WITH BOTH PEN AND SWORD: THE LIFE OF SIR HENRY (HARRY) GULLETT 1878 - 1940 A Thesis submitted by Martin Charles Kerby, PhD (ANU), MA (AmericanMilitaryU), BA (UQ), GDipArts (ACU), GDipT (McAuleyColl) For the award of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Abstract The centenary commemorations of the First World War (1914-1918) have inevitably brought with them a re-evaluation of the conflict and its enduring impact. It has also stimulated further investigation into the means by which societies have come to understand the war, a process characterised by Samuel Hynes as a ‘war imagined’.1 This ‘imagining’ is not synonymous with the creation of a falsehood; it merely emphasises that a view of war is socio-culturally situated. Competing views, as Hynes observed, are merely different versions of the same reality. This biography of Sir Henry Somer Gullett (1878-1940) explores the extent to which pre-war conceptions of a powerful Australia within a powerful Empire within a powerful Anglo-Saxondom shaped both his ‘imagining’ of the war and his subsequent contribution to the creation of a national identity that ‘transmuted the unpleasant particulars of modern combat into an epic model of national achievement’.2 For in one sense, though Gullett worked as a journalist, war correspondent, military historian, and politician, the roles did not define the man. He is better understood as an immigration propagandist who had very fixed ideas on how conditions in Australian had created a self-reliant, egalitarian society connected to the Empire by bonds of blood and culture. Though his career coincided with World War One and the opening months of World War Two, these momentous events wrought little impact on Gullett’s world view, let alone acted as catalysts. They legitimised a commitment to immigration which bordered on an obsession. To understand Gullett, one must ask how his views on immigration informed his imagining of the war rather than the reverse. Biography is a methodology well able to answer that question. 1 S Hynes (1991) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum). 2 R Gerster (1987) Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), p. 15. i Certification of Thesis This Thesis is entirely the work of Martin Charles Kerby except where otherwise acknowledged. The work is original and has not previously been submitted for any other award, except where acknowledged. Principal Supervisor: Professor Patrick Danaher Associate Supervisor: Associate Professor Ken Edwards ii Acknowledgements As in any activity of this scope there are a number of people who made significant contributions at a professional and personal level. Professor Patrick Danaher, Associate Professor Kenneth Edwards and Professor Chris Lee supervised this PhD at various times through the period of my candidature. I thank them for their advice and encouragement. Professor Cameron Hazlehurst was kind enough to read through one of the early drafts. His knowledge of the period and of Henry Gullett specifically proved invaluable. Professor Peter Stanley very generously offered feedback and advice that significantly strengthened the final submission. Ms Eloise Tuppurainen-Mason made a range of editorial suggestions that either removed or ameliorated a number of quirks in my writing. The staff at the University of Southern Queensland Library (Springfield and Toowoomba), University of Queensland Library (St Lucia), British Library (Colindale), and the Australian War Memorial and the National Library of Australia (Canberra). The Australian Government for the provision of an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship and the Research Training Program Fees Offset Scheme. At a personal level I also wish to thank my good friends Dr Cavan Barratt and Mr Trond Ruud. Though she appears last in the list, my greatest thanks must, as always, go to my wife Margaret for her unfailing support and inspiration. iii Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... i Certification of Thesis............................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................. v Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 - Methodology ........................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 2 - Childhood .............................................................................................................. 27 Chapter 3 - Journalist and Publicist ......................................................................................... 33 Chapter 4 - Unofficial Observer .............................................................................................. 59 Chapter 5 - Official Correspondent and Lecturer .................................................................... 80 Chapter 6 – Soldier, Official Historian and War Correspondent ........................................... 111 Chapter 7 - Confidant of a Prime Minister ............................................................................ 159 Chapter 8 – Defender of Anzac ............................................................................................. 179 Chapter 9 - Politician ............................................................................................................. 205 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 254 References .............................................................................................................................. 257 iv Abbreviations AIF Australian Imperial Force ANU Australian National University ANZAC Australian New Zealand Army Corps AWM Australian War Memorial BEF British Expeditionary Force CPD Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates GHQ General Headquarters GOC General Officer Commanding NAA National Archives of Australia NLA National Library of Australia OIC Officer in Charge UAP United Australia Party USQ University of Southern Queensland v vi Introduction On the evening of 14 August 1940, the senior officer of a British tactical school in Cairo welcomed an Australian sergeant into his office and invited him to sit. Perhaps possessing an unsympathetic nature, or perhaps painfully aware that as soldiers they were both bit players in an enormous tragedy in which millions would strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then be heard no more, the officer delivered his message with a brusque formality: I have a message from your General Blamey to say that I am to inform you that your father was killed in an air accident yesterday near Canberra. You are to be granted home leave. You will fly to Australia. The Australian trade commissioner’s office in Cairo will arrange your tickets and passport tomorrow. You will need civilian clothing. You may overdraw your pay if you wish. I am sorry about this sergeant. I think that is all.1 Sergeant Jo Gullett of the 2/6th Battalion, 2nd Australian Imperial Force (AIF) accepted the officer’s proffered hand, stood up, saluted, and marched out. At a distance of almost 80 years the exchange seems a parody of the stiff upper lip demanded of those who had taken the King’s shilling, but Gullett was a man of his times, as indeed his father had been. His autobiographical writing was generally open and frank, yet on the subject of his father’s death he was reserved, almost detached. He acknowledged that his father had suffered numerous bouts of serious ill health, but he was such a ‘vigorous, active man, always making plans for the future, that I had not considered our family life without him’. It was a ‘shock’ but ‘life had to go on’.2 Jo’s return home by flying boat, perhaps a courtesy extended because of Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ friendship with his parents and a recognition of his father’s long service to the nation in war and peace, carried him from the Nile to the Sea of Galilee, Basra, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Singapore, and then finally to Darwin. Other than the observation that during the early part of the journey he flew over the battlefields of 1 HB Gullett (1992) Good Company: Horseman, Soldier, Politician (St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press), p. 127. 2 Gullett, Good Company, pp. 127-8. 1 the First World War where his father had served a quarter of a century earlier with the Light Horse, there was no insight into the grief that accompanied this homecoming. By his own admission, Jo Gullett had ‘a good war’.3 Enlisting as a private and ending as a major, Jo served in North Africa, Greece, Papua New Guinea (where he was awarded the Military Medal), and France. In June 1944 he was the first Australian-born soldier to land at Normandy. Yet it is his father, Sir Henry (Harry) Gullett, whose influence on Australia is more readily discernible through his work as a correspondent, a historian, and finally as