Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  Bean’s views on race reflected a worldview that endorsed the supremacy of the British Empire and at the same time envisioned a vibrant future for Australia. In these years he was rarely challenged, as he voiced attitudes generally held in Australia. At Bourke, Bean—portraying himself as ‘a rather raw, bespectacled young man, with an innocent expression and an English accent, and the usual city man’s idea that the West was an uncivilised country, from which he should expect little convenience and less comfort’—met an Afghan cameleer. They struck up a conversation. Condescendingly, he asked the Afghan if he had been in Australia long, and suggested that he found it easier to make money here than in Afghanistan. He thought that the cameleer must look upon Australia ‘as a sort of a peaceful, plentiful paradise, whither he has fled to escape from the trials of his own native land.’ But the Afghan replied proudly that he would go back to his own country. ‘Can make money here, but what the use of this life? This not life,’ he added contemptuously.

  Bean was surprised—‘even annoyed’—with what he regarded as ingratitude. ‘What right had this half-savage to growl at a country in which he was offered all the advantages of civilisation,’ he wrote indignantly in a chapter he called ‘The Benighted Heathen’. Bean saw ‘quite obvious disgust written in every line of his forehead’. Pointing to the camel camp, the man asked Bean what was the use of living like that. He could go back to the rye and the wheat in the mountain valley where he lived in Afghanistan. Despite his scarcely passable English, there was no mistaking the mixture of pride and longing in his tone.

  Bean suggested that there was a ‘good bit of fighting in your country, isn’t there? Kill a good many people now and then, don’t they?’ Bean expected the cameleer to sniff the breeze, roll his eyes and smack his lips. Instead, he told Bean: ‘No more so much killing now’days . . . Things much better now, We have a law too, and a king, like you. Our king, he punish bad men. Things not so bad in my country.’ Bean was chastened. ‘He was not rolling his eyes, he was hurt, and he was defending his country against defamation. The Sydney passenger suddenly felt very sorry he spoke. He somehow felt very mean, but he could not well explain. So he just listened.’

  Bean realised he had overstepped the mark and, for the first time, questioned his belief about Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. He had always thought about ‘race’ in the context of a divide between ‘East’ and ‘West’. The cameleer made it clear he thought his society in Afghanistan was better, and Bean knew he had to listen. A ‘half savage’ had taught him a lesson. A seed of doubt was sown.

  His views about the advantages of the bush over the city were not so challenged. His excursions into the outback had strengthened his belief that the simplicity of life there was bound to have its effect on city life, if for no other reason than that city folk admired the Australian of the bush as their ideal man. Bean was certain that nothing would ever destroy the outback because it had too powerful an influence. And it was not as if the men of the outback were uneducated. He was particularly impressed with bullockies, who were quite different from the quick-witted shearers or even station hands. No philosopher in Australia gave so much of his time to original thought as the bullocky, and ‘the Prime Minister of England would find him worth listening to.’

  One outback characteristic that struck Bean was the code of loyalty to a mate. While he conceded this was possibly an article of faith with all Anglo-Saxons, he believed that loyalty was a quality largely originating in the back country. To Bean, the ‘ideal Australian’ was still being moulded in the outback, in the pastoral industry and at the diggings, with the standards of ‘pluck, hardiness, unaffectedness, loyalty, truthfulness [and] hospitality.’ It was true that the outback produced wool, meat, tallow and skins. ‘But in the course of that great pastoral industry it produces something far more valuable to the country than all the rest, and that is—men.’ Bean believed that the Englishman had long ago thought out and settled his ideal—the gentleman. He had finished his pioneering and was inclined to rest on his oars; aesthetic or antiquarian questions, and even matters of rank and ceremony, became questions of moment with him:

  But in Australia it is different. The cities, the railways, the navy, the army are not made. The homesteads are not settled. The whole calibre of the people is still being altered by changes in their education. Australia is largely a big blank map, and the whole people is constantly sitting over it like a committee, trying to work out the best way to fill it in.

  On this platform of hope for a grand Australian future, built upon the idealised virtues of the men of the outback, Bean had established a claim to chronicle and analyse Australia’s contemporary history. Just how this would unfold was the question.

  9

  Moral certainty

  After years of urging by his older brother Jack, Bean arrived in Sydney in August 1910. They were a close-knit family and for the first time in six years the three brothers were in the same city. Earlier, in March 1909, Monty had returned to Australia from Britain as an engineer, and was sharing accommodation with Charles. Jack, now a doctor, needed a surgery and Charles found him a house on Old South Head Road in Bellevue Hill. The choice was not a good one, as the wealthy suburb had already attracted more doctors than were needed there.

  Meanwhile, Bean was feeling overworked on The Sydney Morning Herald, where he was writing editorials as well as providing stories for The Sydney Mail. The Herald offered him the plum post of London correspondent, on an annual salary of £400. He saw it as ‘the very work which I could have prayed for with a return to this sunny land at the end of it and perhaps a war correspondentship . . . I can’t imagine anything so happy.’

  There was a bittersweetness in taking the job. After waiting so long for his brothers to join him in Sydney, he would soon be leaving them. But it did mean that he would see his parents, still at Brentwood School. Importantly, there was another consideration: with the political situation in Europe deteriorating, he would be on the spot. He had long believed war to be inevitable, and the portents were growing stronger.

  En route to London, Bean travelled across the United States in September 1910, visiting the Midwest, where huge cities were to be seen. In Chicago he was fascinated by the evolution ‘of the finest city front in the world out of a pile of garbage heaps’. Besides its beautification, he also looked at the industry underpinning the city. He toured Chicago’s huge meat processing and packing factories. In an article for the Herald he described their operations. Noting that they were so big that they had their own railway stations, he wrote: ‘Slaughtering, whether of pigs or bullocks, is never a very pretty process—but it is probably as clean in Chicago as anywhere else, if not cleaner.’

  In Detroit, the wide tree-lined boulevards and a central park that was five kilometres long impressed him. He thought it a model city—and found it extraordinary that Detroit had not been spoiled by the rapid growth of the car industry.

  In New York, he stayed ‘in one of the biggest and richest hotels’ in the city. The experience was an uncomfortable one. ‘It is not the hotel itself that grates on you—that is well planned and well managed. It is the atmosphere of money-worship and sycophancy that gets on your nerves. It is apt to make the ordinary impecunious tourist feel like a criminal from the moment he enters—liable to be detected and arrested at any moment on suspicion of not being able to afford it.’ Bean was affronted by such displays of ostentatious wealth and left the next morning for more modest accommodation.

  Arriving in London in October 1910, Bean did not find the work arduous at the Herald’s bureau, having only to write a weekly column. With time on his hands he was able to poke about London and reacquaint himself with old haunts in search of new material. He wrote a series of articles comparing London’s East End slums with those of Sydney. The subject was close to his heart, but the Herald did not print them and the articles were lost. Thereafter, he tailored his weekly output to what the Herald would print.

  The dumped articles underli
ned just how highly town planning rated in Bean’s thinking. He closely followed a debate he saw as important for Australians if they were to capitalise on the chances that a young country offered for improving living conditions. Town planning, he wrote in a column just a month after his arrival, was the movement of the age and had ‘spread like wildfire through England’. Drawing on an interview with a British government minister, Bean noted: ‘Australians have led the world in several social experiments but it is not at all comforting to realise that we are altogether out of the running in this. It was astonishing, coming from Australia, where the subject of town planning is practically unknown, to find that the experts in the outside world look upon Australia as the one country, par excellence, where town planning ought to be in full application.’ Bean believed that Liverpool was an example of a city that was benefiting from the application of town-planning principles, predicting that it would become one of the finest cities inhabited by an Anglo-Saxon people. In Bean’s mind, Sydney had a wealth of advantages over most cities, but he warned that ‘unless Sydney wakes up and uses those advantages she will find herself surpassed not only by fine cities like Detroit and Liverpool, but by such unpromising places as Birmingham and Chicago.’

  He found it curious that the British experts looked to Australia as the chief hope of town planners—they would ‘give millions to have our chances.’ Town planners knew that although Australia had some big cities, they were only the nucleus of what they would be some day. There was optimism that Sydney and Melbourne would not waste such a chance. Bean was not confident. He, like the experts he had talked to in London, looked to the new federal capital in Canberra. ‘The general hope in England is that the planning of the federal capital will be such an object lesson to the other cities of Australia that there will be a sort of wholesale conversion of them before they allow their still existing chances to peter away as the old-world cities did, in the unenlightened days.’

  Town planning, with all that it meant to Bean in terms of open space and healthy living, had taken firm hold in his mind. His trips to the outback had imprinted on him the superiority of wide-open spaces over confined and narrow inner-suburban streets. He believed the Anglo-Saxon race could not thrive in city slums; people needed space and light.

  He took the opportunity to visit most town-planning experiments in England. His aim was to learn what Sydney might do and he was convinced that Sydney could still ‘turn itself into a city that will be difficult to match.’ Bean’s thinking was informed by a discussion with a ‘distinguished eye specialist’ who ran a school near London that treated trachoma in children who also exhibited ‘feeble-mindedness’. The parents of these children, the specialist told Bean, were often ‘the dregs of the population’ and their brains ‘have never a chance to grow under conditions of food and surroundings such as they get there.’ It was ‘surprising’ how they developed after a couple of years of good food and country air, some even becoming ‘quite sharp-witted’.

  Bean was philosophically opposed to the growth of skyscrapers, and reacted strongly to news that Sydney City Council had authorised the construction of Culwulla Chambers, the city’s first—twelve-storey—skyscraper. He was in tune with the building’s critics, who feared Sydney would develop a ‘New York style’ skyline, and thought the building itself a potential fire hazard, as fire ladders could not reach its maximum height. ‘Everyone who has travelled to cities which own skyscrapers knows well that one single example of them, without being beautiful in itself, suffices to put out of joint the nose of every fine piece of architecture in the city.’

  •

  Rather than live in London, Bean stayed with his parents at Brentwood School. He quickly fitted into the life of his old school, which by then was flourishing. He put his spare time to good use developing a bowling machine, which he described as ‘something like one of Caesar’s catapaults’, delivering a ball consistently within a dinner plate-sized ring to a batsman in the school’s nets. The school’s history describes the machine as ingenious.

  Bean took up the role of cricket coach. He decided that the boys needed a detailed description of just how to play the forward and back strokes, especially on ‘sticky’, uncovered wickets. The Brentwoodian printed the near–800-word article, which the editor thought ‘should be of great value to any batsman.’ The article underlined Bean’s ability to write in precise—if over-long—detail. It was essential in playing a forward stroke, he said, to keep the bat’s shoulders oriented so that a line through them pointed towards the pitched ball. ‘By-the-bye, lift the bat straight up and down. Don’t flourish it, or it will swing out of the straight line. To keep your shoulders right always step out with your left foot square and not pointed to the bowler. Secondly, keep sight of the left shoulder in the corner of the eye, and point it at the ball while striking, and keep it so pointed till the end of the stroke.’

  Bean was further able to indulge his love of cricket by covering the triangular Test series in England in 1912 involving Australia, South Africa and England. His meandering reports were often long—as much as 3000 words—and had the air of a gentlemen’s club discussion. Despite his passion for the game, much of his writing was wooden, only rising in tenor to capture the reception to a brilliant 99 scored by the Australian batsman Charlie Macartney in a drawn, rain-affected match at Lord’s. The innings ended with a ‘tremendous cheer’ for Macartney, and Bean wondered ‘whether at present he is not the finest batsman anywhere.’ He also made special mention of Charlie Kelleway, wondering whether his ‘batting methods’ reflected his stoic character. Perhaps Bean saw something of himself in the tall Kelleway.

  While in London, Bean met with his London publisher, Alston Rivers. Having published both On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling, the firm also agreed to publish an enlarged version of his earlier book, With the Flagship in the South. The new book, Flagships Three, covered the establishment of the Royal Australian Navy. The first flagship was an old Viking longboat Bean had seen in a Norwegian museum; Flagship No. 2 was HMS Powerful, while Flagship No. 3 was the new battle cruiser HMAS Australia. Bean saw a direct racial link from the Vikings to the British and then the Australians. As he explained: ‘The first flagship was the reason for the second; and the second was the reason for the third, and there’s the sum of it.’ It was no accident, Bean contended, that the people of Australia were the descendants of Danes and Norsemen, Frisians, Jutes and Englishmen. It was also no accident that ‘the people who came to the greatest island in the world were an island people,’ or that the Royal Navy had protected Australia until it had a navy of its own.

  Recalling his earlier book, in which he argued the case for the establishment of the Australian Navy, Bean was happy to take a good deal of the credit for its creation. He wondered if he ‘may perhaps for once be forgiven if he feels not a little satisfaction at having expressed views which have been so quickly and completely fulfilled.’

  The high point was the construction of HMAS Australia and the light cruisers HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne, the main striking power of the new navy. At the launch of the Australia at the Clydebank shipworks, Glasgow, on 25 October 1911, Bean watched workmen hammering in wedges beneath the cradle holding the great cruiser. ‘That same night, working like devils in the weird uncertain light reflected in the black water under the stern, they fixed the four great golden propellers on to the carefully swathed shafts. And then, at last, towards morning, they began to knock away, one by one, the blocks beneath the keel,’ he wrote. Bean thought that in the darkness beneath the ship’s flat bottom, the men looked like Roman soldiers, battering a city wall. ‘The sixteen blocks at the bows were still all taut against the keel, but they all seemed to be moving, bending over, all together, like a squad of soldiers. She pulled them over like ninepins as she went.’

  Bean believed the sea to be Australia’s best means of defence and its only means of attack. He saw it as inevitable that because of the sea-faring skills peculiar to the Angl
o-Saxon race, Australia would become a naval power and would the play the role of the sheriff in the Pacific—a policy espoused by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who thought dominions such as Australia should shoulder the burden in their own region in return for British support in a crisis.

  Bean thought that given the need for a strong naval presence in Europe it was probable that Australia and Canada would have to ‘educate the Empire’ to the necessity of keeping a powerful fleet in the Pacific. His posting in London, while clarifying his vision for Australia’s role in the British Empire, was also strengthening his nationalism. At the same time, his sense of duty was affirmed. As his horizons expanded, he was growing in confidence and moral certainty.

  10

  Agent of change

  Charles Bean’s time in London was up. The Sydney Morning Herald wanted him back at head office in Sydney. A reluctant Bean responded in mid-1912 that he wanted to remain for at least another year. With a light workload and time to indulge his interests, he was enjoying himself. The Herald management expressed surprise and refused to give way, telling Bean, ‘the simple fact is that we think we have more valuable work for you to do here.’