Australians, Volume 3

by Thomas Keneally

  Earsman now jumped on a group of newly arrived, unaligned Australian trade unionists and with some success tried to sign them up for Liverpool Street. At a preliminary meeting of Australian delegates, chaired by a senior Russian, the decision was reached that unity between the two parties should occur by January 1922. Earsman was converted to unity very quickly, and believed his Liverpool Street branch could control it. At the Congress, he had depicted Sussex Street as imposters, ‘a sect who surround themselves with a halo arising from the Marxian platitudes which they give lip service to’. Now he could make brothers and sisters of them.

  All this fury and earnestness was based on the belief that world revolution was imminent and that Australia must have its own Lenin. Earsman was willing to be that man. But on the way home, in the United Kingdom, he was told by British Customs that an Australian government ban existed against his re-entry to Australia. He went back to Moscow and taught English at the Soviet Military Academy for a year, and then moved to England in about 1924 and worked for a company that exported machine tools to the USSR. In 1927, when he married an Irishwoman in the Catholic Church, he began to lose faith in Marxism because of the lack of progress of the revolution in Russia, and then joined the British Labour Party. John Curtin, amongst others, tried but failed in the 1930s to have the Australian ban against him lifted. After a career in local government, for which he accepted an OBE, Earsman was one of the founding councillors of the Edinburgh Festival, and died in that city in 1965.

  But in the meantime, in July 1922, the bitter unity conference, as ordered by Moscow, occurred in Sydney. Conference branch members were unruly. Moscow would write to the Communists of Australia: ‘Your Party is still weak, your experience of class struggle as a Party still inadequate, your preparedness for taking a lead in the future intensified class fights is still deficient.’ But at least there was now one Communist Party, and though Earsman would never return to become the general secretary of a ruling regime, the party would have a growing impact on Australia’s industrial history.

  At the national conferences of the trade unions, motions which called for one big union were put forward by the Wobblies, and motions for nationalisation of all industry were also tabled by the stricter socialists in the Labor Party—including, at that stage, James Scullin. There was a strong belief within Labor, however, that Communism was not the answer for Australia. E.J. Theodore, Queensland Labor premier, former miner, son of an Irish mother and Romanian father (Teodorescu was the true family name), had not gone to the Nationals with Hughes yet was one of the pragmatic Labor men. He complained at the 1921 ALP conference that some of the delegates were ‘enamoured with the proletariat in Russia and with the sentiment of the IWW [the Wobblies]’, and that they harboured ‘ideals and dogmas that did not belong to Australia’. He spoke for a majority in arguing this way. There was something in Australian society that favoured practical reform over doctrinal revolution.

  Despite Labor’s willingness to cooperate with capital, conservative governments would reign in Australia throughout the 1920s and, with a brief interval for Scullin’s Depression-destroyed Labor government of 1929–31, until six weeks before Australia entered World War II. The struggle for votes itself made the Labor Party back off from any earlier espousal of strict socialist doctrine.

  TWO IMPERFECTLY REMEMBERED POLITICIANS

  The prime minister under whom Pompey Elliott chiefly served in Parliament was the lawyer and businessman Sir Stanley Bruce, whose government, after early adventures with ideas, became one of stodgy, conservative policy. (Bruce would be the first prime minister to serve in Canberra, when Federal Parliament at last moved there in 1927.) James Scullin, the talented Labor leader, replaced Bruce in 1929 but was blighted by the Depression, by industrial conflict on the coalfields, and by sharing the party of the rebellious New South Wales premier Jack Lang. Scullin and Bruce, both Victorians, both sticklers for grammar and syntax and the proprieties of oratory, had little else in common. Red-haired Scullin was a former Ballarat journalist and a violin-playing grocer in Richmond. The child of Catholic parents from Derry, he believed in Irish Home Rule, which Bruce, with his high Ulster background, considered a disastrous idea. Scullin’s inherited sense of Irish grievance was very strong and in the early 1920s helped fuel in him a militant socialism, but like other children of the Irish he was chastened when the Irish themselves fought a fierce civil war from 1922 to 1923 over the treaty that excluded Ulster, where his parents had grown up, from the settlement. His socialism moderated itself as, throughout the 1920s, he transformed himself into Labor’s taxation expert. His passion for a form of ‘responsible’ social justice was based not on Das Kapital but on the competing and vigorous social justice encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Matters), the 1891 work of Pope Leo XIII, who knew that as a matter of morality as well as a means of keeping his flock, wage justice and social inequality would need to be addressed within the context of Catholic theology. Rerum Novarum became the founding text for many Irish–Australian politicians.

  By contrast with the Richmond grocer, Bruce had an honoured place at the heart of the industrial and merchant establishment of Melbourne, and entered Parliament more or less as its champion. A Cambridge graduate, he was a member of the victorious Cambridge rowing eight of 1904. Bruce had trained as a lawyer and applied these skills on behalf of the family firm, Paterson, Knight and Bruce. He was well married—his wife, Ethel, was a woman of determined interest in theatre and travel, and an excellent companion—and he had fought with the Royal Fusiliers in the Great War, being wounded in the knee and awarded the Military Cross in the Gallipoli campaign.

  Bruce’s prime ministership was marked by a fear of socialism and even Communism, and by conservative economics. Pompey Elliott considered him far too parsimonious when it came to recompensing ex-soldiers. But he was a sleek and gifted negotiator and leader, and his manner was marked by old-fashioned courtesy and reasonableness. In any contest for high colour and a place in history, a prime minister in an era of relative prosperity but who presented no great plans to build national projects could not compete with the volatile, whimsical, vivid character of Billy Hughes, and on that basis Bruce is virtually lost to the popular Australian imagination.

  There was a sense in which Bruce was a servant of the Country Party. Discontented with Hughes and what they saw as his pro-city, pro-manufacturing policies, which drove up prices for farmers, the Country Party, led by the amiable and chatty Grafton surgeon and landowner Earle Page, had given Bruce power. Thus he granted the Country Party five portfolios out of eleven. Scullin opposed Bruce’s reduction of tax on land, which suited the primary producers, and came to believe in 1923 that the Country Party wanted all land tax abolished: ‘The government will relentlessly pursue the small tax payer who is in arrears, but when a million or two is involved those who are liable are to be relieved of their obligation to pay.’

  In 1924, Bruce went to the polls on a campaign aimed against industrial strife. The election—the first in which compulsory voting operated—was a bad defeat for Labor, which, with twenty-three seats, made up less than one-third of the new House. The following year, Bruce introduced three laws that Scullin ferociously opposed. One was the power to deport union leaders from Australia—Tom Walsh, one of the founders of the Australian Communist Party but by now expelled from it, was a target. The second was to undermine working conditions on ships running coastal routes, by suspension of the Navigation Act; and the third was the creation of a uniformed Commonwealth police (a force that until then had been plain-clothed). Scullin saw the uniformed Commonwealth police as a force that would be levied to attack union members: ‘The party opposite wishes to show that it has a strong Government, and that there is a Mussolini in Australia prepared to do things that no other Prime Minister has been ready to do.’

  Bruce agreed with Labor on one thing, though: the idea that the Federal government should acquire more power, however indirectly, by making the states its dependants. In 1926
, it passed a Federal Aid Roads Act to increase its tax on petrol so that it could pay £2 million a year to the states for roadworks, as long as the states contributed three-quarters of a pound to every pound the Federal government granted.

  Bruce was always anxious to increase Australian cooperation, although the Chanak affair shook his faith. This was a 1922 crisis that developed while Hughes was still prime minister, when the Turks, fighting against the Greek army to retrieve land lost in the Great War and to drive the Greeks out of cities and towns within Turkey granted to them by the Treaty of Versailles and reacquire the European side of the Dardanelles (including Istanbul, which had been declared a neutral zone by the Allies), reached the Dardanelles at Çanakkale or Chanak. The British and French built up the garrison defending the town; after the French ordered the withdrawal of their troops, the British prime minister, Lloyd George asked for Australian and Canadian troops to reinforce the British there. The possibility of a new war arose, and the chance that Australian graves at Gallipoli would be violated. Hughes, however, would not countenance any more Australian deaths, and so did not accede to Lloyd George’s request. Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, was similarly dubious. At last Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish leader, signed an armistice with Britain, to the relief of the soon-to-be prime minister Stanley Bruce.

  Bruce was also a believer in the League of Nations. But until 1939 he was opposed to the creation of an Australian diplomatic service to pursue Australian imperatives, because he thought that the British Foreign Office should be trusted to represent the interests of the entire Empire.

  One of his initiatives, and perhaps the chief one, was the creation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, later CSIRO), whose job was to find scientific solutions for the problems of both farming and industry. He took a personal interest in recruiting British scientists to work for this organisation.

  Scullin himself is a largely forgotten prime minister, and lost to memory as well seems the handsome Matthew Charlton, a former miner from Lambton near Newcastle and leader of the Labor opposition from 1922. A moderate, Charlton was rather embarrassed by the Labor Party’s socialist platform, the nationalisation of all means of production, exchange and supply. But in the great leakage from Labor ranks during and after World War I, he stayed firm. He had plans for national development, but they did not win him elections. Anxious about the vulnerability of Australia and the belief that a conventional army was not an answer to Australia’s size and huge, ice-free coastline, at a meeting of the League of Nations in 1924 he attempted to introduce the Geneva Protocol, which would make military conflicts subject to judges exercising international law, and which involved a universal mutual defence pact. But the British did not like the idea and neither did Bruce’s side of politics. The idea lapsed.

  In 1928, respected by both sides of the House, Charlton resigned, and Scullin inherited the chance of leading a federal government, the first Catholic to do so.

  Despite Bruce’s late-blooming though genuine desire for ‘great expenditure upon social amelioration’, strike conflict centred on the waterfront, and an increase in unemployment brought him down. Scullin was enthusiastically elected in 1929, winning forty-six of seventy-five seats. Crowds saw Scullin and his wife Sarah off from Melbourne; crowds laden with tributes and bouquets greeted them at Canberra station. With some aplomb, Sarah distributed the floral offerings she had received around the hospitals of Canberra. The modest Scullins—they did not yet own a house of their own—lived in the Canberra Hotel rather than spend money at the Lodge, where cooks and servants would need to be employed.

  Scullin, entering office, was frightened by the scale of Commonwealth debt. Unemployment was already at 12.5 per cent when Scullin was sworn in, two days before the Wall Street crash of 29 October. He faced also a series of bitter miners’ strikes, and in December 1929, at Rothbury in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, police were brought in by rail to deal with miners. These were not strikers but desperate men who had been for some months locked out of the mine for refusing to accept a 12.5 per cent reduction in contract wages and an end to pit stoppages and union meetings. It was a situation similar to that of the shearers’ strike of the early 1890s, since colliery owners had formed their own alliance to fight the miners in an organised way. A new Illegal Assembly Act was passed by the Conservative New South Wales state government of Thomas Bavin, and in December, Bavin ordered four hundred police into Rothbury to block a march of protest at the lockout and at the colliery owners’ use of scab labour. The march took place, there was hand-to-hand fighting, and at last the police drew their revolvers and shot dead a young bystander named Norman Brown and wounded more than two dozen miners.

  Meanwhile, Scullin’s impulses of generosity to those suddenly unemployed because of the Depression were tempered by the scale of Commonwealth debt. He was not able to take a pump-priming, public-works-to-employ-the-masses approach as did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in America. He could not raise the money he needed. He was suddenly like a man inheriting an over-mortgaged house. The time of anguish was upon him and the people.

  CENTRE AND NORTH

  Asians, and the formerly indentured cane and agricultural workers, the South Sea Islanders called the Kanakas, had by the 1920s been largely expelled from the north of Australia, and now it was the white man’s preserve and the white man’s burden. How was that burden of work there were no longer non-whites to do to be taken up?

  A new phase of the national argument arose, one on which unrealistic sentiments will never cease to be uttered, about whether northern Australia and the Centre could somehow be transformed by irrigation or population or both. It was not yet time to accept that, even with all that landmass, Australia might be destined to be inhabited by a modest population. The English geologist J.W. Gregory of the University of Melbourne, a scholar of amiable diffidence but determination, wrote The Dead Heart of Australia, published in 1906, engraving the term ‘Dead Heart’ like a sentence of desolation and a mark of shame on the Australian imagination, but not on Billy Hughes’ nor on Alfred Deakin’s, the visionary early prime minister. In the 1890s, Deakin had predicted a populous hinterland, and a national population like America’s, and so did Hughes in the 1920s.

  A young Australian geographer, Griffith Taylor, who as an expeditionary team member had survived with honour the two winters on McMurdo Sound leading to the discovery of Scott’s body on the Ross Ice Shelf, produced a thesis entitled A Geography of Australasia in 1916. It was considered so negative on future population that in Western Australia, to which its thesis particularly applied, it was banned from schools and the university. In 1923, Taylor compounded his sins against Australian hope by presenting a map that showed Central Australia labelled ‘Useless’, and much of Western Australia ‘Almost Useless’. The words might have been more tactfully chosen, but again the map offended against much Australian aspiration. It was as if Taylor were guilty of environmental treason, and even at Sydney University, his place of work, he was snubbed. He attracted double opprobrium by arguing that the sooner Australians intermarried with Asians, and thus helped to neutralise the ‘Asian threat’, the better.

  After the controversy, Taylor moved on to new areas of his discipline, including what he called ‘cultural geography’, but his battle over the Dead Heart would be lifelong. His intermarriage proposal was obscene, people argued, and so how could the Yellow Peril be combated unless the Centre and north were subjected to a process of population? The Sun newspaper in May 1924 called Taylor’s theories ‘anti-Australian propaganda’. Also in 1924, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer in his mid-forties who had written bestsellers on the Arctic (The Friendly Arctic, The Northward Course of Empire and My Life with the Eskimo) and believed in its future as a place for concentrations of population, came to Australia and was invited by the Bruce government to tour Central Australia and report on its potential. Unsurprisingly, in tune with his attitude to the Arctic, on his return from Cent
ral Australia he declared he could see no country that could truly be called desert. He recommended the area be aggressively populated.

  Laborites had their grievances against poor Taylor too, depicting him as a privileged fellow trying to keep small farmers out of the cattle kingdoms of the Northern Territory. In particular, Harry Nelson, the Labor member of the House of Representatives for the Northern Territory, who had driven a train at Pine Creek and led (white) drovers in industrial struggles on the Vestey stations in the Northern Territory, agreed with Stefansson, and urged Prime Minister Bruce to send a copy of Stefansson’s tabled report to Taylor. The brothers against whom Nelson was in particular conflict, William and Edmund Vestey, had founded an enormous international company, including huge pastoral runs in Brazil and Venezuela as well as Australia, but Nelson managed to get their attention. Now here was this Griffith Taylor proclaiming a thesis that the enormous properties of people like the Vesteys, and the power they exerted, could never be eroded by new waves of smaller landholders and by the growth of townships. Nelson knew the north would boom and provide the little man with a home, and so Taylor was a menace.

  In fact, Nelson’s animus against Taylor became so intense that in the mid-1920s he decided to ride from Alice Springs to Darwin by motorbike to prove that the country was quite negotiable. He set out one torrid day with the best wishes of the Alice Springs villagers, but failed to arrive in Darwin. A native tracker picked up the zigzagging marks of his motorbike tyres. He had used all the water he had with him and then drunk lubricating oil. In a desperate state when found, he nevertheless lived.

  Taylor could feel vindicated; the land itself had offered Nelson its answer. Taylor thought so, but Nelson didn’t see it. Others, too, including the Aboriginal advocate Daisy Bates, still attacked Taylor for downgrading Australia as a prime field for virtually unlimited immigration. His enemies called him an ‘environmental determinist’, prevented his promotion to full professor, and ultimately provoked him into accepting in 1928 a chair at the University of Chicago.