by John Pilger
In August 1930 Sir Otto Niemeyer arrived from London, sent by the Bank of England ‘to advise on economic policy’. To many Australians, Niemeyer was an imperial bailiff inspecting the assets. The British Government, at the behest of the London banks, was demanding payment of interest on loans at the rate of £10 million a year. Without reference to the national misery, Niemeyer pronounced that Australians were living ‘luxuriously’ and that the interest would have to be paid and wages would have to come down. Most Australian politicians accepted this; the Federal and State Governments agreed to increase taxes and to cut wages and pensions by 20 per cent.
Lang decided to fight Niemeyer, and in the election campaign of October 1930 he placed Australian independence in the political arena. Lang’s manifesto was uncompromising: a forty-four hour week, no cuts in public service wages, a public works programme for the unemployed financed by loans and, provocatively, interest payments to London to be repudiated if necessary. Once in power Lang demanded at a State Premiers’ conference that no further interest should be paid to the British bond holders and called on the Federal Labor Government to abandon the London gold standard ‘and to finally set us free’. For a time interest rates repudiated by Lang were met by the Federal Government, which eventually issued a writ for their recovery from Lang’s New South Wales Treasury.
The Labor Party split between the right wing and those who proclaimed ‘Lang is right’. The New Guard, a fascist organisation run by former army officers, emerged to meet the ‘threat’ of Lang and his ‘revolutionaries’. In 1932 the newly elected Federal Coalition Government moved quickly to deal with ‘the Big Fella’, who was now isolated and condemned on all sides as an egocentric and a demagogue. Under attack Lang agreed to some wage cuts; then in defiance he withdrew public money from the New South Wales banks and barricaded the State Treasury against Federal officers.11
In May 1932 Sir Philip Game, Governor of New South Wales and an appointed British Viceroy acting in the name of the King of England, sacked Jack Lang. To the dismay of many of his supporters, Lang accepted this. The miners were pressed by Federal Labor politicians to make an ‘orderly retreat’ and to accept the owners’ conditions. With Lang’s demise, they had no choice. And independence again was lost.
Australia marches with Britain! From her fighting men to her army in overalls. Land of plenty, land of untold resources: all placed gladly, willingly, at the feet of Mother England. Wool blankets the world, helps to win wars and the greatest wool-producing nation in the world backs Britain to the last men, the last shilling, the last sheep!
Such was the commentary of a film entitled Australia Marches with Britain!, which exemplified Government propaganda at the start of the Second World War.12 On September 3, 1939 the conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, announced that it was his ‘melancholy duty’ to inform the Australian people that since Britain had declared war on Germany, Australia also was at war. By pursuing Britain into war, once again without questioning their role, Australians under Menzies were left in confusion. ‘Other British Dominions’, wrote Malcolm Booker, ‘insisted on the right to make their decision, but the Australian Government and people were happy for it to be made in London.’13
Menzies, an anglophile ad absurdum, had difficulty in finding his own direction. Less than a year before war broke out he took the line shared by many British Tories that ‘it was a great thing for Germany to have arms’.14 Even with the war under way he expressed his ‘great admiration for the Nazi organisation of Germany . . . There is a case for Germany against Czechoslovakia. We must not destroy Hitlerism, or talk about shooting Hitler.’15 During the first two years of the war Menzies saw little of Australia, preferring his beloved London, where he devoted himself to jockeying for a place of influence close to Churchill, even imagining himself taking over from Churchill. Returning home in April 1941 he wrote in his diary, ‘A sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension grows in me as I near Australia.’16
So we Australians were led by a man who apparently disliked us, who may well have despised us and who evidently had little comprehension of where the real threat to his country lay. In 1939 Menzies had gained the nickname ‘Pig-Iron Bob’ after forcing dockers to end their ban on loading pig-iron for Japan. Menzies accused the men of ‘inciting a provocative act against a friendly power’. At that time the ‘friendly power’ was busily conquering China and spreading its ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ closer to Australia.
As if blind to these developments in his own region, Menzies despatched the Australian army to join the British in the Middle East, the Australian air force to the skies above Europe and the most modern Australian warships to serve the Royal Navy. When the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor in 1941, then at Australia in 1942, destroying Darwin in fifty-nine bombing raids, Australia’s defence forces were elsewhere, fighting somebody else’s war.
A Second World War myth, still alive in Australia, is that the Japanese were able to conquer southern Asia because of their superior numbers. This complied with the national nightmare of ‘Asiatic hordes’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’. In reality, the Japanese invaders of Malaya and the Philippines were at a serious numerical disadvantage, numbering only 15,000 compared with the Allies’ 120,000. They succeeded in the Philippines mainly because General Douglas MacArthur slipped away to Australia and left them to it. Had there been Australian forces strategically placed in the region, the Japanese advance might have been stopped, at least before the disastrous capture of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and New Guinea to the immediate north of Australia. Although Australia was spared a land invasion, its defencelessness during the six months from December 1941 to June 1942, argues Malcolm Booker, ‘caused more subtle long-term damage [and] created a psychology of dependence on the United States which continued long after the war and still lingers on. Moreover, our Government’s panic-stricken appeals for help induced a degree of contempt in American government circles which still lingers on.’17 Such an astute observation comes from one of the very few Australian diplomats who have understood the nature of Australian indebtedness to the United States since the Second World War.
With Menzies defeated at the polls in 1941, the Labor leader John Curtin stood waiting to welcome General MacArthur, who had not bothered to tell the Australian Government he had landed in their country. Australia’s imperial capital had moved to Washington and the bond between the two countries, as MacArthur explained when he addressed the Australian Parliament in 1942, ‘is that indescribable consanguinity of race which causes us to have the same aspirations, the same ideals and the same dreams of future destiny’.18
Australia’s imperial historians have described this shift away from Britain and the new relationship with the United States as ‘the dawning of independence’, as if it is possible to measure independence within the confinement of dependency. Australian politicians are still credited as ‘statesmen’ when they successfully serve foreign interests.
This pattern of acquiescence and failure was briefly interrupted by Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, who was both a nationalist anxious about his country’s honour in the world and an internationalist who sought to establish the community of nations. A shy man of intellect and dignity, ‘Bert’ Evatt was a central figure in every civil rights struggle in Australia for a generation and the youngest judge to sit in the High Court, where his opinions established universal precedents of freedom. During the Second World War, as Minister for External Affairs in the Labor Government of John Curtin, Evatt may well have done more than any individual to save his country from invasion when he secured from Churchill and Roosevelt the reversal of a secret policy known as ‘expendable Australia’ or ‘Germany first’. This was little better than a conspiracy, enshrined in a top secret document ‘WW1’. Britain and the United States had agreed to ‘allow’ the Japanese to take Australia while they ‘dealt with Germany’. The Australian Government knew nothing about this; and, as David Day has written, the secret agreement reflected Churchill’s contempt
for a nation he once described as coming from ‘bad stock’ (convicts and Irish) and whom his wartime High Commissioner dismissed as ‘inferior people’.19 When Evatt found out, he was furious and told Churchill what he thought of him, and determined to end forever his country’s servility to Britain.
Immediately after the war Evatt proclaimed Australian independence as his goal: a policy he called ‘the New World’. Australia was to be in the southern hemisphere as Sweden was in the north: libertarian, non-aligned, prosperous, envied and, above all, at peace. At San Francisco in 1946 Evatt was a dominating figure in the framing of the United Nations Charter and, as first President of the United Nations, it was he who announced the Declaration of Human Rights. This was one of the highest points in white Australia’s history, for which Evatt was to pay dearly.
Evatt sought independence for Australia at a time when the American empire was claiming the economic and strategic dependency of much of Asia, with Japan as the principal link to the rest of America’s global network. In Washington Australia’s allegiance to this new order was assumed. For Australians to ‘stand alone’, free of new imperial ties, they needed leaders of strength and courage. Evatt was such a leader; so too was Ben Chifley, who had become Prime Minister on Curtin’s death. Chifley had little formal education; yet his management of Labor’s war economy distinguished Australia as the only Allied nation to emerge from the Second World War with a favourable balance of credit under the US Lend-Lease Scheme. Chifley believed in full employment, and under his Government full employment was achieved. He believed in public works which gave universal benefit, and under his Government the great Snowy Mountains Scheme was conceived and begun, eventually turning rivers away from the sea and into the interior. The Chifley Government was also Anglo-centric and racist in its conduct of the White Australia Policy; yet paradoxically it was the Chifley Government that initiated an immigration programme which was to put an end to an exclusively white Australia.
To Australians, it was Chifley himself who embodied the ethos and mythology of Australianism. ‘Chif’ was an unprepossessing, fair-minded man who believed that a system of ‘them’ and ‘us’ was an absurdity in Australia. My parents loved him for this. When he was not at home in Bathurst, in western New South Wales, he lived in room 205 of the Kurrajong Hotel in Canberra, with a tea kettle and a pile of ‘westerns’; the lavatory and bath were down the corridor. The cost to the taxpayer was six shillings a day.20
Many Australians regarded the ‘New World’ policies with ambivalence. As the historian Humphrey McQueen has pointed out, ‘The trauma of near invasion froze all critical responses [to American policies] for a generation.’21 The United States had ‘saved’ Australia and there public debate foundered. Washington understood this and took advantage of it. During the Second World War the Curtin Government had puzzled over an American request from Washington for a US Air Force plane to fly on what seemed to be a reconnaissance of the entire Australian continent. A ‘top-level US military team’ would be on board. The request was granted and discreet enquiries revealed that the ‘military men’ were mining geologists and businessmen. This ‘aerial prospecting’ was standard practice wherever the US military went, and allowed US corporations to assess the availability of energy resources and ‘strategic materials’. Australia is rich in minerals, and has a third of the world’s known uranium reserves.22
In 1946 the Truman administration demanded swift Australian acquiescence to a draft ‘Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation’, which would give the United States effective control over Australia’s natural resources and much of the Australian economy through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Import-Export Bank, all of them dominated by Washington. The force of American pressure took the Government and bureaucracy by surprise; for two years it was unrelenting. Senior officials of the Treasury and the Commonwealth Bank expressed alarm about the effects of granting ‘special privileges’ to US dollar-projects in foreign investment and of surrendering exchange control. Dr John Burton, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, who shared Evatt’s vision of independence, played a significant part in what began as a bemused, slightly stubborn Australian resistance and developed into a struggle for sovereignty. Advising extreme caution to the Australian side, Burton ensured that the negotiations dragged on and that the treaty eventually was abandoned.23
Evatt was becoming a serious problem for the Americans. Not only had he opposed the ‘Treaty of Friendship’, but he refused to see world events in Cold War terms; and, as President of the United Nations’ General Assembly, his voice was heard beyond Australia by those seeking independence in the ‘emerging nations’. ‘We have all been troubled by the Australian attitude of attempting on various issues to find a middle ground,’ complained the US Representative at the United Nations, Hayden Raynor, in a memorandum to Washington. The memorandum is one of a batch of Government documents declassified by the Whitlam Government in the 1970s which reveal the degree of American concern about the ‘threat’ of Australia pursuing a ‘middle ground’. This concern had risen to the level of panic in 1948 when Washington declared the Australian Government a ‘security risk’ and began to undermine it: a process that was to become known as ‘de-stabilisation’.
To Washington the ‘security risk’ was that of communist influence in Australia and the Australian Government’s ‘unwillingness’ to deal with it. US Embassy despatches from Australia at the time included a 73-page top secret report which listed ‘leading Australian communists and fellow travellers’. The official who compiled the list, Webster Powell, was an intelligence agent, like most US ‘labour attachés’ in Australia or elsewhere. Webster classified people as ‘alleged communist’ or ‘communistically inclined’ or ‘recanted communist’. (The latter category remained ‘suspect’.) He cautioned that ‘care should be taken in the use of this list, although it is believed to be reasonably accurate’.
American spying in Canberra became so rife that, according to John Burton, ‘I could never send a message from my office to Dr Evatt’s office without the American Ambassador having precise details within minutes . . . the Ambassador used to drop little hints to let me know that he knew what I knew.’24 It was during the visit of a Soviet delegation that the Government began to think it should have its own intelligence sources, and the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, was established. According to Burton, this was ‘a most reluctant’ decision by Chifley, and ‘the organisation developed step by step away from the British model, on which it was based, toward the American type’.25
Under a treaty with Britain and the United States, Australia (with Canada and New Zealand) became a junior partner in an ‘exchange of intelligence’. This was the UKUSA Cooperative Intelligence Agreement, the precise terms of which are still secret. It meant that both British and American intelligence could operate freely within Australia. Burton described how ‘a small group of people were “initiated” by a special oath of secrecy over and above the normal and adequate oath taken by public servants. Certain matters of direct concern to foreign and defence policy were to be known to these persons and these only’; and yet these officials were ‘taking part in an intelligence organisation with which other countries were associated’.26 It was this ‘association’ which, argues Dennis Phillips in his Cold War Two and Australia, ‘fixed Australia firmly in an American-dominated defence and intelligence web’.27
The election year of 1949 saw huge amounts of American and British capital transferred to Australia, much of it passed secretly to an anti-Labor election fund. British interests with Australian investments gave £100,000 – an unheard of political donation in those days – to finance a propaganda campaign that was a model for the McCarthy era to come. Chifley was likened to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. The Women’s Weekly, owned by the arch-conservative Frank Packer, published a series of advertisements in which the Government was depicted as aiding an enemy within. One had a full-page picture of
a young woman putting a gun in her handbag and the caption: ‘No need to pack a pistol in your handbag’ because the ‘sinister forces’ overseas which were threatening Australia were being kept at bay as long as Australia remained ‘strong’. The message was ‘Don’t take risks.’ Put Labor out of office. Labor was associated with ‘broken homes’ and worse, ‘no shopping choice for women!’28
Labor might have won had Chifley matched the conservatives’ promise to end petrol rationing and had he not been committed to nationalise private banks. He refused to compromise, remembering as a child the social effects of the failure of two-thirds of Australia’s private banks in 1892. He also remembered, as a politician during the Depression in 1931, how the chairman of the Commonwealth Bank, a public servant, had refused to co-operate with a job creation plan because the private bankers did not approve. The ‘banks issue’ gave the opposition the opportunity to depict Labor as ‘dictators of socialism’. On December 10, 1949 Robert Gordon Menzies was reinstated as Prime Minister.
I belong to the Menzies generation. Sir Robert Menzies, as he became, Knight of the Thistle, Companion of Honour, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight of the Order of Australia, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, President of Kent County Cricket Club, reigned during the 1950s and most of the 1960s, the longest-serving Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia. It was he who shipped the Queen of England and members of her family to the Antipodes more times than they can probably remember; and it was he who caused the Queen to splutter with embarrassment when he turned to her and intoned, ‘In the words of the old seventeenth-century poet who wrote these famous words, “I did but see her passing by and yet I love her till I die”.’