By TOM O’LINCOLN
When William McInnes first stared out at me from the TV screen on Sunday night, I had the eeriest feeling I was watching Kevin Rudd—even though he was obviously playing John Curtin. Apart from both being ALP leaders, what’s the connection?
Of course the show did offer us a historical tale of great importance in its own right, and a compelling one too. Is it just because I’m on the left, or is a drama about Labor in power usually more engrossing than one about the Liberals?
Shows like this are also a great way to learn history, except that they’re drenched in myth and legend … which in this case did seem conjured up to intersect with today’s politics. Undoubtedly the show appears now because it’s an election year. The myths and legends surrounding the ALP in World War II are potent ammunition for 2007.
There’s the emotionally gratifying legend about
how Churchill wouldn’t send our boys home from the
Complementing this is the tale of Curtin the war-winner, with Labor as the natural party of heroic wartime government. What better story to back Rudd’s push for “security credentials” today.
Not to mention tough-guy domestic credentials. In an interview, McInnes told the Sunday Age “M” magazine: “the great thing [Curtin] did was prove the Labor Party could govern in a time of crisis.” If we’re unsure what that means, the program soon tells us. In fact the show’s hardly started when we hear Curtin complain about Labor “hotheads”; then later we have good old Ben Chifley (can’t miss him, that pipe never leaves his mouth) assuring us “there’s not another man alive who can talk the public into all these austerity measures”.
The PM himself is scathing about the “pack of selfish bastards” who don’t embrace austerity; after all “everyone is at the disposal of government”, which is OK because it’s a “war effort for Australians by Australians”. Of course that’s the point about the Churchill story too – to evoke the potent nationalism which is the natural habitat of the ALP. And which was then inseparable from the White Australia Policy.
This awkward fact brings us to the heart of my dissatisfaction with the show. In the interview, McInnes praises Curtin for creating a new Australian identity. Before Curtin “we were Britons. We were white” but apparently in the great man’s wake “we’re Australians now”.
This is a farrago of half-truths.
The real Curtin had, by the time he took office, shed his earlier radical politics; he remained however both a British patriot and an Australian nationalist, with no real contradiction; and at the same time an automatic race patriot. The Prime Ministerial speeches we hear in the program are carefully selected: in real life when Curtin set out his war aims, he referred to the “principle of White Australia”. On another occasion he declared:
"From the day that Captain Arthur Phillip landed here, until this hour, this land has been governed by men and women of our race … We do not intend that that tradition shall be destroyed merely because an aggressor marches against us. Australians, you are the sons and daughters of Britishers…"
Contrary to his image as an internationalist and
anti-militarist, Curtin had attacked the Hughes Government for endangering
White Australia while “the white sons of Australian mothers are fighting for the
Empire on the blood-stained fields of
He also linked his racism to calls for strict limits on women working outside the home, fearing a decline in the birth rate and “race deterioration”.
McInness goes on to
enthuse about what fine leaders
Prominent political and business personalities had been sympathetic to fascism or at least ambivalent. Returning from Nazi Germany in 1938, Menzies hedged his bets but still gushed about the “really spiritual quality in the willingness of Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State”. A more forthright Wilfred Kent Hughes, Victorian Minister for Sustenance, called himself “a fascist without a shirt”.
Historian Kay Saunders found out how extensive this pro-fascist sentiment was when she asked to see “the detailed files on Nazism in Queensland, [a] huge file, they could hardly keep the thing together … and the archivist said, ‘there’s no way you’re going to be allowed to see that, because you would know all the names, these are very prominent conservative Queenslanders and it will never be open, well not in our lifetime.’”
General Thomas Blamey had been Victorian Police Commissioner. When police fired on strikers, killing one who had fought at Gallipoli, Blamey defended the cops. He was closely involved with the ultra-right League of National Security, and after the war had links to The Association, a revival of the New Guard— as did Chief of Staff General Sturdee, who gets such sympathetic treatment in the TV show.
Curtin appointed Essington Lewis, ruthless
anti-union head of BHP, to head the Department of
Munitions. In pursuit of austerity, Lewis turned to Ben Chifley who with his
union credentials might (in biographer David Day’s words) “be capable of soothing the expected union resistance.” It
worked to a degree, partly because of Chifley’s reputation as a unionist. This
came from the 1917 rail strike, during which he’d ensured that in his home town
of
Towards the end, facing rank and file opposition
to ending the strike, Chifley pressured
He was a fitting war leader on other grounds too – he had first won election to parliament through a campaign against “Czecho Slavs” with complaints that the conservative government was giving “preference to dagoes – not heroes”.
This helps explain why, as the TV show indicates
and McInnes rightly says, Curtin and Menzies “got on
so well across parties”. It’s because, like today’s
Reading Howard for Menzies, isn’t that just what Kevin Rudd has begun to do?