Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Joyce was acutely loyal, an old-fashioned girl who lived with her parents in the suburb of Forrest and cycled to work each day. But the Americans did not bamboozle her. When General MacArthur’s secretary called, she was asked to put Curtin on the phone, apparently to wait for MacArthur. ‘“No,” I said, “I shall put the Prime Minister on when you’re ready.” The American secretary said, “Well, shall we switch together?” I thought as Prime Minister of Australia he had the priority to not have to wait.’

  Curtin was certainly busy enough not to be required to wait. A 1942 newspaper article described the prime minister’s ‘timetable for a busy day’:

  Rises 8am. In office, 9am. The morning is filled with interviewing Ministers, service chiefs, departmental heads, foreign diplomats and trade union executives until 1.30pm Press conference.

  Lunch from time this conference ends, usually 1.45, sometimes 2pm to 2.15pm. Back in the office 2.15pm to go through the same routine as the morning until 6.45pm Press conference to 7pm.

  Dinner and current newspapers till 8pm.

  Back in office or at Prime Minister’s Lodge dealing with cables and reports until, at the earliest—

  Midnight, when he tries to get to bed, reading more newspapers and something diverting, mostly thrillers.

  Curtin confessed to the clerk of the House of Representatives, Frank Green, who met him one night while he stood alone in the moonlit garden of the Lodge, that he wasn’t able to sleep ‘while our transports are out in the Indian Ocean with the Jap submarines looking for them’. Curtin was so distressed that he is said to have spent one night praying with his religious-minded secretary Fred McLaughlin. McLaughlin was a member of the Moral Rearmament Association, a movement to counter the literal rearmament of sinister world power by putting on spiritual armour through prayer and meditation, and he said that he spent ‘an awful lot of time during that war on my knees in my office’.

  When film was taken of Curtin returning to his house—typically described as ‘modest’—in Cottesloe in Perth, carrying his own suitcase, troops who saw it in Darwin cheered. Many Australians felt he was living their sort of life, and was one with them.

  AUSTERITY

  Meanwhile, Australian citizens began to know true hardship when it was decided that everyone must carry an identity card and a ration book. The rationing of tea began on 20 March 1942, to be followed by rationing of clothing on 9 May, while sugar was not rationed until 31 August. Butter and meat followed. The neighbourhood butcher became a man of possible generous favours to families, especially those with sick members; or sometimes of extortion, but even so his hands were largely tied by the coupon system. Suddenly goods cost not only money but coupons as well. In June 1942, each Australian received a coupon book with 118 coupons. Every purchasable item had a coupon value—a man’s suit took thirty-eight coupons, a pair of socks four. If buying a particular piece of apparel for fashion (local dances) or necessity (school uniforms), a civilian needed enough coupons left in his or her book to cover it.

  After receiving coupons from shoppers, shops passed them on to wholesalers, so that they could order more goods, and wholesalers passed them back to producers and the Rationing Commission. It was considered a great mercy when a storekeeper supplied some under-the-counter delicacy, say, for a sick child, without demanding coupons, since that meant he was sacrificing a fragment of his own purchasing power.

  The production of beer and spirits was reduced by a third. Hoadley’s, the confectionery company, makers of the famous Violet Crumble bar, advised Australian children that they must await the availability of that confection until the war was won—their entire output was apparently needed for the troops on the front line. The author and many other children of the period imagined soldiers gorging themselves on Hoadley’s products as they rebuffed the Germans and Japanese.

  Rationing was preceded by much panic buying and accompanied by the onset of the black market. Liquor became a fertile item of trade. Lucky young women had gin and nylons supplied by MacArthur’s arriving Americans, who could buy them cheaply at the PX stores set up in American bases. Otherwise liquor was sold by sly grog dealers, selling their goods from premises in laneways, often to men who had missed out on their evening intake because of the newly enacted six o’clock closing of pubs.

  Petrol rationing had already begun in June 1940, and increasingly people got used to the sight of charcoal gas bladders in frameworks on top of cars, or charcoal gas producer tanks welded to the rear of vehicles. Refuelling with charcoal was even then considered a dirty enough business that those who did it wore masks. Research on the running of cars on charcoal gas had been done by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as a possible petrol replacement if an enemy impeded oil supplies. The other initial purpose of rationing petrol in Australia was in part to free supplies for the war in the northern hemisphere. On the day in 1940 when rationing was to begin, there was a rush on supplies, and unsafe private stockpiling for personal use or black-market sale began. The Motor Trades Association claimed it knew of one man who had compiled a store of two hundred 44-gallon drums. Labor, then in opposition, and motor traders generally, opposed the necessity of the rationing and declared Australia could not win a war by strangling the means of transporting goods. But fewer tankers were arriving, and the Commonwealth Oil Board worked within the program of oil deliveries devised by the Empire Oil Board in London, whose priority was the European front.

  Robert Menzies had received angry letters from motorists declaring they lacked the petrol to get to church or hospital, and some writers were angry that ‘Dagos’ got the same ration as everyone else. But in September 1941, rationing grew tougher still. The allocation for taxis was reduced from 100 to 22 gallons a week. This had a sometimes severe impact even in an era when most people used taxis only in the most dire or important circumstances. The author’s mother, whose husband had been sent overseas during her pregnancy, had organised with a local cab driver, the sole one in the suburb, to take her to hospital if she went into labour. When she called, however, the taxi had used up its petrol allowance and was not yet fitted with a charcoal gas device (installation of the unpopular gas producer bladders, one of whose defects was that they increased tyre wear, took some time). She had no neighbours with cars, and thus no option but to walk, in the early stages of labour, over a mile to hospital.

  Petrol rationing would in fact last until 1950, and in the post-war period, Australian drivers received only 50 per cent of the British ration. Rationing had been one of the chief issues in Menzies’ near-loss of government in 1940, and would contribute to the discontent that brought down Ben Chifley’s Labor government in 1949. But in World War II, most people accepted it with grumbling but a fundamental good grace, eroded only a little by the black marketeers and the exorbitant prices they charged for luxuries.

  The austerity drive also involved the standardisation of clothing, including the introduction of a ‘Victory’ suit for men, much mocked by commentators. In an age when suits were much worn—even to football matches—it was a suit made with a minimum of cloth. The jacket was shorter in the tail than usual, and if it was double-breasted it lacked the vest, then normally part of any suit. It was matched, in the case of women, by the unavailability of stockings and by ‘austerity dresses’. These used the minimum of cloth required for modesty and were made out of old, discarded clothes or even curtains, bedding or tablecloths. Young stockingless women put tan lotion on their legs and drew a seam down their calves to simulate the real thing. The sight of boys on the cusp of adolescence wearing too short and crotch-pinching pants was common.

  The apparent zealotry of Minister Dedman’s department often attracted mockery. John Dedman, radical economist and former British army officer, Curtin’s Minister for War Organisation of Industry, was dubbed Minister for Austerity by the public. In accepting a report of his department on 29 April 1942, he took a tone that was certain to generate opposition from conservatives and business. It had, he s
aid, a ‘specific duty of setting in motion a transfer of the nation’s resources into those uses in which they will go furthest towards victory’. Confectionery, pharmaceuticals, bicycles, cosmetics, radios, building materials, smallgoods and clothing of all kinds would come under his provisions. Under pressure of mass production, brands and trademarks might be affected through companies being compelled to contribute mass-produced goods for generic use, but the minister said, ‘I shall not hesitate to move in every case for the most effective rationalisation plan, irrespective of the interest of particular firms in product-markings of one kind or another.’ On 7 May he told Parliament, ‘The paramount consideration . . . must be the most effective use of the nation’s manpower in the production of the war.’

  Dedman, a former professional soldier, was strangely sensitive and easily baited by the uncomplimentary nicknames hurled at him across the floor, but he had the courage to pursue agendas that other Cabinet members found too unpopular. He prohibited cosmetic manufacture to conserve scarce supplies of oils and chemicals. In South Australia in particular he wanted to bring a large number of women previously employed elsewhere, in stores and non-essential industries, into munitions factories.

  THE PEOPLE AND POLICY, 1942

  The growing public conviction of the rightness of returning the troops to Australia played in the Labor Party’s favour. The United Australia Party (UAP), according to Paul Hasluck, suffered from ‘ideological poverty’. The jovial and garrulous Queensland accountant Artie Fadden, who had left the Country Party for the UAP at the time of his brief prime ministership in 1941, had not appeared to be a credible alternative leader of an embattled Australia. The Labor Party and Curtin had by artfulness, political instinct and merit come to be identified with the war effort, and Hasluck would complain later that there was an assumption that the Labor Party had won the war and saved Australia. Don Rodgers, Curtin’s press secretary, was skilled at pushing the view of Curtin as saviour.

  When in government the UAP had asked for single-minded support from Labor, and now many of the conservative opposition gave support to Curtin’s war measures even though Fadden thought they smacked of socialism. He complained that the government’s policy in limiting profits and increasing taxation on higher incomes had reduced the capacity of the ‘investing public’ to subscribe to loans. There were cries from the opposition, too, that the Labor Cabinet was pandering to the trade unions by regulating the coalfields and the waterfront less than other sections of the community.

  Eddie Ward, Labor warrior from Paddington in Sydney, said that by having raised the possibility of the socialisation of banks and industry, and the repudiation of interest on war loans, Fadden had shaken the confidence of investors. Ward had been merciless on Menzies, describing him as ‘this posturing individual with the scowl of Mussolini, the bombast of Hitler and the physical proportions of Goering’. But he was willing to extend the same level of compliment to his own side as well, and even to Curtin. Ward and another inheritor of Irish Labor-style militancy, Arthur ‘Cocky’ Calwell from Melbourne, were called the ‘terrible twins’ and believed that the war should be financed by taxation and by loans Australia would not need to repay until the end of the war. As a youth, Ward had lost employment in the Eveleigh Railway Works in Sydney for his involvement in the railway strike of 1917. He boxed professionally at Rushcutters Bay stadium to bulk out his small returns from work and, after visiting his fiancée in Parramatta, would walk home the 25 kilometres to Surry Hills for lack of a train fare. He had been and would remain, in this war, an anti-conscriptionist.

  Curtin left it above all to his Treasurer, Ben Chifley, to assure Australians that the social justice program would be maintained during wartime. Invalid and old-age pensions were raised and these benefits were extended to at least some Aborigines. A Maternity Allowance Bill was passed and similarly extended to Aborigines, and a Child Endowment Bill and a Widows’ Pension Bill were passed. The government linked the rise in the pension rate to the rise in the cost of living as war demand drove up prices. The Aboriginal entitlement to these benefits was limited to ‘Aboriginal natives of Australia who are living under civilised conditions and whose character and intelligence qualify them to receive pensions’. Payment of the benefit could be made either to the pensioner or to ‘a suitable authority or person for the benefit of pensioners’. This created the risk of corrupt withholding of money in the many cases in which Aborigines were wards of the state and were not entitled to receive money directly.

  Nonetheless, in the minds of Curtin and Chifley, to lower social-benefit standards during the war was to lose what Australia was. The only Australia worth fighting for was a just one. In fact, these social service measures, unlike Dedman’s emergency plans, received support from both sides of Parliament, and some had been foreshadowed in Menzies’ last budget. While the Minister for Social Services, the former bootmaker Ted ‘Jack’ Holloway, said, ‘So far as lies in our power, we shall at least prevent a lowering of social standards during the war, and we have every intention of improving them from time to time,’ the shadow minister, Sir Frederick Stewart, one of the founders of Australian National Airways with Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, declared, ‘I believe we are more likely to succeed in this conflict if we are able to maintain the morale of the people by giving at least an instalment of this new social order.’

  One wonders how much deal-making went on at Canberra’s Hotel Kurrajong, where so many parliamentarians stayed and where Chifley’s secretary and lover, Phyllis Donnelly, a tall, thin, brown-haired diabetic woman whom some found difficult, also stayed, sharing the breakfast table with Chifley. Unlike the frailties of politicians in later eras, no one pointed a finger at this alliance. Maybe, too, some internal Labor Party issues between Chifley and the turbulent Victorian Arthur Calwell were smoothed away on their stroll to Mass at St Christopher’s each Sunday.

  In 1941, Fadden had tried to persuade the states to surrender temporarily their power to impose income tax. The premiers had rejected the proposal. Now Chifley forced the issue. In April 1942, the Commonwealth insisted to all the premiers that there should be one income-taxing authority in Australia. In May, Chifley introduced four income-tax measures into the Commonwealth Parliament, the effect of which would be that for the duration of the war and for the financial year in which the war came to an end, the Commonwealth should be the sole authority to tax income. Chifley said that the Commonwealth had the task of mobilising the complete resources of the nation, and its financial obligations had increased beyond anything imagined. The states would be reimbursed for their lost revenue. He declared in Parliament: ‘Nothing short of complete control by the Commonwealth during the war will meet the huge demands that have to be faced . . . the rights of the sovereign people are paramount to the sovereign rights of the States.’

  The reality Curtin and Chifley did not emphasise was that once the states dismantled the structure for collecting income tax, and gave the public servants who had previously collected and processed taxes other jobs, it would be hard for them ever to take over collection of taxes again. One conservative politician complained of Chifley’s tax coup, ‘Canberra . . . has swept aside every consideration except its own more and more intense desire to destroy the Federal system.’ Indeed, there was not much doubt that Chifley saw this centralism as an objective desirable whether in peace or in war. Chifley’s subtle argument was that the government did not seek to take away from the states their power to impose taxes upon incomes, but ‘we say to the states: “If you impose income tax you will receive no compensation from us. On the other hand, if you vacate the income tax field, we shall give you the money that you would otherwise have raised for yourselves.” I ask the States to accept that arrangement.’ It was, in fact, the querulous young Melbourne Labor member Calwell who said he hoped the states would challenge the legislation in the High Court, for he predicted that having lost their right to impose income tax, they would become ‘mendicants existing upon the bou
nty of the Commonwealth . . . and for practical purposes will cease to exist as States’.

  Sections 106 and 107 of the Constitution, the temporarily routed Menzies pointed out, indicated that not even the use of the defence power of the Commonwealth could operate ‘by destroying the States as polities’. But even many on his side of the plain little Parliament in Canberra did not agree with him on the issue. ‘We are not destroying the States,’ declared one UAP member loudly in reply to Menzies, and another cried, ‘We are just putting a bomb under them.’

  Many opposition members voted with the government, while Curtin’s friend and old mentor, the noble Maurice Blackburn, crossed the floor to vote against the legislation. In the Senate, four of the opposition voted with the government. Four states—South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia—decided to make a High Court challenge to the ‘Federal grab’. Billy McKell, the Labor premier of New South Wales, wanted to join them in their cause but was overruled at the annual Labor State Conference in June when a massive majority decided to support the Commonwealth’s intentions. Even the old Labor warrior Forgan ‘Bill’ Smith, Queensland premier, declared in his robust Scots-Presbyterian manner that his motivation for going ahead with the High Court challenge was that ‘my breeding and training are such that I will not be a vassal to anyone’.

  The High Court action began on 22 June and the judgment was delivered on 23 July. The four Commonwealth Acts were upheld. As historian David Day says, ‘A major change in constitutional relationships and in the political structure of Australia had been made without any formal amendment of the Constitution.’ But when later in 1942 Evatt introduced the Constitutional Alteration (War Aims and Reconstruction) Bill, which prefigured the post-war structure of Australia, Hasluck feared it would create lasting socialist or centrifying tendencies in Australia, and as we will see the measure would ultimately be defeated in a 1944 referendum.