by Peter Rees
As the Herald articles appeared, Bean also wrote a 1700-word article for The Spectator magazine in London supporting the White Australia policy, as the Immigration Restriction Act was known. Legislated at Federation in 1901, the policy was generally supported by Australia’s small European population, who feared being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants from the vastly different cultures of the populous countries to Australia’s north. Justifying the policy, Prime Minister Edmund Barton had asserted, ‘The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.’ The legislation found strong support in the new Australian Parliament, with arguments ranging from economic protection to outright racism. The Labor Party wanted to protect ‘white’ jobs and pushed for more explicit restrictions.
In his article, Bean pointed to the fact that there were some three million whites in Australia inhabiting three million square miles, while as close as a day’s voyage away were eight hundred million Asians. In defence of the White Australia policy, he baldly stated that a Western and an Oriental race could not live together; yet he saw an oriental invasion as inevitable. He feared Britain would not come to Australia’s defence, and beseeched it to make a clear promise not to leave Australians to fight the battle of their race alone. He conceded that Britain was likely to support Australia in the end—‘but ungraciously at the eleventh hour.’ At this time, Britain was in an alliance with Japan and, Bean believed, ‘out of sympathy’ with Australia on the issue.
Bean had closely followed the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, and his thinking reflected growing fear of Japan in the wake of Russia’s defeat, which was principally achieved by the destruction of the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait. What worried Bean was that this was the first major victory by an Asian nation over a European nation in the modern era.
Bean saw the British as failing to understand the reality Australia faced in its proximity to Asia:
. . . the Australian sees a deal of the Oriental. He has the Queensland coolies, and the Chinese quarter in every town. Every ship brings them to his gates or takes him to them. He knows what every Briton who meets them knows—that, living together, the Western demoralises the Eastern, and vice versa.
Australians [would] not live as a white race over the head of a subject people, even if they could do so. Their ideal is to keep Australia, if possible, a land where their children can live the healthy Western life of their British fathers. That ideal you must allow them. [T]his is the last land open to the white man—the only one that can be purely British. South Africa cannot be a white man’s land, simply because you cannot spirit away millions of blacks. The United States—even our magnificent Canada—will be less purely Anglo-Saxon as time goes on. And Australia, of all countries in the world, is an ideal one for the white man to live in. That is what a white Australia means to Australia and to England.
Bean saw this as a continuing theme in world history, and that antagonism between Occidental and Oriental was not new, dating back to when the Greeks fought the Persians, the Romans battled the Parthians, the Huns fought the Ostrogoths, and the Crusaders warred with the Saracens. Such analysis was hardly surprising, given Bean’s grounding in the history and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome.
In a note at the end of the article, The Spectator’s editor supported much of Bean’s argument but noted that Australia had made no great effort to open the country to white immigrants from Britain. Australia had been ‘too apt to regard it as her duty to protect her working men against newcomers.’ Nonetheless, ‘we shall stand by Australia be the cost what it may.’
During this period, a few politicians spoke of the need to avoid hysterical treatment of the White Australia question. Among them was Senator Edward Pulsford, a free trader and Nonconformist liberal who was out of step with prevailing attitudes to Asian immigration and was one of the few members of the Federal Parliament to vote against the Immigration Restriction Act. As late as 1905 he was still attempting to swim against the tide in his pamphlet supporting Japanese protests about the administration of the White Australia policy. Unsurprisingly, he took issue with Bean’s ‘alarmist’ views. No one would dream from reading the Bean article, he said, that Japan had made repeated offers to Australia to enter into a treaty controlling the emigration of Japanese to Australia, or that Australia, instead of accepting Japan’s ‘courteous offers’, preferred to deal with immigration restriction in a way that offended Japan. Pulsford refused to accept that restrictive immigration laws represented ‘the instincts and intellect’ of Australians:
Mr. Bean can do good work by urging on his political friends the wisdom of removing causes of friction between Australia on one hand, and Japan and other Asiatic countries on the other hand . . . I submit that the people of Australia are not in the least fear as to Great Britain, in a supreme hour, failing in her duty towards any part of the Empire; but there are many of them who do view with deep regret the fact that certain Australian legislation tends to create Empire difficulties that more courteous methods would obviate.
To The Spectator’s editor, these were ‘wise words’. This was controversial territory into which Bean had willingly walked; his arguments reflecting a view of the superiority of the British and the British Empire. Such views a century later would be seen as frankly racist and anachronistic, but not then. Bean rationalised his arguments as being more about a historical clash of civilisations—East meets West—than race per se. Given his interest in defence policy and military history, this was hardly surprising. And these views found fertile ground in Australia. But they were also views that he would revisit and reevaluate over the years ahead.
That aside, Pulsford was aware that Bean had ‘political friends’. This was clearly a reference to members of the Australian National Defence League (ANDL) with whom Bean had associated. The ANDL, which supported compulsory militia and cadet service, was a lobby group formed in response to the perceived threat Japan posed following its defeat of Russia. Bean was an early member, along with politicians and other senior figures in Sydney. He was moving in influential circles and not afraid to take a nationalist stand.
While at the time Bean was proud of the article and its publication, his big news for the family in England was that he would soon be joining the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘I may have to start low—but it is just the one work I most like and the prospects are good . . . I have set my heart on it for I don’t know quite how long—certainly for two years—and I have got the chance now.’ He told the family that his experience at the Bar would always be beneficial. Underlining his lack of interest in a legal career, he wrote: ‘I was never very worried about getting no briefs, because I never intended to get them except as a last resort. Still it is nice to have an assured income again, and this time one which lasts and progresses.’
Bean threw himself into his new career with an enthusiasm that had been difficult to muster in the law. He had already shown an ability to write about big-picture issues at the centre of Australian life. ‘Although I did find that many facets of the study of law could be very interesting, the prospect did not compare with that held out by writing, in which I found, from the moment I took the plunge, a fascinating interest in every task.’
He was offering something to which Australians were unaccustomed—a public intellectual who could give his readers a sense of where they came from and what they represented. And he laid before them ideals—however grandiose—for the nation’s future.
7
The cub
By the standards of the profession, Charles Bean was relatively old to be entering journalism. He was not far off turning twenty-eight in 1907—usually a time when journalists have long completed their training and become senior reporters. But in coming to his decision, he concluded that he had two gifts that a writer needed:
I know what interests people, and I have a pretty fair judgment—I can generally see the flaw in a false argument, and have a pretty true sense of w
here the right and the wrong lie. It is those two faculties which made me the right sort of person to take up journalism. I am slow, and lack ever so many other qualities, but those and a sense of duty (which Father and Clifton gave me) have carried me through.
It was this sense of duty that compelled Bean to write, to persuade and to convince. There was no better channel than journalism. That he was an emerging talent was clearly evident from The Sydney Morning Herald series. As his role model and mentor, Banjo Paterson advised Bean that journalism was ‘a poor job’ but recommended that he approach the Herald’s proprietors, the Fairfax family. Paterson thought the Fairfaxes, who knew Bean’s father, offered him the best hope. He met with Geoffrey Fairfax, who told him that ‘if I took up shorthand and started at the bottom, he thought there was no reason why I should not rise pretty quickly.’
Bean enrolled at Stott & Hoare’s business college, learning Pitman shorthand and typing eight hours a day, at classes and in his rooms. Within four months he could ‘manage eighty or a hundred [words a minute] with a scramble.’ In January 1908, the Herald took him on as a junior reporter at £4 a week (about $500 in 2013), at the Hunter Street, Sydney, office. He wrote excitedly to the family in England:
I am at work on the Herald; and as I was anxious to get a special article or two and not let a chance skip I was working till 12 or so last night, and most of today have been writing . . . They are going to give me, I think, their military work and their trades and labour work—which is pretty advanced work but of course I shan’t be on that for a week or two . . . One’s principal duties consist in getting to know everybody you possibly can in your own time, e.g. officers, trades unionists etc.
Bean was put on police rounds, which required him to phone police stations, the fire brigade and hospitals looking for news. One of the Herald’s senior reporters, the boisterous and lovable Archie Whyte, showed him the ropes and became his mentor. Bean thought himself lucky that there were ‘no big murders or other crimes or even fires, while I was on rounds.’ Among his first jobs was to report on a deputation to the state Minister for Works lobbying for the construction of a bridge. Bean ‘made a paragraph of it’ and the chief sub-editor, the legendary Montague Grover, liked the report. Grover would later recall the night that he had to edit ‘a wad of copy written in an unfamiliar hand’ by a long, lean, red-headed newcomer:
It concerned a deputation from the shire of Gumtree Flat, or some such district, asking the Minister for Works for a bridge over Dingo Creek. The copy itself was as unfamiliar as the writing . . . It was written so that the street-bred resident of Surry Hills knew precisely the significance and the value of the proposed bridge. It violated all the traditions of the Sydney Morning Herald and most of those of the old-time journalism. It put the case with such incandescent clearness that the position could not be misunderstood, and put it in half the space which tradition would have occupied. The subeditor turned back to the first slip and saw the writer’s name. This was the very first job of practical journalism, which the same man had attempted; and it was a model for three-fourths of the newspaper men who could look back to 10 or 15 years creditable experience. Probably for the first time in the history of newspaper work a reporter had his maiden copy sent to the printer without a mark of the blue pencil on it. That reporter was C.E.W. Bean.
Bean made the transition to cub reporter and professional journalist effortlessly. He later explained that he had found great pleasure in writing news reports, fixing ‘on the interesting or crucial point’, and putting it as clearly and crisply as he could, with the ‘news’ leading the story:
I always looked on the reader as a fish, to be hooked, if possible, in the first sentence and then ‘played’—or kept tight on the hook—until the article was finished. You should never relax your hold on him—if you put in one uninteresting sentence—for example, if you repeat yourself—he will get away and wriggle off and dash away to some other article.
He would apply these principles as a journalist and as an author—indeed, such basic advice on how to write ‘news’ would still be part of training for cadet journalists decades later. As he made his way in the new job, Bean soon found himself in a curious position—reporting on the law courts and coming into contact with people with whom he had worked not long ago. He did not like such assignments; nonetheless, the fraternity among fellow journalists was helpful and supportive. These were happy times for Bean. ‘It was a big family, from Jack the office boy to the Editor and even to Geoffrey and Jim Fairfax, the proprietors. All the old Herald men were loyal friends.’
Bean quickly established his standing. ‘No one was more popular in the office or better qualified to help the paper in every call made upon him,’ an associate editor and future editor of the Herald, C. Brunsdon Fletcher, said, adding that Bean was ‘a tremendous worker.’ For a short time, Bean was also put onto the trades and labour round, which meant going to Trades Hall to keep abreast of strikes and industrial action. Often wearing his Clifton College boater, he was an incongruous sight at Trades Hall. His young cousin Joan Butler, who first met him around this time on a visit from Hobart, would later recall his ‘laughing face, shining pince-nez and a cockatoo crest of red hair’.
During this time, a strike hit the operations of the three New South Wales coastal shipping companies, when wharfies demanded the same rate of pay as those working for interstate companies. Work stopped at the wharves at Newcastle and Morpeth. From a simple quarrel, as Bean saw it, the strike quickly became extraordinarily complex. Bean was able to straddle the tricky line, earning him the respect of both parties involved. Being in charge of the strike news, Bean had contact with the firebrand Welsh-born Labor figure William Morris (Billy) Hughes, Federal Member of the House of Representatives and president of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Bean thought Hughes had acted with good sense during the dispute, and soon thought him the ‘ablest man’ in Federal Parliament.
Like Bean, Hughes was an early member of the ANDL, and it is likely that this is how their association began. The two men had common origins in the English education system, owing a shared cultural link to ‘the Arnold Tradition’—in Bean’s case through John Percival and Thomas Arnold, and in Hughes’ case, through Arnold’s son, Matthew Arnold, who had been his supervisor when Hughes was a pupil teacher in London. Throughout his life Hughes gratefully acknowledged Arnold’s influence upon him. Bean and Hughes also shared contemporary interests—foreign affairs and defence, the law and journalism. As Bean began his career at the Herald, Hughes was already writing, having begun a widely read weekly column in the rival Daily Telegraph.
After the shipping strike ended in June 1908, the Herald sent Bean out west to report on two rival routes for the railway to Broken Hill—one from Cobar via Wilcannia, the other from Condobolin via Menindee. He was struck by his first experience of the far west as he travelled:
. . . first through the mountains and then through the wheatfields until the country had gradually flattened itself out as if beneath a steam roller, and the landscapes began to extend at times somewhere near the brim of the world; and then the wheat paddocks became fewer, and the railway stations farther and farther between, and when you did come to a siding there was as often as not no township at the back of it, but only, somewhere in the landscape . . .
He took a horse-drawn coach to Wilcannia, from where another coach took him to White Cliffs. Changing horses at midnight, they drove all night and the next day, and all the next night. As the coach pitched and rolled over rough, jarring tracks, he began to understand the empty vastness of the region. ‘During that time, being lucky, we saw perhaps a dozen men . . . half a dozen horses and bullocks, a hundred sheep, two rabbits, five emus, a couple of cockatoos, and a few galahs,’ he wrote of the trip.
He came to realise that a western sheep station was less a country house than a township, with its tradesmen in private employment, its store and sometimes its school. He was ‘intensely interested in the people, the country,
the grasses, the animals, the trees and the life.’ From Broken Hill he went to Menindee by coach, and then to Condobolin in a buggy. He wrote a series of articles about the experience, and concluded that the southern route via Menindee was the better one. By now, he was one of the Herald’s recognised feature writers.
Bean’s next assignment was to meet the United States Navy fleet, which was touring the world to impress the major powers and had been invited to Australia by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. The captain of the British flagship on the Australian station, HMS Powerful, had offered the Herald a free return passage for one of its reporters to meet the fleet in Auckland. Bean’s colleague, Archie Whyte, told him, ‘You may like it—you speak the language.’
Bean reacted to the American fleet with a passion that makes odd reading a century later. One battleship was ‘a great grey warhorse, brave and big and fast, and full of the gentleness of all big things,’ its smoke ‘as black and soft as—the coat of a Persian kitten.’ In another article, he wrote that, ‘the eyes of one [American] sailor grew very soft as he slapped one fat barrel on the Louisiana . . . He fondled that cold steel contour as you might a woolly lamb.’ These awkward metaphors would have made Bean’s father proud.
After a month on the Powerful, Bean thought the articles he had written would make a book—and that could bolster his reputation. When no publisher offered a contract, he paid for the book to be published by William Brooks & Co of Sydney, complete with his own drawings, under the title of With the Flagship in the South. The exercise cost him £100, for a return he later estimated at £50, ‘But it was well worth the expense.’