by Peter Rees
Bean clearly thought that there would be war with Germany. His assessment would prove prescient, and the articles generated wide interest. He wrote that he wanted to give a picture of the great fight that had never yet been fought—an equal battle between two big modern fleets:
The Navy knows that the German is a magnificent sailor in magnificent ships; and the war would be desperate . . . There is only one possible justification for war; and that is if in its heart the German people, as apart from its Emperor, covets some corner of British territory. We do not know that it does. But the Empire must make ready to speak with anyone [who comes] in the gates. So, for that matter, must Germany.
The Americans and their white-painted warships impressed Bean, but he noted that their officers, especially their captains, had an average age of around sixty—at least fifteen years older than most British captains. He had no doubt that ‘our service is ideally youthful just now.’ He approved of the American crews he met—‘as young as their officers are old—mere slips of schoolboys, brimful of bright intelligence, sparkling and overflowing with humour.’ He looked for an Australian parallel. ‘One cannot help thinking that the Australian seaman will have every bit as much intelligence as the American; and the nerves and energy of the British. His difficulty will be discipline.’ This was premised on Bean’s dream for the Commonwealth Naval Forces, which had been established in 1901, becoming a much expanded and stronger Royal Australian Navy patrolling the Australian seas. As much as anything, the book was a plea for an Australian navy.
To Bean, this was needed to ensure ‘the place which Anglo-Saxon men and Anglo-Saxon ideas shall take and keep in the Pacific’. Politically, he was on fertile ground, as both Alfred Deakin and Labor’s rising star Billy Hughes believed in asserting Australia’s role in the Pacific. This common ground was a reflection of the racial nationalism that had become popular in the late nineteenth century.
On a per capita ratio to the British fleet, Australia would need five battleships, twelve cruisers and thirty-four torpedo boats—at a cost of £14.6 million. But the all-up cost with infrastructure would be at least £25 million and £4 million a year to run—which would provide a navy a third as strong as the Japanese one. Bean cautioned that:
. . . Australians do not realise the value of thoroughness. The Japanese artillery—probably the Chinese, too, by this time—may be officered by men who are really elaborate engineers; who may have their balloons, their kites, their wireless telephones, their crowds of signallers. But any old thing is good enough for the Australian batteries.
In reflecting on war in general, Bean saw that there were times when all this ‘prodigious preparation to kill or be killed’ seemed useless and hopeless. ‘But after all it is based on the one truth, which is true beyond question, that there are matters about which a man worth anything cannot compromise; that there are worse things than dying; that, if it comes to that pass, life which would have to be lived not as you think right, but as some Asiatic may think right, is not worth living at all.’ However anachronistic this might appear today, Bean reflected a view commonly held at the time—not least by politicians such as Billy Hughes, who echoed the case for an Australian navy and argued that if Australia tied itself wholly to British naval power, over which it had no control, it might find itself abandoned in the event of war. In the political debate of the time, advocacy such as that of Hughes helped give legitimacy to Bean’s views.
When the book was published, Australians took note—among them Henry Lawson, who wrote to his sister more than a year later that he was ‘reading With the Flagship in the South over and over again’. Bean’s style reminded him of Rudyard Kipling and the Australian writer and Boer War veteran John Henry Abbott ‘at their very best.’ Abbott’s 1902 book, Tommy Cornstalk, presented a picture of the Australian soldier very much in accord with the one Bean eventually incorporated in the Anzac legend.
Monty Grover was also greatly impressed when the articles that formed the basis for Bean’s book landed on his desk at the Herald. Grover, too, compared Bean with Kipling, citing his 1898 book, A Fleet in Being, but found Bean the simpler and more honest writer. He called him ‘a super-journalist for several reasons.’ Foremost among these was ‘his marvellous clearness of description.’ Bean took nothing for granted and allowed the reader to take nothing for granted. Thanks to his legal training, he approached the subject with an open mind and realised that his job was to explain things to the reader as clearly and as briefly as possible—not to appear wise or pose as ‘literary’. Bean did not strive for effect and was ‘too good a sport’ to descend to Kipling’s trick of flinging technical terms at a mystified reader ‘that men might think him brave’. Nor did he use tricky phrases or didactic generalisations to conceal sloppy investigation. Importantly, Grover added, ‘Like every true journalist Bean regards the manner as less important than the matter. Facts are supreme; the writing is only a necessary attribute to the work.’
Grover had one reservation, though. At the end of With the Flagship in the South the influence of Bean’s British and public school upbringing was clearly evident. He wrote that there was ‘a certain pure old cross of St George which the smallest grey gunboat carries about the world.’ To Bean, it was ‘. . . a thousand and one ideas wrung out by British men and women from the toil and sweat of nine hundred years, that make the Anglo-Saxon life worth living for the Anglo-Saxon.’
This imperial idealisation was too much for Grover, who observed: ‘The book concludes with a short chapter which is unworthy of the writer—a few hundred words of flamboyant flapdoodle about the flag. It could well have been omitted.’
In a postscript to a new edition published in London in August 1909, Bean ignored such criticism. He noted when the book first appeared, ‘Germany has quietly been planning, for some purpose, to have on the sea, some time in 1912 or 1913, a navy stronger than the British navy.’ And he forecast:
Australians have never yet had their naval problem brought really home to them. It will come on them with a jump in 1915 . . . The navy knows today its greatest problem is that in 1915 England must either make some stupendous effort to send to Hong Kong 14 or 18 Dreadnoughts; or else for the first time give up the Pacific Command. The navy knows. But the first land folk to realise the bareness of the Pacific will be Australians not British . . . England has definitely pledged herself to defend Australia on the seas. But at that time, as far as can be seen, England will still be struggling neck and neck with Germany . . . Under the circumstances, does it not seem absolutely impossible for her to send at that time a quarter of her fleet, wrung out of the purses of her people, to the other end of the world chiefly to defend Australia?
Bean was certain that war was coming and wanted to shake Australians out of their torpor about this prospect. Just who the men were who would form the backbone of the new Australian Army he was about to find out.
8
The Sydney passenger
The newspaper world was taking notice of Charles Bean. The Melbourne Argus tried to poach him; so too did the Herald’s Sydney rival, the Daily Telegraph. The Herald raised his salary to £9 a week—and he stayed. By 1909 Bean was fast becoming its star reporter. He had cut his teeth on the hard news of daily rounds, but he saw himself more as a commentator. Living away from Australia for ten years enabled him to stand outside and take a different perspective, observing at once as an Australian and as a foreigner.
His editor, Thomas Heney, was clearly impressed. Bean had not long returned from reporting the opening of the Kosciusko [sic] Hotel, which had taken him into the alpine landscapes that Banjo Paterson glorified. The opening, by the Governor and the Premier of New South Wales, was a noteworthy event. Bean was enraptured and reported in the Herald:
Last night the State Governor formally opened to the people of Australia a district which, once having seen it, one cannot doubt to be the playground of Australia in the future, the Australian highlands.
Men could not ride down these ri
dges, as the [people of the Monaro region] undoubtedly do, as the man from Snowy River did, if the climate did not make for strength, both of body and spirits.
Heney, however, had a new project in mind for him, far from the snowfields. He called Bean into his office and told him he wanted a series of articles on the comparative importance of the wool industry. The paper had recently looked at the problems of wheat, fruit, dairy and other farmers, but Heney, who had edited a paper at Wilcannia on the Darling River, believed that the wool industry counted for more in Australia than any of these and was being unduly ignored. He gave Bean an open brief. More than fifty years later Bean—writing in the third person—recalled:
The youngish reporter was not enthusiastic—the chief-of-staff, into whose cubby-hole he turned, had tasks much more urgent in view for the young man; and as the latter trudged up Pitt Street, glumly revolving a possible division of the subject in accordance with the products of the sheep industry—wool, meat, tallow, glue, lanolin—his heart was as heavy as the prospective articles. And then it flashed upon him that the most important product of the wool industry for Australia was men; it was responsible for creating some of the outstanding national types. If he described the lives of those men—their qualities, worries, and occupations out in those lonely parts—he would incidentally be describing the processes and methods of the wool industry.
Bean realised that he had never seen wool industry characters systematically portrayed. Who were the boundary riders, the rouseabouts, the shearers, the drovers and the rest? As he walked along Pitt Street he explained to his colleague Harry Green how he would tackle the assignment, the first article already shaping itself in his mind. Bean caught the tram home a happy man.
He took the train to Quirindi, 400 kilometres from Sydney, and stayed at Kurrumbede station, one of several sheep properties owned by the respected physician, politician and grazier Sir Charles Mackellar, who was prominent in Sydney society and in the dominant Anglican community. Mackellar held strong views, including the belief that environmental factors determined the development of the young. To Bean, Mackellar was a respected friend. He was also the father of his good friend Dorothea Mackellar, then a rising literary figure. A few months earlier, the London Spectator had published her evocative poem ‘Core of My Heart’, which would become better known as ‘My Country’.
From Kurrumbede Bean headed to Bourke, a riverboat town on the Darling River and a hub for pastoralists in western New South Wales since its establishment in 1861. Here, where the railway met the port, steamers unloaded goods for outback communities and collected wool from the stations. The Darling River was the barren and inhospitable region’s vital artery. At Bourke, Bean found the riverboat Jandra—or, as he would name it in one of his two books on his travels to the outback, the Dreadnought.
The Jandra took Bean down the Darling, and four days later he arrived at the vast Dunlop Station, sprawling over nearly 400,000 hectares. The pastoralist Sir Samuel McCaughey owned Dunlop, and it was there in 1888 that the world’s first mechanised shearing of sheep took place in a forty-five-stand woolshed that, more than 125 years later, still stands. Bean stayed in the large sandstone homestead, one of several grand residences along the Darling River.
Bean returned to Sydney after two weeks in the outback, convinced that he had ‘seen all I could of the wool industry.’ He rounded off his research with a visit to a factory in suburban Marrickville to see what became of the wool. With this knowledge, Bean wrote twenty-three articles that the Herald published as the ‘Wool Land’ series.
A visiting British journalist, Archibald Marshall, himself a novelist, read the articles and asked Bean if he could take them back to England with the aim of having them published. ‘I put the wool articles into book-shape, altering them very little, and called them On the Wool Track.’ Marshall gave the articles to the London publisher Alston Rivers, and the book appeared to general acclaim.
Together with his trip the previous year to Broken Hill, the travel also enabled him to write The Dreadnought of the Darling, published in 1911—again based on nine articles that first appeared in mid-1910 in The Sydney Mail, which the Herald also published. These experiences provided Bean with an insight into the character of Australians in the bush, and the struggles they faced in a harsh and inhospitable land. The first chapter of On the Wool Track begins dramatically:
There was death in the paddock. For nine days the police had followed a man’s footsteps. Once and again the footmarks would turn back upon themselves. Now they would lead round and round a tree. Now they would shoot off at right angles. At long intervals the searchers had found towards evening clear signs that his feet had begun to drag. They could see clearly the long scrape of the toe before each heel-mark. They quickened pace, following the tracks with all the skill that was in them. Presently they came to his hat.
The first page sets the scene for the life-and-death battle that Australians faced in the arid interior. In this case, the dead man had become lost in a vast paddock as he attempted to walk to Sydney, 1000 kilometres away. ‘He never got out of the one paddock,’ Bean wrote. Amid this harshness, Bean was mesmerised by the beauty of the endless, pitiless country:
One has seen the country where men have died; and if the place had not actually done them to death, one would not have dreamed that there could be any cruelty in the heart of it. There were no Alpine precipices. No avalanches or black jungles full of wild beasts, no earthquakes, not even a flood or a bushfire. The countryside looked like a beautiful open park with gentle slopes and soft grey tree-clumps. Nothing appalling or horrible rushed upon these men. Only there happened—nothing. There might have been a pool of cool water behind any one of those tree-clumps—only there was not. It might have rained, any time; only—it did not. There might have been a fence or a house just over the next rise; only—there was not. They lay down, with the birds hopping from branch to branch above them and the bright sky peeping down at them. No one came. Nothing happened. That was all.
The men out there fascinated Bean, not least the shearers. He heard conversations on a variety of topics, which he thought made better listening than many speeches in Parliament. To Bean, the shearer was a surprisingly high class of workman. He ‘could manufacture what was needed out of things which one would have thought impossible to turn to any use at all,’ and this had become more than an art. ‘It has long since become part of his character.’ Bean thought that Australians alone were born with this quality, and he was reminded that British Field Marshal Lord Kitchener had said that, as raw material for soldiers, Australians were the equal, if not the superior, of any people he knew. Kitchener added: ‘A great deal of training that would, in the ordinary course, have to be supplied to obtain an efficient soldier is already part of the daily life of many of your lads.’ Bean saw this as a product of race:
Such qualities as Australians have are, of course, only drawn from the British race, because the people of Australia was then and still is as purely British as the people of Great Britain—perhaps more so than the population of London. But these qualities were never—and never will be—elicited from the race by such agencies as the sea-beaches and soft breezes, sweet fruits and easy hours of which the advertisements speak. The men whom Kitchener had seen at Eland’s River [Transvaal] came spare, brown, and wiry from the cattle stations and sheep runs, the dust and heat—the dreary months with vivid intervals of overstrain—of Queensland.
Race, together with Britain’s cramped city living conditions, helped Bean explain why Englishmen who had migrated to Australia had adapted to the trials of the outback. New chums tended to believe at first that ‘a thing could not be done’ whereas, of course, it always could. At the base of his argument was a belief that having to deal with the harsh—and by comparison with Britain, primitive—conditions of Australia somehow reinvigorated the British migrant.
It is a convenience, but at the same time it is a sign of danger in a community, when people begin to walk on the rig
ht-hand side of the footpath. They begin to lose the capacity for elbowing themselves through a crowd. That capacity obviously exists pre-eminently in the British race. But it does not come out till the race gets to places like Australia, where it has to.
When it came to indigenous Australians, Bean approvingly quoted shearers saying that they would not have a Chinaman, an Indian or an American negro among them, but they would work with a Maori or an Australian Aborigine. As he put it, ‘All the Governments recognise a duty to the blacks, and the Australian worker of his own accord regularly recognises his obligations to the blackfellow by drawing a firm distinction between him and other dark-skinned peoples . . . It is really a matter of principle; they recognise that Australia and New Zealand once belonged to the blackfellow and the Maori.’
Conscious of these rights of ownership of the land that they no longer controlled, Bean concluded that the old tribes had not so much fled from their districts as simply dwindled there. Out west, the remnants survived in the ‘blacks’ camps’ on the outskirts of a few small towns, such as one he saw that was just ‘a few miserable “humpies” barely worth the name of huts, which might have been hen-roosts or the houses of any miserable class of white people, for all the distinctive marks that they displayed.’
The trip to the Darling had occasioned his first real contact with Aborigines, and with it an understanding of how and why they lived as they did, and what had happened to them. People who had lived in the area for many years explained to Bean about the widespread conflict. One station owner told Bean of incidents when the local Aborigines had been giving trouble at the stations, and ‘every blackfellow that was killed was considered as a pest . . . like a snake in the grass.’
Recognising the damage that the clash of cultures had wrought, he also appreciated Aboriginal achievements in a harsh country. He accepted that early encounters between blacks and whites were characterised by wrongdoing on both sides, and lamented the displacement of Aborigines from traditional lands. Importantly, he recognised in European Australians an acknowledgement of Aborigines as worthy of special consideration because they were the original inhabitants of the land. He lamented that in less than fifty years the number of full-blooded Aborigines in New South Wales had dwindled to fewer than 4500. Their misfortune had been to come into contact with the ‘wrought-iron civilisation hammered out in the wild competition of the world from which Australia was for aeons cut off.’ Bean blamed drink and European diseases for what he believed would be the death of the race.
