with Duncan submitted his resignation from the police force. On 8 September Duncan sent a letter to the Deputy Director-General of Manpower in Melbourne recommending Cairns’ resignation be accepted. Cairns was formally discharged from the Victoria Police on 20 September 1944.51 Amid the bitter and contentious circumstances of Cairns’ exit from the police force, it was appropriate that his omission to report attendance at a university lecture had played, ostensibly at least, an important part in the events that precipitated his resignation. Since the beginning of the 1940s Cairns’ academic interests and talents were a sign that he had outgrown the police force. The initial excitement he had derived from his duties had long passed and all that was left were doubts about the legitimacy of the work he was ordered to carry out, and a growing sense of futility and frustration. Equally, the lack of understanding of Cairns’ academic pursuits among senior officers underscored the fact that he no longer belonged in the job. As Cairns observes, the events of 1944 merely represented ‘the final straw’ in his alienation from the police force.52 Cairns devoted the final months of 1944 to his studies. Having

successfully completed his Diploma of Commerce, he enlisted in the AIF on 23 January 1945. Ormonde quite reasonably characterises Cairns’ attitude to the war as ‘conventionally patriotic’. Indeed, there is a suggestion that an element of his disenchantment with his police work in the 1940s was that he felt he should have been playing a more direct role in the war effort. 53 When Cairns enlisted, the war in the Pacific was still at a decisive stage. Japan, though on the retreat, continued to offer furious resistance. The Australian forces, however, had been marginalised by their American allies, confined to mopping-up operations in Dutch New Guinea and Borneo. Cairns completed his training at Cowra in New South Wales. Before he could be posted overseas he was hospitalised in Melbourne with a severe case of boils. By the time he had recovered, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had precipitated Japan’s surrender. Along with most Australians, Cairns greeted the news of the atomic blasts with a mixture of bewilderment and relief—the war that had seemed destined to drag on was abruptly over.54 A fortnight after Japan’s formal surrender of 2 September 1945 Cairns was despatched to Morotai, a tiny island in the Moluccas off Dutch New Guinea. He spent four largely uneventful months there, attached to the Army Education Service, writing ‘pamphlets on occupational subjects for the Pre-Release training scheme’, and lecturing to soldiers on current affairs and basic economics. 55 One enduring legacy of this period was that Cairns became conscious of the nationalist sentiment sweeping South-East Asia. On his flight to Morotai Cairns touched down in Dutch New Guinea, where he witnessed several truckloads of local people driving around waving Indonesian flags in support of the Indonesian nationalists who had recently proclaimed independence from Dutch rule. On Morotai and his visits to the surrounding islands Cairns saw less evidence of support for the nationalist movement, but was struck by the friendliness of the indigenous population despite their obvious poverty. 56 These experiences stirred in Cairns an affection for the people of South-East Asia and

fascination with the region. He returned to Australia with a sympathy for the nationalist cause and the first seeds of what became an emblem of his political career—a commitment to the ideal of building a harmonious and mutually respectful relationship between Australia and its Asian neighbours. Cairns had been on Morotai only a matter of weeks when a letter arrived from Herbert Burton inviting him to apply for a position as senior tutor in Economic History at the University of Melbourne. Burton’s approach came within the context of university preparations for the anticipated large influx of ex-servicemen and women under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme and severe academic staff shortages. A. G. L. Shaw had suggested to Burton that Cairns’ maturity and intelligence made him an obvious choice for the position of tutor. Cairns ‘could have jumped over the moon’ when he received Burton’s letter. He had entered the army unsure of his future employment prospects and without any thoughts that he might be able to break into academia.57 In his application for the job, dated 6 October 1945, he stressed his commitment to furthering his academic qualifications. As the unanimous choice of the faculty selection panel, he was notified of his appointment as a temporary (post-war) senior tutor in Economic History in a cable on 3 January 1946.58 By virtue of pressure from the university and an opportune intervention by General Blarney, Cairns was discharged from the AIF in time to commence the 1946 academic year. 59 According to Ken Gott, the campus Cairns returned to was pulsating with ideas and intoxicated by a spirit of optimism: the war had brought about an unprecedented fervour for social change . . . Out of the blood-bath a new and better world would be bom; new societies and movements sprang up to assist the birth, while streams of pamphlets poured out a bewildering array of panaceas to bring happiness and peace to mankind . . . We were all socialists and in terms of practical co-operation there were few if any differences which could arise between Communist student leaders and those whose reforming zeal derived from the

ALP or Christianity.

Another undergraduate of this period, Vincent Buckley, recalls the mood of the campus in less celebratory terms, describing as a ‘nostalgic myth’ the notion that the university ‘was a hotbed of purposive, probing constructive intelligence’. But Buckley concedes that during the immediate post-war years Left-wing student organisations, the Melbourne University Labour Club (MULC) and the university Communist Party branch, dominated the campus.60 Two prominent members of both of these organisations, Stephen Murray-Smith and Ian Turner, write fondly of the Left’s pre-eminence in this period. Murray-Smith claims: the ‘hegemony’ of the Left at the University of Melbourne in the post-war years was both apparent and real. Members of the Labour Club had little difficulty in achieving election to the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) and in dominating its proceedings, or in leading a number of successful ‘broad’ actions among students, or in becoming ‘trend-setters’ in student debates, lunch-time meetings and the like. Effective and paid-up members of the Labour Club numbered, at its peak around 1947, some 450, while within those figures was a tightly-knit Communist Party branch, including some staff members, of over one hundred.61

The hegemony of the Left was not limited to student politics. Patrick O’Brien identifies the 1940s as a critical point in the entrenchment of an intellectual ‘Left/Left-liberal Establishment’ within the university’s schools of history, philosophy and political science. Robin Gollan, though writing from a very different ideological perspective, shares the view that in the mid-1940s Melbourne University emerged as a centre of Australian post-war intellectual radicalism.62 Many reasons are given for the Left’s post-war supremacy at Melbourne University. According to Manning Clark, who began lecturing in May 1944, the Left was emboldened by the defeat of fascism as signalled by the Allied war victory. A second factor was that, as Gott writes: ‘Communists were seen in the glow of the Red Army’s struggle

against the Nazis’. The appeal of communism at this time was not, however, merely related to the Soviet Union’s image as a brave and mighty war ally. It also owed much to the CPA’s wholehearted commitment to the war effort following Hitler’s invasion of Russia, and its pursuit of a united front strategy within the labour movement throughout the war years. As a result, by 1945 the CPA’s support and influence within Australian society was at or nearing its apex. 63 The Communist Party’s popularity within the wider community was mirrored, indeed magnified, within the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the university. As Murray-Smith indicates, in the immediate years after the war the university’s CPA branch claimed an active membership of over one hundred, including staff members, and used its position of strength to exercise control over the SRC, other clubs and the student newspaper Farrago. For those on the Left not aligned with the Communists there was also cause for optimism. Clark and his fellow historian Geoffrey Serle, who graduated in political science and history in 1946, recollect that those of a social-democratic inclination fervently believed that a new social order would arise out of the ashes of war and the Depression. This confidence was fed by the election of the Atdee Labour Government in Britain in 1945 and the re-election of the Chifley Labor Government in Australia in 1946, both committed to a post-war reconstruction agenda centred on the principles of full employment and an enlarged welfare state. Another factor that contributed to the Left’s vitality in these years was the change in social composition of the student population due to the introduction of Commonwealth scholarships in 1944 and the impact of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. In particular, the massive influx of ex-servicemen and women into the university in 1944– 47 created not only a diverse and mature stuent body, but a more egalitarian one. Suddenly, as A. G. L. Shaw observes, the character of the campus was transformed/No longer were most students the sons and daughters of wealthy families who were there because ‘it was the thing to

do’.64 Curiously, Cairns does not remember the campus he came back to in 1946 as a hot-bed of radicalism, nor as a place of intellectual vitality. This assessment, however, must be seen in the context of his heavy teaching load, which allowed him little time to participate in university life outside the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. He returned to Melbourne in mid-January with only weeks to prepare for the commencement of the classes. All year, Cairns was busy digesting the reading necessary to teach Economic History I. This task was all the more challenging because, like most areas in the university, the Faculty of Economics and Commerce was confronted with a surge in enrolments. 65 To supplement his income Cairns was also tutoring at Trinity College, as well as teaching night classes at both the Council of Adult Education and ‘A’ Division in Pentridge Gaol. Furthermore, he was studying two subjects towards his Bachelor of Commerce, Economic History II and History of Economic Theory. It was a measure of his prodigious work capacity and his academic progress that, despite these huge demands, he managed to achieve first-class honours and first place in both subjects.66

Starting school on horseback, Melton, 1921.

Letty and Jim, aged fourteen.

Jim as a school-leaver, early 1930s.

Constable Cairns (left), Easter 1935.

The aspirant Olympian leading the field, 1938.

A whirlwind romance: Jim and Gwen, 1939.

Barry and Philip Cairns, aged four and five, 1939.

Cairns graduating as Bachelor of Commerce, University of Melbourne, 1948.

Gwen Cairns working as a receptionist at Kenilworth House, South Yarra, late 1940s.

Jim Cairns, Gwen Cairns, Louise Miller (Gwen’s mother) and Barry, mid-1950s.

Jim Cairns, the newly elected Member for Yarra.

Barry Cairns, Jim Cairns, Elizabeth Ford (Jim’s grandmother) nursing Barry’s first child, Michael,

and Letty Cairns, late 1950s.

Gwen and Jim, late 1950s. Cairns found intellectual nourishment in Economic History II and History of Economic Theory. The former included an examination of contemporary economic trends in Japan, Indonesia and Singapore, which provided him with a deeper insight into the economic forces underpinning the nationalist stirrings in Asia. The chief focus of Economic History II was a study of Australia’s economic development in the twentieth century. 67 Listed in the reading was Brian Fitzpatrick’s The British Empire in Australia (1941), the second volume of his radical economic history of Australia. 68 Together with the first volume, British Imperialism and Australia (1939), this work had challenged the orthodox view of Australia’s economic development. Fitzpatrick specifically confronted the work of the conservative economic historian Edward

Shann, whose study, An Economic History of Australia (1930), had been the standard text of the 1930s. Unlike Shann, who defended the Anglocolonial dependency, Fitzpatrick set about not only to explain the impact of British imperialism on Australia’s economy, but to show that exploitation rather than mutual interest was at the heart of British imperialist policies. The second theme to reverberate through Fitzpatrick’s work was that of class conflict. He thought Australian history could be best understood as ‘a struggle between the organised rich and the organised poor’. In sum, Fitzpatrick constructed a story of Australia based on the conflict of national and class interests. From Marx he derived his emphasis on class conflict and the methodology of historical materialism. However, as his biographer Don Watson notes, he did not believe ‘in the historic inevitability of capitalism’s downfall . . . Marxism provided many of the answers for an analysis of history and society, but Fitzpatrick found in it neither a means of prediction nor a guarantee of revolution.’69 Cairns admired Fitzpatrick’s economic histories as important pioneering works. The conspicuous sympathy they betrayed for the social justice aspirations of the labour movement appealed to him. Shortly after, when Cairns’ own written analyses of Australian society and its history egan to appear, they shared many characteristics with Fitzpatrick’s writings: the application of a broadly Marxist methodology; the lack of faith in a revolutionary will; the conception of Australian history as a perennial struggle between reform and reaction, with the labour movement depicted as the vehicle of the reformist-progressive spirit; and a pronounced radical nationalist streak. Later in the 1940s, Cairns and Fitzpatrick crossed paths in the MULC and organisations such as the Australian Council for Civil Liberties and the Australian Peace Council. Cairns indicates that their friendship never developed beyond a formal cordiality. The puritan in Cairns was discomforted by Fitzpatrick’s fondness for alcohol and other bohemian traits. He was also unsettled by the air of superiority that surrounded Fitzpatrick.70 Notwithstanding their

contrasting temperaments, there is one way in which the two men were kindred spirits. As Ian Turner notes, they were bound together by an ideal that social problems could ultimately be resolved through the agency of ‘goodwill’. The phrase ‘men of goodwill’, a trademark of Fitzpatrick, was his way of identifying all those individuals who shared a respect for rational argument and for democratic and humanitarian values. On the existence of such individuals both Fitzpatrick and Cairns pinned their hopes for a better society.71 History of Economic Theory represented another significant step in Cairns’ intellectual development. As indicated earlier, he nominates this subject and Economic History I as having played a vital role in leading him to an understanding that economic forces determine much of what occurs in society. The book that most influenced Cairns and heightened this understanding was Eric Roll’s History of Economic Thought (1938), a monumental and ambitious study tracing the evolution of economic doctrine from the time of the Old Testament through to the age of Keynes via mercantilism, early socialist criticisms of the classical school, Marxism, and the ‘modern’ classicists including Jevons and Marshall. Cairns was impressed specifically with the scope and authority of the book’s treatment of Marx’s economics. This is interesting because History of Economic Thought presents an essentially critical view of Marxism. While acknowledging the ‘grand audacity’ of Marx’s schema, Roll concluded that Marxism amounted to little more than a ‘militant faith’.72 Although impressed with Roll’s analysis, Cairns did not embrace his categorical denial of the legitimacy of Marxist theory. Roll may have helped Cairns to investigate Marxism with a more critical eye, but failed to negate his hardening belief that its account of capitalism contained much that was valid. Cairns studied Roll at a time when he was striving to find his ideological bearings. There was no doubt his sympathy lay with the Left. His early life history, the ideas he had imbibed since the

late 1930s and the intellectual climate in which he found himself at Melbourne University in 1946 all suggested that this should be so. But if his alignment with the Left was a fait accompli, there was still a difficult ideological choice to be made. At the end of World War II and in its immediate aftermath the Communist Party was at its zenith. To many on the Left it represented a viable and radical alternative to the Labor Party. By 1946 it had captured, and was continuing to capture, some of Australia’s best and brightest minds. The question for Cairns was where would he line up? Would he throw in his lot with the communists, thereby accepting their rigid pro-Soviet line and doctrinaire Marxism, or would he side instead with the Labor Party and its reformist-democratic tradition? Those with whom he exchanged ideas in 1946–47 gained the impression that Cairns would not readily fit into the Communist Party. During his first year back at Melbourne University Cairns’ heavy teaching load left him with little time to get involved in campus activities. Nevertheless, in 1946 he began to establish contacts with several prominent members of the MULC. Lloyd Churchward, who was then a member of both the CPA and Labour Club and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, met with Cairns on a handful of occasions to discuss Marxist theory. According to Churchward, Cairns was ‘terribly interested’ in Marxism and determined to acquire a ‘thorough understanding’ of Marx’s body of thought. Yet, from their discussions together, Churchward formed the opinion that Cairns was at best a ‘proto-Marxist’. Cairns also tried to improve his knowledge of Marxism by enrolling in classes run by the CPA at its shortlived education centre, Marx School, in Collins Street. His tutor in political economy was the communist intellectual and barrister Ted Laurie. Peter Cook, Laurie’s biographer, notes that Laurie was ‘very impressed’ by Cairns and spent a great deal of class time engaged in ‘spirited debate’ with him. Cairns’ alertness to any hint of indoctrination apparently convinced Laurie that he was an unlikely Communist Party recruit. In

fact, Cook asserts that it ‘never occurred to him that Cairns might join the party’.73 Others like Murray-Smith and Turner were not as ready to dismiss the prospect of coaxing Cairns into the party; yet they, too, recognised that he did not share their unbending faith in Marxism or the communist movement. Murray-Smith remarks that Cairns was never a ‘thoughtless fellow-traveller’ but would make up ‘his mind on the moral principles of an issue’. Turner, secretary of the SRC and chairman of the university Communist Party branch in 1946, agrees: ‘He [Cairns] was a long way from the dogmatic Stalinist Marxism we were professing. We regarded his liberal doubts about the validity of Marxism as professed by the Stalinists as weak-kneed social democratic deviation.’ Two of the leading non-communist members of the MULC in this period, Arthur Burns and Geoff Serle, also noticed a refreshing open-mindedness and lack of dogma in Cairns. Burns saw him as ‘a man catching up on his own education’. ‘The impression he gave’, Burns adds, was ‘of an intellectual seeker’. Serle echoes this view, referring to Cairns’ ‘genuine inquiring attitude’—a quality, he considers, which rendered it unlikely that Cairns would ever be genuinely attracted to the CPA.74 Cairns may have seriously flirted with the idea of joining the Communist Party at this time. As Ormonde observes, both Churchward and Turner believe he did express an interest in becoming a member of the CPA. Cairns, however, disputes this suggestion. 75 Whatever the truth, it seems that in the course of 1946 a delegation of communists from the university put forward a recommendation to the CPA’s Victorian State Executive that Cairns be admitted to the party. The Executive not only flatly rejected the recommendation, but issued a stern warning to party members that they should be circumspect in their dealings with Cairns. Churchward was summoned to the party headquarters in Elizabeth Street to answer questions from a security official about his association with Cairns. He was advised against any further contact. The basis of the

Executive’s concern about Cairns was simple: he was an ‘ex-cop’ and regarded, therefore, as a security risk. Suspicion of Cairns among communists in this period was not confined to the Executive. Manning Clark vividly recalls the communist writer Judah Waten dismissing Cairns’ Leftist credentials with the brutal assessment ‘He’s just a bloody cop’.76 At the time Cairns was irritated that his background as police officer made him the subject of mistrust within communist ranks. In retrospect, though, the Communist Party hierarchy’s suspicion of Cairns was probably a blessing. It provided an eye-opener into the inflexible and authoritarian nature of the CPA and excluded any possibility that he would give his allegiance to the party. In all likelihood, any such commitment would have been ill-fated and short-lived. The sense of inquiry and non- doctrinaire approach that others detected in Cairns suggest he would have been unprepared to tolerate for long the ideological discipline demanded of Communist Party members. The bloody-mindedness of the CPA’s Victorian Executive perhaps spared him an unfortunate phase in his political development. As it was, despite the Executive’s directives, Cairns continued to fraternise and debate ideas with communist members in university forums after 1946. In fact, as the 1940s progressed and concerns about his security status waned, Cairns shared the platform with communists in a range of organisations outside the boundaries of the university. Moreover, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as growing Cold War tensions sparked a conservative backlash against communists in Australia, Cairns took a positive role in trying to combat efforts to suppress the CPA. These activities, examined in the next chapter, were testament to another of his characteristics as a thinker and activist—his non-sectarianism. Ironically, it was a quality that further distinguished him from many communists. If, in ideological terms, Cairns could not have been pigeon-holed as a communist in 1946–47, then neither did he seem a likely recruit for the ALP. Cairns’ misgivings about Labor were highlighted in a short piece,

titled ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, contributed to the 1947 winter issue of Meanjin. It was written in response to a review that had appeared in the previous issue of the journal by the Labor activist and historian Lloyd Ross to mark the republication of the Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy) novel Rigby’s Romance. Ross lamented what Labor had done to ‘Rigby’s democratic equalitarian socialism’ and urged that the novel ‘be passed around the workshops in a desperate attempt to revive the idealism of Labor’.77 Cairns eagerly took up the theme of Labor’s desertion of its radical origins. He agreed that Rigby’s message was needed in the workshops, but added cynically they would ‘never hear about Rigby if it is left to the Labor Party to tell them’. His criticisms of Labor did not stop there: The ‘intense political conviction on the ethical case for socialism’ has certainly gone from the Labor Party and likewise are gone its ‘years of the great agitators’. . . the Labor Party is now what the old Australian Socialist Party told us it would be—a party of opportunists. . .

And finally: ‘the Labor Party has adopted a policy of day to day objectives strictly within the capitalist status quo. In other words, the Labor Party is the “left wing” capitalist party and is not a socialist party at all.’78 In this, his earliest published piece of writing, Cairns unequivocally registered his lack of confidence in the Labor Party as an agent of socialist change. He also implied a disillusionment with the post-war reform agenda of the Chifley Labor Government. Not long after Cairns wrote an article for the annual Melbourne University Magazine in which he explicitly expressed his doubts about the Chifley Government’s full employment program. The article provides a substantial statement of his ideological position in 1947. Entitled ‘A Road to Full Employment?’ it applied an essentially Marxist paradigm to analyse Australia’s economic system. According to Cairns, ‘a most significant feature of [Australian] society is its division into groups of those who own and control “the

means of production” and those who do not’. An important consequence of this economic inequality was a corresponding disparity in the distribution of both political and social power. Again consistent with a broadly Marxist interpretation, he concluded that class conflict was an inevitable result of this social system. ‘It is a structure in which man appears to be impelled to action and to conflict and probably will remain so, as long as inequality exists.’79 Although utilising Marxist concepts, the article confirmed that Cairns was not a doctrinaire Marxist. As he told a Labour Club discussion group in July 1947, Marxism constituted a ‘method of enquiry, not a dogma or belief.’ It was an ‘avenue of study’ through which to analyse the evolving economic and social structure of society, but it did not ‘obviate the need for continued investigation’.80 In short, for Cairns Marxism was not an article of faith, nor an infallible guide to the future. The most obvious departure from Marxist orthodoxy in ‘A Road to Full Employment?’ is that it eschewed any notion of a sudden or violent break with the prevailing social order. The tone of the article was unmistakably gradualist and democratic. It cautioned would-be revolutionaries: ‘We cannot demand perfection, we must take the social structure as it is and see what we can make of it’. Similarly, the article stopped well short of endorsing an exclusively materialist conception of socialism. True, Cairns affirmed that socialism could only be constructed ‘on the foundations of a highly developed democratic organisation within “the relations of production”’. But he indicated that a socialist order would also be distinguished by its rational and ethical character. Cairns looked forward to a society which boasted a democratic economic structure, as well as a ‘general willingness to freely enquire into any and all subjects’ and a ‘social ethic of community welfare not individual profit’.81 The dichotomy apparent in his attitude to the role of morality in the process of social change suggested a further slide from economic determinism. On the one hand, Cairns noted that ethical values were

relative to economic conditions and, accordingly, capitalism was inimical to Christian values ‘because it is not possible to practice [sic] universal co-operation and fellowship in an environment which requires us to make profit out of one another’ Yet, on the other hand, the article struck a strong ethical chord: Sooner or later we must make a decision and in so doing we might recall the last words of J. M. Thompson in The French Revolution: ‘He (Louchet) was interrupted by loud protests, and from all parts of the house there were cries of ‘Justice’. ‘Justice’ . . . ‘Justice for every man. . .’

Moreover, Cairns was optimistic that, guided by reason, humanity would be able to construct a universally accepted ethical code. Asking ‘Are we to test events by reference to how they effect [sic] human beings . . .?’, he answered: ‘If we sincerely agree that human welfare is our supreme value, then we will not disagree very much about anything else’.82 The answer assumed that humans were not motivated purely by economic self-interest; they were also rational and moral beings. In ‘A Road to Full Employment?’ Cairns not only departed from Marxist orthodoxy, but also questioned the Chifley Government’s embrace of the Keynesian ideal of full employment within a mixed capitalist economy. He endorsed Keynes’ thesis that an unfettered system of free enterprise was incapable of maintaining full employment, but warned: ‘‘‘full employment” in an unreformed system will not work, because of an inability to solve the conflicts which are generated within it. With “full employment” the bargaining power of workers is raised to a point where they can defy the sanctions of the status quo.’ Thus, Cairns did not believe that the Keynesian economic model—and by implication the policy approach of the Chifley Government—was capable of eliminating the conflicts and instability inherent in capitalism. As long as the structural inequalities of the system remained unchallenged, class tensions between capital and labour would persist. Indeed Cairns suggested that, without accompanying fundamental structural change, full

employment could exacerbate tensions within the capitalist system. He predicted, prophetically as it transpired, that in the long term employers would not tolerate the increased bargaining power of workers in an environment of full employment. Instead they would opt for a condition of ‘high employment’ that would mean a level of unemployment ‘necessary to produce the degree of industrial discipline acceptable to private enterprise’.83 Following this gloomy assessment of the viability of full employment within a capitalist economy, Cairns proposed a policy to ‘make full employment work’ He described his policy as ‘pretty revolutionary . . . [and] incompatible with the working of private enterprise in its present form’. Cairns also clearly envisaged it as a radical alternative to the limited reform program of the Chifley Government: It means that more of the national income will have to go to wage and salary earners and less to profit receivers. It means more than this, it means that employers will have to forgo some of the high dignity of their control and power and lose sight of the ‘inviolability of private property’. It means that the traditional ethic of ‘individualism’ will tend to be replaced by one of ‘socialism’. It means that the important thing will tend to be not private profit but public welfare. It means more than a re-distribution of income, it means an elimination of some of the causes of maldistribution. It means more than adding a few shillings a week to the nominal income of some people by transfers from some others.84

Read together, ‘Wot, No Socialism?’ and ‘A Road to Full Employment?’ reveal a disillusionment with the Labor Party. They suggest that in 1947 Cairns was especially impatient with Labor’s lack of commitment to socialism. He emerges as sceptical of both the Chifley Government’s full employment strategy and the long-term viability of the Keynesian economic model. In August of the same year Cairns reminded a MULC gathering that the General Theory was concerned with the preservation of capitalism. He also noted that Keynes’ allegiance rested with the ‘cultured, educated bourgeoisie’. 85 Cairns appeared

unconvinced that the preservation of capitalism, even in a modified form as envisaged by the middle-class Keynes and pursued by the Chifley Government, was compatible with the objective of a stable and cooperative society. This objective could only be realised through farreaching structural change: the effective dismantling of the capitalist system and its replacement by a socialist order and accompanying socialist ethic. In light of this outlook it is something of a paradox that Cairns joined the ALP in 1947. Asked to explain the apparent contradiction between this decision and the obvious disenchantment with Labor expressed in ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, Cairns wryly observes that he has ‘always been disillusioned with the Labor Party’. Pressed further, he states ‘it was the most effective means of political action available in Australia’.86 This reply invites the question of why in 1947 Cairns felt compelled to become engaged in political action. In ‘A Road to Full Employment?’ Cairns wrote of the need ‘sooner or later to make a decision’, that is, to take a stand. By 1947 that time had arrived for Cairns. In 1947 Cairns completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree in fine style, achieving first-class honours and first place in Modern History and second-class honours in Statistical Method.87 At the beginning of the same year, he was promoted to the position of temporary lecturer within the Department of Economic History. 88 In effect, Cairns was well on his way to securing a niche in the world of academia. But already there were indications that a life of teaching and researching within the orbit of the university would not satisfy him. In 1947 Cairns began to embrace the role of activist. He published two more articles that year. 89 He also participated regularly in MULC conferences and discussion groups, speaking on topics including ‘The Revolt of the Colonial Peoples’, ‘The Significance of Classical Economic Theory’, and ‘Marxian Economic Theory’. Outside the university Cairns

involved himself in the Australian-Indonesian Association and the Australia-Soviet House. In addition, following an approach from a former fellow officer in the Victoria Police, he commenced work on an industrial log of claims on behalf of the Victoria Police Association.90 As will become evident in the next chapter, Cairns’ activism increased during the remainder of the 1940s and the early 1950s, culminating in his entry into the Commonwealth Parliament in 1955. From the time he delved into Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in 1937, Cairns had gradually acquired the theoretical equipment with which to explain and critique the economic and social system in which he lived. His studies had also strengthened his resolve that the existing order must be both challenged and changed. He had come to renounce classical economic theory and its assumption that the welfare of society would be best served when individuals pursued their own self-interest. To Cairns this notion was little more than a rationale for the preservation of privilege and an unequal distribution of wealth and power. In a lecture drafted in 1947 he noted that classical economics was premised on an abstract and imaginary providential order, the existence of which ‘the poor classes find some difficulty in accepting’. 91 He had found greater attraction in the ideas of Keynes but, more than any other economist, it was Marx who appeared to Cairns to have offered a convincing explanation of the division of society into haves and have-nots, and to have shown that economic forces were a vital determinant in shaping all else that occurred in society. At the same time, Cairns was reluctant to swallow the Marxist doctrine whole. To him concepts such as revolution and an ineluctable materialist march to socialism were incongruous, especially in a society with a robust reformist democratic tradition. In 1947 Cairns saw himself as being at the beginning of an intellectual journey. The purpose of this journey was to shed light on the ‘social question’: how might society be placed on a more ethical and rational footing? He did not expect that any one theory would provide an all-embracing answer to the ‘social question’. Rather it was a matter, as

he wrote a few years later in his Master of Commerce thesis, of an everevolving quest for enlightenment: let us see if we can discover the causes of large scale social and historical events. In the course of this we will no doubt raise many theories which appear to identify the fundamental causes, but one cause will no doubt be the effect of a cause further back, or more fundamental. And so the search will continue, but we will come to know much more as we proceed.

Cairns was adamant that the subject of this quest should be socially relevant. Already in the late 1940s it was obvious that he saw his role in academia, and that of social scientists in general, as entailing a grave social responsibility. In his master’s thesis he disparaged the proposition that the social sciences be confined to an abstract or atomistic level of inquiry. Similarly, in an article he wrote in 1949, he implored the university not to become divorced from the rest of society or allow itself to be pressured into assuming an uncritical position vis-à-vis that society. If such pressure was not resisted, he warned, a situation would arise where the radical became ‘conservative; the humanist tends to become the supernaturalist; the realist moves towards more abstraction and the giver of light becomes the obscurantist’.92 By the late 1940s Cairns had assumed a role that he believed involved a heavy obligation to society. He was not, as Arthur Burns points out, ‘a playful intellectual . . . [nor] a speculative thinker’.93 To Cairns, ideas were too important to be played with. Ideas were not passive. On the contrary, he saw them as an injunction to action and commitment and, above all, as agents of social change. This characteristic was very much in keeping with the ethical impulse that underpinned his socialism. In Cairns’ ethical view of the world, the idea of abstract theorising or playing the part of a disinterested observer of society was completely alien. It is in this context that the emerging conjunction between ideology and practice in Cairns’ life in 1947— manifested most clearly by his decision to join the Labor Party—is most

properly understood. Cairns must have realised, however, that alignment with Labor was likely to be a difficult commitment. He harboured deep reservations about the Labor Party and, in particular, was highly critical of what he interpreted as its retreat from the ideal of a socialist society. This retreat showed little sign of being reversed in Australia’s changing post-war ideological landscape. The reconstruction phase in Australia, as in much of the industrialised world, ushered in a period of ideological consensus between social democracy and ‘social’ liberalism. This consensus was built upon the welfare state and a mixed or state capitalist Keynesian economy. Increasingly the broad social democratic Left was to accept that the objectives of socialism could be realised by reform within the capitalist system. In contradiction to this trend, Cairns’ early writings insisted that true socialist change required a fundamental reorganisation of the economic order. In short, his message was out of step with the ideological realignment taking place within the mainstream of Australian politics and, more significantly, with the direction in which Labor was heading. Cairns and the Labor Party were destined to be strange bedfellows.

3 politic al apprentic e 1948–1955 THERE WAS A TOTAL WAR GOING ON . . . [WE] WERE FIGHTING TOOTH AND NAIL TO RETAIN CONTROL OF THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT IN DECENT AND REASONABLE HANDS. AND WHEN A BLOKE [CAIRNS] WAS FOUND TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH THE OTHER SIDE HE COULDN’T VERY WELL EXPECT TO ONE DAY TURN UP AT THE PARTY AND EVERYONE SAY ‘GOOD TO HAVE YOU’. Frank McManus interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 15 April 1975.

A S J IM CA IRN S BEG A N TO MA K E H IS MA RK as a political activist in

the late 1940s, he did so in an environment that was very different to that which had prevailed when he had returned to the University of Melbourne at the beginning of 1946. Within depressingly quick time the initial postwar hopes for a peaceful and harmonious world order had been replaced by the reality of an international community increasingly polarised between the capitalist and communist power blocs. Although Australia was geographically far removed from the focus of superpower tensions in partitioned Europe, it also became a testing ground for the battle against communism. Nor was it spared the fear, suspicion and intolerance that were all staples of Cold War politics. Reaction against the Left, but particularly communists, was evident

at Melbourne University by early 1948. SRC elections that year saw a decline in support for the Left; more ominously, McCarthyist-style allegations of communist infiltration within academic ranks intensified. At a meeting of the university Liberal Club in March, a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, F. L. Edmunds, called for the dismissal of Manning Clark, then a lecturer in the Department of History, accusing him of being ‘either a fool or a paid agent of the Soviet Union’. This attack was part of a sustained assault by Edmunds against the university Departments of Economics and History, which he complained had become ‘instruments of Marxian propaganda’.1 Another sign of the Left’s eroding strength was the sharpening tensions between communist members and ALP supporters within the MULC. A specific bone of contention was the Labour Club’s affiliation with the communist front organisation, the Eureka Youth League. More broadly, the tensions reflected the deepening hostilities between the Chifley Government and the CPA and, as Lloyd Churchward recalls, the tendency of communists to ‘steam-roll’ the activities of the MULC.2 In 1949 the schism within the Left in university student politics was formalised with the establishment of the ALP Club. Among its foundation members was the future State and federal Labor parliamentarian Clyde Holding. Although it seems Cairns never formally joined the ALP Club, younger members regarded him as something of a patron of the organisation and he became one of its regular speakers. 3 The outcome of SRC elections for 1949 provided further evidence of the Left’s eclipse as the dominant force in student politics. Ivor Greenwood, a previous president of the university Liberal Club and a future Liberal senator, headed a conservative-leaning council. At the same time, the strengthening anti-communist mood in the wider community continued to make its presence felt within the confines of the university. In May the leader of the federal Opposition, Robert Menzies, drew a record crowd of 2000 students to an address in which he argued the case for the banning of the CPA.4

Cairns observed the changing political climate of the late 1940s both within and outside the university campus with disquiet. He was dismayed by the fall of the Chifley Labor Government at the end of 1949. While previously disappointed by the government’s lack of commitment to fundamental socialist reform, like many of the more radically inclined members of the ALP, he had been pleasantly surprised by its decision of August 1947 to nationalise the banking sector. As it transpired, that decision galvanised fierce conservative resistance to the government.5 In an atmosphere of growing Cold War ideological intolerance Labor’s opponents successfully painted bank nationalisation, plus other elements of its reform program (in particular plans for a national health scheme), as forerunners to the imposition of a socialist system. As further evidence that the ALP was ideologically suspect, the Liberal and Country Parties contrasted its reluctance to outlaw the CPA with their determination to do so.6 This argument had powerful popular appeal: anti-communist sentiment flourished in Australia in 1948–49, fuelled by the menacing international environment and domestically by an aggressive campaign of industrial action by communist-controlled trade unions. As Cairns watched the Chifley Government’s slide towards defeat, he was frustrated with Labor’s failure to mount a spirited campaign to sell the bank nationalisation proposal to an anxious electorate. This was symptomatic, he felt, of a wider malaise in the operation of the party. The main lesson he derived from the ill-fated attempt at bank nationalisation was not that radical reform would inevitably invite defeat, but rather that it must be accompanied by a vigorous education campaign.7 Notwithstanding such deficiencies, Cairns regarded Labor’s achievements in office during the 1940s as considerable. A few years later in his doctoral thesis, he identified this period, especially the years 1943–48, as having been characterised by a spirit of co-operation and unity of purpose. Furthermore, he lamented that by 1949 that spirit was replaced by a return to an ethic of individualism and ‘justification for

people to “get in for their cut”’. Writing more recently, Cairns has argued that the Chifley Government represented ‘Laborism at its best’, and effected ‘the most substantial elements of social and economic policy’ in Labor’s history.8 In addition, among all his predecessors within the ALP, Cairns singles out Chifley as the one who most helped shape his political outlook. On 1 June 1951, less than a fortnight before Chifley’s death, Cairns met and talked with the Labor leader for two hours in the Federal Members’ Rooms in Melbourne. He still retains the notes of their discussion, eloquent testament to his admiration for Chifley, given his usual practice of disposing of personal papers.9 In the discussion Chifley anticipated several of the themes that were to be the subject of his last major speech to ALP members at the New South Wales Labor Party Conference on 10 June. 10 He articulated a view of Labor’s purpose that was fundamentally idealistic, as well as being rich in moral sentiment. It was a view echoed by Cairns throughout his own parliamentary career. Chifley expressed concern about the growing presence within the labour movement of anti-communist ‘extremists’ who would ‘never compromise’. He singled out Stan Keon, the federal Labor Member for Yarra, as an example. Presaging the circumstances of Cairns’ election to parliament, Chifley warned that before long Keon and his fellow extremists would have to be challenged. Next Chifley stressed that the ALP should guard against the temptation of pursuing power as an end in itself. It was essential, he told Cairns, to ‘know what we are fighting for’ and to follow that course irrespective of its popularity. Chifley observed further that the ideal of socialism was essential to Labor; although he cautioned that a ‘decent and democratic’ socialist society would not be ‘given on a plate’ and would have to be fought for ‘every inch of the way’. Another aspect of the discussion recorded in Cairns’ handwritten notes was Chifle’s description of parliament as a ‘place of privilege’ which before long seduced even the ‘fighters’. Suggestive of Cairns’ reservations about pinning too much hope on parliament as an instrument of social change, Chifley added that little

could be achieved through that forum which had not been ‘won outside’. It was not just the fate of the Chifley Government that troubled Cairns. He was also disturbed by broader events: the deteriorating international climate and the attendant mood of political and intellectual intolerance within Australia. Evidence of these concerns pervades his writings and activities in this period. In 1948 Cairns wrote an article called ‘Peace or War?’ for the Melbourne University Magazine, discussing the growing threat of conflict between America and the Soviet Union. It aimed to balance what Cairns identified as the ‘prevailing propaganda and practice [which] is likely to lead to war.’ He proposed a rational examination of economic and political forces in the United States and Soviet Union. Cairns emphasised the tendency to economic centralisation in the United States—the increasing domination of the private sector by a small number of massive corporations. American political institutions had been unable ‘to develop machinery to control this giant [corporate] structure’ and he feared that, divorced of democratic constraints, US capitalism was likely to impel the world towards war. Conversely, Cairns felt it improbable that the Soviet Union would provoke a military confrontation with the United States. Among his reasons were its economic backwardness relative to the United States; the extent of its wartime losses both in lives and industry; and its apparent freedom from domestic political problems, economic fluctuations or economic drives to invest in other countries ‘which might otherwise be likely to force her into aggression’. This is not to say that Cairns ruled out the prospect of continued Soviet expansionism. On the contrary, he saw this as a predictable outcome of the Soviet Union’s expectation of attack from the capitalist bloc and its desire to see ‘favourable’ governments installed in Europe and to spread communism globally. However, Cairns asserted that, in view of the Soviet’s military and economic inferiority to the United States, its ‘leaders would be fools (which their enemies deny) if they risked war to achieve any of these objectives’.11

Mindful that his argument was likely to be construed as being motivated by a pro-Soviet or anti-American design, Cairns insisted that this was not his purpose. The article was not calculated to show that Russia is right and the United States wrong. Soviet policy can be criticised with some justification, but it is criticised so extensively that there is no reason to believe that I could add anything to it. On the other hand American policy is supported so much there is no reason why I should add to that either.12

Despite this assurance, Cairns had left himself open to accusations of being pro-Soviet. What is more, with the benefit of hindsight, his attitude to the Soviet Union seems too sanguine. Like many of Australia’s radical intellectuals from that period, he had a deep-rooted distaste for capitalism that led him to overestimate the Soviet Union’s peaceful and progressive qualities and to underestimate its totalitarian and militaristic tendencies.13 At the same time, he was never guilty of mouthing the dogmatic proSoviet line regurgitated by Communist Party members, which justified all Soviet excesses as a necessary part of resisting US imperialism. Indeed it seems Cairns’ opinion of the Soviet Union at this time was informed not so much by doctrinaire considerations as by a broadly idealistic and humanitarian notion of international relations. Here and in the unfashionable views on Australia’s relationship with Asia that he began to present around this time, Cairns was offended by barriers, whether ideological or racial, that divided humanity. Even more so he was appalled by the by-products of those divisions—fear, intolerance and, worst of all, conflict. To Cairns, international relations meant building bridges and promoting mutual understanding and goodwill. In this sense, he was inclined to look upon the Soviet Union as a potential partner in peaceful coexistence rather than an ideological foe. The year after the publication of ‘Peace or War?’ Cairns’ anxiety about the threat of global conflict saw him become a foundation member and inaugural chair of the Australian Peace Council. Although his

involvement with the Peace Council lasted less than twelve months, it was the most visible and contentious of his political activities before his election to parliament. It also marked the first dear instance where Cairns’ idealism rendered him vulnerable to manipulation by those whose motives were less noble than his own. The genesis of Cairns’ involvement in the Peace Council was his participation in discussion groups at Australia-Soviet House and his acquaintance with its director and secretary of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society John Rodgers. In 1948 Cairns chaired several meetings in Melbourne at which Rodgers spoke about his recent tour of the Soviet Union. The calm and authoritative manner in which Cairns presided over these controversial meetings led to his being asked to chair and address the official launch of the Peace Council at the Melbourne Town Hall on 7 September 1949.14 The Peace Council had emerged from the World Peace Congress held in Paris a few months earlier. A major impetus behind both the Paris conference and its Australian offshoot was the anxiety within communist ranks at the military vulnerability of the Soviet Union to the United States. Moreover, a broad-based Australian peace movement was compatible with the CPA’s strategy for creating a popular front. This did not mean that the impulse for the foundation of the Peace Council derived exclusively from the Communist Party nor that communists dominated its membership. Most of its members were non-communist, including clergy, academics, writers and trade unionists. Nevertheless, a tightly structured communist ‘fraction’ within the Peace Council was able to orchestrate its activities and organisation. Both Ian Turner, the foundation secretary of the Peace Council, and Lloyd Churchward recall that Cairns’ election as its chair had been previously determined at a meeting of this communist ‘fraction’.15 Shortly after its launch, the Peace Council issued a detailed manifesto. Cairns helped to formulate it and, even at this early stage, was concerned at attempts by communist members to engineer a pro-Soviet

policy line. Despite these attempts, the final document adopted a scrupulously neutral tone and embraced a wide-ranging internationalist and humanitarian agenda that mirrored Cairns’ outlook. The specific objectives of the Peace Council outlined in the manifesto included the mobilisation of public opinion in support of the United Nations; opposition to all military alliances and acts of aggression in defiance of the UN Charter; a demand for the limitation of armaments and the outlawing of nuclear weapons; support for the self-determination and national independence of all peoples; and the defence of democratic liberties.16 From the outset the Labor hierarchy was profoundly suspidous of the Peace Council’s credentials, dismissing its rallying cry of peaceful coexistence as a cloak for furthering the interests of the CPA. In early 1950 that scepticism translated into moves to bar party members from involvement in the organisation. In February the New South Wales ALP Executive placed a ban on members belonging to the Peace Council. The Victorian Executive followed suit, declaring the Peace Council to be ‘a united front organisation for communist propaganda. . . [and] subsidiary of the Communist Party’.17 The proscription of the Peace Council coincided with Cairns’ departure from the organisation. He had become disillusioned with the determination of Turner and Rodgers to push an approach of ‘blind support’ for Soviet foreign policy objectives. Cairns felt that the Soviet Union, although often unfairly branded as the sole aggressor in international disputes, should not be immune to criticism. Communist members of the Peace Council saw things differently and, as Turner later acknowledged, their coercive tactics forced Cairns and others out of the organisation: The problem for the communists in the peace movement was how to reconcile our personal support for the day-to-day shifts in Soviet foreign policy with a more broadly acceptable peace objective. Sometimes we were over-manipulative. . . among those who broke early with the Peace Council because of this were Jim Cairns and the novelist Leonard Mann.18

None of this was to diminish Cairns’ opposition to attempts to proscribe the CPA. As much as he deplored the Communist Party’s authoritarian methods, he strongly believed in its right to exist. To Cairns this was an issue not just of defending fundamental democratic liberties but, equally importantly, of resisting what he saw as a concerted campaign to impose a conformist and conservative hegemony on the Australian people. In 1949 he wrote two articles voicing consternation at the growing constraints on intellectual freedom. The first complained that a systematic campaign was being waged against expressions alleged to ‘have a bias towards left wing politics’ and which insisted that ‘political matters are not within the scope of education and literature’. Cairns questioned the motives of those responsible for this campaign: Is it that they desire to intimidate people and so drive inquiry into political matters out of all authoritative places? Do they desire to drive politics out of education so that the propaganda devices—press and radio—which they so use, will be left with a near monopoly of the power to form the opinions and habits of the people?’

He repudiated the idea that the repression of radical views was justified because ‘the Soviet Union is totalitarian and evil and that we must eliminate all Communists and fellow-travellers’. Even if this was true of the Soviet Union, the ‘elimination of liberty and the construction of a great censorship machine’ was no way to stop the spread of influence ‘alleged to be Russian’. In Cairns’ mind the cure prescribed by conservatives was more dangerous than the disease: ‘Perhaps one can immunise himself against a disease by taking the infection in small doses —but this does not apply to tyranny’.19 The second article, in the Melbourne University Magazine, was a response to recent events that had ‘called into question the economic and intellectual position of the teacher and research worker’. The most significant of these was the Victorian Liberal Government’s appointment of a Royal Commission in April 1949 to investigate the activities of the Communist Party in Victoria, including whether there was evidence of

communist indoctrination of students at the university. 20 The article vigorously defended the principle of freedom of inquiry within the university. The role of the university and the academic was to seek the ‘truth’; to critically analyse the social system and to devise solutions to society’s ills. Intellectual freedom was essential to this quest, and Cairns warned that this freedom was being jeopardised by a process of smear and intimidation: Those who favour change are given a label—one which people are trained to think of in association with something evil or to be feared. It is unpleasant or perhaps costly to have this label applied to us and so we try to avoid doing or saying things which would earn it for us. By this means an automatic instrument of censorship is set up which inhibits seriously freedom of inquiry.

How were academics to resist this process? To Cairns the answer lay in collective action. Politicians and business interests must not be allowed to set limits on intellectual inquiry: ‘The scope necessary for proper teaching and research can be defined only by those who do the job . . . the protection of this scope depends upon the collective strength of the teachers and research workers themselves’.21 Cairns’ appeal for collective action was no mere abstraction. It was consistent with his involvement in the Melbourne University Staff Association (MUSA). Cairns was elected to the committee of the association in December 1948. Its minutes show that he breathed life into what had been a rather moribund organisation whose activities were largely confined to staging lectures and arranging social functions. He was also appointed as convenor of a special sub-committee charged with the task of pursuing salary increases for academic staff members. For some time Melbourne University academics had been concerned that their incomes had fallen below those of their colleagues at other Australian universities, nor had they kept pace with the pay increases received by Victorian school teachers and public servants. Until late 1948, however, MUSA had done little to act on these concerns. Under

Cairns’ leadership the subcommittee on salaries formulated a detailed submission establishing the case for academic salary increases. In May 1949 the submission was presented to the University Council, which approved a substantial increase in salaries for senior academic staff. Cairns’ work with the sub-committee did not end there. Over the next eighteen months he was heavily involved in drawing up further salary claims and related negotiations with the University Council, most of which met with success.22 MUSA also became active in staving off challenges to intellectual freedom. Its meeting in August 1949 noted that evidence given to the Victorian Royal Commission on Communism mentioned the names of several academics ‘in such a way as to prejudice their personal and professional reputations’. Consequently, it was decided that a subcommittee, including Cairns, should draw up a statement of general principles concerning the political convictions of academic staff. The next month the sub-committee considered a draft statement prepared by Cairns defending the right of academics to belong to the Communist Party. The statement also declared that ‘Communist theories and practices’ were of ‘sufficient significance’ to be studied ‘in the University by students of history, economics and other social disciplines’.23 During 1950 the threat to academic freedom became more tangible. The newly elected Liberal-Country Party coalition government moved quickly to outlaw the CPA. On 27 April Prime Minister Menzies introduced the Communist Party Dissolution Bill to the House of Representatives. Its controversial features included a very loose definition of a communist as ‘a person who supports or advocates the objectives, policies, teachings, principles or practices of communism, as expounded by Marx and Lenin’. It gave the government the power to ‘declare’ as unlawful any organisation which it deemed to be affiliated with the CPA, or any individual who was suspected of having been a member of the Communist Party or of a ‘declared’ organisation.

‘Declared’ individuals were to be precluded from employment in the Commonwealth public service or defence forces, or from holding office in key trade unions. Finally, the Bill reversed the normal onus of proof; ‘declared’ persons had to prove their innocence, rather than the Crown establish their guilt. Along with its brutal assault on the Communist Party, the proposed legislation was also seen as a thinly veiled attack on the ALP and the broader labour movement. But its potential targets went further. As Don Watson indicates, its ‘implications for teachers and writers were extraordinarily threatening’.24 Now secretary of MUSA and recently co-opted to the executive of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties (ACCL), Cairns played an energetic part in the seventeen-month struggle to defeat the Communist Party Dissolution Bill.25 Within weeks of the introduction of the Bill to parliament, the Staff Association wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Medley, warning him of its dire consequences for academic freedom. In June a meeting of over 100 academic staff supported a motion drafted by Cairns which condemned the proposed legislation as a ‘danger to civil liberties’, and called on the University Council to guarantee that the ‘primary criteria for appointment, continuation of employment and promotion of members of staff should remain knowledge, nous, and ability in teaching and research’.26 Meanwhile, the same month Cairns was appointed to a sub-committee of the ACCL that had been established to co-ordinate opposition to the Communist Party Dissolution Bill.27 For those opposed to the government’s anti-communist legislation, hopes for its defeat rested principally with the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP), which had retained control of the Senate at the December 1949 elections, but the party room was divided over the issue. Chifley and his deputy, Herbert Vere Evatt, regarded the Bill as anathema and believed it should be vigorously resisted. On the other hand, a small but vocal group of fanatical anti-communist Labor MPs led by two Victorians, Stan Keon and Jack Mullens, sympathised with the Bill’s

objectives. This group was closely associated with the Right-wing Catholic Social Studies Movement, which had by then established considerable influence over the Victorian ALP. Others in the Caucus viewed the Bill as undesirable, but were worried about the electoral consequences of rejecting a measure which, according to opinion polls, enjoyed overwhelming public support. The parliamentary party opted for a compromise. It would not oppose the Bill as a whole, but rather would seek to amend those sections that most gravely encroached on civil liberties. When the Bill passed from the House of Representatives to the Senate and back again in May and June 1950, Labor adhered to this policy, but by the time the parliament reassembled in September the pressure to pass the Bill had intensified. The outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula in June had fuelled anti-communist sentiment, and many Labor members were unnerved by Menzies’ threat that, if the Senate continued to obstruct the Bill, he would seek a double dissolution and fight an election on the issue. Labor’s resistance finally crumbled in October when the Federal Executive resolved that the FPLP should allow the Bill through the Senate.28 The Victorian ALP was a prime mover behind Labor’s backdown on the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. However, the change in policy did not win the universal approval of party members in that State. On 25 October Cairns’ branch, Toorak, wrote a letter registering its ‘disgust’ at the Federal Executive’s decision. 29 Such protests aside, the focus of the campaign to defeat the ban on the CPA now shifted to the High Court, where the Communist Party and several trade unions launched a successful appeal against the legislation. Undeterred, within days of the High Court judgment of March 1951, Menzies obtained a double dissolution on the pretext of Senate obstruction of the government’s proposed banking legislation. On 28 April his government was returned to office with a majority in both houses of parliament. With this renewed mandate, the coalition parties pressed ahead with their efforts to outlaw the Communist Party. A referendum was announced for 22 September

1951 which, if successful, would give the parliament the power to proscribe the CPA. Once again Labor was seriously divided over its response. Victorian Labor MPs, both federal and State, refused to support the ‘no’ case despite it being the official party policy. One of those to defy the policy was the Toorak branch’s MHR, Bill Bourke, so angering the branch that it publicly denounced him. In the light of such disunity in Labor ranks, and an opinion poll in August that indicated a vast majority of Australians backed the government’s proposal, the referendum looked likely to succeed. However, in the final weeks of the campaign—due largely to the herculean efforts of Evatt, who had been elected leader of the FPLP following Chifley’s death in June—the ‘no’ case gradually gained ground. On 22 September 1951 the referendum was narrowly defeated.30 By the time the referendum was held, Cairns was sailing to England, having been awarded a Nuffield Dominion Travelling Scholarship to study at Oxford University. Right up to his departure Cairns remained active in the campaign and had left Australian shores confident that the referendum would be defeated. From Oxford he wrote to Geoff Serle, claiming that he was not surprised at the result, though he conceded he had not expected a ‘no’ majority in Victoria.31 Cairns had resigned as secretary of MUSA shortly before his departure for England. The annual report for 1951 noted the ‘great deal of hard and valuable work’ Cairns had contributed while serving on the committee since 1948.32 Even allowing for the formal nature of such an acknowledgement, there is little question Cairns had impressed the majority of his colleagues with his work for MUSA. Alan McBriar, who returned to Melbourne University from Oxford at the beginning of 1949 to lecture in history, quickly formed the opinion that Cairns would make a good politician because of his skills as an organiser and his ability to present an argument lucidly. Lloyd Churchward was similarly impressed, though adding that some of the older and ‘more liberal minded’ members

of staff were ‘dead scared’ at what they saw as the attempt by Cairns and others to transform MUSA into a trade-union type body.33 The comments by McBriar and Churchward suggest that, during his time on the committee of MUSA in 1948–51, Cairns had already demonstrated some of the qualities which later became hallmarks of his political persona. First, he was able to articulate a position with compelling logic. This was a talent he had developed as a child and refined later in debates and in university classrooms as both a student and teacher. It was a role that came naturally to him and in which he revelled. Second, Cairns had a capacity to get things done. Although essentially an idealist who was more than prepared to take up radical causes and challenge mainstream ideas, he could not be dismissed as a quixotic dreamer. The other characteristic that started to become evident during Cairns’ involvement with the Staff Association, and indeed many of his activities in this period, was his inclination to lead rather than follow. If Cairns’ sharply defined ethical view of the world impelled him to assume the role of activist, then, equally, the traits of self-reliance and independent-mindedness that he had acquired when young steered him to positions of leadership. Another focus of Cairns’ activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the Melbourne University Australia-Overseas Club, formed in May 1949. Cairns was both its founder and inaugural president. Farrago, announcing the club’s establishment, stated its purpose as: to cater for the needs of overseas students in the University . . . [and] to bring the Australian students in contact with overseas students in the University. In addition to its social and cultural activities the club would also provide an opportunity to distinguished foreign visitors to address the students of the University. Thus, whereas it would help in cultivating the spirit of understanding and appreciation among the students of different nationalities, it would also provide an opportunity to develop a much broader outlook.34

In short, the Australia-Overseas Club was conceived as a vehicle for transcending and breaking down racial divides within the university

community. Cairns was especially concerned that it become a forum to foster greater understanding and goodwill between Australian and Asian students. It soon boasted a membership of around 200 and successfully attracted a diverse range of Asian students. Farrago reported that its membership included students from Australia, Ceylon, China, India, Malaya, Pakistan, Palestine, Poland, Siam and the United States. The activities of the club were mainly social, but it also conducted regular conferences to debate specific topics. For example, during the first term vacation in 1951 a four-day conference discussed the subject: ‘Is Australia’s immigration policy based on racial prejudice?’35 Outside the university Cairns also worked to foster better relations between Australia and Asia. In the late 1940s he became president of the Melbourne-based East-West Committee (EWC), which he later described as ‘one of the first post-war bridges between Australia and Asia’. Established in March 1946, the EWC operated under the motto ‘For Friendship with Asia’. It was the creation of a compassionate and feisty Melbourne woman, Elizabeth Marshall, who believed the White Australia Policy to be ‘immoral, petty, and unjustified’. From its inception the EWC campaigned for the humane administration of Australia’s immigration laws in regard to Asians.36 In the immediate post-war period there was a particular need for such a campaign as several hundred Asian refugees who had fled to Australia during the war were facing deportation under legislation initiated by the Chifley Government’s Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell. As president of the EWC, Cairns was closely involved in several battles with the Immigration Department over deportation cases. In 1948, for example, he acted for two Sikhs who were to be deported and managed to persuade the authorities to allow the two men to leave Australia voluntarily. One of the men was subsequently permitted to return to Australia to settle. For each person the EWC was able to help, however, there were many more who, as Cairns later lamented, ‘were victims of the dead hand of bureaucracy without any aid at all’. They were excluded from Australia, he observed bitterly, ‘only

because of their colour’.37 Through his association with the EWC Cairns also played a role in the formation of the Indonesian Medical Aid Committee in August 1947. Like the EWC this organisation was the brain-child of Elizabeth Marshall, and it was set up in response to news of an outbreak of bubonic plague in Indonesia. Its objective was to raise funds to purchase medical supplies for those parts of Indonesia under the control of the nationalists. For Cairns, involvement in the Indonesian Medical Aid Committee was only one expression of his sympathy for the fledgling Indonesian Republic. In July 1947 when the Australian-Indonesian Association called a protest meeting at Melbourne University to oppose Dutch aggression against the nationalists, Cairns was one of the main speakers.38 The following year he wrote an article for the MULC journal, United Front, which set out to make historical sense of the Indonesian people’s aspirations for independence. It briefly outlined the record of Dutch colonial rule in the region, and traced the rise of the ‘modern’ nationalist movement in Indonesia from its genesis in 1908 to the proclamation of independence in August 1945. ‘When all this has been said,’ Cairns wrote, ‘the record of the Dutch administration in Java is probably better than any other colonial power’. Yet this did not alter the fact that Dutch control of Indonesia was essentially exploitative nor obscure the lessons of history, which proved ‘that if the welfare of any people is to be improved at anything like the rate that economic resources will allow, then that people must possess political power over their own economic resources’. Perhaps the most interesting section of the article dealt with the consequences for Australia of an independent Indonesia. Here Cairns anticipated the argument which, a decade and a half later, he refined and built upon in opposing Australia’s military intervention in Vietnam. According to Cairns, there was a revolutionary and historical process at work in the undeveloped world. Across the globe, and especially in Asia, non-white people were engaged in a struggle to liberate themselves from

centuries of European colonisation, poverty and political repression. Resistance to this historical dynamic was not only morally indefensible, but futile: For many centuries the coloured people the world over have been badly treated by the whites. During the present century they have shown that they are slowly but surely rising from their position of economic, social and political subjection. There can be no doubt that in the long mn not even atom bombs can stop them.

The challenge for Australia and the rest of the developed world was to line up on the right side of history by embracing and, where necessary, guiding the process of change: It seems as though it would not be a bad idea if the white races were to start treating the coloured people as human beings for the first time If we see, as far as we can, that they are given powers of self-government, if we help in their education along progressive democratic lines and see that they are fairly dealt with in trade and commerce it is certain that our children are likely to get along much better with their children.39

Ormonde observes that the expression of these ideas in 1948 made Cairns ‘dangerously radical’. While conservatives may well have regarded his views in that way, they were not too far removed from those being advanced by progressive-minded elements in the Labor Party at that time. By 1948 the Chifley Government had moved, belatedly and cautiously, to support the Indonesian Republic within the United Nations. Moreover, in general terms in the late 1940s and early 1950s there was considerable sympathy within the Left of the ALP for decolonisation in Asia. A small number of Labor parliamentarians endeavoured to construct an analysis of the post-war social upheavals in Asia that went beyond the typical Cold War configuration, which tended to interpret those upheavals as a product of communist expansionism and subversion, rather than as a legitimate manifestation of nationalist aspirations. The proponents of this alternative analysis emphasised the need for a discerning and humanitarian response to the forces of decolonisation that

took local conditions into account and acknowledged that poverty was often the root cause of instability in Asia. In a sense, then, Cairns was articulating themes that were already surfacing within the Labor Left. On the other hand, however, as John Murphy notes in his study Harvest of Fear, these themes remained largely undeveloped and marginalised in the ALP until the 1960s. Cairns’ great achievement in that decade was to reinvent and expand upon them in formulating the intellectual case against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.40 Cairns’ increasing activism did not come at the expense of his professional advance. In July 1948 he was appointed as lecturer in Economic History, thereby achieving permanency within the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. Having graduated as a Bachelor of Commerce in December 1947, he passed the Master of Commerce qualifying examination the following year and began work on his master’s thesis early in 1949. An investigation of theories of economic growth, the thesis was submitted in January 1950, with Cairns formally graduating three months later. The same year he was asked to write the Australian history section for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.41 His teaching load was still heavy. Although enrolments in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, having peaked in 1947, began to decline gradually as the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme was wound down, the staff-student ratio remained low. This was especially the case in the Department of Economic History, which in 1949 was still operating with only two fulltime staff members, Professor Burton and Cairns.42 Among his colleagues Cairns gained a reputation as a dedicated teacher. Burton was struck by the unusually strong personal interest he took in the welfare of his students. It was an approach to teaching that Burton surmised had been shaped by the barriers that Cairns had experienced in obtaining further education. Professor John La Nauze, who replaced Burton in the newly created chair in Economic History at the end of 1949, also formed a favourable impression of Cairns’ teaching

abilities. In a letter to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor George Paton, in October 1952 recommending Cairns’ promotion to senior lecturer, La Nauze wrote: I would stress Cairns’s qualities as a teacher and helpful member of my Department and of the Faculty. He came late to academic life, and is a man of maturity whose place among his colleagues in the University has been prominent, despite his comparatively junior status. I have a high opinion of him as a man and as a loyal colleague.43

Students, too, recognised the commitment Cairns brought to his work. As Ormonde indicates, he was ‘widely respected as approachable, a man of infinite patience with the struggling student’. Yet opinion of his teaching style varied. Vincent Buckley found his classes heavy going: ‘Cairns had presence, but was not intellectually appealing; at that time he was not one of nature’s lecturers, his lectures being linear and unrelieved’. By contrast, another of his former students, Geoff Harcourt, later Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide, recalls being inspired by ‘an exhilarating set of lectures’ that Cairns gave on the development of capitalism.44 The award of the Nuffield Dominion Travelling Fellowship was more evidence of Cairns’ growing academic status by the early 1950s. Accompanied by Gwen, Philip and Barry, and two friends of the children, Cairns sailed for England aboard the Stratheden in August 1951. Upon settling in Rose Hill in Oxford, he embarked upon research for his PhD thesis, a study of the historical links between the British and Australian labour movements. As well, he continued work on a manuscript on the development of the Australian welfare state that he hoped to have ready for publication upon his return. To add to his writing commitments, while in England he was commissioned by the London publishers A. and C. Black to produce a book about Australia suitable for secondary school students. Understandably, he felt somewhat daunted by this workload. In January 1952 in a letter to one of his colleagues from the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Professor Wilfred Prest, he observed that

while he was having a ‘wonderful time’ in Oxford, there was ‘so much to be done that it all can’t be done’.45 There was some respite with a visit to Ireland at Christmas 1951. Cairns, Gwen and Barry stayed for a week at the home of his father’s sister, Emily, in Bangor, Northern Ireland. It was during this stay that Cairns, aged thirty-seven, first learnt that his father had not been killed during World War I. The news was broken by his Aunt Emily who three decades earlier had attempted to salvage the family’s honour by writing to Letty to offer to adopt young Jim. Yet again Cairns insists that this shattering revelation hardly touched him: ‘It was all over and done with. He was gone. It didn’t make much difference which way he had gone. He had gone.’46 This reaction suggests that in 1951 Cairns had not come to terms emotionally with the news of his father’s desertion. Rather he repressed the knowledge; its impact finally surfaced over twenty years later in early 1975, when the foundations of his world were shifting. Cairns found he had little in common with his father’s family either socially or politically They were British Royalists and, as Gwen Cairns recalled, ‘Tory to their bootstraps’. Any misgivings the family may have felt about Cairns’ political leanings did not prevent them showering him with hospitality nor, as Ormonde notes, in honouring him ‘as the son and heir of the late James John Cairns’.47 In retrospect, Cairns downplays the degree of cultural enrichment or intellectual stimulation he derived at Oxford, but at the time he saw things differently. In August 1952, during a short stay in London before heading back to Australia, Cairns wrote to Professor La Nauze telling him that his ten months in Oxford had ‘put something into my makeup . . . I would not want to be without’.48 He did not spell out what Oxford had contributed to his development, but it appears that it was a period in which his conception of socialism obtained sharper focus. The supervisor of Cairns’ doctoral thesis at Oxford was Professor G. D. H. Cole. Appointed to the Chichele Chair of Social and Political

Theory in 1944, Cole was working by that stage on his massive history of socialist thought to add to his already voluminous body of writings on socialism and the British labour movement. Beyond his scholarship, Cole had also been a committed socialist activist for most of his life. That activism peaked in the guild socialist movement that briefly flourished in Britain around the time of World War I. Essentially guild socialism was a reaction against the Fabian socialist model which looked forward to a time when the state, administered by an elite band of scientifically trained civil servants, had assumed control of the instruments of production. The guild socialists deplored the anti-democratic and technocratic tendencies of this model, fearing that it was a recipe for the creation of a vast state bureaucracy in which workers would have no more autonomy over their lives than they did under capitalism. As an alternative they advocated the organisation of society into a series of national guilds that were to be based on an association of workers within a particular industry. It was envisaged that each guild would be selfgoverning and highly decentralised. Besides its libertarian-democratic temper, the socialism of Cole and his fellow guild socialists differed from that of their Fabian counterparts in its explicit moral tone. Whereas Fabians indicted capitalism for its inefficiency and irrationality, guild socialism highlighted its ethical shortcomings.49 One of Cole’s great contemporaries, who had also been involved in the guild socialist movement, was R. H. Tawney. Educated at Oxford, though most of his working life was spent as Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics, Tawney was arguably the most significant British socialist thinker of the inter-war years. His books, including The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931), projected an unashamedly Christian-ethical view of socialism. To Tawney, capitalism’s great evil was that it flouted Christian values and promoted instead those of acquisitiveness and competition. Equally, he was adamant that a decent socialist order must create the conditions for the moral regeneration of the individual on the basis of fellowship and

co-operation, as well as providing for the extension of democracy into all walks of life.50 Before arriving at Oxford Cairns was familiar with, and influenced by, the writings of both Cole and Tawney. 51 That influence undoubtedly deepened during his time at Oxford. The effect was not to transform but rather to clarify Cairns’ socialist vision. He returned from England all the more convinced that the socialist endeavour must be concerned with two principal objectives: the enrichment of democracy—that is, the creation of a more equal distribution of power and responsibility in society—and ethical renewal. Unlike Tawney, for Cairns the latter objective did not derive from an explicitly Christian impulse. He had long renounced any religious faith, but this could not obscure the reality that the values he wished to see society abide by were the Christian ones he had absorbed as a child. At first hand, Cairns found Cole to be ‘the most incredible academic’ he had encountered. At lectures and in graduate classes he was frequently awe-struck by the sheer breadth of Cole’s knowledge. From another perspective, however, studying under Cole proved disappointing. Cairns detected elements of condescension and snobbery in Cole. More irritating, Cairns soon discovered that Cole’s range of interests did not extend to Australia. His frustration was intensified by his lack of progress in locating source material for his doctorate, a problem that eventually forced him to convert his previously separate study of the development of the Australian welfare state into a revised thesis topic.52 While progress on his thesis stalled, Cairns completed work on the manuscript for A. and C. Black. The text book that resulted provided a largely descriptive account of Australia’s history and contemporary society, but there were some revealing insights into Cairns’ view of Australia. Where he attempted to sum up the main features of the Australian national character, from the distant vantage point of England, he drew a picture which, though positive on the whole, was not without a

critical edge. The Australian, Cairns recorded, is self-reliant and independent, but he likes cooperation, or ‘solidarity’, as it is often called, with his own class: his ‘mates’ or ‘cobbers’. He is not easily led, he dislikes discipline and he is slow to be convinced . . . One result is that he is very safe from propaganda, from being made a fool of, but is difficult to move towards constructive action.

Ominously for someone who was to spend the next forty years expounding theories of social change to his compatriots, Cairns noted that ‘the Australian is a practical person and has little time for what he calls “‘theory” and for “theoretical people”’. As he would often do in the future, he lamented that the Australian people were ‘short-sighted and over-concerned with material gains’. But Cairns was careful to balance this criticism: ‘His self-interest, however, is always much influenced by a desire to give others a “fair go” (as he calls it), particularly those he regards as “dinkum” (those who give him a “fair go”) and those who are the “underdog”’.53 Not long after arriving in England Cairns learnt that the Toorak branch of the Labor Party, of which he had been a member since 1947, had been suspended by the Victorian ALP Executive. This suspension was one manifestation of the festering tensions in the ALP, particularly the Victorian branch, that were to culminate in the split of 1954–55. Between 1945 and 1947 State Labor Party branches in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland established Industrial Groups to spearhead the fight against communist influence in the trade unions. Within a few years the Groups commanded considerable power in the labour movements in New South Wales and Queensland. Their influence, however, was greatest in Victoria. Major inroads had been made into some of the largest Victorian trade unions, and the Groups and their supporters had secured control of the Victorian ALP Executive after a bitter struggle with old-guard moderates. In 1950 Dinny Lovegrove, a former communist who had developed an implacable hatred of the CPA

following his expulsion from it in the 1930s, was confirmed as secretary of the Victorian ALP and Frank McManus was elected as assistant secretary. The strength of the Groups in Victoria also had an effect on the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party. Of the eight new Labor MHRs elected from Victoria in December 1949, six were Catholics, and they included the anti-communist zealots Stan Keon and Jack Mullens.54 One reason for the rapid consolidation of power by the Groupers in Victoria was the backing they received from a secretive Melbourne-based organisation, the Catholic Social Studies Movement. Established in 1942, ‘the Movement’ was the inspiration of the young Catholic Action activist and intellectual, B. A. Santamaria, and the deputy leader of the Victorian ALP and devout Catholic, Herbert Cremean. Its goal was to co-ordinate Catholic resistance to communists in the trade unions. This was part of a broader strategy: to head off what the Movement’s publicity organ, Freedom (renamed News Weekly in 1947), depicted as the threat of a communist take-over in Australia. At first the Movement’s basic tactic was to encourage Catholic trade unionists to attend union meetings and organise opposition to communist officials. Later, after the creation of the Industrial Groups, its emphasis shifted to lending organisational and financial assistance to the Groupers. This assistance extended to the practice of branch-stacking; Catholics were mobilised to join ALP branches in large numbers in order to vote in ballots for parliamentary candidates and State Conference delegates.55 Ostensibly the Victorian Executive had suspended the Toorak branch because of its failure to meet regularly during the second half of 1951. The Executive further claimed that Cairns, who was the branch’s acting treasurer before his departure for England, had taken its bank books with him overseas, an allegation subsequently denied by Cairns, who pointed he had handed over the books before leaving Australia. In truth, the Toorak branch had fallen foul of the Grouper-dominated Executive for publicly criticising Bill Bourke—one of the contingent of Victorian Right-wing Catholics elected to the House of Representatives in 1949—

for his unwillingness to oppose the Menzies Government’s referendum proposal to ban the CPA. There was a suggestion, too, that Bourke had complained to the Executive about the branch’s lack of support for him during the 1951 election campaign. In a broader sense, Toorak was a target of the Groupers due to its reputation as one of the few remaining strongholds of the Left in Victoria. The unusually high number of academics within its ranks probably added to those suspicions.56

Addressing anti-Vietnam War meeting, Richmond Town Hall May 1965.

With Gwen in Fiji, 1966, as guests of the Fijian Atomic Explosion Protest Committee and the Fijian Labor Party.

With Indonesian President Sukarno and Clyde Holding, mid-1966.

In talks with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia, 1966.

Meeting Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, 1966.

Gwen Cairns announces Cairns’ intention to contest the Labor leadership, April 1968. Cairns was unable to speak because of laryngitis.

The Labor leadership team: Whitlam and his loyal lieutenant, Lance Barnard, 1969.

Battered and bruised: after

the bashing at Wattle Road, August 1969.

The mobile electoral office: campaigning for Lalor, 1969. For Cairns, the suspension of the Toorak branch was further evidence of the authoritarian modus operandi of the Groupers. Upon joining the ALP in 1947 Cairns had taken little part in the affairs of either the Toorak branch or the wider party. But, just as his level of activism had grown in other areas by the early 1950s, so too had his involvement in the Labor Party. Along with being elected treasurer of the Toorak branch, Cairns became a member of the publicity sub-committee of the Victorian ALP Central Executive. In that capacity he contributed pieces to Labor Call and made broadcasts on the Labor Hour on the ALP-owned Melbourne radio station 3KZ. Furthermore, in common with most rankand-file members, he helped out during election campaigns by distributing party literature and working at polling stations.57 As indicated, Cairns had decided to join the ALP almost reluctantly; he was pessimistic about Labor’s commitment to radical social change. This pessimism remained largely undiminished at the beginning of the 1950s.

Addressing the Melbourne University ALP Club in mid-1950, Cairns decried Labor’s tendency to adopt policies ‘dictated by the political necessities of the moment’. He challenged the party to revive the idealism of the 1890s by putting ‘considerations of policy and long-range objectives before considerations of machinery and political tactics’.58 Cairns’ continuing reservations about the ALP were reinforced by what he saw of its operations in Victoria. With the exception of Toorak, he found the atmosphere in the Grouper-dominated Victorian ALP intellectually oppressive. One incident that underlined this fact occurred when Cairns sought to arrange a talk under the auspices of the ALP by the Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, William Macmahon Ball, on the subject of post-war developments in Asia. In 1946–47 Ball had served as the British Commonwealth representative on the advisory Allied Council for Japan, a body convened to oversee and coordinate the occupation of Japan. Back in Australia Ball became a regular commentator on international affairs on ABC radio. By challenging orthodox Cold War views—most contentiously he advocated diplomatic recognition of Communist China—Ball inevitably became a target for anti-communist militants. The mouthpiece of the Movement, News Weekly, speculated that his true allegiance was with Red China, not Australia. Just as predictable was the Victorian ALP Executive’s decision to veto Cairns’ plans for a talk by Ball. As Cairns later recalled with disgust: ‘You would have thought it was Trotsky I was trying to get’.59 Writing from Oxford soon after being advised of the suspension of Toorak, Cairns asked Geoff Serle to find out what was to happen to former members of the branch. He also expressed concern about losing his membership, which was due for renewal in March 1952. Ormonde speculates that Cairns’ anxiety about his membership lapsing was due to his ambitions of seeking pre-selection as a parliamentary candidate for the ALP. (Two years’ continuous membership was a pre-requisite for endorsement as a Labor candidate.) This is refuted by Cairns, who states that he wanted to retain membership simply in the hope of influencing

the party. 60 While this may have been the case, it would have been surprising if he had not at least toyed with the idea of entering politics in the early 1950s. For all his doubts about the Labor Party, a career in politics was a natural extension of his steadily increasing political activism since 1947. His prominent involvement in a whole range of radical causes reflected not only his dissatisfaction with the existing social structure, but his determination to play a part in the process of change. Moreover, Cairns was strongly drawn to parliamentary politics by the prospect of furthering his cherished role as an educator. For him, the chief advantage of being in parliament was that it would provide him with a greater platform than that of the university from which to preach his message of social change. From an ideological perspective Cairns’ entry into the political fray made sense too. Though lie continued to complain about Labor’s lack of commitment to the goal of socialism, as the 1950s progressed he grew more certain that there was no other viable avenue to a socialist society in Australia than the ALP and its strategy of political gradualism. His master’s thesis had strengthened his sense of the malleability and dynamism of modern liberal capitalist economies and further convinced him that those Marxists who predicted that capitalism was lurching towards inevitable collapse were mistaken.61 Common sense confirmed this finding: when Cairns looked at contemporary Australian society he saw a capitalist system which had been substantially reformed in such a way as to make the prospect of an uprising by the working-class inconceivable. So, too, did the analysis of Australia’s social and political history that he was developing in his PhD thesis. Cairns briefly outlined that analysis, which underpinned his passage to an essentially conventional democratic socialist ideological position, in an article published in Meanjin in early 1955.62 The ‘real meaning of socialism in Australia’, he wrote, lay in Labor’s original commitment to use the state ‘to interfere with the capitalist market, the capitalist

property system and its political superstructure’. Early Labor had forged this commitment out of a realisation that ‘capitalist competition produced unemployment, exploitation, waste; it forced indignity upon the worker . . . and it put him under the control of a political system over which he had little influence’. In sum, early Labor had embraced socialism because of a recognition that capitalism was unjust, undemocratic and, ultimately, unethical: it treated ‘human life as the shuttlecock in the game of money making and competition’.63 Since its formation Labor had fought for many ‘interferences’ in the capitalist system, including factory legislation, workers’ compensation, an arbitration court, the basic wage, welfare services, a Commonwealth bank, public utilities and progressive taxation. But, according to Cairns, it had to go much further. The challenge for Labor, and by implication especially the socialists in its ranks, was a policy which fulfilled this general requirement . . . continued interference with capitalist possessions and practice so as to make it ‘possible for more people to act more freely, more justly in their dealings with their fellow-men . . .’ This means that moral principles must be applied more and more in the actual relations that exist between people, particularly, in the course of their economic activities. And it means that the ideals of democracy must be applied in the economic life of the community.64

Personal ambition was another thing that may have attracted Cairns to becoming a parliamentarian. Since 1946 he had risen swiftly through academic ranks, all the more impressive because of the age at which he had broken into academia and his limited educational background. This rise was a testament to his intellect and his determination to get ahead. Among some of his contemporaries at Melbourne University there was a question mark over which of these qualities Cairns possessed in greater proportion. They intimate that he fell short of the top rank of intellects on the campus in the immediate post-war years. One claims that Cairns was thought of as a ‘fair second rater’; noting that ‘at that stage there was quite a galaxy of talent and in comparison Jim didn’t strike people as the

most brilliant man in the university’.65 Perhaps the best insight into his colleagues’ assessment of his academic ability is in two letters written by Professors Cole and La Nauze in the second half of 1952. Although this correspondence was written to support Cairns’ promotion to senior lecturer in Economic History—an appointment he duly received in January 1953—it reveals that both men believed he had limited potential for further advance. Cole’s letter replied to a request from La Nauze for an opinion of Cairns’ suitability for the position of senior lecturer. It smacked of the patronising attitude that Cairns had noticed in Cole: I like Cairns and have enjoyed having him with me in Oxford . . . He is not, as you say, an academic type by nature, nor is he a very clever man, but I have found him sensible and well-informed, and always keen and interesting. I should think he would do well with first-year and probably second-year students (in terms of Oxford levels) and can see no reason why he should not become a senior lecturer unless this involves the regular teaching of really advanced students. His mind, though not subtle, is clear; and I feel sure he would give of his best.

La Nauze wrote to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paton, advising him that Cole’s views ‘coincide very closely with my own’. Although emphasising Cairns’ qualities as a teacher, La Nauze was less effusive when it came to the issue of research: ‘He is not an outstanding scholar of the research kind, but he is a hard worker and thoughtful writer in his field’. Nor was his concluding statement unequivocally positive. While Cairns merited the position of senior lecturer, La Nauze thought him unlikely ‘to be qualified to hold a chair’.66 Whether Cairns knew that he was the subject of such opinions is hard to gauge. Even if did not, he was probably aware that he had little chance of further promotion in the near future. If so, his motivation to seek a career outside academia could only have been strengthened by the growing disenchantment he felt both at his own role in the university and the university’s role within the wider society. By the early 1950s, with

the end of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme and the corresponding drying up of the inflow of ex-service personnel, the undergraduate population was once more made up in the main of the children of the well-to-do. Consequently, when Cairns arrived back from Oxford in late 1952 he found a less stimulating teaching environment. The changing social composition of the student body also compounded the declining fortunes of the Left at Melbourne University and dampened the previously politically charged atmosphere on campus. 67 Even before leaving for Oxford, in an address to the university Free Thought Society, Cairns had complained that the campus was no longer a ‘hotbed of ideas’ Soon after his return he developed this theme further in a Farrago article under the heading ‘Crisis in the Universities’. He condemned the dearth of Commonwealth spending on tertiary education, but reserved his greatest criticism for the universities for being inward-looking and apathetic.68 At the time of Cairns’ return to Australia, his ALP membership status remained unresolved. While still in England he had attempted to renew his membership but the secretary of the Victorian Labor Party, Dinny Lovegrove, advised him that the Executive’s Disputes Committee was still investigating the affairs of the Toorak branch, and the matter of his membership would have to be held over. Upon his return Cairns met with Lovegrove and the assistant secretary, Frank McManus, to request that his membership be put in order. Lovegrove informed him that his membership was not in question and that it would he restored once the position of Toorak was clarified. In turn, Cairns offered to give evidence before the Disputes Committee. Despite Lovegrove’s assurances, Cairns’ membership was not restored throughout 1953, nor did the Victorian Executive reach a determination regarding the future of the Toorak branch. Finally, in December 1953, after he and Gwen moved to Brighton, Cairns began to attend meetings of the Brighton branch. Early the following year he was formally admitted to Brighton, after a ruling by the Executive that he was required to join as a new member of the

party.69 This transparent attempt by the Victorian Executive, led by Lovegrove, to edge Cairns out of the ALP showed the suspicion with which the extreme Right regarded him. To the Groupers, Cairns was ideologically unsound and an unwelcome element in the party. Ironically, given that only a few years earlier he had been seen as a security threat by Communist Party officials, it was Cairns’ fraternisation with communists in the Peace Council and other forums which had aroused this distrust. In the 1970s McManus recalled that Lovegrove was ‘crook on Cairns because he reckoned he had been mixed up with the Communist Party’. McManus shared Lovegrove’s suspicions. In a statement richly evocative of the climate of intolerance that polarised the labour movement at the height of the Cold War, he continued: There was a total war going on . . . [we] were fighting tooth and nail to retain control of the trade union movement in decent and reasonable hands. And when a bloke [Cairns] was found to be associated with the other side he couldn’t very well expect to one day turn up at the party and everyone to say ‘Good to have you’.70

Significantly, not only the far Right wing of the Labor Party distrusted Cairns. He had also been singled out for attack by some of the most enthusiastic red-baiters on the conservative side of politics. As early as 1947 F. L. Edmunds had identified Cairns as one of the academics who was responsible for Melbourne University being ‘a Soviet propagandist agency’. Similarly, in 1949 one of Edmunds’ colleagues in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, J. S. Lechte, delivered a speech in which he implied that Cairns and several other staff members were communists. 71 Although innocuous in themselves, these attacks were a portent of the vilification Cairns would suffer after entering parliament. Still more sinister, in the late 1940s and early 1950s Cairns became the subject of surveillance by the Commonwealth Investigation Service and its successor, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

(ASIO). Amid the culture of intolerance and suspicion nourished by the Cold War, political surveillance in Australia reached epidemic proportions. This was especially true from 1950, when the Menzies Government appointed Colonel Charles Spry as Director-General of ASIO. Under Spry’s leadership ASIO quickly developed into an instrument for controlling ideological dissent and harassing those who dared to question the status quo.72 While the CPA and its ‘front’ organisations were the main focus of ASIO’s surveillance activity, hardly any Left-wing organisations escaped attention. As well, individuals who betrayed even the least sympathy for radical or progressive causes, or who were deemed to be social misfits or nonconformists, usually came under scrutiny. In her 1993 study Writers Defiled, Fiona Capp shows that in its determination to protect the community from subversive ideas ASIO kept a particularly close eye on Australia’s authors and intellectuals. At Melbourne University alone, sixty-three staff members were the target of scrutiny by ASIO in the early 1950s—each placed into one of four main classifications. Category A were those for whom there was evidence of membership of the CPA; Category B were persons ‘suspected on reasonably well-founded grounds’ of membership; Category C were Communist Party ‘sympathisers and other persons concerning whom there is reasonable suspicion other than mere association’; Category D were all ‘other persons recorded by ASIO about whom insufficient evidence is held to warrant placing [them] in categories A, B or C’. According to an accompanying memorandum, two-thirds of the sixtythree staff members fell into Category D, ‘many of whom come under notice solely because of the manifestations of their advocacy of freethought’.73 Cairns was in Category C.74 That is, he was regarded by ASIO as a communist sympathiser, though not necessarily a card-carrying member of the CPA. This assessment is consistent with the material compiled by

the intelligence services on Cairns up until that point: he was viewed as pro-communist in outlook, but there were doubts about whether he belonged to the party. Unfortunately, interpreting that material is complicated by the extent to which it has been censored. From what has been released it seems that interest in Cairns was initially aroused in April 1947 by newspaper reports of his public comments complaining of press bias against the Soviet Union. A memo in November the following year advised that: subject [Cairns] is a definite Communist, but it cannot be stated whether or not he is an actual member of the Party. About 12 months ago CAIRNS applied for membership of the ACP but his application was rejected on the grounds of his previous association with the Police Department. As indicated in the previous paragraph it is not known whether he has since been accepted.

Attached to this memo was a brief list of some of Cairns’ activities upon which this strident assessment of his political leanings had evidently been based. Apart from a few innocuous newspaper pieces, the chief cause of concern about Cairns appeared to stem from his association with ‘subsidiaries of the Communist Party’.75 This is also borne out by miscellaneous ASIO references to Cairns dating from the early 1950s. One of these catalogued the ‘pro-Communist and Communist subsidiary organisations’ with which Cairns had been involved, including Australia-Soviet House, the Australian Indonesian Association, the ACCL and the Peace Council. 76 There are indications, too, of continuing confusion about whether Cairns was, or had ever been, a member of the CPA. In June 1951 ASIO recorded: ‘While no concrete evidence is held that he is a Party member, it is considered that Mr Cairns is very definitely an “intellectual pink”‘. Eighteen months later came the assertion that Cairns was ‘at one time a member’ of the CPA, but it was ‘not known whether he is still’.77 By the time Cairns was moving towards a career in politics in the mid-1950s, ASIO’s concerns about him had eased considerably. An entry

that appears to date from the second half of 1954 reported: Strangely enough, Cairns’ association with G. D. H. Cole seems to have pushed him over to the Right, for the only record of any ‘front’ activity since his return is that he was one of the sponsors of a Festival Week planned at Melbourne University, to coincide with the Fourth World Festival of Youth at Bucharest in 1953, and that he spoke at the Australian Convention on Peace and War in the same year.

It further observed, incorrectly, that he had joined the ALP in 1951. The entry concluded with this benign, if condescending, analysis of Cairns’ ideological evolution: Cairns has made a slow and laborious but otherwise normal intellectual progress from the extreme ‘left’ towards the ‘right’ and has now reached the orthodox Fabian Socialist position. His interest in Asian students appears to be genuine and humanitarian and in part at least inspired by a wish to save them from falling into the snare of Communism.78

Despite these reassuring words, ASIO continued to monitor Cairns’ activities. Following his admission to the Brighton branch of the ALP at the beginning of 1954 Cairns became entangled in the ever more turbulent affairs of the Victorian Labor Party. His time was increasingly dominated, at the expense of his PhD and other activities, by his efforts as what he later described as a ‘de facto organiser of anti-Grouper forces’ in Melbourne’s southern suburbs. For Cairns, the case against the Groupers and their allies in the Movement was straightforward. In his Meanjin article of March 1955 he argued that their obsession with fighting communism was such that, perversely, their behaviour emulated the ‘unscrupulous’ practices of their protagonists. The Groupers and communists were equally guilty of ‘working for the supremacy of their own group’ within the labour movement, thus threatening democratic tradition of the movement.79 Cairns’ involvement in the struggle against the Groupers was

conducted behind the scenes until the final months of 1954, when he sent a letter to the federal secretary of the ALP, Jack Schmella, complaining that the position of the Toorak branch still remained unresolved. 80 As a result of the letter, Cairns was asked to give evidence before an inquiry set up by the Federal Executive to investigate the affairs of the Victorian branch. This inquiry had been established in the aftermath of Dr Evatt’s explosive statement of 5 October in which he ‘outed’ the Movement. Evatt’s decision to denounce the Movement publicly was rooted in his bitterness at Labor’s defeat at the federal elections of May 1954. Evatt had begun the year confident of leading the ALP into office. A strong showing in the May 1953 half-Senate election and a series of pleasing results at State level suggested that the political pendulum was swinging back to Labor. However, on 13 April, only hours before the parliament was due to rise for the forthcoming elections, Prime Minister Menzies played a political wildcard by announcing the defection of Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Menzies also announced that a Royal Commission was to investigate documents supplied to ASIO by Petrov that purportedly revealed the operation of a Soviet ‘spy ring’ in Australia. While the extent to which Petrov’s defection affected the outcome of the 1954 election has been a matter of spirited historical debate,81 in Evatt’s mind there was no doubt that the Petrov affair was responsible for thwarting his ambition to become prime minister. His conviction that the whole thing was a conspiracy hatched by conservative forces to discredit both himself and the Labor Party strengthened into an obsession in July, when three members of his staff were publicly named by the Petrov Royal Commission in connection with one of the documents. Defying the advice of senior party members and without consulting Caucus, Evatt took the fateful decision to appear before the commission as counsel for his staff. This action, coupled with his intemperate performances before the Royal Commission, exacerbated tensions within the FPLP. At Caucus meetings in late August and September his leadership came under fierce attack,

especially from Right-wingers such as Bill Bourke. Against the background of these attacks Evatt launched his assault against the Movement. Consumed with bitterness and a growing paranoia, he believed that the Santamaria-led Movement, in league with Right-wing elements within his own party, principally Bourke, Keon and Mullens, were part of the wider conservative plot that had denied Labor victory at the May poll.82 The Federal Executive inquiry met in Melbourne over several days during November and December 1954. Cairns was one of twenty-six witnesses to give evidence. Others included Evatt, Bourke, Keon, Mullens, the Labor Premier of Victoria John Cain Snr, his Deputy William Galvin, Senator Pat Kennelly, Lovegrove and McManus. 83 For Cairns, the inquiry presented a chance to show his mettle before some of the key power-brokers in the ALP. It also afforded him a significant moral and practical victory over the Groupers. Following consideration of Cairns’ evidence about the suspension of Toorak and his associated loss of membership, the Federal Executive ruled that his party membership for the years 1952–53 be reinstated.84 With his continuity of membership restored, Cairns was importantly now in a position to run for pre-selection. An opportunity to do so was not long in coming. At the conclusion of its inquiry, the Federal Executive directed that a special conference of the Victorian branch be held in February to elect a new State Executive. The Federal Executive was to supervise the conference and it was to be conducted in accordance with rules which, in effect, increased the likelihood of an anti-Grouper delegation being elected to represent Victoria at the March Federal Conference. Over the summer of 1954–55 the Victorian ALP disintegrated over the issue of how to respond to the Federal Executive’s inquiry. The Victorian Executive split in early February; a month later, two separate delegations from Victoria sought admission to the Federal Conference in Hobart. Amid extraordinary scenes, the delegation that had

been elected by the Victorian special conference was admitted, while the ‘old’ pro-Grouper delegation was locked out. In April the split in Victoria moved inexorably towards its bloody conclusion. The ‘new’ Victorian Executive exerted its authority by expelling more than one hundred ALP members who remained loyal to the ‘old’ Executive. They included more than a dozen State MPs and seven MHRs, among them Bourke, Keon and Mullens. Together with other supporters of the ‘old’ Executive, this group went on to form the breakaway Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist). Meanwhile, the Victorian Labor Government led by John Cain Snr fell victim to the split, losing a no-confidence motion on the floor of the Legislative Assembly when the ex-ALP breakaways crossed the chamber to vote with the Liberal-Country Parties. The ensuing election campaign took place in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination and hatred. ALP and Labor (AntiCommunist) candidates and supporters traded insults, and at times blows. Predictably, the beneficiary of this turmoil was the Liberal Party and its leader Henry Bolte, who emerged as Premier in the elections for the Legislative Assembly on 28 May. The ALP lost five seats while the Labor Party (Anti-Communist) was virtually annihilated. Its sole remaining representative in the Assembly was Francis Scully, a dedicated member of the Movement and protege of Keon, who narrowly held the seat of Richmond.85 In the weeks prior to the Victorian State election the ALP cast around for candidates to oppose sitting members of the Labor Party (Anti-Communist) and replace previously chosen candidates who had defected to the new party. In this context Cairns’ name was raised as a possible candidate for the seat of Hawthorn. Cairns discussed the idea with Cain and several party officials but was eventually dissuaded by a timely intervention by Senator Pat Kennelly. A long-time adversary of the Groupers and a former Victorian State secretary as well as federal secretary of the ALP, Kennelly had a well-earned reputation as a consummate numbers man and ‘kingmaker’ within the Victorian branch.

Kennelly had ear-marked Cairns to take on Keon in the federal seat of Yarra. In July 1955, backed by Kennelly, Cairns nominated for Yarra. On 9 September the Victorian Executive officially endorsed him as the Labor Party from a field often nominees.86 The task of defeating Keon in Yarra was formidable. Traditionally a safe Labor seat, it centred on the inner Melbourne working-class suburb of Richmond. Politics in that tough industrial community boasted a unique flavour. As the historian Janet McCalman notes, Richmond politics was fundamentally about loyalty—loyalty to family, friends, the Labor Party and the Catholic Church. This tribal aspect went hand-inhand with its reputation as a place where back-room deals, electoral fraud and intimidation were the norms of political life. The goings-on of the Richmond City Council had frequently embarrassed the Victorian Labor Party, particularly since the 1920s, when municipal politics in Richmond became synonymous with a machine that was largely controlled by family dynasties and derived patronage from the legendary Melbourne businessman, John Wren.87 In the second half of the 1940s Keon took on and beat the Richmond Labor machine, first to win the Legislative Assembly seat of Richmond and then to secure pre-selection for Yarra. Both in challenging the Richmond ‘establishment’ and in his time in the State and federal parliaments, Keon showed himself a politician to be reckoned with. A potent orator—Cairns recalls the ‘electric character in his voice’—Keon was energetic, passionate and intelligent, though occasionally intemperate. Keon’s victories over the Richmond ‘establishment’ were based on his success in building up his own Catholic Grouper machine in the area. Indeed by the 1950s the Groupers not only claimed the area’s two parliamentary representatives in Keon and Scully, but also exercised enormous power over the Richmond City Council and within the local ALP branches. Moreover, from 1946 the Groupers had their own mouthpiece in the Richmond News. As McCalman writes, the Richmond News ‘often abandoned journalism for propaganda . . . . [serving] up to

the people of Richmond an unrelieved diet of Grouper politics and sport’.88 Because of strength of the Groupers in Richmond, the split of 1954–55 had devastated the local community. Suddenly traditional loyalties to the Catholic Church and the Labor Party were in conflict. Families and friends were divided as Richmond suffered the bitterest twelve months in its history. The ALP branches were badly hit as most active members followed the example of Keon and Scully and defected to the breakaway Labor Party (Anti-Communist).89 Cairns had little time to savour his pre-selection success before he was thrust into an election campaign. In late October, capitalising upon Labor’s disarray and Evatt’s injudicious response to the findings of the Petrov Royal Commission, Menzies announced that Australia would go to the polls on 10 December. Whereas Keon was a household name in Richmond, Cairns was unknown in the electorate when he started his campaign. Nor did Cairns have any real knowledge of the area; his first significant exposure to Richmond had come when he letter-boxed in the suburb during the May State election. Kennelly figured, however, that Cairns’ status as an outsider and clean-skin, someone unsullied by the rough and tumble of Richmond politics, could work to Labor’s advantage. This theory could easily have foundered if the local ALP branches had rebelled at the way Cairns had been drafted in over the heads of a number of local hopefuls for the seat of Yarra. But fortunately, as Kennelly later remarked to McCalman, the Richmond ALP accepted Cairns ‘strangely well when you consider it was someone who didn’t live in the electorate, an ex-policeman, academic—it could hardly be worse’. In Cairns’ favour, too, was that for many weeks prior to polling day, Keon, as deputy leader of the Labor Party (Anti-Communist), was tied up campaigning interstate and in other Victorian electorates. This neglect of the contest for Yarra also reflected the Keon camp’s confidence in the outcome.90 Perhaps, though, the biggest factor to account for Cairns’ success in Yarra was the tremendous effort put in by himself and the forces that

were mobilised behind him. Even before the announcement of the election Cairns, accompanied by Gwen, undertook an extensive round of door-knocking in the electorate. Once the date of the poll was set, street meetings became the chief focus of his campaign. He embarked upon a punishing schedule, regularly addressing more than three meetings per day. Reviving the old custom of bell-ringing to announce the street meetings, sometimes he attracted only a handful of curious onlookers, yet on other occasions hundreds turned out. Cairns found the audiences generally receptive as he explained the shortcomings of the government’s economic policies in his characteristically didactic style: ‘[I] mesmerised them a bit. They were impressed by the way I could talk—with what education could do’.91 While Cairns poured his efforts into the street meetings, a large support team flooded the electorate with campaign literature. The team included a broad cross-section of trade unionists and ALP activists both from within and outside the local area. His greatest support base, however, was Melbourne University. The young law graduate and founding figure of the ALP Club, Clyde Holding, was campaign manager. Another law graduate and former contact from the ALP Club, John Button, also assumed an important co-ordinating role. As well, fellow academics and members of the MULC volunteered their assistance.92 Holding initially knocked back the MULC’s offer of help. Acutely aware that the Keon camp would seize upon any suggestion that Cairns was receiving direct support from the Communist Party, he was concerned that the involvement of Labour Club members, a number of whom were well-known communists, could jeopardise the campaign. Unhappy with Holding’s decision, a deputation of MULC members approached Cairns directly to offer assistance. Typically, Cairns seemed unfazed. He welcomed their support, though it was agreed that wherever possible they should work behind the scenes. Neither did Cairns shy away from the issue of communism in his campaign. Addressing one street meeting, he lampooned the obsessive anti-communism of the

government: ‘If the Communist Party looked like disbanding in this country, Mr Menzies would see that it got enough money to keep going. It is the Communist scare that is keeping him in power.’ 93 At the same time, his campaign literature endeavoured to combat the inevitable allegations that he and the Labor Party were soft on communism. One leaflet declared that he stood for: A constructive policy designed to put Communism out of business by: The maintenance of democracy and full civil rights against all threats; Removing the causes of Communism—inflation, depression and injustice; Vigorous ALP leadership in the Trade Unions; Efficient and scientific defence against all external enemies.94

Cairns’ campaign literature also sought to deflect claims by the Keon camp that as an outsider and university academic he had no understanding of the issues facing working-class people in Richmond. ‘JIM CAIRNS has experienced adversity’, proclaimed one of his election fliers. Bending the truth a little it asserted: ‘His father was killed in the First World War. His widowed mother became an invalid in 1935. He gained his qualifications by hard work.’ Naturally enough, Cairns’ radical tendencies were skated over, and he was presented to the voters as a paragon of mainstream values. He was a family man with two sons, had served overseas with the AIF, and was a former champion athlete and experienced policeman. Another principal theme was that of loyalty to the Labor Party and especially the party’s ‘Great Tradition In Yarra’. Cairns was extolled as a ‘worthy successor’ to Frank Tudor and James Scullin. Keon, on the other hand, had betrayed that tradition. He and the ‘Santamaria Clique’ were opposing genuine Labor candidates and delivering their preferences to Menzies. In short, as another flier pronounced, ‘A Vote for Keon is a Vote for Menzies’. In the final fortnight of the campaign Keon’s complacency about holding Yarra evaporated as he realised that Cairns was gaining strong support. He returned to the electorate and began to engage in what Cairns later described as ‘behind the hand stuff’. According to Cairns, one of his

tactics was to tell audiences ‘that if anyone mentioned how I’d left the police force I’d turn white’.95 The Richmond News, which had subjected Cairns to persistent abuse since his pre-selection, reserved its most venomous attack for its final issue before polling day. A front-page advertisement from the Keon camp described Cairns as having ‘a list of Communist affiliations as long as your arm’. Inside, an editorial demanded: ‘A feature of this election campaign has been the denials of the Evatt candidate of any connection with Communists or Communism. What does the Record Show?’ Predictably, this was followed by a list of Cairns’ past activities with organisations such as the Peace Council and the MULC. The editorial concluded scornfully: ‘STRANGE COMPANY FOR A LABOR MAN!’96 Next day Cairns responded with a strongly worded open letter to the voters of Yarra: As soon as I was endorsed as ALP Candidate against Mr Keon, following his expulsion from the ALP, he began allegations about Communism. I have repeatedly challenged Mr Keon to repeat publicly these and other untruthful allegations which might concern me. HE HAS CHOSEN NOT TO DO SO. He has, however, saved the publication of his assertions until TWO days before the election. This is the behaviour of a man concerned only to mislead and defame. I deny the allegations. I leave it to the good sense of the electors of Yarra to identify Mr Keon’s allegations with the record of a man who has set the standard in character defamation made so infamous in the United States by the now discredited Senator McCarthy.97

On the Monday night before polling day, Cairns’ election campaign climaxed with a large meeting at Richmond Town Hall. The main speaker was the Labor leader, Dr Evatt. Given the simmering hostility between the Cairns and Keon camps, the atmosphere was volatile. Addressing a crowd estimated at between 1500 and 2000 people, Evatt was persistently interrupted by cries of ‘Molotov’ and ‘Petrov’. The following day the Age claimed that it was the ‘wildest and most enthusiastic welcome’ of Evatt’s campaign. Meanwhile, the Richmond News dubbed the meeting a ‘Hate Keon Rally’.98 When polling day arrived, the violence that had been threatening throughout the campaign finally erupted. Ormonde

melodramatically describes it as ‘bloody Saturday’. Most of the outbreaks of violence coincided with the close of voting at 8 p.m. The worst of the reported brawls occurred outside a polling booth at St Stephen’s Anglican Church in the heart of Richmond. The police were called and two arrests were made. Ormonde suggests that Cairns ‘preferred to remain ignorant’ of the violence perpetrated in his name during the struggle for Yarra. This is unfair. True, questioned about the violence, Cairns downplays its severity. Yet he readily acknowledges that clashes did take place and that in some instances they were provoked by ALP supporters. His attitude seems to have been that the violence, while regrettable, was probably inevitable in view of the emotions unleashed by the Labor split.99 Cairns and his team of helpers gathered at the Collingwood Town Hall after the close of polling. At just after 10 p.m. enough votes had been counted for him to tentatively declare victory. Asked whether he was excited at that moment, Cairns replies self-mockingly: ‘As far as I can ever be excited; yes’. The final result in Yarra was close; after the distribution of preferences Cairns had a majority of 791 votes. On a national basis the election result provided further evidence of the calamitous impact of the split on the Labor side of politics. The ALP’s share of the vote was down more than 5 per cent from the 1954 poll. The Liberal-Country Parties emerged with an increased majority of 75–47 seats over the ALP in the House of Representatives. All seven of the Labor Party (Anti-Communist) members were defeated, though McManus scraped in as the fifth Senator elected in Victoria.1 The contest for Yarra ended acrimoniously. At the declaration of the poll Keon was jeered by the assembled crowd when he told them that the voters of Yarra had made a ‘whopper’ of a mistake in electing Cairns. He labelled the outcome a triumph for the communists. Cairns followed with a remarkable statement that could only have rubbed salt into the wounds of the embittered Keon. He expressed his confidence that the Labor Party would

long be prepared to remain in opposition rather than give up its policy and identify itself with the parties of big business and other conservative organisations. I believe Labor, true to its ideals as the party of change and progress, will be able to withstand years of opposition better than some of its political opponents will be able to withstand years of effort with little or no hope of ever electing a candidate. I believe that Labor, true to its function of working for rapid social change for the betterment of the people, would be able to stand years of opposition better than some of its opponents will be able to withstand the force of events which will identify them more and more closely with the main opponents of Labor.2

These words were designed not just to sting Keon. It was as if Cairns had set out to send a shiver down the collective spine of Australian conservatives, as well as the more moderately inclined members of the Labor Party. In Cairns’ mind the future direction of Labor in the aftermath of the split was clear. It was to renew its commitment to radical change, even if that meant being consigned to the political wilderness.

4 the member for y arra 1956–1964 THE HONOURABLE MEMBER FOR YARRA . . . CAN ALWAYS BE RELIED ON TO PUT THE CASE OF THE FREE WORLD IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY AND THE CASE OF THE COMMUNIST POWERS IN THE BEST WAY. HE IS QUITE FAMOUS FOR THAT. R. G. Menzies, CPD, vol. 28, 8 September 1960, p. 986.

to the House of Representatives on 22 February 1956. He spoke in what became his trademark parliamentary style: his voice an impassive monotone, his face expressionless. Also characteristically, the speech was meticulously researched and rigorously argued; its main thrust was a critique of the government’s economic policy. Yet deadpan delivery style and scholarly content could not obscure the moral passion that underpinned Cairns’ politics. His ethical distaste for capitalism and its morally corrosive values was undisguised: CA IRN S

DELIVERED

H IS

MA ID EN

S P E E C H

Man is very much the creature of his environment. When he lives in an acquisitive society in which self-interest is raised to the level of a social philosophy, as it is in ours, then man will bear very much the marks of conflict and self-interest; as he does in our community. . . a society in which there is considerable injustice, inequality, and oppression, a society wherein the people do not govern themselves . . . cannot be a society in which the citizens exhibit all the qualities that please democrats and liberals.

And if this is so, it is because of these conditions and not because of any moral fault that some may be able to find in these people.1

The ethical aversion Cairns felt towards the capitalist order was to sustain his belief in the need for fundamental social change throughout his political career. He had arrived in the parliament at one of the darkest points in the history of the FPLP. It had already lost four consecutive elections and the prospects of an early return to the government benches seemed remote. The party was racked by factional divisions and personal animosities that were a legacy of the split in Victoria of 1954–55 and continuing ructions within the New South Wales and Queensland party branches.2 Evatt, though re-elected leader after the 1955 election, was widely perceived as a lame duck after his role in the Petrov affair and the ALP split. To add to Labor’s woes, the split meant that it could no longer rely upon the overwhelming loyalty of Irish Catholics; a significant proportion of whom defected to the Democratic Labor Party (DLP)—the name adopted by the ALP breakaways when they formed a federal party structure in 1957. Even more ominous for Labor was the erosion of its traditional working-class support base. By the mid-1950s, in common with other advanced capitalist nations, Australia was beginning to enjoy a period of sustained economic prosperity and stability that was to continue until the early 1970s. Low unemployment levels and steadily increasing real incomes for workers combined to enable most Australians to share the fruits of prosperity. For the average family, this prosperity typically came in the form of a home in the expanding outer suburbs and the accumulation of consumer durables, usually on hire purchase. The spread of material affluence camouflaged the persisting class-based disparities in income and wealth in Australian society. The working-class was also fragmented by changes in the composition of the workforce and the breakdown of old inner-city working-class communities as the consumerist, home-centred life-style of the new suburbs took over. The

upshot was a dulled class consciousness as increasing numbers of workers identified themselves with the burgeoning middle-class.3 This phenomenon helped to consolidate the Liberal-Country Party coalition in office during the 1950s. As early as 1942, when he delivered his seminal address ‘The Forgotten People’, Menzies had set out to refashion conservative political philosophy to meet the values and aspirations of the middle-class. Menzies appealed to the emergent suburban nuclear family of the 1950s by articulating a model of citizenship rooted in the private sphere, in family life and in the commitment to home ownership.4 By contrast, the ALP appeared bewildered about how to respond to the changing class landscape of postwar Australia. Should it remain wedded to its historical role as a party of the working-class, especially male, blue-collar workers of Anglo-Celtic origin? Or should it redefine its philosophy to embrace a more pluralistic model of society? Labor’s dilemma was linked to a broader theoretical debate, which surfaced among democratic socialist and social democratic parties in Britain and Europe in the 1950s and began to significantly affect the ALP by the first half of the 1960s. Simply expressed, that debate was over whether the traditional democratic socialist strategy of public ownership of the means of production had been rendered irrelevant by the post-war transformation of liberal capitalism. At the fore of the debate were the ‘modernists’ or ‘revisionists’ who confidently asserted that the development of the welfare state, combined with a Keynesian-managed mixed capitalist economy, had eliminated the problems of primary poverty and mass unemployment which had previously dogged capitalism. Consequently, there was no longer any need to abolish private enterprise through a massive program of nationalisation. Instead, the expanding resources of a mixed capitalist economy could be used to provide greater social equality. In this way the socialist goal of a classless society could be achieved within the existing social structure. On the opposite side, the ‘traditionalists’ or ‘fundamentalists’ greeted the

idea that capitalism had changed its spots with scepticism. They argued that an unequal distribution of wealth and power was intrinsic to capitalism and would persist unless the means of production were brought under social control. Further, they warned that in the end the revisionist road would lead to little more than an accommodation with capitalism and a degeneration into electoralism.5 Between 1955 and 1964 Cairns emerged as the most articulate advocate of the traditionalist democratic socialist position within the FPLP. In so doing, he portrayed the ALP’s post-split predicament as less of a cause of despair than an opportunity for a renaissance and return to ideological integrity. He insisted that the party’s salvation lay not in the single-minded pursuit of power, but rather in a reaffirmation of its intention to use the state to extend democracy into the economic sphere. Pushing aside his doubts about the ALP constituting an effective agent of radical social change, Cairns based his defence of the ALP’s democratic socialist tradition on an interpretation of Australian history which posited Labor as having been at the vanguard of a historical struggle to use the state to create a fairer, more co-operative and humane society. In Cairns’ mind there seemed little doubt that the next and ultimate step in this struggle would be for Labor to usher in a socialist order through a substantial extension of public ownership of industry. But he was conscious, too, that the temptation was for Labor to bow to pressure from conservative forces, both within and outside its own ranks, to relinquish its commitment to socialisation. To do so, he maintained, would be to sacrifice the party’s legitimacy and deny its historical heritage. Needless to say, there was an inherent tension between Cairns’ acceptance of the premise that the main road to fundamental social change in Australia lay in the democratic capture of the state and his opposition to the idea that Labor temper its policies in pursuit of success at the ballot box. This tension was suggestive of a deeper paradox about Cairns the politician which surfaces in this chapter—his ambivalent attitude towards political power. From the time he entered parliament,

Cairns departed from mainstream ideas and values. That trait was most noticeable in his defiance of Cold War assumptions. The political cost of such dissent never seemed to trouble Cairns. He measured political success in a different currency, in terms of minds converted over the long haul rather than in votes won at the next election. On the other hand, it was this readiness to thumb his nose at the orthodox, coupled with the ability and tenacity with which he articulated his case, which separated Cairns from the crowd. He excelled in the oppositional role, becoming a figure of significant and growing political stature. Yet his unconventionality also brought with it a fragility. Surely one could only defy gravity for so long? Not long after taking up his seat in the House of Representatives Cairns wrote a brief article for the journal Voice in which he acknowledged the serious impact of the split on Labor’s support base and the intense ‘soul searching’ the party was undergoing. This situation invited and demanded ‘new thinking about policy’, but he cautioned that for future policy to have any hope of success it ‘must reflect the essential features of the past.’ What then was the defining feature of Labor’s past? According to Cairns, it was its function as the ‘party of movement’ within Australia’s political arena. Traditionally, Labor had fulfilled that function by refusing to accept the decisions of the free market, seeking instead to ‘apply some standard in place of, or additional to, the market price or decision. It is a moral or humanitarian standard.’ In practice, this impulse had been manifest in a series of social achievements, the most recent of which was the creation of the welfare state. Having started out on the ‘road of “interference”’, Cairns suggested, Labor’s historical destiny was clear: ‘it will not be able to stop until it achieves all the instruments needed if workers are to control industry’. Those in the party who wished to eschew such a goal in search of short-term electoral gain risked making it indistinguishable from its political opponents: All Labor people who advocate that the policy of the Labor Party must be moderate, that

the important thing to do is to win elections, are committed to a line which would make the policy of the Labor Party similar to that of the Liberal and Country Parties. All these people would make Labor as much a ‘party of resistance’ as are these parties.6

The historical role that Cairns attributed to the ALP in both this article and the piece he had written for Meanjin a year earlier was a direct spin-off from his PhD thesis. First submitted in 1955, the thesis was resubmitted two years later after a rushed job of revision. Although it is poorly organised and lacks clarity, the account of the development of the welfare state is seminal among his writings of the 1950s and early 1960s. Here Cairns offered a view of Australia’s social and political history that identified Labor unambiguously as the authentic agent of social progress within Australian society. Permeating the thesis is a sense that, though, both sides of the political divide are acting in their own economic interest, it is Labor—the ‘party of movement’—which is on the side of history and justice, while its political opponents—the ‘parties of resistance’— stand against the natural momentum for reform and a fairer social order. 7 Yet even if the force of history is with Labor, progress is neither assured nor pre-ordained. It will be secured only when humans make meaningful choices and take corresponding action to shape their world. As Cairns noted in the preface: ‘No social changes ever take place unless some men make decisions about them and act to see that these decisions are carried out. Social changes are unlike geological changes.’8 Underlying the account Cairns provides of the development of the welfare state in Australia is the concept of class struggle. He rejected the idea that in Australia there had generally been a class or associated ideological and political consensus about the need to ameliorate the working and social conditions of the masses. Rather, the central motif of the thesis is ‘that the beneficiaries of social reform were mainly responsible for its enactment, and that from 1891, they acted mainly through the Labor Party’. Conversely, the attempts to frustrate that impetus to build a sodal welfare system had been led by those whose

traditional position of economic and social privilege was threatened by the intrusion of the state into the free market. This group extended to middle-class property owners, employers, managers and, in some cases, white-collar employees. In fact, Cairns appeared to believe that it was support for the non-Labor parties—the ‘parties of resistance’—that defined this group.9 While Cairns saw the evolution of the Australian welfare state primarily in the context of class struggle, he recognised that the very successes the working-class had enjoyed in modifying the capitalist system invalidated attempts to analyse Australian conditions in conventional Marxist terms. The critical factor that had opened the way to these modifications was political democracy. Indeed Cairns argued that, by definition, a capitalist economy could not be transformed into a ‘welfare state unless it is also democratic’. He endorsed the conventional historical view that the trade unions’ decision to embrace political action in the aftermath of the great strikes of the 1890s was a watershed in the struggle between capital and labour. To Cairns it was a ‘turning point’ for the labour movement not only in ‘methods but in clarification of aim’. He had little doubt that this aim was socialist: [it] is distinctly to ‘interfere’ with the operation of the capitalist market to secure a change in the allocation of resources . . . and a change in the distribution of income . . . But the general aim is more complex and indefinite—implicitly it extends as far as to bring about ‘a socialist change . . . by gradually and disconnectedly extending the interference of the state in private industry.’10

In the thesis Cairns chronicled three phases in the development of the Australian welfare state: emergence, 1870–1914; decline, 1914–39; and establishment, 1939–50. In each phase a nexus was drawn between the strength of Labor’s political influence and the advancement of the social welfare system. Lack of progress in the 1920s, for example, followed the ‘curtailment’ of the ALP as a political force after the split of 1916. Not that Cairns believed Labor was always automatically an agent

of progress. To the contrary, its ‘movement was often slow’. And in some cases it had not advanced the cause at all. Cairns attributed the Scullin Government’s ineffectiveness in ameliorating the hardships of the working-class in 1929–31 ultimately to a failure of political will: ‘Depression experience suggests that if Labor is to do the work its principles demand, its leaders must recognise that it should not accept the basic assumptions of the “parties of resistance” but remain true to its own’.11 The concluding chapter of the thesis discussed some of the principal results and limitations of the Australian welfare state. Extended analysis of a range of economic statistics delineated the positive influence of the welfare state and post-war full employment upon income distribution and resource allocation. To Cairns, the figures supported the general conclusion that in Australia there had been ‘some transfer of political power, and with it also a transfer of economic and social power, from the propertied classes to the wage and salary earning classes’. He debunked the concerns of the radical liberal theorist F. A. Hayek, whose famous anti-state polemic, The Road To Serfdom (1944), had equated the rise of the welfare state and centralised economic planning with a curtailment of individual freedom and drift towards totalitarianism. The notion that government now watched over citizens ‘from the cradle to the grave’ was dismissed by Cairns as ridiculous. Far from eroding liberty for the majority of people, the welfare state had ‘meant an increase in freedom, self-respect and independence’.12 While clearly acknowledging the benefits of the welfare state to the masses, Cairns saw those benefits as proceeding only so far. The trend that he had identified in Australia and other advanced industrial nations towards a growing concentration of ownership and wealth within the private sector negated the claim of classical economic theory that ‘there would be no problem of power in the relations of economic units, for each was so small that its power would be negligible’. Nor did Cairns accept the argument of the American economist, J. K. Galbraith, that the

power wielded by oligopolies in the modern economy was in some way less disturbing because it was ‘countervailed’ by the power exercised by other large economic units and the major trade unions. To the contrary, Cairns thought that the ‘problems of social control of economic units are still the main problems of the welfare state’. And until those problems were remedied the welfare state’s transfer of power would remain ‘superficial and conditional’.13 Predictably, Cairns proposed that the solution to the lack of social control within the economy rested with Labor’s stated objective to socialise ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’ There was cursory reference to the ‘lions in the path’ of that objective, including the limitations of federal power under the Constitution as exposed in the bank nationalisation case, but Cairns ended on a defiantly optimistic note: There is no natural reason why democracy should not extend into the economic system. . . Democracy is not necessarily only a social and political affair . . . Labour’s intervention is natural in that it is the outcome of the needs and demands of its beneficiaries. These needs and demands are part of the community of ideas and practices. What is impossible today becomes an achievement of tomorrow. 14

Although written at a time when the traditionalist/revisionist ideological cleavage was only starting to materialise at the margins of the ALP,15 Cairns’ doctoral thesis indicated that he was against the revisionist thinking that had already gained ground within the British Labour Party. Like its Australian counterpart, by the second half of the 1950s the British Labour Party was enduring a protracted period in opposition and confronting the challenge of appealing to an electorate mollified by material progress. It was in this context that revisionist ideas —most influentially expounded in C. A. R. Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956)—sprouted in Britain. Working from the premise that the economic deficiencies of capitalism had been largely resolved, Crosland and his fellow revisionists questioned whether the conventional

democratic socialist strategy of public ownership and control was either apposite or desirable. Highlighting the post-war expansion of the state and the rise of an ever more influential managerial class, they argued that wholesale nationalisation would only exacerbate the problem of the centralisation of power. Accordingly, they argued that it would be more appropriate, as well as electorally prudent, to pursue social equality via welfare and fiscal policy and other related means.16 Despite his familiarity with the revisionist tendencies in British socialist thought, Cairns made no direct reference to The Future of Socialism in his thesis.17 By contrast, he quoted favourably from Aneurin Bevan’s In Place of Fear (1952). The pre-eminent figure of the Left wing of the British Labour Party, Bevan was recognised as the stoutest defender of traditional collectivist practice in post-war Britain. In Place of Fear represented the most systematic statement of his political philosophy. It left little doubt that he believed in a continuing and extensive assault on private capital: ‘to the socialist, Parliamentary power is to be used progressively until the main streams of economic activity are brought under public control’. Bevan rebuked those in the Labour Party who claimed that the time had come to abandon the policy of nationalisation and accept a consolidation of the relations between private and public enterprise. ‘Before we can dream of consolidation’, he wrote, ‘the power relations of public and private property must be drastically altered’.18 Cairns regarded Bevan as something of a theoretical and practical role model during his early years in the parliament. In 1957, he wrote to Bevan explaining that the ALP had ‘recently gone through a great testing time’, and then declared, ‘I feel personally that your presence in Australia would do more than that of any other person to benefit the ALP in these and similar problems’.19 Nothing came of the invitation, but well into the 1960s Cairns called on the ideas of Bevan to support his own arguments in favour of greater social control of the economy.

At the same time as Cairns was struggling to finalise a doctoral thesis that argued the case for a democratic socialist Labor Party, he was also busy with the practical demands that came with being a member of parliament. Having only narrowly defeated Keon, he had to build up his support base to counter the still formidable Grouper machine within Yarra. In 1956 Cairns and Gwen moved into the electorate, buying a modest but spacious Victorian-style house in Wattle Road, Hawthorn. They began an exhaustive round of door-knocking which over the next few years saw them visit virtually every home in Abbotsford, Collingwood and Richmond. The aim was to lift Cairns’ profile and to increase his understanding of the social problems facing his constituents. Like Melbourne’s other old industrial suburbs, Richmond was starting to undergo some profound social changes. But Cairns was impressed by the still healthy sense of working-class community: There was less alienation amongst them than amongst the people with whom Td lived in the country. They talked to one another more. They knew much more about one another. There was a lot of gossip, of course, but what they didn’t have in money and material things they had in personal relations.

Not even that sense of community, however, could conceal the bitterness that continued to be generated in Richmond by the ALP split. Knocking on doors, Cairns and Gwen experienced that bitterness firsthand: ‘We found a significant number of people who just wouldn’t speak to us— closed the door as soon as we came’.20 One of the first initiatives of Cairns and his supporters to combat the Grouper influence in Richmond was to launch the monthly journal, Spotlight on Yarra. Delivered free to every house in the electorate, its purpose was to counter the pro-Grouper Richmond News. The value of Spotlight on Yarra was underlined in mid-1956 when controversy erupted over the Bolte Government’s intention to build a new Housing Commission estate in North Richmond as part of its slum clearance program. Local residents were unnerved by the government’s proposal,

especially as there were serious questions about whether house owners would receive adequate compensation for the demolition of their homes. Prior to the split the Grouper-controlled Richmond Council had done a deal with the Housing Commission to support extensive slum reclamation in the suburb. Accordingly, both Frank Scully and Maurice Sheehy, the local MLC and another ALP defector, were committed to supporting the Housing Commission estate. In the pages of Spotlight on Yarra and a series of street meetings, Cairns and the local Labor Party vigorously attacked the Bolte Government’s plans. Cairns told his audiences that the Housing Commission was going to build the ‘slums of the future’ and that the proposed valuations on their homes were unfair.21 The Groupers’ unpopular stance on slum reclamation contributed to the setback they suffered in the Richmond Council elections of August 1956. Labor’s victory in four of the five seats brought it in striking distance of regaining control of the council, a goal that was achieved at the municipal elections the following year. The results of the 1958 State elections provided further evidence of a decline in Grouper influence in Richmond. Although the DLP received about 14 per cent of the vote and its preferences helped the Bolte Government retain power comfortably, it emerged without a seat in the Legislative Assembly. In Richmond, Scully was convincingly defeated by the ALP candidate, W. J. Towers. In the Legislative Council elections that followed soon after, the DLP’s sitting members were eliminated; among the casualties was Maurice Sheehy, who lost to Labor’s Jack O’Connell. A former Mayor of Richmond, O’Connell was a member of one of Richmond’s most notorious family dynasties. His election to the Legislative Council symbolised the renaissance of the old Richmond Labor machine, along with a return of the corrupt practices, nepotism and scandal that had long dogged politics in Richmond.22 Cairns was aware of this darker side of the Richmond machine, but for the most part he turned a blind eye. Cairns opted for a policy of tolerance principally for pragmatic reasons, but he also figured that the

corruption associated with the Richmond Council was no worse than that in neighbouring middle-class suburbs: The machine itself worked because of corruption, because of ‘jobs’ . . . jobs on the Council and other things the Council could do. That sort of corruption is different. In other areas like Hawthorn, Camberwell and Kew councillors don’t accept ten pounds or fifty pounds like they do in Richmond, but they benefit from being on the Council through their business activities and thereby get far more money . . . But they don’t even see it to be corruption.23

The results of the 1958 State elections augured well for Cairns’ reelection prospects in Yarra. Also working in his favour was the reputation he had established within the electorate as a local member who would go to extraordinary lengths to help constituents. As Ormonde documents, this extended to giving refuge to people in his own home. Of a more prosaic nature were his tireless representations to the Immigration Department on behalf of the rapidly growing numbers of Italians and Greeks who were settling in Richmond. Gwen was also very active within the electorate. She organised and managed a twice-weekly free laundry service for pensioners. Another of her initiatives was the supply of milk to deserted mothers with young infants. Through their work in the electorate Cairns and Gwen earned enormous respect, and they grew extremely fond of the Richmond community. Yet, as Janet McCalman points out, in the rough and tumble world of Richmond the studious and austere Cairns always remained something of an enigma. She notes that ‘Richmond found “the Doc” strange’; quoting one constituent who observed: ‘the Doc and I have always been good mates, but he was a funny bloke—he never let anyone get on top of him, standoffish’.24 Once more, Cairns’ main opponent in Yarra in the 1958 federal election was the DLP’s Stan Keon, and this time the Keon camp mounted a lengthy and concerted campaign. Cairns and his support team responded by setting an even more frenetic pace than they had in 1955. On polling day, 22 November, tempers again boiled over in Richmond. There was a

series of skirmishes between ALP and DLP supporters, with the worst brawl resulting in four arrests. When the votes were counted, Cairns’ share of the vote was up more than 6 per cent while Keon’s had declined by a similar margin. The result was further proof of the fading power of Keon’s once mighty Grouper machine. Though Keon would contest Yarra on three more occasions, his chances of wresting the seat from Cairns had long disappeared.25 Cairns’ 1958 campaign literature trumpeted that he boasted ‘all the qualities necessary to obtain ministerial rank in a future Labor government’ and had already ‘gained great respect’ for his input to national political issues.26 Government members would have contested the latter claim, yet from the time he entered the Commonwealth parliament Cairns had made his presence felt. Focusing on the weighty areas of economic policy and international affairs, he took to his new role with typical earnestness and resolve. He quickly won a reputation not only for serious and considered contributions to debate, but as someone who was unafraid to express unfashionable views or to lock horns with members on the opposite side of the chamber. The need for greater social control of the major industrial concerns and financial institutions operating within the Australian economy was a common theme in Cairns’ early parliamentary addresses on economic policy. For example, in debate on the 1957–58 Budget he used figures from the Commissioner of Taxation to illustrate the growing economic dominance of a small number of massive corporations. According to Cairns, the increasing profits of these corporations were feeding exactly the inflationary pressures that the Budget was designed to contain, and the Menzies Government, rather than confront this reality, had adopted an economic strategy based upon: ‘control and regimentation of workers and pensioners by wage and pension freezes’. He concluded by warning that: ‘Until these large industrial monopolies of which I have been speaking are brought under some kind of reasonable social control the present conditions will continue.’ The speech met with a familiar response from

the opposite side of the House. The following government speaker thundered that Cairns did not believe in the ‘Australian way of life’, but instead represented ‘the degrading philosophy which wants to shackle men’.27 The insinuation that he was un-Australian quickly became one of the most popular forms of insult levelled against Cairns by his political enemies. This was particularly the case with regard to his contentious approach to international affairs. It was his views on international affairs that guaranteed Cairns a place as one of the most controversial figures in the parliament. Within two months of taking up his seat in the House of Representatives, Cairns gave a talk to a group of Asian students from the University of Melbourne questioning Australia’s ongoing military presence in Malaya. This prompted a Country Party backbencher, Winton Turnbull, to declare, ‘it is beyond my comprehension that a loyal Australian would make such remarks’.28 Later the same year a speech by Cairns on foreign and defence policy provoked another government backbencher to allege melodramatically that Cairns was guilty of toeing the line ‘that is followed by the same people who follow Mao Tse Tung, whose maxim is that everything comes out of the end of a gun’.29 Not just government backbenchers targeted Cairns for attack. In April 1957 the Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey, summing up a debate in the House on the Egyptian–Israeli conflict, singled out Cairns for criticism. ‘The young man from Yarra’, Casey declared, ‘is gradually building up a reputation in this place. I do not accuse him of partisanship in any particular way, but I will say we are becoming pretty well aware of where his personal political sympathies lie.’ Other members of the government were less subtle. In December 1957 the Liberal Party’s most notorious anti-communist crusader, W. C. Wentworth, took his first shot at Cairns. After listening to a speech in which Cairns rebuked the government for its ‘one-sided assumption that the sole responsibility for international tensions lies with the Communist powers’, Wentworth noted

acidly that Cairns ‘will scarcely dare to deny the close personal connection that he has had in the past with Communist bodies’.30 The main premises of the Menzies Government’s foreign policy help explain the unease and hostility Cairns’ approach to international relations created within conservative coalition ranks. The most dominant of these was that of a continuing global power struggle between the communist and non-communist world, in which the former was dedicated to expanding its sphere of influence. Thus, though broadly accepting the notion of peaceful coexistence, the Menzies Government adhered to the view that the security of the Western world lay in a maintenance of strength and steadfast commitment to containing the spread of communism. By the 1950s Australia’s concerns about its security and communist expansionism were increasingly focused upon South-East Asia. Fear and suspicion of Asia had a long history in white Australia stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, when images of the ‘yellow peril’ were first invoked. In the post-war period the traditional anxiety about Asia was given additional impetus by the great social upheaval occurring to Australia’s north amid the collapse of the old colonial order. The communist victory in China in 1949, the defeat of the French in Vietnam in 1954, communist insurgency in Malaya and ongoing instability in Indonesia, all contributed to a picture that Australia was located in a volatile and threatening part of the world.31 True to its Cold War thinking, the Menzies Government saw communist aggression as fundamental to the post-war turmoil in Asia. In particular, by the end of the 1950s, and further still in the early 1960s, it assiduously promoted the view that Communist China was behind the region’s numerous trouble spots. 32 This paranoia about the dangers of Communist China reinforced another central premise of Australia’s postwar foreign policy: a close strategic defence and economic relationship with the United States, and a corresponding effort to encourage greater US interest and presence in South-East Asia and the South Pacific. This policy assumed that Australia’s security was

ultimately dependent on a close association with its major allies. It was reasoned that not only would a substantial American presence in the region serve to check communist aggression, but, in the event of a direct threat to Australia, the United States would feel obliged to lend assistance by virtue of the special relationship.33 Cairns challenged the Menzies Government’s foreign policy outlook on several fronts. First, he regarded as flawed and reckless, as well as ethically unpalatable, the proposition that the security of Australia and the Western world could continue indefinitely to be based upon what he described as the ‘doctrine of strength’. In a speech to the parliament in April 1957 he lamented the fact that the policy of the Western powers and the Soviet Union was ‘almost exclusively to increase their power and their strength in the view that this will intimidate them into safety’. Rather than meekly accept this situation, he urged the government to take the initiative by promoting a ban on nuclear weapon tests, the control and inspection of existing stockpiles, and the prevention of further nuclear proliferation. Anticipating that his suggestion would be condemned as idealistic, he stated: ‘I think that a little idealism in this world is not uncalled for’. In May 1958 he informed the House that the policy of containing the spread of communism through a ‘preponderance of Western military power’ was outmoded. He quoted a recent statement by one of the architects of the strategy of containment, George Kennan, conceding that the precondition for that strategy—the West’s decisive military supremacy over the communist world—no longer held true. Cairns reasoned that it therefore became essential to develop a new way of thinking about security that placed greater weight upon international co-operation than the confrontational attitude ‘that the West is completely right and that Russia is completely wrong’. He hoped Australia would play a part in advancing this new way of thinking, but feared that the government was too busy fuelling Cold War tensions for domestic political reasons.34

Cairns relentlessly criticised what he saw as the crude attempts by the conservative parties to interpret the post-war upheavals in Asia and the Afro-Arab world within the context of the Cold War struggle He was convinced that by doing so, they were not only guilty of misconstruing what was occurring in these places, but following a path that would be ultimately self-defeating. Rather than simplistically blame monolithic communism for the social ferment in Asia and elsewhere, Cairns urged the government to recognise the legitimate nationalist aspirations driving the movements for change. He believed that the West was morally obliged to support the transition to independence in its former colonies and assist the inhabitants in their struggle for better economic and social conditions. Moreover, he argued that this was the only effective way to prevent communism gaining ground in the emerging nations. As he noted in his very first speech on international affairs in March 1956: ‘The first thing to do in dealing with communism is to remove injustice in the countries where communism might advance’.35 Cairns returned to this theme time and again. In October 1956, in a House of Representatives debate on estimates for the Department of Defence, he warned: it is not much good for . . . Government supporters to rely on bombardment, aircraft carriers and frigates to contain communism in South-East Asia. To do so is to court failure, unless we improve our relations with the backward countries and assist them to improve their standard of living. We have not related economic development sufficiently to defence, and we have not worked closely enough with the leaders of the underdeveloped countries. Until we do these things, there can be no security for the Western countries, particularly Australia.

News of continuing political unrest in Indonesia in mid-1958 prompted him to accuse the government and its allies, including the United States, of making the same mistake in Indonesia as they had in the Middle East: ‘We allow these economic problems to fester and continue, and then pour in more and more arms to aggravate the situation and make it more dangerous’. ‘Let us’, Cairns urged, ‘get to the economic root of the

problem first’.36 The Menzies Government had made gestures towards overcoming the vast economic and cultural gulf between Australia and Asia, for instance with technical and educational assistance under the Colombo Plan. But these attempts were hamstrung by its obsession with communist imperialism in the region, as well as its commitment to a White Australia immigration policy—a commitment shared by the ALP. Cairns vigorously put the case for Australia to build bridges into Asia. During a September 1959 debate on estimates for the Department of External Affairs he declared: We still have very little real relationship with Asian countries, very little understanding of them and very little information and knowledge of them. Similarly, those countries have very little knowledge of us. It seems to me that the amount spent in fostering diplomatic, cultural and economic relations with Asia is far too small.

Three weeks earlier he had argued that Communist China was among those nations with which Australia must seek to establish better links. He advocated recognition of Communist China irrespective of Washington’s refusal to do so.37 In Cairns’ mind there was a compelling nexus between the need for Australia to adopt an independent foreign policy and for Australians to come to terms with the fact that they were part of Asia, not some farflung outpost of European civilisation. He understood what the great majority of Australians, including most members of the federal parliament, were still struggling to grasp—that it was in Australia’s longterm interests to embrace and enmesh itself with the emerging nations of Asia, rather than cling to a fast-decaying white colonial order. Furthermore, he was aware that an important first step in this process was for Australia to stop echoing tired Eurocentric attitudes. In a powerful speech to the House of Representatives in September 1961, he decried the government’s dichotomous and servile view of international relations that presumed that the West had a monopoly on virtue and should always

be automatically supported. This blinkered approach, Cairns feared, reduced the prospect of Australia developing an appreciation of the AfroAsian peoples’ ‘need and desire for independence and their suspicion as a result of two centuries of adverse relations with white European powers’. He continued: Australia is a new country with an old country’s posture. Australia is a country with different interests that has been willing to absorb and adopt the attitudes of an old, declining Europe, and transfix herself in those attitudes. We are not part of Europe. We are part of an area of the world which is very different. We have been willing to put on the clothes of Europe without seeing, first of all, whether they would fit. Having been unaware of the uncomfortable situation that these clothes have created for us, we are fast losing any possibility of working in constructive sympathy and understanding with the countries of the new world.38

Cairns’ desire to see Australia shed its historical phobia of Asia was also reflected in his continuing opposition to the White Australia Policy. In the late 1950s he became a member of the Immigration Reform Group, based at the University of Melbourne, which pushed the case for the abolition of the restriction on non-European immigration. In 1960 it issued a pamphlet, Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?, attacking the morality of the White Australia Policy and complaining that it was ‘poisoning’ Australia’s ‘relations with Asia, indeed with the whole nonEuropean world’. Cairns praised the pamphlet in the House of Representatives, commending it to members on both sides. He prefaced the recommendation by describing the White Australia Policy as the ‘act of a past and passing generation’.39 The reference to a ‘passing generation’ was apt. By the early 1960s debate over the White Australia Policy revealed a distinct generational cleavage in the ALP and, indeed, the wider society. 40 Cairns and other young Labor parliamentarians—especially the deputy leader of the FPLP, Gough Whidam, and the South Australian MHA and future State premier Don Dunstan—were in the vanguard of attempts to liberalise the party’s immigration policy. The chief stumbling-block to reform was Arthur

Calwell, who at the age of sixty-three had replaced Evatt as leader in March 1960. At the 1961 Federal Conference Calwell stymied moves to alter the party platform on immigration. Another ageing Labor heavyweight who was determined to bring Cairns and other ALP members to heel on the White Australia Policy was the secretary of the Federal Executive, F. E. Chamberlain. In mid-1961 Chamberlain was instrumental in the Federal Executive’s ruling (which some considered direcdy targeted Cairns) banning ALP members from the Immigration Reform Group and similar organisations opposed to the White Australia Polity. Cairns reluctantly resigned from the group, though vowing to maintain the struggle for reform from within the Labor Party. True to his word, a couple of months later he asked the Prime Minister in the parliament whether he appreciated the ‘extent of the moral indignation in Australia, and the harm done to Australia abroad, as a result of discrimination against coloured people?’ Menzies countered with customary political skill, noting that his government supported the White Australia Policy ‘just as staunchly as the Labor Government stood to it before us’.41 Many of the ideas Cairns expressed on international affairs gradually won respectability. Indeed, with several decades of hindsight, a great deal of what he was arguing in the late 1950s and early 1960s seems unexceptional. Yet at the time those ideas were disturbingly radical, even heretical, and made it easy for Cairns’ political foes to cast him in a malevolent light. The suspicion of Cairns among government members accumulated during his first term in parliament. Not long after parliament resumed sitting after the November 1958 elections, that distrust exploded. The trigger was the so-called ‘Hursey Affair’. Earlier that year the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) had organised a picket line to prevent two of its former members, Frank and Dennis Hursey, from reporting for work on the Hobart wharves. The Hurseys were members of the DLP and claimed that the union action against them originated from their refusal to pay a levy imposed by the Hobart branch

of the WWF for the benefit of the ALP. They had initiated legal action against the WWF in the Tasmanian Supreme Court. The union leaders offered a different interpretation, alleging that the Hurseys had failed to pay their union dues for the year 1957 and were being used to prepare the way for the introduction of nonunion labour on the waterfront.42 The Hursey case became something of a cause célèbre during 1958. The press generally depicted the Hurseys as the innocent victims of the thug tactics of communist union officials. 43 The federal government made noises about introducing legislation to protect unionists from being forced to contribute to funds used for political purposes, and the DLP organised a series of public meetings to support the Hurseys. In November the Tasmanian Supreme Court ruled that the levy was invalid and that the union had unlawfully prevented the Hurseys from working on twenty-five separate occasions. The Hurseys were each awarded £2500 damages. Prime Minister Menzies was effusive, calling it ‘a day of mourning for Communists’.44 On 17 March 1959 Cairns directed a question to the AttorneyGeneral, Sir Garfield Barwick, about the Hursey case. It specifically related to suggestions that Frank Hursey and his wife had sworn false evidence against another waterside worker, John Gold, who had been deregistered by the Stevedoring Industry Authority following an inquiry into allegations that he had assaulted Hursey on the Hobart wharves in December 1958. Cairns asked Barwick if the government intended ‘to examine the alleged false evidence given by the Hurseys with a view to prosecution, or is it the Government’s intention further to protect these two persons in view of their value to Liberal party propaganda?’ He also asked whether the legal counsel representing the Hurseys had ‘also appeared in another well known case in Tasmania in which it is alleged that perjury occurred?’45 The legal counsel was a Tasmanian Liberal Senator, Reginald Wright. The next day Wright savagely attacked Cairns in the Senate. The attack betrayed the extent to which Cairns was

distrusted and reviled by some in the coalition parties, and explicitly aired government suspicions that he was a communist sympathiser. Wright angrily condemned the questions and complained that they were ‘smear tactics which are typical of the Communists in whose confidence J. F. Cairns is well known to be’. Not himself averse to the practice of smearing, Wright cited some of Cairns’ past associations as evidence of his alleged connection with the CPA. There was nothing new in the material. All of it had been dredged up before by the Groupers in their attempts to discredit Cairns within Yarra. Amid cries of ‘McCarthyism’ from the other side of the chamber Wright pointed to Cairns’ chairmanship of the Australian Peace Council and appearances in MULC forums with prominent communists. He also trotted out the familiar claim that Cairns was unknown in the ALP until the split when ‘Communists were given an opportunity of open prominence’.46 Wright’s speech attracted widespread press coverage and prompted heated scenes in the House of Representatives the next day. Cairns warned government members that he would not be intimidated by Wright’s allegations, nor apologise for his association with the peace movement. The ensuing debate brought forth further accusations that Cairns was linked to the CPA. The flamboyant W. C. Wentworth elaborated his theory that there was a pattern of conspiracy behind Cairns’ entry into the parliament. According to Wentworth’s version of events, Cairns first joined the ALP in 1950 following a period of involvement in the communist-controlled peace movement during the late 1940s. Then, after the suspension of the Toorak branch, he had reentered the Labor Party in 1954 when ‘a certain Mr Lovegrove, who had been a Communist and had gone through an anti-Communist interlude, became pro-Communist again and got control of the ALP’. Summing up his suspicions, Wentworth concluded: Here you have a person who was openly associated with the Communists, who suddenly finds a desire to join the ALP, gets into the ALP, becomes a member of this House, and in this House acts as a representative of the Communist party would act. . .

Fellow Victorian and veteran Labor member, Reg Pollard, rose to defend Cairns against Wentworth’s ‘innuendoes’: If the honourable member for Yarra at any time in his career stood on a public platform or amidst an assemblage of men who were advocating the cause of peace, he was only following the line of the Great Master, who said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. The motives of the people with whom the honourable member happened to be in association with at that time are of no consequence.47

Predictably, this defence drew howls of derision. In the eyes of the Cold War diehards of the conservative parties, any form of collaboration with communists was tantamount to supping with the devil. This attitude was manifest in the Menzies Government’s heavyhanded response to the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament in Melbourne in November 1959. Throughout the 1950s the Australian peace movement staged triennial national congresses. The Communist Party had dominated the congresses of 1950, 1953 and 1956, but in 1959 the organising committee was determined to draw on a broad constituency. In the words of the committee chairman, the Rev. Alf Dickie, the guiding principle was to be ‘exclusion of none, domination by none’. In the months leading up to the Congress there were strong indications that the committee’s objective would be realised. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) voted to sponsor the Congress, as did the Victorian ALP. In addition, there was extensive support from the religious, academic and scientific communities and a number of prestigious international guests accepted invitations to attend.48 Despite these promising signs, the popular press, the Anglican Church and the Returned Services League joined the government in denouncing the planned Congress. The government’s efforts to undermine the Congress went beyond issuing public criticisms. Only a matter of days before the Congress was due to commence, two of its most prominent sponsors, Professor A. K. Stout of the University of Sydney

and Sir Mark Oliphant, announced their withdrawal. Persistent questioning of the government in the House of Representatives by a handful of ALP members, including Cairns, led to an embarrassing admission by Barwick that he had sent the chief of ASIO, Colonel Spry, to interview Stout before his decision to resign as sponsor. It was also revealed that Oliphant had received a letter from the Department of External Affairs signed by the minister, Richard Casey, urging him to disassociate himself from the Congress.49 Along with several other federal Labor MPs, Cairns publicly supported the Congress. Indeed he was chairman of one of the eight major sections, the Artists’ and Writers’ Conference. As it transpired, this was the section in which greatest controversy reigned over alleged communist manipulation of proceedings. Much of the controversy surrounded the attendance of the exiled Hungarian writer, Tibor Meray, who was the guest in Melbourne of a loose alliance of non-communist Leftists, among them the former communist and editor of Overland, Stephen Murray-Smith. Essentially Mercy’s attendance was seen by his hosts as a litmus test of the democratic credentials of the peace Congress. Believing it would be impolitic for Meray to be seen in his company at the Artists’ and Writers’ Conference, Murray-Smith asked the poet and academic Vincent Buckley to escort Meray. It was a curious choice that seemed likely to heighten any potential resistance to Mercy’s presence. As editor of the Catholic journal, Prospect, Buckley had been an early and vociferous critic of the Congress.50 Even before the opening session of the conference there was a kerfuffle over whether Meray would be admitted as a guest speaker. Buckley later claimed that Cairns had backed down on a previous arrangement to grant him such status, a claim Cairns denied. Eventually, after enrolling as a delegate, Meray addressed the conference on the subject of the repression of writers in Hungary. As the last speaker of the evening, Mercy’s speech was cut short by Cairns. This action angered the writer David Martin, who accused Cairns of ‘lying in his throat’ and

being ‘dictatorial’, comments he later retracted.51 Further controversy erupted the following day over the conference’s general resolution, which blandly declared inter alia: ‘we claim freedom for every true artist to express and communicate his vision of life’. An amendment was moved by Murray-Smith to add the words: ‘We recognise that many writers in a number of countries do not yet have this freedom’. The amendment, though not containing any specific reference to the plight of writers in Hungary, was comprehensively defeated.52 These events merely reinforced the conviction of the mainstream newspapers that the peace Congress was dominated by communists. The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, reported that the proceedings of the various sections of the Congress, especially the Artists’ and Writers’ Conference, bore the ‘thumb print’ of communist influence. ‘The ALP leaders, whose main argument for attending the conference was their intention to fight the Communists, have come rather badly out of the whole affair.’ Two days later the Sydney Morning Herald published responses from Cairns and another of the federal Labor MPs who had participated in the conference, fellow Left-winger Leslie Haylen. Cairns and Haylen had returned to Canberra on parliamentary duties by the time the vote on the general resolution was taken, but they vigorously rejected the suggestion that communists had controlled proceedings at the conference. Haylen claimed that the general resolution was ‘highly representative’ of the conference delegates: ‘the majority, I would say, being strongly non-Communist’.53 Inevitably, the matter did not rest there. Over the next days the correspondence page of the Sydney Morning Herald featured a slanging match between Cairns and Buckley. Buckley fired the first shot in a letter disputing Cairns’ and Haylen’s version of events. He smugly observed that if both men had sat through the working sessions of the conference they would not be as confident that the ‘majority’ of delegates were ‘strongly non-Communist’. ‘In fact’, Buckley wrote, ‘party-liners were in

a large majority at these latter sessions, and successfully directed their attention to blocking any change’ to the final resolution. Cairns hit back, bemoaning that ‘a few people’ at the peace Congress had ‘made it their business fervently to search for traces of Communists’. He continued: ‘Another group tested the writers’ and artists’ conference by a resolution that writers lacked freedom in many countries. Some who voted against it followed the “party line”; others did so because they were heartily sick of the people mentioned’.54 Cairns was trying to defend the indefensible. Even allowing for the fact that Buckley’s account of events was coloured by his pre-existing hostility to the Congress, he was not alone in believing that communists had steam-rolled the decision-making process at the Artists’ and Writers’ Conference. The non-aligned socialist journal, Outlook, while judging the ‘net effect’ of the Congress to have been a departure from the old pattern of communist dominance of the peace movement, commented that the Artists’ and Writers’ Conference had witnessed ‘a lamentable demonstration of left wing sectarianism’.55 Cairns’ refusal to accept this verdict is perhaps best understood, if not excused, by the awkward position in which he found himself. Having become intimately associated with the Congress and having repudiated conservative predictions that it would be an instrument of communist propaganda, he found it difficult to turn around and concede that there had, indeed, been evidence of communist strong-arm tactics, albeit limited, in the broad context of the Congress. He was clearly angered, too, by what he saw as the way Buckley and others had deliberately set out to expose any hint of communist manipulation and thereby discredit the whole Congress. Ultimately, Cairns’ belief that it was wrong-headed to allow an obsession with weeding out communist influence to imperil an honest effort to nourish the forces of international peace and co-operation rested on his analysis of where power resided in Australia. As he declared in a speech made soon after the Congress:

absolute (authoritarian) Left wing movements are not a power problem (in Australia). The Communist Party and its front organisations . . . have so little power that they are not in any way part of the power structure. Compared with the power of concentrated wealth, the power of the Left wing is completely negligible.56

In other words, as manipulative and authoritarian as the CPA could be, its ability to exercise control over the minds of the Australian people was minuscule compared to the influence wielded by private capital and the political Right. The latter possessed a stranglehold on the mainstream press, which pervaded nearly all quarters of Australian society with confrontationist Cold War rhetoric and was intolerant of any dissenting viewpoint. Accordingly, Cairns believed that there was a greater imperative for those on the Left, including the Labor Party, to build and maintain broad alliances in order to combat the prevailing assumptions of the political Right, rather than worry about the exaggerated dangers of falling prey to exploitation by communists, or of being tagged as communist sympathisers. Indeed, as he warned in an article written in 1964, there was no other alternative for the ALP: It is . . . impossible for Labor to become as anti-communist as the conservatives. We are situated in the political spectrum next to the communists and they stand for many things for which we also stand. We cannot therefore oppose those things . . . we will find ourselves in the same places as communists on some occasions, doing the same things for the same ends.57

Two days after the opening of the peace Congress the Sydney Morning Herald published a letter from the Right-wing Western Australian Labor MHR Kim Beazley Snr in which he labelled the event ‘an instrument of Soviet foreign policy’. While most members of the FPLP refrained from commenting on the Congress, it is highly unlikely Beazley was alone in holding this view. The ambivalence and divergence of opinion in Labor ranks over the Congress58 was indicative not only of a deeper ideological divide within the ALP, but of the party’s inherent conservatism. Robert Murray has argued that, after hiving off its anti-

communist wing during the split of 1954–55, the ALP veered towards the Left. As it continued to languish in opposition federally, Labor did gain something of an aura of sterile doctrinaire purity. No-one was more responsible for this than the party’s federal president from 1955 to 1961, and federal secretary from 1961 to 1963, F E. Chamberlain. As Graham Freudenberg observes, Chamberlain emerged from the split ‘as both the sea-green incorruptible and the grey eminence of the Labor movement’. Chamberlain used his dominant position within the Labor organisation to uphold the integrity of the party line which, in his terms, included an ongoing commitment to a socialist objective, opposition to state aid to non-government schools and support for the White Australia Policy. It also meant tolerance of unity tickets with the communists in trade union elections and an implacable hostility to any suggestion of a rapprochement with the DLP.59 In spite of Chamberlain’s efforts to enforce his particular brand of militancy upon the ALP during the post-split years, the idea that the party drifted substantially to the Left in this period is questionable. With the exception of the Victorian branch, where the purge of the Right had been comprehensive, the other State party organisations mostly remained under the control of moderates. In fact, the entrenched hegemony enjoyed by the Right wing in the powerful New South Wales branch made up for the Leftist influence of the Victorian party. 60 The FPLP was also largely moderate or conservative in composition. Between the elections of December 1955 and December 1961, which saw an influx of new ALP federal parliamentarians, only a few members were usually identified with the Left. Besides Cairns, there was the veteran firebrand and longserving member for East Sydney, Eddie Ward. Also from New South Wales were the former journalist and writer Leslie Haylen and, after the 1958 election, the representative for Reid, Tom Uren. The only others commonly described as belonging to the Left were Reg Pollard and his fellow Victorian, Gordon Bryant; Clyde Cameron from South Australia; and the Tasmanian Senator Justin O’Byrne. The Left, loosely defined as it

was, constituted little more than a small enclave in the federal Caucus. In a party dominated by the Right, Cairns was from the beginning an outsider. Frank Crean, the Labor MHR for Melbourne Ports, who was himself sometimes grouped with the Left principally because he came from Victoria, recalls that a significant section of the Caucus, especially a phalanx of Right-wing Catholics from New South Wales, regarded Cairns as being ‘near enough to being a communist’. Fred Daly, one of those mentioned by Crean, agreed that Cairns was profoundly distrusted by the Right: ‘Cairns was ostracised for no other reason than his views’. In a party room riven by ideological and personal animosities, many of them a hangover from the split, Daly saw Cairns as an oddity. Whereas there was usually scant communication, let alone co-operation, between members on opposite wings of the party, Daly found Cairns to be unaffected by the prevailing ‘us against them’ mentality: [he] was a strange fellow. . . He could differ with you on anything, but if you went along to him and said ‘Look Jim, could you tell me what the national debt has been for the past forty years?’, he’d sit down and work it out for you. He was a man you could talk to . . . [Normally] if I didn’t agree with you I didn’t want to know you. I certainly wouldn’t work out bloody figures for you.61

Even among his Left-wing colleagues Cairns remained somewhat isolated. In his first term in parliament Reg Pollard was the only one from the Left with whom he formed a strong friendship. His relationship with the bellicose Eddie Ward, while not unfriendly, was never dose. Ward, though capable of enormous loyalty and generosity to his circle of followers, was also jealously protective of his status as the most senior member of the Left within the FPLP. An archetypal old-style workingclass Labor politician, he was scornful of the new breed of universityeducated professionals who were slowly entering ALP ranks. These two factors combined to create a distance between Ward and Cairns. When Cairns contested a position on the FPLP Executive for the first time in February 1959, Ward blocked his bid. Tom Uren contends he ‘saw Cairns

as a threat to his own pre-eminence on the Left’. A year later, when the Caucus met to choose a new leadership team following the resignation of Evatt, Cairns turned the tables on Ward by voting against him in the ballot for the deputy’s post. Instead Cairns supported Gough Whitlam, who narrowly defeated Ward.62 Two years younger than Cairns, Whitlam entered the House of Representatives in 1952 at a by-election for the New South Wales seat of Werriwa. Like Cairns, he personified the youthful, educated breed of Labor politician that gradually rose to prominence in the post-split era. Unlike Cairns, however, Whitlam had grown up on the right side of the tracks. The eldest child of a senior Commonwealth public servant, Whitlam sprang from a relatively privileged middle-class family. Upon completing his schooling at Canberra Grammar he studied Arts-Law at the University of Sydney and successfully practised as a barrister. 63 Whitlam’s comfortable upbringing had insulated him from the traumatic experiences of the capitalist system that had so affected the young Cairns. This crucial difference is a starting point in appreciating their conflicting ideological directions. Whitlam was never an outsider. He did not carry any baggage of alienation from, and grievance with, the established social order. Thus, the idea of compromise and accommodation with that social order never evoked in him the same abhorrence as it did in Cairns. Cairns’ decision to vote for Whitlam in the contest for deputy leader was ironic. Within a few years Whitlam had commenced a drive to modernise Labor’s organisational structure and policy agenda, and it became plain that they were fundamentally ideologically opposed. While Whitlam spearheaded the transformation of Labor into a modern social democratic party, Cairns, at least up until the late 1960s, remained committed to traditional democratic socialist practice. Moreover, by the mid-1960s Cairns had emerged as Whitlam’s chief rival for the leadership of the FPLP. The irony is greater still when one considers that Cairns supported Whitlam in 1960 largely because he represented the modern face of the party. In other words, it was a decision motivated by

generational, rather than strict ideological or factional, considerations. Cairns believed that Ward’s brand of politics with its narrow focus on ‘wages and pensions and attacking the bosses’ was not only too negative, but tied to the past. Whitlam, by contrast, shared Cairns’ interest in foreign policy and issues such as education. As well, Whitlam, like Cairns, was free of many of the traditional Labor prejudices; most notably he was an ardent opponent of the White Australia Policy.64 Amid the complex ideological and generational configurations in the Labor party room of that time, Cairns was akin to Janus—he looked both forward and back. On the one hand, he was a traditionalist in respect to upholding the party’s democratic socialist ideals, but he was far removed from the old guard of the party on social issues like White Australia. For Cairns there was no inconsistency in straddling these positions. He applied a similar standard in these cases. The maintenance of the White Australia Policy could not be justified on humanitarian or social justice grounds, and for similar reasons Labor should not turn away from a commitment to extensive social control of the economy. Not that this made it any less invidious for him in the party room. He was at home with neither the Whitlam-style modernists nor the old guard, and all the while anathema to the residue of anti-communists. The election of Tom Uren to the House of Representatives in 1958 provided Cairns with another ally in Caucus. Although opposites in temperament, the two men developed one of the closest partnerships ever witnessed in federal politics. Born in the working-class Sydney suburb of Balmain, Uren had been brought up in the school of hard knocks. His father had an erratic employment record and his mother worked in a bar to make ends meet. In 1934, at the age of thirteen, Uren left school to supplement the family income. As a young man he was a champion sportsman, fighting for the Australian heavyweight boxing title. When World War II broke out, Uren enlisted in the army; in February 1942, while based in Timor, his unit surrendered to the advancing Japanese forces. He spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war,

including eighteen months working on the notorious Burma–Thailand railway. Uren was deeply affected by his experience of the primitive collectivism practised by the Australian POWs, which enabled him and many of the others to survive their ordeal. He was driven thereafter by the simple philosophy of the ‘fit looking after the sick, the young looking after the old, and the strong looking after the weak’.65 Though he shared Cairns’ vision of a co-operative and humane society, his commitment to radical politics boasted few of the intellectual trappings that distinguished Cairns within the Labor Left. An emotional and passionate man, Uren was instinctive and visceral in his socialist convictions. At the same time, his emotionalism was combined with a strong practical streak and a capacity for hard-headedness and ruthlessness in the political arena. Whereas Cairns tended to remain aloof from Labor party room infighting, Uren was never reluctant to enter the fray. His talents as a political pugilist and Left-wing numbers man made Uren an invaluable ally for Cairns. In his autobiography Uren writes that he and Cairns ‘built a rapport from the first day we met’. The two men shared a cramped office at Parliament House and when parliament was in session both stayed at the nearby Kurrajong Hotel. They quickly slipped into a pattern that was to endure for over a decade. They would walk to and from Parliament House together, ruminating on events. Uren’s loyalty to Cairns was based on a mixture of genuine affection and admiration, and shrewd political calculation. As Ormonde notes, he was convinced that Cairns had qualities which not only made him an ideal standard bearer for the Labor Left, but potentially a great Australian radical leader. In fact, there is a messianic tone to Uren’s descriptions of Cairns over the years. In an interview with Ormonde in 1974, for example, he declared that Cairns ‘should be the Lenin of the Labor Party’ and claimed he was the ‘most Christ-like man I’ve ever met in my life’.66 Two years earlier, in an extraordinary statement to the House of Representatives, Uren gave voice to the depth of his feelings and devotion to Cairns:

In all my public life, during my Army service or at any other time I have never known a man like the honourable member for Lalor [Cairns]. He is the most honest, democratic, sincere and capable man that I have ever known. If there is any man for whom I would give my life it is the honorable member for Lalor.

Not surprisingly, there were some in the FPLP who thought Uren’s tireless promotion of Cairns occasionally counterproductive. In December 1966 when Cairns was preparing for his first run at the Labor leadership, Reg Pollard counselled Uren that his ‘justifiable hero worship of Jim may unless you are careful do him real harm. . . some people resent it’.67 Despite his admiration of Cairns, Uren perceived some serious weaknesses in his friend. Politically the most disabling of these flaws, he considered, was Cairns’ lack of a hard edge. In October 1974, shortly before a reluctant Cairns accepted the position of Treasurer in the Whitlam Government, partly at his insistence, Uren told Ormonde: ‘Cairns is basically a gullible man. He likes being liked . . . He’s not tough enough. He accepts people on face value. He is far too gentle . . . He is never good in party struggles; he is always too nice to the other person.’68 Hence, a vital part of Uren’s self-appointed role as Cairns’ champion was the need to protect him from his unworldliness and, where necessary, steel him to follow the path that would best advance his career and, just as importantly, the interests of the Labor Left. The other major weakness Uren detected in Cairns was of a more personal nature: ‘There is an old saying that no man is an island, but I think Jim was an exception . . . He didn’t really need other people’. It was a trait that lent the two men’s friendship a lop-sided quality. Ormonde points out that the cultivation and resilience of their relationship was almost exclusively dependent on Uren. Others, too, sensed that it was not entirely a friendship of equals. Clyde Holding has compared it to a teacher-pupil relationship. Cairns’ reticence in speaking about the friendship has also been revealing. He would confirm its existence but, in sharp contrast to Uren’s effusiveness, was reluctant to go any further. It was as if his self-

reliance and emotional reserve prevented him from acknowledging the strength of the bond he has shared with Uren.69 Bill Hayden was one of the few others with whom Cairns established a firm friendship during his parliamentary career. The parallels in their respective backgrounds were an obvious factor in their mutual attraction. Hayden was born in Brisbane during the Great Depression. His father was a casualty of the economic crisis, losing a small musical instrument and repair business. According to Hayden’s memoirs, his father never recovered. For the rest of his life he struggled to eke out a living as a door-to-door piano tuner and drank heavily to dull his pain. Hayden left school at age sixteen to work as a junior clerk in the State public service. Four years later, bored by the tedious nature of his duties and keen to find a job that would pay more, he joined the Queensland Police. Hayden, like Cairns, at first enjoyed life as a police officer, but gradually became disenchanted, convinced that he was stagnating both professionally and intellectually. In addition, as his biographer John Stubbs writes, Hayden ‘increasingly believed there needed to be political rather than policing solutions’ to the social problems he encountered on his beat. As Cairns had, Hayden sought refuge from the frustrations of his job by taking up part-time study. At the end of 1960 he gained his matriculation with the ambition of enrolling at university to study law. That plan, however, was put on hold in 1961 while Hayden concentrated his efforts on his successful campaign to win the seat of Oxley.70 Hayden’s first encounter with Cairns pre-dated his election to the House of Representatives. In 1961 he attended a public meeting in Brisbane at which Cairns spoke against the White Australia Policy. Much later, Hayden recalled it as an inspiring moment: watching Cairns trying to ‘push the clock forward’.71 The meeting set the tone for the two men’s initial relationship; Cairns was a mentor and, as Stubbs observes, early political hero to Hayden. It is something Hayden does not disguise while at the same time expressing some regret: ‘I esteemed him [Cairns]

greatly; too much so in those early years for I sometimes allowed his views to over-ride mine’. In his first years in the parliament Hayden was regarded as being factionally and ideologically aligned with Cairns and Uren. He also regarded himself as a dedicated democratic socialist. This was another thing he came to lament and gradually retreated from.72 In August 1960 Cairns made a second, and this time successful, bid to be elected to the FPLP Executive, filling a vacancy created by the death of the Member for Bendigo, Percy Clarey. 73 This elevation to Labor’s shadow Cabinet suggested that, notwithstanding his relative isolation in Caucus and the unease caused by his unconventional approach to many issues, the party recognised Cairns’ ability and potential. Another indication of his growing stature within the FPLP had come in April, when Caucus met to finalise the party’s position on a resolution before the House concerning an incident in the South African township of Sharpeville in which police had opened fire on a crowd of African demonstrators. Amid an international outcry, Prime Minister Menzies deplored the loss of lives and welcomed the South African government’s announcement of an official investigation. He stopped short, however, of any criticism of the South African regime and reiterated the principle upon which his government had consistently baulked at taking a strong stand against South Africa’s apartheid system —that of non-interference in matters within the domestic jurisdiction of another government.74 Shortly after the release of Menzies’ statement, Calwell introduced a motion into the parliament declaring outrage at the shootings and censuring the Australian government for its pusillanimous attitude to South Africa’s apartheid policy and reaction to the Sharpeville massacre. Menzies moved an amendment which stated, inter alia, that the House was distressed that such events should have occurred in a member country of the Commonwealth of Nations; expresses its sympathy with those who have suffered;

profoundly hopes that order may be re-established as soon as possible; and earnestly hopes that the adjustment of all disputes and differences will be achieved by orderly and lawful processes for the common benefit of the people of South Africa.

Labor now faced a dilemma. The FPLP Executive recommended to a meeting of Caucus that Menzies’ amendment be supported: not only was it certain to be passed on party lines, but it went further in its criticism of the South African regime than the government had been prepared to go previously. Cairns and others, however, insisted that support should be withheld unless the amendment was strengthened. Finally, after what was described as an impassioned appeal by Cairns, Caucus voted by the narrowest of margins to adopt the second course of action. 75 In the House Cairns led the ALP’s attack, labelling the amendment ‘timid and useless’. He warned the government that it was being isolated internationally by its attitude to apartheid and appealed for Australia to support proposals for a trade boycott of South Africa. His suggestion was received with scorn by the Acting Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, who asserted that the only beneficiaries of a trade boycott would be those ‘who want to subvert the economy of the country in order to throw it into complete disorder such as would make a climate suitable for Communist subversion’.76 If Cairns’ election to the FPLP executive and successful intervention in the Caucus debate on the Sharpeville shootings were measures of the growing confidence with which his colleagues regarded him, then the events of 1961 showed that confidence was still britde. In the second half of 1960 Cairns was approached to become a panel member on a new weekly Sydney television program, Talking Point. The program was hosted by a former British Conservative parliamentarian and editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Angus Maude, and other panel members were Liberal MP Allen Fairhall, economist E. L Wheelwright, and Sydney businessman John Broinowski. Fairhall soon relinquished his position on the panel, but Cairns remained a regular participant throughout the twelve months or more of the program. As Cairns later observed, his

appearances on Talking Point probably raised his public profile more than anything else he did during his first years as a member of parliament.77 His comments frequently attracted press attention, as well as landing him in hot water on more than one occasion. On Talking Point in January 1961 Cairns once more publicly defied Labor’s position on Asian immigration by labelling the White Australia Policy absurd. Three months later he weighed into the contentious matter of unity tickets in trade union elections. The practice of grouping ALP and Communist Party members in mutual support on trade union how-tovote cards was a divisive issue within the Labor Party. ALP policy was officially against the practice, but in Victoria it was generally tolerated. On the other hand, the New South Wales Executive, controlled by the Right wing, vehemently opposed unity tickets. Cairns, therefore, did not endear himself to the New South Wales ALP by questioning the issue’s importance and asserting that it was up to the labour movement to sort out its own position on unity tickets. The ire of the New South Wales party and conservative members of the FPLP was further raised in May when on Talking Point Cairns defended the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, describing him as a ‘democratic socialist’ and declaring that Cuba had ‘undergone a democratic socialist revolution’. Uren also fanned the flames by endorsing Cairns’ remarks in a speech to the parliament.78 These comments generated particular hostility because of what had occurred at a meeting of the federal Caucus three weeks earlier. Only days after news arrived in Australia of the launch of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Cairns moved a motion within the party room urging UN action, condemning the invasion and implicitly supporting the Castro regime. Right-wing members of Caucus were appalled. Kim Beazley Snr moved a four-point amendment that called on the United Nations to enforce a cease-fire in Cuba and supervise democratic elections in the country. After heated debate the original motion was defeated and Beazley’s amendment was carried by an overwhelming

majority.79 In the light of this decision, the statements by Cairns and Uren in support of Castro were provocative. So incensed were some on the Right that they tried to censure Cairns and Uren at a party-room meeting on 17 May. In the end Calwell refused to rebuke either Cairns or Uren, though he did tell Caucus that their comments ‘were not helping the party’. Meanwhile, the New South Wales Labor Executive, stung by Cairns’ outspokenness on Talking Point , passed a resolution warning members not to make statements on television or radio in conflict with official policy. Aware that Cairns, as a Victorian, was not bound by such a resolution, it also asked the Federal Executive to take similar action.80 The backlash created by Cairns’ expressions of support for Castro undoubtedly played a part in his relegation to the backbench when Caucus met to re-elect the FPLP Executive after the December 1961 federal poll.81 Labor had gone within a whisker of pulling off an unlikely victory in that poll as the electorate vented its dissatisfaction with the conservative coalition’s clumsy management of the economy since the previous election. In 1960, faced with a developing balance of payments problem and spiralling inflation, the government had severely tightened fiscal and monetary policy. The resulting credit squeeze led to a downturn in economic activity, and unemployment climbed to a post-war high of over 100 000. The influx of new members that accompanied Labor’s improved performance at the polls damaged Cairns’ chances of retaining his position on the Executive. Hayden later told Ormonde that ‘many of these new people (over half of whom came from Queensland) had come into Caucus with stereotyped pictures of him’. In addition, some of the older, established members of the FPLP resented the exposure Cairns had enjoyed as a result of Talking Point.82 Characteristically, Cairns hid any bitterness he felt at his dumping from the Executive. In July the following year, Alan Reid, the doyen of the Canberra press gallery, wrote of his response to the demotion: There were no recriminations, complaints, nothing. Calmly, his good-looking face

unruffled, he picked up his papers, took his seat on the benches immediately behind the front bench on which the Executive sits . . . and went on with his job as though he had not suffered a heavy setback. He sits and ‘takes it’, without complaint, his arms folded and his face inscrutable.

Reid’s profile of Cairns was the most comprehensive and incisive since his arrival in Canberra. Reid was fascinated and puzzled by Cairns, labelling him the ‘No. 1 enigma’ of Australian politics. He confirmed that ‘a real hate of Cairns’ existed among a section of the government and ‘some individuals on the Labor side’. To his enemies, Reid observed: [Cairns] is ‘a cold fish’, chill, withdrawn and dedicated. They do not merely dislike him, they are rather frightened of him and of what they consider to be his bleak, passionless determination to enforce upon the Labor Party and the Australian community the political viewpoint for which he stands. . .

Reid suggested that this ‘cold fish’ image was just part of the mystery. Anticipating a recurring theme in future profiles of Cairns, he sensed that underneath the surface calm was: a man of considerable passion and intensity who keeps the passion and intensity under iron control, a man who is . . . lonely politically but who prefers to endure loneliness because of his belief in his need to maintain a disciplined control over himself if he is to achieve his goals.83

Reid’s profile of Cairns appeared at a time when the Labor Party was reeling from another damaging policy wrangle. The source of the dispute was the government’s approval in mid-1962 of a request from the US Administration to construct a naval communications station at Northwest Cape in Western Australia. The base, which was primarily designed to relay messages to US submarines carrying nuclear missiles, was regarded as anathema by Cairns and other members of the ALP Left. Cairns was especially disturbed that the base would drag Australia into the ‘nuclear web’, as well as intolerably infringing Australia’s national sovereignty.84 A special Federal Conference in March 1963 narrowly voted to

accede to the appeals of the FPLP leadership team of Calwell and Whitlam to support the facility’s establishment, albeit on conditions essentially requiring joint Australian-American control. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Menzies skilfully exploited the closeness of the decision and claimed that the conditions imposed by the Conference would jeopardise construction of the base. Most destructive, though, was his barb that Labor’s policy had been determined not by the FPLP, but ‘by the decisions of thirty-six people forming the ALP conference, not elected by the people of Australia, and in no sense responsible to them’. This image, that Labor was controlled by ‘thirty-six faceless men’, was used by Menzies to devastating effect in an early election he sprang in November to capitalise on an improved economic climate, and to take advantage of Labor’s turmoil over the North-West Cape installation and the issue of state aid to non-government schools.85 For Labor the results of the 1963 election were shattering; much of the ground it had made up in 1961 was lost. Out of office now for fourteen years, the party seemed incapable of convincing the Australian people that it represented a credible alternative government. Its grassroots membership was dwindling; its financial position was precarious; its organisational structure was archaic and unwieldy; and it continued to suffer from frequent and damaging bouts of internal discord. Above all, the ALP appeared to have run out of ideological steam. The old-style labourist politics that had sustained the party for the greater part of the twentieth century was fast losing relevance as mainstream Australia enjoyed the fruits of prolonged economic prosperity. The archetypal Labor voter, the male blue-collar trade unionist, was a diminishing breed as the professional and technical workforce expanded. In the privatised and home-centred world of the sprawling suburbs any residual sense of class solidarity was gradually being eroded. While the great social movements of the late 1960s had not yet taken shape, the aspirations of Australians were changing. This was especially true of the younger generations who had grown up in the post-war era of full

employment and relative abundance. They had no experience of the deprivations that their parents’ generation had endured during the Great Depression, which had indelibly shaped the political outlook of so many of the elderly men who dominated the ranks of the ALP. To the young, the Labor Party’s tradition of working-class struggle seemed passé.86 Shortly after the opening of the 25th federal parliament in early 1964, Cairns drew a sarcastic comparison between Menzies and the British pop group, the Beatles: Just as the Beatles have an exultant audience, the Prime Minister may have had one on the other side of the House, and he may even have a popular appeal to the voters outside. . . the Government has never been prepared to risk losing votes. This he will not do. So he remains as popular as the Beatles and just about as fundamental.

Cairns went on to complain about the failure of Australia’s political parties to develop a national plan or establish national priorities. He attributed this failure to the fact that elections were ‘conducted as a popularity contest. We try to outbid one another in promising most to everybody. Beatlemania has got us all.’ 87 Although tinged with frustration at Labor’s continued banishment to Opposition, the comments were consistent with the position he had taken since his election to parliament. According to Cairns, politics was not merely a contest for winning power. Nor was it about tailoring policies to garner electoral support. Rather Cairns retained his faith that politics was essentially about the pursuit of ideals, irrespective of their fashionability. Cairns’ response to Labor’s 1963 election defeat was the antithesis of Whitlam’s. Two decades later Whitlam reflected: The reverses which we suffered in the 1963 election . . . convinced me that the Party was providing an inadequate alternative to the policies of the Menzies Government. New and attractive policy programs, meeting the aspirations of both the Party and electorate, had to be developed if the Party was to regain government.88

Whitlam’s determination to revamp Labor’s policy agenda and

organisational structure, and his unshakeable belief that he was the person to lead the ALP out of the wilderness, were telegraphed in a report he prepared for the New South Wales Executive on the party’s poor showing in the 1963 poll. The report spared no one; it censured both the parliamentary and organisational wings. But the ambitious deputy also specifically criticised the leadership of the ageing Calwell. The report, and Calwell’s scornful rejection of Whitlam’s suggestion that he stand down before the next election, precipitated a drastic deterioration in the two men’s relationship. 89 Their falling out became public knowledge in April 1964, when Whitlam’s election report was leaked to the press. Another indication of the leadership tensions came in July with Calwell’s shock decision to join the Victorian ALP Executive. The decision was generally analysed as an attempt by Calwell to shore up support within the party’s Left wing in order to stave off any challenge from his deputy.90 In the context of growing speculation about a leadership struggle within the FPLP, suggestions emerged in the press that Cairns might be an alternative to Whitlam as Calwell’s successor. It was even contended that Calwell, desperate to stymie Whitlam, was promoting the claims of Cairns. Alan Reid reported in the Sunday Telegraph that, spurred on by ‘an almost irrational dislike for Mr Whitlam’, Calwell ‘has now made it clear that Mr Cairns is the one he would like to see take up the crown of Labor leadership when he ultimately has to lay it down or has it wrenched from his grasp by a younger generation’. The idea that Cairns could one day lead the ALP filled Reid with gloom. For Labor, it would be the equivalent of jumping from the flying pan to the fire—Cairns’ Leftist sympathies rendered him ‘a worse political liability if he ever becomes leader than Mr Calwell or the former Labor Leader Dr Evatt’.91 Reid’s gloom was matched by Cairns’ pessimistic assessment of his leadership prospects. In an interview with the Melbourne Truth in May he insisted that his radical views were likely to disqualify him from ever

being party leader: ‘I have never thought it likely that I will be elected leader. Look through the history books and you will see that no one far to the left or the right has ever made it. You sometimes have to pay a price for your convictions.’92 It is easy to dismiss this statement as part of the normal political artifice whereby leadership hopefuls disavow their aspirations. Yet perhaps Cairns was an exception. Future events were to show that he suffered from squeamishness when the leadership prize beckoned. It was a trait that again betrayed an ambivalence about power, and distinguished him from the nakedly ambitious Whitlam. The leadership speculation about Cairns, however, underlined the fact that his political star was on the rise again. In February 1964 he had regained his place on the FPLP Executive. Two months later he was elected to Labor’s Caucus Foreign Affairs Committee. 93 Cairns was also back in the public spotlight as a result of his dogged pursuit of the government over its tolerance of the activities of extremist Right-wing Croatian nationalists. The thousands of displaced Yugoslavs who emigrated to Australia at the end of World War II included supporters of the Croatian puppet regime that had been established in April 1942 with the support of the invading Nazi forces. Headed by Ante Pavelic, the regime was responsible for the brutal repression and killings of Serbs, Jews and gypsies. After the war Pavelic and many of his key supporters escaped to Latin America and elsewhere. Using the title Ustasha (‘insurgents’), they organised a world-wide emigre movement dedicated to the creation of an independent Croatian nation and the overthrow of the communist state of Yugoslavia. In September 1963 Ustasha’s activities in Australia were uncloaked when Yugoslav authorities announced that nine Croatian exiles had been arrested after entering Yugoslavia illegally with the intention of carrying out terrorist activities. Two of the men were naturalised Australians, and it was alleged that all nine had been recruited in Australia.94 Soon after these revelations, Cairns made a detailed speech in the

House outlining the history and activities of Ustasha in Australia and calling for a government investigation of the movement. Before parliament rose for the 1963 election, he also placed a 21-part question on notice seeking full disclosure of Ustasha’s background and activities.95 When the question still remained unanswered in early May— around the same time that a Croatian migrant lost both of his legs when a bomb he was carrying exploded in a busy Sydney street—Cairns directed a question without notice to Menzies on the matter. The Prime Minister referred the issue to the newly appointed Attorney-General, Bill Snedden, who alleged in question time the next day that Cairns had shared a platform with a well-known communist at a meeting called to oppose Ustasha. Later, in an adjournment debate, Cairns accused Snedden of ‘putting out a smokescreen’ and demanded he withdraw his ‘slimy insinuations’. In the ensuing uproar Cairns was suspended from the House of Representatives, only to be readmitted later the same day when Snedden was forced to concede that his allegation was inaccurate. On 27 August Menzies finally responded to Cairns’ question with a statement that the historian David McKnight has described as ‘a masterpiece of evasion, legalism and special pleading’. Cairns condemned the government for ‘continuing to shield’ Ustasha from any serious scrutiny.96 The campaign against Ustasha was not without cost for Cairns and his family. Soon after first raising the matter in parliament, Cairns began receiving death threats. Many of the threats were directed to the family home in Hawthorn. His stand on Ustasha was the catalyst, too, for bitter attacks by his more extreme political enemies. W. C. Wentworth, in particular, construed Cairns’ opposition to the movement as yet further evidence that he was a fellow traveller.97 Cairns gained additional prominence in the second half of 1964 by agreeing to sponsor the Australian Congress of International Cooperation and Disarmament, scheduled to be held in Sydney in the final week of

October. As in 1959, the Menzies Government portrayed the Congress as a communist front. In a transparent attempt to embarrass the ALP, the coalition parties initiated a debate in the House on the Congress less than a week before it began. The strategy paid dividends, with the debate exposing a rift in Labor ranks. Whitlam, who was the party’s first speaker, delivered what the Australian reported as a ‘skilful but embarrassed speech on the congress’. His discomfort was not lost on Menzies, who teased Whitlam by offering to lay odds that he would not be at the Congress ‘because he will realise that self-preservation is the first law of life’. By contrast Cairns unequivocally supported the Congress. His response to a government member’s interjection, ‘Are you going to it?’, was swift and definite: ‘Of course I am’.98 A few days later the political correspondent of the Australian, Brian Johns, wrote a lengthy article on Labor’s struggle for unity. Pointing to their respective contributions to the parliamentary debate on the peace Congress, Johns observed: ‘Dr Cairns and Mr Whitlam represent polar forces in the Labor Party’.99 This view that the two men embodied conflicting ideological streams within the ALP gained currency as the 1960s progressed. The divide was characterised not merely in terms of a Left-wing versus Right-wing dichotomy, but as indicative also of a battle within the party between traditionalist and modernist forces.1 The logic underpinning Whitlam’s push to modernise Labor’s policy framework and organisational structure was to make the party electorally viable. He was determined to see the ALP jettison unpopular longstanding shibboleths, among them its opposition to state aid for nongovernment schools, and insisted that it take a strong stand against the damaging practice of unity tickets in trade union elections. Whitlam also set out, as he later explained, ‘to ensure that foreign policy issues were no longer turned to the ALP’S disadvantage’. 2 In practical terms, this meant shaping policy to remove any suggestion that the party was isolationist or anti-American. Another crucial part of Whitlam’s

modernist agenda was to secure representation of the leadership of the FPLP within the top councils of the party—the Federal Executive and Federal Conference. The purpose of this reform was to give the parliamentary wing of the party greater influence in the formulation of policy and to remove the ‘faceless men’ stigma. The pragmatism that informed Whitlam’s crusade to refurbish Labor’s policy agenda and organisational structure was also evident in his broader goal to transform the ALP into a modern social democratic party. According to Graham Freudenberg, Whitlam’s fundamental objective was ‘to find a definition of democratic socialism which could be translated into practical action’.3 In one sense this is undeniable: Whitlam sought to chart for the party the most feasible and relevant path by which it could deliver on Labor’s historical democratic socialist vision to build a just and humane society. Yet it is equally true that Whitlam wanted Labor to turn its back on the traditional democratic socialist practice of nationalisation. In its place he aimed to promote a social democratic strategy, centring on government intervention to promote equality of opportunity for all citizens within the broad framework of a mixed capitalist economy. In his quest to wrench Labor away from what he believed was the anachronistic and untenable strategy of nationalisation,4 Whitlam placed most faith on the idea that the state could draw upon the growing resources of the economy to meet the emerging needs in the areas of education, health, welfare and urban planning. In doing so, Whitlam placed himself squarely in the revisionist stream in post-war social democratic and democratic socialist thought. He accepted the essential premise that, courtesy of Keynesian economic management and the welfare state, post-war capitalism had had its teeth pulled. Rather than interfere with the basic structure of the economy through a program of nationalisation, Labor should focus on finding the most efficient and equitable way to redistribute economic prosperity within the capitalist system. Whitlam conceded as much when he declared in his 1961 Curtin

Memorial Lecture: ‘Socialists are now more concerned with the creation of opportunities than the imposition of restraints. Within our own nation we do not have to ration scarcity but plan abundance.’5 For Whitlam, the fundamental objective of an expanding public sector was not economic equality per se, but rather to encourage equality of opportunity within society. As both Freudenberg and Whitlam’s biographer, James Walter, point out, the precept of equality of opportunity, which boasted a heritage stretching back to nineteenthcentury British ‘social’ liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green, represented the keystone of Whitlam’s political philosophy. In a 1975 speech Whitlam told his audience: This concept of equality—what I call positive equality—does not have as its goal equality of personal income. Its goal is greater equality of the services which the community provides. This approach not merely accepts the pluralistic nature of our system, with the private sector continuing to play the greater part in providing employment and growth; it positively requires private affluence to prevent public squalor.6

That is, Whitlam’s vision assumed that the private marketplace would remain the hub of the economy. It also assumed optimistically that postwar prosperity would continue to flow largely uninterrupted, enabling the state to continue to milk the capitalist economy in order to advance the achievement of social equality. As it turned out, that optimism was misplaced. The great dilemma his government was to face in 1974–75 was the drying up of the economic growth upon which its ambitious reform agenda had been predicated. To Labor traditionalists like Cairns, the other great weakness in Whitlam’s revisionism was that, by effectively side-stepping any challenge to the dominance of private capital, it stopped short of confronting the fundamental cause of the unequal distribution of wealth and power in society. In 1963 the Victorian Fabian Society published an essay by Cairns entitled Socialism and the ALP. The essay revisited many

of the themes Cairns had explored in his PhD thesis several years earlier and in other articles he had written since.7 It resonated with a characteristic sense of moral indignation at the degenerative values of capitalism, but less familiar was the whiff of moral determinism: It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the history of man . . . shows a purpose, a groping, a drive towards a better life. How else could all the evolutionary stages have been overcome? How else could the primeval swamps and jungles, the fires, storms and wars; the cruelties of man to man, the poverty, isolation, and neglect have been overcome? This evolution is certainly not without a direction. It moves logically as though it has a destination. And that destination is not of man divided into races, nations, parties or groups; it is man in one, men in unity.8

In the context of Australian society Cairns continued to see the ALP as the principal agent of this Promethean struggle for social progress. It was the party which nourished the ideal that there can be unity only in conditions of co-operation, friendship and love. This is the philosophical background of the Australian Labor Party . . . Contrasted to this is another view which sees man’s disunity and future in individual terms. In this view the human essence is to be found within the individual, but in the Labor view the human essence is in relations between men.

According to Cairns, the ALP recognised that the primary factor ‘which militates against inevitable unity among all men . . . arises, in Australia significantly from the economic system and from the social organisation that follows from it’. The essential feature of the economic order that created disunity lay ‘in the system of “private” property’.9 Therefore Labor’s mission—its moral quest—was to challenge the dominance of private capital. Given that revolution was not feasible in Australia, or indeed ‘in any advanced capitalist country’, the most effective weapon of challenge was parliament. The real meaning of parliament, Cairns insisted, must be recognised. They are still depicted to us, very much as what they still are: the formal pageants and rituals of an age long since dead. But in fact they are the most

significant means to power that the ordinary citizen possesses and they are the greatest substance of power to achieve community and national purposes that we possess.

In the latter stages of the essay Cairns endeavoured to give practical expression to how the ALP would go about its assault on the entrenched power of private capital, and here his denial of the revisionist argument became most stark. He outlined a blueprint for intervention in the economy. The centre-piece was a national economic plan that would incorporate the major private corporations and the public sector of the economy. This would be designed to ensure that vital social areas like education, housing and community services were given top priority instead of allowing ‘scarce resources to be attracted according to the degree of private economic power that exists, leaving the already rich and powerful to get more and the needy to fall further behind’.10 In setting out to interfere with the prerogatives of capital, Cairns knew that Labor would encounter fierce resistance. He was well aware, moreover, that there were many in the party who were prepared to retreat in the face of that resistance to a position of being satisfied with ‘little differences’: They would say that if Labor proposes to make more than a “litde difference” we will never be elected’. Symptomatic of this outlook were ‘Progressive conservatives like Crosland [who] argue that planning and its benefits can be secured without interference with ownership’. Yet Cairns maintained that such a strategy was ill-conceived, not only ‘on the ground that Labor must seek to change the irrational, hedonistic society into a better one’, but also because ‘there is the simple question of getting things done—the pure question of power’. To illustrate his point, Cairns quoted Aneurin Bevan: In practice it is impossible for the modem State to maintain an independent control over the decisions of big business. When the State extends its control over big business, big business moves in to control the State. The political decisions of the State become so important a part of the business transactions of the combines that it is a law of their survival that these decisions shall suit the needs of profit making. The State ceases to be the umpire. It becomes the prize.

In other words, the argument of the revisionists that nationalisation of private industry was no longer essential was illusory: it rested on a view of modern capitalism that was too benign. Private capital would never stand by idly and permit sufficient government interference with its activities to achieve the degree of regulation and planning necessary to deliver truly on the socialist goal of social equality. Faced with this reality Labor’s choice was clear: ‘[it] must come down on the side of public control’.11 Conversely, Whitlam and his fellow revisionists in the ALP were adamant that it was traditionalists such as Cairns who were deluding both themselves and their supporters. They were burying their heads in the sand by defiantly defending a policy of socialisation that was not only constitutionally implausible, but also, more importantly, alien to an increasingly affluent and diverse society. By renovating Labor’s ideology, Whitlam clearly hoped to supplement the party’s shrinking traditional working-class base by building a more pluralistic supporter base. The social democratic strategy of improved service provision seemed well suited to this task. By this means Labor could reach out to the young families in the expanding outer suburbs, as well as cater to the needs of oppressed groups previously ignored by the party, including migrants and women. Yet as a strategy it also carried an inherent risk. It suggested a retreat from a class-based analysis of society and appeared to assume that class inequalities were becoming less important as a result of post-war abundance. As was implicit in his critique of the revisionist position, Cairns regarded this latter assumption as a fiction. Class inequalities were not dissolving, nor would they as long as the structural economic inequalities endemic to capitalism were allowed to persist. I n Socialism and the ALP Cairns conceded that formidable barriers lay in the path to a substantial extension of collective ownership of industry.12 That he did not see those barriers as sufficient reason for Labor to do away with its socialisation policy reflected the most

fundamental difference in political style between him and Whitlam. Underlying the traditional/modernist ideological schism between the two men was a more basic divide. Whitlam was essentially a power politician; that is, he was motivated by the goal of winning government and exercising power. He recognised that a vital part of achieving that goal was the compromise of principle. Cairns, on the other hand, was inclined to see principles as immutable and was wary of power and its temptations. For him, politics was at least as much about opposition and dissent as about capturing and wielding power. He worried, too, that power attained through the dilution of principle was not worth having. It would be unfair to suggest that Whitlam was a political opportunist. As Walter suggests, Whitlam’s political creed was essentially optimistic and expansive.13 Nor for that matter was Cairns an incurable idealist; his ongoing commitment to the pursuit of social change within the Labor Party attested to this fact. Nonetheless, whereas Whitlam placed a high premium on power, Cairns placed it on principle. In the second half of the 1960s nothing would show this more clearly than their respective attitudes to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

5 v ietnam: the great moral c rus ade 1962–1967 MY MIND IS TROUBLED AND I AM DEEPLY INVOLVED; I VERY OFTEN WISH I WAS NOT. IT MIGHT BE EASIER FOR ME AND FOR OTHERS . . . TO GO ALONG WITH THE TIDE . . . TO DISMISS THE WAR, AS MANY PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA DISMISS IT . . . I AM NOT PREPARED TO SUPPORT A POLICY WHICH IS DOING TO THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM WHAT THE POLICY THAT IS SUPPORTED BY THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT IS DOING. EVEN IF OUR SECURITY IS INVOLVED, AND I DO NOT THINK IT IS, I AM NOT PREPARED TO BUY OUR SECURITY AT THE COST OF DESTROYING THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM. J. F. Cairns, CPD, vol. 56,17 August 1967, p. 251.

T H AT J I M C A I R N S B E C A M E T H E M O S T E F F E C T I V E and

indefatigable opponent of Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War is not surprising. Since entering the House of Representatives in 1955 he had dedicated himself to refuting the Cold War premises upon which Australia’s military intervention in the conflict rested. Cairns quickly concluded that intervention was a folly based on incorrect assumptions, misinformation and half-truths. Above all, he was convinced that the government and its supporters had completely misinterpreted the nature of the conflict in South Vietnam. Rather than being fomented or directed by North Vietnam which, in turn was being instructed by Communist

China, he believed that the war was essentially a national revolutionary movement determined by the history of the country and the failure of the South Vietnamese regime to institute economic, social and political reform. Cairns had begun to read extensively about the situation in Vietnam during the late 1950s, and by 1967 could claim to ‘have referred, I think carefully, to everything that has been published [on the war]’. t1 Better informed and with a deeper understanding of the origins and progression of the conflict than any other member of parliament or, for that matter, the vast majority of Australians, he constructed a painstakingly researched intellectual case against Australian involvement. Within the federal parliament, at hundreds of public meetings across the country, in the media and in a series of publications he set out to elaborate that intellectual case. He became, as Tom Uren writes, ‘the chief theoretician of the anti-war movement’.2 More than any other issue in his political career, Vietnam afforded Cairns the opportunity to fulfil the role to which he was naturally inclined —that of public educator. Consistent with this, unlike many others in the anti-war movement, he largely eschewed emotional rhetoric in opposing the Vietnam War. Instead he was determined that sheer weight of logic would eventually force the government and the Australian people to reassess their preconceptions about the Vietnamese conflict. Yet, despite his efforts to retain a scholarly approach, to Cairns Vietnam was fundamentally a great moral issue. By seeking to expose the deficiencies in the government’s analysis of the conflict, Cairns invited Australians, both individually and collectively, to question the morality of their nation’s military intervention. As well, he made a clear effort in his major writings on the issue to weld a critique of the policy of intervention to a broader critique not only of the government that had made the decision to send troops to Vietnam, but also of the society that had allowed it to happen. In this way Cairns’ opposition to the Vietnam War was linked to an attack on the materialistic, illiberal and conformist characteristics of Australian society. An unhealthy foreign policy was, he

believed, a manifestation of an unhealthy social order. Accordingly, Cairns presented Vietnam as a possible ‘turning point in our history.’ The very act of rethinking anachronistic and flawed foreign policy principles could be a catalyst to transform Australia into a ‘freer, more open, more humane and rational society, and one more committed to moral values’. 3 The struggle against the Vietnam War, therefore, became symbolic of, and intimately connected with, his long-standing objective to reconstruct Australian society along ethical lines. When the Menzies Government’s announced on 24 May 1962 that it would send military advisers to South Vietnam, reaction within Australia was muted. In the press there was only limited commentary. One of the most perceptive pieces appeared in the Melbourne Herald, where Denis Warner offered this explanation for Australian intervention in Vietnam: ‘Partly because we think a Communist victory there would threaten the rest of Southeast Asia and jeopardise our security and partly because of the need to convince the Americans that we are more than paper allies’. 4 Parliament was in recess when the decision was announced, but in the weeks before, although there was speculation about an Australian military commitment, the ALP did not press for a debate on the matter. However, on the day the House of Representatives rose, 17 May, a question appeared on notice from Cairns, which inquired in part: ‘What number of service personnel has been, or is to be, sent to South Vietnam by Australia?’ Two months after parliament resumed in August, Tom Uren became the first member of the FPLP to formally express disapproval of the government’s decision: We of the Australian Labor Party opposed the sending of troops to Thailand. We also opposed the sending of troops to South Vietnam. In both instances, we believed that reactionary governments were being bolstered. We in the Labor Party say that we will send troops overseas only under the direction of the United Nations.5

Despite Uren’s suggestion that the ALP collectively opposed the despatch of advisers to Vietnam, the reality was that throughout 1962–63

the great bulk of Caucus members, including Arthur Calwell, remained silent on the issue, implying tacit acceptance. To be fair to the party, this apathetic response was not altogether surprising. As Fred Daly states, the May 1962 commitment was not ‘looked upon as extremely significant . . . just a nominal kind of action’. Even Cairns was to later write: ‘The despatch of Australian “advisers” to Vietnam to aid Diem in 1962 passed almost unnoticed. I did no more than watch the position much more closely’.6 There were other reasons for Labor’s passive reaction. This was the period when the leadership team of Calwell and Whitlam were engaged in an earnest bid to end the party’s post-1955 flirtation with a non-aligned foreign policy. Labor’s acceptance of the establishment of the NorthWest Cape base and other decisions adopted at the party’s Federal Conferences of March and July 1963, including a strong statement of support for ANZUS and regional co-operation with the United States, were consistent with that push. The shift towards a more conservative foreign policy was motivated, to an extent, by electoral considerations; Calwell and Whitlam wanted to shield the party from accusations of antiAmericanism and isolationism. But many senior members of the party agreed with the government’s analysis that Communist China and the nationalist Sukarno government in Indonesia posed an increasing threat to security within South-East Asia. Trepidation about Chinese and Indonesian intentions, together with the view that Washington deserved support in its quest to turn back the tide of communism in Asia, were important factors in Labor’s initial acquiescence in the government’s Vietnam policy.7 Until mid-1964, Vietnam remained submerged as an issue in Australia. It barely rated a mention during the election campaign of 1963, surfacing only briefly with news of the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. The historian John Murphy writes that the Menzies Government emerged from the election with public endorsement for ‘a developing policy known only in the vaguest terms’. The next step

in that development came in June 1964 when the government, more anxious than ever to secure a US guarantee of Australian security because of the heightened possibility of conflict with Indonesia as a result of its policy of confrontation of Malaysia, announced the provision of an additional thirty military advisers and six Caribou transport aircraft for South Vietnam. 8 Two months later the first full-scale parliamentary debate on the issue of Vietnam took place, prompted by the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 2 and 4 August. According to the official US version of the incident—later discredited—North Vietnamese torpedo boats had on two separate occasions fired, unprovoked, on US destroyers on routine patrols in international waters. Following the second attack, President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam. 9 In the House of Representatives the Minister for External Affairs, Paul Hasluck, made a statement supporting the ‘restrained but determined actions of the United States’, and welcoming the resolution passed by the US Congress in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a signal ‘that will hearten those who resist aggression throughout the world’.10 The ensuing debate uncovered clear divisions within the FPLP over the government’s policy in Vietnam. Calwell delivered a tortured speech sounding, as a government member quipped afterwards, like someone ‘trying to walk the tightrope’.11 He began by emphatically rebutting suggestions that the ALP did not support the US alliance. He acknowledged that the situation in Vietnam made ‘the abandonment of the military effort impossible . . . it is imperative that the anti-communist forces should negotiate from a position of strength’. Yet Calwell warned against a sole reliance on a military solution to the conflict and called for UN intervention. This ambivalence was also evident regarding Australia’s military involvement. While not condemning involvement he decried the government’s ‘policy of piecemeal commitment of Australian troops in Vietnam without a single coherent statement of its aims or intentions’.12

This speech was symptomatic of the turmoil the Vietnam issue was causing the Labor leader by 1964. For a number of reasons, Calwell was susceptible to the logic that the Menzies Government used to justify Australia’s entry into the Vietnam War. 13 The last great defender of the White Australia Policy within the ALP, Calwell could never quite free himself of the hint of racial contempt towards Asia, nor of the taint of ignorance and fear. As well, Calwell was of the Irish Catholic generation that came to dominate the Labor Party in the aftermath of the conscription split of 1916. He was a devout churchgoer, and regarded communism as anathema: ‘a materialistic philosophy. . . denying the existence of God and every form of freedom’. Finally, Calwell also had a strong personal admiration for the United States. His paternal grandfather had been born in Pennsylvania, and Calwell himself had long been a keen student of American history. These factors, accentuated by the political imperatives of not being seen as anti-American or soft on fighting the spread of communism in Asia, made Calwell initially reluctant to oppose Australia’s intervention in Vietnam. Cairns goes as far as to accuse him of ‘manipulating’ within the FPLP ‘a fairly silent acceptance’ of that intervention during much of 1962–64.14 On the other hand, by mid-1964 Calwell was becoming uneasy about the direction of government policy, and especially at the growing prospect of Australia rushing headlong into war in Indochina. In his initial response to Hasluck’s statement on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he sounded a note of genuine alarm: ‘We do not desire to see another eighth division of Australian troops sucked into an Asian jungle or swallowed up by the quicksands of Asia’. 15 Another factor that may have induced Calwell to re-evaluate his attitude on Vietnam during the first half of 1964 was the leadership tension between himself and Whitlam. Depending on Left-wing support to retain the leadership, Calwell came to embrace a position on Vietnam that was more compatible with that section of the party.16

The leadership struggle was having a commensurate influence on Whitlam’s approach to the Vietnam issue. By mid-1964 it was widely accepted that Whitlam was cultivating support among the party’s Right wing as a precursor to a leadership challenge. Along with his ongoing effort to prevent the ALP being burdened with policies that could be painted as anti-American, this was an obvious reason for the conservative nature of Whitlam’s contribution to the Gulf of Tonkin debate. In April 1954, at the height of the Viet Minh siege of the French at Dien Bien Phu, Whitlam had been the first Australian politician to counsel against Australian military entanglement in Indochina. Ten years later, however, there was no suggestion of any criticism of either American or Australian intervention. Although not directly referring to the Australian contingent, he indicated that military action was ‘essential in South Vietnam to secure the position until political and social advance can be made’. Moreover, he enthusiastically endorsed the US response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and accepted without question the Administration’s account of what had taken place. ‘It is many, many years’, Whitlam declared, ‘since it has been so easy to come to a conclusion on any incident in South-East Asia’, adding that it was ‘difficult to think that any US President, or any other head of state, would have reacted differently’.17 Whereas Whitlam blithely accepted the official US version of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Cairns was less easily satisfied. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, while addressing a Hiroshima commemoration rally in Sydney on 9 August, Cairns told the 2000-strong crowd that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had been within a few miles of their own shores when they came into contact with the American destroyers. It was further reported that he had said that the ‘United States could not claim that it was being attacked in the present Vietnamese crisis, or that it was acting in self defence’. Inevitably, government members sought to exploit the comments during the course of the parliamentary debate. The Liberal Member for Parkes, Tom Hughes, angrily declared that Cairns

had gone ‘so far as to brand, by clear implication, the American actions in the Gulf of Tonkin as aggressive’. Prime Minister Menzies indignantly demanded: ‘Does he [Cairns] really deny that they [the North Vietnamese torpedo boats] were 30 miles off shore, as has been stated authoritatively in America?’ In a personal explanation to the House Cairns argued that the Sydney Morning Herald had misquoted his remarks. His statement that the United States could not claim to have been attacked had been made in the context of the wider conflict in Vietnam, and not specifically about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Significantly, however, he did not deny having cast doubt on Washington’s account.18 In his first extensive speech to the parliament on the Vietnamese conflict in the Gulf of Tonkin debate, Cairns articulated themes that he would expand upon throughout his long struggle against the war. At the outset he emphasised that Australia must be willing to criticise US foreign policy, especially when that policy was predicated on military force. ‘No-one can say’, he declared, that the war in Vietnam will bring democracy and justice to that country. South Vietnam will be ruled by dictatorships, whoever wins the war. American policy . . . is not justified on the ground that America is acting in the war . . . in self defence or because there is a moral case for the governments of Bao Dai, Diem, Minh or Kanh. At present, the justification lies in the strategic interests of the US to be present in South-East Asia.

But Cairns warned that American policy in Vietnam was destined to fail for the very reason that its primary focus was on military measures, and because of its persistence in bolstering regimes that did not ‘meet the needs of the population’. It was essential to recognise, he added, that ‘the war cannot be won, that force cannot succeed’. To believe otherwise was to misconstrue the nature of the conflict: ‘The war in South Vietnam is not a result of Chinese or North Vietnamese interference’. In support of this point, Cairns cited the US General Paul Harkins and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who had stated not only that there were no North Vietnamese military units operating in South Vietnam, but also

that there was no evidence of systematic supply of the National Liberation Front from either China or North Vietnam. In fact, the reality was, Cairns argued, that the war sprang from ‘a national revolutionary movement’. Accordingly, the most appropriate solution to the situation rested in economic, social and political measures. Finally, though conceding that an immediate withdrawal of troops was not feasible, he urged Australia to work for a ceasefire and UN action ‘to bring all the parties to the conference table’.19 Summing up the House of Representatives debate on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Hasluck claimed that some members of the Opposition supported the government’s view. Menzies also drew attention to Labor’s divisions, pointing with relish to the contrast between the ‘soberminded right wing members’, who basically agreed with the government, and ‘a left wing which, in its heart, is not hostile to Communism but, in its heart, is deeply hostile to the United States of America’. 20 For all the political point-scoring that underlay these statements, by 1964 the Vietnam War was generating serious tensions within the FPLP. The disparate positions adopted by Cairns and Whitlam exemplified that emerging gulf. For the greater part of the 1960s the FPLP was to be plagued by division over Australia’s participation in the Vietnam conflict. The Left faction, led by Cairns, and including Uren, Hayden, Gordon Bryant, Albert James and Senator John Wheeldon, consistently and vocally condemned the war. Conversely, until 1968–69, the mainstream of the party, Whitlam among them, oscillated between tacit acceptance, enthusiastic endorsement, and half-hearted and ambivalent criticism of Western military intervention in Vietnam.21 Labor’s support for military action in Vietnam reached its apogee in February 1965 when the FPLP Executive endorsed a policy statement by the Caucus Foreign Affairs Committee, which expressed support for President Johnson’s decision to commence large-scale bombing raids against North Vietnam. The statement accepted that the ‘American action

of recent days’ was ‘based on the aim of shortening the war and achieving a negotiated settlement, which would establish and maintain the rights of the South Vietnamese people’. Freudenberg writes that Calwell greeted the Executive’s adoption of the statement with ‘unqualified delight’. Whitlam, though not present at the Executive meeting, later conceded that he ‘would have as willingly accepted the US account [of the air strikes] as I had in the debate six months earlier on the Tonkin Gulf incident’.22 The role of Cairns, who was a member of both the Foreign Affairs Committee and the FPLP Executive, in the formulation and endorsement of the statement is contentious. In his analysis of the evolution of Labor’s Vietnam policy, Kim Beazley Jnr suggests that Cairns and the chairman of the committee, A. D. Fraser, drafted the statement. Beazley argues that Cairns was motivated by a belief that the United States was sincere in its stated objective to pursue a negotiated settlement to the conflict. While this account seems incongruous, press reports from the time lend it some weight. The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, noted that the resolution of the Foreign Affairs Committee had been unanimous, and that Cairns had supported its adoption by the Executive.23 Cairns’ own recollection is that Kim Beazley Snr wrote the statement and that he opposed the resolution but that the numbers were against him, a plausible claim given the committee’s predominantly Right-wing composition. Cairns’ version is corroborated by Uren. Moss Cass, a member of the Victorian ALP Executive and future Labor MHR, also recalls Cairns complaining that he had been ‘rolled’ on the committee. Similarly, Freudenberg and Whitlam both identify Kim Beazley Snr as the author of the statement, although Whitlam contends that it was endorsed by Cairns.24 It is impossible to verify which of these conflicting accounts is closest to the truth. What can be said is that, when Cairns next referred to the Vietnam issue in parliament in late March 1965, he joined with other

members of the Left in expressing dismay at the deepening US involvement. Cairns warned that there was ‘no opportunity of a ceasefire’ as a result of the escalation of hostilities: ‘The only thing that can be got from an extension of war is more war’.25 Left-wing disquiet surfaced again at a meeting of Caucus on 24–25 March. Hayden called for a review of the party’s policy statement on Vietnam and chastised the Executive for adopting the February statement without consulting Caucus. In what was described as a bitter debate, an attempt by the Left to overturn the Executive policy was defeated. Instead the majority of the FPLP voted in favour of a motion by two members of the Right, Frank Stewart and Senator Don Willesee, to endorse the Executive’s position. Uren’s recollection of that meeting, though faulty in some respects, is that Cairns strongly sided with the Left.26 A change in party policy on Vietnam was not to be forthcoming until after Prime Minister Menzies’ momentous announcement of 29 April 1965 that Australia was to send a battalion of combat troops to South Vietnam. The reaction to the announcement was largely positive. 27 A Morgan Gallup Poll conducted the following month indicated that a majority of Australians endorsed the government’s decision. Among the metropolitan dailies, only the small stable of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian, the Sydney Daily Mirror and Adelaide News, dissented from the otherwise uniformly supportive editorial comments. The immediate response from the church hierarchies, both Protestant and Catholic, was also generally favourable. Even within the trade union movement and universities, criticisms of the commitment were counterbalanced by expressions of support. The FPLP reserved its response to the announcement until a meeting of Caucus scheduled for the morning of 4 May. In the interim a parliamentary speech was prepared for Calwell arguing the case against intervention. When Caucus met, Calwell sketched out the contents of the speech and, after a brief discussion, a resolution was unanimously

adopted authorising him to oppose the despatch of combat troops to Vietnam. According to Freudenberg, who at that time was Calwell’s press secretary and was the principal author of the speech, there was never the slightest doubt that the Labor Party would oppose the commitment of combat troops . . . No significant member of the Labor Party ever suggested that there could be any attitude other than opposition. The doubts and subsequent divisions within the Labor Party were about the role of the United States and the manner and timing of Australia’s withdrawal.28

Although fundamentally accurate, this statement underestimates the variation in the intensity of opposition within the FPLP. It ranged from bitter and unequivocal to cautious and uncomfortable. Indeed, despite the unanimous decision of 4 May, in the parliamentary debate that commenced later the same day Labor gave little impression of being completely united over the issue. In preparing Calwell’s speech, Freudenberg consulted only two people, one of whom was Cairns, ‘already the most concerned and bestinformed member of the Parliamentary Labor Party about events in Vietnam’.29 His influence was manifest in the section of the speech that repudiated the government’s ‘grotesquely over-simplified position that this is a straight-forward case of aggression from North Vietnam against an independent South Vietnam’. For the most part, however, the speech was preoccupied with trying to reconcile Labor’s opposition to the commitment of Australian combat forces while avoiding the charge of anti-Americanism. Calwell warned that the government’s encouragement of a military solution ‘is playing right into China’s hands, and our present policy will, if not changed, surely and inexorably lead to American humiliation in Asia.’ ‘Humiliation for America’, he prophetically declared, ‘could come in one of two ways—either by outright defeat, which is unlikely, or by her becoming interminably bogged down in the awful morass of this war’.30 Before delivering his speech, Calwell had permitted Cairns to read

the text. Ormonde writes that Cairns pointed out that it made no reference to withdrawing Australian troops. Calwell said, ‘We’re not going to take that on. We’d be giving them a stick to beat us with.’ Cairns replied that rather than referring to direct withdrawal Calwell should say that Labor would work to have the decision to send troops to Vietnam reversed. Cairns penned the formula in the margin of Calwell’s draft and Calwell agreed to it.

In the event, when delivering the speech Calwell muted Cairns’ formula by substituting the phrase ‘we shall do our best to have that decision reversed’.31 The leader’s sensitivity over the issue of withdrawal was a portent of the convulsions that it would create within the Labor Party for much of the remainder of the decade. Calwell nominated Cairns to follow him in the parliamentary debate. It was a sign that Cairns was recognised as the most knowledgable member of the party on the subject of Vietnam, and also that Labor’s policy on the war was now more closely aligned with the Left. Cairns began with a statement that captured the essence of his approach to Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War: The issue that divides the Government and the Opposition is a moral one . . . The question involved in this debate will be decided on the facts; it will be decided on the facts considered in relation to the moral issue involved. The moral issue involved is whether the Government’s course of action is right, proper and justified, whether in respect of the interests of the people in Vietnam or in respect of the interests of the people in Australia.32

He then set out systematically to demolish the rationale for military intervention. His objective was clear: to lay bare the immorality of the government’s position. Cairns focused on the recently published US State Department White Paper, Aggression from the North. The report, which argued that the conflict in Vietnam was almost entirely the product of Hanoi’s campaign of aggression and infiltration, had been used by the Menzies

Government to justify Western military involvement. 33 Accusing government members of failing to analyse the document, Cairns subjected to detailed scrutiny the three major elements of the case for North Vietnamese aggression; the infiltration of personnel from the North, the supply of arms and ammunition from the North and the control by the North of the revolutionary forces in the South. On all three counts he argued that the supporting evidence was weak. He pointed out that the report itself conceded that the level of infiltration from the North was modest. Cairns went further, asserting that ‘90 per cent of what has happened in the South has been caused by people living in the South’. He cited figures which showed that, out of a total of over 15 000 weapons captured from the Vietcong since 1962, the number of foreign manufactured weapons, including those of Chinese, Soviet, East German and North Vietnamese origin, amounted to just 914. The paucity of supply of weapons to the South from the North, Cairns suggested, made nonsense of the claim that Hanoi was controlling the insurgency in the South. Indeed, the only evidence provided by the White Paper to support that claim was the repetition of North Vietnamese revolutionary slogans. Cairns went on to outline what he believed was the true nature of the conflict in South Vietnam. He returned to what was by now very familiar territory: I suggest that what is happening in South Vietnam and other places in Asia is not something which, like an avalanche, is flowing full of Asian aggression and Communism towards Australia . . . This is an inevitable condition that comes out of decades of poverty and suppression. That is the inevitable condition that flows from the lives of those people. There is nothing that can be done by military force, the exercise of public relations or the glibly spoken word of the Prime Minister in this Parliament, to stop those things happening.

He heaped particular scorn on the government’s view that the revolutionary movements in Asia or other parts of the globe endangered Australia’s security:

With respect to these processes of change that are going on in Asia, South America, Africa and elsewhere, the first thing to realise is that they are not directed at Australia. Those involved in them do not sit up at night thinking of Australia and how they might come to Australia for all the good things that are here. For them, Australia is not the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow . . . They think of their own country and their situation. Their situation has never related to Australia and hardly ever to the country next door. The difficulties facing them in these revolutions are enormous . . . They have no time to take part in any thinking about what happens in this country. Their minds are filled with their own problems.34

These were words that not only ridiculed the government’s doctrine of forward defence and the spectre of falling dominoes, but also derided the more pervasive national paranoia about ‘yellow hordes’ enviously eyeing Australia’s riches. Cairns’ speech confirmed his status as Labor’s most persuasive proponent of the case against intervention. True, the speech displayed little of the passionate rhetoric that other members of the party, principally those on the Left, mustered in attacking the decision to commit combat troops. Yet it was precisely the absence of emotive and overblown language, and the emphasis on building a meticulously logical argument, that made Cairns the government’s most formidable adversary when it came to the issue of Vietnam. His elevation to that position was made all the more obvious by Right-wing ALP members’ conspicuous reluctance to condemn US military action in Vietnam. Whitlam, for example, declared that ‘America’s motives in South Vietnam are above dispute’, and acknowledged the ‘military strength which the United States wishes to establish before negotiations commence’. By conceding the legitimacy of US policy, Whitlam seriously limited the basis upon which he could criticise the Menzies Government’s decision. The result was a limp speech.35 Cairns’ activities outside the parliamentary arena further singled him out as an influential opponent of the Vietnam War. He had addressed his first public meetings on the issue as early as 1963, but from the middle of 1965 the demand for him as a speaker escalated as new anti-

war organisations and groups opposed to the prospect of conscripts being sent to Vietnam sprang up.36 Cairns endeavoured to meet every invitation he received to speak. He later estimated that in 1964–66 alone he addressed more than 600 meetings on the subject of Vietnam, travelling all over Australia. The purpose was to raise consciousness about the war or, as Cairns simply puts it, ‘to educate people’. It was a role he basked in; he never saw it as a chore although, at meeting after meeting, he was essentially regurgitating the same message. Tom Uren confirms this image of a man who fulfilled his responsibilities within the protest movement with enormous dedication and patience: We were often at meetings together and afterwards people would mill around him, some just to talk to him or put forward their point of view, others to ask him questions. No matter what time it was, he gave his full attention to the person he was addressing and always provided a detailed reply. I never saw him brush anyone off.37

One of the early by-products of Cairns’ anti-war activism was the visibility he gained within the university student population. If the Vietnam protest movement in its initial phase was predominantly middleclass and middle-aged,38 by 1964–65 opposition to the war and conscription had mobilised the younger generation, especially university students. The first student meetings to protest against conscription were held at the University of Sydney in November 1964. Later that month, the Youth Campaign Against Conscription was launched at a packed meeting in the Sydney Town Hall. One of the main speakers was Cairns, who told the predominantly young audience that ‘It was strange that those who opposed conscription of doctors or wealth for public service were found amongst those who readily accepted the principle of military conscription’.39 The following July the first of the teach-ins on the Vietnam War took place at Australian university campuses. The second teach-in, at Monash University on 29 July, saw Cairns pitted against the Minister for External Affairs, Paul Hasluck. The event attracted widespread media coverage and an estimated audience of 2000 people.

According to the Canberra Times, Cairns won the debate hands down. He was at his sparkling oratorical best . . . wooing the audience with his quiet reasoning, then ramming his conclusions home by shouting into the microphone. Mr Hasluck on the other hand rambled through the most complex, repetitive and incomprehensible passages to recurrent jeers and sarcastic dapping.40

It would be wrong to exaggerate the influence Cairns’ anti-war views and activities gave him among Australian youth in the mid-1960s. Opinion polls from the period indicate that the great majority of those born after 1945 approved of the government’s decision to send combat troops to fight in Vietnam. In fact, they suggest that approval of the commitment decreased with age.41 Still, there is little doubt that Cairns’ regular presence on university campuses, especially at Melbourne and Monash, gave him a higher profile among students than almost any other politician. Equally, Cairns was playing an important part in causing some within the younger generation to question the government’s position. One of those was William White, a 21-year-old Sydney school teacher, who in 1966 leapt to national prominence as the first conscientious objector in the Vietnam era to defy a call-up notice. Before his refusal to comply with the National Service Art, White had attended meetings in Sydney addressed by Cairns and was impressed by his exposition of the conflict. Brian Pola, a Catholic seminarian in the early 1960s who later became active in the anti-war movement, was another whose views on the war were shaped by Cairns. Explaining his radicalisation, Pola later noted that Cairns had been a ‘big influence. I realised his analyses of American imperialism and the Vietnam War were correct.’42 The government was certainly anxious at Cairns’ impact on the minds of the young. In June 1965 the Minister for Air, Peter Howson, discussed with the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Sir James Plimsoll, the need to do something to counter the influence of Cairns, who was ‘infecting the students’. Similarly, in question time on 2 December 1965 a Liberal backbencher, John Jess, raised the alarm about

an anti-war pamphlet Cairns had written, which he claimed was circulating among Victorian school students. Jess sought an assurance from Prime Minister Menzies that ‘official information and booklets’ on Vietnam be made available to school pupils ‘so that their minds will not be subverted at an early age’.43 Entitled Vietnam: Is It Truth We Want? , the pamphlet that so concerned Jess summarised the middle chapters of the major work Cairns was in the process of completing. Eventually published in December 1965, Living With Asia brought together many of the themes of Cairns’ writings and speeches since the second half of the 1940s—the historical and revolutionary momentum for change in Asia; the paralysing effect of anti-communism on Australia’s foreign policy and public discourse; the desirability of greater state intervention in the economy; and the Labor Party’s function as the primary agent of radical social change in Australia. The book’s central thesis was that the establishment of a mature and constructive relationship with Asia was contingent on the creation of a better Australian society. It was a complex and sophisticated analysis, although Cairns’ ambitious attempt to synthesise the imperatives for reform in both domestic and foreign policy sometimes seemed strained. Murphy observes that the most distinctive feature of Living With Asia was ‘its historical tone—a tone both Promethean and unafraid’.44 This tone was apparent from the opening pages: Asians are emerging from a thousand years and more of poverty and national impotence. They will emerge: nothing can stop them. At present our Government has placed us against them, and perhaps many of them are against us. The important question is: Can we learn to live with them and they with us. Or must Australia, at best, become a kind of island fortress isolated and protected by the might of arms?

Ignorance and fear had bedevilled Australia’s outlook on the surrounding region and, Cairns argued, this was nourished by a deep-seated psychology of dependency:

There are many ‘ghosts’ in Australia’s attitude to Asia and we ourselves have created them in the murky depths of our national consciousness which we have so little penetrated because for a century or more, standing behind Britain, we ignored Asia, and for twenty-five years since, standing behind the United States, we have only peeped out nervously at our mysterious neighbours.45

To Cairns, greater autonomy in international affairs was a prerequisite to closer engagement with Asia, a notion far removed from the historical radical nationalism of the Labor Party with its overtones of racism and hostility to Asia. While the book stressed the importance of Australia acting as a sovereign nation on the world stage, and was critical of US actions in Indochina, the overall tenor was not anti-American. Thus, though lamenting the Cold War pattern of prevailing policy in the United States, Cairns asserted that the ‘most humane and advanced thinking anywhere in the world about international relations’ was also to be found in America. This idea that there were two Americas was one of the chief means by which the ALP tried to get around the thorny problem of criticising military intervention in Vietnam without being seen as hostile to the United States. For Cairns this was more than an argument of political necessity. The references cited in Living With Asia revealed his intellectual debt to American sources. Later he commented that ‘the case against Vietnam was made in America’, singling out the writings of the American correspondents David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Robert Trumble in the New York Times and Newsweek, for alerting him to what was going on in the war. As well, he borrowed heavily from the works of American scholars, including Joseph Buttinger, Bernard Fall and George McT. Kahin, in developing an understanding of Vietnamese history and constructing an argument against intervention. Another source of inspiration were Congress members like William Fulbright, Michael Mansfield and Wayne Morse, who opposed the Administration’s policy.46 Despite these influences, Cairns’ writings on Vietnam retained their

distinctive flavour. The section of Living With Asia that explicitly dealt with the conflict began with a passage that was quintessentially Cairns: We are not only involved in war in Vietnam: we are involved in history. We are taking sides in history. There is a national revolution in Asia. The rise of the Asian people out of poverty and impotence to national existence, economic strength and human dignity requires a revolution. But the revolution has disturbing, violent and Communist aspects, and therefore the Australian Government has committed us against it.

After surveying the history of Vietnam since the end of World War II, the book assiduously sifted through the evidence of aggression from China and North Vietnam in the war in the south, and then concluded: ‘what is happening in South Vietnam is not the result of “aggression from the North” . . . the war there is, on the contrary, a revolutionary war determined mainly by the history and conditions of Vietnam’.47 The discussion then focused on the dynamic of revolutionary wars and ‘what might be done to change them into peaceful social revolutions’ It began by turning orthodox Cold War thinking on its head: ‘War and revolution . . . are mainly the product, not of revolutionary groups, but of those who resist necessary economic and political change’: In the context of the problems of South-East Asia, this means that policy must not be directed, as was Diem’s in South Vietnam, at stopping all change in the name of antiCommunism, but at making all the necessary changes so that force may be taken out of the situation and the necessary national revolutions may become as peaceful as possible.

The West, Cairns insisted, must cease relying upon ‘Laotians, Vietnamese, Thais, Burmans, Malays, Chinese or Indonesians who have “nothing to be revolutionary about”’.48 Even though he contested Cold War assumptions on policy, Cairns agreed that it was ‘important to do something about the “advance of Communism”’ within Asia. This advance, however, did not occur as ‘simply or mechanically as postulated in the “dominoes” theory . . . Communists are not supermen. Whatever their revolutionary slogans and

batdecries, they are able to do only what a given situation allows. They have to seek popular support.’ The advance was more accurately explained by the fact that ‘Communists, by choosing indigenous national and political objectives, are going with the grain of the revolution’.49 The challenge for Western nations, therefore, was to recapture the dynamic of history from the communists and translate it, as far as possible, into peaceful ends. Cairns’ plea that the West embrace, rather than set itself against, the revolutionary impetus in South-East Asia provided the nexus to his argument for economic and social reform in Australia. Instead of vainly trying to check national revolutions by military means, Australia’s security would be better served by an initiative to establish an international ‘pool of resources for economic aid actually to assist national revolutions’. This economic aid would, he suggested, have to be very substantial, with the United States the chief contributor. This emphasis on economic aid, together with an argument for Australia to develop its own defence industry, led on to one of the most critical passages in the book: Affluent Australia, putting inessentials first, cannot live successfully with an Asia rising out of poverty and oppression. The challenge of Asia, and of our own future, demands greater economic strength: strength to be used to work with Asia in her revolution, to defend Australia if that should be our fate, and to provide opportunities for those of our own people who lack it. To meet the challenge of the future, Australia must become a better society, better organised for more fundamental purposes.50

This bridge established, the rest of the book proceeded to discuss flaws in Australia’s capitalist structure and the potential for radical change through the political system. First, however, a short chapter tackled some ‘matters of conscience’ that Cairns believed diminished Australia’s moral standing in the international community and inhibited the forging of better relations with Asia. These included the official reluctance to encourage national independence in Papua New Guinea, and

the continuing discrimination against non-whites in Australia’s immigration policy.51 Particularly shameful was the plight of Aborigines: ‘Australian history has only one “Black Hole of Calcutta”. It is our treatment of the Aborigines, and it is enough. We can never erase the disgrace, but we can make up for it a little to those who are still alive. We have really never tried to do so.’ Cairns supported demands for constitutional reform to give the Commonwealth greater power over Aboriginal policy. This would have to be complemented, he thought, by ‘a campaign to awaken our national conscience. Not only do we need a legal basis of equality for the Aborigines, but, above all, a national attitude of equality.’ 52 The book’s critique of Australia’s capitalist system echoed previous writings: the growing centralisation of economic power and the accompanying skewing of resources away from areas where ‘progress is essential: education, scientific research, development, defence, trade with Asia, and justice for people who are not now getting it’. Similarly, Cairns’ prescription for these problems was familiar, involving greater public control and planning of the economy through the functioning of the national parliament.53 It was, in short, a reiteration of his commitment to democratic socialism. Familiar, too, was the theme in the final three chapters that the ALP, as the party of initiative in Australian politics, offered the best hope for the radical shift in domestic and foreign policy he was advocating. But, as always, Cairns was under no illusions about the resistance to radicalism that existed within Australia. His description of life in the suburbs betrayed a strong element of moral repugnance. The legacy of post-war affluence and the Cold War was a conformist, de-politicised and materialist culture: Sport, play and private activities seem to dominate: the car, the garden, the house, bowls, fishing and the ‘pagan’ sports—the surf to ride, the sea to spearfish in and the snow from which one can reach out ever closer to the sun. In affluent Australia you must be ‘normal’. Perhaps the ‘way-out’ generation is making beards and blue jeans respectable, but the real convention is still to treat the unconventional person as a bit of a ‘rat-bag’.

Mass conformity seems to dominate . . . Arguments about politics and religion are as scarce as talk about sport and cars is common. Someone is called a ‘Communist’ and the word is passed on.

Murphy locates Cairns’ critique of suburbia within the context of a growing debate among Australian intellectuals in the early 1960s about the ‘cultural and political effects of the expansion of suburban patterns during the previous two decades’. Left-wing intellectuals, in particular, despaired at what they saw as the supplanting of Australia’s radical democratic tradition by the mass consumerism of the suburbs.54 Significantly, this despair felt by established Left intellectuals showed little inkling of the culture of dissent that was building in the suburbs among the more educated younger generation. Despite the fears of the ‘Old Left’, middle-class suburban affluence, rather than stifling radicalism, would act as a catalyst to a ‘New Left’ radical ferment in the latter part of the decade as this younger generation rejected their parents’ materialist and conservative values. Cairns, through his regular contacts with university students, was better placed than most within the established Left to detect the pent-up frustrations and growing mood of radicalism among the young, but showed little such insight in Living With Asia. Thus, while correctly diagnosing the nature of the suburban culture that would be both a cause and target of the youth rebellion, he seemed pessimistic about its political impart. Indeed Cairns appeared to concede some ground to the social democratic revisionist viewpoint that post-war abundance had diminished the scope for fundamental social reform: ‘affluence has undermined much of the support in advanced capitalist countries for parties that favour change’. Ever the idealist though, Cairns implored Labor to continue to fight for a radical agenda both domestically and internationally. He reminded impatient party members and supporters that such radicalism was frequently incompatible with electoral success: ‘The whole history of Labor has been a struggle, an unending struggle. There is no easy road for Labor to office or power’.

But he did offer them this reassurance: ‘it is morally and historically right that Australia should seek ways to assist Asian people who are emerging from poverty and desperation . . . I believe that what is morally right will win in the end’.55 As if to confirm Cairns’ worst fears about the intolerance of dissent within Australian society press reviews of Living With Asia were generally negative. The Sydney Morning Herald paid Cairns the compliment of reviewing the book in an editorial, only to savage its author. The editorial, though ostensibly welcoming the stimulation of debate on foreign policy, dismissed Cairns’ credentials. He was accused of repeatedly failing to ‘distinguish his own position from that of the Communists’ and of ‘a lack of intellectual distinction and deep knowledge’. Another hostile review in the Bulletin had the disdainful heading, ‘When Will They Ever Learn?’ Written by a Catholic intellectual, Brian Buckley, it criticised the book, not unfairly, for its sweeping and imprecise use of the term ‘revolution’. This and other criticisms were overshadowed, however, by the review’s heavy-handed sarcasm and superior tone. Buckley regarded Cairns not so much as a knave, acknowledging his ‘genuine sincerity and humanity’, but as a fool: Victim partly of Marxist ideology and partly of Communist propaganda, Cairns, at 50, may live long enough to see the horrible truth in a remark about the events of 1789 . . . There is reason to fear that the revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn each of her children.’ 56

The adverse press reaction to Living With Asia anticipated a stunning attack on Cairns by the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 23 February 1966, headed ‘Cairns is the real danger’. Nothing better illustrates the animosity, near hysteria, that his unconventional views evoked within some conservative quarters. The editorial, published in the context of the intensifying leadership struggle between Calwell and Whitlam, gravely warned that

Mr Whitlam and Mr Calwell, in their scramble for the leadership, have compromised themselves with Labor’s left wing. And the left wing, headed by Dr Cairns, could, if it reached a position of power, deliver Australia on a platter to Communist China. These are not idle words, they are not scare propositions; they are in fact feelings shared by tens of thousands of dedicated Labor voters throughout Australia. If Dr Cairns and his gang got to power in the parliamentary Labor Party, Australia could kiss goodbye to American friendship, protection, and assistance. If this left wing cohort had its way, Australia as freedom-loving people know it, would cease to exist in a decade.

Cairns, hitherto extraordinarily thick-skinned in the face of such calumny, chose this time to instigate libel proceedings. The eventual result was a substantial out-of-court settlement from the Daily Telegraph’s proprietor, Sir Frank Packer.57 In 1966 Cairns also found himself under fire from the Left wing of the ALP. During the winter parliamentary recess he departed on a 31-day tour of South-East Asia, visiting South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Two months earlier, as a member of the FPLP Foreign Affairs Committee, he had helped to draft a statement on Vietnam which, following endorsement by Caucus, was announced by Calwell as the party’s policy for the election due later that year. The statement’s chief objective was to clarify Labor’s position on the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam in the wake of the government’s decision to treble the size of the military commitment to 4500 and to include a contingent of national servicemen in Australia’s task force. That decision was announced in the House of Representatives by Harold Holt, who had succeeded Robert Menzies as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister the previous January. The escalation of Australia’s commitment prompted a discernible hardening in Labor’s stand on Vietnam. For Calwell, the deployment of conscripts removed in one stroke any lingering doubts about opposing Australia’s military involvement in the war. Politically blooded during the 1916–17 anticonscription campaigns, and an outspoken critic of the Curtin Government’s decision to despatch the nation’s militia force to the

South-West Pacific during World War II, the principle of opposition to conscription for overseas service was a bedrock of his political philosophy.58 Shortly after Holt’s announcement Calwell, foreshadowing the tactics he would adopt in the 1966 federal election campaign, told the Tasmanian ALP Conference that he was prepared to ‘live or perish politically’ on the issue of conscription. The policy statement adopted by the FPLP in May committed a Labor government to ‘bring home without delay’ conscripts serving in Vietnam, ‘acting with full regard to the safety and security of the Australian forces’. On the question of regular forces, an ALP government would ‘take no action without consultation with the United States’. But it would ‘work for, and insist upon, the return of all Australian forces from Vietnam as soon as practicable’.59 What Cairns witnessed during the four days he spent in Saigon and touring Phuoc Tuy province, where the Australian forces were based, strengthened his conviction that the conflict was essentially of a civil or revolutionary nature. According to Ormonde, Cairns was struck by the evidence of the intensity of Allied bombing, the insecurity of the Allied position just 30 kilometres from Saigon, the unresponsiveness of the villagers, the disproportionate number of children and old people and the absence of young men. It confirmed Cairns’ view that Australians were engaged in a war against the villagers of Vietnam.

However, the visit transformed his attitude on the issue of withdrawal. Cairns was impressed by the work the Australian task force was doing in Phuoc Tuy; and his discussions with the Australian soldiers, their commanding officer, Major-General Kenneth Mackay, the South Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Tran Van Lam, Buddhist leaders and other parties left him acutely aware of the dependency of the south on the presence of Allied forces. As a result, he began to have serious reservations about the effects of ‘a sudden pull-out’. Of special concern was the fate of anti-communist South Vietnamese: what I saw in Saigon made it look as if the idea of an enclave might have to be accepted;

that is, a perimeter might have to be held while something was decided to be done with those Vietnamese. . . It seemed to me unacceptable that having encouraged them to go out on a limb, that there could simply be a withdrawal.60

Upon his return to Australia, Cairns gave notice of his shift in thinking in a statement to the press on 11 August: ‘My view of e war in South Vietnam is a more difficult and complthe history of this war is unchanged. But I think that the cessation of thex matter than I thought it was’. He added that a negotiated political settlement appeared the only hope for an early withdrawal of forces. Two days later he remarked: ‘If feeling a new deep personal involvement and seeing problems more in human terms is to change, then I have changed my viewpoint on Vietnam’. The same month Whitlam, who had been on a separate tour of South-East Asia, including South Vietnam, arrived home expressing the opinion that the war could be over within two years. Privately, he told colleagues that Labor should stop talking about withdrawing forces and instead begin to talk about an end to the conflict. Meanwhile, the public statements by Cairns and Whitlam were tersely dismissed by Calwell, who insisted that there would be no change of party policy for the forthcoming election.61 Cairns’ modified approach to the issue of withdrawal enraged the ALP Left. Believing that Cairns had been ‘conned’ by Mackay, Uren bluntly reproached him. The response within the Victorian Labor Party was more severe. Moss Cass later told Ormonde that the Victorian Left never forgave Cairns for his perceived backdown on Vietnam in the second half of 1966. At a meeting of Victorian ALP candidates shortly before the election campaign, he was accused of ‘ratting on everything the party stood for’. If Cairns’ reputation within the Victorian Labor Party had been dented, Calwell’s was on the rise. Having drawn progressively closer to the Left as his hold on the leadership became tenuous, Calwell now won plaudits from within the faction for his uncompromising attitude to withdrawal. The irony was, as Cass pointed

out, that a fundamentally conservative Right-winger had become the ‘darling’ of the Victorian Left.62 When the Australian people went to the polls on 26 November 1966, Labor was crushed. For the first time since World War II the party’s share of the vote slumped below 40 per cent. Analyses of the election results confirm that the ALP’s opposition to the Vietnam War had cost it votes.63 The odds had been stacked against Labor even before the campaign began. Only days before the writs for the election were issued, the government had a public relations coup with huge crowds turning out in Sydney and Melbourne to welcome the US President, Lyndon lohnson, during his three-day visit to Australia. In opening Labor’s campaign, Calwell boldly signalled his intention to transform the election into a plebiscite on conscription. Over the following weeks his tone became increasingly strident, employing rhetoric reminiscent of that used by the anti-conscriptionists in 1916–17. Bound to the past, Calwell utterly misjudged the mood of the electorate. Nor was his cause helped when, at a press conference on 21 November, Whitlam purposely distanced himself from Labor’s policy on the withdrawal of regular troops. The result was a damaging rift between the leader and deputy leader in the final week of the campaign.64 Cairns, perhaps chastened by the angry response to his qualified views on withdrawal, stayed out of the spotlight during the campaign. He concentrated his energies on Yarra, where his main opponent was the Liberal candidate, a 29-year-old company information officer, Leo Hawkins. Hawkins had been working in the electorate since May and his campaign strategy included the use of Irish tenors and ‘go-go girls’ at meetings. As polling day approached, Cairns was pessimistic about Labor’s chances nationally. He told Uren, ‘We’re going to be very badly beaten . . . Calwell doesn’t understand the war in Vietnam’. He was also worried about the outcome in Yarra, believing that the seat was at risk. This anxiety proved to be well-founded: the ALP’s primary vote in Yarra

was slashed from 54.04 to 48.8 per cent.65 As vote counting on election night confirmed that Labor had been routed, Cairns appeared on television to discuss the defeat. His message was typically defiant but tinged with bitterness. The result, he claimed, reflected the fact that Australian voters were materialistic, cynical and unthinking. Labor had lost, he stated, because it had fought for what it believed was right and he, for one, would continue to fight for those things. To some observers it was a reaction that epitomised Labor’s problems. In an article headed ‘Is the ALP breaking up?’ the chief political correspondent of the Age, John Bennetts, caustically noted that Cairns’ ‘views offer no solace to his right wing and moderate Parliamentary colleagues who believe, they have lost their seats, or had their majorities slashed because the left wing minority has committed the party to electorally disastrous policy positions’. He continued: ‘Many of his colleagues are, in fact, beginning to wonder whether Dr Cairns knows what politics is about’.66 If, indeed, many in the FPLP were questioning Cairns’ political judgement, their doubts would not have been allayed by an article he contributed to the Melbourne Sun on 29 November. A post-mortem on the election, the article warned the ALP against ‘a panic reaction born of despondency’. Cairns expressed concern that, because of the dismal result, the party would swing to the Right. This pressure must be resisted: ‘It would be wrong for us to believe that compromise is the road to power. The real role of the Labor Party is to maintain an alternative—a genuine alternative—to the policies and positions of a Conservative Government coalition.’ The election, he wrote, should not be judged as if it had been a football match: Unlike football, winning is not all. In the elections we put forward certain policies and certain principles because we believed, and believe, them to be right for ourselves and for Australia. The election result is a judgement on their current state of acceptability, not of their essential rightness.67

Underlying its strongly idealistic tone, the article had a practical purpose: Cairns was staking out his ground for the leadership battle to replace Calwell, who had earlier undertaken to relinquish the post if Labor lost the 1966 election. Cairns had first signalled that he would be a contender for the leadership the previous August. At that time he indicated that he had decided to make a bid for the leadership because he disagreed with many of the things Whitlam, Calwell’s expected successor, stood for. 68 As noted in the preceding chapter, the ideological differences between the two men ran deep. By 1966 Cairns was alarmed at the direction in which Whitlam was likely to take the party. This was especially true of foreign policy, including the crucial issue of Vietnam. Cairns was also sceptical of his rival’s attempts to reform the party’s organisation, suspecting that Whitlam wanted to centralise power in his own hands. Cairns viewed those attempts as symptomatic of Whitlam’s elitist and egocentric political style. Here was a man who was prepared to ride rough-shod over the ALP’s democratic traditions and to use the party as a servant for his own goal of one day being prime minister. In April 1966, in the Victorian ALP newspaper Fact, Cairns had aired his concerns about giving the parliamentary wing of the party greater authority at the expense of rank-and-file members and the industrial wing. From the time of the formation of the Labor Party, he argued, ‘it was recognised that a vital thing for “government by the people” was that “the people” and not just Members of Parliament should govern’. Although Cairns acknowledged there was ‘some room for reform and improvement in the ALP structure’, he cautioned that past experience had shown that ‘increasing power for MPs has resulted, not only in less influence for the rank and file, but in many cases support for adoption of policies similar to those of parties opposed to Labor, and against the interests of the rank and file’. Cairns’ article in the Sun had a similar message and contained a thinly veiled attack on Whitlam: ‘the Labor Party does not work on the “fuhrer” principle . . . [it] can be effectively led only by consultation with the whole movement’.69

Media speculation about who would succeed Calwell bubbled along during the first part of 1967. Whitlam and Cairns were regarded as the chief contenders, with the former the clear favourite. Other contenders were Kim Beazley Snr, Frank Crean and Fred Daly. On 6 February, two days before the FPLP was due to meet to choose a new leader, the Australian profiled the candidates and weighed up their chances. Cairns was, it considered, until three months ago ‘the only real threat to Gough Whitlam’s accession . . . But no one in the leadership race suffered as heavily as he did because of Labor’s electoral thrashing . . . his left wing views leave him at complete variance with the attitudes of the Australian people.’ He was judged to have ‘both the intellectual ability and capacity to be a great leader’, but was handicapped by ‘his views on socialism [which] are 25 years out of date’.70 According to the Australian, another liability for Cairns was his identification with the Victorian ALP. The battle between Whitlam and Cairns was viewed not only as a showdown between Labor’s Right and Left factions, but also as a power struggle between the New South Wales and Victorian ALP branches. For some time it had been clear that the Victorian branch, especially the State Executive, was the traditionalist stronghold within the Labor Party. Whitlam and many in the New South Wales branch saw Victoria as the stumbling-block to party restructuring and a return to power federally. 71 Cairns, though wary of Whitlam’s reform plans and a member of the Victorian Executive since 1964, was never particularly close to the hardliners who dominated that body. Nor was Whitlam, as Cairns himself points out, ever part of the dominant New South Wales Right-wing machine, remaining instead somewhat aloof from the factions. Indeed, neither man could be described as a party machine politician; nor, for that matter, were they archetypal products of their respective State branches. Both were too individualistic for that.72 Yet there is a kernel of truth that in their contrasting approaches to politics the two men did reflect the sharply different cultures of the New South Wales and Victorian Labor parties—Whitlam, the pragmatic

moderate; Cairns, the militant purist. As expected, on 8 February Caucus elected Whitlam as party leader by a comfortable margin. The contest for the position of deputy leader, with a total of eight candidates, was much tighter. Cairns led the field for the first six ballots, only to be narrowly defeated by the Tasmanian Rightwinger, and Whitlam’s choice, Lance Barnard, in the seventh and deciding ballot, 35 votes to 33.73 Uren—who, as usual, was Cairns’ numbers man in the contest—was convinced that it was the defection of two Victorian Left-wingers, Crean and Senator Sam Cohen, that had cost him the deputy leadership. He was incensed by their act of ‘treachery’ Typically, Cairns accepted the setback stoically. The following week Uren wrote to friends in London: ‘My mate Cairns took it like a champion with no complaints about treachery, although I know he was terribly hurt’.74 In his first statement as FPLP leader, Whitlam unequivocally signalled his objective to re-establish the ALP as a credible electoral force: ‘our actions in the next few years must determine whether it [Federal Labor] continues to survive as a truly effective parliamentary force . . . We cannot afford an indefinite continuation of the defeats of the past eight elections.’ He set a number of priorities, among them, ‘to ensure that foreign policy issues were no longer turned to the ALP’s disadvantage’.75 To this end, he appointed himself as the party’s foreign affairs spokesman and allocated the shadow defence portfolio to Barnard. In a series of public statements during the first half of 1967 both men sought to soften Labor’s stand on Vietnam. Specifically, Whitlam tried to shift the emphasis away from the question of withdrawal, arguing instead that Australia’s military presence in Vietnam placed the government in a unique position to pressure the United States for a negotiated end to the war.76 The opportunity to alter the party’s Vietnam policy presented itself at the Federal Conference, which convened in Adelaide on 31 July. At

this Conference, Whitlam and his supporters secured two significant reforms to Labor’s federal structure, though his proposal for a special commission on party reorganisation was stymied. On foreign and defence policy, things also largely fell Whitlam’s way, the Conference adopting resolutions that strengthened the ALP’s commitment to the US alliance and ended its outright opposition to conscription in peacetime.77 The outcome in regard to Vietnam policy was less favourable to Whitlam. As with other areas of defence and foreign policy, Conference discussion on Vietnam was preceded by a report from the Federal Executive’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. The report’s recommendation on Vietnam, which Cairns had helped to write as a member of the committee, was sufficiently flexible to give Whitlam leeway to pursue his own course. Cairns, who was attending the Conference as part of the Victorian delegation, initially supported the adoption of the committee’s report. But in a step that angered Rightwingers, he subsequently drafted and spoke in favour of an amendment that committed the party to a firmer line on Vietnam. The amendment, which was carried by the Conference stated that a Labor government would request its allies to cease bombing North Vietnam, recognise the National Liberation Front as a party to negotiations, and transform the war ‘into holding operations’. If these conditions were not met, Labor would ‘consider that it had no alternative other than to withdraw’ Australia’s forces. 78 Whitlam was dismayed by the new policy, especially by its implicit ultimatum to the United States. Cairns, on the other hand, was satisfied with the outcome. He had turned up at the Conference uncertain whether he could persuade it to take a strong position on Vietnam. Upon discovering that strong support existed, he was more than happy to push for a firmer resolution. Some observers, however, were unimpressed by his volte face. Maxwell Newton, who reviewed the Conference proceedings for Nation, thought that it showed inconsistency, raising ‘fresh doubts about the quality of his [Cairns’] leadership’.79

Angered by his defeat at the hands of the Left over Vietnam policy on the Conference floor, Whitlam was overheard telling party colleagues: ‘It’s bastards like that [Cairns] who stop me from being Prime Minister’.80 Notwithstanding Whitlam’s fury, the Adelaide decision proved to be only a temporary setback to his efforts to neutralise Vietnam as a political issue Throughout the rest of 1967 he skated around the Adelaide policy, and when in October the government announced its intention to send a third battalion to South Vietnam, Whitlam passed up an opportunity to have a full-scale debate on the decision in the House of Representatives. The next month, opening Labor’s campaign for the halfSenate election due on 25 November, he ignored the strict conditions that the party had attached to a continuing Australian military presence in Vietnam and thereafter carefully focused the ALP campaign on domestic issues, even at the cost of being charged with evasiveness on foreign policy. The outcome provided a heartening boost for Labor; its vote was up 5 per cent on the 1966 result.81 Whitlam’s strategy, though appearing to pay electoral dividends, added to the sense of futility that some in the parliamentary Left felt about continuing to try to oppose the war under the auspices of the Labor Party. Cairns and others from the Left had long been frustrated at the reluctance of the mainstream of the party to unambiguously condemn Australia’s involvement in the conflict. By 1967 that frustration had turned into despair, and a belief that it was time to bypass the party and look to extra-parliamentary activities as the most effective means of promoting the case against intervention. Cairns recalls: ‘1967 was really the time when it became essential to take it outside the party . . . It was a waste of time in the party. We had to take it out into the streets.’ 82 It was not only Left-wing members of the ALP who had arrived at this conclusion. Many within the anti-war movement were doubtful about traditional methods of campaigning in the hope of influencing public opinion and thus changing government policy, or securing the election of

a Labor government. In the lead-up to the 1966 federal election the movement had been largely united in its pursuit of the latter goal, and militant tendencies were subsumed as anti-war protesters looked forward enthusiastically to an ALP victory. When Labor was demolished at the polls, the peace movement was shocked and demoralised. The older and more moderate elements, in particular, were bewildered. By contrast, the election loss radicalised younger sections of the peace movement. They increasingly derided established liberal democratic forms of protest and the notion of working for social change through existing political and social institutions. Instead they were drawn to a new militant strategy to confront the authority of the liberal capitalist state head-on, where necessary employing illegal and even violent tactics.83 Towards the end of the 1960s the mobilisation of the ‘New Left’— the term encompassed the surge of student radicalism—was crucial in invigorating the anti-war movement. The young militants’ rebellion against the government’s Vietnam policy and against the society that had produced it nourished Cairns’ hope that opposition to the war might provide a window to the construction of a better social order. Yet for an established ‘Old’ Left leader like Cairns, the new breed of radicalism also presented a challenge. What distinguished the New Left was its rejection of conventional ways of thinking about creating social change. It embodied a new anti-institutional politics. The debacle of 1966 and Whitlam’s subsequent dilution of Labor’s anti-war policy had shown Cairns the need for an alternative grass-roots strategy. But unlike the New Left radicals, he was not yet ready to disregard the validity of parliamentary politics as a medium for fundamental social change. His aim was to try and achieve some form of theoretical accommodation between the New Left philosophy and the older traditions of Australian radical thought. He wanted to harness the energy of the student radical movement, while restraining some of its more intemperate and doctrinaire elements. In short, a delicate balancing act was required.

6 ‘a s y mbol of partic ipatory democ rac y ’ 1968–1970 SOME . . . THINK THAT DEMOCRACY IS JUST PARLIAMENT . . . BUT TIMES ARE CHANGING. A WHOLE GENERATION IS NOT PREPARED TO ACCEPT THIS COMPLACENT, CONSERVATIVE THEORY. PARLIAMENT IS NOT DEMOCRACY. IT IS ONE OF THE MANIFESTATIONS OF DEMOCRACY . . . J. F. Cairns, CPD, vol. 66, 14 April 1970, p. 1066.

B Y E A R LY 1 9 6 8

serious cracks had emerged in Australia’s Vietnam policy. Their immediate cause was the fall-out in Washington from the Vietcong’s Tet offensive in South Vietnam, which had intensified the escalating doubts in the United States about the war. On 31 March 1968 President Johnson announced that he would limit air strikes against the North and seek a negotiated peace. Washington had not consulted the new Liberal Party Prime Minister, John Gorton, and his government, who were politically embarrassed by the President’s statement. More importantly, they faced the beginnings of the unravelling of a generation of conservative foreign policy. Australia’s entry into the Vietnam War had been the logical culmination of a foreign policy rooted in Cold War assumptions of superpower confrontation and the containment of

communist expansionism. More specifically, it sprang from anxiety about the post-war social upheavals in Asia, and a desire to draw the United States into a commitment to the security of the Asia-Pacific region to replace the declining power of Britain. Johnson’s announcement of March 1968 was the first step in America’s long and painful disentanglement from the Vietnam War and an indication of a broader shift in direction away from the doctrine of containment to that of rapprochement.1 The disintegration of the foundations of the Liberal-Country Parties’ foreign policy was just one manifestation of the collapse of the conservative hegemony in Australia during the years 1968–72. This was a period when, as Donald Home notes, the ‘“natural rulers”—the Liberal and Country party leaders—had lost the knack of appearing natural . . . Things were changing, and they didn’t know what to do about it.’ 2 The ferment that erupted in Australia in the late 1960s was the product of complex economic, social and cultural forces. Fundamentally, however, it was a generational phenomenon as the ‘baby boomers’, those born after World War II, reacted against the values and institutions of their parents. Equally, there is little doubt that opposition to the Vietnam War (and the related anti-conscription movement) was the catalyst for much of the dissent that swept Australia by the end of the 1960s: Controversy around the Vietnam War was part of a wider, multipronged questioning of Australian society. Yet the war was to become central to the public drama of the period. It probably ripened, perhaps somewhat synchronised, the other calls for change, the social restlessness and permissiveness of the time.3

For Jim Cairns the years 1968–70 were pregnant with hope. His public career was at its zenith; though even at the point of his greatest political triumph, his leadership of the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium movement, his actions remained shrouded in controversy. It was a period of significant ideological change for Cairns, and in hindsight may also be seen as a time of personal transition. For more than a decade Cairns had

argued tirelessly for a reappraisal of the assumptions behind Australia’s foreign policy. As those assumptions were progressively discredited by the events of the late 1960s, he had cause to feel vindicated in this stance, especially on the issue of Vietnam. Yet his crusade against the Vietnam War was far from over. Even as the logic of Australia’s involvement in the war fell apart, the Australian government obdurately resisted pressure for a withdrawal of forces. In the face of such intransigence, Cairns and the protest movement intensified their opposition to the war. By 1968 the focal point of that struggle had moved outside parliament. The shift was not simply a reaction to his frustration with the ALP, but an indication of the evolving direction of his theory of social change. As the 1960s progressed, Cairns embraced elements of New Left philosophy, most notably the concept of participatory democracy. Indeed, his extra-parliamentary activities in this period, especially the Moratorium movement had a significance beyond the mere aim of stopping the war. To Cairns, they were a means of giving practical expression to the ideal of grassroots democracy. His interest in New Left theory, however, went only so far. For example, he never completely renounced the importance of parliament as an agent of social change. Rather, Cairns seemed intent on synthesising New Left philosophy with traditional patterns of Australian socialist thought. The result was an uneasy and often ambiguous ideological mix that reflected his delicate position: he had to reconcile his role as a senior member of the Labor Party with that of key player in a grassroots social movement that was suspicious of established power structures, an incongruity all the more conspicuous as it became apparent Labor was headed for government. To the New Left militants, this balancing act was a sham. More than any other politician of the time Cairns entered into a dialogue with student radicals through his involvement in the anti-war movement. He welcomed the growth of youth radicalism, seeing it as a potentially exciting force for social change. Yet he was also mindful of the need to check its extreme and destructive elements. Consequently, although

Cairns assumed hero status among many of the younger generation, the militants treated him as one of their most dangerous enemies. As Cairns’ political thought evolved in the second half of the 1960s, there were tentative signs that he was beginning to undergo a profound personal change. Perhaps inevitably, as he began to delve into and absorb New Left philosophy, with its stress on personal liberation and selfexpression, Cairns was brought face to face with his own emotional inhibitions. During a series of pioneering interviews with a psychiatrist, Dr John Diamond, in 1968 he was directly confronted with his emotional detachment, his neglect of personal relationships, and his loneliness. In retrospect, other events from this period, too, can be seen to have left him in a vulnerable psychological state. When Cairns began openly to preach a creed of personal liberation in 1974–75, to many of his bewildered followers he appeared to have undergone some form of sudden and dramatic transformation. Yet, in truth, the personal and intellectual origins of that transformation were sown during the late 1960s. Although serious divisions persisted in regard to both the issues of withdrawal and the party’s relationship with the anti-war movement, the ALP’s longstanding turmoil over Vietnam substantially eased in the wake of Tet. For the Right wing of the party, in particular, the anguished response to the offensive within America helped solve the problem of how to condemn the Australian government’s position without appearing to be lukewarm on the alliance with the United States. The ambivalence that had so often characterised the Right’s approach to Vietnam was missing when the parliament debated the issue in late March. Whitlam exacted a heavy toll of the government’s sudden vulnerability, accusing it of encouraging a policy ‘which through failure and disillusionment will lead to ultimate withdrawal of American interest and influence in this region’. In a gesture that symbolised the reduced tensions within the FPLP, Cairns took the time in his speech to praise Whitlam’s contribution to the debate.4

Ironically, just when the gulf that had separated Whitlam and Cairns over Vietnam was narrowing, their rivalry flared again. On 19 April 1968 Whitlam startled colleagues by announcing his intention to resign the leadership and recontest it at a special Caucus meeting eleven days later. This shock decision had been precipitated by what became known as the ‘Harradine Affair’.5 In real terms, however, as Whitlam acknowledged in a detailed explanatory letter to Caucus members, the fundamental issue at stake was resistance within the Federal Executive to his attempts to reform the Victorian ALP. Even his supporters had misgivings. Gil Duthie, a Tasmanian Labor MP, noted in his parliamentary diary on 24 April that he would vote for Whitlam reluctantly: ‘He is too impulsive, too dictatorial, too petulant, too messianic’.6 On the same day, Cairns indicated that he would nominate for the leadership. His initial instinct had been against standing, despite pressure from the Victorian Executive and the urgings of both Tom Uren and Gwen. In fact, along with other senior members of the FPLP, Cairns actively encouraged Barnard to contest the position in the belief that he could muster the votes to defeat Whitlam. When Barnard declined these overtures, and in the absence of any other challenger, Cairns felt he had no option but to stand.7 One reason the Left was insistent that Whitlam not go unopposed was their fear that Whitlam and the Right were preparing the ground for some form of rapprochement with the DLP and, if necessary, were willing to precipitate a split with the Left to achieve this aim. Indeed, Uren suggests that Whitlam would have interpreted a decisive victory in the leadership contest as a mandate to pursue that very course.8 At the heart of Cairns’ challenge, however, was his intense distrust of Whitlam’s anti-democratic leadership style. This was the dominant theme of a letter he wrote to Caucus members appealing for their support. The final version of the letter was produced with the assistance of the newspaper columnist and advertising executive Phillip Adams, who replaced Cairns’ ‘diffident phrases’ with ‘table-pounding rhetoric’. ‘Whose party is this—ours or his?’, demanded the letter, and then

continued: ‘The historic traditions of the party are that its democratic processes should be preserved, widened and deepened, not placed more and more in the hands of one person’. This idea of Whitlam’s contempt for Labor’s democratic traditions was underscored in another passage which inveighed against those ‘who believe they are being “modern” in seeking to replace [the party’s] consultative processes [by placing] an elite—and even an individual—at the top, on the assumption that it, or he, knows best’. By contrast, Cairns vowed, if elected leader, to ‘work for unity based on loyalty and a genuine spirit of fellowship with my colleagues . . . no-one who knows me could believe that I possess any personal characteristics, ambition or aim that would be a handicap in achieving this purpose’. He also pledged to build an inclusive party which would ‘find room . . . for both those broad viewpoints often misleadingly called “left” and “right”.’ Labor, he warned, in another tilt at Whitlam, would not achieve government ‘by a continuing disregard for the socalled “left” in the belief that it has nowhere else to go’.9 The denial of personal ambition, together with his initial reluctance to stand for the position, gave Cairns’ pitch for the leadership a curiously equivocal quality. So, too, did his complaint to a journalist on the eve of the ballot that he did not ‘enjoy any of this. I wish I was right out of it altogether.’ 10 It is easy to dismiss such protestations as nothing more than an effort by Cairns to depict himself as someone to whom individual spoils were unimportant, thereby projecting a favourable contrast to the transparently ambitious Whitlam. However, as subsequent events would illustrate, Cairns did genuinely recoil from political in-fights, especially those that could be construed as advancing his own cause. Uren identified this ‘softness’ as one of Cairns’ chief political weaknesses, yet it also suggested ambivalence about both the pursuit and exercise of personal power. Such ambivalence was, at least partly, philosophical—Cairns preached egalitarianism and was distrustful of authority and elites. But, as John Diamond endeavoured to draw out when

interviewing Cairns later that year, his tentative approach to power was also possibly a function of his wider pattern of psychological denial. Diamond grilled him about his lack of ‘killer instinct’. Unsettled, Cairns confessed that he had always, even during his years as a competitive athlete, felt a ‘distaste’ for winning. Struggling to explain this feeling, he ventured that winning involved ‘too much attention’ and often meant ‘hurting somebody’. He also spoke of anxiety that being ‘first’ would deprive him of the time to ‘read, research and think’. In a later interview, Diamond returned to the subject, this time suggesting to Cairns that he had a capacity for ruthlessness, but (like so many of his drives and urges) he kept it tightly suppressed. ‘Perhaps, you are worried’, Diamond asked, ‘that if you were on top, if you were the boss, than these forces within you that you are now able to control might run away with you?’ Hesitantly, Cairns agreed.11 When the FPLP met on 30 April to settle the leadership, the result was closer than anticipated. Cairns, ably assisted by Uren and Clyde Cameron in organising support, received 32 votes to Whitlam’s 38. Emerging from the meeting, as the Australian reported, looking ‘anything but a beaten man’, Cairns told journalists that he believed the party would be strengthened by the outcome: ‘I feel there will be greater restraint, greater stability, on all sides’. The next day the press, which had widely promoted the view that a Cairns victory would be a disaster for the ALP, questioned whether anything had been resolved by the leadership showdown. Allan Barnes of the Age, observing that ‘yesterday’s ballot was a contest between the ideologist, Dr Cairns, and the pragmatist, Mr Whitlam’, forecast it was ‘more like the beginning than the end of the fight’ within the Labor Party.12 In the ensuing months, speculation was rife about leadership tensions within the ALP, including rumours of a possible schism between the Whitlam and Cairns camps. In a brief article written in mid-1968, the Sydney academic R. W. Connell lampooned the media’s preoccupation:

On my right, in the blue shorts, Stabber Whitlam, the reigning champion and white hope of the rising middle-classes. On my left, in the pink shorts, Cairns the Wrecker, the rosered working-class wonder from the banks of the muddy River Yarra. Round ninety-three coming up.

Yet Connell did not doubt the seriousness of the ideological and factional differences that separated the two men. He feared that ‘the two most talented men in Federal Parliament’ would be unable to settle their differences, thus dashing the chance that they could give Australia ‘one of the most active and most brilliant governments it has known’. Members of the government were also convinced that it was only a matter of time before there was another leadership battle within the ALP. In May the Minister for Air, Peter Howson, confidently predicted in his parliamentary diary that ‘Whitlam’s days are numbered . . . Cairns could well be leading the Labor Party within eighteen months.’ 13 Nothing of the kind eventuated; Whitlam stayed leader and Cairns never again challenged him for the position. Moreover, Whitlam remained as determined as ever to purge the Victorian ALP, culminating in federal intervention in that State in 1970. Nonetheless, there was a perception that Whitlam, chastened by the narrowness of his re-election, moderated his more bellicose tendencies following the events of April 1968. According to Uren, Whitlam’s realisation that he had a strong adversary spurred him to become a better leader. Cairns states that his challenge ‘stopped Whitlam going Right’ and was an important factor in producing the ‘It’s Time’ policy manifesto upon which Labor won the 1972 election. If this claim seems grandiose, it is endorsed by an unexpected source. In his memoirs B. A. Santamaria notes glumly that, following the 1968 Labor leadership showdown, Whitlam ‘suddenly understood the facts of life and reversed his right wing orientation’.14 Heightened interest in Cairns during and after the leadership contest resulted in a rash of profiles in the press, but it was Craig McGregor in People Politics and Pop who provided the most enlightening portrait of Cairns in this period. McGregor tried to explain his subject in terms of a

dichotomy between intellect and emotion. This theme had been tentatively used before, firstly by Alan Reid in his 1963 Bulletin profile and two years later by the Australian columnist Peter Hastings, who had divined in Cairns an element ‘of Strindberg’s self-description: “Outwardly I am ice, inwardly on fire”.’ Hastings added: ‘His life and career suggest a certain controlled restlessness, a search for a selfexpression he has never properly found’.15 Similarly, McGregor argued that Cairns’ escape from poverty, the Depression, and the authoritarianism of the police force was all part of a struggle for freedom. Yet the image McGregor conveyed of Cairns hardly suggested a liberated individual. To the contrary, he described a man who had surrendered himself to his principles: ‘somewhere along the line Cairns has made up his mind that what he stands for is more important than what he is himself’. This lack of self-regard was matched by a lifestyle that was single-minded and all but viceless: His energy and power of concentration are extraordinary. He has meetings to attend nearly every night and week-end. He flies all over the country to take part in teach-ins, protest demonstrations, marathon debates . . . He survives the strain by sheer willpower and by keeping physically fit: no breakfast, light lunch, no smoking, an occasional beer, exercises, an athlete’s discipline. . .16

As Cairns confirmed years later, this personal regime left little time for either recreational or social activities. The occasional round of golf or attendance at an Australian Rules football match afforded some release. Cairns did not read fiction and rarely watched television; though he enjoyed listening to music, he usually did so while hard at work in his study17 His was a way of life quarantined from the hedonism that animated the late 1960s, an incongruity all the more telling given his unique status as a symbol of political liberation in that same era. According to McGregor, Cairns’ idealism and dedication unnerved many people. They were disturbed, too, by his ‘coldly inhuman blue eyes . . . When he smiles, which isn’t very often, it is in “a funny downturned

sort of way”’. McGregor, though, sensed a tension that betrayed the pentup emotion encased within this grey demeanour: When he talks he has a habit of flexing his jaw muscles, of stretching his mouth into a momentary grimace, of running his hands over and down his face, like a man waking from a long sleep . . . It is the performance of a man under strain, in whom the conflict between emotion and rationality, fury and control, is still present. The emotion? The desire to be free.18

What McGregor left unresolved was where that desire would ultimately lead. When the psychiatrist Dr John Diamond interviewed Cairns in the second half of 1968, he set out to unlock his emotions. The interviews arose out of an early experiment in political psychology by the departments of political science at Melbourne and Monash universities. Cairns and the young Liberal backbencher Andrew Peacock were approached to talk to Diamond. Both agreed, but it was only with Cairns that the experiment progressed beyond the preliminary stages. Following an initial interview videotaped for use by political science students, Cairns submitted to five further private sessions with Diamond. The fact that Cairns found time in a hectic schedule to make himself available for the interviews suggests that his motive was more than intellectual curiosity. Ormonde argues that the interviews grew into ‘a voyage of selfdiscovery for Cairns’.19 The interviews with Diamond covered a wide range of subjects, including aspects of Cairns’ early life, his personal relationships and contemporary political events. Irrespective of the subject, the pattern of the exchange between the two men varied little. Diamond strove to elicit an emotional reaction from Cairns, whereas Cairns, as Diamond observed, constantly reverted to ‘logical dissertation mode’. For instance, when the discussion turned to some minor behavioural problems that Cairns’ adopted sons, Philip and Barry, had displayed in their early teenage years, there seemed little doubt that these problems had caused

the family considerable distress at the time. Yet Cairns explained the episode with an air of academic detachment. There was an undertone of guilt in his admission that he had not spent enough time working through the problems with the children. Preoccupied with his work, he had taken too many ‘shortcuts’ and ‘restrained’ the children too much. But when Diamond asked if this meant he could have been ‘more loving to them’, Cairns talked about a breakdown in reason rather than any emotional shortcoming: ‘We didn’t at the time get any logical explanation about what they were doing. It seemed to be inexplicable behaviour.’ Diamond suggested that ‘there are some dealings with people, some problems which you just can’t solve by logic’. Perhaps this was where he had gone wrong with the children? Again, he met a stonewall, Cairns insisting that his failure had been to analyse the situation inadequately.20 On occasions, Diamond managed to penetrate his subject’s emotional defences. When the interviews resumed in December, he probed Cairns about his recent confrontation with Calwell over the seat of Melbourne. The anger in Cairns’ voice was noticeable as he talked about the incident. The trigger for the battle for Melbourne was the news on 5 August that the seat of Yarra had been abolished in a federal redistribution. At the same time, the electorate of Melbourne, which the 72-year-old Calwell had represented since 1940, had been expanded to incorporate a large slice of the old seat of Yarra. Despite previously assuring Cairns that he would vacate Melbourne in such circumstances, Calwell announced that he would seek re-endorsement for the seat. To rub salt into Cairns’ wounds, Calwell declared he wanted to stay in parliament to keep Labor honest on Vietnam.21 There were frantic behind-the-scenes attempts to avoid a public confrontation between Victoria’s two highest-profile federal MPs. It soon became clear that Calwell enjoyed powerful support from key members of the Victorian Executive, including the State president Bill Brown, vice-president George Crawford, assistant secretary Glyde Butler and, to a lesser degree, secretary Bill Hartley. On the other hand, Cairns had the

backing of most party officials outside Victoria, as well as the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, including Whitlam, whose long-standing feud with Calwell transcended any enmity he may have felt towards Cairns. Local party members also gave Cairns their imprimatur, with several branches, three of which were located within the old boundaries of Melbourne, passing resolutions calling on the Victorian ALP to endorse him. The State Executive pressured Cairns to opt for the seat of Lalor in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs, regarded as a safe Labor seat following the August redistribution. But Cairns was concerned that this would disrupt his family, especially if they were required to shift into the new electorate, and would tie him down to the tedium of electoral work and rebuilding party branches in Lalor, thereby forcing him to curtail his political activities on the national stage.22 On 11 September Cairns finally broke his public silence on the issue, and announced his nomination for Melbourne. He expressed regret at the ‘distressing situation’, but threatened that if defeated he would: retire from the national Parliament until perhaps some appropriate occasion came at some other election when I could stand for an electorate which would allow me the opportunity to do the work in parliament and around the Australia without which membership of Parliament to me would not be worthwhile.

A week later, with still no signs of a resolution to the crisis, one of Cairns’ principal supporters, Clyde Cameron, persuaded the South Australian ALP to call on the Federal Executive to intervene. The Queensland branch backed the call. Paradoxically, the prospect of federal involvement, with the accompanying threat of the dispute providing the pretext for wider intervention in Victoria, was probably the factor that precipitated Cairns’ change of heart. 23 On 18 September, at a meeting arranged by another of his supporters, Moss Cass, Cairns met with Brown, Hartley and Butler. The Executive officers reiterated that the only solution to the impasse was for Cairns to take Lalor. Cass told him that he believed he would win Melbourne if it came to a vote, but warned that the

party might ‘blow apart’ in the process. Cairns capitulated, accepting the offer of Lalor, albeit on the condition that he would not have to move house.24 As Michelle Grattan observed in Nation, there was a mixed reaction to Cairns’ decision. Some applauded it as ‘statesmanlike’; others were dismayed. Uren was bitterly disappointed, especially that Cairns could not tell him of his backdown ‘to my face’. He adds that the whole episode left ‘an enormous scar’ on Cairns. 25 When Cairns announced his withdrawal from the race for Melbourne, he refused to comment when asked if Calwell had acted selfishly. Later, when Diamond pressed him, he could not conceal his antipathy towards the former party leader, remarking that Calwell’s political career had always been ‘conditioned by his own self-interest’. Diamond seemed to strike a particular nerve by asking Cairns if kindness had been a motivating factor in his decision not to pursue Melbourne. The reply was venomous: Mark Twain once told the story of Abraham Lincoln on the way to his inauguration in a horse and carriage. He saw a pig caught in a barb wire fence. He jumped out of his carriage and released it from the fence, even though he got his clothes torn and covered in mud. I don’t know whether that’s kindness, or whether you just can’t stand the squeals of the pig any more . . . I just couldn’t stick it any more.26

The dominant picture of Cairns that emerged from the interviews with Diamond was that of a solitary and highly regulated individual. As Diamond pointed out, his most striking characteristic was his capacity ‘to divorce emotion and thought’. In the course of the interviews, Cairns spoke of not having any close friends, of his inability to cry when his mother had passed away four years earlier, and the emotional barriers he put up even with those in his immediate family. To Cairns, who had recently turned fifty-four, all of this was a natural outcome of his life history: ‘the whole thing is a story of not much involvement with people . . . There was certainly no time when I was different.’ Nonetheless, he acknowledged that he was ‘curious’ to know what it would be like to be

‘involved . . . less detached’. As well, he expressed concern at the way people regarded him as cold and enigmatic and admitted that his lifestyle was lonely. During their final session Diamond put it to Cairns that the ‘big hurdle’ he had to overcome was to become ‘closer to people’. Cairns agreed but then pulled back: ‘I’m not sure if the change did come about that there wouldn’t be disadvantages . . . I might lose the time and the detachment that is necessary to research and write.’ To the end, then, Cairns gave the impression that he had a duty to sacrifice his emotional life to a greater cause. It was, as McGregor had observed, as if he had chosen ‘to subsume his own personality to the working out of social movements’.27 At one point in the Diamond interviews Cairns talked optimistically about the mobilisation of the under-thirty generation as ‘the next phase of social development in this country’. He confidently predicted that the youth movement could be ‘constructively’ politically directed and believed he was uniquely placed to achieve that goal: Over the last four or five years there isn’t a university in Australia that I haven’t spoken at three or four times every year. Increasingly in Victoria I have been talking to secondary schools . . . more than any other politician I have been in touch with the generation under thirty.28

This was no idle boast. Since 1964 Cairns’ anti-war and anti-conscription activities had brought him into close contact with the student population across Australia. By 1968–69 his status as a philosopher and mentor of the youth movement was unmatched. Whereas most of his fellow politicians, especially those from the ruling conservative parties, responded to the rising tide of youth radicalism with a blend of hostility and bewilderment, Cairns lent his weight to many of their causes and protests. He was one authority figure who appeared to understand the young generation’s alienation and disenchantment with the way society was organised, and who welcomed their mood of dissent and restlessness. Cairns’ association with the growing wave of youth dissent was

highlighted by his public support for the increasing number of young men who were directly challenging the government’s conscription scheme. In June 1968 he created front-page news by alleging that ASIO had recorded a conversation he had in his home with Denis O’Donnell, a national serviceman who had unsuccessfully sought exemption from military service as a conscientious objector. Previously, Cairns had given evidence in the County Court in Melbourne in support of O’Donnell’s application for conscientious objector status, and in April 1968 he was the main speaker at a rally held in Melbourne after O’Donnell had been sentenced to 48 days’ detention at Holsworthy military prison for being absent without leave.29 Cairns’ willingness to champion the cause of O’Donnell and others who refused to comply with conscription drew the ire of government members. In debate on the National Service Bill in May 1968 the Liberal member for Bradfield, Henry Turner, shrilly warned that if ‘a substantial part of our youth’ refused to go overseas to defend the country then ‘all of us will incinerate in our cities’ In that event, Turner continued, ‘I should like to stand beside the honourable member for Yarra and smile at him just before our ashes mingle’. In the same debate, one of Cairns’ arch-foes, the Liberal backbencher John Jess, mocked him for encouraging the crowd to defy the National Service Act at the rally in support of O’Donnell: ‘here indeed was a great man! He was not running any risk. The risk was by the young hollow-chested, extraordinary-looking types who were surrounding him.’ 30 The enthusiasm with which Cairns embraced the youth mobilisation was hardly surprising. Here at last, he considered, was a substantial section of society that shared his moral revulsion at the values of capitalism and who were willing to question conservative orthodoxies. In a paper delivered to a conference held by the Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament (AICD) in October 1968, Cairns spoke of the ‘glimmer of hope’ that emanated from the underthirty generation: They appear to be convinced that their society is amoral. ‘They appear to reject the old political, business, religious and

ideological cliches. They appear to know how much their leaders dodge embarrassing questions.’ The fundamental cause of ‘today’s stirring among our youth’, Cairns had explained to a journalist the previous July, was that we ‘are living in a society where there is very little government by the people. . . [they] buck the system because they feel it is laid down by a lot of old dodderers who won’t give them a hearing’. 31 This idea that the young were rebelling against their disempowerment and related feelings of alienation found frequent expression in Cairns’ writings at this time. For example, in August 1969 in the magazine Broadside he argued: Young people today are looking around for the solution to our moral malaise . . . The moral malaise from which our society is suffering lies in the lack of purpose and identity that is felt by so many. . . [it] is not due to any increase in the number of, or intensity of, or the objective causes of our suffering. . . The young are experiencing a sense of futility at their inability to influence the controlling power . . . 32

Cairns’ attempt to make sense of the student radicalism in this way hinted at the evolution in his own ideological position. By the first half of 1966 there had been indications of a subtle shift in his thinking. In March of that year he wrote a piece for Meanjin in which he referred to an emerging crisis in Australian society that would not be cured by rising material standards: ‘The individual feels as much impotence living in Balwyn or Toorak as in Richmond or Port Melbourne’. Why have the achievements of social democracy left us with this problem? It is because social democrats have proved wrong in believing that democratic parliaments would bring about a fairly equal dispersal of power. Those of us who still live within this tradition are blind to the way in which power is exercised in our own society. This has meant that the Labor movement as part of the whole social democratic pattern, has remained passive towards the exercise of power by those who have it. Occasionally there has been a challenge—a general strike or an attempt to use Parliament to nationalise the banks—but there has always been a retreat which does little more than increase feelings of impotence and frustration. And then we have all settled down to add a few pence to the pension and a few bob to the award wage. . .

In isolation, this passage appeared to simply reiterate a basic tenet of his theoretical approach since the late 1940s, that political democracy was largely meaningless unless it was a precursor to a more equitable distribution of power and wealth within the economy. Cairns had maintained that, until the dominance of private capital was effectively broken by the democratic exercise of state power, there could be no fundamental social change in Australia. At the same time, he had long accepted that the Labor Party and the system of parliamentary democracy offered the best chance for such an outcome. Significantly, in the Meanjin article, though, Cairns seemed to suggest that this approach was too narrow. Quoting the British New Left intellectual Perry Anderson, he declared: ‘“socialist strategy must aim at entering and inhabiting civil society at every possible point, establishing an alternative system of power and culture within it’”.33 The following month Cairns reviewed the book Towards Socialism (1965) for the journal Comment. Edited by Anderson and Robin Blackburn, Towards Socialism was the most comprehensive theoretical statement produced by the British New Left to that date. The genesis of the British New Left is usually traced to the exodus of a number of intellectuals from the British Communist Party in the wake of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, yet it was also an attempt to reinvigorate socialist theory in the context of the perceived failure of post-war social democracy to deliver on the humanist values of socialism. The New Left in Britain saw itself thus filling the void created by the deficiencies of both Stalinism and social democracy. In organisational terms, the British New Left, initially divided into two major streams, had merged by 1960 around the journal New Left Review.34 By contrast with the student New Left that surfaced in the United States and other Western industrialised nations, including Australia, during the 1960s, this original British New Left was far less diffuse in organisational form. This was also true of its theoretical approach.

The student New Left in Australia was characterised by its theoretical eclecticism.35 In their critique of urban industrial society and consumer capitalism, student radicals harked back to the early writings of Marx, laying particular stress on the concept of alienation. They drew heavily on the humanist Marxist tradition of the Frankfurt school, with Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) achieving special influence. Also under the banner of the student New Left were the Maoist groups in Melbourne, most notably the Monash Labour Club, and Trotskyists in Sydney, who embraced a basically orthodox Leninist socialist strategy. The overt revolutionary slogans of this section of the student movement sat awkwardly with notions of pacifist civil disobedience that filtered into Australia, primarily from the United States. As well, there was a strong revival of interest in nineteenthcentury romantic-libertarian socialist thinkers such as William Morris. Third World revolutionary heroes like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were lionised, and non-Western philosophy and culture attracted many. Muddying the picture further still, the student New Left was nourished by the amorphous phenomenon of youth rebellion and generational change that found its expression in new music and fashions, drug-taking and adventurous sexual mores. While much of this experimentation was distinctly non-political in character, it was sanctioned by the New Left’s emphasis on personal politics. A popular slogan of the movement was the need to ‘live the revolution’: a change in one’s personal values and lifestyle could prefigure a broader social transformation. Amid all this theoretical diversity, if anything unified and defined the student New Left (apart from its generational nature), it was a repudiation of parliamentary politics. Encouraged by Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance—which attributed capitalism’s durability to its capacity to absorb, integrate and thus neutralise its critics by diverting their protests into non-harmful channels, particularly institutionalised democracy— student radicals were determined to avoid such a fate by remaining outside the mainstream political system. The British New Left

largely shared this scepticism about parliamentary politics. In the second of his essays in Towards Socialism, Anderson wrote that the starting point of social democracy had been ‘the decision to work exclusively’ within the limits of parliamentary democracy. This represented, he argued, an ‘ineradicable misconception of the nature of power in advanced capitalist societies and the means of attaining it’. Power in these societies was not ‘monocentric’, rather it was ‘mediated and objectified in a range of crucial institutions’, including families, schools, universities, factories, offices and newspapers. A social democratic government is, therefore, circumscribed and neutralised, first by the ‘immense aggregate power preserved by the hegemonic class in all the other sectors of the power structure’; and, second, by its acceptance of these limitations. As a result, the ‘power’ won by a social democratic government is a mirage; it is ‘simply permission to operate the status quo’.36 Anderson then outlined an alternative strategy for a socialist party in an advanced capitalist society: ‘[it] must present itself unambiguously as a hegemonic force. That is to say, it must propose, a coherent, global alternative to the existing social order.’ He stressed that the party’s ‘arc of action must embrace not only the bare institutions of the state, but the whole complex landscape of civil society as well’. Given this objective, and the post-war fragmentation of social classes, Anderson insisted that the party should be broadened to incorporate intellectuals and the intermediate classes—the white-collar salariat and technical intelligentsia—while retaining its working-class base.37 This raised the inevitable question of where the British Labour Party fitted into Anderson’s strategy. Despite lamenting Labour’s non-socialist character, he acknowledged that it was the hegemonic party of the British workingclass, and spent much of the essay suggesting ways in which it might be transformed into a medium for the type of grassroots socialist movement he hoped to create. Ultimately, thus, Anderson and the British New Left generally found the Labour Party ‘too overwhelming a formation to be bypassed’.38

The reluctance of the British New Left to divorce itself totally from the existing political structure was one of the chief features that distinguished it from the student radical movement. In Australia a similar road was taken by some of the intellectuals who split from the CPA after the events of 1956. Disillusionment with Stalinism sparked a revival in socialist theory that found its outlet in the establishment of the Sydneybased independent socialist journal Outlook in 1957.39 Even more than its British counterpart, this ‘first’ New Left in Australia, sometimes described as the ex-Communist New Left, sought to maintain a dialogue with the traditional Australian Left. Ian Turner, who was closely involved in the formation of Outlook, later recalled that the journal tried ‘to keep open the channels of communication’ with the CPA and ‘to define a new relationship with the Labor Party’. By 1959, the basis of that new relationship was apparent, with the ex-Communist New Left seeing its role as that of a socialist ginger-group within the ALP and broader labour movement. Outlook articulated that role in an editorial declaring that the task of socialists was not to form a new Labor Party, but to work ‘through the ALP, which commands the electoral support of the workers and intellectuals who seek change’.40 When Jim Cairns began to enunciate New Left ideas in the second half of the 1960s, he did so largely in the fashion of the British New Left and the ex-Communist Australian New Left of the 1950s. Unlike the student New Left, he wanted to breathe new life into Australia’s democratic socialist tradition, rather than start from scratch. Thus, while he came to agree that it was self-defeating to focus the struggle for socialism exclusively upon the state, he was equally convinced that it would be misguided to ignore Australia’s long history of political reformism through the agency of the ALP. Instead Cairns advocated social change through political activism both within and outside the parliamentary arena. He hoped that these two approaches could complement one another, although inevitably there was a basic contradiction in trying to implement change through, on the one hand,

mass participatory action and, on the other hand, the exercise of state power by a parliamentary elite. A parallel ambiguity, never far from the surface in his thinking, surrounded the question of whether the advent of socialism was dependent, in the first instance, on economic structural change, or alternatively, on a change in consciousness. The emphasis Cairns had long placed on disseminating new ideas, even at the expense of political power, suggested a predisposition to the New Left precept that the success of socialism was to be decided principally in the realm of ideas and culture. Yet Cairns also continued to insist upon the need for a direct assault by the state upon the private control of the means of production. These tensions were to be conspicuous during the late 1960s and early 1970s as his view of the relative importance of parliamentary and extraparliamentary activity fluctuated. Cairns was sending out such conflicting messages partly because he was simultaneously acting within two distinct political milieus—a senior member of the federal parliament and a key figure within the grassroots anti-war movement. Equally, it may be a sign that his thinking on the process of social change was still in a state of transition. Cairns reviewed Towards Socialism in glowing terms. The review’s title, ‘New look for Labor’, pointed to the context within which he analysed the book: There are always people around who say Labor must obtain a “new look”. By that many of them mean that Labor must drop Socialism and adopt a policy which seeks primarily to gain power, and to that end it must accept capitalism . . . There are others, however, who maintain that Labor must obtain a “new look” for different reasons . . . Power, says the New Left, should not be merely used to put a few shillings on a pension or wage, or even to nationalise an industry, but to change society.

From the outset, then, it seemed clear that Cairns was interested in what the New Left had to say not because it opened a new and separate pathway to social change, but because of its relevance to Labor and, in

particular, the issue that had long preoccupied him: the party’s commitment to socialism. At the same time, Cairns gave his imprimatur to the book’s central message that power in modern capitalist societies was not located primarily in the state: ‘There is a multiplicity of “centres of power”’ within which the individual was ‘more and more managed, and brainwashed’. Therefore, the changes envisaged by socialists could not be left to parliament: ‘They cannot be brought about by a dozen party leaders, or a few hundred men in Parliament, whatever the laws they make’.41 In his review, Cairns acknowledged to a greater degree than hitherto that post-war capitalism modified by social democracy, or what he preferred to call ‘laborism’, had eliminated scarcity for most of its citizens. But, he argued, ‘to make further progress man has to create in conditions of affluence a real community acting humanely and behaving co-operatively. This capitalism has not done and cannot do.’ Social democratic practice did not offer a solution: ‘we are left with the problem of the powerful and bureaucratic state, with powerful private monopolies, with alienation. There is nothing in Laborism, old or new, which will do much to humanise society’ This was the task of socialism, and consistent with the New Left, Cairns here evoked the authority of early Marx: Socialism is derived from a different aspect of Marx . . . It is influenced by the kind of sociology of which Marx was a precursor. Socialism is not derived out of the single contest of the capitalist and proletariat ending in either a revolution or a gradual capture and use of the State: it is derived out of the alienation of man caused by capitalism, out of what has been called the ‘fetishism of goods’. The justification for socialism does not rest upon capitalism’s inability to produce and create affluence, nor upon the extent to which it exploits people, but upon its failure to create a humane and cooperative society. The purpose of socialism is to do so.

How was this to be achieved? Cairns suggested that the fate of socialism hinged on a grassroots mobilisation requiring ‘the dedication and active participation of vast numbers of people’. He endorsed Anderson’s vision of a diverse socialist network: ‘Socialist proposals must concern how

factories are run, what happens in schools and in families, it must be a “political program which concerns men in their entirety and tries to liberate them in their whole social life”‘.42 There were elements of both continuity and change in Cairns’ thinking here. Certainly the stress on alienation was new, though he had long been concerned with the powerlessness of the average person in a society where private capital was dominant. Equally, while he went further than before in acknowledging capitalism’s ability to provide material wealth, his protest that it was incapable of producing a humane and co-operative society was familiar. In essence, this was a restatement of what he had been arguing for two decades—that capitalism’s primary failing was a valuative or ethical one. There was, however, a definite departure in the idea that socialists could not solely rely upon the state to usher in a new social order, but must instead pursue a strategy involving a multi-pronged and community-based challenge to capitalism. What was unclear, though, was whether Cairns believed this type of mass participatory action should be merely an adjunct to state action or, more significantly, supplant it. In a series of writings in 1968–69 Cairns appeared to opt for the former position. Among them was an article published in the La Trobe University student newspaper, Rabelais, in mid-1969. Simply entitled ‘Socialism’, it presented a singularly depressing picture of the operation of parliamentary democracy. Cairns described a climate of widespread public apathy in which most people were willing to tie their own hand politically between elections . . . Then at election times there does not seem to be much choice; politicians are not respected and so the citizen withdraws even further from participation in his own government . . . Social democracy really consists of thousands of autocratic units, each governed from the top. Factories, offices, stores, government departments, schools, universities, churches, clubs, political parties and trade unions are all more or less autocracies in which there is very often little or no internal self government at all.

In short, social democracy amounted to little more than a ‘benevolent

dictatorship’.43 According to Cairns, therefore, the basic issue facing socialists was the democratisation of society. Cairns believed that this action should ‘proceed where ever and when ever we can win a little power for the people’; but crucially, he added: ‘in order to set out systematically it may best begin with the power of the state’. This point was reinforced towards the end of the article: ‘Workers must come to realise that State power is their only offset to the ever increasing and concentrating private power, and that trade union and political party action is still the most effective way of obtaining positive State power’.44 The primacy of parliament as an instrument for social change was also the chief message of the article Cairns contributed to Broadside. He emphasised that the malaise that afflicted contemporary Australian life originated ‘in the structure of society’, which prevented individuals ‘from making National decisions’. Ordinary people had little control over their own lives. The answer, then, was to give them ‘an effective voice’ by developing ‘government by the people’ in, among other places, schools, shops and factories. But there was an important caveat: ‘we must, of necessity, turn back to our National Parliament. . . [as] so much more can be done in Parliament than elsewhere’. He went on to conclude: people as a whole will change only when there is a change in their environment . . . Parliament is still the only effective way to achieve this . . . This is the basic truth on which the Labor movement stands and this is the basic truth on which socialism stands.45

When Cairns spoke of the need to ‘turn back’ to the parliament, he had in mind the student radicals. Several months earlier, addressing the AICD conference, he had voiced his growing concern at the readiness of the young to spurn conventional politics. Cairns warned the ‘student generation’ that it was not sufficient ‘to correctly recognise the amorality of the social establishment of today, and to protest and dissent’; in order

to change society, it would have to stop disenfranchising itself. Politics appears to be amoral. But no more than society as a whole. Nothing can be gained by boycotting politics in the belief that protests, demonstrations and civil disobedience can do the job and politics can’t. Unless sufficient of the new generation goes into the political machine it won’t achieve more than its disillusioned predecessor . . . All the thoughts of the new protesting generation have been thought before. Unless they are channelled into politics and unless politics is made to change the way society is run then the old order will have yet another victory.46

Cairns was disturbed not only at the student radicals’ repudiation of institutionalised politics but also at the willingness of some to embrace violent tactics. The Monash Labour Club and other ultra-Left groups within the student movement held violence to be a legitimate—indeed, indispensable—tool in the campaign against the Vietnam War and the broader struggle against capitalism. In April 1969 the Monash Labour Club’s journal Print declared that the ‘peaceful protest movement’ had failed, and that for a demonstration ‘to be effective it must be violent’. 47 When the previous July an American Independence Day demonstration outside the US consulate in Melbourne erupted into violence, members of the Monash Labour Club had been prominent. Addressing a packed meeting of the club the next day, Cairns admonished the assembled students, telling them that any departure from non-violent activity was ‘totally inappropriate’ and would harm their cause. Yet neither did he absolve ‘the authorities’ from responsibility, complaining that their aggression had fuelled the violent reaction of protesters.48 In his article for Broadside, Cairns reiterated his opposition to violent protest. But, importantly, he placed this disavowal of violence within the context of an individual’s right to break an immoral law: there must be freedom to break the law, when we know the law is bad. We must have freedom to express opinion contrary to the ruling opinion, but there must be no claim for the use of violence Violence is evil, corrupting and harmful for all those who turn too readily to it.49

The right to protest and defy the law were issues tackled by Cairns in a paper produced, rather incongruously, for the Apex Club and published in its magazine, the Apexian, in May 1969. He began by pointing out that, under the provisions of the Commonwealth Crimes Act and a raft of State laws and local government regulations, there existed virtually no scope for legal protest in Australia. Despite this absence of a legal right to protest, Cairns insisted there was a moral one: ‘If the factor of supreme conscience is the individual, his soul or conscience, and not the State or some other authority . . . then certainly the individual has to be free to show what is his soul or conscience’. He noted it was the conventional wisdom that if the people did not approve of a government’s actions ‘we can vote them out at the next election. But between elections the democratic theory is that we have to accept what the governments do and should not much object.’ It was generally accepted, moreover, that too much protest could lead to ‘anarchy’. Cairns rejected this thinking. He argued that it was consistent with an emasculated version of democracy in which the average person exercised little power, or took scant responsibility for the way society was organised: ‘Most people do not protest. They merely vote in elections . . . [choosing] habitually or unthinkingly between two candidates they regard as “tweedle-dum” and “tweedle-dee”.’ 50 A clear connection existed in Cairns’ mind between the right to protest and the wider ideal of a vibrant, participatory democracy. In the following twelve months he would constantly return to this theme, especially in the buildup to the first Moratorium. Equally, he persistently reiterated that the ultimate basis for protest and defiance of the law was individual conscience; it was a matter of moral choice and, where the government’s position was particularly objectionable, an issue of moral responsibility. As was so often the case with Cairns, his theorising had a practical dimension. Inspired by the spontaneous actions of individual draft resisters during 1967, the anti-conscription movement had entered by 1968 what its historian, Michael Hamel-Green, identifies as a phase of

direct resistance to the national service scheme. This collective resistance was manifested in sit-ins, raids on government offices and large-scale campaigns to encourage 20-year-olds not to register. The first of the major ‘Don’t Register’ campaigns was launched on 25 January 1969 at the commencement of the January–February registration period. On the first day of the campaign several students were arrested, two on charges of incitement under the Commonwealth Crimes Act, and the remainder under a Melbourne City Council by-law which prohibited the handing out of leaflets.51 Soon after, at a meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall called to protest against the gaoling of draft resisters, Cairns declared that if ‘required to register myself today for military service, I would refuse to register’. At another protest meeting in Hobart’s Franklin Square on 1 April, he again publicly supported the campaign by challenging police to arrest him for inciting people not to surrender themselves for military service. He read to the crowd sections of a pamphlet that police had deemed to be in breach of the Crimes Act and for whose distribution outside the Hobart office of the Department of Labour and National Service several students had been arrested. Commonwealth and State police looked on, but made no move to arrest him.52 The same day the Melbourne City Council announced that, despite a representation from university students, it had decided not to repeal the archaic by-law that prohibited the handing out of leaflets in city streets. Cairns, who three weeks earlier had written to each of the councillors appealing for the repeal of the by-law, promptly issued a statement advising that he would head a group of academics, clergy and other citizens distributing leaflets outside the Town Hall at a demonstration organised by the Save Our Sons Movement (SOS) on 3 April. 53 A large contingent of police, City Council officers and media were in attendance when, as announced, Cairns and his fellow demonstrators gathered near the steps of the Town Hall with leaflets specifically written by Cairns for the occasion. This time the police were prepared to act. As they began to hand out leaflets, Cairns and twelve others were arrested for breaching

the City Council by-law and for refusing to give police their names and addresses. After questioning at police headquarters, Cairns was released without charges but was informed he would be proceeded against on summons for breaching the by-law.54 With the arrest of Cairns attracting headlines, the pressure on the Melbourne City Council to repeal the by-law intensified. He turned up the pressure another notch by stating that he was ready to go to gaol if convicted of handing out leaflets and would take part in further protest action in defiance of the by-law. Both the Age and Herald called for the by-law’s repeal, and to add to the Melbourne City Council’s discomfort the Victorian Liberal government’s Minister for Local Government, Rupert Hamer, said he opposed the ban on distributing leaflets. 55 Finally, on 9 April the councillors buckled, unanimously voting to repeal the bylaw and announcing that actions against the more than sixty people awaiting summons for breaching it would be dropped. Cairns was elated at the news, declaring that it ‘proved the effectiveness of reasonable demonstration, even if it appeared unlawful. . . it shows to the young people of this country that if they campaign intelligently they can obtain an adjustment of the law’.56 While Cairns continued to put himself on a direct collision course with authorities by participating in other acts of civil disobedience in the second half 1969, Labor was preparing the ground for a federal election. In August the party’s Federal Conference endorsed a motion stating that an ALP government would ‘take immediate action to notify the United States Government that all Australian armed forces will be withdrawn from Vietnam’. Whitlam, who had unsuccessfully sought a less categorical statement on withdrawal, opposed the motion. In 1967 Whitlam had shown he was prepared to flout the party’s official policy on Vietnam if he disagreed with it. But a Morgan Gallup Poll had found that, for the first time since the commitment of combat troops, a majority of Australians wanted the contingent to be brought home, and there had been

two major US troop withdrawals over the previous six months; this time he toed the party line. Opening the ALP’s campaign for a House of Representatives election that had been called for 25 October, Whitlam declared that under a Labor government there would be ‘no Australian troops in Vietnam after June 1970’. The Left wing of the party was delighted. The issue of withdrawal, which had plagued Labor since 1965, had finally been laid to rest.57 As it turned out, Vietnam did not play a substantial role in the 1969 election campaign; both Gorton and Whitlam focused on domestic policy. Labor had the upper hand, with a comprehensive program of reform in health, education, cities, housing and the environment, as mapped out at the party’s August Federal Conference, whereas the government campaigned on a mish-mash of policies that reflected its own increasing confusion over the aspirations of the Australian people. The result was a massive 7.1 per cent swing to Labor, bringing it within striking distance of government.58 The fact that the conservative parties had fought the election on Whitlam’s preferred ground underscored the disintegration of their foreign policy and defence strategy and, by implication, Vietnam’s significance to the outcome. As Cairns noted early in the campaign, the ‘great anti-communist simplification’ that had dominated post-war Australian politics had broken up.59 With the Gorton Government on the defensive, the new parliament sat for just 13 hours on 25–26 November before rising for the summer recess. In the dying minutes of the sitting during the adjournment debate, Cairns delivered a brief but fiery speech about Vietnam. Less than a fortnight earlier the US media had broken the story of the My Lai massacre. In March 1968 a platoon of US soldiers led by Lieutenant W. L. Calley had entered this hamlet in the central Quang Ngai province and slaughtered up to 500 unarmed villagers.60 For Cairns, My Lai and reports of other atrocities further exposed the lie that Western intervention was ‘protecting the Vietnamese people’. On the contrary, it

was ‘massacring and destroying them’. He cited estimates of Vietnamese civilian casualty figures, upwards of 200,000 in 1968–89, and American use of napalm, saturation bombing and anti-personnel weapons. ‘It is stupid and ironical’, he bitterly continued, for a nation that employed such weapons to convict one or two of its soldiers of murder because he shoots 1 or even 20 Vietnamese civilians in a village. It is stupid and ironical to regard one man who shoots 10 or 20 people on the ground as a murderer and to regard a man who flies Puff the Magic Dragon [a DC3], pumping out 5,000 bullets a minute, as otherwise.

His point was clear—My Lai was merely a microcosm of the far greater atrocity of the war itself. Nor was there any doubt about who was responsible for that atrocity; the US Administration stood ‘condemned of a system of mass murder’ and the Australian government was one of its ‘accomplices’.61 Cairns’ anger derived in part from frustration at the Gorton Government’s stubborn refusal to rethink its policy on Vietnam or begin the pull-out of Australian forces, even as the Americans started their own painful process of extrication from the war. As he noted, ‘The whole question of Australian foreign and defence policy is in the melting pot. . . [but] the government believes, of course, that it can continue to maintain its position on the deck of the old ship’.62 The impassioned character of the speech also possibly reflected the personal travails Cairns had endured over the previous few months. In the early hours of 31 August 1969 he and Gwen, their son Barry and daughter-in-law June, and four guests were savagely bashed by gate-crashers at an ALP fund-raising party in their Hawthorn home. Cairns was hit over the head with a heavy wooden ornament, as well as being kicked in the head and body, leaving him with a severe cut to his head, facial bruising and concussion. Within days of the attack one of the assailants, Leo Peter McDonald, was arrested and charged on several counts which were subsequently amended to include that of wounding Cairns with intent to murder. Released on

bail, McDonald twice failed to appear in court before finally facing trial in the County Court in Melbourne in October 1973, when he pleaded guilty to charges of having assaulted Cairns and one of his guests.63 The physical legacy of the bashing for Cairns was excruciating headaches, sleeplessness and impaired concentration for some time.64 Almost as hurtful were the murmurs that later surfaced, and gathered force as he drifted outside the political mainstream, that he was never quite the same after the attack. Cairns and those close to him, including Uren, hotly deny that there is any basis to the claim. But it is a theory that commands a surprising number of adherents, although it is usually only mentioned in whispered tones. Even some of Cairns’ former parliamentary colleagues are inclined to the view; Kim Beazley Snr is one of those said to have wondered if he ever fully recovered from the assault.65 Another rumour was that the bashing was connected to the underworld of Richmond politics. Janet McCalman writes that ‘the assault originated from deep within Richmond; the motives and the actors are known but lips are sealed’ Cairns has persistently discounted this suggestion. A few days after the bashing Barry Cairns informed the media that the family was convinced the attack was ‘not political in any way.’ He then read a statement from his father which asserted that violence of that kind could not be ‘dealt with by punishment. It seems the result of bad upbringing, poor education and no sensible advice or training.’ Cairns’ explanation years later was less forgiving, but basically unchanged: ‘It was nothing more than four or five thugs showing off to their girlfriends’.66 In the afterglow of Labor’s dramatic renaissance at the 1969 poll, Cairns publicly praised Whitlam’s leadership. The improved relationship between the two men was underscored in November when Whitlam launched Cairns’ new book, The Eagle and the Lotus: Western Intervention in Vietnam, 1847–1968. According to Cairns, Whitlam was ‘euphoric’ at the launch, waxing lyrical about how the book proved the

case that Labor’s opposition to involvement in the war had always been justified. The irony of the occasion was not lost on Cairns—he alluded to it in the inscription he wrote in a copy of the book he presented to Whitlam.67 In The Eagle and the Lotus Cairns placed the war in Vietnam within the context of the long historical struggle of the Vietnamese people for national independence. As he explained, the national revolutionary movement in Vietnam was ‘more than a century old, it was strong and it went deep into the lives and experience of the people. It was unique.’ 68 The book charted the nationalist resistance to French colonial rule from the middle of the nineteenth century to the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Cairns argued forcefully that the French created the fertile ground for the emergence of revolutionary forces in Vietnam not only by their determination to maintain control over the country, but also by their support for an arbitrary, corrupt and cruel Vietnamese ruling class. With the fall of the French and the temporary partitioning of the country under the articles of the Geneva Agreement, Vietnam became a focus of the international Cold War struggle. According to Cairns, Washington had initially interpreted the war in Vietnam against the French as a colonial war and recognised that a national revolution was taking place. The seeds of the failure of US policy were in not standing by this assumption and, in particular, lack of pressure on the Diem regime in South Vietnam to address the economic and social grievances of the people: the Diem government destroyed the opportunities it had to establish a stable, nonCommunist government in South Vietnam, and produced dissent for which it denied any political or peaceful outlet. This is how and why that force which became the national guerilla movement in Vietnam originated, not by aggression from the north or from any Communist conspiracy, but in South Vietnam . . . 69

By the early 1960s, Cairns argued, the die had been cast for war in Vietnam. On the one hand, the revolutionary forces in South Vietnam,

harassed and persecuted by the Diem regime, made the crucial decision to opt for violent struggle. Hanoi had always been dedicated to the reunification of the country but had relied primarily on political methods; now it had to sanction the actions of the revolutionary forces in the South or risk forfeiting any influence over events there. On the other hand, Washington’s explanation of the situation in Vietnam had shifted from a historical and sociological one to that of ‘aggression from the north’. The paradox was, as Cairns stressed in the final chapter, that America’s military involvement had proved counter-productive to its goal of South Vietnam becoming an anti-communist bastion in South-East Asia and, in all likelihood, ended any prospect of a ‘third force’ controlling that country: the Eagle played a crucial and vital role not in successfully resisting Communism—for Communism is no weaker now than it was in 1954 or 1961 and may well be stronger— but in weakening the Buddhist-nationalist alternative . . . I think it is probable that the South Vietnamese Lotus—the Buddhist-Nationalist alternative—would have handled Communism more in the interests of the Vietnamese people than did the American military intervention and its pistol-packing generals.70

For a senior politician, especially one as busy as Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus was a considerable achievement. The book’s analysis of the historical origins of the Vietnamese conflict did not break any new ground in terms of either research or interpretation, but in Australia, where debate on the war had rarely risen above the level of Cold War clichés, it reinforced the fact that Cairns was a shining exception. The book was also testament to Cairns’ uniqueness in Australia in a broader sense. As Dennis Altman commented in a review in Nation: ‘In a country whose politicians are noted for their ignorance of, and contempt for, intellectuals, he [Cairns] is committed to intellectual endeavour and rational argument’.71 With conservative thinking on the war dented by recent events, The Eagle and the Lotus did not inspire anything like the hostility that had

greeted the publication of Living with Asia. This is not to say that The Eagle and the Lotus was without its faults or critics. As one review justifiably suggested, the book bore the traits of having been produced in a rush and suffered from a lack of editing. A more substantial criticism was that on occasions Cairns’ analysis lapsed, as the same review noted into, ‘determinism and romanticism’: ‘The heroes are all on one side— anti-capitalist, in step with history, fighting for freedom from oppression; the villains are all on the other—rabidly anti-communist, reactionary, foreign, collaborationist, exploiters’.72 Specifically, Cairns was accused of underestimating the atrocities perpetrated by the National Liberation Front. He responded to this charge, though not totally satisfactorily, in a postscript to the second edition of the book in 1971: There have been war crimes by Americans and terror by the ‘Communists’. This kind of violence is an evil thing but few people draw any distinction between the violence of Americans on an expedition ten thousand miles from their own country and the violence of people in their own country who fervently believe they are fighting for their own country and for their survival.73

If publication of The Eagle and the Lotus consolidated Cairns’ status as the intellectual leader of the anti-war movement in Australia, his involvement in the Moratorium movement would guarantee that his name became synonymous with the opposition to the Vietnam War. His participation began with the first meeting of the Victorian Vietnam Moratorium Campaign (VMC), held in the Caprice restaurant in Collins Street on 9 December 1969. Cairns was asked to chair the meeting by John Lloyd, secretary of the Victorian-based Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament (CICD) and a prime mover behind a national consultation of peace groups, which the previous month had decided to stage an anti-Vietnam Moratorium campaign in Australia culminating on the second weekend in May 1970. The meeting endorsed the twin aims of the VMC as adopted by the national consultation, that is, the withdrawal of Australian and all other foreign troops from Vietnam;

and the repeal of the National Service Act. It also established a temporary organising committee to which Cairns was elected. When a little over a week later the temporary committee was convened for the first time Cairns was appointed to a five-person secretariat and a decision made to arrange an open meeting of sponsors to determine the policy of the movement.74 On 1 February 1970 over 400 people filled the Richmond Town Hall to attend the sponsors’ meeting of the Victorian VMC. It was the first of several large public meetings that the Moratorium movement held there during 1970–71. Projected as an exercise in direct democracy, these meetings became a testing ground for an ideological struggle for control of the VMC between the moderate, established sections of the anti-war movement and the radical, younger elements. Debate ranged over many issues, from the tactics and slogans to be used at the demonstrations to the choice of speakers. Underlying these practical issues were deeper questions about whether the Moratorium movement should restrict its aims to stopping the war in Vietnam and ending conscription in Australia or, as the radical sections insisted, explicitly align itself with the struggle of the National Liberation Front to defeat American imperialism in Indochina. 75 Even more fundamental were the divisions over the character of the VMC. On the one hand, the moderates, loosely comprising the Left wing of the ALP, members of the CPA, and representatives of established peace groups such as the CICD and SOS, sought to create a broad non-exclusive coalition of Left forces unified by their opposition to the war. On the other hand, the young militants were adamant that the quest for unity and diversity within the movement should not be achieved at the cost of ‘diluting radical sentiments’. Indeed, the small but vocal ultra-Left component of the student radicals, including members of the Monash Labour Club and a fellow Maoist group, the Worker-Student Alliance, were uninterested in building a mass grassroots movement; they preferred the strategy of direct confrontation to ignite revolutionary action. They were

antagonistic to the idea of forming an alliance with either Cairns or the ALP as a whole. Sam Goldbloom, vice-president of CICD, recalls that, when sponsorship by the Labor Party was canvassed at the Caprice restaurant meeting, the Monash contingent exploded: ‘“Fuck the pollies. We don’t want them and we don’t want Cairns”.’ 76 Any hope the ultra-Leftists may have harboured that they could lock Cairns out of the Moratorium movement were dashed at the Richmond Town Hall meeting of 1 February. One of the first resolutions adopted was that Cairns be appointed chairman of the Victorian VMC. 77 This decision suggested that, at least among the moderate sections, there was an appreciation that the movement needed a public face and that there was no-one within their ranks better equipped to serve that role than Cairns. Aware that the movement could be torn asunder by the tensions between its various factions, Cairns went about chairing the Richmond Town Hall meetings in as conciliatory a style as possible. Even when he was the target of frequent stinging attacks by the militants, he refused to be provoked. Bernie Taft, the CPA’s chief representative within the Victorian VMC and an important ally of Cairns in the movement, remarks that he ‘bent over backwards’ to give everyone a say, intervening only rarely in debate. The upshot was that the meetings often dragged on interminably, testing the patience of many. Goldbloom and other senior members of the VMC would hand notes to Cairns urging him to gag debate, but to no effect. In retrospect, Cairns is convinced that by allowing everyone to air their views, no matter how extravagant (at one meeting a leading light of the Monash Labour Club, Albert Langer, proposed that the US consulate be torn down ‘brick by brick’), the meetings became an important release valve for the movement’s extremist elements, thereby helping to ensure that the demonstrations were themselves peaceful.78 Although the utterances of the radicals aroused some sporadic publicity for the VMC, by March the organisers were concerned at the

dearth of media interest. The historian of the Moratorium movement, Malcolm Saunders, records that at this point Cairns ‘resolved to say something provocative and hence newsworthy.’ His press statement of 25 March triggered ‘an intense Australia wide “debate” over the Moratorium’—a debate predominantly about whether the Moratorium threatened traditional democratic practice. The statement called on workers, students and other citizens to stop work and occupy the streets of Melbourne and Victorian provincial towns on 8 May to demonstrate their opposition to the war and conscription. The aim of the VMC, Cairns explained, was to ‘hold up the commercial and industrial life of the country’ for that day and, while the organisers wanted the demonstrations to be peaceful, they could not guarantee non-violence because of the risk of police intimidation.79 There followed a prompt and outraged response from various quarters. Prime Minister Gorton labelled Cairns’ remarks a ‘call for anarchy’ and an ‘excursion into storm trooper tactics’. Cairns retaliated by describing the Prime Minister’s comments as ‘a diatribe of misunderstanding and distortion’. Meanwhile, others lined up to denounce Cairns. The deputy leader of the DLP, Senator McManus, called on him to resign from parliament. There was even criticism from within the labour movement. A senior official of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association rebuked Cairns for interfering in trade union affairs with his appeal for a stop-work.80 The most concerted attack came, however, from the editorial columns. The Melbourne Herald led the charge on 26 March, arguing that it was astounding that such threats should be coming not from a raw and reckless student fringe but from a seasoned and high-ranking Labor politician of intellectual eminence . . . [the] democratic right of protest emphatically does not include attempts to disrupt the life of Melbourne and to prevent other citizens from going about their lawful business.

Echoing the Prime Minister, both the Brisbane Courier Mail and

Adel ai de Advertiser invoked the spectre of anarchy. The latter complained that Cairns had developed an ‘irrational outlook’ on the Vietnam War that had carried him to ‘extremes’. It went on: To suggest that a city’s traffic be brought to a stop, schools closed, industry paralysed, shops and offices shut, and that, in effect, mobs take charge in the streets, was to show a dangerous leaning to violent and disruptive measures. It would be naive to believe that a ‘protest’ on this scale would remain peaceful.81

The storm unleashed by his statement of 25 March had barely subsided when Cairns sparked further controversy with a speech he made at the University of Melbourne on 13 April. He told a group of over a thousand students that, while the Moratorium campaign should be ‘reasonable, peaceful, inoffensive, and dignified’, it did not necessarily have to keep within the law. He reaffirmed his belief that an individual had a right to break an unjust law and that public protests were a legitimate form of political expression in a healthy democracy. ‘The argument that things should be left to Parliament, or to whoever happens to be ruling, is the argument of those who want to stultify and quieten the essentials of democratic action.’ 82 Previous remarks by Cairns along these lines had passed almost without comment, but in the super-charged atmosphere of the build-up to the first Moratorium they incited another barrage of hostile editorials. The Hobart Mercury considered that Cairns had ‘revealed himself as no more than a political provocateur’. ‘What is worse’, the editorial continued, ‘is that Dr. Cairns has expressed the amazing belief that a “citizen has the right to break an objectionable law.” This is stupid and dangerous. If people assumed the right to disobey laws they do not like society would revert to pure anarchy’ The Sydney Morning Herald presented a more sober analysis, but concluded that ‘When Parliament decides that a law is objectionable, it will presumably repeal it. Until then the first duty of a citizen is to obey.’ It fell upon the Australian to supply an alternative viewpoint:

In the abject state of Australian policy on Vietnam, the Moratorium campaign deserves support. Dr Cairns deserves commendation for leading it. If these activities help to hasten the withdrawal of Australian forces, and to end the war in Vietnam, they will be a signal achievement for the democratic process.83

The day after his speech at Melbourne University, Cairns took part in a parliamentary debate on the Moratorium movement. Beginning with a ministerial statement by the Attorney-General, Tom Hughes, the government’s efforts to discredit the VMC centred on three major themes. The first was that it was controlled and inspired by the Communist Party. A less clichéd but equally predictable criticism was that the Moratorium was dedicated to forcibly displacing the institution of parliamentary democracy. Finally, a number of the government speakers made much of the fact that Cairns had admitted that the organisers of the VMC could not guarantee that there would be no violence at the protests.84 The ALP’s defence of the Moratorium campaign was led by an illat-ease Whitlam. Along with many others in the Labor Party, Whitlam regarded the VMC as, at best, a nuisance. Indeed, in some sections of the ALP, especially the New South Wales and Tasmanian State branches, there was barely disguised hostility to the Moratorium. Only in Victoria did the Labor Party provide unqualified moral and practical support.85 Whitlam’s less than enthusiastic attitude to the movement was partly philosophical. Unlike Cairns, Whitlam was unswerving in his faith in the supremacy of parliament as an instrument of social change. He appeared to share none of the former’s premonitions about the inherent shortcomings of relying on the state to refashion society. Nor did he worry, as Cairns did, that a basic contradiction existed as long as the task of redistributing power and wealth in society remained the preserve of an elected elite. Beyond these philosophical issues, Whitlam also believed that demonstrations were a political handicap for the ALP. He had enunciated his doubts about their value when the House debated the issue of student protests in May 1969:

I am convinced that no demonstration helps to end conscription or to end the war. I am convinced that they are counter-productive. I am convinced that they are deliberately played up in such a way as to react against the Labor Party . . . It is precisely because I believe that parliamentary institutions are still fundamentally sound, and precisely because I believe that change can and must be reached through parliamentary processes, that I do not myself march.86

Appropriately, it was Cairns who offered the most articulate and effective defence of the Moratorium movement in a speech that stands as among the most memorable and powerful of his time in the parliament. In it, he grappled unflinchingly with the charges that had been brought against the campaign. Cairns heaped scorn on the notion that opposition to the war required a communist conspiracy: It needs no messages or control from Hanoi or Peking. Is it surprising that there is intense opposition to what has happened in Vietnam from students, workers and all sorts of people all around Australia and in every country of the world? There is surely a limit to the number of human beings anyone will kill—even if they are coloured, foreign and Communist—to achieve any particular purpose. What is the limit in Vietnam?

In these circumstances, he insisted that it was not the opponents of the war who were ‘in such a strange position that they should have to explain their conduct. . . It is the supporters of the war in Vietnam who need to explain what they do’. Cairns did not deny that there were communists in the Moratorium movement, nor that he was prepared to co-operate with them in the struggle against the war: Communists believe that it is right to oppose the war in Vietnam. I believe that it is right to oppose the war in Vietnam. I will oppose the war in Vietnam with anyone who opposes it. . . Communists can be a threat to democracy, but threats to democracy in Australia come from a different direction. They come from some of those who can draw upon all the traditional and conventional values and who, because of their status and authority, can make people look over their shoulder, lapse into silence in the presence of injustice and sneak off out of sight.

The most compelling passage of the speech came when Cairns asked what opponents of the war were to do, apart from retire into ‘apathy and

disinterest’. The answer, he suggested, required an understanding of what democracy was: Some . . . think that democracy is just Parliament alone . . . But times are changing. A whole generation is not prepared to accept this complacent, conservative theory. Parliament is not democracy. It is one manifestation of democracy and it can become a most important manifestation of democracy if people are prepared to come out of their apathy and do something about it . . . The weaknesses of Parliament have been widely recognised. They will not be cured by accusations of anarchy and mob rule whenever anyone decides to do something about it. Democracy is government by the people, and government by the people demands action by the people. It demands effective ways of showing what the interests and needs of the people really are. It demands action in public places all around the land.

The corollary was that, far from being a subversion of democracy, the VMC represented precisely the opposite; it was ‘an example of government by the people . . . an example of people taking action about issues that are important to them, actions which they believe will be influential in the making of national decisions in the ways that are open to them’.87 According to Saunders, Cairns’ speech became for many in the antiwar movement ‘their manifesto of dissent. . . sections were quoted throughout the peace movement at many meetings and gatherings of supporters’. For those who opposed the war and conscription, he was their ‘mouthpiece’, offering them ‘justification for their actions and an articulation of beliefs’.88 But Cairns’ role did not stop there. In his parliamentary speech and other public utterances of that time, he invested the movement with a significance that went beyond stopping the war or abolishing conscription. Through his words the Moratorium came to embody a sweeping rejection of the Cold War political culture and the accompanying post-war conservative hegemony. He appealed to all those who were fed up with the apathy, conformity and intolerance of dissent that were so characteristic of that hegemony. Above all, in defending the VMC, Cairns gave encouragement and a theoretical underpinning to those

who were clamouring for a greater say in the way their society was organised. In this way, during the build-up to the first Moratorium, he became ‘a symbol of participatory democracy in Australia’.89 At the same time, as Ormonde argues, Cairns’ role in the peace movement was largely ‘inspirational rather than organisational’. Speaking on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the May 1970 Moratorium, Cairns conceded this, paying tribute to the crucial organisational work undertaken by Goldbloom, Jean McLean, Harry van Moorst and others who were ‘closer to the grassroots [of the movement] than I was’.90 In turn, both McLean and Goldbloom acknowledge that Cairns fulfilled a vital function as the campaign’s focal point, but they vary in their estimate of how important he was to the mobilisation of support. McLean claims, ‘it cannot be said Jim Cairns brought those people into the streets, they were brought there by a huge groundswell of the public, of students, of draft resisters’. On the other hand, Goldbloom believes ‘that without Jim there would have been no Moratorium, not of that dimension or character’ Saunders leans towards the latter view, noting that Cairns ‘was a drawcard in his own right’, inspiring ‘many thousands of people to demonstrate their solidarity with him’.91 To determine the exact strength of Cairns’ personal following is impossible. Clearly the Moratorium campaign achieved its greatest triumph in Melbourne, where his influence was most pronounced. Equally, by 1970 Cairns was the subject of hero worship among a considerable section of the community. Hayden felt this to be the case, commenting in 1981: ‘His persistence on the issue of Vietnam elevated him to a cult figure, especially among the young’. One of those young people was Michael Leunig, later a celebrated cartoonist, who recalls that within the anti-war movement Cairns was ‘a hero to everyone. There was a great calm and conviction about him, as well as some charismatic quality which he didn’t overblow. Everyone trusted him, and he inspired people without whipping them up.’ Donald Home explains the affinity

that developed between Cairns and his fellow protesters in strikingly similar terms: The hero of the peace movement was . . . the Victorian Labor MP Jim Cairns . . . Handsome to look at, firm, yet also quietly reasonable to hear, Cairns could project a mood of trust and intimacy even through the metallic blare of an open-air public address system. No matter how large the crowd, he was never the ranter, always the reasoner. . .

Home finishes, however, on a jarring note: ‘despite the love for him from the crowds, there was always, on his part, a certain historical remoteness’.92 What Horne failed to notice was the nexus between the two features of Cairns’ leadership of the anti-war movement. It was Cairns’ ‘remoteness’ that equipped him to be ‘never the ranter’, that enabled him to stay controlled in front of the largest of crowds rather than ‘whipping them up’. Even at the head of a mass movement, Cairns’ pattern of selfdenial held firm; he kept his emotions and urges on a tight leash. This was perhaps the secret of his ability to be at the front of a mass movement like the VMC without succumbing to demagoguery. 93 Nonetheless, there remained the paradox alluded to by Stephen MurraySmith in 1974: ‘you have this strange contrast between someone who can lead 100,000 people down Bourke Street, but who isn’t a people’s man’. Uren, who was in a better position that most to judge the relationship that existed between Cairns and the anti-war movement, saw a different side, though no less poignant: ‘a lonely man’ who ‘lived on the warmth of the crowd’.94 If Cairns’ leadership of the Moratorium campaign made him a hero to some, for at least as many, it confirmed their worst suspicions of him. To his critics, he was an irresponsible rabble-rouser, even a traitor. Not only government members and newspaper editorialists promoted such views. News Weekly , the journal of the National Civic Council, which waged a fierce campaign against the VMC, alleged that Cairns had become a ‘totalitarian’ because of his organisation of the Moratorium as

a form of ‘mob rule’ 95 ASIO, which had kept a dose and suspicious eye on the anti-war movement throughout the 1960s, clearly shared these concerns. By 1970 the VMC had become a prime target of ASIO’s attentions; as its unofficial leader Cairns came in for particular scrutiny. Alarmed by the rise of the extra-parliamentary Left, ASIO was fearful about the potential radicalising effects on the ALP and the wider ramifications for Australia’s political and social stability. According to David McKnight, ASIO embarked on a campaign to ‘expose Cairns’, a ‘pivotal figure’ in those fears.96 One of the papers compiled on Cairns by ASIO in 1970–71, when the organisation’s anxieties about him appear to have reached their zenith, was leaked to the Bulletin shortly after Cairns was elected deputy prime minister in June 1974. As well as providing an insight into the paranoid simplicities that passed for political analysis within ASIO, the dossier was a sharp reminder of the dread that Cairns’ views struck into the hearts of conspiracy-minded Right-wingers. It gravely warned that his activities could lead, via civil, industrial and political unrest to the growth of elitism in every sphere, to the manipulation of people by demagogues, to the fascist cult of the personality, to the worship of force, and to the destruction of the democratic parliamentary system of government and its replacement by a form of collectivism.

As if this was not apocalyptic enough, it further asserted: The democratic parliamentary system of government is the only known means of combating fascism, of either left or right wing varieties, yet it is this system which Dr Cairns wishes to destroy and replace with an undefined form of populist collectivism, a vaguely described system of participatory democracy operating in a moral and cultural vacuum. That way lies anarchy and in due course left wing fascism.97

Within the general community there was also a deep well of hostility to Cairns. In the lead-up to both the first and second Moratoriums the National Co-ordinating Committee of the VMC sent out thousands of

broadsheets promoting the campaigns. A significant number were returned to the CICD office in Melbourne; a fair proportion of them carried abusive messages directed at Cairns. He was labelled, among other things, as a ‘traitor’, ‘troublemaker’ and ‘the enemy within’. Much of the crank mail accused Cairns of being a communist and an agent variously of Peking, Hanoi and Moscow. More sinister were the death threats. Prior to the second campaign one supporter was so worried that he went to the lengths of designing a bullet-proof vest for Cairns to wear.98 The pressure on Cairns in the final days before the first Moratorium dwarfed anything he had previously experienced. Forecasts of violence flew thick and fast from the opponents of the protest. In Victoria the Liberal Premier Henry Bolte inflamed the situation by urging people to stay out of the city on the day of the march. ‘The fewer attending’, he asserted, ‘the less chance of violence’. Bolte insisted, moreover, that responsibility for any trouble would ‘rest fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Dr Cairns’. B. A. Santamaria and the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr James Knox, were two others who contributed to the mood of impending violence with predictions of likely clashes between police and demonstrators.99 The newspapers did nothing to relieve the tension with a last-minute flurry of negative editorials. Their general thrust was that it was the VMC organisers who would ultimately have to answer for any outbreaks of violence. The Sydney Morning Herald commented that ‘responsibility to maintain order’ was widespread, but applied ‘first to the organisers and orators of the campaign. If there is irresponsibility here—the kind of irresponsibility exemplified by one leader, Dr Cairns, in a notorious statement on the breaking of the law—then the chief blame, if trouble occurs, will be theirs.’ The Sydney Daily Telegraph opted for a different tack. Taking up the theme of mob rule, it proclaimed: Best advice for the citizen . . . is to avoid like a plague spot any Moratorium

demonstration . . . As one of the crowd, you add fractionally to the impressiveness of the mob. Fractionally, you buy a share in the mob’s blind recklessness, and that is a needless moral burden which no sane man will care to shoulder.1

In the federal parliament the Minister for Labour and National Service, Bill Snedden, went close to matching the Daily Telegraph’s hysterical outburst with his notorious assessment that the Moratorium organisers were ‘political bikies who pack-rape democracy’. This was only one of many extravagant claims thrown about by government ministers on the eve of the Moratorium. The Defence Minister, Malcolm Fraser, shrilly demanded: The honourable member for Lalor. . . has said that there is a right to occupy the streets. What does this term ‘to occupy the streets’ mean? It is strangely reminiscent of the circumstances that have occurred in Paris . . . during the course of France’s history when one republic has been overthrown by revolution and replaced by another.2

Meanwhile, Cairns was busy issuing his own final appeals for people to participate. On 6 May the university student newspapers Farrago, Lot’s Wife and Rabelais combined to publish a special Moratorium supplement, which included a brief article by Cairns entitled Why You Must Act’. Over the course of the history of Western civilisation, he argued, philosophers and religious leaders had worked out a doctrine that there were things so evil and immoral that none was ever justified in doing them. John XXIII put it in Pacem in Terris (Part 2) ‘it follows that, if civil authorities legislate for or allow anything that is contrary to the moral order and therefore contrary to the will of God, neither the laws made nor the authorisations granted can be binding on the conscience of the nation.’

‘Who decides’, Cairns asked, ‘what is “contrary to the moral order and therefore contrary to the will of God”?’ His answer was emphatic: It is YOUR individual, personal conscience that must decide . . . It is not a majority of Australian voters counted in gerrymandered electorates after they have once every two or three years dropped a piece a paper in a box marked for Tweedle-dum or Tweedle-

dee. This system works well enough if as a result it does not do something that is contrary to the moral order. But when it does YOU are the judge and YOU must act.3

In these two short passages Cairn laid bare his belief that an informed moral conscience must, in the last analysis, be the arbiter of political action and expression. What alarmed his conservative opponents was the clear message that, in circumstances when conventional democratic institutions were incapable of giving expression to an individual’s conscience, that individual had just cause, even a duty, to act outside the normal limits of those institutions. To his opponents, this was a formula for anarchy; for Cairns this was the democratic impulse at its highest level—a community of individuals making rational and moral decisions about their lives, rather than having those decisions imposed upon them by a parliamentary elite or some other form of authority. Naturally, Cairns was deeply concerned at the potential for violence at the Moratorium. In the event of any significant trouble, blame would inevitably be sheeted home to him. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest, as Ormonde does, that Cairns ‘staked his political reputation, and perhaps his political future, on a peaceful Moratorium march’. Following an approach from a former police colleague, Inspector Geoffrey De Vere, Cairns met twice with a police delegation to discuss arrangements for the demonstration. He urged the police simply to leave the protesters alone. The meetings were kept behind the scenes, one reason being that radicals within the VMC regarded any consultation with the police as anathema. As a further precaution against violence, the VMC secretariat appointed around 400 marshals, many of them seamen and waterside and metal trades workers, to maintain control of the march. Part of their role was to protect Cairns.4 Later, Cairns would recall feeling ‘nervy and worried’ on the morning of 8 May. His anxieties had no doubt been heightened by the front-page stories in both Melbourne’s morning dailies. The Age’s headline read: ‘HELMETED POLICE GET READY FOR SIT-DOWN’, while the

Sun led with ‘SHUTTERS UP IN CITY FOR BIG PROTEST MARCH’. 5 At around midday Cairns took part in a briefing of marshals at the Assembly Hall in Collins Street. Along with other VMC officials and a small entourage of bodyguards, he then headed to the main assembly point at the Treasury Gardens. Even as the crowd gathered and the magnitude of the turn-out slowly dawned, the organisers remained tense. One of the marshals, Sue McCulloch, subsequently observed ‘up until an hour into it everyone was nervous and hoping no one would shoot Jim Cairns’. Cairns implored the assembled marchers: When you leave here today, realise a sacred trust. You have the trust to stand for peace and for the qualities of the human spirit to which we must dedicate ourselves . . . Our spirit is the spirit of peace and understanding. Our spirit is opposed to violence, opposed to hate, opposed to every motive that has produced this terrible war.6

The march moved off a little after 3 p.m. Cairns was near the front, and when the marchers entered Bourke Street he started to appreciate the scope of their achievement: ‘The whole city was open before us. Not even a tram or a person crossed Bourke Street . . . We did take over the city. Absolutely.’ He was ‘astonished’ that 70 000 to 100 000 had joined the march, having expected 20 000 and hoped, at best, for 50 000. Equally impressive was the sense of common purpose and spirit that animated the crowd: ‘The whole thing was full of excitement and energy. We had real meaning. If ever we had a collection of energy in people it was there.’ As planned, in Bourke Street the demonstrators staged a fifteen-minute sitdown, beginning with a two-minute silence. There followed what Ormonde realistically describes as the ‘supreme moment’ in Cairns’ life.7 Mounting the loudspeaker truck, he looked out the sea of expectant faces stretching out as far as the eye could see. As elated as he was, Cairns did not let the moment run away with him. The Launceston Examiner observed: ‘Dr Cairns could have started a riot, yet not once did he attempt to manipulate the emotions of the crowd in a destructive way’. When he spoke, Cairns declared: ‘Nobody thought this could be done . . .

Nobody need feel worried or fearful about the will of the people. The will of the people is being expressed today as it has never been before.’ 8 The march in Melbourne was a stunning and unequivocal success. It had mobilised an unprecedented number of anti-war protesters and, apart from a few minor scuffles, the event had passed without trouble. In the other States the demonstrations were not nearly as large, but the number of marchers in each of the capital cities and provincial towns still exceeded the turn-out for any previous peace protest. The only significant violence occurred in Adelaide, where a group of soldiers harassed and assaulted a number of demonstrators.9 For Cairns, the outcome was a special achievement. Although only one of many people who had dedicated their time and energy to the Moratorium, Cairns had stood to either gain or lose most from it for the very reason that he, more than anyone else, had become publicly identified with the VMC. His sense of accomplishment must have been boosted as he considered how far the anti-war movement had travelled since its tentative and fragile beginnings over half a dozen years earlier. Three decades later, he reflected that for a long time anti-war protests had been lucky to draw a few hundred people and that until 1968 he had frequendy felt ‘depressed’ at the apparent futility of opposing the war. 10 By 1970, however, the tide had turned, as measured not only by the attendance at the Moratorium, but in the opinion polls and in the 1969 federal election result. The press reported the march in Melbourne as a personal triumph for Cairns. John Hamilton of the Age wrote that Cairns was ‘[the] hero of the day’. His colleague Kevin Childs recorded that by the end of the march Cairns had the ‘aura of a pop star. They shook his hand, time and again, posed for photos with him, asked him to autograph their posters.’ So impressed was the Age by the scale and peaceful nature of the Moratorium that it put aside its previous reservations to commend the VMC for having ‘given enlarged meaning to the notion of peaceful public dissent’. Most of the other newspapers, however, were unwilling to revise

their views. The Melbourne Herald, for example, while begrudgingly noting that the demonstration had left a ‘remarkable impression’, argued that ‘it does not follow that street power is an acceptable way of changing laws and altering national policy. The decisions belong in Parliament and the instrument of change remains the ballot box. Nothing must be allowed to weaken this principle.’ 11 The federal government appeared similarly unmoved by what had taken place. Back in the parliament on 12 May, Cairns asked the Prime Minister whether the government would take ‘any notice whatsoever’ of the protest. Gorton replied that his government would not formulate its policies as a result of street marches.12 Historians have generally accepted that the Moratorium of May 1970 and the subsequent campaigns of September 1970 and June 1971 did not substantially influence the coalition’s Vietnam policy. The staged withdrawal of Australian combat forces from Vietnam in 1970–71 by the Gorton and McMahon Governments is attributed rather to the evolving direction of Washington’s policy. 13 Freudenberg too discounts the impact of the first Moratorium campaign, though recognises it as a watershed for Cairns: Profoundly moving in itself, with a deep emotional significance for Cairns, a vindication of his past and a pointer to the future development of his thinking this greatest success of the Moratorium movement came too late to influence events in Vietnam or Australia.14

Yet even if one concedes that the Moratorium movement had little direct influence on Canberra’s policy-making, its broader significance remains undiminished. As Cairns has stressed on many occasions, the Moratorium campaigns played a seminal role in legitimising protest, establishing the right of people to use the streets and other public places to express political dissent.15 This achievement was all the more notable given the dark shadow that the Cold War had long cast over Australia’s political culture, marginalising dissent and silencing ‘vital public discourse’. Indeed, as Murphy suggests, the success of the first

Moratorium extended further: ‘[it] reflected a sea-change in political attitudes, in which middle Australia was no longer enthralled by the fears which had paralysed political debate since the Cold War began. With the Moratorium, the Cold War was finally shrugged off’. Ian Turner, who reflected on the significance of the first Moratorium march in the 1970 winter issue of Meanjin, saw the event more in terms of a generational break with the past, but his point was essentially the same: the Moratorium represented a rejection of the post-war conservative hegemony and a clamour for a more relevant, dynamic and participatory politics. That those on the conservative side of politics seemed incapable of either understanding or responding constructively to these demands for change (Turner made this point by paraphrasing Bob Dylan16) was a crucial factor in their waning political authority. Perhaps an even greater legacy of the mass mobilisation of the antiwar movement by the early 1970s was that flagged by the former Attorney-General, Tom Hughes, in a speech to the House of Representatives just days after McMahon’s announcement in August 1971 of the impending final withdrawal of Australia’s combat troops from Vietnam. The initial public support for the commitment, Hughes asserted, had been gradually eroded by its ‘seeming lack of positive success’ together with ‘a massive and successful propaganda campaign directed towards undermining public belief in the justice of the cause’. Hughes, who at one stage had led the government’s efforts to discredit the VMC, went on to warn: The result of the process of erosion to which I have referred has been to create a distinct change in the climate of public opinion in this country. That change will not be a passing phenomenon; it will manifest itself in a deep-seated aversion to involvement in warfare on the Asian mainland or its island rim.17

In one sense, Hughes’ argument that the Australian people would be unwilling to tolerate another military expedition into Asia was misplaced. Australia had only ever entered into Vietnam on the coat-tails of the

United States. More to the point, then, was the fact that, after the disaster of their military entanglement in Indochina, Washington and the American people had lost the will for any further such involvement. In the end, though, the implications for Australia were much the same— what was required was a fundamental rethinking of the nation’s foreign and defence policy assumptions. In particular, there was an urgent need for a radically different outlook on Asia, one freed from the conception of it as an ideological and military battleground to halt the spread of communism. For Cairns, who had not only waged an almost decade-long crusade against the Vietnam War, but also an even longer struggle against the sweeping policy simplicities that had led Australia into that conflict, there could be no more valuable legacy. Yet the success of the May 1970 Moratorium also posed some thorny questions for Cairns. His presence at the head of such a mass, extra-parliamentary movement dovetailed with the recent trajectory of his thinking on social change. This trajectory appeared to be transporting him away from parliamentary politics towards a grassroots, antiinstitutional politics. Would the success of the first Moratorium propel him further down this road? And, if so, would the end result be a rejection of parliamentary reformism altogether? In addition, there was the question of the future of the Moratorium movement itself. Could it possibly prefigure the type of community-based socialist network that Cairns now believed vital for the transition to socialism? Finally, the events of 1968–70 had thrown up a personal challenge for Cairns. His emergence in those years as Australia’s best-known champion of the ideal of participatory democracy paradoxically highlighted the asymmetry between his public and personal life. In the former he preached liberation and empowerment, but in the latter he remained emotionally straitjacketed.

7 ‘feelings of profound dis illus ionment’ 1970–1972 IT IS UNLIKELY THAT ONE, OR EVEN SEVERAL LABOR GOVERNMENTS COULD, BY THEMSELVES, DO VERY MUCH TOWARDS CHANGING AUSTRALIA. J. F. Cairns, ‘Labor and Tariffs’ in John McLaren (ed.), Towards a New Australia, p. 80.

B Y 1 9 7 1 T H E L A B O R PA RT Y ’ S long period in the political wilderness

was coming to an end. It was now the turn of the conservative parties to fall into disarray as the twin pillars upon which their post-war ascendancy had rested crumbled.1 The McMahon Government’s announcement of the withdrawal of combat forces from Vietnam in August 1971 and the news one month earlier that President Nixon intended to visit Peking left the coalition’s foreign and defence policy cupboard conspicuously bare. Not only this, but the government’s handling of the economy was looking increasingly fallible. Australia was experiencing an economic slowdown as the post-war Western capitalist boom petered out. Average weekly earnings were rising sharply and inflation was also accelerating. The federal Budget of 1971 was designed to dampen economic demand, but

its principal effect was to push unemployment up to its highest level for more than a decade. If the intractability of the economic difficulties confronting Australia in 1971–72 was not yet apparent, they were serious enough to undermine the Liberal-Country Parties’ claim to superior economic management. The coalition was also beset by leadership instability and other internal tensions that were symptomatic of a deeper malaise as the conservatives struggled to come to terms with the breakdown of the old verities amid rapid social and cultural changes in Australian society. John Gorton’s clumsy attempts to forge new policy directions, together with his informal leadership style, precipitated his overthrow in March 1971. His replacement, William McMahon, while having a long record as a capable minister, was out of his depth as prime minister. He was unable to provide the conservative parties with the decisive leadership they had been hankering after since the retirement of Menzies, and was no match for the ever more confident Whitlam.2 With Labor on the threshold of office after more than two decades on the opposition benches, it was a time of great expectation and optimism in party ranks. Yet strangely, for Cairns, 1971–72 were years of disillusionment and pessimism. Probably the chief reason for this despondency was that, after the triumph of the May 1970 campaign, the Moratorium movement went into a gradual but inexorable decline, dashing his hopes that it might evolve into a movement for broader social change. The waning of support was due to several factors, not least that, as progress was made towards the withdrawal of Australia’s combat forces from Vietnam, many felt the movement had achieved its chief aim. In addition, conservative federal and State governments did their best to discredit the movement with a sustained law and order campaign. But perhaps the most important reason why the VMC never fulfilled its potential as an agent of social change was that it succumbed to internal ideological divisions. The tensions between the moderates and radicals, largely muted in the build-up to the first campaign, became more intense and destructive.

One by-product of that escalating struggle was that Cairns became the target of a series of withering attacks from the young militants. At the other end of the spectrum, Cairns continued to bear the brunt of persistent hostility from conservatives and the mainstream press. By around 1971 there were indications that the constant criticism was taking its toll. There were signs, too, that the enormous pressures Cairns had shouldered over the previous few years had sapped his prodigious energies; his normally insatiable hunger for political discourse and action had waned. As well, Cairns was still mired in theoretical confusion about which road—the parliamentary or extra-parliamentary—offered the best hope for a radical social transformation. He continued to straddle both positions. Even as the VMC faded away, he remained interested in building a mass collective movement for social change in Australia. Yet he was no longer under any illusion about how difficult it would be to develop and sustain such a movement; the process of change would be arduous and the obstacles huge. This was one of the dominant themes of The Quiet Revolution—the manifesto Cairns published at the time of the Whitlam Government’s election. It was an acute paradox: here was someone, about to assume a senior ministry in a federal Labor government who was flirting with ideas of creating a mass extraparliamentary movement. On the verge of office, his doubts about what could be achieved though the institution of parliamentary democracy were deep and undisguised. Within days of the first Moratorium march, Cairns invited members of the State VMC committees to attend a national consultation in Melbourne on 26–27 May 1970 to plan future activities. There they agreed to hold further mass actions in the week ending 18–20 September. Another motion declared that the realisation of the VMC’s objectives was dependent ‘upon decisions by the government’ and, therefore, urged supporters to ‘work to remove the present government of Australia and replace it by one which is consistent with the aims of the VMC’.3 To the radicals this motion was anathema. Within the Victorian VMC it became

the subject of a struggle between the radical and moderate forces. The main battle occurred at a meeting, chaired by Cairns, at the Richmond Town Hall on 19 July. A veteran of the peace movement, the Rev. Alf Dickie, put forward a resolution that ‘the aims of the VMC would be materially assisted by the removal of the Government of Australia and that we work towards this end’. The radicals immediately countered. Albert Langer moved an amendment which called on the Victorian VMC to reject parliamentary political action and to express its belief ‘that the mere replacement of one government by another is not as crucial a question as the defeat of the allied forces in Vietnam’. Two similar amendments followed before a compromise amendment proposed by Bernie Taft was finally adopted: The aims of the VMC are to arouse the Australian people to active mass opposition to the war in Vietnam and a deeper understanding of its causes to the stage where we force our rulers to end this war. We call for the removal of the present Australian Government, which persists in our participation in the war in Vietnam as part of and as a reflection of the mass movement against the war.4

The VMC minutes of this meeting do not indicate whether Cairns intervened in the debate, yet it is safe to assume his sympathies rested with the moderates. On two occasions during the previous fortnight he had tried to temper the mood of the student radicals. Addressing the Rationalist Society at the University of Melbourne on 4 July, he questioned the view that ‘effective action to change society was always and everywhere possible, given enough courage, and that anyone who denied this was corrupt and cowardly’. When a member of the audience scoffed at the value of political action within the Labor Party, an exasperated Cairns retorted that it was ‘no good shooting pea-shooters at it [the ALP] from outside’. Then, in a letter published in Farrago only two days before the Richmond Town Hall meeting, he pleaded with young supporters of the VMC not to give in to the urge for extremist behaviour or ignore parliamentary politics. ‘It is hardly likely’, Cairns

wrote, ‘that escalating militancy will help either in the educating of people or in the acquiring of [political] power’ upon which the VMC’s goals ultimately relied. He further warned that the peace movement was in danger of dividing into warring groups ‘each doing its own thing’, and that there were ‘no shortcuts by spasmodic acts of violence’.5 Along with illustrating the strains in his own thinking on social change, these appeals for restraint probably served only to strengthen the suspicions of Cairns that already existed among the ultra-Leftists within the anti-war movement. They interpreted his message not as a matter of common sense, but as an example of the double-talk of politicians. The events of the next couple of months hardened those suspicions. Shortly after the Richmond Town Hall meeting Cairns departed on a three-week lecture tour of the United States, sponsored by the American peace group Sane.6 It was his second speaking tour of the United States, the first having been in mid-1967. On that occasion he had been greatly impressed, particularly by the openness of debate and intensity of dissent, including on the issue of Vietnam. He wrote to Uren from North Carolina, remarking that ‘Apart from its treatment of negroes and for the fact that it can’t govern itself in big international and economic issues it [America] is, I think, the best society in the world’. Upon his return Cairns gave public voice to his admiration, telling an anti-war meeting at the Sydney Town Hall that the United States was the freest country he had visited. A few days later he admitted to a journalist from the Australian that his comments had elicited a hostile reaction within some quarters. However, he was unrepentant: The United States surprised me, I thought it was a more capitalistic, aggressive kind of society which stifled radical opinions . . . This is a wrong impression . . . a month’s American tour dispelled it. But it will take longer to convince emotional, anti-American Left wingers here full of uninformed prejudice against the US. They distinguish between governments and people in other countries, but they don’t do it for America.7

This idea of a distinction between official policy and public

discourse in the United States harked back to the theme of ‘two Americas’ that Cairns had floated in Living with Asia. What he witnessed during his 1970 tour convinced him that the divide between the liberalradical and authoritarian-conservative elements in American society had sharpened and reached a critical phase. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Cairns stated that, despite the sense of national crisis after ‘a decade of a cruel and unnecessary war; inflation, ghetto turmoil . . . campus uprisings and political assassinations’, he continued to see much in the United States to be optimistic about. The American ideals’, he declared, ‘are among the finest that have come from the struggle of man . . . I retain great confidence in success because I have great confidence in . . . the American conscience.’ He was also encouraged that the United States remained ‘the most intellectually vigorous and untrammelled nation in the world’.8 In an article for the Melbourne Herald on his return home, Cairns again highlighted the strength of dissent in the United States. Unlike in Australia, he noted, criticism of society was not confined to ‘long-haired students’, but was found in the mass media, the universities, even among ‘judges, generals and colonels’ and business executives. Two months later, writing in the magazine Non-Violent Power, his confidence in America was undented: ‘the prospects of change from the old militaristic and repressive policy in the United States is sufficiently good to justify a constructive attitude towards it’.9 Cairns’ optimism about the United States, whether misplaced or not, was grist to mill for his Left-wing opponents, especially at a time when the radicals were intensifying their push to have the peace movement adopt an explicitly anti-American stand. While Cairns was in the United States, there were moves for federal intervention in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. The catalyst was a dispute that had erupted within the Victorian ALP during the May 1970 State election campaign over the issue of state aid for non-government schools. Hardliners on the Victorian State Executive, including the

president, George Crawford, and secretary, Bill Hartley, endorsed an education policy calling for the phasing out of state aid to independent schools, even though this contravened the ALP’s policy on state aid as laid down by the 1969 Federal Conference. In the ensuing fracas both the Victorian ALP leader, Clyde Holding, and Whitlam clashed with the State Executive, torpedoing the party’s election campaign. This fiasco, combined with events at a turbulent Victorian State party Conference in June 1970, converted a number of powerful ALP figures to Whitlam’s long-held view that a purge of the Victorian branch was essential to the party’s chances of winning power federally.10 This decision of the Labor Federal Executive on 29 August 1970 to authorise intervention in the Victorian ALP placed Cairns in an invidious position. Since his humiliating defeat in the battle for the seat of Melbourne in 1968, he had harboured bitter resentment towards Crawford, Hartley and other members of the clique that effectively controlled the State Executive. His improved relationship with Whitlam, which had led to whispers in the Victorian Left that Cairns was an ‘undercover Whitlam man’, further alienated him from that group.11 In March 1969 this mutual distrust came to a head when Hartley, acting on the request of the then Victorian ALP president, Bill Brown, reprimanded Cairns for his non-attendance at recent Executive meetings. In a response widely interpreted as aligning himself with those pushing for party reform, Cairns resigned from the Executive. Three months later he rejoined the Executive after being elected as senior vice-president of the Victorian ALP at the party’s annual State Conference. Upon his election Cairns made it plain that he intended to fight for a more representative party structure.12 At the same time, Cairns still shrank from the prospect of federal intervention in Victoria. He was unconvinced that the Victorian branch could be democratised through a process imposed by an outside body. As he told reporters on his return from America: ‘I don’t want a situation to

develop in which a group of men far off make some decision without consultation’. Hence, when the federal inquiry into the Victorian Executive commenced in Melbourne on 5 September, Cairns found himself torn between conflicting imperatives: to defend an Executive of which he was part, and to see the Victorian branch embrace change. Whichever way he swung, he risked weakening his own position within the party. Perhaps inevitably, as argued by John Fitzgerald, the historian of the 1970 federal intervention, Cairns’ behaviour during the inquiry was ‘erratic’.13 Although not an official delegate to the meeting, Cairns gave evidence to the Federal Executive during the early stages of the inquiry. 14 As well, he was involved in the Byzantine backroom negotiations as various factional groupings attempted to hammer out a solution to the crisis. According to Fitzgerald, at one behind-the-scenes meeting convened by Left-wing trade union supporters of the Victorian Executive, Cairns ‘made a “magnificent speech” about the undemocratic nature of the Federal Executive’s actions’, which he said had caused ‘him to consider leaving the ALP to form and lead an industrial Labor Part’. Ormonde, too, suggests that Cairns flirted with the proposal by implacable opponents of intervention to set up a breakaway party. If so, it was a brief flirtation. His more considered approach was to back a compromise position leaving reform of the Victorian branch in the hands of a committee of inquiry appointed by the State Executive three weeks earlier, along with the federal ALP president, Tom Burns, and the federal secretary, Mick Young. 15 As the Federal Executive meeting followed its tortuous course and it became obvious that the numbers favoured intervention, Cairns bowed to the inevitable. On the final day of proceedings on 14 September the Federal Executive endorsed a motion abolishing the Victorian branch and creating a 14-person advisory council, including Cairns, to make recommendations for its reconstruction.16

Ian Turner, another member of the advisory council, later told Ormonde that Cairns joined that body for two main reasons: to prevent a split in the party; and to ensure that restructuring resulted in a party built on ‘open lines’ and with greater ‘membership control’. Turner added that Cairns’ presence proved crucial to the former objective: ‘if Jim had not been there then the possibility of a split would have been infinitely greater’. He pointed to the unifying influence Cairns exerted at the twoday mass meeting at Festival Hall in January 1971, when 1500 party members gave the green light to the advisory council’s recommendations for the reform of the Victorian branch. A commentary on that meeting by t he Age’s political correspondent, John Jost, supports Turner’s claim. Under the heading ‘ALP takes giant stride’ Jost wrote that the meeting entered the later part of Sunday afternoon with a new spirit of hope . . . it was Dr Cairns who lit the fuse. He won a thunderous reception when he exhorted leading figures on the left and right to see that ‘each of you is a better man that the other thinks he is. Judge a man on his merits and not on rumours that are handed across hotel bars.’ 17

Yet Cairns’ co-operation with the reform process, and wider involvement in the intervention imbroglio, had its costs. Cairns found the machinations associated with the process profoundly distasteful. By early 1972, disenchanted, he had withdrawn from any official capacity on the Victorian Executive, and years later he still lamented that intervention ‘ever had to happen’.18 His presence on the advisory council further tainted him in the eyes of the hard core of the old Victorian Executive and their supporters. This group, led by Hartley, Crawford and the former Victorian ALP branch organiser Robert Hogg, established the journal Inside Labor to take their fight to the interventionists. Predictably, Cairns came in for his share of criticism. In late November 1970 the journal declared that it was ‘tragic’ to see Cairns doing the ‘dirty work’ of the interventionists. ‘No longer’, it warned, ‘will the Left, which once saw him as its Parliamentary leader, uncritically accept his position’. The attack did not go without answer. In a letter published in the next issue, a

member of the Melbourne branch of the now defunct Victorian ALP complained that it would be ‘folly to reject a man who probably more than any other person has been responsible for the radical policies so long associated with the Victorian branch’.19 Cairns’ acceptance of intervention also put him off-side with parts of the anti-war movement. The old Executive’s unequivocal endorsement of the protest movement had won it plenty of loyal supporters, including many impressionable young militants seduced by its reputation for ideological purity. That Cairns had been an accomplice to its execution was more evidence to them that he was just another corrupt politician. The events surrounding the September 1970 Moratorium added to the ultra-Leftists’ list of grievances against Cairns. On 3 August the Victorian VMC Executive established plans for the main demonstration in Melbourne on 18 September. The primary assembly point was to be the Treasury Gardens, followed by a march through the city streets to the Princes Gate Plaza, where the demonstration was to conclude with an address by speakers and concert.20 As the big day approached, however, it was apparent that the authorities in Victoria, emboldened by the federal government’s antiMoratorium campaign, were intent on frustrating the VMC’s plans. On 15 September the Melbourne City Council refused permission to use the Princes Gate Plaza. The next day Premier Bolte warned that his government would not tolerate an occupation of the city streets. On the eve of the march he repeated the warning, telling reporters that police would intervene if there was violence, wilful damage or obstruction. Cairns urged demonstrators not to be provoked by the statements and accused Bolte of running ‘a shoddy law and order campaign’. Meanwhile, worried by the potential for confrontation, Cairns and other VMC officials had met representatives of the Melbourne City Council and the Victoria Police to discuss the march plans. The outcome, though, was discouraging, with neither the council officials nor police yielding

ground.21 Consequently, when the protesters, numbering around 50 000, gathered in the Treasury Gardens there was considerable apprehension that the police would block the demonstration. Cairns cautioned them to meet ‘provocation with extreme restraint’ and be prepared for any change in plans en route.22 Initially the demonstration went ahead as planned. But when the marchers reached the corner of William and Lonsdale Streets they found their path blocked ‘with steel barricades behind which were several rows of foot and mounted police, buses, vans, and trucks’. Cairns consulted with the officer in charge of the police operation, Superintendent Gerald Hickey, who advised him that the marchers would not be allowed to turn right into Lonsdale Street or any other route to Swanston Street and the Princes Gate Plaza. Following a hasty meeting with other VMC officials, Cairns announced that the march would proceed to the University of Melbourne. By this time, however, several hundred radical students had hived off from the main march in an attempt to reach the Princes Gate Plaza by various other routes. For over an hour the breakaways attempted to burst through the police lines, some hurling smoke-bombs and firecrackers at the mounted police. Despite several scuffles, there were only four arrests. In the meantime, the main march had moved to the university grounds, but not before Cairns was forced to intervene at the intersection of William and Victoria Streets to stop another group of protesters from heading back to the city centre. Frustrated militants booed Cairns and yelled profanities at him as he implored the marchers to remain orderly. At the university grounds, there was more tension as Cairns traded angry words with Michael Hyde of the Monash Labour Club, who in a fiery speech told the crowd that the march should not have been diverted; rather, they should have stormed the barricades.23 The next morning a report in the Melbourne Sun lamented that the demonstration had none of the spirit of the first Moratorium. Instead it

had ‘degenerated into a kind of political Chinese chequers, a battle of manoeuvre and wit’.24 Generally, though, the reaction was relief that, in contrast to both Sydney and Adelaide where there had been serious dashes between police and protesters and hundreds of arrests, Melbourne had emerged virtually unscathed. 25 Another report in the Sun headed ‘“PC Cairns” to the rescue’ claimed that Cairns’ decisive action had prevented chaos. Similarly Malcolm Saunders suggests that a confrontation with police in Melbourne ‘was averted largely because of the concern of Cairns and the VMC secretariat to avoid violence under any circumstances’. Alan Ward, a La Trobe University academic, applauded that concern in a personal reflection on the September Moratorium in Meanjin: Jim Cairns has allowed the police to turn him from his route: the left extremists don’t like this and cry betrayal. But Cairns lacks their flint and fanaticism . . . Another leader, some day, might risk blood and broken heads—his own and others—but I feel a surge of warmth for Cairns. What would we gain in a victory won by leaders who are willing to commit the blood of others as readily as the present Establishment does in Vietnam?26

Ironically, it was the very preparedness of the VMC leadership to do their utmost to avoid a violent altercation with the authorities that so irked the young radicals. Here was more proof still that Cairns and the others were incurable moderates and reformists. Analysing the September Moratorium in the Socialist Youth Alliance publication Direct Action, Jill Jolliffe complained sourly that the ‘Melbourne Moratorium was run out of town’. Jolliffe insinuated that the ‘Cairns, Goldbloom faction’ had entered into a pre-arranged deal with the police over the plans for the march. Another young militant writing in Rabelais asserted that the Moratorium had exposed ‘the ultimate failure of massive, passive apolitical demonstrations’. The author went on to insist that it was time the movement developed ‘beyond the simplistic mystifying analysis of the Indochina war presented by social democrats like Cairns’.27 The tensions generated within the VMC by the September

Moratorium culminated in a bitter showdown between the movement’s radical and moderate factions at the national anti-war conference in Sydney in February 1971. Organised by the VMC, the five-day conference was mostly taken up with the presentation and discussion of papers. The best contemporary account of the factional struggle at the conference, in the National Civic Council’s News Weekly , pointed out that a significant feature was the ‘attack launched on Cairns by some of the student radicals’.28 Not only was Cairns subjected to constant heckling, but he was also denounced in several of the conference papers. Langer and Barry York, of the La Trobe University Labor Club, hammered away at the theme that the conflict in Indochina was a product of US imperialism. Accordingly, the anti-war movement must commit itself to the world-wide struggle against this evil by the defeat of American forces in Indochina and an end to the US-Australian alliance. York decried the ‘advocates of parliamentarism’, declaring that if the VMC was to ‘become more than an election gimmick for the ALP and a couple of its “Left” leaders, then we must persistently propagate . . . anti-imperialist policies’. A paper by Bob Gould, representing the Sydney Anti-Imperialist Caucus, ostensibly examined the links between the peace and labour movements, but in practice it was little more than a muddled diatribe against Cairns and other prominent Laborites. Gould spoke confidently of an emerging new socialist formation that had demystified ‘the roles of humbugging, moralising Left misleaders like Jim Cairns’. He alleged that ‘veteran betrayers of the Left like Cairns’ were attempting ‘to cast a fig leaf over their very recent political assaults on the Left inside the Labor Party in Victoria, by striking a few poses about their (very general) opposition to the war’. Cairns was not without his defenders at the conference. Max Teichmann, a Monash University academic and friend of Cairns, praised him for having shown ‘just what support the aspiration of peace in Vietnam . . . really had in this country’ and mocked the ‘jackass cries of

the pseudo-revolutionaries’. Never afraid to cross swords with his critics, Cairns, too, chided the radicals. If they wanted, he told them, ‘to “smash capitalism” or break through the barricades’ then they ‘must at least be in front when action is taken and not advising through the columns of revolutionary publications or from the back of the audience’. Crystallising the tactical differences between the moderate and militant factions of the peace movement, he continued: [it is] of vital importance that the vanguard of the anti-war movement does not go much beyond what the mass of people will already accept. I think it is fair to say that the ‘revolutionary vanguard’ which has a value of its own in this campaign has never done much to advance the understanding and support of the mass of people to oppose war and change society.29

As News Weekly noted, whereas ‘the vocal opposition to Cairns at the conference came from the likes of Langer, the real ideological hatchet job on Cairns was done by Canberra academic, Humphrey McQueen’.30 Fresh from the publication of his revisionist and polemical study of the origins of the Labor Party, A New Britannia (1970), McQueen was by 1971 the enfant terrible of Australia’s Left intelligentsia. Not content with his efforts to demolish the Old Left historians’ arguments about the radical and egalitarian roots of the ALP, McQueen had also set his sights on exposing the ideological corruption of the modern Labor Party. McQueen’s paper to the anti-war conference was subsequently expanded and published in Arena under the title ‘Living off Asia’. 31 This crude pun on Cairns’ 1965 work was indicative of the sneering character of McQueen’s onslaught—a common and unattractive feature of the New Left intellectuals’ attack on the Old Left. The stated purpose of the article was to trace the burgeoning strategy of Cairns and leading Right-wing members of the Labor Party—Whitlam, Lance Barnard and Don Dunstan—‘for counter-revolution in Asia’. Using selective and out-of-context quotations, McQueen diminished any ideological differences between Cairns and the others. In his view, they

were united in their support for US imperialist interests in Asia and their acceptance of the legitimacy of neo-capitalism in Australia and the creation of a neo-colonial economic relationship with Asia. Even when it came to the issue of the Vietnam War, McQueen saw little to separate Cairns from the Right wing of the Labor Party: Vietnam has proved a testing ground for more than weapons. Like a barricade it not only keeps people out; it enables one to see who is on the other side. Cairns, Whitlam, Calwell and Barnard have all made it dear that they want us (i.e. US) to win. Cairns has been quite explicit on this.

And further: ‘his [Cairns’] public campaign on Vietnam is part of his entire counter-revolutionary project’.32 ‘Living off Asia’ was part of a broader offensive by a brigade of young Marxist intellectuals against the Labor Party in 1970–72. In Arena McQueen, Kelvin Rowley and others launched a pre-emptive strike in anticipation of the election of the Whitlam Labor Government. The principal charge levelled against the Whitlam-led ALP by the neoMarxist intellectuals was that it ‘represented the arrival of technocratic laborism’.33 In a 1971 article Rowley identified Whitlamism as the agent through which technocratic laborism had captured the ALP and supplanted traditional working-class laborism. While the latter was chiefly concerned with the objective of equality via a redistribution of wealth, technocratic laborism was characterised by a fetish for efficiency —its dominant goal a streamlined capitalist system. It promoted the principles of equality of opportunity and a meritocracy, and abandoned the policy of nationalisation of major industries for a strategy of economic planning. Rowley linked the ideological shift in the ALP to the party’s changing social composition, particularly its growing strength among the well-educated white-collar or intermediate strata. None of this was to say that Rowley, and certainly not McQueen, believed that the advent of technocratic laborism had transformed the ALP from a working-class socialist party. To the contrary, in tune with McQueen’s

thesis on the origins of the Labor Party, they maintained that the ALP was ‘umbilically linked to capitalism’ and had never been other than pettybourgeois in character. Nonetheless, the young Marxists argued that technocratic laborism had extinguished the last vestiges of class politics associated with traditional laborism.34 In ‘Living off Asia’, despite having lumped Cairns together with Whitlam, Barnard and Dunstan, McQueen stopped short of locating him as a technocratic laborite. Instead he claimed that Cairns was ‘a “radical reformer” in the English Fabian tradition’, although adding that his Fabianism rendered him ‘susceptible to the social tinkering and efficiency of the technocrats’. As if this was not confusing enough, elsewhere in the article McQueen cited Cairns’ recently published booklet, Tariffs or Planning? as an example of the trend towards technocratic laborism in the ALP. By comparison, Rowley did not equivocate in defining Cairns as a technocratic laborite, albeit describing him as ‘among the most radical and humanitarian’ of their kind. Also referring to Tariffs or Planning?, he insisted that it revealed the ‘limitations of his [Cairns’] “socialism”‘ and that ‘we are completely justified in regarding him as a bourgeois ideologist’.35 Although unacknowledged by the neo-Maixist intellectuals, technocratic laborism was little more than an updated label for the modernist or revisionist pattern of social democratic thought that had been gathering influence within the Labor Party for at least a decade. Moreover, while they were correct to identify Whitlam as the wellspring of that strain of thought within the ALP, their readiness to tag Cairns as a technocratic laborist overlooked the rearguard action he had fought in defence of traditional democratic socialist practice throughout much of the 1960s. Still, McQueen and Rowley had a point when they argued that Tariffs or Planning? showed signs of a surrender to technocratic laborism. As the ALP’s shadow Minister for Trade and Industry Cairns put out

this slim volume in March 1971, outlining a possible economic strategy specifically in the area of industry development for an incoming Labor government. Its publication coincided with the retirement of the longserving leader of the Country Party and Minister for Trade and Industry Sir John McEwen. Under McEwen’s stewardship during the 1960s tariff assistance to Australian industry had reached dizzying heights. In the second half of that decade McEwen had defied calls from bureaucrats, some rural groups, economists and financial journalists to expose Australian industry to greater international competition, and had tried to block attempts by the chairman of the Tariff Board, Alf Rattigan, to review Australia’s tariff regime. 36 When Cairns was appointed shadow Minister for Industry in 1967, proponents of lower industry protection, Whitlam included, had hoped that he would provide stiff resistance to McEwen by steering the ALP away from its historic support for high tariffs. His consistent appeals for an overhaul of the tariff system and a thorough scrutiny of protected industries in the years prior to his appointment had encouraged this optimism.37 It was also assumed, perhaps, that his economic training and internationalism would combine to make him impervious to the crude xenophobia which provided one of the foundations of the labour movement’s protectionist outlook. These expectations, however, had to be weighed against concerns Cairns harboured about the social consequences of tariff cuts. He had to look no further than his own electorates of Yarra and Lalor to see the likely effect on employment if manufacturing industries were exposed to competition from cheap foreign imports. Initially, Cairns appeared to live up to the hopes of the advocates of trade liberalisation. In August 1967, as a member of the Caucus Economics and Trade Committee, he was instrumental in producing a policy statement that downplayed the significance of tariffs in job creation and proposed that manufacturing ‘specialise’ in areas of ‘economic advantage’. Similarly, in his first major address to parliament as Labor’s spokesman on industry on 16 March 1967, Cairns riled

McEwen by arguing that an excessive tariff regime was diverting scarce capital resources to unproductive industries. On the other hand, he acknowledged the crucial role of tariff assistance in Australia’s post-war prosperity and advised that Labor would ‘protect inefficient industries in this country rather than have a shortage of employment’.38 The tensions in Cairns’ position on tariffs remained transparent in the early 1970s. By that time Whitlam, despite retaining Cairns as Labor’s industry spokesman, had lost any faith in him as an agent of reform in that portfolio. He believed—as did Rattigan—that Cairns had fallen captive to the lobbying of the manufacturers and their union allies. Indeed, in his memoirs Whitlam suggests Cairns had become ‘as bad as McEwen’.39 This was unfair. It was more accurate to say that Cairns had tried to strike a balance between McEwenism and free trade. For example, in debate on the government’s Customs Tariff Bill in April 1971, he told the parliament that the ALP would not bow to either the free trade or the protectionist school. He ridiculed the free-traders’ assumptions of perfect competition, but conceded that the old system of tariffs could not be preserved and that change would entail social dislocation. To soften the blow for those workers who lost their jobs because of reduced protection, Cairns vowed that a Labor government would guarantee them a living wage until they found alternative employment, as well as providing retraining. The following December he reiterated that pledge, proclaiming that the ALP would not accept tariff reductions ‘which will cause unemployment if those unemployed are to be left to the capitalist market—national or international’.40 Alas, Tariffs or Planning? did nothing to relieve the ambiguities in Cairns’ approach to industry policy. If anything it compounded them by revealing deeper discrepancies in his ideas on economic management. Essentially, it side-stepped the protection versus free trade debate, arguing that neither was acceptable. Instead the booklet’s chief proposal was for a national economic plan to bring the distribution of economic

resources ‘under public decision’.41 In concrete terms, he advocated the establishment of a series of new commissions to receive submissions from various organised interest groups—primary producers, manufacturers, unions, retailers, consumers —about the allocation of resources. Each of these groups would have its own research bureau, if necessary with government assistance, to help in its task ‘of ascertaining the facts that affect their economic situation, and of bringing those farts quickly to bear in the formation of decisions’. The work of the commissions would be co-ordinated by a Ministry for National Planning, whose aim would be to achieve an efficient and balanced result by agreement brought about by consultation, and close and rapid communications and understanding which can come only from knowledge of the facts. In every part of the process any tendency to issue edicts, orders, and arbitrary procedures must be avoided.

Cairns stressed that the ‘essential principle of planning is consent’, achieved not by ‘edict or arbitrary power but by consultation, discussion and a level of factual knowledge which can make co-operation the most profitable and desirable course for all parties to follow’.42 Cairns was seeking to marry the goals of participatory democracy with the building of an efficient and productive economy. In fact, he admitted that his chief priority was the first: ‘we need a plan for planning, designed more for the widening and intensifying of democracy than for efficiency’. At the same time, he was adamant that grassroots participation was not incompatible with efficiency. To the contrary, it was the status quo with its authoritarian decision-making process that squandered human potential. How could anyone ‘think a system will work efficiently’, he inquired, ‘when more and more people are denied a say in the way it works’? 43 There were two gaping holes in the blueprint set out in Tariffs or Planning? The more conspicuous was the softening in Cairns’

commitment to any substantial interference in the prerogatives of capital. True, he envisioned that private enterprise would lose some degree of autonomy over the allocation of resources within the economy, but that was to be achieved through a consensual framework in which industry and unions, among others, were expected to reach agreement on the basis of little more than mutual goodwill and access to relevant factual information. Although Cairns had never despaired that ultimately his fellow citizens could transcend their narrow and selfish economic interests to build a co-operative and humane social order, he had always been hard-headed about the entrenched basis of class interests and power in Australian society. Yet here he was proposing a model in which the whole issue of class was somehow magically defused. His idea that bosses and workers would be able to arrive at a consensus on important economic decisions, or even agree on what constituted factual information, seemed naive in the extreme. If, as appeared likely, consensus proved unattainable, decisions would have to be imposed from above by the governing body. 44 One was left, not with a scheme that encouraged active participatory democracy, but with a cumbersome, bureaucratic and elitist planning structure. And, given that much of the factual information relevant to economic decision-making was likely to be highly technical, the proposed set-up would disenfranchise the ordinary people whose involvement Cairns most wanted. These weaknesses illustrated the practical difficulties inherent in any scheme to create a more equal distribution of power in society. Those difficulties were all the more stark because Cairns was trying to fulfil two roles: prophet of participatory democracy and long-term valua-tive change; and senior shadow minister preparing for government, with the responsibilities of applying himself to shorter-term proposals for structural change. The final pages of Tariffs or Planning? acknowledged that the second of these was the booklet’s primary concern. He rightly anticipated that some people would reject his proposals as ‘not radical enough’, a view with which he had some sympathy. However, his purpose

had been more limited: ‘I can appreciate the case for a radical attack on this acquisitive society. . . [but] I can see that in Australia today there are a number of very serious practical problems that need solution . . . Consequently I am satisfied to deal now with these practical problems.’ 45

Admissions of this kind by Cairns convinced his other Left critics that, seduced by the whiff of political power, he was jettisoning any pretence of socialism to embrace social democratic or technocratic laborist practice. Ironically, the ideas expressed in Tariffs or Planning? had also strengthened the doubts within mainstream opinion about Cairns’ suitability for government. It was universally panned in the press. There was justifiable criticism of its intellectual shallowness, though the review by Robert Murray in Nation seemed excessively vicious. He described it as ‘a pompous, innocent book’ that contributed ‘nothing to the mainstream of economic debates’. Among economic commentators the chief disappointment was that Cairns had showed no sign of joining sides with the free-traders. Alan Wood of the National Times saw the booklet as a lost opportunity, lamenting that Cairns had ‘headed back to the barren ranks of Labor orthodoxy’.46 So appalled was the Australian’s Kenneth Davidson that he suggested Whitlam shift Cairns into a different shadow portfolio. Another of Davidson’s complaints was that Tariffs or Planning? ‘gives the impression of a tract hurriedly rushed off by a man who is far more interested in other things’.47 Unwittingly, Davidson had touched on a deeper malaise that was afflicting Cairns by 1971. The indications were that he had temporarily run out of political steam. His political opponents were naturally keen to entrench that perception. In April 1970 the Minister for Labour and National Service, Bill Snedden, advised the House that he had reached the ‘melancholy conclusion’ that Cairns had become a ‘casualty of Vietnam’. He awaited the time when Cairns rekindled his interest in parliamentary matters ‘rather than being more concerned . . . with the formulation of will outside’. The press too

fostered the view In April 1971, in a biting editorial sparked by Cairns’ participation in an anti-conscription protest, the Age fumed that the action reflected ‘the role he has increasingly adopted: not the role of a serious parliamentarian, but that of deputation leader and demonstratorextraordinary’. ‘We may well wonder’, it went on, ‘whether Dr Cairns thinks very highly of Parliament at all. He appears to be abandoning the opportunities and responsibilities of the parliamentary forum for the headier attractions of direct action in the streets.’ It was not just government members and the press who felt that Cairns had allowed himself to be diverted from the mainstream political process. At a meeting of the FPLP Executive on 17 September 1970 Whitlam chastised Cairns, who was absent in Melbourne tied up with final preparations for the next day’s Moratorium demonstration, for neglecting his parliamentary duties. He claimed that Cairns had been devoting too much time to both the Moratorium campaign and the intervention crisis in the Victorian ALP.48 Cairns’ activities during 1971 could have done little to reassure Whitlam that he was properly fulfilling his parliamentary responsibilities. In the first half of the year his participation in debate in the House of Representatives was meagre, and his most spirited contributions were concerned with opposition to the war and conscription.49 In early May Cairns left for Budapest to take part in a World Peace Council conference on Indochina. He had attended a similar conference in Stockholm in November 1970,50 after which he had generated a minor stir by telling reporters that, during a four-day stopover in Moscow en route to Stockholm, he had witnessed no more suppression than in many aspects of Australian life. This ill-considered off-the-cuff remark was to provide fodder for some of his more zealous conservative critics for years to come.51 Cairns had been back in Australia for only a few days following the Budapest conference when he returned to Europe to attend a meeting in

Oslo of the International Commission of Inquiry into American War Crimes in Indochina.52 Previously appointed as a permanent member of the commission, Cairns was elected vice-chairman at the Oslo meeting. He found the experience harrowing. For several days the commission heard evidence of massacres and systematic terrorisation of the civilian population, mass deportations, and the extensive use and effects of chemical warfare, including herbicides. The evidence came from a range of witnesses—North and South Vietnamese civilians, former US soldiers, academic specialists and volunteer workers—and a taskforce that had visited Vietnam in May on the commission’s behalf presented its report. On 24 June the Oslo meeting unanimously adopted a concluding statement that not only charged the United States with violating the Hague and Geneva conventions on warfare, but also declared that its action in Indochina amounted to genocide.53 From Oslo Cairns rushed back to Australia for the third mass Moratorium demonstration, to be held on 30 June. Significantly, he had been out of the country for the ALP’s Federal Conference at Launceston, where the party’s policy program had ‘received a final polish’ in preparation for the 1972 election. Upon his return, he confessed to journalists that he had been ‘shocked’ by the evidence produced in Oslo and that the war crimes were ‘much worse’ than he had previously believed. Later that day, his anguish spilt over into a somewhat intemperate call for supporters of the VMC to boycott the Commonwealth census as a form of protest against the Vietnam War. Conservative politicians and the media pounced on this call. One State Liberal MP claimed that it was typical of his ‘ratbag tactics’, while the Melbourne Herald declared archly that ‘Dr J. F. Cairns sometimes acts as though irresponsibility were a personal virtue’.54 By August, Cairns had departed on yet another overseas tour. Accompanied by Gwen, he flew to Europe via Fiji, Tahiti and the United States. In Paris between 2 and 10 September, Cairns was part of an

Australian joint party parliamentary delegation that attended the 59th Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. From there, he and Gwen travelled around Eastern Europe, visiting Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union.55 Back in Australia in late October, Cairns showed little desire to re-enter the fray of parliamentary politics. Cairns’ wilting political energies did not escape the attention of the press. In the early months of 1972 a series of articles picked up on the theme. In April Richard Farmer of the Sunday Australian noted that for some time ‘the talk of Canberra had been how Jim Cairns had faded out as a national political figure . . . become tired, bored, disheartened, disillusioned. No longer was he the mouthpiece of the left in Australian parliamentary politics.’ A fortnight earlier in the National Times Eric Walsh commented that not only were the days ‘long since gone’ when Cairns was considered a possible Labor leader, but in assessments of the best performers in the party’s shadow ministry it was common for his ‘name not to make the first half dozen’. Interviewed in the Herald in March, Cairns tried to counter the mounting speculation that he was a spent force politically. Yet he admitted the heavy toll that had been exacted by his long crusade against the Vietnam War: it did take a lot out of me. My phone still has to be controlled by police. There are those who continue to torment us . . . this [recent] lack of controversy . . . has been beneficial to me, its been a breather, its given me peace of mind. When I was fighting on Vietnam I was never free of doubts.56

The most perceptive insight into Cairns’ state of mind was provided by Max Teichmann in a lengthy piece for Nation Review in January 1972. Teichmann diagnosed a man who had finally been worn down by constant criticisms from both sides of the political fence: Cairns has had to endure the most sustained campaign of personal and political calumny of any politician since Evatt . . . some of the most treacherous attacks have come from people professing to share his views . . . and after a decade or more of such treatment

there are distinct signs that this humane and civilised man is struggling against feelings of profound disillusionment, even hopelessness.

He confirmed Cairns’ ‘growing disenchantment with parliament’ and pointed out that his involvement in the Victorian federal intervention imbroglio had left him battered. His ‘distaste for feudings, witchhunts and personalities’ exposed him to attack, whereby ‘Opportunists called him opportunistic, professional liars accused him of being untruthful, thrice convicted backstabbers said he was a fair weather friend’. Another source of the pessimism that had gripped Cairns was the failure of the Moratorium movement to live up to its potential as an agent for social change, principally because of the excesses of the radicals: In so far as he was allowed, Cairns used the streets with rare skill and judgment, but the unremitting sabotage of far left groups and associated exhibitionists eventually fabricated the counter ideology of law and order. Henceforth, effective action in the streets has become virtually a thing of the past, and the educational and proselytising opportunities which Cairns had reasonably expected to flow from mass movements, were gradually squandered.57

Teichmann had identified the depth of the despair that had engulfed Cairns by 1972. The overwhelming picture was that of an idealist whose faith in humanity and in the possibilities of building a better social order was being sorely tested. This disillusionment was inextricably linked to the theoretical road that Cairns had travelled since the mid-1960s. His scepticism of the institution of parliamentary democracy was welldocumented and showed no sign of abating despite Labor’s proximity to government. If anything, his doubts about the conventional political process seemed to have intensified. Sam Goldbloom recalls conversations he had with Cairns in Moscow in February 1972, when both men were en route to Versailles for a congress of the World Assembly for Peace and Independence of the Indochinese People. To Goldbloom’s horror, Cairns spoke about getting out of parliament and was ‘agonising’ over whether he would be more effective in working for social change by devoting his

time to writing and extra-parliamentary activities.58 Yet, as Teichmann suggested, there was little comfort for Cairns in what was happening outside parliament. By the second half of 1971 the Moratorium movement was in a state of collapse. Despite ever-worsening factional infighting, the Victorian VMC had managed to stage a successful mass demonstration in Melbourne on 30 June 1971. Cairns told the 50 000 strong crowd assembled in the Treasury Gardens that their aim was ‘to recapture the spirit of 8 May’. The next day the press, which in sharp contrast to the previous two campaigns had generally ignored the preparations for the march, reported the event favourably. The Age’s John Larkin unwittingly identified what was quickly developing as a grave problem for the anti-war movement. No longer did the demonstrators feel, Larkin wrote, that ‘they were freaks, that they were the outsiders’. Emphasising his point he added: ‘the fight is over, done. Peace has become respectable, accepted. This was the meaning of yesterday, the third and probably last Moratorium, to say, We’ve made it.’ 59 This notion that the struggle against the Vietnam War had been won and the associated apathy that it engendered became all the more difficult to counter when, two months after the third Moratorium campaign, Prime Minister McMahon announced that Australia’s remaining combat troops would be home by Christmas. Weakened by the loss of grassroots support and internal bickering over its future direction, the Moratorium movement began to unravel organisationally in the second half of 1971.60 The problems escalated in the first half of 1972. In April the movement made its first concerted effort to organise a nation-wide protest action since McMahon’s August announcement. The result was disappointing. Only about 15 000–20 000 people joined the demonstrations, which were marred by violence, especially in Melbourne, where organisers lost control of the march as police and militant protesters clashed. As Saunders observes, the April demonstrations illustrated that the peace movement no longer enjoyed mass support, and

that, with the moderates no longer able to restrain the radicals, it was impossible ‘to guarantee that future anti-war demonstrations would not be violent’. As if to underscore the latter point, demonstrations the following month in response to President Nixon’s announcement of the blockading of North Vietnamese ports erupted into violence in almost every capital city. In Melbourne there were two separate outbreaks on 9 and 12 May 61 Amid an outcry against the demonstrations, Premier Bolte argued that the violence was the harvest that had been sowed by Cairns. ‘He started all this’, Bolte claimed; the stone-throwing protesters were ‘Cairns’ troops’. 62 While deploring an equally crude attempt by McMahon to rekindle the law and order theme in the wake of the demonstrations, Cairns was dismayed at the direction of the peace movement. On 15 May he dropped a bombshell by threatening to quit the VMC if he could ‘no longer influence people to demonstrate peacefully’. Disgusted, he accused the militants of having ‘set everything we have worked for back five years’ and of betraying the peace movement and the Vietnamese people. Cairns’ threat to cut ties with the VMC seemed to have some effect. Only twenty-four hours later he informed the press that enough work was being done to ensure that a march, announced by the VMC to recover ground after the 12 May debacle, would be peaceful and this had persuaded him to participate. But he warned that he would not ‘give it another chance. If it doesn’t turn out peacefully this time, I will not take part in it again.’ 63 On 18 May, the eve of the planned demonstration, tensions were further magnified when the leader of the Victorian ALP, Clyde Holding, revealed that he had been ‘tipped off by an authoritative source’ that a group of Right-wing extremists intended to shoot Cairns during the march. Despite the death threat, Cairns was at the head of the 8000 demonstrators who marched through the city streets on 19 May. The march was free of violence, apart from one minor incident when a young

woman, shouting ‘communist pig’, hit Cairns with a bag of eggs. Afterwards, a relieved Cairns remarked that the eggs ‘didn’t worry me— but I must admit I was watching the tall buildings’. He declared the demonstration a success, while the police commended the organisers. Any sense of satisfaction Cairns had that the march had gone smoothly was tempered, though, by a recognition that the halcyon days of the antiwar movement were gone. He admitted as much, advising the press that there would be fewer marches in the future.64 The day before the 19 May demonstration a journalist from the Australian had asked Cairns whether he was disillusioned with the peace movement as a means of changing society’s values. While he professed not to be disillusioned, the melancholy nature of his reply indicated otherwise: ‘No, not really. I have never been one to have illusions, and if you don’t have illusions much, you don’t have disillusions.’ Two decades later he was more frank about the despondency he had felt at the way the VMC had ‘closed down’ after its initial successes. There were things I wanted the Moratorium to be concerned about’, he remarked, ‘but I could find no interest’.65 The decline of the Moratorium movement was a bitter pill for Cairns to swallow. Just as the triumph of May 1970 had raised his public profile so, too, the later set-backs robbed him of much of that prestige. Moreover, Cairns had fed emotionally off the early Moratorium crowds, finding in them the warmth that was missing from other areas of his life. But as the mood of the demonstrations changed after May 1970 and the radicals’ influence grew, his relationship with the movement soured. The hostility and the jeers of the militants drowned out the affection and applause of his supporters. Once more, he was left a lonely and isolated figure. Perhaps most seriously, the slide of the Moratorium movement towards irrelevance left Cairns at a theoretical dead-end. Having accepted that conventional political action offered little scope for fundamental social change, he had now run into an impasse in the extra-parliamentary sphere. It was little wonder that by 1972 Cairns was deeply pessimistic

about the chances of creating the ethically based socialist society he so longed for. During 1972 Cairns was working on a new book that was eventually to be published under the title The Quiet Revolution. In June he explained to a Melbourne Sun journalist that the book’s objective was to clarify his ideas on the process of social change. The task of writing the book had been nagging at him for several years, he added, particularly because he wanted to correct the common misconceptions about his views on social change.66 What Cairns did not mention, but what was surely an equally essential part of his purpose, was the need to find some way of extricating himself from his theoretical predicament. By the time Cairns was putting the final touches to The Quiet Revolution, Labor’s preparations for the elections due later that year were well-advanced. By August the ‘It’s time’ slogan had been chosen and market-tested and the first series of television commercials had been produced. Opinion polls showing steadily increasing support for the ALP added to the confidence within party ranks.67 Against this background, Cairns showed some tentative signs of renewed enthusiasm for political activity. In the parliament he was more active in his shadow portfolio of Industry, frequently criticising the government and Tariff Board for paying little heed to the social consequences of the lowering of tariffs. In August he accused the Tariff Board of embarking on a ‘search-anddestroy mission’ and insisted that a future Labor government would halt tariff reductions until satisfied that the costs of further cuts did not fall disproportionately on the workers in the affected industries. 68 He was also vocal both inside and outside the parliament over the continuing activities of Croatian nationalist extremists in Australia. This issue had flared again in 1972 after a series of violent incidents, the most spectacular in Sydney on 16 September, when two bomb blasts injured sixteen people. As David McKnight notes, Cairns saw a blatant contradiction in the government’s reluctance to take firm measures

against Croatian extremism and the hysterical law and order campaign it had waged against the anti-war movement.69 It was the matter of French nuclear weapon tests in the Pacific that most clearly saw Cairns recover some of his old spirit. His opposition to the tests was not new. He had raised the issue on several occasions in the parliament over the previous decade and in mid-1966 had travelled to Fiji to take part in a protest against the French government’s policy. 70 By 1972 there was a public groundswell against the tests in Australia and other parts of the Pacific. Addressing a demonstration in Melbourne on 26 June, Cairns urged the Australian government to suspend diplomatic and trade relations with France. The next day, with the blessing of Whitlam, he announced his intention to lead a protest delegation to Tahiti to express to French authorities the Australian people’s opposition to the tests. At the last moment though, the French frustrated these plans by refusing to permit the delegation to land in Tahiti. Undeterred, Cairns, accompanied by anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott and the president of the Australian Union of Students, Ken Newcombe, flew to Europe on 30 June to protest directly to the French government. During a two-day stop-over in London Cairns criticised the British government for its silence on the nuclear tests.71 In Paris the delegation tried in vain to see President Georges Pompidou, but they met the French Socialist leader, François Mitterand, as well as having discussions with senior diplomatic officials at the Elysee Palace. According to Caldicott, the French officials assured them that the tests posed no health risks: ‘So Jim asked the obvious question: “‘Why don’t you test your bombs in the Mediterranean, if they are so safe?” The blood drained from their faces. “Mon Dieu,” they exclaimed, “too many people live around the Mediterranean! “‘ 72 His stand against the French nuclear tests put Cairns back into the public limelight, but it was only a brief return to prominence. On 10 October Prime Minister McMahon announced that there would be

elections for the House of Representatives on 2 December. In the ensuing campaign Cairns played an inconspicuous role. He was not present when Whitlam delivered Labor’s policy speech before an overflowing and rapturous crowd at the Blacktown Civic Centre on 13 November. The Blacktown meeting set the tone for the remainder of the campaign. Over the next eighteen days Whitlam travelled around Australia, the focal point of what Graham Little identifies as a ‘Californian-style campaign in which entertainers displayed their passionate convictions in favour of the “new”, and euphoric crowds joined in an orgy of television glamour’. By contrast, Cairns was relegated to campaigning quietly in his own electorate of Lalor. On one of the rare occasions he bobbed up in the media it was to deny reports that the ALP had softened its policy on US military bases in Australia.73 On 30 November Labor’s campaign climaxed with a rally at the St Kilda Town Hall in Melbourne. Laurie Oakes and David Solomon describe it as ‘the biggest, most colourful, most pro-Whitlam meeting of the lot’ This time, Cairns was among the audience of some 4000 who looked on while Whitlam, Labor’s Senate leader, Lionel Murphy, and ACTU president, Bob Hawke, ‘were led up on to the stage by 14 gyrating girls in yellow, blue and orange “It’s time” skivvies’. After Whitlam’s speech the audience broke into wild and sustained applause, forcing him to take repeated curtain calls.74 While Whitlam rejoiced, Cairns was irked by what he saw, fearing that the messianic aura that surrounded Whitlam during the campaign would feed his egotism and authoritarianism. Possibly, too, he felt a tinge of envy as he watched ALP supporters passionately embracing the man who had only narrowly defeated him for the leadership in 1968. It was a painful reminder of what he had lost with the passing of the Moratorium movement. As expected, Labor emerged triumphant on 2 December, yet there was nothing like the landslide that some had anticipated. The ALP secured a 2.7 per cent swing, giving it a nine-seat majority in the House of Representatives. The swing was patchy and heavily concentrated in the

south-eastern corner of Australia. Labor’s strongest gains were in the outskirts of Melbourne and Sydney, indicating that Whitlam’s emphasis on urban renewal policies had paid handsome dividends.75 Given all of the factors that had been running in the ALP’s favour during the campaign— Whitlam’s supremacy over the hapless McMahon, the growing economic problems, the divisions within the Liberal Party, the defusing of anti-communism as a potent electoral weapon for the conservative parties, and their inability to react positively to the yearnings for social change associated with the growth of the anti-war movement and other social movements—the victory was surprisingly small. In embracing change, the Australian people had done so cautiously. For a new government bursting with reformist energy this fact, together with their lack of a majority in the Senate, should have injected a note of sobriety into the euphoric celebrations that accompanied Labor’s historic victory. In retrospect, Cairns is adamant that he did not share in that euphoria. Conceivably, this recollection is coloured by the disappointments he endured in office, but neither is it implausible. Resentful at his eclipse by Whitlam in the campaign, Cairns ‘felt like an outsider when we won’.76 That feeling must have been strengthened by the realisation that it was Whitlam’s victory. Cairns had done much to foster the spirit of change which had been crucial to Labor’s election, as well as having contributed mightily to the destruction of the conservative hegemony, especially in foreign policy. Yet, ultimately, Labor had won on Whitlam’s social democratic agenda. Cairns’ cool reaction to the victory could also be explained by his ambivalence about power. Cairns, the educator and persuader, now had to come to terms with the decisionmaking and conflicts that were inseparable from the exercise of power. Possibly he feared the task was beyond him. Above all else, Cairns may not have greeted the result with unrelieved joy because of his disillusionment with parliamentary democracy as an instrument of social change.

With a young fan, first Moratorium march, 8 May 1970.

In familiar pose addressing a Moratorium meeting, 9 May 1970.

Flashpoint: Superintendent Gerard Hickey advises Cairns that police have blocked the route to the Princes Gate Plaza, second Moratorium march, 18 September 1970.

Opposite: Addressing the multitudes in Bourke Street first Moratorium march, 8 May 1970.

As Vice-Chairman of the International Commission of Inquiry into American War Crimes in Indochina, Oslo, 1971.

With Tom Uren and Charles Jones, swearing in of the full Whitlam ministry, Government House, December 1972. The Quiet Revolution was published within days of Labor’s triumph. It made sobering reading for those who assumed that the advent of a Labor government in Canberra would usher in a new social order. The book was pervaded by a sense of the difficulties of bringing about radical social change in Australia. While not defeatist, its forlorn tone betrayed the gloom that had settled on its author over the previous couple of years. It revealed a man who was deeply dissatisfied with the existing capitalist system and still firmly believed that socialism offered a better alternative. Yet, despite clinging to the idea that change was possible, Cairns was increasingly frustrated and depressed at his inability to bring

it about. In previous writings, Cairns had portrayed Australian history as a story of unending struggle between the forces of reform and reaction. Although not accepting a determinist view of history, he had been optimistic that socialism would be the ultimate outcome of that struggle. One of the most striking things about The Quiet Revolution was the bleak view it presented of Australian history: ‘History is not on the side of the “left”. Australian history has not given the “left” something upon which it can build. There is no bias from nineteenth century “mateship” toward twentieth century socialism.’ Similarly, in the past, though frequently expressing disenchantment at modern Labor’s lack of radicalism and infidelity to its socialist origins, Cairns had consistently identified the ALP as the primary agent of progress and reform in Australia. By contrast, The Quiet Revolution, while not going so far as to endorse the New Left thesis that the ALP was never anything other than capitalist, described a party that had succumbed to the status quo and the materialist aspirations of its working-class supporters: there can be little doubt that nothing happened to justify the still remaining beliefs that the 1890s was a ‘turning point’ which could produce something radically different. . . As well there was little to support the belief that the ‘old Labor Party’ was something far more sincere and united than that of recent years. There had been little change in the years after the trade union movement had ‘extended’ itself into parliaments because there had been little change in what Australian workers really wanted and little change in their willingness to fight for anything. They may have wanted ‘better things’, but if they did, the ‘better things’ were only more of what they had before and, like everyone else— the capitalist, the ‘middle’-class, the farmer—it was measurable only in money and work.77

This pessimism at Labor’s historical limitations as a force of social change was complemented by the book’s powerful critique of social democratic practice. In answering the question of why the Australian Left, particularly those who had chosen to work through the ALP, had made so little progress in the twentieth century, Cairns explained that

they had made ‘a basic mistake about the actual location of power in the industrialised capitalist society’. What followed was perhaps the most important passage in the whole book. It is remarkable in that it was written by a man who was about to assume a senior position within a Labor government, and in its prescience about the fate of that government: social democrats decided that it was the State, or the Government, that really had power, and that all you needed to do was win an election and you would have won control of the place where power really was located and you could then fully exercise power . . . But power is not located mainly or wholly in parliament. In an industrialised capitalist system power is located in the productive system—in factories, banks, stores, offices, newspapers, TV networks, universities, schools, and in churches and families. Parliament is only one of the many places where power is located. In an economically advanced society any government is circumscribed, conditioned, neutralised, and often dominated, by some or many of these more basic power centres . . . In a very significant sense Labor cannot gain power at all simply by winning an election. A Labor government can operate its administration within the limits imposed by the basic power centres of which the social structure consists.78

To some extent, this passage was qualified by the suggestion that a Labor government could do much to achieve a fairer income distribution and resource allocation, and to introduce cultural and law reforms that would benefit Aborigines, women, migrants and other disadvantaged groups. Cairns also pleaded with the young radicals, as he had so often before, not to ‘ignore what can be done in parliaments and other “governing” bodies’.79 Even so, Cairns obviously held out little hope that an ALP government could spearhead the type of fundamental social transformation he wanted to see. The impetus for that change would have to come from elsewhere in society. But Cairns did not see much promise in other elements of the Australian Left. Most of them, including many of those in the labour movement were ‘un-ideological militants’. This group served an important purpose as a force of resistance to the capitalist system but, despite all the sound and fury associated with strikes and demonstrations,

they offered no comprehensive critique of the social system and showed little real desire for a ‘transfer of power and responsibility’. The communist parties had been rendered ineffective by their adherence to imported ideologies. Surprisingly, perhaps, Cairns was considerably more optimistic about the potential of the New Left: it had ‘a reasonably well developed criticism of contemporary society’, though Cairns added that ‘it had no viable or even feasible alternatives’.80 As things stood, then, progress for the Left in Australia was neither ‘inevitable or even likely’. It followed, moreover, that ‘something different is needed. Something for which hardly any example so far exists.’ What Cairns envisaged was ‘a profound change in the values which dominate us today’—in other words, a transformation of consciousness that would challenge the prevailing capitalist hegemony. Cairns did not expect the change to happen easily or quickly: ‘None of this is likely to be sudden or dramatic . . . Change is slow and the revolution is quiet.’ He wrote of a ‘new Reformation’ propelled by the looming threats to humanity posed by ‘the destructive power of the modern war and production machines’. Accompanying references told of growing problems of environmental degradation, limited resources, population pressures and civil conflicts. The new consciousness would not only assert the socialist values of co-operation, equality and peace, but carry ‘the essential truth that human life . . . is an integral, functioning part of the natural process in which there is a reciprocal interdependence of each life process with another’.81 According to Cairns, the harbinger of the developing consciousness was the growing mood of dissent sweeping the world, especially among the young. Predictably, in Australia, he singled out the Moratorium demonstration of 8 May 1970 as a manifestation of ‘this dissent, this dissatisfaction, this new and counter culture’. Future change would depend on the emergence of a similar-style movement. The role of this movement would be educational and it would also have to serve as an example for the type of society it wanted to build. As such, it must be

‘ethically sound’, in particular, both non-violent and non-elitist: ‘It must never place anything above the individual. . . Its purpose is the fulfilment of human needs not the supremacy of leaders, party, group, idea or nation.’ He further explained: What is done will take many forms. Every form of action should be based upon some collective organisation. Each should be concerned to equalise power and wealth and, to that end, gain an effective say in the determination of conditions of life—at work, in schools, universities, churches, parties, groups—by working out ways of running these places democratically.82

Cairns looked to the younger generation to lead this mass grassroots movement. In a theme to which he would constantly return in his post1975 writings, Cairns argued that advancing technology was ‘producing a new type of people—humane, non-violent, radical and “cultured”‘. Their role would be extensive but primarily educational: They must possess a revolutionary attitude against self-concern, deceit, coercion and violence. They must use non-violent action in every area, social, industrial and political, at every point and in every way in which injustice can be resisted and progress can be won. They must take power when it can be won but remember that their main role and purpose is to advance the understanding and effectiveness of the people.

Above all, the young radicals had to forge a partnership with the working-class, who remained ‘of decisive importance in the struggle for a better society’. Led properly, the working-class were ready to reject materialist values. The young radicals must, however, clearly explain to the working-class ‘what it is doing, and it must work with the workingclass, not separate itself off into an advance intellectual group’. No doubt with the experience of the Moratorium movement in mind, Cairns stressed that the easiest way to alienate ordinary people was ‘by “left” extremism’. This meant a repudiation of dogma and, most importantly, any use of force: ‘It is by rejection of violence and coercion that the revolution begins. It is by their elimination that it is completed.’83

In the second half of The Quiet Revolution, Cairns challenged the Australian Left to produce ‘not only an effective criticism of the established order but a practical program derived from what is needed to travel down the road to the new society’. At best, his book went only halfway to meeting that challenge. It realistically appraised the entrenched power of capitalism in Australia and the formidable barriers that lay in the way of fundamental social change. It highlighted the shortcomings of social democratic practice and, in so doing, presaged the pattern of systematic conservative resistance that was to undermine the Whitlam Government. Yet when it came to proposing an alternative and practical strategy for abolishing capitalism, The Quiet Revolution did not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. To be fair to Cairns, he laid no claim to having put forward a blueprint for change; in fact, he wrote that the time was not yet ripe for such a plan.84 Still, it was impossible to ignore the highly abstract, almost mystical character of the vision that unfolded throughout the book. He recognised that the quest for a new social order would require arduous and protracted struggle, but simultaneously anticipated humanity being on the threshold of a profound transformation in consciousness. The drift to millenarianism evident in The Quiet Revolution suggested that Cairns, dejected at what he grimly described as ‘the appalling difficulties always in the way of progress’, 85 was taking refuge from those difficulties by projecting his aspirations for a new society far into the future. Clearly, he had little confidence that the Whitlam Government could significantly contribute to the building of a socialist society. Whereas Cairns had once held that the essential precondition to the triumph of socialism was for the ALP to use the state to break the dominance of private capital, he now placed greater importance on the development of a mass grassroots movement to nourish a counterhegemony to capitalism. Thus, he appeared to have finally resolved the tension that had bedevilled his thinking on social change since the mid1960s. Not that this could have been much consolation, given the

incongruous situation in which he found himself in December 1972. For years in Opposition the party’s radical conscience, Cairns arrived in office having lost hope that Labor could do anything radical in government.

8 a ‘new jim c airns ’? 1972–1974 THE KING OF THE KIDS, THE REVOLUTIONARY WHO LED THE MASSES THROUGH THE STREETS. HAS BECOME A PRAGMATIC REFORMIST—A ZEALOUS AND IDEALIST ONE, CERTAINLY, BUT A REFORMIST FOR ALL THAT. Mungo MacCallum, ‘A symbolic sop to the people’, Nation Review, 31 May–6 June 1974.

J A M E S McC L E L L A N D , former New South Wales Labor Senator, and for a

brief period minister in the Whitlam Government, wrote of Jim Cairns: ‘A likeable but woolly man, he typified the politics of “the warm inner glow” . . . He was in his element in a hall full of cheering young idolaters but the tedious grind of administration was not his dish.’ 1 This image of Cairns as a man temperamentally ill-equipped for government has become standard since his political career crashed in 1975. Parallel with this is the view that he was essentially an oppositional politician. As Margaret Bowman and Michelle Grattan argue, he was more the protester than the creator. He was at his strongest when reacting against perceived wrongs . . . He did not arrive in government bearing a program, but rather an ideology and a set of attitudes. Without a map to guide him through the labyrinth of power, Cairns was to lose his way and, inevitably, to find the experience of office disappointing.2

While both of these assessments contain a kernel of truth, neither adequately explains what happened to Cairns in 1972–75. First, they neglect Cairns’ reputation as one of Labor’s most effective and influential ministers during a considerable portion of the life of the Whitlam Government, including its first term from December 1972 to May 1974. He surprised many with his capacity for compromise and moderation, and apparent willingness to accept the restraints of office. Second, they imply that his downfall can be entirely explained by his own inadequacies. Cairns did have feet of clay but his demise and, indeed, that of the ALP government, can only properly be understood when broader forces are taken into account. Cairns’ lack of expectation on coming to office helped make the first Whitlam Government a positive experience for him. Having accepted that Australian society was not malleable to radical socialist reorganisation by a Labor government, he lowered his sights in 1972–74 to endorse the lesser goal embodied in Whitlam’s social democratic agenda. This agenda was premised, as Whitlam has written, on ‘the pluralistic nature of our [economic] system, with the private sector continuing to play the greater part in providing employment and growth’.3 The Labor government set out to milk the resources of the mixed capitalist economy to substantially increase the availability and accessibility of services to the community. In other words, Labor was trying to effect a social transformation, while essentially maintaining the economic status quo. With the economy booming (in fact, seriously overheated), the government implemented large slabs of the Whitlam agenda during its first term in office, pouring resources into areas like education, health, urban development and Aboriginal affairs. In fact, the period December 1972 to May 1974 can be seen as the high-water mark of post-war social democracy in Australia. Cairns, though conscious of the limits of what Labor was doing, was encouraged by its early social achievements. The gloom that had settled on him during 1971–72 gradually lifted. He was heartened too by the government’s success in modernising

and transforming Australia’s international outlook. As Minister for Overseas Trade, a job he later described as ‘philosophically productive for me’, Cairns played an important part in that transformation. For years he had wanted to transcend the Cold War pattern of Australia’s relations with the rest of the world, and the trade ministry gave him the opportunity to do so. He eagerly set about trying to expand Australia’s economic links with previously neglected regions. The high point of his first term in office was the trade mission he led to China in May 1973. His other portfolio of Secondary Industry proved less philosophically rewarding.4 Cairns’ own preferred blueprint for industry reform remained unrealised. Much of his energy was devoted to staving off those in the government and bureaucracy who wanted a market-driven process of industry restructuring. Nonetheless, his period as Minister for Secondary Industry was not without achievement. He managed to establish a substantial industry panel system and forge a constructive relationship with the business community. His most significant and surprising legacy, though, was his close involvement in the across-the-board tariff cut of July 1973. While Cairns’ first period in power turned out better than he had dared hope, his situation was still fragile. The contradictions involved in his position were great. An avowed socialist, he was responsible for the health and stability of the capitalist system. This paradox was not lost on Cairns. In his 1976 book Oil in Troubled Waters he reflected: ‘Ironically for one who was by conduct and philosophy among the most radical in the government, I had . . . Ministries which most required one to be concerned with jobs and money and private enterprise’.5 But this was not all. In 1972–75 Cairns was acting in an arena in which he no longer fundamentally believed. Since the late 1960s he had charted an ideological course that seemed inevitably to be propelling him outside the margins of the ALP. The Quiet Revolution had been a statement of his disillusionment with the Labor Party and the institution of parliamentary democracy. During the first Whitlam Government this discrepancy was

held in abeyance as Cairns concentrated on the demands of office. It was as if his ideological evolution had been placed on pause; his yearning for a new society temporarily sated by Labor’s progressive reforms. Yet the question remained: how long could it last? On 18 December 1972 the FPLP met to choose the ministry in the Whitlam Government. Following the unopposed election of the four parliamentary leaders—Whitlam, Barnard and Senators Murphy and Willesee, Cairns topped the ballot for places in the ministry. Thus, Cairns was the third-ranking minister in the new government behind Whitlam and Barnard. Naturally, he was chuffed, telling the Melbourne Herald: ‘It is encouraging to be voted in like that by colleagues who have known you and your work for so long’. Later the same day Whitlam allocated portfolios to the new ministers. Cairns hankered after Foreign Affairs, but was well aware that Whitlam would never countenance the idea and, in any case, Washington had signalled that it would not tolerate him in that position. Instead, as expected, he was given charge of trade and industry. Acting on Cairns’ recommendation, Whitlam divided the Department of Trade and Industry into two separate departments, Overseas Trade and Secondary Industry with Cairns responsible for both.6 Although acceding to Cairns’ advice on the departmental restructure, Whitlam delivered a backhander by transferring the Tariff Board into his own jurisdiction within the Prime Minister’s Department. The move had been urged on Whitlam by Alf Rattigan, chairman of the Tariff Board, who was sensitive to Cairns’ criticisms of the board’s protection reduction program over recent years. In his first statement after being sworn in as minister, Cairns gave notice that he would not be pushed aside so easily. He declared that the Department of Secondary Industry would play an active part in tariff and protection policy and also pledged that ‘the Government would not contemplate precipitate action of a kind which would involve major disruption of industry’.7 The preliminary skirmishing between Whitlam and Cairns over

tariffs was soon overshadowed by controversy sparked by President Nixon’s decision to order the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam. In November 1972, buoyed by the proclamation of his National Security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that ‘peace is at hand’ in Vietnam, Nixon had been re-elected by the American people. On 13 December, however, the peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam collapsed. Five days later, when Cairns was elected to the ministry, a journalist asked him whether his interest in Vietnam had waned. He replied: ‘No. It still worries me. The whole peace talks arrangement was a fraud by President Nixon to win the election.’ Cairns’ worst suspicions about Nixon were realised that same day when the United States commenced massive air strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong. For eleven days and nights, wave after wave of American B-52s rained an estimated 100 000 bombs on the two cities, pausing only for Christmas Day.8 On 20 December Australia added its voice to the international outcry provoked by the bombing, with Whitlam sending a letter of protest to Washington. Although news of the letter quickly reached the media, Whitlam refused to comment publicly on the letter or the bombing. Cairns was less reticent. The bombing would not, he declared, ‘bring the end of the war any nearer. It is simply resulting in the purposeless killing of more and more people.’ On 28 December, with the air raids still continuing, Cairns and Victorian Labor Senator Bill Brown issued a joint statement condemning the bombing as ‘the most brutal, indiscriminate slaughter of defenceless men, women and children in living memory’.9 Further denunciations of US policy by Cairns followed on New Year’s Eve and 4 January. His comments were reinforced by the Minister for Labour, Clyde Cameron, and the Minister for Urban and Regional Development, Tom Uren, who employed similarly florid language in separate attacks on the Nixon Administration.10 Whitlam later recorded that President Nixon’s anger at receiving his protest letter ‘turned to fury’ at the statements by the three senior Labor

ministers. Washington, accustomed to automatic and uncritical support in Canberra, was shocked and disturbed by the reaction of the new Australian government. Behind the scenes, Australian diplomatic officials did their best to assuage the American concerns. Despite these efforts it seems certain that the incident created doubts deep within the US establishment about the reliability of the Labor government and individual ministers, especially Cairns. In Australia there was also consternation at the outbursts by Cairns and his parliamentary colleagues. The Opposition and the press had a field day. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that the language used by the senior members of the Australian Government is the ‘language hitherto reserved to Moscow and Peking’.11 Against a background of demands that he discipline the ministers, Whitlam summoned Cairns, Cameron and Uren to a breakfast meeting at which he advised them that, in future, statements on foreign policy should be left to him as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Apparently satisfied by the response to his edict, Whitlam confidently informed a press conference on the same day that ‘there will be no further statements on foreign policy except by the Minister’. He could hardly have been impressed, therefore, when only twenty-four hours later Cairns told the media that he would continue to speak out on issues like the bombing of North Vietnam. These statements/he explained, would be expressions of his own opinion, and not government policy. Although acknowledging this might cause embarrassment for the government, Cairns argued that ‘this is essential in an adult democratic community—it is only because we have had a lot of tame cats in the past, that this is considered unusual’. His comments led to another spate of negative editorials. The Age declared huffily that Cairns had ‘a quaint notion of Cabinet government’ and should be stripped of his ministerial responsibilities ‘if he persists with the fantasy that his moral insights put him above the discipline of his office’.12 With this initial controversy behind him, by February Cairns had

settled down to the business of government. Addressing the Metal Trades Industry Association on 21 February, he enunciated his broad approach to industry policy. A vital part of his task would be to overcome the resistance that existed among both workers and proprietors to the development of more efficient industries. There was a particular need to encourage Australia’s integration into the international economy, but Cairns was adamant that the corresponding structural reforms should not be left to market forces, or that change be imposed in an indiscriminate and arbitrary fashion by government or unaccompanied by appropriate measures to offset any potential social dislocation. The ‘important thing’, he declared, was that change ‘be achieved so that workers are not disemployed without protection’. Thus, while tariff reform was essential in Australia, reductions must occur at a manageable rate so that the interests of the workers can be secured and their positions improved, at the same time as tariffs are being changed. It cannot be the policy of the ALP to allow the ‘crisis of the market place’ to perform the job of ‘reallocating resources’; nor can it be the policy of the ALP to allow ‘across the board’ changes of economic conditions which can neither be foreseen nor ameliorated for those unable to bear the cost.13 There was a familiar ring to all of this. But whereas in Tariffs or Planning? Cairns had advocated substantially restructuring the government department system to facilitate industry planning, he now outlined a more modest scheme. Shortly after the December election he had indicated to Alan Wood of the Sydney Morning Herald that he had shelved, at least temporarily, his hopes for the establishment of a Ministry of National Planning. Instead Cairns had decided on a major expansion of the industry panel system set up by his predecessor as Minister for Trade and Industry, the leader of the Country Party, Doug Anthony. Under Anthony, the industry panels had operated in only a

limited number of industries and primarily comprised industry representatives and departmental officers. 14 Cairns’ intention was to establish panels across a wide range of industries and broaden their membership. On 1 February he told the Australian Textile, Apparel and Related Industries Conference that the panels would include ‘public servants, industry managers, unionists, academics, ecologists and ordinary citizens who were the consumers of the industries’ products’. In his address to the Metal Trades Industry Association he explained that the panels would provide the government with ‘widely-based expert advice’, thereby assisting it to hand-pick those industries and enterprises that were to be nurtured and developed.15 A comprehensive system of industry panels was the practical means by which to inject a greater level of participation and co-operation into economic restructuring. Cairns also moved to fulfil the other condition he had attached to his support for industry reform, that the process be conducted compassionately and with appropriate safeguards. On 14 February 1973, a meeting between Cairns, Clyde Cameron, and the Minister for Social Security, Bill Hayden, created an economic structural adjustment committee. Chaired by Secondary Industry, this interdepartmental committee was to facilitate industry reform by making recommendations on the training and retraining of employees, the relocation of industries, adjustment help to affected industries, and the development of comprehensive social security and welfare measures for individual workers and their families.16 By May 1973 industry panels were operating, or being formed, in a cross-section of industries, including printing, footwear, chemicals, metals, motor vehicles and electronics. Yet already a significant flaw had appeared in the scheme. According to a report in the Canberra Times, while industry participation was extensive, the ‘support or the talent has not been easy to come by in the case of employee or consumer groups’. Alf Rattigan was sceptical of the value of the panels (he described them

as ‘an arrangement to facilitate lobbying by the manufacturers for higher protection’); in his memoirs he confirms that the recruitment of consumer representatives had posed particular difficulties. Cairns indirectly admitted to the problem in July, in a speech to the Australian Industries Development Association. He affirmed that the panels remained the centrepiece of his bid for the planned development of manufacturing industry, but he had lowered his expectations about their composition. While still hopeful that ‘consumers, localities and environmentalists’ might yet become involved, he now conceived the panels as fundamentally tripartite bodies made up ‘of representatives of management, unions and the Department of Secondary Industry’.17 The scaled-down panels had little in common with the pluralist democratic institutions Cairns had originally envisaged. They evoked, instead, a corporatist style of government in which decision-making became the preserve of capital and labour elites united in partnership and supervised by the state. Another formidable impediment to Cairns’ industry reform model was Whitlam. As both Prime Minister and the minister responsible for the Tariff Board and its successor, the Industries Assistance Commission (LAC), Whitlam was well-placed to stamp his authority on the government’s industry policy. He used that authority to press hard for a major shake-up of Australian industry. In doing so, he had the vigorous backing of Rattigan and, for the most part, the support of Treasury. The result was a powerful rationalising alliance against which Cairns pitted himself. Whitlam’s bluntness about the shortcomings of Australian industry was epitomised in a speech he gave to the Metal Trades Industry Association in June 1973, sharply at odds with the one Cairns had delivered to the same body a few months earlier. He made it dear that he would push for lower tariffs and accused industry of growing fat and complacent, too accustomed to being mollycoddled by government:

As soon as an industry has come into existence, too often it considers that its very existence entitles it to a certificate of immortality and changelessness, to be guaranteed—by way of Government subsidy and protection by way of tariffs, or even worse, permanent quantitative control on imports—of a safe and easy life.18 The division between Whitlam and Cairns over industry policy echoed elements of their theoretical differences over the merits of nationalisation a decade earlier. Yet again, it was Whitlam who was anxious to junk a Labor shibboleth. Cairns, by contrast, though no orthodox protectionist, upheld the traditional viewpoint that Labor’s first priority was job security. Whereas Cairns was preoccupied with the human cost of industry restructuring, Whitlam was attracted to a more robust method of change in which tariff protection would be withdrawn and import competition allowed to weed out inefficient businesses. The common thread in these differences was that Whitlam did not regard the market place with the same ingrained suspicion as Cairns. Whitlam’s impatience with consultation underlined a further discrepancy between the two men’s approach to industry reform and their political styles. Cairns was by instinct a democrat and uneasy about the exercise of power. He was more comfortable in educating and persuading others to his point of view than in decision-making. In government this trait sometimes caused Cairns to appear indecisive and inconsistent. Whitlam, on the other hand, was by instinct confrontationist and authoritarian. As Prime Minister these features became even more pronounced; he ‘often eschewed the delicate business of negotiation and compromise’19 to steamroll decisions through the government. An early example of Whitlam’s autocratic style of leadership in government was the revaluation of the Australian dollar in mid-February 1973. The friction created between Cairns and Whitlam by that decision exposed not only their divergent ideas about the management of economic change, but

their conflicting views of the way the government should operate. When Labor was elected in December 1972, Australia’s international reserves were at record heights and continuing to accumulate at a furious rate. This phenomenon was due to several years of strong export performance, as well as a major inflow of speculative capital. Despite the inflationary pressures associated with the surge in foreign capital inflow, the McMahon Government had remained paralysed on the question of a shift in Australia’s exchange rate, principally because of Country Party intransigence towards any revaluation of the dollar. 20 On 23 December after discussions between Whitlam, Lance Barnard and the Treasurer, Frank Crean, the new government announced a 7.05 per cent revaluation of the currency. The decision was generally regarded as a bold and overdue step, but it was not universally welcomed. Miners and farmers complained that Australia’s exports would become less competitive, while manufacturers expressed anxiety about the impact of cheaper imports. Cairns, though not opposed to the revaluation, was unhappy at not being consulted on a decision that had a direct bearing on his portfolio areas. He warned that a higher dollar might cause job losses in some vulnerable industries.21 The following February the US dollar was devalued against gold, and Australia faced the decision of whether to follow suit or maintain the value of the Australian dollar, thereby effectively revaluing the currency by a further 11.1 per cent. By now, the Department of Secondary Industry had received hundreds of representations from manufacturers claiming to have been adversely affected by the December exchange rate adjustment, and Cairns was determined that the government should carefully consider the impact of a further appreciation of the dollar before it acted. He refused to say publicly what course he thought the government should take, but told the press that the decision must not be hurried. He also sent telegrams to both Whitlam and Crean appealing for consultation with senior ministers on the issue. Cairns was still waiting for a reply when Crean announced on 14 February that the Australian dollar’s gold parity

was to be held firm. As in December, the matter had not been referred to Cabinet. It was widely reported that Whitlam had consulted only with Crean and his personal economics adviser, Dr H. C. Coombs.22 Understandably Cairns was incensed by his exclusion from the decision. As Minister for Overseas Trade and Secondary Industry as well as a member of Cabinet’s Economic Committee, he believed that his advice should have been sought. In a statement the next day he complained that the ‘present decisions on the Australian dollar’ were exacerbating the ‘state of uncertainty’ in the manufacturing sector. This reaction suggested that Cairns had serious doubts about the wisdom of the latest revaluation. In fact, as Brian Johns of the Sydney Morning Herald explained, he had been ambivalent about what should be done with the Australian dollar: ‘Dr Cairns was open to persuasion. The difficulty was that no one tried.’ Meanwhile, the Opposition’s spokesperson on Primary Industry, Malcolm Fraser, described the way the decision had been arrived at as ‘government by junta’. In a transparent attempt to fuel government tensions, he asked, ‘how long Dr Cairns will permit himself to be pushed around, and put into a position where he cannot fulfil his Ministerial responsibility’?23 Humiliated by Whitlam and Crean over the revaluation of the Australian dollar, Cairns exacted some minor revenge in mid-March by convincing the Cabinet’s Economic Committee to extend the life of the manufacturing exports incentive scheme until June 1974. Backed by the Prime Minister, Crean had presented a Treasury submission that argued for the scheme to be phased out by the middle of 1973. Cairns, on the other hand, pushed for it to be renewed and enhanced. The Economic Committee would not agree to the latter, but did accept the case for renewal. Upon confirmation of the decision by the full Cabinet on 13 March, a delighted Cairns claimed that it would have ‘beneficial effects on investment decisions and employment prospects’.24 Though only a tiny victory, it showed he could not be lightly dismissed. Along with

other decisions, such as the extension of the operation of clothing import quotas,25 these moves signalled that Cairns would be a thorn in the side of supporters of industry rationalisation. With Secondary Industry fast becoming a minefield for Cairns, he found the going in Overseas Trade more congenial. In March he signed an agreement with the visiting Soviet Foreign Trade Minister which expressed the desire of the Australian and Soviet governments to develop closer trade relations and economic co-operation.26 Soon after, he travelled to Wellington to conduct talks on the operation of the New Zealand-Australian Free Trade Agreement successfully laying the groundwork for the renewal of tariff preference arrangements between the two countries.27 Far more momentous was Cairns’ announcement on 13 March that he was to lead a trade mission to China in May. The trip had historic significance: Cairns would be the first Australian minister to visit China since the Labor government’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with Peking the previous December. On becoming minister, Cairns had acted swiftly to revive plans for a trade mission to China, which had remained still-born under the McMahon Government. The move coalesced perfectly with his long-held goals of forging a more understanding relationship with Asia and easing the hostility between the communist and non-communist worlds. In comments to journalists just before departing on 8 May, Cairns was optimistic that the trip would result in agreements for wheat, wool and other primary products and, in the longer term, could pave the way for the doubling of Australian exports to China within ten years. Yet this was only part of what he hoped to achieve: ‘We have been moved too long by fear of Asia. Not only will this mission be interested in trade relations, but our aim is to preserve peace between China and Australia and in the Pacific area and the world as well.’28 Besides Cairns, who was accompanied by Gwen, the mission consisted of thirteen businessmen; an ACTU representative; Department

of Overseas Trade officials, including the Secretary of the Department, Douglas McKay; and personal staff. Around 2000 applications were received to join the mission, and the names selected read like a Who’s Who of Australian industry and commerce. 29 Appropriately, just as the trip to China represented a powerful symbol of rapprochement between capitalism and communism, it was an ideal setting for breaking down the residual suspicion between Australia’s business establishment and the avowed socialist Cairns. The result was a revelation for both sides. Cairns was impressed by the intellectual calibre of the business leaders, while they were highly complimentary of his leadership in China.30 On 11 May the mission crossed the border from Hong Kong into the southern Chinese province of Kwangtung. Cairns led the way as the Australian party walked across the railway bridge separating the two countries. Maxwell Grant of the Melbourne Herald, who witnessed this historic moment, wrote that Cairns was ‘bursting to get into the country he has so long longed to visit’. The mission spent its first night in Changchow (Canton) and the following day visited the city’s Export Commodities Fair before flying on to Peking.31 On 13 May in the Great Hall of the People, Cairns commenced several days of talks with the Chinese Minister of Foreign Trade, Pai Hsiang-kuo. The discussions progressed smoothly. On 19 May Cairns and Pai issued a joint communiqué that foreshadowed the signing of a trade agreement between the two countries and indicated that Pai had accepted an invitation to visit Australia in the near future. In addition, it stated that China and Australia had agreed in principle to granting each other most-favoured-nation treatment in trade and to establish a Joint Trade Committee to promote future trade links. For Australia, most important was China’s agreement to negotiations on a long-term wheat deal, along with ‘exploratory discussion for similar long-term arrangements in respect of other commodities’. Cairns was jubilant at the latter breakthrough, telling Australian journalists: ‘This is the great achievement of this mission and what I set out to achieve’.32

The mission also visited a number of historical sites, including the Great Wall of China, as well as industrial centres and village communes. The warmth of the Chinese reception left an indelible impression on Cairns. Two decades on, his normally expressionless face lit up and his voice grew unusually animated as he recounted aspects of the trip. Grant considered that the hospitality extended to Cairns by the Chinese went beyond the usual diplomatic courtesies: Dr Cairns, because of his long and consistent stand in Vietnam and friendliness towards the Chinese, has about him an aura of Comrade Chairman Jim. You feel he is given just a little more than the red carpet treatment. He is an old and trusted friend. If this were the case, then Cairns reciprocated the sentiment. Ormonde perceptively explains the spirit of goodwill that emanated from Cairns during his stay in China: ‘It was as if he felt he was among people who were spiritually closer to him than many of his own countrymen. He was constantly smiling and laughing in an unrestrained way, in contrast to his more inhibited social responses at home.’ 33 One small indication of his buoyant mood was the photograph that appeared in various Australian newspapers of the mission visiting the Great Wall. Cairns was sporting an uncharacteristically broad smile. The image was too much for one reader of the Age, who sourly observed in a letter to the editor: ‘[this] must surely be the first published portrayal of the gentleman wearing a smile, which would indicate that he is at home in China. . . Let him stay there!’ 34 On 17 May the Australian mission met with the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People. In a statement issued on his return to Australia Cairns identified this as the high point of the trip. 35 Zhou was the chief architect of China’s new open-door foreign policy towards the West. The 75-year-old revolutionary hero was at the peak of his political power in 1973, as would be confirmed by his starring role at

the 10th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in August. For more than an hour Zhou entered into a general discussion with members of the Australian party. He answered questions from the business representatives, stressing China’s desire not only to increase trade with Australia, but to build closer transport, science and cultural links.36 Cairns was delighted by the exchange. It was a scene that captured better than anything else the spirit of the mission—a group of white, Western capitalists in constructive dialogue with a leader of the world’s most populous communist nation. The rest of the party then withdrew and Cairns, in the presence of the Australian Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald, had almost an hour of private talks with Zhou. A joint communiqué released afterwards characterised the talks as ‘an unrestrained conversation in a friendly atmosphere’.37 The discussion traversed a wide range of subjects. Zhou impressed on Cairns that China did not have aggressive intentions in Asia and asked him to communicate this message to other regional leaders. He also explained that China’s decision to suspend the purchase of wheat from Australia between 1970 and September 1972 was a consequence of the previous government’s policy on Vietnam.38 The talks took a less agreeable turn when Cairns raised the issue of nuclear tests. In Australia he had continued his vocal opposition to the French tests in the Pacific. In April he had risked a reprimand from Whitlam by stating that Australia might have to consider breaking trade and diplomatic relations with France because of its obduracy over the issue. Then, only days before Cairns departed for China, Philip Cairns, who was working as a private secretary in his father’s electorate office, announced that he and his father had organised a protest yacht to sail to the French nuclear test zone later that month.39 Under these circumstances, to have failed to take the opportunity to tackle Zhou about the Chinese tests would have exposed him to accusations of double standards—a charge that conservative politicians had in the past levelled

at him over the issue.40 The polite but dogged way in which Cairns approached the matter with the Chinese Premier went beyond political window-dressing. Zhou explained that, although China supported a nuclear-free zone in the Pacific, it would persist with its testing program. Cairns’ persistence ‘irritated and annoyed’ Zhou, who made it clear that he wanted to move on to another topic. Cairns was left ‘disappointed’ by Zhou’s response.41 The Australian mission departed Peking on 18 May, eventually crossing back into Hong Kong on 28 May via Shenyang, Nanking, Shanghai and Kwangchow. Flushed with the trip’s success, Cairns returned to Australia three days later. His elation was reflected in a press statement released on arrival home: ‘I am particularly proud to have led this Mission which, from the start, was conscious of the importance of its pioneering role in China-Australia relations’. He heaped praise on all those involved, but reserved his greatest gratitude for the Chinese authorities and people, whose ‘hospitality and cooperative approach’ had been instrumental to the mission’s achievements. While cautioning that a dramatic expansion in trade with China would not ‘take place overnight’, Cairns was confident that the basis had been established for a close longterm trading relationship. The press shared his optimism. The Age proclaimed that the ‘Cairns mission would have been of value had it done no more than establish contact, foster good will and achieve understanding. It has done all this and more.’ Gregory Clark of the Australian believed that the success of the trip had been inevitable, yet still considered Cairns to have scored ‘the trade public relations coup of the decade’.42 By July the mission had begun to bear fruit, with the arrival in Australia of a Chinese trade delegation led by Pai Hsiang-kuo. On 24 July Pai and Cairns signed a trade agreement, which the latter hailed as ‘historic’. As anticipated in the 19 May communiqué, China and Australia granted each other most-favoured-nation trading status and

agreed to the establishment of a joint trade committee to continue trade talks. Article 2 of the agreement stipulated that Australia and China were to hold ‘exploratory discussions for long-term commodity arrangements’. In announcing the agreement Cairns forecast that a long-term wheat contract would be the first concrete result of Article 2 and indicated that such a deal could be struck within days.43 This prediction was premature, but by early October the Australian Wheat Board had signed a three-year contract with China, under which China was to buy up to 4.7 million tonnes of wheat from Australia at a value of over $600 million.44 Following on from the wheat deal were announcements of large sugar and iron ore sales to China in November and December. These deals helped to boost the total value of trade between Australia and China in 1973–74 to $233.9 million, almost treble that of 1971–72. Exports to China leapt from $62.8 million in 1972–73 to $162 million in 1973–74 (though this was still marginally less than the record of $168.2 million in 1963–64). While this increase did not match some of the more heady forecasts, it reversed the declining trend that had marked the final years of conservative government and, just as vitally, laid the foundations for much greater increases over the following decade.45 These achievements were not solely the result of Cairns’ efforts. The sugar contract, for example, was negotiated by Crean and the Minister for Northern Development, Rex Patterson, when they accompanied Whitlam on his visit to China in October-November 1973. 46 Moreover, improved trade links were a direct spin-off from Labor’s normalisation of political relations with China. Nonetheless, Cairns can be credited with playing a major part in the Whitlam Government’s creation of a stable and growing economic relationship with China. Like so much else he accomplished in government, this was largely forgotten amid the drama of his political demise in 1975. If the strengthening of trade with China was the spectacular legacy of Cairns’ first year as Minister for Overseas Trade, in the portfolio of

Secondary Industry it was his co-operation with Whitlam in the 25 per cent across-the-board tariff cut of July 1973 that was most striking. Whereas developing trade with China was clearly consistent with his philosophical outlook, the decision to slash tariffs, at least on the surface, seemed an incongruous one for Cairns to have endorsed. With time, he came to regret it bitterly. The idea of an across-the-board tariff cut was floated at a Cabinet economic briefing on the day Cairns flew back from China. The most obvious rationale was that it would greatly accelerate industry restructuring. A second and more immediate motivation was that it would help control inflation.47 At the beginning of 1973 professional economists and the new Labor government shared the assumption that unemployment was Australia’s most pressing economic problem. By the middle of the year, however, it had become evident that the economy was overheating and inflation was the chief danger. As Cairns notes in Oil in Troubled Waters , inflation had ‘got into “the boiler”‘ before Labor’s election in December 1972. The conservative parties had stood by idly in 1971–72, despite an explosion in the rate of capital inflow. Faced with a deteriorating job market, the McMahon Government had exacerbated the risk of inflation by relaxing monetary and fiscal policy in 1972. Another significant factor in the rapid build-up of inflationary pressures in the first half of 1973 was a boom in international commodity prices. Australia’s export price index soared, accompanied by a jump in domestic food prices. In the first year of the Whitlam Government, food price increases accounted for over one-half of the 13.2 per cent rise in the consumer price index.48 The buoyant economic conditions of 1973 presented both opportunities and dangers for the Labor government. On the one hand, as Whitlam explained in his 1972 policy speech, the ALP’s reform program could succeed only ‘within a framework of strong uninterrupted growth’.49 Yet the speed of the upswing created a risk that the spending

required to fulfil the government’s ambitious social objectives would strain the already overstretched productive resources of the economy, thereby worsening inflation. The challenge for Labor was to find ways of dampening demand without curtailing its reform agenda. In these circumstances the government looked to non-fiscal measures to combat inflation. In addition to the revaluations of the Australian dollar of December 1972 and February 1973, a variable deposit requirement was introduced, obliging overseas borrowers to deposit a portion (initially 25 per cent, later increased to 33 per cent) of the amount borrowed, interestfree, with the Reserve Bank. The aim was to further reduce the volume of capital inflow. The government also established a Prices Justification Tribunal, which commenced operations on 1 August 1973. The proposed across-the-board tariff cut promised to restrain inflation not only by reducing the price of imported goods, but by encouraging an increase in expenditure on imports and hence easing the pressure on domestic productive resources.50 On 27 June the Prime Minister’s economic adviser, H. C. Coombs, approached Whitlam with a formal proposal for a general tariff cut. Whitlam conferred with Cairns, obtaining his agreement for the establishment of a confidential committee to examine the idea. The committee, chaired by Rattigan, included Professor Fred Gruen, another of Whitlam’s economic advisers, and Brian Brogan, who was an economic consultant with the Prime Minister’s Department as well as an adviser to Cairns. Other members were senior bureaucrats from the departments of Overseas Trade, Secondary Industry and Prime Minister.51 Significantly, Treasury was not represented and was consulted only when the committee had completed its report. At that point, Treasury expressed serious misgivings about a general tariff reduction on the grounds that, among other things, it could prejudice the chances of a further revaluation and might be used by the government as a substitute for cutting spending to fight inflation. The government’s decision to ignore these warnings marked the beginning of a deterioration

in its relationship with Treasury. The committee’s terms of reference were set out in a letter from Whitlam to Rattigan; Cairns inserted an additional clause which asked the committee to consider ‘the effect on employment’ of the recommended tariff changes.52 Working to a tight schedule, the committee reported on 15 July, unanimously recommending a general 25 per cent cut in tariffs. Its report also proposed procedures to deal with requests for assistance from businesses and employees harmed by the tariff reduction. 53 Whitlam’s endorsement of the committee’s recommendation was never in question. But the Prime Minister realised, as he had earlier confided to Rattigan, that he was dependent on Cairns’ support to get the proposal through Cabinet. That support appeared uncertain. In the preceding fortnight Cairns had given mixed signals on the issue of industry protection. On 3 July he announced a tariff preference scheme whereby manufactured and semi-manufactured goods from developing countries were to be granted access to the Australian market at a tariff rate 10 per cent lower than normal. Cairns’ enthusiastic backing for the scheme, which he hailed as a way of encouraging imports from the Asia-Pacific region, underlined the danger of pigeon-holing him as a dogmatic protectionist. Yet only six days later, in a major speech to the Australian Industries Development Association, he reiterated his pledge that the restructuring of Australian industry would be ‘limited to that which can be handled at a manageable rate—so that the consequences of it can be handled in an equitable manner and without hardship or injustice’.54 As it transpired, Cairns not only gave his imprimatur to the general tariff cut, but was instrumental in its passage through a divided Cabinet on 18 July. According to Alan Reid, Whitlam played only a minor role. . . He left Cairns to carry the ball, which was shrewd. But for Cairns’ advocacy the recommendation would probably never have been endorsed. Cairns supported the recommendation with the ardour of a recent convert,

and with the almost unique authority he then possessed within the ALP Parliamentary Party.55 The decision to slash tariffs by 25 per cent was announced in a joint statement by Whitlam and Cairns on 18 July. 56 The statement emphasised that the decision was designed to ‘restrain price increases by increased competition and by stimulating in the short run a sufficiently large inflow of additional imports to help meet pressing demand’. Acknowledging that the expected increase in imports ‘may affect production and employment’, the government would follow the committee’s recommendation to establish a tribunal to hear appeals from companies ‘seriously affected by imports’. The tribunal would have the power to ‘recommend appropriate assistance’ to companies, including the option of restoring ‘the tariff level which previously protected it’. However, the latter course would not be undertaken lightly since it would frustrate ‘the purpose of the initial tariff cut. . . [and] the anti-inflationary impact of the original measure would be seriously weakened’. The government, as recommended by the committee, had provided $25 million for adjustment assistance. Any workers who lost their jobs as a result of the tariff reductions would be entitled to income support and ‘retraining for new and better occupations if they so desire’. The reactions to the announcement were predictable. The retail and rural sectors were predominantly supportive, but for the trade union movement and manufacturers the decision came as an unwelcome shock. Although privately incensed at the absence of consultation, the president of the ACTU and federal ALP president, Bob Hawke, publicly defended the tariff cut. He was unable, however, to contain the outrage of large sections of the union movement. For example, the federal secretary of the Rubberworkers’ Union, H. B. French, described the tariff reduction as a ‘betrayal’ of workers and warned that it would send the footwear industry to the wall. On 20 July Cairns issued a statement attempting to stem the union assault. He decried the ‘wild speculation’ about job losses. He was

confident that the tariff cut would help to control inflation ‘without cost to any Australian’, but stressed that this would require ‘co-operation from industry, State Governments, workers, and especially from trade union leaders’.57 Like the union movement, manufacturers were bewildered and dismayed. The Age reported that Cairns’ endorsement of the tariff reduction was a particular blow to manufacturers ‘who have seen him as their main bulwark against the low tariff forces in the Government’. While most industry groups refrained from publicly criticising Cairns, a representative of the Victorian Footwear Manufacturers’ Association accused him of duplicity in recent talks over the industry’s future.58 The press generally applauded the tariff cut, though they were dumbfounded by Cairns’ support. The Australian Financial Review provided the most rapturous response, describing the decision as ‘a watershed in Australian economic history; a vast step toward national maturity’. Its correspondent, Robert Haupt, wrote that the biggest surprise was that ‘the decision bears the imprint of Dr Cairns . . . who has long been seen as the main defender of the old-style protection’. Similarly, Maxwell Kemp of Nation Review remarked: ‘a one hit cut in all tariffs—putting some workers out of a job, forcing some parts of some industries to close and putting the screws on others—runs completely and absolutely counter to everything you’ve ever been told about Cairns’.59 Why did Cairns support the tariff reduction? One popular reason advanced at the time was that Brian Brogan, his friend and former student, had persuaded him to agree to the measure.60 There is no doubt that Cairns was influenced by Brogan’s advocacy. He had nominated Brogan as a member of the Rattigan committee and, when the committee completed its work on 15 July, it was Brogan who flew to Melbourne to brief him on its findings.61 Yet Cairns flatly rejects the inference that Brogan convinced him to perform a back-flip in his attitude to industry protection. In part, this rejection is an example of Cairns’ tendency to see

himself as a man aloof from intellectual influences, what Ormonde diagnosed as his ‘obsessive self-reliance’.62 But it is also based on his conviction that the action announced by the government on 18 July was not, as most commentators assumed, a fundamental departure from his views on tariffs. The notion that Cairns had performed a sudden U-turn by endorsing the general tariff cut was only partially correct. It presupposed that he was an incurable protectionist, but the reality was not nearly so simple. True, the secrecy of the decision contradicted everything he had ever said and written about consulting widely with industry, unions and other interested parties. Yet this has to be weighed against the government’s dilemma: unless it took swift action to increase the supply of resources to the economy, inflation threatened to run out of control and seriously compromise its reform agenda. While other commentators were vainly trying to make sense of Cairns’ role in the tariff reduction, Alan Wood observed shrewdly that his position was best understood as an antiinflationary measure rather than one designed to restructure industry. This was borne out in a number of defences Cairns made of the tariff cut over the ensuing weeks.63 Another factor explaining Cairns’ support for the tariff changes was that the elaborate adjustment assistance measures, especially the access to special benefits and retraining for employees who lost their jobs, faithfully adhered to his plans for a safety net to ameliorate the social impact of economic restructuring. The strengthening job market would have encouraged his confidence that the social costs of the decision could be mitigated. By mid-1973 the economy was rapidly approaching full employment, and there were labour shortages in sectors such as motor vehicle manufacturing. The Rattigan committee’s report had pointed out that in normal circumstances a 25 per cent tariff cut could reduce employment by 33 000, but it expected many of the jobs lost in importcompeting industries would be absorbed by the demand for labour in

other areas of the economy.64 Until well into 1974 the government’s decision appeared to have paid off. In the parliament on 5 December 1973 one of the tariff cut’s loudest critics, Country Party leader Doug Anthony, acknowledged that ‘Imports are now rising strongly and only a handful of workers has been obviously disadvantaged to date’. Cairns crowed at Anthony’s admission. He quoted figures confirming a sharp jump in imports in the quarter ended September 1973 and declared with satisfaction ‘no one apparently has lost his job’. Four months later, Cairns was able to boast that, contrary to predictions, fewer than 100 people claimed to have lost their jobs as a result of the tariff changes and that ‘hardly a dollar’ of the $25 million allocated to adjustment assistance had been needed.65 In spite of Cairns’ confidence, by April 1974 manufacturers and unions were becoming alarmed at the flood of imports.66 During the second half of the year their concerns at the impact of the tariff cut escalated dramatically as Australia slid into recession and unemployment spiralled. Cairns also began to lose faith in the wisdom of the action. He was especially dismayed by the inadequacy of the government’s adjustment assistance machinery and was convinced that it had been sabotaged by Whitlam, Rattigan and the Treasury. As the demands for a restoration of tariffs intensified, he led the government’s retreat, principally through the provision of import quotas to the worst-hit industries. The political damage had been done. As companies shut down and jobless queues lengthened, the tariff cut became a convenient scapegoat, its negative effects magnified out of all proportion. By 1975 Cairns was sure the decision had been a mistake.67 In 1973, though, all this was in the future. One by-product of the tariff cut was an improved relationship between Whitlam and Cairns. In the afterglow of the government’s decision the Prime Minister extolled Cairns’ performance, reportedly telling his personal staff that it had been ‘magnificent’. In return, Cairns was highly complimentary about

Whitlam’s leadership. Interviewed by the National Times in early August, he stated that he was pleased with ‘just about everything’ Whitlam had done since becoming Prime Minister, singling out for special approval his handling of foreign affairs.68 The new sense of co-operation between Whitlam and Cairns could not obscure, however, their ongoing differences on key areas of industry policy. One illustration was their tug of war over the government’s proposed Industries Assistance Commission during the winter of 1973. In March 1972 the FPLP had decided, with Cairns’ agreement, that in government Labor would expand the role of the Tariff Board, giving it the authority to analyse assistance to primary as well as secondary industries. One year later, on the recommendation of Rattigan, Whitlam appointed Sir John Crawford, former permanent head of the Department of Trade and retiring Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, to advise on the powers and responsibilities to be vested in a new institution to replace the Tariff Board. Crawford reported on 19 June. His key recommendation was that the ‘Tariff Board be expanded into an Industries Commission to advise the government on all forms of assistance to all sectors of the economy’. The most contentious aspect of the report was its endorsement of mandatory reference: Crawford proposed that all restrictions on imports and financial assistance to industry ‘where the period of entitlement exceeded 12 months’ be referred to the commission.69 On 26 June Whitlam released the Crawford report and announced that Cabinet had agreed it should form the basis of the Bill for the establishment of the IAC. A few days earlier the Prime Minister had signaled his support for the main thrust of Crawford’s recommendations. He told the Metal Trades Industry Association that the conservative parties had placed ‘blinkers on the Tariff Board’ and that his government intended to rectify that situation. The first public indication that Cairns would resist moves to give the commission greater control over industry policy came when he addressed the Australian Industries Development

Association on 9 July. He declared that ‘so-called independent, disinterested’ bodies such as the Tariff Board and Arbitration Commission were, in fact, made up of people—always men—whose thinking is determined by particular legal or economic theories—and these theories are appropriate to a particular form of economy and society—a free enterprise, competitive market economy run by the owners or managers of banks, factories, newspapers and other businesses in which ‘competition’ is a virtue and any collective action or interference is a sin. These bodies, Cairns warned, were ‘not a substitute for government. They should be advisers to governments not governors themselves, or even gurus.’ He then took a thinly veiled swipe at the mandatory reference provision: ‘The Tariff Board is advisory, but I don’t want to be in a position where we have to have its imprimatur before we as a government can do anything’.70 Clearly, Cairns feared that an autonomous IAC would greatly strengthen the hand of the proponents of industry rationalisation. His anxiety was intensified by Whitlam’s announcement that Rattigan would head the commission. Over the next two months Cairns pressed on with his campaign against Crawford’s blueprint. In parliament he vowed to ‘do my best to keep out of the Australian law in the future, any mandatory reference to the Tariff Board’. 71 He also prepared a paper for circulation among his colleagues that questioned the rationale of the proposed IAC. Meanwhile, an interdepartmental committee set up to assist in the drafting of the IAC Bill split on the merits of Crawford’s recommendations. The Departments of Secondary Industry, Primary Industry, Customs and Excise and Overseas Trade opposed mandatory reference which, as a result, was significantly watered down in the Bill. Glezer explains that only ‘the “provision of assistance to a particular

primary or secondary industry” was to be mandatory, limiting general assistance measures and those for tertiary industries to non-obligatory references’.72 By the middle of September a draft of the IAC Bill was ready for consideration by Cabinet. On 9 September Cairns flew to Tokyo to lead an Australian delegation to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAIT) Ministerial Conference on Multilateral Trade Negotiations. From Japan Cairns travelled to South Korea and then North Korea for trade talks—the first Australian minister to visit the latter.73 He was still out of the country when Cabinet formally considered the IAC Bill on 24 September but, by telephone and telegram, continued to inform Whitlam of his misgivings about the proposed legislation. He remained unhappy with the mandatory reference provision even in its diluted form, and he warned that it would interfere with the government’s ability to plan industry development. He was also concerned at the policy objectives outlined in the Bill, which stressed the importance of promoting the efficient use of the community’s productive resources. According to Rattigan, Cairns argued the objectives were ‘of a laissez-faire economic philosophy and not those of social responsibility and social action’. Despite Cairns’ objections, Cabinet approved the Bill. He was a conspicuous non-participant when the House debated the proposed legislation in October. But Cairns could not escape the taunts from the opposite side of the chamber. The leader of the Liberal Party, Bill Snedden, pointedly reminded him of his unfulfilled vow to block the mandatory reference provision.74 Cairns’ defeat over the establishment of the IAC was the precursor to a more severe setback. In a Cabinet reshuffle announced by Whitlam on 9 October, Cairns was stripped of Secondary Industry, Kep Enderby replacing him in the portfolio. Some sections of the press interpreted this decision as an attempt by Whitlam to reduce the workload on senior ministers,75 but others saw it in a more suspicious light. In the National

Times Alan Wood speculated presciently that, although Cairns had endorsed the general tariff cut, ‘it is always possible that when the moves really begin to bite as the economy slows down he could revert to high protection attitudes. Perhaps Mr Whitlam is aiming to head off this possibility.’ While Cairns had ‘supported the Whitlam line in crucial areas, it has not been without some difficult manoeuvring . . . No doubt this situation has irked Mr Whitlam—a man not noted for patience or humility.’ And further: ‘It is hard to dismiss the feeling that there was a strong element of personal antipathy in the decision’.76 Cairns remained publicly silent on the reshuffle. Privately he was convinced that he had been a victim of his long-standing ideological and personal rivalry with Whitlam and, more immediately, their frequent battles over industry assistance. As those stoushes had shown, the two men had conflicting ideas about the degree to which market forces should be permitted to shape industry policy. In the aftermath of his dismissal from the ministry in 1975, Cairns told Ormonde that his dumping from Secondary Industry was the culmination of the growing policy differences between himself and the Whitlam-Rattigan-Treasury axis. In retrospect, Cairns saw the decision as the beginning of a pattern of behaviour by Whitlam in government. As he bitterly observed, those differences were ‘solved by his first removal of me from an office’.77 Amid the disappointment of his loss of Secondary Industry, Cairns may have found some consolation in the reaction of the business community. The federal president of the Associated Chambers of Manufactures of Australia, C. R. Nichols, paid him a glowing tribute: ‘Dr Cairns’ contribution to the progress of Australian secondary industry is worthy of high praise. . . [he] did a great deal in a relatively short space of time and gained the respect of business leaders’. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries also expressed gratitude for ‘the sound contribution’ Cairns had made to the motor vehicle industry. More unexpected was praise from the leader of the Country Party, Doug

Anthony.78 Another consolation for Cairns was that in negotiations with Whitlam over the reshuffle he won agreement to retain ministerial responsibility for the Australian Industry Development Corporation (AIDC). It was a crucial concession. Labor’s plans for a revamped AIDC offered the prospect of some tangible progress towards one of Cairns’ long cherished goals—greater public involvement in the economy. Established by the Gorton Government in 1970, the AIDC had been conceived by John McEwen as a vehicle for reversing the trend of increased foreign multinational control of Australia’s industrial and resource sectors. Under its original charter, the corporation’s primary function was to tap overseas funds which could then be provided on favourable terms to predominantly Australian-owned companies to enable them to expand their operations in mineral processing and manufacturing. From the outset, sections of the Liberal Party and the business community regarded the AIDC as a mistake. They feared that in the wrong hands it could become an agent of socialisation. By contrast, though supportive of the AIDC, the ALP believed that its mandate was too restricted. In the 1972 election campaign Labor had emphasised economic nationalism, promising to restore the Australian people ‘to their rightful place in their own country . . . as the owners and keepers of the national estate and the nation’s resources’. 79 One way Labor intended to live up to this promise was to expand the AIDC’s operations. The government’s plans for the AIDC, unveiled by Cairns in March 1973, aimed to lift a number of the restraints on its activities. First, it would no longer be limited to aiding industry development, but would be required to give ‘equal regard to assisting the ownership of Australian economic activities’ by taking up and holding equity in companies. Second, its scope of operation would be extended beyond mineral processing and manufacturing ‘to production of all forms’ Third, rather than waiting for companies to invite it to act, it would acquire a ‘national interest’ function: the government would be able to direct it to supply

capital to projects deemed to be of social importance. As an example of such a project, Cairns nominated the planned national gas pipeline system. Finally, the corporation would be permitted to raise capital, not just overseas, but also within Australia. To this end, the government intended to create a National Investment Fund financed by, among other things, investment bonds and saving plans that would tap into life insurance and pension funds.80 After these plans had been on the back-burner for some months, Cabinet approved a joint submission from Cairns and Crean to expand the AIDC on 27 August 1973. Cairns announced the decision in grandiose terms: ‘the Australian can become an owner of great industrial enterprises in a way which was never before within his reach. Owning Australia for the individual Australian can now become a reality.’ The major newspapers thought the government’s desire to harness investment to ‘buy back the farm’ and keep future major national developments in Australian hands was attractive in principle, but they were sceptical about the scheme’s practicality and disquieted at its socialist overtones. The Australian argued that Labor was ‘taking about the furthest step modern Australian society can contemplate in comfort toward Nasser-style socialism’.81 On 30 August Cairns introduced the Australian Industry Development Corporation Bill and National Investment Fund Bill to the parliament. In a skilful speech he tried to head off an anticipated conservative scare campaign against the scheme by explicitly appealing to nationalist sentiment. Summing up the objective of the Bills, he distinguished between the interests of local and foreign capital: ‘We want a fair deal for Australians, and we include Australian capitalists in that desire’. He continued: Where there is strong Australian participation in the ownership and control of a development, we can expect that development to be directed towards the national interest of Australia, and towards

maximising earnings in Australia. Without such Australian participation we will have the prospect of Australian resources and industries being developed to maximise the global profits of multinational corporations. . . Unashamedly populist, Cairns conjured up David and Goliath imagery in arguing that the government’s plans would give every Australian the chance to play their part in preventing the further pillaging of the country’s assets by greedy and self-interested foreign multinationals. He was confident that the people would rally to this great national cause. At the same time, Cairns did not shy away from the collectivist implications of the government’s plans: he stressed that only through collective action could individual Australians hope to take a successful stand against the might of the multinationals. Labor’s policy to expand the AIDC’s powers was based on [the] assumption that individual action is good but it recognises that the individual today is vulnerable to powerful groups, many of them international, and that if he is to hold his own he needs more strength. He can get some of that strength by working together with other individuals and by being backed by the Government. Cairns finished by extending an olive branch to those who opposed the changes to the AIDC. Debate on the proposed legislation would be held over for several weeks to enable detailed scrutiny by both the parliament and public, and he promised to give careful consideration to any constructive amendments suggested by either the House or the Senate.82 If Cairns hoped that this conciliatory gesture would temper conservative hostility to Labor’s plans, he was to be sorely disappointed. When debate resumed, the coalition parties signalled their determination to reject both Bills. Their main line of attack was brutally simple—

Labor’s objective in expanding the AIDC was to socialise the economy. The deputy leader of the Opposition, Phillip Lynch, warned that ‘the new powers to be granted to the AIDC will cause a massive diversion of funds away from existing private institutions, increase the control of industry by a statutory corporation, and provide a vehicle for the socialisation of Australian industry’. Not to be outdone, Jim Killen thought the Bill represented ‘the most far-reaching attack on free enterprise’ since Federation. When Cairns interjected: ‘More than bank nationalisation in 1947?’, an unfazed Killen retorted: ‘the bank nationalisation proposals fade into insignificance with the potentialities of this Bill’83 There was strenuous resistance, too, from business, especially the financial sector. After being passed by the House of Representatives, the two Bills were presented to the Senate on 23 October. One month later, in a move condemned by a frustrated Cairns as a deliberate delaying tactic, they were referred to the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Ownership and Control.84 The committee’s inquiry, which was still incomplete when parliament was dissolved in April 1974, became a forum for a host of business groups to express their disapproval of the ALP’s proposals. A common objection was that the AIDC, armed with its new powers, would have an unfair advantage in the competition for funds, thereby distorting the capital market and damaging the interests of private enterprise. Cruder still was the fear that the corporation, through its national interest provisions, would be able to take over private industry.85 Cairns did what he could to allay these anxieties. In a speech to a gathering of business leaders in Melbourne in March 1974 he strongly denied that the government wanted to turn the AIDC into a socialist Trojan horse. He rejected as absurd the proposition that the corporation threatened to squeeze private enterprise out of the capital market. The AIDC could not hope to ‘rival the massive power of private investment in Australia’ and would move only gradually to increase Australian equity in industry. Cairns concluded by appealing to the audience to approach

the government’s policies with an open mind. It was natural, he observed, that after more than two decades of conservative rule business was suspicious of the changes ushered in by the ALP. Cairns did not expect business to become Labor supporters, but he considered it only reasonable to ask them ‘to examine our policies fairly, objectively and without emotion’. Cairns hoped, naively as it transpired, that reason might prevail over economic interest.86 The opposition to the proposed reforms to the AIDC was symptomatic of the growing pressure being exerted on Labor by a range of conservative forces towards the end of 1973.87 The most obvious source of that pressure was the Senate, controlled by the Liberal and Country Parties, which not only frustrated key elements of the government’s legislative program, but also persistently threatened to withhold supply. The business sector’s initial edginess towards Labor was hardening into open distrust. Although Cairns had cultivated a surprisingly co-operative relationship with industry leaders, overall relations between the government and business were poor. Only days before Labor’s first anniversary, Nichols of the Associated Chamber of Manufactures complained that a ‘them and us’ attitude had ‘nullified attempts to reach an understanding of the other’s point of view’. 88 The government’s reforms had also alienated various powerful interest groups like the medical profession, which opposed the introduction of a universal health insurance scheme, and the farmers, whose anti-Labor feelings reached fever pitch in February 1974 when Cabinet abolished the superphosphate bounty. Other points of resistance were the bureaucracy, particularly Treasury; and the State governments, which resented what they saw as the centralist tendencies of the ALP.

insert image

Being sworn in at the opening of the twenty-eighth Commonwealth Parliament 27 February 1973.

Gwen Cairns at Wattle Road, 1973.

Leading trade mission to the People’s Republic of China, May 1973.

With Gwen at official banquet China, May 1973.

The Australian trade mission sightseeing, Peking, China, May 1973.

Signing trade agreement with the Chinese Minister of Foreign Trade, Pai Hsiangkuo, Canberra, July 1973.

In talks, China, May 1973. On the far right is the Australian ambassador to China, Stephen FitzGerald.

The Whitlam Government ministry with Queen Elizabeth II, February 1974.

Campaigning for Labor’s reelection, Moorabbin Town Hall, May 1974.

With Whitlam and the European Economic Community’s External Commissioner Sir Christopher Soames, Parliament House, September 1974. Especially alarming for Labor was the evidence of a serious slump in the party’s electoral stocks, reflected not just in public opinion polls but in State and by-election results. The government’s reputation had been tarnished by some spectacular lapses in judgement, inevitable, perhaps, given the dearth of ministerial experience in its ranks. Nor were perceptions of the government helped by its failure to present a united front on a number of issues, a situation exacerbated by the unwieldy 27member Cabinet and Whitlam’s imperious leadership style. Another theory put forward for the erosion of Labor’s support was community disquiet at the pace of reform. Such anxiety was hardly unexpected in a society accustomed to the policy dawdle that had characterised the long years of Liberal–County Party dominance. Arguably, however, anxiety would have been less if Labor’s reforms had not been introduced within a climate of increasing economic insecurity. In the final analysis, it was the deteriorating economic situation, and the attendant doubts over the ALP’s

ability to maintain the health of the capitalist system, that most fuelled a conservative backlash against the Whitlam Government. At the close of 1973 Labor was overseeing a still buoyant economy marked by strong wage growth and near full employment. But a question mark hung over the sustainability of the boom as prices continued to rise; the consumer price index reached an annual rate of 13.2 per cent in the December quarter. 89 In framing its first Budget the government was hamstrung by Whitlam’s election pledge that Labor would not increase income tax. Cairns, conscious of the need to find ways of funding Labor’s spending programs without further overheating the economy publicly suggested in June 1973 that the government might have to abandon that pledge. Whitlam promptly repudiated him. Undeterred, in the ensuing Budget deliberations, together with Crean, Hayden and Bill Morrison, Cairns pushed for a rise in income tax. Their arguments proved futile. When Labor finally unveiled the Budget in August, it featured large increases in expenditure in education, housing, and urban and regional development, but in overall terms the outcome was hardly one of profligacy. In fact, in 1973/74 the ALP produced a domestic surplus, thanks mainly to the non-indexation of tax scales which, when coupled with the effects of inflation and strong wage growth, produced a dramatic increase in government receipts.90 Nevertheless, Labor was still primarily dependent on non-fiscal measures to slow the economy. In September, acting on the recommendations of Treasury and the Reserve Bank, it further revalued the currency and raised interest rates.91 Caucus also resolved to ask the Australian people to pass two referendums that would give the Commonwealth power over prices and incomes. Cairns was out of the country when the decision was taken. Previously, he had been sceptical about the value of an income-prices policy, insisting that Australia’s inflation outbreak was due to overseas forces rather than a domestic wages push. Upon his return, though, he put aside those doubts and

exhorted the trade unions to support the government’s position. Despite this and other appeals by government ministers, the ACTU recommended a ‘no’ vote on the incomes question, diminishing the already slender chance that the referendums would be successful. On 8 December both referendums were overwhelmingly rejected.92 For Labor it was a double blow. Not only had its relations with the unions, already strained by the July tariff cut, been further soured, but it was also left looking as if it was impotent to arrest the inflationary surge. Cairns may have felt a sense of melancholic vindication as he contemplated Labor’s growing difficulties as it headed into its second year in government. The developing pattern of institutionalised conservative hostility must, in particular, have seemed depressingly close to what he had foreseen. Yet, paradoxically, his original pessimism about what Labor could achieve in office appeared to have temporarily subsided. In its place was, as Ormonde notes, an ‘increasingly overt’ enthusiasm for the government; he was ‘visibly bouncy almost happy-golucky’. This rekindled optimism caught the attention of journalists. In November the Age’s chief political writer Allan Barnes argued that Cairns was undergoing a ‘metamorphosis’, having been only two years earlier a political ‘spent force’. Barnes’ colleague, Dennis Minogue, developed this theme in a major profile on Cairns in the final week of 1973. According to Minogue, the ‘new Jim Cairns’ was ‘an extraordinary creature. He has withdrawn from the brink of political oblivion . . . escaped disillusionment, and emerged anew, as if from [sic] chrysalis’.93 Cairns had been greatly encouraged by Labor’s accomplishments in its first year in government. He was especially proud of the government’s projection of a far more independent foreign policy outlook. More than two decades later he observed of the Whitlam Government’s early performance: the first twelve months was first rate. . . Aboriginal Affairs, status of women, education, public health . . . [we] were speaking

for the first time really as Australians, not as Menzies had done as an Englishman, or like Harold Holt ‘going all the way with LBJ’.94 The important qualification, of course, is that the areas of progress nominated by Cairns were in foreign and social policy rather than in economics. Apart from its policy in minerals and energy, the ALP’s economic objective extended little beyond managing that system in such a way as to facilitate its social reforms. Cairns had long suspected such an approach to be untenable. Unlike Whitlam, he had never laboured under the assumption that significant progress to social equality was possible without corresponding action to abolish structural economic inequalities. In this context, the achievements of the first Whitlam Government were perhaps surprising to him. The scope for reform was greater than he had hoped. In Oil in troubled Waters he noted that 1973 had shown that a Labor government could ‘do much good for the people . . . without threatening the [capitalist] hegemony’.95 But, as the gathering economic clouds and growing reaction against the government suggested, Labor was already testing the limits of progress. On a personal level, the events of 1973 had also given Cairns cause for optimism. When he was originally elected to the ministry, widespread doubts had been expressed about his suitability for government. This scepticism was starkly reflected in an opinion poll conducted in early 1973 which voted him the minister most likely to fail in the new Labor government.96 Twelve months later those doubts had been largely erased. The trade mission to China and his support for the July tariff cut had been important in prompting a reappraisal of Cairns. But what most impressed, as well as astonished, observers was his pragmatic approach to business. The National Times commented in December: ‘expected to be a firebrand and a centre of controversy, he has stayed out of trouble and has even gained a reputation with Big Business of being sensible’. Some commentators were confused by Cairns’ new aura of respectability. John Edwards of the Australian, for example, warned that it was ‘still too early

to anatomise so elusive a politician’. Yet others were convinced that Cairns was transformed, like so many radicals before him, tamed by the experience of government.97 Perhaps the most important reason for Cairns’ political renaissance was his strong standing in Caucus. Since topping the ballot for the ministry in December 1972, he had wielded enormous authority within the government. In the course of Labor’s first year in office that authority was enhanced as his parliamentary colleagues increasingly looked to him as a counter-weight to Whitlam. Whereas the Prime Minister was inclined to bully or ignore Caucus, Cairns took a radically different approach. In 1974 Hayden explained that Cairns made a strong point of working with the Caucus, wanting to talk with them. He is prepared to lose a fight, he’s prepared to lose an argument . . . if it’s not carried there’s no bitterness, no rebuking. So I think people learn to trust him. They know Jim’s not just trying to assert his ego, it’s the principle or point he’s trying to put. Such was Cairns’ standing within the FPLP by the end of 1973 that talk surfaced of him as a potential alternative leader. Allan Barnes predicted that, if Whitlam fell ‘under the proverbial bus tomorrow’, Caucus would ‘elect not one of the younger men who are generally spoken of as Labor’s next leader. . . but 59-year old Jim Cairns’.98 For all the talk that Cairns had mellowed in government he had not exhausted his capacity to disturb conventional opinion. He ended 1973 much as he had started it, embroiled in a diplomatic row over comments he had made about Vietnam. On 9 December Cairns arrived in Hanoi to head the first Australian government mission to North Vietnam. The official purpose of the four-day visit was to commence preliminary negotiations on a trade relationship between the countries,99 but for obvious reasons it was especially poignant for Cairns. Before flying into Hanoi from Laos he reflected: ‘For the best part of 10 years I devoted

two-thirds of my time to the war—reading, thinking and writing about it’. Inevitably, his personal crusade against the war spilt over into the mission. Michael Richardson, the Age’s South-East Asian correspondent, who accompanied the Australian party, wrote that Cairns had gone ‘to Hanoi as a partisan of the Vietnam conflict: and he was treated and greeted as such’.1 The trip was dogged by controversy from the outset. At a dinner in his honour on arrival, Cairns delivered what, in essence, was an apologia for Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War: In the past Australians were involved in making war upon your country and your people This must never be allowed to happen again. As long as a Government drawn from the Labor movement is in office in Australia it will never happen again. The past divisions between our countries and the Australian association with the United States war of destruction upon your country is to be regretted because those who were responsible were unable to see they were in no way threatened by the people in Vietnam whom they attacked. His words prompted a swift backlash at home. The Age denounced them as ‘an unjustifiable distortion of Australia’s (and America’s) role in the Vietnam War’, while a Sydney Morning Herald editorial headed The wild colonial boy demanded condescendingly that Cairns stop masquerading ‘as a poor man’s Bertrand Russell’. 2 As it turned out, this was only the forerunner to a bigger storm. On 12 December in a meeting with the North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, Cairns was reported to have questioned Saigon’s commitment to the peace agreement and suggested that consistent with US policy in Vietnam since 1953, the Nixon Administration was likely to endeavour to maximise its sphere of influence by supporting the South Vietnamese regime. Then, at a press conference following the meeting, Cairns, who had campaigned for

recognition of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, expressed confidence that recognition would be granted by Australia. This appeared to contradict the ALP’s 1973 Federal Conference decision against recognition and a statement by Whitlam on 27 November reaffirming that stand.3 The comments triggered further recriminations in Australia, as well as outraging the American and South Vietnamese governments. In the House, Snedden urged the Prime Minister to discipline Cairns. Whitlam mounted a surprisingly strong defence of his embatded minister, declaring that Cairns had been ‘more traduced and vilified over the years on these matters than any other member of the Parliament’. On 14 December the South Vietnamese Ambassador met with Australia’s Foreign Minister, Senator Willesee, to lodge an official protest over Cairns’ suggestion that Australia intended to recognise the provisional government. Meanwhile, the US Administration sent a strongly worded protest note to the Australian Ambassador in Washington. A senior State Department official grumbled that ‘Coming from a responsible minister of a close ally like Australia—I think we can still use the term—the remarks are outrageous’.4 Cairns arrived back in Australia on 16 December to a chorus of demands that he be sacked. The New South Wales president of the Returned Services League, Colin Hines, claimed Cairns had brought Christmas grief to the widows and families of the Australian soldiers killed in Vietnam. The Sydney Morning Herald’s indignation had turned to fury. ‘In one short crusade abroad’, it thundered, ‘he [Cairns] has offended two allies. He must have also sickened large numbers of his countrymen.’ The US Ambassador, Marshall Green, stoked the fire by publicly confirming that Washington was ‘unhappy’ with Cairns’ remarks. Amid the tumult Cairns remained largely silent, though what he did say indicated he was unrepentant.5 At the heart of the controversy was Cairns’ belief that some issues

were of such moral gravity that they transcended norms of Cabinet solidarity and other conventions of government. In February 1974 this was again evident when, as CICD chairman, Cairns announced the revival of the Moratorium movement to arrange a protest march in Melbourne to demand the implementation of the Paris peace agreement. One of the march’s key objectives was to promote recognition of the provisional government as a crucial step to the achievement of peace in Vietnam. On 6 March he wrote a piece for the Melbourne Herald entitled, ‘Why I Criticise My Own Government’, explaining his support for the planned march. The article reinvoked the spirit of participatory democracy, which Cairns had championed so compellingly during the heyday of the Moratorium movement. Government, he declared, was about ‘action and participation by the people, not just decisions by ministers and cabinets’. The twist, of course, was that he was now one of those ministers and a senior member of Cabinet. Unabashed, Cairns proceeded: I believe in solidarity and unity . . . But I also believe that if something is important to you, then criticism must be clear and open, as my criticism is over the failure of the government to recognise the [Provisional Revolutionary Government] . . . I will not shut up. People have got to get used to that, if they believe—as I do —that solidarity in government is one thing, but that monolithic government is another. I don’t believe in monolithic government . . .6 Noble in theory, this was, nevertheless, a risky formula for government. It was questionable, moreover, whether a government under siege, as Labor increasingly was, could afford such an indulgence. In the same month that Cairns was resuscitating the Moratorium movement, Whitlam was engaged in a secret, and ultimately bungled, attempt to improve Labor’s chances of winning control of the Senate in the half-Senate election scheduled for 18 May. The plan was to create a

sixth Senate vacancy in Queensland through the appointment of the former DLP leader, Senator Vince Gair, as Australia’s Ambassador to Ireland. The manoeuvre was stymied, however, by Labor’s failure to secure Gair’s actual resignation before the Bjelke-Petersen State government issued writs for the election of five Queensland senators, thus rendering the Gair vacancy irrelevant. To make matters worse, the Opposition, alleging political corruption and feigning moral indignation, used the Gair appointment as a pretext to withhold supply from the Labor government.7 Having previously foreshadowed that in the event of the Senate refusing supply he would seek a double dissolution, Whitlam announced on 10 April that the Governor-General had accepted his advice to dissolve parliament. The election was laid down for 18 May. The ensuing campaign and its immediate aftermath confirmed Cairns’ political rehabilitation. Whereas eighteen months earlier he had played only a peripheral role in the ALP’s election strategy, in 1974 he was one of the party’s trumpcards. A survey conducted after the 1974 poll showed that he was regarded by swinging voters as Labor’s second most impressive performer on the hustings behind Whitlam.8 Similarly, while in 1972 he had seemed almost indifferent about winning government, in 1974 he was passionately committed to Labor’s re-election. His catch-cry throughout the campaign—that the Prime Minister must be allowed ‘to complete his historic mission’9—underlined his new-found faith in the Whitlamesque sodal democratic agenda. By contrast, the electorate’s enthusiasm for the Whitlam project had ebbed. On polling day Labor’s majority in the House of Representatives was cut from nine to five seats. Nor could the government derive much comfort from the Senate results: while improving its representation, Labor still narrowly lacked a majority in the upper house, thus guaranteeing that it would face further destabilisation by the conservative parties.10

Early in the campaign the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story claiming that Cairns had informed colleagues he would stand for the position of deputy leader of the Labor Party after the election. Cairns emphatically denied the story, therefore killing off further speculation during the campaign. Later, Peter Blazey and Andrew Campbell suggested in their study of the 1974 double dissolution that the source of the story was a leak planted by Whitlam’s office, designed to nip in the bud any chance that Cairns would secure the deputy’s job. 11 If this was the case, then the strategy failed dismally. Once the election was out of the way, speculation again surfaced in the press about whether Cairns intended to challenge Barnard. For several days he refused to comment. Meanwhile, behind the scenes a familiar scenario was played out. Cairns vacillated about whether to seek the position, but after prodding by Uren and Gwen resolved to do so.12 Typically, Uren worked the numbers for Cairns, with Hayden, Rex Connor and Charlie Jones also helping to muster support. Whitlam later complained that the rolling of Barnard by the Cairns forces had been ‘bloody awful’. Strangely, though, at the time he made only a halfhearted attempt to defend his deputy’s position. It fell to Crean, perhaps already fearful that Cairns’ elevation would threaten his hold on Treasury, to publicly endorse Barnard. Uren and the others lobbying for Cairns argued that as deputy leader he would art as a brake on Whitlam’s authoritarian tendencies, in particular making the Prime Minister more responsive to the wishes of Caucus. Barnard, by contrast, was depicted as a ‘rubber stamp’ for Whitlam.13 Cairns’ decision to pursue the deputy’s job was also prompted by a determination to restrain Whitlam and assert a more collective style of government. An additional motivation was his desire to have a greater say over the government’s future economic direction. On 25 May at a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, Treasury officials had presented a grave economic prognosis to Cairns

and other senior Labor ministers. Previously the ministers had seized on a decline in the consumer price index for the March quarter to suggest that the prices spiral was abating, but now they were advised that it had been a false dawn; inflation was likely to continue to rise sharply. 14 It was clear to Cairns that in the weeks and months ahead the government would come under intense pressure from Treasury to adopt draconian measures to beat inflation, even at the expense of rising unemployment. At the declaration of the poll for Lalor on 30 May, Cairns foreshadowed his struggle against the Treasury line: The key to anti-inflation is equity and fairness. It is continued economic growth, not economic recession. Perhaps inflation could be reduced by 5 per cent in a year, but it would be likely to be at the expense of throwing 350,000 people into unemployment. . . That is too high a price to pay . . . 15 As Deputy Prime Minister, Cairns figured that he would be better placed to carry on that struggle. In contesting the deputy’s position Cairns was also driven by personal ambition. But, as his initial vacillation indicated, this ambition was tempered by a persistent ambivalence about leadership and the exercise of power. In the same month that he resolved to challenge Barnard, Cairns was interviewed by a Melbourne University political science student, Diane Wieneke, as one of three case studies of the linkage between personality and politics.16 Asked how he felt about ‘being an idealised leader’, Cairns confessed it made him uncomfortable. He worried about ‘letting people down . . . it’s too big a responsibility’. ‘I don’t like the idea of leaders at all’, he added, though he conceded that they were probably ‘a necessary evil’. Similarly, a few weeks later on the Mike Willesee Show Cairns insisted that he did not enjoy the practice of decision-making. To me a decision is not just. . .

writing my signature on something that has to be therefore carried out . . . I believe that decision-making is essentially a process of explanation, getting people to understand what you have made a decision about so that they will in fact bring that about. Both answers highlighted that, although Cairns was drawn to leadership and power, he was troubled, if not repelled, by this feature of himself. Wieneke was to conclude, much as Diamond had suggested, that Cairns’ anxiety about power stemmed from a fear ‘of what he would do with it’. That is, power would unleash forces within him that he had hitherto kept bottled up or, as Wieneke observed, create a situation in which he would give way to his ‘destructive impulses’.17 The events of the next twelve months were to prove that anxiety was well-founded. In the ballot for the deputy leader on 10 June, Cairns defeated Barnard 54 votes to 42. The press greeted the result warily. The Age, which had warned that Cairns’ elevation to the deputy leadership ‘would provoke distrust at home and suspicion and unease abroad’, hoped that ‘he comes to his new position with full realisation of its responsibilities and implications’. The Australian pointed to the apparent mismatch in Labor’s new leadership team. ‘In background, temperament and philosophy’, it declared, ‘it would be hard to find two more dissimilar men than the Prime Minister . . . and his newly elected deputy’. Certainly, Cairns had no doubt that Whitlam was displeased by his victory over Barnard.18 For Cairns’ supporters and admirers, and even for some of his opponents, his elevation to Deputy Prime Minister was just reward for his steadfast adherence to principle. Gwen told the Sydney Morning Herald that she was ‘so proud and so happy, because Jimmy has . . . never given an inch on what he believes in, and now that has been vindicated by the Labor Party and Caucus’. Among the many congratulatory messages Cairns received was one from the Gosford branch of the New South Wales ALP, which declared:

This prestigious and responsible position is the pinnacle in the illustrious career of a sincere and dedicated ‘Labor Man’. Throughout his stormy and political life Dr Cairns’ unswerving devotion to the principles, morals and ethics of politics in the face of extreme, irrational and often severe personal criticism has been an inspiration to many ALP members and to Australians generally.19 The director-general of the Associated Chamber of Manufactures, W. J. Henderson, joined in the congratulations, describing Cairns’ promotion as ‘fitting recognition for his successful handling of the Secondary Industry and Overseas Trade portfolios’. Doug Anthony also surprised again with a generous tribute to Cairns: ‘He is a man of great integrity. . . I don’t agree with him at all. But I have always admired his honesty. While the rest of the world might have criticised him heavily, he has never apologised or backed down on his point of view.’ 20 As Deputy Prime Minister, Cairns was entitled to any portfolio he requested. In accordance with his stated wish to increase his influence over economic policy Whitlam offered him Treasury. To the chagrin of Uren and some other Left-wing members of Caucus, Cairns turned it down. Instead, he retained responsibility for Overseas Trade and the AIDC. In addition, he took over the Priorities Review Staff from the Special Minister of State, Lionel Bowen, a body established by the government in 1973 as a policy thinktank; Cairns evidently hoped that it could be transformed into an instrument for the long-term planning of economic policy. He was also given control of the proposed Adjustment Assistance Agency—a body that had its origins in the recommendations of the economic structural adjustment committee that Cairns had helped to set up in February 1973. Whitlam knocked back, however, his request for the LAC to be included among his new responsibilities.21 Along with a desire to see through his work in Overseas Trade, two

further considerations influenced Cairns’ decision to reject the Treasury portfolio in June 1974. First, he sensed he was unsuited to the job. He feared becoming bogged down in the detail of the portfolio as well as being put off, he later explained, by its restrictions: ‘whatever were the limitations on being in government, on being a minister, they would be much more severe on being Treasurer’.22 Cairns preferred the idea of carving out a position for himself in which he could exercise ‘an unfettered role’ in economic policy, a kind of roving commission. As time went on his critics, Whitlam among them, saw this as an example of Cairns wanting influence without the commensurate responsibility. Second, Cairns was reluctant to push Crean out of his job. He told an angry Uren: ‘“I’ve hurt Lance enough by defeating him for deputy leader. I’m not going to hurt Frank as well”‘.23 Once again, Cairns had baulked at being perceived as too ruthless. Although he had turned down the Treasury portfolio, there was little question that Cairns was at the zenith of his parliamentary career in June 1974. He had emerged from the first term of the Whitlam Government with his reputation enhanced and his faith in the Labor Party and political reformism renewed. Sister Jude Connelly of Bundoora, another who wrote to congratulate him on becoming Deputy Prime Minister, expressed the confidence and anticipation that surrounded the resurgent Cairns: ‘Your new position will enable you to forcefully represent your ideas for a new Australian society, one based on justice and equity. Certainly one can look forward to the future with hope and optimism.’ 24 But just as the March quarter reduction in inflation was a false dawn, so would Cairns’ renaissance prove shortlived and ultimately illusory. As the Labor government faltered in the second half of 1974, battered by economic crisis and besieged by conservative forces, despair at the conventional processes of social change once again began to gnaw away at him. His search for an alternative path to a new society, temporarily suspended in December 1972, was reactivated—the way forward

illuminated by a profound personal upheaval. This time there would be no turning back.

9 ruin and liberation 1974–1975 PERHAPS I DO WEAR MY HEART TOO EASILY ON MY SLEEVE. PERHAPS IF I DO THAT I AM NOT SUITABLE TO BE A MINISTER OF THIS NATION. IF THIS IS THE DECISION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE NATION I ACCEPT IT BECAUSE I WILL NOT CEASE TO WEAR MY HEART ON MY SLEEVE. J. F. Cairns, CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, p. 3634.

I N O I L I N T R O U B L E D WA T E R S Cairns describes 1972–73 as a time when

there had been ‘a glimpse of an area of human freedom’. By 1974, however, that window of opportunity had passed: ‘Economics had come back’.1 And it was back with vengeance. In Labor’s second term it became apparent that the post-war capitalist boom, which had been showing signs of collapse since the early 1970s, was definitely at an end. Across the industrialised world nations were battling levels of inflation and unemployment unparalleled in two decades. The economic crisis brought a watershed in economic theory as the post-war dominance of Keynesian economic management broke down. A fundamental tenet of Keynesian theory was that there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment: one could have rising unemployment or rising inflation, but not both at the same time. By the mid-1970s, as stagflation took root, that no longer held true. The resulting vacuum in economic thought was

quickly filled by the rise of neo-liberal economic doctrine with its ‘fight inflation first’ prescriptions and implicit assumption that a certain level of unemployment was necessary to impose discipline upon the labour force. The emergence of neo-liberal economics and its rapid acceptance as a new economic orthodoxy heralded the destruction of the post-war social liberal or social democratic consensus built on support for a mixed capitalist economy, full employment and the welfare state. By contrast neo-liberal economics was defined by the principles of market efficiency and small government. Australia was not immune to the sea change in economic thought under way by the early 1970s. As 1974 proceeded, pressure intensified for the Labor government to adopt a deflationary policy and abandon both its social reform program and commitment to full employment. Cairns, who assumed a dominant role in shaping Labor’s economic policy following his election as Deputy Prime Minister, resisted that pressure, and his defiance culminated in Whitlam’s decision to remove him as Treasurer in June 1975. That dumping and his dismissal from the ministry one month later were also tied up with the tumultuous events that came to be known as the ‘Morosi Affair’ and the ‘Loans Affair’. But to a significant extent those events were little more than the theatre surrounding Cairns’ fall. They have overshadowed and camouflaged the real reason for his political destruction in June-July 1975. In the final analysis, it was his unwillingness to embrace a policy of deflation being foisted on the Labor government by its conservative opponents that precipitated his removal from office. Junie Morosi, however, had a critical impact on Cairns’ ideological evolution. She entered his life at a time when the optimism he had briefly felt during 1973 and early 1974 about the Whitlam Government’s reform achievements was withering. By late 1974 Cairns was once more filled with doubts about the political process as an avenue of social change. Morosi provided the spur to the next stage in his theoretical journey by opening him to the idea that a fundamental social reformation would have

to begin at an individual level. It would involve personal liberation and the removal of the causes of psychological repression, alienation and authoritarianism, factors that had their origins deep within the structure of the patriarchal system. Morosi’s impact on Cairns was not purely intellectual. She also had a profound emotional effect upon him. There had always been a certain fragility about Cairns’ emotional and psychological make-up. Morosi pushed all the right buttons to disturb that precarious balance. She brought him painfully face to face with his emotional withdrawal, disturbing the ethic of duty and sacrifice by which he had religiously lived his life. In so doing, she ‘turned his head’ at a time when Cairns required all his powers of concentration. His colleagues and supporters demonised Morosi as a temptress who had ruined him and destabilised the government. For Cairns, though, this missed the point; to him she was an agent not of his destruction but of his liberation, helping to guide him out of a world in which he no longer belonged nor believed. On 20 June 1974 Cairns made his first major public appearance since becoming Deputy Prime Minister with an address to the National Press Club in Canberra. It is not too much to say’, he declared, ‘that the era of McCarthyism, established in Sir Robert Menzies’ time, which for so long disfigured Australian life, may have ended’. Cairns’ election as Deputy Prime Minister triggered a panic within some of the most conservative quarters of Australian society which suggested that this pronouncement was premature. B. A. Santamaria was distraught. He dedicated successive ‘Point of View’ columns in News Weekly to elaborating the dangers of Cairns’ elevation. Not just the Catholic Right wing was distressed. Ormonde notes that one Anglican clergyman in Sydney was so disturbed by the turn of events that he asked his congregation to pray for Cairns’ dismissal from Cabinet.2 The rise of Cairns also caused consternation within the security establishment. Only days after his election as Deputy Prime Minister, the Bulletin published extracts from the 1971 ASIO dossier on Cairns. The leaking of the dossier—with its astonishing conclusion that his anti-war

activities could lead to ‘anarch’ and ‘left wing fascism’—was a calculated but botched attempt to discredit Cairns.3 Nor were the security concerns sparked by Cairns’ elevation confined to Australia. It also set off shock waves in Washington. According to Whitlam, the US Ambassador to Australia, Marshall Green, expressed ‘misgivings about Cairns being briefed on the operation of the US bases’. Whitlam told Green that, as Deputy Prime Minister, Cairns was entitled to a briefing, but suspected that ‘he would be happier not to be’. In fact, Cairns had been quizzed about the American installations during his National Press Club appearance. While suggesting that their future was ‘negotiable’, he stated that he had no intention of rushing ‘up to North-West Cape or elsewhere to see what is going on there. I have a pretty good idea of what is going up there’.4 Reassuring noises from both Whitlam and Cairns did not allay the anxieties of the Nixon Administration. This is dramatically illustrated by the contents of a classified White House document released in March 1995, a memorandum signed by the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Colby. Dated 1 July 1974, the memorandum states that Nixon had ‘directed a review of US policy toward Australia in the light of recent changes in the Labor Government’. Among the issues the President ordered the CIA to examine were the ‘implications’ of the changes ‘for future relations between Australia and the United States’; the ‘prospects for keeping US defence installations in Australia, and the policy options for trying to prolong their existence there’; and the ‘alternatives for relocating essential existing US security functions outside of Australia’.5 That Nixon was prompted to order such a sweeping review of the United States’ relationship with Australia as a direct consequence of Cairns’ appointment as Deputy Prime Minister is eloquent testament to the paranoia he evoked.6 It seems likely that Cairns’ high-profile leadership of the Australian anti-Vietnam War movement had attracted

the attention of the US security establishment. ASIO, which had been gathering information on Cairns since the 1940s, would have passed on some of that material to the CIA as part of the normal intelligence exchange between the two organisations. American security concerns about Cairns probably sharpened as the ALP came closer to government. Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson note that, in the years before the 1972 election, Australian security officials ‘had been scaring their American counterparts with tales of what a nightmare a Labor victory would be for “the Alliance”‘. It is safe to assume that Cairns figured large in those tales, and his actions in government added to the unease. Certainly Peter Barbour, director-general of ASIO between 1970 and 1975, has no doubt that the CIA regarded Cairns with great suspicion. In 1993 he told David McKnight that the CIA assessed Cairns as a virtual communist.7 The panic that Cairns’ election as Deputy Prime Minister generated within the US political and security establishment has, inevitably, fuelled speculation about CIA involvement in his political destruction. Conspiracy theories implicating the CIA in the destabilisation and dismissal of the Whitlam Government have abounded since 1975. One of the most passionate conspiracy theorists is the expatriate Australian journalist John Pilger. In his intriguing, if sensational, account of the government’s fall, Pilger asserts that, while Cairns never asked to be briefed on the bases, ‘the possibility was always there, in the words of one staff member, “like some ulcer that could erupt any day”. For the Americans, the unthinkable was that Cairns might end up running the country.’8 The implication is clear enough. Cairns had to be removed. Speculation about a CIA ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against Cairns has revolved around two main issues. First that the letter which precipitated his sacking from Cabinet in July 1975 was fabricated. Second, and more fanciful, are the whispers that Junie Morosi was a CIA plant.9 When only days after his dismissal Cairns was first questioned about

the possible involvement of a ‘spy conspiracy, he replied: ‘I don’t think you need a sort of CIA syndrome to explain what has happened. I think you can explain that in terms of 100 per cent Australianism.’ 10 With this response Cairns provided what, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, is perhaps the best way to treat speculation about CIA complicity in his destruction. Cairns’ failure to sufficiently toe the line of the interests of private capital and other conservative forces in Australia from mid-1974 to his dismissal one year later is more than enough to account for his eventual fate. There is no need to resort to conspiracy theories involving the CIA. If the CIA—or, for that matter, ASIO— actually played any part in the events surrounding his removal from Treasury and then Cabinet, it is most appropriate to see that role within the context of the wider conservative mobilisation against Cairns and the government. In the months following the May 1974 election, Cairns moved to the centre-stage of Labor’s economic policy management. He did so in the context of the government’s rejection of Treasury advice on the framing of a July mini-Budget. By mid-1974 Treasury was convinced that the primary source of continuing inflationary pressures in the economy was not external factors, but a domestic wages explosion. Wages and salaries had been growing rapidly since the second half of 1973, with average weekly earnings increasing by 14.8 per cent in 1973 and by 28 per cent in 1974. The wages outbreak resulted from several inter-related factors: the determination of workers to seek pay increases in response to rising prices and higher interest rates; the improved bargaining power of trade unions under a Labor government; the government’s encouragement of wage rises, especially for women; and labour shortages in some economic sectors.11 The wages explosion hastened a theoretical shift that had been under way within Treasury since the beginning of the 1970s. As Greg Whitwell explains

In the face of what was seen as growing domestic disorder, the Treasury abandoned the remnants of Keynesian meliorism. . . [and] moved ever closer to a purely neoclassical outlook. The benefits of market-imposed discipline combined with a rise in the unemployment rate, became increasingly attractive to the department as a means of restoring order and efficiency and dampening an apparent tendency toward excessive wage demands.

This shift was nourished by the growing view that Keynesian economics was impotent in the face of wage-push inflation. In fact, it was argued that in their attempt to maintain full employment, governments had directly contributed to ‘an environment in which inflationary expectations could fester’. By the early 1970s an increasing number of economists were drawn to monetarist theory as an alternative to the Keynesian model. The leading exponent of monetarism, Milton Friedman, argued that inflation was essentially a product of the attempt by government to over-utilise the productive capacities of the economy (in order to reduce unemployment below its natural rate) through an oversupply of money. The corollary was that a reduction in inflation would require a slowdown in the growth of money supply which, in turn, meant a reduction in government expenditure, since deficit spending was an important factor in money supply growth. The upshot of such a deflationary policy would be a period of under-utilisation of productive capacity and an accompanying high level of unemployment. In short, unemployment was a necessary side-effect of curing inflation.12 It would be inaccurate to characterise the economic approach adopted by Treasury in 1974 as pure monetarism. Nevertheless, the department had targeted the fight against inflation as its chief priority and was prepared to use unemployment as a weapon in that fight. After the May 1974 election the ALP government initially seemed disposed to accept the Treasury position. At a Premiers’ Conference in early June Whitlam announced cuts in government expenditure and a freeze in Commonwealth funding levels to the States. In his speech to the

conference the Prime Minister also departed from his government’s previous script that inflation was being generated from overseas, arguing instead that rising prices were due to a combination of excessive demand and excessive wage costs. The government, he asserted, was determined to break the wage-price spiral.13 The ascendancy of the Treasury strategy was short-lived. As the government set about formulating a mini-Budget in the weeks following the Premiers’ Conference, a revolt against Treasury gathered force. 14 Most of the preparations for the mini-Budget were conducted in a series of meetings of the ‘kitchen Cabinet’—Whitlam, Cairns, Crean, Hayden and Cameron. Others present at the meetings included the secretary of Treasury Sir Frederick Wheeler, his deputy John Stone, and the government’s economic advisers Coombs, Gruen and Brogan. Wheeler and Stone advocated a deflationary package of measures that Treasury estimated could result in an unemployment rate of 3 per cent, or around 180 000 jobless. Whitlam endorsed Treasury’s proposals. The main opposition came from Cameron, who had been warning for some time that unemployment would take off in the second half of 1974. Hayden and Cairns also expressed reservations. Cairns shared Cameron’s concern that a rise in unemployment was imminent and was worried that the package was designed to curb economic demand at a time when it was already tapering off. The Prime Minister, realising that the Treasury proposals were likely to be unpopular with the wider parliamentary party, hoped to avoid a fullscale Cabinet meeting on the mini-Budget. True to his pledge to work for greater consultation on major government decisions, Cairns thwarted Whitlam’s plans. 15 The Prime Minister’s fears were realised when, at a meeting on 22 July, Cabinet vetoed much of the Treasury submission, leaving a revenue-neutral package—a sharp departure from the deflationary policy advocated by Treasury. The mini-Budget debacle had a number of important consequences.

First, it marked the virtual eclipse of Treasury as a source of economic advice to the government, a state of affairs that would persist for the next twelve months. Second, it effectively broke Whitlam’s confidence in Crean. Whitlam believed that Crean had left him to argue the case singlehandedly for the Treasury brief in Cabinet. Without the confidence of the Prime Minister, Crean’s position as Treasurer became untenable, and in December 1974 he was replaced by Cairns. Third, uncomfortable with economic issues at the best of times, Whitlam was humiliated and disheartened by his defeat in Cabinet. As a result, for several months he divorced himself from economic management.16 All this created a vacuum in the government’s economic policy-making. In August and September Cairns moved to fill that vacuum. Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Cairns was asked what he would most like ‘the Whitlam-Cairns years’ to be remembered for. He replied: ‘to be able to deal with the inflationary situation without causing unemployment’.17 Amid the various twists and turns that would characterise his approach to economic policy over the following twelve months, the goal of minimising unemployment would remain an article of faith for Cairns. This goal was to place him in conflict with Treasury and with the view promoted by many influential sections of society that a significant level of unemployment would have to be tolerated to break the circle of inflationary pressures. In the critical period leading up to Labor’s second Budget in September 1974, Cairns played a pre-eminent role in the defeat of the Treasury line. He articulated an alternative strategy that explicitly rejected the use of unemployment as a tool in combating inflation. Although he endeavoured to construct a theoretical rationale for that rejection, instinct and emotion also drove Cairns’ resistance to the Treasury position. Along with other members of the FPLP who rallied to his alternative policy, Cairns had been indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and regarded as abhorrent any significant retreat from the ideal of full employment. As a teenager, he had watched with dismay as the Scullin Labor Government surrendered to the

pressures of its conservative opponents and accepted a policy of mass unemployment. He was determined that the Whitlam Government would not follow suit.18 The first definite sign of Cairns’ increased influence over Labor’s economic policy-making came at a meeting of the Caucus Economic Committee on 12 August, when he circulated a paper that was to provide the broad parameters for Labor’s September Budget. 19 Written by Brogan, the paper synthesised a number of ideas that had emerged out of discussions Cairns had conducted with a range of university and public service economists as part of his pre-Budget consultations in August. The result of these meetings, he claimed at the end of that month, was a consensus about the way to fight inflation, with nobody wanting ‘the old draconian measures of producing a considerable level of unemployment’.20 The meeting of the Caucus Economic Committee came within 48 hours of the release of statistics that showed that unemployment had risen steeply in July. 21 This increase all but guaranteed that the contractionary policy advocated by Treasury would be rebuffed. Whereas Treasury proposed a substantial Budget surplus to cut demand, Cairns called for either a balanced Budget or slight deficit with the aim of stimulating the economy. His paper was premised on the assumption that demand had dried up and the ongoing inflationary pressures were primarily the result of rising costs, but it disputed Treasury’s view that the only practical means of dampening cost-push inflation was to squeeze business and reduce the bargaining power of unions by creating unemployment. To reinforce its case against the Treasury position, the paper observed that expenditure reductions were ‘unacceptable’ while the ‘public sector needs additional resources—houses, education, health, urban and rural improvement—indeed, this is the main reason Labor was elected’. In other words, support for the proposed Treasury spending cuts would sacrifice the purpose for which Labor was in government.

The paper presented an alternative anti-inflation plan. Instead of bludgeoning the labour force into modifying wage demands through the threat of unemployment, it assumed that wage restraint could be achieved co-operatively in a climate where economic activity and government services were maintained and employment preserved. The plan would encourage wage restraint by a combination of measures. The most important was tax relief for low- and middle-income earners, as a sweetener for union support for the introduction of wage indexation. Other elements of the package included the introduction of a capital gains tax; support for the Prices Justification Tribunal to disallow price increases based on unacceptable wage rises; and the selective easing of the credit squeeze. In addition, the paper advocated job subsidies and retraining schemes to counter unemployment. Endorsed by the Caucus Economic Committee, Cairns’ blueprint also received the imprimatur of Cabinet during Budget deliberations in late August. 22 Cabinet once again spurned Treasury, which had stubbornly adhered to a strategy entailing sweeping spending cuts and tax increases. Hayden was another loser in the Cabinet deliberations. He had devised a Budget plan that, like Cairns’ proposals, called for the relaxation of monetary policy and the granting of tax cuts as a trade-off for limited wage indexation. Where it radically differed, however, was that Hayden advocated substantial reductions in expenditure. This was an early indication of the divide separating the two men on economic policy —a divide that would grow starker over the coming months. Word that Cabinet had decided to frame the Budget in accordance with the guidelines established by Cairns nourished an emerging perception that he was in control of the government’s economic policy. At the end of the Cabinet’s Budget discussions the Sydney Morning Herald declared the Prime Minister had ‘abandoned the de facto leadership of the Labor Party to his deputy, Dr Cairns’. It was still more scathing in its assessment of Crean, commenting that he ‘might just as well be paying a visit to, say Guinea-Bissau for all the impact he is

making on the local economic scene’. The Opposition too made much of the alleged shift of power within the government. It prompted a hysterical outburst from the Country Party frontbencher, Peter Nixon. ‘In one great coup’, he ranted, ‘Labor hopes to install Dr Cairns as Prime Minister, abolish the Senate, [and] introduce a fully socialist system to Australia’.23 Cairns’ growing prominence on economic issues guaranteed that he, and not the low-profile Crean, was seen as the architect of the Budget unveiled on 17 September. In fact, the reality was not nearly so simple. Many of the Budget decisions, especially on the expenditure side, were the outcome of Cabinet’s collective input. As the Australian’s Russell Schneider perceptively commented, the Budget-framing process was turned into a ‘mini-exercise’ in ‘participatory democracy’. Once the Treasury line was overthrown, ministers indulged in a free-for-all as they pressed for large spending increases in their portfolios and endorsed their colleagues’ expenditure proposals. The sizeable increases in government outlays diminished the scope for tax cuts to low- and middle-income earners. Consequently, the tax cuts contained in the Budget, as worked out by Cairns and Crean, were meagre and unlikely to provide a carrot for wage restraint as intended by Cairns. Interviewed shortly after the Whitlam Government’s dismissal, Cairns demurred at the suggestion that he was the architect of the 1974–75 Budget, pointing out that it remained largely based on the original Treasury documents with adjustments hammered out in the Cabinet. It could have been much better, he lamented, if there had been greater time and freedom to shape its contents.24 What is indisputable is that Cairns supplied the Budget’s philosophical underpinnings. Delivering the Chifley Memorial Lecture at the University of Melbourne on 3 September, he gave an insight into that philosophy. Cairns used the occasion to explicitly repudiate the Treasury line on inflation. It was an unjust and undemocratic approach that set out

to use ‘unemployment and bankruptcy to compel people to give up their inflationary conduct’. There was a better way, he argued; ‘people can choose to give up inflationary expectations and behaviour . . . What is needed is not just a way to control inflation. We will need to stop treating society as if it were just an economy or a market and remember that it is a community.’ On Budget eve Cairns returned to this theme in an article in the Age explaining the strategy the government had adopted in fighting inflation. That strategy, he wrote, was based ‘upon the consent of the people. It depends upon co-operation and good will. There is no other way.’25 Inevitably there seemed a massive contradiction in Cairns’ attempt to construct a Budget contingent on values foreign to those that greased the wheels of the capitalist economy whose smooth operation the Budget was supposed to facilitate. Cairns seemed to be saying that, through the power of enlightened reason and some gentle prompting by the government, people could at least temporarily be persuaded to put aside the values of competition and self-interest normally endemic to capitalism. In this way, inflation might be conquered without resort to unemployment. It seemed an unlikely outcome, something that Cairns perhaps conceded in the title of his Chifley Lecture: ‘The Impossible Attainment’. This approach emphasised the philosophical chasm that separated him and Treasury, the department he would soon be leading. Just as Treasury was coming to espouse an economics predicated on a pessimistic social philosophy whereby people would have to be coerced and punished into giving up their wayward behaviour, Cairns was promoting a doctrine that assumed an optimistic view of human nature. The Chifley Lecture highlighted that gulf: I have come to a position in life in which I value most as a source, or as a confirmation, the words of men who are simple and real. I have come also to a rejection, and even a fear of men, who make basic philosophy complex and intellectual, or who base it upon an untested or abstract assumption. We have learned little from the halls of fame, or from the intellectual towers, or even from the campuses that helps to understand how to live or

to love. . .

With its mystical tones, this declaration signalled, as Freudenberg observes, the improbability there would be a ‘meeting of minds, much less hearts’ between Cairns and Treasury.26 Crean’s Budget speech confirmed that the government had chosen a path broadly in line with the principles furnished by Cairns. The conventional response to inflation, he declared, relied ‘almost entirely on the creation of mass unemployment’. Labor, by contrast, had decided to attack inflation directly. This depended on ‘widespread and unusual cooperation. To rely on unemployment to reduce cost pressures would inhibit that co-operation and could destroy the Government’s right to claim it.’ The government expected ‘the principal burden of restraint to fall on upper income groups’, while reducing the load on wage earners, particularly low-income and single-income families. The most striking section of the speech came when Crean advised the House: Crucial as the fight against inflation is, it cannot be made the sole objective of Government policy. . . The Government’s overriding objective is to get on with our various initiatives in the fields of education, health, social welfare and urban improvement. The relatively subdued conditions in prospect on the private sector provide the first real opportunity we have had to transfer resources to the public sector.

To prove Labor meant business on this score, the Treasurer proceeded to outline hefty expenditure increases in these areas. Other big winners were culture and recreation, overseas aid and Aboriginal Affairs. Total Budget outlays were forecast to grow by a massive 32.4 per cent. But because of an expected equally strong increase in receipts, principally a large rise in income tax revenue due to the effects of inflation, the overall result was an estimated domestic surplus of $23 million. This compared to a surplus of $211 million in 1973/74, indicating that the Budget was anticipated to have a mild expansionary impact. On the revenue side, the most notable ingredients included a restructuring of the tax scales to give tax relief to low- and middle-

income earners, and the introduction of a capital gains tax.27 Reaction to the Budget was largely negative. The Age’s editorial headline, ‘Canberra, capital of a dream world’, typified the view that Labor had dodged the realities of Australia’s economic problems. It was recognised that the Budget’s basic rationale was to establish the climate for a social contract with the trade union movement by hitting the wealthy and giving hand-outs to those at the lower end of the income scale. Yet there was scepticism that the government would succeed in extracting wage restraint from workers, especially given that the promised tax cuts were likely to be eroded by inflation. Nor was there any confidence that the large increases in expenditure on social services would encourage wage restraint. What most alarmed commentators about the Budget was Labor’s intention to use the downturn in the private sector as an opportunity to extend the reach of government. Claude Forell of the Age considered that the ‘deliberate weakening of private enterprise. . . and the seduction of people to depend increasingly on Government provision . . . could achieve by stealth what most Australians would never tolerate as open nationalisation’. However, he predicted that Labor’s strategy would backfire by alienating middle-class support. Forell’s colleague, Kenneth Davidson, warned of a different reckoning—a collapse in company profits and investment.28 Predictably, business groups shared the fear that Labor was hell-bent on displacing the private sector. They roundly condemned the increased government expenditure and expressed dismay that nothing had been done to revive flagging business confidence and activity. There was some solace for the government in the reaction of the trade union movement. Bob Hawke of the ACIU announced that the Budget created the climate for wage moderation. A special conference of trade unions at the end of September agreed to a form of wage indexation, but attached specific preconditions: further tax reforms; a strengthened Prices Justification Tribunal; lower interest rates; and restrictions on imports to assist

industries such as clothing and textiles.29 Even before the Budget had been delivered, Cairns had indicated that the government was prepared to curb imports as a way of protecting jobs and as an incentive for wage restraint.30 Since the middle of the year trade unions and import-competing industries had been bombarding the government with horror stories of retrenchments directly attributable to the 1973 tariff cuts and predictions of the imminent collapse of whole industries. While some of the claims were exaggerated, there was no question that Australia was being flooded by imports. In the three months to August the value of imports was 74 per cent greater than for the corresponding period in 1973.31 Though convinced that the import surge and any related job losses were primarily due to the currency appreciations rather than to the reduction in tariffs, 32 Cairns was concerned to arrest the trend. He had never disguised his belief that in the event of altered circumstances, especially deteriorating economic conditions, the government should be ready to change tack on industry policy. This willingness to shift direction was reinforced by his disappointment at the failure of Labor’s structural adjustment procedures. As the unemployment queues began to lengthen in import-competing industries, the safety net that he had confidently expected would soften the effects of the general tariff cut was still not in place. The Adjustment Assistance Agency, later renamed the Structural Adjustment Board, for which Cairns had gained responsibility on becoming Deputy Prime Minister, had been stymied by the combined resistance of Treasury the Prime Minister’s Department and the IAC. Alf Rattigan, in particular, had been anxious that Cairns would use the Structural Adjustment Board to encroach on the IAC’s operations. In August 1974, a frustrated Cairns effectively conceded defeat by opting for the establishment of an interim committee for structural adjustment with very limited powers.33 Meanwhile, he was painfully conscious of the hardships being

experienced in vulnerable industries like clothing and textiles. This awareness came not only from his Budget discussions, but from numerous deputations from industry and unions, as well as from the countless letters he received from ordinary workers condemning the tariff changes. A 56-year-old man from the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea wrote to Cairns in September explaining, that after a lifetime in the textile industry, he was now unemployed: Just as we reached the stage of consolidating for our own future old age, our world has fallen apart. . . To realise that this clouding of my future and my hopes of retirement with some degree of dignity is the result of deliberate government policy, shocks me and fills me with bitterness.34

By the time Cairns received this letter he was already in the vanguard of action to assist industry. On 17 September at a meeting with Whitlam, Crean and senior officials from Treasury and Reserve Bank, he recommended a devaluation of the Australian dollar. Cairns argued that this would ease the pressure on import-competing industries and stimulate production within Australia. By protecting jobs it would also, importantly, heighten the chances of co-operation between government and unions on the wages front. Treasury opposed the proposed devaluation on the grounds that it would be inflationary. After initial hesitation the government decided on a 12 per cent devaluation. Whitlam’s agreement to the move was assumed to stem from a desire to stave off growing demands, some from within Caucus, for a reinstatement of industry protection.35 With Cairns’ influence over economic policy continuing to grow, a cover story by Peter Samuel in the Bulletin of 21 September crystallised the popular view that he had become the government’s dominant force. Headed ‘Cairns running the country’, it argued there had been ‘a major change in the power structure in Canberra’ with Whitlam confined ‘to the soft, easy issues (particularly foreign affairs) while Cairns makes the running on the hard issues. Gough has been kicked upstairs . . . to the

boardroom with Jim taking over the day-to-day work as managing director’. Perhaps most significantly, Samuel saw Whitlam’s relegation to ‘a largely titular role’ as having been foisted on him by the Cabinet and Caucus.36 As with earlier perceptions that Cairns had almost singlehandedly shaped the Budget, the article probably overestimated the extent of his power within the government in late 1974. Nonetheless, it was true that his influence over his colleagues, already considerable when elected Deputy Prime Minister in June, had grown to even greater heights. Rankled by the publicity Cairns was attracting, Whitlam decided to push him into Treasury. Whitlam figured that his deputy, having become the ‘key figure in economic policy formulation processes within the Party’, should ‘accept [the] greater responsibilities’ that went with that role. However, the actual task of shifting Cairns was messy, dragging out over several weeks in October-November 1974. When it was finally done, the Age would aptly comment that Crean had died a ‘death of a thousand cuts’.37 The major obstacle to a smooth transition was that the two protagonists opposed the move. Although he had flirted with the idea of an appointment to the position of chairman of the Commonwealth Bank, Crean was keen to retain his current job, while Cairns was still deeply reluctant to become Treasurer. Crean believed that this reluctance was a pretence and that Cairns had coveted his portfolio since he was elected Deputy Prime Minister.38 Yet those who were closest to Cairns, including Gwen, Uren and Junie Morosi, who by this time had already forged a strong friendship with Cairns, were convinced that his preference was to stay in Overseas Trade. Uren later recalled that Cairns continued to have qualms about forcing Crean out of his job. Moss Cass has a similar recollection: ‘He [Cairns] didn’t campaign or plot to get it [Treasury] and he certainly refused it when there was doubt about the fact that his saying yes would be the cause of Crean’s demotion’.39 In late October Whitlam decided to force the issue. He summoned

both men to his office, where he told them that he wanted them to swap portfolios. Whitlam was annoyed by Cairns’ hesitancy about taking Treasury and, like Crean, suspected that it was feigned. This was no surprise. Whitlam, convinced of his own omnipotence, could neither comprehend nor empathise with Cairns’ self-doubts. Finally, it was agreed that the two ministers would exchange portfolios at the conclusion of the parliamentary session.40 The day after the meeting in the Prime Minister’s office, Cairns departed for Georgetown, Guyana, to attend the inaugural conference of the Council of Ministers of the International Bauxite Association. During his fortnight’s absence media speculation about his replacement of Crean was rife.41 In the parliament the Opposition peppered the Prime Minister with questions asking him to express confidence in his Treasurer. Whitlam evaded the questions and, most cruelly for Crean, the government took the unprecedented step of refusing to bring on for debate a motion of no-confidence in the Treasurer moved by Snedden.42 Arriving home to this maelstrom over the proposed portfolio swap, Cairns expressed second thoughts about accepting Treasury. An exasperated Whitlam now threatened to give the job to the Special Minister of State, Lionel Bowen. This threat galvanised Uren and other senior members of the Left faction of the FPLP into renewing pressure on Cairns to take Treasury rather than let it slip to Bowen, who was aligned with the Right.43 Interestingly, not everyone from the Left believed that Cairns should take Treasury. According to Cass, Senators John Wheeldon and George Georges opposed the idea because they feared it was ‘a move to destroy Jim’. This accorded with a theory popular among some Caucus members that the Prime Minister’s desire to see Cairns assume Treasury had a sinister motive. As Alan Reid records, they were of the opinion that in shifting his deputy to Treasury Whitlam had calculated he would implode in the job, therefore ending ‘for all time his prospects of ALP leadership’.44 The notion that Whitlam would have chanced further

damage to his government’s battered economic reputation as a means of eliminating a leadership rival seems implausible. But, ironically, the ultimate result of Cairns’ shift to Treasury would be just that. Pressed by a majority of his Left-wing colleagues, Cairns once more agreed to become Treasurer. As a result, despite the continued objections of Crean, the way was finally clear for Whitlam to announce the planned ministerial switch on 21 November. The press greeted with relief the decision that resolved the prolonged saga over Crean’s future. Of all the commentaries on Cairns’ appointment as Treasurer, the most penetrating was in the Sydney Morning Herald. It highlighted the paradox of the position in which Cairns was now trapped: ‘nobody can have a stronger ideological dislike of the economic system whose problems it will now be his task to tackle and, if possible, solve’. Years later, reflecting on his misjudgement in becoming Treasurer, Cairns would make much the same point: ‘The Treasurer is the manager, the expert of capitalist economics; that’s important, but not for me’.45 The circumstances awaiting Cairns in his new portfolio were unpropitious. Inflation was still rising and unemployment had just hit a post-war high of 3.6 per cent. The September quarter National Account figures, released only days before his swearing in, completed the picture of gloom: in seasonally adjusted terms gross domestic product had declined by 2.8 per cent during the quarter. 46 For Cairns and others in the government, the economy’s slide into recession confirmed Labor had been right to reject the contractionary policy advocated by Treasury as late as September. Whitlam was especially incensed that Treasury had failed to inform the government of the severity of the liquidity problems afflicting the economy by mid-1974. His anger boiled over into a remarkable outburst against the department on the day after he announced Cairns’ appointment as Treasurer. Cairns, too, publicly accused Treasury of failing the government.47 These criticisms inflamed Treasury, already smarting from the knowledge that its new minister was the man chiefly

responsible for the overthrow of its preferred policy line. Its mood was not improved by the noises from Cairns’ office that he intended to reorganise Treasury by establishing a department of economic planning. Little wonder that, as Freudenberg writes, ‘Crean’s replacement by Cairns transformed Treasury sulkiness to hostility’.48 The most ominous feature of the economy when Cairns became Treasurer was the slump in private sector profits. Business complaints about declining profitability were given substance by the figures: profits as a proportion of gross domestic product had fallen from 15 per cent to 9 per cent by the end of 1974. This situation was a result of several factors, among them the credit squeeze, continuing wage rises, and the pressure for resources being exerted by the government sector. 49 In Oil in Troubled Waters Cairns identifies the decline in profitability of the private sector as a fatal turning point for the Whitlam Government. It had failed, he writes, ‘to keep the production system functioning in an acceptable manner . . . Labor had to go: we had gone too far in public expenditure, and employees had gone too far, with our approval, in getting wage and salary increases.’ Later Cairns elaborated on this theme, arguing that towards the end of 1974 capital had gone on strike against the government: the financial and some parts of the industrial establishment changed their attitude to the Labor government. They had been reasonably co-operative up until then . . . [but] they now decided to oppose economic policy and every other sort of policy with the aim of getting rid of us.50

The rhetoric of business leaders certainly suggests that, by the time Cairns took over Treasury, their attitude to the government was one of outright enmity. Cairns’ replacement of Crean was expected to improve Labor’s relations with the private sector, yet the business response to his appointment was frosty. ‘The executive director of the Australian Council of Employers’ Federations, George Polites, was sceptical that the new Treasurer would change anything’, while the chairman of the Australian

Associated Stock Exchanges, John Valda, thought the business community unlikely to be ‘thrilled by the appointment of a dedicated socialist as Treasurer’.51 Even before Cairns’ appointment as Treasurer, the government had taken significant steps to revive the private sector. On 10 November Crean announced the second relaxation of monetary policy since August; two days later the Prime Minister unveiled a mini-Budget which cut company and income tax rates, as well as increasing import duties on motor vehicles and promising assistance to the textiles industry. 52 The mini-Budget was generally well received, although the Sydney Morning Herald wondered whether it was a ‘case of death-bed repentance’. Barry Hughes, analysing the shift in Labor’s economic policy dating from the November mini-Budget, observes: The government feared that it had seriously antagonised the business community, which in turn was wreaking revenge on it by creating havoc with the economy. The solution seemed to be to resume feeding its profits in the hope that thereby the beast would become placid and return the goodies of full employment.. ,53

As the new Treasurer Cairns presided over Labor’s efforts to ‘feed’ the private sector. He acknowledged at a press conference on 21 November: There’s a considerable deficiency of private investment and that’s where the dynamics of the economy occur. . . we have to get the economy going again wherever there is productive capacity, wherever there is unemployed resources they must be put to work’.54 This task of having, in effect, to placate capital provided Cairns with stark evidence for his long-held suspicion that a Labor government operating within the capitalist system was fundamentally powerless. His sense of futility at Labor’s predicament deepened as it became clear by early 1975 that the government’s neo-Keynesian style attempts to revive the economy, far from placating business and its other conservative critics, were inspiring greater hostility as the monetarist revolution in economic thinking took root in Australia. According to the new monetarist dogma embraced by

sections of the business community, the Opposition and even some within the ALP, Labor’s efforts to spend its way out of the slump were only exacerbating the country’s economic woes. The real way forward to economic recovery was to break the inflationary cycle by cutting the money supply, slashing government spending and, by implication, allowing unemployment to remain high. The incongruous position in which Cairns found himself at the end of 1974 was compounded by the enormous influence that Junie Morosi was beginning to have on him both emotionally and ideologically. Morosi had entered his life not long after her appointment in August 1974 as an assistant to the government’s Commissioner Designate on Community Relations, Al Grassby. The basic details of her background are welldocumented.55 She was born in Shanghai, China, in 1933 to an Italian father and Portuguese mother, both of whom were part Chinese. The family was relatively wealthy and after several moves settled in Manila when Morosi was aged four. Her schooling was interrupted by the brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Morosi married for the first time as a teenager, partly to escape regular beatings by her father. Within a few years she and her young Filipino husband had three sons. They lived with her husband’s family in a poor area of Manila, but already Morosi was planning another escape. She studied at university and found work as a journalist, then in marketing and public relations. In 1958 she became a ground hostess with Qantas Airlines in Manila, her long-term aim to find a way out of the Philippines for herself and her children. That plan came to fruition four years later when she was transferred to Sydney. Morosi left Qantas in the late 1960s and took on various positions in the travel industry. By that time she had married her third husband, David Ditchburn, who was the Australian manager for Ethiopian Airlines. They were friendly with Lionel Murphy and his wife, Ingrid, and in 1973 Murphy appointed Morosi as a civil marriage celebrant. She had also come to know Grassby who, acquainted with her strong views on racial and sexual discrimination, invited her to join him in his new role within

the Attorney-General’s Department. In 1996, looking back at the tumultuous events of 1974–75, Morosi boasted: ‘I shook up his [Cairns’] world. . . I shook up a few worlds along the way.’ It is an appropriate description. When Morosi went to work with Grassby in Canberra, she was an outsider with no knowledge of the workings of the Australian political system or of the Labor Party. Yet she was undaunted and along the way was to challenge many of the unwritten rules of the corridors of power. In hindsight, Morosi concedes she was naive, uncomprehending of the forces she had unwittingly unleashed. She was a woman of striking natural beauty and grace, and her exotic qualities were not confined to her physical appearance. In a society where notions of sexual liberation and equality for women were still largely foreign, Morosi was an unsettling figure. She seemed free of the emotional and sexual inhibitions and anxieties characteristic of Australia’s dominant Anglo-Celtic culture. This openness fascinated yet intimidated people. Morosi was also compellingly intelligent and highly articulate as well as fiercely independent and confident, even pushy. She enjoyed influence and power and seemed curiously immune to the storm that was breaking around her. She remained unflappable in the face of the most searching media inquisition and the intense hostility of many in the ALP. Morosi attributes this trait to a philosophy in which life is ‘a game . . . a great adventure’ made up of varying experiences, among which the events of 1974–75 were no exception.56 To Canberra insiders, for whom politics was a matter of life and death, nothing could have been more alien or disturbing. Shortly after commencing work in Canberra, Morosi stumbled across a copy of The Quiet Revolution. According to her 1975 book Sex, Prejudice and Politics, she had rapidly become frustrated in her new position as she and fellow staff members battled to deal with an ‘avalanche of migrant problems’. She started to question whether ‘meaningful solutions’ were possible in ‘our present structure of society’. In this context Cairns’ book ‘sparked something’ in Morosi. She made an

appointment to see him in his Canberra office. Her first impression of him was of a ‘passionate man, very reserved who kept his passion locked and inward; an extremely inquiring mind . . . a kind man, a gentleness that came out of him’. They talked for over half an hour about the book and China. Morosi recalls Cairns being ‘nonplussed’ at her interest in his ideas, even more so at her offer of research assistance to further his thinking.57 The relationship quickly blossomed from that first meeting. The two were regularly seen in each other’s company around Parliament House, setting tongues wagging. Uren in his autobiography writes: ‘Cairns really fell in love with Morosi and I don’t think he had ever really been in love so intensely before’. On one level, this idea of a man just turned sixty falling in love with a younger, beautiful woman is unremarkable. What made the relationship exceptional was its timing—it occurred when Cairns was at the zenith of his political power. But even this would not have been so significant, nor Morosi’s impart on Cairns so powerful, had not the emotional upheaval also translated into a dramatic ideological shift. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that Morosi would ever have pierced Cairns’ emotional defences so completely had she not also confronted him intellectually. She found Cairns to be emotionally cocooned—’Jim lived in his mind, everything was in his head’—but that mind was ‘free to wander, so when I presented him with an idea he had no armoury to come up and say no’.58 In other words, Morosi’s intellectual challenge to Cairns spearheaded an emotional assault, with each reinforcing the other. The result was at once destructive and traumatic, liberating and renewing. From childhood, Cairns had developed a pattern of dealing with other humans along a narrow emotional range. His interactions with other people—whether his constituents, Labor Party colleagues, or family— were dominated by the principles of self-denial and duty. It was even the case with his wife. Gwen, who had suffered tuberculosis as a child, endured lengthy bouts of ill-health for much of the marriage. She was

fiercely loyal to and adoring of Cairns. As Uren explains: ‘Jim was the basis of her politics—if you liked or supported Jim, she liked you’. Yet she was also insecure, possessive and demanding. Cairns responded to Gwen’s demands with monumental patience, always attentive and solicitous. When in Canberra he would ring her twice a day, every day, and fly home for the night whenever possible. Moss Cass recalls that when Gwen demanded it he would return home ‘at the drop of a hat. . . he took it all philosophically. That was just his duty.’ 59 What is most striking about these descriptions of the marriage are the uncanny similarities to aspects of Cairns’ relationship with his mother. Indeed, some observers of the marriage, including Whitlam, felt that it resembled a mother-son relationship. 60 Both Letty and Gwen Cairns were sick women who required looking after and lived their lives vicariously through Jim. He was expected to do the looking after, a task that he fulfilled dutifully and without complaint. Both women idealised him. To Gwen, he was ‘the most wonderful man I’ve ever known’.61 Whether consciously or not, they projected and perpetuated for Cairns a role as son and husband, more saint-like than human. By contrast, Morosi challenged Cairns to cast off his ethic of duty and self-sacrifice. Not surprisingly, given that she was endeavouring to break down life-long behavioural patterns in Cairns, she initially encountered resistance. In 1976 Morosi told Ormonde: We had strong differences of opinion to begin because he couldn’t cope with my lack of a so-called moral code, yet I pointed out to him that his whole theory of freedom of the individual precluded the existence of such a compulsive code. He had never looked at it that way. For instance, he was saying that monogamy was necessary because it was a contract one undertook—yet this was totally at variance with the freedom which was inherent in his total approach in every other area. I told him: You espouse freedom for everyone else but you deny it to yourself.’ To me that was as bad as the priest in the pulpit saying ‘Do as I say and not as I do.’. . . Jim had a tendency to undervalue himself —he never makes any demands in terms of his own needs . . . It struck me as very strange that everytime something happened it was because someone came and said to him: ‘You must do this Jim for the good of the party, for the good of this, for the good of that, we need you.’ I’d say, What do you feel about this?’ He’d say, Well, that’s not

important’. I said, ‘It is important. Do you know how you feel about this?’

She continued: Here was Jim Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister, probably the freest thinker we have in parliament, and what was he doing about it for himself? What I was saying was, ‘Can you have an effect on people if what you are preaching is not even good enough for you to live? What do you want to do most of all in this world?’ It was social change. So I said, Well, if it’s what you want more than anything else in the world, well why aren’t you doing it?’62

According to Morosi, Cairns’ resistance crumbled ‘the moment we took it out of his personal situation into a theoretical situation. He saw the thing very clearly’ In an introduction to Sex, Prejudice and Politics Cairns explained: I thought the production system and the production classes were just about all you needed to know about if you were to understand social change . . . [but when] Junie Morosi started to work for me . . . I began very soon to realise that I had overlooked something which might be vital to social change.

That area of neglect was what he later summed up as social psychology. Having recognised his underestimation of the significance of psychology Cairns compensated, Morosi claims, by an ‘intense focus on it’.63 His detailed study of psychology and related areas did not commence until after his sacking from the ministry—beforehand there was no time. Then with Morosi’s assistance, he delved into a diverse range of texts, among them Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970), Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Charles Reich, The Greening of America (1970), and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955). He also visited theorists whose writings on the subordination of women he had previously glossed over. For example, in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Cairns confronted the implication of Engels’ argument that the concept of property under patriarchy had its origins in the treatment of women as chattels and from there progressed

to private ownership of goods, land and capital. That is, the subjugation of women was the forerunner of all other unequal power relations.64 Cairns’ search also led inevitably to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Yet Freud’s fundamental proposition, most clearly articulated in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), that human civilisation was based on the repression of human instincts and that the gratification of those instincts was incompatible with cultural formation, did not appeal to Cairns. Instead he was powerfully attracted to the writings of the controversial Austrian psychoanalyst and social theorist Wilhelm Reich, to the extent that Morosi, who introduced him to Reichian theory, identifies it as his critical ‘breakthrough’. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Reich published a series of major works, including The Function of the Orgasm (1927), The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality (1931), and The Mass Psychology .of Fascism (1933), all of which Cairns cites as among the most influential books he has read.65 These writings were later overshadowed by the notoriety Reich achieved as a result of his claim to have discovered a life force (orgone energy) that permeated the cosmos and was present in both living and inorganic matter. He insisted that this energy, when isolated and concentrated in a specifically designed structure, possessed curative powers. Not until the 1960s, with the clamour for sexual liberation and the surge in interest in Freudo-Maixism (made fashionable by Marcuse), did Reich’s earlier ideas receive renewed attention.66 Reich had emphasised the inter-relationship between psychological and social structures.67 He considered his social theory an attempt to forge a synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxism. He repudiated the Freudian premise that repression was a prerequisite of civilisation and also denied the Marxian view that ruling-class domination and exploitation of the masses were purely socio-economic phenomena. Reich identified compulsory sexual morality, enforced particularly through the institutions of the authoritarian (patriarchal) family and

monogamous marriage, as a primary but neglected instrument of social oppression. The repression of instinctive, biological sexual urges, especially in childhood and adolescence, culminated in the submergence of an individual’s naturally social, self-regulating and spontaneous impulses beneath a deformed character structure. This distorted character manifested itself in a variety of neuroses and anti-social behaviour, as well as a fear of freedom and submissiveness to authority. Hence, for Reich, the breaking down of bourgeois sexual morality was not only of paramount importance to the psychological well-being of the individual, but also a key to the emancipation of the masses. On the surface, Cairns seemed an unlikely candidate for conversion to the ideas of this rather obscure prophet of sexual liberation. Yet on deeper reflection the appeal of Reich’s work is not so incongruous. One important factor that drew Cairns to Reich’s theories rather than Freud’s was their explicit social content and critique. Whereas Freud, by accepting the necessity of the subjugation of human instincts, could be interpreted as defending the status quo and traditional mores, Reich attacked the established order. Furthermore, while Freud had presented an essentially pessimistic view of human nature, in which instinctive urges must be renounced and regulated for the sake of social organisation, Reich vehemently disagreed. In a preface to The Mass Psychology of Fascism he argued that within all humans was a ‘biologic core’ and in ‘this core, under favourable social conditions, man is an essentially honest, industrious, co-operative, loving, and, if motivated, rationally hating animal’.68 In short, in their natural state humans were moral creatures. The thing that militated against that natural state was a hostile, anti-organic environment. For Cairns, who had always believed in the intrinsic goodness of humanity, this premise doubtless had a strong allure. But where previously he had believed that the fundamental step in liberating that goodness was a change in the mode of production, from Reich he derived the idea that it was at least as important to develop the appropriate psychic structure.

The appeal of Reichian theory to Cairns is also explicable in the context of the convulsions in his personal life in the mid-1970s. Its focus on the sex-negative attitudes of society must have seemed particularly pertinent in the light of the hysterical reaction to his relationship with Morosi. In addition, Reich’s identification of monogamy as part of the institutional framework that oppressed humanity may have helped to steel Cairns against the guilt and other emotional stresses that inevitably flowed from trying to accommodate that relationship with his marriage to Gwen. From Reich Cairns received theoretical licence for his rebellion against monogamy. This points to the deeper question of how much of Reich’s effect on Cairns sprang from an attempt to deal with the unresolved issues of his own emotional and psychological alienation. At one level, Cairns was drawn to Reichian theory because of its social implications. But was there superimposed on this a profound individual resonance for him in Reich’s conclusions regarding the devastating impact of sensory deprivation in the formative years of life? Reich was hardly unique among psychoanalysts in highlighting the consequences of repression in childhood—it is a point of departure in all psychoanalytical theory. Nonetheless, to an unparalleled degree, Reich stressed the importance of the untrammelled development of the young. Such a message must have registered sharply with Cairns, whose own childhood had been characterised by the denial of physical affection and an expectation that he keep his emotions under lock and key. Two further things stand out about the ideological conversion Cairns was undergoing by 1974–75. First, while the importance of that transition cannot be overestimated, there was a continuity with the direction in which his thinking on social change had been heading since the mid1960s. In that period, his faith in state collectivism had been disturbed when he absorbed aspects of the New Left’s critique of orthodox democratic socialist and social democratic practice. As if ring-barked, that faith slowly withered during the remainder of the 1960s and early 1970s, to be replaced by a new conviction that social change would have

to come from a grassroots transformation of consciousness. This development in his thinking can be viewed as a logical precursor to the position he adopted after 1975, that the crucible of social change was a revolution in individual consciousness. From this perspective, Labor’s election and Cairns’ involvement in the Whitlam Government represent an interregnum in which he is briefly sucked back into the political mainstream before returning to the ideological path upon which he had embarked before December 1972. Second, Cairns never came to regard personal liberation as an end in itself. In 1976 he told Ormonde that Morosi had a great knowledge of personal development techniques including psychotherapy, but that he was interested in these only ‘insofar as they throw light on the process of social change’. Elaborating, Cairns said: I’m keen to see individuals lead happier and better lives . . . But the significance to me is how do you extend that to society as a whole, how do you make society fuller and better? The first is valuable and important, but it would be much more valuable to me if I can see a way to translating that to society.69

This statement, as well as prefiguring a later theoretical rift between Cairns and Morosi, suggested that, while she had gone a long way to emotionally unshackling him, he still felt a burden to save the world. The ‘Morosi Affair’ exploded as a public issue in the first week of December 1974, precipitated by Cairns’ decision to appoint her as his private secretary. Cairns and Morosi subsequently defended the decision on the grounds that he was having problems with the organisation of his office and that she had the skills to improve its operation. 70 According to Morosi, they also hoped she would be able to begin preliminary research on the areas being opened up by their theoretical discussions. Uren, who saw the appointment as foolhardy, believed there was a more basic motive. Cairns, aware how busy he would be as Treasurer, thought that having Morosi on staff was the only way he would be able to share time with her.71

The appointment caused a sensation. At first, the media concentrated on the ‘supergirl’ angle, with pictures of the glamorous Morosi splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. Above one such photograph the Age carried the suggestive headline ‘The new Treasurer’s office will be well co-ordinated’. This was subtle compared to the crude sexism of the Melbourne Sun’s Alan Trengrove, who commented: ‘if a qualification in working for the Treasurer is to look a million dollars—she’s got it’. 72 The ingredients for a full-blown scandal followed with the disclosure that in November Senator Murphy had unsuccessfully sought to obtain a government flat for Morosi and had appointed Ditchburn to a part-time position on the Films Board of Review. On 4 December in an adjournment debate in the House, the young Liberal backbencher John Howard announced that Morosi and Ditchburn had been directors of companies under investigation by the New South Wales Corporate Affairs Commission. Amid these revelations the media’s initial instinct to treat the story as an excuse for titillation and innuendo gave way to grave calls for the release of full details of Morosi’s appointment. The Age piously asserted that at stake were the government’s ‘ethical standards, its political honour, its moral authority’.73 Cairns was shocked by the storm generated by Morosi’s appointment, particularly at its strong undercurrent of sexism.74 His surprise said a great deal about his unworldliness. It seemed astonishing that, as a participant in public life for three decades, he was blind to the depth of sexism in Australian society. But having decided that sexism, and to a lesser degree racism, lay behind the backlash against Morosi, he never budged from that view. The protests of his staff and parliamentary colleagues only hardened his resolve; for him, they confirmed the extent of discrimination against women and the way in which issues of sexuality were subject to distortion and hypocrisy, even among those who considered themselves progressive. In this way, the reaction against Morosi became for Cairns a practical illustration of the phenomenon he was beginning to grapple with theoretically—the dominance of

patriarchal culture. Cairns made his first public defence of Morosi in a statement to the parliament on 5 December. Identifying what he believed to be the crux of the issue, he suggested there would have been no outcry if he had ‘chosen a man or even a woman who was not good looking’. Despite his defiant tone, pressure was building within the FPLP for Cairns to revoke Morosi’s appointment. Whitlam had intervened in the row by asking the New South Wales Premier, Sir Robert Askin, for a report establishing whether Morosi’s and Ditchburn’s former business activities were under investigation and, if so, whether they were implicated in any way. 75 On the evening of Cairns’ parliamentary statement he met with Murphy, Morosi and Cass in Murphy’s office to discuss the controversy. Murphy alarmed at the damage he had sustained in the furore, wanted Morosi to resign; Cairns was equally adamant that she should stay The impasse was broken when Morosi proposed that she stand down but return when, as she confidently expected, the Askin report cleared her and Ditchburn of any financial impropriety. Accordingly, in the early hours of 6 December, Morosi announced that she had decided not to accept a position on Cairns’ staff ‘because of the incessant barrage of innuendo and vilification’ directed at her by sections of the media.76 The ‘Morosi Affair’ limped on for several more days. With the House in summer recess, the Opposition continued its attack in the Senate but, with nothing new to add to the allegations, its actions looked petty and vindictive. Against the advice of Cairns’ press secretary, Geoff Gleghorn, Morosi had a media conference on 11 December to answer the ‘campaign of innuendo’ to which she had been subjected. She described Cairns as a friend but calmly denied having had ‘sex at any time to further my career’.77 It was generally agreed that Morosi acquitted herself with poise, though the press seemed just as interested in how she looked as in what she said.78 Cairns, too, could not let the matter rest. He made a thinly veiled reference to the controversy at a book launch on 12

December. Politics to him, he declared, meant a commitment to ‘causes. For this I have been described as a communist, an anarchist or an uprooter of law and order—and finally I have been suspected of sexual intercourse.’ For those who hoped Morosi would disappear as an issue, it was an ominous statement. In Cairns’ mind, it seemed, loyalty to Morosi, who he was convinced had suffered a great injustice, had been transformed into another cause—another wrong to be righted, irrespective of the cost. Thus, even as the issue petered out in the second half of December, the probability was that it would flare again. As Morosi remarks, ‘I was like a bomb waiting to go off.79 Another bomb ticking away for Cairns and the government by the end of 1974 was its attempt to raise a large overseas loan to finance the development vision of Labor’s larger-than-life Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor. Connor’s development wishlist included the completion of a natural gas pipeline grid, a petro-chemical plant and uranium mining and milling plants, and the upgrading of coal-exporting harbours. The major obstacle to these projects was lack of finance. The Senate had sabotaged Labor’s plans to use the expanded powers of the AIDC in concert with the National Investment Fund to provide the required capital. Borrowing the funds within Australia was also ruled out because of the constraints of the domestic capital market. A further option was to seek an overseas loan. But the dislocation of international capital markets since the oil price rise of 1973 complicated this. There had been a major shift of capital away from the traditional international centres of finance in the United States and Europe to the oil-producing countries, especially the Middle East.80 When Cairns defended his involvement in the ‘Loans Affair’ in the parliament after his sacking, he asked: Was it not important in the interests of the Australian nation. . . to realise that as much as $60,000m of liquid funds has been diverted from conventional financiers in New York and in Western Europe to the Middle East? Was it not important to realise that the conventional financiers in New York and Western Europe would seek to regain those

liquid funds and prevent countries like Australia from gaining direct access to them in the Middle East?

There is a trace here of the kind of conspiracy thinking that had inspired earlier generations of the labour movement and previous Labor governments in their battles with the ‘money power’. In this case, Cairns sees the banking gnomes of New York, London and Zurich in league to frustrate Labor’s national development plans. The historical parallels do not end there. Just as the Chifley Government’s attempt to take on the ‘money power’ by nationalising the banks in 1947 was ill-devised and hamfisted, so were Labor’s efforts to by-pass the international financial establishment in 1974–75. Leaving aside the economic and constitutional implications of the planned loan—which those Labor ministers who hatched the scheme never seemed to adequately consider—the search for petro-dollars was doomed by the use of shadowy and untrustworthy intermediaries. Another parallel is that both bank nationalisation and the loan scheme provoked ferocious conservative mobilisations. In Oil in Troubled Waters Cairns maintains that the use of ‘non-official, nonrespectable money dealers’ was ‘merely the stuff of headlines’ and not the true cause of the conservative mobilisation. Labor’s real sin was its departure from the ‘capitalist hegemony’ as manifested in Connor’s public enterprise program, and aggravated by the government’s decision to borrow money from the Arab world ‘against the interests of American and British financial houses’.81 What he omits to say is that, by flirting with ‘non-official, non-respectable money dealers’, Labor left itself vulnerable to the backlash that followed when the Opposition and media learnt of its loan-raising activities. As Paul Kelly notes, Cairns was largely peripheral to the main loanraising activities.82 In the final days of September and first week of October 1974 Cairns had his first stint as Acting Prime Minister while Whitlam visited the United States. He presided over a meeting between Cameron, Connor and an Adelaide businessman, Jerry Karidis, who

subsequently provided Connor with the link to a Pakistani international commodities dealer, Tirath Khemlani, who became the principal conduit for the government’s quest to negotiate a major overseas loan. Cairns was sceptical of Karidis’ claim that funds were available at an interest rate of 8 per cent or less, but did nothing to discourage further talks. His next significant involvement came on the evening of 13–14 December when, along with Whitlam, Connor and Murphy, he signed an Executive Council minute authorising Connor to borrow up to $US4000 million. He had arrived at the Prime Minister’s Lodge that night to attend a Labor Federal Executive meeting, unaware that Whitlam had arranged a simultaneous meeting to finalise the issuing of the loan authority. Over the previous week there had been intense discussions about the proposed loan between the Prime Minister, Connor and Murphy and senior officials from Treasury, the Attorney-General’s Department and Minerals and Energy. Treasury vehemently opposed the scheme. It protested, among other things, that a massive overseas loan would have damaging economic repercussions and that Australia’s reputation in the world of international finance would be compromised by such an unorthodox approach to loan-raising. Treasury’s hostility was underscored by Wheeler’s insistence that, contrary to normal practice, the loan authority not be vested in the Treasurer. This condition suited Whitlam and Connor, who were convinced that Treasury would try to thwart the scheme. When Cairns joined the tail-end of the meeting he was stunned by the size of the proposed borrowing. He cautioned that, as such a sum could not be utilised for some time, the government would have to find a way of temporarily reinvesting it without incurring a loss. Cairns also warned that the States would eventually have to be drawn into the process. Notwithstanding these reservations, he endorsed the authority.83 Less than twenty-four hours later Whitlam departed on a five-week tour of Europe, leaving Cairns as Acting Prime Minister. Treasury immediately began to exert pressure on Cairns to put a stop to the loan scheme. On 21 December he convened a meeting with Connor and

Murphy in Canberra, where he outlined evidence furnished to him by Wheeler which indicated that Khemlani was misleading Connor. Cairns suggested that all dealings with Khemlani be terminated. Connor offered surprisingly little resistance, but Murphy required greater persuasion. The upshot was that on 7 January Connor’s loan authority was revoked. Whitlam arrived home on 21 January and a week later the authority was reinstated, although the amount was reduced to $US2000 million. Despite his prerogative over the government’s loan-raising activities as Treasurer, Cairns was not consulted.84 In the interim Cairns had received a separate approach from a Melbourne businessman and president of the Carlton Football Club, George Harris, about overseas borrowings. Cairns had been introduced to Harris by Sir Robert Menzies at a Carlton Football Club luncheon a couple of years earlier. Harris wrote to Cairns on 17 December asking him if Treasury and Reserve Bank approval would be forthcoming in the event that he and his business partner, Leslie Nagy, successfully negotiated overseas loans for State government authorities. Cairns referred the letter to Treasury. A short time later a deputy secretary, R. Daniel, recorded a ‘note for file’ saying that Cairns had approved a memo to staff advising ‘the need for caution in relation to approaches by people claiming to be able to arrange overseas loans for the Government’. He had also agreed all such approaches should be automatically referred to senior Treasury officials. 85 So, as things stood in January 1975, Cairns had acted prudently in relation to the loan scheme. Nor was there anything in his behaviour to contradict his later assertion that his inclination was against the use of intermediaries, preferring a policy of direct government loan negotiations.86 What is baffling is that he had abandoned this caution by March-April and, in so doing, provided the pretext for his removal from the ministry. As the forces that would politically destroy Cairns gathered momentum, his career experienced one final flourish. While Acting

Prime Minister between 14 December and 21 January—normally an uneventful time of year—Cairns was faced with a series of calamities as Australia’s holiday season was disturbed by natural disasters and ongoing economic turmoil. The most dramatic was the destruction of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy in the early hours of Christmas Day. Once informed of the situation, Cairns responded promptly and compassionately. He cut through red tape, instructing the director-general of the Natural Disasters Operation, Major-General Alan Stretton, to assume supreme command of Darwin. Over the following week, the critical phase of the relief operation, Cairns and Stretton were in constant communication. In addition, he arranged a special Cabinet meeting to deal with the problems of finding temporary accommodation and supplying financial help for the thousands of evacuees. On Boxing Day, along with Gwen, he flew to Darwin to inspect the devastated city, visiting evacuation centres and comforting disaster victims. Stretton was ‘impressed by their sincerity and obvious concern’ and later wrote that both were ‘very emotionally involved as they heard first hand stories of the terrible tragedy’. Back in Melbourne after a 35-hour round trip, an exhausted and still emotional Cairns told reporters that the city looked like ‘a battlefield, a Hiroshima’. He went on: The morale and courage of the people of Darwin is high. It was an honour to move, often silently, among them, and to try and share a little in their tragedy and their courage. The loss of Darwin is a national loss. Its cost must and will be shared by the nation.

It was, as Paul Kelly observes, a ‘peculiarly appropriate’ statement. The ‘socialisation of Darwin’s disaster was something comprehensible and acceptable to the entire country’.87 Cyclone Tracy struck at a time when Cairns was trying to find a solution to another crisis—a brazen attempt by car manufacturers to force the government to socialise their losses by threatening mass redundancies. The crisis was precipitated by an announcement by General Motors–Holden (GMH) on 16 December that, because of falling sales and

import competition, it would retrench 15–20 per cent of its workforce in the new year unless the government adopted measures to slash imports. Ford and Chrysler indicated they too were planning significant redundancies. These threats caused outrage within the government. In its November mini-Budget Labor had increased import duties on cars and, only days later, Cabinet had approved a policy for the motor vehicle industry that rejected the IAC’s recommendations for the immediate abolition of local-content plans and the phasing out of tariff protection. The car manufacturers had threatened to cease investment in Australia if the LAC recommendations were implemented.88 Now the ALP found it was again being blackmailed by those same corporations. Learning of GMH’s announcement while in London, Whitlam accused the company of trying to ‘stand over’ the government. Cairns backed Whitlam’s comments but, desperate to stave off the job losses, he commenced negotiations with GMH on Christmas Eve. The talks, which also involved Ford and Chrysler, continued into the new year. On 22 January Cairns outlined a ‘deal’ he had offered the manufacturers whereby, in return for the suspension of their retrenchment plans, the government would temporarily reduce the sales tax on motor vehicles, impose quotas restricting imports to 20 per cent of the market for twelve months, and repeal the tax on the private use of company cars. The ‘deal’ was consummated after GMH agreed to defer any sackings for ninety days, and Cabinet endorsed the measures.89 Labor’s capitulation to the motor vehicle manufacturers was evidence of how cornered the Whitlam Government felt by January 1975. Confirmation of this came twenty-four hours after Cabinet had approved Cairns’ rescue package, when it voted not to proceed with the capital gains tax announced in the September Budget. ‘This was the surest sign’, writes Hughes, ‘that the ALP government had lost its nerve . . . the capital gains tax was a long-cherished reform of the system’. Labor’s scramble to pump-prime the economy did not stop there. As Acting Prime Minister, Cairns initiated discussions with the States to assess their

budgetary problems with the purpose of averting job losses and, if possible, stimulating employment. At a Premiers’ Conference in midFebruary, in line with an undertaking Cairns had given for additional Commonwealth funding, an extra $240 million was granted to the States.90 Although there were mutterings about what the Sydney Morning Herald dubbed his “‘give them what they want” populism’, Cairns generally won plaudits for his spell as Acting Prime Minister. Any political damage he had suffered through the Morosi controversy was temporarily erased. Mike Steketee summed up the judgement of most political correspondents when he wrote that Cairns had emerged as ‘a credible alternative Prime Minister’ and the government’s ‘greatest electoral asset’. If Cairns’ reputation had been enhanced, Whitlam’s had been dented by being absent during such a tumultuous period. The Age commented: ‘he gave the impression of gallivanting in far-off places while Australia, metaphorically, burned’. Whitlam arrived home to media reports of manoeuvrings within the ALP to replace him with Cairns. Although it is doubtful that there was any substance to the reports, they were sufficiently common for Cairns to feel compelled to pledge his loyalty to Whitlam. He claimed to have heard nothing of alleged moves in Caucus to oust Whitlam and insisted that, if approached to become Prime Minister, he would refuse. 91 The statement cut short the speculation and by February with the ‘Morosi Affair’ once more on the front pages and growing disquiet about Cairns’ handling of the economy any notion of his displacing Whitlam was well and truly laid to rest. The trigger for the revival of the ‘Morosi Affair’ was the revelation that Cairns had sacked his press secretary, Geoff Gleghorn, following what the latter described as differences over ‘the publication of articles and interviews involving the relationship between Dr Cairns and Miss Junie Morosi’. As Morosi had anticipated, the New South Wales Corporate Affairs Commission had found that neither she nor Ditchburn

had acted illegally in their former business activities. On 29 December, ignoring the advice of Gleghorn, Cairns reappointed Morosi as his private secretary. Gleghorn had become concerned by what he felt was Morosi’s indiscreet and politically damaging courting of publicity. 92 In December she had granted a series of exclusive interviews to a Sydney Sun journalist, Toni McRae, who was also the wife of a lawyer who had Liberal pre-selection for the marginal Labor seat of Phillip. Ditchburn, too, had got into the act, interviewed by McRae for a three-part story in the Sydney Sun. Readers were treated to an assortment of trivia about the couple’s relationship, everything from how they first met to their plans for a child and their dietary habits.93 Gleghorn grew more agitated when Morosi agreed to do a series of articles on her life for the magazine Woman’s Day. The final straw was an interview Cairns and Morosi gave to McRae in early February while attending the Federal Labor Party Conference at Terrigal on the New South Wales central coast, from which came his infamous avowal of ‘a kind of love’ for her. What Cairns said to McRae, after the interview ended and her tape recorder was turned off, was that he had not changed his opinion about Junie since the day a few months ago somebody asked me if I was in love with her. I said then it had nothing to do with the love he was talking about. Love is a word that has many meanings. I said—but I was incorrecdy quoted—that love ranged from the kind of thing I might have for the Vietnamese people to the kind of thing his boss had for money. I would like to add though, that in her capacity as my private secretary Junie must command my respect and trust. Surely you can’t trust somebody in this world unless you feel something akin to a kind of love for them.

Not surprisingly, the subtleties and context of Cairns’ words were lost, especially when the Sydney Sun ran the interview under a headline which screamed ‘MY LOVE FOR JUNIE’ and alongside a photograph of a swimsuit-clad Morosi.94 Cairns had shown breathtaking political naivety to put himself in a situation where his words could be so manipulated. Both he and Morosi later defended the Terrigal interview and the

Woman’s Day series as an attempt to staunch the torrent of innuendo and gossip associated with their relationship. Morosi claims they decided that ‘if you didn’t give them [the media] something to say they would say it for you’.95 In principle this was fine, but it was also incredibly simpleminded. Its inevitable outcome was still more innuendo and gossip. None of this is to excuse the unconscionable way in which the media treated Cairns and Morosi. For months, both were subjected to constant harassment. Photographs were taken from up trees and over fences; telephones were listened to; private inquiry agents monitored their activities; and money was offered to staff members to write about their relationship.96 The veteran journalist Alan Reid argued that the media scrutiny would have been just as great if Morosi ‘had been male, albino, Anglo-Saxon and physically repulsive’. This is a risible proposition—all the more so, given that Reid worked for the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph, which was guilty of some of the most unscrupulous practices against Cairns and Morosi. On 8 February, for example, under the heading ‘Breakfast with Junie’, it published a photograph of the two apparently sharing breakfast on the terrace of a Terrigal motel. In fact, Cairns had breakfasted with Gwen, and Morosi was at a separate table with Ditchburn. The photograph, taken though a telescopic lens, was snapped later, when Gwen had left the table and Morosi had gone across to confer with Cairns.97 A more serious instance of the media’s ignoble conduct was the eager reprinting of allegations of business malpractice against Morosi aired in the parliament on 20 February. The allegations, produced by W. C. Wentworth, were contained in a statutory declaration signed by four former business associates and employees of Morosi and Ditchburn. Remarkably, one of those signatories had been convicted on the same day of breaking into Morosi’s Sydney home with the purpose, he confessed, of procuring incriminating evidence against her. Nor were the allegations new. They had been previously hawked around newspaper offices but

rejected on the grounds that they were unsubstantiated and therefore libellous. The best commentary on this sordid episode was by the Age journalist Peter Smark after Wentworth’s speech and the contents of the statutory declaration were featured on the front pages of the nation’s press. Although Smark thought Cairns’ reappointment of Morosi imprudent, he noted: ‘[she] is still entitled to natural justice. How can she be said to enjoy this when newspapers unwilling to touch material without privilege have leapt slavering upon it behind a cloak of safety?’98 In an angry speech Cairns condemned Wentworth’s actions and once more pledged to maintain Morosi on his staff. This determination to keep her as his private secretary, whatever the apparent political consequences, incensed many of Cairns’ colleagues. There was talk of moves within Caucus to have the Prime Minister intervene and remove Morosi from her post. Whitlam, however, refused. Indeed, he attacked Wentworth for having raised the allegations against Morosi.99 A bitter Gwen would later assert that Whitlam’s reluctance to do anything about Morosi was ‘because he thought she was destroying’ Cairns. This is unfair. Whitlam had always abided by the principle that ministers were responsible for their staffs and, moreover, he felt there was no basis on which to ask Cairns to dispense with Morosi as long as nothing had been proved against her. There were no such inhibitions from a group of trade union leaders who discussed the issue in Melbourne on 25 February. They decided to urge Cairns to dismiss her, one of them declaring that Cairns had to choose between Miss Morosi and the Labor Party’.1 Characteristically, Cairns reacted to the pressure by digging in his heels. Cairns had decided, Morosi later wrote, ‘that in various ways this issue represented all of the things he had stood for and believed in. . . His point was clear: if we give in on individual rights what hope have we for even the most basic democracy?’ Of course, in Caucus and in the broader labour movement few considered that any fundamental principles were at stake in the defence of Morosi. To the contrary, they held that Cairns’

entanglement with her had distorted his priorities. Nobody felt this more than Uren. In Straight Left he observes that Cairns’ ‘relationship with Junie had changed him completely . . . He seemed to have disregarded values he had previously believed in and cherished.’2 Murmurings about Morosi’s influence on Cairns extended to the most trivial things, among them that he had begun to wear his hair longer and dress more fashionably. Stories circulated of her feeding him dessert from a spoon in Canberra restaurants and of moonlight walks together in the Parliament House rose gardens.3 Of greater significance were the claims that, in order to consolidate her own power, Morosi controlled access to and isolated Cairns. She would accompany him virtually everywhere, with Cairns even insisting that she attend factional meetings of the Caucus Left. Cass recalls the consternation this caused: ‘She’d sit there dressed to kill taking notes. Well none of us took notes. She was taking notes! People said she must be CIA.’ Morosi had also reorganised Cairns’ office so that it functioned along the lines to which she was accustomed in private enterprise. Whereas previously colleagues and associates had casually breezed into the office, now they had to pass through Morosi. Sam Goldbloom, Jean McLean and Helen Caldicott all remarked later about the problems of getting to see Cairns once Morosi took over the administration of his office. 4 Other staff members resented her influence. Gleghorn’s dismissal coincided with the departure of Cairns’ long-time personal assistant, Maxine Burgess. Brogan remained, but complained of being frozen out. The upheavals in Cairns’ office were seen to provide Morosi with scope to accumulate still more power through her control of the promotion and hiring of staff.5 Quickly enough, the stories about Morosi gained a life of their own within the hot-house atmosphere of Parliament House. The day of his removal as Treasurer, Cairns fumed that many had originated ‘around the parliamentary bar’. One of the better-known anecdotes had it that, when Milton Friedman criticised Labor’s economic policy during a visit to

Australia in April 1975, Morosi had asked: ‘Who is this Friedman? Is there something we can get on him?’6 Whether this story is true or apocryphal is immaterial; its significance is that, like so many of those that gained currency, its circulation was designed to belittle Morosi. In trying to assess why Morosi inspired so much fear and loathing, it is hard to disagree with the conclusion reached by Freudenberg: ‘She was that most disturbing thing—a woman with influence’.7 But there was something else, besides. For some within the Labor Party, Morosi came to represent the archetypal femme fatale. She had used her feminine wiles to corrupt the previously incorruptible Cairns. For this crime they were prepared to see her metaphorically burned at the stake. Amid all the rumour and gossip, a few things about the impact of Morosi and the surrounding controversy were incontestable. First, the ructions in Cairns’ office and associated departure of many of his most experienced staff members meant that, as Ormonde points out, he had lost his ‘protective covering’. Many of his new staff, including Morosi, lacked an understanding of the workings of government, the bureaucracy or the Labor Party. Second, Cairns was distracted by the emotional and intellectual upheaval created by Morosi’s entry into his life. The idea that he was ill-suited to the demands of ministerial responsibility has been exaggerated. But it seems true that in 1975, at a time when he had been thrust into a portfolio requiring marathon hours of detailed administration, his mind was not on the job. His work in Cabinet was widely regarded as having deteriorated, and the three overseas trips he crammed in between March and May were read by colleagues as a signal of his loss of focus.8 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ‘Morosi Affair’ seriously eroded Cairns’ standing within the FPLP. Members of Caucus were alienated by his steadfast loyalty to Morosi, and this was reinforced by the barriers many felt she had erected around him. In late February Peter Bowers of the Sydney Morning Herald postulated that, if Whitlam suddenly resigned, Cairns would be lucky to muster half a dozen votes in a leadership ballot. Interestingly, this coincided with the

publication of a Gallup Poll showing that Cairns’ public approval rating was at a record high of 60 per cent.9 There appeared to be an inverse relationship between his popularity within Caucus and in the wider community. The most telling indication of Cairns’ estrangement from his parliamentary colleagues was the fraying of his friendship with Tom Uren. For more than fifteen years Uren had worked tirelessly to push Cairns forward within the FPLP, often in the face of ambivalence from Cairns. In all that time Uren had never wavered from his faith in Cairns’ essential greatness or belief that his destiny was to one day lead the ALP. In his autobiography Uren candidly admits that his ‘life was wrapped up in Jim Cairns. Through those long years I persisted in serving Cairns and through him, the Left.’10 Morosi’s arrival inevitably altered the two men’s relationship. She provided Cairns with the intimacy that had been so lacking in his life—a void hitherto partially filled by Uren. In that sense, Morosi supplanted Uren. In addition, Morosi encouraged Cairns to think about his own needs and feelings instead of always subordinating them to those of the government, the party or the Left. For Uren to whom loyalty to the Left, in particular, was a sacred trust, this was tantamount to apostasy. He resented Morosi’s influence upon Cairns and saw her as the wrecker of everything he had struggled for. Uren’s growing dissatisfaction with Cairns had surfaced in February at the Federal Conference at Terrigal, when he vigorously attacked the latter’s proposal for a department of economic planning. There was further tension between the two men after Cabinet killed off plans for a capital gains tax on speculative land sales on 17 February. Uren and Cairns had sponsored a joint Cabinet submission supporting the tax. However, when Cabinet debated the submission Uren was infuriated by the lack of support he received from Cairns.11 To Uren, this episode epitomised Cairns’ distraction and increasingly skewed priorities. His disappointment grew during the ensuing months, especially over the issue

of restructuring Treasury. Underlying this was a more fundamental grievance. Cairns seemed increasingly aloof, impervious to advice, and reluctant to consult with his colleagues. On 2 April Uren vented his feelings in a letter to Cairns. He pointed out that he had fought to make him Treasurer ‘because I trusted you to do something about the bureaucracy of Treasury’. Uren was disturbed that Cairns was ‘restructuring the Department without the slightest consultation with people who you have worked with for two decades’ His anguish and frustration were palpable: ‘I am sorry that I have had to write this letter—really sorry—but I am sick to death of just having to say something to you which sometimes you tend to listen to, sometimes you tend not to hear at all’. The letter finished with what amounted to a threat. Unless Cairns changed course, he could no longer count on the Left’s support: ‘if you continue as you suggested to me—at best you will hand over to the technocrats—you have not our ideological base’.12 By early 1975 Cairns was confronted with a dangerous configuration of forces. The upheavals in his office, his preoccupation with his personal life, and the slump in his party-room support left him vulnerable to a fall at a time when his economic management was coming under sustained attack from the growing band of converts to monetarism. Besides the distractions of Morosi, another factor may also have disturbed his emotional equilibrium in 1975. Ormonde had commenced research on his biography of Cairns and had unearthed the fart that, contrary to the public record, Cairns’ father had not died in World War I but had abandoned his young family. Cairns had first learnt of the true fate of his father more than two decades before but, typical of the powerful element of denial in his character, he had pushed that knowledge aside. Now, when his emotional defences were already under siege and he was taking the first tentative steps towards the view that the key to social change lay in the way children were reared, he was confronted once again with the unpalatable reality of his father’s desertion. How he reacted is difficult to gauge, since Cairns continues to baulk at reflection on the issue. Some

insight, though, is yielded by a response he gave during an interview in 1987 when his guard briefly slipped. He admitted to being ‘demolished’ by what his father had done. There is a curious footnote to Ormonde’s discovery. Shortly after Ormonde told him of his find, Cairns was sitting in the House with Whitlam when he confided the news to the Prime Minister. Whitlam was shaken by the revelation. He found himself suddenly feeling a wave of compassion and affection for his deputy and long-time rival.13 Cairns’ wandering mind and the disarray in his office were to contribute to the disastrous outcome of his growing involvement in the ‘Loans Affair’in March-April 1975. Informed by Treasury in February that Connor’s loan authority had been reissued, Cairns was at first incredulous and then annoyed at being shut out of the process. Wheeler and other senior Treasury officials once more began ‘pouring woe’ to him about the damage the Connor–Khemlani negotiations were doing to Australia’s international financial standing. Cairns passed on the complaints to Whitlam and Connor but to no effect. 14 Meanwhile, Harris resumed contact with Cairns after receiving advice from a Sydney company director, Dan Thompson, that considerable loan funds were available to the Australian government through sources in the United States.15 In January Cairns had agreed that all such approaches should be automatically referred to Treasury. But in direct contradiction of that policy, he now commenced dealings with Harris independently of his department. This volte-face has to be located in the context of the breakdown in relations between the government and Treasury. Behind the veil of politeness with which Treasury officials treated Cairns, Treasury concern about their minister had been fuelled by his proposal at Terrigal for a department of economic planning. Whitlam’s floating of the idea that the secretary of the Department of Minerals and Energy, Sir Lennox Hewitt, head the new department and Wheeler be shifted to the position of

Governor of the Reserve Bank sharpened Treasury unease.16 The fact that Whitlam and Connor had chosen to ignore Treasury warnings about the Khemlani negotiations further strained relations, as well as providing Cairns with a precedent to shun his department. Ironically, Treasury’s constant reports about Khemlani’s unreliability also encouraged Cairns to enter into discussions with Harris. By comparison, as Cairns told the House on 9 July, Harris seemed to be beyond reproach: I did not consider I had to be suspicious or careful about Mr Harris. He had come to me with a letter which stated he had established relations with several Victorian State Government authorities . . . I knew he had easy and close access to Victorian Ministers, including the Premier. He appeared to be a personal friend of Sir Robert Menzies.

It is bewildering that Cairns was so ready to trust implicitly a man who, on Cairns’ own reckoning, had impeccable connections to the conservative Establishment, in a project designed to buck that Establishment. It is another illustration of Cairns’ naivety, another indication that his powers of concentration were impaired in early 1975. In fact, as Cairns would admit in the days after his sacking, he never regarded his dealings with Harris to be ‘of much significance’. He had only a handful of brief meetings with Harris and his business partner, Leslie Nagy. Moreover, Cairns believed, and this has never been disputed, it was fully within his powers and discretion as Treasurer to undertake such initiatives to obtain loan funds. Cairns had an Executive Council authority to borrow up to $US500 million and in addition, under the terms of the AIDC legislation, could borrow $A250 million. 17 His decision to enter into an arrangement with a private individual like Harris, though unconventional, had the precedent of the Connor– Khemlani negotiations. Similarly, his bypassing of Cabinet, though questionable, was not far removed from the example set by Whitlam and Connor, especially in light of their failure to inform him of the renewal of Connor’s loan authority in January.

Perhaps the most important reason why Cairns treated his dealings with Harris with such insouciance was because he did not see that there was anything particularly substantial about the role he had asked Harris to play. Harris was not intended to be an intermediary, but was to be strictly limited to making preliminary inquiries about the availability of funds. Later Cairns explained to the parliament that he had instructed Harris: Find out what you can and let me know. If the prospects look reasonable I will then ensure that Treasury, Reserve Bank or Commonwealth Bank officials take up the matter. At every stage I made it clear . . . that no agency obligation or responsibility could possibly arise until a loan acceptable to the Australian Government was actually undertaken.117

In a letter to Cairns on 2 June 1975, Harris concurred that this had been the basis of his arrangement with the Treasurer: You went to great lengths to emphasise that you would give me no commitment other than in the most general terms that you were interested in overseas borrowing. Further you stated in the most specific terms that I could not and would not be given any official status, nor be appointed an agent for you or the Government in any way shape or form, but was merely to report to you if and when I established beyond doubt that large private funds were available.19

What Cairns failed to perceive was that, with Labor embattled and his own position in the government increasingly tenuous, there was no leeway for even such an innocuous foray into the murky world of foreign loan-raising. On 7 March Harris and Nagy had a meeting with Cairns at his Melbourne Treasury office. They went away with a letter bearing Cairns’ signature that read: The Australian Government is interested in exploring available loan funds from overseas. In the event of a successful negotiation which may be introduced or arranged by you, and provided the interest rate for a term loan does not exceed 8 per cent per annum in total, we would be prepared to pay a once only brokerage fee of 2.5 per cent

deducted at the source to you and/or your nominees. We would need to be satisfied about the source of the funds and the size of the loan would have to be appropriate to our needs.20

This letter was to cost Cairns the deputy prime ministership and his place in the ministry. What happened at the meeting of 7 March remains a mystery. Cairns has always insisted he has no recollection of signing the letter and, indeed, that both on that day and at another meeting with Harris and Nagy on 15 April he explicitly rejected their request that he provide a letter which nominated a specific commission. He also claims to remember clearly telling Harris that any letter which limited the bearer to seeking a loan on terms of an 8 per cent total cost would be ‘a waste of time’ as those terms were unachievable. Instead Cairns offered to supply a more general letter which he asked his secretary, Karen Stegmar, to prepare. Harris and Nagy waited outside the office while this was being done. Stegmar returned to Cairns’ office with a pile of letters that Cairns signed, glancing at them as he did. Soon after, Cairns asked where Harris was and was told he had gone. Cairns assumed he had left without the letter; this seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Harris had made a further appointment to see him in Sydney on 10 March.21 This version of what happened at the meeting was supported by Nagy in a statutory declaration tabled by Cairns in the House on 9 July. Nagy, who professed to be making the statement in ‘the interests of decency’, testified that Harris had ‘stood near Miss Stegmar and began to talk to her’ while the letter was being typed. 22 The inference was that Harris had pressured Stegmar to change the letter, which Cairns then signed without realising it had been altered. Nagy’s statement was actually to harm Cairns. Many of his colleagues thought it a cowardly attempt to pass the buck for his own incompetence. Stegmar, too, was bitter that her reputation had been impugned.23 In an affidavit dated 14 July, Harris supplied his account of the 7 March meeting which stated

that Cairns had freely agreed to the terms of the letter and dictated it to Stegmar.24 In the parliament on 4 June, answering an Opposition question, Cairns categorically denied having given a letter offering a 2.5 per cent commission or brokerage fee on any loan money—a fact that strongly suggests he was unaware of having signed the 7 March letter. By that time he had received reports from Treasury and journalists that Harris had a letter mentioning a specific commission. He also knew that the Liberal Party was privy to that information.25 In such circumstances, the only reasonable explanation for his having denied the Opposition question is that he believed he had not signed such a letter. How, then, did Harris get the letter? The most likely answer is Cairns inadvertently signed it and it slipped through his by now chaotic office structure. If so, Cairns was still culpable, not only for having signed the letter, but for having allowed his office arrangements to degenerate to the point where the error was not picked up. Another scenario that has enjoyed currency in some radical circles is that the 7 March letter was fabricated, possibly by the CIA. On 3 July, the day after Cairns’ dismissal, the CIA’s in-house briefing newsletter, the National Intelligence Daily, reported that Whitlam had sacked Cairns ‘even though some of the evidence had been fabricated’. As Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson note, this ‘intriguing remark was left hanging’.26 Without verification, allegations of involvement by the CIA or other clandestine forces in Cairns’ downfall remain just that, intriguing but enigmatic. Harris and Nagy kept their appointment with Cairns in Sydney on 10 March. After a brief discussion, Cairns furnished them with a general letter enabling them to make inquiries about the availability of loan funds. It stated simply: ‘The Australian Government is willing to borrow funds from lenders overseas on terms and conditions suitable to us’.27 On 15 April Harris and Nagy met with Cairns again, this time in Canberra. Harris claimed that the letter of 10 March was inadequate and requested a

letter of introduction stating that he was entitled to make loan inquiries, and another which nominated a specific commission. He showed Cairns drafts of the letters, the second of which referred to a 2.5 per cent brokerage fee. Cairns rejected the drafts but agreed to supply Harris with two further letters.28 The opening paragraph of the first letter highlighted Cairns’ concern to establish that no one had been given an authority to negotiate a loan on behalf of the government. It read: To Whom it May Concern Recently I have been concerned that persons in Europe and elsewhere claim to represent the Australian Government in negotiating loans. No such authority exists. The Australian Government is interested in borrowing on favourable conditions and should any person be able to assist us we would be glad to hear from him. I am providing Mr George Harris, holder of Australian Passport No. G740206, and whose signature appears in the margin, with this letter so that he may make inquiries for me. If it is felt necessary to confirm the authenticity of this letter, then with the consent of Mr Harris, this may be done by contact with Sir John Bunting, Australian High Commissioner, London, or the Australian Ambassador to Switzerland in Berne, or direct with me by telex, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. In the event that he recommends that any funds are available and I am satisfied with the authenticity of such availability and the terms and conditions for lending are acceptable to me, and the funds are in amounts sufficient for our needs, I would be pleased to take the matter up.

The second said: Dear Mr Harris, In the event that the Australian Government or its representatives or nominees successfully negotiates the borrowing of overseas funds introduced or arranged by you, an appropriate commission would be paid to you or your nominees.29

If Cairns intended to keep his dealings with Harris hidden from Treasury, he had not reckoned on the department’s wide-ranging information network. Treasury was first alerted on 2 April when a communication was received from its London representative, Dr N. Davey, that Harris had visited the firm Morgan Grenfells and produced a letter which purportedly contained an undertaking to pay him a

commission of 2.5 per cent if his efforts in locating a source of funds led to the successful negotiation of a loan. The Treasury secretary, Wheeler, confronted Cairns with this information. In a report later prepared for Whitlam on Cairns’ loan-raising activities, Wheeler did not indicate whether Cairns denied giving Harris a letter mentioning a specific commission, only that he admitted supplying Harris with ‘credentials’. Wheeler advised Cairns to withdraw those credentials. On 13 April the departmental liaison officer in Cairns’ office, Ed Shann, found a copy of the 10 March letter and sent it to Treasury. Then, on 22 April, Davey informed Treasury that Harris had called on the Australian High Commissioner, Sir John Bunting, and shown him a copy of the ‘To Whom it May Concern’ letter of 15 April. Wheeler phoned Bunting, a long-time colleague in the senior Canberra bureaucracy, and had him dictate the text of the letter. 30 Cairns had left Australia the day before to attend a meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. Ironically, twenty-four hours before his departure, at Treasury’s behest, Cairns wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to revoke Connor’s loan authority as it was jeopardising negotiations for a $US100 million loan through conventional channels in New York. Whitlam fobbed off the request.31 Upon Cairns’ return from Manila, Wheeler spoke to him about the ‘To Whom it May Concern’ letter. According to Wheeler, Cairns told him that it was designed to enable Harris ‘to ferret around in business circles’ Cairns also stated that he did not expect further developments in the Harris matter. Unimpressed with the Treasurer’s assurances, Wheeler now made the critical decision to seek legal advice from the AttorneyGeneral’s Department on the ‘To Whom it May Concern’ letter. He later justified this highly unorthodox action by asserting that he was anxious that ‘the letter could involve the Government legally in an unwarranted liability’. On 6 May Treasury referred both of the letters of 15 April—a copy of the second one had been sent from Cairns’ office by Shann—to the Attorney-General’s Department. In an effort to disguise their source, specific details were omitted from the letters, including the first

paragraph of the To Whom it May Concern’ letter. The secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, Clarrie Harders, in no doubt that Cairns was the author of the letters and uncomfortable with Wheeler’s action, urged him to discuss the issue with the Treasurer rather than seek legal advice. Wheeler was unmoved and insisted that his request be carried out.32 By the time Harders furnished his legal opinion on 28 May, Cairns was again out of the country attending an OECD Ministerial Council meeting in Paris. Harders found that the letters implied an agency relationship existed between the bearer and the government, though only for the purposes of making inquiries into and recommendations on the availability of funds, and not for negotiating a loan. Harders further advised that the bearer would be entitled to a commission, but only if a loan were consummated. He added the caveat that his opinion assumed ‘that the letters would not be supplemented or affected by any oral discussions’. 33 In the days before Treasury received Harders’ opinion, the government had come under increasing pressure in the parliament over its loan-raising activities. It had become apparent that the Opposition was well-informed on the Khemlani negotiations, thanks in part to consistent leaks from Treasury. On 21 May, answering a question from the recently elected Liberal leader, Malcolm Fraser, the Prime Minister announced that Connor’s loan authority had been revoked. Cairns had been instrumental in this decision. Shortly before leaving for Paris, he had approached Whitlam in the House and again impressed on him the problems that the Khemlani dealings were posing in relation to the proposed New York loan. Whitlam, conscious of the growing political costs of the Khemlani scheme, was now prepared to accept his deputy’s argument. 34 The announcement of the cancellation of Connor’s loan authority failed to stem the Opposition’s onslaught or the media’s developing

interest. On 22 May Whitlam’s office asked the Acting Treasurer, Hayden, to deny an allegation raised by the ABC television program, This Day Tonight , about an apparent new twist to the government’s loanraising efforts. The story proved baseless, but unintentionally blew the lid on the Cairns-Harris connection. Hayden refused to issue a denial of the story until fully briefed on his colleagues’ loan schemes. In the course of that briefing, to which Whitlam was also privy, Wheeler divulged Cairns’ dealings with Harris At another meeting with the Prime Minister and the Acting Treasurer on 28 May, Wheeler passed on Harders’ opinion on the Harris letters.35 He then cabled Cairns in Paris informing him of these developments and included a copy of Harders’ memorandum. The cable advised Cairns to cancel immediately ‘accreditations or authorisations (if any) given to George Harris’, and suggested that Cairns contact both Wheeler and the Prime Minister. On 29 May Cairns rang his department head. Remarkably, Cairns still seemed oblivious to the gravity of his situation; he continued to believe the Harris dealings were of little consequence. Cairns told Wheeler Harris was ‘no problem’, and indicated he intended to head from Paris to Switzerland to carry out some personal checks on loan-raising. This complacency was shattered when he spoke to Whitlam, who demanded he urgently return to Australia.36 An exhausted Cairns arrived back in Australia on 1 June to speculation that he was to be stripped of the Treasury portfolio in a Cabinet reshuffle precipitated by the expected resignation of Lance Barnard from parliament.37 The next day he met the Prime Minister, who told him that he had acted unwisely in providing Harris with the letters and confirmed that he intended to move him out of Treasury. Cairns was staggered by Whitlam’s reasoning. He pointed out there was doubt over Harders’ advice because the text of the letters had been altered and his oral instructions to Harris had not been taken into account. Moreover, he insisted that, even if the letters created an agency between the government and Harris, he had not exceeded his powers as Treasurer and that his actions were trivial in the context of the Connor–Khemlani

negotiations. Whitlam refused to budge.38 Angry and disappointed, Cairns made one last desperate attempt to save his position as Treasurer. He put out a statement criticising the proposals ‘to appoint Mr Barnard to a diplomatic post and to make several changes in the Ministry’. These moves, Cairns asserted, would ‘cause the distraction of a by-election and involve the risk of divisions in the Party and Government at a time when unity and teamwork are essential’. With its implicit threat to the Prime Minister’s authority and its potential to split the government the statement was a terrible tactical blunder by Cairns. Far from shoring up his position, it made his dumping more certain. His colleagues were dismayed, seeing the action as symptomatic of his declining political judgement. Similarly, the abject failure of his colleagues to rally to his battle-cry only highlighted the slump in his support within Caucus. At a meeting of the FPLP on 3 June, a repentant Cairns was forced into a humiliating backdown.39 Although his attempted defiance of Whitlam had ended in surrender, Cairns remained furious at Treasury’s complicity in his downfall. On the same day that it was announced he was to be given the Environment portfolio and Hayden was the new Treasurer, Cairns made a statement to the House raising questions about Treasury’s conduct. He pointed out that Shann had removed letters from his office and forwarded them to the department without his permission, and that the letters provided to Harders by Treasury had been amended. The statement, which for the first time brought Cairns’ dealings with Harris into the public arena, caused a sensation. On 6 June Whitlam requested reports from Wheeler, Harders and other relevant parties on the circumstances leading to Cairns’ removal as Treasurer. He then asked the Commonwealth Solicitor-General, Sir Maurice Byers, to assess Treasury’s actions. In his report of 20 June Byers cleared Shann of any wrong-doing, but criticised Treasury for seeking legal advice on the letters without consulting either Cairns or the Prime Minister. He described this as ‘behaviour inconsistent with the Public Service Act’. Yet apart from this rap over the

knuckles, Wheeler and Treasury escaped scot-free. Indeed, they were rewarded by the appointment of Hayden, whose views were known to be far more sympathetic to the department orthodoxy. Treasury’s elation over the change’, the Australian’s Mike Steketee reported, ‘is barely disguised behind the stiff protocol of its officers’.40 While Whitlam publicly maintained that Harris connection was the ‘sole reason’ for shifting his deputy out of Treasury, most commentators suspected that the Prime Minister was not being frank. Various theories were advanced for Whitlam’s actions, but it was generally assumed that the principal factor in Hayden’s replacement of Cairns, along with the simultaneous dumping of Clyde Cameron as Minister for Labour for Senator James McClelland, was that the government was altering economic course. Robert Haupt, writing in the Australian Financial Review, best grasped the significance of the ministerial changes. The major consequence of the reshuffle, he noted, was that the ‘new Whitlam Cabinet is dominated by what Treasury would call “economic rationalists’”.41 The first indications of a change in Labor’s economic direction had come in late January when Cabinet established an expenditure review committee comprising Whitlam, Cairns, Hayden, Cameron and Uren. The committee’s formation coincided with the release of figures showing the government was heading towards a deficit of around $ 1500 million in 1974–75 compared to the original Budget estimate of a small domestic surplus.42 In a parliamentary debate on the economy on 18 February Cairns defended this blowout, pointing out that more than half of the increased expenditure had come in the form of direct assistance to the private sector to boost production and reduce unemployment. Not everyone in the government was so relaxed about the burgeoning deficit. At a Cabinet meeting the day before, Hayden ridiculed Cairns’ argument that the government should not be overly concerned with the size of deficit while unemployment was still rising. Hayden was afraid that, by

allowing the deficit to soar and money supply to increase rapidly, the government was creating the conditions for another inflationary surge, which, in the end, would only feed more unemployment. Accordingly, he believed it imperative that spending be cut back and monetary policy moderated.43 Hayden had become a convert to the monetarist or inflationary expectations view of economics. In essence, this required the government to hold unemployment at high levels while inflation was checked. He was not alone in this conversion. In early February the Liberal Party released its new economic program. This document, with its emphasis on monetary control and associated fiscal discipline, wage restraint and a private-sector-led recovery, heralded the Opposition’s embrace of monetarism. In the first months of 1975 the newspapers, too, were actively promoting a monetarist line. On the day of the Cabinet showdown between Cairns and Hayden, the Sydney Morning Herald complained that Labor’s ‘preoccupation with unemployment has led to an extraordinary expansion in the Federal Budget deficit’. It insisted that the ballooning deficit was feeding a growth in money supply which, unless checked, would ‘push the economy into another bout of severe inflation’.44 By April there were signs that the government’s expansionary policies had arrested the economic slide. Production figures and other indicators such as motor vehicle registrations and retail sales suggested that activity was picking up.45 Most importantly, the deterioration in the job market appeared to have eased. After climbing to over 4.5 per cent early in the year, unemployment had stabilised. This trend continued and, in the week that Cairns was shifted out of Treasury, figures were released confirming a tentative labour market recovery. Naturally, Cairns saw this turnaround as vindication of his policy approach, especially his defiance of Treasury’s push for a deflationary Budget in 1974.46 Any credit Cairns deserved for his economic management was

overshadowed as the monetarist offensive gathered momentum. The tentative economic recovery only heightened fears of renewed inflation. Those fears were given credence by the publication in April of the March quarter’s consumer price index, which revealed that the inflation rate, having slowed during the previous quarter, had climbed to 17.6 per cent. Equally worrying, Treasury now estimated that the Budget deficit had increased to $3301 million.47 There were predictable demands for a reversal of government policy and denunciations of the Treasurer for having permitted the Budget position to worsen. The Australian Financial Review, fast emerging as Cairns’ most virulent critic, deplored his ‘irresponsible demagoguery’. What it interpreted as ‘demagoguery’ other critics viewed simply as softness. This was the period when Cairns’ reputation as ‘Dr Yes’ became established. He was portrayed as a man too easily swayed by a sob story and lacking in the steel required to prescribe the harsh economic medicine called for in the prevailing environment. Hayden felt it was a case of Cairns relying on his ‘emotions’ instead of being ‘informed by rigorous analysis’.48 Nothing better symbolised the growing assault of monetarism in Australia than the visit in April of its prophet, Milton Friedman. In Sydney, at one of his many speaking engagements, Friedman scolded the Australian people for having become too accustomed to full employment and being intolerant of the harsh policies needed to defeat inflation.49 Against the backdrop of Friedman’s visit, the Opposition launched a fullscale attack against Cairns in the parliament over the increasing Budget deficit. On 9 April, responding to a question from the shadow Treasurer, Phil Lynch, Cairns gave a reply that would have mortified Friedman. He declared, that with the economy still in a state of substantial undercapacity, the present deficit was not inflationary and pledged: ‘Wherever there are resources available for employment the Labor Government will never see those resources remain unemployed because of a shortage of money. That battle was fought in this country 50 years ago, and we are not going to fight it again.’ Encouraged by this answer, the Opposition

continued to pursue the Treasurer. On 15 April the Liberal backbencher Bert Kelly asked him: ‘If printing money is a good solution to the unemployment problem why not print more of the stuff and get rid of the unemployment problem altogether?’ To the catcalls of members opposite and the consternation of his colleagues, Cairns replied: We might do precisely that. There are still about 250,000 persons unemployed in Australia. I assure the honourable member and every other honourable member that if by government expenditure I can ensure that any one of those men is put to work productively I will make sure that he is, and he will not be allowed to remain in unemployment because of a shortage of money.50

Scenting blood, Lynch initiated a debate that afternoon in the House on the ‘inflationary consequences of the Government’s policy of printing money to pay for its excessive spending programs’ Opposition speakers used the debate to pillory Cairns. Lynch mocked his economic management: ‘The one factory in this country which has the lights going day and night is the Government mint’. In a revealing sign of the Liberal Party’s recent conversion to monetarism, Lynch commended to Cairns the ‘views of Professor Milton Friedman on the problem of deficit financing’. While Cairns seemed unperturbed by the onslaught, Hayden betrayed his alarm by attempting to clarify the Treasurer’s views on the economy.51 As Hughes suggests, Cairns’ performance in the parliament on 15 April, especially his reply to Kelly, was ‘disastrous for his reputation. . . it was only a matter of time before he was relieved of his portfolio’. The reaction was savage. The Australian Financial Review raged: He [Cairns] understands virtually nothing about the process of inflation . . . this kind of performance by the Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer is not satisfactory. While the notion that the Australian Labor Party is not fit to govern must be dismissed, Dr Cairns’ recent comments must give one pause.

Less vehement, the Australian felt that Cairns’ ‘humanitarian concern for

the jobless has led him to put government action to control inflation in the “too hard” basket’. Business also registered its dismay at the Treasurer’s statements. The director of the New South Wales Chamber of Commerce, N. Mason, accused Cairns of churning out ‘funny money’ and forecast an inflation rate of 28 per cent by early 1976. This was conservative compared to a prediction by Professor H. W. Arndt of the Australian National University who warned that if the government persisted with its ‘irresponsible’ efforts to reduce unemployment by expanding money supply inflation would reach 30–35 per cent by the year’s end.52 There was disquiet as well within the government at Cairns’ economic stewardship. At a meeting of the Caucus Economic Committee on 21 April he came under intense questioning. His performance failed to impress at least one committee member who remarked that Cairns had ‘tended to sit back and waffle’. Meanwhile, in the parliament Cairns was forced to deny stories of a growing policy rift between himself and Hayden.53 On 23 April his economic reputation sustained another blow with the disclosure that he was behind a recent Cabinet decision to give $650 000 to Associated Pulp and Paper Mills to avert massive lay-offs at its Burnie plant. Also revealed was Cairns’ responsibility earlier in the year for a similar grant to the Electrolytic Zinc Company to pay the wages of 670 workers whose jobs were threatened. Interrogated about the rationale of these subsidies, Cairns responded: ‘human affairs—the fact that about a couple of thousand people might lose their jobs where there are none available and that they have families to keep’.54 Inevitably, such logic appalled his critics. The revelation of the grants provoked another round of indignant editorials.55 Perhaps chastened by the backlash generated by his recent statements on the economy, at a press conference in early May Cairns tried to counter the impression that he was unconcerned about the dangers of a fresh outbreak of inflation. He announced that inflation remained the

chief economic problem and that the deficit would be reduced as far as possible in the forthcoming Budget.56 Around the same time, Cairns circulated among his colleagues a paper outlining the broad parameters within which he proposed to shape the Budget. The document emphasised the importance of controlling inflation, but also assumed that excessive wage demands, rather than Labor’s relaxed fiscal and monetary policy, remained the principal source of inflationary pressures.57 It singled out wage policy, therefore, as the most crucial instrument in curbing inflation. At the same time, Cairns’ Budget strategy paper conceded that government expenditure must be pruned. He stressed, though, that in the prevailing economic conditions some level of Budget deficit was ‘necessary and unavoidable’. Moreover, it was imperative that neither fiscal nor monetary policy be tightened so drastically as to induce further unemployment. That is, unemployment must not be permitted to become part of the price of beating inflation. The most telling section of the paper came near the end, where Cairns urged that, while striving to reduce the deficit, the government must never fail to re-employ people who can be re-employed productively merely because it would add to the deficit. We must not consent to surrender any significant part of our programs for welfare, education, urban improvement and culture advances as the result of pressure from the media and other anti-Labor forces. It is far better to be defeated while attempting to implement Labor policies than to be defeated after surrendering them. I do not believe we can win by surrendering these or, if by any chance we did win, that winning would be worthwhile.

Junie Morosi.

Jim Cairns, Acting Prime Minister, 1975.

The reshuffled Whitlam ministry, Government House, 6 June 1975.

Answering media questions

after his sacking from the Whitlam ministry.

Promoting Morosi’s Sex, Prejudice and Politics, November 1975.

Counter culture philosopher: Down to Earth Confest, Berri, April 1979. Stripped to its bare essentials, Cairns was saying that it was better for the Whitlam Government to die on its feet than live on its knees. He had always held that, for Labor, power should not be an end in itself; now he was declaring that the party should not cling to office if that meant deserting the ideal of full employment. Whitlam had never accepted that the pursuit of power be subordinated to ‘sacred principles’. Nor was he now willing to tolerate his deputy’s quixotic stand on the economy, especially at a time when the Opposition, business and the media were all demanding a major change in economic policy. Those demands carried political menace. Upon his election as Liberal leader in February, Fraser had announced that when the Opposition judged that the government was ‘so reprehensible’ it would be ready to force Labor to an early election. 58 An ‘irresponsible’ Budget, that is, one that did not carve into spending and put the fight against inflation first, might well provide the condition for Fraser to move. Politically, therefore, Whitlam needed a tough Budget and he had no faith in Cairns delivering such an outcome. It is this context, and not his negotiations with Harris, that best explains Cairns’ sacking as Treasurer. The Budget delivered by Hayden in August 1975 won praise from the editorial writers for its fiscal discipline and, at least for a time, derailed any designs the Opposition had of blocking supply. As a number of commentators have recognised, the 1975/76 Budget represented a political and economic watershed. It marked a decisive break with the Keynesian economic management model and a retreat from the post-war commitment to full employment.59 ‘We are no longer operating’, Hayden declared in his Budget speech, ‘in that simple Keynesian world in which some reduction in unemployment could, apparently, always be purchased at the cost of some more inflation. Today, it is inflation itself which is the central policy problem. More inflation simply leads to more

unemployment.’ He went to considerable lengdis to contrast the predicted Budget deficit with the outcome that would have resulted if the expenditure levels projected when Cairns was Treasurer had remained unchecked. What he did not advertise, but was implicit in the Treasury forecasts, was that unemployment was expected to rise.60 Unemployment did climb. By the latter part of 1975 it was trending up again and in October hit a new post-war high of 5.3 per cent. In his autobiography Hayden notes that the increased unemployment ‘led the rate of wages growth to ease more than had been expected . . . In terms of economic management the result was welcome, as the inflationary forces which had been let loose in the economy were clearly easing.’ Those joining the jobless queue may have puzzled at this sanguine assessment. Equally, whereas Hayden boasts that ‘the 1975 budget provided the foundation stone on which the development of rigorously responsible economic management evolved thereafter’,61 a different interpretation is that it set a precedent for the deficit fetishism and small-government philosophy that has dominated economic policy-making in Australia ever since. Cairns had barely settled into the Environment portfolio when Whitlam moved to dump him from the ministry and as Deputy Prime Minister. Two days prior to the reshuffle, Cairns had signed his own death warrant by denying in the parliament that he had issued a letter offering a 2.5 per cent commission or brokerage fee on any loan money. The Liberal Party had been tipped off to the existence of the 7 March letter by Dan Thompson, the Sydney businessman who had first alerted Harris to the possibilities of securing overseas loan funds for the Australian government. When Cairns denied the existence of the letter, Fraser believed that Thompson’s information must be wrong. Others in the Liberal Party, though, were not so easily put off. The information was leaked to the Murdoch press and on 13 July the Australian published a story about the alleged letter, together with another denial from Cairns’ office that any such document had been signed by the minister. Only a

few days later, Hayden received a copy of the 7 March letter. It had been sent to Treasury by the Australian embassy in Washington after a New York firm sought verification of it, following an earlier approach by Harris and Nagy for assistance in obtaining loan funds. Hayden passed on the letter to the secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, John Menadue, who, after conferring with Whitlam, supplied a copy to Cairns.62 With the letter’s existence now confirmed, Cairns apparently believed that it would be enough to wait until parliament resumed in midAugust to correct his reply of 4 June. But when the Prime Minister saw the letter on 30 June, he concluded that it provided sufficient grounds to dismiss his deputy. Whitlam had other ammunition against Cairns, too. He was in receipt of a report by the Auditor-General on the involvement of Cairns’ son and electoral officer, Philip Cairns, as an intermediary in negotiations between private investors and the Fijian government. Despite Philip’s subsequent insistence that he had made it plain he was acting in an unofficial capacity in his visits to Fiji, the report revealed he had blurred the lines between his public office and private interests. Further damaging revelations about his activities were published by the Age beginning on 1 July. The Age had outbid the Murdoch press to purchase from a London financier, Harry Gilham, documents linking Philip to overseas loan-raising activities. The main substance of the avalanche of material printed by the Age, and rehashed in other sections of the press and electronic media, was that Philip was a director in a company, Sunshine Migrant Services Pty Ltd, which had sought to raise a large overseas loan to finance a housing development scheme in Melbourne’s western suburbs.63 Another director of the company was Eric Sear Cowls. A Walter Mitty character, Sear Cowls had turned up on the Cairns’ doorstep a few years earlier to talk international affairs with Jim Cairns. Like so many other lost souls, he had been admitted to the family home and extended

hospitality, thereafter becoming an occasional visitor. When Sear Cowls wanted to get married and had no place to do so, the Cairns family let him use their residence. At first, Jim Cairns enjoyed his conversations with Sear Cowls but, as the latter’s stories grew more fanciful (he claimed, among other things, to be a former CIA agent), Cairns had less to do with him. Philip Cairns, it seems, failed to see through Sear Cowl’s inventions. Of the various allegations published by the Age, the most serious were based on material contained in telexes authored by Sear Cowls. These included that Philip Cairns stood to receive a $600 000 commission on a proposed $US2000 million Arab loan, and that Jim Cairns had been aware of and participated in the operation, to the point of assuring Sear Cowls he would help him bypass official procedures to obtain a mandate to raise funds. On the same day that the Age emblazoned these allegations across its front page under a headline ‘Cairns’ son to get $600 000 fee, says telex’, Sear Cowls admitted in a sworn affidavit that they had been fabricated. This admission was dwarfed the next morning by headlines announcing that Whitlam had sacked Cairns.64 Still bitter at the media frenzy that had engulfed Morosi, Cairns was outraged at the way the media had now leapt to condemn both himself and Philip. He complained that the Age had failed to contact him to check the veracity of the allegations before rushing into print. Yet Cairns later conceded that Philip had acted foolishly. He acknowledged, too, that if he had retained his place in the ministry he would have been forced to ask Philip to resign his position on his staff. Cairns had known of and given his blessing to Philip’s association with a scheme to build low-cost housing in the western suburbs—a proposal which had come out of discussions with a number of people in the region, including the Mayor of Sunshine. But he had been unaware that his son had a nominal interest (one share) in Sunshine Migrant Services or of the company’s amateurish attempts to raise overseas capital.65 In particular, Cairns had no idea, as Ormonde notes, that ‘his name, good standing and authority as Treasurer

of Australia would be bandied around the fringe financial world as if he had officially authorised the project’. Such ignorance again suggested that Cairns’ administration of his office was sorely deficient. For his part, Philip maintained he was not guilty of the ‘slightest impropriety’, but confessed that he may have been ‘a little naive’.66 This remark also applied to his father. In the atmosphere of crisis engendered by the Age’s allegations against Philip Cairns, the Prime Minister’s sacking of his deputy on 2 July took on an air of inevitability. The media assumed that Whitlam had no choice other than to dump Cairns. The great bulk of comment focused not on the decision to oust Cairns but on the question identified by the Age’s Claude Forell of ‘whether the whole Government will not come toppling after him’. Within the labour movement expressions of support for Cairns were lukewarm, though the criticisms of Whitlam for having acted unilaterally in removing his deputy from the ministry were more spirited. Two of Cairns’ parliamentary colleagues, Uren and the Minister for Tourism, Frank Stewart, spoke out, claiming that powerful Establishment forces had helped to bring Cairns down. In the privacy of his diary another Caucus member, the veteran Tasmanian backbencher Gil Duthie, wanted to know why Cairns should be ‘punished twice for virtually the same offence?. . . I believe Whitlam has acted impetuously and ruthlessly and against Labor tradition in sacking Jim Cairns, who is an honest, humane man.’67 In retrospect, Whitlam’s decision to axe Cairns appears harsh, yet in the circumstances it was probably unavoidable. Nobody, the Prime Minister included, ever seriously suggested that Cairns had maliciously mislead the parliament over the Harris letter. Nor, despite the mass of material that found its way into the hands of the media and Liberal Party, was there anything that could have been remotely construed as corrupt in his behaviour. Moreover, as the Opposition and sections of the press noted, a discrepancy seemed to exist between the standards by which the Prime Minister had judged his deputy’s loan-raising activities and those

that he had applied to Connor.68 Nonetheless, Cairns had shown some disturbing lapses of judgement. In his writings he had correctly forecast the entrenched conservative resistance encountered by Labor in government but, in practice, had not taken the necessary precautions to arm himself against it. He had first underestimated and then shown blithe disregard for the backlash unleashed by his economic policies and his foray into overseas loanraising. By his cavalier dealings with Harris and lax administration of his office, Cairns had invited his own political destruction. He had allowed his relationship with Morosi to dull his political antennae. Above all, he had been let down by his own gullibility; the almost childlike trust and loyalty he bestowed on others which, however admirable, was also fatal. As the dust setded on the events surrounding his sacking, John Hurst of the Australian wrote of Cairns: he has this need to believe in the capacity for good in everybody. He desperately wants to believe that other people are or can be thoughtful, as charitable as he has tried to be. . . that whatever his own errors of judgement they will forgive him as he would forgive.69

In the cruel world of politics forgiveness was an alien concept. In assessing Whitlam’s axing of Cairns, it is also impossible to ignore the climate in which the decision was made. As Ormonde shrewdly observes, in ‘calmer political times’ Cairns might have survived, but with the government ‘under siege, he was the sacrificial offering’. This was essentially how Cairns saw his dismissal. But he was adamant that Whitlam was wrong to think he could save the government in this way. It was a short-term fix that would ultimately make Labor’s defeat more certain: when a Labor government is on a sled racing across the snow from the wolves, it is a mistake to believe that every now and again one of its members can be thrown off and that will stop the chase. The wolves will devour each as they are thrown to them, gaining confidence from each one, that it will not be long before they even have the leader to devour. . .

In analysing his dismissal Cairns did not, however, stop there. He also saw it as symptomatic of a Labor government that was by mid-1975 in full political and ideological retreat.70 To be fair to Whitlam, there is nothing to suggest he relished this second and final sacking of Cairns. While driven by what he saw as the immediate political realities of the situation, he realised Cairns’ loss was a sickening blow to both his government and the party. There is no need to doubt his sincerity when he told the House on 9 July: The dismissal of a Deputy Prime Minister, for whatever reason, cannot but be damaging to any Government. This dismissal of a Deputy Leader, from the Ministry, particularly one held in the regard—the affection—of his Party in and out of Parliament as is the honourable member for Lalor, is a tragedy for all the Party, not least its Leader.

Interviewed the following day, Whitlam said he had found the dumping of Cairns ‘distressing’. He seemed anxious that the sacking might be interpreted as the denouement of their long power struggle. His decision to remove Cairns, the Prime Minister admitted, was particularly ‘difficult for me. . . because so many of the public or people in the party will think this is to take advantage or to get rid of a rival’. In an aside, Whitlam noted that he and Cairns had ‘never had raised voices or rudeness in almost 20 years together; Cairns later confirmed this fact, but added that they had never really shared a personal conversation.71 To the end, then, these two great ideological and political protagonists had remained polite strangers. The firing of Cairns failed to staunch the flood of stories concerning the government’s loan-raising activities. The media’s gaze reverted to the Connor–Khemlani negotiations. Whitlam decided to try to defuse the issue by calling a special sitting of the House of Representatives on 9 July. The Prime Minister’s strategy and that of other government speakers during the sitting, was to preserve Connor’s position at all costs, whereas the ‘already politically dead’ Cairns was left undefended. 72 As a

result, what was always going to be a traumatic experience for Cairns was transformed into a cruel and lonely ordeal. The final act in the drama surrounding Cairns’ dismissal was played out in the party room on 14 July. In calling the meeting Whitlam delivered an ultimatum to Caucus members, saying that if they voted to reinstate Cairns in the ministry he would refuse to nominate him for a ministerial commission. On the eve of the meeting Cairns’ spirits were lifted by a large, emotion-charged rally at the Collingwood Town Hall organised by the ALP Greek committee. After he spoke, Cairns was mobbed by members of the audience who pressed forward to shake his hand and hug him. One man leapt onto the stage and read out a motion appealing to the FPLP to reinstate Cairns. It was passed by acclamation.73 In the cold light of day, however, there was never any real chance that Caucus would revolt against the Prime Minister’s decision. In opposing Whitlam’s motion that the position of deputy leadership be declared vacant, Cairns noted glumly that there was ‘a certain inevitability over what has happened’.74 Arguing that the Prime Minister had made up his mind on political grounds, he asked: ‘would the political situation be worse if he had supported me as he supported Rex Connor?’ He hit a nerve with his complaint that it was impossible for him to be judged fairly in the face of Whitlam’s ultimatum. The debate on Cairns’ fate dragged on for almost two hours, sidetracked by procedural wrangles. Senator George Georges asked Whitlam whether he was prepared to withdraw his threatened veto of Cairns so that the vote could be conducted without duress. The Caucus chairman, Senator Bill Brown, ruled the question out of order. In the main debate five members spoke in support of Cairns, led by the Minister for Health, Doug Everingham, who described him as one of Labor’s great leaders and ‘a symbol for that light on the hill’. Everingham was followed by Georges, Uren, Cass and Senator Jim Keefe. Other than Whitlam, only two members spoke in favour of the original motion and against Cairns. They were the Attorney-General, Kep Enderby, and a New

South Wales backbencher, Bob Whan. Enderby dared to mention Junie Morosi, a figure which until then had hovered, like Banquo’s ghost, in the shadows of the debate. Whitlam meticulously summed up the case for the prosecution, warning darkly that Sear Cowls was ‘peddling many things about the press that could come out at any time’. The motion that the deputy leadership be declared vacant was carried 55–33, with Cairns receiving a solid core of Left-wing support. Determined to fight to the end, he contested the ministerial vacancy created by his sacking. Nine nominations were put forward and Cairns survived to the eighth and final ballot, when he was defeated by the Western Australian MHR Joe Berinson, 54–37. Within five months the Whitlam Government followed Cairns into political oblivion. The best efforts of Whitlam and Hayden to steer a course of orthodoxy and respectability were undone in October by new revelations about Connor’s dealings with Khemlani. Connor was dismissed by the Prime Minister, but Fraser had his ‘reprehensible’ circumstance and promptly announced that the Opposition intended to defer supply. The ensuing impasse between the Labor government and the coalition-controlled Senate was broken on 11 November when the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, terminated Whitlam’s appointment as Prime Minister. One month later the ALP was wiped out at the polls. To Cairns, Kerr’s action and the following electoral rout were merely the final indignities for a government whose lifeblood had been drained by the earlier events of 1975. In Oil in Troubled Waters he wrote: The victory of the Liberal-Country parties was not a victory of an alternative to Labor; it was a victory of the prevailing hegemony made more certain by Labor’s acknowledgement and acceptance of so much of it. We were not replaced by an alternative; we were assimilated by the ‘true’ representatives of what we had finally so much admitted was ‘true’75

There could be no more bitter post-mortem on the Whitlam Government.

10 ‘s ome wac k o theory ’ 1976–1990 PEOPLE EITHER SIGHED AND RECEDED INTO MEMORY, OR TROTTED OUT SET PIECE OPINIONS WHEN I SAID I WAS GOING TO TALK TO DR JIM CAIRNS. ‘AH, YES. POOR OLD JIM,’ WAS THE STANDARD RESPONSE. THEY FELT THEY KNEW HIM, AND MOST HAD HIM PLACED IN A BOX MARKED ‘SPENT FORCE’, OR WORSE STILL, ‘ECCENTRIC’. SOME SAW A FLAWED GREAT MAN; OTHERS, A CONTEMPORARY CHIDLEY HAUNTING OUT-OF-THEWAY PUBLIC PLACES IN SEARCH OF RECOGNITION FOR SOME WACKO THEORY. Peter Ellingsen, ‘The lonely world of Jim Cairns’, Age, 18 November 1987.

I N T H E A F T E R M AT H O F 1 9 7 5 , Jim Cairns took flight into utopianism.

The experience of the Whitlam Government in 1974–75 confirmed what Cairns had suspected even before Labor had come to office: the pursuit of radical social change through parliamentary reformism was doomed to failure. In his 1972 book The Quiet Revolution he had forecast that a Labor government would inevitably find its power to implement social change circumscribed by an entrenched capitalist hegemony. He had signalled his belief that the quest for socialism had to shift emphasis away from centralised state power and political reformism to grassroots activity directed at building a counter-hegemony to capitalism. Cairns

emerged from the Whitlam Government even more certain of this view. The difference was he was now confident that, with the assistance of Junie Morosi, he had come closer to locating the means to build that counter-hegemony. It did not lie in conventional politics nor in changing the economic structure, but rather in the domain of psychology, or what he describes as human relations. The essential precondition to creating a new consciousness and a better society was to understand and change human behaviour at its source. In other words, social change had to be prefigured in individual change. This basic idea sustained Cairns over the next two decades. Typically, even as he parted ways with the Labor Party after 1975, Cairns was not content to confine himself to the realm of theory. He looked for an appropriate vehicle to give practical expression to the new direction in his thinking. The result was a short but turbulent involvement in the alternative lifestyle movement. Cairns entered the movement hopeful that it would evolve into a model of human liberation for the rest of society. However, after a promising start at the 1976 Cotter River Confest, the movement was quickly beset by internal conflict and other difficulties. Cairns, who briefly acquired guru status within the movement, found his role increasingly mired in disharmony and controversy. By the early 1980s he had effectively cut his ties with the counter-culture. Soon after, his decade-long intellectual collaboration with Junie Morosi also disintegrated under the pressure of both theoretical and personal differences. Following Labor’s crushing election defeat of 13 December 1975, approaches were made to Cairns from within the ALP to retire from parliament and vacate his seat of Lalor for Bob Hawke. Cairns flatly rejected the overtures. Indeed, as Ormonde indicates, the pressure for him to step aside for Hawke actually helped Cairns to decide to stay on in parliament. He was suspicious of Hawke, believing that he was as egotistical and power-hungry as Whitlam.1

A more important incentive for Cairns to remain in parliament after 1975 was that it afforded him a platform from which to project his new theories on social change. He had always treated parliament primarily as a forum for disseminating ideas, and this approach was even more evident now that he no longer had any interest in the prospect of executive government. Cairns’ role in the parliament in 1976–77 was more like an independent than a member of a major political party. From the time of his dismissal from the Whitlam ministry he largely divorced himself from the activities of the Labor Party. The Caucus minutes in the final months of 1975 show no evidence of any involvement in party-room meetings. His role in parliament was also negligible, though he did manage on one occasion to irritate Whitlam with a question about the government’s policy on the unfolding crisis in East Timor. Cairns’ estrangement from the ALP was highlighted during the election campaign. He invited the scorn of his colleagues when, on the day of Labor’s official campaign opening, he was in Sydney helping to launch Morosi’s book Sex, Prejudice and Politics. To compound matters, less than a fortnight before polling day, Cairns and Morosi featured in a documentary screened on Channel 9 in which they spoke frankly about their friendship and the events of 1975.2 These were unhelpful distractions at a desperate time for the ALP. On 27 January 1976 the FPLP met for the first time following its election defeat. In the leadership ballots Cairns adhered to the Left ticket by voting for Frank Crean as leader and Tom Uren as deputy leader. Crean was decisively beaten by Whitlam; Uren fared better, narrowly prevailing over the Right’s candidate, Paul Keating. Uren’s election formalised the passing of the mantle of unofficial leadership of the Labor Left from Cairns. Another sign of his retreat to a self-imposed exile was his decision not to nominate for a position in shadow Cabinet.3 For the remainder of 1976–77 Cairns continued to show scant interest in Caucus proceedings. He did display some renewed interest in parliament, although as a humble Opposition backbencher his opportunities to enter

debate were limited. Cairns asked a number of questions during 1976 relating to the Indonesian annexation of East Timor, lamenting Australia’s failure to take a stronger stand in support of selfdetermination for the East Timorese. He also raised concerns about the economic and social impact of the Fraser Government’s expenditure cuts.4 It was, however, a speech on the Budget in September 1976 that reflected just how far Cairns had shifted outside the political mainstream. He spoke at length about the nexus between capitalist hegemony, social alienation and psychological deprivation. The sense of marginalisation attached to Cairns was accentuated by the setting in which he delivered the speech, late in the evening and to a virtually empty chamber. A moment of special poignancy came when, looking at the surrounding vacant benches, he declared part of the result of alienation to be a ‘mutual loss of contact between people, the replacement of natural human relationships by artificial, formalistic, meaningless contacts like those most of us have with each other in this Parliament’. His conclusion that it was not economic growth but rather ‘human growth that counts’ provoked a derisive response from the National Party member for Riverina, John Sullivan, who thought that Cairns was ‘totally out of touch with reality’. Much of the speech was a condensed version of the theoretical material that Cairns and Morosi were crafting together through their combined research. Following his dismissal from the ministry, Cairns had retained Morosi on his slimmed-down staff in the position of research assistant. As his ties to the Labor Party withered away, he drew closer to Morosi, finding in her intellectual and emotional shelter against an otherwise isolated existence in Canberra. In May 1976 Cairns told Toni McRae of the Sydney Sun he had enjoyed with Morosi over the past eighteen months ‘a more continuing exchange of ideas’ than with anyone else previously in his life.5 Apart from theoretical research, Cairns devoted himself during 1976 to preparing for an alternative lifestyle conference and festival (termed

Confest) planned for December. The genesis of this event was a statement he had made in April suggesting that a national conference be convened on social change and alternative lifestyles. Over the following months Cairns helped organise and spoke at meetings across the country promoting the idea. By August a rudimentary organisational structure was in place with Cairns its official convenor, and in November the name Down to Earth (DIE) was adopted.6 A circular announcing that the Confest was to be held in Canberra on 10–14 December was sent out from Cairns’ parliamentary office to environmental organisations, student, peace and radical political groups, and counter-culture communities. The largest of the latter communities was centred on the northern New South Wales coast. Known in counter-cultural circles as the Rainbow region, it had sprung up after the 1973 Aquarius alternative lifestyle and arts festival at Nimbin. The circular, which included a thumbnail sketch of themes Cairns had explored earlier that year in a self-published pamphlet entitled The Theory of the Alternative, invoked the vision of a ‘new renascence’ of free co-operating individuals that would offer an alternative to the ‘selfinterest’ and ‘mechanical obedience or senseless revolt’ of contemporary society. This would spring from ‘individuals and groups; from workers, students, ethnic communities, communes, cooperatives, sex reformers, feminists, peace activists . . . They become the community for radical change.’ The Confest was intended to ‘see if there is in Australia this community for change’.7 Clearly, Cairns envisaged the Confest becoming the focus for the development of an open coalition of grassroots radical groups, reminiscent of the Moratorium movement. The difference was that, whereas the Moratorium had galvanised around the issue of opposition to the Vietnam War and had failed to evolve into a more general movement for social change, Cairns now hoped to create a mass movement directed specifically at reconstructing society. Another notable difference was that in the Moratorium movement

Cairns had functioned as theoretician and figurehead rather than organiser; in the early stages of DTE he filled all of these roles. Literature distributed in the days before the Confest claimed it was a spontaneous gathering, not organised or controlled by anyone. 8 The reality behind this rhetoric was that a core group of about twenty volunteers, among them Morosi, had been responsible for the preparations. Cairns did the lion’s share. It was a task he did not enjoy and which did not come naturally to him, but was essential to get DTE off the ground. Apart from publicity, the most critical matter he dealt with was the location of an appropriate site on which to hold the Confest. The Canberra showgrounds were initially mooted, but ultimately the Cotter Reserve was chosen. About 20 kilometres south-west of Canberra, this picturesque 6-hectare site lay at the junction of the Murrumbidgee and Cotter rivers. Overseas guests were invited, with Dr James Prescott of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wilhelm Reich’s daughter, Dr Eva Reich, both agreeing to attend. In addition, Cairns helped to bankroll and oversee the financial arrangements of the Confest.9 By the first week of December preparations were under way at the Cotter Reserve. Large geodesic domes gave the site what the Canberra Times described as ‘a futuristic holiday camp’ appearance. A makeshift kitchen and showers were constructed. Meanwhile, the first visitors had begun to trickle in and set up camp among the towering eucalypt trees.10 When the Confest officially opened on a warm, sunny morning on Friday, 10 December, over 2000 people were present. The event began with a ‘sharing’ ritual designed to break down inhibitions, in which participants danced, hugged and massaged one another. Morosi summoned people to the ‘sharing’ by walking among the village of tents ringing a bell. As convenor and undeclared guiding light of the Confest, Cairns delivered an informal speech to the assembled crowd. Stripped to the waist, he told them that they could reform the ‘acquisitive, alienated, corrupt, and violent society’ in which they lived by liberating the ‘life force’ which

everyone had within them but was usually ‘repressed’. If this life force could be freed in them, then one day it could be liberated in whole societies.11 Over the weekend of 11–12 December the numbers camping on the site swelled to about 5000 and there was a similar number of day visitors. As Cairns later put it, they were ‘all sorts of people; in Jaguars and BMWs, on push-bikes and on foot’. Some had come from as far afield as Western Australia and Darwin. The larger than anticipated attendance placed enormous pressure on the limited facilities and haphazard organisation. A few days after the Confest, Cairns told Ormonde it had been an ‘exercise in participatory democracy’. Yet he confessed that the absence of a formal organisational structure had been a source of considerable personal stress, causing him ‘many mornings of anguish’. Activities were diverse and included workshops on personal growth, natural childbirth, the free family, organic food, meditation, yoga, auric massage and iridology. Cairns, whose predominant interest was in the ‘theoretical side’ of the Confest, devoted much of his time to the ideology workshop.12 In a letter to Nation Review one of the organisers, Kerry Bindon, claimed that thousands had contributed to this workshop. He went on ethereally: Through all the different perspectives . . . a common position was articulated for the Movement . . . not to define its futures, which all felt should be open ended and free, but as a statement of the present, trembling on the brink of the new in the light of the experience of the past.

Robert Hefner of the Canberra Times, who listened to Prescott and Reich speak, reported that both had conveyed a similar message: ‘the more physical touching shared by people for the purpose of pleasure and understanding, the less the tendency toward violence in their society’.13 The Confest ended on 14 December with a pageant and the adoption of a manifesto for alternative living. Media coverage of the event had been sparse, with the notable exception of the Canberra Times. Its

otherwise open-minded account of the Confest was marred by a heavyhanded satirical piece by Ian Warden on the day after it closed. Warden seemed to be preoccupied with the nudity of some of the participants: while a shirtless Cairns had not been a ‘pretty sight’, he regretted that Morosi had remained ‘stoically clothed’. The Confest, Warden sneered, had been an exercise in middle-class indulgence. Despite this cynicism, Warden admitted that it was possible that the gathering might help ‘in bevelling some of the hard edges off our brittle society’.14 Those who participated in the Cotter River Confest had little doubt that it had done this and much more besides. Within counter-culture circles Cotter River holds a special status. It is viewed as having been a profoundly moving, almost spiritual, experience, and a seminal moment in the development of the alternative lifestyle movement within Australia. In a short history of the DTE organisation he wrote as editor of Down to Earth News in 1983, George Schmidt asserted that Cotter River ‘created an euphoric state of recognising in each other a “fellow traveller” in the quest for a better society’.15 Interviewed more than a decade later, Schmidt had not changed his mind. He compared the experience to a ‘religious ecstasy’ and insisted that the legacy of Cotter River was still apparent in a number of alternative communities that had grown out of the event. Schmidt also acknowledged the importance of Cairns to that inaugural Confest, describing him as its ‘focal point’.16 Kerry Bindon had made a similar point, telling Ian Mackay of the Melbourne Herald that the whole event was ‘being maintained’ through Cairns’ efforts. Cairns was regarded ‘as a visionary, as a wise man, an elder who sees the needs of all the Earth, of everyone on it, of us’. Not everyone saw his involvement in such a heady light. Bindon conceded there ‘is a lot of talk that he is using us for his own ends’. In his letter to Nation Review later that month, Bindon expressed confidence that the suspicion of Cairns was unwarranted and attributed it to a ‘neurotic reaction’.17

Cairns shared in the euphoria of Cotter River. A statement he released on the final day of the Confest bears ample testament to this.18 Any incredulity had been thrown to the wind, replaced by a state of near rapture. It was as if he had been part of a collective quasi-religious revelation and after years of fruitless search the Holy Grail of social change had been unearthed. ‘For the past five days’, Cairns proclaimed, over 9000 people have shared a rare experience—in an explosion of goodwill, marked by gentleness, tolerance and love, we have shared a growing realisation of the possibility of radical change in ourselves and society . . . We have all undergone a subtle experience of extreme power and beauty which has radically altered our understanding of human and social potential . . . Where once many of us were afraid to touch each other, afraid to be intimate, afraid of love, we have become free.

Those who had attended the Confest were the ‘possessors of a new and greater consciousness of human potential’ and would return to society carrying what was once a dream and continue it as a reality . . . no words can really say what we are—no words can describe the impact we will achieve—we are the seeds of change sowed not only here but throughout the world. We are the seeds of change that will ultimately transform humankind.

The success of Cotter River only made more inevitable a breach between the old and new worlds of Cairns. Predictably, he was unable to generate any interest in DTE within the Labor Party. Uren visited the Confest, more as a gesture of support than an expression of genuine curiosity. Uren found it ‘embarrassing’ and was extremely dubious about the wisdom of involvement with the counter-culture. In an interview with Ormonde in January 1976, Uren had not even tried to disguise his scorn for the ideological direction in which Cairns was heading, describing it as ‘bullshit’. Cass was another from the Labor Left who was unimpressed by the turn in Cairns’ thinking. He could find little that was ‘illuminating’ in Cairns’ ‘rehashing’ of Reich. Significantly, not just Labor colleagues felt this way. Sam Goldbloom later recalled a meeting of the CICD sometime

after 1975 at which Cairns was invited to speak. According to Goldbloom, Cairns gave ‘one of these very obtuse speeches about morality and human liberation . . . and people just sat there po-faced’.19 There is no doubt Cairns was conscious of the bewilderment and ridicule that his latest activities were arousing among his former associates. He was, of course, accustomed to being viewed as eccentric. A powerful blend of moral courage and a highly developed sense of selfrighteousness had always helped to shield him from the negative judgement of others and enabled him to follow a path of nonconformity. Nonetheless, he was hurt by his growing marginalisation. The years 1976–77 were a time of painful transition and broken equilibrium. On the one hand, he was embarking on a new and potentially exciting chapter in his life but, on the other hand, mourning the passing of the old and all that went with it. A passage from his 1982 book Survival Now provides an insight into the depth of the loss he endured in those years: In 1975 I was Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Minister for several things. I had been a member of the National Parliament for twenty years, and of the Labor Party for a lot longer. Suddenly I had to confront the ‘shock of non-being’. I was no longer any of these things. I was just me. It seemed to me that from everywhere nothing but pressure came It seemed that even the air I was breathing was against me. It was a matter of ‘nameless anxieties’. Jobs had gone, social approval had gone . . . I was almost on my own.20

What is palpable here is that, despite his loss of faith in the parliamentary process, the demise of his political career in 1975 had been a wrenching experience for Cairns. It had shaken him to the core, rocking his self-esteem and sense of identity. What made it all the worse was his belief that his Labor colleagues had deserted him. Although, with the exception of Uren, he had never been particularly close to any of them, his relationship with the party had been important to him. Indeed, as Morosi observed in 1996, his difficulty in developing and sustaining

close relationships had created the need for ‘surrogates’, and the ALP had served that role for a large chunk of his life. In this context, his dumping from the ministry in July 1975 by Whitlam, and more specifically its endorsement by Caucus, left him feeling personally rejected. Besides stripping him of a job and the attendant trappings, it had deprived him of a sense of belonging. His reaction in these circumstances was to curl up and withdraw. Cairns admitted as much in 1983. Ruminating on what had happened to him in 1975, he remarked that it was a long time before he had felt ready ‘to come out from under the bed’.21 The trauma endured by Cairns in the second half of the 1970s was exacerbated by the convulsions in his personal life. His relationship with his family, especially Gwen, was severely tested in those years. Naturally enough, the principal source of that strain was the need to reconcile his 35-year marriage to Gwen with the presence of Morosi in his life. From the mid-1970s through to the mid-1980s he divided his time between his family and Morosi. It is impossible to know the extent of the problems that were created as a result, but Cairns has provided some clues. In May 1976 he confessed to Toni McRae that he was unsure whether, in the confines of the rigid social mores imposed by society, it was feasible to sustain both a marriage and a relationship such as the one he shared with Morosi. Acknowledging the predicament in which he had placed Gwen, he explained that marriage was ‘male dominated. Women have very little alternative. Unfortunately the older they get the less alternative they have.’ True to his new philosophy of personal liberation, Cairns implied that he was not prepared to sacrifice his relationship with Morosi, despite the upset that it had caused: ‘I do know it’s not possible to do what you have to do for yourself without hurting somebody’.22 Three years later Cairns reflected on the same issues with Adele Horin of the National Times. Rather coyly he spoke of what happens ‘when loyalty in the old form like mine to Gwen . . . conflict[s] with a new pattern of loyalty like mine to Junie’. He admitted that tensions remained in the process of adaption: ‘Gwen has not changed and that

makes it hard’. However, Cairns now appeared optimistic that an accommodation was being forged: ‘A new relationship has got to be founded . . . to effectively reconcile that [conflict] without any substantial loss of value. It can be done; it is being done.’ In his final interview with Ormonde in 1981, while asserting that he was closer than ever to Morosi, Cairns claimed that the tensions created by their relationship had eased. Yet he did not disguise the personal toll, pointing out that on many occasions over the past half dozen years he had been ‘unable to sustain the pressure. I just had to get away . . . to go away and hide somewhere.’ The next year, in the acknowledgments page in Survival Now, he signalled that the process of reconciliation was complete. ‘Events of recent years’, he wrote, had placed great stress upon the family, ‘but the result has been that we are closer together than before’. Morosi concurs that a form of co-existence gradually evolved, though she hints that she and Gwen never shared anything more than an uneasy truce.23 A sense of mounting futility coupled with feelings of humiliation and betrayal, culminated in Cairns’ announcement on 10 August 1977 that he would not recontest Lalor at the next election. If it was fruitless trying to elicit interest in his new ideas within the Labor Party, then it was still a more thankless task attempting to do so within the wider parliament. In a speech to the House in March, Cairns emphasised again how it was vital to look beyond economics and examine the causes of the ‘social and psychological’ afflictions that disfigured society. This time his words did not even stir derision; they were simply ignored.24 Cairns announced his intended retirement from parliament with a pompously titled statement, ‘A Call for a New Society’. 25 He pointed out that the ‘political process for me has become frustrating, time consuming and unproductive’. The election of Labor governments was still important; but it was ‘essential not just to work for more of what we have —uranium, jobs, money, anonymity—but for a new society and for a spirit of friendship and co-operation’. He invited others to join him in a

new path of grassroots activism: I want to work in the future to try to help people become more aware of the causes of their own limitations, meaninglessness and powerlessness. . . This work can only be done by creating new living experiences in community groups of many kinds—local, ethnic, women’s, cooperatives, workers’, learning and growth centres, neighbourhood houses, refuges and so on, so that people can achieve important things and get rid of their powerlessness and limitations. The political process has rarely tried to do this . . .

Despite its inevitability, the decision to leave parliament was far from easy for Cairns. On the day of the announcement he told reporters that it had caused him ‘a great deal of anguish’. That evening on the ABC television program This Day Tonight , Cairns noted that his disillusionment with parliamentary politics harked back to his writing of The Quiet Revolution. But he admitted that the ‘ultimate dissatisfaction was the middle of 1975 with the lack of solidarity, lack of decency in the Parliamentary Labor Party’.26 Morosi, together with his family and Uren, was one of the few whom Cairns had consulted over the decision; she thought this was the catalyst for his desire to leave. Remaining in parliament and in the ALP had become too painful, the equivalent of a ‘sword in the side’. She regretted the decision, believing that ‘he would never get as powerful a lectern as parliament’. When the Adelaide Advertiser requested a comment from her, she said prophetically: ‘I don’t think anyone else will fill the role Jim Cairns filled in Parliament’.27 The announcement prompted a flood of political obituaries. The major dailies ran editorials and opinion pieces. Despite the thousands of words expended, there was a depressing sameness about the analyses of Cairns’ career. Overwhelmingly, it was portrayed as a story of unfulfilment and failure. Cairns was seen as a man who by nature had been suited to Opposition. His career had reached its apotheosis at the time of the Moratorium movement, only to have his weaknesses exposed in government and eventually to be brought low by his own selfdestructive tendencies. The Australian summed it up: ‘He is a man made

for Opposition rather than government. He achieved his heights in protest: he will be remembered as the conscience rather than the dynamo of the Labor Party.’ Some of the commentary was even less generous. Michelle Grattan of the Age wrote: ‘Judged in any normal terms, Jim Cairns will leave parliament with a record of considerable disaster behind him, despite being proved right on Vietnam’. She also described his planned departure from parliament as the culmination of his ‘trek to political irrelevance’. It was left to the Canberra Times to cast a different perspective on Cairns’ announcement and to discern a significance in his status as a voice of dissent against the established order. An editorial headed ‘A Rebel to be Heeded’ declared that any ‘successful human society’ needed ‘rebels, idealists, philosophers, eccentrics’ and suggested that Cairns ‘could prove the truth of what a much greater revolutionary than he said a long time ago: “No one can be a prophet in his own country”‘. Although an enigma, the Canberra Times considered him ‘an example of the human spirit searching for new ideas’.28 Mercifully perhaps, the end of Cairns’ parliamentary career came sooner than anticipated. Although an election was not due for another twelve months, the Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, called a poll for December 1977. Since his August announcement Cairns’ appearances in the House had been rare; his one major speech delivered in September passionately denounced the uranium industry. 29 The final sitting day of the thirtieth parliament, 8 November, was Cairns’ last in the House. In question time he asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Andrew Peacock, about the government’s inaction in legislating to protect whales as endangered species. His absence when the valedictory speeches were delivered during a special adjournment that evening was made all the more noticeable by the presence of Kim Beazley Snr and Frank Crean, the other two Labor warhorses not standing for re-election. Beazley and Crean addressed the House and received tributes from both sides of the chamber. There were a few polite words for Cairns, the warmest from Paul Keating, but the strongest impression was that his contribution to

Australia’s post-war political life had already begun to be erased.30 One reason why Cairns had spent so little time in the parliament in the final months of 1977 was that he was pouring his energies into preparations for a second Confest planned for December. The choice of location was crucial because he hoped that it would become the site for an ongoing alternative community once the Confest was over. Cairns had hatched the idea for a permanent ‘national festival conference centre’ in the wake of Cotter River’s success. At the time of the announcement of his decision to leave parliament, he told journalists that it was envisaged that the centre would eventually become self-sustaining. As well, it would engage in ‘research-learning activity’ on models of human growth, both physical and psychological. People would be encouraged to visit the centre ‘to see new ways of living’ and then ‘return to the normal environment and in this way the alternative lifestyle could develop as they passed on their knowledge’. In other words, the centre would act as an incubator for an alternative society. Cairns also indicated that the site of the centre would be ‘bought through contributions and held by a cooperative’.31 Several properties were inspected around Canberra and in the Aruluen Valley between Braidwood and Moruya on the New South Wales south coast, but there were few properties that could be leased with an option to purchase for a modest outlay. Eventually an 1100-hectare property called Mount Oak was selected, a short distance from the sleepy hamlet of Bredbo about 80 kilometres south of Canberra. Nestled in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, the land was bordered by a sluggish and undrinkable section of the Murrumbidgee River and the Monaro Highway that links Canberra and Cooma. Pastoral activity had left the property deeply dissected by erosion gullies, the rolling hills and ravines sparsely covered in natural grasses and a thin scattering of shrubs and stunted trees. As Cairns later admitted ruefully, it was a ‘very unattractive’ piece of land. 32 Certainly, it seemed an unlikely place for a

future Utopia. To make things worse, at the time of the 1977 Confest the region was in drought. Ian Warden was again despatched to cover the event for the Canberra Times. He vividly described the conditions confronting the several thousand who took part in the Confest over a ten-day period between late December and the early New Year: Oh, the dust! Perhaps the whole area would be transformed by a few good showers but in the meantime it looks like an elaborate film set for the production of a film about Hell. Dead trees, dead sheep, tawny turf and the profuse dung of assorted animals.33

The barren setting was matched by the primitive quality of the facilities. Unlike Cotter River, everything had to be constructed from scratch. The toilets were pits in the ground and the small number of showers were hopelessly overcrowded. Drinking water had to be trucked in from Cooma daily and many participants were laid low by an outbreak of ‘Bredbo bug’. Moreover, in the parched landscape fire was a constant anxiety.34 The harshness of the environment at Bredbo combined with a host of factors to prevent a recapturing of the magical spirit that had prevailed at Cotter River. As the secretary of the DTE Rainbow region, David Spain, later wrote in Nimbin News, the Bredbo Confest was a ‘demoralising’ experience for the movement. To some extent, this disappointment was not a surprise. The euphoria of the inaugural DTE Confest was unsustainable; Bredbo was destined to be a let-down in comparison. The problems, however, were deeper. At Cotter River complaints about the roles of Cairns and Morosi, and to a lesser extent David Ditchburn, had been only barely audible; at Bredbo they grew into a rumble. Steve Kelly, in an otherwise positive review of the Confest for Nation Review, referred to [the] big question mark that hangs over the entire DTE organisation and it has three names: Jim Cairns, Junie Morosi and David Ditchburn . . . A lot of people at the festival,

particularly those who had gotten actively involved, spent quite a bit of time discussing this trio and trying to work them out.35

Much of the criticism of Cairns that surfaced at Bredbo was the inevitable fate of any guru or mentor within the confines of a relatively small community. Admiration and idolisation are often forerunners to envy and resentment. On the other hand, gurus have a long history of succumbing to authoritarian behaviour, which eventually breeds revolt among their followers. In his previous incarnation as a charismatic leader in the Moratorium movement, Cairns had seemed free of any such propensity, yet at Bredbo, the principal complaint against him, Morosi and Ditchburn related to their perceived dictatorial control of the Contest. According to George Schmidt, ‘every decision had to be countersigned . . . by Jim or Junie or David’. In an uncanny echo of the events of 1974–75, the campfire gossip at Bredbo singled out Morosi as the one who was pulling the strings. Kelly noted that many felt Cairns was ‘a mouthpiece for the exotic Ms Morosi’. Meanwhile, Ditchburn, who was in charge of the financial administration, was regarded as the worst offender in flouting the Contest’s democratic procedures.36 At another level, evidence emerged at Bredbo of a fundamental incompatibility between the expectations that Cairns had of DTE and those which the movement had of him. Schmidt claims that what became noticeable was Cairns’ ‘non-participation’, apart from ‘his talks’. Adele Horin detected a similar aloofness at the following Confest at Berri in South Australia in April 1979. In the National Times, Horin observed that Cairns remained ‘demurely on the sidelines’, eschewing the ‘open expressions of emotion, uninhibited involvement in massages and other sensuous pursuits, midnight gyrations around communal campfires, even the vegetarian food’. To have expected anything else from Cairns was probably unreasonable. A lifetime pattern of puritanism could not be easily reversed. He was uneasy with some of the mores of the counterculture, whether it be the nudity of many participants or the

widespread use of drugs, principally marijuana. Of the former, he told Horin somewhat unconvincingly: ‘Like everyone else will sooner or later, I had to get used to it’. He struggled particularly to come to terms with the practice whereby Confest participants freely hugged one another. Schmidt recalls that, when embraced, Cairns ‘gently froze . . . the way a shy kid does’. Finally, in deference to his obvious discomfort, the others stopped trying to hug him.37 The tendency of Cairns to shrink away from involvement in many Confest activities also reflected that, for him, the counter-culture was primarily of theoretical interest. Cairns did not look to the movement as an agent of his own personal liberation. In fact, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Cairns liberation found its dominant expression in his relationship with Morosi and did not transcend that relationship. True, in the period after 1975 he did experiment with some counter-cultural techniques: vegetarianism, herbal medicine, and acupuncture treatment to relieve the chronic headaches he had suffered since his bashing several years earlier. As well, he studied elements of astrology, iridology and Tai Chi.38 But none of these appear to have had an enduring impact on his lifestyle. Writing in Nation Review in August 1978, Cairns pointed out that being ‘alternative does not consist of replacing cigarettes with pot, short hair with long, beer with apple juice, city living with a rural commune’. This was mere window-dressing. Ultimately, being ‘alternative’ was measured by an individual’s level of consciousness; it was about adopting ‘new values and starting to live by them now wherever you are’.39 Allied with this was Cairns’ fear that many in the counter-culture showed little regard for the broader social context. The quest for individual liberation easily degenerates into solipsism. Disturbing signs of this appeared at Bredbo. There was ‘no concern’, Cairns recalls, ‘with the things I was interested in: social change . . . the explanation of economic and social power’. Cairns found it impossible to attract more

than a small proportion of those at the Confest to his talks. The majority, he observes disdainfully, were only ‘interested in massage’. 40 The lack of social conscience or responsibility manifested itself in other ways, too. Cairns was dismayed that an estimated half of those who attended Bredbo did not pay their $10 registration fee–a major factor in the Confest’s failure to meet its costs. Even worse, a significant amount of equipment was pilfered.41 Perhaps the darkest shadow hanging over the Bredbo Confest was the contentious issue of whether the DTE movement should support Cairns’ scheme to establish a permanent community by purchasing the Mount Oak property. According to Steve Kelly, debate on this question ‘flared into open dissent’. The most common objection claimed the land was unsuitable for such a project. Assisted by Bill Mollison of the University of Tasmania, Cairns countered this argument with a plan for regenerating the land and reversing the effects of over-grazing by the introduction of permaculture, essentially a process of mixed cropping. A system of key-line dams was also proposed to overcome the problem of aridity by storing rainwater in the soil. The resistance to buying Mount Oak was not exclusively driven by practical concerns. Among those from the Rainbow region, there was unease that Mount Oak could become a competitor to northern New South Wales as a mecca for counter-culture activity. Furthermore, those already unhappy at the influence of the Cairns-Morosi-Ditchburn axis harboured a suspicion that Mount Oak might provide a means for consolidating their control. One cynic remarked that ‘Bredbo was about to become Jim Cairns [sic] Retirement Farm’.42 Eventually, a decision was reached to purchase Mount Oak. As originally envisaged by Cairns, the estimated $60 000 purchase price was to be financed through donations invested in a foundation. Ultimately, the property title was to be held by a collective trust, effectively free land for communal development and an alternative to the normal system of

capitalist ownership. Announcing the foundation’s creation at the Bredbo Confest, Cairns outlined its aims: trustees of the foundation will be expected to make a commitment. . .to bring about or encourage human growth in themselves and in others in a spiritual awakening and to assist the development of communities for this purpose . . . And, for almost the first time in Australia since white people came here, to establish communities not based upon personal gain.

He defined the guidelines by which the foundation would operate. It was to receive funds for specific community projects such as the purchase of Mt Oak, Bredbo. The foundation or members of it shall not by money or property acquire any basis for influence, control or power . . . Each and every person who has attended any Down to Earth Confest shall have the right to participate in the growth of a community project such as Mt Oak.

Finally, Cairns emphasised that, once the ‘legal formalities’ were complete, ‘those who hold that legal skin would not have . . . any control or interest over what happens . . . no rights would derive from ownership’.43 They were words that were to come back to haunt him. Any contentment Cairns felt at the decision to establish Mount Oak as an ongoing community was tempered by disillusionment at the ‘bad atmosphere’ surrounding Bredbo. Later, he described Bredbo in uncharacteristically florid language as an ‘abortion’. He was not only dismayed by the introspectivity of the event, but also incredulous at the power struggles that had surfaced during the Confest. His initial optimism that the counter-culture might provide a ready-made vanguard for a new social consciousness had largely evaporated. He was also disturbed by the strong undercurrent of resentment towards him within the DTE organisation. Customarily, he refused to countenance that there was any validity to the complaints about either himself or Morosi, blaming them instead on a ‘good deal of envy’.44

Although Bredbo marked the beginning of a parting of the ways between Cairns and DTE, a final rupture did not occur for two years. Following Bredbo some of the DTE groups, or families as they were called in alternative lifestyle idiom, became moribund. The major exception was in Victoria, where Cairns played a significant part in maintaining the group’s momentum during 1978-79. His most crucial assistance was to bail it out of a debt accumulated between Cotter River and Bredbo. He helped, too, to get Down to Earth News off the ground and regularly published. He was frequently heard on the weekly DTE program on the radio station 3CR, as well as being a drawcard at DTE conferences. Cairns also arranged the establishment of a centre for DTE known as Earth Haven at Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenongs east of Melbourne, which for a time served as a focal point for workshops and other activities.45 Outside the immediate confines of DTE, Cairns also grabbed every opportunity to disseminate his new theory of social change. Now in his mid-sixties, he showed no signs of slowing down. In the second half of 1978 Cairns contributed a weekly column to Nation Review. It polarised readers. Several letters praised his views as a breath of fresh air; another demanded irritably: ‘For God’s sake can’t you get Jim Cairns to write about something else. Week after week we get virtually the same rambling article about goddesses and hunter gatherers. What’s the point of it all?’46 Taking advantage of his generous travel entitlements as a former parliamentarian, Cairns also criss-crossed the country spreading the message. In 1978 he attended an alternative lifestyle festival in Western Australia, undertook lecture tours of Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland, and travelled to Adelaide to deliver the H. V. Evatt Memorial Lecture.47 On top of this, Cairns commuted weekly to Morosi’s Sydney home, where they pressed on with their research. The third national DTE Confest was held over the Easter long weekend in April 1979 on the banks of the Murray River at Berri in South

Australia. Cairns, though official convenor of the Confest, played almost no part in its organisation. Indeed, in the preparations for the event the trio of Cairns, Morosi and Ditchburn had been shunted aside. Despite lower numbers, the Berri Confest contrasted positively with Bredbo. The site was less remote and barren, and the facilities much better. In a report on Berri for Nimbin News, David Spain claimed that it had restored ‘our faith in ourselves’. He also argued pointedly that the gathering had exploded the ‘myth’ that DTE’s ‘affairs are dominated by some ruling gang’.48 There seems no doubt that, as a result of the sidelining of Cairns, Morosi and Ditchburn, Berri was free of many of the antagonisms that had poisoned the atmosphere at Bredbo. Having given birth to a baby son, Gaelian, a few weeks earlier, Morosi did not attend. Ditchburn turned up with Cairns but played little role, apart from running an orange juice stall. His removal from financial control especially eased tensions although, when Berri returned a handsome profit, questions about Ditchburn’s management of Bredbo gained strength.49 Cairns agreed that Berri was a success, yet he was still disappointed by its social myopia. He again did his best to give the gathering a theoretical underpinning, but to little effect. Adele Horin noted that Cairns provided ‘some of the only serious moments’ amid a ‘picnic atmosphere . . . not disturbed by reminders of the real world’. This was not entirely fair. For instance, on the final day of the Confest hundreds joined in an anti-uranium ritual. As protests go, however, it was an eccentric affair: people sat in concentric circles chanting ‘Aum’, thereby hoping to send enough ‘energy to Kakadu National Park so that uranium might stay in the ground’. Moreover, as Spain acknowledged, many of those at Berri had come with no higher purpose than ‘to consume—the wide variety of food, the spontaneous diversity of acoustic and amplified music, the “laid-back, non-paranoid” atmosphere of nakedness and marijuana-smoking’.50 Buoyed by Bern’s success, representatives from various DTE groups

gathered in Victoria in mid-1979 to plan the organisation’s future. A percentage of the financial surplus from Berri was allocated to assist Mount Oak, but it was decided to treat it as a separate entity rather than as a national DTE project. In short, Mount Oak was being placed at arm’s length from DTE. Peter Van der Wyk of the Rainbow region reported in Nimbin News that the decision arose out of an ‘unwillingness by many to give financial and energy support to Bredbo’. 51 The decision came at a time when the dream of Mount Oak was still struggling to be transformed into reality. The contract for the purchase of the land had been signed by Cairns in December 1978 but was conditional on the transfer of the land from crown lease to freehold. This had required protracted negotiations with the New South Wales government—still unconcluded almost one year later. Finance for the deposit to purchase the property had been supplied by donations received at the Bredbo Confest and pledges of weekly amounts from some of the participants. The exact sum and source of many of the donations later became a bone of contention. What is undisputed is that one young man from Sydney Alex Eunson, contributed his life savings of around $32 000. The balance of the purchase cost was a loan from the Commonwealth Bank for $30 000, with Cairns as guarantor.52 Along with legal and financial complications, Mount Oak was encountering other difficulties. After the Bredbo Confest about 100 people had stayed on to be part of an ongoing community. Four months later, Down to Earth News reported that the numbers living there had declined to less than twenty, one of whom was Eunson. Isolation and the vagaries of the climate were just two of the problems for the fledgling community. Rabbit infestation was another headache. Nevertheless, some progress had been made. A communal house was being constructed and a herb garden had been started. Brian Lavery, one of the community members, still spoke of Mount Oak in evangelical terms: ‘We are not founding just another hippie commune. We are attempting something much more special, much more unique.’53

One year on, and only a short time before DTE decided that it was no longer prepared to sponsor Mount Oak, another of the residents, Ross Morton, provided Down to Earth News with an update on its fortunes. By now the population had dwindled to a ‘hard core’ of half a dozen, and Morton seemed less inclined to indulge in starry-eyed forecasts about the community’s future. He was conscious of the many hurdles that had to be overcome before Mount Oak became fully viable. Water supply remained a ‘critical factor’, as was the infertility of the soil, and the uncertainty surrounding the tenure of the land had inhibited ‘the establishment of permanent schemes and structures’ Enigmatically, Morton referred to ‘a series of personal conflicts and crises’ which had dogged the community. On a more positive note, Morton reported the communal house had been completed, and around it clustered several permanent stone-wood housing structures and herb and vegetable gardens. The re-vegetation of the land had also commenced with the planting of various species of trees. Morton concluded with cautious optimism: ‘We are slowly but surely moving towards a self-sufficient local trading situation . . . life is settling down to a measure of serenity and regularity. The alternative is becoming the alternative establishment.’54 For Cairns, who remained passionately committed to Mount Oak, the decision by DTE to effectively cut it adrift in mid-1979 was a cruel blow. It was one of the underlying factors in his final break with the organisation later that year. Yet another source of friction between Cairns and DTE were moves to give the body a permanent organisational structure. Cairns believed this development would result in an institutionalised and hierarchical structure, stifling participation and spontaneity. Expanding on these concerns in Down to Earth News, he urged the movement against resorting to the orthodoxy of representative democracy. This was, he wrote, ‘part of the old culture and we should not expect to use it as a “model” for the new culture’. However salutary, such a warning seemed a trifle presumptuous coming from someone who had spent over two decades in the highest institution of representative

democracy in the land. DTE should remain, Cairns went on, ‘a participant body of people using structures no more than necessary . . . to get things done, and then coming to an end’. He attacked those who advocated otherwise, suggesting that ‘within the motivations for structure is the desire for them per se as a means of ego expression and satisfaction’. In a direct challenge, Cairns also made it clear he would not be bound by any DTE organisational structure.55 There was some sympathy for Cairns’ position within DTE. A prominent member of DTE Victoria, Peter White, agreed that if a structure became ‘more important than the people within it . . . We’re back to square one.’ But just as Cairns questioned the motives of those who wanted to revamp DTE, others were suspicious of what lurked behind his resistance. They regarded his insistence on a minimal and transitory organisational structure as a cloak for defending his own authority within the movement. Shortly after matters reached a head between Cairns and DTE, Brian Lavery of the Canberra group wrote in an open letter to him: ‘Jim, no group operates without structure or power. If structure and power are not admitted, they exist anyway in secret and not accountable’.56 The final showdown between Cairns and DTE occurred in the context of a dispute in late 1979 over the organisation and control of a State-based Confest to be held on French Island in the middle of Westernport Bay south-east of Melbourne. 57 In reality however, the ‘French Island kerfuffle’, as those events were thereafter known within the movement, was the product of the mutual disenchantment between Cairns and DTE that had been building up for some time. It was the final tear in an already tattered relationship. Since the fading of the Cotter River euphoria it had been evident that there were intractable differences between Cairns and the counter-culture. In particular, Cairns was exasperated by the movement’s failure to address itself explicitly to the objective of social reconstruction. While one can sympathise with his

frustration, he was guilty of wanting to impose his own vision on those in the movement. The expectations he placed on the counter-culture were unrealistic. Individual liberation was destined to be an unreliable instrument for social change. Quite simply, there was an incongruity in encouraging people, on the one hand, to seek personal fulfilment and, on the other hand, to retain a broad social outlook. At the same time, there is no doubt that many within the counter-culture were, as Cairns complained, hopelessly self-absorbed. Furthermore, the virulent distrust displayed towards Cairns, Morosi and Ditchburn by some in the movement had also proved destructive. Yet Cairns’ flirtation with the alternative lifestyle movement brought some positives. Amid the recriminations sparked by the French Island imbroglio, David Spain had thought it timely to remind the readers of Nimbin News of just what a vital mobilising role Cairns had played: ‘Jim did, after all, crystallise formation of the movement, provide a figurehead for it, and align his life with it’.58 As he had done in the Moratorium movement, Cairns drew people to the counter culture through a combination of intellectual leadership and personal charisma. In DTE’s formative stages he played, as well, a crucial organisational role. And, while the counter-culture movement of the 1970s never evolved into the agent of social transformation he had hoped for, it was not without significance. For all its absurdities, it did leaven the values of a materialistic society. It also had some enduring legacies. Even today, although having gone through various splits and incarnations, a DTE organisation exists in Victoria and holds annual Confests. In addition, there was undoubtedly some cross-over between the alternative lifestyle movement of the 1970s and the embryonic environmental movement of that period. Nor should one lightly dismiss Schmidt’s claim that events like Cotter River changed some people’s lives irrevocably and sowed the seeds for alternative communities which survive to this day. In the wake of his split with DTE, Cairns’ life settled down to a regular routine. He applied himself to his research and writing with

increased vigour. In 1979 he released Growth to Freedom and produced four more books between 1982 and 1990.59 This stream of self-published books had now become his primary means of, and unlikely last hope for, radically changing society. The bulk of his writing was done in his small, cluttered study at the family’s new home on an 8-hectare farm on the south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne. After more than two and a half decades at Wattle Road, Hawthorn, Cairns and Gwen, together with Philip and his wife Alice and their teenage son lames, moved to the semi-rural area of Narre Warren East in late 1981. Perched high on a crest, their new home afforded sweeping views of the lush surrounding rolling hills and the nearby sprawling suburbs of Melbourne. The farm boasted a large number of fruit trees and the family had plans to grow orchids, as well as to keep sheep and hens.60 They named the farm Nakari—Aboriginal for ‘a beautiful place’. In his study, pondering how to transform society into just such a place, perhaps Cairns paused to consider that his life had turned full circle from his childhood when, isolated on his grandparents’ farm, he had first tried to make sense of the mysterious outside world. Armed with a stack of copies of his latest book, Cairns would leave the tranquillity of the farm a couple of times a week and head to one of Melbourne’s markets where he would set up a makeshift bookstall. There was a practical reason for these excursions: without a commercial publisher it was difficult to get bookshops to stock his books. His market appearances also provided an opportunity for an ‘exchange of ideas’. In May 1984 an Age journalist, Brett Wright, was sent to investigate the curious phenomenon of a former Deputy Prime Minister flogging books at the Prahran Market. Cairns told him that he talked to about fifty people every time he set up his stall. They spoke a ‘natural language’, free of ‘the programming you get in the Public Service, around Parliament and around the universities’. That language, however, could be cruel, as the Australian’s Paul Edwards discovered upon visiting Cairns at the same market in June 1987. He wrote of one well-dressed woman rushing past Cairns’ stall and, while still within earshot, remarking to her companion:

‘“You wouldn’t think him the sort of man to lose everything for Junie Morosi, would you?”’61 In the first half of the 1980s, Cairns also travelled weekly to Canberra to stay with Morosi and Ditchburn, who had shifted there at the beginning of the decade. In July 1981 Morosi and Ditchburn became the registered leaseholders of a block of land at 22 Morant Circuit, Kambah, a suburb in south Canberra. The following May Cairns became a joint shareholder in the property. He helped as well to finance the mortgage on the adjoining property, 24 Morant Circuit, which was owned by Morosi’s brother Mark Morosi and his wife Leonore Policarpio. In the early 1980s 24 Morant Circuit developed as one of several accommodation bases located around Canberra for a burgeoning community which was incorporated under the title of the Wyuna Cooperative in January 1985. Morosi’s sister Bemadette was the registered office-holder of Wyuna, and several other Morosi family members, including Mark Morosi, were among the approximately thirty adults and children who made up the cooperative. Morosi, Ditchburn and Cairns did not formally belong to the community, although Cairns was cited in Wyuna literature as the cooperative’s ‘inspiration and catalyst’.62 On his visits to Canberra, Cairns continued his joint research with Morosi. In addition, he keenly observed the growth of the Wyuna community and the development of Morosi’s and Ditchburn’s son, Gaelian. In 1981 Cairns informed Dianne Rayner of the Sydney Daily Mirror that while he did ‘not like to describe Gaelian as subject for my work’, his upbringing was ‘providing interest’. He pointed out approvingly that at two and a half Gaelian was still being breast-fed, sleeping in his parents’ bed and had never heard the words ‘no’ and ‘don’t’.63 In 1982 Cairns completed the book Survival Now. Almost 200 pages of dense text, this work constituted a mature statement of his postpolitical economy theory. It not only fleshed out the major precepts of

that theory but also, drawing upon the product of several years of concerted research, located his ideas within a broad anthropological and historical context. In the preface Cairns noted that the book blended psychology, anthropology and history. In addition there were smatterings of physiology and philosophy. This seemed like a recipe for enormous complexity and Cairns warned that the book ‘sometimes offends the rule of simplicity’.64 It was no idle warning. As has been the case with nearly all of his writings since 1975, Survival Now makes for laborious reading. It is often maddeningly obscure, full of abstruse theorising, and disjointed in structure. At least some of the confusion evident in Survival Now and his other post-19 75 writings may be attributed to the highly intricate and arcane material with which Cairns is dealing, but it also suggests that he has been overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task he has set himself. The basic premise underpinning Survival Now was straightforward. Human behaviour is the result of ‘life experience . . . One kind of life experience produces human behaviour that is good, and another kind produces human behaviour that is bad.’ Most crucial were the ‘psychosomatic life experiences’ up to and including adolescence. These could be either ‘repressive and distorting’, or ‘nurturing, liberating and strengthening’, resulting in individuals who were ‘affectionate, intelligent, strong, capable and independent’, or ‘dependent, neurotic, violent and cruel’.65 From the opening pages there was no doubt as to which of these alternative states Cairns considered to be humanity’s natural condition. In fact, it is impossible to ignore the strong whiff of essentialism that pervades the book. Notwithstanding the anthropological and psychological evidence cited by Cairns, he proceeded from a preexisting assumption that humans are intrinsically social, co-operative and ethical creatures. The puzzle he set out to solve, therefore, is why humans do not always behave in accordance with these innate instincts. Fundamentally, the answer was that society distorted the individual: the corrupting force was the planetary culture of patriarchy, which ‘as an

unavoidable consequence, demands repression of bodily and sexual needs of women and children’. Patriarchy and its institutionalised system of sensory repression was the chief source of individual oppression which, in turn, served a critical social function: To make the majority of people powerless is essential in every system for those who hold and exercise power. It makes people passive . . . politically and socially manipulable’.66 In short, individual oppression was the starting point for social oppression. A passage near the end of the first chapter summarises the theoretical paradigm Cairns had embraced since the mid-1970s. It suggested that Cairns was trying to fuse Marxism and psychology, just as Reich had done.

At the new family home, Narre Warren East 1982.

A familiar Melbourne sight: Cairns’ bookstall Prahran Market 1988.

Twentieth anniversary of the first Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, Melbourne Town Hall, 11 May 1990.

Jim and Gwen celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, February 1999.

Jim, Gwen and great-grand children, February 1999.

Awarded life membership of the Victorian Labor Party, June 2000. With the Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks, and Barry and June Cairns. Yet it also confirmed that Cairns had shifted his focus from the mode of production to the mode of reproduction. This was a term he had coined to denote those institutions within which the character structures of the young were shaped, and he now identified it as the ultimate cause of the maldistribution of power in society. That being so, reform to the mode of reproduction was the sine qua non of social reorganisation. The passage is worth quoting at length. it is true that social, political and economic power is held by the owners or controllers of the economic means of production . . . It is true enough that the economic means of production, the economic structure, is where power is, and that it determines in general all the rest—and all the rest is a superstructure which takes shape in general, according to the shape of the economic structure below it. But it is not true that the people can gain power gradually while this situation lasts. It is equally untrue that the people can gain power by the overthrow of those who do own or control the economic means of production. Power is a psycho-somatic process which operates irrespective of who controls the economic means of production . . . This process is basically similar in every country no matter what its economic system. It is similar in America, in Russia, India, China, and in Australia. . . People everywhere are conditioned to make the exercise of power, in all those places, as easy and effective as possible. The conditioning and the means by which power can

be exercised, is done in a sensitive and pervading psycho-somatic process, beginning at birth . . . for each and every infant, and continuing until his/her character structure and behaviour dynamics are completed. This is hardly done intentionally or consciously. It is the inevitable result of the culture which exists. . . Power is a complex force which is generated in actual human relationships . . . This process of power creation takes place in the mode of reproduction—the hospital, the home, the school, the neighbourhood, the Club, the Disco, the TV . . . up to the age of 16–18 years. Important as is the economic means of production and the superstructure as the area in which power is played out, it is in the mode of reproduction that the conditions and dynamics of power are created. There can be no changes in power, or in its distribution, unless there are changes in the mode of reproduction.67

Later chapters of Survival Now wade into the mists of pre-history. Cairns called upon the works of some of the pioneers of anthropology, for example, J. J. Bachofen, Robert Briffault, Bronislaw Malinowski and Lewis Morgan, as well as some contemporary writings in that field. This excursion was intended to show that patriarchy was a comparatively recent phenomenon in human history. It had come into existence some 4000–5000 years ago and had been preceded by matriarchy (femalecentred and mother-right societies), which represented the first and most enduring form of social organisation in primordial times. Indeed, Cairns singled out the maternal instinct—the bond between mother and infant— as the keystone of the genesis of social relations and structures.68 By tracing patriarchy’s origins, he hoped to demonstrate that it should not be treated as an immutable feature of social organisation but rather just one stage in the evolution of humanity. It followed that patriarchy was not immune to challenge and might eventually give way to another phase in human history. 69 By illuminating some of the characteristics of matriarchal primordial societies, in particular the absence of restrictive sexual practices, Cairns also endeavoured to explode the idea that compulsory sexual morality had always been the natural order of things, or that the repression of instinctive drives was synonymous with social formation. Cairns identified two major factors in the genesis of patriarchy. The

first was the accumulation of property, which he related to the shift from nomadic hunter-gathering to an agricultural mode of production. Second was the discovery of the male role in procreation. Together these provided the essential logic for the patriarchal family and monogamous marriage—the production of children of undisputed paternal lineage. Cairns acknowledged the pioneering significance of Engels’ work in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in understanding the relationship between the patriarchal revolution and economic oppression, especially his recognition that the subjection of women within monogamous marriage was a prototype of class subjugation. Yet Cairns argued that, by concentrating on the economic implications of patriarchy, Engels had overlooked something vital: ‘Engels did not realise the crucial role played by suppression of sensuality and sexuality . . . how it was, in fact the basis of authority’.70 Marxists, in general, had failed to grasp that the chains that bound the masses were not merely economic, they were psychological. Following a highly recondite anthropological discussion of the rise of ancient cities and their part in the crystallisation of patriarchy, 71 Cairns turned to the role of theology in entrenching its cultural hegemony. There was little differentiation in his examination of theological traditions but the focus was plainly on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Cairns surveyed the writings of some of the major theologians to support his contention that theology had been ‘the main repository of repression for two thousand years’. He singled out the influence of St Augustine in establishing the doctrine of original sin as a cornerstone of Christian theology. That doctrine had been ‘aimed primarily at sexual thought and action and . . . was acutely anti-organistic’. It had also been ‘the foundation of suppression of women, and of the association of women with sin’.72 Having accounted, at least to his own satisfaction, for the anthropological and historical forces which had contributed to

patriarchy’s emergence as the dominant planetary culture, Cairns took a closer look at the psychological dynamics that shape human behaviour. He acknowledged that different schools of psychoanalytical theory disagreed about how to deal with the anxieties arising from the conflict between the instinctive, biological urges of the individual and the constraints imposed by society. In a footnote Cairns identified Wilhelm Reich as the ‘greatest single exponent’ of the view that it was possible to remove the burden of anxiety and alienation from humanity. There was an unmistakably Reichian flavour to Cairns’ explanation of character structure formation.73 He asserted that every individual was imbued with a natural life force which was part of humanity’s evolutionary inheritance. If, during the early years of life, that life force met with a ‘congruent environment’—one that was non-repressive and physically affectionate—there was a good interaction or mutual reciprocity. Individual interest and social interest become one . . . The build up and discharge of energy is pleasure. There is nothing to feel anxiety about. There is nothing to repress and taboo. There is nothing to prohibit changed thinking and human growth.74

On the other hand, if that life force met with a hostile environment—one in which instincts encountered social disapproval, first within the family and then in the school, peer group, church and so on—the build-up of energy was blocked. This blockage led to anxiety and the ‘whole process up to taboo and alienation is under way’. Cairns continued: The normal and healthy flow of instinctive energy is misdirected by anxiety, as the pain of continued frustration is being repressed and distorted, into behaviour quite the opposite of the natural needs in the first place. Instead of flowing freely, the energy will go into maintaining the blockage and into maintaining defences which would otherwise be unnecessary. . . it changes behaviour from what is socially good to what is socially bad, as the infant unconsciously, comes to see those around him as hurtful and unfriendly.

Two basic patterns of the distorted character type emerged out of this

cycle of denial and anxiety: submissive, powerless and self-rejecting; domineering, power-hungry and aggressive. Moreover, the deprivation of organic needs led to the pursuit of substitute forms of gratification, especially in material goods, but also in things like drug-taking and pornography.75 By a series of neat steps, therefore, an equation was constructed which purported to demonstrate the process by which repression in the early life of the individual—and here patriarchy was clearly implicated— had its outcome in a society that was authoritarian, materialistic, alienated and violent. Conversely, a society which provided its young people with a non-repressive, affectionate upbringing was ‘highly unlikely to be violent, criminal, neurotic . . . [it is] highly likely to be capable of self-regulation, co-operation and affection,. A common principle was at work in both of these scenarios that Cairns succinctly expressed thus: ‘Experience in life reproduces itself’.76 The final chapter of Survival Now, entitled ‘Aquarius is Rising’, evaluated the possibilities of change to the patriarchal culture. Not for the first time in his body of thought, Cairns was vague about whether change was contingent on human agency, or on the forces of history and evolution, or on a combination of both. He summed up the two great stages of human consciousness hitherto, that is, matriarchy and patriarchy. The former had been ‘receptive of the human organism’ whereas the latter was ‘organically denying’. 77 Nonetheless, patriarchy had served an important evolutionary function. From its earliest origins patriarchy had been inextricably tied to the drive to accumulate wealth. This characteristic, coupled with its encouragement of obsessive consumption and acquisitiveness arising from its inability to satisfy organic needs, made patriarchy, as a culture, conducive to the economic, technological and scientific advancement of the species. But by the second half of the twentieth century, patriarchy had outlived its evolutionary use. For material progress had been accompanied by the

capacity to destroy, a capacity that, with the development of nuclear weapons, jeopardised survival. Nuclear apocalypse was just one of several crises that threatened humanity. Others included the unsustainable pressure on the environment posed by obsessive consumption, and the alienation and violence borne of thousands of years of repression which could not be alleviated by further economic growth.78 In order to ensure survival, then, a radical break with patriarchy was essential. Happily, Cairns saw evidence that such a break was occurring. ‘We are living’, he declared, ‘in the time of the emergence of a third consciousness’. This third stage of human history was one in which there would be a ‘synthesis of female and male biological need and function’. What was propelling this change? Although this was never explicit, Cairns appeared to signal that an evolutionary instinct for survival was at work. The sounds of survival are clear. How can we fail to hear them?’ 79 He injected a little more clarity by informing the reader that the new consciousness was ‘emerging because of derepressive experience’. What this entailed, however, was only loosely defined; Cairns claimed ‘if derepression is genuine and real it must involve the true liberation of women and children’.80 Some measures were proposed to accelerate the process of ‘derepression’, such as the allocation of funds to Parent Effectiveness Training. Natural childbirth was vital. Ideally, home births should become common, but hospital birth environments must also be transformed to allow greater mother-infant intimacy and the involvement of fathers. Cairns advocated a National Child Care Allowance payable to every mother to facilitate close bonding between the mother and child during the crucial first four years of life.81 While these measures seemed to require government action, Cairns insisted change would come first culturally and ‘only then . . . pass into politics, the institutions and the professions’. He had little faith in existing formulas or movements for change. Feminism represented ‘the

most disturbing or radical alternative of any “movement”’, but so far it had been ‘limited very much to “entering the male hierarchies’”. The alternative lifestyle movement boasted some elements of the ‘third consciousness’ but, predictably, Cairns lamented ‘its low level of concern with social issues’.82 A new force for social transformation was needed. As had been the case since the late 1960s, Cairns insisted the impetus for change would have to emanate from the grassroots. It must also be spontaneous and free of any organisational structure—so amorphous, indeed, that it could not be called ‘a movement; it does not have a committee, a chairman or secretary . . . It is a state of mind, a state of feeling, a consciousness, the third consciousness.’83 In the end, the new culture, it seemed, would evolve seamlessly out of the old, the spirit of change spreading gradually, like osmosis. If this sounded hopelessly half-baked, Cairns conceded at least that there would be ‘pathfinders’ to guide humanity to the ‘third consciousness’. As well, in an echo of The Quiet Revolution, he suggested that technological change, especially in the workplace, would help to produce people who were receptive to the new way of thinking.84 In the last pages Cairns introduced another dimension to his thesis, warning that the era of the welfare state and full employment was exhausted—a victim of growing resistance to taxation, de-industrialisation and technological advance. As the scope for improvement to society in the economic sphere diminished, it became imperative to tend to the social sphere where the potential for enrichment was yet untapped. The ‘post-industrial revolution’, he proclaimed, ‘is in the development of the social environment’. And, above everything else, this meant providing ‘better ways of meeting the basic natural needs of all young people in a more nurturing, strengthening and stimulating relationship between them and parents, teachers and all other persons. Infants and children must become top priority.’85 This final exhortation that social progress would stand or fall on the

way society treated its young raised the great imponderable of Cairns’ post-1975 writings. How much are they a manifestation of a struggle to heal the wounds of his own childhood? In holding patriarchy responsible for the wrongs of the world, is Cairns wreaking revenge on a father who abandoned him as a baby? Though understandably reluctant to have his later writings construed as having their roots in the recesses of his own psyche, Cairns is conscious of a link. In 1987 Peter Ellingsen of the Age quizzed him about the relationship between his personal life and his latest book (published the following year as Strength Within: Towards an End to Violence). The interview turned to the subject of his father’s desertion, prompting a brief but revealing confession from Cairns: ‘That is the trouble—what I have had to overcome—all the books are an attempt to resolve that. It made it hard to trust.’ If the books are a means of purging the hurt inflicted by his father, then they seem just as obviously a reaction to the emotional and physical estrangement Cairns suffered at the hands of his mother. It is hard to ignore the overlap between the elderly Cairns who believes the main ingredient for a better world is to raise children in an affectionate environment and the young Cairns who, from the age of four, was denied any physical contact with his mother apart from shaking hands. Gwen Cairns certainly thought that the rigidly austere upbringing her husband experienced within the Ford household had a bearing on what she discreetly described as ‘the rebellion in his older years’. She suspected the rebellion is ultimately aimed at his mother: ‘[Jimmy] thinks that people should be able to show affection . . . It was almost like he said [to his mother]: “I’ll do it whether you like it or not”.’86 On the other hand, to characterise Cairns’ recent spate of books purely as an exercise in personal therapy is to indulge in crude reductionism. Moreover, while it may be argued that Cairns was using the books to exorcise his own demons, they may equally have been a diversion from coming to terms with those demons. His focus was still on devising grand schemes for humanity rather than on personal contemplation. The

interview with Ellingsen was again illuminating in this respect. Asked why his latest work, so concerned with better human relations, was devoid of any personal sense, Cairns replied uncertainly: it should be more personal, but, ah, I don’t want to open up those things for me . . . I haven’t been able to talk about it . . . I do see the paradox in the book saying how valuable relationships are, and my experience saying how difficult it is to get into them.

It was a tendency that frustrated Morosi. In 1996 she lamented that Cairns remained obsessed with ‘solving the problems of the world’ instead of dealing with his own.87 There is another reason not to interpret Survival Now and Cairns’ other post-1975 writings simply as a personal elegy to a life of thwarted passions. It risks seeing them as an aberration rather than as a natural progression in his ideological evolution. These works are part of his fiftyyear quest to plot a course to an ethical social order. More specifically, they marked the completion of a shift in his thinking that had begun in the 1960s with his gravitation to New Left strategies of participatory democracy and consciousness-raising. Yet Cairns’ conversion to New Left ideas at that time proceeded only so far. Still convinced that human oppression was essentially an economic phenomenon, he remained inured to its more libertarian impulses. Although he talked about grassroots change, he refrained from endorsing individual liberation as a social panacea. Although lamenting the alienating effects of modern capitalism, he was still not ready to envisage a social order that would give unfettered release to human instincts. By 1975, spurred by Morosi and with the theoretical inspiration of Reich,88 whose ideas had been rescued from obscurity by the New Left, he was ready to make that next step. It was not inevitable that he should have done so. Indeed, it is more than possible he would not have gone down that path without the cataclysmic political and personal events of 1974–75. But neither was his eventual shift in that direction entirely unpredictable, nor explicable merely in terms of a personal catharsis.

The quasi-spiritual vision of a coming Utopia that Cairns elaborated i n Survival Now and his other post-1975 writings happily assumed that humanity shared a universal moral nature. In the second half of 1985, however, the equilibrium of Cairns’ life was shattered by events that testified only too well to the vagaries of human nature. In July 1985 the Hawke Labor Government announced an inquiry into a housing grant allocated to the Wyuna community earlier that year. The grant had been made to Wyuna through the Community Housing Expansion Program (CHEP), which had been established in 1983 by the newly elected Labor government’s Minister for Territories, Tom Uren. Its purpose was to provide funds for co-operatives in the Australian Capital Territory to purchase their own community houses. On 1 February 1985 the Wyuna Co-operative lodged an application for a CHEP grant. The original application sought over $400 000 to finance the purchase of four houses, but the main priority was to obtain funds to buy 24 Morant Circuit. This had become a matter of urgency as Wyuna’s tenure there was jeopardised by the breakdown of the marriage of Mark Morosi and Leonore Policarpio, who remained joint title holders of the heavily mortgaged property. The application proceeded through normal channels, and in early April the community-based CHEP committee recommended a $133 000 grant to Wyuna. Gordon Scholes, who had replaced Uren as Minister for Territories after the December 1984 elections, approved the grant on 9 April and it was paid to Wyuna on 28 May.89 The first sign of trouble came in mid-June when Prime Minister Hawke, alerted to the grant’s existence, contacted Scholes demanding to know why it had been approved. Apparently, Hawke was alarmed at the potential political embarrassment of any link to the names of Cairns or Morosi. On 24 June Scholes wrote to Hawke defending the grant. He acknowledged receiving representations from Cairns regarding it, but insisted that Wyuna had been ‘accorded no special treatment’. The matter proceeded little further until 18 July, when the National Times broke the story. The same day Scholes announced an inquiry into the ‘financial and

administrative arrangements concerned with CHEP grants, and with Wyuna in particular’. At a separate press conference, Hawke revealed that CHEP was to be wound up.90 The announcement of the inquiry and news of the Wyuna grant featured prominently on the front pages of most metropolitan dailies. The Sydney Morning Herald considered it serious enough to merit editorial comment. The Age cartoonist Ron Tandberg got to the nub of the issue with a grim Hawke muttering ‘Now she might stuff my government!’ 91 Interviewed at his home, Cairns expressed astonishment at the ‘reaction to the word Morosi’. He claimed his representations to Scholes had not been exclusively about Wyuna but had also been on behalf of other cooperatives concerned at delays in grants and by rumours that CHEP was to be abolished. Morosi complained that it was ‘discrimination when people are attacked on the basis of a name’. A Wyuna spokesman, Ken Goudge, confirmed that neither Morosi nor Cairns belonged to the community, though they had been ‘supportive’ of it and other cooperatives since the 1970s. Goudge further asserted that, of more than a dozen people living at 24 Morant Circuit, only two were Morosi family members, Mark Morosi and his daughter Ishtar.92 A former Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, Brian O’Donovan, conducted the inquiry into CHEP. His report was tabled in parliament on 20 August. 93 O’Donovan was of the opinion that there had been no improper conduct in the recommendation of the Wyuna grant, but concluded that the recommendation should not have been made. He gave several reasons for this, including that 24 Morant Circuit was already occupied and beneficially owned by Wyuna and, therefore, the grant for its purchase would not result in any expansion of community housing. The report had some damaging things to say about Wyuna and Cairns. Wyuna, it pointed out, had advised the CHEP committee that 24 Morant Circuit had been purchased from loans from the Commonwealth Bank and Department of Territories and that, as the house was relatively

new, nobody else had equity in the property or would receive money as the result of a grant. Yet it had come to light that, of the $133 000 paid to Wyuna, $11 648 had been disbursed to pay off a loan Cairns had made to the community. A further $51 778 had been used to discharge loans from the Commonwealth Bank made to Wyuna jointly with others, including Cairns, Junie Morosi, David Ditchburn, Mark Morosi and Leonore Policarpio. There was a suggestion that one of these Commonwealth Bank loans had been secured by a mortgage on 22 Morant Circuit. These revelations led O’Donovan to conclude that Wyuna had been ‘less than frank’ with the CHEP committee and that ‘much of the grant had been used to discharge the liability’ of Cairns and the others, which they otherwise ‘would have been required to meet from their own resources’. He appeared to believe that Cairns had been particularly disingenuous in this respect: ‘Although Dr Cairns has said that he has received no benefit from the CHEP allocation . . . the evidence is to the contrary’. The Wyuna community condemned O’Donovan’s findings. It rebutted his argument that the purchase of 24 Morant Circuit would not increase community housing stocks, pointing out that the grant ‘would secure the community’s house’ which had been under threat of foreclosure and would result in expanded living space as a result of proposed extensions. Cairns also hit back. He questioned O’Donovan’s assertion that he had claimed he would receive no benefit from the grant. He happily admitted it was a significant benefit ‘to have a great debt lifted off your shoulders as this grant did for me’. In a curious piece of logic, however, Cairns stressed that the benefit was purely in terms of debt relief and that ‘in the sense of any addition to cash, any gain, there was none’. He was adamant that Morosi and Ditchburn had received ‘not a cent’. Their names had appeared on the Commonwealth Bank documents because a second mortgage, as O’Donovan had suspected, had been raised on 22 Morant Circuit which they owned jointly with him. Of the accusation that Wyuna had mislead the CHEP committee, Cairns acknowledged there had been ‘quite a few gaps in information’. But he

excused this as an honest oversight consistent with its having been ‘a working-class operation’.94 In itself, the ‘Wyuna Affair’ was a storm in a teacup, especially in the context of the public controversies Cairns had weathered over the years. Yet its backwash proved devastating. Even before O’Donovan had completed his report, the Commonwealth had secured an injunction in the ACT Supreme Court to freeze the assets of the Wyuna Cooperative and commenced proceedings to recover the $133 000 grant.95 The ensuing legal tussle between the Commonwealth and Wyuna dragged on until the late 1980s before the grant was eventually confirmed. The financial cost was enormous. In 1996 Junie Morosi stated that it had caused her to lose three Canberra-based businesses and her home at 22 Morant Circuit. There was also a heavy personal cost. Morosi found the furore over Wyuna far more difficult to cope with than the events that had engulfed her in 1974–75: ‘I can handle myself. But [the pain] expanded because my family was included. They harassed my mother, my brothers, my sisters, my children, they shattered the ordinariness of the lives of my family’. The pressure was so great that Morosi was hospitalised in early 1986. The same year, her marriage to Ditchburn broke down, another casualty, she claims, of that pressure. 96 Cairns is more reticent about discussing the fallout from the ‘Wyuna Affair’. Yet it exacted a toll on him, too. He acknowledges losing a considerable amount of the money he had ploughed into 22 and 24 Morant Circuit. In addition, according to Morosi, he was badly hurt by the way the O’Donovan report publicly compromised his reputation for honesty.97 Sadly for Cairns, his reputation was further sullied by his embroilment in another unfortunate saga in the second half of the 1980s. In October 1985 simmering tensions over the control of Mount Oak exploded. The purchase of the property had been finalised in late 1980, after nearly three years of delay in getting the title transferred from crown lease to freehold. At the time Cairns heralded the purchase,

describing Mount Oak as ‘the only free land in Australia . . . [it] is to be the site of a multicultural, cooperative demonstration project in participatory democracy— a future oriented development of alternative, post-industrial lifestyles’. These grand words belied the reality that his vision for Mount Oak was dying. Despite some painstaking progress towards regeneration of the land through tree planting and the installation of an irrigation system, the property continued to support fewer than a dozen permanent settlers who eked out a living on unemployment benefits and selling vegetables and eggs at nearby markets.98 Cairns’ original pledge that the property title would be held by a collective trust had been shelved. Instead, the title was vested in Research for Survival Pty Ltd, a company set up by Cairns in April 1976. Apart from a Canberra solicitor, Kevin Rogers, Cairns was the sole director and shareholder of Research for Survival.99 Hence, he effectively owned Mount Oak. The legal difficulties of placing the title in a trust was one reason for this change in plan, but more important was the record of conflict that had plagued Mount Oak since its earliest days. In November 1985, Cairns claimed to have spent numerous hours ‘trying to resolve differences’ at the property, but ‘from the beginning some people have tried to gain control’. He had maintained ‘ownership of the land to ensure it remains free and open to people of all kinds’.1 Predictably, not everyone was convinced by this explanation. Among some of the Mount Oak settlers and within the broader counter-culture, there was widespread cynicism at Cairns’ decision to renege on his promise to vest the ownership of the property in a trust. In the counter-culture press there were sporadic attacks on Cairns over the issue in the first half of the 1980s, but attempts at a resolution got nowhere.2 In the first half of 1985 the intrigue and animosity surrounding Mount Oak deepened. Ross Morton, one of the original settlers, left to join the Wyuna community. Morton had kept a diary which, as Wendy Bacon later reported in an article on the Mount Oak dispute in the

National Times, documented ‘an unrelenting and intimidating campaign’ by four of the residents ‘to drive others off the property’. The four residents were Michael Conway, Barrie Griffiths, Margaret McLean and another woman named Uta. The plot thickened on 28 May, the same day Wyuna received its CHEP grant, when the Wyuna Co-operative and Junie Morosi were allotted shares in Research for Survival. Putting the best possible construction on this decision, Cairns may have hoped that allocating Wyuna an interest in Mount Oak would help breathe new life into the moribund settlement. As well, he may have seen it as a way of breaking the control of the aforementioned group that was purportedly intent on excluding others from the property. Even so, it hardened the perception that, contrary to the original ideals of Mount Oak in which ownership was to accord no right of power or control over the property, Cairns was doing with the land as he pleased. Moreover, by allotting Wyuna shares on the same day as the CHEP grant was paid—he later claimed this was merely a coincidence—he invited the impression it was part of a wider design to bolster the community’s assets.3 In early October 1985 violence erupted at Mount Oak between some of the settlers and members of the Wyuna community. This development appeared to have been precipitated by Wyuna’s occupation of one of the houses on the property though, like so much else to do with Mount Oak, its exact trigger was clouded by a welter of accusations and counteraccusations between the opposing groups.4 Police called to investigate the violence elected not to press charges, but eighteen private prosecutions were subsequently launched as a result of the incidents.5 News of the deteriorating situation at Mount Oak quickly circulated within the counter-culture. Nimbin News published a letter from a member of Wyuna, James Conlon, who asked why those living at Mount Oak were ‘resisting the attempts of other people to move on to and share (not control) the land with them’. For the most part, however, coverage of the dispute in the counter-culture press was hostile to Wyuna and to Cairns. An article by ‘Ian’ in Down to Earth News in December 1985 was

typical, concluding that the episode was a ‘warning to those of us who would succumb to the doublespeak of “alternative” gurus like Cairns’.6 The outbreak of violence at Mount Oak attracted the attention of the Canberra Times. On 2 November it ran a front-page story on the issue, based on interviews with Griffiths and Conway, which depicted the residents as the hapless victims of bullying tactics by Cairns and Wyuna. Cairns responded with a written statement vehemently denying that pressure had been exerted on anyone to leave Mount Oak. It was Griffiths, Conway and McLean, he insisted, who were trying to control the property and who had ‘declared war’ on him. During the following weeks Cairns and Griffiths slugged it out in the pages of the Canberra Times. The principal issue of contention concerned the financial contributions to Mount Oak. According to Cairns, apart from one large contribution from Alex Eunson, who had later left Mount Oak disillusioned to join a spiritual sect, donations towards the purchase of the property had been less than $1000. Cairns had taken out and serviced a $30 000 loan, as well as investing $6000 to put down a bore on the land. Furthermore, he asserted that Griffiths, Conway et al. had contributed nothing to the purchase of the property, ‘nor have they paid one cent to live there’. Griffiths labelled Cairns’ statements as ‘outrageous’ and claimed to be in possession of a tape recording of a 1979 meeting at which Cairns had read out a long list of donations. Although conceding he did not know the precise total of those donations because Cairns had kept the information ‘secret’, Griffiths was certain that (including Eunson’s contribution) the sum exceeded $40 000. In addition, he argued that the improvements to the land made by those living and working on it amounted to over $35 000 and the value of their labour was considerably more.7 Perhaps the safest conclusion to be drawn from these conflicting claims is that neither Cairns nor Griffiths could boast a monopoly of truth. The fact that Eunson had invested over $30 000 and Cairns had obtained a loan for $30 000 to purchase a $60 000 property suggests that

the total of the other donations was negligible. But this is not to deny that Griffiths and the others may have made a substantial input to improving the value of Mount Oak. In normal legal terms those improvements probably afforded them no claim to the land, yet Mount Oak was not supposed to be bound by standard capitalist legal conventions. It had been conceived as free land in which ownership was to carry no rights, with decision-making the preserve of the community on a basis of selfregulation and self-determination. If, however, as Cairns and Wyuna alleged, Griffiths et al. were intent on holding the land for themselves to the exclusion of others, this behaviour was hardly consistent with the principles of Mount Oak. Putting aside the questions of right and wrong in the dispute, the tragic irony is that the dream of free land and of building a model of cooperation for the rest of society had been reduced to an ugly squabble over ownership and control. Like so many utopian schemes that had gone before, Mount Oak had ended in conflict and disillusion. In January 1986 the battle over Mount Oak moved to the courts. Research for Survival launched legal proceedings in the New South Wales Supreme Court to evict Griffiths and the other three from the property. They retaliated with a counter-claim against the company. 8 In 1991, with the litigation still unresolved, Cairns decided to wind up Research for Survival and a liquidator was appointed. In effect, Cairns had elected to wash his hands of the whole sorry affair and cut his losses. Morosi observes that he could no longer ‘take it’. By 1996 the process of liquidation was in its final stages.9 The title of Mount Oak remained formally vested in Research for Survival but Cairns, who had not set foot on the property for over a decade, professed to have no idea what was ‘happening there and I’m not interested’.10 The crisis over Mount Oak, coming so quickly after the CHEP grant controversy, helped to drive a wedge between Cairns and Morosi. Both emphasise that their parting of the ways was primarily the result of

growing theoretical divergence. Yet Cairns cautiously admits that the events of 1985 played a role in the unravelling of their relationship. Rather enigmatically he remarks that he felt things had been ‘badly managed’ and that Morosi had been ‘part of that’. The timing of their estrangement, dating from around 1986, suggests a link to the turbulent events that had engulfed Wyuna over the preceding twelve months.11 In 1989 Cairns explained the theoretical roots of his break with Morosi: ‘At first she accepted the Reichian point of view, which is essentially about the interaction between the psychological and social structure. She has now gone more into the psychological structure and the social structure has been ignored.’ Morosi saw things differently. She had not retreated but was moving forward. It was Cairns who was marooned, incapable of assimilating the ultimate significance of their work together: there is a breakthrough point when we need to move to another dimension and that other dimension is in your consciousness . . . You need to see consciousness as a reality and, therefore, you are talking God and spiritual. And so really [that is] the point of divergence for Jim and me.

She went on: ‘Jim can’t get to that point. It’s too mystical.’ That Cairns remained captive to his rationality and, therefore, unable to take the next step towards liberation did not surprise Morosi: he was sixty when I met him and he took one of the most forward looking leaps I’ve seen. I suspect that was enough for him. I can understand why he like a lot of people can’t make that change; break out of . . . an intellectual set into a feeling set. It’s too confronting.12

To put it another way, Cairns was imprisoned by his life history. He was incapable of surrendering himself to a personal search for the sublime. The patterns of denial and self-sacrifice that had been forged in his early years were too strong. Perhaps here was proof of what he had come to believe; the early years of life were crucial in character formation. He was no exception to that rule. The die was long cast.

As Morosi passed from his life, Cairns appeared to retreat into his shell, and a deep sense of melancholy settled on him. In 1976, at a time when liberation had seemed possible with Morosi by his side, he had declared: ‘I want my heaven on earth. I don’t want it anywhere else. And what’s more, I believe now it can be here.’ By 1987 that optimism had been replaced by regret at a lifetime of stunted emotional relationships. He told Ellingsen that Philip and Barry had ‘looked at me as their father and that was enough, but I didn’t have an intimate relationship with the children’. Asked if he had had one with anyone, he paused before replying ‘Not really’. A few years later he had eliminated the words love and happy from his vocabulary. In an interview with Doug Aiton in the Sunday Age in 1990 he stated that he did not ‘use the word love. I hardly ever use it on its own. I always qualify it’. When Aiton inquired whether he had been a happy man, Cairns answered: ‘Again, I don’t use that word. If I was to use the word as others do, I’d say no. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of the work I do.’13 It seemed a small consolation.

epilogue

T H E 1 9 9 0 s were a decade of personal and political fence-mending for

Cairns. His break with Junie Morosi enabled a healing of any residual wounds in his marriage to Gwen. In February 1999, surrounded by family and friends, they celebrated the durability of their bond with an afternoon tea to mark their sixtieth wedding anniversary. A few months later in an interview for SBS television, Cairns spoke of Gwen with rare public tenderness, though his description of their relationship retained a customary analytical edge. ‘I don’t say we’ve got along perfectly’, he observed, ‘but no-one, no single person . . . has been so much involved in my life than she has, not a fraction of it. It was an active thing, a participating thing, not just an affection . . . it’s not so much emotional as real’. In early 2000 Gwen was diagnosed with lung cancer. Treatment did little to slow the disease, and she passed away at the family home in December. This time there was no analysis as a deeply bereaved Cairns paid a simple tribute to his late wife: ‘She was a much loved person and important partner to me for sixty-one years’.1 Political reconciliation was more elusive. In the mid-1970s Morosi had been a catalyst in Cairns’ split with the Labor Party. The circle was completed when, as she drifted out of his life in the late 1980s, he rejoined the ALP. It is tempting to imagine that Cairns, a prodigal son, was returning to the fold after several years of fruitless wandering in an ideological desert. But in his decade-long exile from the party Cairns and Labor had become strangers, virtually unrecognisable to one another. In a perverse way there had been an element of symmetry between the directions Labor and Cairns steered after the shock of 1975. Just as Cairns turned away from state collectivism as an agent of social change,

Labor too had renounced any residual faith in significant levels of state intervention within the marketplace. Inheriting an economy with serious structural problems that were being compounded by globalisation, the 1980s federal Labor government of Bob Hawke embarked on an ambitious program to overhaul it. The party jettisoned its historical suspicion of the unfettered marketplace as it deregulated the financial sector, implemented a policy of financial austerity, reduced industry protection, privatised public assets, and oversaw the beginnings of a retreat from a centralised industrial relations system.2 While this embrace of the neo-liberal orthodoxy of marketplace competition and small government helped secure the ALP a record period in office, the experiment launched by the Hawke Government was not without costs. Among Labor’s traditional supporters, especially in industrial working-class areas that bore the brunt of economic restructuring, there was bewilderment and resentment at the party’s ‘alien’ new policies. Ironically, one byproduct of that disillusionment was nostalgia among some Labor diehards for ‘Whitlamism’. The reality, however, was that in many respects the Hawke Government merely completed the revolution begun by Whitlam. By the 1980s, Whitlam’s insistence that power must be the sine qua non of Labor politics had merged into a pragmatism dedicated to turning the ALP into the natural party of government. Similarly, his assumption that Labor’s goals could be achieved within an economy still dominated by the private market had collapsed into an explicit support for market forces (as anticipated by the Hayden Budget of 1975). Whitlam’s drive to extend Labor’s support base beyond its working-class roots had successfully translated into a more pluralistic party, better equipped to respond to social cleavages on gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on. Yet that same drive had also paved the way for rule of the ALP by a meritocracy that seemed increasingly aloof from the concerns of its traditional constituency.3 Conversely, the route taken by the ALP in the 1980s transported the party even further from what Cairns had believed the party should stand

for. In that sense, those years were witness to Whitlam’s final triumph over Cairns in their protracted struggle for ideological supremacy within the Labor Party. In the post-war era Cairns had personified the radicaloppositional tendency of the party, not just suspicious of the marketplace but adamant that capitalism and its values were inimical to a good society. By the time Cairns returned to the ALP at the end of the 1980s, that tendency had been blunted to the point of being moribund. Even the Left of the party, traditionally the mainstay of the anti-capitalist sentiment, had been co-opted or corralled into the Hawke revolution. In this light, it was perhaps inevitable that Cairns rejoining of the party was less a gesture of hope than of protest. Soon after renewing his membership he told the Australian that his return had been prompted by the disaffection of ordinary Labor supporters and that he wanted to see the party revert to a traditional agenda.4 The comment presaged a subtle shift in his message on social change that became increasingly evident during the 1990s—a decade in which his output of writings continued unabated, a new book appearing at three-year intervals. The most striking feature of these writings was that Labor once more loomed large as an agent of social reform. A pamphlet Cairns prepared in May 1997 for distribution at the Victorian ALP State Conference epitomised that development. Entitled What Can Labor Do Now?, it was an amalgam of new and old. On the one hand, Cairns urged the party to ‘understand patriarchal capitalism’ and take ‘full part’ in its transformation. Accordingly, Labor’s policy priorities must include the establishment of ‘Personal and Community Growth Centres’, as well as a ‘National Research Council’ to ‘clarify and educate in the sources of human character and behaviour’. On the other hand, he also believed that the time had come to exhume traditional Labor practices. The party must commit itself to the ‘regulation of the economy especially its overseas monetary transactions’. There had to be a reintegration of government and the economy: the alternative was a further retreat of the state, leading to an ever-increasing dominance of private interests and the subversion of

democracy to the might of international capital.5 Thus, in his ninth decade Cairns’ anti-institutional phase had ebbed. Yet his return to the Labor Party and this most recent twist in his thinking were not enough to rescue him from obscurity nor end his ideological marginalisation. Indeed, his rekindled faith in state collectivism only seemed to guarantee his isolation in the new Labor Party. The party seemed unsure how to treat him. In June 2000, together with several other party luminaries, Cairns was awarded life membership of the Victorian ALP.6 On the other hand, he was conspicuous by his absence from most celebratory party functions, including those staged to commemorate the Whitlam Government—sometimes by his own choosing but just as often because nobody bothered to invite him. However, in December 1997 he attended a dinner in Melbourne to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the election of the Whitlam Government. The event drew a long list of former Whitlam Government ministers, but the star attraction was—as always—Whitlam. As an exercise for the Labor faithful to revere Whitlam, the evening began routinely enough. But this time it was Cairns who stole the show. When presented to the audience, he surprised the organisers by launching into a carefully prepared speech that punctured the air of cosy nostalgia. Cairns assailed the policy direction of the modern ALP and reminded those present that the origins of those policies could be traced back to 1975. And with that he disappeared into the night.7 While Cairns continued to proselytise for a new social order in the 1990s, he was aware that nobody was listening. Why did he go on? Perhaps the best explanation is that to give up would have been tantamount to an act of self-abnegation, an acknowledgement that his lifetime struggle to transform society had been in vain. In other words, going on was for his own purposes. He hinted at this in a radio interview with Doug Aiton in October 1996. ‘I can’t say’, he confessed, ‘I’m achieving much. But there’s nothing else I can do: I want to do.’ This

could not shield him, though, from the despair born of a suspicion that his struggle had, indeed, been futile. In an earlier interview with Aiton in 1990, he momentarily surrendered to that despair: ‘what has happened to everything I believed in! Socialism . . . co-operation, fraternity. What’s happened to them! Nobody thinks they amount to a hill of beans.’8 That Cairns’ crusade to remake the social order should end in this way was probably inevitable. There had always been something unrealistic about his expectations of humanity and of himself. The ultimate source of those expectations can be found in his formative years. The dichotomous elements of his upbringing, repression and idolisation, made for a complex mix in the mature Cairns. The emotional gulf that had existed between Cairns and the Fords was to be replicated in his other personal relationships. Cairns became a kind of permanent emotional refugee. He compensated by living predominantly in his head, in a rational, intellectual sphere. In itself this was not especially unusual, but Cairns’ instinct for self-denial was extreme. It was manifested in an unnatural compulsion to forsake the normal temporal pleasures of life for a commitment to high ideals and causes. This urge to devote himself to a higher mission was reinforced by his self-image as being somehow special—a man of destiny. Cairns was subject to a subtle narcissism, most conspicuously reflected in a vanity that he could change the world. These threads converged in his tendency to indulge in grandiose and unrealisable schemes for human salvation. The accent in those schemes on a social order that was co-operative and caring was congruent with the Christian values he had absorbed from the Fords. But it suggested, too, the displacement from the private to public sphere of Cairns’ elusive quest for human intimacy. In the end, the Fords’ emotional inheritance to Cairns proved to be combustible. On the one hand, they had equipped him with the wings to soar. The inner confidence that flowed from his self-image as being special helped propel him to high political office. His inclination to commit himself to noble ideals and causes, and the sharply defined moral

lenses through which he measured the world, were integral to the strength of character and moral courage he regularly displayed in public life. In turn, these traits separated Cairns from the crowd, thus fuelling his political ascent. On the other hand, the legacy of emotional deprivation from his childhood meant that Cairns’ wings were made of wax. He was haunted by self-doubts. His frequent hesitation as he scaled the next rung up the political ladder was a function of his self-denial and his genuine egalitarianism. Similarly, his ambivalence about political office, which intensified as Labor came closer to government, was primarily a reflection of the evolving direction of his thinking on social change. But these things also betrayed that there was a hollowness to his inner faith. The emotional rejection he had suffered as a child, magnified by his father’s desertion, deprived Cairns of the self-esteem, or conviction in his own omnipotence, that would have emboldened him to pursue and hold power as nervelessly as, say, Whitlam did. The premonitions Cairns had of the eventual fate of the Whitlam Government were a projection, as well, of a subliminal anxiety that he would himself crash in office. Cairns’ early life also left him with an enduring hostility towards the capitalist system. Like so many of his generation who were scarred by the Great Depression, he emerged from those years with an embryonic conviction that there had to be a better way to organise human affairs. The existing system was capricious and cruel, and antithetical to the Christian values he held dear. Essentially the analysis he undertook of the capitalist economy as an adult merely lent theoretical substance to this original intuition. Whereas others could imagine a reformed capitalist order, Cairns’ instinct has always been that it was morally irredeemable. The slaying of the capitalist dragon was the greatest cause to which Cairns dedicated himself in adult life. His weapon in this herculean task was the ALP. He knew that it was an imperfect weapon, but judged that Labor represented the most promising agent of social change in Australia. Cairns joined the party in the milieu of post-war reconstruction. Out of depression and war a new economic and political consensus had been

forged around the principles of Keynesian economic management, full employment and the welfare state. Labor moderates were optimistic that in such an environment the path lay open to delivering upon the party’s historic quest for a just and humane society without the need to resort to a fundamental reorganisation of the economic system. Cairns belonged to a different stream of the Labor Party: a more radical and explicitly anticapitalist stream. He believed that, as long as the basic economic structure of capitalism remained intact, Labor’s project would be incomplete. The means of production must be brought under social control if a truly equal distribution of wealth and power in society was to be achieved and if people were to be preserved from the morally corrosive values of the capitalist marketplace. Moreover, Cairns suspected that the post-war ideal of full employment was unsustainable. In the long run, capital would not tolerate the increased bargaining power afforded to workers in a tight labour market. In the decade following his election to the House of Representatives in 1955 Cairns fought for a Labor Party that would be faithful to a traditional democratic socialist agenda. His struggle, however, had all the hallmarks of a rearguard action. A prolonged era of material prosperity was giving succour to the modernists or social democrats in the party who argued that the goal of social equality could be achieved within the framework of the mixed capitalist economy. The second half of the 1960s marked an ideological watershed for Cairns. Disillusioned by the Labor Party’s direction, he was filled with broader doubts about the institution of parliamentary democracy as an instrument of social change. Influenced by the New Left analysis of capitalism, Cairns questioned the assumptions that had underpinned his faith in orthodox democratic socialist practice. He realised that he had overestimated the power of the state and, conversely, underestimated just how entrenched was the power of the capitalist system in modern industrialised societies. The cultural hegemony of capitalism had become so diffuse and pervasive as to render it virtually impregnable to challenge from the state. He worried, too,

whether an enlarged state would be compatible with the goal of individual freedom—a motif that was assuming greater importance in his writings. Achieving radical social change thus required a different strategy. It demanded mass grassroots action to nurture an alternative to capitalist hegemony. In the late 1960s there was a happy conjunction between the trajectory of Cairns’ thinking on social change and his leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement. The stunning success of the May 1970 Moratorium encouraged him to believe it might develop into a movement for broader social change. When the Moratorium movement unravelled in 1971–72, Cairns did not resile from his view that social change would have to spring out of a grassroots mobilisation. His 1972 book, The Quiet Revolution, written on the verge of Labor’s election to government, was his most explicit statement yet that parliamentary reformism represented a dead-end for radical social change. The experience of the Whitlam Government proved to Cairns that the state was an inadequate force for transforming society. For a brief period it seemed that it might have been otherwise. Initially, Cairns was encouraged by the government’s progress, surprised at what could be done within the existing system. He was also surprised, perhaps, at how he had managed to adapt to office, an adaptability that defied the expectations of most political observers. By the second half of 1974, however, the post-war economic boom had collapsed and a major economic and political realignment was under way. The whole edifice of the post-war order began to crack. Much as Cairns had foreseen, full employment was becoming unviable, giving workers too much leverage, feeding inflation and squeezing profits. Similarly, much as Cairns had warned, it was becoming evident that Whitlam’s social democratic project had been premised on a misconception about the limits of reform within the capitalist system. The Whitlam Government came under pressure to abandon the ideal of full employment and suspend its social reform program. Labor’s conservative critics demanded that Keynesian economic management give way to a neo-liberal deflationary policy As

Treasurer in this period, Cairns was in the ironic position of defending what he had suspected to be untenable. He argued that the government should stay faithful to the ideal of full employment and press ahead with its social reform agenda. That irony became more acute in mid-1975 when his determination to hold the line precipitated his dumping as Treasurer. In the aftermath of 1975, Cairns’ crusade for social change took him further down the path he had been heading prior to the election of the Whitlam Government—away from state power and institutionalised politics, and towards fostering an alternative consciousness at the grassroots of society. Amid the ruins of his political career, Cairns believed that he had struck upon the key to creating such a consciousness. Junie Morosi served as the personal catalyst for this discovery, while Wilhelm Reich provided the theoretical insight. Cairns now believed that individual liberation was fundamental to ending the hegemony of (patriarchal) capitalism. Human behaviour had to be changed at its source, specifically by bringing up the young in an affectionate and unrepressed environment. This revelation seemed to have a twofold attraction for Cairns. Together with promising an elixir for humanity, it validated an attempt late in his own life to break out of his emotional prison. By the latter part of the 1980s, however, progress towards these two ends had stalled. Cairns’ flirtation with the counter-culture, which he had briefly hoped might spawn a wider grassroots movement for human liberation, had ended in conflict. Similarly, his personal quest for liberation had ground to a halt as he and Junie Morosi went their separate ways. In the last instance, then, perhaps Cairns could not even claim what Ormonde had singled out in 1981 as his only unequivocal accomplishment: that he had ‘changed himself’.9 Yet that judgement, and the obscurity into which Cairns has been cast since 1975, does not do justice to a record of considerable achievement in public life. While it is true that Cairns’ search for a new social order has remained unfulfilled,

along the way he contributed to many significant social changes. And by doing so, he has left a substantial imprint on Australian society. From his first venture into the public spotlight in the late 1940s, Cairns was distinguished by his passionate commitment to an enlightened outlook on Asia. In an era when perceptions of Asia were refracted through the prism of historically rooted racial prejudice and Cold War suspicion, he grasped that post-war decolonisation required Australia to forge a mature and constructive relationship with its regional neighbours. To do so, he believed, was not just in Australia’s long-term national selfinterest but was also a question of humanity. Rather than recoiling in fear at the post-war upheavals in Asia and blaming everything on monolithic communism, Cairns considered it imperative that Australia try to understand the complex forces behind that turmoil and, where possible, lend a helping hand to the process of change. In a similar vein, Cairns was an early recruit to the battle to end the White Australia Policy. He risked the opprobrium of many in the ALP and the broader labour movement by throwing his weight behind the eventually successful push to have Labor abandon its attachment to a racially discriminatory immigration policy.10 The greater part of Cairns’ public life coincided with the Cold War. He was a nonconformist in an era in which fear and suspicion of communism dominated Australia’s attitude to the external world, and foreign policy settings were regularly adjusted according to the agenda of ‘great and powerful friends’. Cairns spoke an unfashionable language of goodwill, harmony and peace in international relations. He challenged his fellow Australians to see the world through less blinkered eyes and to assert a greater national independence. Cairns also fought against the atmosphere of punitive intolerance that stifled domestic debate in Australia during those years. He insisted that not everyone be labelled a fellow traveller, or treated as an outcast, because they dared to express a different opinion. As a consequence, Cairns was himself reviled, especially by the more uncompromising Cold War warriors. They

questioned his patriotism and much else besides. Ultimately, Cairns excited loathing among conservatives because he was a formidable adversary. What distinguished him most was his moral courage and imperviousness to criticism. In the face of a sustained campaign of calumny (not always from the Right), Cairns barely blinked. He certainly did not alter course. Behind his studious and earnest exterior he was a man of passionate commitment and seemingly inexhaustible drive. In addition, Cairns had a sharp mind that he used to joust with his opponents and to regularly prick their hypocrisies. He assiduously dressed his beliefs and actions with a broader philosophical framework. Cairns saw himself, above all, as an educator, and demonstrated a flair for communicating ideas with a persuasive logic. On top of all this, he had an understated yet palpable charisma. These characteristics combined to make Cairns a force to be reckoned with. He became not only a thorn in the side of his political opponents but also a powerful rallying point for the Left in Australia. Cairns’ rare ability to draw people to a cause was reflected most strikingly during the campaign against the Vietnam War. This was the pinnacle of his public career. Cairns constructed a powerful intellectual and ethical case that Australia’s intervention in the conflict was folly. In time, this view came to be accepted by a majority of Australians. 11 For the greater part of the 1960s, however, his struggle against the war was a lonely one. He could not rely upon the unequivocal support of most of his FPLP colleagues, a reality that has sometimes been obscured by the passage of the years. More than any other individual, Cairns carried the load of opposing Australia’s Vietnam commitment. Once more, he did so in the face of withering attacks from his political foes. Cairns realised that, by exposing the immorality of Australia’s intervention in the Vietnam War, it might be possible to open a window on a deeper infirmity within society. The campaign against the war could, therefore, become a catalyst for a more far-reaching social rebellion. By

the late 1960s those hopes materialised. As public opinion started to shift against the war, a broader mood of dissent swept Australia, challenging the long years of conservative rule and Cold War orthodoxies. Cairns acted as a lightning rod for that dissent. He articulated the grievances of many of those who felt disenfranchised under the ancien regime, especially the young. This climaxed in his leadership of the Moratorium movement. Cairns transformed the VMC into an instrument of individual and social empowerment. He encouraged Australians to believe that the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship extended beyond voting in elections every few years. He also demonstrated that mass public protests need not descend into anarchy. Cairns’ leadership of the Moratorium movement was skilful and prudent. He managed largely to contain the excesses of the fringe militants who were prepared to spill blood in the name of peace. Nor did he concede ground to the conservative critics of the VMC, many of whom seemed more intent on inciting trouble than on preventing it. Moreover, Cairns eschewed the temptation to exploit his position at the head of such a mass movement by indulging in demagoguery. Peter Edwards, the official historian of the Australian homefront during the Vietnam War, rightly characterises his leadership of the protest movement as ‘courageous and statesmanlike’.12 Many of the most significant legacies of Cairns’ years in public life also date from that time. While never fully living up to the expectations which Cairns held for it, the Moratorium movement was a powerful focal point and symbol of the forces which would shortly bring down the Cold War conservative political ascendancy. The VMC and the broader antiwar movement inspired many other marginalised groups to stake a claim in Australian society. The Moratorium demonstrations helped to legitimise political protest and gave Australians a glimpse of an enlarged concept of democracy. Furthermore, the acceptance by the bulk of the community that intervention in the Vietnam War had been wrong precipitated a reappraisal of Australia’s foreign policy assumptions.

Australia began at last to adopt a more independent stand in world affairs and to look at Asia in a less malignant light. In the final analysis, it is impossible to fully calculate the influence Cairns had on Australian society in the post-war era. His prodigious activities in the public arena overshadowed his deeds at a micro-level. Despite his tendency to neglect his own emotional life, Cairns never ignored the plight of individuals. He had a well-earned reputation as someone who would go to inordinate lengths to assist those whom he considered to be the victims of an uncaring social order or arbitrary authority. Gauging Cairns’ impact is also problematic because of his predominant role in public life, that is, as a voice of dissent against the established order. While dissent is integral to the well-being of any society, by its very nature its results are difficult to quantify. MaxTeichmann alluded to this in a 1981 review of Ormonde’s A Foolish Passionate Man. Cairns’ achievements, Teichmann wrote, could not be measured in ‘dams, bridges and foundation stones. His contribution was different, and superior’. Cairns was unique in Australian politics not because he espoused values such as ‘equality, tolerance, the necessity of us all playing the Good Samaritan to others in need, cosmopolitanism, internationalism and Freedom’, but because he ‘really meant it’. Teichmann continued: The Establishment their police and their media hated his guts as did all the authoritarian and sadistic elements within the community. He exposed their rotten values, their misanthropy, and he implicitly delegitimised an entire system of greed, status seeking, and carefully devised and lunatically defended inequalities. It was not that the Right, the Philistines and the Life Haters really believed Jim could up-end their precious system—it was simply that he devalued it and them.13

Cairns’ staunch commitment to the ideals he espoused was, of course, the very thing which eventually marginalised him in the world of parliamentary politics, where compromise is the precondition to success. This characteristic goes to the heart, too, of the inevitable disillusionment

which he suffered in public life and which ultimately led him to retreat to a kind of mysticism in his struggle to change humanity. Finally, perhaps it is also the fundamental reason why Cairns is ending his life as he started it: as an outsider. As Teichmann suggests, Cairns never really threatened the social order, nor was he ever likely to. But his search for perfection made him a disturbing presence, particularly in an era in which there is a prevailing acceptance of competition and self-interest as the primary dynamics of social organisation. In the end, it was easier to forget him.

NO TES Abbreviations AA

Australian Archives

AFAR

Australian Foreign Affairs Record

AFR

Australian Financial Review

CPD

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives unless otherwise specified)

SMH

Sydney Morning Herald

SLV

State Library of Victoria

UMA

University of Melbourne Archives

VPD

Victorian Parliamentary Debates

Introduction 1 From the author’s tape-recordings of the launches, Richmond Town Hall, 22 September 1996 and 26 November 1999. 2 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Uren, Straight Left, p. 241. 3 Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, p. v. 4 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 1. 5 The only serious attempt to analyse Cairns’ ideological development is Gay Summy, The Political Philosophy of Dr J. F. Cairns. See also Summy’s article based on her thesis, ‘The Revolutionary Democracy of J. F. Cairns’. Summy supplies a useful discussion of the changes crystallising in Cairns’ thought in the second half of the 1960s. Although necessarily limited in scope, her analysis has helped to clarify the author’s understanding. 6 Cairns, Reshaping the Future, p. 11. 7 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. vii.

8 For example, see Stan Anson, Hawke: An Emotional Life, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Vic, 1991; Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People. 9 A collection of Cairns’ official papers is housed in the Australian Archives (AA). However, some of this material remains embargoed. 10 See chapter 6 for further details. 11 Little, Politics and Personal Style, p. 2. 12 The origins of this orthodoxy are briefly discussed in Walter, ‘Intellectuals and the Political Culture’, pp. 237–41. For a critique, see Geoff Stokes, ‘Australian Political Thought: Editorial Introduction’ in Geoff Stokes (ed.), Australian Political Ideas, UNSW Press, Kensington, 1994, pp. 1–10.

1 ‘The victim of a great wrong’ 1 Argus, 3 October 1914. 2 The following details regarding James Cairns’ AIF service record are derived from AA, B2455, Item James John Cairns. 3 An AIF private on service overseas was paid 6 shillings per day or £2 2s per week. This was considered generous and a considerable financial inducement to many workers, especially as unemployment levels increased in Australia. See Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 10. 4 In a letter dated 15 April 1920, an AIF records officer (name obscured) advised James Cairns that as he had been ‘cashiered from His Majesty’s service’ he was not entitled to any medals or decorations (AA, B2455, Item James John Cairns). 5 Ormonde secured this account from Letitia’s sister, Eleanor Ford (A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 8–9); Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. Cairns’ reluctance to discuss, or tendency to gloss over, what happened to his father is apparent in many interviews, including those with the author, Ormonde and Dr John Diamond. Most newspaper profiles of Cairns have said that his father did not return from the war—creating the impression that he died in the conflict. 6 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, June and December 1968; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 6–8. James Cairns’ employment with the City of Glasgow is detailed in a letter from the City Archivist, A. M. Jackson, to the author, 1 March 1999. Ormonde claims James Cairns was an arts graduate, but the University of Glasgow has no record of him. 7 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 7; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990, and by Diamond, 10 July 1968. Shipping records at the Public Records Office, Melbourne, show that the Benalla disembarked at Melbourne on 31 May 1913. The passenger list includes Elizabeth, Eleanor, Letitia and Sara Ford, along with Letty’s cousin, Agnes Smith, and Elizabeth Salthouse, a domestic servant. James Cairns’ name could not be

located, but many of the names are indecipherable and there are little grounds to doubt that he met Letty on the Benalla. 8 Marriage certificate of James John Cairns and Letitia Ford. 9 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. In the interview he made no reference to the most obvious reason for that reticence—James Cairns’ desertion of his family. Details of James Cairns’ employment at the Melbourne Town Hall Clerk’s Office are contained in the City of Melbourne Council Proceedings Minutes of 1913–14. The specific reference to his appointment occurs in the minutes of 7 September 1914. 10 The desire to escape unhappy domestic circumstances is cited by Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 10, as one of numerous personal motives for enlistment. On the other hand, James Cairns enlisted in July 1915 at a time when voluntary enlistments—spurred by news of the heroics at Gallipoli—had surged to a level that would not be matched again during the war (Beaumont, ‘Australia’s War’, pp. 14–15). Desertion of wives by Australian soldiers serving overseas was common enough for the government to remit most of the pay of married men on overseas service direct to their wives. See Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4, 1901–1942, p. 154. 11 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992. 12 Ibid.; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 10 July 1968 and December 1968. 13 The records of the Department of Human Services Victoria show her appointment on 21 October 1921 at a salary of £172 per annum. Letty’s elder sister, Eleanor, also worked as a cook at the hospital. 14 Cairns quoted in Cannon, The Human Face of the Great Depression, p. 242; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. 15 Sunday Age, 3 June 1990; Cairns interviewed by Doug Aiton, ABC Radio, 3LO, 21 November 1990; Australian Biography, SBS Television, 18 July 1999. 16 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992. 17 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 11; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 18 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992; Cairns interviewed by Caroline Jones, The Search for Meaning, Radio National, December 1989; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 10 July 1968. 19 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 20 Cairns, The Untried Road, pp. 42–3. 21 This section is based on Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4, 1901–1942, pp. 217–21; Radi, ‘1920–29’, pp. 359, 384–7; Schedvin, Australia and the Great Depression, pp. 49–75, 89. 22 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. Cairns was admitted to the fourth grade on 29 April 1924 (Sunbury Primary School roll).

23 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 23 June 1974. For the preoccupation with sporting feats and heroes in Australia in the 1920s, see Radi, ‘1920–29’, pp. 389–90. 24 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns, The Untried Road, p. 41. 25 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. 26 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992; Cairns, The Untried Road, p. 43. 27 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 28 For instance, A. F. Davies points out: ‘A father seems often . . . by design or accident, to set the agenda, as it were, for a son’s whole political life’ (Essays in Political Sociology, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1972, p. 113). 29 Little, Politics and Personal Style, p. 7. 30 Launching The Untried Road in 1990, Barry Jones, Minister in the Hawke Labor Government and Cairns’ successor in the seat of Lalor, observed that many of the things Cairns had stood for in his public career were ‘historically part of the culture we used to think of as [embodying] feminine values’ (tape-recording of the launch, Richmond Town Hall, 16 November 1990). 31 For a somewhat nostalgic view of the social and cultural trends in Australia in the 1920s, see Robert Murray, The Confident Years: Australia in the Twenties, Allen & Unwin, London, 1978, esp. chs 1 and 7. For a more critical perspective, see Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last?: The Changing Character of Australian Nationalism, 1880–1988, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1988, ch. 3. 32 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992; Cairns, The Untried Road, p. 44. 33 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 15 August 1976. 34 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 154–5. 35 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 36 This section is largely based on Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4, 1901–1942, pp. 242–50. See also Radi, ‘1920–29’, pp. 406–8, and Souter, Acts of Parliament, pp. 240–5. 37 Cairns quoted in Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 70; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 38 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 10 July 1968 and December 1968. For a profile of Sir Rupert Clark and his brothers William and Sir Francis, see R. J. Southey’s sketch in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1981, pp. 16–18. 39 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992; Cairns interviewed by Caroline Jones, The Search for Meaning, Radio National, December 1989; Cairns, The Untried Road,

p. 44. Cairns still has in his possession the 1908 edition of News from Nowhere given to him by Rogers. 40 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns, The Untried Road, p. 44. 41 According to the Northcote High School History (no publication details), the school was built on its site in St Georges Road in 1927–28 and officially opened in September 1929 with 460 students. 42 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992. The author inspected a copy of Cairns’ academic results at Northcote High in March 1993. 43 For the most cogent account of Australia’s slide into depression, see Schedvin, Australia and the Great Depression, ch. 6. 44 Commonwealth Year Book, cited in Louis and Turner, The Depression of the 1930s, p. 89. 45 The genesis and contents of Theodore’s plan are analysed in Fitzgerald, ‘Red Ted’, pp. 283–98. 46 For details of the derailing of the Theodore plan, see Schedvin, Australia and the Great Depression, pp. 239–43. The debate over economic policy in 1930–31 is discussed in ibid., ch. 10; Clark, ‘“Fools and madmen”’, ch. 12; Love, Labour and the Money Power, chs 5–6. 47 See Clark, ‘“Fools and Madmen”’, pp. 188–9; Fitzgerald, ‘Red Ted’, pp. 287–9; Nairn, The ‘Big Fella’, p. 223. For an account of the fissures in the Scullin Government in early 1931, see McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 169–72. 48 Louis and Turner, The Depression of the 1930s, p. 89. 49 Love, Labour and the Money Power, pp. 123–9. 50 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 18; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. 51 Cairns, The Untried Road, p. 45; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. One element of Theodore’s plan for economic recovery was a £6 million assistance package for wheatgrowers. See Fitzgerald, ‘Red Ted’, p. 292. 52 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. Letty Cairns’ transfer was in February 1930 (Department of Human Services Victoria records). 53 Old age pensions were cut by 12.5 per cent, and further pruned in the Lyons Government’s 1932–33 Budget. See Schedvin, Australia and the Great Depression, pp. 249, 321. 54 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968; Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 70. 55 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 10 July 1968. For Hogan’s political career, see Pam Jonas, ‘Edmund John Hogan’ in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1983, pp. 323–5. 56 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 10 July 1968. 57 Cairns, The Untried Road, pp. 45–6; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990.

Cairns is unsure why he selected Cain, but Cain had visited Northcote High in his capacity as MLA for Northcote, and was present at the official opening of the school in September 1929. See Northcote Leader, 20 September 1929. 58 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. See Northcote Leader, 31 October 1930. 59 Cairns’ membership application was dated 3 January 1931. He has in his possession a small collection of records from his time as a member of Melbourne Harriers. 60 Cairns’ academic results, Northcote High School; Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. 61 Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 70; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968; Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. 62 Cairns’ academic results, Northcote High School; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 16. 63 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992. According to the Northcote Leader, 23 October 1931, Cairns won the 100 yards, 220 yards, 440 yards and the 120 yards hurdles, and came second in the high jump. The presentation was reported in ibid., 18 December 1931. 64 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992.

2 ‘An intellectual seeker’ 1 Louis and Turner, The Depression of the 1930s, p. 89. 2 Quoted in McGregor, People Politics and Pop, p. 180. 3 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 18. 4 Records of Australian Estates in the Noel Butlin Archives (Business and Labour) Centre, Australian National University, do not include records from the Melbourne office. 5 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 27 November 1992; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, June 1968. 6 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Melbourne Harriers Annual Report 1932– 33, private papers of J. F. Cairns. 7 Commemorating British settlement in Victoria, the games were held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 26 and 28 January 1935 and featured athletes from around Australia, as well as from England, Scotland, New Zealand and Finland. Cairns placed fifth in the hop, step and jump (Age, 29 January 1935). 8 Hetherington, Blamey, pp. 57–8; Cairns interviewed by Caroline Jones, The Search for Meaning, Radio National, December 1989.

9 In an interview with Diamond in June 1968 Cairns explained his mother’s ailment thus: ‘owing to some maladjustment [as a result of lifting at work] . . . something happened to the spine which affected the nervous system and she had a pretty severe, but not in any way complete, paralysis of the left side’. Letty’s death certificate shows only that for many years she had suffered from ’s evere generalised osteo-arthritis’. 10 James Ford Cairns (registration no. 8933), Victoria Police Service File. Also based on Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 21–2. 11 The incident was extensively reported in both the Age and Argus the next day, though Cairns was not mentioned by name. The murder charges against Cody were later dropped, but he was sentenced to six years’ gaol for shooting at Guider and resisting arrest (Argus, 19–21 August 1937). 12 Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. 13 Hetherington, Blamey, pp. 64–9. 14 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 30. 15 Age, 24 February 1936 and 28 February 1938; Argus, 24 February 1936. 16 Information supplied by Barry and June Cairns, 23 January 2001. A copy of the marriage certificate was kindly supplied to the author by Barry Cairns; see also Australian, 29 December 2000. 17 Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993; Sydney Sun, 11 April 1973; Australian, 29 December 2000. 18 Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992 and 2 June 1993. A copy of the marriage certificate was kindly supplied to the author by Barry Cairns. 19 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 25; Sunday Age, 3 June 1990. 20 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 8 July 1968; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993; Barry Cairns interviewed by the author, 4 July 2000. Adoption papers for Philip and Barry Cairns were kindly supplied to the author by Barry Cairns. 21 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. 22 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. The following details about Cairns’ studies in the 1930s have been pieced together from his application letter for the position of senior tutor in Economic History at the University of Melbourne, 6 October 1945 (personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne); an official statement of his academic record issued by the Student Administration Office, University of Melbourne, 8 October 1990; and Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 23 Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. 24 The precis is included in a memorandum from Cairns to the Detective Sub-Inspector of the CIB James Birch, 11 April 1940 (Cairns, Victoria Police Service File); Cairns interviewed by

the author, 2 June 1993. 25 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 11 December 1968; Australian, 30 October 1965. For the impact of Progress and Poverty in the Australian colonies in the final decades of the nineteenth century, see Lloyd Churchward, ‘The American Influence on the Australian Labour Movement’, Historical Studies, vol. 5, no. 19, November 1952, pp. 258–63. 26 From a tape-recording of Cairns’ address to the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society, 4 July 1970. This recording was among those generously provided to the author by Paul Ormonde. 27 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Barry Cairns interviewed by the author, 4 July 2000. 28 Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. The commendation was dated 27 February 1941. 29 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 26. For details about the Menzies Government’s wartime repression of the CPA, see Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 393–405. 30 Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. 31 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 14 July 1993. Student enrolment figures are cited in Hodgart, The Faculty of Economics and Commerce: A History, p. 7. For a more general discussion of the impact of the war, see Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1957, ch. 18; Gott, ’s tudent Life: The Forties . . . That other RSL’, pp. 23–7. 32 The following summary of the central ideas contained in the General Theory borrows heavily from Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, ch. 15. 33 Ibid., p. 545. 34 For an overview of the reform program of the Curtin and Chifley Labor Governments, see Bolton, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5, 1942–1988, ch. 2. 35 The intellectual and practical influences that operated on the Australian post-war reconstructionists are explored in Black, ’s ocial Democracy and Full Employment’, pp. 34– 9; and Walter, ‘Intellectuals and the Political Culture’, pp. 263–5. 36 Love, Labour and the Money Power, pp. 150–1. 37 Cairns, Human Growth, pp. 178–9; Cairns interviewed by the author, 14 July 1993. 38 Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne; Cairns interviewed by the author, 14 July 1993. The reading list and a summary of the syllabus of Public Finance can be found in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce Handbook 1943, University of Melbourne. 39 This and other weekly synopses, together with a detailed course outline of Economics I, are in William Osborne Papers, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA). 40 From a tape-recording of Cairns’ address to the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society

4 July 1970. 41 Cairns interviewed by the author, 14 July 1993. 42 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990; Cairns, Human Growth, p. 179. 43 Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne. 44 Shaw interviewed by the author, 5 December 1990; Burton interviewed by Ormonde, September 1974. 45 An attempt was made to find reference to the incident in newspaper reports but without success. Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992 and 2 June 1993; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. 46 Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. 47 Memorandum from Magener to Duncan, 15 April 1944, ibid. 48 Cole was charged with being absent without leave on 3 April and failing to complete his diary on 3 and 4 April. Moloney was charged with failing to fill in his diary, using a vehicle on loan to the police for private purposes, and ‘being found in company with a convicted person in a reputed gaming house’. 49 Memorandum from Cairns to Magener, 29 August 1944, Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. 50 Memorandum from Magener to Duncan, 15 April 1944; memorandum by Duncan, 5 September 1944, ibid. 51 Cairns, Victoria Police Service File. Ormonde points out that when Cairns entered public life rumours circulated that he had been forced out of the police due to corruption. Cairns never publicly responded to the rumours and over time they evaporated. Both Ormonde (A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 25–8) and Hetherington (Blamey, p. 350) suggest that Blamey, by then a Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of Allied land forces in the South-West Pacific, helped Cairns to obtain his police discharge, but Cairns’ service file provides no evidence of this. 52 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 53 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 28; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, December 1968. Details of Cairns’ service with the AIF are derived from an official statement of his service record kindly provided to the author by Paul Ormonde. 54 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s War: Asia and the Pacific’, pp. 45–7; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 55 Cairns’ AIF service record; Cairns’ application, 6 October 1945, for the position of senior tutor in Economic History, Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne. 56 Cairns interviewed by the author, 28 August 1993. Indonesian nationalists had proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945. 57 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 33; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August

1990. For the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, see H. C. Coombs, Trial Balance, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1981, pp. 191–2. 58 Cairns’ application, 6 October 1945, and the Registrar, J. F. Foster, to Cairns, 14 June 1946, in Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne. See also Associate Professor Wilfred Prest of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce to the Registrar, J. F. Foster, 19 December 1945, recommending Cairns’ appointment, Wilfred Prest Papers, UMA. 59 Cairns reached the rank of staff sergeant and received the war medal: Cairns’ AIF service record; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 60 Gott, ’s tudent Life: The Forties . . . That other RSL’, p. 25; Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, p. 59. 61 Dow (ed.), Memories of Melbourne University, pp. 119–36 (quotation, p. 124); Turner, Room for Manoeuvre, pp. 105–49. For a useful account of the dominance of the Left in student politics, see Carole Harris, The Student Movement at Melbourne University, 1945– 1948: Students, Socialism and Society, BA (Hons), Monash University, 1979. 62 O’Brien, The Saviours, ch. 3; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 196–200. 63 Clark interviewed by the author, 23 April 1991; Gott, ’s tudent Life: The Forties . . . That other RSL’, p. 25. For details of the growth and influence enjoyed by the CPA in Australian society, see Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, chs 4–5. 64 Clark interviewed by the author, 23 April 1991; Serle interviewed by the author, 21 September 1990; Shaw interviewed by the author, 5 December 1990. 65 Hodgart, The Faculty of Economics and Commerce: A History, p. 6; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 66 Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne. Details of Cairns’ workload in 1946 are also based on University of Melbourne Council Minutes, 5 August 1946; and Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 34. 67 Syllabus, Faculty of Economics and Commerce Handbook 1946, University of Melbourne; and Cairns interviewed by the author, 14 July 1993. 68 Fitzpatrick’s life and writings are explored in Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s twovolume economic history of Australia receives specific attention in ch. 8. For a more concise discussion, see Wells, ‘The Old Left Intelligentsia, 1930 to 1960’, esp. pp. 216–19. 69 Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, p. 62; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 171. 70 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. Interviewed by the author on 23 April 1991, Manning Clark proffered the opinion that Cairns harboured ‘grave reservations about Fitzpatrick the drinker’. 71 Turner interviewed by Ormonde, 30 October 1974. Turner elaborates on Fitzpatrick’s attachment to the ideal of ‘men of goodwill’ in his introduction to Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, pp. 43–4.

72 Roll, A History of Economic Thought, pp. 296–7; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990 and 14 July 1993. 73 Churchward interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990; Cook, Red Barrister, pp. 97–8. 74 Murray-Smith interviewed by Ormonde, 1974; Turner quoted in Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 35; Burns interviewed by Ormonde, September 1974; Serle interviewed by the author, 21 September 1990. 75 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 34–5; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 3 August 1974. 76 Churchward, Max Marginson, Murray-Smith and Turner interviewed by Ormonde, 1974; Churchward interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990; Clark interviewed by the author, 23 April 1991. 77 Ross, ‘Socialist Ideals’, pp. 39–41. Rigby’s Romance was based on a section excised from the original manuscript of Furphy’s most celebrated work, Such is Life (1903). It was first published as a serial in 1905–6 and as a book in an abridged form in 1921. The bulk of the novel consists of yarn swapping and discussions in which an American, Jefferson Rigby, keenly expounds his socialist ideas. See William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australia Literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 304–5, 649–50. 78 Cairns, ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, pp. 125–6. 79 Cairns, ‘A Road to Full Employment?’, pp.78–80. 80 Farrago, 29 July 1947. 81 Cairns, ‘A Road to Full Employment?’, pp. 80–1. Emphasis in the original. 82 Ibid., pp. 78, 81. 83 Ibid., p. 79. 84 Ibid., p. 81. 85 Farrago, 12 August 1947. 86 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 87 Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne. 88 Faculty of Economics and Commerce Papers, minutes for 1947, UMA. The recommendation that Cairns be promoted to the position of temporary lecturer in Economic History is also noted in the University of Melbourne Council minutes, 19 November 1946. 89 Cairns, ‘Will America Go Berserk?’, pp. 2–4; Cairns, ’s hort Steps and Public Opinion’, pp. 266–7. 90 Farrago, 13 May, 24 June, 1, 29 July 1947; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 38. 91 A copy, entitled ‘Interpretation of Modern Society’, is contained in Cairns’ file in the Meanjin Collection, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. It is unclear to what

audience, if any, he delivered the lecture. 92 Cairns, Preliminary Studies in Analysis of Economic Growth, ch. 2, pp. 17–19; Cairns, ‘The Economic and Intellectual Position of the Academic’, pp. 80–2. 93 Burns interviewed by Ormonde, September 1974.

3 Political Apprentice 1 Edmunds’ attack on Clark was reported in a letter from Associate Professor of History Kathleen Fitzpatrick to the Melbourne University Staff Association, 19 March 1948, Melbourne University Staff Association Papers, UMA. Other targets included the Professor of History, R. M. Crawford, Brian Fitzpatrick and Associate Professor Herbert Burton. See the Age, 29 March, 3 April 1947; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 209. 2 Churchward interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990; Gott, ’s tudent Life: the Forties . . . That Other RSL’, p. 27. 3 Farrago, 15, 22 June 1949; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993; Churchward, interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990. 4 Farrago, 3 March, 11 May 1949. 5 For an exhaustive account of the attempt to nationalise the banking sector and the conservative backlash, see A. L. May, The Battle for the Banks, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1969. Also useful is Love, Labour and the Money Power, ch. 10. 6 Cain and Farrell, ‘Menzies’ War on the Communist Party’, pp. 112–13. 7 Cairns, ’s hort Steps’, pp. 266–7; Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. 8 Cairns, The Welfare State in Australia, pp. 331–2; Cairns, Towards a New Society, pp. 89– 90. 9 Cairns interviewed by the author, 9 August 1990. The purpose of his meeting with Chifley appears to have been to obtain a letter of introduction to the Secretary of the British Labour Party, Morgan Phillips, to assist Cairns with research for his PhD while studying in England in 1951–52. Chifley’s letter to Phillips, 8 June 1951, describes Cairns as ‘a very decent young fellow, and most anxious to advance his studies’. Cairns has kept the letter. 10 For details of the speech see Crisp, Ben Chifley, pp. 410–11. 11 Cairns, ‘Peace or War?’, pp. 65–7. 12 Ibid., p. 68. In a speech to a United Nations Association luncheon in March 1947, Cairns had complained that the Australian press was guilty of presenting news so as to ‘blacken Russia in order to confine her to the smallest geographical area possible, and to restrict her economic power’ (Age, 1 April 1947). 13 This phenomenon is briefly discussed in Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 213–14. For another perspective, see Robert Manne, The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in

Australia, Text, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 237–40. 14 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 30 June 1974. 15 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, pp. 104–5; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 260–1; Churchward and Turner interviewed by Ormonde, 1974. 16 A copy of the APC manifesto is contained in Lloyd Churchward Papers, UMA. This is also based on Cairns interviewed by the author by telephone, 18 November 1993. 17 Labor Call, 10 March 1950; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 263. 18 Cairns interviewed by the author by telephone, 18 November 1993; Turner, Room for Manoeuvre, p. 128. Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 105, incorrectly asserts that Cairns resigned from the APC because of its ‘decision to place all blame on the USA and South Korea for the Korean War’. Cairns had already broken with the APC when the Korean War started in June 1950. 19 Cairns, ‘Attacks on Office of Education’, pp. 51–4. 20 For a comprehensive analysis of the commission, see Vicky Rastrick, The Victorian Royal Commission on Communism 1949–50: A Study of Anti-Communism in Australia, MA, Australian National University, 1973. For a more concise account, see Cook, Red Barrister, ch. 10. Despite the fears of academics, the commission found that there was no evidence of indoctrination of students in communism in any school of the university (ibid., p. 183). 21 Cairns, ‘The Economic and Intellectual Position of the Academic’, pp. 80–2. Emphasis in the original. 22 Largely based on the MUSA minutes 1948–51, MUSA Papers, UMA. 23 MUSA minutes, 1 August 1949, includes a copy of the draft statement. It is unclear whether the statement was presented to or adopted by MUSA. 24 Cain and Farrell, ‘Menzies’ war on the Communist Party’, pp. 116–19; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 229. 25 Cairns’ co-opting on to the executive of the ACCL was note1-d in the minutes of a meeting of the executive, 28 March 1949, Brian Fitzpatrick Papers, MS4965, National Library of Australia (NLA). 26 A copy of the motion is in Lloyd Churchward Papers. A copy of the letter to Medley, 19 May 1950, is located in MUSA Papers. 27 Other members of the sub-committee were Creighton Burns, Sam Cohen, Professor R. M. Crawford and Brian Fitzpatrick. See Fitzpatrick to W. G. Cook, 27 June 1950, Fitzpatrick Papers, MS4965 1/12. 28 This account relies heavily on Murray, The Split, pp. 79–83. See also Crisp, Ben Chifley, pp. 381–97; Cain and Farrell, ‘Menzies’ War on the Communist Party’, pp. 120–4. 29 Toorak ALP Branch to the Victorian ALP Executive, 25 October 1950, ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1947–52, MS4846 Box 7, NLA. After their marriage Jim and Gwen Cairns had moved to Toorak, an inner south-eastern suburb, first in rented accommodation and

later in their own home at 38 Verdant Avenue. 30 Cain and Farrell, ‘Menzies’ War on the Communist Party’, pp. 125–33; Murray, The Split, pp. 83–9. 31 Victoria, along with New South Wales and South Australia, recorded ‘no’ majorities. Cairns to Serle, 14 January 1952. Dr Serle kindly provided a copy of this letter to the author in 1990. 32 A copy of the report is located in Lloyd Churchward Papers. 33 McBriar interviewed by the author, 2 November 1990; Churchward interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990. 34 Farrago, 8 June 1949. 35 Among those who defended the White Australia Policy at the conference was the Minister for Immigration, Harold Holt (ibid., 3 May 1950 and 16 May 1951; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993). 36 From Cairns’ introduction to Marshall, It Pays To Be White, pp. xii-xiii. For a brief outline of the EWC’s composition and main activities see ibid., pp. 34–7. 37 Ibid., pp. xii-xiii. See also Bolton, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5, 1942–1988, p. 56 38 Marshall, It Pays To Be White, pp. 116–17; Farrago, 29 July 1947. 39 Cairns, ‘Let’s Think About Indonesia’, pp. 13–22. 40 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 41; Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 49–50, 134. The Chifley Government’s response to the Indonesian struggle for independence is explored in Margaret George, Australia and the Indonesian Revolution, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1980. 41 F. H. Johnston (Registrar) to Cairns, 30 June 1948, Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne; Cairns’ academic record, University of Melbourne; Cairns, Preliminary Studies in Analysis of Economic Growth. 42 Faculty of Economics and Commerce research report for 1948–49, Faculty of Economics and Commerce Papers; Hodgart, The Faculty of Economics and Commerce: A History, p. 7. 43 Burton interviewed by Ormonde, September 1974; La Nauze to Paton, 1 October 1952, Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne. 44 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 37; Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, p. 61. Harcourt’s recollection is from his introduction to Cairns’ 1978 H. V. Evatt Memorial Lecture, ‘Dynamics of Cultural Growth’, p. 60. 45 Cairns to Prest, 23 January 1952, Wilfred Prest Papers. These details of Cairns’ activities in Oxford have also been gleaned from Cairns to the Melbourne University Registrar, F. H. Johnston, 7 August 1951, outlining his travel plans; and La Nauze to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor George Paton, 1 October 1952, outlining Cairns’ research work in England, both in Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne. They are also based on

Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 46 Cairns interviewed by the author, 27 November 1992; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 9. 47 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, June 1968; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 43. Gwen Cairns recalls that during their stay at Bangor she and Jim visited the Cairns’ family crypt. Although James Cairns was not entombed there, an impressive red marble monument had been erected in his memory. 48 Cairns to La Nauze, 13 August 1952, La Nauze Papers, MS5248, folder 212, NLA; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 49 For Cole’s life and thought, see L. P. Carpenter, G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. An excellent analysis of the major differences between the Fabian and guild socialist currents of British socialism is in Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, pp. 359–438. 50 For a detailed exploration of Tawne’s socialism, see Dennis and Halsey, English Ethical Socialism, chs 7–11. 51 Cairns acknowledged his intellectual debt to Cole and Tawney in an interview with Diamond, 10 July 1968, and in interviews with the author, 9 August 1990 and 14 July 1993. 52 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 53 G. O. and J. F. Cairns, Australia, pp. 20–2. Gwen Cairns researched and wrote the chapter on Aborigines. 54 Murray, The Split, chs 2–3. 55 Ibid., ch. 4; Ormonde, The Movement, pp. 1–39. For Santamaria’s version of these events, see Santamaria, Santamaria, chs 9–11. 56 The events surrounding the suspension of Toorak were carefully chronicled by the postsplit Victorian ALP Executive on 28 September 1955 in a circular responding to an attack by the Richmond News on Cairns’ pre-selection as the ALP candidate for Yarra. A copy is located in the ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87, MS10508, State Library of Victoria (SLV). See also Cairns to the federal secretary of the ALP Jack Schmella, 3 November 1954, Democratic Labor Party (DLP) Papers, MS10389, Box C/l/6, SLV. Toorak’s reputation as a Left-wing stronghold is noted by Murray, The Split, p. 88. 57 These activities are listed in the circular issued by the Victorian ALP Executive, 28 September 1955. 58 Farrago, 14 June 1950 59 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 12 April 1975. Macmahon Ball’s career is outlined in Alan Rix (ed.), Intermittent Diplomat: The Japan and Batavia Diaries of W Macmahon Ball, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1988, pp. vii-xvi, 1–10. News Weekly’s attacks on Macmahon Ball are referred to in Ormonde, The Movement, pp. 28–9, 32.

60 Cairns to Serle, 14 January 1952, Private papers of Serle; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 46; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994. 61 From a tape-recording of Cairns to the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society, 4 July 1970; Cairns, Preliminary Studies in Analysis of Economic Growth, ch. 2, pp. 40–7. 62 Cairns, ‘In Search of a Political Policy’, pp. 51–9. This article was in part a review of Alan Davies and Geoffrey Serle (eds), Policies for Progress: Essays in Australian Politics, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954, a collection of essays put together by the Victorian Fabian Society. Cairns had joined the Fabian Society in May 1951 and, following his return from Oxford, was co-opted back on to the committee in December 1952. Although not contributing an essay to Policies for Progress he acted as a ‘consultant’ on the project. By the time the book was published in November 1954, Cairns was chairman of the Victorian Fabian Society and continued in that position until August 1956 when his parliamentary responsibilities forced him to step down from the committee (Minutes of the Victorian Fabian Society, April 1947–December 1967, MS9431, SLV). 63 ‘In Search of a Political Policy’, pp. 53–4. The author of the phrase ‘human life as the shuttlecock in the game of money making and competition’ was Justice H. B. Higgins, President of the Arbitration Court, 1907–21. 64 Ibid., p. 55. Emphasis in the original. 65 The author has chosen not to identify the source of this quote. 66 Cole to La Nauze, 17 July 1952, and La Nauze to Paton, 1 October 1952, in Cairns’ personnel file, Registry Office, University of Melbourne. 67 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Clunies-Ross, ’s tudent Life: the Fifties, A Quiet Life?’, pp. 28–32. 68 Farrago, 18 April 1951 and 29 April 1953. 69 This account is based on the circular issued by the Victorian ALP Executive, 28 September 1955; Cairns to Schmella, 3 November 1954, DLP Papers, MS10389, Box C/l/6; Cairns to Lovegrove, 15 December 1954, ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1947–52, MS4846, Box 35; and Murray, The Split, p. 202. 70 McManus interviewed by Ormonde, 15 April 1975. 71 Age, 3 April 1947; Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), vol. 229, 12 April 1949, p. 336. 72 David McKnight, ’s eeing Red: How ASIO spied on 50s Australia’, Age Good Weekend, 21 July 1990, pp. 34–40. 73 Capp, Writers Defiled, esp. pp. 15–35, 89–115; Memorandum, 23 April 1952, A6122/ XRl/268/1–11, AA. 74 Capp, Writers Defiled, p. 92, incorrectly cites Cairns as having been placed in Category D. 75 Memorandum, 1 April 1947, A6119/21/312/1–2; Memorandum, 18 November 1948, A6119/21/312/5–7.

76 Undated memorandum, A6119/50/407/62–63. Other activities engaged in by Cairns that attracted ASIO’s attention included his association with the Melbourne University Labour Club and Free Thought Society, the EWC and the Victorian Council Against Nazi Immigration. See memorandum, 10 July 1952, A6119/50/407/6–7. 77 Memorandum, 20 June 1951, A6119/50/407/4; Memorandum, 12 January 1953, A6119/21/312/9. 78 Undated memorandum, A6119/50/407/61–62. 79 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 3 August 1974; Cairns, ‘In Search of a Political Policy’, pp. 56–8 80 Murray, The Split, pp. 202–3. A copy of the letter is in DLP Papers, MS10389, Box C/1/6. 81 Two of the more recent contributions to that debate are Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage, Pergamon, Sydney, 1987, ch. 8; and John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000, ch. 9. 82 Crockett, Evatt, chs 15–16; Murray, The Split, ch. 10 and pp. 181–4. 83 The most comprehensive analysis of the proceedings and findings of the Federal Executive inquiry is Murray, The Split, pp. 198–206. 84 Accordingly, Lovegrove wrote to Cairns to advise him that, despite the Victorian Executive not holding membership tickets for him for 1952–53, it had ‘agreed to your continuity of membership’ (Lovegrove to Cairns, 17 December 1954, ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1947–52, MS4846, Box 35). 85 This section is largely based on Murray, The Split, chs 14–16. 86 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 3 August 1974; Murray, The Split, pp. 27–9; Victorian Labor Party Executive minutes, 9 September 1955, ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87. 87 McCalman, Struggletown, pp. 35–6, 116–19. 88 Ibid., pp. 226–8. Keon’s challenge to the Richmond Labor machine is discussed on pp. 226–36. See also Murray, The Split, pp. 67–73. 89 McCalman, Struggletown, pp. 237–9. 90 Ibid., pp. 239–40. 91 Quoted in ibid., p. 240; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 49. See also the article ‘Battle in Yarra May Be Close’, Melbourne Herald, 23 November 1955. 92 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 48–9. 93 Churchward interviewed by the author, 29 October 1990; Melbourne Sun, 26 November 1955. 94 Dr Geoffrey Serle kindly provided a copy of this leaflet and other campaign literature

quoted here to the author. 95 McCalman, Struggletown, p. 240. 96 Richmond News, 7 December 1955. 97 A copy of the letter is in ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87, MS10508. 98 Age, 6 December 1955; Richmond News, 7 December 1955. 99 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 50; Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994. The violence in Richmond was reported in the Melbourne Sun, 11 December 1955. 1 Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994; Hughes and Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives, 1901–1964, pp. 336, 347; Murray, The Split, pp. 277– 80. 2 Argus, Age, 24 December 1955. The bitterness between Cairns and Keon lingered for years, fuelled by Keon’s attempts to recapture Yarra from Cairns in the elections of 1958, 1961, 1963 and 1966. More than thirty years after their first contest for Yarra, the two men finally achieved a personal rapprochement when Cairns, learning that Keon was terminally ill, rang him at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond to wish him well (Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994).

4 The Member for Yarra 1 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol. 9, 22 February 1956, pp. 145–6. 2 The impact of the split in New South Wales and Queensland is discussed in Murray, The Split, chs 18–19. 3 See Connell and Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, pp. 298–301; Scott, Fading Loyalties, pp. 6–15; Whitwell, Making the Market, esp. pp. 16–29, 64–6. 4 Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, esp. pp. 38–51. 5 For a general account of this growing cleavage in democratic socialist and social democratic thought in the post-war decades, see Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, pp. 465–87. The British and Australian contexts are explored in Scott, Running on Empty, ch. 2. 6 Cairns, ‘The Party of Movement, Not Resistance’, pp. 20–1. The terms ‘party of movement’ and ‘parties of resistance’ were coined by the historian W. K. Hancock in his landmark study Australia (1930). 7 This sentiment evoked Brian Fitzpatrick’s celebrated introductory declaration to his Short History of the Australian Labor Movement. 8 Cairns, The Welfare State in Australia, p. vi. 9 Ibid., p. vii. 10 Ibid., pp. 13, 147.

11 Ibid., pp. vii, 259, 274. 12 Ibid., pp. 358–62. 13 Ibid., p. 362. 14 Ibid., pp. 363–4. 15 See Scott, Running on Empty, pp. 61–4; Smyth, ‘Living with the legend’, pp. 180–201. 16 The revisionist/traditionalist debate in the British Labour Party is cogently analysed in John Callaghan, Socialism in Britain Since 1884, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, ch. 12. For a more concise discussion, see Scott, Running on Empty, pp. 55–9. 17 In 1953 in the journal Voice Cairns had reviewed R. H. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (1952). Among the essays in this collection was Crosland’s ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, which adumbrated the ideas developed in The Future of Socialism. 18 Bevan, In Place of Fear, pp. 50, 144. 19 Cairns to Bevan, 23 July 1957, ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87, MS10508; Cairns, Socialism and the ALP, pp. 21–2. 20 Quoted in McCalman, Struggletown, pp. 8, 274. 21 Ibid., pp. 277–9; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 56. 22 McCalman, Struggletown, pp. 275–6; Murray, The Split, pp. 339–40. 23 Quoted in McCalman, Struggletown, p. 36. 24 Ibid., p. 275; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 54–5; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 February 1994. 25 Melbourne Herald, 10 November 1958; Age, 24 November 1958; Hughes and Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives, 1901–1964, p. 357. 26 A small amount of Cairns’ 1958 campaign literature survives in the ALP (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87, MS10508. 27 CPD, vol. 16, 12 September 1957, pp. 626–31. The government speaker was Charles Anderson (Country Party, NSW). 28 Ibid., vol. 9, 10 April 1956, p. 1117. Cairns subsequently asserted that the press report of his talk was inaccurate. He explained that his comment was in response to a question from a Malayan student who had asserted that his country wanted to get rid of foreign troops. Cairns added, however, that he agreed with the sentiment expressed by the student that Malaya would only be truly independent when foreign troops left its soil. Ibid., vol. 10, 18 April 1956, pp. 1463–4. 29 Ibid., vol. 13, 9 October 1956, p. 1249. The speaker was Wilfred Kent Hughes (Liberal, Victoria). 30 Ibid., vol. 14, 11 April 1957, p. 831; ibid., vol. 17, 5 December 1957, pp. 2947–50. 31 The most authoritative study of the impact of the post-war social upheavals in Asia upon

Australian foreign policy-making in the Menzies era is Edwards and Pemberton, Crises and Commitments. 32 For a discussion of the official anxiety in Australia generated by China in this period, see Clark, In Fear of China, and Strahan, Australia’s China, chs 5–6. 33 For a good analysis of the development of Australia’s post-war strategic defence and economic relationship with the United States see Pemberton, All the Way, esp. chs 1–2. 34 CPD, vol. 14, 11 April 1957, pp. 825–8; ibid., vol. 19, 1 May 1958, pp. 1387–90. 35 Ibid., vol. 9, 8 March 1956, p. 668. 36 Ibid., vol. 13, 9 October 1956, p. 1249; ibid., vol. 20, 20 August 1958, pp. 594–5. 37 Ibid., vol. 24, 2 September 1959, p. 837; ibid., 13 August 1959, p. 211. 38 Ibid., vol. 33, 26 September 1961, pp. 1310–11. 39 Rivett (ed.), Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?, pp. viii, 87–8; CPD, vol. 28, 6 October 1960, p. 1761. 40 This account of the debate within the Labor Party is largely based on Brawley, ‘Long Hairs and Ratbags’, esp. pp. 206–7, 216. 41 CPD, vol. 33, 26 September 1961, p. 1283. 42 This background to the ‘Hursey Affair’ has been gleaned from reports in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 19 February, 13, 15 March, 4, 7 April 1958. For a more detailed account see Tas Bull, Politics in a Union: The Hursey Case, Alternative Publishing Cooperative, Sydney, 1977. 43 For example, see an editorial in the SMH, 19 February 1958. 44 Ibid., 13 March, 4, 7 April, 8 November 1958. The WWF appealed, and in September 1959 the High Court ruled that the levy to assist the ALP was valid and significantly reduced the damages awarded to Frank and Dennis Hursey (ibid., 17 September 1959). 45 CPD, vol. 22, 17 March 1959, p. 649. The suggestion that the Hurseys had given false evidence against Gold had come from the Deputy President of the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission, Justice Ashburner, when dismissing an appeal by Gold against his deregistration (SMH, 4 March 1959). 46 CPD (Senate), vol. 14, 18 March 1959, pp. 462–3. 47 CPD, vol. 22, 19 March 1959, pp. 885–8, 891. 48 Summy and Saunders, ‘The 1959 Peace Congress’, pp. 74–9. 49 Ibid., pp. 81 -3. ASIO’s efforts, encouraged by the Menzies Government, to undermine the Congress are also briefly discussed in McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 115–17. 50 Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, pp. 199–200; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 59– 60; Summy and Saunders, ‘The 1959 Peace Congress’, p. 78. 51 SMH, 10 November 1959; Buckley, Cutting Green Hay, p. 200; Cairns interviewed by the

author, 21 June 1994. 52 Summy and Saunders, ‘The 1959 Peace Congress’, pp. 89–90. 53 SMH, 11, 13 November 1959. 54 Ibid., 17, 19 November 1959. 55 Outlook, vol. 3, no. 6, December 1959, p. 3. 56 Quoted in the Bulletin, 20 July 1963. 57 Cairns, ‘Defending Liberties’, p. 34. 58 See Summy and Saunders, ‘The 1959 Peace Congress’, p. 84; SMH, 28 October 1959. For Beazley’s letter, see ibid., 9 November 1959. 59 Murray, The Split, pp. 228–33, 329–34; Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 27; McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 278, 293–310. 60 McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 297–303. See also Overacker, Australian Politics in a Changing Society, ch. 3. 61 Crean interviewed by the author, 15 March 1995; Daly interviewed by the author, 13 June 1985. 62 Cairns interviewed by the author, 21 June 1994; Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974. For a brief but astute insight into Ward’s character, see Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 13–14. 63 For further details of Whitlam’s upbringing and career prior to entering parliament, see Oakes, Whitlam PM, chs 1–5. For an attempt at a psychological analysis of Whitlam’s early life, see Walter, The Leader, ch 7. 64 Cairns interviewed by the author, 21 June 1994. 65 Uren, Straight Left, p. 49. These broad details of Uren’s early life and wartime experiences are drawn from ibid., chs 1–4. 66 Ibid., p. 106; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 63; Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974. 67 CPD, vol. 77, 12 April 1972, p. 1514; Pollard to Uren, 7 December 1966, Uren Papers, MS6055/1/22, NLA. 68 Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974. 69 Uren, Straight Left, p. 242; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 65; Holding interviewed by the author, 27 May 1985. Departing from that customary reticence at the launch of his latest book On the Horizon in November 1999, Cairns nominated Uren and Gwen Cairns as the two people he had been most close to. 70 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 3–5, 11–15, 40–7; Stubbs, Hayden, pp. 10–24, 35, 40–3. 71 From a tape-recording of Hayden launching Ormonde’s A Foolish Passionate Man, 11 November 1981. Hayden also refers to this encounter in his autobiography, noting that

Cairns ’s uffered quite adversely within the parliamentary party’ as a result of the speech (Hayden, p. 260). 72 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 103, 6. See also Stubbs, Hayden, pp. 52, 99. 73 Age, 18 August 1960. 74 Greenwood and Harper, Australia in World Affairs, 1956–1960, pp. 50–6. 75 SMH, 28, 29 April 1960. For Calwell’s original motion and Menzies’ amendment see CPD, vol. 26, 31 March 1960, pp. 779, 789. 76 CPD, vol. 27, 28 April 1960, pp. 1178–82. Menzies’ amendment was eventually unanimously adopted after the government agreed to the ALP’s demands that the section which declared that the House ‘earnestly hopes that the adjustment of all disputes and differences will be achieved by orderly and lawful processes’ be changed to read ‘by orderly, just, lawful and peaceful processes’ (ibid., p. 1216). 77 Cairns interviewed by the author, 21 June 1994. Fairhall was replaced by W. C. Wentworth. 78 SMH, 31 January, 24 April, 8 May 1961; CPD, vol. 31, 11 May 1961, p. 1850. 79 Melbourne Herald, 20 April 1961; Age, 21 April 1961. This account is also based on Uren’s notes of the proceedings of the FPLP meeting of 19–20 April 1961, Uren Papers, MS6055/5/12. 80 Sydney Daily Telegraph, 18, 24 May 1961. 81 SMH, 20 February 1962. See also Age, 14 February 1962. 82 Souter, Acts of Parliament, pp. 447–9; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 63–4; Cairns interviewed by the author, 21 June 1994. 83 Bulletin, 20 July 1963. 84 Edwards and Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, pp. 277–8; Greenwood and Harper, Australia in World Affairs, 1961–1965, pp. 339–43; CPD, vol. 38, 21 May 1963, pp. 1633– 40. 85 Age, 20, 22 March 1963; Souter, Acts of Parliament, pp. 454–5; Oakes, Whitlam PM, pp. 102–5. 86 See Overacker, Australian Politics in a Changing Society, pp. 37–8, and Scott, Fading Loyalties, esp. ch. 4. 87 CPD, vol. 41, 10 March 1964, pp. 388–90. 88 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 4. 89 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 22–3. For Calwell’s version of these events, see Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, pp. 226–7. 90 For example, see the editorial in the Australian, 24 July 1964. 91 Sydney Sunday Telegraph, 26 July 1964. 92 Melbourne Truth, 23 May 1964.

93 Canberra Times, 25 February, 23 April 1964. 94 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 171–3. 95 CPD, vol. 39, 17 October 1963, pp. 1994–7; ibid., vol. 43, 27 August 1964, pp. 764–5. 96 Ibid., vol. 42, 12 May 1964, p. 1734; ibid., 13 May 1964, pp. 1886–9, 1918–19; ibid., vol. 43, 27 August 1964, pp. 765–6; ibid., 17 September 1964, pp. 1282–5. See also McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 174–6. 97 See, for example, Wentworth’s speech to the House, CPD, vol. 43, 17 September 1964, p. 1286. See also McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 173; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 74. 98 Australian, 26 October 1964; CPD, vol. 44, 22 October 1964, pp. 2270, 2273–8. 99 Australian, 26 October 1964. 1 See, for example, Overacker, Australian Politics in a Changing Society, pp. 39–43; Turner, ‘A Comment on Dr Cairns’, pp. 248–51. 2 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 38. 3 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 72. 4 Whitlam’s scepticism about the ALP’s socialisation objective had surfaced in his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture. See Whitlam, Labor and the Constitution, esp. p. 32. 5 Ibid., p. 56. 6 Whitlam, ‘The Road to Reform’, p. 199. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 75; Walter, The Leader, p. 103. 7 For example, ‘What is Socialism?’, Socialist, Journal of the Melbourne University ALP Club, June 1958, pp. 7–9; ‘Labour—Now a Challenge to Inhumanity’, Outlook, vol. 3, no. 3, May 1959, pp. 8–9; and ‘Beyond Full Employment and Social Security’, Fact, Victorian ALP Newspaper, October 1961. 8 Cairns, Socialism and the ALP, pp. 4–5. 9 Ibid., pp. 5–7. Cairns was careful to point out that Labor was concerned only with the large private concerns and ‘not the many thousands of small shops, factories and farms which possess no individual power to determine economic conditions’ (p. 7). 10 Ibid., pp. 10, 12, 15–18. 11 Ibid., pp. 19–22. Emphasis in the original. 12 As well as acknowledging the inevitability of a backlash from private capital against any attempt by Labor to significantly extend public control over the economy Cairns conceded that it would be difficult for the party to persuade the electorate to support such a policy. This, however, did not mean it should stop trying to do so: ‘The role of Labor is that of advocacy not that of calculators of public opinion’. Nor was he blind to the constitutional problems the party was likely to encounter, though he argued that much could be done towards developing a national economic plan using the Commonwealth’s existing powers

(ibid., pp. 16, 20). For example, see Cairns, ‘What is Socialism?’, p. 8. 13 Walter, The Leader, p. 128.

5 Vietnam: The Great Moral Crusade 1 CPD, vol. 56, 17 August 1967, p. 251. In 1948–50 Cairns delivered several lectures on Indochina for the Victorian Adult Education Council. The lectures consisted of a brief twentieth-century history, as well as some commentary on post-World War II developments. See Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, p. viii. 2 Uren, Straight Left, p. 197. 3 Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, p. xii. 4 Quoted in Edwards and Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, p. 249. See ibid., pp. 234–44, for an excellent account of the diplomatic and foreign policy manoeuvrings that preceded this first step in Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam. 5 CPD, vol. 35, 17 May 1962, p. 2541; ibid., vol. 37, 25 October 1962, p. 1960. 6 Daly interviewed by the author, 13 June 1985; Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, p. viii. 7 Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’, pp. 37–41. 8 Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 113–14; Pemberton, All the Way, pp. 197–201. 9 It subsequently emerged that, shortly before the naval encounters, South Vietnamese commando forces had conducted raids on North Vietnamese coastal facilities, as part of a wider campaign of covert activities approved by President Johnson earlier in 1964. The destroyer USS Maddox, attacked on 2 August, was operating a series of patrols designed to collect electronic intelligence, including transmissions prompted by the commando raids. It was also revealed that at the time of the incidents of 2 and 4 August the US destroyers were operating within the 12-mile territorial limit claimed by North Vietnam. Finally, it later came to be widely accepted that it was unlikely that the second attack on the American vessels of 4 August had, in fact, taken place (Edwards and Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, pp. 307–10). 10 CPD, vol. 43, 11 August 1964, pp. 20–2. The resolution referred to by Hasluck provided President Johnson with the blanket authority to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War. 11 Ibid., 13 August 1964, p. 218. The government speaker was Ian Sinclair (Country Party, NSW). 12 Ibid., pp. 178–80. Calwell’s appeal for UN intervention and the reconvening of the Geneva Conference was in keeping with a policy statement on Vietnam issued by the Federal Executive on 4 August 1964. The statement also implied support for the presence of Australian military advisers in South Vietnam, despite deploring ‘the lack of any formal agreement’ covering their presence (Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’,

p. 42). 13 This section borrows from Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 14–21. 14 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, pp. 24, 10; Kiernan, Calwell, p. 15; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985. 15 CPD, vol. 43, 11 August 1964, p. 22. 16 Both Cairns and Uren suggest that Calwell’s growing reliance on Left-wing support coloured his attitude to Vietnam War (Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985; Uren interviewed by the author, 17 June 1985). 17 CPD, vol. 43, 13 August 1964, pp. 226–8. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 56–7; Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 32–5. 18 SMH, 10 August 1964; CPD, vol. 43, 13 August 1964, pp. 205, 187, 264–5. 19 CPD, vol. 43, 13 August 1964, pp. 234–7. 20 Ibid., pp. 261, 189. 21 For such an analysis see Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, esp. pp. 114–16. 22 The statement is quoted in Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’, p. 43. Also based on Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 55; and Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 36. 23 Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’, pp. 43–4; SMH, 19 February 1965. Beazley’s account is largely duplicated in Edwards and Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, pp. 347–9. 24 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985; Uren interviewed by the author, 17 June 1985; Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996; Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 55; Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 36. 25 CPD, vol. 45, 23 March 1965, p. 250. By this time another decisive step had been taken in America’s deepening embroilment in the war. On 8 March 1965 a contingent of US Marines landed at Danang on the north coast of South Vietnam. They were the first US ground combat units to be deployed on the Asian mainland since the Korean conflict. See Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, pp. 172–80. 26 Australian, 25 March 1965; SMH, 25–26 March 1965. In both his written account of the Caucus meeting and in an interview with the author, Uren claims that the Left moved a resolution condemning the US bombing of North Vietnam, and then Kim Beazley Snr moved an amendment endorsing the American actions. The majority of Caucus members supported the amendment. In the interview Uren suggested that Cairns had moved the original motion condemning the bombing. It seems likely that Uren is confusing events at the Caucus meeting with what occurred at the FPLP Executive meeting a month earlier (Uren, Straight Left, pp. 182–3 and interviewed by the author, 17 June 1985). Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 131, uncritically accepts Uren’s version of events. 27 This brief survey of the initial reaction to the government’s commitment of combat troops

relies on Edwards, A Nation at War, pp. 36–51. 28 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 50–1. See also Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’, pp. 44–5. 29 The other person Freudenberg consulted was Whitlam’s private secretary, John Menadue (Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 50–1). 30 CPD, vol. 46, 4 May 1965, pp. 1102–5. 31 Ibid., p. 1107; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 82. Both Cairns and Uren confirm this version of events (Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985; Uren interviewed by the author, 17 June 1985). 32 CPD, vol. 46, 4 May 1965, p. 1112. 33 See, for example, Hasluck’s statement to the House of 23 March 1965 (ibid., vol. 45, 23 March 1965, pp. 232–3). 34 Ibid., vol. 46, 4 May 1965, pp. 1113–16. 35 Ibid., 6 May 1965, pp. 1251–5. 36 Summy, ‘Militancy and the Australian Peace Movement’, p. 152. The Menzies Government had introduced a national service scheme in November 1964, consisting of a selected (birthday ballot) call-up of 20-year-old males. Those selected were liable for two years’ full time service, with a liability for overseas service if required. 37 Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, p. ix; Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Uren, Straight Left, p. 197. 38 Jordens, ‘Conscription and Dissent’, p. 75. 39 Quoted in Hamel-Green, The Legitimacy of the 1964–1972 Australian Conscription Scheme, pp. 265, 398. 40 Canberra Times, 30 July 1965. 41 Jordens, ‘Conscription and Dissent’, p. 76; Rawson, ‘The Vietnam War and the Australian Party System’, p. 64. 42 White recorded in Langley, A Decade of Dissent, pp. 36–7; Pola quoted in Noone, Disturbing the War, pp. 229–30. 43 Howson, The Howson Diaries, p. 161 (entry 22 June 1965); CPD, vol. 49, 2 December 1965, p. 3478. Menzies duly reassured Jess that a pamphlet issued by the Department of External Affairs on Vietnam was to be distributed to secondary schools. 44 Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 136. 45 Cairns, Living With Asia, pp. 2 (emphasis in the original), 5. 46 Ibid., pp. 2–3; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985 and 29 November 1994, and interviewed by Ormonde, 10 August 1974. 47 Ibid., pp. 23, 57.

48 Ibid., pp. 59, 70. 49 Ibid., pp. 59, 95–6. Emphasis in the original. In a pamphlet written the following year Cairns further developed this theme of the advance of communism in the circumstance of economic underdevelopment and political repression. See Cairns, Economics and Foreign Policy, esp. pp. 10–11. 50 Cairns, Living With Asia, pp. 94, 96–7 (emphasis in the original), 103. 51 Ibid., pp. 104–8. 52 Ibid., pp. 108–9. At the time Cairns wrote Living With Asia pressure was building on the Menzies Government to conduct a referendum to amend the constitution in order to empower the Commonwealth to legislate on behalf of Aborigines. See Will Sanders, ‘Aboriginal Policy’ in Scott Prasser, J. R. Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics, and Policy, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1995, pp. 262–7. 53 Cairns, Living With Asia, pp. 114–15 (emphasis in the original), 126–33. 54 Ibid., p. 146; Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 138. 55 Cairns, Living With Asia, pp. 161–2, 137, 172. 56 SMH, 4 January 1966; Bulletin, 15 January 1966, pp. 35–6. Not all the reviews of Living With Asia were hostile. See, for example, Age, 27 December 1965, and Australian, 8 January 1966. 57 Sydney Daily Telegraph, 23 February 1966; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, 69–70. 58 Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 54–9. See also Kiernan, Calwell, pp. 10– 11, 71–4. 59 Age, 14 April, 13 May 1966. 60 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 85; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985. 61 Age, 12, 17 August 1966; Melbourne Sun, 13 August 1966; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985. 62 Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994; Cass interviewed by Ormonde, 12 February 1976 and by the author, 10 January 1996. 63 See Altman, ‘Foreign Policy and the Elections’, pp. 57–66; Rawson, ‘The Vietnam War and the Australian Party System’, pp. 58–63. 64 This section relies on Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 66–71. To be fair to Calwell, despite continuing strong public endorsement for the government’s policy of military involvement in the war, opinion polls had indicated that most Australians did not favour sending conscripts to Vietnam. Thus, his strategy of concentrating his campaign on the issue of conscription was not without some foundation. See Goot and Tiffen, ‘Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls’, pp. 142–3.

65 Age, 14 November 1966; Uren, Straight Left, p. 185; Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Hughes, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1965–1984, p. 14. 66 Age, Melbourne Sun, 28 November 1966. 67 Melbourne Sun, 29 November 1966. 68 Australian, 15 August 1966. 69 Fact, 7 April 1966; Melbourne Sun, 29 November 1966. 70 Australian, 6 February 1967. 71 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 6. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 92; McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 309, 317–18. 72 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. See also Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 71; Graham Freudenberg, Cause for Power: The Official History of the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Labor Party, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1991, p. 1. 73 Australian, SMH, 9 February 1967. 74 Uren, Straight Left, pp. 160–1; Uren to Russell and Ann Kerr, 14 February 1967, Uren Papers, MS6055/1/2. 75 Quoted in Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 88; Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 38. 76 This is largely based on Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 75–8. 77 See Overacker, Australian Politics in a Changing Society, pp. 128–32. 78 For the full text of the amendment, see Australian Labor Party, Official Report of the 27th Commonwealth Conference, Australian Labor Party, Adelaide, 1967, p. 18. For the original resolution proposed by the Federal Executive committee, see ibid., p. 72. See also Age, 3 August 1967; Nation, 12 August 1967. 79 Nation, 12 August 1967. See also Beazley, ‘Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment’, p. 53; Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR., pp. 31–2. 80 The remark was overheard by Geoff Harcourt, one of Cairns’ former students at Melbourne University. In a letter to Ormonde Whitlam denied calling Cairns a ‘bastard’ but did not dispute the substance of what Harcourt claimed to have heard (Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 90–1). 81 Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 83–5; Age, 14 November 1967. 82 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985. 83 Summy, ‘Militancy and the Australian Peace Movement’, pp. 152–61; Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 159–60; Edwards, A Nation at War, pp. 167–9.

6 ‘A symbol of participatory democracy’ 1 Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 201, 269–73; Edwards, A Nation At War, pp. 193–205. Gorton had been sworn in as Prime Minister on 10 January 1968 after Harold Holt was presumed drowned on 17 December 1967. 2 Home, Time of Hope, pp. 65–6. 3 Cochrane, ‘At War at Home’, p. 166. See also Alomes, ‘Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties’. 4 CPD, vol. 58, 26 March 1968, pp. 459, 475. 5 For comprehensive accounts of the ‘Harradine Affair’ and its fall-out, see Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 129–37; Oakes, Whitlam PM, pp. 170–83. 6 Oakes, Whitlam PM, pp. 173–9; Duthie, I Had 50,000 Bosses, p. 247. 7 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. See also SMH, 23 April 1968, Oakes, Whitlam PM, pp. 180–1; Uren, Straight Left, p. 163. 8 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Uren, Straight Left, p. 163. Speculation about a possible reconciliation between Labor and the DLP had periodically surfaced since at least the mid-1960s. According to the memoirs of the former New South Wales DLP Senator Jack Kane, in February 1968 Labor’s Pat Kennelly broached the idea of a merger with Victorian DLP officials. Kennelly told the officials that he was acting on behalf of Whitlam and Barnard. He sought to clarify what the DLP’s attitude to a merger would be in the event that Labor split into two parties, one led by Whitlam, and the other by Cairns (Jack Kane, Exploding the Myths: The Political Memoirs of Jack Kane, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1989, pp. 177–8). 9 Adams in Australian, 21 November 1992; Canberra Times, 27 April 1968. 10 SMH, 29 April 1968. 11 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 8 July, 9, 11 December 1968. 12 Australian, Age, 1 May 1968. See also Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 95. 13 Connell, ‘Whitlam v Cairns’, pp. 369–70; Howson, The Howson Diaries, p. 425 (13 May 1968). 14 Uren, Straight Left, p. 165; Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Santamaria, Santamaria, p. 213. 15 Australian, 30 October 1965. 16 McGregor, People Politics and Pop, pp. 177, 183. 17 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. 18 McGregor, People Politics and Pop, pp. 177–9. 19 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 95–6. 20 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 9 December 1968.

21 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 99; Uren, Straight Left, p. 172. 22 Age, 23 September 1968; Nation, 28 September 1968. See also Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 98. 23 Melbourne Herald, 11 September 1968; Age, 23 September 1968; Nation, 28 September 1968. 24 Cass interviewed by Ormonde, 12 February 1976; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 101. 25 Nation, 28 September 1968; Uren, Straight Left, p. 173; Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994. 26 Australian, 20 September 1968; Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 9 December 1968. 27 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 11 December 1968; McGregor, People Politics and Pop, p. 176. 28 Cairns interviewed by Diamond, 8 July 1968. 29 Age, 1 June 1968; Hamel-Green, The Legitimacy of the 1964–1972 Australian Conscription Scheme, p. 290; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 104. 30 CPD, vol. 59, 28 May 1968, p. 1623; ibid., 13 June 1968, p. 2266. 31 Cairns, ‘Foreign Policy after Vietnam’, pp. 186–7; Melbourne Herald, 24 July 1968. 32 Cairns, ‘The labor movement and socialism’, p. 11. 33 Cairns, ‘Intellectuals and the ALP’, pp. 113–14. 34 Chun, The British New Left, pp. 1–16. 35 The following section borrows from Alomes, ‘Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties’, pp. 33–9; Docker, ‘"Those Halcyon Days": The Moment of the New Left’, pp. 296–8; Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, pp. 46–54; Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 221–2. 36 Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, pp. 231, 235–7. 37 Ibid., pp. 240, 244, 245–7. Emphasis in the original. 38 Ibid., pp. 247–82; Chun, The British New Left, p. 18. 39 Gordon and Osmond, ‘An Overview of the Australian New Left’, pp. 12–14. 40 Turner, Room for Manoeuvre, p. 145. 41 Cairns, ‘New look for Labor’, p. 21. Emphasis in the original. 42 Ibid., pp. 21–2. 43 Rabelais, 19 June 1968. 44 Ibid., 31 July 1969 (the article was published over two issues). Emphasis in the original. 45 Cairns, ‘The labor movement and socialism’, pp. 10–11.

46 Cairns, ‘Foreign Policy after Vietnam’, pp. 188–9. 47 Quoted in Ockenden, Anti-War Movement and the Student Revolt at Monash, p. 76. 48 Ibid., pp. 61–2; Age, 5–6 July 1968; Australian, 6 July 1968. 49 Cairns, ‘The labour movement and socialism’, p. 11. 50 Apexian, May 1969, pp. 10–11. 51 Hamel-Green, The Legitimacy of the 1964–1972 Australian Conscription Scheme, pp. 403, 419–23. 52 Age, 3 March 1969; Australian, 2 April 1969. 53 Age, 2 April 1969. SOS had been founded in Sydney in May 1965 with groups subsequently forming in other cities, including Melbourne. Largely comprised of middleaged women, it opposed the conscription of young men for overseas service. 54 Melbourne Herald, 3 April 1969; Australian, 4 April 1969. 55 Age, 5, 8 April 1969; Melbourne Herald, 7 April 1969. 56 Age, Australian, 10 April 1969. Both newspapers featured editorials welcoming the decision, the latter noting that Cairns’ ’s tand against the by-law almost certainly brought the issue to a head’. 57 This is based on Strangio, Labor and the Agony of Vietnam, pp. 102–5. 58 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 155–62. 59 Australian, 6 October 1969. 60 Madear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, pp. 373–8. 61 CPD, vol. 66, 26 November 1969, pp. 66–7. As commonly noted by historians, the My Lai massacre came to represent for anti-war campaigners a metaphor for the immorality of the Vietnam War. See, for instance, Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 229. 62 CPD, vol. 66, 25 November 1969, p. 54. 63 Age, 1 September, 1969; Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, pp. 101–5; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 112. McDonald was fined $150 on each charge after the judge took into account the fact that he had spent seven months in gaol on remand awaiting trial. 64 Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, p. 106; Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994. 65 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994. Beazley is cited in McMullin, The Light on the Hill, p. 323. 66 McCalman, Struggletown, p. 275; Australian, 2 September 1969; Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. 67 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 114; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 May 1985. 68 Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, p. 185.

69 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 70 Ibid., p. 227. 71 Nation, 13 December 1969. 72 Hudson, ‘Dr Cairns On Vietnam’, pp. 99–101. 73 SMH, 22 November 1969; Cairns, The Eagle and the Lotus, pp. 239–40. 74 Caprice restaurant meeting, 9 December 1969, Victorian VMC Minutes in CICD (Victoria) Papers, MS 105 84, SLV. See also Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 25–7, 31–2. 75 Van Moorst, VMC 25th Anniversary Seminar, 18 May 1995; Taft, Crossing the Party Line, pp. 246–7. 76 Murphy, Harvest of Fear, pp. 254–6; Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 32; Goldbloom interviewed by the author, 22 March 1995. 77 Sponsors’ meeting, Richmond Town Hall, 1 February 1970, Victorian VMC Minutes. Goldbloom and Jean McLean were elected as deputy chairpersons at a meeting of the Victorian VMC Executive on 2 March 1970 (Executive meeting, 2 March 1970, ibid.). 78 Taft interviewed by Ormonde, 23 April 1975; Goldbloom interviewed by the author, 22 March 1995; Cairns speaking at the launch of his book Towards a New Society at the Richmond Town Hall, 17 October 1993. For the reference to Langer’s proposal, see Jean McLean interviewed by Ormonde, 18 February 1979; Taft cited in Langley, A Decade of Dissent, p. 128. 79 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 34, 54; Age, Australian, 26 March 1970. 80 Australian, 27 March 1970; Age, 28 March 1970. 81 Melbourne Herald, 26 March 1970; Brisbane Courier Mail, 30 March 1970; Adelaide Advertiser, 31 March 1970. 82 SMH, 14 April 1970; Farrago, 17 April 1970. 83 Hobart Mercury, SMH, Australian, 15 April 1970. 84 Strangio, ‘Keeper of the Faith’, pp. 265–6. 85 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 48–52. 86 CPD, vol. 63, 27 May 1969, pp. 2247–8. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 78–80. Notwithstanding his misgivings about demonstrations, Whitlam disclosed in his parliamentary speech on the Moratorium that he had agreed to address a VMC meeting outside Parliament House on 6 May (CPD, vol. 66, 14 April 1970, p. 1059). 87 CPD, vol. 66, 14 April 1970, pp. 1065–8. On the subject of the potential for violence at the Moratorium, Cairns essentially reiterated what he had said in his statements of 25 March and 13 April. That is, that demonstrations should be peaceful but this could only be guaranteed ‘if fair and reasonable outlets are available for protest and dissent. They are not available

today, and so no-one can guarantee that result’. He added: ‘I deplore violence and repudiate anyone who initiates it or deliberately uses it’ (ibid., p. 1066). 88 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 56. 89 Ibid., p. 57. 90 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 110; Cairns, VMC 25th Anniversary Seminar, 18 May 1995. 91 McLean interviewed by Ormonde, 18 February 1979; Goldbloom interviewed by Ormonde, undated; Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 57. 92 Hayden launching A Foolish Passionate Man, 11 November 1981; Leunig cited in Langley, A Decade of Dissent, p. 136; Home, Time of Hope, p. 56. 93 Edwards highlights this trait of Cairns’ leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement, A Nation at War, p. 347. 94 Murray-Smith interviewed (along with Churchward, Marginson and Turner) by Ormonde, 1974; Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974. 95 Quoted in Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 249. See also Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 114–15. 96 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 218–19, 234. 97 Bulletin, 22 June 1974. For further details about the leak of the dossier and the reaction to it, see chapter 9 below. 98 A number of pieces of crank mail directed at Cairns are among the documents of the Victorian VMC, CICD (Victoria) Papers, MS10584. See also Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 53; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 30 June 1974. 99 Melbourne Herald, 4 May 1970; Age, 7 May 1970; Melbourne Sun, 20 April 1970. 1 SMH, 8 May 1970; Sydney Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1970. 2 CPD, vol. 67, 7 May 1970, pp. 1783, 1862. 3 Farrago, Lot’s Wife & Rabelais, special combined Indochina Moratorium supplement, 6 May 1970. 4 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 126; Cairns interviewed by Marcus Beer and Greg Langley, 8 March 1988. 5 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 30 June 1974; Age, Melbourne Sun, 8 May 1970. Cairns’ movements on 8 May were outlined in Kevin Childs’ article, ‘A cup of tea, then triumph’, Age, 9 May 1970. 6 McCulloch quoted in Langley, A Decade of Dissent, p. 137; Cairns quoted in Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 127. 7 Cairns quoted in Langley, A Decade of Dissent, pp. 137–8; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 128.

8 Launceston Examiner, 11 May 1970; Cairns quoted in the Age, 9 May 1970. 9 Curthoys, ‘Mobilising Dissent’, p. 157; Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 136–7. 10 Cairns interviewed by Marcus Beer and Greg Langley, 8 March 1988. 11 Age, 9 May 1970; Melbourne Herald, 11 May 1970. 12 CPD, vol. 67, 12 May 1970, p. 1947. 13 See, for example, Edwards, A Nation at War, pp. 344, 351; Pemberton, Vietnam Remembered, p. 232. Saunders, while basically concurring, argues that the Australian government’s withdrawal of forces was also motivated by a desire ‘to take away the raison d’être of the protest movement’ (‘Australia’s Withdrawal from Vietnam’, pp. 56–61). 14 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 169. 15 For example, see an interview with Cairns commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first Moratorium, Australian, 5–6 May 1990, and his address to the VMC 25th Anniversary Seminar, 18 May 1995. 16 Murphy, Harvest of Fear, p. 258; Turner, ‘The Vietnam Moratorium’, pp. 243–4. (In his 1965 song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, Dylan sang: ‘Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’) 17 CPD, vol. 73, 23 August 1971, pp. 560–1.

7 ‘feelings of profound disillusionment’ 1 For this point, see Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 218. 2 This section borrows from Crowley, Tough Times, pp. 19–25 and ch. 4. 3 Minutes of the VMC National Consultation, Wesley Church, Melbourne, 26–27 May 1970. See also Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 144. 4 Public meeting, Richmond Town Hall, 19 July 1970, Victorian VMC Minutes. 5 From a tape-recording of Cairns’ address to the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society, 4 July 1970; Farrago, 17 July 1970 (the letter was reprinted in Lot’s Wife, 27 July 1970). 6 Australian, 20 July 1970. 7 Cairns to Uren, 16 June 1967, Uren Papers, MS6055/1/23; Australian, 4, 8 July 1967. In a speech at Monash University on 7 July Cairns reiterated his opinion that the United States was a free society. This provoked Janet Surlow, a Monash student, to accuse Cairns of having ‘made himself an enemy of truth’ (Lot’s Wife, 25 July 1967). 8 Cairns quoted in Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, pp. 176, 184. 9 Melbourne Herald, 31 August 1970; Non-Violent Power, October 1970, p. 8.

10 McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 327–31. 11 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Australian, 26 November 1968; SMH, 27 March 1969. An important factor in the New South Wales Labor Left’s support for intervention in Victoria was the Victorian Executive’s failure to back Cairns in the 1968 preselection tussle with Calwell. See Fitzgerald, Federal Intervention in the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party, pp. 169–70. 12 Age, 27–28 March, 1 April, 16 June 1969. 13 Australian, 15 August 1970; Fitzgerald, Federal Intervention, p. 222. 14 Australian, 7 September 1970. 15 Fitzgerald, Federal Intervention, p. 210; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 132, Australian, 7, 9 September 1970. 16 Fitzgerald, Federal Intervention, pp. 218–19. 17 Turner interviewed by Ormonde, 30 October 1974; Age, 1 February 1971. 18 Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995. See also Cairns interviewed in the Melbourne Herald, 7 March 1972. 19 Inside Labor, no. 10, 28 November 1970, p. 6; ibid., no. 11, 5 December 1970, p. 9. The opponents of intervention were known as the Combined Unions-Socialist Left (CUSL). Later the CUSL became known simply as the Socialist Left. 20 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 170. 21 Ibid., pp. 171–3; Age, 17–18 September 1970; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 133. 22 Quoted in Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, p. 136. 23 This account of the demonstration has been constructed from ibid., pp. 136–8; Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 173–4; Age, Melbourne Sun, 19 September 1970. 24 Melbourne Sun, 19 September 1970. 25 For example see the Age’s editorial, 19 September 1970. The violence in Sydney and Adelaide was reported in the Australian of that date. 26 Melbourne Sun, 19 September 1970; Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 174; Ward, ‘The Second Vietnam Moratorium’, p. 502. 27 Jill Jolliffe, ‘Melbourne Moratorium’, Direct Action, no. 2, October 1970, p. 3; Rabelais, 25 September 1970. 28 ’s trains and tensions in the protest movement’, News Weekly, 31 March 1971. The author of the article is not identified, but Saunders suggests it was the young conservative intellectual Gerard Henderson (The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 252, n. 29). 29 Langer, ‘Revolutionaries and the Moratorium’; York, ‘Imperialism and the Moratorium’; Gould, ‘The Australian Anti-War Movement and the Labour Movement’; Teichmann,

‘Mixing with the Untouchables on the Australian-American Alliance’; Cairns, ‘The Anti-War Campaign 1971’. Copies of these and other papers delivered at the conference are in the Victorian VMC collection, CICD (Victoria) Papers, MS10584, SLV. 30 News Weekly, 31 March 1971. 31 McQueen’s conference paper was entitled ‘The ALP’s Strategy for Counter-Revolution in Asia or Living off Asia’. 32 McQueen, ‘Living off Asia’, pp. 14, 20 and 37. For a spirited reply to McQueen’s attack on Cairns, see Summy, ‘Cairns Reassessed’, pp. 38–61. More recently, Rick Kuhn has recycled McQueen’s thesis that there was little to distinguish Cairns’ attitude to the Vietnam War from that of Whitlam (The Australian Left, Nationalism and the Vietnam War’, Labour History, no. 72, May 1997, pp. 167–8). 33 McQueen, ‘Technocratic Laborism’, p. 55; Beilharz, Transforming Labor, pp. 98–9. 34 Rowley, ‘Bob Hawke: Capital for Labor?’, pp. 9–17; McQueen, ‘Technocratic Laborism’, p. 54. See also the section on ‘Laborism, Old and New’ in Rowley’s essay, ‘The Political Economy of Australia Since the War’ in John Playford and Douglas Kirsner (eds), Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique, Penguin, Ringwood, 1972, pp. 302–14. 35 McQueen, ‘Living off Asia’, pp. 14–15; Rowley, ‘Bob Hawke: Capital for Labor?’, p. 11. 36 For a comprehensive analysis of the industry policy pursued by McEwen in the 1960s, see Glezer, Tariff Politics, esp. chs 5–7. 37 For instance, addressing the House in March 1966 Cairns had decried the stagnancy of Australia’s tariff policy-making system and warned that no government ‘can long expect to hand out protection and subsidies to industries without expecting them to have something to say about how those industries will handle that protection and those subsidies’ (CPD, vol. 50, 9 March 1966, p. 99). 38 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 209–10; CPD, vol. 54, 16 March 1967, pp. 796–9, 801. See also Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 33. 39 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 191; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 48–9. 40 CPD, vol. 72, 28 April 1971, pp. 2160–2; ibid., vol. 75, 7 December 1971, p. 4222. 41 Cairns, Tariffs or Planning?, pp. 12–13, 20–2, 43. 42 Ibid., pp. 51, 61, 63 (emphasis in the original). 43 Ibid., p. 49. 44 This flaw in Tariffs or Planning? is identified in Summy, ‘The Revolutionary Democracy of J. F. Cairns’, pp. 64–5. 45 Cairns, Tariff or Planning?, pp. 63–4. 46 Nation, 3 April 1971; National Times, 22–27 February 1971. 47 Australian, 20 February 1971. 48 CPD, vol. 66, 16 April 1970, p. 1246; Age, 22 April 1971; Australian, 18 September 1970.

49 See, for example, CPD, vol. 72, 7 April 1971, pp. 1599–602. 50 Age, 25 May 1971; Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, p. 144. 51 Age, 5 December 1970; Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995. Similarly, following his second visit to the Soviet Union in 1971, Cairns claimed that he saw little evidence of discontent among the citizens and that the Soviet police were ’s lightly comical figures’ who had little to do (Melbourne Observer, 7 November 1971). For an example of the use of these comments as an enduring source of ammunition for his critics, see Gerard Henderson, ‘The Left’s truth: stranger than fiction?’, Australian, 4 December 1989. 52 The origins of this body are obscure, but it seems that it was an offshoot of the Stockholm World Peace Council conference on Indochina of November 1970. 53 Browning and Freeman (eds), The Wasted Nations. See also Melbourne Herald, 28 June 1971; Dowsing, Jim Cairns MHR, p. 155. 54 McMullin, The Light on the Hill, p. 334; Melbourne Herald, 28–29 June 1971. 55 Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995. For the report of the parliamentary delegation see Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers, 1972, vol. 8, no. 60. 56 Sunday Australian, 16 April 1972; National Times, 27 March–1 April 1972; Melbourne Herald, 7 March 1972. 57 Teichmann, ‘Idealist in the wrong country’, Nation Review, 22–28 January 1972. Interestingly, Teichmann’s assessment that the radicals prevented the Moratorium movement from developing into a more significant agent of social change is supported by Home, Time of Hope, pp. 178–9. 58 Goldbloom interviewed by Ormonde, undated. 59 Age, 1 July 1971. 60 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, pp. 313–17. 61 Ibid., p. 327; Age, 11, 13 May 1972. 62 Age, 11, 16 May 1972. 63 Melbourne Sun, 16 May 1972; Adelaide Advertiser, 17 May 1972. For McMahon’s attempt to revive the law and order theme and Cairns’ reaction to that attempt, see Age, 16 May 1972; Australian, 17 May 1972. 64 SMH, 19 May 1972; Age, Australian, 20 May 1972. 65 Australian, 19 May 1972; Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995. 66 Melbourne Sun, 21 June 1972. 67 Oakes and Solomon, The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, pp. 95–101; Crowley, Tough Times, p. 72. 68 CPD, vol. 79, 31 August 1972, pp. 1056–7, 1079. 69 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 250–1. For Cairns’ contributions on this issue in the

parliament, see CPD, vol. 77, 20 April 1972, pp. 1875–8; vol. 78, 17 May 1972, p. 2651; vol. 80, 19 September 1972, pp. 1574–5, and 20 September 1972, p. 1627. 70 Cairns had travelled to Fiji in May 1966 at the invitation of the Fijian Atomic Explosion Protest Committee and the Fijian Labor Party. However, on his arrival in Fiji he was only allowed entry into the country on a visa which, among other things, stipulated that he was not to speak at public meetings, distribute political pamphlets, or take part in processions or political activity (Australian, 31 May, 1, 4 June 1966). 71 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 143; Age, 1 July 1972; Australian, 5 July 1972. 72 Caldicott, A Passionate Life, pp. 137–8. Cairns also provided an outline of the delegation’s Paris discussions in a speech to the House on his return to Australia (CPD, vol. 79, 16 August 1972, pp. 215–18). 73 Little, ‘Whitlam, Whitlamism and the Whitlam Years’, p. 61; Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995; Melbourne Herald, 29 November 1972. 74 Oakes and Solomon, The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, pp. 246–7; Age, 1 December 1972. 75 The voting patterns are analysed in ibid., chs 21–22. 76 Quoted in Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 73. 77 The Quiet Revolution, pp. 111–12, 39. 78 Ibid., pp. 133–4. This passage clearly borrowed from the analysis by British New Left intellectual Perry Anderson of the shortcomings of social democratic theory. See chapter 6 above. 79 Ibid., p.9. 80 Ibid., pp. 113–16, 124–6. 81 Ibid., pp. 111–12, 7, 10, 15. 82 Ibid., pp. 13, 7–9. 83 Ibid., pp. 170–1, 146–7, 168. 84 Ibid., pp. 112–13, 167. 85 Ibid., p. 171.

8 A ‘New Jim Cairns’? 1 McClelland, Stirring the Possum, p. 138. Hayden echoes McClelland’s assessment (Hayden, p. 261). 2 Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 72. 3 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 3. 4 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 74–5.

5 Ibid., p. 75. 6 Melbourne Herald, 18 December 1972; Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 148. 7 Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 148–50; SMH, 21 December 1972. 8 Melbourne Herald, 18 December 1972; Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, pp. 420–2. 9 Saunders, The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, p. 353; SMH, 22 December 1972; Age, 29 December 1972. 10 Canberra Times, 1 January 1973; SMH, 5 January 1973. For the statements by Cameron and Uren see respectively Age, 30 December 1972; SMH, 8 January 1973. 11 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 43; Albinski, Australian External Policy Under Labor, pp. 125–6; SMH, 1 January 1973. 12 Age, 10–11 January 1973; SMH, 11 January 1973; Uren, Straight Left, pp. 222–3. 13 Address by Cairns to the MTIA, Lakeside Hotel Canberra, 21 February 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. 14 Ibid.; SMH, 14 December 1972; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 134. 15 Quoted in Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 155; Address by Cairns to the MTIA, 21 February 1973. 16 Australian Financial Review (AFR), 15 February 1973; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 152. 17 Canberra Times, 5 May 1973; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 134, 156; Address by Cairns to the AIDA Annual General Meeting, 9 July 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. 18 AFR, 22 June 1973. For a further insight into Whitlam’s views on industry protection, see Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 191 19 Walter, The Leader, p. 47. Walter identifies these traits as characteristic of Whitlam’s inspirational leadership style that, in turn, was an extension of his narcissistic, grandiose personality type. See James Walter, ‘Gough Whitlam: Bursting Limitations’ in Judith Brett (ed.), Political Lives, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, pp. 28–51. 20 Hughes, Exit Full Employment, p. 62; Whitwell, The Treasury Line, pp. 196–8. 21 Age, 26 December 1972. 22 Ibid., 15 February 1973; SMH, 14–16 February 1973; Melbourne Herald, 15 December 1973. 23 Melbourne Herald, 15 February 1973; SMH, 16 February 1973. 24 AFR, 13–14 March 1973. 25 Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 164. 26 The text of the joint communiqué on the agreement issued by the Australian and Soviet

governments is in the Australian Foreign Affairs Record (AFAR), vol. 44, no. 3, March 1973, pp. 206–7. 27 Ibid., no. 5, May 1973, pp. 348–9. See also Cairns’ ministerial statement to the parliament on the Wellington talks, CPD, vol. 83, 11 April 1973, pp. 1299–304. 28 Melbourne Herald, 8 May 1973; Age, 9 May 1973. 29 AFAR, vol. 44, no. 3, March 1973, pp. 202–3; Age, 9 May 1973. 30 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 159; Albinski, Australian External Policy Under Labor, p. 213. 31 Melbourne Herald, 15 May 1973; Melbourne Sun, 12 May 1973. Grant also covered the mission for the Melbourne Sun. 32 For the full text of the communiqué, see AFAR, vol. 44, no. 5, May 1973, pp. 362–3. See also Age, 14, 16 May 1973. 33 Melbourne Sun, 15 May 1973; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 157. 34 Age, 23 May 1973. It had published the photograph of Cairns at the Great Wall, 21 May 1973. 35 For the full text, see AFAR, vol. 44, no. 5, May 1973, pp. 363–5. 36 Dick Wilson, Zhou Enlai: A Biography, Viking, New York, 1984, ch. 22; Melbourne Sun, 18 May 1973. 37 AFAR, vol. 44, no. 5, May 1973, p. 362. The following account is primarily based on reports in the Age, 19 May 1973, and the Australian, 29 May 1973, as well as Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 January 1996. 38 At the time the suspension had been assumed to have been prompted by Peking’s unhappiness with the continuing refusal of the Liberal-Country Party government to grant China diplomatic recognition. The suspension caused considerable harm to Australian wheatgrowers. The economic and political dimensions of Australia’s trade relationship with Communist China in the years immediately preceding the Whitlam Government are discussed in Fung and Mackerras, From Fear to Friendship, chs 3–4. 39 Age, 24 April, 5 May 1973. The yacht set sail for Muroroa while Cairns was in China. 40 For example, see a speech by the Victorian Liberal John Jess when the parliament debated the issue of French nuclear tests in August 1972, CPD, vol. 79, 16 August 1972, pp. 218– 19. 41 Age, 19 May, 1 June 1973; Melbourne Herald, 31 May 1973; Melbourne Sun, 1 June 1973. 42 AFAR, vol. 44, no. 5, May 1973, pp. 363–5; Age, 1 June 1973; Australian, 19 May 1973. 43 For the text of Cairns’ statement announcing the agreement, see AFAR, vol. 44, no. 7, July 1973, p. 472. See also AFR, 25 July 1973. 44 Australian, 12 October 1973. 45 Fung and Mackerras, From Fear to Friendship, pp. 179–84, 194.

46 Ibid., p. 179. 47 Glezer, Tariff Politics, p. 117; Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 192. 48 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 21; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 57–60; Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 208. 49 Quoted in Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 185. 50 Ibid., p. 189; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, p. 62; Gruen, ‘The 25% Tariff Cut’, p. 9. 51 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 117, 313; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 162–3. 52 For the Treasury critique see Gruen, ‘The 25% Tariff Cut’, pp. 9–10. See also Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 117, 313; Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 214. 53 Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 166. 54 Ibid., p. 163; Age, 4 July 1973; Address by Cairns to the AIDA Annual General Meeting, 9 July 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. 55 Reid, The Whitlam Venture, pp. 115–18. See also Age, 18 July 1973. 56 See CPD, vol. 85, 21 August 1973, pp. 167–9. 57 d’Alpuget, Robert J. Hawke, pp. 226–7; Australian, 20–21 July 1973. 58 Age, 19 July 1973. 59 AFR, 19 July 1973; Nation Review, 20–26 July 1973. 60 See, for example, Fred Brenchley’s commentary in the National Times, 23–28 July 1973. It is a view repeated in Glezer, Tariff Politics, p. 117, and Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 114. 61 National Times, 23–28 July 1973; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 167. 62 Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 January 1996; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 115. 63 See, for example, his press statement ‘Tariff Reduction’, 15 August 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. See also National Times, 23–28 July 1973. 64 Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 72–7; Glezer, Tariff Politics, p. 313. 65 CPD, vol. 87, 5 December 1973, pp.4317, 4324–5; ibid., vol. 88, 9 April 1974, pp. 1253– 5. For Anthony’s initial criticisms of the decision, see Australian, 20 July 1973. 66 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 126–7. 67 On 12 April 1975, interviewed by Ormonde, Cairns lamented that he had assisted Whitlam to get the tariff cut decision through the Cabinet. He has expressed similar regret on several occasions since, most recently in an interview with the author, 8 January 1996. For details of the Whitlam Government’s back-pedalling on industry policy in 1974–75, see the next chapter. 68 National Times, 15–20 October, 6–11 August 1973. In his memoirs Whitlam is less flattering about Cairns’ role: ‘Cairns was rational enough when one tquld prise him away

from his sycophants’ (The Whitlam Government, p. 191). 69 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 111–12; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 154–5, 159–60. 70 AFR, 27 June, 10 July 1973; Australian, 22 June 1973; Address by Cairns to the AIDA Annual General Meeting, 9 July 1973. 71 CPD, vol. 85, 28 August 1973, p. 456. Also see Rattigan, Industry Assistance, p. 161. 72 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 114–15, 312. 73 For further details of Cairns’ visit to Japan and the two Koreas, see his ministerial statement to the parliament, CPD, vol. 86, 15 October 1973, pp. 2062–7; AFAR, vol. 44, no. 9, September 1973, pp. 614–17. 74 Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 166–7; CPD, vol. 86, 22 October 1973, p. 2430. 75 See, for example, the Australian, 9 October 1973. 76 National Times, 15–20 October 1973. 77 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 16 November 1975. 78 Press statement by ACMA, ‘Secondary Industry Changes’, 9 October 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA; Age, AFR, 10 October 1973. 79 Quoted in Catley and McFarlane, Australian Capitalism in Boom and Depression, p. 124. For a brief discussion of the origins of the AIDC and Labor’s plans for its expansion, see ibid., pp. 129–30, and Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 219. 80 Press statement by Cairns, ‘Expanded Role for AIDC, 6 March 1973, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. 81 Joint press statement by Cairns and Crean, ‘AIDC Proposals Approved by Cabinet’, 27 August 1973, ibid.; Australian, 29 August 1973. 82 CPD, vol. 85, 30 August 1973, pp. 653–8. 83 Ibid., vol. 86, 16 October 1973, pp. 2162, 2186–7. 84 In a speech reintroducing the Bills to the House on 8 April 1974, Cairns catalogued the Opposition’s record of obstruction of both Bills (ibid., vol. 88, 8 April 1974, pp. 1167–70). 85 Ibid., pp. 1171–2. 86 Cairns, ‘The Policy and Intention of the Government for Industry in Australia’, Southern Cross Hotel Melbourne, 15 March 1974 (copy in the possession of the author). See also Australian, 16 March 1974. 87 The following section is largely based on Crowley, Tough Times, chs 5–6; McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 338–52. 88 Quoted in Ghosh, ‘Business and the Whitlam Government’, p. 226. 89 Crowley, Tough Times, p. 95. 90 Australian, 18, 20 June 1973; Hayden, Hayden, pp. 168–9; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 66–7.

91 Age, 10 September 1973. 92 AFR, 3 October 1973; Hughes, ‘Australian Political Chronicle September–December 1973’, p. 79. The trade union movement’s attitude to the incomes referendum is examined in Singleton, The Accord, pp. 28–9. 93 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 162; Age, 24 November, 28 December 1973. 94 Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 January 1996. 95 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 10, 24–5. 96 Australian, 13 March 1973. 97 National Times, 3–8 December 1973; Australian, 1 December 1973; Age, 28 December 1973. 98 Hayden interviewed by Ormonde, September 1974; Age, 24 November 1973. 99 The mission appears to have been successful in this respect. Following two rounds of talks between Cairns and the North Vietnamese Finance Minister, Dang Viet Chau, the two countries announced an agreement to start detailed negotiations on a trade pact (Age, 11 December 1973). 1 Ibid., 18 December 1973. 2 Cairns quoted in ibid.; ibid., 11 December 1973; SMH, 12 December 1973. 3 Age, 13, 18 December 1973; Albinski, Australian External Policy Under Labor, pp. 128–9; CPD, vol. 87, 27 November 1973, p. 4078. 4 CPD, vol. 87, 13 December 1973, pp. 4686–7; Age, 15–16 December 1973; SMH, 19 December 1973. 5 Age, 16, 19, 21 December 1973; SMH, 18 December 1973; Australian, 19 December 1973. 6 Age, 21 February 1974; Melbourne Herald, 6 March 1974. 7 The most exhaustive account of the ‘Gair Affair’ and the associated machinations precipitating the May 1974 election is in Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, chs 1–5. 8 Blazey and Campbell, The Political Dice Men, p. 197. 9 Cairns used this phrase while addressing a group of students at Monash University on 30 April, as well as at an election rally in Melbourne on 16 May. He had also used it in his speech to the parliament of 9 April. See Age, 1, 17 May 1974; CPD, vol. 88, 9 April 1974, p. 1284. 10 For a full analysis of the election results and voting patterns, see Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, ch. 29. 11 SMH, 29 April 1974; Blazey and Campbell, The Political Dice Men, pp. 100–1. 12 Age, 24, 27 May 1974; Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974. 13 Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974; Whitlam interviewed by the author, 22 April 1994; Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, p. 526; Uren, Straight Left, p. 232.

14 Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, pp. 305, 523. 15 Press statement by Cairns, ‘Inflation’, 30 May 1974, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA. 16 Wieneke, Personality and Politics. The author is indebted to Doug Kirsner for drawing his attention to this work. 17 Ibid., pp. 328, 89, 96; transcript of the Mike Willesee Show, 0/10 Network, 23 June 1974. 18 Age, 5, 11 June 1974; Australian, 11 June 1974; Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 January 1996. 19 SMH, 11 June 1974; C. A. Daly, Secretary of the Gosford branch of the New South Wales ALP, to Cairns, 2 July 1974, M116 Box 12, AA. Interestingly, another who wrote to congratulate Cairns was the Australian’s China correspondent, Gregory Clark. ‘For me it proved’, Clark wrote, ‘there is still some justice in the world, that these long years of sticking to your principles have paid off’ (Clark to Cairns, 30 July 1974, ibid., Box 6). 20 Age, 12 June 1974; Australian, 11 June 1974. 21 Australian, 11 June 1974; Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, pp. 527–8. For further details about the PRS and the proposed Adjustment Assistance Agency, see respectively Thompson, ‘The public service’, pp. 76–7; Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 130–1. 22 Quoted in Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 74. This is also based on Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 January 1996. 23 SMH, 11 June 1974; Uren, Straight Left, pp. 232–3. 24 Sister Jude Connelly to Cairns, 22 June 1974, M116 Box 7, AA.

9 Ruin and Liberation 1 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 25. 2 Address by Cairns to the National Press Club, Canberra, 20 June 1974, AA1975/386/1 Box 2, AA; News Weekly, 12, 19 June 1974; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 173. 3 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 286–7; Pilger, A Secret Country, pp. 204–5. Three weeks after the initial leak the Bulletin published extracts from a 1972 ASIO document which, as Peter Samuel noted, suggested that terrorism was the ‘logical extension of radical street demonstrations’ led by Cairns (Bulletin, 13 July 1974). 4 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 50; Australian, 21 June 1974. 5 The memorandum was reprinted in the Australian, 26 December 1995. 6 The Nixon Administration was also worried by other changes to the Whitlam Government Cabinet. See the Melbourne Herald, 12 June 1974. 7 Toohey and Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks, p. 83; McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 293. 8 For Pilger’s speculations about the CIA’s role in Cairns’ downfall, see Pilger, A Secret

Country, pp. 204–7 (quotation, p. 204). A more sober examination of the evidence of CIA involvement in the destabilisation of the Whitlam Government is in Toohey and Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks, ch. 3. 9 Rumours of Morosi’s alleged links to the CIA surfaced soon after she joined Cairns’ ministerial staff. 10 Transcript of Cairns interviewed by Mike Willesee, Channel 7, 10 July 1975. 11 Whitwell, The Treasury Line, pp. 211–12. 12 Ibid., pp. 178, 199–200, 203–4. For a useful summary of the main points of difference between Keynesian and monetarist/neo-liberal economic paradigms, see Bell, Ungoverning the Economy, pp. 123–7. 13 Age, 8 June 1974. See also Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, pp. 523–5. 14 The following account of the framing of Labor’s mini-Budget is primarily based on Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 60–5; Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, pp. 523–40. 15 Australian, 20 July 1974; AFR, 18, 22 July 1974. 16 Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 65–6. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 304–7. 17 Australian, 21 June 1974. 18 Hayden, though generally highly critical of Cairns’ stint as Treasurer, acknowledges that he ’sought to manage the economy according to compassionate responses influenced by the experiences of the Great Depression’ (Hayden, p. 231). 19 A copy of the paper was reprinted in the Age, 17 August 1974, and in Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, pp. 541–5. 20 Australian, 27 August 1974. See also Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 66; Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, p. 541. 21 Age, 12 August 1974. 22 The Cabinet deliberations are discussed in Hayden, Hayden, p. 179; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 69–70; Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, pp. 207–8. 23 SMH, 23 August 1974; Australian, 20 August 1974. 24 Australian, 18 September 1974; Reid, The Whitlam Venture, pp. 180–1; Oakes and Solomon, Grab for Power, p. 548; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 16 November 1975. 25 Cairns, The Impossible Attainment, pp. 10–11 (emphasis in the original); Age, 16 September 1974. 26 Cairns, The Impossible Attainment, p. 6; Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 323. See also Whitwell, The Treasury Line, pp. 203–4. 27 CPD, vol. 90, 17 September 1974, pp. 1275–6; Australian, 18 September 1974. See also Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 90–2.

28 Age, 18–19 September 1974. 29 Australian, 18 September 1974; Singleton, The Accord, pp. 33–6. 30 See, for example, his article on the Budget in the Age, 16 September 1974. 31 Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 208–9; Australian, 25 September 1974. 32 See his reply to a question on the effects of the tariff reductions in the House, CPD, vol. 90, 24 September 1974, pp. 1653–4. Cairns’ belief is supported by the analysis of Gruen, ‘The 25% Tariff Cut’, pp. 13–18. 33 Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 130–1; Rattigan, Industry Assistance, pp. 201–4. 34 A. C. Pentland to Cairns, 20 September 1974, M116 Box 21, AA. 35 Australian, 26 September 1974. See also Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 71–2; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 94–5. 36 Bulletin, 21 September 1974. 37 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, pp. 210–11; Age, 22 November 1974. 38 Crean interviewed by the author, 15 March 1995. See also Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 211; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 73–4. 39 Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974 and 23 January 1976; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996; and Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996. For Gwen Cairns’ view, see the Australian, 23 November 1974. 40 Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 211. 41 Whitlam blames Cairns for leaking the news of the proposed portfolio exchange in ‘indiscreet’ comments made to Overseas Trade officials at farewell drinks prior to his departure for Guyana. This seems a bit rich. As early as 23 October John Jost of the Age had forecast that Cairns would soon be appointed Treasurer, because of an equivocal reply the Prime Minister had given at a press conference when asked about the possibility of Crean being shifted to another portfolio. But the story was also based on rumours circulating around Canberra about Crean’s future, which had been partly fed by Whitlam’s mischievous habit of introducing Cairns to foreign visitors as ‘Australia’s next Treasurer’. See Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, p. 211; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 73. 42 Australian, 5 November 1974; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 74. 43 Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 75; Oakes, Crash Through or Crash, p. 120. 44 Cass interviewed by Ormonde, 12 February 1976 and by the author, 10 January 1996; Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 184. 45 SMH, 22 November 1974; Cairns quoted in Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, p. 76. 46 Australian, 9 December 1974; AFR, 5 December 1974. 47 Age, 23 November 1974; SMH, 22 November 1974. 48 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 307. See also AFR, 25 November 1974.

49 Catley and McFarlane, Australian Capitalism, p. 140; Age, 30 November 1974. 50 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 125; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 15 May 1979. 51 Transcript of AM, ABC Radio, 22 November 1974. 52 Whitlam also announced that the PJT had been directed to ease the squeeze on business profits (AFR, 11 November 1974; Australian, 13 November 1974). 53 SMH, 13 November 1974; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 101. 54 Transcript of AM, ABC Radio, 22 November 1974. 55 The following sketch of Morosi’s background is largely based on the account she provides in her book Sex, Prejudice and Politics, esp. pp. 19–26 and ch. 3. It also draws upon a profile of Morosi in the Sunday Age, 7 April 1996, and an interview she gave to the author, 15 June 1996. 56 Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 57 Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, pp. 26–8; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996; Sunday Age, 7 April 1996. 58 Uren, Straight Left, p. 244; Morosi interviewed by Ormonde, 16 October 1976. 59 Uren, Straight Left, p. 246; Uren interviewed by Ormonde, 21 October 1974; Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996. 60 In September 1968, following a conversation with Whitlam, the Liberal Minister for Air, Peter Howson, recorded in his diary: ‘Gough was interesting on the subject of Gwen Cairns, Jim’s wife, saying that she exercises a sort of “mother” approach to Jim. He consults her on every action that he’s about to take, and the relationship between them is much more “mother to son”, on the surface, than husband and wife’ (The Howson Diaries, p. 461). In her 1975 psychological profile of Cairns, Diane Wieneke points to some of the parallels between his relationship with Gwen and his mother (Personality and Politics, p. 93). 61 Sydney Sun, 11 April 1973. 62 Morosi interviewed by Ormonde, 16 October 1976. 63 Ibid.; Cairns in Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, p. 2; Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 July 1996; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 64 This list represents just some of the works Cairns and Morosi nominate as having explored together in the mid-1970s (Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 15 August 1976; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996). 65 Cairns, Human Growth, pp. 179–80. Morosi described Reich as Cairns’ ‘breakthrough’ when interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 66 For a comprehensive study of Reich’s life and ideas, see Boadella, Wilhelm Reich. 67 The following sketch of Reich’s social theory borrows from ibid., chs 2–3, and Rycroft, Reich, chs 2–3.

68 Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. xi. Emphasis in the original. 69 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 15 August 1976. 70 From a transcript of ‘Of Course I Love Jim Cairns’, Channel 9, 1 December 1975 (Uren Papers, MS5816/1/2). 71 In fact, Cairns had first raised the possibility of Morosi joining his staff in October, but it was not until his move to Treasury that an opportunity to do so arose (Uren, Straight Left, pp. 243–4; Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, p. 30; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996). 72 Age, 2 December 1974; Melbourne Sun, 3 December 1973. 73 Oakes, Crash Through or Crash, p. 75; CPD, vol. 92, 4 December 1974, pp. 4587–8; Age, 6 December 1974. 74 See Cairns’ introduction to Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, pp. 2–3. 75 CPD, vol. 92, 5 December 1974, p. 4605; Age, 6 December 1974. 76 This account of the meeting is based on Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996, and Oakes, Crash Through or Crash, pp. 76–7. For Morosi’s statement, see SMH, 7 December 1974. 77 Age, Australian, 12 December 1974. For the Opposition’s attacks in the Senate, see CPD, vol. 6 (Senate), 10–11 December 1974, pp. 3256–9, 3358. 78 For instance, in SMH, 12 December 1974, John Waugh reported that Morosi wore ‘a white cotton dress with a gold chain, with a green jade pendant on it, and toe-peeper shoes’. 79 Australian, 13 December 1974; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 80 Cairns extensively discusses the government’s problems in obtaining a source of funds for its minerals and energy program in Oil in Troubled Waters, ch. 3. 81 Ibid., pp. 8–9; CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3635–6. Hayden briefly explores the economic and constitutional implications of Labor’s attempts to secure a massive overseas loan in 1974–75 in his scathing discussion of his colleagues’ loan-raising activities (Hayden, pp. 246–51). 82 Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 169. 83 These details of the meeting of 13–14 December and the preceding discussions have been pieced together from Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 93–4; Cairns, interviewed by the author, 8 July 1996; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 160–4; Reid, The Whitlam Venture, ch. 1. 84 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 94–5; Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 July 1996; Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 27. 85 See Daniels to Wheeler, 9 June 1975, CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3568–9. Like so much else of the documentation relevant to the ‘Loans Affair’, Daniels’ memo to Wheeler was tabled in the House during a special sitting on the government’s loan-raising activities on 9

July 1975. See also Cairns, Oil in troubled Waters, p. 96. 86 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 71. 87 Stretton, The Furious Days, pp. 39, 73–4, 80; Australian, 28 December 1974; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 87–8. 88 Age, 16, 18 December 1974; Glezer, Tariff Politics, pp. 163–6. 89 Age, 23–4 December 1974, 23, 29 January 1975. 90 Hughes, Exit Full Employment, p. 104; Australian, 22, 30 January, 15 February 1975. 91 SMH, 24 January 1975; Australian, 20, 24 January 1975; Age, 21 January 1975. 92 Australian, 20 February 1975; Gleghorn interviewed by Ormonde, 9 October 1977. In this interview Gleghorn told Ormonde that he had begun to suspect Morosi might be a ‘plant’. 93 McRae’s interviews with Morosi started with a piece in the Sydney Sun, 9 December 1974, headed “Is it a Crime to be Beautiful?”. The interviews with Ditchburn appeared in ibid., 20, 23, 24 December 1974. 94 Ibid., 7 February 1975. McRae acknowledged the circumstances in which the comments were made in an article she wrote for the Sunday Herald Sun, 5 November 1995. She also claimed that the headline was not her choice of words, nor was she ‘too chuffed with the paper’s use of the swimsuit shot of Morosi’. 95 Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 16 November 1975. 96 See Cairns’ introduction to Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, p. 3. See also his speech to the parliament following his dismissal from the ministry, in which he chronicled the media’s misconduct, CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3636–7. 97 Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. Uren, Straight Left, p. 245, corroborates this account. For Reid’s observation, see The Whitlam Venture, p. 243. 98 CPD, vol. 93, 20 February 1975, pp. 535–8; Age, 22 February 1975. See also Australian, 21 February 1975. 99 CPD, vol. 93, 20 February 1975, p. 540; Age, 21, 26 February 1975. 1 Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 July 1996; Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 323; Age, 25–26 February 1975. 2 Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, pp. 59–60; Uren, Straight Left, p. 245. 3 See Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 198; Hayden, Hayden, p. 261; Oakes, Crash Through or Crash, p. 80. 4 Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996; Goldbloom interviewed by the author, 22 March 1995; McLean interviewed by Ormonde, 18 February 1979; Caldicott, A Passionate Life, pp. 153–4. 5 Australian, 20 February 1975; Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996. Oakes even suggests that Morosi attempted ‘to recreate an entire staff in her own image’. The only

real evidence he provides is that a newly hired research assistant, Margaret McKenzie, and another staff member promoted by Morosi, Glenda Bowden, had long, dark hair! (Crash Through or Crash, pp. 82–3). 6 Both Hayden and Oakes relate this anecdote, albeit different versions (Hayden, pp. 243–4; Crash Through or Crash, pp. 82–3). The Cairns quote comes from a transcript of This Day Tonight, ABC Television, 6 June 1975. 7 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 324. 8 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 214; Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994. The trips were a trade mission to the Middle East, an Asian Development Bank meeting in Manila, and an OECD Ministerial meeting in Paris. 9 SMH, 27 February 1975; Bulletin, 1 March 1975. 10 Uren, Straight Left, p. 198. 11 AFR, 5, 18 February 1975. 12 Uren to Cairns, 2 April 1975, Uren Papers, MS6055/1/7. 13 Age, 18 November 1987; Whitlam interviewed by the author, 22 April 1994. The episode is also recounted in Clem Lloyd and Andrew Clark, Ken’s King Hit!, Cassell, Sydney, 1976, pp. 134–5. 14 Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 27; Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 95; Cairns interviewed by the author, 8 July 1996. 15 See an affidavit signed by Harris, 14 July 1975, and reprinted in the Age, 15 July 1975. 16 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 354. 17 CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3633–4; Cairns interviewed in Nation Review, 25 July 1975. 18 CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, p. 3634. 19 Harris to Cairns, 2 June 1975, as tabled in the House, 9 July 1975 (ibid., p. 3593). 20 The letter is reprinted in Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 97–8. 21 Cairns has been consistent in this version of events, for example, in his speech to the House during the special sitting (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3633–4). See also Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 97–9; Nation Review, 25 July 1975; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 16 November 1975, and by the author, 8 July 1996. 22 CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, p. 3629. 23 Hayden, for example, labelling Cairns’ 9 July speech ’self-exculpatory’, writes that this was ‘capped’ by his tabling of Nagy’s statement (Hayden, p. 262). Stegmar made her own statutory declaration concerning the events of 7 March, though, in turn, her account was contradicted by another typist on Cairns’ staff, Wendy Webster. See Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 224; SMH, 11 July 1975. 24 Age, 15 July 1975.

25 See Cairns’ speech to the House during the special sitting, CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3634–5. 26 Toohey and Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks, p. 107. 27 The letter is reprinted in Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 97. 28 Ibid., p. 98; Cairns interviewed in Nation Review, 25 July 1975. Cairns’ account of the meeting of 15 April is corroborated by Nagy’s statutory declaration and statements by Morosi and another staff member, Glenda Bowden, tabled in the parliament (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3561–2, 3630). 29 The letters are reprinted in Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 98–9. 30 These details are based on Daniel to Wheeler, 9 June 1975; Wheeler to Whitlam, 11 June 1975; and Shann to Wheeler, 11 June 1975 (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3565–6, 3569, 3573). 31 See Wheeler’s memo to Cairns, 29 April 1975, reprinted in Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 101. 32 These details are based on Wheeler to Whitlam, 11 June 1975; Shann to Wheeler, 11 June 1975; and Harders to Whitlam, 14 June 1975 (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3566, 3575– 6). 33 Harders to Wheeler, 28 May 1975 (ibid., pp. 3564–5). 34 CPD, vol. 95, 21 May 1975, p. 2545. See also Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, pp. 307– 8; Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 100. 35 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 256–7; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, p. 175. 36 The text of Wheeler’s cable to Cairns and details of Cairns’ response can be found in Wheeler to Whitlam, 11 June 1975 (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3566–7). See also Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 260. 37 See, for example, the Age, 30–31 May 1975. 38 This account of the meeting is primarily based on Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 102– 3. 39 Age, 3 June 1975; Australian, 4 June 1975. 40 CPD, vol. 95, 5 June 1975, pp. 3463–5; Australian, 5 June 1975. Byers’ report, 20 June 1975, was tabled in the House (CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3582–9). 41 Australian, 11 June 1975; AFR, 6 June 1975. 42 Australian, 29 January, 1 February 1975. 43 CPD, vol. 93, 18 February 1975, pp. 366–7; AFR, 19 February 1975; Hayden, Hayden, pp. 178, 230–1. 44 Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 38–40; SMH, 17 February 1975. 45 Catley and McFarlane, Australian Capitalism, p. 147. See also Age, 7 April, 12 May 1975.

46 Australian, 5 June 1975; SMH, 7 June 1975. 47 Age, 22 April 1975; Australian, 8 April 1975. 48 AFR, 14 April 1975; Age, 4 April 1975; Hayden, Hayden, p. 178. 49 Age, 2 April 1975. 50 CPD, vol. 94, 9 April 1975, pp. 1358–9; ibid., 15 April 1975, p. 1584. 51 Ibid., 15 April 1975, pp. 1586–7, 1594. 52 Hughes, Exit Full Employment, p. 42; AFR, 17 April 1975; Australian, 17, 21 April 1975. 53 AFR, 18, 21 April 1975; Age, 28 April 1975; CPD, vol. 94, 21 April 1975, pp. 1855–6. 54 Age, 24 April 1975; AFR, 9 May 1975. 55 See, for instance, SMH, 25 April 1975. 56 AFR, 9 May 1975. 57 The paper was reprinted in the Age, 6 June 1975. 58 Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur, p. 314. 59 See, for example, Catley and McFarlane, Australian Capitalism, pp. 145–50; Hughes, Exit Full Employment, pp. 114–19; Whitwell, The Treasury Line, pp. 216–17. A sample of the reactions to the Hayden Budget can be found in Crowley, Tough Times, p. 154. 60 CPD, vol. 96, 19 August 1975, p. 53. See also Hughes, Exit Full Employment, p. 116. 61 Age, 8 November 1975; Hayden, Hayden, pp. 221, 230. 62 CPD, vol. 95, 4 June 1975, p. 3294; Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 217–19. 63 Kelly, The Unmaking of Gough, pp. 220–1; Age, 1–2 July 1975. See also Sexton, Illusions of Power, p. 167. 64 Age, 2–3 July 1975. Another of the telexes included the bizarre claim that the proposed housing development was to be called ‘Cairnsville’. Cairns explained the background to his acquaintanceship with Sear Cowls in interviews with the Age, 7 July 1975, and Mike Willesee, Channel 7, 10 July 1975. 65 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 112; Cairns interviewed in the Age, 7 July 1975; transcript of Cairns interviewed by Mike Willesee, Channel 7, 10 July 1975. 66 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 223; SMH, Age, 2 July 1975. 67 Age, 3 July 1975; Australian, 4 July 1975; Duthie, I Had 50,000 Bosses, p. 304 (3 July 1975). 68 For example, see Fraser’s speech during the special parliamentary sitting, CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, pp. 3601, 3606; and the Australian’s editorial, 10 July 1975. 69 Australian, 19 July 1975. 70 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 225; Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, pp. 10, 125.

71 CPD, vol. 95, 9 July 1975, p. 3557; SMH, 11 July 1975; Cairns interviewed by the author, 16 October 1995. 72 Sexton, Illusions of Power, p. 168. 73 Australian, 14 July 1975. For Whitlam’s ultimatum to Caucus see ibid., 4 July 1975. 74 The following account of the Caucus meeting is based on the FPLP minutes, 14 July 1975, MS6852, NLA. 75 Cairns, Oil in Troubled Waters, p. 126. For the most complete account of the circumstances of the Whitlam Government’s dismissal, see Paul Kelly, November 1975: The Inside Story of Australia’s Greatest Political Crisis, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995.

10 ‘Some wacko theory’ 1 SMH, 19 December 1992; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 237. 2 CPD, vol. 97, 23 October 1975, p. 2449; Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, pp. 233–4. 3 FPLP minutes, 27 January 1976, MS6852, NLA. This is also based on Cairns interviewed by the author, 4 December 1996. 4 For example, on East Timor see CPD, vol. 99, 1 June 1976, pp. 2701–2, and vol. 101, 21 October 1976, p. 2090. On the spending cuts see ibid., vol. 98, 26 February 1976, p. 312, and vol. 100, 25 August 1976, p. 526. 5 Ibid., vol. 100, 14 September 1976, pp. 1013–16; Sydney Sun, 10 May 1976. 6 Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 15 August, December 1976. 7 A copy of the undated circular is in Uren Papers, MS6055/24/25. See also Cairns, The Theory of the Alternative. 8 Canberra Times, 6 December 1976. 9 Ibid., 16 September 1976; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, December 1976, and by the author, 18 November 1996. 10 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996; Canberra Times, 9 December 1976. 11 Canberra Times, 11 December 1976. 12 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, December 1976. See also Cairns, Growth to Freedom, p. 82. 13 Nation Review, 30 December 1976–5 January 1977; Canberra Times, 11 December 1976. 14 Canberra Times, 15 December 1976. 15 Down to Earth News, no. 37, September 1987, p. 2. 16 Schmidt interviewed by the author, 12 November 1996. 17 Melbourne Herald, 11 December 1976; Nation Review, 30 December 1976–5 January

1977. 18 A copy of the statement is in Uren Papers, MS6055/19/1. 19 Uren interviewed by the author, 6 December 1994, and by Ormonde, 23 January 1976; Cass interviewed by the author, 10 January 1996; Goldbloom interviewed by the author, 22 March 1995. 20 Cairns, Survival Now, p. 12. 21 Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996; Age, 1 March 1983. 22 Sydney Sun, 10 May 1976. 23 National Times, 12 May 1979; Cairns interviewed by Ormonde, 14 February 1981; Cairns, Survival Now, p. viii; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 24 CPD, vol. 104, 23 March 1977, pp. 528–31. 25 A copy of the statement is in the possession of the author. 26 SMH, 11 August 1977; transcript of This Day Tonight, ABC Television, 10 August 1977. On the subject of his successor in Lalor, Cairns declared that he would like to see the seat go to a woman: ‘Women are less dangerous . . . A woman feels the value of life’ (Australian, 11 August 1977). 27 Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996; Adelaide Advertiser, 11 August 1977. For those Cairns consulted over the decision, see Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 239. 28 Australian, Canberra Times, 12 August 1977; Age, 11 August 1977. 29 CPD, vol. 106, 22 September 1977, pp. 1529–31. 30 For Keating’s and the other valedictory speeches see ibid., vol. 107, 8 November 1977, pp. 3082–96. For Cairns’ question to Peacock, see ibid., p. 3030. 31 Melbourne Herald, 11 August 1977; Canberra Times, 12 August 1977. 32 Canberra Times, 12 August 1977; Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996. This description of Mount Oak is largely drawn from that by one of the settlers on the property, Ross Morton, in Down to Earth News, no. 8, 31 May 1979, pp. 31–2. 33 Warden thought that the harsh conditions at Bredbo had encouraged a greater authenticity than at Cotter River. There ‘are few total pseuds involved’, he wrote (Canberra Times, 27 December 1977). 34 This is based on Steve Kelly’s account of the Bredbo Confest, ‘I don’t want to work on Junie’s farm no more’, Nation Review, 12–18 January 1978. 35 Nimbin News, no. 64, 23 April 1979, p. 8; Nation Review, 12–18 January 1978. 36 Schmidt interviewed by the author, 12 November 1996; Nation Review, 12–18 January 1978. 37 Schmidt interviewed by the author, 12 November 1996; National Times, 12 May 1979. 38 See Horin’s article on Cairns in the National Times, 12 May 1979, and John Hurst’s

interview with him in Nation Review, 25–31 August 1977. 39 Nation Review, 18–24 August 1978. 40 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. It was not completely true that there was no interest in wider social issues. On 30 December Cairns and several hundred Confest participants travelled to Canberra, where they staged a colourful anti-uranium demonstration (Age, 31 December 1977). 41 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994. Down to Earth News later reported that over half of the participants at Bredbo failed to pay the registration fee (no. 8, 31 May 1979, p. 4). 42 Nation Review, 12–18 January 1978. This is also based on Schmidt interviewed by the author, 12 November 1996. 43 From a recording of Cairns’ speech as quoted in Wendy Bacon, ‘As the dreams fade, the battle for Bredbo begins’, National Times, 31 January–6 February 1986. 44 Cairns interviewed by the author, 29 November 1994 and 18 November 1996. 45 These details of Cairns’ continuing involvement in DTE Victoria are largely based on Down to Earth News, no. 5, undated, and no. 6, January 1979. 46 Nation Review, 15–21 December 1978. 47 Cairns, ‘Dynamics of Cultural Growth’, pp. 59–76. These details of Cairns’ activities in 1978 have been pieced together from the West Australian, 31 January 1978; Hobart Mercury, 1 September 1978; Nimbin News, no. 31, 4 September 1978, p. 3; National Times, 12 May 1979. 48 Nimbin News, no. 64, 23 April 1979, pp. 7–8. This is also based on Down to Earth News, no. 6, January 1979, p. 6; and Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996. 49 National Times, 12 May 1979; Schmidt interviewed by the author, 12 November 1996. 50 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996; National Times, 12 May 1979; Nimbin News, no. 64, 23 April 1979, p. 7. 51 Nimbin News, no. 73, 25 June 1979, p. 1. See also Down to Earth News, no. 8, 31 May 1979, pp. 3–6. 52 These details about Mount Oak’s purchase are based on a statement by Cairns in Down to Earth News, no. 10, 31 July 1979, pp. 11–12. They are consistent with a statement by Eunson in Nimbin News, no. 31, 4 September 1978, pp. 11–12. 53 Down to Earth News, no. 2, April 1978, pp. 5–6. 54 Ibid., no. 8, 31 May 1979, pp. 31–2. 55 Ibid., no. 10, 31 July 1979, p. 12. 56 Ibid., p. 13; Lavery quoted in Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 244. 57 For details of this dispute see Strangio, ‘Keeper of the Faith’, pp. 487–9.

58 Nimbin News, no. 103, undated, p. 12. 59 They were: Growth to Freedom (1979); Survival Now (1982); Strength Within: Towards an End to Violence (1988); and The Untried Road (1990). 60 Sydney Daily Mirror, 26 October 1981. The farm was damaged in the Ash Wednesday bushfires of February 1983. The fruit trees and orchids that had been grown were lost (ibid., 17 April 1984). 61 Age, 28 May 1984; Weekend Australian, 20–21 June 1987. 62 This information about the genesis of the Wyuna Co-operative is largely based on the National Times, 19–25 July 1985. See also Age, 19 July 1985; SMH, 20 July 1985. 63 Sydney Daily Mirror, 26 October 1981. 64 Cairns, Survival Now, p. 1. 65 Ibid., pp. 2–5. 66 Ibid., pp. 10 (emphasis in the original), 128. 67 Ibid., pp. 29–30. Emphasis in the original. 68 Ibid., pp. 37–8. 69 Engels used the works of Bachofen and Morgan for a similar purpose in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. See Millett, Sexual Politics, pp. 120–1. Millett also note8-s that another school of anthropology disputes the idea that matriarchy was the original form of social organization (pp. 108–9). 70 Cairns, Survival Now, pp. 61–4, 57–8. 71 Ibid., pp. 79–84. 72 Ibid., pp. 103–4. 73 Ibid., p. 112. For an extensive analysis of Reich’s theory of character formation, see Boadella, Wilhelm Reich, ch. 2. 74 Cairns, Survival Now, p. 113. Emphasis in the original. 75 Ibid., pp. 113, 116, 126–8. 76 Ibid., p. 137. To reinforce his hypothesis Cairns trawled through behavioural science and child psychology for research on the effects of tactile stimulation in early life. The evidence showed an inverse relationship between the level of tactile stimulation and anti-social behaviour (pp. 140–50). 77 Ibid., pp. 151–2. 78 Ibid., pp. 61, 177. 79 Ibid., pp. 151, 181. 80 Ibid., pp. 157 (emphasis in the original), 166. 81 Ibid., pp. 168–9. On the issues of childbirth and child-rearing Cairns recommended Junie

Morosi’s Tomorrow’s Child, Research for Survival, Canberra, 1982, as a valuable reference (ibid., p. 172). 82 Ibid., pp. 173, 154–5, 170. 83 Ibid., pp. 160–1. 84 Ibid., pp. 159, 172. 85 Ibid., pp. 178–81. 86 Age, 18 November 1987; Gwen Cairns interviewed by the author, 2 June 1993. 87 Age, 18 November 1987; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 88 Although Reich was the principal theoretical inspiration for Cairns’ post-1975 writings, they boast a more enduring and diverse intellectual heritage. See Frank Bongiorno, ‘Love and Friendship: Ethical Socialism in Britain and Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 116, April 2001, pp. 1–19. 89 This is based on the National Times, 19–25 July 1985; Canberra Times, 19, 25 July, 21 August 1985. 90 The full text of Scholes’ letter was reprinted in the Canberra Times, 19 July 1985. See also National Times, 19–25 July 1985. 91 SMH, 20 July 1985; Age, 19 July 1985. 92 Age, 19–20 July 1985; SMH, 19 July 1985; Canberra Times, 20 July 1985. 93 The following summary of the main findings of O’Donovan’s report is derived from the CPD, vol. 143, 20 August 1985, pp. 21–5; ibid., 23 August 1985, pp. 342–3; Canberra Times, 21 August 1985. 94 Canberra Times, 23 August 1985; Age, 21–22 August 1985. The SMH, 21 August 1985, reported Cairns as saying that at one time he had a $60,000 overdraft on 24 Morant Circuit. 95 The basis of the legal action was that Leonore Policarpio, Mark Morosi’s estranged wife, had refused to transfer the tide of 24 Morant Circuit to the Wyuna Co-operative, and therefore Wyuna had failed to comply with the terms of the deed of agreement between it and the Commonwealth (Canberra Times, 25–27 July 1985). 96 Sunday Age, 7 April 1996. This is also based on the National Times, 31 January–6 February 1986, and the author’s telephone interview with Morosi, 25 November 1996. 97 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 98 Nimbin News, no. 139, 1 December 1980, p. 4; Canberra Times, 2 November 1985. 99 A company search through the Australian Securities Commission in December 1996 showed that Research for Survival Pty Ltd was registered on 21 April 1976. Its principal activity was listed as agistment. See also Canberra Times, 5 November 1985. 1 Canberra Times, 4 November 1985. This is also based on Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996.

2 Nimbin News, November 1985. For an example of the attacks on Cairns in the counterculture press over Mount Oak, see Lisa Samuels, ‘Cairns’ ‘free land” vision dies in the Bredbo dust’, Down to Earth News, July–August 1982, p. 4. 3 National Times, 31 January–6 February 1986. See also Canberra Times, 2, 5 November 1985. 4 See, for instance, Barrie Griffiths’ press release, 9 October 1985, in Nimbin News, November 1985, and a reply by a member of Wyuna, James Conlon, ibid., December 1985. 5 Among those charged with assault were Mark Morosi, Ken Goudge and another member of Wyuna, Kariem Ali-Sharief; and Conway, McLean and Geoff Hunter from the Mount Oak community. When the charges came before a magistrate in Cooma the following July, most were either dropped or dismissed. However, Morosi was convicted of four counts of assault and sentenced to three months’ gaol, while Ali-Sharief was fined after being found guilty of two counts of assault (Canberra Times, 16 July 1986). 6 Nimbin News, December 1985 (emphasis in the original); Down to Earth News, no. 48, December 1985, p. 5. 7 Canberra Times, 2, 4–5, 9, 25 November 1985. See also National Times, 31 January–6 February 1986. 8 National Times, 31 January–6 February 1986. See also Nimbin News, vol. 9, no. 1, March 1986, p. 17. 9 According to the records of the Australian Securities Commission, a liquidator was appointed in Jury 1991. This is also based on Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996; and Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June and 25 November 1996. 10 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996. A titles search at the New South Wales Land Titles Office in November 1996 showed that Research for Survival was still the registered proprietor of Mount Oak, but in an interview with the author, 12 November 1996, George Schmidt asserted that the legal proceedings had been finalised in favour of the Mount Oak settlers. On the other hand, in a telephone conversation with the author, 25 November 1996, Junie Morosi maintained that the legal status of Mount Oak remained unresolved. Attempts to clarify this situation have been unsuccessful. The author’s repeated written inquiries to the Mount Oak community have remained unanswered, while an attempt to gain access to records of the relevant court proceedings in the New South Wales Supreme Court was also unfruitful. 11 Cairns interviewed by the author, 18 November 1996. In November 1987 Cairns told Peter Ellingsen that he had seen Morosi only about four times that year (Age, 18 November 1987). 12 Cairns quoted in Bowman and Grattan, Reformers, pp. 78–9; Morosi interviewed by the author, 15 June 1996. 13 Sydney Sun, 10 May 1976; Age, 18 November 1987; Sunday Age, 3 June 1990.

Epilogue 1 Australian Biography, SBS Television, 18 July 1999; Australian, 19 December 2000; Sunday Age, 3 December 2000. 2 For a cogent discussion of the economic policy-making of the Hawke Government, see Bell, Ungoverning the Economy, chs 7–9. 3 The ideological and political continuities and discontinuities between the Whitlam and Hawke Labor Governments have been the subject of scholarly debate. Two examples of the opposing views are Tim Battin, ‘A Break from the Past: The Labor Party and the Political Economy of Keynesian Social Democracy’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 28, no. 2, 1993, pp. 221–41; and John Warhurst, ‘Transitional Hero: Gough Whitlam and the Australian Labor Party’, ibid., vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, pp. 243–52. 4 Australian, 12 May 1988. 5 Cairns, What Can Labor Do Now? 6 This information was kindly supplied to the author by Bob Chynoweth of the head office of the Victorian ALP. 7 This account is based on the recollections of some of those who attended the dinner. 8 Cairns interviewed by Doug Aiton, Favourites, 3LO, 24 October 1996; Sunday Age, 3 June 1990. 9 Ormonde, A Foolish Passionate Man, p. 1. 10 In July 1997 Cairns was ejected from a One Nation meeting in the Melbourne southeastern suburb of Dandenong after he entered the hall and began distributing anti-racism pamphlets (Melbourne Herald Sun, 8 July 1997). 11 In April 1995, the 30th anniversary of the Menzies Government’s commitment of combat troops to Vietnam and the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, an AGB McNair Age Poll found that 55 per cent of respondents considered that Australia should not have become involved in the war, while 30 per cent thought that the intervention had been justified (Age, 29 April 1995). At this time Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defence in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, declared in his memoirs that the war had been a tragic mistake. According to McNamara, the causes of Washington’s disastrous Vietnam policy included its failure to appreciate ‘the power of nationalism to motivate a people (in this case, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong) to fight and die for their beliefs’. This and other policy misjudgements had ‘reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area’ (In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Times Books, New York, 1995, p. 322). McNamara’s mea culpa triggered a spirited debate in Australia about the legitimacy of the country’s participation in the war. See, for example, Weekend Australian, 22–23 April 1995. 12 Edwards, A Nation at War, p. 347. 13 Teichmann, ‘A dangerous passionate man’, Review, 4–10 December 1981.

SELECT BIBLIO G RAPHY ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS Australian Archives, Canberra Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, CRS A6119 and CRS A6122. James Ford Cairns, Personal Papers, CRS M116, CRS M117, CRS M118, CRS M1156, CRSAA1975. James John Cairns, AIF Service Record, CRS B2455, Item James John Cairns. Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne Meanjin Collection, Jim Cairns file. National Library of Australia Australian Labor Party, Federal Parliamentary Labor Party Minutes, MS6852. Australian Labor Party, Federal Secretariat Records, MS4985. Australian Labor Party (Victorian Branch) Papers 1947–1952, MS4846. Brian Fitzpatrick Papers, MS4965. John La Nauze Papers, MS5248. Ian Turner Papers, MS6206. Tom Uren Papers, MS5816 and MS6055. State Library of Victoria Australian Labor Party (Victorian Branch) Papers 1915–87, MS10508.

Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament (Victoria) Papers, MS 10584 (includes papers of the Victorian Vietnam Moratorium Campaign). Democratic Labor Party Papers, MS10389. Clyde Holding Papers, MS10252. Ian Turner Papers, unnumbered MS. Victorian Fabian Society Minutes, MS9431. University of Melbourne Archives Lloyd Churchward Papers. Faculty of Economics and Commerce Papers. Melbourne University Staff Association Papers. William Osborne Papers. Wilfred Prest Papers. Privately Held Papers Barry Cairns. James Ford Cairns. Paul Ormonde (copy of official statement of AIF service record of James Ford Cairns, 1945–46). Geoffrey Serle.

WORKS BY J.F. CAIRNS ‘ALP Policy Trends’, Overland, no. 26, April 1963, p. 32. The ALP’s Strategy in the Affluent Society’ in Henry Mayer (ed.), Australian Politics: A Reader, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1966, pp. 243– 7.

‘Attacks on Office of Education’, Meanjin, vol. 13, no. 1, Autumn 1949, pp. 51–4. Changing Australia’s Role in Asia, H. V. Evatt Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University Democratic Socialist Club, Melbourne, 1967. ‘Controlling Inflation’, Voice, vol. 5, no. 4, April 1956, pp. 24–5. The Crimes Act’, Overland, no. 20, April 1961, p. 18. ‘Defending Liberties’, Dissent, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1964, pp. 34–5. Do We Need a Labor Party or is the Age of Ideals and Reforms Dead?, self-published, Narre Warren East, 1988. ‘Dynamics of Cultural Growth’ in Hawke, Hayden, Cairns, Renouf: H. V Evatt Memorial Lectures, 1976–1979, Adelaide University Union Press, Adelaide, 1980, pp. 59–76. The Eagle and the Lotus: Western Intervention in Vietnam, 1847–1971, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1971 (first published 1969). The Economic and Intellectual Position of the Academic’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1949, pp. 80–2. Economics and Foreign Policy, Victorian Fabian Society, pamphlet no. 12, Melbourne, 1966. ‘Foreign Policy after Vietnam’ in The Asian Revolution and Australia, Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament, Sydney, 1969, pp. 175–89. ‘Foreword’ in The Bitter Fight: A Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1970, pp. v-vii. ‘Foreword’ in Jack Heffernan, The Socialist Alternative: An ALP View, Sydney, 1969, pp. 3–13. ‘Generation on Trial’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1951, pp. 41–7. Growth to Freedom, Down to Earth Foundation, Canberra, 1979.

Human Growth: Its Source and Potential, self-published, 1985. The Impossible Attainment, Chifley Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University ALP Club, Melbourne, 1974. ‘Independence’, Outlook, vol. 9, no. 2, April 1965, p. 17. ‘In Search of a Political Policy’, Meanjin, vol. 14, no. 1, March 1955, pp. 51–9. ‘Intellectuals and the ALP’, Meanjin, vol. 25, no. 1, March 1966, pp. 112–14. ‘Introduction’ in Junie Morosi, Sex, Prejudice and Politics, Widescope, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 1–12. ‘Labor and Economic Policy’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 2, no. 1, November 1956, pp. 123–5. ‘Labor and Tariffs’ in John McLaren (ed.), Towards a New Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 80–95. ‘Labour—Now a Challenge to Inhumanity’, Outlook, vol. 3, no. 3, May 1959, pp. 8–9. ‘Let’s Think about Indonesia’, United Front, vol. 1, no. 1, 1948, pp. 13– 22. Living with Asia, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1965. ‘Making Democracy Effective’, Voice, vol. 2, nos. 8–9, March and April 1953, pp. 26–7 and 25–6. ‘Millar’s Defence’, Outlook, vol. 9, no. 4, August 1965, pp. 19–20. ‘New Look for Labor’, Comment, vol. 1, no. 1, April 1966, pp. 21–2. Oil in Troubled Waters, Widescope, Camberwell, Vic, 1976. On the Horizon: A Cultural Transformation to a New Consciousness, selfpublished, Narre Warren East, 1999. ‘The Party of Movement, Not Resistance’, Voice, vol. 5, no. 3, March 1956, pp. 20–1.

‘Peace or War?’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1948, pp. 65–8. Preliminary Studies in Analysis of Economic Growth, Master of Commerce, University of Melbourne, 1950. The Quiet Revolution, Goldstar, Melbourne, 1972. Reshaping the Future: Liberated Human Potential, self-published, Narre Warren East, 1996. ‘A Road to Full Employment?’, Melbourne University Magazine, 1947, pp. 78–81. ‘Short Steps and Public Opinion’, Meanjin, vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1947, pp. 266–7. Silence Kills: Events Leading Up to the Vietnam Moratorium on 8 May, Vietnam Moratorium Committee, Melbourne, 1970. Socialism and the ALP, Victorian Fabian Society, pamphlet no. 8, Melbourne, November 1963. ‘Socialism and State Aid’, Dissent, vol. 2, no. 4, September-October 1962, pp. 5–6. ‘Socialism in the New Society’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, September 1962, pp. 106–8. ‘Some Problems in the Use of Theory in History’, Economic Record, vol. 26, December 1950, pp. 239–53. Strength Within: Towards an End to Violence, Nakari Publications, Narre Warren East, 1988. Survival Now: The Human Transformation, Research for Survival, Canberra, 1982. Tariffs or Planning? The Case for Reassessment, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1971. The Theory of the Alternative, self-published, Canberra, 1976. Towards a New Society: A New Day has Begun, self-published, Narre

Warren East 1993. The Untried Road, Nakari Publications, Narre Warren East, 1990. Vietnam: Is It Truth We Want?, Victorian Labor Party, 1965. Vietnam: Scorched Earth Reborn, Widescope, Camberwell, Vic, 1976. The Welfare State in Australia: A Study in the Development of Public Policy PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1957. What Can Labor Do Now?, self-published, Narre Warren East, May 1997. ‘What is Socialism?’, Socialist, June 1958, pp. 7–9. Will America Go Berserk?’, Shop, vol. 2, no. 3, August 1947, pp. 2–4. ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, Meanjin, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1947, pp. 125–6. With Cairns, G. O., Australia, A. and C. Black, London, 1953.

BOOKS, ARTICLES, CHAPTERS AND THESES Albinski, Henry S., Australian External Policy Under Labor: Content, Process and the National Debate, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1977. Alomes, Stephen, ‘Cultural Radicalism in the Sixties’, Arena, no. 62, 1983, pp. 28–54. Altman, Denis, ‘Foreign Policy and the Elections’, Politics, vol. 2, no. 1, May 1967, pp. 57–66. Anderson, Perry, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, Cornell University Press, New York, 1966, pp. 221–90. Beaumont, Joan, ‘Australia’s War’ in Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War, 1914–18, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, pp. 1–34. ——, ‘Australia’s War: Asia and the Pacific’ in Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War, 1939–45, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp. 26–53.

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SOUND RECORDINGS AND TRANSCRIPTS Interviews by the Author Bryant, Gordon, Melbourne, 18 June 1986. Cairns, Barry, Dandenong South, 4 July 2000. Cairns, Gwen, Narre Warren East, 27 November 1992; 2 June 1993; 2 February 1994; 8 July 1996. Cairns, J. F., Narre Warren East, 18 May 1985; 9 August 1990; 27 November 1992; 2 June, 14 July 1993; 2 February, 21 June, 29 November 1994; 16 October 1995; 8 January, 8 July, 18 November 1996. Cairns, J. F, telephone, 28 August, 18 November 1993; 12 July 1995; 4

December 1996. Cass, Moss, Melbourne, 10 January 1996. Churchward, Lloyd, Melbourne, 29 October 1990. Clark, Manning, Canberra, 23 April 1991. Crean, Frank, Melbourne, 15 March 1995. Daly, Fred, Canberra, 13 June 1985. Goldbloom, Sam, Melbourne, 22 March 1995. Holding, Clyde, Melbourne, 27 May 1985. McBriar, Alan, Canberra, 2 November 1990. Morosi, Junie, Canberra, 15 June 1996; telephone, 25 November 1996. Schmidt, George, Melbourne, 12 November 1996. Serle, Geoff, Melbourne, 21 September 1990. Shaw, A. G. L., Melbourne, 5 December 1990. Uren, Tom, Canberra, 17 June 1985; Sydney, 6 December 1994. Whitlam, E. G., telephone, 22 April 1994. Other Interviews and Recordings Burns, Arthur, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, September 1974. Burton, Herbert, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, September 1974. Cairns, J. F„ interviewed by Dr John Diamond, June, 8, 10 July, 9, 11, undated December 1968. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 23, 30 June, 3, 10 August 1974; 12 April, 16 November 1975; 15 August, December 1976; 15 May 1979; 14 February 1981. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Marcus Beer and Greg Langley, 8 March 1988. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Caroline Jones, The Search for Meaning,

Radio National, December 1989. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Doug Aiton, 3LO, 21 November 1990. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Doug Aiton, Favourites, 3LO, 24 October 1996. Cairns, J. F., addressing the University of Melbourne Rationalist Society, 4 July 1970. Cairns, J. F., recorded at the launch of On the Horizon, Richmond Town Hall, 26 November 1999. Cairns, J. F., recorded at the launch of Reshaping the Future, Richmond Town Hall, 22 September 1996. Cairns, J. F., recorded at the launch of Towards a New Society, Richmond Town Hall, 17 October 1993. Cairns, J. F., recorded at the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign 25th Anniversary Seminar, YMCA Melbourne, 18 May 1995. Cass, Moss, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 12 February 1976. Churchward, Lloyd, interviewed (along with Max Marginson, Stephen Murray-Smith and Ian Turner) by Paul Ormonde, 1974. Gleghorn, Geoff, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 9 October 1977. Goldbloom, Sam, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, undated. Hayden, Bill, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, September 1974. Hayden, Bill, recorded at the launch of A Foolish Passionate Man, 11 November 1981. Jones, Barry, recorded at the launch of The Untried Road, Richmond Town Hall, 16 November 1990. McLean, Jean, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 18 February 1979. McLean, Jean, recorded at the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign 25th Anniversary Seminar, YMCA Melbourne, 18 May 1995. McManus, Frank, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 15 April 1975.

Morosi, Junie, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 16 October 1976. Murray-Smith, Stephen, interviewed (along with Lloyd Churchward, Max Marginson and Ian Turner) by Paul Ormonde, 1974. Taft, Bernie, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 23 April 1975. Turner, Ian, interviewed (along with Lloyd Churchward, Max Marginson, and Stephen Murray-Smith) by Paul Ormonde, 1974. Turner, Ian, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 30 October 1974. Uren, Tom, interviewed by Paul Ormonde, 21 October 1974; 23 January 1976. Uren, Tom, recorded at the launch of On the Horizon, Richmond Town Hall, 26 November 1999. Van Moorst, Harry, recorded at the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign 25th Anniversary Seminar, YMCA Melbourne, 18 May 1995.

Radio and Television Transcripts AM, ABC Radio, 22 November 1974. Australian Biography, SBS Television, 18 July 1999. Cairns, J. F., interviewed by Mike Willesee, Channel 7, 10 July 1975. Mike Willesee Show, 0/10 Network, 23 June 1974. ‘Of Course I Love Jim Cairns’, Channel 9, 1 December 1975. This Day Tonight, ABC Television, 6 June 1975; 10 August 1977.

INDEX Aborigines, 158, 243 Acquisitive Society, The (Tawney), 78 Adams, Phillip, 175 Aeneas, 7 Advertiser (Adelaide), 201–2, 355 Age, 164, 176, 193–4, 210, 212, 221, 232, 235, 250, 258, 259, 264, 275, 277, 282, 295–7, 299, 310–11, 317, 339–40, 355, 366–7, 374, 377; wins bidding war for loan-raising documents, 339 Aggression from the North (US State Department White Paper), 151–2 Aiton, Doug, 383, 387 alternative lifestyle movement, 346, 348, 350–1, 358–9, 361, 391; hostility towards JC re Mount Oak, 380–1; self-absorption, 365; significance, 365–6; see also Down to Earth Anderson, Perry, 184, 186, 189 Anthony, Doug, 251, 265, 269, 282 ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, United States treaty), 143 Apexian, 192 Arena, 226 Argus, 6 Arndt, Professor H. W., 336 Ascanieus, 6 Askin, Sir Robert, 311–12 Associated Chambers of Manufactures of Australia, 269, 273, 282

Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, 336 Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament, 183 Australia-Overseas Club (University of Melbourne), 72 Australia-Soviet House, 57, 65, 87 Australian, 134–5, 149, 166, 176, 177, 218, 202, 231, 237, 259, 270, 276, 282, 294, 335, 338–9, 355, 367, 386 Australian Congress of International Cooperation and Disarmament, 134– 5 Australian Council for Civil Liberties (ACCL), 50, 69, 87 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), 116, 239, 256, 263, 274, 297 Australian Estates and Mortgage Company, 28, 33 Australian Financial Review, 264, 332, 334–5 Australian Imperial Force (AIF), (First) 6–7, (Second) 45–6 Australian-Indonesian Association, 57, 73, 87 Australian Industries Development Association, 252, 262, 267 Australian Industry Development Corporation (AIDC), 269–72, 283, 312– 13 Australian Labor Party (ALP), 1–2, 21–2, 24–5, 35, 51, 53–4, 56–7, 61–3, 70, 74–5, 82, 86, 98–9, 129, 130–1, 135, 156, 159, 160, 165–6, 167– 9, 172–3, 175, 177, 187, 194, 196, 200, 203, 215–16, 219–20, 228, 238, 239–40, 245, 346, 355, 384–7, 389; Federal Conferences, (1961) 113, (1963) 130, 143, (1967) 167–8, (1969) 194, 220, (1971) 233, (1973) 277, (1975) 318–19, 323, 324; Federal Executive, 70, 89–90, 113–14, 129, 135, 174, 180, 220–1; ideology, 5, 39, 59, 82, 83, 99– 103, 104, 120–1, 122, 131, 135–9, 160, 184, 226–7, 241–2, 385–6, 389; Split, 79, 89–96, 98, 100, 105, 120; Vietnam War, 143–5, 147– 51, 152–3, 161–4, 167–9, 173–4, 179, 194; White Australia Policy, 112–14, 120, 123, 145, 392; see also FPLP; New South Wales ALP;

Victorian ALP Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), 90–2, 96; see also DLP Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament 116–20 Australian Peace Council 50, 64–6, 85, 87, 94, 115 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), 86–8, 89, 117, 182, 207, 287–9; assessments of JC, 87–8, 207, 287 Australian-Soviet Friendship Society, 65 Bachofen, J. J., 369 Barbour, Peter, 288 Barnard, Lance, 167, 174, 226–7, 248, 254, 280–3, 331 Barnes, Allan, 275, 276 Barwick, Sir Garfield, 115, 117, 127 Beatles, 131–2 Beazley, Kim Jnr, 1, 148 Beazley, Kim Snr, 120, 128, 148–9, 166, 196, 356 Benalla, 8–9 Berinson, Joe, 344 Berri (Confest), 358, 362–3 Bevan, Aneurin, 104–5, 138–9 Bindon, Kerry, 350–1 Blarney, General Thomas, 28–30, 42, 46 Bolte, Henry, 91, 208, 222–3, 236 Bolte Government, 106 Bourke, Bill, 70, 80, 89–90 Bourke, Billy, 18

Bowen, Lionel, 283, 300 Bowman, Margaret, 246 Bredbo (Confest), 356–61, 362–3 Briffault, Robert, 369 British Empire in Australia, The (Fitzpatrick), 49 British Imperialism and Australia (Fitzpatrick), 49 Broadside, 183, 191–2 Brogan, Brian, 262, 264, 291–2, 321 Broinowski, John, 128 Brown, Bill, 180, 220, 249–50, 343 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne, 13 Bruce–Page Government, 13–14, 18 Bryant, Gordon, 121, 148 Buckley, Brian, 160 Buckley, Vincent, 47, 76, 117–19 Bulletin, 160, 170, 298; publishes leaked ASIO dossier on JC, 207, 287 Bunting, Sir John, 328–9 Burgess, Maxine, 321 Burns, Arthur, 52, 58–9 Burns, Tom, 221 Burton, Herbert, 42, 46, 75 Butler, Glyde, 180 Buttinger, Joseph, 156 Button, John, 93 Byers, Sir Maurice, 332

Cain, John snr, 24, 90–1 Cairns, Alice (Philip’s wife), 366 Cairns, Barry (JC’s son), 31–2, 35, 76, 179, 196; adopted by JC, 32; relationship with JC, 32, 179, 383 Cairns, Gwen (JC’s wife), 30–1, 35, 76–7, 93, 105, 107, 174, 196, 233, 256, 280, 282, 299, 316, 319, 320, 353–4, 366; first marriage, 30–1; courted by and weds JC, 31–2; marriage, 32, 305–6, 353–4, 384; on cause of JC’s ‘rebellion’, 374–5; death, 384 Cairns, James (son of Philip and Alice), 366 Cairns, James Ford (Jim) early life: birth, 6; early childhood at Victoria Farm, 10; abandonment by father, 10; relationship with mother, 10, 11, 181, 305–6, 374–5; emotional reserve with family; 11–12; attention to intellectual advancement, 12; character, 15, 17; schooling, 13, 14, 19–20, 25–6; pastimes, 14–15; religion, 15–16; repressive environment, 17, 20, 387–8; subject of idolisation, 25–6, 31, 387–8; political interests, 17–18, 24–5; socialism, 19; experiences effects of Great Depression, 22–3; athletics, 25–6, 28, 29, 30, 33; early employment, 27–8 private life: emotional life, 15, 17, 172, 173, 177–9, 181–2, 206, 214, 237, 286, 305–6, 309–10, 323–4, 352–3, 374–5, 383, 387–8, 391; father’s abandonment, 10, 76–7, 323–4, 374, 388; family relationships, (mother) 10, 11, 181, 305–6, 374–5, (Gwen) 31–2, 304–5, 309, 353–4, 384, (sons) 32, 179, 383; and Morosi, 286–7, 303–6, 309, 310, 318–22, 341, 346, 347–8, 353–4, 359, 382–3, 391; and Hayden, 125–6; and Uren, 123–5, 322–3, 353; and Whitlam, 324, 342 police service: joins force, 28–9; training, (Cairns, James Ford: police service, continued) 29, 34; shadowing squad, 29, 33, 36, 42; Special Branch, 36, 42; consorting squad, 42; commendations, 29–30, 36, 42; unease with duties, 30, 33, 35–6, 42, 44; misconduct charges,

43–4; discharged, 44; rumours re exit, 94 student and teacher: post-school studies, 33; Diploma of Commerce, 36–7, 40–1, 45; impresses teaching staff, 42; appointment to Economic History department, 46; heavy teaching load, 48–9, 51, 75; Bachelor of Commerce, 49, 50, 57, 75; temporary lecturer, 57; reputation as teacher, 75–6; Master of Commerce, 75; appointed lecturer, 75; Nuffield scholarship, 71, 76; studies at Oxford University, 76–8; doctorate, 76, 78, 82, 88, 101, 105; promotion to senior lecturer, 84; assessments of academic ability, 83–4 early activism: 57; ACCL, 69; Australia-Overseas Club, 72; CPA, admission rejected, 52; (opposes) CPA ban, 66, 69, 71; EWC; 72–3; MUSA; 68–9, 71; Peace Council, 64–6 in Opposition: antagonism created by views, 114, 115–16, 129–30, 134, 160–1; appearances on Talking Point, 127–9; bashing, 196; confrontation with Calwell, 179–81, 220; contests FPLP leadership (1968), 165–7, 174–6; decline in political energy, 232–5; electorate (Yarra), 105–7; FPLP Executive, 126, 129, 133; maiden speech, 97; opposes French nuclear tests, 238–9; overseas tours, 161–3, 218–19, 232–3, 235; participates in Peace Congresses, 117–19; profiles of, 129–30, 177–8; pursuit of Croatian nationalist extremists, 133–4, 238; relations with FPLP colleagues, 121–9; shadow Minister Trade and Industry, 228–9, 238; stance on international affairs, 108–14, 126–9, 130, 141, 157–8, 172, 195, 214 Vietnam War: 74–5, 143, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 162–3, 168, 172, 197–9, 211, 214, 232, 277–8, 288, 390, 393; case against intervention, 141– 2, 146–7, 151–2, 157–8; most knowledgeable in FPLP, 141, 150–1; on Gulf of Tonkin incident, 146; on United States, 156–8, 218–19, on withdrawal of forces, 150–1, 162–3, 168; Oslo Commission, 232– 3 Anti-Vietnam War Movement: relationship with the movement, 153, 173, 206, 237, 240; influence over student population, 153–5; and

student radicals, 173, 191, 224–5, 237; focuses on extraparliamentary activities, 169; supports anti-conscription movement, 154, 182–3, 193–4, 232; personal toll of opposition, 234; and VMC, 172–3, 192, 200–1, 232–3, 243–4, 278–9, 390, 393; appointed chairman of Victorian VMC, 200; triggers debate over VMC, 201; defence of VMC, 201–5; on right to protest, 192, 202, 209–10, 212; importance to VMC, 205–6; hero status, 206; hostility, 206–8; death threats, 208, 236–7; and VMC mass demonstrations (May 1970), 210–12, (September 1970) 223–4, (June 1971), 235; disappointment with VMC, 216, 234–5, 237; threatens to quit VMC, 236 in Government: 388, 390–1; on election, 240–1; initial pessimism, 241–2, 245; adaptation to government, 246–7, 275–6; growing optimism, 274–5, 279–80, 283; renewed doubts, 284, 286, 303; postmortem on, 344; standing with colleagues, 248, 262–3, 276, 299, 322–3, 332, defies Cabinet solidarity, 250, 278–9; criticises US bombing of North Vietnam, 249–50; visits North Vietnam, 276–8; Nixon Administration security concerns over, 248, 250, 277–8, 287– 9; Overseas Trade portfolio, 247, 249, 255–60, 268, 276, 282–3, 299; China trade mission, 247, 256–60, 276; Secondary Industry portfolio, 247–55, 260–9, 282 (loses), 268–9; and general tariff cut, 248, 260, 261–8, 276, 297; and IAC, 266–8; and AIDC, 269–72, 283; relations with business sector, 256, 264, 269, 273, 276, 335–6; elected Deputy Prime Minister, 280–2; reaction to elevation, 287–9; ‘running the country’, 298–9; Acting Prime Minister, 314, 315–18; growing influence over economic management, 274, 283, 289, 298; and 1974 Budget, 292–5, 299; reluctance to become Treasurer, 283, 299; appointed Treasurer, 299–301, (reaction) 300–2; relations with department, 292, 295, 301, 324; defends deficit, 333, 335, 337; full employment, 337; parameters for 1975 Budget, 336–7; economic management criticised, 333–6; sacked as Treasurer, 286, 331–3, 337; and ‘Morosi Affair’, 286, 310–12; appoints Morosi to staff, 310; defends Morosi, 311, 320; elevated to cause, 312, 320; reappoints

Morosi, 318; Terrigal interview, 318–19; erodes standing in labour movement, 320; and ‘Loans Affair’, 286; defence of involvement, 313–14; initial involvement, 314–15; dealings with George Harris, 315, 324–9, 331–2, 337, 341; provides letters to Harris, 326–9; denies existence of letter, 327, 338–9; discovery of Harris dealings, 330–1; Treasury’s role, 329–32, 339; attacks media’s role, 340; Philip Cairns’ loan-raising activities, 339–40; JC’s naivety, 325, 340–1; disarray in office, 322, 327; special parliamentary sitting, 343; dismissal from ministry, 286, 338–9, 340–2, 343–4; conspiracy theory re downfall, 288–9, 327–8; JC’s analysis of fall, 342 post-1975: parliamentary role, 347, 354; retirement from parliament, 354–6 (media reaction), 355–6; disseminates social change message, 361–2; market bookstalls, 366–7; involvement with alternative lifestyle movement, 346, 348, 358–9, 361–2, 365–6; role in DTE, 348–9, 351, 361; refuses to be bound by structure, 364; Confests (Cotter River) 348–52, (Bredbo) 356–8, (Berri) 358, 362, (French Island) 365; disillusionment with DTE, 361; breaks with DTE, 365– 6; Mount Oak, 356, 359–61, 363, 364, 379, (ownership) 379–80, (defends actions) 381, (washes hands of) 382; and Wyuna Cooperative, 367, 376, (criticised by inquiry) 377–8, (responds) 378, (personal toll) 379 views, visions and influences: Asia, 45–6, 73–5, 111–14, 152, 155–8, 256, 391–2; capitalism, 97–8, 137, 189, 388–9; Cole and Tawney, 77–8; communism, 93–4, 110, 111, 152, 157, 391–22; CPA, 51–3, 66, 119–20, 204; early readings on political economy, 34–5; full employment, 55–6, 292, 337, 374; Keynes, 37, 39–40, 56, 58; leadership and power, 100, 133, 140, 164–5, 175–6, 240–1, 281–2, 388; Marx and Marxism, 41, 50–2, 54–5, 58, 82, 368, 370; post-war affluence, 159–60; Wilhelm Reich, 307–9, 368, 371, 375; White Australia Policy, 73, 113–14, 123, 126, 128, 158, 392; ideological trajectory, 2, 51–2, 56–7, 82–3, 172–3, 184, 187–90, 214, 216–17, 235, 245, 248, 283–4, 286, 306–10, 345, 375–6, 386, 388–91;

democratic socialist commitment, 82–3, 99–100, 137–9, 158–9; doubts about parliamentary reformism, 189–90, 217, 235, 242–3, 286, 345; New Left tendencies, 172–3, 184, 187–9, 309–10, 375–6; post-political economy theory, 286, 306–7, 308–10, 345, (Survival Now) 367–5; ebbing of anti-institutional phase, 386 and the ALP: 1–2, 5, 24–5, 81–2, 383–7, 389–90; early misgivings, 53– 4, 56–7, 59, 81; on Chifley Government, 54–6, 61–3; joins, 56–7, 59; and Groupers, 85–6, 88–90; on Labor as agent of reform, 82–3, 96, 100–1, 137–9, 159–60, 165; defends democratic socialist commitment, 99–100, 103–5, 122–3; 137–9; on Labor’s ideological proximity to CPA, 120; growing disillusionment, 172, 241–2, 248; estrangement from, 346–7, 354–5; rejoins, 384; and Victorian ALP, 161–3, 166, 387, (federal intervention) 220–2, 232, 234 and Whitlam: in Opposition, 122–3, 134–5, 145–8, 153, 162–3, 167– 70, 180, 196–7, 220, 228–9, 232, 239–40; in government, 248–50, 253–5, 260–3, 267–9, 276–80, 282, 283, 291–2, 298–300, 320, 331– 2, 337, 339, 340–4, 346; ideological and political differences, 135– 40, 164–6, 174–7, 203, 226–7, 253–4, 268–9, (Cairns, James Ford: and Whitiam, continued) 337, 385–6; leadership rivals, 132–3, 165– 7, 174–7, 276, 317–18 writings: 66–7, 73–4, 79, 83, 88, 100–1, 183–4, 188–92, 219, 306–7, 366; ‘Crisis in the Universities’, 85; doctoral thesis, 62, 82, 101–4; Eagle and the Lotus, The, 196–9; Growth to Freedom, 366; Living With Asia, 155–60, 198, 219; Master of Commerce thesis, 58, 82, Oil in Troubled Waters, 17, 248, 261, 275, 285, 301, 313; On the Horizon, 4; ‘Peace or War?’, 63–4; Quiet Revolution, The, 217, 237– 8, 241–5, 248, 304, 345, 355, 374, 390; Reshaping the Future, 4; ‘Road to Full Employment, A’, 54–7; Survival Now, 352, 354, 367– 76; Socialism and the ALP, 137–9; Strength Within, 374; Tariffs or Planning?, 227, 229–31, 251; Theory of the Alternative, The, 348; Untried Road, The, 13; Vietnam: Is It Truth We Want?, 155; What

Can Labor Do Now?, 380; ‘Wot, No Socialism?’, 53–4, 56–7 Cairns, James John (JC’s father), 6, 9–10, 13, 31, 76–7; background, 8; marriage to Letty, 9–10; war service record, 6–8; abandons family, 8, 9–10, 76–7, 323–4, 374, 388; syphilis, 11 Cairns, June (Barry’s wife), 196 Cairns, Letty (JC’s mother); 6, 8–12, 15, 16, 23, 31–2; marriage, 9–10; relationship with JC, 11, 25–6, 305–6, 374–5; boycotts JC’s wedding, 31–2; syphilis, 11, 29; invalid, 29; death, 181 Cairns, Philip (JC’s son), 31–2, 76, 179, 258, 366; adopted by JC, 32; relationship with JC, 32, 179, 383; and ‘Loans Affair’, 339–40 Caldicott, Helen, 239, 321 Calwell, Arthur, 73, 113, 127, 129, 130, 132–3, 143–5, 148–51, 161–6; confrontation with JC over electorate of Melbourne, 179–81 Cameron, Clyde, 121, 176, 180, 250, 252, 291, 314, 332–3 Canberra Times, 154, 252, 349–50, 355–6, 381 Capp, Fiona, 86 Casey, Richard, 109, 117 Cass, Moss, 148–9, 163, 180–1, 299–300, 305, 311–12, 321, 343, 352 Castro, Fidel, 128–9, 185 Catholic Action, 80 Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement), 69–70, 80, 88–9, 91 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 287–9, 327–8 Chamberlain, F. E., 113–14, 120 Chifley, Ben, 62–3, 69, 71 Chifley Government, 48, 61–3, 73, 74, 313 China (Communist), 81, 110, 112, 141, 143–4, 157, 215; JC leads trade mission to, 247, 256–60, 276

Churchward, Lloyd, 51–2, 61, 65, 71 Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud), 307 Clarey, Percy, 126 Clark, Gregory, 259 Clark, Manning, 6, 47–8, 52, 60 Clarke, Sir Rupert, 18–19 Clarke, Sir William, 18 Cody, William John, 29 Cohen, Sam, 167 Colby, William (CIA director), 287–8 Cold War, 60–1, 81, 85–6, 109–11, 119, 141, 156–7, 159, 171, 197, 198, 213, 247, 391–2, 393 Cole, G. D. H., 77–8, 84, 88 Cole, Detective William, 43–4 Colombo Plan, 112 Commonwealth Investigation Service, 86; see also ASIO communism, 47, 60, 64, 68–9, 88, 93–5, 109–11, 144, 145, 147, 152, 157, 214, 392 Communist Party of Australia (CPA), 36, 48, 51–3, 61–2, 64–70, 79–80, 85–8, 93, 94, 114–20, 128, 134, 187, 200, 203; University of Melbourne branch, 47–8, 52; rejects JC’s admission, 52 Communist Party Dissolution Bill, 68–70 Community Housing Expansion Program (CHEP), 376–8, 380, 382 Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament (CICD), 199, 200, 207, 278, 352 Connell, R.W, 176–7

Connelly, Sister Jude, 283–4 Connor, Rex, 280; ‘Loans Affair’, 312–15, 324–5, 329–30, 341, 343–4 conscription (Vietnam War), 153–4, 161–4, 182–3, 192–3, 199, 232 Conway, Michael, 380–1 Coombs, H. C, 255, 261, 291 Copland, Professor Douglas Berry, 37 Cotter River (Confest), 346, 348–52, 356, 357, 365–6; impact of, 350–1, 366 counter culture, see alternative lifestyle movement Country Party, see Liberal and Country Parties Courier Mail (Brisbane), 201–2 Coutts, Ian, 43–4 Crawford, George, 180, 219–20, 222 Crawford, Sir John, 266–7 Cremean, Herbert, 80 Crean, Frank, 121, 166–7, 254–5, 260, 270, 274, 280, 283, 291, 294–6, 302, 347, 356; replaced as Treasurer by JC, 299–302 Croatian nationalism, 238; see also Ustasha Crosland, C. A. R., 104, 138 Curtin Government, 38, 161 Cyclone Tracy, 315–16 Daily Mirror (Sydney), 149, 367 Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 160–1, 208, 319 Daly, Fred, 121, 143, 166 Davidson, Kenneth, 231, 297 De Vere, Inspector Geoffrey, 210 Delahunty, Mary, 1

Democratic Labor Party (DLP), 98, 106–7, 114, 120, 174, 279 Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone), 307 Diamond, Dr John, 4, 11, 13, 19, 24, 32–3, 42, 173, 175–6, 178–9, 181–2, 281 Dickie, Rev. Alf, 116, 217 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 144 Ditchburn, David, 303, 311–12, 318–19, 357–8, 360, 362, 365, 367, 377–9 Down to Earth (DTE), 348–9, 361, 366; Confests, 346, 348–52, 356–63, 365; dissent over Mount Oak, 359–60; distrust of JC, Morosi, Ditchburn, 357–8, 360, 362, 365; places Mount Oak at arm’s length, 363, 364; tensions over organisational structure, 364–5 Down to Earth News, 350–1, 361, 363–4, 381 Dowsing, Irene, 3 Duncan, Alexander, 42, 44 Dunstan, Don, 113, 226–7 Duthie, Gil, 174, 341 Eagle and the Lotus, The (JC), 196–9 East Timor, 346–7 East-West Committee (EWC), 72–3 Economic History, Department of (University of Melbourne), 40, 57, 75 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 41 Economics and Commerce, Faculty of (University of Melbourne), 37, 48, 75, 76 Edmunds, F. L., 60–1, 86 Edwards, John, 276 Edwards, Paul, 367

Edwards, Peter, 393 elections (federal), 1951, 70; 1953 (half-Senate), 89; 1954, 89; 1955, 95– 6; 1958, 107; 1961, 129; 1963, 130–1, 144; 1966, 163–4; 1967 (halfSenate) 168; 1969, 194–5; 1972, 239–40; 1974, 280; 1975, 344 Electrolytic Zinc Company, 336 Ellingsen, Peter, 345, 374–5, 383 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 75 Enderby, Kep, 268, 344 Engels, Friedrich, 307, 370 Eros and Civilisation (Marcuse), 307 Equality (Tawney), 78 Eunson, Alex, 363, 381 Evatt, H. V., 69, 71, 89–90, 92, 95, 98, 113, 122, 133, 234 Everingham, Doug, 343 Examiner (Launceston), 211 Fact, 165–6 Fairhall, Allen, 128 Fall, Bernard, 156 Farrago, 47, 72, 85, 209, 218 Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP), 69–71, 89, 121–4, 126–9, 130, 135, 143–4, 147–50, 161–2, 164, 166, 167, 174, 176, 266, 343–4, 346–7, 352–3, 355 Firestone, Shulamith, 307 Fitzgerald, John, 220–1 FitzGerald, Stephen, 258 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 49–50

Foolish Passionate Man, A (Ormonde), 3–4, 394 Ford, Eleanor (JC’s aunt), 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 23; on the Fords’ emotional reserve, 12 Ford, Elizabeth (JC’s grandmother), 8–17, 20, 22–3, 25–6, 31–2, 387–8 Ford, John (JC’s grandfather), 8–13, 14–18, 22–3, 25–6, 31–2, 387–8 Ford, Sara (JC’s aunt), 9, 10, 11–12 Forrell, Claude, 296–7, 340 Fraser, A. D., 148 Fraser, Malcolm, 209, 255, 330, 337, 338, 344, 356 Fraser Government, 347 Freedom, see News Weekly French, H. B., 263 French Island (Confest), 365 Freud, Sigmund, 307–8 Freudenberg, Graham, 120, 135–6, 148–50, 212, 295, 301, 321 Friedman, Milton, 290, 321, 335; visits Australia, 334; see also monetarism Froggatt-Tyldesley, James, 30–1 Fulbright, William, 156 full employment, 37–8, 48, 55–6, 103, 131, 286, 290, 302, 337–8, 389–91; see also unemployment Full Employment in Australia (White Paper), 38 Function of the Orgasm, The (Reich), 307 Future of Socialism, The (Crosland), 104 Gair, Vince, 279 Galbraith, J. K., 103

Galvin, William, 90 General Motors–Holden (GM-H), 316–17 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes), 37– 40, 56 Georges, George, 300, 343 George, Henry, 34–5 Giblin, Professor Lyndhurst Falkiner, 37 Gilham, Harry, 339 Gleghom, Geoff, 312, 318, 321 Glezer, Leon, 267 Grassby, Al, 303–4 Gold, John, 115 Goldbloom, Sam, 200, 205, 235, 321, 352 Gollan, Robin, 47 Gorton, John, 171, 194, 201, 212, 216 Gorton Government, 171, 194–5, 269; Vietnam War, 171–2, 174, 195, 212 Gott, Ken, 46–7 Goudge, Ken, 377 Gould, Bob, 225 Grant, Maxwell, 256–7 Grattan, Michelle, 181, 246 Great Depression, 18, 20–1, 37, 48, 102, 131, 292, 389 Green, Marshall, 278, 287 Green, T. H., 136 Greening of America, The (Charles Reich), 307

Greenwood, Ivor, 61 Griffiths, Barrie, 380–2 Groupers, see Industrial Groups Growth to Freedom (JC), 366 Gruen, Professor Fred, 261–2, 291 Guider, Alfred, 29 guild socialism, 77–8 Halberstam, David, 156 Hamel-Green, Michael, 192 Hamer, Rupert, 194 Harcourt, Geoff, 76 Harders, Clarrie, 330–2 Harkins, General Paul, 147 Harris, George: ‘Loans Affair’, 315, 324–9, 331–2, 337, 338–9, 341 Hartley, Bill, 180, 219–20, 222 Hasluck, Paul, 144–5, 147, 154 Hastings, Peter, 177 Haupt, Robert, 264, 332–3 Hawke, Bob, 239, 263, 297, 346, 376–7, 385–6 Hawke Government, 376–7, 385–6; completes Whitlam revolution, 385 Hayden, Bill, 129, 148–9, 206, 252, 274, 276, 280, 291, 293, 330–1, 338, 344; background, 125–6; relationship with JC, 126; growing economic differences with JC, 293; critical of JC’s economic management, 333–6; replaces JC as Treasurer, 332; and 1975 Budget, 337–8, 385 Hayek, F. A., 103

Haylen, Leslie, 118, 121 Heckle Hour (debates), 34 Henderson, W. J., 282 Herald (Melbourne), 142, 193–4, 201, 212, 219, 233, 256 Hewitt, Sir Lennox, 324 Hickey, Superintendent Gerald, 223 High Court, 70 Hines, Colin, 278 History of Economic Thought (Roll), 50–1 Hogan, Ned, 24 Hogan Government, 24–5 Hogg, Robert, 222 Holding, Clyde, 61, 93, 125, 220, 236–7 Holt, Harold, 161, 275 Holt Government, 163; Vietnam War, 161, 168 Horin, Adele, 353–4, 358, 362 Home, Donald, 172, 206 Howard, John, 311 Howson, Peter, 155, 177 How to Pay for the War (Keynes), 40 Hughes, Barry, 302, 317, 335 Hughes, Tom, 146, 203, 213 Hursey Affair, 114–15 Hursey, Dennis, 114 Hursey, Frank, 114–15 Hurst, John, 341

Hyde, Michael, 223 Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?, 113 Immigration Reform Group, 113–14 Indonesia, 73–4, 110, 111, 143–4 Indonesian Medical Aid Committee, 73 Industrial Groups, 79–81, 88, 90–2, 105–8, 115; distrust of JC, 85 Industries Assistance Commission (IAC), 266–8, 283, 298, 316; see also Tariff Board industry protection, 228–9, 238, 251, 253, 255, 266–8, 297–8, 302, 316–17; July 1973 general tariff cut, 260–6, 268, 274, 276, 297 inflation, 108, 129, 215, 260–3, 265, 273–4, 281, 285–6, 289–96, 301, 303, 333–8, 390 In Place of Fear (Bevan), 104–5 Inside Labor, 222 International Commission of Inquiry into American War Crimes in Indochina, 232–3 Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality, The (Reich), 307 James, Albert, 148 Jess, John, 155, 183 Johns, Brian, 135, 255 Johnson, President L. B., 144, 148, 163, 171 Jolliffe, Jill, 224 Jones, Charlie, 280 Jost, John, 221 Karidis, Jerry, 314

Keating, Paul, 347, 356 Keefe, Jim, 343 Kelly, Bert, 335 Kelly, Paul, 314, 316 Kelly, Steve, 357–8 Kemp, Maxwell, 264 Kennan, George, 110 Kennelly, Pat, 90–2 Keon, Standish, 62, 80, 89–92, 94–6, 105, 107–8 Kerr, Sir John, 344 Keynes, John Maynard, 37–40, 50, 56, 58 Keynesian economics, 39, 99, 136, 285, 289–90, 338, 389, 390–1 Khemlani, Tirath, 314–15, 324–5, 330–1, 343–4 Killen, Jim, 272 Kissinger, Henry, 249, 287 Knox, Dr James, 208 La Nauze, Professor John, 75–6, 77, 84 Labour Party (British), 104–5, 186 Lalor (electorate), 180–1, 228, 239, 281, 346, 354 Lang, Jack, 21 Langer, Albert, 201, 217, 225 Laurie, Ted, 51 Lavery, Brian, 363, 365 Lechte, J. S., 86 Leunig, Michael, 206

Liberal and Country Parties, 61–2, 96, 98, 101, 172, 215–16, 273, 344 Little, Graham, 3–4, 16, 239 Living With Asia (JC), 155–60, 198, 219 Llanstephan Castle, 7 Lloyd, John, 199 ‘Loans Affair’, 286, 312–15, 324–32, 338–41, 343, 344 Lot’s Wife, 209 Love, Peter, 39 Lovegrove, Dinny, 80, 85, 90, 116 Lynch, Phillip, 271–2, 334–5 Lyons, Joseph, 21, 24 Mackay, Major-General Kenneth, 162–3 Macmahon Ball, William, 81–2 McBriar, Alan, 71 McCalman, Janet, 91–2, 107, 196 McClelland, James, 246, 332 McCulloch, Sue, 210 McDonald, Leo, 196 McEwen, John, 228–9, 269 McGregor, Craig, 177–8, 182 McGuffie, Detective-Sergeant, 43 McKay, Douglas, 256 McKnight, David, 134, 207, 238, 288 McLean, Jean, 205, 321 McLean, Margaret 380–1 McMahon, William, 213, 216, 236, 239–40 McMahon Government, 215, 254, 256, 261; Vietnam War, 212, 215

McManus, Frank, 60, 80, 85–6, 90, 96, 201 McNamara, Robert, 147 McQueen, Humphrey, 226–8 McRae, Toni, 318–19, 348, 353 McT. Kahin, George, 156 Magener, Superintendent J. H., 42–4 Malaya, 109–10 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 369 Mansfield, Michael, 156 Marcuse, Herbert, 185–6, 307 Marshall, Alfred, 35, 50 Marshall, Elizabeth, 72–3 Martin, David, 118 Marxism, 41, 49–51, 54, 58, 368 Marx, Karl, 40–1, 49, 50, 58, 185, 189 Mass Psychology of Fascism, The (Reich), 307–8 Maude, Angus, 128 Meanjin, 53, 83, 88, 101, 184, 213, 224 Medley, Sir John, 69 Melbourne (electorate), 179–81 Melbourne City Council, 193–4, 222–3 Melbourne Harriers, 25, 28 Melbourne University Labour Club (MULC), 47, 50, 51–2, 56, 57, 61, 73, 93, 94, 115 Melbourne University Magazine, 54, 63, 67 Melbourne University Staff Association (MUSA), 68, 69, 71

Melton State School, 13 Menadue, John, 339 Menzies, Robert, 61, 68, 70, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 114, 115, 126–7, 130– 1, 134–5, 146, 147, 149, 155, 161, 216, 275, 287, 315, 325 Menzies Government (Liberal Party-Country Party), 86, 108, 112, 114– 17, 129, 130, 132, 133–5, 155; attempts to ban CPA, 68, 70, 80; foreign policy, 109–12, 126–7; Vietnam War commitment, 141–2, 144–5, 149, 151, 153 Menzies Government (United Australia Party-Country Party), 36 Meray, Tibor, 117 Mercury (Hobart), 202 Metal Trades Industry Association, 250–1, 253, 267 Mike Willesee Show, 281 Mill, John Stuart, 136 Millett, Kate, 307 Minogue, Dennis, 275 Mollison, Bill, 360 Moloney, Constable Bryan, 43–4 Monash Labour Club, 185, 191, 200–1, 223 Monash University, 154, 178 monetarism, 290, 303, 323, 333–4 Moratai, 45–6 Moratorium, see Vietnam Moratorium Campaign Morgan, Lewis, 370 Morosi, Junie, 289, 299, 309, 312, 318–19, 321–3, 340, 341, 344, 346–7, 349, 350, 353–4, 355, 357–62, 365, 367, 378–9, 380, 383, 384, 391; background, 303–4; character, 304; impressions of JC, 304–5;

impact on JC, 286–7, 304–7, 320–1, 345, 375; appointed to JC’s staff, 310, (reaction) 310–11, (stands down) 312, (re-appointed), 318; controls access to JC’s office, 321; frustration with JC, 375; theoretical differences with JC, 310, 346, 382–3; parting of way with JC, 346, 382, 384; son (Gaelian), 362, 367; Sex, Prejudice and Politics, 304, 346; and Wyuna Cooperative, 367, 377–9 Morosi, Mark (brother of Junie), 367, 376–7 ‘Morosi Affair’, 286, 310–12, 317–20, 322–3; media’s role, 310–12, 318– 20; sexism, 310–12 Morris, William, 19, 185 Morrison, Bill, 274 Morse, Wayne, 156 Morton, Ross, 363–4, 380 Mount Oak (alternative lifestyle community), 356–7, 363–4, 359–61, 379; conflict, 364, 379–80; outbreak of violence, 380–1; conflicting claims, 381–2; litigation, 382 Movement, see Catholic Social Studies Movement Mullens, Jack, 69, 80, 89–90 Murdoch, Rupert, 149 Murdoch press, 319, 339 Murphy, John, 75, 144, 155, 213 Murphy, Lionel, 239, 248, 303, 311–12, 314–15 Murray, Robert, 120, 231 Murray-Smith, Stephen, 47–8, 51–2, 117–18, 206 Nagy, Leslie, 315, 325–8, 341 Nation, 168, 181, 231 Nation Review, 234–5, 264, 350–1, 357–8; JCs weekly column, 361

National Civic Council, 207, 224 National Intelligence Daily, 328 National Liberation Front, 147, 168, 198, 200 National Service Act, see conscription National Times, 231, 234, 268, 276, 353–4, 358, 376, 380 neo-liberalism, 285–6, 385, 391 New Left, 159, 169–70, 185–6, 187, 226–7, 241, 243, 375–6, 390; British New Left, 184–7; ‘first’ Australian New Left, 187 New South Wales ALP, 21, 121, 128, 166, 203; Executive, 66, 128–9, 132 Newcombe, Ken, 239 News (Adelaide), 149 News from Nowhere (Morris), 19 News Weekly, 80, 81–2, 207, 224–6, 287 Nicols, C. R., 269, 273 Nimbin News, 357, 362, 363, 365, 380–1 Nixon, Peter, 294 Nixon, President Richard, 215, 236, 249–50, 288 Nixon Administration, 277–8; security concerns re JC, 287–8 Northcote High School, 19–20, 25–6 North-West Cape naval communications station, 130–1, 143 nuclear weapon tests, 238–9, 258–9 Oakes, Laurie, 239 O’Brien, Patrick, 47 O’Byrne, Justin, 121 O’Connell, Jack, 106 O’Donnell, Denis, 182–3

O’Donovan, Brian, 377–9 Oil in Troubled Waters (JC), 17, 248, 261, 275, 285, 301, 313 Oliphant, Sir Mark, 117 On the Horizon (JC), 1 One Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 185 Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, The (Engels), 307, 370 Ormonde, Paul, 3–4, 8, 12, 26, 30, 32, 36, 45, 52, 74, 76, 77, 82, 95, 107, 124, 125, 129, 150, 162, 163, 179, 205, 210, 211, 221, 257, 264, 269, 275, 287, 306, 310, 322, 323–4, 340, 342, 346, 350, 352, 354, 391 Outlook, 119, 187 Overland, 117 Oxford University, 71, 76–8, 84 Packer, Sir Frank, 161 Page, Earle, 13 Pai, Hsiang-Kuo (Chinese Minister of Foreign Trade), 257, 259 Paton, Professor George, 75, 84 Patterson, Rex, 260 Pavelic, Ante, 133; see also Ustasha Peacock, Andrew, 178, 356 People Politics and Pop (McGregor), 177–8 Petrov, Vladimir, 89 Petrov Affair, 89, 92, 98 Pham, Van Dong, 277 Pilger, John, 288 Plimsoll, Sir James, 155

Pola, Brian, 154 Policarpio, Leonore, 367, 376–7 Polites, George, 302 Pollard, Reg, 18, 116, 121–2, 125 post-war economic boom, 98, 131 post-war reconstruction, 39, 48, 389 Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 41 Premiers’ Plan, 22, 23 Prescott, Dr James, 349–50 Prest, Professor Wilfred, 76 Prices Justification Tribunal, 261, 293, 297 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 35 Priorities Review Staff, 283 Progress and Poverty (George), 34–5, 57 Prospect, 117 Quiet Revolution, The (JC), 217, 237–8, 241–5, 248, 304, 390 Rabelais, 190, 209, 224 Rattigan, Alf, 228–9, 249, 252–3, 261–2, 266–8, 269, 298 Rayner, Dianne, 367 referendums: on banning CPA (1951), 70–1, 80; on prices and incomes (1973), 274 Reich, Charles, 307 Reich, Dr Eva, 349–50 Reich, Wilhelm, 307–8, 352, 368, 371, 375–6; JC and Reichian theory; 307–9

Reid, Alan, 129–30, 132–3, 177, 262–3, 300, 319 Research for Survival Pty Ltd, 379–80, 382 Reshaping the Future (JC), 4 Returned Services League (RSL), 117, 278 Richardson, Michael, 277 Richmond, 91–2, 93, 95, 105–7, 196 Richmond City Council, 91–2, 106–7 Richmond News, 92, 94–5, 106 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 103 Rodgers, John, 65 Rogers, John, 19 Rogers, Kevin, 379 Roll, Eric, 50–1 Ross, Lloyd, 53 Rowley, Kelvin, 226–8 Royal Park Hospital (Parkville), 23, 29 Rupertswood (Sunbury), 18, 23 Salthouse, Lizzie, 10, 11–12, 23 Samuel, Peter, 298–9 Santamaria, B. A., 80, 94, 177, 208, 287 Saunders, Malcolm, 201, 205, 224 Save Our Sons (SOS), 193, 200 Schmella, Jack, 88 Schmidt, George, 351, 358–9, 366 Schneider, Russell, 294

Scholes, Gordon, 376–7 Scullin, James, 94 Scullin Government, 21–2, 24–5, 39, 102, 292 Scully, Francis, 91–2, 106 Sear Cowls, Eric, 339–40, 344 Serle, Geoffrey, 48, 52, 71, 82 Sex, Prejudice and Politics (Morosi), 304, 306–7, 346 Sexual Politics (Millett), 307 Shann, Ed, 329–30, 332 Sharpeville massacre (South Africa), 126–7 Shaw, A. G. L., 42, 46, 48 Sheehan, Neil, 156 Sheeny, Maurice, 106 Skidelsky, Robert, 38 Smark, Peter, 320 Smith, Mattie, 10, 11–12 Snedden, Bill, 134, 208, 232, 268, 278, 300 Socialism and the ALP (JC), 137–9 Solomon, David, 239 South Africa (apartheid policy), 126–7 Soviet Union, 47, 51, 63–7, 87, 110, 184–5 Spain, David, 357, 362, 365 Spotlight on Yarra, 106 Spry, Colonel Charles, 86, 117 Stegmar, Karen, 327 Steketee, Mike, 317, 332

Stewart, Frank, 149, 341 Stirling, Ian, 43 Stone, John, 291 Stout, Professor A. K., 117 Stratheden, 76 Strength Within (JC), 374 Stretton, Major-General Alan, 316 Sullivan, John, 347 Sun (Melbourne), 164–5, 166, 223–4, 238, 311 Sun (Sydney), 318–19, 348 Sunbury, 10, 14, 16, 18–19, 20, 22, 23 Sunbury Mental Hospital ('The Hill’), 10–11, 23, 25 Sunbury State School, 14, 19 Sunday Age, 383 Sunday Australian, 233–4 Sunday Telegraph, 132 Survival Now (JC), 352, 354, 367–76 Sydney Morning Herald, 118–19, 120, 128, 146, 148, 160, 202, 208, 250, 251, 255, 277–8, 280, 282, 293–4, 300–1, 302, 317, 333, 377 Taft, Bernie, 200, 217 Talking Point, 127–9 Tandberg, Ron, 377 Tariff Board, 228, 238, 249, 253, 266–7; see also IAC tariffs, see industry protection Tariffs or Planning? (JC), 227, 229–31 Tawney, R. H., 78

Teichmann, Max, 225, 234–5, 394–5 Theodore, Edward, 21–3 Theory of the Alternative, The (JC), 348 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 41 This Day Tonight, 331, 355 Thompson, Dan, 324, 338 Toohey, Brian, 288, 328 Towards Socialism (Anderson and Blackburn), 184, 186, 188 Towers, W. J., 106 trade unions, 62, 69, 79, 80, 86, 94, 102, 103, 114, 120, 128, 149, 190, 201, 229–30, 251–2, 263–5, 274, 297, 298, 320; see also ACTU Treasury, Department of, 253, 255, 266, 269, 274, 280–1, 289–93, 294, 298, 314–15, 323, 325, 327, 329–32, 334, 339; relations with JC, 292, 295, 324, 332; relations with Whitlam Government, 262, 273, 291, 293, 301, 314, 324 Trumble, Robert, 156 Truth (Melbourne), 133 Tudor, Frank, 94 Turnbull, Winton, 109 Turner, Henry, 183 Turner, Ian, 47, 50, 51–2, 65–6, 187, 221 unemployment, 14, 18, 21, 22, 27, 37, 39, 98–9, 129, 215, 260, 265–6, 281, 285–6, 290–98, 301–3, 333–8; see also full employment United Australia Party, 21–2 United Front, 73 United Nations, 65, 74, 128, 144, 147

United States of America, 63–5, 110, 111, 128, 142, 143–4, 145–9, 150, 153, 156, 158, 167–8, 171, 174, 185, 195, 197–8, 213, 218–19, 225, 226, 232–3, 249–50, 277–8; military bases, 130–1, 143, 239, 287–8; Vietnam War, 142, 144, 145–9, 150, 153, 156, 167–8, 171, 174, 195, 197–8, 212–13, 232–3, 236, 249–50, 277 University of Melbourne, 36–7, 42, 44, 46, 60, 81, 83, 86–7, 88, 93, 109, 113, 154, 178, 202, 223, 281, 294; post-war Left hegemony, 46–8, 51, 60–1, 85 University of Melbourne ALP Club, 61, 81, 93 University of Melbourne Rationalist Society, 35, 218 Untried Road (JC), 13 Uren, Tom, 3, 121–2, 123–5, 126, 128–9, 142–3, 148–9, 153, 163–4, 167, 174–7, 181, 196, 206, 218, 250, 280, 283, 299–300, 310, 333, 341, 343, 347, 352, 353, 376; background, 123–4; character, 124; relationship with JC, 124–5, 322–3, 353; estimate of JC, 124–5; on Gwen Cairns, 305; on JC’s relationship with Morosi, 305, 320, 322– 3 Ustasha, 133–4; see also Croatian nationalism Valda, John, 302 van derWyk, Peter, 363 van Moorst, Harry, 205 Victoria Police, 28–9, 30, 57, 223 Victorian ALP, 70, 79–81, 88, 89–91, 116, 121, 128, 161, 163, 166, 174, 177, 180, 203; awards JC life membership, 387; Executive, 24, 66, 79–80, 81, 82, 85, 90, 91, 132, 148, 166, 174, 180–1, 219–22, 225; federal intervention, 177, 219–22, 232, 234; Toorak branch, 70, 79– 81, 82, 85, 89–90, 116 Victorian Fabian Society, 137 Vietnam: Is It Truth We Want? (JC), 155

Vietnam Moratorium Campaign (VMC), 172–3, 192, 199–203, 207–9, 216–17, 222–3, 232–3, 278–9, 348, 355, 358, 390, 393; debate over first campaign, 201–5, 207, 208; decline, 216, 235–7; internal ideological divisions, 199–201, 216, 217–18, 224–5, 235–7; significance and legacy, 205, 212–14, 394; first mass demonstration (May 1970), 210–12; second mass demonstration (September 1970), 223–4; third mass demonstration (June 1971), 235 Vietnam War, 74–5, 140, 141–2, 144–8, 171–2, 173–4, 194–5, 197–9, 232–3, 249–50, 258, 277–8, 348, 393–4; Australian commitment, 142, 144, 149, 161, 168, 172, 195, 212–13, 215–16, 236; anti-war movement, 153–4, 169, 172, 191, 222, 237, 238, 390, 393–4 Voice, 100–1 Walter, James, 136, 140 Ward, Alan, 224 Ward, Eddie, 121–3 Warden, Ian, 350, 357 Warner, Denis, 142 Waten, Judah, 52 Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF), 114 welfare state, 48, 59, 76, 78, 99, 101–3, 136, 286, 389 Wentworth, W C, 109, 115–16, 134, 319–20 Whan, Bob, 344 What Can Labor Do Now? (JC), 386 Wheeldon, John, 148, 300 Wheeler, Sir Frederick, 291, 314–15, 324, 329–32 Wheelwright, E. L., 128 White Australia Policy, 72–3, 112–14, 120, 123, 126, 128, 145, 158, 391

White, Peter, 364 White William, 154 Whitlam, Gough, 2, 113, 122–3, 130, 132–5, 139–40, 143–4, 149, 161, 165–6, 247, 275, 305–6, 385–7, 388, 390; background, 122; Opposition leader, 167–9, 174–7, 180, 194–7, 203, 216, 220, 228, 229, 232, 238, 239–40, 347; and Vietnam War, 140, 145–6, 148, 153, 163–5, 167–9, 174, 194, 226; and VMC, 203; PM, 346, 353, chs 8–9 passim; for relations with JC, see Cairns, James Ford: personal life; Cairns, James Ford: and Whitlam Whitlam Government, 125, 137, 217, 226, 245, 256, 260, 274–5, 288, 387, 388, 390; election, 240; Cabinet, 255, 260, 262–3, 268, 270, 273, 278–9, 291, 293–4, 299, 323, 325, 331–3, 336, 338; economic conditions, 247, 254, 260–1, 265–6, 273–4, 281, 285–6, 289, 292, 298, 301, 333–4, 338, 390; economic management, 254–5, 261–3, 273–4, 285, 289–98, 301, 302–3, 317, 332–3, 337–8, 390–1; growing resistance to, 272–4, 279; relations with business, 272–3, 297, 301– 2; and Senate, 272–3, 279, 280, 312–13, 344; dismissed by Governor-General, 344; defeat, 344 Wieneke, Diane, 281–2 Wilkinson, Marian, 288, 328 Willesee, Don, 149, 248, 278 Woman’s Day, 318–19 Wood, Alan, 231, 251, 265, 268 Worker-Student Alliance, 200 Wren, John, 91 Wright, Brett, 366 Wright, Reginald, 115 Writers Defiled (Capp), 86 Wyuna Cooperative, 367, 380, 382; CHEP grant controversy, 376–9; and

Mount Oak violence, 380 Yarra (electorate), 91–6, 105–8, 115, 164, 179, 228 Young, Mick, 221 York, Barry, 225 Youth Campaign Against Conscription, 154 Zhou, Enlai, 258–9