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John Curtin for Labor and for Australia

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John Curtin for Labor and for Australia John Curtin for Labor and for Australia LLOYD ROSS AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PRESS CANBERRA This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. THE INAUGURAL JOHN CURTIN MEMORIAL LECTURE 1970 John Curtin for Labor and for Australia LLOYD ROSS AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PRESS 1971 © Lloyd Ross 1971 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Printed and manufactured in Australia. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 71-151971 National Library of Australia Card no. and ISBN 0 7081 0163 2 FOREWORD W. D. BORRIE Director, Research School of Social Sciences My first duty, on behalf of the Research School and indeed of the whole University, is to express our gratitude and appreciation to one of our founders, John Dedman, a Bachelor of Arts, a Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa), and a Councillor of the University, for his thoughtfulness and generosity in founding an annual John Curtin Memorial Lecture. John Curtin was Prime Minister during the period of the University‘s effective conception and he gave the event his cordial blessing. We are all in Dr Dedman’s debt for this generous endowment. It was fitting that the invitation to deliver the first lecture in this annual series should be extended to Dr Lloyd Ross, who has been working for some years— for a time as our guest at the ANU—on his life of John Curtin. I understand that it is now completed. The propriety of his selection as the first lecturer is also related to a much wider set of circumstances. First, Lloyd Ross’s father, R. S. Ross, a socialist agitator in the old and best sense of the term and a labour journalist, was one of those who, along with Tom Mann, Frank Anstey, and others of that brigade, helped to mould and influence the young John Curtin as socialist, orator, agitator, trade unionist, and journalist. In a sense these were the men who prepared the ground for John Curtin’s long climb to the office of Prime Minister. By the same token, Lloyd Ross, though younger than John Curtin, shared the same human, social, and ideological background. Secondly, Lloyd Ross himself has been a trade union leader, a labour journalist, a socialist agitator, and an orator of no mean ability. His own career has thus given him the insights essential to feel, appreciate, and convey so much of what John Curtin was at any stage on the way to the Prime Ministership which crowned his life work. Thirdly, Lloyd Ross suspended his trade union career for some six years to serve as Director of Public Relations in Curtin’s Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction. There he contributed his share, for instance, to the White Paper on Full Employment of 1945, which was a landmark of the time and which was prepared upon a direction to the then Minister for Post-War Reconstruc­ tion, J. B. Chifley, issued by John Curtin when he came back from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London in 1944 with a copy of the British White Paper on the same subject. As it happened, a reshuffle of portfolios early in 1945 led to the Australian White Paper’s being completed under the direction of John Dedman as Minister for Post-War Reconstruction and pre­ sented to Parliament by him in May 1945, just a few weeks before John Curtin’s untimely death. For the next four years Lloyd Ross worked under the Ministerial direction of John Dedman, whose benefaction is now the occasion of the John Curtin Memorial Lecture. Thus no inaugural lecturer for this series could be more fitted than Dr Lloyd Ross. JOHN CURTIN FOR LABOR AND AUSTRALIA Since this Memorial Lecture aims to tell the life of a man of moods and changing loyalties, I begin with the welcome to an audience that was Curtin’s for nearly half of his adult life—‘Mr Chairman, Comrades, and Friends . The conventional starting point of a Memorial Lecture is the date of the first meeting between author and subject. I cannot give this, because John Curtin became the friend of my father, R. S. Ross, and my mother, when I was a baby and Curtin a teenager, in a society not permissive but acquisitive. Early Influences Curtin was born in 1885 at Creswick, a small Victorian country town. The family moved to Brunswick a few years later. Their growing poverty can be traced by the different houses they moved to. Politically, Curtin moved from the Irish Nationalism of his grandfather to a belief in socialist internationalism; from the position of a Catholic to that of a free-thinker; from the end of the Victorian period to the beginnings of a new Federation, and a new beginning for many people and institutions. On the way to these changes John Curtin met my father, who was also moving—from the Bellamy Club in Brisbane to the editorship of the Barrier Truth in Broken Hill. From there he went to Melbourne to edit the Socialist, and met in the Victorian Social­ ist Party a young man who was already making a name for him­ self as a speaker, a Marxian student, and a sincere and very conscientious activist for Labor and socialism. That young man was John Curtin, turned twenty in the year 1905. For the militants of Melbourne, this was an important year in the path of socialism, with revolutions and revolts in the main capitals of the world. The leaders of the popular movements were known in Australia 1 by their books and journals and some were to visit it during the early decades of the century. Curtin obtained a job as an office boy for the Lindsays’ paper {The Rambler). ‘Norman paid me once in stamps,’ he said later. His next job was at the Titan Manufacturing Company, and from there he walked on many nights to the Public Library where he read the books that had been recommended by his teachers, especially Tom Mann, Frank Anstey, and R. S. Ross. Anstey was the State Member for Brunswick, and later Federal Member for Bourke. Pamphleteer, brilliant orator, earthy, primi­ tive, grossly effective in his use of similes, Anstey turned the grammatical mistakes of inadequate learning to symbols of his campaigns as leader of ‘Left’ Labor. He hated parsons, money­ lenders, and anti-Labor leaders. He invited young enthusiasts to his Brunswick home on Sundays. The room was crowded with books and small boxes, which contained extracts from the speeches of his enemies. Were his enemy the local Blue Ribbon advocate or the Head of the Bank of England, he could find a quotation to overwhelm him. Anstey provided ammunition for such pupils as Frank Hyett, secretary of the Victorian Railway Union, and Curtin’s friend. Another pupil, Alf Wallis, became secretary of the Clothing Trade Union and later Conciliation Commissioner. Per­ haps his most notable pupil was John Curtin. Although the hatred of militarism was a permanent result of Curtin’s contacts with Anstey, Tom Mann, and R. S. Ross, he stored for later use within his thoughts the Anstey manner of reconciling anti-imperialism and nationalism. He repeated Anstey’s phrases and ideas, rewrote Anstey’s pamphlets, felt his own disappointments to be intensified by the neglect suffered by Anstey, yet gathered in the strength that came to those who had been Anstey’s close colleagues. Years later, as leader of the Federal Labor Opposition, John Curtin spoke to the conventional resolution of sympathy with the relatives of the Hon. Frank Anstey. T find it very difficult to speak about Frank Anstey. He was a remarkable figure. Very humbly I make the statement that of all the men who have influenced me, he influenced me most. He introduced me to the Labor Movement. He set my mind going in the direction in which he wished it to go, and in quite a humble way, I sought to play the role of a supporter, an aider and abetter of the cause in which he instructed me, believing it to be the greatest cause in the world. .’ 2 In Melbourne at this time was Tom Mann, a dominant British and world-wide militant. Mann had arrived in Melbourne early in the century. He was first an organiser for the Political Labor Leagues, and then founded a public questions society, which later became the Victorian Socialist Party. Other associates of the developing John Curtin were poets, writers, clergymen, union leaders, business men, and politicians, and of course there was William Morris of England, whose career and writings in Britain influenced Curtin’s ideas and methods, as well as his morale, for most of his life. Such people built or inspired an organisation to give its com­ rades not only strength, but fraternity; a Party which united the romanticism and brilliant pen of R. S. Ross, the organising capac­ ity of Tom Mann, the reckless, untamed campaigning of Frank Anstey— an Academy of Agitators, a Community of Workers, a Fraternity of Socialists— a covey of individualists. One of the major figures of the movement was Curtin. He easily accepted the training and toleration of the Victorian Socialist Party at this period of his career.
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