Robert Menzies: a life, Vol. 2 9780522848649, 9780522876277, 9780522876284

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction (page xi)
Abbreviations (page xix)
1 The Liberal Party (page 1)
2 Hope, 1945-1946 (page 30)
3 Uncertainty, 1947-1948 (page 59)
4 England, 1948 (page 88)
5 Achievement, 1949 (page 104)
6 Slipping into Harness, 1949-1950 (page 128)
7 Fears of War, 1951 (page 169)
8 Difficult Times, 1952 (page 201)
9 To the 1954 Election (page 227)
10 Post-Election Fallout, 1954 (page 264)
11 New Security? 1955-1956 (page 290)
12 Suez, 1956 (page 324)
13 From Personal Depression to Electoral Triumph, 1956-1958 (page 352)
14 Interlude: Canberra; Universities (page 381)
15 The World Stage, 1959-1960 (page 400)
16 Credit Squeeze to Common Market, 1961-1962 (page 430)
17 To the 1963 Election (page 459)
18 A Prime Minister's Life, 1964-1965 (page 483)
19 Predictable Rigidities and Unexpected Sentimentalities, 1965 (page 515)
20 Afternoon and Evening, 1966-1978 (page 540)
Reflections (page 567)
Sources (page 585)
Index (page 588)

Citation preview

ROBERT

MENZIES

ROBERT

MENZIES A Life

Volume 2 1944-1978 A. W. MARTIN

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PO Box 278, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia info@mup. unimelb.edu.au Wwww.mup.com.au

First published 1999 Text © Allan Martin 1999

Design and typography © Melbourne University Press 1999 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher. Designed by Alice Graphics Typeset by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia in Palatino 11 point Printed in Australia by Brown Prior Anderson, Burwood, Victoria National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Martin, A. W. (Allan William), 1926- . Robert Menzies: a life. Vol. 2, 1944-1978.

Bibliography Includes index. ISBN 0 522 84864 8.

1. Menzies, Robert, Sir, 1894-1978. 2. Prime ministers—Australia—Biography. 3. Australia—Politics and government—1945- . 4. Australia—Politics and government—1939-1945. I. Title. 994.042092

Contents

Introduction Xi Abbreviations X1X

1 The Liberal Party 1 23 Uncertainty, Hope, 1945-1946 30 1947-1948 59

45 Achievement, England, 1948 88 1949 104

6 Slipping into Harness, 1949-1950 128

7 Fears of War, 1951 169

8 Difficult Times, 1952 201 9 To the 1954 Election 227

10 Post-Election Fallout, 1954 264 11 New Security? 1955-1956 290

12 Suez, 1956 324

1956-1958 352

13 From Personal Depression to Electoral Triumph,

14 Interlude: Canberra; Universities 381

15 The World Stage, 1959-1960 400 16 Credit Squeeze to Common Market, 1961-1962 430

17 To the 1963 Election 459

18 A Prime Minister’s Life, 1964-1965 483

vi CONTENTS 19 Predictable Rigidities and Unexpected Sentimentalities, 1965 515

Reflections 567 Sources 585

20 Afternoon and Evening, 1966-1978 540

Index 588

Illustrations

page

Views of the issues at the 1946 election 52-53 Age, September 1946

Listening to the progress count, 1946 election 57 Age, September 1946

The new and old prime ministers of Australia, 1950 130 National Library of Australia

Moving into the new Canberra home, January 1950 134 Sydney Morning Herald, January 1950

January 1951 176 At the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference,

National Library of Australia

At Parliament House, Canberra, November 1951 199 Photograph by Max Dupain

At a garden party in 1953 232

National Library of Australia

With Pat and Heather in Scotland in 1953 236 D.C. Thomson & Co Ltd, Dundee

At a family bush barbecue in 1953 243 Major General Sir John Swinton, Duns, Scotland

February 1954 247 Menzies and the Queen at Parliament House, Age

Farewell to the Queen 250-1

J. J. Frith and Associates, Garran, ACT

vil

vill ILLUSTRATIONS At the East Molesey Cricket Club, January 1955 292 National Library of Australia

Meeting the press on BBC Television, January 1955 293 National Library of Australia

In Conference mode, February 1955 295 National Library of Australia

Menzies’ Cabinet, January 1956 316 Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

A bleak Anzac Day in Canberra, 1956 318 National Library of Australia

Meeting President Nasser in 1956 337 National Library of Australia

With Anthony Eden in London 341 National Library of Australia

A meeting at the White House in September 1956 342 National Library of Australia

Holding the Coalition together, 1950s 346 National Library of Australia

Menzies in his favourite ‘fishing’ hiding place 352 Gordon Humphreys

At a local book show with Harold Macmillan 371 Canberra Times

At the Weipa Presbyterian Mission in 1958 372 Queensland Newspapers

In Kuala Lumpur, December 1959 408 National Library of Australia

At the United Nations in October 1960 419 Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Victorian State Liberal Convention, 1962 455

the Thistle 457

National Library of Australia

A student prank in 1963 to celebrate the Knighthood of Adelaide Advertiser Library

With Hasluck and Townley 482 National Library of Australia

ILLUSTRATIONS 1X

Hello Dolly, 1964 490 With Carol Channing and Mary Martin backstage after

Australian Associated Press

With Heather in Honolulu in January 1965 503 National Library of Australia

1962 539

Menzies and Calwell at the Australian National University 537 The Australian National University

Laying the foundation stone of the H. C. Coombs building, The Australian National University

With John Bunting at the cricket in Melbourne, 1965 541

retirement 544 Age

Ata dinner given by the Young Liberals on Menzies’

Jeremy Hearder

At Dover Castle in 1966 548 National Library of Australia

With Dr H. C. Coombs in 1969 559 The Australian National University

Introduction

In 1944, when this study of the second, and major, phase of Menzies’

life and career begins, he was approaching fifty. Handsome, with silvering hair and bushy black eyebrows, he was a striking figure.

Gifted with a pleasant, cultivated but unmistakably Australian voice, he had as barrister and politician developed over the years notable skills as a public speaker. The hallmarks of his speeches were lucidity and clarity of structure. He was as accomplished on spontaneous occasions as when delivering prepared remarks. On formal occasions he usually spoke from brief notes. He rarely wrote, or read out, a speech in full.

For a man of his age, Menzies had already had considerable, if not always happy, political experience. He had served a ministerial apprenticeship in the Victorian parliament before being elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1934. There he at once received

a portfolio in Joseph Lyons’ newly created United Australia Party (UAP) Government, then ruling in coalition with the Country Party. In 1939, when Lyons died, Menzies was elected to the party leadership, thus also becoming Prime Minister. As such he led Australia into World War I, presiding over his country during that stage of the conflict when Europe was the focus of hostilities, and before Japan’s entry into the war. In North Africa, during 1940-41, soldiers of the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF), sent in the once tradi-

tional way to Egypt to complete their training, fought the first successful Allied land battles, sweeping a larger Italian army over 800 kilometres from the Egyptian border beyond Benghazi in Libya. Uncomfortable at possible threats to Australia’s north, and aware

that the new war would be very different from that of 1914-18, Menzies had initially balked at the despatch of this expeditionary force abroad. A little later, alarmed at Britain’s neglect of the military and naval strength of Singapore, thought of by Australians in

those days as their chief bastion of defence in the north, he went x1

xii INTRODUCTION personally to London in 1941. His mission was to remonstrate with British ministers, chiefly Winston Churchill, at their neglect. But by then the Nazis had overrun France, had begun their aerial Blitz

on British cities, and appeared to be poised for invasion across the English Channel. For the moment substantial strengthening of Singapore was out of the question. To add to Menzies’ anxiety Australian and New Zealand troops in North Africa—at that stage the only available infantry not garrisoning the British Isles—were sent, partly to meet Churchill’s wishes, on a doubtful effort to defend Greece against German invaders moving southwards through the Balkans. This expedition was defeated with heavy losses. Meanwhile General Rommel established a German bridgehead in North Africa and his armoured desert forces began rolling back towards Suez the gains which had been made in recent sweeps against the Italians. Through these painful days Menzies, admitted by courtesy to the British Cabinet, made no secret of his dissatisfaction with what he saw as Churchill’s high-handedness and Britain’s seeming ineptitude in the face of Germany’s superior military tactics. Disgust with policy makers and distress at the setbacks suffered by Australian soldiers could not, however, dim Menzies’ profound admiration for the courage with which the British people were facing air raids, food shortages and the loss of loved ones. When he came

home after his stay in London, which extended to five months, he spoke eloquently about the spirit of national solidarity he had seen and shared, and he was admired and feted in many quarters. But he was soon contrasting British unity of purpose with what he saw as local apathy and ignoble divisions. Where Britain had a national, all-party wartime government, political parties in Australia still operated in the traditional, adversarial way. Increasingly his own Government drifted into difficulties. It had made great strides in putting the country on to a war footing, but there were critics who

argued that still not enough had been done. Others resented the shortages that wartime conditions brought, even at Australia’s distance from the actual theatres of war, and acted as if they believed that too much had been done.

But the most profound malaise was in Menzies’ own party. He was not universally liked. Certain members, including ministers, resented his sometimes overbearing manner and sharp wit, and during his absence he had received more than one warning of plots against him. Some thought that he lacked leadership skills; others maintained that he was unpopular in the electorate and that the Government could not carry its wartime responsibilities with him as head. After complex internal manoeuvres, and Labor’s refusal to agree to the formation of a British-style National Government,

INTRODUCTION xiii Menzies had the galling experience of appearing to lose majority support in his own Cabinet. He resigned both the prime ministership and later the leadership of his party. It was the most humiliating personal collapse in the history of federal politics in Australia. Arthur Fadden, Treasurer and leader of the Country Party, became Prime Minister. But the Government’s difficulties continued, and at the beginning of October 1941 it was defeated on the majority vote of two independent members of the House of Representatives. The ageing W. M. (‘Billy’) Hughes was elected head of the parliamentary UAP and John Curtin, the sagacious leader chiefly responsible

for having reunited a Labor Party torn apart by the agony of the Great Depression, became the new Prime Minister. He faced a supreme test of leadership almost at once. On 8 December he had to

announce to Australians that they were at war with Japan, following her unprovoked attack on British and United States territory, by which action ‘the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed’. For Australia the most dangerous stage of the war had begun. In the first agony of his forced resignation Menzies toyed with the idea of leaving Australian politics and employing his talents in some senior wartime role in England. The idea did not last long. It was defused in part by his detractors, particularly Churchill. But more

important was the pull of family ties and the thrust of remaining political ambition. Wiseacres talked of the impossibility of resurrection in Australian politics following such a fall, but after the initial

blow of defeat Menzies climbed back with remarkable resilience and courage. He remained in parliament, seconding from the Opposition backbench the Curtin Government’s struggle against the peril

of Japanese invasion, while at the same time indignantly repudiating the charge of Labor extremists (with whom Curtin himself did not agree) that his own Administration had at an earlier stage failed

energetically to put the country on a proper war footing. Shortly after losing the prime ministership Menzies took up the idea of weekly radio broadcasts modelled on the ‘fireside chats’ with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had inspired the American people as they fought their way out of the Depression. By July 1943 he noted

that since moving to the Opposition benches he had made almost

eighty such broadcasts, in which ‘I have tried to put in simple language the difficulties that face us today and for the future’. The importance of these broadcasts lies less in any immediate effect on the electorate (though many were without doubt useful in boosting patriotic morale) than in symbolizing Menzies’ refusal to be neutralized, and his concern to worry his way towards fruitful future adaptations of ideas he had always cherished. The most important of the

xiV INTRODUCTION broadcasts, “The Forgotten People’, did not embody, as has sometimes been implied, a telling new idea whose exploitation would become a turning point in Menzies’ career. It was simply an elegant exposition of moral principles which he had learned as a child and a view of social life and stability which as a politician he had consistently advanced and built upon ever since his apprentice days in the 1920s.

For Australia the darkest year of the Pacific war was 1942. But by

the time the next federal election fell due, in August 1943, the immediate danger had receded, though the war was still far from over. United States naval victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway

in 1942 had broken Japanese dominance at sea and, after a close contest in the Owen Stanley Ranges, Australian soldiers had in effect driven the Japanese out of Papua. The chief thrust of the war moved north, becoming an almost exclusive American operation. Australian forces still fought bloody campaigns on the northern coast of New Guinea, and on Bougainville, New Britain and Borneo, but these were not critical battlefields. The Australian fighting was

at first nominally designed to release American troops for a drive

through the Philippines towards Japan, but it was to become a matter of controversy whether these ‘mopping up’ operations were necessary at all. By the last half of 1943 a fundamental adjustment in

the Australian war effort was under way. With American troops reaching their peak numbers, food and other supplies which could

be locally produced were at a premium, and towards the end of the year manpower shortages brought Cabinet decisions for the demobilization of growing numbers of servicemen and women.

Menzies’ continuing intellectual superiority in the UAP was signalled when he was asked to formulate, and in due course won Executive endorsement of, the party’s policy for the 1943 election. He was already—perhaps too soon—feeling his way towards a new

kind of politics. His key statement was that, despite disclaimers from Curtin, there were some Labor ideologues who were bent on using wartime powers to begin a transformation to socialism, in which ‘thrift would be penalised, and the great middle class of people crushed’. Much more research, he argued, was needed to prepare for post-war reconstruction: policies had to be developed for ‘the encouragement by all possible means of thrift, independence and the family home’. But, after a lack-lustre UAP campaign, Labor won a landslide victory. Hughes resigned and Menzies, reelected as leader of a chastened UAP, also reclaimed leadership of the Opposition from Arthur Fadden. The electorate’s decisive rejection of the UAP, and therefore of the ideas which Menzies had formulated for his party, meant that, as

INTRODUCTION XV the war drew to a close, Labor was firmly in the saddle. The under-

pinnings of its strength were the unity of the party, the prestige which Curtin’s outstanding wartime leadership had won it, and the

idealistic plans being formulated by the youthful intellectual bureaucracy it had recruited, particularly in the Department of Post-

war Reconstruction. These plans, which hinged on the notions of full employment and economic management with Keynesian ends in view, inevitably appealed to a broad constituency. Labor ministers, especially the Treasurer, Ben Chifley, looked back with pain on the Depression sufferings of the 1930s, determined that what they saw as past social injustices should not be allowed to recur.

Labor’s strength was enhanced by the weakness, indeed for many voters the irrelevance, of the Opposition. Originally a striking

political formation which had appeared as the party of sanity and

salvation in the most disturbed days of the Great Depression, the UAP had failed to develop positive and distinctive policies, becoming a somewhat grey defender of the status quo. A slow decline in its effectiveness was evident before the war, as improving economic conditions began to remove its original raison d’étre. War,

with its requirements for full employment and total mobilization, completed this process. The divisions and jealousies which culminated in Menzies’ fall in 1941 were the outward manifestations of the party’s decay. ‘The progeny of a political expedient’, as Paul Hasluck once described it, the UAP had run its course. ‘Fortunate is the political party’, Hasluck wrote, that can boast of its nativity or invent an honourable ancestry. From 1934 to the death of Lyons in April 1939 the chief reasons for the existence of

the UAP were to be found in the political measures taken to overcome the Great Depression. From 1939 to 1941 [the party’s leaders] had little opportunity to think of much besides war. The necessary rediscovery of their political tradition, the necessary re-examination of their political

faith, and the necessary restatement of their political platform for present and prospective conditions in Australia had never been made. The party had been due for overhaul in 1938. By 1943 it was rattling at every joint.!

Robert Menzies’ place in post-war Australia has initially to be appreciated in this longer-term context. If his seeming determination to build his position anew was to bear fruit, a first task was to

wonder how the tottering UAP could best be regenerated or replaced as a power base which was more than ‘the progeny of a political expedient’. ! Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945, 387.

xvi INTRODUCTION Thus by 1944, after the first volume of this study of Menzies ends and a second begins, politics and party leadership had in a particularly powerful way reasserted themselves as the outward focus of his life. How Menzies would fare in the new circumstances would primarily be a political story, and thus, inescapably, much attention is paid to political events in the pages which follow. Indeed, my own leaning is to think of the public career of such a man as offering the most empirically useful basis on which to construct a bony edifice for the progressive display of what can be glimpsed of the flesh of the life. This book therefore consists of chapters primarily structured around sequential phases of Menzies’ political career. But I

am also interested in a variety of matters incidental to politics, though I prefer readers to sense and judge these for themselves rather than to ask them to accept or reject analyses of my own. I am, naturally, well aware that, however much one strives for objectivity,

presuppositions—not all necessarily conscious—inevitably affect the choice of matters to discuss. Beyond that, there is the dismissive

reaction of many committed critics of Menzies. The ‘hindsight’ industry has been especially active in judgements of him. [ wish also to emphasise that I have tried to direct this book to the interested general reader rather than to the relatively small number

of Australians who have a competent working knowledge of our political history. The Menzies era is now chronologically half a century away. The past, it has been said, is a foreign country; hence the

difficulty we often have in understanding it. Given the extraordinary social, economic and technical changes Australia has experienced since the 1960s, when Menzies left public life, it must be said that in this case the recent past itself has become notably remote. For

the modern reader, even someone half a century old and able to recollect, albeit dimly, Menzies in the evening of his prime minister-

ship, it will be difficult to recall an era before the fax, STD telephones, investigative reporting and current affairs journalism on radio and television. Indeed, Menzies left office before the first decade of black and white television had ended and more than half a decade before the arrival of colour television. He left well before wide-bodied jets made inter-continental travel readily accessible to Australians and when a visit ‘home’ to Britain on a P&O liner was still for many a normal mode of travel. In writing this book I have

sought to mute the inevitable sin of hindsight, and to consider Menzies primarily in the light of his own time and experience. I have also tried to capture something of the flavour of his personality; to reach beyond and behind the symbolic caricature of Australian conservatism, as Menzies is so often depicted, to the real live

INTRODUCTION xvii man whose own humanity was in many ways central to his success as a political figure. The constant question with Menzies is what, politically, drove him on? Chemistry in the blood (the strange compulsion that the political life has for those who become its addicts), the spur of ambition, or a vocation for public service—a feeling that experience and talent impose, inescapably, a kind of public duty? Reverence for British institutions and an anxiety to preserve and make them work in a Commonwealth outpost? The list and the plausible permuta-

tions and combinations are endless. Some will be found in these pages. I eschew, however, as being beyond the range of my taste and expertise, the kind of speculative and theoretical reasoning so effectively deployed by scholars like Judith Brett.* In today’s climate of opinion few historians dare to say that they seek to find ‘what actually happened’. That, nevertheless, is my ambition in this study, though constrained naturally by the limitations evidence and space impose on glimpses of the wide canvas of the life. My hope is still that Menzies might be more understandable as a consequence of the labour which this book represents. I wrote most of it while an Honorary Fellow in the Law Program, in the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University. I cannot forget the warmth with which the then head of the Department, Professor Paul Finn, took me in. I have appreciated

the subsequent hospitality given to me by Professor John Braithwaite and his colleagues, and have benefited from the advice of my old friends in the History Program of the same School. [have sad but deeply grateful memories of the assistance given to me on both volumes by the late Patsy Hardy. After the shock of Patsy’s death Pam Crichton helped me in numerous ways. Heather and Peter Henderson have provided much information without ever seeking to influence my interpretation. I have been assisted by a great number of fellow scholars and interviewees: in general they are individually acknowledged in the footnotes. But special mention must be made here of my friends Geoffrey Bolton, lan Hancock and John Nethercote. Geoffrey read and insightfully criticized the whole manuscript in draft. Ian’s work on the Liberal Party’s organization was conceived and carried out over approximately the same time as my preparation of this volume. We enjoyed many fruitful exchanges

on common problems and I believe that our finished writings, which have very different foci, will in the best sense come to com-

plement each other. John Nethercote’s erudition and interest in * Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Sydney, 1992); Political Lives (Sydney, 1997).

xViii INTRODUCTION Menzies (and in cricket), and patient readiness to discuss any of my

developing hypotheses, have enlivened happy years of our personal, peripatetic luncheon ‘club’.

I offer my thanks for a generous grant from the Australian Research Council, which enabled me to travel and acquire some research assistance. No work of this kind can possibly be produced without the resources of libraries, and I therefore salute the libraries and their keepers with whom I have worked throughout the world. But I owe a special debt to my friends of the manuscript room of the

National Library of Australia in Canberra, who over months, nay years, took it in their stride that I had become something of a permanent fixture in their hallowed precincts. I am grateful for the professionalism and care which Mrs Chris

Treadwell showed in undertaking, at short notice, the final corrections and formatting of the manuscript.

And, as ever, I offer thanks to my wife, who has, with typical graciousness, seen me through a rocky period. Canberra, May 1998

Abbreviations

AA Australian Archives ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission

ACT Australian Capital Territory

ACTU Australasian Council of Trade Unions AGPS Australian Government Publishing Service

AHQ Australian Head Quarters AIF Australian Imperial Force ALP Australian Labor Party

ANU Australian National University

ANZAAS Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science

ANZAM Australian, New Zealand and Malayan area ANZUS Australia, New Zealand United States (Security Treaty)

ASIO Australian Security Intelligence Organisation AVCC Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee BHP Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited BOAC British Overseas Airways Corporation

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CIGS Chief of the Imperial General Staff COR Commonwealth Oil Refineries

CPA Communist Party of Australia

CPD Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates CRIS Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme CRO Commonwealth Relations Office (British) CSIRO Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

CT Canberra Times

DLP Democratic Labor Party

DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam

DT Daily Telegraph

EEC European Economic Community EFTA European Free Trade Area

EXIM Export-Import Bank of the United States FAD Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of Cabinet X1X

XX ABBREVIATIONS IFASES Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools

IPA Institute of Public Affairs IRBD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

LSE London School of Economics MCC Marylebone Cricket Club

MFP Menzies Family Papers

MSs. Manuscript

MUA Melbourne University Archives NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NCDC National Capital Development Commission

NLA National Library of Australia

NSRB National Security and Resources Board PAVN People’s Army of Vietnam PLAF People’s Liberation Armed Forces

PRO Public Record Office, London , PWR Department of Post-war Reconstruction

RSL Returned Soldiers’ League

RT Round Table

SCUA suez Canal Users’ Association

SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

SLV State Library of Victoria SMH Sydney Morning Herald UAP United Australia Party

UK United Kingdom UN United Nations

UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

US United States of America USSR Union of Socialist Soviet Republics WWE Waterside Workers’ Federation A Note on the spelling of ‘Labor’

Throughout this book the contemporary conventions of the period have

been followed

The official party spelling, used in all party publications and by all party members, was ‘Labor’.

Opposing parties and most mainstream newspapers described the political formation as the “Labour Party’.

However, the ‘Labour Movement’ was so described by people of all shades of political allegiance.

1

The Liberal Party

()\ SUNDAY OCTOBER Menzies’ secretary, Miss Eileen Lenihan,10 wrote from the1943 ‘Office of the Rt Hon. the Leader of the Opposition’ (‘hope you are duly impressed’) to Lieutenant Ken Menzies, then serving with the AIF somewhere in the islands to the north of Australia: How I wish you could be transported to Canberra just for one... day in order to see your father again sitting at the Table (it’s a very pleasant sight—even if its on the off rather than the on side). The dignity of the whole Chamber has, needless to say, improved marvellously already and we now have ‘speeches what are speeches’ on every subject of importance—at the proper time by the proper person. The first was on the Address-in-Reply and it was a ‘corker’ although your father said afterwards that he felt as nervous as though he were making a maiden speech.

The tone of affection was typical: most who knew him well have commented on how Menzies’ kindness and good humour encircled and captivated those who served him most closely. Miss Lenihan (‘Lennie’) added that she hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a week before the day of the election which had restored Menzies to party leadership and on that day itself she was ‘too twittery’ to ‘even get out a decent word of congratulation’! The federal parliament whose changed arrangements Lennie celebrated was the seventeenth. Its first session, after the election of

August, had begun on 23 September 1943. The few weeks before then had been hectic ones for Menzies and the UAP. The leadership election, only days before the convening of parliament, had in the previous fortnight been preceded by at least three post-mortems of the catastrophic defeat which the party had suffered in the general | E, Lenihan to K. Menzies, 10 October 1943, MFP.

l

2 ROBERT MENZIES election.* Though in detail not all to Menzies’ satisfaction, postmortems commonly agreed with Menzies’ own conviction that what was now needed was a new party, with a new name and a new form of organization to match that of Labor. Meanwhile, in ordinary day-to-day terms, there was, as Menzies explained to his brother, ‘a terrific amount of cleaning up to be done’. The initial difficulty was ‘to get hold of first-class staff—practically an impossibility’. Lennie observed that since Ken’s father now had a ‘really worth-while job’, she was assailed from the public service by ‘professional-male-secretaries’ of whom only one “chap allowed it to enter into his skull that I might be kept on’. For Menzies himself this was not an issue: Lennie’s gifts in adversity were only the more

valuable in success. To Menzies, ‘getting first-class staff’ meant finding people like Curtin’s legendary press secretary, Don Rogers, who, Menzies wrote, ‘has built up his chief in a really remarkable way; he knows exactly what the public want to read, and he has a

really burning enthusiasm for Labour’s cause ... I simply can’t think of one man who is anywhere in his class’. But although no such paragon was momentarily on the horizon, Menzies within a few months decided on Charles Meeking of the Department of Information for a press officer, describing him as ‘a very experienced journalist, with whom my personal r felations are of the best’.° Meeking had once been editor of the Leader, Melbourne, and had

subsequently worked in Melbourne and Canberra as political roundsman for the Age. In writing to accept the position he also

spoke of the long and friendly relationship he had had with

Menzies: ‘it began, as I vividly remember, when I called on the

newly appointed Minister for Railways and he gave me three appreciated and exclusive statements’. Meeking asked Menzies, ‘in view of the extreme difficulty of keeping anything secret in Canberra’, to issue a brief press statement about his having accepted the

post of “Press Relations Officer to the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Menzies) and the United Australia Party’ (UAP). In drawing up for Menzies a list of conditions under which Meeking was to be employed, someone in his office (probably Lennie) suggested that Meeking be simply known as ‘Press Secretary’, and that the phrase

2 These are detailed in Martin, Robert Menzies, vol. 1, 417-21. 3 Menzies to Les Menzies, 28 September 1943, MFP. Lennie told M. she had sent Les a

, copy of ‘my last talk, entitled “Leading the Opposition” ’.

5 Menzies to D. B. Copland, then Prices Commissioner, asking for the release of a member of his staff, Bonney, to take Meeking’s place in the Department of Information. NLA, MS. 4936/1/19/165.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 3 connecting him formally to the Party be eliminated.°® So, attached to

Menzies personally, he became in truth the Opposition leader’s answer to Curtin’s Don Rogers. From the outset he saw it as his role

to shore up Menzies’ leadership in the Party and to advise constantly on how Menzies’ public image might be improved. In retro-

spect this can be seen as an important step in the process of consolidating the office of Leader of the Opposition, a notable development in the House of Representatives in the 1940s.’ Writing to son Ken just before he recaptured the party leadership Menzies had given a dramatic account of what the general election campaign of 1943 had involved for him: five weeks of continuous

campaigning, in the course of which he travelled over seven thousand miles. He had more than fifty meetings, only two of which were badly disrupted (by contrast to those of Fadden, who

complained repeatedly of organized obstruction, ‘but my own impression’, Menzies added characteristically, ‘is that he created most of the noise by a failure to realise that interjections, properly

considered, are a help and not a hindrance’). His own two most riotous meetings were in East Sydney, ‘where the mob looked exactly like a French Revolution mob, and where, in the dark street afterwards, I had some nasty feelings before I reached safety’, and in Fremantle, where in the Town Hall he faced disruptive groups, organized by wharf labourers, which counted him out continuously for seventy minutes. Otherwise meetings were well attended and

frendly and there was ‘no superficial sign of any swing in the direction of Labour’. Indeed, he could even write jocularly about his father’s supportive efforts in his own electorate of Kooyong: He got to the booth at 8 a.m. as usual and was on ‘how to vote’ card duty all day. Sid [Menzies’ brother] went across during the day, but was very

soon ordered off as a nincompoop! The old man was performing his usual stunt of taking Labour tickets out of the hands of people and tearing them up and dropping them over the fence, and using honeyed words as he pressed my own tickets into more or less reluctant hands... Unfortunately, one result of the day’s exertions is that Father is now in

bed with a heavy cold, but even in a recumbent position he can still reconstruct the political world to his own complete satisfaction. There is no doubt that he is a marvol [sic].°

6 Meeking to Menzies, 14 March 1944, and attachments, NLA, MS. 4936/1/19/165. Meeking’s Railways Minister reference was to Menzies’ first taste of ministerial office, ia the Argyle Nationalist government in Victoria in 1932 (vol. 1, 102-3). 7 Menzies, Afternoon Light, 283; J. R. Nethercote, The Office of Leader of the Opposition ia the House of Representatives, passim, but esp. 58. 8 Menzies to Ken, 2 September 1943, MFP.

4 ROBERT MENZIES Menzies’ remark about the negligible swing towards Labor was

rather naive, suggesting how out of touch he was with the real sentiments of sections of the electorate. For example, the Director of the Victorian Institute of Public Affairs, W. F. McConnell, took a random straw poll of voters on the weekend after the election. A selection of the remarks he gathered is amusing and instructive: ‘Public antagonism to Menzies, Hughes too old’; ‘Curtin is a real leader and nobody knows who is the real leader of the other crowd’; ‘Fadden is a blob. Billy Hughes is living in the past. Menzies is not a people’s man (UAP) voter)’; ‘You'll have to get a policy and a leader

and you'll have to popularise the policy. The UAP is run by Pharisees, not by Samaritans (C of E parson)’. At the election the most obvious signs of the bankruptcy of the

UAP had been the multiplicity of independent non-Labor candidates and the emergence, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, of

splinter parties as different groups struggled to express a wide variety of conservative sentiments. In the aftermath of the election there was much jockeying between ambitious local politicians in an attempt to retrieve the situation. Probably the most arcane of these local struggles was in Sydney where, beside the UAP (renamed Democratic Party after the election), there was a Commonwealth Party, composed chiefly of ex-servicemen anxious about Labor’s post-war plans, and a Liberal Democratic Party, largely a business

group organized by one E.K. White. White, a timber merchant whose cantankerous arrogance alienated many, was dissatisfied with the UAP leadership in New South Wales and driven by a combination of personal ambition and an exaggerated fear of Labor. We need also to notice that an essential element in the manoeuvres of these days was the Institute of Public Affairs. Victoria’s was the pioneer organization, formed in October 1942 by leading members

of the Chamber of Manufactures, goaded by the industrialist improver, Herbert Gepp. An IPA followed in New South Wales in February 1943 and counterparts appeared in South Australia and Queensland in the following June. Businessmen predominated in

all cases: the organizations represented primarily the fear that Labor’s political dominance during and after the war would mean

the triumph of socialism and a serious challenge to individual initiative. The New South Wales Institute was from the beginning involved in politics, and remained so. The Victorian IPA also, but briefly, had a strong political orientation. It was active in the 1943 electoral campaign. Seeking to improve ‘a situation produced by ? Typescript document, n.d., ‘R.G. Menzies and the Institutes of Public Affairs’, from Melbourne IPA archives, kindly supplied by Dr David Kemp.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 5 years of intrigue on the one hand, and incompetence on the other’, it virtually took over from the old, distrusted National Union the task of collecting—chiefly from business—campaign funds for the UAP. But the UAP’s decisive defeat in the election convinced IPA

leaders in Victoria that involvement in the day-to-day work of politics was not the organization’s most urgent task. It was more important to develop long-range policy and to look for a wider social base for the anti-socialist cause.!°

Menzies was well aware of these and other immediate post-

election manoeuvres: his contacts were wide and his ambition was quickly taking shape. As early as 13 October 1943, writing to tell his son of his having become UAP leader again, he spoke of a trip he was making next day to Sydney for a conference with a number of people associated with such organisations as the Middle Class and the Soldiers and Citizens and so on

which sprang up before and during the last campaign. They are all opposed to the Socialist doctrine and there were some good men amongst their candidates. I have already found a good deal of support for proposals which I have been putting forward in suitable quarters. | am anxious that we should all get together so that a new and powerful grouping of people who are prepared to think hard and work hard shall take form as soon as possible."

While in Sydney Menzies met a ‘Reconstruction Committee’ which, under the chairmanship of one John Cramer, was investigating the

possibility of negotiating arrangements with local organizations and the Victorian UAP to establish an Australia-wide anti-Labor party. Cramer came subsequently to claim that he was responsible for persuading Menzies to undertake the leadership of such a party and that he, not Menzies, was the real founder of the Liberal Party!”

Unknown to Cramer, Menzies had other contacts and was well aware of the situation in New South Wales. Ten days after his meeting with Cramer’s Committee, for example, he heard from a friend in Sydney, Eric Kennedy (chief executive of Associated Newspapers), who wrote to say how anxious he was ‘to help the plan you outlined to me in Canberra’. He stressed the need for a new organization: any new programme from the old elements in the VAP would

look ‘rather like a gift from a dead hand’. Petty controversy continued in New South Wales. The UAP renamed itself the 10D. A. Kemp, The Institute of Public Affairs, 1942-1947 (B.A. honours thesis in History and Political Science, Melbourne, 1963) is the authority for my general remarks on the IPA’s formation and activities. 'l Menzies to Ken, 13 October 1943, MFP. 12 John Cramer, Pioneers, Parties and People, 59-68.

6 ROBERT MENZIES Democratic Party. But at the State election of May 1944 Democrats,

Liberal Democrats and other fragments fought each other bitterly and Labor won convincingly. In June Telford Simpson, an old and

well-known UAP organizer in the State, wearily reported to Menzies the formation of yet two more anti-Labor bodies—a Political Reform League and an Australian Constitutional League. The time, he wrote, was ripe to get all these people representing various forms of dissatisfaction with the present set-up into a room and ‘bump their heads severely together and deliver an ultimatum of the basis on which future activities of the Anti-Socialist forces are going to be conducted if you are to be the leader of them’.!8

The confusion—of which in this brief summary we have only sampled a part—was greatest in New South Wales, but difficulties, varying according to local circumstances, experience and personalities, also existed in the other States, particularly Victoria and Queensland.'* Altogether, by the end of 1943 and the early part of 1944, to achieve united and effectual action on the non-Labor side sometimes seemed a hopeless cause. But Menzies persisted, and then an unscheduled political happening brought new optimism. The Labor Government attempted to win at referendum the continuation of certain wartime powers for five years after the end of hostilities, whenever that would be. But the move failed, defeated by a vigorous campaign in which Menzies was the most prominent leader.

Curtin’s ministers argued that continuation of the powers in question was needed for a smooth transition to peacetime conditions and to enable the Government to mount effectively the special plans that were being developed in the Department of Post-

war Reconstruction. One way of achieving this would be to persuade the States to delegate the desired powers to the Common-

wealth, and in fact a conference late in 1942 had agreed that this should be done. But when it came to the point, only Queensland and New South Wales honoured the agreement. Thus frustrated, the Government was emboldened by its great victory in the election

of 1943 to try the alternative of obtaining the powers it wanted through constitutional amendment by referendum. Persuaded by Chifley and Evatt against the better judgement of some colleagues, including Curtin himself, the Ministry asked for global approval of fourteen powers. They ranged from uncontentious items like civil '3 Telford Simpson to Menzies, 29 June 1944, NLA, MS. 4936/14/418/64. ‘4 Tt is not germane to examine the detail of these divisions: their general effect is what matters here. They receive passing reference in Gerard Henderson, Menzies’ Child, 623. The most authoritative discussion is that of lan Hancock, in chapters 1 and 2 of a manuscript to be published as a monograph by Melbourne University Press.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 7 aviation and uniformity of railway gauges to debatable issues like price control, organized marketing of certain commodities, and national health. Menzies argued against the ‘lumping’ of so many powers together, while conceding that some controls would be necessary when wartime hostilities ceased, for ‘individual freedom must always be subject to the restraints of a society which believes

in order and good government’. But restraints must be gently imposed and relaxed rationally. The Government’s claim to enlarged powers, he insisted, was spurious: uniform taxation gave it, already, financial power over the States and the Defence power does not end

when the war ends. ‘Just as it has been treated as authorising the

mobilisation of the Nation for war, so equally it authorises the demobilisation of the Nation during the period of transition from war to peace.’!»

In the campaign that followed, Menzies worked with his usual enthusiasm, addressing meetings in all States and taking a leading part in the organization of propaganda. On 16 June, a few days before the vote, he presided over a meeting in Melbourne of UAP ‘Parliamentary Party Leaders and Office Bearers in all States’, called to discuss the last stages of the campaign against Labor’s proposals. After the meeting Menzies issued a statement noting how Delegates to the Conference expressed the opinion at its conclusion that

it had been of great value in cementing the relationships between the various State organisations. It was the first full interstate conference that

had been held for some time and the agreement shown during the discussion was an indication of strong unity of feeling, both on the referendum and on political questions generally.!®

The referendum was decisively rejected: only South Australia and Western Australia registered majorities in favour. This victory, coming hard on the heels of the successful inter-State UAP meeting

in Melbourne, seemed to promise a clear turning point in the fortunes of the parties on Menzies’ side of politics. As he wrote to

his son in the AIF:

Two things at any rate are established. One is that my own position has been very much strengthened, because ‘nothing succeeds like success’; the other is that I am now able to get out invitations to all non-Labour

bodies (other than the Country Party, with which we can always negotiate later on) to attend a conference in Canberra in about a month’s time to have a shot at setting up an Australia-wide organization with a 'S Argus, 15 August 1944; NLA, MS. 4936/14/413/29. 16 Statement of 16 June 1944, NLA, MS. 4936/14/412/19.

8 ROBERT MENZIES Federal Executive and Secretariat and proper equipment for conducting a national campaign. If this move succeeds I| think we will be in a fair

way to winning the next election. The Government's defeat [in the referendum] cannot be laughed off.!”

That was on 5 September 1944. Already, on 30 August, the press had

announced that Menzies was about to call a conference of nonLabor organizations from all States to discuss the possibility of political unity. At once letters of pleasure came in to him from a variety of sources. In a typical example Cecil Hoskins, head of

BHP’s Port Kembla steelworks, wrote that the Council of the New South Wales IPA had greeted the news with enthusiasm. Hoskins suggested that Menzies come at once to Sydney to talk the matter over with interested parties,!® and this he did. As he told his son,

referring to the ‘quite ... bitter internecine war between the

Democratic Party and the Liberal Democrats’, he ‘interviewed all factions with first class results’, so that at the subsequent Conference ‘the two principal NSW groups worked in the greatest harmony’.!?

Then, on 7 September, a circular letter over Menzies’ signature invited a wide range of organizations, and some individuals, to a conference in Canberra on 13-16 October. “The time seems opportune’, it said, ‘for an effort to secure unity of action and organization among those political groups which stand for a liberal, progressive policy and are opposed to Socialism with its bureaucratic adminis-

tration and restriction of personal freedom’. Labor’s efficient Australia-wide machine must be matched. ‘My colleagues and I

believe it to be most desirable that those of us who share the same broad political beliefs should first see if a basis can be found for unity. A successful outcome to such a discussion might quickly and completely alter the current of Australian politics.” If the Canberra

meeting signalled strong approval, a further conference could establish a new party. Menzies’ hard work and latent prestige were reflected in the rollup to the conference: 77 delegates or observers, representing a galaxy

of political parties or non-party organizations.*? He opened proceedings with a scintillating speech, which called for a new start for the non-Labour movement. Beginning with an account of the posi-

tion in individual States, he sketched an overall picture of many '7 Menzies to Ken Menzies, 5 September 1944, MFP. '8 C, Hoskins to Menzies, 31 August 1944, NLA, MS. 4936/14/418/64. 19 Menzies to Ken Menzies, 6 December 1944, MEP. 20 Henderson, Menzies’ Child, 68-71, has a useful brief discussion of who the delegates were, and what they stood for.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 9 thousands of people, all desperately anxious to travel in the same political direction but divided into various sects and bodies, with no Federal structure, no central executive, no clearly accepted political

doctrine or faith to serve as a banner under which to fight. This conference, he hoped, would declare a belief that an Australia-wide organization to fill this vacuum must be set up, founded on a liberal

and progressive faith to make it possible for a new generation to

build a new Australia.

On the eve of the conference Menzies had read a 70-page pamphlet written by the Victorian IPA’s economic adviser, C. D. Kemp. Called ‘Looking Forward’, it was a businessman’s argument

about the virtues of free enterprise, but it also warned of the dangers of monopolies, urged consultation in industry and the fostering of profit-sharing schemes. It was not hostile to the State, but demanded agreed lines between when governments should attempt to thrust themselves forward and where they were being intrusive. What was essential, it said, was a kind of middle way: service as a managerial ideal. The Bulletin described it as ‘the most comprehensive and intelligent set of recommendations concerning post-war problems’ yet published in Australia. Menzies agreed: he wrote personally to Kemp, declaring ‘Looking Forward’ to be ‘the finest statement of basic political and academic problems made in

Australia for many years. I feel most enthusiastic about it and would like to see its substance conveyed to the people as widely as possible’.*! Subsequently he concluded his opening address at the

Canberra conference with a long quotation from Kemp’s work, urging every delegate to study it. The Victorian IPA had two observers at the conference: by the time they went home delegates

had placed orders with them for 21000 copies of ‘Looking Forward’. The work had come at the right moment. It formulated ideas about the post-war world kindling already in Menzies’ mind, but not yet lucidly set out. By so lauding it, for the time being at least, the coming Liberal leader was adopting “Looking Forward’ as

his alternative to the ambitious post-war plans of the Labor Government.*4

When it came to detailed discussions, the opinion of conference participants was unanimous that Menzies was the key player. ‘No single factor contributed so much to the success of the Conference as Mr. Menzies’ personality’, reported the Victorian IPA observers. -1 Menzies to Kemp, 10 October 1944. Quoted in IPA Review, vol. 46, no. 3, 61.

*2 Henderson, op. cit., 82-7, shows that Kemp subsequently had little discernible influence on the development of Liberal policy. ‘Looking Forward’, however, in terms of its timing and elaboration of views forming in Menzies’ mind, seems to have been of crucial importance in the founding conferences of the Liberal Party.

10 ROBERT MENZIES ‘His good humour, his patience, his skilful handling of the business before the meetings, were at all times outstanding. Moreover, one felt that in his absence the proceedings would have declined into mediocrity.’*? Menzies could, however, be tough as well as goodhumoured. So, for example, he reported to his son how he had dealt

with South Australian delegates who were ‘gloomy’ about the possibility of an Australia-wide organization. ‘I had to roll up my sleeves and hop into them properly, telling them in substance that if

they would not co-operate they might just as well leave the conference and we would form an organisation without them. This touch of realism served its purpose and they came into line.’”4

The conference agreed that a ‘federal body representing liberal thought’ be established. The affairs of this body should be adminis-

tered by a Federal Council, with a permanent secretariat. There

should be a branch of the new party in each State, but these branches should constitute their own State organization and control their own affairs. The party must raise and control its finance. As

delegates to the present conference were not authorised to bind their organizations, they were now to report to these organizations, obtain their comments on conference recommendations, and prepare for a second meeting. This conference would have plenary powers, each State delegation would have six votes, and the party could be

formally set up. Then, upon the creation of a State branch, the existing political organizations would be dissolved. Meantime a provisional Executive Committee, consisting of Menzies and two delegates from each State, would liaise with all State organizations

and set the date for the next conference. Menzies was delighted with the resolutions, unanimously passed, which embodied these plans. ‘I believe this is really a momentous conference’, he declared, ‘and it will be even more momentous if we do not regard it as the end of our difficulties but rather prefer to look at it as the first great

step towards what I believe can be revolutionary changes in the Australian political scene’. The conference, indeed, closed on a note

of euphoria. Alexander Mair, lately parliamentary leader of the New South Wales UAP and sometime Premier of his State, in a speech of extravagant praise for Menzies, caught at the more starryeyed emotions of the moment: No one else could have brought us here as he did. He waited patiently for the psychological moment. We have waited, and have wondered whether the political wreckers would do too much damage before we 23’‘R.G. Menzies and the Institutes of Public Affairs’, 14. 24 Menzies to Ken Menzies, 6 December 1944, MFP.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 11 could come together to put up an organization to save our country and the individual freedoms which are essentially British and which we have cherished. More than anything we have waited to see if we could not bring to the public mind this realisation that the war was being used

to undermine our freedom, to regiment us, and to get us used to a system that was un-Australian and un-British.*°

The second convention was held in Albury from 14 to 18 December 1944. Menzies thought it a good thing to hold the meeting in a provincial centre to counter the impression that the new movement

was a purely metropolitan one; besides, ‘travel has become so difficult that it is worthwhile selecting a place which will save all the delegates from Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, an extra night sitting up on the train’. Representatives or observers attended from fifteen extra-parliamentary organizations.

Menzies addressed the first plenary session, taking as his central theme what the Sydney Morning Herald called ‘rising resentment against the manner in which the extreme wing of the Labour Party, far from having its socialistic ardour dampened by the referendum vote, has been bent on making the most of the opportunities of office, regardless of the popular will’.*° Never in my life have I been so alarmed as now at the growing threat to all that is good in our beloved country. Political unity among the nonSocialist forces is for us who are its trustees at this moment not a mere matter of political convenience or opportunity, it represents our great chance to give a means of expression to the deepest feelings of hundreds

of thousands of Australians who are frustrated by the present, and unhappy about the future.”

The address lasted an hour; the conference then went into committee to discuss a draft constitution (which had been drawn up by Menzies himself), organizational structure, and finance. Agreement was reached on these matters over the next two days. The new party was to be federal in structure, with a permanent secretariat for the purposes of co-ordination, research, publicity, and giving assistance

to the federal parliamentary party. Each State organization would be under the control of a State Council, elected annually. There was to be a Federal Council, composed of one representative from each

State organization, plus the two federal parliamentary leaders, in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Joint standing committees on policy were to be formed in each State and at the federal 25 Minutes of conference meetings, NLA, 4936/14/414/41. 26 SMH, 15 December 1944. 27 Argus, 15 December 1944.

12 ROBERT MENZIES level. And the new party must raise and control its own funds, which was seen as a crucial step in distancing itself from the old charge levelled against its predecessor, the UAP: that it was primarily the party of big business. A membership fee was fixed at 2s 6d a year for adults and one shilling for juniors. The party could certainly receive larger donations from outside sympathizers, either

organizations or individuals, but they had to be handled by the party’s formal fundraising machinery and must have no strings

attached to them. One of the more insightful journalists of the day, Crayton Burns (Canberra correspondent of the Argus), noted as the keynote of the new party’s purpose that clause of its constitution which dedicated it to the task of creating a nation ‘looking primarily to the encouragement of individual initiative and enterprise as the dynamic course of reconstruction and progress’. All the other clauses, he insisted, hinge on this. Further, there could be no question as to whether or not this was Menzies’ party: His initiative, leadership, hard work and persuasiveness have brought it to its present stage. Physically he stood head and shoulders above most

of the delegates, and intellectually he undoubtedly did ... Though greyed and falling to flesh, he was still the best-groomed and handsomest man present, a tribute at once to his tailor, his barber, his valet (if any), his laundry, and his cook. His draftsmanship runs through all the

documents, and the more they are studied, the more the new party is seen to be the Menzies party . . .78

Certainly—on paper at least—Menzies’ position at the close of the Albury conference was extraordinarily strong. He was ex officio member of the new party’s governing body, the provisional Federal

Council. He was chairman, with both a deliberative and a casting vote, of the twelve-member standing committee on federal policy. But at this stage, as Burns put it, the Liberal Party really consisted of a commander in chief and the nucleus of a general staff. An army had still to be ‘recruited, drilled and enthused for a decisive battle

within about eighteen months against a strongly entrenched political enemy. Great political courage and unremitting energy will be required if the Liberals are to win. . .’ Burns’ report was followed by

a strong Argus editorial which, under the headline ‘Liberalism Resurgent’, exhorted the Party to put forward ‘a positive and dynamic faith, not a mere stubborn defending of the ancient citadels’:

28 [bid., 18 December 1944.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 13 Perfected organisation may win an election once the way to victory has

been paved by a demonstrated worthiness for that victory; but strategical cleverness is not enough to save Australia from the political slough in which it finds itself today. The new Liberal Party must have a

faith that will appeal to the people by its humanity, its fairness, its political sagacity; and that faith must not only be preached persistently

to the people by its leaders but acted by them with an evangelistic fervour if the people are to be won by it.

A question of critical importance was that of winning the confidence of ex-servicemen now returning to civilian life: Large numbers of them have faced dangers and hardships to keep Australia free. Free for what? For the playing of the same old game of

‘ins’ and ‘outs’? Or for a process of orderly development in which human values will be adequately rewarded and human freedom assured in so far as political action can accomplish these things???

How far the Liberal Party was Menzies’ personal creation will no

doubt always be a subject for inconclusive, and largely pointless, debate. His conviction of the need for a new party arose immediately from his analysis of the UAP’s electoral disaster of 1943, and

he at once began working for some kind of unity among the disparate political groups then arrayed against Labor. That the majority looked to him as the most likely personal focus of leadership is undoubted, though of course that fact does not necessarily mean that the initiative was primarily his. There can be no doubt that business interests, most clearly exemplified in the Institutes of Public Affairs in both Victoria and New South Wales, were key influences in promoting and supporting the new party and, indeed, that without their initiatives it might never have been born.°° The somewhat arcane politics of anti-Labor groups in individual States, particularly New South Wales, gave rise to beliefs that the initiative for unity came from far-sighted people whose role was to persuade Menzies to take charge of a movement which they in fact initiated.

John Cramer’s allegations constitute one case in point; another arises from the claims of that strange and controversial founder and

leader of the New South Wales Liberal Democrats, E. K. White. White from the beginning advocated an Australia-wide Liberal Party and, despite the fact that in reality he was clearly a disruptive, 2) Tbid., 19 December 1944. 30 Marian Simms, A Liberal Nation (Sydney, 1982); Peter Aimer, ‘Menzies and the Birth of

the Liberal Party’, in Cameron Hazlehurst (ed.), Australian Conservatism: Essays in Twentieth Century Political History (Canberra, 1979).

14 ROBERT MENZIES wild-card influence in non-Labor politics in New South Wales, always claimed that he was the de facto founder of the Liberal Party,

who had induced Menzies, then the only acceptable inter-State leader, to take the headship of the party.

Three months after the Albury conference Menzies wrote to son Ken that the first work of setting up Provisional State Executives Was going ‘remarkably well’, though of course there had been

difficulties—‘differences of opinion on Executives and some jockeying for position here and there by representatives of older organisations, and the result is that I have had to spend a great deal of time in Sydney where such difficulties have been most acute’.

Beside the personal work of negotiation that his time in Sydney involved, Menzies also took a leading part in agitation to keep the new party before the public eye: My experience in Sydney has been quite astonishing. At six suburban meetings I had a total of 5,000 people, of whom I should think nearly 3,000 became financial members. At each meeting the enthusiasm was remarkable. The anti-Menzies tide of which one hears so much from grumblers in Pitt Street and Castlereagh Street has obviously turned in the suburbs, because I have been having the uncommon experience of being received with great personal enthusiasm. The S.M.H., after years of bitter hostility, has decided to support me and, as you will see from the cuttings which your Mother is forwarding to you, they are reporting my speeches at greater length than anything in my experience. I feel no doubt that the Government will lose ground at the next election.*!

His old admirer the insurance broker, F. H. Wright, told a friend that ‘Bob is at last coming into his own again’. He had recently ‘had a

really triumphant series of meetings in Sydney, night after night addressing different meetings in different places, always with overflow meetings to be handled by loudspeaker’.** Por the Bulletin there was ‘news value’ indeed ‘in a man who is restoring the vogue of the public meeting when it seemed doomed and who can pack suburban halls and hold his audiences rapt eighteen months before a general election’. And there had been no interjections: not even a ‘Pig Iron Bob!’?3

31 Menzies to Ken Menzies, 26 March 1945, MFP.

32 Wright to Schuurman, 26 February 1945, NLA, MS. 8119/6/23. On Wright’s earlier association with Menzies, see Martin, vol. 1, 313, 378, 404. 33 Bulletin, 21 February 1945.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 15 Though in these early days Menzies could not dodge responsibility, as leader, to be virtually on call to smooth ruffled feathers and otherwise lend his authority to the progressive establishment of the

new party machine, his hope from the beginning was that any personal direction of that machine would soon not be needed. “The organising of a party’, he had written in December 1944, ‘is not my line of country and experience indicates that it is physically impossible to discharge the constant duties of Opposition leader and at the same time attend to these outside matters’. Always the parliamen-

tarian, Menzies had begun to develop, from the moment he recovered the headship of the UAP in the House of Representatives, a clear conception of what Opposition leadership meant. In the wartime emergency he saw it as his duty to embrace whatever degree of bipartisanship was possible. When Prime Minister in 1940 he had reluctantly accepted Curtin’s proposal for an Advisory War Council

in lieu of the all-party National government he himself wanted. With equal numbers of Government and Opposition members, this body received classified information and advised the Government

accordingly, but took no responsibility for any decisions that followed. Its members were not free to speak publicly about what they knew and protocol in consequence did not allow unrestrained

criticism of the Government’s conduct. Curtin maintained this arrangement when he became Prime Minister, and the Council worked well enough. But as new UAP leader at the beginning of 1944 Menzies judged the wartime emergency to be waning and in February persuaded a party meeting that their representatives should withdraw from the Council. As he explained in a letter of notification to Curtin: ‘In the absence of an all-Party administration,

[the UAP] feels that it can assist in the essential war and

reconstruction effort of Australia best by resuming full freedom to express its views on the floor of Parliament’.*°

34 Letter to Ken, 6 December 1944. After the Albury conference, the Melbourne Herald

observed: ‘Mr Menzies intends to take no organizational part, nor to seek a controlling voice in the party, believing this should be the responsibility of strong State organizations so that he can be left free to concentrate on the leadership of the party at Canberra’ (3 January 1945). 35 Menzies to Curtin, 18 February 1944. AA, A5954/1, Box 206. With typical courtesy, Menzies added: ‘During the years in which the Council has functioned, I have been indebted to you and your colleagues for many courtesies and acts of consideration,

and to the chiefs of staff and the most competent officers of the Council for much assistance. I acknowledge all this with great pleasure’. Curtin subsequently persuaded two UAP representatives, Percy Sperider and W. M. Hughes, to continue on the Council and both were in effect expelled by their party.

16 ROBERT MENZIES For Menzies it had not always been a happy experience to work on the Council with Labor men like J. A. Beasley, now ministers, who had in the past evinced the greatest animus against him and what he was supposed to stand for, and it may have been a relief

to cut himself off from them. But, much more important, his uneasiness about the evolving Labor vision of policies for post-war

Australia made the development of a proper Opposition seem to him essential. Years later, reflecting on ‘the gentle art of Opposition’,

Menzies argued that an Opposition’s duty was not just to oppose for opposition’s sake, but to oppose selectively. No government was always wrong on everything: what mattered was for an Opposition

to use the respite from the cares of government to rethink its position and develop for the voters’ choice a position that was different.°° In his first address-in-reply speech in 1943 as leader of the UAP (the speech that Lennie thought such a “‘corker’), he made the

same points, though in a manner more sharply attuned to the mood of the moment. Admitting at once the débdacle of the recent election,

he acknowledged that the Government had come back with ‘an overwhelming mandate from the people of Australia’. He and his followers would therefore not raise issues that were dead—they would look to the future and not back to the past. Issues would naturally arise on which differing points of view were inevitable and on these matters the Opposition would express its opinions ‘with such vigour and skill as we possess’, because it is of the first importance for Australia that the people should get to understand that this Parliament not only makes the laws—which are determined by a majority—but is also the supreme debating society

of the country. The function of an Opposition in this country, as the Prime Minister said many times when he was in my present position, is to see that the opinions of all sections of the people are put clearly and resolutely. We propose to put them clearly and resolutely. We propose in that sense to be a fighting Opposition, even though we are, numerically speaking, a small Opposition.°”

36 ‘It is my own view that the duty of an Opposition which wants to move over on to the

anaes Benches is to be constructive, judicious, and different’ (The Measure of the 37 04 September 1943, CPD 176: 55. Menzies listed the matters bound to cause controversy as ‘constitutional changes, problems associated with reconstruction, and the method of obtaining social security’. Painting in such broad strokes enabled him to avoid defining the Government’s ‘mandate’, since each subject had appeared in some form or another in the late election!

THE LIBERAL PARTY 17 Subsequent withdrawal from the Advisory War Council was one

of a number of ways of signalling the reality of this forthright declaration of his Opposition leadership. In this context matters seemingly as minor as the title given to Meeking, to match him against Don Rogers, acquired a symbolic significance.

In the parliamentary session that followed in 1943-44—the session, that is, just before the establishment of the Liberal Party— the UAP band which Menzies led in the House of Representatives was indeed small: twelve members.°*> The Country Party held nine

seats, but though also in opposition, it was not in coalition. By comparison the Labor Party’s numbers, at forty-nine, signalled an overwhelming ascendancy, which would be clinched in July 1944 when Labor majority in the Senate, won at the election, became effective. From then on few on the other side put real credence in an

assurance which Curtin had made at the 1943 election, that the

Government would not use its wartime powers to advance the realization of its traditional socialist programme. Legislation like that

which set up a government-owned aluminium industry or which sought to nationalize interstate airlines (‘arrant political confiscation’, Menzies called the latter) were taken as prime examples of the Government’s socialistic intent. Its social service measures, like those which set out to provide sickness and unemployment benefits or to supply certain medicines free of charge, secured a degree of bilateral support but were controversial in their detail. Among the many fears stirred by the attempt to prolong Government authority

through the powers referendum one of the most important was that of some private bankers that the wartime supremacy of the Commonwealth Bank would be consolidated and that even bank nationalization might prove possible. In a busy parliamentary session when such issues as these were uppermost Menzies relished

the conflict against seemingly impossible odds and was momentarily elated as ‘the debating force of the Opposition continues to

erow. He mounted three censure motions, hardly expecting to overturn the Government but gleefully harassing its members, keeping them, he claimed, on the defensive, forced to escape embarrassment by gagging debate. ‘I have carefully selected the eround for each attack’, he wrote,

8 i.e., after Hughes and Spender were forced out of the Party when they rejoined the Advisory War Council.

18 ROBERT MENZIES the idea being to put forward no case unless in the nature of things it is politically unanswerable. In all this my Members have played very well, particularly good marks going to Harrison, Holt and White... You will be delighted to know that the personal attitude of the fellows towards myself is excellent and that old criticisms appear to be forgotten.°?

Menzies thought that Curtin, who was away from Australia in April and May to visit England for a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, came home strangely lacking in ‘political fire’. In fact, Curtin was a very sick man, victim of strain and the heart trouble which—to Menzies’ distress—would soon bring about his death. Increasingly, Menzies thought, Curtin ‘let his wild

men get out of hand’, and in November and December 1944 the Prime Minister was out of the House altogether, in hospital in Melbourne after suffering a coronary occlusion. In the last sittings of the year, Menzies wrote, his Ministers behaved exactly as if they did not expect him to resume

office and were jockeying either for leadership or position ... As a debating force the Government is hopeless in the absence of the Prime Minister... [ have never thought that Curtin was a good debater in the true sense; he never meets the point of an argument and would therefore never win a case before a judge. But as a jury debater he possesses skill. His technique is that of evasion, with a very broad appeal to the political prejudices of his followers. From a parliamentary point of view this is of course useful, because though it may not answer the Opposition’s argument it does stimulate the Government’s supporters.

But in Curtin’s absence the Government had to rely on three available senior ministers: Francis Forde, the Minister for the Army and

Deputy Prime Minister; H. V. Evatt, the Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs; and Arthur Calwell, Minister for Information and Immigration. Menzies had little time for any of them as speakers: ... Forde’s speeches represent nothing so much as the crackling of

thorns under a pot, and nobody takes him seriously. Evatt is an execrable debater who loses his temper and is almost a genius for the 39 Menzies to Ken, 6 December 1944. Of the politicians whom Menzies praises here, only

E. J. Harrison had remained a faithful supporter when in August 1941 Menzies had resigned the prime ministership so ignominiously. Harold Holt, a Young Nationalist who owed much to Menzies, was not prepared to support him, and ‘Tommy’ White had been among his bitterest critics (see, e.g., vol. 1, 230-2, 248). Note that Geoffrey Sawer remarks (Australian Federal Politics & Law, 169) that the imposition of the guillotine in the Representatives during the sessions ‘was the first example of its use by any Labor government in Commonwealth parliamentary history’.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 19 disorderly presentation of a case. Calwell is under the impression that vulgar personal abuse couched in the coarsest of extravagant language is a sign of mental virility.”

Parliament met again on 21 February 1945, after the Christmas break. The Albury Conference and its immediate aftermath over, Menzies could announce to the Representatives that, ‘in consequence of the formation of the Liberal Party of Australia, those who sit with me in this House desire to be known in future as members

of the Liberal Party’. Within three months he launched another want of confidence motion not, given the small numbers behind him, in the hope of defeating the Government, but to register the existence and position of the new party. Menzies protested against

the refusal of the Government to agree to the formation of an educative joint committee on foreign affairs or to allow parliamen-

tary discussion of momentous United Nations issues then being discussed at San Francisco. He objected to the way in which Labor

measures for post-war reform were being pushed through the House: in particular to the use of the guillotine to hasten the passage

of a Re-establishment Bill, on which there was considerable disagreement between the parties about preferences in employment for ex-service personnel vis-a-vis unionists. He alleged that the Government had done little to curb industrial lawlessness or to discourage the machinations of communists in Australia. Already, before this general statement of position, Menzies had joined battle with the Government on what was to him the key legislation of the session, Treasurer Chifley’s banking bills. The prime aim of these was to temper the position of the Common-

wealth Bank and to use it as the instrument for guaranteeing

currency stability and maintaining full employment. For Chifley and the ALP a deep and bitter legacy of the Great Depression was

belief that the Commonwealth Bank, established in 1911 as a nominal People’s Bank, and developing by the 1930s the initial characteristics of a central bank, should to a high degree be answer-

able to democratically elected federal governments. In 1924 the Bruce—Page non-Labor Coalition had legislated avowedly to make the Commonwealth Bank Australia’s central bank, giving it control

of the note issue, and placing it under the governance of an

independent Board of Directors. It was this Board, chaired by the steely Scots businessman, Sir Robert Gibson, which in the early stages of the Depression insisted on the orthodoxy of balanced 40 Tbid.

20 ROBERT MENZIES budgets, foiled moves to resort even to mild deficit financing, and thus brought down the federal Labor Government of James Scullin.

In the circumstances it was not surprising that ‘banking reform moved to the top of the Labor Party’s agenda’.*! An important starting point of the new legislation was to abolish the Board of Directors and replace it with a Governor assisted by an Advisory Council composed of Commonwealth Bank officers and officials responsible to the Commonwealth Government. There were other, more urgent, plans to retain various wartime controls which, through the Commonwealth Bank, regulated many operations of the trading banks and thus controlled the volume of credit in circulation and the disposal of gold and foreign currency. Agitation against such measures began in late 1941. It was spearheaded by the aggressive head of the National Bank of Australia,

L.J. McConnan, and supported by quickly developing organizations among private bank officers. On 21 March 1945, on the eve of

the introduction of the first measure to bring these policies into effect the Argus reported, under the heading “Battle of the Bank Bills Begins’, the arrival in Canberra on the previous day of Ian Potter, of

Collins House, and other financiers from Sydney and Melbourne. They spent the day in conference with Menzies and his Liberal colleagues, and that evening were entertained by Hughes at a small dinner party, at which the other guests were Arthur Fadden, Dame Enid Lyons, and Mrs Nelson Johnston, wife of the American ambassador.#* It seemed to one reporter that when Menzies subsequently launched his attack on the second reading of the Commonwealth Bank Bill it was ‘as much a social as a political event’. The Visitors’ Gallery was crowded and in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery seats were provided for a vice-regal party. For a man not normally noted for economic expertise Menzies’ speech was something of a tour de force. It had taken him a number of weeks to prepare and he spoke for almost two hours. He began

with a learned historical account of how central banking had emerged relatively recently all over the world and explained that it had effectively reached Australia in 1924. In that year the Bruce— Page Government gave the Commonwealth Bank extensive powers,

including control of the note issue, and established a Board of

41 C. B. Schedvin, In Reserve, 53.

#2 Argus, 21 March 1945. Note that the 1943 election had seen the arrival of the first women in parliament: Dame Enid Lyons (UAP, in the Representatives); and Miss Dorothy Tangney (Labor, in the Senate). 43 Menzies to Ken Menzies, 26 March 1945.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 21 Directors to govern it. ‘I line myself with the bank’s constructors’, he declared, those who believed in the growth of a central bank to accomplish three main tasks: ‘to stabilize the purchasing power of the people’s money; to stabilize the external value of money, and to eliminate sharp variations in the general level of employment and trade activity’. Thus he had no objection to the idea of strengthening the Central Bank functions of the Commonwealth Bank. But he rejected utterly the elimination of the Bank Board. The Central Bank was ‘the custodian of the nation’s cash reserves and the nation’s chief monetary adviser’. To Menzies:

The adviser to any government or to any community should be detached, objective and utterly above the storm, because on the skill, honesty and disinterestedness of his advice a great deal will depend.

The consideration of these things will show that a central bank

adequately committed with brains, scientific knowledge and experience must be in a position to lead banking thought and banking practice.

He unequivocally pledged his party, when returned to government, to restore Board control of the Bank. And in a thoughtful conclusion

in which he referred to Depression and the ‘somewhat tentative position occupied by the Commonwealth Bank for a number of years’, he remarked how such influences, combined with the experience of wartime finance, have conspired to induce in the minds of many people a belief that

monetary reform, as such, is the be all and end all of economic reconstruction, and that irrespective of hard work, ingenuity and the

encouragement of enterprise and thrift, full employment can be provided without difficulty by central bank action.¥#

The debate over these bills in the end extended over five months. But Labor was in firm control over both Houses and Chifley at the height of his form, and both banking bills passed into law with only minor amendments. Nevertheless, such signs as his own improved reception in public and the wave of agitation against the banking legislation stirred a belief in Menzies that ‘there is an unmistakable movement of public opinion against the Government’. It was, indeed, a time of unsettle-

ment. While the everyday impact of wartime austerity was still strong, demobilization, now at its height, added to the sense of social flux.

“ For this speech as a whole, see CPD 181: 744-59.

22 ROBERT MENZIES There is an increasing understanding of Curtin’s weakness. There is a growing feeling that the Left Wing of the Caucus has taken charge ... The ‘floating vote’ which has to a substantial extent embraced the small shopkeepers and the white collar workers, is leaving Labour. The small shopkeepers because they have had a raw deal during the war and have in no sense shared even the spurious prosperity produced by war-time expenditure, and the white collar workers partly for that reason and partly because the Socialistic programme threatens many of them (e.g. the Bank clerks) with loss of employment.

In the circumstances Menzies found his parliamentary work taxing, especially when ‘a good percentage of my weekends ... have to be spent in tearing down to Sydney, there to engage in almost continuous conferences and speechmaking, partly to gal-

vanise the people and partly to reconcile somewhat childish dif-

ferences which always appear to arise in Sydney on political committees’. By June, ‘with the Canberra nights beginning to freeze

hard’, the House was sitting four nights a week until midnight, having begun on three of them at 10.30 in the morning. The war’s end was now clearly in sight and the Government kept the noticepaper filled with prospective measures to further its post-war plans; Menzies declared that this was a session of parliament which for him had ‘no parallel in my previous Commonwealth experience’: ... not only does it impose a very heavy burden on me as leader of the Opposition, but it is at a vital period preventing me from getting out on an Australia-wide campaign for the new Liberal Party, which is going very well but which would plainly go much better if the fire could be lit in the right places at the right time.*°

In these hectic days he also felt some concern that ‘in the Opposition we have not been shaping as well as we did last session’.

45 Menzies to Ken, 26 March 1945. 46 Tbid., 5 June 1945. Menzies summed up, at this date, by writing: “We have disposed

of a censure motion and one or two general debates, one major Bill—the Re-

establishment Bill—and some minor ones, but still have before us _ the Commonwealth Bank Bill, the Banking Bill, a Life Insurance Bill, a War Gratuity Bill,

with the promise of bills coming up the lift to deal with air lines, divorce,

consolidated social services, etc., to say nothing of the Budget and the Estimates’. ‘You will get some idea of the nature of the Parliamentary work which I have to do nowadays’, he added, ‘when I tell you that I hardly ever left the table during the passage of the Re-establishment Bill and made no less than 26 speeches during the three days on which the Bill was debated in Committee’.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 23 There is just a slight disposition to feel unduly optimistic about the next election. There is not a sufficient disposition to study bills closely. There is a sad falling-off in manners, much to my regret, because I feel that whatever comes or goes people of my Party ought to set a good example in courtesy and dignity of debate. The longer I go on in Parliament the more struck | am by the scarcity of true debaters. There are plenty of people who can talk, particularly when some previous speaker has told

them what to say. There are some who can prepare a set speech and plough through it with magnificent indifference as to what has gone

before. But the man who can seize hold of the point made by his opponents, destroy it or brush it aside, and proceed to make a lively counter-attack with relevance and reasonable brevity and with sufficient personality to hold the interest of the House, is indeed a rare bird.

Too few, moreover, knew the lesson he had learned from his first days at the Bar: ‘that it is a good advocate who, having made his point, sits down—on the sound principle that you cannot improve on a winning argument but if you talk too long you may destroy it’. Time after time in Committee this session he himself had clearly established some criticism of a clause and had the minister at the table fumbling for an answer, ‘with some of his own Members clearly disapproving of his stand, only to find people on my own side getting up and obscuring the whole point and allowing the Minister to make his escape’. In these comments, as in his earlier berating of Government speakers, Menzies’ elevated, almost aristocratic, conception of the importance of dignified and, indeed lawyerlike, parliamentary debate is uppermost. In the same letter he wrote, disarmingly: ‘so much for the reflections of an ageing politician’ — but those reflections included: If you were to ask me what I thought the most deep-seated fault in Australia I would unhesitatingly reply that the old notion of disinterested public service has almost disappeared and that politics has come to be merely regarded as a war of interests in which much loot is to be won from the defeated. If the soldiers returning from the war are able to bring into the country a new spirit of civic service they will win just as great a victory here as in any theatre of war in which they have fought.*’

Menzies’ numbers in parliament were small and the Government’s power, when it came to the crunch of party-directed votes, unassailable. His private reflections nevertheless suggest an almost unrealistic belief that debating superiority, together with an elevated conception of public service, could give him and his new party a

kind of moral authority. Understandably, perhaps, he showed an 47 Tbid.

24 ROBERT MENZIES inadequate capacity to gauge the Government’s strength in the electorates or—which in a sense was the same thing—to sympathize meaningfully with the fears for the future which distress in the 1930s

had bred in many sections of society, and which gave the planners and Labor’s parliamentary leaders their ideological drive. Though

he could write disparagingly about some of his followers’ ‘disposition to feel unduly optimistic about the next election’, this was in fact a sentiment which he privately shared. As early as January 1945, just after the Albury conference, Menzies and his wife had

lunch with the judge Owen Dixon, who noted in his diary that Menzies “considered defeat of Labor certain but agreed that it wd. leave his party in an unfortunate position in cleaning up a mess’.*® Menzies’ letter to his son in June put it more clearly: Iam really deeply concerned about the political future. It could, I think, be summed up in this way: The Government is unquestionably losing ground; the Prime Minister is ill and his ultimate return to his office is at least doubtful; the Cabinet embraces some very ambitious people whose interests clash and whose capacities are usually in inverse ratio to their ambitions. In 18 months therefore [i.e. at the forthcoming election] the Government may be defeated. On the other hand I have not yet heard of any new and outstanding candidates being produced by the Liberal movement, remarkable though the success of that movement is. If this state of affairs continues and Labour is defeated to make way for a mediocre cabinet, nothing but disaster would confront all of us.

He sometimes pinned his hopes, he added, on getting bright young men into parliament after demobilization from the services, but it would be difficult to put them straight into Cabinet. ‘There is a great art in politics and it has to be learned.’ To precipitate a young man into office without proper preparation would be ‘sheer cruelty’. All this was just a little tongue in cheek. For more than fearing a victory in the 1946 election, Menzies was in fact prepared, as his

early remarks to Dixon had suggested, to give his best efforts to achieving it. In March of that year he was ‘so much persuaded that 1945 is the crucial year, politically speaking, that I am now refusing all legal work and, apart from completing one part-heard matter in the High Court, I will probably be out of practice for the rest of the year’.4”? Three months later Menzies apologized to his son for the

garrulousness of a long and chatty letter full of family news and #8 Dixon Diary, 28 January 1945. (From diary notes and other papers of Sir Owen Dixon, quoted by kind permission of Mrs Betty Danby, of Box Hill). ® ‘To Ken, 26 March 1945. He made the matter public knowledge. It was announced by

the asus on 31 March that Menzies would accept no more briefs for the next twelve months.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 25 reflections on the problems of the coming peace. But ‘unfortunately’, he said, ‘when I do write, I like to have a talk to you about

various matters of moment, and this means more time than can usually be snatched from my political affairs’. I say political because some months ago I decided that in justice to the

new Liberal movement I must decline to accept any new briefs, and consequently the Law Courts have caught only a passing glimpse of my

manly form, while the taxation Commission is probably gnashing its teeth at the thought of the taxes that I will not pay this year.°°

For a leader who claimed to be fearful of the consequences of winning the coming election even this jocular commitment to straining every muscle to try to do so might seem incongruous. But for him there could hardly be an alternative. In the heat of the moment, Menzies was prone to exaggerate the degree of sacrifice which his dedication to Liberal hopes involved. Certainly, with him, as had long been the case with lawyers turned politicians, a legal practice was something to keep alive, partly as a source of supplementary income and partly (though by the 1940s this seemed to apply less in Menzies’ case than most) as a possible business to fall back on if a political career was forcibly halted by loss of one’s parliamentary seat. Menzies also exemplifies, along

with many others, the kind of professional commitment which, learnt as legal student, journeyman and practising lawyer created a mind-set which revolved around a sense of the critical importance of law in the operation of society as he knew it. The motives, in other words, were mixed. But he could never abandon his belief,

and his instinctive pleasure, in the practice of the law, or forget the friendships which his years at the Bar had given him.*! And, at

least in the earlier 1940s, his style of life enabled continuing, if attenuated, attention to happenings in the Victorian jurisdiction. After his fall in 1941 and consequent expulsion from the Lodge °0 To Ken, 5 June 1945.

>! Note that he retained his room in Selborne Chambers until his death, renting it out to

younger lawyers after his commitment to full-time politics. One John M. Young occupied it from Menzies’ election to office in 1949, keeping the latter’s law reports up to date. In October Young secured a room of his own in the Eagle star building. With the concurrence of Frank Menzies (who as usual was keeping his eye on his brother’s local affairs), ‘another Scot’, Ninian Stephen, was to take up the room ‘and I am sure that he will bring no discredit upon it’. Young to RGM, 27 September and

4 October 1955, 4936/1/34/282. Menzies visited the Chambers on numerous later occasions, and ‘was always greeted with warmth and affection by his colleagues. He went to no end of time and trouble to get to know the young barristers’ (C. H. Francis Q.C., member for Caulfield, in speech in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 16 May 1978, on death of R. G. Menzies).

26 ROBERT MENZIES Menzies became, like most federal members, a sort of intermittent denizen of Canberra, primarily during the weeks when parliament was sitting.°* His home was in Melbourne, to which he returned when parliament was in recess, and often at weekends when it was not. In the circumstances he maintained a primarily Victorian, and only modestly lucrative practice. Menzies’ feebook for this period has survived. It shows, for example, an income of 2404 guineas for 1944.°° This, though not inconsiderable as a supplementary salary to his parliamentary earnings, was scarcely a princely sum. In the next twelve months, income from the practice fell by more than two-thirds. It was further reduced in 1946. Though he did accept a few briefs, Menzies indeed cut down drastically from 1945, as he said he would, on his legal work.*4 It would be a mistake to imagine that the hard work and strain of

this period, and the professional sacrifices Menzies felt himself driven to make, cut him off from his family or seriously affected his

enjoyment of the social aspects of his life. The puckish sense of humour which underlay the sterner exterior he presented to the world often broke through, mostly to the enjoyment of those around him. Adjudication between and wooing of the sometimes cantankerous factions of the new party machine certainly kept him hurrying around the country, particularly between Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, and there was the long grind of federal parliament over such periods as the winter of 1945. But after 1941 home was again at Howard Street in Kew with his wife and daughter. The legal world from which he swore ruefully to take a voluntary holiday was for him primarily a Melbourne world. So too 2 This was principally true for members from Victoria, New South Wales and Queens-

land, in a period when air travel was still in its infancy and railways had to be depended on. Members from South Australia and—even more—Western Australia had perforce to spend more time in Canberra (I am obliged to Miss Hazel Craig for her memory of what life was like in Canberra during the 1940s. See also Hasluck, The Government and the People, 475-8, for an insightful discussion of the isolation of Canberra and the difficulties of wartime administration). 53 Menzies’ Feebook for 1929 to 1953 is held in the archives of the Bar Council, Melbourne. I wish to thank Sir George Lush for information about its existence, Mrs Adams, archivist, for her courtesy in supplying me with a relevant photocopy, and Mrs Heather Henderson, for permission to refer to it. Dr John Williams and Sir Anthony Mason provided much appreciated legal expertise in helping this layman interpret the document. 54 In 1945 he accepted four briefs, none on major cases. In February 1946 he took two, requiring perhaps one court appearance each, and for the rest of the year did no more work of this kind. Occasional opinions and nominal sums for retainers were the chief sources of income in these and subsequent years. Except for 1947, when Menzies was involved in the important High Court case, Essendon v. Criterion Theatres, his legal income for the rest of the decade steadily declined. It was trivial by 1950, being entirely composed then of retainers.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 27 was the world of good fellowship which he continued to enjoy in such special venues as the Savage and West Brighton clubs. The letters he wrote during 1944—46 to his military son, Ken, are not only, as we have seen, a remarkable source for Menzies’ political thinking at this time: they also offer a rare glimpse of his personal life. For the absent member of the family he has chatty news. Thus, for example, he talks of often walking in Melbourne on Saturdays

and ending up by calling on Ken’s Uncle Syd to drink with him what the latter calls a ‘Southerly Buster’. There is the story of the wedding of his niece (Lois Green), which ended in ‘utter hilarity for which Syd Menzies,...and a ‘certain quantity of grog could claim a

share of credit’. (“When I tell you that Bob Green [Lois’ brother] stood ona chair to make a speech at the wedding breakfast and that his Mother [Menzies’ sister, Belle] shed no tears, not even dramatic ones, you will see that a good time was had by all’. There was an account of a holiday at Ferny Creek, in the Dandenongs, ‘a walker’s paradise’, when, looking after a party of guests, “Your Mother, as

usual, worked about fourteen hours a day, sitting down for ten minutes before dinner in a dissolute fashion to have a glass of sherry or one of my formidable cocktails. In spite of all her work she

is looking well ... At the same time I wish I could persuade her to come away even to Canberra, for a fortnight or so so that she should

have no housework’. Lennie came up a couple of times and did a little hill-climbing, ‘with disastrous but purely temporary results to the complexion’.

Above all, there was repeated news of Ken’s sister, Heather, a willowy young lady of sixteen, a senior student at Ruyton Girls’ School, Kew, soon to lose the ‘ironmongery’ fastened on her teeth by

an orthodontist. She was a great tennis player, and when in Canberra ‘her sotto voce comments in the galleries during speeches by such favourites as Forde and Ward and Evatt are really worth going a long way to hear’. She was, it was already well known, the apple of her father’s eye. Younger brother Ian, after doing exceptionally

well at Dookie Agricultural College, was working with a wellknown farmer, John Bott, near Yarrawonga. The press reported a jocular Menzies at a Lord Mayor’s party for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) delegates in February 1945 at the Sydney Town Hall. Family anecdotes ‘stole the day from international affairs: . .. members of foreign embassies regaled each other with stories of their families’. Asked if his wife were in Sydney too, Menzies replied that she was at home in Melbourne and would be doing the washing: then spoke fearfully about his younger son

who had done well at agricultural college and could very well in due course become leader of the Country Party and unseat him.

28 ROBERT MENZIES Would he mind, someone asked, being unseated by his own son? Menzies replied: “Every politician believes he will be unseated only

by death’? somehow there was time to go for long walks. Menzies’ letter to Ken of 5 June 1945 has the nostalgic ending: ‘Some weeks ago we drove through Macedon. It was no good to me; there were too many memories! On your next Leave you must save at least one day when we can walk and talk together again!’ The painful memories were of the weekender, ‘Illira’, purchased in 1929 but destroyed by fire in 1941, in which the family had spent many happy holidays.°° The

note of affection is significant. In later life Ken remembered the father of his childhood and adolescence as rather uncaring to his elder son, and made explicit his jealousy of Heather in those days. Perhaps in his wartime letters Menzies was almost unconsciously attempting atonement, or perhaps Ken had misunderstood his father all along? But, above all, wartime austerity did not still the round of social ceremonies, like weddings, which Menzies always enjoyed. He did his best to share these occasions with his absent son, occasionally

to hilarious effect. Nothing better illustrates Menzies’ eye for the

incongruously funny than his account of the wedding of Joan Harrison, daughter of his most faithful parliamentary colleague, Eric Harrison, to a naval lieutenant, Donald Stirling Taylor. It was at St Stephen’s Church in Macquarie Street, Sydney, and the wedding breakfast was at the Pickwick Club. The officiating minister was Rev. George Cowie, in his prime years Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales. An old friend of Eric Harrison’s,

Cowie was a smallish man, with a proud Aberdonian accent. He was ‘much given to violent political views, not entirely hostile to a well-poured whisky and soda, unexpected in what he has to say’. Menzies reported the wedding service as being ‘absolutely unique in my experience’: The old boy’s notion was that he should sandwich in between the formal

portions of the wedding ceremony a series of homilies to the happy couple, all delivered with the greatest informality and to some extent at least for the benefit of the substantial number of people present in the Church. Let me give you a few examples: He took great joy in pronouncing the bridegroom’s name, which in the true manner he did as if it were ‘Doonald Stairling Taylor’. If he pronounced the name once I am sure he did so a dozen times .. . about

°° Daily Telegraph, 15 February 1945. 6 On ‘Tllira’, see Martin, vol. 1, 72-4, 389.

THE LIBERAL PARTY 29 the third time he suddenly paused and said, ‘Aye, “Stairling”, that’s

a good name. It was at Stairling that we Scots won the Battle of Bannockburn’.

In advising the bride and bridegroom that there were things in life which were of prime importance and which only God could make, he

instanced the fresh air and sunlight, interrupting himself, however, sufficiently ... to make a side remark to the effect that he was a believer in fresh air and that in his opinion a great deal of the illhealth of Sydney was due to ‘air conditioning’. Later on, he looked at the bridegroom and said: ‘Well, Donald Stairling Taylor, you are in the Navy. Let us all hope that in a year the fighting may be over and that we may have peace and’ (with a glance in my direction) ‘new rulers in Australia’. He then went on to say something about the symbolism of the wedding breakfast, the first meal in the married life. This gave him a chance to urge upon the bridegroom and the bride the cultivation of friendly and companionable qualities. I almost rocked from my seat when he then proceeded to say: ‘After all, ye know, Jesus Christ Himself was a companionable man; He liked His cup of tea’.

At long last the Service ended and after this fascinating mixture of religion, ceremonial, politics, bad history, and general observations, we adjourned to the breakfast. There, in introducing myself and then Sir Frederick Stewart, ...the old man elaborated his beliefs ... He made no secret of his political views... and even ran the risk of a prosecution for heresy in the Councils of the Church by telling some of us that in his opinion the miracle of turning the water into wine might be attributed to the fact that wedding festivals in Palestine lasted for seven days and that by the sixth day the guests had taken so much wine that the host could easily substitute water without being detected!

Such hilarious stories did not, however, dim Menzies’ pride, at this time of national emergency, in the soldier son, somewhere on duty in the war zone, to whom he wrote: It is, of course, difficult for you to give all the background... but I know that whatever task is assigned to you will be done very well indeed. Mr Burrell of Bendigo sent me a copy of your letter to him about his son; it

gave him great pleasure. Every account that we get from various quarters shows us how well you stand with the men with whom you are serving. [he casualties in the Unit have imposed some further responsibility upon your miraculous Mother who adds to all her duties the selfimposed task of going around to call upon all the relatives affected by the news.

2

Hope 1945-1946

WENparliament AS actingonPrime Ben Chifley formally told 8 MayMinister, 1945 that the war in Europe was ending, he added a sad note of regret that John Curtin, who had done so much for his country, was too ill to make the announcement himself. Curtin at least knew about this victory, but in the Pacific Japan had still to be defeated. On 4 July Menzies reported: an air of uncertainty around the Lobbies because, I regret to say, the Prime Minister who has been ill for a long time with some developing heart trouble is this evening reported to be in a dangerous and even

desperate condition, so that anything may happen. It will be a real tragedy if, having worked hard ... during a very critical period in our history he is not spared to see final victory.'

The ‘tragedy’ happened almost at once: early next morning the Prime Minister died in his sleep. That day, leaders in a shocked House of Representatives paid their tributes. ‘Of John Curtin’, said Menzies, ‘I can say, as I believe we all can say, with a full heart, “he was my friend, faithful and just to me”’. Menzies warmly recalled Curtin’s friendship when, as Prime Minister in the early days of the war, he had himself faced daunting challenges. He described Curtin as ‘one who really believed in justice; who saw politics clearly as a conflict of ideas and not as a sordid battle of personal hostilities and

ignoble ambitions’.2 Though some might have squirmed at the words, few in the House that day could question Menzies’ sincerity about the dead Prime Minister, or the accuracy of what he said. The by-election for Curtin’s seat of Fremantle had a special sig-

nificance for both parliamentary parties. In the election of 1940 Curtin had almost been defeated but in 1943 as wartime Prime ' Menzies to Ken, 4 July 1945, MEP.

* CPD 183: 4114.

30

HOPE, 1945-1946 31 Minister he swept the poll, his grateful constituents giving him almost 70 per cent of the vote. For Labor it was something of a sacred trust to hold the seat. On the Liberal side, this was the first by-election the new party faced, to a degree a test of Menzies’ belief that the tide of opinion was turning against the Government. Federal leaders, including Chifley, newly sworn in as Prime Minister, and Menzies, as Opposition leader, appeared at Western Australian

meetings in support of their respective candidates. The rivalry of

this coming occasion had not prevented a typically pleasant exchange of notes between Menzies and Chifley on the latter’s election, 26 July 1945. In offering his ‘very warm congratulations’ Menzies warned that ‘At the next election I shall, of course, do my best to get rid of you’. But in the meantime, ‘as at all times, I know

that our mutual respect and regard will be maintained. The

character of the personal relations existing between us has always

been a source of great pleasure to me’. Chifley replied that he ‘would not feel that you were doing your duty if you did not do your best to get rid of me’, but added that nevertheless he wished ‘to thank you for the many kindnesses and courtesies which you

have extended to me, both in and out of Parliament’.° K. E. (‘Kim’) Beazley, graduate of the University of Western Australia, Teachers’ College lecturer and organizer of Adult Education, was the Labor candidate. The Liberals chose D. M. Cleland, who

had once been on the State Executive of the National Party and more recently was an AIF brigadier, having served in the Middle East and New Guinea. Meeking, Menzies’ press secretary, was given the task of going to Western Australia as organizer and chief of publicity for Cleland’s campaign. Cleland’s first meeting, Meeking told Menzies, was promising. ‘He was a bit stilted but will improve as the campaign proceeds.”*

Menzies meantime wrote that the members of the parliamentary party had discussed what ought to be the leading questions of policy at the by-election. It was a very early stage of party development. ‘You will understand’, Menzies explained, ‘that until the Standing Committee on Federal Policy has functioned, there can be no pres-

entation of an electoral policy on behalf of the Liberal Party, but

I believe that there should be no difficulty about conducting a vigorous by-election campaign on fairly general lines’. Housing,

migration, soldiers’ rehabilitation and reduced taxation were major matters which had to be discussed. The Party would favour a

policy of fostering employment, but ‘the choice is between full > Letters of Menzies and Chifley, 26 July 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/1/7/55. *Meeking to Menzies, 24 July 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/14/413/28.

32 ROBERT MENZIES employment in a servile State, i.e. as a result of the maintenance of

wartime restrictions, and maximum employment in a free economy’. Here was the distinctive Menzies touch—evident too in the call for extended social services, but on a contributory basis, and

in the demand for secret ballots in union affairs and a related denunciation, generally, of communism.° Initially, Meeking found Cleland ‘a rather humourless cove, but a

very pleasant, straight chap’.© Soon he was telling Menzies that audiences were good and that ‘Cleland and I get on extremely well; he is improving his broadcasting (which was bad at first)’. Meeking

planned to go to some of ‘Chif’s’ meetings to see ‘how he goes down with a crowd’, though he expected these meetings would be as “emotional and unhostile as all Labor gatherings’.’ He was right about that. Chifley and his fellows waged an ardent campaign: for them it was unthinkable that any but a Labor man should replace Curtin. In the upshot Beazley won with a sound majority, albeit (at 57 per cent of the vote) without matching Curtin’s legendary victory of 1943. Labor’s stocks were high: on the day that the news-

papers announced the results of the Fremantle by-election they were able to report that Labor had also won important State byelections in New South Wales (Blacktown) and Victoria (Prahran).®

The omens seemed at this stage hardly propitious for the coming federal Liberal victory that Menzies had predicted. A few months earlier Menzies and two others had been appointed by the party’s provisional executive to find a standing chairman for

itself, it being understood that the chosen person would in due course become party president. Menzies had originally favoured the appointment of a Victorian, ex-Senator J. A. Spicer,’ but deferred, in the interests of unity, to the insistence of certain Sydney members that someone from New South Wales be looked for first. The position finally went to an engineer and company director, T. M. Ritchie.!°

His appointment was announced on 12 April. Soon after, in an > Menzies to J. M. Paton, (‘in reply to your letter of 13 July and for the information of Cleland’) 19 July 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/14/411/16. 6 Meeking to Menzies, 22 July 1945. 75 August 1945. 820 August 1945,

? A lawyer and contemporary of Menzies’ student days, Spicer had been president of the Constitutional Club (1930) and of the Young Nats (1933, 1937), and a senator,

1 3.

10 Born in Melbourne in 1894, Ritchie was an engineer of Scots descent. He had been

appointed business administrator in New South Wales for the Commonwealth Ministry of Munitions, in 1941 (.e. by the Menzies Ministry). Managing Director of Noyes Bros, and a director of a number of other manufacturing firms. His clubs were the Australian, the AJC, Royal Sydney Golf Club, Melbourne Cricket Club (E. J. Harrison to Menzies, 27 March 1945).

HOPE, 1945-1946 33 address at Moss Vale, Ritchie explained that he had placed his services at the Liberal Party’s disposal because he believed in ‘the propriety of free enterprise’ and because it was a party ‘determined to establish equity for all members of the community’. Most of the men and women with whom I have come in contact in the Party, since | was appointed to the New South Wales State Provisional Executive some three months ago, are as new to politics as Iam, but the same determination to succeed for the good of Australia is everywhere in evidence."

His reports to the somewhat infrequent meetings of his Provisional Federal executive suggest that from the beginning Ritchie took his job seriously. His earliest coup was to visit Queensland, where he persuaded the hitherto reluctant non-Labor leader, J. B. Chandler, to transform his extra-parliamentary organization into the State branch of the Liberal Party. Ritchie visited party officials in other States,

made private addresses to businessmen and generally interested himself in the problem of fundraising for the Party organization. In August 1945 his ideas about the latter activity brought a sharp but very revealing exchange with Menzies, who wrote rebuking Ritchie

for a private memorandum he had written to the executive on securing financial assistance from ‘big business’. Menzies had dis-

covered that the memorandum had fallen into the hands of a journalist, fortunately a friendly one. But most journalists, he said,

were Labor supporters, and if such memos fell into the wrong hands, that would be ‘quite capable of losing us the next election’. Ritchie replied furiously that the offending item was in the report he had made to the executive at the beginning of June, and had been fully discussed ‘in your presence on more than one occasion’. Yet until now he had received no intimation that Menzies or any of his parliamentary colleagues objected to the statement. ‘It does seem to me’, Ritchie added, that there is a woeful lack of contact between the Parliamentary representatives and those responsible for promoting the Party ... You will be interested to recall that during the three months I have acted as Provisional Chairman, my total conversations with you have probably not exceeded two hours duration, and other than meeting Eric Harrison occasionally at State Executive meetings, I have not met any other member of your Parliamentary Party ... The suggestion that my guide to political opinion is limited to the reactions of my business associates

"’ “Address by T.M. Ritchie at Moss Vale’, NLA, MS. 2555/2.

34 ROBERT MENZIES is unfounded, for I have closely identified myself with our branches, and perhaps I might claim to be closer in touch with Public Opinion today than you and some of your colleagues of the Parliamentary Party.

There were various points which he thought ought to be “‘threshed out’ between them in the interests of the party, ‘for lam disturbed at the lack of cohesion evidenced by our present set-up’.!* This cri de coeur would suggest that, perhaps perforce, Menzies had begun in an important sense to fulfil his wish to leave the day-to-day work of organizing the party to others. He was, however, closely involved in the setting up in October

1945 of the permanent centrepiece of the party organization: its Federal Secretariat. Cleland, the recent candidate at the Fremantle by-election, was chosen as Director, and Eric White, a journalist who had been at the Albury conference and in the succeeding months had arranged some of Menzies’ many broadcasts, became Public Relations Officer.!3 These two men visited Canberra at once,

meeting with the federal Liberal parliamentarians (1-4 October), then in Sydney formally set up the Secretariat (10-13 October). On Ritchie’s instructions they spent the next month, from 14 October to 16 November, visiting and inspecting the State divisions. The report they produced was not a particularly happy one. The party, they observed, consisted of six separate entities, each with its own separate problems. The State organizations varied, but overall they were weak and spasmodic as compared to the Labor forces. Except in Victoria, no real publicity or research organization had been set up. There was an incessant demand both within the party

ranks and among the people generally for a clear and positive statement of the party’s platform. They did not doubt that there was a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with the Government, but it was

a mood which could be capitalised on only if ‘both Federal and State organizations apply themselves assiduously and at once to the

problems raised in this report’. Branch development was taking place, but far too slowly. The ultimate aim should be to have a branch or contact group in or about the area of each polling booth, but it was already being found that the biggest difficulty was to keep up interest in such branches as there were. For this reason much of the report was devoted to stressing the importance of

14 ,

'? Menzies to Ritchie, 6 August, and Ritchie to Menzies, 8 August 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/

18 Interview with White, 15 August 1984. Biographical information generously supplied by Ian Hancock: White was born in Newcastle, 1915. Served in AIF. After resigning as Liberal Public Relations Officer in 1947, he formed his own public relations company and, in the early 1950s, co-edited Inside Canberra with Don Whitington.

HOPE, 1945-1946 35 public relations, with research to discover what people wanted, how best to shape policy accordingly, and what media—radio, film, newspaper advertising, public meetings—must be used to force the party’s ideas to public attention. A research officer (W. S. Bengtsson) had already been chosen for the Federal Secretariat and the report recommended the appointment of eight other officers.'4 A meeting of the Federal Executive, held in Canberra at the end

of January 1946, accepted Cleland and White’s report, approved Bengtsson’s appointment, and decided to set up a Research Advisory Committee, “consisting of experts in the main branches of political research’. The President, the party’s hon. Federal Treasurer and the

Director were decreed as a committee to choose additional secretarial staff and fix their salaries, but other recommendations for developing the party apparatus must wait until after the coming election, lest they absorb too much time and attention. There was one matter, however, which could not wait. The Joint Standing Committee on Federal Policy answered one Cleland—White com-

plaint by producing, at the last session of the meeting, a fully detailed draft policy for the party. As the Standing Committee’s chairman, Menzies pointed out that this document must ultimately be referred to the party Council, but as no early meeting of this Council was in prospect, the Executive should adopt it as a draft platform to enable its publication.'!° His eye was naturally on the coming election campaign and the need for the earliest party endorsement of the policy of which he himself had in fact been far

and away the principal designer. The Council subsequently endorsed the statement,!© which duly formed the basis of Menzies’ policy speech in August 1946.

By then peace was a year old. In August 1945 the defeat of Japan, which Curtin had, poignantly, not been spared to see, was hastened by Hiroshima and the atomic bomb. There had been rejoicing, great victory parades, and much sad reflection. Bleak though its losses in slaughtered and maimed young men and women had been, Aus-

tralia was far removed from the overwhelming physical devastation and despair experienced in the war zones. Yet a particular outcome of that suffering—the preliminary chill of the Cold War— did affect Australia almost at once. It has in fact to be said that by early 1946 this was one of the two broad influences which, brooding 1426 November 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/14/411/16. 'S Minutes of third meeting of Federal Executive, 29-31 January 1945, NLA, MS. 4936/ 14/412/18. ‘6 Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Joint Standing Committee, 6 and 8 May 1946, NLA, 4936/14/416/55).

36 ROBERT MENZIES in the background, did most to shape the great variety of political attitudes in the coming federal contest. The other matter was purely local and seemingly disconnected: industrial restiveness as the war emergency ended. Ingeniously, however, some observers managed

to connect the two. The opening stage of the Cold War developed primarily out of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements about spheres of influence in what

was seen as the necessary Allied policing and de-Nazifying of a defeated Germany. As an ostensible element in this process the Russians set up a series of satellite governments in much of the East European territory occupied in their drive to the gates of Berlin. The

first such government, in Lublin, was nominally formed by ‘the Polish Committee of National Liberation’, the USSR rejecting as illegitimate the London-based Polish government-in-exile which

had been formed during the war. The Lublin regime, it was promised, would at an early stage be tested by ‘free and unfettered’ elections. It never was, nor were other ‘peoples’ democracies’ set

up in areas under Red Army control: in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. At a relatively early stage, Winston Churchill denounced the formation of this de facto Soviet empire with his celebrated mot

about the Russians ringing down an iron curtain across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Already it was evident that a kind of

East-West frontier would run through Germany, and that the division between Soviet and Western authorities of the government of Berlin, itself completely isolated in Russian-held territory, was bound to be a source of tension.

Churchill’s anti-Russian prejudice made it inevitable that he should take the worst view of what was happening. His vehemence and the wisdom of hindsight should not, however, obscure the fact that this time of transition in affairs puzzled as well as frightened many other observers. We now know that Western intelligence was

then in a very crude and formative state, unable to give even officials hard evidence on Russian intentions or why, in detail, it

was that Stalin should manifestly turn away from coexistence dogmas of wartime co-operation.'!? Much Western ‘explanation’ was thus for a time guesswork, in which preconceptions of many kinds played the major part. This was the more so in Australia, where expertise on foreign affairs was at the time scarcely abundant.

Churchill made his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. It echoed round the world, coming to Australia just as election propaganda was gearing up. Fortuitously, then, it '’ For an intriguing general roundup of writings on this phase of ignorance see Peter Hennessy, Never Again, chapter 7, 245 ff. (“Chill from the East’).

HOPE, 1945-1946 37 produced at a critical moment a powerful image for the politically-

minded to conjure with. And as if to underline its more sinister implications, the Canadians announced only a few weeks later that,

thanks to the defection of Gouzenko, an official in the Russian embassy, a Soviet spy ring had been uncovered in their country. Then, as an additional reminder of apparently declining trust between the former allies, the scientist Nunn May, an expert working

on Britain’s atomic bomb project at Harwell, was imprisoned for passing secrets to the Russians.

On the matter of industrial unrest in Australia, the most illuminating recent scholarship has been that of Tom Sheridan, who traces in detail the bottled-up expectations of a labour force which had by and large put up doggedly with shortages, pegged wages and long working hours during the wartime emergency. Sheridan notes that

the restraint and discipline of the workforce was all the more remarkable when one recalls the industrial suspicion and bitterness

of the pre-war period. But those earlier experiences had by no means been forgotten. And as peace approached, ‘the workforce turned eagerly to its considerable backlog of industrial claims. The presentation of its bill set in motion the major campaigns in postwar

industrial relations’.'!> The ‘opening salvos’ were a serious 1945 steelworkers’ strike in New South Wales and, in Queensland, a meat-

workers’ stoppage that ran well into 1946. A crucial issue behind both disputes was the assertion by management of its prerogative to use staff and direct immediate output as and how it wished. Among workers, there was a widespread belief that employers were preparing to mount a general offensive on unionism. This was the fundamental ground on which other unionists, most notably coalminers and wharf labourers, provided intermittent support to the main strikers. Tensions in the coalfields and on the wharves were in any case endemic, and notoriously bad working conditions had been made worse by inevitable wartime neglect of machinery and other

equipment. Industrial unsettlement brought intermittent stoppages, which opponents of the unions blamed for chronic shortages of coal and periodic transport crises. Government industrial policy

meanwhile exacerbated the simmering discontent. Chifley was acutely aware of the dangers of runaway inflation in a post-war community in which much pent-up purchasing power must coexist

with great shortages of goods. As Treasurer and Prime Minister '8 Tom Sheridan, Division of Labour, 17. Though through compression they do violence to

its great subtlety, the points I make in this text depend chiefly on the arguinent and evidence presented in this fine book. My conclusions have also been influenced by Robin Gollan’s Revolutionaries and Reformers, esp. chapter 5, ‘The interlude of hope’.

38 ROBERT MENZIES he accordingly evinced a steely resolve to see that wartime wagepegging and the 45-hour working week (as against the unions’ desire to return to the 40-hour week) were continued as long as possible.

The Labour Movement generally was well aware that in an election year industrial action which caused community discomfort

must damage the Government’s prospects at the hustings.’” Accordingly, despite simmering discontent, the majority of unions

showed restraint before the election of September 1946. But shortages, particularly of coal, persisted. The key fuel in those days

for domestic, transport and industrial purposes, coal was intermittently brought painfully into the limelight through gas and electricity rationing, especially in Victoria. It was conventional for conservative politicians and press to blame the Coalminers’ Federation for current ills, stressing particularly the well-known fact that its effective leadership was largely in the hands of communist officials. In fact, before the war ended, these officials, concerned to secure maximum production to support a war effort calculated to assist the Soviets in their desperate struggle against Nazi Germany, had ‘fought to keep the miners at work’. Reports of the central executive began to sound like the exhortations of

the daily press to the miners to produce more coal. The general president, H. Wells, listed days lost because of strikes, tonnages lost by trivial disputes, and made critical analyses of absenteeism. The presi-

dent harangued, cajoled, and threatened those recalcitrant members who stopped work contrary to Federation policy.”°

Clearly, it could scarcely be said at that stage that Federation officials simply ‘controlled’ the miners’ actions. After the war ended and the survival of the Soviets was assured, they were to evince less anxiety to curb the shenanigans of the rank and file. Local industrial issues again took centre stage. The generally arcane internal politics of the union world make easy generalization impossible, but most historians of the Labour Movement do conclude that it was rather

on bread-and-butter issues than on their revolutionary or even radical proclivities that communist officials were elected and trusted by ordinary unionists. Communists’ dedication, energy and attention to detail made them natural conductors of union affairs, though within the Communist Party itself so-called “economism’, prime attention to ameliorating wages and working conditions, was 19 Even the Communist Party decided that for the time being it must, ‘as a matter of practical politics’, support the return of the ALP (Sheridan, ibid., 235). 20 Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, 225.

HOPE, 1945-1946 39 sometimes deplored and always debated vigorously. Sheridan and others draw attention to instances where rank-and-file impatience,

combined with the culture of restiveness—the breath of life in socially isolated working communities—pushed communist officials into radical action, so that to maintain their auctoritas they sometimes had to follow, rather than lead, what one of them once called a ‘blind strike psychology’.*! So what was evidently true

during the war was in many ways still the case after war’s end: communist officials’ ‘control’ of the unions in which they were admired and entrenched was scarcely as solid as most of the anticommunist propaganda of the day asserted. Several general observations about interpreting events in this period, made by Tom Sheridan when discussing the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in the mid to late 1940s, need to be noted at this point.”* The first is what he calls ‘the hallucinatory effect of CPA affiliation with overseas parties operating in real centres of political

gravity. Revelations of the horrors of Stalinism lay in the future. In the late 1940s

underprivileged people all over the world were turning to communism in large numbers. Backed by Soviet realpolitik it was marching to power in large sections of the globe. Australian communists felt themselves to be an integral part of this seemingly unstoppable wave of the future—

and they felt this much more intensely than outsiders could ever imagine.

When this faith was combined with a tendency to assume that any policy supported by the CPA was ‘its property alone’ it was easy to go on and believe that any organization or individual also supporting that policy was under CPA control, ‘i.e., no industrial militancy, left-wing idealism or motivation existed independently of the CPA’. And hence, especially in the torrid industrial years after the 1946 election, CPA leaders often claimed—and believed—that they were the vanguard in the workers’ struggle. Usually it was as much—if not more—the case that they were following and giving a

political interpretation to the pragmatic activism of industriallymotivated unionists whom they served. As a further refinement Sheridan also suggests that many communist leaders’ sense of reality ‘was further warped by the unremitting propaganda of their domestic opponents’. Especially after late 1945 these opponents, 1 Edgar Ross, quoted by Sheridan, 237. 22 Sheridan, chapter 10 (‘The Communist Party and Industrial Relations’), esp. 228-30, is the insightful discussion on which I base the next few points. The quotations are from these pages.

40 ROBERT MENZIES both within and outside the Labour Movement, in depicting supposed communist power in extreme terms, both in industrial matters and on the wider international scale, could only have had an insidious effect on communist leaders’ conception of themselves. In addition to all this, what was in effect a quite new question—

Australia’s relations to one of her neighbours in the days when the fire of decolonization was taking hold—welled up to illustrate, among other things, the ease with which communist ‘control’ could at once be alleged and wondered about. In August 1945, two days after Japan’s unconditional surrender, the nationalist leaders, Bung

Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, proclaimed at Batavia (Jakarta) the independence of Indonesia. That the Dutch should resume control of this, their former colonial possession, had been the official Allied assumption. But the Japanese incited and trained Indonesian elements to resist a Dutch return, and early British operations to dis-

arm Japanese troops and restore order had limited success. As Dutch elements trickled back a complicated and intermittent war of independence developed. The official policy of the Chifley Government was one of non-intervention. However, Indonesian nationalists in Australia (mostly political exiles from Dutch New Guinea) formed in Brisbane a Committee of Indonesian Independence, and at the beginning of September called on all Indonesians in Australia

to oppose the reimposition of ‘undemocratic and ruthless Dutch rule over the peoples of Indonesia’. Indonesian merchant seamen in response walked off Dutch ships being loaded with supplies for the Netherlands East Indies in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Within a week they were supported by the Australian Waterside

Workers’ Federation which imposed a black ban on all Dutch shipping at Australian ports.

This action embarrassed the Government, the more especially since the watersiders were led by communist officials and quickly

had the support of the Seamen’s Union, with which communist leadership was also traditionally associated. The Australian Communist Party itself formally declared its support for Indonesian independence: ‘A fettered Indonesia in the Near North carries a constant threat of political and economic instability for Australian trade and foreign policy’. The boycott of a wartime ally was condemned in the press and Menzies led a political clamour against What he depicted as an arrogant communist takeover, from the country’s legitimate Government, of a crucial aspect of foreign policy. Chifley insisted on caution, reaffirmed the Government's support for retaining Dutch sovereignty, but expressed guarded sympathy for Indonesian hopes and sought to defuse the anticommunist storm that the affair aroused.

HOPE, 1945-1946 41 On 5 March 1946, when federal parliament resumed after its summer break, Menzies moved censure on the Government, his main attack being on the latter’s failure to take decisive action to release much-needed supplies ‘for thousands of whites and Eurasians who had been in the hands of the Japanese’. Delicate negotiations, at present going on between Dutch and Indonesian leaders, should not be disturbed by ‘blundering diplomacy— allowing our relations with these countries to be handled by ‘an irresponsible group of entirely uninformed people on the waterfront’.* Chifley deplored Menzies’ action in bringing Indonesia into

the House for the benefit of party propaganda. But anyway, as he had the numbers, the motion was something of a charade: as the Age said, most people saw it simply as ‘part of the tactical preparations for the coming of the federal election’. For Menzies, however, it was made something more than that by Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’

speech delivered, by coincidence, on the very day on which in parliament this protest against union interference in Australian diplomacy was being made. At the beginning of May 1946 Menzies told a conference of the

Liberal Party’s federal executive that the coming election would ‘determine the future of Australia’, and hammered again his basic argument that the key to the future was production. He quoted Labor leaders appealing to unionists to desist from strikes because strikes would lose votes, acidly noting that at the same time they said little about the need to foster ‘that prosperity which could produce higher standards of living’. Labor’s ‘poisonous talk” about the fear of depression was sadly backward-looking. What mattered

today was pent-up demand, the meeting of which was in everybody’s interest. That process could engender general prosperity and full employment, provided it was not impeded by political strikes.*# Though simplistic, given the economic and industrial complexities of the time, this idea was at the heart of Menzies’ message and, on such evidence as personal letters at this time to his son and others, it was sincerely held. His great strength as a politician was the skill with which he could present such ideas: lucidity went with simpli-

city, and worked, as much as anything, because the ideas were

uncluttered in his own mind. In the repetition of his simple message, Menzies was tireless. For many months he gave relaxed weekly radio broadcasts to press his

views on economic progress and to warn against the dangers of 23. CPD 186: 9, 11-15. “4 Argus, 8 May 1946.

42 ROBERT MENZIES communism.” And as early as the first weeks in May he launched with gusto into what in effect was an early beginning to the election

campaign. He made a trip to Western Australia to confer with executive leaders of the party there, and in Perth chartered a plane to visit regional centres. Travelling 6000 miles, he subsequently addressed twenty meetings, determined to strike an early blow for the capture of three of the five seats then held in the State by federal

Labor.“ A barnstorming trip in Tasmania followed, and in an address to the Victorian State Council of his party a few weeks later

Menzies, reporting enthusiastically on his reception in Western Australia, called for ‘optimism and cheer’. Propitious omens, he

| said, had also appeared in recent State and federal by-elections: the Opposition parties could happily face the coming election in the hope of a victory similar to that won in 1931.7

One by-election result was undoubtedly of special pleasure to him: the winning at the beginning of April of the Henty seat, by Jo Gullett. Gullett, a notable war hero,2® was the son of Menzies’ close

friend and colleague Henry Gullett, one of three members of his ministry who had been killed in a terrible Canberra air crash of 1940.” To win Henty was at first sight a significant achievement for the Liberals, especially since Menzies had taken a very prominent part in Gullett’s campaign. A. W. Coles, the retiring member, was an

independent,°° who had six years before wrested the seat from Labor. But Gullett in fact achieved only a modest majority, in what was seen to have become over time a clearly non-Labor seat. The Age agreed that, given ‘the well-remembered political services of Mr Gullett’s father’, no-one could begrudge the son his success. All the same, “Liberal managers would be super-optimists if they saw

ground for elation or vindication of their claim that the tide is running strongly against Labor’.*!

4° In this he was encouraged, and at times driven, by Meeking, Eric White and the rudimentary Liberal Party publicity machine. See, for example, White’s arrangements with the Manager of the ‘Broadcast Exchange’ for one series of Menzies broadcasts, 14 May 1946, NLA, MS. 4936/14/416/55. 26 Argus, 11 and 22 May 1946. Perth, Forrest and Swan were the seats on which the Liberals had their sights. *7 Ibid., 5 June 1946. The reference was to the landslide victory of the UAP over the Scullin Labor government. 8 See his memoir, Not As a Duty Only : An Infantryman’s War (Melbourne, 1976). 29 See vol. 1, 299-300.

3° A founder and subsequently managing director of the New South Wales branch of the department store of G. J. Coles & Co. He was Lord Mayor of Melbourne, 1938-40, and resigned from federal parliament in 1946 to accept appointment as chairman of the Commonwealth Airlines Commission. 31 Age, 1 April 1946.

HOPE, 1945-1946 43 Menzies’ almost frenetic early pre-election work did much to mask lingering uncertainties about whether he had been accepted fully as leader of the party whose chief creator he had actually been. It was generally agreed that, of the few possible rivals, R. G. Casey

was potentially the most able. Wealthy and patrician, Casey had been Menzies’ colleague in the Lyons Governments of the 1930s. Their relationship had not always been relaxed, a fact which Casey

later explained privately to his (and Menzies’) confidant Owen Dixon by claiming that he had in 1935, in high moral indignation, rejected a secret proposal from Menzies that they should combine to overthrow Lyons, whose ineptitudes in cabinet they both deplored.** In 1939 Casey had been one of the conspirators who, on the death of Lyons, had tried to lure the prime minister of the 1920s, S. M. Bruce,

back from Britain to forestall Menzies’ election to the position. Among those in the know, it was understood that Casey, himself an influential member of the Melbourne Club, in so acting was abetting a Melbourne social élite which on various grounds thought of Menzies as not being quite ‘top drawer’.*° After the move failed, Casey accepted from Menzies in 1940 appointment as Australia’s first ambassador to the United States. The often-touted legend that

Menzies thus schemed to maintain his position by removing a threatening rival from the local political scene is very doubtful.*4 Subsequently, with two British appointments as wartime minister in the Middle East, and then Governor of Bengal, Casey remained abroad until 1946. But in certain quarters, particularly in Victoria, he

was not forgotten. In February 1945, for example, in a special supplement, the Argus sketched out what it called the ‘Portrait of a Lost Leader’. Its subject, Casey, “is still the political hope of many Australians’; their wish being that he should lay aside ‘the cares of Empire and return to the great task of leading his own people to the

political promised land’. Menzies had ‘rallied and restored’ the Liberal Party, being its Moses who had brought together those wandering in the political wilderness.

32 Dixon Diary, 1 February 1947.

33 See Martin, vol. 1, 268-71. It was not only a matter of Menzies’ social origins: his failure to join the first AIF was not forgiven by some blimpish members. Menzies never became a member of the Melbourne Club. At a late (undated) stage Sir Frank Clarke, noting that the ‘stupid yowl’ of ‘three or four returned soldiers’ against him

could now be countered, wrote to ask Menzies’ permission for him, Baillieu, Brudenell White and others to put him up for membership. Menzies replied that he would think the matter over and give Clarke an oral answer. It, presumably, was

negative. 34 See the expert discussion of this matter in W. J. Hudson, Casey, 115-16.

44 ROBERT MENZIES But it was not Moses, but Joshua the warrior, who led the Children of Israel to Canaan, and Mr Casey approximates more to Joshua in the Australian Liberal political scene than anyone at present on the political horizon.

To clinch it, the article was illustrated by an elegant portrait of Casey, by the famous British photographer Cecil Beaton. Towards the end of 1945, especially after he had announced his resignation from the Bengal governorship, it was widely assumed that Casey would re-enter Australian politics. A few friends, who thought Menzies’ leadership of the Opposition ‘lamentably weak’, wrote to tell Casey that the 1946 election could be won only if someone of his experience took over.*° But he was non-committal when local party branches offered him preselection in two electorates and, leaving Bengal early in 1946, he came home in leisurely and somewhat self-indulgent fashion. By April, when he arrived, preselection discussions were in full swing or, in some cases, over. Amid much press speculation about his motives, Casey turned down the offer of

the chance to contest two seats, Corio and Ballarat. He accepted when the selected candidate for a third seat, Lilley in Queensland, offered to stand down in his favour, only to be foiled when the relevant party organization refused to allow the originally chosen candidate to stand aside. In the upshot Casey contested no seat. But he worked vigorously for the party once the election campaign got under way.

Menzies appears to have had good-natured discussions with Casey and party officials in the search for a seat for the “Bengal Tiger’, as the press, with varying degrees of irony, was now calling the returned governor. But some of Menzies’ most faithful followers saw sinister implications in the happenings of these weeks. Late in

June Meeking, for example, warned his master of ‘rumours that Casey is to be brought out somewhere as a last-minute evangelist’.°”

F. H. Wright, longtime leading member of the insurance industry and of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, and close political friend and admirer of Menzies, registered great alarm when he heard in mid July that one Queensland Liberal candidate, Geoffrey Ward, had offered to stand aside for Casey. Ward, manager of a transport company, was a good friend of Wright’s, and the latter

wrote appealing to him to stay in the contest: an ex-governor 35 Argus, 3 February 1945.

36 ‘Lamentably weak’ is from a letter of Allan Campbell, of Brisbane, quoted by W. J. Hudson, 174. My account of Casey’s position in the election of 1946 rests largely on the authority of Hudson, 173-4, 180-4. 37 Meeking to Menzies, 18 June 1946, MFP.

HOPE, 1945-1946 45 of Bengal, he said, could scarcely attract the swinging votes of working men. But what mattered most was the inwardness of the move. “There can be no doubt whatever that a certain section, and a rather powerful section, led by the old “die-hards” has been hard at work trying to groom Casey to challenge Menzies for the Leadership.’ In the light of such intrigue, how could Menzies give of his

best ‘when, God knows, we want to get every ounce out of him? Even those who are fighting him will always agree that Menzies is our No. 1 fighter’.°* But in fact, if he was amenable to the idea of challenging Menzies, Casey showed political ineptitude in a variety of ways, not least in his lateness and vagueness about securing selection for a seat. These were examples of what his biographer, W. J. Hudson, repeatedly shows to have been political characteristics in Casey: naivete and a lack of ruthlessness. He was no match

for a hard-fighting master-tactician who, despite his frankly acknowledged unpopularity in some quarters, had still been at the centre of political life over the years, in the first half of the 1940s, that Casey had been away. In his June note to warn Menzies of the danger of Casey as “a last-

minute evangelist’, Meeking also urged Menzies to counter by making “some sort of rallying call to the people of Australia’. He offered no idea of what, precisely, he had in mind. But his desire that Menzies should positively assert his qualities as leader went beyond mere intra-party rivalries. An important aspect of Labor’s propaganda was stress on the leadership Curtin and Chifley had given the nation in its darkest hours. The less correct corollary was

that Menzies had failed the test of wartime leadership and had nothing to offer now. Public relations people within the Liberal Party, like Meeking and Eric White, saw it as a key to the Party’s success that Menzies’ image in the electorate be consciously built up. Of the frequent occasions on which this idea became explicit, none was more important than at two ‘conventions’ which Menzies and the Party organizers held at Bundanoon in June and August 1946, for preselected Liberal candidates who would face the election

in New South Wales, where the non-Labor parties had been decimated in 1943. The press jocularly depicted these meetings as occasions on which Menzies would induct Liberal hopefuls into ‘the art of winning friends and influencing people’.°’ They were that, but much more: long sessions during which, in an informal but notably professional way, Menzies answered questions, gave 38 FH. Wright to G. Ward, 17 July 1946, NLA, MS. 8119/2/16. A week later, however, Casey announced that he would not, after all, be standing for any seat. 39 Argus, 22 June 1946,

46 ROBERT MENZIES practical campaign advice, and honed his own ideas. At the end of the second convention, Party president Ritchie declared that the thirty or forty people at the conference had a reply to Labor’s attack

on Menzies as a person. They had witnessed him sitting all day from 10 a.m., answering a wide range of questions. ‘Today you have

received the answer to the whispering campaign, “What about Menzies?” ... Our best line of defence is attack. Let us take Mr. Menzies to the elector ... You have had a wonderful demonstration today, and Mr. Menzies has stood up to it well. Let us go out

and sell him!’40

Ritchie naturally made the most of the occasion, though it seems unlikely that his audience disagreed. Meeking, as it happened, kept

in shorthand an almost word-for-word account of proceedings at the second convention. ‘As leader of the Party’, Menzies said at the end, ‘I have had very great assistance from both conferences in the clearing of my mind and the actual formation of policy. There has been keenness and enthusiasm and a wide range of experience. I go

away from this conference feeling extremely confident of the prospects of this State’. Meeking’s record suggests that this was not merely a ritualistic statement: rapport had been high and Menzies

indeed gained personally from the experience. On their side, the chosen candidates had first-hand contact with an old stager, the record of whose down-to-earth advice tells us much about the day to day aspects of the politics of success, at least as he saw them.

The conferences were not organized to debate so much as to explicate policy. Menzies displayed an easy mastery of the issues which he had decided would be most at stake in the coming election, responding to a continuous barrage of questions by translating his ideas into simple, readily understandable arguments. As he saw it, the core of the party’s position was to free up individual initiative

to achieve economic growth. That meant reducing taxation and government expenditure, and a loosening of government controls.

The real difference between Liberals and Labor was that, while the latter liked to think that controls generated by the wartime emergency might become more or less permanent, the former wanted

them in the end to be drastically modified. ‘If we make up our minds that over the next few years these controls are coming off, don’t you understand that this means that some departments will go out of existence? When rationing ceases, the whole rationing staff goes; when price control ceases, the whole organization of the Prices Commission goes.’ But this did not mean that Labor prop*O NLA, MS. 4936/14/418/63. Meeking’s shorthand account of second Bundanoon Convention, 10-11 August 1946.

HOPE, 1945-1946 47 aganda which depicted the Liberals wanting to abolish immediately such controls as wage-pegging or price-fixing was correct, even honest. Commonwealth power over wages and prices derived from the National Security Act, his own creation, which was due to expire at the end of 1946. If the Liberals won the election they would

legislate to maintain wage-pegging, price-fixing and investment control over a transitional period. Productive expansion would not come overnight; these basic controls must remain until it did. He warned at the same time against ever answering opponents’ demands for a list of proposed economies: “don’t fall for that one! That is the oldest thing in the world. People in government always

ask what items the people in opposition are going to cross out. Nobody who is not in charge of departments can answer that question at all’. But everybody who has been in charge of departments knows very well that once in power a government that means business can find unexpected ways of making economies. As for taxation reduction, Menzies was frankly, even ruthlessly, against relief for lower income earners: the Liberals’ principle should be to take ‘a shave off all over’. The great volume of tax revenue, he said, came from incomes of under £500 a year, and Australia already had a steeply graduated scale. ‘We must not get carried away by an idea that by various devices of policy we will attract numbers of Labour voters away from their allegiance.’ Besides, We have to get out of our systems this cock-eyed idea in Australia that there is some crime involved in a man earning a large income. We write articles about brilliant men who go abroad, but we are a country which almost violently gives notice to quit to the man earning a large income. Very few people earn large incomes without doing at the same time a very great service to the community.

But as Liberals, he added, ‘we do not pause there’. It had to be recognized that certain special cases required special consideration. In the case of the family man, for instance, while the rate of tax was

not to be altered, rebates and deductions should be promised to give better allowances for children, and to help with medical and educational expenses. There was extended discussion of other substantial matters, like

industrial relations and the problem of coal production. In these and similar connections Menzies was at pains to remind his troops that ‘from a Commonwealth election point of view we have to confine our attention to things we can do’: it was of crucial import-

ance not to be tempted into unthinking promises about matters within State jurisdictions. Beside that, they had to remember that

48 ROBERT MENZIES what was coming was an election that would end on polling day, not a long set of philosophical speculations that would go on and on. As an instance he referred to the coal industry’s problems, to which Justice Davidson, of the New South Wales Supreme Court,

had devoted ‘years of close study’, and on which he had just produced a report ‘containing a vast number of comments and recommendations.*! It would be a great mistake to endeavour to think of new ones, whatever the immediate attractions may seem’. A federal Liberal Government would need to stress that, though its powers were limited, it was prepared to ‘co-operate to the fullest

extent with the State government’ to implement more of the Davidson Report than the current Government believed possible. All the time, at the heart of Menzies’ message was the need for simplicity in campaigning. There were, naturally, matters of fundamental principle to be attended to, but numbers had to be won, and candidates must have a clear-eyed understanding of how, in the real world, voters were to be wooed: One of the real dangers of every new candidate is that he tends to get himself mixed up in far too many details, too many different items of policy. We have all been through it. Someone says, ‘my vote will depend

on what you say on so and so’, and you wonder what you are going to

do about it. Nine times out of ten that cove will vote against you anyhow. Actually, you win or lose the election on a limited few major matters. A few matters are at the heart of your campaign, and if you talk

about these your audience will think about them, and most of your questions will have relation to them. But if you try to fill up your policy

with a myriad of little instances and smaller matters on which the honest answer would be, ‘I quite sympathise, but relatively speaking, it is a matter of detail. If we can get these other things straight we will have no difficulty in coping with that problem’, you will let the fellow down the street take charge of your campaign, and you will be like the fellow who mounted his horse and galloped off madly in all directions.

In similar down-to-earth mood, he spoke of a Labor member,

Herbert Barnard, ‘the dullest of men’ who had held in Tasmania for twelve years, with a majority of between 500 and 1000 votes, the seat of Bass, which ‘we ought to win’. Menzies had only recently discovered how he did it. Barnard, it seemed, enjoyed tremendous support from the Launceston Examiner, ‘which is owned by people who sit on the Executive of our own Party’. This followed from the “| Por this report see Sheridan, 255 ff. Federal and New South Wales governments announced in June 1946 the formation of a joint federal-State authority to control all aspects of the New South Wales industry. Legislation in the two parliaments set up the Joint Coal Board, which began operations in March 1947.

HOPE, 1945-1946 49 fact that Barnard called at the paper’s office about everything, writing letters and giving announcements about items ranging from a new telephone booth to some industry affecting the electorate. ‘Every day people are reading that Mr. Barnard, M.P., announced so and so.’

It is these tin-pot things that do the trick. Even our own people say, ‘Barnard is a very active chap’. Their evidence is on these matters that have taken him ten minutes. Our people in various places don’t do this, because we have rather got into the habit of thinking that publicity is

something attended to by a central office, which arrives like a disembodied spirit in roneo. But in country places it is the statement of the local candidate which is news. It comes from him, and they publish it... What happened the day before yesterday is forgotten.

But despite all this stress on practicality, Menzies’ concluding address ended on a decisively up-beat note. While Liberals were looking forward to what was to be done in the next three to ten years, Labor was looking backwards, claiming credit for ‘rescuing the country from a state of confusion and helplessness at the end

of 1941’. This was in itself a travesty of history. But what was important was the task ahead: that of “conquering the future, not of brooding about the past’.#

The Bundanoon conferences give us a somewhat more human sense of Menzies than we can get from the day-to-day political wrangle. It was as if, in the informal company of these friendly neo-

phytes, he could easily be himself. Equally fetching, if somewhat more calculated, was an interview which he gave to the Melbourne Herald as he was about to launch the Opposition election campaign. It was headlined “The Man Who Leads the Liberals’. Asked about the cost of being in politics, Menzies said he had never been inclined to make a song about the suggestion that engagement in public life means a loss of income. A far more important sacrifice was that of

family life. For years during the formative years of his children’s life, he said (with some exaggeration), he had had only the most fleeting contact with them; and as for the political wife, ‘she almost instantly qualifies to be one of the saints of heaven’. Politicians,

subject always to whispering campaigns, often felt the need to pretend they have thick skins. But it would be ‘absurd, almost priggish’ for him to say that he had any regrets about his involvement in the political lite. He had been four times around the world,

and had shared the company at close quarters of the world’s 2 NLA, MS. 4936/14/418/63.

50 ROBERT MENZIES greatest figures. Politics had treated him well: ‘I owe more to the people than they owe to me’.*?

Menzies formally launched the Liberal election campaign with his policy speech at the Camberwell Town Hall on 20 August. He had been ‘in smoke’ for a week preparing it.*4 It consisted of 20 close-

typed foolscap sheets and took an hour and three quarters to deliver. The Argus declared it to be ‘one of his finest speeches, delivered at times with almost evangelical fervour’.® A ‘special reporter’ on the Melbourne Herald, however, observed that reading so carefully prepared a speech ‘cramps Mr. Menzies’ style’: He seemed to concede that it was one of his dullest speeches when responding to a vote of thanks at the end of the meeting. ‘Only once in three years do I find myself compelled to write out a speech. I assure you that I will not do it again for another three years.’

[At which an interjector called out: “You mightn’t have the chance’. Menzies retorted: “You bet I will. In the next policy speech I will be

presenting the government’s policy, and you'll probably be here, making the same noises’. As the Herald reporter remarked: ‘That was more like the Mr Menzies we know’ .]*°

The speech presented a critical analysis of the Chifley Government’s supposed weaknesses and failures, followed by a detailed statement of Liberal promises. The main attack was on the Govern- _ ment’s ‘supine’ surrender to an alleged minority of communist agitators, in industrial relations and external affairs, particularly so far as the Netherlands East Indies was concerned. Menzies flayed the Government for its ‘failure’ to prevent coal strikes that were causing community pain through gas and electricity shortages, and pledged that his Party would enforce industrial law while at the same time insisting that private business ‘must, as a condition of its existence, observe humane industrial and social standards’. A Liberal regime would make strikes and lock-outs illegal, and eliminate communist influence in trade unions through Arbitration Courtcontrolled election of officials by secret ballot. It would also establish a Ministry of Development, for ‘production was the master problem’. As one means of freeing up enterprise, there would be tax relief at all levels of income. At the same time social services would 4521 August 1946. 4 Argus, 17 August 1946. Menzies briefly emerged to rebuke a reporter who had written that he was resting in preparation for his election tour. * Tbid., 21 August 1946. 46 Melbourne Herald, 21 August 1946.

HOPE, 1945-1946 51 be maintained: and in what then seemed a somewhat dramatic gesture, Menzies promised their expansion by extending child endowment to the first child in a family (such endowment being confined as the law at present stood to the second and subsequent children). Other promises included positive preference for returned service personnel in civil employment, and speeding up of housing and land settlement arrangements for them. Chifley broadcast the Government's policy speech from Canberra a little over a week later. In the interim the Melbourne Herald’s cartoonist, Armstrong, had hailed Menzies’ performance in a notable sketch which showed a rueful “Chif’ declaring: ‘If I’m going to better Bob’s policy speech, I’ll have to write mine in technicolour’.4” This proved to be wishful thinking: the policy speech, when it came,

was characteristically taciturn, though adorned with the ritualistic rhetorical trappings: the conservative parties, led by Mr Menzies and Mr Fadden sought the overthrow of the Labor government ‘for the benefit of the privileged interests’. Chifley rested on Labor’s achievements in the war and since, insisted that economic controls would be maintained as long as necessary to guarantee stability, and rejected tax cuts as irresponsible until the nation’s financial position became clearer. He stressed the need for balanced modern defence forces, and made much of plans at present in train with the British to establish a test-site for guided missiles at Woomera in South Australia. The Government's chief promises were implicit

in a three-pronged referendum to be put to the country simultaneously with the election vote. It proposed constitutional amendments which would allow the arbitration system to be revised, open the way to the establishment of marketing boards for certain pri-

mary industries, and allow the extension of social services, particularly in the area of national health. The Country Party, while

producing policy statements similar to those of the Liberals, advocated the banning of the Communist Party*® and recommended a ‘no’ vote to all the referendum questions. The Liberal Party

decided to allow its members a free vote, but when questioned by

the press Menzies said he intended to vote ‘yes’ on the social services question but ‘no’ on the others. Menzies had a lively and exhausting campaign. There were some riotous meetings. In the Brisbane City Hall, for example, he battled with hundreds of hecklers in a crowd of 3000,” and at a meeting in ¥ Tbid., 23 August 1946.

48 This was the occasion for Fadden’s statement that ‘the Country Party regards the Australian Communist in the same category as a venomous snake—to be killed before it kills’. Argus, 4 September 1946. 419 Tbid., 27 August 1946.

52 ROBERT MENZIES

: OO ye oe a )a : : | A ‘ ~— #

Ay , * / Se ’ f a / . £

Menzies Laughed! gf 7 is

«>». eee r = «2 - meer * gas tela Shae © ; - | a Z \e > "When, in 1945, the Government placed before Forliament : gy its , rop osals 40 ensure full employment for the Australias | people, the scheme was greeted with derision by Mr. Menties and his followers. But Labor persisted, . Here are the main features of Labor's @ A banking pelies that will eaahle the plan—~the plan which will be fully imople- Government in provide money for mented when the Chifley Government is public werks whenever the neceasit?

returned, . rises, : ;

® Public warks expenditure hy bath Through the Nathunal Works Council, Commonwealth and Mate Govern: the Commonwealth and State Govern

ments, . ments have agreed wpon a works plan

® Fatablishment af secondary industries, which will he put inte operation as jhe @ Securing of new averacas markets for neressity arises to meet full employment.

our praidluce, Urgent and important works to the ofto£200,900,000 have been pre: @Housing. Housing.value sented the Council. Expenditure of

EA

@ Loan facilities for amall and geowing shear £B0.000,000 of this amoint will

| businesses, he commenred when Jabeaur and

@ Low interest rates, materials are available.

BANISH ALL FEAR OF UNEMPLOYMENTI

IF YOU WANT YOUR JOB TO LAST

The parties advertise their views of the issues at the 1946 federal election.

HOPE, 1945-1946 53

a. eae

avaEEEvE TTT ae anemnnnnabeemenmnmmnmnenaal

> . ‘we When go toAchkansay, vole what should =beh [a] WHITE, T. aM. W.

BALACLAVA

:a*_*:

, foea... | BALLAARAT ft oF eee | @ fe3 iif ae a CADDY, A. F. Se Sl q

cane De i ;: [2] Pollard. R. T. 5 2 wena cpebg ce . oe nee ee, ls t : _ BATMAN — i —/£a sa sam 2

Tool a? ee ee ae feo e

= = ~ os a. f : BENDIGO Ve a .-.3, y ae (2) duu, “aah 6l >csr ll 2—— UE: OO iia ;eH, ; . ae SS = ee eee a a 4S ss we Rankin, G, J, 4 2 a oe he a rr | [2] Rankin G5

eg J2.BOURKE ea- —.: —_— 2sie[2 actu, (2) rand, H. a ie [1] STOKES, R. N.

: a CORANGAMITE

You willorchoose between high taxation and low . between Government interference Government co-operation in production . . taxation . between..nationalized McDONALD,a] A,oMcK. industry or individual initiative... between working where you're told, or having [3] Stackpoole, H. J.

your own choice of * c employment, = +2} - aetna inate. in| ,ener more jobs, more money in ‘your pocket) or industrial anarchy, strikes, continued CORIO shortages and unemployment, hardships for the housewife, [3] Dedman, J. J You vote footy for the which F. #. will reallymst GOVERN, Sec esParty [a] WALLACE,

:; ;5 ee .Dednran, J. J. Vest, We Finally. you will choose between increased production (which will mean more goods, —

To-morrow you most vote Liberal. p A Shey Mop LC [2] West, W

: We will see to it thet ‘ance again von = hatter eens

will enjoy personal civil liberties © ° &¢ - = ©which youthose sacrificed to icin the war. ; = DEAKIN

3 - . . " Smith, A. HL

\7 peeseintecnamcnte a [a] HUTCHINSON, w.'s,

\ for Security AND Freedouw/ amine e -2)

Yau must place « aumber in every square an your Balfot Papert. FAWKNER

| | (2) tourke, Ww. a

HENTY KOOYONG | MARIBYRNONG| MELBOURNE | MELBOURNE PORTS |}, «x (3) ouve, v. J. L2) tawrie, BAL H. [a | COLE, A. T. [2] catwen AA. | [1] DENNIS, D. C. [1] HOLT, H. E.

[2] Nickels, ACW. .

[a] GULLETT, H. B. [a] MENZIES, R. G. (2] Betheterd, a. S [a COOPER, R.C.] [2] Holloway, E J. [a] Retin Hs.

SENATE WANNON YARRA FLINDERS

Ratz, F..w. 2. e p [4] Moss,

alB] Hedriencon, Ap LL] BRAND, C. H. [1] MACKINNON, E, D. [a] LEE, FN, [2] vee. T. F

(6) Sandiora, CW. (Z| FRASER, A, J, McLeod, D. [3] Preseor, J. [a] RYAN, R. & au Devlin LE a [3] RECKIE, J. W. [2] Rotda, LR [Z] Scotia, 1. Ht Autharined by LE. ¥. MeOnnnell 15 Queers Stree Ufetboorna, trish

54 ROBERT MENZIES the industrial suburb of Geelong West he wove an impromptu speech around the points made in a communist pamphlet he was handed as he entered the hall. Reading from the pamphlet Menzies quoted, amid uproar: ‘a vote for Menzies is a vote for World War 3’. ‘You print your lousy little sheets and hand them out in the half-

light and I will answer them in the full light’, he declared amid applause and jeers.°’ But the disturbance at this meeting was as nothing to the near-riot witnessed at a rally in Darlinghurst several nights later. The Argus called it ‘the lustiest demonstration in the memory of men who have been in politics for thirty years’. This was

in the heart of the territory of Eddie Ward, the most pronounced Labor baiter, and perhaps hater, of Menzies. When Menzies arrived,

the hall (the Maccabean) was packed. According to the press a nucleus of 300 people, mainly non-Labor supporters, had already occupied their seats for several hours; another 500 or so packed the aisles and clung to the staircases. Amid unbroken yelling, hooting

and counting out, Menzies sat behind the chairman’s table and could not make himself heard all evening. Someone cut all lines to

the amplifiers in the hall and outside. Police removed between twenty and thirty interjectors. Hundreds of demonstrators waved banners and placards, many of which were in the shape of a pig and were inscribed ‘Pig Iron Bob’. Linen bags branded with swastikas

and containing scrap iron were flung on to the stage, and while police scuffled with the throwers Menzies took some of the iron as a souvenir and others on the stage threw the bags back into

the crowd. Supporters marvelled at a more successful meeting held at Kalgoorlie, reckoned to be the centre of the largest electoral district in the world. An estimated 1600 goldfields electors attended, notwith-

standing the rival attractions of a trotting carnival and hotel bars open until 11 p.m. Groups drifted in from time to time from the hotels and, at interval, from adjacent picture theatres. Reporters claimed it was the biggest election meeting in Kalgoorlie since the Federation campaign. One of them wrote: ‘it was near Bedlam at one stage but Mr Menzies enjoyed every minute of it. Lashing out right and left he whipped most of his hecklers into silence before he finished’.°! In the early stages of the campaign, before these scenes occurred, the conservative Bulletin rejoiced that Menzies’ policies were being

well received, and celebrated his steadfastness in persisting for years against odds which might have stopped a lesser politician 9 Ibid., 14 September 1946. >! Ibid., 9, 14 September 1946.

HOPE, 1945-1946 55 in his tracks. The real culprits, it added, were Menzies’ enemies the communists, who on the eve of the war did not forgive him ‘because he refused to let them take charge of Australian foreign policy through their control of waterfront unions’ and who, after the war began, developed a bitter hatred of him when his Government banned their organizations and publications. That hatred ‘achieved a dingy sort of popularity’. However, What Mr Menzies said in those years millions of Australians are saying now ... But for five years he was a marked man, exposed to the malice of Communist mobs every time he spoke in public, and as often as not

followed from the meeting place by jeering larrikins, who were restrained from assaulting him by the presence of police. Only a man with rare endowments of moral and spiritual courage could have stood up to what this man has endured with stoical composure all these years.

Australians admire courage in all its forms, but a great many Australians, influenced by Communist catchcries and the sly digs of ‘Labor’ journalists, have hitherto refused Mr Menzies credit for his unfaltering stand against the enemies of the country, theirs and his.°?

Despite its obvious propagandist intent, this passage captures well both the almost messianic reputation Menzies seems to have developed among his more avid admirers, and the depth of the

fears and antipathies which communism aroused at the time.

Whatever the source, whether a sense of the perils felt as the first stages of the Cold War bit, or the more immediate and often arcane rivalries of officials in unions, these fears coloured the political atmosphere of the time with an urgency and unsettlement sometimes difficult for later generations to understand. As the war drew to a close informal ALP industrial cliques began contesting certain union posts against communists, and in 1945 the New South Wales

branch of the Party formally recognized their existence as ‘the Groupers’. The idea spread, particularly into Victoria, where anti-

communism soon came to be powered by the Catholic Social Studies Movement (or ‘the Movement’), founded in 1942 under the aegis of Archbishop Mannix, and with B. A. Santamaria, brilliant

son of an Italian migrant greengrocer, as its shadowy non-ALP leader. In the RSL, meanwhile, an often bitter contretemps was bringing the naming and expulsion of members accused of being communists. Menzies’ campaign in New South Wales ended after a strenuous week travelling country areas. On the final day he spoke at Narran-

dera, Cootamundra, Temora, Bathurst and Orange, arriving at 92 ‘That Fellow Menzies!’, Bulletin, 28 August 1946.

56 ROBERT MENZIES Orange at 7 p.m., ‘pale and worn out’, but with enough fight left to

make his twelfth speech in five days. In the next, the final week before the poll, he campaigned in Tasmania and Victoria, and on the eve of polling day he was exhausted but optimistic. He claimed five reasons for expecting victory. With a few exceptions, meetings had been ‘amazingly’ well-attended and friendly; the Government had always been on the defensive; he had been struck by the aggression and optimism of the Liberal candidates; and a notable proportion of

these candidates were young men just out of the services. He had found ‘six weeks of incessant and nerve-wracking travelling and speaking ... almost unendurable, but I said three years ago to my colleagues that I would put my last ounce into this fight, and I have almost literally done so. The rest is for the voters’.°’ Party pundits predicted that a swing of 6 per cent was needed to unseat Labor,

and many journalists thought this possible, arguing that the

Government's decision to stand on its record was not enough and the prospect of a change was attractive to many voters. But these predictions and Menzies’ hopes proved badly astray. On the referendum questions, certainly, the Government’s plans were partly foiled. The request for Commonwealth power to provide social services was passed, predictably enough, since Liberal voters

had been free to make up their own minds and Menzies had indicated that he himself favoured the ‘yes’ case. But the other two powers requested—over the marketing of primary produce and the conditions of employment in industry—were rejected. These were, however, minor setbacks beside the overwhelming fact that in the election itself Labor won a decisive victory. It lost six House of Representative seats, but still had forty-three as against the Liberals’ seventeen and the Country Party’s twelve. In the Senate Labor won sixteen of nineteen vacancies caused by members due to retire, so

that from July 1947 the Senate would have thirty-three Labor members, facing an Opposition of two Liberals and one Country Party member. The result no doubt broadly reflected a continuation of the prestige won by the wartime ALP leadership and widespread support for the idealistic post-war plans it sought to effect. Chifley had campaigned all over Australia as energetically and selflessly as Menzies. “The people’s verdict’, he now said, ‘is a clear mandate to the Government to carry on with the policy it has laid down. I give my pledge to the people of Australia that this policy will be carried through with justice to all’.>4

3 Argus, 27 September 1946. >4 Tbid., 30 September 1946.

_ _ -. 23 _2 awee : ie

ae ee 55

P 6 __ite__ Es oe . aon:

’a a 5a

ae ie see a 7, a a rats my

sete ee Ze SES “fe 4

Poe aes a 4 . A

3 pate5oeiraae mits bee oe seeson ae ae.: Hee Sees °Sa8 ae wa es. a,1o — aS pes ga ee . oewos 7— a a ae my.ate oe ae ste — ware at “. Mt fe - a io . . ae "P, * . -a‘ Af

5 ce ot vit cS nee Ree he ‘ ee Oe, set oS

& Ss igBen asee |rite an iste oewes Boot Toe as na eoay 2oe hon .“ a. ae ae aeee Gia $e 2 es oe nn pe28 ae uee . on mcaa as a Ssne vty oe :a vtaon m Sho ee

oS

Pans eeaanyme ae me oe Oe ee iPs _e aed a 2aawe ya_._ i. es, 9eos! os Pe aooset. :oe :"teotoe “Soa:seiaoeeea”aietats&TES sty oe Re? Rxae etya= ae “a ¥,me ay! sseat -ee a e ae ae on a 5 oe aaPe wis oP. a» Pe Ray= me Q Bae os aoe 5 oe Be ae oS ee ce Se: ““ = y ae we . i : oe oe sa ig . :a as seonpeter foiida So ae = = me - oes “2 aorraaeoaese.atet «voG sens a werey . aries ts isies a adiwn -, ae op pe aacae , me a aasheoe Keee as cae ee ee oe. rspieat2tr3oa . 7,ee a —et a iy. as .“ % a :"*oe

_ ele ee : a ‘we vee os

Eee ony oy aaseaan res rey we ee oam ‘s .s Rs “ **7one a ssaeae aiea!a,ect tate aaosor * >a! sss Z me ens! eee ps rane =.me nea. ee Sei.he bY a Say ae mae ant My Biss ms ae aRy om caao*. arr . aE mn ett xg -oF‘ ‘.aaoe sts ose mer » Ag ee Be Sesnas a anid Bene Bere i i :=ei_",5pa ae ooaetote *. tsse5oe~ a“fe ’aae fe :ytmi.My ‘a aoan Sais nyteaaaie¥sate . ?. -esad sa ate aa ~einace ‘ aeY . ao eeeaate 74% sit fal Tyre ; 5‘iar . rot SSm4 rate“t,eeate - me bee eteee oatmins weben Pyoe Bees nia »Anie oa “ao‘ a7 2-* oenats 7s at . autsts. Rae ne)no oy7‘ oe } 98 aryAe Re* ae Do

oe Bae 2- na is a, ae eea a*co oevet atoe: os a 3aao : ir . _Sas oe Beonx.es “A ;ohioevit aecee|eeRs % : 8 ee re ae |g aoeeo. Ret ee oe re a Pe Ro a mr ae As ; ee Soe ae Bes ~ Bac a ays ee Ba Soe ‘ahoe “, ne ani a ye: ont °See uo Soy _ ae sass ae a es >— a * ay. Sane *, ate 4 oteine rt

Ee om ae iam a ae _ Be ecoers oonae"|Pe28 7a aoe "weis: °esos fs Bae ne. Cee ~) ae ee nD aan=o a -A OSS > Bas: orsas We , = wiaeceSiae eo aa oe m sae ame- ‘: Oe ae “7Ss pe aN 7 sien ae aN ye wee mS ree = o r.? y on : ae he rm cee sets! 0 et id man ah t . a poe we oe oa ‘=f Be > se m2 oR o* * ot

as ta tetas! os “Pet ne Som a i aes a a aneis oe ohon on aaa oe as— soe os i wooe on a * nt es ae 7 ae pe Se Ke i‘ee O38 . a i4.at wh ee a“fe ig ? . ed ee a ce oa aes : OF “ 2a: es _ ogee ae F ae toe x Sie ‘aan poe vx ee a . a aan Bi sy fe ie oP noe . cee *. roe ae 2 ee _ Aor att ee we : eee . wt a nate cataee_2oe ee eal ue .pase . acct | ao aa ee aaa os| Le ‘. Re oan ar. amh: oo ee‘stSue oe pis _es aa am : ae Se a“si eeaewere sn Os sea:‘oe re i ota -ee a 3oe .ee rae cin se eee ate . vita et is ae fe MS “ ee 7ee .aSoe rm ae as eee Ne ae Be ae fees : y-“ iSe 8_ ‘er)ses ex “Pee pate ee reae opisoe a ual pat eee te rates Ss * ae : a oer i 7, = sy £ oie ete og * a md 3a ¥ Se Boas ee aos ee a — “y ’ ae a aw a vy" an ,oe sare oeahs xyme neeeo a aa .a. at “etesra .oe i? *. aoY, a+> its. 5; re f,!aon aate 2a roneooh oo me! . ae .iIwi. os .7-la>?»rey oe aeSen 7 oe a" na ae . *ae 2 te oa ee ; a9 sate Res oe ae . itasot . me aaooe “2 .at .; a es oraeee pee ee aa ae coe Lo . ee eeaa “3 ae. or ses 23% Baese. Beae 338 .. ae a“ .ae as a: bee shes Oe Arete oe. Wet De rsitnts”4vi ae oh . on ioeae NO aav) see ee ss renee aoe .St. avite a,fe ad aebe -a’..vot aon 4 aergio8teeae ny ee rae Re fs Bont et! wan vlon -ait sevee axwetet so ety Ae ey ur i aie tate a8 ee on ‘mt pas freoh see “:aue rere oon ne aie Son en fe eet rite ces set esRae ae‘*, rer nate vii ”anie ed iM neces ste sfoy ia a ae nat ace nes toes on eee mare aei iis 2aPe vaons . st ae eee “iu ue fe: seots fate an ba 4. % = Sa oa So an Be oe te a ee a ee : oe seat ee ie mat “s fete aes pa ate Se “.! M = od fe=,De et wan . ‘ae aes 5 . oo ‘ 8 e te Gas “oles ee os aS a at oe oa oe a“ . a vn a oe Ss 7, mo a oot 8 5 =, ee 7 ‘* oe a4 mk vm te Sor ai ‘ 5 te pons ae : et woe ee ay ee . pe re Fs ae wes wae a, ee “ cert “ ", pees me Ma mee Seay we sat Se ae fe . a a i; Lt ‘* oo - a 5 eSe‘=, es ve S oareeent oe oeBedhof.‘¢,vite a!1aaeosae armR e, pase Soeonaemesers es - :cla7 . rate en “se te mpaateome vate fete a ones es me re ae a -. Die Ses arat onae : a tS oe Biss arearere ee ee er =rtre 7 Se ay amh “ i? ies atase oes a *. maee ro> 55 ey met nee he . és oe, Ree Ae ae ns *) venaaeee - 2% ee oes my aees = rare! ‘ Se pete «Brcee Soe: aBas wnSey axw“.i aa os vate “ oe an «,y — .,was Seeao, is nee oe Bets tas! at =e ies . aes! an a tat it: ..". fs or 7, “J a-” .a”: oapaw‘e,ate’ oe we. ,aie aes*rite ruaoe ie oe e is Sts ae mes = Bites oe moe os as Ra pe ae eee oaii oo can=meets te aaSas “al . - == - ff Ge OM

Poo \ ‘ oe ee

Menzies is greeted by Clement Attlee for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in January 1951; Australia’s Minister Resident in London, ‘Tommy’ White, in the background.

18 CPD 212: 72.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 177 The Commonwealth Prime Ministers convened on 4 January 1951. In the few days since Menzies had left home the Korean situation had disintegrated catastrophically. On New Year’s Eve the

Chinese began a new and powerful offensive, and the United Nations commander on the spot, General Ridgeway, had no alterna-

tive but to continue as orderly a retreat as he could, surrendering

Seoul and some 100 kilometres of territory south of the 38th parallel. On the very day of the Prime Ministers’ initial meeting Ridgeway’s army took up positions over the Han River, south of Seoul, to wait for the attacks which the Chinese said would ‘drive warmonger MacArthur into the sea’.!? At the conference Attlee opened proceedings with a long review of the threatening international situation. Korea was the most serious potential flashpoint,

but there was also the great danger of being drawn into war with China.29 Attlee felt, however, that the British were less inclined than

the Americans to look on China as a mere tool of the Kremlin. Though China’s present masters were communist, tradition and nationalism would prevent the Chinese being permanent satellites

| of Russia.?!

| India vehemently agreed. Too many people, Nehru said, thought | that the most important fact in the world situation was the danger | of communism. But much more important was the emergence of | China as an integrated and centralized power. With a frontier of over ' 2000 miles with China, India had tried to make it clear that Russia was not the only friend to whom China could look. In Asia the best defence against communism was to raise living standards. So India

had cut her military expenditure by 15 per cent, to devote more funds to social services. Meantime, it was important not to use provocative language at the United Nations about Chinese ‘aggression’.

Menzies spoke that afternoon, but not without suppressed vexation at a repetition of much of the argument about communism in the abstract which he had been listening to for years from Chifley. It would be unfortunate, he said, if the meeting thought it could lose

sight of the intentions of the United States, for if there was war the Commonwealth could not survive without the United States and vice versa. Nehru had said that in Asia communism was the product of bad living conditions and they should therefore devote more of their energy to improving living conditions than preparing for war. But:

19 Robert O'Neill, Australia in the Korean War, 1950-53, vol. 1, 167. 20 Attlee had visited Truman in Washington, in a piece of alarmed shuttle diplomacy to counteract rumours that the atomic bomb might be used (P. Hennessy, Never Again, 408).

1 4 January 1951, AA, A6712/2 Item 6.

178 ROBERT MENZIES in Australia, the experience was that communism was an active and subversive agency, designed to cripple the efforts of the democratic countries from within and thus to make them less prepared to resist an attack by foreign communist countries. It was because the Australians held this view that they had recently authorised his Government to take the most stringent measures against the Communist Party.

But later when, in the same speech, Menzies talked of difficulties common to all countries represented at the Conference, he raised what he considered to be a special dilemma: how to reconcile necessary and legitimate opposition to subversive or aggressive movements with the broad tolerance of all kinds of thought, even the most radical, which was one of the most valuable traditions of the Commonwealth way of life and its great source of spiritual strength. It was all too easy to discover, that in attempting to repress subversion or aggression, one had in fact been suppressing freedom of thought.’

Here was a statement extraordinary in the light of the Draconian legislation recently carried at home and just justified, in the same

speech, on the ground of its urgent necessity. Could it be that Menzies had taken in more of his critics’ arguments than he could ever publicly admit? Is it possible that the real tragedy for him, and

for Australia, was that in the anti-communist campaigns both behind and ahead of him, Menzies never succeeded in finding an acceptable solution to the intractable problem he identified in this moment of soul-searching? On 6 January the Prime Ministers were presented with reports prepared by the British Chiefs of Staff warning against action which

might throw China irretrievably into the Soviet camp: ‘It should surely be one of the main preoccupations of western policy not to solidify against us the 700 millions of combined Russia and China,

backed by Russia’s enormous military industrial capacity?’ The reports warned that the vast proportion of China’s 475 million people did not live in or depend upon great cities, and a historic tradition of flood and famine had rendered the Chinese people impervious to large-scale disaster, even to the extent that might be inflicted by atomic attack. The chilling conclusion was that open war with China, even without Russian intervention, could not

be won.”

After the conference Menzies for a time resisted the United States wish to condemn Chinese aggression in the United Nations. Still in 22 Thid.

236 January 1951, ibid.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 179 London on 21 January, he learnt with alarm that, on the day before,

the United States delegation had introduced the denunciatory resolution. ‘We just cannot afford to go into a major war at present’, Menzies cabled Fadden and Spender. ‘If there is to be a great war it will not be the United Nations that will carry responsibilities.” What

saved the situation in the end was a willingness on the part of the United States to back down to the extent of agreeing to refer its complaint to the Collective Measures Committee, a lesser body than the Security Council or the General Assembly. So the insult to China

was softened and the question of war did not arise. Britain and Australia were among the 44 nations who were thus able to vote for the United States resolution. Not least among those relieved was Spender, who was anxious not to offend the United States at a time

when his diplomatic moves to lure the latter into a Pacific Pact seemed likely to bear fruit.*4

While the crisis of Korea was the inescapable focus of the Conference’s most earnest discussion, other subjects naturally received attention: the urgent need for a Japanese peace treaty; the Middle East situation and the importance to the Commonwealth of keeping Suez safe and open; economic problems arising from prevailing shortages of raw materials. The last-named had particular relevance to the agreed necessity that defence plans be concerted wherever possible. “The Prime Ministers’, asserted the official communiqué,

‘agreed to recommend to their respective governments that the existing Commonwealth machinery for consultation on questions of supply and production should be strengthened’.*? Menzies took part in discussions on most of these matters, though debilitating illness (almost on arrival he had contracted an extremely bad dose of flu) prevented him attending all sessions and speaking as often and authoritatively as he would have wished.6 Menzies was set down to reply to the toast to the guests at a big Canada Club dinner at the Savoy on the 8th, but when it came to the point, he was too ill even to attend.?” Next evening, he was unable 24 This oversimplified account of the ultimate outcome of the debate the American declaration is based on O’Neill’s excellent discussion in Australia in the Korean War,

chapter 12, “The Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference and Allied Unity, January 1951’, passim. 25 Commonwealth Relations Office List, 1961, 100.

26 For example, he missed the meetings of 8 and 9 January, although on 9 January one

meeting was adjourned to Menzies’ Savoy Hotel suite so that he could join one important discussion. As the Evening News reported it: “No secretaries or shorthand writers were present. The door leading to Mr Menzies’ suite was closely guarded, and any mundane acts—such as the handing round of whiskies—were performed by Mr Menzies’ personal secretary, Mr Willoughby’ (10 January 1951). 27 Evening News, 9 January 1951.

180 ROBERT MENZIES to appear at a party given in his honour at Australia House. The Conference ended on 12 January with a dinner at No. 10. Menzies managed that and also, over the following weekend, to accept an invitation to stay with the Attlees at Chequers.78 During the next week, at Biggin Hill station, he broke a bottle of Australian champagne over the nose of Britain’s first all-jet bomber, to name it the Canberra. Afterwards he watched ‘a sensational performance of the plane’s manoeuvrability’, with the chief test pilot at the controls.”? But his health remained delicate, and medical advisers ordered him to take ‘a complete rest’ before setting out for home. Menzies obviously made a great hit at his first Prime Ministers’

Conference. As Keith Officer, Australia’s Ambassador in Paris,

wrote to his friend, Peter Heydon: Two weekends running I had to go to London to see RGM, who was at the time intensely preoccupied with the Korean situation and the whole

problem of our relations with the U.S. The first time I flew over on saturday morning and found him in tremendous form, very keen and fit, and showing every sign of being the inspiration of the Conference. Unfortunately before I came back here on the Sunday afternoon he had developed ‘flu, and when I went back a week later I was shocked to find how ill and shaky he was though, I fear, feeling he had to get back to work before he should have. Even so he was the main driving force in the Conference and as you no doubt know was responsible for almost the whole of the declaration issued at the end.*”

More terse and graphic was an entry Owen Dixon made in his diary some months later, after dining with Alan Watt, of External Affairs, who had been with Menzies at the Conference. Watt had told him:

‘Menzies head & shoulders above others at Cfe of PMs. Nehru insincere. Bevin & all U.K. people inadequate and stupid in relation to us and also to America’.?!

Pat and an excited Heather had come with the Prime Minister and, having escaped the flu, greatly enjoyed the social events which

accompanied the Conference. In London both women attracted some attention, Heather for her fresh beauty and infectious sense of humour, Pat for her modest, down-to-earth depiction of the role of a provincial Prime Minister’s wife. At interview she described her official home, the Lodge, and its management. Although a small establishment, it was the scene of much entertaining, for which she 28 Fuening Standard, Birmingham Post, 13 January. 29 Fuening Standard, Liverpool Evening News, 19 January.

30 Keith Officer to Peter Heydon, 13 February 1951, NLA, MS. 2629/1/1191-3. 31 Owen Dixon Diary, 10 April 1951.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 181 often lent a hand with the cooking and always insisted on keeping the flower arrangements, not to speak of the management of the garden, in her own hands. ‘Like most Dominion wives’, wrote one interviewer, ‘she is a very efficient housewife. “I’d be ashamed if I couldn’t do things just a little better than the people I employ”, she says’ (which remark may help to explain the notoriously rapid turnover of cooks at the Lodge!) Pat went on to talk about a favourite form of relaxation she and her husband sometimes had on quiet days after lunch or dinner: a game of billiards or snooker. ‘“My husband taught me, but he must have taught me very badly, for he always wins”, said Mrs Menzies, and added: “Perhaps it is a good job for a Prime Minister to feel superior!” ’°?

Later, when interviewed after the ship on which they returned to Australia berthed at Melbourne, both Pat and Heather spoke warmly of Britain. Mrs Menzies thought that middle-aged women had suffered severely as a result of the years of rationing: ‘they are

the ones whom the influenza has hit the hardest’. And, chatting with Heather Menzies, one reporter “was quickly aware of her love for her country, and pride in the talent it produced’. A student at the Conservatorium of Music, she spoke warmly of the performances, by Australians, she had attended in London. But she ‘still affection-

ately regards Melbourne—her home town—"the best city in the world””’. Royalty, however, captivated her, not for its glamour, but because, on the contrary, the Royal family ‘made you feel at home, and not a bit in awe. You had the feeling that Buckingham Palace was just another home’. The three Menzies left London for Paris on 24 January, and from there they caught the Blue Train to Beaulieu in the South of France, where they spent a restful week. Officer was soon able to write more happily, if a trifle forebodingly, about his chief: ‘Fortunately the stay at Beaulieu apparently put him on his feet again and he rang me up

in good form the night before he left for Rome. [ am afraid he is going back to an ugly situation in Australia and I got an impression

sometimes things inside the Cabinet are not too happy’.’ To complete his rest, Menzies decided to travel home by ship, and embarked at Colombo on the Strathaird. The vessel reached Fremantle on 13 February, and after a press conference at which he spoke gravely of the danger of war, Menzies

disembarked and left Perth by air to attend an urgent Cabinet meeting, in Canberra, to discuss part of the ‘ugly situation’ that was

awaiting him: a serious coal strike. Reporters thought the Prime 32 Gwen Robyns, social column, Evening News, 9 January 1951. 33 Officer to Heydon, 13 February 1951.

182 ROBERT MENZIES Minister looked thinner than when he left Australia in December and Menzies himself told them: ‘when I left England I felt about 10%—now I feel 80% but I could still do with a holiday’. A Communist Party plan to paint slogans to greet him at Victoria Quay was frustrated by Fremantle detectives, and the faithful Harrison

was there to hand him a file of the latest reports on the current industrial situation.*+ Next morning, unshaven and looking tired after a sleepless night in a Convair aircraft, Menzies was met at Canberra by a party of ministers and a large contingent from the diplomatic corps. His wife and daughter stayed on the ship and completed the voyage to Sydney.

According to the regular report on Australian politics confidentially prepared by the United States Embassy in Canberra, the parliamen-

tary recess and Menzies’ absence and illness in London were marked by a good deal of Liberal backbench unrest. Members appeared unhappy at what they saw as Government failure to take strong action on pressing economic and industrial problems, and Menzies’ illness led to speculation that he might resign, so that the

succession to leadership would be a question. The Embassy’s watchers believed that the unrest was centred in Sydney ‘and supported, if not actually led, by Mr Spender’.*° Spender was said to

have the succession in mind, but in due course he convincingly denied that he had been in any way involved in a plot against Menzies. When, a few months later, he was appointed Australian Ambassador to Washington, Spender became a prime case in the persistent myth that it was Menzies’ habit to ‘remove’ possible rivals with appointments outside politics. Spender maintained that he had told Menzies of his wish to resign his portfolio and his seat before the Prime Minister left for London, and that the latter had earnestly tried to dissuade him from leaving.* Backbench unease was at this time certainly evident but, in masterful mood, Menzies simply ignored it. On 8 March, for example, Casey sent him a confidential account of a party meeting on the previous day, at which members ‘aired themselves freely, principally on the economic situation’. Casey had told the meeting that ‘everything that had been mentioned had been the subject of 34 SMH, 14 February 1951.

3° Confidential Report of Richard W. Byrd for the Ambassador, 23 February 1951. National Archives, Washington, State Department, Index File 743.00 /2-231. 36 Politics and a Man, 300-4. Spender attributes the story of his alleged disloyalty to Menzies to the journalist Ray Maley, who was some years later to become Menzies’ press secretary.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 183 prolonged Cabinet discussion over a long period’. Menzies dryly endorsed the letter: ‘No action. RGM’.3”

Far more important in early March was the handing down of the High Court's decision on the Communist Party Dissolution Act. By

a majority of six to one it declared the legislation to be invalid. Cabinet considered a paper on the judgement from the AttorneyGeneral, J. A. Spicer, decided that a double dissolution should be sought at the earliest possible moment, and agreed that, with this in mind, the Banking Bill (already rejected once by the Senate) should be put at the head of the Senate notice paper.°* As agreed also at this

meeting, Menzies made a comprehensive ministerial statement in the House of Representatives, explaining the High Court’s reasoning. He dwelt particularly on Justice Owen Dixon’s insistence that, in the absence of war, individuals or associations could only be

brought within the arm of a Commonwealth law by virtue of specific acts, the proof of which must be established in a court according to the accepted rules of evidence. That this decision “discloses a grievous limitation upon the powers of the Commonwealth Parliament it would be hard to deny’, Menzies asserted, for as we have repeatedly pointed out in this House, many facts which those responsible for executive government and therefore for the safety of the country know only too well are not susceptible of legal proof, or alternatively could be proved only by the most dangerous disclosure of the personnel and operation of our Security Service.

But his Ministry was still determined to deal with the danger, by legislating for secret ballots in union elections, by introducing a Defence Preparations Bill and, above all, by going to the country for

vindication of its policy on communism. If the Senate dared to amend the Banking Bill, the Government would seek a double dissolution:

Let the machinery of the Constitution work. Let us go to our masters, the Australian people, and ask them to say where they stand on the

crucial issues of the Communist conspiracy, of law and order in industry, of the public safety, of the preparation of this country to meet as heavy a cloud of danger as free men have looked at for many long

months.°?

37 Casey to Menzies, 8 March 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/6/46. 38 Cabinet minutes, 12 March 1951, AA, A4638 XM1. 39 CPD 212: 365-8.

184 ROBERT MENZIES Less than a week later the Senate decided to refer the Banking Bill

to a select committee and, arguing that this was tantamount to failing to pass it, Menzies asked for and secured from the GovernorGeneral, McKell, a dissolution of both Houses of Parliament. It was

only the second double dissolution granted since federation in 1901.40 Polling day for the election of the new Houses was set for

saturday 18 April. “You have done the right thing in getting a dissolution’, wrote one of Menzies’ oldest friends, Alexander Ellis, a retired Victorian judge. “The further attempt to carry on would have been undignified and even humiliating.”*!

On the eve of the election the British High Commissioner approached Menzies with another letter from Attlee about Monte Bello: reconnaissance reports were now in and the site was judged suitable for tests, but they could only be held in October because of weather constraints. The Americans had still given no satisfactory answer to the request to use their facilities, and the British Government would now like to go ahead and make preparations to use Monte Bello. He warned that the area would be contaminated with radio-activity for three years. Menzies replied that the decision

would have to be deferred for about a month: with an election pending it would be improper for him to commit a future government in such a matter as this. And while he still felt it essential that

he should ultimately take the leader of the Opposition into his confidence, he did not feel he could talk to Chifley about the matter ‘whilst the election heat was on’.*?

Chifley opened the opposition campaign on 28 March and Menzies followed five days later. Few mourned the passing of the old parliament: it had been, opined the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘one

of the most futile parliaments in the Commonwealth’s history’, made unworkable by the Opposition’s refusal to accept the Government’s 1949 mandate.*# On the other hand, when the leaders opened

the campaign other newspapers expressed disgust at the alleged 40 The Constitution, section 57, requires as a condition of the grant of a double dissolution that the Senate should have twice rejected, or failed to pass, or amended in ways unacceptable to the House of Representatives, legislation twice passed by the Lower House. The Commonwealth Bank Bill fell into this category, and the Government argued that reference to a Select Committee constituted ‘failure to pass’. McKell granted the dissolution without consulting the Chief Justice (as Munro—Ferguson had done in 1914): ‘this’, comments the Round Table (June 1951), ‘was very proper, if only because of the possibility that legal action might be taken to challenge the validity of the dissolution’. 41 Alexander Ellis to Menzies, 24 March 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/11/91. 42UK High Commissioner to Commonwealth Relations Office, 30 March 1951, PRO, FCO1/2. 43 18,25 March 1951.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 185 lack of real policy, on either side. ‘Both are good’, declared the Melbourne Argus, ‘at establishing defensive positions, . . . [but] they have not produced one constructive idea between them’.“4 The last assertion was somewhat extreme, but it was true that the position taken by each side was, as one would expect in an election

called to clarify an ambiguity in power, a re-run of established positions. Thus Menzies’ prime target was the communists, whose ‘twin poisons of go-slow and absenteeism’, he said, were the greatest cause of low production, which in turn was the greatest cause of high prices. The Government was taking legal advice about the possibility of holding a referendum to secure power denied by the High Court in its Communist Act judgement; the enemies who

confronted Australia abroad and at home could not be fought by any government with one hand tied behind its back. Beyond that, he denied that his was a ‘do nothing’ government. It had followed ‘developmental’ policies, expanding immigration, subsidizing coal production, obtaining a dollar loan, increasing the construction of housing. Chifley also pledged an all-out war on communism, but one that used—as Labor had done before—existing legislation. But the main task was to do what Menzies had failed to do in 15 months of office: to ‘halt the galloping horses of inflation’. Honest as ever,

Chifley asserted that a Labor Government would take ‘drastic measures to curb inflation, not all of which would be popular’. Most important, the electors must resist being carried away by the Government's ‘hysteria’ campaign about war and communism.*

As was to be expected, there were a few riotous meetings— Menzies, for example, received his usual reception in Brisbane, with

boos, thrown eggs and plainclothes supporters frog-marching the occasional interjector to the street.4¢ But all reporters agreed that the chief feature of the campaign was the electorate’s apathy, as if voters

were weary of the alarms to which they had continuously been subject. As one expert predicted on the eve of the poll, there was nothing to suggest that there would be ‘a big swing either for or against the Government’.*”

That forecast proved correct enough. The Government lost five House of Representatives seats, but still had a comfortable majority of 17 there. The Senate result, which gave Menzies the control he

wanted, was much more important. This time the whole of the Senate had to face election, and the Government won 32 seats to 444 April 1951. ® Argus, 29 March; SMH, 25 April 1951. 46 SMH, 27 April 1951. 47 Tbid., 24 April 1951.

186 ROBERT MENZIES Labor’s 28. A somewhat unexpected majority in Western Australia,

and the Government’s customary advantage in Queensland, were thought to be the most important factors in this result.4° The total vote for both Houses showed that the Government won in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. The ALP won decisively in Victoria, while electors were almost equally divided in South Australia. It was thought by many observers that a minority Roman Catholic group in the Labor Party, whose views on

communism and the international situation were not greatly different from those of Menzies, helped contribute to Labor’s defeat.”

And as usual Menzies received many warm letters of congratulation from establishment figures. ‘Like so many others’, wrote W. J. V. Windeyer, distinguished Sydney barrister and soldier, ‘Iam

both delighted and relieved by the result’.°° Bernard Heinze, the orchestral conductor, considered that ‘it has been a great personal triumph for you and one for which every lover of freedom must offer you deep egratitude’.>!

Fortified by its victory, the Government immediately organized raids on the offices of the principal communist-led trade unions

in Sydney and Melbourne. Menzies refused press invitations to comment on the raids but the Postmaster General, H. L. Anthony, crowed at having ‘fired the first shot into the Communists’ camp’.°? The Waterside Workers’ Federation organized a demonstration in the Sydney Domain and wharfies in Sydney and Melbourne walked off the job. Though conflict between employers and unions on the

waterfront was continuous and complex there was a simple and immediate issue in this case: the support provided by Australian wharf labourers for a strike of their counterparts in New Zealand. It

took the form of contributions to New Zealand strike funds and bans on ships loading for New Zealand in Australian ports. When Melbourne wharf workers refused to load a cargo of flour for New Zealand on the ship Port Halifax, troops were used instead: the first time, it was claimed, that soldiers had been so employed by a nonLabor government. Menzies explained the Government’s stand by alleging that current waterfront troubles in Australia, New Zealand

48 RT, September 1951. The total votes for the Senate were: Liberal—Country Party, 2 198 687; Labor, 2 029 751; Communists, 93 561; others 102 238. There were 339 677 informal votes—more than the Government majority!

* This was the view of RT, for example, which also pointed out that the Victorian branch of the Party, controlled by the right-wing section had at the April State Conference censured Evatt for accepting briefs from the Communist Party and Communist-led unions in recent litigation. 20 W. J. V. Windeyer to Menzies, 3 May 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/34/276. >! Bernard Heinze to Menzies, 27 May 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/15/126. 9¢ SMH, 26 May 1951.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 187 and Britain were linked, and came from instructions given by ‘the Communist Federation of Trade Unions’. The Government had a clear responsibility to ‘maintain the essential transport service of shipping’, especially as it had a ‘clear electoral mandate, so recently reaffirmed, to combat the influence of Communism inside the trade union movement’.*? In the last months of 1950 Menzies’ promise to ‘place Australia on a semi-war footing’ had resulted in a number of important developments. In September Cabinet decided to stockpile strategic material and in the budget allocated £50 million for the purpose. In November it instituted compulsory military training for 18-year-olds, to

build up a reservoir of trained men from whom units could be recruited for service in the event of war. Most important of all, in December 1950 the Government established a National Security Resources Board (NSRB), modelled on an identically named body

created in the United States in 1947. Its task was to advise on the most effective use of raw materials and resources, and how

the economy should be readjusted to meet defence needs. By early 1951 this Board was well established. It consisted of senior public

servants, businessmen, a trade unionist, and the Prime Minister acted as its chairman.*4

These were the publicly acknowledged preparations. But totally secret was the development of an agency known to the initiated as ‘Operation Alien’. It set up a special staff led by Brigadier E. W. Woodward, the Deputy Adjutant General (AHQ), placed under the direct control of Menzies as Prime Minister, to maintain essential services and preserve law and order in the event of an emergency. ‘Emergency’ could mean a Czechoslovak-type communist uprising. That possibility, however strange it may seem in retrospect, was

already in Menzies’ mind when he went to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in January 1951.5 But also implicated 53 Ibid., 29 May 1951.

‘4 For a seminal and detailed discussion of these matters see David Lee, ‘The National Security Planning and Defence Preparations of the Menzies Government, 1950-1953, War and Society, 10, 2 (October 1992), 119-38. Menzies made an excellent statement of measures so far in hand when introducing his Defence Preparations Bill, 1951, in July (CPD 213: 1112 ff.) Bruce McFarlane, ‘Australian Postwar Economic Policy, 19471953’, in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (eds), Australia’s First Cold War 1945-1953, 29-45, discusses the economic effects of the Menzies Government's war preparations. A key study on how the defence and ‘developmental’ elements in Menzies’ policy came together at this time is David Lowe, ‘Menzies’ National Security State, 1950-53’, in Frank Cain (ed.), Menzies in War and Peace, 41-54.

Interview with Sir Henry Bland, 6 June 1988. As the most important public service leader in the Department of Labour and National Service Bland played a key role in the shaping of Operation Alien. Menzies’ knowledge that Operation Alien was already in place is an important factor in interpreting his remarks at the Prime Ministers’ Conference about the undesirability of suppressing opinion. See above, p. 178.

188 ROBERT MENZIES were, naturally, the industrial difficulties which the Government instinctively attributed to communist influence in the unions.°° David Lowe has acutely noted how there was, in these first years of the Menzies era, a ‘blurring of national security and national development’, a synergy which ideally left no room for industrial dislocation: the Government's propaganda always was that advance would best come through employer-employee co-operation. Lowe

quotes the telling advice which the influential economist Trevor Swan gave to Menzies on the setting up of the NSRB: There is a war on; and whether we are mobilising our resources for Korea, for economic development and industrial strength, or tomorrow

for global hostilities, the enemy is the same and the problems of achieving the best disposition of resources for his defeat are essentially similar.°”

The ‘enemy’ was communism; from one point of view its very danger its amorphousness. At the beginning of March 1951 the Government announced that

increased numbers would be called up for national service, and in reporting to Parliament on the recent Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference Menzies declared that ‘it is my belief that we

cannot, and must not give ourselves more than three years to defend ourselves’.°° Confirmation of the Government’s authority in

the April election then opened a new phase in the planning for likely war. There were intensive consultations between senior public

servants and their opposite numbers in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Detailed plans were prepared for the matching of Australian military responsibilities with machinery and manpower needs for agricultural production to support allies in a possible conflict. Behind such plans there were, however, two teasing problems. How was a Government, elected originally on its opposition to controls and so recently rebuffed by the High Court

°6 For our knowledge of the existence of ‘Operation Alien’ and of the scope of its work Australian researchers are primarily indebted to Professor Les Louis, the relentless pursuer, through complex archival sources, of many behind-the-scenes effects of the

Cold War on Australian politics and administration. His classical article here is ‘“Operation Alien” and the Cold War in Australia, 1950-1953’, Labour History, no. 62,

May 1992, 1-18. Though affronted, correctly, by the abridgement of rights and the well-documented attack on certain unions which the ‘Operation’ represented, Louis fully outlines the intricacy of its origin and avoids a simplistic attribution of it all to Menzies’ supposedly cynical, and sinister, use of the anti-communist cry. 7 ‘Menzies’ National Security State, 1950-53’, 48. °§ Quoted by David Lee, “The National Security Planning and Detence Preparations of the Menzies Government, 1950-1953’, 122.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 189 for legislation which too readily assumed powers against threats of war when no war technically existed, to make resource allocation for defence planning effective? McKell, as Governor-General, opened the re-elected Parliament

on 12 June. Through him the Government announced changes in the structure and administration of its Departments, and a determination to find ‘new ways of protecting the safety of the nation’. And, at the heart of all its plans, the Government ‘believes that it has

an express mandate to conduct a relentless campaign against the menace of Communism in Australia and will seek to carry out that mandate by all means which are, or may become, available to it’.°? Jubilee celebrations of the founding of the Australian Commonwealth coincided with the opening of this Parliament. Distinguished guests came to Canberra to represent other Commonwealth countries and the United States, and there was a State dinner on the evening of 12 June and a glittering ball in King’s Hall on the following night. Chifley, who had been unwell for some months attended and spoke

at the former, but ‘tripping the light fantastic’ was neither to his taste nor advisable for a man with heart trouble, and he did not attend the ball. That evening, at the Kurrajong Hotel, where he lived when in Canberra, Chifley suffered a heart seizure, which brought

rapid death. Towards midnight at the ball Menzies silenced the band and sombrely announced the news of what had happened. Dancing at once ended and the guests left in silent tribute to one who was, as Menzies put it, ‘a great friend of mine and yours, and a fine Australian’. For the Labor Party, the loss of Chifley at this stage was a terrible

blow. His sane voice and iron will had been vital in holding the Party together, especially in the face of the strains to which it was exposed by the communist issue. Evatt, who now took over as leader, lacked Chifley’s tact and popularity, and it remained to be seen how far he would be able to contain the potentially schismatic elements in the Party. But he was intellectually brilliant and, after his High Court victory on the Communist Party Dissolution Act, was high in confidence and prestige, ready to do battle against any further Government moves which he considered to be threatening to democratic rights. He did not have long to wait. Menzies followed his election success with a request to the States

that they refer their powers to deal with communism to the Commonwealth. This was obviously a tactical move to prepare the

way for more drastic action. It was not altogether clear precisely 59 CPD 213, 13 ff.

190 ROBERT MENZIES what powers the States possessed in this matter: in any case it was predictable enough that the States with Labor Governments, New South Wales and Queensland, would refuse—as indeed they did. So the Federal Government turned to the one idea left: to ask at a referendum for the power it needed to repress the Communist Party. Accordingly, on 5 July, Menzies moved the second reading of a

‘Constitution Alteration (Powers to deal with Communists and

Communism) Bill, 1951’, to authorise the referendum, and, in Pro-

fessor Leicester Webb’s words, ‘for the fourth time in eighteen

months members settled down to debate on the Communist issue.

Not much of what was said rose above the category of tedious repetition’.©? Menzies’ initial speech recapitulated the High Court judgement, railed against the Government powerlessness which it

created, and presented the usual arguments for believing in the existence of an international communist conspiracy and the dangers of allowing a potential fifth column to exist. Evatt called the Bill ‘a

direct frontal attack on all the principles of British justice. It goes much further than the legislation which was recently held by the High Court of Australia to be unconstitutional’. His argument was that to legislate in effect to overturn a High Court decision made a mockery of the principle at the root of Australia’s polity: the balance

of powers. In any case, adequate laws already existed for the prosecution of saboteurs.®! By a vote of 8-4 the Federal Executive of

the Labor Party decided, on the same day that Menzies introduced his Bill, that the referendum proposals must be resisted. | In the referendum itself the Government sought a general power

to deal with ‘Communists and Communism’; it asked for the

specific power to legislate in the same terms as the nullified Communist Party Dissolution Act, but it also wanted power to amend this Act before or after the referendum. These wide-ranging proposals provoked complicated legalistic argument which tended to confuse thoughtful voters and encouraged simplistic sloganizing by propagandists with their eyes on what they saw as a possibly thoughtless majority. The mandatory official pamphlet setting out the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ cases was not a great help. Each side had 2000 words to defend its position. For the difficult ‘yes’ case the appeal was to reason, setting out as well as could be the grounds for suppressing the Communist Party; for the ‘no’ case the principal argu-

ment was that the communist issue was being used to cloak the 6° Leicester Webb, Communism and Democracy in Australia, 46. I have used this excellent

study as the basis for the brief remarks I make on the referendum. Quotations

otherwise not specifically acknowledged in what follows are from this source. 61 CPD 213: 1076 ff., 1213 ff.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 191 Government’s totalitarian designs and to distract public attention from its failure to cope effectively with the problem of inflation. The

two sets of arguments scarcely met. Evatt opened the ‘no’ case in Cairns on 17 August, and a first round of meetings in Townsville, Melbourne and Sydney followed in quick succession. His main theme was that the Government’s proposals were ‘unnecessary and unjust and totalitarian’. He dwelt on those ‘undemocratic’ features of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill which had from the beginning been at the forefront of the debate. He and his supporters tirelessly urged that the powers

sought by the Government could be used to restrict or destroy groups which had no connection with communism. In full flight Evatt could paint a lurid picture: the Government was ‘following the road that led to the horrors of Belsen .. . It is the Hitler technique over again. First the Reds, then the Jews, then the trade unions, then

the Social Democratic Parties, then the Roman Catholic Centre Party, then the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches’. The Com-

munist Party, in a vigorous pamphlet campaign, developed— though more wildly—the same line: cartoons and leaflets identified

Menzies as an Australian Hitler and painted the Liberal Government as fascists allied to American warmongers. As the campaign wore on, Menzies affirmed at all his meetings that ‘no person or body of persons will be affected by the powers now sought unless he or it is a Communist. No Parliament can convert a power over Communists into a power over non-Communists’, and he obtained

and quoted from a legal opinion by Sydney barrister Garfield Barwick to support this. And, dealing with the argument that the Government’s proposals involved a departure from British democratic traditions, he repeatedly asserted: ‘Much as I love liberty, lam

not prepared to concede freedom to the enemies of freedom’. Perhaps this was the closest he ever came to ‘reconciling’ the dilemma he had so crisply defined at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in January.

Menzies made heavy weather of parts of the campaign, encountering much disruption at some of his meetings. His opening rally at Canterbury was judged by journalists to be Melbourne’s rowdiest political meeting for years: thirty men and six women were ejected by the police. Of other meetings the most riotous was at the Brisbane City Hall, where he received no hearing but spoke

cleverly into the microphone so that listeners on the radio heard most of his speech, together with the jeers of part of the audience 62 This point is drawn from Webb’s analysis, 54 ff.

192 ROBERT MENZIES and Menzies’ often bitter lashes back at ‘these poor stooges’, ‘Communist scum’, and so forth. Disturbance was clearly organized and

Menzies was justified when he issued from Canberra on 14 September a press statement setting out his position on the definition question, ‘as Dr Evatt’s more noisy “no” supporters have decided

that reasoned argument from a “yes” platform shall not be allowed’.

The civil rights issue again caused much unsettlement among intellectuals, some of them, to official chagrin, in Liberal circles. In Melbourne Alan Missen, vice-president of the Young Liberal and Country organization, wrote a powerful critique of the referendum proposals, and was expelled from his position by the State Council

of the Liberal Party. But ten Young Liberals supported Missen, explaining in the press why they, too, intended to vote ‘no’.® At Sydney University the student Liberal organization split, special unease at the powers sought at referendum being voiced by Gordon

Barton, its president. Of university meetings probably the most important was one called at Melbourne by the Political Science Society, where an audience estimated by the Argus at 1000 heard vehement ‘no’ cases from Professors ‘Pansy’ Wright, Zelman Cowen and Jan Maxwell.® Overall, however, other student meetings seem to have been small and unreliable as a guide to opinion, and though most staff activity was on behalf of ‘no’, only a minority of staff (and

those preponderantly from faculties of Arts, Economics and Law) declared themselves.® More influential were the views of some churchmen. Anglican Bishop Burgmann made it clear that he would

be voting ‘no’, though he seemed to give as his major reason a sectarian fear that a ‘yes’ victory might be used by the Roman Catholic Church to strengthen its political position.®% Moyes, the

Anglican bishop of Armidale who had so firmly denounced. the

63 Anton Herman, Alan Missen, Liberal Pilgrim (Woden, 1993), 13-19. Missen’s stand

elicited from Menzies the comment that he was ‘disturbed by the attitude to the referendum of some who regard themselves as Liberals’: he could not understand, he said, how these people could ‘get alongside Evatt and the Communists’. 64 This debate, its context and its effect on University governance is sensitively analysed by Fay Woodhouse in The 1951 Communist Party Dissolution Referendum Debate at the University of Melbourne, an Honours thesis at the Victoria University of Technology, 1996. Ms Woodhouse, with due acceptance of the ambiguity of the subject, suggests reasonably that the debate may have had some effect on the outcome of the referendum. 65 Webb, Communism and Democracy in Australia, 86.

66 On the ambiguities of Burgmann’s position see Peter Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: a Life of Ernest Burgmann (Sydney, 1993), 293-8. Burgmann also argued against conferring on the Federal Government ‘very great powers over the personal liberty of citizens’.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 193 Communist Party Dissolution Bill, came out strongly for the ‘no’ case in the referendum, arguing that the use of force against a faith had never succeeded. There was lively discussion of the issue in the Anglican diocese of Sydney: the Dean of Sydney, Dr Babbage, and others spoke disparagingly of the Government’s proposals, though

none went so far as to tell church members how to vote. In Melbourne Archbishop Mannix, though implicitly opposed, advocated a free vote. When the poll took place, the “yes’ case was rejected by a narrow margin: by three States to three and, in rounded voting figures, by a

majority of almost 58 000 in a total vote of just under 4 700 000, though to keep this ‘victory’ in proper perspective it has also to be noted that there was an informal vote of 66 500. Probably the most judicious contemporary comment was that of the Catholic Worker: ‘On the whole it was a good day for democracy, quite apart from the

result, which only the future can say was wise or not’. However slender, a win in politics is a win, and Evatt and his supporters were entitled to celebrate. What they celebrated was, however, perhaps not as clearcut as, in the first flush of success, Evatt claimed. The Australian people, he said, had ‘rejected the Menzies campaign of unscrupulous propaganda and hysteria’ and saved themselves and their children from the ‘insidious aggressions of the police state’.

Later he paid special tribute ‘to the distinguished churchmen, writers, university teachers, a small section of the press and to those

supporters of the Liberal-Country Party for whom this vital vote transcended party allegiance’. Qualitatively, this was correct enough: whether it was quantitatively so is more open to question, given the

closeness of the vote, the obscurity so far as many voters were concerned of what they were voting for, and the propaganda by

which Evatt himself, Calwell and other Labor leaders did their best to turn the referendum into a vote of no-confidence on the Menzies

Government’s whole performance since the 1949 election, with particular reference to inflation.

Already in June 1951 Frederic Eggleston, described by his biographer as ‘both insider and outsider, reformist and conservative counsellor and _ satirist’,©” had raised with Menzies the question Evatt was to exploit, and asserted that something more important than brute votes was involved. You are bringing in anti-Communist legislation, and a referendum possibly, but the case against Communism is largely a reliance on certain British folklore. We are expecting to have to fight a war against 6” Warren Osmond, Frederic Eggleston: An Intellectual in Australian Politics (Sydney, 1985), 1X.

194 ROBERT MENZIES Russia and yet no attempt is made to show the details of Russian policy

which show its aggressive nature ... Now I am not talking about ordinary party propaganda which has obviously been effective enough to win the last two elections. Most of this is moronic in character but well calculated to achieve its purpose. I should hate, however, to see my

photo on the outside of it. I suggest that this sort of propaganda has never been effective on the intellectuals or the Press in Australia and does nothing to counteract the strong leftish intellectual movement which is getting very dangerous ... What I cannot understand is why the Government sits down so complacently as if its case were completely proved and does not use its resources to convince the influential people in the community ... Intellectuals are against the referendum and you should do something to change their opinions.®

The criticism was not altogether fair in that, especially since the 1951 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Menzies had in parliamentary performances, in his broadcasts and in his platform speeches made much, in precise enough terms, of the international

threat of communism. But it was true that sophisticated material of the sort Eggleston had in mind was not produced and that later, when the referendum campaign came on, the Government did show something like the complacency which Eggleston criticized. That was understandable enough: as Eggleston himself pointed out,

Menzies had within two years won two elections in which he depicted banning of the Communist Party as the major issue; and Gallup polls at the beginning of the referendum campaign showed 80 per cent of voters agreeing with his position. This changed as the contest progressed, and it may well be true, as is often alleged,

that in campaigning Evatt outstripped Menzies in energy and

dedication.” However, given the closeness of the result and the impossibility of assessing in any satisfactory numerical sense who voted which way and why, the folk belief that in the referendum of 1951 Evatt ‘saved’ Australian democracy—or in its more reasonable form, that ‘the defeat of the referendum was a success for which Evatt was largely responsible’”'—is unprovable. The related view that Menzies lost because of a kind of revolt of the intellectuals is flattering to the 68 Eggleston to Menzies, NLA, MS. 423/1/1093. 69 It was also quite wrong as far as the press was concerned. With a few notable exceptions, the mainstream press aggressively supported the Government. 70 See, e.g. Peter Crockett, Evatt: a Life (Melbourne, 1993), 167. In a TV discussion of Menzies on ‘Lateline’, 11 May 1994, Malcolm Fraser said Menzies’ heart was not in

the referendum fight. He claimed that it was not Menzies, but other extremists

, pusning him, who were by this time anxious to see the CPA banned.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 195 latter but depends upon the anti-Government propaganda of the time and the ex-post-facto judgement of a generation which did not share the emotions of the 1950s. Perhaps it was not unreasonable of Menzies, while urbanely accepting defeat (‘as a democrat I respect

and recognize the popular voting’) to express his belief that the electors had been misled by a ‘wicked and unscrupulous “No” campaign’. Evatt had depicted Menzies as a Prime Minister plotting to establish a police state in Australia, to begin the downward slide

to a Belsen. That must have been for many voters difficult to reconcile with Evatt’s equal insistence that hysteria was Menzies’ chief stock in trade. In more philosophical mood, Menzies wrote to McKell, who was then in London and had recently suffered an illness, to commiserate with that and to give the latest news. He reported the failure of the referendum, ‘though by no great margin’, and gave two reasons for the result: The first was the old one which has operated to defeat every Constitutional referendum to which the Opposition in the Federal Parliament was opposed. It is, quite shortly, that there is in a Federation a distrust of the central authority and a dislike to the creating of additional central power. This feeling is easily capitalised by opponents who paint the

most lurid pictures of what the Commonwealth could do under the proposed power... The second reason is one from which Evatt can take no comfort. Beyond question, in my opinion, there must have been scores of thousands of my own supporters who said that while they would give the power to me, they would never give it to him. This kind of argument is, of course, quite puerile but the more experience I have of referendums, the more satisfied I am that ‘the child is father to the man’./4

The first reason was perhaps sound enough, the second was simply wishful thinking. Menzies could strike a more positive note in non-political matters. Finding that the visiting West Indians had no cricket match for 26 October, I have arranged for them to come to Canberra on October 22nd to play a team chosen by myself. It will be an interesting day because, apart from

a couple of Members of Parliament and about three local players, my team will include Hassett, Ian Johnson, Harvey, Loxton, M.P., Donnelly,

Fingleton, and O'Reilly. Iam very sorry you will not be here to see it because I know that you would enjoy it as much as I am expecting to.

72 Menzies to McKell, 8 October 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/22/183.

196 ROBERT MENZIES So occurred one of the happier events of this troubled period: the beginning of the Prime Minister’s XI matches. Another was the birth, to his daughter-in-law, Mrs Ken Menzies, of Menzies’ first grandson. One of his Savage Club friends, Dr Trinca, in sending the

grandfather his congratulations, told of an amusing incident the night before. The baby was in a maternity wing separated by only a passage from Hamilton Russell House, where adult patients were cared for. The crying of babies could therefore be clearly heard by such patients. ‘Last night’, reported Trinca, Your grandson was crying lustily & disturbing the sleep of a crusty old bachelor. “Which baby is making all that noise’, said he. ‘Cannot you stop it?’ ‘It’s Bob Menzies’ grandson’, said the nurse. ‘Oh is it?— well make the nurse take off her bloody red cape and he'll stop.’”

Throughout these months, the question of a British atom test in Australia simmered on: one private confirmation for Menzies of his conviction that Britain and the Commonwealth must be prepared for the threatening war, though a sentiment that he, naturally, could not publicly voice, this still being such a secret matter. There is no evidence that, after the election following the double dissolution, Menzies had—as was his original instinct—taken Chifley into his

confidence, and after Chifley’s death it went without saying that he would keep Evatt in the dark as long as possible. Just after Christmas, the British High Commissioner in Canberra, Williams, informed Menzies that his Government had decided to go ahead with the Monte Bello test. Negotiations with the Americans had broken down, the latter refusing to make substantial concessions to the position implicit in the McMahon Act. As Sir William Penney, the scientist who had headed the British project, was to explain at the Australian Royal Commission in 1985, the Americans ‘would do the test, and they would want a drawing of exactly what was in [the bomb], that kind of information. Our government said, “No, that is unacceptable”. But I would have taken it. The reason was I wanted to get back to Anglo-American collaboration’.”4 There was some press speculation about whether the failure of the referendum would bring Menzies’ leadership into question, but it soon faded. One person who privately thought Menzies should go was the opinionated tabloid journalist Eric Baume, who wrote to Washington to beg Spender, now the Australian Ambassador there, to come home and take over the leadership. 73 Dr A. J. Trinca to Menzies, 16 October 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/31/254. 74 Quoted, Robert Milliken, No Conceivable Injury: the Story of Britain and Australia’s Atomic Cover-up (Ringwood, 1986), 42.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 197 The Labour party voted according to their ticket ... The Liberal Party voted against its ticket, that is to say it didn’t trust Menzies and voted accordingly. There’s no getting away from it, Bob’s use of the word ‘scum’ and his general ‘block-doing’ lost him a lot of votes and made him a lot of enemies among those who had voted for him ... If there

were an election tomorrow Menzies would go flat out on his neck. Fadden has been an evil genius. When you think of fat old whisky Artie

threatening the people of this country with taxes which will hurt and causing the beginning of a recession because of his refusal to have the pound revalued you don’t have too much hope. I believe you should be P.M. ... It is the one hope for this country . .. The country will be ruined by Bob and his spineless, gutless acting. For goodness sake think hard. I don’t know why the hell you fell for the blandishment which was going to take you away. In other words remove you as the most dangerous opponent the failing Menzies ever had.”

In his enthusiasm Baume exaggerated the off-putting effect of Menzies’ style of campaigning, but he was correct in sensing unease

in the electorate and in connecting it to wider Government policy and Fadden’s economic threats. The larger picture was well outlined in a ‘Political Appreciation’ for 1952 which the Public Relations Planning Committee of the Liberal Party made at the end of 1951. The year of 1951, it remembered, had begun well, Menzies having outmanoeuvred the Labor Party, which had hoped to avoid an early double dissolution and force an election later on the budget, thus capitalizing on the Government’s failure to halt inflation. The Government’s win in the April election brought a high in morale,

but between April and September there was a marked change. Steeply rising prices and the emphasis on commitments to defence had a further depressing effect. ‘But the first powerful attack on the Government came with the Defence Preparations Act—and it was

an attack from within our own ranks supported by newspaper

criticism.’”6

The observation caught the inwardness of a pivotal political moment. Menzies had introduced the second reading of the Defence Preparations Bill in the Representatives on 6 July 1951, the

day after he brought down the other Bill to authorize the antiCommunist referendum. The two measures were intimately related:

they were the twin prongs of the Government’s declared aim of

preparing for the threatening war. Menzies outlined what had already been done by the National Security Board, announced that stockpiling of strategic supplies had already begun, but explained > Baume to Spender, 24 September 1951, NLA, MS. 4875/1/3. 76 ‘Political Appreciation’, NLA, MS. 4936/14/414/35.

198 ROBERT MENZIES that the Government also needed additional powers. Personal taxation, compulsory direction of labour, and compulsory military service would be specifically excluded. But, otherwise, the legislation involved a virtual reintroduction of the emergency powers enjoyed by the Commonwealth Government during the late war.”

For the Opposition Evatt denounced the measure as ‘a power grab’, a ‘blank cheque’ for the Government to do what it wished once it had proclaimed the existence of the threat of war. The Bill, he

maintained, should be submitted to a referendum at the same time as the Government’s anti-Communist measure. But that was far from Menzies’ mind. On legal advice, the Government asserted in a preamble that ‘there exists a state of international emergency in which it is essential that preparations for defence should be made to

an extent and with a degree of urgency not hitherto necessary except in time of war’. That assertion was believed to make regulations issued under the Act free from judicial challenge unless, as was most unlikely, the High Court ruled that it, and not parliament, was the authority to decide whether a state of emergency existed or not.

After the Bill had been passed, the Acting British High Commissioner in Canberra reported to his superiors that the measure had ‘immediately caused widespread alarm among Government supporters, who fear that it foreshadows the restitution of wartime controls against the continued retention of which after the war the Liberal and Country Parties so vigorously campaigned’.”8 Menzies

himself stressed that the powers gained through the Defence Preparation legislation were to be taken seriously. He told a number

of gatherings of businessmen that the Government hoped to achieve most of its aims through co-operation. But: It is a great mistake to think we are all co-operators. We are not. And one of the great reasons for the passing of the Defence Preparations Act in its

very wide terms is that if I go along to a group of people and find that there are one or two fellows who won't play I am not going to say to

those people: ‘all right, you can have your material and make your profit. It doesn’t matter. Believe me, gentlemen, I am going to have power up my sleeves to deal with a case of that kind’.”?

Concern of Government supporters at the implications of the Defence Preparations Act was exacerbated by rumours that an 77 CPD 213: 112 ff.

78 UK Acting High Commissioner to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 25 July 1951, PRO, DO 35/2359. 7917 July 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/35/525/2.

FEARS OF WAR, 1951 199 unpalatable budget might be in store in September, and it was in this unhappy atmosphere that the referendum campaign on anticommunism was fought and lost.89 And the fears soon proved to be well founded. When the budget appeared, it represented an urgent realization that, whatever else happened, inflation had to be squarely faced if the Government strategy of combining development with planning for national security was to be feasible. Behind the scenes Coombs had warned from the Commonwealth Bank that inflation, if unchecked, could now lead to a flight from the currency.

He and three other experts in the bureaucracy, Roland Wilson (Treasury), Allen Brown (Prime Minister’s) and E. R. Walker (NSRB) were the real architects of the 1951 financial strategy.

s mie ce 7

pe

The Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, at Parliament House, Canberra, November 1951 89 ‘Political Appreciation’, footnote 76 above.

200 ROBERT MENZIES This was the measure at once labelled by a scandalized press, particularly in Sydney, as the ‘horror budget’. Its essence was a sharp increase in taxation: a 10 per cent income tax levy on individuals and heavy rises in the rates of company tax, sales tax, customs and excise. As C. B. Schedvin writes: “After five years of reduced taxation, the budget seemed to be heading back to the fiscal stringency of the war years’.®!

It was a difficult time, but as the year drew to an end Menzies philosophically took a much-needed rest—‘a week’s break in Tasmania where I enjoyed some good fishing and was able to relax ina way that I can never do in Canberra, so I am feeling mentally and physically refreshed as a result’.8* Though in reality no fisherman, he always enjoyed a rest in Tasmania with his old friend Gordon Rolph, at ‘Como’, on the Tamar. So he may well have been in the

mood to smile at the Christmas message his backbencher Alan Hulme, often—in the words of Sir John Bunting—‘a burr under his saddle’, sent as a veiled comment on the ‘horror’ budget: We're sending this message to tell you That budget restrictions today Have robbed us of all our equipment; Our workshops, our Reindeer, our Sleigh. We’re making our rounds on a donkey; He’s old and decrepit and slow, So you'll know if we miss you this Xmas

We'll be out on our ASS in the SNOW.*4

81 Schedvin, In Reserve, 189. Schedvin also documents, 186, the role of Coombs ef al. in originating the budget strategy. 82 Menzies to Alfred Stirling, 1 February 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/16/138. 83 Interview, 10 March 1994. 84 AS. Hulme to Menzies, 17 December 1951, NLA, MS. 4936/1/16/138.

8

Difficult Times 1952

A! THE beginning of 1952 Menzies made Soon a Newafter, YearEggleston broadcast appealing for unity against inflation. wrote him a long letter expressing ‘my deepest sympathy in your struggle with the various pressure groups, each of which is trying to put the burden of adjustment on the public or on each other’.! Dissatisfaction which had flared among the Government’s supporters at some of its economic measures simmered on, and there were hints that all was not well even in Cabinet. On 18 March, for example, Owen Dixon noted in his diary that a friend, one Baker, whom he took to lunch that day, had it on good authority ‘that Cabinet frequently overruled Menzies... Also younger members all very dissatisfied’.* The stress, it seemed, was telling on Menzies; a few days

after his exchange with Baker, Dixon lunched at the Melbourne Club with the banker Sir Leslie McConnan who ‘told me Menzies looked ill & tired out & was sleeping badly’.~ When McGirr, the Labor premier of New South Wales, decided to resign because of ill health Menzies sent a message of sympathy: ‘I know only too well the strains involved in public life, and particularly in the responsibilities of political leadership’.* His worries were accumulating. By early 1952 the country’s economic situation generated new tensions as, ‘horror budget’ notwith-

standing, inflation continued and unemployment appeared for the first time since the war. The rate of unemployment, which peaked at 4 per cent in November 1951, might not have been high by later standards, but in 1951 the appearance of the phenomenon at all was a shock. It was caused chiefly by import competition, which by now ' Egeleston to Menzies, 21 February 1952, NLA, MS. 423/1/1152. * Dixon Diary, 18 March 1952. 3 Tbid., 21 March 1952. + SMH, 2 April 1952. 201

202 ROBERT MENZIES was slowing down production at home. The encouragement of imports had been an important element in the Government’s antiinflation strategy. The greater availability by 1951 of goods from abroad, combined with post-war improvements in shipping capacity and delayed reaction to the wool boom of 1950, meant that a flood

of imports was reaching the Australian market.5 The journalist Rohan Rivett, who returned to Australia at this time after some years in Britain, told a radio audience how at home the shortages and austerity of the immediate post-war years had been changed in

almost revolutionary ways by the extravagant flow of imports. Every brand of cigarette in the world was freely available; popular English cars, which had had waiting lists of one to three years ever since the war, suddenly became available off the floor; February witnessed in the shops an extraordinary number of bargain sales. It seemed that at long last the seller’s market was coming to an end, and

that the long-suffering customer might get his post-war dream—a buyer’s market, with both courtesy and consideration from those with goods to sell.®

But anti-inflation action and the thirst for consumer goods was only one cause of heavy importation in 1950-51. More potent was

the increase in defence spending which got under way as the Government's preparations for the feared war took shape. While inflation was fuelled by the diversion of local resources into defence activities which were essentially non-productive, much of the capital raised in dollar loans and increased private capital investment from overseas went on defence hardware. The question that progressively

confronted policy-makers was whether the Australian economy could sustain priorities that simultaneously focused on development on the one hand and high defence expenditure on the other. The Treasurer, Fadden, formally warned Cabinet of the dilemma implicit in this situation as early as December 1951.” Inflation and unemployment were bad enough, but by January—

February an alarming crisis in the country’s balance of payments was added to them. Australia’s international reserves had peaked in May 1951, but thereafter they declined at an accelerating rate. The flood of imports combined with fluctuating and indifferent prices

for primary exports to produce a widening gap between the total value of imports and that of exports. Coombs, the Governor of the ° Schedvin, In Reserve, 190. 6 ‘Australia Faces Difficult Times’, Listener, 8 May 1952.

’ This point is noted by Bruce McFarlane, ‘Postwar Economic Policy’, in A. Curthoys and J. Merritt (eds), Australia’s First Cold War, vol. 1, 44, 220.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 203 Commonwealth Bank, and Treasury advisers—of whom the most important was the recently appointed Secretary, Roland Wilson— warned the Government that drastic action was needed at once to

avoid an external imbalance of major proportions. The device reluctantly adopted was import control through licensing, and a stringent system came into force on 8 March. Import licensing had been introduced at the beginning of the war, but after 1945 it had

been gradually relaxed until it was confined to imports that cost precious dollars. The new policy was thus for the Government an embarrassing ideological retreat: to a major part of the wartime system of direct economic control. The cuts suddenly made by the licensing system were very severe. Contemporaries estimated that their net effect would be to reduce imports to something like half their value during the year 1951-52.5 They would most severely affect the United Kingdom, Australia’s major trading partner in a variety of textiles and other manufactured goods. Britain was under new management. The Conservatives had won the general election of October 1951, and Churchill was again Prime

Minister. When the Australian Government’s new moves were announced, Churchill sent word asking Menzies to come to London

within three weeks of 8 April. According to Ben Cockram of the British High Commission in Canberra, the purpose of the summons was to discuss Australia’s import cuts and the unemployment that would result from them, particularly in Lancashire. Allen Brown pointed out to Menzies that the House of Commons would be out of

session from 11 to 24 April ‘and if you made a visit during this period and some satisfactory arrangements had been made or even looked like being made, then a considerable amount of pressure would be removed from the Churchill Government’. He urged Menzies to delay the trip for six to eight weeks. It might look ‘a little

undignified for the Prime Minister of Australia to be summoned like a schoolboy to London to explain himself and then do what he is told’. It would be more appropriate, he thought, for the British President of the Board of Trade to come to Canberra, to see Menzies!?

Menzies took the advice to delay, though not as long as Brown suggested. He had matters other than the import cuts to discuss in England and America. Defence was one issue. There were also the difficulties being currently faced by the sterling area. Commonwealth finance ministers had organized an emergency meeting on this subject during January. In the face of overspending by members

5 RT, September 1952, 374-7. ° Brown to Menzies, 9 April 1952, AA, A1209/23, Item 57/5055.

204 ROBERT MENZIES in the sterling area, dollar and gold resources had fallen too rapidly, and austere measures were needed for each country ‘to live within the means which are or can be available to it’. And there was a need for ‘frequent and comprehensive consultation’.'9 Before leaving, however, Menzies took a few days off to relax ona cruise off the Queensland coast in the HMAS Australia, and stopped off for a fishing trip at Hayman Island.!! From Melbourne his crusty old friend Lionel Lindsay wrote to say how pleased he was to hear

that Menzies had had a break on the Barrier Reef, “and trust you caught some actual fish. It must have felt like a return to nature after

the close atmosphere of Canberra’.!* Then, on 14 May, he left Australia, bound for London via the United States. Pat and a strong little team of advisers went with him.!3 The gossip newssheet Inside Canberra remarked that the trip ‘comes too soon after criticism of the Australian Government’s import cuts from all sides of the House of

Commons not to savour something of a “summons”, as in the old colonial days, of a recalcitrant member of the Empire’.!4

Only two weeks before Menzies reached the United States, the security treaty of which Spender had dreamed and for which he had worked so hard finally became a reality. This was the ANZUS Pact, signed by Australia, New Zealand and the United States for mutual protection against aggression. It had been initialled in Washington

in July 1951, subsequently ratified in each of the participating countries, and came into force on 29 April 1952. Its achievement had been made possible by an almost fortuitous combination of elements in the international situation: United States gratitude for prompt Australian support in Korea, and American and British anxiety for an early Japanese peace treaty under which, as Spender put it, ‘Japan should be allowed the means to defend itself against ageression’.!° Majority opinion in Australia, remembering the atrocities war prisoners had suffered, wanted a hard settlement which

disarmed Japan and guaranteed that there could never be a repetition of her aggression. But, especially against the background of the Korean conflict, Britain and the United States saw a Westernoriented Japan as vital to the containment of communism in Asia. 1021 January 1952, Conference of Commonwealth Finance Ministers, Communiqué, NLA, MS. 4936/35 /526/13. SMH, 9, 26 April 1952. '2 Lindsay to Menzies, ‘May’ 1952, NLA, MS. 10375/290. '3 The Times, 15 May, and San Francisco Chronicle, 16 May 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/28/ April-June 1952. The party included Allen Brown, Roland Wilson, A. S. Watt (Secretary, Department of External Affairs), F. Chilton (Deputy Secretary, Defence Department). 4 17 May 1952. This roneoed sheet was written by Eric White and Don Whitington. 'S Alan Watt, The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy, 1938-1965, 117, 122.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 205 Though Australia, as a minor power, could have in practice done little to resist a ‘moderate’ Japanese settlement, it could still—and the more effectively—press the United States for compensating security arrangements. Spender also argued for protection of Australia’s ‘back door’ if in the event of a global ‘hot war’ she was to follow Britain’s preferred Commonwealth strategy and send forces to help protect the Middle East. On 6 May Acheson, the American Secretary of State, informed President Truman that Menzies would soon be in Washington, on his way to London, and suggested that he be entertained at lunch. Of Menzies Acheson noted that:

his Government has given strong support to us on major international issues, particularly in the case of Korea. The recently concluded Security Treaty between the U.S., Australia and New Zealand has received bipartisan support in Australia and has been welcomed as an important step in bringing Australia and the U.S. into a closer relationship.'©

The lunch duly took place. For it and the discussions which followed

it Truman and Acheson were both well briefed by their subordinates, with biographical notes on individuals in Menzies’ party, on the ANZUS Treaty, on Australia’s defence programme and on Australia’s contribution to United Nations forces in Korea.!” Menzies himself had two particularly ambitious hopes prior to the talks. He

wanted Australia to be privy to global Western strategy through admittance to the planning and policy-making bodies of NATO. And, as a further guarantee under ANZUS, he wanted to secure the firm commitment of American troops to Southeast Asia. But in both

he was frustrated.!®

In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that Truman or his subordinates saw the occasion of the meeting with Menzies as other

than one of the many conventional, polite encounters which were the stuff of their daily diplomatic work. In a brief memorandum recording Menzies’ conversation with the President after lunch Acheson noted that ‘most of the talk was purely social’.!” '6 Memo, Acheson to President, 6 May 1952. Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Official File. ' Harry S. Truman Library, President’s Secretary’s Files. On Menzies’ own ‘characteristics’ the note was brief and complimentary: ‘Brilliant. Self-confident. Industrious. An eloquent and persuasive speaker’. ' Lee, ‘National Security Planning and Defence Preparations of the Menzies Govern0 19 May, ‘Memorandum of conversation with the President’. Papers of Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman Library. Gregory Pemberton, however, has shown that in discussions with Truman’s aides, Menzies failed in a bid to get US grant-aid for the purchase of new jet-fighters (All the Way, 21, 352).

206 ROBERT MENZIES The Menzies reached Britain on 23 May, to be met at the airport by Anthony Eden, now again Churchill’s Foreign Secretary. The Times, after a lucid exposition of the chief matters Menzies was in England to discuss, welcomed him with the warmest of editorials, describing him as being ‘in this country the best known of living Australians—with the possible exception of Sir Donald Bradman— and there is none who is more highly regarded’.”° In reality, no one

could seem less like a recalcitrant schoolboy, come to explain himself to his betters! Almost at once the Menzies had lunch at Buckingham Palace as the guests of the Queen. Later, there was a formal dinner hosted by Churchill at 10 Downing Street. Whitsun, at the end of his first week in London, gave Menzies the chance to watch cricket at Lords and entertain at lunch his old friend, the onetime English cricketer, Sir Pelham (‘Plum’) Warner.?! That afternoon

Menzies and his wife motored down to Chartwell for a weekend

with the Churchills.

Then, on 4 June, came the ceremonial highlight of the trip: admission to the freedom of the City of London. Menzies and Pat drove the long route from the Law Courts to the Guildhall in an open State landau (lent by the Queen). Cheering crowds lined the way. At the Guildhall Menzies inspected a guard of honour and, under draped British and Australian flags, Sir Leslie Boyce, the first Australian-born Lord Mayor of London, presented him with the freedom of the city. It was, for a British-Australian of Menzies’ generation and sentiment, a moving experience. In his speech of

acknowledgement, Menzies claimed kinship with Londoners because he, too, had been there during the blitz which, he said, could not have been endured without such blessings as Cockney humour.” But the main purpose of the visit remained to explain to the British why import quotas had been imposed and what that meant for the larger Commonwealth community. Menzies was at once besieged by special interests which suffered severely—in some cases

disastrously—from the Australian import restrictions. He met delegations, conferred with trade officials and bankers and—above all —addressed meetings of manufacturers and their tradesmen.?? He visited various provincial centres, speaking at gatherings arranged

by organizations such as the Federation of British Industries to representatives of a wide range of firms: especially the makers of 20 24 May 1952. 41 Daily Telegraph (London), 30 May 1952. 22 The Times, 5 June 1952.

3 The account which follows is based primarily on cuttings in two volumes in NLA, MS. 4936/28, ‘April to June 1952’, and vol. 5.

, DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 207 cutlery, pottery, carpets, textiles, boots and shoes, motor vehicles, aircraft. The largest of his meetings was in London, organized by the Empire Industries Association and the British Empire League and held on 9 June at the Central Hall, Westminster. As this sponsorship suggested, the meeting attracted many besides representatives of manufacturing interests. Menzies’ speech was a four de force. It

offered a most detailed and reasoned explanation of Australia’s economic situation, affirmed his belief that in Australia ‘we are at the beginning of our growth, not at the end of it’, and asserted the need for more economic consultation within the British Commonwealth on the problems of trade and currency convertibility.”4

In his speeches and reception of delegations Menzies did not waver in response to pleas for attenuation of the Australian policy, and on the whole his stand was accepted, even admired, if press reaction is any guide. The Times, for example, wrote of his having

‘abundantly justified his Government's stern policy’, and the Manchester Guardian observed how he had ‘manfully refused to weaken on the import cuts’.*° There were talks with British officials, mainly conducted by the experts Menzies had brought with him, on

the alleviation of cases of hardship, but no public announcement was made about any concessions. It was known that Menzies was in

touch with his Cabinet by cable but to what effect no journalist discovered: Menzies’ skill at sidestepping or ignoring questions he

did not wish to answer was repeatedly remarked on. But in fact, chiefly as a result of talks at the British Board of Trade, he had sug-

gested to Cabinet that in particular industries ‘where it is claimed that “the shoe pinches sharply”’ supplementary licences up to a total of £10 million in the September quarter might be conceded. Such a gesture now ‘would pay us dividends in goodwill and in maintaining Australia’s good name out of proportion to the money involved thereby’. But, after taking advice on the technical aspects of the proposal from the Department of Trade and Customs, Cabinet firmly rejected the proposal.*° Menzies was also foiled when he

had had talks with the British Treasury and with certain London banks about the possibility of modifying the import cuts if credit or

a standby guarantee could be made available. Both refused the necessary funds.

+4 Typescript in the papers of Sir Thomas White, privately held by Mrs Judith Harley, through whose courtesy this item was made available to me. 2514 ,17 June 1952.

*6 Cabinet submission no. 282: Import Restrictions. Prime Minister’s Discussions in London. A. W. Fadden, 11 June 1952, and Cabinet Minute, Decision No. 454. AA, A4905 XMI, vol. II.

208 ROBERT MENZIES Defence was the other subject on which Menzies and his officials

had much negotiation with British authorities. He had as little success with the British as he had had with the Americans about Australia becoming privy to NATO planning. He hoped in vain to move Churchill with the argument that the Middle East, which in Commonwealth defence planning was largely Australia’s responsi-

bility, was the place where Commonwealth plans and those of NATO met. His assertion that Australia should therefore take part in NATO planning fell on deaf ears. Pacific and Southeast Asian

defence matters took Menzies on brief visits to The Hague and Paris, but again the substance of any talks he had there was not disclosed.*”

He was farewelled, just as he had been greeted, by a warm Times editorial which spoke of his busy time in London as negotiator and speaker at ‘a number of convivial, sporting and ceremonial functions’, and how ‘the robust and stimulating temper of his speeches in these three weeks on general topics—with the confidence he has shown and evoked in the ability of this people, like the Australian people, to triumph over all the threats of the hour—has proved once more a tonic to us all’. Most newspapers carried similar remarks: he had clearly made a great impression. And on that last day the News Chronicle published a most friendly interview with Mrs Menzies, who pressed possible women migrants to ‘give us a trial’. Asked by

the journalist who conducted the interview what type of women were wanted most, the Prime Minister’s wite replied: “professional

women—nurses, almoners, doctors, architects, journalists’. She added: ‘I should be very surprised to hear that any English woman got on badly with her Australian neighbours. We are generally considered a friendly and hospitable people’. The interviewer could not but believe Mrs Menzies, if the latter were to be considered a typical Australian. On leaving the interview, the lady journalist forgot her handbag. Remembering it when she reached the foyer, she was in process of picking up the telephone to ring the Menzies’ suite when she heard a puffed voice behind her: “Oh, I’m so glad I caught you—

you forgot this’. It was the Prime Minister’s wife, who had run down four flights of stairs in the hope of catching up with the lift.

Menzies arrived back in Sydney on 2 July, and at a press conference declared of his trip that ‘the success achieved is far beyond 47 The Australian ambassador in Paris, Keith Officer, wrote to his friend Peter Heydon, that ‘the P.M. was looking heavier than when I saw him last and .. . had lost some of his old fire. He admits to having had a difficult year and I think he was finding the

present trip a considerable strain ... He reported from London before leaving for New York that things had gone well there and he was feeling much better’. Officer to Heydon, 24 June 1952, NLA, MS. 2629/1 /1482.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 209 any expectations I had before I went away’. He listed as his most important achievements the damping down of the British outcry against import cuts, the negotiation on the way home of another dollar loan in the United States, the speeding up of the first meeting of the Pacific Council,2® and his successful pressure for a new and

urgent Commonwealth Conference on currencies, trade and

commerce. Australia was to step up her food production as part of

the Commonwealth’s defence plans, and in return some of her armament needs ‘will be added to the United Kingdom shopping list and we will get our proportion as it is produced’. In talks with

the British Atomic Energy Commission ‘we have thrashed out heads of agreements for the development, financing and disposing of some products from our uranium fields’. Finally, arrangements had been advanced for a Royal Tour to Australia. The American Embassy’s regular report on Australia summed up the initial response to Menzies’ claims by saying that newspaper editorials ‘concede that the Prime Minister did a good job on an arduous foreign mission’. But “practically all have contrasted his reception abroad with the tough politico-economic situation facing him at home, giving more or less implicit warning of a hard road to hoe ahead of him’.?? Menzies’ first taste of the hardness of that road came in a warning letter his close friend, the wealthy woolbroker J. R. McGregor, wrote

to him on the day of his arrival home from his trip abroad.

McGregor was full of congratulations for ‘all that you’ve done for this very unappreciative country during your journey’, but warned

that:

You've come home to nothing but worry and to a very preoccupied bunch of confreres ... as their local problems—so near at hand and so pressing—make them not too receptive to statesmanship & the oncoming international problems with which you’ve been dealing. I must assure you however, Robert, that it is difficult to overestimate the almost universal resentment at the last Budget

and the seriousness of the need, if there was to be even a remote chance of retaining a Senate majority, to look again at the budget and ‘recast [it], &, if possible, recast retrospectively’. The ‘Banking 28 The Council of ANZUS, referred to here by Menzies as the ‘Pacific Pact’, erroneously. The Council was to meet in August, in Honolulu. This was the one promise Menzies

had managed to extract during his American trip from Dean Acheson, who would also personally attend the meeting. *° Report of 1-14 July 1952. National Archives, Washington, Department of State, 743.00 /7-1852.

210 ROBERT MENZIES problem’ was also urgent ‘if the govt. are to recover very vital support’. Iam no politician & it never occurred to me to play Cassandra—but | have an abiding affection for you all, Robert, and I don’t wish to see you ever again in Opposition—it would be I fear—for an indefinite term, as I have never known such generality of resentment—or swing of political interest as exists at present.°°

Much of the trouble was obviously within Menzies’ own ranks. During his absence the American Embassy watchers had written of a Liberal backbench ‘practically in a state of open revolt’, though no concerted move against Menzies had taken place, simply because

‘there is no leader around whom the discontented ones can

coalesce’.3! On his arrival in Australia, a partisan, biting Sydney Morning Herald article alleged the same disaffection. The 1949 election, it said, ‘threw up on the Liberal side some of the brightest and most earnest young men seen in parliament for many years’. They were firmly imbued with the tenets of Liberalism. They really believed in free enterprise, desocialisation, a fair deal for private banking, reduced taxation, removal of controls—all the principles so eloquently expounded by their leader. In the ‘glad, confident morning’ of the 1950 Parliament, they were full of hope for the future and of trust in their cabinet chiefs.

But they have seen, at first with surprise, and then with growing dismay, party principle after principle placed in cold storage or thrown overboard. They have seen ministers defer uncritically to the views of socialistic planners, inherited from the Chifley regime.

... Now these backbenchers are thinking for themselves, and

insisting that the Government take more notice of party and public feeling, and less of the ‘expert’ guides who have led it astray.**

Here was an explicit remonstrance about the planning, the apparent drift back towards wartime exigencies, which the defence program seemed to be making necessary, and which the Liberal Party ‘appreciation’ at the end of 1951 had spoken of. Conservative backbench

sensibilities were reflected in the gratuitous reference to “expert guides’ who were supposedly leading the Government ‘astray’. Menzies himself in fact never wavered in his defence of the public

309 McGregor to Menzies, 2 July 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/21/178. 31 Report of 19 June 1952, Department of State, 743.00/6—-1152. 32 3 July 1952.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 211 service chiefs he had inherited from Chifley.23 And as Bruce McFarlane says when noting some of the more unhappy economic aspects of the defence programme of 1950-53, ‘only the coterie of exceptional public servants at the pinnacle of policy management prevented the effects from being worse than they were’.*4 The Liberal whip, Jo Gullett, told Menzies in a welcome home note on 9 July that he thought it advisable to have a party meeting as soon as possible. “There is a very strong opinion among a great majority of members’, he wrote, that there should be a considerable reduction in both income and sales taxation ... You will, of course, realise that we are all at the moment under very considerable pressure from our electors. Though it may not be practical to do so, members would very much value an opportunity of discussing financial matters before the Budget has been irrevocably

decided upon.» ,

A note on the foot of this letter—‘Appt. arranged for Mr Gullett. 5.45 p.m. 23/7’—suggests that Menzies did not share his whip’s

sense of urgency, or at least that he was not prepared to have extensive party-room discussion of matters connected with the budget, which must by now have been in an advanced stage of preparation. (The date for its presentation to parliament had already been set at 6 August.)

A meeting of the parliamentary party, as recommended by Gullett, was held on Monday 4 August, just before the budget session began. The budget was apparently not discussed but a eroup of rank and file party members urged the Government to legislate to stop quarterly basic wage adjustments while the Arbitration Court was hearing a current basic wage and standard hours case. They argued that such action was necessary to stop an upward spiral of the basic wage, which they alleged was a principal factor contributing to the Government’s economic embarrassment. But Menzies rejected the idea out of hand: the court, he declared, had sole control of questions relating to the basic wage, and any interference by the Government would be highly improper.*¢ A further meeting was held on the following evening, which was the night before Fadden was to bring the budget down. What exactly was 33 His remarks on this subject are legion. For a particularly spirited example see his rejection of allegations against Coombs and others at the Party’s ‘Key Personnel Conference’ in October 1952. NLA, MS. 4936/14/414/35. 34 “Postwar Economic Policy’, 45. 35 Gullett to Menzies, 9 July 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/13/115. 36 Age, 5 August 1952.

212 ROBERT MENZIES discussed was not leaked to the press, but the atmosphere of the meeting was. E. H. Cox, of the Melbourne Herald, described it as ‘the most widespread and bitter challenge to Government authority and Government policy which Mr Menzies has had to face since he resumed the Prime Minister’s chair’.3’” As was understood to be

normal, the Government probably gave some outline of what would be in the budget, but any who had hoped for discussion before detail had ‘irrevocably been decided upon’ must have been

sadly disappointed. At one level they should not have been because, although all rank and filers did not agree with him, Menzies was always quite inflexible in maintaining that construction of the budget was a matter for Cabinet. He maintained that if there were general party discussion of detail at the planning stage— even behind closed doors—the danger of vital information being leaked ahead of budget presentation was too serious to risk. And even an outline of the coming budget, certainly not a ‘horrific’ one,

must have mollified some critics. Almost certainly, the most vehement attack was an expression of discontent at the past direc-

tion of Government policy, and frustration at what was seen as Menzies’ aloofness and disinclination to consult the ordinary member. One well-disposed and well-informed observer, the conservative Bulletin journalist Malcolm Ellis, would soon write in a private letter: ‘Most of the young members are becoming more and more restive about their relationships with the PM who is too busy

to see much of them. . .’.98 An example of the unease felt by some supporters outside as well

as inside parliament reached Menzies not long before the budget session opened. It was sent by an old associate from UAP days, F. E. Lampe.*%? As a matter of courtesy, Lampe provided the notes of

a speech he was about to give at a businessmen’s dinner. He had three major criticisms to make of the Government. It had been too indecisive, delaying action too long and then making it too drastic. Its basic problem was that it did not look ahead: business, Lampe wrote, works by predicting trends, and the Government should cooperate with business in such matters. Secondly, the Government’s public relations were woeful: it consistently failed to explain its problems and policies to the people. And thirdly, in industrial rela-

37 FE. H. Cox, “Capital Talk’ column, Melbourne Herald, 8 August 1952. 38 Ellis to Spender, 26 November 1952, NLA, MS. 4875/1/4. 3? Lampe was a Director of Manton and Sons Ltd, and at the time of the 1943 UAP elec-

toral defeat was a leading light in the IPA and one of those who made an insightful analysis of the causes of the débacle (see vol. 1, 417-19). Lampe to Menzies, 14 July 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/18/153.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 213 tions, Australia was still applying 1920 attitudes to 1950s problems: assuming that the issues at stake were still class issues, in which the protagonists lined up in opposing camps. The Government should take the lead in fostering a change of attitude, in urging co-operation

between unions and management to increase productivity. In all three points, he added, lessons could be learned from America, where these things were handled very much better. Morale improved markedly when Fadden unveiled the budget.

Its most prominent features were modest reductions in company and sales taxes and, above all, the dropping of a 10 per cent levy imposed on individuals’ income tax in the ‘horror budget’ of the previous year. Even the Sydney Morning Herald, while saying it had not gone far enough, conceded that the budget, with its tax cuts ‘for

the most part well considered’, was likely to have a ‘stimulating effect’ on the economy.*? E. H. Cox reported that the budget had ‘magically, for a moment at least, stilled the all-too-evident spirit of unrest in which Government Party members returned to Canberra’. Labor found it difficult to argue cogently against such a budget, and Menzies, who very neatly took apart Evatt’s rather leaden-footed attack on it, gained in prestige after being listened to in complete

silence by an Opposition “driven to this extreme course by his ability to score off interrupters’.4! For the rest of the session, and despite a continuing decline in Liberal fortunes, there was no further

overt backbench revolt, as much as anything because the tough Leader of the House and faithful Menzies lieutenant, Eric Harrison,

made it his particular task to restore discipline and see to it that disagreements stayed behind the closed doors of party meetings. Though the budget seemed briefly to ease the pressure on the Government, the import cuts remained, the longer-term sufferings caused by the ‘horror budget’ of 1951 lingered on, and inflation was far from being cured. Then, in October, the first of two by-elections

took place in which hitherto undifferentiated dissatisfaction with the Menzies Government seemed to turn ominously into sharp hostility. This was for the Flinders electorate, in Victoria. It fell vacant on the death of the sitting Liberal member, Rupert Ryan, who had won the seat at the 1951 election with an absolute majority of 4000. The press and the main parties regarded the by-election as ‘the most important test the Menzies Government has faced since it

407 August 1952.

» > tephen Holmes to Viscount Swinton, 18 December 1952, PRO, DO 35/8066.

214 ROBERT MENZIES assumed office in 1949’, and an intense campaign followed.* Evatt and Menzies came to the electorate to open their parties’ campaign,

and Menzies spoke there again at least twice. Other State and federal politicians supported the candidates; the staple arguments were about inflation, unemployment and, generally, the effects of the Government’s economic measures. The poll registered a drastic swing against the Government. The

Labor candidate, a 32-year-old honours graduate in Arts and Commerce, K. W. Ewert, walked in with almost exactly the same majority as that which Ryan had enjoyed. Putting on the best face he could, Menzies said he made no apologies for the defeat: ‘at a time

of great economic problems the path of the destructive critic is much easier’. Further, as a popular local man, Ryan had had a large personal following. But, as the Age put it, “whatever be said of the Flinders verdict, it continues and confirms the trend shown since mid-1951, and exemplifies with even stronger emphasis the swing against the Federal coalition’.44 The ALP, naturally, was jubilant. The Federal Secretary of the Party, P. J. Kennelly, claimed that Labor

could win between 28 and 36 seats at a Federal election if the Flinders swing was any guide. The British High Commissioner expressed a truth widely accepted on all sides when he reported to his superiors in London: “There is no doubt at all that if a General

Election were held at present the result would be a Labour victory’. Evatt received many messages like W. 5S. Robinson’s: “Bert, Congratulations on an overwhelming victory’.*6 For his part, Evatt

declared that the Flinders verdict had condemned the Govern-

ment’s “financial and economic policies as well as the scandalous sell-outs to private concerns of assets belonging to the people’. After this vote, for example, the Menzies—Fadden Coalition had ‘no moral

right’ to proceed with a bill already before Parliament to dispose

of Government interests in the Commonwealth Oil Refineries (COR).#7

Federal Cabinet met on 21 October to consider the Flinders setback. After the meeting it was announced that present financial and economic policy would not be changed and that the Ministry would 43 SMH, 17 October 1952. It included campaigning by the member for Corio, one-time cycling champion Hubert Opperman, who rode up and down the electorate signing

autographs for children and giving them how-to-vote cards to take home to their

: parents (SMH, 5 October 1952). Journalists recalled that Flinders had once provided probably the greatest reverse in Federal political history; the defeat in 1929 of the

Prime Minister, S. M. Bruce. 4420 October 1952. 45 Stephen Holmes to Swinton, 18 December 1952. 46 W. S. Robinson to Evatt, 19 October 1952, Evatt Papers, Flinders University Library. 47 SMH, 20 October 1952.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 215 proceed with its legislative programme, including the disposal of

the Government interest in COR and a banking bill. Ministers reiterated that they had been elected on a desocialization mandate and declared that they would proceed accordingly.*8 It was a forthright statement of position designed to attenuate internal criticism and stiffen party discipline. But scarcely a month later, the Government indirectly suffered another by-election setback when at Werriwa E.G. Whitlam won the seat with a greatly increased majority. It had been previously held by the Labor stalwart H. P. Lazzarini, but Whitlam’s victory represented a new swing of 12 per cent against the Liberal Party. Evatt rejoiced that “in effect Werriwa repeats the smashing verdict of

Flinders’, and Whitlam himself observed that his victory reflected ‘the resentment of the people in a fast-growing area on the border of the city [Sydney] against the Federal Government’s economic policy—their resentment of the restrictions on home finance and the curtailment of loan money for schools, hospitals and other civic amenities’.4? A few days before this by-election Malcolm Ellis, strong supporter of the Government, wrote a long letter in answer to a request by Spender, from America, for a review of the political situation. The one bright spot, Ellis said, was that the economic situation was stabilizing itself, but ‘this does not mean that trust of the Government is growing’. All the time we have to face the fact that in energy and drive—and also in brazen hide—Evatt and Calwell and their shadow Cabinet put it all over our people ... You have seen Bob Menzies by this time and can

judge his state of health for yourself. My own impression of him in Canberra six weeks ago was that he had aged in the past few months, that he had too much weight on his frame and that he was losing his energy. Everybody seems to agree that he will crack up like Lyons if he is

not careful.”

The general assumption was that the future was not bright for the Government. Half-Senate elections were due in May 1953 and, as Ellis said, the omens were not good. Beside the unhappy results of the Flinders and Werriwa by-elections, there were to be three State elections before the Senate contests, and the non-Labor parties had a chance in only one of these. On all sides the probability, for some the

inevitability, of what W.S. Robinson said in a letter to Evatt in December, was accepted: 48 Age, 22 October 1952.

49 SMH, 30 November 1952. 0 Ellis to Spender, 26 November 1952, NLA, MS. 4875/1/4.

216 ROBERT MENZIES When this Parliament has run its course—if not before—you will be Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia. I cherish the hope that then I will be still above ground, with at least sufficient strength left to cheer you.”!

(Robinson was still a very hale 76-year-old!) Even the American Embassy reporter felt in November 1952 that Evatt was ‘newly strong’. He was glad to tell his superiors that the

Opposition leader had addressed coalminers and ironworkers before a recent election of union officials, and ‘the Embassy knows

of no other occasion when Dr Evatt has come within miles of speaking so frankly and unmistakably against the Communists’.

And, perhaps more important, he ‘went a long way during the last session toward establishing his stature as a statesman’. Of course, it ‘is always easy to assign ulterior motives to good deeds’, but still two incidents were noteworthy. In the first Evatt gave his personal support warmly in Parliament to the Treasurer, Fadden, when the latter’s integrity was unfairly attacked by a Sydney newspaper. In the second he deferred a debate on ANZUS in which the Government was likely to be damaged until after the Flinders by-election. ‘One might almost say that Dr Evatt already feels the mantle of the Prime Ministership descending on his shoulders and is responding with that traditional sense of responsibility which gives the Parliamentary system its peculiar greatness.”>* That Evatt himself felt this

and received seemingly endless confirmation of impending power is essential to an understanding of many of the emotions and events of the coming year and a half.

Party problems, the budget debate, the Flinders by-election and a heavy parliamentary session which began in August and was to continue, without a break, into December took serious toll of Menzies’ health. He was always in his place when the Representatives convened, and took the lion’s share of day-to-day speaking in the relentless work of the House. Speeches and travel during the

Flinders contest added to his fatigue. Though characteristically cheerful, he was by the end of October run down, and a prey to infections. What made this a potentially serious development was the Government’s earlier agreement that without question Menzies should be the leader of the Australian delegation to the Commonwealth Economic Conference to be held in November—December 51 'W. S. Robinson to Evatt, 15 December 1952, Evatt Papers, Flinders University Library.

52 Julian L. Nugent, First Secretary, for the Ambassador. US National Archives, 24 November 1952, Department of State, Decimal File 743.00/11-1452.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 217 1952. His leadership was both natural and proper, in that, following

his visit to London in June, he had been the chief advocate and architect of further discussions on urgent Commonwealth currency and trade problems. His personal commitment to the Conference was inflexible. He was booked to leave Australia on 13 November to travel to England via the United States and be there in good time to prepare for the meetings.

But in early November he developed a bad dose of influenza (mistakenly thought by some journalists to be pneumonia) together

with conjunctivitis. Bedridden for some days, he appeared to recover, and on 11 November he attended the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Australian War Memorial. But it was a cold Canberra day, which brought on an immediate relapse. Menzies was unable to attend a special Cabinet meeting arranged for the next day to begin briefing him for the London conference. His chief medical adviser, Dr Ralph McMeeking,® had already ordered a deferral of the departure date for a week. Ministerial colleagues urged Menzies to go further and to abandon all idea of making the trip. Churchill offered to send a special Comet jet airliner to Singapore to pick the Australian Prime Minister up there and to

reduce the flying time. But Churchill also urged that Menzies should not attempt the trip if there was the slightest risk of his health being jeopardised.

The most impassioned appeal to reason, however, came from Menzies’ own special ‘family’, in a note from the head of his Department, Allen Brown. Nothing catches better the mood of concern, at this point, of those closest to the Prime Minister:

I believe quite firmly that you should not go to the Conference... You know that you are run down physically and very tired; you are picking up every stray wog and find it very difficult to get rid of them... Going into a northern winter and the fog of London cannot improve this. You contemplate a fortnight’s rest when you get back, but this will not be enough. Next year has all the appearance of being harder for you than this—there will still be acute differences with the States, the Senate Election—the budget—the general political scene ... You have every prospect of being behind scratch physically and not catching up. What of the other side? The conference is intrinsically important— you have promised to go—there is a string of commitments and halfcommitments to many people and on many subjects not connected with the conference ... But none of these things can out-weigh the considerations mentioned earlier. It is also possible to overstress the significance °3 McMeeking was a Melbourne specialist who motored up to see Menzies. He had attended the family during its earlier Melbourne days.

218 ROBERT MENZIES of the conference and particularly Australia’s share in it. Mr McEwen is

not inexperienced in negotiations (and could be instructed) ... Let us not forget that it is Britain’s currency policy that will make or mar the operation.

While Australia could help or hinder the British position, it had no decisive importance.°* Always the level-headed adviser, Brown wanted to curb Menzies’ sense of being indispensable and get him to put things into proper perspective. A few days later Staniforth Ricketson, the stockbroker, wrote to Frank Menzies in some alarm about his brother’s health, suggesting that he was not well enough to go to London and needed ‘a complete break’. For this purpose

Ricketson offered the use of a farm he owned, where the Prime Minister, Pat and Heather could hide away and have a complete

rest. But the offer came to nothing.» On 20 November Menzies’ doctors acceded to intense pressure

from Menzies himself and decided, against the instincts of his family and his Department, that he could go to England for the Conference. But there were conditions. In England Menzies was not to agree to any social engagements outside the Conference, and on his return he was to take a proper holiday. Heather, then 24, was to go with him, as censor and nurse. The doctors insisted that Pat, who was also run down and had a bad cold, should stay and recuperate in Canberra. Menzies climbed uncertainly into the Governor-General’s RAAF

plane at Canberra airport on 21 November. ‘I am just about twothirds alive’, he told reporters. As he subsequently boarded his international flight in Sydney, friends were alarmed at his pale and drawn appearance. The trip that followed was hardly restful. When they finally arrived in London, many hours later than scheduled, Heather told interviewers of a journey marred by three disturbing aircraft faults. The first, between San Francisco and Dallas, had involved engine trouble; in the second, between Dallas and New York, one of the plane’s engines caught fire (‘My father just sat and watched it through the window. He didn’t say a word. I never knew

till we landed’). The third was the most unsettling. They flew out from New York on a regular BOAC flight to London. Anthony Eden, returning from talks on current peace negotiations over Korea, was >4 Brown to Menzies, 12 November 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/5/37. °° Ricketson to Frank Menzies, 15 November 1952. On 23 January Menzies wrote to thank his old friend for the thought: ‘But I still think I was right to go to the Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. As a result I am sure we have a better understanding of the problems of the various countries of the Commonwealth and of each other’, NLA, MS. 4936/2/50/121.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 219 a fellow passenger. But after the aircraft was well over the Atlantic the pilot detected engine trouble and turned back. Heather found it a dramatic and frightening experience as the plane jettisoned fuel and headed for the closest aerodrome. That was Gander, in Newfoundland, which provided—said Heather afterwards, in cheerfully sardonic vein—an unscheduled chance to see part of Canada. Since the offending engine had to be replaced the travellers endured,

during the night, hours of trying to sleep in a primitive hotel at what was a tiny, but very noisy, airport.

The London Economic Conference began almost as soon as Menzies arrived. His health does not seem to have deteriorated under the strain. Early in the piece he attended a dinner Churchill gave at 10 Downing Street and, in common with the other distinguished Commonwealth visitors, had an audience with the Queen. After his first week in London the press reported that he looked tired, but not ill. ‘Carefully shepherded by his daughter, Heather, he is strictly observing his doctor’s advice to go as quietly as possible

outside conference engagements’. He discovered, indeed, that his doctor, McMeeking, had written to Churchill urging him to see that

Menzies did not work too hard!>°°

One highlight of the Conference was the attendance by invitation

of representatives of the seven participating Commonwealth countries at a British Cabinet meeting, at which the main topic for discussion was foreign affairs. Churchill invited the Prime Ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada to Chequers the following weekend for what were described as ‘secret Empire defence talks’. Though no official statement was issued, press reports suggested that the talks had three principal objects: to discuss Britain’s wish to join the ANZUS pact; to reconcile Britain and Canada’s responsibilities under NATO with the needs of imperial defence; and to plan an all-out research and production drive to equip Commonwealth forces with the most up-to-date weapons.*”

But the crux of the Conference was economic. Moreover, as

Menzies pointed out in a press statement on his return, this was not

a ‘crisis’ conference, called together as some earlier ones had been, to discuss what had to be done in the face of an emergency. A central problem, ever since the end of World War II, had been the imbalance between United States trade and that of the countries, of

which Britain was the centrepiece, which formed the ‘sterling area’. Endemic dollar shortages were exacerbated by United States °6 Hobart Mercury, 4 December 1952. 57 Adelaide Advertiser, 5 December 1952. At the cabinet meeting, this report said breath-

lessly, there was an unprecedented number of no less than seven Prime Ministers!

220 ROBERT MENZIES reluctance to lower trade barriers. At the same time the Americans

pressed for multilateral trade and a rapid advance towards convertibility between currencies. In the first few years after the war the Chifley Government, while looking forward to a time when the

dollar/sterling divide might eventually be bridged, had not

wavered in its economic support of Britain and a sterling system drastically weakened by the war.°® The Menzies Government followed the same course, though it showed a greater readiness than Labor to seek some American assistance through dollar loans. ‘Crises’ caused by dollar drain on sterling reserves had been features of Commonwealth meetings in 1947, 1949, 1950, and January

1952. At most of them, and most particularly at the last, participating countries agreed that something positive ought to be done about the dollar shortage.°? This conference had been one of Finance

Ministers: as we have seen, Menzies was a leading proponent of a further conference, this time of Prime Ministers, at the end of 1952 to examine how far the aims set out in January were being achieved and to decide on future policy directions. His anxiety when it came

to the point to overcome any obstacles to his attendance at the meeting as Australia’s leader was not simply a question of amour-

propre. The matters to be discussed and decided on were wideranging and would bear importantly upon the internal problems with which his Government was wrestling. In that sense the act of taking a prominent part in the Commonwealth economic confer-

ence of December 1952 could be looked on as an essential element in Menzies’ policy-making in this year of economic difficulties. It was not a ‘crisis’ conference in that some of the remedies adumbrated by the January meeting appeared to be working already, and

the dollar position was for the moment in hand. As Menzies put it, the real purpose of discussion now was to consider long-term policy, ‘to ensure steady progress towards the development of resources, the promotion of production and trade, and the ultimate achievement of convertibility of currencies’. The long communiqué issued at the end of the conference translated such generalities into a series

of objectives on which the conference was agreed. Some were internal, like perseverance in efforts to curb inflation, expanded production of ‘the essential supplies which the whole world needs —food and agricultural products, minerals and engineering products’, policies to increase the flow of savings. Others were international, like seeking the co-operation of countries outside the 8 David Lee, ‘Protecting the Sterling Area: The Chifley Government’s Response to Multilateralism, 1945-9", Australian Journal of Political Science (1990), vol. 25, 178-95.

°° J. G. Crawford, Australian Trade Policy, 1942-1966, 98. |

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 221 Commonwealth in expanding trade (‘Trade not Aid’), modifying

tariffs and other barriers to multilateral trade, and providing adequate financial support, through the International Monetary Fund or otherwise, for the development upon which higher production and improved standards of living must rest. In its “‘Conclusion’ the document stressed that the co-operative aims it outlined were ‘entirely consistent’ with the ties the Commonwealth had with the United States and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. “The Commonwealth countries look outward to similar

co-operation with other countries, not inward to a closed association.’ At least the notion of sterling autarky, tempting to many in

the worst phases of dollar shortage, had now been decisively rejected. It was agreed that ‘sterling should resume its full role as a

medium of world trade and exchange. An integral part of any effective multilateral system is the restoration of the convertibility

of sterling, but it can only be reached by progressive stages’. It remained to be seen how far, and indeed whether, all these good intentions modified some internal policies the Australian Government had felt obliged to follow. Before leaving for home, Menzies and Heather made a short visit to Brussels as the guests of the Belgian Government. It was not an official visit, but they were received by King Baudouin, and Menzies laid a wreath on the memorial to Belgium’s unknown soldier. They

came home via the United States but again had no official talks, though Menzies met Eisenhower, informally, for the first time, and he and Heather, together with the Spenders, took tea with Truman in the White House, ‘purely to pay respects’.¢! The travellers were safely home on Christmas Eve, in time for a quiet family Christmas at the Lodge: with her usual cook away on holiday, Mrs Menzies cooked the Christmas turkey herself, happy—she told reporters—to have her daughter home to help in the kitchen. Several days later Menzies went to Melbourne by car (‘I’ve done so much flying lately that I just couldn’t bring myself to face another plane trip’), arriving ‘gaunt and haggard’ and clearly in need of the holiday he had been ordered to take.®

One crucial, behind-the-scenes matter of this year was the coming

to fruition of Menzies’ unilateral agreement to the staging of a British atomic test at the Monte Bello Islands. He himself had nothing 69 “Final Communiqué of Commonwealth Economic Conference issued in London on 11 December 1952’, ibid., 115-18. 61 Age, Melbourne Sun, 19-21 December 1952. 62 SMH, DT, 29 December, 1952.

222 ROBERT MENZIES directly to do with the arrangements: as a layman he inevitably left all the practical arrangements to the scientists and administrators. It is difficult to imagine what other attitude he could have taken: and if, given the available knowledge at that time, key scientists erred in assessing the dangers of the tests, it seems unreasonable to blame

Menzies for the long-term outcome, as subsequent writers (also laymen) have been inclined to do. But it is true that Menzies’ unquestioning acceptance of the British insistence on secrecy, while fitting with his current Cold War fears and appreciation of American attitudes, created some strange situations.

One of the strangest was his refusal for many months to admit his Minister of Supply, Howard Beale, into the secret. After the election of April 1951 Menzies had replied positively to a request from Attlee that, since British investigations of the Monte Bello site were favourable, the atomic test might be allowed to take place in October

1952. Experts had calculated that weather and atmospheric conditions dictated this timing. Naval and other preparations would take over a year.®> Menzies arranged for Australia to assist in some

of these preparations. The Department of Supply was necessarily foremost in such work, yet Beale was not informed about it. On two

occasions, in June and October 1951, when questioned in Parliament about rumours of atomic tests in Australia, Beale vehemently branded such rumours as ‘completely false’.6t On his own account of it, he in the end learnt in strict confidence from his Departmental Head and friend, General Jack Stevens, of instructions which the latter had received to co-operate with the British and at the same time, on the so-called ‘need to know’ principle, not to tell Beale. Beale assumed that these instructions came from the Prime Minister. Though he ‘boiled and fumed at what I regarded as an insult’, Beale

in due course became an avid supporter of the British atomic initiatives in Australia.© It is true that in general his association with Menzies was not always comfortable, but Menzies’ refusal for so long to put his Minister into the picture arose from conspiratorial principles which went well beyond a personal relationship.

63 For an excellent account of these preparations see Lorna Arnold, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia (London, 1987), 33-46. 64 CPD 213: 718; 214: 643-4. 65 Howard Beale, This Inch of Time: Memoirs of Politics and Diplomacy, 78-9.

66 He suggests this in his memoirs. Hasluck observed that ‘Although he irritated Menzies and Menzies was somewhat unappreciative and even unfair to him, Beale had a very

Poltice 401) for Menzies and full appreciation of his great qualities’ (The Chance of

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 223 In August 1951, in a “Top Secret’ message, Menzies informed London that arrangements were now in hand in Australia to parallel the structure set up at the British end, as explained to him in a letter of 28 May, to plan the projected tests. In accordance with a change in code-name, this was the ‘Hurricane Panel (Australia)’. Its chief members were top naval, military and airforce staff officers,

with a representative of the Director-General of Security. Its task was to co-ordinate practical arrangements, oversee security, and confer, as necessary, with its British counterpart.®

The British decided on an early announcement that the test would take place in Australia, since speculation about it had already begun in the American press. The chosen time would be 12.30 GMT

on 18 February, when the British and Australian Governments would simultaneously make identical statements. These would be simply to the effect that in the course of the year the British Govern-

ment would be testing an atomic weapon produced in the United Kingdom and that ‘by arrangement with the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia the test will take place at a site in Aus-

tralia’. Menzies insisted on substituting the words ‘in close cooperation’ for ‘by arrangement’, but otherwise agreed to the British text.68 So the secret was out. But even this was not without a final anticlimax. Menzies had planned to inform his colleagues of the impending announcement at a Cabinet meeting at 10 a.m. on the 18th.

But he was frustrated because cables from Britain reached the

Australian press before the local official statement could be made. And a day or so earlier, Beale had again in ignorance made a fool of himself by publicly denying that consideration was being given to the testing of an atomic weapon on a rocket range in Australia.®

Though many experts were employed on the British atomic project at this time the three outstanding names connected with it were those of Sir John Cockcroft, Director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Sir William Penney, Director of Atomic Weapons Research at Aldermaston, and Sir Roger Makins. Cockcroft and Penney were distinguished physicists who had during

the war been leading scientists on the Manhattan project which produced the first atomic bomb; Makins was a diplomat who had close experience of Anglo-American relationships in atomic energy and was Ambassador to Washington between 1952 and 1956. During his trip to England in June 1952 Menzies inspected Harwell, and 67 Menzies to W. J. Garnett, 22 August 1951, PRO, FCO 1/2. 68 Williams to Menzies, 11 February 1952, PRO, FCO 1/3. 6’ B. Cockram to Dominion Office, 15 February 1952, ibid; Menzies to Ismay, 27 February 1952, NLA, MS. 4936/1/16/140.

224 ROBERT MENZIES talked, variously, with Cockcroft, Penney and Makins. The Aus-

tralian Government subsequently invited Cockcroft to visit in August-September, inter alia to speak at ANZAAS, to confer with ‘Defence People’ in Melbourne and to ‘open Oliphant’s new Laboratory’.”” Mark Oliphant, one-time Professor of Physics at Birmingham University and famous for his wartime scientific work, especially on radar and on the Manhattan project, was foundation Director of The Australian National University’s Research School of Physical Sciences. His ‘Laboratory’ was the University’s first substantial building. Cockcroft was in reality in the region to make the final arrangements for and to observe the Monte Bello explosion. Penney came too, though this was for a time ‘top secret’. In Melbourne Penney was particularly anxious to meet Leslie Martin, Professor of Physics at the University there. Scientific adviser to the Australian Department of Defence, Martin had worked for a time in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and was a key figure in the development of atomic research in Australia. A large team of British scientists would observe and judge the Monte Bello test and four Canadians had also been invited. What about Australians? Penney’s impression of Martin was favourable, and he and another scientist, Alan Butement, were accepted as observers. Butement, who had worked in England during the war on radar and other research in the Ministry of Supply, had returned to Australia in 1947, soon becoming the first chief superintendent of the Long Range Weapons Establishment —a joint British Australian venture (of which the Woomera Range was a part) for the development and testing of guided missiles.

Another scientist, whom the British were particularly anxious to have present, might at a pinch be thought an Australian represen-

tative. Ernest Titterton, English-born, had been Oliphant’s first research student at Birmingham University, had worked on the Man-

hattan and other atomic projects, and had accepted the offer from Oliphant of a chair in his new Department at the ANU. As early as January 1951, before Titterton had taken up this chair, the British planners of the tests hoped for his services when the test took place. Menzies was approached, and privately undertook, without initially

consulting Oliphant, that he would see that Titterton was available.”! As a needed expert (especially for his skill and experience in

instrumentation), and as an Englishman whose bona fides was beyond question, Titterton virtually ranked with the British scientists as the tests approached. 70 Cockcroft to N. Pritchard, 19 July 1952, PRO, DO 35/2542. 71 Robert Milliken, No Conceivable Injury: the Story of Britain and Australia’s Atomic Coverup (Ringwood, 1986), 70.

DIFFICULT TIMES, 1952 225 Not so Martin and Butement. The English atomic planners had been from the outset determined to shut Australians out as far as possible from technical knowledge about the test. To them the bomb was exclusively Britain’s and they were in addition very sensitive to the American prejudice about supposedly lax Australian security.

Much had been done to tighten this up, but in a revealing note in April 1952 one CRO official bemoaned the fact that “by explaining to the Australians the measures which we consider they should take to

bring their security standards up to the point we consider satisfactory, we shall deprive ourselves of the easiest excuse for withholding from them information about atomic matters in the future’.”* Excuse

or not, information appears to have been withheld right up to the Monte Bello explosion. This caused an instructive incident when in September 1952 Martin received his invitation to the test containing ‘as it did’—to use the words of one member of the British liaison staff—‘the details of certain restrictions’. At astormy meeting of the Australian Defence Committee someone (probably Martin himself) said that ‘the United Kingdom can be told to stuff their bomb up their jumpers’, and it was agreed to tell

the Cabinet that the invitation as it stood was an insult which should be declined. When told of this Cockcroft himself wrote a personal letter to Martin and had it delivered by hand through a member of his staff, one Christopher Hutchinson, who turned out to be an adroit diplomat. He pretended not to know about the row but helped the still furious Martin to decipher Cockcroft’s difficult handwriting: I pointed out that even if feelings had been hurt the refusal [of the invitation] would not only deprive the United Kingdom of his assistance and Australia of the experience, but would also make invalid any further Australian criticism of lack of opportunity to be scientifically associated with the test. I then quickly turned the subject to administrative arrangements for his stay in Monte Bello, the climate and what clothes to take, etc. He said he had no lightweight evening clothes so I got him to try on my jacket and seeing that it fitted offered him the loan

of a white mess jacket and kammerbund [sic]. He then smiled and promised to ring up Sir Fred Shedden straightaway and say that he now

wished to accept the invitation ... I am glad that all this ended satisfactorily.”

It ended satisfactorily for Hutchinson because no concession had been made at all to meet Martin’s original sense of insult. For the 72 Edwin Sykes to B. Cockram, 28 April 1952, PRO, FCO 173. 73 Christopher Hutchinson to B. Cockram, 24 September 1952, PRO, FCO 1/5.

226 ROBERT MENZIES rest, posterity has a quaint reminder that in 1952 even an atomic explosion could not be allowed to disturb the sartorial traditions of the British navy. Cockcroft had duly opened the million pound laboratories of the Research School of Physical Sciences on 5 September. Menzies told

the audience of over a thousand people that the world was a better place for the scientific discoveries of the past 30 to 40 years. ‘We can put every conceivable discovery to evil use. It is not the fault of the

discoverer but the fault of ourselves.” Later, at a ceremony in the Institute of Anatomy, Professor Oliphant presented Cockcroft to the new university’s vice-chancellor, who conferred an honorary degree on him.” On the previous day Cockcroft had seen Menzies and asked him ‘whether we might have facilities on Woomera Range for further tests if desired. He is agreeable in principle and to Penney

making a reconnaissance for possible sites’.”” At this ceremonial moment the way was thus opened, again without Menzies feeling a need to consult colleagues, for the establishment of testing grounds on the mainland and the ushering in of a series of test explosions which were to have serious consequences and make Monte Bello itself seem small beer.

The final act of the Monte Bello experiment came on 3 October 1952. The bomb had been placed in an anchored frigate, HMS Plym:

the aim was to investigate the effect of an atomic explosion in a harbour. As Churchill told the Commons, technical descriptions of the bomb’s performance could of course not be given. But it could be said ‘that the weapon behaved exactly as expected and forecast in many precise details by Dr W.G. Penney, whose services were of the highest order. Scientific observations and measurements show

that the weapon does not contradict the natural expectation that progress in this sphere would be continued’.”6 In Australia Menzies lauded the result and Evatt declared that the success of the Monte Bello explosion was no surprise. Britain and the British Commonwealth, he declared, had led the world in the field of atomic science,

where names like Rutherford, Cockcroft and Oliphant would be renowned for ever. It was indeed a time for rejoicing, though there was as yet little understanding of the full implications of this first crude demonstration that the United Kingdom could continue on the perilous atomic trail. But Evatt, for one, tempered his enthusiasm for the achievement by adding that it would be ‘up to the politicians’ to see that nuclear energy was “properly used’.”” 74 CT, 6 September 1952.

75 Cockcroft to Makins, 4 September 1952, PRO, ibid. 76 Arnold, op. cit., 48-9. 77 SMH, 4 October 1952.

9

To the 1954 Election

RYMenzies, THE Melbourne which he had at the end of long1952 to use histoown words, wentlimped ‘into smoke’ for his awaited holiday. He took off a fortnight which, as he told Lionel Lindsay, was ‘grossly inadequate’, but it still greatly refreshed him.! Parliament was to begin sitting again on 17 February and a Premiers’

Conference would meet a few days later. Preparations for both involved heavy Cabinet work. In addition Menzies began in January

a new set of regular ‘Man to Man’ broadcasts on current political and economic topics,7 and in February, before Parliament met, he took part in the New South Wales State election campaign. This sudden and strenuous activity makes clear that, the tribulations of recent months notwithstanding, his strength and energy were still robust. Menzies entered the New South Wales contest against the reigning Cahill Labor Government with a speech at Hurstville on 9 February.

He also depicted this address as the long-range opening of his campaign for federal Senate elections, to be held in May. Half the Senate’s 60 members were retiring then, and whether the Menzies

Government could hold its majority (62-28) in that House was crucial to its capacity to carry on with its legislative programme, and perhaps also to its ability to survive the general election that was mandatory in 1954. But the Prime Minister’s intervention in New South Wales had little apparent effect: at the election, only a few days before the federal Parliament reconvened, the Cahill Labor Government increased its majority from 11 to 25. An election ' Menzies to Lindsay, 14 January 1953, La Trobe Library, MS. 9104/1632.

On 12 February the Age reported the third of these broadcasts: an elaboration of how life had improved in Australia since 1949. Blackouts had ended; he claimed that coal production had increased by 50%, iron, steel and cement by 40%; 200 000 new houses had been built, etc. 227

228 ROBERT MENZIES in Western Australia on the same day also returned Labor, displacing a Liberal-Country Party Government. The two State Labor

electoral victories on the same day were widely taken as further proof of the swing of opinion against the federal Coalition: most Labor campaigning in both cases was frankly on federal issues.?

It seemed, however, that the beginnings of economic recovery were becoming apparent. On the day before federal Parliament convened, Menzies announced a substantial easing of cuts. Combined

with smaller concessions already made in late 1952 this would amount to a 25 per cent increase in allowable imports within a period of twelve months. In other words, the Government’s drastic import cuts of 1952 were having the desired effect.4 And the Melbourne Herald’s Canberra correspondent, E. H. Cox, noted that in the lobbies even Labor members were saying that the New South

Wales State election showed some improvement in the political standing of their opponents. The Liberal Party had lagged only 6 or 7 per cent behind the Labor vote: a decisive margin, it was true, ‘but only half the margin by which some recent by-elections were lost’.

Time, “everybody here’ [Canberra] considered, was running in

favour of the Menzies Government:

Most Labor men agree that the Menzies Government could be beaten easily at a Federal election now. They think that it will still be possible to

beat it in the spring, particularly if the winter brings the usual winter touch of unemployment. But they are not certain that the Government can be beaten in July of next year, immediately after it has played host to

the Queen and when it can point to the year’s solid results from an economic programme which at the moment remains its greatest political liability.5

The first legislative measure which Menzies introduced in the new session, though it had evolved as a compromise after heated debates, was bound to help consolidate the Government’s following in the struggle to regain lost economic ground. This was a Commonwealth Bank Bill, which was the end-product of behind the scenes

negotiation in the second half of 1952, much of it between the Governor of the Bank, Coombs, and Menzies and Fadden.® The central issue was the combination in the one institution of central > In campaigning in NSW, e.g., Evatt asserted that federal policies were ‘rightly called up for judgment’. Quoted by H. Mayer and J. Rydon, The Gwydir By-election, 1953 (Canberra, 1954), 5. * CT, 17 February 1953. > Melbourne Herald, 20 February 1953.

61 base my remarks on this legislation on the lucid and authoritative account of

C. B. Schedvin, In Reserve, 156-66.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 229 and commercial banking functions, which received continuing criticism from the private banks. The main charge was that the machinery of special accounts, by which the Central Bank controlled the flow of credit and which could be used as an arm of the Government's anti-inflationary policy, did not restrict seriously the activities of the trading sections of the Commonwealth Bank. As monetary policy tightened, the simplistic theme of ‘unfair competition’ was given press publicity and taken up by a number of

Government backbenchers. The Bank tried to meet some of the criticism by making changes in housekeeping arrangements but the criticism was not stilled and the United Bank Officers’ Association mounted a crude campaign for complete separation on the ground

that this was necessary to stop a future Labor Government from nationalizing by stealth. In the existing climate of political opinion, with the possibility of Labor winning the 1954 election, this was an

argument to chill the spines of the more fanatical Government

backbenchers. Coombs, who by now had what Schedvin calls ‘a well-developed philosophy of central banking’, was for a variety of reasons opposed to any form of separation. He believed that the commercial divisions

of the Commonwealth Bank gave the central bank direct contact with the economy and provided a source of staff trained in commercial banking. However, realizing that this view could not be wholly sustained in the current climate of opinion, he conceded that the General Banking Division might be separated as a government

trading bank and perhaps be required, like other trading banks, to maintain a special account with the central bank. But he insisted that staff and management should be in common with the central bank. The measure that Menzies presented to parliament on 19 February 1953 primarily embodied Coombs’ suggestions and displays well the trust that had come to exist between the Governor of the Bank and the Prime Minister. It was a good example of one of Menzies’

ereat strengths: his capacity to listen to the expert advice of those servants of the State in whom he had confidence, even—or perhaps especially—when that advice did not accord with the wishes of interests with which he was supposed to be identified. Under the bill, the Bank’s General Banking Division became a separate trading bank, which would conform to the special account provisions of the Banking Act and have its own general manager. But it was to have

communal staff and be answerable to the Governor and Board.

There were other detailed technical adjustments designed to ensure for the private banks what Menzies called ‘an appropriate measure of protection against arbitrary action or the imposition of impossible liabilities’. Inevitably the banks were disappointed. The general

230 ROBERT MENZIES manager of the Bank of New South Wales, S. J. Gandon, issued acrimonious public criticism, eliciting an immediate and sharp response from Menzies, who denounced the banker’s views as ‘rigid, uncompromising and extreme’. The Prime Minister was at pains to make it

clear that he was neither the tool of the banks nor unaware that

some change was necessary to hold his following together—but not change so extreme as to jeopardise the Coalition. For, as Schedvin has made clear, ‘Fadden’s Country Party was no supporter of the

private city-based corporations, and indeed harboured within its ranks a good deal of the popular resentment against banks that differed from the Labor Party’s only in detail’.” The Senate elections took place on 9 May. This was the first time

since federation that elections for the Senate had been held apart from a general election for the House of Representatives. Only half the members of the Senate were to be elected,? and an encounter

lacking the concentration of policy and interest that a general election would have involved made interpretation of its meaning difficult. In the outcome the Government held its majority, but that was reduced from four to two. The Liberal—Country Party vote fell by about 3 per cent from what it had been in the Senate election of 1951. But much had been done. The Senate campaign enhanced the personal popularity of the Prime Minister and raised expectations of prosperity and stability. Menzies could ‘create a helpful political atmosphere if he felt inclined to take a buoyant line on Australia’s economic future’. Newsreel footage of him at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth had been ‘very warmly acknowledged by screen audiences’.!0

Before the counting of votes for the Senate election had been completed, though after the general outcome was clear, Menzies flew out of Mascot to travel to England for the coronation of the new

Queen, Elizabeth, and a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference that was to be held concurrently. Pat and Heather accompanied him, and he had arranged for his sister to go too. Evatt went to London for the same reason, as did most State Premiers. (Some of ’ Tbid., 161.

8 For the explanation of this, see the learned footnote 4, Mayer and Rydon, The Gwydir By-election, 7.

9 This was formally the position, but two Senators had died since the 1951 elections and their replacements, nominated pro tem—as was the constitutional arrangement—by the respective State governments had also to face election. That meant that 32 seats

were to be contested, and of these 16 were Government supporters and 16 were

Opposition men. 0 Willoughby to Cockburn (Menzies’ Press Secretary, then with him in London), 26 June 1953, NLA, MS. 5000/7/196.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 231 the latter had gone ahead by boat, missing much of the Senate campaign, a fact which was thought by some ALP enthusiasts to explain lethargy in the campaign in certain States.) Menzies held a press conference on arrival in London and impressed the journalists with his good spirits and health. “The last time I saw Mr. Menzies, six months ago’, one of them wrote, ‘he was ill and troubled and—at 58—seemed an old man. Today, fit again, and full of confidence

about the future—of cricket and politics, too—he appeared an entirely different person’.!! Most of his talk was in fact about cricket:

an Australian XI was arriving to play England in the current test series, and he was full of news about who they were and what chances he thought they had. The first few days in England were fairly relaxed; for Menzies the most pleasant being when he ‘indulged in his favourite recreation’ by going with his old friend and ex-cricketer, Sir Pelham Warner, to a day’s play in a match between Middlesex and Sussex at Lords. They were accompanied by Menzies’ sister, Belle (Pat did not share

her husband’s enthusiasm for the game).!? But a hectic round of activities was about to begin. The Coronation would take place on Tuesday 2 June, and a number of rehearsals in Westminster Abbey had to be attended. On 27 May the Commonwealth Parliamentary

Association gave a luncheon at which the Queen was the guest of honour. It was the first time that representatives of all the parliaments of the Commonwealth had combined to act as hosts to the reigning monarch. The Australian Harold Holt was in the chair

and proposed the toast of the Queen, while at the official table

Churchill and Menzies afterwards led the formal three cheers. Within

days there were two garden parties, one given by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the other by the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury at Hatfield House, their home in Hertfordshire. The latter

was attended by 1000 guests, most of them from the Commonwealth. Menzies was conspicuous with his camera: he caught Crown Prince Olaf of Norway greeting the Queen Mother with a kiss, and photographed Queen Salote of Tonga and the Sultan of Zanzibar, waiting to offer a more formal greeting. And an enterprising Evening Standard reporter overheard him introducing Sir John Cockcroft to daughter Heather as ‘the great atomic wallah’.!°

On the day before the Coronation the Queen gave a morning reception to all overseas Commonwealth representatives, followed by a luncheon party for the Prime Ministers. "Yorkshire Observer, 23 May 1953. 12 DT, 26 May 1953.

3 Thid., 1 June 1953.

232 ROBERT MENZIES

ee i ll . , ie 3 OS

Menzies happily takes movie pictures of what he considers memorable scenes at one of the English garden parties of 1953.

Coronation day was wet and cold, most disappointingly unseasonable. But a great spectacle was nevertheless turned on, as only the British could do it. The Menzies were in the second coach procession—that of the Prime Ministers (in the first went colonial rulers, like the Sultan of Zanzibar), which left Buckingham Palace at 9.20, an hour before the Queen’s State Coach. Menzies’ vehicle was a Royal Clarence carriage lent by Sir Arthur Korda’s London Films Ltd, drawn by six bays from a big British brewery, and driven by 71-

year-old Colonel Arthur Kerr Main, DSO, formerly ADC to King George VI. This arrangement had been made by one Captain Frank Gilby, who took charge when it was thought that Menzies and the

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 233 other nine Commonwealth Prime Ministers would have to walk in the procession. He used his influence with relatives and friends in the liquor and film industries to rustle up horses and a carriage for each.!4 So Menzies was protected from the rain, but he later said it was like travelling in ‘a very draughty hearse’. For on Coronation

day ‘there was a bitter wintry breeze, and you could exclude it by closing the window, but if you closed the window you were not

able to wave to your constituents’. So he kept it open and froze, but the only ‘constituents’ he saw whom he recognized were the Australian XI. The Commonwealth Prime Ministers began their Conference immediately after the Coronation. But social festivities continued to hold centre stage. A London friend of one leading Melbourne journalist, Roy Curthoys, wrote: Isaw Menzies... but only for a very few moments at a party. lam afraid the Coronation celebrations plus the Commonwealth Conference duties plus the social junketings have rather tired out the visiting statesmen.

They are therefore using the parties as periods for repose. It is very difficult to get them to discuss anything. But Menzies did speak most warmly of you.!®

That Menzies in fact presented as good a face to the world as he did is testimony to his notable personal gifts. One glimpse we have of

happenings behind the scenes during this trip suggests that there were times when disaster was not far away. When he returned home, a senior member of the Australian party, A. 5. Watt of External

Affairs, had a remarkably frank discussion about happenings in London with a friend in the British High Commissioner’s office in Canberra, Ben Cockram. Cockram made notes on this talk, which eventually found their way back to the Commonwealth Relations Office. One section of these notes is worth quoting at length: Watt said that the Australian delegation had got through the Prime Ministers’ Conference a lot better than they had any right to expect. For

some time their organisation at such conferences had been of the sketchiest kind and had imposed an unfair strain on both ministers and officials but things had not, in his opinion, ever been so bad as on the present occasion. The Coronation had naturally imposed a very tight timetable and efficient secretarial work and specific arrangements for consulting the Prime Minister and keeping him informed should have

4 Sun, 10 May 1953. 'S London Daily Mail, 18 June 1953. 16 Haley to Curthoys, 8 June 1953, NLA, MS. 2994, Box 3, 1953-5 (2).

234 ROBERT MENZIES been the first essential ... Watt instanced the letters that had not been opened and which had resulted in the Prime Minister’s being precluded from entering the Abbey for the final rehearsal of the Coronation. It had

been particularly difficult when, in consequence, other Ministers and officials could never find out where the Prime Minister was, when he was expected to return or when there would be a chance of consulting him. Mr. Menzies was almost a genius at improvisation but on at least one occasion it had been unfortunate that he had been unable to be properly briefed although every effort had been made to do so. This was when Mr. Nehru had been speaking at the session on South-east Asia and had delivered himself of a number of factual mis-statements which the Australian delegation had been in a position to demolish immedi-

ately and which they most certainly ought to have done...”

None of the Prime Ministers had brought their expert economic advisers, and the Conference seems to have reviewed world affairs in very general terms.!® Three major points of policy emerged from the discussions. The Prime Ministers reaffirmed their belief that the time was ripe for a high-level conference with the Russians. All Commonwealth nations, including India and Pakistan, supported Britain’s case that the ‘effective maintenance’ of military installations in the Suez Canal area was of international importance. And

the economic aim of achieving the widest possible multilateral trade and eventual sterling convertibility in co-operation with the United States was reiterated. There were also closed meetings on Pacific defence between Churchill, Menzies and the New Zealand Prime Minister, S.G. Holland. Menzies and Holland resisted Churchill’s protests at the exclusion of the United Kingdom from the ANZUS Treaty and Menzies urged Churchill to tone down any

outward agitation, as ‘the real answers could not be given in public’.!? The plain fact was that the United States was opposed to a purely “white man’s pact’ for the Pacific area. As an officer of the American Embassy in London put it, ‘if any wider system were in

due course to be developed it should embrace the independent Asian countries as well as the non-Asian powers with interests in

17 Notes from Ben Cockram, 26 June 1953, PRO, DO 35/7149. '8 AA, A5954/1, Item no 1680/1. The communiqué issued at the end of the Conference was very vague. 19 Summary of talks on 10 June, ibid. The Sydney Daily Mirror published on 12 June the story that talks on ANZUS provoked ‘a bitter clash between Sir Winston and Mr Menzies’, in which Churchill shouted at Menzies. Menzies at once issued a statement to the press: “This story is a monstrous invention. All our discussions have been on the most friendly terms’. PRO, DO 35/5956.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 235 the Far East’.2° Menzies and Holland gladly accepted a British suggestion that the chiefs of staff of Britain, Australia and New Zealand should meet later in the year, in Australia, to review defence issues.

This was linked with a British plan for a Far Eastern Strategic Reserve to be composed of British forces in Malaya together with Australian and New Zealand forces redeployed from Korea.*! The meeting, when it took place, was indeed to open the way to important changes of policy in both Pacific Dominions, but the gestation would take time. Atomic matters were no doubt also discussed by Churchill and Menzies, but in fact the most crucial decision had long since been taken, although it still remained top secret. When in Australia for the Hurricane explosion, Penney had visited Woomera, and then

with Butement had identified a potential atomic test-site at Emu Field, in the desert 300 miles north-west of Woomera. After Hurricane, Penney decided that further tests were urgently necessary to

answer some of the questions thrown up by the explosion. In December 1952 Churchill asked for, and received, permission from Menzies for two test explosions on the Emu Field range. Churchill’s note stressed that the safety problem had been closely examined:

the calculations would be available to Professors Martin and

Titterton; the tests would involve no danger. They would take place

in October. The code-name of the operation came to be Totem. The new tests would be smaller and simpler than Hurricane, and there was not time to mount the complicated naval expedition that the latter had involved. Monte Bello was out of the question. What was needed was a site where the logistics were much easier.** Late in June, Coronation and Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meetings well and truly over, Menzies and his family made a trip to Scotland, justified (as if it had to be!) by the fact that he had been invited to

Perthshire to open a new hydro-electric dam. They took the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the tiny village of Weem, reputed to be the home of Menzies’ forefathers. In Perthshire, about a mile from the better-known Aberfeldy, Weem was closer to Menzies

Castle, the home of the chief of the clan for nearly 400 years.” Perhaps the most enduring memento of the visit is a symbolic photograph of Menzies, his wife, and Heather, beside a sign indicating “The road to the Isles’. 20 W. D. Allen (Southeast Asia Department): memo of conversation with Mr Ringwalt of the US Embassy, 15 June 1953, ibid. 21 Peter Edwards with Gregory Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, 162-3. 22 1,. Arnold, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia, 54-5. 23 Sydney Sun, 21 June, SMH, 23 June 1953.

236 ROBERT MENZIES

a eee a ‘oy cee 0 ee we

re ke Ty

eee, “t OAD rommels.es. CO Cee wo Se

Poe Sa

Cs es ee a 68 =, pete =

ae en ae 2 oS ag, CO ee eee LE ee a aon (| ee eee ee. time a oe ee Se mh.

Le Of eo es ae _ a ee ees ee ge ee A happy foray into Scotland with Pat and Heather in 1953, justified by the task of opening a new hydro-electric scheme

The final social event on the eve of their departure from London

was a dinner party Menzies gave to the Australian cricketers and their friends. He graciously invited the South African Prime Minister, Dr Malan: on the way home the Menzies would make a 10-day visit to South Africa as the guests of the Government. One of the cricketers, Bert Oldfield, wrote next morning to thank ‘Bob’ for ‘the easy way you introduced the levelling atmosphere, something

that cricket does to the individual and oh! how true was your reminder to Dr Malan of the importance of this game to his country

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 237 too’. Oldfield remembered that neither Malan nor Hertzog ever came to the matches Australians played in South Africa, but Smuts

did and at tea time joined them and yarned about sheep he ran at his home in the ‘back veldt’. Oldfield also noted that, as far as he

knew, Menzies’ was the only dinner given to the Australian cricketers in England since Hughes entertained ‘Warwick Armstrong and the rest of us in the 1921 Team’.*4

A large crowd met Menzies, his wife and daughter at Johannes-

burg. He was the first Australian Prime Minister to visit South Africa for 43 years—Andrew Fisher having attended the opening of the South African Parliament in 1910.2 Menzies was regarded as

an important visitor and was made a great fuss of, with tours, luncheons and dinners at which he was usually expected to speak.

If the reports of the tour sent home by the British High Commissioner, Le Rougetel, are to be believed, it was a great success, Menzies’ tact and wit carrying him safely through the minefield of local politics. The visit coincided with a particularly delicate phase of these politics, when the Nationalist Government was trying to persuade the Opposition to unite with them in removing coloured voters from the common roll. Nehru had made himself particularly

unpopular with Malan for aggressively implying that he was a potential liberator of South Africa’s Indians, and at a state dinner to Menzies Malan virtually offered an alliance with Australia against India. As Le Rougetel reported it: The Prime Minister’s [i.e. Malan’s] theme was, as usual, the importance of preserving white civilisation in South Africa. He combined this with the suggestion that South Africa and Australia were the ‘twin sisters of the South’ in that they had similar and almost simultaneous origins and were confronted with similar problems, in particular the threat of Indian

penetration ... While the Prime Minister was speaking the wall of the room was lined with Indian waiters whose expressions provided food for thought.

(Well might the Melbourne Herald’s special reporter from South Africa comment on this speech: Having a public meal with Dr Malan is becoming for Commonwealth statesmen what having supper with the Borgias used to be for bygone

Italian politicians. They never know what they might be asked to swallow—politically.)*6

24 Oldfield to Menzies, 28 June 1953, NLA, MS. 4936/1/23/194. 5 CT, 4 July 1953. 26 13 July 1953.

238 ROBERT MENZIES But Menzies quickly altered the atmosphere. ‘Without the slightest apparent effort’, wrote Le Rougetel, Mr. Menzies, next to whom I was sitting at the time, raised the whole tone of the party on to a completely different plane. The upsurge of his eloquence, combined with his personality, was most compelling and could have been resisted only by a few of the more rabid fanatics. There

was nothing original in what he said, but the way he said it was remarkable. He spoke of the Crown and Commonwealth and the importance of preserving the underlying unities. He twitted Dr Malan about his Republican principles and foreshadowed a discussion between them both one day in Paradise, whereupon Malan became sufficiently

infected to retort: ‘If you ever reach it!’ Commenting on another speech, in which Menzies had sidestepped talk from a previous speaker about the unity of the white races and

captivated his audience, Le Rougetel found it hard to ‘resist the impression that morally, no less than physically, it was a case of Gulliver in Lilliput. But such was Mr. Menzies’ magic that it was obvious that the South Africans did not share this impression’.*7 At home Dr Burton and other Evatt supporters criticized Menzies

for making the trip to South Africa at all, saying it would injure Australia’s relations with Asian countries. Meantime Le Rougetel, who regarded the South African Government and its racial policies

with distaste, and who had fallen under the spell of Menzies, thought the visit had done immense good for Commonwealth > relations. After the tour was over Le Rougetel sent his superiors this summing up of its importance, at least as he saw it: He was warmly welcomed in all sections of the South African press. In his public statements he dwelt upon two themes: first, that he had come to South Africa to learn about her problems and not to teach; second, that the great necessity of the time was for unity. In developing these themes he introduced a note of wit and forthright gaiety that is unusual in South African public life... . In everything he said and did Mr. Menzies exuded a spirit of tolerance and goodwill in marked contrast with the

atmosphere of gloom and suspicion now prevailing here. When the Nationalists spoke of race relations, he talked about cricket. When they dwelt upon the Indian menace, he made them laugh despite themselves.

Mr. Menzies has rendered a notable contribution to Commonwealth relations. He made a remarkable impression, not least on his Nationalist

hosts, some of whom were visibly moved by his eloquence and commanding personality.*® 7]. H. Le Rougetel to Sir Percivale Liesching, 10 July 1953, PRO, DO 35/5035. 28 Despatch of 17 July, ibid.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 239 Almost accidentally criticism of Menzies’ visit to South Africa seemed to acquire some substance when, on his return to Australia, Menzies gave an ABC ‘Guest of Honour’ talk about his experiences at the Coronation and afterwards. Reuters reported the talk and in India the press bristled about some of Menzies’ remarks. He was

doing his best to explain how he saw Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conferences: talk-fests made fruitful by the understanding

that participants exchanged views but refrained from making judgements about the internal affairs of each other’s countries. He elaborated a trifle unfortunately on this theme so that, as the Aus-

tralian High Commissioner in India, Walter Crocker, put it in a somewhat caustic despatch home, the broadcast looked to some Indians ‘as though [Menzies] had been making an indirect but hostile comment on Pandit Nehru’s passionate hostility to South Africa’s policies of racial discrimination’. Crocker quoted an article printed in the Hindustan Times. Headed ‘the Malan-Menzies Axis’, it

began: “Today Dr Malan must be a happy man... Mr Menzies has hailed him as the saviour of white civilisation’. Crocker commented:

It would be a disservice to Indo-Australian relations ... and also to the standing of Mr Menzies in India, which is considerable, to conceal the fact that his broadcast, perfectly natural though it was for an Australian or for a South African audience, was unlucky as regards its effect in Asia. Race relations are the primary, almost the pathological, preoccupation of Indians, and to condone South Africa is to flick Indians on the raw. As Mr Menzies is a world figure, and one who gets a good press in India, there would be a tendency to read into such a broadcast as this more significance than it merited.*’

From South Africa the Menzies travelled home on the liner Athenic. Since he was ‘well out of touch now with the local scene’, his press secretary, Cockburn, asked Willoughby to help Menzies cope with the press conference he expected at Fremantle by sending any last minute advice via the pilot ‘before the press get at him’.°! On 24 July the Brisbane Telegraph greeted his arrival with a marvellous cartoon suggesting what was before Menzies. It was titled ‘Welcome Home, Bob!’ and showed Fadden gleefully rolling out a welcome carpet for a Menzies arriving home with luggage adorned

with British flags and Coronation souvenirs. On the carpet was

*2 Enclosed in Marshall (Casey’s secretary) to Menzies, 21 August 1953, NLA, MS. 4936/ 30 Coekbur, to Willoughby, 19 June 1953, NLA, MS. 5000/7/196.

240 ROBERT MENZIES inscribed a list: ‘The budget, Tax relief, Defence, Korea, Wharf Holdups, 1954 Election’.3!

Parliament, in recess over the coronation period to enable

members who wished to do so to go to England, reconvened early in September for the budget session. The Government planned a brief second sitting after that, to introduce and be inaugurated by a new Governor-General, Sir William Slim. This would carry proceedings over until the Christmas break. Then, in January 1954, the

Queen herself would be in the country on a royal tour, and she would open the last session of the current Parliament. That session was expected to be short, clearing the decks for the long-awaited general election. At the regal and vice-regal levels this was a time to delight the hearts of fervent Australian Britishers like Menzies. The prospect of

the young Queen’s tour, only six months after the Coronation, aroused extravagant excitement. It would be the first visit to Aus-

tralia of a reigning monarch. Elizabeth's father, George VI, had because of illness narrowly missed having that distinction. The Chifley Government, as far back as 1948, won the King’s agreement

to make a tour with his wife, Elizabeth, but the trip had to be postponed and the King was never again well enough to undertake it. Though naturally less dramatic than the Queen’s coming, the appointment of Slim as Governor-General was to be—especially for Menzies—a source of lasting satisfaction. Menzies’ initial hostility to Slim’s predecessor, McKell, had soon waned and the two became good friends. But the Prime Minister still steadfastly held that the Governor-General should be an Englishman. Soon after coming to power Menzies had been greatly impressed by Slim when the latter came to Australia as Chief of the Imperial General Staff to advise on defence matters, and it was in his eyes an honour for Australia to

have as its Governor-General so distinguished a wartime hero. Though both he and Slim were strong-willed men bound to have their times of tension, they shared most attitudes and values and were to get on well.

Just before the budget session began in September 1953, there were two by-elections for seats in the House of Representatives:

31 Menzies wrote to Herbert Brookes, on 19 August that it was a ‘wonderful experience to be in London at Coronation time... My visit to South Africa may have done some

good. For my part it helped me considerably to realise the great problems which confront the Government and gave me an insight into the way of life and conditions over there’, NLA, MS. 4936/1 /5/36.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 241 Lang, in New South Wales; and Corangamite, in Victoria. The former was a Labor stronghold, and the latter a blue-ribbon Liberal

seat. The poll for each of them took place on the same day, 29 August, and the parties’ ‘big guns’ played a leading role in the intense campaigning that preceded it. The Liberals stood no chance of ousting Labor in Lang but Labor could hope at a pinch to win in Corangamite, and the fight was particularly intense there.** In the upshot neither seat changed hands, and each leader claimed that the poll boded well for his side in the coming general election. In neither electorate did the Liberal vote return to its 1951 level, and Evatt argued that this demonstrated the Government’s continuing unpopularity. But in both cases the Liberal vote was better than in the 1953 Senate election and Menzies, declaring this to be the relevant comparison, pictured the tide of popular favour as returning, albeit slowly, to him. ‘If this continues, as I am confident it will’, he said, ‘Dr Evatt and Mr Calwell may find that their anticipations of office next year are somewhat extravagant’. Fadden brought down his budget on 9 September. He began with a historical account of the economic difficulties of the last two years,

claiming that a turnaround was now on, and equilibrium in effect

restored. The measures which the Government had taken had worked, and now it was possible to provide relief. Inflation, Fadden claimed, was under control: during 1952-53 prices rose by less than 4 per cent, compared with approximately 20 per cent in each of the

two preceding years. The Government was anxious to promote higher levels of investment and all-round productivity, and it believed that it could best do this through a ‘bold policy of reducing taxes’. The time was ripe for a move forward. The man on the land was enjoying a remarkable run of good seasons. Employment was high and yet there were no labour shortages. There was no scarcity of coal, steel or building materials.

On all sides this was seen for what it certainly was in part: an election budget. But the mainstream press greeted it favourably, and there was no Serious challenge to Fadden’s claim that the economy had changed for the better. As the University of Melbourne’s

Professor of Commerce, Wilfred Prest, put it in a special Argus supplement surveying the budget and the state of the economy:

32 Both Evatt and Menzies drew what the press called ‘comparatively big crowds’ in this electorate. For example, ‘450 people turned out on a cold night when the final test

match was at a crucial stage, to hear Mr Menzies at Ararat, a Labour strongpoint’ (Melbourne Herald, 28 August 1953). 33 Age, 31 August 1953.

242 ROBERT MENZIES During the past year the balance of payments crisis which threatened us early in 1952 has been overcome and our overseas reserves have begun to rise. And the depression which some of our more excitable politicians were predicting last year has failed to materialise. These are all matters for congratulation, particularly insofar as they can be ascribed to the success of our banking and monetary policies.*4

Professor Geoffrey Sawer of the Australian National University noted that public opinion polls taken shortly after Fadden brought down the budget confirmed the impression of by-elections that no ‘major shift’ in electoral opinion had yet occurred. Nevertheless, he thought the budget’s ‘long-term effect is likely to be favourable to the Government’.*° Writing in the Melbourne Herald, E.H. Cox,

who knew the Liberal Party apparatus well, claimed that it had been for 18 months ‘an open secret in Canberra’ that the Federal Government consciously planned ‘to produce one of the most politically attractive budgets in Australian history before the coming general election’. Government supporters, he wrote, agreed that the

budget came too far ahead of the election to be in itself a major election issue. But they believed that it would accelerate the slow return of support for the Government, and that its economic impact would be ‘in full operation by the time that campaigning begins’ .%6

Then, as the year drew to a close, the death of the Country Party member for Gwydir, T. J. Treloar, necessitated another by-election which most thought would test the movement of political opinion and, indeed, in the language of the time, be a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the general election of May 1954.37

Though held by Treloar and the Country Party since 1949, Gwydir had before that been regarded as a swinging seat, and in the political circumstances of late 1953 it was not unreasonable to think that Labor might take it. It was a large rural electorate in the north-

west of New South Wales in which mixed farming, principally sheep and wheat, was the chief form of land use and modest country towns—Moree, Inverell, Narrabri and Gunnedah—were service centres and the homes of small rural industries. The election

was contested by one Labor, one Liberal and two Country Party candidates. The respective party leaders campaigned vigorously on

their behalf. But Menzies took the view that the vote was not so much for party as for the Government. He praised Fadden and McEwen as staunch colleagues and said he stood on the Government’s record ‘and am entirely content to be judged by it’. 34.27 October 1953.

3° Australian Quarterly, vol. 25, December 1953, 88-9. 3610 September 1953. 37 Mayer and Rydon, The Gwydir By-election, 1.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 243

ip eh MR a BO

\ et een CO ile

2 lll alee oeeeee oe es er ee ee “ae

Ata ‘family’ bush barbecue (‘chop picnic’) at Woden in October 1953 to celebrate Lady Slim’s birthday

The vote took place on 18 December 1953. The winner was one of

the Country Party candidates, Ian Allen, who had served as an officer in the AIF during the war and was now the local Regional Officer in the ABC. His majority, ahead of the closest (the Labor)

candidate, was only just below the majority which the previous Country Party member, Treloar, had polled in 1951. On percentage

figures Government support in Gwydir had thus almost returned to the 1951 level.38 Menzies rejoiced: ‘We have felt for some time

that public opinion is increasingly recognizing the soundness of Government policy, as reflected in the high level of prosperity. The

Gwydir vote justifies that feeling’. It naturally suited the Prime Minister to explain the election result in such simplistic terms; but how complex in fact the cross-currents in such an electorate were is

demonstrated in the notable pioneering study which political scientists Henry Mayer and Joan Rydon made of this by-election in 38 [bid., 154. See, however, the sensible caveats to the ‘percentage figures’ to which these writers point, 156 ff.

244 ROBERT MENZIES 1954. The intermingling of local issues, personality, country—city tensions, considered against a varied economic backdrop make conclusions about why people voted as they did hazardous indeed. The Government, however, could not help but be cheered at what had happened. At the end of August 1953, just after the Corangamite and Lang

by-elections, Menzies announced that he was planning what the Melbourne Herald called ‘Pep’ tours to stir support for the Government in advance of actual campaigning for the election of 1954. He

was confident that the fortunes of the Government were rapidly picking up. At the end of October he told the annual meeting of its

Federal Council that the Liberal Party would in 1954 gain an electoral victory ‘no less remarkable than the victory of 1949’. The Sydney Morning Herald declared that Menzies could indeed set out on his tour of the electorates with a high heart. The tide which was

setting against the Government last year had been running the other way since the Senate elections. A good season and a rise in wool prices had wiped out the trade deficit, the budget had brought tax relief and the Opposition ‘can no longer pretend that Australia is other than extremely prosperous’.*? By the end of the year Gallup

Polls seemed to confirm the hunch that the Government was steadily gaining ground.”

The Royal Tour began on 3 February 1954, when Queen Elizabeth

and the Duke of Edinburgh landed in Sydney from the Gothic, a luxury ship specially chartered for the trip because the Royal Yacht was undergoing refitting. The visitors sailed away from Fremantle, a month later, on 31 March. When they left, a triumphant progress

lay behind them, a progress packed with more than 250 formal engagements, ranging from balls and garden parties to investitures and openings of parliaments. Cheering crowds exceeded all expectations in capital cities and country towns, often in their enthusiasm

breaking through barriers and cordons of police. In the resultant

crushes there were injuries, but these did little to dampen the general enthusiasm. In the countryside people lined railways to catch a glimpse of the Queen and the Duke waving from the royal train. In a farewell editorial, the Sydney Morning Herald caught at a sentiment which few failed to endorse: It is a tribute to her Majesty that Australians have shown themselves much less interested in the historic significance of this first visit of a reigning monarch than in the Queen as a person and a personality in her 39 SMH, 27 October 1953.

40 Gallup Polls, selected results, NLA, MS. 4936/35/16.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 245 own right. The sustained warmth of welcome, the obvious sincerity of the great crowds’ loyalty, the surprising demonstrations by a normally undemonstrative people (how silly the early fears that the Queen would misunderstand Australian reticence seem now!), the real sense of personal loss her departure has brought—all these things are vivid evidence of how deeply our sentiment was engaged.*!

Political truce was naturally understood during the Queen’s visit. Eric Harrison, Menzies’ most faithful colleague, was the Minister in charge of the tour and in the highly complex and detailed arrangements care was taken properly to include leading members of the Opposition in all high profile events. Dr and Mrs Evatt, for example, were with the Governor-General and the Menzies at the head of the welcoming party as the royal visitors stepped ashore in Sydney, and

prominently among the official group which finally farewelled them at Fremantle. And when the Queen opened the National Parlia-

ment in Canberra, Menzies moved the address-in-reply and Evatt seconded it. The occasion was purely ceremonial and celebratory. The Queen’s speech made no reference to coming policy: it was a simple but dignified statement of her joy in addressing members ‘not as your Queen from far away . .. Ina real sense you are here as my colleagues, friends, and advisers’. Menzies eloquently moved

appreciation; with equal enthusiasm, Evatt declared that ‘the supremely important aspect of today’s proceedings is not the speech

nor what it contains, but the fact that Her Majesty has made it. At last, the Queen has been with us in the Parliament and has addressed us as Her Majesty, the Queen of Australia’. And he concluded with a prayer for the Queen and her husband. “The prayer is

simple and, I think, is best expressed in one of the verses of the National Anthem which I heard sung very beautifully in Sydney at one of the wonderful demonstrations in honour of the Queen only a few days ago’. He would, he said, conclude his remarks by reading

412 April 1954. On the same day the Age described the scene as the Queen ‘begins her long journey home’. As the Gothic edged her way from the wharf into the channel of the Swan River, ‘40,000 cheering West Australians sang Auld Lang Syne and waved farewell. It was a moving scene and hundreds of women brushed tears from their eyes’. For detailed discussions of the events of the tour see Peter Spearitt, ‘Royal Progress: the Queen and Her Australian Subjects’, in S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith, Australian Cultural History (Cambridge, 1988), 138-57; and Ewan Morris, ‘Forty Years On: Australia and the Queen, 1954’, in Journal of Australian Studies, no. 40, March 1994,

1-13. As younger scholars, both display some puzzlement at certain aspects of the tour, pounce on absurdities committed by press and speakers, and wonder gingerly about sinister implications (e.g. Morris on the disproportionate influence of the powerful in the social construction of meanings). But each vividly portrays the fervour with which the royal couple were in fact greeted.

246 ROBERT MENZIES that verse. He did so, in full. It was the verse beginning “Thy choicest gifts in store/On her be pleased to pour’ .. .¥ In terms of sheer splendour the Canberra visit, though it came early in the piece, was undoubtedly the high point of the tour. The Queen opened parliament in her coronation robes and jewels, after entering Parliament House along the traditional red carpet, escorted by Menzies. Despite showery weather a large crowd waited outside to see her arrival, which was transmitted by television crews (‘a novelty on the Australian scene’) to patients in the Canberra Community Hospital. Massed bands played the national anthem as the - Queen stepped out of her car and 4000 servicemen snapped rifles with glittering bayonets to arms as the royal standard broke on the flagpole above the newly-painted white Parliament House. After a moment’s hush, the crowd burst into wild cheering and the Queen paused at the top of the steps to acknowledge the greeting and gaze at the tableau of schoolchildren in coloured costumes, drawn up on the now soggy lawns to form the words ‘OUR QUEEN". That night there was a State Dinner for 700 guests and on the next evening, in King’s Hall, another 1000 attended what the Sydney Morning Herald, a trifle carried away by the colour and excitement of it all, called ‘the most brilliant ball in Australia’s history’. The

Queen and the Duke attended for an hour and 40 minutes and though they did not dance worked hard at three presentations, receiving more than 100 guests. For those who marvelled at the enormous achievement of catering for these and the other State functions, reporters explained that nine top chefs of various national-

ities worked together as a team, handling choice food drawn from

all over the continent: lobsters swimming in special tanks were flown in from South Australia; oysters came from the north coast of New South Wales; Mildura supplied Murray cod; quail, squabs and pheasants were ordered from various parts of Victoria; sucking pigs came from the Canberra area itself; and freshly picked strawberries

arrived by air from Tasmania. The Canberra visit lasted four days. Other highlights included the opening of University House at the National University by the Duke, the trooping of the colour at Duntroon Military College, inspection of the Australian War Memorial, where the Queen was

escorted by its original proponent, C.E.W. Bean himself, the 42 CPD, H of R, 3: 6-9. 43 SMH, 16 February 1954.

44 Sun-Herald, Women’s Section, 14 February 1954. At the ball one guest, the Aboriginal

artist Albert Namatjira, when shown the lavish buffet before supper started, exclaimed ‘good tucker’ (SMH, 18 February 1954).

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 247

. ga 7 Aaa -

|oo_ o& -* |5ae_ aa F 4

Menzies and the Queen at Parliament House, Canberra, on 16 February 1954, for the major state banquet of her tour.

unveiling of a memorial to the aid given to Australia in the Pacific war by the United States, a garden party and an investiture at Yarralumla. The investiture was a quiet ceremony in the white drawing room of Government House. Thirty-three people received honours from the Queen: for the Menzies family this was a special occasion.

Heather and her father were there, to watch the Queen put over Pat’s shoulder the salmon-pink sash of the order gazetted in the recent new year’s honours list: Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It had been awarded principally for the charitable work Dame Pattie (as she was henceforth to

248 ROBERT MENZIES be known) had long done as a senior member of the voluntary organizations assisting certain Melbourne hospitals. This formal occasion had its informal parallel, when the three Menzies entertained the Queen and the Duke and two of their retinue at a private but convivial dinner at the Lodge.*® The unveiling of the United States Memorial passed with proper aplomb: both Menzies and Evatt made emotional speeches about what the latter described as ‘the valour and sacrifice of those United

States sailors, soldiers and airmen with whom our own armed forces were so closely linked in the Pacific struggle’. But the British High Commissioner in Canberra, Stephen Holmes, took a jaundiced

view of the occasion, and in the process revealed something of Menzies’ real feelings. The memorial, a 79m aluminium-clad obelisk, surmounted by the American Eagle and Sphere, was the brainchild of the Australian-American Association, a body that Holmes described as being concerned to promote the idea that in the late war the United States had “saved Australia’.

The memorial itself, while a striking object, and one which well fulfils the aim of the designer and the Association to produce something which

one cannot fail to see from almost any point in the neighbourhood of Canberra within many miles, has not escaped criticism on grounds of design. Mr. Menzies has frequently expressed his dislike of it to me

and he claims to be responsible for having damned the promoters’ original idea that it might occupy an even more prominent position directly between the Australian Parliament and the War Memorial. It is extremely costly ... and one Cabinet Minister has gone to the extent of expressing the hope to me that the method of construction will ensure that it does not last long.

Holmes asserted that the presence of large numbers of Americans in

Australia during the war ‘is not looked back upon with any great affection’. He also declared that there was nowhere in America a comparable monument to the Australian contribution to America’s survival, and in general deplored the tendency towards the ‘undesirable transfer of admiration from the United Kingdom to the United States on the part of Australians’. He did, however, draw some comfort from the royal tour as an event which had done much to restore the balance.*®

45The menu included flounder specially flown to Canberra from Launceston by Menzies’ Tasmanian friend at ‘Como’, Gordon Rolph (Rolph to Menzies, 5 February 1954, NLA, MS. 4936/1/27/218); details of dinner from discussion with Mrs Peter Henderson, 6 June 1994). 46 res to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 7 April 1954, PRO, DO 35/

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 249 Such tension over the unveiling of the American memorial as existed did not become public, but the major hitch in the royal tour —the coincidence of a poliomyelitis scare—did. The diagnosis of polio cases led to some curtailment of planned events in Victorian

country towns and to major changes in the final visit to Western Australia, where the reporting of seven new cases on the eve of the Queen’s arrival bred talk of an ‘epidemic’ and threatened cancellation of the final part of the tour.4” The Queen’s medical adviser,

surgeon Commander Steele-Perkins, ordered gamma-globulin injections for the royal party and would have liked to stop the Western Australian visit altogether. The extreme fear was that the Queen herself might contract the disease and that concentrations of people, particularly of schoolchildren, at royal appearances would

increase the possibility of wider infection. Australian medical opinion, on polio ahead of that of the English in general and SteelePerkins in particular,’ favoured precautions but seems not to have supported the politically unpalatable cancellation of the last part of

the tour. On 22 March at a conference in Adelaide (then being visited by the royal party) Harrison, Steele-Perkins and the Western Australian Commissioner of Public Health, Dr Henzell, agreed to safeguards also favoured by the poliomyelitis committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council. Menzies flew into Adelaide to confer with the Queen and later issued a public statement on the altered conditions agreed to for the last part of the trip.

Most indoor functions were cancelled, shaking of hands was eliminated, and children presenting posies to the Queen could walk

towards her but must retain the flowers. The Gothic would be Western Australian headquarters for the royal party: they would sleep there and any food they ate, even ashore, must be prepared on the ship. Crew, and even journalists travelling on the Gothic, were not to be allowed ashore unless on official duty.*? The restrictions, rather ridiculous in retrospect, did not blunt spontaneity altogether and the Western Australian leg of the tour saw demonstrations as enthusiastic as in the east. Nor did anyone on the Gothic contract the dread disease.

47 Age, 11 March 1954.

48 See F. B. Smith, ‘The Victorian Poliomyelitis Outbreak, 1937-38’, in J. Caldwell et al. (eds) What We Know About Health Transition (ANU, 1990), vol. 2, 866-81.

49 Age, 23 April 1954. The Premier of Western Australia, Hawke, bitterly criticised

oA) pri). the ‘unnecessary and high-handed way’ he interfered in the matter (ibid.,

250 ROBERT MENZIES The 1954 Election

The Melbourne Herald’s cartoonist Frith had a lovely mood-piece

on 1 April. Bob and Bert stood side by side on the shore, sadly watching the Gothic sail into the sunset. Each carried a pair of boxing gloves by their strings in left hands; under each arm was a rolled-up sheaf of pages labelled ‘Election Policy Speech’. The truce was over. For before the end of April the current federal parliament would have run its course, and the long-anticipated election must take place. On 12 February Cabinet had decided that 29 May would

be the date of the poll? and Menzies announced it formally on

CK py —e—we SI

a a rs a SEPOLICY Sees me, ' en ee ee Q) LECTION Jn a cm,

Cn) Con) = | Caw a) ec, :

Farewell to the Queen: a federal election, briefly forgotten in unanimous joy, now looms. It is overshadowed by the Petrov defection, by anticommunist agitation and Labor’s hopes for power. In the Melbourne Herald,

5° David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets (Sydney, 1994), 64.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 251 24 February. The Government campaign would open on 4 May. It was already known that Evatt would speak at Hurstville, on 6 May, to begin Labor’s fight.5! Frith followed up his ‘seashore’ cartoon with a parallel one on 5 April. Now Bob and Bert were in the ring, with their ceremonial clothes off and their gloves on. The referee, John Citizen, was warning: ‘Remember, no gouging, no biting, no hitting below the belt’. The manifest party truce during the royal tour had not inhibited behind-the-scenes preparation for the contest. In February leaked policy drafts of Labor’s Federal Parliamentary Executive made it

MAY THE BEST MAN WIN!

ma , wy (hrieee i an me 24°, ae we s a of" ce netemeon byl _ Ao Vi , “tae, , "

pa ———t UY eG 2h ae A 4+ J AY SI

FUNNY En Ne

et een eee Le OO mene 5 !

the belt.’ |

Relerce: “Remember, no gouging, no biting, no hitting belou Frith captures the underlying mood as the Queen sails away, but hopes, nevertheless, that all will be well. >! SMH, 25 February 1954. Frank Cain, ASIO, an Unofficial History (Richmond, 1994), 164-5, erroneously puts Menzies’ announcement of the election date at 14 April, the day after his announcement of the Petrov defection, and incorrectly says that ‘it is not known when Prime Minister Menzies selected 29 May to be the election day’.

252 ROBERT MENZIES clear that the party would advocate the abolition of the means test on pensions, the provision through the Commonwealth Bank of.generous housing loans, and a number of improved social services.>* The Government, on the other hand, could be expected to stand on its record and to seek to consolidate its improving prestige,

as demonstrated in the series of by-elections culminating in the Gwydir contest and evident in some opinion polls. Above all, it would depend on the ‘new prosperity’ marked by declining unemployment and the apparent control of inflation. Its prospects were colourfully described in private by Brendan Bracken, the close and

rather larrikin friend of the mining magnate and promoter of Evatt’s political fortunes, W. 5S. Robinson. Writing from England at the end of December 1953, Bracken surveyed the Australian scene

and opined that ‘it looks at the moment as if the Labour Party in New South Wales and perhaps in other States, are going to re-elect Bob provided he is not divorced from “call me Artie” and that senile

brontosaurus Earle P’..° He was referring to the threat posed to Labor by current allegations of corruption in State politics, and to the need for Menzies to retain strength in the electorate by keeping

up his alliance with the Country Party, here identified by contemptuous references to its current leader, ‘Artie’ Fadden, and its former leader, the now ageing Earle Page. Robinson himself thought on a number of occasions in 1952 and 1953 that Evatt was

certain to win the election and told him so, but by 1954 he considered that Menzies’ improving fortunes would make it a ‘close go’ between him and Evatt.4 The Commonwealth parliament which the Queen had opened was due to be prorogued, in preparation for the election, on 14 April.

On the night of 13 April, Menzies dramatically announced in the House of Representatives that Vladimir Petrov, an officer of the MVD, had defected from the Soviet Embassy and brought with him

important information about espionage in Australia. Cabinet had

that morning approved the formation of a Royal Commission, which would be empowered to call witnesses compulsorily, fully to investigate the implications of the documents Petrov had revealed. Menzies told the House that, until the Commission met, the details of Petrov’s revelations would be sub judice, and no names would be mentioned. He was unhappy that the Commission had to be estab-

lished before the election but he expected that all parties would agree that the matter should be investigated without loss of time. 52 SMH, 14 February 1954.

°° Bracken to Robinson, 30 December 1953, Evatt Collection, Flinders University. °# Quoted in Ken Buckley et al., Doc Evatt (Melbourne, 1994), 370.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 253 He made it clear that he did not wish the affair to become entangled in the election campaign. Menzies chose his words carefully and a silent, perhaps stunned,

Opposition offered no objection to the notion that a Royal Commission investigate the evidence of espionage in Australia revealed

in the Petrov documents. It is possible that, had he been in the House, the Opposition leader, Evatt, might have had something to say about this,9°> but he was not there. That evening, having left Can-

berra late in the afternoon, he was at a dinner for the old boys of his school, Fort Street High, in Sydney. All writers, whatever their other predilections, have accepted the view that Menzies knew ahead that

Evatt would not be in Canberra, and timed his revelation of the Petrov defection accordingly. In fact, this presumption is most doubtful. It rests almost entirely on an article which a senior

journalist in the Canberra press gallery, Alan Reid, wrote at the time for the Sydney Sun-Herald. Entitled ‘Labor Claims Evatt “Framed” on Petrov Statement’,-° the article was based on an allegation that Evatt and his deputy had, during the day on 13 April, informed the

Minister for Labour, Harold Holt, that Evatt would be in Sydney that night. Holt, Reid assumed, conveyed this news to Cabinet, which met that morning and decided on the nature and timing of the Prime Minister’s statement to the House and the nation.

When he read this article Menzies wrote furiously to Reid, denouncing the latter’s failure to check on the facts with himself or his office, and setting out in detail an account of the events of his day on 13 April. He explicitly denied having had any knowledge of Evatt’s impending absence which, he said, ‘one would not normally anticipate on the part of an Opposition leader on the second last day of the final session of Parliament’. Menzies declared that, having spent most of the afternoon preparing and checking the accuracy of his statement about Petrov, he had sent a message to say he wished

to see Evatt on an urgent matter before business resumed in the House that evening. He was ‘completely astonished’ to discover at that point (‘not later than 5.30 p.m.’) that the leader of the Oppo-

sition was not in Canberra. In acknowledging this letter—two months later—Reid simply agreed that he should have consulted Menzies or his office before publishing his article, and offered no denial of any detail of Menzies’ version of the events in question. Reid was a dangerous man with whom, unless one was absolutely >° ‘Possible’, but not probable. To allow ‘reply’ to such statements was not normal procedure and even Evatt, confronted suddenly with such dramatic and ‘loaded’ news, would have to step warily. °6 Sun-Herald, 25 April 1954.

254 ROBERT MENZIES sure of one’s ground, to contest matters of political veracity. He was

a dominant figure in the press gallery and had influential connections with knowledgeable politicians. That Menzies confronted him so aggressively suggests that he had little doubt of the correctness of his case.°’

Predictably, Evatt sensed insult and loudly said so in the House next day. While endorsing the decision to appoint a Royal Commission and asserting that ‘a Labor Government would see that any person guilty of espionage would be prosecuted according to law’,

he also bitterly castigated the Government’s failure to consult the Opposition on the working of the Royal Commission and on the terms of reference and the selection of a judge. Above all, he denounced the discourtesy to which he, as leader of the Opposition, had been subjected: [had an important engagement in Sydney last night. However, I did not leave Canberra until 5 o’clock and I would not have left had I had any inkling that the Prime Minister would make his announcement. I heard of Mr Menzies’ statement just before 9 p.m.°®

And pointing out that the security service had been established by Chifley ‘with my assistance and co-operation’, he declared that ‘it always was the practice on important matters of the security service that not only the Prime Minister but the leader of the Opposition should be kept generally informed of the activities of the service,

and that has always been honoured’. That remark elicited no response from Menzies, though on other occasions he denied that the ‘Security Chief under Mr Chifley periodically conferred with me’.°? Under the regime of Charles Spry, the Brigadier from military

intelligence appointed early in the Menzies era to head the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) it is almost certain that as Opposition leader Evatt was indeed rarely, if ever, briefed on

security matters. Both Spry and Menzies regarded the unpredictability of Evatt’s behaviour as a reason for not confiding confidential information to him.

A few days later Evatt made a bitter attack on Menzies for comments on the Petrov case which he claimed made the ‘sly insinuation’ that members of parliament might be called as witnesses °7 All the letters referred to here are in the National Library of Australia’s Menzies collection, MS. 4936/1/26/210. I discuss this matter in greater detail in ‘Evatt’s Absence from the House’, Quadrant, June 1995, 46-50. 58 CPD H of R 3: 372-3; Age, 15 April 1954.

59 He told Reid, for example, that this claim was inaccurate, adding that Opposition leaders ‘had only modest rights in my time’, NLA, MS 4936/1/26/210.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 255 to the Royal Commission and represented a ‘crude attempt’ to disparage the previous administration of the Security Service. Menzies’ remarks, he said, needed careful watching: In some respects they amount to an unjustified interference with the procedures of just investigation which should always be committed to an impartial tribunal and never determined by the political head of what is a ‘caretaker’ administration.

Menzies responded contemptuously to what he called Evatt’s ‘curious and hysterical outburst’, saying that it was incomprehensible, and that he had never questioned the ability and integrity of the former Director-General of Security, Mr Justice Reed. The Sydney Morning Herald ‘Canberra Correspondent’ noted how the chivalry which had characterized Menzies’ relations with Chifley and Curtin certainly did not apply to Menzies and Evatt ‘who make no secret of their dislike of each other, though each has until now been restrained in public’. But Evatt’s personal attack had ‘brought the old-worldly conventions of election campaigns to an end’. And in an editorial headed “Bringing the Petrov Case into Party Politics’, the paper declared that ‘If what is strictly a question of national

security becomes a lively issue in the election campaign, the

responsibility will lie not with Mr Menzies but with Dr Evatt’. But after this initial outburst Evatt refrained from further remarks on Petrov, except to make a justified protest when several ministers at the outset of the election campaign broke the cabinet taboo on the subject. Furthermore, in dramatic events that followed a few days after his exchange with Menzies, the latter’s seemingly masterful

behaviour enhanced his prestige and made the Petrov case an intrinsically difficult and dangerous subject for the Opposition. ' Petrov had defected without his wife, herself an MVD officer, and it soon became known that she was to be sent home in the care of

two couriers who had come out from Russia for that express purpose. Menzies, ASIO and others agreed that Mrs Petrov must be

given every chance to seek asylum, and complicated plans were accordingly made. International convention stipulated that the decision to grant asylum could be made on Australian soil only if Mrs Petrov asked for it, though she could be formally approached once out of the country. Agents with letters from Petrov himself were 60 SMH, 17 April. This attack seems to have been triggered by an explanation Menzies

made to a journalist in answer to a question about the principle of parliamentary privilege and its relation to the Royal Commission (SMH editorial, 19 April). 6! Jbid., 19 April 1954. The suggestion that Evatt and Menzies had not bitterly attacked each other in public before was, of course, incorrect.

256 ROBERT MENZIES accordingly sent to Singapore, to accost her there if necessary. Meantime Petrov’s ASIO ‘minders’ took him to Mascot aerodrome, hidden under the awning of a utility truck in case his wife wanted

to see him. A plan to pass her a note from him misfired, and the couriers got her aboard the plane, but not before a wild demonstration by a crowd of Soviet and Eastern European migrants had broken through police barriers, clutched at her and implored her to stay. Subsequently, at Darwin, she was separated from her Soviet guards, who had committed the offence of carrying weapons on a flight over Australian territory, and were forcibly disarmed by Australian police. After being interviewed by the Acting Administrator

of the Northern Territory, Reginald Leyden, and speaking to her husband on the telephone, Mrs Petrov first asked to be kidnapped. When that request was indignantly rejected by authorities in Canberra, she asked for asylum. Dramatic press photographs of the demonstration at Mascot and the disarming of the Russian couriers

at Darwin were beamed around the world, and Australia was momentarily the centre of international attention.

On 20 April Menzies issued a statement ‘giving a simple narrative of the facts as they are known to me’, which purported to tell in detail what had happened in the lead-up to the rescue of Mrs Petrov. It in fact did so, as far as security considerations allowed.

Menzies laid stress on his own role, speaking of ‘instructions’ he had at various points in the drama given to ‘the head of the Security

Service’ and how ‘we’ had ‘with prudent forethought’ arranged ahead for ‘Security people’ to be in Darwin to meet the plane, and for an agent to travel in the plane itself.°* Congratulations, lauding

what writers saw as the virtuous rescue of a woman who chose freedom, came from home and abroad. Evatt himself described the actions taken at Darwin as ‘fully justified’.©

A few days after Mrs Petrov’s defection the left-wing novelist Miles Franklin wrote to Evatt’s wife to say that it would seem that the Lord must be on the side of Menzies, what with the Queen’s visit and then the spy melodrama. But she wondered about people’s

supposedly conventional reactions to the latter. At a theatre she had seen a newsreel of protesters as the Russian couriers bundled Mrs Petrov on to the plane at Sydney. Some of the audience, she reported, were moved to spontaneous laughter at the antics of what they called ‘loony migrants’. Further, 62 SMH, 21 April 1954 (P.M. Praises Authorities: “Care, Resource” in Petrov case’). I base my brief summary of events leading to Mrs Petrov’s release on the detailed and well-documented account of Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair, 77-90. 63 Manne, The Petrov Affair, 90.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 257 Two comments of many from the average unenlightened voters may interest you. One, an unquestioning adherent of Mr Menzies, said from the start that every move was being directed from Moscow. The other, a

young man on the opposite side has an idea that the whole thing has been engineered by Government bribery etc to defeat the Opposition. A pity that we have gone as far as that in the realm of partisan suspicion already.®4

Brendan Bracken wrote of ‘Bob Menzies’ providential gift of a Communist spy’: he ‘ought to get quite a number of votes through the doings of Malenkov’s minions’. What seemed the extraordinary coincidence of timing of the Petrov affair and the election could at first only look heaven-sent: the now discredited notion that

the whole thing was a conspiracy between Spry and Menzies to

enable the latter to win an unwinnable election had still to surface. But it can be taken for granted that, in the atmosphere of the time, the seeming vindication of the Government’s many warnings about the supposed connection between communism and a fifth column

would win it votes. Menzies behaved impeccably at one level, refusing to allow the contents of any of the Petrov documents to be disclosed until the Royal Commission began its hearings, after the election, and insisting that the Petrov defections not be discussed in

the election campaign. To decide to investigate the extent of the alleged spy network through a Royal Commission (which we now know was originally Spry’s suggestion) was not, as Evatt later claimed it was, unnecessary and improper. The important precedent of the Canadian Royal Commission after the defection of the

Russian Gouzenko in that country had shown how the procedure could uncover a range of espionage activities, and at the beginning there was no reason to suspect that the Petrov revelations might not rival in importance those of Gouzenko. But Menzies was also an acute politician and an experienced showman, who instinctively welcomed the kudos he got from his leading part in the extrication of Mrs Petrov. Again, there is substance in criticism of the Ministry and its advisers for arranging the first three day meeting of the Royal Commission in the penultimate week of the election cam-

paign, instead of after the poll. Admittedly there was a press clamour for the inquiry to begin and no revelations of names or facts likely to affect the Opposition were made, but the meetings were staged in a specially decorated Albert Hall, attracted a large gathering of the press and diplomatic corps, and brought the name of Petrov back into newspaper headlines. 64 Miles Franklin to Mrs Evatt, 24 April 1954, Evatt Papers, Flinders University. 65 Bracken to Robinson, 11 May 1954, MUA, W. S. Robinson Collection 6/54.

258 ROBERT MENZIES Menzies delivered the Government’s policy speech on 4 May. The Sydney Morning Herald characterized it as ‘a highly skilled, if unexciting performance’. It skated past ‘the more obvious weaknesses’

in the Government’s record, made no reference to Petrov (while intoning the by now ritualistic denunciation of the communist menace), and set ‘a reasonably temperate tone’ for the election. Above all, the Prime Minister noted that the Government was appealing to the country at a time of prosperity, and not unfairly

claimed that its unpopular measures of the last few years had brought changes which belied the gloomy predictions of the Opposition. Unemployment no longer existed, inflation had been curbed, exports and international reserves were at record levels. ‘We present our accounts’, he said, ‘not with apology and anxious explanations, but with pride’. The most unfortunate aspect of the occasion was the way the Country Party leader, Fadden, in a supporting speech

cut across Menzies’ ‘temperate tone’ by saying that the present atmosphere of reported communist activity made the choice of leadership urgent. The election was ‘aggravated by the world situation’. He would not deal with the Petrov case except to say that the Royal Commission would carry out its investigation ‘on the lines of British justice’. But ‘In whose hands would you place such results —kR. G. Menzies with his splendid record, or H. V. Evatt with his?’ In this early stage of the campaign several other ministers tried to

make capital out of the Petrov affair before Menzies was able to insist on their silence. Harrison, Minister for Defence Production, attacked Evatt for appearing in Court for communist trade union leaders: ‘this man with his record, now asks you to let him take charge of the Royal Commission into Communist espionage’. Spooner, the Minister tor National Development, declared at Orange

that ‘the Petrov affair had shown in its true light Labour’s opposition to banning the Communist Party’, and the notorious Liberal backbench red-baiter, W. C. Wentworth, took a little time to be contained. Later, Fadden delivered a Country Party ‘policy’ speech which consisted chiefly of anumber of questions, directed explicitly to Evatt, unpleasantly attributing to him culpable ‘softness’ on communism. It elicited an understandable reply, as, ‘his voice trembling with anger’, Evatt declared in a radio broadcast: Behind Fadden is Mr Menzies. He does not do anything himself. He smears through his agents, the Faddens, Wentworths, and Harrisons. | tell them before the face of the world that if they impute to me, who fought Communism and Russian Imperialism, if they impute to me any sympathy with Communism they are the vilest liars in the world.® 66 SMH, 5-7, 12 May 1954.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 259 Evatt gave the ALP policy speech at Hurstville on 6 May. He called it ‘a fighting programme’, of lower taxes, higher pensions, more housing finance and a drive for national development. Above all, he promised that Labor would abolish the means test in the life of one parliament, thus making the old-age pension available to all. Much of what he proposed was progressive, designed to ameliorate hardships caused by sometimes niggardly social services. But his opponents, and most of the press, pounced at once on the potential

cost of the programme, particularly the large pension bill which abolition of the means test would entail. Menzies declared that Chifley would have been ashamed to put such proposals forward and the Sydney Morning Herald denounced the policy in an editorial headed ‘Dr Evatt’s Inflationary Bid for Votes’.°” Evatt had not given

a precise costing for the measures he proposed, simply asserting that it was ‘possible’ to finance them. The stage was set for what, as the campaign got under way, the Sun-Herald called “This “gimme” election’, in which larger issues became subordinate to the wrangle

over how much Labor’s policy would cost and how it would be

paid for. Some of the twists and turns of this argument were ironically amusing. The Sun-Herald’s ‘Onlooker’, for example, observed how:

The ghost of J.B. Chifley, dead three years this June, is walking in the election. Old opponents as well as former colleagues are evoking it in their quest for votes. ‘Chif’ would have been sardonically amused to

find himself being cited as a pillar of rectitude by adversaries who would not have a bar of his policies when he was alive. That is the way of politics. You have to die before your virtues are discovered or, at any rate, publicly acknowledged by the other side.®®

Both leaders embarked on a punishing campaign trail. For the Liberals the key State was Queensland, and Menzies’ campaign began there.®? He was remarkably well received. As one observer

put it, ‘the brawlers and the tomato-throwers of the past were nowhere to be seen’, even in the Brisbane City Hall: In 1951 every policeman within call in Brisbane was rushed to the hall to stop the rumpus when Mr. Menzies spoke there. But at the Brisbane City

Hall on May 6, 1954, he had the biggest political meeting ever held

677 May 1954. 6 16 May 1954.

69 In 1949 the Coalition won in Queensland an unprecedented 15 seats to 3. In 1951 it still held 14 to the ALP’s 4.

260 ROBERT MENZIES in Queensland and probably the most peaceful. Even his passing gibes

at Dr Evatt produced no reaction beyond a discreet titter from the audience.”

Journalists explained this reception as a reflection of prosperity being currently enjoyed in the State.”! This good start buoyed up the Government’s morale, though there were less happy meetings later

in the campaign, especially in Tasmania. The campaign became more lively as the two leaders made no secret of their personal hostility and Menzies’ initial attempts to achieve a ‘temperate tone’ quickly wilted. Press commentators felt that, with his ‘somethingfor-everybody’ policy, Evatt had seized the initiative and forced the Government to fight on ground not of its own choosing. “Tactically’, observed the Sydney Morning Herald,

this is a considerable achievement for an Opposition which had to change position sharply when the economic upswing made nonsense of its plans to campaign on depression and unemployment. No longer able to cry calamity the Labour Party was obliged to cast around for a vote-

winning substitute. It found one in the advocacy of vastly expanded social benefits, labelled as “social justice’.”

After spending the first part of the campaign with the Menzies cavalcade and the second with Evatt, one journalist claimed that Labor’s whole campaign was ‘simple and emotional. It is not intended to win the votes of economists’. Though he still could not match Menzies as a drawcard, Evatt’s public meetings were said to

be much larger than in the Senate election. His platform method was changing: he was speaking faster, more incisively and more emotionally, and was scouring the country with such intensity that people travelling with him ‘were beginning to wilt. They have not had breakfast on the ground yet, since they joined him, in his flying tour of all States’. Mrs Evatt was with him, often on the platform

with a large bouquet of flowers. It was almost entirely due to her that her husband’s usual disorganization and scrambles to catch planes were overcome. “This could be Dr Evatt’s one chance

“0 “Our Canberra Correspondent’, SMH, 11 May 1954.

7 e.g., SMH, 29 May 1954. ‘On his election tour the Country Party leader, Sir Arthur Fadden, a Queenslander himself, went to one club where £20,000 changes hands in

gambling in one night ... In electorates like Capricornia, which takes in Rock-

hampton, farmers who have been struggling for years are in the money now. They have jumped into the high-tax bracket and the threat of eventually still higher tax under Labour has frightened them off.’ ?2 Tbid., 20 May 1954.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 261 to become Prime Minister of Australia, and he is not sparing

himself.’73

But it was not to be, and the consequences, both for Evatt and for the country, were to be far-reaching. The Government held power, albeit with a reduced majority in parliament and a fraction less than a majority of the two-party preferred vote. After his hard work in the election and the hopes stimulated by the unpopularity of the

Menzies Ministry through 1952 and much of 1953 Evatt’s disappointment at failing to win the grail of office was deep. That was understandable: but that the disappointment was bitter and accompanied by the cry of ‘foul’ is another matter. Petrov was at the heart of it: Evatt and his supporters, then and since, claimed that Menzies’ handling—if not his staging—of the defection robbed the ALP and its parliamentary leader of victory and the chance to put into operation a forward-looking democratic programme. This claim has to be judged as at worst incorrect, at best unprovable. Before the 1954 election, the party situation in the House of Representatives was that the Coalition held 69 seats, and the ALP 53. To

gain government, the ALP had eight extra seats to win from the Coalition. In the upshot it gained 5, but the Coalition won back one seat, Flinders, which it had lost at the disastrous by-election of 1952. The voting in the 1954 election registered a ‘swing’ of 1.4 per cent to the ALP, which gave it a majority of the estimated two-party preferred vote of 50.1 per cent. But given the natural concentration of

the Labor vote in certain areas, this was not a decisive—or even important—factor.” It was critical for Coalition success to keep its overwhelming hold over Queensland: in the upshot it won 13 seats to 5,a change of only one seat since the 1951 election. The seat lost to Labor was Griffith.” The other four seats which the ALP took from the Government came from four different States, and represented marginal electorates in which only a small proportion of votes had to change hands.” 73 Tbid., ‘Federal Notebook’, 18 May 1954.

74 Russel Ward, A Radical Life (Melbourne, 1988), 221, writes quite inaccurately of ‘the gerrymander’ which returned Menzies to power. ”> The pro-Coalition landslide in Queensland had been an important factor in Menzies’ 1949 victory: the majority in the State was 15 seats to 3. In 1951 the coalition still won 14 to 4. Liberal Party analysts were puzzled to explain the loss of Griffith in 1954. But they considered it ‘rather stacked against us. Labour organised it very strongly and enjoyed State and Local Government representation in the area’ (Fourteenth meeting, Liberal Party Federal Public Relations Planning Committee, 16-18 July 1954, NLA, MS. 5000/1/15). lam indebted to Mr fan Hancock, who kindly drew my attention to this document.

’6The seats were St George, in NSW; Sturt in South Australia; Swan in Western Australia; Bass in Tasmania.

262 ROBERT MENZIES Grass-roots party workers are the ones who know how various the influences on the vote are in reality; and in the 1954 case we are fortunate in having one glimpse of the views of some of them in the

record of a behind-the-scenes Liberal Party public relations committee meeting, held just after the election.”” State General Secretaries spoke to a detailed statistical record of the final poll, drawn up by the federal research officer. Among the more significant comments were the assertion of the New South Wales Secretary that Evatt, ‘being Labour leader from this State was a favourable factor for Labour’, matched by the Victorian Secretary who observed, of his State, ‘personal campaign and prestige of P.M. outstanding’. In Queensland the Liberal contribution to the good coalition results

was said to be greater than the poll suggested because of the Country Party’s refusal to run a joint campaign. The same was true in Western Australia. Factors in the loss there of the electorate of Swan were thought to be that the electorate had a growing population in State housing areas and that the Liberal candidate began campaigning too late. In Tasmania the loss of Bass was puzzling, though this, said the Secretary, was ‘the one seat Labour concentrated upon’, while the sitting Liberal was too complacent and did not campaign as enthusiastically as in the past. In Sturt a drift away of votes was observed in all subdivisions but the most telling vote against the Government was one of over two and a half thousand

in a new residential area in the Northfield subdivision. No one mentioned communism, let alone Petrov, as a factor affecting the

vote, here or elsewhere. When one considers in this more detailed way the disposition of seats before and after the election of 1954 it is obvious that the story that the Menzies Government ‘saved’ itself by pulling Petrov out of

the hat requires, if it is to be believed, much more sophisticated support than it has received so far. As in 1949 and 1951, the key to

the Government's success was its capacity to hold its position in Queensland. That it did so, with the loss of only one seat in that State, does not suggest that in 1954 its position was in serious danger: consistency over three elections is, after all, to be accorded due weight. A few other seats were lost, but not more than one in any State, and though there was a mild ‘swing’ in Labor’s favour, the Government still retained a firm majority of seats. Whether, in any of them, the electors voted against Labor because of Petrov and

the Communist issue is quite unknowable. It could certainly be guessed that some did, but on that level of generality a more potent ”” This is the document referred to, and acknowledged, in footnote 75 above.

TO THE 1954 ELECTION 263 guess might be that the economic recovery evident by the end of

1953 affected more. The astute W.S. Robinson, whom Evatt’s biographers correctly see as one of their subject’s most important encouragers and backers in 1952-54,’8 observed to his son in midMay 1954: ‘rarely is a government defeated in times of high prosperity and I cannot see Bert doing the trick on this occasion, though some of the good judges think otherwise’.”? Gallup polls, for what they are worth, seem to confirm that the ebb and flow of the Govern-

ment’s popularity over 1952-54 was closely related to popular conceptions of the state of the economy.®? And as we have seen, byelections over this period give substance to the same pattern.

”® Buckley, et al., Doc Evatt, 370-1.

” WSR to LBR, 13 May 1954, MUA, W. S. Robinson Collection, 2/11. 80 See Manne, The Petrov Affair, 109-11, for a thorough analysis of this question.

Ae THE thefor sentiment most expressed the press ELECTION, was that, ‘bidding’ the electorate’s support nowin being over, it was imperative that the Government should turn its attention to problems of defence and foreign relations which had been neglected by both parties during the election.' In fact, as Menzies told the American ambassador, Amos Peaslee, he had decided to convene Cabinet on 4 June for a session exclusively to consider the position in Southeast Asia. With the election over he had hoped to take a vacation but said that that would depend on the outcome of the meeting. ‘He requested conference with me Saturday following Cabinet session [i.e. the next day] and observed that “time is running against us”.’* The main concern at the Cabinet meeting was how far

Australia should agree with United States policy in a crisis which had reached flash-point in Indochina. That developments in Southeast Asia had, on either side, received little mention in the election campaign had been largely a reflection of the public’s—and most politicians’—apathy towards and ignorance of the complex problems of the area. Careful newspaper readers and listeners to radio news broadcasts could, however, have hardly

been unaware that a fierce struggle was going on in northern

'e.g.: editorials, ‘Post-election task’, Sun-Herald, 30 May 1954; ‘Back to Economic Reality’, SMH, 1 June 1954. * Peaslee to Secretary of State, 2 June 1954. Peaslee added that Menzies’ return to power ‘is attributable almost exclusively to [his] personal strength and vigor in a situation where defeat seemed inevitable a year ago ... In my opinion he is now (repeat now) probably the strongest personality in Commonwealth countries, combines wisdom, warmth and humour with extraordinary abilities as advocate, instinctively believes in

leading from strength and ... his increased participation in Commonwealth leadership might have great usefulness to our viewpoint ...” (US Archives, Department of State, Box 3559, 743.00/6-254). Peaslee promised to report Menzies’ news of the Cabinet meeting after he had visited the Embassy again on the 5th. 264

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 265 Vietnam between a revolutionary army and French troops fighting to re-establish hegemony over their country’s former colonial territories. This was what was to become known as the first Indochina war. Its origins stretched back to September 1945 when Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, proclaimed in Hanoi the independent Democratic Government of Vietnam (DRV). The new state was envisaged as combining the old French provinces of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina. The Viet Minh, a coalition of nationalist groups, had been the only

significant local force in the fight against Japanese invaders who seized France’s Indochinese provinces during World War II. The French colonial regime, being aligned with the collaborationist French Government at Vichy, had been quickly discredited. Though

not in any simplistic sense communist the Viet Minh was, in the West, progressively given that reputation as the Cold War developed, particularly as there was no doubt about Ho Chi Minh’s own long commitment to Marxism, his training, chiefly in Moscow, as a professional revolutionary and his role in establishing an effectual Indochinese Communist Party. The French, with British and,

at one stage, rearmed Japanese support, repelled by force early attempts to establish a Viet Minh government in the South, at Saigon. But popular support for the revolutionaries was overWhelming in the North. When attempts at peaceful agreements between the French and Hanoi broke down (chiefly through French bad faith), Ho Chi Minh in January 1950 declared the DRV the only legal government in Vietnam and invited international recognition. Communist China and Soviet Russia complied—sure proof in most Western eyes that the new state was in the communist camp and not primarily the fruit of nationalism. By then the military forces of the DRV, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), had become large and effective, and was soon inflicting heavy casualties on the French.

Late in 1953 it was six divisions strong and the war was clearly coming to a crisis point. In May 1954, after an almost two-month siege, the PAVN inflicted a crushing defeat on the French by capturing their key garrison of Dien Bien Phu. The question which had increasingly haunted Western policy-makers came to a head: would France now abandon her claims in Indochina altogether? The United States had been supporting the French with supplies

and great injections of capital, as well as propping up a series of non-communist governments in southern Vietnam. As the position in Dien Bien Phu deteriorated the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, proposed “united action’ by a number of countries,

including Australia, to promise military assistance. But Britain pressed for a peaceful settlement and Australian advisers, particu-

266 ROBERT MENZIES larly in the Department of External Affairs, counselled Menzies’ Cabinet to take a cautious line, especially given that the local federal election was imminent. In the United States it was generally agreed that unilateral action was too dangerous to be contemplated, though the loss of Vietnam to communism might be a disaster. At a press

conference early in April, President Eisenhower used a metaphor that soon became a cliché: that of the “falling domino’ principle. ‘You have a row of dominoes set up’, he said, ‘you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly’.° His first domino was Vietnam, his last

Australia and New Zealand. The United States Government believed

that Britain’s refusal to contemplate ‘united action’ was the basic reason for the failure of the policy, and showed disappointment that

Australia had done little to change British ministers’ minds. The British position, however, was logical enough, given the fact that a conference on the Vietnam conflict, long-since arranged, was already due to begin on the day after the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.

At the beginning of 1954 a meeting of the foreign ministers of the ‘big four’ (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States) had agreed to a conference on Korea at Geneva, to begin on 26 April. At France’s request there were also, within a few weeks of the first meeting, to be discussions on Vietnam. When the Australian Cabinet met on 4 June it followed the lead of

Casey, the Minister for External Affairs, in concluding that the United States was acting ‘incautiously’ and should be persuaded not to intervene in Indochina ‘without adequate thought and without definition of its military and political aims’. Cabinet regarded the partition of Vietnam as inevitable and wanted a settlement which protected the integrity of the erstwhile French areas of Laos and Cambodia.4 Thus Menzies must have had little to cheer Peaslee

with when they met, as arranged, next day.° So matters briefly rested. Cabinet had taken such decisions as were for the time being necessary. Casey, who headed the Australian delegation of observers

at Geneva and who had come home for the election, left to return to Geneva three days after the crucial Cabinet meeting. Menzies 3 Quoted, Peter Edwards, with Gregory Pemberton, Crises and Commitments, 127. This

thorough and authoritative account of ‘the politics and diplomacy of Australia’s involvement in Southeast Asian conflicts 1948-1965’ provides the general basis for my brief discussion of the Vietnamese issue here. 4 Crises and Commitments, 140.

> Peaslee reported on 6 June to the Secretary of State, but this file has been classified ‘security’ and removed, so we do not know what the thrust of the discussion between Menzies and Peaslee was. Edwards’ account of what happened at the Cabinet meeting (footnote 6) draws on Cabinet papers in Australian Archives.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 267 had told Peaslee that if it had not been for the election he would ‘probably have himself headed the delegation to Geneva’,® but if that was true he was not insensitive enough to take over now. All told, there was a lull, and Menzies decided to take his long-awaited holiday. He left a few days after the crucial Cabinet meeting, headed for New Zealand. His wife, his daughter Heather and his son Ian went with him. It was a happy time: the holiday was in “a fishing lodge in the North Island where we were the only visitors’.” They were away for a fortnight, and only on the last days did Menzies surface for official engagements. He had talks—chiefly, it was understood, on Southeast Asian and Pacific affairs—with Holland, New Zealand’s Prime

Minister, and met the local Cabinet. And he was given a state luncheon at which he spoke eloquently about the identity of Aus-

tralia and New Zealand’s interests in a troubled world.® ‘Pat and I really enjoyed the New Zealand holiday and feel a little rested’, he subsequently wrote to Latham.’ But an even more pleasurable experience was in store. This was a three-day visit to Alice Springs. Menzies had accepted an invitation to lay the foundation stone of a memorial church for ‘Flynn of the

Inland’, late superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission of the Presbyterian Church and founder of the Flying Doctor Service. The Menzies came back from New Zealand to Canberra on 23 June. That enabled the Prime Minister to chair another important Cabinet meeting which on the 24th considered Australian delegates’ reports from a five-power military conference recently held in Washington. Those reports depicted United States Chiefs of Staff divided on the

issue of intervention in Indochina and the French opposed to any stepping up of the conflict. ‘Cabinet consequently reaffirmed the views it had expressed on 4th.” Thus freed, Menzies flew off to Alice Springs next day.!!

Again he went en famille. As he later wrote to his friend, Lionel Lindsay, ‘Ian and Heather were delighted with the place and most reluctant to leave’. He and Dame Pattie could only spare three days, and son Ian had reluctantly to get back to sowing operations at his farm in northern Victoria. But Heather stayed on, the guest into late July of local cattleman, Jim Sargood, and his wife. She came home

6 Peaslee, 2 June. ’ Menzies to R. Heymanson, 15 July 1954, NLA, MS. 4936/1/15/132. 8 Age, 22 June 1954. ? Menzies to Latham, 24 June 1954, NLA, MS. 1009/1/9287A. 10 Crises and Commitments, 141. ll Menzies’ office diaries have details of movements, NLA, MS. 4936/13/401.

268 ROBERT MENZIES ‘looking very suntanned and happy’.!* Menzies himself found the few days he spent in Alice Springs relaxed and rewarding. He and Flynn’s successor, the Reverend Fred McKay, struck up an immediate and deep friendship, which would in time lead to McKay officiating at Heather’s wedding and, in the end, at Menzies’ own funeral.

Menzies laid the foundation stone of the memorial church on 26 June. It was to be a spectacular edifice, built of blocks faced with crushed pink and white marble quarried in the Strangway Ranges, 70 miles from Alice Springs. Already two recent migrants, experts from the Adelaide firm of Florianni, had made on site and by hand

17 000 such blocks of 18 different shapes, some weighing up to 120 Ibs.13 The town’s celebrations included one carefully timed event: the ceremonial arrival of a train from Adelaide, drawn by a

diesel-electric locomotive of a kind which had not been used in the inland before. Pat and Heather were given a special lunch on the

train; afterwards the former addressed a large gathering of local women, amusing them with an account of what she had seen and done at the Coronation. Next day Menzies opened an ‘Australian Old Timers’ Home’, the first in the Northern Territory, three miles from the Alice, at the foot of Mount Blatherskite. Subsequently, over

the flying doctor network, he told Territorians how much he had enjoyed this, his first trip to Central Australia: it had been above all for him an education. ‘All around me I see signs of difficulties overcome and great constructive effort’, he said; ‘I am enlightened and heartened by my visit’.!4 It is noteworthy that, during this first visit to the ‘Centre’, Menzies showed no curiosity about the Aboriginal population. The home he opened for ‘old timers’ was for whites and he cordially met a ‘white’

delegation from the local Labor organization, but he showed no interest in going with his host, the Reverend Fred McKay, to look at Aboriginal paintings in an Art Gallery that Albert Namatjira had set

up. In response to a personal query about whether during his visit Menzies met many Aborigines Dr McKay was later to write: “At the actual Foundation Stone Ceremony there was quite a sizeable Menzies to Lindsay, 20 July 1954, La Trobe Library, MS. 10375/333. The Sargoods became good friends of the Menzies. In 1957, for example, they offered hospitality to the ill and post-Suez ostracized Anthony Eden. Sargood and his wife, wrote Menzies, were ‘delightful people, each of them accustomed to the amenities of life. They have a very attractive house. Pat and I have stayed there with immense pleasure. It is, in fact, the show place of that part of the country. Jim Sargood has just returned from England and has written me a letter renewing a warm invitation to you both to go to them if you would like to do so’ (Menzies to Eden, 8 March 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/2/14). 3 Age, 26 June 1954. 14 Tbhid., 28 June 1954.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 269 number of Aboriginals present. [ would describe them as station stockmen who wanted to see what was going on! They would not have had any opportunity of getting near the Prime Minister’. Then, in a remarkably honest and significant recapitulation of the time and the context, Dr McKay added that his own energies were consumed with his work of ‘rehabilitating the Australian Inland Mission organisation, and my culture concern about Aboriginal de-

velopment came later with Paul Hasluck’s integration policies. | placed the Devils’ Marbles on John Flynn’s grave without knowing it was the egg of the Great Rainbow Serpent!’

Once back from Alice Springs Menzies quickly took the helm again. Summing up the general situation as he saw it, Menzies was writing within a few weeks to his friend Lionel Lindsay: The elections, Cabinet appointments and committees, Premiers’ and Loan Council meetings and the launching of the Petrov Commission are behind me now, and all should be plain sailing until the 21st. Parliament meets early next month.!¢

The British High Commissioner in Canberra, Stephen Holmes, reported to his superiors in London that “Mr. Menzies has made no secret of it to me that he hopes to take a pretty firm grip of things now that he has got a new lease of life as Prime Minister’. Menzies had complained to Holmes about the ‘vested interests’ which pre-

vented him from making the radical Cabinet changes he would have wished. He spoke very frankly of having the Country Party, as he said, ‘round his neck’. They were in many ways a liability. Most of them were physically unfit and most of them indeed (all except MacEwen [sic], one of the invalids) were, he said, not up to the job; he had again to work with Sir Arthur Fadden as Treasurer though on every ground, and especially in view of his serious road accident in the course of the election campaign,!” Fadden

ought to have taken the opportunity to retire. Another Country Party Minister, Anthony, who has been relieved of Civil Aviation but retained

as Postmaster-General, was also the subject of the Prime Minister’s strong criticism. He had found to his horror that Anthony had visited the Post-Office Department (in Melbourne) only twice in the course of the previous two years.!® 'S Dr Fred McKay to A. W. Martin, 26 February 1998. 16 Menzies to Lindsay, 20 July 1954.

17 Accident took place on 28 May. The Age reported on 26 June that Fadden had had a

fifth operation, to remove congealed blood from bruises. On 27th he arrived in Canberra to take part in Loan Council meeting: Age reported (28/6/54) that although in good spirits he looked a very sick man. '8 Stephen Holmes to Sir Percivale Liesching, ‘Secret and Personal’, July 1954, PRO DO 35/8040.

270 ROBERT MENZIES Other Ministers, including some Liberals, were almost as unsatisfactory. Holmes cited two or three examples of New South Wales Ministers whose departments were in Melbourne, but who administered them from Sydney. The Minister for Supply, Beale, was a case

in point: he had a ministerial office in Sydney with a private secretary, ‘and files come to him there without however the benefit to the Minister or to his Senior officers of any direct contact between them’. Menzies had told Holmes that this system, or lack of it, could not go on. Ministers must balance more realistically the demands of

constituency, departments and their duty to spend much time in Canberra. “They must be more courageous as regards their constituencies and he mentioned with approval the fact that Hasluck of

Western Australia, the youngish Minister for the Territories, did spend a good deal of his time in Canberra.’ Most important, these difficulties confirmed Menzies’ determination that departments must be moved to and concentrated in Canberra as soon as possible.

Of particular importance in this regard was the Department of Defence:

One of the Prime Minister’s Secretaries took occasion to tell me quite spontaneously and without knowing that I had had any discussion of this kind with Mr Menzies himself that the latter had been particularly stirred by the difficulties of dealing with the Indo-China situation with the Chiefs of Staff in Melbourne, and the Minister of Defence tending to be in Adelaide (his home town), and Casey all over the place.

Holmes’s informant mentioned the matter partly to warn him that the High Commissioner’s office would probably need to be extended soon to accommodate British Services Liaison Staff, ‘and

he, like everyone else, knew the difficulty of getting buildings begun and finished in Canberra’. New government offices now under way were planned to be ready for the first echelon of civil servants in six months time. Over a period of three years 5000 such people were to be moved to Canberra from various departments. ‘Of course the official programme is not the major problem. It is housing for all this addition to Canberra’s population, with all that development implies in shops and so forth.’ Though it was still out of the question to make major changes in ministerial appointments, Menzies did manage a small adjustment to bring to the fore one junior Minister, Athol Townley. A Tasmanian first elected in 1949, Townley had served in minor portfolios but '9 Ibid. On the general question of Canberra’s growth in this period, see Chapter 14 below, and also Eric Sparke, Canberra, 1954-1980, 31 ff, Chapter 2, “Turning Point’.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 271 was now raised to Air and Civil Aviation. Menzies had developed a special affection for him, an attachment which puzzled some of the

politicians who have left reminiscences of this period. Peter Howson and Paul Hasluck, for example, think of him as ‘little more than the “good fellow”’. Hasluck is, however, the more insightful: ‘I

can think of no higher attribute than that he amused and gave to Menzies a regard that must have been a great comfort and reinforce-

ment ... There was something of the court jester about him but a good deal more’.2” The declaration of the poll at Kooyong took place on 2 July. There

a rather complacent Menzies told the hundred or so people who turned up that the remarkable thing about Kooyong was that the

less he had been in the electorate the bigger had become his

majority.2! He was ready, at the beginning of August, to face what the Sydney Morning Herald called ‘a new Parliament and new perils’.

Though the Ministry’s majority was small it was sufficient. The feeling in Canberra was that Labor had ‘shot its bolt on May 29’.

Evatt had ‘strained every nerve and made every imaginable

promise to win’, and the failure left the Labor Party “distraught and divided’.”? By contrast success and the spectacle of Labor disunity ‘are undoubtedly imparting fresh zest to Liberal planning for the future’. The Government itself believed that a sound and popular

budget would strengthen the hold that it had managed to retain over the country. But unhappily ‘the dark shadow of Communism’s

advance in Asia’ still brooded above everything else. It was a problem neglected by both sides during the domestic struggle for power. ‘The débacle in Indo-China has at last jarred this country to alarmed attention’. As soon as parliament met, Menzies made what was on all sides billed as one of his most important foreign policy statements since he came into office in 1949. Behind Menzies’ speech, and the fullscale foreign affairs debate that followed (the first for three years), lay the ambiguous and dangerous culmination of that section of the Geneva talks which dealt with Vietnam. These had concluded late in July, bringing the actual fighting to an end with cease-fire agree-

ments and a number of arrangements which became collectively 20 Howson (ed. Don Aitkin), The Life of Politics (Ringwood, 1984), 71; Hasluck, The Chance of Politics, 89, 93. 21 Age, 3 July 1954.

22 SMH, 4 August 1954. The degree of division at this stage was no doubt exaggerated by Labor’s opponents. In June Evatt was formally thanked at the annual conference of

the Victorian branch of the Party for his ‘inspiring and indefatigable leadership during the election’, and the NSW branch conference passed a unanimous vote of confidence in him. Evatt claimed that the Federal Labor Party had in fact been given a mandate by having polled a majority of votes in the election.

272 ROBERT MENZIES known as the ‘Geneva Accords’. By the most important of these,

Vietnam was for the time being divided into two ‘regrouping’ zones, roughly divided by the 17th parallel, with a demilitarized zone of five kilometres on either side of this line. The People’s Army of Vietnam was to withdraw to the north of this line, people were to be allowed to move freely between each zone, and foreign military installations were not to be established in either. By July 1956 gen-

eral elections were to be held throughout Vietnam, with a view to reunification under a single government. However, the main points of this settlement were agreed to only orally. France’s support was strongest, since the Accords gave her

a semblance of dignity in retreating altogether from Vietnam. But the United States was inclined to distance itself from the agree-

ment, and the South Vietnamese Government, considering itself abandoned by both France and the United States, declared that it did not necessarily feel bound by the compact. The air of uncertainty gave a fillip to the negotiations, which had been taking place parallel to the Geneva talks, between a number of non-communist countries for a kind of ‘Southeast Asian NATO’. If a pathetically

weak South Vietnam seemed to offer a poor bulwark against the march of communism, was it not the more urgent that a mutual defence agreement, supported by the power of the United States, provide security against aggression for like-minded countries? When Menzies made his parliamentary statement on foreign affairs on 5 August, discussion towards what became the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) was well under way. The treaty establishing it would be signed at Manila on 8 September (only seven weeks after the Geneva Agreements) by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan. South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the three Southeast Asian non-communist entities whose defence was a major factor for most signatories, did not become members. It had been

agreed at Geneva that neither zone of Vietnam should enter into any military arrangement, while Laos and Cambodia undertook not

to take part in a military alliance which did not conform to the United Nations Charter. But by the device of a protocol to the treaty the signatories made it clear that they regarded the three territories in question as those most exposed to the feared threat of communist expansion.

In his speech Menzies outlined the terms of the Geneva agreements and announced increased defence expenditure in Australia. He declared that both in the north and south of Vietnam the communists were so effectively organized that, as things stood at the moment, they could well gain supremacy over the whole of Viet-

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 273 nam. He expressed much of what he had to say in high rhetoric. It

was ‘desperately important’ that the world should see the EastWest struggle as a moral contest—‘a battle for the spirit of man’. What Australia’s contribution under SEATO would be had yet to be

determined, but the Government pledged itself to meet whatever requirements were needed. Final pieties about abjuring aggression but also being ready to resist it led to the conclusion that ‘there can be no joint assurance of Australia’s safety unless we make binding commitments with our friends’. In reply, Evatt complained that the policy Menzies had outlined was ‘a policy of generalisations’. While ‘the tyranny and dictatorship of Communism are hateful to Australians and no one accustomed to freedom could tolerate such a system’, in the real world of

today “you need not limit your attention to Communism’. There were fascist governments masquerading as democracies; but it was not proper to give governments a name and decide which should be

on that ground opposed. What was really at stake was whether a eovernment, however named, was an aggressor or not, and that was a matter for the United Nations, whose charter did not deal at all with nominal forms of government. ‘It permits the use of collective force without stint or limit against an aggressor and it contemplates regional arrangements.’ Labor favoured such arrangements and recognized that the United States had to be a major ally. But that

did not mean that the United States was always right and that its policies should be slavishly accepted. Labor in fact demanded that before the Government ever entered into any binding commitment

with another power the details should be openly discussed in parliament. Evatt’s and Menzies’ differing emphases in this debate reflected

those fundamental disagreements on the worth of the United

Nations and the nature of international communism which under-

lay years of disputation between them about foreign relations. But there was now, at least on Evatt’s part, a special edge of hostility

due to developments, since the election, in the Petrov inquiry. Indeed, less than a week after Menzies’ warnings about the dangers that events in Vietnam seemed to be signalling, the Petrov matter exploded again in Parliament when Evatt made a series of extraordinary allegations against the Prime Minister. At the Royal Commission’s initial meetings, rather theatrically staged in Canberra just before the general election, Victor Windeyer,

Counsel assisting the Commission, described the documents handed over by Petrov but (on Menzies’ express insistence) avoided 23 SMH, 6 August 1954.

274 ROBERT MENZIES naming any individuals to whom reference was made therein. Considered especially vital were the so-called ‘G’ series of ‘Moscow letters’, most of which had still to be translated from the Russian

and interpreted. But there were also two English language documents, labelled ‘H’ and ‘J’, thought to be the work of Australians and designed to inform Russian journalists and agents about the foibles of Canberra-based journalists; though Document ‘J’ went beyond that. Thirty-seven pages long, it contained allegations about Japanese and American interests in Australia, ‘certain trends in politics’, and—in what would be a well-remembered phrase of Windeyer’s—“a farrago of facts, falsities and filth’ about a variety of

individuals. Though Menzies had seen these documents, Evatt had not and thus could not know at this stage that three members of his staff,

Allan Dalziel, Albert Grundeman and Fergan O’Sullivan, were listed among many others in Document ‘J’ as sources of information. This news would have been dynamite had it leaked out during the election campaign. That was good reason for keeping Evatt in the dark: not only was he temperamentally unpredictable, but Menzies could scarcely risk the impression of being a party to the smearing of his opponent. Then, on 3 June, five days after the election, Fergan O’Sullivan, who was Evatt’s press secretary, con-

fessed to Evatt that he was the author of Document ‘H’. He had composed it long before entering Evatt’s employ, but the shocked Evatt nevertheless dismissed him on the spot. Informing Windeyer of O’Sullivan’s admission, Evatt asked whether any other associate of his would be likely to be called by the Commission as a witness. Windeyer indicated that that might happen, and on 15 July, after the Commission had cross-examined O’Sullivan and revealed that

he was also named in Document ‘J’, the Commission chairman, Mr Justice Owen, observed: We think it is right that we should say that we do not find anything in this document which reflects on the Leader of the Opposition. What disturbs us is that the document quotes as sources on various matters,

some of which are of a confidential nature, three members of the secretariat of the Leader of the Opposition, including, in that three,

O’Sullivan.*4

Evatt angrily denounced the mentioning of these few names out of the many alleged to be sources for Document ‘J’, as having unjust political implications and constituting ‘the quintessence of 4 Quoted, Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair, 131-2.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 275 McCarthyism’. The outburst reflected a mood of increasing paranoia as Evatt bitterly reflected on his electoral defeat which, from the beginning, he blamed on a conspiracy. As J. D. Pringle, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, put it when recollecting a lunch he had had with Evatt during the week after the election, ‘his mind seethed

with plots and conspiracies’. He accused ‘Menzies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation who, he firmly believed, had timed the defection of Petrov ...so that Menzies could use it against him’.*°

After the election the Commission had resumed its enquiries on 30 June, beginning with an examination of the Petrovs and moving on to take evidence on the contents and authorship of Documents ‘H’ and ‘J’. Rupert Lockwood, a prominent communist journalist, had in mid-June published a pamphlet, ‘What is in Document J’, identifying himself as ‘the author of certain writings that appear to

have been labelled document J’. He appeared before the commission but refused to answer certain of the questions put to him, and his barrister—a communist, Ted Hill—queried the validity of the Royal Commission’s status. The legislation for its establishment,

passed in April on that last day of the previous parliament, had mentioned only one Commissioner; but subsequently the Government had appointed three, and therefore, Hill contended, it must be concluded that the body was invalid.76 The Government responded by preparing new legislation to strengthen the position of the Royal Commission. It revised the Commission’s Letters Patent, naming the three Commissioners; providing penalties for witnesses refusing to answer questions; and protecting the Commissioners and their

proceedings from anyone who sought to bring them ‘into disrepute’. In Lockwood’s name the communist camp meantime tested

in the High Court the Commission’s validity under the old legislation, but were rebuffed. Menzies moved the second reading of the revisionary bill on the Commission on 12 August. It was in reaction to this measure that Evatt launched his first direct diatribe against Menzies on the Petrov issue. Evatt told the House that the proposed legislation was unnecess-

ary. Already in the High Court Lockwood had unsuccessfully 25 Quoted, ibid., 123.

26 Tt was Menzies’ original hope that Sir Owen Dixon, his longtime hero and in 1954 Chief Justice of the High Court, would be the sole Royal Commissioner. Dixon at first

seriously considered accepting the position, but adhered in the end to an earlier conviction that High Court judges, to avoid possible later embarrassments, should not serve as Royal Commissioners. Menzies then decided on a Commission of three Supreme Court judges. Those chosen were Mr Justice Owen of NSW, Mr Justice Ligertwood of SA, and Mr Justice Philp of Qld (Manne, 114-15, for details of Menzies’ negotiations on this matter).

276 ROBERT MENZIES challenged the validity of the Commission, so its Letters Patent needed no alteration to confirm its authority. The real nub of the matter was Lockwood’s refusal to answer a question before the Commission about his authorship of Document J. On this matter, too, new legislation was unnecessary: under ordinary court rules, Lockwood could have been prosecuted for contempt. Why was this

not done? At this point the Speaker ruled that Evatt could not ‘discuss matters that are happening before the Royal Commission’, and after challenge and a vigorous debate, this ruling was upheld by a division on party lines. Evatt complained, correctly, that in his

second reading speech on the bill Menzies had been allowed to mention Lockwood’s virtual contempt, and asked in vain for a similar concession. In the division W. C. Wentworth crossed the floor and voted with the Opposition, asserting the right of parliament to discuss matters before the Commission.?7

The direction in which Evatt intended his argument to lead, however, became clear from the few remarks allowed to him after use of the name ‘Lockwood’ had been denied. He quoted a complaint from the Melbourne Argus that by revealing only a few of the

names mentioned in the Petrov documents, while withholding others, the Royal Commission was in effect ‘smearing’ individuals. Evatt believed, he said, that the witnesses ‘mentioned by the Prime Minister’ had not been prosecuted for contempt because to test such a charge a court would insist on the revelation of the whole docu-

ment concerned, and that would suit the purposes of neither the Government nor the Royal Commission. And then, that afternoon, Evatt issued a press release to say the electrifying things that he had

been prevented from saying in Parliament. The Prime Minister had never explained, despite ‘repeated’ requests to do so, when he ‘authorised’ a payment of £5000 through the agency of the Security Service to Petrov. The ‘sinister fact’, Evatt asserted, was that Petrov

received payment for documents ‘which the Government bought for the purpose of unduly and improperly influencing the people of Australia at the general election’. He believed that “when the

tangled skein of this matter is finally unravelled, the Petrov— Menzies Letters case will rank in Australian history as an equivalent

to the notorious Zinoviff [sic] Letter which was used to defeat a Labour Government in the British election of 1924 or the burning of the Reichstag which ushered in the Hitler regime in 1933’.*°

2” For Evatt’s speech and the debate see CPD H of R 4: 216-25. 8 Evatt, quoted by Menzies in ibid., 282-3.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 277 This was, without doubt, the most extraordinary and the most serious charge made against any government in the history of the federal parliament. Menzies’ response, on an adjournment motion that evening, was predictably savage. He described Evatt’s statement as ‘not only so hysterical as to indicate a grave state of panic on his part, but also as containing, if I may borrow a term from another place, a farrago of ideas, closely following the normal Com-

munist line about this Royal Commission’. Amid great uproar, he read Evatt’s statement in full, denouncing the notion that so serious an event as Petrov’s defection was a mere ‘election stunt’. He punctuated his presentation of Evatt’s charges with scornful denials. When on 13 April he announced Petrov’s request for asylum he had not spoken of ASIO’s payment of the £5000 because

he did not know it had been made: he learnt about it on 9 May, during the election campaign. That secret agents had been necessary and had authority to carry out negotiations with Petrov was a given: ‘How does anybody outside the kindergarten suppose that a Government, charged with the security of this country, is to find out what is going on in Communist circles?’ Far from exploiting Petrov’s defection in the election, he had issued strict orders to his party that it should not be mentioned. ‘I cannot profess to follow his state of mind completely’, he said of Evatt, but I know that it is one of his theories that the whole of this matter was

cunningly concealed so that it might be used for the purposes of winning an election. Therefore, I say to the House and to the country

that the name of Petrov became known to me for the first time on

Sunday night, the 11th April, I think, or the preceding Saturday night. It

was one of those nights, when the head of the Australian Security Service came to see me at the Lodge in Canberra with the first two or

three literally translated documents that Petrov had handed over ... Therefore the whole idea that there was some cunning concealment falls to the ground.

‘At last the oracle has spoken.’ Thus Evatt opened his reply, the burden of which was that Menzies had deceived the people by not revealing until after the election that the payment had been made to Petrov. On his own admission, Menzies knew about the payment on the day before the first, showy, pre-election meeting of the Royal Commission at the Albert Hall in Canberra. Why was it not revealed then? In effect, Evatt maintained that Petrov’s request for asylum

was tainted, indeed bought, by a monetary reward. Given the electoral position, as Menzies had explained it, that was somewhat

278 ROBERT MENZIES far-fetched.*? But it was a necessary part of the conclusion which had by now formed in Evatt’s mind: that the documents Petrov had handed over were forgeries. For the rest, Evatt assailed Menzies’

lack of ‘duty and decency’ in not arranging for the head of the security organization to keep him, as leader of the Opposition, informed about the Petrov defection, in not privately telling him that members of his own staff were mentioned in documents which Petrov surrendered, and in making the shock announcement of the

defection when he, Evatt, was not in the House. His chagrin on these matters cannot but engage sympathy: as he saw it, Menzies had remorselessly taken every political advantage that followed from the defection. On one level, that was true: on another, considering the local dangers of the tense Cold War atmosphere of the time, Menzies had correctness on his side if he judged that Evatt’s unpredictability, and the temperamental tensions that had been steadily developing between the two men, made it dangerous to take the Opposition leader into his confidence. That seemed indeed to be demonstrated in the next, bizarre, stage

of the Royal Commission’s proceedings. Evatt was, as David McKnight has written, “a man capable of both utterly naive trust and obsessive hatred. He trusted his staff implicitly’. He had per-

emptorily dismissed O’Sullivan when the latter confessed to authorship of Document ‘H’, but he decided to defend Dalziel and Grundeman before the Commission when they denied they had provided information to Lockwood for Document ‘J’. It was “possibly the most politically damaging thing he could have done though entirely in keeping with his courage and obsessive determination’ .°0 Evatt now appeared before the Commission for over three colourful weeks, determined to prove that a part of Document ‘J’—particu-

larly the part which referred to his staff—was a forgery. He persuaded the Commissioners to make the whole of the document available to him and, having examined typewriting, handwriting, even pin-holes, became obsessively certain that part of it was not the work of Lockwood. In evidence, Lockwood himself agreed. The

Commissioners, progressively concerned that Evatt was virtually *? Menzies maintained that he was at pains to avoid any discussion of the Petrov matter in the election, lest he be seen to be exploiting Petrov’s action. The analogy of the Zinovyev letter, he alleged, had in fact occurred to him when he was informed of the defection. ‘Now, since we are forced to discuss these matters, may I say that when I was told of these things on the Saturday or Sunday night at my house in Canberra, oddly enough I referred to the Zinoviff [sic] letter. I said, “I wish this could not have

happened just now, because the last thing I want to have happen is something that may look like an election stunt”.’ Ibid., 284. 30 David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets, 68.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 279 taking over the inquiry and mixing up his roles as advocate for his staff and political leader defending himself, at length asked Evatt

for a formal statement about the conspiracy he was alleging. In reply Evatt declared that Document ‘J’ was not Lockwood's work but a concoction and a forgery. There had been a ‘foul and most serious conspiracy’ to insert the names of Dalziel and Grundeman into it in order to damage their master and, through him, the Labor Party. The forgery had been produced, Dr Evatt now made it explicit for the first time in the inquiry, in order to influence the outcome of the May Federal election.

Shortly after this, on the ground that he lacked the disinterestedness of a proper advocate, the Commission withdrew its leave for Evatt to appear before it. Evatt held his position as Labor leader in the House of Representatives, despite internal party tension over his injudicious actions at the Royal Commission. Then, on 5 October, the tension exploded when he suddenly lashed out against the chiefly Catholic ‘groupers’ of the Victorian right wing of the party, in that bitter attack which precipitated the dreadful Labor ‘split’ of the mid-1950s. Evatt, it

seemed, had detected yet another conspiracy using, as he saw it, ‘methods which strikingly resemble both Communist and Fascist infiltration of larger groups’. The indirect reference here was of course to the ‘Movement’, primarily dedicated to fighting communism in the unions. The shadowy principal figure behind it, B. A. Santamaria, was not, however, a member of the ALP. Though a

‘tiny minority’, ‘disloyal’ elements were largely responsible for Labor’s defeat in the recent election. They had not supported Labor policy wholeheartedly, openly criticizing such key elements in that

policy as the promise to abolish the means test. ‘Thousands’ of messages had come to him from Labour Leagues and trade unions: They are almost all to the effect that this planned and somewhat desperate attempt to disrupt and injure Labor leadership is really intended to assist the Menzies Government, especially in its attempt to initiate in Australia some of the un-British and un-Australian methods of the totalitarian police state.?!

Two days before this, Parliament had gone into a week’s recess, before a five-week sitting which would take it up to the Christmas break. As the Age’s Canberra correspondent put it, that short session did not seem ‘to offer anything spectacular’. Menzies had every 31 Age, 6 October 1954.

280 ROBERT MENZIES reason to be pleased. He had weathered minor problems in his own

party, and the Opposition was “weak and disunited’. The budget had meantime been brought down: it promised Government popularity since prosperity had allowed tax cuts and pension increases. ‘The remaining weeks of the session will be of great personal interest to him. In December he will have served as Australian Prime Minister for a longer aggregate period than any political leader since Federation.’22 The prediction that the last few weeks of

the parliamentary year would produce no fireworks proved, however, greatly astray. Once more, the Petrov affair was the cause of a bitter clash between Evatt and Menzies. The occasion was the tabling of an interim report from the Royal

Commission on Espionage. Evatt moved on 28 October that this document be printed, in order that the House could fully discuss the work of the Commission.*? He regretted that the evidence taken by the Commission, ‘though so voluminous that the relevant parts

cannot be easily sorted out’, was not available to honourable members together with the Report. And in a long, rambling speech he traversed again his complaints of Menzies’ alleged deceptions,

his belief that the affair was a plot designed to damage him personally and defeat the ALP in the late election, and his certainty that —whatever the Commissioners said—Document ‘J’ was a forgery. He dwelt on the minutiae, especially, of his own arguments to the Commissioners on the latter point, rejecting their unequivocal conclusion that Lockwood was the sole author. But, he concluded, he was convinced that ‘as the facts become more and more clear, the truth of my conclusions will emerge’. ‘The House has had a very uncommon privilege tonight’, began Menzies in reply. It has heard counsel who has unsuccessfully advanced certain arguments before a tribunal have the opportunity to advance them for the

second time before a tribunal which has not heard the witnesses and has not read the detailed evidence. That is something that I cannot remember in my fairly long experience of public affairs.

Menzies said he had read, day by day, what Evatt said when acting as counsel before the Royal Commission; listening carefully tonight,

he found the conclusion inescapable that Evatt had nothing to

say now to the House which he had not already said to the

Commission. In effect, by repeating himself in the face of the 32 Tbid., 4 October 1954.

33 The debate is reported in CPD H of R 5: 2467 ff.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 281 Commission’s judgement about Document ‘J’—for that was the main point of the interim report: to clear the air on this matter— Evatt was attacking the ‘considered and impartial judgment of three

of the most distinguished Supreme Court judges in Australia’.

Menzies dwelt at some length on the careers and previous

contributions of each to the community and the nation. He would not re-argue the case, he said. “This is not a court of appeal. This is a

Parliament which is considering an interim judgement.” He in fact regretted that that judgement was being discussed at all: Here we have three Supreme Court judges of great experience, of unquestioned ability and of untarnished character, who have heard every word of the evidence, seen every witness and every document, and listened to tape recordings to which the right honourable gentleman has never listened. Having had all this material before them they have made an interim report—a calm, cold, logical, judicious report, in which they find the facts without hesitation. In the result, they are treated with hysterical abuse and their findings are submitted to exam-

ination by an audience which, I very respectfully submit, has no material before it on which it could dare to disagree with those findings ... lam old-fashioned enough to prefer the cold judgment of the judge to the heated allegations of the advocate.

And then he ran quickly through individual points on which the Commission explicitly rejected Evatt’s claims. Document ‘J’ was not

a forgery or concocted by more than one writer: it was the work of Lockwood, composed and typed in the Soviet Embassy on 23, 24 and 25 May 1953. The Commissioners could find no credible evidence of a political conspiracy against Evatt and the ALP. They also rejected criticism of senior ASIO officers for ‘serious dereliction of duty in accepting from Petrov the fabricated document’: once it was shown that Lockwood was sole author of Document ‘J’ this, like the conspiracy charges, automatically fell to the ground. Indeed, the Commissioners found that, as Menzies put it, ‘the security officers

acted with high intelligence and complete propriety in difficult circumstances’. In a final peroration he denounced Evatt for ‘standing up in this place and ... reproducing some of his attacks on the security service and on the Royal Commissioners—attacks on their character or their capacity’. The right honourable gentleman may have it either way. But he renews his attacks, attacks which have come from only one other quarter in this country. In short, ever since his inglorious and discreditable performances before the Royal Commission, he has engaged, to use his own favourite words, in a smearing campaign, a campaign in which he has

282 ROBERT MENZIES had the enthusiastic support of the Communist press. Why has he attacked these judges? Because they disagree with him, because they do not share his own curious, excited, ill-balanced view on these matters. That is the only reason, unless, of course, he has come back to the good, simple, old-fashioned ground that you always should attack the judge when you have lost. Nothing could do more harm to the safety of the people of Australia than attacks on the security service. | would not have believed it possible, until the last few weeks, that the leader of a political party in Australia should have worked so hard to destroy the confidence of our people in these men, who are our guardians and our friends ... But I cannot help wondering how many of the great army of Labour supporters in Australia, who fear and dislike communism, and who are its pledged enemies, have enjoyed the spectacle of their leader, in his dual capacity, playing the communist game on a public platform, and therefore with public influence to a degree that the communists, by their unaided efforts, could not have reached in 100 years.*4

Here, as in his other attacks on Evatt, particularly in relation to the latter’s charges over the Petrov affair, Menzies was ruthless both in his logic and his readiness to fan Labor’s disunity on communism, which had just come to a head in Evatt’s attack on the ‘grouper’ movement. From one point of view, these were normal enough political tactics, though they no doubt derived a particularly sharp edge from the Prime Minister’s conviction that Australia was in serious danger and Evatt’s opposing claim that that did not justify an alleged abridgement of civil rights. Evatt’s complaints about some aspects of Menzies’ handling of the Petrov affair have substance. While it is almost certain that Menzies did not know that

Evatt would not be in the House when he announced Petrov’s defection, it was certainly unsporting of him, and of those of his ministers who were in the know, not to have warned ahead that a serious issue was coming up. To set up the Royal Commission on Espionage before the election, and with such razzmatazz as its staging in Canberra’s Albert Hall involved, was open to the criticism that, whether it was so intended or not, the Government would gain electoral advantage from highlighting the alleged communist threat in this way. However proper Menzies’ approach to the election, it would be naive to believe that, given the atmosphere

of the time, he did not envisage the psychological effect on the electorate which the dramatization of the Petrov defection

34 Years later, in a TV interview, Menzies was taxed with having been unnecessarily merciless with Evatt in this debate. He replied that he had tried to persuade Evatt not to debate the report at that stage. But Evatt had insisted.’ “Very well”, [told him, “but let the blood be on your own head”. After all, I had been accused of being a crook... And I am not a crook’ (Melbourne Sun, CT, 26 October 1970).

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 283 promised. That Menzies advanced good objective reasons for what the Government did when the Petrov defection, so to speak, fell into its lap, does not alter the fact that it took the maximum advantage of the happening. On the other hand, thanks to the work of historians of a number of different persuasions, it is clear now that there is little, or nothing, to support the myth triggered by Evatt and treasured in certain leftwing circles, that the Petrov defection was a plot concocted by the Menzies Government to defeat Labor at the 1954 election. Careful

tracing of the negotiations between Petrov and ASIO, and of Petrov’s relations within the Russian Embassy, has made it clear that Petrov, and the changing circumstances in which he found himself, decided the timing of the defection, and not the whim, or the needs, either of ASIO or the Government.*° Nor has the central Evatt allegation, that Document ‘J’ was a fabrication designed to sink his staff, and through them, himself and the ALP, survived the scrutiny even of Menzies’ detractors. The coup de griice comes from

David McKnight, who asserts that he has established ‘beyond the shadow of a doubt that Document J was wholly Lockwood’s work’.

His unnamed source, in a ‘confidential interview’, claimed reli-

ability through the assertion that ‘the truth could not be told because “Evatt had to be protected”’. McKnight adds: It is hard to put oneself in the shoes of those who took the decision to swear that J was a fabrication, although clearly whatever else it does, their decision speaks volumes about an anti-communism so fierce that evidence of contact between Evatt’s staff and press gallery journalist Lockwood was seen as enormously damaging to Evatt. The allegation that Document J was a typical Secret Police fabrication was universally

accepted by ALP and CPA supporters, however it did not fool the judges, nor ASIO.. .°6

McKnight is, however, still one of a number who subscribe to what he calls ‘an attenuated version of the “conspiracy theory””’. This is that Menzies had confidential information from Spry that a defection was likely, ‘delayed the election until the last possible 35 The prime analysis which shows this is Robert Manne’s. It has been explicitly accepted by the sympathetic biographers of Evatt, Ken Buckley et al. (Doc Evatt, Melbourne, 1994) and the latest critic of ASIO and Menzies’ complicity with Spry, David McKnight (Australia’s Spies and their Secrets, esp. 63). Arthur Birse, official interpreter and translator in the Petrov case (top British interpreter whose services were secured by Menzies through Anthony Eden) attended all court sessions at which the Petrovs gave evidence and considered, on a variety of grounds, that they were ‘witnesses of truth’ (Memoirs of an Interpreter, London, 1967, esp. 239 ff). 36 McKnight, 68.

284 ROBERT MENZIES moment to allow maximum time for the defection to take place’, and then ‘deliberately’ misled parliament about when he had first

heard of Petrov. Menzies’ declaration that ‘the name Petrov’ became

known to him for the first time on 10 or 11 April will surely be believed or disbelieved according to the whim and prejudice of the

observer. He later admitted to receiving from Spry ‘early in February’ information that ‘there was a possibility of a defection, but the identity of the subject was not disclosed nor did I ask for it’.37 The point which conspiracy theorists latch on to, not altogether

unreasonably, is that Menzies knew, as he later wrote with greater precision, on 10 February*® that a defection was possible. Cabinet

decided on the election date two days later. That this meeting would choose a date was already foreshadowed”? but that it should be 29 May was not, which gives some credence to the guess (for it is

no more than that) that the date settled upon was affected by the news of a possible defection. In addition McKnight triumphantly produces evidence that in August 1953, nine months before the election, Spry informed Menzies that ‘a member of the Soviet embassy, whom we believed to be the controlling MVD officer, was thinking of defecting’.*° It is not clear, however, how this affects the argument either way, unless it be adduced as further ‘evidence’ that

Menzies’ later statements were deliberate lies. That possibility is certainly opened, but much less wan evidence is needed to prove that such an event so impressed itself on the mind of a busy Prime Minister as to become the major factor in a decision his Cabinet made six months later about the timing of the election. The argument that Menzies put off the election till the last possible moment in the hope of a defection has two flaws, one minor and the other major. The minor one is that the assertion that it was mandatory for the election to take place by the end of May 1954 is not correct. If the Government had really wished to delay the election as long as possible, it could have put it off until 7 August.*! But 37 CPD H of R 8: 1871, 25 October 1954. ‘I now learn’, he added, ‘that others were told orally of the possibility too: the Solicitor-General, the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, the Attorney General and the Minister for External Affairs’. 38 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, 156. Here he wrote: ‘It is his [Spry’s] memory that he for the first time mentioned the name of Petrov to me. There was no particular reason for me to remember an individual name; and in fact I did not’. 3? Manne, 97.

40 McKnight, 63. In his letter to this effect, a letter dated 30 August 1954, seemingly in

answer to a request from Menzies for his memory of the events in question, Spry added: ‘You may recall this incident, as | remember that you derived some amusement from the term “defect”. I did not mention, so far as I can recollect, the name of the Soviet official’. 41 J. R. Nethercote, ‘The Timing of the 1954 Election’, Quadrant, June 1995, 50-2.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 285 the major difficulty of even an ‘attenuated’ version of the conspiracy theory is that, Janus-like, it has two faces. On the one hand, even if the hypothesis that there was a degree of ‘delay’ is accepted there were, aS we have seen, other—and more powerful—reasons than Petrov’s defection for believing that time was on the side of the Government. This had been revealed by improving performance at by-elections and opinion polls, and these in turn reflected voters’

reactions to economic conditions, which had steadily recovered from the nadir of the ‘horror’ budget and import cuts of 1952. But beyond that, in the circumstances of 1954, there was a certain inevitability about the timing of the election. The Royal Tour lasted from 3 February until 31 March. The bipartisan understanding, if not the constitutional convention, was that the election would not take place while the monarch was in the country, she being constitutionally above the battle of political parties and in any case the focus of celebration for all citizens, of whatever formal political persuasion. We have seen that on 12 February Cabinet set 29 May as

the date of the election and that Menzies announced this decision

on 24 February. His statement elicited no adverse comment from the Opposition or the press. Once the royal visitors had gone, the party leaders looked to a normal resumption of rivalry in the face of the impending election. But the current Parliament still had two weeks to run, to mid-April, before it could be prorogued. After that, in the first week of May, the rival leaders made their policy speeches. A three-week campaign—the normal expectation for a federal general election in Australia—followed. It is not easy to see how, given the routine nature of this timing, the notion of conspiracy is defensible. Vale 1954

Parliament adjourned in mid-November for the Christmas break. It was not to resume until April 1955. The two most important measures dealt with in the final days of the session were a ‘Collective Treaty Bill’, to ratify Australia’s membership of SEATO, and

a Stevedoring Industry Bill. Support for the first was virtually bipartisan. In approving the measure, Evatt observed that collective security arrangements were permitted under United Nations rules: his only objection to this bill was a preamble which said that SEATO

was directed against communism. Australia was committed to resisting fascist or nationalist aggression too, and this should be

understood. The Stevedoring Industry Bill, however, caused lively controversy and a brief but fierce waterside strike. It proposed the setting up of an inquiry into the troubled waterfront industry, to advise the

286 ROBERT MENZIES Government on reform legislation in 1955. But it also stipulated that

immediately, before the inquiry reported, the existing terms of employment on the waterfront be changed. Twelve years earlier the Labor Government had legislated to make unionism on the wharves in effect compulsory by giving the WWF the sole right to provide the quotas of workers set out for each port by a Stevedoring Industry Board. The new Bill provided that employers should have

the right to choose men—whether union members or not—whenever the WWF failed to provide the number of workers set down in the Board’s quotas. In a public broadcast Menzies declared that the

‘compulsory’ unionism of the WWF—the only such unionism Which existed at the time—had failed. By consistently refusing to meet the quotas, he alleged, the union had purposely slowed down shipping turnaround and ‘arrogantly’ taken to itself the ‘monopoly’ right to say how many men were to be employed. The Labor opposition and the unions interpreted the measure as an attack on unionism per se, and within several days 26 000 watersiders in 60 ports were on strike. The Government refused to back down, and since communist officials—the most notable of them the legendary ‘Big Jim’ Healey—led the WWF, declared the strike to be

primarily political, not industrial. Exchanges between Evatt and Menzies on this bill were almost as fierce as those over Petrov. In one particularly heated broadcast Evatt declared that the Government had failed to explain in any satisfactory way why the legislation was necessary: In despair, Mr. Menzies brings out the catchcry of ‘Communism’, but this has been the catchcry of every totalitarian Fascist since Hitler and Goebbels. I say that 98% of the rank and file of this particular union are supporters of the Labor Party. While their officials are Communists, the Minister for Labour and National Service ... has dealt with them and has referred to their co-operation from time to time with approval and satisfaction. So much for the hypocrisy of the catchcry of Communism.”

The Government guillotined the Bill through but the moderate leadership of the ACTU supported the striking watersiders, then organized an urgent conference with maritime and other influential leaders which, following the passage of the Bill, recommended a return to work. It was clear that, on the eve of Christmas, support for a drawn-out strike on behalf of the watersiders was not strong. But the conference issued a resolution declaring that the Govern42 SMH, 8 November 1954. Earlier quotations in the text are from a variety of news items in this source.

POST-ELECTION FALLOUT, 1954 287 ment’s legislation was ‘anti-working class in its character and must

be fought by the whole Labour movement until it is repealed’. Meantime it warned all workers, whether unionists or not, that any

who accepted work from the shipowners under the terms of the new Act would be regarded as an ‘industrial renegade’. There was every reason to agree with union officials who declared that the real clash over the waterfront was still ahead.*®

But there was other, less contentious, legislation as the session died. Indeed, one measure received unanimous endorsement from both sides of the House. This was the Aged Persons Homes Bill,

brought forward by William McMahon, the Minister for Social Services, and allocating £1 500 000 to be paid to churches and recog-

nized charities to help provide homes for the aged. It was commended by truly great speeches from opposite sides of the House, most notably Leslie Haylen for Labor and W. C. Wentworth for the Government. William Bourke, Labor member for Fawkner, ponder-

ously caught at the general feeling by declaring that this ‘very important and desirable piece of legislation provides a happy note upon which the Parliament should finish its labours before going

into recess for Christmas’.“4

At the end, the traditional ‘valedictory’ speeches took place early

in the morning (3.13 a.m.) of 12 November. Neither Evatt nor Calwell was in the House, and Reg Pollard spoke for Labor. His party leaders were no doubt exhausted by a series of long sittings in which the Government had pushed ruthlessly forward on measures which in a busy and highly emotional session had inevitably taken

more time than anticipated. They may also have been deeply dispirited by the disintegration that at this time their party was internally suffering. Menzies, by contrast, was in fine form, offering

the conventional congratulations and Christmas greetings to all who made the Parliament work, from the Speaker and the leader of the Opposition to House officers, Hansard reporters, refreshment room staff, and so on. The sitting just over, he said, had been a memorable one. We have had many exciting battles. We have had many differences of opinion. There have even been times, Mr Speaker, believe it or not, when some members of the House did not agree with your rulings. Mr Speaker: Thank heavens!

At all times somewhat fewer than half the members of the House have found it possible to disagree most heartily with anything that I 43 Tbid., 13 November 1954. 44 CPD H of R 5: 2898.

288 ROBERT MENZIES might say. But I always like to feel, and I say this after twenty-six years’ experience of parliamentary life, that we carry our differences with us

because we believe in them, we are able to go at the end of the year feeling that there is in this House a great deal of goodwill and mutual respect. We may, therefore, all wish to one another a merry Christmas and the happiest of good new years.*

It is almost certain that, had he been present, Evatt could not have made a speech in this vein. For him, the session just finished had

been bitter and demoralizing. The good will to which Menzies referred scarcely existed for him. The contrast in temperament, not to speak of attitude to what the political life is about, could scarcely be more extreme. In December, Menzies continued in fine form. At a Lawn Tennis Association jubilee dinner he gave a witty speech in the presence of

Australian and visiting American and Swedish Davis Cup contestants, telling them to ignore the reports of press critics: ‘go for your life. You are much better players than any of your onlookers’.*6 Later in the month, with the American ambassador, Amos Peaslee, he drew positions for the United States challenge round against the Australian Davis Cup holders.*” Heather and Dame Pattie attended most of the matches. A fetching photograph in the Age on 30 Decem-

ber showed Dame Pattie as ‘a summery figure at White City, sydney, yesterday, and like most mothers, was left to carry her daughter’s hat and umbrella’. Before this, early in December, Menzies had been the presiding genius for what journalists called ‘cricket bright and light in Canberra’, when Hassett captained the Prime Minister’s XI to play the visiting MCC team under Hutton. It was, as the Age’s special correspondent put it, a carefree, festival

| match. Jack Fingleton, a former Australian opening batsman and a good personal friend of Menzies, was one of the umpires, and gave most batsmen a ‘no ball’ as their first ball in the hope that they

could at once score. ‘Fingleton looked like an African hunter in khaki topee, light cream coat and white trousers.’ Every four earned

10 shillings for Legacy, a six was worth £1 10s, the cost donated by the Canberra Chambers of Commerce and Manufactures. The Manuka Oval gate, £685, went to Legacy.*®

45 Tbid., 2930.

46 Age, 4 December 1954. 47 Tbid., 27 December 1954. 48 Ibid., 9 December 1954.

Menzies, it was currently said by his friends, was at ‘the apex of his power’.4? On 30 November he passed Hughes’ record for the longest aggregate period as Prime Minister since federation. That evening the Cabinet gave him a celebratory dinner and a few weeks later the Victorian branch of his party arranged a congratulatory reception at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. It was a gala event, hosted by J. M. Anderson, leading Victorian Party light, and his wife. The 180 guests included federal Cabinet Ministers, State nonLabor politicians and their wives, and the social columns of the local press gave loving descriptions of the scene, especially the ladies’ colourful dresses.°° In expressing appreciation of the occasion

Menzies remarked that the Liberals’ opponents were grappling with the most troublesome problems they had faced for years: While this is a point of danger for our political opponents, it is a point of danger for us, and not a time to take it easy. If we believe in the great things we stand for, we must pursue our political enemies at all times. We must not slacken, but redouble our efforts. We must remember that five of our States are in the hands of our enemies, and we must work to the day when there is a Liberal Government in every State.

Then, in paying tribute to the ‘staunch support’ he had received as Prime Minister from his wife and daughter, he made one of his very rare references to their feelings: He himself could not ‘care less’ about political abuse against himself, but the wife and family of a politician found it hard to be indifferent. They felt the bitterness of it and had no defence against it.

That suggested that the furious political battles of 1954 had not been without their toll.

49 Tbid., 4 October 1954.

50 e.g, the Age noted that Dame Pattie wore a frock of teal blue satin faille, with a softly flared skirt and a deep V neckline to the bodice. She wore a ‘tiny platter hat’ of black

straw. With her frock of grey iridescent taffetas, Miss Heather Menzies, who was

hatless, wore four charming bracelets, given to her as a memento of her first launching of a ship, at Woolwich, NSW. This was the 6000-ton cargo ship Baralga.

11

New Security? 1955-1956

| A! THEofbeginning of was January 1955 theMelbourne third in the current series test matches played at the Cricket Ground (MCG). ‘Melbourne crowds are part of test cricket’, wrote Geoffrey Hutton in a light-hearted article for the Age: Of course, there were some people around the streets in Melbourne yesterday, but if you were at the cricket you would hardly have thought so. Peering over the solid rows of heads which blocked every stairway in the outer, I was reminded of a fact which can be proved—and has

been proved—by simple arithmetic. That Melbourne is the greatest cricketing city in the world. ... Clothing styles have changed since my younger days. Looking at a broad slice of the outer I recall a drab sight, made up largely of grey felt

hats and blue suits. Now the crowd looks as gay as a herbaceous

border!

An alert reporter spotted Heather Menzies and her father among the spectators on the first day of play. His clothes were not worth commenting on (he still belonged to the blue-suited, grey-hatted brigade) but hers were: she added to the day’s colour, topping ‘a black poplin full skirt with a chrome yellow cap sleeved blouse’.* Dame Pattie, for whom watching cricket was a bore, was not there, but all the same accepted protocol to join her husband and daughter in attending, a few days later, a Town Hall reception for the English

cricketers. The match was a disaster for the Australians, Frank Tyson, the ‘demon bowler’, routing their batsmen. Hutton’s claim

about Melbourne’s enthusiasm for cricket seemed vindicated when the crowds who watched were finally calculated: in the five days of

the contest, an aggregate of 300270 people passed through the ' Age, 5 January 1955. * Ibid., 3 January 1955. 290

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 291 turnstiles.> Menzies, who enjoyed the match to the full, bemoaned

the fact that he would miss the fourth and fifth tests.4 For, on 11 January, he flew out of Canberra, en route to a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London and a subsequent itinerary that would not bring him home until late in March. As was customary, no agenda for the Prime Ministers’ Conference had been announced, but it was clear that problems of security, especially in the light of atomic developments, recent changes in French Indochina and the formation of SEATO, would bulk large in the discussions. That expectation was reflected in the contingent of senior advisers which Menzies took with him: the heads of the Departments of External Affairs (Tange), Defence (Shedden), Air

(Hicks). Athol Townley; the new Minister for Air also went, as friend and colleague. Then—another straw in the wind—a few days after Menzies set out for England, the Secretary of his own Department, Allen Brown, left on a ‘familiarisation’ tour of Southeast Asian

countries. He would visit Indonesia, Siam, the Philippines and Indo-China. The aim was ‘to enable him to examine personally poli-

tical and economic problems in the area’. Though he had been on many missions to England and America, this was to be for him a new experience. And as the press meaningfully noted, Brown was ‘one of Mr Menzies’ closest advisers’.° Menzies embarked at Perth on the liner Himalaya, on 12 January.

A week later he spent two days on an official visit to Ceylon, then caught a flight at Karachi which took him to London on 26 January. Interviewed at London airport, in a Nissen hut warmed by a kerosene lamp and proudly labelled “conference room’, he was bland but inscrutable. He was prepared to discuss cricket at length, but

not the issues of the Conference. Before the Conference began, indeed, he personally had a serious cricketing engagement: to lay the foundation stone of a new pavilion for the East Molesey Cricket Club, of which he had long since been made a life member. This was said to be the oldest cricket club in the world, having organized the playing of its first match in 1695. To commemorate his laying of the stone, Menzies was presented with a rare silver meat skewer, dated 1695.6 Another cricket occasion before he left London must have warmed Menzies’ heart even more: a dinner at Lords, given in his

3 Ibid., 6 January 1955.

4 He complained about this especially to reporters in London and emphasized that he had ordered his secretaries to get a short-wave radio so that during the night he could listen to a ball by ball description (e.g., Daily Sketch, 28 January 1955). > SMH, 19 January 1955.

6 Star (London), 26 January 1955.

292 ROBERT MENZIES a a Vy S So eae cael ——— _ - a

iy! ae 4. i aAa. ee — 2. an ee

Menzies, an established member of the East Molesey Cricket Club, reputedly the oldest in the world, lays the foundation stone of the Club’s new Pavilion, January 1955.

honour, was the occasion for an announcement that he had been elected a member of the MCC.

Menzies’ time in London, the three weeks between 27 January and 15 February, included more of those social events which he so

relished, and which registered the prestige which he had won at what he saw as the centre of the universe. There was an audience,

alone, with the Queen, and the Queen’s dinner party, given at Buckingham Palace to all the visiting Prime Ministers. There was Churchill’s dinner party, and a luncheon at Chequers. Menzies was

personally entertained at a City of London luncheon at Mansion House and was the special guest at a dinner of the Clothworkers’ Guild, of which he had been made an honorary member in the

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 293

eee. 28 2 eee eee a wh | ee ee ee Fe a

. wT ge op = ag Ae eee ae fe >. . ££ \ EES

An early meeting with the press on BBC Television, January 1955

1930s. He presided at an Australia Day reception at Australia House and spoke at an Australia Club dinner at the Savoy. More intimately, he entertained his old cricketing friend, Sir Pelham Warner, and two kindred spirits, to dinner in his suite at the Savoy.”

The point-counterpoint to these lighter moments was the seven days of the Conference itself. Though the press was officially told of the general topics considered each day and in some instances speculated fairly accurately about the drift of deliberations, most sessions were closed, and brief communiqués issued at the end of each gave little away. The Spectator exaggerated only a little when it said that

in most respects the communiqués which were issued could have been written before the Conference began. But the writer thought nevertheless that ‘in ways to which communiqués cannot do justice, the occasion was something of a triumph’. He instanced the begin-

ning of new friendships, like that between Churchill and Pandit Nehru; and the role of the Australian Prime Minister: ‘Mr Menzies

7Various newspaper references, plus schedule of London engagements, NLA, MS. 4936/3/173/19.

294 ROBERT MENZIES emerged less as a powerful advocate and more as an elder statesman commanding universal respect’.® For the first time in the history of the Prime Ministers’ meetings,

two communiqués were issued at the end of the Conference. One emanated from the series of meetings at which all Prime Ministers were present, the other came from regional defence discussions from which Nehru of India and Sir John Kotelawa of Ceylon, the

representatives of the ‘non-aligned’ members of the Commonwealth, absented themselves. ‘This is the first time on which a sep-

arate statement on defence has been issued and the innovation is

the key to the whole Conference’, observed the Manchester Guardian.

‘For the first time the Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth have had to study the face of the world in an atomic age.’ The first, general, communiqué was the more platitudinous, committing its signatories to the cause of peace, working towards disarmament, and facing the ‘choice and challenge’ of nuclear energy. But the second, the result of conferences between the Prime Ministers of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan, more positively asserted that

Western superiority in nuclear weapons was at present the best guarantee of peace. It also reported that discussions on the Middle East had brought ‘a new approach to defence planning in this area’, and that the Prime Ministers of Britain, Australia and New Zealand, having considered the security of Malaya and ‘the strategic position of the area’, had agreed on joint planning with other members of SEATO on the defence problems of Southeast Asia.? For Australia, and Menzies, these generalities registered fundamental changes in defence policy that had yet to be publicly spelled out in detail.!° The notion that, in the event of global war, Australia and New Zealand should have a primary responsibility to provide troops for the defence of the Middle East was finally laid to rest. Instead, priorities were endorsed which had been steadily emerging since British, Australian and New Zealand service chiefs began in

1953 discussions of Southeast Asian defence, discussions which linked the defence of Malaya with regional resistance to communism. The service chiefs, who became known in official circles as the

ANZAM (Australian, New Zealand and Malayan Area) planners, worked on the underlying presumption—based, it was said on intelligence reports—that communism threatened to make a downward 8 Cutting, NLA, MS. 4936/28, vol. 8. ? SMH, 10 February 1955.

'0'Two works in particular closely follow and explain these changes: Edwards, Crises and Commitments, esp. 162-78; David Lee, ‘Australia and Allied Strategy in the Far East, 1952-1957’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1993), 511-38. The brief remarks which follow depend chiefly on these sources.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 295

ee 3 ee ee ee

I Ytk _

Menzies in Conference mode, February 1955

thrust from China. The first stage of this would be the Vietnamese

election prescribed by the Geneva Accords. The conventional fear was that this election would produce a majority in favour of communism in Vietnam as a whole. If that happened communist pressure on Laos, Cambodia and Thailand might prove irresistible. Here again was a version of the ‘domino’ theory, with a special twist

to emphasize British Commonwealth responsibilities. Given the unhappy possibility of the area further north turning communist, Malaya must be considered the key bastion against additional communist expansion. The ANZAM planners therefore urged that a Far East Strategic reserve, under an integrated British-Australian-New

Zealand command, should be stationed in Malaya to meet the

296 ROBERT MENZIES threat." Australia was thought to be especially vulnerable, for the loss of Malaya, it was calculated, would bring northern Australia within the range of existing Soviet-built aircraft. At the 1955 Prime Ministers’ Conference closed meetings of the parties most directly involved needed little persuading to accept the ANZAM proposals. It was, further, agreed to add Australian and New Zealand staff officers to British military staff in Singapore to form a Commonwealth unit to prepare future plans and to exchange intelligence.!2 After the Prime Ministers’ Conference Menzies visited Amsterdam, The Hague and Paris. At a brief stopover back in London he proudly announced that Churchill had offered him a picture he had painted. Menzies, now an acolyte of the great man, was delighted. He chose ‘fishing smacks against a Moroccan background’, which he had seen hanging in Churchill’s study at Chartwell. After that Menzies travelled to Athens and completed in a four-day stay an important courtesy visit to a country which—like the Netherlands —was doing so much, through migration, to contribute to Australia’s population growth.! Turning at last towards home, Menzies talked for another four days with political leaders and officials in Ottawa, and moved on to the United States, where he was to make his first official State visit. Given the decisions that had been made in London, that was inevitably to be of great importance. The Americans took the visit very seriously. Their Ambassador in Australia, Amos J. Peaslee, considered Menzies ‘easily the coming spokesman of the Commonwealth: one of the most effective advocates I have ever seen in action’. He wrote this to Bernard Shanley, Counsel to the President, adding: ‘We are fortunate in having such a friend’. To bear out his case he sent a copy of the full text of one

"| This was the so-called ‘Harding Plan’, named after Sir John Harding, the British CIGS.

It proposed a reserve based on an army brigade group, comprising an Australian battalion and other Australian British and New Zealand units. 12 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 166-7.

13 Menzies was a great success with his British hosts in Athens. Lady Peake, wife of the Ambassador, in thanking him for flowers he had sent, wrote: ‘Charles and I have so enjoyed meeting you—as a person as well as a Prime Minister! And I can really say

that yours was the only official visit I ever enjoyed’, NLA, MS. 4936/2/70/283. Michael Niall, who called himself ‘de facto the only Australian Government representative for the whole of Greece and a great part of the Middle East’, wrote on 23 March about conversations he had had with Menzies about the possible establishment of a Consulate-Generalship or even a full Diplomatic Mission in Greece. His letter began: ‘Shortly after your departure, in accordance with local custom, I sent, in your name, bouquets of flowers to the wives of the leading Greek Ministers and others who had

entertained you, including Lady Peake ... The reaction to your visit has been a

splendid one, and I am sure that although perhaps a little exhausting for you, it has been well worth while’, 4936/2 /69/280.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 297 of Menzies’ most celebrated recent speeches in London: that made

at the Australia Club on 31 January. ‘Perhaps you will slip this marked copy to the Chief if he has not seen it’.14 Menzies came to Washington from Ottawa by a Royal Canadian Air Force plane on

13 March. As the formal guest of President Eisenhower, he was lodged at Blair House, the official residence for distinguished state visitors. Work began at once. On the 14th he had his first interview with the President. (The social events also began that day. There was

a White House luncheon for 25, men only, seven of them from Menzies’ party. That evening the Secretary of State gave a white-tie dinner in Menzies’ honour. This time the guests were ‘mixed’: there

were about 70, eight from Menzies’ party because Mrs Townley, who was travelling with her husband, could now be included!)

Official talks and often lavish entertainment went on for a little over a week. Menzies finally flew out, bound for San Francisco and then Sydney, on 20 April. He had met the Secretary of Commerce, Sinclair Weeks, in talks

about problems arising from the disposal of United States farm surpluses. He and his advisers had completed the negotiation with Eugene R. Black, president of the World Bank, of a further loan of $54 500 000. This was the bank’s fourth loan to Australia and brought to a total of $258 500 000 the amount the Menzies Government had secured on loan for the import of capital goods and equip-

ment from the dollar area.!° He had had discussions with Harold Stassen, the Secretary of the Treasury, and other Cabinet members

interested in economic aid to Asia. But the most important exchanges had been with Eisenhower himself and the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, on Southeast Asian defence.

On this matter, Menzies acted in Washington as the de facto representative of the three Commonwealth ANZAM. nations.!” Dulles’ briefings to Eisenhower before his first meeting with Menzies

reflect appreciation of the changed emphasis in the policy of these

'4 Peaslee to Shanley, 16 February 1955. Eisenhower Library, Abeline. Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961. Ann Whitman File, International Series, Box 2. 15 Details from a full itinerary of the visit, ibid. Note that Menzies’ exposure to the American public was greatly enhanced by a celebrated television programme filmed in London in which he gave ‘an outstandingly clear interpretation of how the British Commonwealth works’. Over 100 television stations in the US booked the film for a first showing on the evening of 13 March, the day of his arrival in Washington. An information officer had said at the film’s preview in London some days earlier: ‘Tf Mr Menzies could not earn a living as a Prime Minister or lawyer, he certainly could as a television artist’ (Age, 14 March 1955). 16 Financial Times (London), 19 March 1955. 17 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 168.

298 ROBERT MENZIES countries, but also register continued distaste at their anxiety to become joint parties in the strategic planning of United States policy. On this and on other anticipated questions Dulles recommended to the President distinctly vague answers. But all the same he wrote:

We believe that it is in the interest of the United States that the Australian defense effort should be such as to produce forces and plans which would be consistent with our own war plans. We are allied to Australia in two security pacts, and it is important for us to go as far as we can toward meeting their needs. We therefore must continue our efforts to give them a sense of close partnership to ensure that they will be effective allies in an emergency.!®

Menzies told Eisenhower that to keep Malaya in non-communist hands was vital for Australia’s safety and SEATO’s defence strategy as a whole, and that Australia proposed sending two divisions of troops to Malaya. He intended to ask for Cabinet approval of the unprecedented step of introducing conscription for overseas mili-

tary service. Impressing on his hosts that both conscription and the sending of troops overseas in time of peace were unprecedented

for Australia and certain to be controversial, he asked for words he could quote to his Cabinet and parliament as a guarantee of American support under SEATO. For some time Menzies, Dulles and officials on both sides searched for a mutually acceptable statement. Menzies’ first draft included words to the effect that the Presi-

dent had assured Australia of United States co-operation in the event of the ANZAM countries undertaking to engage substantial forces in the defence of Malaya. But Dulles insisted that this be replaced by something milder. What was agreed in the end was that ‘the United States considers the defense of Southeast Asia, of which Malaya is an integral part, to be of very great importance’, and that employment of force, if the need arose, would have to be worked out in detail on the Services level. ‘The United States considers that such effective co-operation was implicit in the Manila [SEATO]

Pact.’

18 Dulles recommended that when this matter came up, Eisenhower should say: ‘We recognize Australia’s need for a close planning relationship. A great deal has been done in this area, as Admiral Radford [the Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff] will explain in detail to the Prime Minister at their meeting on Friday. We will continue to work this out both bilaterally and, as necessary, with the UK and New Zealand’. Eisenhower Library. Ann Whitman File, International Series, Box 2. 'S Lee, 525. Menzies read out the text of the statement in the House of Representatives on 20 April. CPD H of R 6: 52-3.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 299 Arriving home at the end of March, Menzies reported to Cabinet

on his trip, securing agreement to Australian participation in the Far Eastern Strategic Reserve and to the imposition of conscription for service in the Manila Treaty area. On 1 April he issued a public statement rehearsing the threat to world peace implicit in China’s

alleged ambitions, as demonstrated in Korea and in its determination to capture Taipei, and stressing the urgency, for Australia’s northern defence, of protecting Malaya against communist attack ‘from without and from within’. The attack ‘from within’ referred to what was known as the ‘Malayan Emergency’. Declared in 1948

by the British colonial authorities against an uprising which the Malayan Communist Party led, the Emergency involved terrorist jungle activities against which British troops had for some years now been deployed. Malaya’s peril, Menzies declared, required action from Australia: armed forces would be provided to contribute to a strategic reserve there,2° thus meeting the country’s responsibilities in ‘a very important portion of the Manila Treaty area’. What for the time being was left ambiguous was whether the

Australian forces would be used in the fight against the internal terrorist campaign. Evatt, assuming that that would be the case, at once rejected the new policy. It was, he said, a cynical defence of colonialism in the face of an internal movement which, though it had identifiable communist elements, was essentially nationalist.

On 20 April, on the opening of a new sitting of Parliament, Menzies made a major statement on defence policy, repeating the Government's decision to contribute to the strategic reserve and reading, as ‘proof’ of the United States guarantee on security, the rather ambiguous version of the American promises which he had negotiated with Dulles. His motion that this document be printed

triggered a long and acrimonious debate, made the more bitter by the fact that, fortuitously, it coincided with a climactic stage of

the Labor Party’s split. On the previous day, when Parliament convened, a new and separate Australian Labor Party (AntiCommunist) had been formally announced by its leader, Robert Joshua, and its seven members took their seats on the Opposition crossbenches. Menzies, to a chorus of Government ‘hear hears’, congratulated Joshua and his deputy on their election to head the

0 Australia’s contribution, Menzies announced, would be two destroyers, an aircraft carrier on an annual visit, and other ships in an emergency; an infantry battalion (a modest contingent of ground forces compared to the two divisions he had spoken of to Eisenhower!); two squadrons of fighters and one of bombers. Edwards, 169.

300 ROBERT MENZIES new party.*! Next day ALP members in the House of Representatives listened in appalled silence to an attack on their leader, Dr H. V. Evatt, ‘unequalled in violence by anything heard in the Federal Parliament for twenty years’. It was made by W. M. Bourke (Vic), a leading member of the Anti-Communist Labor Party, who

denounced Evatt as ‘the man who wrecked the Labor Party’, and moved that as a matter of urgency the House should consider the subservience of Evatt and his followers to the Communist Party, ‘evidenced by his acceptance of large sums of money from Communist sources to the funds of the party’. Bourke claimed that the Communist Party had paid £13 000 to the ALP to help fight the 1951 anti-Communist referendum. Evatt denied the allegation as ‘absol-

utely and wickedly false’. Meanwhile ‘Ministers and Government

members sat back. They did not intervene in a debate in which former Labour colleagues were trying to hack one another to pieces’.22 It was a sad moment in the history of the Labor Party. Evatt denounced the sending of Australian soldiers to Malaya as

‘provocative’, said that it was ‘nonsense’ to establish a strategic reserve so far away from Australia and its vital island territories, and observed, correctly enough, that the American guarantee in relation to Malaya was vague, ‘no doubt because the United States had always refused to be committed in any particular locality’. In the long debate that followed, opinion divided on party lines. While

Evatt and his followers maintained traditional Labor opposition to sending Australian forces abroad in time of peace, Joshua and the Anti-Communist group gave Menzies almost embarrassingly enthusiastic support. Predictably, Menzies’ conservative admirers outside the House were full of praise for what one of them, Sir Robert Knox, called his ‘momentous presentation’ of the new policy.*? Such congratulatory messages in more than one instance also remarked on the effect of the Labor breakup which adventitiously came to a head just as the debate opened on Southeast

*1 Evatt was quick to respond. ‘I note the congratulations of the Prime Minister and see the secret alliance is now apparent’, he said. According to the SMH, members on both

sides of the House ‘laughed uproariously and Dr. Evatt sat down redfaced and

laughing’ (20 April 1955). Evatt subsequently wrote angrily to the Speaker about his ‘interfering with the official accommodation [in Parliament House] both of the Leader of the Opposition and his Deputy’. Sending a copy of this letter to Menzies, he wrote: ‘The plain fact is that the allocation to the new group—which you so eagerly “recognised” as a party—in the rooms adjacent to those of the official Opposition leader—is quite unnecessary’, NLA, MS. 4936/2/66/252. 22 SMH, 21 April 1955.

23 Sir Robert Knox to Menzies, 21 April 1955, NLA, MS. 4936/2/68/267.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 301 Asian defence. Thus, when K. L. O. Macleay wrote of the ‘pleasure and delight’ with which he had listened to Menzies’ ‘able address’ on the evening of 20 April, he could not help exploding: ‘What a

debacle amongst your opposition! From present indications one

would expect that they will be in the “wilderness” for many years’.4 And J. Macarthur-Onslow, besides hearing Menzies’ ‘simply

splendid speech on Foreign Affairs’, listened to the ‘Donnybrook’ between the Labor factions next night and felt ‘certain now that you

and your Government can “write your own ticket” for the next twenty years’. Menzies’ homecoming prestige after having strutted the world stage and his assured performance in the first debates after his return acted to confirm his ascendancy in the parliamentary and party politics of the day. There are indications that during his absence there had been some unsettlement in the Government and more festering of the chronic problem of too many bright backbenchers matched by irremovable old ministerial warhorses. How serious it was is hard to estimate: our principal source in this matter,

sir Owen Dixon, though a great jurist, could be gullible when it came to gossip. Early in February 1955 Dixon and his wife had a weekend at Government House in Canberra as guests of the Slims.

On the afternoon of the first day there was an investiture, the occasion of Dixon's elevation to the GCMG. At dinner that night, after the ladies retired, Dixon sat next to Roland Wilson. ‘He spoke of the want of cohesion in the Cabinet & how like (according to Arty

Fadden) it was to 1941.’°6 On the afternoon of the next day the Dixons visited Dame Pattie for tea. ‘She sd. she was frightened of

them |[ie., the Cabinet] doing something very silly while her husband was away, particularly Casey.’2” Dixon recorded a subsequent conversation with Slim, in which the Governor-General did

not speak directly of ministerial tensions but complained about ministerial absences from Canberra, which in his opinion left too much decision-making to permanent heads. Like Dame Pattie he did, however, refer explicitly to Casey: “Casey he liked but he cd not

learn that a govt. should not put forward policies ... beyond its strength, e.g. he wanted to send a battalion to Saigon which was

24K. L. O. Macleay to Menzies, 21 April 1955, NLA, MS. 4936/2/68/270. 25 J. Macarthur-Onslow to Menzies, 21 April 1955, NLA, MS. 4936/2/69/280. 26 Dixon Diary, 4 February 1955. Whether Fadden, if this was the occasion on which he offered testimony, was a reliable witness may be open to question. Dixon notes: ‘After

dinner Fadden and I and the GG talked. Fadden had consumed much champagne in the afternoon but seemed better’. 27 Tbid., 5 February.

302 ROBERT MENZIES ridiculous’.*® At about the same time the British Deputy High Commissioner in Canberra, G. W. Tory, was reporting to a colleague in the Commonwealth Relations Office how the High Commissioner has always found the Prime Minister to be very

frank; Casey is a more difficult problem not because he is ‘prickly’

himself but because he is so seldom in Canberra and for this reason it is impossible to maintain continuous contact with him. The High Commissioner feels that the Secretary of State is well informed about the declining position Casey holds in Australia and among his colleagues.*?

In these various rumblings there is no suggestion that Casey was involved in any intrigue against Menzies; rather, that his prestige in the party was not always high, and that his critics feared that without Menzies’ restraining hand at the helm, he might do something silly. While as steely as the rest of his colleagues in his vision of the

communist threat in Asia, Casey’s travels there and anxiety to establish friendly relations with non-communist politicians could bring sharp disapproval from Menzies. As a case in point, soon after Menzies’ return the non-aligned Afro-Asian nations arranged a Con-

ference at Bandung, to which Zhou En-lai was invited, to discuss problems of the area. Menzies’ Government looked upon these meetings with the disdain and suspicion it had always reserved for ‘Peace’ conferences, and would have nothing to do with it. Cabinet had received a preliminary appraisal of the significance of the Conference from Casey, who was in due course to provide a full report on it. This was predictably captious, though Casey retained his urge

to deal even-handedly with individuals who, though they might have taken part in the Conference, were of importance to the establishment of what he saw as necessary friendly relations. Following

his attendance at the Bandung Conference Krishna Menon, the Indian nationalist and a prime champion of neutralism,° was 8 Ibid., 6 February. It was clearly a very frank conversation in which Slim rather let his hair down. Inter alia he said that ‘Menzies’ hatred of Evatt was due in part to the fact that he alone had brains approximating to his own’; that Evatt after 40 minutes with the Queen was in tears; that Slim ‘had been used to command & could not adjust himself to his present position, wondered whether he did any good. It was financially very unattractive and he had to provide for his wife. ..’. 22 G. W. Tory to W. A. W. Clark, 8 February 1955, PRO, DO 35/10618/5. $0 After studying at the LSE, Menon had been called to the bar at the Middle Temple. He became an ardent socialist and served as a Labour member of the St Pancras Borough Council from 1934 to 1947. His primary political interest while in England was in the

struggle for freedom in India—he had a long and close relationship on this with Nehru. With the coming of Indian independence in 1947, he was appointed High Commissioner for India in London. He returned to India in 1952 after 27 years in England, becoming a member of the Indian Parliament in 1953 and minister without portfolio in 1956, minister for defence in 1957. From 1952 to 1960 he represented India in the General Assembly of United Nations, ‘where his vigorous presentation of anticolonial and neutralist policies of his government won him many admirers’.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 303 invited to visit Peking towards the end of May. The Australian rep-

resentative in New Delhi was pressed about the possibility of Menon’s making a visit to Australia after the Peking trip, and Casey wrote to Menzies that he thought ‘It would be a politic thing to do. It would do us a bit of good with some of the critics... Anyway, he is a stimulating, if irritating, fellow. You might let me know what you think’. Menzies had no doubts and pulled no punches. ‘I think a visit from this chap would delight Evatt, and do harm to sound thinking.’?!

On the backbench question, Menzies received in mid-May a vigorous protest from one E. Armstrong, the managing director of the Rhodes Motor Co., ‘that you should permit, at a time like this a

situation to arise in Parliament, where our own supporters in the Party are quoted in today’s press as bitterly criticising and challenging you’. Armstrong described himself as a strong supporter and a contributor to Liberal Party funds, and complained that if disaffection were allowed to continue it would give the Opposition

parties a “weapon with which they will flail the Liberal Party at Election time’. He was referring to a press report of a ‘flare-up’ at a

meeting of the Government parties when a number of members were said to have clashed with Menzies after he complained about a failure to preserve confidentiality about Party meetings. The reference was to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which detailed,

in direct speech, an animated discussion in the party room about Whether the Government should allow Evatt to introduce sectarianism into the political wrangle without either protesting or entering the fray itself. Menzies told his followers that he had been giving some thought to the issue, and would probably speak about it in the course of the coming Victorian election campaign. Menzies’

annoyance next day at the fact that a reporter had obtained so accurate an account of the discussion included the threat ‘that the Cabinet would not bring its decisions before the Government parties for debate if there were any more leakages’.° After the incident Menzies seemed unruffled. He wrote back to assure Armstrong

31 Casey to Menzies, 9 May 1955, and Menzies’ comment written on Casey’s letter, NLA, MS. 4936/2/69/274. 32 SMH, 17, 19 May 1955. Menzies did, indeed, attack Evatt at a rally in the Melbourne Town hall a few days later for ‘deliberately raising the hateful issue of sectarianism’ and splitting his followers into ‘two of the most bitterly opposed groups ever seen in the history of the Commonwealth Parliament. Menzies was speaking in the campaign for the Victorian Legislative Assembly. ‘It was the first time’, observed the SMH, ‘any

prominent speaker on the Liberal-Country Party side had mentioned sectarianism’. Evatt angrily denied the charge. What he had done, he said, was ‘to fight strenuously against the attempt of an outside body to infiltrate, control and capture the whole internal machine of the Labour Party’ (ibid., 21 May 1955).

304 ROBERT MENZIES that he need have no concern that ‘recently reported disagreement in the Party Room will lead to any serious division in the Government Parties’.33 Within a few weeks, however, a dramatic incident suggested new backbench dissatisfaction with the Government; but it also revealed Menzies’ powerful ascendancy over his followers. The immediate provoker of the trouble was W. C. Wentworth, perhaps the loosest cannon on the Liberal side of the House.34 On one of his deepest concerns, civil defence against possible atomic

attack, Wentworth considered the Government too supine, and during the Christmas recess had made a world trip at his own expense to study what was being done in other countries. As a result he decided to act independently of Cabinet and fashioned a private bill to set up a Commonwealth-State civil defence council to speed up defence planning. On the eve of Wentworth’s moving the

second reading of this bill, Menzies called a special joint party meeting at which he threatened resignation if the bill were proceeded with. Wentworth then took the unprecedented step of revealing this threat in an adjournment speech in the House.

So open a breach of party confidentiality provided an excuse for the press to publicize leaked information about restlessness in Liberal ranks. A group of backbenchers, it was reported, had demanded a Cabinet reshuffle, and at the meeting at which Menzies

had threatened resignation some had openly attacked the preponderance of ‘old hands’ among Menzies’ ministers and the inefficiency which allegedly resulted.3° After Wentworth’s revelation of Menzies’ resignation threat, the Prime Minister that night adjourned both Houses early and called an emergency party meeting. Next morning he told a press conference that the incident was closed.

Seemingly well-informed reports of the party meeting told of Menzies reprimanding Wentworth, demanding unity in the face of a possible early election, and refusing to countenance a suggestion that Cabinet should be elected by the Government parties.*° The Sydney Morning Herald summed up the significance of the incident: 33E. Armstrong to Menzies, 19 May ; Menzies to Armstrong, 23 May 1955, NLA, MS. 4936/2/63/230. 34 The descendant of the famous pioneer of the same name, Wentworth was the fiercest anti-communist in the House and had clashed with Cabinet’s judgement on this and a variety of other matters, including defence, financial policy, uranium development, unification of rail gauges (SMH, 7 June 1955). 35 ‘These reports bore the hallmark of accuracy. The SMH, for example, on 3 June named

the chief anti-government speaker at the crucial party meeting (H.J.P. Bate) and the backbenchers who had met to demand the Cabinet reshuffle (R.L. Dean, D. E. Fairbairn, W. C. Wentworth, T. F. Timson, C. W. J. Falkinder, A. W. G. Luck, and M. McColm. They were joined by Senators J. A. McCallum and J. G. Gorton). 36 SMH, 4 June 1955.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 305 The men who were prepared to see him go in 1941 are not prepared to do so in 1955. In fact, the one thing that would stop any revolt in the Government ranks would be the possibility that it could endanger the position of Mr. Menzies as leader of the Government. He is in a stronger position than ever, and there is no challenger remotely in sight.°’

As we know, Menzies wanted changes too, but his hands were tied both by old loyalties and his need to preserve the coalition with

the Country Party. Meantime backbench dissatisfaction, if for the time being muted, simmered on, to reappear most openly as the budget session got under way.

For the Menzies family a particularly happy event during these months was the marriage of their daughter, Heather, to Peter Henderson, then Third Secretary at the Australian Embassy in Dyakarta.

The wedding, which took place in the cathedral-like St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Forrest, was Canberra’s social event of the year. Four hundred guests from all parts of Australia attended the ceremony and the subsequent reception, which was held at University House. The Chief Justice, Sir Owen Dixon, in moving the toast to the newlyweds, referred to the bride as a ‘nationally known’

figure in her own right and said that the Australia-wide interest created in the wedding showed that people were really more interested in domestic affairs than politics.

Certainly, people began gathering outside the church at noon, and by the time Heather and her father arrived for the service at 2.30, barricades had been erected and police were on duty in a scene reminiscent of many during the royal tour a year before. A crowd

estimated at about 2000 watched as two Scottish pipers in Royal Stewart kilts piped the car from the entrance to the church steps, and cheered and shouted good wishes which momentarily brought tears to the bride’s eyes. Hector Harrison, permanent officiating clergyman of St Andrew’s, and Fred McKay, Menzies’ new-found friend from Alice Springs, conducted the service. After the reception groomsmen, in somewhat hilarious mood, carried the couple shoulder high through the crowd to their car to leave for the honeymoon.°®

At the end of July 1955 the London Economist noted that ‘stability characterises Australia in the sixth year of the Menzies regime; but

37 Thid., 7 June 1955. 38 CT, Age, 28, 30 May 1955.

306 ROBERT MENZIES it is a vulnerable stability’. Certainly, the ‘almost unruffled’ industrial peace of the last five years reflected the degree to which the reigning economic facts had cut the ground from under the feet of old-fashioned Labour militants: High earnings have led to an unprecedented hire purchase boom, and this in turn has been an unexpected contribution to industrial and political stability; union members paying for cars, refrigerators and washing machines are reluctant to part with their wages.

Prosperity also gave Menzies the support of the floating voter, ‘at least to the extent that this anonymous personage is convinced that his continued good fortune is safer in the present Prime Minister’s

conservative hands than in the less predictable ones of Dr Evatt’. But there were serious clouds on the economic horizon: the danger of inflation and the development of a serious trade deficit.°? A few weeks later the Treasurer admitted that the Government was worried about these two threatening problems. Bringing down his 1955-56 budget on 24 August, Fadden reminded the House that Australia had had a number of years of substantial prosperity, with good seasons, high earnings and employment levels, and rapidly

increasing production in many industries. But wage rises were putting pressure on prices, while consumer demand and local shortages of materials and labour were accelerating the flow of imports. The rapid growth of hire-purchase, and “a far too generous expansion of credit’ by the banking system had greatly added to the inflationary tendencies. ‘Let us not deny’, he said, that much of the excess demand that is causing our present difficulties

springs from an effort to reach and maintain standards beyond our limited resources ... In Australia today we are attempting to build up a many-sided modern economy, to enlarge our population and to carry through extensive preparations for defence—all this at a forced pace. Such objectives require a large share of our resources to be applied to activities which either do not serve ordinary private needs at all, as with

defence, or do not serve them immediately, as with a great deal of development.”

Menzies vigorously seconded Fadden’s economic arguments. On 6 September he opened a new assembly plant at the Port Melbourne works of the Standard Motor Company and took the opportunity to declare that the problems currently facing Australia were problems 39 Economist, 30 July 1955. 40 CPD H of R7: 31.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 307 of prosperity, not of depression.*! That day Fadden left to represent Australia at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Istanbul, part of his task being to negotiate a short-term loan to help Australia over its immediate balance of payments difficulties. On the same

evening, speaking to 500 guests at the annual dinner of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures, Menzies announced that he was about to confer with the heads of Australia’s trading banks on measures to ‘prevent the economy from moving from a state of prosperity to one of great inflation’. His determination was inflexible: after eight years as Prime Minister, he said, he had given up caring whether anybody liked or disliked a Government policy decision.” The conference with the bankers duly took place, as did meetings with representatives of hire-purchase firms and the chairmen of the Melbourne and Sydney stock exchanges. Menzies and Coombs both addressed the hire-purchase meeting and the delegates agreed on a statement committing themselves to a policy of restraint in the credit they would make available.42 Menzies announced this in parliament on 27 September, in a major statement on the economy. He was at pains to emphasize the extent of current prosperity. There were, he said, innumerable measures of that. But four major trends nevertheless gave cause for concern. The community’s purchasing power was high, giving an unprecedented level of demand

for goods and services; as a result, thanks to the limits of local resources, a ‘vast’ demand was being created for imported goods; expansion of export earnings was made difficult by increasing levels of wages and costs; the terms of trade—thanks chiefly to unfavour-

able prices for Australian produce in the world’s markets—were moving against the country. What was to be done? The Government’s policy was to call on the community generally to exercise

voluntary self-restraint. But the Government would also act coercively. Import restrictions would be stepped up, and trade

missions would be sent abroad in search of new markets. And there

would be a new effort at open communication. Routinely, in the autumn session of parliament (i.e., in March or April), the Prime Minister would himself present an economic report on the state of the nation, ‘not announcing policies, but presenting an objective account of trends and problems on export and import trade, industrial expansion, production and development, employment... and other associated matters’. The idea was to stimulate debate and 41 SMH, 7 September 1955. The plant was part of a£2m expansionary programme which the company hoped to complete that year. #2 Tbid., 9 September 1955. 43 Ibid., 16 September 1955.

308 ROBERT MENZIES ‘prevent the community being taken by surprise when economic difficulties emerge’.#4

There was much press approval of the Prime Minister’s move. In the absence of the Treasurer, declared the Sydney Morning Herald, Menzies had offered something more than mere exhortation to the nation. Useful promises of Government economies gave the right

moral example to a private sector stirred by his appeals for restraint.44 And as ‘Onlooker’ remarked cheekily in the Sun-Herald: Prime Minister Menzies didn’t get down to plans to meet the economic crisis, or emergency, or whatever it is, until Treasurer Fadden was well on the other side of the world. Sir Artie read the lecture in the Budget: it was Menzies who summoned the conferences, hammered out the new economic policy, and announced it to Parliament. A Do-It-Yourself job, so to speak.’

Menzies’ call to action, if financially inevitable, also had its poli-

tical uses. It was bound to mute restiveness among Government supporters, and it had an important bearing on a matter that, by October 1955, was becoming an issue: should the Prime Minister call an early election? An election for the House of Representatives need not occur until towards the middle of 1957, though half the Senate was due to retire in mid-1956, and an election to replace

them had to be held in May at the latest. Until the double dis-

solution of 1951 it was the normal rule for elections for the House of Representatives and the retiring half of the Senate to take place on the same day: to restore this situation was one argument for an early

Representatives election. This was in fact the major argument Menzies used when, after consulting Cabinet, he wrote on 19 October to the Governor-General to request an early dissolution of the lower House and an election on 10 December. In recent years the country had experienced a surfeit of contests in the constituencies,

he said, and it was essential that elections for the two Houses be brought into kilter. Besides, he had himself just announced, after conferring with important sections of industry, a “comprehensive

economic policy’ to bring Australia’s overseas payments and receipts into balance by mid-1956. 44 CPD H of R7: 974.

45 SMH editorial, ‘Mr Menzies Gives Lead to Nation’, 28 September 1955. This editorial

drew attention particularly to Menzies’ decisions to reduce Commonwealth works expenditure by 10%, to reduce departmental imports by 30%, and to defer increases already agreed to in parliamentary salaries. These might be relatively small savings in themselves, but they were for the private sector ‘tangible evidence of the gravity of further drift’. 46 2 October 1955.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 309 The achievement of this purpose requires . . . steady and firm action and

a clear authority ... Though the Government has a parliamentary majority, there is considerable political confusion in the House of Representatives, a confusion which tends seriously to obscure great matters of national policy. We desire a clear mandate from the people to deal with these economic problems, and the election of a Parliament which will represent a definite public opinion upon them.”

It was natural enough for Menzies to make no public announcement yet about the election—to preserve the element of surprise and make a last-minute announcement when that best served the Government was normal practice. What made it especially important in this instance was that the final debate on the matter on which Evatt was most vulnerable—the Royal Commission on Espionage—

was due to begin on 19 October, the very day on which Menzies wrote to Slim requesting an election. Menzies would have been but the shadow of the master-tactician he really was if he did not

imagine that in the bitter atmosphere which this issue might provoke, a climactic announcement of an impending election could be highly dramatic. Menzies had tabled the Royal Commissioners’ final Report on 14 September, moving that it be printed. After the normal adjournment to allow for this, Evatt was the first speaker when the debate

was resumed on 19 October. His conviction that he had been

the victim of a conspiracy had not abated. The Report reiterated the assertion of the Commissioners’ interim report a year before that the Petrovs were reliable witnesses and the documents which they

had brought when they defected were genuine. Evatt at once claimed that the Inquiry had in fact uncovered no chargeable spies, had cost a great deal of money, had led to the attempted smearing of

many innocent Australians and had made grave inroads on Australian freedoms. He proceeded to allege that the Petrov defection had been an anti-Labor conspiracy. This, and detailed analysis of certain aspects of the Commissioners’ supposed failure to admit evidence, or frequently biased misconstruction of evidence when accepted, formed the main substance of what became a long and often incoherent speech. Nothing demonstrated more clearly that, however learned in the law, Evatt lacked those skills as an advocate

which made Menzies so superior when it came to presenting an argument with clarity, order and economy. But whatever the merits

of Evatt’s case they were dashed almost at the outset by one of the most extraordinary statements ever made in an Australian 47 Menzies to Slim, 19 October 1955, AA, M2576/1, Item 116.

310 ROBERT MENZIES parliament. He had written, said Evatt, to Molotov, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, to ask whether certain Russian language documents handed over by Petrov were genuine or forgeries. Molotov had replied that they were forgeries, ‘fabricated on the instructions of persons interested in the deterioration of the

Soviet-Australian relations and in discrediting their political opponents’. ‘I attach grave importance to this letter’, declared Evatt, which shows clearly that the Soviet Government denies the authenticity of the Petrov documents. It seems to me that in these circumstances the

matter cannot be left where it is, and that, if possible, some form of international commission should be established by agreement with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to settle the dispute once and for all.

The Soviet Union was not represented at the hearing. It will be in a position to prove clearly, definitely and unequivocally, that the letters are fabricated.*®

Silent in disbelief at what they had heard, Evatt’s followers had

to listen to Government supporters collapsing into equally unbelieving laughter and hooting. Though the Opposition leader manfully soldiered on with his long speech, disorder was barely con-

trollable and valiant interjections from the Opposition in support of him could hardly be heard or taken seriously. The reaction of the press was predictable enough. The Sydney Morning Herald may be taken as representative, with its editorial ‘The Grave-Digger of the Labour party’. ‘Dr Evatt’, it began, ‘continues to dig his political grave as if dedicated to self-annihilation’. The Molotov letter, it

presumed, was ‘intended to be a sort of kinghit—a punch that would so rock his opponents in the first round that he could then proceed to pummel them at will’, but the politicians behind Dr Evatt were ‘the ones who were rocked’.*? A week later, Menzies, opening the debate in reply to Evatt, moved in for the kill. Diplomats, senators and members of the public filled all galleries

to capacity before Menzies began speaking at 8 p.m., the prime broadcasting time. The importance he attached to this performance 48 CPD H of R 8: 1695. According to one of Evatt’s biographers, Peter Crockett (Evatt: A Life, Melbourne, 1993, 277), Evatt had earlier shown a draft of his letter to Molotov to

his staff, ‘who disparaged his intention; he filed the letter, later deciding to send it through the Swedish Embassy in Canberra’. Russel Ward (A Radical Life, South Melbourne, 1988, 223-5) claims that John Burton, together with himself and another ANU PhD student, Ron Heiser, spent the evening before the speech closeted with Evatt, helping him to revise and polish the text of what he would say. No reference, he says, was made to the Molotov letter which a stunned party listening at Burton’s home to the broadcast of the debate first heard about when Evatt made his speech. 49 SMH, 21 October 1955.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 311 was indicated by the fact that, uncharacteristically, he read from a written script. He departed from this only to answer interjections, which were fast and furious. Menzies’ speech was described in the

press as ‘one of the most brilliant and powerful of his political career’. It was also one of the cruellest. He spoke for almost two hours, taking up in detail and scornfully rejecting most of the points

he said Evatt had made. The central thrust of his argument was summed up in the final peroration: I have referred to those who are charged by the right honourable gentleman. Honourable public opinion will acquit them, beyond question. But the same honourable public opinion will not acquit the man who made these reckless and villainous charges; nor will it acquit those who have,

in this House, authorised those charges, and, by their presence and support, countenanced them. If there is a charge to be made, it is this: the Leader of the Opposition has, from first to last in this matter, for his own purposes, in his own interests and with the enthusiastic support of

every Communist in Australia, sought to discredit the judiciary, to subvert the authority of the security organization, to cry down decent and patriotic Australians and to build up the Communist fifth column. I am, therefore, compelled to say that, in the name of all these good and

honourable men, in the name of public decency, in the name of the safety of Australia, the man on trial in this debate is the right honourable

gentleman himself.°° ,

This summing up grossly oversimplified Evatt’s arcane and fevered approach to the Royal Commissioners’ findings and cunningly used the current travail of the Labor Party to wield once more Menzies’ old weapon: de facto—and misleading—identification of Evatt’s views with those of the Communist Party. But if doubtful as analysis it was formidable as political rhetoric, and the time had in any case long since passed when anything remotely approaching

logical argument on the Petrov affair could take place. This debate was the climax to, and the final expression of, the fundamental hatreds that Petrov had brought to the surface and exacerbated. Those hatreds spring out vividly from the Hansard pages which record both Menzies’ long speech and the poisonous remarks he exchanged with Evatt across the table. In his constant interjections, ‘smear’ was Evatt’s favourite word. (‘If the right honorable gentleman could get through ten minutes in this House without referring to McCarthy and smears’, Menzies declared at one point, ‘it would be a wonderful thing. However, as I propose to show with studied

50 Menzies’ speech is in CPD H of R 8: 1858-74.

312 ROBERT MENZIES moderation, the right honorable gentleman... has sought to smear every decent person associated with this inquiry’.) Menzies was ruthless in his ad hominem exploitation of Evatt’s weaknesses as a

parliamentary performer and of the mental instability at last evident in the production of the Molotov letter. He complained at Evatt’s ‘muttering and mumbling’ when the latter attempted interjections (‘I am not muttering. I am trying to yell’), and he provided lordly responses to interjections that did break through: ‘I understand your feelings perfectly. You are in a very agitated state of mind’ (‘not a bit!’). When the Deputy Speaker ordered Evatt to cease interjecting, Menzies seized the opportunity to observe: “Of course,

he is troubled. He made a monumental exhibition of himself last week. I am not adding to the monumental exhibition; I am merely sealing the tombstone on top of it’.

The highest point of tension in this last full-scale debate on the Petrov affair, the Evatt-Menzies confrontation, was obviously an

aspect of deep personal rivalry that had developed into frank

hatred. But, as we have seen, there were in the structure of contemporary politics wider, equally bitter ideological rifts on which, in a sense, the conflict between Evatt and Menzies—as far at least as it reflected mainstream Labor and Liberal antagonism—inevitably fed. Events in parliament subsequent to Menzies’ denunciation of

Evatt underlined this point. Eddie Ward spoke after Menzies and developed the reasonable suggestion that Labor’s questioning of the Commissioners’ findings was not ipso facto a questioning of these men’s integrity, but simply an assertion of ‘the well-known legal principle in this country that we can differ from the opinion of a tribunal’ and appeal to a higher court, which may legitimately overturn the original judgement. But under rules set down by the Government for the debate Ward was allowed only twenty minutes to speak and, on a party vote, the House rejected a motion by Evatt that his time be extended. Pandemonium then broke out when Eric Harrison, Menzies’ deputy and the Leader of the House, formally

moved that Stan Keon, who was deputy-leader of the Anti-

Communist Labor Party and Chief Speaker for his party in this debate, be allowed an hour to speak. Harrison claimed that this had already been arranged with his opposite number in the Labor Party, Arthur Calwell, but that Evatt had repudiated the agreement. Wild scenes followed, with Harrison and Evatt standing on the floor of the House shouting at each other, and other members, mostly those in the two Labor parties, joining in the mélée before a distracted and

almost powerless Deputy Speaker. In the end a party vote gave Keon the floor and the opportunity, against constant and often

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 313 shouted interjections from Evatt and Ward, to rehearse the cruder aspects of the Labor split and the alleged communist menace. At the end of this unedifying debate, on 26 October, Menzies announced that he had advised the Governor-General to dissolve the House of Representatives and to give notice of an election on 10 December for it and half the Senate. In explanation he rehearsed

the reasoning he had set out in his letter to Slim. In an angry response the embattled Evatt doubted whether these were the reasons actually given to Slim, declared that the economic crisis for whose solution Menzies said he wanted a mandate was imaginary, and spoke darkly and enigmatically about ‘the reasons that really animated the Government’. The Government is trying to seize a political advantage and effect a political deception. The people of Australia have seen only one occasion like this in our history. I refer to the elections of 1929, and I say now, “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall’.°!

The analogy was, to say the least, far-fetched. That aside, it was indeed evident that the Government—as governments of any colour and in any situation always naturally are—was out to ‘seize a political advantage’. It was far from clear, however, what Evatt meant by the phrase ‘effect a political deception’. Perhaps he had nothing

precisely in mind and that the assumption of conspiracy as the

normal part of his thinking. Journalists expected a wild election. “Iry to Keep it Clean’, motive and the weapon of his enemies had simply become by now a

trumpeted the Sun-Herald: ‘We are in for a dirty Federal election, if the campaign is to be an extension of the brawling and smearing that made a disreputable spectacle of the short-lived twenty-first Parlia-

ment. No Parliament in memory accomplished less or wrangled more’.°* But in fact the election proved to be remarkably quiet and

dull. The most common explanations for the widespread apathy were the ‘ho hum’ factor resulting from the frequency of Federal polls (this was the fourth since that of December 1949, with a refer-

endum thrown in); and prosperity. When a Liberal Party worker was told by a taxi-driver that the Government was sure to win, and asked why, he received the cheerful answer: “Because you can’t kill

5! CPD H of R 8: 1896-7. ‘Onlooker’, in the Sun-Herald of 30 October, was more mindful of Menzies’ recent speech, and wondered whether another Biblical phrase had come into his mind: ‘The Lord had delivered thee today into mine hand (1 Samuel, 24.10)’. °2 30 October 1955.

314 _ ROBERT MENZIES Santa Claus. Everyone’s got jobs, the wheat’s high, the sheep are woolly, and the weather’s good’. In their policy speeches the party leaders did little to inject drama into the contest. For Labor, Evatt promised pension increases, new taxes on ‘exorbitant company profits’, pressure on the Arbitration Court to restore automatic basic wage adjustments, and undertook

to bring back the troops from Malaya. Joshua’s policy speech for the Anti-Communist Labor Party consisted chiefly of a bitter attack on Evatt and a promise to tighten the laws on espionage. Menzies stressed two purposes for this election. One was to bring Senate and Representatives elections back into kilter. The other was

to clear the air and remedy the situation of which the deputy Opposition leader, Arthur Calwell, had complained: ‘the tension and strain now existing in Canberra have made Parliament practically unworkable’.°¢

That the Government would hold its position in the House of Representatives was predictable enough. When the numbers came up, however, they revealed a virtual landslide: the previous majority of seven Coalition seats rose to 28. The Anti-Communist Labor Party vanished from the House of Representatives; all seven of the breakaways stood for their old seats, but none was re-elected. The split in Labor ranks, especially in Victoria, unbalanced old loyalties. Coalition forces were inevitably the beneficiaries, especially since the Anti-Communist Labor Party in this election began the habit, Which its successor the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) continued, of directing its supporters’ second preference votes to Coalition candidates. The Government was far less successful in the Senate election, where the voting procedure was complicated and the fact that each State had 5 vacancies, each elected on a Statewide ballot,

53 SMH article, 26 November 1955 by a ‘Staff Correspondent’: “You Wouldn’t Know An Election Was On Would You?’ An early, and by later standards rather undisciplined, piece of social research, this article reported the findings of interviews with 50 people

in the city of Sydney and four suburbs of obviously different social composition (Chatswood, North Sydney, Kogarah and St Peters). Only nine admitted to more than a ‘very casual interest in this election’. And not one of these nine people volunteered any views on ‘what pass for issues in this campaign—the Petrov Inquiry, Troops for Malaya, or the economic emergency’. Only one of the nine, a woman Labor voter, ‘had changed her mind about Dr Evatt since the Petrov Inquiry: “he behaved like an overgrown schoolboy” ’. °4 Policy speech, SMH, 10 November 1955. 95 SMH, 11 November 1955.

56 Ibid., 16 November 1955. It is significant to find Harold Holt, in a very detailed summary he made for the party on 4 February 1957 of the then and future political situations, explaining part of the Government’s strength by the fact that “We avoided specific commitments in the election campaign of 1955’, AA, M2576/1, Item 38.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 315 usually ensured a close result. After the election the Coalition held 30 of the 60 seats, the ALP 28 and Anti-Communist Labor two. In the unlikely event of the two Labor parties combining, the Senate

which ultimately incorporated three new members could thus be deadlocked. It has become a truism that the great Labor defeat in 1955 was

essentially due to the split for which Evatt carried the prime responsibility, and which briefly changed the character of Australian federal politics. Due credit has, however, also to be given to

Menzies’ consummate instinct for political timing in calling the early election when he did and for the ruthlessness with which he exploited Evatt’s last folly over the Petrov affair. A nice comment on this came in a Christmas message from a friend in the United States, Justice W. O. Douglas of the Supreme Court: Dear Mr Prime Minister, What goes on down in Australia? Do you think it proper to demolish the

opposition so completely? A news account says that while Labor washed its linen in public, you tossed in handfuls of a detergent. But your detergent practically ate up the linen, didn’t it?

Not to be drawn, Menzies coolly replied: “The Prime Minister and Dame Pattie Menzies thank you for your congratulations and good wishes. The victory was won by our friends’.°’ But before the elec-

tion campaign even began, he had written frankly to the newlymarried Heather in Indonesia ‘for the confidential information of yourself, your husband and your Ambassador [Crocker]’ information about his fundamental purpose in calling the early election. We all thought that, on the whole, it would be flying in the face of Providence not to seize the opportunity (which I hope we will not lose by folly during the next six weeks) to clean up the political position and to write ‘terminus’ to the career of the Right Honourable the leader of the Opposition, whose mental oddities grow upon him.*%%

When Menzies announced his new Ministry on 10 January he revealed a significant change in the Cabinet system. He chose two eroups of ministers: senior and junior. The first, twelve in number, were to form the Cabinet; the others, ten more (he increased the overall number of ministers from 20 to 22) were outside Cabinet. He made this change partly in response to a suggestion from his

Departmental head, Allen Brown, that the Cabinet system be 57 1 am indebted to Dr John Williams for having made this note available to me. 58 NLA, MS. 4936/40/572/2, 31 October 1955.

316 ROBERT MENZIES

ser cw nS. sec ee mo ft . oo ¥o ~w Me “VW PF MO gy

ee ae ee Roy ee ee eee

Pa tk eK ee re ee oe

_ a : aor. eee P a pee | ; | 2 ee ge = oo - a we ; my a

Menzies Cabinet, sworn in, January 1956: front row, from left, Harrison, Menzies, Slim (the Governor-General), Fadden, Holt; back row, from left, Hasluck, Townley, McBride, Spooner, Spicer, McEwen, O’Sullivan, Casey

tightened up, particularly to overcome disadvantages that were arising from the development of too many ad hoc committees.°? A previous division, after the 1954 election, of Cabinet into two teams,

one primarily concerned with policy-making and the other with administration, had proved largely unworkable, mainly because members of both groups had policy responsibilities within their own departments, so that divisions of function were not clear-cut. On the allocation of portfolios Menzies’ room for manoeuvre was

still limited. Fadden increased the difficulty by insisting that, despite the overwhelming strength of the Liberals in the Coalition (57 to 18 Country Party members), the Country Party’s share of portfolios (five) should remain as before. But some of the incompetence of which Menzies had complained to the British High Commissioner, Holmes, was removed when old Earle Page (he was 76) retired, as did (under pressure, it was believed) H. L. Anthony, the 59 David Lee, ‘Cabinet’, in Prasser, Nethercote and Warhurst, The Menzies Era, 131-2.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 317 Post-Master General. Two more vacancies were created by giving Sir Josiah Francis, who had been in Parliament since 1922, a consular post in the United States and by simply dropping Billy Kent Hughes, allegedly inept as Minister for the Interior. With the two extra posts he was creating, this gave Menzies six new ministries to fill. He used this opportunity both to go some way to meeting backbench ambitions and to improve efficiency—a paramount objective also being pursued at this time by accelerating plans to move civil

servants in key departments to Canberra. In his new Ministry

Menzies contrived to have ten men who had been first elected in

1949 or later: all the six new men were of this group. It is also noteworthy that, not long before the election, Senator McLeay, Minister for Shipping and Transport, had died, and Menzies appointed Shane Paltridge in his place. A Western Australian publican, Paltridge had been elected to the Senate after the double dissolution of 1951, and now, at 45, was the youngest member of the Ministry. Menzies came to admire him and develop with him a special friendship, not unlike that which he had with Townley. Hasluck thought Paltridge overbelligerent on the hustings but greatly admired his ‘sturdy’ work in

Cabinet: ‘he could always be depended on for a clear and sound analysis of a problem and for a view that I can best describe as wellexpressed commonsense’. He was by 1958 ‘undoubtedly one of the

most useful and also one of the more influential members of Cabinet’, and in Hasluck’s view he ‘had the making of a good prime

minister—certainly better than Holt and better than Gorton and immeasurably superior to McMahon or any of the others’.©° As well as his telling of new Cabinet arrangements Menzies also

announced a reshuffle of departmental duties which was to be of great significance in the days that lay ahead. The old Departments of Trade and of Agriculture were abolished, their functions being

split between two new Departments, of Trade, and of Primary Industry. The first was headed by the forceful John McEwen, designated as a member of the Cabinet, and whose amplified power was intended to help in the drive he soon announced for augmented exports. By contrast the new Minister for Primary Industry, William

McMahon (previously Minister for Social Services), was to be a junior minister, not in the Cabinet. There were some press com-

plaints about this, on the ground that McMahon was the only

60 P. Hasluck, The Chance of Politics, 101-3. Fadden was abroad when Paltridge was

appointed a minister and Menzies cabled him to ask whether he agreed. Fadden replied: ‘As a coincidence, anticipated his selection. As my own choice, obviously in full agreement’ (Cables of 22 and 23 September 1955, NLA, MS. 4936/2/70/282).

318 ROBERT MENZIES

a a oe Gis: a a ee

AP | a rn: ne, RSPR ES KON nr

A bleak Anzac Day at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1956: front row, from right, Lady Slim, Menzies, Sir William Slim, Dame Pattie

minister with university qualifications in Economics, and hence with presumed expertise in what were clearly to be burning issues in coming politics. But perhaps, behind the scenes, McMahon had already given signs of the untrustworthiness that later made him something of a pariah among ministers. On 16 January J.G. Crawford, previously Secretary to the old Department of Commerce and Agriculture and a close associate of McEwen, was appointed Secretary to the new Department of Trade.

On the same day McEwen himself announced a drive to boost exports and a determination to negotiate changes in those parts of the Ottawa Agreement which currently disadvantaged Australia. He was at pains to argue that the Australian balance of payments

problem did not arise from any fundamental weakness in the Australian economy. It was, he said, rather a by-product of the

nation’s surge of prosperity, with high consumer and investment spending by the public and governments. Spending had reached the stage of anticipating the next year’s earnings, and hence overseas credits were temporarily strained. The short-term task was to

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 319 preserve these credits as far as possible by regulating imports while

greater export earnings were generated. And he added that ‘the total problem, not merely the question of selling to the best advantage’ would be the function of his new department.®!

The difficulties which McEwen here said that he and his new department were determined to confront were of course the difficulties to which Menzies had drawn attention before the election and which prompted him to promise that there would be regular bulletins on the economy. Treasury issued the first of these at the end of January 1956. It triggered a quite unprecedented cry of alarm.

The eight heads of Economics Departments in Australia’s universities jointly issued a public statement that the Government was

irresponsible in doing so little to rectify inflation and curb the imports which were masking ‘the critical state of the economy’.©

The Government responded by appointing a special, and very distinguished, committee to advise it broadly on what should be done.® The result was the concoction of a kind of mini-budget to | increase taxation on items which stimulated a high level of imports

(motor vehicles, petrol, etc.) and on luxuries generally. And to impose some check on investment spending, company taxation was raised. In announcing such measures Menzies insisted that ‘we are

neither anticipating nor seeking to meet a depression. What we are trying to do is to prevent some elements in our prosperity from aggravating an inflation which could, if left alone, undermine our prosperity’.°4

Menzies’ smooth movement into the world of economics—new evidence of his barrister’s skill in mastering a brief—did not go unnoticed. Muted irony could not entirely hide admiration in one comment on his ‘political bedside manner’:

61 SMH, 12 January 1956.

6¢ The economists involved were Arndt, of Canberra University College; Black, of Sydney; Cochrane, of Melbourne; Downing, of Melbourne; Firth, of Tasmania;

Karmel, of Adelaide; Prest, of Melbourne; Swan, of the Australian National

University. 63 From the public service it included the Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Roland Wilson;

the Trade Secretary, J. Crawford; the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Allen Brown; R. J. Randall of the Treasury. Other members were H.C. Coombs, Governor of the Central Bank; the Vice-Chancellor of the National University, L. G. Melville; T. Swan, Professor of Economics at the Australian National University; Sir Daniel McVey, an industrialist; A. Osborne, General Manager of the Commercial Banking Co of Sydney; C. N. Williams, ex-President of the National Farmers’ Union; and F. Lampe, former head of Mantons, a Melbourne retail store (SMH , 23 February 1956). 64 CPD H of R 9: 787.

320 ROBERT MENZIES The eminent physician has studied the symptoms, read all the textbooks, taken counsel with the economic specialists, and thoroughly mastered the case ... You listen to the consoling voice and follow the smoothly logical analysis, and feel how lucky you are to be in such skilful hands.©

This sentiment was not, however, universal. ‘Punishment for all —except Governments’, blared one headline, and cries of pain and protest arose from business interests of every kind. Needless to say, Evatt bitterly attacked the change in policy and Menzies treated him with studied and uncharacteristic arrogance. He arrived in the

House ten minutes after the Opposition leader began his major speech against the new policy initiative and strolled out long before Evatt had finished.° By this time Menzies and his advisers were preparing for an important trip abroad, timed to allow him to attend the next Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, in London at the beginning of June 1956. The plan was for Menzies to leave Fremantle late in May.

He would travel by sea to Malta and then fly to London via Paris and Vienna. After the Prime Ministers’ Conference he was to pay official visits to Austria and Germany at the invitation of those

countries’ governments. On the way home he would visit the United States, and also accept some at least of the official invitations he had received to make calls on Japan, the Philippines, Malaya and

Indonesia.” Partly to prepare for the wider responsibility that these travels would involve, and partly because of his overwhelming involve-

ment in what he and the Cabinet saw as the country’s central economic difficulties, Menzies was not, during the first months of 1956, at the centre of debate on other issues. He was also suffering bouts of illness. After being out of circulation for several weeks with

severe gastric trouble he left his bed briefly to appear, pale and

6° Sun-Herald, 18 April 1956.

66 SMH editorial, 21 March 1956: ‘Dr Evatt’s Poor Aim’ (‘It is a great pity that Dr Evatt

has never shone in economics’), but also implicitly censuring Menzies’ egregious ‘urbanity’. It was, indeed uncharacteristic of Menzies—the great stickler for parliamentary proprieties—to show such discourtesy ... which no doubt reflected the real depth of the contempt he had by now developed for his rival. When originally announcing on 13 March that he would be making his economic statement the next evening Menzies had acted much more in character, by stressing Evatt’s right to reply, by promising to provide him with the text of the statement ahead of its presentation, and by suggesting an adjournment to allow the Opposition leader to digest it (CPD H of R 9: 695). 67 SMH, 9 May 1956.

NEW SECURITY?, 1955-1956 321 weak, at the opening of the new Parliament on 15 February.®* Then, in the first week of April, when in Perth to take part in the Western Australian State elections, Menzies suffered a heavy fall in his bath,

a fall which again drew attention to his health. No bones were broken though the Prime Minister had to be treated for ‘bad bruising and a strained back’ and it was said that the accident had ‘aggravated an old injury’.©’ His indisposition again spurred speculation that now, having reached the height of power but in ill health

and fatigued, Menzies might be contemplating retirement from politics. Such speculation, rife since the recent election, was wide-

spread and strong enough to receive special mention in United States Embassy reports to the State Department, and the Australian correspondent to The Times, Roy Curthoys, had urgently to press his

superiors in London to leave the story alone until conclusive evidence had come to light.” Menzies himself laid the speculation to rest, temporarily at least, in the course of an address at the beginning of May to a group of Brisbane businessmen. He told them that he had just started on a pretty big job—that of preserving Australia’s prosperity—and he was not one to start on something and then run away from it. ‘I do wish people would stop talking about putting me in the House of Lords’, he said. ‘It does not seem a very engaging prospect.’7! Correspondence at this time between W. 5. Robinson and Brendan Bracken

amusingly suggests how serious the speculation was among those who thought themselves in the know. One of Bracken’s letters in

particular must have made Robinson hug himself when, a few months later, the Suez affair began its tortured course. Bracken had a fey pen; from London he wrote on 8 May:

63 [bid., 16 February 1956.

69 Ibid., 6 April 1956. The hotel switchboard was jammed with calls from well-wishers, one of whom offered to fly Menzies to the goldfields for treatment from a well-known Boulder chiropractor. The cricketer Bert Oldfield wrote recommending a Lismore

chiropractor and the Perth medico who attended Menzies wrote a report to the latter’s Canberra doctor noting that ‘a little weight reduction would be a good thing’. From the United States Judge Velix Frankfurter sent commiserations and wondered whether his friend the Australian Prime Minister was ‘youth-proud’: did he think himself superior to the old man’s precaution which Frankfurter himself had long since adopted—the use of a rubber mat in the bath? 70 US Canberra Embassy to State Department, report covering 31 March to 5 April 1956, National Archives, Washington, 743.00/4—956. Curthoys to The Times, 1 April 1956, warned that it was clear Menzies hadn't broached the subject to Cabinet or even to his senior colleagues, NLA, MS. 299473. 71 SMH, 2 May 1956.

322 ROBERT MENZIES . [think that if our friend B.M. becomes a resident here he could ask for a place in the morgue [i.e., the Lords], but the British Prime Minister is not obliged to ennoble him, though I feel he will do so if Bob so desires . . . If I were one of the shipping boys I would put our friend Bob on the board of the Suez Canal which pays very high fees to its directors and which is

lacking in bellicosity. Bob would certainly fight hard to preserve the rights of the company. And if it were to be expropriated the company has prudently kept most of its cash in London and Paris, so the directors’ old age will be well provided for. I oughtn’t to say will be well provided for because most of the directors are between 70 and 80, one is nearly 90.7

Menzies’ last significant act in parliament was to lay on the table What he called his own first annual survey of the economy. It was chiefly a reiteration of the analysis made in March after the special advisory committee had briefed Cabinet, and an endorsement of the emergency measures which Menzies subsequently announced.

‘Onlooker’ commented that the ‘lucidity of style’ of the survey ‘confirms the report that the P.M. took a considerable hand in writing it’.”° But he joined with other press commentators in com-

plaining that Menzies was going away leaving behind much unfinished business. Reconsideration of the immigration intake and examination of the wage structure in preparation for the coming budget were only the largest of the questions to be faced by ‘those who will be responsible for running the place in his absence’.”4 Nevertheless ‘Onlooker’ was reminded of a famous American cartoon of the 1900s, when swashbuckling Theodore Roosevelt had

been big-game hunting in Africa, which showed wild animals peering from behind trees into a jungle clearing, and inquiring fearfully, ‘Has he gone?’ Prime Minister Menzies’s departure has left a somewhat similar void in the political jungle of Canberra, whose denizens must be feeling both bereft and relieved.

’2 Brendan Bracken to W. S. Robinson. 8 May 1956, MUA, W. S. Robinson Papers, Box 6. 73 Sun-Herald, 3 June 1956. This view was not shared on all sides. W. S. Robinson, for

example, wrote crustily to his son: ‘While the statistics are valuable, the commentary in the Paper represents Roland Wilson and Swan at their worst. Bob and Arty just

don’t count—the former is ignorant of economic affairs and the latter is almost continuously “under the table”. Possibly the authors intended the commentary as a warning of the imminence of physical controls on investment, wages, prices, etc. Such developments would not surprise me—I can think of no other justification for the publication’. W. S. to L. B., 28 May 1956, W. S. Robinson Papers, MUA, Box 17. 74 SMH, 25 May 1956, Editorial: ‘Prime Minister’s Farewell’.

NEW SECURITY ?, 1955-1956 323 There is no doubt who is the boss when he is around nor that there is a

relaxation of tension when he goes. Cabinet room and the House in session are alike conscious of a presence withdrawn.”

In even more jocular mood, one leader writer speculated, under the heading “Case of the Buried Treasurer’, whether Menzies’ departure

would mean that Fadden would resume his old role. Admirers of Menzies,

reviewing his handling of the economic crisis during the past six months, are inclined to say that the old Latin tag should now be rewritten to read: “Ars est celare Artie’—which, when you think how large Sir Arthur Fadden bulks in the political scene, is a considerable feat.”

79 Sun-Herald, 3 June 1956. 76 SMH, 26 May 1956.

12

Suez 1956

Mie Arcadia, WELCOMED seabeen voyage London, via the as the resthis he had sorelytoneeding. Cartoonists and others liked to imagine him distressed at news from home. In one amusing instance the cartoonist Eyre Jr depicted the Prime Minister sitting on a deck chair under a rug, having just opened an envelope which disgorged papers headed ‘inflation’, ‘immigration problem’, ‘wharf bill’. “Quick, steward!’ says the distraught Menzies.

‘A pick-me-up! I’ve just had a wire from Sir Artie!’! But in fact Menzies gave every sign of distancing himself expeditiously from the minutiae of local politics. His trip included state visits to Malta and—by air on the last leg— Austria.* In both cases he was much féted. At the Vienna airport he reviewed the newly-formed Austrian Army’s first guard of honour

since 1938 for a visiting head of government, and he and Dame Pattie, accommodated in the former Palace of Princess Starhemberg, were guarded throughout their four-day stay by what was described as ‘one of the strongest Security screens the city has seen’.

Menzies’ personal friend the Australian ambassador to France, Alfred Stirling, was one of the official party (Menzies had flown to Vienna from Paris), as was the head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Sir Allen Brown. The Minister for Trade, John McEwen, came by train from Rome en route to West Germany and went sightseeing with the Menzies before having intensive talks with Austrian industrialists. On a round of official functions, Menzies was entertained at a State banquet, and visited and conferred with the Austrian President, Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Though it was not altogether | SMH, 12 June 1956.

He was in Valetta on 14 June, and in Vienna from the 17th to the 20th. Earlier, at Colombo, Menzies persuaded the Arcadia’s captain to stay longer than scheduled to allow fellow-passenger Benno Moiseiwitsch to give ashore a piano recital which Menzies himself attended (SMH, 2 June 1956).

324

SUEZ, 1956 325 clear to outsiders what the main point of the visit was, the presence of McEwen suggested that trade bulked large among the matters for discussion. At the State banquet Menzies thanked Austria for the thousands of fine settlers she had given Australia, and the Austrian Chancellor, Julius Raab, noted (somewhat enigmatically) the simi-

larities between the two countries: “both ... are outposts, facing people and ideologies foreign to ours’. The Menzies arrived in London on 21 June. At the airport he told

reporters that he thought 90 per cent of the discussions at the coming Conference would be on foreign affairs, though Australia also wanted to talk about better trade relations, particularly with Britain. At the Savoy the Menzies were greeted in their quarters with presents from their old friend back in Australia, the wealthy woolbroker J. R. McGregor: cigars for Menzies and cashmere goods for Dame Pattie and Heather. McGregor had also arranged for a physician they both knew, Dr Shaw, to give Menzies a thorough overhaul while he was in London: [ have the feeling that he is more than tired, and it worries me a little, as just what he means to this country I find difficult to express in words, and I think that this rest away from Australia, and particularly as Dame Pattie is with him, will do him a power of good.*

It was a marvellous time to be in London: high summer, and the second of the current series of test cricket matches between Australia and England was about to begin. The British Government lent Menzies a Daimler car for the period of his visit, and he had a tele-

vision set installed in it so that he could watch the cricket while travelling! Not long after the Conference began one Australian journalist wrote home in a ‘London Letter’: ‘And here’, said the suave television commentator from Lord’s, ‘is that fine supporter of the Australian cricket team...” And then appeared the beaming face of Mr. Menzies. The impression seemed to have been left that the Prime Minister was here for the express purpose of building up the morale of the Australian side. Gradually, however, Britons became aware that Mr. Menzies has other business here besides cricket.®

3 Tbid., 19 June 1956.

47. R. McGregor to Menzies, recording, inter alia, his note to Shaw, 14 June 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/1/21/179. 5 SMH, 27 June 1956. It cost him £70 to install. The British government was at the time considering banning TV sets in cars. 6 Ibid., 2 July 1956. Sir William Heseltine, then Menzies’ private secretary (and with him on this trip, confirms that ‘the Lords Test monopolised his attention immediately after arriving in London’ (Heseltine to A. W. Martin, 6 January 1987).

326 ROBERT MENZIES Menzies was correct in thinking that foreign affairs would dominate discussion at the Conference. At preliminary meetings Eden and his ministers set up a programme of plenary sessions in which the salient issue would be Commonwealth relations with Soviet Russia.’ The climate of the time made this emphasis inevitable. The

implications for the Cold War of Khrushchev’s ascendancy after Beria’s execution and the decline of Malenkov were still being assessed. Khrushchev was assumed to be behind the conclusion of the treaty with the Western powers which in May 1955 sealed the peace with Austria, marked the first withdrawal of Soviet power in Europe and—an absolutely minor coincidence—made possible the offering of the honours enjoyed by Menzies during his recent ‘State’ visit! Khrushchev had met Eisenhower at Geneva in July 1955, and

though no agreements of substance were reached, it was a widespread view that ‘the spirit of Geneva’ involved an implicit easing

of tension between East and West. It was evident that the new Soviet

regime was wooing nationalist leaders in Asia and Africa with offers of aid and trade. Khrushchev and Bulganin had made a highly publicized trip to India late in 1955. More ominous, in Western eyes, was Soviet agreement to supply arms to the Nasser regime in Egypt.

The Soviets were also negotiating on capital loans to help in the construction of Egypt's great twentieth-century project: the Aswan High Dam, designed to facilitate ultimate control of the Nile waters. Important but less urgent issues included Arab-—Israel tension in the

Middle East, future relations with China, and the use of nuclear

energy for peaceful purposes. On the key question of relations with the Soviets, Nehru of India and Menzies of Australia were the leaders of diametrically opposed

schools of thought.’ Nehru observed that he had recently visited Russia and had also received the new Soviet leaders in India. He had no doubt that significant and broadly based changes were occurring in Russia. Russians were becoming better educated and it was Clear that they wanted peace. The visit of their leaders to India —the first occasion on which they had travelled out of the circle of communist nations—was an earnest of the desire to establish friendly relations with non-communist countries. It was broadly accepted that, especially in the light of the coming of the hydrogen

bomb, major war was unthinkable. We would do well, Nehru observed, to encourage the changed policies of Soviet Russia, thus ’ Ministerial Committee: Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meeting, 20 June 1956, PRO, FO 371/123196.

5 The discussion that follows depends on the official report of proceedings at the conference, particularly on 27 June and 2 July, AA, A1209/23 57/5293 Pt 2.

SUEZ, 1956 327 enabling outstanding international problems to be discussed in a more friendly atmosphere. In response Menzies said that it was not acceptable to judge the policies of the Soviet leaders only by their words. What practical proof had these men given, by deeds, of their pacific intentions? ‘Was it not still the ultimate aim of the Soviet Union to see communism the dominant political faith throughout the world?’ What had changed was the method, not the objective.

A similar gulf separated the views of Menzies and Nehru on

China. While en route to the Conference Menzies had received from

John Foster Dulles ‘a purely personal note’ asking that at the meeting he should not forget the Communist Chinese threat to Formosa: ‘I feel that you understand better than anyone else who will be there the gravity of this problem’. His hope was that ‘your Commonwealth Conference will not ... do anything which could encourage the Chinese Communists and discourage our friends’.? At the Conference Nehru argued that the Chinese Communist Government was firmly established in the country, that in any case it was more nationalist than communist and should be recognized, as had been done by the United Kingdom and almost all Asian countries.

Recognition must involve admission to the United Nations. It would be impossible to solve any outstanding problem in the Far East without China’s cooperation. But Menzies insisted that public

opinion in the United States would make it impossible for the Government there to agree to ‘any arrangement which failed to define and protect the independent status of Formosa’. The real danger was that ‘a sudden change of front on the part of those countries of the Commonwealth whose views hitherto closely accorded with those of the United States would lead to an open conflict between the United States and the other democracies’.!°

The division over communism was the sharpest in the Conference, though there were others. But all were submerged in the bland

generalizations which were customary in the final communiqué issued at the end of the Conference. In submitting, on 7 July, to his Minister the draft final communiqué ‘which officials worked out last night’, P. Dean of the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO)

remarked that ‘much of it has been said before and it is full of clichés, but this is inevitable in a document of this sort’. He then went on to detail how even this document might need some ? Dulles to Menzies, 18 June 1956, Eisenhower Library, John Foster Dulles Papers, Chronological Series, Box 13. '0 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting, 2 July 1956, AA, A1209/23, 57/5293 Pt 2. Commonwealth countries which did not recognize Communist China were Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa.

328 ROBERT MENZIES deletions to satisfy the touchiness of some delegations.!! Dean was

not the only one who remarked on the document’s blandness. It was especially deplored in both the English and Australian press. In

an editorial headed ‘Platitudes From the Prime Ministers’, the Sydney Morning Herald acidly commented that the Conference

might be summed up in an old Persian proverb: ‘We came together,

we talked, we dispersed’. But at least the Persians did not think it necessary to issue a communiqué ‘full of generalisations to hide a lack of agreement on solutions’.!? Just before the communiqué was issued Brendan Bracken wrote hopefully to W. 5. Robinson: “Our Prime Ministers’ Conference which was, as you know, merely a sort

of prolongation of a Lord Mayor’s luncheon, deserves a niche in history for its decision (which [ hope will be fulfilled) to issue a very short account of their doings’.!5 He was quickly disappointed.

Even Menzies, in a speech to a high-ranking audience at the Australia Club said that ‘he did not deny that the communiqué of the recent Prime Ministers’ Conference produced platitudes’, but ‘we do not meet to advertise our differences; we meet to exchange ideas about our differences’. He also declared, somewhat inconsistently, that it would be a disaster if the British Commonwealth should ‘become so loose and so vague that it might almost pass for a committee of the United Nations’.!4 In a private conversation next day with Lord Home, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Menzies argued that, while an ‘inner circle’ (i.e. a group

of leaders from ‘old’ Commonwealth countries) could not be

equipped with ‘formal machinery’, closer co-operation within that

circle ‘must be devised as we might be driven back upon it and it must not be weakened’.!5 Later, in press conferences in Canada on his way home, Menzies ‘jocularly commented’ on the difficulty

of “political leaders representing the far-ranging nations of the Commonwealth reaching a unanimous verdict on any question of moment’, said that Prime Ministers’ Conferences attempted to cover

too much ground, and hoped that future meetings could confine

"Pp. Dean to Secretary of State, 5 July 1956, PRO, FO/123196. 12 SMH, 9 July 1956.

'3 Bracken to Robinson, 6 July 1956, MUA. He added that ‘Eden, as you would expect, pleased them all. He is a considerate chairman and a great minimiser of controversy’. 14 SMH, 11 July 1956.

'S “Extract from record of conversation between Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and Mr. Menzies, at the Savoy hotel on Wednesday 11 July 1956’, PRO, DO 35/6109. Menzies also emphasized his ‘readiness’ to tell Spender (the Australian ambassador in Washington) to keep in much closer touch with Makins (the British ambassador) and to require Walker (Australia’s representative at the UN) to keep in the closest touch with Dixon, the permanent leader of the UK delegation to the UN.

SUEZ, 1956 329 their discussions to one or two related questions to “see whether we couldn't produce a statement of Commonwealth opinion . . . I think

the world needs the force of judgement that the Commonwealth has’.1¢

By 22 July the Menzies were in New York, on the first leg of their

trip home. Before embarking on a Far East tour, in which a visit to Japan would be the major component, Menzies was to spend 16 days in talks with Canadian and United States Government officials, talks which, according to ‘authoritative sources’, would chiefly be about ‘the impact on the world of internal changes in Russia’. The first weekend was spent as house guests at the New Jersey home of Amos Peaslee, former American Ambassador to Australia. Menzies and his party travelled there by the New Jersey Turnpike, ‘the super-highway’, noted the Australian press with a degree of awe, ‘along which traffic moves without halt at 60 miles an hour’. Among Peaslee’s guests were the veteran American tennis players, Donald Budge and Bill Trabert, who played an exhibition match for Menzies’ entertainment.!” Shortly afterwards, in a well-publicized address to the AmericanAustralian Association in New York, Menzies surveyed impressions he had gained from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference and his visits to Europe. His remarks focused on what at that point seemed the key question in international relations: how far the West should go in responding to the ‘New Look’ in Soviet policy. As in his pronouncements on this subject during the Conference, he preached, with some eloquence, the conservative view that words were cheap and that the democracies should therefore respond with great caution. And he took the opportunity to warn again—as he

now did, almost by second nature, on every possible occasion— against thinking that ‘the noble experiment of the United Nations, riddled by the veto, will be able to protect us’. Menzies made this speech on Wednesday 25 July. Later that week

he travelled to Canada for an informal visit, received an honorary doctorate from Laval University and spent the weekend in Quebec. On the Monday, en route for Washington, he flew to Chicago, and there a confidential message from Anthony Eden caught up with

‘6 UK High Commissioner in Canada to CRO, 27 July 1956, PRO, FO 371/123196. Note,

however, that an official in the British Embassy in Cairo reported that he had met Nehru, Krishna Menon and Raghavan Pilli passing through on their way home and all said the Conference had been ‘a great success. Nehru was obviously extremely satisfied and the others told me that he had a real feeling of sympathy with the Prime Minister, who they thought had handled the conference admirably’ (ibid.). 17 Thid., 20, 23 July 1956.

330 ROBERT MENZIES him. It was to bring a quite new and unexpected focus to his thinking about the international scene and to be the impetus for what quickly became a complete change in his planned itinerary. ‘We cannot allow Nasser to get away with this act of appropriation’, the message ran. Political pressure must be applied first, “but in the last resort ... force may have to be used’.!® The subject referred to

had already electrified the world. It was the dramatic action of Gamel Abdul Nasser, now head of the military junta which had ruled Egypt since the deposition of King Farouk in 1952, in national-

izing (and, in the view of interested non-Egyptian parties, seizing) the Suez Canal. The background to Nasser’s action was complex and the coup itself melodramatically executed. In the mid-1950s it was for the West ominous that the Nasser regime was looking successfully to Eastern Europe as a potential supplier both of military equipment and capital for developmental projects. Of the latter by far the most important was Aswan High Dam. Britain and the United States, also negotiating to help finance this dam, withdrew in July 1956 following Nasser’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China and his encouragement of possible Soviet investment in the High Dam project. On 26 July Nasser, in a speech delivered in the main square of Alexandria to mark the fourth anniversary of Farouk’s

forced abdication, announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal, whose revenues would henceforth be earmarked for the building of the Aswan High Dam. The operation was well planned: when in his speech Nasser uttered a pre-arranged codeword, ‘de Lesseps’ (the original French designer and builder of the Canal), Egyptian officers opened sealed instructions, martial law

was proclaimed in the Canal Zone, and troops seized the Suez

Canal’s offices and installations. Built originally under French aegis the Canal, completed in 1869, was run by a company which had the right to operate it for 99 years

and whose administrative headquarters were in Paris. The British had acquired a major interest in this company in 1875, when the ruling Khedive of Egypt was in financial difficulties and the Disraeli eovernment bought his shares. A convention signed by a number of states in 1888 guaranteed that the Canal would be open to all ships

of all nations, both in peace and war. Internal Egyptian troubles from the late nineteenth century onwards led the British to station troops in Egypt and establish what remained for many years a kind of informal protectorate, to guard the Canal. An agreement between 18 PRO, PREM 11/1094.

SUEZ, 1956 331 London and Cairo in 1936 limited the acceptable number of troops and agreed to their confinement in what was called the Canal Zone.

Then, in 1954, after Egyptian nationalist and often violent antiBritish agitation, and chiefly on the initiative of the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, agreement was negotiated that all British forces should leave by stages over the ensuing 20 months. The last British troops left the Canal Zone on 23 June 1956, six weeks before

Nasser’s surprise move to nationalize the Canal. Eden’s fury is understandable. In the evacuation negotiations he had kept his head in the face of intense emotional pressure from the leaders of his own party (Churchill sat in the Commons with tears flowing down his cheeks as the requisite legislation was passed). He had been anxious to understand and meet anti-colonialists more than half way, and now he felt badly let down.

On 27 July, the day after Nasser’s announcement, the British Cabinet appointed a committee of five ministers, under Eden, to ‘formulate plans for putting our policy into effect’. This was the beginning of the so-called Egypt Committee, which became a kind

of inner Cabinet, responsible for military plans which, by a convention at once established, were never reported to full Cabinet or the nation. The Egypt Committee immediately instructed the Chiefs

of Staff to prepare plans and a timetable for military operations against Egypt. Within 24 hours decisions had been made to call up 24 000 reservists, post a new artillery regiment and two extra fighter

squadrons to Cyprus, and to concentrate British troops then in Libya along the Egyptian border.!?

In Washington Menzies, naturally unaware (as he was, almost certainly, to be throughout?°) of the existence and detailed plans of

the Egypt Committee, discussed the situation with the British ambassador, Sir Roger Makins. ‘In days gone by’, said Menzies, ‘military action would have been the appropriate reply to Egypt but

in the present circumstances resort to it would split the western

world ... it should be kept in the background and not talked

about’.2! The “political pressure’ which Eden had referred to in his message of 29 July to Menzies had in effect already begun: a joint

19 R. Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London, 1986), 457, 461-2, 467.

20 W. J. Hudson, the authority on the minutiae of Australia’s involvement in the Suez crisis, inclines towards this view, in the lack of direct evidence to the contrary. But he presents a useful case for accepting that, though he may not have known the full details of the Egypt Committee’s plans, Menzies, like lesser members of the British cabinet, quickly became aware of the danger of war, and that plans were in train to meet it. Blind Loyalty, esp. 65-7). 21 Sir Roger Makins to Foreign Office, 1 August, PRO, PREM 11/1094.

332 ROBERT MENZIES communiqué issued by France, Britain and the United States called for a conference of maritime powers to discuss ways of ensuring

international management of the Canal. Force was indeed, as Menzies said it should be, in the background, though at this stage he could not know how radically. In secret the Egypt Committee

was uncompromising. ‘While our ultimate purpose’, ran their -- minutes for a meeting on 30 July, is to place the Canal under international control, our immediate concern

is to bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian Government. Britain’s aim should be to limit the function of the conference to the approval of a declaration of policy ... to form the basis of a Note to the Egyptian Government which we would be prepared, if necessary, to

despatch on our own responsibility and which would be a virtual ultimatum. If Colonel Nasser refused to accept it, military operations could then proceed.**

On 3 August Menzies, accompanied by Spender, called informally on Eisenhower and the Acting US Secretary of State, Herbert

Hoover Jr. In a wide-ranging general discussion of international affairs, Eisenhower agreed with Menzies’ belief that, because “Nehru

would be very useful in countering Nasser’, he ought to be invited

to the conference. But Eisenhower’s principal concern was that the UK and France, as great powers, would continue to exercise restraint. What they faced was what he called the tyranny of the weak: ‘the difficulty which arises when weak nations are placed in the position of challenging Great Powers by taking advantage of certain situations, thereby making it difficult for the Powers to do much about it’. In a remark that firmly branded him a man of his time Menzies declared—one hopes, all the same, with a twinkle in his eye—that

‘long experience in politics had taught him that the most devastating opponent during a speech was a woman: one could hardly be rough on a member of the weaker sex!?°

Two days later, having discovered from Eden that the sponsors envisaged that representation at the forthcoming conference would

22 Quoted, Rhodes James, Eden, 469. From Washington the Australian ambassador, Spender, reported a starker version. Harold Macmillan (one of the more hawkish members of the Egypt Committee) had told John Foster Dulles that if the United Kingdom had to die as a first-class nation, they would prefer to do so ‘with their boots on’, AA, A5462, 118/24/IL.

23 Memorandum of conversation, call of Prime Minister Menzies upon President Eisenhower, 3 August 1956, Eisenhower Library, Abeline, Papers as President of US, 1953-61, Ann Whitman File, International Series, Box 2.

SUEZ, 1956 333 be at Foreign Secretary level and that Casey was therefore expected

from Australia, Menzies stepped in and intimated that he ‘felt strongly inclined to attend ... myself’. Eden replied that ‘we shall be delighted to see you here at any time. The sooner the better. If you come I hope you will join our councils’.24 Menzies accordingly

jettisoned his other plans and flew to London on 9 August. Eden no doubt expected that Menzies, as now the virtual leader of the old members of the Commonwealth and an instinctive despiser of would-be dictators, would be a crucial ally in any hard-line approach to Nasser. Through leaks reported by the British High Commissioner in Canberra, Stephen Holmes, it was understood in the CRO, well before he came to London, that Casey’s instincts were

conciliatory and diplomatic, but that he had lost out to emotional jingoism in the Australian Cabinet. Though invited, Nasser refused to come to the London Confer-

ence, denouncing any suggestion that the Canal be put under international control as ‘collective colonialism’. In what was no doubt a gesture of defiance he arrived in Moscow on an official visit to Russia on the day the Conference opened. Meanwhile in London,

two days before that, Eden invited Menzies to a British Cabinet meeting, where the Australian Prime Minister spoke robustly on the

need to resist Nasser’s actions. Afterwards he wired home to Fadden, his Acting Prime Minister, that the British Cabinet was taking a grave view of the crisis: “... the chances of armed conflict are very substantial and . .. in such circumstances our own involvement would be extremely probable’.2° At the initial meeting of the Conference John Foster Dulles, the United States Secretary of State, put forward proposals whose substance would, as it happened, be finally agreed upon with the approval of 18 of the 22 nations rep-

resented. In a long conversation that day between Menzies and Home, the Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, the latter asked whether, if Nasser turned down the proposals and Britain decided to use force, Australia would be prepared to contribute. Reporting this discussion to Eden, Home wrote: 24 Menzies to Eden, 5 August, and Eden to Menzies, 6 August 1956, PRO, DO 35/6315. 25 The complex Cabinet discussions on the first stages of the Suez affair are carefully teased out from archival sources by W. J. Hudson, Blind Loyalty, esp. ch. 2 (‘Isolation of the Doves’). The two strongest opponents of precipitate action were Casey and the Minister for Defence, McBride, both of whom were advised by level-headed Departments. Casey personally had considerable diplomatic experience, much of it in the Middle East. The crucial Cabinet meeting at which Casey’s reservations were rejected was on 7 August. Fadden reported it in detail by cable to Menzies. Paul Hasluck, who was in the Cabinet at the time, observed that, on Suez, Casey’s arguments were rarely taken seriously: he was generally regarded as a ‘light-weight’. (Personal letter.) 26 Menzies to Fadden, 15 August 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/16/423/11.

334 ROBERT MENZIES Mr. Menzies said Australia would certainly be in this with the United Kingdom... It was doubtful if they could send troops, but naval and air

help might be possible although much depended on the timing of operations as to how effective the help might be.*’

But this would be the ultimate step. Meanwhile the Dulles proposals had to be put to Nasser, and Menzies told Home he favoured ‘presentation by a few on behalf of the Conference’. Then he added: He had to return to Australia some time next week and would not be very happy with Casey representing Australia if the latter should be one

of the countries suggested. Casey was on the whole sound, but he would begin to try to adjust formulae with Nasser whereas what was wanted was to face Nasser with a definite plan.”®

Casey, who had arrived in London shortly after Menzies, was certainly not attuned to this approach. On the morning after the Menzies—Home exchange Casey visited Menzies at his hotel. Aware

‘from my knowledge of the area’ that there were grave military difficulties about attacking Egypt, and convinced that an attack would have disastrous consequences for British prestige, he asked Menzies to speak personally to Eden against the use of force. He also pressed Menzies to demand from the British a full appreciation of their military plans, of which, as he pointed out, “we are entirely

in the dark’.2? Menzies appears to have taken neither request seriously, and it was left to Casey to attempt to beard Monckton, the

British Defence Minister, to ask, as he put it, to be ‘let in’ on the military appreciation of the Suez Canal problem. “He said’, Casey records, ‘that only two other ministers beside himself knew about it and that the cabinet as a whole did not, so that he would have to get Anthony Eden’s clearance before he made us aware of it’.“? Casey asked Monckton to do this: but if he did, the request seems to have borne no fruit. The matter continued to rankle. Within a week, on 27 August, Geoffrey Tory of the British High Commissioner’s Office 27 ‘Record of Conversation between the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and the Prime Minister of Australia’, 16 August 1956, PRO, PREM 11/1094/157. As Hudson acutely remarks: ‘that Home asked such a question suggests that the Egypt Committee, of which he was a member, had not taken Menzies into its confidence’;

and Menzies’ reply makes it clear that ‘while he was happy to promise political support for the United Kingdom in a military operation against Egypt, ... he was chary of rash promises of actual Australian participation’ (Blind Loyalty, 70). | 28 ‘Record of Conversation .. .’, ibid. This remark was much to Eden’s taste: on Home’s

report he minuted, in red, ‘I agree’. |

2° T. B. Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister: The Diaries of RK. G. Casey, 1951-60 (London, 1972), 240 (17 August 1956). 30 [bid., 241 (20 August 1956).

SUEZ, 1956 335 in Canberra was reporting: ‘the Australian Chiefs of Staff have been surprised at our failure to give them any indication of our military

thinking, having regard to the fact, of which they are only too conscious, that shooting might begin at any moment and that they would certainly be involved’.s! Presumably Tory knew nothing about the plans of the Egypt Committee. The Dulles scheme, which the Conference approved, was in the eyes of the majority of the delegates reasonable and necessary if the Canal were to remain an unfettered waterway. The proposal was that the Canal be operated by an international body established by treaty and associated with the United Nations. In his arguments for this solution Dulles placed much emphasis on the 1888 Convention, which he believed had been ‘grievously assaulted’.32 When it was agreed that a committee of five, representing ‘assenting nations’, should take the proposal to Nasser, Eden and others assumed that Dulles himself would be its head. But he declined, on the ground

that the United States should from this point become ‘less conspicuous’. When it came to choosing a substitute, Menzies, in the words of H. A. F. Rumbold, of the CRO, ‘almost automatically’ seemed the man to lead the delegation, given the major part he had

played in guiding the Conference to its conclusions: “his interventions were few but always impressive and his moderation did much to set the atmosphere’.*? Under British and American pressure, and after enthusiastic encouragement also from Fadden and the Australian Cabinet, he agreed—reluctantly, he said—to do so.*4

Menzies worked assiduously with his team of five: between its formation in mid-August and its disbandment in mid-September

the group met formally at least fourteen times, nine of them in London before going to Cairo on 2 September. They examined the finances involved in running the Canal, interviewed directors of the Canal Company and an engineer who had had much experience in

the Canal Zone. Their homework did not, however, extend to serious examination of the social situation and sentiments of the people with whom the talks were to take place. From the beginning >! Tory to A. W. Snelling, 27 August 1956. 32 Rhodes James, Eden, 501. The Soviet representative and five delegates from unaligned countries supported an Indian proposal that the new body should be advisory only to the Egyptian operators of the Canal. Rhodes James points out, 500-2, that Dulles and Eisenhower had basically different views on how the crisis should be approached, the

position of the latter tending strongly towards that of those who advocated an only advisory body. 33 Secret Report of H. A. F. Rumbold, 30 August 1956, PRO, DO 35/6315/135B. 34. R. G. Menzies, Afternoon Light, 155-7.

336 ROBERT MENZIES Menzies’ approach was strictly legalistic: points of law and logic took centre stage, and the feelings of the people who had to accept them were clearly not thought to be relevant. This approach fitted anyway with the governing assumption—evident at the Conference and confirmed, it seemed, by the Committee’s subsequent examination of ‘expert’ witnesses—that the Egyptians could be expected neither to work the Canal effectively nor to refrain from harassing anyone else who could.* But it also reflected Menzies’ inbuilt personal presumption (natural to a man of his age and education) of the inferiority of non-British, non-white peoples involved. As it happens, we have in the Egyptian case a particularly clear expression of this attitude in an entry Menzies made in his diary some years before, when passing through Cairo. Though Farouk was then still on the throne, the more radical of his ministers were agitating

for the withdrawal of British troops, on the ground that they were ‘an affront to our sovereignty’. In talks with the agitators, Menzies

found that they simply assumed that in the event of attack by outside forces the British would return, and Australian troops, as

ever, would be deployed to defend Suez. “These Gyppos’, he

recorded,

are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, mouthing the slogans of democracy, full of self-importance and basic ignorance. Two bombs dropped on Cairo, and their only grievance would be that British troops didn’t come back fast enough.*°

Nor, when his mind was firmly made up, was Menzies always amenable to informed advice. He took little notice of Casey’s pleas for the sympathetic understanding of Egyptians and the exercise of patient diplomacy, and the two senior Australian civil servants who

accompanied him on the mission to Nasser, Allen Brown and Arthur Tange (heads respectively of the Departments of the Prime Minister and of External Affairs), appear not to have been consulted

3° discuss these meetings more fully and indicate the sources used in A. W. Martin, ‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 92, April 1989,

36 Diary, 12 July 1950, NLA, MS. 4936/13/397. It is proper that we should note at this point how another man of the same generation, Richard Casey, was shortly to see the matter. Before Menzies left for Cairo Casey visited him at his hotel ‘to impress on him my personal view ... that infinite patience and tolerance had to be displayed by our

side. I explained the extreme fanaticism of the Egyptians, which I thought was beyond that of any race I knew. The issues at stake were very great. The Egyptians were quite capable of pulling the house down about their ears rather than submit to 19st} rough handled’ (T. B. Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister, 242: 27 August

SUEZ, 1956 337

ae eee llltrtr—s—=t . errr Menzies’ mission to Cairo on the Suez crisis in 1956: meeting President Nasser

about the negotiations that took place. It was with a kind of amused irony that Menzies later recalled how the American member of his delegation, Loy Henderson, had been ‘somewhat cluttered up with a number of expert advisers’: The American expert adviser is of a race apart. He loves sitting in committees to draft documents ... and he exercises considerable ingenuity in the elaboration of proposals ... Whenever Henderson has come to a meeting after a long session with his experts, the marks are

heavy upon him. When he speaks for himself, without such wellmeaning help, his views are wise, clear and experienced.°”

This was, in some moods, particularly when dealing with international matters, a Menzies ideal: to rely on personal wisdom, and what he liked to call a meeting of minds. At the end of the talks with Nasser Tange wrote tersely to his minister, Casey: ‘About the future 37 Afternoon Light, 160.

338 ROBERT MENZIES [cannot speculate. The P.M. will go to London and see the Cabinet. I

do not know his mind. He is unlikely to discuss the subject with me’ .38

At their first encounter, Nasser, though pleased at Menzies’ affability, was politely uncomprehending of his allusive after-dinner conversation.*? For his part Menzies was soon to send Eden a confidential description in which the lingering presence was still there of his private 1950 caricature of the Egyptian type: I was told that Nasser was a man of great personal charm who might beguile me into believing something foreign to my own thought. This is

not so. He is in some ways a likeable fellow but so far from being charming he is rather gauche ... I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence. He lacks training or experience in many of the things he is dealing with and is, therefore, awkward with them... like many of these people in the Middle East (or even in India) whom I have met, his logic doesn’t travel very far; that is to say, he will produce a perfectly adequate minor premiss, but his deduction will be astonishing.#0

Menzies’ approach to the talks with Nasser was that of a barrister

presenting a brief. As emissary from the London Conference, he said, he was not in Cairo to discuss the legality or otherwise of nationalization, nor to contest the question of Egyptian sovereignty. He was there to offer a scheme whereby the proposed Canal Board,

simply as a tenant, should rent the Canal from Egypt, run it, and guarantee the users’ wish that it be kept an open waterway, operated free of politics and on a sound financial basis. As in any form of

tenancy the fact of Egypt’s ownership was not diminished. But Nasser could never accept this argument. To him the tenancy analogy was deeply flawed: in the real world, as he saw it, international control made ownership an empty word and inevitably diminished Egyptian sovereignty. This sticking-point exasperated Menzies. ‘With frightful reiteration’, he wrote to Eden, 38 Tange to Casey, 8 September 1956, AA, A1838/163/4/7/3/3 Pt 7. Sir Arthur Tange

spoke to me of Menzies’ views on expert advice and ‘meetings of minds’ in an interview on 7 August 1987. It is fair to note the additional view of Sir Paul Hasluck, who observed impatience in Menzies with preceptors of the kind that tried to tell him what to say instead of letting him, as an experienced advocate, master his own brief after considering all the information and opinion that could be supplied to him. ‘He was intolerant towards any officer who cast himself in the role of “adviser” but he

certainly was a good listener to anyone who had relevant material to offer ...’ (Hasluck to the author, 13 January 1988). But Suez is an example of an issue on which

he had made up his own mind on principle, in which prejudice was involved. Hasluck’s observation more strongly applies to domestic affairs. 39M. Heikal, Cutting the Lion's Tail: Suez through Egyptian Eyes (London, 1986), 149-50. +0 Menzies to Eden, 9 September 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/16/423/9.

SUEZ, 1956 . 339 Nasser kept coming back to slogans: ... to ‘sovereignty’, to our desire for the ‘domination’ of the Canal... I exhausted my energy and almost

wore out my patience in explaining to him that ... what we were seeking was an agreement; and any scheme for the actual control and

management of the Canal, while leaving Egypt’s sovereign rights untouched, was the kind of working arrangement which was an exercise of sovereignty and not a derogation from it.*!

But one man’s definition is another man’s slogan, and pathos and satire laced the tortured argument. Menzies, Nasser exclaimed, did not understand Egyptian psychology: We have a complex on this matter. The small nations are more touchy about sovereignty than great ones. Great Britain may find it not inconsistent with her sovereignty to have American bases established in Great Britain, but that is only because Great Britain is a great nation and is not sensitive about sovereignty.

Menzies’ response was unhelpfully rational: It is good sense and also, I believe, good medical theory that the right way to get rid of a complex is to set out all the facts quite plainly in a sensible way and thrash out a logical conclusion.

The talks broke down on 5 September. According to Menzies and

others, they were killed by President Eisenhower, who at a press conference on the previous day declared that the United States would not countenance the use of force against Egypt and insisted

that if the present negotiations became stalled other proposals would have to be worked out peacefully. This, Menzies would always maintain, gave Nasser unlimited opportunity to stall and, by artificially prolonging negotiations, to secure de facto success for his coup. Menzies’ chagrin was especially great because of what

he considered a most significant conversation the night before Eisenhower’s statement broke: a private talk in which he warned Nasser, ‘in the friendliest way’, that it would be a mistake for him ‘to exclude the possible use of force from his reckoning’. In an aidemémoire Menzies recorded the result:

Much to my surprise, Nasser took this very well and said: ‘I realise the truth of what you say ... I do not confidently treat the talk of force as

mere bluff. It adds to my feeling of responsibility on this difficult matter’. | am glad to hear this statement which [is] the first forthcoming 41 Tbid. 22 Tbid.

340 ROBERT MENZIES statement that Nasser has made. It suggests to me that he will be anxious to secure a settlement though I most seriously doubt whether he can eat his own words sufficiently to make a settlement along lines which we can possibly agree to, under the terms of our authority.*

In a rueful wire to Fadden and the Cabinet at home Menzies observed: ‘you know the result’ of the mission. But he added: ‘though it is all very well for people to denounce the idea of force... in a negotiation of that kind with an Egyptian it is good to keep him guessing’.44 By the time, a decade later, that Menzies wrote for his

memoirs ‘My Suez Story’, he had learnt enough to sense that the last sentence of this message could hardly be published in its original form. So it became: ‘it is all very well for people to denounce the use of force, but in a negotiation of this kind, it is good sense to keep the other man guessing’.*°

Menzies returned to London on 10 September. At the airport he told reporters, correctly, that ‘Egypt will have nothing to do with any peaceful solution of the Canal problem which does not leave Egypt sole master of the Canal’.*° That day, a Times editorial congratulated Menzies on his conduct of the mission and added that ‘firmness and care’ must be Britain’s watchwords as a new stage in the crisis opened: ‘nothing has occurred to alter the view that the

use of force cannot be ruled out if other means of persuasion are seen to have failed’.4” Menzies saw Eden in London, reported to the Queen at Balmoral, and flew out from Prestwick on 13 September, bound for Australia via the United States.

In New York he had on 14 September a brief and somewhat strained meeting with Eisenhower and more serious talks with Dulles at the State Department. He reached Sydney on 18 September, after 16 weeks overseas. In the United States he had told a press

conference that he was returning to attend to his ‘rather battered home front’, referring chiefly to economic and industrial affairs.*° In

addition, his faithful whip, Hubert Opperman, had told him that ‘our own party is not particularly happy’ though that and the other ills of local politics were trivial by comparison with ‘the bigger 43 Aide-mémoire, 25 August 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/16/423/5-6. On his return to Australia Menzies told his friend Owen Dixon the same story. (Dixon Diary, 22 October 1956. Dixon adds: ‘RGM had spoken to Eisenhower, who excused himself’.) 44 Menzies to Fadden, 11 September 1956, AA, CRS A4926/XML, vol. 13. 45 Afternoon Light, 165-6. 46 Rhodes James, Eden, 503. 47 Times editorial, ‘Firmness and Care’, 10 September 1956.

48 SMH, 18 September 1956. Holmes, the UK High Commissioner in Canberra, also reported the phrase, Holmes to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 6 November 1956, PRO, DO 35/8066.

ee oe | a| |(_iej : | ee a = 9 ae —eS Wr 7 aa

SUEZ, 1956 341

Menzies returns to London to report on Nasser to Anthony Eden

issues you are dealing with’.?? That did not mean that Fadden had not been a success as Acting Prime Minister. On the contrary, he had

earned plaudits on all sides for his conciliatory administration, perhaps the most notable aspect of which had been his success in defusing Suez as a source of conflict between the Government and 4 Opperman to Menzies, 20 August 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/1/24/196. All the same, Oppy added, ‘when you return I trust you will have enough patience and control left following your efforts, to give them the appearance at least, of the immediate furrowed brow and deep concentration, which the members feel is their due, from their electoral perspective’.

342 ROBERT MENZIES

es ee Oe . ! Holmes to CRO, 19 September, PRO, DO 35/6315/215.

SUEZ, 1956 343 A focus for potential disagreement came just before Menzies arrived home. Dulles had a new brainwave, made public before

Menzies reached New York and the main focus of their discussions

on the 14th. This was that the ‘eighteen’ (the nations which had already attempted through the Menzies mission to come to terms with Nasser) should form a Suez Canal Users’ Association (GCUA), whose pilots would conduct ships through the Canal, collect Canal dues and pass on to the Egyptians what SCUA considered ‘their fair share’. Anew London conference was planned for 19 September to consider the idea, but before that Nasser rejected it out of hand and declared that Egypt would militarily resist any attempt by SCUA to run the Canal. Dulles replied that the United States had no wish for

armed hostilities and would send all its ships around the Cape rather than force a passage through the Canal: the implication was that the United States expected others to do the same. In Australia Evatt’s reaction, as early as the 13th, and after elaborate consultations with the federal ALP Executive, was that to establish SCUA

would gravely increase the risk of war and that the Australian Government and other implicated parties should at once take the Suez issue to the United Nations. In a long Cabinet meeting on the same day, ministers were understood to favour the establishment of a Users’ Association, but postponed further action until the return

of Menzies.°* The stage was set for a breakdown in the Faddeninspired truce. On arrival at Kingsford Smith airport Menzies told reporters that the SCUA scheme had been agreed to ‘quite hastily’ by the British, French and United States Governments on the eve of a vital speech which Eden was to make in the House of Commons in defence of

his Government’s Suez policy.°° It was an issue already deeply dividing British society: the Labour Opposition had moved censure on it. Eden’s speech, delivered on 12 September, was the opening shot in two days of acrimonious debate. At the end Eden won on a division of 321 votes to 251 but only on the promise that, barring an

emergency, the Government would consult the United Nations before using force against Egypt.°4 Within three days Russia accused

Britain and France of planning to seize the Canal and warned against any such action.°° By this time the pilots who had worked for the old Canal Company, most of them from Western European countries, had left Egypt, to be progressively replaced by new men, 52 SMH, 14 September 1956. °3 Ibid., 19 September 1956.

4 Ibid., 15 September 1956. °° Ibid., 17 September 1956.

344 ROBERT MENZIES overwhelmingly from Russia and Eastern Europe. Traffic flow in

the Canal soon became almost normal, thus belying the initial assumption of the defenders of the old order that the Egyptians would prove incapable of efficiently running the Canal. At the same time, though in detail secret, the British Egypt Committee’s plans to use force involved movements of troops and equipment that could not be hidden and seemed to lend authority to Russian allegations.°°

Then, to the displeasure of the Americans and the puzzlement of supporters like Menzies, Britain and France, without consultation, suddenly decided on 23 September to refer the Suez crisis to the

Security Council. It was a move officially explained as being designed to forestall any like action by Russia or Egypt; though at the meeting to establish SCUA the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn

Lloyd, told Spender, Australia’s representative, that the main purpose was to achieve ‘freedom of action’.°”

Against this general background Menzies met his Cabinet on 24 September to report on the Suez position. At this meeting he read, in full, the statement he intended to make in parliament, and secured Cabinet endorsement of it.°° Delivered in the Representatives next day, this was a hard-hitting speech: in the words of one journalist, ‘a masterpiece of robust reasoning and lucid statement’.°?

Menzies spoke for over 70 minutes, traversing the history and illegality, as he saw it, of Nasser’s actions; denouncing Nasser’s rejection of the terms he, Menzies, had brought from the ‘eighteen’;

underlining his fears that Nasser was threatening chaos in the Middle East and that Russian interference there was already becoming evident; and declaring the economic dependence of Australia and other Pacific and Southeast Asian countries on the traditional free navigation of the Canal. Reference of the matter to the

Security Council was all very well, but Russia’s veto had to be reckoned with and our ‘vital principles’ should not to be abandoned. In his peroration Menzies declared that the 56 Inter alia, as British troops and British and French air force detachments built up on the island, the Governor of Cyprus formally signed on 1 September an order providing for the presence of ‘visiting military forces’ (Sun-Herald, 2 September 1956).

Troop movements in Britain, especially with tanks painted bright yellow, were spectacular enough to attract much press attention (SMH, 24 August). 57 Hudson, Blind Loyalty, 99.

58 Hudson, 103. The British High Commissioner, Sir Stephen Holmes, was also supplied with an advance copy, which he at once telegraphed to his superiors in London. Eden

was delighted, and sent Menzies his ‘warmest congratulations on your lucid and forceful exposition of our problem’, PRO, PREM 11/1095. 39 ‘Onlooker’, Sun-Herald, 30 September. On the Menzies—Evatt clash, he added: ‘the lines of policy blurred during the brief interlude of bi-partisan good fellowship, were drawn sharply again. The old antagonists faced one another across the table of the House... and straightway the lightnings crackled’.

SUEZ, 1956 345 central and unforgettable fact in all this unhappy business is that, unless

the Egyptian action is frustrated and the international status of the Canal assured, a score of nations, great and small, will have put their fortunes into pawn. We are indeed at one of the crossroads of modern history.

The users of the Canal must reserve the right to organize ‘a full blooded programme of economic sanctions against Egypt’ or even use force to restore international control of the Canal.

A packed House, with galleries crowded to capacity, heard this speech, punctuated with turbulent exchanges by interjectors and followed by a tense, emotional response from Evatt. Menzies, he said, seemed incapable of using the language of a twentieth century in which the United Nations existed and war had been outlawed. Sanctions were cruel expedients which the Labor party rejected, and talk of force implied a return to gunboat diplomacy. The real answer

to international disagreement was mediation and conciliation. In any case it was false to argue that there had ever been international control of the Canal: it had been run for profit for shareholders by

what was in effect an international cartel. It was not in Egypt's interest to interfere with the Canal’s traffic and therefore its profits.

Egypt had every right to pass a law which concerned her own territory. If all that was genuinely wanted was to keep transit of the Canal open, what was wrong with the Indian suggestion that Egypt

should run it, subject to an advisory committee of the United

Nations? The masterfulness of his immediate handling of the Suez debate

in the federal House of Representatives did much to silence party

critics who complained that Menzies had been away too long. ‘From the moment he stepped off the plane at Mascot’, wrote the ‘Canberra Correspondent’ of the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Mr. Menzies showed that he was the same confident, often autocratic, occasionally charming political leader who left Australia at the end of May’. A brief meeting with members of the Government parties, this reporter averred, ‘was enough to convince members that—as one put it—“the boss is back”’.© As if to underline this, Menzies moved quickly on the key question of who would take the strategic position, soon to be vacant, of the Party’s deputy leader. Sir Eric Harrison, who had served in this capacity since the foundation of

the Party, was about to go to London as Australian High Commissioner. At a Party meeting he called on the day after his Suez exchange with Evatt Menzies saw his preferred candidate, Harold 60 SMH, 29 September 1956.

346 ROBERT MENZIES SSS ae Ss, PSS as SS Sa eh rs: SSS ce

Holding the Coalition together, some time in the 1950s: Menzies and Fadden on the steps of Parliament House, beside the former’s beloved Cadillac

Holt, elected as deputy, at the relatively early age of 48. Holt did not win by a commanding majority, but the decisive fact of the election was the humiliating defeat of the natural contender, Casey, on the first ballot. Some saw Menzies’ speed in bringing on the election at

once (Harrison had still a month to go before taking up his new position) as capitalizing on the triumph within the party of his views on Suez over those of Casey. It was generally thought that this was the end of any hope by Casey or his supporters of ever winning leadership of the party.®! At the same time, Menzies at once

scotched speculation that he might soon leave politics. At a welcome home party he told colleagues that he had ‘no intention of resigning and taking an overseas appointment ... his aim when he retired was to settle down among his friends and go into the club occasionally’.® °! e.g., see ibid., 27 September 1956. And see Hudson, Casey, 275-6. Some days before the

election, also, Menzies told Plimsoll that ‘the Party will not elect a man who is four years older than me and is approaching his seventies’. They would have a younger man to take over from him (Plimsoll to Hudson, 13 January 1987, NLA, MS. 8048/21 / 97. 1am indebted to Graeme Powell for drawing my attention to this document). °* SMH, ibid. Casey was one who had believed that, thanks to the physical strain of the job, ‘R.G.M. will not continue at least beyond the life of the present Parliament’ (Hudson, Casey, 275).

SUEZ, 1956 347 In the ensuing stages of the Suez imbroglio Menzies was an onlooker rather than an actor, but he never wavered in his confidence that Eden’s and the British Government’s course was correct. He was not aware of the plot with the Israelis (the Sevres Agreement) which, at the end of October, led to Israeli invasion of Egypt and the prearranged intervention of Britain and France in an alleged ‘police’ action to separate Egyptian defenders and Israeli attackers. Eden never answered Menzies’ puzzled queries about the logic of what

was happening, but clutched hungrily nevertheless at the propaganda value of any unquestioning support the latter could give. When Menzies cabled that ‘nobody has more clearly understood the difficulties that you have had to deal with since you became Prime Minister ... You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country’, Eden had copies sent to several others, including the Queen. He also responded with a request for even more precise assistance: ‘It would help me greatly if you would authorise me to indicate that the Australian Government fully understands our action, or of course any stronger indication if you feel possible .. .’. He was soon to have it.

On 1 November, after French paratroops had landed in Egypt, British aircraft had bombed Egyptian installations and Egypt had begun sinking ships in the Canal to block it, Menzies made a major

speech in the House of Representatives. He declared that the Australian Government considered the Anglo-French action in attacking Egypt ‘proper’ and that the failure to consult other British countries in advance or wait for a United Nations decision was ‘no fault at all’. The circumstances, he declared, “were those of great urgency. Hostile forces were approaching each other and extensive

combat was imminent’. The British High Commissioner in Canberra sent a copy of the speech to Eden, who cabled: ‘Dear Bob, I cannot tell you how much your message has heartened me’.® The Executive of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party had meantime met and unanimously adopted a series of resolutions condemning Britain’s use of force, and declaring that the Labor Party would ‘oppose any attempt by the Menzies Government to involve Australia in the Suez war’. When Evatt replied to Menzies’ speech in the House, Menzies frequently interjected and, in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘the enmity between the two leaders at once

flared into a bitter exchange’. When Evatt said that the United Nations should deal with the crisis, Menzies interjected with ‘what do you mean by “deal with” ’ and Evatt, white-faced, leaned across 63 For the more detailed story from which this summary is taken, see Martin, ‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis’, 176-81.

348 ROBERT MENZIES the table and snapped back: ‘Do you want to cross-examine me?’ Menzies smiled and rubbed his hands, and, gesturing wildly, Evatt shouted that he had plenty of questions to ask Menzies.*4 The truth was that any pointed questions Evatt might have asked

could almost certainly have not been satisfactorily answered by Menzies, even had he wished to do so. Now, and in the confusing days ahead, the Australian authorities lacked really precise information about British actions and intentions.® Suez was already being heatedly discussed in the Security Council when British and French paratroops were dropped outside Port Said and British invaders arrived by sea. The United Nations ordered that hostilities should cease, that the British and French must withdraw and that an international ‘police force’ take over. The crisis—hardly fortuitously

—coincided with one of the most notorious post-war displays of Soviet oppression when, on 4 November, Russian troops swept into

Hungary and put down a revolutionary government under Imre Nagy, who had declared Hungarian neutrality in the Cold War and appealed to the United Nations for support. The Western powers’ failure to respond was in many eyes a measure of embarrassment at

the simultaneous aggression by France and Britain in Egypt. All Australian politicians expressed horror at the events in Hungary: but Menzies especially berated the United Nations for at once denouncing the Egyptian invasion and taking no action in Hungary.

Evatt and the Labor Opposition, he vehemently argued, by supporting United Nations action on Egypt, was in effect siding with Russia. With equally tricky logic he bitterly attacked a decision to exclude British and French troops from the United Nations police force then being formed for the Suez Canal area. ‘For people to be criticising Britain and France’, he told the Federal Council of the Liberal Party, ‘to be joining in the carping sneers and snarls at a time

when Russia was on the march, when Communism was showing

itself once more in its vilest colours, seemed ... the essence of lunacy’.% 64 SMH, 2 November 1956. The CRO was informed on 1 November of the official Labor position, as set out in a public statement by Evatt (Tory to CRO, PRO, DO 35/6336.)

6 For an authoritative account of the complex events of this period and the misty Australian perception of them see Hudson, Blind Loyalty, esp. 103-28. But in an attack on the British Government at the end of the first week in November Evatt came very close to stating the truth which no one dared face. ‘It was clear’, he said, ‘that deep penetration of Egypt by Israel and the decision of the UK and France to act with their

forces against Egypt were associated’—though he quickly backed off from the extreme interpretation: ‘I am not saying it was prearranged’ (Speech reported in esa) 58) UK High Commission, Canberra, to CRO, 9 November 1956, PRO, DO 35/ 66 SMH, 13 November 1956. A hostile editorial that day berated Menzies for ‘making the United Nations the football of Australian politics’.

SUEZ, 1956 349 The final embarrassment came later in the month, after Britain and France had long since observed a cease-fire. Both refused to withdraw their troops until the United Nations police force was on the ground in Egypt, and after what Casey (who was there) called ‘a sour and unpleasant debate’, the United Nations General Assembly

passed a resolution censuring Britain and France and demanding that they immediately pull all their forces out of Egypt.°” The voting was 65 to 5. Canada and South Africa abstained. Those who voted against were Britain, France, Israel, New Zealand and Australia. From England, Menzies’ friend and fellow Savage Club member, A. P. Herbert, regaled him with what he saw as an appropriate piece ot doggerel: Expect no gratitude from any man, From India, say, or Pakistan: Under the wing of Nasser and the Russ I hope they prosper as they did with us, Though Allah knows why they suppose a pal The man who stole, and stoppered, their Canal. Forget, forgive: but then a mighty hand To two who did not doubt the Motherland! In all the turbulence, the fools, the frenzies, One rock of sanity was Robert Menzies. As usual, Australia was there— New Zealand too—God bless the faithful pair!°®

On 3 December Selwyn Lloyd told the Commons that Cabinet had decided to withdraw all British forces from Egypt. Events had run their course and there was little that even Menzies could say. On

4 December Casey issued a statement, which Menzies endorsed, describing the British decision to withdraw as ‘wise’. The Aus-

tralian Cabinet met on 5 December and afterwards Menzies issued a

declaration reasserting the importance of the British and French action in stopping the spread of hostilities in the Middle East. But, beyond saying such things, he said, ‘it is now more useful to contemplate the future than to continue a fruitless argument about the past’. In wiring the text of Menzies’ statement from Canberra to the CRO the British High Commissioner added:

We are told that although unhappy about step we are taking he [Menzies] recognices its inevitability .. . and places blame not repeat not

in any way on United Kingdom [but] squarely on United States ... | 67 Millar (ed.), Australian Foreign Minister, 256 (25 November). 68 A. P. Herbert to Menzies, NLA, MS. 4936/1/15/131.

350 ROBERT MENZIES understand that in Cabinet today Casey reported that Indians in New York had accused Australia of backing United Kingdom out of sentimental and family loyalty. Cabinet strongly repudiated this and deliberately reaffirmed, for our information, that their support had been based on full agreement with what we had done.*

As it happened, Menzies’ mock-rueful references in Washington to the “battered affairs’ he had to face on his return to Australia tended to be either exaggerated or to reflect fears that he was soon able to

dispel or postpone. On the most important, the state of the economy, there was initially something of an air of ambiguity. Was the ‘little budget’ which Menzies had presided over before his departure working? His critics seized gleefully on a statement in the annual Tariff Board Report, issued only a few days after he arrived home, that the ‘measures designed to be anti-inflationary have yet to produce results’.’”? But in a careful and sophisticated analysis a

month later the respected economist Peter Karmel decided that ‘there is little doubt that demand has been damped down’. Noting, moreover, that no change in policy was evident when (in Menzies’

absence) the 1956-57 budget was brought down in August, he concluded that the Government and its advisers felt that stability was being achieved.’”! In November Menzies claimed at the annual meeting of the Liberal Party’s Federal Council that ‘a remarkable

stability in the cost of living had followed the Government's economic measures’.”* And by February 1957 Holt felt able to write, as part of a long internal Liberal memo on ‘the political situation’: A continuance of good seasons, a substantial rise in the price of wool

and the working out, largely to plan, of our general economic programme, have resulted in a rather more stable and satisfactory state of the economy than even the most sanguine of us could have forecast.”

On a lighter note, the year closed for Melbourne with the buzz of

successfully staging the Olympic Games. In the events of these weeks, both as Prime Minister and as Melbourne’s senior citizen, Menzies took the full public ceremonial role he so enjoyed, and experienced on the side his usual pleasure as a well-informed spectator. He had played little part in the sometimes tempestuous

691222. Fee Commissioner, Canberra, to CRO, 5 December 1956, PRO, DO 35/6336/ 0 “More Realism from the Tariff Board’, SMH, 20 September 1956. ’1 ‘Inflation or Recession?—Cross Currents in the Economy’, SMH, 30 October 1956. 72 SMH, 13 November 1956. 73H. E. Holt, ‘The Political Situation’, 4 February 1957, AA, M2576/1, Item 38.

SUEZ, 1956 351 events of the years leading up to the Games, but in 1956 was President of the Australian Olympic Federation.”4 As such he spoke at

the opening of the congress of the International Olympic Committee in the Melbourne Town Hall on 19 November, welcoming ‘all

our visitors of all nations’, met and entertained the Duke of Edinburgh, who came out to open the Games, and was the chief speaker at the banquet given by the Australian Olympic Federation to 500 euests at Menzies Hotel. The Games lasted from 22 November to 8 December, and the Menzies seem to have missed few of the highlights. With Governor-General Slim they visited the Olympic village at Heidelberg to inspect it and to congratulate Betty Cuthbert, the Australian ‘Golden Girl’ sprinter who won three gold medals. In the course of a rousing welcome Menzies declared he should be neutral as President of the Olympic Federation, but in fact he found

himself applauding Australian winners ‘in quite a scandalous manner’. Afterwards, to the glee of press photographers, he gave Betty and two of her friends, who had been delayed by his visit, a lift to the main stadium in his official car. And on more than one occasion, alert reporters noticed him filming events with his own movie camera, though to do so was not strictly legal.

4 Wrangling over the stadium site (Carlton or the Melbourne Cricket ground?) and other delays almost cost Melbourne the Games (see Harry Gordon, Australia and the Olympic Games, St Lucia, 1994, 195-201. On this and a variety of important sociological issues Graeme Davison has characteristically wise remarks in ‘The 1956 Olympic Games and the Re-presentation of Melbourne’, Australian Historical Studies, 109, October 1997, 64-76). In 1953 Menzies refused to give the Olympic Organising Committee (under the chairmanship of Wilfrid Kent Hughes) a Commonwealth ‘blank cheque’ for development of the Carlton site and for a time barred the use of federal

funds for the construction of the Olympic village. (He said he had no intention of allowing the Victorian Labor Government to use the Olympics as an excuse for prizing extra housing money out of the federal Treasury.) But in the end the Common-

wealth provided the State with a loan of £4 500000 to begin construction of the Olympic village (Age, 27 January, 3 February, 1953; J. Kieran and A. Daley, The Story of the Olympic Games, 776BC to 1968 [Philadelphia and New York, 1969], 270).

Electoral ‘Tri h ARLY IN January 1957 Menzies obeyed his medical advisers and took a holiday, the first since his New Zealand trip in 1954. He went to Launceston to spend a few weeks with his friends the Rolphs, at ‘Como’, on the Tamar River. An enterprising press photo-

grapher snapped him sitting with Rolph in a boat, fishing: ‘my mind’, Menzies told the reporter, ‘is a blank—I am sleeping the

fa 2

Menzies in his favourite hiding place and ‘fishing’ venue—Gordon Rolph’s ‘Como’ on the Tamar River in Tasmania: Rolph usually baited the hooks and Menzies did most of the talking. 352

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 353

sleep of the just’.! He had been suffering since the previous Septem-

ber with increasingly widespread neurodermatitis, which a skin specialist was unable to cure. But, Menzies later told a doctor in London, a fortnight of the simple life in Tasmania caused [the ailment] to melt away nearly completely’.2 He went back to Melbourne for the Australia Day weekend and thence to Canberra, to prepare for a series of Cabinet meetings before the parliamentary session began. Menzies’ conviction of the correctness of Eden’s position on Suez was in the first months of 1957 the source of a particularly upsetting

obsession. Nasser, as he saw it, had ‘got away with’ the coup. He corresponded sympathetically with Eden, received effusive thanks for all his support, and had greetings from anti-Nasser hawks like R. A. Butler and—even more important—Harold Macmillan.° There

were other consolations, like letters from English friends and a declaration from the RSL approving his position.*+ Perhaps most cheering of all was the message that came from his American hero, Judge Felix Frankfurter, who admitted to disagreeing with United States policy on Suez. Frankfurter had read a talk which Menzies had given to Melbourne University students (sent, no doubt by the speaker himself!) which was extremely caustic about Eisenhower. ‘Thank you Bob’, he wrote, “for a whiff of bracing fresh air. But don’t tell on me to the FBI’? But all that Menzies had been through had taken its toll. Dixon’s

diary records a conversation with Menzies’ colleague, Philip McBride, who said he had never seen Menzies ‘down so long about anything as Suez’. The Prime Minister’s depression, moreover, was ageravated by news of a movement in Melbourne to support Casey if he challenged for the party leadership.® Shortly after Dixon noted

McBride’s concern Menzies himself wrote to thank a Canadian friend for a supportive Suez letter and observed that the situation was ‘still very unpleasant’.’ In public appearances he took every ' SMH, 8 January 1957.

2 Cedric Shaw to Clive Fitts, 13 August 1957, Melbourne University Archives. In a graceful letter to Lady Rolph (‘Da’) Menzies subsequently thanked her for a perfect holiday: ‘This was, as ever, due to your immense kindness aided, of course by the unerring skill with which Gordon selected the places where the fish would be biting), 11 February 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/27/218. 3 Eden to Menzies, 28 February 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/2/4; RAB to Menzies, 24 January 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/5/42; Macmillan to Menzies, 25 March 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/

4 Fi Wright to Menzies, 25 January 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/34/279. 5 Frankfurter to Menzies, 4 April 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/12/104. 6 Dixon Diary, 21 January 1957. 7 Menzies to Duncan, 6 February 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/2/75/330.

354 ROBERT MENZIES opportunity to present his pro-English case on Suez. When persuaded in 1957 to choose talks he had given for a volume entitled Speech is of Time he nominated almost half (seven out of thirteen) on

the Suez issue.®

Depression in the aftermath of Suez marked the beginning of a half-year in which Menzies suffered, through illness, great discomfort, relieved in the end only by quite unexpected surgery when in London in July for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. The worst of the suffering was brought on by a brief goodwill trip he and Dame Pattie took to Asia during the Easter parliamentary break. As we have seen, the Suez crisis had prevented Menzies calling at Japan, as he had originally planned, on his way home from the 1956 Prime Ministers’ Conference. But early in 1957 Casey and External

Affairs officers were reporting a strong Japanese wish to see the cancelled trip take place and urging Menzies to fit it in. It was not simply a matter of importance that it should be ceremonially shown,

as a Times editorial later put it grandiosely, ‘that Australia now wishes to let bygones be bygones and co-operate in building up a strong and self-reliant Japan, ...a partner in guarding the peace of the Pacific’.? Delicate trade negotiations which had been going on since 1953, chiefly between the bureaucrats of the two countries, were about to bear fruit. Nothing could be more appropriate than a goodwill visit by the Australian Prime Minister just before the final clinching and announcement of a trade agreement that was expected

to be a landmark for the future of both countries. And then, as a final inspiration, Menzies was to visit New Guinea and be there on 25 April, for Anzac Day.

With his wife and a small party of officials and attendants!° Menzies arrived in Tokyo on 11 April and spent six days in Japan. He was introduced to a plenary session of the Diet, lunched with the Emperor and had conversations with political leaders, of whom

the most important was the Prime Minister, Nobusuke Kishi. Menzies kept discussions on a general level, declaring his inability to comment on the work of specialists in such matters as the trade

negotiations. His natural skill in such generalized international encounters lay in the creation of a productive informal atmosphere, and it is evident that that skill worked as well in Asia as in Europe. A long confidential report of the visit sent by the Australian ambassador, Sir Alan Watt, to his superiors in Canberra makes the point. 8 A.W. Martin, Speech is of Time, 3. ? The Times, 24 April 1957.

10 Sir Allen Brown, James Plimsoll, Hugh Dash and Hazel Craig.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 355

At Menzies’ and his officers’ first meeting with Kishi and appropriate officials at the Foreign Office, Kishi read in Japanese a speech lasting over half an hour from a script which each Japanese official

present had in front of him. For the Australians, none of whom spoke Japanese, this was an uncomfortable experience, especially since parts of the speech dealt with controversial matters, like Japanese pearling in Australian waters. Watt observed that the translator, a Mr Nara, was not very skilled and used words which gave an unfortunate ‘impression of directness and over-frankness bordering sometimes on the rude’. But then Menzies replied and made a brilliant recovery from a somewhat oppressive situation. He spoke slowly and clearly, firmly and persuasively, introducing in due course a joke or two... By the time Mr. Menzies finished speaking ... [he] had won the respect of at least some of the Japanese present by speaking on the whole range of subjects without any notes ... The friendly atmosphere engendered during the latter part of the official talks never to my knowledge changed during the rest of the visit. In my view, personal links have been forged between Mr. Kishi and Mr. Menzies which only a visit by one or other to Japan or Australia could have achieved."

A three-day visit followed to Thailand, where Menzies spoke about Australia’s SEATO ties, was given a ceremonial state banquet,

and received permission to photograph sacred buildings at the temple of the Emerald Buddha. He read the lesson at a special

Anzac service at the small Christ’s Church, which was crowded for the occasion with members of Bangkok’s Australian community. Then on to Manila, where in an address to the Philippine Congress

Menzies asserted Australia’s friendship, again through SEATO.

After a brief visit to Biak, in Dutch New Guinea, the Menzies flew into Port Moresby on an RAAF plane, arriving on 24 April. They were accompanied by Paul Hasluck, Minister for Territories, and Sir George Holland, federal president of the RSL. It was an important occasion. Menzies was the first Australian Prime Minister to visit New Guinea since the end of the war. ‘It is

fitting that on Anzac Day he should be on the ground where his countrymen fought and died in Australia’s defence’, declared the West Australian on 25 April. As it was only 12 years since war’s end,

the great majority of those who saw and heard him—whether old 'l Watt to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Canberra, 23 April 1957, AA 480/ 2/10/3. Watt also thought Menzies showed notable self-control when he and Dame

Pattie were constantly surrounded and often rudely pushed by hordes of Japanese press and T'V photographers!

356 ROBERT MENZIES Territorians, civil servants (of whom many were ex-servicemen who

had fought in the area) or indigenous New Guineans—must have known at first hand the sufferings which Japanese invasion had brought. !4

On the first evening the visitors were given a public reception at Ela Beach, with what contemporaries called ‘a native sing sing’. As

a Sydney Morning Herald reporter enthusiastically put it, ‘tall, slender gaily-clad Mekeos, stocky, big-boned Sepics, near-pigmy Goilalas, and wild Chimbus whirled through their tribal dances for the Prime Minister’.!3 Early next morning Menzies walked in the tropical gardens of the Bomana war cemetery, thirteen miles from

Port Moresby, where almost 4000 Australian servicemen were buried. He photographed the graves of two men posthumously awarded the VC, and laid a wreath on the Cross of Sacrifice, a memorial unveiled in the cemetery in 1953 by the Governor-General, Sir William Slim. Later that morning, again at Ela Beach, Menzies took

the salute at the Anzac Day march past watched by most of Port Moresby’s population of 16 000. They had turned out to honour the dead, and to see the parade of ‘veterans, green-clad native troops of

the Pacific Islands Regiment’, and the navy-uniformed native police.!4

That was the high point of the visit, but much still lay ahead. In the next couple of days Menzies was flown to Rabaul and later to Lae, to meet local dignitaries, inspect schools and a hospital, and

visit another major war cemetery. He had to address various audiences and cope with pressmen, not all of whom he satisfied. The Port Moresby South Pacific Post, for example, complained— under the headline ‘Menzies Says No, No, No on Major Issues’—at his refusal to commit his Government to a generous capital works programme or to a grant of unrestricted liberty to native people to

travel to the Commonwealth." An angry correspondent to the Pacific Islands Monthly bemoaned the fact that Menzies had been given ‘the old well-known VIP treatment and a completely wrong impression of what the ordinary Territorian has to put up with in the normal course of duty’.!¢ The visit, nevertheless, had to be considered a success. It was something of a coup to make a trip to this '? Contrast, on a later prime ministerial visit, Paul Keating’s performance in 1992. Here was the representative of another generation, who could only present an imagined, much romanticized, version of what had happened in 1942. 13 SMH, 26 April 1957.

'S1 May 1957. ,

4 Age, 26 April 1957. For a notably sensitive evocation of place and atmosphere see Peter Ryan’s ‘Reflections at Bomana’, Quadrant, June 1997, 87-8.

16 May 1957.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 357

part of the world, so full of wartime associations, coincide with Anzac Day ceremonies. And Menzies, despite occasional criticisms

in the local press, had learnt a lot on this, his first trip to the Territory. When he got back to Canberra he told journalists that though he ‘sweated gallons in Papua and New Guinea’, he was ‘tremendously impressed with what was going on there’.!” Hasluck

recorded later that ‘from about 1958 or 1959, I think, Menzies, following his visit to the Territory in 1957, began to ... appreciate more fully both the intricacies and the value of doing the right thing in Papua and New Guinea’.!®

But for this experience, and whatever goodwill the trip had earned Australia, the price was high. When he got home, Menzies collapsed, was diagnosed as having an infection on the chest!’ and confined to his bed. After a fortnight there, when allowed up for a few hours each day, he wrote to tell his old friend and colleague Eric Harrison, now Australian High Commissioner in London, about his

condition. The trouble had manifested itself in ‘high temperatures

and violent headaches and moist spots on the chest and other strange aches and maladies’ but was, for a man of 62, the result ‘really [of] a form of insanity’: Though already very tired, I decided to put in the whole of the Parliamentary Easter break of 18 days in catching up my previously cancelled visits to Japan, Bangkok, Manila and New Guinea. The programme was extremely intense and the strain of a goodwill mission to a recently and thoroughly detested enemy country is much greater than the onlooker

observes. By the time we arrived in New Guinea, I was just about flat out. The tropical heat had been building up; there was practically no leisure time

allowed on the programmes and the last three days in New Guinea finished me off... I should add, for your information, that my final act of lunacy, after the roughest flight from New Guinea (or anywhere else) that I have ever experienced on the Sunday, I flew back to Sydney on the Monday to honour a promise made long before to the Australian Institute of Management. My luck was out. They had all the lights in the

world for television purposes. I am tremendously allergic to these lights. Finding me in an already weakened condition they administered the ‘knock-out’ to me. My eyes burned and throbbed and my frontal sinuses were in a high state of inflammation for at least the next 8 or

9 days.

17 Age, 30 April 1957.

18 P. Hasluck, A Time For Building, 376. (1am indebted to Professor Hank Nelson for this reference.) 19 SMH, 6 May 1957. He went down, Dr Cedric Shaw wrote later, ‘as though pole-axed’. At the same time, his skin trouble was back. 20 Menzies to Harrison, 14 May 1957, NLA, 4936/1/14/119.

358 ROBERT MENZIES He did not exaggerate. Writing at about the same time to Harrison, Harold Holt expressed great concern about Menzies’ health: he was ‘very weak and fatigued’, and had lost fourteen pounds in fourteen days.?! It was not long, however, before Menzies’

peculiar symptoms were traced to a deeper source than the goodwill trip. In July he went to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, and while there sought an overhaul from ‘Toby’ Shaw, the medico friend who showed “a willingness at all times to look at me’.2? On 15 July he wrote to tell Dame Pattie that he

was about to go into hospital to have an operation to remove his tonsils.

This is the result of about a complete week of overhauling by Shaw, Myles Formby, an X-ray expert, a pathologist and a surgeon. I have never had such a complete and exhaustive set of examinations in my life. In the result they have all felt that some of my innards, such as the gall bladder and the pancreas, are being injuriously affected by germs which have a common character with those secreted by my tonsils.

Why could the operation not wait? Ordinary rationality, he wrote, suggested that he should stick to his plans to come home at the end of the conference, and have his tonsils removed in Australia. But he would be coming back to busy Cabinet discussions, particularly on the impending budget, and the danger would be that the operation would be put off for months. ‘I have therefore decided, happily with

your approval, to make my pause at this end so that when I get home I will be immediately fit for duty.” He would cut down his planned visit to the United States on the way back and be home during the first week of August.*? The operation duly took place. Jim McGregor, then in London, fussed by bringing every day to the

hospital fresh ice-cream and jellied soup—the foods he believed sufferers most needed after tonsillectomy—until in exasperation the matron told him that a patient’s diet had to be a hospital matter.*# Not to be outdone, McGregor told the convalescent Menzies that Shaw thought that for at least a year he should stick to Mosel and Saar wines, and that accordingly he (McGregor) had arranged for his

agent in Germany to send out to Australia an appropriate number of cases of both.2° More seriously, Shaw prescribed a dietary and 21 Holt to Harrison, 9 May 1957, Holt Papers, AA, M2608/1/16. (I am indebted to Ian Hancock for this reference.) 22 Menzies to Pixie Shaw, 20 January 1957 with apologies for not having written to thank her husband for his attention during his previous visits to London. °3 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 15 July 1957, MEP. 24 Menzies to Lionel Lindsay, 21 August 1957, La Trobe Library, MS. 9104/1652. 25 McGregor to Menzies, 1 August 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/21/179.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 359

pharmaceutical regimen for the next twelve months, and in a whimsical report late in September Menzies duly recorded that all

was going well. He was half a stone lighter than when he came home and he felt better than he had felt for some years. About every fortnight the stress of circumstances (I have hardly come up for air since I resumed work) induces in me a somewhat peevish temper which as a rule exhausts itself on my long-suffering staff without getting me into serious trouble outside. By the end of a very heavy day-and-night week’s work, Iam not a fraction as tired as I have been during the last two years. I am sure that Brother Formby will be

delighted to know that the removal of my tonsils has had such a splendid effect and that I am carrying out your subsequent orders in a docile fashion.

He was even sure that ‘the abstention from spirits, though bitterhard on a wintry day in Canberra, is... paying dividends’.*6 Though serious for Menzies, the operation was seen by others as a subject for good-humoured banter. One friend, Tom Argyle, jokingly reported to the Prime Minister that his wife, Yvonne, “wonders how so great a man can have so childish a complaint!’*’ But the faithful

Hubert Opperman assured Menzies that “even if you return physically minus your tonsils your prestige is unimpaired’.*° The latter point seemed indeed for the moment to be more than wishful thinking. Menzies finally arrived in Sydney on 6 August and his

homecoming was greeted on all sides with pleasure. Even the Sydney Morning Herald declared that he came at an opportune time: he was much needed to give Cabinet an authoritative direction. The

most urgent matter, it contended, was the budget; and the gravest

was defence.”?

The British High Commissioner in Canberra, Lord Carrington, while not doubting that Menzies would indeed be prepared to give ‘authoritative direction’, was inclined to regard this trait with only qualified admiration. Several weeks after the Prime Minister’s return Carrington, judging the Government to be about mid-way

through its current term, thought this a convenient moment to assess its present standing, and accordingly wrote a long report for

26 Menzies to Shaw, 23 September 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/28/226. On 2 October Harrison wrote that ‘as you must have returned full of virtue and tomato juice there is nothing beyond your capacity. When are you going on to Palato?’, NLA, MS. 4936/1/ 27 Argyle to Menzies, 16 July 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/2/10. 28 Opperman to Menzies, 24 July 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/24/196. 29 SMH, ‘Mr Menzies Returns at Opportune Time’, 7 August 1957.

360 ROBERT MENZIES his superiors in London.*° He considered that ‘real political courage’

had been shown in economic matters since the unpopular ‘Little Budget’ of March 1956, that the Government had handled problems

of industrial relations well, and that its achievement in enlarging overseas markets through trade agreements with the United Kingdom and Japan was notable. Menzies’ Government ‘thus have a good record on the main issues’ but ‘have found nothing to strike the imagination of the Australian public and ...a general appearance of unexciting competence may fail to attract votes when it comes to a general election’. But: In public relations over small things the Government has not always had a happy touch. To a large extent this is because the Government is far too much a one-man show. Mr. Menzies is by any standards out-

standing; he is certainly quite out of the ordinary run of Australian politicians. He has a real grasp of the major issues, and courage and ability to deal with them. Australians are justifiably proud of the role he plays in international, and particularly Commonwealth, affairs .. . But it is important to remember that the high reputation which Mr. Menzies so rightly enjoys overseas is not matched by his reputation in Australia... There is undoubtedly a general feeling in Australia—and Mr. Menzies does not take sufficient pains to counteract it—that he is not as closely in touch as he should be with the bread and butter issues at home which affect most nearly the interests and concerns of the average Australian.

Moreover his relations with his Cabinet colleagues and his party supporters are not ideal. Mr. Menzies dominates his Cabinet and any decisions which might have political effects are only taken after he has approved them ... His relations are unsatisfactory with his own back benchers who resent what they regard as his cavalier treatment of them.

He has seldom met them during the last year, and there is a growing feeling among them that they are not consulted as they should be and that they are given little scope for active and effective work in the service of the Government. The magic spell with which in the past Mr. Menzies could bind them to him is no longer so powerful.

The fact remained, however, that Menzies’ position as leader ‘is unchallenged and unchallengable’. But Carrington added that Menzies

had ‘more to thank his colleagues for than he himself would perhaps readily acknowledge’. Fadden, for example, was intensely loyal and in addition had ‘conspicuously the popular touch which

Mr. Menzies often lacks’. Holt gave the impression of ‘quiet competence’. McEwen, a ‘more colourful character’, most recently

in the limelight over the United Kingdom/Australia ... and the 39 Carrington to Home, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 20 August 1957, PRO, DO 35/8066.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 361

Australian/Japanese Trade Agreements’, was a man, clearly, with ‘an important political future’. Carrington had taken up his post only in November 1956, and it is doubtful whether he had yet developed even the beginnings of that intimacy which he came to enjoy with the Prime Minister and which would in time allow him to make more accurate judgements

about such matters as Menzies’ role in Cabinet or his relations, generally, with his colleagues. But his report of Menzies’ reputation

and demeanour at this point is supported by much evidence. No doubt illness made Menzies rather more inclined to that old impatience which had always tended to put him at odds with the press

and convey a sometimes unfortunate air of superiority. He was already holding few press conferences. The Sydney Morning Herald,

admittedly for the most part ill-disposed to him, caught at his manner of conducting one of them earlier in 1957, when lordly statements he made about the then chronic housing shortage caused much ill feeling: As usual, it was not what he said which provoked an outburst of fury, so much as the way he said it. Even his most reasonable statements were steeped in that peculiar mixture of complacency and intellectual arrogance which is the Prime Minister’s worst fault. Any criticism was put down to ‘clamour’ or ‘grizzling’. Other people’s ideas were ‘quaint’ or ‘ignorant’. It was a tragedy that ‘these elementary things were not understood’.?!

Fadden brought down the budget on 5 September. There was no evidence of any input by Menzies; in fact budget discussions must have been at an advanced stage when he returned. But he would

have had no quarrel with what was finally decided. The mini budget of 1956, said Fadden, had worked well. Some tax concessions were made across the board, though they were not large enough to satisfy everybody.** On the question of defence, however,

Menzies was soon at the forefront of controversy, bringing a new spate of bitter Sydney Morning Herald attacks on his style and policy.

In the budget the Government had retained, without cuts, the defence allocation required for a reform programme which Menzies had announced back in April. That involved a new stress on materiel rather than men: the call-up was to be reduced, the air force was to

be strengthened with the latest fighters and guided missiles, and 31.9 March 1957.

32 In an editorial entitled “Taxes That Have Come to Stay’ the Age (5 September 1957)

pointed out that few of the expedients justified as emergency measures fifteen months before had been lifted.

362 ROBERT MENZIES army equipment would be steadily standardized with that used by the United States. Whether significant change had been made by the time Menzies returned from England in August is not clear. But as a

result of investigations in the United States by the Minister for Defence, McBride, Cabinet decided late in July not to purchase the Lockheed 104 supersonic fighter, which had been the star item in earlier discussions about rearming the RAAF. As Menzies pointed

out, this was a rational enough decision: the fighter was horrendously expensive and required complex ground installations

that made it unsuitable for Australian conditions. The Government’s opponents criticized the decision as symbolizing half-heartedness

in defence planning. This criticism, however, was as nothing compared to a storm which broke out in September when a retired Master General of Ordnance, Major-General Legge, publicly stated that a decision of the Government several years before to build an ammunition filling factory at St Mary’s in New South Wales had

been taken against the advice of the service chiefs. It had also involved a waste of public funds to the tune of £10 million, which could have been saved had a wartime factory been reactivated for the purpose. Menzies at once reacted violently, denying the charge and even going to the length of producing confidential documents to show

that the chiefs had approved the Government’s action. He also asserted that tenancy agreements contracted when Chifley closed down wartime munitions factories made their restoration to govern-

ment purposes either impossible or extremely costly. But he admitted that, while this problem was being considered, there had been a two-year delay before deciding to build the new factory. As

was to be expected, Menzies’ critics, and especially the Sydney Morning Herald, denounced his defensiveness and lauded Legge who, however, rather wilted in the face of the Prime Minister’s attack. Menzies bitterly assailed the Sydney Morning Herald in Parliament and the latter produced a series of biting articles arguing

that nothing substantial had been done over the years that had elapsed since Menzies made his dramatic call in 1951 for defence preparations due to the threat of war in three years. An expected Labor attack in the Representatives proved weak but in the Senate the Labor leader, Nicholas McKenna, almost secured a Royal Commission inquiry into the affair. The Government countered by setting

up a special committee under the chairmanship of the wartime hero, General Sir Leslie Morshead, to examine the whole machinery

of defence and to recommend any organizational changes that seemed necessary. Thus Menzies did not come through unscathed, though Legge’s allegations were countered fairly successfully. At

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 363

the same time the old hostility between Menzies and the Sydney Morning Herald was reactivated, in what was soon to prove for him a dangerous form. The other major issue which came to a head in the latter part of 1957 was banking. Always—once in power—relaxed on the banking

issues Menzies, as we have seen, was nevertheless constantly pressed by some of his backbenchers to carry ‘reform’ forward. Though masterful in his delaying tactics, he finally agreed to a series of conferences between the private banks, the Commonwealth Bank and the Treasury to explore the question, unresolved since 1949, of the relationship between the Commonwealth Bank, as a central bank, and the private banks. In a sense Menzies was more

the initiator than a significant participant in the long discussions that followed. H. C. Coombs, the Governor of the Commonwealth Bank and Roland Wilson, the head of Treasury (both of whom, in different ways and for different reasons, were not in favour of drastic change) and the Treasurer, Fadden (who, as Country Party leader, was not anxious to see the power of the Commonwealth Bank, friend of the man on the land, seriously abated) were more important. The outcome of these talks, followed as they were by intensive and detailed Cabinet discussions, was a comprehensive package of 14 bills introduced into the Representatives by Fadden, late in October. Ten of the bills were simply machinery measures, but three would effect basic changes, not all of them welcome to Coombs, Wilson and Fadden. A Reserve Bank Bill separated central banking from other functions and renamed the central bank; a Commonwealth Banks Bill set up three banks—the Trading Bank, the Savings Bank and the Development Bank, all of them to be controlled by the Common-

wealth Banking Corporation; a Banking Bill altered the existing arrangements whereby the Commonwealth Bank controlled credit issues by the private banks. In debates in the House of Representatives some thought that, while the bills brought about the longdesired separation of functions, they in some respects strengthened the power of the Commonwealth Bank. On the other side, Labor took the view that the legislation represented a ‘sinister sellout’ to private interests of the People’s Bank, which had been neutralized

during the Great Depression and restored in the great days of 33 C. B. Schedvin, In Reserve, 281, puts Menzies’ general position, in a nutshell: “As Menzies had no particular interest in banking reform as such and was not beholden to any banker, there was every reason to proceed cautiously, defer decision and await development’. Schedvin’s careful study of the background to the attempted legislation of 1957-58 is the warrant for the few summary remarks made here.

364 ROBERT MENZIES Chifley. So, on both sides, the past weighed heavily on the present. When the bills reached the Senate, tradition briefly reasserted itself

and the three Anti-Communist Labor members voted with the

Labor Party to reject them. Thus equally divided, the Senate in effect

rejected the legislation, and it fell to the ground. The same thing happened when the bills were brought up again in the first half of 1958. Menzies might then have requested a double dissolution. But he chose not to, contenting himself with the observation that ‘the Australian electors will have a golden opportunity when next they vote to cast a Senate vote which will prevent the views of the lower House from being frustrated’. Warwick Fairfax, who visited Can-

berra in December 1957 and talked to a number of politicians (though not Menzies, ‘whose hatred of the “Herald”’, he found, ‘was as intense as it well could be’) concluded that the idea of a double dissolution had little support among Liberals. While agreeing with the Government’s lack of enthusiasm few wanted to see the banking legislation dropped: it seemed ‘to be assumed that it will be taken through sooner or later, even if after an election’.*4 In January 1958 his old colleague and Australia’s representative in London, Eric Harrison, wrote to Menzies that ‘the boys tell me that the pleasant interludes in the Anteroom are now a thing of the past’: What a pity. How I enjoyed your reminiscing when you were comfortably settled with a cigar and whisky and soda at your elbow. This is one of the pleasant things I like to look back on. It was a lovely association and one I shall ever cherish.’°

It was easy in this nostalgic mood to be somewhat misinformed. Maybe the illnesses and other vagaries of 1957 had reduced the time

the master could spend with his men in the ante-room. But it was also the case that over time those favoured for such ‘pleasant interludes’ could subtly change. There is no evidence to support the claim that the ‘interludes’ themselves had in fact become ‘a thing of the past’. They were, and remained, an essential element in the behind-the-scenes flavour of all the Menzies years in power. There were many who, like Harrison, highly valued these relaxed

talks over a drink in the Cabinet ante-room. Gordon Freeth, for example, a ‘forty-niner’ who entered the Ministry in 1958, always 34 Michael Dunn, ‘Summer of 57. Fairfax on Menzies’, Bowyang, no. 7, March 1982, 50. Memorandum addressed to Colin Bingham, acting editor of SMH. (Dunn provides no explanation of where this document comes from, but other notes appear to attest to its genuineness. ) 35 E. J. Harrison to Menzies, 7 January 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/120.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 365

remembered them as ‘absolutely fascinating—a unique blend of reminiscences and political wisdom [which] taught all of us a great deal’.56 On the other hand, some critics thought of such occasions as evidence of garrulous irresponsibility. In Fairfax’s memorandum to

Bingham (written only a week or so before Harrison’s letter to Menzies) he alleged that both Casey and McEwen had confidentially told him that while it was often difficult to make appointments with Menzies to discuss serious matters, he ‘spent hours gossiping to friends or to people he happened to like’%”? Prim observers like Sir Walter Crocker, who in other respects had a very high regard for Menzies, did not like, but understood, ‘the talkative-

ness which developed with the years. Telling anecdotes became

more and more a means, as that behaviour or reflex did with

Abraham Lincoln, to unwind tension’.“* Among the cognoscenti it was not uncommon to lampoon, in a kindly way, Menzies’ reminiscences and accompanying banter. Thus in 1956 Brendan Bracken wrote of Menzies at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London: Almost all the happenings of previous conferences were repeated. Bob’s

jokes, hallowed by antiquity, received the same delighted applause, mainly because the Asiatics didn’t understand them, Huggins is stone deaf, Strijom doesn’t understand “Orstrylian’ and St Laurent is wholly preoccupied by political troubles in his own country.*”

The memories of Sir William Heseltine, who was Menzies’ private secretary from 1955 to 1959, add another dimension to the ‘winding down’ picture. In Heseltine’s experience, Menzies’ custom was to expect some who served him as employees to be available, if parlia-

mentary colleagues were not around, for an almost ritual act of relaxation at the end of a trying day in parliament or the office. Sometimes this happened late in the evening and in Heseltine’s day it primarily involved him and Menzies’ most celebrated press secretary, Hughie Dash. Either, or both, were expected to be there to be summoned for a whisky and chat before the Prime Minister went home.*° Dash, a particularly colourful character, had a notable sense

of humour and a great fund of stories, many with a bluish tinge. Menzies, who himself never swore or told risqué jokes, was greatly attached to and entertained by Dash. Indeed, an often unrecognized 36 Gordon Freeth, NLA Oral History Collection, TRC 400-89. 37 Memorandum to Bingham, ibid. 38 Personal letter to the author, 11 July 1994. 3° Bracken to W. S. Robinson, 6 July 1956, MUA. 40 Interviews, 24 November 1986, 12 February 1987.

366 ROBERT MENZIES element in Menzies was his tinge of liking for what some describe

as larrikinism and others have called down-to-earth Australian-

ism.4! Two ministers who were particular favourites, Athol Townley and Shane Paltridge, fall somewhat into this category. Menzies’ natural good-fellowship, attested to in the pleasure he drew from the hearty simplicities of the Savage and West Brighton Clubs and the informal friendship he and his family gave to many newcomers to the small Canberra community of the 1950s,47 was clearly as important as the imperative of ‘unwinding’ in explaining his gregarious habits in his official rooms in Parliament. Nor are the few surly charges, then and since, of laziness readily supportable.

All who sat in Cabinet with Menzies vouch for his remarkable

mastery of the issues at hand,*? and he constantly displayed skill in preparing, for innumerable parliamentary performances, his commanding ‘brief’ for subjects within and outside his areas of personal expertise. His papers make it clear that as administrator and fielder of a vast correspondence he was more than competent. His intellectual superiority for the post of Prime Minister is not in doubt. It may be, however, that there is an additional dimension to all this. Menzies’ home life has generally been accepted as he—some-

times fiercely—wanted it to be: a private and happy matter not open to discussion by the outside world. Publicly there was never any question about the role of Dame Pattie, to use Heseltine’s words, as Menzies’ ‘secret weapon’. In election campaigns she was usually

there, appearing—often until 1955 with daughter Heather—at his side on platforms. She was more comfortable and effective than he in informal canvassing, at yarning with farmers, ordinary workers, Aborigines. And in his many trips abroad, she was often a companion whose simple dignity was frequently remarked upon. There are also intimations, however, that Dame Pattie, far from being merely a dutiful Prime Minister’s wife, had a firm and somewhat astringent mind of her own. When he first became Menzies’ secretary Heseltine was told by his predecessor that he would enjoy the job, provided he never forgot one cardinal principle. If Dame Pattie phoned he must drop everything else and do her bidding; if there was a message for the boss it must be conveyed at once. The implication was that, away from the office, his wife assumed a

41 e.g. The late Ian Fitchett, on larrikinism (17 June 1986); down-to-earth Australianism, Lord de LIsle (18 February 1987). Interviews.

42The many witnesses who could be quoted on this include Slim, Carrington, Hamilton, Battle. 43 See, e.g., the important discussion of this matter by David Lee, ‘Cabinet’, in Prasser, Nethercote and Warhurst, The Menzies Era, 123-36.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 367

position of dominance over the Prime Minister. Outward signs of this, like Heseltine’s testimony, are rare but there are internal family memories which point strongly to such being the case. The tensions which this dominance promoted could, at least in part, be attributed to Dame Pattie’s feeling intellectually inferior to her husband. This could account also for her persistent belief that the original Menzies family (which in her mind came to be represented by Bob’s sister Belle) disapproved of her. Her response was to overcompensate: to

assert herself where she believed she knew best. In the circumstances Menzies appears to have spent as much time out of the

Lodge and in his office at Parliament House as was seemly, and that

could not but add to the incentive to have congenial company around himself when not actually working.

Harrison might have been wrong about the trend in ante-room happenings but he was right enough in assuming for himself the old, easy relationship with his leader. Menzies continued to write with uninhibited frankness. The year just beginning, 1958, was election year and it was already clear that major Cabinet changes were in the offing. For a start, Fadden had decided to retire from politics,

although he wished to retain the Treasurership till the election. Privately, Menzies thought this a mistake: a budget would have to be brought down before the election, and it would be a handicap

that the person responsible for it would not have to defend the budget at the hustings. But affection made him receptive to Fadden’s

wishes, and he was anxious to avoid any disagreement with the Country Party as to who should take the Treasury: “I can do without

that kind of argument this year when our relations are in all other respects so harmonious’. Fadden had intimated that he would make it clear to his followers that he wished his successor as leader of the Country Party to be John McEwen, a view which Menzies endorsed while at the same time recognizing that when Jack becomes Deputy Prime Minister I will enter a new phase of life. He has, of course, outstanding ability but I can look forward to a fair number of difficulties because he still retains some of the old Country Party aggressiveness which characterised him when I first knew him Many years ago.

44 In a letter to Harrison late in the previous year, Fadden had said that he was ‘about as

tired and overworked and often as lonely as a drover’s dog’. “You know’, wrote Harrison, ‘the drover’s dog works and walks all day, has got to be half asleep and ever alert at night, is half starved, is lonely when he is in the bush and working, and all the dogs snarl and have a bite at him when he comes into the cities’ (Harrison to Menzies, 2 October 1957, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/119).

368 ROBERT MENZIES Phil McBride was another who would be retiring. A faithful supporter since the 1930s, he had held portfolios in Menzies’ first government and had been Minister for Defence since 1950. A South

Australian grazier, McBride was in his sixties and the Prime Minister considered him now ‘a complete misfit in Defence’. “He doesn’t understand it’, Menzies told Harrison, ‘and therefore has no command over it. He cannot make a speech about it in the House except by reading out in a very monotonous way something that has been prepared in the Department’. This deficiency was underlined by the fact that the Morshead Committee had by now com-

pleted its report and recommended a drastic reorganization of defence arrangements: that the hitherto separated areas of supply and defence production be amalgamated, and that individual service departments be abolished, putting everything under the authority of the Minister for Defence. Cabinet accepted the thrust of the reform and so, wrote Menzies, ‘like Diogenes, I am looking for a man’. Despite ‘our very long and close association’, it was clear

that McBride was not the man. Menzies briefly thought McBride had some qualifications for the job of Australian ambassador in Washington, which Percy Spender had recently vacated, on his election to the International Court of Justice. But McBride’s ‘inability to

express himself with command and lucidity rather grows on him with the years and I found myself unable to put a convincing argument in his favour to the senior colleagues with whom I discussed

the matter’. McBride, disappointed at being passed over, told Menzies that he had had a long run in parliament ‘and would be glad to get back to his own affairs. I have not attempted to persuade him to the contrary’.

Political experience being, as Menzies put it, ‘vital’ for the Washington post, Cabinet decided that it should go to Howard Beale, a member since 1946 and Minister for Supply and Defence production. Menzies himself would have preferred ‘on the merits’ Athol Townley, then Minister for Immigration. But the prevailing opinion was that being a younger man (he was ten years Beale’s junior) Townley had greater potential if for the time being he remained in Australian politics. Of Beale, whose relationship with Menzies had intermittently in the past been somewhat rocky,* the Prime Minister now confidentially wrote that he had ‘improved a great deal in recent years and has been a good active administrator and has had some of the pomposity knocked out of him. I hope it

45 ee Beale’s notable reminiscences of Menzies in chapter 12 of his memoirs, This Inch of 1IT1e.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 369

will not come back’.*6 Beale’s departure was soon to lead to another

important change in the Liberal parliamentary hierarchy. By vacating Parramatta, a blue ribbon Liberal seat, he made way for Sydney’s leading barrister, Sir Garfield Barwick. Menzies himself, a

friend and with an eye clearly on the political future, was chiefly responsible for enticing Barwick to stand for the seat at a by-election

in March.*”

Harrison, meanwhile, rejoiced to hear that Menzies and his family had begun to enjoy Kirribilli House, on the shores of Sydney Harbour, a historic house refurbished, as Menzies put it, ‘as a guest house for Commonwealth VIPs. I will myself occasionally use it if I am in Sydney for a few days because it proves an excellent means

for having groups of Sydney business people to dinner, and so improving my public relations’.48 Harrison pointed out that Kirribilli was his ‘baby’: I well remember how you pooh-poohed the idea when I told you that I intended putting in a VIP suite which could not only be used for visiting VIPs but might well be a lovely spot for you to visit when you came to sydney, rather than staying at that cess of iniquity the Hotel Australia ... Candidly Bob I am over-joyed. The only thing that I had no hand in was the furnishings .. .4”

As it happened, one of the early overseas guests to stay at Kirribilli was Harold Macmillan, the first serving British Prime Minister to visit Australia. He was duly impressed. “We were most fortunate’, he later wrote, in staying at Kirribilli House next to Sydney Harbour—a guest-house maintained by the Commonwealth Government—opposite Admiralty House. Here, apart from the beauty of the view, there was the thrill of

46 The Menzies judgements quoted are from letters to Eric Harrison, especially of 4 February and 21 March 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/120. 47 Garfield Barwick, A Radical Tory, 102-3.

48 Menzies to Harrison, 4 February 1958. He added: ‘Oddly enough, there was no com-

plaint about our substantial expenditure on this house. On the contrary, all the Sydney press welcomed what they regarded as the rescuing of an historic house from destruction’. The federal government had spent £61 608 to redecorate and refurnish Kirribilli House. The first.overseas resident was the Prime Minister of Japan, Mr N. Nishi. Menzies and Dame Pattie began to use it in October 1957 (SMH, 24 Decem-

ber 1958). Kirribilli House had originally been built by Adolphus Feez in 1855. It had a

number of subsequent owners and there was a public outcry in 1920 when one of these planned to subdivide the land on which it stood. W.M. Hughes approved resumption of the property by the Commonwealth to save it (Woman's Day, 22 May 1972).

49 Harrison to Menzies, 22 January 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/120.

370 ROBERT MENZIES seeing the great ships seeming to pass within a few feet of the garden wall. The house (an old one, just done up in excellent Regency style) is very comfortable ... By the kind thoughtfulness of our hosts, Dorothy and I were alone with one or two of our own staff.°?

Successor to the broken Eden, Macmillan visited Australia in January 1958 as part of aCommonwealth tour which, in the aftermath of his

first Prime Ministers’ Conference of June-July 1957, had two objects. One was to reassert British solidarity in the face of the fractures that Suez had brought. The other was to talk to Common-

wealth dignitaries about changing relationships due, on the one hand, to the march of decolonization and, on the other, to Britain’s increasing orientation towards Europe.

As his chief host Menzies naturally spent much time with Macmillan over the two weeks during which the latter toured and spoke in Australia. Carrington, then British High Commissioner in Canberra, later thought on reflection that Menzies ‘did a lot’ for Macmillan, who until then was not very well known publicly. The two, ‘very witty and amusing when they appeared together’ made

the visit “a great success’.°! Before Macmillan’s arrival press observers claimed that there had been no preliminary work by officials on either side, that there was no fixed agenda for dis-

cussions with Menzies and the Cabinet, and that the time set aside for high-level talks was ‘very limited indeed. The talks, therefore, will bear more relation to a fireside chat than to a meeting which is trying to get down to brass tacks’. At the end of the visit, Menzies

and Macmillan held a joint press conference which seemed to confirm this prediction. Both insisted that, in general, they were ‘as one’ on a range of matters, including the defence of Southeast Asia,

the attitudes to be adopted towards Indonesia and her claims, Britons as the most desirable migrants for Australia, the urgency of a Summit meeting with the Soviets and the pursuit of disarmament. Macmillan, declared Menzies, ‘did not come out to engage in close defence discussions. Our talks have been of a much more general kind and the closest discussions we have had have probably been on the economic and financial problems that at present exist’.>4

The most important of these ‘problems’ was undoubtedly that

to which (in his own words) Macmillan ‘devoted much time expounding, privately to Ministers ... and publicly through press conferences and speeches: the objectives we were seeking to secure’ °° Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956-1959 (London, 1971), 405-6. >! Interview with Lord Carrington, London, 10 February 1987. 52 SMH, 8, 28, 31 January 1958.

ee

ae i ee ee ey a 6 eee

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 371

aS ee 8 eee ae oe

0Coo2pel rreeerrrr lh ee en 6 eee s ce ee ek oeeeoo oe ——e)h6lce

Fe eet 0 Beee eeeeee ‘A Lf a

ses SEN Ga ste AS ASE EES Oe RRR OC CEE, i. a5 a so ye as se A “e .. ia : book. : :

OU rr bees) ' # pe pe a ™ “ a. we 2 a ar ak oo ea ’ . Bo ea ae TV WE, , 2... ae et ee: eee pe 0S oe ee OR ee ae © bP Foy ae A. Wes AB SE a er eee en ee 6 ee, | hon, on oe oe Corea 2 REED EMA Oa nha ee oe : oO ; ey Moe Me qe

7 ee Sg I

eS. fee wo ED EID, ee : oy SPSS Sra de

x°e

pee ESE DEEP rkce nex SET epee to OSE NESS Gen 0S ee hp, Sol RE Rea iS Sr a heeds Pe Phy oii ees Bree eee spat PoaFe

°ee

Harold Macmillan and Menzies at a local book show

e e° *e >*e.eeerd e* e e « * * e ° ° Ld *.® * s e *eeea Ad e e t e e s

in current negotiations with the six countries which had in 1957 set up the European Economic Community (EEC). The six had agreed to establish a Common Market, progressively eliminating over twelve years all trade restrictions between themselves, and developing a common commercial policy towards third countries. The first stage

ee°e ee e

of the agreement was due to come into effect at the beginning of 1959. Britain, constrained in part by trade obligations to her Commonwealth and Empire, did not at this stage seek to join the Common Market. Instead, her Government developed the idea of a wide European Free Trade Area (EFTA), which would include the six. Britain's ideas for this free trade area excluded agriculture; for the EEC countries, by contrast, removal of impediments to trade in *.

372 ROBERT MENZIES primary products had been a key incentive for their association. Both for her home producers and Commonwealth providers unre-

eee.®eJ

strained European competition in Britain’s market would be a most unhappy prospect.

In his public statements Macmillan frequently averred that he drew new strength from demonstrations of the affection of ordinary Australians for Britain. Menzies, for his part, revelled in old verities

. e CJ ° J * « «

when, coincident with Macmillan’s visit to Australia, the Queen

a. rr SE FFrr—~—C—C“

— ~~ ae eel my lg Le 4 In the later stages

of his tours Menzies seems to have been more successful, again helped, however, by people in his entourage. Perhaps the most unlikely, but successful, moment of his travels took place during a visit to the Aborigines at Weipa Presbyterian Mission. Here photo-

graphers caught him singing softly to two Aboriginal children cradled on his knee.°° By June, Menzies was confessing to Harrison

that he found these tours, which he planned in all States, ‘very exhausting’.°° W.S. Robinson, who visited Canberra at this time and ‘had a short talk with Bob’, told his son that the Prime Minister ‘looked and is well, and is very confident’.°” Though in his ordinary talks and his speeches at what seemed an

endless round of opening new factories and enterprises Menzies lauded the growth and prosperity which some sections of the economy were enjoying, there were ominous signs in others. Prolonged drought combined with falling world prices for primary goods to

reduce farm incomes. Another balance of payments problem seemed to be in the offing: at the end of the financial year in June Australia’s visible trade surplus had dropped almost £250 million from that of the year before. Robinson, who talked with Evatt as well as Menzies, found him resigned to the view that DLP preferences would again win Government supremacy in the Representatives. Robinson agreed, but he also thought that, if there had been a united Labor opposition, economic circumstances ‘should have made Bob’s present position difficult to hold’.°8

The budget for 1958-59, brought down early in August, prescribed a ‘stay-put’ year, with no tax concessions and few new initiatives: the aim, said Fadden, was simply to ‘maintain growth, while preserving stability of prices and costs’. The Sydney Morning Herald described it as a ‘dismal failure to meet the country’s needs’, and Evatt called it ‘the Budget of a tired and lazy Government, with

little care for the well-being of anything but its own bureaucratic 54 SMH, 14 April 1958.

»° Ibid., 12 June 1958. Bill Heseltine, Menzies’ secretary at the time, always thought of his having persuaded Menzies to allow this picture to be taken as one of his greatest triumphs (Interview, 24 November 1986). °6 He had found, nevertheless, that they ‘proved so valuable when I last did them’ (Menzies to Harrison, 21 March, 7 June 1958). .. Me : Robinson to son, 4 May 1958, MUA, W. S. Robinson Collection, 17/150.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 375

machine’. Sir Garfield Barwick, making his maiden speech in the House of Representatives, depicted it as ‘honest and honourable’, which gave the rising Labor star, E. G. Whitlam, the chance to quip

in a subsequent speech that it was well known in Sydney legal circles that if you had an impossible case ‘the only hope is to brief Barwick’.°? Menzies reported to Harrison that in his broadcasts beforehand he had discouraged any expectation of a spectacular budget, with the result that the press out of Sydney received the Government’s proposals ‘quite well’. The Sydney Morning Herald’s comments ‘were, as usual, ... extravagant and ill-reasoned’, but in his many travels he had encountered ‘no symptoms of new hostilities to the Government’, while the Opposition’s denunciation of the budget had been ‘flat, stale and unprofitable, and there is, Iam happy to say, a general atmosphere of gloom among our divided

and dispirited opponents’. Menzies nominated 22 November as the date for the election, and approached the contest with guarded optimism. Evatt, like the Prime Minister, had been travelling and speaking widely around the country for some months; he formally opened the Labor campaign on 15 October. The centrepiece was a promise of a family package featuring increased child endowment rates and the establishment of marriage loans. There were also to be housing and taxation benefits. These promises, he claimed, would cost the taxpayer nothing extra. The Sydney Morning Herald hailed the policy state-

ment as a ‘formidable challenge’ to the ‘inertia of the Menzies Government in a drifting economic situation’, offering benefits certain to ‘reactivate the economy’.®! Menzies made his appeal squarely the Government’s record. There was no need for new promises: ‘as trustees, we can point to a great estate, in good repair, amazingly developed, sensibly managed, respected and trusted all round the world’.® In making his policy speech Evatt caused a sensation by declaring that, win or lose, he would vacate the ALP leadership after the election if the DLP were prepared to direct their second preferences to his party. His audience stood and cheered him, but the “Split’ had

become too complex to be cured by personal abnegation of this kind, and nothing came out of the dramatic gesture. Subsequently throwing himself into a typically gruelling campaign tour Evatt for

the first time overtaxed his strength, collapsing after five weeks 59 SMH, 6, 15 August 1958.

60 Menzies to Harrison, 16 August 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/120. 61 16 October 1958. 62 Ibid., 17 October.

376 ROBERT MENZIES with bronchial pneumonia. Out of action for twelve days, he won widespread concern: even Menzies sent him an uncharacteristically warm note of sympathy. Evatt subsequently completed a quieter campaign, which stressed the case for economic reform and improved social services, scarcely touching on socialism and avoiding the communist question altogether. Menzies campaigned with his usual gusto, and many of his meetings were, as he benignly told Harrison, ‘crowded and overwhelmingly friendly’. But, as Don

Rawson has written, a series of quiet Menzies meetings came almost to be regarded as an ominous sign. ‘Before long, however, there would be a meeting in one of the capital cities, at which hostile placards, thrown eggs, struggling policemen, howls from the floor

and sneers from the platform would reassure observers that the Prime Minister’s campaign was again proceeding normally.’64 Gallup polls and newspaper commentators predicted a ‘swing’ which would reduce Menzies’ majority, but not unseat him. ‘You must not be disappointed’, he wrote to Harrison, ‘if you find in the result that we have lost five or six tail feathers’.©

The final poll surprised everyone. With 74 seats to 45 in the House of Representatives, the Government won four more seats than in the previous parliament. Its majority was the largest which any government had commanded since federation. Moreover, this was achieved without the aid of DLP preferences.° And, to complete the victory, the Government parties won control of the Senate.

| Carrington, after two years experience in Canberra, had come to

admire Menzies and had won his friendship.®” He noted that in private conversation Menzies could advance no explanation for what had happened. ‘I got the feeling whilst having dinner with Bob’, he reported, 63 ‘Sincerely sorry to hear of your illness, brought on by a tremendously heavy programme. I wish you a speedy recovery, for I know how a leader feels when he is out of action. My wife sends special messages of sympathy to your wife, whose anxieties and added burdens she warmly understands’ (drafted in Menzies’ handwriting), 3 November 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/2/79/361. ‘Jindivik’ (Ian Fitchett) noted cattily

in Nation that Evatt’s illness probably saved Menzies from succumbing to the temptation of making personal attacks on him (8 November 1958).

64 T), W. Rawson, Australia Votes: The 1958 Federal Election (Melbourne, 1961), 97. © 16 November 1958.

66 Rawson, Australia Votes, 223; M. Mackerras, ‘Elections and Party Performance’, in Prasser, Nethercote and Warhurst, The Menzies Era (Sydney, 1995), 61. 6” Carrington went to Canberra as a young man in his thirties. His predecessor, Holmes, had been greatly disliked and the British authorities, anxious that this should not

happen again, took the risk of sending out a much younger and somewhat inex-

perienced man. Menzies was ‘extraordinarily kind’ to Carrington and his wife: ‘quite

avuncular and literally we came to admire and love him’. Carrington thought of

Menzies as a good man, ‘head and shoulders over his contemporaries, great fun to be with: a big man in every way’ (Interview, 10 February 1987).

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 377

that he was somewhat embarrassed by the size of his majority and would have preferred to have had it reduced to the ten to fifteen which he had expected. I said he must be pleased nevertheless with the vote of confidence in his policies (which indeed I think he is and rightly) but he replied that he was too busy working out which members of his Cabinet and Ministry to sack to have much time to rejoice.

The retirement from politics of Fadden, Neil O’Sullivan and McBride meant that the key Treasury, Attorney-General and Defence

portfolios were vacant. Their filling necessarily constituted fundamental change at the heart of the Ministry. McEwen, though Country Party leader, opted to hold on to his already powerful bailiwick of Trade rather than follow in Fadden’s footsteps. Thus the balance of forces which had lasted for nine years was broken, and the Liberal deputy leader, Holt, became Treasurer. Townley received Defence (so he proved to be the man Menzies, Diogeneslike, had been looking for!) and, as expected, Barwick was appointed Attorney-General. He was one of five backbenchers elevated to the Ministry.® Overall, the average age of the Ministry fell a little below that of its predecessor, from 57 to 55. The changes in personnel were

more important, marking something of a culmination of the steady

wearing away of Menzies’ ‘old guard’ Ministry of 1949. This seventh Menzies Ministry included only five survivors from 1949: retirements, deaths, judicial and diplomatic appointments accounted for the others. But as one contemporary remarked: Though the falling away of so many colleagues must remind Mr. Menzies that the years and the strain of office take their toll, he meets the new Parliament at the peak of his political power and prestige ... His Government has been refreshed by the recruitment of younger men, and it includes some able post-1949 Ministers to whose training and advancement he has given much care.”

As a footnote to this account of the 1958 election and its aftermath

a word needs to be added here about Menzies’ unhappy relations with the Sydney Morning Herald before and during the campaign.

For it was a prelude to much more serious disagreement still to come in 1961. Always rocky, Menzies’ rapport with the newspaper

took a downward turn in 1958. The elegant J. D. Pringle, editor between 1952 and 1957, had espoused causes naturally antagonistic

to Menzies’ policies (recognition of Red China and revulsion at 68 Carrington to Earl of Home, 9 December 1958, PRO, PREM 11/3646. 69 The others were Charles Adermann, Alan Hulme, Gordon Freeth and John Gorton. 0 ‘Onlooker’, Sun-Herald, 15 February 1959.

378 ROBERT MENZIES Britain’s Suez performance were prime examples) and tension between Menzies and the management group of the paper— especially Warwick Fairfax, the owner and ‘Rags’ Henderson, the managing director—was longstanding. And, under the influence of

Tom Fitzgerald, financial editor after 1952, the paper was often sharply critical of the Government’s economic policies.”! Pringle resigned late in 1957 and, following established policy, the paper’s

principals chose another journalist from the United Kingdom to take his place. This was Angus Maude, a 44-year-old conservative MP, an Oxford don who was a freelance journalist and had been cowriter of two important sociological studies of aspects of post-war

Britain. Howard Beale, en route to take up his appointment as Ambassador to the United States, met Maude in London in June and wrote confidentially to tell Menzies how impressed he had been. At his request and in confidence, I told him something of the Henderson-

Herald set-up. I also described the vendetta to which you had been subject for years. He said he was grateful for my information on Henderson, but he thought he understood him and could handle him. I said I thought it was a grotesque state of affairs that Australia’s greatest newspaper should carry its personal animosities to the extent to which

the Herald was doing. He said he was determined to end this if he could. I asked him if he would care to meet you, and he said he greatly wished to do so and would wish to win your confidence.

Menzies met Maude when he arrived in Sydney and had an hour’s conversation with him. A few days later the Sydney Morning

Herald carried a leader expressing what Menzies called ‘rather grudging approval’ for a Government committee’s recommendations. He was rather less starry-eyed than Beale. ‘Perhaps’, he wrote sardonically, “we can hope for better things!’ But he was disappointed. The paper remained critical of his Government, unreasonably so, Menzies thought. As the election campaign warmed up,

he complained to friends about the Sydney electorates being ‘poisonously affected’ by the Sydney Morning Herald. This sentiment

reached a climax on 16 November, a week before the poll. On that day the paper told the electors that they had a ‘poor choice’, between

a disunited Opposition and a Government notable only for its ‘tired, dull orthodoxy and lack of initiative’.”’ Menzies was livid. In “1 Por these and other such generalizations which follow I depend, except where otherwise stated, and with apologies for any inadvertent misinterpretations, on Gavin Souter’s superb history of the Sydney Morning Herald, Company of Heralds. 72 Beale to Menzies, 18 June, and Menzies to Beale, 2 July 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/4/27. 7316 November 1958.

FROM PERSONAL DEPRESSION TO ELECTORAL TRIUMPH, 1956-1958 379

a furious burst of letter-writing to trustworthy friends he poured out his bitterness. The fiercest missive went to Anthony Eden, to whom he owed acknowledgement of a gift of a recent volume of the latter’s reminiscences which, as it happened, covered the Suez crisis, to his and Menzies’ credit. ‘I regret to say’, Menzies wrote in part of his letter, that we are now endowed in the Editorial chair of the Sydney Morning Herald, of one Angus Maude, previously no doubt a devoted follower

of yours. The Sydney Morning Herald has always detested me, a detestation which I heartily reciprocate. Since his arrival I fear it has gone from bad to worse. Its leading articles contain in almost equal proportions testiness, pomposity and a sort of bogus intellectuality which I find hard to bear. Unfortunately, they have a very considerable influence among my own supporters. Knowing that they would lose this influence if they came flat out in favour of Evatt, they have gone through a sickly pretence of being a candid friend and have therefore done me a maximum of damage in uncritical and unsophisticated minds. I fear that they will cost me a few New South Wales seats. All this means that from my point of view they have added cowardice to stupidity. The two things added together make a most unpalatable dish.”

When Eden replied, almost a month later, the election was over, and he was able to declare himself “deeply relieved that the Sidney

[sic] Morning Herald was unable to damage you’. He though it ‘probably true that we who have to bear the burden of the day in politics over-estimate the power of the press. Carson was right when he described the attacks on him by a certain section of the press as “the measure which makes my reputation grow”’. At the same time, he indignantly denied that Maude could be ‘classified at any time as a devoted follower of mine. I should doubt his confidence in any personality other than his own. . .’”° Maude resigned

his editorship in May 1961, after disagreement with the Herald management. This proved, however, little comfort for Menzies since the paper, under the interim editorship of Colin Bingham, the

first native-born Australian to hold the position for forty-three years, was to continue with even more virulent a form of criticism.”

74 Menzies to Eden, 16 November 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/2/14. Other letters written on the same day to similar effect include those to James McGregor (4936/1/21/180) and to Eric Harrison (4936/1/14/120). 75 Eden to Menzies, 15 December 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/1/2/14. 76 Souter, A Company of Heralds, 377. Asample of the animosity against Menzies which

Fairfax shared with Bingham has already been noted in his memorandum from Canberra at the end of 1957.

380 ROBERT MENZIES Cabinet-making over, Menzies could relax. He and Dame Pattie flew to Sydney to spend Christmas at Kirribilli. They stayed there until 1 January when they caught a plane to Melbourne to see play in the Second Test of the current battle against the visiting English cricketers.”” They were back in Sydney a fortnight later for the Third Test. Menzies revelled in the close and exciting contest that marked

this match, had tea with the Australians and subsequently hosted a dinner for both teams at Kirribilli House.”® Then it was off for two weeks in his favourite Tasmanian hideaway, as the fishing guest of his old friend Gordon Rolph, at ‘Como’ on the Tamar River.””7 He returned to Canberra on 29 January, in time to celebrate the arrival

of his sixth grandchild, Heather and Peter Henderson’s second daughter. Then he flew to Adelaide for the Fourth Test. Serious work began when, back in Canberra, Menzies chaired the first meeting of his new Cabinet on 5 February.

77 SMH, 24 December 1958. * Tbid., 14 January 1959.

79 On 11 December 1958 Menzies had explained to Rolph that ‘if it suits you, the date will have to be before the end of the Third Test’. He subsequently wrote to ‘Da’ (Lady Rolph), on 14 February, thanking her for a ‘wonderful holiday’. On 12 March Menzies reluctantly turned down an invitation from Rolph for Easter, adding that ‘I feel much better for the Christmas rest at “Como”—mainly as a result of the great comfort and attention provided by Da and yourself’. Only twelve days later he had to send Da a telegram of shock at the news of Gordon’s unexpected death, NLA, MS. 4936/1/ 27/218.

14

Interlude: Canberra; Universities

IeGovernment DECISIVE victory at the 1958 poll put the Coalition in a seemingly impregnable position, marked definitive confirmation of Menzies’ ascendancy over his followers and, equally, conveyed a widespread air of inevitability about his leadership of the nation. For many Australians, he had by now acquired

an avuncular, almost father-figure status. By contrast, he still remained for others a personage thought to symbolize distasteful ideological positions ranging from conservatism, even pseudofascism, to insistence on boring middle-class mores and resistance to avant-garde ideas. Such polarities were the inevitable result of a long and often controversial political career subject to a range of readings largely, if subtly, affected by the notable economic and generational changes of the time. But at a different level Menzies’ little-known consolidation in 1958 of Cabinet and administrative arrangements was of pragmatic importance for government beyond any public argument about what he was taken to stand for ideologi-

cally. And this development indirectly chimed in with another phenomenon which in these years came increasingly to interest Menzies: the development of Canberra as the national capital. As we have seen, in the aftermath of the 1958 election, Menzies

was able, as a result of retirements and through a little careful manipulation, to produce a mildly ‘new look’ Ministry. Its introduction of fresh blood was not exactly revolutionary, but it did go some way to rectify the wretched slackness about which Menzies had in 1954 complained to British High Commissioner Holmes. Some of the most incompetent of the old guard had gone, and we

now know, thanks to the archival work of David Lee, that even before they went Menzies was, behind the scenes, uncompromisingly making explicit what his expectations of Cabinet ministers were. In January 1958, for example,

381

382 ROBERT MENZIES He directed that all ministers should be in direct and continuous contact

with their departments and warned them against administration of departments by remote control. He counselled, furthermore, that ministers obtain and heed departmental advice on official matters. He also directed that [Cabinet] submissions involving matters in which other departments were concerned should be discussed with the relevant minister or department in advance.!

It goes without saying that the new Cabinet would be kept well aware of the importance of these principles.

Menzies’ complaints to Holmes about the inefficiencies of his Ministers were in part complaints about the difficulties forced upon them by the retarded development of Canberra, and the consequent

difficulties of administration and policy-making when Departments and civil servants were in many cases located elsewhere and not in continuous contact with their Ministers. As one of Canberra’s historians, Eric Sparke, has written, ‘in 1954 many of the gibes about Canberra were uncomfortably close to the truth. It was a bush capi-

tal still, a garden without a city ... Canberra, H. B. (Jo) Gullett declared in Parliament, was ‘a place of makeshift buildings which displayed an utter lack of vision on a national scale. It was “like

a great outer suburb, without character, distinction or convenience”’.* Its population of 28 000 people lived in six suburbs strung to the north and south of the Molonglo flood plain. Almost a third of them were public servants of one kind or another, but a third more than this total were in Melbourne where fourteen departments still had their headquarters, compared with eleven in Canberra. Parliament might have moved in 1926-27 from the temporary capital of Australia, Melbourne, to the permanent capital decreed by the Founding Fathers, but Canberra still awaited most of the population the transfer implied. This had a number of causes. One was the stiff resistance of many Commonwealth employees to the idea of uprooting their families from places that had become their homes and moving to the rawness of Canberra. In the Depression years shortages of capital, and then during the wartime emergency lack of labour and materials, inadvertently seconded this resistance. In his history of the home front during the war Paul Hasluck drew attention graphically to the administrative difficulties, given the limited technologies of the day, caused by the dispersal of Common-

wealth administrators between two large cities (Sydney and ! David Lee, ‘Cabinet’, in Prasser, Nethercote and Warhurst, The Menzies Era, 132. 2 Eric Sparke, Canberra, 1954-1980, 1. Generally, except where otherwise stated, what follows is largely based on this excellent book.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 383

Melbourne) 600 miles apart and ‘a national capital which had developed the appearance and outlook of a garden suburb’. He denounced the stupidity of all this: ‘it wasted time and money, fretted men and hampered understanding, delayed decisions and led to conflict and duplication’.? Chifley’s Cabinet in 1948 approved a programme by which 7000 officers would be brought to Canberra

over ten years, but this faded away, chiefly because of continued shortages of skilled labour and materials to build housing. In his report of July 1954 to London, Holmes wrote that he thought

Menzies ‘is now convinced that the concentration of Departments in Canberra cannot be postponed indefinitely and that the sooner it can be effected the better it will be for the country as a whole’.4 By May 1955, as the city’s first Administrative Block neared completion, an interdepartmental committee of senior public servants was at last working, at Cabinet initiative, on recommendations for initial transfers of the Defence Department to Canberra. W. E. Dunk, Chief of the Public Service Board, who had been the main architect of the abortive 1948 scheme, was this committee’s energetic chairman. Progress was, however, slow. Committee members complained of the difficulty of extracting necessary information from the Defence Department, and found Kent Hughes, Minister for the Interior and the most influential administrator in Canberra’s affairs, often unco-

operative.” Then, before the interdepartmental committee could complete its work, a quite public body drew dramatic new attention

to the plight of Canberra. This was a Senate Select Committee, chaired by Liberal member John McCallum, to examine the city’s development. It produced its Report on 29 September 1955.

McCallum, a cultured gentleman with a long career as an educationist, was a pugnacious opponent of what he called contempt for the capital. Under his inspiration, his Committee undertook, through witnesses and documents, a most intensive inquiry into the degree to which the city had met the aspirations behind its conception by the American town-planner and architect Walter Burley Griffin. In a report of 84 pages the Committee concluded that, ‘after forty years of city development, the important planned areas stand

out, not as monumental regions symbolising the character of a national capital, but more as graveyards where departed spirits await a resurrection of national pride’. As a remedy the Report proposed the establishment of a single authority to supervise the 3 Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939-41, 478. * Holmes to Leisching, July 1954, PRO, DO 35/8040. > There is a clutch of letters to Menzies complaining about these and other difficulties in

NLA, MS. 4936/2/63/227.

384 ROBERT MENZIES eventual building of a city as envisaged by Griffin, in the grand manner of a Washington or even a Versailles. Then the Committee went on to picture Canberra ‘as a cultural, educational and tourist

centre, with a national gallery, theatre and museum, a school of drama, conservatorium of music and opera house ... Altogether they produced a Report brimming with recommendations that left nothing to chance’.®

Given his current anxiety to see Canberra a proper administrative

capital, this Report could only please Menzies. In the 1930s, as himself a Melbourne man, he had on the whole thought of Canberra

as a place of exile. Even in the 1940s, when he was leader of the Opposition, Melbourne was in many ways the focus of his life. His family was there, he still practised as a lawyer there, and he went home most weekends. But by the 1950s he and Dame Pattie lived in Canberra, and from about the middle of the decade he became, as he put it himself, an ‘apostle’ for the idea of making the city a real national capital. Family badgering seconded the idealism of propagandists like McCallum. Menzies’ daughter Heather, now married and with a baby, came to Canberra at the beginning of 1956, suffering difficulties ranging from housing problems to poor footpaths when taking her baby out for a walk. ‘I continually complained to Dad’, she later recalled, ‘and I’m sure I had an influence in changing his attitude to the city’.? Menzies’ growing dissatisfaction with Canberra was colourfully expressed in a letter he wrote in April 1956 asking his new Minister for the Interior, Allen Fairhall, to look at a range of things about life in Canberra which displeased him. His hope clearly was that in Fairhall he had a promising junior minister who might get things done. Fairhall was one of the bright backbenchers first elected in 1949. An electrical engineer, he had worked in the Ministry of Munitions,

supervising the production in New South Wales of all radio and radar equipment for the armed forces. Menzies had managed to find him a ministerial place in the reshuffle of January 1956 by dropping the previous holder of the Interior portfolio, ‘Billy’ Kent Hughes. Menzies diplomatically maintained to Kent Hughes—an old but difficult colleague whose association dated back to Victorian politics in the late 1920s—that the reallocation of his portfolio meant

no censure, but was a regrettable forced choice in the game of Cabinet-making.? But Kent Hughes had been lukewarm in his reception of the McCallum Committee’s Report and was notoriously 6 Sparke, Canberra, 46, 48. ? Tbid., 31.

5 Frederick Howard, Kent Hughes: A Biography (South Melbourne, 1972), 182.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 385

maladroit in his handling of the two difficult Departments, Works and the Interior, which were pivotal to the physical development of Canberra. Few doubted that Kent Hughes was in fact being sidelined because of his ineptitude. Menzies’ letter to Fairhall, written on 28 April, was long and cantankerous. It followed several drives around Canberra to observe in more detail the character of the town. This was only a few weeks before Menzies set out for that London Prime Ministers’ Conference which turned out to be for him the prelude to the Suez crisis. ‘I am

not very proud of what has happened to Canberra during my current term of office’, the letter began. ‘It may be useful if, instead

of mumbling to myself about it, | put some of my criticisms on paper.’ Four detailed pages followed, the underlying question always being: what explanation was there for the things that offended? ‘When in the past I have asked about these monstrosities I have always been told it is somebody else’s business. But whose business it is, I have never been able to find out.’ Was some bureaucratic control exercised over the architecture of public and semi-public buildings? Menzies asked acidly. Did that

explain ‘the prevalence of the squat, flat-topped building which needs only a few bales of hay and a goat on the roof to be painfully reminiscent of Suez or Port Said?’ There was, he thought, ‘neither

form nor comeliness’ in new shops in Civic Centre, and who ‘conceived the fantastic idea that in an artificial capital city all buildings ought to look the same and that on a high plateau, where spires and towers and an occasional high building would lend such variety to the landscape, it is essential to be flat, stale and unprofitable?’ On the fine upper slopes of Narrabundah ‘the most villainous half-sized cottages have been built on half-sized allotments; the whole thing resembling nothing more than a somewhat superior chicken farm’. On the other hand, observation on the ground had also convinced

the Prime Minister that it was ‘utter nonsense’ to think that ‘the

original lay-out of Canberra is sacrosanct’. The cost of housing must be ‘grievously added to by the fact that we appear to keep spreading out on the periphery with all the added costs of streets and services

while there are great numbers of allotments ... not built on in otherwise settled areas’. He was clearly thinking nervously about the costs involved in moving to and settling into Canberra large numbers of public servants. Another reason for high costs was the inefficiency with which even simple jobs were done. He instanced having watched how, outside his office, four workmen, a driver and a truck were needed for a whole day to lay a piece of concrete: a task which, ‘in a more civilised age, would have been attended to by one

386 ROBERT MENZIES man in about two hours’. He had seen similar extravagances in the repairing of tarmac on roads. Even the Lodge, a publicly owned house, was not properly maintained, and his wife, who was usually

the one to discover defects, had endless trouble in getting the relevant Departments to deal with them expeditiously. Organization, he concluded, was thoroughly bad and there must be a great waste of time and money. You would help me very greatly if you could find out from the Department of the Interior or the Department of Works who is responsible for the matters to which I have referred, which are, after all, only a sample of the matters which strike the eye of the beholder. Iam greatly relying upon your fresh but experienced mind to get these things straightened out... So far as am concerned, I will turn a very cold eye on proposals for Canberra expenditure until I am satisfied that the business is being attended to in a businesslike and effective way.’

Fairhall acknowledged this letter on 9 May, promised to look in detail at the matters Menzies raised, and ‘indicate the general direc-

tion of my thought in the very near future’.'!° That proved too hopeful; he was unable to provide a reply before the beginning of October, when Menzies was still deeply preoccupied with the fallout of the Suez imbroglio. Fairhall explained the delay by telling Menzies that pursuing ‘the subjects of your complaints’ took him ‘to the very foundations of Canberra’s development’. As a result of his studies he planned to write a paper ‘which I trust will constitute

something of the new approach to this problem which you suggested to me when you installed me in the office’. Meantime he offered interim comments on the ‘special questions’ which Menzies

had raised. These ranged in considerable detail over the topics of architectural standards, housing development and cost, and maintenance work.!! They demonstrate Fairhall as a hard-working minister, anxious to add to the knowledge already collated by the McCallum inquiry, and responsive to the stimulation of Menzies’

interest. From this starting point Fairhall successfully moved in November 1956 for the establishment of a joint Committee of both Houses

of parliament to examine and report on all proposals to vary the existing Canberra plan and any other matters concerning the ACT referred to it by the Minister. This Committee first met in April 1957.

? Menzies to Fairhall, 28 April 1956, NLA, MS. 4936/1/16/139. 10 Fairhall to Menzies, 9 May 1956, ibid. 11 Fairhall to Menzies, 4 October 1956, ibid.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 387

From the beginning it was bipartisan and successive governments automatically re-established it. Senator McCallum was elected its first chairman, holding the position until he retired in 1962. A few days before its initial meeting the Committee gained immediate significance when Menzies announced formally that the Government had decided, once and for all, to move the Defence Depart-

ment to Canberra by 1959. ‘We believe’, he declared, ‘that, for complete efficiency, the headquarters of the Cabinet, of the Prime Minister’s Department, of the Treasury, of the Department of External Affairs and of Defence should all be within immediate reach of each other in the Federal Capital’.!* Together with their families, 1100 public servants would initially be involved. If it was

to take place, this movement would involve for Canberra unprecedented expansion to provide schools, homes and services to meet the needs of the newcomers and the backlog of shortages that those already there suffered. This was the main challenge behind the Government’s bringing down, on 28 August 1957, a National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) Bill, to scrap the old divided responsibility between the Departments of Interior and Works and to concentrate in one

body the responsibility of planning and developing Canberra. In introducing the Bill, Fairhall said that the Government was gladly accepting from the Senate Select Committee its recommendation that a centralized authority was urgently necessary.!3 Passed by the House of Representatives at once, this Bill is to be seen as the ulti-

mate fruit of what Fairhall had recalled in his letter to Menzies

almost a year earlier: ‘the new approach to this problem which you suggested to me when you installed me in office’. It superseded the

paper he had then thought of writing. Unhappy experience and Menzies’ complaints and questions had been a shrewd dig at

aimless administration. When he saw the draft NCDC Bill Menzies insisted on changes, before it went to parliament, to strengthen the independence of the Commission. As he wrote to Fairhall, whose first draft he thought not strong enough: If, as we all agree, there is to be a Commission, it follows that it must be powerful, responsible and competent: not put into conflict with the Departments of Interior and Works: as far as possible (subject to the responsible Minister) autonomous within its budget.

2 Sparke, Canberra, 55. 13 CPD H of R 16: 44.

4 Sparke, Canberra, 66. For a lucid description of the final Bill, see 63-4.

388 ROBERT MENZIES Fairhall served Menzies well as a facilitator who agreed with and speedily became a committed advocate of the quite radical reforms

which the Prime Minister and advisers in his Department saw as necessary to cope with the strains that Canberra’s expansion from the late 1950s onwards would entail. He had an important part in two crucial developments that went hand in hand with the setting up of the NCDC: the engagement of Sir William Holford, a world famous British urban planner, as adviser on Canberra’s development under an amended Burley Griffin rubric, and the appointment of John Overall, the chief architect of the Department of Works in Melbourne, as the first Commissioner. Menzies was a prime mover in both choices, which proved extremely successful. Fairhall played the key role in commissioning Holford and handling the mechanics of the NCDC’s formation. He became a sound abettor of Overall’s administration, insisting—against pressure at times from Treasury and elements in Cabinet—that it control its own budget, and that

Overall should have a free hand in making staff appointments, sometimes even against Menzies’ objections. Fairhall was the last Interior Minister who had to carry all the flak

directed by internal and external critics of Canberra: once the NCDC was in place to take over responsibility for policy, a new target materialized. But for him the relief was short-lived. In remaking his Ministry after the election of 1958 Menzies dropped Fairhall not, it appears, because of dissatisfaction with his performance, but to make way for the eminent Sydney barrister Sir Garfield Barwick, whom he wanted as Attorney-General. To keep the right State balance in the Ministry a New South Welshman had to go, and

Fairhall represented Newcastle. His replacement was Gordon

Freeth, the member for Forrest, in Western Australia. As Freeth took office the first wave of Defence Department transferees were leaving Melbourne. Though he had had nothing to do with the planning for this, he won much local favour by announcing that he was taking a flat and planned to do what few politicians ever did in those days: live in Canberra.

Menzies’ interest, and effectiveness, in the development of the national capital was later for him a source of special pride. So too

was another matter which also first came to a head in the later

1950s: his initiatives to save the ailing Australian universities. Both no doubt helped swell his kudos in a few quarters, but neither could be said at bottom to be politically motivated. The element of disinterested concern for beauty and for excellence as he saw them was no doubt important in motivating the Prime Minister to devote time and thought to matters that were on no party platform.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 389

On the evening of 28 November 1957 Menzies tabled in the House of Representatives the report of an inquiry into the state of

the Australian universities, conducted by a committee headed by Sir Keith Murray. A distinguished scholar and administrator, Murray was Chairman of the British University Grants Committee, and thus at the heart of university management and finance in the United Kingdom. After introductory remarks on his own concep-

tion of the role of universities, Menzies briefly summarized the recommendations of the report, which involved considerable expenditure of federal money, and announced the Commonwealth Government's substantial acceptance of them. “We considered’, he said, ‘that there should be no delay in dealing with the main recommendations, having regard to what the Committee has described as “the need for immediate action in 1958, 1959 and 1960 if the position [of the universities] is not to be catastrophic” ’.15 Next morning one academic, a historian, wrote perhaps the most

feeling of the many letters which were to come to Menzies in the following days. It rehearsed the writer’s commitment to his ‘richly satisfying profession’, and went on: Amongst all those who will be writing grateful letters about your last night’s statement on the universities, I feel I have special and personal reasons for thanking you for making my trade more fruitful and creative than it has ever been in this country. So [join with everybody else in thanking you for this noble revolution which by itself would be enough to get you pages of praise in the history books (and that I am peculiarly able to promise), as one sure and permanent result of the Murray Report.!¢

The writer was not a man given to hyperbole or insincerity. He was Professor Hugh Stretton, then Dean of Arts in the University of Adelaide. Years later, Stretton still saw what had come to fruition in

1957 as having indeed been a revolution. ‘Very stable opinions | have, over 33 years’, he wrote privately in 1990, and in earnest of that he sent his correspondent an extract from a Wurth Lecture he had recently given, “Life After Dawkins’: ... In about twenty years from the onset of the Menzies reforms our universities were transformed, and contributed noticeably to transforming our society. They became respectable members of the international league and substantial contributors to our own economy and culture. We should not forget who contrived that: a Liberal Prime 15 CPD H of R 17: 2694-2702. 16 LH. Stretton to Menzies, 29 November 1957, AA, CRS A463/17, 1957/6541.

390 ROBERT MENZIES Minister decided to revolutionise the universities. He commissioned three excellent teachers, researchers and academic administrators to tell him how to do it. And he did what they advised.”

This, which we might call the ‘heroic’ picture of Menzies and university reform, is the version Menzies himself came to remember.!8 While acceptable in its broad thrust, it does require some modification. For Menzies, as a busy and often harassed Prime Minister, sometimes required cajoling on university matters, on initiatives developed as a result of the thinking and experience of others. What mattered in the long run, however, was that he was a university man of the old school, a graduate devoted to his own alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and by sentiment and tradition a believer in liberal studies and university autonomy. After his own colourful experience as an undergraduate during World War I, Menzies served briefly on the Council of Melbourne

University and in 1933, as Victoria’s Attorney-General, piloted

through the Legislative Assembly a measure authorising the

appointment of the University’s first full-time Vice-Chancellor. The State was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, and its grant to the University, set in 1923 at £45 000, had been reduced to £36 000. Despite repeated assurances from Menzies that the ViceChancellor’s salary would come out of this grant, Labor members

denounced the move as an effort to get more funds for the

University. It was, said George Prendergast, a revered leader of the

ALP, an attempt to spend money ‘on certain classes instead of the masses’, a case of ‘appointing someone of the Government's own class’ to a lucrative position in the University.!? Depression heightened a widespread sentiment in this and other States that Australia’s six universities were elite institutions, whose usefulness lay chiefly in training the relatively limited number of professional people needed in an overall population of a little over six and a half million. Until at least World War II it is a fair generalization that the

universities were small, poor and for the most part treated with indifference by a society hardly renowned for widespread concern about things of the mind.

Melbourne’s first salaried Vice-Chancellor, R.E. Priestley— scientist, Antarctic explorer and seasoned Cambridge administrator —proved a dynamic and high-minded reformer who was shocked

by the conditions he found when he took up his post. He set out '’H. Stretton to A. W. Martin, 9 April 1990. '8 See, e.g., R. G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, 81-91. ' Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 1 August 1933, vol. 191, 565, 638, 642.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 39]

both to reform the University internally and to raise its profile in the community, but in the end resigned in 1938 in despairing protest at the State Government’s refusal to increase the University’s grant.” In a typical address in 1937, “The Place of a University in a Democratic Community’, Priestley made observations whose thrust would find an echo twenty years later in the Murray Report. Speaking of the impending six-hundred-year anniversary of the invention of the printing press, he sadly observed: Yet today, 600 years after printing provided us with books, we still herd our students together in hundreds and dictate notes to them; Melbourne

University still has to put up with a library that can only give seating accommodation at one time to 200 out of over 3000 students. We need a library that shall be a worthy centre of University learning and research. We need to develop .. . informal teaching in groups of three or four. We

need to make a feature of the graduate seminar where student mind sharpens student mind. . . Our job—the job of a University—is not to fill

students’ minds with facts. We need to teach them to think and give them time to think and read; to encourage them to criticise and use their

brains; to show them how to weigh evidence; ... how to handle men and situations as well as things.*!

Priestley’s arrival in Melbourne coincided with Menzies’ first trip, at the age of 41, to England. There he ‘discovered’ Oxford.’ Its ‘spirit’, at least as he sentimentally interpreted it, left Menzies par-

ticularly ripe for the more down-to-earth formulation of the university ideal he would hear from Melbourne’s new Vice-Chancellor.

After Menzies came home, the two talked and corresponded: Menzies quickly came to admire Priestley and saw him as an influence Melbourne badly needed. Invited in 1939 to give the annual commencement speech at Canberra University College, Menzies chose for his subject a real Priestley title: “The Place of the

University in the Modern Community’. His central message was that the university’s fundamental task was to serve “as a liaison between the academician and the good practical man’.*? Later, as Opposition leader in the House of Representatives, he would in 1945 speak warmly of the need to bring university problems ‘to the very forefront of our educational thinking’.** And in 1946, in the debate on the Labor Government’s bill to establish the Australian *0 Geoffrey Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne, 1957), 149-51. *l Australian Quarterly, vol. 9 (1937), 27-8. 22 Martin, Robert Menzies, vol. 1, 158. 23 The Place of the University in the Modern Community (Melbourne, 1939), 22. 24 CPD 184: 4612 ff.

392 ROBERT MENZIES National University, he was eloquent and well informed on the relationship of research to teaching, and on the role of the humanities in fostering the production of civilized graduates.*° His ideas might be conventional and sometimes over-emotional, but he had experienced and was a wholehearted believer in liberal university education.

Under the federal compact educational provision, so far as it involved government, fell into that category of ‘residual powers’

retained by the States. Student fees and endowments provided some university income, but State grants were the principal source of university finance. No federal money of any significance reached the universities until 1943. Then, under its wartime National Secur-

ity regulations the Labor Government established a Universities Commission, whose broad charter was ‘to ensure, in co-operation

with the Directorate of Manpower, that the flow of trained personnel from universities and other approved institutions would be sufficient to meet the needs of Australia during the war and postwar periods’. The Commission’s first task was to devise a scheme of means-tested assistance for university students. Later in 1943 it was

also given the responsibility of supervising a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRIS), to provide government funding for ex-servicemen and women to undertake university courses. The Commission proved so successful that in 1945 an Education Act made it permanent and set up a Commonwealth Office of Education, whose Director would also be ex officio Chairman of the Universities Commission.

Thus wartime needs provided the first precedents for federal action to support universities. Under CRTS the Commonwealth not only paid trainees’ fees and gave them a living allowance but also, through the agency of the Universities Commission, made special erants to cover the extra cost for buildings and equipment notionally caused by the new ex-service students. But the aid earned through

CRIS in fact only went a small way towards meeting problems caused by years of poverty, the stress of wartime deterioration of buildings, shortages of staff and the rising demand for university places. And as CRTS numbers would inevitably taper off, it followed

that the most significant source of federal funds must dry up. ‘Crisis’ became the word most frequently used when those in the know talked about the universities’ prospects.*°

Those most in the know were the university Vice-Chancellors. They were organized in the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Com5 Tbid., 187: 290 ff.

*6 Australian Universities Commission, Report on Australian Universities, 1958-63, 5-6.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 393

mittee (AVCC), which by the beginning of 1949 was pressing for a Commonwealth inquiry into the universities’ immediate and long-

term needs. The then Prime Minister, Chifley, agreed to set up a committee of three to ‘examine all the factors associated with uni-

versity control and management’.2” This committee was duly appointed, but the Government fell before it could begin its work. The AVCC at once urged the new Prime Minister to carry on with his predecessor’s plans. Menzies agreed, accepted as head of the inquiry committee Chifley’s nominee, Professor R. C. Mills, then

Commonwealth Director of Education, and replaced one of the other two with D. B. Copland, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University. Copland was also deputy chairman of the AVCC: he and his chairman, Professor Currie of Western Australia, were the delegates who received Menzies’ approval of the inquiry.

Currie kept confidential notes of this meeting, and these have

survived. Menzies said he wanted a short interim report from Mills within three months. The financial needs were obvious and simple. What he needed was firm advice for necessary action. Since the States had

financial problems which prevented them from funding the universities adequately, the Commonwealth must help them out: ... There were two questions—the immediate needs and later possibly yearly grants. His own view was that the British tradition of autonomy in the universities must be preserved at all costs. Freedom to expend their funds as they saw fit should be at the absolute discretion of the governing bodies... Block grants should be made which would leave at

the universities’ discretion the proportional allocation of moneys to research and teaching. He saw no reason for the Commonwealth asking that governing bodies add Commonwealth nominees to their number just because funds were granted.*®

The Mills committee duly produced an interim report by August 1950. The Government accepted its immediate recommendations but did not press for the inquiry to continue. A kind of ‘band-aid’ scheme of assistance was embodied in a States Grants (Universities) Act of 1951, giving a special grant of a little over £1 000 000 for each of the next three years. Though welcome, these extra funds barely met the universities’ immediate needs and by the beginning of 1952

were in any case being seriously eroded by inflation. In that year

27 AA, CRS A 463/17, 1956/115.

28 ‘Notes of an interview between the Prime Minister and the Chairman and Deputy of the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee’, 21 February 1950, ibid.

394 ROBERT MENZIES two AVCC deputations unsuccessfully asked for a review of the grants and resumption of the larger inquiry. Menzies’ reforming zeal seemed to have faltered and a complex saga began as, on the one hand, university agitation was matched, on the other, by official —especially bureaucratic—foot-dragging.”9

The agitation included such heavyweight propaganda as that of Ian Clunies Ross, head of CSIRO, who in August 1952 delivered the

oration at the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University of Sydney. Clunies Ross spoke on ‘The Responsibility of Science and the University in the Modern World’, and contrived to turn an elegant celebration of the traditional role of the University

into an urgent appeal for help. Clunies Ross wrote to Menzies, pressing ‘the recommendation contained in my oration for the setting up of a Commission of the greatest prestige and authority to

redefine not only the material needs but the true purpose and

function of the universities’.

If Menzies was impressed, he did not show it. At a meeting of Commonwealth and State ministers in August 1953 the States pressed for more assistance for universities. A slightly jocular exchange between the Victorian representative, Galvin, and Menzies seems nicely to sum up Menzies’ current state of mind. Galvin: ‘the

Commonwealth derives a great benefit from the universities, and has assisted them, I do not deny that. Consider what the University of Melbourne has meant to the great Commonwealth. Mr Menzies,

it has given us your good self’. Menzies, drily: ‘The Melbourne University did so... without a Commonwealth grant’.

But the outside agitation did not abate. In March 1954 the

Australian National Research Council (the predecessor of the Aca-

demy of Science) held a high-powered symposium in Canberra, under the chairmanship of Sir Owen Dixon, to discuss the plight of the universities. It unanimously passed a resolution calling for ‘a

thorough investigation of our universities, which are labouring under many handicaps’. The president of the Council, Professor A. P. Elkin, conveyed the resolution to Menzies. Some weeks later

he received the reply: ‘I will be happy to consider the proposal which you have outlined but in view of the complexity of the problem and my heavy commitments in the immediate future, I do

oT examine this story in detail in ‘R.G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’, in F.B. Smith and P. Crichton, Ideas for Histories of Universities in Australia (RSSS, Canberra, 1990), esp. 102-11. What follows is drawn, without detailed acknowledgement of sources, from this paper.

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 395

not see much prospect of my being able to reach finality for some time’. His commitments, as we have seen, were indeed heavy: the royal tour was in progress and an election loomed. And just as that began, the Petrov case broke. Over the next two years there was much discussion behind the scenes in the Commonwealth bureaucracy on the nature of a poss-

ible inquiry, which the mandarins hoped could be kept under control and feared might prove expensive. Allen Brown made extensive inquiries about the operation of the British University Grants Committee (UGC) and was soon, in the words of one of his lieutenants, ‘thinking in terms of trying to get some middle body which will have enough sense to suppress the excesses of the ViceChancellors and yet be practical and sensible enough to have the confidence of the Government’. The other important influence over

this period was that of A. P. Rowe, who succeeded Currie as chairman of the AVCC.

Vice-Chancellor of Adelaide University, Rowe was a reformer largely in the Priestley mode, thought something of a maverick and lacking the Priestley tact. He began to write persistently to Menzies,

urging that, though money was the universities’ prime need, an overall plan for university development in Australia was essential to prevent money being wasted. He therefore urged Menzies to ‘seek advice from the British Treasury on the name of one man who

could be invited from the United Kingdom to examine whether a University Grants Commission on UK lines would work here, and generally to make recommendations to the Commonwealth Government on what should be done’.

A response to Rowe’s pressure came at last on the eve of the critical 1954 election. In no mood to take unusual initiatives,

Menzies wrote: ‘I am anxious not to involve the Commonwealth

Government in the internal affairs of the universities ... The question of co-ordination is, I think, a matter for the universities to work out for themselves’. He said nothing about the idea of getting

an adviser from the United Kingdom to examine the Australian situation. Rowe accordingly began an attempt to devise through the AVCC a five-year plan for future university development. But disagreements occurred, promised papers were not written, and by March 1956 the Committee’s inefficiency as an instrument of planning had become painfully clear. The Vice-Chancellors decided to make another appeal to Menzies to establish a special committee

‘possibly with an overseas chairman and local members, to make

a full enquiry into the future of universities from a national viewpoint’.

396 ROBERT MENZIES The Prime Minister’s situation was by this time wholly different from that of early 1954. He had won two elections, the second of them with a majority that had put him firmly in the saddle. There were economic problems, but he was taking them in his stride. It

was a relaxed time, a time for magnanimity. On 7 March 1956 Menzies joined the Vice-Chancellors at dinner and afterwards talked

over their problems with them. Allen Brown had briefed him on Rowe’s disappointments and on university arrangements in the United Kingdom. To the Vice-Chancellors’ delight Menzies now warmed to the idea of appointing an outside committee, and asked them for suggestions about a chairman. Sir Keith Murray, Chairman of the British UGC, was their first choice.

Menzies lost no time in acting. In London next month for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, and just before the Suez crisis broke, he arranged to see Murray. The meeting took place at Menzies’ hotel, the Savoy, on 5 July. Murray wrote later: ‘I was So impressed by his earnestness and concern that I accepted his

invitation on the spot’. Murray particularly recalled that in their discussion Menzies emphasized three points: that the terms of reference should be widely cast, ‘as he wanted me to have a free hand’; that he wished Murray to keep the State governments in the picture when visiting the universities; that the committee should be

attached to, staffed from and report to the Prime Minister’s

Department. The last point, Murray thought, “was for me the most significant, as it convinced me of his personal interest’. Over the next five months, in Murray’s words, ‘the terms of reference were

drawn up in Canberra and agreed with me ... and the detailed arrangements and procedures were discussed with officials of the Department ... At no point did any problem arise’.*° Thus every-

thing was cut and dried and approved by Murray when on

19 December Menzies signed a letter formally inviting him, ‘as foreshadowed in our discussion in London’, to chair the Committee. The Committee assembled in June 19572! and in less than three

months visited all the Australian universities and took a mass of oral and written evidence. Menzies kept aloof from the inquiry. He

30 From an undated account, in Murray’s handwriting, of his ‘five meetings with the Prime Minister’ (Murray MS.). It was generously sent to me on 26 September 1984 by the late R. W. Baker, a close personal friend of Murray when the latter was Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. 31 As well as the Englishmen Murray and Sir Charles Morris, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, there were three Australians on the committee: Sir Ian Clunies Ross (Chairman of the CSIRO); Sir Alex Reid (Chancellor of the University of Western Australia); J. C. Richards (Chairman of BHP).

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 397

met Murray once half-way through, questioned him, over drinks,

and expressed confidence in his judgement. At the end, when Murray came to Canberra to hand him the Report, Menzies, before looking at it, passed Murray a sheet of paper and asked him to write

down the essentials of the committee’s conclusions. ‘I noted’,

Murray records, ‘four or five of our recommendations on the universities’ immediate financial needs in the coming three years. Though these proposed capital and recurrent grants would [greatly] increase the Commonwealth Government’s responsibilities ... he did not appear unduly perturbed’. Menzies asked Murray to delay release of his Report until November, so that the Government could at the same time announce how it would be implemented. He then made the amazing statement that he thought he could promise to meet in full the essential proposals that I had noted on his piece of paper. I question whether any chairman of any government committee

in any country ever had such an immediate and such a generous response.°*

The Murray Report presented a masterly account of the history,

present conditions, problems and future prospects of the universities; an account which, with its extended discussion of the place of universities in the Australian society of the late 1950s, makes it a sociological document of the first importance. But central

to it was registration of the pressure of numbers and the need for better accommodation and equipment. Between 1945 and 1956

student enrolments had almost doubled, from 16 500 to 31 000, and the committee estimated that they were likely to increase by another 120 per cent from 1957 to 1967. The most immediate political conclusions to which the Report pointed were formulated in a Cabinet

submission which Allen Brown and his colleagues drafted and presented to Menzies on 19 November 1957: ‘it is in your name and

I believe is consistent with your views’. There were two major points: that the Government accepted the committee’s recommendation that a University Grants Committee be set up to advise the States and Commonwealth on university finance and developmental policy; and that, during the lead-time for the establishment of this body, there should be an emergency three-year injection of Commonwealth funds into the system. On the financial side the submission fully accepted the Murray recommendations. For the first time (at least since CRTS days), the Commonwealth would

32 Murray MS.

398 ROBERT MENZIES provide grants for capital expenditure, on a £ for £ matching basis with the States up to just under £8 million. The recurrent grant would be increased by 10 per cent, with an additional sum of over half a million to finance a sharp rise in academic salaries, and an emergency grant, which the States did not have to match, of £4.5 million. All told, these proposals meant that, over the three years 1958-60, the Commonwealth would spend on universities approximately £13.5 million in addition to the estimated £15 million it would otherwise have spent. The Prime Minister’s submission went to Cabinet on 22 Novem-

ber. The Treasurer, Fadden, had reservations about the Murray Report and asked Treasury officials for a commentary on it. They, predictably, disliked the Report, partly for the lavish expenditure it proposed, but chiefly for the danger, as they saw it, of setting up a university grants committee. As one official wrote: “Universities

would be in the unique position that, although State bodies, they would have direct access to a Commonwealth body constituted to deal with their financial requirements. Other State bodies would not be slow to press for the same privilege’. Members of Menzies’ own Department clearly expected that the submission would not have a smooth passage. Brown’s deputy, John Bunting, instructed A. L. Moore, who had been secretary to the Murray Committee, to be available, throughout the meeting, in the Cabinet ante-room. During the debate Menzies sent out a number of questions for Moore to answer and at one stage briefly ordered him into the Cabi-

net room to explain particular points about the Murray Committee’s procedures. According to custom, no record was kept of the Cabinet debate, but in the upshot the Prime Minister’s submission

got through unscathed to form the basis of that parliamentary statement of 28 November which so delighted Professor Stretton.

This fuller story sheds a little more light on the heroic view of Menzies as the saviour of the Australian universities. He was not, as he was prone to imply in his later years, the originator of Common-

wealth support for the universities, nor (again as he was prone to suggest) did he invent the idea of a Murray-type inquiry—indeed for a time he was opposed to it. But as that idea developed, partly as a result of discussions among officials in his own Department and

partly through the pressure of committed academic agitators like Rowe, the way was prepared for him to act when attention to the mounting university crisis became unavoidable and other political preoccupations did not press intolerably. Once Menzies was converted he used all his power in Cabinet and party to push the idea through, to have a good committee appointed and to see that its

INTERLUDE: CANBERRA; UNIVERSITIES 399

recommendations were implemented. Why? He is hardly likely to have imagined that in the Australian electorate of the 1950s there were many votes in a pro-university policy. Perhaps Murray, good man that he was, sensitively gauged something vital in the last encounter he had with Menzies: I shall never forget his parting words. ‘I have been almost thirty years in Australian politics. | have not found them very rewarding, but if I leave the Australian universities in a healthy state it will have all been

worthwhile.’ It was said with such a note of sincerity, and also of emotion that I was convinced once again of his deepseated devotion to the universities’ welfare and to scholarship in general.*9

33 [bid. ,

15

The World Stage 1959-1960

Reeless ELECTION victory theonend of 1958 made urgent for Menzies to at focus domestic matters andit allowed him greater freedom to turn his attention more directly to

the overseas world which had always had such a fascination for him. His burgeoning intimacy with Macmillan and his by now well established position as a senior Commonwealth politician encouraged him to believe, despite the unhappy memory of Suez, that he had an important part to play on the world stage. And as 1959 began there was a new and ominous development in the Cold

War which drew the main focus of his fears back to Europe. Khrushchev triggered another ‘Berlin Crisis’ by demanding the withdrawal of all Allied troops from the city, a demilitarization that must be effected within six months or military traffic would again be cut between West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany. Since this trouble had occurred only days before Menzies’ election

win, he may be forgiven for seeing in Macmillan’s cable of congratulations an important double-entendre: ‘It is grand to feel you are there to help us all’.!

Menzies was extravagantly enthusiastic when in February 1959 Macmillan decided to try to cut through the Cold War impasse by personally visiting Moscow simply to meet the Soviet leaders: the first Western chieftain to think of doing so. ‘Harold’, Menzies cabled, ‘I think you did a great piece of work. Iam old fashioned enough to think that you gave back to Great Britain her proper intellectual and

spiritual leadership in the Western World’.2 Macmillan expressed appreciation for Menzies’ ‘generous message’, explained that he was now going to Washington to try to budge the somewhat stift-

! Macmillan to Menzies, 23 November 1958, PRO, Prem 11/3646. 2 Menzies to Macmillan, 11 March 1959, PRO, PREM 11/2599. 400

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 401 necked United States attitude to high-level discussions on Berlin, nuclear tests and disarmament, and added: ‘I will of course let you know how I get on and may well have to ask for your active help’.? Menzies was enthusiastic about the approach to the Americans. Deeply as he respected these mutual friends, he wrote, ‘I have for a

long time felt that they are not yet ripe for the intellectual and spiritual leadership which many people have assumed they can give. Great Britain still has the major resources in this field’. He had read with distaste of press criticism in the United States of Macmillan for visiting Moscow, and even at home in Australia,

I have a few die-hards around my own Parliament who appear to believe that the iron curtain ought to be reinforced with concrete on both sides! But the more I think about these matters the more I believe that such views are based on the inevitability of permanent hostility which seems to involve the inevitability of war at some time in the future.*

These were significant exchanges. On Menzies’ side they revealed, at least for the time being, a degree of flexibility on the Cold War not

always reflected in his previous public statements. And on both sides that feeling of mutual understanding which began during Macmillan’s late visit to Sydney was steadily growing. Macmillan clearly valued Menzies’ likemindedness and support, while Menzies

was beginning again to see himself at the cutting edge of inter-

national relations. Macmillan had decided at the end of 1958 not to hold a Common-

wealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1959. This removed the routine reason for Menzies to visit London but officers in the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) told Allen Brown, then Australian Deputy High Commissioner in London, that Macmillan was anxious ‘to stimulate such a visit’. Menzies announced that during May-June he would be making a world tour, and Macmillan

intimated that the Australian Prime Minister and Dame Pattie would be the guests of his Government during their stay in the

United Kingdom. Menzies held a press conference on the eve of his departure: ‘I think’, he told reporters, ‘that the Prime Minister of Australia should be in direct personal touch with world leaders at reasonable intervals of time’. The remark brought a snide editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald which, while agreeing with the sentiment, deplored the fact that “London and Washington remain the focal points of Australian interest’, and argued that the ‘national 3 Macmillan to Menzies, 12 March 1959, AA, A6706/1, Item 5, f.32. 4 Menzies to Macmillan, 17 March 1959, PRO, PREM 11/2599.

402 ROBERT MENZIES interest required in preference a programme of visits to Southeast

Asian countries’.°

After travelling to Vancouver in the Orcades Menzies had talks with John Diefenbaker, the Canadian Prime Minister, and told a press conference that he wanted ‘to keep the Iron Curtain a little more flexible and was all in favour of talking to the Soviets’. He went on to Washington for a six-day, semi-official visit, during which John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State and the real maker of United States foreign policy, died of cancer, and the funeral brought many foreign dignitaries to Washington. Menzies was one of the distinguished foreigners whom Eisenhower entertained at luncheon.’ Just before that Menzies made an important speech—which the Washington Post called ‘eloquent and bracing’— to the Press Club. After paying a gracious tribute to Dulles, he moved

on to a plea that democratic leaders be prepared to meet Communist leaders at any time and place, with no preliminary strings attached. He stressed the importance as propaganda of conveying to the uncommitted nations of the world the honesty of the Western intentions. And he wrote privately to McEwen: I saw the President on the morning of the day of the funeral and said something of the same kind to him. He, as you know, has been very reluctant about a Summit meeting, largely I think because he does not feel sufficiently in command of the problems involved to risk himself in

such a setting. However, you will be interested and I think happy to know that when I saw him he was in better physical and mental form than I have observed for some years. He had leaned a great deal on Foster Dulles whom he regarded as, in substance, Prime Minister. Foster’s death had, I think, made him realise quite suddenly that he must stand more on his own feet. This I imagine explained why he was so much more vigorous and forthcoming in his conversations with me.®

The British Ambassador, well aware that Menzies’ speech would be music to Macmillan’s ear, sent a copy to London, together with laudatory cuttings from the American press.? And at home Evatt

ironically expressed pleasure at noting that Menzies had at last

° SMH, 13, 14 March 1959. 6 Ibid., 23 May 1959.

7 Afterwards, as Eisenhower’s secretary coolly wrote: ‘As quickly as was decent, The President left for Burning Tree [a golf course] with George Allen, where he had a wonderful score, I am told’ (Ann Whitman File, Diary Series, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas). 8 Menzies to McEwen, 10 June 1959, NLA, MS. 4936/1/21/177. 925 May 1959, PRO DO 35/10867.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 403 realized the need for summit talks and had made a statement in Washington in favour of what had been ALP policy for years.!9 In June the Menzies went on to the United Kingdom. Though on arrival in London Menzies said he had ‘nothing special’ to discuss with British ministers, he had long talks with Macmillan, attended a

number of Cabinet meetings, and was privy to discussions with Selwyn Lloyd about current talks in Geneva. Lloyd, as Macmillan’s

Foreign Secretary, was British representative at so far fruitless negotiations at Geneva on the Berlin crisis. It was soon announced that Menzies was about to visit Bonn to see the aged West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and Paris to talk with the French President, de Gaulle. His mission was to attempt to persuade both

that whether or not the Geneva talks broke down there was an

urgent need for an open-ended summit conference at which, through

informal discussion, propaganda could be set aside and a start made towards some sort of mutual understanding. Adenauer and

de Gaulle were both known to be suspicious of Britain and to oppose the summit idea.!! The British and Australian press, quoting ‘London diplomatic circles’, depicted Menzies as Macmillan’s emissary, a statesman from an ‘outside’ country not directly concerned in any summit conference with Russia, and therefore more likely to penetrate the hostile attitude of the German and French leaders. But he convinced neither, though de Gaulle intimated that he would be enthusiastic about a summit meeting without Khrushchev! Menzies reported apologetically in some detail to Macmillan, who hastened

to thank him for undertaking the journey: ‘you could not have spoken better’.! On his return to England Menzies spoke at an Australia Club dinner at the Dorchester before 750 guests, who included Churchill, Attlee and Macmillan. The Geneva talks were breaking down, and the guests cheered when Menzies declared:

10 SMH, 1 June 1959.

'! Adenauer attended Dulles’ funeral and at that time talked with Eisenhower. The latter recorded that Adenauer ‘seems to have developed almost a psychopathic fear of what he considers to be “British weakness”. I went over with him some of my conversations with Mr. Macmillan and also described in rough fashion some of the British problems in the world. I told him that Iam certain that in basic conviction and belief, Harold Macmillan and the Conservative Party leadership stand squarely with the rest of us’ (Conversation with Chancellor Adenauer, May 27, 1959; Eisenhower Library Abilene, Ann Whitman File, DDE Diary Series). De Gaulle, who had come to almost

dictatorial power in France in the previous year, shared some of Adenauer’s misgivings about Macmillan and in any case had a fixed determination to reduce as far as possible British influence in continental Europe. 12 Menzies to Macmillan and Macmillan to Menzies, 22 June 1959, PRO Prem 11/3644.

404 ROBERT MENZIES Believe me, talk is perhaps the most important thing in the world. There are misapprehensions in the minds of people today which can only be removed by talk. You can’t have too many conferences about the state of the world.

At this, Macmillan loudly shouted ‘hear, hear!’, and in a subsequent speech he referred to Menzies as “perhaps the greatest figure in our Commonwealth today’. Under Menzies’ guidance, said Macmillan,

Australia’s stature had increased beyond recognition. When in trouble Britain could always look to Australia for loyalty and sympathy.!s Menzies left for home late in June, calling for talks at The Hague, Switzerland, Pakistan, India and Singapore before arriving in Australia on 8 July. The relentless Sydney Morning Herald, in an editorial headed ‘Whistlestop Through Asia’, castigated Menzies for having

spent 28 days in Britain, with side trips to Bonn and Paris and The Hague but only six in Asia on his way home. No doubt it is pleasant to wear the mantle of an antipodean Jan Smuts and make portentous interventions in Great Power politics. But it is not only in Washington or London (still less in Bonn or Paris) that Australia needs to seek friends or that Australia’s influence can most usefully be exerted.!4

In a press conference on the day after his return Menzies criticized

‘one or two people still surviving in Australia who think the problems of Europe and the Western world are irrelevant to Australia’. But the fate of the world depended on the peaceful solution

of a range of tensions; his discussions in 10 countries, he said, encouraged his hope that one way or another there could be continuous dialogue.'’ It was an argument, now repeated endlessly, which to the cynical observer had its naive side. But in Menzies’ case the substance behind it was the rapport he had developed with

Harold Macmillan, whose British brand of diplomacy seemed to him. to strike exactly the right note at this stage of the Cold War. Menzies thought it important both for world peace and the continuing integrity of the British Commonwealth that Macmillan be able to wield the influence that only office could give him. So, just as

Macmillan had rejoiced at Menzies’ Australian election victory in 1958, Menzies was delighted when at the British general election

13 SMH, 24 June 1959.

'4 Tbid., 17 June 1959: comment when Menzies’ itinerary announced. 1S Tbid., 10 July 1959.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 405 late in 1959 Macmillan retained his position with an increased majority. !6

Those who complained about Menzies’ neglect of Asia ignored the fact that in the previous February, before he began his trip to America and Europe, he had promised to pay a State visit to Indonesia later in the year. Not that, in private, he had been stirred by a burning wish to ‘get to know’ his neighbours better. In August 1958, for example, an admirer who had urged that after the election he should take an Asian trip which would “do good in the East and be popular in Australia’ received the frank reply that ‘after my last experience [am not in a hurry to undertake another visit round this

area—I found the heat and discomfort extremely wearing’. But the Indonesian trip had a different purpose and there is no indication that Menzies saw it as other than a necessary duty. Behind it lay the long-vexed question of Sukarno’s determination, from the early 1950s on, to secure sovereignty over Dutch New Guinea, or ‘West Irian’, which he saw as a legitimate part of an independent Indonesia. The attitude of early Menzies Governments was well summed up

in 1955 by Spender, then Ambassador in the United States, and involved in United Nations debates which followed spirited Indonesian attempts to get international support for its claims. Australia wanted Dutch control of the area to continue, for the simple reason that this seemed the best way of meeting the “basic objective’ of keeping West New Guinea in friendly hands. ‘Strategic consider-

ations are fundamental’, wrote Spender. “Dutch New Guinea is essential to our security ... all other considerations (e.g. friendly relations with Indonesia and the rest of Asia), though relevant and however important, are secondary’. Elaboration of this argument followed, and Menzies wrote at the foot of Spender’s despatch: ‘I heartily agree with Spender’s case’.!8 Fears that Indonesia might use force to seize the disputed territory periodically elicited veiled assurances that Australia would not let the Netherlands fight alone.!°

There was, however, an important change in the atmosphere when the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Dr Subandrio, made a visit to Australia early in 1959, to establish contact at the highest level and to discuss particular matters which concerned his and the 16 Menzies even sent Macmillan a long, and slightly cheeky, letter of advice about what

to concentrate on in his election propaganda, and expressing his confidence that ‘when your elections are over, I will be able to send you a happy congratulatory message’, NLA, MS. 4936/1/22/106. 17 Menzies to R. G. Guthrie, 27 August 1958, NLA, MS. 4936/2/80/365. 18 Spender to Prime Minister and Secretary, 8 November 1955, AA, M2576/1, Item 39. 19 See, e.g. ‘A Warning to Dr. Soekarno’, SMH, 2 September 1958.

406 ROBERT MENZIES Australian governments. West New Guinea, predictably, headed the list of these. Subandrio’s initiative also made it clear to the External Affairs Minister, Casey, and to the Cabinet as a whole, that protocol required an appropriate return gesture. Menzies agreed to promise a return visit before the year was out, thus becoming the first Australian Prime Minister to visit his country’s newest, most powerful and, at this stage, most volatile, neighbour. The fruit of Subandrio’s talks in Australia was a new declaration that Indonesia would not seize the disputed territory by force of arms, and a formal Australian promise to accept the outcome of any

agreement negotiated peacefully between the Netherlands and Indonesia. This apparent ‘softening’ of Australian policy caused an immediate outcry, led by the RSL and the DLP. Both stressed the

dangers implicit in the then unstable political situation in Indonesia, especially the strength of the Indonesian Communist Party,

the PKI, and the fear the Sukarno might wish, or be unable to prevent, his country to turn communist. Australian amour propre was not mollified by the attitude of Subandrio and the Indonesian press, both of which depicted the results of the visit as a diplomatic victory for Indonesia. The Labor Opposition, which on this matter

agreed with the DLP, wanted ‘a tripartite agreement between Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia working for the welfare of the natives’, and there was talk of its moving censure on the Government. But in the debate on a parliamentary explanation of Casey’s dealing with Subandrio Menzies came powerfully to his minister’s support, denying a change of policy and for the time being largely defusing the issue.”° Menzies, Dame Pattie and a small party of six, mostly officials, flew into Djarkata on 1 December, to begin a six-day goodwill visit to Indonesia. The Prime Minister had been well briefed by External Affairs on the current Australian position regarding difficult matters like West New Guinea, and on Indonesian sensibilities and protocol

generally. Steps had been taken ahead to stress to the Indonesian authorities that the prime purpose of the visit was not to reach any

formal agreements but to demonstrate good-will at the highest level.2! Menzies began well with a courtesy call on members of the Supreme Advisory Council. Composed of representatives of the

20 Labor’s formulation of the solution is in Evatt’s words. Predictably, the SMH was unimpressed by Menzies’ carefully prepared speech, saying it had only ‘succeeded in making confusion worse confounded’ (25 February 1959). 217. R. McIntyre, Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 2 November 1959 (AA, A 1838/280, 3034/10/11/15, Pt 1), and P. R. Heydon to E. J. Bunting, 26 November 1959 (AA, A1209/54, 59/1071).

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 407 army, religious and intellectual organizations and businessmen, the Council ‘advised’ ministers who ruled the country under Sukarno’s powers of government by decree. ‘I am here primarily as a learner’, Menzies told its members. Australia understood that Indonesia had to solve its own problems of self-government in its own way.

Indonesian officials were impressed that Menzies brought no personal bodyguards, but were determined that no chances would be taken with so important a guest: cars carrying him were always sandwiched between army vehicles packed with soldiers. Menzies conferred with key ministers, toured Central and West Java, and addressed students and faculty at Gadiah Mada university. He had What was described as ‘a long and cordial talk, with Sukarno’, inti-

mating that the Indonesian leader would be welcome to make a visit in 1960, and promising to raise in Cabinet the possibility of training some Indonesian army officers in Australia.22 In perhaps the most insightful summing up of the tour Bruce Grant, the specialist Sydney Morning Herald correspondent on Southeast Asia, thought it went ‘well enough’. But Asia is not Mr Menzies’ field. It is too hot for a start, but it is also too

emotional for a man with ar. ironic and conservative judgement ... Mr Menzies kept the visit in a minor key, stressing that he had come to

learn and not to teach, sitting through performances of Indonesian singing and dancing with an attentive smile, plodding through the heat with rugged good humour. It seemed sometimes that the main object of the exercise was to avoid disaster... Lately Mr Menzies has reflected in his speeches a tolerance of Asian forms which are not democratic in the Western parliamentary sense, and the effort he made on this occasion

was accepted as genuine by the Indonesians and appreciated. It will probably take another generation before Australia produces a leader who can approach some of the new nations of Asia with any certainty of

understanding.”

The visit to Malaya which followed was by contrast more congenial. Menzies and the Malayan prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, were already friends. The latter had paid Australia a visit only a month earlier to open the new Malayan High Commission office in Canberra which, as Menzies took great pleasure in pointing

out, was the first such building to be erected in Canberra by any Asian country. The Tunku’s ‘ease of manner and lightness of touch’ 2 “Prime Minister’s visit to Indonesia, December 1st to 7th’. Department of External Affairs, secret outward cable to a number of missions abroad, 8 December 1959, AA, A1209/23, Item 57/4775, Pt 2. 23 SMH, 14 December 1959.

408 ROBERT MENZIES made him a popular visitor, as did his attendance at the Melbourne Cup, where he actually backed a winner!24 Malaya and Australia

had common interests as Commonwealth countries, and in talks with Menzies the Tunku and his ministers expressed both appreciation of the part Australian troops had played in the fight against Malayan terrorists and the wish that they stay until security was assured. The Menzies inspected some of the results of Australian aid under the Colombo Plan, visited Australian troops in highland jungle country, and generally carried out ‘a continuous heavy programme of sightseeing and visiting, involving constant travel by aircraft and car’.*°

While Menzies was doing his duty in Indonesia and Malaya, the wider hopes he shared with Macmillan seemed to be coming to exciting fruition. Macmillan, Eisenhower and de Gaulle met in Paris

ve” a rr er ee ee ee dt — Se” a i ie Fae Pi. ad ee ee nat as ook aa hs 9 vee ‘i, at a ee ae pe re LP ep TR! | eye oe or be. Singing “Auld Lang Syne’ at a dinner party given by Menzies to the Malaysian Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, at the Merlin Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, in December 1959

24 UK High Commission in Canberra, Report to CRO, 1 December 1959, PRO, DO 35/ 9011.

29 SMH, 12 December 1959.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 409 and at last agreed to try for a summit. They sent an invitation to Khrushchev who, at the end of December, accepted. A date was even agreed on for the meeting: 16 May 1960, in Paris. Thus the new

year began in a spirit of euphoria. Evatt rejoiced that 1959 had closed with “a sincere determination on the part of the Great Powers to discuss their differences in the spirit of conciliation’.2° And on 6 January 1960 Menzies released a new year greeting which he, as Prime Minister, had received from Khrushchev: I am deeply convinced that there is every possibility that the coming year will see a further diminution of international tension, the liquidation of the cold war and the establishment of better mutual understanding and collaboration of States on the basis of the principles of peaceful co-operation.?’

One local event which at this time brought all parties together in mingled sadness and celebration for an outstanding term of office was the farewell to Sir William and Lady Slim. The major event was

a banquet, at which Menzies proposed, and Evatt seconded, the toast to the vice-regal pair. Slim, said Evatt, ‘has done a job of tremendous importance in a difficult period. He will always be remembered as one of the greatest Governors-General of Australia’. In reply, the normally self-contained Sir William spoke with great

emotion about the love he and his wife had developed for the country and its people, then relieved the tension with a well-timed joke. Menzies had presented him with two silver fighting gamecocks as a memento of his period of almost seven years in Australia.

Slim described them as a most appropriate gift, as they had the quality of spirited determination and an aggressive posture. ‘And so, blow me, I will call one Bert and the other Bob’ he added, as the

guests, including Evatt and Menzies themselves, roared with laughter.*®

Later, having embarked on the Arcadia, Slim wrote to Menzies a farewell note marked by more feeling than the politeness merely required by protocol: I shall never forget the good fortune I had in having only one Prime Minister during my term—and such a Prime Minister. I learnt much from your wisdom, strength and tolerance during those talks which I enjoyed more than anything else in Australia, and which I shall now miss beyond words.” 6 Tbid., 1 January 1960. 27 Tbid., 7 January 1960. 48 Tbid., 22 January 1960. 29 Slim to Menzies, 5 February 1960, NLA, MS. 4936/1/28/230.

410 ROBERT MENZIES Five years later, in his farewell speech to Slim’s successor, Lord De L’Isle, Menzies recalled that Slim was sometimes given in public to ‘expressing his mind in certain areas with vigour’ and he, as Prime

Minister, felt it his duty to ask the Governor-General to be more circumspect. When he had steeled himself to do this ‘I was in a muck sweat, because I was frightened of him’. But Slim would usually smile: ‘Yes, there may be a great deal in what you say’, and offer a drink.*° It was an interesting relationship: despite occasional potential tensions, the two men seem to have been much on each other’s wavelength. And the warm informal relationship between the two families made for happy bushwalking and barbecues. Hard on the heels of the Slim farewell came another send-off, this time to R. G. Casey, who had in January been given a life peerage,

and left for England in March to take his seat in the Lords.

Journalists had a field day guessing what was going on, especially

when, after Casey’s resignation, Menzies announced a Cabinet reconstruction in which he himself was taking over the External Affairs portfolio. In a characteristic piece of speculation ‘Jindivik’ (lan Fitchett) wrote that Menzies must have nobbled Macmillan while in London in 1959 to secure Casey’s elevation to the peerage, so that he himself could become External Affairs Minister before the forthcoming summit meeting. Maybe his friend Macmillan would

ask Menzies, now with his status in world affairs enhanced, to accompany him to that meeting?3! Menzies had indeed suggested that Casey would be an ideal candidate for the recently established honour of a life peerage, but only after Casey himself had privately

intimated his wish to leave politics altogether and Menzies had assured him that he could remain Minister for External Affairs as long as he desired.°* All the same, there can be no doubt that Menzies

relished the opportunities that the new portfolio might give, though he nonchalantly spoke of it as a temporary expedient. As he wrote to his wife: ‘For myself, I have made life a little more strenuous by taking on External Affairs, and also by trying to clean up a lot of Cabinet and speaking engagements while the going is good’.*3

30 SMH, 5 May 1965.

31 Nation, 13 February 1960. |

52 Sir James Plimsoll to W. J. Hudson, 13 January 1987, commenting on the latter’s Casey.

Plimsoll was at the time close to both Menzies and Casey, and was told this story by

each of them. Casey in fact had only the vaguest idea at this stage of what a life peerage was (NLA, MS. 8048/21/97. I am indebted to Graeme Powell for drawing my attention to this document.) 33 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 6 April 1960, MFP.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 411 Menzies wrote to Dame Pattie because, late in January 1960 she had left for Europe in the Arcadia, the ship on which the Slims were travelling home. Earlier in the month Hazel Craig, feeling that the

exhaustion of the recent trip to Indonesia and Malaysia had been ageravated “by having four and at most times six, grandchildren with her since Christmas’, worried that the Prime Minister’s wife would not be well enough to embark on the Arcadia.34 That worry, however, reckoned without the well-known doggedness of Dame Pattie. For her, the trip involved critically important things to be done abroad. For one thing, the diplomat husband of her daughter Heather had been posted to Geneva, and Dame Pattie, as Miss Craig

put it, was determined to help them ‘settle in’ (‘knowing Dame Pattie’ she added sardonically, ‘she will have undone all the good of

the rest [on the ship] by taking the children out or acting as a fur- , niture removalist for the Henderson family, but we cannot alter her’). After that, Dame Pattie was going on to Belfast, where she was to launch the new P & O luxury liner, Canberra. She successfully

accomplished both objectives, and much more. (On the Canberra launching, her husband remarked in a later letter: ‘I particularly enjoyed the remark you are reported to have made to Sir William Currie when for a few seconds the ship failed to move. You are said

to have turned to him “with professional ease” and said to him “After all, it is the heaviest ship I have ever launched” ’.>5) Dame Pattie left on her sea voyage ahead of the Hendersons, who were to fly to Geneva. Menzies’ formidable sister, Belle, moved up from Melbourne to stay, and virtually preside, at the Lodge until the Prime Minister himself was due to leave in mid-April. (He planned

to meet Dame Pattie in Rome, and then fly via Geneva to London for a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference.) Menzies and Belle came down from Canberra and entertained the Hendersons at Kirribilli House before seeing them off at Sydney airport, ‘where we

all managed to conceal our emotions as well as possible’. “The Lodge’, he wrote, ‘seems quite different without you but I must say

that Belle has taken to the life like a “duck to water”’. That was

natural enough: Belle had long shown herself a redoubtable organ-

izer and public relations buff during her years as manager of the Melbourne Exhibition Building. Poor Menzies was no doubt at pains to set Dame Pattie’s mind at rest by telling her that all was well in her absence. ‘Belle is really enjoying herself enormously’, he was writing by March.

34 Hazel Craig to W. R. Crocker, 13 January 1960, NLA, MS. 4936/1/9/74. 35 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 25 March 1960, MFP.

412 ROBERT MENZIES Mrs. Woods and Alfreda are very happy, with old Margaret at the top of

her form, so that the household is running very satisfactorily. Meanwhile, Belle already knows half the Diplomatic Corps in the most friendly way, and we are taking an occasional opportunity of having a few people together so as to work off those arrears that have always troubled us so much.

But he was on dangerous ground, remembering the latent tension between Dame Pattie and Belle. Would the former take kindly to the notion that under the latter’s presiding hand, all was going so swimmingly at the Lodge? That the staff were so happy, and that an old entertaining backlog was being remedied, might not be pleasing to her? As if suddenly realizing this, Menzies concluded this letter with an almost effusive backtracking paragraph: I am already beginning to count the weeks, and no doubt I will soon begin to count the days, before I set off to meet you in Rome. Though Belle is very good company and I am getting a great deal of pleasure out of her visit, there is no substitute for you and for my periodical visits to Wilmot Crescent [Heather and Peter’s former home]. I will therefore be in an intolerable state of excitement as the day comes when I will see you all again.*°

The weeks before Menzies left Australia saw events he scarcely

could have anticipated but which were the first harbingers of change in that order of the British Commonwealth world which he

had so long taken for granted. The first, in January 1960, was Macmillan’s six-week tour of Africa (a logical extension of the Commonwealth tour of 1958) in which he visited Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, finishing up in South Africa. There he made his famous

statement: ‘The wind of change is blowing throughout this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it’. That meant that, although

there was not at the moment a clear quarrel between Britain and

South Africa, it had to be recognized that in the real world a profound ‘difference of outlook lies between us’.5” Menzies, who could scarcely be expected to be happy at this statement, made no comment on it. Then less than two months later, the killing by South African police at Sharpeville of 67 protesters against the pass laws,

brought a new focus on the whole question of South Africa’s

36 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 22 January, 4 March 1960, MEP. 37 Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan, i1, 1957-86 (London, 1989), 195-7.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 413 apartheid policy. Almost at once, a bitter debate on the subject developed in the United Nations. And in the Australian parliament the Labor Opposition moved to condemn both apartheid and Menzies for his reactions which ‘will be construed’ as Australian condonation of what had happened. This initiative fell to Arthur Calwell, the new ALP leader who had just replaced Evatt. Evatt had left the House of Representatives, a broken man, to become, at the invitation of that State’s Labor Government, Chief Justice of New

south Wales. After a contest with Eddie Ward, Gough Whitlam became deputy leader. (Before the vote on this position Menzies had written to his wife: ‘Somewhat to my surprise I am told that Eddie

Ward is the favourite. This, I think, is very satisfactory, since the combination of Calwell and Ward leading the Opposition should do no harm to us’.) Menzies took the view that apartheid, separable from the Sharpe-

ville outrage, was a policy which must be allowed to concern the South African government alone. In a skilfully argued speech he

made this point and had the House simply record its regret for ‘the loss of human lives occasioned in the recent events in South Africa’. There was widespread agreement with an article in which Bruce Grant declared that Menzies’ attitude came ‘like a dash of cold water on the emotions of Asians who . .. have been calling for action against the Union Government’. And the Sydney Morning Herald gleefully published a report from Johannesburg that two

Afrikaner-language newspapers had praised Menzies. One, the Transvaaler, carried a cartoon showing a young girl representing South Africa shaking hands with Menzies and saying: ‘Dankie Oom Robert’ (Thank you, Uncle Robert). When a Liberal backbencher, Bury, asked Menzies whether he had studied the text of Macmillan’s

speech on the winds of change and whether the views expressed there were in accord with those of the Australian Government Menzies refused to offer ‘any opinion which impinges on the views of another Prime Minister of the Commonwealth’.28 The then South African High Commissioner in Canberra, Anthony Hamilton, who had become a good friend of Menzies, reported at this time to his

superiors at home that Menzies’ refusal to join in the blanket

condemnation of South Africa

has cost him a great deal in the way of bitter personal attacks from people who normally support him, [and] widespread criticism in the press ... He has had floods of abusive letters, one correspondent charging him with ‘hypocrisy and cowardice’! He found some ironic 38 SMH, 30, 31 March, 1, 5, 6 April 1960.

414 ROBERT MENZIES amusement in this: as a politician he thought it was going a bit far to be called a coward when he would have found it much easier, and politically profitable, to have gone along with the violent opinions.*?

Menzies flew out of Sydney airport on 17 April 1960, telling reporters that the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference was occurring at ‘a historic time’. As Macmillan had anticipated, ‘the South African trouble seemed to keep getting into everything, like King Charles’s head with poor Mr Dick’.*° At the outset an attempt by the Tunku, of Malaya, to have the whole question of racial dis-

crimination in South Africa discussed in plenary session was scotched. Macmillan records that, ‘with the help of Menzies, who carried more weight than any other Prime Minister’, he got agree-

ment that the racial question in South Africa was essentially a matter of internal policy. But since it had repercussions for the Commonwealth as a whole it was also agreed that the matter should be discussed with the South African representative, Eric Louw, ‘upstairs’, by Prime Ministers alone, without any of their advisers present. For a while that cleared the deck, and in the ordinary sessions there were useful discussions on the world situation and other general matters. But the ‘informal’ talks on South Africa

went badly, and though Macmillan found Menzies ‘a tower of strength’, a final breakdown was only averted when, working until

after midnight on the night before the final meeting of the Con-

ference, Macmillan and his immediate advisers worked out a compromise clause on South Africa for the final communiqué. In effect it said nothing,#! but was accepted and, as Macmillan reported to the Queen, ‘does at least keep the Commonwealth for the time being from being broken up’. But he and Menzies could only look forward

with anxiety to the next Conference, which had to meet in the following year.

The strain of this Conference over, Macmillan set off almost at once for the Paris summit. There is no evidence to suggest that it was ever mooted that Menzies should go with him; in any case Menzies had a long-standing commitment which would keep him

39 Quoted by David Tothill, ‘Menzies and the South Africans’, Frank Cain (ed.), Menzies in War and Peace, 31. 40 Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way (London, 1972). The main drift of my account of the conference depends on this source, 170-7. 41 It referred to ‘informal discussions’ in which Louw ‘gave information and answered questions on the Union’s policies, and other Ministers conveyed to him their views on the South African problem. The Ministers emphasised that the Commonwealth itself is a multi-racial association and expressed the need to ensure good relations between all member states and peoples of the Commonwealth’.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 415 in the United Kingdom for some days yet. And as it happened, it

would have been the height of futility if he had gone with

Macmillan. For even before the latter left for Paris the news broke that the Russians had shot down an American U2 spy plane deep inside their territory, and captured the pilot. Krushchev scarified Eisenhower and declared that the Soviets would not now take part

in summit talks for at least six to eight months. Macmillan was shattered. “The Summit—on which I had set high hopes and for which I worked for over two years—has blown up like a volcano! It

is ignominious; it is tragic.’ This disaster was to give a particular

colour to international events later in the year, especially at meetings of the United Nations.

On 16 May, only two days after the collapse of the summit meeting, Menzies delivered the first Smuts Memorial Lecture and received an honorary degree at Cambridge.*? The lecture is an important period piece in the history of relations within the British Commonwealth. Menzies took as his subject “The Changing Commonwealth’. His central theme was the continuing viability of Smuts’ contention that the linchpin of the Commonwealth was the notion that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. Smuts had been shaken by the decision of the Prime Ministers in 1949 to

allow India, though about to become a republic, to remain in the Commonwealth. For him loyalty to the crown was the cement that held the parts together: its removal ‘violated every concept of the Commonwealth’. But the Commonwealth had not disintegrated, and Menzies was at pains to argue that it was a ‘living organism’, whose adaptability would keep it together. While some parts, like his own, would always be constrained by traditional loyalty to the sovereign, others would ‘remain united as equal members of the

Commonwealth of Nations, freely co-operating in the pursuit of peace, liberty and progress’. He strained to give meaning to this somewhat nebulous concept by contrasting meetings of the United Nations, with their large numbers of delegates, often strangers to each other, their formal proceedings and their debates, with

Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conferences. ‘We are not a court. We are brothers in a special international family.’ Informal brotherhood, the readiness to meet and talk in anon-judgemental way, was

42 Herbert Butterfield, to Menzies, 19 January 1960 (NLA, MS. 4936/1/28/231), invited Menzies to give the lecture and receive the degree. For ceremonial robes his approximate height and size in hats was asked for and, in sending these details on 29 April, Hazel Craig added: ‘I don’t know whether all robes for a certain height are made to

the one pattern, but I might add that Mr. Menzies is rather a big man and skimpy robes would hardly fit’.

416 ROBERT MENZIES crucial. “That is why I can sit in a Prime Ministers’ Conference and

feel instantly as much at home as if I were sitting in my own

Cabinet.’

Menzies had written most of his lecture in Canberra, before coming to the just completed Prime Ministers’ Conference. That what had happened at that Conference vitiated much of his oldfashioned argument was no doubt at this stage beyond his understanding, or at least his acceptance. More realistic was The Times’ question, in an otherwise sympathetic editorial about the lecture, about Menzies’ faith in ‘social comity’ as the sound foundation of the Commonwealth’s strength: There may be many who will question whether ministers from Ghana and Ceylon, from the West Indies and Cyprus, feel now, or can learn to

feel in the future, as much at home in Westminster as in their own

cabinets. But here at least, among the few who speak from experience, is a confident optimist.*?

After his return to Australia Menzies continued to feel a strong responsibility to play some constructive role as adviser in South Africa’s relations within the Commonwealth. This feeling had led him to make arrangements to talk privately in London, before the late Conference, with South Africa’s Prime Minister and rigid proponent of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd. The meeting, however, did

not take place because injuries resulting from an assassination attempt on him prevented Verwoerd attending the Conference. But Menzies still hoped that he might soften South African rigidity in the face of at least some of the criticisms of its opponents. So in July 1960 he wrote Verwoerd a long and in many ways remarkable letter

commenting on discussions at the Conference and gently suggesting that the South African Government might reconsider some aspects of its critics’ case. He emphasized, as ever, ‘the principle of

non-interference in the domestic affairs of another [Commonwealth] country’, but praised the readiness of Eric Louw, Verwoerd’s representative, ‘to engage in private talks’.

Menzies was at pains to play down the hostility of the new Commonwealth Prime Ministers. ‘I just want you to know that, in my own opinion, the Tunku* is a very good fellow but, in terms of government, inexperienced and possessed of a certain boyish

43 hoc 17 May 1960; R.G. Menzies, The Changing Commonwealth (Cambridge, 4 Tank Abdul Rahman of Malaya had actually brought instructions from his own parliament to condemn apartheid.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 417 impulsiveness. But I urge you not to think of him as your enemy but only as your critic.’ The others most critical of South Africa were Kwame Nkruma of Ghana and Mohammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan.

Menzies himself was ‘on very good terms with all three of these leaders, who in discussions with Louw recognized the position of the white population in having given South Africa her economic strength and ‘the whole structure of government and administration’ and did not ‘expect for one moment the immediate adoption of policies which would put the position of the white population

at risk. I want you to know that they seemed to me to be entirely fair and quite moderate and indeed quite understanding on these points’.

The matters on which they were more immediately unhappy were the failure to grant even token parliamentary representation to the Cape Coloureds and the Bantu, and to receive diplomatic missions from ‘coloured’ countries. Menzies hinted that he was

sympathetic to the first objection, and came out decisively in support of the second. Ghana and India were certainly right in contending that it was against all Commonwealth precedent for South Africa to refuse to allow them to maintain High Commissions there. All members of the Commonwealth met as equals in London: why

should distinctions be made in representation elsewhere? And consider Australia. She had a very strict immigration policy, yet we have found no difficulty in receiving diplomats from Asian countries or in meeting them socially and otherwise on equal and friendly terms. The Tunku, to take one example, upholds our immieration policy but greatly admires the absence of discrimination in respect to Asians who come to Australia temporarily, either as diplomats or students or traders. This, unhappily, sets up in his mind, when he thinks of South Africa, a somewhat angry contrast.

Verwoerd appears not to have responded to this appeal. Then, on 6 October, the South African Government went ahead with a referendum on whether the country should become a republic. The

proposal was endorsed, in a white-only vote, by a firm but not overwhelming majority. Menzies had written to Verwoerd in the previous month counselling against too swift an application for South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth if the referendum endorsed the republican proposal. ‘Unhappily our South African friends have a poor sense of timing’, he wrote to Macmillan. ‘It was

45 Menzies to Verwoerd, 2 July 1960, NLA, MS. 4936/15/422/11.

418 ROBERT MENZIES profoundly unwise to have the Republic referendum in the middle of a meeting of the General Assembly [of the United Nations] where heated speeches may be made and serious political commitments accepted.’ The matter must be calmly discussed, without outside agitation, at the next Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference.

Meantime Macmillan wrote in alarm to Menzies imagining an awful scenario at that Conference with Malaysia, Ghana, Nigeria,

India, Pakistan and Ceylon ganging up against everyone else— in effect an Asian—African bloc—to expel South Africa from the Commonwealth on racial grounds.* The special meeting of the General Assembly with which Menzies thought it unfortunate for the South African referendum to be coinciding had been called primarily at the instance of Khrushchev. After the breakdown of the Paris summit, the Soviet Premier had withdrawn from, and therefore brought to an end, the Geneva talks on disarmament. At the same time, civil war and chaos accompanying the decolonization of the Belgian Congo brought a crisis which many feared might develop into a new Korea. Khruschev announced that he would personally lead the Soviet delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in the session formally beginning on 20 September 1960, and urged all heads of government to do the same. The stage was thus set for one

of Khruschev’s more bizarre performances before the world audience. Menzies was there and, though taking only a bit-part, found himself involved in side-play which, while bolstering his sense of being involved in international affairs of great moment, was in Australia a cause of often misplaced condemnation, even hilarity, on the part of many of his enemies.

Originally deciding against going to the meeting, Menzies had approved the appointment of Barwick as leader of the Australian delegation. But he changed his mind when Macmillan cabled that

he had decided to go, and that he and Eisenhower hoped that Menzies would do the same: ‘he feels as I do that it would be of great value for someone of your authority and forcefulness to make

a further justification of our policies’.47 Cabinet also pressed

*6 Macmillan to Menzies, 27 August; Menzies to Macmillan, 12 September; Verwoerd to

Menzies, 16 September 1960. All in NLA, MS. 4936/15/422/9. Macmillan wrote asking Verwoerd to postpone the referendum ‘until times in Africa are calmer’. But his letter crossed with one from Verwoerd saying that the referendum had been announced. After this, Macmillan ‘sent a further letter to Menzies asking for his help, for I had a great respect for his wisdom and experience’ (Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 47 Nleowillan to Menzies, 22 September 1960, AA, A6706/1, Item 7.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 419

So : awh, | Pa 5 . E Fe Ps A i ASSEMBLY - : | 7 Lon, Besse a

e\ Op eo eo sy, = Ff.

\ ——r—CC i

ee rrrsrrr—( ee . - .

At the United Nations in October 1960 Menzies and James Plimsoll greet the President of the General Assembly, Frederick Boland of Ireland.

i tJ . . e e J

Menzies to go. He reached New York on the morning of Friday 30 September, “dog tired after in effect two nights in the air’.48 Next

day he lunched with tMacmillan, who had arrived on the previous ° Sunday. Khrushchev’s first speech to the Assembly, already made, 48 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 8 October 1960, MFP. This was a personal letter in which Menzies colourfully recounted for his wife the events of his first week at UN. He also sent two secret cables to his Acting Prime Minister, McEwen, on the same subject, ‘in terms which I could hardly use publicly’, 6, 9 October, AA, A6706/1, Item 71. Except where otherwise stated, the discussion which follows is based on these sources.

420 ROBERT MENZIES was a three-hour diatribe denouncing United States bad faith over disarmament and encompassing a series of extraordinary demands, which included immediate ‘freedom’ for all colonial territories and the removal of the United Nations from New York. Macmillan had spoken on the 29th, in a calm fashion which nevertheless stirred the excitable Khrushchev to discourteous interjections, some of which he emphasized by banging on the desk in front of himself with his shoe. Once when this happened, Macmillan stopped and said in a quiet tone—’Mr. President, perhaps we could have a translation, I could not quite follow’. This for some reason was thought very witty and effective. Naturally the world Press took up this episode, and British phlegm was contrasted with Russian excitability.”

On the day of his arrival, Menzies spent the afternoon at the General Assembly, in time to hear Sukarno announce that Nehru would move a resolution sponsored by five ‘neutralist’ countries: Ghana, the United Arab Republics, India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia. It called for renewed ‘contact’ between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. Menzies at once concluded that it was designed to be embarrassing, since Eisenhower had already refused to meet K. unless K. released the American fliers who were brought down off the Russian coast; while K.

refused to meet Eisenhower unless the latter apologised for the U2 incident ... But I had another objection; it was that I am very tired of being told, as the Communists always tell us, that the conflict in the world is between America and Russia, and the rest of us are the innocent victims.

After their lunch on 1 October Menzies and Macmillan went to Washington where, in discussion that evening, Menzies found both Macmillan and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, receptive to the

idea of his moving an amendment to Nehru’s resolution. This would be to the effect that the meeting called for should be a reconstitution of the summit of four nations, not two. Next day Menzies, Macmillan, Home and the Australian Ambassador, Beale, had talks

at the White House with Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, Herter. Menzies put forward his idea of an amendment, undertook to draft it, and after lunch he and Macmillan again met Christian Herter, who ‘agreed to my draft amendment’. Menzies now planned to make his main general speech and move the amendment on the 49 Pointing the Way, 279.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 421 afternoon of the following Wednesday, 5 October. Barwick, mean-

time, had deferred to Menzies when informed that the latter was coming to the United Nations to take over the Australian leadership. But he and Plimsoll, the senior career diplomat who was Australia’s permanent representative at the General Assembly,°° were horrified when they learnt of Menzies’ amendment, how it had emerged, and that he was determined to move it. Menzies had asked for no advice from Barwick or Australian officials familiar

with the working of the Assembly and aware of the need for preliminary ‘leg-work’ before essaying so important a move. Nor, it

seemed to them, had Menzies sought advice on how his move might offend countries about whose opinion Australia should be sensitive: rather, the amendment was concocted in private consultation with English and American leaders for whom non-aligned opinion on a summit meeting was a secondary consideration.°! Menzies had planned to deliver his main speech on world affairs on the afternoon of 5 October, as a prelude to moving his amendment to the five-power resolution. But the President of the Assembly ruled that the resolution and amendment should be separately discussed on the morning of that day. Menzies thus spoke briefly for

the amendment, and those in favour of the original resolution rallied to its support.°* Menzies, they said, had missed the nub of their position. They had purposely used ‘contact’ as a key word. They were not proposing a ‘summit’. They were simply asking, as an urgently needed step towards later discussions, for a kind of icebreaking beginning to release tension and—as Shukairy of Saudi

Arabia put it—‘“air-condition” the cold war and start genuine negotiations’. Closer to the bone, however, he added that: The Australian proposal is conceived in terms of the post-war era of 1945, when nobody existed except the victors, except the major powers.

But times have changed. The two continents of Africa and Asia have

50 Plimsoll was highly regarded by the British for his integrity and his readiness to foster ‘close and cordial’ relations with their representatives. He arranged regular meetings and had drily commented that ‘once ministers were out of the way and matters were left to officials, these meetings became much more workmanlike and worthwhile’. (Note on conversation between Plimsoll and Sir Henry Linlott on 14 January 1960, PRO, DO 35/10618/27.) 51 Interview with Sir Garfield Barwick, 19 November 1987. Sir Nicholas Parkinson, then a junior External Affairs officer in attendance with Plimsoll, remembers being sent by

Menzies, acting unilaterally, to lodge the amendment formally, before the debate, with the Secretary General’s office (A. W. Martin, interview with Parkinson, 1 June 1996).

52 The ‘uotations used here are from the record of the debate, General Assembly, 5 October 1960, 888th Meeting.

422 ROBERT MENZIES come to the international stage ... The Australian draft resolution simply ignores the emergence of that new force ... the non-committed States have a great contribution to make to any summit meeting, being what they are, and detached from military alliances. From this position of moral strength they can bring pressure to bear on the major powers, which have up to the present moment been unable to agree, to make them agree.

That was polite enough. Quite different were the words of Nehru,

who soon also spoke. Profoundly divergent in temperament, he and Menzies always had a tense relationship.’ Now, with cold savagery, Nehru assailed Menzies’ logic, denying that it was possible to take his arguments seriously and implying that the amendment had a sinister purpose. Menzies was outraged. As he wrote furiously to his wife: Nehru took the rostrum and made just about the most poisonous speech I have heard since I last heard one from Eddie Ward. He sneered, he distorted what I had said, he was grossly offensive. All the primitive came out in him.

Walter Crocker, the Australian High Commissioner in New Delhi, later reported that after his return to India Nehru admitted to his

Cabinet that on the Australian amendment he let his temper get ruffled and then ‘swung into my parliamentary manner’.°* Menzies

also felt his parliamentary instincts deeply stirred. Parkinson remembers that in the face of Nehru’s attack Menzies turned red

with anger and was restrained from springing up to reply by Plimsoll, who sternly told his Prime Minister that the United Nations General Assembly was not a place in which one could act as one would in the Australian House of Representatives. He then ordered Parkinson to take Menzies away to watch the rest of the debate on closed circuit television in a separate room, giving him a stiff martini to calm his nerves.°° Menzies made his main speech that afternoon. “By this time’, he told Dame Pattie, ‘the excitement of the morning had warmed me up and I felt much less nervous’. He had also regained his composure, and the speech was for the most part a dignified rejection of

°° For an insightful discussion of their relationship see Meg Gurry, ‘Leadership and Bilateral Relations: Menzies and Nehru, Australia and India, 1949-1964’, Pacific Affairs, 65, 4, 510-26. >4 Crocker to Department of External Affairs, 14 October 1960, AA, A6706/1, Item 7. °° Interview, 1 June 1996.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 423 the main points Khrushchev had been making, particularly allegations of colonial exploitation which, Menzies declared, were singularly ludicrous in the case of Australia’s work in New Guinea.

His few brief remarks about Nehru were not rancorous though there was an indirect barb in his description of neutralism as ‘one of

those rotund words which does not readily admit of definition’. This speech was televised and well received in the United States, but thanks to the time difference it was not registered in Australia before the press had seized on Nehru’s morning attack and planted the notion of—as one Sydney Morning Herald headline put it— ‘Australia’s Humiliation in the U.N. Assembly’.°® In some quarters

an orthodoxy quickly developed that Menzies’ ineptitude, lack of concern for non-aligned opinion, and anxiety to pull Macmillan’s and Eisenhower’s chestnuts out of the fire, had split the Commonwealth in the eyes of the world. Menzies cabled to McEwen that he was ‘very sorry to learn that | appear to have got the Government in trouble’. But McEwen replied coolly that the Government had not suffered, that personally he could think of no line of criticism which would trouble him less than that he had sought to be helpful to the United States and Britain, and that ‘we are all grown up enough to have a different point of view and express it with vigour. .. without

any reasonable person suggesting that this represents an enduring impairment of relationship’. By 14 October Bunting was cabling to tell Menzies that much greater recognition of his main speech was coming through, and that in Australia press opinion was settling down. And for Menzies himself there was the private satisfaction of receiving a typical note from crusty, ageing Churchill himself:

Much interested to read of your recent intervention at the United Nations. I am sure that you were right to go there and the presence of a

statesman of your stature must have been of great assistance to counterbalance the gabble of the neutralists and the East.°”

By then the Menzies amendment to the five-power resolution had been voted down, but in a welter of counter-proposals and points of

order. Nehru finally withdrew the resolution, earlier votes having removed its point. Thus, in an indirect way, Menzies had achieved

part of his object. He also won plaudits, even from Australian critics, by seeking and obtaining an interview with Khrushchev before both left New York. Menzies publicly spoke of these as

°6 7 October 1960.

5? Churchill to Menzies, 11 October 1960, NLA, MS 4936/1/7/58.

424 ROBERT MENZIES ‘relaxed’ conversations in which Khrushchev had indicated a readiness for summit talks, with disarmament as the most vital subject.°®

In a secret cablegram to McEwen Menzies mentioned stressing

to Khrushchev his personal friendship with Macmillan and Eisenhower and his conviction of the depth of their wish for

accommodation with Russia. Khrushchev deplored the use of the General Assembly as a forum for propaganda and Menzies, with Khrushchev’s own performances in mind, blurted out ‘don’t look at me: my speech was very short’. Khrushchev’s retort was quick, if smiling: ‘Yes, but it was very sharp’.°?

In due course Menzies made a long statement in parliament, defending his actions in Washington and New York, and. highlighting his conversations with Khrushchev. He wound up by claiming success: ‘in my simple vanity, that at any rate we have now

eot to a state of affairs in which there will be, after the American presidential election [and consequent demise of Eisenhower], a summit conference’. When he moved that the statement be printed,

Calwell countered with an amendment rebuking Menzies for failing to consult the other Commonwealth Prime Ministers before taking the action he did. In the angry debate that followed Calwell’s

deputy, Whitlam, was Menzies’ most trenchant critic, in a witty speech which lampooned the Prime Minister as a man with an “Atlas complex’, a belief that ‘he can shoulder the problems of the whole world’.® While this debate was still in progress, the historian Ken Inglis, in a short but comprehensive survey, looked at the ways in which the Australian press had covered, and reacted to, Menzies’

performances in New York. He found them ‘strikingly diverse’, condemnation being counterbalanced by enthusiastic approval, so that, in the end, the comments tended to cancel each other out.®! None of the journalists could have had more than a partial picture of all that had happened, but that they reacted to what they did know in such a varied manner was perhaps symbolic of the pluses and minuses of this lively passage of Menzies’ appearance on the world stage.

When Menzies came home from the United Nations meeting late in 1960, a new Prime Ministers’ Conference was looming early in °8 SMH, 14 October 1960.

°? Menzies to McEwen, secret priority cablegram, 12 October 1960, AA, A6706/1, Item 71. Also PRO, PREM 11/3203. 6° The debate took place between 20 and 25 October 1960, CPD H of R 29: 2274-93, 23052

s1 Nation, 22 October 1960.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 425 the new year. It was a conference to which both he and Macmillan were looking forward with considerable apprehension. Their fears were not misplaced; and for Menzies the outcome would prove far more disturbing than anything that had recently happened in New York.

Menzies set out for London on 21 February 1961. He travelled via the United States, and made a point of meeting the new president, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s departmental advisers and the CIA briefed him ahead in great detail about Australia’s current policies and Menzies’ qualities. A luncheon which Kennedy gave to Menzies and a carefully selected group of local notables was, according to one American official, ‘a most memorable occasion’, completely informal, completely relaxed ... Two of the greatest spellbinders that I had ever encountered were the principals. Menzies is just a fascinating figure and a man of immense stature—he would have been in any country, let alone Australia—and a very colourful and persuasive talker and relater of anecdotes. And, of course, the President ...aman of great humor, great presence, great wit.

They reminisced about the war, especially Kennedy’s PT boat escapade off the Solomon Islands, in which a coast-watcher had

used a clandestine radio to rescue him and his crew. “Of course there was business discussed, too.’ © But this was just a pleasant social interlude before the real trial of the trip. The meeting of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers began

in London on 8 March. The ordinary matters of economics and world affairs were intermittently discussed, but the crucial issue

was South Africa: now that it had at referendum voted to become a republic, was its application to stay in the Commonwealth accept-

able? Being a republic was not the main issue: previous British colonies, now independent and republics, had without serious debate been taken in. But after the tension of 1960, everyone knew

that South Africa’s racial policy was the real problem. While all agreed that South Africa could stay in the Commonwealth, the Afro-Asian members, led by Ghana, Nigeria, India and Ceylon insisted that, as a quid pro quo, the Prime Ministers agree on a

62 J. G. Parsons (at the time Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs), later interviewed (22 August 1969) for Oral History Program, JFK Library, Boston. The detailed briefing (‘President’s Conversation with Australian Prime Minister Menzies’) is in the same Library, President’s Office Files, Box 111. A White House communiqué ‘reaffirming the traditional partnership between the peoples of Australia and the United States’ was issued after the meeting.

426 ROBERT MENZIES statement disapproving apartheid. As Menzies later told an Australia Club dinner, he and Macmillan ‘worked like horses’ over a series of drafts to find words acceptable to all and therefore to keep the Commonwealth intact. He kept his Cabinet at home closely informed of every step in these distressing proceedings, and received

opinion, encouragement and sympathy throughout from McEwen and Barwick. When Macmillan insisted on the near-final draft of the

statement, to be issued on behalf of all Prime Ministers except Verwoerd, a troubled Menzies sent the text home with his own gloss on it. The statement expressed “deep concern’ about the impact of South Africa’s policies on ‘the relations between member countries of the Commonwealth, which is itself a multi-racial association of peoples. Accordingly they declared that such policies were incon-

sistent with the ideals on which the unity and influence of the Commonwealth rest’. “To me’, Menzies cabled McEwen, ‘this means

(a) South Africa is being given notice to quit, (b) In view of our plainly discriminatory immigration policy we have a good chance of being the next in line’.®? He was correct, at least, in his first prediction. Verwoerd ’s rigidity,

which still included refusal to reconsider even the policy of not allowing ‘coloured’ Commonwealth diplomatic representatives in Pretoria, turned the tide. Macmillan, to avoid ‘a catastrophe and possible dissolution of the whole Commonwealth’, stepped in and,

conferring privately with Verwoerd, urged him to withdraw his application to re-enter the Commonwealth. The South African Prime Minister in the end did that, with considerable dignity. Both Macmillan and Menzies were deeply upset. When Macmillan announced the news to the Commons he did so, he said, ‘weighed down by a sense of grief’. Back home early in April, Menzies devoted most of an hour-long speech in the Representatives to an explanation of his actions at the Prime Ministers’ Conference. He vigorously defended his stance of

non-interference: in taking this position, he said, ‘I felt that I was defending my own country, its sovereign rights and its future. To do this was no academic exercise; it seemed to me to involve the selfgovernment of Australia’. The Opposition was predictably critical: Calwell called for Menzies to resign the External Affairs portfolio.

But press comment, even from journalists habitually hostile to Menzies, labelled his ‘report to the House on his mission abroad one

63 Menzies to McEwen, 14 March 1960, NLA, MS. 4936/15/422/11. The other cables regarding the negotiations are at this location.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 427 of the most skilful of his parliamentary efforts in recent years ... this was a high and serious occasion, and Mr Menzies treated it as such’.¢4

The most difficult part of Menzies’ speech was explaining why

Australia had reversed its position on apartheid in the United Nations General Assembly. In April a resolution had been tabled by Ceylon, India and Malaya denouncing South Africa’s racial policy,

declaring it to be a threat to peace and calling on United Nations

members to take individual or collective action against South Africa. On a previous occasion when such a resolution had been moved, in 1959, the United Kingdom voted against it and Aus-

tralia abstained. Now, in 1961, both the United Kingdom and Australia voted in favour. It was over this seeming somersault that the most angry debate in the Representatives took place, and that the demand for Menzies to resign the External Affairs portfolio was hottest. Menzies coped with it coolly, telling in fact the plain truth: that the United Kingdom had decided, without consultation, to vote in favour. At the last minute the Australian Government learned of this from its representatives at the United Nations; if it had followed its normal policy and abstained, it would have been in a minority of two, the other party being Portugal. What could not be made public was Menzies’ annoyance with

the British, and, more important, his growing disillusion with Macmillan and feelings of despair about the Commonwealth. In a furious letter to the appropriate British minister, Duncan Sandys, Menzies berated the British failure to consult on the question of the United Nations vote and spoke bitterly of how ‘deeply resentful’ he

was of a situation in which he and his country were exposed to ‘considerable ridicule’. Sandys wrote a long letter of explanation in

terms of unexpected changes of mood and circumstance in the

United Nations environment, but Menzies was not mollified.® His other feelings come through in letters he wrote to Dame Pattie (who was still in Geneva, with Belle still in charge at the Lodge!) and to Eric Harrison, in London. He was displeased at Macmillan’s speech in the Commons, which depicted Verwoerd’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth as a voluntary act and at subsequent statements in

which Macmillan implied that the Commonwealth was stronger

than ever. Menzies made no bones about his belief that South Africa had been ‘pushed out’ or that if Macmillan

64 SMH of 12-14 May for lively accounts of these exchanges. 65 Menzies to Sandys, 3 May 1961, and Sandys’ reply, NLA, MS. 4936/12/27/221.

428 ROBERT MENZIES thought it would strengthen the Commonwealth to get rid of South Africa, it is a pity he wasted so much of our time on the final day of the Conference. I am really very sick about Harold Macmillan’s statements. He will do anything to placate India but thinks nothing of embarrassing

me in my own country.

Here was the rub. Even so fairminded an observer as Jack Bunting, who was there throughout, thought that in his chairmanship of the Conference Macmillan had been, ‘deliberately or not... partial to India and its adherents’.°” Menzies told Dame Pattie that when he heard of Britain’s decision to support the United Nations

resolution condemning South Africa’s policy he sent an urgent cable to Macmillan urging that this course not be adopted. New Zealand would be sure to follow the British lead, and Australia would be left as the only Commonwealth country not voting in its favour. This ‘would give rise to enormous political difficulties and would lend support to the people who are ever ready to say that I have become a “lone wolf” in the Commonwealth’. Because the British, without explanation, held to their decision Menzies expostulated to his wife that ‘the simple fact is that Harold is much more concerned to be right with Nehru than he is to be right with me’. And to Harrison he wrote: ‘I sometimes doubt whether the Government of the United Kingdom appreciates the fact that old friends are best and some of the new boys are in the Commonwealth for what they can get out of it’. Macmillan himself could not but sense a new strain in Menzies’

relationship with him. Harrison told Menzies that Macmillan ‘is very concerned with regard to yourself and shows every sign of a guilty conscience’. Was there anything that he, as Australian High Commissioner, could take up with Macmillan on Menzies’ behalf?

But all he got was a bleak reply. The resolutions at the United Nations had crippled ‘almost fatally’ the domestic jurisdiction clause in the Charter, Menzies wrote. ‘This may be of no great moment to some people but to Australia, with the aboriginal problem, the immigration problem and Papua and New Guinea, either on our doorstep or inside our house, the complete integrity of the domestic jurisdiction clause is vital.’ Sadder still, for a loyal old monarchist, seemed the prospects of the Commonwealth:

66 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 6 April 1961, MFP.

67]. Bunting, confidential account of ‘Prime Ministers’ meeting: South African Membership’, 23 March 1961, AA, M2576/1, Item 40.

THE WORLD STAGE, 1959-1960 429 Last year, as you know, I delivered the Smuts lecture and set out my ideas on the ‘Changing Commonwealth’. Today I refuse invitations to speak on the Commonwealth because, quite frankly, I don’t know what is happening to it or is likely to happen to it... I would not wish you to pursue these matters with Harold Macmillan or his colleagues because our various attitudes can be very easily misunderstood. Leave it alone while I try to solve my own problems in my own mind, All I know at present is that if I survive the next election I will not be in a hurry to attend another Prime Ministers’ Conference in which the balance of power has changed so much and in which my own views have become so relatively unimportant. Quite frankly, at many times during the last Conference, I felt that silence was as eloquent a contribution as | could make.®

6814/122. ieee to Menzies, 16 May; Menzies to Harrison, 30 May 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/

16

Credit Squeeze to Common Market 1961-1962 Misa.disillusion TRAVAIL during the South African crisis and his about the future of the British Commonwealth took place against a background at home of economic difficulties resulting from a Government-induced ‘credit squeeze’, imposed late in 1960, which caused an even greater outcry than had the ‘horror budget’ of 1952. These difficulties were crucial in shaping opinion in the lead-up to a general election, in December 1961, which almost toppled Menzies’ Government. Beside being important for our understanding of the broad history of the period, the story of the ‘credit squeeze’ offers a revealing sample of how, in the Menzies era, policy was made through the interaction of politicians’

initiatives and the advice of top public servants whose expertise was concerned with larger objectives than that of worrying about who was in Office.

The Australian economy gained in buoyancy during 1959, so much so that in February 1960 Cabinet decided that import licensing could at last be abandoned. Though used since 1952 as a means of regulating imports and protecting Australia’s international reserves,

the licensing system had always been thought of as a temporary expedient. Partly as a result of its ending, anew boom developed in 1960. Alternative control measures were not included in the budget

brought down in August, and an adverse drift in the balance of payments soon became evident. Before long severe action seemed necessary, and on 15 November the Treasurer announced a package

of drastic deflationary measures, ranging from steeply increased sales taxes on motor vehicles to tough restrictions on bank loans. This was the notorious “credit squeeze’ of 1960, destined to pass into legend as the archetypal example of the ‘stop’ phase in the ‘stop—go’

management sometimes thought of as characteristic of economic policy through most of the Menzies era. Behind it lay the Treasury

‘line’, most strongly pressed by its head, Roland Wilson, that 430

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 431

development and growth were the key imperatives for the economy.! This advice was naturally congenial to Menzies and the Liberals, despite the politically embarrassing results it sometimes produced: most notably hell-for-leather expansionism, punctuated

by sharp deflationary measures when the economic situation threatened to get out of control. Such advice was cold to the idea of planning, though that was still attractive to “Nugget” Coombs, the nation’s banking guru, who believed in the use of monetary policy to fine-tune a difficult economy. Cabinet was not, however, completely dependent on these two

high profile advisers. It could also depend on a small but expert group of economists within the Prime Minister’s Department, an arm of the public service which underwent significant expansion in the Menzies years. These specialists were of particular importance in the events of 1960-61, providing a watching brief over Treasury recommendations. The chief of this division was Peter Lawler, who later had a long career in other sectors of the public service. His col-

leagues included Wilfred Salter, a young economist recruited in 1960 and Ron Gilbert, who subsequently wrote an important study

of the Loan Council. The group could also call on the advice of Trevor Swan, the brilliant economist inherited from Post-war Reconstruction, and now the first Professor of Economics at the Australian National University. Salter was the practical planner of the Novem-

ber 1960 credit squeeze, and afterwards wrote regular confidential reports for Menzies and the Cabinet on the progress of the economy and the effects of the Government's interventionist measures. These measures understandably caused a great outcry from businessmen and unionists. There were some bankruptcies and early signs of unemployment. But at the end of January 1961, on the eve of Menzies’ departure for what turned out to be that most unhappy Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Bunting handed the Prime Minister a detailed memorandum from Swan in which the professor surveyed the main trends in the economy and concluded that ‘the situation calls now, not for new and perilous remedies, but for a policy of masterly inactivity ... Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem’. Menzies noted with a delighted tick in the margin of his copy this classical allusion to the celebrated delaying tactics of Fabius Maximus Cunctator in the struggle against Hannibal.3 For

him the analogy was apt: his instinct was to hold on through a 'G, Whitwell, The Treasury Line, passim, but especially chapters 5 and 6. ba.

2 Interview with the Ron Gilbert, 14 July 1989, and subsequent correspondence. There poe

are two of Salter’s’ lengthy memoranda in AA, M2576/1, Item 57. {

3 Bunting to Menzies, 30 January 1961, AA, ibid. |

432 ROBERT MENZIES rough patch, in the belief that the policy was working. But as he said

in a telegram to a London sporting friend, he still expected to be hurrying home after the Prime Ministers’ meeting, ‘as my political wicket is taking a little spin’.*

As Menzies flew out, official statistics showed unemployment nudging at the unheard of post-war level of 2 per cent. He came back to find his ‘political wicket’ taking more than a ‘little spin’. The

current ‘agitation’ against the Government, he wrote to Dame Pattie, ‘is rather more violent than it was in 1952 when the so-called

“horror budget” was under attack’. Certainly there had been an upturn in unemployment, but he expected this soon to diminish: overseas balances were looking healthier and the truth was that ‘the country is in a very prosperous condition and is economically very sound’: But the men who have under my Government enjoyed unexampled prosperity for ten years and have become accustomed to high incomes and a minimum of competition, are the first to complain if they find their profits and dividends declining even by a fraction. But I still think that when we get towards an election they will not be in too much of a hurry to put Calwell and Whitlam and Ward and Cairns in charge of the affairs of the nation. But I do not feel in any sense comfortable about it ... Much as I am hoping that the next election campaign will be the last for me, it will need to be, I think, just about the best if we are to hold our position.°

But evident recovery from the recession did not come quickly,

and dissatisfaction grew when in August Holt brought down a ‘standstill’ budget which gave few new concessions and averred that the Government’s watchword was stability and confidence in steady progress. As press criticism mounted, observers like W. S. Robinson wrote caustically about the Liberals’ refusal to ‘take on any major risks. All the eloquence of the Prime Minister will be needed to save the Government from defeat in December’.® Privately Menzies detected by August ‘some signs of growing optimism in the business world’, but it would take time for this to affect unemployment ‘where the figures are intrinsically comparatively very small but where a steady increase in the monthly figures may well be used to create an uneasy political psychology’. He thought the Government faced a ‘hard core of critics in the manufacturing + Menzies to E. W. Swanton, 24 January 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/30/250. 5 Menzies to ‘Family’, 21 April 1961, MFP. (Dame Pattie was in Geneva with Heather and Peter.) 6 W. S. Robinson to Anthony Eden, 19 June 1961, MUA, W.S.R. Collection, Box 4, f.39.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 433

groups of Sydney and Melbourne’, with the Sydney Morning Herald

and the Melbourne Herald as their journalistic spokesmen. These would put some marginal metropolitan seats at risk. But ‘I do not think that we will be beaten. There are no circumstances which would suggest even a remote possibility of the Opposition winning

17 seats ... I think that the electors will hesitate to entrust their

fortunes to the most divided and leaderless Opposition I have ever seen’.’

He was in for a profound shock. From many points of view the

campaign which preceded the December election, as one contemporary commentator put it, would ‘not go down as one of the most thrilling in history’.8 Mindful of such advice as Swan’s, Menzies and the Cabinet opted for a ‘stay-put’ policy, resting their

case for re-election on a claimed reputation for experience and stability. On the other side, Calwell insisted that unemployment was the major issue confronting the nation. If elected, Labor would remove it, with a policy package which included selective import

controls and greatly expanded social services. While Menzies denounced this as pie in the sky, unachievable without renewed inflation or higher taxation, Calwell lampooned what he, and many others, saw as the Prime Minister’s arrogant complacency. He also attacked Menzies for McCarthyism in the latter’s denunciations of Labor’s division and ‘feebleness’ over communism. Menzies’ rather eratuitous reviving of the communist issue was the main cause of rowdiness at his two most unruly meetings, at Waverly and in the

Brisbane City Hall. The latter, at a venue by now traditional for organized disruption which Menzies enjoyed but could not always handle, was followed by an ugly incident in which, under police protection, Menzies’ party had to run the gauntlet of a heckling crowd to reach their hotel.? But this was an aberration: the campaign as a whole was orderly and the voters, it seemed, somewhat apathetic. This could only make the election result, when it came, the more

dramatic and unexpected. The Government escaped defeat by a hairsbreadth: the ALP won 60 seats, the coalition 62, after a very close and long-drawn out counting of votes in the Queensland electorate of Moreton, only just held by the sitting Liberal member, Killen. This meant that, after providing a Speaker, the Government would have a majority of one in the House of Representatives. It

7 Menzies to Harrison, 21 August 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/122. 8R.J. May, in Australian Quarterly, XXXIV, 1 March 1962, 90. 2 SMH, 5 December 1961.

434 ROBERT MENZIES was an almost unbelievable change from the great majority of 32 in the previous parliament. Menzies put on a brave face when he met the press: ‘He admitted he was surprised by the election result. “Tt would be foolish to say I was not surprised .. .So0 is Mr Calwell, and so are you, he said”’.!9 The biggest swing took place in Queensland, where unemployment was particularly pronounced, though there were also serious losses in New South Wales. As Menzies had predicted, some business groups, especially manufacturers, advertised and throughout the campaign applied pressure against key aspects of the Government’s economic policy. As we have seen, his Departmental economic advisers strengthened the Prime Minister’s resolve to hold to that policy, but that resolve may also be seen as reflecting what Mel Jacques, a writer in the usually unfriendly Nation, at this time called

‘one of the strands in [Menzies’] complex attitude towards the business interests whom he is supposed, in Labor demonology, to serve’. This was

a high punctiliousness about the status of the Prime Minister’s office and scorn for moneyed pressures applied to it... For a leader of the non-Labor forces in Australia, Mr Menzies shows unusual symptoms of,

if not disliking the profit motive, at least seeing virtue in measures which have the effect of moderating profits."

It was an open secret that manufacturers, especially those in the automobile industry, cut contributions to Liberal Party funds during the election, but Menzies gave no sign of being moved by that. His main spleen was vented on the Sydney Morning Herald, which

had consistently alleged supineness on the Government’s part, attacked Menzies personally and, on the eve of the poll, advised its readers to vote Labor—the first time it had ever done so. Menzies’ natural anger at this was well supported by indignant friends. From New Delhi, in mid-November, Crocker remarked that the Herald's ‘subsidiary’, the Financial Review, ‘reads as if it is being written from

the Trades Hall, as I told Vincent Fairfax when he was here last month for the Commonwealth Press Union’.!2 In London, Eric Harrison was more down-to-earth. He had watched the Sydney Morning Herald (‘the lousy coots’) attacking Menzies personally, and

wished he could be home ‘to say something to these boys in the gutter language they understand ... and boy how I would revel in 10 Age, 14 December 1961.

'! Nation, 26 August 1961. 12 W. R. Crocker to Menzies, 16 November 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/9/74.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 435

doing it’.!3 And when, in shock, he heard the final results of the election he wrote in despair: I have always said that if the Archangel Gabriel came down and led the

Labour party they could not destroy your majority [in] under two elections. Now don’t tell me that Rags Henderson [Rupert A. Henderson, general manager of the Herald] has more power than Gabriel.'4

Menzies made no bones about his belief that over twenty years the Sydney Morning Herald, while not until this point actually advo-

cating a Labor vote was, supposedly as a ‘candid friend’, a frequently destructive critic, running the risk of provoking situations through which men might be brought to office who were essentially

as unacceptable to the paper’s management and readers as to

Menzies himself. In mid-November 1961 Warwick Fairfax himself revived his wartime pen-name of ‘Political Observer’ to write three articles which, while stopping short of advocating an outright vote for Calwell, concluded that it would be difficult to regard it as ‘a great national tragedy’ if the voters gave Labor the opportunity of office.!° Then, on 30 November Fairfax wrote a long leader for publication next day under the title ‘“Herald’s” Political Principles’, and signed ‘John Fairfax & Sons Pty. Limited’. In it he described Menzies’ ‘vendetta’ allegation as ‘no more than a convenient myth to discredit the “Herald” and to portray the Prime Minister as the innocent victim of factious opposition’. The Labour leader has given a firm undertaking that if returned to power his Government will not raise the question of nationalisation during the life of the next Parliament ... And since, after 12 years of office, the Government can offer no further suggestion except to stand on its record, we would prefer to take the alternative and to give Labour its opportunity.

The managing director, Angus McLachlan, was not prepared to authorise publication of this without Henderson’s agreement. At first Henderson equivocated: while agreeing with Fairfax’s general sentiments, he balked at openly advocating a vote for Labor. But

in a telephone conversation, Fairfax talked him into reluctant acceptance.

13 Harrison to Menzies, 28 November 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/122. 14 Harrison to Menzies, 16 December 1961, ibid. 'S Gavin Souter, Company of Heralds, 379-86, is—except where otherwise stated—my warrant for the following account of internal SMH events.

436 ROBERT MENZIES So much for Harrison’s attributing to Henderson the initiative of

the Archangel Gabriel! In another sense, though, the guess was not far wrong. Behind the scenes, Henderson ‘in effect became Calwell’s campaign manager, providing hard-headed advice on policy, very reasonable rates for television time, and the writing services of two of John Fairfax’s best men ... preparing speeches and statements for Calwell’.!¢ In March 1962, in his first speech to the new parliament, Menzies launched a bitter attack on the ‘new unity ticket’ between ‘Dear Arthur’ and ‘Dear Rupert’ in the face of

a common enemy—himself. It was an understandable but miseuided move, which gave the Sydney Morning Herald editor, Colin

Bingham, an excuse to attack Menzies, with an acidity that even Maude would have envied, for indulging in ‘the juvenile gibes of a lower-deck jester’: His resentment of the fact that this newspaper’s attitude was confirmed by the votes of more than two and a half million electors benumbed his better judgment, limited though it has proved to be in the later years of his regime. The result was a speech, directed not at illuminating the vital national issues raised by [Labor] ... but vainly at discrediting a single newspaper in a single city of the Commonwealth.

Henderson thought this was ‘one of the best leaders we have ever published ... Reading it I felt immensely proud of the “Herald”, and privileged to be associated with it’. The sentiment was for him

perhaps natural, although it hardly allowed for the fact that Bingham’s language was as spiteful as Menzies’, and that he conveniently sidestepped both the issue of the Herald’s influence with its readers in New South Wales and the fact of Henderson’s considerable and clandestine assistance to Calwell.!’ That assistance must also have been known to Fairfax, which, however, did not stop him writing a protest to the editor of the London Times when that newspaper published, without comment, extracts from Menzies’ attack on the Herald, ‘falsely charging it with some sort of association with the Labour party’. Menzies’ bitterness, he said, sprang simply from the fact that the Sydney newspaper had been consistently correct in forecasting the evil effects of the Government’s economic policies: “No more than The Times does the Herald make “bargains” or “Entente Cordiales” with anybody’.'® 16 Thid., 380.

'’ This is not Souter’s point, but mine; I suspect he might disagree with it. '8 The letter was published in The Times on 20 March. Harrison indignantly cut it out and sent it to Menzies with the comment: ‘Warwick is going round the bend and fairly rapidly ... Just how silly can you get before they certify you?’ Harrison to Menzies, 21 March 1962, NLA, MS. 4936/1/18/158.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 437

The election of 1961 brought one Cabinet reshuffle of great importance. Menzies gave up the External Affairs portfolio, persuading Barwick to take it on as well as the Attorney-Generalship. He had originally offered the position to Barwick when Casey resigned, but Barwick had insisted on keeping the Attorney-Generalship because of legislation still in train, and Menzies considered that to allow his

Minister to adopt the onerous work of both portfolios would endanger his health. Now the Prime Minister agreed with a suggestion from Barwick that he take both on if he could have two assistant ministers to help him deal with routine work. It is likely that Menzies himself, after the two chequered years he had had in the portfolio, and given the heavy weight of his other work, was relieved to give up the responsibility, however great his relish for performing on the world stage. Barwick was, moreover, not altogether new to External Affairs. He had had experience as Acting Minister more than once when first Casey and then Menzies were on their perennial trips abroad. And the fact that Menzies had had it in mind to groom Barwick for the job is suggested by his insisting in

1960 that the latter take a leisurely trip home through Southeast Asia after having fulfilled important duties in London. Barwick interviewed a galaxy of leaders and made shrewd judgements about

key issues which were to fit him extraordinarily well for policymaking in an area about which Cabinet expertise was weak.!?

This would in the near future be of profound importance to Australia’s relations with her powerful near-neighbour, Indonesia. Meantime, just before he gave up the External Affairs portfolio, Menzies reacted positively to current United States diplomatic intimations that the effort in supporting the government of South Vietnam against communist subversion ought to be multinational and that allies should assist in economic and possibly military training. Menzies promptly informed Dean Rusk, the American Secretary of State, that he would make arrangements for a study of possible Australian help and hoped to make a decision soon after the December election. Not all Army and External Affairs authorities greeted this move with enthusiasm, but by late February 1962 the Army agreed to make ten officers available to assist with training in counter-insurgency and jungle fighting in South Vietnam.”9 Though its long-term significance could not be foreseen, this was the formal beginning of Australia’s direct involvement in the Vietnamese conflict.

'9 Garfield Barwick, A Radical Tory, 161-2, 165-71. 20 Peter Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 235-6.

438 ROBERT MENZIES In the months before the election little of Menzies’ sense of disillusion at the changing nature of the British Commonwealth had

abated. Indeed, it had if anything been reinforced by another of Macmillan’s new preferences which stirred in Menzies more unease: anxiety for Britain to reverse her decision of 1957 not to take part in

the Treaty of Rome and to apply now for full membership of the European Economic Community. According to his biographer, Macmillan came to this decision at the end of 1960, following the disastrous collapse of the summit meeting on which he had set such

store. Since the summit had failed, maybe safety might lie in Europe, plus Britain, acting ‘in a harmonious leadership’, a combination which might be equal in influence to the USSR and the United States?2! This vision, which Macmillan would soon see as ‘The Grand Design’, was notably controversial. But by mid-1961 he

had persuaded an uneasy Cabinet to accept it and was tentatively broaching the subject with Commonwealth leaders. At the beginning of July he sent to Diefenbaker and Menzies copies of a paper originating in the Commonwealth Relations Office, and entitled “The stage we have now reached re EEC’. It reported initial talks about the possibility of Britain applying for membership, but stressed that these talks had been exploratory only. In a covering note Macmillan

enthused about the Community acquiring ‘a dynamic of its own’ and ‘developing into an effective political and economic force’.”2 The British Cabinet meantime decided that the Commonwealth countries should be formally visited by ministers (the task was split up between four of them) to sound out opinion on a possible application. Duncan Sandys, the rather tough, plain-speaking Common-

wealth Relations Minister, was to come to Australia and New

Zealand, which were expected to be the most difficult to convince, given the expectation that EEC membership by Britain would inevitably involve modification of the imperial trade preferences they presently enjoyed.” Sandys visited Australia in the early weeks of July, and had what

he told Macmillan were ‘amicable and constructive’ talks with Menzies, McEwen and the Australian Cabinet. Drafting an acceptable joint communiqué did, however, generate ‘a certain tension’.

41 Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan, ii (London, 1989), 256. 22 Macmillan to Menzies, 3 July 1961, PRO, PREM 11/3557.

2315 June, arrangements for tours, ibid. Sandys would be accompanied by the deputy secretary of the CRO, Lintott, and representatives from the Department of Agriculture and the Board of Trade. Lintott requested and received from the High Commission in Canberra a long preliminary report on current feeling in Australia about Britain’s proposals. Costar to Lintott, 10 June 1961, PRO, PREM 11/3556.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 439

Sandys drew Macmillan’s attention to the fact that in the communiqué the Australians said that they did not feel ‘entitled to object’ to “our opening negotiations. With a general election [due] in

a few months time, in which the farmers’ vote will be of great importance, it would have been unrealistic to hope that we could get an expression of approval’. He also thought it unfortunate that Menzies insisted on a paragraph reflecting anxiety that Britain’s entry into the Common Market would weaken the Commonwealth relationship—‘he has a bee in his bonnet about this’. But Sandys had

had ‘several heart to heart talks with Menzies and I| think I have been able to dissipate some of the misunderstanding which grew up in his mind as a result of the [last] Prime Ministers’ Conference’. Menzies had asked him to tell Macmillan that he need not worry

about ‘his attitude of friendship towards you. He needed a little time “to convalesce”, at the end of which he felt sure our relations would be just as close as they always had been’. Macmillan cabled Sandys at once to thank him for ‘your more reassuring account of Menzies’.*4 Menzies sent Macmillan a positive account of his ‘firstrate meeting with Duncan’, but emphasized that Australia wished it

to be clear that at the moment she was ‘stopping well short of approval’—while granting that the final decision would have to be made by Great Britain. In a letter he wrote at this time to W. R. Crocker, Menzies revealed

private disillusion with the new world situation he now saw emerging. He was unhappy at what to him was the steady disappearance of the Commonwealth, a change symbolized in his eyes by the scandalous action of India in voting at the United Nations for a motion, sponsored by the Soviets and the United Arab Republic,

calling upon Australia to give immediate independence to New

Guinea. And now there was the Common Market! Did Macmillan and his ministers have a hidden and, for an old traditionalist like Menzies, radical agenda? I do suspect that the present Government in London is withdrawing somewhat precipitately from its African and other responsibilities so that it may achieve in the latter part of the twentieth century a new and European phase of its history. As I pointed out to Sandys, this move into Europe represents a complete reversal of the nineteenth century balance of power policy. It may disclose in time great results. But if it turns out that the results are bad, it will be too late to reverse the policy.*®

44 Sandys to Macmillan and Macmillan to Sandys, 11 July 1961, PRO, PREM 11/3558. 25 Menzies to Crocker, 31 July 1961, NLA, MS. 4936/1/9/74.

440 ROBERT MENZIES In December, just after the concentration and bruising of the election, there came out of the blue a letter to take Menzies’ mind again away from local politics to uneasiness about where Macmillan was

taking Britain. It was from R.A. Butler (‘RAB’) who, though Macmillan’s chief rival for the Prime Ministership when Anthony Eden resigned, had become Home Secretary and a reliable deputy. He was, however, one of a number of Tories who disagreed with

their chief on the EEC issue and, as he now told Menzies, were ‘increasingly worried about the situation that is developing on the future of the Commonwealth’. The disappearance of South Africa had struck the Commonwealth a serious blow by upsetting ‘that balance between white and black—between, in other words, the civilised and uncivilised—members, on which, at any rate in my view, its continued survival must largely depend—and what is more, has upset it on the wrong side’. It was essential now that there

should be no further weakening of the links between the United Kingdom ‘and the remaining members of what has come to be called “the Old Commonwealth’”—the White Commonwealth’. This

was sure to happen if Britain went into Europe, as was the wish of Macmillan, who ‘has come to his own conclusions, and he will, if I know him, force it through by any means in his power’. So RAB’s friends had asked him to sound Menzies out on the possibility of his

coming to London and, at this crucial time, addressing ‘a great meeting, say, at the Albert Hall, to put the Commonwealth case, as only you could do it’.

Menzies replied that ‘I profoundly and sadly sympathise with your views’. Inter alia he recalled how at the last Prime Ministers’

Conference he had declared that if someone at a future meeting wished to discuss Australia’s immigration policy he would simply walk out for good. Since then one Grantley Adams of the West Indies had asked Macmillan to have the question of the movement of population between Commonwealth countries put on the agenda

for the next Conference. Adams received from London a ‘temporising’ answer. ‘In common with other Prime Ministers I have been asked to comment. I will, as you might suppose, express myself quite plainly.’ And he went on to recite the usual grievances:

Nkrumah had revealed himself as a ruthless dictator; too much deference was shown to Nehru, ‘who is a perfectly cynical realist’;

the Tunku was friendly but ‘very impulsive’; and in general ‘the enormous accretions to our membership are a growing source of weakness’. He agreed in deploring the idea of moving into Europe, but on reflection felt his position as Prime Minister of a precarious Government which had ‘delicate negotiations’ on its hands over the Common Market made it somewhat improper for him to intervene

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 44]

in the way suggested. RAB sent a warm note of understanding, and of further grief at the fact that the idea of a united Commonwealth no longer had much reality:

If only we could shed those new, immature and utterly alien excrescences on our hitherto homogeneous family, how much happier we should all be and how much better, I believe, it would be for the world! But I do not see how that delightful result, or anything like it, is to be achieved.76

On 15 January, the day on which he wrote to RAB, Menzies sent off to Macmillan his broadside against Adams’ suggestion. If it were

followed, he declared, the last blow to the Commonwealth will have been struck. And he went on to elaborate at length the same picture of despair which he had shared with RAB. His depressed mood was well reflected in his doubt that, in any case, he should himself risk going to a meeting in London ‘since my nominal majority includes one or two people who would be quite happy to make mischief in my absence. I had some bitter experience of this in 1941 and will not be in too much of a hurry to repeat it’. Macmillan

replied promptly to say that he was sure that Adams’ demand would not be acceptable to others, and anyway Adams was unlikely to survive in power long enough to be at the next conference. ‘So | do not think there is a danger of the subject being raised seriously.’

He was, however, more perturbed by ‘your other thoughts’. He would think about them and in due course write more fully.?7

The result was a remarkable eighteen-page letter, sent early in February 1962, which vividly reflects both Macmillan’s affectionate concern for Menzies’ difficulty in adjusting to change and his own adaptability. “You and I’, Macmillan wrote, ‘were born into a different world which seems, as one now recalls it, almost as long ago

as the age of George III or Queen Elizabeth I... And now here we are, my dear Bob, two old gentlemen, Prime Ministers of our respec-

tive countries, sixty years later, rubbing our eyes and wondering What has happened’. After sketching his version of the imperial and other verities of that bygone world Macmillan identified the crucial happening of their lifetimes: ‘by folly and weakness on the one side,

and incredible wickedness on the other, Europe has twice pulled itself to pieces in a single generation’. In less than half a century the

6 Butler to Menzies, 22 December 1961, 1 February 1962; Menzies to Butler, 15 January 1962, NLA, MS. 4936/1/27/221. 27 Menzies to Macmillan, 15 January; Macmillan to Menzies, 23 January 1962, NLA, MS. 4936 /1/22/187.

442 ROBERT MENZIES prestige which had enabled Europeans—white people—to govern the world for 2000 years was destroyed. For not only did the yellows and blacks watch them tear each other apart, committing the most frightful crimes and acts of barbarism against each other, but they actually saw them enlisting each their own yellows and blacks to fight other Europeans, other whites. It was bad enough for white men to fight each other, but it was worse when they brought in their dependents. And what we have really seen since the

war is the revolt of the yellows and blacks from the automatic leadership and control of the whites.

It was natural enough for the newly independent nations which were consequently developing to behave both in the United Nations and in the new Commonwealth in a “troublesome way’. They could not be expected to accept all the old rules at once. “They

have an itch to interfere not only with the affairs of the older countries but with each other’s. They are very young and very inexperienced.’ ‘I now shrink’, he confessed, ‘from any Commonwealth meeting because I know how troublesome it will be’.

But he thought nevertheless that the Commonwealth should be kept together because he sincerely believed that, ‘slowly and gradually’, the older members would influence the younger for the better. And ‘while the Communist/Free World division really holds the front of the stage’ the Commonwealth was desperately needed

as one non-communist focus of loyalty and discussion. If the present negotiations with the EEC failed it would be almost impossible for the British to continue in NATO or to keep large forces at

enormous expense to defend a Europe that did not want to incorporate them economically or politically on reasonable terms. Maybe the whole project would fall to the ground. But if that happened, ‘I would not be surprised to see comparatively soon not this time the Germans on the Channel ports but Communist-controlled countries. And then where are we?’*® One reflection of the depth of Macmillan’s concern about Menzies

and the issues he raised was that he had copies of Menzies’ original letter and this reply of his sent to the Cabinet Secretary (Brook), the Commonwealth Relations Secretary (Sandys), the late High Commissioner to Australia (Carrington) and the Queen. Carrington wrote

on his copy: |

My friends from Australia still tell me that Bob is upset & bitter & I think

his letter shows this. But the PM’s reply is so reasoned, friendly & convincing & he has obviously gone to so much trouble that one must 28 Macmillan to Menzies, 8 February 1962, ibid.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 443

hope that Bob will relent. I wish they could meet. It is very easy to grumble when you are 12,000 miles away and grievances and apprehensions multiply. Face to face it’s much more difficult & Bob’s a gregarious, friendly person.’

The idea of a meeting clearly appealed to Macmillan too, especially

as the weeks passed and no reply to his long letter came. Late in

March he circularized all Commonwealth Prime Ministers to ask for a conference in September on the EEC question. To Menzies he sent

a separate message on the ‘grave issues’ which had to be faced during the coming year: ‘it would be very precious to me if there were any chance of having some intimate talk with you before too long ... If you felt able to come over at some time perhaps in May, June or July it would be the greatest help to me’.°! Then, on 18 April, Menzies at last responded. Yes, he was already thinking of a special visit to London in late May or early June. “Such a visit, not cluttered up with official or formal engagements, would

enable me to have, as I hope, close personal talks with you, with those of your colleagues who are handling the [EEC] negotiations, and with some of your principal official advisers.’ He would decide his precise course of action when McEwen, his Trade Minister, came home ‘after strenuous labours on your side of the world’ with firsthand news of the progress of the negotiations. Menzies would try to come to the September Prime Ministers’ Conference, though he had

reservations about its usefulness: by then Common Market negotiations would be advanced and discussions would tend to be ‘both

generalised and retrospective’. On the wider questions which Macmillan had tried to discuss, ‘I do not quarrel with your history, and in any case would not dare to do so’. But ‘people like me are too deeply royalist at heart to live comfortably in a nest of republics’.

With the proliferation of prime ministers and their advisers conferences must become like public meetings: the only hope for the future was ‘to discover ways and means of holding the “old brigade” together’.?!

The McEwen trip to which Menzies referred had taken seven weeks and won him great kudos. A forceful debater and ruthless, if clear-eyed negotiator, McEwen saw a bleak future for many Australian primary exports unless Britain could wrest concessions from the EEC which would, in the event of British entry, safeguard or compensate for the loss of the privileged position which Australia and other Commonwealth countries enjoyed in the British market 299 February 1962, PRO, PREM 11/3665. 30 Macmillan to Menzies, 31 March 1962, AA, A6706/1, Item 55.

31 Menzies to Macmillan, 18 April 1962, NLA, MS. 4936/1/22/187. (Macmillan’s ‘history’ was in many respects quite bizarre.)

444 ROBERT MENZIES thanks to the Ottawa Agreements in their renegotiated form of 1957.

McEwen conferred with British and Continental ministers, and made public performances in television, on the platform and in the press, to bring Australia’s hopes for continued advantages in the British market firmly forward, in what was in effect the culmination of a campaign he and his advisers in the Department of Trade had waged ever since the entry of Britain into Europe was first mooted. From London Harrison wrote to assure Menzies that McEwen had made ‘a tremendous impact over here’, and reported conversations with key British ministers, all echoing the remark of Ted Heath, who warmly confessed himself ‘greatly beholden to McEwen. I suppose we can say now that we understand Australia’s case far better than

we have up to the moment. He is tough, he knows what he wants and his reasoning and logic is very clear and good’. Christopher Soames, the Minister for Agriculture, told Harrison that ‘this bloke knows more about wheat than any of our experts’, to which the bluff Australian High Commissioner nonchalantly replied: “Yes, he was selling wheat when your boys were being fed on pap and so

that’s not surprising’. Nevertheless, however great McEwen’s impact, Harrison thought it needed consolidation, especially given that there might be ‘a lapse of memory’ before the Prime Ministers’ Conference in September. Therefore, I am hoping that it might be possible for you to come over here somewhere in June/July during the recess and put the coping stone on Jack’s efforts. I think it would only require you to swing the balance in our favour. Jack has done the spade work, but it needs the master touch to make it effective.°?

Macmillan’s and Harrison’s hopes thus coincided as, naturally, did McEwen’s and Menzies’ feelings about Britain and the Common Market. Within a fortnight Menzies informed Harrison that he had decided to ‘follow up the notable work done by McEwen’ and come over: ‘Jack has his own methods and I have mine which are different, and between the two of us we may build up an all-round case ... Also, in a matter of this magnitude, I want to satisfy my own mind as to the difficulties and the prospects’. Holt suggested that this was so important a matter for Australia that Opposition

leaders should be invited to go to England too—an idea about which Menzies was reluctant, until he talked to Calwell and Whitlam and found they were enthusiastic about such a chance to see whether a bipartisan policy was desirable.*° In agreeing to this 32 Harrison to Menzies, 30 April 1962, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/123. 33 Menzies to Harrison, 14 May 1952, ibid.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 445

idea Menzies, among other things, removed the danger that the Opposition would take advantage of his being away by refusing to agree with the ordinary parliamentary convention for the arrangement of ‘pairs’, vital for a Government anxious to hold its majority in a closely divided House. His decision also scotched current press speculation that McEwen’s high profile made him a potential rival for the coalition leadership, given the recent electoral near-defeat and rumours of Menzies’ ageing and weariness. Even the Sydney Morning Herald hailed Menzies’ announcement of his mission to London and of his invitation to the Labor leaders with a friendly headline: ‘The “Old Master” Again Steps Into The Limelight’. ‘My prime purpose’, Menzies told reporters, will be to discuss broad principles... [ won’t take a list of commodities and go through them as if I were giving a good imitation of Mr McEwen. I hope I will know all about them, but that won’t be my business. Some

British Ministers believe that Britain’s entry into the European Community would strengthen the Commonwealth ... My own view has always been that it will tend to weaken the Commonwealth.**

Macmillan, for his part, was delighted with the news. He at once

invited Menzies to dine quietly with him on the evening of his arrival, 30 May. The Queen’s birthday holiday would follow on 2 June: Macmillan wanted Menzies to watch the Trooping of the Colour with him and Dorothy, and afterwards have a glass of sherry at 10 Downing Street: unfortunately he then had to leave for a conference in Paris.’ In the crowded days that followed, Menzies had talks with other British ministers, made a notable television appearance, interviewed by acid public affairs. commentator Robin Day, and in other public appearances he stylishly upheld his reputation

in England as senior Commonwealth statesman and orator. After Menzies’ first major speech, made at the Savoy, Humphrey Becker,

the defence representative at Australia House, wrote to say how impressive it had been: Mr McEwen was good and called a spade a bloody shovel which is one way of impressing these Englishmen. [But] two Englishmen, walking out ahead of me, summed up your talk where one said to the other ‘The old devil is as clever and as shrewd as ever. If all England could hear that, we would not be joining the Common Market except on Australia’s terms’. [ was watching Mr Macmillan closely. He did not enjoy what you said.”°

34 SMH, 22, 24 May 1962. 35 Macmillan to Menzies, 16 May 1962, PRO, PREM 11/3657.

36 Humphrey Becker to Menzies, 13 June 1962 (on notepaper ‘Head, Joint Services Staff’), NLA, MS. 4936/1/1/26.

446 ROBERT MENZIES Indeed, so effective were Menzies’ speeches that, though he was usually at pains to say that he insisted that the decision whether to

go into the Market or not hat’ be made exclusively by Britain

herself, it was often difficult not'to think that he was arguing that, if she took her Commonwealth obligations seriously, Britain should simply stay out, and that was that.’’ This was disturbing for those

who thought of the issue as involving something much more important than Commonwealth trade preferences. At the end of his

triumphant couple of weeks in England Menzies went on to Washington for talks with President Kennedy and his ministers. He

would have been horrified had he known about one opinion that preceded his arrival. It was from the English economist, Barbara Ward, who had developed an intense dislike of Menzies and all he stood for during a visit to Australia in 1951.98 Early in June 1962 she

was in Australia again and wrote to Walter Lippmann about her concern that Britain must succeed in joining the Common Market. In view of Menzies’ impending arrival in America Lippmann, presumably wishing indirectly to inform the President, sent McGeorge Bundy an extract from the letter. In Barbara Ward’s view Kennedy

could help Macmillan in two immediate ways: first, by sending ‘really trusted’ emissaries to talk the Germans and British Labour (through Gaitskell) into favouring British entry and second, by beating the daylights out of Menzies when he arrives in Washington. He is NOT a great statesman in any case and his present role in London can be disastrous.

Australia’s whole future depends on the Atlantic Community becoming a fact. If old-fashioned nationalism creates a narrow, restricted Europe, if Britain’s economy declines still further, if America retreats further into isolation—all consequences of a failure to enlarge

5” See for example, his ‘powerful and emotional’ speech to the Australia Club on 13 June,

in which he said that he believed Britain would never choose against the British Commonwealth if entry into the Common Market meant an end of all Commonwealth preferences by 1970. In a strong though friendly editorial (‘The Commonwealth Trumpeter’), the SMH expressed anxiety lest the campaign to protect trade preferences ‘should not be allowed to become, or appear to be, a campaign to prevent Britain from entering the European Economic Community’ (14 June 1962). A message sent on 15 June from the American Embassy in Canberra to the Department of State noted Menzies’ ‘departing London speech’ as suggesting ‘attempt to place on US and

Six, because of stand on preferences, responsibility for possibly facing UK with “terrible” choice of entering CM under conditions unacceptable to Commonwealth or

of staying out. Shortly before London speech there were warnings to Menzies in Australian press against pursuing policy that could place Australia in position of executing veto on UK entry into CM’ (J. F. Kennedy Library, Boston, NSF, Australia

6/6/62-6/15/62).

38 See, for example, Dixon Diary entries for 29 April and 7 July 1951.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 447

the Common Market—then Australia will find itself isolated and impoverished. I don’t think Menzies, who is a vain and shallow man, has thought of these longterm implications of his pressures on Britain. By putting his terms high, he plays into de Gaulle’s hands. I think Kennedy should be very firm and point out that America is not likely to be interested in an Australia that has helped to wreck the Atlantic grand design.*”

In a special message sent on 15 June to the State Department, officers in the United States Embassy at Canberra underlined their

belief that it was:

particularly important from standpoint overall Australian—American

relations that if at all possible, publicity arising from Menzies’ Washington visit reflect fact that US fully sympathetic to Australia’s problem, anxious to help her find a solution (even though this may vary from Australia’s own answer of continued preferences), and places high

value and significance on maintenance of strong Commonwealth as a source of free world strength . .. If it were possible to wrap up much of the above in a joint Menzies-Kennedy statement, that would be ideal . . #0

This hope was indeed realized, though the communiqué issued at the end of Menzies’ talks with the President was couched in unusually bromidic language, even for such diplomatic concoctions. The final version eliminated even mild references to difficulties of negotiation mentioned in earlier drafts.*! Certainly, Kennedy made no attempt to ‘beat the daylights’ out of Menzies. The Australian

Prime Minister was treated royally, being given full military honours on his arrival, flown from New York to Washington in Kennedy’s own official aircraft and lodged at Blair House. He had a

‘working lunch’ and other meetings with Kennedy, and dined or otherwise had sessions with Averell Harriman, Assistant Secretary

of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Robert McNamara, the Defense

3° Kennedy Library, White House Central Subject File, Box 41, CO 18, 1/1/62-12/31/62. 40 Message of 15 June, ibid.

‘1 One example will make the point. ‘It was agreed that Britain’s entry involved questions of profound economic and political importance both for Europe and the Free World and that in the event of her entry that the United States and Australia would, as great suppliers to Britain and Europe, face problems in endeavouring to preserve access for their goods ...’ became: ‘They reviewed ... the implications for the trade of their two nations of the possible accession of the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community. It was agreed that, in this event, the United States and Australia would, as great suppliers to Britain and Europe, face problems in endeavouring to maintain and expand access for their goods’. (Draft in Kennedy Library, NSF, Box 8, and final, official version in SMH, 22 June 1962.)

448 ROBERT MENZIES Secretary, G. Ball, the Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury.

A Position Paper, prepared for the President before Menzies’ arrival, drew attention to the danger of the campaign which he was conducting in Britain. It might: produce great unpleasantness in the Commonwealth Economic [Prime Ministers’] Conference in September, which could be a major factor in preventing the UK from joining the EEC. .. Itis important, therefore, for us now to be as forthcoming as is consistent with our basic position on preferences in order to meet the Australian problem and try to lead the Australians away from such a head-on collision. This will mean a direct appeal to Menzies’ statesmanship. The recommended United States

position is designed to give what ammunition is available to us to achieve this objective.

A detailed account of trade history and options, especially under

the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade treaty, followed. Menzies rose to the occasion. He and his advisers took part in down-to-earth talks which ‘established that Commonwealth preferences affect less than half of Australian trade and of this half only a portion is competitive with United States products’. Agreement was reached ‘to hold commodity-by-commodity talks in order

to find the broadest possible measure of common ground’. At Menzies’ request these were subsequently conducted in detail during July and August by Dr W. A. Westerman, Secretary of the Australian Department of Trade, and one of McEwen’s right-hand

men. A wide range of agreement was reached on common approaches and objectives. At the end of the talks Under-Secretary Ball sent Menzies a special message to assure him of United States

satisfaction with the outcome and to express ‘confidence that Australia’s balanced approach and statesmanlike position would set the tone for the Prime Ministers’ Conference at London in September’.*

#2 Kennedy Library, NSF Box 8. Countries, Australia, 6/16/62. Position Papers for Menzies’ June Meeting. 1 Briefing paper, for visit of Sir Garfield Barwick: ‘Australia—United States Talks on United Kingdom Entry into the European Economic Community’, ibid. (This docu-

ment contained a summary of the agreements on specific items. They included canned and fresh fruits, rice, sugar, livestock and meat, grains, dairy produce and eges, aluminium, lead and zinc.) On 21 June Menzies announced the agreement for commodity-by-commodity discussion with a great flourish, after ‘his extensive talks with the President and officials’. He asked Westerman to come to Washington from London to begin the talks (SMH, 22 June 1962).

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 449

Menzies was barely home when one of his ministers, Leslie Bury, caused a sensation by observing in a speech to a conference of the Australian Institute of Management in Canberra that, if looked at from the viewpoint of Australia as a whole, worry about the effects

of Britain entering the Common Market ‘seems to me very farfetched’. He pointed out that less than one-fifth of Australia’s total

exports currently went to the United Kingdom, and that of this ‘only a small proportion seems likely to be much affected’. He went on to examine in some detail the particular products and economic processes involved, to demonstrate his main general point that the political and defence implications for the free world of British entry into Europe far outweighed any immediate material fears. At 49 Bury had experience and expertise well beyond those of the normal run of politicians. A Cambridge graduate in economics and law, he had come to Australia in the mid-1930s, working first in the Bank of New South Wales, spending three years in the second AIF during World War II, and going on afterwards to become a financial adviser

to the Treasury. He was elected to parliament in 1956, having resigned for that purpose from the position, which he had held for three years, of executive director of the International Bank and the

International Monetary Fund, in Washington. His opinion was therefore of more than ordinary importance, especially since he was

junior Minister Assisting the Treasurer. McEwen was so shocked that in an unprecedented rebuke to a fellow minister he accused Bury of publicly undercutting Australia’s negotiating strength on the Common Market. After reading the speech, Menzies agreed,

and dismissed Bury from office on the ground of his having breached the convention of Cabinet solidarity. Bury accepted the point about Cabinet solidarity with grace, but in the House he later used what he called ‘my new-found freedom’ to elaborate again his conviction that ‘the superficial issue is trade, but the real one is that of re-drawing the political map of the world’.

A few experts supported Bury’s views. One of the most

enthusiastic was Professor H. W. Arndt, who in a letter to the press and in the ABC’s ‘Notes on the News’ said that the Common Market picture painted by McEwen and Menzies could not be supported by

‘dispassionate economic analysis’. In referring superciliously to Arndt as ‘an unofficial Labour Party publicist’, the Sydney Morning

Herald noted that his views differed markedly from those of the Party’s deputy leader, Whitlam, recently back from the Government-

sponsored tour abroad to investigate the Common Market. 44 SMH, 27, 28 July, 14 August 1962.

450 ROBERT MENZIES Whitlam’s trip had been extensive, and with characteristic energy he had talked to political leaders and their advisers in New Delhi, London, Paris, The Hague and New York, to name only the most

important centres.4° But his final position did not differ substantially from that already adopted by the federal Caucus which declared in August 1961 the projected losses posed by Britain’s joining the EEC to be ‘a national danger transcending party politics’. The main attack was on the Government for its failure to anticipate the danger and to take action to prepare for it. Whitlam renewed this attack with force and subtlety when the Common Market was discussed in parliament in August.*¢ The fateful Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference began

on 10 September. When originally planning it, Macmillan had expected that negotiations being conducted by British representatives in Brussels would have been completed and the Conference

would have before it a precise set of conditions proposed for Britain’s entry into the Common Market. Instead, thanks mainly to de Gaulle’s uncooperative attitude, negotiations were still dragging on, and in consequence the Prime Ministers could bring along to the Conference a ‘shopping list’ of things they wanted. A series of unhappy meetings produced a final communiqué in whose diplomatic language nothing new was said. Macmillan and Edward Heath, the chief British minister at the Brussels negotiations, opened the Conference with hour-long speeches outlining the stage the bargaining with the Six had reached, and declaring the ‘hard but inescapable

fact’ that the British market alone was no longer big enough to absorb the growing production of the Commonwealth. British entry into the EEC would ‘not be incompatible with the Commonwealth; the two associations being complementary’ .?”

But two days of attack on the British negotiating position followed. Diefenbaker of Canada led the assault but even Macmillan’s trusted friend, Bob Menzies, made what Macmillan himself called ‘a very damaging speech’.*® And the American Embassy in London, in a long telegram to the Secretary of State, noted how ‘failure of Menzies to play more statesmanlike and mediating

role was minor disappointment’.4? The British expected strong criticism to come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand on

45 See, e.g., ibid., 7, 21 June. But he did not see Kennedy. 46 Tbid., 31 July, 10 August 1962. 47 Horne, Harold Macmillan, ti, 355. 48 Thid.

49 Jones to Secretary of State, 22 September 1962, Kennedy Library, President’s Office File, Box 111, Folder ‘Australia, Security 1961-3’.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 451

‘temperate foodstuffs’, and they certainly got that. What was a surprise was fiercely adverse comments from India and Pakistan and, more important, the flat rejection by African Prime Ministers, even before the Conference began, of the idea of Britain joining the Common Market under any terms. It was not only that these less developed nations were dissatisfied with the package Britain had so

far negotiated for them, but also there was an undercurrent of nationalism, fanned by Nkrumah’s line that the EEC represented neo-colonialism.*° Perhaps as much in reaction against this kind of argument, Menzies was more helpful towards the end of the Conference. As Macmillan noted, somewhat ungenerously: ‘Menzies (having, I suppose, made a sufficient demonstration for home politics) was reasonable. He reverted to his favourite sport of teasing Diefenbaker’.°!

Despite its disappointments the United Kingdom team, in the

words of the American report, ‘retrieved situation admirably through adept diplomatic footwork which resulted in as favourable a communique as the British could hope for’. It did not veto British

entry and affirmed that the decision was one for the United Kingdom itself. At the same time the Prime Ministers “took note that

the negotiations in Brussels were incomplete and that a number

of questions had still to be negotiated ... the British ministers promised to take full account of the views expressed by Common-

wealth members at the meeting, and to arrange for the closest consultation’, etc., etc.°2 The best Australian press summing up of it

all was the Sun-Herald’s, which in an ingenious extended article

likened the conference to a cricket match: “Britain v. The Rest—Test

drawn’.

In a note written on 20 September Macmillan recorded that Menzies had called on him late that afternoon to say goodbye as he was leaving for home via the United States. He explained his conduct at the Conference by the weakness of his political position. Mr McEwen was at him all the time to take a much stronger line and range himself on the side of Mr Diefenbaker. He resisted, greatly to Mr McEwen’s displeasure, joining in the demand for

another Prime Ministers’ Conference ... He ended by saying that any

°9 Tbid.

51 Horne, Harold Macmillan, ii, 352.

52‘Commonwealth Prime Ministers 1962, Marlborough House. Final Communique’ (Accounts and Papers, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command, Session 1961-2, vol. XXX, 69). °3 23 September 1962.

452 ROBERT MENZIES feeling between himself and me at the last Conference and the problem of South Africa that had arisen was quite forgotten and I must think no more of it. He was clearly trying to be as pleasant as possible and excuse himself for not having taken a more constructive position throughout the Conference.*4

The British ambassador in Washington, Sir David Ormsby Gore,

cabled the Foreign Office to say that Kennedy expected to see Menzies and wondered if there was anything he could say to him ‘which might help us over the Common Market negotiations’. In reply he received a message from the Prime Minister himself to the effect that the President should be told that Menzies: has made it clear to me that... internal politics had a certain influence on his attitude during the Conference. The President can rest assured that no serious damage has been done to the character of the Commonwealth in its new and strange form. The President will find Menzies very concerned about the African and Asian members. This is quite natural because the sense of mission which has encouraged Britain to transform the Commonwealth as we have, has not been present in the same degree for the other old Commonwealth countries. We shall try to get them to share our task more fully in the future.

Menzies had an hour’s talk with Kennedy, but declined to comment to newspaper reporters about it. But Ormsby Gore informed Macmillan that at a dinner at the Australian Embassy Menzies made an impromptu speech, in which he said that the atmosphere at the Prime Ministers’ Conference had been ‘serious

but good’, and it had been agreed that only Britain could judge whether joining Europe was right. Personally he thought it probably was, but he had misgivings about the future of the Commonwealth. For the invariable experience of confederation was that the

participants ‘grew ever closer together and developed in the end into a federation with power residing increasingly at the centre and

not with the separate States’. That drew a scotty response from Macmillan, who scribbled on the message from Ormsby Gore that this was the argument Menzies had used in his early speeches at the late Conference. But ‘in my winding-up speech I suggested that it

was a mistake to believe that what had happened to the original American colonies, all of the same stock and isolated on the far side

of the Atlantic, would necessarily apply also to Europe. But

54 Macmillan to First Secretary (to be distributed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretaries, and Carrington), 20 September 1962, PRO, PREM 11/3663.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 453

evidently my argument did not convince’. The tinge of bitterness in the last remark caught at the likely importance for both Menzies and Macmillan of the Conference of September 1962: that it brought to a head the recent cooling of the friendship which had developed after Macmillan’s notable tour of Australia in 1958 and which had

been fundamental to Menzies’ continuing sense of himself as a world statesman. Some of the issues which divided Menzies and Macmillan suddenly became irrelevant at the end of January 1963 when de Gaulle vetoed the possibility of the United Kingdom joining the EEC by abruptly and in the most offensive manner ordering the end, permanently, of the Brussels negotiations. ‘He wants to be the cock on

a small dunghill instead of having two cocks on a larger one’, Macmillan bitterly said to Kennedy, as de Gaulle’s declared aim of

making France the dominant power in Europe brought to an end the British Prime Minister’s second great dream for achieving future peace and prosperity. And there was in de Gaulle’s thinking a

special hostility towards the idea of making concessions to the

members of Britain’s older Commonwealth. As he told Macmillan in November 1961: “Canada, Australia and New Zealand may have been Europeans once, but they were no longer Europeans. . . France did not want to change the character of .. . Europe and therefore did not want Britain to bring this great escort in with them’.°® When the news of the collapse of the Brussels talks came through in Australia

Menzies called a special Cabinet meeting to consider it, and afterwards issued a statement expressing ‘a sincere feeling of sympathy for the Government of Great Britain in the manner in which the

negotiations were terminated’. Cabinet did not favour an early Prime Ministers’ Conference to consider the matter, as was already being asked for by Diefenbaker, but Australia was happy to engage

in any bilateral discussions with Britain if they were sought. Meantime existing trade arrangements—the renegotiated Ottawa Agreement—stood.°’ And there, for the time being, the matter rested. At the beginning

of February Macmillan visited Rome and was feted by the Italian government, Italy being one member of the EEC who disagreed strongly with de Gaulle’s veto. Alfred Stirling, Australia’s Ambassador to Italy and a good friend of Menzies, wrote in a personal

55 Ormsby Gore to Macmillan, 19, 25 September 1962; Macmillan to Ormsby Gore, 21 September 1962, PRO, PREM 11/3645. °6 Horne, Harold Macmillan, ii, 446 (‘dunghill’), 451 (‘great escort’). 57 SMH, 6 February 1963.

454 ROBERT MENZIES letter that Macmillan ‘looked very tired on arrival but relaxed a bit afterwards’. At the airport he: told me he had had a telegram from you on the previous day and he again spoke of this when we met at tea, saying you were alright again. He spoke very warmly of you several times and repeated “great courage,

great courage’.

Menzies’ telegram would have been to sympathize with Macmillan at the abrupt ending of the Brussels negotiations, and Macmillan’s remark about Menzies being ‘alright now’ no doubt referred to his

recovery from a painful bout of diverticulitis which had put him in hospital for fifteen days from Christmas eve onwards.°? Real intimacy between the two men might be past, but there had been no

attenuation of the sympathy towards suffering which each

instinctively felt. By the beginning of 1963 Menzies was less ready either to argue

for the ‘old’ Commonwealth or to denounce the ‘new’. When

reporting to parliament after his return from the September Prime Ministers’ Conference he had indicated approval of Britain’s wish

to join Europe and produced an uproar by observing that ‘suggestions of panic, sometimes heard in Australia, are absurd’. In weary elaboration of his point he added: I think that twenty years ago I might have become more impassioned about this matter, but the Commonwealth has changed a lot since then. Its association has become much looser ... The old hopes of concerting common policies have gone. Under these circumstances, it may well be

that, even if federation should be achieved in Western Europe, the anomalous position of Britain in the Commonwealth which would then

emerge would be regarded as no more anomalous than many other things which have been accepted, and with which we have learned to live.

Disillusion about the political future of the Commonwealth could

not, however, dim the importance in Menzies’ eyes of Australian loyalty to the throne, another matter altogether. In February 1963 a royal visit by the Queen and Prince Philip, inter alia for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Canberra, 6 Stirling to Menzies, 4 February 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/30/247. >» Of the many letters written about this, perhaps the best was Menzies to Harrison, on 17 January. “The condition was painful and inconvenient. I had hoped to relax at the second test.’ This was not possible, but later, ‘a few days in Sydney and the tonic of an exciting third day’s play in the Third Test have done much to bring about recovery’, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/123.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 455

. a = = 6h oe [ bil

— . &. — ee | : i ie= =——E—m—E_smseeseF 3 l aM - 7 oo AS i a ae aan oe ee le Pe eee

i +=j$§j-,e, Ac eee . iat 6 fee Preaching to the converted: the Victorian State Liberal Convention, 1962

was an appropriate occasion for him publicly to affirm this bond. He made his most fulsome assertion of it at a welcoming dinner given to the Queen on 18 February 1963. This was the occasion when, after eloquently asserting that the British monarchy was the most democratic monarchy in the world, he spoke about Australian affection as an expression of that and quoted the famous lines of an alleged “old seventeenth century poet who wrote, “I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die”’.©° Newsreel films show that

the Queen winced in surprise at this, and journalists and historians routinely accustomed to denigrating Menzies assume that surprise

was in fact distaste. Anachronistically and mindlessly, this one sentence is generally used to lampoon Menzies’ attitude to the monarchy, as if this was the only thing he ever said on the subject.

For Menzies the royal visit was actually memorable in a much more profound sense. On 12 March journalists covering the Queen’s tour were handed an official statement: that the Queen was graciously 60 SMH, 19 February 1963.

456 ROBERT MENZIES pleased to confer on Menzies the ‘Most Noble Order of the Thistle’, as a personal honour in recognition of his services to the Queen and to Australia. This knighthood, of Scottish origin in 1687 and second only to the Order of the Garter in the hierarchy of British honours,

was in the gift only of the reigning monarch, who was herself Sovereign of the Order, which in turn was limited to sixteen members. It was the highest Order of knighthood to which an Australian had so far been admitted. That Menzies was to be offered it was unknown even to his closest Cabinet ministers, and Menzies himself knew nothing about it until the Queen summoned him to a private audience at Government House on the afternoon of the announcement. The knighthood was conferred next day in

a private ceremony, attended only—apart from the Queen and Menzies himself—by Dame Pattie and son Kenneth, it being understood that in due course Menzies would be inducted into the Order in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. Predictably, journalists and others —especially university students—who were accustomed to treating

Menzies as a figure of fun, did their best to make the award an occasion for hilarity. But congratulations poured in from all sides, at home and abroad. Even the Sydney Morning Herald, in a generous editorial headed ‘Sir Robert Menzies’, accepted the honour as something which as much dignified Australia as her Prime Minister. In the circumstances, it said, no one could begrudge the fact that this same man was ‘now a proud Knight of the Thistle, quietly rejoicing,

no doubt, in the motto of the Order, “No one provokes me with impunity” ’.°!

Menzies had on a number of occasions given it as his view that it would be improper for a Prime Minister while in office to accept a knighthood. It was not that he did not value distinctions—as, for example, his veritable thirst for honorary university degrees already

demonstrated. But he was properly chary of the fact that local knighthoods involved recommendations, through the GovernorGeneral, behind which there was often a political element, however innocent. But now the Queen, without any Australian prompting, was asking him to accept an honour that depended on her initiative as well as being in her gift alone. It was, in the atmosphere of the time, and given Menzies’ own affection for the monarchy, unthinkable that he should be other than delighted. Of his personal writings at this time reflecting the unfeigned pleasure he felt, none is more

fetching than the slightly arch note he wrote to the American actress, Mary Martin, who had, with her husband Richard Halliday, 61 Ibid., 13 March 1963.

CREDIT SQUEEZE TO COMMON MARKET, 1961-1962 457

i > fe oe Bee i sts

a yoo ae a a | “as iT | 8. a oe A student prank in 1963 to celebrate the Knighthood of the Thistle: at the University of Adelaide Menzies, after naming a new building at Lincoln College, is presented with a bunch of Scotch thistles by an athletic Malaysian fifth-year medical student, George Ananda. Those in the receiving party are, from left to right, the chairman of the College (Rev. E. T. Pryor), the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide (H. B. Basten), Menzies, the President of the South Australian Methodist Conference (Rev. G. T. Inglis) and the Master of Lincoln College (Dr W. F. Hambly).

eevei

become a good friend.®* After reminding Mary that she had caused

embarrassment by mistakenly introducing him to other dinner guests as ‘Sir Robert Menzies’, he was pleased to inform her ‘that °° The Menzies first met Mary Martin when taken back-stage after one of her early performances in South Pacific, and it became a regular ritual that Menzies not, as he once put it, a habitual theatre-goer (‘the pressure of work is against it’), should on his visits to New York ‘see you on the stage and be reminded of your unbelievable talent’.

For their part, the Hallidays appreciated Menzies’ warmth and wit, and he and his immediate entourage were always welcome dinner guests (correspondence at NLA, MS. 4936/1/19/168, especially letters of 6 July 1960 and 1 July 1962).

458 ROBERT MENZIES your position has now been regularised’. He then gave a detailed account of the Queen’s decision and of the significance of the Thistle knighthood. The award has created a tremendous amount of interest in Australia and

in Great Britain. People seem to be very pleased about it ... I cannot help thinking that your persistent references to me as ‘Sir Robert’ must have reached the Queen’s ears! However, everything is now in order.

Menzies’ friends at the Savage and West Brighton clubs also found light-hearted ways of celebrating the event. That stern conservative, sir John Latham, the retired Chief Justice, learning that the Prime Minister would be in Melbourne in the middle of March, hoped he would come to the regular Saturday evening meeting of the West Brighton Club. Latham had in anticipation ‘thought up’ two poems for the occasion. He had learned from the press how stern was the real motto of the order into which Menzies had been inducted. One of his ‘poems’ ran: I’ve lately become what I must call a Thist’ler, Because it is almost a rhyme for Prime Minister; But I ain’t got no prickles—I’m softer than silk,

I’m shy like a violet, I’m milder than milk.

63 Menzies to Mary Martin, 21 March 1963, ibid. 64 Latham to Menzies, NLA, MS. 1009/1/9791. On the West Brighton Club, see John Bunting, R. G. Menzies: a Portrait, 208-11.

17

To the 1963 Election

()5 14draw FEBRUARY 1963 Eddie Ward sent Menzies telegramday to his attention to an article published on the aprevious in the Sydney Sun, with details of a proposed United States naval communications base in Western Australia. He asked whether the contents of the article were factual, only partly so, or completely

erroneous, and whether the article was based on information

officially released from any Commonwealth source. Menzies wired in reply that he had himself made a statement in the House of Representatives on 17 May 1962, giving the basic facts of the proposed station. Some of these facts appeared in the article, for the publi-

cation of which no Commonwealth authority was in any way responsible. In a string of telegrams that followed Ward was told

that, while there was a consensus on the matter between the

Australian and United States governments, an agreement was not yet ready for signature, but when it was signed, as Menzies had intimated in answer to a question from Calwell in parliament on 29 November 1962, the Government would be prepared to have it discussed in the House of Representatives.! The incident offers a good example of the harassing techniques Ward had developed for use against the opponent who was his béte noire: one of the minor things that, in retrospect, give spice to the politics of the period. Though it was true that the Prime Minister had been less than informative on the details of the negotiations, there was no doubt about either their ultimate import or the divided Labor reactions to it. In October 1962 the Western Australian branch

of the party brought to the ALP Federal Executive a resolution calling on the party to declare its opposition to any base being built

in Australia that ‘could be used for the manufacture, firing or | NLA, MS. 2396/7/3225. A459

460 ROBERT MENZIES control of any nuclear missile or vehicle capable of carrying nuclear missiles’. This resolution was to be put on the agenda for the party’s biennial conference in June 1963. But the party’s Federal Executive

judged the matter to be more urgent than that and called for a special Federal Conference on 20 March to consider the Northwest

Cape issue and party policy, in general, on external affairs and defence. In accordance with normal ALP constitutional practice each State Executive appointed six delegates to the Conference, after heated discussions on the extent to which there should be implementation of the policy resolution reaffirmed at every biennial conference since 1955: that ‘cooperation with the United States is vital in the Pacific, is of crucial importance, and must be maintained

and extended’.

The Conference was stormy. It finally ended at 2 in the morning,

with a compromise between right and left factions, passed by a narrow majority (the vote was 19 to 17). To the relief of Calwell and

Whitlam, extremist delegates who wanted to reject the American proposal altogether did not have their way. But the resolution of acceptance was qualified by a series of provisos, of which the most important was that the facility must be under joint control, and that if the United States was at war or threatened with war it “must not be used in any way that would involve Australia without the prior knowledge and consent of the Australian Government’. The point here was that the communications station was to be an essential part of the United States radio net for making atomic polaris missiles

effective, a point which had added importance given the demand of Labor’s left wing that the southern hemisphere be declared a

nuclear-free zone. Calwell and Whitlam, though the ALP’s parliamentary leaders, were not by right members of the Federal Executive or the Special Conference, which was composed primarily of paid party or trade union officials. All they could do was go to the Hotel Kingston, in

Canberra, where the Conference was taking place, to encourage those of the 36 who agreed with their wish to maintain the American alliance. An enterprising Daily Telegraph photographer caught the

two men standing outside the hotel waiting for the Conference’s final verdict. Published next day, the picture became the leit-motif

for a stunning Liberal propagandist coup. The photograph was claimed graphically to show that, for parliamentary Labor, debate in the Houses or the party room was irrelevant. In reality the party was directed by 36 “faceless men’. 2 SMH, 12 March 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 461 Menzies at once denounced the ‘miserable compromise’ which the ‘outside parliament of the Labour Party’ had imposed. Calwell vainly challenged him to fight an election on the issue: the Labor Party was pledged to maintain friendship with the United States, ‘but we do not believe that friendship means subservience’. The

contrary Government argument was that in the event of a real atomic attack there would be no time for consultation, and that perfect trust between allies was crucial.? Soon the United States ambassador in Canberra, Bill Battle, who had been carrying the local burden of negotiation, was urging his superiors in Washington to hurry on with the task of removing remaining ‘stumbling blocks to final agreement’. The Labor Party’s difficulties over the Northwest Cape station, he wrote, ‘have placed Menzies’ Government in an excellent position to make much needed political ground’. This was ‘very much to the advantage of the United States’. Menzies had

just told him that he wanted to table the agreement in parliament before the end of the present session in May. ‘With present precarious balance in Parliament the Government could be replaced by Labor at any time. Our negotiations would then be vastly more difficult. Thus, we should cooperate fully in concluding negotiations at the earliest possible moment.’4 The agreement was finally concluded on 9 May, after negotiations which had lasted a year. Meantime the Government had weathered two censure motions moved by Calwell, one on alleged failure in

economic policy and the other on the granting of a Melbourne television licence to a subsidiary of Ansett Transport Industries (it was still Labor policy, Calwell said, to make television a public instrumentality, and he demanded a royal commission to examine the whole question of how the Government granted licences). In 3 Tbid., 22, 23 March 1963. + Battle to Secretary of State, 17 April, 25 March 1963, J. F Kennedy Library, Boston, NSF, Box 8. After a visit to Australia at the beginning of 1962 Dean Acheson wrote Averell

Harriman, then Assistant Secretary of State, a long letter in reply to a request for the qualities needed in an American ambassador to Australia. A prime task would be that of ‘gaining the confidence of the Prime Minister—either Mr. Menzies, or, perhaps Mr. Calwell, both pretty rugged characters—and their associates’ ... We have sent some dismal political hacks to Australia, relieved only by an occasional run-of-themill foreign service officer ... The next appointment will be a critical one. Another political nonentity would be a disaster. The appointee should be either a leading foreign service officer, ... or a non-service (and largely non-political) figure of distinction’ (Acheson to Harriman, 13 February 1962, Papers of Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence). The advice was well heeded. On 7 June 1962 the Senate confirmed the appointment to the post of William C. Battle, a 42-year-old and highly respected principal of a large Virginia law firm. He had three young children aged four to seven (biographical sketch, Kennedy Library, Boston, NSF Box 8, Australia 6/6/62-6/15/62.) Almost at once the Battles and the Menzies became good friends, especially due to Dame Pattie’s kindness to the children.

462 ROBERT MENZIES both instances Menzies seized on the allegation that the Labor Party’s authority ‘has been handed over to 36 men’.° Particularly in

the first case this enabled him to deflect attention away from the economy to Labor’s ‘dangerous and evasive’ policies on foreign affairs and defence. ‘It might have been different in the days when Labour had strong leaders’, he said. But it was not true today: A Labour government would be the tired spokesman of 36 outsiders, none of them elected by the Australian people, and any 19 of whom can

control the minds and voices of a Labour government ... Labour has leaders who bow in the corridors and wait for orders... In other words, the people are not being offered by Labour a ‘government of the people’ who will attack problems and exercise their own judgment and stand by that judgment but people who will say to the obscure nonentities who give the orders: ‘Please, what am I to do?’

Calwell denounced the Prime Minister’s ‘vilification and misrepresentation’. A Labor government would approve of the establishment of the base, but would renegotiate the terms of the agreement to obtain joint control by Australia and the United States. But the agreement was ratified as it stood by the House of Representatives on 22 May, and by the Senate a few days later. Menzies had had his

way: the matter had been tied up before Parliament adjourned for the winter break. On the day that the House of Representatives approved of the Northwest Cape agreement Menzies also announced a £205 million increase in Australian defence expenditure over the subsequent five years. It was Australia’s third and biggest defence increase in the past seven months. Menzies drew loud applause from Government

and Opposition members when he said that a priority was the defence of territory in Papua New Guinea, and he went on to detail increases in the numbers of personnel in each of the services and of equipment purchases, particularly for the air force. The announcement in fact rested on a series of major decisions taken by Cabinet at the end of the previous month, on the advice of an expert defence

review instigated largely by Arthur Tange, head of the External Affairs Department, who was especially aware of American feeling that Australia ought to pull her weight more strongly in the West’s

defence effort in the Southeast Asian Region.’ Though therefore quite independent of the Northwest Cape agreement, the increase 5 SMH, 19 April 1963. 6 Ibid., 4 April 1963.

7 For details of these recommendations and decisions see Peter Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 269-72, where their wider significance is also discussed.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 463 in defence expenditure seemed nicely timed to meet part of the criticism of dependence on United States protection. Not that it satisfied everybody. The financial editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (T. M. Fitzgerald), for example, observed that, ‘economically speaking, it is not a heavy suit of armour that Sir Robert proposes issuing the nation’. Fitzgerald calculated that, given the foreseeable rate of growth in national product, defence would be taking only 2.9 per cent by 1967-68. It was hard to see a significant change: without

the trumpeted increases, defence expenditure was already taking the scandalously low figure of 2.7 per cent of national product.® For the Menzies late 1962 had not been a time of good health. Dame Pattie, ordered by her doctors earlier in the year to cancel arrange-

ments for three months, had been left behind in London after her visit there at the time of the Prime Ministers’ Conference. Dr Shaw,

who in 1957 had arranged for the removal of Menzies’ tonsils, decided that Dame Pattie’s condition demanded the same thing. Friends who visited her in hospital sent reassuring messages to Menzies, who was especially pleased that he and the Harrisons had persuaded her to come home by sea: that would give her more rest. ‘Jet flying is, in my experience, the most tiring way of travelling. It

took both Bunting and myself a good fortnight after our arrival before we felt completely normal.’”? He was, in fact, not “completely

normal’ until well into the new year, fatigue being complicated by his bout of diverticulitis. As the year began Menzies and, at various times, other ministers, began to assert with some confidence that the economy was improving. Though on this matter their opponents inevitably took the opposite view, it was hard to gainsay the Government's good faith when it decided in February to set up an expert, non-parliamentary

committee to examine, in unprecedented detail, the state of the nation’s economy. Dr James Vernon, managing director of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, was named as the committee’s chairman, and a group of distinguished economists and businessmen were chosen to serve under him.!° So far as immediate action

was concerned, the Commonwealth agreed, at a Loan Council

8 SMH, 23 May 1963.

9 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 25 October 1962, MFP. The Harrisons took the convalescing Dame Pattie under their wings and were responsible for putting her on the ship. 10 Crawford, Karmel, Molesworth and Myer. In announcing the appointments, Menzies

said that the inquiry would study the availability of credit, the distribution of the workforce, the balance of payments and trends in costs, prices, wages, productivity and the standard of living.

464 ROBERT MENZIES meeting, also in February, to a £15 million grant to the States for unemployment relief over the next four months.!! And within a few weeks the Royal tour, with the outcomes we have already seen, proved to be a personal triumph for Menzies. As parliament went into recess late in May, he was poised to receive in England, and

with the pageantry dear to his heart, the formal sealing of the honours that Her Majesty had conferred upon him in Australia. Naturally, he could not yet know what the passage of time has made clear: that whatever he said to the Queen about loving her as she passed by would quickly become for Menzies and his party— and for Australian history—far less important than the instinctive nous through which, just after that, he seized on the politically stunning image of Labor’s 36 faceless men’. At a press conference on the eve of leaving Sydney on 13 June, Menzies said he would be away a month visiting Britain, the United States and Canada. He would have talks on the Common Market

and on international affairs, and on 1 July he would be formally installed by the Queen as Knight of the Thistle. The writer of the Sun-Herald’s ‘Candid Comment’, often acerbic about Menzies, was on this occasion benign. The Prime Minister, he said, could go overseas content that the ‘political pendulum’ was slowly swinging his way; he should make this a well-earned holiday.'

Menzies arrived in London just after the Profumo scandal had broken. A Sydney cartoonist depicted him at the doorway of No. 10 Downing Street: ‘I’ve come to have discussions with your Prime

Minister—is it still Mr Macmillan?’!s It was, but he was a very preoccupied Macmillan. He entertained Menzies at lunch, and they

had talks, but brief ones. The ceremonial side of the visit began

shortly afterwards, with Menzies’ installation as an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. By the end of the month

Menzies, his wife and son Ken were in Scotland. While weekend

guests of the motor-car magnate, Lord Rootes, they drove to a service at Weem parish church, where Menzies’ grandfather had worshipped. Menzies read the lesson, before setting out for Edinburgh, where he and his family members were to be the guests of the Queen at the Palace of Holyrood House. Then, on 1 July, came what some Australians called ‘Menzies Day’ in Edinburgh. In the

tiny Thistle Chapel at St Giles High Kirk, in a centuries-old ceremony, the Queen installed Sir Robert Menzies as a Knight of the Order.

' Tbid., 15 February 1963. 12 Sun-Herald, 9,23 June 1963. 13 Tbid., 17 June 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 465 The day was grey but the scene was colourful. Flags flew all along the Royal mile from Holyrood House, and large crowds gathered to

see the Queen’s arrival at the cathedral. There was a guard of honour of 50 members of the Royal Company of Archers, dressed in

green uniforms and eagle-plumed bonnets, and when the Queen

came to the main door a fanfare sounded by the Household Trumpeters announced the beginning of proceedings. Heralds in medieval tabards of scarlet and gold headed a procession which wound slowly towards the West Door of the cathedral. Dame Pattie

and Ken walked with members of the Royal Household and the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came at the end of the procession

with Sir Robert and 12 other Knights of the Thistle. Each was dressed in the forest green mantle of the Order and carried a velvet

hat with a white plume. At the Royal Stall Menzies stood before the Queen and, after traditional prayers were said, the requisite oath was administered and the secretary of the Order pronounced the style and titles of the new knight. After the service the Queen and Duke walked with the knights to the Signet Library for the unrobing. Later, Menzies travelled to Edinburgh University where he was given the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Presenting him to the Chancellor the eulogist, Professor Archibald Campbell, said: ‘For his services to Australia, to the British Commonwealth and to the world honours have been heaped on him, too many to enumerate’ .!4

Two days later Menzies was in the United States, on Independence day, in the grounds of Monticello, delivering the first of anew series of Jefferson Memorial orations. Monticello, a national shrine,

had been the home of Thomas Jefferson, the third president and drafter of the Declaration of Independence. To be invited to give this oration was a great honour. Menzies was the first foreigner to do so:

the previous orations had been delivered by former presidents Roosevelt and Truman.'° His theme was the ‘deep feeling’ of Australia for America, ‘not just because your friendship contributes so ereatly to our national security but basically because, great or small, we work for the same kind of free world’. He spoke of points of

special Australian interest and understanding in the past, only exaggerating a little by taking as one prime example the very act of M4 Tbid., 2 July 1963.

'S Kennedy Library, Boston, NSF, Box 8, Australia, 6/6/62-6/15/62 and 3/16/63-7/5/ 63. From the time of World War II, Menzies had always been greatly admired in America for his speaking skills. It is possible, also, that there was in this case the additional admiration of Battle, the ambassador in Canberra. Battle had been married in November 1952. At that time his wife, Frances Barry Webb, was secretary to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which operated the shrine at Monticello.

466 ROBERT MENZIES federation when ‘the draftsmen of the Australian Constitution turned to the Constitution of the United States for “light and learning” ’.!¢

A few days later Menzies, Dame Pattie, and other members of the Australian party lunched with President Kennedy. Kennedy had a short talk with Menzies before the lunch, whether to more effect than the trading of generalities seems unlikely. Kennedy knew well enough where Menzies stood on international matters, both from the Jefferson Oration (there is a verbatim copy in Kennedy’s papers), and from a special note he received from one of his staff on the eve of the meeting. It read: Averell feels you would like to know that the Prime Minister believes that he was among the first—if not the first—Head of Government to support your stand on the Soviet missiles in Cuba last October. He did this without consulting his Cabinet.'”

At his press conference on his return to Australia Menzies spoke of little beyond the present Cold War situation about which, he said, he had found both in London and Washington a feeling of ‘restrained optimism’. The breakdown of Russo-Chinese solidarity, combined

with Kennedy’s firmness in confronting Russia over the Cuban crisis seemed likely ‘to give Khrushchev a more amenable attitude in his relations with the West’. He rejected rumours that there was

some coldness between Macmillan and Kennedy over NATO problems; on the contrary ‘I found on both sides a very healthy personal, friendly relationship between them’. He said nothing about Vietnam, or the Northwest Cape. But he did make it clear that Australia would be behind Britain in guaranteeing the integrity of

Malaysia, the new and independent Malayan federation, loudly opposed by Sukarno, but due to be set up at the end of August.!® Though presidential and official circles in the United States were

naturally gratified to see Menzies so long in power they reacted favourably to a request by Calwell, who passed through Washington shortly after Menzies left for home, to call on the President. Calwell

was returning from an extended tour to the Middle East, various European capitals, and London. In the course of a detailed CIA biography, made available to the President before his meeting with Calwell, the latter is described as “most cooperative and friendly towards Americans’, a man who ‘takes pride in the claim that his 6 SMH, 5 July 1963. '” Kennedy Library, NSF, Box 8. 18 SMH, 15, 16 July 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 467 grandfather was born in the United States and affirms that Australia needs this country as “a partner in defense” ’. Though somewhat unprepossessing in appearance, Calwell has an alert mind, writes well, and can be a fluent and facile speaker. Although in private conversation he has sometimes shown deference and fairness to hostile views, he is easily provoked in the heat of political debate, and more

than once his impulsive temperament has prompted him to rash

behaviour.

A long (and unsigned) memorandum from within the State Department briefed Kennedy for his talks with Calwell, beginning with a clear rationale: With the present (Menzies) government operating with a majority of one in the House of Representatives, there is always the possibility that sickness, absence, or party-jumping could bring about an Australian

election and that Mr. Calwell might be returned as the new Prime Minister. Our purpose in receiving him is therefore not only to show courtesy to a distinguished foreign visitor and to take advantage of his being in Washington to convey our views on items of world importance but to avoid a snub to a potential first minister of our close ally.!

On 15 October 1963 Menzies announced that there would be a snap

election on 30 November, a year earlier than was constitutionally

required. His Government had survived for two years with a working majority of one, having weathered no less than five censure motions. But that was at a cost, he said, of devoting valuable time to ‘the almost daily problem of political survival, with all the cumu-

lative strains involved’. This was not acceptable at a time in Aus-

tralian history when international problems, defence, and the

nation’s economic affairs demanded undivided Government atten-

tion. Sickness or death could at any time upset the precarious balance. For stable government and steady policy it was essential that the Ministry should have a good working majority. For the Opposition Calwell was critical. To the reasonable argument that an early election involved expense that could be avoided he added the more bizarre claim that the aim of the election was simply to give Holt, regarded on all sides as future successor to Menzies, ‘an easy ride into the Prime Ministership’. (Menzies’ answering quip came quick as a flash: ‘then you assume we will win?’)

'9 Kennedy Library, NSF, Box 8, Australia General 7/963 to 8/13/63; Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Central Reference, Biographical Register, ibid.

468 ROBERT MENZIES McEwen was understood not to be enthusiastic at the news, but he accepted without demur Menzies’ prerogative in deciding the date.*° That prerogative was certainly held, traditionally, by all nonLabor Prime Ministers. But in Menzies’ case it was exercised with increasing imperiousness. By 1963 it is certainly evident that it was never his practice to consult his colleagues before announcement of an election was made. This was merely a minor manifestation of Menzies’ unquestioned ascendancy as Party leader, an ascendancy which, firmly established at least by the election of 1958, reached its

apogee in the 1963 contest. The 1961 electoral setback led to frequent, but feeble, demands from the Party organization to be consulted by the parliamentary wing. In practical terms, that ‘wing’ equalled Menzies himself. And when it came to policy Menzies’ penchant was simply to ignore the Party organization, a tendency

made the more easy by the long party presidency of his old colleague and friend, Sir Philip McBride. Repeated press allegations that his ‘towering authority’ made Menzies for all practical purposes ‘dictator’ of his Party were not exaggerations.2! The contemporary verdict of ‘Jo’ Gullett, Government Whip for the seven years up to 1955, that ‘the Menzies Government was “90 per cent

Menzies”’, was widely accepted. Given the fact that Menzies ‘exceeds in brilliance, experience and seniority all his colleagues’, said Gullett, ‘it is difficult to set limits to his personal influence. He is one of the most persuasive men alive’. The hiccup of 1961 hardly

dented the prestige and authority deriving from an impressive record of electoral victories: despite sometimes bitter criticism outside, few in the party queried that instinct about when and how to

strike which had been a key element in Menzies’ long political career. It remained to be seen whether the brusque amputation of a third of a parliament’s life would now prove a dangerous gamble. Before considering the election proper it is important to note the attitudes Menzies had been developing over the previous couple of

years to an issue which would almost inevitably come up in the campaign: education. In August 1960 when asked whether or not his Government favoured the provision of financial aid to denominational schools, Menzies sidestepped the question in the usual way. Such aid was a State matter, outside the jurisdiction of the federal government.” In the following year he began to approach 20 SMH, 16 October 1963. As late as 10 October after a tense seven hours in the Representatives the Government was saved from defeat when Wentworth refrained at the last

moment from moving a threatened amendment to a Disabled Persons Accom-

modation Bill. “1 See, e.g., ibid., 14 November 1962. 22 Cited in J. S. Gregory, Church and State (Melbourne, 1973), 232.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 469 that question within the jurisdiction in which his Government did have responsibility: the Australian Capital Territory. Mainly as a result of quiet negotiation between Menzies and Eris O’Brien, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Goulburn and Canberra, the

Commonwealth agreed to provide interest subsidies, first on secondary, and then on primary school buildings erected by church

authorities in the ACT.*2 When opening new buildings at the Church of England Girls’ Grammar School in 1964 Menzies carefully explained that the Government had begun to assist private schools in the ACT because it admitted a responsibility for bringing so many people and their children into the area.*4 But he also took credit for recognizing that Canberra was not alone in facing edu-

cational difficulties of scale. In April 1962, for example, when opening a new science wing at Canberra Grammar School, he noted that the proportion of students studying science at Australian universities was less than it had been ten years before. The observation

gave him the chance to deliver a homily on the need for a sound supply of good scientists—people with a sense of mission, for these were the people who kept ‘this world going’ .*° The fact was that at this time a combination of influences—popu-

lation growth, prosperity and higher school retention rates—was bringing great pressure to bear on Australia’s school systems, both

State and private. The difficulty reached a symbolic climax in Goulburn in July 1962, when local Catholic schools closed their doors and forced their students to seek places in State schools. This action was triggered by a long-running dispute with the authorities over inadequate toilet facilities in a Catholic girls’ primary school, and the declared inability of the school, without special financial

help, to meet the required standard. In a moderate but strongly worded address to his flock, Archbishop O’Brien pointed out that While the State schools of Goulburn had an enrolment of 2900 children, the Catholic schools had 2200. The education of the latter, if left to State schools, would have cost the taxpayer at least £200 000

a year. But a much smaller sum than that—though beyond their own present resources—would allow the Catholic management to provide additional buildings, equipment and teachers to redress present deficiencies and overcrowding. The incident was a virtual demonstration in favour of state aid, and elicited great controversy.

The State schools could not cope, and the Catholic schools, *3 On these negotiations see, especially, J. L. Cullinane, The Goulburn School ‘Strike’: The Inside Story (Canberra, CEO Printing Service), 17. 24 SMH, 21 September 1964. 45 Tbid., 20 April 1962.

470 ROBERT MENZIES declining to penalize their students, reopened. But their point had been forcibly made.*°

A straw in the wind was the recommendation of the Policy Committee of the New South Wales State Liberal Party that the

Party should abandon its opposition to state aid, both to woo Catholic voters and to forestall moves like that in Goulburn to put

intolerable pressure on the State system. The recommendation caused immense sectarian controversy within the Party and for the time being nothing decisive was done.”” A few days later Menzies launched an attack on Bishop Loane, an Anglican Coadjutor Bishop of Sydney, for making the ‘irresponsible and reckless’ prediction that he, as Prime Minister, was about to announce a policy of state aid in a White Paper he would shortly bring to parliament.28 When it appeared, the Paper was primarily a historical account of how the

Commonwealth had settled the question of state aid in its own jurisdiction, the ACT, but had refused to take over the States’ educational functions, while co-operating by increasing funds generally available to them. Only in the tertiary field, especially since the Murray Committee reported, had there been direct Commonwealth intervention. When Menzies moved the usual resolution to have

the Paper printed, Whitlam countered with a series of radical Opposition amendments demanding the establishment of a new Commonwealth Department of Education and a series of measures to involve the Commonwealth directly in education. Though these

were debated hotly, they were not voted on before parliament dissolved for the 1963 election. But the whole episode looked like the harbinger of a coming change in Labor’s policy on state aid, too.

As the months went by Menzies came out more and more ostentatiously in support of non-State schooling. In March 1963, for example, he opened a new Catholic Teachers’ Training College at Watson in the ACT. Australia, he said, ‘would never be without church schools. The Christian churches provided an essential background to civilised education’.”? A few weeks later he opened new science laboratories at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, gave his usual homily on the urgent need for more science training

and praised the emergence of a private Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools (IFASES), which

76 Cullinane, The Goulburn School ‘Strike’, 52. The Catholic Weekly reported one layman important in the Catholic ‘strike’ as saying: ‘a high Commonwealth official told me that Sir Robert Menzies had been impressed’. 27 SMH, 5 October 1962. 28 Tbid., 10 October 1962. 29 Tbid., 25 March 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 471 had provided £20 000 for this block. Then in October, on the eve of

the election, Menzies opened additions costing £400 000 at the Waverly Christian Brothers College. An appeal had already raised £190 000, and the cost of the new science laboratories, £15 000, had already been met by the IFASES. He again lauded the private school system. “The greater the variety and versatility in education’, he said, ‘and the more parents were encouraged to choose their own schools, the better it would be for all’.32 No one who had watched the Prime Minister’s performances at these openings could have been very surprised at the position he took at the election on what at

first seemed the minor question of education. It was in contradiction to his position in the 1962 White Paper, but in extension of measures firmly in practice in his ACT bailiwick. In announcing the election, Menzies declared that the Government would fight it principally on foreign policy issues. In effect, it would seek from the electorate endorsement of Government action on three key issues: the Northwest Cape agreement with the United States; resistance to Labor’s proposal for a nuclear-free southern hemisphere; and participation with Britain in the defence of the

new state of Malaysia. Immediately and in the campaign which followed Menzies presented the issues as clearcut and depicted Labor’s response to them as weak and equivocal, the product of factionalism and external pressure. Though it was true that on these

matters there had been within the Labor ranks much internal

debate, some of it bitter, the parliamentary party came to the election with modified acceptance of the thrust of Government policy. Calwell spelt out agreement with the establishment of the Northwest Cape facility, but demanded that it be jointly controlled by Australia and the United States. He insisted that his party stood for a nuclear-free southern hemisphere only if that could be agreed on by the relevant powers, including China and the United States—an unrealistic proviso which had the effect of making the policy in effect

the same as the Government’s. Nor was Labor opposed to helping Malaysia, but it wanted conditions somewhat different from those announced by the Government. When the ‘strategic reserve’ for Southeast Asian defence was established in 1955 Evatt had denounced the Government's policy and demanded the recall of Australian troops from Malaya. But by 1963, when Sukarno developed his ‘confrontation’ campaign against

the newly independent Malaysia, the Labor position necessarily changed. The establishment of Malaysia, a confederation of Malaya, 30 Tbid., 21 October 1963.

472 ROBERT MENZIES Singapore and the former British territories on the island of Borneo, had been formally announced on 16 September. Sukarno, who over

the previous months had whipped up Indonesian emotion against what he purported to see as a kind of neo-colonialism threatening to the integrity of his country, refused to recognize the new federation, which in turn broke off diplomatic relations with Indonesia. In a tense international atmosphere rioting mobs in Jakarta attacked

the Malaysian and British embassies, burning down the latter. Sukarno, who had been building up his armed forces, particularly with Russian assistance, was regarded with alarm as a demagogue, whose relationship with the PKI, Indonesia’s Communist Party, was seen in the Cold War atmosphere to be dangerously ambiguous. In some British circles Sukarno was openly compared to Hitler, and

the government of the United Kingdom, having pledged itself to guarantee Malaysia’s integrity, took a hard line against him. Australia was closely involved in the intense diplomatic activity which took place before and after the establishment of the new | federation. The Australian Minister for External Affairs, Barwick, together with his senior departmental officers and the Ambassador to Indonesia, K. C. O. Shann, took—as had happened during the West New Guinea dispute?!—a “firm but friendly attitude’ towards Indonesia. (The amiable relationship which Shann established with the volatile Sukarno was a key factor in bringing about immunity enjoyed by the Australian Embassy during the Jakarta riots of September 1963.) Predictably enough, Menzies in contrast veered more towards the British line. From January 1963 a new Foreign Affairs

and Defence Committee of Cabinet (FAD) kept close watch on issues of national security and in effect made the crucial decisions on policy. Symptomatic of a tendency to confine major decisions to an inner group of senior ministers FAD’s membership initially consisted of Menzies, McEwen and Holt—the Government’s three most high-ranking members—together with Barwick (External Affairs), Townley (Defence), Hasluck (Territories) and Shane Paltridge (Civil

Aviation). A decision by this committee lay behind a dramatic statement on Confrontation which Menzies made to the House of Representatives on 25 September. In it he pledged full Australian

31 Barwick had been chiefly responsible, in January 1962, for persuading Cabinet to reverse its policy of hostility to the Indonesian claim for West Irian (the previous Dutch West New Guinea). See, primarily, Barwick, A Radical Tory, 173-7; Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 230-1; R. Chauvel, ‘Nearly a Full Circle: From Burton to Barwick, Australian Policy Towards Indonesia’, in John Legge (ed.), New Directions in Australian Foreign Policy, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no. 45, 1997.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 473 military support to Malaysia against any armed invasion or subversive activity. In reply Calwell announced that, as a recent Federal Labor Conference in Perth had decreed, the formation of Malaysia meant superseding of the party plank demanding the recall of Australian troops from Malaya. Labor applauded Malaysia’s ‘experiment in nationhood’, believed it should be given every chance of success, and agreed that Australia pledge its support. However, that pledge should be given directly to Malaya and not indirectly through the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve. Australia was an independent nation: the continued presence of her troops in Malaysia must be covered by “a treaty clear, open and, if possible, mutual, which gives Australia an effective voice in the decision of the treaty powers’. But

Menzies pointed out that Malaysia would never agree to a mutual defence treaty with Australia because this would amount to a military alliance, and Malaysia was an unaligned country. Calwell delivered his policy speech on 6 November and Menzies made his six days later. Given recent advances in the sophistication and ubiquity of television, journalists thought that this would be the main campaign medium and the leaders’ policy speeches appeared to give colour to the prediction. The Liberals’ campaign managers decreed that Menzies’ speech should be delivered on television; he sighed, and made the most of it. Writing in October to his friend Alfred Stirling in Rome he spoke of: looking forward to the forthcoming election, which will, Iam sure, be a lively one. [am to present my Policy Speech to the electors over radio

and television—though the latter medium is one I detest; I would always prefer to have a live audience! However, I realise this is the way to reach the most people, and allow them to form opinions without the

distraction of interjections drowning out the main points at a public meeting.*4

Menzies’ speech was taped four days before the telecast but was kept secret; the tapes were delivered to television stations only a few hours before the broadcast time. Calwell had given his policy speech before an audience of 1200 in the Royale Ballroom, Melbourne, but it was also televised. On the day before, the Melbourne Age reflected on the ‘stern test’ Calwell was setting himself— 32 Por an excellent short account of the complex story of Confrontation itself, see Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 255 ff. Edwards also presents here a most authoritative account of Australian diplomacy and the making of Australian policy. 33 SMH, 26 September, 28 October 1963. 34 Menzies to Stirling, 14 October 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/30/247.

474 ROBERT MENZIES a bid to have the best of both worlds in electioneering—the old style

before an audience and the new before the TV cameras. The TV screen is

a relentless and pitiless exposer. Appearing live, as Mr Calwell plans, denies the chance of producing the smoothly edited performance made possible by filming.

In the upshot, the paper thought Calwell’s performance somewhat indifferent: ‘His chief concern’, it drily reported, ‘seemed to be to cover as much of the speech as would fit into the time available and not to worry unduly about dramatic effects’. Menzies’ effort was predictably suave and polished. His invited audience of 250 Liberal supporters guaranteed that there would be

no interjections. “To make a full National Policy Speech in 40 minutes is impossible’, he told them. “To ask viewers to look and listen for more than 40 minutes would be unkind. There will be issued publicly a full statement of policy, a statement of which this speech is, in some ways, a very brief summary.’ The speech that followed was couched in the usual elegant simplicities, well pitched towards that lower common denominator of intelligence which an internal party research report had a few years before purported to identify as the key to success in political television.%° In the belief that make-up smooths out facial lines, leaving the face blank and devoid of personality, the Prime Minister declined to be made up, and instead of direct, focused lighting the cameramen used ‘broad

lighting’ to produce uniform light throughout the studio. ‘This meant that the normal high clarity of the 625-line picture [of that day] was lost, but some of the unreality of the staged scene was also

removed and a similarity to newsreel pictures achieved.’’’ As the Age saw it, ‘Sir Robert was clearly aiming at the friendly, intimate

approach. He wanted to appear that he was in your living room, reasoning with you. A picked audience of friends assured him of a sympathetic [hearing], but for some listeners it might have implied that he was talking only to his friends, and not to the nation’.°® 35 Age, 5,7 November 1963. 36 In 1959 the Liberal Public Relations Officer, Edgar Holt, was sent to Britain and the US

to report on the use of political television there. His chief conclusion in a long report was that ‘the power of television to communicate the sort of information that can be

expressed in language is ... limited by the intellectual power of the viewer and cannot be expected to enlarge the informed public at any sensational rate . . . The less intelligent and the unintelligent elector is probably no more influenced in terms of ideas by television than he is by the presentation of political ideas in any form. But it would seem that we can interest him to some extent in the personality of the politician and hope, at the same time, that he may absorb a simple message’, NLA, MS. 4936/ 14/414/36. 37 Colin A. Hughes and John S. Western, The Prime Minister’s Policy Speech: A Case Study in Televised Politics (Canberra, 1966), 4. 38 13 November 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 475 Another disadvantage was that this method of presenting the policy gave Labor a fine chance of almost instantaneously scoring off Menzies. In Melbourne an ALP rally watched the Prime Minister’s telecast, and then heard its star speaker, Whitlam, deliver an off-the-

cuff reply for the same length of time. But there was a sense in which Menzies did have his cake and eat it too. He followed the television appearance, the next night, by the live public appearance

he so much relished, in his own electorate. The Age’s advance comment seemed nicely to pin a turning point in campaign style: The television seems fully entrenched in the pattern of electioneering in this country. It is a question whether the traditional rally of the party faithful at the old-style public meeting, when the party leader announces policy and gives the campaign slogans, will much longer survive. No political party in Australia has yet dared to abandon public meetings, but there can no longer be any doubt that their importance is far less than that of television appearances. The Prime Minister seems to be in advance of Mr Calwell in this. Sir Robert Menzies has chosen a two-part

method of announcing his government’s campaign policy, first in a filmed television appearance and then in a public meeting in his own electorate. Like Mr Calwell, he has found a means of bridging two worlds, but with the difference that his method promises him the enjoyment of a double debut.*?

In the upshot the public meeting was as lively as Menzies could have hoped, thanks chiefly to the noisiness of a contingent of Banthe-Bomb demonstrators. Indeed, there was a point at which the Prime Minister’s address had to be stopped while police quelled a fierce fracas between these demonstrators and Young Liberals!

At the beginning of the election campaign Labor, with some success, attempted to contrive that it should be waged on a wider front than one embracing only foreign policy and defence. In his policy speech Calwell listed a variety of ‘home front’ issues which he said were of ‘deep personal concern to the electorate’. Promises followed of increased expenditure on matters ranging from social services and housing to health and development of the North. Labor would ‘plan Australia’s way out of the disastrous cycle of stop and go’, using existing banking powers to control hire purchase credit, and ensuring that expenditure on public works was maintained at a level sufficient to stimulate economic growth. Treasurer Holt had his Department cost Calwell’s promises, and purported to show that they would involve at least twice the sum claimed by the Opposition leader himself. And despite Calwell’s 39 Age, 5 November 1963.

476 ROBERT MENZIES gloomy picture of the Government’s alleged economic failure the economy had been progressively picking up, however painfully, over the previous eighteen months. Unemployment was ‘virtually down to bedrock’.*° At the same time, the recent appointment of the Vernon Committee to make a close study of the present state and future prospects of the economy seemed a welcome reflection of the Government's concern to find ways of ensuring orderly growth. Menzies’ position was also tactically stronger than that of his rival on the wild card of this election: the crisis in education. A report by State Education Ministers in mid-1963 had calculated that, due to the combined effects of immigration and the rise in births since the end of World War IL, there was for existing pupil numbers in Aus-

tralia as a whole a total of 3600 too few classrooms and 5200 too few teachers. Whitlam, who quoted these numbers, accused the Government of having rejected appeals by State premiers for extra funds to meet the crisis; and in elaborating Labor’s policy Calwell promised

an emergency grant to the States, for educational purposes, of

£10 million. A Labor Government, he said, would also extend the Commonwealth scholarship scheme to secondary schools, and also institute a full inquiry into current educational difficulties. But, as the Catholic Weekly noted, it remained to be seen whether a

Labor Ministry could implement state aid if recommended by the inquiry, since an ALP Federal Conference had already decided against it. Menzies, for his part, had no hesitation in grasping the nettle. He had extended aid to private schools in the ACT, and over the last year had repeatedly praised the variety in education that church schools allowed, as well as stressing the urgent need to improve science education in schools of all kinds. Though careful in

his White Paper of October 1962 to define education as a State responsibility, he had also stressed that making more Commonwealth funds generally available to the States did not necessarily guarantee that the augmented resources would be spent on education. He was ready now to announce direct Commonwealth action to assist schools. In his policy speech he promised 10 000 Commonwealth scholarships for secondary students, to be awarded on merit irrespective of the schools attended. He promised £5 million a year to supply buildings and facilities for science teaching in secondary schools, to be available to State and non-State schools alike. And the States would in addition be offered £5 million towards the building and equipment costs of technical schools. There can be no doubt of Menzies’ genuine concern at the plight of schools: it was of a piece 40 SMH, 23 November 1963.

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 477 with his work for universities. But it would be naive not to note also his careful eye on the electorate. He had his reward when Senator Cole, in opening the DLP campaign in New South Wales, declared: Those concerned with equality in education face a clear choice. They vote DLP. If they give their preference to the ALP they are voting against

the Menzies proposal which is a solution to a problem which has long faced Australia ... No political party will ever again take an interest in the independent schools if the voters who send their children to them show they are not prepared to vote for justice for themselves and their children.*!

Two external events during the electoral campaign caused many, though quite uncheckable, speculations about their possible effect on the voting: the assassination in Dallas of President Kennedy, and the death in Melbourne, only a year short of his 100th birthday, of Archbishop Mannix. Some, including the ALP Federal Secretary, C. Wyndham, thought Kennedy’s assassination may have made some voters, especially women, cautious about changing the Govern-

ment. Others thought Mannix’s death might lessen the strength of the DLP vote, but it was clear that it came too close to the poll to have much effect. Actually, right to the counting of the votes the

assumption was widespread that the contest would be close. In many quarters Labor was thought to have the best chance of victory

since 1949. The opinion of the journalist and test cricketer, Jack Fingleton, was typical of those who thought this way. Reporting on the election at the height of the campaigns to a friend in America, he

wrote that he ‘wouldn’t at all be surprised if the Prime Minister went down. This is the second time he’s gone to the country short of his elected term and people are a bit apt to get fed-up with recurring elections’.44 Menzies’ own mood fluctuated. Both he and Calwell had some stormy meetings, and in a visit to Western Australia late in the campaign he described the possible outcome of his campaign as ‘a toss-up’. Asked by an interjector at a Moonee Ponds meeting what he would do if the election again produced only a majority of two he replied: ‘I will sit down and cry bitter tears’.

He need not have worried. At the end of counting he had a

majority of 22, one of whom would have to be Speaker. The Govern-

ment regained three of the eight seats it had lost in Queensland in

41 Quoted Colin Hughes, ‘Political Review’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 36, March 1964,

42 Fingleton to Pierre Salinger, Kennedy Library, Boston. Central Subject File, CO 18 Australia.

478 ROBERT MENZIES 1961, all five of the seats it had lost in New South Wales, and captured two more in that State. Gains were more modest in other States, and

the voting pattern was very uneven over the whole country. The swing against Labor varied from 3 to 7 per cent, except in Western Australia, where Labor gained in a majority of the seats.43 DLP pref-

erences went solidly (an estimated 80-90 per cent) to the Government; and in New South Wales, Colin Hughes concluded in an expert summary, ‘State aid appears to have cut deeply into Labor’s following’. He thought too that Labor losses were probably increased

by ‘the return of the Sydney Morning Herald to the Government

camp (although rather like the Grand Army retreating from Moscow some units were back across the border before others)’ .44

(In writing later to thank his friend Frank Packer for the Daily Telegraph's “tremendous loyalty and enthusiastic help right through

the campaign’, Menzies added: “I am not sure that you shouldn’t become an evangelist, since in the last couple of weeks of the campaign you appeared to have converted your great contemporary!”*) Labor spokesmen admitted that the sloganizing about ’36 faceless

men’ had lost them votes, as had the Government’s alleged misrepresentation of ALP defence and foreign policies. At the declaration of the poll in Yarra Dr Cairns declared that Labor must move to the left: the 1963 election had been decided ‘by fear, and superstitious and impractical people who fell easy victims to the “big lie””. Perhaps Menzies, however, expressed spontaneously what some others saw as a sinister secret when, in October of the following year he wrote to Sir Alec Home regretting the Tory loss of the British elections of that year. That was partly, he thought, attributable to the gloom of ministers, especially ‘RAB’ Butler, who expected defeat and showed it.

+3 Hasluck wrote Menzies a most insightful analysis of the Western Australian results, noting how the differences in political preoccupations between that State and Eastern Australia made it almost like a foreign country (Hasluck to Menzies, 4 December 1963, AA, M2576/1, Item 38). Most of the other analysis presented here is taken from Hughes, ‘Political Review’, 102-4. 4 Hughes, ibid., 103. On the eve of polling day the SMH had advised voters that ‘The best interests of the nation would assuredly be served by the return of Sir Robert

Menzies’ Government’, 28 November 1963.

* Packer replied modestly: ‘What we did to help was prompted by our belief that you are and have been a very, very great Prime Minister, and that it was overwhelmingly in Australia’s interest that you should continue to lead the Government. Apparently

the public, and particularly the young folk, went along with this’. He thought

Menzies overdid the reference to his ‘Evangelistic potentialities’, for the SMH at the end gave only ‘a grudging acknowledgement that you were the best of a bad lot’ (Menzies to Packer, 23 December, and Packer to Menzies, 28 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/25/201).

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 479 This kind of defeatism ... can, of course, do tremendous harm in a closely fought election. My own experience has been that in an election the psychological factors are no less important than the material ones. During my last visit to London, I took every opportunity of saying to your senior colleagues that they were looking too gloomy, that one must conduct a campaign looking and sounding like a winner and that there will always be a certain number of people who like to be on the winning

side.

Menzies himself, as he told correspondents like Latham and Harrison, felt (as Packer did) that this was an election ‘in which younger voters gave us remarkable support’, and that explained much of his success.?” Old friends and colleagues, who knew him well, paid tribute to what seemed to them much more important: the flair of Menzies’ political instinct and timing, and the incomparable skill with which he had consolidated so much of the potential support which the issues he decided to highlight—national security, state aid, the question of the ALP and democracy—were bound, in the circumstances of 1963, to attract. In this spirit Spender cabled

him to say that ‘you are the miracle man of Australian politics’. From London Harrison reported how Macmillan had slapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘well, our Bob has done it again’; ‘and indeed’, Harrison added, ‘whilst they [the British Tories] are jubilant they do not appear to be very surprised, they seem to think that

you can turn it on whenever you want .. .’” And in a thoughtful letter of congratulations on the Prime Minister’s ‘great win’, the Victorian Treasurer of the Liberal organization, Anderson, wrote: Before the campaign commenced I said that this election could be won only through your personality and your projection of the case—far more so than on previous occasions. In the event, in my humble opinion, we

were treated to a brilliant, but sober, a convincing and unrelenting exposition. It broke the ALP and was welcomed by the electors . . .°°

Despite the speculation which before the election had become customary that Menzies would soon retire, he remained as tightlipped as ever on the subject and proceeded, with every sign of

46 Menzies to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 23 October 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/10/82. 47 Menzies to Latham, December 1963, NLA, MS. 6409/3/21: Menzies to Harrison,

13 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/123. This instinctive feeling was based chiefly on audience attendance and reaction during the campaign. 48 Spender to Menzies, 2 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/28/233. 49 Harrison to Menzies, 11 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/123. 50 Anderson to Menzies, 6 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/1/9.

480 ROBERT MENZIES confidence in his augmented strength, to form a new Cabinet. Two ministers were appointed to overseas posts, Downer to the London High Commissionership and Townley to the Washington ambassadorship (dying tragically, however, before he could take it up), two other ministers (John Cramer and Charles Davidson) retired, and three new portfolios were created by the separation of Works and Interior, and External Affairs and the Attorney-Generalship. The full ministry was increased from 22 to 25: the new blood in-

cluded five former backbenchers (Billy Snedden, Jim Forbes, Charles Barnes, Doug Anthony and Fred Chaney) and two former ministers, Leslie Bury and Alan Hulme. Hulme had lost his seat in the 1961 election but now regained it; Bury, the man dismissed not so long before for his heretical views on the Common Market, was welcomed back to the new portfolio of Housing. There were now

five ministers under 50 and the Ministry’s average age was 55 against its predecessor’s 58. Never before, in 14 years of office, had Menzies produced such a ‘new look’ Ministry. At the same time the election had so strengthened his own hand

and appeared so strongly to endorse his own ideas, particularly those on international affairs and the American alliance, that it remained to be seen whether this Ministry would in any significant

way attenuate the certainties which seem to have calcified in his mind. In a somewhat uncharacteristically generous editorial celebrating the election’s ‘Dramatic New Mandate For Sir Robert’, the Sydney Morning Herald put the situation with the utmost simplicity and clarity. The Prime Minister had been continuously in office for 14 years and had been put to the electoral test six times. Not every

win had, in the Herald’s view, been deserved (and, it should be noted, the editorial made no mention of the superiority, in all but one election, which the ‘accident’ of the Labor split and DLP preferences had given him), but it remained true that: although the confidence in his leadership has fluctuated he has retained a continuity and degree of support by the electorate which has never been equalled federally in this country, and rarely in any democracy in the world.

Such results are not achieved by little men: they are the public rewards of men of outstanding talents and ability. The Prime Minister’s mastery of politics, his long service to Australia in the highest seat of

government, and his formidable reputation in international councils have generated a political momentum of their own which the Labour

Opposition has been quite unable to offset. Undoubtedly this preeminence has drawbacks which must be guarded against: a tendency to authoritarian control by Sir Robert in party and in administration, and a

TO THE 1963 ELECTION 481 corresponding disposition among his followers to make his judgment their own. It must be hoped that the scale of Saturday’s victory will not encourage either.°!

Of the many congratulatory messages sent to Menzies at this time, one was perhaps especially pregnant with implications for the ‘drawbacks’ to which the Sydney Morning Herald had drawn attention. William Battle transmitted it from Lyndon Johnson, the new President who had, only several weeks before, replaced the assassinated Kennedy: My heartiest congratulations on your personal triumph. Everyone here

understands the importance of your victory in reemphasising Australia’s firm support for our common purposes in the world’s affairs. I also hope that now that you have enlarged your majority, you will find a

minute to come and tell me both how you have governed with a majority of one and how you have so fully mastered the great art of victory in a free election.

For Menzies personally, one sad event marred the celebrations of these days. On Christmas eve 1963, Athol Townley died. The outcome of a long period of ill health, Townley’s passing was expected, but nevertheless difficult to digest. In May, Menzies had written in alarm about his health, affectionately relieving him of all ministerial duties until budget discussions were due in July; then in July both had had long personal discussions about the ‘gloomy reports’ of doctors. In October Townley, as Minister for Defence, sealed in Washington an agreement for the purchase of two squadrons of F111 strike bombers to replace the RAAF’s ageing Canberras. The terms were generous, Menzies hailed the deal and it was a good omen for the coming election. (But the aeroplanes were still on the drawing board, and as delivery delays and expenses mounted, the purchase became, later on, a subject of political controversy.) Beale, the Australian Ambassador in Washington, was shocked at how ill and exhausted Townley looked while he was there negotiating the F111 deal, and pleaded with him ‘to take it easy—“take a slow boat

to China” was the way I expressed it’? Townley somehow got safely through the election but collapsed with pneumonia and heart complications on 13 December.

51 SMH, 2 December 1963.

52 Johnson to Menzies, 2 December 1963, NLA, MS. 4936/1/16/143. °3 Howard Beale, This Inch of Time, 174.

482 ROBERT MENZIES ' oe “NR Le i ae COU CT FC

5 % 4 - eh

Menzies with congenial ministers Hasluck and Townley

‘Pat and I share your shock and sorrow for we too loved Athol. I can never replace him’, Menzies wired to Townley’s widow. He ordered a state funeral, for which most of the Cabinet travelled to Tasmania. Later Menzies personally paid for a special government

memorial plaque to be added to the headstone over Townley’s grave in Hobart Cemetery.>4

** Menzies’ correspondence with and about Townley is in NLA, MS. 4936/1/31/254.

18

eeeJe

A Prime Minister’s Life 1964-1965

LotaBaillieu, IN January Menzies’ old friend,home Cliveon Baillieu—Lord head1964 of Dunlop Rubber—came a three-month visit from his headquarters in London. He had travelled via Malaysia and, writing from Melbourne to Peter Carrington (the British High Commissioner in Canberra from 1956 to 1959), sent ‘jottings of

notes and discussions’ he had had on the trip and, at its end, with Menzies. Menzies had spent a weekend with Baillieu at ‘Sefton’, the

latter’s holiday home at Mount Macedon. ‘He was in rare form’, wrote Baillieu, and naturally delighted with the result of the Elections. He would have settled for less than half the majority he achieved, and he is convinced that a substantial reason for his victory is the support he received from the young voter. He spoke most enthusiastically of the political aware-

ness and tremendous interest of these young people throughout the election. !

This belief, held as we have seen by a number of other observers,

was sensible enough. Perhaps a quarter of a million young Australians and New Australians voting in 1963 had not been on the rolls in 1961, and there were hundreds of thousands of other voters

aged 30 years or less who had never known anything other than Menzies governments.* With a couple of unpleasant but brief hiccups these governments had presided over an economy characterized by almost full employment, considerable prosperity and

rising standards of living. Liberal domestic policy at the 1963 election had been in part consciously shaped to meet the needs of younger married couples, with the promise of a housing subsidy ' Baillieu to Carrington, 24 January 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/3/21. 2 See, e.g., Don Whitington, The Rulers (Melbourne, 1964), 71. 483

484 ROBERT MENZIES scheme for persons up to the age of 35, as well as the educational improvements entailed in the extension of Commonwealth aid to all schools. In formal recognition of the importance of younger party members the Liberal Council in April 1964 voted for a constitutional change to give delegates from the Young Liberal Movement,

now flourishing in all States, full voting rights at annual Council meetings. The move was also supported by canny party members as a means of complementing the election success of pinning on Labor’s Federal Executive the tag of ‘the 36 Faceless Men’.

Carried away by the euphoria of his recent victory, and the conviction that what he called ‘the youthful element in the community’ had turned to the Liberal Party, Menzies made a rousing speech at this Council meeting, predicting that the Liberals would win the next five elections. “We have recognized’, he said, ‘that the making of profits is one of the dynamic inducements to the taking of capital risks in the development of a nation. But we have insisted on the performance of social and industrial obligations’. It was, of course, a pep-talk to the converted; understandably, it was too much for the newly-friendly Sydney Morning Herald. Under the heading ‘Here’s Tae Us, Wha’s Like Us’ the paper editorialized that only those with short memories could accept without reservation Menzies’ picture of the Liberal Party as the unsullied guardian of liberal principles. ‘At this stage of our affairs’, it declared, complacency would be a limping guide for the Government and for the

country. Both Sir Robert Menzies and Sir Philip McBride laid great emphasis on the need to appeal to the youth of the nation. They could remember with advantage that youth is the antithesis of complacence and expects from its leaders boldness, imagination and enterprise unfettered by political smugness.°

The especially buoyant economic situation at this moment inevitably shored up Menzies’ sense of his Government’s supremacy. Only a few weeks before making his boast to the Liberal Council he

had had the latest of that series of informal meetings which he began with business representatives after his near-defeat in 1961. The aim, in his words, was ‘to give Ministers an opportunity early in the year to obtain the up-to-date views of those concerned with

day-to-day workings of commerce and industry’. The meeting brought together representatives of ‘10 national organisations with

primary and secondary industry and rural banking interests’. It unanimously asked that the Government ‘keep the economy running 3 8 April 1964.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 485 on its present even keel’. No special stimulation was needed: it was best for the Government ‘to leave well alone’.4 Here was a repetition of Trevor Swan’s ‘masterly inactivity’ advice. Australia was in fact

entering into a new period of high and stable economic growth. Development was particularly pronounced in 1963-65, when output grew at 7 per cent and unemployment fell from 2 to 1 per cent. High growth was to continue for the rest of the decade, despite a severe drought in the eastern States in 1965-66. As the economic historian Boris Schedvin has written: The mood of the time was confident, expansive and a touch complacent. With increased wealth beginning to flow from a wide range of mineral

discoveries, it appeared that the uncertainty and instability of the previous half century had been cast aside and that the country had entered a new golden age.°

It was in this period that the last spurt of Menzies-induced development of Canberra took place. There were new developments in tertiary education, thanks to the capacity and willingness of the Commonwealth to continue its leadership in this field. Early in 1964 Menzies announced steps to honour the election promise of providing aid to schools for scientific education, and notable growth in secondary education was foreshadowed. When Menzies saw Clive Baillieu in January 1964 the latter was fresh from a visit to Malaysia. ‘I gave him a pretty full report on the

Indonesian situation, along the lines of my notes’, Baillieu told Carrington. “He stands firmly and openly by his statement to Parlia-

ment on 25 September 1963, and I am confident there will be no backsliding.’ Baillieu had had many talks with Malaysian politicians and officials. Most put forward the same view as did the sales manager of ‘our local Co., Dunlop Malayan Industries Ltd’. This man, a nephew of the Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, was convinced that the crisis arising from Indonesian ‘Confrontation’ would deteriorate further unless the United States stepped in. But Kennedy and the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, had made it

clear that they were reluctant to allow their country to become involved: the Malaysian difficulty was one that Britain and interested

Commonwealth countries must cope with. Certainly, under the ANZUS Treaty the United States did have obligations to Australia if

4 SMH, 19 February 1964. The ACTU was also invited to send delegates, but ‘because of

other commitments’ it could not do so, and met Ministers separately several days 5 c B. Schedvin, In Reserve, 333-4.

486 ROBERT MENZIES she were attacked. The question was, what would happen if Australian armed forces in Malaysia or Borneo were attacked by Indonesian troops: would this rate American intervention? In talks with Barwick in October 1963, Kennedy and Rusk agreed that in the event of ‘overt attack’ (but not subversion) American air and sea forces (but not ground troops) would come to the assistance of the Australians affected.

In April 1964, after repeated appeals from Malaysia for more assistance, the Government decided to send a squadron of Australian engineers to Borneo. Two minesweepers would also be made available and four RAAF helicopters with pilots. The decision was announced by Hasluck as Minister for Defence. When it was taken

Barwick, the External Affairs Minister, was at a SEATO Council meeting in Manila. Questioned at Sydney airport by reporters on his return home, he stated unequivocally that under the terms of the ANZUS agreement the United States would certainly come to the assistance of Australian servicemen if they were attacked in Malaysia. The answer was correct, but failed to enunciate the American provisos, and brought the Government a certain amount of embar-

rassment. Menzies, under attack from the Opposition, denied in parliament that ‘we are trying in a rather cheap way to involve the United States in something’. It happened at this point that the Chief Justice, Owen Dixon, had just retired and his position was vacant. Barwick was offered it, and accepted, whereupon the Opposition charged that he was being removed from the Ministry for his ‘gaffe’ over ANZUS. There is, however, no reason to doubt Menzies’ assertion that Barwick had been sounded out on the chief justiceship while in Manila and had agreed to his name going forward before coming home. In a press conference in Perth Menzies described as

‘drivel’ the notion that Barwick had been appointed because of ‘indiscreet statements about Malaysia’, and lampooned anyone ‘stupid’ enough ‘to think you can threaten someone with the chief justiceship of Australia’.6 Writing to thank a former Chief Justice, Sir John Latham, for a letter approving the appointment and expressing disgust at the allegations made about it, Menzies added:

‘... no one realises, more than you, just how the Opposition can make an issue out of nothing, just to feed the newspapers’.’

Barwick’s departure brought about an important Cabinet reshuffle. Menzies moved Paul Hasluck, Minister for Defence, into Barwick’s place and appointed Senator Shane Paltridge to the © SMH, 29 April 1964.

7 Menzies to Latham, 12 May 1964, NLA, MS. 6409/3/21.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 487 Defence portfolio. Paltridge had first become a junior minister in 1955 and—like Hasluck—was already a member of Cabinet’s Foreign Affairs and Defence (FAD) Committee. He had had five years as the Deputy Leader of the Senate, and in 1964 became Leader. Menzies

showed something of the same affection for him as he had for Townley. On Hasluck’s account, Paltridge was ‘a very simple and loveable and staunch man’. Menzies ‘valued him highly and paid a great deal of respect to his opinions’. Hasluck thought Paltridge had ‘the makings of a good prime minister—certainly better than Holt and better than Gorton and immeasurably superior to McMahon or any of the others’. Paltridge also had a fanatical hatred of socialism and fear of communism.’ This was no doubt a factor in the bond between him and Menzies. Though they had formerly not had a lot to do with each other Paltridge and Hasluck, on the latter’s testi-

mony, became firm friends and like-thinking allies in administrative and policy-shaping matters in Defence and External Affairs. And, as Peter Edwards has pointed out, in Hasluck Menzies gained ‘probably the best qualified politician, in terms of education, experi-

ence and character, ever to have taken the External Affairs portfolio’. He was also a man who had learned much from his revered leader and was convinced in any case by education and instinct that power was ‘the principal determinant of international politics’: the fate of small and middle powers, such as Australia, would be determined predominantly by the balance struck between the great powers, such as the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Australia’s foreign policy should be shaped, not by undue ambition or naive

idealism, but by a prudent concern to protect its interests in a world dominated by the ruthless politics of power.?

Now, as Menzies’ prime ministership neared its end, the triumvirate

—Menzies, Hasluck and Paltridge—came to be of crucial importance in the final shaping of foreign relations. Late in May 1964 a first troop transport, the converted aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, left with 200 Australians for service in Borneo

and Malaysia. Then, at the end of the month Cabinet agreed to a recommendation from the FAD Committee that Australia should reply sympathetically to American appeals for more assistance (‘more flags’) in its work of trying to shore up the South Vietnamese government of general Nguyen Khanh. The latter had seized power in a bloodless coup, overthrowing a military junta formed after Ngo 8 Paul Hasluck, The Chance of Politics, 99-103. ? Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 283.

488 ROBERT MENZIES Dinh Diem, Prime Minister of the Republic of Vietnam since 1954,

had been assassinated in November 1963. Khanh’s Government seemed unable either to generate popular support or to provide a

formidable defence against communist insurgency. The Australian Cabinet decided to send another 30 non-commissioned officers to join the training team already in South Vietnam, thus doubling it in size, and to provide by October 1964 another six Caribou aircraft and RAAF crews. Hasluck made a trip to Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam in June, and came back convinced, as his predecessors Casey and Barwick had been, that this area, particularly

Vietnam, was vital to the forward defence of Australia. He

announced firmly in public that the Vietnamese situation was more

difficult to control than Malaysia, and more dangerous. And he urged Menzies, who was about to visit Washington on the way to a

Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting in London, to press President Johnson and his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, on the strength of their preparedness to stay in Southeast Asia. Menzies, who had had to cancel a visit to Israel because of illness, was ‘not robust’ when he arrived in San Francisco on 19 June. He and his party rested there for several days before travelling to New York and thence to Washington. The party consisted of Dame Pattie, John Bunting, two Assistant Secretaries from the Prime Minister’s and Trade Departments, and Hazel Craig. Townley’s widow, Hazel,

also went with the Menzies, her invitation an expression of their affection and sympathy. At the White House on 24 June, after an hour’s conversation alone with him, the President gave a ‘stag luncheon’, in Menzies’ honour, to 80 guests. (Mrs Renouf, wife of the acting Australian ambassador, gave a separate luncheon in honour of Dame Pattie in the Embassy of Australia.) Johnson presented Menzies with three gifts: a “small card tray in vermeil with the Presidential seal and inscription’; an autographed colour photograph of himself in a silver frame; and an autographed copy of his “A Time For Action”.!° Later in the day Menzies had conversations in their Departments with Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara. Before their meeting, McGeorge Bundy, Johnson's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, briefed the President on Menzies and his interests. ‘Menzies’, he wrote, ‘will be most interested in our problem in Vietnam and his problem with Malaysia’. It was import10 Johnson Library, Austin, Texas, President’s Daily Diary, Box 1, 24 June 1964. The gifts were not unique. That morning Johnson had presented exactly the same three, though of course suitably inscribed, to the visiting Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, when he arrived by helicopter.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 489 ant for the President to remember that Menzies’ Minister of External

Affairs, Paul Hasluck, had recently ‘made a strong statement’ on Vietnam and that Menzies’ Government was doubling the number of its training instructors in Vietnam and making more transport aircraft available. Special appendices discussed America’s role in ANZUS, and summarized Menzies’ life. ‘Once or twice’, Bundy added, ‘Australians have tried to interpret our Anzus commitment

as a blank check, but Menzies has never made this mistake. He

knows that we are good allies, but that the exact shape of our action

under the treaty will depend on your judgment as President, at every stage’.!! For his part, Menzies reported after the talks that Australia’s extra aid meant that ‘our stocks are pretty good’ in Washington, and that both Johnson and Rusk thought that firmness

was appropriate with Indonesia.'* The Australian press reported great cordiality at Johnson’s lunch for Menzies; it stressed Menzies’ certainty that he had ‘established a close relationship with President Johnson at their first meeting’. And in general Menzies was féted in

New York, where he received a standing ovation for a spirited address on the ‘threatening and slaughter’ with which Sukarno was

assailing Malaysia. The New York Times carried a long article describing him flatteringly as “an adamant Australian—a prickly adornment of the Australian political scene for more than 35 years’.!° Menzies also gave himself his usual New York treat: on 24 June the Sydney Morning Herald published his photograph taken

with Mary Martin and Carol Channing backstage at St James Theatre after seeing Hello Dolly.

Menzies went on to England for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, being joined there by Hasluck, who was to attend the Conference and return home via the United States, hoping to confer with President Johnson. Arriving in London, the Menzies were at once given an audience by the Queen, and Menzies conferred at length with the British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Home was the successor to Macmillan who, after losing much prestige over the Profumo Affair and because of declining Conservative success in the face of economic difficulties, had resigned

through ill health after a serious operation in October 1963. Macmillan’s loss of office, under these sad circumstances, brought to an end his practical partnership with Menzies in Commonwealth

'l Memorandum to President, 24 June 1964, Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, NSC— Country File, Box 234, Johnson Library. 12 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 301-2. 13 Reported in SMH, 26 June, 1 July 1964.

490 ROBERT MENZIES

BE eee). i aoomee el wl St ll SSL. WL . ~. - a

———————— | rt (i itss.:CdCm se rr =e .rti“‘“_iO__

rrr e.t”t—“‘=‘R#R“‘R‘ROOCROOCC CD . _

a(lll. OO OT——— CT!” lr—C Oe Llrlrlti“(tiw@™®™’SCOCiéCsésCrS Cee CE ST TLT,rrr”rt—“—is—i‘(‘iaiiShUwUCwW®;™CUL qo r—t—“‘“a—siO L

,, —E—l le eee | ._—=sC i CS A| errr aOO eee Oe... ae e.)—.)ClCO eEeEeee e ”—lteeeer

Se ee eg

Well sl Ol — ft + S....,dl lel”! h!.UC~™m”*~C~C~COCOCOCO;C*CO‘C;C*COW

me ee eC tstsi‘(‘éC?

ee eri“ ‘iaertré*éi*é;*w*CO®*™OCO*OC*CSCTD Menzies with Broadway friends Carol Channing (left) and Mary Martin (right) backstage after a performance in 1964 of Hello Dolly

. _e LJ e v4 e e = . Cd e . f

affairs, though already, as we have seen, the intensity of that partner-

ship was waning. Macmillan’s resignation had brought from Menzies an affectionate note of regret and a tribute to his friend’s work; they remained friends, but with the passage of time contacted

* ° e f s ° t ° e od * ° e *

each other rarely.

Asked about his health at a press conference on his arrival in

T LJ

London Menzies said: ‘I am a decent 75 per cent. Unless it rains at Leeds, I expect to make a remarkable recovery’. It did not rain, and after seeing Douglas-Home Menzies took the train to Leeds, in time

. °4e Ite i*e e*°

to see the first two days of the Third Test between England and Australia. When leaving Australia he had said to a reporter, somewhat acidly, that ‘he wished some people would give up the idea that he was going to England to see the cricket’. ‘With a little bit of luck he would see two days of the Leeds Test match. That would be the lot.’!4 It was, too. But the match (won eventually by Australia)

14 Tbid., 20 June, 2 July 1964. :

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 491

was at that stage excitingly evenly divided, and proved the

tonic Menzies needed. He returned to London refreshed, to face sterner things. In the Conference about to begin he would be indisputably the

most long-serving and senior Commonwealth Prime Minister. Nehru of India, the only contender for this position, had died a month before. Though in 1961 Menzies had been thrown into some-

thing like despair by the last ‘general’!’ Conference—the one at

which South Africa had ‘left’ the Commonwealth—he still treasured

his statesmanlike reputation and role as a leader. It was more evident than ever that that role bore no relation to the numerical strength of the peoples represented by ‘old Dominion’ stalwarts like himself. As decolonization continued, the numbers of new Heads of

Government increased: for this Conference there were 18, representing 720 million people. Of these the British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian populations accounted for only 12 per cent.!¢ When the Conference began Menzies at once asserted Australia’s

support for Malaysia in its resistance to Indonesia’s clamour and appealed for general Commonwealth backing. As Malaysia’s Prime

Minister, the Tunku, put it in a strong subsequent speech, jungle skirmishes were now making the ‘Confrontation’ issue more serious

than a mere diplomatic euphemism. Though in the debate which followed some of the African states had quibbles, the Conference in

the end came down with unanimous assurances to Malaysia of sympathy and support. More controversial, predictably, were the racial questions centring on notions of black v. white. In the Conference’s discussions two issues gave focus to these: the running sore of apartheid in South Africa and the demand that in Southern Rhodesia, which had seceded from the Central African Federation in 1963 to become again a colony of Britain, there should be independence and majority (= black) rule. Delegates were in accord in condemning apartheid and issuing a

joint statement to that effect: but not everyone agreed with the vehement demand of some of the African states that sanctions be imposed on South Africa. Menzies led the case against sanctions, arguing that they would not be helpful to the liberal cause in South Africa. Investigation, he said, showed that the South African goods imported by Australia were overwhelmingly—about 90 per cent— the product of non-European labour. ‘It did not appear that it would 15 The 1962 Conference was a special one, on Britain and the European Common Market: it did not have a definite outcome and was in any case superseded by France’s later veto of the British application for membership. 16 SMH, 20 June 1964.

492 ROBERT MENZIES help these people if a prohibition were imposed upon the importation of their goods into Australia and they became unemployed.’ This view particularly angered the Prime Minister of Sierra Leone, Albert Margai, who took the unprecedented step of breaking protocol and issuing a public statement against Menzies’ argument which had originally been made, as was conventional, behind the closed doors of the Conference. Menzies’ reasoning was ‘obstructive’, said Margai, ‘serving as a delaying factor in view of the heavy investments by certain powers in South Africa’. Affronted both by Margai’s breaking of confidentiality and by the accusations he was implying, Menzies gave no ground and led those who successfully insisted that the final communiqué, while condemning the policy of apartheid, explained that a difference of opinion among Commonwealth countries made the further step of imposing sanctions out of the question for the time being.

Southern Rhodesia was the main subject on which (to use

Menzies’ own phrase) ‘periods of tension’ arose at the Conference. Menzies, like Douglas-Home, saw it as solely the British Govern-

ment’s prerogative to decide when, and under what conditions, Southern Rhodesia should become independent. Beside the obvious issue of principle (by its own choice Southern Rhodesia had again become a colony, and therefore was subject to Britain) there was the

real danger that its white supremacist Prime Minister, lan Smith, should be provoked into making a unilateral declaration of independence on his own terms. Some African members of the Commonwealth thought that the Conference, or a Convention arranged by it,

should determine the conditions under which Southern Rhodesia would gain independence, ensuring constitutional arrangements

under which everyone should have a vote and votes should be equal in value, whatever the colour of the voter. The most difficult

stage of the discussion followed a Canadian suggestion which delighted the African Prime Ministers as vindication of their position from one of the ‘old Commonwealth’ countries. This was that a Commonwealth Declaration on Racial Equality should be made, and that Southern Rhodesia should become the test case. Menzies led the argument against the dangers of this suggestion. The barrister in him was evident in a number of arresting arguments, not least of them the observation that ‘one man one vote’ was hardly an effective guarantee of democracy in polities where it was possible

(as had happened in a number of the new African states) to put one’s opponents in gaol. In the end, on Rhodesia, the Conference’s final communiqué simply noted variety in the delegates’ opinions, accepted that the final decision as to what should be done was the British Government’s, and recorded that Douglas-Home undertook

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 493 that when shaping his policy he ‘would give careful consideration to all the views expressed by the other Prime Ministers’. Similar, if occasionally less vague, compromises were reached on

most other contentious issues, and there was unanimity on condemning racism. It was agreed that ‘the Commonwealth has a particular role to play in the search for solutions to the inter-racial relations problems which are threatening the orderly development of mankind in general’. And—on an African initiative—there was to be established a Commonwealth Secretariat, an idea that, over many years, Australian Prime Ministers had asked for in vain. Afterwards, Douglas-Home wrote to Menzies that he was ‘deeply erateful to you for the many times during the conference when you took fire on yourself to contrive for me a way out from deadlock

and illjudged proposals’.’’ British newspapers argued that the Conference had ‘marked a new stage in Commonwealth development’. The Times was particularly enthusiastic: Once again a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference has had to erapple with the most disruptive and divisive of issues, yet has ended

up on a note of understanding and purpose. A wider partnership is under way. The Prime Ministers’ Conference is no academic debating

shop. It may not make decisions, but it winnows the thought that preceded decisions.!®

Menzies may not in his heart have shared all this optimism, but

he does seem to have come home less disillusioned with the Commonwealth than he had been in his gloomy exchanges with Macmillan. He told a press conference in Canberra that some of the

old principles had been reasserted. The Prime Ministers, for example, had traditionally come together ‘to exchange our views with frankness and to learn something from each other’, but at the

beginning of the recent Conference many wanted to treat the meeting ‘as a sort of sub-committee of the United Nations’. Such an idea was unacceptable, but ‘ultimately, that view came to be accepted’. He seemed all the same—at least on the surface—to have

accepted with a good enough grace that times had irrevocably changed: We have to understand that this is a very different Commonwealth. This is now a meeting of a large number of communities and Governments

which have different histories and different ideas about how things ought to be done. We cannot impose our somewhat old-fashioned views on these matters on new people. '7 Douglas-Home to Menzies, 24 July 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/10/82. '8 Reported in SMH, 17 July 1964.

494 ROBERT MENZIES Perhaps, too, he had been unexpectedly cheered by the decision that, at last, a Secretariat was to be established. A week or two before

the Prime Ministers came together Menzies had told a press conference about ‘gloomy prophesies that the whole thing would break up and that this would be the last meeting’. But now, thanks to the African initiative, ‘there is to be established a Secretariat based on the proposition that the Commonwealth is an enduring thing and that machinery ought to be made available to enable it to continue more effectively’. Some who watched the televised press conference at which Menzies elaborated this idea queried as ‘wishful thinking’

the notion that he was planning an early retirement. As the ‘Canberra correspondent’ of the Sydney Morning Herald put it, his mind was as alert as ever. More important, it was difficult to believe that ‘Sir Robert, delighted as he undoubtedly is at the new life injected into this year’s conference’, would voluntarily absent himself from next year’s meeting. He gave every indication that he regarded that

conference ‘as the all-important one, when the leaders ... will be able to get down to the more solid fare of concrete proposals for mutual aid in development put forward by the United Kingdom’.!°

Soon after arriving back in Canberra, Menzies sent DouglasHome a “secret personal message’ which, though primarily about his deep concern for Malaysia, carried two overtones which help greatly to explain his more relaxed attitude to the Commonwealth. One was an almost affectionate understanding of some of the newer

Prime Ministers, and especially the Tunku, which seems on this occasion to have been strengthened through close contact at the Conference. The other was the respect he now had for DouglasHome, almost a renewal of the confidence he had once had in Macmillan. ‘At this end’, he wrote, ‘and with the assistance of our most experienced High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur [T. K. Critchley], we have been giving much thought to Malaysia and the mind and attitude of the Tunku himself’. Sukarno was not likely to risk open war: his aim, rather, was to weaken Malaysian morale. The Tunku’s role was therefore crucial: firmness on his part was

essential. But ‘his own nature is so kindly that, as we saw in London, he may be induced into rather weak compromises’. The

need for strength—in the face of Sukarno, in presenting the

Malaysian case at the United Nations, in the Commonwealth and in diplomatic posts generally—had to be conveyed to him ‘with consummate tact’ lest he ‘react against what he would regard as pressure’.

9 Tbid., 19, 21 July 1964.

A PRIME MINISTER’S LIFE, 1964-1965 495 We saw in London that he cannot rely on some of the African leaders .. .

As you must acknowledge, after your immense success at the Prime Ministers’ Conference, your own influence exercised with your own

wisdom and tact, could do much to clarify the Tunku’s mind and strengthen his future course of action. Please do not regard my message as an unnecessary intrusion. But as I most passionately believe in you, I have taken leave to think that you can do things in this field that nobody else can do half so well.”

As a kind of footnote to the Prime Ministers’ Conference, Hasluck,

coming home via Washington to attend a meeting of the ANZUS Council, made a first visit to President Johnson, on 16 July. United States officials noted ahead that the President would find it “worthwhile’ to see the new Australian External Affairs Minister: “I am told’, wrote one, ‘that Hasluck is a vast improvement over his predecessor and has a more sophisticated view of Indonesia than the Prime Minister’. Another observed that ‘it is popularly credited that

Mr Hasluck stands a good chance of becoming Prime Minister in the event that the Prime Minister retires’, which was another reason for Johnson to meet him. So far as we can determine, Mr. Hasluck’s sole objective is to make a courtesy call. Being a very serious, intent man, he will probably not limit himself to pleasantries, but we know of nothing urgent that he intends

to discuss. We surmise that he will want to exchange views on the course of events in Southeast Asia.?!

That guess was correct. Hasluck, together with Arthur Tange and

Alan Renouf, temporary Chargé d’Affaires for Australia in the United States, met Johnson and William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, at the White House. Matters discussed included the recent Prime Ministers’ Conference in London and affairs in Southeast Asia, with special reference to Australia’s “contribution’ in South Vietnam. What, precisely was said is not clear,*” 20 Menzies to Douglas-Home, ‘Secret Personal Message’, 31 July 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/10/82. Menzies presumably composed the original. It is pencilled in his handwriting. 21 Michael Forrestal to Bundy, Benjamin H. Reed to Bundy, LBJ Library, Austin, NSF, Country File, Box 233.

22 US records include a Memorandum of the Conversation, but when viewed by this writer in 1993 it had been so heavily ‘sanitized’ that though it recorded when Hasluck spoke, all his actual words had been whited out. LBJ Library, NSF, Country File— Australia, Memos, vol. 1. Though note Edwards’ point, from Australian sources (318), that ‘a senior Pentagon official had told Hasluck that the West should avoid giving

the impression that Peking and Hanoi were firm allies, an implicit criticism of Hasluck’s public reference to the DRV as China’s “puppets” ’.

496 ROBERT MENZIES but the conversation must have confirmed Hasluck’s conviction of the overriding dangers of the Vietnamese situation. He was soon to express this conviction with renewed forcefulness in parliament.

The occasion for this was the episode known as ‘the Gulf of

Tonkin incident’ when a clash between vessels of the American and the North Vietnamese (Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV) navies led to United States bombing raids against DRV installations. Subsequently Congress passed a resolution—the so-called ‘Gulf of

Tonkin resolution’—declaring the preservation of international peace and security in Southeast Asia to be vital to the national interest of the United States, and authorising the President to ‘take all necessary measures’ to prevent ‘further aggression’. In a statement to the House of Representatives Hasluck announced Government support for the action taken by the United States and declared that there was ‘no current alternative to assisting South Vietnam to

preserve its independence, and ... no current alternative to using force, as necessary, to check the downward thrust of militant Asian Communism’.

Australia’s first full-scale parliamentary debate on Vietnam ensued. Menzies welcomed ‘a Congress resolution which had no direct precedent in American history’ as dramatic confirmation that Southeast Asia would not be ‘overlooked in the conflict of ideas between the Western Powers and the Soviet’. Labor responses were mixed. Calwell condemned the prospect of military action and urged a ‘search for a political, economic and social settlement of this

most tragic situation’. His deputy, Whitlam, while demanding clearer statements than had so far been offered of the nation’s obli-

gations and liabilities in Southeast Asia, approved of American action over the Gulf of Tonkin incident and did not rule out the possibility of resorting to force to strengthen America’s and South Vietnam's hands in any negotiations with the North. On the left of the Party Jim Cairns, though supporting ‘the maintenance of United States sea and air coverage in the area’, foreshadowed something of

a coming protest movement by declaring that fighting must end before negotiation could usefully begin. He had already angered Menzies by expressing doubts about the accuracy of the American version of the Tonkin Gulf incident. Just as this debate was welling up Holt brought down the 1964— 65 budget. It decreed a slight rise in taxation and in expenditure, but

the proportion of defence spending was no larger than in the

previous year’s budget. Coming only hours after Hasluck’s statement on the perils of the Vietnamese situation and the frequent warnings, by Menzies among others, of the danger of war with Indonesia, this feature of the budget caused much press criticism,

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 497

some of it very strong indeed,*? and unease, especially among Government supporters, both inside and outside the House. In the debate on the budget a number of backbenchers criticized the inadequate level of defence expenditure. The most trenchant was Sir Wilfrid Kent Hughes, notable (and often cranky) patriot and war

hero, who declared that Australia should have at least one Army division always ready for overseas service, and should introduce conscription if there were not enough volunteers. Kent Hughes,

who in latter years had had a rather rocky relationship with

Menzies, blamed him for the ‘drift’. Because of the Prime Minister’s

prestige and power, he said, ‘the Chief-of-Staffs Committee and external affairs advisers did not dare tell Cabinet what it did not wish to hear’.*4

That was a guess, and somewhat off the mark. The navy and air force consistently rejected all suggestions that they accept conscripted men and the army for a time held out against conscription, chiefly on the ground that too few officers were available for an extensive training programme. The key behind-the-scenes organiz-

ation remained the FAD Committee of Cabinet, which on sub-

stantial matters certainly accepted advice from the Chiefs of Staff.2° But the rapid deterioration of the Malaysian—Indonesian situation

soon forced the Government to promise another review of Australia’s defences. On 30 October Menzies told a tense House of Rep-

resentatives that for the first time in history Australian soldiers were in combat with Indonesian troops, following the landing of a

party of 60 Indonesian raiders on the Malayan coast, south of Malacca.26 The revised defence assessment, drawn up by Paltridge

at the request of the FAD Committee, was already in Cabinet ministers’ hands. A major problem was that, with virtual full employment, recruitment for the army had been dangerously disappointing. Army leaders were still reluctant to countenance compulsion, and Paltridge recommended that over the next six months ‘a final intensive effort’ be made to attract volunteers. But Cabinet overruled this advice*” and made the decision—unique in Australian

history and pregnant with social and political implications for the 23 See, e.g., SMH, 12 August 1964, ‘Budget Poses Questions for the Future’, which questioned ‘Mr Holt’s ability to hold a proper scale of priorities’; or Sun-Herald, 16 August 1964, on ‘Deeds Versus Words’.

24 SMH, 28 August 1964. See also ibid., 15 September 1964: ‘The Political Perils of Defence Inaction’. 25 T base this point, as well as part of the foregoing and of what follows on the excellent discussion in Edwards, Crises and Commitments. 26 SMH, 31 October 1964. 27 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 328-9.

498 ROBERT MENZIES future—to introduce, as the key measure in a reformed defence strategy, selective conscription for service at home or abroad. Menzies announced the new system on 10 November. There was to be a compulsory national service scheme for the Army, based at the beginning on a ballot of men turning 20 in 1965. Those called up would be liable for two years full-time service, including ‘overseas service as required’, followed by three years on the reserve. The first

year’s intake would be 4200, which was about one in 20 of those turning the stipulated age in 1965. Thereafter the annual call-up would be 6900. The aim was to have by 1966 a Regular Army of 37 000 men with an effective force of 33 000, compared to the existing

22750. Menzies also announced a range of not very startling additions to equipment and armament for the Navy and the RAAF.

These changes, together with the expansion of the Army, would increase defence spending over the three years from 1 July 1964 by £404 million, bringing it to a total of £1220 million. Menzies listed

Indonesian actions and the growth of communism in Laos and South Vietnam as reasons for Australia being forced to be prepared to face ‘military situations’. There was also always the possibility that the frontier of Papua~New Guinea might have to be defended against Indonesian incursions from West Irian.

On the eve of this statement the Treasury had issued a White Paper on “The Meaning and Measurement of Economic Growth’ in which it was remarked that: In spending on defence, the choice is between growth and the risk that the country will be unable to do enough in its own defence in the event

of external aggression. It is broadly true that diversion of output to defence results both in some slowing down in the rate of growth of output and, no doubt, in living standards lower than they might otherwise have been.

Before World War IL, when unemployment was much greater and more widespread than today, an increase in defence spending could stimulate economic activity and increase growth. But there are probably no advanced economies in which this is true to any great extent today.”®

Menzies made no direct reference to this paper in his speech but it

was, Clearly enough, in the back of his mind. The Government’s decisions, he said, “with their added demands for manpower and

material resources, will have very significant economic and financial effects’. Direct budgetary effects, for example, would be limited in the present financial year, but in 1965-66 and later years, 28 SMH, 10 November 1964.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 499

‘the impact will be large’, presenting ‘a formidable budgetary problem’; and ‘the additions to expenditure at home will add to the call on the resources of the economy, which are already under some strain, and the additions to expenditure abroad will increase whatever drawings would otherwise be made on our external reserves’. It was thus somewhat unfair, if predictable, that on behalf of the Opposition Arthur Calwell should assail the Prime Minister for not

mentioning, let alone refuting, the Treasury’s White Paper. Also predictable was the simplistic claim that that Paper declared ‘that the Australian people must accept lower living standards’. The burden of Treasury’s argument was in fact far more complex than that. But, allowing for the exaggeration implicit in so partisan a statement, Calwell’s denunciation of the Government’s general position on defence caught at longstanding criticisms. After 14 years in

office, he said, the Federal Government had made the interesting

discovery that Australia was virtually defenceless. ‘The Prime Minister’s statement is a sweeping condemnation of the Government’s own past failures in preparing the defences of Australia’.?° Though on this occasion crudely made, the point had long-term substance, and struck to the heart of an issue that brooded over many years of the Menzies ascendancy: how, in a relatively small economy, the chronically conflicting elements of post-war recovery, migration, development and defence were to be balanced. Menzies made the defence statement on the eve of a half-Senate election necessitated by his calling of an early election for the House of Representatives in 1963. The half-Senate election had to be held before June 1965: Menzies chose 5 December 1964 as the polling date. His defence review was regarded on all sides as the ‘opening shot in the poll campaign’, and Calwell demanded that the election

be treated as a referendum on what he called the Government's ‘lottery of death’.3° With 31 of the 60 seats the Government had a bare majority in the Senate. To preserve it was of crucial importance.

Menzies opened his campaign on 19 November, in a television address he had recorded the week before. This time he did not even have the ‘comforting company of the well-chosen’. He was, wrote

one journalist, ‘a quiet guest in the lounge room, a dependable, family lawyer’, making ‘what was probably the calmest, quietest opening for an election campaign ever seen in Australia’.3! He asserted that the Government’s defence programme was realistic, practicable and completely necessary. Calwell’s response was 29 Tbid., 11 November 1964. 30 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 330. 31 SMH, 20 November 1964.

500 ROBERT MENZIES epitomised by his opening of the New South Wales Labor campaign

at the Trocadero ballroom in Sydney, an event, according to one observer, which ‘combined the paradoxical effects of a modern medium [television] transmitting what looked like a turn-of-the-

century political rally. There were the huge draped flags—

Australian and Union Jack—the full platform, all heads turned respectfully and admiringly to the speaker’. Most of Calwell’s speech consisted of denunciation, often fiery, of conscription, and suspicion of the Government’s motives:

Let the Prime Minister answer this question: has the Government secretly abandoned its declared military policy in relation to South Vietnam [i.e. limiting its anti-communist commitment to the provision of 80 instructors], and does it propose to use Australian conscripts in that bottomless pit of jungle warfare?’

It was perhaps a little early, despite statements Hasluck had made, to direct attention primarily at Vietnam. Menzies mentioned

it, but focused on the immediate dangers Indonesia appeared to pose. Labor’s difficulty was that, while deploring the Government's alleged neglect of defence preparations, it was in basic agreement

about where the current threat lay, and was not very successful in offering viable plans for reforms. “The Labor Party’, declared Calwell, ‘wanted a highly trained, highly mobile, highly specialised and properly equipped Army’, but he had difficulty explaining how —especially in a situation of civilian affluence and full employment —this generalization could quickly be given body. His alternative to

conscription was not calculated to bring an overnight solution to the recruitment crisis: ‘restore the soldier to his proper position in the community as a first-class citizen, not as a neglected, illequipped, underpaid and overlooked second-class citizen’. Equally longer-term were other objectives, like the need to ‘develop Aus-

tralian defence production industries to provide employment in peace and security in war’. Menzies made great play of Labor’s ‘Maginot Line’ concept of

defence: the failure to understand that ‘the main object of any defence policy was to keep the enemy out of your country and as far away as possible’. On the other hand, speakers like E. G. Whitlam to some effect accused the Government of ‘failing to dovetail diplomatic and defence policies’, one result of which had been the production of “panic measures’. And, though the conscription issue had yet to bite in the way Calwell wanted, it gave Menzies the rowdiest 52 Thid., 26 November 1964.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 501

meetings he had faced for some years. In the Festival Hall at Brisbane his old Queensland antagonists distributed themselves in groups through the audience to hoot and shout ‘warmonger’; and at Woy Woy a crowd of 800 packing a local theatre included bevies of loud interjectors who periodically drowned Menzies out. He was

in a reasonably bright mood on these occasions, and managed entertaining sallies against his antagonists. But at his last campaign meeting in Melbourne’s Caulfield Town Hall, an organized demonstration aroused him to what one reporter described as his ‘greatest

public show of anger for many years’. A group of 18 youths sat silently for 20 minutes in the body of an audience of about 1000 people, then in unison broke into a slow chant: ‘Give the youth of Australia the choice Sir Robert had in 1916’. Menzies ‘paused in his speech as if deeply shocked’ and angrily retorted: “Tell me, are you

university students? It is wonderful to be dirty in rhythm. That is What you are, you miserable brats’. Uproar broke out and widespread heckling began; on the fourth repetition of the students’ chant a red-faced Menzies shouted into the microphone: ‘I cannot have my time truncated by these half-baked creatures down there who would not know the truth if they saw it’. To other hecklers who

loudly disputed remarks he made on SEATO Menzies again erupted. ‘I wonder if you would be yelping that sort of nonsense if you lived in South Vietnam’, he shouted, ‘and you found that your village had been torn to pieces by the Vietcong’.°? The election produced no tell-tale swing against the Government.

For the time being, then, the electorate, if it had considered

seriously the main thrust of Government policy, appeared unruffled about it. Government seats, at 30, were reduced by one. The ALP Opposition held its 27 seats, there was one Independent and now

two (formerly one) DLP members. If it came to the crunch, the Government would be dependent on the DLP. On anti-communism

and conscription this would scarcely matter: both agreed wholeheartedly on such issues. Menzies’ loss of self-possession at that final meeting at Caulfield was one indication of the strain which the election campaign, and the long Cabinet sittings and difficult defence decisions that preceded it, had imposed on him. After his return from London at the

end of July his continued stamina and intellectual grip were the main factors in damping down speculation about his imminent retirement. But minor signs of tiring were appearing towards the 33 Calwell at Melbourne, Whitlam in ABC talk, Menzies at Woy Woy, Brisbane and Caulfield (ibid., 28 November, 1-3 December 1964).

502 ROBERT MENZIES end of the year. In October, for example, he wrote confidentially to the Indian and Ceylonese High Commissioners in Canberra that he would have to cancel visits he had planned to make to their respective countries after the Senate election. He asked each to keep this news for the time being confidential, since he did not want speculation to get around that he was ‘teetering on the edge of the grave’.*4

The election over, he wrote to his friend Alfred Stirling, then in Rome, of the weariness with which the campaign had left him: I would very much like to take a month’s complete break away from the office, but this seems almost impossible, although I realise that it is what

the doctor has ordered and what is needed to put me back into good shape for the coming year. I suppose at 70 one should start to remember that one cannot keep going at the same pace as at 17.

Later in December his Cabinet gave him a special dinner to celebrate his impending 70th birthday and his 15th anniversary as

Prime Minister. By the end of the month the ‘impossibility’ of getting away had faded before the sheer necessity of fatigue, and plans for the much-needed holiday were announced. Menzies would leave Sydney on 2 January for a month’s cruise in the Pacific on the Arcadia. On the first leg of the trip, to Honolulu, he would be

accompanied by daughter Heather. Dame Pattie would stay at

home and look after the children. From Honolulu Heather would fly home and son Ken would join his father, to share the trip across the Pacific to the United States, and a leisurely return. At the beginning, the cruise was restful and uneventful. Both Heather and her father took advantage of the chance to sleep in and rest, although he had, by the time they reached Honolulu, ‘with some pain and trouble worked myself up to four miles a day around

the decks—a record on which I hope to improve, given decent weather for the rest of the voyage’.5° At Honolulu Heather left and Ken arrived by air. As they crossed the Pacific McEwen, who was in

close radio touch with his chief, kept Menzies informed about Churchill’s condition, which the whole world was watching. The old warrior was ill, and sinking fast.

Churchill had fallen and broken his femur at Monte Carlo in mid1962. He recovered but, as his daughter was later to write, thereafter

34 Menzies to High Commissioners for India and for Ceylon, 17 October 1964, NLA, MSS. 4936/1/16/139, 4936/1/7/54. 35 Menzies to Stirling, 11 December 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/30/247. 36 Menzies to Dame Pattie, 13 January 1965, MFP.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 503

ae_—— on 2 weOl"| jw oS =, : é , We 3:= rr Pa NdJ ;| A Ww:

ein ee ee A SO roa Py

>“ oe aTSais Si ee ee pT “reeAON | ’ . ¥ : ( ae — oe tee | . i’ 7 7 . as Menzies and Heather lunch at the [likai Hotel, Honolulu, during the former’s brief holiday in January 1965. Churchill’s death was soon to necessitate an unforeseen extension of the trip to London.

the pace of life for Winston was very slow: it was like a broad, weary river, gently meandering on. Sometimes he seemed quite content: even though he might not say much, one knew he was glad one were there. But sometimes he withdrew a great distance from us—and who knows what thoughts or images moved across the screen of his consciousness from the long saga of his life, so crowded with events and people??”

He died on 24 January, at the age of 90. Menzies had reached San Francisco by then and at once travelled to London, via New York,

for the funeral. This would follow three solemn days when the coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall and thousands queued outside in bitter winter weather waiting to file past it in homage. By 37Mary Soames, A Churchill Family Album (Harmondsworth, 1985), np, but at photograph 413.

504 ROBERT MENZIES now an old family friend, Menzies called at once on Churchill’s widow, Clemmie—she, he said, “was remarkable’. And as friend and the senior representative of the Commonwealth, he was asked to be one of the 12 pallbearers who, after the funeral service in St Paul’s Cathedral, carried the coffin out and placed it on a gun-

carriage for the last stage of the funeral cortége in London.

Churchill’s wish was to be buried in the churchyard of St Martin’s, Bladen, near his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. A long and solemn

procession wound its way from the Cathedral to the Tower Pier, whence the casket could be carried by boat up the Thames. While this took place, Menzies had a special task. As he described it to Dame Pattie: After the coffin had departed and the Royal Family left, I by arrangement scuttled around the corner and down into the Crypt where, when my teeth stopped chattering, I made a talk about Winston which came over the BBC television as a sort of background to their pictures and description of the procession from the Cathedral to Tower Pier... it was a rather weird experience to be sitting down in the Crypt talking to a microphone which I had to clutch closely to my face because of the noise

around me and I feared that my voice would come over in a rather distorted way. I had, of course, the previous night written what I was going to say, because I was not actually on television but the voice came over.

He need not have worried. His voice, it appears, came over as sonorously as ever and this was a subject on which he soared, his prickly relations with Churchill in 1940-41 long since forgotten, and with his beloved Shakespeare no doubt ringing in his ears: Some day, some year, there will be old men and women whose pride it will be to say—'l lived in Churchill’s time’. Some will be able to say—'I saw him, and I heard him—the unforgettable voice and the immortal words’. And some will be able to say—I knew him, and talked with him, and was his friend’. This I can, with a mixture of pride and humility, say for myself. The memory of this moves me deeply now that he is dead, but is gloriously remembered by me as he goes to his burial amid the sorrow, and pride, and thanks, of all of you who stand and feel for yourselves and for so many millions.°®

38 ‘Broadcast by the Australian Prime Minister from the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral over BBC television on the occasion of the funeral of the late Sir Winston Churchill, Saturday, 30 January, 1965’, NLA, MS. 4936/1/7/60.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 505 Attendance and debate at a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, followed by intense work on the shaping and presentation of domestic and external policy in the face of a perceived defence

crisis, interlarded with budgetary worries, parliamentary debate and endless meetings in Cabinet and with civil and armed service advisers—these were for Menzies the staples of the period just discussed. Now, as always in the past, opinions differed on the wisdom and correctness of what he did or attempted to do. But few of those who knew his daily routines and intellectual rigour well— colleagues like Hasluck and, most notably, the distinguished group of civil servants who headed his own Prime Minister’s Department —are to be found endorsing the often repeated view that Menzies was indolent and, simply, a fortunate drifter with the tide of events. Sir Allen Brown, the formidable departmental head whom Menzies

had inherited from Chifley’s Post-war Reconstruction team and who held the headship until in 1959 he became Deputy High Commissioner in London was, with his successor, John Bunting, the man

who knew most intimately the nature of the specialized work routinely carried out in Prime Minister’s and other Departments and the interaction between this work and that of Prime Minister

and Cabinet. Brown spent some time at Oxford in 1965 when, among other pieces of news, he wrote to Menzies: I have been reading a Penguin book called “The Lucky Country: Australia in the 1960s’ by a chap called Donald Horne (a ‘friend’—soi-disant

[sic] lent it to me: scarcely a friendly act!) The author says we'll be a Republic soon and we must learn to think of ourselves as Asians. He doesn’t approve of you. In fact, on all matters which I can claim to know anything at all, he is wrong-headed and ill-informed. I suspect him of being some sort of Don at some university somewhere!’

Like any Prime Minister, Menzies was much in the public eye fulfilling functions separate from, though of course sometimes indi-

rectly related to, the strict business of government and administration. Of their nature most of the events involved were one-off and disparate, lost to posterity because to catalogue them all would be tedious and their meaning usually trivial. But if we are to have some sense of the texture of Menzies’ life at this late stage of his 39 Brown to Menzies, 1 June 1965, NLA, MS. 4936/1/5/37. Note also the appreciation of Professor Geoffrey Sawer (CT, 16 May 1988), who knew both, of Bunting’s book about Menzies: ‘Bunting’s thorough account of Menzies’ working methods and timetable

puts an end to the myth that he was lazy ... His working schedule was exemplary, and was aided by the conditions of life in Canberra—an advantage of having a bush capital not previously noted’.

506 ROBERT MENZIES career we need to sample a fragment of this activity. In what follows [ therefore pause briefly to list some of the things Menzies fitted into

1964 beside the sterner business of government. Most involved impromptu speaking, at which he was an old pro and which, like the occasions themselves, he usually enjoyed. There was often in his

speeches a touch of what to the modern ear seems heavy-handed humour. His audiences, however, tended to react spontaneously

rather than dutifully: the times were certainly different but in addition the printed word does not properly capture Menzies’ mastery of timing and intonation. One of the tasks for which Menzies was most frequently nobbled was the opening of new buildings. The cases he handled in 1964

ranged from P. & O. headquarters in Sydney (23 January) to the Canadian High Commission offices in Canberra (30 January), and from a Chrysler Plant at Tonsley Park (2 October) to a new block at

Canberra Girls’ Grammar (20 September). The first gave him the opportunity of saying how he disliked flying and how much he was looking forward to a relaxing sea trip when he retired, and in the second case he sarcastically observed that the Canadian Treasury had something in common with the Australian: miserliness when it came to allowing air-conditioning in government offices. He seized on the chance offered by the Chrysler Plant to reflect on the ‘remarkable stability’ of the Australian economy, and at the Girls’ Grammar he explained a trifle complacently why he had pioneered State Aid

in the ACT. This was also the year when Lake Burley Griffin was completed and it was inevitable that Menzies—who had saved it by insisting, against a Treasury decision in his absence in England, that the money be spent on its construction—should preside over the appropriate celebrations. That meant fun for the cartoonists. Eyre, for example, gleefully depicted Menzies asking his Treasurer: ‘A tremendous responsibility, Harold. How do you open, unveil or inaugurate a lake?’40

Then there were the dinners. They were extraordinarily various

in character and at most Menzies was the guest of honour. He shared that distinction once, however, when he and ex-Governor General Sir William McKell were féted at the Bloodhorse Breeders’

Association dinner (23 April). There was nothing particularly remarkable in Menzies being invited to the Church of England Grammar Old Boys’ dinner (1 May) but, given his often ambiguous relations with the press, it was a notable gesture on the part of the officials of the Journalists’ Club to have him at the head of the table

40 SMH, 1 May 1964.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 507

for their Twenty-fifth Anniversary dinner (31 July). At another Silver Jubilee dinner—that of the Partially Blinded Soldiers’ Associ-

ation at Paddington—there was a light-hearted half hour when the Association’s State President persuaded Menzies to become the founder of a new branch of chivalry, the ‘Order of the Double Cross’. The Order’s shield, which was given to him for safe keeping,

was quartered and carried devices new to heraldry: an uncooked prawn, rampant; a snake, couchant, in the grass; a crescent and star;

a rose hammer and sickle; and the picture of a man ‘variously identified’ as Khrushchev, Nasser or Sukarno. Menzies brought a laugh when, remarking on the brilliant success of a picture which could be any one of three men, said it might even be taken for ‘Menzies’. He then went on to make sure this didn’t happen by delivering a rousing declaration of the need to keep Southeast Asia

‘outside the Communist orbit’, so that Australians would be

‘masters of their own future’ (30 October). But perhaps the dinner which brought the warmest glow was the Cardinal’s annual dinner, held at the Australia Hotel in July. A redletter event in the Sydney Roman Catholic calendar, the dinner was

held this year in honour of Menzies and attended by 400 leading members of the Catholic community. ‘It is doubtful’, observed the Sydney Morning Herald,

whether a gathering of Roman Catholic dignitaries has ever looked upon a Presbyterian with such benevolence as Cardinal Gilroy and his bishops did upon Sir Robert Menzies on Thursday evening. His Eminence’s annual dinner has rightly become celebrated for its atmosphere of goodwill, and the Prime Minister, as the principal guest this year,

glowed with a matching spirit of tolerance and understanding. His address to the assembled representatives of the Roman Catholic community reflected that spirit with perfect propriety, and Bishop Muldoon,

not to be outdone in adorning the occasion with handsome words, hailed Sir Robert as perhaps the greatest Australian of all time.

It is true that Menzies’ speech was fittingly broadminded: he would not want to be in public life, he said, if he had to discriminate

between Protestant and Roman Catholic schools. His archness about his offer at the last election of Commonwealth assistance for science teaching—‘this, I thought in my innocence, was a sensible idea’, was, however, a little too much for the Sydney Morning Herald.

The proposed grants served a genuine and defensible need: that should be enough without investing them with ‘a spurious political innocence’.#! 41 Ibid., 31 July, 1 August 1964.

508 ROBERT MENZIES Somewhat more taxing were formal lectures. Menzies always insisted on preparing these himself and was over all the years of his prime ministership in constant demand for them. In 1964 he gave

two important ones: in London, the British Institute of Management’s Baillieu Lecture; and in Sydney, at the University of New South Wales, the inaugural Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture. Menzies’ subject for the Baillieu Lecture, “The Interdependence of

Political and Industrial Leadership in the Modern State’, proclaimed disparagement of ‘industrial leaders’ who behaved as a pressure group, and embodied a declaration—certainly in very general terms—of the social philosophy he himself stood for. Unlike socialists, conservatives of his kind, he said, believed that true rising

standards of living ‘are the product of progressive enterprise, the acceptance of risks, and the prospect of rewards’. These were all individual matters: there was no government which could create these things. But, by the same token, people who in the modern world thought this way were not reactionaries who ‘wanted to turn the clock back’ and “yearned for a restoration of laissez-faire’. They recognized that an uncontrolled free competitive enterprise system

would tend to destroy the weak, ‘impoverish the poor and reduce that dignity of the individual man and woman which it must be the purpose of democracy to create and enhance’. To this extent industrial activities were not altogether private matters to be resolved by private decision alone. It was essential that industrial leaders understand something of the complexity of politics, especially where economic policy was concerned, so that they could enjoy fruitful interaction with political leaders (6 July). The Wurth lecture was in honour of Wallace Wurth, Chancellor of

the University of New South Wales and Chairman of the Public Service Board, who died in 1960. Menzies delivered it to an estimated audience of 1000, which included Wurth’s widow and two sons. In an inaugural tribute to Wurth as a great civil servant he mounted a warm defence of civil servants as a genus. They were people ‘referred to with monotonous regularity as bureaucrats, clock-watchers, red tape merchants, and repetitive and costly tea drinkers’. But such criticism came most loudly from those with the

least information:

When I cast my eyes around the upper brackets of the Commonwealth Civil Service and realise the devotion, talent, experience and objectivity they bring to their work I could laugh to hear them dismissed with a sneer. There are few people who work harder and who think more assiduously.

The main focus of the lecture was discussion of the troubles then being faced by the Australia’s universities, most especially through

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 509

high failure rates and the difficulty of securing properly trained teaching staff. He remarked the—for its time—notable growth of undergraduate numbers, from 53 000 in 1953 to 69 000 in 1963 and an estimated 95 000 by 1966. Because of the great post-war expansion of tertiary institutions, especially in Britain, the time had come when professors and lecturers could no longer be recruited in significant numbers from overseas. ‘We must, as never before, generate

in our universities our own future staff’, he said, and that meant that there must be positive encouragement for bright students to

work for higher degrees (28 August).#

There were more informal occasions, like Menzies’ address in

September to a Press Club luncheon held to mark the thirtieth anniversary Of his first election to Federal Parliament. It was a garrulous and rather self-indulgent set of disconnected reminiscences (15 September). Earlier in the year he had faced a more formidable audience

when he opened the twenty-fourth board meeting of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women. There were some 400 delegates who came from all over Australia and 13 overseas countries, in effect for a week-long conference on the theme ‘the decade of opportunity’. Menzies professed to be ‘unnerved’.

When he was ‘cajoled’ into coming (‘I use this word carefully. I could change it to being ‘ordered’) he was under the misapprehension that this was an ordinary ‘board’ meeting. ‘This is the biggest “board of directors” I have ever looked at in my life’. More-

over, he was not used to walking into a room where the entire audience was ‘completely and respectfully silent’.

It is a very great ordeal to have to stand and speak in front of 400 women. Opinions differ as to whether men understand women or not, but Iam one of the few men honest enough to admit that he does not understand them.

That was meant to be facetious, but he went on to demonstrate himself to be truly a man of his generation. Speaking of women and

politics, he said that entering political life required first a basic knowledge of the political and governmental structure: I hope Iam not being offensive when I say that if a woman says:

‘Iam a woman and Parliament ought to hear a woman’s view so elect me to Parliament’, it is a mistake. The first thing is to understand that the business of politics and government is of the utmost seriousness.

42 NLA, MS. 4936/6/280/207.

510 ROBERT MENZIES Occasionally there are periods of fun and periods of general abuse. But

government is the business of the nation and, as such, must be conducted with skill and seriousness.

One can only imagine how any early feminists among these silent but very competent ladies must have shuddered!

There were many less serious matters which were part of the flavour of 1964 for Menzies. He was, for example, proclaimed by the

Father’s Day Council as ‘Father of the Year’. In an informal ceremony at an Australia Hotel luncheon in August, Justice Herron called him “Daddy of Australia’, and in accepting, Menzies confessed that it was 36 years since he ‘found himself’ a father. It would

be more appropriate to be named grandfather of the year: by now

he had 10 grandchildren, and ‘grandchildren are rather more engaging than sons and daughters. You see them at their best. When they get a little damp, when they get a little difficult, you hand them back to their parents’ (15 August). Scarcely a week later, the Prime

Minister had occasion to reiterate this preference in Parliament, \ Kt w whenl Country Party backbencher, W. G. Turnbull, drew his attention to the fact that Enid Blyton’s ‘lovable character’ Noddy was currently non grata with librarians, and that the story-books about him had been withdrawn from the shelves of the ACT Children’s Library. Turnbull asked whether Sir Robert, as Father of the Year, considered Noddy suitable reading for his grandchildren. Menzies

replied that he vividly remembered one night when he had been ‘left in charge of a considerable parcel of grandchildren’. They insisted on him reading a book by Enid Blyton, ‘and really, it was a terrible book’. It was about a little boy whose father was a jockey, and because he took sick on the day of the big race the boy rode the race instead. I thought it

was Clearly a case for the stewards (laughter). It was rather immoral from an adult point of view but quite amusing.

Menzies added that after reading the book he was ‘pretty husky’. So his grandchildren said: ‘Grandpa, if you can’t read us any more of her books, sing us a hymn’. ‘Any writer’, he concluded, ‘who can occupy the attention of my grandchildren with a rather improbable

story, and have me ending up singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” is pretty good’ (27 August) )

Other seemingly trivial points about day-to-day life include a decision to order filtration equipment for the Lodge, Menzies’ opinion of Canberra water after rain being “unprintable’. In parlia-

ment he excused this move as hardly extravagant: his habit had

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 511 long been that of filtering water at work in the ordinary facilities at Parliament House, and carrying the result home in gin bottles (7 April). Among other decisions made this year was his reluctant giving up of his official car, a 1949 Cadillac, to which he had clung because its firm upholstery enabled him to alight more readily than from many more modern cars with soft-cushioned seats. A Bentley, Which had the same characteristics and which he normally used when in Melbourne, was brought to Canberra. The Cadillac was subsequently sold at auction for £1000 to a 37-year-old Gosford orchardist and apiarist who planned to use it in his work—as one newspaper headline had it, the Prime Minister’s car was to become a ‘Bee Bus’. But the buyer admitted to having a sentimental streak: eight years before he had bought Menzies’ last discarded official car, a black Buick. When quizzed, however, he thought he would not be buying the next: Bentleys were beyond his range. Visitors sometimes stimulated bizarre happenings. For example, Princess Marina, the Duchess of Kent, came to Australia in September in connection with an important British Exhibition. She received a royal welcome and carried out ceremonial duties like the opening of the Russell Defence Offices in Canberra. A highlight of her visit was a dinner at the Lodge. The occasion, characteristically, was dig-

nified by the Menzies with the playing of Scots pipers. They had also arranged for plastic koalas to be positioned and spotlighted in the garden’s trees. When Menzies made his unscheduled trip to London for Churchill’s funeral there was a new, a Labour, Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street. In the previous October Harold Wilson had narrowly won a

general election in which the Conservative party, after appearing to be in hopeless disarray had rallied somewhat unexpectedly. The last stage of the election was nicely described by the American Ambassador, David Bruce: ‘Anyone, especially a foreigner, would be extremely foolish to try to predict, with any assurance, its result’.

The local soothsayers, ‘usually emphatic in drawing conclusions, have sought refuge in ambiguity and whisky’.* Wilson won with an overall majority of five. Soon after his defeat, Douglas-Home

wrote reflectively to Menzies as a fellow-Conservative on the vagaries of politics, adding warmly: ‘I cannot tell you what a joy it

has been to work with you over so many years and to be able to draw on so much wisdom .. .“44 Menzies was equally emotional: 43 Philip Ziegler, Wilson, the Authorised Life (London, 1993), 160.

44 Douglas-Home to Menzies, 17 October 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/10/82.

512 ROBERT MENZIES My colleagues and I felt nine months ago that the turn of the tide against the Conservatives was so strong that all the chances were that Labour

would come back with a fairly handsome majority. We are all full of admiration for the impact of your own leadership at this period. We feel very strongly that to come within a touch of victory is one of the great personal achievements of leadership in modern times .. .*

There was, however, for Menzies one amusing aspect to Wilson’s

win. Harrison reported it to him in the last letter he wrote to Menzies before leaving London when his period as High Commissioner ended. He had a final audience with the Queen who asked him to tell Menzies a story which, clearly, greatly tickled her. (Several weeks later, when Harrison’s successor, Alexander Downer, came to present his credentials she regaled him with the same tale.)

When the Queen sent for Wilson to ask whether he could form a Government his reply was: ‘yes, of course I can. Bob Menzies carried on for two years with a majority of only one. I have five’. The Queen told Harrison that Menzies seemed to have ‘established a precedent now that all future Ministers would adhere to’. Downer

(lacking Harrison’s, and perhaps the Queen’s, sense of humour) thought the incident displayed excessive self-assurance on Wilson’s part; and that this was ‘not really a very respectful way to address one’s sovereign’ .*©

Menzies had talks with Wilson, ‘whose views on Southeast Asia and our own problems are eminently satisfactory’. At a press con-

ference on his return to Australia he denied that Wilson had put pressure on him to send Australian troops into Borneo, though Wilson hinted to the contrary in discussing the Malaysian crisis in the Commons at this time. Certainly, the decision announced by McEwen on 2 February, before Menzies came home, that the Australian battalion with the strategic reserve in Malaysia would become available to serve in Borneo was partly in response to pressure Wilson exerted on McEwen, beginning in mid-January while Menzies was still on holiday. Other factors naturally lay behind the final decision, not least of them appeals for more assistance from Malaysia itself as Indonesia increased its military build-

45 Menzies to Douglas-Home, 23 October 1964, ibid. 46 Harrison to Menzies, 20 October 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/123; Downer to Menzies,

13 November 1964, NLA, MS. 4936/1/10/84. Wilson’s words are taken from

Downer’s letter, but both told the same story.

A PRIME MINISTER'S LIFE, 1964-1965 513 up in Borneo.*” On the day before McEwen made his announcement

Wilson, Menzies and Keith Holyoake, the New Zealand Prime Minister, met over a working luncheon at 10 Downing Street to discuss the crisis in Southeast Asia.48 This was presumably one of the talks which Menzies told a London press conference were ‘full of mutual understanding and, from Australia’s point of view, very satisfactory’. He found ‘no diminution of Britain’s interest in Southeast Asian developments since the change of government’ .4? By 11 February Menzies was home and on what the Australian Financial Review called his ‘once a year day’ gave a press conference

in Canberra: the first for seven months. Noting that it would be another five weeks before the Prime Minister would be required to

face further questions about Government policy (parliament, at present in recess, would not meet until then) the Review reminded its readers that in Chifley’s day press conferences were bi-weekly events. They had progressively tapered off since 1950; once there had been twelve months without one, although near defeat in 1961 had briefly brought a slight increase in frequency. The established

pattern now was that such conferences usually took place on Menzies’ return from an overseas visit. It was natural in such circumstances for him to speak in generalities about foreign affairs and to brush off questions on domestic affairs on the ground that, having been out of Australia, he was not familiar with the latest developments. The Canberra Times, in an editorial on ‘The Gentle

Art of Saying Nothing’, dismissed the Conference as another example of endless warfare in which, as Menzies had once written, journalists and politicians were natural enemies. In that warfare, the paper asserted, Menzies had a belt-full of scalps. (By now a variety

of put-downs was routine. In a typical case, “young cub reporter rushes across the tarmac with notebook and the breathless appeal: “Sir, I’m from the Daily”... “My boy, you have my deepest sympathy”, interrupted Sir Robert, and the enemy was confounded. It was easy’.)°! The Financial Review described acidly how, in this case,

from the moment Menzies walked into the room, the Conference

47 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 340-3. On the advice of the Chiefs of Staff two

other battalions available for service overseas were kept in Australia as reserves against the possibilities that they would be needed in Vietnam or on the West New puunea oreo. border. But a squadron of about 100 Special Air Service troops was to go to 48 Australian, 3 February 1965.

SMH, 6 February 1965. °° CT, 18 February 1965.

514 ROBERT MENZIES ‘resolved itself into a familiar pattern of tentative questioning and generalised answer’: He enumerated Australia’s diplomatic ties in the Vietnam crisis, denied that the British Government had applied pressure for an increase in our defence commitment in Malaysia, admitted that he did not fully understand the Senate voting system and confessed that the possibility of a Senate deadlock did not keep him awake at night... About 45 minutes after the Conference started the PM abruptly ended it just as a visiting US journalist was about to ask a question.°!

5! Australian Financial Review, ‘Canberra Observed’, 12 February 1965.

19

Predictable Rigidities and Unexpected Sentimentalities 1965 AL HIS press of conference on his returnthat from London the beginning 1965 Menzies claimed Australia hadatmore responsibilities in Southeast Asia than any other country, instancing

the defence of Australia and Papua New Guinea, the defence of Malaysia and obligations under the ANZUS and SEATO treaties. He had discussed with Prime Minister Wilson, he said, the question

of getting ‘some sort of priority in Australia’s overseas responsibilities’.! The two had agreed that it would be helpful for Australia to have discussions with Britain, the United States and New Zealand

on this issue, but no precise plans for such were made. Menzies made no public statement about a much more significant assurance he got from Wilson. It was about Vietnam. Well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident the situation there had been rapidly deteriorating.

While infiltration from North Vietnam steadily strengthened the clandestine forces (commonly known as the ‘Viet Cong’) of the insurgent National Liberation Front? in the South, United States efforts ‘peacefully’ to shore up stable government in Saigon seemed more and more ineffectual. Early in July 1964 U Thant, the United Nations Secretary-General, called for the reconvening of the Geneva Conference to seek a peaceful settlement of the threatening conflict in Vietnam. France, Russia, China and North Vietnam supported the proposal, but Johnson refused to consider it. When, at the time of Churchill’s funeral, Menzies had his discussions with Wilson, the

latter was being urged by some supporters and much public ' SMH, 12 February 1965. 2 ‘Viet Cong’, Peter Edwards explains, ‘came to be used almost universally during the Vietnam war by people of all political persuasions to refer to the insurgents in South

Vietnam ... the term was used to refer both to the political organisation properly called the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam ... and to its military wing, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces or PLAF’. Crises and Commitments, xix. 915

516 ROBERT MENZIES opinion to swing his weight behind the U Thant call for negotiations. But he promised Menzies that ‘the British would not make

any proposal to refer the matter to Geneva unless and until the United States approved’. Menzies could not claim credit for persuading Wilson to take this position. For, while careful to avoid his country becoming directly involved, Wilson in fact approved the original United States stand in Vietnam. And he managed to maintain, by what his biographer calls ‘the most intricate manoeuvring at home and abroad’, good relations with Johnson.? But Menzies did relish Wilson’s acceptance

of the view that negotiation with the North Vietnamese Government at Hanoi would be morally wrong, thanks chiefly to that Government’s open violation of key clauses in the 1954 Geneva Accords. These had forbidden the establishment of foreign military bases or military forces on either side of the temporary ‘regrouping line’ of the 17th parallel. Besides objecting to negotiations on moral

grounds, Menzies held the more pragmatic view that there was ereat danger that Hanoi might get most of what it wanted unless its

opponents could bargain from a position of strength. As matters stood at the beginning of 1965 such strength seemed far away. Despite the efforts of the large American and the small Australian teams of military and technical ‘advisers’, the South Vietnamese forces remained comparatively weak and ridden with factionalism.

Insurgent guerrillas and infiltrating northern troops controlled most of the countryside, and killing of southern officials and their supporters was endemic. The United States Administration was, as the Australian Embassy reported, ‘at its wit’s end’.4 Debate raged among Johnson’s advisers: between so-called ‘hawks’ (who saw no hope in anything other than an escalation of the United States effort, even to the point of putting in combat troops) and ‘doves’ (who favoured the lesser risk of con-

tinuing existing measures, or even contemplated negotiation). Menzies, Hasluck and their Foreign Affairs and Defence (FAD) Committee anxiously devoured every scrap of available information on the progress of the Washington debate. Their outlook

was predominantly hawkish. In their eyes, it was vital for 3 Philip Ziegler, Wilson, 229. 4 Edwards, Crises and Commitments, 339. [base my account of the steps leading up to the

commitment of an Australian battalion to Vietnam on ibid., especially 335-75. As official historian, Dr Edwards had complete access to official documents, many of them not released at the time of writing. He has seen it as his responsibility to the public and to other historians to put down the sequence of events these documents reveal as dispassionately as possible. Except where otherwise stated, quotations are from Dr Edwards’ account.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 517

Australia’s ‘forward defence’ that the American presence be forcefully maintained in Vietnam. Then, on 7 February, less than a

week before Menzies arrived home from London, the Viet Cong launched attacks on a United States helicopter base and a number of advisers’ barracks, causing the death of eight Americans. Retaliatory bombing of targets between the 17th and 19th parallels (i.e. in the southernmost areas of North Vietnam) followed immediately, and

soon merged into regular bombing of North Vietnam. Despite intense diplomatic activity around the world, hopes of negotiating peace faded. Both North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front

now refused to begin talks until the United States withdrew all its personnel and munitions. At this point Menzies underlined his uncompromising views by replying with ferocity and at length to a letter in which 13 Anglican bishops urged the Government to take ‘positive steps towards an honourable and peaceful settlement of the fighting in Vietnam’. The

bishops, headed by J.S. Moyes, who had recently retired after 35 years as Bishop of Armidale, couched their request modestly, and

without criticizing previous Government policy. But Menzies declared that the letter ‘distressed’ him. He pointed particularly toa passage in which the clerics said that in pressing for negotiations they were interested in peace, not in canvassing the merits of the respective attitudes of the Governments of the United States, and of

North and South Vietnam. Menzies declared that, unlike the bishops, the Australian Government was, and had to be, concerned

with such issues. To him it was elementary ‘that unless we have some ideas on the merits of these matters, our actions will be those

of expediency and not of principle’. And he went on at length to maintain the impossibility of negotiating with ‘the Viet Cong, well organised but hidden, determined on revolution by violence’, and

North Vietnam, ‘which had shown it would be bound by no

agreement’.° That Menzies wanted the widest possible audience for

this declaration is shown by the care he took to see that it was at once cabled to London and to Washington, where it was to be passed on to Johnson and his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. Several weeks later most of the bishops replied, giving instances

in which they said that South Vietnam and the United States had also been guilty of breaching the Geneva Accords and accusing Menzies of idealizing the Vietnamese situation when he maintained that the war was a crusade for democracy and against ‘atheistic and materialistic communism’. Bunting and the Secretary of the Depart-

ment of External Affairs, Sir James Plimsoll, advised Menzies to ° SMH, 26 March 1965.

518 ROBERT MENZIES send a short and ‘unbelligerent’ reply, for ‘there are some aspects of

the Vietnam situation which are so hazy that anything written, no matter how carefully, can be open to rebuttal’. But Menzies wrote a longer and more aggressive response than his first, then closed the correspondence, declaring that it had served ‘a valuable purpose’. Meantime Johnson made at Johns Hopkins University a speech obviously designed to head off growing domestic criticism of his Vietnam policy. While reasserting his commitment to South Viet-

namese independence, he declared his readiness to engage in ‘unconditional discussions with North Vietnam’. The Opposition in

the Australian House of Representatives seized on the apparent contrast between this attitude and that of Menzies, whom Whitlam described as ‘the most conservative and bellicose head of government elected in any free elections in the world today’. Hasluck explained that Johnson’s reference to ‘unconditional’ discussions was in reality a rejection of the conditions North Vietnam demanded

before negotiations could begin: complete United States withdrawal from Vietnam. Menzies also made this point in his second reply to the bishops, and laid stress on the many parts of Johnson’s

speech in which he reasserted his Government’s commitment to

South Vietnam.

Johnson made his Johns Hopkins speech on 8 April (Australian time) and the bishops sent their second letter to Menzies on the 9th. But the FAD Committee, at a momentous meeting on the evening of the 7th, had already taken the decision that Australia would send a combat battalion to Vietnam if it was requested. Part of the immediate background to this decision was a three-day military staff conference (30 March to 1 April) held at Honolulu, at which senior

American service officers discussed various strategies for the deployment of troops if, as now seemed likely, action against North Vietnam were to go beyond bombing. As friends and de facto allies,

Australia and New Zealand were invited to send representatives. Australia’s representative was its Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Air Chief Marshal Scherger. Scherger’s frank hawkishness is neatly captured in a reference Edwards makes to preliminary discussions of his brief for the Honolulu meeting: Patrick Shaw, the Acting Secretary of External Affairs, told Hasluck that, in the Defence Committee discussions . . ., Scherger had been inclined to

speak as if his task were to discuss why, when and where Australian forces would be sent to Vietnam. Shaw and Bunting had had to remind him that there was a prior question—whether they would be sent—a question to be decided by ministers.° 6 [bid., 358.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 519

In the event the Honolulu meeting made no final recommendations on the plans to be adopted, but in his report Scherger indicated that the most likely to be adopted was an ‘enclave’ strategy, whereby

American troops already in Vietnam to guard advisers’ barracks and airfields should be greatly increased in number and take offensive action against the Viet Cong. The Americans, he added, clearly

wanted an Australian contribution to any such scheme, and he recommended that Australia should offer a battalion. It was this recommendation that the FAD Committee adopted on

7 April. Hasluck and McMahon (the Minister for Labour and National Service) were inclined to delay a decision until the Ameri-

cans had firmly decided on their strategy. But Paltridge, Holt, McEwen and Menzies thought, as Holt put it, that Australia should be ready to provide a battalion if formally asked, ‘as an act of faith and because of its political significance’. Menzies declared that ‘the

security of Australia would be at stake if South Vietnam fell’. Australia therefore had, ‘if anything a livelier interest than [the Americans themselves] in the success of their Vietnam efforts’.”? A week later the Australian Ambassador in Washington, Keith Waller, was directed to convey the decision confidentially to the Secretary of State, Rusk. But Cabinet decided that, according to established practice, public proclamation should await a request for assistance by the country concerned. Negotiations with the current authorities in South Vietnam dragged on for three weeks after the decision of 7 April. On the 28th someone (probably, if the suspicions of those

who knew him well are correct, McMahon) leaked the story to veteran political correspondent Alan Reid, who broke it in the Sydney Daily Telegraph next day. Word came through to the Govern-

ment on the same day (29th) that South Vietnam had agreed to ask for Australian troops, and in the evening session of the House of Representatives Menzies made a brief announcement that, according to a decision made ‘weeks and weeks ago’, it had been agreed that

an Australian battalion should go to Vietnam. Emphasizing

Australia’s close alliance with the United States he read in full a letter from President Johnson, expressing delight at the Australian decision.

In the hours between Reid’s breaking of the story and Menzies’ announcement Senator Gorton, then a junior Minister who was Hasluck’s representative in the Senate, was asked what truth there was in Reid’s press claims. He replied that he knew nothing of the ’ Edwards, 361-2, points out that it was a mark of the ‘unusual importance’ attached to this meeting that, contrary to established Cabinet practice, a record was kept of the discussion as well as of the conclusions.

520 ROBERT MENZIES matter. This was not a lie; and it underlines the fact that Ministers

outside the Cabinet had not been informed about, much less consulted on, the decision to send troops to Vietnam. The operation of policy-making through the very limited group of Ministers who constituted the FAD Committee had in a sense reached its apogee. While it was understandable that on such sensitive matters as aid to

South Vietnam and the day-to-day relationship with the United States a high degree of confidentiality was considered necessary, the

narrow range of those admitted to the discussion meant that other options could scarcely be fruitfully canvassed. Unquestionably, too,

Menzies’ influence was dominant in the small group of decisionmakers. Though—as later events would show—over-simplistic, his views on what was best for Australia were fiercely held and put forward with certainty and a degree of impatience for dissenting opinions which some saw as arrogance and complacency bred of too many years of unchallenged power.

The bitterest debates about Vietnam lay in the future, after

Menzies had left office. But though at first the Government’s decision

received much support, Menzies’ exchanges with the bishops opened the first round of controversy. When the matter was dis-

cussed in Parliament Calwell delivered what has been described as the best speech of his whole career—a stunning denunciation of the Government’s failure to judge the war in Vietnam correctly by not seeing it partly as a civil war. Written for Calwell by his press secretary, Graham Freudenberg, the speech foreshadowed most of the

arguments which the Government’s critics would subsequently use. It rallied the Labor Party in opposition to the despatch of the

battalion. But it did not make clear how any subsequent Labor Government would withdraw the troops, and in general it failed to offer convincing answers to the immediate problems faced by the

United States, which Calwell at the same time said must not be

humiliated or forced to withdraw. Though firm in his public statements, Menzies was grateful for unexpected private expressions of support. From America came a welcome note from Mary Martin, sending “Dear Sir Bob’ a cutting from the New York Journal American: “US Hails Menzies’ Backing on

Vietnam’; and when Bill Battle sent a telegram of congratulations Menzies’ acknowledgement included the words: ‘Although I know [have a great deal of support for my stand on Vietnam, there are not 5 Mary Martin to Menzies, 14 April 1965, NLA, MS. 4936/1/19/163. This message, sent before the announcement of the Australian combat contribution was announced (but

er, re Gecision was in fact taken) referred to Menzies’ truculent speeches in support

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 521

many who bother to send messages when they approve’.’ A few

weeks after the announcement of the battalion for Vietnam Menzies was due to travel via the United States to the regular Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. Just before he left there was ‘a little family gathering’ at the Balwyn home of his brother Frank, who afterwards sent a characteristic note of encouragement: You are constantly in my thoughts during these difficult testing times

but I am convinced that you are heading the right policy for this country’s welfare. I trust that the visit to America in particular will fortify you for the difficult decisions which face you in the current year and that you will not find the Prime Ministers’ Conference too harrowing an experience.!°

Menzies left for the United States on 4 June, taking with him Bunting and high officials from Treasury (Richard Randall) and External Affairs (Richard A. Woolcott). Dame Pattie and Hazel Craig were, as usual, part of the party. At his press conference before

leaving Menzies was suitably vague about discussions he would have with the leaders and officials he would be meeting. He also refused to make predictions about talks he would have with the Queen about the governor-generalship, now vacant since the last incumbent, Lord De L’Isle, had finished his term of office. He explained how the choice would be made. It would be a ‘gross discourtesy’ for him to submit to the Queen a short list of candidates: instead they would ‘discuss names and qualifications in an infor-

mal, intimate atmosphere’. The discussion would continue until both agreed on one name. ‘Some chuckleheaded fellow in some London newspaper’, he added ‘announced we were hawking this job about London’. This was ‘utter drivel’; and anyway, he himself had ‘no prejudice about the appointment of an Australian’. Rather a strange change of heart, nevertheless, considering that he had long

been adamant in his opposition to Labor’s preference for an Australian Governor-General, and had engaged in good-natured badinage with Calwell on the subject as recently as the farewell banquet to De L’Isle only a month before."

On the day after reporting this press conference, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a pleasant editorial wishing Menzies well as he set out to ‘call on our allies’, and catching with not unkind irony at one now well-established image of such peregrinations:

9 Bill Battle to Menzies, 19 May 1965, NLA, MS. 4936/1/4/25. 10 Frank Menzies to Menzies, 25 May 1965, MFP. T Age, 5 May 1965.

522 ROBERT MENZIES The Prime Minister’s annual trip to Britain and the United States has assumed some of the dignity and ritual of a royal tour. There are those cosy chats at Buckingham Palace which he described so enticingly on Thursday. (‘What about Mr. X, your majesty?’ ‘A very sound man, Sir Robert, but perhaps not quite... you know?’ It is irresistible to imagine these conversations.) There are the meetings of the Commonwealth

Premiers with Sir Robert playing the part of the privileged uncle, advising the Afro-Asian children not to make too much noise. There are the formal visits to the White House and No. 10 Downing Street, and the

informal visits to the House of Commons and the playing fields of Lords. It is a stately progress.

Well ahead of Menzies’ visit to Washington, Dean Rusk, the American Secretary of State, felt it necessary to remind President Johnson that: sir Robert and his Government have placed Australia in the forefront of the countries supporting our policy in Viet-Nam, and elements of the Australian battalion will be arriving in Saigon during the course of his visit here. Your receiving the Prime Minister and entertaining him at lunch will point up and dramatise this major tangible demonstration of

Free World support for Viet-Nam, and help the Prime Minister to maintain the support of the Australian people . . .!

The luncheon was duly arranged for 7 June. Beforehand Johnson,

who had just arrived by helicopter after fulfilling other engagements, took Menzies for a ten-minute walk around the White House

grounds in 90-degree summer heat, introducing his beagle and collie dogs. (As Menzies, wiping his perspiring brow, re-entered the

White House, some American reporters thought he looked disgruntled, but Menzies insisted that he was ‘completely gruntled’).!% An hour's talk preceded the lunch (a 30-strong ‘stag’ meal),!4 but it

is doubtful if anything more than mutual affirmation of policy already decided on was discussed. Two days of talks with various

officials followed, and Menzies gave his usual address to the

American-Australian Association in New York. He could see ‘a murky shadow coming down over the whole of South-East Asia’, he said. But Australia—unlike some other countries—was not prepared to leave everything to the United States.»

” Rusk to Johnson, 19 May 1965, LBJ Library, NSE, Country File, Box 233. 13 SMH, 9 June 1965.

‘4 LBJ Library, President’s Daily Diary, Box 4, 7 June 1965. 1S SMH, 14 June 1965.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 523

As expected, Vietnam came immediately under discussion when the Commonwealth Prime Ministers met, though with an unanticipated twist. Harold Wilson’s own position, especially at home, had become increasingly difficult as American bombing in North Vietnam was stepped up, but he remained determined to keep good relations with Johnson. He had visited Washington in April, and

told Johnson he approved of the Australian decision to send a battalion to Vietnam, even implying that the United Kingdom would have done so too if he had not had ‘to give priority to our Malaysian task’. Johnson had replied, expressing appreciation for Wilson’s attitude, acknowledging his difficulties and promising not to spike any moves he felt obliged to make in search of constructive peace talks. Thus armed, Wilson, on the first day of the Prime Ministers’ Conference, made what Philip Ziegler has called “a dazzlingly ingenious attempt to achieve his three main policy objectives in a single stroke: to maintain the Anglo-American alliance, to fortify the unity and standing of the Commonwealth, and to keep his left wing quiet’. After privately checking with Menzies, Wilson proposed that a

mission of Commonwealth leaders, headed by himself, visit the capitals of all those involved to see if they could broker terms for a peace settlement in Vietnam. All but one Prime Minister, Nyeyere of Tanzania, enthusiastically agreed, though Nkrumah of Ghana, having heard that Wilson had consulted Menzies before making the proposal, growled that he hoped that it was ‘merely a malicious rumour’. He went on to demand that Australia at once withdraw all her soldiers from Vietnam. While these troops were deployed there, Nkrumah asked, how could the good faith of any Commonwealth mission be taken seriously? Menzies indignantly rejected this idea, but gave full support to Wilson’s plan. The mission planned to leave

early in July to visit Moscow, Washington, Beijing, Hanoi and Saigon.!6 But in the end the whole idea collapsed when Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi refused to have anything to do with it. It had, however, served the important purpose of preventing Vietnam becoming a disruptive issue at the Conference. The Prime Ministers agreed again to express support for Malay-

sia and were unanimous in approving African majority rule for Rhodesia. Outside the Conference Menzies spoke disparagingly to the press about excessive speech-making, now that there were so '6 This paragraph is based primarily on Ziegler, Wilson, 223-5. Peter Edwards also has a good discussion of the Conference in A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War, 52-5.

524 ROBERT MENZIES many Prime Ministers at each meeting. This year, for example, there were 21. There were roughly 15 topics to discuss, ‘and if everybody

wants to make a speech on each that will be 300 speeches and, of course, that horse won’t gallop. In the old days everybody could speak on everything ...” His disillusion with the new Common-

wealth had clearly returned. Some other delegates and British newspapers made the same point: though the Commonwealth would survive, this would probably be the last Prime Ministers’ meeting on the existing pattern. The Sunday Telegraph, tor example, argued that for modest purposes, like the exchange of students and cultural contacts, the Commonwealth was useful. ‘But gathering all Prime Ministers together under one roof merely turns it into a tower of Babel, inviting nothing but ridicule from the world in general.’!” Menzies’ main public performance in London was a defence of his Vietnam policy at an Australia Club dinner. It was as vigorous as his speech to the American-Australian Association had been in New

York. On this occasion Menzies based a virtual tirade on an unsubtle version of the domino theory and startled his hearers, and the next day’s newspapers, with the declaration: ‘We are at war. Make no mistake about it’.!8 It was a speech which, together with many of Menzies’ remarks about the changing Commonwealth, was bound to cause unease in some quarters. The Guardian, for example, in a special editorial on him, said that now Menzies had committed Australian troops to Vietnam, We shall see whether he is a statesman or just an immensely gifted politician. We may find out whether he is able to distinguish, at the second attempt, between a Munich and a Suez. At the moment there is a

small nagging anxiety about him. He is an unbending man and he is inflexibly attached to many principles we still need to uphold. He is a man you would be glad to have guarding your back in a tight corner. But he is a man for one season, and the season is almost past.!9

While he was in London, Menzies was also the subject of a nasty

pre-prepared BBC television ‘profile’—very different from the picture of him normally presented in the United Kingdom. It was put together by aggressive interviewer Robin Day, whose principle in choosing witnesses was to find people bound to be critical. One of them, Frank Green, formerly Clerk of the House of Represen-

tatives, wrote to a friend in April to tell how he had just been 17 Quoted, SMH, 21, 28 June 1965. '8 Tbid., 14, 30 June 1965. 19 Quoted, Sun-Herald, 20 June 1965.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 525

interviewed for a film on ‘the life of “The Knight of the Thistle”’. Day had “turned up with camera, Kleig lights etc. and set them up in my lounge’, and in reply to one question about “Bob’s foreign affairs policy’ Green said that Australia’s foreign policy came to Canberra regularly by air from London or Washington. He expected ‘a blast’ from Hasluck if the programme was shown in Australia.” Green also produced the old chestnut about Menzies getting rid of rivals by posting them abroad. The other major witness was Calwell, who declared that Menzies saw himself as ‘the spiritual descendant of Sir Winston Churchill’, and ‘the embodiment of all that is good in the Commonwealth’. He conceded that Menzies was an able man, a fine speaker and a formidable opponent, but he had had ‘a lot of luck’. And ‘the older he gets, the more arrogant he becomes’. Day himself concluded that Menzies “embodies the ways of an age that is passing. But he has massive gifts which are not so common now in world affairs’.?!

But whatever the negative impressions in London, Menzies managed on his return to Canberra to charm even the press. In a 50minute conference with almost 100 reporters, television and radio

men under blazing television lighting he spoke quietly and with unexpected detail for over 20 minutes about the situation in Vietnam, devoting the rest of his time to answering questions. ‘He could not have been in a more relaxed and benign mood’, ran one report. ‘In full control of his matter and his audience’, declared another, he yet managed to avoid the faults of arrogance and over-simplification

which sometimes mar these performances. An incipient sneer at the ministers who had written to him was quickly checked. There was no tendency to dismiss his critics as fools or Communists—though he once referred to them as ‘philosophic doubters’. On the whole it was a sober

... attempt to convince the nation that the Government had acted rightly in sending a battalion to Vietnam and that there was no alterna-

tive to fighting on until the Vietcong admit defeat and are ready to negotiate.

Menzies was evasive on questions about his own retirement and refused to comment on the issue of an appointee to the governorgeneralship. One journalist thought that the Prime Minister looked so ‘bouncingly fit’ and was ‘clearly so vigorous mentally’ that it 20 Green to Ward, 13 April 1965. Correspondence of F.C. Green, Tasmanian Archives, microfilm 3008, RY 336, consulted through the generosity of John Thompson, NLA. For a useful discussion of Green’s career and the views it generated see Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14, 314-15. 21 SMH, 16 June 1965.

526 ROBERT MENZIES was difficult to take seriously his ‘half-humorous reference to the possibility of his retirement’.*2 Whether Menzies had been as coy with Harold Wilson about the

date of his retirement as with colleagues and press in Australia is doubtful. In any case, shortly after arriving home from the Prime

Ministers’ Conference he received a letter from Wilson in which the latter recalled that ‘I spoke to you recently about the office of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports’ and was now writing to ask “whether

you would be agreeable to my putting forward your name to the Queen’. Churchill had been the last occupant of this office, now a purely honorific one. It entitled the holder to the wearing of an antique uniform, to a stake in Walmer, a castle built by Henry VIII, and to the title of Constable of Dover Castle. There were few cer-

emonial duties, though it was understood that the Lord Warden should appear fairly regularly in the area to consult with municipal

authorities—an understanding, as it happened, which Churchill had rarely honoured. The five towns of Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich covered a stretch of the English coast where the distance to the Continent was least and which had been the landing place of almost every invasion since Neolithic times. Their

harbours were for many centuries the homes of mariners and vessels which provided ship service and were vital to the country’s defence. The internal administration of these ports had once been

controlled by their own courts, the most important of them the Court of Stepway, which was presided over by the Warden of the Cinque Ports. This wardenship was for a number of centuries one of the realm’s key defence posts, to which the king made all appoint-

ments. It was sometimes filled by men of royal blood. For a man with Menzies’ veneration for tradition, to hold this post would be a great honour, especially when he was immediate successor to Churchill. That it no longer had any practical significance was not from his point of view important. Menzies did not reply to Wilson’s initial approach for a month.

He had been for some time out of action, having gone into the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne, after a severe chill, for a rest and careful check-up. (He returned to Canberra early in August, declaring that he was ‘refreshed and very satisfied’.)*? He apologized to Wilson for the delay in replying and expressed his ‘warm gratitude for such a mark of your own personal confidence in me and the imagination which prompted you to think of me’. He asked

22 Ihid., 13, 14, July 1965. *3 Tbid., 5 August 1965.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 527

whether a modest flat could be constructed in Walmer Castle for his periodical accommodation, what the cost of residence there would be and how expensive the uniform was. (Menzies knew that retirement would not be for him a lucrative time.) When Wilson replied that he was looking into the matter of the flat, that the cost of residence would be on a par with the cost of a first-class hotel, and that

the uniform would involve an outlay of about £365, Menzies accepted. ‘I would regard this appointment as a great personal honour’, he wrote. ‘I also think that it may very well give satisfaction in your own country, as I am certain it will in Australia.’*4 In

due course he was delighted to learn that the British Ministry of Works was building an apartment in the west bastion of the castle, to consist of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and a maid’s room. Word of the impending appointment seems to

have soon spread among the cognoscenti in England. In July, for example, Slim wrote to say how good it was that the Cinque Ports

would guarantee that his visits to England would continue. In passing Slim’s letter on to Menzies, Hazel Craig minuted (perhaps not without indignation): ‘What is the meaning of his reference to

the “Cinque Ports” giving you an excuse to go to England?’. Menzies returned the letter for filing, with the almost skittish scribble: ‘I'll tell you!’ The appointment was announced from the British Prime Minister’s residence, 10 Downing Street, early in October. It was the first time in its 900-year history that the office of Lord Warden had gone

to a person outside Britain, and press agencies reported that it symbolized the fact that in the last 50 years whenever the Channel

Ports had been in danger the Commonwealth had come to their

rescue. In an official statement Menzies said that the selection of an Australian for a position ‘so steeped in British tradition and history is a real demonstration of the family bonds of the British Commonwealth’. No doubt Wilson, some of his Labour colleagues notwithstanding, wanted it to be regarded in this way. Journalists at a press

conference which Menzies called to talk about the appointment received short shrift when they asked whether it presaged early resignation on the Prime Minister’s part, and perhaps a retirement in England. He declared that he would announce his retirement when he chose to do so: he had not decided about that, and would not be tricked into any premature statement. The Cinque Ports appointment fitted quite comfortably into his now established 24 Correspondence in relation to this post is in NLA, MS. 4936/29/484/1, 2. 25 Slim to Menzies, 9 July 1965, NLA, MS. 4936/1/28/230.

528 ROBERT MENZIES practice of visiting England once a year. As to his retirement, he was an Australian and he hoped to die here, and was at present looking for a house in Melbourne, his ‘own home town’.2° Menzies’ simple and personal delight in the appointment is well conveyed in a note which Harold Holt sent to his colleague Alick Downer, now High Commissioner in London: Bob is in great form and shows no sign of flagging. No pun intended, but he did exhibit the flag of the Warden of the Cinque Ports in the Cabinet ante-room earlier in the week, and has been giving us some detail about his uniform, accoutrements of establishment, etc. Clearly he is delighted with this latest honour.’’

In some quarters, predictably, Menzies’ pleasure ensured that he would be a figure of fun. For example, on the first sitting day after the announcement, the Labor member for Bonython, M. H. Nicholls,

opened question time in the House of Representatives by asking

Menzies whether he would rehearse his installation as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports by ‘donning an Admiral’s uniform and sailing a barge around Lake Burley Griffin’. In view of his friendship with

the Waterside Workers’ Federation, Nicholls added, would the Prime Minister arrange for a couple of wharfies to pipe him aboard?

Someone managed, at this point, to arrange the imitation of the sound of a bosun’s whistle in the Chamber. Menzies, unfazed, accepted this as a ‘valuable suggestion’, though he asserted that ‘if I

do it I will arrange for the recruitment not to be conducted by the

WWFE’5

The other major matter of journalistic speculation—who the new Governor-General would be—was at last laid to rest at the end of July, when Casey was named for the post. Those who remembered Menzies’ surprise declaration on the eve of his recent trip to England

that he now had no objection to an Australian being GovernorGeneral must have concluded that he had Casey in mind for his forthcoming ‘chat’ with the Queen. The Sydney Morning Herald detected “a certain magnanimity’ on Menzies’ part in the elevation of ‘a man who was once his rival—and never, perhaps, close friend’, who lacked Sir Robert’s intellectual powers or political gifts, but was his equal in ‘character and statesmanship’.*? What, naturally, was never divulged was that the first choice for the post was Vice26 SMH, 8 October 1965.

27 Holt to Downer, 22 October 1965, Holt Papers, AA, M2608/1/16. Iam indebted to the kindness of Mr Ian Hancock for this reference. 28 CPD H of R 48: 1651; SMH, 13 October 1965. *° Ibid., 29 July 1965.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 529

Admiral Sir John Collins, wartime naval hero who had been Chief of the Naval Staff between 1947 and 1955. He declined.2° Meanwhile, Menzies remained tight-lipped about his own plans, though most commentators expected his retirement within the foreseeable future. Some were specially intrigued when the Menzies bought a house in Haverbrack Avenue, Malvern, remembering Menzies’ statement at a recent press conference that he would be retiring to Melbourne, and noting that a caretaker ‘house-sitter’, not an ordinary tenant, took the Malvern house over.?!

Two critically important happenings in this last phase of Menzies’ prime ministership belong to August and September 1965: the bringing down of what became labelled as a ‘guns before fun’ budget; and the tabling of the so-called Vernon Report. The budget increased income tax and duties on petrol, beer, spirits and tobacco, and raised general spending, the most important single item being

defence. On the day after the Treasurer presented this budget to

Parliament Menzies announced that an additional 350 men were to

be sent to Vietnam and that the intake of national servicemen in 1966 would be higher than originally planned. Considered beside the massive commitment of troops to Vietnam which the United States administration had just made, after long internal debate, the increased Australian contribution could scarcely be regarded as more than a token one. Indeed, the additional force, which would consist of an artillery battery, some engineers and other ancillary forces, would simply raise the original battalion, committed at the end of April, to what in military terms was a battalion group. But domestically the announcement, coupled as it was with budget increases on defence, inevitably added to the concern of those who found the Government’s approach to the Vietnamese situation oversimplistic and Australia’s involvement unnecessary, if not immoral.

Desultory protests stimulated by academic and religious leaders had occurred from the first announcement that a battalion was to go to Vietnam. These became stronger as, echoing practice in American universities, “‘teach-ins’ were held in the Australian National University in Canberra and Monash in Melbourne, spreading to other 30 Note, ‘top secret’, on background to Lord Casey’s appointment as Governor-General, NLA, MS. 4936/1/8/67. 3t A group of Menzies’ supporters and friends clubbed together to buy this house, on

the ground that after years of public service, he was not affluent. Those involved made a point of not knowing the identity of each other. Though at first objecting, Menzies finally agreed on condition that the property not be left to his family. After his death, the house was sold, and the proceeds divided between Dame Pattie’s and Heather’s schools, Tintern and Ruyton (information by courtesy of Mrs Heather Henderson).

32 Edwards, A Nation at War, 57.

530 ROBERT MENZIES tertiary institutions, when students and others began to debate, and seek a better understanding of, the conflict in Vietnam. A wider

protest movement soon developed of which Jim Cairns, Labor member for the House of Representatives seat of Yarra, became the chief speaker and informal leader. Support for Government policy remained strong, but uneasiness about Australia’s Vietnam policy inevitably coloured Menzies’ last months in office, adding to the negative view of his regime held by some intellectuals and many of the young.

The budget’s increased defence allocation might highlight the Vietnam commitment, but it also reflected what the Sydney Morning Herald called the ‘economic steadiness’ of the country over the past

year or so. Combined with an increase in taxation, this steadiness held inflation in check and enabled planned Government spending which in total ‘will be the heaviest in Australia’s history’. Such economic health was of great importance as part of the climate in which Menzies took another step deplored by most of his critics: that of rejecting, almost contemptuously, the main thrust of a voluminous report on the past and future of the Australian economy

produced by a distinguished Committee chaired by Sir James Vernon, managing director of the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. When setting up the Committee in February 1963 Menzies wanted as Chairman Sir John Crawford, late head of the Department of Trade, who had long advocated the need for such an inquiry. But he

failed to carry this suggestion through Cabinet. Crawford was, however, persuaded to accept the vice-chairmanship, though he was not altogether happy with Menzies’ enigmatic warning to the

Committee that it could ‘draw conclusions from its studies, but was not invited to make recommendations to the Government’ .*4

The Report took over two years to prepare. The Committee mobilized experts on short-term secondments from universities and

private enterprise to prepare analytical papers, was given formidable resources from the Commonwealth public service and travelled all over Australia taking evidence from a multiplicity of sources. It gave its Report, a hefty document of over 400 pages, with 600 pages of appendices, mostly statistical analysis with projections for the next ten years, to the Government in May 1965. Over the next four months the document received detailed discussion in Cabinet, part of which involved consideration of submissions by individual

ministers based on comments from their Departments. When in September Menzies tabled the Report in parliament nobody outside 33 SMH, 18 August 1965.

34R.S. Parker, ‘Public Enquiries’, in L. T. Evans and J.D. B. Miller (eds), Policy and Practice: Essays in honour of Sir John Crawford (Sydney, 1987), 109-10.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 531

the Government and its senior advisers had seen it in detail. He was thus able to make criticisms which few members were in a position to judge. Overall, Menzies declared, the Committee had exceeded its brief

by offering opinions on policy. In a democracy policy must be determined by the Government alone. On a whole range of matters the Committee presented arguments based primarily on economic facts and figures, but governments had to take into account a range

of other considerations in deciding on policy. Menzies further

instanced as flawed such Committee recommendations as those on optimal levels of immigration, the need to avoid the ills of uncontrolled foreign investment, what special taxation and other concessions were desirable to encourage manufacturing industry, how to sustain regularity in economic growth. The implications of the last issue particularly attracted his spleen. The Committee considered a

erowth rate in the gross national product of 5 per cent a year possible but difficult, and devoted much space to examining how the difficulties could be overcome. In the process, said Menzies, the

thesis seemed to emerge that the desired growth rate ‘will be achieved only if there is a conscious diversion of resources from some areas of activity to others’. That meant planning: interference to change demand not, as is occasionally necessary, to meet a crisis, but ‘to achieve some pre-ordained statistical result’. What made this

kind of planning particularly unpalatable was the suggestion that two independent expert bodies, a Special Projects Commission and an Advisory Council on Economic Growth, be established to provide

‘material assistance to the Government and to the community in general in the making of economic decisions’. He referred scornfully to the Committee’s “so-called projections in Appendix N’, on

which its calculations of desirable growth were based, as predicating ‘a degree of planning and direction of the economy which in our opinion would not be either appropriate or acceptable in Australia’. The Labor interjector who wryly noted “The Prime Minister is politely rubbishing this report’ was not wide of the mark.* It was suspected at the time,“ and is now known to be the case,

that Menzies’ main criticisms were originally formulated by Treasury. The key submissions came to Cabinet via the Treasurer,

Harold Holt. Numbered 955 and 964, they set out to discredit Appendix N of the Report (‘Projections to 1974-75’), and the 35 CPD H of R 47: 1081, 1084-5.

36 See e.g. H. F. Lydall, ‘The Economy as a Whole: Policies for Growth’, in Economic Record, vol. 42, no. 97, March 1966 (special issue devoted to reviews of the Vernon Report), esp. 164. Lydall also dismisses as ‘a rather shoddy debating point’ Menzies’

suggestion that to accept the Committee’s proposal for an Advisory Council on Economic Growth would be yielding to a ‘technocracy’.

532 ROBERT MENZIES proposal to create ‘advisory’ bodies. Holt wrote that without the projections, many of the Committee’s policy suggestions, ‘and almost all of the more important of them... would have no visible means of support’. But the projections themselves were unsound: ‘vulnerable to technical criticism on just about every major point’. They departed ‘seriously from the commonly recognised procedures for economic forecasting that have been developed, not only in Australia, but in overseas countries’. As to the suggested Advisory Council on Economic Growth: nothing was to be said in its favour. Businessmen’s advice could be obtained ‘through the system of consultation we have already established’ and if economists’ advice were required ‘we already have it on tap’. The day is long gone by when trained economists were only to be found in universities or similar institutions. Within the Commonwealth Public Service we have today a number of economists at least the equal in point of abilities and attainments of those to be found in the universities and having the advantage over their academic counterparts of being on the whole better informed on the problems which are the real content of economic policy.*’

There was the real rub: the notion of setting up an independent source of economic information and opinion implicitly challenged the near-monopoly of that role by the Treasury Department, which had recently set up an Economic and Financial Survey Section with similar functions. Moreover, Treasury officials, arguing that Crawford was a

‘high protectionist’, hand-in-glove with Australian manufacturers, feared the enhancement of his political influence as an almost certain appointee to—possibly chairman of—the proposed economic advisory council, if established.°8

Though no longer himself in the Public Service—he was now

Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies in The Australian

National University—Crawford could not be forgotten as once a formidable figure in the rivalry between the Department of Trade and the Treasury. It is noteworthy too that many of the spurned university economists agreed with the thrust of the Report and did not hide their belief that Menzies had dealt shabbily with it.%9 37 AA, CRS. A5827/1, vol. 29, Cabinet Submissions, nos 955 and 964. 38 Parker, loc. cit., 110-11.

°° In the Menzies Papers, NLA, there is a most useful cutting book with many of these criticisms, MS. 4936/28/25, various pages from 162 on. Among Menzies’ sternest critics were Professor Gates of Sydney University, Professor Arndt, of the ANU’s Research School of Pacific Studies, and the ex Vice-Chancellor of the ANU, Professor Copland. The Melbourne financier Staniforth Ricketson publicly rapped Menzies for his attitude to planning (Melbourne Herald, 18 October 1965).

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 533

sir James Vernon and his colleagues did not issue a joint state-

ment in reply to Menzies’ criticisms but agreed to Crawford addressing the National Press Club. He did so in what the Age called a reasoned and persuasive defence’, delivered in a ‘calm, tactful tone of address ... in marked contrast with the intemperate criticisms the Government and some other commentators heaped upon the Report’.4° Crawford took up the issues which Menzies had

raised, spoke to them one by one, and stressed that it was a misinterpretation to conclude that the Committee favoured a technocratic society. It knew that the Government in a democracy had final

responsibility and it had no wish to change that. It thought, however, that there was room for advisory bodies, though they might have no executive role. After all, ‘ours is a mixed economy in which

Government and private decisions must be meshed in an ordered whole’. The Government, naturally, was free to reject the views of its advisers. ‘But I would have been a little happier had the Report been widely available before major decisions were taken.’ In Parliament, in reply to a Labor member who asked whether he

had read the reports of Crawford’s address, Menzies displayed a

suavity in marked contrast to his earlier ferocity. Crawford’s remarks, he said, had been ‘extremely temperate and restrained’, and he went on to assure the House that he and his colleagues had little difficulty ‘in agreeing with the great bulk of the Vernon Committee’s Report, which would be useful to the Government’.*! ‘Useful’, presumably, not for its policy recommendations, but for its encyclopaedic and connected factual survey of economic resources,

trends and issues: a kind of reference tool which had not existed before. That having been implied, its initiatives for change were quietly buried. Among other things this was, naturally, a victory for the amour propre of Treasury. But more important was current pros-

perity and the apparent success of ‘steady as she goes’ economic policies. The decision to establish the Vernon inquiry was originally

made in the shadow of the 1961 election. As we have seen, an important element in that decision had been the depressing effect —bankruptcies and unemployment—of the ‘credit squeeze’ of November 1960. It was important then that the Government be seen to be concerned, in a very practical way, to find out in detail what was happening in the economy. But much had happened since then. The downturn was shortlived, employment had picked up, and the

Liberals had handsomely won the 1963 election. Whatever the Vernon Committee came up with now could, in the political sense, “0 Age editorial, 7 December 1965. The speech is reported well in CT, Age, SMH, 3 December. *1 CPD H of R 49: 3639, 7 December 1965.

534 ROBERT MENZIES be safely rejected if it involved criticism of the Government's course, especially if that criticism implied changes of policy. Given the inevitability of another election in 1966, maybe any policy which

might risk, even briefly, interference with the current prosperity was not to be contemplated? The final chapter in the Menzies dispensation to the Australian

universities also came to a head late in 1965. As we have seen, Menzies’ masterful acceptance of the Murray Committee’s recom-

mendations brought a critical emergency injection of Commonwealth funds into the university system, and also ensured that a local body would be set up to parallel the British University Grants

Committee (UGC). This was the Australian Universities Commission (AUC), established in 1959. But whereas Murray, with the

UGC model in mind, had envisaged a somewhat informal and largely academic body, the Government established the AUC as a

statutory authority with equal representation of academic and business interests. His admiration for Murray notwithstanding Menzies, like his closest bureaucratic advisers, was apprehensive lest the AUC prove too university-centred and expensive. And for all his long-standing belief in university autonomy, Menzies saw that in Australia’s situation of notable population growth, of escalating demand for student places, and of need for more and more trained people in an expanding and diversifying economy, a degree of co-ordination of university development was needed. What the Vice-Chancellors had spectacularly failed to do before appealing to him in 1956 would in effect be essential to the work which the Prime

Minister now handed to the AUC. That was one of the ends for which the Australian body received formal powers which had never been part of the UGC arrangement in the United Kingdom. Menzies invited Sir Leslie Martin, the distinguished physicist, to be the foundation chairman. The Commission made its first visits to the universities between September and December 1959 and presented an interim report to the Government in June 1960. University budgeting was to be in

three-year periods, and this report included recommendations for the next triennium. In the light of the Government’s difficult financial situation at this time, the expansion contemplated by the Commission seemed to Cabinet and its advisers to be excessive. But the Commission had aroused wide expectations and through canny negotiations had increased matching grants from the States. Menzies therefore legislated for the recommended sums, while warning that further large increases were out of the question.” 42 Susan Davies, The Martin Committee and the Binary Policy of Higher Education in Australia (Melbourne, 1989), 27, 30, 33. Except where otherwise stated, this excellent study is the chief source for the discussion which follows.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 535

The effect of the Murray-recommended emergency grants and of the AUC’s achievement of its first funding requests were spectacular. The former made possible—as B. R. Williams has put it—‘an

increase in academic salaries from a depressed level, and a very large increase in the number of students without a deterioration of staff-student ratios’.43 The latter added another great increase in the

number of student places, ushering in a second phase of post-war university expansion. This was characterized by the consolidation of second universities in New South Wales and Victoria and a move

to plan further new establishments in these and other States. Already, in its first report of 1960 the AUC projected a considerably

larger growth in the demand for university places than that estimated by the Murray Committee. The future, clearly, held formidable problems. Martin therefore asked for the help of a special committee of inquiry to review Australia’s future needs for tertiary education as a whole.

Menzies welcomed this, and with a new emphasis. As he told parliament: unless there is early and substantial modification of the university pattern, away from the traditional nineteenth century model on which it is now based, it may not... be practicable for Australian governments to meet all the needs for university education and at the same time to achieve the best use of resources in the national interest.

Martin nominated himself as chairman of the proposed advisory committee. For him its task was to investigate what was essentially

a university problem, and he proposed a membership composed almost completely of senior university administrators. But Menzies and the officers of his Department insisted on the inclusion of others from outside the university world: from commerce, agriculture and industry, and other branches of education.

The Committee presented the Government with the first two volumes of its Report in September 1964. Though most members of

the Committee had a hand in writing the report, Martin’s own imprint was firmly upon it. Susan Davies argues that Martin, originally a product of the great Cavendish days at Cambridge, had an elite view of universities as research institutions and not agents of technological training. Other types of institution, he held, could

deal with practical aspects of higher education, whether simply professional, or carrying out the more lowly task of finding effective ways of exploiting the discoveries of pure research. In fact, so neat

43. B. R. Williams, ‘Resources per University Student, 1951-75’, quoted by Davies, ibid., 27.

536 ROBERT MENZIES and narrow an approach could be only marginally relevant to an established Australian system, of which Menzies himself was so notable a product. But circumstance was bringing divergent traditions together. Menzies, believing that costs must swamp unrestrained development of the university system he loved, could accommodate to at least the practical implications of the Martin Committee’s Report. Though these were complex, their main thrust was Clear. It was for an expansion of places for tertiary education

outside the universities through the development of a so-called ‘binary system’. Colleges of Advanced Education would stand beside the universities, concerned less with research than with providing practical and largely vocational training in a variety of fields. These Colleges, though promising in due course to be less costly than a multiplication of conventional universities might have been, nevertheless involved considerable expense. In accepting the thrust of the Martin Report the Commonwealth was thus committing itself

(and as well, indirectly, the States)** to a further acceptance of responsibility in a crisis situation in tertiary education. It was, ina broad sense, a repetition of the advance brought by the adoption of Murray’s recommendations in 1957. In this case, however, a busy Menzies was not involved in the minutiae. The ultimate responsibility for Commonwealth policy and practice in education remained

with the Prime Minister, but in 1964 he had appointed a junior minister, John Gorton, to assist him in this matter. When it came to the point Gorton was the minister most closely involved in putting the new system into practice; Menzies himself had little to do with it. Susan Davies, who reveals this, is also inclined to think, on the evidence of his memoirs, that Menzies was not greatly enamoured of the new educational philosophy. His acceptance of it, she argues,

was ‘an act of political expediency’. But the generalization of another distinguished historian of education in Australia remains equally true. While ‘credit for the developments of the period 1949 to 1966 should go as much to the influential advisers of the period as to Menzies . .. the bottom line is that the Murray and the Martin

committees and the AUC would not have happened without Menzies’ .*9

While the work of the Murray and Martin committees in reshaping the nation’s university system as a whole was the major 44 In presenting to parliament the legislation to make an initial grant of £2.4 million for the new Colleges, Menzies emphasized that it would be matched by the States (SMH, 20 November 1965). 4 Grant Harman, ‘Development of Higher Education’, in Scott Prasser, J. R. Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era, 255.

PREDICTABLE RIGIDITIES AND UNEXPECTED SENTIMENTALITIES, 1965 537

~ L. fe... .t ae

Menzies and Calwell at the opening of the Menzies Library at the Australian National University, a symbol of the rekindling of the mutual respect of the Curtin-Chifley days?

development in tertiary education during Menzies’ years of office,

the founding and growth of one unusual university on his very doorstep in Canberra was for the Prime Minister an engaging personal and official experience. This was The Australian National University (ANU), established on the initiative of the Chifley administration, but beginning its active life just as Menzies took office. Unlike the other universities the ANU received its grant entirely from the Commonwealth, though in common with them it came under the scrutiny of the AUC after 1959 and followed the pattern of making triennial submissions to the Commission on its plans and needs. In its first decade the ANU developed as

its founders had envisaged: a research institution without

undergraduates, and therefore unique in the Australian system. It

was necessarily an expensive enterprise, not amenable to the ordinary formulae for assessing needs (e.g. the movement in student numbers), and therefore watched jealously by outsiders for signs of favouritism.

538 ROBERT MENZIES Particularly in the 1950s Menzies and many of at least the senior members of the ANU frequently encountered each other, and there

was an important sense in which Menzies had a paternalistic attitude to the University. In his relations with individuals and in his carrying out of formal duties there lurked that sense of humour which could often relieve the air of pomposity he so easily exuded.

One example was in an exchange of letters in 1958 with W. K. Hancock, the internationally distinguished historian and Director of the School of Social Sciences, who had written puckishly about a

new Department of the History of the Art of Cricket he had it in mind to establish. He himself would be part of it, and he offered Menzies a Readership in it. He hoped that ‘our financial masters’ would not baulk at the ‘enormous’ expense the research work of the Department would entail, since all members would be expected to carry out continuous field work in Australia, England, South Africa and the West Indies. Menzies thought it a great idea and expected that ‘our financial masters’ would not object to paying his own field

expenses since for many years he had listed in Who's Who his recreations as ‘walking and WATCHING FIRST-CLASS CRICKET’.

But whether Hancock could ‘make the grade’ as a colleague was doubtful: “You condemn yourself, my friend. Your recreations read “swimming, walking fishing’”—you have put yourself well behind

scratch’.*6

An example of humorous sang-froid on a ceremonial occasion is best told in the words of an American visitor who in 1963 witnessed Menzies’ laying of the foundation stone of the Coombs building, the future home of the Research School of Social Sciences: There was a small crowd there of academic-robed faculty and assorted hangers-on. Just as Prime Minister Menzies stepped onto the platform, trowel in hand, ready to do the honours, a very scruffy-looking young

man carrying a large box came running through the crowd. He deposited the box at Menzies’ feet, then ran off and disappeared. The box appeared to be a case of beer. Menzies looked at it for a moment, observed that ‘if the label on that box is any indication of its contents, I’d

say social research at the Australian National University is well launched’, then slapped the mortar on the stone and shoved it into place. No one shot the young man or even tried to prevent his escape; no one moved to get the Prime Minister out of possible danger; no one even removed the box. It was all very un-American.#”

46 8 December 1958, 8 January 1959, NLA, MS. 4936/1/14/117. 47 Personal communication, Lincoln H. Day, 5 November 1987.

sie ENTA a. an ECTED SENTIM

* = iam, | ee , ee nee rt ee eens oe eee Be fy ee

ot fe es| 0 Bee ELte NS“4 Bygag? eho =. se4.oft 8,a=oa

oo . 4Se .SSoole MEP Aerfoe. eea Sli.JEP SSee ke ; 3oe ee=] eee ee Ag wope45 aPe Pe tee,~ ee EEZS aeSG see ie Ay 8, 3=