Helen Callwark’s family, of Japanese origins, had been in America for two generations before the war, but when they were interned during the war, her father decided to return to Japan, and the family arrived in Kure in 1946. They were living in poverty and Helen’s wages as an employee in the British Occupation Forces office, plus the food from the staff mess, helped them through the appalling post-war period. While employed in the office she met her Australian future husband. She waited to marry until she saw whether her prospective mother-in-law in Western Australia would welcome her. The letter from Western Australia was one of warm acceptance, and so the marriage went ahead.
In nearly all cases of Australian hostility mentioned, the hostility came from the men of the soldier’s family. However, over time many of these originally hostile relationships were transformed into positive ones. By 1956, Harold Holt, Minister for Immigration, had expanded upon the Calwell view and enabled Japanese war brides amongst others to become naturalised, an option many of them rushed to take up.
ITALIAN IMMIGRATION
As more Italians entered Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, proxy marriages, where vows were exchanged by two people located on separate continents, commonly took place between Italian nationals, usually between women still in Italy and Italian males in Australia. This form of marriage had been authorised at the post-Reformation Catholic Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and, although rare in Australian history until now, was recognised by civilian authorities in Italy and Australia. Proxy weddings were also not entirely unknown amongst Dutch, Polish, Portuguese and Czechoslovakian immigrants in Australia. But since Italy was the largest source of non-British migrants to Australia in the post-war period, it was most common amongst Italo–Australians. Proxy marriages carried a certain stigma in the Italian community, however, and those men who had married in that form often kept it a secret. This was partly because proxy marriages that went wrong once the girl arrived were frequently covered in the Italian–language newspapers in Australia. The attention given to them by Italo-Australian newspapers such as La Fiamma and Il Globo in the 1950s and 1960s indicates they were numerous.
These marriages, however, when they worked, strengthened campanilismo, or parochial ties, between Italian immigrants. Campanilismo meant that even in Australia your loyalty and love should be expended on those who had heard throughout their Italian lifetimes the same church bells from the same campanile.
Between 1938 and 1971, a thousand such marriages occurred in the Archdiocese of Western Australia alone. As each record represents two people, it means that two thousand ultimately Australian citizens were involved in proxy marriages in Western Australia alone in the post-war period. If the figures for Western Australia are representative, then some twenty-four thousand Italo–Australians who settled permanently in Australia after World War II were married by proxy. Based on this sample it was Italians from the southern regions of Italy—Sicily, Calabria, Abruzzo—who accounted for the majority of proxy marriages. Northern regions, such as Lombardy, the Veneto and Friuli, and central areas such as Tuscany sent a much lower number of immigrants, but though Lombards were only 1 per cent of immigrants they produced 5 per cent of proxy spouses, because of the small pool of immigrant Lombard women.
If an immigrant wanted a proxy bride, he needed to know the bride’s family and whether they would honour the legitimacy of the marriage. The male relatives of the woman could attend to the proposal and supply a pseudo groom to stand by the bride in church while the priest and the community heard her pledge lifelong loyalty to a man in Perth or Liverpool or Frankston.
An Italian immigrant named Vincenzo, who came to Australia in the early 1950s from Lazio in central Italy, and married a woman from his home town by proxy some years later, recorded, ‘I wrote to my mother saying I would like a girl who would share my life in Australia. I was worried I would not find a girl from my village as Australia was so far away, not like going to Germany or Yugoslavia where you can be home in one day. I wanted someone from my own village so that I knew her a little, it was not like a “blind” date without knowing if she had faults.’
Some family groups considered it desirable for a future immigrant girl to be married by proxy rather than that she emigrated as a fiancée, because in the latter case their family ran the risk of being shamed by the sexual freedom of their daughters or sisters on the journey. But if they had been married by proxy, there was little danger of extramarital sex. Family honour was better guaranteed.
Within Australia it was generally men who married by proxy. There was a gender imbalance amongst Italian immigrants until the early 1960s, when 40 per cent of the Italian-born population was female, most of them married. The vast majority of arrivals were also married women, and most of the other women were either widowed or younger than fifteen. In 1952, La Fiamma, the Italian community’s Sydney paper, called the lack of single Italian women ‘the most serious problem to influence our community’.
The question arises why the immigrants were not ready in numbers to marry Australian-born girls. A journalist, Alfredo Strano, argued that there were suitable Australian women, and if it were not for the difference in language, religion, customs, et cetera, Italians could even consider marrying them. It would be the children of the immigrants who would ‘marry out’, Strano suggested, but in the meantime he was also dubious about the virtue of Australian women, who were as valuable, he said, as ‘used stamps’. If an Australian girl went out with an Italian male, the Italians themselves argued, it had to be because she had blotted her reputation in other quarters.
CHAPTER 10
The atomic years
Dread defines Australia’s nuclear enthusiasm
THE LONG SHADOW OF MENZIES
Menzies’ attitude to foreign relations, said Donald Horne in his famous 1964 analysis, The Lucky Country, was to a large extent nostalgic, for he was nostalgic for the past and regretted the direction Australia took in the 1960s. Menzies failed to have a massive impact on Australia’s foreign relations, though he served for two years, 1960–61, while prime minister, as Minister for External Affairs.
The development of the Department of External Affairs from the late 1930s, and the growing importance of Australia’s relationship with the United States and therefore of the Washington embassy after 1939, combined to shift the centre of gravity in Australian foreign policy away from Menzies, who was so frankly and intensely a statesman of Empire. Horne, Bulletin editor and writer of the massively successful classic, The Lucky Country, argued that Menzies was more a witness than a participant in his long-running government’s decisions in foreign and defence policy—from the commitment of troops to Korea to the formulation and development of the Colombo Plan, under which Asian students, as a means of winning them over to the West rather than Communism, were brought to White Australia to study. Surprisingly, at first Menzies saw the invasion of South Korea by the North as a sideshow, and Australia’s commitment of troops to Korea was engineered by External Affairs minister Percy Spender after he learned that the United Kingdom was about to announce its own military commitment. Menzies was on a ship in the Atlantic at the time and learned of the decision when he arrived in the United States. He quickly recognised the political and diplomatic advantages flowing from Spender’s initiative.
In June 1950, Menzies had sent a squadron of Canberra bombers to Singapore because Chinese Communist guerrillas were operating in Malaya, and he saw this as another wing of Communist advance in Asia, one affecting Britain’s place in Malaya, which he considered crucial to Australia’s security. But he was not enthusiastic for the ANZUS Treaty. He believed that the United States was most unlikely to allow itself to become entangled in such a pact, and commented in a cable to Artie Fadden from Washington in 1950: ‘Tell Percy Spender that the Pacific Pact is not at present on the map because the Americans are uneasy about the stability of most Asiatic countries. We do not need a pact with America. They are already overwhelmingly friendly to us.’ Menzie
s was surprised at Spender’s ultimate success in getting the Americans to sign.
Britain’s collaboration on nuclear matters with the United States in 1957 brought an end to the sharing of British and Australian nuclear ambitions. Britain’s attempt to enter the European Economic Community in 1961–63 raised questions about the future of the Commonwealth and sparked a debate in Australia about relations with Britain and about national identity generally. Menzies adopted a very disgruntled attitude towards Britain’s attempt to enter Europe. He was also disturbed at the speed with which Britain was relinquishing its imperial responsibilities. He did not like a new Commonwealth that included both republics and dark faces. Menzies was appalled and offended when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan asked India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, rather than Menzies to occupy the chair at the 1961 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference.
It was at this conference that South Africa was forced to resign from the Commonwealth, a process that Menzies opposed. The formal question asked at the conference was now that South Africa had at referendum voted to become a republic, was its application to stay in the Commonwealth acceptable? But the sub-question was whether the nation could stay in the Commonwealth while pursuing its racial policy of apartheid. Menzies worked with Macmillan on a series of drafts to find the acceptable formula that would keep the Commonwealth intact. The final statement expressed ‘deep concern’ about the effect of South Africa’s racist policies on the Commonwealth, ‘which is itself a multi-racial association of peoples’. South Africa in any case withdrew its application to stay and Menzies regretted that South Africa had been, in his opinion, ‘pushed out’. He began to feel that the balance of power had changed so much that his own views were becoming irrelevant.
A year later, though, he sanctioned the commitment of troops to Vietnam, a conflict in which Britain was not involved, and in 1965 appointed an Australian, his former Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey, as Governor-General. He purchased the American F-111A jet on the grounds that although he was British ‘to the bootheels’ his main duty was to ‘the safety of my country’.
So it seems true that Menzies was emotionally uncertain about where the world was now, and the questions of world power, and anxious that it should remain in the hands of the British Empire. In the Australian Parliament in 1948 he said, ‘If we can in some ways—not, of course, in all ways—learn to think of the British Empire as a unit, and plan its development so that there will be the maximum encouragement and use of all its resources, the possibilities are still enormous.’ He opposed both Indian independence (achieved in 1947) and its membership of the Commonwealth as a republic. George VI seemed more willing to accommodate the Indian arrangement than Menzies, and the King complained to the Canadian External Affairs minister, Lester Pearson, about the then Australian Opposition leader’s criticisms of the independence of India. What Menzies professed to find offensive about the so-called London Declaration by the prime ministers of the Commonwealth in 1949, which had permitted non-dominion members to remain in the Commonwealth, was the idea that membership of the Commonwealth required no personal allegiance to the King. Menzies had been a harsh critic, too, of the Chifley government’s sympathy with the Indonesian nationalists, arguing that to support their war against the Dutch was suicidal behaviour on Australia’s part.
He was not embarrassed to be frank about race. Broken Hill-born Sir Walter Crocker, who served as High Commissioner and ambassador to countries as diverse as India, Indonesia, Italy, Uganda and Kenya, wrote in 1955, ‘Menzies is anti-Asian; particularly anti-Indian . . . he just can’t help it.’ In that same year, the External Affairs minister, Casey, entertained the idea of Australian participation in the Bandung Conference of African and Asian nations. Of Egyptians, who would give the British Empire some trouble, Menzies asserted that they were ‘a dangerous lot of backward adolescents’. After a clash with Nehru in the United Nations in 1960, Menzies wrote to his wife that, ‘All the primitive came out in him [Nehru].’ Deakin’s mental and spiritual openness to Asia was far removed from Menzies’ dismissiveness. Many members of his Cabinet, however, were aware of the need to foster a productive relationship with Asia, even though they saw Asian–Australian relationships almost exclusively within the parameters of the Cold War.
Throughout the 1950s, Spender and Casey, not Menzies, were the architects of the diplomatic engagement in Asia. Menzies was more interested in planning for World War III, and he consequently focused in the early 1950s on the military commitment that Australia might make to the Middle East in the event of a global conflict with the Soviet Union. For he believed that the war with the USSR would be won or lost in Europe and the Middle East, not in Asia.
It was Liberals such as Casey and Spender (the latter was the son of an itinerant Paddington locksmith, and was a brilliant lawyer and a surfer and married to a crime writer) who, as well as recognising the geopolitical reality of where Australia was located, led the process to the signing of the ANZUS Treaty. Meanwhile Black Jack McEwen, leader of the Country Party, a successful soldier settler who had worked on the wharves to raise money for his farm, and a future prime minister for a little over a month after the drowning of Harold Holt, was the champion of the 1957 trade agreement with Japan. Sydney lawyer Garfield Barwick and his Department of External Affairs were the drivers of Australia’s restrained and successful response to Indonesia’s ‘confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1963–66, when Indonesian troops captured and were then driven out of Brunei by Australian and New Zealand forces.
Perhaps Menzies’ most important contribution to Australian foreign policy was to allow ministers such as Spender, McEwen and Barwick, as well as Casey and Hasluck, to exercise their own talents while he remained open to reasonable argument. In 1948, writing in the British journal The Listener, he had complained that ‘of recent years there has grown up a queer anxiety to avoid any suggestion of an Empire bloc. As somebody recently said to me, “We must not act too much in concert at these conferences, because we shall be accused of ‘ganging up’ and of Imperialism.” My comment is, “Imperialism indeed, and what of it? Are we to give up causes and associations and the superb family instinct which seems to us to be vital to our progress and the development of our common assets just because some propagandist chooses to say, ‘Yah! Imperialism!’ ”’
Accordingly, Menzies’ greatest influence was in the British relationship, which became less important to Australia in the last years of his prime ministership, 1963–66. ‘All I need say,’ Menzies had said in 1949, delineating the twin and in some cases divided loyalties of Australia, ‘is that Australia is British. It has a great and tried and common family allegiance under the Crown. But Australia knows, and so do the Communists, that the closest concert between the United States and the Commonwealth is vital to the common defence. We will work incessantly to strengthen this great association, just as the Communist powers and their overseas friends will work incessantly to divide and destroy us.’
Through his prime ministerships and afterwards, Menzies remained what one writer called ‘an important figure in Labor demonology’. He was seen as appeaser of Mussolini and of Hitler, of both of whose early regimes he was on record as being an admirer, and left-wing complaints continued with the ‘Pig Iron Bob’ affair in 1938 that delivered ore to Japan. His enemies depicted him as being the likely head of a Vichy-style regime in the event of a Japanese occupation of Australia. Again—according to this depiction of Menzies—he had neglected Japanese threats to Australia by sending Australian forces to the northern hemisphere to defend British interests. About World War II, the historian John McCarthy says that Menzies was ‘the leader of a government which was steadily denuding the state of its power to resist an attacker’.
In the 1950s, runs the argument of those who abhorred him, he sought to turn Australia into a police state by attempting to ban the Communist Party. Though he avoided World War I service, he was a warmonger during the Cold War. In 1954 he engine
ered the defection of the Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov, and thus stole the subsequent federal election. He allowed the British government to drop atomic bombs in Australia, an expression of his subservience to the Empire, and a peril to Australian servicemen, desert Aboriginal people, and even to the Australian populace.
While continuing to profess loyalty to Britain, he hypocritically signed the ANZUS Treaty, framed in late 1951, coming into force in 1952. Then—to glide into another decade—in 1965 he lied about having received a request from South Vietnam for support, and committed troops to Vietnam to appease his American masters. Yet when the new monarch, Elizabeth II, had visited Australia in 1954 she had shed some of her own glamour and augustness on Menzies as well, and he stood praising her as a subject should, the very incarnation of British Australianness.
THE CANAL
Menzies’ engagement in the Suez Crisis in 1956 would be condemned by diplomat Owen Harries on the usual terms ‘that Menzies was not seeing things in terms of Australian interests and policy’. According to Harries, Menzies was seized by the notion popular in his youth, but discarded for over thirty years, of an Empire-wide foreign policy, with himself as one of its statesmen. But in connection with his apparently blundering intervention in the Suez Crisis, when Colonel Gamal Nasser, President of Egypt, ‘seized’ the Suez Canal in 1956, some would argue that Menzies’ reaction had to do with Australia’s nuclear ambitions, which could only be pursued in partnership with the United Kingdom, and that it was thus not blind loyalty on the part of the Anglophile Menzies, but the ambitions of a Cold War patriot. The Menzies government was focused on China, not Suez. The British Joint Planning Committee Paper submitted to the British Cabinet in 1956 a paper called ‘The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy’, describing the Australian dilemma: ‘a geologically isolated small power with limited manpower and resources . . . she must relate her defence policy and planning to the global strategy of the Western powers and must be prepared to contribute to the implementation of this strategy’.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 62