Australians: Flappers to Vietnam
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In 1920, Brigadier Gerald Campbell, a New South Wales grazier, formed the Conservative King and Empire Alliance with the tacit support of Prime Minister Billy Hughes. In May 1921, it held a monster loyalty meeting and two days later flooded Sydney’s Domain with over a hundred thousand men who stormed the platforms of the Socialist Labor Party, the Communist Party and even the ALP returned soldiers. These events foreshadowed the growth of private armies and profound divisions. (Sydney Mail, 11 May 1921, National Library of Australia)
Margaret Preston, influenced by Post-Impressionism and Cubism, produced the sort of artwork Norman Lindsay had attacked in his tracts on modernism. Prosperous by birth and marriage, in 1925 Preston produced a brilliant portrait of her maid Myra entitled The Flapper. The dress, cut to ride above the knees, was considered shocking by churchmen but was thought essential style by halfway adventurous girls. (Margaret Preston, The Flapper, 1925, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Australia, purchased with the assistance of the Cooma-Monaro Snowy River Fund 1988 © Margaret Rose Preston Estate. Licensed by Viscopy)
Country veteran and bush solicitor, Eric Campbell, disgruntled at lack of action by the not-so-secret Old Guard, formed the popular and numerous New Guard. Influenced by Fascist movements in Europe, he drew up plans for the kidnapping of Labor Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, in an era when civil war was no remote possibility. (Fairfax FXT169511)
‘Smithy of the Air’ was composed and had a spate of popularity in 1930, a year when Charles Kingsford Smith would fly ten thousand solo miles and enjoyed membership in Eric Campbell’s New Guard. (National Library of Australia, nla. mus-vn5465277)
In 1927, twenty-year-old university student Beryl Mills of Western Australia became the first Miss Australia, a contest designed to promote a now defunct newspaper, the Daily Guardian. In an age of eugenics, Miss Australia was designed to represent ideal antipodean womanhood as envisaged in the age of White Australia. Heavily chaperoned by her mother on a tour of the United States, Beryl was acclaimed in San Francisco as a worthy sister to the Anzacs. (State Library of Western Australia BA287/146)
The Lindsays, Norman and Rose. Adventurous as regards theme in his writing, sketching and painting, and author of banned novels, Lindsay was a foe of both wowserism and modern art. This photograph by Harold Cazneaux, with the forthright, thin admirer and Rose as the rounded, yielding woman, seems to encapsulate his ideals of what art should be. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Pompey Elliott was the most famous of three AIF leaders who died by his own hand by 1931. Ironically, the wound stripe below Elliott’s on the sleeve the child is sewing is dedicated to Sir James McKay, whom Pompey despised and whose death was of natural causes, not of war neurosis. (Sunday Mail, 29 March 1931, State Library of Queensland)
Adela Pankhurst Walsh, daughter of the leader of the Suffragette Movement, took her baby to the founding of the Communist Party in 1920, and thereafter embraced a number of radical positions, Left and Right. A strong isolationist as a new war neared, she mounted a chair to address a crowd on Japanese peaceful intentions in the Pacific. She and her husband would be interned during World War II. (Fairfax FXJ339541)
Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Melbourne soldier, businessman and Tory, was Nationalist Prime Minister of Australia from 1923 to 1929, and so the politician who moved government from Melbourne to Canberra. An urbane man, he shines here at the opening of the Canberra golf course. His influence continued in his participation in the League of Nations and as High Commissioner in London for twelve years before and during World War II. (National Library of Australia, nla.pic-vn3695870)
A miner from the Hunter Valley, the distinguished-looking Matthew Charlton led the Labor Party in the dog days, indeed years, from 1922 onwards. A moderate, he believed in a more independent foreign policy and in the League of Nations. By 1928, pressed by ill health and the rise of Jim Scullin, he retired from the leadership, and from parliament in 1929. It is interesting to speculate how he would have dealt with the Depression. (Newcastle Regional Library Collection, Image 345 002142)
Geographer and Antarctic explorer, Griffith Taylor, committed a form of heresy against nationalist hopes for the continent when he declared the core of Australia useless and that he was under impressed with other sectors of the country. He would say in the 1920s in the United States that the term ‘Australian desert’ was ‘anathema’ to most Australians. (State Library of New South Wales, ML325/b)
Victorian Aboriginal leader, William Cooper, became a spokesman for Aboriginals denied aid in the 1920s drought and then in the Depression. Leaving his settlement to become eligible for the old age pension, he used it to fund his campaign for direct representation in parliament, the franchise, land rights and populating remote Australia with formerly dispossessed Aboriginals. In early 1938, he led the first Aboriginal deputation to a prime minister, and was the first to raise the idea of a constitutional amendment to empower the Federal government to legislate uniform Aboriginal rights. (Newspix)
Douglas Mawson, young geologist on the right, with his mentor Edgeworth David and Alistair McKay, located the South Magnetic Pole in 1909 as part of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition. Mawson would decline an invitation from Robert Falcon Scott to join his fatal 1910 expedition and instead mounted a large expedition of his own to what would become Antarctic Australia. This and Mawson’s later BANZARE expedition of 1930 created a huge Australian Antarctic claim of 5.9 million square kilometres, over 40 per cent of the continent. (State Library of Victoria, H90.31/35)
Radio transmissions excited Australians as another weapon against distance and torpor. Here two sisters, little Jean and seventeen-year-old Dot Cheers, listen to a homemade crystal receiving radio in their back yard in Melbourne on Christmas Day 1923. Dot herself would become a radio star, broadcasting as ‘Aunty June’. (Museum of Victoria, courtesy of Dr Christina Chee, reg no. MM11115)
Western Australia expanded its population by land schemes that brought British migrants to the state. They gained and maintained their grants by living primitively and labouring long. Northcliffe, named to honour the press baron, began as such a settlement in the 1920s. Settlers such as these were required to clear their land. (State Library of Western Australia BA1881/3)
Sir Otto Niemeyer (left), the Bank of England man, came to Australia to tell State and Federal governments that, after heavy borrowings in the 1920s, they could not spend money on great public schemes to employ the poor. He seems to have survived a meeting with Premier Jack Lang in Sydney in 1930, even though Lang was the sole dissenter from Sir Otto’s message. (Fairfax FXT272525)
In the early 1930s, the Unemployed Workers Union tried to oppose what it considered unjust evictions. Increasingly, considerable forces of police were sent to break up its organised occupation of premises to which eviction notices had been sent, and the confrontations grew more and more violent. In this Newtown eviction of June 1931, the police have just pacified the occupation force of unemployed workers. (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June 1931, National Library of Australia)
In grievous political trouble because of the Depression and the limitations on spending, Prime Minister James Scullin, addressing a Sydney crowd from the back of a truck just before the Christmas (19 December) election in 1931, holds out hope of better days if people will stick with Labor. His party would in fact be decimated, losing thirty-two seats, and the former Labor man, Joe Lyons, would lead the United Australia Party coalition thus elected to power. (Fairfax FXT22692198)
The Fascista Seziones, sections of the Italian Fascist party, were not as successful in garnering hardcore membership amongst the Australian–Italians as were the Fascios, the more informal business and social associations, and the Dopolavoro (after work) clubs. But engagement in Fascism was encouraged by Italian diplomats in Australia, where many conservatives publicly expressed their admiration of Mussolini, and in whatever form, Fascism was powerful in the Italian business and general community. This flag for the Werribee Fascista
Sezione was made in 1928, and its display did not become illegal until Italy entered World War 11 in 1940. (Museum of Victoria SH940595)
The Young People Auxiliary line up to lead a Communist Party procession in August 1931 in an Australia where unemployment had climbed to one-third and Communist Party membership was rising. (Fairfax FXT269164)
The Secessionist delegates of Western Australia display the proposed flag of their independent country in London in October 1934. Backed by a successful referendum in Western Australia, they hoped that the Imperial Parliament would alter the Australian Constitution, originally an act of that parliament, in their favour. (State Library of Western Australia BA556/1)
Though the Republican side had lost the Spanish Civil War, their cause shone brightly with all anti-Fascists. In 1939, the Sane Democracy League welcomed back volunteer nurses May McFarlane and Una Wilson, who had nursed wounded Republicans during that fierce dress-rehearsal for World War II. (State Library of Western Australia 226,476PD)
Workers were still angry about the pig iron conflict of 1938 when Prime Minister Menzies visited Wollongong in 1939. Cries of ‘Pig Iron Bob’ filled the air, and police called on union leaders to help them escort Menzies through an angry crowd. (Fairfax FXJ156071)
From a studio in Melbourne in September 1939, Robert Gordon Menzies makes his well-phrased declaration of war against Germany, announcing Britain had already done so, and ‘for that reason’, a state of war existed between Australia and the Third Reich. (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an23217367)
Literally providing a lens on the war in the Western Desert, Greece and the South Pacific, the Melbourne cinematographer Damien Parer took the idea of frontline photography to a degree of skill, valour and recklessness that ensured his photographs became archetypal images of the war and that his life would not be easy or long. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales PXA 24, 1/a9451001)
Chester Wilmott of the ABC would achieve international renown as a frontline broadcaster from within the besieged port of Tobruk. Here, in Syria in 1941, he broadcasts from the back of a truck with a cloth over the microphone to protect it from wind. (Australian War Memorial 008619)
In Hobart in September 1940, as petrol rationing begins, a car owner produces his ration cards for a service station attendant. Due to war needs for fuel, post-war shortages and economic pressure, rationing would continue for nearly ten years before being abolished by Robert Menzies, who first introduced it. It created much keenly felt inconvenience and a vigorous black market. (Newspix)
Mr Dedman, Federal Minister, wears the austere ‘Victory suit’. Double-breasted coats and waistcoats were prohibited by regulation. Three cheerful women model spring frocks for 1942, built according to exact measurements that prohibited wrap-overs and apron skirts, and pockets in sweaters. (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1942, National Library of Australia)
Enemy aliens were detained at a number of internment camps. This magazine was produced in Tatura camp in Victoria early in World War II, and contains articles in English and German as well as cartoons and quizzes. At Tatura, the innocent were imprisoned with the adults, sometimes themselves only questionably dangerous. (Museum of Victoria HT 15387)
Italian POWs captured in the Middle East were men of many political beliefs. Those who were not camicie nere, blackshirt Fascists, were placed on farms to work, and remained in Australia for lack of shipping until months after the end of the Second World War. This Italian, nicknamed ‘Frisco’, worked on a dairy farm near Barmedman in New South Wales and was so happy there that he returned after the war and worked at the dairy until 1961. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales bcp_02815)
A member of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, Alma Warren, and Dorothy Heitsch of the Australian Women’s Army Service, work on an aircraft engine together at the height of the Pacific War. (State Library of Victoria H98.105/533)
Kathleen Best would achieve the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Women’s Medical Service. A veteran of Middle East and Greek campaigns, her nurses were subjected, while working in and escaping from Greece, to severe attacks from German aircraft. Her staging camp for nurses at Suez, guarded by wire and entered by only a single gate, was nicknamed ‘Katie’s Birdcage’. (Australian War Memorial 141181)
Something of John Curtin’s lonely burden is caught in this wartime photograph. Harried by the quarrel over bringing the Australian divisions home, tortured by fear that they would be sunk at sea, wracked by insomnia and the call of alcohol, he roamed Canberra’s streets and surrounding bush by night. He was as willing as any Australian to greet General MacArthur as a saviour. (National Library of Australia nla. pic-an23297484)
Essington Lewis, head of BHP and wartime Director of Munitions, was marked by philanthropy and a non-ideological commitment to social welfare. Appointed by Robert Menzies early in the war, he continued to work energetically with Curtin, for whom he had an abiding respect. Here, in Broken Hill in 1950, he unveils a war memorial. (State Library of New South Wales jppd_26382)
Three boy aces of the Battle of Britain created in Australian males a desire to be fighter pilots, though many of the willing young men were siphoned into Bomber Command, whose lumbering aircraft were considered the equivalent of buses, not sports cars. All three of these men would perish flying. Irishman Wing Commander Brendan ‘Paddy’ Finucane, in the middle, flying with an Australian squadron, was killed in the English Channel; Bluey Truscott, on the left, on a training exercise back home; and Thorold Smith, on the right, while rebuffing a Japanese raid on Darwin. (National Library of Australia nla. pic-vn3723178)
Max Martin, a boy from Balmain, enlisted under-age for the army and was discovered, but then rushed to the RAAF and was offered faster access to the air battles if he chose to become a gunner. A great grandson of Irish convicts, he flew ninety missions over Europe, many of them as a member of a Pathfinder squadron that marked targets at low level. Commissioned and decorated, he was appalled by the bombing of Dresden. (Judy Keneally)
Future prime minister, Gough Whitlam was a navigator in what became an elite Mitchell bomber crew. While his squadron operated against Japanese targets from Yirrkala in eastern Arnhem Land, his interest in the Yolgnu people was matched only by his enthusiasm to persuade fellow fliers to vote YES in a 1944 referendum to increase federal power. (The Whitlam Institute)
American troops were given a pocket guide to Australia with the warning that ‘when it comes to slang, the Australians can give us a head start and still win’. They should also have been warned that Australians called all United States personnel, North and South, white and black, ‘Yanks’. (National Library of Australia NL919.94UNI)
Australian girls picnic with the glamorous Yanks on a beach near a United States base close to Brisbane. These associations between Australian women and Americans would cause conflict in society, arousing the question of whether Australian women were too susceptible to Yankee glamour and trade goods. (Newspix)
Reg Saunders was the first Aboriginal soldier to be commissioned and to command a company. A veteran of the Desert War, he remained in hiding on Crete for twelve months after the island fell to the Germans. He then fought until mid-1944 in New Guinea and was commissioned as a platoon commander. In Korea, he commanded a company of the 3rd Battalion. His brother, similarly a veteran, was killed in New Guinea. (Australian War Memorial 003967)
A still believed to have been taken by Damien Parer. During the assault on Salamaua throughout mid-1943, an action designed to draw off Japanese defenders of Lae but becoming a savage battle in its own right, a burial party honours a casualty, and a soldier protects the padre’s prayer book from rain with a flap of raincoat. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales PXA 24,58/a9451058)
John Curtin arrives in Brisbane to consult with the American, Douglas MacArthur. Blamey, in the background, will regret the closeness between the conservative American and the Australian socialist prime minister. (Newspix)
; In April 1944, an ailing and nervous John Curtin, who will become sick for most of the journey, and his shy wife, Elsie, chat with General Blamey aboard the Lurline as it departs for the United States. Curtin’s meetings with President Roosevelt and then the British would not bring quite the fruits he desired. (National Library of Australia nla.pic-vn3583643)
During his army service, the artist Albert Tucker was permitted to draw patients at the Heidelberg Military Hospital, near Melbourne. In this work he gives a stunning depiction of what it meant to suffer from the war neurosis described by soldiers as ‘being bomb happy’. (© Barbara Tucker. Courtesy of Barbara Tucker, Australian War Memorial ART28305)
On a hot summer’s day in 1944, Australian infantrymen, returned home from New Guinea, move to their train, passing African–American soldiers, the second-class citizens of the American army, who are about to leave for the jungles these Australians have just left. (Australian War Memorial 064160)
The war is over, and during an Imperial Conference in London, two men with a desire to build a new planned society, Nugget Coombs and Prime Minister Ben Chifley, go for a stroll in Regent’s Park. (National Archives of Australia M2153, 6/1)
Lance Sharkey, Catholic-born Communist, addresses a crowd in Sydney on Soviet Communism after his return from the Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in Moscow. He would follow the Kremlin in every alteration in Communist ideology, accommodating himself to the disgraceful non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. When Prime Minister Menzies declared the Communist Party illegal in June 1940, he went underground, emerging again after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. (Fairfax FXT170871)