Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In 1937, another organisation, the almost identically named Aborigines’ Progressive Association (APA), founded by William Ferguson and Jack Patten, two men from the far south-west of New South Wales, argued that Aborigines should have the same rights as other Australians, but rather than Aboriginality it emphasised the importance of integration to bring about change. Ferguson and Patten were sick at heart at the breaking up of many reserves and the crowding of Aborigines into remaining ones, the terrible conditions of water supply and housing on these reserves, the dictatorial control by white reserve managers, the poor schooling, the denial of social welfare benefits, the removal of children from their parents, and the colour bar in country towns. But by mid-1938 the APA had split into two bodies, one led by Patten and getting support from Australian near-Fascists such as the editor and writer Inky Stephensen and W.B. Miles. The other APA, led by Ferguson and the indomitable South Sydney woman Pearl Gibbs, was concerned very much with Aboriginal problems in Dubbo and other western New South Wales communities. Its support came from the Australian Workers’ Union, the Unemployed Workers’ Union, feminist organisations and the Communist Party of Australia.

  When nationalist supporters withdrew their backing for Australian Abo Call, a monthly newspaper, Patten’s APA lost much of its force, and it was disbanded in 1939.

  There was little such political activity in Queensland, with its repressive state regime. Under the ‘Queensland Act’, the body of law governing Aborigines, they were powerless to form political organisations. The Protection Board there was headed by Protector J.W. Bleakley, former boilermaker, a man whose compassion became apparent to many individual Aborigines but whose overall administrative manner was one of paternalistic authority. The board oversaw workers’ wages through trust funds, controlled the large reserves or compounds, and removed Aboriginal children from their kin. Troublemakers were sent to the notorious Palm Island, off the coast of North Queensland.

  Bleakley was obsessed with the ‘half-caste question’. Like many others of the time he was concerned with categorising Aboriginal people according to their degree of native heritage, and drew distinctions between full-blooded Aboriginal people down to people who were only one-eighth Aboriginal, whom he called octoroons. The lighter the skin, the more civilised and intelligent the board considered the person to be.

  In South Australia, the Aboriginal voice was represented by several mission-educated men, most notably David Unaipon, whose story will be told later. Various forms of protest, public meetings and concerts, petitions, deputations and testifying in government inquiries took place. The tone of these representations was, in the spirit of Unaipon’s own temperament, extremely polite. There was a relationship between the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, which was made up of politically conservative missionaries and their friends, and one of the mission stations, Point McLeay, where Unaipon had spent his boyhood. Aborigines on other reserves frequently appealed to Constance Cooke, the convenor of the Aboriginal Welfare Committee of the South Australian Women’s Non-Party Association. Cooke was one of a number of white campaigners on issues such as loss of land, overcrowding on reserves, the right of Aboriginal representation on the bodies governing their lives, and the removal of children. One journalist reporting such an incident in 1924 used the term ‘stolen children’.

  In Western Australia one of the interwar leaders was William Harris, a farmer in the Morawa district who had denounced the treatment of his fellow Aborigines in the area since 1906. He had been educated at the Swan Native and Half-Caste Home in Perth, and while working on cattle stations in the northwest of the state had seen the misuse of his people. Now he attempted to form a Native Union, along with his nephew Norman. One of their platforms was opposition to the authority of the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, on whose orders a considerable number of children were taken from their parents. They were also aggrieved at what they described as ‘imprisonment’ on reserves such as Moore River or Mogumber. Harris passionately protested against the massacres of Aborigines by punitive expeditions in the north of the state. His nephew noted that it was hard to maintain a political organisation ‘under the Act’, and the Native Union was short-lived, but Norman Harris and other members of the Harris clan continued to play a role in campaigning against Neville’s regime, giving evidence to a 1934 royal commission about the removal of children from their parents.

  ‘AS A RESULT’

  On the first day of September 1939, late at night, news broadcasts and cables reached Australia that Polish cities had been bombed and that the German army had crossed the border. Prime Minister Bob Menzies had been at a speaking engagement at Colac in Victoria, and when he returned to town by car, the Cabinet, previously summoned, met in the Commonwealth Offices in Melbourne. The date clicked over, for the first meeting ended at 3 a.m. Menzies recorded a cautious broadcast at the ABC studios saying there was no official confirmation of events being reported by radio from Europe—that Polish cities had been bombed by the Nazis, who had demanded the return of the Free City of Danzig, and that German armed forces had crossed into Poland.

  There existed a War Book, created by a special section of the Department of Defence after the Imperial Conference in 1930. It covered the procedures to be followed if war broke out, and secretary of the Department of Defence Frederick Shedden and Menzies now studied the section dealing with precautionary stages. If the British went into the precautionary stage, and remembered to send Australia a telegram, then the Australian Cabinet would meet again and put their own precautionary procedures into play. These included the beginning of an intelligence plan for the war, the immediate warning of shipping, the placing of permanent naval forces and other forces ‘on a war footing’, and the assumption by government of extraordinary powers, under the Defence Acts, to conscript workers for the war effort—a process that would come to be called Manpower. The government would also be empowered to censor newspapers, intern aliens, and call on the citizen forces to be available for war service. Postal censorship would be immediately imposed.

  Waiting for further intelligence, Cabinet members had a few hours’ rest and met again at the Commonwealth Offices on Saturday morning, 2 September, where they were presented with the latest information from the British government. The Australian Cabinet included Sir Henry Gullett, the former official correspondent attached to Australian forces in Palestine and Syria in World War I, now Minister for External Affairs. Also present was Menzies’ urbane rival for national leadership, Richard Casey. The Cabinet contained three Military Cross winners from World War I. They finished their deliberations at 1 p.m; as they dispersed, Menzies told them that they must be available for further meetings at short notice. They rested as best they could, and that afternoon they ordered Australia into precautionary mode, commanding all citizens’ forces to be called out and made available for disposition by the military, air and naval boards. The Australians learned that Lord Halifax, British Foreign Minister, a former enthusiast for Hitler’s suppression of the German Communists and a less than full-blooded enthusiast for the war, had been instructed by his prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to order the British Ambassador in Berlin to deliver an ultimatum to Hitler, demanding he withdraw his forces from Poland by 8 p.m. eastern Australian time.

  The trams that night ran as crowded as usual on their way to the city’s dance halls and cinemas. The Caulfield Cup that year was much discussed in a nation in which horseracing had a far more pervasive hold on society than it does now. (It would be won by Rivette.) Melbourne had won the footy that day and were on their way to grand final success over Collingwood later in the month, a game which, when it came, war or not, would be played before a crowd of seventy-eight thousand. In Sydney, Balmain and Eastern Suburbs were flexing muscles for their grand final, and the breath of war could not diminish the crowd one whit. Menzies and Cabinet and his secretariat, led by the public servant Shedden, were like a island of anxiety in a country in which many citizens were doing their
best to forget international politics, and the bitter want, still not vanished, of the past decade.

  Not everyone was gallivanting that night. Many were at home, radio listening. But not everyone from the farms and suburbs possessed a radio or had the price of a restaurant meal or a jaunt to the flicks. Menzies and his government were in fact worried that the Australian harvest would earn inadequately in the world market that year, that prices would be low, shipping hard to come by, and unemployment figures likely to rise again to the pernicious levels of around 30 per cent. Mateship was at a low ebb. The secret armies were largely gone, but classes still looked at each other with a bitterness restrained only by the ethos of good manners that characterised Australia then.

  The government knew too that on a recent journey to Britain, Menzies had expressed his admiration for Germany, not only by showing sympathy by going along with British Prime Minister Chamberlain in appeasing Germany, and its desire to take Czechoslovakia over, but also by declaring that the Reich was not all bad—‘there were credit entries in the Nazi ledger . . . There is a good deal of really spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State.’ To be fair to Menzies, he was not the only conservative in the world uttering such sentiments in that period of concessions before the war. Lord Halifax had made many similar statements. This Polish thing could be smoothed over in the same way Hitler’s Czechoslovakian seizure had been. Poland was a long, long way from the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

  The ultimatum would expire at 11 a.m. British time the next day, 3 September in Britain, but at 8 p.m. on Sunday night, 3 September, in Eastern Australia.

  It was the shortwave-wireless listeners—Menzies and his staff amongst them—who picked up the broadcast from England that Chamberlain had declared war on Germany. Ministers met again at the Cabinet offices in Melbourne. No official telegram from Britain had arrived. The question arose: was the broadcast authentic? Menzies and his ministers decided to accept the wireless broadcast and Prime Minister Chamberlain’s inimitable voice as the equivalent of notification. The first official communication from London had in fact already arrived at the Navy Office in Melbourne—a cable from the British Admiralty announcing the commencement of operations against Germany—and an officer was sent with a copy to show Menzies.

  At 9.15 p.m., as soon as the radio equipment and technicians could be gathered in the room of the postmaster-general at the Commonwealth Offices, Menzies sat before the microphone and announced, over every national and commercial broadcasting station in the Commonwealth, Australia’s declaration of war. Menzies recounted the background of the onset of this conflict as he declared war on Australia’s behalf. The form of his declaration has been a subject of debate ever since. ‘In consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and . . . as a result, Australia is also at war.’

  In Canada and South Africa, the decision to go to war was first debated in the parliaments. The speed and almost automatic nature of Menzies’ declaration left Australians of a later generation—and even some Australians then—convinced that his British reflex was stronger than his Australian. The defence for his summary decision to take Australia to war was inherent in that phrase ‘as a result’—a phrase offensive to nationalists but understandable to constitutionalists. For to Menzies it was supremely evident that Australia’s declaration of war was inherent in Britain’s. Chamberlain had declared war on behalf of King George VI, George VI was head of state and sovereign of Australia, and ‘as a result’ Australia was obviously involved. Nor had the Australian government, unlike those of Canada and South Africa, yet ratified the Treaty of Westminster that had awarded the dominions self-governance in defence and foreign policy.

  Niall Brennan was a university student from Melbourne whose father had been a member of the House of Representatives from the days of Deakin, Cook and Fisher right up to the Labor defeat of 1931. Brennan senior had served for two years as attorney-general under Jim Scullin. Naturally, the Brennans—Irish, Labor—found the voice of Robert Menzies smug, and the father jumped up from the couch at the phrase ‘as a result’ and cried, ‘That’s constitutionally wrong.’ Niall thought that the ‘as a result’ declaration was one of the stupidest things that Menzies ever said.

  But if John Curtin, Labor opposition leader and former pacifist, had doubts about the matter, he did not express them, either because it would have been politically inadvisable or, as it actually seems, because it did not occur to him that Australia would not be at war. Western Australian, but son of an Irish-born policeman and later publican in Kyneton, Victoria, Curtin had risen from an entirely different background and political heritage than Menzies, but declared in Parliament a few days later that there was ‘no alternative but for this dreadful affliction to come to mankind’. Australia’s prosperity had always depended on British control of the seas—the capacity of thousands of cargo ships laden with Australian produce to reach Britain across secure waters. Thus it was not only Hitler’s ambitions in Europe that Australian politicians were reacting to, but his intentions perhaps in North Africa and eastwards, his Alexander the Great-like ambition to spread the boundaries of the Reich towards India. In the Federal Parliament there was no voice raised against going to war.

  For the time being, even the Communist Party, given Hitler’s savagery towards German Communists, gave support to the proposition. Poland fell rapidly to the German forces, and on 23 September, Stalin and Hitler surprised the world, and not least world Communist parties, by making a pact allowing Germany to continue to occupy Poland without Russian intervention. As a quid pro quo, Russia would receive back the parts of Eastern Poland that it considered traditionally its own. From that point, the Communist parties of the world, including the party in Australia, were told to oppose the war as an imperialist exercise, and to celebrate the liberation of a section of Poland by Soviet forces. Some Communists refused to do so—Guido Baracchi, the Melbourne activist who had been expelled from the party in 1925, had lived in Russia for fifteen months in 1933–34 together with his partner, the young Sydney playwright Betty Roland, and had regained membership in 1940, now resigned over it, or else was pushed out because of his support of Trotsky. But Sam Aarons, who had gone to France and crossed the Pyrenees to fight with the International Brigade against Franco, and many other true believers, stuck firm, despite the shock of Stalin’s alliance with the naked fascism Sam had earlier fought.

  Japan was also undeniably an unnamed and a phantom party to the Australian declaration of war against Germany. Across the Commonwealth, photographs of slaughtered children and women lying on steps, of decapitated Chinese heads arranged in ranks for the camera at some time during the weeks of horror that followed the capture of the city of Nanking (Nanjing) in central China by the Japanese army in late December 1937, had appeared as a warning of what the Japanese army might do after other victories. The images of smiling and enthusiastic Japanese soldiers using living targets as bayonet practice and standing, glutted with vengeance, amidst piles of corpses, were harbingers for Australia. Any footage of Japanese advances in China brought to cinemas a hush that only Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda or Cary Grant in The Awful Truth could dispel. There were press reports of the rape of girls under ten and women up to and beyond the age of seventy, and of burials alive. ‘They’re on their way here, you know,’ people said. It was this supposition that ironically made it more, not less, advisable that Australian troops should be immediately recruited and perhaps even sent to Europe. The equation was that loyalty to Britain in a European war would earn loyalty from Britain to Australia in a war in East Asia.

  As well as the reaction in the Brennan house there was an extraordinary range of attitudes to the declaration of war. Margaret Maxwell, a schoolgirl in Swan Hill, Victoria, did not understand quite what was happening when Mr Menzies spoke on the radio but saw both her parents in tears. Margaret Holmes, a pacifist, who
lived in Sydney, felt ‘absolutely terrible’. Ted Hartley, another pacifist, who was at a service at a Congregational church at the time when he heard, believed that this was ‘like the end of the world . . . it was as though the world had gone mad’. Bob Bahnsen, a farm labourer in New South Wales, was in bed in a shearer’s hut he shared with one of the farmer’s sons, and at 9.30 p.m. the boy came in and gave him the news: ‘“They declared the bloody war.” And I just couldn’t believe it—that Hitler would be such a maniac as to launch the world into war.’ For German-born Australians and Australian residents it was a frightening hour. On the coast north of Sydney, Irmhild Beinssen had German guests over that evening. The party broke up very soon after the declaration, and when the guests got back to their houses, the authorities—police and military—were in some cases already there to send them to internment.

  Some young Australians, after a restless Sunday night, rushed straight off to the main barracks in their cities to enlist. Charles Janeway, a schoolboy in Mount Gambier in South Australia, said that his father had nightmares that night and was up walking the house, and that the next morning there was a gathering at their farm of his uncle, a cousin and two or three World War I ex-servicemen. ‘And oh! What they wouldn’t have done to those Germans!’

  Merv Lilley, a rural labourer and bush poet, said that ‘thousands and thousands of characters on the dole and the breadline knew they’d get a job in the army . . . when you joined the army you met them all, and they were all in there for the three square meals . . . and five bob a day—big money’. A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald read: ‘Today I am unemployed, and when the war broke out, like many another man in a similar position, I hoped that a chance of enlistment would arise and take me off food relief, and give me a chance to become a useful citizen again.’ The Age soon reported that on coming into the Army Pay Office for his first week’s pay as a recruit in what would become the 2nd Australian Imperial Force, one man took the envelope and made a Nazi salute while shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Asked by the officer what he was doing, he said, ‘This is the first blinkin’ pay I’ve had in two blinkin’ years.’ It was a gift arising from Hitler’s aggression against Poland. Niall Brennan claimed (with obvious exaggeration) that 95 per cent of the first AIF volunteers were unemployed. Certainly Patsy Adam-Smith, a future author who as a child lived in Warragul, Victoria, remembered that the boys of the town, including her future brother-in-law, were jumping on the trains, hiding themselves under the tarpaulins covering grain, to get to Melbourne to enlist and put an end to unemployment. But, she noticed, there was also a peculiar excitement in their eyes.