Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  The Prime Minister’s enemies within his own United Australia Party were anything but united. Ministers not given the portfolios they wanted or reshuffled out of them schemed for their leader’s downfall. Disgruntled backbenchers plotted in the lobbies and at times went public with their discontent in the newspapers. And Menzies was his own worst enemy. He did not suffer fools gladly. Radiating a patrician grandeur, he could be cruelly condescending to his intellectual inferiors, handing out slights that were not forgiven. As John Curtin once remarked, ‘Ah, poor Bob, it’s very sad; he would rather make a point than make a friend.’7

  Relishing the turmoil in the government, Labor’s more fiery members were all for seizing power at the first chance. Curtin, content to bide his time, stayed their hand. Menzies, reading the writing on the wall, attempted a bold stroke. On 22 August, he wrote to the Labor leader suggesting the formation of an all-party government on the British wartime model. To everyone’s astonishment, Menzies said that Labor could have half the Cabinet positions and that he would be prepared to see Curtin become prime minister and to serve as a minister under him.

  The Labor caucus debated the letter at length but concluded that the government apple was now so rotten that it could be left to fall from the tree by itself. Which it duly did. Menzies’ letter had exposed his political weakness and further inflamed his party foes. His leadership was dead. Late on the evening of 28 August, sick at heart, he called a party meeting and tendered his resignation. Unable to agree on one of their own to replace him as prime minister, the United Australia Party members offered the job to Fadden. ‘Big Artie’, an affable Queensland accountant, became Australia’s 13th Prime Minister.

  He lasted little more than a month. Without a majority in the House of Representatives, the government held power only with the support of two independent members seated on the cross-benches. Disgusted by the sleazy manoeuvring that had toppled Menzies and by the continuing turmoil in the government’s ranks, the independents decided that enough was enough. Australia at war deserved better. On the first day of October, in tumultuous scenes, Labor moved a censure motion in parliament. The cross-benchers voted with Labor, and the government, outnumbered, duly fell. The Governor General invited John Curtin to become prime minister. It was Friday 3 October, the day before the 51st birthday of Curtin’s wife, Elsie. ‘This is your birthday gift,’ her husband cabled.

  Curtin was born in Victoria in 1885, the eldest of four children of an Irish immigrant police officer. The father’s illness saw the family slump into poverty, erratically supported by whatever work John’s mother, Catherine, could scratch up in their wanderings from Victorian country town to town. The boy left school at 13, searching both for work and for some meaning to life. He abandoned the Catholic Church as a young man, flirted for a brief spell with the Salvation Army and eventually flung himself into books, newspapers and political tracts with the voracious thirst of the self-taught. After embracing the promises of socialism, ambition led him to the infant Australian Labor Party and a job as Secretary of the Victorian Timber Workers Union. In the First World War, he was an ardent opponent of the conscription policies of Billy Hughes’s Labor government. Friends in the Labor movement who despised Hughes found him a job in Perth as a freelance sports journalist for the Westralian Worker, and there, in 1917, he married Elsie Needham, the daughter of a socialist activist.

  It looked to everyone at first that Elsie had bought a bad bargain. Her husband was an alcoholic at the age of 32 – a slobbering, maudlin drunk who would lurch home late at night and collapse face down on the floor. But her untiring if sometimes despairing devotion, and Curtin’s own intellect and willpower, eventually got him off the booze, if never entirely eradicating the thirst for its comforts.

  In those turbulent years of the late ’30s and early ’40s, Labor was a cauldron of feuds. Red-letter socialists, Soviet sympathisers and ultra-nationalists, Yellow Peril racists and preachy pacifists, devout Catholic fundamentalists and atheist Sydney lawyers, rural labourers and raucous inner-city trade-unionists ripped into each other with abandon. These categories were blurred and elastic. Curtin, having been all of the above but a lawyer, managed in time to assert a dominance over the brawling mass.

  Maturity had smoothed his radical politics. Some Labor men, mindful of the agony at Gallipoli, had long harboured a distrust of Winston Churchill and the British. Curtin, as Prime Minister, was a loyal subject of the King and a proud citizen of the Empire. However, shocked by the bloody defeats in Greece and Crete, anguished at the attrition of Australian lives in the siege of Tobruk and with a wary eye on Japan, he believed that the Empire could best be defended if Australia was to marshal its forces closer to home.

  By the middle of October, Perth was back alongside at Garden Island and almost ready for sea when a fire broke out on board. It was early on a Saturday morning, just after midnight, and most of the crew were out of the ship, including the Acting Captain, Pricky Reid. The new Navigator, Lieutenant Harper, awoke to the acrid smell of burning electrical wiring and found the bridge structure full of smoke. The damage put back Perth’s sailing date. It took almost a month to replace the cabling to the Director Tower.

  They never found out how it had happened. The buzz went around that it was sabotage, perhaps by dockyard workers – who, as everyone knew, were always bolshie about something or other. Or it might have been a sailor not too keen on returning to sea in a hurry. The navy held an inconclusive inquiry and reported to the War Cabinet that ‘the possibility of sabotage could be ruled out’, but added that ‘there had been a certain amount of slackness and laxity on board’. Someone would have to pay for that eventually.

  The flurry of excitement over the fire had hardly died down when another buzz went around. Perth’s new captain would be none other than ‘Hard Over’ Hec Waller, the man who had achieved legendary status as the Commander of the Scrap Iron Flotilla. The rumours were true. He formally assumed command of the ship on 24 October 1941.

  The city of Benalla lies 220 kilometres to the north-east of Melbourne, on the way to the New South Wales border. Like Silver Creek, it is Kelly country. Today, it is one of those civic jewels of rural Australia, a neat country town proud of its botanic gardens and its art gallery, its tranquil lake on the Broken River and the annual Rose Festival. Its beginnings were rougher. In the roaring days of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people killed eight white settlers there and paid for it with five-score lives of their own. Benalla’s grog shanties watered travellers on the Cobb & Co. coach rumbling through from Melbourne to Albury, and in 1880 outlaw Ned was held at the police station after his capture at Glenrowan.

  The Waller family, free emigrants from England, settled at Benalla in the 1850s. William Frederick Waller, the first of the family born in the colony, kept a grocery store on Bridge Street with his wife, Helen. The youngest of their ten children, Hector Macdonald Laws Waller – named, obscurely, after a Scottish hero of the Boer War, Major-General Sir Hector Archibald Macdonald8 – arrived in the world on 4 April 1900. His childhood was a country idyll, of lessons by day at the local state school, of hot summers roaming the bush in the hills above Benalla and splashing in the creeks.

  There is no record of what turned him to a career as an officer in Australia’s infant navy but it is at least plausible that he and his parents were captivated, like the entire nation, by the visit of the American Great White Fleet in 1908. It is easy to imagine a country boy of eight enthralled by the romance of the sea, and quite possible that his parents welcomed a free education and a promising future for their youngest.

  In 1914, barely a teenager, Hec entered the Royal Australian Naval College at its temporary home at Osborne House, Geelong, and took to the spartan life of a cadet midshipman with aplomb. Active and athletic, he won his colours for rugby, and in his final year he became Chief Cadet Captain, passing out in 1917 with the college’s highest distinction, the King’s Medal.

  The next year, he was sent off to Britain fo
r his first spell at sea in a battleship of the Royal Navy, HMS Agincourt, a coal-burning dreadnought of the Grand Fleet so lavishly appointed that it was known throughout the service as The Gin Palace. He was too late to see a shot fired in anger in the First World War, but his career took a steady upward curve through the ships and ranks of the RAN, interspersed with periods on loan to the British.

  At the age of 23 – unusually young for a seagoing officer – he married Nancy Bowes, the petite, red-haired daughter of a Methodist clergyman. Their wedding photographs, taken at Lewisham in Sydney, show a solemn young lieutenant in formal naval frock coat with gloves and sword, the bride veiled in white with a short train and a flowing bouquet. Beneath close-cropped brown hair, his face was blunt and strong, rather big-nosed, but with lines of humour around blue-grey eyes set in a high forehead. He had a deep and resonant voice, its Australian bush accent rounded off by his years with Englishmen. His frame was muscular and nuggety, with stocky legs. ‘I’ve got the duck’s disease,’ he would joke with Nancy. ‘Backside too close to the ground.’

  The year after his marriage, 1924, he topped the Royal Navy’s signals course – a gruelling ordeal known as ‘The Dagger’ – famously passing out with better marks than the previous highest achiever, none other than Lord Louis Mountbatten. Even as a ship’s captain, he took a wicked delight in reading flag signals more quickly than the bunting tossers, or working a signal projector to keep his hand in.

  Hec survived the navy’s lean years when so many of his contemporaries found themselves on the beach, but promotion was slow and it took him until 1937 to get his first command: a Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Brazen. He had her during the Spanish Civil War, which rocked Europe and the civilised world in the ’30s, and the posting nearly brought him undone. In a formal written report on his abilities – known to naval officers as the dreaded ‘flimsy’ – his flotilla commander gave him marks of just two out of ten for ship handling and three out of ten for judgement and reliability. ‘His ability in handling a ship at sea in spite of much instruction and advice is far below average and at sea, his erratic movements upset the whole flotilla,’ it read. ‘In consequence of his lack of judgement and his lack of ability in handling his ship and his sub-division, I am unable at present to recommend him for promotion.’

  That was a hammer blow: he faced the dismal prospect of his career killed off as a three-ringed commander at the age of 37. But there were consolations to be found in a growing family. Nancy – he called her by the pet name ‘Bill’ – had presented him with two sons: Michael in 1927 and John in 1933. John has happy memories of a cottage in Plymouth, of a snowy English winter, of bouncing along leafy country lanes in a Baby Austin car that, famously in Waller legend, rolled down the cottage driveway and overturned when Hec left the handbrake off. Away at sea, the father delighted in sending his boys sketches of the ships he served in and the sights he saw, often accompanied by some nonsense rhyme. Back in Australia, driving a desk ashore, he settled his family into a home at Hawthorn in Melbourne. There, he introduced his sons to the delights of the bush he had loved as a child and put them into Scotch College, where two of his brothers were teaching.

  Sometimes, a naval officer branded mediocre in peacetime finds his true calling in the fires of war and rises to meet it. The reverse also happens: the gilded careerist, expert at fleet manoeuvres and a social lion at quarterdeck cocktail parties, has been known to fail the test when the guns start firing. Hec Waller came into the first category. On the day that Hitler marched into Poland, he was given his first Australian command: the destroyer leader HMAS Stuart. Character and dedication to duty sailed with him.

  Some Australian officers of Waller’s vintage who had spent time with the Royal Navy affected a British air, a haughty demeanour foreign to their roots. Not Hec. He was dour at times on the bridge and a firm disciplinarian, but he was genial company in the wardroom and not a man to allow rank to mask his humanity. One of his officers in Perth, Philipp ‘Polo’ Owen, recorded their first meeting:

  He never failed to be himself. He was humble. He was firm: forthright and to the point, perspicacious and uncomplicated in expression. He was without any frills: always fair and without favourites. He was a definite character with a flair for making the best of the material and conditions offering … I hear his voice now, as clearly as a ship’s bell striking, saying to me, ‘Polo, it’s the rub o’ the green.’ Not only did he have a sense of humour but also of the ridiculous. I first met him in 1926 when I joined the RAN as a Paymaster Cadet. I was required to Mess in the Wardroom at Flinders Naval Depot. Here were, to me, hard-bitten men barely conscious of my presence. Not so Waller. Freshly back from England where he had topped his Long Signal Course, this unassuming man befriended me on my first guest night, when I was petrified, fearful and lonely. Amongst some 60 officers he had no cause to notice me! Yet he made the effort to seek me out and put me at ease.9

  Others were not so glowing. One of Waller’s sub-lieutenants in Perth, Norman ‘Knocker’ White, wrote that he despaired of ever pleasing his captain:

  I was a cadet when he was Commander of the Naval College. He was terribly tough on officers, and he gave me a very hard time. He was tough, especially on young, untrained officers who did not have a watch-keeping certificate, which I didn’t have then. As Second Officer of the Watch, I copped Hec’s very abrasive tongue on more than one occasion.10

  Waller’s sailors, though, were unstinting in their regard. They especially liked the way he dressed at sea. Bowyer-Smyth on the bridge had always looked like an advertisement for Gieves, the naval tailor in Savile Row. Hec turned out as if he was going fishing. In summer, he sported a pair of tattered shorts and sandals. In winter, it was a hand-knitted pullover and baggy trousers with an old beret jammed on his head – his ‘pirate rig’, he called it. There was invariably a fuming pipe clenched between his teeth. One of his signalmen in Stuart, Les Clifford, summed up in his memoir what the mess decks thought of their captain:

  Commander Waller was the type of man in whom one could have complete confidence in an emergency; friendly in manner, and possessing the happy faculty of making one feel completely at ease in his company … as a disciplinarian, he was firm but just, displaying a personal interest in his ship’s company. He could often be seen chatting with ratings on the upper deck, and when on his bridge, would join conversation on general subjects with the signalman on watch.11

  Waller returned the confidence. When Stuart’s elderly engines broke down in the Mediterranean, the ship lay motionless for five hours, a sitting duck for any passing enemy. The Captain never once called down to the engine room to tell his engineer officer to get a move on. He simply let him get on with the job. Stories such as this became part of the Waller legend. Sailors, when they tell a yarn, call it ‘spinning a dit’. The dits gathered around Hec like barnacles, growing ever more colourful with the retelling. There was the time in Stuart when Hec emptied a revolver into the head of a shark caught by the crew. In the Mediterranean, he would sometimes detonate floating enemy mines by firing at them with a rifle. Socially, he enjoyed a whisky and he liked his scran, especially a sweet dessert. Invited to stay with the governor of Malta, he spent a happy afternoon pruning the vice-regal roses. Returning to Alexandria from the perils of a Tobruk ferry run, he would take a packet of sandwiches and hop into a sailing dinghy to potter around the harbour for a few solitary hours. Most of all, the dits told of his coolness in battle. Sprawled flat on the deck during an air raid, Waller once remarked to a man lying beside him, ‘Not so bad, is it, son?’

  ‘Not so fucking good, either, sir,’ said the sailor.

  Everyone knew that Waller at sea liked nothing better than going in for the attack. He would fire a shot across the bows of an errant merchantman almost for the fun of it or drop a few depth charges to ‘get a bang in the water’ at even the most improbable hint of a submarine lurking below. Admiral Cunningham, working at his desk in his flagship, was once startled by some explo
sions in the distance. ‘I hear Commander Waller’s rejoined the fleet,’ he quipped dryly. Undaunted by rank, Waller once had the temerity to question one of the Commanders-in-Chief’s decisions in front of a table full of captains. ‘Get out of my cabin, you bloody Australian,’ snapped the Admiral. But he later invited him back in to drink gin. Cunningham, a hard marker, knew quality when he saw it. The two got on like a house on fire. ‘Now you are going to meet one of the greatest captains who ever sailed the seas. His name is Waller,’ said Cunningham to Menzies as they went to inspect Stuart in Alexandria in 1941. It was not an idle remark.

  All this was the measure of the man. The shopkeeper’s son from Benalla, now the RAN’s most tried and tested captain, would take command of Australia’s most seasoned warship – although, curiously, it was not a job he wanted. Waller confided to friends that he much preferred the knockabout intimacy of destroyers, where the crew was counted in dozens and a captain knew his officers and men by their names, nicknames, strengths and foibles. And there was another matter more private still. At the end of 1941, Hec Waller was a sick man. He suffered from a gall-bladder condition and a mild jaundice that brought on painful cramps and bouts of vomiting. Sam Stening, who had stayed on as Perth’s doctor after his passage home from the Mediterranean, would give his captain the occasional painkiller. This condition, and the accumulated strain of two years of command in constant battle, should have kept him ashore. It did not. Hard Over Hec returned to the fight because there was no one to take his place.