John Curtin

Lloyd Ross

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780522847345
• eBook ISBN: 9780522874778

1 Early Days, 1885-1905

John Curtin was born at Creswick, Victoria, Australia, in 1885.

In his lifetime Australia witnessed the formation and development of the Labor Party. When he was born, sixteen years would pass before Australia became federated and six years before the Labor Party would be formed in New South Wales. In 1945, when he died, Labor had held office in the federal parliament six times, on the last occasion for four years. A few weeks later, in July 1945, as World War II came to an end, British Labor formed the first Labor government with full political power in Britain.

The year Curtin was born, A. W. Duncan died. Both were Labor leaders. Duncan had rallied the traders of convict Sydney against transportation and military government and resisted a migration policy that was aimed at lowering the standard of the free. He combined the traditions of the English Chartists with reformers in New South Wales and sought to bring together workmen into political organizations. To link the beginnings of Labor history in Australia with its successes under John Curtin is to recognize how short is the story of this movement, since two men comprise so much of its story.

In 1885, in Beaufort, Victoria, Abraham Needham (Curtin’s future father-in-law) was reading the Arcana of Spiritualism by Hudson Tutts. John Farrell and Brunton Stephens were writing political and popular poetry. Published books included Mary Foot’s Where the Pelican Builds Its Nest, Thomas Walker’s Bush Pilgrim, Henry Parkes’ Beauteous Terrorist and Sladen’s Australian Poets. Vance Palmer had been born; he was to become a close friend of Curtin. Victor Daley was writing both lyrical and satirical verses that were read and treasured by the men who would know Curtin as their disciple. The Bulletin celebrated John Ruskin on the front page, and honoured Victor Hugo as a ‘Poet and Radical’. The Liberal was started by a group of free-thinkers and liberals, who sought to express their discontent in a secularist creed; the Liberator was issued more aggressively by Joseph Symes in opposition to God, Monopoly, and Bureaucracy.

A Royal Commission on Working Class Conditions reported in 1884. Its findings summarize some of those social conditions that Labor opposed: the employment in factories of children of eight and nine years of age, working for twelve hours a day, many of them never having seen the inside of a school; seam-stresses working fourteen and sixteen hours a day for a bare livelihood; employees obliged to work for periods beyond the limits of human endurance under conditions of physical and moral degradation; 20,000 persons working in Victoria subject to grievous hardships under a system of forced labour, ‘repugnant to every sense of justice and humanity’.

Demonstrations welcomed Henry George in Sydney and Melbourne in 1887. During the shearers’ strikes of the late 1880s men formed their communes on the pastoralists’ property and guerrilla war raged along the banks of the Murray and Darling Rivers between police and shearers. The great maritime strike of 1890 was fought and lost. Henry Lawson wrote in William Lane’s Worker:

So we must fly a rebel flag,

As others did before us;

And we must sing a rebel song,

And join a rebel chorus.

We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting

Of those that they would throttle,

They needn’t say the fault is ours,

If blood should stain the wattle.

The leaders and rank and file of the new evangelists were young, probing ‘radicals’. They included free traders, protectionists, anti-imperialists, socialists, and unionists, and they recognized the contradiction between their dreams and the realities of conversion. Hopes ran high though their numbers were small; and they battled on against growing economic distress.

When Curtin was born, the ingredients that were to nourish his views were already in existence; the institutions that he was to join had been founded; the basic characteristics of his nation were established. It was a time of transition; a watershed between a collection of colonies and a federation of states. Trade unions had been established and an eight-hour day won; trades halls were being built and state Labor Councils formed. The strength of unions was being increased by amalgamations and intercolonial congresses, the third of which met in Sydney in 1885.

Unionists were elected to the colonial parliaments; fitful political parties of liberals, radicals and trade unionists were being formed. Strikes were becoming frequent. Mass meetings of workers, secularists, republicans and ‘radicals’ in the cities in 1885 protested against the decision to send colonial troops to fight in the Sudan. A flowering of national literature was beginning.¹

Curtin’s childhood was a time of vitality, excitement and questioning; confident in its hopes, daring in its dreams. John Farrell described it:

O dear and fair! awakened from thy sleeping

So late! The world is breaking into noon;

The eyes that all the morn were dim with weeping

Smile through the tears that will cease dropping soon!

Thine have no tears in them for olden sorrow,

Thou hast no heartache for a ruined past;

From bright to-day to many a bright tomorrow

Shall be thy way, O first of lands and last.

During World War II, J. J. Simons, a life-long friend of John Curtin, then Prime Minister, received a collection of newspaper cuttings. He immediately destroyed them because he believed their publication could damage the Allied cause. They were about the anti-British activities of the Curtin family in Ireland.

According to the cuttings, Cornelius Curtin (born in 1846) and his brother John had been arrested during the Fenian agitations. In an obituary notice Cornelius was said to have been a prominent member of the Fenian movement political activities during the famine years of the 1840s. At the rising of 1867 he took part in the capture of the Ballyknochane police barn. In 1918, he handed his antique rifle to his son and said: ‘Take it, Danny boy. I hope ye will succeed better than we did.’ His home was a refuge for Nationalists during the Black and Tan raids. Three of his brothers, including John (the future Prime Minister’s father), and a sister migrated to Australia.

Towards the end of the 1870s, after serving as a warder at Coburg jail in Melbourne, John took up duty as a constable in Creswick, a typical Australian mining town. A pleasant and vigorous personality, tall and heavily built, he seems to have been a popular member of the police force.

The Creswick Advertiser of 12 October 1881 mentions the possibility of a transfer to Geelong for John Curtin: ‘a very efficient officer whose removal would be regretted.’ However, further references indicate that he stayed on in Creswick. His marriage was announced: on 19 June 1883, at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, John, youngest son of J. Curtin, Kilpadden House, County Cork, Ireland, to Kate Agnes, youngest daughter of Mr John Bourke, Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Their first child, born 8 January 1885, was registered as ‘John’, but baptized ‘John Joseph Ambrose’. He stood for election under the latter name but later dropped ‘Joseph Ambrose’.

Three other children were born to the Curtin family: George on 15 March 1887; Mary on 23 May 1889; and Frances on 25 April 1891. The family doctor was Dr Lindsay, father of the artist Norman Lindsay.

A weatherboard cottage, prominent against the slate hills of the distance, was Curtin’s home. An early photograph shows John in the arms of his mother, a woman taller than average and slightly plump beside her tall, powerful, bewhiskered husband. The low-roofed wooden house stood on a corner block on top of a low hill, overlooking the valley of Creswick Creek and the Ballarat Road where legions of gold diggers had passed during the 1850s to the 1880s.

Constable John Curtin suffered from rheumatism or rheumatic fever so severely that in April 1885 it seemed he would have to resign from the police force, but he recovered sufficiently to withdraw his resignation although he had periods of ill-health. In 1890, a news item in the Creswick Advertiser announced: ‘Constable John Curtin is retiring through ill health on January 13. He is to get superannuation for 13 years’ service. His condition will prevent him ever serving again in the department.’

So the family left Creswick, a little town which has contributed so much to Australian development. The first president of the Creswick Miners’ Union was John Sampson, grandfather of R. G. Menzies, Curtin’s future political opponent and Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister.

The Curtin family moved to Melbourne where the vague ideals of poets and utopians were stimulating new mass organizations of shearers, miners and labourers into industrial action and incipient revolt. Economic crisis hastened the movement of events, sharpened and simplified issues, coloured language, established priorities.

The particular relationship between men and women and the mood of the 1890s is difficult to define exactly in time and events. Vance Palmer wrote in National Portraits: ‘There is no doubt that during the latter half of last century the Australian people were acutely aware of their isolation, and were determined to turn to account the freedom it gave them by building up something like an earthly paradise.’ Ideals of nationhood, equality, social change and ‘revolution’ abounded. Although it was sharpened by the practicalities of economic crisis, the radical movement was founded in an almost visionary idealism.

The ideas on social change that were important in these formative years were expressed by those who called themselves republicans, socialists, anarchists, Bellamyites, nationalists and land reformers. Such agitators formed organizations that often changed their ideas and their composition, and produced intensive faction fights. Futility and disillusionment for many was saved by the establishment in all states of a unifying organization that welcomed all ‘radicals’ under the inclusive name of a ‘Labor Party’. The name varied from state to state, beginning as the New South Wales Political Labor League of 1890. The basic urge for unity was there.

The influences on Labor—whether from the United States, Great Britain, or Australia—were diverse, contradictory, and vague. ‘Socialism’ became the umbrella word that covered the builders of the Labor Party. In its turn the Labor Party developed from radical sects into the main organization of the mass movement. Many small groups continued to form and reform around narrow doctrines such as republicanism, Marxism and free trade. Yet by the gradual moderation of the purists or militants and by the toleration of dissenters in the pluralistic circumstances of the period, the official Labor synthesis survived and expanded into a major party.

Curtin’s father took young Jack to meetings during the Commonwealth federation campaigns. ‘It won’t be much good to me’, the father said, ‘but it will be to you.’ ‘Commonwealth’ was in the air. There were dozens of Commonwealth hotels and, in Melbourne, a Commonwealth Football Association. When one of the umpires asked permission to resign on the grounds that he was ‘leaving the State’, delegate John Curtin from West Brunswick moved that the resignation be held over as the request should have read, ‘leaving the Commonwealth’.

In retrospect, the federation of the Australian colonies seems to have been inevitable, but in the 1890s it faced strong opposition among competing groups and individuals: some feared the breaking of the imperial connection; some believed the movement was an attempt to frustrate the growing power of Labor—indeed, most of the founders of the Labor Party in each of the colonies opposed the proposed constitution; some supported it provided free trade could be maintained; some objected to the unequal franchise and the appeal to the Privy Council. But all doubts were swept aside by popular vote and the colonies officially became the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

The ideals that reached their climax at the end of the century in the federation of the Commonwealth were interpreted by each according to his needs and experiences. To Curtin, they were an almost fanatical belief in the future of a new Australia for the people, the importance of mateship, comradeship, solidarity; hopes of a world of peace, prosperity, equality and security; the federation of Australia and of the world.

In Melbourne, John Curtin Sen. moved from one hotel to another. For a couple of years he was temporary manager of the Letterkenny Hotel in Melbourne; he moved to the Dromana Hotel and then the Macedon Hotel. In Charlton, in north-west Victoria, he managed the Golden Fleece for his sister, who had married Con Bourke, and then became a manager for the breweries. He made very little money. The superannuation he had received on leaving the police force had disappeared. ‘There was nothing in hotels in those days,’ said George Curtin, John’s younger brother, years later. ‘They kept open until 11 p.m. and beer was tuppence a pint.’

Understandably, the children’s education was sketchy. John first attended St Francis’ Catholic School, then seems to have attended St Bridget’s at North Fitzroy, St Ambrose’s in Sydney Road and the Macedon Public School. Records at Macedon show he spent three terms in class 6—for pupils thirteen and fourteen years old. Apparently he left before the end of the year as his name does not appear in the lists of an examination held in September 1898.

Locals later recalled that he was good at marbles and joined the lads in rabbit expeditions and wallaby hunting. Curtin was fairly uncommunicative about his early days. He recalled one occasion when the yardman in a country hotel, where his father was manager, asked whether he would like to have his boots cleaned. His mother, overhearing the remark, said: ‘You need to be a good man to have someone else clean your boots for you; go and clean your own.’

Con Bourke, young John’s cousin and schoolboy pal who remained a friend through Curtin’s life, recalls the time that ‘we were both sick and got a flogging for smoking our own made cigarettes on a Sunday afternoon.’ He remembered Curtin’s passion for reading: ‘He used to read books right up against his eyes by candlelight,’ he said. ‘But he did not seem to work hard at school. He taught himself—and he was a wizard at school in figures. Show him a sum only once and he knew all about it.’

Curtin was a keen amateur cricketer and football player until poor eyesight affected his game. A staunch member of the Brunswick Football Club, he sat on the committee of investigations into rough play. Umpires dreaded to come before Curtin as he would ‘turn them inside out’ in the inquiries. Curtin later became a member of the Brunswick Football Club committee, a position he held until he went to Western Australia. In the Victorian Football League competition he supported the Carlton Club.

Curtin often returned to his sporting days for inspiration or illustration. Attempting to persuade his teacher and friend, Frank Anstey (then MHR), to stand again for the federal seat of Bourke, he wrote:

I have my hurts. I have my days of dark clouds. But we were standard bearers in a holy war and we must go on to the end and not yield while life is left to us. You can say of me that I did not fight every day. I agree. But what of it? I played for Brunswick and did badly some Saturdays, but I turned up the next match and lived it down. That is it. Stick it out and see it through.

When they left Macedon the family settled in Brunswick where John Sen., suffering from the effects of rheumatic fever, seems to have at last given up work. To people in Brunswick he was known as Sergeant Curtin (although he had never been more than a constable), or ‘Old Man Curtin’ or ‘Bumble’; he limped as if he had a club foot, hence the nickname, which for a while was attached to his elder son. The Curtins lived in the Irish part of Brunswick, ‘Paddy’s Town’. They had a hard struggle. They had tea without milk; ‘bread without butter’ was John’s description to his wife. Every penny had to be conserved. Rent of their house was often only three shillings a week; but they moved from one house to another with the rent unpaid. The decline of the family fortunes can be traced in the appearance of the houses. Mrs Curtin was said to have done washing. M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Early Days, 1885–1905
• 2: A Young Socialist, 1906–1911
• 3: Timber Worker, 1912–1913
• 4: Anti-war, Anti-conscription, 1914–1917
• 5: To the West, 1917–1918
• 6: Westralian Worker, 1919–1923
• 7: Consolidation, 1924–1928
• 8: Member of Parliament, 1928–1929
• 9: Labor in Office, 1929–1931
• 10: Back to the West, 1932–1935
• 11: Leader of the Opposition, October 1935
• 12: Responses to Aggression, 1935–1936
• 13: The Approach of War, 1937–August 1939
• 14: Australia at War, September 1939-June 1940
• 15: Election Year, July 1940–Apri1 1941
• 16: Political Crisis, May–September 1941
• 17: The Curtin Government, October 1941
• 18: War with Japan, November–December 1941
• 19: Curtin and Churchill, January–February 1942
• 20: The Coming of MacArthur, March 1942
• 21: Victory at Sea, April-May 1942
• 22: One Year as Prime Minister, June-October 1942
• 23: Militia Bill, December 1942–February 1943
• 24: Brisbane Line, February–December 1943
• 25: The Holding War, January–December 1943
• 26: Australia-New Zealand Agreement, January 1944
• 27: The Strain Begins to Tell, January-March 1944
• 28: Trip Abroad, April–May 1944
• 29: Failing Strength, June 1944–May 1945
• 30: Death of a Prime Minister, June–July 1945
• Notes
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Index