In the Australian Communist Party, a Chinese section was formed that would be known as the ‘Direct Branch’. In 1950 it comprised only ten members, three of whom were market gardeners. The threat of deportation made it an unattractive proposition for most Chinese. The 1953 campaign against the ‘Piglet System’ again brought the radical Chinese up against the merchants and major restaurant owners of Chinese communities in the larger cities. Anti-Communist Chinese businessmen were given preferential treatment to sponsor the migration of poor Chinese workers—known as ‘piglets’—from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. All their documents remained in the custody of their employers, and they worked in excess of eighty hours a week, slept on the floors of their employers’ businesses and were paid one-fifth the basic wage of Australian workers. They were compelled to sign fake wage books and time sheets.
Founded in March 1952, the New South Wales Chinese Workers’ Association took up the living conditions and wages of the piglets, and successfully sought the support of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Australian Seamen’s Union and the Restaurant Workers’ Union. ASIO mounted various raids on the CYL, but the seamen had already disappeared into the community under assumed names. ASIO believed that the CYL and its fraternal organisations acted as spies for the People’s Republic of China. Many Chinese seamen brought films and literature from revolutionary China to the CYL office in Chinatown and this as good as proved to ASIO their sympathies with Communist China.
Mok Kuan was a fourteen-year-old female piglet employed in Sydney by the Consul of the Republic of China, that is, Taiwan. She was often beaten by her employers and was paid pocket money and had very little freedom to walk abroad. She wrote to a relative in Sydney, who passed on her note to the Chinese Workers’ Association. A large body of Chinese workers demonstrated outside the consular residence against Mok’s slave conditions. Eventually she was released, cut and bruised, and with no money or accommodation. The Australian Immigration Department granted her temporary residence.
After the Mok Kuan case, many piglets came forward and joined the ranks of Australian unions. Sit-down strikes and go-slows by piglets occurred in Sydney at the Modern China Restaurant, the Sun Sai Gai restaurant, the Hong Kong Restaurant and several large Haymarket warehouses, and at Chinese market gardens at Botany and Rosebery. After negotiation with their employers the workers gained the wage levels to which they were entitled and were helped by the Chinese Workers’ Association to find accommodation in Chinatown. In the wake of the struggle against the piglet system, the Menzies government rescinded the deportation orders and gave Chinese seamen, refugees and students permanent residency. In 1956, the wartime Refugee Removal Act was repealed, and the Chinese in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia no longer had to fear deportation.
The idea of Chinese visiting China or bringing family to Australia became impossible during the early years of the Cold War, and most Chinese kept their opinions about revolution in mainland China silent. It is hard to know how much they reacted to news of Mao’s Great Leap Forward later in the next decade, and the millions it killed by famine. The community remained active in the Australia China Society from 1950 and, through the CYL, hosted various delegations to Australia from China. Chinese seamen acted as couriers for information about the new Chinese society the CYL sought to gather. When several CYL members established the Wu Hop Trading Company exporting seafood to China, it was seen by ASIO as ‘a front for the exchange of intelligence’.
The split between Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China in 1961 broke the unity between the Communist Party and the Chinese radicals. Except for one man, Albert Leong of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Chinese radicals adopted the Beijing line of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, rather than Moscow’s policies of detente and peaceful coexistence.
CHAPTER 9
Welcome to the 1950s
Decade of employment and dread
WAR AND RUMOURS OF MORE
The author remembers looking in 1950 at the war maps from Korea in the Daily Mirror, the household tabloid of choice. The city of Seoul fell to the North Korean army a week after Northern soldiers crossed the border in June 1950 in an attempt to unify the country under Communism. The Americans, however, offered South Korea military forces, and the United Nations voted and the Security Council asked members to repel the aggression. Australia offered the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR) and Number 77 Squadron flying Mustangs, as well as naval support.
After their initial success, the North Koreans were driven by forces led by Douglas MacArthur, pacifier of Japanese society since the war, back across the 38th parallel, the agreed-on border between the South, a client state of the West, and the North, a client of China. The Australian infantry fought its first battle near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The United Nations forces (South Korean, American, British and others) in what people in the West saw as a holy war, drove the North Koreans nearly back to Yalu River on the Chinese border. The weather in those northern mountains was colder than most of the RAR had ever experienced before. And then eighteen divisions of the Chinese Red Army joined the battle, and the maps in the Daily Mirror and other papers became calamitous. Suddenly the Allies were disastrously driven southwards again, suffering appalling casualties to the cold; Seoul fell to the Chinese, and the Southerners and the Allies occupied only a small slice of beachhead in the south-east of the country. There was certainly a sense that, if that beachhead fell, the result might be equivalent to if not worse than the fall of Singapore.
MacArthur was never more applauded in a lifetime of plaudits than when he organised a flanking movement with an amphibious landing far to the northeast, of the beachhead at Inchon. Seoul fell again as the Chinese and North Koreans were driven back or retreated back across the border. On the way, in the spring of 1951, the Australians efficiently stopped a retreat by United Nations forces at a place named Kapyong. The Chinese were advancing amidst fleeing South Koreans, and the all-night engagement involved a line in which Australians held strongpoints and Chinese others—a formula for infiltration, bayonet-work and terror. The battle brought a hundred Australian casualties and thirty-two deaths. ‘At last I felt like an Anzac,’ said Aboriginal captain Reg Saunders, survivor of Crete.
Further north, at the Imjin River, which crossed the border, with the Commonwealth Division, the Australians fought for five nights and suffered one hundred dead or wounded. The border now secure, the question was whether to cross the 38th parallel again. MacArthur wanted to, and wanted to use nuclear weapons, but was dismissed by President Harry S. Truman. From that summer on, trench lines were dug and the war became one of sniping and patrols. By mid-1953, when an armistice was signed and a demilitarised zone created along the border, one heavily patrolled to this day, three million civilians had died, half a million soldiers from both the North and South, possibly three-quarters of a million Chinese, and some thirty-four thousand Allied troops, including 278 [some sources say 291] Australians.
During that conflict, now almost forgotten in the bluster of politicians at war memorials, the peace movement in Australia could be written off in most minds by its perceived association with Communism. To most Australians, the Korean conflict was a just war. They feared, however, it was the start of something worse. Returning from a trip to Britain and the United States in September 1950, Prime Minister Menzies had warned Australians to prepare for the possibility of a third world war. Two in three Australians believed that peace could not last beyond 1958.
All this explained the wide support the government enjoyed when, on 26 July 1950, External Affairs minister Percy Spender announced Australian troops would join the Americans in Korea. If Korea was the spark for world war, then the spark must be stamped out early, without appeasement. In December 1950, when asked to name their chief dread or worry, 57 per cent identified the possibility of another world war. In March 1951, in a pre-election speech, Menzies said that Australia must expect the out
break of war within three years. Even though this was electoral scaremongering, many Australians agreed with him. In mid-1950, the new government had introduced legislation requiring all eighteen-year-old men to register for national service and to undertake training in one of the services. There had been little public protest.
Later generations might consider the 1950s in Australia as halcyon to the point of torpor. But it was not so if one consulted the mental torments of the public.
BEN CHIFLEY DIES
Chifley had not been a particularly strident leader of the Opposition. He had, he said, borne ‘responsibility far too long ever to be a destructive oppositionist’. He held the party together despite the growth of right-wing Catholic Labor men in Parliament. ‘Those new Melbourne fellows,’ he claimed, ‘have a bug . . . that’s what’s wrong with them . . . the religious fanatic is worse than the political fanatic.’
This new Labor Party supported Menzies’ 1950 Communist Party Dissolution Bill through the Senate without asking for any of the protections of rights of individuals over whom the shadow of the bill might fall. To add to Chifley’s troubles, Evatt decided to appear before the High Court to contest the validity of the Act. ‘That’s the trouble with brilliant minds,’ said Chifley, ‘they make hellish awful mistakes.’
On 19 March 1951, the Governor-General, Sir William McKell, an old Labor man from Sydney, granted Menzies’ request for a double dissolution on the grounds of Parliament’s failure to pass his Commonwealth Bank Bill. The 1947 appointment by Chifley of W.J. ‘Billy’ McKell, a former boilermaker and New South Wales premier, as Governor-General created much of the same pressure that occurred when Sir Isaac Isaacs was appointed in 1931. Before McKell, Lord Gowrie, Curtin’s friend, and a known quantity as former Governor of South Australia, had held the position until 1945, when he was succeeded by the King’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester. In 1947, the Duke was willing to serve in the post for a further two years, but fell foul of two problems—his reputation as a boozer and his not being Australian. When in fact he was succeeded by an Australian, as a man who had had the ambition of maintaining Australian loyalty to the Crown despite the British–Australian (Churchill–Curtin) conflicts of the war years, the ailing Lord Gowrie declared, ‘Then it seems I have wasted my bloody time.’
The Liberals at first very strongly opposed McKell because they thought he would not have the capacity to be nonpartisan. Events would prove otherwise. Even so, from 1953 onwards, Menzies reverted to overseas appointments: Field Marshal Sir William Slim, followed in 1960 by Viscount Dunrossil, after whose death in office in 1961 Viscount De L’Isle was appointed. De L’Isle would be the last non-Australian to serve in the post.
In 1951, Menzies tried to dismantle the status Chifley had endowed on the Commonwealth Bank, and he was surprised an election was granted on the issue. The elections of 28 April 1951 gave a few gains to Chifley in the House of Representatives, but he lost control of the Senate.
On 26 November 1950, while driving an American Buick, Chifley had had a coronary occlusion. He had been driving around visiting his country constituents in the Bathurst area—Oberon, Baraga, Rockley—and was on his way back home to his wife Lizzie. This meant four to six weeks in hospital followed by two additional recuperation months. Don Rodgers, Curtin’s old press secretary, handled the press releases with aplomb. He had to cover up the fact that Chifley had also been visiting Nell Donnelly, Phyllis’s much younger sister, whose company he frequently sought on his weekends back in Bathurst, thus creating rumours that he was conducting affairs with both sisters.
Chifley was released from hospital on Christmas Eve and was photographed getting into his Buick, pipe in hand, for a short drive to his home in Busby Street. He and Lizzie accepted Evatt’s offer that they should stay in his house at Leura in the Blue Mountains. For all the goodwill, Chifley was failing, and his distress was that the Labor Party was showing its first signs of fissure as well. He knew that the fervent anti-Communists in Caucus were closer to Menzies than they were to him. For Chifley did not believe that Asian problems were entirely Communist-inspired but that they had been created by inequality and imperial domination. The people of Asia were looking for someone to provide them with enough to eat, he argued.
If Labor held together, there was a chance of winning the next election, and on that basis the Labor Party voted for the Communist Party Dissolution Bill and the National Service Training Bill and thus deprived Menzies of some ammunition. But the young politician Fred Daly recalled that Chifley was an increasingly lonely figure within the ALP. According to Daly, more and more members chose not to listen to his uncharacteristically frantic lectures on what was happening to Labor, and so he lost friends.
After that 1951 election, Chifley was re-elected leader of the party nonetheless. On 12 June there was a ceremonial reopening of Parliament, but Chifley did not go down to the steps of the House for the march past. The Jubilee Banquet to mark fifty years of Federation was held at Parliament House that night, and Chifley attended and made a brief toast to the federal phenomenon. The following night there was to be a Jubilee Ball, but Chifley told Daly before the event that he would not be attending: ‘I’m going to read a couple of bloody Westerns.’
The night of the ball, Jim Gussey’s ABC Dance Band played on the floor, and only Eddie Ward wore a lounge instead of a dinner suit. Across at the Hotel Kurrajong, Chifley settled down in the company of Phyllis Donnelly in his first-floor room. The couple listened to a radio debate over whether people were happier now than they had been fifty years before. He made a call to Bathurst to his wife Lizzie at 7 p.m., telling her he was feeling all right. Some time later, lying in bed, he was struck by the familiar agony of a heart attack. Dr John Holt, his physician, came after Donnelly rang him, and he in turn called an ambulance. Chifley had lost consciousness, and as the ambulance approached Canberra Hospital, he was already dead.
The news came to Menzies while he was celebrating at the Commonwealth Jubilee Ball in King’s Hall at Parliament House. Menzies, who always rose to such occasions with courtliness and sincerity, solemnly announced the news and called an end to the evening’s celebrations.
THE GOLDEN 1950s
The 1950s, synonymous with the name Menzies, are looked back on as a time of suburban happiness, of stupor and, depending on the commentator involved, of high employment and stability. But those about to enter the 1950s did not do so without concern, domestic or planetary. For them, there seemed to be no guarantees. Many had been raised, as we’ve seen, in families devastated by World War I and the wounds their fathers brought home with them. They had then been through the Depression, in which one-third of Australians were unemployed, and in which children were forced to leave school prematurely. World War II had involved the conscription of the workforce, the conscription of soldiers, and the terror of foreign bombing and potential invasion.
The late 1940s had been fraught with strikes that reduced families to cooking meals over fires in the backyards of blacked-out houses. A person in their early thirties in 1950 looked forward to a future of dark possibilities. Nuclear obliteration of the human race and a conviction that World War III would inevitably break out between the Communist world, which now included China, and the West, deprived people of sleep.
On New Year’s Eve in 1949 the Women’s Weekly wrote, ‘This year brings in the fifties—the second half of the too noisy, too speedy, troublesome twentieth century. What will they be known as, these fifties? The lucky fifties would be nice to live in.’ But there was no guarantee they’d be lucky.
In December 1949, an election took place that would introduce a quarter of a century of conservative rule. People were sick of the hardships and shortages that continued post war. They felt overregulated and underprovided-for. The time for Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’, the honest earning middle class, had come. The election occurred in the year of the triumph of Communism in China, and the threat of international Communism had produced a great political shift,
well exploited by Menzies and his party.
This author can remember that, for the first time in his experience, classmates ran around the playground extolling Menzies. The interesting thing was that this was a Christian Brothers school, and the children came from forebears who had been solidly Labor. The year 1949 seemed to be the end of the automatic marriage between Catholics and the Labor Party. The 1950s were certainly an era in which the number of middle-class occupations expanded; Catholics were part of that movement and many of them wanted the offered security of a Menzies government. Menzies was ready to be harder on Communism than Chifley or Evatt seemed to be, and so a new Catholic–Coalition alliance was born.
Historian Russel Ward claims that on election night in the richer suburbs of the great cities, many normally conservatively behaved citizens turned up the volume on their radios so that the news of Menzies’ success reverberated through the streets. After all that hectic industrial unrest, they had no doubt their champion had come.
Yet there were still the shortages and high prices for goods that had helped end Chifley’s prime ministership. By 1956 a quarter of homes in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane still had no refrigerator, two-thirds had no hot running water, and three-quarters did not have hot water in the laundry.
Indeed, by the time of the Petrov or Russian Spy election in May 1954, the economy had been through a low period. There was argument about whether it was inflationary or heading for a depression. Credit was scarce, and the share market had fallen. Twenty per cent fewer people were attending the races, which in those days of horse-racing mania was a genuine indicator of economic hardship.
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