Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin

Their early political careers and the making of the modern Labor Party

Liam Byrne

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780522876482
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Australia e dell'Oceania

Before becoming the prime ministers who led Australia in moments of extraordinary crisis and transformation, John Curtin and James Scullin were two young working-class men who dreamt of changing their country for the better. Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin tells the tale of their intertwined early lives as both men became labour intellectuals and powerbrokers at the beginning of the twentieth century. It reveals the underappreciated role each man played in the events that defined the modern Australian Labor Party: its first experience of national government, the turmoil of war, the great conscription clash and party split of 1916, and the heated debates over the party's socialist objective. Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin shows how they became the leaders that history knows best by painting a portrait of two young men struggling to establish their identities and find their place in the world. It tells of their great friendships, loves and passions, and reminds us that these were real men, with real weaknesses, desires and dreams. It explains how their early political careers set the scene for their later prime ministerships as they honed the techniques of power that led them to the summit of Australian politics. This is the story of two young men striving to better the world they had inherited, a story of optimism and hope with enduring relevance for today's troubled politics.

Chapter One

Colonial Childhoods, 1876–1901

In 1927 Labor’s deputy leader, James Scullin, penned a pamphlet entitled: From Out The Past Glimpse the Future. Within its pages, Scullin told the story of the Australian labour movement from its origins to his day. ‘History’, Scullin began, can teach ‘many lessons that prove useful and often necessary in shaping the course of future actions’. It could be a powerful weapon for those ‘who are striving to improve the workers’ lot, and planning for their future economic emancipation’.¹

It was a heroic tale. First came the Chartists, the ill-fated yet valiant movement for workers’ rights from 1836 to 1848 in Britain that had fuelled the ardour of labour reformers across the globe. After more than a decade of agitation it was defeated and many of its veterans sought new shores to pursue their dreams of equality. At the same time, across the Irish Sea, the homeland of Scullin’s family was wracked by famine. Irish migrants fled the repression, and the hunger. These ‘lovers of liberty and antagonists of oppression’ travelled to the other side of the world to find ‘that freedom which they had sought in vain in their own country’.²

From such stock the Australian labour movement was born. The immigrants were drawn by hopes of freedom, and deep rivulets of gold. These were the rebels at Eureka in 1854—the ‘sturdy pioneers’ that forged the Australian union movement. They would work the mines, shear the sheep, clear the scrub and till the land. Their sons and daughters entered the factories, the workshops, the docks. There, they were ‘sweated’ by tyrannical bosses, their hopes and dreams for social advancement in a land without class eroded by the mendacity of the capitalists and the ‘squatters’. To this was added the cataclysm of the Maritime Strike of 1890, presented by Scullin as a ruling-class conspiracy ‘to put an end to unionism’.

Through this strike, Scullin wrote, Australian workers came to realise that the ‘forces of Government, backed by the police, the courts, and the military, were behind the employers in every struggle’. The impetus for a political party to represent labour was born. The working-class movement’s conviction that it was necessary to conquer parliament was swiftly reinforced by the crisis in the financial system that immediately followed the strike, part of a global economic depression. The international depression of the 1890s punctured hopes of shared prosperity, ‘bringing poverty and misery to thousands of homes’. The Labor Party was founded to prevent such misery being repeated, and to ensure that workers would no longer be the ‘victims of a policy they had no hand in shaping’.³

Entertaining and vivid as Scullin’s tale was, it was the mythos of Labor’s emergence, rather than its history. It was intended to fuel the ardour of the faithful, and instil a sense of historical mission into a party that had, since 1916, been cast in the wilderness of federal politics. To Scullin, Labor was the party of nation building and social change, the only political force capable of reflecting the heroic impulses of the rebels preceding his own generation. Only by pursuing the cause of transformative reform could members of the labour movement live up to, and continue, this proud legacy. But there was another significance to his tale. These moments were not just the signposts to Labor’s development, but to Scullin’s life as well. His identity and accomplishments were intimately tied to the fortunes of Labor—so much so, that it is difficult to tell the story of one without accounting for the other. And he was not alone.

Scullin believed that an understanding of Labor’s mission and purpose had to begin with its formative influences, with the great movement of people from the ‘old world’ to the ‘new’. To understand James Scullin and John Curtin, and the significance of their parallel journeys to power, it is necessary to start in the same place.

Arrivals

John Scullin, father of James, was the first to arrive. In 1862, aged just twenty, he landed in Melbourne after a long journey from his native County Derry in Ireland. The city was a thriving colonial capital gorging on the previous decade’s gold rush. Melbourne was still young. The land it was built on was taken from the Wurundjeri, the Indigenous owners, as part of the forced European settlement of the colony.⁴ By the time John arrived Melbourne had become a sprawling metropolis, a city in constant motion. People from across the world journeyed there to find their fortune, and about 125 000 made it their home. The city stank. The sewage and industrial run-off flooding the Yarra gave it a distinctive aroma, and the inelegant nickname of ‘Smelbourne’.⁵ But it was a place of excitement and hope.

John, like many young Irishmen of his generation, was looking for opportunity and riches.⁶ He had left behind his fiancée, Ann Logan, and was hoping to find fortune for their reunion, and fast. Reality did not quite match expectations. His son would later remark that John arrived expecting ‘to dig up gold from the streets’.⁷ With gold harder to find than anticipated, the young man had to toil to establish himself. Life was not as miserable as it was at home, but the Irish had their share of difficulties in Australia. They were shamed, lampooned, caricatured and excluded from public life.⁸

John Scullin braved the opprobrium and journeyed westward to Ballarat, the capital of the gold rush. Few details about John’s first years in Australia survive, but it is known that he was working in mining conditions that were dangerous and difficult for a modest income. In late 1867, Ann Logan undertook the long journey from Derry to Ballarat arriving in Melbourne in November on the Donald McKay, aged 23, before journeying inland.⁹ As little is known of Ann as of John.¹⁰ By January, the young couple were wed, settling in a small house in the west of the city. That November their first child, John junior, was born.¹¹

The family was a happy one, but life was not easy. Mining was a laborious and insecure occupation for the patriarch of a growing family. Two more children soon arrived: Mary in 1870, and Ann in 1872. John and Ann Senior changed direction. They left Ballarat, and John found work on the expanding railways, laying plates on the new lines linking the small towns in the colony’s west. In 1874 the family welcomed a new daughter, Eliza, their growing brood prompting an interregnum in their wanderings. For the next ten years the family Scullin resided in the small township of Trawalla, 40 kilometres from Ballarat. By 1876 they had settled into the rhythms of rural life, living in a small cottage by the railway. That year, on 18 September, James Henry Scullin was born.¹²

John Scullin was working in a booming industry. The railways threaded their way through the colony, west, east and north. In 1872 new deposits of gold were found near the township of Creswick, a small settlement just 18 kilometres from Ballarat.¹³ Rails were laid to link Creswick to the colonial network, assisting a new wave of migrants. Soon another John would join them.

John Curtin Senior arrived in Australia from County Cork in October 1873. He was tall and heavily built, with a stern demeanour. The young man, just nineteen at the time, was accompanied by two of his brothers. Appropriately for men from the rebel county, there was revolution in the bloodline. John’s brother Cornelius had been a Fenian, a member of the radical Irish republican fraternity that haunted the British establishment in the nineteenth century.¹⁴ The brothers alighted in Adelaide, but John journeyed to Victoria alone.

Soon after, in 1875, Curtin’s mother, Kate Bourke, also from County Cork, landed in Melbourne. Little is known about her early years in the colony. Her family quickly took up the publican’s trade, managing a hotel in the working-class suburb of Fitzroy where they had settled. In this environment Kate was likely to have been inducted into the customs and rituals of the Melbourne pub and the city’s drinking culture. Such knowledge would serve her, and her family, well.

Elsewhere in Melbourne, Curtin had chosen to pursue a career in the police, a common choice for Irish migrants.¹⁵ By 1878 he was walking the Melbourne beat, reporting to police headquarters in Russell Street, within sight of the Trades Hall building, the centre of Victorian trade unionism. But John was soon exiled from this posting, and Melbourne life, in a revealing incident. David Day has provided forensic analysis of the scandal that ensued when Constable Curtin sexually harassed, and potentially assaulted, a woman while on his beat. He was banished for this act, deemed ‘misconduct’, though not dismissed from the force.¹⁶ His exile was to be served in Creswick.

From a policing perspective, Creswick was a relatively quiet town. There were the regular disturbances and bar fights, but the populace was generally orderly. On at least one occasion, reflecting the dark racialised heart of Australian society at this time, Constable Curtin was called upon to disperse a mob that was threatening a Chinese camp on the local minefields.¹⁷ But his routine mostly involved basic policing, and sometimes protecting the local forest saplings from overly-eager timber cutters.¹⁸ Constable Curtin’s policing style was later summed up in an anecdote related by his son, who told of John being informed of two men fighting nearby while he was on duty. After it was reported that the combatants had already been slugging it out for ten minutes, the constable replied: ‘Very well … I’ll be down in—let me see—in 20 minutes’. The son who told that story did so as Australia’s prime minister. ‘Well’, the country’s leader reflected, ‘perhaps there’s something in heredity’.¹⁹

But Creswick was far from some sleepy rural community, devoid of excitement or circumstance. The town had many claims to fame, particularly for the quality of its denizens and their contribution to Victoria.²⁰ Norman and Percival Lindsay, later acclaimed as artists and cartoonists, were both born in the town. Their father, Robert, was the town doctor, assisting in John Curtin Junior’s birth. Norman, whose most enduring contribution to literature was his authorship of the children’s book The Magic Pudding, would one day capture the foibles of small-town life in his Creswick-based novel Redheap.

Australia’s longest-serving prime minister (and Curtin’s antagonist), Robert Menzies, also had roots in the town, where his mother was born. Menzies’ grandfather, John Sampson, was an influential Creswick local. As circumstance would have it, his story is linked with those of both Curtin and Scullin. Sampson was a collaborator in the creation of a un...