Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  Bean saw no joy in the ‘jazz and crooning coming from a hundred radio stations nearly all churning out the same cheap stuff,’ or the ‘persuasive rubbish with which broadcasters try to mislead us into thinking one shop better than the next.’ There were ‘floods of cheap novels; comic strips; talkies,’ and ‘streets plastered with posters, often prurient, aimed at raking in every penny that can be caught by pumping suggestive notions into half-developed minds; at every turn some showman or salesman trying to shout louder than the next; handbills and headlines of the yellow press . . .’ His mood was dark and angry, pessimistic about the direction he saw Australia taking. The hopes he had held in 1919 had turned to ashes. So disillusioned was Bean with the Australian political system that, probably with memories of the Depression still fresh in his mind, he considered socialism a reasonable alternative:

  It is socialism that brings the nearest approach to social equality . . . in a capitalist society wealth tends to be the basis of public worship, and the striving after fashion furnishes the leading motive for a great part of civilised humanity, sending it along the wrong rails to ends not worth reaching, in a socialist state those urges are reduced to an almost negligible influence by the removal of great distinctions of wealth.

  Nonetheless, Bean was realistic. He recognised that socialism had disadvantages, not least being inadequate incentives for efficiency and progress. He also feared its effect on national character, particularly through the erosion of initiative and independence. For these reasons, he rejected socialist government for Australia. In passing, he noted that ‘even in Russia women are not immune to the lure of cosmetics and to the vogue of silk stockings.’ Frivolities, luxuries and pretensions were distasteful to Bean. Also distasteful were the privileged positions that the Communist Party and the secret police held in Russia—in reality, a ‘class’ in a supposedly classless society.

  Bean had seen from his early outback travels just how necessary the state was in Australian development. State intervention brought justice, equality and social and economic development, and he supported this. He was thus sympathetic to the Labor Party, believing that it offered perhaps the greatest hope for achieving equality. However, he believed that Labor had betrayed its calling by becoming a parliamentary party rather than staying outside the party system that he deplored because it stifled versatility and individuality.

  However, Bean accepted that in Australia plans for the whole nation could not be made unless the Federal Government, and not merely the separate states, had power to make them. He had no doubt that for planning to be effective it must be a federal responsibility. For this reason, he supported the constitutional reform proposals in the Curtin Government’s 1944 referendum to extend federal powers, speaking in their favour at a rally in the Sydney Domain.

  Bean recognised that there was no perfect system of government. He strongly favoured freedom for the individual in a society defined by planning and universal education. He saw education as the solution to the world’s ills. He also began a reappraisal of his views on immigration, which he suggested now called for the frankest realism. ‘We must . . . adjust ourselves to the truth that the possibility of our maintaining a claim to racial superiority has passed beyond recall,’ especially in view of the achievements of the Chinese under ‘the magnificent idealism’ of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Having reached this conclusion, he advocated in 1943 a gradual relaxation of the White Australia policy on the grounds that ‘a degree of intermixture increasing in the long run’ was virtually inevitable.

  Bean had several other books in mind to follow the relative success of War Aims of a Plain Australian. Among them was one he planned to call The Straight Line. This would be a companion edition to War Aims but would explore the foundation of his belief system. It would be about the search for truth, because truth meant freedom, and this could only be built on universal education. He saw himself as a patriot with ‘progressive ideals’. But being a patriot would not prevent him from reassessing where fault lay in war. Since the Great War he had been convinced that right was on the side of the Allies. But in his jottings for The Straight Line, Bean wrote: ‘No one nation is solely responsible for many of the wars in which one nation only is accused. E.g. Germany in WWI and II. Japan in WWII. It is a matter of degree in WWII for example our shutting out of Japanese goods as well as immigrants was a factor which would have driven any of us towards war had we been Japanese.’

  Bean’s ardent belief in moral right had gone; he now saw grey where previously there was largely black and white as he gave vent to a conscience that, as he put it, had been twenty-three years on the sidelines. The certainties that had governed his life for so long were now being challenged and reappraised. ‘I believe that millions of my countrymen and others are longing for a straight line through the tangle,’ he wrote. His aim was to build on the themes of War Aims. Among them was the issue of competing political systems. In these notes, Bean concluded that there were no absolutes in politics.

  Around this time he read Darkness at Noon, the 1941 novel by the Hungarian-born British author Arthur Koestler. The book’s disillusionment with Soviet Communism influenced Bean’s thinking. ‘Basically you cannot have absolute individualism or the absolute state. Every system, in practice and in theory, has to be a mixture: the differences are only in degree . . . There are only shades of grey . . . The happiness of mankind depends on its approximation by degrees, however small, to one side of the light scale or the other.’

  Bean saw that totalitarianism was not the answer, either. However, there would always be a ruling class. The danger was that if people were not protected, exploitation would follow. ‘Society has, probably always, rested on a balance, even though the balance may be heavily tipped sometimes in one direction, and is probably always see-sawing,’ Bean wrote. In attempting to negotiate his way through the quagmire of political ideology Bean became ensnared in oversimplification: the very ideologies he was trying to come to terms with were engaged in a titanic struggle that was far from finished.

  He wanted to marry this to his own conclusions drawn from the Great War, where the AIF’s experience ‘had shown what we could do given a common purpose.’ In a draft preface to The Straight Line, he wrote that, ‘in one way perhaps I saw more of its battles than any other man’.

  I feel that anyone who took part had the right to question the whole structure of the system of which war is a part; has the right to question capitalism or religion or patriotism or paganism or whatever they believe to be a precondition of war. The problem forced itself on one from the first. In Gallipoli I could see no farther than that good must somehow surely come from so much courage and loyalty. But 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.

  Bean wrote a draft chapter in which he appeared as a character named John Percival after the great British educator and moral crusader who had strongly influenced Bean’s father, Edwin, and Bean himself. Percival was, of course, in the ‘Arnold Tradition’ of education. However, if Arnold’s educational philosophy emphasised character, then Percival’s stressed a sense of social mission: creating a new world for the masses. Bean was such a social missionary. He had set out his ideals in In Your Hands, Australians which he had reaffirmed War Aims of a Plain Australian, and had been disillusioned when they had not been wholeheartedly adopted.

  In creating the alter ego ‘John Percival’—even armed, at Third Ypres in 1917, with Bean’s trademark telescope—he was identifying with the moral philosophy that drove Percival. As he wrote:

  Again and again on Gallipoli or in billets in France John had thrashed out with his messmates the kind of Australia they might make if only Australians devoted their brains and vigour to planning it as they planned operations in war . . . the new towns planned and old ones replanned by applying—or inventing, w
here necessary—the principles of town-planning to Australian conditions of climate and social equality.

  John . . . wrote a small book in which he crystallised their hopes for that dreamland which it would soon be in their hands to make or mar. ‘We should have a generation or two free for the improvement of Australia,’ he thought . . . ‘The League of Nations should ensure us peace for present lifetime—and if in that time we can’t build something like the Australia that we all want, we don’t deserve to possess her.’

  Bean’s sense of frustration was evident. Perhaps, in the task of bringing his disparate ideals, hopes and memories together to find a straight line to a new future, he lost his bearings in an ideological sense—as he believed Australia had. The book would never be finished.

  46

  About turn

  Two events just over a year apart had a lasting impact on Bean in World War II. Both occurred in Canberra, within a few kilometres of each other, and they stirred contrasting emotions. A few months into the war Keith Murdoch, by now a newspaper baron and the newly appointed Director-General of Information, asked Bean to come to Melbourne to establish a liaison system between the armed forces and the press. Murdoch had been appointed to the job on the advice of Federal Government Minister Harry Gullett, who then suggested that he approach Bean. Their old friend Sir Brudenell White had been recalled from retirement to become the chief of the general staff, underlining the close links that these men had forged in the Great War.

  Bean’s job would be to facilitate contact between the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the press, and ease the flow of war information. In mid-1940 he and Effie flew to Melbourne for a nine-week stay to establish the new system. He saw daily confidential cables from the British Government and other secret papers, and at conferences in Sydney and Melbourne passed on to the press background information on the war.

  On the morning of 12 August 1940 Bean flew to Sydney for his second press conference there. At the same time, White, Gullett and two ministers in the Menzies United Australia Party Government—the Army Minister, Geoffrey Street, and the Air Minister, James Fairbairn—also left Melbourne to fly to Canberra for a Cabinet meeting. Along with six crew, they died when their Lockheed Hudson crashed and burst into flames as it prepared to land at Canberra airport.

  When he arrived at the Information Department in Sydney, Bean was given the news. ‘It was unbelievable that four of the noblest of Australia’s leaders—two of them among my dearest friends—had perished in that dreadful moment. At first, in that office, the information about White was uncertain. When presently, after hoping against hope, I learnt the truth, for me a light went out.’ Their friendship stretched back to 1914, when White had been one of the first officers Bean met in Melbourne after his appointment as official correspondent. In the years after the war White, at Bean’s request, had read nearly every chapter of Bean’s own six volumes of the Official History, except those pages that referred to him. Bean regarded White’s comments as invaluable. Only the final volume lacked White’s critique.

  Given Australia’s involvement in a new world war, the Government sought Bean’s advice on arrangements for an official history, and in 1940 he urged the appointment of an editor for the series. Bean stressed that it must be free from censorship, reassuring the Government that in the twenty-three years of work on the Official History only three points had been queried, and they were easily settled by conference between the minister and himself.

  Meanwhile, John Treloar had left his position at the War Memorial after being made head of the Information Department. Taking charge of the military history section at Army Headquarters, Treloar began establishing a collection of war relics and documents. Sent to the Middle East, Treloar kept pushing for the Government to make an appointment for the official war correspondent position. He discussed the two main contenders with Bean—Sydney journalists Gavin Long and Kenneth Slessor. Treloar was not convinced that Slessor was the right person for the position, saying he was lazy and had ‘a wrong conception of his job as official correspondent.’ Slessor had made no attempt to collect war records by interviewing the men as Bean did. ‘I am afraid that Slessor is not likely to be a strong candidate for this appointment. I think he would be keen to have it, and more or less assumes he will get it, but as far as I can gather he is making no serious effort to qualify himself for the task and so forge strong claims,’ Treloar wrote to Bean. In a letter shortly after, he added: ‘I believe Gavin Long would be a better choice as editor. He is more solid and hard-working, and I think has a greater regard for exactness.’

  Bean also had reservations about Slessor. In Canberra, he met with the commander of the 2nd AIF, Tom Blamey, now knighted and holding the rank of Lieutenant General. He was unlikely to hear anything positive from Blamey about Slessor, as the correspondent had become the commander’s enemy through his reporting in the Middle East. Bean told Treloar that Slessor, as the official war correspondent, ‘had the ball at his feet if he wanted it.’ But he doubted if Slessor had compiled any records. Bean thought the job may have to go to someone more adept at collecting information, and suggested Long be given the appointment.

  Yet another war correspondent—the broadcaster Chester Wilmot—sought out Bean. Before leaving for the front, Wilmot met Bean, who told him that the war correspondent’s role went beyond reporting to Australians at home. Occasionally, said Bean, a good war reporter should use his access to those in high command to represent the views of the men on the ground. Wilmot did not forget this, and when he later came across serious mistakes in Crete and in Greece, as well as the indolence of many of the headquarters staff in Cairo, he took the matter to the then Commander-in-Chief, Sir Archibald Wavell. While Wavell appreciated the information, it was the start of tensions with Blamey.

  Blamey’s appointment to AIF commander had been one of White’s first acts, but Bean immediately detected widespread criticism—though not public at the time—of the decision. Bean’s friend and biographer Dudley McCarthy has suggested that with his perception and capacity for detailed observation, Bean would have noted from their first contact in the Great War that Blamey kept to himself, made few close friends and would have been ‘a bad man to cross.’ Bean’s misgivings about Blamey surfaced in comments after the war noting his reputation as a bon vivant, and that he had ‘undoubtedly been reckless of his reputation and his record’ in the inter-war years when, as Victoria’s Police Commissioner, he had left his badge in a brothel. He was subsequently sacked after an attempt to cover up the shooting of a police officer.

  Bean noted that the Attorney-General and External Affairs Minister, Dr H.V. ‘Bert’ Evatt, was critical of the Official History of the Great War. Evatt had told him there would be ‘many historians’, if only the records were preserved. With the Government in no hurry to make an appointment, Bean refused to let the matter rest and continued lobbying Prime Minister John Curtin. Finally Bean won his support, and the War Cabinet agreed to appoint Gavin Long on Bean’s recommendation.

  Bean and Long were similar in background and temperament. Both were the sons of clergymen and both had attended All Saints’ College in Bathurst. Both had been journalists early in life for The Sydney Morning Herald and both were appointed official war correspondents, Bean in 1914 and Long in 1939. Both were eyewitnesses to the wars about which they later wrote. Long adopted many of Bean’s research and writing methods and would offer his authors the same firm but generous guidance that Bean’s colleagues enjoyed from him. And like Bean, Long would eventually write a one-volume summary of his war history.

  But not everything went smoothly. Chester Wilmot, who was selected to write the volume on the siege of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein, wrote to Bean following publication of his book The Struggle For Europe with his official history volume not yet completed. He wanted to acknowledge his indebtedness for Bean’s advice. ‘You always drilled into me the importance of structure and of bringing together both sides of the story, and
I think that what you taught me is very evident in the construction of the book and in the writing,’ Wilmot said. In the same letter he criticised Gavin Long’s first and second volumes, To Benghazi, and Greece, Crete and Syria, the first as needing more work, and the second for being ‘unduly ready to condemn’ the British command in the Greece, Crete and Syria campaigns.

  I know the British historians think he has been too precipitate in his judgements, and has not taken the opportunity of finding out all of the facts on the controversial issues . . . I have put them quite bluntly to Gavin personally and by letter, but I hope that you will read his TS [typescript] with a critical eye and will endeavour to restrain him from submitting to pressure to bring out volumes before they are ready.

  Clearly, Wilmot believed that Long had not been assiduous in following the Bean template. Wilmot never produced his volume: he died a few months later in a plane crash over the Mediterranean Sea.

  With Bean preoccupied with the final stages of his last Official History volume, and caught up in lobbying over arrangements for the writing of the history of Australia in World War II, the Australian War Memorial neared completion. John Treloar, as the Memorial’s director, stayed in close contact with Bean during the inter-war years. When the history encountered difficulties in the 1930s, Treloar had arranged for the Memorial to take over publication and distribution through a government order scheme. No two men had worked more closely on gathering the records and history of the AIF, but when the vision for the Memorial was finally realised, Treloar was in the Middle East.