Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  During the campaign leading to the vote, opposition to secession came from the Unity League and the Federal League of Western Australia, but they were overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the Dominion League. On the day, 8 April 1933, almost two-thirds of the electorate voted for secession, that is, for question 1. The second proposal was rejected overwhelmingly. Only the gold-mining districts, with residual connection to the east, voted against secession. Ironically, the Labor Party, which had opposed secession, was elected at the next state ballot.

  Faced with a popular voice favouring secession, the state government had to present a petition to the Imperial Parliament in Westminster to amend the Constitution Act and thus make Western Australia an independent dominion. There was another possibility, and that was to seek an Australia-wide referendum on the Constitution through Section 128, a referendum in which all the citizens of the other states would have to vote. But a majority of ‘yes’ votes in a majority of states was not a possibility, even if Canberra allowed such a referendum to take place. That is, Australia wouldn’t voluntarily let Western Australia go. In February 1934, the state government announced it was proceeding along the route of a petition to the Parliament in Westminster, for the Australian Constitution was an enactment of that Parliament. Western Australia enacted an initial Secession Act of its own in June 1934. The Dominion League was very confident that the Westminster petition would be kindly and promptly received and acted upon after its presentation in November 1934. But it was February 1935 before a joint select committee of the British Parliament was formed to decide whether Western Australia could secede.

  Since Federation, and after the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the United Kingdom wanted less and less to enact legislation regarding the affairs of dominions unless requested to do so by the dominion in question. Since 1931, indeed, no Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom could be passed affecting a dominion unless that dominion requested and consented to it. But the lawyers from Western Australia, led by Professor J.H. Morgan, advised the Imperial Parliament that it had the power to act unilaterally if it decided to do so. The Statute of Westminster did not compel the Imperial Parliament; it was ‘declaratory’, that is, it was etiquette, a non-binding protocol. Besides, Australia had not yet adopted the Statute of Westminster (and would not do so until world events in the early 1940s made it advisable).

  The select committee did decide promptly, and the secessionists did not like what they decided. Even though Western Australia was not mentioned in the general preamble to the Constitution that referred to uniting ‘in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown’, it was mentioned in Preamble 3: ‘after the passing of this Act, the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, and also, if Her Majesty is satisfied that the people of Western Australia have agreed thereto, of Western Australia, shall be united in a Federal Commonwealth’. Here, unlike the opening of the Preamble, that Commonwealth was not described as indissoluble. Western Australia had accepted the Commonwealth as a marriage of 1901, but had believed it could leave at will. They had ‘agreed thereto’, which was the only condition placed on them, and assumed they could later agree to the opposite. The select committee, however, decided that the word ‘indissoluble’ covered Section 3 of the Preamble. The bad news for Western Australia was that its entry into the Commonwealth was no different from that of the other states: Western Australia was as bound in as was, say, Victoria. Whereas the US Constitution had mentioned a voluntary union, the Australians, influenced by the American Civil War, had emphasised the term ‘indissoluble union’ as the founding utterance of the Preamble. Therefore ‘the [WA] petition was not receivable’. The committee did not have jurisdiction to recommend enacting the request unless it contained ‘the clearly expressed wishes of the Australian people as a whole’. That is, there would need to be a federal referendum specifically to modify the indissoluble idea, and a majority of Australians and a majority in a majority of states would need to vote for them to be allowed to depart. The Western Australians knew this option was impossible.

  Prime Minister Lyons was delighted with the result. The Labor premier of Western Australia, Philip Collier, who had succeeded Mitchell in April 1933, was relieved also. The Dominion League was appalled, and vowed to continue to work for secession, but there was obviously no further option open to it now, and the idea withered away. The Commonwealth Grants Commission, newly established by the Lyons government in response to the strong support shown for Western Australian secession, began to investigate the financial difficulties of smaller states so that special assistance grants could be offered. It recognised that a great part of Western Australia’s financial problems stemmed from federal tariff policy that favoured industries in New South Wales and Victoria but drove up prices for the wheat and sheep producers of Western Australia. Lyons agreed to look into all this. Amidst the budget-straitening, Western Australia gained a little. Many of its citizens were now too desperate and too far removed from the trickle of funding to notice, however.

  CHAPTER 3

  Aggression everywhere

  Appeasement and war

  ALOOF FROM THE WARS OF THE WORLD

  When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in late 1935, the world was so divided and hapless in its response that tyrants could take heart. The international reaction was a confession that the League of Nations in Geneva had become emasculated. The Italians, having acquired Eritrea in the Horn of Africa as part of the great European carve-up of the late nineteenth century, had always had an eye on Abyssinia, not yet allocated to any European power. But in 1896 the Abyssinian army had beaten the Italians off at Adowa, on the Eritrean–Abyssinian border. In 1934 there were border incidents between Abyssinian and Italian troops and their African allies, which Mussolini was happy to build into a justification for a coming invasion. By early 1935, the Italian government and armed forces were already preparing to take Abyssinia with mechanised Italian legions, although the invasion would not occur until October. On 2 November 1935, the League voted to prevent weapons exports to Italy and Abyssinia; to prohibit financial dealings with Italy on both an individual and an institutional level; and to ban imports from Italy and exports to it.

  Britain was the chief driver of these sanctions, since the British public were offended by the sense of entitlement Mussolini demonstrated in invading the empire of Haile Selassie. Many Britons believed that there should be military retaliation, but their conviction was undermined by the fact that the French did not. In fear of Germany, the French had made a pact with Italy and professed themselves appalled by British talk of military sanctions against Mussolini, including the blockading of Italian ports. Mere trade sanctions seemed to the British government a far more desirable option than confronting Mussolini directly, and in that spirit Australia voted for them also.

  The Australian politicians of the 1930s, on both sides of politics, felt that they had enough to deal with domestically and internationally and were dedicated appeasers. Joe Lyons had already been a strong advocate of the appeasement of Japanese in Manchukuo (Manchuria). He reported that he had reassured the Japanese of Australia’s friendship and expressed hopes that nothing would upset the relationship between the two countries. Now he did go so far as to mention to the US consul-general in Australia, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, that he ‘could never forget that Australia might someday find herself in the plight of Abyssinia’, but that was as big a reason not to intervene as it was to take action.

  The Australian government, like many individual Australians, hoped that Britain under the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would not intervene, and were relieved to find Baldwin had no intention to. The courtly Stanley Melbourne Bruce, former Australian prime minister, was Australian high commissioner in London, and at that moment held the rotating position of president of the League of Nations Council. Bruce had had a great deal to say to the British government about the imposition of trade sanctions. With almost saturnine reasoning, Bruc
e assured Australian Prime Minister Lyons that the League Covenant’s clause demanding military intervention did not apply unless a sanctions-imposing state was itself attacked. If this position was rather technical, it was welcomed in Canberra, as in many other capitals. Lyons believed in the League, and in world and national government by consensus, and was such a kindly fellow that he was bewildered as to why humanity as a whole was not bent on getting along. The League was the organ of world consensus, and Honest Joe, who—despite the Depression—attracted much affection amongst Australians, was, like other statesmen, unable to see that appeasement would destroy the League.

  As for a blockade of Italian ports, Bruce argued that it was not even remotely likely that America would respect a British and Australian blockade of Italian ports, or that the British could turn back ships loaded with American goods. Nor could the British close the Suez Canal to Italy without hurting themselves, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand economically. The situation was further complicated by the fifty thousand Italian troops in Libya, Italy’s Northern African possession on the Mediterranean, next door to British-controlled Egypt. Mussolini had armies on both flanks of the Suez, the western flank in Libya, and the south-eastern one in Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and, potentially, Abyssinia. From Australia House on its oblique corner in the Strand, Bruce, however, went so far as to suggest to both Australia and the British Cabinet that the crisis showed up the vulnerability of both countries, which must now begin to rearm, given that their militaries were too puny to stop Mussolini in any case. Meanwhile, the Canadians wanted an oil embargo against Italy, but Bruce was against it.

  The weakness of the League was that, despite President Woodrow Wilson’s early trumpeting of the organisation, America had never joined it, for fear that it had the power to undermine American sovereignty and neutrality and drag it into wars. It now seemed unlikely that the League had the required unity and moral strength to drag any country into armed conflict. By now, Japan had also walked out of the League, over criticism of its military activities in Manchuria—not that the League had taken any firm action. By 1933, Germany, under Hitler, had also departed. By letting the Japanese establish an empire in Manchuria, and standing by as Mussolini prepared his Ethiopian attack, the League of Nations, in its Palace of the Nations, looking out from its vast, inoffensively modernist headquarters across parkland to tranquil and neutral Lake Geneva, was reducing itself to irrelevance.

  Lyons’ government, in its fear of an advancing Japan, had by the time of the Abyssinian crisis begun a modest rearmament program; however, it was discussing not only how to appease Italy but even looking at establishing links with the other great Pacific nation, the United States, to balance any coming threat from Japan. The reason this latter radical—and to some heretical—idea had been even spoken in the little capital, Canberra, was the fear that any European war would take the attention of the British fleet, and might mean that the naval base at Singapore, commenced in 1923, could not be held. Lyons had met Roosevelt in mid-1935 and felt he could work with him. He had also met Mussolini on 27 June 1935, on his way home to Australia from London, before the Abyssinian crisis but while it was threatening, and like many others at the time he had been impressed by Mussolini’s energy and his supposed respect for diplomacy over military action. Back in Australia, Lyons told a press conference that ‘the influence of such a man on the destinies of Europe is immense’.

  On the opposition benches, Labor’s position was also very confused. Generally it did not want any military activity against Italy. The party came under the leadership of the Western Australian John Curtin the day before Mussolini began his attack on Abyssinia in October 1935, and Labor had its attention fixed on dealing with its breakaway Lang Labor rebels in both the Federal Parliament and in New South Wales. Curtin was also conscious that the Labor Party had a powerful tribe of Catholics both within it and behind it, and that some of them felt tolerant towards Mussolini because of his recognition of the Vatican state and Pius XI. An isolationist, Curtin did not seek any sanctions at all against Italy: ‘The distinction between economic sanctions and military sanctions appears to be doubtful,’ he warned. Once drawn into the one, it was hard not to be drawn into the other. Australia should stay ‘aloof from the wars of the world’. He was not even in favour of the modest military actions Lyons had taken in putting two Australian cruisers, the Australia and the Sydney, at the Admiralty’s disposal. Neither was Lang, who wrote in Labor Daily: ‘Sanctions mean war. War means conscription. Conscription means a foreign grave for your husband, brother or son . . . beware the Sanctioneers.’

  But many Labor members were in favour of sanctions as long as they did not undermine the economy, and agreed with the Lyons government’s arguments for modest sanctions to be imposed on Italy by Britain and Australia. These consisted of refusing to export to Italy items such as gold or textiles but did not extend to oil and coal. Lyons declared that the British Empire and the unity of the League of Nations were Australia’s ‘sword and buckler’ in a dangerous world (a buckler is a small shield). Total neutrality, argued Lyons, was a constitutional impossibility without seceding from the Empire itself. And since we needed the British base in Singapore to protect us from Japanese thrusts into the Pacific and Indian oceans, seceding from the Empire was unthinkable. So the majority in the Australian Parliament backed Lyons and the British in voting that if Italy did invade Abyssinia, trade sanctions should be imposed and Italy would be condemned as an aggressor. These were threats that barely delayed Mussolini.

  Hughes, Lyons’ Minister for Health and Repatriation, broke ranks and published a book entitled Australia and War Today, which appeared on the eve of the second reading of the Australian Sanctions Bill. In it he railed against the British Empire’s lack of military response and advocated massive and urgent rearmament in the United Kingdom and in Australia. He declared that League decisions not backed up by force ‘are not only futile but mischievous . . . all effective sanctions must be supported by adequate force’. This position was, however, an embarrassment to most of his ‘sanctions-only’ colleagues.

  The League decided on sanctions which were to apply from mid-November 1935. The Abyssinian invasion, despite the tanks-against-spears nature of the war, was taking a little longer than Mussolini had hoped. The most effective sanctions would have been a ban on oil supplies to Italy, who had only three months’ reserve to finish their campaign on. But in February 1936, the Standard Oil Company of New York totally undercut any idea of oil sanctions by making a contract with the Italian navy to supply it with oil via Germany and Brazil. Only Roosevelt’s ‘moral embargo’ was left in place. As for coal, Germany was pleased to sell it to Mussolini.

  On 5 May 1936, the Italians marched into Addis Ababa. Lyons had hoped the Abyssinian spring rains would fall and slow the Italians down, but as so often, they did not come on time. Now that Abyssinia was lost, Lyons not only pushed Bruce to argue for the lifting of British sanctions, but also suggested informal talks between the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy to strengthen the League by attracting Germany back into the international family. ‘We think it essential,’ Lyons told Bruce, ‘that action for reform of the League should be contemporaneous with removal of sanctions and that preliminary conversations be commenced now.’

  On 18 June 1936, Lyons made a statement to the Australian press in which he said that the Italian victory had been too fast to allow sanctions to do any good. Yet to get fifty nations to agree to impose them, he argued, was nonetheless a ‘great moral advance’.

  In mid-May of 1936, Robert Gordon Menzies, the young Melbourne lawyer who, by his force of personality and ambition, would ultimately take the prime ministership after Joe Lyons’ death, was in Britain with Earle Page. Page was the Grafton surgeon and gifted Country Party leader who had been Bruce’s deputy and Minister for Commerce through the 1920s, and who was now a very effective deputy for Lyons. He had had the extreme and crippling misfortune of losing his son, also
Earle, to a lightning strike on the family’s Clarence River Valley farm, but he was now back in Parliament and world affairs after his year’s mourning. Page and Menzies advised Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Minister, that the government of the United Kingdom should lift sanctions on the grounds that they had done nothing for Abyssinia, and that continuing them would make the League look ridiculous and would only serve to encourage the Italians to greater aggression.

  Sanctions were lifted in July 1936. The world, despite its sentimental affection for the exiled Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie, settled itself to regard Abyssinia as Italian, as were Eritrea and Libya. Lyons would be pleased to be able to acknowledge Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia in late 1938. Many of his fellow Australian Catholics took a similar view to Lyons: Archbishop James Duhig in Brisbane argued that just as Australia had been ‘black and barbaric’ in 1788 but was now British and civilised, so Italy was only trying to achieve the same for Abyssinia.

  Australian trade with Italy resumed in 1938. It was chiefly in wool—Italy was usually Australia’s fourth or fifth best customer. The overall balance of trade was massively in Australia’s favour, with £4.6 million worth of exports in 1934, which dropped to £1 million in 1935, but jumped back to £5.3 million in 1937. For that reason, too, Australia did not want to be too severe on Mussolini.

  VIVA CRISTO REY

  Two significant encyclicals were issued in 1931—Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year: On Reconstructing the Social Order) and Non Abbiamo Bisogno (We Do Not Need to Acquaint You: Concerning Catholic Action). Quadragesimo Anno was seen by Catholics as second only to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in its importance as a Catholic social document. It generated the idea of Catholic action—lay Catholic organisations that sought to live by and spread Catholic teachings but also to combat the twin monsters of ‘blighted capitalism and the godless materialism of Socialism’. It urged that groups of activist Catholics be trained, and at the same time wanted Catholic groups to take action in the world without having political ambitions. These ideas were attractive to an adolescent student at St Kevin’s Christian Brothers, then in East Melbourne. B.A. Santamaria was the son of a greengrocer from the Aeolian Islands. His life would show that Catholic action inevitably led to political results, but that was not an issue in the mid-1930s, when he was studying Arts and Law at Melbourne University. He opposed both Fascism and rampant capitalism, but he was torn about Mussolini, for whom he had sympathy until his alliance with Hitler. He believed, however, that British policy drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler, of whom Santamaria never approved in any way.