Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The Australians had received news of the plan for a British nuclear capability in the Far East two days before Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and took control of it away from France and Britain. But Nasser did not close the Canal to shipping, rather waiting for a resolution by way of an international London Conference. Menzies was summoned to London and asked by the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, to go to Egypt as chairman of a five-nation committee, and to talk sense into Nasser. The invitation appealed not only to Menzies’ vanity as a statesman but also as a mission of global importance. He declared before leaving for Egypt that Colonel Nasser’s actions had created the most serious crisis since World War II, exacerbated by the fact that the Soviet Union was ready to align itself with Egypt. When he arrived in Egypt, Menzies told a young journalist that military action against Nasser would split the Western world, and the journalist, Keith Kyle, thought the observation very sensible. But before he left for Egypt, Menzies had made a speech about ultimate military force being deployed, and Eden, to the great resentment of the BBC, had forced the broadcaster to transmit the interview as part of his own campaign for a British invasion of Egypt. The speech made Menzies’ Minister for External Affairs, Casey, who had some knowledge of Arab countries, very unhappy, as it did another leading Liberal, Billy McMahon. McMahon declared he could not see why it was wrong for Egypt to take the Canal back as long as Nasser didn’t close it. In a telephone hook-up, Menzies’ ministers advised him not to lead the mission. Their dissent was leaked to the media and embarrassed British Prime Minister Eden.

  Menzies’ mission landed at Cairo airport late on 2 September. He was greeted at the bottom of the plane’s stairs by a scrum of press, foreign and Egyptian. As he landed and made his press statement, throughout Cairo there had been demonstrations against the British. Houses were burned and a Canadian trade commissioner had been killed, and the cry that raged through the streets was ‘Get out, British!’ Western attitudes such as Menzies’ earlier statement that the Egyptians were not capable of running their own country fed into the sense of grievance. Again, Menzies himself wrote, ‘These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, mouthing the slogans of democracy.’ In that atmosphere, he and his commission were driven to Nasser’s headquarters.

  Nasser was a charismatic leader with visionary plans for Egypt. His idea of the Allied success at El Alamein in 1942 (not that he wanted Rommel in Egypt either) was diametrically opposed to that of Menzies and Churchill, since in his view it had enabled Britain to impose its will on the weak King Farouk and to maintain control of the Canal. Israel’s military victory in 1948 over encircling Arab nations in the Sinai angered Nasser and other military men in Egypt because they had fought with gimcrack weaponry underprovided by Farouk’s corrupt family. Nasser had overthrown Farouk in 1952.

  On the evening of their first meeting, Nasser impressed Menzies, but when Menzies asked that the canal be placed in the hands of an international body, Nasser ultimately refused, seeing such a body as continuing ‘collective imperialism’. He referred to Menzies privately as ‘that Australian mule’, and over the next few days would often leave Menzies confused as to his manners and intentions. He did not guess anything regarding Menzies’ desire for nuclear weaponry.

  Even though Casey had warned Menzies his mission to Cairo would fail, Menzies always felt President Dwight D. Eisenhower undermined him during the meetings by saying the United States would not go to war over the issue, thus making it easier for Nasser to reject him and then give his urbane apologies and depart for Alexandria to visit his family. Eisenhower, said Menzies, had undermined British prestige. ‘It’s apparently not fashionable to speak of prestige,’ he declared with what by later standards would seem a leap of logic, ‘but the fact remains that peace in the world and the whole authority of the charter of the United Nations alike require that the British Commonwealth and in particular its greatest and most experienced member, the United Kingdom, should retain power, prestige and moral influence.’

  There is some evidence that Nasser’s refusal was the result Eden wanted, for that made it possible for France, Britain and Israel to invade Egypt—in late October in Israel’s case, followed by France and Britain in early November, supposedly as peacekeepers but in fact as canal reacquirers. Under torrents of international outrage, including from America, an armistice was signed within days, despite the success of the Israelis, French and the British. This was a sign that Britain could use its force only conditionally, that what Menzies called the ‘prestige’ had passed to the United States. By overreaching, Eden had helped make this happen.

  So, was Menzies a statesman or a stooge? Was he driven by a hard-headed concern about national security or by reflex imperial sentiment? Many historians argue that Australia’s regional interests depended on the Middle East. The sea route through the Suez Canal had long been a lifeline of the Empire and thus of Australia. So was there really a ‘Britain first’/‘Australia first’ polarity in Menzies?

  Menzies acknowledged the geopolitical reality of Australia’s situation with visits to Asia, particularly one in 1957 that involved six days in Japan with Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, a three-day visit to Thailand where he spoke about Australia’s South-east Asia Treaty Organization ties, and an address to the Philippine Congress in Manila.

  In the early 1950s Menzies pursued Australian economic policies that were detrimental to British and Commonwealth interests. He took his party to the polls in 1949 on a policy of abolishing petrol rationing, against the wishes of the British government, who wanted to preserve the scarce US dollar supplies of the sterling bloc, an alliance of Commonwealth countries including Australia that merged in a sort of currency fortress to protect the value of the pound sterling against all other currencies. The Menzies government came to see Australia’s economic interests as ‘irreconcilable with membership of a discriminatory sterling area’, and he favoured the incorporation of the sterling countries into a multilateral economic order led by the United States.

  And when the risk of global war diminished and the Asian region became an arena of Communist advances, Australia paid more attention to that, and even Menzies retreated from the idea that the Middle East would be a region of Australian military endeavour. Even in the case of Malaya, he sent troops in 1955 to battle Chinese Communists, but only after he became alarmed by the French defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese Communists in Indochina.

  Menzies had no doubt that Armageddon was coming, but Australia’s spending on national security (as by governments before World War II and in more modern times) was nowhere near as fulsome as the rhetoric. Despite the introduction of compulsory national service, there was no mobilisation of the economy for the imminence of war. Curtin and Chifley had mobilised the economy in a way that left the electorate ultimately disgruntled, and had—in Chifley’s case in particular—affronted Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’, his constituency. Such mobilisation and the dourness it introduced into life was what Menzies had promised to put an end to when elected in 1949. The desires of manufacturers and the public were not to be dragged away from the purchase of goods into the building of a large army, air force or navy.

  Despite that, Menzies was haunted by Australia’s lack of preparation for World War II. As a result, from 1951, nearly all eighteen-year-old males were required to register for national service training of fourteen weeks and to serve a further forty-two days in the citizen military forces over three years. It was a universal scheme but there were exemptions. University students were expected to serve during a designated period between the first and second years of their study, but ministers of religion, priests and theological students and the medically unfit were entitled to exemption.

  The problems with national service in the 1950s foreshadowed some of the issues that would arise from conscription for Vietnam. There were, for example, many other claims for exemption. In 1953, a Tasmanian widow pleaded, ‘My husband died in 1948, and this boy is my only son. He has had a cal
l to enter camp January 4 1954 with no further deferment. We have twenty-five acres of potatoes to work and some soon to dig, also twenty-two cows to milk and harvest to attend to, besides other stock and work. I have one other man working at present but it’s almost impossible to get labour . . . will you please help me?’

  Harold Holt, the Minister for Defence, initially brushed aside concerns about rural labour shortages, but in late December 1954, deferral criteria were broadened to include rural workers. The Victorian Anti-Conscription Council pointed out the problems young men had trying to put a case in front of a magistrates court and the injustice ‘that youths who cannot help being eighteen years old should be denied a right allowed to convicted criminals’.

  In 1952, a South Australian conscientious objector named Brian Mason galvanised those supporting the right of appeal. His situation encapsulated the problems generated by the government’s rigid approach. A magistrate denied Mason’s application to be recognised as a conscientious objector, and as a result of his remaining so, he was imprisoned in Holsworthy army base in Sydney where he refused to wear a uniform. Two other unsuccessful conscientious objectors followed Mason to imprisonment in Holsworthy. The claim ‘that his forcible removal from home is causing great hardship to his widowed mother’ resulted in Mason’s case becoming a cause célèbre.

  A principle was put in place that there would be no naturalisation of those immigrants of an age appropriate for national service unless they fulfilled National Service. This involved a complicated negotiation with overseas governments on the issue of call-up, and international problems continued to hamper efforts to conscript aliens. Meanwhile, Aborigines exempted included full Aborigines, half-castes, and persons of Aboriginal extraction living as Aborigines. Chinese Australians were eligible for call-up, an explicit contradiction of the White Australia Policy. The navy was quite definite though in its unwillingness to recruit naturalised Australians of non-European descent. Similar caution was exercised with Maltese immigrants.

  In 1964, Menzies decided to block the efforts of his Immigration minister, Hubert Opperman, legendary cycling champion, and Department of Immigration Secretary Peter Heydon to bring about a moderate liberalisation of the White Australia Policy by admitting a few ‘distinguished non-Europeans’. Menzies answered Opperman’s complaint that the existing policy was racially discriminatory by saying, ‘Good thing too—right sort of discrimination.’

  The imperial baubles that Menzies received at the end of his career, with their arcane references to the Order of the Thistles and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (an honorary remnant of the medieval job of looking after the crucial English ports of Dover, New Romney, Sandwich, Hastings and Hythe), seemed a reward and culmination for this last great imperial loyalist, and seemed also to some to show the irrelevance of his convictions to the sort of pragmatic politics pursued by Sir Percy Spender. Menzies’ grudging acceptance of the end of the old Empire and his attachment to old-fashioned Britishness allowed Labor, despite the work of Spender, Casey and Barwick, in creating Asian and American contacts, to be seen as the party best suited to place Australia in a post-colonial world.

  King George VI died in 1952, bringing in a handsome young queen with whom Sir Robert Menzies would be platonically enamoured. To most people, the fresh-faced young monarch seemed preferable to Stalin’s saturnine features, and the Queen’s visit in 1954 created unprecedented excitement. Thousands of schoolchildren rallied at public grounds to welcome the monarch, the Catholic kids—whose parents were generally now onside and equally scared of Communism as the majority—as enthusiastically as the rest. If a few thought the monarchy anachronistic, they might have been more exercised to hear that high-grade uranium ore was also discovered that year, upping the politics of nuclear tests.

  Menzies’ electoral success in 1957 was again resounding. On 22 November he was returned with a nineteen-seat majority in the House of Representatives, helped by Democratic Labor Party preferences, the emerged anti-Labor party in the Australian polity. It was the largest majority any government had commanded since Federation.

  AGAIN, OUR ICE

  The issue of Antarctica surfaced with the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which, with three further treaties and subsidiary agreements, constituted the Antarctic Treaty System, and would ensure that the polar continent and surrounding ocean remained a demilitarised space largely free of squabbling over resources. There had been, unnoticed by most Australians until later in the century, tensions involving fishing and potential military use, and the minerals and other bounties Antarctica might offer. Griffith Taylor, a member of Scott’s last expedition, had called Antarctica the ‘gigantic inheritance’, but it did not enter the minds of twentieth-century Australians as such. These matters did not have the same impact on the Australian emotions as the issues of Communism in Asia and nuclear power.

  Post-war, Australia established stations on its two subantarctic islands, Heard Island in 1947, and Macquarie Island in 1948. Australia had revived its interest in the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean by secretly commissioning the ship Wyatt Earp to visit the Antarctic coastline and to put parties ashore, because they feared if they did not the Americans would claim them. A 1948 visit by ship to various areas in the Australian claim was frustrated by thick pack ice and weather that prevented reconnaissance by air. The Australian government created an Antarctic Division and also placed two permanent scientific stations on the long coastline of Australian Antarctica: Mawson (near Mawson’s original hut) in 1952; and in 1957, Davis, named after the famous Antarctic navigator, further to the east, in a location Mawson had visited on his 1931 expedition. Wilkes Station, initiated in 1957 by the Americans, was taken over in 1959 by the Australians, and in 1969 Australia would replace Wilkes with the purpose-built Casey, further east still from Davis—as if they were asserting the claim.

  For the Antarctic Division director, Phillip Law, recognised in 1949: ‘No nation can hope to rope off a section of the earth as its property unless it sustains its claim by actively occupying a portion of that area and carrying out useful work there.’ The new Antarctic Division operated under the aegis of the Department of External Affairs. The Cold War had its impact on Australia’s relationship to Antarctica. The establishment of the first Australian station, Mawson, in 1952, occurred because at that time the extent of Australian Antarctic Territory was under direct challenge as the United States and the Soviet Union refused to recognise it as Australian space.

  Both superpowers had shown they would not recognise any existing claims to the region and reserved the right to make further claims of their own. The US navy had by now initiated a series of expeditions to the Antarctic under the name of ‘cold weather training’, and in return, in 1949, the All-Soviet Geographical Society reiterated its commitment to pursuing studies of the Antarctic.

  The announcement of an International Geophysical Year for 1957–58 led to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a direct challenger to Australian polar sovereignty; Russian stations such as Mirny, within a short ride of Davis, were founded. Had the Australian public noticed developments on the ice it would have stoked their fears of the advance of Communism. As it was, some noticed and expressed anxiety that the presence of Soviet scientists in Australian Antarctica would lead to their secretly establishing submarine bases and missile stations to threaten cities such as Perth and Adelaide. It did not seem such a fantastic claim in that period. Hundreds of Russians at Mirny base could be seen as foreshadowing that. Antarctica, therefore, became the southernmost frontier of a Cold War.

  AUSTRALIAN ART AND ITS FRIENDS

  In 1937, Menzies, then Attorney-General, had declared he found ‘nothing but absurdity in much so-called modern art with its evasion of real problems and its cross-eyed drawing’. Labor politicians probably harboured the same attitudes, if indeed they had any—perhaps ‘Doc’ Evatt was the Parliament’s sole aficionado.

  Menzies’ views were expressed during the much-publicised disputes generated by his propos
al to establish an Australian Academy of Art, an Australian version of London’s Royal Academy. Its purpose was hard to define, but Menzies wanted it to ward off decadent modern trends. Its declared aim—in addition to art education—was to ‘champion the rights of individual and associated artists’. A number of painters associated with George Lambert joined by invitation, and so did many of those influenced by the Impressionists, including Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, who were considered ‘sane modernists’. The fifty foundation members came from the various art societies around Australia. They included W.B. McGuinness, the doctrinaire Max Meldrum and John Longstaff, who were personal friends of Menzies. The academy did not contain even leading conservative artists like Arthur Streeton and Norman Lindsay. Rupert Bunny was one of five invitees who declined to join. Modernists were not welcome.

  The academy’s inaugural exhibition was in Sydney in 1937, and a year later a second was held at the State Gallery of Victoria. In opening an exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, Menzies declared with all the confidence of his ignorance that he noted that the Victorian Artists’ Society was encouraging a range of painting. ‘Experiment is necessary in establishing an Academy,’ said Menzies, ‘but certain principles must apply to this business of art as will any other business which affects the artistic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today talk in different language.’ In the exhibition there was a wall devoted to modernist painting—surrealism, for example, and post-cubism, futurism, those influenced by Picasso. These artists, members of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), raised eyebrows at each other. James Quinn, curator of the exhibition, though not a modernist himself, immediately distanced himself from Menzies’ statement. George Bell, founder of the CAS, a respected Melbourne artist and teacher who had nurtured Russell Drysdale and the immigrant Sali Herman, amongst others, though he would later himself denigrate artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, nonetheless sought to set Menzies right over his remarks and his intention for the academy. ‘Just as it would be ludicrous for an artist to argue a knotty point of law, so it is ludicrous for Mr Menzies to lay down what is good drawing and what good art is . . . Academies have been, throughout history, reactionary influences.’ Meldrum lined up on Menzies’ side, Herman (and Evatt, who knew something of modern art) on Bell’s.