by Peter Rees
Through these years, their marriage remained close, and letters between them were full of affection. ‘I am counting the days for my hubby to get back—I don’t like him away a bit, but it really would be dreadful to go on through the world, day after day, without my greatest love . . . That taken away would see a very tiny bit of me left. However I must say I think we shall be a long time together,’ Effie wrote from Lindfield to Bean who was in Hobart visiting his mother. In another letter, she urged him ‘to get all the sleep you can—to rest your nerves and brain, darling—it does all the thinking for everyone.’ And Bean reciprocated these intimate sentiments. ‘Just as the ship left,’ he wrote on another voyage to Hobart, ‘I went up on deck and I thought I saw you on the wharf . . . I waved but I don’t think you saw me . . . was most regretful at having missed you . . . Nothing in the world would have satisfied me so well as to have you here. The longer I live, the more true that is.’
The Lindfield house was located in a semi-rural setting, with an outlook westwards over mostly undeveloped bush. A rail service gave Bean easy travel to his office at Victoria Barracks. The location fitted with Bean’s philosophical commitment to cities built around bushland and open spaces. He had wasted little time in taking up these themes after returning in 1919 from the war. As he had outlined in his book In Your Hands, Australians, he wanted progress associations and town planning to give Australians ‘the healthiest and prettiest towns.’
Dr Jack Bean, who lived close by, had a vision of postwar reconstruction similar to that of his elder brother. By now heavily involved with Theosophy, Jack likewise espoused city planning, physical training and education reform. He wanted eugenic examinations and, having seen the curse of venereal disease during the war, wanted free treatment for it. Although sympathetic, Charles Bean was not a Theosophist himself. However, he joined Jack’s social welfare club and became an executive member. Through the Parks and Playground Movement, which he founded in 1930 as an offshoot of the Town Planning Association, Bean came into contact with suburban progress associations, local tree lovers’ leagues and a wide group of prominent Sydney conservationists. Among them was the designer of Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin, who, like Jack Bean, was a Theosophist and who lived in the nearby suburb of Castlecrag. Griffin once joined Bean on a tree inspection tour for an endangered cypress species.
Deriving from his belief that the prowess of Australian soldiers came from their rural backgrounds—a view challenged since by historians such as Lloyd Robson who showed that only a small proportion listed occupations in primary industry when they enlisted—the Parks and Playgrounds Movement’s aim was to make the city a little more like the country for city dwellers. Bean believed that Australia’s city-bred soldiers had been nearly as good as country men because they had mostly grown up with gardens, fresh air and playgrounds, which meant they were unlike the ‘weedy and weak’ Tommies, with minds ‘as stunted and small as their bodies.’ Given gardens, beaches, playgrounds and fresh air, ‘the youth of Australia will see to his own exercise.’ Bean wanted Australian cities ‘to provide for every detail of health—of exercise for the body, brain and will.’ The New South Wales Government was sympathetic to these arguments, and took steps to provide more land to extend playgrounds in schools.
Despite the time and effort needed to work on the Official History, Bean managed to do as he had urged when he started work on his book in Cannes—he took matters into his own hands. In the process, he began an important change in his thinking, becoming more concerned about environmental challenge than racial heritage.
44
The ghastly spectre
Bean was taken aback—the Official History was under threat. He had published Volume III in April 1929, with three more volumes still to come. In October 1929, the share market collapsed, ushering in the Great Depression. By 1930 the Australian Government was looking for budget cuts. Treasurer Ted Theodore considered stopping the Official History. Bean was given only a few days’ notice to prepare a statement arguing for the half-finished history to continue. He realised that the story to which he had devoted the past fifteen years was now at risk.
In his memo to Cabinet he pointed out that other countries involved in the war were publishing official histories to record the military lessons of the conflict and to establish responsibility for successes and failures. The main object of the Australian history was to establish the truth about the nation’s participation in the war. The effort of Australian soldiers in 1918 had definitely affected the ending of the war, and it was on this that the influence of Australia at the Versailles conference and the status of the Dominions in the League of Nations were largely based. But unless the facts could be established by scholarship and careful documentation, Australia could not hope that its claimed achievements would ever be accepted. He continued:
The achievements of our light horse in Palestine would never have been accepted if Volume VII had not been published. The influence of the Australians in the Battle of Amiens and the breaking of the Hindenburg Line will never be recognised in America or England until established, as it will be, in Volume VI. The authority of Volume I definitely averted certain belittlement of the part played by Australians in Gallipoli.
Bean explained that the Australian history had now passed 1916, and was ahead of the British, American, French, Canadian and German histories. He asserted that the Official History had achieved precisely the aims intended. It had won international recognition of its truthfulness and scholarly authority and was used by the other war historians as a trustworthy reference. He added: ‘The librarian of the leading war-library in Great Britain has called it “the best of all the war histories”, and I hold scores of letters and reviews from all over the world to much the same effect. I do not propose to publish these, but they can always be produced if desired, and would probably prove very gratifying to the Australian Government.’
Six days later the Defence Department wrote to a relieved Bean, assuring him that the Government had spared the Official History from the budget axe and agreed to its continuation—but only because the money required ‘to offset breaches of contracts and agreements involved would have at least equalled the cost of completing the History.’
The Depression shook Bean: his own salary, fixed by contract, was unaffected by the reduction imposed on public servants, including his staff; but he insisted that his pay be cut too. The mass unemployment of the 1930s worried him deeply. He had flirted with the idea of socialism in his discussion with Brudenell White at Gallipoli and supported the Russian Revolution. That line of thinking had gone no further, but now in this new and depressing environment he became interested in planning to reduce inequalities.
If that interest was theoretical, Bean still had to deal with the practical. Budget cuts were also targeting government works, including the Australian War Memorial. The AWM had been Bean’s conception, emerging from the horror that the AIF endured at Pozières in 1916. Arthur Bazley later recalled how, after days tramping the Pozières battlefield and visiting units in the line, he would roll out Bean’s blankets in the trenches on the edge of Bécourt Wood and Sausage Gully. ‘We used to sleep feet to head . . . [and] on a number of occasions he talked about what he had in his mind concerning some future Australian war memorial museum,’ Bazley wrote.
Back in 1918 Bean pictured in his mind the Memorial, ‘on some hill-top—still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent, a building of three parts, a centre and two wings. The centre will hold the great national relics of the AIF. One wing will be a gallery—holding the pictures that our artists painted and drew actually on the scene and amongst the events themselves. The other wing will be a library to contain the written official records of every unit.’
He expanded on this after the war, seeing the building as testimony to an event that would ‘always be the greatest episode in our nation’s history,’ and as Australia’s memorial to its dead. As such, it should be Greek in style, a ‘temple worthy of their memory . . .
a simple building of pure style in white Australian marble on a white stone terrace,’ and set among dark Australian trees to ‘express for all ages Australia’s sorrow and reverence for those who fell in her Thermopylae.’
The building was to be located at the foot of Mount Ainslie—a site that Walter Burley Griffin agreed was appropriate. To Bean, the War Memorial would assert and reinforce the independence, strength and progress of Australia, domestically and internationally. However, since the Memorial would be a symbol of national unity, he spoke of neither secularism nor religion. As a ‘temple’ to commemorate the AIF, he imagined the building as a spiritual space for all Australians, regardless of faith. Above all, he wanted it to inspire a deep reverence for the men of the AIF, and ‘embody for all time for our children the great national tradition of the Australian Imperial Force.’
Bean also had to manage fraught dealings between the AWM management and George Lambert. Bean thought Lambert had an ‘erratic temperament’, but cautioned that if too much pressure was applied he might abandon the Palestine pictures he was doing. Bean undertook to act as an intermediary, drafting a letter ‘strong enough to make Lambert realise we consider the position serious, but worded in such a way as to leave him no cause for ill-feeling.’ In the letter, Bean said he had convinced the management that Lambert and Will Dyson were the artists ‘most seized with the almost sacred nature of the work.’ Lambert was won over, saying by telegram that Bean understood ‘the type of bloke I am’ and completing his commissions—albeit some years later.
With the help of the AWM director, John Treloar, Bean worked hard to keep the concept in the public mind throughout the 1920s. Finally, the Government held an architectural competition in 1927, but this failed to produce a winning entry. However, two entrants, Sydney architects Emil Sodersten and John Crust, were encouraged to collaborate on a joint design. The result would not be in the pure Greek style that Bean had envisaged, instead drawing more strongly on Byzantine traditions.
In evidence he gave to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works on the project in 1928, Bean praised Sodersten’s concept for a building of the ‘general appearance of Sancta Sophia, at Constantinople’ that rose to a central dome. In a letter to Treloar in February 1929, Bean suggested that the entrance to the Memorial needed an inscription that epitomised the principles for which Australians had died. It should impress on the visitor that they had given their lives ‘to protect the weak by ridding the world of war and militarism and replacing the rule of brute strength by that of reason and of right.’
While such an inscription never found a place in the Memorial, Bean’s clear intention was that the building was to inspire a sense of responsibility and duty to the nation.
He was also adamant that the Honour Roll not show military rank. ‘I feel strongly that inclusion in the Honour Roll is given for one reason only—that these men all made the one equal sacrifice,’ he wrote to Treloar, who, along with the AWM board, agreed.
Prime Minister Stanley Bruce inaugurated the Memorial on Anzac Day 1929, just before the Depression struck. In Federal Parliament, there were calls for expenditure on it to be cut back. The newly elected government of Jim Scullin announced, just a month after the share market collapse, that it had ‘decided temporarily to suspend operations in connexion with the War Memorial.’ Treloar accepted that a start on the building could not be made for two to three years—and such would be the case.
As work on the project slowed, Bean was caught up in an incident involving Sir John Monash. In what seemed like a lapse of judgement, Monash agreed to ‘write’ a series of articles for Smith’s Weekly. After lengthy interviews, the journalist Eric Baume wrote the articles under Monash’s name. Smith’s Weekly had been founded in 1919 and was directed to a mainly male and ex-serviceman readership. It championed the cause of the returned soldier in brash and irreverent style. Monash’s articles caused a furor. In defending the Digger from criticism in various books published after the war, he inadvertently offended many others. A concerned Bean penned a letter to Monash advising him to repudiate the articles as his work. He continued:
I think they went down with a certain number of the more or less unthinking and less well-educated members of the AIF, but I could hardly tell you how many ex-soldiers and officers of the other sort have spoken to me about them and expressed themselves as puzzled or astonished that this style of thing should have come from a great commander of the AIF.
Bean was concerned that the articles implied there was nothing worthwhile outside the AIF, but he was quick to suggest that Monash could not have been ‘prey to that ignorant self-conceit,’ unlike the author of the articles. However, ‘I would urge you, for the sake of your own reputation . . . to be cautious in your interviews with the press, and . . . give them something that we can all feel is really worthy of your great calibre of mind and of the very great position which you occupied.’
Bean wanted Monash to know that his ‘frank reply’ was written with goodwill towards him ‘and solely from care of that precious thing which you and I and some others have to some extent in our keeping—the great name of the AIF.’
Responding, Monash acknowledged that he was ‘very much indebted’ to Bean for his ‘helpful and understanding’ letter, and that he had been right to take strong exception to aspects of the articles, and that ‘I greatly appreciate your entire goodwill towards myself.’
Monash tried to bluff his way out of the situation, distributing a statement to senior officers and secretaries of the RSL and service clubs in each state requesting that his ‘disclaimer of the language and many of the sentiments’ in the articles be made widely known. It all backfired when Smith’s Weekly refuted Monash’s disclaimer by reproducing his editorial amendments to the manuscript.
Around the time Monash’s predicament arose, Bean had to deal with the unexpected resignation of Professor Tucker, in February 1930. He was worn out and his health was suffering. He wrote to Bean to let him know of his ‘admiration of the thoroughness of your researches, your skill of narrative, and your manipulation of such a mass of perplexing material. Also I greatly admire your judicial attitude towards both sides and your fairness to officers and men on our own. As a writer myself, I know the labour and conscientiousness required by such a work as yours.’
Bean had come to appreciate just how much Tucker had improved the writing of the volumes so far published. He wrote back acknowledging his indebtedness. ‘To follow your corrections of my draft chapters has been a sort of liberal education, and, once I realised the need, an unmixed pleasure, but, more than that, one has come to rely on your support and, if ever an awkward question arises, to say “Leave it to Professor Tucker—if he passes it, it will stand.” Now that we are deprived of that comforting solution, we shall, I am afraid, have sometimes to play for safety.’
Bean pressed on with the writing of Volume IV—a volume covering 1917. Under the arrangement with Sir James Edmonds to exchange draft chapters, the different approaches they took to writing their official histories came to a head over comments Edmonds made on Bean’s drafts for this volume. A letter from Edmonds called it a ‘corps history’, saying: ‘the draft chapters do not seem to me to be up to the standard of your published volumes, and, as regards matters touching the higher command are really outside the scope of an ordinary corps history, they seem to me sometimes to be misleading.’ Edmonds continued:
We all feel that the historian of the AIF could afford to be a little more generous in his allusions to British units and formations. You are now aware perhaps that the home troops regarded the Australians and Canadians as the spoiled children of GHQ, who were given most rest, the pick of the fighting pitches and most of the praise—not that it was grudged. What they envied most was the corps formations of the Dominion divisions which gave them many advantages.
To have his history reduced to ‘a corps history’ incensed Bean, as did the absurdity of Edmonds’ allegations about the treatment and praise accord
ed the Australians and Canadians. Edmonds belittled Bean as unqualified to comment upon the workings of the higher command, and said he was guilty of bias against British units. Finally, he dismissed Bean’s view ‘that colonial life and conditions produce, on the whole, a stronger fighting people.’
Bean was indignant. He rejected the assertion that the Australians were given ‘the pick of the fighting pitches,’ questioning whether any impartial observer would consider such places as Pozières, Mouquet Farm and Bullecourt as such. Bean was dismissive of Edmonds’ view that matters concerning the higher command were outside the scope of the Australian history. ‘If you do not recognise that the Australian official history of the war is more than an “ordinary corps history”, then you will forgive my saying that it shows me that, far from having written too strongly, I must make my points even more clear in future chapters, and this I will endeavour to do,’ he wrote bluntly. Such a view, Bean continued, was symptomatic of the attitude that prevailed during the war and which was responsible for most of the difficulties that arose between the British and Australians. He reminded Edmonds that Australia ‘voluntarily entrusted her forces to British commanders and staffs’ and that the wisdom or otherwise of decisions made by them affecting Australian troops was ‘a matter of proper concern for the Australian Official History.’ Analysis of this could well influence whether such cooperation might in the future be deemed ‘unsuitable’.
British commentators, he went on, wished the Australians to admit that their successes were also partly due to their being in ‘homogeneous formations which gave us all sorts of advantages.’ The British, he claimed, really wanted Australians to admit that their reputed success was ‘due to these advantages arising from chance and from supposed favours,’ and not to the fact that ‘colonial life and conditions produce, on the whole, a stronger fighting people.’ He took Edmonds to task over his rejection of this: ‘You Englishmen, however, are constantly impressing upon us that these chance advantages were the root of the matter; and this I believe to be radically wrong and untrue.’