The conference knew that Lang had begun defaulting on state loans, and he was expelled with the entirety of ‘Lang Labor’ from the federal ALP. For, as civilised leaders, Scullin and most premiers believed, they would all have to honour debts. Lang in turn expelled from the New South Wales branch New South Wales members who supported Scullin. Labor was fatally torn apart. ‘That was the basis of our dispute with the Scullin government,’ said Lang. ‘They were prepared to carry out the dictates of Sir Otto Niemeyer. We were not.’ It would be five years before the branches were reunited under John Curtin.
At a Premiers’ Conference in June 1931, the same fiscal and social pieties were invoked and a Premiers’ Plan forged. There seemed no way out for Scullin. What he was trying to achieve could only be done by reducing the entitlements of the poor and the affluent, of both the pensioner (whose payment was reduced by 20 per cent) and the bondholder (22 per cent). Savings interest was also cut. The Premiers’ Plan slogan was ‘Equality of Sacrifice’.
Lang, the vinegary real-estate agent of Granville, was not willing to buy into the Premiers’ Plan. He flayed the financial institutions like an Old Testament prophet, and Niemeyer was once more his target. Niemeyer was a bailiff sent by the British to garnish Australia’s finances! The philosophy behind the Premiers’ Plan of 1931, Lang argued, was that unemployment was not a fault of the capitalist system but rather due to unreasonable union or workers’ demands. Lang would not accept that argument. He was aware that America had agreed to reduce interest rates payable by Britain on her World War I debts, and extend the repayment period to sixty-two years. Why could not Britain do likewise for Australian debt, particularly given their relationship and Australia’s help in saving the Empire in World War I?
Lang attacked the other premiers’ commitment to the cut in expenditure, and when an economist laughed at him, he said, ‘The man who suffers doesn’t laugh at all; he just suffers . . . you hear a lot of economists telling us what we ought to do. It is like their confounded impudence.’ Lang urged that ‘immediate steps be taken by the governments State and Federal to abandon the gold standard of currency, and to set up in its place a currency based upon the wealth of Australia, to be termed “the Goods Standard”’. This would allow more printing of money without undermining its value, he argued. Above all, Lang’s dissent from the Premiers’ Plan was his intention to refuse to meet loan-interest payments.
Again, in the streets and around bare tables, Lang’s fury was applauded.
Lang’s first move in his economic rebellion was a refusal to repay £737,000 owing to the Westminster Bank on Treasury bills, a debt that the bank was refusing to renew. His next move was to introduce in the New South Wales Parliament a Reduction in Interest Bill. It failed to pass in the Legislative Council. But financial institutions were in a ferment about Jack Lang.
UNHAPPY VALLEYS AND EVICTIONS
On 17 June 1931, the police were sent to Brancourt Avenue in Sydney’s Bankstown to carry out an eviction order against the tenant family who lived there. When they arrived, they found the house barricaded. The riot that followed was considered one of the most serious clashes the state had seen.
Tenants were in trouble everywhere, and some were allowed to stay by compassionate landlords, or else landlords who did not want their property damaged by organised supporters of evictees. Many of those evicted, however, lived in shanty camps, called ‘happy valleys’, at La Perouse, Milperra or Clontarf. The Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM) which, amongst other things, applied itself to the question of evictions, was founded on May Day 1930, in part through the activism of the Communist Party. It expanded beyond the control of the Communists, however, for men and women did not need to fall back on doctrine to work out that they could not pay the rent. Soon there were branches of the UWM all over Sydney, for it was an idea and a structure of brotherhood to which people could turn to soothe their sense of utter and lonely helplessness. In the year from May 1930, the UWM staged a series of what in a later generation would be called ‘sit-ins’, to prevent the eviction of out-of-work tenants.
The first of the UWM’s anti-eviction sit-ins occurred in Glebe in Sydney on New Year’s Day 1931. A widow living with her children in a one-room cottage owed three weeks’ rent. The gas and electricity supply had been cut off by the time members of the Glebe UWM met with the owner outside the cottage. Whatever pressure the local UWM put on him, the landlord agreed to allow the woman and her children to remain there rent-free. It was a satisfactory and morale-raising success for the union, which considered any threats it might employ in its cause negligible when compared to the crimes of capital and landlordism.
In February 1931, a Greek family in Surry Hills was served with an eviction notice for £5 in arrears. The notice came from the Permanent Trustee Company, which owned their cottage and many others in Surry Hills. The UWM moved in to occupy and guard the premises, and local shopkeepers and others kept them supplied with food throughout February. The little house became an occupied fortress, though the strikers were not armed. Several attempts by bailiffs to evict the Greek family were repulsed by persuasion, forceful or otherwise. Eventually, magistrates gave police the power to remove trespassers from private rental property, and the house was repossessed peaceably by bailiffs and police.
During March and April 1931, UWM members averted an eviction in Donnelly Street, Balmain, and another in Booth Street, Annandale. Two eviction notices served in Rozelle were withdrawn when the UWM turned up. A UWM occupation of a rented house in Granville persuaded the landlord to retract his eviction order. Sixty UWM members resisted an eviction in Lakemba in May 1931; two of the family of eight who were renting the Lakemba house were a father and son who had served in World War I. Indeed, in many cases former Diggers cooperated with the UWM in preventing the evictions of veterans. In the Lakemba case, too, the family was permitted to stay.
In May 1931, a house in Douglas Street in Redfern, which had been rented for many years by prompt rent payers the MacNamara family, became a target for eviction. After Jack MacNamara had lost his job as a boot machinist in a factory closure in December 1929, he had managed to keep paying the rent until December 1930. By May 1931 the MacNamaras were £25 in arrears. When the landlord sought their eviction, the MacNamara family locked themselves in with five UWM members, barricaded the windows, and hung a red flag from the veranda. At the end of the month, the police, sick of negotiating, arrived—fifteen in number—and smashed through the front door and beat several of the UWM members. With revolvers drawn, the police ordered the crowd that had gathered outside to vanish, and the MacNamaras were on the streets, discussing their limited options.
Evictions were occurring all over Australia. The Unemployed Melbourne Men’s Group had been evicted from terraces in Fitzroy and as a protest dumped their pathetic furniture on the tramlines outside Parliament. The same group fought unsuccessfully against an eviction in South Melbourne.
In Sydney, increasing numbers of UWM members attended evictions, and so did police. Seventy police had to be used to break into a house in Starling Street, Leichhardt, defended by a crowd of two hundred UWM supporters. The Brancourt Avenue, Bankstown, anti-eviction occupation by the UWM was likely to attract special force from the authorities. Bankstown was at the limits of Sydney, and by 1930 more than 60 per cent of Bankstown males were out of work and 40 per cent of its houses were empty. Evicted homeless families were living on vacant land near the Chullora Railway Workshops in shacks made of hessian bags, kerosene tins and saplings. Life here was of the most rudimentary kind, says Tom Galvin, who lived in the original Happy Valley near Botany Bay. His family lived in a shanty six metres by three, on a sand floor covered with hessian bags. Cooking could be done on a primus stove or on a fire outside. Until a pipe was put in, the inhabitants walked a kilometre and back again to fetch their water from the golf course. Politics were argued in the Botany Bay Happy Valley, but inevitably no one blessed the angels of capital. Nonetheless, Galvin remembered a co
uncillor named Wilson who owned a store in Anzac Parade from which he dispensed furniture to the inhabitants; the Chinese market gardeners sold their less perfect fruit and vegetables very cheaply; and a woman named Mrs Herbert Field laboured like a modern-day aid worker in these internal refugee camps.
But in Bankstown, the house in contest was owned by a war widow, Isabelle McDonald, and was let to Alfred Parsons, an ex-Digger and itinerant labourer, married and with two young daughters. Parsons failed to pay the rent from April until mid-May. After a policeman delivered the eviction notice to him, Parsons invited the UWM to occupy the house, for he had been attending UWM meetings which were held outdoors on Friday nights near the Bankstown Railway Station. Now Parsons and his UWM friends sandbagged the walls, surrounded it with barbed wire, and over the front door painted the words ‘Remember Eureka!’
In the delay between eviction notice and the act itself, the UWM members and the Parsons family enjoyed each other’s fraternal company. In the evenings, on a nearby vacant site, the UWM would hold sing-alongs, with a seventeen-year-old fiddler named Alexander Makaroff and a tenor named John Corbett. Seventeen men, including Makaroff the fiddler, slept on the floor of the house and took their turn as sentry. On the morning of the eviction there was a UWM meeting at Bankstown Railway Station which was attended by more than three hundred people. One speaker said that what was happening in Bankstown ‘was only the beginning of the revolution’.
At 6.45 on the morning of 17 June, a force of more than thirty police cars and three Black Marias (police vans) surrounded the house. Possibly as many as 120 police advanced from the vehicles, throwing stones at the windows and onto the tin roof. Pistols were turned on bystanders, who were warned to keep away. The seventeen defenders were arrested one by one at gunpoint. Only one of them, John Bowles, had a record of activism—he had joined the Communist Party at Broken Hill when he was a miner. Nine of the seventeen were returned soldiers, survivors either of Gallipoli or of the Western Front.
The police version was that as they forced their way in through the back door they were attacked by those inside wielding piping and pick handles. Inspector White claimed that he had been struck on the head with a large stone by Richard Eatock, an Aboriginal brickyard labourer, and suffered a fractured skull. But according to two of the arrested, Eatock, after being shot in the thigh, was then batoned and kicked into unconsciousness. Murray Lavender had a bullet graze on the head and was beaten with batons. Some of the other defenders were also severely beaten and were carried out unconscious. Prisoners made sworn statements denying the police version. John Arthur Terry, a survivor of nearly three years on the Western Front, said he had never seen ‘such bestiality’. Lawyer Clive Evatt, defending those arrested, set out to question the police account but was prevented from doing so.
Events took an even more intense form. A day after the Bankstown eviction, the UWM were engaged in resisting an eviction in Union Street, Newtown. As the police took away UWM members ‘almost insensible’ in the Black Marias, they were jeered and threatened by a crowd of almost a thousand people. The men arrested there and charged with riot joined the seventeen from Bankstown on remand in Long Bay Gaol. In July 1931, the Newtown defendants were tried, and a hung jury could not reach a verdict. A second trial began in September 1931, also ending in a hung jury, and a third trial took place in November 1931. Defence discovered that the police had evicted the inhabitants of the house a day before the warrant came into effect. This gave no ultimate help to the defendants, however. Sixteen men received sentences of between three and eighteen months. One UWM man, Andrew Dunbar Thompson, was sent to gaol for six months. The UWM described these men as ‘international class-war prisoners’. The UWM came to the conclusion that turning every house into a fortress of barbed wire and sandbags would not be as effective any more as bringing out the mass UWM membership in protest against the evictions. It was as a result of a UWM march, or certainly after it, that Premier Jack Lang froze rents; still an active estate agent himself, he hoped that this measure would cause the UWM’s anti-eviction demonstrations to diminish in number.
NAMING AN AUSTRALIAN
Amidst the Australian misery, James Scullin had one triumph. It occurred at the Imperial Conference in 1930. He would be away from Australia, wisely or not, from August 1930 to early 1931. With Scullin in London for the conference, the deputy premiership went to James Fenton, a Victorian journalist who would, in November 1931, vote against the government on a no-confidence motion, and join the United Australia Party led by Joe Lyons.
Many of his supporters in Australia thought Scullin should have excused himself from the Imperial Conference, and he himself declared the mission he was attempting was probably too big for any one man to encompass. At Fremantle, suffering from bronchial infection, he had told unionists who visited him in his cabin aboard the ship to London that he was appalled that the hostile Senate had thwarted him in all his planned legislation to help the unemployed, and he hoped soon to be able to relieve the sufferings of Australians.
This was no joy trip for Scullin. On the way, he suffered from congestive illness and pleurisy, even as he kept in contact with ministers by ship’s radio, and he fell sick again in Colombo, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). He could not do much when he first arrived in England, having to stay aboard the steamer for his health’s sake, but he was determined to address the League of Nations in Geneva on armament reduction and visit the International Labour Organization, so he stayed aboard as the ship made its way to Toulon. He ultimately reached London in late September, to be greeted by ministers of Ramsay MacDonald’s British Labour government. Scullin was horrified to find articles in the London press declaring that Australia would repudiate its debts. He perhaps did not fully understand that many Labor members were now publicly talking about this option back in Australia.
In any case, to him, this at once seemed to justify his presence in Britain. He would calm the press, the British government, the banks. Scullin was sure he was doing the right thing by demonstrating Australia’s perhaps unreal confidence and buoyancy, and taking the opportunity to speak to the British government (without a lot of success, admittedly) about Australian exports and why Britain should prefer them and throw up a barrier of duties against non-British dominion products. He was thinking particularly of wheat, the same wheat he had urged farmers to grow. He also tried to prevent a slackening off on the building of the naval base in Singapore, but was informed by the British Ministry of Defence that war was unlikely to break out in the next ten years and that ‘Japan, in particular . . . was unlikely to disturb the peace’.
Scullin did not yield to any British government pressure on White Australia, and voted for the proposals that would underpin the Statute of Westminster, passed by the British Parliament the next year, which basically got rid of all legal and constitutional inequalities between the government of the United Kingdom and the governments of the dominions, and gave them the absolute right to pursue their own policies in foreign affairs and defence. Canada and South Africa would quickly pass laws to give the statute effect in their countries, but it was not until 1942, when the idea of Empire-wide defence and foreign policy collapsed in Australia under the threat of Japan, that Australia would legislate it. A reasonable symbol of Scullin’s mixed success in England came when he met British aeronautical industry leaders to discuss connecting Australia and the United Kingdom with a regular air service (something that would eventually occur). The issue was aborted when the experts Scullin had spoken to were all killed in a dirigible crash in France.
But he did have one unqualified success. He had been involved in a constitutional issue that had little to do with the stricken and the threatened but was nonetheless significant. The question had arisen of who was to replace Lord Stonehaven as Governor-General. Stonehaven—Johnny Baird—was an Etonian conservative, former British Minister for Transport and the first Governor-General to reside in Canberra instead of Melbourne. Scullin considered two men suitable to r
eplace him, both from Melbourne and both of them, remarkably, given the attitudes of such journals as the Bulletin, Jewish. One was General Sir John Monash, who was in poor health by then, and the other was Sir Isaac Isaacs, the energetic and outspoken Federationist, a man now in his mid-seventies who had been a justice of the High Court since 1906. The issue had arisen earlier than Scullin’s arrival in Britain; indeed, before he left Australia. Towards the end of the fraught March of 1930, Scullin had advised King George V to appoint Isaacs. George objected to a sole Australian nominee being elevated to the post, and declared that the Australian government had no right to force a particular individual upon him. The British Labour government agreed. The appointment was stood over until Scullin reached London for the Imperial Conference.
Towards the end of the Imperial Conference the King made it clear that he would not accept the Australian government’s recommendation for Governor-General, and that he was used to being given the courtesy of a choice between a number of names. For a man renowned for tact, Scullin now showed an unaccustomed stubbornness. He told MacDonald that ‘he would be unable to return to Australia if the appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs were refused’. One wonders if that was true, given that most Australians were focused on economic matters. His stubbornness in this constitutional area is therefore interesting. Scullin told the King’s secretary, Lord Stamfordham, ‘Presumably had we nominated an Englishman personally acceptable to the King you would not have raised the question that only one man was nominated.’ He told the Palace that he was willing to hold a referendum on the matter and fight an election on the question of whether an Australian, because of his birth, was to be barred from the office of Governor-General.
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