Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

What did hamper McMahon’s career was a sense of restlessness, a growing disenchantment with his life. As 1939 progressed, the young solicitor grew bored. The work at Allen Allen & Hemsley was repetitive: setting up companies, issuing claims, writing correspondence, dealing with matters small, litigious, commercial, and everyday. None of this was unexpected. It was an office job. Yet the devotion that his new role demanded left little time for socialising. McMahon began to feel isolated by the corridors of the office, by not being able to mix with others. Nor did his work offer much in the way of recognition. The satisfaction that he drew from his work ebbed. Then he lost interest entirely. ‘By the time the war came I really felt I’d had enough,’ he said later. ‘I think if the war hadn’t come I would soon have branched out into some other area of activity, the stock exchange or something.’15

  When it came, World War II found Australia largely unprepared. In the aftermath of the Depression, the Lyons government had been parsimonious with defence spending. In 1932–33, defence spending represented only 0.61 per cent of national income; in 1936–37 it was 1.09 per cent. Though it would continue to rise further over the next three years, this ‘tiny proportion’ of the national income was enough to fund little more than the maintenance of existing defence equipment.16 When he looked back, the treasurer at the time, Richard Casey, privately admitted that he could not summon ‘any arguments to support the belief that the Lyons government went out, horse, foot, and artillery to improve and increase Australia’s defensive equipment’.17

  Menzies surveyed the emasculated defence forces with apprehension. Australia’s navy was small; the air force had few modern planes and limited capability; the army was only a few thousand strong. Although the militia had been swelled by a frenetic recruitment campaign to some 75,000 men, it was poorly regarded.18 The militia was a social club for ‘Toy Soldiers’, claimed veterans of the AIF. They sneered that it was ‘fit only for half-wits’.19

  Despite this parlous state, nothing would prevent Australia’s entry into the war. When Britain declared hostilities on Germany for its violation of Poland’s sovereignty, Australia duly followed. The ‘melancholy duty’ that was Menzies’ to announce on 3 September 1939 was spurred by the ‘coldblooded breach’ of the ‘solemn obligations’ that Hitler had undertaken.20

  The government hastened to place the country on a war footing. Three days after declaring war, Menzies introduced the National Security Bill to the House of Representatives. The Bill gave the Commonwealth sweeping power to regulate every aspect of daily life, and it provoked outrage from the Labor opposition, which held it up in stormy sessions that lasted until the early hours of the morning of 9 September. Six days later, Menzies announced that the government would raise a volunteer military force of 20,000 men serving in Australia and abroad; this ‘special’ force would become the 6th Division of the AIF, succeeding the five that had been sent overseas during World War I.

  McMahon did not enlist immediately. He later claimed to have served briefly with the navy and the army before war broke out, but the documentary record does not contain evidence of this.21 McMahon could have been confusing his service with the militia, or simply exaggerating. Like many other Australians at the time, McMahon is likely to have been sanguine about the war.

  Between September 1939 and April 1940, it was possible to be so. Frustrated by the European winter, Germany made no move to attack the French on land; Australia’s relationship with Japan, while strained because of the latter’s aggression in the Pacific, still remained intact. There were no shortages of food or fuel, and the effects of the National Security Act were not yet understood beyond the lawyers who saw opportunities to prosper because of the poorly drafted regulations that were promulgated under it. Menzies had stressed the need for ‘calmness, resoluteness, confidence and hard work’, and the public had paid attention, to the point that plans for rationing petrol were resisted by the motor trade on grounds that it was unnecessary.22 These were the quiet months, later called the ‘phoney war’, when a new peace was still in prospect.

  This changed in the European spring of 1940. On 9 April, the Germans came with speed and force. They took Denmark in a night, and seized vital land in neutral Norway. During the next few weeks, as the British infantry in France was repeatedly routed, the muddle of English military preparedness and the failings of its political leadership were brutally exposed. Neville Chamberlain resigned. Winston Churchill became prime minister.

  In Australia, complacency fell away. Any notion that peace would be quickly restored was quashed and quashed again as news came of the German advance through undefended Holland and Belgium. By early June, the Germans were storming through the Ardennes and encircling the French troops on the Maginot Line while pressing the British back towards the beaches of Dunkirk. It was a shock to all. ‘The news struck cabinet like a bomb,’ recalled Percy Spender, the then-treasurer in the Menzies government. Henry Gullett, a distinguished veteran of World War I and the vice-president of the Executive Council, was staggered. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ Gullett kept saying. ‘I just can’t believe it.’23

  McMahon enlisted in the Citizen Military Force — the equivalent of the modern-day Army Reserves — on 26 April 1940. He was given the provisional rank of lieutenant for the year’s experience that he claimed as a former member of the university militia, and was assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 9th Army Brigade. But the enlistment did not last. Within a few weeks, he was back at work at Allen Allen & Hemsley.24

  Six months later, McMahon was posted for duty, this time with the Australian Military Forces, and assigned to the Machine Gun Training Battalion. He was thirty-two years old, single, and, when asked for his address, wrote that of Allen Allen & Hemsley’s. The address was no small point. ‘Arrangements’ had been made with Arthur Allen to allow Cowper, McMahon, and the other partners to enlist, serve, and return when the war was over.25 McMahon named his brother, Sam, as his next of kin, and wrote ‘Nil’ on the line available for statement of his religious denomination. It was not necessarily an indication that he had abandoned his faith. He did not record it on any of the remaining records.26

  The medical officer who examined McMahon deemed him Class II: fit for duties for which a disability was no bar. That disability was a ‘limited flexion’ of McMahon’s left knee, the reason for which was an ‘old injury’.27 The injury, along with his hearing problems, had the effect of keeping McMahon in Australia. He never served abroad.

  His war years, thus, were modest. ‘I can’t be pretentious about them,’ he later said.28 Kept on staff duties, McMahon was seconded to train in field marks and topography at Glenfield before rejoining his unit for further training in Dubbo. Late in February 1941, he was transferred to make use of his legal training in the Courts of Enquiry. Promoted to temporary captain in October, McMahon was an aide-de-camp before his appointment the following January as a staff captain with the deputy assistant quartermaster general (movements) at the headquarters of II Corps.

  In July 1942, his medical fitness was re-assessed, and he was classified as Class I — fit for active service. But the assessor noted McMahon’s hearing trouble: ‘Very slight disability hearing. Possibly from boxing.’ McMahon volunteered for the AIF, hoping to be sent overseas. It was not to be. Participating in night exercises, he failed to hear some danger signals. As a result, his fitness was re-assessed and downgraded to Class IIb: fit for any duty other than with field formations. The medical examiner’s diagnosis, of chronic bilateral middle-ear inflammation, was wrong, but the assessment of McMahon’s hearing capacities was correct. His hearing difficulties were hampering him again, restricting his choices and his opportunities.29

  He would later wonder about what might have happened had his hearing problems been accurately diagnosed and properly handled. That he had not been able to join the II Australian army’s move to Papua New Guinea in 1943 frustrated him. The fight against the Japanese on the Kokoda Track was hard,
wearing, and cruel, but he wished he had gone. ‘I suffered from a slight deafness then … and that made it difficult for me to command troops in a battle line,’ he said.30 Would he have commanded troops if his hearing had not been a problem? It is unlikely. McMahon was older than most recruits, and better educated. He knew how to handle paperwork. He knew how to administer. He would have been most useful in positions that utilised these talents. Serving in the field would have been a waste.31

  His promotion to major — temporary, at first, but then confirmed — was some solace, proof that he was making a contribution. He was happy. He had wanted out of an office, and in the army he got that. Moreover, he was close to Sydney: close enough to his friends and family, should he wish to see them; close enough to keep an eye on political developments, should he wish to as well.

  THE government that Menzies took over in the wake of Lyons’ death had been teetering by the time an election was called in 1940. The deaths of three cabinet ministers in an aeroplane crash in August that year had severely weakened the government’s capacities and its morale. Despite the restoration of a coalition between the UAP and Country Party, the government was too riven by conflict, and the Labor Party, under John Curtin, was resurgent. At the election, Menzies lost his slender majority. A year later, in August, his party’s restlessness and division forced his resignation from the prime ministership. ‘I have been done,’ Menzies told his private secretary afterward.32 The big man had tears in his eyes, yet was wry enough to quote an old children’s song: ‘Ile lay mee downe and bleed a while, and then Ile rise and fight againe.’33

  The stout and gregarious Arthur Fadden, who had returned to the Country Party fold and taken over the leadership from Archie Cameron, was thrust into the prime ministership by a combined vote of his party and the UAP. Treasurer after the election, Fadden was not enthusiastic. He was nervous. Percy Spender, sitting next to Fadden at the meeting, recalled the perspiration ‘running in little rivulets down his face’.34 Fadden knew his time as prime minister would be short. So did his colleagues. ‘Artie,’ Cameron said to him, ‘you’ll scarcely have enough time to wear a track from the back door to the shithouse before you’ll be out.’35

  And so it was. Forty days later, with the vote on the budget imminent, aware that the ‘rotten reeds’ of the mercurial independents Arthur Coles and Alex Wilson were likely to bring his government down, Fadden went without lunch. ‘My table was piled with files,’ he recalled, ‘and I worked on these to give my prospective successor a reasonable start.’36

  A reasonable start seemed hardly in prospect for his successor, John Curtin. Like Fadden and Menzies before him, the security of his government rested on the whims of the two independents. Like Menzies, Curtin came to the prime ministership with a divided, rancorous, and fractious party in tow. That ‘tangle of impulse[s]’,37 Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, had stepped down from the High Court to take a place in the House of Representatives in 1940. Ambitious and restless, he thought Curtin was ‘woefully timid’, and criticised his caution and tendency towards moderation.38 The puppeteer of the factions in New South Wales, Jack Beasley, had designs on the leadership himself; both men, wrote the British high commissioner to Australia, Sir Ronald Cross, were ‘determined to stab the other on the steps of the throne’.39 Moreover, a history of stress-related illnesses, bouts of depression, and drinking problems did not auger well for Curtin’s resilience in the face of the demands of the office. No one wanted a prime minister with the flagging energies that had mired Scullin and Lyons.

  Yet Curtin, for all his apparent unsuitability, was a quick study and a sure hand. Within a few weeks, one journalist judged, Curtin ‘had the job completely at his fingertips. He felt he was master of it and he was master of it.’40 Notwithstanding that his body would eventually give out, Curtin was able to overcome the difficulties that had plagued his predecessors. Unlike Menzies, he was able to quell the criticism and infighting of his colleagues. Unlike Menzies and Fadden, he was able to place his government’s parliamentary foundations on stable ground. And, by harnessing all of the restless energies around him, Curtin managed to bind his party, his government, and the Parliament towards one goal: defending Australia.

  He was aided by the onset of war with Japan. For two years, Japanese aggression in China and over the Pacific had been checked by a policy of economic isolation. Finally, on 7 December 1941, Japan lashed out against its enemies. Woken with the news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Curtin was calm: ‘Well, it has come.’

  Aware that war would now be fought on Australia’s doorstep, Curtin demanded from Churchill and US president Franklin Roosevelt a strong Allied presence in the Pacific. These demands grew more urgent as the rapid Japanese advance through Malaya continued towards Singapore, destroying the illusion of British-enforced security in the region. Alarmed, aware of Australia’s vulnerability, Curtin appealed publicly to the United States for help: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’41 The loss of Singapore was the shock Curtin needed in order to capture America’s attention. Late in March 1942, the American general Douglas MacArthur was appointed supreme commander of the south-west Pacific area, and took responsibility for strategic military decision-making. Though the threat of a Japanese invasion was effectively removed by the presence of American troops and naval vessels, and the victories of the Coral Sea and Midway Island, the Japanese landing in New Guinea and its thrusts over the Kokoda Track kept an edge and an urgency to the Australian war effort. In Sydney, barbed wire was uncoiled along the beaches; shopkeepers replaced glass frontages with boards; and the red double-decker buses that heaved through the streets were repainted in dull khaki.42

  The unity Curtin had wrought, and the effectiveness with which he prosecuted the war, saw him rise in the estimation of many. It was a complete contrast to the UAP and the Country Party, whose division and disunity had continued in opposition.

  After Fadden’s resignation from the prime ministership, Menzies had stepped down from the leadership of the UAP in order to leave his party ‘free to decide, without regard to individuals, whether it should become the official opposition or combine with the Country Party’.43 His colleagues in the UAP decided on joint party action, and allowed Fadden to stay as leader of the opposition. Menzies, adamant that the UAP, as the senior partner of the coalition, should hold the position, went to the backbench in despair, while remaining a member of the Advisory War Council. ‘Well, a party of our numbers which is not prepared to lead is not worth leading,’ he told colleagues.44

  Billy Hughes took over as leader of the UAP and deputy leader of the opposition. Wizened and deaf, but still full of fire and thunder, the Little Digger set himself two goals: to help win the war, and to keep hold of the UAP leadership for as long as he was able to.

  By 1943, Menzies had had enough. Labor was doing too well. The UAP was not prosecuting its case effectively. Divisions over conscription had afflicted it more than the government — a staggering fact, given the splits that had crippled Labor when the issue was confronted during World War I. On 1 April, Menzies and seventeen colleagues wrote to Hughes to inform him of their decision to not attend party-room meetings. ‘We consider it essential to reorganise the UAP under new and vigorous leadership,’ they wrote. Releasing the letter to the press, they formed what they called ‘a national service group’ that would operate within the UAP and help sharpen its attacks on the Curtin government.45

  Hughes was no fan of Menzies. ‘He couldn’t lead a flock of homing pigeons!’ he once said.46 Now a mesh of wrinkles, just skin, bone, and indomitable energy, the former prime minister had no reticence about lashing out. Calling the group ‘wreckers’, Hughes declared that they would be ‘as helpless in the House of Representatives as a beetle on its back’.47

  This was, however, a better description of the UAP and Country Pa
rty’s position after the Labor Party’s bomb-thrower, Eddie Ward, got involved. Sharp-tongued, often provocative, and never deferential, Ward suggested in October 1942 that the UAP and Country Party had planned to abandon northern Australia to a Japanese invasion. The so-called Brisbane Line was evidence of its rank defeatism, he argued. The attack was untrue and unacceptable, as Curtin himself acknowledged in an off-the-record briefing he gave to the press. Ward was a ‘bloody ratbag’, Curtin said,48 yet he did not quash the rumour until late in June 1943. Moreover, after the dissolution of the House of Representatives for the August election, Curtin would allude to the rumour by his comparison of the handling of the war under the Coalition and the Labor Party.

  It was in the lead-up to that election that McMahon made his first moves towards a political career. At the urging of Samuel Walder, he scouted Sydney for a seat that he could win. There were few options. The Labor Party held sway over much of the city. Seats inclined towards the UAP were held by the big men of the party: Percy Spender, Eric Harrison, Billy Hughes, and Frederick Stewart, who were firmly in control. McMahon would have no hope of toppling any of them in a preselection battle. ‘I came down to Sydney, but the notice was too short,’ McMahon reasoned later, ‘and I didn’t relish standing for preselection against the sitting Liberal Member [sic].’49

  It was for the best that he did not try. The 1943 election was a debacle for the non-Labor parties. The UAP was left with only fourteen members in the House of Representatives. Contesting only thirty-seven of the seventy-four seats in the parliament, the UAP attracted only 16 per cent of the primary vote. The popular support that buoyed the Curtin government almost swept away the big men that McMahon had shied away from challenging. ‘This is the first election in which my return has not been a foregone conclusion,’ wrote a shocked Billy Hughes, still leading the UAP. ‘We’ve been struck by a cyclone.’50 That cyclone stripped the party bare. On show were its institutional failings, its bereft leadership, and its lack of a policy direction beyond opposition to Labor.