Australians: Flappers to Vietnam
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After Hitler invaded Russia in June 1942, Australian Communists, having previously condemned the war as imperialist, swung all their efforts behind the fight. Suddenly the images of Lenin and Stalin were acceptable in the general community, given that the USSR was now our ally, and the party itself, and its leaders such as Lance Sharkey, were no longer proscribed. (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an23608272)
The bitter coal strike of winter 1949 would become such a crisis for Prime Minister Ben Chifley that he took the exceptional option of sending troops to work the mines in July, causing the miners to return to work, defeated, two weeks later. The strike was one of the factors that would end Chifley’s prime ministership later in the year. (Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University: Australasian Coal and Shale Employee’s Federation, Edgar Ross Collection)
The miners’ strike of 1949 produced extensive blackouts and gas supply failure and families were reduced to seeking fuel for cooking and heat. (Newcastle Region Library, BHP Collection, Image 0020021)
Following his defeat in the election of 1949, Ben Chifley consults Dr Bert Evatt, former Foreign minister and one of the architects of the United Nations, on the party’s future. In an Australia riven by sectarianism and anti-Communist fervour, Evatt would succeed Chifley as Labor leader, but fail to appease many Catholic members and in holding the party together. (Fairfax FXJ119728)
Young Britons transported to Australia under various schemes as a solution to their supposed economic and social disadvantage, suffered bitterly in repressive institutions from Western Australia to New South Wales. These boys at the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong, New South Wales, in 1949, are drying rabbit skins on a fence. (National Archives of Australia A1200, L11594)
Two unnamed Australian corporals of the Australian Occupation Force bring home their Japanese brides and children. Relationships between Japanese women and the occupation forces had at first been forbidden and considered as fraternisation with a recent enemy. But by 1956, when Australia had made a trade agreement with Japan, the Immigration minister allowed a crack to open in white Australia to admit ‘occupation brides’. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales APA 01486)
Left: William Hudson was Chief Engineer and Commissioner of the Snowy River Scheme. More than one hundred thousand workers from over thirty countries would be urged along by the tireless Hudson, who suffered the harshness of life in the Snowy along with the workers. (National Archives of Australia A11016, 358) Right: A post World War II poster aimed at attracting migrants was designed by newspaper graphic artist, Joe Greenberg. These images of the Australian idyll were hung in the grim displaced person camps in Europe and must have attracted even more than were accepted. (National Archives of Australia A434, 1949/3/21685)
Workers on the Snowy River Scheme have a party in the single men’s barracks at Island Bend in 1952. The man second from the left is a German immigrant, Karl Rieck, and his fellow German, Karl Pahl, is second from the right. (Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Karl Rieck, 1999, PHM 99/101/2)
Children of workers on the Snowy River Scheme were taught at bush schools such as the Happy Jack School in Khancoban, which is seen here just after it opened in 1955. (Fairfax FXJ157257)
By 1956, displays of ethnic heritage from countries other than Britain and Ireland were becoming part of all civic ceremonies. At the Moomba Festival in Melbourne that year, the Good Neighbour Council organised a float on which candidates for the Miss New Australia appeared in national costume. As such displays became more common, all but a minority of Australia thought it appropriate that gestures of immigrant origins be made. (National Archives of Australia A12111, 1/1956/17/75)
In 1955, Barbara Porritt, a pleasant but shy twenty-one year old from Redcar in Yorkshire, was credited with being the one-millionth post-war migrant, and found herself harried by the press after arriving in Melbourne aboard the liner Oronsay with her twenty-five year old husband, Dennis, an electrical fitter. Here the enthusiastic Australian press persuade Dennis to carry her over the threshold of their housing commission home. (National Archives of Australia A12111, 1/1955/4/41)
National service was introduced by Robert Menzies during the Korean War and the growing Communist infiltration of Malaya. Here a trainee named Brian Dryden of Fitzroy trips over barbed wire, to the appropriate amusement of his fellow recruits. (State Library of Victoria H98.105/4296)
Men from a Company of the 13th National Service Battalion based at Ingleburn near Sydney wait to go home after their period of national service. Such part time National Servicemen were referred to as ‘Nashos’. The scheme lasted from 1951 to 1959, but a system of conscription would be introduced again on terms of full-time duty in 1964. (Australian War Memorial P04443.007)
Robert Close, who first went to sea in a windjammer when he was fourteen, was a survivor of the Depression, and in an unhappy marriage when his racy Love Me Sailor was published in 1945. The following year he and his publisher were subjects of a charge of ‘obscene libel’. Sentenced to three months, he served only ten days, but thereafter moved to Paris, where he was compared to Hemingway and where this photograph was taken about 1948. (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an23609053)
At a communal washing area in Millers Point in Sydney in 1955, women take advantage of a dry day. These were typical of millions of Australian women of the period—they had heard and read of labour-saving devices, they had seen advertisements, but the miracle appliances were still beyond easy acquisition by most working people. (Fairfax/National Library of Australia/Ken Redshaw FXT162051)
In the wake of the Communist take-over of China in 1949, surveillance of premises associated with Communism became more intense. At the stage this picture was taken by police, the Communist Party Dissolution Act was being framed by Robert Menzies’ government, though the act would be struck down by a High Court decision the following year, when the government would move to a referendum on the matter. (Surveillance of suspected Communist Party members, Police Photographers Merchant and Clarke, 26 June 1950. NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & Police Museum, Sydney Living Museums, FP08_0158_002)
Bartolomeo (B.A.) Santamaria, son of a greengrocer of the Aeolian Islands, was founder of the Catholic Action Movement, the organisation from which the Industrial Groupers anti-Communist trade union warriors were recruited. Thus he was a catalyst for a disastrous Labor Party split in the 1950s and the emergence of the Democratic Labor Party. Combined with Santamaria’s uncompromising anti-Communism was an equally vehement call for social justice and the restriction of capitalism. (Newspix)
The 1956 Melbourne Olympics, as important to Australia’s assertion of identity and sporting prowess as they were, occurred at a time of intense international conflict, the Russians now having moved back into Budapest to suppress the Hungarian Revolution. When Hungary met the Soviet Union in the Olympic water polo semi-final, Ervin Zador of Hungary was only one of the Hungarian team who suffered spiteful damage in the pool, and who reciprocated. (Newspix)
The children of Melbourne were allowed an open day in the Olympic precinct and availed themselves of the chance at a gallop in this tapestry of Australian childhood past. (Newspix/State Library of Victoria H93.20/270)
Prime Minister Robert Menzies visited the Olympic Village and gave young sprinters Betty Cuthbert (right), eighteen, and Heather Innes, seventeen, a lift to the main stadium. Unlike modern similar scenes, this would have been an unscripted moment, and it delighted Australians who saw it as a gesture of social cohesion between avuncular politicians and ordinary people. It was an era too when our athletes trained in surf-fed pools and bush ovals and still won, as did Cuthbert, who would phenomenally fulfil Australian hopes by winning the 100m, 200m and relay Gold Medals. (Newspix)
The news of the coming British atomic tests on the Montebello Islands off the West Australian coast, to occur in October 1952, was kept such a secret that it was only when British war ships began arr
iving in Fremantle that the news got out. The leader of the ‘atomic fleet’, Rear Admiral Torlesse, complemented the people of Onslow, Western Australia, but when Perth newspapers heard the rumours, they dispatched journalists and photographers along desert tracks northwards to Onslow. (Australian War Memorial P00131.007)
In 1955 in South Australia, where atomic bombs tests were still in progress at Maralinga, the assurances of Professor Titterton, the eminent nuclear scientist, and of Minister of Supply Howard Beale, did not neutralise the scepticism and concern about the arms race of these members of the Union of Australian Women, Nan Sandy, Irene Bell, Kay Alexiou and Phyllis Powell. (State Library of South Australia B52555)
By modern standards the packaging of uranium being loaded aboard a commercial aircraft in Brisbane in 1952, by an unprotected, un-gloved airport luggage handler, seems cavalier and displays the systemic under-estimation of the peril of the tests by government and the Australian people. (Newspix/Bob Millar)
In 1952, the first nuclear device ever exploded by the United Kingdom was detonated in a bay on the main Montebello Island off Western Australia. There were two other tests in 1956. This airmail letter of 1958 carries the notation, ‘unable to deliver. The nearest we can get to the island is 5000ft in the air. Still radioactive.’ (National Archives of Australia C4078, N11350)
During the controversial British–Australia atomic bomb tests on the Australian mainland, bombs were detonated at ground level, in towers and by being dropped from aircraft. This RAF Valiant bomber dropped a bomb at Maralinga, eight hundred kilometres northwest of Adelaide, on 11 October 1956, and helped to create an environment uninhabitable by the Maralinga Tjarutja people. The release of the bomb, from a height of eleven thousand metres, was the first British launching of a nuclear weapon from an aircraft. (Newspix)
Sometimes the scientific officers at Maralinga, who wore more appropriate protective covering than many other personnel, were the ones most aware of the scale of radiation during the atomic testing in South Australia. (National Archives of Australia A6457, P214)
Michael Kmit, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, was a displaced person in Austria by the end of the war. Under the terms of his migration to Australia in 1949, he was required to work for two years in a job as a railway porter and cleaner. Already a friend of James Gleeson, Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale, he won the Blake Prize in 1953 and the Sulman Prize in 1957. He was a major influence on the so-called ‘Charm School’ of painting, based in the Sydney mansion Merioola, that included such painters as Margaret Olley and the other ‘reffo’, Sali Herman. (National Archives of Australia A1211, 1/1953/6/7)
Seven-times Archibald Prize winner and World War II official war artist, William Dargie was a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board at the time the Contemporary Art Society’s garnering of the first official invitation for Australia to attend the Venice Biennale. The invitation caused conflict and some embarrassment for the Australian art community. (National Archives of Australia A1200, L30134)
Albert Namatjira had already received renown as an artist when this picture of him and his wife was taken at a painting camp near the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission in 1946. His marriage to Rubina in 1928 had caused a period of exile, given that she was from a prohibited ‘skin group’, and during that time he had worked as a camel driver, travelling extensively through a landscape he would become famous for depicting. (National Archives of Australia A1200, L7853)
Albert Namatjira was presented with a truck by the oil company Ampol, and had by 1957 acquired full citizenship and been liberated from the restrictions that oppressed most Aboriginals. It was for carrying alcohol to a relative who still laboured under those conditions that he came to face a prison sentence. (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an24130689)
Desert Aboriginals Mark Wilson and David Unaipon attended the South Australian parliament in early 1942 to hear debate on an Aboriginals Bill aimed at a system of control of 3300 Aboriginals in South Australia. They were not happy that the normal controls on movement and employment of Aboriginals were reinforced by the legislation. (Newspix)
Pam, the young daughter of the secretary of the Australian Aborigines League, Doug Nicholls, has dressed in her best to see her father cast his vote in the 1949 federal election. This was the first federal election in which the minority of Indigenous people already registered in their states were allowed to vote. (Fairfax FXJ333271)
Pearl (Gambanyi) Gibbs, daughter of a Brewarrina Aboriginal woman and a white stockman, who spent her childhood on sheep stations, came to Sydney as a servant. Distressed by legislation which allowed the Aborigines Protection Board to confine anyone of Aboriginal blood at any of its managed stations, Pearl, seen here in 1954, began her long campaign against discrimination. (Fairfax/George Lipman FXJ72707)
Though of South Sea Islander background, Faith Bandler was often described as ‘an Aboriginal activist’. What was certain was that this persuasive woman was the face of the successful 1967 Yes vote. (Fairfax/ George Lipman FXJ2707)
The 1967 referendum to empower the Federal government to take control of the rights of Indigenous people, ensuring standard laws throughout the nation, the franchise to all Aboriginals, and opening the door to land rights, was passed by the largest Yes vote of any referendum proposal in Australian history. (The Australian Women’s Weekly/Bauer Media Ltd)
At Green Valley in 1963, the New South Wales government opened a housing scheme for Aborigines. In this picture, Chief Secretary Kelly of New South Wales welcomes Arthur McLeod and his wife, who have moved from Worragee near Nowra. Mrs McLeod became president of the Parents and Citizens Association of the Sadlier Primary School. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales GPO 2 21630)
As part of their demand for land rights and wage justice, in 1966 the Gurindji stockmen sat down at the Northern Territory’s Wave Hill Station, owned by the international Vestey group. (Newspix)
In 1968 this depiction of a Gurindji man receiving crumbs from the pastoral industry was a graphic statement of the validity Aboriginal land claims were coming to have in popular opinion. (Newspix/John Frith)
In 1962, Robert Gordon Menzies met President Kennedy on a September morning in the White House. Though one was a champion of Empire and the other a Massachusetts liberal democrat, both men were uneasy about the advance of Communism in South East Asia. (Abbie Rowe, White House Photographer. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum AR7489-B)
Labor leader Arthur Calwell had the distinction of being the only Australian political figure subjected to attempted assassination. Here he returns to Melbourne after treatment of facial wounds suffered when an unstable young man named Peter Kocan shot him in Sydney in mid-1966. Kocan, rehabilitated, would become a notable novelist. (Fairfax FXJ217389
Doug Walters, the twenty-year-old Test cricketer, reports at Marrickville Barracks for induction as a conscript soldier, and passes anti-conscription protesters. As 2783873, Private Walters would not be sent to Vietnam, but while still a soldier, played against the Indians and toured England, scoring his one thousandth Test run in only his eleventh Test. (Newspix)
In early 1966, a pedestrian passes the placards of Save Our Sons in Martin Place, Sydney. The power behind the movement was the remarkable English-born Bridget Gilling, fourth from the right, who would also be involved in the founding of the Women’s Liberation Movement. (Fairfax FXJ171269)
Charles Perkins, the first Aboriginal university graduate, was leader of the Freedom Riders, a collection of students, white and black, who travelled around the state of New South Wales campaigning for an end to the segregation and exclusion of Aboriginals in places such as cinemas and pools. After fighting a hard campaign in Moree in 1965, he joins Aboriginal children in the town pool. (Newspix/Neville Whitemarsh)
By the end of the 1960s, Australian women were active in the equal pay campaign and Mrs Zelda d’Aprano made her point by chaining herself to the front doors of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne.
(Fairfax FXJ128797)
In October 1966, President Lyndon Johnson visited Australia, considering it an important ally in South Vietnam. When protesters blocked his motorcade, the colourful New South Wales Premier, Robert Askin, accompanying Johnson, shouted this advice to the driver. (Newspix)
At Nam Dong in South Vietnam in June 1964, the incisive, eloquent and vigorous leader of the Australian Army Training team, Ted Serong, inspects a mortar pit in which, the previous day, Warrant Officer Kevin Conway became the first Australian killed by enemy action. (Australian War Memorial P00963.005)
On the left, Captain Barry Petersen, a young Queenslander, had an extraordinary career as a leader of Montagnard irregulars, whose grievances he directed towards the Viet Cong. After two years of commanding the Montagnard Truong Son Force of a thousand tribesmen and having acquired the Montagnard name Dam San, Captain Petersen was brought back into the regular service. With him here is one of his Montagnard warriors, and his offsider Warrant Officer Jock Roy. (Australian War Memorial DNE_65_0428_VN)