Curtin University In search of John Curtin Public lecture by JCPML Visiting Scholar Dr John Edwards on 21 April 2001. COPYRIGHT: John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library. JCPML00611/1 In a conversation with poet and radio documentary maker John Thompson broadcast in July 1955, former Clerk of the House of Representatives Frank Green recalled walking home late one night in that extraordinary month of February 1942 and seeing Prime Minister John Curtin pacing through the grounds of the Lodge. It is perhaps the best remembered and most characteristic story of Curtin’s whole life. The Prime Minister’s home was then adjoined by open fields, so Green would probably have walked up from the old Parliament House on a path through the scrub which then covered Capital Hill. Ten minutes later he would be passing the Lodge. It was, as it is now, a quite modest home, but protected then only by a wire fence rather than the electrified cables, high walls and patrolling police which guard it today. It must have been a moonlit night because Darwin had already been bombed, and even as far south as Canberra a blackout would have been in force. Curtin’s driver Ray Tracey had dropped him a hint, Green said, that Curtin was not sleeping and suggested that as an old friend he stop by and encourage him to get some rest. Meeting Curtin in the Lodge gardens Green told him he needed to sleep. “Can’t sleep” Curtin replied, “How can I sleep while our transports are in the Indian Ocean, and while Japanese submarines are looking for them? ” Curtin was then 57, a man of slightly under six feet, and ten pounds over his normal weight. He had been Prime Minister for five months – the first time in his life in which he had held ministerial office. Those five months were surely the most momentous in Australian history. Eight weeks after he had become Prime Minister Japan attacked the US pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, and Australia suddenly found itself living the Page 1 of 14 nightmare which had troubled it for half a century – a war with Japan. It was, Curtin claimed, “the gravest hour in our history” adding, in the solemn style which we can see in some of his earliest surviving letters, “I ask every Australian, man and woman, to go about their allotted tasks with full vigour and courage.” At the same time as it attacked Pearl Harbour Japan attacked the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island, and Malaya, and pressed south towards the Netherlands East Indies and Australia by land and sea. Two months later Japan completed the conquest of Malaya and invaded Singapore, forcing the surrender of the 17,000 surviving troops of the Australian Eighth Division – one quarter of Australia’s battle trained soldiers. Frank Green’s story of Curtin’s sleepless vigil as the transports carrying the 6th and 7th divisions of the AIF made their way across the Indian Ocean is surely the most memorable and touching episode in Curtin’s time as Prime Minister. It was a time of hazard for the country and stress for Curtin, which itself followed ten days of drama obscured from the public in which Curtin refused the most pressing requests of Winston Churchill, the leader of the mother country, and of Franklin Roosevelt, the leader of the world’s greatest democracy and Australia’s ally in the war against Japan. His insistence on the return of the 6th and 7th divisions of the AIF from the Middle East to Australia against the demand of Churchill and Roosevelt that they should be sent to Burma, forever altered our relationship with the UK and changed the way Australians think about themselves. This afternoon I want to ponder the way these events of Curtin’s first six months of office have defined his place in our thinking, perhaps at the expense of other and more important circumstances of his time as prime minister. I want to argue that with the passing of time and the opening up of new materials we can see that Curtin is actually far more significant for his impact on the institutional and economic character of post war Australia than for his resistance to the allied leaders, and to the Japanese. Specifically, I wish to claim that the Labor governments of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, often portrayed as remote from the spirit of Curtin and sometimes as betrayers of his legacy, were in fact his direct and faithful inheritors in their engagement of Australia with the global economy. Page 2 of 14 Before moving on those points, however, I also want to argue that Curtin was a rounder and more interesting character than the Curtin of our national mythology, and one far closer to his successors than we usually think. Part of the Australian tradition of the events of February 1942 for example is that Curtin was an accidental hero, a reluctant Prime Minister, a man of modest attainments and limited experiences, the poorly educated son of an itinerant policeman and unsuccessful publican, by trade a printer’s estimator, a recovering alcoholic, an innocent and an idealist forced by the circumstances of war to compromise life long principles, a man who in the words quoted by David Black from a newspaper obituary “had greatness thrust upon him” and to which he “responded greatly”. He represents an Australian ideal of an ordinary man who rises to the occasion. Curtin himself sometimes liked to present himself in this way. By contrast we think of his great contemporary and rival for importance in our history, Robert Menzies, as an unusually gifted and urbane barrister, witty and commanding, who far from having greatness thrust upon him rather wanted for a challenge sufficient to his remarkable gifts – a challenge like, for example, being the dominions representative in the British War Cabinet, or perhaps Prime Minister of England. The more we discover about Curtin, however, the more we learn that he was both more and less than the accidental hero of our mythology. As previously closed records are opened and research is extended the more we see him as a sensible, talented and practical professional politician with a clear and instinctive grasp of the ways of power. In this respect the JCPML has I think been performing a great service to Australia by encouraging in this area the rediscovery and reinterpretation of our history. We’ve long known of his weakness for alcohol, for example, but from Curtin’s earliest surviving letters recently edited by David Black and published by the JCPML we now also know the restless quality of his intellect, the breadth of his reading, the way he stocked his mind with the poetry and novels of late nineteenth century England and with socialist texts. Even among politicians better read than today’s he was unusually well read and thoughtful. Just as Curtin’s personality was complicated, so too his views on the world. Though portrayed as an internationalist and idealist, he was also indisputably a racist. One Page 3 of 14 of his arguments against conscription for overseas service during the first world war was that it would so deplete the white population of Australia it would be necessary to bring in Asians and blacks. Even on the central issue of Curtin’s attitude to war there is much confusion. He does not seem ever to have been a pacifist, though this description of him is still frequent. He objected to conscription for overseas service in World War 1, but he did not object to volunteer enlistment for overseas service and he did not object to conscription for home defence. Curtin is generally credited with swinging Australia from alliance with the UK to alliance with the US, but there too I think his own role is more ambiguous. He was of course the author of the famous Melbourne Herald piece in which he wrote that Australia looked to America, free of any pangs as to the traditional links with the United Kingdom. But the legend of the Melbourne Herald piece obscures the central truth about the Pacific War, which was that it was an attack by Japan on the forces of the United States. They took Malaya for rubber and the Netherlands East Indies for oil, but the serious enemy was the United States – not Britain or the Netherlands colonial administration and certainly not Australia. In this sense Australia and the United States were natural, instant, automatic and inevitable allies – rather more so in fact than the United States and the UK, had it not been for the good fortune of Hitler’s prompt declaration of war on the United States. Curtin’s actual conduct thereafter towards the UK and the US was ambivalent. He pointedly told reporter Harold Cox that the British were making a very big contribution to the advance from Normandy though press reports made it appear the Americans did all the fighting. In speaking to conservative Adelaide voters during the 1943 election campaign, Don Rodgers recalled, Curtin wrapped himself in the Union Jack. When in London in 1944 he declared his belief in the British Empire, in the racial identity of Australians and Britons, and in Australia as a “British community in the South Seas”. One persistent theme in writing about Curtin is that he was not really a politician at all. His long time private secretary, himself a member of Moral Rearmament, Fred McLaughlin, saw Curtin only as a man of principle, someone who “never sought office”. McLaughlin portrays him as a saint; Rodgers as a human being.