Bearing Witness

by Peter Rees

  After the opening ceremony, on 11 November 1941, Bean wrote to Treloar, noting that everyone wished he could have been there. This was apt, because if Bean was the visionary, Treloar had been the institution’s guiding hand, establishing it and keeping it going during the 1920s and 30s. Bean told him Curtin’s speech was ‘just right, and the ceremony very impressive,’ and that there had been ‘very great appreciation of the Memorial from every side.’ Treloar replied that it was appropriate that the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 and the Australian War Memorial should be finished together. ‘The two were closely linked and I am glad that it was so.’

  In Treloar’s absence, Bean became unhappy with the performance of the Information Department, which he had left shortly after the fatal plane crash in August 1940. Under the control of the Labor Government’s Postmaster-General, Senator William Ashley, Bean objected to the department’s radio ‘blurbs’ or ‘flashes’. He saw them as propaganda against the Germans and Japanese; in particular, he objected to the inflammatory, racist vilification of the Japanese. What upset him was the adoption of the very methods and arguments Australia was supposed to be fighting:

  Reasonable statements of fact and argument, noble appeals to emotion, based on truths which most of us feel to be vital, carefully accurate disclosures of idleness, wherever it is relevant, in our enemy’s aims or methods, are all to the good. But the mere calling of names and making of faces in the effort to raise hatred—which is what these two-minute outbursts amount to—is not merely disastrously below the dignity of a civilised people, but will do us untold harm, wherever it reaches the ears or eyes of men and women with any culture.

  A few days later, with no sign of change, Bean stepped up his criticism of the department’s ‘bad propaganda’. He wrote: ‘Apart from the direct damage to the moral cause for which we stand, the psychology of these outbursts is wholly bad. They remind one of nothing so much of a small frightened boy loudly bragging to keep his spirits up.’ Bean pointed out that he had ‘studied the Australian soldier for twenty-seven years, and I say without hesitation that there is nothing he so hates and despises as this sort of “skite.” A chief mark of the Digger is that of talking little and acting strongly.’ He believed that to use extremist propaganda while engaged in a war against a vicious racialist ideology was to court moral defeat. Such philosophical niceties, however, did not endear him to the Queensland Digger, which judged him to be ‘dangerously close to the people who want Australia to pull her punches.’ Bean’s changing ideas on race were not necessarily in keeping with contemporary opinion.

  After the war ended, and as he watched appalled at family disruptions caused by the repatriation of non-European evacuees to Malaya, Bean’s ideas changed even more rapidly, and he advocated an immigration quota system which would have the dual aims of preventing dislocation caused by indiscriminate immigration and of avoiding offence to other races. He advocated a quota system that could be ‘entirely effective in safeguarding the economic interests on which it is based, without insistence . . . on a quite senseless colour-line.’

  This was an about-turn for Bean. In his youth he had described a multiracial society as ‘that mixed horror.’ On the contrary, he now believed that positive benefits would flow from a more heterogeneous population produced by mixing various races. He dismissed ‘talk of the evils due to cross breeding’ as ‘very like the kind of trash that Hitler spoke.’ He recalled Harry Freame, the half-Japanese who was ‘the finest scout’ in the 1st AIF, a man who had devoted himself to Australia, who received the first Distinguished Conduct Medal at Anzac Cove and who, he believed, should have been awarded a Victoria Cross. Freame had headed a soldier settlement through the peace years until he died. He also recalled Trooper Billy Sing, the part-Chinese soldier who was ‘the most famous sniper’ of the 1st AIF. The Australian experience was that those who had been ‘living and working among us with the friendship and goodwill of their Australian neighbours, grows not into a Fifth Column, but into a steadfastly loyal community of the utmost value to its adopted nation in war and peace.’

  Bean’s attitude to race had undergone a fundamental change by the end of World War II. He had entered the Great War with an evolutionist view of the world, but he had seen that war brought no benefits; it only killed the ‘best men’ and encouraged antisocial qualities. Bean entered the 1920s and 1930s fearing war, fervently supporting the League of Nations, and even supporting appeasement of Hitler to avoid war. However, the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism brought home to him the evils of racism, and by the end of World War II, confronted with the horror of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’, Bean understood that there was no such thing as racial superiority. The one thing missing from Bean’s advocacy on race relations was inclusion of the Aborigines. The Great War had scuttled his plans for a series of articles about Aborigines after a visit to outback South Australia, and he never revisited the issue.

  Nevertheless, in his early writings he despaired about the survival of the Aborigines in the face of a clash of cultures. He acknowledged their achievements in a harsh country, and accepted that wrongdoing on both sides characterised early encounters and bloodshed between Aborigines and Europeans. He lamented the displacement of Aborigines from traditional lands and recognised that European Australians had an obligation to acknowledge the Aborigines as the country’s original inhabitants.

  47

  Back among old diggers

  Effie Bean saw it first: Charles Bean would sit in silence at the dinner table, abstractedly chewing each mouthful thirty-two times. This had become his custom. If not at the dinner table, her husband would retreat to his potato patch or weed the lawn, devoting an hour to each square metre. During these long, bleak silences, Effie told the historian Denis Winter, Charles reflected on good friends who had not returned or the Western Front’s bleak crater-fields. Effie understood.

  Four years at the front had given Bean a horror of war that affected him for the rest of his life. He had witnessed shocking injuries and still carried a bullet in his thigh. He had buried his cousin along with countless friends and acquaintances. On his return to Australia in June 1919, General Sir Brudenell White acknowledged Bean’s bravery: ‘That man faced death more times than any other man in the AIF, and had no glory to look for either. What he did—and he did wonders—was done from a pure sense of duty.’

  It is inconceivable that Bean would not have suffered a degree of traumatic stress from these experiences. But he was there to do a job, and his professional discipline undoubtedly helped inure him to the events he recorded in his diaries and in cables back to Australia. He debriefed in these diaries, whether fulminating against generals, politicians, artists or fellow correspondents. His character analyses could be withering and the observations insightful and gripping. But he wrote little about his own experiences where his life had been often at risk; these were the diaries of a professional observer at work.

  While so many men returning from Gallipoli and the Western Front had sought solace in alcohol, Bean instead had focused on work: writing and editing the Official History volumes, checking and cross-checking his diary entries, notebooks and, with his staff, the more than 21 million pages that John Treloar’s Australian War Records Section had accumulated. Between 1919 and 1941, Bean sent out more than 10,000 letters seeking information, in which he said he felt that it was ‘one’s duty to the AIF to make this history as accurate as it can possibly be made.’ Then there were the 60,000 questionnaires sent out to the next of kin, 45,000 of which were filled in and returned. The intensity with which Bean approached this work over so many years, together with the intellectual detachment required, perhaps gave him some protection. He had seen too much, however, to avoid post-traumatic stress altogether.

  Ted Le Couteur, the son of Bean’s adopted daughter Joyce, was at university, and full of questions about philosophy and psychology that he would discuss with his grandfather on walks at Collaroy. ‘
He wasn’t a person who forced his views or attitudes on to anyone. One thing I will always remember, I asked him about war and he immediately shut up. I think he may have said, “I prefer not to talk about it”.’ Ted concluded that Bean ‘was probably the most inappropriate person in a way to be a war journalist because he hated aggression, he hated violence, he hated war and the things that war brings out. He was such a gentle man that in retrospect I just can’t imagine him being involved in that sort of stuff.’

  A few years earlier, in September 1955, Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies had arranged for a lifetime honorarium of £10 a week to be paid to Bean in recognition of his contribution to the nation; this was later increased to £25 (about $700 in 2013). Bean noted at the time: ‘if Effie outlives me she will receive £20 per week. This was unasked for and entirely unexpected and a great relief.’ Bean’s comments were heartfelt: his wife understood the personal toll that the war and the subsequent years of writing the Official History had taken. Her vitality and effervescence provided a counterweight to his introspection.

  During these postwar years, Bean wrote four books. Disappointed that the Official History had failed to reach a wider readership, he wrote a short history of Australia’s war effort, Anzac to Amiens, published in 1946. Gallipoli Mission followed two years later, telling the story of his return to Gallipoli at war’s end. In 1950 he published Here, My Son, a history of private boys’ schools in Australia. Education was at the core of Bean’s beliefs for improving society. Bean went to school in England at a time of vibrant philosophical change in the British school system. Primed by his father’s experience under John Percival, Bean’s own values for the rest of his life were shaped by these years.

  After meeting Percival at Oxford, Bean had been critical of Britain over Boer War concentration camps. Importantly, in 1912, when Bean was The Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in London, he returned to Clifton College to hear Percival explain that his aim had been ‘to turn out, to serve its country in every walk of life, a steady stream of men made competent by a rather broader training, modest, industrious, fit to sympathise with the needs of a modern democracy, and fearless to face the right and wrong in the social problems of this age.’

  Bean thought this an inherent truth about the British, because ‘every day and hour the country reaps invaluable good from it.’ He theorised that the public school system was the most important institution in Britain because it turned out men ‘who have on the whole this distinguishing feature—that they will do their work in life not merely for the sake of the reward, but for the sake of the work itself.’ This was not so evident in Australian professionals who, schooled in Australia, had not been steeped in ‘this scarcely conscious sense of public duty.’ For Bean, to write the Official History was to fulfil this commitment to ‘public duty’.

  Bean’s final book, published in 1957, was Two Men I Knew, in which he paid tribute to General Bridges and General White. He also revised On the Wool Track and The Dreadnought of the Darling. All his books, including those written on behalf of the nation, had not made Bean wealthy. He noted in his diary in 1947, for instance, that he had eaten into his capital to the extent of £600 (more than $37,000 in 2013). His brother, Jack, offered to help—‘when he thought my health was under strain, to bring up Effie’s income and mine to an amount that would clear us of worries by giving us £212 a year.’ In May 1947 Bean was appointed Chairman of the ABC’s Promotions Appeal Board, which meant Jack’s financial support was no longer needed. Perhaps unwittingly, Bean had taken literally the words of his mother, Lucy, about her then six-year-old son: ‘I do not want to see you a rich man, or man holding a leading position, so much as to see you a good, charitable man.’ And above all, she had wanted him to pursue truth.

  Against this background, Bean revisited comments about John Monash he had written on 1 June 1918. The general, he had said, had worked to get command of the Australian Corps ‘by all sorts of clever well hidden subterranean channels.’ With a shaky hand and spidery handwriting, he now wrote alongside that assertion: ‘I do not now believe this to be true.’ This was an important mea culpa on an issue that had sat uncomfortably in the background since the Great War, and it came as he re-evaluated his views on the question of race. He would never, though, place Monash in the same league as Brudenell White.

  Bean became chairman of the War Archives Committee, which Prime Minister John Curtin had convened to preserve Australia’s World War II records. Thus the foundations for the National Archives of Australia were laid. Additionally, he was appointed chairman of the board of the Australian War Memorial in 1951. John Treloar died shortly afterwards. With Gullett already dead, Bean was the last of the founding group. In reality, there had been sharp differences between Treloar and Bean since 1943, on what relics were to be collected, and on the pace of change. And with Treloar gone, there was suddenly a shortage of men with intimate knowledge of the internal operations of the AWM. Bean had recognised that the job was getting too big even for Treloar, who worked eighty-hour weeks. With Treloar having delayed appointments, the institution was understaffed. As Michael McKernan wrote in his history of the War Memorial, no one knew how Treloar had proposed to complete the Roll of Honour, how he had intended to classify and display World War II relics, and what building extensions he had in mind. Bean suggested that Arthur Bazley, who had been Acting Director from 1942 to 1946, needed to be brought back from his position at Immigration ‘at the earliest possible moment.’ Better than anyone, Bean knew that Bazley had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australia in the Great War and wrote to the Public Service Board supporting his former batman. But it was to no avail; the government appointed Acting Director Jim McGrath to the directorship. Bazley undoubtedly had the better claims for the position and thought of appealing. Bean said he would support him, but added that he was impressed by what he had seen of McGrath. Bazley did not appeal.

  Bean and the board had allowed Treloar a relatively free run, but Bean now decided to play a more active role in the AWM’s operations. He directed McGrath to establish a Plans Committee—something he had urged Treloar to do nine years earlier. The committee would set priorities and devise strategies to complete and develop the AWM. Bean also undertook the first survey of the 1914–18 relics collection—only to conclude that many of the collection’s most valuable items could not be found. He was surprised by the failure to show an important Australian invention, the periscope rifle, a device that had saved the lives of many Anzacs at Gallipoli by virtually ending the threat posed by Turkish snipers. Bean wanted the story told but knew that no periscope rifle had survived the evacuation. He also knew that the then External Affairs Minister, R.G. ‘Dick’ Casey, had made a sketch of a periscope rifle while at Gallipoli. He wrote to Casey and, based on his notes, ordered a replica to be made for display. Although it was not authentic, the replica told an important part of the story of Australians at war.

  Bean also found himself mired in controversy and out of touch with public sentiment. With the reopening of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra, Bean ordered the removal from public display at the Memorial of the World War II surrender sword and table. He was being courteous, wanting to improve Australian–Japanese relations, but did not reckon on the critical public reaction. His decision ran counter to his own concept for the War Memorial after the Great War. The display was reinstated.

  As chairman, Bean had the task of conducting Queen Elizabeth through the Memorial during her visit to Canberra in 1954. According to members of the Bean family, the Queen offered him knighthood, which he declined—as he had done in 1940. He had also refused a CBE in 1920. Bean had written to the Governor-General in 1940 expressing his appreciation but explaining why he refused the first knighthood offer:

  I have for many years held that in Australia the interest of the nation would be best served by the elimination of social distinctions, so far as is reasonably possible. Though I have the greatest admiration for many titled men and women (and for their work and
influence) it seems to me that in practice, despite certain advantages, the system encourages false values among our people, and that our generation needs above everything to see and aim at true values. For this reason, and this only, I have begged to decline this reward . . .

  To have accepted a knighthood, no matter how strongly pressed on him, would have been out of character for such a firm believer in egalitarianism. Furthermore, Bean felt that in all conscience, he could not accept a knighthood when he had done so little compared with the bravery of the Diggers in war. Bean told his assistant, Johnny Balfour, he had no regrets. ‘I don’t really mind my close friends knowing, so long as it is not generally known.’

  Gradually, he resigned from his positions with the War Memorial, the National Archives and the ABC, and retired with Effie to a smaller house overlooking the ocean at Collaroy. Together, they had dinner once a month in the city. With sixty friends, they marked his eightieth birthday at a Kings Cross hotel.

  By early 1963 Bean’s health had begun to decline seriously. In August, Jack Bean wrote to Brentwood School about draft chapters on a history of the school that had been sent to his brother to correct, saying his memory was failing and that he would be unable to complete the task. Their younger brother Monty Bean returned the corrected chapters five months later, writing: ‘my brother Charlie is I am sorry to say much too ill to take any part in criticising any part of the history.’