curtin defenders strike back
Remember Downer’s assault on John Curtin? It turns out to be a first salvo, with people like the Australian’s Paul Kelly taking up the cudgels and following in Downer’s footsteps.
Now David Dale, a genuine historian, has been granted the space (thanks fellas, so good of you to remember) in the Australian to provide a reply.
It’s under the fold.
David Day: Curtin led us out of dark days into a golden age
July 05, 2005
TODAY marks 60 years since Labor prime minister John Curtin died from heart failure in the Lodge. Despite being prime minister for less than four years, he is widely regarded as having been Australia’s greatest leader. John Howard acknowledged as much when he joined with then West Australian Liberal premier Richard Court to buy Curtin’s Perth house so that it would be preserved for posterity, something that was not done for the Melbourne house of prime minister and Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies.
In more recent days, Curtin’s historical legacy has been reappraised by economist John Edwards and The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly.
In his book Curtin’s Gift, Edwards has attempted to shift attention from the traditional focus on Curtin’s role as a wartime leader to his role as the economic manager who established the foundations of the modern Australian economy. However, as several reviewers have observed, it is difficult to disentangle the roles of Curtin and his astute treasurer and minister for post-war reconstruction, Ben Chifley, when determining who made the more substantial contribution in that sphere.
For his part Kelly, writing in The Weekend Australian (”Labor at War, June 18-19), has portrayed Curtin as an isolationist who rigidly opposed an expeditionary force to Europe in 1939 because of Labor’s experiences during World War I. What Kelly fails to mention is the parlous defence position in Australia in the late 1930s and the possibility of Japan expanding into the southwest Pacific if Australia’s limited military forces were sent to the other side of the world. It was this possibility, rather than any knee-jerk isolationism, that caused Curtin to argue for Australia’s defences to be secured before any distant commitments were made.
Kelly’s article was a partial response to the notorious attack on Curtin’s reputation by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who alleged that Curtin supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany when in fact it was Menzies who was the staunchest supporter of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Rather than being an apologist for Adolf Hitler, Curtin was a relatively lonely voice in the Australian wilderness of the ’30s who argued persistently for Australia to strengthen its defences against the expansionist Japanese. Curtin was particularly concerned that Australia not depend for its defence, as the conservative government was doing, on the supposed impregnability of the British naval base at Singapore.
By the time that Curtin was made prime minister in October 1941, just two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no time to make good the decade of neglect of Australia’s defences. With no modern fighter or bomber aircraft, no tanks and no battleships, the country’s survival would have to depend on whatever Australian forces Curtin could wrest back from the British, along with the limited US forces that Washington was willing to provide.
Although there would be no invasion of Australian soil, Curtin ensured that the nation was mobilised to ward off such a possibility. Discarding the “business as usual” mantra of Menzies, he managed to convince his party and the people at large to accept the tightening of rationing, the government control of civilian manpower and a limited extension of conscription to allow Australian troops to be used beyond the borders of Australian territory.
Curtin’s finest hour came in February 1942, following the fall of Singapore, when he insisted in the face of threats and intimidation from British prime minister Winston Churchill, US president Franklin Roosevelt and Menzies that two Australian divisions en route to the Netherlands East Indies from the Middle East should return to Australia rather than be diverted to the hopeless defence of Burma. The battle-tested Australian troops thereby became available for the fighting in New Guinea that prevented Port Moresby being captured and used as a possible launching pad for attacks on northern Australia.
Less laudable was Curtin’s decision to send additional and poorly trained Australian troops into Singapore just before its surrender and his later support for the questionable mopping up campaigns in Borneo and elsewhere that cost many lives for little strategic gain.
Curtin is also lauded and criticised for the closeness of his relationship with US General Douglas MacArthur. Some see it as the forerunner of the later ANZUS agreement while others worry that he conceded too much to MacArthur, allowing the Americans too much control, not only over the disposition of Australia’s fighting forces but over the economy as well. While such criticisms carry some weight, it is difficult to know how a position of relative subservience could have been avoided, given the dire conditions of 1942.
By ensuring that Australians gave their utmost to the war effort and by astutely managing the war economy, Curtin ensured that the country emerged from the conflict without suffering undue privation or being saddled with an unbearable burden of war debts. He used the wartime controls and the mandate of his 1943 election victory to ensure that the Australian government, rather than the bankers of London, played the dominant role in determining the economic parameters of post-war Australia. And he overturned traditional Labor opposition to mass immigration to ensure that Australia would be secured against any future invasion attempt.
Not that Curtin would want to be hailed as a national hero. He knew he was sometimes engulfed by challenges that were beyond him. At crucial times he was laid low by depression and unable to cope. And he was forever on guard, with the help of friends and family, against the alcohol that had almost destroyed him in the past.
Yet he led Australia through its most testing time, ensuring that it emerged not only relatively unscathed but with the means to establish the golden age that developed under his successors Chifley and Menzies. As Paul Hasluck observed, Curtin was “a man who reached nobility through humility”. His was certainly a complex life and it deserves celebration rather than denigration.
David Day is author of John Curtin: A Life (HarperCollins, 1999) and Conquest: A New History of the Modern World (HarperCollins), released last week.
July 9th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
I see little difference in Curtin and Menzies, both were reflexively subservient to their “great and powerful friend”. Australia produced no Monash or Williams in WWII for a reason – because the Australian government did not really care that much for sovereignty and self-management. Australia acted more independantly in WWI than in WWII.
Williams actually got shunted by Menzies before the war, and the British hack which replaced him put into the place the Empire Air Training Scheme, which sent Australian pilots to England via America, rather than having them fight in the Pacific.
When Williams got Marshall to agree to EATS being trained in Australia and then fighting with lend-lease aircraft from the US (so US pilots and aircraft could go to Europe), both MacArthur and Curtin knocked it on the head. Curtin apparently didnt want the US to thik Australia was being ungrateful.
Jim Scullin showed more courage than either Curtin or Menzies, demanding an Australian Jew be made Governor-General.
July 9th, 2005 at 11:25 pm
I reckon the history of this stuff is very contingent on the hindsight through which we view it.
Downer set that up by babbling about appeasement, which referred ineptly into an argument being held between Guernica and Munich, whose details I don’t know about. He is of course using the simple lens of support for Iraq.
Then we get caught in the dumb ironies of this: if Curtin was an appeaser, then so was Menzies and for longer; if Curtin was grovelling to the Americans, what is Howard doing now?
It is a productive debate because we fighting about 2005. But as a piece of genuine history, I doubt that it is very useful. Sovereignty was a problem from the Boer War on, and had different avatars, moving from empire to great and powerful friends. But the terms of reference were set in terms of a larger agenda – a world war in which we were genuinely minor players.
It is at this level, of course, that some of the most fascinating battles were played out. What about the French in Vietnam, for instance, managing to get on with the Japanese?
I think the sovereignty and standing up for Australia issue is only one of many matrices that are needed to understand the times, and evaluate the quality of the people. I am actually suspicious of the whole idea of “heroic people coming to the fore” notion of leadership. It just becomes a bunch of propaganda myths.
Notice already how the question of panic has come from the bombings on Thursday. The Beeb is insisting in its narration tracks – there was no panic, no panic, no panic – not realising that ‘civilian panic’ is a dumb artefact that always occurs in the minds of bureaucrats and spin doctors when conflicts are new.
(We won’t talk about Singapore now – that is more complicated).
The sovereignty issue as a meme does have a deep and continuing meaning apart from trash goodies and baddies point scoring around Iraq. It is to do with us achieving a sense of internal sovereignty as a culture and a way of life, an autonomy denied to us until we throw off the yoke of psychological colonialism.
A journey we have not truly faced. A comparison with Canada is apt here, since they have had to deal with this, both as a consequence of the US behemoth and the French-Canadian challenge.
From my particular point of view, this is why the Canadian National Film Board gets ten times the budget of Film Australia.
Cultural politics is bloody important. Just ask the Quebecois.
Nice observation, BTW, about Scullin and courage, because it frames the argument away from its mythic pillars.