Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  ANZAC: QUESTIONED AND ENDURING

  Australia’s focus on the Anzac campaign became diffused by opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but it was not unseated from its central place in the historiography of the ordinary Australian.

  Anzac commemoration became, in playwright Alan Seymour’s ironic term, The One Day of the Year. And yet there were many who quietly abstained—soldiers with bitter memories of bungled campaigns, soldiers simply fed up with military life, soldiers who had seen too much horror, soldiers who carried their war memories and their knowledge that men were just men too intimately and continually.

  Is Gallipoli central or not? It became common, and particularly after World War II, to say that Australia was born at Gallipoli. If so, it was born on Turkish beaches, a proposition a minority of commentators found absurd. Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History, published in 1955, has no reference to Gallipoli. It was of interest to observers that Australia was not a militarist nation in the sense of expanding its territory—its thinking was defensive, and its control of the Pacific islands was based on Australia’s defensive reflex, a sense that the islands were the castle moat. Except for during world wars I and II, Australian defence spending has generally been about 5 per cent of budget allocations. And yet the country defines its history in terms of military engagement. The extra irony is that the military engagements of the world wars were undertaken by young men who were citizen recruits, and often by generals who were citizen soldiers too, and that, according to a cherished myth, what they lacked in formal discipline they made up for in initiative and dash. By the 1960s, Australia remained a militaristic yet under-militarised and—unless distressed by what it saw as the advance of Communism—peace-loving community.

  Katharine Susannah Prichard, the Western Australian novelist, was deeply influenced by the war experience of her husband and brother, whose letters home told of terrible waste of life. Describing a futile attack and the men dead and dying as a result of it, one letter noted, ‘Someone has blundered!’ And later: ‘I begin to agree with many of your ideas . . . war is a rotten business. A way must be found to stop it ever happening again.’

  Anzacs were a divided and divisive political force in World War I Australia and their official representatives in the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia were determinedly conservative. Yet, the belief remained that Australia was formed not at Federation but on the brutal Gallipoli peninsula. To what extent did the peacefulness of Federation start it all off, the yearning deep in the blood, for some war or revolution, an outlaying of young men’s valour? In World War I, Banjo Paterson saw blood-letting as a maturing process:

  The mettle that a race can show

  Is proved with shot and steel,

  And now we know what nations know

  And feel what nations feel.

  Alan Seymour was a young radio writer, born in Western Australia and working in Sydney, when he wrote The One Day of the Year, a play in which the ex-Digger was portrayed as a drunken, brutal sentimentalist of war who browbeat his wife and his son. Oz Magazine wrote of the father, Alf, as if he were representative of a generation and declared that the ‘Alf movement aimed to convert you to a clean-living, all-Australian, anti-erotic, healthy, mentally retarded citizen’. Seymour had been inspired by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit lambasting Australia Day and written by a student named Geoffrey Havers.

  When the play was first performed, in 1960, it proved the size of Anzac in the Australian mentality. It was banned by the first Adelaide Arts Festival in 1960 on the grounds of its perceived insensitivity to returned servicemen, and bomb threats were levelled at the theatrical companies that tried to perform it. For example, in April 1961, at the first professional season of the Palace Theatre in Sydney, a bomb scare during a dress rehearsal forced police to close the theatre. It played to a full house, and then toured Melbourne, regional Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, at every turn dividing the country. Seymour meanwhile left for London, where The One Day of the Year opened at the Theatre Royal and received a standing ovation.

  One can only speculate as to the extent to which the chastening he got for his play in Australia convinced Seymour of the value of earning a living in Britain by television writing, although he did continue to write plays, and a novel, though none of these works had the impact on any nation that The One Day of the Year had upon Australia.

  THE MILLIONTH

  The Good Neighbour, the monthly bulletin issued by the Australian Department of Immigration, announced in October 1955 that the millionth post-war migrant was due in November aboard the Oronsay. The migrant was identified as Mrs Barbara Ann Porritt (née Wood), a twenty-one-year-old former stenographer of Redcar, Yorkshire, only sixteen kilometres from the birthplace of Captain Cook. A welcome dinner was planned for her by the Australian Minister for Immigration, Harold Holt. Her journey would be a romantic holiday trip, said the bulletin, because she had married Dennis Porritt, an electrical fitter, on 17 September. It was quite possible that the Porritts had seen the 1954 advertisement that declared, ‘the Australian way of life as seen by Her Majesty the Queen can be yours . . . as the Modern Emigrant’. Dennis Porritt would go directly to employment as a skilled tradesman with the State Electricity Commission (SEC) in Yallourn, in Gippsland, Victoria. It was announced that Mrs Porritt would work as a stenographer for the SEC. The couple would be amongst a total of between three and four thousand assisted migrants to arrive from the United Kingdom in November 1955.

  When the Oronsay docked, a telegram from Holt welcomed her ‘on behalf of nine million prospective good neighbours’, and declared that she had ‘been chosen to carry the title of Australia’s millionth migrant’ (emphasis added). It was so appropriate that the millionth migrant should be a young English girl that later it would be wondered if it were a rigged choice, and whether a young Calabrian or Polish woman would have been given the distinction. The selection had occurred, said Holt, because ‘you typify the kind of migrant we hope will follow you in ever greater numbers’.

  Good neighbours of the Porritts’ were photographed in Yinnar Street, Newborough, having a working bee outside the SEC-provided house that had been pre-cut and shipped from England. The Porritts meanwhile inspected Captain Cook’s house in the Treasury Gardens in Melbourne, and were given a bouquet by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Society of Victoria, and taken to inspect the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the Olympic Games were to take place. At an evening reception for the couple, Holt said it was ‘fitting that this couple from Yorkshire should have been designated as the end of the line of a million migrants because it was from Yorkshire about 180 years ago that Captain James Cook, [et cetera]’ Holt congratulated the Australian people as good neighbours who ‘have absorbed these people with relatively little discomfort . . . seeing that our new settlers are never without a friend’. Mrs Porritt herself found the occasion overwhelming, as she later described. That night, after ‘a really terrible day . . . it was a doctor that was at the party who came up and said, “I think you should get her out” because I just collapsed. It was like hysteria. I think it was because of all the attention and having to answer questions and constantly being given a microphone to say something.’ The girl in a million was further honoured with an international pageant of welcome at Myers department store, where ‘new Australians from twenty-five different countries wore their national dress’. The Argus followed her to her Yallourn home where Dennis carried her over the threshold.

  There was a notion that British migrants required little help in the way of settlement and assimilation. ‘Britons were less migrants than transplants to British settlements overseas,’ said Prime Minister Menzies, who liked to think that moving from England to Australia was no different to moving from Yorkshire to Somerset. Mrs Porritt was quickly pressed into service to greet newly arriving immigrants. The Australian Women’s Weekly dwelt on her ‘English-rose complexion’. But she did not
experience British and Australian identity as the same thing, and many British migrants found a gulf between Australian ‘Britishness’ and the Britishness of Britain. Yet Mrs Porritt was under pressure to argue that British heritage had transferred itself seamlessly to Australia, and was trying to do so at a time when Australia was becoming something else again. For those with ears to hear, she had warned the well-wishers even on arrival: ‘I am frightened too [as well as excited] but I expect that most migrants feel like myself when they first come, and I guess it won’t last for long in happy Australia.’ She could recall the time before she left Redcar when the press had come to the house and wanted a picture of her packing and she had felt ‘really cranky’ and emptied the suitcase and tossed it upside down. She confessed she was ‘all het up prior to getting married and the fact we were coming to Australia . . . you know we were just on edge and they [the press] don’t think, they just think of themselves, and that’s why I wanted to . . . When we look back we feel they really spoilt the wedding in a way because they were there in the background all the time.’ She was also angry that Australian press reports often disparaged life in England. ‘We never ever said we were glad to get out of there. We just said we came because we felt we might perhaps better ourselves.’

  Mrs Porritt’s name appeared in the papers again in the 2000s with the arrival in Sydney of Australia’s six millionth migrant, Christina Jurado from the Philippines. Mrs Porritt was invoked as a means of charting the cultural and social differences between the 1950s and the present.

  UNNUMBERED OTHERS

  In the three decades after the war, Australian immigration was always linked to the Australian labour-market needs, with intakes increasing during economic booms and declining during periods of economic downfall. Immigration from southern Europe involved people with little formal education and poor language skills. On most projects, workers born in Australia and English-language immigrants were heavily concentrated in the best jobs.

  Before the beginning of the mass post-war immigration program, 85 per cent of the first-generation Greeks in Sydney owned or worked in cafés, milk bars, fish-and-chip shops and other small businesses. Similarly, before 1947 (the date often given for the beginning of the implementation of Arthur Calwell’s post-war vision) more than half the immigrants born in Greece, Poland and Italy, and more than a third of those born in Germany, Malta and the former Yugoslavia, were self-employed or small employers—and this compared to only one-fifth of Australian born.

  But with the post-war period, the rate of immigrant entrepreneurs fell. Calwell and the government he represented did not seek men and women who would be creators of their own enterprises, shops and small businesses. They sought muscle. A number of immigrants entered the clothing, footwear and textile industries, because these required less start-up capital. These included the Anglo-Indian Basil Sellers, who would one day finance the statues of heroes in the Sydney Cricket Ground precinct, and the Pole Abe Goldberg. The Smorgon family, originally from Russia, founded a financial empire on new forms of continental meats. The Greek Andronicus family imported coffee and helped make it fashionable in tea-drinking Australia. Peter Manettas and Theo Carlis both emigrated from the Greek island of Kastellorizo and made their fortunes selling seafood. Franco Belgiorno Nettis, an engineer in the Snowy, founded a powerful engineering and construction company, and Sir Peter Abeles from Budapest bought two trucks he dubbed Samson and Delilah and built the vast Alltrans group from them. Other Hungarians included small businessmen Frank Lowy and his friend John Saunders; Lowy, having begun as a deli/milk-bar owner in Sydney’s Blacktown, developed the giant Westfield Corporation.

  The Good Neighbour Council spread amongst the newcomers the idea that a quick Australian assimilation was the way to be accepted as a mate. It advised the newcomer to avoid behaving in any way that would attract attention. Assimilation for a Greek, Italian, Eastern European would be complete when nobody noticed the immigrant as a newcomer. At Good Neighbour Conferences post-World War II, photographs of selected children were displayed, and delegates were asked to choose the Australian-born amongst them. It was a game, based on the idea that appearance bespoke place of origin. Blond children from Greece or Northern Italy must have confused the selectors somewhat. The fear of Italians as an ethnic component was almost as vivid as it had been thirty-five years or more past, when the Bulletin published its outrageous race-poem ‘The Dago Menace’:

  He’s both ignorant and slow

  And we often tell him so!

  And his anger is the rage of a virago—

  For he’ll maim or take a life,

  With his swift and sudden knife.

  But you’ll have to take your hat off to the dago!

  The Ferry Report on immigration to North Queensland in 1924 had declared that ‘it was the swarthier Southern Italians who were dubbed “the Chinese of Europe” and execrated as “scum and refuse” while the lighter-skinned, ‘thriving, highly paid and long haired Piedmontese—the Scotsmen of Italy—were distinctly preferred’.

  British and European immigration peaked in the 1960s, the decade in which 875,000 British immigrants arrived. Immigration agreements were in place with nearly all Western and Eastern European states, and were extended into Asia Minor when Turkey signed an agreement with Australia in 1968. These agreements not only stated the conditions under which assisted passages would be given, but also obliged the Australian government to provide acceptable levels of settlement services and employment. Many of the mixed-race immigrants coming from Asia in the 1960s did not receive assisted passages, nor were they subject to official agreements between governments. They were almost invariably English-speaking Christians and were often assimilated very quickly. But since, pre-war, they would not have been welcome, any more than the Turks, the envelope of White Australia was being blown out in this decade. It is significant or at least symbolic that the agreement with Turkey was signed the year after the retirement of the two old race guardians, Calwell and Bob Menzies.

  Assisted passages had, from colonial days, been used as a means of competing for immigrants against the attractions of North America. Canada competed with Australia, and the US quota for British and Irish immigrants was itself rarely filled. Europeans other than British and Irish had been seriously limited by the national quota system adopted by the United States in 1924 to combat ‘the hordes’ of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe before World War I.

  In 1965, the Australian national quota system was abolished and family reunion was given priority. This made migration to Australia from Europe more uncertain, unless the migrant already had family members in Australia. The beginning of the functioning of the European Community (EC) in 1968 meant that migration between EC members became more common as an alternative to migration to ‘the new world’—Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

  Dr Thomas Barnardo began his work among destitute people in the United Kingdom in the 1860s. A convert to evangelical Christianity, he created a ‘Ragged School’ in Stepney and founded homes for street children. Overcrowding and lack of opportunity for his wards prompted Barnardo to find places for them overseas. He had sent off seven thousand children to various parts of the British Commonwealth by the end of the nineteenth century, but from the early twentieth century onwards Australia became the popular destination for poor British children. A hundred and fifty thousand children were shipped from British children’s homes or by well-meaning impoverished families through Barnardo’s and other schemes, notably the Fairbridge scheme.

  The first post-war shipment of 150 boys and girls arrived on the SS Asturias in 1947. The boys ended at the ultimately notorious Catholic Boys’ Town at Bindoon outside Perth, where they were pressed into the work of building three two-storey extensions, on a diet of porridge mixed with bran for breakfast. The abuse at Bindoon was of every variety. Nigel Fitzgibbon found himself here as a child, transported to Australia without his parents’ consent. He remembers becoming emaciated
and brutalised, subject to prods in the genital and anal areas by a sadistic brother who used for the purpose a rod tipped with a .303 bullet.

  It was common for children sent abroad to be told they were orphans even if they weren’t—a means of making them commit to their new environment. David Hill and his brothers were told so on their arrival in New South Wales in 1959, after their mother reluctantly gave the boys up in the hope they would have a chance in Australia. But she pursued them to Australia, where she was appalled at the conditions in their Fairbridge School at Molong and extricated them. The children at Fairbridge rose as early as 2 a.m. to do the milking, and at other times worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., ploughing, crutching sheep, driving tractors and so on. The physical and mental abuse there rivalled that of Bindoon, and Hill, who would later become chairman of the Board of the ABC and chairman of the Board of Australian Railways, remembered that amongst his fellow transportees were children as young as three or four who were never hugged.

  ABORIGINAL VOTING

  There had long been agitation by Aboriginal leaders such as William Cooper for the Aboriginal federal franchise. Fear of Aboriginal numbers in South Australia and Western Australia had helped some legislators to support the female franchise in the 1890s, as a means of diluting any potential Aboriginal influence. In 1899, Western Australia had removed the vote in any case from Aborigines who did not own freehold property.

  Throughout the Commonwealth, since their names did not appear on the Commonwealth electoral rolls, and Commonwealth rolls were used in the states, many Aborigines were effectively disenfranchised in their states. From 1940 until six months after the war, Aborigines serving in the military had been enfranchised. It was not until 1949 that the government enfranchised any Aborigine who had fought for Australia. But 1949 also saw a more far-reaching reform—legislation to enfranchise all Aborigines entitled at that time to vote in their state. Even so, most Aborigines—those in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory—remained disenfranchised, for they were not entitled to vote in their state. Had Labor been re-elected in 1949 it is possible that Aborigines ‘educated to the point of understanding’, as Labor’s Minister for the Interior put it, and who lived ‘a respectable white man’s code of life’ would have been ‘given citizenship and allowed to vote at the next election’.