The Power Of Speech

Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image

James Curran

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522852486
• eBook ISBN: 9780522867565
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The subjects of this book are five fascinating prime ministers—Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard—and how they view Australia.
Until the 1960s, our nation believed itself to be British. Then, during a decade of momentous change, this concept of our national identity collapsed. It was buried by the forces of cultural and political renewal; by disturbing and exciting developments in Asia; and by a dawning recognition that the global era of colonial power was over.
The result was a crisis of national meaning reflected in public debates about multiculturalism, Australia's relationships with its Asian neighbours, the dispossession of indigenous Australians, and the nation's involvement in war. In recent years, our political leaders have played a conspicuous role in the controversy.
In The Power of Speech, James Curran explores the end of the idea of British Australia, and how successive prime ministers have attempted to assert personal, and often competing, visions of Australian nationalism in its place. This highly original study of prime ministerial rhetoric exposes the sources of our most powerful leaders' beliefs about Australia.

CHAPTER 1

JOLTED BY EVENTS TO ADULTHOOD:

Prime Ministers and the British myth in
a changing world: 1941–1972

‘There has been such a vacuum since the decline of
standard imperial patriotic rhetoric that it is difficult
to make any sure statement.’

—Geoffrey Serle, September 1967¹

FROM WORLD WAR II until the resignation of Sir Robert Menzies in January 1966 there existed a consensus and certainty about Britishness as the defining idea of Australian national community. But in the mid-1960s, following a set of destabilising events and unsettling circumstances, this idea lost much of its potency and not a little of its virtue. With Britain’s ongoing attempts to join the European Economic Community, the withdrawal of Australia’s ‘great and powerful’ friends from Asia and the gradual relaxation of Australia’s once racially exclusive immigration policy, prime ministers Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon made the first attempts to come to terms with these changes and understand their implications for the nation. Yet the residual power of the British legacy, the lack of any alternative, unifying tradition which could easily replace it, and the failure of nationalism’s hold on the public imagination meant that the political and intellectual leaders’ response was confused and ambiguous. The first steps to re-make the national image were tentative indeed.

The nature of the political consensus over Australia’s Britishness was dramatically revealed in the reaction to Labor Prime Minister John Curtin’s New Year’s message to the nation in late 1941. By this stage of the war, fear of a Japanese invasion had reached fever pitch. The British base at Singapore, for so long considered an impregnable ‘last bastion’ between a hostile Asia and a white, British Australia, looked decidedly pregnable. The sinking of the two British ships that had been sent to avert the unthinkable, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, only served to confirm many Australian policy-makers’ long-held fears—namely that, with Britain fully committed in the European theatre of war, Australia would be defenceless in the face of an onslaught from the north. The Japanese had swept through British Malaya and were advancing towards Singapore. And so, in his New Year’s statement, published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December 1941, Curtin did not mince words: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind,’ he wrote, ‘I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

The bluntness of Curtin’s statement provoked a swift rebuke from political opponents. This seeming elevation of self-interest over sentiment was deeply offensive to their ingrained sense of Britishness. Robert Menzies labelled it ‘a great blunder’, Percy Spender thought it ‘deplorable’, and Billy Hughes thundered that it was a ‘suicidal and a false and dangerous policy’ for Australia to regard Britain’s support as being less important than that of ‘other great nations with which we are associated’. Later that afternoon, at a specially convened press conference, Curtin sought to assuage his critics:

There is no part of the Empire more steadfast in loyalty to the British way of living and British institutions than Australia. Our loyalty to His Majesty the King goes to the very core of our national life. It is part of our being . . . I do not consider Australia a segment of the British Empire. It is an organic part of the whole structure. But I do not put Australia in the position of a colony. Australia is a Dominion.²

The remarks were an emphatic reaffirmation of Australia’s British ties. They also gave expression to a deeply ingrained Australian view of the nation’s place in the British world. Curtin’s concern to stress Australia’s position as a ‘Dominion’ in an organic whole was predicated on the view that all British peoples were equal and that all should contribute to the direction of imperial affairs. This explanation went some way towards mollifying his critics. Billy Hughes conceded it had ‘removed the uneasy feeling in the minds of the people that he regarded the Empire as of secondary importance’, and the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, the Most Reverend J W C Wand, lauded Curtin for his ‘handsome amends . . . His expression of indignant horror at the suggestion that we were drifting in the slightest degree from Britain was as well-timed as it was forceful’. After all, Wand declared, Australians were ‘come weal or come woe . . . for ever a British people’.³

Yet Curtin’s ‘call to America’ has been woven into a legendary tale of defiant Australian leadership, asserting an independent Australian ‘nationhood’ over British ties. Noel MacLachlan claimed ‘Probably only an Irish–Australian Prime Minister grappling with the most terrible emergency in our history could have written off the entire British connection in a single no-nonsense sentence’. Geoffrey Serle portrayed Curtin as ‘a natural Australian, impervious to imperial ideology’. Gareth Evans and Bruce Grant, in explaining the evolution of an ‘independent’ Australian foreign policy, depicted Curtin’s war leadership as having awoken a slumbering national spirit: ‘The Australian nationalism of the 1890s was still awaiting its expression in the Australian nation-state when war brought home to all Australians how precarious our dependence on British power had become’. Curtin has thus been credited with providing the crucial ‘turning point’ which re-defined the nation’s cultural identity and re-oriented the direction of its foreign policy away from Britain and towards the United States. In respect of the latter, T B Millar, for instance, judged the Australian realisation that only America could protect her from hostile powers at this time to be the ‘conviction [that] has determined the bases of Australia’s foreign and defence policies in all the succeeding years’.⁴

But far from being the hero of Australian ‘radical nationalism’, John Curtin identified wholeheartedly with the myth central to the Australian people at this time—the idea that Australians were as one with the British people and an integral part of the wider British Empire. To the London City Corporation in May 1944 Curtin confirmed that:

Australia is a British people. Australia is a British land, and the 7,000,000 Australians are 7,000,000 Britishers. They are located in the Antipodes, but they are not a bit different from those who are located in any part of this country.⁵

The power of the myth was such that Australians were defined as identical to the British. To differing degrees, Prime Ministers Chifley and Menzies also belonged to this same British race patriot tradition.

So intense was this Britishness in the eyes of some that it served to lessen the possibility of more chauvinistic and exclusive expressions of Australian nationalism. In March 1942, after the supposed ‘great betrayal’ of Australia by Britain at Singapore, Kenneth Bailey, Dean of Law at Melbourne University, described Australia’s overwhelming pro-British sentiment as ‘one of the most precious things in a world made anarchical by the spirit of nationalism. For it is a nationalism combined with a real sense of loyalty to a wider community’. Writing around the same time, Keith Hancock celebrated Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth ‘family’, for it was one in which ‘each declares its independence; each proclaims its interdependence. Here, in this sundered world of snarling nationalisms, is a true political miracle’.⁶ Hancock and Bailey represent a liberal sensitivity towards nationalism. Theirs was by no means the dominant Australian attitude to the idea of Britishness, but it was an approach that reconciled liberalism with British nationalism so that even liberals, though suspicious of nationalism, could embrace Australia’s identification with the British empire. For these liberal idealists, it was further proof of the genius inherent in the British tradition—the free co-operation of peoples in a rational, mystical, cultural and moral union, one which had continued irrespective of the sovereign status of its members. The commitment to Britain and Britishness had diffused any potential nasty tendencies in Australian nationalism. An aggressive, parochial nationalism would have been almost improper and against the spirit of declaring the nation’s ‘loyalty to a wider community’.

‘Trustees for the British way of life’—Curtin, Chifley and Menzies

The idea that Britishness, rather than a more exclusively defined concept of Australian nationalism, should inform the outlook of the nation’s leaders in this period does not always fit neatly into a nationalist historiography that views the 1940s as marking a decisive shift in Anglo–Australian relations. Historian David Day, for example, has portrayed Curtin as a leader who forsook his attachment to the ideal of a socialist utopia and instead wholeheartedly embraced the cause of nationalism. Day dates this transition back to Curtin’s public statements on defence policy during the 1937 election. Fearing a renewed threat from Japan at a time when Britain was focusing all its energies on meeting military challenges in Europe, Curtin had argued for a greater concentration on local rather than imperial defence. According to Day, Curtin had apparently

sensed there might be a new crusade worth pursuing in place of the socialist crusade. If the Australian people could not be roused to join the socialist crusade, then surely they could be roused to join the nationalist crusade that would defend them from outside attack and keep their society pristine and pure.⁷

This description gives the impression of a politician who, when he finds one idea not working, looks around for another that will propel him to high office. It is a view that again highlights the problem of nationalism as it has been understood in Australian history. Curtin’s nationalism is being expressed in terms of local defence and an appeal to ‘White Australia’. Day assumes, firstly, that the insistence on providing for Australia’s own defence was a rejection of a British identity and, secondly, that the people would readily acknowledge Labor’s leadership role in shaping an exclusive Australian nationalism that separated Australia from the ‘mother country’. But Day was forced to concede that ‘most Australians declined to fall in behind’ Curtin and that ‘they would require much more convincing before they would be willing to give up their traditional dependence on Britain for their defence’. Nevertheless Day maintained that ‘Leading the nation in war allowed Curtin to give greater vent to his nationalism.’⁸

Yet whenever Curtin was called upon to rouse national feeling or express ideas of cultural identity, he gave voice to a British race identity. One of his first official duties after becoming prime minister in October 1941 was to open the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The memorial ‘gives continuity to the Anzac tradition’ and ‘the basic impulses of the nation,’ said Curtin, ‘. . . the symbolism of this structure is associated with the very basic ways of life of the people of Australia and of the whole British race.’⁹ The building directly faced the Parliament and enshrined the ‘story . . . of the deeds that helped to make the nation’. On that day Curtin sounded a mystic chord between Australia’s inheritance of parliamentary democracy and those who had spilt blood for both nation and empire. Curtin likewise appealed to this same myth in calling on Australians to face the common foe. After news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, Curtin broadcast a solemn but stirring message to the Australian people. Declaring war on Japan in what he termed Australia’s ‘darkest hour’, Curtin sought to galvanise the people in the face of ultimate danger: ‘We Australians . . . shall vindicate them. We shall hold this country, and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race’.¹⁰

‘British-speaking’ may at first glance seem puzzling but, in context, it was nonetheless a powerful reflection of how Australians understood their own self-image. Australia as a British land inhabited by seven million Britishers could only have a ‘British’ language. Just as Billy Hughes had celebrated a common accent as indicative of Australians being ‘more British than the people of Great Britain’, so Curtin’s use of ‘British-speaking’ implied that the nation had welded the various English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh elements into an indivisible whole. The term ‘English-speaking’ could be applied to many countries, but ‘British-speaking’ suggested a distinctively Australian interpretation of Britishness. To look at it another way, the very intensity of Curtin’s identification with being ‘British’ made the use of ‘English-speaking’ problematic. To isolate the description ‘English’ would have been to detract from the unity of Australians as a British people. Both Curtin and Chifley continued to use the term, in Australia as well as in Britain.

Curtin’s Australia Day broadcast of 1942 was delivered amid these ongoing fears of Japanese invasion and a growing anxiety that Australian leaders were being excluded from high-level discussions among the great powers over the direction of the Pacific War. His words were an attempt to capture the historical essence of an Australian ‘nationhood’ and so bolster the country’s flagging morale:

On this Australia Day with a full realization of what this day means to us, we give regard to the meaning of our nationhood. Our men have shown the stuff of which we are made on many a death-charged battlefield; in many a spine-chilling air battle; on the storm-tossed seven seas. These deeds are our salute to our nationhood . . . The flame of freedom lit in this land by our first settlers, and kept aglow by the generations which followed, is not extinguishable by any enemy. We are the youngest civilisation in the oldest continent. On this, our anniversary natal day, I pay tribute to intrepid explorers, hardy pioneers, great statesmen, industrialists, men and women of the land, heroic warriors . . . That is the call I sound to you tonight. We carry on the purpose of Captain James Cook; we maintain the tradition of Captain Arthur Phillip. This Australia is for Australians; it is a White Australia, with God’s blessing we shall keep it so.¹¹

The content of this ‘nationhood’ exudes blood, race and military sacrifice. Notwithstanding his expunction of Australia’s true racial origins, Curtin’s emotive rendition of a ‘national story’ spoke to a glorious and heroic past which he urged Australians to emulate in wartime. He depicted an Australia that had come of age in combat, both against the ‘enemy’ and, throughout her history, against the land itself. There is a distinctive Australian experience being identified here, with Curtin’s emphasis on the country’s very youth and its ‘nation-building spirits’, epitomised by the figures of the explorer, the pioneer and the warrior. Yet the final call to arms to perpetuate the purpose of Cook and the tradition of Phillip—and it is couched in those terms—also evoke a deep historical continuity with the British foundations of the Australian experience. Neither the Eureka Stockade nor the bush balladeers of the late nineteenth century could find a place in this national story. Curtin’s Australian ‘nationhood’ acquired a teleology that followed the ‘flame of freedom’, a torch ignited by the first settlers and handed on to contemporary Australians, descendants of a great British explorer and the first British Governor of New South Wales.

The subsequent cable conflicts with Churchill over the return of Australian troops from the Middle East to defend Australia against the threat from Japan in no way diminished Curtin’s commitment to imperial kinship. During his trip to London in 1944 for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter one
• Chapter two
• Chapter three
• Chapter four
• Chapter five
• Chapter six
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index