Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In July 1936, at the beginning of the war, all but three Australian bishops had signed the Spanish bishops’ joint letter to the ‘Bishops of the Whole World’, in which they damned the Republican government and justified the war as Christian and just. The Reverend Father Leo Dalton told an audience in Croydon in New South Wales, ‘I have uncontestable evidence of fiendish and lustful torture inflicted by the Communists on nuns, priests and all who tried to bar their way in Spain.’

  In response to apologists for Franco, Communist Party members had, during the luncheon adjournment of the fifth cricket Test in February 1937, unleashed at the Melbourne Cricket Ground large banners and leaflets that declared, ‘It is the first stage of the Second World War—outlaw bodyline in world affairs.’ * Meanwhile, though it is hard to tell how many Australians fought in the Spanish war, some fifty-two were known to have volunteered for the Republican side, of whom, ultimately, sixteen were the much-sneered-at nurses. Nugent Bull was, as far as can be told, the only Australian who fought on the Franco side. Perhaps ten Australians were drowned amongst the hundred in the City of Barcelona, a Republican troopship taking volunteers from Marseilles in France to Barcelona. The ship was torpedoed close to its name city by an Italian submarine and sank in little more than seven minutes. A witness mentioned ‘one poor guy who couldn’t swim standing right on the point, and then that went down too’. Those who dived overboard could see the screaming faces of men trapped at portholes.

  One Australian who fought in Spain was Charles Walters, son of a Sussex game warden, who emigrated to Australia at seventeen, worked as a rabbit trapper in South Australia and was secretary of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Tasmania. Another was Ted Dickinson, brought by his mother to Australia in 1907 at the age of three. He educated himself through Workers’ Educational Association classes and was drawn to the Wobblies. Jim McNeal had a vocal Irish father who inveighed against tyranny. He was educated by the Christian Brothers at Balmain. Sam Aarons was a second-generation Communist, something of a rarity in Australia; his mother had travelled to the USSR in 1932. These were amongst the first Australians to take part in a shooting war since World War I. Aarons would return to Australia in 1938, McNeal and Walters in 1939, and Dickinson would be killed in the fighting.

  Another irrepressible rebel was Ron Hurd, apprentice jockey, boxer, and member of the Communist Party since 1929. In 1932, after a year of agitation amongst the unemployed during which he was arrested twice, he tramped to Adelaide and stowed away on a ship to England. He became an organiser of the International Seamen’s and Harbour Workers’ Union, based in Liverpool. ‘Ron Hurd looks what he says he is, an Australian, a seaman, and a defender of democracy,’ the Workers’ Star said admiringly on his return to England from Spain. ‘The workers of Kalgoorlie like him. Ron calls a spade a spade and a Fascist a Fascist.’ In October 1936, Australian Blue Sampson—real name Jack Sampson—wrote from Barcelona, ‘It would be impossible to explain just how it makes one feel to see the workers patrolling the streets fully armed and keeping order and discipline.’ He had been out of Australia since 1934, when he was arrested and charged with striking a policeman during an eviction of the unemployed.

  Jack Stevens of Western Australia had declared, ‘Adolph [Hitler] the Butcher has got right under our skins.’ It would be a few years before he got under the skin of other Australians. Stevens was killed in 1938. A correspondent from Spain, quoted in the West Australian, reported that ‘he fell mortally wounded during a daring and successful assault on Villanueva de la Cañada. This was the commencement of a sweeping offensive on the North-Western Madrid front’. Stevens was a member of the International Brigade. The newspaper declared that he ‘more than upheld the glorious tradition of the Anzacs at Gallipoli’.

  A passionate pro-Franco man and a believer in Catholic action was Nugent Bull, former star batsman of the St Joseph’s College cricket team. He belonged to a notable Catholic dynasty of undertakers. Bull’s great influence was Brother Gerard, a famous rugby coach and director of the Hunters Hill school. ‘Still we have won,’ Bull would write to him from Spain, ‘and the new state is being built around the Church, as it is in Portugal. Iberia will be strong in the Church and now in arms.’ He had sailed on the Esquilino in October 1937 to join Franco’s Nationalist forces, and travelled to Talavera near Toledo where, thanks to the French he’d studied at St Joseph’s, he found himself amongst the St Joan of Arc (Juana de Arco) battalion. With the Joan of Arc and other companies of the Spanish Legion he advanced on the Aragon front.

  Eileen Palmer would be at the front lines for two years in Teruel in Aragon, not so far removed from Bull. The British writer Winifred Bates met Palmer and wrote of her, ‘She comes in looking very rosy and well; dressed in corduroy trousers, muddy boots, and an enormous old sheepskin coat; she reminds me of one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.’

  Amongst the Republican soldiers ultimately taken prisoner at Teruel in February 1938 was Jack Alexander of Brisbane, an officer in the British battalion. The town changed hands but Bull was amongst the forces that finally recaptured the town. He wrote to Brother Gerard, ‘They have refused to return to Teruel and . . . that I think is the general condition of the Red Army.’ Alexander had been buried by a shell burst and dug out semiconscious, taken to a village close by and lined up with others to be shot. He was saved by the arrival of a staff car bearing an order that they were to be taken prisoner for use in exchanges. They were driven to Saragossa but many men died on the way. Alexander’s wounds healed slowly in an overcrowded prison camp located in a convent. Its six hundred International Brigade prisoners had only three taps for water and were infested with lice, but in 1938, at a camp run by Mussolini’s Italian forces, though sentenced to death, he was fortunate instead to be amongst the first exchange prisoners to be repatriated. On a bridge near San Sebastien he was swapped for an Italian POW formerly captured by the Republicans. From Saragossa, Bull wrote to Marie Salisbury, a young Melbourne girl with whom he had been friendly during the journey from England to Spain, ‘Dear Marie, I am not dead yet—very best Catholics don’t die. The war is practically finished now—another month will see it through. Don’t get married yet—I can’t afford a present.’

  By 15 April 1938, Franco’s troops reached the Mediterranean, and Republican Spain was cut into two sectors. But the war saw the year out. In December 1938, Bull was amongst the forces assembling in north-west Catalonia for a final offensive on Barcelona. It worked so well that a terrible exodus occurred into France, in which were caught up the young Australian journalists Alan Moorehead (soon to be a renowned author) and Mary Larsen.

  Moorehead wrote of Franco’s African troops trying to halt the fleeing Spanish at the border, of people ‘carrying children, bedding and scraps of household goods which they have snatched from their houses . . . Normally the train from Barcelona runs through the tunnel. Together hundreds are wedged together in the darkness there, afraid to go back and unable to push on to the safety of France.’ Such scenes created horror in the imaginations of people at that time, though they would become more familiar in the world war about to be waged. Larsen would make it to Perpignan in southern France where she worked as a nurse in a hospital for Spanish refugees.

  British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was appalled on 24 March 1938 by the bombing of Barcelona and made a protest to the Spanish Nationalists; that is, to Franco’s government. Protests came to Joe Lyons, such as a cable from the Melbourne Spanish Relief Committee—‘Australian people joined world expressing horror ruthless bombardment refugees protest in name humanity’. Lyons replied that the Australian people were against interfering in the Spanish dispute.

  The last Australian left alive in Spain by February 1939 was Bull. Franco’s troops entered Madrid on 28 March, Bull marching with the Spanish Legion, one of 120,000 ‘warriors in perfect formation whom Franco addressed, welcoming them to “martyred Madrid”’. After the march, Bull travelled with the Spanish Legion to Morocco, where he was
given an honourable discharge in July 1939. It would not be long before he was back in conflict, this time fighting against his former German allies.

  Another war in Europe was about to begin and, if the reader will forgive us for jumping forward to cover the full tragedy of Nugent Bull, it would claim Bull too. After his transfer with his fellow legionaries to North Africa and his discharge, Bull was unable to get work in Morocco and so left for London just in time for the first blackouts and, from a pew at Mass, to hear the air-raid warnings of World War II. He often went to Lyons teashops on weekdays, he reported. The chain of teashops were good places for tea, but then he found out that the Lyons were a Jewish family and gave them up. At last he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) and trained—like Harvey Buttonshaw, an Australian who’d fought on the other, Republican side in Spain—as a gunner in Bomber Command. Over Berlin he reported his plane skimming ‘up and down [the boulevard] Unter den Linden for 30 minutes and plastering the Siemens factory with over one and a half tons of bombs’. In September 1940, Bull’s Lancaster, which had just raided Boulogne, had an engine burst into flame. The crew parachuted out but Bull was never rescued. At home, hatred for the side he had taken in the Spanish war turned up in a cruel letter to the Bull family: ‘That he should be killed fighting those he fought with in Spain is a just fate,’ some of it read.

  Jack Alexander also enlisted in the RAAF in December 1941, having made his way home as a deckhand, and spent eighteen months flying in Brisbane wearing both the insignia of a flight sergeant and that of the International Brigade, which had supported the Republicans in Spain. He would survive the Second World War.

  The Spanish Civil War, which many Australians considered none of their business and others felt passionately close to, might seem a separate event to many. But despite the fact that Spain, bled dry, opted out of World War II, it could be argued that World War II began long before it was formally declared, and that the Spanish Civil War was simply part of its overture.

  Ken Coldicutt had been appointed national film organiser for the Spanish Relief Committee (SRC) on a salary of two pounds a week and persuaded the SRC to buy one of the few sound projectors in Australia. In February 1938, he took the films—Defence of Madrid and They Shall Not Pass—to Sydney and the SRC was staggered by their success. Coldicutt would become an extremely important film commentator. He had earlier been film manager for the Friends of the Soviet Union, and in 1936 imported what were said to be the first prints of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World. He knew that Defence of Madrid was ‘anything but a masterpiece’ but that it had great impact. He had been contemplating joining the International Brigade to fight the Fascists in Spain, but when Defence of Madrid was shown, he abandoned these thoughts because he believed that raising money and awareness for the SRC was more important. He would be responsible for the showing of a number of 1937 films on the Spanish Civil War. In early 1938, he set off on an east-coast tour, going as far north as Cairns and Townsville, where the films were received with much enthusiasm by the Italian, Spanish and Yugoslav cane cutters, who donated large sums of money. He exhibited the films to twenty-five thousand people and raised £500 for the SRC.

  Coldicutt was one of the creators of film societies in Australia and the author of a famous essay in Proletariat entitled ‘Cinema and Capitalism’. He was critical of commercial cinema. He lugged the heavy equipment off trains and into halls, made speeches, projected the films, took up the collections, announced the result and then packed up everything, ready for the next town. Before going to bed after each screening he typed up a financial report for the Melbourne and Sydney SRC. A large taxi fare to Molloy on the Atherton Tablelands was queried. The manager of the Molloy Theatre had assured Coldicutt that his voltage was 110 watts and Coldicutt had therefore freighted the 56-pound (25-kilogram) transformer on to Townsville by train. At the theatre, Coldicutt discovered the voltage was 240, and he took the taxi to pursue the goods train to Kuranda and retrieve the transformer.

  JOE GOES

  For ordinary Australians, as the world went to hell, the terms of their existence were still bitter. As the Australian writer Dorothy Hewett wrote of Depression charity:

  Dole bread is bitter bread,

  Bitter bread and sour.

  There’s grief in the taste of it,

  There’s weevils in the flour.

  For Sydney wharf labourers, the Hungry Mile, at the eastern end of Darling Harbour, was still a place of degradation, but there were such sites all over Australia. Albert, a wharf labourer looking for work on the Mile, saw the foreman pick his favourites and then throw the remaining twelve to fifteen work tickets in the air for sport. ‘You’d be like dogs. Your mate would become your worst enemy. You might get one on the ground and go to pick it [up] and somebody would stand on your hand.’

  Joe Lyons’ childhood had been influenced by Irish politics, the politics of want. Since his parents were Irish, Lyons had supported Home Rule, often considered a sign of Irish Republicanism by the Establishment. Yet even as Tasmanian premier, he had consulted conservative economists and worked amiably with the Country Party and the Tasmanian Nationalists. As an orthodox fiscal manager, he was appalled by Jack Lang’s behaviour. With Keith Murdoch’s powerful support, Lyons became the leader of the new United Australia Party in 1931, the conservative coalition that included the former Nationalist Party, and in less than a year he would win the prime ministership, helped along by his wife Enid, who would in 1943 be the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. Lyons was immensely popular, and did whatever his economic principles and advisors allowed him—such as releasing money to allow the states to offer employment. The hard yakka of building the road to the top of Mount Wellington in Hobart was financed first by Scullin, then by Lyons. Throughout the Depression, though, there was never a coherent federal assistance agency to promote employment. And in terms of trade, he passed up other opportunities so that Australia could go on trading with Britain, sincerely believing that this was the best way out.

  Like Hughes, Lyons was an aviation enthusiast, but there was little to spend on the RAAF. In the 1931 election campaign, he was piloted around Australia by Charles Ulm in the aircraft named Faith in Australia. For the 1937 election he travelled 9600 kilometres to hold forty-three meetings in as many days. Dame Enid was equally popular, and probably helped garner women’s votes. In return she was herself helped by her husband’s amiable but rather avian-faced presence.

  As prime minister, Lyons stood against inflation, and for debt conversion. This suited his Melbourne business backers, and the London bankers. In 1938, Charles Hawker, South Australian pastoralist, member of Parliament, and Minister for Repatriation and Markets, disagreed with Lyons on the matter of national service and lack of defence spending. He was said to be on his way to challenge Lyons’ leadership, but was killed when his plane crashed on Mount Dandenong.

  Lyons’ lack of will to move on national insurance after the 1937 election caused Menzies to resign altogether. Lyons’ inability in the late 1930s to keep his government together meant he was unlikely to win another election. The stress on him had been prodigious, as he tried to retain the loyalty of the Country Party and of his ministry. He told Enid that in this third term he returned to Canberra with dread. He had won three elections—1931, 1934 and 1937—but his credit with his followers was running out. Mortality claimed him before his colleagues did. He died in Sydney Hospital in April 1939 of a coronary occlusion. The Melbourne lawyer Robert Menzies would be his successor.

  THE ABORIGINAL FIGHT

  The 1920s and 1930s would see an emergence of a new politics amongst Australia’s indigenous peoples.

  The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) was founded in Sydney in 1925 by Fred Maynard from western New South Wales, the child of an Aboriginal woman and an English labourer who lived and worked there, but its focus was the mid-north coast of New South Wales and Aboriginal communities in towns suc
h as Kempsey and Bellbrook. Maynard had been influenced by his experience as a young drover and stockman, and later as a wharfie and an active member of the Waterside Workers’ Union, as well as by members of his family who had lost land when it was leased to white farmers. He was assisted by the humanitarian Elizabeth McKenzie-Hatton, the only non-Aboriginal member of the organisation. McKenzie-Hatton took on the Aboriginal Protection Board over the issue of so-called ‘incorrigible Aboriginal girls’ who had absconded from employers, often for good cause, and for whom in 1924 she set up a house in Homebush, in defiance of the board. One of the incorrigibles she had rescued from perceived misuse at Nambucca Heads. McKenzie-Hatton was subjected to considerable police harassment during the two years she ran the house.

  Maynard also travelled, holding meetings of Aborigines in country towns and hearing in particular of the seizure of Aboriginal reserve lands. The AAPA was also concerned with the other large practical question: the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. It sought citizenship rights for Aborigines but grounded these claims in their Aboriginality, asserting their status as Indigenous Australians and proclaiming a pride in being Aboriginal. It made an appeal to the Federal government on these issues after failing to get a reaction from the New South Wales government or from its petition to George V. An appeal would also be made to the imperial monarch when, in 1933, King Burraga (Joe Anderson), a western Sydney Basin (Dharug) man, led a movement to settle Aborigines at Salt Pan Creek camp in south-western Sydney, where Aborigines fleeing the control of the Protection Board on the north and south coast gathered from the mid-1920s onwards. These appeals were based on the idea that Aboriginal reserve lands had been granted to them by Queen Victoria, which meant that imperial monarchs had the authority to step in and protect them when they were resumed by the state government, which had happened in a number of places on the New South Wales coast, including Tea Gardens.