Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  As early as the 1923 Imperial Conference in London, when Leo Amery, a genial Anglo-Hungarian and a notable Conservative, assured the Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, that Singapore and Britain could protect Australia, Bruce himself said he was not as clear as he would like to be on how the impregnability of Singapore would be assured.

  Defence spending in Australia was low in the 1920s and 1930s, with a skeleton military staff that ran a larger part-time citizen force. In 1928–29, expenditure on defence was a mere 0.89 per cent of national income. In the Depression years it sank as low as 0.61 per cent, though it jumped in 1936, as the intentions of Italy in Africa, Germany in Europe, and the Japanese in China became apparent. By 1933, Japan had already invaded China from its base in Manchukuo (Manchuria). So there was much to spur an enormous country like Australia, populated by fewer than ten million people, to a greater defensive effort. But even so, much of what was allocated in the late 1930s went unspent, and despite a high level of fear of Japan in the community, spending money on the military was not popular with Australian voters. Military works could well have been a fruitful source of labour for the unemployed, but that option was not considered. In any case, given Australia’s massive coast, it could be argued that a colossal expenditure would be needed to defend it, and so governments might as well underspend as otherwise.

  Britain itself, also underspending on its forces, and also becoming wary of the Japanese after their invasion of China, felt that a heavy investment of its ships in the Pacific would stretch its navy, and began to look to the American Pacific fleet as its potential policeman in that ocean. The Americans would have been offended to be looked upon in that light, as Britain’s mere henchmen, but given the Brito-centrism of the Empire, such thinking was endemic in the Admiralty and even in Canberra. The fact was that British sea power was on the wane, but without eroding the Empire, Britain could not afford to tell the Australians as much; and without exposing themselves to panic, neither could the Australians admit it. It would later become Australian mythology that Singapore was a British con job, but if so Australia fell for it willingly. Australians were anxious to see Singapore as the pledge that allowed them to progress as a white dominion. There was in fact in many Australian minds at the time, and later, an unfounded belief that the mind of the British government was focused upon their future. Of course, it had more important issues—one of them being to hold on to India if the Japanese should attack, or defending France and England if Germany did. Like individuals, nations possessed an appetite for self-delusion, and in this the Australian governments and commentators in the 1920s and 1930s, on all sides of politics, were as notable as any other population in the world.

  Singapore featured far more in the Australian mind than did the great American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Indeed, it would be seen by the behaviour of British statesmen and generals in World War II that the Americans were considered, after the official enemy Japan, something of a sub-enemy—anti-Imperial, hungry to dominate the Pacific commercially, and particularly agitated about the need for Indian democracy and independence. They were a rival to the very Empire whose continued existence Australia believed it needed for its economic health, its psychological solace, and its safety.

  In his 1935 book, Australia and War Today, rambunctious seventy-three-year-old Billy Hughes warned the Australian people that they had been ‘living for years in a world of dreams . . . The dove of peace has fled to regions unknown. Mars once again in the ascendant smiles sardonically at Geneva. Yet Australia in an armed world is almost defenceless.’ Australia, he argued, must provide for its own defence, and the best way to defend Australia, he said, was from the air. Because of its ability to consume distance, the aeroplane was to Australia a ‘gift from the Gods’. Australia must have an aircraft industry, he shouted in vain.

  There were other heretics who thought like him. A number of Australian military commentators, professional soldiers whose names would become known in another, coming world war, such as Wynter and Lavarack, believed that Japan would attack when the British were preoccupied in Europe, and that Singapore would fall before the British navy could arrive.

  Henry Douglas Wynter, a Queenslander and son of a dairy farmer, had served as a staff officer with General Birdwood during World War I, and remained in the small permanent army afterwards. As early as September 1926 he had told the United Service Institution of Victoria that ‘if war [involving Australia] were to break out with a Pacific power, it would be at some time when Great Britain was involved in war in Europe’. Colonel Wynter’s view of the coming conflict, including his emphasis on air defence, had a great influence on John Curtin. Despite his isolationist hopes, Curtin was wise enough to know a threat was coming.

  On 5 November 1936, Curtin used Wynter’s more recent speech to United Service Institutions in Melbourne and Sydney as the basis of an attack on government policy. So abominable was talk of sophisticated air defence considered that Sir Robert Parkhill, Minister for Defence, vengefully argued that an article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph written by Wynter’s son, Philip, contained information the son could only have got from his father. Henry Wynter was refused a court-martial to respond to the accusation, sent in March 1937 to serve in the 11th Mixed Brigade in Queensland, and demoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel with reduced pay. When Parkhill was defeated at a general election in October 1937, Wynter was again promoted to colonel and in July 1938 became commandant and chief inspector of the newly created Command and Staff School above Balmoral Beach in Sydney. A career in World War II as a lieutenant-general would be cut short by his illness and death.

  The 1930s were above all a period in which Australia attempted to shelter within the self-sufficient economic bloc of the Empire, and in which it similarly attempted to shelter under what it thought of as a cosmic umbrella of British power. Both these shelters were to fail.

  The state of military aviation in Australia gave little comfort to Wynter, Curtin and the ageing Hughes. Despite the adventurousness of Australian civil flying in the 1920s and 1930s, the RAAF continued to fly obsolescent planes during their extraordinary survey and rescue works around Australia. It was a force which, because of the immensity of the country, deserved better aircraft than the Wapitis and De Havilland Dragon Rapides often assigned it. The Wapitis were general-service biplanes, old-fashioned two-seaters. The Dragon Rapide was larger, enclosed, two-propeller, and generally used as an airliner. They would seem of another age, however, from the aircraft which, within a few years, would be required for survival in the air over Europe and Asia. On 27 March 1939, the Wirraway Number 1 had been rolled out of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factory and was taken for a test flight over Melbourne. Geoffrey Street, the Minister for Defence, greeted the emergence of this aircraft and said it would be good for scouting, fighting and night-bombing. Though part of a government upgrade of the air force, it would prove futile.

  At the beginning of war in 1939, the permanent air force consisted of 246 aircraft, of which only 164 were operational. Australia would early in the war have on order Beaufighters, which Robert Menzies, having succeeded Joe Lyons, would divert to British defence, leaving Australia looking forward to the arrival in 1941 of a ill-omened plane named the Brewster Bermuda.

  Civil aviation was in a much better situation. Already, in 1934, Qantas Empire Airways, using entirely appropriate Douglas aircraft, had begun flying the Brisbane-to-Singapore sector of the Australia-to-England air route. It initiated a weekly service in February 1935, and Lyons, characteristically for a politician of the day, saw this as a boon for Empire, not just for Australia: ‘We can be proud that the Commonwealth, in assuming responsibility for the operation of the section of the Singapore–Australia section of the chain of Empire Air Services, is the first of the British Dominions to operate an international air transport service.’ A Labor politician would not have put it any differently.

  But no such impetus was reflected in funding for the RAAF.
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  ON THE AIR

  There exists in the Museum of Victoria a photograph that shows Florence ‘Dot’ Cheers listening to a crystal set radio in the backyard of the family home in Brunswick on Christmas Day 1923. Dot was seventeen at the time and the set had been made by her brother Ronald when he was twenty. Radio captivated Dot, there, in that photograph. She would become a radio announcer known as ‘Aunty June’ at Melbourne’s 3JR and would marry the cowboy singer Smoky Dawson during World War II.

  Listening to her crystal set, Dot is in theory breaking the law. When the first stations were licensed by the Federal government in 1923, the scheme was that the broadcaster would make and sell their own receivers to the public. The earliest stations were commercial, Sydney’s 2FC being the first, and 2SR (later 2BL) the second. The following year two stations were opened in Melbourne. The government’s idea of people buying a ‘sealed set’ devoted to one station was a failure, only fourteen hundred such sets being purchased. In the suburbs and nearer country towns, people subverted the arrangement with primitive wireless apparatus with a crystal diode in them and by modifying devices to receive a range of stations.

  A new plan was devised, a system by which there were A-class stations that were supported by radio licence fees, and B-class, which would support themselves by advertising. By the end of the decade, stations had proliferated across Australia, and the populace had a huge taste for broadcasting.

  The new prime minister, Joe Lyons, due to a number of influences (including the success of the BBC, founded ten years earlier), inaugurated the government-funded ABC on 1 July 1932. Coverage included Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Newcastle, Corowa, Rockhampton and Crystal Brook, a town north of Adelaide where an A-class station had been operating.

  Opening-day programs included the first Children’s Session with Bobby Bluegum (Frank Hatherley), a broadcast from the Randwick races, British wireless news received by cable from London, weather forecasts, stock-exchange reports and shipping news. There was also an inaugural ABC Women’s Association session and a talk on goldfish and their care, as well as morning devotions and music.

  Outside broadcasts were soon attempted but needed to confront tough conditions. The first outside broadcast in Perth was a concert for three hundred violins. Only one microphone was available and it was in use in the studio: the announcer told listeners that they would be crossing to the concert in the Exhibition Hall soon; he then took the studio microphone by way of tram to the hall, and so the broadcast began.

  ABC News was taken from newspapers rather than gathered independently, although the first ABC journalist was appointed in 1934. In 1936, a news editor, Frank Dixon, was appointed and began to argue for an independent ABC news service. By the 1930s, women were on the air as announcers and were working in radio production. Such women as Queenie Ashton, Ethel Lang and Grace Gibson were getting renown as producers, directors, writers and performers.

  It would not be until World War II that the independent news service was achieved. Although on the eve of World War II a Canberra correspondent was appointed, this was at the request of the government, who felt that the ABC was relying on inaccurate reporting by newspapers. Ray Denning, the appointee, was told to shadow the prime minister wherever he went.

  In 1935, pre-recorded programs were laid down on gramophone records and copies sent from the major states to the remoter ones, particularly Tasmania. Sport was always a major part of ABC radio programming, and cricket Test matches in Britain were described, ball by ball, by reconstructing the information on cables telephoned through to the ABC studio after every over. The tapping of a pencil on the mike made a very convincing sound mimicry of bat on ball. Race commentaries were delivered via public telephone from the track to a studio presenter.

  Programs such as the Hospital Half Hour, Harry Pringle and Wilfred Thomas were staples for the children and adults who heard them. Serials such as Singapore Spy were absorbed whole, without questioning or any critical distancing between the radio wave and utter belief. The Children’s Hour ran from 1935 and again possessed magical narrative power; school broadcasts were also immensely popular, particularly with teachers, whose curriculum they enriched.

  During the Depression, not all families could afford to own a radio or pay the licence fee. The radio set itself was, after all, crafted and contained in beautifully wrought wooden cabinets, standing on legs, a glory of household furniture as well as a new voice, a companion, a modulator of culture and opinion. In 1934, Glebe Council in Sydney commissioned the construction of a ‘wireless house’, a public listening place in a park. It allowed large crowds to gather and listen to daily programs, and operated until the early 1950s. Department store chain Grace Brothers donated the radio to the wireless house.

  In 1939, Dr C.T. Madigan, the geologist and Antarctic explorer, a man who harboured amongst his possessions a bitter but as yet politely unrevealed diary about the flaws and vanities of Mawson, led the first major expedition across the Central Australian desert, which he would name the Simpson Desert, in honour of the president of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. Madigan gave a series of talks during this trek which were broadcast first by means of a pedal receiver to the postmaster general’s office at Yunta, then by landline to Adelaide, from where they were broadcast nationally. It served as a last, enthusiastic tale of exploration, almost in the tradition of John McDouall Stuart, that graced Australian imaginations before the second great world disaster struck.

  An overseas short-wave program began in World War II, and Australia Calling, a tiny, two-kilowatt service that was called the ‘tin whistle of the Pacific’, became the forerunner to Radio Australia.

  FASCIO

  For Italian Australians, the uncertainty and torment of the Depression made Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s Italy look suddenly enviable. As well, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s Fascist government of Italy had funded and promoted within Australia a network of business organisations and political–social clubs named Fascio and dopolavoro (after-work) societies, and Italian schools for first-generation Italian–Australian children. It has to be remembered that a number of Australian conservatives had, before the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, openly stated their admiration of Mussolini, and groups of Italian veterans of the Great War marched under Fascist banners in Anzac Day marches in towns such as Innisfail and Cairns.

  The Australian Security Services would break up this infrastructure after Italy’s declaration of war on Britain in 1940, but it is hard to assess how far the Italian Australians who used Italian social clubs in the 1930s were actually devoted to Mussolini and Fascism. Daria Burla, a Queensland wartime detainee protesting against his internment in February 1941, wrote: ‘If I had made an application to belong to some Fascio it was for business reasons, because the Consul had promised to give some [business] consideration to the Italian community.’ There was a measure of truth in such an argument as the detainee put forth. In Queensland in the 1930s there had been Italian consular vigilance of the Italian community, taking in part the form of threats that Italians who did not harbour the correct sentiments towards Mussolini would suffer commercially. So for many in business in the cities and larger towns, to be a member of the local Fascio and wear its badge was to have preference in procuring import licences on Italian goods.

  That did not mean there were no true believers at all. In the 1920s in Sydney, Franco Battistessa, a hardline immigrant of great charm and energy, claimed that the Italian consular and party representatives in Australia, including Antonio Grossardi, Consul-General in Sydney from 1920 to 1932, were not devout enough ideological Fascists but had joined the party for the sake of their careers. It was true that the urbane Grossardi had joined the Italian Fascist Party only after it became a requirement of his job. Grossardi saw his main hope not as raising Fascist cohorts in the Australian bush but as fostering a connection between Australia and land-hungry Italy. He believed the weedy prole
tariat of factory workers Australia kept importing from Britain were ill-equipped to penetrate and settle the interior, unlike the hardy Italians. One of the symptoms of this unfitness was, in his mind, an obsession with sport. The Depression was a corrective to the excess of experiments in social democracy of which Australia had been recklessly guilty, he argued. Now the newly formed, conservative United Australia Party led by Joe Lyons might well become, in its alliance with secret armies such as the Old Guard, a basis for Fascism.

  A later consul-general, Paolo Vita-Finzi, an Italian Jew wary of Fascism, nonetheless saw Australia, even in the Depression, as living in a dream world, unaccustomed to the sort of strenuous thought and action that might produce a truly progressive state. He criticised its ‘carefree jumping about and playing, the enjoyment of nature and life, while pushing into the recesses of conscience that small jab of fear for the sharks that one day may suddenly jump out of the placid waters’. Visiting Canberra in 1935 to inform the Australian government of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, Vita-Finzi was appalled to find the Foreign minister, Sir George Pearce, former sidekick of Billy Hughes during World War I, in a near-empty building and wearing shirtsleeves. Vita-Finzi complained that there was not a barber or a newspaper in sight. ‘It appears impossible in this vast and silent vastness to think of wars and conflict. Europe and its revolutions, Asia and its struggles appear distant, mythical, from another world.’ He could not understand why Australia was so bound to Britain when the trade competition Britain deliberately fostered between Australia and Japan drove down Australian commodity prices.