The next morning there was fog from the sea, and its effects would be added to by dust storms. But though the hole in the defenders’ line would never be repaired, the defences around the port held. Three months later, Morshead would try again to take back the perimeter. A battalion attacked at each end of the German salient to capture perimeter posts. This, too, failed, and the siege went on. It is hard to know if the young men defending the port understood that they had crucially delayed great German plans for conquests far to the east. They would no doubt have sworn at anyone who tried to tell them.
The British general Claude Auchinleck, now in charge in the Middle East, ordered that the 18th Australian Brigade be relieved and taken out of the port by sea in August. This withdrawal was due to Morshead’s telling Blamey in July that the garrison’s capacity to resist a sustained assault was diminishing. The men’s health was poor. Blamey took up the cause of the relief of the Australians by other troops, and the Australian government demanded it too. Churchill thought Blamey was being troublesome for Australian political reasons, to try to bolster Menzies’ diminishing reputation with voters. In any case, most of the remaining Australians were taken out in September and October, to be replaced by, amongst other units, a Polish brigade. The 13th Battalion AIF stayed until it fought its way out of the siege in December. By then there had been three thousand Australian dead and wounded, and just under a thousand taken prisoner.
The navies of Britain and Australia had kept the garrison supplied throughout—the soldiers called the supply ships the ‘Tobruk ferry’. On 27 November, escorting a slow convoy from Alexandria, HMAS Parramatta was shepherding one of the fuel ships on the approaches to Tobruk, and travelling at only three knots. Her sailors had spent the day before protecting the ship and her convoy from a number of attacks from dive bombers. Such an exhausting day as that was standard for the crews while on convoy duty to Tobruk. Parramatta was torpedoed in the magazine by a U-boat, exploded and sank fast, with the loss of all her officers, and 138 men as well.
Back in Mount Gambier, a schoolboy named Charles Janeway remembered the minister’s visit to a neighbour’s house. The neighbour, Mr Clarke, called to the hesitant parson, ‘Come on, I can take it.’ A telegram was delivered later. All telegrams, good and bad news, had to be signed for. Mr Clarke signed his, as thousands of other parents would manage to in the next four years.
General Auchinleck said that Morshead’s aggressive defence of Tobruk was responsible for ‘freedom from embarrassment’ of the weak force stationed on the Egyptian frontier. It kept ‘the enemy constantly in a high state of tension’. Cairo, Alexandria and the Canal were held by brave counter-attacks, in part by troops rescued from the ports of Greece and Crete. Tobruk was Rommel’s first failure, the viper at his flank.
CURTIN RISING
The brilliant young jurist and Labor member Herbert Vere Evatt understood that Hitler’s assault on Russia in June 1941 would have a worldwide impact and an impact for Australia. It drew Russian divisions facing Japan away from the far-eastern borders, and so gave the Japanese army a windfall of divisions and aircraft for a potential thrust into the Pacific.
While most politicians who fancied themselves as lawyers went from politics to the High Court, Evatt had already been on the High Court; appointed at the age of thirty-six, he was the youngest High Court judge yet. He had been on the bench for the case which upheld Scullin’s Commonwealth government’s claim against Lang’s New South Wales government after the Federal government had paid New South Wales’ interest bills, but had himself dissented from the decision. He was East Maitland–born, son of an English publican, but—like many a brilliant boy—never fully a child. His attitudes were formed in part by the Maitland Irishmen and unionists who favoured his father’s pub. Though a gifted all-round sportsman, he was rejected for military service in World War I because of astigmatism, and his thick glasses would become famous through press photographs. Once he was admitted to the bar, Evatt’s work was often what people would now call human rights law—for example, representing trade unionists such as Tom Walsh, threatened with deportation from Australia in 1925. As a High Court judge he was often a dissenting voice. In 1935, he successfully upheld, however, the right of the visiting Czech radical and anti-Fascist Egon Kisch to tour Australia. (Kisch had been reduced to hurling himself off the ship about to deport him, and broke his leg when he landed on the pier.) Evatt also had time to publish three works of history, including one on the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Injustice within the Law, and another on the legality of the Rum Rebellion on 1808. He also wrote a biography of William Holman, a New South Wales premier and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century compadre of the ‘fiery particle’, Billy Hughes. As a jurist Evatt was smart, contentious and, some said, glib. He was passionate about rugby league and cricket, and a friend of artists and of the writers Kylie Tennant and Eleanor Dark.
In 1940, Evatt stood for the federal seat of Barton in New South Wales, won it and retired from the High Court. He chafed in opposition and longed for office, and was impatient with his leader John Curtin in a parliament where a vulnerable Menzies had ruled with the help of two independents. When Curtin came to office in 1941, Evatt was appointed Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs.
In 1920, Evatt married Mary Alice Sheffer, the American-born daughter of a chemist, a woman who had grown up in the Tory purlieus of the Sydney suburb of Mosman. Their relationship was sometimes turbulent. Sheffer was an artist who studied modernist painting in Sydney and then attended the George Bell School in Melbourne. She studied in Paris in 1938, and in New York she and Evatt met a number of modernist painters. Because the Evatts were prosperous, they bought paintings and drawings from Russell Drysdale and a young working-class Melbourne painter named Sid Nolan. The works Sheffer bought at an exhibition of French and British contemporary art on the eve of World War II included those of Modigliani, the French Cubist Léger, and Vlaminck.
Now Evatt stated his convictions about Australia’s danger most vocally at meetings of the Advisory War Council, of which he became a member in 1941. Evatt considered the gentlemanly Curtin too conciliatory in his manner towards the United Australia Party (UAP). But there is no doubt that Curtin understood the peril of the moment as well as Evatt did. At the Advisory War Council meeting on 12 June, Curtin urged that Australia put its own defence first, the way Britain had. He did not necessarily want Australian forces withdrawn from the Middle East yet, but he complained that Britain had not given the Middle East priority in aircraft and equipment, and thus made the British and Australian forces there all the more vulnerable.
In part for fear of loss of identity and of an ability to represent their constituency—working people—Labor had been unwilling in mid-1941 to share power and form a combined government with the UAP, as both sides of the British Parliament had. Partially this was because Menzies’ hold on power was so slim and his view of the crisis so much at odds with Curtin’s. Curtin told Menzies he was content to let Menzies’ government make policy and refer it to the Advisory War Council for comment.
A combined Labor–conservative government would have permitted Menzies, while retaining leadership, to return to London to continue in his desired role as statesman of the Empire, and allowed him to find a place on the British War Cabinet as well. Many attacked Curtin, even some in his own party, for not joining a national government, while others like Evatt attacked him for being too amenable with Menzies and Menzies’ amiable deputy Artie Fadden. But Curtin’s relationship with Fadden was very close, and Fadden knew about Curtin’s tendency to go on the occasional bender. Fadden, leader of the Country Party, was of Irish parentage too, and his father, as Curtin’s had been earlier in life, was a policeman, another coincidence of background.
It is not to demean the two lawyers, Evatt and Menzies, or to question the genuineness of their highly contested visions, if we say that they had strong self-regard and a conviction of their ability—and even of their destiny—to lead.
Curtin was a complex being by contrast. He was certainly a politician and knew the value of a vote, and how to work the press through his skilled pressman Don Rodgers, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties who cut his teeth on such hard-nosed Hunter Valley journals as the Miners’ Advocate and the Newcastle Sun. But Curtin possessed immense self-doubt as well. Though his political beliefs were strong, he made many apolitical friends and often trusted them better than he did his colleagues. He would say his best friend during World War II was Fred Southwell, brother of Curtin’s mistress Belle Southwell, housekeeper of the Kurrajong Hotel. Whenever Curtin, a reformed alcoholic, lapsed, and went on a bender in Sydney or elsewhere, he depended on opposition members, not one of his own fraught party, to look after him. Lloyd Ross, expelled from the Communist Party because of his negative reaction to the 1939 German–Russian pact, and for much of the war a government PR man, would tell the story of a Country Party man once ushering a ruinously drunk Curtin onto a train from Sydney to Canberra, and into a compartment where the shades were pulled down so that no one could see in from the corridor. Belle Southwell always arranged that when Curtin had a get-together with her brothers, only soft drinks were served. Years before, Curtin had managed to get so drunk while staying with his wife Elsie in a Melbourne temperance hotel that it took some days before he was fit to travel to Canberra, and even then he tried to retain a whisky bottle in his pocket. Elsie extracted the bottle and hurled it out of the train window.
To what extent was Curtin’s occasional lapse due to how difficult he found it to take adverse news? He was accused of insensitivity when in late 1940 he failed to visit his old mentor, Fred Anstey, who was dying in Brunswick and who disapproved of the way Curtin’s amiability undermined strict socialist principles. But Curtin got to the door and could not go further, not from fear but from grief at the withering of friendship and the loss of a political parent. One biographer, David Day, argues that these days Curtin might have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for he could be immobilised with depression which, if given the chance, he would medicate with liquor. Anstey had been a Scullin minister, and Curtin, a backbencher, blamed Ted Theodore for keeping him out of a portfolio in Scullin’s government because, unlike Theodore and orthodox Labor, he opposed the Premiers’ Plan. Defeated that year, he drank in a hotel in Cottesloe where he was having an affair with the housekeeper, though the publican said all he ever heard them do was talk politics.
Even then, as he had from youth, Curtin took things hard, and hardest of all the misfortune and peril of others, and these days, of Australia. And he was a peacemaker: he brought the seven Lang Labor rebels, led by Jack Beasley—known as ‘Stabber Jack’ after he crossed the floor to bring Scullin down—back into Labor. Through his membership of the Advisory War Council he worked on improved social welfare payments and better pay for troops, but in a savage 1940 Caucus meeting he was accused of backing down, blamed for his sociability with Menzies and lack of bite, to the extent that he offered his resignation as party leader. It was not accepted.
Curtin recovered from the damage to him, physical and spiritual, over the Christmas of 1940. In the New Year of 1941, Menzies was gone to Britain, and Curtin could do business congenially with acting Prime Minister Fadden. He had pledged himself to honour Menzies’ narrow mandate and continued to do so. The Australian people, he said, had differing politics, but they wanted the ‘complete cooperation of those who are charged with the responsibility to ensure the safety of our country’. Such talk enraged his followers, and some asked what Menzies was doing for the country’s safety anyhow.
Curtin was fully aware that Menzies was not only unpopular but had failed to provide an imperilled Australia with any form of sophisticated defence should the Japanese attack and thus had caused the electorate anxiety about the primitive state of Australian defences. Faced with the prospect of power, Curtin took advice from Scullin, the elder statesman, and from his at first sight unlikely friend, the Scots replacement for Sir Isaac Isaacs, Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, whose curriculum vitae included Eton, Winchester, a good regiment, Tory parliamentarian, et cetera. After initial apprehension about a Labor government, Gowrie warmed to, and was warmed to by, Curtin. In an informal Canberra, Curtin, especially after he became prime minister, would stroll across from the Lodge to Government House and, as Gowrie wrote, ‘spend quiet afternoons and evenings with my wife and myself ’. Gowrie liked Curtin for his perseverance and patience and lack of personal ambition: ‘The most selfless man I have ever met,’ he declared of Curtin.
It cannot be denied there was true friendship there, but it would be unrealistic to think Curtin did not pass on his sense of Australian priorities, knowing Gowrie would include his views in reports to London. These would not be greatly influential but would be a further voice to buttress Curtin’s plans.
Curtin’s health was fragile, and he suffered pneumonia at the time military disasters occurred in Greece and North Africa. In the three weeks Curtin was in hospital in Melbourne, Crete fell, and Labor blamed Menzies—who had been in London the better part of six months—for the debacle. Events were indeed turning on Menzies that June. He imposed a ban on the Communist Party, and yet a few days later Hitler invaded Russia and the Australian Communists became Australian patriots, no longer devoted to thwarting the war effort. Richard Casey would later describe Menzies at this time as the ‘worst man at getting anything done that I’ve ever met’. Besides his pre-war sympathy for Nazi Germany and for appeasement along the lines pursued by former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, there was his export of pig iron (that is, iron with a high carbon content) to Japan against the unions’ protests. All this told against him in public opinion. So did his anxiety to return to London in August 1941 when he had achieved so little on his first trip.
Menzies’ Cabinet was, in fact, perversely grateful for his proposal to return to England, because it, like Curtin, preferred Fadden’s company and style. But in a House where his support was so narrow, Menzies needed Labor’s agreement to his absence. Curtin, while aware of the threatening times, was willing to let Menzies depart; however, many of his party were not, and when the Advisory War Council met on 14 August, it was obvious that Menzies would not get the Labor Party’s approval for his absence. It was Frank Forde, a Labor teetotaller from Queensland (in a culture where many deals were sealed at the bar), who, with the young jurist Evatt, argued that the right place for an Australian prime minister in wartime was in Australia. Curtin suggested as a compromise that Menzies be permitted to go to London only for as long as it took him to arrange the dominion representation lacking in the British War Cabinet. But the others spoke of the barrenness of his last visit and of the debacle in Greece and Crete, and ultimately went along with Menzies’ narrow majority. Curtin might have struck now and tried to attract a frustrated UAP man, Arthur Coles, and the independent Alex Wilson to cross the floor. He wanted to avoid becoming prime minister on terms that would rile the UAP–Country Party majority in the Senate. This made a forceful minority of the hardheads in his party wonder if Curtin had the political will for leadership. But Curtin felt he must wait until they obviously came across to his side for the national interest and without blandishments.
Menzies had recently told the Sydney Morning Herald that he would go to any lengths to keep the conduct of the war out of Labor hands. But in secrecy he offered Curtin the prime ministership in a national government if Curtin would select him to represent Australia on the War Cabinet in London. The Labor Caucus met to consider Menzies’ astounding offer, and rejected it. Labor wanted to govern in its own right. If it joined a national government made up of all parties it would forgo its right to offer, as Curtin said, ‘honest patriotic criticism without which a successful war effort is impossible’. To prevent rejection in the polls and still hold to his London ambition, Menzies resigned as prime minister on 28 August in favour of the Country Party’s ‘Affable Artie’ Fadden. Arthur Coles now thought it time to leave the UAP and reverted to b
eing an independent, though still supporting Fadden. Some of the Labor Party wanted to challenge right then for government, but the majority took Curtin’s view and were against it. They wanted moral legitimacy, and felt it was close.
On 2 September 1941, two years since the beginning of the war, Curtin told the Australian people, ‘We will govern when we are given a mandate by the people to do so.’ The Fadden government lasted for just forty days with the support of the two independent MPs, Coles and Wilson, whose sympathies were increasingly with Curtin. Evatt had been cultivating the support of the Wimmera wheat-grower Wilson, and had even visited the Wimmera electorate to tell the drought-affected farmers that Labor would offer drought relief if it came to power. When Fadden presented his budget to Parliament at the end of September, Labor decided to test the government support by opposing it, on the basis that the burden was not shared amongst the community. In protest, Curtin moved to amend the budget, symbolically, by one pound, knowing that this gesture would test his friend Fadden’s support. Friendship in politics, only went so far.
In early October, Curtin came to Fadden’s office in Parliament House and they held a conversation that possesses all the quaintness of their friendship and the intimacy of Canberra as a bush town and a federal capital. Curtin is said to have asked, ‘Well, boy, have you got the numbers? I hope you have, but I don’t think you have.’ Fadden answered, ‘No, John, I haven’t got them. I have heard that Wilson spent the weekend at Evatt’s home and I can’t rely on Coles.’
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