by Peter Rees
Bean had established a presence in London. As he later recalled, he was in danger of becoming accepted as an authority on the Australian wool industry. On the Wool Track had been well reviewed in the British press. Students wrote to him seeking information about the industry. The London School of Economics asked him to give six lectures in which he covered the whole course of the wool trade, from the sheep’s back to the tailor’s shop. He was also asked to give a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded a silver medal.
As he prepared to pack up in 1913, Bean believed that a European war was getting closer. Not only were the Balkan states at war, but a militarised Germany was asserting its strength amid increasing tensions in Europe. In his column, Bean chided Prime Minister Andrew Fisher for rejecting an offer from the British government for an Australian Minister, either periodically visiting or permanently based in London, to attend meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence. It meant that Australia would forgo the opportunity to influence Britain for or against war at a critical period; indeed, Canada had taken up the offer. ‘The great mistake Australians make is in believing that, because there is no obvious urgency, therefore any time will do for making these arrangements. In these matters of defence, those who have any real experience know that, if a thing is good to be done at all, then it cannot wait.’ So critical was Bean of the decision that he returned to it in his next two columns, asserting that Australia should take ‘a man’s share in deciding her own fate rather than leaving it like a child to be decided for her by others’.
He boarded the passenger liner Orvieto and left England on 16 April 1913. Somewhat wistfully, he made it clear he was leaving London with happy memories of his three-year posting. ‘And here let it be stated that, in spite of all her defects, this old city possesses an allurement, an all too powerful allurement, for the average Australian.’
Arriving at Sydney on 22 May, he was put to work as a leader writer. During the next year he wrote frequently on his favoured subject—town planning. In an article in the architectural journal The Salon, he admitted that he had no qualification to write about town planning except that of being an enthusiastic lover of Sydney. While overseas, he wrote, he had consciously compared every city that he visited with Sydney. Although almost all of them were applying more intelligence and energy to their development than Sydney, no city had ‘the possibilities either for beauty or health which Sydney possesses’. He was convinced that Sydney could still turn itself into a city that would be difficult to match. ‘There is no inlet in any harbour that I saw in Europe or America that can compare with Farm Cove. I saw no gardens with a site which could approach that of our Botanical Gardens.’ But he feared the time was fast approaching when the only place from which the harbour would be visible in most districts would be a private housetop. One by one, all the great views of Sydney, which ought to be preserved for the people for all time, were being shut off forever.
Sydney’s most pressing problem was to make and enforce a plan for expansion. In the city’s centre, the damage had already been done. Bean contended that a Sydney Code based on a Greater Sydney Act was needed. There should be a local government board and a Sydney Building Act—something that was twenty-five years overdue. He wanted a Chair of Town Planning and Architecture at Sydney University, whose graduates ‘would create the public opinion and set the standard for Australia.’ Expansion of the city’s railways was also necessary: ‘the future Sydney will contain a far more intricate network of railways than any yet planned. There is no reason why these should not now be as far as possible planned, and the necessary land resumed.’ As well, a Sydney Harbour bridge was urgently needed. One thing that worried Bean was that ‘widespread interest and pride in the city does not exist in Sydney to the same extent as in Melbourne or many country towns.’ The best way to create that interest lay with the professional institutions for architects and engineers, as well as the Town Planning Association of New South Wales.
The association had been established seven months earlier, in October 1913. Walter Burley Griffin, the designer of the new capital at Canberra, gave a lecture to the inaugural meeting on town planning and civic ideals. In the audience were two men who would play key roles in furthering town planning and become allies of Charles Bean—the architect and town planner Sir John Sulman, and the publisher and progressive thinker George Augustine Taylor. Sulman was elected foundation president, while Taylor was honorary secretary. Within a year war had been declared on unhealthy, inefficient and ugly cities.
Bean was not only mixing in influential circles, he was also fulfilling a role not uncommon among journalists in the so-called Progressive Era. As the American historian Richard Hofstadter later wrote: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind, and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.’ Like fellow journalists George Taylor, who published the journals Building, Construction and Local Government, and Australasian Engineer, and Charles Reade, whom Bean had met in London, Bean was playing an educative role as a journalist in taking town planning to a wider audience. His aim was to inform and convince readers of the need for action. He would later reflect that he came up against entrenched interests among suburban aldermen whose positions would be at risk if he succeeded. Dismissing them as ‘too strange’, he insisted that the logic for action was irresistible. ‘I had seen in London and Birmingham etcetera how a nation’s physique could be changed in 75 years by the growth of unplanning.’ Bean had become an agent for change.
Writing for The Salon was quite different from his Herald job typing editorials, a task he found far from congenial. As Bean became increasingly frustrated by his work at the Herald, his parents returned to Australia in early 1914. Edwin had succeeded in building Brentwood into a successful school, lifting numbers from just forty-five to more than 200. But it had taken its toll on his health, and he now had a serious kidney infection. All the family was now settled in Australia, Edwin and Lucy in Hobart, and their sons in Sydney. Monty had just become engaged, and Jack had set up a surgery in the Sydney suburb of Kensington.
Bean shared a house with his aunt, a member of the Butler family, and her daughter, Joan, who had moved from Hobart. For Joan Butler, Charles and Jack were foster fathers, her parents having separated. ‘Charlie left all the disciplining to Jack,’ she recalled of the ‘smouldering resentment on my part, and stubborn, somewhat heavy-handed correction on Jack’s. Charlie kept clear of these tussles.’ Joan remembered that there was ‘much exasperation—but always affectionate—on Charlie’s part at Jack’s lack of business sense, his lack of worldliness as regards the [medical] practice.’ Even then, Jack was eccentric, so unselfconscious that he doggedly refused to believe, for example, that ‘people could possibly see him doing physical jerks stark naked in an upstairs bedroom, with the blinds up and the lights on.’ Such behaviour exasperated Charlie, who would exclaim, ‘Good Lord’ and ‘Good Heavens’ in discussions with his brother. That, according to Joan, was ‘about the strongest language I ever heard Charlie use.’
Along with brother Monty, Charlie and Jack decided to invest in a shooting gallery as part of the new White City amusement park at Rushcutters Bay, with Charlie in charge of the decor. Joan recalled: ‘You will not be surprised when I tell you that this was a most spirited and colourful painting, a mural stretching across the back of the gallery, showing a blue sea, headlands, seagulls, and—yes, BATTLESHIPS—the last named attached to a moving belt, targets at which the shooter had to blaze away at and knock over for a prize.’ But the venture failed and was closed down.
At the Herald, Bean believed he would serve the paper far better by becoming a roving correspondent. The general manager, W.G. Conley, agreed, and he was re-assigned as a feature writer, or ‘special commissioner’. Bean was delighted by his new role; it meant he could once more immerse himself in the outback. There was no doubt about his affinity with the bush, which h
ad become integral to his conception of what made Australians ‘Australian’.
In May 1914 he began writing a major series on the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Darling rivers. A South Australian government commission had begun an inquiry into the possibility of building locks on the river system. Bean was with the committee when it began its inquiry at Barren Jack Dam—now the Burrinjuck Dam—and travelled with its members through the Riverina and onto the mouth of the Murray River at Goolwa, in South Australia.
While he supported harnessing the flow of the inland rivers, and the case for locking them, Bean concluded that irrigation caused salinity problems that would worsen over time. As he neared the end of the journey it was clear that the isolation of the landscape, and its impact on people and the way they lived, was on his mind. He was delayed for ninety minutes at a whistlestop railway ‘station’ platform, measuring just three yards by six, while on his way to the Murray River town of Tailem Bend. Bean shared the platform with two bags of chaff and reflected on a landscape where the railway line ran out of sight in front and behind, as it ‘rose and dipped over the long, low billows of land till it heaved over a billow bigger than the rest and disappeared on the other side of it’. He and the committee party were stuck there; their train couldn’t move because another train somewhere out in front of them was late. Bean sat on one of the chaff bags and asked the stationmaster about the delay:
It was impossible for him to tell. The other train was somewhere on the road in front, and we could not move until it came in. Perhaps it had run off the line, and its staff was out there somewhere in the mallee trying to jack it on again. Or perhaps, it had merely come to a hill too steep for it, and had tried once or twice, and then decided to go on with half a train and come back later for the other half. Or it might just be leaving the terminus at Tailem Bend, or, perhaps, going back there. It might be doing any one of these things—a mile or 10 miles or 30 miles away. The stationmaster could not tell. He could not see the train on account of the mallee; and the authorities had not given him any other way of finding out where it was—a telephone line, for instance, or a telegraph. So he could only sit and guess. He knew it was somewhere in the mallee, and would come in some time, unless it had gone back or been crumpled up, in which case another train would, I suppose, some day come in instead of it. We never found out in the end.
Reaching the end of the trip and arriving at the Murray River’s mouth, Bean pondered the immensity of the river system and visualised it from beginning to end. ‘Sitting there, on a white sandhill, I can see them—the freshes from the Queensland hills, the snow of Kosciusko [sic], the Macquarie marshes, the Darling lakes, the Anabranch, the Warrego, even the Paroo River when it is a river—sitting here I can see them all, within 25 yards of my left foot.’ The third of his great inland trips for the Herald was over.
In his own mind, Bean had his future nicely laid out. Before he left England, he had drawn up a list of ‘Suggested Works’ for 1913–14: among them a history of Bathurst, his long-planned novel based on Roman times, a book on Brentwood, perhaps some essays, and a project focusing on his mother and father. While in South Australia, he had travelled to Killalpaninna, a mission near Lake Eyre, with government officials investigating Aboriginal education, and also visited the town of Tarcoola and the new transcontinental railway, then under construction. Bean thought these trips would make first-rate articles; he also had a book in mind dealing with the underground and over-ground waters in southern Australia. But events were about to take a very different turn.
Part Two
The War Years
Australians watched the name of their country rise high in the esteem of the world’s oldest and greatest nations. Every Australian bears that name proudly abroad today; and by the daily doings, great and small, which these pages have narrated, the Australian nation came to know itself.
Address by Charles Bean to the New South Wales Institute of Journalists,
29 October 1930
11
The booted heel
The fuse that set Europe on the inevitable path to war was lit by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Sydney Herald immediately assigned Bean to writing daily War Notes on developments flowing from ‘the trouble in Serbia,’ as he later put it. With his knowledge of European affairs honed by his time in London for the Herald, Bean was the ideal person to make sense of rapidly moving and complex events.
He had to rely on cables from London to interpret the fast-changing situation. On 31 July, he told readers that by far the most important news from the Australian perspective was that the British First Fleet—‘the strongest fleet that had ever left any port on serious service’—had sailed from Portland the previous day. To put this development in context, he wrote that the force was more than twice the size of the American fleet that had visited Sydney in 1908.
Bean could foresee dire economic effects of the war on all countries, but ‘as long as the British fleet is undefeated Australia will feel very little of the effects of this war . . . The moment the British fleet is defeated . . . then an entirely new set of circumstances would arise for Australia to face in the future as best she could.’ On 3 August, Germany declared war on France, and a day later invaded neutral Belgium. Britain responded by declaring war on Germany. Prime Minister Joseph Cook stated on 5 August that ‘when the Empire is at war, so also is Australia.’ Bean would later write that during the last days of peace, Australians ‘were possessed of one anxiety alone—the fear that Britain might hold aloof from the war.’ This overstated the case: in fact, strikingly few such statements were made. Nonetheless, there were strong calls in the press for Australia to become involved. The Herald, for example, asserted on 3 August that Australians would support Britain ‘to the utmost of their resources’. Bean, like many others, clearly believed the wider strategic arguments about why Australia should go to war if Britain did. Fears of the Asian invasion he had warned about were now brought into focus.
Although Australia faced a federal election on 5 September, there was bipartisan support for Cook’s pledge of an initial force of 20,000 troops to be placed at Britain’s disposal. Further, the Government placed the ships of the Royal Australian Navy under the immediate control of the Royal Navy, as had been planned before the war. Two opposing alliances faced each other: the Allies, based on the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia; and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria–Hungary.
With war declared, and his War Notes finished for the day, Bean walked down Macquarie Street late that night. Oppressed by a sense of foreboding, he looked up. Even the cloud formations seemed menacing to him. He saw them, ‘dimly piled high in the four quarters of the dark sky above . . . like the pillared structure of the world’s civilisation, of which some shock had broken the keystones . . . The stable world of the nineteenth century was coming down in chaos.’
In those first War Notes after the declaration of war, Bean was cautious, warning against the ready acceptance of early news reports. The war was no frontier expedition, no Crimea, no Indian Mutiny. ‘It is a fight for life and death against an enemy of tremendous strength, who, if he succeeds, will quite probably endeavour to break up the British Empire for all time,’ he wrote. Bean also focused on the economic links between Australia and Britain, and the implications of the war for these. Australia had a choice: ‘We can volunteer and go out to fight wherever the British people may need us; or we may stay at home and go quietly about our ordinary business as nearly as possible as though no war existed at all.’ Regular shiploads of mutton or wheat would be worth more than all the patriotic funds that Australians could raise.
Despite his urging to continue normal trade, inevitably some Australian companies cancelled large orders for goods from Britain at the outbreak of war. With its trade with much of the Continent cut off, Britain would ‘feel it desperately hard’ if the dominions’ merchants were the first to desert Britain in war. ‘Thousands of the poorer Austra
lians are volunteering their lives as the best help they can give, and it remains tor the wealthier people of commerce frankly to face sacrifices also, and show that they are not British only as long as there is monetary profit to be made out of the fact,’ he excoriated, adding: ‘The man who cancels an order in Great Britain and transfers it to America in the present crisis, is dealing the mother country a heavy, well aimed blow in the back.’
Bean wondered if he should enlist in the newly formed Australian Imperial Force (AIF) to serve overseas. His brother Jack had done so on the first day, as a medical officer, and he urged him to ask Colonel Henry MacLaurin, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, if he thought he should also. MacLaurin said ‘not yet’. As well as the War Notes, Bean was also writing the Herald’s Saturday editorials, which he regarded as ‘the best leaders I think I wrote during my time on the Herald.’ Among these was an editorial on the brutal German defeat of Belgium—a victory over a country, Bean wrote, that just three weeks earlier had been ‘at perfect peace with the world’ and which ‘had no quarrel with Germany, nor Germany with it.’ All that had changed dramatically as German troops marched through Belgium on the way to France. Having spent childhood holidays in Belgium, Bean was appalled at the country’s destruction. Unusually in an editorial, he allowed his repugnance to show:
The mists still rise over those peaceful farmlands, of three weeks since, but the bent figures in the blue smocks are there no more. They are lying, thousands of them, with their heads amongst the furrows that they tilled, shapeless forms here and there amidst the corn, bundles of tattered uniforms lying distorted and stiff amongst their own stubble. The sun still sinks in a red flush over the Belgian hills, but it finds no sturdy peasant trudging home thankfully beside his cart to his evening meal. When the end of a long day comes it finds him—thousands of him—piled three or four deep, silent and motionless, in the trench that he has defended since daybreak against his country’s enemies.