by Peter Rees
Planning the development of the cities in which most Australians would live was critical. Australia had advantages over European nations: its towns were still comparatively small, little reconstruction was needed, and there was plenty of cheap land. Nevertheless, development needed to be controlled or the comparison would become unfavourable.
When Bean had toured the outback before the war he had found much to praise but also a deal to deplore—the drinking, the loneliness and boredom, the scarcity of women and consequently of families, and the absence of culture. He did not want the admirable people he found in the outback to forgo the benefits of civilisation simply because of their remote location. Moreover, if country life was more desirable than city life, the nation would be better off if it encouraged citizens to live in the country. This could only be achieved—and the traditional flow from the country to city could only be reversed—by a national endeavour in education, entertainment and local government.
Much of what Bean wrote echoed his pre-war views on town planning and the benefits of rural life. There was also, of course, the familiar theme that Australia was an Anglo-Saxon nation needing to build relations with the western United States, Canada, New Zealand and perhaps South Africa. But the war had given him renewed purpose and certainty of the correctness of his beliefs about Australia’s development.
Bean was not alone in thinking about postwar reconstruction. The publisher George Taylor anticipated him with his magazine Soldier, which picked up similar themes in Australia from 1916, and the educationist Meredith Atkinson in 1919 published The New Social Order: A Study in Post-War Reconstruction.
But Bean was also thinking about a memorial to those killed in the war. In his vision, it would stand on a Canberra hill—‘still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent, a sacred reminder throughout all ages of the men who really created the Australian nation.’
Hardly an Australian family was untouched by the war. In their grief, Australian communities would find it difficult to share Bean’s enthusiasm for a new beginning for the nation. For Bean, though, utopian idealism was entirely compatible with homage to the dead. But there was another dynamic: in writing at length about the war, he was subconsciously confronting the horror that haunted him. The writing would give him a means to deal with it—and it would be a long journey.
Part Three
After the nightmare
. . . one could not go through that experience without questioning the morals, the religions, the education, the political systems, the ideals that were responsible for what one saw, and seeking all the time for a clear line through all the tangle.
Charles Bean, The Straight Line
39
The bush backwater
As he toiled away on the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, the bush was a natural haven for Bean. It was also a place where he could heal emotional wounds after the years at war.
His chosen retreat was Tuggeranong, an old sheep station in the Tuggeranong Valley flanked by the Murrumbidgee River and the Brindabella Ranges in the Federal Capital Territory, as the Australian Capital Territory was then known. The Australian Government had bought the property three years earlier, but the eighteen-room homestead, complete with a convict-era stone barn, remained empty. As the nation’s capital was the site Bean envisaged for the Australian War Memorial, it offered a rare opportunity.
Tuggeranong—an Aboriginal word meaning ‘cold plains’—would provide the quietness that Melbourne could not. Victoria Barracks, where the Defence Department initially provided an office for Bean, was a magnet for returning Diggers, from generals to privates, who would drop in daily for a yarn. Such interruptions had brought his work nearly to a standstill. Tuggeranong was quieter. A daily mail train between Cooma and Queanbeyan, which stopped at a siding about 3 kilometres away, was its main connection to the wider world.
The Government had appointed Bean to the role of official historian on 12 February 1919, for a five-year period, terminating on 30 July 1924, at a salary of £1200 a year. After a preliminary inspection in July 1919, Bean had decided that this fine old homestead was suitable in every respect for his purposes. A couple of months later Bean boarded an overnight train in Melbourne and travelled to Yass, where a Defence Department car was waiting to take him the 100 kilometres to Tuggeranong homestead. The countryside was ravaged by drought, decades of overgrazing and a rabbit plague. Thousands of hectares lay treeless from bushfires and ringbarking. This was the harsh landscape that had captivated Bean since 1904; this was country he could commune with.
Before returning to Australia Bean had visited Gallipoli, where he retraced the steps of the Anzacs and inspected the field of battle as the Turks had known it. He was not going to leave anything to speculation when writing his history.
There had been many puzzles about Gallipoli, and all the time he was on the Western Front Bean had interviewed men who had fought there, trying to solve them. From these conversations—more than 200—Bean had become certain that the accepted story of the Anzac landing was far from the truth. And it was not just the landing. There were so many other questions that he knew he had to go back to the peninsula.
Yet another motivation was to collect relics. Unlike on the Western Front, where the Australian War Records Section had collected truckload after truckload of relics from the battlefields, there had been no systematic approach to preserving relics at Gallipoli. Another part of Bean’s task was to survey the Australian graves and advise the Australian Government on how they should be laid out and maintained.
Among those who joined Bean on the eight-man Australian Historical Mission were Harry Gullett, Hubert Wilkins, George Lambert and John Balfour. Bean also took with him Lieutenant Herbert Buchanan, who had been in charge of the Australian Corps’ mapping section in France, and his assistant, Sergeant George Hunter Rogers, to draw necessary maps. The final member of the mission was engineer Lieutenant Cyril Hughes, who had been seconded from Egypt to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The commission had been set up after the 1917 Imperial Conference with responsibility for the graves of all British and Dominion soldiers in all theatres. Hughes had already been on Gallipoli for two months as part of the commission’s work when Bean and his party left London.
They set off by ship in late January 1919, stopping at Malta and Lemnos, where Bean inspected Australian graves on the two islands. At Lemnos, low grey hilltops were faintly visible on the horizon. Bean knew what they were at once. ‘They were the hills of the Dardanelles, and at that moment I, for one, was poignantly homesick for them,’ he wrote.
Arriving at Gallipoli in mid-February, Bean retraced the steps of the Australians, collected relics and inspected the graves. The weather was bitter, with snow and blizzards, as the group set out northwards from the Narrows, along a track winding through scrub, towards the rugged mass of high ground that had been the Anzacs’ goal. Where the Lone Pine had once stood, the Turks had erected a white obelisk. Bean was fortunate to have the help of a young Turkish officer, Major Zeki Bey, the commander of a Turkish regiment who had seen much of the fighting and been wounded on the day of the landing. They talked at length in French as Bean strove to understand the Turkish perspective. Bean was impressed. ‘I had never dreamt of being able to obtain information of the Turkish side from an authority with such experience,’ he said. ‘The answers of Zeki Bey to my questions proved absorbingly interesting from the start, at least to us Anzacs.’
Setting up camp in a green valley on territory the Turks had held, Bean was swamped with recollections: ‘I could still see two of them, with their bronzed cheeks and khaki skull-caps, peering foolishly towards us over a water cask under a low brush roof.’ However, there was something new: the sound of jackals. He also noticed that local Turks had removed crosses from graves in some cemeteries, probably for firewood. Now many graves were unmarked.
He went on with Wilkins and Lambert, on horseback, to find the Australian trenches, still much as the Anzacs had lef
t them. The posts that the Anzacs had fought over—Steele’s, Courtney’s, Quinn’s, Pope’s Hill and Battleship Hill—Bean scoured them all. He collected bullets and kit for the museum. The bones and tattered uniforms of men were scattered everywhere, and he checked to see if they were Australian or Turkish. Skulls and bones—mostly of Turks—lay exposed in crevices and gullies. Amid this renewed evidence of the slaughter that had occurred there, Bean had his own memories:
Naturally I was eager to discover, if possible, the niche where I had lived, worked, slept and eaten, from the first month of the campaign to the last. From the middle of the Beach we turned up Anzac Gully. Several ledges, one of which I recognised with fair assurance as the site of General Birdwood’s old shelter, were on our left. We clambered two hundred yards up the washaway to the two tracks or ledges, one above the other, that used to hold the old 1st Division’s staff. They were still bordered by the row of niches that had contained the offices and bivouacs. There, 150 feet up, each of us used to sit at his evening meal, looking out on those glorious sunsets over the sea and the distant mountain tops of Imbros and Samothrace, with the hospital ship in the Cove below us like a beautiful memory of peace, and, closer in, the crowded beach. The shelters were now just holes in a bank, bereft of the roofs of waterproof sheet or iron, and of the biscuit box furniture. I found it hard to pick out which hole had been mine.
In his report about the war graves at Gallipoli, Bean noted that Cyril Hughes’ party had so far located and identified 2500 Australian graves, and would locate at least 80 per cent of those of which there was any record. However, much greater resources were needed, such as labourers to carry out remedial work on graves and paths. This was urgent because both storms and returning inhabitants would inevitably destroy graves and relics. Bean recommended that the cemeteries be planted with ‘certain Australian plants, but so as to avoid alteration of the appearance of the battlefield,’ and he added: ‘The site contains, besides the graves, the most wonderful battlefield in the world. It is also a vast store of relics ranging from lifeboats and gun-carriages to innumerable shell fragments from which the local proprietors will make profits unless the Australian Government anticipates them.’
Bean returned to Egypt, then embarked for Australia. During the voyage he worked on papers for the war history and also for the war museum, of which he was to be temporary director. Arriving in Melbourne on 6 May, Bean was quarantined because of the Spanish flu epidemic before travelling to Hobart to stay with his parents, whom he had not seen since October 1914.
Returning to Melbourne, he quickly found that his work had not gone unnoticed. Lunches were held in his honour. At one, given by the Institute of Journalists in Sydney, the New South Wales Premier, William Holman, praised the manner in which Bean had worked, saying he had enormously enhanced the reputation of Australian journalism. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Holman said that:
No man at the front representing the Press had carried away a greater reputation for unflinching courage and for trustworthiness. In Mr. Bean, not merely did they have one who had brought to the task of war correspondent the new ideas characteristic of a young nation, but he had brought also a sense of devotion and a determination to be truthful, no matter at what sacrifice or personal risk. That was characteristic of Mr. Bean. (Applause.) There was another point, the extraordinary absence of the provincial outlook. He (Mr. Holman) believed that no single writer whose work he had been able to identify had shown a greater grasp of the problems and a clearer understanding of the war situation than Mr. Bean.
The Herald’s proprietor, John Fairfax, with the memory of his visit to the Western Front under Bean’s guidance the previous year still fresh in his mind, said the Diggers had told him of the conscientious manner in which Bean had carried out his duties, and declared that if he said a thing it could be relied on. There was no man who had such inside information and knowledge.
The machinery for the Official History and the War Memorial began to fall into place during 1919. A year earlier, the Government had been persuaded when Bean wrote to Defence Minister Pearce:
I believe that our country men are capable of any achievement, provided high, unselfish, national incentive can be encouraged in them . . . Australia has lost thousands of her best and finest men, but I believe that the history of them, and the appeal which their lives will make to young Australians, through galleries and museums, and, not least the histories of our country, will be the greatest of several great results of their sacrifice.
On his return to Australia, Harry Gullett was appointed as the proposed War Memorial’s first director. It would be a brief appointment, for the following year he accepted Prime Minister Hughes’ invitation to become director of the Australian Immigration Bureau. John Treloar would succeed him in the post and hold it for the next thirty years. Bean was appointed to the Memorial’s governing committee.
The Official History was Bean’s immediate focus, and when he first submitted a proposal in August 1919, he confidently expected that the whole work would be completed within three years, four at most. Harry Gullett was appointed to write Volume VII, on the Light Horse in Sinai and Palestine. It was proposed that a small committee of experts would read the proofs and edit any statement they thought was libellous. Bean wrote to the Government that neither he nor Gullett would agree to this, and threatened to quit. ‘I would not spend the portion of one’s life that will be occupied in writing this book, if it were not a book in which one could tell the people of Australia anything which one is convinced they should be told,’ Bean wrote bluntly.
The Government suggested that Bean and the writers of planned single-topic volumes indemnify it against any successful libel action. Bean pointed out that he had been a practising barrister before he became a journalist, and ‘under this agreement I must lose all my means before the Government can begin to suffer.’ Hughes agreed ‘entirely’ with Bean’s argument, and the matter was settled—albeit with a continuing problem over censorship of Volume IX, on the Royal Australian Navy.
The government accepted Bean’s proposals for the History, and he was now ready to begin what would become a monumental task. Among those joining him at Tuggeranong was Erskine Crawford, his secretary. Crawford had worked for the Department of Home Affairs in Canberra as a clerk in 1913 and saw service in Rabaul with the Australian Naval and Military Expedition Force before enlisting in the AIF in February 1917. Later that year he went to Egypt to join the Camel Corps but became ill and in July 1918 was sent to London to join the War Records Section after Bean apparently intervened on his behalf. It seems Crawford was a friend of Bean’s, as his cousin, Joan Butler, who also knew Crawford, remembered receiving letters from him during the war. The background to the connection is hazy, but Crawford apparently at one stage worked for The Sydney Morning Herald. Bean was evidently impressed by Crawford’s ability as a writer—he was an accomplished music critic and author of three plays. According to Arthur Bazley, it was Crawford who suggested Tuggeranong homestead as a place to write the Official History. Bazley was appointed librarian, and John Balfour assistant historian. And there was one more interesting appointment: young George Lowery, who had written to Bean during the war, joined them soon after as a junior clerk and typist. According to Bazley, the ‘eager tone’ of his letter during the war had so impressed Bean that he offered him a job. Initially, Bean had four draftsmen, but within a few weeks this was reduced to one.
At the end of October, with numerous crates and boxes and map cabinets containing the first batch of records—those from Gallipoli—as well as books and newspapers and their private goods and chattels, the team travelled to Tuggeranong with some apprehension about how the move to the relative isolation of the bush would turn out. To Bean, he had a ‘small picked team’ that he regarded ‘more like a family.’
Bean, with his keen sense of economy, saw the potential for frugal but healthy living for himself and ‘the small team of youngsters.’ Two housekeepers and a handyman
lived on site, there was a large vegetable garden and a productive orchard, and Bean was anxious to acquire a cow or two and some sheep. ‘With the price of meat what it is we can make a real saving,’ he told a local official. Lieutenant Colonel John Goodwin, Surveyor General for the Commonwealth, who oversaw the disposition of Federal Capital lands, promised to get him some draftsmen’s tables and stools from the nearby former Molonglo internment camp. At Bean’s request, Goodwin arranged for all the storage tanks on the property to be filled by pump from Tuggeranong Creek ahead of the coming fire season. Bean asked for the old shearing sheds adjacent to the homestead garden to be demolished because of the smell. A decade earlier, while touring sheep stations for On the Wool Track, Bean made no mention of the smells from the shearing sheds. Since the war, there is no doubt that Bean had become more sensitive to both sound and smell. In his idiosyncratic way, he often in his diaries described the sounds of bullets whizzing above his head and shells exploding nearby, and he made reference to the stench of death at both Gallipoli and France, which nearly made him sick.
From the Tuggeranong homestead there were clear views of the distant Brindabellas, which Bean found uplifting but also distracting. To work, he moved his study to a room with a different outlook. Colonel Arthur Butler, who would write the medical history of the war, later recalled visiting Bean at Tuggeranong. At 6.30 ‘on a glorious spring morning, with the air piquant with an exhilarating freshness such as only uplands like these of the Federal Territory can give, and the sun perhaps 20 degrees above the horizon on the Queanbeyan hills,’ Butler walked from the Tuggeranong siding to the old homestead. He was struck by ‘a profound sense of the glamour and beauty of Australian scenery.’