What If?: Australian History as It Might Have Been [1 ed.] 0522851746, 9780522851748

Citation preview

What If?

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What If? Australian history as it might have been Edited by Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2006 Copyright collection © Stuart Macintyre & Sean Scalmer 2006 Copyright in the individual pieces remains with their respective authors Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2006 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 publishers. Printed in Australia Typeset in Australia by J&M Typesetting National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry What if? : Australian history as it might have been. Includes index. ISBN 978 0 52285 174 8. ISBN 0 522 85174 6. 1. Australia — History. 2. Australia — Social conditions. I. Macintyre, Stuart, 1947– . II. Scalmer, Sean. 994

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CONTENTS Contributors

vii

Abbreviations

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Introduction Sean Scalmer

1

Statecraft

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1. What if Tasmania had become French? Jim Davidson

15

2. What if Alfred Deakin had made a declaration of Australian independence? Marilyn Lake

29

3. What if Federation had failed in 1900? Helen Irving

44

4. What if New South Wales had not paid parliamentarians until after Federation? Frank Bongiorno

67

5. What if the federal government had created a model Aboriginal state? Tim Rowse

89

6. What if Australia’s baptism of fire had occurred at the Cocos Islands? Stuart Macintyre

115

7. What if Whitlam had won another opportunity to implement his program? James Walter

138

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Society and Culture 8. What if there had been a school of figure painting in colonial Sydney? Virginia Spate

163

9. What if Aborigines had never been assimilated? Peter Read

187

10. What if the attempted assassination of Arthur Calwell had been successful? Sean Scalmer

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11. What if the northern rivers had been turned inland? Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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12. What if a men’s movement had triumphed in the 1970s? Ann Curthoys

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Notes

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Index

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CONTRIBUTORS Frank Bongiorno is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of New England, and has written extensively on the early history of the Australian Labor Party. Ann Curthoys is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra. Jim Davidson taught history at Victoria University, Melbourne. He has a long familiarity with Tasmania, and became immersed in French culture while researching Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre (1994). Tom Griffiths is a Senior Fellow in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His book Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica will appear in 2007. Helen Irving is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. Marilyn Lake is Professor of History at LaTrobe University and AdjunctProfessor at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra. Stuart Macintyre is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. Peter Read is Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Faculty of Law, Australian National University. Tim Rowse is a Senior Fellow in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. Sean Scalmer is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney. Tim Sherratt is a historian of Australian science and culture in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is editor (with Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin) of A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (2004). Virginia Spate was Power Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney from 1979 to 2003. James Walter’s current research interests encompass political and intellectual history, leadership, biography, institutional change and political careers. He is Professor of Politics at Monash University, Melbourne.

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ABBREVIATIONS AAPA ACTU AFAP▲

Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association Australian Council of Trade Unions All For Australia Party

AIF

Australian Imperial Force

ALP

Australian Labor Party

APL

Aborigines Protection League

ASIO

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ▲

ATOCA

Aboriginal Territory of Central Australia

AWB

Aborigines Welfare Board

▲

BSA

Bradfield Scheme Authority

CSIR

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

CSIRO

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization

GST

Goods and Services Tax

▲

International Men’s Year

IMY

IWW

Industrial Workers of the World

▲

MEL

Men’s Electoral Lobby

OPEC

Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries

PMC

Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations

RSA

Regional Structural Adjustment ▲

SPEW

Society for Putting an End to Women

TAFE

Institute of Technical and Further Education

UN

United Nations

▲

Fictional organisation

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INTRODUCTION Sean Scalmer

Who hasn’t wondered about the road not taken? It perplexes the anxious politician and entices the restless lover. What might have been haunts the ambitious with the opportunities scorned; it reminds the affluent of their lucky escapes. Hindsight brings an easy wisdom. In our imaginations, mistakes can be corrected; invitations proffered; misjudgements righted; and obstacles foreseen. The question ‘What if?’ is not only the stuff of daydream or regret. It equally guides the canny operator, keen to shape the future. Chess masters project likely moves; technocrats map the outcome of new proposals; boxers feint and anticipate; party strategists plot and predict. All of us try to envisage the consequences of our actions. We scan the possible, assemble our choices, imagine their impacts, and then make our decisions. This is the everyday practice of the rational agent.1 It can also be the method of the historian. Students of the archive strive to understand the past. They catalogue the tastes of rivals; sketch their ruling motives; reconstruct sequences of interaction; calculate the room for manoeuvre. Often, they know more about a situation than those who lived through it. Why, then, not put that knowledge to work? Why not ponder what might have been? This was the suggestion of Max Weber: 1

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The historian has … the advantage over his hero in that he knows a posteriori whether the appraisal of the given external conditions corresponded in fact with the knowledge and expectations which the acting person developed … Hence, the historian is able to consider the question: which consequences were to be anticipated had another decision been taken, with better chances of success than, for example, Bismarck himself.2 Weber’s advice has proven popular. What might have been is often embedded in the most conventional narratives.3 Even cautious writers sort through the play of actual and possible, action and result, event and consequence.4 Such meditations give historical prose its characteristic depth, dynamism and vitality. At times, ‘what if?’ can become a grander principle of textual organisation, pursued with greater commitment and purpose. This is a specific genre of writing, known variously as counterfactual history, alternative history or imaginary history. It dates back to Pascal’s comical postulation in his Pensées: If Cleopatra had been born with a larger nose, Mark Antony might not have succumbed to her charms. He should have defeated Octavian at Actium, and from that point, Roman imperial history would have unfolded in a quite unaccustomed direction. But for a nose, the fate of empires and millions would be much changed.5 This kind of counterfactual history has had a rather interrupted career. Following Pascal, the English liberal historian G.M. Trevelyan offered his own imaginary history in 1913: ‘If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo’.6 By 1932, the literary editor Sir John Squire could call upon G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill and other eminences to ponder ‘If the Moors in Spain Had Won’, ‘If Booth Had Missed Lincoln’, ‘An Imaginary History of the Battle of Gettysburg’, and a cluster of alternative happenings.7 Bertrand Russell mused about Henry VIII’s loves and the birth of America in Freedom and Organisation around the same time.8 What-if scenarios became a kind of fad.9 The adventurous G.V. Portus even explored a series of alternative histories for Australia (‘If the Chinese had Discovered Australia’, ‘If Tasman had Followed the Track taken by Cook’, and so on).10 Then, suddenly, a relative silence descended. Like flappers and skyscrapers, the fashion for counterfactuals seemed to pass. Thence, ‘what if?’ became the domain of the fiction writer. Of course, describing a different world had long been expressed in utopian and socialistic literature. It had also tantalised the readers of political 2

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fiction by Anthony Trollope and Benjamin Disraeli.11After World War II, things changed. Now, it enlivened the ‘science fiction’ of Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham and Harry Turtledove. The triumph of the Nazis became a particular object of contemplation.12 A trickle of these works continues. Recently, Philip Roth has imagined the victory of fascism in the United States,13 while John Birmingham has rewritten World War II as a battle joined by the humans of the future.14 Such fantastical tales delight, amuse, and provoke. Historians produce a different kind of counterfactual to this sort of speculative fiction. Many of them insist that the technique is more than entertainment for the educated. Respect for truth constrains the historical imagination; detailed knowledge makes their alternatives truer but safer; interest in causation ensures that their scenarios are experiments as well as portraits, tests as much as games. Counterfactual history need not be a pure fabrication. It can illuminate the mysteries of economics, military strategy, and high politics. A swag of new volumes edited by historians such as Niall Ferguson, Robert Cowley and Andrew Roberts have all sought to prove the point.15 Why, specifically, do historians adopt counterfactual procedures? There seem to be four reasons: causation, theory, evidence, and diversion.

The attractions of counterfactual history Historians study change.16 The key is causation: what made things turn out this way? Counterfactual thought offers one means of establishing an answer. ‘What ifs’ remove or reshape a specific historical presence: the decision to enter a war; the operation of a railway; the fracturing of an alliance. If this presence is decisive, then the counterfactual world will be much changed; if little proves different, then it surely lacks genuine causal power.17 In this way, those bewitched by social relationships can examine how actions solicit responses, and how chains of interaction become pathways of historical development.18 Others, more interested in human freedom, might contemplate the possibilities available to those who went before us, and the scope for individual manoeuvre.19 This kind of mentality disrupts the smug certainty of hindsight. It strives, instead, for what Henri Lefebvre called ‘objective relativism’. This is a search for the limits of the possible, an understanding of how ‘the past becomes present (or is renewed) as a function of the possibilities objectively implied in this past’.20 The counterfactual helps us trace the limits of the possible, and thereby the making of the world that is. Sean Scalmer

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The theoretically minded prefer to move from the abstract to the actual. Theories suggest hypotheses, and hypotheses must be tested. The world can become a laboratory. Here, general propositions might be trialled, and their predictive power judged. But what happens when such a test is not practical? What if my theory’s predictions are too disturbing, and the costs too great? What if the messy conflicts around us are too impure for a controlled experiment to ever be organised? In these circumstances, virtual history can sometimes provide a useful resource. Counterfactual scenarios can test the robustness of a theory. The imaginary can become an experimental space. In this way, Robert Fogel has calculated the relevance of the railways to economic growth (in a counterfactual America where they did not exist);21 Jeffrey M. Chwieroth has trialled the role of personality in presidential rule (through a counterfactual study of President Wilson’s failure to secure the ratification of the Versailles Treaty);22 and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has examined the power of international relations theory (in an attempt to model the counterfactual outcomes of the Cold War).23 In these scholarly hands, the counterfactual is a thought experiment: a means of evaluating general propositions and testing their range. In an imaginary world, history and social science can search for new certainties; theory can be trialled, rejected, confirmed, or extended. Evidence is the historian’s best friend. Sometimes, though, the archives are empty and the actors have fallen silent; evidence is scarce, and the historian is friendless. Imaginary history appeals in this situation too. Counterfactuals can substitute for direct empirical analysis. Indeed, this is their most important function in social science history.24 Even when a counterfactual scenario cannot be fully imagined, it can still assist the search for evidence. In these circumstances, the very struggle to formulate a counterfactual can suggest new sources of data: ‘unassessable counterfactuals typically act as rhetorical devices or “spotlights” that direct us to look at other, more local sorts of evidence relevant to assessing related causal claims’.25 From the imaginary, unexploited traces of the actual might be discerned. Finally, counterfactuals are fun. On occasion, the rigours of the footnote can frustrate even the most earnest professional. Sober judgements can seem po-faced and charmless. In comparison, alternative history attracts as a realm of free and creative invention. Conventions can be disregarded, or even mocked. Worlds might be remade, the tyrannical overthrown, and the humble elevated. New orders can be

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imagined. Doubtless, this is a scholarly, nerdy kind of game. Still, good counterfactuals amuse writer and reader alike. The attractions of alternative history should now be obvious. However, its recent growth still requires some explanation. Why have its charms increasingly tempted? What has prompted the flurry of recent volumes? One explanation lies in the collapse of grand theories. Unquestionably, the age of confident determinism has now passed. Progress is doubtful. Marxism has fallen from favour. The paths linking the past and the future seem more precarious and shadowy. Chaos theory suggests a new, uncertain environment.26 In this context, the student of history enjoys a difficult freedom. Abstract rules now offer little guidance. Those interested in the transformation of our world have been unshackled from dry certainties. They have also been challenged to construct and test new kinds of general accounts. Not surprisingly, counterfactuals have therefore enjoyed a boom. Their ability to test hypotheses and illuminate causation has proven especially attractive. At the same time, the historical profession has also passed through its own crisis. During the 1990s enrolments fell; sales dropped; and jobs disappeared. Some scholars wondered whether historical truth was but a literary conceit. Then, a ‘history war’ was rapidly declared, prosecuted, rejected, and narrated. Academic practitioners found their integrity questioned, and their ability to communicate doubted. To some critics, the academic monograph seemed a luxurious irrelevance. While most historians continue to defend scholarly tradition, this ferment has encouraged a number of scholars to experiment with the art of writing. Narrative has returned. In the search for readers, many historians have sought to borrow novelistic and dramatic techniques. Counterfactuals have appealed as one mysterious method in this capacious box of tricks. Finally, the flat politics of the last decade has also contributed to the counterfactual boom. The zone of the possible has contracted; current political alternatives seem either absent or barbarous. Radical hopes are now so meagre that they have become an object of study. For some intellectuals, this is now the way it is. Liberal capitalism rules OK. Others remain committed to the possibility of a different world. The latter grouping has no paradise to proclaim or new order to announce. Their alternative worlds lie within the imagination. Perhaps hope can be

Sean Scalmer

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nourished in a counterfactual space? This belief sustains many of the contributors to our own volume. Counterfactual history can be a radical practice, and a kind of political intervention. But are there dangers to this approach? What should we be wary of?

The perils of counterfactual history (and some attempts to navigate them) Even the practitioners of counterfactual history admit to its perils. They include: bias, plausibility, probability, narrative and scope. First, it is difficult to avoid a biased account of ‘what might have been’. Psychologists have noted the distorting power of theories, political ideologies and unacknowledged preferences.27 ‘What ifs?’ often reflect our deepest desires. We are happy to imagine a better world, but less enthused by its deterioration. Equality, justice, and peace can all be imaginatively grasped. In an illusory universe, what force will discipline these impulses? Who will check our historical passions? The danger of bias is one reason why counterfactuals are sometimes dismissed as little more than speculation or amusement.28 Second, not all counterfactual assumptions are equally justified. Some will jar with their imaginary environment. If war had been abolished, then the state, citizenship, gender and economy would also be much changed. If all Germans had green hair, then race and aesthetics would be different, too. In a successful socialist society, our current political calculations would no longer make sense. It is not possible to imagine with impunity. Counterfactual worlds must have a plausible point of origin.29 Their structures must be interconnected; their variations fully imagined. Otherwise, what follows will have little to teach us. We will be studying different kinds of societies, not altered versions of our own.30 Even in these plausible and complete cases, how can the historian accurately foresee what happens next? Perhaps initial outcomes might be accurately established, but what about their repercussions? Each step in the relational chain increases the range of possibilities. History arcs outwards. The probability of accurate prediction falls. This is the problem of ‘compound probability’.31 The further an imaginary world departs from its year zero, the more a chaotic flux threatens to engulf it.32 This problem is the most pressing for those committed to the experimental power of the counterfactual method. Narrative composition is also surprisingly difficult. The counterfactual is parasitic upon the actual. Readers need to know what really 6

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happened if they are to appreciate the detail of the imagined alternative. Many will not. How, then, can a counterfactual be composed? The scope for free invention is hedged by the need to narrate the actual. Imagination turns out not to be so unfettered. Our contributors all struggled with this problem in different ways. We think that their creative responses are one of the most interesting aspects of this collection. Finally, existing examples of alternative history tend to be rather narrowly imagined. Counterfactuals are invariably applied in the most patterned and game-like domains. Military history dominates, followed by international politics, and economics. The broader social and cultural possibilities are typically left aside.33 A counterfactual history of marriage, or the environment, or national identity, has not even been contemplated. Practitioners have been more comfortable with armies than art-works, less interested in society than statesmen. Still, all is not lost. If counterfactual history remains narrowly focused, many authors have begun to grapple with its principal difficulties. None of these problems has been definitively solved. Plausibility, probability, bias and narration remain substantial perils. However, the most experienced writers have begun to improvise some tricks and procedures to control them. These assist recent attempts to write alternative history. Among the most important procedures: Historical consistency: counterfactual assumptions should be as small as possible (the ‘minimal rewrite’ rule).34 Consideration: counterfactual assumptions should only be accepted if there is evidence that they represent alternatives that were seriously considered by contemporary historical actors.35 Balance: alternative pasts must include both appealing and disastrous scenarios.36 Direction: counterfactual analyses should identify alternative paths of development, rather than emphasising the simple contingency and possibility inherent in historical time.37 Agents: counterfactuals must specify the mechanisms that connect antecedents and consequents.38 Relations: sequences of interaction between actors should be broken down, with the motivations and justifications for move and countermove reconstructed.39 Evidence: the same apparatus of evidence (including statistical evidence) used in conventional history should be applied to the consideration of counterfactual scenarios.40 Sean Scalmer

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These are rules-of-thumb, not grand, theoretical determinations. They help to guide the contributors to this volume, and to navigate the rocks of bias and implausibility. If they are followed then alternative history can be more than speculative fiction; counterfactuals might instruct as well as entertain.

The collection What does our own volume add to this bundle of dangers and improvised responses? It is offered to the reader as a mix of application, extension and experimentation. Australian historians have been comparatively slow to adopt counterfactual methods. This is the first serious collection of imaginary histories to focus on the island continent. We believe that the application of counterfactuals to Australian history promises both to illuminate our past and entertain the interested. Why illuminate? The writing of Australian history is currently an uncertain enterprise. Granted, most readers are able to recall a procession of historical landmarks in the years since the arrival of Europeans. We expect that nearly all readers will be familiar with the founding of a penal colony by the British in 1788; the frontier conflict between Black and White; the gold rush and the democratic reforms that followed; then the achievement of Federation with its immediate codification of the White Australia Policy and votes for women, along with the emergence of a two-party system of politics that used trade protection and industrial arbitration to build the Commonwealth. There is general familiarity with the continuing participation in the British Empire that took Australians into World War I, and the achievement of sacrificial glory on the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front, followed by the fight for survival in World War II. The Snowy Mountains Scheme is remembered as one of the great projects of postwar reconstruction, which drew on migrant labour to bring further growth and greater prosperity. And we know how the beneficiaries of this legacy turned to protest in the 1960s and then the reforming government of Gough Whitlam was laid low by scandals and then dismissed by the governor-general. But this common awareness of landmark events has not brought unanimity on their meaning. Whereas a catechism of governors and explorers, heroes and national leaders once thronged the pages of history books that celebrated Australian nationhood, competing accounts now jostle for pre-eminence. From the 1960s radical scholars catalogued 8

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the violence of European settlement and listened for Aboriginal voices. Australian history, they have argued, is more racist, sexist, bellicose and unequal than the ‘white blindfold’ of the past allowed. More recently this view has itself been interrogated and denounced. We are told that the British occupation of Australia was uniquely peaceful, that the colonists flourished under the freedoms bestowed by a beneficent British Empire, that Federation was a uniquely democratic achievement and even the White Australia Policy was not motivated by racist prejudice. Our military engagements are celebrated along with membership of the Western alliance, the close regulation of Aboriginal lives applauded. Even the Dismissal is justified as prudent and proper. Those who lead these exercises in rehabilitation have received generous publicity when they have questioned the methods of radical scholarship. Conservative politicians have bemoaned the popularity of a ‘black armband’ view of the past. Media commentators join in the denunciation of the progressive elites. These have been bitter fights: ‘history wars’. The clash of opposing views has been accompanied by a narrowing of preoccupations: how many Aboriginal people were killed by Europeans? Which estimate is more reliable? Who can be trusted? Many readers have been understandably exhausted by the unending martial conflict. In this context, counterfactual history promises to refresh the jaded student. It encourages novel speculation rather than polemical excess, poetical imagination instead of prosecutorial vigour. Imagining a different Australia leads away from the bog of the ‘history wars’ and toward more fertile pastures. As a result, new versions of our history might emerge. But if this volume enlivens the study of Australian history, we also hope that it might extend and improve counterfactual procedures. What If? explicitly aims to increase the scope of alternative imagination. In addition to military and political histories, we also commissioned essays in environmental history, social history, and cultural history. We hope to test the relevance of this method to new and unfamiliar domains. Can counterfactual reasoning be applied to artistic movements and social campaigns? What about patterns of land use and national identities? Our contributors struggled to produce historical worlds that covered these difficult issues. The collection is divided into two sections. In ‘Statecraft’, authors entertain a world in which different political arrangements and foundational decisions were made. Jim Davidson contemplates a French Tasmania, and Marilyn Lake, Australian independence under the prime Sean Scalmer

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ministership of Alfred Deakin. Helen Irving imagines a history of Federation delayed, and Frank Bongiorno a political world in which the birth of a distinctive Labor Party was delayed. Tim Rowse describes a model, Aboriginal-run state in central Australia. Stuart Macintyre’s chapter postulates that most of the First AIF might never have made it to the battlefields of World War I. Finally, James Walter returns to the Dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975, and ponders a different sequence of events. In the second half of the book, ‘Society and Culture’, authors aim to extend the counterfactual method in new directions. Virginia Spate attempts to reconstruct an imaginary ‘art world’ in colonial Sydney, Peter Read wonders ‘What if Aborigines had never been assimilated?’. Sean Scalmer ponders the death of Labor leader Arthur Calwell from an assassin’s bullet in 1966. A new environmental history is ventured by Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt, in which the northern rivers are turned inland. For her part, Ann Curthoys considers a new history of gender relations, wherein a men’s movement emerges triumphant from the 1970s. In short, social organisation, political power, culture and nature are all reimagined across twelve distinct chapters. Finally, if this collection aims to apply and extend counterfactual methods, it also aims to experiment. Rather than rigorously imposing a fixed, ‘house style’, we encouraged respected historians to fashion their own versions of counterfactual history. As they struggled with the perils of the method, so they improvised particular and individual versions. This volume contains great variety. Contributions range from the social scientific to the almost purely imaginative; from the serious to the comical; from the conventionally narrated to the multi-voiced; from the immediate to the long view; from the continuous narrative to the fractured, fragmentary account. Some chapters include conventional footnotes; others concoct imaginary historical documents and cite fabricated authorities. This variation is deliberate. The excitement of counterfactual history emanates from its creative, inventive quality. A rigid or formulaic approach to the genre would not exploit its full potential. As editors we insisted only on a minimal level of formal control. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction that lays out the historical context. A counterfactual scenario follows, and this is succeeded by a ‘coda’, in which authors explain their inventions, justify their choices and recommend further reading. What is the result of our labours? Can counterfactual history teach us something new? Will it stimulate fresh theories? Draw excited readers? 10

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Illuminate forgotten paths? Can it be extended to the social and cultural sides of our past? And does it suggest different forms of historical writing? Like all experiments, much rests on interpretation. Certainly, we found the process difficult and surprising. Our faith in counterfactual methods waxed and waned. At times, its rigours seemed too demanding; its promises difficult to fulfil. We do not expect (or hope) that counterfactual history becomes a dominant approach. We do aim to encourage others to wonder ‘what might have been’, and to understand why an alternative Australia did not eventuate. Finally, we also hope to have fanned the imaginative impulse. The capacity for invention is not limited to the dim past. The clash of constraint and creativity remains an enduring dynamic. Even today, there are still new Australias to imagine, and new futures to make.

Sean Scalmer

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STATECRAFT

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1

WHAT IF TASMANIA HAD BECOME FRENCH? Jim Davidson

The British took possession of Australia in two separate stages: in 1788 and in 1829, when they extended sovereignty over Western Australia. The western third of the continent till then had been unclaimed. It was a persistent fear of the British that the French, who after all had shown interest in Australia, most notably with the La Pérouse expedition, might establish a settlement of their own in Tasmania or on the mainland. In their exclusive British control, Australia and New Zealand differ from all the other regions of European settlement. Even today, off the coast of Newfoundland, lies the French territory of St Pierre and Miquelon …

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During the cessation of hostilities that followed the Peace of Amiens in 1802—a kind of half-time in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars—a scientific and exploratory expedition was sent by the French to Australian waters. It consisted of two ships, under the command of Nicolas Baudin, and contained (among others) geographers, cartographers, botanists and artists. They poked about intensively near Shark Bay, the west coast of Eyre peninsula, and in southern Tasmania. At Sydney they cast anchor just opposite the settlement, in a cove still known as Neutral Bay, exciting considerable curiosity and some suspicion. Then they sailed away. A few months later, at one of the regular meetings that had been instituted between representatives of the French government and those of his Britannic majesty, the French minister adverted to Van Diemen’s Land. The British froze. French interest—particularly French settlement—in the new Australian sphere of British activity was the last thing wanted. But the French were persistent. They were planning to sell Louisiana to the infant United States, and could do with a temperate colony capable of taking settlers. The British were resistant. ‘Come, come’, said M. Dupleix, ‘It could save you a lot of trouble. Give us Terre de Diémen, and we would then refrain from exhibiting any further interest in la Nouvelle Hollande.’ The British were sceptical. ‘Put it this way. If you don’t, you will still be trying to forestall us in, say, 1826, with a settlement at Albany and another one at Western Port. That will be costly.’ The British began to listen. ‘And’, continued Minister Dupleix, ‘we know of your particular attachment to King Island. Why, you were so keen to take possession of it that right in front of our expédition scientifique you ran up your flag upside-down before firing a volley at it.’ The British drew long faces. ‘Since we in France no longer have a king’, continued the minister, ‘we have no particular use for King Island. Have it! As a gift from the French peo-pull.’ The British professed themselves delighted. ‘With Terre de Diémen we shall rest content’, Dupleix added, ‘plus Flanders Island’. The French had got no further than renaming their new possession Tasmanie, after the Dutch navigator who first brought it within the range of the European world, when war broke out again. Plans for a settlement were stillborn. But after the Napoleonic wars, Britain seemed more interested in consolidating its hold on former Dutch colonies than in acquiring further French ones. Unsettled Tasmanie drew little attention, and, remembering that continued French possession also meant a delimitation of French interest in the Great South Land, the British did 16

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not insist on the colony changing hands. Besides, they saw an advantage in depopulating strategic Mauritius of its French colonists; so they stipulated that they must be resettled in Tasmanie. It was not till 1816 that three ships, La Résolution, La Providence and La Plénitude, brought the first band of settlers to the new possession. They sailed up the Rivière du Nord and established themselves at Bellerive. Some influential voices in the party—secret adherents of the then fashionable English doctrine of utilitarianism—pointed to the harbour on the opposite side of the river, and said they should locate the capital there. But Governor Dupleix prevailed: regardez! said he. Look at the view! Indeed it could not be denied that the massive Mont Bourbon, with the river gleaming in front of it, afforded a fine spectacle. Prominent among the settlers were the Mauriciens, who promptly— and resentfully—dubbed their removal the Grand dérangement. A good few had come from aristocratic families, and now felt doubly displaced. Large grants of land provided insufficient consolation. They were not impressed with the strange wildlife, which included the striped wolf-like creature they dubbed the coyote tasmanien, and a smaller, snarling one which became cerbère tasmanien. A diminutive emu they called the dodo tasmanien—before proceeding to make it as extinct as the original. The French determined on trying to befriend the indigenous people. The gulf between their cultures was wide; it was not a simple matter of there being no colour bar, and of assimilation being partly effected merely by access to common facilities. A belief in the noble savage was of considerable assistance, while residual ideas of the brotherhood of man prompted the newcomers to exercise patience and restraint. They also exhibited a genuine curiosity. Soon they joined in indigenous hunts (rather than hunting the indigenous); these came to develop inclusive rituals of their own. Knowing how the naturels delighted in White man’s clothing, the French began to hold masked balls out in the open air, with corroboree fires to attract the attention of the locals. They laid out plenty of spare clothing, to inveigle them to join in. The governor issued a comic-strip proclamation, posted on gum trees, to illustrate French intentions. After a tentative beginning, there was a good response. One thing led to another. Drink was shared, and before long there was sex across the colour line. Then leading citizens began to take Tasmanian concubines. The church encouraged intermarriage. Promising indigenous youth were soon educated in Jesuit schools. By mid-century an indigenous family, the Lannés, were prominent members of Bellerive society. Jim Davidson

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By this stage another element had been introduced into the society of Tasmanie. The French government, in these days before Devil’s Island and New Caledonia, decided to make it a repository for convicts. The Forestier peninsula and beyond seemed to offer a natural penitentiary, with one (if not two) narrow necks of land linking the projected settlement site with the mainland. Here arose Port-Raoul, a bastille to Bellerive, a grim fortress with walls and sealed courtyards, where rather inadequate long, wooden triangular sheds were built to house the convicts. But since these were often set on fire by the men, they soon had to be replaced by more durable brick accommodation. Elsewhere the walls of isolation cells were so thick that they could have hidden the Man in the Iron Mask. Less serious offenders were assigned to landowners, and it was with the sweat of convict labour that much of the land was cleared and the great estates established. The French quickly realised that Tasmanie lay in much the same latitudes as their homeland, and so they began to plant the vines and produce the wines that are so well known today. There also arose, particularly in the north of the island, great houses. One of these, Charenton, has a fine colonnade; another, Clairville, still has one room featuring the panoramic wallpapers favoured during the Restoration. Relations with the Australes britanniques were not always easy. For a generation after the Napoleonic wars, there remained an edginess and suspicion between them and Tasmanie. But as there was little to draw the two together, and the island remained a few days’ sailing away, this mattered little. Then gold was discovered in Victoria. Many young Tasmaniens dropped tools and got themselves to the diggings as fast as they could. British diggers were none too happy: there was the taint of convictism about the new arrivals. Their Frenchness did not endear them to the mainland colonists, either, although this mattered less once France and Britain were allies in the Crimean War, and Tasmanie surprised everybody by despatching more volunteers than all the Australes britanniques put together. For a time, relations improved. The Cobden free-trade treaty between Britain and France encouraged greater trade, and this extended to their colonies. But Victoria was self-governing, Tasmanie was not; and in 1866 the Victorians opted fully for protection. Duties were slapped on all goods reaching the larger markets of the mainland. The Tasmaniens were in despair; their insular economy was imperilled. They protested to Paris, and Paris on their behalf to London, for the free-trade treaty was being violated. But the English—as so often!—were 18

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unsatisfactory. ‘We are having trouble ourselves’, they dourly remarked. ‘Our own goods are subject to this upstart colonial tariff.’ In Paris it was felt that the time had come to show the flag, in a gesture of solidarity. In 1867 the emperor decided that he would visit Tasmanie; it was in fact the only time that reigning French royalty (of any kind) visited any colony. Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie thoroughly toured the island, relishing its romantic scenery. They were most taken with the Freycinet, particularly when viewed from a comfortable establishment across the Baie des Huîtres. At the conclusion of the visit, the emperor announced a number of boons. There would be further immigration, to stimulate the ailing economy. And, as an extension of his recent reforms at home, Tasmanie would receive considerable self-government. To the conseil législatif would be added a chambre des députés; to govern, a premier would need to hold a majority there. The capital, now a little cramped, would be moved across the river to Sécheron; Baron Haussmann would be commissioned to plan it, complete with boulevards, squares and obelisks. There would be fine public buildings, a casino, and an opera house. This would be surmounted by busts of Auber, Gounod, Meyerbeer and (since this was a colony) Offenbach. Mont Bourbon would be renamed Mont Impérial. The colony progressed. Ex-convicts and their descendants had taken up small-holdings in the valley of the Nord, or planted orchards in the Huon. Vignerons cultivated assiduously in the north, around Lanceton. The Mauriciens had established themselves on their demesnes on the grassy plains around the northern rivers, growing fine wool. Seeing themselves as the backbone of the colony, they applied to the area the name of their old home, Ile de France. When visiting Australes scratched their heads, for want of being able to see any island, they were told, with a shrug, ‘Eh bien, that is just as it is around Paris, exactement!’ Particularly inclined to follow metropolitan fashion was the Mauricien grandee the vicomte de Bournailles, who was premier for much of the last third of the nineteenth century. He was, however, quite pragmatic. Within a few months of the proclamation of the Third Republic, the mountain above the capital became Mont Marianne, the name it bore until recently. Meanwhile the perimeters of the island were also attracting greater attention. Tasmanie had missed out on the mid-century gold rushes, but now substantial mineral deposits were located one after the other. First was tin, in the north-east; Vietnamese from Tonkin were brought in to work the mines. And then more tin was discovered, in the north-west, Jim Davidson

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Tasmanie

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followed by silver at Rohan and the huge copper deposits at Mont Laval. The great eucalypt forests that thundered down to the sea along the Côte d’Azur, beyond La Trobe and Port-Devan, were also now being cleared. In this part of Tasmanie there had always been a sprinkling of Australes, some settled evasively in forest communities. But the RohanMont Laval discoveries suddenly brought a large influx of them. They took ship from Melbourne and disembarked at Bournailles, and then trudged overland. Soon there was agitation for a private railway to be built, since the projected route was at some remove from the colony’s network. Even before permission had been granted, the laying of the track had begun. Worse, because of the move towards federation of the Australes britanniques, something like a national consciousness was running high among the newcomers. There was talk of detaching this part of Tasmanie from the French colony, and making it part of Victoria. For its part, the Tasmanien government was insistent that licence fees and taxes be paid. De Bournailles was determined to maintain authority over Mont Laval: he at once authorised the construction of a road to this remote part of the island (traditionally called Transylvania), and declared that a rail link would follow. Police patrols were increased. Le Mercure de Tasmanie urged him to send in the troops, but he desisted. Nevertheless, with rumours of meetings being organised to discuss secession, affairs in the west were drifting into crisis. It is usual to discuss the tension that arose between Great Britain and France in 1898 in terms of the confrontation on the headwaters of the Nile, at Fashoda. But the death of the hotelier Fanshaw at Pillinger played no little part in it. This was, after all, the time when Germany sent a battleship to Haiti because one of its nationals there had been propositioned by a policeman; the great powers were touchy about their honour. The incident which contributed towards near war between the French Republic and the British Empire was as follows. A police patrol had come across a meeting of well-known secessionists in a remote, rarely frequented inn. The police burst into the room; the Australe miners were annoyed and provoked by their officiousness. There was a scuffle. A young officer produced a gun, and fired, wildly; unfortunately the proprietor of the establishment, Mr Fanshaw, who had just put his head around the corner to see what was going on, was hit by the bullet. In Bournailles the Advocate and Wellington Times got hold of the story, magnified and inflamed the incident, and before long the telegraph wires were running hot across the world. French Tasmanie was seen to Jim Davidson

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be persecuting honest British subjects. Hostile telegrams were exchanged between Paris and London. De Bournailles shrugged, and said it would all die down. It did. But in order to be better briefed on any threat which the Anglo-Saxon mining community might present in future, he invited the Transvaal republic (then concerned about the Uitlanders) to open a consulate in Tasmanie. Not long afterwards the parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in Melbourne. A number of people urged de Bournailles to boycott the celebrations, but he thought this both ungracious and unwise. He attended, caught a chill in unseasonable weather, and died shortly after returning to Sécheron by steamer. Tasmanie in the belle époque enjoyed the legacy of his benign rule. Tourists from Australia increased in number, attracted by the lifestyle of these antipodean French. Sécheron at this time had but 50 000 people; but it also had a relaxed urbanity which did not exist on the mainland. On a Sunday, for example, one might begin by attending mass in twintowered Notre Dame. Then, as the leading locals did, follow this with a slap-up dinner at the Café de Paris. About 3.30 (should you feel the inclination), you could stroll across the Place de Bournailles to attend the opera: people always went early so that, using the fauteuils placed in the stalls as a base, they could dart about and briefly chat with everyone they knew. On a weekday you might sit at an open air café, imbibing the fine wines, and watch the changing of the guard on the Place d’Armes. Or visit the market, picking up indigenous shawls or carvings with their circular designs. When war broke out in 1914, Tasmanie found itself allied with the mainland. People were struck by the generosity with which the Australes volunteered for service, usually in France—although some unkind souls said that, if French Tasmanie had not existed, there might have been more. As the struggle showed signs of deepening, so the links with the mainland strengthened. While some local regiments went straight to France, it was thought expedient, as a way of fostering good relations, to place some with the Australians. The result was Tanzac. The exploits of the D’Entrecasteaux Division were among the most famous at Gallipoli. After the war Tasmanie experienced a time of difficulty. Politics became polarised. On one side was the church, led by the activist Cardinal Leclerc, together with the Mauriciens and other great landowners, plus others of a more moderate conservative persuasion. If this was a more decided right than existed anywhere in neighbouring Australia, so too was the left. For on the other side were first the agrariens, 22

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small landholders rightly or wrongly seen to be largely descended from convicts. There were also the métis, or mixed-bloods; this is what most indigenous people had now become, with a Tonkinese admixture. They comprised fully one-seventh of the population. Finally there were the tranjis, a slang term that had arisen from Transylvania and étranger (no one quite knew which), and who were the descendants of Englishspeaking miners. The government of Cardinal Leclerc, which had come to office during the war, was put to the test with the peace. Returned soldiers, emboldened by moves on the mainland towards soldier settlement, agitated for similar moves in the island. But the cardinal’s government would not move against the church’s allies, the great Mauricien landowners; extensive church lands might also come under attack. However, with increasing marches, riots, and hints of further and lasting unrest, the ultras found they could no longer command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Pressure from the pulpit was of little avail. In the election of 1921 the Front Populaire was swept into power. The new premier, O’Keefe, was, ironically, a devout Catholic; but as he was also a tranji, he was to some degree immune from the cardinal’s more excessive pronouncements. The slogan Partagez la terre! (Share the land!) was designed to unite the various elements which supported him: aggrieved returned soldiers, métis whose claims had never been fully recognised in the courts, and agrariens who felt cooped up on their small-holdings. A redistributive land bill provoked resistance, and even riots among the retainers of the Mauriciens. The chamber’s response was to pass even more drastic legislation. Meanwhile the minister for Education was, to the great unhappiness of the premier, stumping the country with speeches urging the complete secularisation of schools. The minister for Justice gave it as his opinion that oaths in court should no longer be sworn on the Bible. The treasurer then returned from overseas, having negotiated a large loan on what increasingly looked like distinctly unfavourable terms. A whiff or two of sexual scandal had begun to swirl about, and then there was a loud report in the rue de Coligny. Someone had shot the premier. As is often the case, the assassin turned out to be a disturbed young man: someone called Briand, who had no explicit political associations. Nonetheless the government was badly damaged, and staggered on for a couple of years. But at the next election the right was returned. And so it was again and again—if occasionally more centrist—all through the 1930s. The O’Keefe experiment had given Tasmaniens a bad fright: Jim Davidson

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although the great depression bit deeply, there was little inclination to ameliorate its effects with even mildly socialist legislation. Poverty spread, and illnesses such as rickets, tuberculosis and diphtheria became more common. Goitre suddenly appeared in areas with iodine deficiency in the soil. The birthrate fell, immigration almost ceased, the population declined. Many of those workers who could left the island for Australia. So things went on until 1939, when war broke out again. This time, with a more right-wing government, there were no troops placed under Australian command; the link was now directly with France. But in 1940 France fell, and the Tasmanien government found itself in a dilemma. It found the Vichy regime quite compatible; it would have liked to line up with Madagascar and Indo-China and declare its support. But it was all too clear that Australia would find this intolerable. Such a decision would be almost guaranteed to provoke invasion. Having no sympathy with de Gaulle and the Free French, the Tasmanien government therefore took what it saw as the only course available. It declared independence from France. The peace did not greatly change Tasmanie’s downward trajectory. Just as some years later the French took even the telephones away from newly independent Guinea, so now they showed their displeasure with their errant colony. Investment dwindled, scholarships were cancelled, fewer tourists and visiting businessmen came from Europe. Tasmanie was becoming isolated. There was talk of hydro-electricity being developed, in the hope that cheap power would encourage secondary industry. But continued strike action delayed the construction of the first dam, and minimised its impact. The government became reluctant to underwrite the construction of any more. At the same time it was disinclined to entrust private enterprise with so major a venture. Timidity and control had together become the implicit watchwords of the Tasmanien government. Its bureaucracy was now notorious for obstructionism. One way and another, relations with Australia became closer in this period, although without much cordiality. Some money poured in from the mainland following the French withdrawal; but as the prospects did not seem to be good, this funding was less than it might have been. Tourists also came in larger numbers. But whereas in Edwardian times Melbourne gentlefolk had sought climatic asylum in Tasmanie from the excessive mainland summer, now they went to Queensland and embraced it. By the 1960s there was some talk of federating with Australia, and a tranji party won a few seats in the chamber on this platform. But this in 24

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turn provoked a reaction. The government explored the possibility of an alliance trans-tasmanique with New Zealand. Meanwhile it banned Australian broadcasts. Melbourne radio was received quite clearly on the northern coastline, and many people in Bournailles and Port-Devan had often tuned in, to improve their English. Increasingly there were political tensions. During the Vietnam war mainland draft-dodgers had organised resistance in Australia from Sécheron, and despite repeated protests from Canberra the Tasmanien government refused to do much about it—although it did keep them under observation for its own purposes. Later, the Australian Aboriginal renaissance was paralleled by the rise of Action métie, one of the more significant of Tasmanie’s many political parties: it repeatedly expressed alarm at Aboriginal deaths in custody, and the failure of Australia to grasp the nettle and execute a just land settlement. So things drifted on inconclusively almost until the twenty-first century. Then John Howard was elected and re-elected prime minister of Australia: the khaki tinge in that country’s public life steadily deepened. On his third re-election in 2004, a number of left-wing people threw up their hands in horror and emigrated across Bass Strait. Some dedicated anti-Howard activists were already established there. The spam, propaganda leaflets, videos and broadcasts they produced were becoming an annoyance. Howard was particularly riled by spliced footage of election speeches which made him out to be a bald koala, having a tantrum. The Tasmanien government was alerted to these activities—warned—but did nothing. Suddenly, on the basis of the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, Australian troops landed before dawn at Georgesville, where there was an expatriate colony, and proceeded to round up suspects and occupy the town. Shock jocks and some of the tabloids had alleged that there were terrorist training camps in Tasmanie, but few Australians were convinced and no one expected such precipitate action. People were shocked. On reflection, foreign observers noted the widening arc of Australian influence. The military action in Tasmanie could be seen to complete the trifecta begun with Timor and continued in the Solomons. Meanwhile, it became apparent that the troops did not intend to stop. Reinforced, they advanced to Lanceton and Sécheron; there was another landing at Bournailles before they were welcomed (though not warmly) in Transylvania. Prime Minister Howard appeared on television: ‘For a long time now’, he intoned, ‘Australia has not been relaxed and comfortable … with the Tasmanian republic’. Declaring himself ‘proud’ of Jim Davidson

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the achievement of the men and women of the Australian army, Howard described himself as practising ‘non-core hubris’. In 2007 Tasmanie was annexed to Australia. New settlers from the mainland poured in; nothing like it had been seen in the region since Javanese were relocated in Irian Jaya forty years earlier. Property boomed. Tourism did too, for a time, but continuing military administration (with its occasional curfews) has proved a dampener. Meanwhile there are signs that a maquis of resistance fighters is gathering in the mountains of the Massif Central. The recent bomb outrage at Deloraine (the old Delorin), in which three soldiers were killed while drinking in a pub, may be just an opener.

Coda Tasmania was never annexed by France and no French colony established there, but there was considerable anxiety on the part of the British that such settlement might occur. In 1792 an expedition led by Bruni d’Entrecasteaux explored the coast south of Hobart, which was also the Tasmanian focus of the much more serious Baudin expedition of 1802. The farcical raising of the Union Jack on King Island actually happened. (For further reading on the Baudin expedition, see Frank Horner, The French Reconnaissance: Baudin in Australia, 1801–1803 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1987). It was as a response to French interest that in 1803 the British sent Collins to establish a settlement at Port Phillip (which he did at Sorrento) and Bowen to the Derwent to do the same (at Risdon, on the east bank). Later, a third French expedition, under Dumont D’Urville, reached Tasmania in 1826. As referred to in the text, this again led to precautionary British settlements at Westernport in Victoria and at Albany in Western Australia. In consequence, southern Tasmania in particular is littered with French names. These have been drawn on extensively in the present essay, and other names have been rendered into French. Burnie becomes Bournailles, Devonport Port-Devan, Mount Lyell Mont Laval. The two grand houses referred to actually exist, though Charenton is really Clarendon. The argument has been advanced that the detailing of its massive colonnade echoes French practice more than that of the American South. Clairville still had its panoramic wallpaper when I saw it some years ago. The removal of the French-Mauritians did not occur, but could have. In 1763 the British tossed the French out when their Acadie became Nova Scotia, for strategic reasons; the Acadiens called it the 26

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Grand dérangement when they were resettled in Louisiana. (They later became known as the Cajuns.) For cross-cultural race relations, it is useful to bear in mind that the thrust of French colonial policy was towards assimilation. While conscious of the Rights of Man, the French also held a strong belief in the superiority of their civilisation. This would be extended to subject peoples, who would then gradually be included in the French polity. The liberal element in this policy has, however, been much exaggerated— and it is that which is lightly satirised here. For example, while it is true that Senegal sent deputies to Paris from 1848, the first African was elected only in 1914. Again, in the whole of French West Africa (save for four special boroughs in Senegal), there were, out of a total population in 1936 of fifteen million, barely more than two thousand French citizens (see Michael Crowder, Senegal: A Study in French Assimilation Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 4, 11, 21). To return to Tasmanie: William Lanney (sometimes spelt Lanné) was described as the last full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal male when he died in 1869. Other aspects of Tasmanie in the nineteenth century should also be mentioned. There was, of course, no visit by Napoleon III and Eugénie, but reforms ushering in the Empire libéral in 1867 correctly have a counterpart here. The name Sécheron comes from Secheron House, Battery Point; there is an old story (which seems to be based on fact) that Secheron and Bellerive were named after localities on opposite sides of Lake Geneva. Tonkinese were imported as miners to New Caledonia; old maps show ‘Transylvania’ inscribed across western Tasmania (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1949), p. 281). Tasmanie in the belle époque draws on the way the island emerged as the major tourist destination in Australia in this period, while the hypothetical Sunday is very much as it was still observed by the haute bourgeoisie of Nancy in the 1980s. There are two sub-textual narratives in the twentieth-century section of the piece. One is the way Tasmanie indicates what can happen when a colony is used as a dumping ground—as some of them were, in a variety of ways. Add then the French system of proportional representation, and you almost ensure more explicit sectionalism and a greater ideological component in politics. The second narrative is one of stagnation, the nemesis that can overtake any colony when the initial bursts of energy involved in its establishment and consolidation start to slacken. At the back of my mind was also French-speaking Quebec, with its clerical dominance and conservative governments for much of the twentieth Jim Davidson

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century. Details of Tasmanie’s interwar misfortunes are scarcely an exaggeration of those that beset the anglophone Tasmania in this period. Lloyd Robson, in his Short History of Tasmania (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 173, points out that in 1954, 20 per cent of the Tasmanian-born had moved to the mainland. The more recent period is fantasy. If there is only one dam, there will be no Greens; indeed the Australian state of Tasmania built a number of power stations through the 1950s and 1960s without exciting much protest: it was Lake Pedder in 1972 which turned the tide (although not the floodwaters). And, of course, the ending is quite arbitrary; John Howard might even have behaved as well towards these stranded French as he did about the tsunami—the word itself almost an anagram of Tasmania.

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2

WHAT IF ALFRED DEAKIN HAD MADE A DECLARATION OF AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENCE? Marilyn Lake

It is commonly assumed that Federation saw the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia as an independent nation-state. In fact, the achievement of Federation simply highlighted the limits of Australian sovereignty and the contradictions inherent in the status of the self-governing colony. Although Australia was formally accorded the status of self-government, Australian political leaders, led by Alfred Deakin, were aggrieved by their continuing subjection to the Colonial Office in London. In the years immediately following Federation, the tensions between the Australians and British ran high and dominated the Colonial Conference in 1907. At the same time, influential Australian political leaders looked across the Pacific to the manly example of the republic of the United States and found that, in the case of President Theodore Roosevelt, the admiration was reciprocated. Here was the possibility of a new racial solidarity enshrining the status of White men, a vision given enthusiastic expression on the occasion of the visit of the American Fleet to Australia in 1908. If Britain would not accommodate the anxieties and aspirations of its restless colonists, might they not transfer their ties across the Pacific? In separating from the Mother Country and declaring for a republic, might not Australian men also redeem their manhood?

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Preparations were under way for the celebration of the centenary of Australian Independence Day some years before the day itself arrived on 1 September 2008. The date was easy to remember, for it was, of course, Australia’s premier national holiday and the beginning of spring. There was no denying the pride among the people, though cynics said that it was no big achievement—no blood had been shed after all—and numerous historians reminded their fellow Australians that nations were also built on repressions, exclusions and silences. At least there was one heroine in the story: even misogynists agreed that it was international feminist Vida Goldstein who had strengthened the politicians’ resolve at a crucial moment and persuaded them, in the end, to assert their manhood, to stand up to the British and negotiate with the Japanese as their equals. Federal and state governments had provided generous funding in preparation for the big event, making large grants to schools, universities, writers, the ABC and Film Australia, to oversee a range of multimedia projects that explored the meaning and consequences of Australia’s dramatic break with Britain. There was a particular focus on the role of our intellectual and political leaders, whose statues still presided over the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra; and there were even some fanciful writers constructing ‘counterfactuals’, daring us to imagine the course Australian history would have run had we remained tethered to the Mother Country, resentful but subservient, protected but isolated. Certainly most of us believed Australia would have been dragged into Britain’s European wars within ten years, sending thousands of our best and brightest half-way across the world to die for Britain in Europe, just as they had been lured into the imperial mess in South Africa in 1900 to fight the Boers, for God and empire. Just imagine, some joked, we might have had to prove our manhood fighting for the British, not against them. Even our national day would probably have commemorated the deaths of soldiers fighting the wars of our imperial masters. We amused ourselves with these scenarios, but they had once been real possibilities, so when Australians were called upon to contemplate the significance of the centenary of Independence in 1908, there was palpable relief at having escaped the costly and debilitating entanglements of the sort the Canadians and New Zealanders had experienced, and never recovered from. There was cautious pride in what the Commonwealth of Australia had been able to achieve on its own: a progressive and prosperous 30

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welfare state, whose role in linking the East with the West had become legendary. But it was in the nature of centenaries to spark debates about the ambiguities of national history—the achievements and the failures—and 2008 would be no different. What were we to make of the privileged Japanese communities that had grown up in and around Sydney, Brisbane and Broome from around 1910, their preferential employment in the public service and their insistence on turning Aboriginal peoples into a virtual slave labour force, not only in Australia, but also overseas, where many were sent to serve as personal and domestic servants for military and navy personnel? One outcome of the break with Britain was Australia’s diplomatic initiative in establishing a reciprocal immigration agreement with Japan, which saw many thousands of Japanese merchants and traders coming to live in Australia, while a smaller number of Australians had settled in Tokyo and Kyoto, there to work as influential promoters of democratic reform in Japan and interpreters of Japan to the Western world. There were those who regarded the Japanese presence as the crucial underpinning of our myriad achievements, and as the source of our prosperity and oceanic trade; but of course many other historians blamed Japanese Australians for the exploitation of Aboriginal communities, the excessive ritual of our social life and the economic marginalisation of the Chinese. Some historians had written long theses demonstrating AngloAustralian resistance to their worst discriminatory and elitist practices, but Indigenous writers tended to argue that their relationships with the Japanese had been empowering and ultimately liberating. A Pacific School of historians, as they became known, had dominated historiography for some decades, sustained by their professional alliances with United States scholars—as well as American fellowships and philanthropic foundations. Their joint projects often focused on earlier solidarities between American and Australian workers, migration networks and the political legacy of the famous embrace of presidents Alfred Deakin and Theodore Roosevelt, in San Francisco, in October 1908. Deakin was one of the most intellectual and ambitious of Australian political leaders and our first president. He was revered as a founding father and honoured in his final years with an appointment as president of Stanford University, but he secretly envied Vida Goldstein’s appointment as president of Radcliffe, a superior women’s college on the east coast. During the 1880s, Deakin set his sights on a career as a statesman, but in envisaging Australia’s future, he had been torn between his Marilyn Lake

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allegiance to the British Empire and his admiration of the bold independence of American manhood. Deakin was proud to identify with the English-speaking races, but resented British condescension towards colonials. He found the status of British subject demeaning, especially when the British government reminded Australians that all British subjects—including Chinese and Indians—enjoyed an equality of status and respect within the British Empire even as Englishmen treated Australians as their inferiors. Deakin’s American sympathies had been encouraged by his mentor and fellow Liberal politician, Charles Pearson, the erstwhile history professor at King’s College in London; and also by his attorney-general, the Tasmanian Andrew Inglis Clark. His favourite writers were Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman and his favourite history was Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning of the West together with H.B. Bancroft’s dramatic account of the war of independence. In 1888 he met Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, while travelling to Sydney for a conference, and his admiration for Royce’s writings—and his joy in Royce’s company—confirmed his sense of the power of American intellectual culture. Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1901, the same year that the Commonwealth of Australia came into being. To both Roosevelt and Deakin this seemed providential. One of Roosevelt’s themes in Winning of the West was that Australia and the United States shared the same ‘race history’ and he often made flattering mention of the parallels between the Commonwealth and the Republic. Deakin enjoyed the attention of Roosevelt, who wrote often of his admiration of the vigour of White Australian manhood. For Deakin, as for Roosevelt, the distinction between the ruling and ruled races—between those fitted for self-government and those not so fitted—was of the utmost importance, but it was a precarious distinction, rendered ever more vulnerable by the political ascendancy of the Black and Yellow races, as Charles Pearson pointed out, in a book that startled readers the world over. Charles Pearson was best known as a historian in England, but in Australia he made his mark in Liberal politics as a radical educational and land reformer. Pearson’s migration to the South Pacific had afforded him a new perspective on world history and especially the rising power of China and Japan. In National Life and Character: A Forecast, Pearson questioned the belief in British superiority and progress, warning that advanced Anglo-Saxon societies had become ‘stationary’, with their birthrates in decline and a loss of vigour in their national life. 32

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Meanwhile, Blacks, in Haiti for example, and Chinese, 400 million in number, were in the ascendant, already the dynamic agents of world history, their energy fuelling impressive industrial and population growth. In Haiti, ‘the Black Republic’, ex-slaves had asserted their right to self-government. Asian nations would soon take their place on the world stage, control their own navies and commerce and meet on terms of equality in international conferences. Pearson, an advanced Liberal, thought these historical developments, like women’s emancipation, ‘inevitable’, but nonetheless ‘humiliating’ for the White man who must accept these developments with a manly stoicism. His Australian readers, who included future political leaders, took a different view and looked to the United States to lead a new solidarity of White men. Ironically, the admiration of some Australian political leaders for American institutions had been fuelled in part by the writings of E.A. Freeman, that influential English historian of Teutonic institutions, who saw American achievements and heroes such as Washington, ‘the expander of England’, as expressions of the triumph of the AngloSaxon racial seed.1 In lectures in Boston, in the 1880s, Freeman had explained to a receptive audience how they fitted into the historical longue durée. There were three phases of English history he said: Old England was to be traced back to the Teutons in the German forests; England itself should be thought of as Middle England, while Massachusetts had been properly called New England. The vigour and virility of American life could be seen as the ultimate triumph of Anglo-Saxonism. That was certainly Theodore Roosevelt’s view. But where did that leave Australia? Some colonial political leaders looked to ‘the great republic of the west’ with yearning; they read its dramatic history of revolution and civil war, they admired its spirit of freedom, and followed the decisions of the great jurists of the United States Supreme Court. They travelled there, too, taking the long sea voyage to San Francisco and then the train across country. San Francisco was of especial interest to them—its Chinatown was often cited in American and Australian reports of enquiry and political debate as final evidence of the inability of the Chinese to assimilate—but the real destination of these travellers was Boston in New England, where they might meet the leading intellectuals, jurists and poets of their time, and to whom they often carried letters of introduction. Charles Pearson enjoyed a friendship with Charles Eliot Norton. When Andrew Inglis Clark—who cultivated a special friendship with Oliver Wendell Holmes— embarked on his second trip to the United States, planning a trip that Marilyn Lake

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would take in Washington, New York and Boston, he carried with him a letter of introduction written by the American consul-general in Sydney, George Bell, who knew Clark well: he was, his letter affirmed, ‘a great admirer of the splendid manhood of our dear America’. The Australians admired the independence of their American cousins, but they were also students of American race relations and given to quoting American history lessons, chief among them being the impossibility of a multi-racial democracy, the unassimilability of alien races and the foolishness of expecting recently emancipated Blacks to enter into self-government. ‘We have only to look at the great difficulty which is being experienced in America in connexion with the greatest racial trouble ever known in the history of the world, in order to take warning and guard ourselves against similar complications’, H.B. Higgins told the first Australian parliament in 1901.2 In 1906, Higgins became president of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court and was proud author of a series of articles on its work, characterised as ‘A New Province for Law and Order’, which was first published in the Harvard Law Review. Higgins admired the United States—by far the largest section of Higgins’ vast library was dedicated to American history—but his enthusiasm for the role of the state in protecting working conditions was not shared by many Americans. Sam Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, wrote to tell him so. Dependence on the state, in his view, spelled emasculation. American history lessons and political theory convinced Australian liberals that a democracy enshrining the equality of men must be racially homogeneous. The introduction of slavery to America, the resultant Civil War between north and south, the failed experiment of Radical Reconstruction and the terrible consequences of emancipation—the assertion of White supremacy through intimidation, violence, mutilations, tortures and lynchings—convinced Australians that their new nation must be racially homogeneous. Men must deal with each other man to man, but only White men were deemed to have the capacities of manhood—most notably the capacity for self-government. Australians considered that the American experience of racial segregation and violence, the tortures and lynchings—which peaked in the 1890s, Australia’s ‘federal decade’—degraded everyone and there was no reason to believe that Australian White men were made of better stuff than the gentlemen of the American south. It was from the southerners they picked up the idea of defining their place as a ‘White man’s country’. In casting around for solutions 34

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to their ‘racial problem’, Americans—and their influential interpreters such as Englishman James Bryce, whose American Commonwealth was widely read in Australia—had often canvassed the possibility of deporting the Blacks ‘back to Africa’, but by the 1890s the census recorded their numbers as reaching nearly eight million, too large a population to transport half-way across the world. Australians determined, however, that they could do what the Americans could not. It didn’t matter that journals of opinion such as the Australasian Review of Reviews warned Australians that their plans for racial expulsion jeopardised ‘the unity of empire’; they were determined to deport the Kanakas brought to Queensland to work in the sugar cane fields. This would be an inaugurating statement about the identity of the new Commonwealth of Australia—a White man’s country in the southern seas. As Prime Minister Edmund Barton proclaimed: ‘We have decided to legislate our racial identity’. When the Australian delegates to the constitutional conventions met during the 1890s to frame a new federal constitution, and engaged in lengthy debate about its basic principles and provisions, the Colonial Office signalled its disapproval of key colonial proposals, in particular the plan to enact a racially discriminatory immigration program. In the 1901 elections and in subsequent parliamentary debate, Australians said again and again they did not want coloured migrants settling in Australia, that Africans and Asiatics would bring down the standard of living and level of wages, that non-Whites could not assimilate into Australian society, and that their presence would demean the status of all labour. But equally important to many legislators was the issue of their rights as self-governing White men to decide their own policies. The issue was central to their future as a nation, and also to their manhood. To many radicals, such as H.B. Higgins, the British government was robbing the Australians of their manhood at the very moment they entered into nationhood. The British, who turned class distinctions into impassable social barriers, were refusing the colonials the right to draw their own social distinctions based not on class, but on race. ‘If we have to be deterred from carrying out the great principle of a White Australia merely from fear that the royal assent may be withheld from any Bill that we may pass’, exclaimed the member for Melbourne Ports in parliament, ‘then I think there is sufficient manhood and vigour in the country to assert itself, and in such a manner that the principle will be established and that some means will be found of giving effect to the wish and will of the people’. Marilyn Lake

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There was also conflict with the Colonial Office over matters of defence and tariffs. Australians wanted control over the deployment of their military and naval forces; naval power as represented in Alfred Mahan’s Sea Power had come to symbolise masculine power in its most modern form. In matters of tariff the leading Australians were committed protectionists. Charles Pearson, a keen observer of the tensions between the Australians and the Colonial Office in the 1890s, warned his friend James Bryce about the prospect of ‘separation’. If the British tried to impose their authority on the Australians and robbed them of their right to self-government, in the matters that were important to them, wrote Pearson in 1892, ‘I think it would result in a declaration of Australia’s Independence within five years’.3 In the event the process took rather longer, but they were prophetic words, for the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia through federation simply exacerbated the contradictions inherent in the status of a ‘self-governing colony’. Australian proposals to prevent Chinese and Japanese from migrating to Australia prompted continuing protests from their diplomatic representatives in Sydney and London. The Colonial Office had suggested to the Australians that they should follow the Natal precedent and frame their discriminatory intentions in terms of an educational test. In fact, Natal had followed the American state of Mississippi, which sought to disenfranchise Black voters through the introduction in 1890 of an educational test for voting. Around the world ‘White men’s countries’ followed these related developments closely. The British also impressed on Australian political leaders that they should not offend Japan, a British ally. In drawing up immigration restrictions, Deakin accordingly recommended that the Australian legislation incorporate not a race-based test as exemplified by Natal’s requirement that applicants speak a ‘European’ language, but a dictation test in the national language, English. The Colonial Office objected to this departure from colonial precedent, however, and told the Australians to reinstate the ‘Natal formula’. The British were worried about the sensibilities of their main European ally, France, and the Australians had already pushed them into unwanted conflict with the French over the New Hebrides: ‘The Australians, who have never had to face any difficulty, seem to think that we can treat France as if she were Tonga or Samoa’, the Colonial Office fumed.4 But the Australians considered that the Colonial Office treated them like Tongans or Samoans. Just because it was proper for the monarch to treat all her subjects as equal in her eyes, deserving of equal 36

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consideration and respect as British subjects, that was no justification for imperial officials putting Australians on the same level as Indians, Chinese, Malays, Javanese and Afghans. The Australians had to continually remind the British that they were White men and thus of equal status with themselves. They would not be treated as supplicants. In this context, the Australians were gratified by the attention of the Americans, especially Theodore Roosevelt. Some years earlier he had reviewed Pearson’s National Life and Character at length in the Sewanee Review and written to Pearson to express his admiration. The book made a profound impression on Roosevelt, but the American didn’t share Pearson’s pessimism. He thought that Australia, like the United States, had a great future. Writing to British diplomat Cecil Arthur Spring Rice in 1899, he observed: To you India seems larger than Australia. In the life history of the English-speaking people, I think it will show very much smaller. The Australians are building up a giant commonwealth, the very existence of which, like the existence of the United States means an alteration in the balance of the world and goes a long way towards ensuring the supremacy of the men who speak our tongue and have our ideas of social, political and religious freedom and morality.5 He counselled Rice against race pessimism—perhaps set in train by Pearson: the settlement of North America and of Australasia goes on and the remaining waste places of the two continents will be practically occupied in our own life time … In spite of all the unhealthy signs in this country, I still see ample evidence of abounding vigour. There is certainly such vigour in Australia.6 The Australians took heart from American admiration, but the British continued to ignore or patronise them. The hypocrisy of the British—their unmanly evasions—disgusted many members of the Australian parliament who proposed an amendment to the immigration restriction legislation, calling for a straight-out declaration in favour of exclusion on explicit racial grounds. To speak honestly, they said, was more honourable, but the Australians’ straight Marilyn Lake

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talk hardly impressed the Japanese. When they learnt that even courteous Deakin had told parliament that it was Japanese who were the main target of their legislation, they protested in the strongest terms to the British government. They too objected to being classed with coloured races such as Kanakas or Samoans. They demanded recognition as a civilised nation of the first rank. The Australians were mindful of Japan’s increasing status as a world power and the implications of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which seemed increasingly to suggest that if the British should be occupied in Europe, Japan as her ally could best guard British interests in the Pacific. To be beholden to Japanese naval and military power was not a happy prospect. Then, in the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese vanquished Russian naval power and suddenly seemed ready to set the conditions of their international engagements. World attention shifted to the Pacific Ocean as Japanese expansionism confronted the United States as it extended its territorial claims in Hawaii and the Philippines. Clearly, in British eyes, Japan was more important as an ally than were the querulous Australian colonials. When the British decided in 1905 that they must renew the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Sir George Sydenham Clarke, once governor of Victoria and now secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, told the British prime minister that: If such a Treaty as this came into existence our Colonies, Australia especially, will have to put the Japanese on precisely the same footing as Frenchmen or Germans. Discrimination against the Japanese, as a colonial people, would not be possible. It might be necessary to speak plainly to Australia, but Australians are not without their sense, and their position is one of peculiar weakness except for our support, so that they would find it necessary to swallow their race prejudice as regards the Japanese.7 The Australians were beginning to think that it was time, in turn, to speak plainly to the British. The occasion presented itself at the next Colonial Conference in 1907 in London, when Prime Minister Deakin was accompanied by a new breed of colonial bureaucrat, the acute, articulate and dapper secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Atlee Arthur Hunt. As a European power, the British had to deal with the ambitions of France and Germany as well as negotiate their imperial commitments. 38

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They had to deal with tensions arising from the naval power of Germany in the North Sea and of Japan in the Pacific. They thought that the Australians didn’t understand their complex responsibilities. The Australians were convinced, in turn, that the British had no interest in seeing the world from their point of view. Furthermore, they were never consulted—always a complaint of the powerless. All they knew they learnt from the newspapers. For example, with regard to the position of the Burns Philp company in the Pacific Islands, and the attitude of Germany, Atlee Hunt tried to explain to his equivalent in the Colonial Office: Negotiations take place between your Government and Germany of an important and definite character. We learn of them only from newspapers. The Germans say they won’t agree to arbitrate unless Great Britain also agrees to arbitrate about some of their claims. What these claims are and what the British government thinks about the proposal we have no means of knowing. But you tell us nothing. You may remember the stress I laid on the desirableness of keeping us informed of every movement. My views on that point are stronger now than ever.8 And then there was the question of the honours list. Again they weren’t consulted and the choice seemed perverse at best. ‘You can hardly appreciate the blow to the prestige of the Federation that the King’s advisers have inflicted’, wrote Atlee Hunt to Sir Francis Hopwood in the Colonial Office.9 Hunt also felt keenly imagined personal slights. ‘You can hardly conceive what unimportant persons we are in the minds of the Colonial Office’, he wrote to his friend Bob Garran, ‘not one of these exalted gentlemen have done me the honour to leave a card …’ Deakin and his adviser decided that the only way the Australians could remain in the imperial embrace was through a revolutionary restructuring of the empire that would acknowledge Great Britain and Australia (and the other self-governing colonies) as equal partners. If they were to join in common defence and foreign policies, then they must have an equal say in shaping these policies. Australians had had to accept the logic of a federal system of government in which small and large component parts were treated as equal parties. So now would Britain. Regardless of population size, all self-governing states must have an equal vote on foreign policy and defence. The British government Marilyn Lake

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must deal with the Australians, government-to-government, man-to-man and remove the surveillance and control of the Colonial Office. Hunt wrote home to Bob Garran about how the clash of British and Australian expectations was evident in plans for the conference: the Colonial Office had intended to make the whole thing a mere departmental Conference of the Secretary of State for the Colonies with subordinate officials. It was only quite late in the week that it was decided that the Prime Minister should open the Conference and then the proceedings were not to be published but only a brief précis communicated. Mr Deakin, when this was announced Saturday morning, wrote a very strongly worded letter to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman himself which completely changed the tenor of his opening address, from which you will have seen that the admission has now been made that this is a Conference between Government and Governments, and not one of the limited character it was first intended to be … But although the concession was welcome, the recognition of governmental equality did not go far enough. Prime Minister Deakin took some specific resolutions to the Colonial Conference, but was frustrated at every turn, especially regarding proposals for imperial administrative reform and the creation of an Australian navy. He proposed the establishment of an imperial council, to be chaired by the British prime minister, on which governments would be equally represented and which would bypass the Colonial Office. His plan was rejected, the British citing the imperative of ministerial responsibility. When the British government announced they would meet colonial objections to the relations of rule in the Colonial Office by dividing its functions between two departments, one to deal with the self-governing dominions, and another to deal with crown colonies, the Australian government let it be known that they did not ‘consider the new arrangement marks any improvement on the old order’.10 The time for a new order had arrived. Already negotiations had taken place between Deakin and President Roosevelt, through Ambassador James Bryce in Washington, regarding a planned visit by the American fleet to Australia, which would inaugurate a new White alliance to control and patrol the Pacific. When word reached the Colonial Office that Deakin had issued the invitation to Roosevelt to 40

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detour the fleet to Sydney and Melbourne without first asking their permission, they were furious and gave voice to their real feelings about Deakin. ‘It is no use trying to explain to Mr Deakin’, they said. ‘He is simply intent on giving offence.’ Charles Lucas was especially annoyed by the ‘fulsome’ language Deakin had used about the American president, whom he had praised as providing leadership to the White men of the world. ‘Mr Deakin’, he said, ‘thinks he has a second string to his bow’. As indeed he did. The visit of the American fleet in March 1908 was a major success for Deakin who was passionate in his welcome to Rear-Admiral Sperry and his men. Just one week before he had received his own personal tribute from Josiah Royce who sent his old friend an inscribed copy of his latest work called Loyalty. The New South Wales premier greeted the Americans in Sydney, hailing them as brothers and White men. Sperry returned the compliment, telling his gratified hosts that he regarded them as very White men. In Melbourne, Deakin quoted from Royce’s book on loyalty, praised the common ideals of Americans and Australians, and proposed a ‘perpetual concord of brotherhood’. In place of the empire, Deakin imagined a new community of White men. Deakin introduced his proposal for formal separation from Britain in the wake of the visit of the American fleet, complete with detailed plans for a new defence scheme and Australian navy, a gentlemen’s agreement with Japan to allow increased migration and other privileges and a formal Australian–American Alliance. There was, needless to say, some distress on the part of the minority of Australians born in Britain and others who maintained sentimental attachments, but the real surprise was the readiness of the majority of the parliament and public to embrace independence. The British were astonished at this sudden turn of events. The planned goodwill visit of leading Colonial Office men to Australia had to be cancelled and the British press alternated between diatribes against Australian ingratitude and loud warnings about Australian vulnerability to Japanese attack. ‘Who would protect the island continent in the event of an invasion?’ asked the The Times. The Australians looked to America, but exhilarated by their new-found independence, they also entered into separate alliances with Japan and France, the latter ceding the New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the Australians in return for a promise of support in the event of a future war with Germany. It was an undertaking most Australians would come to question when the Germans occupied Noumea in 1915. But the cost of the Marilyn Lake

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agreement wasn’t high; Australia offered food and refuge to the French and most regarded the resulting influx of thousands of French refugees as good for our sartorial style and culinary arts. It was a judgement shared by current Australian president, Akira Sugimoto, whose own popularity, it was said, partly derived from the success of the French– Japanese fusion cuisine with which his family had been associated for decades and which had since conquered the world. Indeed, fusion feasts were a regular highlight of Independence Day celebrations, and the open-air dinner planned for Hyde Park in 2008 was reported to have been booked out two years in advance. Independence Day 2008 was an occasion for historical reflection as well as feasting. That year saw the release of several documentary films, plays and installations as well as the publication of some excellent history. Although there were, as ever, many differences of interpretation, there was considerable agreement on one historical point: that the Australian decision to break from Britain had forced on our political leaders the responsibilities of freedom and independence, which had included an accommodation with the Japanese and a new experiment in multi-racial democracy. Having avoided the costly entanglements of the European war of 1914–18 and the Asian war of 1938–44, Australia with its highly developed Asian language skills and sophisticated diplomatic culture had enhanced its status as mediator and peace-broker in the post-war world. As the only country officially bilingual in English and Japanese, Australia was invited to fill the chair of the new East–West Forum for Economic Co-operation. Another fact on which historians also agreed, rather surprisingly, was that the public meeting organised by Vida Goldstein in 1908 to promote a new spirit of ‘open door cosmopolitanism’ had been a key event in setting the Eurasian democracy on track. To commemorate her achievement, the John Hirst Chair in Women’s History was also established in 2008—funded by anonymous donors—to support research into women’s contributions to democracy.

Coda Of course there was no declaration of Australian independence in 1908 and has not been since. In the histories of this period of nation-building, there is a general consensus that the British identities and loyalties of key players such as Alfred Deakin and Edmund Barton—as well as strategic considerations—made such a possibility unthinkable. The best 42

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book on the tensions between Australians and the Colonial Office in this period remains Neville Meaney’s The Search for Security in the Pacific, cited in my footnotes. In a later article ‘Britishness and Australian Identity’ in Australian Historical Studies, no. 116, 2002, Meaney spells out more fully his belief that Australians at this time identified overwhelmingly with Britain. One problem with this analysis is that it misses the ways in which Australians’ emergent identity as White men could and did position them in opposition to imperial Britain. My own research for my current project on the emergence of selfstyled White men’s countries at this time has suggested that Australian historians—largely writing in a British framework of interpretation— have failed to notice the importance of Australian identifications with the United States, especially on the part of leading figures such as Alfred Deakin, A.I. Clark and H.B. Higgins and the historical memory of the American War of Independence in late-nineteenth-century Australia. Deakin, in particular, was strongly drawn to the example of manly republicanism he associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and with his friend, the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce and then later the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he wrote in the warmest terms in 1908. Symptomatically, Deakin’s pilgrimage to Emerson’s grave in Concord, Massachusetts in 1885 is totally omitted from J.A. La Nauze’s lengthy biography of Alfred Deakin (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1965). My account is largely drawn from my own research at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the National Archives in London and Washington and is factually based—until the point at which Deakin declares independence from Britain. In reality, Deakin had a severe nervous breakdown. A good source on Japanese ambitions in the Pacific is Akira Iriye’s Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), and there is discussion of the meeting called by Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Political Association to discuss the ideal of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Melbourne in Marilyn Lake, ‘“Stirring Tales”: Australian Feminism and National Identity, 1900–40’, in Geoffrey Stokes (ed.), The Politics of Identity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The actual meeting takes place later, however, in 1919, at the time Prime Minister W.M. Hughes successfully mobilised to defeat Japanese plans to have a racial equality clause written into the draft Covenant of the League of Nations.

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3

WHAT IF FEDERATION HAD FAILED IN 1900? Helen Irving

Australia’s federation was accomplished in 1901. It might not have been. For decades, the idea of unifying the Australasian colonies under one federal authority had been talked about, promoted, and officially investigated. The creation of a single Australian nation served as a dream and a beacon for many. The final accomplishment of federation occupied a decade of meetings, negotiations, elections, and referendums in the colonies. By 1899 a full Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Bill had been completed. To become law, the Bill required passage through the Imperial (British) parliament, and so it was taken to London the following year by an Australian delegation, led by Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin and Charles Kingston. To the Australians’ astonishment, British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain refused to put the Constitution Bill through the parliament without significant alterations. After weeks of argument, public debate and private negotiation, a compromise was reached. Deakin, Barton and Kingston were finally left alone: ‘When the door closed upon them … they seized each other’s hands and danced hand in hand in a ring around the centre of the room to express their jubilation’.1 But imagine this scene: Chamberlain leaves, the Australians look at each other, barely able to contain their grief. They know that the end of the road has been reached, that compromise will never result, that neither they nor the British will yield. With heavy hearts, they return to their hotels, and begin to pack their bags. 44

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Australia’s Federation was accomplished in 1911. Yet ten years earlier, the Commonwealth of Australia had been merely a signature away from completion. A delegation of leading federationists had taken the completed Constitution Bill to London, anticipating its smooth passage through the Imperial parliament. But Britain refused to pass the Bill without substantial amendment, and the Australians were equally determined not to alter it. Although few now realise it, this one event, coming at the end of an arduous ten-year process, would prove critical to the shape of the Australian Commonwealth almost one hundred years later. Had the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, been less intransigent, or had the Australian delegation been prepared to compromise, it is almost certain that Federation would have been accomplished in 1901. With hindsight, the ten years that were to pass between defeat and ultimate success amounted to much more than just a delay. Both Australia and the world changed dramatically during that decade. The accomplishment of Federation in 1911 was to be the work, not of Victorians, but of Edwardians, and these were different types of people. As one of the very few (and certainly the most colourful) works written by participants in the 1890s federation movement, Deakin’s memoir, The Federal Story, now stands as an important account of the first serious thrust towards the creation of an Australian nation. It is also a powerful portrait of the men who led the movement at that time, and who might have led the Commonwealth in its formative years. We think now of Federation as an achievement of the early twentieth century. But we should not lose sight of the contribution of the Victorians.

Deakin and the London delegation Now all-but forgotten, Alfred Deakin was an ‘eminent Victorian’. His talents were large and his promise seemed great. A leading colonial liberal, he was trained as a barrister, but served as a member of the Victorian parliament during the 1880s. He was to be one of the most enthusiastic and tireless of the fin-de-siècle federationists in the decade that followed. By the mid-1890s, having represented his colony at the federation conferences of 1890 and 1891, he was acknowledged as the effective leader of the federation movement in Victoria. At the second Federal Convention in 1897, he served on the Constitutional Committee and took a prominent part in debate. It was no surprise, then, that he was chosen as Victoria’s delegate to take the completed Constitution Bill Helen Irving

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to London in 1900, joining other colonial representatives in overseeing its passage through the Imperial parliament. The Australians arrived in London full of confidence. They did not expect resistance. Having written their Constitution, and with all colonies (except Western Australia) having approved it, they were dismayed at the attempt to alter it, and adamant in their refusal. Joseph Chamberlain was a strong proponent of imperialism and an ardent promoter of empire where other colonial secretaries had been more casual about the portfolio. He was more than willing to allow self-government in the ‘White’ colonies, but would not give way on imperial matters. Uniformity of common law, and access (especially by investors) to the authority of English judges were, he believed, essential to keeping the empire intact.2 The Australians took advice from their colonial premiers. They decided to hold out, and attempt to convince Chamberlain that the empire would be enhanced, not threatened, by Australian independence. The colonial secretary was not convinced, and he knew that the parliament would not pass the Constitution Bill without the government’s approval. The delegates, in return, threatened to withdraw the Bill altogether. After a final confrontation where their threats were met with acquiescence, they admitted defeat. They withdrew, travelling home together, exhausted and bitterly disappointed. It was to be the end of their part in the campaign. Had Federation been accomplished then, Deakin is likely to have played a major role in the new Commonwealth. Many imagined him, indeed, as a future prime minister. He was a man of great talent, but also of unusual sensitivity and feeling, and he was severely shaken by the experience in London. He never sought to re-enter politics after 1900. Sadly, although he lived to see the ‘miracle’ of Federation’s accomplishment in 1911, his health and memory were pitifully eroded, and this once-brilliant man had no hope of playing any real part in its final stages. Until his powers failed completely, Deakin worked as a journalist and an occasional writer of prose, as he had done in his early years. In his diary of October 1911, only one month before the proclamation of the Commonwealth, he wrote: ‘Another A.D. sits among ruins, picking his way carefully across the debris to the wave of complete forgetfulness that awaits me’.3 Traces of his political influence remain, however. What subsequently became known as the ‘New Protection’ (protectionism of Australian industry, in exchange for a system of wage fixation and indexation) was to be engineered in 1912 by the first Commonwealth 46

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government, under Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. It is said to have been derived from Deakin’s thinking. If this is so, his part in the Commonwealth, while indirect, was of real significance.4 The other members of the ill-fated London delegation were the New South Wales federation leader, Edmund Barton, and the former South Australian premier, Charles Kingston (plus two less active delegates, from Tasmania and Queensland).5 Upon his return to Sydney, Barton was offered the leadership of the New South Wales Protectionist Party, a position he occupied for two years with little energy or enthusiasm, the cause of Federation having been, it seems, the only real political ‘love’ of his life. 6 He left politics in 1902, to take up the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The Labor Party, hitherto in alliance with the Free Traders in New South Wales, subsequently governed on several occasions with the support of the Protectionists. By 1907, however, the new alliance had begun to fracture as Labor inched closer to the socialist objective it was ultimately to adopt in 1921. Charles Kingston returned to South Australian politics, and served once again as premier of his colony until ill-health forced him to step down in 1903. During the 1890s, his government had effectively adopted a labour program, incorporating an advanced industrial arbitration system and social welfare provisions. Kingston’s death in 1908 deprived Australia of a leader who might well have adapted better than many of his contemporaries to the modernisation of politics, and who would undoubtedly have been an experienced and valuable participant in the introduction of such initiatives at the Commonwealth level.

Lost years and lost leaders Others too missed the providential moment. George Reid, New South Wales premier from 1894 to 1899, and member of the second Federal Convention, most certainly had personal hopes of serving in the new Commonwealth parliament (perhaps as prime minister). However, as later historians note, he was always best suited to colonial politics, to the era of gas lamps and public rallies. By 1910 when the third convention began its work, he was too detached from modern Australian politics to be part of it. He chose, instead, a life in London, serving in the newly created post of high commissioner for New South Wales. Deakin, as The Federal Story makes clear, despised Reid with unmitigated passion. One can only imagine his dismay had Reid actually accomplished his ambitions in the new Commonwealth.7 Helen Irving

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Sir John Forrest, premier of Western Australia, who led his colony’s delegation at the 1897–98 convention, might also, if paradoxically, have played an important part in the Commonwealth, and his role as the most experienced and powerful representative of the west, would have been significant.8 But his colony was deeply divided on the matter, and by 1900 no referendum had been held on the Constitution Bill. (It remains uncertain, therefore, whether Western Australia would ever have joined if Federation had occurred then.) Forrest was also among the most ardent of colonial imperialists, and a staunch opponent of labour. He would have found the subsequent shift in Australian politics alien and uncongenial. Like Reid, he was to see his final political fortunes as lying more in England than in Australia, and it was en route to London to take his seat in the House of Lords as a newly created baron that he died in 1918. Any of these men might once have earned the title of ‘father of Federation’, but in the event, this concept was eschewed by those who actually accomplished Federation. Many traditionalists today still attach the name to Henry Parkes, in recognition of his being the first politician seriously to promote the idea. But Parkes, five times premier of colonial New South Wales, and the instigator and president of the first Federal Convention in 1891 (from which the first draft Constitution emerged), died in 1896 at the age of eighty, one year before the second Federal Convention began sitting.9 His entitlement to the title, thus, would always have been subject to historical doubt, even had Federation succeeded in 1901. Another potential player, remote, but symbolically important, also missed out. On 22 January 1901, in the very month when it had once seemed possible that the Commonwealth might become a reality, Queen Victoria died. She was eighty-one years old, and had been failing for some time. Still, the empire was plunged into grief. It was, literally, the end of an era, and to federalists in the Australian colonies, it seemed symbolic of the end of many hopes. Every possible avenue towards Federation had been explored. A full and worthy Constitution had been drafted. The Australian voters had endorsed it. Yet, like its predecessor of 1891, it could go no further. Federation was, once again, ‘put by’.10 For a good while, little progress was recorded. Indeed, for many who lived through that time, it may well have seemed that the goal of federation was closed forever (as it was for New Zealand, when its Royal Commission11 concluded definitively in 1901 against joining any federation of the Australasian colonies). By 1907 New Zealand and all the 48

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Australian colonies had all been granted Dominion status,12 reinforcing the view that their destiny was to be a common but separate one, as friendly, but independent nations under the Crown. All the signs suggested such an outcome. The great success of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Chamberlain’s imperial enthusiasms, and even, paradoxically, Victoria’s death, had given the relationship between the colonies and the Mother Country a new lease of life. Britain’s gradual acquiescence to Australian wishes for a racebased immigration policy also contributed to a diminished colonial nationalism. Troops from the individual colonies readily served in South Africa from late 1899, and at the Boer war’s conclusion in 1902, many Australians looked back over the previous year—the year that had come so close to being the first in the life of the Commonwealth of Australia—and concluded that the union of the colonies was no longer necessary or even desirable. Indeed, federation, which had once seemed the first step towards ultimate independence, now appeared almost disloyal. Defence anxieties, coupled with Britain’s insensitivity to Australia’s strategic concerns, had once been a significant source of disquiet. But opportunities for coordination and common defence policy had greatly improved since the 1880s when the Edwards Report had concluded that the defence capability of the Australian colonies was dangerously inadequate.13 Britain’s gratitude over the colonies’ involvement in the Boer war encouraged Australians to expect enhanced British support for Australian defence in the future. The ‘Imperial Federation’ movement of the 1880s that had aimed to create a federal empire with a central government in London now began to attract new adherents. Australians were, it seemed, tired of federation, and were ‘born-again’ as imperialists.

The emergence of a federal Labor Party Ten years is a long time in politics. One event in these ‘lost’ years was to prove of great significance. A Federal Conference of Labor took place in Sydney in 1902, with representatives of four colonies adopting a ‘national’ platform and agreeing on the co-ordination of colonial policies and endeavours.14 Labor had experienced rapid successes in fielding candidates for parliament in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and had even formed government briefly in Queensland in 1899. The Labor Party now held the balance of power in most of the colonial parliaments. From the perspective of history, we can see these early developments as a harbinger of both the modernisation of Helen Irving

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Australia’s political parties and of Australia’s transformation from a cluster of colonies into a single nation. For Alfred Deakin, the one positive outcome of his visit to England in 1900 had been to secure an assignment as an occasional columnist, commenting on colonial matters, for the London Morning Post. Among other things, he observed the rise in support for Labor with considerable unease. Within a year of his return, he was to write of the ‘most disturbing element in local politics of late years’. This, in his view, was the growing support for the colonial Labor parties. ‘If the working classes were not divided among themselves’, he commented, ‘they would be all-powerful in the towns, for their platform is selfish and their discipline is admirable’.15 Although Deakin did not yet recognise it, the shift of Labor towards national organisation in 1902 was a signal that any such divisions would soon be overcome. Paradoxically, in turning ‘national’, Labor would pick up the federationist reins that Deakin and his fellow colonial liberals had been forced to drop. Within a few years, even Deakin, in promoting a trade-off between industry protectionism and wage fixation, was to acknowledge the importance of labour as a national force. Intercolonial meetings and the creation of ‘federal’ or ‘national’ organisations were, in themselves, nothing new. Many such bodies had met or been formed in the second half of the nineteenth century, well before there was any real prospect of uniting the colonies under a federal government. Both the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National Council of Women federated in the 1890s, along the lines of their United States sisters. Scientific and sporting organisations, even the churches, had also come together at intercolonial meetings to form ‘national’ bodies. The movement of Labor in this direction could not in itself have been considered a portent of anything. What was significant, however, was Labor’s change of heart on the federation question, signalled at the conference in 1902. Had Federation gone ahead after the second Federal Convention, 1897–98, it is probable that the Labor Party of the twentieth century would never have felt entirely comfortable with either the Constitution or the new Commonwealth. The convention was directly elected in early 1897 in four of the five participating colonies. Labor had fielded candidates in all, but with virtually no success, the one exception being William Trenwith in Victoria.16 This fact, and the conviction shared by Labor in the larger colonies that the new draft Constitution was insufficiently democratic (in particular, because it provided for a relatively 50

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strong Senate and gave equal representation to all the colonies in the Senate, regardless of population size), contributed to a pattern of powerful (if not universal) Labor opposition to the Constitution Bill in the referendums of 1899. At the time of the convention elections, Labor was still relatively inexperienced in electoral strategies, still diverse in its policies, and its candidates were still relatively unknown. But by 1902 these disadvantages had been almost entirely removed. Furthermore, the colonial Labor parties soon began to recognise that an Australian Commonwealth could actually deliver many of their policies nationally rather than separately: a uniform scheme of immigration restriction as a bar against the importation of cheap, ‘coloured’ labour could be achieved hand in hand with protectionism for Australian industry, regulation of working conditions, and industrial arbitration. All would be enhanced by powers granted at the level of national government within a federal framework. In addition, the recognition that conservatives were now promoting ‘imperial federation’ ahead of Australian federation shifted Labor thinking. In one of the great paradoxes of Australian history, the union of the colonies became associated with Australian nationalism, and Labor. At its next federal conference, in Melbourne in 1905, Labor Party delegates adopted three objectives. The first was ‘the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community’; the second was the ‘securing of the full results of their industry to all the producers by the collective ownership of monopolies’; 17 and the third, ‘the immediate union of the Australian colonies as the surest means of advancing the interests of labour’. In little more than a decade Labor had grown from a dispersed collection of small and inexperienced Electoral Leagues into a modern party, characterised by national co-ordination, mass membership, and party discipline. The old type of political party, divided along fiscal lines, formed out of loose, shifting alliances, and based on narrow electoral platforms, was now a thing of the past. The parties that had once been dominant—the Free Traders and the Protectionists—saw the writing on the wall and ‘fused’ in 1906.18 A shared hostility to socialism, and a recognition that the scope of government was rapidly widening, led the former rivals to find common ground and to modernise. Their union was cemented by a common opposition to the ‘pledge’ and to the party discipline to which Labor members adhered. Deakin, an advocate of the fusion, described these practices as ‘a rigid system of rule that leaves no Helen Irving

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individual freedom’.19 Although Deakin could not have known it, these were to be the very qualities that set Labor on a successful course, once the goal of federation was on their platform. With the fusion of the Free Trade and Protectionist parties in the majority of colonies, several further realignments took place. Among the ‘Fusionists’, support for free-trade policy (with British trade preference) gained the upper hand, and with it came an enhanced imperialist sentiment. Although Labor had at times aligned with Free Traders during the 1890s (most notably in New South Wales), it now took on a protectionist character, combined with a growing radical nationalism. All of these shifts distressed the protectionist Deakin, and all, paradoxically—as is evident with hindsight—created the political climate and ‘infrastructure’ for a final push to federation.

Edwardian Australia The Edwardian era was marked by rapid and dazzling political and cultural changes in Australia, as in Britain and Europe. Art, literature and music underwent an international transformation. Britain began to open to the world, extending its trade and diplomatic alliances. It was an age of optimism and initiative. At the same time, the tensions that would soon lead to world war were already being felt in Europe. An armaments race between Britain and Germany had begun, and shifts in colonial claims in North Africa were starting to affect European relations. In mid-1908, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, creating tensions between its ally, Germany, and Serbia’s ally, Russia, and leading to protests on the part of Britain and France. Imperial defence was the subject of renewed discussion, and the defence capability of the Australian dominions, specifically with regard to Germany’s colonial interests in the South Pacific, was once again on the agenda. That same year, the American ‘Great White Fleet’ visited New South Wales at the invitation of the Labor premier, Chris Watson.20 It caused a sensation. Decorations adorned the streets, illuminations and fireworks lit up the sky, and military reviews entranced spectators. As ‘2,500 Marines and Blue-jackets marched behind their Admirals through cheering crowds’,21 some, especially within the labour movement, must have considered the contrast between Britain’s earlier desultory gestures and this dazzling display of naval might altogether striking. Although officially Labor was as pro-British and monarchist as any other party, its nationalism was always more pronounced and its willingness to 52

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follow imperial interests less automatic. Despite expressions of loyalty, a whiff of republicanism had always been associated with the labour movement. The example of a new world republic as a powerful Pacific neighbour may even have stimulated imaginings about the potential benefits of shifts in alliances. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Labor Party would indeed be strongly associated with a pro-American foreign policy, and its initial hesitation in entering World War II was significantly influenced by America’s position.

The British crisis But something of more immediate significance was happening in the old world. In 1908 Herbert Asquith, the new British Liberal Party leader, took office as prime minister. He appointed David Lloyd George as chancellor of the exchequer.22 The following year, to the great dismay of conservatives, Lloyd George introduced a so-called ‘people’s budget’. Among other things, it created extra taxes, including on luxuries, to fund old age pensions. Lloyd George’s budget bill passed in the House of Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords. Although technically the Lords could veto any bill, to vote down a budget constituted a dramatic breach of convention. A prolonged and divisive constitutional crisis ensued. Between its start in 1909 and its resolution two years later, Britain was to undergo two general elections, with the narrow return of the Liberals on both occasions, the death of King Edward VII, the coronation of King George V, and an apparently intractable deadlock that split the Lords and finally gave the Commons a definitive victory. Although the differences between the colonial parliaments and Westminster were important, there were lessons here for the Australians. By the 1890s all of the Australian colonies had achieved ‘responsible government’, with bicameral legislatures, payment for members and broad (even in some cases, universal) franchises for their legislative assemblies. With most workingmen enfranchised, and also assured of an income for service in parliament, Labor was in a position to stand candidates, and to win votes. Its members quickly gained a major foothold in many of the colonial assemblies in the 1890s. The legislative councils were another matter. In New South Wales and Queensland, MLCs were appointed for life by the colony’s governor. In the other colonies, they were elected for six-year terms on a property or professional franchise. In New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, no salary or allowance at all was paid to legislative Helen Irving

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councillors. The character of the Australian upper houses tended, therefore, to be conservative, favourable to the interests of property, and hostile to the demands of Labor. The legislative assemblies were not necessarily progressive, but resting on a much broader franchise, they gave reformist parties the opportunity of forming government. Time and again, however, legislative councils exercised their legislative veto on progressive bills.23 Mechanisms for resolving deadlocks between the houses were either cumbersome or non-existent. Clashes had occurred on many occasions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, some leading to dramatic constitutional crises, as in 1877 when the Victorian Legislative Council refused to pass the Berry government’s appropriation bill of that year because it contained a provision for payment of MPs. The crisis was resolved only after a series of extraordinary measures was adopted to cut government expenses and raise funds. With such experiences in mind, once Labor assumed government in the dominions, the curtailment or even abolition of upper houses was in its sights. In the years between 1905 and 1908, Labor governments in Queensland and New South Wales attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to abolish their legislative councils.24 On each occasion, they were thwarted in both their own supreme courts, and in the Privy Council in London.25 Around the same time, and for similar reasons, the British Labour Party resolved to abolish the House of Lords, but its prospects of succeeding were also slim. Pensions had already been on the legislative programs of some of the Australian colonies before 1900, and the 1898 draft Constitution included provisions for Commonwealth powers over old age and invalid pensions. But the prospects of a national scheme had, it seemed, ended with the failure of federation in 1900. Given the high mobility and transience of much of the colonial working population, however, welfare provisions that reached beyond colonial borders seemed both inevitable and desirable in the eyes of many Australians. The English budget, and its possible defeat at the hands of that old enemy of Labour, the House of Lords, was thus a matter of great interest in Australia. An English compromise, a way of allowing the Commons and the Lords to co-exist without the prospect of upper house obstruction, would therefore be of considerable value as a precedent in Australia. Unlike the English Liberals, the Australian Fusion Party took no interest in such matters. It thus fell to Labor to draw Australian lessons from the English budget crisis. These events may now seem remote, but 54

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in the Australian dominions the crisis served as a catalyst, stimulating the recognition both that national control of reform agendas was possible, and that the removal of powers of obstruction by undemocratic upper houses was crucial. Labor leaders now turned their energies towards the creation of a national forum to restart the federation process. Labor opposition to the Constitution Bill of 1898 (at least in the larger colonies) had principally been to an ‘undemocratic’ Senate, one that could wield unrepresentative weight against the popular House of Representatives. As the 1898 Constitution had designed it, the Senate had significant potential to thwart a government’s program, not unlike that of the House of Lords. While Labor leaders in the smaller dominions were far from persuaded that equal Senate representation was in itself undemocratic, they knew that the Senate’s design could serve as a bargaining chip. Equal representation for each state, they calculated, could be maintained, so long as they were prepared to make concessions over the powers of the Senate. The reduction of the powers of the House of Lords was already in the air in late 1909, when an extraordinary conference was convened in Melbourne at the initiative of dominion Labor leaders, notably Andrew Fisher, Chris Watson, King O’Malley, and Henry Higgins (a former Victorian liberal, who had been a delegate at the 1897–98 Convention, but who considered the Constitution Bill’s defeat in 1900 to be a blessing).26 Here it was resolved that the time was ripe for a renewed and immediate effort to federate the dominions. Enlarged defence capabilities and immigration control, the desirability of a national system of wage fixation, protection of Australian industries, and the need for uniform welfare provisions, were all cited as pressing grounds. The time was indeed ripe. With Labor governments in four of the six Australian dominions in that year, the matter was settled with little delay. By March 1910, the election of ten delegates for each dominion was agreed upon at a special Premiers’ Conference. Enabling bills were passed in each of the parliaments, and elections were held in May. We consider their outcome shortly.

Emerging women One other development of significance to our story occurred during these years, and needs now to be threaded into the picture. Women gained the right to vote in almost all the dominions. In the 1890s, in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, attempts to put female suffrage bills through the parliaments had been thwarted more than once Helen Irving

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by the veto of their conservative legislative councils. Before 1900, two colonies alone, South Australia and Western Australia, had enfranchised their women. It was all very well to see South Australia take such a step: all sorts of radical ideas had been adopted there in the 1890s. But when Western Australia enfranchised its women in 1899, the logic was different. Premier Forrest, it was claimed, had calculated that the women of the western electorates of his colony would serve as conservative ballast to the large numbers of Labor men in the eastern goldfields. The idea thus took hold that women voters might prove a conservative counterweight to Labor elsewhere. Legislative councillors turned into converts. Female suffrage bills were quickly reintroduced into the parliaments of Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania, this time successfully. (In Queensland, however, where the parliament was too deeply divided and the influence of Labor already too significantly embedded, women remained without the vote until after the first Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1912.) By 1910, when elections were held for the third Federal Convention, women in five colonies were entitled to vote, and in three (South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria) they were also entitled to stand for parliament.27 It might have been otherwise. There was little place for women in the consciousness, let alone the politics, of Labor men at that time. The conservative-feminist alliance28 (as it has come to be known) that was forged during this brief historical hiatus is therefore one of the great serendipities of Australian history. Labor was formed in the unions; it sprang from the experience of men on outback stations, on the docks and in the mines. Its primary purpose was to improve the wages and conditions of workingmen. Its ethos was mateship and mutual aid. Labor recognised the hardships faced by men with families and its policies were directed towards support of households, but the specific circumstances and needs of women were secondary. In return, most activist women in this period distanced themselves from Labor, and declined to use their weight to support the election of Labor governments. Many women, additionally, were advocates of temperance, a platform dominated by liberal Protestants, and for which few Labor men had sympathy. In power, Labor is unlikely to have prioritised the suffragists’ demands; indeed, the likelihood is of a level of hostility comparable to that originally displayed by the conservative legislative councils. But liberal governments, with conservative support, had legislated for adult suffrage. In early 1910, then, the majority of Australia’s women 56

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were eligible to take part in elections for the new Federal Convention. They remembered the experience of Catherine Helen Spence, whose candidature in South Australia for the second convention thirteen years earlier had failed. This was, at least in part, because Spence had chosen to stand as an advocate of ‘effective voting’ (proportional representation) rather than as a woman candidate. This time round most stood on women’s tickets, and campaigned directly to the woman voter. Their platform included the Commonwealth suffrage, temperance, a national system of health and sanitation, and a broad range of national welfare provisions. The count was completed in all the dominions by the last week of October, and the convention began its work three weeks before Christmas, 1910. Of the sixty elected delegates, there were twenty-six Labor men; twenty-one ‘Fusionists’; four self-styled Conservatives; and nine from the women’s ticket. The balance of power was female.

A new decade: A new constitution Britain’s constitutional crisis was resolved with the Parliament Act of 1911.29 It reduced the term of the UK parliament from seven to five years and provided for money bills to be presented for the royal assent after one month, with or without the Lords’ approval. All other bills could be passed with support of the Commons alone, after two years. Lloyd George immediately initiated a National Insurance Act, creating a health and unemployment insurance scheme, to be financed out of employer and employee contributions. As the Act was working its way through the parliament at Westminster, the third Federal Convention was drafting Australia’s Constitution. It was now well recognised that a national scheme similar to Britain’s would not have been possible under the draft Constitution of 1898. And even a relatively moderate budget, like Lloyd George’s first, would have been in peril, had it faced a hostile Senate. In the third convention, Labor thus set out both to enlarge the powers of the Commonwealth and restrict the powers of the Senate. The result was to be a Constitution significantly different from the one brought by Deakin and his fellow delegates to London eleven years earlier. Yet the differences should not be exaggerated. A decade is a long time, but short of revolution, the cultural and political values of a nation do not utterly transform themselves in ten years. Like their predecessors, the framers remained committed to creating a national parliamentary democracy, through a federation under the Crown. It was not their Helen Irving

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idea of the grand structures of government, but of what came under the heading of ‘national’ that had evolved. In convention debate, the smaller dominions remained adamant that the composition of the Senate would not be altered. Their view was shared by the conservatives, most of the Fusionists, and behind the scenes, a good number of Labor members. An unequal number of senators per state was never going to gain support, and the Labor representatives from the large dominions quickly gave way on this. But the power of the Senate over money bills—one of the most contentious issues at the earlier conventions—was a different matter. As the 1898 Constitution stood, the Senate was only restricted with respect to initiating or amending money bills. It was still able to delay or even reject them and, potentially (although no one seriously believed this possible until 1909), to depart from convention and cut off the funds to government. The women, elected on a national welfare platform, were alarmed by the British example. Although they knew that the Senate would not necessarily have the conservative character of the Lords, they nevertheless feared that a similar scene might play out, if welfare programs were to be advanced by an Australian government. They now supported a Labor proposal reducing the powers granted to the Senate in the 1898 Constitution. As the new Constitution was drafted, not only was the Senate unable to introduce or amend money bills, it could no longer reject such bills and its powers even to delay their passage were reduced. As in Britain, a rejected money bill, or a bill that had not yet been passed by the Senate, could be presented for vice-regal assent without Senate approval within one month of its tabling in the upper house. Unlike in Britain, however, other bills were not freed from passage through both houses, being acknowledged that the federal principle which distinguished Australia from Britain required the representatives of the states to have an equal share in ordinary legislation. This temporary alliance of the women with Labor (and some of the Fusionists) also supported the broadening of the Commonwealth’s powers. These were expanded to include unemployment benefits, widows’ pensions, and health benefits,30 in addition to old age and invalid pensions (already in the 1898 Constitution). Health and hospitals were added to the Commonwealth’s ‘heads of power’. The women, skilled tacticians by now, did not accede to these measures until they had ensured a provision in the Constitution entrenching adult suffrage. These same women also supported Labor in including a prohibition on ‘coloured’ persons voting: it was to deprive Australia’s Aborigines of the 58

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suffrage for Commonwealth elections until it was altered by referendum in 1962.31 The power over industrial arbitration was expanded, so that the Commonwealth could now legislate with respect to industrial disputes generally, where the earlier Constitution had confined this to ‘industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State’. With defence purposes particularly in mind, the Commonwealth was given a broader power over railways, extending to the immediate laying of a uniform national rail gauge and the construction of the transcontinental railway line.32 Fiscal provisions were also altered. The ‘Braddon Clause’ of 1898 was removed. This provision had obliged the Commonwealth to return three-quarters of its customs revenue to the states for the first ten years after its establishment. It was seen by Labor as effectively depriving the Commonwealth of the means of employing its national powers (a perspective supported by the women delegates). Its removal opened up large reserves of funds to the Commonwealth to spend on the national schemes for which it now had wide powers. Not all initiatives to vary the 1898 Constitution were successful. A proposal to add the words ‘but not so as to authorise the immigration of members of coloured races’ to the Commonwealth’s immigration power was lost. The majority of the delegates were strongly opposed to coloured immigration and supported the proposal in principle, but they feared that the British parliament might refuse to pass the Constitution Bill if it contained such a provision. South Australian delegate (and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union) Elizabeth Nicholls proposed a constitutional prohibition on the sale and consumption of alcohol in the Commonwealth. Her earnest declaration that the new federal capital should begin its life alcohol-free was met with laughter,33 and her motion was defeated by the joint vote of Labor and a large proportion (although not all) of the Conservative and Fusion delegates. It was a rare example of such an alliance. A motion to remove the reference to the Crown and to establish the Commonwealth as an independent republic was supported by only a handful, and easily lost without division. It is not without significance that the Federal Convention began sitting in the year of the death of King Edward VII. The movers of the republican resolution had to defend their proposal all the more energetically, but with all the less chance of success, against claims of callous disregard for the common Helen Irving

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person’s grief at the loss of their king. Still, even the delegates who had no sympathy for the republican cause were anxious that the imperial sentiment stimulated by the event might diminish support for federation, as Victoria’s death had done in early 1901, and they were cautious of playing this card too powerfully. Significantly, a more subtle ‘declaration of independence’ was successfully proposed. The provision that had brought about the Australian delegation’s defeat in 1900 was not only reaffirmed, it was enlarged. The objectionable provision had severely limited appeals from the Australian High Court to the British Privy Council. Now, in addition, it ruled out appeals from state supreme courts to the Privy Council. The nation had retained the king, but clipped his wings. It was a typical, and satisfactory, Australian compromise. One final proposal, for a memorial to be erected to honour the work of Australia’s ‘founding fathers’, provoked guffaws and shouts of derision. Victorian delegate Vida Goldstein rose to her feet to point out, with gentle irony, that ‘neither she nor her fellow women delegates could say with confidence that they had earned the title’. Labor men scoffed at the idea that the work of individuals could be separated from that of the class they represented, and still others declared that their memorial was to be the Commonwealth itself. The mover, the elderly South Australian Conservative, Sir John Downer, had been a delegate at both the first two conventions and a member of the Constitution’s Drafting Committee in 1897–98. Although he himself was one of the very few veterans of the 1890s, his proposal, he assured them, was in no respect intended to promote his own work. Rather, it was to honour the many men who had not lived to see the great building of the Commonwealth completed, but whose sacrifice and dedication had laid the foundations. ‘Who’, he asked—prophetically, it now seems—‘will remember them if we do not? Who will honour their names and their memories?’

Return to London With the convention’s work completed, referendums in each of the Dominions followed. A higher turnout of voters was recorded than in 1899, but the overall majority fell below the previous level. Had it not been for the ‘national defence vote’ caused by rumours of a coming war with Germany, it is not certain that the outcome would have been positive. But an air of urgency now surrounded the process. The premiers were determined to avoid the fate the earlier Constitution Bill had suffered in 1900, and this time they sent a single delegate, former New 60

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South Wales Labor leader, Billy Hughes, to London, with a single adviser, Robert Garran, former secretary to the Drafting Committee of the 1897–98 Federal Convention,34 now solicitor-general of New South Wales. Hughes, a one-time unionist leader in whom, unusually, were combined the useful attributes of both imperialist and nationalist, was under instructions to deliver the Constitution and see it through without delay and without amendment. Failing this, he was authorised to threaten the British with the immediate adoption of the Bill by each dominion parliament accompanied by an address to His Majesty unilaterally proclaiming that the Constitution would come into operation at a nearby date. Notoriously obdurate and single-minded, Hughes was the right man for the job.35 In the event, he was to have an easier time of it than his predecessors. As before, Britain cared little about Australia’s internal arrangements. But where the conservative British government had adamantly opposed restrictions on Australian appeals to the Privy Council, the Liberals’ colonial secretary, Lewis Harcourt, was far less concerned about the matter, and the Asquith government was generally disinclined to alienate the dominions. Joseph Chamberlain was no longer powerful. While he fulminated from his retirement, via letters to The Times, he was impotent now to stop what he had successfully prevented eleven years earlier. The Bill passed through the British parliament and received the royal assent on 9 July 1911.

Triumph at last The Commonwealth was inaugurated, with fireworks and a grand public picnic in Centennial Park, in Sydney on 1 November 1911. It was a less extravagant event than might once have been planned, partly because the Labor government in New South Wales was reluctant to spend great sums of money for such purposes, and partly also because the inauguration was promoted as a national, not imperial, achievement. The large, costly imperial representation that an earlier generation might have sought was missing.36 A third reason is sometimes also suggested: many who attended the inauguration were anxious to get back to Melbourne in time for the Melbourne Cup three days later. It is not without credibility. Parliament first sat in Melbourne in March 1912, but the grand opening was held over until September that year, when the seat of government moved to its permanent home in the new federal capital. As in Helen Irving

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1899, it was accepted that this should be in New South Wales, but this time the convention itself selected the site. The choice was inspired, in part, by what appeared now to be the certainty of conflict in Europe. There was no time to build an entirely new city, as many had once imagined; an existing town had to be chosen. But the choice could not be at large. Were war to happen, the national parliament would need to be inland, clear of a coastal port and the risk of naval attack. There was another consideration, something of which the federationists of the 1890s could have had no inkling. The capital city was not to be located within a region where fog was common, for the development of general air transport was clearly in progress, and the need for airplanes to land without delay was already recognised as an imperative. The suggestion of Broken Hill brought acclaim from some Labor delegates, but expressions of dismay from the women. It would, they said, make the prospect of election to the Commonwealth parliament all the harder for women, as the difficulty of relocating families at such a distance from state capital cities would prove an insurmountable barrier to the majority of women. The federal capital, said Vida Goldstein, should not be located so that only unmarried women could ever be expected to sit. And so Albury, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria, was chosen. And there, on 1 September 1912, in the newly built Parliament House beside the mighty Murray River, the Commonwealth parliament was opened. Some now say that the location of the capital was a particular blessing for the river. Unlike many others, it has continued to flow splendidly, assisted considerably by the direct control that the Commonwealth gained over the section of its water that passes through the capital territory, and the necessity this has created for constant Commonwealth attention to it entire length.

What difference did ten years make? How much difference, finally, did the delay in federating the colonies make to Australia in the twentieth century? To begin with, the Commonwealth gained the opportunity to introduce progressive legislation, especially in social welfare and national health, more broadly and much earlier than it might have done under the 1898 Constitution. A national insurance scheme, similar to Lloyd George’s, was introduced in the first Fisher government, in 1913. Widows’ pensions, old age, invalid and unemployment benefits were in place well before the great depression of the 1930s, and although pension rates were reduced during 62

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those years, Australians were spared some of the extreme experiences of destitution that were witnessed in other Western countries. At the end of World War II, a national health system, based on a program jointly designed by Australian and British experts, was adopted in both countries. Most of these initiatives were the work of Labor governments, and although a long period of conservative rule followed the war, by then national welfare was considered part of the fabric of Australian life, and while there was some erosion, no program was subsequently dismantled. When the Whitlam Labor government (1969–80) came to power, it restored these schemes to their earlier levels, added single parents’ and student benefits, and among other things, created a network of federal hospitals and a national dental service, to complement the national health service. Women MPs, although remaining apart from Labor politics generally, were enthusiastic supporters of these programs. Among them in the parliament during the early years were several of the women who had played such a pivotal role as delegates to the Federal Convention, and who had successfully stood for parliament soon after. In her autobiography, completed late in her life, in 1945,37 Vida Goldstein, a longstanding member of the House of Representatives, wrote that it was the experience of sitting in the convention that had encouraged her to take her first steps into parliament. In particular it had affirmed (what she had always suspected) that in practice the men were no more capable than the women. The convention, she wrote, gave the women of Australia an early opportunity to see other women in a political role, and inspired them to vote for members of their own sex. What a loss, had the earlier Constitution been adopted and the new Commonwealth parliament begun its life without the woman’s influence. Years might have gone by, Goldstein concluded, before women entered the national parliament. Rarely, but occasionally, history turns out neatly. Although Australia’s first woman prime minister, Liberal leader, Beryl Beaurepaire, was not elected until 1980 (one year after Britain’s Margaret Thatcher), most fittingly it was as the member for Goldstein. The delay in federation was largely beneficial from the progressive point of view, but was not without its drawbacks. Within less than three years of its inauguration, the Commonwealth was faced with a challenge of unparalleled magnitude and immediacy. Britain declared war on Germany. Although defence had been one of the issues of the renewed efforts to federate, Australia’s readiness for engagement in an external Helen Irving

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war was another matter. The Commonwealth defence forces were still relatively undeveloped and undersized, compared to the strength they may have attained had Federation taken place ten years earlier. While ardent imperialists found this a matter of some shame, many within the Labor movement were relieved that necessity had forced a smaller war commitment upon Australia than might otherwise have been possible. From others, there were proposals for national conscription, and with them dramatic clashes of opinion in the community, in particular among Labor leaders who were already divided over support for the war. In the event, a traumatic split over conscription took place in the Labor Party in 1916. This might have been avoided had Federation and thus national defence been well settled before the war broke out.38

The long run The long-term effect of the ten-year delay must always remain a matter of speculation. At the very first convention, in 1891, Western Australian delegate Sir John Hackett had predicted that ‘either responsible government will kill federation, or federation … will kill responsible government’. Such a fight to the death was avoided with the adoption of the ‘Asquith solution’ at the final convention. By effectively affirming the principle of parliamentary sovereignty through limiting the powers of the Senate, ‘responsible government’ triumphed and the Senate took on the role (for which it is now much admired) of ‘house of review’. Many measures initiated by Australian governments over the years may not have survived a Senate empowered as it was under the 1898 Bill. Much progressive legislation may have been defeated or abandoned. Among those few Australians today with any historical knowledge of the earlier versions of the Constitution it is sometimes asserted that, under the Bill of 1898, the potential for the Senate to thwart a government through exercising its powers over money bills might, one day, have led to a dramatic constitutional clash, even a crisis on the scale faced by Britain between 1909 and 1911. Certainly the potential was there, and the cries of alarm from the Fusion-dominated Senate when Labor introduced its budget bills in 1912 reinforce the view that hostility to Labor reforms may have induced a more powerful Senate to wield its powers. However, to contemplate a situation where the Senate blocked supply to the government, is to imagine a crisis of unimaginable magnitude. Without a king to intervene and without the powers to ‘stack’ the Senate, as Asquith had threatened to do to the House of Lords, Australia’s parliamentary system may have been severely 64

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weakened. Reform of the Senate’s powers through referendum would have been urgent, but divisive, and success cannot be assumed. It is also sometimes imagined that Australia would not have become a republic as it did in the referendum of 1980—Whitlam’s final achievement before losing government later that year—had Federation been accomplished in 1900. The reasoning behind this is complex, but it lies principally in the recognition that the Constitution of 1911, while still ‘under the Crown’, was more nationalistic in both its character and its manner of adoption than the version of ten years earlier. Had the Australian delegation not been defeated in 1900, there would have been no need for Australia to assert itself over Britain. The habits of independence would not have taken hold so early. The recognition that Australia could control not only its own parliament, but also its own laws, without disaster or even disadvantage, may have taken much longer to achieve. As Australia approaches its centenary of Federation in 2011, it is hard to imagine an alternative outcome. While Deakin and his contemporaries cannot have known it at the time, the ‘miracle’ of federation’s accomplishment lay as much in their defeat as in their hopes and aspirations. We must, finally, imagine Deakin happy.39

Coda This is an alternative history of Federation, not a fantasy. It is a genuine attempt at painting a counterfactual picture, one that might really have happened, had a small but plausible shift taken place in 1900. No persons have been invented, and no personal details of the characters have been altered. No world events have been imagined or altered. Those (fictional) things that happen in Australia before and after 1911, as a consequence of the delay in completing Federation, are made to happen because of the impact of real international and local events. Most significantly, the Australian Labor Party grew powerful over the early years of the twentieth century, and would definitely have played a more prominent role in forging the new Commonwealth, at any time after 1901. The British constitutional crisis cannot have failed to influence Labor thinking about the design and powers of the Australian Senate. A more powerful House of Representatives and greater constitutional powers in the hands of the Commonwealth may well have resulted in national welfare and health initiatives at an earlier stage in Australia, as happened in Britain. It would also, certainly, have prevented the constitutional crisis of 1975. Helen Irving

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The political position of women would likely have improved in the first decade of the twentieth century, as the efforts of the colonial suffragists bore fruit, and it is certain that such women would have demanded a greater role in a renewed federation effort. Had women been involved in the processes of writing a new Constitution and creating the Commonwealth, it is not implausible to imagine that they would have gained a sturdier foothold in national Australian politics from an earlier stage. It is not inconceivable that a woman might have led a political party, even holding office as prime minister before the close of the century (after all, this happened in Britain). And—taking the realities of the culture of the political parties and without inventing a woman—who better to have done it than the redoubtable Beryl Beaurepaire!40 The site of Canberra, we may be confident, would never have been chosen as the capital city, had the growth of air transport and the difficulties of landing planes in fog been appreciated at the time. Had the capital been located on the Murray River instead, it is unimaginable that the degradation that this mighty waterway has suffered in the twentieth century would have been permitted. But who can say whether an Australian republic would have been accomplished in that century? We may only speculate that a greater sense of independence and struggle in the achievement of federation may have assisted it. We wait, still, for the last historical ‘straw’ that will tip the constitutional balance, and with it the Australian people, into the final stage of national independence that the delegates in London began. Deakin’s concluding words in The Federal Story have been well and truly overused. But they seem too apt not to repeat here, and too poignant not to adapt to the prospect of Australia’s republican future. When it finally happens—at least ‘to those who [have] watched its inner workings’—the accomplishment of an Australian republic will undoubtedly ‘appear to have been secured by a series of miracles’.

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4

WHAT IF NEW SOUTH WALES HAD NOT PAID PARLIAMENTARIANS UNTIL AFTER FEDERATION? Frank Bongiorno

In mid-1891 the newly formed Labor Electoral League won thirty-five seats in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. While working-class political parties were also soon formed in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, Labor in New South Wales was the most electorally successful, and it formed the prototype for ‘labour parties’ across the country. Labor was notably unsuccessful in the second most populous of the Australian colonies, Victoria, where the forces of liberalism remained in charge. But the success of New South Wales Labor gave the party a strong foundation on which to build nationally. The federal party followed the organisational form and, to a large extent, the ideological tendencies of the party in New South Wales. Unionism was encouraged and state enterprises extended across the continent. Co-operative schemes, however, withered on the vine, and a complete system of welfare support was barely imagined by the new party. Instead, a ‘wage-earners’ welfare state’ slowly and unevenly emerged. Labor in Australia was internationally precocious. The breakthrough into parliament shocked and thrilled socialists in Europe and America. British unionists looked on enviously. The Australian practice of paying parliamentarians— beginning in Victoria in 1870 and extending elsewhere mainly in the 1880s—was central to this precocity. Payment of members was legislated in New South Wales in 1889, and Labor exploded into parliament at the following election. But what if this democratic advance had been slower to arrive? 67

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In 1870, after years of argument, agitation and obstruction, the Colony of Victoria finally introduced parliamentary salaries for members of the Legislative Assembly. Initially, it was legislated on a temporary basis, but the innovation was destined to survive as a permanent measure down to this day. Victoria was the only Australian colony to introduce parliamentary salaries before Federation. Payment of members had been one of the six points in the People’s Charter in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, since most working-class radicals recognised that, without remuneration, it would be difficult for workingmen to take their seats in a legislature and impossible for them to stay there and remain faithful to their supporters and principles. Without a salary, they would be susceptible to the bribes of vested interests, and vulnerable to government patronage. No man could be expected to attend to the interests of the country if he also had to work at his trade in order to eat. The 1870s was a turbulent period in Victorian politics, dogged by deadlock between the popularly elected and recently remunerated Legislative Assembly and a conservative Legislative Council dominated by pastoral, financial and mercantile interests. In circumstances of constitutional crisis that threatened to develop into civil disturbance, conservative propagandists in Victoria and elsewhere were so successful in arguing payment of members degraded political life that no other colonies followed suit in the nineteenth century. Payment of members had powerful opponents, who saw it as likely to produce parliamentarians of the wrong kind, men who treated their duties as a mere trade or profession, rascals eager to line their pockets at the public expense. One conservative New South Wales parliamentarian, Joseph Abbott, argued in 1889 that remuneration was undesirable because workingmen parliamentarians would be disinclined ever to return to their work benches. Wherever it was proposed, payment of members faced resistance in conservative Legislative councils. Yet it grew in popularity among voters, who saw it as consistent with the democratic temper of the age, and an antidote to rule by ‘gentlemen’. Consequently, payment of members was introduced in the Commonwealth in 1902 on the insistence of Victorian liberals. South Australia quickly followed in 1903, Queensland in the following year, and New South Wales, finally, in 1905, after a protracted struggle between the elected Assembly and appointed Council, in which the premier of the day threatened to advise the governor to appoint two-dozen new Legislative councillors to break the deadlock. Observers of the New South Wales political scene recalled the great Victorian political 68

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conflicts of the 1870s, and opponents of the move complained about the ‘Victorianisation’ of the state. Meanwhile, there were occasional efforts by trade unions to send their own candidates into parliament, particularly in the aftermath of their bitter maritime strike defeat of 1890. Only in Victoria, however, did a Labor Party emerge and survive for more than a year or two. Several of its endorsed candidates were successful at the 1892 election, and a small Parliamentary Labor Party of about a dozen was formed. Victoria was the only colony with payment of members in 1892; but the strength of that colony’s traditions of tariff protectionism and liberalism meant that Labor was a radical wing of the Liberal Party. Labor did not emerge as a completely independent political force in Victoria before Federation. Victoria became the envy of labour activists everywhere, and they sought to emulate the Victorian Labor Party’s reputed success in squeezing concessions from its Liberal allies. The colony led the way in industrial legislation, and its Labor Party struggled but survived. Payment of members was a boon, not only in allowing members of parliament to carry on their duties with the support of the taxpayer, but also because it helped the party increase its strength in the bush. Parliamentarians received free railway passes and, when parliament was not sitting, travelled the countryside forming branches and enrolling members. The party occasionally discussed the need for a pledge to bind members to support majority decisions in parliament, to uphold the platform, and to withdraw from an election if not selected by the party to stand. There was, however, resistance to this idea from the moderate and respectable workingmen of whom the parliamentary party was mainly composed, who argued that their word should be sufficient. A few hot-heads became impatient with their Liberal allies from around 1896, and said that Labor could do better as a more independent force. But a majority of the party supported alignment with the Liberals, and the relationship, although fraying at the edges by the late 1890s, managed to survive until Federation. With Federation the power to impose tariffs passed to the Commonwealth and the division between free traders and protectionists, so vital to colonial politics, was transferred to the federal sphere. Victorian Labor sent two ‘Williams’ into the Commonwealth parliament in 1901: William Trenwith, a pugnacious bootmaker and son of convicts; and William Maloney, a flamboyant socialist doctor. Both represented innersuburban Melbourne constituencies—and, as had occurred in Victorian Frank Bongiorno

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colonial politics, these members aligned themselves closely with the Liberal Protectionist Party of Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin. Compared with Victoria, New South Wales was very much an alsoran as far as the Labor Party was concerned. There, a small Labor Party emerged in the general election of 1891, but lack of payment of members discouraged unionists from an all-out assault on the parliament. The Parliamentary Labor Party of 1891 was a varied group. Two were sitting members, one Protectionist and one Free Trade—both businessmen representing inner-Sydney electorates—who saw in workingclass dissatisfaction with the actions of the government in the maritime strike an opportunity to revive their flagging political fortunes. Another was a middle-class socialist who financed his own campaign and, after the election, funded his parliamentary activities by work as a barrister and journalist. There was a member of the Single Tax League, an organisation which advocated the abolition of all taxation except that on the unimproved value of land. His campaign was paid for by the league, which also agreed to pay him a weekly allowance. But he quickly fell out with his political masters, initially joined the Australian Socialist League, and within eighteen months defected to the Free Trade Party. Four candidates were run—two successfully—for working-class Sydney electorates by a Labor Electoral League that had been formed by the Trades and Labour Council. The council funded their campaign, and initially paid the two winners an allowance for their parliamentary work. However, it was cut off when one joined the Free Traders and the other defected to the Protectionists. Three Labor Electoral League candidates were successful in mining districts, but they too all joined the existing parties when their fiscal beliefs were put to the test. Labor made little impact on the balance between the major parties, especially as it quickly split over the tariff issue and all members joined the existing Free Trade or Protectionist parties. By 1893 it was clear that the labour experiment in New South Wales had failed. The New South Wales Labor Party was too small and divided to trade support in return for concessions, and, unlike in Victoria, little legislative experimentation occurred. A few liberals interested in labour questions and the remnants of the Labor Party of 1891 formed radical wings of the Protectionist and Free Trade parties and called occasionally for industrial arbitration, but in the financially straitened 1890s there was little momentum for such reform which, it was argued, would increase the costs to employers. A few advocates of land taxation campaigned strongly at the 1895 election on this plank, but without success. By 1900, the only traces of political 70

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Labor organisation in New South Wales were a few inner-city branches of the old Labor Electoral League, now called the Political Labor League. The devastation of the union movement, particularly in Sydney, in the depression of the 1890s also sapped morale. Outside parliament, however, a vibrant radical culture thrived in New South Wales, despite the difficulties for Labor in gaining parliamentary representation and the hardships of the depression. A cooperative movement urged workers to form their own organisations for the production of goods, and the sale of life’s essentials to working-class customers. Dozens of such organisations were formed. The president of the Co-operative Baking Society, Billy Hughes, commented at its 1898 Annual Meeting: ‘God helps those who help themselves; but God help the Capitalist who helps himself to the wealth produced by the workers’. The Australian Socialist League, of which Hughes was also a member, advocated the abolition of capitalism but the remoteness of the socialists from parliamentary and executive power meant that state socialism had little appeal. It was the preserve of a tiny, rather fanatical minority who propounded the ideas of an American called Edward Bellamy. Instead of advocating parliamentary action, most socialists called for the formation of village settlements, communes and co-operatives, and warned workers that parliamentary democracy was a delusion. The Anarchist Society, which called for the complete abolition of the state, had about 2000 members. Republicans, secularists, single taxers, women’s suffragists and advocates of the free coinage of silver all clamoured for the support of working-class citizens who, at election time, had little choice but to vote for middle-class Free Traders or Protectionists if they voted at all. There was no payment of members in South Australia or Queensland before the turn of the century, with similar results to New South Wales. In Queensland, the calls of utopian socialist William Lane for the political organisation of labour were taken up, and members elected: but those who did not wipe themselves out by taking to the bottle were soon in the pockets of either brewing interests, if they had little integrity, or the pastoralists, if they had none. Lane sailed for Paraguay to create his ‘New Australia’ utopian colony in 1893. An English emigrant, brilliant journalist and fanatical racist, his farewell speech was widely publicised in the Australian press: All men are weak, but men without means are the weakest of all. There will be no social progress in Old Australia until Frank Bongiorno

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members of parliament are paid for their services. Until then, every Labor man is liable to become the tool of the monopolist, the brewer, the squatter, and the purveyor of cheap coloured labour. But in New Australia, no man need fear that his daughter will become the harlot of either the Capitalist or the Chow. Lane revealed himself a raving dictator in the South American jungle, and his ‘New Australia’ would ultimately fail as a utopian commune. Still, the experiment attracted much attention in Australia and Britain, and similar communal settlements were formed in Australia itself in the 1890s. But by 1900 most traces of working-class political organisation had disappeared in Queensland and South Australia, and, like New South Wales, neither sent a Labor candidate into the federal parliament in 1901. The first Commonwealth parliament, sitting in Melbourne, contained two parties: one Liberal Protectionist, with Melbourne as its heartland; and one Free Trade, based on Sydney. Although it was more ‘liberal’ than the colonial parliaments—with the possible exception of Victoria’s—few electors looked to the Commonwealth parliament in any expectation of radical possibilities. With only two parliamentarians, Labor was too small even to form a caucus, and so both members simply attended the meetings of the Protectionist Party under Barton’s leadership. The Labor members pressed the Barton government (1901–03) for industrial legislation, but without success: they found it difficult to gain a hearing in a party primarily concerned with ensuring that the federal tariff would not disadvantage manufacturing interests. Barton himself was not much interested in industrial legislation while the Protectionists didn’t need the support of the Labor men, and behaved accordingly—despite the interest of a more radical minority in experimental industrial legislation. These members, led by a South Australian, Charles Cameron Kingston, but including H.B. Higgins from Victoria, formed a radical corner of the House, although they still gave general support to Barton. The introduction of payment for members of the Commonwealth parliament in 1902, following effective agitation by Victorian members of the Commonwealth parliament backed by the Melbourne Age, led to an accretion of Labor members in subsequent elections, but Labor made slow progress. The main problem was that in the most populous of the colonies, New South Wales, Labor was in a pitifully weak condition. Its 72

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organisation was poorly developed in the other states, too, and there was no acceptance, outside a small minority of party members, of such tools for maintaining solidarity as the pledge and the caucus system. There were five Labor members after the 1903 federal election in a house of seventy-five, but they had difficulty maintaining unity on many issues, and especially tariff questions. Three years later, half a dozen Labor members sat in the federal parliament, and, although they were divided over some matters, they now usually voted as a solid bloc. Growing industrial conflict in the period after 1906, and the effects of payment of members having been established throughout Australia, helped Labor increase its contingent to sixteen members by 1913. By now, the principle of caucus solidarity was accepted by all parliamentarians, and Labor was accordingly in a position to exercise greater influence on parliamentary affairs. The Labor Party was unable to challenge the fiscal basis of party divisions. The Free Trade and Protectionist parties fought out the elections of 1901, 1903, 1906, 1910 and 1913; Labor was very much a bitplayer until the eve of World War I. The prime ministership passed from Protectionists Barton and then Deakin, before the immensely fat Free Trader, George Reid, became prime minister from 1903 until just before the 1906 election. He was subsequently appointed Australian high commissioner in London and succeeded by Joseph Cook. However, the Protectionists were again able to form a government after the 1906 election, this time under Deakin. The ‘solidarity’ Labor members elected at the 1906 election agreed to support the Deakin government and they were sure to hold firm. Deakin, however, was never dependent on their support in matters of confidence in his government, and only fitfully on other questions. The radical ideological ferment of the 1890s had lost some of its momentum by the time the Australian colonies federated, and the union movement, devastated by the depression, was now a little more inclined than before to look to the state to assist it in its effort to rebuild. Victoria’s wages boards were considered worthy of emulation while New Zealand’s system of compulsory arbitration provided an alternative model. There was very little industrial legislation in the other Australian colonies in the 1890s; labour experimentation was largely extra-parliamentary, and focused on co-operative enterprise and communal village settlement. A major debate occurred in the labour movement around the time of Federation between ‘Co-operators’, who argued that the labour movement should not worry too much about parliament but Frank Bongiorno

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instead help workers to help themselves by training them in the ethics and the mechanics of co-operative enterprise; and the ‘Statists’, who said that labour needed to capture the state if the working class were to achieve justice. The Statists exercised growing influence: even Billy Hughes, who had been prominent in the co-operative movement, was arguing in the early-twentieth century that while co-operative enterprises were a jolly good thing, if socialists captured the state they would be able to organise the whole of society along co-operative lines and so build a ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’. Arbitration, said Hughes, was simply co-operation applied to relations between capital and labour. There were several private members’ bills in the area of compulsory industrial arbitration introduced by both radical Protectionists and Laborites between 1902 and 1907, and New South Wales and Western Australia set up more or less functional arbitration systems in this period. In 1910 the Deakin government finally sponsored a bill. Years of agitation inside and outside parliaments by proponents of such legislation had increased working-class support for compulsory arbitration, and Deakin recognised that his party was dependent on a large workingclass vote that might be filched by either Labor or the Free Traders if the Protectionists refused to move. Most importantly, increasing industrial militancy disposed the government to introduce legislation which, it hoped, might reduce the danger to society. In his optimistic moments, Deakin believed that arbitration would bring greater civility to relations between capital and labour. Few Free Traders were prepared to oppose the legislation outright, although some sought to limit its provisions to industries in the manufacturing sector. The Arbitration Court made little impact on industrial relations until after World War I, and the idea of a living or family wage determined by a tribunal remained a minority taste. The early history of the court was dominated by Richard O’Connor, who rejected the opinions of those such as Higgins in the radical section of Deakin’s party that the court should be used as an instrument of social policy. The latter said the court should lay down a family wage, based on need rather than the capacity of industry to pay. O’Connor, however, insisted that the court was designed to settle industrial disputes, not reconstruct society. High Court Chief Justice Samuel Griffith nodded sagely when he read these remarks in one of O’Connor’s judgments. After O’Connor’s death in 1912, the new president of the court, Charles Powers, an uninspiring Queenslander, followed O’Connor’s minimalist approach.

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Union leaders, however, were not unduly concerned by this emphasis on the capacity of industry to pay. They had some interest in a needs-based approach to wage fixation, as they could see the potential of arbitration in assisting unorganised or poorly organised workers; but they were not wildly enthusiastic about the social engineers among the Liberal Protectionists. If compulsory arbitration had been introduced in 1904 when the unions were weaker, the labour movement’s attitude might have been different. By 1910, in an inflationary, booming economy they could see that a ‘living wage’ would be insufficient to protect wage levels even in the medium term; a fair share of profits was far preferable. Moreover, by this time, Australia had a highly developed system of consumer co-operatives—New South Wales’, in particular, rivalled Britain’s in their comprehensiveness, but they were thriving all over the country. These gave working people some relief from price inflation. By this time the union movement had also grown enormously in numbers and strength, due in large part to a buoyant economy, and the unions couldn’t see massive benefits in compulsory arbitration that weren’t obtainable by other means. They were doing well without it in their recruitment drives, and in their bargaining with employers. Nevertheless, they appreciated the role of the court in restraining aggressive employer behaviour in some industries. By 1913, there were powerful currents in the Australian labour movement with little sympathy for compulsory arbitration, which they dismissed as a ‘trap’ or a ‘snare’. Direct action was the thing. Union leaders complained half-heartedly about a situation in which industries that received increasingly generous tariff protection did not pay a living wage to their workers. Yet this situation had long obtained, so their complaints made little impact. Labor politicians warned that their party would not support every tariff increase proposed by manufacturers and their parliamentary representatives in these circumstances, although Victorian Laborites were notably silent—for it was well known that Victorian Laborites would support every tariff increase proposed by manufacturers and their parliamentary representatives in any circumstances. The idea of a living wage persisted, but it had little impact on decisions of the Arbitration Court. More generally, observers of Australian political culture noted a reluctance to extend the role of state intervention in the economy much beyond the scope set during the colonial period, a factor that undoubtedly hindered industrial development.

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Nevertheless, protectionist sentiment in the electorate was increasing, stimulated, in part, by Joseph Chamberlain’s attempt to move Britain in a protectionist direction in the early years of the century. A group of Australian Free Traders committed to moderate tariff protection of Australian manufacturing industry—called the ‘Chamberlainites’ in the press—formed a corner party in 1905 and agitated for tariff revision. Although they continued to support the Free Trade government, there were concerns that a major debate over the tariff might create a split. As we have seen, the Protectionist vote increased at the 1906 election and in several seats Free Traders who said they would support a moderately protectionist tariff were returned. With a Protectionist government in office, the time was now ripe for tariff revision. Accordingly, in mid-1908 a moderately protective tariff was passed after a protracted parliamentary debate. Cook’s Free Trade followers, bowing to pressure within the ranks and shifting public opinion, now changed their name to the Tariff Reform Party in a moderately successful effort to halt their apparent decline while signalling an acceptance of the need for some tariff protection. By 1913, with sixteen seats, Labor was in its strongest position ever. The Protectionist Party was again able to form a government under Alfred Deakin, but for the first time seemed dependent on Labor support. Labor, somewhat disappointed with the meagre fruits of Deakin’s rule in the period 1906–13, debated the possibility of supporting a Tariff Reform Party government, but was unimpressed by the increasingly conservative flavour of the Tariff Reformers on many issues dear to the hearts of the labour movement. In his regular and anonymous column in the London Morning Post soon after the 1913 election, Deakin commented: The election has been held, and it has produced a situation unfamiliar in the annals of the Commonwealth. The days of stability are over. Not only has the so-called tariff reform party of Mr. Irvine been defeated, the labour party has increased its strength notably under the able leadership of Mr. Watson, who has with his predecessor as leader, Mr. Trenwith, saved the party from the dangers of extremism. Mr. Deakin has again formed a ministry, but relies on the uncertain support of a labour corner united on industrial matters but divided over much else, a radical corner of his own party barely distinguishable from labour in its ideals, and a few defectors from the old 76

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Free Trade Party the extent of whose enthusiasm for high tariffs is an unknown quantity. His situation is not to be envied. Meanwhile, Vida Goldstein, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Victoria, ran as an independent Senate candidate in 1903. She called herself a ‘Progressive Protectionist’, but said that she would not tie herself to any party machine. As she told a meeting of electors in the Melbourne Town Hall during her campaign: Party government is men’s government, and men’s government is not in the interests of women citizens. So, a women’s candidate must be non-party. Nevertheless, I favour protection of industry and justice for workers—both men and women— on the same grounds as I support protection and justice for wives, mothers and daughters. These are the marks of a civilised society rather than one organised according to the ethics of the brute. Although she did not appear in the officially approved slate of candidates for the Protectionist Party, it was well known that she had the sympathy of Alfred Deakin, with whom she mixed socially, and was also a darling of the radical section of the Protectionist Party that looked to Kingston for leadership. Goldstein came third in the Senate vote in 1903, and was a distinguished advocate of women’s rights in the Commonwealth parliament until her defeat in 1917, as a result of her opposition to the war. Rose Scott won a New South Wales Senate seat in 1906 as an ‘independent’ and another three female candidates were triumphant as Senate candidates for Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. By this time they were in a position to form the ‘Ladies’ Parliamentary At Home’—thus avoiding the hated ‘party’ term, ‘caucus’—which met during parliamentary sittings and agitated on ‘women’s issues’. These women crusaded for the right of women to equal pay for equal work and government encouragement of consumer co-operatives, which had strong support from Australian women; and they took every opportunity on offer to claim an equal status for women in Australian society. They were in the forefront of agitation for a maternity allowance just before World War I; it was introduced by the Deakin government with Labor support in 1914. In the 1920s and 1930s many more women followed these pioneer senators and were elected to both houses of the federal parliament. Frank Bongiorno

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Although not a few were anti-Labor in their politics, they were instrumental in several legislative initiatives that assisted women in general, and mothers in particular. Their crowning achievement was a motherhood endowment, paid each fortnight to mothers for their role in raising ‘the rising generation of the Anglo-Australian race’ (as one proponent declared in the House of Representatives). European observers of antipodean social policy began to refer to Australia as the world’s first ‘maternal welfare state’. Meanwhile, in the first decade of the new Commonwealth, there were occasional calls from extreme anti-socialists for a ‘fusion’ of the Liberal Protectionist and Tariff Reform parties in order to meet the challenge posed by the Labor Party and, more particularly, an increasingly militant industrial labour movement. Few took these seriously, for Labor in politics was weak, and the tariff issue remained contentious. Between 1910 and 1914, this situation changed as Deakin, in the junctures between his efforts to converse with the spirits of the ancient Greek sculptor, Phidias, and the recently deceased editor of the Age, David Syme, made stronger gestures towards the Labor Party and the unions in his legislative program (for example, in the passage of an old age pension in 1910 and an invalid pension in 1911). Meanwhile, the Tariff Reformers became reconciled to a genuinely protective tariff. It took a world war, however, to bring about a temporary ‘fusion’ of the two major parties. Late in 1915 the non-Labor parties in Australian federal politics, the Reform Party (formerly the Free Traders/Tariff Reform Party) and the Liberal Nationalists (formerly the Liberal Protectionist Party) followed the example of Great Britain and formed a coalition government. By this time, the Reform Party was the more resolutely anti-Labor and anti-union of the two; its anti-socialism now easily outstripped its commitment to free trade. Its leader from 1911, the conservative former premier of Victoria, W.H. Irvine, unleashed his ill-fated ‘Shoot the Socialist Elephant’ campaign in 1912, beginning with his celebrated speech in the Victorian town of Kyabram. ‘The socialist elephant’, he declared, ‘is rampaging through the country. He is trampling all individuality, all freedom, all enterprise, all civilisation … We must shoot him down.’ There were wild cheers from local farmers; a few even raised their pitchforks in triumph, and the pitchfork became the emblem of the Reform Party from this time until it was dropped in 1934 because of its fascist overtones. Irvine’s campaign drove a wedge between his own party and the labour movement, which in any case still hated Irvine for his role, as 78

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Victorian premier, in suppressing the Victorian railway strike of 1903. The very selection of Irvine as leader, although aimed at increasing the popularity of the Reform Party in Victoria, was a sign of the party’s growing conservatism. Reform now had a strong base of support among farmers and other rural folk opposed to high tariffs and high wages, although it also attracted the backing of urban commercial interests and a residual, but rapidly declining, conservative workingclass vote. The Liberal Nationalists, while they held some protectionist rural seats, found their main support in the major cities and large towns, and they had strong connections with manufacturing interests. They held on to a larger urban working-class base of support than the Reform Party. Both parties claimed to be the true heir to the Australian liberal tradition, but the Liberal Nationalists made the stronger case. There was a heated debate within the Labor Party in 1915 over whether it should also throw in its lot and accept a couple of ministries in a wartime government, but it decided to remain aloof and instead temporarily became the official opposition under the Scottish-born Queenslander Andrew Fisher. In 1916, when the coalition government of Victorian Protectionist W.A. Watt (Deakin having lost his mind by this time) introduced conscription for overseas service via a simple act of parliament, a majority of Labor members were opposed, but they lacked the numbers to stop it. Some Labor members—led by the belligerent William Morris Hughes—really supported conscription but they were unwilling to cross the floor because they knew they could do no harm to the government’s legislation, but much to their own careers and their party’s prospects. In any case, Hughes was a fervent supporter of home defence and was privately worried that conscription for overseas service would render Australia vulnerable to invasion by an Asiatic power. Hughes was in favour of Labor joining a ‘national government’ in 1915, but so long as Labor was supportive of the war effort, he was happy enough. Besides, he wanted the party leadership, and although sorely tempted by the offer of a portfolio in the government, seemed the likely successor to Fisher, whose health was already failing. Hughes became leader late in 1917. With most of the industrial labour movement opposed to conscription and increasingly sceptical about the war, Hughes believed he could best aid the empire’s cause by remaining in the Labor Party. He threw himself into soldier recruitment campaigns, causing much distress among radicals in the labour movement. Frank Bongiorno

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Although there was industrial disputation throughout the war, a massive wave of strikes occurred in the last eighteen months, as war weariness set in and living standards continued to plummet. Labor members were blamed in the press, pulpit and parliament for this industrial strife, but they could not have controlled it even if they had been foolish enough to try. Labor leaders such as Hughes and Fisher condemned agitators, but could not influence a working class frustrated with years of austerity while bloated capitalists profited from the carnage on the Western Front. Syndicalist impulses, stimulated in part by the agitation of the Industrial Workers of the World before its suppression in 1917, were also contributing to the climate of militancy. A new wave of strikes occurred in 1919, and the coalition government was quite unable to manage the crisis, especially when returned soldiers started rioting as well. The Spanish influenza outbreak added to the sense of national crisis. Paramilitaries formed, as strike-breakers were sent into vital industries. The wartime coalition collapsed over the question of how to respond to the crisis, and a Reform Party ministry emerged under the leadership of a doctor from northern New South Wales named Earle Page, a development that reflected the increasingly ‘country’ orientation of the party. Where the Liberals had been reluctant to crush the strikes with brute force, the Reform government had no such qualms. It introduced punitive legislation, froze union funds and gaoled strike leaders. By early 1920 the unions had been defeated in every industry. Some workers now looked to the ‘one big union’ for the solution to this crisis in capitalism, arguing that better industrial organisation would lead to the overthrow of the wage system. Others, taking their cue from the dramatic events in Russia, formed an Australian Communist Party and favoured revolutionary politics. Both groups made considerable headway in the union movement, but were unable to get any candidates elected to parliament. Nevertheless, they drew the support of many potential activists and some supporters away from the Labor Party at a time when it would have benefited from them. Meanwhile, a still-powerful co-operative ‘old guard’—although often disparaged as ‘The Dinosaurs’ by syndicalists, communists and even some Laborites— reminded all who would listen that the people had gained much more from consumer co-operatives than they had ever won by industrial militancy or interference in parliamentary politics. The labour movement remained divided over the best way forward. A growing body of workingclass people, however, concluded from the defeat that Labor needed to control the machinery of government if it were to prevent a repetition 80

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of the humiliation of 1919. Throughout the 1920s, Labor improved its organisation and gained votes (although not always seats) steadily at each federal election except 1925, mainly at the expense of the declining Liberal Nationalists, who lost much of their old working-class base. In 1913 Labor had made its first gains outside solidly industrial or mining electorates; disappointingly, after 1916 it again held only urban working-class and mining seats. The return of three-way contests in 1919 helped Labor, whose tally of seats returned to nineteen but it was unable to do much better than that in subsequent elections in the 1920s. The Reform Party remained in government throughout this period, largely because the Liberal Nationalist opposition, as the smaller of the two non-Labor parties, refused to turn it out of office. Labor parliamentarians mocked the Liberal Nationalists as Reform Party stooges, and called on the two non-Labor parties to end their charade and combine. Labor, they declared, was the real opposition, and they pointed to the preference swapping between Reform and the Liberal Nationalists that had occurred in several seats in 1925 as evidence for their case. The Reform Party press, for once, agreed with Labor: fusion should occur. The Liberal Nationalists, however, refused to surrender their autonomy, despite calls even within their ranks for an amalgamation. Labor’s massive gains at the 1931 election, which exploited the complete failure of the Reform Party to cope with the depression, brought Labor to the brink of national power. In the atmosphere of economic crisis, the Reform Party and the dwindling Liberal Nationalists now formed a fusion, which called itself the All For Australia Party (AFAP). Australia seemed finally to have developed a two-party system, but a Country Party emerged before the 1934 election; in an atmosphere of rural economic crisis, its members complained of the neglect of their interests in the ‘city-dominated’ AFAP government. The 1934 election brought Labor to power with the slogan ‘Rebuilding the Commonwealth’, under the leadership of the septuagenarian, W.M. Hughes. It gained large majorities in both houses, and one of the most talented ministries in Australian political history was formed: Ted Theodore, Jim Scullin, Jessie Street, Muriel Heagney, George Pearce, Bert Evatt, Ben Chifley, Joe Lyons and John Curtin all took on portfolios. The Labor Party governed Australia until 1949, a period of unprecedented legislative achievement. In the early 1930s, Labor governments were also formed in New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. Surprisingly, Victoria lagged behind. It would not have a majority Labor government until 1952. Frank Bongiorno

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After 1934 the Hughes Labor government was perhaps less inclined to think in terms of creating the co-operative Commonwealth than its leader had when he was a younger man. It did, however, legislate to give the consumer co-operatives significant advantages over rival enterprises, and it also set about extending the ‘maternal welfare state’ into something more comprehensive and universal. The means-tested old age pension, which had provided a miserable existence to those ‘deserving poor’ dependent on it since its introduction by Deakin in 1910, was increased in 1936 and again in 1939. It remained means-tested, although the test was much less rigorous than before. Invalid allowances, which had been established before World War I, were increased in 1935 and 1939, while new pensions covered sickness, widowhood and unemployment. The motherhood endowment, stuck at about three-fifths of the average wage since being instituted in 1925, was increased to four-fifths in 1938. Although there was some doubt about the constitutional validity of these measures, the government placed the matter beyond doubt by sponsoring a successful referendum in 1946. Child endowment, given directly to mothers, was added to the motherhood endowment, and paid for every child, as a universal measure. On the eve of the war came a critical breakthrough: a national health scheme covering the entire population was legislated, in the face of fierce resistance from the medical profession. The new scheme provided free medical treatment in hospitals, massively subsidised consultation with doctors and specialists, and free medicine; a bold initiative that required every ounce of political skill which the wily Hughes had acquired in a parliamentary career of over thirty years. In any case, his massive backbench was in no mood for compromise with the forces of darkness. The Health Benefits Act was initially subjected to a successful High Court challenge, but the elderly Hughes persisted, arguing that in wartime a healthy population would be a victorious one. After his party’s crushing victory at the 1940 polls, Hughes proposed a referendum to change the Constitution. The demoralised opposition, which had split into fragments after the 1937 election, was divided over the proposal, with a large section of the party supporting the Labor Party’s proposal for constitutional change. The Hughes government was accused of exploiting wartime censorship measures to ensure a favourable outcome. As it happened, a narrow ‘yes’ vote allowed the government to proceed with its scheme. Hughes met objections to holding such a referendum in wartime with the claim that a 82

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referendum to ensure a healthy population was a very necessary wartime measure for the defence of the nation. By the time of Labor’s defeat in 1949, Australia was recognised internationally as the most advanced welfare state in the world.

Coda Parliamentarians’ payment and perks might seem an unusual theme on which to base a counterfactual history, but it’s on such measures that the history of democracy turns. The argument in my essay is based on the following proposition: that although a Labor Party is not an inevitable consequence of the introduction of remuneration for parliamentarians, a parliamentary salary was a necessary condition for the emergence of a permanent and stable Labor Party under Australian conditions. I add the rider ‘under Australian conditions’ because it is true that British unions set up a compulsory subscription fund to pay Labour candidates from 1903 (Britain didn’t have payment of members until 1911). But it’s hard to see how such a scheme could have worked in the Australian depression of the 1890s. I have shown for Melbourne (in The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875–1914 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1996), pp. 62–3), as Raymond Markey has for Sydney (in The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880–1900 (Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press, 1988), pp. 158–67), that the urban unions were virtually wiped out at this time. Perhaps the rural Australian Workers’ Union might have been able to pay parliamentary salaries, but it too was in poor shape, as John Merritt points out in The Making of the AWU (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986). The eventual failure of every Australian experiment in working-class parliamentary representation in the period before payment of members also suggests that remuneration was probably a precondition for the emergence of an Australian Labor Party. My counterfactual history allowed for Victoria to have payment of members from 1870, as it did in actual history, but I delayed its initiation elsewhere. In reality, the measure was introduced in Queensland in 1886; South Australia in 1887; New South Wales in 1889; Tasmania in 1890; and Western Australia in 1900 (see Marian Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the world?’, in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections: Full, Free and Fair, (Annandale, NSW: The Federation Press, 2001), pp. 1–27). This counterfactual ‘delay’ in the establishment of payment of parliamentarians outside Victoria produced two immediate consequences for my story. First, my account of the emergence of the Victorian Labor Frank Bongiorno

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Party stuck fairly closely to the actual history. But the second consequence is more startling because it transforms the New South Wales Labor Party from a prince among the colonial labour parties into a pauper. Similarly, Queensland and South Australian Labor, both in reality more substantial and (particularly in the case of Queensland) more independent of other political groups than Victorian Labor, are also presented as weak, ineffectual and impermanent. In ‘real’ history, New South Wales was the critical colony in the birth of the Labor Party. Although New South Wales Labor split over the tariff issue in 1891, it survived and shifted decisively towards a sinking of that issue by the mid1890s, via the adoption of a solidarity pledge. The most accessible source for the early history of the various colonial/state Labor parties is D.J. Murphy (ed.), Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia 1880–1920 (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975). I have also drawn on the work of Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985) and Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). These authors stress the diversity of radical thought, and refuse to present the triumph of parliamentary socialism or labourism as inevitable. Here, I suggest that the absence of payment of members in New South Wales would probably have weakened the arguments for state socialism and a parliamentary road to socialism and strengthened non-statist (and antistatist) approaches, such as co-operation, communal settlement and anarchism. Burgmann also briefly explores the consequences of payment of members in ‘Premature Labour: The Maritime Strike and the Parliamentary Strategy’, in Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), The Maritime Strike: A Centennial Retrospective (Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press/University of Wollongong Labour History Research Group/ Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1992), pp. 83–96. Party organisation in Australia is likely to have remained looser if Labor had emerged later than it actually did. This situation would have had implications for the political history of Australian women. Female suffrage came to all of the Australian colonies and states, and to the Commonwealth, between 1894 and 1908. Women’s political organisations were frequently hostile to ‘party’ which, they correctly believed, tended to privilege men’s issues and interests. Vida Goldstein, a leading Victorian feminist of the years around the turn of the century, while sympathetic to the labour movement, refused to submit to pledge and caucus. In her campaign for the Senate in 1903, which was unsuccessful 84

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despite the more than 50 000 votes she attracted, Goldstein railed against ‘machine politics’. Her story is told in Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1993). Looser party organisation might have provided a space for successful female candidature. I have gambled on a new wave of female candidates being able to build on the pioneering work of Goldstein and Scott early in the century, and using their positions in the Commonwealth parliament to institute a maternal welfare state. Here, I have drawn on Marilyn Lake, ‘The Independence of Women and the Brotherhood of Man: Debates in the Labor Movement Over Equal Pay and Motherhood Endowment in the 1920s’ (Labour History, no. 63, November 1992, pp. 1–24). The weakness of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party in my counterfactual history in the first decade of the new Commonwealth has implications for both party alignment and public policy. In ‘real’ history, Deakin’s ‘alliance’ with Labor helped to stimulate an anti-socialist campaign by Reid in 1905–06, and also divided the Protectionist Party. Conservative Protectionists combined with a group of Free Traders to form a corner party. In my counterfactual history, these new party configurations do not occur because the Labor Party is too weak to stimulate such an anti-socialist campaign, even making due allowance for the role of paranoia in politics. For the Free Trade Party in the early Commonwealth, see Phil Griffiths, The Decline of Free Trade in Australian Politics, 1901–1909 (BA (Hons) thesis, Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, 1998, at http://members. optusnet.com.au/~griff52/Free%20Trade.html). In 1909 the Deakinite Protectionists and the Free Traders joined together to form one anti-Labor Party, the Fusion. This outcome was possible because of the 1908 ‘solution’ to the tariff issue (the adoption of the protectionist Lyne Tariff) but also because of increasing concern within the non-Labor parties about the growing power of Labor in parliamentary politics and the burgeoning militancy of industrial labour outside it. In the 1910 election, two parties faced each other, one Labor and the other Fusion. These developments are covered in John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), chap. 8. By way of contrast, Labor in New Zealand would not form a majority government until 1935, British Labour not until 1945. The electoral precocity of the Labor Party is one of the distinctive features of Australian political history, but not in my counterfactual Frank Bongiorno

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history. I have drawn heavily on New Zealand example for my counterfactual history of both party alignment and the development of the welfare state, depending on Bruce Brown, The Rise of New Zealand Labour: A history of the New Zealand Labour Party from 1916 to 1940 (Wellington: Price Milburn, 1962); Barry Gustafson, Labour’s Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party 1900–19 (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1980); Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969); and Ronald Mendelsohn, Social Security in the British Commonwealth: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (London: University of London/The Athlone Press, 1954), chap. 5. In my story, Labor does not have to face the problem of governing Australia during World War I, and it need not split acrimoniously over conscription. Moreover, the emergence of the counterfactual Reform Party as a conservative, anti-Labor force with a strong rural orientation—rather as happened in New Zealand—delays the emergence of a Country Party until the economic crisis of the depression period. My imaginary ‘Shoot the Elephant’ campaign of 1912 combines (and adapts) a number of developments that, in reality, occurred a few years earlier: notably the conservative Kyabram movement in Victoria in 1902 and George Reid’s ‘socialist tiger’ push of 1905. But it also foreshadows the ‘rural revolt’ of the immediate post-World War I period that produced the Country Party. If Labor had not emerged as a significant political force by Federation, would Australia’s twentieth-century legislative history have been different? The idea that there was an Australian national settlement has been widely (although not universally) accepted within recent accounts of the period (see Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), for whom the ‘Australian settlement’ comprised a White Australia, industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence). Kelly stresses the role of Liberal Protectionists such as Deakin and Higgins in making the Australian settlement, while Markey has suggested that the New South Wales Labor Party was instrumental in delivering the working class to it. But what if there is no New South Wales Labor Party at Federation? There is no doubting the significant part played by Liberal Protectionists in creating Australia’s system of compulsory industrial arbitration. This matter is discussed in Stuart Macintyre, ‘Neither Capital nor Labour: The Politics of the Establishment of Arbitration’, in Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell (eds), Foundations of Arbitration: 86

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The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration 1890–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 178–200. Nevertheless, the Labor Party often played a critical role in bringing about such legislation (see William Charles Pender, A Fair Decade’s Work: The Origins of Compulsory Arbitration in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1905, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1999). Deakin, for his part, appears to have nurtured only modest plans when he introduced the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill in 1903, but later developed more ambitious ideas. Under his ‘New Protection’, only employers who paid a fair wage would receive the support of a tariff and in 1907 Justice Higgins’ Harvester Judgment in the Arbitration Court laid down a fair wage as 42 shillings a week. His needs-based approach would have farreaching effects on wage fixation and social policy, despite its invalidation by the High Court in 1908. In my counterfactual history, I make several changes. Higgins, who as president of the Arbitration Court from 1906 played a critical personal role in bringing about its intervention in social policy, is removed from the picture, and less sympathetic judges are substituted. But I also legislate compulsory arbitration later than 1904, with the result that the labour movement’s enthusiasm for the living wage concept is now reduced. Through my introduction of a maternal welfare state, my stress on consumer co-operatives, and abolition of the male breadwinners’ living wage, I have effectively cut away the foundations of Kelly’s ‘Australian settlement’ and Frank Castles’ ‘wage-earners’ welfare state’ (see Francis G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890– 1980 (Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin in association with Port Nicholson Press, 1985)). Australia’s social policy becomes less masculinist and less statist, and its welfare state more ‘maternal’ and less orientated towards protecting the family unit through assistance to the male breadwinner. When Labor finally comes to power in my counterfactual history, it is strong, popular and capable of introducing a generous welfare state based on universalist principles. Counterfactual history is necessarily speculative. For example, the New South Wales Labor Party helped to block Henry Parkes’ ambitions for Federation in the early 1890s. Without a New South Wales Labor Party, or with a much weaker one, must we contemplate an Australia federated before 1 January 1901? Counterfactual history, however, does not profess to show how history would have happened, but how it might have happened. The early electoral success of the Labor Party makes Frank Bongiorno

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Australian political history unique, and by imagining a different scenario, albeit one which reduces this uniqueness, we can imagine an alternative line of political development, and, as a result, a rather less determinate political history. Australia’s future, and its past, become open and democratic—and therefore both settled and contested.

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5

WHAT IF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAD CREATED A MODEL ABORIGINAL STATE? Tim Rowse

Until the 1970s, Australian governments denied Indigenous Australians the security of having their own land, and they have since then conceded only a part of the self-determination that Indigenous Australians have demanded. Yet in the remote north and centre of the continent the Indigenous domain has retained much of its vitality, in part because the forms of colonial authority—such as pastoral land use and the declaration of remote reserves—did not impose the rapid cultural transformations that were typical of the more temperate agricultural zones of Australia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Could Australian governments have recognised that parts of Australia remained effectively ‘Aboriginal’, despite the formal assertion of British law, and could they have done so by declaring such a region to be a model Aboriginal state? The Commonwealth government declined this option when it was presented in 1927. In this counterfactual essay, I ask: Under what circumstances might the Commonwealth have found that proposal attractive? And what would life have been like in that ‘Model Aboriginal State’? I have come to the conclusion that while some of the abuses of colonial authority would have been punished under a model Aboriginal state, some of the welfare processes of the frontier would have been much the same. I have learned from observing Indigenous organisations in Alice Springs in the 1980s that a change in the racial background and cultural outlook of those with authority over Indigenous welfare does not necessarily bring about a change in the structures of cultural difference nor in the techniques of intervention.1 89

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On 19 November 1941, World War II arrived on Australia’s doorstep. Off the coast of Western Australia, the German raider Kormoran overwhelmed Australia’s cruiser, the Sydney, and not one of the Sydney’s 645 crew survived. John Curtin now made a decision that he had pondered during the six weeks he had been prime minister: along with the rest of northern Australia, the Aboriginal Territory of Central Australia— known as ATOCA, or sometimes as the Model Aboriginal State—would have to be placed under military command. Invoking the Commonwealth’s defence powers, on 20 November, Curtin declared all of Australia north of the 20th latitude to be subject to the overriding authority of Australia’s senior military officers. With ATOCA’s extinction ended one of the British Empire’s least known experiments in native self-government. The possibility of Indigenous Australians being entrusted with authority over themselves was first raised by a deputation to Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce on Australia Day 1927. Twenty Aboriginal people presented a ‘long range policy for Aborigines’. They wanted a new national department of Aboriginal affairs that would be advised by a ‘Board, consisting of six persons, three of whom at least should be of Aboriginal blood, to be nominated by the Aborigines Progressive Association’. The department would help ‘uncivilised and semi-civilised Aborigines’. ‘We suggest that patrol officers, nurses, and teachers, both men and women, of Aboriginal blood, should be specially trained by the Commonwealth Government as Aboriginal Officers, to bring the wild people in to contact with civilisation.’2 Bruce was incredulous at the idea that an educated Aboriginal elite could assume responsibility for the rest of their race. And were not Aborigines properly a matter for the states, he had asked them? However, two events of 1927 came together to send his mind further along the path to which the Aboriginal delegation had pointed. The first was a diplomatic row. In 1921, the League of Nations had entrusted Britain, New Zealand and Australia with a C class mandate to govern Nauru, a south-west Pacific island seized by Australian troops from the rather nominal control of Germany in November 1914. The three mandated nations had agreed that Australia would administer the island, which was valued for its deposits of phosphate, a mineral precious to Australian farmers. The British Phosphate Commissioners, a consortium of the three governments, extracted the phosphate. Every year, Australia had to report on this responsibility to the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC). The commission, which 90

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included a nominee of the Japanese government, had quickly become frustrated by the Australian government’s unwillingness to specify its responsibilities towards the Nauruans. The PMC suspected that tiny Nauru—whose land mass consisted almost entirely of phosphate—was nothing more to the Australians than the source of a vital supplement to its poorly constituted soils. By 1925 the commission had lost patience with Australia. It did not help Australia’s standing before the commission that Bruce had appointed William Morris Hughes to be Australia’s permanent representative in Geneva from January 1923. Bruce knew that Hughes was no diplomat and that he was openly contemptuous of Japan’s claim to be among the civilised nations, but the Geneva posting had been the only bauble that would tempt Hughes not to stand in the 1922 federal election. Bruce’s ability to lead the parliament’s forty-four conservative MPs had depended on Hughes’ exit from not only the parliament but also from Australia. In 1926, the politically resourceful PMC staff drew to the attention of the commissioners the social conditions of the Northern Territory. The non-Indigenous population of the Territory had peaked in 1891 at 4898. The most recent census (1921) had counted only 3867 persons, with men outnumbering women by more than two to one. The estimated Aboriginal population (not included in the census) had been 17 809. The Commonwealth had done little to develop the Territory: only one railway line of 320 kilometres, joining the port in Darwin to a hinterland where agriculture provided little more than subsistence for those who tried it. There had been talk of extending the railway from Adelaide to the southern hamlet of Stuart (renamed Alice Springs in 1933), but no action yet. Between Stuart and the southern tip of Darwin–Katherine railway stretched 1200 kilometres of roadless land, on which a few sprawling undercapitalised pastoral leases had been granted. The vast lands of the Northern Territory, the commission staff argued, held a native population that lacked the attention of any responsible authority. None of the Permanent Mandate commissioners had given any thought to this part of the Australian landmass, as it had seemed to be integral to the Australian nation, at the time of the League’s foundation in 1919. Once the commission examined the matter, however, it was plain to them that only nominally was the Northern Territory part of the nation-state of Australia. With Australia so blithely exploitive in Nauru and so defiant in Geneva, the commission’s more anti-colonial spirits Tim Rowse

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began to question Australia’s claim to the Northern Territory: why was this land only a ‘territory’ and not one of the states that had contracted, in 1901, to be part of the Australian federation? And why were there so few Whites in this Territory, among so many (as far as anyone knew) Aborigines languishing in their traditional state? To put pressure on Australia, the commissioners in their March 1927 sessions on Nauru and New Guinea had startled Hughes by presenting him with two papers. One had calculated the market value of the phosphate extracted from Nauru by the British Phosphate Commissioners; it demanded to know the details of a trust fund that they assumed (with some mischief, for this requirement had never been spelled out) Australia was maintaining, as the island’s administrative authority, to compensate Nauruans. The second paper outlined the case for Australia to concede that the Northern Territory should be subject to the same scrutiny by the League as Nauru. Lost for a reply to either paper, Hughes had cabled their essence to Bruce, who was no less thunderstruck. The League was not empowered to oversee the domestic affairs of its member states, no matter how many ‘natives’ were there. His consultations with Whitehall soon enabled him to hypothesise the strategic logic of the commission’s thrusts. The PMC’s real objective, he conjectured, was to call Australia to account in Nauru. The commission’s Northern Territory challenge had no legal basis, but it expressed the depth of the commission’s feeling against Australia. Bruce knew from his own experience the emotions that Hughes could arouse in an opponent. But would it be politic for Australia simply to ignore what the commission was saying about the Territory? The second development provoking Bruce to new thoughts was a petition presented to the Australian parliament in April 1927 urging the Australian government to set up ‘a model Aboriginal State’ in the Northern Territory.3 The leaders of Adelaide’s Aborigines Protection League (APL) who organised the petition included men and women who had visited, inspected and ministered to nomadic Aborigines in central Australia and Arnhem Land. They believed Aborigines to be intelligent, adaptive people who could soon assume the responsibilities of ‘self-determination’. Colonel J.C. Genders, honorary secretary of the APL, a wealthy accountant, was inspired to raise the petition by what he knew (from reading) about the relative autonomy of New Zealand’s Maori communities. He and the APL persuaded over seven thousand people to sign, and it was an MP from Bruce’s own party who presented the petition, with signatures, to the Commonwealth parliament. The 92

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petition suggested that the model Aboriginal state ‘be ultimately managed by a native tribunal as far as possible according to their own laws and customs but prohibiting cannibalism and cruel rites’. The state would be closed to ‘any persons, other than Aborigines, except Federal Government officials and duly authorised missionaries, teachers and agricultural instructors’. The governing tribunal—eventually to be composed of ‘natives’—would decide ‘the extent to which control shall be exercised over such natives still in their wild conditions as are within the State’. Aborigines were to be granted autonomy, and they would grow into that autonomy through guided reform. The petition named David Unaipon as an example of a ‘full-blooded Aboriginal’ who would be ‘competent to assist in founding the proposed State’.4 The petitioners knew nothing of the League’s recent comments on Australia’s administration of the Northern Territory, but that information would have heartened them. Bruce’s colleagues in the National and Country parties found this document bizarre, and when Bruce placed the petition on the agenda of Cabinet, they assumed that his purpose was to amuse them. It was while referring to the petition that Bruce told his colleagues of the challenge thrown down by the PMC. The possibility that Nauru’s cheap phosphate would be lost to Australian farmers (or at least be sold to them at world market rates) was particularly alarming to Earle Page and his Country Party colleagues. Bruce then proposed his response. Australia would wrong-foot the commissioners by calling the commission’s bluff on the less important issue. That is, Australia would volunteer to be accountable to the League for its administration of the Northern Territory under the League’s C class mandate. As a C class mandate, the Territory could still be governed as an internal portion of Australia’s territory, with no promise of eventual independence. At the very least, Bruce hoped, this unexpected gesture to League liberalism would buy Australia a few years in which to work out what to do about Nauru. In that time, Bruce told Cabinet, it would be imperative to find a new job for Billy Hughes. Mingled with Cabinet’s admiration for Bruce’s boldness was the cautionary argument that the League would inhibit development of the Northern Territory. Bruce was one step ahead of these objections. He argued that Australia could finesse the PMC by always exceeding the standards of a C class mandate. Australia would treat the ‘Aboriginal state’ according to the more demanding standards applied to B class mandates such as bound the British government in Tanganyika (formerly Tim Rowse

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German East Africa): no promise of early independence, but with certain native rights guaranteed. This strategy would require the Commonwealth to constitute a native government in the Northern Territory, and Bruce was confident that he could handpick this Aboriginal elite and ‘guide’ it so that no significant colonial interest was ever compromised. He had recently received expert advice that the model Aboriginal state could not enact genuine Aboriginal self-government. Immediately upon receiving the petition, Bruce had asked J.W. Bleakley, the Queensland government’s chief protector of Aborigines, for comment. Bleakley had told him that Aborigines: have no conception of democracy as understood by civilised nations. Their native laws and customs seem to utterly fail to conceive any idea of combination or federation of tribes for mutual government or protection. Each tribe is a separate and distinct group, with its own language, customs, and laws environing its peculiar totem, and has interest in nothing outside of those associations.5 Bruce tabled Bleakley’s advice, and Cabinet concluded that any ‘Aboriginal government’ that they would appoint would fail to gain authority among the natives of the Northern Territory. Commonwealth public servants would continue to make the few decisions that mattered. Since January 1927 the Commonwealth had been experimenting with a division within its Northern Territory administration: Northern Australia and Central Australia. Northern Australia included Darwin, a port of potential significance in northern defence, so Bruce’s ‘Aboriginal state’ would be confined to Central Australia—an administrative unit, created by 1926 legislation, south of the 20th latitude and gazetted on 1 January 1927. From 1 January 1929, the Aboriginal Territory of Central Australia (soon known by its acronym ATOCA) would be a C-class mandate of the League of Nations.

Appointing ATOCA’s Aboriginal government The PMC had no choice but to express pleasure at Bruce’s surprising announcement, even though the commissioners appreciated immediately how difficult it would be now to cast Australia as a recalcitrant colonial power. The Australian public, not having taken any interest in Australia’s relationship with its mandates or with the League, reacted variously—with bemused ridicule (cartoonists had a carnival with many 94

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versions of ‘King Billy’), outrage and pleasant surprise, in roughly equal measure. The PMC now had a problem. Asked by Bruce to help appoint an Aboriginal Council, the PMC had to be seen to act with knowledge and concern, but no one on the staff had ever had any contact with Australian Aborigines. The commission’s librarian in Geneva was mortified to say that she had recently included her small Australian ethnology collection in the bundle of superfluous volumes sold to a London book dealer. Not that reading Baldwin Spencer or Alfred Howitt would have helped. The information that the commission now needed was in unpublished letters by Aboriginal activists to state premiers, and in pamphlets and manifestos printed, in small runs, by the more radical publishers of Sydney and Melbourne. It was in such documents that an Aboriginal ideology of government was emergent. With as much dignity as it could manage, the commission formally asked Bruce for advice on how to compose an Aboriginal government for the Aboriginal Territory. Bruce had three names ready for the commissioners: Fred Maynard, Pearl Gibbs and David Unaipon. In May 1927, Fred Maynard had presented to the New South Wales Premier Jack Lang a petition on behalf of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA). The AAPA wanted ‘capable Aborigines’ to have title to their land and for all Aboriginal families to be free to raise their own children. The AAPA petition acknowledged that not all Aborigines were ‘capable’. Those who were not should be ‘properly cared for in suitable homes on reserves’, at the expense of the government, but with supervision from ‘the educated Aboriginals possessing the requisite ability for such management’. New South Wales should entrust ‘Aboriginal affairs, apart from common law rights’ to ‘a board of management comprised of capable educated Aboriginals under a chairman to be appointed by the government’.6 The distinction between ‘educated and capable’ Aborigines and other Aborigines who required education and supervision was taken as self-evident by the Indigenous critics of Australian colonial rule. As Maynard explained to Lang, Aborigines wanted to be credited as people who aspired to be modern: Our people have … accepted the modern system of government which has taken the place of our prehistoric methods and have conformed to same reasonably well when the treatment accorded them is fully considered. We are, therefore, Tim Rowse

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striving to obtain full recognition of our citizen rights on terms of absolute equality with all other people in our own land.7 As a worker on the Sydney docks, in 1907 Maynard had met with a ‘Coloured Progressive Association’, made up mainly of African American seamen. Through his contact with African Americans he had read Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. According to his descendant, John Maynard, Fred Maynard and other Aboriginal leaders ‘reformulated the political agenda and demands of black Americans according to their own experiences, needs and ideals’.8 Among the black American influences on AAPA’s 1927 petition to Lang we can discern W.E.B. Dubois’ conviction that the educated minority among the colonised coloured people had the duty and the capacity to lead their people, by example, to emancipation. Maynard had been reported to suggest that Aborigines in the Northern Territory ‘be provided with their own communities, with schools and other public buildings, and should be supervised generally by educated and capable Aborigines’.9 Maynard believed that any residual Aboriginal ‘backwardness’ shamed not Aborigines but the governments who denied them education. Many Aborigines who had succeeded in educating themselves felt an effortless and justified superiority over the Whites who had been recruited into the bureaucracies of ‘Aboriginal welfare’. David Unaipon, for example, had called for South Australia’s reserves to be handed over to humanitarian organisations whose members were ‘longer-experienced and more sympathetic than public servants, who have merely had a clerk’s training’.10 Unaipon was a Ngarrindjerri man, born in 1872, who grew up at Point McLeay Mission in South Australia. His Aboriginal father had been an early convert to the Congregational church and taught at the mission school where young David was a pupil. Unaipon had read widely and worked on and off the mission, turning his restless mind to mechanical inventions for which he sought patents. Chafing under mission supervision, in 1912 he had led a deputation asking the government to take over Point McLeay. An able public speaker, his themes were the past and the future of his people. In the late 1920s, the Aborigines Friends Association published his collections of Aboriginal folktales. His stories also appeared in the Daily Telegraph from 1924. He regarded himself (and was in turn admired) as demonstrating the potential of the educated Aborigine. Because the policies of Aboriginal ‘protection’ were so neglectful of education, it was to Aborigines’ advantage not to be dependent on 96

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government, if they and their families could find support among the less prejudiced Whites. Pearl Gibbs was one of the New South Wales Aborigines who had picked up an education in this way. Her Aboriginal mother had been a domestic servant, her father a White tradesman. In Yass in the years immediately before World War I, an Aboriginal child’s only possible schooling was in a segregated class at the local Catholic school. From the age of nine, Gibbs became part of the retinue of servants in a grazier’s household, in north-western New South Wales. Trained for domestic service, she then worked in well-to-do households in Sydney, where she married an English sailor in the 1920s, bearing two children. She and similarly employed Aboriginal women became dissatisfied with the Aborigines Protection Board’s supervision of their employment and wages. The board’s blunt rejection of her protest ended any respect that she had felt for official authority over her people. Gibbs became attuned to the message of critics such as Fred Maynard. In 1928, she told William Morley, secretary of the Association for the Protection of Native Races, that abolition of the Aborigines Protection Board should be high on the list of reforms that his association was urging.11 Gibbs’ letter to Morley and her brush with the board attracted the attention of some of Sydney’s women’s associations. They were well connected with newspaper editors and radio producers, and it was not long before Gibbs found herself speaking to listeners of 2GB Sydney and 2WL Wollongong. Gibbs proclaimed herself an Australian citizen, one of an emerging group of ‘intelligent and educated Aborigines’ who would no longer put up with the official paternalism and daily exploitation visited upon their people in the name of ‘protection’. Judging the susceptibilities of her audience, she called not for the board’s abolition but for its reconstruction: ‘an equal number of Aborigines as Whites on the Board’ and for the board to include nominees of the humanitarian advocacy groups.12 In picking this Aboriginal triumvirate, Bruce had shown himself to be well connected and a fast learner. He judged that the Labor Party, which had exhibited considerable uncertainty about how to respond to his ATOCA policy, would be more likely to warm to it if a man of the labour movement such as Maynard was involved. Bruce’s contacts within conservative women’s associations soon produced Pearl Gibbs’ name. He liked the emphasis that she had placed on ‘Australian citizenship’ in the radio broadcasts that he found in her police file. The learned societies that were taking an interest in Aborigines had told him of a Tim Rowse

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well-spoken Aboriginal man from South Australia who had written for the newspapers on the ancient customs of his people. David Unaipon would bring ethnological insight to the job. Bruce thus recommended to the Permanent Mandates Commission that a compact Aboriginal Council, made up of Maynard, Gibbs and Unaipon, should replace the government resident of Central Australia. A small Commonwealth bureaucracy, including a tiny police force, would be at this council’s command.

The Aboriginal Council’s first decision The council held its first meeting in February 1929, at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station (a few kilometres outside Stuart), with the former government resident, Mr Cawood, as its secretary. Cawood’s career as a public servant had begun in the north coast forests of New South Wales. Residing in Bellingen Shire, he had gone on to start his own saw-milling business, later serving his community as shire councillor, shire president, coroner and magistrate. The Country Party leader Earle Page had recommended his appointment as government resident of Central Australia in 1926. Cawood had been in office for twenty-two months when the Aboriginal Council commenced. He assumed that because public administration was a science that no Aboriginal person had yet mastered, his guiding hand would be indispensable to the three councillors. He hoped he could be sufficiently tactful in his advice to sustain the pretence that it was they who ruled. Cawood had submitted an agenda of matters for council’s consideration. In the discussion of the first item—the planning of the celebration of the soon to be completed railway from Adelaide—Cawood’s understanding of his relationship with the three councillors began to fall apart. In his 1953 memoir Desert Experiment he recalled the moment: How close was this railway to completion? Mr Unaipon asked. I told him that the line had just crossed the Hale River and that in the coming winter progress would be so rapid that the construction party would have the line through Heavitree Gap by the end of October 1929. The celebrations, to which dignitaries from Melbourne and Adelaide would be invited, were to take place in the first week of November 1929. Any later and the attending dignitaries would find it too hot. I drew the Councillors’ attention to a figure on the agenda paper, the funds set aside for these festivities. Mrs Gibbs pointed out 98

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that the amount suggested was twice the annual budget of the ‘Half-castes Home’ that had recently been shifted from the centre of Alice Springs to Jay Creek, about 25 miles west of the town. Before I could respond to this indisputable observation, Maynard asked: ‘Whose idea was this railway anyway?’ It took all of my professional restraint to govern my tongue in the minutes that followed. The three Councillors began to tell stories of what had happened in other Australian regions remote from the capital cities, when the railway had arrived. Unaipon told of incidents in Hergott Springs, as Oodnadatta was once named; Gibbs repeated what she had heard from members of her family about similar goings on around Broken Hill when the line from Adelaide reached it in 1888; Maynard said that he had heard from an American sailor, descended from a Navaho grandmother, about the dreadful things that had happened in New Mexico, after the rail service to Santa Fe had commenced in 1889. Their stories soon precipitated a theme to which they all warmed: that the railway, by easing the immigration of the European, had everywhere accelerated the demoralisation of primitive people. There was a pause in their dismal colloquy, giving me the chance to intervene with a sentence beginning ‘But progress …’ I never finished that sentence.13 In this way, the first meeting of the Aboriginal Territory Council halted one of twentieth-century Australia’s proudest civil engineering projects, a rail line that would eventually link southern agriculture to Australia’s most northern port. Cawood managed to persuade the council that the railway construction be suspended, just north of the Hale, while an inquiry was conducted into its likely effect on the Aboriginal Territory. However, the inquiry never took place, because all who were concerned with ATOCA soon became preoccupied with another matter.

The Coniston killings The Lander River region, north-west of Alice Springs, was the customary territory of Warlpiri and Anmatyerre people. After World War I, two kinds of colonial enterprise began to encroach on their hunting grounds. Europeans with ambitions to be pastoralists took up leases there, and so too did men eking a living from the government bounty Tim Rowse

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on dingo scalps. Both enterprises depended on Aboriginal labour, for which the colonists paid by issuing food, tobacco and clothes. Sometimes the Aboriginal men consented to include women’s sexual services in the ‘labour’ thus traded with the newcomers. However, as on other Australian frontiers, this transaction was easily misunderstood, and violence often ensued. On Coniston lease in August 1928 conflicting understandings of the terms of such trade may have been the trigger for a fight that proved fatal to the European involved, the dogger Fred Brooks. It was the duty of Mounted Constable William Murray to arrest those suspected of the murder. Murray had two Aboriginal trackers and he also summoned several civilians to help him, among them Alick Wilson, known locally as a ‘half-caste’. As this party rode through the lower Lander River region in the second half of August 1928, they made only two arrests; for the most part, they killed. Murray’s official report declared seventeen Aborigines slain, in four encounters. In subsequent patrols, and after another Aboriginal attack (not fatal) on a White, Murray and his party shot fourteen (Murray’s officially reported figure) Aborigines and made two further arrests. The trial and acquittal of the arrested Aborigines, in Darwin, drew public attention to Murray’s methods, and in the closing months of 1928 the Commonwealth government was under pressure from the humanitarian lobby and the southern capital city press to conduct an inquiry into the police killings. Bruce relented on 28 November 1928. Had he foreseen the political scandal of the Coniston massacre he would almost certainly not have advocated ATOCA. However, by the time Murray’s methods became a political issue, ATOCA had been announced and the three councillors were on their way to Stuart. For Bruce’s ATOCA gambit to have any credibility, the Aboriginal Council would now have to be involved in any inquiry into Murray’s actions. Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon were sickened by the ease with which Whites still assumed a power of life and death over Blacks. But they knew that it was no easy matter, in Australia in the 1920s, to enforce the law of the land against murderers when the victims were Aborigines and the killers were led by a mounted constable. As recently as 1926, a royal commission in Western Australia had found that Aborigines of Forrest River Mission had been murdered en masse, but not one killer had been prosecuted. The inertia of the Whites’ law weighed heavy on their minds as they entered their second weekly meeting with Cawood. The startling decision about the railway at the first meeting of the council had forced Cawood to reassess the councillors. He knew that 100

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Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon had been pleased by their first exercise of power and that they were likely now to assert themselves on other issues. Certainly the Coniston killings would be among them, Cawood surmised. So when the councillors failed even to glance at his suggested agenda for the second meeting—roadworks, a proposed abattoir—he was prepared. Cawood’s memoir does not summarise the discussion, and the minutes are very brief. They simply record that the council constituted itself as the board of inquiry into the Coniston killings, with Cawood as their secretary. It would begin the following week. The federal attorney-general had briefed Cawood on the council’s meagre powers. That the inquiry was weakly constituted was not among the things that Cawood chose to discuss with the three councillors. While he personally disapproved of the slaying of Blacks, he judged that no good could come of bringing the Coniston killers to justice. Extended dry weather and the global depression had already sapped settlers’ confidence in Central Australia; any challenge to Whites’ discipline over Blacks would panic them. His strategy was therefore to let the three councillors discover their impotence, as they plodded through the process of inquiry. He would be passive, letting them devise their own modus operandi, and merely letting them know what they could and (mostly) could not do. Cawood had not anticipated the local Aboriginal perception of the council. In the perspective of the locals—whether ‘half-caste’ or ‘fullblood’—Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon were an anomaly. They clearly were of Aboriginal descent, but they dressed like Europeans (and more like Mr Cawood and his family than like the Whites who prowled the river-bed camps looking for a woman). They spoke like Europeans too, but their efforts to recruit local people as interpreters set them apart from most Europeans, who seemed rarely to acknowledge that there were other languages, such as Arrernte, in which people’s thoughts could be heard. In the few weeks in the summer of 1929 in which the Arrernte had been observing the three councillors, other things about them had become clear. Mr Unaipon had accepted, with evident pleasure, the blackened haunch of kangaroo that one old man had hesitantly proffered when they had met on the Todd River. The offer had been a kind of test. Did these exotic blackfellows eat the local meat? Unaipon’s actions had immediately answered that question to the donor’s satisfaction, and a few days later the old man had found himself being introduced, by Unaipon’s gestures and smiles, to Gibbs and Maynard, in another chance encounter ‘upstream’ from the Telegraph Station. Tim Rowse

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The word quickly spread that these new arrivals were people of great sympathy to the Arrernte, and that they were people of authority. They had been seen in Mr Cawood’s car, being driven between Stuart and the Telegraph Station by the local police sergeant. That officer’s quiet and respectful manner towards his Black passengers was like nothing the locals had ever seen; it conveyed, better than anything said to the Arrernte, that the three blackfellows from the south were bosses. The Coniston killings were well known to the Arrernte, for terrified Anmatyerre had fled south and east to stations such as Bushy Park, where large numbers of Arrernte camped. When they understood that the councillors were now asking about the killings, the Arrernte began to consider one of the pieces of information that the Anmatyerre survivors had conveyed. One of Murray’s band had been the ‘yellerfella’ Alick Wilson. Some of the dismayed and angry survivors said that they even knew this man’s Aboriginal kin. The Arrernte talk about this collaborating ‘yellerfella’ soon reached the ears of David Unaipon, and he was quick to bring it up with Gibbs and Maynard. They wondered what Alick Wilson knew and what it would take to get him to say what he knew. Alick Wilson was one of the ‘go-betweens’ that every frontier produces—a man with access to both the European and the Aboriginal domains. He spoke both Warlpiri and Arrernte, and he had long enjoyed the patronage of various White masters: pastoralists and police. To be so situated was, in ‘normal’ times, to be in a position of strength, but these were not ‘normal’ times. We do not know what Aboriginal people were saying to Wilson in February 1929, but we do know that it was enough to give him a severe fright. For towards the end of that month Unaipon heard from a very agitated Wilson a detailed account of the police patrols that, if heard in a court as sworn evidence, would probably convict Murray of homicide. Perhaps Wilson was told by his Arrernte contacts that he was soon to be the object of sorcery; perhaps he was told that he should in future avoid walking around Stuart at night. Whatever motivated Wilson, he presented himself to Unaipon as willing to testify against Murray. Would his testimony be credible? Unaipon, discussing this point with Gibbs and Maynard, concluded that it would. When Wilson had interpreted in the magistrate’s hearing and in the Supreme Court trial of the Aborigines arrested by Murray, he had been praised for the care that he had taken. Indeed he had become a minor celebrity in the White community of Central Australia as a ‘good’ 102

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Black, as a man who had redeemed his colour and demonstrated the ‘half-caste’ potential. The rest of this story is too well known to need a detailed telling. The Aboriginal Council quickly produced a report consisting largely of a sworn affidavit from Wilson that described, in detail, every Aboriginal fatality to which Murray’s reports had admitted. In nearly every case, the killing was beyond anything defensible as a legitimate police action; and in every case, it was Murray who pulled the trigger. In the Supreme Court trial in Darwin, other members of Murray’s parties supported the details of Wilson’s affidavit and court testimony. Why wouldn’t they? Convicted on twenty-three counts of homicide, Murray was sentenced to be hanged. This moment in Australia’s colonial history recapitulated another: the execution of the Myall Creek murderers in Sydney in 1838. In both cases the trial and conviction of the killers reflected the political will of a new governing authority: Governor Gipps and the Aboriginal Council. In both cases, a substantial portion of public opinion believed that the convicted were being treated harshly. But the two cases differed in one respect. In 1838, according to their gaoler, Henry Keck, the Myall Creek killers ‘were not aware that in destroying the Aboriginals they were violating the law’.14 In 1929, Constable Murray made no such protest, objecting (through his lawyer) only that Wilson and the other witnesses against him should share in his guilt and in his punishment. Whether Wilson and the others were killers we will never know; no proceedings were brought against them because no one could be found who could credibly testify against them.

The autonomy of ATOCA By the middle of 1929, Bruce’s Cabinet was divided in its feelings about ATOCA. Cherished ideas about the White settlement of the arid centre and tropical north were under challenge. No rail link to the north? Police authority over Aborigines constrained by criminal law? These were bitter lessons in post-colonial diplomacy for British Australians. But to rein in the Aboriginal Council now that it had become so conspicuously independent would ruin Australia’s diplomacy with the PMC, as the Aboriginal Council had not exceeded its powers, and international opinion favoured applying the rule of law to killers of natives. To test Australia’s room for manoeuvre on ATOCA Bruce consulted his Geneva representative. By now, this was not W.M. Hughes but E.L. Piesse. The second part of Bruce’s strategy for conciliating the PMC had Tim Rowse

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been to replace W.M. Hughes with this more sophisticated representative to the League in Geneva. In July 1929, when Murray’s sentence was the subject of a furious debate across Australia, Bruce pointed out to Piesse that his ‘concession’ to the PMC—ATOCA—had turned into a political problem in its own right. ‘Was it generating any benefits for Australia in Geneva?’ he asked Piesse. Piesse’s advice was clear, and Bruce presented it in full to his Cabinet. Australia’s delegate urged Bruce to stick to his strategy. To cave in to those who would hobble the fledgling ATOCA would not be defensible in Geneva, and Piesse would be forced to reconsider his capacity to continue in his position if Cabinet directed him to justify such a craven retreat. ‘ATOCA is the talk of Geneva’, wrote Piesse, possibly exaggerating. Certainly we know that it was the subject of much discussion among the staff and commissioners of the PMC. Those most fired with the tenets of Wilsonian liberalism were hailing ATOCA as a model for indigenous self-determination. Australia had ceased to be the commission’s pariah and had begun to shine as its exemplar. The commissioners’ worries about Nauru had not completely disappeared, but for the next few years Australia was unlikely, Piesse predicted, to face the searching questions that had nettled Hughes in the mid-1920s. Bruce was thus able to reassure his Cabinet that his strategy for neutralising the League’s Nauru threat had been successful, albeit at an unexpectedly high domestic political cost. The Country Party was both furious at the ‘loss’ of Central Australia (as they perceived it) and glad to have secured Nauru’s phosphate, at least for a few years. It could be said that ATOCA survived its first critical period, thanks, in no small measure, to the deficiencies of Australian soils.

ATOCA and ‘uplift’ It could be argued that the halting of the railroad and the prosecution of Murray were the easiest decisions that the Aboriginal Council ever made. Far more difficult were the issues of child protection and of guardianship over the Aboriginal people of the centralian hinterland. The small European population of the ATOCA was alienated by the railway decision and by the conviction of Murray (and the commuting of his sentence to life imprisonment scarcely dented their dismay). Many who had not yet made a substantial investment in the region withdrew over the next few years, and few Whites arrived to take their place, unless they were recruited by the Aboriginal Council or by the Finke River Mission to work on ‘welfare’ projects. By 1932, ATOCA 104

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was almost entirely Aboriginal in population. Mr Cawood, a few policemen, a doctor, a nurse and the mission staff at Hermannsburg were the abiding European nucleus of ATOCA’s effort to reach out to an Aboriginal population in need. ATOCA had inherited responsibility for scores of children. Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon were well aware that, in the rest of Australia, such children were known as ‘half-caste’ or ‘quadroon’, and that popular and authoritative racial theories attributed certain features of character and intelligence (or their lack) to such hybrids. But they did not believe that a child’s needs, character and potential could be inferred simply from his or her genealogy. Their own experience had continually contradicted so much of what they had heard from ‘experts’ on racial matters. The question that interested them was: Who was looking after such and such a child? The painful answer to that question—for scores of children in ATOCA—was ‘no one’. It was therefore the duty of the state or the church to supply these children with something resembling a home and an education. Throughout the 1920s, several visitors to Stuart had criticised conditions at ‘the Bungalow’, the make-shift home for ‘half-caste’ children. The council was able to take some pressure off the Bungalow’s resources, and thus improve conditions slightly, by sending some children back to the camps and homes of their mothers, whenever such mothers could be found and were judged fit to look after a child. However, that left about thirty children who were effectively homeless. Could they be adopted into other families? The council hoped that they could, but the police—who doubled as welfare case workers—reported that there were few families capable of providing the standard of care that Pearl Gibbs had specified as a minimum. Gibbs’ background in domestic service had persuaded her that household cleanliness and hygiene were essential to any household; Maynard and Unaipon deferred to her standards, which she enthusiastically imparted to the police. The result was that a residue of institutionalised children remained at Jay Creek, under the care of a series of married couples that fed, housed and taught the inmates as best they could. Their number diminished, as the children became old enough to move out and to find work— mostly as employees of ATOCA itself. At the same time, ATOCA found the money to build the Jay Creek facility, which had started at the end of 1928 as a cluster of tents and bough shelters. By 1939, there were only ten children at Jay Creek, living a life of comparative ease; the superintendent and his wife, appointed late in 1938, were themselves Tim Rowse

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former residents of the Bungalow, pleased to return to its comparative security. The contrast with Darwin was marked. There Dr Cecil Cook, chief protector of Aboriginals (the title always brought a smile to Fred Maynard’s face) persisted, throughout the 1930s, in a policy of active recruitment of ‘half-caste waifs’ to Kahlin compound. There was a plentiful supply, in the sense that the northern half of the Northern Territory continued to draw single men from all over Australia who were attracted by, among other things, the sexual opportunities of frontier life. Cook saw it as his duty to give hybrid children a chance to grow up as ‘White’ as possible. And so his ‘Half-Caste Compound’ flourished.

The ‘whiteness’ of ATOCA For hundreds of miles around Alice Springs there were Aboriginal people for whom ATOCA had responsibility. The council’s perspective is best encapsulated in Unaipon’s words of 1924 that: my race, living under native and tribal conditions, has a very strict and efficacious code of laws that keeps the race pure. It is only when the Aborigines come in contact with white civilisation that they leave their tribal laws, and take nothing in place of these old and well-established customs. It is then that disease and deterioration set in.15 The council faced the task of managing these people’s ‘contact with white civilisation’. Was ATOCA itself an instance of ‘white civilisation’? Let me explain some ways that it was, notwithstanding the firm grip of the Aboriginal Council on ATOCA’s most important public policies. First, although Maynard, Gibbs and Unaipon were trenchant critics of British-Australian colonial authority, they had also embraced what they considered to be the best of the European heritage. From the standpoint of their selfconscious modernity and achieved civility, they levelled their scorn for the exclusive, predatory and intrusively authoritarian practices of the British-Australian colonists. They did not repudiate all that Europe brought to the new world; they demanded admission—for themselves and for those Aborigines more recently affected by colonisation—to those parts of ‘white civilisation’ that they valued. Second, as a governing authority ATOCA was made up of both Aborigines and Europeans. The Aborigines were in control of policy, but in the execution of those 106

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policies much was unavoidably delegated to European officials, particularly to the police. ATOCA was fortunate in its police recruits. Police who sympathised with Murray had resigned from the small ATOCA service within weeks of his sentence; the police who joined ATOCA in the 1930s were self-selecting humanitarians—men and women who admired the council’s firm approach to the Coniston incidents. As well as the police, there were the missionaries of the Finke River Mission. All were Europeans and all were dedicated to the same broad vision of ‘uplift’. My third reason for seeing ATOCA as an instance (albeit unusual) of ‘white civilisation’ is that ATOCA was part of the world of European production and European goods. Throughout the Australian colonial process, the hunter-gatherer economy of Aborigines had been affected in two ways. One colonial process took land, the other offered new goods. In much of Australia, the taking of land by pastoralists had been the more radical challenge to Aboriginal ways. Where introduced species such as sheep, cattle, goats and horses grazed, Aborigines were forced to give up many of their sources of water and to restrict their hunting to native species—on pain of death. In most of ATOCA, this process of pastoral usurpation had barely begun by 1929, and the inception of ATOCA and the onset of the depression shrank the clovenhoofed beachhead. The mildness of pastoralism in ATOCA threw into relief the potency of the second process: the increasing availability of European goods. The basics of life were hard won in the arid zone hunter-gatherer economy, so that when Aborigines became aware of sources of goods for much easier taking, they flocked to them. In marginal cattle country such as ATOCA, the ‘pull’ of colonial goods proved to be a far more significant force for change than the ‘push’ of a usurping pastoralism. ATOCA was, in this sense, a variant of the ‘white civilisation’ that had undermined the hunter-gatherer economy throughout Australia. The problem of the ‘deterioration’ of ATOCA’s Aborigines was soon the council’s main concern. How could they manage the adjustment of these people to a world in which flour, sugar and tea were cheaply and abundantly available and, evidently, overwhelmingly attractive? At the police ration depots on the northern and southern edges of Stuart more and more people were camping, waiting for their rations, many having walked in for hundreds of miles. The camps were becoming unsanitary, and fights were breaking out. Councillors soon found that another authority within ATOCA had been grappling with the same problem: the Finke River Mission, 75 miles Tim Rowse

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to the west of Stuart. Mission superintendent the Reverend F.W. Albrecht called on the three councillors in their Wills Terrace residence late in 1929, on one of his rare visits to ‘town’. Albrecht had been in charge of Hermannsburg Mission (as the site was known) since 1926. He told the councillors something that they already knew: that it was difficult to manage Aborigines’ mendicancy, without abrogating entirely one’s responsibility to look after them. He went on to explain that the mission had evolved an approach to rationing that sought: to keep Aborigines away from harmful contacts with non-Aborigines, and especially to keep them from ‘drifting’ to Stuart; to teach Christian belief (and to assert its superiority over Aboriginal law); and to avoid ‘pauperising’ Aborigines by too liberal an issue of rations. His mission required those rationed to show their commitment to work such as tanning and boot-making, gardening and cattle management. If an able-bodied Aborigine did not work, then he or she was not to be given any rations; he or she was expected to continue to hunt and gather for themselves. Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon were not sure how to take Albrecht. Unaipon had been raised in a devoutly Christian family, but his Christianity had not prevented him from publicly declaring that Point McLeay would be better administered by the government than by the church. Maynard had long been sceptical of all churchmen and was not himself a believer. Much of Albrecht’s advice appealed to Gibbs’ values, but she, like her two colleagues, was offended by Albrecht’s assumption that Aborigines must be disabused of their ‘pagan’ beliefs and must give up their rituals. Each of the councillors had heard their grandmothers and grandfathers speak wistfully of the disused ceremonies and forgotten songs of south-eastern Australia. They could not warm to the task of destroying the Indigenous religious patrimony of ATOCA. For all that, there seemed to Gibbs, Unaipon and Maynard to be a kernel of good sense in Albrecht’s words. Albrecht’s hope that Aboriginal religion would wither was balanced by his wish that the Aboriginal economy would adapt and survive. His notion of ‘work’ included Aborigines’ hunting of dingo scalps (on which there remained a Commonwealth government bounty); when hunters brought scalps to the mission, they were rewarded with rations, and the missionaries collected the scalp bounty in order to purchase further rations. As well, Albrecht had told the three councillors that he wanted the mission to become a broker of ‘curios’. All over Australia, there were British-Australians who would buy boomerangs, woomeras and other artefacts—particularly if the workmanship was fine. Albrecht speculated that Aborigines’ graphic 108

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tradition—evident in some of the sacred designs that he had chanced to glimpse—might be the basis of painting. He was going to invite a water-colourist from Adelaide to Hermannsburg to offer painting lessons. There were lots of ways, Albrecht predicted, that Aborigines could ‘work’ for their rations, without forsaking their traditional skills. The council had evidence at their door of the apparent fragility of Central Australian society. By the end of 1929, the ration camps near Stuart had become critically overpopulated, a hazard to the health and safety of all who were migrating to them. From Albrecht’s point of view too they had become a problem, for Aborigines were leaving Hermannsburg to camp at the less demanding (of work and other duties) ration regime that had emerged at Stuart. Albrecht’s visit to Maynard, Gibbs and Unaipon had not been without self-interest. He concluded his visit by inviting ATOCA to combine with the Finke River Mission to create a line of ration depots about 150 miles west of Stuart, in the hope of intercepting the eastward migration of the people of the western desert. The next day, after a night of thoughtful and anxious discussion among themselves, the councillors visited the Lutherans’ camp and told Albrecht that they agreed. Their western desert ration project would commence in the winter of 1930. The council needed to know how much food the project would require. Experience suggested that if too many recipients were attracted to the planned depots, local game and vegetable foods would be hunted and gathered to exhaustion by those ‘able-bodied’ not receiving rations. Albrecht’s estimates of the western desert population were mere guesses. And who would distribute the food? Albrecht had trained some Arrernte men to refuse the ‘able-bodied’ and to adhere to the stipulated quantities per person, even in the face of importuning kin. It was in the interests of the rationing authority to be parsimonious—not only to discourage those who Albrecht called ‘parasites’ and ‘loafers’ (terms that made Maynard wince) but also to keep the whole project within budget. When the ration depots at Areyonga and Haasts Bluff commenced in June 1930, the western desert people were waiting. They had heard that ‘super waterholes’ were soon to open on the eastern edge of their customary country. In Stuart, the police had told some western desert people of the project, so they started to move west. And word had travelled throughout the desert, along networks occasioned by ceremonial meetings, that a camel train of unprecedented size was making its way through the land of the Yankunytjara, Arabana and southern Arrernte. What was on those camels? And where would they set down? These were Tim Rowse

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subjects of lively speculation in the hinterlands of Stuart. These anticipations produced an unexpected demand. At Haasts Bluff, a year’s rations for 100 had been supplied. When Albrecht submitted a Haasts Bluff census of 253 to the council in October 1930, he insisted that only 120 of those counted met the criteria for being given rations, and that at any one time some twenty of them were out hunting: 100 recipients, just as the budget allowed. Hunting included getting dingo scalps, kangaroo skins and making ‘native curios’ for trade for food at the ration store. The 93 children counted in the census were not included by Albrecht in this 100 recipients because the rationed mother was supposed to share with her offspring. Albrecht and his trained delegates made a list of the names of the 120 they judged deserving. Over the next few months, people were refused rations if their names were not on that list. By such devices, the Haasts Bluff demand was crafted to match the supply. Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon could see what was factitious about Albrecht’s accounting. They visited Haasts Bluff in August and in November. The second visit revealed a larger number of people than the first visit, and a more depleted landscape. On each occasion they were surrounded by a throng of naked or near-naked people—smiling and laughing in August, but sullen and puzzled in November. In August one of Albrecht’s native evangelists was in charge of the ration depot, with Albrecht a weekly visitor; by November, Albrecht had taken over the job himself, and he admitted to being a worried man. The Haasts Bluff experience proved to be typical of all of ATOCA’s efforts to manage the process of contact between ‘white civilisation’ and the people of the region. The logic of Albrecht’s and the council’s philosophy of rationing proved to be self-defeating. If a lot of people were attracted by news of rationing, but only a few were rationed, the others would make an unsustainable impact on the surrounding country. Those refused rations were unlikely to leave the area for several reasons. First, some of the old people to whom they were affectionately bonded were being rationed. Second, under Aboriginal custom the undeserving could cadge from the deserving. Third, ceremonial opportunity was afforded by large congregations. Under unrationed conditions, large gatherings were rare and difficult to sustain; with a ration source a gathering could develop an attractive ceremonial momentum. That the rationing of western desert people altered their social dynamics in unpredictable and unmanageable ways quickly became clear to the council. In further discussion, Albrecht admitted that 110

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Aborigines’ redistribution of food to ‘undeserving’ ‘parasites’ and ‘loafers’ had undermined the Finke River Mission’s efforts in moral management. There was a tendency for rationing to become universal, rather than discriminatory, and for Aboriginal dependency to deepen into habit and become a way of life. Albrecht admitted to seeing a deep irony in Christian humanitarianism on the Australian frontier: he was the unwilling agent of Aborigines’ ‘pauperisation’. But just as Albrecht saw no alternative to living out that irony, so too did Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon commit themselves to rationing the people of ATOCA. Where Albrecht saw recipients becoming ‘loafers’, ‘paupers’ and ‘parasites’, Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon saw an excited and at times bewildered people, eager to forge a bond with newcomers—by taking, certainly, but also by giving. What were these people giving? Not only the authorised tangibles, such as ‘curios’ and dingo scalps, but also their laughing and chattering humanity. Where Albrecht saw an enormous and perhaps hopeless task of moral management, Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon saw their grandparents and great-grandparents, as they had long imagined them to have once been, people whose every gesture was invested, with fearful optimism, in a future for which no preparation was conceivable. Both energised and humbled by their historic role as the edge of a reformed colonisation, the council learned from the first year at Haasts Bluff and Areyonga to disperse the ration points as widely as possible, to militate against huge concentrations of recipients. This commitment led them to two policy decisions in 1932 that no one, in 1929, could have anticipated. First, quelling any remaining uneasiness about churches and churchmen, Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon approached every mission organisation in the Pacific with an offer to partner the council in making ration depots in ATOCA. The council knew that these church partnerships would pose a threat to Aboriginal religion. However, their observations of the Lutherans’ domain had reassured them that Aboriginal law was more resilient than evangelists admitted. The second surprising decision by the Aboriginal Council was to resume the construction of the railway. To continue to provision a large-scale rationing program by a camel string from Oodnadatta was not feasible, they judged. They needed the railway to Alice Springs for their fundamental humanitarian task in ATOCA, and they felt confident that they could handle the new world that a railway brings.

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Coda In 1911, the Commonwealth took over the government of the Northern Territory (from South Australia). As in the rest of Australia, settlers coming to the Territory assumed sovereignty and land ownership, and there was the usual contention between government and settlers about how much violence was justified to quell Aboriginal objectors and about who had the right to exercise it. The Commonwealth’s 1918 Aboriginals Ordinance set a framework based on the states’ established practices of Indigenous administration: Aborigines had no customary rights to land and they were to be treated by the government as not yet competent to be citizens of the new order unless they could show, by living ‘at the white standard’, that they did not need such intensive supervision. Laws that protected them from sexual and other kinds of exploitation also abridged the rights that other Australians took for granted. The Commonwealth did what it could to ‘develop’ the Territory for European enterprise, with Aborigines as cheap labour. From a European point of view, the Territory remained a backwater until the 1940s, when the possibility of Japanese invasion gave it military significance. By 1933 there were still fewer than five thousand persons (not including ‘full-blood’ Aborigines) in the Territory. Distinguishing ‘half-castes’ from ‘fullbloods’, the Commonwealth reserved the right to remove ‘half-caste’ children from their families and to rear them in institutions. Though a humanitarian lobby persuaded the Commonwealth to declare some large reserves in the western desert and in Arnhemland in the 1930s for the ‘full-bloods’, the Commonwealth’s approach to governing Northern Territory Aborigines continued largely in this fashion until the 1940s, when the labour-starved war effort reached deep into the ‘full-blood’ population for labour. So Bruce did not accede to the 1927 petition for a Model Aboriginal State, as he was under no significant domestic or international pressure to depart from what the states (Western Australia and Queensland in particular) were doing. Though the League of Nations imposed a duty of care on Australia in respect of New Guinea and Nauru, the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission did not take an interest in the Northern Territory. Its pressure on Australia is thus drawn from my imagination. The characters in my story are real, but their actions are largely my invention. Hughes and Piesse were not Australia’s representatives to the League of Nations. Maynard, Gibbs and Unaipon never served as the Aboriginal Council of ATOCA (or in any other governmental capacity). Alick Wilson did not testify against Murray, and 112

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Murray was not tried for murder. Cawood’s memoir is entirely my fabrication, and I have speculated about his stance towards the Aboriginal Council. The rail link to Alice Springs (Stuart) was completed in 1929. However, it is important to recognise that Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon and other Aborigines did say the things that I quote, though I have changed most of the dates of their saying them to fit my counterfactual story. And the rationing process west of Alice Springs was much as I have described it here, though the real events were in 1941–42, not in 1930 (see Tim Rowse, ‘Rationing’s Moral Economy’, in Tony Austin and Suzanne Parry (eds), Connection and Disconnection: Encounters between Settlers and Indigenous People in the Northern Territory (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press, 1998), pp. 95–124). Counterfactual history is most useful to our thinking about history when it dwells on what could plausibly have happened but didn’t. In order to distinguish the plausible from the implausible Didn’t Happen, you need to think about the underlying structure of the events that Did Happen. Only a relatively minor contingency (Bruce’s Nauru gambit) separates what Did Happen from what plausibly could have happened, because what did happen and what plausibly might have happened share an underlying structural determination. So counterfactual history is good for making you think about the underlying structures of the history that we understand to be true. In this case, there are three underlying structures. 1.

The temporal structure of Australian settlement. Australia was colonised region by region, and it took almost two centuries for colonial authority to subject all of the country and its Indigenous people to effective administration. In Australian history there has been a sequence of colonial frontiers. The colonial frontiers of temperate Australia occurred at a different time in world history from the colonial frontiers of arid central Australia. The state in the 1930s was not the same as the state in the 1830s; it was more likely to bring to bear more confidently solicitous techniques and norms of government. And the world system of states in the 1930s was not the same as the world system of states in the 1830s, for the doctrine of ‘colonial trusteeship’ had become influential between 1900 and 1920. The frontier regions of the 1930s were not as favourably placed within a global commodities market as the temperate grasslands of Australia had been in the 1830s. Taking these factors together, it should matter to the historian that the frontiers of the Tim Rowse

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2.

3.

1930s were close to the end of a 160-year (c. 1800–1960) sequence of Australian frontiers. The cycles within frontiers. Some writers have argued that frontiers between Europeans and Aborigines, whenever they have taken place, have had the same phases. I have long been interested by the sequence in which violent pacification gives way, relatively quickly, to mutual accommodation. There are many possible forms of mutual accommodation; it is the space in which humanitarianism is put to its most severe test, facing the question ‘how to govern Aborigines?’ This phase, in which humanitarianism must find its techniques of government, is to be found in every frontier in which there were Indigenous survivors. The rise of an Indigenous leadership that was literate in English. One consequence of the moving Australian frontier was that it created opportunities for Indigenous survivors to become literate critics of colonial authority in the later frontiers. In Australia it took about sixty to ninety years for an articulate, literate Indigenous intelligentsia to emerge in the wake of the colonisation of the arable regions of the south-east and south-west of the continent. By the time leaders such as Gibbs, Maynard and Unaipon were winning some credibility among colonial authorities, those authorities were, through the Commonwealth government, establishing colonial dominion over the Northern Territory.

These three deep structures of colonial history made an interesting conjuncture, out of which my plausible story is concocted.

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6

WHAT IF AUSTRALIA’S BAPTISM OF FIRE HAD OCCURRED AT THE COCOS ISLANDS? Stuart Macintyre

World War I—or the Great War as it was known until World War II caused a retrospective change of name—is a hinge of Australian history. Colonial troops had fought in previous imperial wars: most recently, from June 1900 until March 1901, they helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in China, and from December 1900 to June 1902 they helped subdue the Boer republics in South Africa. But many regarded the call to arms in 1914 as the first great test of the Commonwealth and a chance to prove the martial qualities of the new nation. The first test of the Australian Imperial Force came on 25 April 1915. The initial reports described a baptism of fire, and the landing at Gallipoli came to define the Anzacs as soldier-citizens with special qualities of defiance, stoicism and valour. But the much greater losses suffered on the Western Front from 1916 strained acceptance of British leadership and strategy. A third of a million men enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and 60 000 failed to return from service on the other side of the world. The Labor government fell apart on the issue of conscription, arguments over the burden of sacrifice opened social divisions and accusations of disloyalty fanned sectarian animosity. Nor did the final victory bring lasting security. W.M. Hughes, the Australian prime minister, cultivated the identification of ‘the little digger’ to assert his country’s particular interests and entitlements at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Hughes was particularly resentful of the territorial concessions Britain had made 115

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to Japan and resistant to the Japanese desire for a declaration of racial equality as part of the post-war order. The course of World War II augmented the suspicion that Australians had misdirected their endeavours in World War I, at the cost of their own regional interests. Might an earlier war in the Pacific have averted this outcome?

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The German squadron found the Australian and New Zealand troop transports late in the afternoon of 7 November 1914. There were nearly forty ships in the flotilla, made up of passenger liners and carriers of wool, meat and dairy products that the two governments had chartered and fitted with mess-tables and hammocks so that the lower decks looked like crowded barrack rooms. Escorting the 30 000 men of the expeditionary force on their long voyage across the Indian Ocean were just four light cruisers, two Australian, one British and one Japanese. The flotilla travelled in tight formation at the speed of the slowest vessel, just over ten knots. The billowing smoke alerted the nearest German raider to its presence. There were three warships in the German squadron. Two of them, the Emden and the Leipzig, were light cruisers, but the third was an armoured cruiser, the Scharnhorst, and a key unit of Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron. Along with another light cruiser and one other armoured cruiser, they were stationed at Tsingtao, Germany’s Chinese naval base. The Royal Navy also had a naval base in China, with two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers and eight destroyers, but they were older and inferior to the German warships. The British commander of the China station was a worried man. The senior service was crucial to Britain’s defence strategy. Its land forces were dwarfed by those of its European rivals, since the continental powers used conscription to maintain large standing armies— Bismarck, the German chancellor, had dismissed the British army when he said that if it landed an expeditionary force on Germany’s north coast, he would send a policeman to arrest it. The role of the Royal Navy was to safeguard Britain from invasion and also to keep open the sealanes on which its trade was conducted. More than half the calories consumed in Britain came by sea, notably grain from North America and meat from New Zealand and Argentina; Australia also sent significant quantities of both. Britain’s larder as well as its status as the workshop of the world relied on naval supremacy. Aware of this dependence and jealous of Britain’s extensive empire, Germany built up its own navy and by 1914 had thirty-four light cruisers capable of operating over long distances. The chief weakness was a lack of ports. Germany’s Pacific territories—the Marianas, the Marshalls, the Carolines, and portions of New Guinea and Samoa—provided its navy with wireless stations and hiding places but none of them possessed a port that could service modern warships. Hence the importance of its

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Tsingtao (now called Kiautschou) naval base on the Chinese peninsula of Shantung. For its part, the British Admiralty maintained more than thirty battleships and cruisers in Far Eastern waters in 1900 but had withdrawn half of them to home duty by 1910 to meet the build-up of the German navy. When Winston Churchill became first sea lord, he intensified this trend. Meanwhile the French fleet had been recalled from the Far East while that of Russia, the third member of the entente cordiale, rested on the sea floor after its destruction by the Japanese navy in 1905. To fill the gap Churchill wanted Australia and New Zealand to incorporate their new navies into the Royal Navy under his command: he insulted the dominions in 1913 by suggesting that they could be protected by a quickreaction force stationed as far away as Gibraltar. Churchill also used Britain’s 1902 alliance with Japan, the rising power in the region, counting on its navy to neutralise the German threat in Chinese waters. Japan took advantage of the outbreak of war in 1914 to capture the Tsingtao naval base in an operation completed by the end of the year. It had previously seized control of the German colonies in the north Pacific, making clear its territorial ambitions. Britain could hardly protest. After all, New Zealand and Australia had pursued their own imperial ambitions when they occupied German Samoa and New Guinea in August and September of 1914. Yet the equatorial symmetry of these appropriations did not assuage the resentment of the dominions, which were as fearful of Japan as they were of Germany. When Australians pondered the threat of invasion, and they did so often, they betrayed a strong racial anxiety that they would be overrun by Asian hordes. The first contingent of Australian and New Zealand volunteers was to assemble in September at Albany, on the south-west corner of the Australian continent, and then proceed to the Suez Canal. Before the transports left on their long voyage, it was necessary to establish the position of the enemy squadron, since the two German armoured cruisers were a match for any Allied warship in the Indian Ocean with the exception of the battle-cruiser Australia, which Churchill wanted to transfer to the Atlantic. Where were the Germans? Graf von Spee, the commander of the East Asiatic Squadron, had ordered his warships out of Tsingtao upon the outbreak of war in July 1914, and they assembled at a north Pacific rendezvous in August. If they stayed to defend the German colonies, they would be outgunned. They could cross the Pacific to neutral ports in South America, or go the other way, to prey on Britain’s extensive sea-trade in the Indian Ocean. 118

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Spee decided to split his squadron, and took one of the armoured cruisers and one of the light cruisers east, detaching the other three vessels to steam west. Reports soon reached Australia of a German cruiser conducting operations in the Bay of Bengal, sinking ships, even bombarding Madras. British intelligence failed to establish that it was not operating alone. The Australian and New Zealand governments worried that the enemy was lurking in their home waters. They sent their contingents with heavy escorts across the Tasman, down the eastern coast of Australia and across the Bight to Albany. They wanted to delay the final departure. Then came news of a German raid in Tahiti. If there was only one German cruiser in the Indian Ocean, the Anzacs might set off under the protection of two Australian and two British cruisers, providing the Royal Navy met them midway at Cocos Islands and escorted them to the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, a Japanese cruiser replaced one of the two British escorts so that it could join in the search for the missing raider. Hence the mixed composition of warships guarding the flotilla when not one but three German warships discovered it approaching the Cocos Islands. The German raiders stood off till nightfall. Under the cover of darkness the Scharnhorst came alongside the Melbourne on the port station and opened fire. The sudden bombardment at close range crippled the Australian ship. Meanwhile the two German light cruisers engaged the Sydney on the starboard station and soon put it out of action. The raiders then cut into the troopships and raked one after another. The British cruiser, which had been leading the flotilla, steamed back into the carnage, and put up desperate resistance before it too listed helplessly out of the action. The defenceless transport vessels scattered like sheep as the wolves bore in on their quarry. One after another, the troopships were overtaken and sunk. Horses and men perished in the darkness. When the British escort ships that had been waiting at the Cocos Islands reached the flotilla, dawn was breaking and the Germans broke off to steam east. Only eighteen troopships survived the disaster and the death toll exceeded 15 000. The few survivors from the two Australian naval vessels who were plucked from the sea demanded to know how the German raiders had managed to catch them unawares. But of the Japanese cruiser that had brought up the rear of the flotilla and was meant to guard it, there was not a sign.

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‘Japan now has a free hand in the Far East’, declared Japan’s military attaché in Washington a week after the outbreak of war. His country seized the chance to extend its presence in China, and the expansion into the Pacific heralded further plans. Although the Japanese navy had put to sea ostensibly to escort the Australian and New Zealand troopships, it had taken the opportunity to occupy Germany’s territories in the north Pacific; and while the occupation was nominally only a wartime measure, there were clear signs that annexation was intended. The nationalist lobby in Tokyo helped the military to brush aside the objections of civilian ministers, so that the navy fortified the islands, diverted their phosphate trade to Japan and imposed Japanese ways upon the inhabitants. To signal the new status of these territories, the South Seas squadron was renamed the Provisional South Seas Islands Defence Force and readied for a possible engagement with the United States, the only other power in the region that was not distracted by the European conflict. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, was caught in a quandary. Any public acknowledgement of Japan’s territorial claims would cause uproar in Australia. Any serious rebuff of those claims would endanger the alliance on which Britain relied to neutralise the German threat in the region. Britain’s object was to defeat Germany within Europe; its efforts outside Europe were designed to restrict the war, to hunt down the German raiders, take control of the German colonies in Asia and Africa, and eliminate Germany as a global force. While the British would refer to the conflict as the Great War, the official German history called it Der Weltkrieg. Hemmed in by opponents on both sides, those German strategists who conducted it always believed that victory would depend upon extension beyond Europe. German diplomacy and military planning before 1914 drew similarly on the expansionist idea of a Weltpolitik, and the belief that Germany had been denied overseas territories, trade and influence commensurate with its status as a world power. German strategists therefore looked to alliances in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East that might extend the war. German officers had trained Japan’s soldiers. Both countries had come late to military industrialisation and both resented their exclusion from the earlier distribution of imperial spoils; both also shared a desire to assert their new capacity. Now that Japan had taken all that the British alliance offered, might it not switch sides and make further gains? We do not know when the Japanese lost patience with Britain. It might have been Japanese interception of British messages late in 120

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October 1914 to the governor-general in Melbourne, urging him to placate the Australians with reassurances that the final allocation of Germany’s Pacific territories would occur at the end of the war. It might have been the failure of the British to restrain the dominions’ administration of New Guinea and Samoa, compounded by the Australian argument that since New Guinea was the administrative centre for all the German Pacific islands, its surrender to them gave them rights to the whole network. For their part, the Japanese insisted that the cruiser escorting the Australian and New Zealand troopships had experienced trouble with its boilers and lost contact with the flotilla late on 7 November. Unable to rectify the problem, the Japanese ambassador in London explained, the vessel had repaired to its home port. We do know, however, that the Japanese accepted the German surrender of Tsingtao on the same day and then allowed the three vessels from Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron to return to the port and fill their bunkers. The ambassador contended that Japan’s treaty with Britain required it only to help capture armed German merchant vessels, and said nothing about requiring warfare against the German navy. The Japanese inaction created particular problems for the British Admiralty. A home squadron had to be sent into the Indian Ocean to protect merchant shipping and hunt down the German raiders. Emboldened by their success, and encouraged by U-boat action in the North Sea, the German naval command directed an additional force of cruisers out of their home base and onto the high seas late in 1914. The Royal Navy could spare only limited numbers of its home fleet to police trade routes. The heavy toll of cargo ships lost in the Atlantic and Indian oceans drained food supplies and depleted the merchant marine. Australians learned of the Cocos Island disaster from newspaper reports on the morning of 8 November. The circumstances were shrouded by censorship, and it took some days before the pitifully small number of men pulled from the sea could be identified and the exact losses established. Ministers of religion then began the grisly business of informing the families of the loss of sons, brothers and husbands who had volunteered so eagerly to serve in the Australian Imperial Force and paraded through city streets just a few weeks earlier. The magnitude of the death toll was almost impossible to grasp. The navy suffered six hundred fatalities, the Australian Imperial Force over ten thousand and the New Zealanders more than four thousand. Stuart Macintyre

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Sixteen thousand Australian soldiers had served in South Africa between 1899 and 1902, and five hundred had died there. Now twenty times that number had perished in a single engagement, without firing a shot in defence against a predator that had struck without warning. The German squadron remained at large, and in following months it would harass Australian shipping and launch further raids on Apia and Rabaul. If these bases fell, then there would be no buffer to protect this country from the greater threat of the Provisional South Seas Islands Defence Force, which continued to patrol the Pacific. Australia therefore required its own navy to remain in home waters, and relied on British naval reinforcements. The survivors of the first expeditionary contingent of the AIF, meanwhile, had been taken to Egypt, and were soon required to defend the Suez Canal from a Turkish attack. Winston Churchill, who had hatched a scheme to force the Dardanelles and strike at the Turkish capital, was already calling for Australian reinforcements. There was no shortage of additional recruits. The volunteers who had been turned away in August were now enlisted and hastily trained. Nor was there any shrinkage of resolution. The deadly German attack brought the initial antagonism to the enemy to a fever pitch. The new note of irresolution concerned the deployment of these additional forces. The national leaders who had pledged Australia’s last man and last shilling to the defence of the empire were suddenly assailed by doubt. Would a second flotilla of troopships not run the same risk as the first? Were the renewed assurances of the British that the Anzacs could be escorted safely any more reliable than the earlier ones? Rather than dispatch these new troops half-way around the world, might not Australia need them to defend itself? In the end, a further 30 000 men were sent to Egypt in February but they arrived too late to complete their training before the Dardanelles expedition, so the newcomers remained in Egypt with the Light Horse. There were just two brigades of Anzacs available for the assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, and General Birdwood decided they would have to serve in a subordinate capacity to Indian troops and a Senegalese contingent of the French army. This combined force landed at a place on the peninsula that was named Colonial Cove on the morning of 25 April, and it stormed the heights before coming to a halt under Turkish fire. All subsequent attempts to take the peninsula failed. The valour the Allies showed over the next months could not make up for failures of planning and staff work, and all of the units took heavy losses in the botched withdrawal several months later. 122

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After the earlier naval disaster, this failed operation increased Australian criticism of the British war leadership. A young journalist named Keith Murdoch visited Gallipoli in the last stages of the operation and took back disturbing reports of deficiencies in the British command. He made much of the mixed composition of the force. Most Australian troops had nothing but praise for their comrades—the Africans vied with the Maori in their steadiness under fire, the Indians dealt with the precipitous terrain of the peninsula better than anyone—but there were some diggers who felt uncomfortable sharing their trenches with men of different races. Murdoch’s report went as a secret state paper to the British and Australian governments, but was soon leaked. Back home, where the White Australia Policy was sacrosanct and Australians believed they were fighting to protect their racial purity, Murdoch’s account of Gallipoli cut across the efforts of Charles Bean, the official correspondent, to tell a story of distinctively Australian heroism. Even while the Australians were entrenched on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Universal Service League was formed to argue the case for conscription. After a year of fighting, there was no prospect of respite: major battles on Germany’s Eastern Front had inflicted heavy casualties on both sides, while the offensive on the Western Front had bogged down into trench warfare that soaked up millions of combatants. The threat that Germany posed to Australia was abundantly clear. It was equally apparent to the founders of the Universal Service League that an Allied victory would require the full mobilisation of the country’s capacity. Just as Britain and the other dominions were abandoning voluntarism for compulsory military service, they argued, so Australia must insist that all men able to bear arms should rally to the defence of the empire. The manifesto of the Universal Service League was endorsed by civic dignitaries, proclaimed in metropolitan newspapers, preached from protestant pulpits. There were critics of Australia’s participation in the war, though in the aftermath of the tragedy in the Indian Ocean they were barely tolerated. Rather, the chief opposition to the Universal Service League came from those who were no less preoccupied by the threat to Australian security. Instead of raising additional troops for service in Europe and the Middle East, however, these patriots wanted to reinforce this country. They responded to the formation of the Universal Service League by reviving an organisation formed ten years earlier to promote greater awareness of Australian vulnerability, the National Defence League. Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905 Stuart Macintyre

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had been the catalyst for this league’s formation, and both Liberal and Labor leaders had used its platform to warn of the ‘yellow peril’ and mobilise support for compulsory military training and the creation of an Australian navy. The National Defence League revived during 1915 to campaign for an emergency naval program that would protect Australia from blockade or hostile landing, for an expeditionary force to reinforce New Guinea, for enlistment of fresh troops for home duties and for the rapid creation of metal and manufacturing industries that would make the country self-sufficient in munitions. The league drew support from separatists who decried Britain’s reckless disregard for Australian interests, from radical nationalists who demanded that Australians control their own destiny and from Irish immigrants who associated the empire with an English and protestant ascendancy. The Universal Service League and the National Defence League were at odds over where Australia’s war effort should be directed: abroad as part of an imperial force or within the Pacific under local command. The debate they conducted arose from divergent interpretations of the nature of the threat to Australian security: one regarded the country as an integral component of an empire menaced by a Germany bent on world domination, the other as an immigrant nation vulnerable to Japanese as well as German ambitions. While the strategic issue rested on an estimate of closely balanced considerations, an atmosphere of alarm polarised the argument into one of loyalty and disloyalty. The empire loyalists accused their opponents of a failure of duty that betrayed Britain and sullied the national honour. The advocates of home defence accused their opponents of a reckless disregard for Australia’s safety. The argument cut across party lines. The conservative wing of the Liberal Party, with its roots in the finance and export sector, upheld the imperial cause; some members of its progressive wing, who drew their support from local manufacturers, inclined to home defence. The Labor Party had won an election on the eve of the war with the pledge to contribute Australia’s last man and last shilling to the Allied cause, but the Cocos Islands disaster shook that resolution. Andrew Fisher, a Scots immigrant who had given the pledge and was prime minister, led a party that was increasingly divided. Billy Hughes, an immigrant of Welsh descent, led the bellicose faction of the Labor Party. As attorney-general, he used the sweeping powers of the War Precautions Act to round up enemy aliens. Reports 124

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were circulating of German spy rings operating in the metropolitan ports and gathering intelligence on shipping; some said the departure from Albany of the Australian military convoy had been reported to Berlin and then relayed by radio to the East Asiatic Squadron. Such was the mood of grief and anger after the Cocos Islands disaster that every trace of the German presence in Australia was an affront. The Commonwealth seized the assets of German companies, closed German-language schools and newspapers, prohibited German cultural activity. The arrest and internment of enemy aliens affected not just the Kaiser’s subjects but the diverse nationalities ruled by the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Bosnians working in gold mines, Afghan camel-drivers and Lebanese shopkeepers were among those taken into custody. The extension of restrictions early in 1915 to Japanese traders as well as the Japanese communities living on Australia’s northern coast caused Japan to withdraw its consul and the British Foreign Office to reprimand its tactless dominion. Hughes was implacable. He acquired additional powers in 1915 with the passage of a Homeland Security Act, which allowed indefinite detention of naturalised and even native-born Australians. The socialist and feminist groups that opposed the war were constantly policed, their publications censored and their leaders imprisoned. But tightening austerity fuelled such protest. The onset of war had deprived Australian producers of European export markets and a shortage of shipping restricted sales of non-essential goods to Australia’s chief customer, Britain. A jump in unemployment was followed by a rise in the cost of living as the government commandeered food and war materials. The winter of 1915 saw hunger marches through city streets and shop windows smashed. The most forthright opponents of the war were the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an international movement of militant activists who scorned all forms of reformist politics. The Wobblies, as they were known, saw the Great War as a conspiracy of bosses to distract workers from the real war, the class war between capital and labour, and they urged direct action to disrupt the military machine. ‘If the politicians of Australia want war’, suggested the IWW paper Direct Action, ‘let them take their own carcasses to the firing line’. Tom Barker, the editor, turned the advice into a mock recruitment poster that read: ‘To Arms! Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians, Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and other Stay-at-home Patriots, Your Country Needs You in the Trenches! Workers, Follow Your Masters!’ Stuart Macintyre

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For twelve months after the Cocos Islands disaster, the government took a middle line between support for the empire and domestic defence. It continued to raise recruits and still sent some of them to reinforce the AIF on the Western Front, where it was deployed from the end of 1915. But the government held many back for home duties and dispatched a division for forward defence in New Guinea. Meanwhile, the steelworks that began production in Newcastle in 1915 were rapidly extended, and used to lay down the keels of four battleships and eight cruisers, while factories and workshops in Melbourne and Sydney were given over to the mass production of munitions. Working day and night, Australia created its own machine tool and chemical industries, and quickly expanded the manufacturing base. The workforce requirements were met by extensive labour controls, including the replacement of military volunteers by women workers and the transfer of men from primary to secondary production. All of this required an unprecedented measure of government planning, and it was accompanied by rancorous argument over the direction of the war effort. The demands proved too great for Fisher, who resigned in October 1915 and was succeeded by Hughes. The new prime minister immediately travelled for discussions with the Imperial War Cabinet to London, where he was met by urgent entreaties to provide greater assistance. The British government called for more troops, more food and more transport. Reinforcements were needed to make good the appalling losses on the Western Front. German raiders were inflicting a heavy toll on the ships that carried grain, meat and dairy products to feed Britain, and Hughes was asked to increase Australian exports and concentrate his country’s shipbuilding program on the mercantile marine. Hughes returned with a strengthened conviction that Australia’s fate was bound up with the outcome of the war in Europe. ‘Australia was a nation’, he insisted, ‘only by the grace of God and the power of the British Empire’. The war, he proclaimed, had purified an ancient race and restored its purpose; it ‘had welded the scattered the nations of our Empire into one united people’. Hughes was persuaded that conscription was necessary to make good the shortfall in volunteers for military service. He also realised that many in his party would resist conscription, some because they could not accept compulsion and some because they feared the conscripts would be sent away from where they were most needed. Since he could not count on their support for the enabling legislation, Hughes decided to appeal over the head of the Labor Party to the whole country. He called a referendum. 126

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The plebiscite on military conscription for overseas service was held on 28 October 1916 and failed narrowly. Unabashed, Hughes led his supporters out of the party room to make common cause with the Liberal Opposition. They formed a new party that Hughes wanted to call the National Party, but that title was so obviously at variance with its purpose that the Liberals insisted it should be the Universal Service Party. The accession to office of this new ministry coincided with an appraisal of the heavy losses on the Western Front over the past year and a new appeal from Britain for assistance. The omens were auspicious. Germany’s East Asiatic Squadron had finally been eliminated and its submarine fleet was concentrated in the Atlantic. Even though the South Seas Islands Defence Force remained on station above the equator, Whitehall insisted that there was no need for Australian concern over Japanese intentions; in any case, the Royal Navy would protect Australia from any danger. Still dependent on voluntary enlistment, the Universal Service government reduced the home garrison and recalled most of the New Guinea force for service in Europe. They left with a full escort of Australian warships at the end of November. Even while this new contingent was on the Indian Ocean, Japan struck. During 1915 its ambitions had been concentrated on China, and the demands it imposed on that hapless republic disturbed the Western powers, which had already secured their own concessions. The United States wanted Britain to restrain its restless ally, but Britain was too dependent on Japanese co-operation to do more than temporise. AntiWestern sentiment in the Japanese press helped the military faction of the government to brush aside moderates and seize the opportunity for further expansion. On 7 December 1916 the Japanese launched a naval assault on the American fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay. Caught by surprise, the United States navy suffered serious losses. The South Seas Islands Defence Force quickly captured the American base of Guam in the Marianas, and then the American portion of Samoa as well as the larger western portion of Samoa, which had been lightly garrisoned by New Zealand since its occupation in 1914. A Japanese landing in the Bismarck Archipelago of New Guinea followed. Here was vindication of the predictions of the National Defence League and proof of the danger to Australia’s very survival these patriots had identified. Their warning had been renewed when the Universal Service Party assumed office a month earlier, and yet the government Stuart Macintyre

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had once again accepted British assurances and stripped Australia of its defences. Hughes’ reckless insistence on imperial assistance disturbed some members of the Liberal Party when it joined with the prime minister, and six of the Liberal dissidents defected to sit in parliament as independents. Others turned on the government during the emergency sitting of parliament that followed Japan’s attack on the Philippines. The ministry fell and several parliamentarians crossed the floor to allow Labor to take office in the last week of 1916. The new prime minister was Frank Tudor, a homely and decent man. Tudor had grown up in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond and lived there for the whole of his life, though he travelled as a young man to England and the United States to practise his trade as a hatter. He was elected to the first Commonwealth parliament as the president of his union; neither an orator nor an ideologue, Tudor remained above all a union man and a faithful servant of his working-class electors. His word was his bond, while his home was always open to constituents. The prime minister neither smoked nor drank, and remained a deacon in the Congregational church—a denominational attachment that eased the sectarian tensions. Moderate, conciliatory and widely respected, Tudor seemed an antidote for the mercurial Hughes, yet he quickly showed he could be as bold as his predecessor. Just a few days in office, on 27 December 1916, Tudor released a message for the local press and cable transmission to international news agencies. In it he acknowledged the gravity of the country’s position, menaced by a powerful foe in a distant theatre of war. The prime minister also acknowledged that Britain was sorely pressed on land and sea, and unlikely to be able to provide the assistance that was needed to repel the Japanese. ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind’, he stated, ‘I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. The prime minister’s New Year message brought a storm of criticism from the loyalists of the Universal Service Party. They accused Tudor of shameful opportunism in pandering to the anti-British extremists of his party and severing the sacred links of empire. Yet even as he issued his declaration the Australian prime minister was engaged in acrimonious dispute with his British counterpart, David Lloyd George, who that same month had succeeded Herbert Asquith at 10 Downing Street. As soon as he took charge, Tudor requested that two of the four Australian divisions in service on the Western Front be released to return 128

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to the Pacific, along with a new fifth division that was due to disembark in England. Lloyd George rejected the request. Tudor insisted, and the Australian navy escorted them back. Historians still debate the significance of Tudor’s call to America. It brought only a limited response from its primary recipient, since the United States was soon drawn into the war in Europe and would direct its principal effort there. President Wilson did assemble a new Pacific fleet, and it proceeded on a visit to Sydney and Melbourne after driving the Japanese out of Samoa. The arrival of this second Great White Fleet, just nine years after President Roosevelt had sent the original one here, delighted Australians; Alfred Deakin came out of retirement to repeat the welcome he had given then to its commander, Admiral Sperry, heralding an ‘“entente cordiale” spreading among all White men who realise the Yellow Peril to Caucasian civilization, creeds and politics’. But the Americans stayed only long enough to refit and steam north, while hasty negotiations between Washington and Tokyo averted a naval battle for Guam and Manila, which returned to American control. This uneasy truce removed the immediate threat to Australia but left Japan’s capacity and ambition intact. The consequences of Tudor’s declaration on Australia’s relationship with Britain are equally open to argument. The illusion of an empire united in loyalty to a common sovereign and a single purpose was shattered, as was the constitutional fiction that the ministers of the United Kingdom determined the foreign policy of the dominions. Hitherto the governor-general relayed communications from Whitehall to and from his Australian ministers, but from the end of 1916 the elected leaders of the two countries negotiated directly. From 1917 Australia had its own ambassador in Washington, the first of additional diplomatic representatives who took their instructions from a Commonwealth department of external affairs. The economic ties were also strained. In the early phase of the war Australia had agreed to prohibit the export of wool to all foreign countries except with British consent, and while Hughes was in London in 1916 he had negotiated for Britain to buy the whole Australian wool clip. These arrangements now collapsed and Australia sold much of the next season’s wool to the United States. At the same time Britain imposed new conditions on further Australian war loans, and the new loans were raised instead in the United States. Australian shipments of wheat, meat, butter and other agricultural products had already declined with the shift to industrial production as well as German raids on Stuart Macintyre

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merchant shipping; the provisioning of the home country fell away as the Commonwealth redoubled its own defence effort. By 1917 the Allies were sorely pressed. Russia, in particular, had suffered crippling losses. The Tsarist regime fell in February and socialists began to demand that the new provisional government quit the war. On the Western Front the French were faltering and Haig’s spring offensive ground to a halt with appalling casualties. Reduced shipments of food and other supplies were straining the capacity of Britain to sustain its effort. The grave news from Europe softened recriminations in Australia during the federal election of July 1917. Opposition to the war had died away after Japan brought it so much closer, though the subsequent retreat of Japanese forces revived discontent. The new government placated the unions with the introduction of price controls, a levy on wealth and the formation of workers’ councils. Even so, the burden of wartime austerity weighed heavily, the close regulation of labour was increasingly irksome and a ban on strikes was particularly resented. The relatives and friends of those interned were pressing their demands for release and amnesty. Tudor was a conciliatory leader who lifted many of the restrictions on domestic dissent. He quashed the conviction of twelve leaders of the IWW who in 1916 had been framed for arson. During the 1917 election, the head of the Commonwealth Counter-Espionage Bureau, who operated out of the governor-general’s office to co-ordinate its activity with British security, came forward with a new allegation against the Wobblies. He accused them of sabotaging a ship that sank off Gabo Island as the result of an explosion in its hold, shortly after it had been serviced in Sydney. Hughes demanded that the IWW be declared an illegal organisation. Tudor ordered an immediate inquiry by Frank Brennan, a Labor lawyer, who soon found that there were no grounds for the allegation. The head of the Counter-Espionage Bureau was replaced and the intelligence services reorganised. By far the most sensational charge in the election came from Frank Anstey, the minister for Labour and National Service, who claimed that the Hughes government had prepared a plan to abandon northern Australia in the event of a Japanese invasion. Anstey was a radical socialist and publicist who had denounced the war in Europe as ‘a war of rival capitalists’ and bitterly denounced Hughes, his close associate before the war, for surrendering Australian workers to the carnage. An 130

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investigation suggested that the evidence for Anstey’s claim was thin but it revived hostility to the leader of the Universal Service Party who had stripped Australia of protection in its hour of need. Labor won a record majority in the ensuing election and Hughes resigned his leadership of the opposition. Back in office, Tudor determined that Australia must introduce military conscription for overseas service. He was mindful of the need to reinforce detachments in the Pacific, but did not rule out replacements for the depleted two divisions in Europe. That possibility upset the radical nationalist wing of the Labor Party, and Anstey resigned from the ministry in protest. The recent repression of a nationalist rising in Dublin inflamed Irish Australians, and Archbishop Mannix denounced the proposal. Still, Tudor put all of his authority behind it, carried the Caucus and withstood criticism at a special federal conference of the Labor Party. Conscription was then introduced by an act of parliament. The legislation provoked an acrimonious debate that distressed Tudor, who felt a personal responsibility for what he saw as his national duty despite the raw memories of the earlier referendum. While troopships were on the Indian Ocean at the end of 1917, the prime minister was tormented, unable to sleep, stricken by heart disease that would soon end his life. The spring of 1918 brought a final reckoning. Russia had capitulated, allowing the German leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff to concentrate their forces in a massive western offensive that once again threatened Paris before the Allies, with United States reinforcements in the line, blunted its advance. With Germany close to exhaustion, it seemed at last that victory was imminent—but the Allies also were at the limits of endurance. They, too, were starved of essential supplies as the result of German naval activity; without food from the dominions, the Londoner’s food ration was as meagre as the Berliner’s. There had been mutinies in the French army in 1917, and serious unrest in the munitions works. Many French divisions now refused to take part in further attacks. The Socialist Party, which had already withdrawn from the country’s wartime coalition, the union sacré, called for an armistice. The call was taken up in the United Kingdom and Italy. On the Clyde, where shop stewards were defying the leaders of the engineering unions, John Maclean declared a provisional workers’ government of Scotland. In Ireland the nationalist rebellion flared up once more, while workers’ councils were formed in Manchester, Sheffield, Stuart Macintyre

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Milan and Turin. At Wilhelmshaven the imperial fleet refused an order to put to sea, in Berlin the socialists and shop stewards were debating an uprising, and in Bavaria the socialists seized power. The generals faced a dilemma. They could suppress the civilian unrest, providing the detachments they withdrew from the front could be trusted to obey orders, but unless the other side followed suit there was a risk of military defeat. In the end the governments of France, Britain, Italy and Germany each decided the risk was too great and in October 1918 opened negotiations at a conference in Stockholm. The conference finally reached agreement on peace terms that restored territorial boundaries to 1914. Even then, the settlement came too late to save the French government, which fell at the end of 1918 to a socialist Fourth Republic. An Irish republic was quickly established and the acceptance of Scotland’s independence in 1919 dissolved the United Kingdom. The Hapsburg empire fractured into separate nation-states, both Austria and Hungary becoming socialist republics, while in Germany the Kaiser abdicated and a coalition of socialists and liberals began the process of reconstruction. Remnants of the old order, especially the landed and military classes, contested these new regimes, but the tasks of rebuilding the ruins, demobilising the armies, healing the loss and restoring living standards called for a new spirit of egalitarian solidarity that only the socialists could provide. Some nationalists found it difficult to abandon dreams of martial conquest: an obscure German lance-corporal, wounded at the Somme in 1916, gassed in 1918, convinced himself that Germany had been betrayed by the treacherous and enfeebling influence of Jews and Marxists. He even attempted a futile putsch in 1923 to make General Ludendorff dictator, but few wanted to repeat that folly. It was different outside Europe. The United States and Japan had been drawn into a conflict that was not of their making, and had taken the opportunity to pursue their own ambitions as rising world powers. They had suffered losses but not the catastrophic toll of human lives imposed on the European combatants, nor the crippling drain on savings and investment. Their homelands were unscarred, their productive capacity enhanced rather than depleted. Australia, a lesser power, had made a greater sacrifice. It had entered the war as a faithful dominion, pledging its last man and last shilling to the cause of empire, only to realise that the greater part of both were needed at home. It emerged from the war with a clearer sense of its own national interest. 132

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The change of mood was apparent at the Stockholm Peace Conference. While siding with their British counterparts on many issues, the Australians supported President Wilson of the United States and President Martov of the Russian Republic in their joint resolution on national self-determination. Tudor’s successor made clear his support for Irish independence, and joined with his Canadian and South African counterparts at a subsequent imperial conference to secure formal acknowledgement that the dominions were ‘autonomous communities within the British Commonwealth, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs’. If Australia escaped the worst of the European slaughter, it also did not undergo the same political transformation. Labor remained in office and continued to appeal for unity and discipline in the tasks of post-war reconstruction, but the spirit of common purpose quickly dissipated. The greatly enlarged war industries had to adjust to peacetime production at a time when the country yearned for relief from austerity and the public finances were burdened by the large war debt. Women were reluctant to give up their place in the workforce. Employers chafed at the regimen of controls. The Wobblies spearheaded a challenge to wage restraint with tactics of direct action that the arbitration system could not contain. When Keith Hancock returned from Harvard to take up the chair of History at Adelaide University at the end of the 1920s he could find little trace of the pre-war Deakinite settlement. One of the terms of the Stockholm peace treaty was equal access to all markets. Germany joined with Japan and the United States in insisting on it since they believed they had been locked out of world trade. The League of Nations, established at Stockholm, was charged with the prevention of war and the promotion of co-operation, including in trade and commerce. Hence Britain had to open up its territories to foreign trade and investment, and Australia had to abolish its preferential duties on British imports—a requirement that was more easily accepted now that its own factories produced such a wide range of manufactures. While the principle of national self-determination did not extend to colonies such as New Guinea, it created a strong pressure on the European powers to allow greater freedom to their overseas possessions. The British introduced representative forms of government to India and the Malay states, as did the French in Indochina and the Dutch in the East Indies. This liberalisation eased the resentment of a Japan that was no longer denied access to the countries of its region. Stuart Macintyre

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Partly for that very reason, it disturbed the older generation of Australians who felt the props of their security as a White man’s country were being kicked away. A growing trade between Australia and Japan eased their former antagonism. Closer economic and strategic relations with the United States aroused fears of a new dependency. Such were the costs of going it alone in a post-imperial world order. The war ended in 1918, the conflict it engendered shows no sign of abating. The first anniversary of the Cocos Island disaster in 1915 was marked by public ceremonies of mourning and ever since 7 November has been sacred in the national calendar. The divisive memories it evoked softened with the passage of time, so much so that participation in the midnight service fell away alarmingly in the 1960s; but interest has revived and thousands of young Australians now travel each year to the Cocos Islands to scatter wreaths on the surface of the Indian Ocean. That day of tragedy is a constant point of reference in the national story as it is repeatedly retold. For some it marked a painful coming of age that set Australia on a path of self-sufficiency, for others a trial that disclosed a fatal infirmity of purpose. It lent itself to nationalist prejudices against a ruthless enemy and treacherous allies, and to the realisation that all the combatants experienced their own senseless loss of life in a struggle for world supremacy. Politicians continue to define national loyalty and international relationships by reference to this formative episode, and they draw on historical interpretations of the war that are more sharply divergent than ever, for this is a major theatre of the History Wars. A freelance historian has recently alleged, to the acclaim of the American-owned sections of the national press, that a cabal of politically correct historians working at the Australian Defence Force Academy have conspired to fabricate a myth that more Australians were lost at sea as the result of the Admiralty’s mistake than died on land in defence of the British Empire.

Coda The voyage of the Australian and New Zealand troop transports across the Indian Ocean in November 1914 forms the fifth and sixth chapters of C.E.W. Bean’s The Story of Anzac (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1921), which is the first volume in the official history of Australia in the Great War. His account is amplified in the companion volume of A.W. Jose, The Royal Australian Navy 1914–1918 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935). The flotilla was indeed escorted by four light cruisers drawn from 134

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the Australian, British and Japanese navies, to guard against German raiders. Hew Strachan discusses the balance of naval forces in the Pacific, as well as the German and Japanese strategies, in the first volume of his major history, The First World War (Oxford: University Press, 2001); he quotes the Japanese diplomat on p. 481. Graf von Spee did divide the German East Asiatic Squadron, and two cruisers commenced operations in the Indian Ocean but there was only one, the Emden, at the Cocos Islands. The Sydney disengaged from the flotilla to attack and disable it so my story of the night attack and destruction of the troopships is imaginary. So too is the suggestion that the Japanese navy colluded with the Germans (in fact, the Japanese cruiser, the Ibuki, wished to join the action but was ordered to remain on escort duty). On the other hand, Japan’s expansion in China, its occupation of the North Pacific islands and the misgivings as to its further intentions are all documented in the literature. Peter Lowe, Great Britain and Japan 1911–1915: A Study of British Far Eastern Policy (London: Macmillan, 1969) and Keith Yates, Graf Spee’s Raiders: Challenge to the Royal Navy, 1914–1915 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995) are useful accounts. The counterfactual history draws out a series of consequences from the early disaster of the Australian Imperial Force. It posits a shortage of troops for the Dardanelles expedition, a lesser Australian role and a more costly withdrawal, hence robbing the Anzac legend of much of its impact. E.M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations during World War I (Cambridge: University Press, 1993) provides details of Keith Murdoch’s criticisms. I hypothesise that the German navy was able to inflict a much greater toll on Allied shipping, creating grave supply problems and hastening the end of the war. Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), emphasises the importance of the dominions to the war effort as sources of food. The imaginary Cocos Island episode has consequences for Australia’s wartime history. My political narrative preserves the wartime Labor government led by Fisher and then Hughes down to the end of 1916. Works such as L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography. Volume 2: The Little Digger 1914–1953 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979) provide a political narrative, while Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia 1914– 1920 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989) describes the security regime. There was a Universal Service League pressing for Stuart Macintyre

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compulsory military service in Europe; in light of the more proximate threat I have revived the pre-war National Defence League. The anti-war agitation of the IWW is quoted in Ian Turner, Sydney’s Burning (London: Heinemann, 1967), pp. 5, 15; Hughes’ bellicose statements are in Donald Horne, The Little Digger (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 68, 100. I follow the date and result of the first conscription referendum, as well as the split in the Labor Party, but have suggested that the new party Hughes then formed would have identified its imperial orientation with the title of the Universal Service Party. Some readers will note that I have Japan launch a naval attack on the United States base in the Philippines on 7 December 1916, exactly 25 years earlier than its air force attacked the Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii. The subsequent assaults on Guam, Samoa and Rabaul are all imaginary, and it will be apparent that I have superimposed key episodes of World War II onto World War I in order to anticipate their implications for Australian strategic policy. Accordingly, I have installed Frank Tudor into office in similar circumstances to those that made John Curtin prime minister in 1941; his message to America follows the wording of Curtin’s; his insistence on returning Australian troops for home defence follows that of Curtin, and so does his insistence on conscription, as well as his re-election. Similarly, I have Frank Anstey anticipating Eddie Ward’s allegation of a ‘Brisbane line’. Tudor did follow Hughes as leader of the Labor Party but remained leader of the opposition until he died of heart failure in 1922, while Anstey was as outspoken a federal Labor parliamentarian as Ward would be. There was no American naval expedition to Australia in 1917, and Deakin did not repeat the welcome he had given to Admiral Sperry in 1908 (which is quoted in Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, volume 4, 1901–1942 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 139). Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) relates the accusations of sabotage against the Wobblies, and Frank Cain reveals the activity of the intelligence services in The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983), but Frank Brennan did not discredit the accusations and the Wobbly leaders were not released from prison until 1920. My account deals accurately with the Russian Revolution except that I have an early peace thwarting the Bolsheviks. The mutinies did occur, as did the labour unrest, but the Stockholm conference that met in 1917 was restricted to the socialist parties and failed to restore peace. 136

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The counterfactual conference a year later relies for its plausibility on the exhausted nature of combatants unable to gain a decisive advantage, and the political settlement depends on their acceptance that this was so. Without peace terms dictated by the victors, and in the absence of wrangling over responsibility for defeat, it is assumed that the politics of rancour and revenge would not have revived—hence the allusion to Hitler’s failed Munich putsch in 1923. Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade After World War I (2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) explores these dynamics. The story told here suggests how a reconsideration of Australia’s war aims and national interest might have softened the suspicion and resentment that poisoned public life after the war. It is counterfactual to the political history of the post-war decade, which saw the Nationalists in office and secret armies of ex-servicemen turn out during the depression to guard the nation’s honour. It is also at odds with a group of historians who insist that the war was necessary and just, that Germany was bent on world domination and posed a direct threat to Australia, and that their espionage justified the internment of German nationals. Their claims are set out in John A. Moses and Christopher Pugsley (eds), The German Empire and Britain’s Pacific Dominions (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2000) and Jurgen Tampke (ed.), ‘Ruthless Warfare’: German Military Intelligence and Surveillance in the Australia–New Zealand Region before the Great War (Canberra: Southern Highland Publishers, 1998). A more open-ended inquiry, including a counterfactual by Geoffrey Blainey, was conducted at the Australian National University in 1994 and the papers edited by Craig Wilcox as The Great War: Gains and Losses—ANZAC and the Empire (Canberra: Australian National University, 1995). A dissident military historian, John Mordike, argued in An Army for a Nation: A History of Australian Military Developments 1880–1914 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992) and ‘We Should Do This Thing Quietly’: Japan and the Great Deception in Australian Defence Policy 1911– 1914 (Fairbairn, ACT: Aerospace Centre, 2002) that the early Commonwealth created a citizen militia to be used for home defence against the threat of Japan, but British influence diverted it into an imperial role.

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7

WHAT IF WHITLAM HAD WON ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO IMPLEMENT HIS PROGRAM? James Walter

On 11 November 1975, the Labor government of Gough Whitlam was dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Liberal leader, Malcolm Fraser, was appointed as caretaker prime minister. The Dismissal was a political crisis. The coalition parties had used their majority in the Senate to deny Labor the ‘money bills’ necessary for government services. Now, they were rapidly passed. However, industrial action was threatened, and, briefly, civil dissent loomed. For many, this was a ‘constitutional coup’. Whitlam denounced the Liberal leader as ‘Kerr’s cur’, and Labor’s campaign slogan was ‘Shame, Fraser, Shame’. For his part, Fraser went to the electorate promising stability and order (‘Turn on the Lights, Australia’). The coalition won a decisive victory in 1975 and again in 1977. Labor was out of office until 1983, and the Whitlamite revolution became a symbol of excess, ill-discipline, and failure. Later Labor governments led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating offered greater fiscal rectitude, narrower cultural vision, and a dominating commitment to free-market economics. They, in turn, became models for a more conservative brand of social democracy around the world. Today, Whitlam’s legacy is still contested but seemingly much diminished and tarnished with associations of economic incompetence.

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The dismissal of 1975 still dominates our political memories. It is a contemporary cliché that the prosperity and experiment of the recent past would not have been possible but for this confusing, destabilising moment. And yet, it might have unfolded so differently. Let us revisit the later months of that fateful year. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government had been elected in 1972 on a grand program of social reform, forged in the 1960s. However, it soon became clear that ‘the program’ could not readily be achieved in the more straitened circumstances of the 1970s. Hence, disunity threatened. Cabinet ministers pursued individual, sometimes conflicting, ends. There was internal squabbling and an embarrassing record of ministers being shuffled and removed. The cabinet was divided over whether to pursue its Keynesian economic principles or to accept the Treasury’s counsel of restraint. Behind the scenes, alternative measures to fund the Labor dream began to be considered. One minister even used a mysterious Pakistani intermediary to pursue a massive loan from the Middle East. This was the ‘scandal’ that the conservative parties had been waiting for. The Liberal–National Country party decided to use its majority in the Senate to block the government’s appropriation (or ‘supply’) bills. On 16 October, the Senate deferred voting on the budget. Conservative leader, Malcolm Fraser, reasoned that without ‘supply’ the government would be forced to call an election. In a moment of disorder, victory would be complete. Sensing this, Whitlam decided to tough it out. He refused to call elections and made contingency plans to ensure Commonwealth workers and creditors would be paid. Whitlam thought that the opposition would be blamed for any ill effects or public suffering. In consequence, he argued, the Senate majority’s nerve would eventually break. A stalemate developed, and public feeling on both sides ran high. Who would be the first to crack? Unexpectedly, matters were brought to a head with the intervention of the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. The events of 11 November 1975 have been relayed many times before. Whitlam, intending a partial compromise, contacted Kerr’s office to arrange an appointment. His plan was for a half-Senate election, which might deliver a new majority to Labor and break the paralysis of government. Kerr deferred the appointment until 1 pm. There was a Remembrance Day service to attend, and other official duties to perform. In fact, once the service was completed, Kerr spent the morning on seemingly minor matters—interviewing for a position on James Walter

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his staff, and sitting for a portrait with the artist Clifton Pugh (who had earlier painted a powerful portrait of Whitlam). Not only that, Kerr also made an appointment to meet with Fraser at 1.15 pm. Why this odd ordering of business? The possibility of a half-Senate election had already been canvassed in public, and Kerr had decided that it was no solution. He reasoned that Labor’s quest for a majority might fail, and, in this case, the crisis would be prolonged. Instead, Kerr determined upon a more radical course. After conversations with Sir Garfield Barwick, Kerr decided that he would ask the prime minister to hold a general election. If Whitlam refused, he would hand him a letter terminating his commission. Malcolm Fraser would then be commissioned to form a ‘caretaker government’ whose purpose would be to pass supply and to hold office until an election could be held. This was a complex plan. As the morning passed, the governor-general contemplated the future with anxious anticipation. Certainly, Kerr’s sitting for Clifton Pugh did not go well. The viceroy was fidgety and preoccupied. Finally, he terminated the session. Embarrassed, Kerr explained himself to the artist. He had much on his mind. In a confessional fit he would come to regret, the governor-general outlined his plans. Pugh was a friend to Whitlam and several other Labor figures, and he could barely contain his fury. Rapidly, he packed his equipment up and departed the scene. And so John Kerr got down to business. The meeting with Whitlam went as he had predicted: Whitlam refused to consider a general election and was handed the letter terminating his commission. Fraser was rapidly summoned and commissioned as caretaker prime minister. His brief was to secure supply and to govern until an election on 13 December. Fraser returned immediately to Parliament House to inform his colleagues and to prepare for the afternoon. It was expected that the supply bills would be reintroduced and passed immediately upon the resumption of the Senate at 2 pm. Where was Whitlam? On leaving Yarralumla, he returned not to parliament but to the Lodge, where he summoned his key staffers and senior ministers to brief them on the sacking. Curiously, no one thought to include the managers of government business in the Senate, which is where the mechanics of Kerr’s plan were to prove vulnerable. But for an accident, it is conceivable that the ALP leaders in the Senate, unaware of what had happened, might have reintroduced the supply bills at 2 pm and they would instantly have been passed, allowing for the smooth dissolution of parliament. 140

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Yet chance intervened. Pugh had sought an outlet for his rage in ringing an acquaintance, ALP Senator Jim McClelland, known to have been a friend of Kerr, to express condolences and to ask his view of this ‘betrayal’ by a Labor appointee. Astonished, McClelland in turn phoned Whitlam’s office to confirm what Pugh had told him and then forewarned ALP senate leader, Ken Wriedt. There was just enough time for Wriedt and the manager of government business in the Senate, Doug McClelland, to rearrange matters so that the supply bills could not be considered until that night. This was to give Whitlam a crucial window in which to bring a vote of no confidence in the caretaker government before Fraser had been able to secure supply. The outline of Kerr’s intentions was made clear to all when he released a press statement at 2.05 pm explaining what he had done, his reasoning and his expectations concerning the caretaker government. When the House resumed at 2 pm it first had to complete the debate on a censure motion against the Whitlam government that Fraser had initiated that morning—half an hour passed before the predictable vote on party lines. That completed, at 2.34 pm Fraser stood and announced that he had been commissioned as prime minister until an election could be held and moved that the House adjourn. His motion was lost. Labor MP Fred Daly immediately moved the suspension of standing orders to allow Whitlam to put a motion, passed by the ALP majority, and then Whitlam moved want of confidence in the caretaker government, calling on the governor-general to recall the member for Werriwa (himself) to commission a government, also of course passed by the ALP majority. In effect, Fraser’s nascent government had been immediately defeated on the floor of the House and should fall. The speaker, Gordon Scholes, then adjourned the House and prepared to wait on the governor-general to deliver formal notification of this vote of no confidence, while Whitlam sought a follow-up appointment—Kerr refused to see either of them until late afternoon. In parallel, the Senate was descending into turmoil. There had been no announcement of the Fraser appointment when it resumed sitting at 2 pm (Fraser would not formally speak on this for another half hour). It soon became clear to coalition senators that the supply bills were not to be reintroduced. Coalition senate leader, Reg Withers, then asked leave to confer with Ken Wriedt behind the President’s Chair, where he forcefully put the view that since Fraser had the commission, he was entitled to take over the management of government business in the Senate. As no formal announcement had been made in the Senate James Walter

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(and neither side was yet aware of Kerr’s press release), Wriedt disputed this interpretation. While this exchange was under way, news came through that Fraser had lost a vote of confidence in the House, raising real questions about who was entitled to assume the prerogatives of government. At this point, the president of the Senate, Justin O’Byrne, relying on precedent cited in J.R. Odgers, Australian Senate Practice, exercised his discretion to suspend the sitting ‘until the matter of who should be entitled to manage the business of the Senate is clarified’. The possibility of the coalition being able to use its Senate majority swiftly to pass the supply bills it had been deferring was denied, perhaps indefinitely. Kerr was now in an impossible position. His expectation that Fraser would secure supply and that parliament could then be adjourned had been made public in his press release. This could not now happen. By convention, however, once he had received the speaker’s advice on the vote of no confidence, he would be obliged to dismiss Fraser and to reinstate Whitlam—knowing not only that the crisis would now be worse but also that his own position would be under threat, since Whitlam might be expected to ask the Queen to dismiss Kerr. Driven by these considerations, he took an even bigger gamble, the legality of which has been debated ever since. He stuck with his resolve to dissolve both houses of parliament, relying on section 5 of the Constitution as his authority; arranged for his official private secretary, David Smith, to read the proclamation dissolving parliament on the steps of Parliament House at 4.30 pm; and (never having seen the speaker) insisted that Fraser’s was still a valid commission. Against the challenge that the condition placed on Fraser—the guarantee of supply—had not been met, Kerr agreed that this would have been ‘most desirable’, but asserted that the wording of his earlier statement simply meant that Fraser had been asked to guarantee that coalition senators would no longer vote against supply: that guarantee given, the circumstances where they could so vote had been denied them. Against the charge that such a dissolution could not proceed without supply, he responded that section 5 implied no such qualification upon the governor-general’s reserve powers and further, that where a prime minister could not get supply (which was the case with Whitlam) he must resign and face an election, which is what Kerr had contrived to bring about. There ensued the most rancorous campaign in Australian history. On the one hand, the dismissed Labor government had been sliding in the polls for months as the result of disastrously bad management, 142

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unconventional practices and scandal—all of which provided both the justification for the coalition’s intransigence and the matter for its election campaign. On the other hand, Fraser’s confrontational tactics, and the shifts he was forced to adopt as an outcome of Kerr’s botched intervention, undercut his principal claim: that he was the apostle of integrity and sound government. Desperate to find a means to maintain government services between 30 November (when supply would run out) and the election of 13 December, and hobbled by Kerr’s injunction that the caretaker government could take ‘no new decisions’, Fraser was forced back on those measures that the prime minister’s department had prepared for Whitlam—an understanding with the banks to underwrite federal expenditure until new appropriations after the election could provide for their reimbursement. These were measures that Fraser himself had described as illegitimate prior to the dismissal and to which he now had recourse without even the endorsement of the legislature. This gave enormous impetus to the ‘Shame, Fraser, Shame’ campaign building up in the streets. The media persisted in debating not only the legitimacy of the dismissal and the dissolution of parliament, but also the probability that the banks’ deal would fall over. In time, the banks themselves began to express doubts. The confidence of all those who depended upon government payments—public servants, contractors and suppliers, pensioners and welfare recipients—was badly shaken. Given the interdependence of the private and public sectors, broad economic consequences could be predicted and all unions began to outline adverse effects on working people. The predictions that Labor ministers had made before the dismissal about the economic consequences of an irresponsible denial of supply began to look frighteningly real. Rhetoric became increasingly inflated, and Whitlam’s call to the protesters who had thronged to the steps of parliament on 11 November to ‘maintain your rage’ began to look tame against the apocalyptic admonitions of the unions as they geared up for a general strike, mooted for 30 November. Demonstrations against Fraser and Kerr began to turn violent. Labor leaders feared that the strike would rebound on the ALP, and ACTU president, Bob Hawke, campaigned energetically to head it off. But feelings were running so high that the strike movement became unstoppable. In the event, the tactic of funding public provision though the private banks held firm, and it was the strike that caused chaos. Industrial James Walter

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production was virtually halted and civil disobedience and protest reached dangerous levels. As each side accused the other of illegitimacy, the press began to hint at a type of civil war. The attempts of civil authorities to manage the strike lacked authoritative leadership, given the questions hanging over the caretaker government and the lack of coordination of state authorities. There was fighting in the streets. Tensions were exacerbated when it was reported that Kerr planned to call out the army to ensure public order. Finally, a measure of calm was restored by Whitlam himself when, in what has since been regarded as one of the great rhetorical feats of modern politics, he addressed a series of huge public meetings to mount the case that the proper response to the cavalier tactics of Kerr and Fraser was to deploy constitutional and parliamentary means to resolve the crisis—only thus would democratic due process be restored. The volatility of public opinion in the run-up to the 1975 election has never been matched. The polls, trending downwards for Labor all year (prompting pundits to predict that Labor must lose), began to swing back during the Senate stand-off. After the Dismissal, and as the potential economic consequences of the unfunded caretaker government became evident, massive support swung behind Labor (the pundits predicted a Labor landslide). But as violence emerged, the strike movement gained ground and industrial and civic disruption increased, support for Labor dropped precipitately (the pundits predicted a coalition landslide), only to be arrested when Whitlam’s intervention seemed to stem the anarchy. Given the knife-edge result in the 1975 election—won by the Liberal and National Country Party coalition with a slim majority after prolonged recounting in marginal seats—most commentators concluded that all the major players were damaged in the preceding crisis. Fraser’s ruthless confrontationalism had been an enormous gamble, hinging on dangerous manipulation of parliamentary conventions. Kerr’s botched intervention and willingness not only to deploy his reserve powers against a majority government, but also apparently to contemplate the use of military force against public protest, fatally undercut respect for the role of the governor-general. The erratic style and misjudgements of the ALP government had been ameliorated in the public mind by Whitlam’s sustained battle against the Senate and his persuasive, statesmanlike intervention in support of parliamentary propriety at the height of public disorder. But the violence, chaos and disruption surrounding the Great Strike told against Labor. Critics 144

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interpreted the final dispute over who should control the Senate, and the abrupt termination of its sitting, in such a way as to provoke the suspicion that Labor, too, had played fast and loose with the rules in its endgame.

The lost years Preoccupied with our domestic dramas, few Australians understood the vast tectonic changes under way: the 1975 crises were both an enactment of underlying tensions and a distraction from their true import. It was the start of what we now call globalisation. There had been a set of implicit understandings after the war between the Western democracies about how they would rebuild. Everybody believed in quarantining national development. Protectionism and American hegemony were the keys. Currency controls, tariffs, partnership between government and business, international investment in industrial restructuring but behind national tariff walls—this was how these implicit understandings were played out. Yet these conditions, if we only knew it, had a sunset clause. The success of economic restructuring meant that at some point business, finance and investment would become transnational, competitors would emerge to challenge American hegemony, new technologies would enormously increase the circulation of capital, and increasing demands for global investment opportunities would outstrip the capacity of governments to control what was happening. The OPEC oil crisis of 1973 was one indication of such pressures coming to a head. From that time all bets were off. The Fraser government, 1975–78, never really found its feet. Fraser came to office with a commitment to small government as the counter to Whitlam’s ‘excess’. Australia’s trade had suffered in the industrial disruption of late 1975, confronting the precarious new government with immediate economic problems. While its tenuous majority ensured party discipline initially, the government suffered enormous internal divisions between ‘wets’ (liberal progressives trying to sustain social liberalism) and ‘dries’ (economic conservatives asserting government rollback and market liberalisation as the solution to current problems). Fraser could not find the middle ground. Torn between the mantra of economic responsibility (with which he had challenged Whitlam), and a residual commitment to ‘nation-building’ (which in his case found expression as an unwelcome Tory paternalism), he could not offer a consistent message. His authoritarian response to party critics and his James Walter

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patrician public manner drove the dries into a sustained public campaign in support of neo-liberal economic policy. The public perception was that the government compounded current difficulties with policy inconsistency and was divided against itself. The Labor opposition was able to build its case for reinstatement on Fraser’s leadership: he had sought power through a disreputable gamble and, having succeeded, had no idea what to do with it. Whitlam, an indifferent prime minister but a brilliant opposition leader, continued to insist that Labor had a program that had been prematurely terminated and could yet ensure the future. Kerr’s refusal to depart the stage assisted the Labor cause, as he was consistently held to symbolise the unwise tactics that had precipitated Australia’s difficulties. Unable to venture anywhere without heavy security, continually buffeted by strident public protests, Kerr’s health began to fail, and at last, in mid-1978, Fraser was able to persuade him to stand aside; he immediately left the country. Sir Zelman Cowen was appointed his successor. Fraser’s government was blighted by the circumstances of its accession, its slim majority and its failure to persuade voters of a coherent direction. Kerr was the albatross around Fraser’s neck. Given the opinion poll volatility that, again, characterised the 1978 election campaign, it is unlikely that the electorate fully accepted Whitlam’s claims about a program for the future, or entirely forgot past mismanagement. But some of the old figures (Rex Connor, Jim Cairns, Frank Crean) had gone, and a new cohort (Paul Keating, Ralph Willis, Gareth Evans, Susan Ryan) had emerged to suggest generational renewal. It was, in contrast to the Liberals, a party that still seemed to stand for something. To the surprise of most analysts, the ALP won government again in 1978. Fraser resigned from parliament and was succeeded as Liberal leader by Andrew Peacock. Whitlam acknowledged that he now had to do things differently— neither the prime minister nor his ministers were given their heads in the old way and cabinet consensus ruled. Yet it rapidly became apparent that Whitlam’s brave hopes of finding new ways to promote his program could not succeed. The agenda forged so successfully in the 1960s was out of step with the times. Government-driven social reform was not achievable while economic reform was so clearly needed. The ALP descended into its own version of the conflict that had sundered the Liberal Party. Whitlam put his energies into foreign affairs, multicultural development, Senate reform and republicanism. He gave 146

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inordinate amounts of time to a preoccupation with fixed parliamentary terms and simultaneous elections for all levels of government. It was left to his treasurer, Bill Hayden, whose first attempt at fiscal conservatism had been evident in the 1975 budget, to introduce the new economic orthodoxies to a restive ALP. Despite his heroic efforts, caucus meetings and party conferences were consumed by battles between economic managers and social reformers. The Whitlam ‘program’ fell apart. This, like Fraser’s, proved a one-term government, and when the ALP lost the 1980 election, Whitlam resigned and Hayden was elected as federal Labor leader. Whitlam’s return to government left three notable legacies. First, he achieved significant augmentation of multiculturalism as ‘the Australian way’. His first government had begun the development of multicultural policy, and this had been taken up enthusiastically by Fraser who appointed a commission of inquiry under Frank Galbally. Whitlam in turn picked up the Galbally report and implemented its recommendations: his government in addition introduced migrant-support schemes, cultural ‘entitlements’ and language promotion. Second, unwilling to deal with the domestic imperatives of the day, he instead put his considerable energy into foreign affairs. His work led to ever closer relations with Australia’s Asian neighbours; those partnerships, in which Whitlam had been the catalyst, were later to pay dividends to subsequent governments as the Asian economies developed and stimulated Australia’s economic renaissance. Third, Whitlam was able to persuade key figures on all sides of politics that confidence in the role of the governor-general could never be restored, and that there should be a referendum to introduce a republic with an appointed president. It was not hard to persuade his colleagues on the left. The new Liberal leader, John Howard (who had defeated Peacock in 1979), opposed Whitlam vehemently, but said the Liberals should have a free vote on the matter. Since his fall from power, Fraser, and by extension Kerr, had been demonised by some Liberals. Others saw the governor-general as having undermined Fraser’s legitimacy. There were enough of each to consolidate a Liberal voice in support of Whitlam’s plan. The incumbent governor-general, Sir Zelman Cowen, had worked tirelessly as a ‘healer’ but the depth of negative feeling remaining after 1975 had defeated his best efforts; it was said he tacitly supported Whitlam’s move. Thus, with key supporters in all parties, the referendum proposal was supported in parliament. Put to the people in early 1980, it was passed and a republic with an appointed president was James Walter

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endorsed. The first president, appointed by both houses of parliament, was the chief judge of the Family Court, Justice Elizabeth Evatt.

The era of neo-liberal economics Internecine battles within the Liberal Party had continued after the coalition defeat of 1978, but by 1980 the dries were forcefully in the ascendant. Peacock, Fraser’s successor, was consistently bested in the House by Whitlam, and the progressive marginalisation of the small ‘l’ Liberals eventually saw him defeated in a 1979 party-room ballot by John Howard. With the dries dominant, and the freedom afforded by opposition, the Liberals adroitly used Commonwealth parliamentary study schemes to facilitate travel to the UK and interchange with their neo-liberal Tory counterparts. Margaret Thatcher had been elected as the Conservative prime minister in 1979, and was pursuing radical economic change there. The close ties between Thatcher and John Howard’s team were not known at the time, but by 1980 the Liberal Party had a message about the need for rigorous economic management that signalled certainty about future directions, a decided contrast with the failing Whitlam government and a pronounced distance from the Fraser years. The Howard Liberal–National government was elected in a landslide in 1980, winning the rare distinction of also controlling the Senate. Soon after his election, Howard appointed the Campbell Committee of Inquiry into the financial system. Its report eighteen months later, with sixty-four pages of recommendations on deregulating the financial system, was quickly implemented. Financial markets were liberalised; controls on borrowing, lending and foreign exchange transactions were removed; government trading and commercial activities were ‘corporatised’ and in many cases privatisation was initiated. Such measures won approval from economic pundits but not without disquiet in coalition ranks: on one hand, the National Party, with its agricultural producer base in mind, opposed the intended removal of all state subsidies; on the other, proposed reduction in tariff protection agitated manufacturers and fragmented business support for the government. Progress was therefore slower than Howard had promised, but he made this an argument for pushing ahead faster. Howard began to outline what he called the Buildup program, which promised more rapid rewards from more radical reform, and made this the centrepiece of his 1983 election campaign. Buildup was largely devised by his economic adviser, Professor John Hewson, who had been a part-time consultant to

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Howard’s office since his election as Liberal leader in 1979. Howard persuaded Hewson to stand for a safe Liberal seat in the 1983 election. Labor was not well placed to contest the coalition’s arguments. Hayden had worked effectively to heal the divisions in the party, but still struggled to persuade the majority that there could be no return to Keynesian economics. No one had yet devised a way to marry the message of equity and social responsibility with economic reform, and the unions—still smarting from the Great Strike—used their leverage to impede policy change. ACTU leader, Bob Hawke, could do little to help. He had clung tenaciously to his position after 1975, but had been damaged within the labour movement by his opposition to the strike— enormously popular with the public, he was still regarded with great ambivalence in labour circles and had to work constantly to shore up his position. When Hayden asserted his own claims as a responsible economic manager, he looked like a pale imitation of Howard. In November 1983, the Howard government won a second term, with a slightly reduced majority. Howard immediately made the newly elected Hewson his treasurer. The Howard–Hewson duumvirate now made Buildup the mantra of change. Between 1983 and 1986, still with control of both houses, they left the caution of the first term behind and outmanoeuvred the fainthearted on their own side. Australia moved to a floating exchange rate; tax rates were flattened and a goods and services tax (GST) was introduced; foreign banks were admitted to compete with locally based banks; monetary policy focused on price stability; public sector management was reformed (along private sector lines); service provision was outsourced; tariffs and agricultural subsidies were reduced or eliminated; and the sale of state assets was ramped up, with proceeds used to retire public debt. Hewson provided an endless stream of economic argument while Howard astutely capitalised on the very comprehensiveness of reform: those who suffered could barely collect their wits before the next ‘initiative’ arrived; Howard skilfully persuaded losers from specific reforms that they would be compensated when the next change was delivered; critics hardly had a chance to consolidate around a target issue before the government had moved on; and Howard painted all opposition as the pleading of vested interests while representing his government alone as attending to the large problems confronting the country. It was a bravura performance, winning plaudits from the international economic ‘commentariat’ and rivalling the parallel projects of

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Margaret Thatcher (in the United Kingdom), Ronald Reagan (USA) and Roger Douglas (New Zealand). But it was not trouble-free. There were four weaknesses that began to tell. First, Howard had wilfully chosen to distance himself from Whitlam’s (and Fraser’s) multicultural achievements, cutting back funding for multicultural programs, taking a hard line on immigration (introducing smaller quotas and ‘skills’ criteria that excluded applicants from developing countries), and allying himself with his northern hemisphere peers (Thatcher and Reagan) so insistently as to threaten Asian relations. Needled by questions on these topics, he borrowed from historian Geoffrey Blainey’s critique of past immigration policy in comments that were widely seen as adverse to their interests by Asian observers. Heretofore strong trading relations with neighbouring countries began to deteriorate. Second, deregulation of the labour market had been posited as integral to Buildup, but it became clear that deteriorating trade relations could be further undermined by the industrial disruption a union backlash would engender if Howard was to introduce the legislation to dismantle arbitration and the central wage-fixing system. Thus, Howard chose the slower route of winning public support for union reform first. Third, as the initial impact of the GST on small business began to be felt, failed small business operators emerged as vocal critics. Fourth, the climate of public opinion began to shift as the number of those who were beginning to hurt became manifest. None of these trends was pronounced enough to prevent Howard winning a third term in 1986, but they generated a much more difficult outcome—he lost control of the Senate; an independent, Ted Mack, won the Sydney North Shore seat from the Liberals; and Howard retained power by only two seats in the House—and they influenced the circumstances that would see him lose office in mid-term in late 1987. Labor made substantial policy progress in the period 1983–86. Hayden had made much of this possible, and the scale of the swing to Labor in 1986 was significant, but a third Labor loss marked the death knell for his leadership. He battled on for much of the following year but within the party some argued that change was needed and that he had failed to communicate ‘the vision’ to the electorate. Paul Keating, deputy leader of the parliamentary ALP, shadow treasurer and a brilliant parliamentary performer who had consistently dominated John Hewson in debate (unsettling him with the epithet, ‘the feral abacus’), began to be touted as the ‘coming man’. In August, 1987, Hayden tired of what he by then regarded as consistent undermining by his critics 150

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and moved a spill of leadership positions. In the ensuing ballot he was defeated by Keating. Politics rapidly turned sour for Howard in 1987. The deterioration in trading figures undermined economic confidence. Reform, it had been argued, would free up capital for more productive uses, but as extensive de-industrialisation kicked in it appeared that there were few alternative uses, and investors took their money off-shore. Cutbacks in public spending, high interest rates and high unemployment led to dramatic falls in private consumption, with corollary business failures, reductions in investment and diminished export expenditure. The pursuit of the free-market chimera had produced lower, not higher, rates of growth than those that had prevailed in the post-war era. In the span of the Howard governments, 1980–87, income disparities had become remarkably skewed: average incomes of the top 5 per cent of households had increased by more than a third, and of the top 10 per cent by about a quarter, while the bottom quarter of households experienced a fall in income of between 4 and 10 per cent—the sacrifices of change had been disproportionately carried by those least able to afford it. It became ever harder to depict critics as ‘vested interests’ speaking against the interests of the ‘broad mainstream’ as more and more of them—small business failures, manufacturers, farmers—came from the ranks of coalition supporters. Indeed, the eccentric Queensland National Party premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, taking issue with ‘those lunatics in Canberra’ and demanding Howard’s removal, began to build a populist ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign, exacerbating tensions between the Liberal Party and its coalition partner. Towards the end of the year, the new ALP leader, Paul Keating, already in his role as shadow treasurer having diminished Hewson, took the battle to the prime minister with an energy, directness and virtuosity Hayden had never equalled. Howard’s dogged self-righteousness appeared no match for the onslaught and he looked more vulnerable than at any point in the preceding seven years. In these circumstances, facing a hostile Senate and with a waferthin lower house majority (after the election of the speaker, the government had only a one vote advantage), Howard and Hewson might have been thought foolhardy in fighting for the final components of Buildup— the sale of the last significant government asset (telecommunications), and complete labour-market deregulation—and in introducing the legislation to implement these objectives. It could be predicted that their legislation would fail in the Senate. However, evidently they hoped to James Walter

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use the debate generated by these controversial tactics to revive the campaign for reform, and to reach deals with minor party senators to achieve some of their aims. Failing that, they would accumulate a series of blocked bills that could provide the trigger for a double dissolution. What they had not counted on was defeat in the House. The proximate trigger was a growing rift between the coalition partners, with indirect influence from the ‘Joh for Canberra’ movement, and allied restiveness among Queensland NP senators about economic policy. On 11 November 1987 two Queensland National Party backbenchers crossed the floor, along with independent Ted Mack, to vote against the government’s legislation on the sale of Australian Telecom. They had spoken bitterly about the devastating effects of economic reform on rural communities, and argued that the reduction of communication services that they saw to be the inevitable consequence of the Telecom sale was the final straw. Labor quickly pressed its advantage, moving a no-confidence motion, which one of the renegade NP members and Mack supported: the Howard government was defeated in the House.

The inception of ‘third way’ government Paul Keating, having won ALP leadership only months before, thus became prime minister without having to contest an election. It was widely thought that Keating would be unable to hold this tenuous majority together and that his tenure was unlikely to exceed that of the first Labor prime minister, J.C. Watson, who had governed for four months in 1904. The press immediately emphasised what a confrontational and divisive figure Keating had been, questioning whether Labor could have won an election under his leadership in normal circumstances. The ‘leadership biographies’ that were quickly produced adduced plenty of evidence to show that he appeared just as committed to swinging economic reform as Hewson and Howard had been, questioning whether he had an alternative vision. Yet, itself committed to the neo-liberal project, the press also insisted that, should he pursue an alternative course, diluting the momentum of reform, the country was doomed. Thus, if one believed mainstream commentators, whichever way he jumped, Keating was damned. If he could hold a voting majority in the House, Keating had two years in which to change his image and to establish the credentials of the Labor government. An immediate development favouring his continuance in office was that the Liberal–National Party coalition 152

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agreement was suspended while the respective parties negotiated to resolve their differences, so the Liberal and National parties would vote separately in the House. If the National Party—especially those who had crossed the floor—could be persuaded that there were gains for rural communities in the Labor agenda, then defeat of the ALP in parliament could be fended off. To Keating’s further advantage, polls were showing that people believed reform had benefited big business more than regular wage earners; that government had a role in ensuring a ‘fair go’ for all; that the growing gap between rich and poor was a cause for concern; and that there had been too much attention to economic factors and not enough to social issues. The policy initiatives developed under Hayden’s leadership would fruitfully be linked by Keating with these sentiments. In the desperate circumstances facing his government, Keating was the ideal leader. With Churchill as his acknowledged model, and the ferocity of a rat backed into a corner, he played out his own version of fighting all comers on the streets, on the beaches, in the skies—and in parliament. A dazzling display of hard-ball politics held the media in thrall, shattered the opposition and captured public attention. He was able to sell four ‘big-picture’ initiatives as the first steps in a program of ‘caring government’: the industrial Accord; an economic summit; the rural structural adjustment scheme; and investment in ‘capability building’. None of these initiatives, now so firmly associated with Keating’s first term in government, had been developed by him. Others provided the script on which he capitalised, but once convinced of its merits, he became its most ardent advocate. The idea of the Accord—through which unions acceded to containing salary claims in return for an enhanced ‘social wage’—had been developed as part of Hayden’s policy review in opposition. Its authors were Ralph Willis and, for the unions, Bob Hawke. Its success in practice depended on the negotiation between Keating, Willis and Hawke. The economic summit was the progeny of Hawke alone. He persuaded Keating of the tactical value of being seen to bring the key players from business, unions and state agencies together to reach broad consensus on economic policy directions. As the government could not risk this exercise being seen as a ‘sell-out’ to the unions, Hawke’s central role had to be obscured; thus the summit came to be chaired instead by Mick Young, whose ability to win friends on all sides (while keeping both Hawke and Keating happy) ensured a productive beginning. The rural structural adjustment scheme James Walter

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promised three things: investment in infrastructure (roads, railways and telecommunications); regional business strategy councils (with representatives from all levels of government and the private sector); and a rural employment strategy. The ‘capability building’ exercise began with a multi-sector review of educational provision and national economic needs, closely linked with the deliberations of the economic summit. It would rapidly reveal the adverse economic effects of ‘disinvestment’ in education by the preceding coalition government. The first fruits of these activities had barely begun to register before the 1989 election, but the pursuit of such ideas was enough to seed an artful message. This was a government that accepted the legitimacy of markets, and would make private sector input crucial in the policy project, yet it would not be driven by markets but by beliefs in a proper role for government, in a better future for Australia, and in the relevance of a renewed social-liberal vision. Polling showed that even those who could not abide the last of these tenets were persuaded by the first. In the face of disillusion, the time was ripe for proactive government. Keating translated this into his campaign message as he went into the election—this was a government for the 1990s. Keating’s campaign speeches canvassed Labor principles (and he represented his success against Howard as ‘a victory for the true believers’). He drew on Samuel Johnson (‘In a civilised society we all depend on each other’) to highlight the threat of divisions (‘It will be a long time before an opposition party tries to divide this country again … to put one group of Australians over here and another over there. The public of Australia are too decent, too conscientious and too interested in their country to wear these sorts of things.’). Emphasising the significance of values (‘It was Australian values on the line, and the Liberal Party wanted to change Australia from the country it has become, a co-operative, decent, nice place to live, where people have regard for one another.’), he challenged the need to subordinate economic to social imperatives (‘I will never accept for Australia the notion of a competitive economy being a synonym for social regression.’). Keating’s watchwords were the importance of a shared history (‘We can give young Australians a knowledge of their past and a sense of where they belong in the story. We can tell them about the gift of Australian democracy … We can imbue them with a faith in the core values of Australia …’); and ‘those great nostrums of access and equity’. It was a seductive message, and one to which the divided opposition—its Liberal wing so closely identified with market supremacist ideals, while its 154

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National Party wing struggled with a constituency won over by Keating’s rural reconstruction promises—had no answer. Keating won government in his own right in December 1989. Despite a divided opposition, and notwithstanding the support of significant private sector advocates who began to see the benefits of the Accord and the economic summit, the media had largely continued to represent Keating as a dangerous idealist, ignorant of global economic imperatives, until the election of 1989. Thereafter, it had to be acknowledged that the rhetorical battle against economic fundamentalism had gained some purchase. In this changed context, ‘policies of inclusion’ that would have been deemed unthinkable in the Howard years began to emerge. These included the Working Nation jobs compact (within which the 1988 rural jobs strategy was subsumed) and the Creative Nation package (which built on the 1988 ‘capability building’ review but now incorporated development of a creative industries package). The promotion of Aboriginal reconciliation, the appointment of a ‘civics expert group’ to revive responsible citizen politics, aspirations for gender equity, and the promotion of health and welfare were indicative of the early post-election phase. A ‘national strategies conference’ was initiated to complement the economic summit. There was continued insistence on the importance of ideas. Nonetheless, the vision of socially responsible, inclusive government could only be sustained if economic policy that complemented its aims was devised, and economic growth that provided the wherewithal for its initiatives was attained. Economic growth was sustained in the early 1990s as the Keating government developed a restrained version of a social market. Drawing on its rhetoric of inclusiveness, the government was able to build a picture of national development that incorporated better relations with Asia (and increased Asian trade); more investment in service provision and infrastructure (creating jobs); skills enhancement appropriate to a knowledge economy (directing more investment to education and removing divisions between academic and vocational training); industrial policy that recognised the utility of prudential regulation (access to Australian markets entailed accepting certain obligations); continuing wage restraint (with a better ‘social wage’); and a much enhanced metropolitan and regional structural adjustment scheme (drawing on the lessons of the earlier rural adjustment scheme with its regional strategy councils). Keating was advantaged by the Whitlam heritage in building better relations with Asia to offset the adverse effects of the Howard years, just at the time that the Asian ‘tiger economies’ were able to give significant James Walter

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economic stimulus to Australia. Only a growth environment could provide the opportunity for the style of proactive government now envisaged. Despite the contumely attracted from economic rationalist critics, the Keating government based its policy approach on the strategic trade theory that had emerged in the late 1980s. This recognised the importance of markets, the reality of globalisation and the necessity of global competitiveness. The government could not, therefore, be accused of returning to the old ways of protection and subsidy. Its intentions were manifest in such initiatives as the regional structural adjustment (RSA) scheme. This RSA scheme hinged on two things: agreement between federal, state and local government about revenue distribution that would both cushion the harsh effects of change and facilitate economic development; and the formation of metropolitan and regional stakeholder planning councils. GST revenue, flowing from Howard’s initiative, and the Keating government’s ability to determine how it was distributed, provided leverage on gaining agreement with the other levels of government on revenue distribution. Innovative use of the Loans Council and the Grants Commission supplemented this. The Metropolitan and Regional Planning Councils—involving representatives of all levels of government, key metropolitan or regional employers, unions and community interest groups—were crucial. Through the councils, active coalitions of state, commercial, worker and community interests were created. It was not their job to bail out failing industries. Rather, the injunction was to engage in area-based forward planning for economic change. Only on the basis of persuasive business planning would public funding be deployed. Policy implementation depended on the recommendations of the councils. Thus, for instance, funds to cushion those on whom change impacted most directly were linked to training for emerging sectors relevant to a specific city or region. Where government could improve the resource base or provide enabling conditions to attract competitive industries, public–private partnership agreements with sunset clauses were entered into. Infrastructure, research and knowledge production were seen to be key to the new economy—and these were areas where provision had to depend on government as well as private sector provision. The placement of new service infrastructure (and especially educational resources) was carefully matched with needs generated by the decline of old industries. That the new Labor vision depended both on national strategy conferences and on devolution to area-based planning councils gave 156

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effect to a communitarian approach long missing from the Australian polity. It was, for an electorate battered and disillusioned by a period of individualistic market fundamentalism, an attractive approach, and sustained the Keating government through another election, to 1995. It gave substance to the sentiments Keating expressed in his 1989 campaign. It appeared to be a means of managing economic change while giving new life to Labor principles of collective benefit and social responsibility. The government’s fortunes were undoubtedly boosted by Asian economic growth. Nonetheless, the fact that the Australian economy was one in which, with these policies, industrial change was facilitated proved attractive to investors. They were prepared to accept a degree of prudential regulation and the capital flight predicted by critics did not eventuate. In short, the Keating government gave hope that communities could negotiate the economic changes demanded by globalisation on their own terms. Market imperatives, economic growth and proactive government could work together. Thus it was that Australia came to be seen, again (as it was in the 1890s), as a social laboratory for Western polities: the pioneer of third way government.

Coda What really happened? There was no ‘civil war’ in 1975. Pugh may have been painting Kerr on 11 November (as was claimed in a press article by Peter Ryan, who had the portrait subsequently), but Pugh’s phone call to McClelland and all that flowed from this is my invention. The Labor leaders in the Senate were not forewarned of Whitlam’s dismissal in time and reintroduced the supply bills into the Senate, where they were passed immediately. While a motion of no confidence in Malcolm Fraser’s caretaker government was passed in the House, by then supply had been secured, Fraser had achieved what Kerr had asked, and parliament could be dissolved pending an election, as funding for the departments of state was assured. Despite outrage on the Labor side, perplexity and doubt about the propriety of Kerr’s intervention, and a series of demonstrations against Fraser, rage was contained—talk of a strike was fended off by ACTU leader, Bob Hawke. In the event, the Fraser-led coalition won the 1975 election in a landslide. Fraser professed his commitment to rigorous economic management but was still too much a nation-builder fully to adopt economic fundamentalism as pioneered by Thatcher. Despite conflict within the coalition between ‘wets’ and ‘dries’, Fraser’s majority gave him authority and his government won the next two elections, holding office until James Walter

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1983 (for the best account of Fraser in power, see Patrick Weller, Malcolm Fraser PM: A Study in Prime Ministerial Power (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1989)). The failure to address the problem of economic reform and to match ‘small government’ ideology with action led Liberals later to dub Fraser’s term a wasted opportunity (see J.R. Nethercote (ed.), Liberalism and the Australian Federation (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2001), ch. 13). In time, Fraser became an outspoken critic of economic rationalism—twenty-five years later he could be found upon the same platform as Whitlam speaking against dominant economic orthodoxies. Whitlam remained leader of the Labor opposition until 1977 when, having lost another election, he resigned and was replaced by Bill Hayden. Little policy progress was made in that time: Whitlam continued to insist on ‘the program’ he had developed in the 1960s and 1970s. A myth grew up that it could have worked if only the machinations of Kerr and Fraser had been forestalled and Whitlam in time was installed as a Labor hero, defeated by dark forces of the right, robbed of the greatness that was his due. Periodic celebrations of ‘the Whitlam years’ continued to obscure the rethinking that was needed. Hayden, as leader, worked doggedly with his Shadow Cabinet to address this problem and collectively policy gains began to be made. Precursors of the sort of policies that would later (in England and the USA) be claimed as ‘the third way’ could be seen in the economic policies developed in the office of shadow treasurer, Ralph Willis—much of this would be swept away in the circumstances of the ALP accession to power in 1983. By 1983, Fraser’s credibility was running thin, but despite the ALP’s policy progress there was public debate within the ALP about leadership. Former ACTU leader Bob Hawke, the most widely recognised and popular political figure in the country, had been elected to parliament in 1980 and came to be talked of as the logical leader if Labor was to win office. Fraser decided to capitalise on apparent dissension within the ALP by calling a snap election on 3 February 1983. Coincidentally, on the same morning that Fraser advised the governor-general of his intentions, Hayden resigned (saying bitterly that the ALP would win even if led by a drover’s dog), and Hawke was elected leader. Fraser unexpectedly faced a new, immensely popular leader and an apparently rejuvenated party. The coalition was defeated. Hawke, a profoundly non-ideological leader, installed Paul Keating as treasurer. Despite a shaky start, Keating adopted the neo-liberal rhetoric of the moment with enthusiasm, dismissing the work that had been developed by Willis’s staff in opposition as ‘tooth-fairy economics’. 158

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It was the ALP governments of Hawke (1983–91) and Keating (1991–96) that pursued economic deregulation and market solutions, arguing that both Australia and the ALP had to be transformed to meet the imperatives of global economic change. The most influential account remains Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty: Power Politics and Business in Australia (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1992), while a pointed critique of the capitulation to economic fundamentalism is Michael Pusey’s Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The Accord (see above) was an ingenious measure that allowed for a social wage, and some innovative social policies could be developed on the sidelines (see relevant chapters in Susan Ryan and Troy Bramston (eds), The Hawke Government: A Critical Retrospective (North Melbourne, Vic.: Pluto Press, 2003)), but there is no question that economic reform was the main game. The harshness of readjustment generated a deep social malaise, which has only increased since the Hawke and Keating years (see Michael Pusey, Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Peter Saunders, The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)). It was argued at the time that Hawke and Keating had abandoned Labor principles (see Graham Maddox, The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1989); Dean Jaensch, The Hawke– Keating Hijack: The ALP in Transition (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989)), and that Labor has lost its philosophical raison d’être remains a strong argument (see, for instance, Andrew Scott, Running on Empty: ‘Modernising’ the British and Australian Labour Parties (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000)). Against that, there are some who have argued that Labor, under Hawke and Keating, adopted new means to meet its traditional objectives (the Ryan and Bramston collection, above, and Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2002) offer the most spirited defence). A methodical overview of the federal ALP story can be found in Stuart Macintyre and John Faulkner (eds), True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001). My own view is that the monistic nature of the argument that captured the policy high ground undercut the grounds for genuine political debate (see James Walter, Tunnel Vision: The Failure of Political Imagination (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996)). Labor has recovered ground (and won government) in the states as the pragmatic deliverer of basic James Walter

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services, but there is no big picture and little long-term vision. Labor has not discovered a persuasive account of what it stands for since 1996, and John Howard’s coalition governments (1996– ), while capitalising on the outcome of ALP-initiated economic reform, have added a virulent strain of market populism (in which freedom is interpreted solely as a matter of choice realised in the market) to the mix. This has led to even harsher disparities between the haves and the have-nots. Could it have been different? My argument rests on four suppositions. First, the mythology about Whitlam’s program had to be swept aside: a return to government would have shown it as unsuited to the problems of the day. Second, had the tensions within the Fraser government been brought to a head more swiftly, it is likely that Howard would quickly have become leader. Had the coalition then won government a much harder edged version of economic rationalism would have been instituted earlier, provoking a deeper disillusion. (The parallels are with what happened in Thatcher’s Britain and with New Zealand.) Third, in these circumstances Labor would have been compelled to explore alternatives, drawing on more innovative economic approaches being debated in the 1980s. Fourth, Keating was a leader energised by ideas and by battles—if, in effect, the script he actually adopted in the 1980s had been denied him (not only because it was irrevocably associated with his political opponents, but also because its shortcomings had led to electoral backlash), he would have had to find another script. Given a different intellectual framework, what might he and his colleagues have done? The narrative conceit is that a very minor contingency (such as the invented phone call from Pugh to McClelland) might have seen the events of 11 November 1975 play out in subtly different ways, changing the course of subsequent history—and seeing all these suppositions come to fruition.

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SOCIETY AND CULTURE

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8

WHAT IF THERE HAD BEEN A SCHOOL OF FIGURE PAINTING IN COLONIAL SYDNEY? Virginia Spate

Landscape painting and portraiture dominated colonial art in Australia, as they did in all the British settler colonies. Figure paintings—paintings of humans in action or at rest in real or imaged scenes—were rare. After the first decades of the settlement at Sydney Cove, painters rarely painted urban life, and instead represented landscapes in which figures were mere signs of human presence, if they were there at all. Images of the human figure had been central to European art since the Renaissance. Until the mid-nineteenth century, large-scale paintings of biblical and classical subjects were regarded as the highest form of art, because they required mastery of the human form, conceived in God’s image, and because they were believed to be capable of embodying the highest spiritual and ethical values. Paintings of contemporary life were regarded as less significant until the revolutionary transformations of the nineteenth century valorised bourgeois life and individual experience. In Australia, however, there were very few such works until the emergence of Naturalistic paintings of ‘national life’ in the 1880s and 1890s. These were descriptive works, composed as self-contained scenes (as in Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams), which give the spectator little access to the individual being of the people depicted. A landscape painting can persuade the spectator that he or she can imaginatively enter it, but this is a solitary rather than a social experience. A figure painting can confront one with a simulacrum of human beings in ways

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that make one see them as living beings, even when one knows that they are not. One can look at painted figures more intently than one can look at any real human being. Figure paintings can persuade spectators to consider the painted relationships between individuals, their society and their environment, and they have thus played a role in shaping how societies define themselves.

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Le but de la société est le bonheur commun. (1793)1 In 1989 a fragment of a once huge figure painting appeared in the catalogue of an obscure auction house, where it was identified as part of a fire-damaged painting by an unknown artist; a partly burnt label on the back identified it as Australia Conferring Her Benefits Equally on All Her Children, exhibited in the Garden Palace of the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879.2 This was enough to identify the painter as Francis Brown, who had had a retrospective exhibition in the International Exhibition, but most of the works exhibited were tragically lost or damaged in the fire that destroyed the Palace in 1882.3 In 1877 critics agreed that the centrepiece of Brown’s exhibition was the four-metre long allegory of Australia, with its three major life-sized figures set on Sydney Harbour, and surrounded by complex subsidiary scenes. Today all we can see is its central area: a radiant, sensuous female nude floating across the blue waters between the great cliffs at the entrance to Port Jackson; she is flanked by two beautiful youths, one white-skinned, the other dark, both transfigured by the golden Australian light. The real title of the painting is The Birth of Liberty, and, as I will show, it was originally an allegory inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. The painting also marks the birth of the Sydney school of figure painting, a school that focused on grand-scale paintings of contemporary human beings set in their local environment. These radical paintings embodied the promise of life in a new land, revealed the inhabitants of the land to one another, and uncovered the injustices that stained the colony’s aspirations towards social justice and human dignity. It would be fitting for this smoke-scarred fragment to be hung in the National Gallery of Australia, next to Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), as two foundational images that represent very different approaches to what Australia might be. Both suggest a sensuous harmony between human beings and a land that is free, open and beautiful, but Streeton shows a small, solitary figure, dwarfed by the landscape, and scarcely distinguishable from his sheep, while the other insists on human dignity and tolerance, and suggests that Australia was not only a home for sheep, but one where there would be love and harmony between men and women and between the races.4 The art of the British settler colonies was dominated by landscape painting, but New South Wales was unique among them in having a great tradition of figure painting, la grande peinture. The tradition was characterised by large-scale narrative paintings on religious and classical Virginia Spate

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themes, inspired by classical art, achieving its highest form in the high Renaissance and the seventeenth century; revivified in late eighteenthcentury neo-classicism, and becoming increasingly secularised in the nineteenth century. Such paintings often had a strong ethical content, even if this consisted simply of the expression of the dignity of ordinary human beings. Most of this article will be devoted to Brown’s work as an artist and as a teacher, followed by a brief account of the work of his artistic heirs, the greatest painters of pre-Federation Australia. The existence of a strong school of socially engaged figure painting in Sydney from the early 1800s to Federation has been long been neglected. The aesthetic quality of the surviving works of the school’s major artists is acknowledged, but there has been wilful misunderstanding and even fraudulent misrepresentation of the content of such works. They are regarded as somewhat eccentric, isolated works, rather than as part of a continuously creative tradition. As I do not have sufficient space to discuss this matter here, I will simply observe that the radical impulses within Australian culture have always had to contend with strong conservative forces, frequently masquerading as liberal. Although Brown’s students acknowledged him as the founder of the Sydney school, it has been difficult to reconstruct his oeuvre. The few paintings that survived the Garden Palace fire are almost all in private collections; some have been attributed to other artists, and some have even been vandalised by overpainting. Brown left a set of his lithographs after his major paintings to the Bibliothèque Nationale and these should help reconstruct his work. However, as I have not been able to study them in the original, only in photographs, I am not yet in a position to give a clear account of his stylistic evolution. Even Brown’s favourite pupil, James Eorthen, knew little more about his origins than that he was French and a Republican.5 The most striking result of my research has been the discovery that Francis Brown was in fact the Jacobin painter, François Topino-Lebrun. Lebrun (as he was frequently called) was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, the great neoclassicist, whose huge Oath of the Horatii (1785; Musée du Louvre), was celebrated as embodying a new ‘language of truth’ and as anticipating the French Revolution.6 This fact enables us to understand Brown’s oeuvre, as well as the principles that animated his teaching. From about 1812 to 1843, he taught several generations of painters and sculptors according to the principles of la grande peinture, while insisting that their work should be firmly rooted in the contemporary world. 166

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The identification of Francis Brown with François Topino-Lebrun (born in Marseilles in 1764) is confirmed by a collection of undated letters now in the archives of Mouton-sur-Chèvre, Var (Box T-J 35A). Most are addressed to Marie-Anne-Thérèse Rolland,7 the mother of the correspondent; they are signed with the initials ‘FTL’, and were written in Sydney. The handwriting is the same as Brown’s, and one letter contains an annotated list of paintings, some of which refer to Sydney locations, thus making it possible to identify them with known paintings by Brown.8 Scholars have ridiculed my argument on the grounds that the official records state that Lebrun was arrested on 13 November 1800, accused of complicity in an attempted assassination of Napoleon, and guillotined on 31 January 1801.9 However, the first of the Rolland letters was written from Mauritius in March 1801 and signed François; it asks an unidentified friend to tell his mother that he had escaped arrest and had signed up aboard ship. The ship is not named, but late in life Brown told Eorthen that he had arrived in Sydney on the Le Naturaliste in 1802. Le Naturaliste and Le Géographe were the two ships of the expedition to Les Terres australes, which left Le Havre under the command of Nicolas Baudin on 19 October 1801.10 Brown is said to have ‘laughed sardonically’ when he told Eorthen that the expedition had been ordered by the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and that ‘the Tyrant would have sliced off my head if he could’.11 The expedition was instructed to chart the western and southern coasts of Australia, as well as to collect zoological and botanical specimens, to depict flora and fauna, and to represent its native peoples. It carried a full complement of scientists, notably three botanists and five zoologists, as well as four artists. The committee reporting on the expedition praised the scientific value of the 1500 drawings and paintings that it brought back, noting in particular that these represented the ‘history of Man’, that is, ‘All the details of the existence of the natives … all their musical instruments, those of war, of hunting, of fishing … in a word all that their rude ingenuity has been able to accomplish’.12 The outward voyage was hard, and three of the official artists—one of whom was named as Louis Lebrun—are recorded as having left the ship at Mauritius. This is obviously an error: Topino-Lebrun was often called Lebrun, and he certainly stayed on board. Baudin replaced the departing artists with Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who had joined the expedition as a gunner’s mate, and Nicolas-Martin Petit, who had been one of David’s pupils, and who produced some beautiful and sympathetic drawings of Aboriginals in Van Diemen’s Land and on the Virginia Spate

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mainland.13 Both served on Le Géographe so Lebrun may have had little contact with them. The Baudin expedition arrived in Sydney in May 1802. During its five months’ stay Lebrun jumped ship. He would have been an object of suspicion to the colonial authorities, but he must have convinced them that he risked death in France, and even in those nervous times, he was given refuge.14 He soon anglicised his name, and in May 1803 we find an announcement in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser that a Mr Francis Brown was offering his skills as a surveyor, draughtsman—and portrait-painter. Lebrun/Brown lived in Sydney for the rest of his life. He could not safely return to France while Napoleon was in power, and, with his ardent faith in La Glorieuse,15 he probably would not have wished to do so when the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814–15. It did not take long for him to establish himself as a respected member of the colony for he soon recognised that his artistic skills could have practical applications that were useful in a colony where no one else had his education. Academic teaching provided an exacting discipline, and there was obvious practical application of the skills acquired after years of learning to draw (from prints of the great masters and plaster casts, and then from the living model), and from intensive study of anatomy, composition and perspective. Lebrun first studied in the Marseilles Académie des Beaux-Arts; he attracted David’s attention in Rome when the latter was painting the Oath of the Horatii, and later joined his studio in Paris. He shared his master’s ardent faith in the Revolution, but not his fanatical support of Robespierre on the Committee of Public Safety, and, he even tried to temper some of the savage acts committed during the Terror. Under the Directory and Napoleon’s rise to power, Lebrun remained committed to the Constitution of 1793 with its grand opening declamation: ‘Le but de la société est le bonheur commun’, even when this became very dangerous, for this was a time when anyone who pursued radical reform ran the risk of being denounced as a terroriste. Lebrun was close to Gracchus Babeuf who dreamed of recreating an ideal Republic founded on his fundamental principle: ‘By its origins, the land belongs to no one, and its fruits are for everyone’. Babeuf was tried for conspiracy against the Directory and was guillotined in 1797. Lebrun himself tempted fate a year later when he exhibited his sombre, six-metre long masterpiece, The Death of Caius Gracchus (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles) in the Salon of 1798. The contemporary relevance of the classical subject 168

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would have been recognised by those in power, since Gracchus—whose name Babeuf had appropriated—had sought to reform the Roman Republic through the redistribution of land. Surprisingly, however, the Directory purchased Lebrun’s painting for the City of Marseilles.16 Whatever the reason, once he began his climb to supreme power, Napoleon would be ruthless in eliminating anyone unwise enough still to believe in the continuous struggle for a just republic. When Lebrun/Brown arrived in the colony, he was artistically and philosophically prepared for his new circumstances. He was neither an untutored convict struggling to paint naïve pictures of his new environment, nor was he contemptuous of les misérables for he had seen what they could accomplish: the destruction of the Bastille, the overturning of the Ancien Régime, the decapitation of a king; the creation of a citizen army that defended France against the European powers. He may well have seen Port Jackson with its military governor and oppressed convicts as a microcosm of the society he and his fellow-citizens had sought to eradicate. Moreover, Lebrun had seen David painting his huge Rape of the Sabine Women (1799; Musée du Louvre), and he would have known that Rome had been founded by refugees from Troy, that Rome’s population was increased by ‘a miscellaneous rabble’, regarded by the oldestablished tribes with contempt, and that from this originary violence there was to grow a great Republic.17 In Port Jackson, Brown was alone, an exile, easily suspect, with no hope of the collective action he had experienced in Paris, so it could be only through the solitary exercise of his art that he could hope one day to change minds. In this situation he found solace in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s faith in the perfectibility of mankind through Nature, but even he admitted to his ‘melancholy’ when he realised that the early colonists had no interest in art, and wanted only ‘records of their faces and their properties’ (and he mocked such portraits as ‘no more true than inn-signs’).18 Brown did paint classical subjects in Australia, but he had learnt during the Revolution that the people preferred paintings of contemporary life. The list of works in the Rolland papers names many such works, including Natives fishing on the waters of Port Jackson, Moonlight; The Departure of ‘Le Naturaliste’ from Sydney Cove; Men loading the ‘Dryad’ with bales of wool, 25 January 1831. Reports in the Sydney Gazette indicate that Brown displayed his ‘Scenes of Colonial Life’ in the window of his studio in the Rocks. But there were works that Brown could not have exhibited, such as The Battle of Vinegar Hill; A Dreadful Example of Man’s Inhumanity Virginia Spate

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to Man: The Flogging of a Young Convict; By its Origins the Land belongs to All: The Dispossession of the Natives from Woolloomooloo Bay; and The Rape of the Eora Women, a powerful example of the classicist distanciation that characterised David’s Rape of the Sabines.19 Other paintings show he had contact with political prisoners: he painted a portrait of Thomas Muir, one of the Scottish Martyrs (whose path he could have crossed in Paris in 1792), as well as two group portraits of the Wicklow United Irishmen and the Tolpuddle Martyrs that he called The Martyrs of Tyranny.20 Brown’s continuing existence in the colony would have been jeopardised had the colonial authorities known of such works. He was, however, respected by a succession of governors. His vivid portrait of Governor Philip Gidley King holding a bunch of grapes did much to establish his position in Sydney.21 Moreover, the psychological penetration of his portrait of Governor Macquarie suggests that he could sympathise with this representative of a monarch because he admired his humanity and his practical intelligence in developing the foundations of a new society. Indeed, his annotated list names at least twenty-one small paintings of the public works initiated by Macquarie.22 Academic training stressed mastery of drawing over colour, but perhaps surprisingly a treatise on painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the academically trained landscape painter, helped Brown find the means to represent the brilliance of Australian light. Brown’s waterstained, paint-smeared copy of this treasured book is now in the Mitchell Library.23 Valenciennes insisted on the necessity of the close study of nature to provide raw material for studio-paintings of classical or biblical subjects. He admitted that an artist cannot pose a female model for Venus bathing in the open air, but that he could go to a river ‘when the burning summer sun forces men to plunge into the water in order to be cool’ to do studies of the figures in natural light. Back in the studio the painter could use memory, imagination and his studies of male bodies to paint male and female nudes as if they were in nature. Valenciennes advises the painter to do quick studies since light changes so rapidly; he should study nature at different times of the day, in different seasons and weather conditions; he should also do studies of water, rocks and plants, including the structure, bark, and foliage of trees. Lebrun was in Rome when Valenciennes was there, and may have followed his advice when doing his own Italian landscape studies. His sensitivity to the brilliance of Italian light, as well as that of his native Provence, could have prepared him for the even brighter Australian light. A French exile, the Baron Wagram, described Brown’s lost painting of Port Jackson as: 170

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so brilliant in colour that it gives the painful glare of light, the almost vulgar blue of the sea and the sharp silhouettes the eucalyptus make against the hard blue sky. From the artistic point-of-view, one would prefer the veils of atmosphere characteristic of our dear Patrie, but one cannot deny the painter’s real skill in representing this landscape of the beginning of time.24 Brown’s annotated list of paintings restores the radical meanings of certain works that were falsified after his death. For example, he describes an allegorical painting, La Naissance de la Liberté : A Figure of surpassing Beauty rises, like Venus, from the Sea, her feet on a spar of a Wreck that signifies the Destruction of Empire. On either side rise rugged cliffs, the Sublime entrance to Port Jackson. She is the sacred figure of Liberty, coiffed by the Phrygian cap, escorted by Dolphins (which I drew from Life as they gambolled on the peaceful waters of this great harbour); she is flanked by two naked Boys, one white-skinned, the other black, who gaze rapturously at her; two spirits float above them in the sky, signifying the Winds of Equality (holding the Level) and of Fraternity (carrying three Infants signifying the different Races of the World). On a small bay, there are naked black figures and white men, throwing off the shameful garb of Servitude and their cruel fetters; they embrace joyfully, and trample the flag of Tyranny beneath their feet.25 The artist also describes the ‘Virile Line’ of the eucalypts and the brilliant light that ‘gives a transcendent Radiance to the pearly Flesh of Liberty’ as she stands ‘Naked and Unashamed in that state of Nature that existed before the Body was deformed by false Superstition and corrupt Society’. It is significant that Brown identifies Liberty with the goddess of Love. There are such close similarities between this description and the fragment of Australia Conferring Her Benefits Equally on All Her Children that they must be assumed to be one and the same painting. There are also significant differences: the breasts and pubis of Liberty are covered by floating draperies; there is no Phrygian cap, and the flying figures scatter roses instead of displaying the symbols of Equality and Fraternity. Pigment analysis and X-rays make it clear that a later painter added Virginia Spate

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the draperies and painted out the revolutionary symbols.26 A painting of revolutionary intent was thus transformed into a still beautiful, but conventional classical allegory in which the meaning of the erotic nude is lost. Other works were also overpainted or retitled so as to drastically alter their content. The blandly named Native tribes fighting one another can be identified with La Résistance héroique de Pemulwuy. Thick layers of paint were used to obliterate part of the work, but the flaking of the paint has partially revealed a line of soldiers with guns. Without them, the painting reads simply as an incomprehensible brawl between naked savages, and what Brown characterised as Pemulwuy’s ‘Heroic Anger’ as a bestial grimace. Brown’s most moving work was painted after the invasion of France by the Allied powers. He exulted in the fall of Napoleon, but the shame of the Allied invasion of his fatherland and the tragic farce of the restored monarchy shook his faith in the triumph of reason and justice. It was in this unaccustomed mood of dejection that he painted his sixmetre-long Naufrage de l’Esperance [The Wreck of Hope], now (disgracefully) titled Abide with Me. Unlike previous paintings of shipwreck, the ship is not painted in the distance; instead the painter imagines himself on the upturned deck as a huge wave sweeps desperate figures into the sea. Brown told Eorthen that in his anguish at the fate of his country, he wanted to remind himself—and others—that co-operation between men and courage against the terrible odds could once again regenerate Mankind, but that he had come to realise this would be a continuous struggle rather than a single heroic act as he had thought in 1789.27 Brown had witnessed shipwrecks at first hand so he was able to give intense realism to his figures—the mother holding her baby above the waves as they submerge her; the father desperately trying to resuscitate his dying child; the small boy who tugs at his weakened sister to show her the light of the rising sun; men struggling to keep the boat afloat, while others vainly signal a far-off ship. Wagram vividly describes all these details, but extensive repainting has transformed the heroic men into a motley band of villains, sinks the baby, drowns the mother, paints out the boy, and transforms his sister into an angelic figure in white praying for deliverance. In short, the painting loses its tragic intensity and becomes simply a typical example of pious Victorian sentiment.28 Brown died in 1843. He refused the Last Sacrament and affirmed his faith in Rousseau’s Supreme Being. His grave is in Waverley Cemetery on the cliffs above the sea, past which the little Naturaliste had sailed 172

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forty years earlier. His gravestone is ambiguously inscribed ‘MA PATRIE. LIBERTY OR DEATH’, but this, like the Phrygian cap, the level and the clasped hands carved into the sandstone, has been almost effaced by the sea-winds. Brown’s coffin was carried by six of his students. He had established his first school in his one-room studio-cottage in Gloucester Place in the Rocks in 1807. His first intention was not to teach artists, but to equip artisans with skills in mechanical drawing, surveying, drawing up plans for buildings, etc. His own training in perspective, and his studies of architecture, interiors, furniture and drapery could be adapted for working men, many of whom had no experience of measurement or draughtsmanship. Many, as he ruefully said in a letter to his mother, ‘had less written English than myself’.29 Brown’s greatest inspiration was always Rousseau’s writings on Nature found in the Confessions and the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire. But he also had a life-long interest in new developments in the earth sciences and the ‘sciences of life’. He bequeathed to the Mitchell Library the many books on geology, on fossils, on the controversies between Vulcanologists and Uranists, and on the Deluge or deluges that he had obtained from France. These included works by Buffon and Linnaeus as well as the *Philosophie zoologique of 1809, in which Lamarck developed his theory of transformism, and which was to contribute to the ultimate triumph of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Brown’s understanding of the natural sciences enabled him—and his best students—to see Australian nature as significant in its own right, rather than as a deformed or deficient variant on the universal nature claimed by European art. Brown was able to earn a respectable income from his surveying, teaching, and sale of portraits and paintings of colonial life, and in 1812 he moved to the two-room cottage in Potts Point where he lived the rest of his life. The second room was the private studio where he painted and stored his more radical works.30 The cottage had an extensive garden where he constructed a fairly substantial brick building for his teaching studios, in one of which he taught technical drawing, and in the other painting. This is the first hint of what he called in a letter home ‘mon Académie des Beaux-Arts’, an art school that in one form or another was to survive until the demise of life drawing in the 1960s. Brown was level-headed about what he could achieve: well-trained painters and graphic artists who could produce good portraits, landscapes, depictions of daily life, and of political and social issues, as well Virginia Spate

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as the ever-popular disasters of flood and fire. Brown had to admit that—as in most art schools—most of his pupils produced technically accomplished, but comfortable work, while his dream was to create painters who would produce paintings that would challenge their contemporaries to consider the realities of their lives, and to desire social justice. At the end of his life, he found one such pupil. James Eorthen, our first ‘native-born’ and greatest painter, is too well known for me to rehearse his life and work, so I will simply discuss how knowledge of the revolutionary origins of his teacher transforms our reading of his oeuvre. I have had access to Eorthen’s intensely private ‘Memoir to my son’, which reveals the ways in which his difficult childhood shaped him as an outsider who was predisposed to accept Brown’s radical ideas.31 He was born in 1821 in a slab hut at Snug Cove (incorporated in the township of Eden in 1843) in the days when the easiest access was by sea. His father John Eorthen was an emancipist from Sussex who acquired sufficient wealth through whaling, timber-cutting and boat-building to believe that he could make his son a gentleman. James’s mother was an Aboriginal woman whom John Eorthen had brought south from the Wollongong area. James remembers his father returning drunk at night to their one-room hut, confiding in his memoir: ‘He was violent sober, but when drunk he was a beast’. His mother tried to escape to her home, taking him with her, but the father overtook them. It is not known what he did to her, but he returned to Snug Cove only with his son, then aged about six. Her name was never spoken again. James grew up wild and rebellious. He refused any instruction beyond reading, and whenever possible he escaped to the bush with the Aboriginal boys who lived on the fringes of the settlement, and with them he spent ‘the happiest days of my youth’, swimming, hunting, learning to read the bush. Yet he belonged nowhere: his skin was light enough to suggest a Mediterranean origin, but he found his father’s community contemptible—and he had no access to the innerness of Aboriginal culture. When James was eleven years old, his father sent him to the King’s School to teach him discipline and ‘fine manners’. The boy who had roamed free now felt ‘caged, and in the dormitory at night I dreamt of Mother Earth, of the scent of the gums, the water of the creeks, cool and welcoming to the body’. He detested the quasi-militaristic school uniform, and was mocked by the ‘real gentlemen’s sons’. He said that he gave as good as he got, but that ‘it was blasphemy, not manly fighting, that put an end to my career as a gentleman’.32 His father, summoned 174

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to remove him from the school, decided that his son should have his portrait ‘done by the best face-painter in town’—Francis Brown. ‘Thus it was’, wrote Eorthen, ‘that I found my real father’. Faced by his obdurate refusal to do anything else, his father accepted that he train with Brown ‘as a surveyor’. Eorthen later wrote: I loved Brown. I learnt everything I know about Painting and Man from him but I laughed at his plaster casts, mocked his stagey figures, his allegorical fantasies, his classical subjects. But when he spoke to us about the spirit of place (using the fancy Latin genius loci), and told us tales of the loves of the gods, of sacred forests and of wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, I would dream of my own beloved forests and creeks …33 Eorthen was determined to paint his own place and time, not the myths of foreign places and past times. Brown—who had watched David embark on huge paintings of great revolutionary events with contemporary figures in contemporary clothes—encouraged this ambition and gave him the means to realise it by insisting that he follow the arduous processes of academic training. And Eorthen, impatient of anything else, submitted to this rigid discipline in order to master the skills that would make him an artist. He soon developed an original mode of expression, although it retained a strong stylistic relationship with Brown’s painting. Brown’s figures tend to be lighter and full of nervous force, while Eorthen’s figures became weightier, as if asserting their attachment to the earth. The materiality of his figures was intensified by his thick painterly brushwork, very different from Brown’s more refined technique. Eorthern’s first independent painting The Swagman (1841; The School of Arts Museum, Eden) depicts the eternal wanderer. He set his model—a well-known Sydney tramp who resolutely refused Christian offers of rehabilitation—on a track between the patches of forest that still survived between Sydney and Parramatta. He toned down the clearer colours of his master so that the landscape seemed to be vibrating with light. This was, he said, ‘a man who is free, who has liberated himself from the artificial desires of society, and who traverses Nature as if it were his home’.34 One of Brown’s most substantial contributions to Sydney culture was his establishment of annual exhibitions of art. He hoped to follow the example of the Revolutionary salons and to allow free access to all Virginia Spate

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works of art, but even his optimism faltered when he was ‘submerged in torrents of mediocre daubs’, so he agreed to a selection committee. By the mid-1830s, the annual exhibition had become an accepted part of Sydney’s social life, just as Brown had become a figure of authority in cultivated circles. Thus when he proposed works that transgressed English standards of taste to the ladies of the selection committee, no one dared admit their reservations for fear of seeming provincial. But even Brown met opposition in 1841 when his favourite pupil began submitting his ‘coarsely painted’ pictures of full-sized figures in scenes that conveyed no redeeming sentiment. He managed to convince them that The Swagman would be recognised in London or Paris as ‘a characteristic page of Australian history’, but he could not persuade the committee that two of Eorthen’s greatest paintings, The Shearers and Thawa Boys bathing in the Nullica River, should be shown to the public, so he exhibited them in his own studio where they attracted an attentive crowd. Even the critic of the Sydney Gazette, normally condemnatory of painterly techniques that violated Ruskinian ideas of finish, was not wholly negative: Why this young man has to put paint on with a spade is not clear to me. Attentive observation of God’s Creation is a surer way to the sacred Realm of Art than the daubing promoted by the French doctrine of ‘Realism’. Copying Nature is not Art. Paint that is like mortar is not artistic. But this writer does not shun youth. James Eorthen is young; he has talent. Let us hope he will settle down to paint good healthy pictures and give up his young man’s desire to shock his elders.35 A writer in the Sydney Evening Post was harder to please: No lady could look at his naked boys bathing, and any lady would be revolted at the disgusting men displayed in The Shearers as if they were examples of diseases in a medical textbook, but there were ‘ladies’ present, and what they looked at from behind their fans, this writer prefers not to consider.36 In The Shearers, Eorthen gave a pitiless depiction of the hardships endured by bush workers. Rather than standing above them in the position of the overseer—as Roberts later did in Shearing the Rams (1888–90)—Eorthen manipulates perspective so that the spectator seems to be on the same level as the men. The stunted bodies stand 176

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heavily on the floor, their bodies distorted with painful effort (besides which the bodies of Roberts’ shearers are tall and lithe). Eorthen’s shearers cannot straighten up, cannot walk away, and cannot be imagined as spending their accumulated pay on a spree in bush towns when their contract ends. They are doomed to endless labour. In contrast, the painting of Aboriginal boys bathing represents the sheer joy of liberated bodies delighting in the sparkling water. Beside a river shaded by casuarinas, the boys dive off the water-smooth rocks or run across the coarse sand (and the dabs of red paint make us almost feel the heat on the soles of their feet). I know of no painter who has succeeded in conveying the intensity of such bodily sensations, which clearly owes much to the ‘Garden of Eden’ of his boyhood. Eorthen’s paintings focus on the human body. He created images of bodies that bear the shape of their oppression or of the human instinct for survival; bodies formed by the dream of free men in harmony with their native land; bodies shaped by desire. Feminist scholars have attributed the rarity of his paintings of the female body to the masculinism of Australian culture, and it is true that his expression of desire was either masculine or diffused into the landscape.37 In this respect, one could argue that he sublimated the tragic early deprivation of his mother into desire for the maternal Earth.38 He rarely painted landscape paintings without a strong human presence, but when he did they have a powerful emotional charge that somehow conveys the sense that they are alive, that they possess meanings deeper than those of outward appearances. Eorthen’s landscapes do not reflect human emotion, nor is it represented in terms of its human utility (as in Brown’s works). He was scornful of what he called ‘property-painters’, and, although he praised von Guerard’s depiction of light-filled limitless space, he was angered by the meticulous little fences that the German artist painted around pastoral properties.39 Here his indignation at the doctrine of terra nullius could have fused with Brown’s account of Babeuf’s defence of a communist government which would ‘bring about the disappearance of all boundary lines, fences, walls, locks on doors … of all crimes, tribunals, prisons, gibbets and punishments; of the despair that causes all calamity; and of greed, jealousy, insatiability … in short, of all vices’.40 Although Brown had acknowledged Eorthen as his artistic heir, he appointed Frederick Lightfoot as his successor at his Academy of Fine Arts in 1845. Brown hoped that Lightfoot, a proficient painter, would carry on his legacy of intensive academic teaching—and maintain the Virginia Spate

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support of the guardians of culture in Sydney, as Eorthen was unlikely to do. He was not to know that Lightfoot’s art would be increasingly influenced by English bourgeois taste and notions of cultural propriety, and indeed by the ever-stronger insistence on the Britishness of this distant part of the empire. Lightfoot thus betrayed Brown’s legacy by producing a large number of technically skilled painters working in prettified, conventional styles and producing anecdotal and sentimental figure paintings, portraits that expressed nothing but their sitters’ social status, and landscapes empty of human presence or passion. Moreover, evidence suggests that it was Lightfoot who overpainted some of Brown’s works.41 The retrospective exhibition of Brown’s paintings and drawings at the Sydney International Exhibition in the Garden Palace was of decisive importance for the small Sydney avant-garde. It included some of Brown’s most important works, although most of his more radical paintings of colonial life were not exhibited. Yet times had changed sufficiently to allow the public to see his portraits of the political prisoners of the early colony (although the sitters were not named) and his Birth of Liberty which, even with its new name and even with Lightfoot’s overpainting, hypnotised viewers with its power and beauty. Other works were also doctored to make them conform to contemporary proprieties (for example, the Convict woman’s lament for her child was transformed into a piece of Victorian sentimentality by smartening up her ragged dress and battered bonnet and giving her soulful eyes). Lightfoot was a man of limited imagination, he may have felt that he was protecting Brown’s reputation in a society that was more ‘civilised’ than in early colonial days. If so he failed signally, since Eorthen, who had studied the paintings more intently than anyone, denounced his desecration.42 The scandal had a tragic sequel in the destructive flames of the Garden Palace fire. Deeply shocked by these events, Eorthen retired to Eden where he died two years later in 1884. He was buried, as he requested, in an unmarked grave by the river that he had immortalised in paint. A mediocre teacher does not necessarily destroy the capacity of academic teaching to give talented students mastery in the representation of the human figure. This is proved by the work of Aurora Luce and Bruce McCullion who submitted to Lightfoot’s teaching in the late 1860s, but who were to develop powerful and original styles. They hugely admired Eorthen’s work, and took advantage of his ‘Academy of Free Drawing’ where students could draw from the model.43 Luce recalled that Eorthen would take her and McCullion to see Brown’s works:

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In front of them, he forgot his usual reticence, and would talk with such passion that we were spellbound. He also told us about his goodness and dedication to the cause of liberty and justice. We will never forget these times, standing in front of those great paintings.44 Both painters were to inherit the two masters’ sense of the dignity of the individual human being, as well as Eorthen’s use of dense material pigment. Unlike Eorthen, both were able to go to Paris where they were plunged into an avant-garde that was creating new ways of expressing la vie moderne. Aurora Luce’s wealthy parents encouraged her studies with Lightfoot and then took her to Paris where she attended the Académie Julian. She visited the salons of 1868–70 where, like Berthe Morisot, she was particularly excited by pictures of modern figures ‘painted in the open air’.45 Her long correspondence with Morisot helps us understand not only the difficulties that confronted women artists, but their courage and creativity. After the accidental death of her parents, Luce realised that she would have to earn her own living, and she returned to Sydney in 1870 determined to be accepted as a professional painter. She set up an art school for young ladies, intending that they too should know art as a vocation not a pastime. Aurora Luce’s painting concentrated on ‘what I know from the inside; the life of a modern woman’. Morisot almost always depicted her female models sitting passively in their bourgeois drawing room or garden, but Luce’s new circumstances gave her greater empathy with women who worked, active women, the school teacher rather than the genteel governess; women editing a newspaper rather than writing social notes; women in the Domain demanding the vote or marching in the Eight-Hour Day demonstrations; she painted shop-girls, women factory-workers and women doing hard labour in the bush. When she did depict bourgeois women in their domestic cocoons, she conveys a sense of ennui, the neurosis of being supposed to have no occupation. She was almost unique in depicting women with inner lives: women who think, make decisions, even have desire. After her marriage to McCullion in 1878, her paintings of women have a sensuality that is unprecedented in women’s paintings until the early twentieth century. McCullion’s parents decided that he would obtain the best education in the Royal Academy School, London. Under Eorthen’s

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guidance, McCullion had already learned to draw the living model very well, but he now had to spend ‘two years at the RA, two years of excruciating boredom, drawing after plaster casts of noses, progressing to real noses, and graduating to plaster casts of Venus …’ He escaped to Paris in 1873, where he spent another two years, ‘in an ecstasy of paintings from the divine Veronese’s paintings of modern life to Degas’ malicious visions of the dark side of dazzling Paris’, as he wrote to his parents.46 He studied the contemporary works in the annual salons, but his real inspiration came from visiting the Impressionist exhibitions and Manet’s studio where, as he told Aurora, ‘I was overwhelmed by his fleur du mal, the divine—or diabolic—Olympia’.47 McCullion’s letters to Aurora make it clear that he was less interested in the Impressionists’ landscapes than in their paintings of modern life: I’ve just come back from the Impressionists exhibition, dizzy with excitement. The bon bourgeois are mad with rage at this sincere art that struggles to be true to its time—Renoir’s dance at the Moulin de la Galette!!! I’m standing at my window— gazing over the chimneys as you used to do—dreaming of getting home—thinking how to get down OUR life—the happiness of it—picnics—pretty girls—bright dresses on white sand—blue water. It’s strange that I had to come to the other side of the world to SEE it … Degas’ little pastels show that one can’t neglect the sordid side of the city—but I am more inclined to happiness (and you have something to do with that!).48 After McCullion returned home in 1877, he did indeed create a new vision of Australia, not as a place of hardship and oppression, but of simple pleasures in a beneficent nature in which all human beings could have a part. In 1880, McCullion wrote to Aurora: My bush studies are going well. It’s good to get out of the city—especially with the huge crowds for the Exhibition. I’m shocked at what you tell me about what that rotter Lightfoot has done to Brown’s paintings. And what’s this about Eorthen taking a black lad to see Brown’s paintings with you—and wanting to make him a painter? All right—I can see you wrinkle your nose and I admit I said women couldn’t do good stuff until I saw yours—so I’ll wait and see.49 180

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His slighting reference was to Eorthen’s last pupil, Peter Helios. In about 1878 Eorthen noticed an Aboriginal youth, whom he employed to clean up the studio, picking up discarded sticks of charcoal and doing witty sketches of the students. He was struck by Helios’s acuity of eye, and set him to draw from the model (despite the objections of other students). He was soon obsessed by Helios’ extraordinary talents. We should recall that he had called Brown his father, and in taking him to see Brown’s works, he may have found comfort in thinking that Lightfoot’s betrayal of the father could be compensated by a renewal of Brown’s greatness. He may also have been making a form of reparation to his long-lost Aboriginal mother—and for Helios’ loss of his culture. In any case, Helios’ talent was enough to move any real teacher. When Eorthen died in 1884, he left Helios a substantial sum ‘to study the great masters in Paris’. McCullion commented: I hear that the Maître left Peter a tidy sum to go to France. I’m almost frightened for the poor little blighter. I know his school knocked some letters into him, but how will he know what he’s seeing? David’s naked Romans might remind him of his old folks at home, but what does he know about la vie moderne? Well we can give him introductions, but frankly can you imagine him turning up in Madame Manet’s [née Morisot] drawing room?50 Despite its supercilious tone, the letter was realistic about the obstacles that might be faced by Helios. But curiously they did not matter. Helios was interested in only one thing: how to paint huge paintings that would cover the walls of public buildings, like the murals by Puvis de Chavannes, which he had seen in the black-and-white photographs that McCullion had sent Eorthen, and had described to Luce. Thus, as soon as he arrived in France, Helios took the train to Amiens and did detailed drawings and watercolours of Puvis’ paintings in the Musée des BeauxArts, as well as plein air studies of the surrounding countryside. Then, he returned home. He spent the last eighteenth months of his short life in Eorthen’s empty studio, working up his studies for at least eight huge mural paintings. The most developed of these were squared-up compositions for a cycle entitled RECONCILIATION that was to be composed of two ten-metre-long paintings, Before and After, that would flank the six-metre-long Horror. His scheme was modelled on Puvis’ Amiens cycle, the huge allegories of Picardy mounted around the stairwell of the Virginia Spate

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Musée des Beaux-Arts.51 Helios’ figures were to be life-size, and, following Eothern’s teaching, he did life-drawings of every figure, as well as for their settings. The figures in Before and After were clearly inspired by Puvis’ modern classicism, simple, dignified and graceful forms set against the idyllic surroundings of Sydney Harbour. Helios stressed the horizontal of earth and water to express a kind of timeless peace, and he transposed the pale harmonies of the French landscapes into scales of bleached gold, olive-greens, the intense blues of sky and water, accented by the white trunks of the eucalypts, and flecked with gold. Before depicts the Eora people before the invasion: a scene of men hunting in the dappled shade of a forest that meets the blue waters of a little bay, where women and little girls are gathering shell-fish, and boys play in the water. Horror is a night painting in which a depiction of a massacre in the bush, lit by fire and the red flash of guns, is interwoven with evocations of Sydney’s lower depths, drunkenness, rape, degradation. He then added patches of day-blue sky, which, set against the slashing red and black brushstrokes, brings the painting to a pitch of violence unique in Australian painting. Helios conceived After as a vision of reconciliation, but his dozens of sketches show that he had the greatest difficulty in imagining Blacks and Whites living together in the harmony and love (that Brown had also longed for). His sketches include scenes from bush and city; scenes in which traditional hunting co-existed with new ways of rendering the land fruitful; Blacks and Whites building railways, playing cricket and football, sitting together at school; teaching and healing one another in their different ways; arguing cases in court or in parliament or on traditional lands in the bush. Modern clothes presented a problem since black suits disrupted his colour harmonies and looked absurd in a pastoral idyll, so he adopted the loose-fitting, light coloured clothes of the Aesthetic movement. His final compositional study shows that he decided on a drastically simplified modern allegory. Choosing Cockatoo Island as his setting, he depicted a group of men of different races building an ideal city; in the middle ground, children play on the grassy slopes and in the water. In the foreground, there is a much altered, smudged sketch of an Aboriginal and White couple looking tenderly at their baby. There are fourteen preliminary drawings for this couple in which Helios changes the father and mother from Black to White, White to Black over and over again. Helios died of tuberculosis in 1890. He did not leave any written statements about his work, so I end with another of McCullion’s letters: 182

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I was with him a few hours before he died—I’ve never been more affected—Eorthen served out his time, but Helios was just beginning—and he could have been the strongest of us all—I never thought this before but he told me to look into three big portfolios—all stuffed full of drawings and studies—some miraculous things—partly finished compositional studies—two already squared-up—figures, landscapes, colournotes, all in preparation for three huge murals—even precise measurements—for a building that doesn’t exist. Some had titles in capital letters—LIBERTY—HATRED—EQUALITY. I can hardly bear to tell you what he said—that he had tried to make his studies exact so that someone else could one day realise them. I don’t think he meant me—too frivolous— but all I can think is that he has left something—or something for us to do …52 Brown and his artistic heirs created a socially radical pictorial language markedly different from the descriptive Naturalism of painters like Roberts, Ashton, McCubbin and Longstaff. Unlike the Naturalists’ celebration of the bush myth, Brown’s heirs created ambivalent images that undermined comfortable bourgeois assumptions that all was ‘for the best in the best of possible worlds’. These were the two most significant pictorial languages that were inherited by the Commonwealth of Australia in January 1901. Naturalism was to prevail in film and in television, but the critical tradition was all but submerged by landscape painting until the 1930s, when it re-emerged in the totally different styles of Social Realism (as in the work of Noel Counihan) and the Antipodeans (notably in Albert Tucker’s savage wartime paintings of the city). The vitality of these movements was doused by the fear-induced, bland conformism of the later 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, the radical tradition re-emerged in art shaped by the feminist and ecological movements in the last decades of the twentieth century. That was also the time of the emergence of the Aboriginal art movement, which in all its varied forms, challenges stereotypical assumptions of what it means to be Australian. But now that the radical tradition is again at threat internally, as well as externally from of the hegemony of American culture, it is more than ever necessary to understand it.

Virginia Spate

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Coda There were many reasons why landscape painting was the dominant genre in the Australian colonies—and why it remained dominant until the 1930s. It answered complex cultural needs not only in the British settler colonies, but also in Europe, in the United States, and in Britain, the primary but not the only source of Australian colonial art. Despite the superior prestige of paintings of human action or of religious subjects, Constable and Turner were recognised as the major British artists of the first half of the century, and laid the basis of what can be seen as an imperial school of landscape painting. By the 1850s, many British and European critics recognised landscape as a major genre, often relating its rise to that of the bourgeoisie. The opposition between city and country that had been central to European culture since classical times was exacerbated when the agricultural and industrial revolutions swelled urban populations. Landscape painting could provide visions of an unsullied nature, free from the corruption and pollution of the city, and bourgeois audiences found it preferable to contemplate nature rather than the feared lower classes. Landscape painting was responsive to the contemporary fascination with the natural sciences, and also played a role in national self-definition. Painting nature was often conceived in transcendental terms as a reverent depiction of God’s creation, and of divine purpose in the transformation of wilderness into cultivation— and the displacement of Indigenous inhabitants. These and other factors shaped the cultural meanings of Australian landscape painting. Confronted with a strange, new environment, it is not surprising that artists and viewers would be attracted to images that rendered that environment familiar. But it is less clear why, after the early decades of the colony, painters painted fewer and fewer figures in their landscapes. In particular, Aboriginals who had had a fairly strong presence in early colonial scenes gradually disappeared from painting, though not from the colony. They returned only late in the century, when they tended to be depicted as examples of a ‘dying race’. In the late 1870s, the role of landscape painting in rendering the environment familiar was strengthened by the arrival of plein air painting; its insistence that painters paint in nature sharpened their perceptions of the Australian environment, and led them to express love for it. The best overview of Australian colonial painting is still Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting, with Terry Smith and Christopher Heathcote, 4th edn (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001). My invention of a coherent tradition of paintings of the human 184

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figure was inspired by a nagging, unanswerable question as to what the absence of such painting might mean. My history required the presence of academic art because it was the primary mode of transmitting the tradition of la grande peinture by means of years of study of the figure, of Greco-Roman sculpture, and the canonical masters of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century masters, as well as of the Bible and the classics as sources for stirring and elevating subject-matter. I located my history in Sydney because it was only there François Topino-Lebrun could have come ashore, in full possession of technical skills, his ambitions formed by his knowledge of the great masters, and infused by revolutionary visions of social justice. His character allowed me to fill a lack in Australian culture, that of an eighteenth century that provided a language to articulate universal principles, such as those of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ (as opposed to the culturally very specific ‘fair go’). Lebrun/Brown could not, of course, articulate such ideals in a British convict settlement, but something of their strength can be sensed in the individual humanity of the Aboriginals depicted by the real draughtsman of the Baudin exhibition, Nicholas Petit (see Bernard Smith’s magisterial European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768– 1850, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), and Sarah Thomas (ed.), The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002)). I constructed my history in terms of painters’ connections with French rather than British art. Britain did of course have an academic tradition—and several Australian artists, including Tom Roberts, had academic training there. In the second half of the century, a number of British artists turned to contemporary subjects, including the miseries of the urban and rural working classes. Such paintings tended to be fairly conformist in providing narratives with a moral, sentimental or humorous resolution. French Realism was more challenging in that it did not provide ready-made meanings, and thus made greater demands on the spectator. Courbet and Manet drew attention to paint, the material that creates the illusion of human presence. They avoided narrative structures, and their simple, frontal presentation of their figures endows them with dignity and an elusive sense of the significance of ordinary men and women. My artist Eorthen is inspired by Courbet, and I used his imaginary works to signal the absence of this kind of Realism in Australian painting. In the 1880s, colonial painters with academic training did produce ambitious figure paintings on Australian themes; these usually were bush scenes, depicting what Tom Roberts called ‘strong masculine Virginia Spate

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labour’ (McCubbin was one of the few who depicted pioneering women in the bush). His Bush Burial (1890; Geelong Art Gallery) or Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1888–90; National Gallery of Victoria) responded to the demand for works depicting modern Australian life. Like most Naturalistic works they are descriptive and present their subjects as selfcontained scenes that distance the figures from the spectator. My history turns out to have a conventional ‘great artist’ structure, an approach that is not appropriate to the early colonial period, as is made clear by Joan Kerr’s Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Anita Callaway’s Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in the Nineteenth Century (Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press, 2000), which reveal the huge variety of art forms in the colony. My artists would not have been able to survive as figure painters because there was not the cultural and institutional infrastructure necessary to sustain the ‘high arts’. Art critics called for major figure paintings on religious or historical themes, which the bourgeois elites saw as a mark of colonial maturity, but there was no real market for them. No Australian artist could survive from the sale of ambitious figure paintings. The most promising prospect for a school of painting depicting Australian subjects occurred with the so-called Heidelberg School in the late 1880s, but this promise was dissipated by the economic crisis of the 1890s, and the artists went their separate ways, some to England. I have also imagined figure painters who could have had no role as professional artists: the femininity of a woman painter was believed to be at risk if she sought to earn money for her works, and large-scale figure painting was regarded as a ‘virile’ art (modestly scaled figure studies, landscapes, portraits were acceptable). An Aboriginal painter of great murals in the European tradition is even more unthinkable, not only because Helios’ contemporaries would never have accepted him, but also because my history rests on the Eurocentric assumption that the academic tradition embodies a universal mode of seeing, neutral as to gender, class and race. All the French artists are real, including François Topino-Lebrun. I have tampered with French art only in saving him from the guillotine, substituting him for the real Louis Lebrun on the Baudin expedition, and inventing correspondence and the archive in Mouton-sur-Chèvre. Of the Australian painters, Francis Brown, James Eorthen, Aurora Luce, Bruce McCullion and Peter Helios did not, alas, exist.

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9

WHAT IF ABORIGINES HAD NEVER BEEN ASSIMILATED? Peter Read

What was the assimilation policy? In northern and southern Australia two separate policies can be tracked and debated, but even in New South Wales, where this counterfactual is set, policy and administrative action changed markedly from one decade to the next. I have assumed, therefore, that so little is known of forced assimilation generally that I have matched a ‘real’ narration of seventy years, 1913–83, with what might have happened to these same (imaginary) people had the assimilation policy never been implemented. The story is set in Wiradjuri country in southerncentral New South Wales, mainly along the Murrumbidgee River. The rest of the action takes place at Yass, Cowra, Narrandera and Condobolin, all within the ‘walkabout’ of Wiradjuri people. The ‘real’ (left-hand) narrative is based on my historical research in Wiradjuri country 1979–83 and as a field-officer for LinkUp (NSW) Aboriginal Corporation 1984–87.1 All the vignettes of event, character, appearance or anecdote of the ‘real’ narrative are drawn from archival records, newspaper accounts, observation and personal narratives mostly collected by me. The characters themselves are, of course, fictitious. The imaginary events in the right-hand pages are based on my research and reading in Australian social history generally. The two versions of a single set of lives demonstrate the essentially compulsory and hostile nature of successive variants of the NSW assimilation policy.

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Seldom, indeed, was it understood by its local administrators, nor explained to its subjects. Should it ever be doubted, the story reinforces the view that Australia’s Indigenous people really have very little to thank the invaders for in the period 1913–83, and much to hate. There was nothing gentle about assimilation, ever. The tragic disparities between the stories are significant both for things that were done and for chances that were missed. At the end of the story, I have portrayed the 1980s imagined community to have been at least as much voluntarily integrated as real Wiradjuri society—without the dreadful residue of hatred, hurt, violence, terror, intolerance and fear that has disgraced Australian society for so long. Every generation of administrators since the invasion had a chance to make amends for the evils perpetrated by the previous. In this period, none took it. It may be objected that I have made the White communities of the middle Murrumbidgee region more friendly towards unassimilated Wiradjuri Aborigines than they might really have been. However, had Aboriginal small family groups (up to twenty people) been allowed to stay within their traditional areas, instead of being shifted to huge reserves often far from their country, they would have mingled with small White communities that mushroomed throughout New South Wales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hundreds of such small Aboriginal family reserves actually did exist in New South Wales to about 1910.2 Then the revocations began. Forced relocations drove the family groups to the big reserves. For most of them there was no alternative. Yet if the small and local reserves had been allowed to remain, interracial relations in these small towns would have been personal and close. Mutual integration would have happened all the faster. One hundred years later, race relations today tend to be worst in the towns that once had, or still have, a large reserve nearby. The clear implication of these narratives is that, if the administrators really wanted Aborigines to be absorbed into the general population, in implementing forced assimilation they were bound to fail. Herding people onto reserves only raised consciousness of pan-Aboriginalism. Reserve revocation generated implacable hatreds. Child removal was counter-productive: more than half the first elected commissioners of ATSIC were removed from their families as children; as adults, they turned their Western education against that larger society. Yet the opposite alternative, to allow everyone to identify and practise whatever lifeways or philosophy they wished, would not have resulted in Aborigines disappearing. We already have hints of how Aboriginal society inflected the rest of Australia: in laconic humour, in mateship, in a sense of a spiritualised landscape.3 Without forced assimilation we would have experienced a degree of mutual convergence. The real what-might-have-been, then, was the chance to forge a new multi-racial society fully a century ago. The Aboriginal historian 188

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Gordon Briscoe looks forward to a century hence when most non-Aboriginal Australians will probably have some Aboriginal ancestry as well.4 He may be too sanguine, but one thing is clear: White Australia did have that chance a century ago. The hateful, ham-fisted and cruel assimilation policy prevented it. Now it’s probably too late. Without forced assimilation, perhaps we would not now be regretting what ‘we’ did to ‘them’; for, in large part, we would have actually become them, and they us.5 In this story ‘Riverside’, an Aboriginal reserve created in 1883, and ‘Tirrenbong’, a small town a few kilometres from Riverside, and within one hundred kilometres of Leeton, are imaginary. Everywhere else is real.

Peter Read

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What happened The NSW 1909 Aborigines Protection Act established the Aborigines Protection Board. It defined Aborigines, inter alia, as people who lived on an Aboriginal reserve. However, men who, in the opinion of the board, ought to be earning a living elsewhere, were debarred from living on or entering reserves.6 Non-Aborigines under the Act were forbidden to wander with Aborigines.7 At Riverside Reserve, near Tirrenbong, in Wiradjuri Country, on the Murrumbidgee, 1911 … Young Lucy Needham of Irish-Scottish descent and the eighteen-yearold Wiradjuri man Jongo Clarold got a bit close one night in 1911 and she fell pregnant. The news wasn’t well received by her family. Lucy’s dad said she had brought shame on them all and that she needn’t think she was going to bring her damned half-caste baby back to live with them. Lucy was sent to the Ashfield Children’s Home in Sydney to have her baby. Showing few Aboriginal features, Lucy’s son was named Joey by the Ashfield matron. From Ashfield Lucy was sent to an aunt at Strathfield. Three years later, never again mentioning her first-born son to anybody for the rest of her life, she married a fencing contractor.

In 1913, one-year-old Joey was sent from Ashfield to the Montrose Infants Home, Sydney, then to the Mittagong State Homes. He was never told that his father was Aboriginal. Nobody knows what happened to him. He vanished into White Australia. Lucy’s family did not enter Joey’s name into the family Bible, because they did not wish to find out whether her child had been born alive, nor its sex, nor its name. The pre-World War I generation of children of Riverside Reserve were the last to speak Wiradjuri fluently. Nor did the children learn the full traditional life, for their elders seemed half ashamed of it themselves and drove the children away from serious conversations with the words ‘Little pigs have long ears’. The children heard, rather than were taught, some of the stories, but they were never shown the places where the sacred events had occurred along the river and in the hills.

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What if … The NSW government announced that all existing reserves would remain open, and that Aborigines could stay or leave as they pleased.

Non-Aborigines might also live on the existing reserves if married to an Aborigine residing there. At Riverside Reserve, near Tirrenbong, in Wiradjuri country, on the Murrumbidgee, 1911 … Young Lucy Needham, of Irish-Scottish descent, and the eighteen-yearold Wiradjuri man Jongo Clarold got a bit close one night in 1911 and she fell pregnant. At first displeased, Lucy’s family accepted her choice to live with Jongo on the reserve. Lucy married Jongo one Saturday afternoon in 1912 after the football. Both sides of the family came for the wedding. Lucy, sixteen, had her baby, attended by Clara, the revered Wiradjuri midwife.26 Lucy and Jongo called their son Joey. Against her parents’ wishes, (they wanted the family to live nearer them in town) Lucy decided to follow Jongo’s, and her own, desires, to live on the Riverside Reserve. Although she was White, she was accepted readily as a member of the community. Young Joey spent as much time in the other Riverside homes as he did in his own. Joey played with his cousins by the river. He never doubted his joint inheritance as the child of Aboriginal and White parents.

Joey spoke Wiradjuri well, and knew the traditional stories from the elders living at Riverside. He also liked the Christian stories that he learned in Sunday school, and since nobody told him that the Wiradjuri ways were rubbish, he accepted them both as mutually compatible. Whenever Jongo or his uncle Dee took him out bush, they told him the stories at the places where they had occurred and named the places in the Wiradjuri language.

Peter Read

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What happened No Aboriginal child was admitted to the Tirrenbong school. Jongo Clarold never saw Lucy again. In the next three years he had two children to Aboriginal women living on the Riverside Reserve, one (1915) to Emily Blackmore (her family was from Cape Barren Island) who was known as Jill-Girl, and a boy (1916) to Lizzie Tirrenbong, known as Rabbito; Jill-Girl was the lighter of the two. In 1915 the Riverside Reserve, on prime agricultural land, was wanted for the settlers demanding riverside frontages. The Tirrenbong constable reported to the Warangesda manager that the Riverside Blacks were running wild up and down the river. A week later three police arrived to burn down the huts and truck the seventeen Riverside Aborigines 100 kilometres along the Murrumbidgee to the big state Aboriginal Station, Warangesda. Eight months later all the Riverside land had been sold to White settlers.8 Jongo, in particular, didn’t want to go. Nor was Jongo wanted at Warangesda. The manager said he didn’t want any half-caste troublemakers like Jongo on his reserve and forced him to camp outside the reserve. A week later the police received an Opinion of the NSW Crown Solicitor (September 1915) that all ‘Quadroons’ and ‘Octoroons’ might be forcibly removed from towns—which included river-banks. The police arrested Jongo in his bark shelter as an Aboriginal vagrant and ordered the manager to take him back in. He refused. Jongo, drunk, planned to walk to Brungle Reserve, near Tumut, to join his cousins. Sleeping rough, and while dead drunk, he was caught in a thunderstorm at Bethungra and died of pneumonia. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Junee General Cemetery. His death certificate names him as ‘Aboriginal, Unknown’. The facts of his life, death and burial are unknown to his descendants. Jill-Girl was a babe in arms when in 1915 she arrived with her mother Emily Blackmore at Warangesda. In 1915 Aboriginal station managers were warned, on penalty of fine or dismissal, that all ‘quadroon’, ‘octoroon’ or fairer ‘half-caste’ children were to be merged into the White population.9

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What if … Joey and the other Riverside children walked the two kilometres to the Tirrenbong school. A third of the school pupils were of mixed descent. Jongo and Lucy had two more children, Jill-Girl (1915) and Rabbito (1916); Jill-Girl was the lighter of the two.

Despite the demands of the settlers, the NSW Lands Department refused to revoke the Riverside Reserve whose population, by this time, was half non-Aboriginal by descent. In 1913 Jongo asked Whilo Plomley, a famous Wiradjuri busharchitect, to extend the family’s tin house. It had four rooms with movable interior walls, and a big verandah overlooking the river. In Aboriginal fashion, Jongo and Lucy asked for a window looking up the road to town so that they would always know what their neighbours were up to and to check out the visitors.27 Jongo was famous for his skill as a gun shearer and became known as the Tirrenbong Tearaway. In early 1916 Jongo gave up his job as a farm labourer and volunteered as a soldier in the AIF. In November of that year Jongo was killed in action at Bullecourt. Jongo is buried at the Bullecourt War Cemetery in a grave provided by the Imperial War Graves Commission. In 2004 little Lucy Holding, during the Anzac Day commemorations at Tirrenbong Area School, spoke about her great-grandfather Jongo. ‘We’re very very proud of him. He was a soldier and he was one of my Aboriginal ancestors.’ Jill-Girl was a babe in arms when Lucy, living on the reserve, heard the news of Jongo’s death.

Peter Read

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What happened When Jill-Girl was four, the Warangesda manager, acting under the 1915 Amendment to the NSW Aborigines Protection Act, and satisfied that such a course was ‘in the moral or physical welfare of the child’, removed her to the care of the state. Jill-Girl was sent to the United Aborigines Mission Home at Bomaderry, NSW. Here she was renamed Jill. At the age of seven, Jill was sent to the Cootamundra Home for Aboriginal Girls where she remained until she was fourteen. Her educational assessments, like those of many other institutionalised children, deteriorated year by year. In 1921 Jill was first in class, ‘very fair even good’, but ‘needs help, wants to be a nurse’; in 1923 she was only ‘reasonably good’, and in 1927 had become ‘defiant, rude and untruthful’.10 Despite her increasingly poor school performance, and because Jill was very fair, matron took a special interest in her. Instead of the usual country placement as a housemaid/child-minder, at the age of fourteen (1929) Jill was sent to Summer Hill, Sydney, to work for a bank manager. Her duties were to clean the bank as well as his house, and wait on the family’s meals. She was paid 3s 6d per week, of which she received 6d. Her employer took her to the pictures but not to other social engagements, nor would he let her have the dog she wanted so much. For her two-week annual holiday she returned to Riverside, where her family reinforced their desire that she should not marry a White man. In 1917 Lizzie Tirrenbong, carrying Jongo’s child Rabbito, formed a new relationship with a Warangesda man, Lawrie Bingham. Like Rabbito’s father Jongo, Lawrie did not accept arbitrary managerial authority lightly. Under s. 13A of the Aborigines Protection Act, and like Jongo before him, Lawrie was many times ordered off the reserve. He always came back. But when, in 1919, Jill-Girl was removed to Bomaderry the family had had enough. Lawrie, Lizzie and Rabbito moved off too. In 1921 Lawrie was described as ‘having no home nor likelihood of same’; but by keeping one jump ahead of what they called the ‘Aborigines Persecution Board’, by 1923 they had arrived at what was known as one of the ‘safe’ areas for Wiradjuri people—Condobolin. They pitched their tent up near the trucking yards.

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What if … When Jill-Girl was four, the police reported that some of the Riverside Reserve children spent more time playing by the river than going to school. Since NSW children could not be separated from their parents without a committal hearing, the question was held over until the arrival of the visiting magistrate who heard the case in the dining room of the Tirrenbong Arms. He ruled, under the 1905 Neglected Children and Juvenile Offenders Act, that although the children were not wearing shoes and were poorly clad, they seemed well fed and intelligent. He ruled that the police should present a report on school attendance at the time of his next visit. Jill-Girl did well enough at school, but was much more interested in bush work. She left Tirrenbong at fourteen (1929) and went to work at a sheep station down river owned by her mother’s family. Uncle Clarrie was a sheepman through and through, and he taught Jill-Girl to love stock animals too. Although Aboriginal shearers were welcome in the sheds, nobody wanted a woman shearer. So Jill-Girl, giving commands in Wiradjuri to her kelpie, acted as rouseabout and picker-upper. She watched the wool-classer with fascination.

In 1917 when Lucy finally received official notice of her husband’s death from wounds, Jongo’s younger brother Dee moved in with her into the house which Jongo had had extended. From time to time Lucy wondered whether she should not follow her mother’s wishes and move near her parents in Tirrenbong town, but the kids seemed happiest on the river with their many cousins. The reserve seemed to be losing some of its Aboriginal character, for by now as many of her kinfolk lived up in town or along the river as they did on Riverside. The chief disadvantage of the reserve was the lack of amenities: no power and only a single tap. The adults shared what they had, and the kids ate, and slept, wherever they finished up for the night.

Peter Read

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What happened Rabbito, seven years old, went to the Condobolin Aboriginal mission school. It was deteriorating rapidly: no wood for the fire, the walls unlined against the deadly frosts, a leaking roof. That year nearly all the children suffered from flu or congestion of the lungs. Their teacher wrote of her pupils, that ‘they go deaf, dull, and seem too cold, too dull, half-fed, badly clothed, living in tents and falling down houses, poor little things ending up in a cold classroom’. At several places, she wrote, she could put a hand through the schoolroom floor.11 The teacher was brave and dedicated, but the odds were great against the children learning to read and write. But Condobolin was no longer a ‘safe’ town. What Rabbito’s parents did not know was that many Aborigines who had been expelled for being ‘idle young half-castes’ from half a dozen Wiradjuri and other reserves had gathered around Condobolin in such numbers that the town Whites greatly resented their presence. The reserve houses were falling down. No Aborigine was allowed on the streets after dark. Men and women were pursued by Alsatian dogs through the bush, prisoners were dragged through the streets by their handcuffs tied to the policeman’s saddle.12 In 1926 at a fiery meeting of the local council, Alderman May told the council that ‘the Blacks are getting thicker in the town’. Council demanded that the Protection Board close and remove the reserve immediately. The board refused. In 1927 the health inspector complained about the filthy state of the camp at the trucking yards. Council resolved that ‘necessary action’ be taken to clear them.13 The little community was given two hours to be out of town or be charged with vagrancy. Lawrie got into a fight with the coppers. They bundled him out of town, handed him a spade, told him to dig a grave, and when he had finished, to lie face down in it.14 They fired a shot over his head with the admonition, ‘That’s what happens to coons who hang around here too long’. Without Lawrie, Lizzie Tirrenbong and Rabbito were on the road again. They turned for Lizzie’s home town of Tirrenbong.

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What if … Rabbito, seven years old, went to the Tirrenbong primary school. He didn’t like it much—but he loved washing days. Every Saturday he helped his mum drag the big washing tubs down to the river, gather sticks for the fire, heat the water, stir the clothes round and hang them on the star thistles to dry. He learned to swim the way all the kids learned—by being thrown in until he sank, spluttering, given a breather, thrown in again—until he stayed afloat. He learned to play the gum leaf; to respect wa-wi the river spirit, and to go to bed early when Uncle Frog announced that the gidji man, the feather-foot, would be coming along the river any night now. Work was harder to find in the late 1920s, and more of the river-folk, White and Black (but mostly somewhere in between) seemed to be coming home. Lizzie and Dee made out well enough; since they had never left the district, they knew the best fishing holes, where to catch galahs, where to get the best prices for rabbits and which of Lizzie and Dee’s extended families were most likely to help them out. Joey, a shearer like his dad had been, came home sometimes with money, and young Rabbito, though he was only thirteen, could hump 40 kilogram wheatbags onto the wagon all day long. One night in 1927 three older men from ‘down the river’ appeared unexpectedly, to let it be known that Rabbito and four other Riverside boys must ‘go through the rules’, that it is, undergo the first stage of the initiation rites which would be part of his growth as a Wiradjuri man until later middle age. Two of the boys didn’t want to take part, but Rabbito was urged to by his mother. The nightly sound of the bull-roarer told the Riverside community that the ceremonies had begun. A month later, Rabbito returned. He knew now the sacred places along the river and in the mountains and their creation stories. He had seen some of the mysteries.

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What happened Meanwhile … Jill preferred to live in Sydney rather than quiet Tirrenbong, but in 1929, as the economic depression began to hurt the banking industry, Jill was given notice from Summer Hill and returned to her family to help out with cooking and child-minding, unwaged, at the Riverside Reserve. She began living with George, a man recently returned, much traumatised, from the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home. She found she had more in common with him than the other men who hadn’t been away. Always the calm one, she could reason with his fears; even after he began to beat her in alcoholic binges, she never thought to leave him. Rabbito and Lizzie, hungry, traumatised and despairing, found that they couldn’t stay at Tirrenbong for more than six weeks even though the town was named after her family, and though the river-banks were thronged with her relatives.15 The ‘susso’ (working for sustenance weekon-week-off) was available only to White people. The Tirrenbong policeman ordered them to return to their own reserve to receive the minimal food relief. But where was ‘their own reserve’? Condobolin was too dangerous. They couldn’t return to Warangesda, which, like Riverside in 1916, had been destroyed in 1924 by the Protection Board in the name of assimilation and sold to white farmers. Along the river? They’d be hunted off within a few days. Everyone was starving. Some of Lizzie’s cousins lived at Erambie, the huge and angry camp 3 kilometres from Cowra. It seemed the best option. With her sister Janey, and Janey’s five hungry children, Lizzie and Rabbito set off to walk to Erambie. By 1933 Jill was living, through George’s kin connections, at another ‘safe’ area, 12 miles from Narrandera, known as the Sandhills. Unlike Condobolin, ‘Weirs’ was genuinely safe. Old Man Weir, the owner of the property, didn’t mind the Wiradjuri camping on his land, provided the people kept to themselves, and worked hard in town or in the community. Jill helped out with the younger children and, being able to read and write, became the unofficial reserve spokesperson.

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What if … Meanwhile … As the economic depression began to hit the rural industries, Jill-Girl left her uncle’s property to return, not to her mother on the reserve, but to her grandparents’ house in Tirrenbong town. She worked, unwaged, in their shop. Always known as the calm one, she was the one sent to confront the customers pleading for just a little more credit.

Rabbito, fourteen years old, like everyone was bewildered at the lack of work and the collapse of the world of bush employment that he had known. The Riverside community shared what they had, but during 1930 it doubled in size. Even by sharing ‘blackfeller way’, there was simply not enough to go round. Everyone was hungry. Something, anything, had to be better than life at Tirrenbong. Rabbito and his cousin Billy took to the road. At Molong they were moved on. At Wellington they were moved on. At Dubbo Rabbito broke into an empty farmhouse, was caught, arrested and found guilty. Too young for gaol, too old for Boystown, he was sent to the Mount Penang reformatory near Gosford, NSW.

Rabbito’s cousin Billy joined another group of unemployed men camping outside Euabalong. So small were their prospects for work that they gave up looking, living on rabbits, fish, native animals and selling tiny amounts of gold they had prospected.

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What happened Jill loved the Sandhills.16 Sandhills people built their own houses of tin and scrap wood, lined the walls with paper and constructed their own furniture. They had their own claypan dance floor, and their own musicians; the kids played, slept and ate wherever they finished up for the night; they respected wa-wi, the river spirit, and round the night fires the men told stories of old days and old mysteries. It was the happiest time in the lives of both Jill and George. No welfare office snooped about, the police seldom bothered them, the children were taken to school in a dray, the men drank wine, not spirits, and at weekends. The mid-1930s was the last time that the Wiradjuri lived by themselves in their own country, unobserved and unbothered by forced assimilation. The formal ceremonies seemed finished, the language in terminal decline.

In 1937 the first Commonwealth and State Conference of Aboriginal Authorities met in Canberra and resolved that ‘the destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of full descent, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth’. At this conference Mr Secretary Pettit, representing New South Wales, announced that the experience of his state had been that when ‘these people are put to it to paddle their own canoe they have not made much of a success of it … They leave the reserves and generally reside on the outskirts of some town or village and there they are very apt to become a reproach to the neighbourhood’.17 Rabbito, camping on the Lachlan near the Erambie Aboriginal Station, was arrested under the 1936 Amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act of that year, which effectively enabled the police to arrest him on suspicion of being an Aborigine and forcibly remove him from the town to a reserve.18 Since the Erambie manager flatly refused to admit him, the police drove him 20 miles out of the town and dropped him there, promising him six months imprisonment should he return. Managers were advised that when a man was ejected from any Aboriginal station, his family should be ejected also.19

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What if … The self-regulating Riverside Reserve had functioned like the Narrandera Sandhills—for forty years. The differences were the greater number of non-Aborigines living at Narrandera, a lesser feeling of isolation, and a deeper knowledge of the traditional life.

The mid-1930s was the last time in which the older Wiradjuri men got together for secret ceremonies. The women had already stopped. While the language was spoken freely about the reserve, including by some of the White kids, some of the senior men living on the river seemed too preoccupied to take the initiates to the next stage; a homestead had been built on the nearest bora ground where the ritual should take place.

Released from Mt Penang, Rabbito returned to Tirrenbong in the improving economic conditions. He worked as a lucerne cutter until in 1940, yearning for excitement, he volunteered for the army, and saw war service in Crete and New Guinea. Promoted to lance corporal, he was busted to private after a drinking bout, but said he didn’t care. Demobbed in 1946 he returned to Riverside and with his hand in quite a few minor rackets, worked as a casual fencer and farm-hand. Handy with his fists, he was often in trouble for drinking or fighting, but never did more than a fortnight in the local lock-up, cutting the copper’s lawn or washing his car.

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What happened Banned from Cowra station, Rabbito went on the road. He lived in work gangs during most of 1943–44 constructing airfields. As White servicemen returned to the bush, he found work increasingly hard to obtain. A competent shearer, he knew well what the words from the contractor meant: ‘Sorry, mate, haven’t got a pen for you now—come back next week’. In 1940 The Aborigines Protection Board announced that the assimilation of Aborigines would be added to the purposes which the newly renamed Aborigines Welfare Board would pursue—even though the board had in practice followed such a policy since its inception in 1883. Among new initiatives would be the building of new houses for selected suitable families for removal from reserves into the White towns.20 In practice this meant destroying, one by one, the existing Aboriginal stations and revoking the reserve land, while offering new town houses to a quarter of the population, moving half to another reserve not yet targeted for destruction, and washing its hands of the rest. In 1945 the AWB began implementing this policy, forcing people from selected reserves, withdrawing the manager, demolishing houses and refusing to repair those which remained, however bad their state. Unknown to the residents of the Hollywood Reserve, Yass, their town was one of the first selected in which to enact the latest version of forced assimilation. In 1948 the Welfare Board reported that assimilation was necessary because Aborigines had neither the traditional background nor the culture of White men to guide them.21 In 1948 Rabbito returned to Tirrenbong where he met his cousin Billy. Billy lived on the unmanaged Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve, on a stony ridge opposite the abattoirs on the edge of Yass township. Billy told him that there was plenty of work in the district. Rabbito moved to Hollywood and squeezed, along with sixteen other people, into Billy’s house, sleeping on a mattress and wire bed frame outside. He earned enough money to get by, got a fair-skinned cousin to buy grog for him, and generally obeyed the unspoken rule to keep away from the main street—the Hume Highway.

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What if … In the boom years following World War II, Rabbito bought his own bullock team, but lost it through drink and gambling. He was philosophical about it; his cousins lived in every town, village and property in Wiradjuri country, and he had enough mates, White and Black, to stand him a drink when things were tough.

In 1948 Rabbito returned to Tirrenbong where he met his cousin Billy, by now a professional shearer who lived on the edge of Yass township on a stony ridge up near the abattoirs. Billy invited him to try his luck, for there was plenty of fine wool work to be had in the district. Rabbito stayed with Billy in Yass, on and off, for ten years, until his back gave him too much trouble to continue working in the sheds full-time.

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What happened In December 1954 Cousin Billy applied for one of the new houses in town. In January 1955 the area welfare officer told him that even though his house on the reserve was unfit for human habitation, he was ‘ineligible’ to have a house in town. Instead, he and his family must move to the managed reserve at Wallaga Lake or to Erambie or his children would be removed.22 Billy said he would think about it, but, returning with Rabbito from fruit picking two months later, Billy found his house had been destroyed by the Aborigines Welfare Board demolisher. Nothing now was left: the tin was already used to repair the remaining houses, the rafters mostly had been burnt by his neighbours’ cooking fires. The remaining members of Billy’s family moved into the already overcrowded Hollywood school house (disused for educational purposes since the AWB had decided that the reserve must be revoked in the name of assimilation). Rabbito moved in with another cousin in the last remaining, though decrepit, cottage. When the carter came the following week to demolish that one, Rabbito threatened him with a star picket. He was arrested later that day for refusing to obey a lawful order, sentenced to two weeks in prison, then told to remove himself from the district or he would be arrested again. Billy’s family were trucked to Erambie. In 1956 the Hollywood Reserve site was empty, cleared, revoked and sold to a farmer. Six Hollywood families now lived in town. Everyone else— from Hollywood, and those living in isolated camps along the Yass River, had been rounded up and trucked to the hated Erambie Station, Cowra. A few, like Rabbito, had escaped the net, because they had no family. The Wiradjuri of Yass were now, according to the board’s thinking, ‘assimilated’—because they no longer lived in association with each other.

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What if … Cousin Billy continued living on his two which he preferred to living in town. It here he could he could run his ducks, Rosemary, a White woman, maintained animals, he’d surely die.

hectares on the edge of town, was rough, stony country, but geese and a donkey. His wife that if Billy couldn’t have his

With his earnings as a shearer and fruit picker, Rabbito bought a cheap block of land very close to Billy’s. Here, with the help of Billy and his sons, he built his own house from scrap tin and timber. Rabbito could generally be found outside the house rather than in it, his fingers holding his rolly cigarette drover-fashion ‘inside out’, and with a billy boiling on his Kookaburra wood stove mounted on its brick foundation: outside, of course. Forty years old in 1956, Rabbito was one of the youngest along the river to have undergone the initiation rite. He would have liked to carry his own traditional education further, but being away from Tirrenbong and the Murrumbidgee pathways made it more difficult to keep in contact. An old man from Moulamein promised he would return the following year to raise him to the status of elder, but never returned. Whenever he returned to Tirrenbong, Rabbito talked worriedly with his mother Lucy and Uncle Dee about the fact that so many of the new generation didn’t seem very interested in speaking Wiradjuri, let alone in being initiated. The teacher at Tirrenbong Primary invited him to talk to the children whenever he was passing through. But it seemed a losing battle. Throughout the 1960s, whenever he returned to Yass, he drew more inspiration from talking to the spirits of the old people along the Yass River than from talking to the schoolchildren.

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What happened Rabbito, with few friends and only a couple of relations in the district, followed Billy to Erambie, where he was seldom out of trouble. In 1966 the last AWB manager left and life became easier. In 1980 the Erambie Aboriginal Housing Co-op offered him one of the new pensioner houses overlooking the Lachlan. Here he would tell any young Erambie person prepared to listen (there weren’t many) of the terrible days of the depression and the mission managers. The young ones wanted to know more of the language. Anthropologists and historians came to consult him about what he remembered of the traditional life; but whatever little he had known he had almost forgotten. Meanwhile … Jill and George, and almost all the Sandhills community, had left the old Weirs Reserve outside Narrandera as work became available during World War II. The Sandhills in 1946 seemed too far away from town, too inconvenient. Jill and George, and two other former Sandhills families, knew the Narrandera Whites to be not unfriendly to Aborigines. With council approval, they built their own houses on the edge of town, with second hand tin and timber. Jill helped her George fight his alcohol addiction. She couldn’t stop him going into town, but she always sent someone down at ten o’clock to bring him home safely. He shouted at her, he bashed her, but never once did she call the police. While living at the Sandhills, Jill had worked as a cleaner at the chemist shop. Now in the post-war decades no work seemed available—not even for an out-of-sight cleaner. In 1963 an Amendment to the Aborigines Act (No. 7/2 ) abolished the sections of the Act which allowed the removal of an Aborigine to a reserve or from a township, and prevented non-Aborigines from ‘wandering’ with Aborigines. In 1964 the Sandhills site was deserted. It has never been reoccupied. In 1965 the official Aims of nation-wide Assimilation were softened from Aborigines ‘would’ obtain the same manner of living as other Australians to Aborigines ‘would choose to attain a similar manner and standard of living as other Australians’.23

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What if … His back improved from the rest, Rabbito worked the Riverina sheds part-time. He made many friends, and though never the ringer, was always welcomed by the boss of the board. His mates respected his temper and learned not to cross him.

Meanwhile … The Riverside Reserve had passed its peak. Nobody ever decided not to return there, but few people ever did return after the war. Though semiskilled and unskilled work was available, the young people were moving, past Tirrenbong, sometimes past Dubbo, all the way to Sydney. The daily bus service taking people the 5 kilometres into town was reduced to twice a day, then only once—for the school kids. The weekly visits from district nurse stopped as the population dropped, between 1950 and 1960, from forty-five to fifteen. Lucy and Dee, having one of the best houses in the best positions, took their dray into town once or twice a week. With chooks, goats, geese, three dogs and the rich riverflat soil, they were happy to live without electric power or mains water. To the entreaties of her large Tirrenbong family, Lucy replied, ‘I’m too old to move’. In 1960 Rabbito’s mother Lucy, and Uncle Dee, fifty-two years old, had become respected authorities on Wiradjuri law, customs and language. They lived, seemingly immovable, at the Riverside Reserve. In 1964 only two families remained on Riverside: Lucy and Dee, and Dee’s cousin Mary, great-aunt of Lizzie Tirrenbong. She too stated that she would stay forever. Mary died in 1969.

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What happened Rabbito, in his sixties, was angry at police who always wanted him out of Cowra town, and at the young Wiradjuri people who were not very interested in his stories, and at the Wiradjuri Co-op which wanted him to pay rent for his flat. Jill sometimes wished for something better, but never found it. So long ago the Cootamundra Home had promised more, but all she had was a tumbledown house that George was too drunk to fix, a sofa with the springs coming through, a wooden table, a wire bed, three plates, an aluminium teapot, two tin mugs and a black and white TV—and Henny the chook who sat on her lap in the evenings. She read the paper, when she had it, but never visited the library. She loved stories about the past, but was unaware of the existence of the Narrandera Historical Society’s Museum. She loved travelling, but apart from funerals, she had not been away from Tirrenbong for thirty years. Most of her seven children lived near her in Narrandera, but Jill was not on good terms with all their partners nor their partners’ extended families. Always short of money, Jill and George lived mainly on tea and camp pie. By the 1970s Jill’s health became fragile as she aged. She began drinking herself. Bashed again by her husband after a drinking bout together, Jill died of a brain clot on 4 September 1979. She is buried in Narrandera.

Meanwhile … Never staying long with any woman, Rabbito fathered six children, one of whom died before she was one. Two were removed from their mothers before they were eight. During the 1980s, two of Rabbito’s children who had been adopted, through the Link-Up service, met their father for the first time. The last one, of whose existence Rabbito had not known, had decided not to search for him after being told by the Royal Women’s Hospital family counsellor that ‘Your father was a feller from the Abo Board’.

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What if … Rabbito, in his sixties, was angry that the young people along the river, half of whom were of mixed descent, were more interested in the Beatles than the Wallaga Lake Gum Leaf Band. They preferred American slang to lessons in Wiradjuri. As economic conditions improved, Jill-Girl returned to her uncle’s farm near Junee. In 1956 she trained as a wool-classer and gained her certificate the following year. Working for the Wagga District Agronomist during the war, she finished the Intermediate certificate in 1947, then her Leaving Certificate in 1950. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s she worked in most of the larger sheds in the Riverina, staying in the homesteads. In 1978, her last year of full-time work, she received the award Riverina Rural Woman of the Year.

Marrying a White stock and station agent, Jill-Girl had two children. One became a rural bank manager, the other teaches agricultural science at several TAFEs in Griffith, Leeton and Narrandera.

Jill-Girl is still alive and living at Griffith. Anthropologists and young people come to her to ask about her memories of the days when Aboriginal life was a separate part of Australia’s society. She no longer speaks Wiradjuri perfectly, for though young people are learning the language at the Charles Sturt University campus in Dubbo, much was lost among her own generation who ceased to speak Wiradjuri as a first language to their children in the decades 1945–65.28 Meanwhile … Rabbito, in two long-term relationships, had six children. In 1973, one lived at Tirrenbong, one at Tumut, two in Leeton and two in Sydney. His youngest daughter married an Italian, at which Rabbito was not delighted. In his cups he would complain about ‘wogs taking over the country’.

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What happened In his last years Rabbito became morose and short-tempered, but the Erambie community tolerated him because there were so few old people left. He survived in his Erambie pensioner’s flat, never paying rent, until 1982. In December, never once having had a close friendship with a White person, he died in his sleep. Two hundred and seventy Aboriginal people attended his funeral. He is buried in the Cowra General Cemetery. And afterwards: In 1980, three-quarters of Wiradjuri people had a family connection with Warangesda. Even though the station had lasted not much more than forty years, it had become the great meeting place in the decades when the Wiradjuri were being forced together rather than dispersed. In 1983 the Wiraduri Regional Aboriginal Land Council was formed.24 The Wiradjuri language is taught at several centres by people who did not learn it as a first language. Wiradjuri organisations are numerous, proud and strong, but the community is much riven by concerns over past trauma, domestic and sexual violence and inter-family disputes. Marriage with non-Aborigines, especially among tertiary-educated Wiradjuri, is now common. Perhaps one-third of the hundreds of Wiradjuri children removed, like Jill-Girl from their families, have returned.25 Many people, removed as babies like Joey, died early deaths far from their country. Many men like Rabbito, deeply traumatised, unfulfilled, violent and alcoholic, died in middle age. Wiradjuri society is in part assimilated, at a terrible cost of violence, hatred and distrust. Yet in 1983 the world-wide revival of indigenous identity is about to affect Wiradjuri society deeply. Though the last large-scale religious ceremonies were carried out before 1914, dozens of young Wiradjuri are exploring ways to revive the old rituals and to re-assume a more traditional life.

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What if … Rabbito died in October 1968 after injuring himself falling from the roof of his cottage while fixing the gutters. Two hundred Australians attended his funeral. He died just too early to experience the revival of interest by the young people of the 1970s in the old Wiradjuri ways. He was the last person to be buried in the Riverside cemetery.

And afterwards: In 1980, almost all the people identifying as Wiradjuri were connected by marriage and descent to non-Aborigines. Both the Riverside and Warangesda reserves were farmed by several mixed-descent families.

The Wiradjuri language is taught at several campuses of Charles Sturt University, where students can work towards a major in Wiradjuri studies. Wiradjuri organisations, known as the Riverside and Warangesda Coops, have hundreds of mixed-descent members. Older people sometimes tell their grandchildren they should marry people of clear Aboriginal descent. Only a dozen children were removed from their families in the period 1913–73 under the general child welfare legislation. Of these, five have returned to the river, seven live elsewhere in the district. Successful mixed-descent women like Jill-Girl are everywhere. Many men like Rabbito, after adventurous rural lives, sleep peacefully in the country of their ancestors. A multi-racial Australian society is in part mutually integrated without a deadly legacy of trauma and destruction. Yet in 1983 the world-wide revival of indigenous identity is about to affect the Murrumbidgee people deeply. Though the last large-scale religious ceremonies were carried out in the mid-1950s, hundreds of young Australians of Wiradjuri descent are exploring ways to revive the old rituals and to re-assume a more traditional life.

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10

WHAT IF THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF ARTHUR CALWELL HAD BEEN SUCCESSFUL? Sean Scalmer

On 21 June 1966, Peter Raymond Kocan shot the leader of the Australian Labor Party and of the federal opposition, Arthur Calwell. Calwell survived, and took the ALP to a crushing defeat in December. It took a further six years for Labor to gain federal office, under a new leader, Edward Gough Whitlam. The Whitlam government was characterised by rapid legislative change and enlivened by radical political mobilisation. Dismissed from office by the governorgeneral in 1975, the ‘Whitlamite revolution’ quickly gained a treasured place in Labor’s mythology. In contrast, Calwell’s period as leader is seldom recalled. He is absent from the pantheon of Labor heroes.

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The following pages collect six documents pertinent to the enduring significance of former Labor leader, Arthur Augustus Calwell. Their purpose is to establish Calwell’s many contributions to public life, and to chronicle the often surprising consequences of his untimely passing. The documents range from a eulogy to newspaper commentary, from an official lecture to a radical pamphlet. To aid the reader, they have been collected in roughly chronological order, and each is prefaced by a short introduction. The collection’s multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives may occasionally jolt the reader. It is hoped that they might also provoke questions about Australian labour history, memory, and the uneven succession of political generations.

1 The assassination of Arthur Calwell provoked a range of memorials, testimonies and tributes. An example is offered below. Just three years ago, the life of a visionary, reformist leader, raised in the Roman Catholic Church, was mercilessly extinguished. American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was felled. Now, an Australian leader has been taken from us, older in years, but no less brave, adventurous and devout. Arthur Calwell is lost to his family, lost to Labor, and lost to Australia. His body has descended to earth, brought down by a shotgun, wielded by the angry, violent hand of man. His soul shall ascend to heaven, and his contribution shall live on. Arthur was a modern leader. He secured Australia’s safety and prosperity by supervising a massive program of post-war immigration. Thousands of ‘New Australians’, as he generously termed them, will always remember him well. He articulated a new mission for his party, fit for a changing world: ‘Labor’s Role in Modern Society’. When the ALP seemed reconciled to inevitable defeat, he brought it to the very cusp of victory. But for a few hundred votes, he would have become prime minister in 1961. As it was, he died on the campaign hustings in 1966. Many believed (Arthur among them), that he was on the verge of a most remarkable and thrilling victory. For all his progressive force, Arthur was a politician of the old school. He grew up surrounded by poverty. He nurtured his young mind with the socialist classics, and he based his life on the twin pillars of church and party. His solidarity never wavered. Through seven long Sean Scalmer

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years, he acted as loyal deputy-leader to Doc Evatt. While others turned away from true Labor in the middle 1950s, he stayed the course. While opponents created the myth of ‘thirty-six faceless men’, he accepted and defended the democratic traditions of his party. When war broke out in Indo-China, he bravely fought for the cause of sanity and of peace. Whatever the odds, he always held aloft the battered standard of Labor. What did he receive for all of this? His best years were spent in opposition. His credentials were criticised by a hostile press. His place in the community of the church was threatened. His solidarity was confused with weakness. His reputation was traduced. His leadership was undermined by the ambition and impatience of others. Finally, he was murdered. An assassin’s bullet killed Arthur Calwell. But a bullet cannot kill the dove of peace. A bullet cannot kill the army of Labor. It cannot rob us of our faith in each other, and of our hope for a common future. We cannot let it. Arthur had a famous phrase: ‘We are Labor because we are Australian, and we are Australian because we are Labor’. So much of his passionate, committed life is contained in that simple phrase. So much wisdom is contained in that great motto. It guided his career through the maze of political struggle. Never did he forget it, even as a storm of spears rained down upon him. Long may that phrase ring out, and long may his words be remembered. This collection hopes to do justice to his memory, and to keep his most important speeches before those working people of Australia whom he loved so dearly. They include his statement of opposition to the dispatch of Australian troops to Vietnam, 4 May 1965, surely one of the greatest speeches of any Australian leader. (Excerpt from the introduction to Australian and Labor: The Collected Speeches of Arthur Calwell (Melbourne: Australian Labor Party, 1966)) Read on and fight on, as Arthur would doubtless say …

2 Surprisingly, the impact of Calwell’s death was felt in social movements, and in the rhythms of popular struggle. In the three years after his passing, the repertoire of non-violent contention was applied with an inventive, persistent rigour. This was the ‘golden age of protest’, still referred to in the historiography of the sixties, 214

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before the disruptive impact of the Whitlam government. The following document captures the spirit of the time in the rather theoretical jargon of the extreme left. ‘Paris, May 1968.’ The phrase is on everyone’s lips. On campuses around Australia, they whisper it. ‘Paris, May 1968.’ What does it mean? Is it revolution, the end of capitalism, etc.? Is France now the weakest link, to use Lenin’s apt formulation? Has Marcuse’s repressive tolerance been broken in a festival of struggle? Has the ‘hegemony’ of the ruling class (as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, would put it) now been shattered? Can students detonate the bomb of worker-power (as asked so recently in Arena)? In this time of change, we need to produce rapid, incisive social analysis. Our theory must aid our struggle in the most direct and material fashion. We cannot wait. We must think and we must act. We write as revolutionary socialists, opponents of conscription and war, and advocates of non-violent civil disobedience. We are students of Mahatma Gandhi and believers in the efficacy of non-violent struggle. We aim to assess the place of these methods to aid the common struggle. We will proceed dialectically. We must remember the last three years: • The Freedom Ride began to change the world for exploited Aborigines. (Will any of us ever forget the power of our own Martin Luther King Jr, Charlie Perkins?) • The campaign against war, conscription and imperialism took off, using non-violent methods (Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, Youth Campaign Against Conscription, Save Our Sons). Thesis: the value of non-violent methods was being demonstrated Then, a change. The right turned to violence: • Arthur Calwell was shot and killed by a fascist youth. We know that Kocan had joined the Young Rhodesia League, corresponded with the Nazi Party and professed his admiration for Lee Harvey Oswald. • Agent provocateurs encouraged reckless behaviour within the movement. • With the whole world watching, police viciously assaulted protesters in Melbourne and Sydney, during President Johnson’s 1966 visit. • The Liberal Party tried to depict the peace movement as the home of violence. Not their stinking war-making machines, but us. Sean Scalmer

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Remember back to March 1966, when Prime Minister Holt’s official car was rocked in Kooyong? Remember how, in the aftermath of Calwell’s death, the Liberals tried to compare that rocking with the shooting murder of a man of peace? Remember? ‘It is only one step from rocking to overturning a car … and from overturning it there is only one step to throwing a match into the spilt petrol and burning it.’ (Liberal official, cited in ‘Security for our top men’, Sun-Herald, 26 June 1966, p. 40) Antithesis: for every non-violent act, the techno-military complex attempt to distort it and to replace it with violence In the teeth of this struggle, the philosophy of non-violence appealed as the people’s most important weapon. We knew that if we were resolutely non-violent, our aims could not be distorted. We knew that this was the best way to answer those in power. We turned to Martin Luther King, and from there back to the writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Michael Hamel-Green led the way. ‘Satyagraha’ became our watchword. The closeness of the 1966 poll surprised us and encouraged us that the struggle was being won. Rapidly, the movement advanced into 1967 and 1968. Synthesis: the philosophy of non-violence responded to the mobilisation of the right and deepened our struggle But now, suddenly, change is in the air again. There is a triangulation of forces, undermining non-violence: • Technological: the economic base is changing and the role of the media/technology is increasing. The media seem increasingly interested in violent acts, rather than in non-violent display. This is creating a tension. All change flows from this technological base. • Political: the fear of the ALP’s defeat in the next elections. If Gough Whitlam cannot win, then the radicalisation of the movement and the turn to violence will be difficult to contest. • International: the success of violence in Paris will be sure to promote such tactics among our local ‘revolutionaries’. The lure of violence will always be strong. Our response must be equally strong. We need the strength of non-violence. Just as 1966 saw the deepening of our commitment to Gandhian civil disobedience, so the current environment must see a redoubling of 216

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that effort. We need to develop better, more imaginative, non-violent tactics. We need to return to our Gandhian texts, and to set them beside our Situationists, our Marx and the newly translated French theorists. The last three years have shown the efficacy of non-violence. More than ever, we need it now, lest the tide of blood washes down from Vietnam and engulfs our own movement, and our own quest for change. (‘Gandhi Down Under: Has His Time Passed?’, National U, 2 July 1968)

3 The death of Calwell was succeeded by Labor’s electoral defeat in 1966, and then by Gough Whitlam’s famous electoral victory in 1969. As we will see below, the causes of that victory have stimulated a range of academic debate and argument. What prompted Labor’s victory in the 1969 poll? Existing biographical and institutional studies have tended to adopt deterministic, reductionist and tendentious explanations. Dominant accounts focus especially on such nebulous forces as the rise of the professional middle-class, the prevailing mood of change (the ‘Now is the Time’ factor), the moral atmosphere created by the assassination of Arthur Calwell, and the appeal of Labor’s rewritten electoral program. While they obviously played a part, these broad forces have yet to be welded into a complete, synthetic and subtle explanation. They do not explain the specific nature of the 1969 poll. Why was victory won in 1969? Why did the breakthrough not have to wait till 1972, or after? These are unfamiliar questions. Their aim is to reinstate the contingency of the 1969 victory, for long celebration has clouded the significance, the novelty and the fragility of that famous win. The question ‘why 1969?’ cannot be answered with broad and sociological explanations, but only with a more event-focused, interactive, culturalist and nuanced approach. In this paper, I aim to suggest the broad lines of such an account. I hope to encourage other scholars of electoral history to take up my lead, and to enrich it with fine-grained historical research. It complements the recent move to ‘event-based’ reconstructions that has become prominent in the ‘Essex school’, and that I have sought to apply in earlier studies of the 1949 and 1951 elections. Specifically, I want to suggest that the assassination of Arthur Calwell played a direct role in Labor’s eventual win. I will argue that this Sean Scalmer

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is so across three domains: Party image, Party modernisation and Party unity. While Calwell’s life has been the object of intense and deserved praise, ironically it may have been his death that contributed most to Labor’s subsequent electoral success. In the section below I examine the contribution of Calwell’s death to each of the three domains. I sift the available material and test relevant hypotheses. Always, I seek to balance respect for evidence, systematic logic and theoretical parsimony.

Party image The Labor Party of 1966 faced an ‘image crisis’. Calwell himself was oldfashioned and resistant to the rise of television. In fact, he appeared rarely, and even tried to prevent the interview of other party figures. His great desire not to undercut the party’s internal democracy made him a halting, unconvincing performer on television. Witness his response to a question on Labor’s conscription policy, just a few weeks before his death: ‘Well, I said it before and I will say it again—conscription is the most important issue on which the election will be fought. If I am Prime Minister I will do what the Party wants me to do.’ In stark contrast, Gough Whitlam, who narrowly replaced Calwell as party leader, had a far more assertive and dynamic approach. As deputy-leader in early 1966, he had taken on the power of the party’s Federal Executive on the issue of state aid for Catholic education, and directly appealed to television viewers. Whitlam had been integral to Labor’s by-election win in Patterson, February 1966 (where the party received a 12 per cent swing), and he was seen as a proven vote-winner. In January 1965, political correspondent Brian Johns had written that no one but Whitlam ‘could so quickly dash the spectre of “Calwellism” in the public mind’. To our own eyes, accustomed to the deification of Calwell, such a judgement seems harsh. Johns was correct, however. Whitlam’s elevation rapidly changed the party’s image, and ensured Labor’s competitiveness in the 1966 poll. From there, victory in 1969 could be seriously contemplated.

Party modernisation How do parties change? International and comparative analysis suggests attention to four significant forces. First, the recent work of Müller regards leadership as vital: ‘All changes can be related to the new 218

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approach of a new leader’. Second, Appleton and Ward’s broader, multi-factorial perspective identifies three additional factors as crucial to party innovation: party performance (especially failures); periodic factors (such as long epochs of comparative stasis); and accidental factors (especially the sudden death of a leader). Under the stewardship of Arthur Calwell, two of these factors were relevant. Labor had experienced a string of electoral failures since 1949, but despite such a poor performance, it had remained mired in a period of institutional lethargy. With Calwell’s tragic assassination, two additional factors came into play: an accidental death transpired, and it resulted in the installation of a new leader, Edward Gough Whitlam. All four factors were now in play, and rapid change became possible. In short, the awful death of Calwell powerfully assisted the rapid modernisation of Australian Labor. The dimensions of that reconstruction are familiar, and will not be rehearsed at length. The technicisation of policy formation had begun in 1961, with the establishment of standing policy committees of sympathetic Labor experts and parliamentarians. Thanks largely to these committees, 60 per cent of the platform was ‘stripped down’ at the 1965 conference, to use federal secretary Cyril Wyndham’s colourful description of the process. This process accelerated over the next four years. In 1967 the remaking of the Labor platform was extended, and by the 1969 conference the party had prepared a new agenda for government. Whitlam had his blueprint for office. Second, the party also underwent a bout of professionalisation. A full-time party secretary had been appointed before Calwell’s death. However, it was only in later years that his impact was truly felt. Over the middle and later 1960s, the changes were dizzying. Publicity material was released with an efficiency and aplomb previously unglimpsed. Campaigning improved. Old-fashioned advertising was abandoned and a fresher, more contemporary approach was adopted. Indeed, the 1969 campaign has remained justly famous to this day. At the same time, the party’s structure was reorganised, and new, more assertive parliamentary leaders gained permanent places on Federal Executive and Federal Conference. The argument that Labor leaders took their orders from ‘faceless men’ could no longer be sustained. Indeed, with Whitlam in harness, they could no longer be imagined. The speed and completeness of these modernising changes flowed directly from the death of Calwell. They created the conditions for rapid party change. They meant that a modern Labor Party was forged over Sean Scalmer

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1966–69—a party capable of appealing to Australians in new and more creative ways.

Party unity Calwell’s leadership had been destabilised by persistent speculation over the years 1964–66, and by unsuccessful challenge from Whitlam. The deputy-leader firmly believed that Calwell’s time had passed. Their antagonism had ideological as well as personal roots, however. First, on the question of modernisation, they were polar opposites. Calwell was a traditionalist; Whitlam, an ardent moderniser. Second, the ‘Vietnam’ question also divided them. The bulk of the Labor Party was devoted to the anti-conscription cause, but on the specific question of the Vietnam war, opinions were, in fact, far from united. If nearly all were against the presence of conscripts, there was much uncertainty over the presence of regular forces. As late as 1965, the federal caucus expressed its support for the bombing of North Vietnam. It was after this time that Calwell, as leader, committed himself to strong opposition to the war in Vietnam. Gough Whitlam, in comparison, remained far more ambiguous and peripatetic. He was hard to pin down on the question of Australia’s participation over 1965 and early 1966. Many on the left regarded him with suspicion. Calwell’s death removed much of this personal and ideological disunity. Whitlam was a young leader who quickly garnered success. He profited from the shocked mood that followed from Calwell’s sudden death. Destabilisation ceased. With Calwell now departed from the scene, the party’s left and right united around a policy on the Vietnam war. Whitlam promised to recall troops from Vietnam, but asked his party to put aside this issue until accession to office. Instead, he suggested a more disciplined campaign on the question of conscription. This was calculated to maximise the party’s electoral support. An opinion poll conducted in March 1966 indicated that Australia’s increased participation in the Vietnam war was narrowly supported (48 per cent in favour; 35 per cent opposed; 17 per cent undecided), but that Australians were far more strongly opposed to the use of conscripts (57 per cent opposed; 32 per cent in favour; 11 per cent undecided). A firm and agreed policy on these questions would not only neutralise an electoral threat, it could also attract new voters to Labor’s ascendant cause.

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Jim Cairns, leader of the anti-Vietnam movement, reasoned that this electoral strategy had the best chance of quickly ending Australia’s participation in the war. Somewhat reluctantly, he decided to support Whitlam’s plan. This new axis of unity also extended to the modernisation of party policy. Cairns had supported Whitlam in the ballot for deputy-leader in 1960. He shared a distaste for the White Australia Policy, and a desire for change. He nursed an admiration for the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson that he saw reflected in Whitlam’s restless energy. While agreement between Whitlam and Cairns was never total, the latter was impressed with the former’s reforming zeal. With the government benches finally in reach, they co-operated in the lead-up to the 1969 poll. The disunities of the 1950s and 1960s seemed, temporarily at least, to be a thing of the past … (Excerpt from ‘The 1969 Election: A Revisionist Account’, in Decisions: Turning Points in Australian Electoral History, ed. Martin Samuels (Canberra: Australian Society for Electoral History, 1999))

4 The Whitlam government faithfully implemented its 1969 program. It pioneered new approaches in education, social welfare, health and urban affairs that proved a watershed in Australian governance. However, its relations with the extra-parliamentary left were sometimes strained. Below, we visit a retrospective account of those interactions (composed in 1979), arguing for a changed approach in future moments of Labor government. Memorial lectures inevitably begin with a kind of ritual. We hark back to the Labor tradition. We genuflect to Arthur Calwell and to his contemporary relevance. We come to praise, as it were, not to bury. Labor luminaries who have come before me, whatever their differences, have adhered to this convention. Tonight, though, I will depart from established practice. I come to bury, if you will, not to praise. I will not pay tribute to John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Arthur Calwell or Gough Whitlam. I will not base my claims on tradition. I will assess the balance sheet of Labor’s history coolly and dispassionately. I will look boldly to the future, not comfortably to the past. Doubtless, I will ruffle feathers. I do so not in the cause of mindless controversy, but in the spirit of constructive engagement. I do not speak lightly. It is not the time for hollow self-congratulation or sentimental

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reminiscence. Labor, all of us will admit, needs serious and dispassionate debate. The party is in danger of losing its place in Australian politics. It is up to all of us here tonight to find a way out. Arthur Calwell would expect no less. Our party is the great progressive force in Australian history. As W.K. Hancock famously conceded, it is the labour movement that initiates political reform in this country. It is Labor that pushed forward the regulation of working conditions, the expansion of state enterprises, the system of child endowment, and the control of the banking system. Arthur Calwell developed the nation with great schemes of post-war immigration. Gough Whitlam’s government established a system of universal health care, opened up the university system, enhanced our welfare state, and brought a new attention to the urban environment. These advances were brought forward by Labor and resisted by our conservative opponents. ’Twas ever thus. In some senses, Australian political history is the same old story. Contemporary Labor remains committed to innovative policy. Whatever the criticisms it has faced, the last Labor government faithfully implemented its program. Prime Minister Whitlam fought for an historic mandate, won it, and then diligently set about fulfilling the promises he had made to the people. And yet, amid the repetition, change can be glimpsed. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a new political force: the social movements. In 1965, students came out to fight for Aboriginal rights. They were followed by fighters against conscription and the Vietnam war, and then by campaigners for women’s liberation, gay liberation and Black liberation. Protesters took to the streets. The existing boundaries of our world simply exploded. New questions pressed themselves upon the public consciousness: childcare, love, trees, racism, sexism, popular participation. As all of us here will remember, relations between the Whitlam government and the social movements were not always smooth. Whitlam was constitutional, parliamentary, institutional, rationalist, and Fabian. He had spent decades fighting for the pre-eminence of parliament. He had spent four long years preparing his party for office. He had a detailed program of government, and he was bound to institute it. The new movements were a threat to this program. They were extra-parliamentary, spontaneous and romantic. They were expressive as much as instrumental. They wanted everything changed, but they didn’t know how. They had no time for a detailed program, little 222

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inclination, and even less ability. They demanded, disrupted and fulminated. In short, they destabilised the steady approach of Whitlamism. Not surprisingly, we Laborites were very critical of this new force. We doubted the seriousness of the students and the ‘long-hairs’. We thought that they lacked the experience of genuine hardship and the application required for detailed, effective planning. They tended to rigid dogmatism, or ultra-leftism. They seemed to want to make their progress by seven league boots, or not at all. We were angered when they gained attention. We thought them ungrateful. They thought us timid and ‘straight’. As our second term drifted on, we could feel the political ground shifting. It led straight to defeat. By saying this, I am, of course, deliberately setting up an Aunt Sally. No one would argue that our loss in 1975 was only the direct product of the relations with the new movements. The worldwide economic crisis and the local anger over our tariff cuts deserve greater attention. Like the Chifley government, we did not ‘sell’ the benefits of our political reforms. All of these forces contributed to our defeat. Nevertheless, there was something limp and passive about our fall from office. There was little passion or anger. The energy of the young was untapped. They did not really care that we were threatened. We were too distant, too removed, to be ‘their government’. This made the defeat harder, and makes the rebuilding harder still. Perhaps these differences were inevitable. However, I would suggest that they were magnified by the timing of Labor’s victory and by its relationship to social-movement mobilisation. Labor gained power in 1969. It quickly recalled conscripts from Vietnam and set free imprisoned draft resisters. It began the removal of regular forces. By 1970, the anti-war movement had simply run out of steam. While the moratorium on Vietnam took off in the United States, Australians had no local target for their anger. Political radicalism was diffused to a broader, cultural ferment. The new movements that emerged in the early 1970s faced a government that had already established its firm priorities. The raft of legislation was already overflowing; the ship of reform had already left the dock. The character of Whitlamism had already been formed: legalistic, technocratic, bold but unromantic. Tempers flared; relations soured; firm, friendly connections were rarely made. Labor failed to link hands with the new political forces of the 1970s. Labor is justly proud of its traditions. It should be proud of its time in government. However, it should not be proud of its relationship with Sean Scalmer

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the emerging political forms. The world has changed. The ALP cannot simply base itself upon the blue-collar working class. It must stretch outwards: toward the intellectually trained and the new social movements. David Williamson’s brilliant play Don’s Party makes the same point. It takes us back to Labor’s victory in 1969. Don and his wife, members of the new middle class, excitedly hold a shindig on the night of the 1969 poll. The expected, celebrated victory does not bring harmony, however. The event explodes into a drunken argument, as Labor’s new constituents struggle over the spoils. They wake to a hangover: divided, angered, and uncertain. Things do not have to be this way. Conduct a ‘thought experiment’, if you will: imagine an alternative path. What if Labor’s longawaited victory had been postponed until 1972? In this event, Labor’s government would have been synchronous with the rise of liberation politics. Cultural radicalism might have enveloped the government; and room might have been found for new demands on developing ministerial agendas. The technocracy might not have dominated. ‘Whitlamism’ might have been a very different beast: colourful rather than grey, heady rather than steady. Of course, things might not have transpired in this way. We will never really know. We should know, however, that the ALP need not pit itself against the new social movements. They are perceived as being antagonistic when, in fact, they are necessarily complementary. They can be friends, not enemies. Labor needs the energy and pulse of the new political forms. They could do with a dose of reality and with the discipline of governance. Both sides can gain much from the exchange. We can learn much from past Labor successes. We must be honest about our failures, too. It is only by recognising them that we can rethink and improve our approaches, and it is only then that we can recapture the initiative for change. (‘Friends, Not Enemies’, Arthur Calwell Memorial Lecture, 1979)

5 The closing decades of the twentieth century were marked by tremendous changes in Australian public policy and political culture. In this context, the meaning and ownership of the ‘Calwell’ legend became the object of a new wave of commemoration and contest.

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The Mosman Town Hall, nestled along the north side of Sydney Habour, seems an odd inclusion in our radical perambulations. The building itself is unprepossessing and the locale is upscale bourgeois—bosky, tasteful and resolutely boring. The prim exterior conceals a volatile history. Mosman Town Hall is, in fact, the site of Australia’s first political assassination. It was on these quiet streets that the Labor leader, Arthur Augustus Calwell, was shot dead by the labourer and right-wing youth, Peter Kocan. Think back to June 1966. Visualise the night: cold and clear. The hall is packed and enthusiastic. The Labor leader is in passionate form. He denounces the conscription of ‘voteless youths’ and the slaughter of a defenceless people in Vietnam. The applause is deafening, and the hall empties at 11 pm. The crowd pours onto the streets, animated, angry, aroused. A septuagenarian slowly makes his way along the path. He is tired but unbowed, and his spirits are up. He talks to stragglers, adjusting those thick, black-rimmed glasses. Sometimes, he nods his head slowly. He ambles to his car, and takes a seat on the passenger side. Then, he sees someone. A young man is striding purposefully towards the car. He is saying something. What is it? What can he mean? Who is he talking to? Arthur Calwell winds down his window and Peter Kocan lifts his shotgun. The explosion is heard all around the world. Mosman’s peaceful streets were stained with blood on 21 June 1966, and they were forever changed. The Town Hall was transformed into a site of memory. Calwell’s bronzed statue now peers out at us. The Liberal heartland has been invaded by the passionate socialist and peace-maker. I like to think that Arthur is smiling down, amused and at peace. But it would be wrong to move on right now, because the radical history of this place has not been exhausted. It is the site of the annual Arthur Calwell Memorial Lecture, and it is also the place of Labor’s federal campaign launches in 1978 and 1981. Recently, it has been the site of more extreme speechifying and demonstration. The ‘Australia First’ movement swept across the Australian polity in the early and middle 1990s. Propelled by a reaction against economic rationalism and ‘political correctness’, it developed into a significant party of the extreme right. Split from the ALP, its leaders plumbed Labor traditions for some sense of legitimacy. They settled upon the ghost of Arthur Calwell: the last great Labor leader who had been committed to ‘Whiteness’ and to ‘the state’.

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Thirty years after Calwell’s death, the surrounding streets echoed again to the sounds of bitter political division. ‘Australia First’ sought permission for rallies and meetings. Their gatherings prompted counterdemonstrations and violent affrays. When the council denied future permission, there were further disputes, conflicts over free speech, and controversies. Mosman Town Hall crystallises the themes of this book. Politics and place are bound up together. The meanings of places are contested and remade. Radicals should value our own sacred places. We need to understand them and to keep their memories alive. If we do not, someone else will do it for us, and we might not like their version of the past or of the future. (Excerpt from Radical Sydney: A Walking Tour of the Hidden History of People and Places (Sydney: The People’s Press, 2002))

6 Interest in Calwell’s life continues to grow, unabated. Below we visit a review of a just-published, revisionist biography. Why another Calwell book? A veritable ‘Calwell industry’ has emerged over the last four decades. What can another tome possibly add to the acres of newsprint and the scores of volumes? Doubtless, the intensity and duration of public fascination stem from the nature of Calwell’s passing. Conspiracies continue to swirl around the martyred death. It is clear that his assassin, Peter Kocan, had attended meetings of the Young Rhodesia League, and had even paid a $1 membership fee. He had written to the Nazi Party. We also know Kocan’s words, upon arrest for murder: ‘I don’t like his politics’. When these facts are combined with Calwell’s stance on the Vietnam war, conscription, and socialism, even wise heads can get carried away. A thousand dinner parties have been ruined with the question ‘You don’t really think his death was that simple, do you?’ Robert Fitzgibbon’s new biography avoids the excesses of Johnson’s Calwell and of Ellison’s Cocky: An Unfinished Life, the two most conspiratorial of recent bios. On matters of assassination, Fitzgibbon takes his cues from Case Closed, to my mind the most authoritative and sobering of investigations. There are no wild allegations to chew upon. The director-general of ASIO will rest easy.

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Still, this is not a sober or respectful text. It is that other beast: the great debunking biography. Fitzgibbon has no sympathy for his subject. On the contrary, he regards him as the fortunate beneficiary of sentimentality and hindsight. To summarise: Calwell was a racist anachronism. He failed to position the ALP to take on the challenges of post-war society and politics. Labor was lucky to almost win in 1961 and lost comfortably in 1963. As a leader, Calwell nurtured a sense of grievance about the passing of his time. He became a proponent of Labor’s traditional democracy and of the anti-war cause only when his own position was threatened by that great moderniser, Gough Whitlam. In the battle of Gough versus Arthur, there should be no contest. The younger man deserves the place in Labor mythology long claimed by the older and less successful one. Most controversially, Fitzgibbon’s arguments are extended into a long and somewhat eccentric counterfactual speculation. For many decades, Americans have wondered ‘What if Jack Kennedy had lived?’ A long-maligned branch of history specialises in the posing of these rather pointless ‘what ifs’. Now Australians are joining the silly parlour game. Fitzgibbon asks ‘What if Arthur Calwell had survived?’ and his answers will not please members of the Calwell fan club or consumers of existing Labor mythology. Fitzgibbon argues that if the Labor Party had gone to the 1966 elections under Calwell, it would have been a rout. He had withstood Whitlam’s challenge early in the year, but could only limp on to defeat. At more than seventy, he had lost the confidence of his party and the interest of the electorate. Prime Minister Holt would have gained a landslide and Labor’s representation would have slumped as low as forty seats. From this point, victory in 1969 would have been impossible, and Labor would, at best, have scrambled into office in 1972. There would have been many more Australian lives lost in Vietnam. The detailed policies of Whitlamite social democracy would have been implemented just as the worldwide economic crisis hit. They would have faced greater opposition and might never have been accepted. They might have been blamed for economic collapse and social ruin. Worse still, Fitzgibbon imagines a much-diminished Calwell living on into his seventies. This is not the figure we are accustomed to: the party loyalist, boldly holding forth on the evils of war and conscription. Instead, the old man is struck down by resentful ageing. He snipes from the sidelines, unable to accept the new order. He hangs onto the seat of

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Melbourne when the 1969 redistribution is held, pushing the younger and more relevant Jim Cairns out to find another electorate. He tarnishes his earlier contributions with racist and self-interested announcements. He dies unmourned and he is soon forgotten. The ‘Calwell industry’ never emerges. Readers, I hope, will immediately see the error of this procedure. Inverting a single event, no matter how significant, cannot justify so many predictions. The problem of ‘compound probability’ intervenes— there is a reduced likelihood of accurate prediction with each step away from a changed antecedent. We might, with due diligence, accurately guess how the next few days would unfold after an unsuccessful attempt on Calwell’s life. We can never know whether Calwell would have won in 1966, or whether he would have become obstructive upon defeat. Too many additional forces intervene, too many actors and interactions. Politics is a chaotic and probabilistic game. The determinism of Fitzgibbon’s counterfactual cannot be accepted. In truth, counterfactuals should really be presented as hypotheses. They arc outwards as multiple paths. Each decision made, each event, creates a new set of reactions, circumstances, opportunities and choices. It is then that more paths open up, and decisions must again be taken. In this way, choice piles upon choice and event upon event. The present becomes the past. Until someone finds a way to narrate the multiplicity and flux of these decisions, ‘counterfactual history’ should be shunned. We will be left with nothing but hollow dreams and fake rigour. But if the technique is so suspect, then what could possibly prompt such counterfactual speculation? Why does Fitzgibbon take the intellectual risk? One answer immediately springs to my mind: studies suggest that ‘bias’ frequently creeps into the selection and testing of counterfactuals. Fitzgibbon dislikes Calwell and raptures over Whitlam. His ‘exercise in alternative history’, to use the author’s phrase, is calculated to skewer his subject and to elevate his hero. It is an idle dream, in the service of a rather immature and pointless iconoclasm. Perhaps this is a little harsh to the author and the technique. Fitzgibbon is obviously intent on showing us the connection between popular memory, martyrdom and history. He wants his readers to question how some politicians are remembered fondly, while others are forgotten. He challenges us to think through the connection between the ‘ending’ of a political career (the conditions of its termination) and the tendency to eulogise it. The point is important, and the

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counterfactual demonstrates it with starkness. In that sense, the exercise has its own, limited merits. (Excerpt from ‘Pointless Iconoclasm, Idle Dreams’, review of Arthur Calwell and the Labor Tradition (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2002))

Coda What really happened? The attempt on Arthur Calwell’s life was not successful. He led the Labor Party to an inglorious defeat in 1966, and remained a rancorous critic of his successor, Gough Whitlam. One study characterises Calwell as a victim of ‘resentful ageing’—see Lindsay Rae, ‘Resentful Ageing’, in Judith Brett (ed.), Political Lives (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997), pp. 85–103. There was no book of commemorative tributes issued on Calwell’s death, neither is there an Arthur Calwell memorial lecture, a ‘Calwell industry’ of biographies, nor even much sustained interest in the attempted assassination of 21 June 1966. Calwell’s support for a White Australia is occasionally recalled in racist propaganda (Pauline Hanson’s maiden parliamentary speech refers to it, for example), but in the absence of a sparkling ‘Calwell legend’, there have been no major contests over his political legacy. There were no heated clashes outside the Mosman Town Hall in the 1990s. After Calwell’s serious defeat in 1966, Gough Whitlam was unable to make up enough ground to win the 1969 poll. The Labor Party did not win government until 1972. As a result, Labor’s detailed program could not be implemented before the onset of a worldwide economic downturn. Inflation, and then unemployment rose. This has prompted occasional counterfactual exasperation: ‘if only’ Labor had gained power three years earlier, it is sometimes argued, then this government might have had a different fate—for example, Race Mathews, ‘Victoria’s War Against Whitlam’ in The Whitlam Phenomenon: Fabian Papers (Fitzroy, Vic.: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1986), p. 127. As it was, Labor really held power for just three years. Conservative parties used their dominance of the Senate to deny the passage of money bills, and to force Labor to the polls. This tactic prompted an early election in 1974, and a reduced Labor majority. The conservatives tried the same tactic again in 1975. This time, Whitlam refused to buckle. As a result, the governor-general dismissed his government, and appointed the Liberal leader, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker prime

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minister. The general election that followed brought a resounding conservative majority. The heady period of victory and defeat created an enduring interest in ‘Whitlamism’. Conservative politicians focused on the rapid growth of government outlays, and the rise in unemployment and inflation. The Whitlam government was depicted as an economic wrecker (for a fascinating discussion of the historiography around Whitlam, see Nathan Hollier, ‘From Hope to Disillusion? The Legacy of the Whitlam Government in Australian Policy and Culture’, in Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis (eds), It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor (Melbourne: Circa, 2003), pp. 414–43). Subsequent Labor governments have attempted to emphasise their economic responsibility and moderation. The Hawke and Keating governments were associated with the rise of ‘economic rationalism’—see Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). These issues are also discussed, from a different counterfactual perspective, in James Walter’s chapter in this collection. Whitlam himself always emphasised the rationality and order of his period in office. This was a period of sustained, sensible reform—constitutional, parliamentary, institutional, rationalist and Fabian—see Whitlam’s own work, The Whitlam Government 1972–75 (Ringwood, Vic.: Viking, 1985). The liberation politics that emerged alongside the Whitlam government were of a different character. They were extra-parliamentary, spontaneous and romantic. As Graham Little perceptively noted, these movements were separate from the Labor Party, and from Whitlam. However, they became associated with ‘Whitlamism’ as an historical phenomenon, and enlivened it with colourful challenge— Graham Little, ‘Whitlam, Whitlamism and the Whitlam Years’, in The Whitlam Phenomenon: Fabian Papers, pp. 60–76. Today, the conflicts between radical movements and the Labor government in the middle 1970s are rarely recalled. Movement and government are typically mixed up together: collective markers of a different, more optimistic time. My counterfactual is concerned with the making of political traditions and myths. It is based around a selection of imaginary historical documents, written from different perspectives. This idea is inspired by an earlier counterfactual: Philip Guedalla, ‘If the Moors in Spain had Won …’, in J.C. Squire (ed.), If It Had Happened Otherwise (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972; originally published by Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), pp. 1–19. 230

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I have been guided, clearly, by the Kennedy myth. The first document makes this most obvious. The rhetorical flourishes concerning the ‘assassin’s bullet’, for example are adapted from Johnson’s eulogy to Kennedy. However, I also borrowed the reference to ‘Labor’s battered standard’ from Leslie Haylen, ‘Calwell: hero of Labor’s last stand’, Australian, 11 January 1965, p. 6. The practice of collecting the speeches of a departed Labor leader had been established with The Things Worth Fighting For: The Collected Speeches of Jospeph Benedict Chifley (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1952). Calwell’s expectation of victory in 1966 is noted sardonically in Graham Freudenberg, A Certain Grandeur (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1987), p. 85. His fondness for an equation of Labor and Australia is mocked on p. 9. The second document draws from my study of protest movements in the 1960s, Dissent Events: Protest, the Media, and the Political Gimmick in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002). This charted a rise in non-violent protest over 1965 and 1966, a clear decline over 1967, and the development of a more radical, disruptive protest movement from 1968. The counterfactual does not tinker with ‘real’ history terribly much. Kocan’s imaginative connection with Lee Harvey Oswald was noted at the time (‘Life for Calwell Wounding’, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 1966, p. 8), as was his attendance of meetings of the Young Rhodesia League (Joe Glascott, ‘The Private World of Peter Kocan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August, 1966, p. 9). Kocan’s correspondence with the Nazi Party is referred to in Colin Kiernan, Calwell: A Personal and Political Biography (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1978), p. 255. The quote from the ‘Liberal official’ was printed in the Sun-Herald on 26 June 1966, p. 40. Michael Hamel-Green was an influential advocate of Gandhian non-violence (see, for example, his ‘Vietnam—Beyond Pity’, Australian Left Review, vol. 24, April–May, 1970). It is commonly argued that the substantial defeat of the Labor Party in 1966 threw the peace movement into despair and inactivity over 1967—see John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia’s Vietnam War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 211. The counterfactual posits a close result in 1966, and an energised peace movement. It also suggests the death of Calwell might have increased interest in ‘non-violence’ still further over 1966–67. Even if this had occurred, the rise of revolutionary movements in Europe together with the media’s appetite for disruption would likely have threatened non-violent commitments over 1968 (this happened in the United States, for example see Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, Sean Scalmer

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1980)). The second ‘historical document’ is written as an intervention into this counterfactual moment, and leaves the results of the struggle somewhat open. It mimics the house style of National U, the major student newspaper of the time. The third document is written according to the conventions of academic political science. It mocks the ‘scientistic’ cast of much of this writing. The references to academic literature are mostly genuine. C.W. Müller, ‘Inside the Black Box: A Confrontation of Party Executive Behaviour and Theories of Party Organizational Change’, Party Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 1997, p. 309 and A.M. Appleton and D.S. Ward, ‘Party Response to Environmental Change: A Model of Organizational Innovation’, Party Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 1997, pp. 345–6 do explore the forces behind party change in the way that I indicate. The counterfactual suggests that the installation of Whitlam after Calwell’s assassination would have created a more unified and modernised party more quickly. This would likely have reduced the margin of the loss in 1966. It might have made victory in 1969 possible. In this case, Labor’s 1969 campaign might have been lauded, the way that the ‘It’s Time’ 1972 campaign is today. For contemporary praise for Labor’s 1969 campaign, see Don Aitkin, ‘The 1969 Federal Election’, Politics, vol. 5, no. 1, May 1970, pp. 45–53. This counterfactual document relies on genuine historical research. The quote from Calwell is in ‘Calwell Cautious on Conscripts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1966, p. 1. Brian Johns’ praise for Whitlam is in ‘A Time for Chances and Change’, Australian, 15 January 1965, p. 7. Cyril Wyndham’s statistics concerning the rewriting of the platform are from his ‘The Future of the ALP’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, June 1966, p. 32. The poll on Vietnam and conscription is real: ‘Polls View on Troops for Viet.’, Sun-Herald, 13 March 1966, p. 2. The actual positions of Whitlam and Cairns on withdrawal from Vietnam are discussed at length in Paul Strangio, Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002); for the caucus support for the bombing of North Vietnam, p. 148.; for Whitlam’s evasiveness, p. 153. The fourth counterfactual document imagines a Labor government elected in 1969, and ruling until 1975. This changes the relationship between Labor and the new social movements. The synchronous emergence of Whitlam and extra-parliamentary radicalism that stemmed from a 1972 victory is now disturbed. The rationalism of Whitlam’s program is given more chance to dominate. As a result, a close relationship 232

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between government and movement (detected by Graham Little) does not develop. This counterfactual experience would mirror the more distant movement–government relations that characterised the Wilson government in Britain, for example, or the Hawke government in Australia. The comparative greyness of the Whitlam government lends extra lustre to the ‘Calwell legend’, and prompts the establishment of an ‘Arthur Calwell Memorial Lecture’. David Williamson’s Don’s Party does not chronicle an election defeat, but a disappointing victory. I have attempted to base this document on Bill Hayden’s somewhat florid prose. The reference to ‘ultra-leftism’, dogmatism and ‘seven league boots’, for example, is from his 1968 pamphlet The Implications of Democratic Socialism (Melbourne: Victorian Fabian Society), while the term ‘Aunt Sally’, the contrast between ‘antagonist’ and ‘complementary’, and the use of the term ‘alternative path’ are all used (in different ways) in his Chifley Memorial Lecture Social Welfare and Economic Policy (Melbourne: Victorian Fabian Society, n.d. [1973?]). The fifth counterfactual document imagines a book dedicated to the life of Radical Sydney. This would follow on from the ‘real’ texts, Radical Melbourne and Radical Brisbane that have recently been published by the Vulgar Press. The scenario is organised around a far-right movement that splits off from the Australian Labor Party in the early 1990s. The ‘Australia First’ movement did, in reality, split from the Labor Party, under the leadership of Graeme Campbell. In this version of history, it is able to call on the rhetorical power of Arthur Calwell, and it appeals to many of those voters who embraced Hansonism in our own, real history. ‘Australia First’ organises public rallies that descend into disorder. Hansonism is the clear model here. See my article on these gatherings: ‘From Contestation to Autonomy: The Staging and Framing of AntiHanson Contention’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 47, no. 2, June 2001, pp. 209–24. Finally, the chapter closes with an imaginary review of a series of Calwell biographies. This is consistent with a sustained interest in the ‘Calwell legend’. The review comments on the gap between the counterfactual and the real. A similar technique has been used in a counterfactual organised around Lincoln: Milton Waldman, ‘If Booth Had Missed Lincoln’, in J.C. Squire (ed.), If It Had Happened Otherwise (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972), pp. 197–222. The issues I raise here about the status of counterfactuals and the development of ‘traditions’ are taken up at greater length in the introduction to this volume. Sean Scalmer

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11

WHAT IF THE NORTHERN RIVERS HAD BEEN TURNED INLAND? Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

One of the most persistent dreams of twentieth-century Australia, and one that recurs tenaciously today, was to turn Queensland’s fast-flowing northern rivers inland to irrigate the dry heart of the continent. This transformative vision was known as the Bradfield Scheme after the engineer, Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, who designed and promoted it. This ambitious plan to make the deserts bloom was never implemented. But it was so energetically advocated in the 1930s and 1940s that it might almost have happened. What if it had?

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… people’s desires and aspirations [are] as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (1986) On 17 September 1998, under the glare of an inland sky, the mayor of the Barcoo Shire turned the first steak on the commemorative barbecue honouring the fiftieth anniversary of Australia’s most ambitious national project of the century. Councillor Calabrese welcomed back workers and families associated with the building of the Bradfield Scheme, Australia’s great post-war feat of engineering when Queensland’s northern rivers were turned inland to irrigate the Lake Eyre basin. Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, engineer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, gained his greater fame with the implementation of this scheme, his ‘dream of a great inland waterway, ever flowing’.1 The fiftieth anniversary was a celebratory occasion—there was much speechmaking about the courage and vision of such a transformative, continental enterprise—but there was a palpable air of discomfort and doubt, too. As the guests enjoyed the shire’s hospitality on the irrigated lawn of the scheme’s Bradfield office, they could see the reassuring glint of Cooper water ‘ever flowing’, but they could also see abandoned machinery and housing, and they felt a little bit abandoned themselves. Prime Minister John Howard had declined to attend, and there was a notable absence of the several surviving former directors of the scheme. The leader of the National Party, representing the prime minister, spoke of his government’s determination to ‘see the scheme through’. By the end of the century, the Bradfield Scheme had come to constitute a controversial inheritance. In the fifty years since the governor-general, Sir William McKell, triggered the first explosion in the building of the Burdekin Dam, serious ecological consequences of irrigating the inland had emerged, and few of the economic benefits had. Other critics, however, claimed that the scheme had never been fully or properly implemented, and that it was always going to be a long-term project plagued by doubters. More still needed to be done, they urged, to ‘drought-proof Australia’.2 What had happened to the high hopes that earlier had united Australians in this exciting post-war project? The Bradfield Scheme had been immensely attractive to Australians because it drew upon a number of powerful national imageries and anxieties. The inland sea was a persistent Australian dream ever since nineteenth-century explorers had noted with hope that many rivers flowed inland from the Great Dividing Range. But the central sea for Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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which they searched had existed millions of years earlier. Shells and fishbones remained in the sandy soils, and so did the basin of Lake Eyre (15 metres below sea level), the sump for a central watershed comprising one-seventh of Australia. When the explorer Colonel Warburton first saw Lake Eyre in 1866, he recorded in his diary that it: was dry—terrible in its death-like stillness and the vast expanse of its unbroken sterility. The weary wanderer, who, when in want of water, should unexpectedly reach its shores, might turn away with a shudder from a scene which shut out all hope … I felt a dismal fascination in looking on this lake, hardly knowing whether I saw before me earth, water, or sky.3 Only the most ingenuous of map-makers coloured Lake Eyre in blue.4 J.W. Gregory, geologist and author of the influential book The Dead Heart of Australia (1906), visited the same dry lake in 1901 and also found a ‘repellent monotony’. But the title of Gregory’s book was not a condemnation of the land or an epitaph; it was a statement of opportunity and the first line of a parable of hope. Those elements—Warburton’s indecipherable ‘earth, water, or sky’—could be reconfigured. The dead heart, Gregory’s science told him, had once been a living heart and could be so again. The engineered ‘inland sea’ of the Bradfield Scheme would fulfil this destiny. It would, in Bradfield’s words, ‘ameliorate the climate and rejuvenate inland Australia’; it would ‘restore our arid lands to their former fertility’.5 At the end of the nineteenth century, as Australians came to value the distinctiveness of their land and to draw their emerging national identity from it, they began to discover just how much they were damaging it. Historian Stephen Pyne has observed that the burgeoning literature of cultural nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s found a bracing environmental counterpart in the same years as scientists reported on the fate of eucalypts, grasses and soils since European settlement.6 From the long drought and depression of the 1890s to the duststorms and fires of the ‘dirty thirties’ of the twentieth century, Australian settlers were confronted by the sobering environmental realities of their adopted land. It seemed as if, after a century and more of European settlement, the land was fighting back. The long economic boom and sustained good seasons of the nineteenth century seemed to have evaporated, and the decades leading up to World War II saw a growing

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and vigorous debate about the developmental potential of Australia— and about the environmental impact of settlement. A single horrific event encapsulated the environmental crisis of the 1930s and merged it with the threat of war. In January 1939 the Black Friday fires bared soil and killed people and trees across 1.4 million hectares of south-eastern Australia. H.G. Wells was visiting Australia at the time of the fires, and was chastised by Prime Minister Lyons for attacking Hitler—a ‘friendly Head of State’—as a ‘certifiable lunatic’.7 Wells, ever the prophet, drew lessons from the fires for ‘the coming war’. He found to his surprise that the fire front was unpredictable: ‘A bush fire is not an orderly invader, but a guerrilla’. Australia had to defend itself from military attack, he argued, in the same way it had to defend itself from fire: through aggressive prevention.8 The anticipation and commemoration of war underpinned Australian attitudes to nature.9 ‘The coming war’ stirred deep Australian fears of invasion and gave political momentum to the Bradfield Scheme. By populating the inland and north with (in Bradfield’s words) ‘a sturdy, self-reliant White race’, the plan was about more than water; it was also a defence strategy. ‘Population makes for prosperity and safety … Australia must fight to hold what Australia possesses’, Bradfield warned a Millions Club Luncheon in September 1938.10 So the language of war, like the rivers, was turned inland. In historian Michael Roche’s terms, the ‘war against nature’ initiated by the nineteenth-century improvers and clearers continued, only now it was a fight, literally, ‘to hold the land’, to possess it, but also to stop it from blowing away.11 ‘Our Soldiers attacked and defended the enemy without’, proclaimed the returned soldiers’ leader Arthur Chresby in 1947, ‘it is now our job to attack and defeat the enemy within’.12 The ‘enemy within’ was drought and soil erosion: in 1944, W.E.M. Abbott wrote to Prime Minister Curtin: ‘It may be well said, that Australia has been saved from the Japanese, for us—only to be lost by us to the growing menace of droughts that grow more serious year after year’.13 ‘Sand’, exclaimed a newspaper correspondent, ‘can be as destructive as bombs’.14 In the immediate aftermath of World War II, as Australians looked anxiously and strategically at the ‘empty spaces’ of their country’s centre and north, the politics of national development gained their moment. Science and primary industry collaborated in grand schemes of environmental change: cloud-seeding experiments were launched to elicit more rain, and the climatic benefits of large bodies of inland water were

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carefully assessed.15 CSIR embraced the new research and engineering effort in arid lands partly because the region was remote enough for federal initiatives to be tolerated by state governments. The far inland beckoned as an available realm for scientific nation-building.16 In the early 1940s, the country thus faced an environmental as well as political turning point. In turning its strategic eyes towards America under Curtin’s leadership, Australia also acknowledged the transforming imperial power of science and technology on desert lands. The United States model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created in 1933 to rebuild a river and a region, became influential and decisive.17 Water dreaming had been part of the settler psyche for a century, but it developed quite precise engineering dimensions in the 1930s. Bradfield toured the country and gave eloquent and detailed lectures to government, business and community groups. This was no pipe dream. He knew how to secure the attention of the powerful. Historical geographer J.M. Powell, an authority on the scheme and its consequences, described Bradfield’s ability to write an executive briefing ‘nicely tailored to the attention span of the average politician’.18 In 1936, the popular outback author, Ion Idriess, wrote passionately about what he called ‘The Plan’. His was ‘a crusade to set in action the greatest reclamation job in the history of the world’. The title—The Great Boomerang— of his 1943 book about it was symbolic not only of the shape of the redeemed country, but also of restoration and return. An Indigenous icon became an imperial solution. ‘When the belly of a man craves water he stretches out a hand to lift a cup to his lips’, he wrote. ‘Our continent has also got a hand, a mighty hand that could stretch out and bring the water from the east to its Dead Heart.’ That hand was the course of the Cooper. The bones of the plan, he argued, had been created by the ‘Great Engineer’—the river-beds, the gradients, the continental sink, the virtual inland sea were all there, waiting, and the rains of north-east Queensland were also providentially available. But those rains were wasted because they ran uselessly into the sea.19 Recently, some historians with the benefit of hindsight have characterised all advocates of the Bradfield Scheme as environmentally ignorant or naïve. But the scheme was implemented at a critical and complex moment in the history of Australian environmental sensibilities and understanding. Settlers had long resisted the political acknowledgement of drought. Implementation of the scheme was therefore championed as a sign of national environmental maturity: it accepted the recurrent reality of drought and engineered around it. The 238

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Australian inland, claimed the developers, was not an unredeemable desert. By the early twentieth century, Australian scientists were more discriminating about deserts and knew that theirs bloomed abundantly in response to rare rainfall. ‘There is really no need for me to elaborate on the fertility and productive capacity of the soil of the Inland’, wrote A.W. Noakes. ‘The richness of the soil will not be refuted, not even by those little Australians who are opposing schemes.’20 In soils that were perceived to be so promising, water was the key. The scheme included a substantial meteorological intervention. For many years, the scientist E.T. Quayle had strongly argued that extensive inland water would ameliorate the climate, leading to greater evaporation and then rainfall downwind. He based his case on ‘a carefully conducted series of tests’ to the south-west of Lake Torrens and Lake Frome. In 1944 Curtin commissioned Quayle and three other senior meteorologists to report on the likely meteorological effects of implementation of the Bradfield Scheme, and although a minority report was submitted by Fritz Loewe, the committee endorsed the bulk of Quayle’s research and concluded that implementation of even a portion of the Bradfield Scheme would result in appreciable and economically productive improvements in rainfall.21 Government therefore launched a massive scientific experiment, a serious inquiry into the nature of Australia. The Bradfield Scheme was a major conservation initiative in another sense. It aimed not only to ‘conserve’ water for human use, but also to literally settle the soil itself, with habitation and vegetation. Its goal was ‘restoration’: both of an ancient reality of a watered inland, and of a landscape recently further degraded by reckless European occupation. There was increasing evidence that the miraculous resource of the artesian basin—tapped since the late 1870s—was diminishing. And the ‘oncoming desert sands’ were seen to threaten holdings even on the inside country, despite some scientific appraisals to the contrary.22 The ‘dead heart’ of Australia threatened to extend its fatal grip. ‘The rot in Central Australia can be stopped’, argued a passionate advocate of the scheme in the 1940s.23 Implementation of the plan signalled national maturity, urged Bradfield—the fusion of ‘land and people, body and soul’.24 As agricultural economist Bruce Davidson has subsequently shown, none of the post-war irrigation projects in Australia could be justified on economic grounds alone.25 One of the most outspoken critics of the Bradfield Scheme was Griffith Taylor, a geographer who seemed to have Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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made a career of debunking the boosters and whose ‘environmental determinism’ had, since the 1920s, attracted accusations that he was unpatriotic and a ‘croaking pessimist’. His consistent argument was that the basic pattern of the continent’s population distribution was already fixed and that ‘economic Australia’ would always be confined to the fertile and well-watered east.26 In 1928, amid popular vilification, he had left Australia to take up academic positions in North America. When in the 1950s he returned home in his retirement, Taylor became a trenchant critic of the Bradfield Scheme in progress. ‘The dismal prophet’s second coming’, trumpeted the Bradfield Bugle : The eminent professor, who fled the country in the 1920s, has returned to find his despised ‘deserts’ undergoing a transformation. Confronted with the errors of his own short-sighted predictions, he can only bluster about the scheme’s supposed lack of scientific credibility. All the while real Australians are simply getting on with the job. Critics of the Bradfield Scheme found themselves overwhelmed by the powerful nationalist rhetoric, and by a strong post-war political momentum for decentralisation.27 It was Curtin’s personal commitment from 1944 that carried the scheme through some initial bureaucratic opposition. His three years as a child in drought-stricken Charlton, a mainly wheat-growing town on the Avoca River, north-west of Melbourne, were probably responsible for Curtin’s later sympathy towards Australian farmers.28 The older Curtin saw in the Bradfield Scheme an opportunity to bring security to rural life, and the sacred imprimatur of the war leader who died in office became crucial. But Chifley, too, was deeply involved through his role as minister of Postwar Reconstruction from December 1942. Director-general of the ministry, H.C. Coombs, imagined ‘the regional development of our national estate’ as the resources of war were turned upon ‘other enemies’.29 In 1943, to help plan the foundations of ‘a new social order’, Chifley appointed the Rural Reconstruction Commission to rehabilitate and improve the agricultural sector. This inquiry was the most extensive ever made into Australian agriculture and it advised on the judicious settlement of exservicemen on the land. The Bradfield Scheme became central to this vision. As one of its advocates wrote to Chifley when he was prime minister: ‘We propose to change a pastoral country into an agricultural country’.30 They were simply hastening an ancient and inevitable 240

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progression of civilisation. By the 1950s even the new leader of the CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, had embraced the expansionist rhetoric. ‘It is as though we were seeing Australia for the first time—seeing it not as a hard, difficult and drought-stricken country as so often in the past—not as a country with the final limits of its agricultural development already set’.31 ‘The lesson to be learned from this radical change’, he wrote in 1958, ‘is, surely, that we can never forecast the future’.32 The hydrology of Lake Eyre inspired and utterly disrupted the plans for its regulation. An ecology of occasional, sudden water was destined to frustrate and endanger development. As one Aboriginal man told anthropologist Deborah Rose, ‘You can’t change em this ground … How you going to change that creek? Put that creek this side, he’ll come back to flood this side. You can’t! No way! I know government say he can change em rule. But he’ll never get out of this ground.’33 In March 1949, as work continued on the Burdekin Dam and tunnel in north Queensland, three cubic kilometres of water flooded past Currareva near Windorah and Cooper’s Creek broke through sand dunes that had blocked its access to Lake Eyre for many years.34 It seemed abundant proof of the scheme’s necessity, but also a warning to the Bradfield Scheme Authority (BSA) whose first tractors were hopelessly buried in soil before they could move any themselves. So began a decade of good rains when Lake Eyre was never completely dry. In the early 1950s, as the BSA began its works on the Innamincka Dam and invested in the town of Windorah, economic life pulsed down the Cooper like a ‘fresh’, bringing hope and bustling energy. In 1955–56, massive floods filled the Innamincka Dam but devastated Bradfield (as Windorah was renamed in 1952). Prime Minister Menzies declared the region a ‘national disaster’, and Australians mourned the loss of thirtyfive lives, mainly of immigrant scheme workers stranded without access to high ground. The new levee banks had made the course of the flood unpredictable, old houses on reliably dry sandy outcrops were engulfed, and cultivation machinery destroyed. In his address to the nation in the wake of the disaster, Menzies renewed his government’s commitment to ‘the social as well as economic’ dimensions of the scheme and honoured those who had sacrificed their lives for their adopted country. He reminded Australians that the great inland enterprise was ‘teaching us … to think in a big way … to be proud of big enterprises and … to be thankful for big men’.35 The great flood, even as it wrought havoc across the unfinished works of the BSA, entrenched the heroism of the endeavour and made all criticism churlish. Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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By the end of the 1950s Bradfield had become both the administrative headquarters of the scheme and a test case of its transformative social potential. It had grown quickly as the centre of the Cooper Irrigation Area. There were new tractors in the saleyards and the town became the hub of a rare outback network of bitumen roads. Nevil Shute’s book, A Town Like Alice (1950), which imagined a designed oasis of the north, was a bestseller in the Bradfield general store. It gave hope to many of the new settlers who had arrived from Britain and Europe and found themselves pouring concrete and laying pipes under a baking sun. They, too, might one day sit down to ice-cream sodas in an air-conditioned shopping mall. The authority wanted to create ‘a vital, breathing community of homes’. The first homes were simple, fourroomed wooden houses built in rows, but soon a variety of larger, brick family houses were constructed, and discrete ‘neighbourhoods’ were incongruously mapped onto the vastness of the Channel Country. Although an effort was made to keep costs to a minimum, the BSA ‘was confronted with the fundamental problem of model towns: simply, that workers could not afford to live in them’.36 Within a few years, a rival and disordered community of workers formed on the other side of town, and untidy groups of huts and tents sprang up, often in ethnic clusters. One of the shanty towns surrounding the model town consisted mainly of Aboriginal people who had taken the chance offered by casual employment to return nearer their traditional lands. It was the central, civic buildings that featured most prominently on the authority’s publicity literature and films: the squat, verandahed shopping centre and general store, the white formality of the hospital, the landscaped grounds of the school, the fountain on the lawns at the BSA head office, and the railway station with its vast platform and container sheds, the new end of the line from Longreach. Lawns were astonishingly popular in town: these carefully drenched patches of boastful green were not just cool oases to the eye, but luminous badges of progress in the capital of an irrigation area. Plantations of roses abutted the walls of most public buildings, and a line of Canary Island palms marked the median strip of the main street. Bradfield’s small City Garden featured not only another fountain and vast lawn but circular beds of dwarf floribunda roses and cannas, with plantings of evergreen athel and pepper trees. Journalists delighted in the appearance of the colour green in ‘the red heart’. They also celebrated the arrival of technological modernity in an ‘ancient land’, and rejoiced in the sight not only of ‘well-tended gardens’ but of ‘well-dressed young 242

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mothers and lovely children’.37 The multicultural character of the immigrant workforce received little attention in these foundation years. The ‘Balts’ and ‘Slavs’, Italians and Greeks were just small human silhouettes beside huge machines and concrete structures in a vast, flat landscape.38 The 1960s were the time of greatest hope in the Cooper Irrigation Area. Some of the civil engineering innovations and expertise developed through the Bradfield Scheme attracted overseas admiration and imitation, and new earth-moving technologies invented beside the Cooper were patented with profit in South America. Government money poured into the basin, chiefly through the towns of Bradfield and Innamincka, the population boomed, and an agricultural community assumed dominance over the foundation industrial workforce. Cotton, rice, peanuts, wheat and table grapes were all established and processing plants in food and fibre began to congregate on the edges of town. Small, private dams proliferated around the larger weirs and canals of the BSA. Visitors flying in to Bradfield airport commented favourably upon the regular geometry of the storages and the glinting sheets of water in an otherwise unruly landscape. Water became the fount of all local politics. Even before the scheme, water had been the chief language of the floodplain. Grazing families that boasted descent from the first White pastoralists, the Duracks and Costellos, talked of almost a hundred years of social and economic adjustment to the natural regimes of the channels. These seasoned White landholders had learned to call the wayward behaviour of the region’s water a ‘flow’ and not a flood. Sudden, unpredictable, discontinuous water was the flow, and they had built their industry around it, knowing when to fatten the stock, when to burn, when to reduce cattle numbers and wait out the dry years. During the 1955–56 floods, graziers along the Cooper watched the resulting mayhem with some satisfaction and hoped that the land itself might help them beat the interlopers and their technology. They refused to call their town anything but Windorah, an Aboriginal name. Bitter contestations ensued over access to water. Graziers felt that upstream irrigators were siphoning off the drinking water of their stock, and river regulation robbed them of the flooding and silt their pastures needed. Skin irritations and allergies were blamed on the new industries. Graziers also expressed concern that chemical contamination from the new farms might endanger international markets for their beef, and these fears were dramatically realised in the 1980s and forced most of Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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the remaining pastoral families out. A relict grazing community remains in the region today, but it feels bitter and powerless, as well as profoundly saddened by the effects of irrigation on the channels. But, as Heather Goodall observed of White pastoralists on the Darling floodplain, ‘there are few comfortable positions for most Whites in opposing the new political and economic ascendancy of the irrigators’ because graziers themselves once represented progressive modernity.39 Burke and Wills’ camp at Cooper’s Creek had disappeared under dam water (the ‘Dig Tree’ was moved and propped up beside the new fountain in Innamincka’s main street), and now the days of droving along the Cooper had gone too. In 1974–76, Bradfield’s imagined inland sea was realised. But it happened in spite of, and not because of, his engineering. Sustained rains across the basin filled Lake Eyre beyond the horizon, the Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina flooded along their lengths, the Innamincka Dam overflowed, and the Coongie Lakes were watered again at last. Since the building of the dam and the establishment of the upstream irrigation area, the Coongie Lakes—and Lake Eyre itself—had been starved of water. It was puzzling to most Australians that the scheme they had been told would water the ‘dead heart’ had turned it into an even greater dustbowl. The Arid Zone Research Centre established at Bradfield began to reveal how little J.J.C. Bradfield and other scientists had understood the hydrology of Lake Eyre in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than a mostly dry lake, it emerged that Lake Eyre was often moist. Early travellers to its shores had failed to see water in the vast saltpan even when considerable amounts were there, and so had greatly underestimated the frequency of its filling.40 Innamincka Dam created a large sheet of water (just as the writer William Hatfield had envisaged in 1937) but deprived the even bigger sump of Lake Eyre and killed the vegetated waterways of Coongie Lakes.41 Lake Eyre North continued to be filled occasionally from the Diamantina and Georgina river systems (whose proposed dams remained on the drawing board) but it was only in 1974–76 that there was enough water coming down the regulated Cooper to get beyond Innamincka. It proved to be quite literally a watershed in popular Australian attitudes to the scheme. Critics reworked Bradfield’s estimates of river flows, evaporation and seepage, scientists demonstrated that irrigation actually increased the instability of agricultural production during severe droughts, economists declared the scheme a ‘white elephant’, and meteorologists revived—and then endorsed—the 1945 minority report about the low likelihood of climate 244

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change from an inland sea.42 Along with the petroleum crisis of 1973 and emerging ecological problems in the Cooper Irrigation Area and the Burdekin Valley, the mid-1970s flood washed away much remaining hope and faith in inland water engineering. ‘The early dreaming seemed green indeed, in its naivety’, reflected J.M. Powell.43 By the 1970s, with most of the Burdekin River in north Queensland diverted away from its valley, salt intrusion had occurred right up the stream, and mangroves and saltwater fish had extended their range. The infant coastal prawn industry—dependent on freshwater outflows—was gutted. Large areas of the Great Barrier Reef offshore from the catchment were starved of the wash of nutrients and began to die. A whole new understanding of the ecological role of apparently ‘waste’ water began to emerge. In the lower Cooper, wetlands had become dustbowls, redgums and floodplain vegetation died, and salt blew corrosively off Lake Eyre. Scientists stood in the dry beds of the Coongie Lakes and tried to imagine what might have been. In the central Channel Country, carp and willows became established and the channels were deepened and eroded. Old red gums tumbled into the watercourse and became battering rams in the next flood. Native fish and water bird populations collapsed.44 By the 1970s, surface salt had started to affect agricultural potential in the irrigation areas and by 1990, the Cooper was declared a priority catchment for investment under the federal Salinity Plan. Cooper Food and Fibre, as the local irrigation industry badged itself, suffered also from the decline in commodity prices on the world markets. Residents lamented each time they saw another roadside letter-box removed, a sign that more farms had been abandoned or amalgamated. Geoffrey Dutton reflected that ‘grand schemes for the outback hatched in city offices and clubs, like the huge caravan of equipment sent off with Burke and Wills, invariably came to grief. For Australia, like some endless python, quietly swallows them.’45 Today, the boom and bust history of the scheme seems a parable of Australian settlement—and indeed, a typical arid zone ecological cycle. Disillusionment had set in by the mid-1970s as the environmental costs of the scheme became evident. Having lost the battle to save Lake Pedder from being drowned, environmental activists now sought to win Lake Eyre back its floods. International scientific attention increasingly focused on the ecological damage wrought by the scheme. But the Queensland government responded to growing criticism by commissioning a series of reports that downplayed the environmental costs and Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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demonstrated the benefits to be gained from a renewed commitment to the scheme. With national unemployment rates beginning to rise from the mid-1970s, the expansion of the scheme along the lines originally proposed promised not just more water, but more jobs. The premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, constantly criticised the federal government’s ‘half-hearted’ implementation of the scheme, blaming its failures on Canberra’s lack of courage and will.46 And he was not alone in believing that many of the nation’s ills could be alleviated by refreshing the great nation-building dreams of the Bradfield Scheme and ‘taking life to the Dead Centre’.47 The Fraser government finally succumbed to pressure from Queensland and allocated substantial funds for a reassessment of the Bradfield Scheme extensions in its Bicentennial Water Resources Program. Funding was also provided for a feasibility study of the Snowy Scheme, which aimed to divert water from the Snowy River for hydroelectric power and irrigation. The Snowy Scheme had first been suggested in the 1940s, but had been pushed aside by Bradfield’s more expansive vision. In the early 1980s, however, the Snowy development seemed more attractive than continuing to pour funds into the ailing Bradfield Scheme. The feasibility study recommended that the Snowy Scheme be pursued, while the reassessment of the Bradfield Scheme was quietly shelved. Critics of the Snowy Scheme pointed to the Bradfield experience as evidence of the environmental damage that would be wrought if the Snowy River’s flow was drastically reduced. Greens activists initiated a highly successful ‘No dams’ campaign, linking the proposed Snowy development with plans for the damming of the Franklin River in south-west Tasmania. With the election of the Hawke government in 1983, the Bicentennial Water Resources Program was scrapped, and both the Bradfield extensions and Snowy Scheme were removed from the Commonwealth’s agenda. The distinctive political culture of ‘the Bradfielders’—now a minor electoral force and the breeding ground of ‘One Nation’—was formed over the first three decades of the scheme’s operation. It combined a heroic frontier pride with deep disillusion at the betrayal of ideals—and, residents would add, failure of the will of government. Bjelke-Petersen harnessed this rural resentment especially against the Hawke government for its ‘betrayal’ of the scheme in 1983, and he used federal neglect of the Bradfield Scheme to rally disaffected voters behind his ‘Joh for PM’ campaign in 1987. His crusade failed, but it crystallised the Bradfielders’ feeling of neglect, their distrust of government, and their 246

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nostalgic longing for the confidence of the past. Bradfielders felt a growing sense of isolation and grievance, and gave national voice to a ‘siege’ mentality, especially later in the century as politicians from both the right and the left endorsed ‘economic rationalist’ reductions in public services and infrastructure.48 The rose—representing the deserts in bloom—became their symbol of defiance, and was brandished on banners in their annual march commemorating the foundation of the scheme. The tenacious political culture of the Bradfielders is not unlike that of the South American pampinos, or people of the pampa, whose attachment to the desert landscapes and communities of nitrate mining has survived economic decline and even social dispersal. Indeed, in both cases, the desert landscapes have come to express a distinctive corporate and industrial identity, and the workers’ sacrifice in such heroic environments is a historical feat to be memorialised and celebrated.49 One of Bradfield’s abandoned food-processing factories has been recently converted to a studio and gallery where defiant desert art of giant human figures has gained national attention. The Bradfielders have also drawn much of their solidarity from their common migrant experience. As the technological and environmental success of the scheme faded, its profile as a site in ‘the making of multicultural Australia’ grew stronger. Politicans of all hues had learned by century’s end to honour Bradfield’s unexpected social and cultural legacy. As historian Ian Tyrrell has argued, ‘For the historian of popular environmental thought, irrigation is not about drains, pumps, pipes, and dams, but about dreams’.50 And those dreams, for the Bradfielders, have been remarkably resilient. In Australia’s coastal communities, the Bradfield Scheme may have become a synonym for ecological disaster, but for irrigators along the Cooper, the scheme retains the glow of frontier endeavour, and the latest problems of salinity, erosion, chemical pollution and biological impoverishment are viewed as ‘natural’ challenges to be fought and overcome, like the floods. In an attempt to defuse this persistent rural resentment and to neutralise the explosive growth of the One Nation Party, the Howard government used the 1998 anniversary of the scheme’s foundation to announce that funding would be allocated under its Centenary of Federation infrastructure program to re-examine the Bradfield Scheme extensions. Yet another report was commissioned, but its findings have yet to be made public. The shire exhibition on the occasion of the 1998 anniversary featured many photographs from the BSA’s official archive—scenes of machinery and men at the building of the Innamincka Dam, Bradfield Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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Weir and Burdekin Tunnel—but there was also a display of intimate family snaps of homes and gardens under construction, picnics by the water, children playing at the swimming pool, women picking produce, people eating and celebrating, and main street carnivals. Each of these was captioned with a recent quote from a Bradfield resident or district farmer, and so an affectionate community album was assembled. There was no mention of the century-long grazing era that had finished, nor of the economic downturn, saline soils, and agonising decline of farming since the late 1970s—and the land itself featured in the photos only as earthworks. But there was still a strong sense that these people had bound themselves to this place and were determined, somehow, to stay.

Coda The Bradfield Scheme was itself a counterfactual scenario, a powerful vision that engineered against the gradient of nature and history. Therefore, in our version here, the rhetoric is real even if the implementation is invented. J.J.C. Bradfield formally proposed his scheme to the Queensland government in March 1938 and described it in broad terms in Walkabout in July 1941, and again in Rydges Weekly in October 1941 and Australian Quarterly in March 1942. It was never implemented—but it was seriously considered in the 1930s and 1940s and even today has its advocates. Our counterfactual history strives for a seamless transition from fact to fiction. The first half of the chapter therefore grounds the scenario in real visions, and all direct quotes are genuine except for that from the Bradfield Bugle in the 1950s. Our purpose has been to explore a potential parallel reality rather than a starkly alternative world. So where does reality end and counterfactual begin? Compared to some of the other chapters in this book, the divergence between history and invention in our story may not seem so great. Historians (with their strong bias towards politics and human affairs) might be inclined to dismiss massive environmental change as a trivial narrative twist while they would see the invention of a different prime minister as more daring. We have deliberately retained the basic structure of national politics in the twentieth century (Curtin, Chifley, Menzies, Fraser, Hawke, Bjelke-Petersen, Howard) so that the reader is not distracted from the environmental and cultural dimensions of the story. Also, we believe that counterfactuals need not only imagine seismic fractures in the landscape of the past; they can also explore interlacing and 248

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haunting continuities, reminding us of the actuality and agency of dreams. They can make us wonder about the historical limits of choice and chance as well as their liberating potential. And they can lead us to reflect upon the scales of time and value against which we measure change itself. Our purpose has been to illuminate the power of water dreaming in Australian history. The Bradfield Papers in the National Library, together with an astonishingly vigorous stream of published sources (some mentioned in the Notes), document a current of desire so strong that it is difficult to know just where reality finally intrudes. Whenever the real archives of Bradfield imaginings ran dry, we could dip into the histories of other irrigation schemes for guidance. The Chaffey brothers’ scheme on the Murray River at Mildura and Renmark, begun in the late 1880s, lured many fruit-growers into financial ruin in the 1890s but was later celebrated for its vision by Ernestine Hill in her book, Water into Gold (Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne, 1937). The Snowy Mountains Scheme, which we imagine being supplanted by Bradfield and then later deferred, was a hydro-electric and irrigation development relying on river diversion that was constructed in the Australian Alps between 1949 and 1974. In his Searching for the Snowy, George Seddon lamented the strangulation of a great river and drew attention to the dubious benefit of the scheme’s hydro-power generation as well as the serious ecological problems unleashed by irrigation in the Murray and Murrumbidgee valleys. Yet the Snowy Scheme remains a revered feat of engineering and an inspiring achievement of post-war national development. Furthermore, as Grahame Griffin argues in ‘Selling the Snowy: The Snowy Mountains Scheme and National Mythmaking’, the Snowy Scheme is now celebrated with a word never used during its construction period—‘multiculturalism’. Siobhan McHugh’s The Snowy: The People Behind the Power (William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1989) tells the stories of the one hundred thousand Snowy workers, two-thirds of whom were European immigrants. The governorgeneral, Sir William McKell, presided at the initiation of the Snowy just as he did over our imaginary Bradfield, and Prime Minister Menzies’ words about ‘big enterprises’ and ‘big men’ were uttered in 1958 at the opening of the Tumut Ponds Dam. From the 1960s, the Ord River Scheme in north-western Australia became a controversial focus of national development, and in spite of being declared a white elephant by economists in the 1980s, it continues to inspire hope as new crops and technologies are introduced. Lesley Head (‘The Northern Myth Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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Revisited? Aborigines, Environment and Agriculture in the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, Stages One and Two’, Australian Geographer, vol. 30, no. 2, 1999, pp. 141–58) and Jay Arthur (The Default Country: A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003)) have analysed the rhetoric and myths of northern development. Like our imagined Bradfield Scheme, the Ord’s economic vindication is always just around the corner, and its failures are seen to be failures of implementation rather than of vision. In Australian history, northern and inland development schemes have constantly traded on promise, and the future always discounts the past. These far frontiers are always in a state of becoming, as Deborah Rose has argued eloquently in her Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004). On the history of irrigation generally in Australia, we have drawn inspiration from the work of Bruce Davidson (Australia Wet or Dry? and The Northern Myth), J.M. Powell (An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe and Plains of Promise, Rivers of Destiny: Water Management and the Development of Queensland, 1824–1990) and Ian Tyrrell (True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930). Because of Powell’s sustained commitment to writing the history of water schemes in state and national development, it was irresistible to imagine him as the scholarly authority on Bradfield. Research by Meredith Fletcher and Mark Peel on the ‘ideal towns’ of Yallourn (Victoria) and Elizabeth (South Australia) helped us imagine what Windorah might have become (Fletcher, Digging People Up For Coal: A History of Yallourn, and Peel, Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and Future in Elizabeth (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1995)). The successful defence of Cooper’s Creek against irrigators in the 1990s suggested the dimensions of likely politics in and around Bradfield (Mandy Martin, Jane Carruthers, Guy Fitzhardinge, Tom Griffiths and Peter Haynes, Inflows: The Channel Country (Mandurama, Qld: Mandy Martin, 2001)). Heather Goodall’s social and environmental study of the Darling floodplain analyses a comparable, later revolution (‘“The river runs backwards”’, in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, pp. 30–51). Richard Kingsford’s work on the ecological impact of river management in the arid zone provided us with crucial insights (‘Ecological impacts of dams, water diversions and river management on floodplain wetlands in Australia’, in R.T. Kingsford (ed.), A Free-Flowing River: The Ecology of the Paroo River). 250

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J.J.C. Bradfield’s Queensland scheme, as proposed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, advocated damming of the headwaters of the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers and diversion of their floodwaters through the Great Dividing Range by aqueduct and tunnel into the Flinders (also dammed) and thence to the channel of the Thomson which flows into the Cooper. He further proposed the damming of the Diamantina and Georgina rivers, as well as a Central Australian Scheme with a series of dams at gaps in the McDonnell-Musgrave Ranges to store the floodwaters of the Finke River and its tributaries. Bradfield confidently expected that regulation of the flow of these rivers would also discipline and clear the wayward natural channels. He dismissed the idea of a canal from the sea to Lake Eyre as impracticable. In his 1945 report on the rainfall and climatological aspects of the Bradfield Scheme, the director of Meteorological Services, H.N. Warren, noted that ‘there appear to be sound reasons to expect realization of the schemes envisaged by Dr Bradfield in respect of Queensland’, but that ‘considerable doubt is felt’ about the Finke River scheme because of ‘the comparative infrequency of high rainfalls’ (H.N. Warren, Bradfield Scheme for ‘Watering the Inland’, Meteorological Aspects, Bulletin no. 34). He recommended that the schemes be considered on their relative merits from water storage and irrigation aspects only, putting aside climatic and rainfall improvement aspects. A majority of the Committee of Meteorologists (comprising F. Loewe, H.M. Treloar, J.C. Foley and E.T. Quayle) working on the report decided ‘that no material increase in rainfall in the regions concerned is likely to accrue from implementation of Dr Bradfield’s schemes; and that the climate of the regions affected is unlikely to be materially improved either immediately or ultimately’. A minority report in support of the climatological dimensions of the Bradfield Scheme was submitted by E.T. Quayle, whose theories that large bodies of inland water would ameliorate climate were used by Bradfield. In the counterfactual, we have imagined that the minority report was a majority report. Published critics such as G.W. Leeper, from the School of Agricultural Science at the University of Melbourne, especially attacked the climatic dimensions of the scheme (G.W. Leeper, ‘Restoring Australia’s Parched Lands—A Comment’). Prime Minister Chifley declared against the Bradfield Scheme in parliament on 22 November 1946. An excellent summary of the history of Bradfield’s vision can be found in Powell’s Plains of Promise, pp. 154–62, 193–6, 267–9. The key dimensions and philosophies of the Bradfield Scheme have been retained in the counterfactual. For example, Bradfield Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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planned a dam at Innamincka which would create ‘a freshwater lake approximately 40 miles by 100 miles’. We have imagined that only Stage 1 of his scheme was implemented and that dams were not built on the Georgina or Diamantina rivers—yet. Historical counterfactuals play with social, political and economic factors but rarely alter natural or physical realities. We have followed this tradition, and Bradfield himself, by trying to work with (or, to be more accurate, against) the existing geology, hydrology and climate of the Lake Eyre Basin, and we have not even imagined a different run of seasons to those that prevailed. However, the geologist John Magee commented that our counterfactual has exaggerated the impact of stopping the flow of Cooper water on the filling of Lake Eyre because about 70–80 per cent of water reaching the lake comes via the Georgina–Diamantina systems. But he agrees with our description of the impact of the Innamincka Dam on the Coongie system. Bradfield’s own hydrological calculations were criticised by W.H.R. Nimmo in 1946 in the ‘Annual Report of the Bureau of Investigation for the year 1946’ (Queensland Parliamentary Papers, 1947– 48, vol. 2), John Burton in Water for the Inland: A Review of the Bradfield Plan (Report No. 2, Sydney: Water Research Foundation of Australia, 1961) and Vincent Kotwicki in Floods of Lake Eyre. One of the pleasures of writing this chapter was our conversations with scientists and environmental managers who were excited by the idea of counterfactuals in history. They are often themselves engaged in ‘future scenarios’ as a policy tool, and were intrigued by the idea of history as an archive of alternative futures. For examples of the work of CSIRO in this area, see Michael Dunlop, Graham Turner, Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy, Decision Points for Land and Water Futures, and Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy, Dilemmas Distilled: Options to 2050 for Australia’s Population, Technology, Resources and Environment; A Summary and Guide to the CSIRO Technical Report. A central aim of our history is to argue the original environmental credentials of the Bradfield vision, which tend to be overlooked in an era of green environmentalism. The scheme, as portrayed here, was indeed a ‘restoration’ project, aiming to return ‘our parched lands to their former fertility’ as Bradfield put it (Australian Quarterly, vol. xiv, no. 1, March 1942, pp. 27–39). Australians, he argued, had to understand ‘the romance of our continent’ in order to comprehend the scheme. What did he mean by ‘romance’? It was the deep history of the continent, the recent revelation that once ‘The inland waters abounded with crocodiles and giant fish’ and ‘terrifying herds of 252

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Dinosaur, Diprotodon and the Eury, or giant wombat, fed on the rich vegetation’. Bradfield wrote of ‘redeeming’ the arid inland. Settlers in North Queensland wrote to the prime minister in 1945 of their concern that the ‘dead heart’ was growing. ‘It is known from the discovery of the skeletons of pre-historic animals’, wrote the North Queensland Local Authorities Association, ‘that this great but now dead and worthless area was once a rich and fertile land’ (National Archives of Australia, A9816/4 1943/664 Part 1). The vision that inspired Bradfield and his supporters was historical as well as futuristic. Dr Bradfield died in 1943 but there was life after death for his scheme. Ion Idriess continued to be a passionate advocate, as recounted in the counterfactual. In 1979, an editorial in the Australian (15–16 December) advocated ‘Taking life to the Dead Centre’ through the establishment of an equivalent to the Snowy Mountains Authority to develop ‘The Great Interior’. In the same year, L.J. Hogan proposed the turning of waters inland and also the modification of the Australian climate through the building of a 4000-metre-high mountain across Australia at longitude 130˚ (Man-Made Mountain, (Sydney: Charter Books, 1979)). The Queensland government pushed for a ‘Revised Bradfield Scheme’ in the 1980s. In 1993, R.L. Chynoweth, the federal Labor member for Dunkley, urged parliament to implement the Bradfield Scheme, and in 1997 Tony Smith, the federal Liberal member for Dickson, made a similar plea for the scheme because it could ‘stop this incredible drought cycle that we have all the time’ and ‘one sees in North Queensland so much water running into the sea’ (House of Representatives, Debates, 17 August 1993 and 23 October 1997). A variety of plans to ‘drought-proof’ Australia are surveyed in a publication by Farmhand Australia entitled Talking Water: An Australian Guidebook for the 21st Century (Sydney: 2003). A principal of Farmhand, the broadcaster Alan Jones, declared in July 2002: ‘It’s not as though Australians don’t have water. Nearly four billion litres a day is not used in the Ord River system in Western Australia. The Clarence River, the Burdekin River, the Daly River, all could be turned inland’ (Wahlquist, ‘Desperate Measures’). Professor Mike Archer suggested the flooding of Lake Eyre in the Sydney Morning Herald of 20 June 2005: ‘Might a huge permanent body of water in Central Australia act like a giant humidifier, evaporating water that moist winds would then sweep across vast areas of the continent?’ he wondered. The independent federal member for Leichhardt, Selwyn Johnston, currently promotes ‘The Revised Bradfield Scheme’ as ‘Australia’s next great national project’. Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt

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We wanted our ‘what if’ to be plausible enough to help us see ‘what is’. Australia still harbours a lingering hope that certainty and control can yet be wrought from an ancient, arid land with its frustrating, variable climate. The ‘what ifs’ are not confined to the past. What if the state Liberal Party had won the 2005 Western Australian election? Would we now be watching the development of a massive engineering scheme to divert the waters of northern rivers to the thirsty south? Our counterfactual strives to be plausible. The catch is that truth really is stranger than fiction.

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12

WHAT IF A MEN’S MOVEMENT HAD TRIUMPHED IN THE 1970s? Ann Curthoys

From the late 1960s, radical politics was energised by the women’s movement. Liberationists promised to ‘smash the family’ and remake sex. Moderates worked through the Women’s Electoral Lobby to change government institutions and priorities. Equal pay was won; anti-discrimination legislation passed; rape and domestic violence recognised; childcare supported; language reworded; history excavated; relationships altered. A generation of young femocrats staffed the state. Some men responded sympathetically to these changes. A diffuse men’s movement struggled to comprehend (and sometimes reinstate) the contemporary meaning of masculinity. Others fought more directly to preserve male prerogatives. The latter gained force, especially from the early 1990s. Conservative governments reversed early legislative gains, and a new generation of women struggled for an independent political voice. While the world was much changed, gender equality still remained a distant ideal. The meaning of feminism, and its relevance, was now an object of regular debate. The history of Women’s Liberation faced passionate review. Historians have begun to sketch the history of the modern Australian women’s movement.1 It began, they say, around 1970. Yet what if the movement that began then was not a women’s movement but a men’s movement? How different would the 1970s and 1980s in Australia have been? How different would our lives be today? 255

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In this essay I use existing histories of the women’s movement of this era, and recast them so that it is men, not women, who experienced the excitement of those years and who made demands. I began with some essays I wrote some years ago on the Australian Women’s Liberation movement, and changed ‘women’ to ‘men’ and ‘feminine’ to ‘masculine’, but it quickly became clear that no simple reversal is possible. When you make these substitutions, some odd things happen. It is this impossibility, and this oddity, that I want to explore. So the main part of the essay evokes an imagined men’s movement which tries to mirror histories I and others have written of the women’s movement of those years; the coda reflects on what could not be mirrored, and what that whole exercise illuminates for us when we set out to write history.

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The Men’s Liberation movement of the early 1970s was preceded by earlier campaigns throughout the twentieth century for men’s rights. Nevertheless, the year 1970 does seem to mark a significant moment in Australian history, as the starting point for a new kind of men’s movement, one that was much more direct and aggressive than its predecessors. This new movement demanded recognition of men’s superiority, developed a thorough critique of existing society, and urged men’s right to sexual domination. It sought to empower men by changing their assumptions about themselves and their aspirations, dreams, abilities, and bodies. In the future, men would more vigilantly defend their rightful place in the world. Women’s participation in many aspects of social life had been growing since the late nineteenth century, with developments in women’s education, political rights and participation, employment opportunities, and ability to control reproduction. Some men had welcomed these developments, for as John Stuart Mill had foreseen, it brought them more interesting female companionship, and a more challenging and productive life both in the public sphere and in the home. Most men, however, resented these changes and there emerged a range of men’s organisations across the political spectrum seeking a halt to any extension of women’s opportunities. Particularly important were the United Associations of Men, founded in 1929 (from the amalgamation of four earlier organisations) and still in existence in 1970, the far rightled Union of Australian Men which had been active since 1950, the Business and Professional Men’s clubs, the Australian Federation of Men Voters, and a range of other organisations, most notably the Rural Men’s Association. The men’s pro-war movement, as exemplified in organisations such as the Men’s International League for Freedom and Security through War, also had a long tradition of activism. These and other organisations had waged important but unsuccessful campaigns against any extension of women’s sphere and power, especially in the two decades following World War II. There had, for example, been active opposition to women’s growing campaign for equal pay. Several men’s organisations had also argued strongly for maintaining and increasing discrimination against women in employment, in terms both of the kinds of jobs they could enter, and their opportunities for advancement and promotion once employed. Yet the men seemed to be losing the battle, with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Commission’s equal pay decision of 1969 seen as particularly dangerous. Although its effects were limited to those women who Ann Curthoys

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did exactly the same work as men, less than 5 per cent of female workers, the decision sounded a loud alarm bell for men’s rights groups everywhere. It would not be long, they feared, before the other 95 per cent of women workers gained equal pay as well, and once that happened, men’s authority in both the workplace and at home would be in jeopardy. When the decision was announced, the men’s organisations were incensed. With the equal pay decision as a catalyst, a new movement sprang into action. In one of its first notable actions, James Robinson, a farright activist, chained himself in protest to the doors of the Arbitration Commission’s offices in Melbourne. Men’s organisations till that point had been generally respectable in tone, using traditional forms of protest such as public meetings, petitions, and deputations to the local member of parliament. By the late 1960s, however, there was a new breed of young men like Robinson who had learned a far more militant and aggressive style. They were part of a growing anti-counter-culture expressly valuing competitive, rationalist, technology-driven Western (especially American) civilisation. Many had participated in the movement supporting Australian involvement in the Vietnam war, which saw victory in Vietnam as essential for economic prosperity in the region. In their demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, direct shouting confrontations with opponents of Australia’s involvement in the war were becoming common. Though no major violence had yet occurred, the threat of it was just beneath the surface. Similar movements and tensions were developing elsewhere, most notably in the United States. Information about a new movement there called ‘Men’s Liberation’ began to filter through to Australia. At first, it came through overseas journals. The University of Adelaide’s student newspaper, On Dit, on 19 March 1969 carried an article by politics tutor Peter Wright, based on his reading of American new right magazines, titled ‘Just about Time for a New Masculinism?’ Wright wrote about the demonstrations by radical right men in the USA against women protesting about beauty contests and pageants, and about the aggressive style of the new Men’s Liberation movement there. Later in 1969, Americans visiting Australia, and Australians returning from visits to the United States, brought with them a more detailed knowledge of the new movement. A group of men, including the American Martin Appleby and recently returned Australian Colin Stewart, began meeting in East Balmain in Sydney in the last few months of 1969. In December of that year the group distributed a leaflet at a pro-war demonstration 258

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announcing the emergence of Men’s Liberation and calling a public meeting in Sydney for mid-January 1970. Something was clearly afoot; even Martin and Colin were surprised by the huge turnout at this meeting. Intense feelings were obviously being tapped. The Men’s Liberation movement was on its way. In subsequent months, Men’s Liberation groups emerged in each capital city, earliest in Sydney and Adelaide, later in Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities, formed by and large by young men who were also active in the pro-war movement. Pro-war activists, however, attacked the men for diverting energies from the pro-war cause. The men’s liberationists replied that the movement’s inability to stop the rise in antiwar feeling could be directly attributed to its failure to exclude women from its meetings and demonstrations. The language of domination and control they had used in the pro-war movement to support Australian intervention in Vietnam was now carried over to the Men’s Liberation movement. Martin Appleby wrote a little later in the personal-is-political style favoured by the movement: Dear brothers: For us in Men’s Liberation, the more we understand our own situation, the more we realize that it will indeed take a major revolt to change it ... sooner or later, as we liberate ourselves, we’ll kick out the United Nations and the dogooders and the egalitarians and create a male-dominated, hierarchical, individualistic, privatised society ... Remembering that we are fighting for our own liberation from the unreasonable demands of women ... (MeTarzan, no. 3, July 1971) Each group went through a ‘consciousness-raising’ period, where discussions were held on the difficulties men were encountering in their attempts to maintain dominance in many spheres of life—economic, political, social, moral, and cultural—the point being to draw out the ways in which individually experienced moments of failure to dominate were in fact common problems, socially produced. The new groups read avidly, especially American pamphlets and newspapers such as Back on Your Backs, and distributed roneoed copies of key American Men’s Liberation texts, such as Tales My Father Never Told Me, and Alexander Benston’s The Political Economy of Men’s Liberation. Two of the most striking and influential pamphlets were Arthur Koedt’s ‘The Myth of a Female Orgasm’ from Notes from the First Year, and Kevin Millett’s daring Ann Curthoys

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essay on the pretensions of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf to be taken seriously. Koedt’s article, with its anti-clitoral argument that men were pressured to pay too much attention to female sexual pleasure and too little to their own, was revolutionary to young men. Millett’s essay, with its energetic critical analysis and its manifestolike proclamation of a new masculinist literary sensibility, was excitedly read for its innovative ways of thinking about questions of gender, sexuality, and culture. Another particularly well-liked American essay was Patrick Maynard’s ‘The Politics of Housework’ (1970), deriding female demands that men and women share. Such women, he wrote, said things like: I don’t like doing housework but it’s OK when we share it. That way, we both have time for other things. Meaning: Historically the upper classes (men) have had hundreds of years of not doing menial jobs. It’s time they did their share. Also meaning: I don’t like dull stupid boring jobs, so we both should do them. Maynard retorted, to the delight of men’s liberationists: If historically men have had hundreds, maybe thousands of years not doing these jobs, why should they have to do them now? From all this literature Australian masculinists developed an analysis that emphasised the importance of sex and gender in modern society. They adopted an economic rationalist interpretation of capitalism, and there was much excited discussion of the value of sexual hierarchy for the economy. Men’s liberationists argued that the entire social and economic system needed male dominance, authority and control. Women’s labour was needed in the home (and on the lowest rungs of the labour market). Thus Men’s Liberation would benefit society at large, including women themselves. Men’s demands came to be seen as not merely for the benefit of men, but for all mankind. The new movement went from strength to strength. A national conference, with men from Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, was held in May 1970. The Men’s Liberation movement now had a clear set of demands—no access to childcare, no full-time or skilled jobs for women, men’s control over women’s access to contraception and abortion, the 260

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re-establishment of higher pay for men across the board, and an end to any images of gender equality in the media. Soon afterwards, Kevin Jennings spoke to a pro-war rally on the front lawn at the University of Sydney, accusing the students gathering for the march downtown in support of Australian involvement in the Vietnam war of having allowed sexual egalitarianism to infiltrate their organisation. In a speech still remembered decades later for the shock it gave its audience, Kevin said: ‘Watch out! You may meet an unashamed male chauvinist pig, or you’ll say I’m a woman-hating member of the male pride brigade, which I am. I would like to speak.’ Australian men participated in International Men’s Day on 15 June; the day had been declared Men’s Day the previous year by the US men’s movement, and in 1970 twenty-five nations took part. (The number rose each year after that until the mid-1980s, when interest declined as the men’s movement’s aims were seen to have been achieved.) In Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, men carried slogans like ‘Your Bodies, Our Minds’, ‘More Brains, Higher Pay’, ‘Get with the Strength’, and ‘Dicks not Dykes’. The media quickly became fascinated by Men’s Liberation. There had for some time been considerable newspaper and magazine discussion of men’s discontents at women’s increased role in education, employment, politics and indeed in society at large, what Bernard Flanders in the United States in his well-known book The Masculine Mystique (1963) had called ‘the problem without a name’. These discontents included having women in universities, as co-workers, on local councils, and active in political organisations and parties. When the new masculinism emerged, with its critique of the idea that men could even consider sharing with women either the workplace or the housework, it added new spice to an established media concern for the modern male. ‘Men’s Lib’ hit the news. By 1971, the movement in Sydney had grown large enough for the establishment in March of its own newspaper, MeTarzan. Similar moves were made in other states—Men’s Liberation houses appeared everywhere, newsletters and magazines were started, and demonstrations held around immediate political issues. Men’s Lib had arrived. All over the country, in the early years of the 1970s men eagerly read the new texts of the international Men’s Liberation movement. Especially important were Kevin Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Steven Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Gerald Greer’s The Male Eunuch (1970), and Julian Mitchell’s Man’s Estate (1971). Greer was of course of some particular interest, being an Australian expatriate in Britain, who Ann Curthoys

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later achieved notice in the United States on his promotional tour for The Male Eunuch, and his public debate with Norma Poster. He visited Australia on a promotional tour in 1971, attracting much media publicity and drawing the book to the attention of many men who crowded his book signings at well-known bookshops. His book was an earthy libertarian look at the ideas that surrounded and constrained men, and urged men to value themselves as themselves and to pay little if any attention to women. Many were struck by Greer’s statement that few men had any idea how much women really feared them, and pondered the implications this had for their treatment of women in the future. The Male Eunuch was the means by which many men came into contact with masculinist ideas, and is still used as a way of referring in shorthand to what early 1970s masculinism was really about: an aggressive assertion of male rights and male sexuality. Yet if Greer’s book was the most widely read and known of the masculinist texts, Kevin Millett’s Sexual Politics was by far the most influential within Men’s Liberation itself. It was an ambitious book indeed, first establishing its terms through literary analysis; then stating a theory of sexual politics, namely that ‘sexual dominion is the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power’; and finally moving on to a massive historical sweep establishing a history of masculinist struggle. These were the best known texts, but there were many others as well, such as Robin Morgan’s Brotherhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Men’s Liberation Movement (1970) including excerpts from Valentine Solanis’ SPEW (Society for Putting an End to Women) manifesto. Notes from the Third Year (1971), the third in a New York radical masculinist series of original essays and reprints, was eagerly read. Also important, a year or two later, were Sean Rowbotham’s histories, Men, Resistance and Revolution (1972) and Man’s Consciousness, Woman’s World (1973). These new collections and books were contributing to a lively and continuing debate. A new kind of masculinism was thriving. These books were only one means of spreading ideas. Vitally important in the early 1970s was also a literature of pamphlets, journals, and newspaper articles. The men in the Sydney group in Glebe Point Road (the rented house they used is now a National Heritage site), learned from the American Martin Appleby about the burgeoning American literature. A listing of Men’s Liberation literature put out by the Sydney group in 1971 gave the American addresses of relevant journals and pamphlets, not only Back on Your Backs, but also Capitalist Man, Men’s Monthly, Rat, Up From Equal, No More Fun and Games, Men Speak Out, 262

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Voice of Men’s Liberation, New York Masculinist, and Men: A Journal of Liberation. An early debate within the Australian men’s movement was over homosexuality. Some early men’s liberationists thought the movement should be open to all, whatever their sexuality, while others thought Men’s Liberation meant a rejection of homosexuality, and a reassertion of male heterosexuality. Yet others thought homosexuality the only truly male-centred solution: heterosexuality meant sleeping with the enemy. These differences were never fully resolved, but over time the antihomosexual position gradually took precedence. ‘Consciousness-raising’ sessions allowed men an opportunity to expunge any suggestion of homosexual preference, and to reassert the importance of homosociality—men should spend most of their time, both at work and in leisure, with other men—underpinned by heterosexuality for purposes of sexual activity and human reproduction. Some Men’s Liberation groups visited schools, and offered counselling and advice to male teenagers who thought they might have homosexual preferences. Pamphlets with titles like Coming In and Unnatural Vices were written especially for these school visits. The Men’s Liberation movement used direct forms of public protest to press for change. A major political campaign in the first years was against abortion. Debate over abortion had accelerated after South Australia passed a liberalising abortion law in 1969, and an active AntiAbortion Association had been formed. By mid-1970 the Men’s Liberation groups joined the campaign to prevent the South Australian reforms spreading to the rest of the country; they also sought funding for men’s health centres and opposed any special funding for women’s health care. The struggle over reproductive rights and health was well and truly on. The new men’s movement made its first serious inroad into parliamentary politics with the establishment of the Men’s Electoral Lobby (MEL) in February 1972, which through its participation in the federal election campaign of that year, placed masculinist demands on the wider political agenda. MEL grew directly from Men’s Liberation groups in Victoria, but quickly developed a national membership and a far more direct emphasis on attempting to achieve change through pressure on the existing political parties. MEL surveyed and interviewed many parliamentary candidates for their position on men’s issues, and lent public support to those candidates whose policies seemed closest to those of the men’s movement. MEL’s survey, and its results, had very Ann Curthoys

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wide media coverage. Men’s Liberation had for two years now fascinated the media, and here was a group directly confronting politicians with its views. Liberal, Country Party, and League of Rights candidates tended to do somewhat ‘better’ than those of the other parties. In the federal election of December 1972, the Wheeler Liberal government was elected for all sorts of reasons, but it was clear, that, now in power, it needed to take on board the demands MEL had made during the campaign. As a consequence of the conjunction of an active men’s movement and a reforming Liberal government, there was a period of rapid change in relation to the masculinist agenda in the years 1973 to 1975. The men’s movement pressed hard for higher pay for men in all occupations and the new government argued strongly to the Industrial and Arbitration Commission for unequal pay across the board. The commission reached its decision on 15 December 1972: men were to be awarded a consistently higher ‘male’ rate of pay, no matter how comparable their work was to that of women. In April 1973, amid much publicity, Elmore Reid was appointed to assist the prime minister on men’s issues. The role of Elmore Reid, and behind him a vocal and active men’s movement, was crucial in pushing the Liberal government to increase its commitment not to yield to women’s demands for childcare services. The government promised never to introduce federal government funding of childcare services, and in response to increasing pressure from MEL and other groups, re-allocated $75 million originally intended for childcare to a new program for all-male sporting clubs. By the end of 1973 Liberal policy also favoured taxation measures to discourage both women’s employment and any growth in private childcare facilities. Further reforms were to follow. By July 1974 a Men’s Affairs section had been established in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and in September the government agreed to allocate $2.2 million to fund the Australian contribution to the UN-designated International Men’s Year (IMY) of 1975. This substantial funding enabled the men’s movement to conduct many activities during IMY, notably a Men and Politics conference which emphasised the importance of the political sphere being confined to men only. The fall of the Wheeler government in November 1975 saw a slowing down from the frenetic pace of change and reform at federal level that had characterised the previous three years. The men’s movement, however, continued to grow in strength, most of the major gains of the Wheeler years were consolidated, and there were some important 264

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developments in several states. From the late 1970s, the men’s movement’s attention turned increasingly towards confining women to casual and unskilled employment, which meant restricting many jobs to men only, and prohibiting women’s access to promotion to higher positions. Again, there was recourse to the powers of the state to achieve these objectives. Progress was made more easily at the state than federal level, especially in states with Liberal governments. South Australia led off with a Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, and New South Wales and Victoria followed in 1977 with a Discrimination Act and Men’s Employment Protection Act respectively. Despite the return of a federal Labor government, there were some changes at federal level as well, suggesting fewer differences between the major parties on gender issues than the men’s movement had feared. As a result of MEL lobbying, an Office for the Protection of Men’s Opportunity was established in the Commonwealth Public Service Board in 1978. The release of new energies was not only in the political arena. Masculinism proved a spur to men’s cultural and intellectual pursuits, a boost to confidence, revolutionising the way men conceived of their own creative abilities. Several foundational Australian masculinist texts appeared in 1975. The best known of these was Arthur Winters’ bestselling men’s history Damned Gigolos and God’s Warriors (1975). This book notably described ‘sexual egalitarianism’ as a ‘pernicious ideology which has limited the extent to which men have been really able to control the development of Australian society’, and a ‘means of reducing men to the role of gigolos, obliged to satisfy a non-existent female sexuality’. It rewrote Australian history as a story of a once harmonious maledominated society that had declined into sexual egalitarianism through the twentieth century, and urged men to remember their earlier dominance and fight without compromise to re-establish it. Also important were Morton Dixson’s Maternal Matildas, Eric Ryan and Anton Conlon’s Unwanted Invaders, and Brent Kingston’s My Wife, My Servant, all of which argued passionately against sexual equality in either work or the family. It was the same in the world of academic scholarship. The demand for courses that studied men and masculinist theory grew, leading to a successful strike for such a course at the University of Sydney in 1973 and again at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1974–75. Gradually courses sprang up everywhere. A masculinist critique of academic disciplines emerged—one after the other; history, philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and political science came under Ann Curthoys

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scrutiny and challenge. In 1973 the journal Rebellious Man was established in Sydney, in 1975 Hercules in Brisbane, and in 1985 Australian Masculinist Studies in Adelaide. Each of these journals provided a forum for masculinist intervention in academic scholarship. Critiques varied according to the discipline, but there were common patterns. Disciplines in the past had paid too much attention to women. Not only had men not been exclusively studied, but also the very assumptions of a discipline, its basic habits of thought, its notions of what was worthwhile to research, write about, and teach, were not sufficiently male-centred. In history, the argument was that the discipline, in being so much concerned with the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’ spheres of life, had dealt unnecessarily with the boring and irrelevant activities of women. Generations of Australian men had had to learn far more about women than was necessary. Masculinists had not only to undertake the exclusive history of men, but also to challenge fundamental assumptions about what constituted ‘history’. Yet with these successes came also internal division within the men’s movement itself. After 1975 disagreement steadily grew, as the various strands of masculinist political thought—radical, liberal, and conservative—developed, and differences became more apparent. Radical masculinist theory concentrated on deconstructing the notion of ‘sexual equality’, focusing on men’s physical superiority, the latter dramatised especially by Stan Brownmiller’s Asserting Our Will (1975) which controversially saw rape as an acceptable strategy, as a means by which ‘all men could keep all women in a state of fear’. Radical masculinists argued that the ‘veil of censorship’ on the rape issue should be lifted so that this strategy for control could be openly and publicly discussed. American masculinist Martin Daly’s visit to Australia in 1981 gave the more extreme radical masculinist arguments a quasi-religious tone, seeing men as needing to seek spirituality as men, and representing all women as femo-communists, the irredeemable perpetrators of egalitarianism. Liberal masculinism, in contrast, went ever more deeply into the relationship between men’s superiority and capitalism, advocating giving free reign to market forces, though within a framework which ensured male preference in the workplace. Conservative masculinism stressed the role of the churches in reminding women of their inferior status, their role as mothers and carers, and the unchristian nature of their demands for a wider social role. The relationships between the men’s movement and the movements against Aboriginal rights and Asian immigration were somewhat 266

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troubled from the beginning. The men’s movement was itself entirely White, but for a long while had only tenuous links to movements for White supremacy. The latter—represented by groups with names like All for Australia, Australia First, the League of Rights, and so on—were at first critical of the men’s movement for implying that its program applied to all men, whatever their colour or national origin. Such visions of universal brotherhood, they pointed out, opened the way to ideas of racial equality. Most anti-immigration and White supremacy groups were therefore wary of the new men’s movement, though they did increasingly take opportunities to address and argue with it, especially at conferences such as the series of very successful Men and Capital conferences of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some masculinists responded to the challenge to masculinist theory posed by White supremacists by developing a concept of ‘partial brotherhood’, whereby although all men had in common the need to exclude women from education, the workforce and public life, racial differences meant it would be impossible to welcome Aboriginal and Asian men into the same organisations as White men. As time went on recognition of the importance of race led the men’s movement to abandon its original belief in brotherhood, and the White supremacist movement and the men’s movement sat more comfortably together. Yet if the men’s movement was facing some internal divisions over the relative importance of economics, sexuality, whiteness, and physical and sexual violence as mechanisms for maintaining male domination, it continued to have major success in influencing government policy. Particularly noteworthy was the national Affirmative Action (Higher Employment Opportunity for Men) Act of 1986, which provided at a national level for the maintenance of career pathways for men only, and the retention of women in low-pay temporary employment, as needed. Mechanisms were put in place whereby employers had to explain their management strategies for discouraging women’s employment aspirations and favouring men over women in a consistent managerial fashion. Women were systematically excluded from management, in both the public and private sectors. The protection of men’s supremacy in employment had reached higher levels than ever before. The men’s movement had in fifteen years changed the face of Australian society.

Coda In the imagined men’s movement above, many of my specific examples are simply masculine versions of books that were actually written, and Ann Curthoys

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events that really happened. There were some extensions to women’s political rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and there did indeed emerge a masculinist campaign against them.2 For example: there was no United Associations of Men, but there was an important body called the United Associations of Women, founded in 1929 (from the amalgamation of four earlier organisations) and which was still in existence in 1970; no ‘far right-led Union of Australian Men’ but a far-left Union of Australian Women which had been active since 1950; no Business and Professional Men’s clubs but many active Business and Professional Women’s clubs, no Australian Federation of Men Voters but of course an Australian Federation of Women Voters and finally no Rural Men’s Association but most definitely a Country Women’s Association. All these organisations were active in the decades after World War II, arguing, in very different ways, for an extension of economic, social, and other opportunities to women. And reversals go on. There was indeed an important decision by the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission on Equal Pay in 1969, just as I have written here. Its effects were limited to those women who did exactly the same work as men, less than 5 per cent of female workers. However, it wasn’t James Robinson, a far-right activist, who chained himself in protest to the doors of the Arbitration Commission’s offices in Melbourne but rather Zelda D’Aprano, a woman trade unionist and communist who was protesting against the severely limited nature of the decision.3 Women in Australia did indeed learn of the American Women’s Liberation movement from returning Australians, visiting Americans, American journals, and locally written articles, an early example of the latter being Warren Osmond’s ‘Just about Time for a new Feminism’ in On Dit, the Adelaide University student newspaper on 19 March 1969. But it wasn’t Martin Appleby who wrote about the new Men’s Liberation movement in MeTarzan in July 1971, but Martha Ansara who wrote about Women’s Liberation in MeJane. It was especially good fun reversing some of the titles of American pamphlets and newspapers that women’s liberationists in Australia read in the early 1970s—the originals were Off Our Backs, Tales My Mother Never Told Me, The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation, Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, and Pat Mainardi’s ‘The Politics of Housework’. As far as I know, no Bernard Flanders wrote a book called The Masculine Mystique (1963), but Betty Friedan wrote a very famous one 268

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called The Feminine Mystique which identified women’s discontents with their narrow social role and opportunities as ‘the problem without a name’. Key texts of the women’s movement included Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), and Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971). In Australia, instead of my imagined Arthur Winters’ best-selling men’s history Damned Gigolos and God’s Warriors (1975), we had Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police. Also important were Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda, Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon’s Gentle Invaders, and Beverley Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, all of which argued passionately for sexual equality in either work or the family.4 The imagined tensions between the men’s movement and movements against Aboriginal rights and Asian immigration did not happen, or not like this. But there were real tensions between the women’s movement, and the demands of Aboriginal and some immigrant women, and these were based on a tension between a notion of universal sisterhood on the one hand and the clear differences between White, especially Anglo women, and Aboriginal and many non-Anglo immigrant women on the other. The effect of the latter was indeed to undermine simple beliefs in universal sisterhood, and a greater recognition of the importance of racial politics as a divider of women from one another.5 Finally there really was a national Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act of 1986, which sought to protect women from gender-based discrimination in the workplace. And so it goes. My attempt to ‘think’ a men’s movement two decades before there really was one,6 and to take the Women’s Liberation movement out of history, reveals that this imagined men’s movement cannot in fact be understood merely as a mirror of the women’s movement. As many of those who have engaged in counterfactual exercises have noted, one change to the historical matrix brings many others with it. Take war and peace, for example. In my original essays on the Women’s Liberation movement, from which I drew this material, I had explored the connections between Women’s Liberation and the antiwar movement, but in transposing everything from ‘women’ to ‘men’ it seemed also necessary to transpose the peace movement into a pro-war movement. Connecting a men’s rights movement to an anti-war movement just didn’t seem to make much sense. For the same reason, I felt I had to change the Whitlam Labor government of 1972–75 to a Wheeler Liberal government. If the analysis of the connections between Ann Curthoys

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the extra-parliamentary men’s movement and a relatively sympathetic government was to be maintained, then a conservative government was needed. Another example is my attempted conversion of the ‘women’s studies’ movement to a ‘men’s studies’ movement: the intellectual ferment generated by feminism can’t really be evoked in a masculine version, for that ferment set itself against generations of male control of institutions of learning and public debate. Again, it felt impossible to posit generations of female control of intellectual life. The story of 1970s feminism gains its power from the entrenched nature of its targets, which no simple inversion can capture. (In that light, even its limited successes seem in retrospect remarkable.) The depth of the change feminists sought was especially evident in women’s large-scale (and not usually feminist-inspired) entry into the workforce. This was a movement that had been going on for decades, but it gathered remarkable speed in the 1960s when economic conditions led to a pull of women into the increasingly productive workforce and out of a household that in terms of productivity could simply not compete. The Women’s Liberation movement was in part an expression of the tensions this massive workforce entry generated; so important was the question of paid work to that movement that some women got the message that that was all it cared about. Yet the feminism that I have elsewhere tried to write about historically was a feminism that emphasised choice, and was actually wary of urging women to place career above family on the grounds that that would tie women in ever more closely to the workings of capitalism, a fate that most women’s liberationists, being of the left, abhorred. Yet this counterfactual exercise, with its emphasis on struggles over women in the workforce, perhaps reminds us that it is nevertheless important for historians to take seriously this current perception of feminism’s complicity with the inexorable suction of human activities into the marketplace, and the concomitant growth in individualism as an ethic and a lifestyle. There are for any social movement both intended and unintended effects; the latter especially deserve further investigation. In any case, despite some of the impossibilities, I found it rather fun, converting the 1970s Women’s Liberation movement into a Men’s Liberation movement. But it was less fun when I came to ask what the impact of my imaginary men’s movement had been. What difference did this imaginary movement make? Too many of my answers were no longer imaginary, but rather descriptions of present Australian society. In the economy, for example, we can see that there are still many 270

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occupations where it is rare to find women, and where they are present it is often in the lower rungs of those occupations. Women are rarely managers and their take-home pay is lower than men’s for all levels of skill. There is substantial sexual discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. Although some women are active in the trade union movement, the movement itself has lost effectiveness. The cost of childcare has increased significantly, and there is limited maternity or paternity leave. There are no agencies left in the Commonwealth or state bureaucracies that monitor the differential effects on men and women of government economic and welfare policies. Combining work with family has become so difficult that many women are opting out of childbearing altogether. The incidence of rape and domestic violence remains high.7 Pornography involving images of violence against women flourishes. The peace movement is weaker than it has ever been. Of course, there is much else to say about our present condition— not only the continuing levels of sexual inequality and masculine power, but also about the very real gains women have made, and the difficulties faced by many men. My sketch is no more than a sketch. But one could at least argue that 1970s feminism has made less difference than we might have expected or predicted in, say, the late 1980s. For the moment from which we write is important. As all historians know, our present vantage point affects the questions we ask about the past, and the way we view it—‘hindsight’ is a constantly moving feast. The histories of 1970s and 1980s feminism will keep changing as the current social arrangements of gender themselves change. Imagining a men’s movement may help us think a little more clearly about the specific moment in history that the Women’s Liberation movement represents.

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NOTES

Introduction, Sean Scalmer 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1949), p. 165. ibid. Martin Bunz, ‘Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide’, American Historical Review, vol. 109, no. 3, June 2004, p. 3 of 27 (electronic). Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1997), p. 43. Pascal’s claim is in his Pensées. It is unpacked and rejected in a recent counterfactual: Josiah Ober, ‘Not By a Nose: The Triumph of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, 31 BC’, in Robert Cowley (ed.), What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), pp. 23–47. George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo’, in Clio, A Muse And Other Essays Literary and Pedestrian (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1913), pp. 184–200. J.C. Squire (ed.), If It Had Happened Otherwise (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972; originally published by Longmans Green and Co., 1932). Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Organisation (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934). This is observed in David Dale, ‘If the Losers had Won … ’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23–24 March 2002, Spectrum Section, p. 9. G.V. Portus, ‘Some Lapses into Imaginary History’, in They Wanted to Rule the World (Sydney and London: Angus & Robertson, 1944). Special thanks to Frank Bongiorno for finding this gem. This is noted in Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, ‘Introduction’, in J.C. Squire (ed.), p. ix. This is noted in Niall Ferguson, ‘Introduction’, in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Papermac, 1998), pp. 3, 7. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). John Birmingham, Designated Targets: World War 2.2 (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2005). For example, Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History; Cowley (ed.), What If? 2; Andrew Roberts (ed.), What Might Have Been: Imaginary History From

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16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Twelve Leading Historians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). It should be noted that Ferguson and Roberts offer a more social-scientific defence of counterfactual history than Cowley does. Hobsbawm, p. 42. Weber, p. 164. Robert Jervis, ‘Counterfactuals, Causation, and Complexity’, in Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (eds), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 310. Human freedom is defined as the choice between counterfactual possibilities in Matthew H. Kramer, ‘On the Counterfactual Dimension of Negative Liberty’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, vol. 2, no. 1, 2003, p. 65. H. Lefebvre, ‘What is the Historical Past’, New Left Review, no. 90, March–April 1975, p. 34. R.W. Fogel, Railways and American Economic Growth: Essays in Interpretative Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). Jeffrey M. Chwieroth, ‘Counterfactuals and the Study of the American Presidency’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2002, pp. 293–327. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, ‘The End of the Cold War: Predicting an Emergent Property’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 42, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 131–55. Edgar Kiser and Margaret Levi, ‘Using Counterfactuals in Historical Analysis: Theories of Revolution’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), pp. 187–8. James D. Fearon, ‘Causes and Counterfactuals in Social Science: Exploring an Analogy Between Cellular Automata and Historical Processes’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), p. 54. The most accessible guide to chaos theory is James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). It is linked to counterfactual history in Niall Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past’, in Ferguson (ed.), pp. 1–90. James M. Olson, Neal J. Roese and Ronald J. Deibert, ‘Psychological Biases in Counterfactual Thought Experiments’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), p. 297; D. Kahneman, ‘Varieties of Counterfactual Thinking’, in N. J. Roese and J.M. Olson (eds), What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995). Chwieroth, p. 310. John Elster, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), pp. 180–1. ibid., pp. 191–2. Chwieroth, p. 299. Fearon, p. 52. This point is critically noted in John Carmody, ‘The Lessons of What Never Was’, Australian Financial Review, 10 January 2003, pp. 6–7.

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34. Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson, ‘Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview’, in Roese and Olson (eds), p. 3; Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, ‘Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological and Psychological Perspectives’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), p. 2. 35. George W. Breslauer, ‘Counterfactual Reasoning in Western Studies of Soviet Politics and Foreign Relations’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), p. 74; Niall Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past’, in Ferguson (ed.), p. 86. 36. For example, Diane Kunz ponders whether a civil rights agenda would have been as sincerely pursued by a Kennedy government as it was by Johnson—Diane Kunz, ‘Camelot Continued: What if John F. Kennedy had Lived?’, in Ferguson (ed.), pp. 368–91. 37. J.C.D. Clark, ‘British America: What if There Had Been No American Revolution?’, in Ferguson (ed.), p. 174. 38. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, ‘Back to the Past: Counterfactuals and the Cuban Missile Crisis’, in Tetlock and Belkin (eds), p. 146. 39. This is most evident in counterfactual military history; see Niall Ferguson, ‘The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘Stood Aside’ in August 1914?’, in Ferguson (ed.), pp. 228–82. 40. For example, Mark Almond examines the price of world oil (and the likely impact of different choices by the Soviet government) in his consideration of counterfactuals around the collapse of communism— Mark Almond, ‘1989 Without Gorbachev: What if Communism Had Not Collapsed?’, in Ferguson (ed.), pp. 412–13.

2

What if Alfred Deakin had made a declaration of Australian independence?, Marilyn Lake

1.

Edward A. Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain; And, George Washington, the Expander of England: Two Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1886). House of Representatives, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 September 1901, p. 4659. Pearson to Bryce, 20 June 1892, H62, Bryce papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Quoted in Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14: A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901–23: vol. 1 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), p. 103. Roosevelt to Rice, 11 August 1899, in Elting E. Morison (ed.), The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 1052. Ibid., Roosevelt to Rice, 16 March 1901, p.4. Quoted in Meaney, p. 103.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

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8.

Atlee Hunt to Hopwood, 23 December 1907, Atlee Hunt papers, NLA, MS52/785. 9. Atlee Hunt to Hopwood, 1 July 1908, Atlee Hunt papers, NLA, MS52/782. 10. Atlee Hunt to Hopgood, 23 December 1907, Atlee Hunt papers, NLA, MS52/785.

3

What if federation had failed in 1900?, Helen Irving

1.

Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story: The Inner History of the Federal Cause, 1880–1900, ed. and intro. J.A. La Nauze (Parkville, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1963), p. 155. 2. The steps towards federation, as described here, are all real, up to the point of the Australian delegation’s refusal to compromise. 3. This is a real sentence from Deakin’s diaries, included in the two-volume biography by J.A. La Nauze (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1965), p. 621. 4. In reality, Deakin, as prime minister, introduced the policy of New Protection, in 1906. 5. These members of the delegation are now all but forgotten. In real life, Phillip Fysh, former premier of Tasmania, was appointed Commonwealth minister without portfolio in 1901, and remained in parliament until 1910; Sir James Dickson died in Sydney in January 1901 during the Commonwealth inauguration celebrations. 6. This, and the following events, are mostly fictional. In reality, Barton became the first prime minister of the Commonwealth in 1901, and then a justice of the High Court at its creation in 1903. Kingston became first Commonwealth minister for Trade and Customs; he resigned from the portfolio in 1903 due to poor health, but stayed on as MHR for Adelaide until his death in 1908. 7. George Reid, very much to Deakin’s disgust, did really serve, albeit briefly, as Australia’s fourth prime minister in 1904. He left Australia permanently for London in 1910 to be Commonwealth high commissioner, a position offered to him by Prime Minister Deakin. 8. These details are all true, except that Forrest did play a role in the Commonwealth parliament. 9. These details about Parkes (and, below them, about Queen Victoria) are all true. 10. See chapter 6, ‘Put By’, in J.A. La Nauze, The Making of the Australian Constitution (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1972). 11. This commission was real; for an account of it and New Zealand’s withdrawal from the federation processes of the 1890s, see Phillipa Mein Smith ‘New Zealand’, in Helen Irving (ed.), The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12. True for New Zealand and the Commonwealth of Australia.

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13. A real report, with a real conclusion. In his ‘Tenterfield Oration’, Henry Parkes had (successfully, as it turned out) used this report as an opportunity to call for a serious attempt by the colonies to federate. 14. A real (albeit post-Federation) event. 15. 26 February 1901. Deakin really did write, anonymously (even while prime minister), for the Morning Post. This is an extract from his column: see Alfred Deakin, Federated Australia: Selections from Letters to the Morning Post 1900–1910, ed. J.A. La Nauze (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1968), p. 41. 16. These details about labour and the 1897–98 convention are real. 17. These first two objectives were really adopted at the 1905 conference. 18. The fusion really did occur, but in 1909. 19. Morning Post, in Deakin, Federated Australia, p. 137. 20. The fleet really did come to Australia, but Watson was, in reality, Commonwealth Labor leader, from 1901 to 1907. He was, briefly, the first national Labor prime minister in 1904. The premier of New South Wales in 1908 was actually a Liberal, Charles Wade. 21. Morning Post, in Deakin, Federated Australia, p. 241. 22. The events in England, as described, all really happened. 23. For example, in Victoria, the last state to enfranchise women, female suffrage bills were put through the Legislative Assembly and defeated in the Legislative Council, eight times before the final victory in 1908, six years after women gained the Commonwealth franchise. 24. This is fictional, although Labor did really abolish the Legislative Council in Queensland in 1922, and unsuccessfully attempted to do so in New South Wales in the same decade. 25. As happened, for real, in New South Wales with Trethowan’s Case—AttorneyGeneral (NSW) v Trethowan (1931) 44 CLR 395; affirmed in the Privy Council by Attorney-General for New South Wales v Trethowan [1932] AC 526. 26. Higgins was in reality a justice of the High Court by then, but he had really been among the few members of the Federal Convention to campaign against the Constitution Bill in the referendums of 1898 and 1899. The other men mentioned here all went into federal politics. 27. In reality, women did have the vote in South Australia and Western Australia before 1900, and they gained the vote for Commonwealth elections and New South Wales elections in 1902. Tasmania and Queensland followed, with Victoria being the last, in 1908. 28. Fictional. 29. This Act, and the events leading up to its passage, are all real. 30. The Commonwealth did not have such powers, in reality, until after the referendum of 1946. 31. As the Constitution really stands, the franchise is not defined in it (despite women’s campaigns to make this a constitutional matter). Women gained the vote in the first Franchise Act, in 1902, at the same time as ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific

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32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

Islands (other than New Zealand), were disqualified from enrolling to vote. Hence this Act could be amended, as it was in 1962, with a simple parliamentary process, rather than a constitutional referendum. A uniform gauge was urged by the Edwards Report in 1889, but was not mentioned in the Constitution. In fact it was not achieved until the 1960s. Canberra was, in reality, ‘dry’ until 1928. See Helen Irving, ‘Garran, Robert Randolph’, in Tony Blackshield et al. (eds), The Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 292–3. Hughes was Australian prime minister from 1915 to 1923; he began as Labor leader, but was expelled from his party in 1916 over his refusal to support Labor policy on conscription. Later, he was famous, among other things, for standing up to both the British prime minister and the American president in defence of Australia’s interests at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Garran was, indeed, his real assistant on that occasion. The real inauguration, on 1 January 1901, was very lavish, and included thousands of troops from around the empire. See Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1. This biography is fictional. Goldstein did stand, several times, albeit without success, for the parliament in the early years. See Janette Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press), 1933. The first woman sat in the Commonwealth parliament in 1943. In reality, the Labor Party did split in 1916 over conscription. Here, I have made the fictional result and the reality the same, to show that our guesses about what might have happened historically are sometimes right, but for the wrong reasons. In retrospect, it is surprising that the Commonwealth of Australia did not invest in defence to a greater extent than it did after 1901, given the international instability already apparent in its early years. In the spiritual life he anticipated. See Al Gabay, The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Born in 1923. Among her many political roles, she was a longstanding president of the Federal Women’s Committee of the Liberal Party, and from 1976 to 1986, vice-president of the Victorian Liberal Party. In 1980 (the year I have made her prime minister) she became Dame Beryl Beaurepaire, with an Order of the British Empire.

5

What if the federal government had created a model Aboriginal state?, Tim Rowse

*

I want to thank my colleagues at the ANU for their extremely helpful comments on this paper at a seminar held on 25 February 2005 in the Humanities Research Centre. See Tim Rowse, ‘From houses to households? The Aboriginal Development Commission and economic adaptation by Alice Springs town campers’, in

1.

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2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

8

Jeremy Beckett (ed.), Aborigines and the State in Australia (special issue of Social Analysis, no. 24, 1988), pp. 50–65. ‘Our Ten Points’, Australian Abo Call, no. 1, April 1938, in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (eds), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 91; emphasis in original. See Keith Blackburn, ‘White Agitation for an Aboriginal State in Australia (1925–29)’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 45, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 157–79. In fact the petition was presented to parliament on 20 October 1927, but I have brought it forward six months to fit my counterfactual sequence of events. Michael Roe, ‘A Model Aboriginal State’, Aboriginal History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1986, p. 41. Bleakley, quoted in Roe, p. 44. Maynard to Lang, 28 May 1927, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 67. Maynard to Lang, 3 October 1927, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 68. John Maynard, ‘The Other Fellow: Fred Maynard and the 1920s Defence of Cultural Difference’, in Tim Rowse (ed.), Contesting Assimilation (Curtin University of Technology, WA: API-Network, 2005), p. 33. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 1927, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 70; emphasis added. News (Adelaide), 3 November 1936, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 114. Gibbs to Morley, 23 July 1938, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 92. Pearl Gibbs’ radio broadcast, 8 June 1941, in Attwood and Markus (eds), p. 97. J.A. Cawood, Desert Experiment (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1953), p. 42. Keck to High Sheriff, 21 December 1838, in Sharman Stone (ed.), Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine, 1697–1973 (South Yarra, Vic.: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1974), p. 58. David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 7.

What if there had been a school of figure painting in colonial Sydney?, Virginia Spate Only those references marked with an asterisk are factual. I hope the real authors will forgive any liberties taken.

1.

2.

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*Preface to the Declaration of the Rights of Man [sic] and the Citizen, the preamble to the 1793 Constitution of the French Republic. It is possible to give only a rough translation of this seemingly simple phrase: ‘The aim of society is shared happiness’. Translations from the French are my own. Louche Auctions, catalogue, 9 February 1989; I have been unable to trace the painting’s provenance.

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

I will discuss Brown’s life and work in my projected book, ‘A New World: Francis Brown and Australian Painting’. The words ‘love’ and ‘harmony’ echo throughout Brown’s comments on art (see James Eorthen, Mater Australis, facsimile of the unpublished manuscript, ed. Bruce McCullion (Sydney, 1898), pp. 1–35. They show that he was deeply influenced by French Utopian Socialism. *Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left 1830–1850 (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 191–210. Eorthen, Mater Australis, pp. 45–50. *Thomas Crow, ‘The Oath of the Horatii in 1785: Painting and PreRevolutionary Radicalism in France’, Art History, December 1978. François was the illegitimate son of Jean-Baptiste Topino-Lebrun. Lebrun, Liste annotée de mes tableaux les plus notables, enclosed in a letter to his mother, Mme Rolland [c.1832]. Archives, Mouton-sur-Chèvre, Var. *Alain Jouffroy and Philippe Bordes, Guillotine et peinture: Topino-Lebrun et ses amis (Paris, 1977), pp. 13–18, 128–34. A ‘Topino-Lebrun’ was arrested on 13 November 1800. The incoherence of the subsequent interrogation provides strong proof that the person arrested was not Topino-Lebrun, and that the case was rigged (see the documents published by Jouffroy and Bordes, pp. 128–34). Eorthen, Mater Australis, p. 30. One wonders what Lebrun would have thought of the naming of southern Australia as ‘Terre Napoléon’! *American Journal of Sciences and Arts, September 1849, cited *Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 198. *Jacqueline Bonnemains, ‘The Artists of the Baudin Expedition’, in The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages, ed. Sarah Thomas (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002), pp. 126–38. I have not been able to visit the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Le Havre, where the Baudin expedition collections are located. I would hope to be able to identify works by Lebrun. Petit too may have been an anti-Bonapartist: he returned to France in March 1804 and died in October, as the result of ‘an accident’ (see Jérome Badinguet, Le bras long de Joseph Fouché (Montréal, 1875), pp. 221–2). News of peace negotiations between Britain and France may have reached Sydney, but even when the Treaty of Amiens (April 1802–May 1803) broke down, Lebrun does not seem to have been harassed. Martin Peureux, The Enemy Within: 1788 to the Present (Canberra: Cassandra Press, 2002), pp. 5–6 claims that Brown curried favour by telling the authorities that the expedition was sent to spy on the colony. This would have been totally out of character. The term used throughout the nineteenth century by the partisans of the long-desired Republic. *Philippe Bordes, ‘Intentions politiques et peinture. Le cas de la mort de Caius Gracchus’, in Jouffroy and Bordes, pp. 33–40.

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17. *Livy, Ab Urbe Conditur, Book 1: pp. viii–ix. I am indebted to Dr Eleanor Leach for this reference. 18. Eorthen, Mater Australis, p. 62. 19. *Livy, Book 1: p. ix. The Romans did not have enough women to guarantee the future of their city, so they captured the women of the neighbouring Sabine tribe by force. 20. These portraits remained in possession of their sitters and their descendants. 21. The grapes make symbolic reference to King’s encouragement of the planting of vines. 22. Lebrun, Liste annotée. 23. *P.-H. Valenciennes, Elements de Perspective pratique à l’usage des artistes, suivis de Réflexions et Conseils à un Elève sur la Peinture, et particulièrement sur le genre du Paysage (Paris, An VIII [1800–01]). 24. Baron Wagram to his wife, July 1816, in Correspondance familiale (Montpellier, 1877), vol. II, p. 200. The baron was exiled after the Restoration. 25. Lebrun, Liste annotée. 26. See my article, ‘Overpainting in Francis Brown’s allegory of Liberty’, Conservation Studies, December 1989, pp. 6–19. 27. There are some striking similarities between this idea and *Jules Michelet’s Géricault (Paris, 1846). 28. Wagram purchased a small oil study for the painting, which he showed to artists and connoisseurs when he returned to France in 1817. Could it have inspired Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819; Musée du Louvre)? 29. Letter to Mme Rolland [c.1807], Archives, Mouton-sur-Chèvre, Var. 30. Eorthen (Mater Australis, pp. 30–1) states that it was many months before Brown trusted him enough to show him these works. 31. Seemingly written in 1879. The present owner of this short manuscript is a descendant of Eorthen’s anonymous son. He has allowed me to quote from it, subject to his approval. 32. He was overheard shouting to a boy who questioned his origins: ‘I come from the Garden of Eden. My Father is a—white-haired old toff, but he stinks of whale-blubber and brandy … ’ (Eorthen, Mater Australis, p. 40). 33. ibid., p. 43. 34. Compare this sentiment with Peter Trueblood’s The Life and Work of James Eorthen (2 vols, Sydney, 1914, passim), which presents Eorthen as a conformist at ease with the squattocracy and the Sydney bourgeoisie. See my essay, ‘Eugène Suë’s Le Juif errant and Eorthen’s Swagman’, Oceanic Judaic Studies, June 1999. 35. Raphael Jones, Sydney Gazette, 15 May 1842. 36. Anon., Sydney Evening Post, 13 May 1842. 37. He was the only significant Realist painter—in Australia or overseas—not to paint the female nude. 38. Philomela Johnson, Male Art, Muted Women (Brisbane, 1999), pp. 200–25.

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39. Eorthen, Mater Australis, pp. 70–5. 40. Babeuf’s defence in his 1797 trial is reprinted with other texts in *Albert Fried and Roland Sanders (eds), Socialist Thought: A Documentary History (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964). 41. Alba Libera, ‘Silencing Australia: The Colonial Office and Censorship’, Censorship Studies, ed. Jane Mills (Glen Davis, 2005). 42. ‘Artist Denounces Vandalism’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 1880. The controversy raged in the press for months. 43. Like Brown, Eorthen encouraged female students; Brown may have been following David’s example. 44. Aurora Luce, ‘Some Memories’, in Aurora Luce: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June–20 July 1973, n.p. Her achievement was not fully realised before the late 1960s with the advent of the women’s movement. 45. *Berthe to Edma Morisot, 5 May 1869, in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, compiled Denis Rouart, ed. Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb (London: Camden, 1986), p. 37. Luce kept copies of her letters to Morisot, but we have only her side of the correspondence, now published in Aurora Luce, A Retrospective. 46. Letter to Dr and Mrs V. McCullion [1873], reprinted in John McCullion, A Life in Art (Sydney, 1913), p. 213. Veronese, The Marriage of Cana (Louvre). 47. Letter to Aurora Luce, Paris, May 1874; reprinted in McCullion, p. 214. As far as I know this is the only published text where a man mentions Manet’s scandalous painting (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) to a woman. 48. Letter to Aurora Luce, Paris, [May 1877], reprinted in McCullion, p. 216. 49. Letter to Aurora Luce, Narrabri, 1880, reprinted in McCullion, p. 243. 50. Letter to Aurora Luce, Katoomba, 1884, reprinted in McCullion, p. 245. 51. Anna Rubbo, ‘Imagining a Building for Helios’s Mural Cycle, Reconciliation’, Journal of Architectural Studies (Sydney) (forthcoming). See also Aimée Brown Price, Puvis and Australia, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 22 October–30 November 2003. Puvis’ cycle consists of Pro Patria Ludus, Travail, Ave Picardia Nutrix and Rest, War and Peace. 52. Letter to Aurora Luce [1890], reprinted in McCullion, p. 243.

9

What if Aborigines had never been assimilated?, Peter Read

*

I wish to thank Bain Attwood and Gaynor MacDonald, readers of an earlier draft, for many wise insights into the course of Wiradjuri history. Here I have drawn especially on P. Read, A History of the Wiradjuri People of NSW 1883–1969, PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1984; P. Read (ed.), Down There With Me on the Cowra Mission (London: Pergamon, 1984).

1.

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

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For example, see Ann Jackson-Nakano, The Pajong and Wallabalooa (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 2003), in which Jackson-Nakano traces the loss of several small reserves to Ngunnawal people 1920–40. A full list of all existing NSW Aboriginal reserves was carried in the NSW Aboriginal Protection Board’s Annual Reports until about 1910. For example, D.J. Mulvaney proposed in 1981 that ‘the greatest gift of Aboriginal society to multi-cultural Australia is a spiritual concept of place’, cited by Deborah Bird Rose ‘Gulaga: A Report on the Cultural Significance of Mount Dromedary to Aboriginal People’, Commissioned Report, 1990, p. 15. G. Briscoe, Counting Health, Health and Identity (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003), p. 346. A reader of this paper pointed out that the loss of cultural and ethnic differentiation is always to be regretted. It may be so: my remark here concerns what I believe would have happened. I do not necessarily applaud it. Aborigines Protection Act, No. 25 of 1909, ss 3; 8 (1), (2); 10. ibid., s. 10. For an example of compulsory closure of official and unofficial reserves at Yass, see P. Read, ‘A Double-Headed Coin’, in B. Gammage and A. Markus (eds), All That Dirt (Sydney: 1938 Bicentennial Committee, 1982), pp. 9–29. Aborigines Protection Board, Circular to Managers, 13 March 1915. Most of the NSW State Archive material in this essay is referenced in Read, A History of the Wiradjuri People of NSW 1883–1969. Drawn from a ‘middle of the road’ Cootamundra Girls Home Wiradjuri student, school and institution reports; cf P. Read , A Rape of the Soul So Profound (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000), pp. 172–5. Condobolin Aboriginal School, Teacher to Chief Inspector, and file note 8 April 1926, 22 June 1927, State Archives of NSW. Alan Sloane, interview, Canberra, 1980. Lachlander, 9 June, 29 September, 15 October, 1926; 11 May 1927. Personal communication, Mr T.C., Moree, 1984. From 1932, only Aborigines deemed to be previously independent of the APB were allowed to apply for state relief; others had to seek rations at the nearest Aboriginal station. NSW APB, Annual Report, 1931–2, p. 1. Ossie Ingram, interviewed by P. Read, ‘The Proudest People on Earth’, in B. Gammage and P. Spearritt (eds), Australians 1938 (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987), pp. 117–24. Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Authorities, Canberra, 21–23 April 1937, p. 15. NSW Aborigines Protection Act, Amendment No. 32 of 1936, s. 2(c). APB, Minutes of Meetings, 15 September 1942, State Archives of NSW. Aborigines Welfare Board, Minutes of Meetings, 3 September 1940, State Archives of NSW.

Notes

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21. AWB, Annual Report, 1947–8, p. 3, State Archives of NSW. 22. Interview by the author, Mrs R.C., 5 July 1980. 23. Conference of Commonwealth and State Ministers of Aboriginal Affairs, Adelaide, 21–22 July 1965, Minutes in AWB, General Correspondence, State Archives of NSW. 24. For this period, and the later history of the Wiradjuri, see Gaynor Macdonald, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. A Wiradjuri Lands Rights Journey (Canada Bay, NSW: LHR Press, 2004). 25. P. Read, ‘How Many Separated Children?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 49, no. 2 (June 2003), pp. 155–63. 26. Cf the famous La Perouse midwife Emma Jane Foster, in La Perouse Community Writers, La Perouse, The Place, the People and the Sea (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), pp. 33–4. 27. For an account of Aboriginal ‘architects’ in northern New South Wales, see Stephanie Smith, ‘The Tin Camps: Self-Constructed Housing on the Goodooga Reserve, New South Wales, 1970–96’, in P. Read (ed.), Settlement (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001), ch. 14. 28. Linguistic theory on the death of languages usually dates a future extinction—perhaps two generations ahead—from the time when parents, for a variety of reasons, stop speaking the minority language as a matter of course to their young children. The variety of Aboriginal languages spoken along the Murrumbidgee at this time would have also worked towards the acceptance of an Aboriginalised English as a lingua franca.

11 What if the northern rivers had been turned inland?, Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt *

1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

We are grateful for the advice and assistance of Max Bourke, Michael Cathcart, Kirsty Douglas, Guy Fitzhardinge, Barney Foran, Grace Karskens, Richard Kingsford, John Magee, Jessie Mitchell, Steve Morton, Neville Nicholls, Joe Powell, Peter Read, Libby Robin, Deborah Rose, George Seddon and Mike Smith. Bradfield’s address to a Millions Club Luncheon, 7 September 1938, Bradfield papers MS 4712/6/2, National Library of Australia (NLA). See, for example, Åsa Wahlquist, ‘Desperate Measures’, Australian, 27 May 2004, p. 12, and http://www.johnston-independent.com/ bradfieldscheme.html#INDEX. Quoted in J.W. Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia (London: John Murray, 1906), pp. 94 ff. This is the comment of George Farwell in ‘On the Shores of Lake Eyre’, Traveller’s Tracks (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1949), p. 54. J.J.C. Bradfield CMG, ‘Developing Australia’ [undated typescript], and ‘Rejuvenating Australia’s Arid Lands’, talk to the Ipswich Rotary Club, 10 June 1940, MS 4712/6/2. Stephen J. Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), pp. 301–9.

Notes

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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Age, 9 January 1939. H.G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical In Search of Hot Water (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1939), ch. 4 (‘Bush Fires’). Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 6. Bradfield’s address to a Millions Club Luncheon, 7 September 1938, MS 4712/6/2. Michael Roche, ‘“The land we have we must hold”: Soil Erosion and Soil Conservation in Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century New Zealand’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 23, no. 4, 1997, pp. 447–58. Arthur A. Chresby (ex-state and federal secretary of the Demobilised Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen’s Association of Australia), ‘Foreword’ to A.W. Noakes, Water for the Inland: A brief and vivid outline of conditions in the outback of Queensland in which is embodied the Reid and Dr Bradfield Water Schemes (South Brisbane: Railings & Railings, [1947]). W.E.M. Abbott to Curtin, 2 November 1944, file: Dr Bradfield’s Scheme for Watering Inland Australia, A9816/4, 1943/664 Part 1, National Archives of Australia (NAA). Michael Sawtell, text of letter to newspaper, 4 December 1946, file: Dr Bradfield’s Scheme for Watering Inland Australia, A9816/4, 1943/664 Part 1, NAA. R.W. Home, ‘CSIRO and Cloud Seeding’, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), pp. 66–79. Libby Robin, ‘Ecology and Identity: Australians Caring for Deserts’, EASA lecture, Portugal, September 2003. William Henry Droze, High Dams and Slack Waters: TVA Rebuilds a River (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1965). J.M. Powell, Plains of Promise, Rivers of Destiny: Water Management and the Development of Queensland, 1824–1990 (Brisbane: Boolarong Publications, 1991), p. 156. Ion Idriess, The Great Boomerang (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1943). Noakes, p. 8. H.N. Warren, Bradfield Scheme for ‘Watering the Inland’, Meteorological Aspects, Bulletin no. 34 (Melbourne: Commonwealth Meteorological Bureau, 1945). (It was actually Quayle who made a minority report.) Francis Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1947 [first published 1938]). Noakes, p. 52. Bradfield, ‘Rejuvenating Australia’s Arid Lands’, talk to the Ipswich Rotary Club, 10 June 1940, MS 4712/6/2. Bruce Davidson, ‘Developing Nature’s Treasures: Agriculture and Mining in Australasia’, in Roy MacLeod (ed.), The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australasia, 1888–1988 (Melbourne:

Notes

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 280. See also Davidson’s The Northern Myth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), and Australia Wet or Dry (Sydney: Halstead Press, 1969). J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 131–49. As an example of early criticism, see G.W. Leeper, ‘Restoring Australia’s Parched Lands—A Comment’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 2, June 1942, pp. 50–2. David Day, John Curtin: A Life (Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), pp. 34–43. Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 100, 106. Michael Sawtell to F. Strahan, the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, 8 December 1946, A9816/4, 1943/664 Part 1, NAA. Ian Clunies Ross, ‘The Place of Science in Agriculture in Australia’, Country Hour Journal, vol. 4, no. 11, November 1953, pp. 3–4. Ian Clunies Ross, ‘Some Problems of Australia’s Scientific Development’, Welcome, vol. 4, no. 11, August 1958, pp. 11–13. Riley Young of Lingara (Victoria River District) quoted in Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 57. Vincent Kotwicki, Floods of Lake Eyre (Adelaide: Engineering and Water Supply Department, 1986), p. 52. Quoted in George Seddon, Searching for the Snowy: An Environmental History (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994), p. 36. Meredith Fletcher, Digging People Up For Coal: A History of Yallourn (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), p. 29. See also Mark Peel, Planning the Good City in Australia: Elizabeth as a New Town, Working Paper no. 30, Urban Research Program, RSSS, ANU, Canberra, February 1992. See George Farwell, Walkabout, vol. 24, no. 5, 1 May 1958, pp. 11–13, and Herald (Melbourne), 15 March 1952, p. 13. Grahame Griffin, ‘Selling the Snowy: The Snowy Mountains Scheme and National Mythmaking’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 79, 2003, pp. 39–50. Heather Goodall, ‘“The river runs backwards”’, in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (Kensington, NSW: UNSW Press, 2002), p. 48. Pandora Hope, Neville Nicholls and John L. McGregor, ‘Climate Response to Permanent Inland Water in Australia’, Australian Meteorological Magazine, vol. 53, 2004, pp. 251–62. For a palaeoenvironmental history of Lake Eyre over 60 000 years, see John W. Magee and Gifford H. Miller, ‘Lake Eyre Palaeohydrology from 60 ka to the Present: Beach Ridges and Glacial Maximum Aridity’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, no. 144, 1998, pp. 307–29. William Hatfield, I Find Australia (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 273–5.

Notes

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42. See Davidson, Australia Wet or Dry?, and Hope, Nicholls and McGregor, ‘Climate Response’. 43. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia, p. 325. 44. See R.T. Kingsford, ‘Ecological Impacts of Dams, Water Diversions and River Management on Floodplain Wetlands in Australia’, Austral Ecology, vol. 25, 2000, pp. 109–27, and R.T. Kingsford (ed.), A Free-Flowing River: The Ecology of the Paroo River (Sydney: New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1999). 45. Geoffrey Dutton, Patterns of Australia (Melbourne: Mobil Australia, 1980), p. 15. For current scientific thinking about possible Australian environmental futures, see Michael Dunlop, Graham Turner, Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy, Decision Points for Land and Water Futures (Canberra: CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, 2002), and Barney Foran and Franzi Poldy, Dilemmas Distilled: Options to 2050 for Australia’s Population, Technology, Resources and Environment; A Summary and Guide to the CSIRO Technical Report (Canberra: CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, 2002). 46. See http://www.johnston-independent.com/bradfieldscheme. html#INDEX for details of Queensland government activities and planning for the ‘Revised Bradfield Scheme’ in the mid-1980s. 47. Australian, 15–16 December 1979, quoted in D.N. Parkes, ‘Australia’s Arid Zone: Geographical Setting’, in D.N. Parkes, I.H. Burnley and S.R. Walker (eds), Arid Zone Settlement in Australia: A Focus on Alice Springs (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1985), online at http://www.unu.edu/ unpress/unupbooks/80506e/80506E00.htm 48. On the ‘seige mentality’ of many western NSW towns, see Goodall, ‘“The river runs backwards”’. 49. See Alberto Corsín Jiménez, ‘Landscaping History: Nitrate Mining in the Atacama Desert’, in M.A. Smith (ed.), 23° South (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2005), pp. 333–4. 50. Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 103.

12 What if a men’s movement had triumphed in the 1970s?, Ann Curthoys 1.

286

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See Hester Eisenstein, Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women’s Movement, 1950s–1990s (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: the History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999). See also Ann Curthoys, ‘Australian Feminism and the State: Practice and Theory’, in Paul James (ed.), The State in Question (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 138–160; Ann Curthoys, ‘Australian Feminism since 1970’, in Ailsa Burns and Norma Grieve (eds), Australian Women: Feminist Questions in the 90s (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 14–28, 296–8; and Ann Curthoys, ‘Cosmopolitan Radicals: Australian

Notes

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

Interactions with International Feminist Texts 1960–1980’, in Barbara Caine et al. (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 39–48. Any resemblance between the last three mentioned essays and this current essay is no accident. Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86 (1986), pp. 116–31. Zelda D’Aprano, Zelda: The Becoming of a Woman (Melbourne: Visa, 1978). See Miriam Dixson The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975 (Melbourne: Penguin, 1976); Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1975); Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788–1974 (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975); and Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975). There were also other works in the field that year, especially the collection Women at Work, edited as a special issue of Labour History by Ann Curthoys, Susan Eade and Peter Spearritt. Heather Goodall and Jackie Huggins, ‘Aboriginal Women are Everywhere: Contemporary Struggles’, in K. Saunders and R. Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992). For discussion of the actual men’s movement that emerged in the late 1980s, see Marian Sawer, ‘Emily’s List and Angry White Men: Gender Wars in the Nineties’, in Marian Simms and John Warhurst (eds), Howard’s Agenda: The 1998 Federal Election (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2000). See Anne Summers, The End of Equality: Work, Babies, and Women’s Choices in 21st Century Australia (Sydney: Random House Australia, 2003).

Notes

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INDEX

Abbott, Joseph, 68 Aborigines, 31; alcohol, 198, 201, 203, 206, 208; in armed forces, 193; art, 108–9, 181–2, 183, 184, 186; in art, 167–8, 172, 177, 181– 2, 184, 185; assimilation, 25, 27, 34, 187–211; child removal, 105– 6, 188, 190, 194, 195, 208, 210, 211; Coniston killings, 99–103; deaths in custody, 25; education, 96–7, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 209, 210, 211; employment, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209; Freedom Ride, 215; halfcastes, 105–6, 190–3, 196; housing, 202, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210; land rights, 89, 210; literacy in English, 98, 114, 209; missions, 107–8, 109, 111, 196; Model Aboriginal State, 89–114; Myall Creek murders, 103; protection, 96, 97, 190; rations, 109, 110, 111, 113; reconciliation, 155; reserves, 89, 96, 188, 201, 202, 190–207; self determination, 89, 90, 92–5; suffrage, 58–9; Tasmanian, 17, 23, 27; traditions, 190, 191, 197, 200, 201, 205–11 Aborigines Protection Board, 92, 97, 202 Aboriginal Territory Council, 98–9, 100, 103–4, 113 abortion, 263 Accord, 153, 155, 159

288

What if.indd 288

affirmative action, 267, 269 Albrecht, F.W., 108–9, 110–11 Alice Springs, 91, 98, 105 All For Australia Party, 81 allegorical painting, 171–2, 181–2 Anarchist Society, 71 Anstey, Frank, 130–1, 136 Antipodeans, 183 appeals to Privy Council, 60, 61 Arbitration Court, 74, 75 art; Aboriginal, 108–9, 181–2, 183, 184, 186; critics, 176; exhibitions, 175–6; women painters, 178–9, 186 Asia–Pacific region, 147, 155–6, 157 Asquith, Herbert, 53, 64 assimilation, 25, 27, 33, 34, 187–211 Australia First movement, 225–6, 233 Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, 95 Australian Communist Party, 80 Australian Socialist League, 70, 71 Barker, Tom, 125 Barton, Edmond, 35, 42, 44, 47, 70, 72, 73 Bean, Charles, 123 Beaurepaire, Beryl, 63, 66 Birdwood, General, 122 Biscoe, Gordon, 188–9 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh, 151, 152, 246 Black Friday, 237 Blainey, Geoffrey, 137, 150 Bleakley, J.W., 94 Boer War, 30, 49

What If?

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Bradfield, Dr J.J.C., 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 244, 248, 251, 252–3 Bradfield Scheme, 234–54 Brennan, Frank, 130 Britain; and Australian independence, 29–43; constitutional crisis, 53–5, 57; defence of Australia, 36, 40, 41, 49, 52, 126, 127–9; Japanese alliance, 36, 38, 118, 120–1; and King Island, 16, 26; and Tasmania, 16–17; in WWI, 117–21 Brooks, Fred, 100 Bruce, Stanley, 90, 91, 92, 93–4, 97, 100, 112, 113 Cairns, Jim, 146, 221, 228 Calwell, Arthur, 212–33 Campbell, Graeme, 233 Canberra, 61–2, 66 Cawood, Mr, 98–9, 100–1, 113 Chaffey brothers, 249 Chamberlain, Joseph, 44, 46, 49, 61, 76 Chifley, Ben, 240 Churchill, Winston, 118, 122, 153 Chynoweth, R.L., 253 Clark, Andrew Inglis, 32, 33–4, 43 Clunies Ross, Ian, 241 Cocos Island defeat, 115–37 compulsory arbitration, 59, 74–5, 86, 150 Coniston killings, 99–103 Connor, Rex, 146 conscription, 64, 79, 115, 123, 124, 126–7, 131, 215, 220 Constitution; drafting, 57–60; referendum, 82–3 constitutional conventions, 35, 45–6, 47, 48, 57 constitutional crises; in Britain, 53–5, 57; The Dismissal, 138–60, 229–30 convicts, 18 Cook, Dr Cecil, 106 Cook, Joseph, 73, 76

Cooper Irrigation Area, 242–3 co-operatives, 71, 74, 75, 77, 82 Counihan, Noel, 183 Country Party, 81, 86 Cowen, Sir Zelman, 146, 147 Crean, Frank, 146 CSIRO, 238, 241, 252 Curtin, John, 90, 239, 240–1 customs, 59, 69, 84, 85 D’Alprano, Zelda, 268 Daly, Fred, 141 Darwin, 91, 106 Deakin, Alfred, 29, 38, 50, 51–2, 66, 70, 73, 74, 76–7, 78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87; American sympathies, 31–2, 37, 40–1, 43; and Britain, 31–2, 36, 39–40, 41; and Federation, 45–7, 57, 67 deaths in custody, 25 defence; populating the north, 237–8; ties to Britain, 36, 40, 41, 49, 52, 126, 127–9; tie to USA, 41, 128, 129 depression (1930s), 24, 25, 81 dictation test, 36 Dismissal, The, 138–60, 229–30 Downer, Sir John, 60 Edwardian era, 52–3 Emden (German), 117, 135 environment, 236–9, 245, 246, 247 Evans, Gareth, 146 Evatt, Justice Elizabeth, 148 Federation, 22, 32, 36; delay in, 44–66 figure painting, 163–86 Fisher, Andrew, 47, 55, 79, 80, 124, 126 Forrest, Sir John, 48, 56 France, 131; exploration of Australia, 167–8; settlement of Tasmania, 15–28 Fraser, Malcolm, 138–46, 157–8, 229–30

Index

What if.indd 289

289

26/4/06 8:11:16 AM

Free Traders, 51, 52, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 84, 85 Freedom Ride, 215 Freeman, E.A., 33 Friedan, Betty, 268–9 Fusion Party, 51–2, 54, 84, 85 Galbally, Frank, 147 Gallipoli, 22, 30, 115, 122–3, 135 Gandhi, Mahatma, 215, 216, 217 Genders, Colonel J.C., 92 Germany, 52, 90, 117–19, 122, 125, 127, 131, 132, 134–5 Gibbs, Pearl, 95–114 globalisation, 145 gold, 18 Goldstein, Vida, 30, 31, 42, 43, 60, 62, 63, 77, 84–5 goods and services tax, 149, 150 Gregory, J.W., 236 Griffith, Samuel, 74 Hackett, Sir John, 64 Hamel-Green, Michael, 216 Hanson, Pauline, 229, 233 Hawke, Bob, 138, 143, 149, 153, 157, 158, 159, 230 Hayden, Bill, 147, 149, 150–1, 153, 158, 233 health scheme, 63, 82, 155 Heidelberg School, 186 Hermannsburg, 108, 109 Hewson, John, 148–9, 151–2 Higgins, H.B., 34, 35, 43, 55, 72, 74, 86, 87 Hogan, L.J., 253 Holt, Harold, 216, 227 homosexuality, 263 honours list, 39 Howard, John, 25–6, 147–50, 151–2, 156, 160 Hughes, Billy, 60–1, 71, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 91, 92, 93, 103, 112, 124–5; and League of Nations, 43; prime minister, 126–7, 128; in

290

What if.indd 290

WWI, 115, 130–2 Hunt, Atlee Arthur, 38–9, 40 hydroelectricity, 24, 28, 249 Idriess, Ion, 238, 253 immigration, 31, 49, 59, 150; White Australia Policy, 32, 34–5, 36, 37– 8, 123, 225, 229 independence, 29–43 industrial relations, 59, 73, 74–5, 86 Industrial Workers of the World, 80, 125, 130, 133, 135 influenza pandemic, 80 inland sea see Bradfield Scheme intelligence service, 130 irrigation see Bradfield Scheme Irvine, W.H., 78–9 Japan; ambitions in Pacific, 31, 38, 39, 41, 43, 118, 120–1; British alliance, 36, 38, 118, 120–1; immigrants, 38; trade with, 134; in WWI, 118, 119, 120–1, 123–4, 127, 130, 136 Johns, Brian, 218 Johnston, Selwyn, 253 Kanakas, 35, 38 Keating, Paul, 138, 146, 150–4, 158, 160, 230 Kerr, Sir John, 138, 139–44, 146, 157 King Island, 16, 26 Kingston, Charles Cameron, 44, 47, 72, 77 Kocan, Peter, 212, 215, 225, 226, 231 Kyabram movement, 78, 86 Labor Electoral League, 67, 71 Labor Party (Federal), 55, 65, 73, 78, 80–1; Calwell, 212, 213, 229; emergence, 47, 49–52, 83; and the Left, 221–4; paying politicians, 83, 84; republic issue, 53, 147; and unions, 67, 69; and Vietnam War, 220; and women’s movement, 56,

What If?

26/4/06 8:11:16 AM

58; see also The Dismissal; Hawke; Keating; Whitlam Labor Party (NSW), 67, 70, 72–3, 84 Labor Party (Victoria), 67, 69, 81, 83–4 Lake Eyre, 235, 236, 241, 244, 245 land rights, 89, 210 landscape painting, 163, 165, 170–1, 177, 183, 184 Lane, William, 71–2 League of Nations, 90, 91, 93, 112, 133 legislative councils, 53–4, 68 Liberal Nationalists, 78, 79, 81 Liberal Protectionists, 70, 72, 86–7 Lightfoot, Frederick, 177–8 living wage, 75 Lloyd-George, David, 53, 57, 128 logging, 21

naturalistic painting, 163, 179–81, 182–3 Nauru, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 112, 113 ‘New Australia’, 71–2 New Guinea, 112, 121, 124, 126, 133 New South Wales; co-operatives, 71, 74, 75, 77, 82; Labor Party, 67, 70, 72–3, 84; paid parliamentarians, 67, 68, 71, 83 New Zealand, 48–9, 86, 117, 119, 160 Nicholls, Elizabeth, 59 Noakes, A.W., 239 non-violent protest, 216–17 Northern Territory, 91, 93, 112 O’Bryne, Justin, 142 O’Connor, Richard, 74 O’Malley, King, 55 OPEC oil crisis, 145 Ord River Scheme, 249, 250

McCubbin, Charles, 183, 186 McKell, Sir William, 235, 249 McLelland, Doug, 141 McLelland, Jim, 141, 157 Mack, Ted, 150, 152 Magee, John, 252 Maloney, William, 69 Mannix, Archbishop, 131 maternal welfare state, 78, 82, 85, 87 Maynard, Fred, 95–6, 97–8, 112, 113, 114 men’s movement, 255–71 Menzies, Sir Robert, 241, 249 mining, 19, 21 Model Aboriginal State, 89–114 money bills, 58, 64–5, 139, 140, 141, 143 multiculturalism, 42, 146, 147, 150, 249 Murdoch, Keith, 123 Murray, William, 100–13 Myall Creek murders, 103

Page, Earle, 80, 93, 98 Parkes, Henry, 48, 87 parliamentarians, paid, 53–4, 67, 68, 71, 83 peace movement, 216–17, 231, 258–9, 271 Peacock, Andrew, 146, 147, 148 Pearson, Charles, 32–3, 36, 37 pensions, 54, 62–3, 82 Perkins, Charles, 215 phosphate, 90–1, 92, 93, 104 Piesse, E.L., 103, 104, 112 plein air painting, 170–1, 181, 184 portraiture, 163, 168, 170 Powers, Charles, 74 protectionism, 18, 36, 46–7, 76 Protectionists, 51, 52, 69–70, 72, 73, 74, 77, 84, 85 protest movement, 214–17, 221–4, 231 Pugh, Clifton, 140, 157

National Defence League, 123, 124, 127

Quayle, E.T., 239 Queensland, 68, 71, 83

Index

What if.indd 291

291

26/4/06 8:11:16 AM

railways, 59, 91, 98–9, 100–1, 111, 113 Reagan, Ronald, 150 reconciliation, 155 referenda, 60, 82–3, 126–7 Reform Party, 78–9, 80, 81 Reid, George, 47, 48, 73, 84, 85, 86 republic issue, 29, 53, 59–60, 65, 66, 147–8 returned soldiers, 23, 80 Roberts, Tom, 163, 176–7, 183, 185–6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37, 40–1, 43 Russia, 118, 130, 131 Russian Revolution, 130, 136 Ryan, Susan, 146 salinity, 245 Save Our Sons, 215 Scholes, Gordon, 141 Scott, Rose, 77, 85 Senate; and The Dismissal, 141–2, 145; power, 50–1, 57–8, 64–5 Single Tax League, 70 Smith, David, 142 Smith, Tony, 253 Snowy Mountains Scheme, 246, 249 South Australia, 47, 68, 71, 81 Spence, Catherine Helen, 57 Streeton, Arthur, 165 strikes, 80 suffrage; Aborigines, 58–9; women, 55–7, 58, 63, 66, 77, 84 HMAS Sydney, 90, 119, 135 tariffs, 59, 69, 76, 84, 85 Tasmania, 83; French settlement, 16–27 Tasmanian tiger, 17 taxation, 70 Taylor, Griffith, 239–40 Telecom, sale of, 152 Thatcher, Margaret, 148, 149–50 Topino-Lebrun, François, 166–7 tourism, 22, 24, 26, 27 trade unions, 67, 69, 73, 143–4

292

What if.indd 292

Trenwith, William, 50, 69, 76 Tucker, Albert, 183 Tudor, Frank, 128–9, 130, 131, 133, 136 Unaipon, David, 93–114 unemployment, 125 Union of Australian Women, 268 Universal Service Party, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131 United States, 38, 131; defence of Australia, 41, 128, 129; fleet visits, 40, 41, 52; relations with Australia, 29, 31–2, 33–4, 37, 40–1, 43, 134; slavery, 34 Victoria, Queen, 48, 49, 60 Victoria; Labor Party, 67, 69, 81, 83–4; paying parliamentarians, 67, 68, 69, 83; protectionism, 18, 69–70 Vietnam War, 25, 214, 217, 220–1 von Guerard, Eugene, 177 wage fixation, 75, 87, 150 water see Bradfield Scheme Watson, Chris, 52, 55 Watson, J.C., 152 Watt, W.A., 79 Western Australia, 48, 78, 81, 83 White Australia Policy, 32, 34–5, 36, 37–8, 123, 225, 229 Whitlam, Gough, 63, 146–7, 158; The Dismissal, 138–44, 220–30; image, 218 Willis, Ralph, 146, 153, 158 Wilson, Alick, 102, 103, 112 wine industry, 18, 19 Withers, Reg, 141 women, 50, 255, 269; equal pay, 77, 257–8, 268; and Labor Party, 56, 58; painters, 178–9, 186; in parliament, 57, 63, 66, 77–8, 84–5; prime ministers, 63, 66; and protest movement, 215; suffrage, 55–7, 58, 63, 66, 77, 84; in workforce, 126, 133, 270–1, 257

What If?

26/4/06 8:11:16 AM

Women’s Electoral Lobby, 255 Women’s Political Association, 43 wool industry, 19 World War I, 52; Britain, 117–21; Cocos Island defeat, 115–37; conscription, 64, 79, 115, 123, 124, 126–7, 131, 215, 220; Gallipoli, 22, 30, 115, 122–3, 135; German internment, 125; home front, 79–80, 125, 126, 133; Japan,

118, 119, 120–1, 123–4, 127, 130, 136; peace, 115, 132, 133; Western Front, 123, 126, 128–9 World War II, 24, 90 Wriedt, Ken, 141–2 Young, Mick, 153 Youth Campaign Against Conscription, 215

Index

What if.indd 293

293

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