Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The question for Santamaria and other Catholics was, who do you back when it comes to a fight between Fascism and Communism—especially if it is a case of Fascism in a traditionally Catholic country?

  The Spanish Civil War brought frontal conflict between Catholicism and Communism in a way that the invasion of Abyssinia did not. This struggle between two massive forces occupied every Catholic mind, and indeed not only of Catholic consciousness, for decades. In the case of Spain, most Catholics would prove to be anti-Communist and in favour of the rebel general, Franco, who would in the end crush the radical forces that fought for the elected Socialist government of Spain. The author remembers being told of the heroic siege of the Alcázar in Toledo, the attempt early in the Spanish Civil War by the forces of the Spanish Republic to capture a fortress and magazine of that name from a rebellious Catholic force. The siege lasted until September 1936, when General Franco’s forces arrived in Toledo from North Africa. The relief of the Alcázar was a triumph for, as the Spanish said, Cristo Rey (Christ the King) and ‘Viva Cristo Rey’ became a war cry not only of Franco’s forces but of Catholics the world over.

  In the same year that Japan invaded Manchuria, republicanism swept the Spanish elections and King Alfonso XIII fled the country. The Church was disestablished. From those elections of May 1931, army officers and monarchists began plotting against the Republic, and the primate of the Spanish Church, Cardinal Segura, issued a pastoral letter condemning the Republic.

  The Carlist (that is, monarchist) Party began receiving arms from Mussolini and in return sent its officers to Italy for training. The conservatives allied with the Carlists and in power initially under the republic were involved in suppressing a miners’ strike in Asturias in north-western Spain. Moorish troops from Spanish Morocco and Spanish legionaries loyal to the republican government were sent in, and 1335 strikers were killed and nearly three thousand wounded. This almost guaranteed a left-wing government would come to power in the elections in early 1936.

  Before the elections of February 1936 were held, anti-Republican plotting by the young General Franco and General Godet was intense. But the government elected was the radical Popular Front, the republican left. Basque and Catalonian separatists were also part of the ruling coalition. These elections and their results provoked strikes and church burnings by Popular Front followers.

  On 11 July 1936, a plane chartered in London with the help of English Catholic supporters of the rising by Franco, piloted by an Englishman and carrying English passengers to allay suspicion, took off from Croydon airport to collect Franco from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, to which he had been exiled, and fly him to Morocco to take command of the Army of Africa, a Spanish force garrisoned there. The army sailed under Franco for the Spanish west coast and landed south of Portugal. Cadiz, Seville and Córdoba fell to them, and by October the Franco forces in the north and south had connected with each other and threatened Madrid.

  Nettie Palmer, the Melbourne writer and socialist intellectual, had been living since May 1936 with her husband Vance in Montgat, a Catalan village fourteen kilometres north of Barcelona along the coast. Vance was working on an abridgement of Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life. Nettie was writing on the defence of Western culture, but now became the woman on the spot and declared in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘My first news of the insurrection in Barcelona came from the village milkman, who drove round as usual early in the morning . . . “There’s a revolution. Don’t you hear the guns?”’ The Palmers were concerned for their daughter, Eileen, a Melbourne University graduate, twenty-one years old, who had become an interpreter in Barcelona for the French team at the Olympiada Popular, the People’s Olympics, an anti-Fascist attempt at holding a games to rival Hitler’s Berlin Olympics.

  It was apparent by 19 July that the firing they heard was from a revolution, which Vance called ‘Fascist-militarist’. These rebels were as yet far from Franco’s front line and were destined not to flourish. Vance found that the local people were definitely on the side of the leftist government—‘the people [are] out in the streets and burning the Church’. The next day he found Roca, the owner of a grocery store in the village, forthcoming. Fiercely anti-clerical, Roca declared, ‘Every church and monastery is a Fascist barracks, but after this they’re finished.’

  Geoffrey Hutton, an Argus journalist who was in Spain as a tourist, had described the pre-election scenes in Madrid’s main square, where the police sided with the crowd against the republic’s conservative government. Brian Penton, a journalist for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and its future editor, had published a novel named Land Takers, which had appeared in 1934 and sold well, and was in Spain working on his second novel. He reported that the hungry people of Torremolinos, a little fishing village nearly thirteen kilometres from the republican village of Málaga, had been deprived of ballot boxes by the rightist political bosses in Madrid, and reacted by shooting the priest, the tax collector and the landlord’s representative. After the Popular Front won, he saw the people burn down the church.

  HMS London appeared off the Mediterranean coast to pick up Britons, and the Palmers were amongst those who got on board, having faced the fact that they were running out of charcoal, and cooking would soon be impossible. They had not been able to change travellers’ cheques and thus had no money for food. The Palmers’ daughter Eileen was indignant when Vance told her she was to go too. The Games Eileen was working for, however, would never take place. She would nevertheless stay on.

  Writing for the Communist Daily Worker in London on 1 August 1936, Vance declared: ‘The Left Front [the Popular Front] was a living reality, its courage and decision had swept into the ranks of middle class elements that might have wavered or even gone over to the enemy.’ In his view, an unarmed and unprepared people had had to face an uprising by an organised, paid and fully equipped army.

  The Tasmanian Catholic and able journalist Noel Monks was already on London’s Daily Express staff when the Spanish war began. He had a family friendship with Prime Minister Lyons, also a Tasmanian, and that had helped him land a job with the British paper. To him, Franco was fighting for the church in which Monks had been brought up.

  Two South Australians, H.M. (Bill) Seppelt and B.R. Gee, had been in Barcelona on a working holiday to study the wine industry. In Badajoz, a city on the Portuguese border which had fallen to the rebel Nationalists—that is, the Franco forces—they witnessed terrible slaughter. Survivors of the battle were put in a bull ring and several men were shot dead. Near the cemetery they came across three hundred republican bodies piled up to make a bonfire, but a priest told them that the dead had deserved what they had got.

  The Australian press didn’t quite know what to make of these events, or of this war, which would drag on until early 1939, when Madrid and Barcelona both fell to Franco. Some ABC journalists expressed concern that Franco was being supported by Hitler and Mussolini. John McCallum’s judgement was heard on the ABC on 23 June 1937: ‘Win or lose, General Franco’s rebellion has brought frightful misery to Spain.’

  On her return to Australia, Nettie Palmer became a great promoter of the Spanish republican cause. Soon after her return, she produced a pamphlet, Spain! The Spanish People Present Their Case. She would become the president of the Spanish Relief Committee, and was much helped by the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, the Reverend Farnham Maynard. The committee initially sent off four nurses, including the formidable, diminutive Mary Lowson. Lowson had been nursing in the Lidcombe State Hospital and attended a meeting on 26 August 1936 at which a Red Cross unit was proposed to represent Australia. Two weeks later, three more nurses from Lidcombe, and one from elsewhere, booked their passage.

  Lowson was less than five feet tall, born in Hobart, orphaned early, and had been a teacher before she took up nursing. The Depression forced her into less preferred work at Lidcombe State Hospital and its attached dumping ground for destitute men. The poverty of the inmates caused her to seek a radical solution and
she joined the Communist Party. She was forty-one years old when she volunteered.

  May McFarlane, at twenty-six years, was the youngest of the contingent. She had considered being an Anglican missionary but was influenced by Lowson’s view of the inequalities of society. Una Wilson was a theatre nurse. A fourth nurse, Edith Curwen, a Catholic, was persuaded by her parents to withdraw. A replacement was Agnes Hodgson, daughter of a commercial traveller and Digger, who had been killed on the first day of Gallipoli. She had earlier travelled in Spain, and had tried unsuccessfully from Australia to get a post nursing in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s invasion.

  When it was reported that volunteer nurses were proposing to go to Spain, Hughes, the Minister for Health, was asked in Parliament if he could prevent them from leaving Australia. He replied that he could not but that he had his own opinion of Lowson and her fellow nurses. By imputation, it wasn’t a good one. Hughes further said that he wasn’t concerned about their going and would offer them inducements to stay in Spain if he had his way. Yet the Commonwealth Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General’s Department was asked to report on the nurses and found that they were not Communists, not even Lowson. The Attorney-General’s Department was asked whether the nurses could be forced to stay in Australia under the British law that prevented citizens fighting in wars in countries with whom Britain was at peace. The answer was that the nurses were not combatants and couldn’t be prevented from going.

  From March 1937, Lowson was attached to the English-speaking section of the Foreigners’ Division in Spain. She received a pass to France and went there to buy supplies. She also sent back to Nettie Palmer and the Spanish Relief Committee a plan for reorganising republican health services.

  Returning to Australia, her skill as a publicist was evident from the moment she stepped off the ship at Fremantle on 28 September 1937 to begin a lecture tour devised by the Foreigners’ Division to raise money. Amongst the messages she brought was a letter she had received from Una Wilson: ‘Mary and I have seen hardships . . . we heal their wounds and back they go to the trenches to be shot to bits.’ Lowson addressed the Labor Women’s Conference in Perth, the Trades Hall and railway workshops in Adelaide, as well as a public meeting in the Botanic Gardens, and then on to Melbourne. She declared that many of Franco’s forces were defecting to the legitimate government, and described aerial bombardment and the amazing spectacle of people going to work as bombs fell. She expanded on the subject of food shortages and called Franco’s rebellion a revolt against a new social revolution. She recounted the frontline experiences of her fellow nurses. She was farewelled from Sydney at the Paddington Town Hall on 21 March 1938, after raising some hundreds of pounds—£352 by the end of 1937, quite a feat in the midst of a Depression.

  The Spanish Relief Committee sometimes cast up some strange bedfellows. Not all of the Protestant clergymen associated with the committee joined it for purely humanitarian reasons. They were pleased to see the Republicans attack the Catholic Church. Some were activated to support the Republic for that reason. In any case, Nettie Palmer took help where it was offered, and worked relentlessly in Melbourne. Her Melbourne secretary was an Anglican, Helen Bailey, a woman of independent means who worked with the Australian Aboriginal League and particularly served those families living in the slums of Fitzroy.

  The nurses collected donations in Melbourne, Adelaide and, with the help of the novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, Fremantle.

  A leaflet was signed by the heads of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican churches in Victoria appealing for funds. The two sets of operations and fundraising seemed to work well. The collection of funds for the Joint Spanish Aid Council was not as fast as it was for the Spanish Relief Committee.

  But the main Australian concerns manifested themselves in the issue of godless Communism versus Franco’s rebel forces of Light and Christianity, and then, above all, the preservation of world peace. Spain was even further away than Abyssinia. An International Non-Intervention Committee was formed in 1936 by the French and British to ensure that no other countries would be sucked into the Spanish vortex. Ironically, as well as France and Britain, the Non-Intervention Committee included the Soviet Union, who would supply aid to the Republicans, and Italy and Germany, who would support Franco’s rebels in even more significant ways. The League of Nations seemed impotent as it watched the Non-Intervention Committee go through its surreal paces.

  Lyons’ government and Curtin’s opposition approved of the committee. There was still the World War I anti-conscriptionist heart beating in Curtin, the belief that no more Australian boys should be asked to die far from home. The Bulletin was passionately anti-interventionist. Inky Stephensen and W.J. Miles, in the spirit of the Bulletin, brought out their Loyal to Australia First monthly to encourage isolationism. But F.R. McIlwraith would write in Smith’s Weekly—McIlwraith was the Smith’s Weekly man in London—‘If the facts of the war in Spain were presented as they should be to the people of Australia . . . they would enter a wild cry of protest, and compel their timeserving politicians to make representations to Downing Street.’ McIlwraith’s son, Warren, was also accredited by Smith’s as a war correspondent also and set off for Barcelona with a typewriter and £10 in cash.

  Some of the opposition to Franco’s rebels arose from a racial regret to see Moorish (North African Muslim) troops back in Spain from which the Moors had been driven in the fourteenth century. The remarkable Mary Gilmore, survivor of Bill Lane’s nineteenth-century attempt to build a socialist New Australia in Paraguay, and who would become more and more vocal in her support for the republic, was one of them. She wrote to her friend, the poet Hugh McCrae, ‘No doubt the Moors are as good as we are, but not in Spain.’ Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane, however, a devout Franco supporter, had no trouble with the issue.

  Influential in the debate in Sydney was Professor John Anderson, a Scot who taught Trotskyist Marxism and a radical scepticism that marked the course of Sydney’s intellectual life. Anderson gave a lecture on ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, which was packed out. Yet also influential was the anti-interventionist Inky Stephensen, who was at the time editing Capricornia, Xavier Herbert’s radical, pro-Aboriginal novel. Other intellectuals were concerned about the prospect of a Fascist Spain with debts to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. A possible future Franco–Mussolini–Hitler alliance rightly scared them.

  But from Prime Minister Lyons down, sentiments were non-interventionist. Lyons was in fact pleased at the success of the Franco forces. Not even the bombing of Guernica on 28 April 1937 changed this. The journalist Noel Monks had arrived there on Anzac Day. Far from being anti-Catholic, he noticed the republican Basques had been at Mass for part of the day. On the day of the bombing, at four in the afternoon, Monks beheld, several waves of German aircraft, Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts, dropped incendiary, high-explosive and shrapnel bombs for three hours on Guernica. Because the Daily Express in London inadvertently ran articles under his name which had not been submitted to the Republican censor, Monks was arrested and expelled from Spain. But he returned by sea to the Republican northern city of Bilbao, on which rebel forces were advancing.

  Monks returned to the town of Guernica and walked amongst the ruins. Franco defenders had a hard time explaining why there had been no attacks on the church in the Basque areas, attacks on churches by the Communists being part of the justification for the raid. So there was a tendency to deny that the bombing had occurred or to assert that it had been the work of the Republican forces themselves. It was a period when massed bombardment was still a new and horrifying experience, and so both shock and denial were likely reactions. Guernica had been blown up by the Reds, argued many supporters of Franco. Other Catholics acknowledged that it had occurred; Monks knew it had.

  On a hot March night in 1937, a large audience crowded into a sweltering theatre at Melbourne University to debate the subject ‘The Spanish Government Has Been the Ruin of Spain’. B.A. Santamaria and Nettie Palm
er were involved in organising the event, and one of the debaters on the pro-Republican side was the extraordinary Dr Jerry O’Day, raised a Catholic but now a Communist. He had abandoned his lucrative medical practice and made his services either free or very cheap for the poor of Melbourne. This was certainly a meeting that transcended the usual Australian indifference to Spain. Cries of ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’ drowned such speakers as O’Day and led to fighting in the corridors. Fire hoses were commandeered by the pro-Franco sections of the audience and turned on the Republican side. Some men also climbed onto the roof of the theatre and stamped so loudly that the speakers could not be heard. Catholic action had perhaps gone too far.

  Franco and Mussolini supporters organised a concert of support for Franco’s side in the Sydney Town Hall where the visiting Italian tenor, Tito Schipa, gave the Fascist salute five times at the start of his performance. The audience clapped and stamped.