Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  On the day Ross Smith’s successful flight from England to Australia began, the autumn air was frosty and the weather bureau forecast conditions unfit for flying, but at 8.30 they started their engines and took off from the snow-covered aerodrome. At the French coast they had to climb above snow clouds—the cold in the open cockpit was savage, 25 degrees Fahrenheit of frost. For three hours their breath froze on their face masks and the sandwiches they had brought were frozen solid. It took five days to cross Europe to Taranto in Italy. The next leg was to Crete, to Suda Bay, then to Heliopolis in Egypt. On 19 November, they took off for Damascus. The practical aspect of going to Damascus was that the journey directly south-eastwards would take them across the worst of the deserts of Arabia. Their route lay over the old battlefields of Romani, El Arish, Gaza and Nazareth and thus possessed a quotient of nostalgia for Ross Smith, who had flown over all those sites as a combatant.

  A simoom wind nearly destroyed the aircraft in Damascus, and though they lashed it to the ground, they and a crowd of Indian Lancers had to hang on to it through the night. Taking off the next morning, they had their best day. They kept on across India, landing briefly at Delhi, then at Allahabad and Calcutta. They made Rangoon and passed the unofficial contestant, a French Lieutenant Poulet in his small Caudron machine. They had been advised to land at Singora in Thailand, which turned out to be a primitive aerodrome in the jungle not adequately cleared of stumps. But they survived it and reached Singapore on 4 December. At Surabaya, on an airstrip the Viceroy of Indonesia had ordered cleared especially for the race, their aircraft became deeply bogged as it rolled to a stop. The machine was dug out with the greatest difficulty. ‘At one time I feared it would be impossible ever to start off from that aerodrome again,’ said Ross Smith. Bamboo mats were laid down for 350 yards and the machine was hauled from the bog by Indonesians. The take-off was of course dangerous, with bamboo flying up and splintering into spears that came lancing backwards to them. When they landed in Timor, last stop before Darwin, ‘Excitement kept us all from sleep that night.’ The next day, ‘A tiny speck upon the waters resolved itself into a warship, HMAS Sydney, in exactly the position we had asked her to be in, in case of need.’ They arrived at Darwin on 10 December, beating the time limit of a month by two days, and won the prize. But even in their glory they knew something of the chanciness of aviation. Within eighteen months, former Sergeant, now Lieutenant Bennett would be killed in a crash.

  Both Ross and Keith were knighted after the flight and the sergeants immediately commissioned. Democratically, the prize money was split four ways.

  As for the Australians Ray Parer and John McIntosh, whose flight would inspire a poem by W.H. Auden, the British Air Ministry had forbidden them to take off because it considered their craft under-powered. The two airmen ignored this diktat, but it took them seven months to reach Darwin. They had left Hounslow on 8 January 1920, and arrived in Cairo on 21 February after flying over the crater of Vesuvius where heatwaves from the volcano caused the machine to fall out of control for 500 feet. They made two landings in the desert between Ramleh in Palestine and Baghdad, and their encounter with armed Arabs was the subject of Auden’s poem. After four crash landings along the way, at Singapore Parer replaced his propeller for the fourth time. They crossed the Timor Sea and landed at Darwin in the evening of 2 August 1919.

  Through these aviators, war aviation began to blend into civil aviation, and like the Overland Telegraph, into a creative assault on the challenges of time and size.

  MAKING PEACE

  Billy Hughes brought to the Peace Conference following the Armistice of 11 November 1918 a half-amused mocking tone, but one which involved a clear sense of Australian blood having been spilled on an altar at which world leaders could now strut and gesture. The conference was, in his eyes and with ironic inflection, the ‘charmed circle [where] humanity but walked arm in arm and, defying the curse of the Confusion of Tongues, and the clash of colour, race and creed, held Communion one with the other on matters grave and gay’. Because of his increasing deafness, he brought his portable hearing machine to help him be party to discussion and eccentrically proposed that the Emir Feisal was ‘the most striking and picturesque figure in the conference’. One Sergeant James, an Australian soldier who had served in the Middle East, translated Feisal’s Arabic for Hughes, but Feisal and T.E. Lawrence would not come away from Paris as pleased as would Billy Hughes.

  The British and French had huge delegations in Paris in 1919, and even the Germans had more than a hundred, while the American delegation numbered well over two hundred. When on 11 January 1919 Hughes travelled to Paris with Lloyd George and other British and Empire representatives, Hughes’ party consisted of his secretary Percy Deane, Sir Robert Garran (his old friend from his attorney-general days and a senior public servant), Sir Joseph Cook and his private secretary, and the lawyer and politician John Greig Latham. On a less official footing, Melbourne barrister and member of the Round Table Group in Melbourne Sir Frederick Eggleston also accompanied the delegation, as did Henry Gullett, official war correspondent with the Australians in Palestine. Keith Murdoch was on hand to transmit news for his cable service.

  The international intent was to make a new world which would be structured by two influences—British and French desire for vengeance, and President Woodrow Wilson’s glowing Fourteen Points, which were to provide the basis for a new level of negotiation between aggrieved nations, a new and peaceful mechanism for the resolution of warlike intentions, and self-determination for many minorities. The direction of the conference came under the Supreme Council, or the Council of Ten, a continuation of the Supreme Allied Council consisting of the presidents and foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Before it, representatives of the smaller countries would be called to state their case on matters of special concern to them. Later, more informal decisions were resolved by a Council of Four: Wilson, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Vittirio Orlando, Prime Minister of Italy. Special committees or commissions were also set up.

  Before leaving London for Paris, Hughes summarised his aims at a luncheon of the Australia and New Zealand Club. ‘We do not want to exact an indemnity in excess of the cost of war . . . but up to her full capacity Germany must pay for the cost of the war.’ Australia must also be given management of New Guinea and other South Sea islands. Hughes insisted that the Bismarck Archipelago and the German Solomons were inseparable from the Australian mainland strategically and administratively. Japanese infiltration of Rabaul, for example, would be just as serious as in New Guinea proper. All of them were ‘necessary for our security, safety and freedom’, he claimed. Lloyd George asked Hughes to take care of the Empire’s case for the payment of indemnities by Germany. When Hughes went to see Clemenceau on this issue, he was warned of President Wilson’s determined opposition and the Fourteen Points of ‘the great man’. ‘Wilson is the God in the machine to the people outside,’ wrote Hughes. ‘He is great on great principles. As to their application: he is so much like Alice in Wonderland.’

  In President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, there were to be no annexations, no indemnities, and freedom of the seas. Freedom of the seas was defeated by the self-interest of the various maritime parties; no indemnities was overturned in favour of Germany paying reparations; and to avoid on a technical basis the problem of annexations, the system of ‘mandates’ and ‘mandated territories’ was put in place, these to be supervised by the proposed League of Nations. Even so, President Wilson did not want the New Guinea mandate to be given to Australia unless a plebiscite on the matter was held amongst the New Guinea population. Hughes response, as related in his own narrative, was very much one of the time. ‘Do you know, Mr President, that these natives eat one another?’ Wilson, of course would have been offended by such an answer, and that would have been Hughes’ genuine purpose. Lloyd George, however, held the all
iance with America to be more important than Australia’s desires, and therefore told Hughes that if he insisted on the mandate, the British Navy would take no part in supporting Australia’s control of New Guinea. Hughes would later say that he made some biting remarks to his fellow Welshman about politicians who, after the huge sacrifice the British peoples had made, now bowed in subservience before America, which had profited much and sacrificed little.

  The conference was made up of a number of committees and the most important was the Covenant Committee of which President Wilson was chairman, and to which was delegated the task of drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations. The committee included Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts of South Africa. The Covenant Committee, whom Hughes called the ‘elect’, were billeted in the Hotel Majestic, ‘a magnificent caravanserai near the Arc de Triomphe where the food was excellent and the company even better’. (He should have known—he stayed there himself.) He became exercised by news from the Covenant Committee of a Racial Equality Clause designed to allow the members of any nation of the league free entry into any other nation of the league. ‘Applied to Australia, it meant that Japanese might enter our country when and to the extent they desired. Our White Australia Policy would be a pricked bladder.’ Hughes was again visited by Baron Makino, who urged a recognition by Australia of the Equality Principle, and told him both Lord Cecil and General Smuts were in favour of the clause. Africa and England were different, said Hughes in reply. Africa was already a coloured man’s country. ‘Australia, on the other hand, is very much a white man’s country, sparsely populated by white men.’

  Hughes lobbied the American press to fight against the clause, particularly journalists from the Pacific Coast states which had a Japanese minority. In the event, the unanimous vote President Wilson required to adopt the clause did not eventuate. In March there were direct talks between Hughes and the Japanese, and they seem to have been quite amicable, but Hughes had an immutable belief that the ultimate aim was Japanese immigration to Australia. ‘Hughes alone persisted along his stubborn solitary path,’ the Japanese delegation reported to their foreign minister. Yet, ‘he was not unsympathetic to the Japanese stand’. Hughes, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, declared that he did not want the Japanese people to believe that Australia was the only country who objected to the insertion of the amendment to the peace treaty proposed by Japan. As the representative of Australia, he claimed, he would ‘give place to none in my respect, goodwill and esteem for the Japanese nation’. But as he did not ask the Japanese people to vary their domestic policy to suit Australia, he thought the Japanese would concede to Australia the same right. He hoped the two nations, the ancient one and the new one, could achieve their separate destinies and realise their ideals in their own way. But Wilson’s chief aide, Colonel House, continued—conveniently—to put all the blame for the defeat of the proposition on Hughes.

  For part of Hughes’ battles and meetings with the Japanese, Wilson was absent in the United States, returning to Paris in mid-March 1919 with the intention of establishing the League of Nations as an integral part of the Treaty of Peace. He had been looking during his time at home at his chances of getting the peace treaty as it was proposed, including the idea of a League of Nations, through Congress. This hope would never be fulfilled. Returning to France a little daunted, Wilson was greeted sarcastically by Hughes. ‘The heaven-born has returned from God’s own country,’ wrote Billy, who had spent part of the interval visiting Australian troops in Belgium, men anxious to be shipped home but for whom shipping had not been allocated.

  Hughes ultimately stated his chief objectives to the Governor-General in a letter of 13 May 1919. ‘I want (1) to get those islands on a satisfactory tenure; (2) to get our share of an indemnity; (3) to get the boys home; (4) to sell our wheat, lead, copper etc.; (5) to establish markets for our produce in Europe. If I do all these things I shall certainly deserve something better than to be hit on the head with an egg as at Warwick.’

  Lloyd George was aware of the problem inherent in reparations—they could only be paid by allowing German industry to function and export, and thus be in competition with British goods. The Germans could not pay indemnities and at the same time be denied raw materials. But in late 1918, with grief and loss still upon them, people wanted Germany to suffer, and Lloyd George had an election coming up. So he proposed a committee of the Imperial War Cabinet to come up with a solution, and Hughes had been ultimately persuaded to act as its chairman. Perhaps Lloyd George thought that exposing Hughes to expert opinion would moderate his ideas. It did not. Hughes wanted to refuse to consider German capacity to pay reparations and simply concentrate on what she owed. The report of the committee was given to Lloyd George on 10 December, just in time for George to make a fire-eating reparations speech at Bristol.

  The debate over the issue in the Peace Conference’s Commission on Reparations, of which Hughes was a member, was a gruelling fight between Billy and the young John Foster Dulles, Princeton dropout, New York lawyer and special counsel to the American delegation. Hughes had originally opened on 10 February with a general statement of the British case. Reparation was a ‘matter of compensation not a punishment’. The war had been a monstrous wrong inflicted by Germany. Dulles was willing to concede a certain obligation on Germany to compensate Belgium. Then what about the compensation of nations that came to Belgium’s aid? Hughes declared, ‘Those who have mortgaged their all to right Belgium’s wrongs have suffered as much at Germany’s hands as Belgium itself.’

  The commission broke up with no decision and with Dulles’ recommendation that it be referred to the Council of Four. Dulles had at least proposed the War Guilt Clause, an acknowledgement of guilt by Germany which would exercise the imaginations of German nationalists and be a useful tool for extreme German politicians. In the end, reparations would be settled on, but Australia would receive only £5.5 million, made up principally of ships seized in Australian ports and the value of expropriated property in New Guinea. Her total claim was close to £100 million.

  As for such places as New Guinea in Australia’s case or the Caroline Islands in Japan’s, Wilson wanted to postpone these questions until after the establishment of the League of Nations. Clemenceau told Lloyd George to bring ‘his savages’, including Hughes and the New Zealanders with their claims on Samoa, to an afternoon session of the council. Hughes addressed the council and told them that the islands Australia had claim to ‘encompassed Australia like fortresses’. New Guinea was only 80 miles (130 kilometres) from the mainland. Neighbouring islands could provide coaling and act as a submarine base to hostile powers unless Australia controlled them. Australia, he conceded, had no need for further territory, but these islands were essential to her peace, and Australia’s sacrifices in the war entitled her to security. The US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, would write, ‘Hughes is a great bore.’ Hughes didn’t believe that the League of Nations should have the power to determine mandates—New Guinea should as of right be Australia’s to administer. The Australian position, thought Wilson, came from ‘a fundamental lack of faith in the League of Nations’ as the ultimate defender.

  Hughes got the chance to demonstrate on a map to the members of the council ‘the narrow strip of sea that separated Australia from these strategic bases’, which included New Guinea, Rabaul, Nauru and the Solomons. According to Hughes, Baron Nobuaki Makino, Japanese plenipotentiary and former foreign minister, approached him and told him he had made a good case, not only for Australian control of New Guinea but ultimately for Japanese control of the Marshall and Caroline Islands. Hughes objected that the Japanese had already occupied these islands, and it was therefore all the more important that Australia control New Guinea.

  Hughes would claim that at one stage of negotiations Wilson asked him, ‘And would you allow the natives to have access to the missionaries, Mr Hughes?’

  ‘“Indeed, I would, sir,” I replied,
“for there are many days when these poor devils do not get half enough missionaries to eat.”’

  Even though it may only be an anecdote, it indicates Hughes’ comtempt for what he saw as Wilson’s moral posturing.

  At a meeting with Hughes, Lloyd George suggested that he could see the case for a mandate for the mainland of New Guinea but was doubtful whether it could be applied to the adjacent islands, the Bismarck Archipelago (which included New Britain and the port of Rabaul, and New Ireland) and the German Solomons. Hughes made the argument that Rabaul was just as much a matter of concern, and a Japanese arrival there would be just as dangerous as one on the New Guinea mainland. Lloyd George lost his temper, told Hughes he had fought for Hughes’ claims for the last three days but ‘would not quarrel with the United States for the Solomon Islands’. Hughes did not back off when Lloyd George said that if Hughes persisted in his claim, he could not expect the British navy to help him enforce it. Hughes threatened ‘to go to England and ask the people who owned the Navy what they have to say about it’. The meeting descended to Welsh cursing between Hughes and Lloyd George, and the latter was so distressed that that night, relaxing after dinner at a flat he had now rented, and playing Welsh hymns on the piano, he broke off and spat out the sentiment that he was not going to be bullied by ‘a damned little Welshman’.

  Finding the conference probably disinclined to agree upon the annexation of New Guinea by Australia and Samoa of New Zealand, Hughes and the New Zealanders agreed to Class C Mandates designed for claims on former German territories and areas that possessed ‘remoteness from the centres of civilisation’ or else had ‘geographical contiguity to the mandatory state’ and so could best be administered under the laws of the mandatory state, subject to safeguards for the native populations. Hughes realised that the C Mandate would not limit Australia’s capacity to secure the Pacific Islands, and at the same time would put some limitation on Japan’s right to fortify the northern Pacific islands to which they received a Class C Mandate as well. Hughes wanted the precise terms of the mandates settled before the treaty was signed, and had written to Colonel House, Wilson’s aide, that ‘if peace was signed leaving Australia’s position as regards the islands uncertain, there would be not only bitter disappointment, but grave misgivings . . . that both the territorial integrity of their country and the White Australia Policy, which is the cornerstone of our national edifice, were in serious danger’. But that was the minimum Australia and New Zealand would accept, and if that was not conceded definitely now they would not take part in an agreement at all. The US President asked if Australia and New Zealand were giving the conference an ultimatum. Hughes, who was deaf and depending on his hearing instrument, seemed distracted and was asked again whether he was laying down an ultimatum to the conference. He said that that was about it, but some thought that he had not understood the question. The less turbulent New Zealand Prime Minister William Massey assured Wilson it was not the case. ‘Then, am I to understand,’ Wilson continued, ‘that if the whole civilised world asks Australia to agree to a mandate for these islands, Australia is prepared to defy the opinion of the whole civilised world?’