In September 1914 Cook deliberately brought on a double dissolution by trying to push through the Senate legislation to abolish preferences for union members. Hughes, Fisher’s deputy, demanded that the election be postponed and that the Parliament support Cook for the duration of the conflict. Hughes wrote to Fisher, ‘All ideas about having an election at the moment when our very existence is at stake, must be set aside.’ If Labor renounced its almost certain victory at the polls, argued Hughes in a slightly serpentine manner, Cook’s carping and attacks on the loyalty of Labor would merely show he was putting his ‘wretched party interests’ above those of the nation. But the people wanted to hear only about the war and government existed only to deal with the war, and it should be one government.
Hughes’s argument was an omen of the little Welshman’s ultimate identification with the war, his intense sense that Australia should be involved not only for love of Empire but to make Australia safe from German ambitions and German warships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It is hard to recapture the urgency of that hour, the sense of threat at home Australians felt as well as the intimate sense of the threat abroad to the Empire.
But Fisher proceeded with the election campaign because he felt it impossible to work with the difficult Cook. Labor won. Although he had hope for diplomatic solutions, Fisher was now prime-minister-at-war. Under his aegis the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) would sail off to its various conflicts and the Australian navy take to seas from Northern Europe to the South Pacific.
With the war, and intimations it would not quickly end, came the introduction of federal income tax and the War Precautions and War Census Acts. Fisher was early presented with demands for conscription, which he avoided since he knew it would split the party and its followers. Hughes complained from the start that Fisher was not aggressive enough to lead a nation in wartime. But Fisher was one of the first recipients of the real news from Gallipoli. His naval representative in London, Captain Muirhead Collins, told him both that the Australians had won universal renown but that the operation itself was a blunder. He adapted to the casualties rather as Lincoln did to Civil War casualties—each list eroding him a little more. He was particularly distressed by the mortal wounding of his friend General Bridges by a Turkish sniper’s bullet. In the meanwhile, Hughes’ discontent was broadly expressed, and the little Welshman spread news of the imminent resignation of the more phlegmatic Scot, even telling the Governor-General that Fisher was finished.
The premiers of the states fought Fisher’s plan to standardise the rail system as a first step in Australia’s defence. But he held out to Australians his belief, which Hughes would never share, that when the war ended there could arise ‘a great international tribunal’ to resolve conflicts. He told his party that the ‘great war was taking place because we were in a transition period from an era of capitalism, where there was commercial greed, to an era when the toiling masses of the world would have more control over international affairs’. Under pressure from such delegates to the Labor Party conference as young John Curtin of the Timber Workers’ Union, who wanted protection from wartime ‘price brigands’, Fisher wanted to hold a referendum to give the federal government power to fix prices. But the states would undermine the proposition and the referendum was never held.
After the failure of August offensives on Gallipoli, a young journalist named Keith Murdoch wrote a damning 8000 word report on the Gallipoli campaign and sent it to Fisher and a number of leading British politicians. In London, the Australian High Commissioner, Fisher’s old leader Chris Watson, was urging that Australia send its last man into the battle, a concept that alarmed and haunted the Prime Minister. Empire loyalists attacked him for not doing enough for the war effort, while his faithful attacked him over war profiteering, and he bore the knowledge that Australia’s finest children were being uselessly killed or maimed beyond repair on Gallipoli. In poor physical and mental condition, Fisher nonetheless came to agree with Hughes on the conscription issue, even though he despised the man. His feelings were contradictory on Billy. He thought that the quick-footed Hughes might be better equipped to save the Labor Party from breaking up over the issue of conscription which, he believed, would inevitably arise. At one time, however, he tried to get him out of the way by offering him the post of High Commissioner in London, which Hughes declined. Now Fisher was being offered that role should he resign. He did so on 30 October 1915. His war minister, Senator Pearce, would claim that walking down the steps of Melbourne Parliament House that day, Fisher declared the members of the party could all go to hell.
The sacrifice Fisher made in resigning, at least in so far as it was a sacrifice, would prove futile, since the Labor Party would split on conscription. Fisher worked for Australia’s interests in London and in support of the AIF. He had established a working relationship and friendship with General Birdwood, the Commander-in-Chief of Australian and New Zealand forces in Europe. When, through Birdwood, he was offered the Legion d’Honneur, he refused, according to his vow never to accept such honours.
Fisher returned to Australia in 1921 and made a few gestures towards entering Parliament again, but he already had health problems and the onset of dementia. He returned to live in Britain in 1922, and tried but failed to get British Labour endorsement for a Scottish seat. He died in London in 1928.
SURF
Federation coincided with the emergence of a new relationship between Australians and the ocean. From 1810 there is evidence of Australians using their surf beaches for picnics, particularly the natural lawns and bush behind the beaches. But when, as early as 1877, surf-bathing began there were outcries about beach rowdy-ism and immoral practices. A bill was debated in the New South Wales Parliament in 1894 which sought to legislate for minimum legal public clothing, since there were bathing costumes that left ‘the larrikins of Sydney with their abdomens bare and exposed to the view of females’.
The nineteenth-century ideal Australian, despite all evidence of hardship, was the selector. Coastal people, especially in the cities, were not as noble as those who were being tested and ennobled by the bush. In the poetry of the now largely urban Paterson and Lawson, figures such as Clancy of the Overflow transcended the urban mob, Clancy having ‘the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’ while city people had ‘stunted forms and weedy’ since they had ‘no time to grow’. Henry Lawson similarly confessed, in part with a political sting Paterson lacked,
I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet
In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street.
Those who went surf-bathing in the late nineteenth century were not culture heroes but larrikins, a word which then had the same meaning as ‘lout’. And larrikinism was a product of all things mean, including Catholicism and slums. A correspondent had written to the Bulletin in 1887: ‘Larrikinism is a disease begotten of sacerdotal slavery, hypocrisy, poverty, destitution, ignorance, bad housing, class oppression, and environment, and want of rational and elevating amusement.’ And the larrikin might intrude on your beach picnic and certainly did not elevate the beach with the remnants of his masculinity. He degraded it. Respectable people who wanted to bathe in the surf rented the bathing machines, small private huts backed down to the beach into the shallows by horses and from whose steps families, and particularly women, could bathe without being seen from the beach.
By 1900, however, the surf was becoming the place that in some minds gave fibre to the city dweller. As the popular, illustrated Sydney Mail wrote, the ‘combat with the curling breakers . . . and the exultant feeling of physical energy actively exerted in the open air vibrates through this summer seaside’. Surf-bathing and ‘breaker-shooting’ at Manly, Bondi, Coogee, Long Bay and elsewhere were quite suddenly not only a national pastime, but a rival to the bush myth. Paterson’s city people of pallid face and nervous haste were soon rushing for the trams to Bronte or Bondi or Brighton. A
nd a ferry trip to Manly could release the city-dwellers from their urban greyness.
In 1902, on a hot morning when nearly two hundred men could be seen bathing at Bondi, the Waverley Council brought in the police who, uncertain about their power, could not prevent bathers from entering the water but tried to intimidate them out of it. Fifteen men persisted, though, and policemen took down their names. It turned out that none of them were larrikins and one of them was even the local Bondi clergyman. Only two of the men were wearing neck to knee costumes, with the rest wearing only trunks. Senior Constable McKenzie and Constable Roach reported to the Commissioner that the bathers had not been disturbing anyone, they were not, as reported, running along the beach naked, and ‘there are only two houses within view of the beach’. The police suspected that the attack on surfing was being led by a man named Farmer, who had leased an enclosed bathing area from Waverley Council which was not now so well patronised any more.
By 1905, Manly presented itself, in an age blighted with consumption, as being a sanatorium as well as a place of recreation, but that year up to a thousand surfers a day of both sexes—‘families and friendly parties’—were seen in the surf on hot days. Many, including councillors and clergy, were scandalised, and they and the mayor of Waverley, R.G. Watkins, were still fighting a rearguard action against surf-bathing when the 1907 swimming season began, and were particularly exercised about surf-bathers and sunbathers. ‘After contact with water, the V-trunks favoured by many of the male bathers, show up the figure . . . in a very much worse manner than if they were nude.’ The effects on the outline of the female bathers, however, ‘are worse than [with] the men’. The chief anxiety seemed to have been the embarrassment of women visitors to the beaches caused by male nakedness rather than male lust caused by brazenness amongst the young women bathers.
But by now surf-bathing was not only believed to be healthy and invigorating, and a blessing to ‘thousands of the toilers in the metropolis’, but surf-bathers were becoming middle-class heroes. In 1907 the Sydney Morning Herald described a gathering of surf-bathers at Bondi Beach as ‘decidedly handsome, Roman centurions’. The beach was at the same time a venue for human equality, open to all, free of payment.‘The surf is a glorious democracy—or else it represents the adjustment of all the classifications that history and politics and social conditions ever brought about’, one commentator, Egbert T. Russell, wrote in January 1910. ‘Plain primitive manhood and womanhood are the only tests the surf-bather applies to distinguish one from another.’ The beach was even preparing Australian men for future national conflicts. It was a venue for a sun-kissed Australian herrenvolk. A.W. Ralph, in the Sydney Morning Herald of 26 September 1908, wrote, ‘When Australia needs them, as someday no doubt she will, these men, training athletes, tan with the sun on the beaches, strong and brawny with the buffeting in the surf, will be well-fitted to take up their trust and do duty for their country.’ Surf lifesaving clubs began to form, taking on themselves the duties of safety and rescue but also of keeping good order. In 1909 the prodigiously successful novelist Jack London, visiting Manly, was astonished to see a lifesaver stop two youths from dragging another one into the water.
The beaches of Gallipoli were another matter, though men swam there for relief and hygiene. By the 1920s Harvey Sutton, former Olympic athlete and Professor of Preventive Medicine and Director of the School of Tropical Health at the University of Sydney, was helping the popularisation of surfing for its eugenic benefits for men and women. For the healthiest girls met the healthiest boys on the beach. In the post-war suburbs, the idea that the surf could produce a better race was solidly entrenched as a sport and an engine to produce a better, unique race. The women who participated in the Silver Reel Competition, said Professor Sutton, proved that Australian women were gaining their freedom from traditional drudgery.
While Australian climatic conditions and post-war changes in commodity prices would increasingly render the bush a more ambiguous place of redemption, the surf would not lose its charm or power, and the march-pasts and reel competitions of the young gods and goddesses of the beach showed promise of what Bernard O’Dowd had raised as a possibility years before in his famous poem on Australia, that Australia might become the ‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race’.
ACCENT ON THE ‘CAN’
‘I name the capital of Australia, Canberra,’ declared young Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General Lord Denman, good friend of Andrew Fisher, in an Australian paddock one blustery hot day in 1913. ‘The accent is on the “Can”.’ Lord Denman suffered from hay fever and the Australian pollens, particularly the wattle, set him off. He may have asked his wife to make the announcement so that his own speech should not be interrupted by sneezes. Thus a spot on the Canberry Plains of the Monaro was consecrated to this high national purpose, and a considerable contest between competing locations came to an end.
A ‘prohibitory arc’, mentioned in Section 125 of the Australian Constitution, ran north, west and south of Sydney. The federal capital when chosen could not lie within it. Beyond it, bush municipalities of New South Wales and their politicians competed for some years to become the federal capital. Bathurst, for example, formed its own Bathurst Federal Capital League in 1900 in its desire to become the capital. A local man, Price Warung, notable anti-imperialist and opponent of the Boer War, author for the Bulletin of convict stories emphasising British colonial savagery and a man who had advised Andrew Barton on how to handle the provincial press on the matter of Federation, was employed by Bathurst to write a booklet entitled, Bathurst, The Ideal Federal Capital. In his words, Bathurst was desirable for its ‘centrality and accessibility; salubrity; and capacity for impregnable defence’. Bombala, a timber and wool town in the south-eastern mountains of New South Wales, had its passionate local promoters pushing the idea that it could be capital and Eden its port. The similarly upland village of Dalgety would prove to have great endurance as a possible site. Commonwealth Commissioners appointed after Federation to consider the location of the capital suggested the region of Albury. So did Sir William Lyne, former Free Trade premier of New South Wales, originally an anti-Billite but nearly the first prime minister and, as the member for Hume, a founding member of the federal Parliament. He had also, as Minister for Home Affairs, guided the legislation enfranchising women through both Houses in 1902. He would relentlessly push for the Albury area, and in particular Tumut, within his electorate, to be the capital of the new Federation. He was sure that the Victorians would be happy with a capital closer to Melbourne than to Sydney. George ‘Yes-No’ Reid likewise promoted his electorate round Carcoar and the village of Garland, serviced by the small train station at Lyndhurst. Queensland, however, wanted the capital to be as far north as possible rather than down on the Victorian border, and some therefore liked the Armidale area.
One remarkable member of the new federal Parliament was particularly passionate about building an august capital. This was King O’Malley, born—he claimed—in Canada in 1858, a circumstance which if true gave him automatic British citizenship. In reality he seemed to have been born in Valley Falls, Kansas. O’Malley would later claim, however, his Canadian-resident father was killed in the Civil War and thus he went at an early age from Canada to live with an aunt and uncle in Kansas. O’Malley sold insurance throughout the United States and also became a successful real estate agent. He was interested in fundamentalist religion and avoiding tax and so founded an elaborately entitled sect, the Waterlily Rockbound Church, the Red Skin Church of the Cayuse Nation, of which he was sole bishop. He married a good-looking young adherent, Rosy Wilmot.
O’Malley was a temperance man, but could speechify and tell anecdotes as if he were filled with what he called ‘stagger juice’ liquor. He claimed, for example, to have been a journalist for a paper called the Arizona Kicker, and that when he arrived in Brisbane around 1888, suffering from tuberculosis, he had shipped his own coffin with him. In Australia, h
is health rebounding, he tried selling insurance in Melbourne and western Tasmania, and then in Western Australia, before settling in Adelaide. Here he became a successful insurance agent and, by emphasising his Canadian origins, was elected to the House of Assembly in 1896. Having been rejected by the voters at the next election, he returned to Zeehan in Tasmania and stood for a seat in the new federal House of Representatives. In 1901, a month after the federal Parliament first assembled, he joined the Australian Labor Party. On 19 July that year, O’Malley moved in the Parliament a bill to set aside an area of not less than a thousand square miles (approximately 1600 square kilometres) for the ultimate federal capital. His thousand square miles was larger than some had previously envisioned.
Members of the House of Representatives and Senators, including the irreverent Labor sprite William Morris Hughes, made a number of tours of possible sites from March 1902 onwards. On their first expedition they travelled out into drought-stricken regions near Albury and then to Tumut, in both of which places people told them the conditions were not normal and therefore that they could expect better things in the future if they put the capital there. Later in the year, when the delegation rolled up the coastal range into Bombala by enclosed wagon, a fierce mountain wind blew all day and the coaches became, said Hughes, ‘perambulating refrigerators’. The local policeman did not help by telling the visiting politicians that he had lived in Bombala for fifteen years ‘and I declare to God this is the warmest winter I have ever known’. But it was only at Bombala, they would report, that they saw enough water to support a new city. Billy Hughes, travelling with the party, found nearby Dalgety, west of Bombala in the Snowy Mountains, a ‘frozen waste, where the half-dozen houses seemed to have been washed up and left on the bank during a flood’. He tried to swim at Dalgety in the ‘liquid ice’ and claimed he had ‘never been the same man since’. Descending into the Monaro region, they found that the drought-stricken Lake George, pushed by local pastoralists, an unreliable environment.
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