Curtin’s Empire by James Curran

‘A peculiar bloke, Jack; you never knew him. You couldn’t get close to him.’ Reg Pollard, who was one of the abler members of the Labor Caucus in the 1940s, confessed his puzzlement to Lloyd Ross as Curtin’s biographer gathered personal testimony. Ross had a longer familiarity with Curtin – his father worked closely with the young Curtin in the Victorian Socialist Party – and suffered from no such diffidence. In acknowledging the complexity of a person who was warm and sympathetic but cold and aloof, a comrade and a loner, moody and vacillating, yet courageous and resolute, Ross gathered these qualities together into a story of the man who began as a rebel and anti-conscriptionist and found his appointment with destiny as the great wartime leader. Perhaps it is in the nature of biography to seek such clarity. Norman Lee’s 1983 potboiler hailed Curtin as the ‘Saviour of Australia’, and it was accompanied by a foreword from Bob Hawke. David Day chose Curtin in 1999 for the first of his prime ministerial biographies (John Curtin: A Life), and found him wanting in private life and national assertiveness – or just a trier, as Paul Keating put it. John Edwards, as befitted an economic adviser to Paul Keating, was less interested in the jousting with Churchill and Roosevelt, and hailed Curtin’s role in opening up Australia to the world economy (Curtin’s Gift, 2005). Geoffrey Serle, who had written a long entry on Curtin for the Australian Dictionary of Biography in 1989, became increasingly vexed by Keating’s iconoclasm; his last work was a lapidary vindication of Curtin. And just last year, John Hirst wrote one of his revisionist essays and found Curtin too nice. The novelty of James Curran’s monograph is that it is concerned with one aspect of the Curtin legend, his wartime assertion of Australian interests. An obvious starting point is the statement he made at the end of 1941: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’ The statement was criticised at the time as reckless and disloyal; it has been cited repeatedly since as the moment Australia threw off the imperial shackles. The circumstances of the statement are well known. It was written eleven weeks after Curtin assumed office and a fortnight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was already apparent that Britain would be unable to send adequate reinforcements, and that the United States would lead the Allied effort in the Pacific; the first American troops had in fact arrived in Brisbane just a few days earlier. The burden of the article was the need for Australians to devote themselves to the war effort in a new spirit of determination. It was written for the Melbourne Herald and destined for the magazine section, until an editor saw its news value. It was then cabled across the Pacific and widely publicised. Churchill, who was conferring with Roosevelt in Washington, took grave offence. Roosevelt said it smacked of panic and disloyalty. Curran reminds us that there was nothing at all novel about such appeals to the United States: Deakin had invited a previous President Roosevelt to send the ‘Great White Fleet’ after rowing with Downing Street before World War I. Curran reminds us also of the words Curtin had broadcast the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor: ‘We Australians have imperishable traditions. We shall maintain them. We shall vindicate them. We shall hold this country and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race, and as a place where civilisation will persist.’ Nor was this the only instance. Speaking in parliament on 16 December, Curtin declared that ‘this nation will remain for ever the home of sons of Britishers who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race’. Curtin, in short, understood Australia as part of the British world, and Australians as British in their ancestry, institutions, and ideals. Curran is one of a number of historians who have identified this phenomenon of ‘British race patriotism’, which exercised such a powerful influence in this country in the first half of the last century and is so incomprehensible today. His book is, among other things, an exercise in cultural translation that seeks to explain how Britain and Australia were not competing but complementary loyalties. For Curtin, however, this loyalty was combined with others. Converted to socialism in the early years of the century, he was an internationalist who rejected both imperialism and militarism. Confronted by the exigencies of war in 1914, he was powerless to prevent the rush to arms but took a stand against conscription – and when he first stood for parliament in 1919, was condemned for it. As Curran explains, the wartime crisis imposed new tests of imperial loyalty that condemned Labor to the political wilderness between the wars. When Curtin assumed the leadership in 1935, he was determined to rebuild his party’s credibility. It was at this time that he adopted the respectable dress captured in wartime photographs: the hat, the suit cut conservatively with a high lapel, the black-rimmed spectacles. Campaigning in New South Wales, he castigated the local candidate for appearing in a soft shirt-collar. In foreign policy he had to steer a line between those in his party supporting collective action and the isolationists. He found it in a policy of home defence that was quite unrealistic, but then so too was the appeasement followed by the government. It has been suggested that military strategy is all too often based on the last war. Hence the British garrison at Singapore was designed to repel a seaborne invasion but incapable of holding out against the Japanese thrust down the Malay peninsula. The same might be said about the raising of the AIF for service in the Middle East, the training of an air force in Canada for service in Europe, and the production of wool, wheat, meat, and butter for Britain. When the Australian high command had to prepare for the Japanese thrust south, there were no means of transporting troops and materials north, no air cover, and a deficiency of munitions and war production. These were the circumstances in which Curtin issued his call to America and exchanged angry cables with Churchill. The call was unnecessary, for the United States had already decided to use Australia as its principal base for the war in the Pacific, and the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in mid-1942 would avert the Japanese threat. But the cost of American assistance was substantial: Curtin had to break with party tradition to allow conscripts to serve outside Australian territory; he had then to allow MacArthur to relegate Australian forces to a subsidiary role, and he had to provide an increasing quantity of goods and services under the Reverse Lend-Lease arrangements. It was hardly surprising that he should look to the Empire as a counterbalance. Curran places great significance on the proposal that Curtin took to the meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers in London in 1944, calling for a permanent secretariat that would allow greater cooperation. As he relates, the scheme was opposed by Canada and South Africa, and was treated with ill-disguised contempt by Churchill. This would have come as no surprise to Curtin, since Stanley Bruce, who had tried something similar after the last war, was advising him as high commissioner in London. Curran’s presentation of this episode makes it seem almost quixotic. He recognises that the British relationship was maintained after the war, with new defence arrangements and renewed bulk contracts for Australian exports. He passes over the wartime conferences at which the members of the Commonwealth sought to establish an alternative to the American design for the postwar economy: the attempts to formulate a common position on trade and finance, the efforts to maintain the sterling bloc. Curtin and Chifley after him were wary of the prospects of a pax Americana, and realised that Britain was the only makeweight. I think also that Curran underestimates the political constraints on Curtin. Dependent on the support of independents until the 1943 election, he had to put up with ministers as well as backbenchers who had little British race patriotism. More than once he was reduced to tears by critics in Caucus, and when all else failed he would pull a paper from his pocket and announce that the Japanese were steaming south. He used Bruce in London and Owen Dixon in Washington to temper the excesses of Evatt. As he explained to Paul Hasluck, who accompanied him to a Christmas party for the press gallery and was startled by the language: ‘It’s the only time I tell dirty stories. You need a lot of kid-stakes with the press.

Stuart Macintyre

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