Ming vast: the great Menzies myth machine rolls on

The Young Menzies : Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, edited by Zachary Gorman (Melbourne University Press)

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Henry “Chips” Channon, was a diarist, novelist, Tory MP, bon vivant, anti-Semite of a viciousness remarkable even for the 1930s (visiting Tel Aviv during World War II, he wondered gloatingly what would become of the “Jews’ security” should the Germans get there), a bisexual who appears to have been responsible for the word “gay” acquiring its modern meaning, and a friend of Sir Robert Menzies.

Volume two of the recently published, unexpurgated edition of his diaries tells us that Channon, visiting his lover Peter Coats, first met Menzies in Cairo in January 1941, when Ming was making his slow passage towards London, through the empire. Channon and Menzies dined and went shopping for knick-knacks, and they ultimately shared a plane back to London, a several days’ journey, sharing hotel rooms along the way.

They appear to have been fast friends during Menzies’ long, initially purposeful, finally quixotic and futile four-month stay in London. Channon makes no appearance whatsoever in Menzies’s diaries of the trip, which would, of course, later be lying around in the Lodge or Parliament House. Yet when discussing who might replace Churchill as prime minister — less than a year in, as the Tory right tried to poleaxe him — Channon in mid-April 1941 notes “I suggested Robert Menzies”. What on earth was going on there? 

This visit lies at the dead centre of Menzies’s life. He was 46, and had been a professional politician since the end of the Bruce government in 1929, rising through state and federal ranks as surely and steadily as he had risen from a remote but fairly well-heeled childhood in Jeparit, a one-street town in the Mallee, through Wesley College, Melbourne University and the Melbourne bar, to the seat of Kooyong, scarcely missing a beat or a moment.

The United Australia Party he led was in its 11th year in power, hanging on with the support of independents and party renegades, and gradually coming apart as the country debated all options for wartime reorganisation, from full war socialism to business as usual. 

Though it was not yet apparent, it is clear from Menzies’s diaries and letters from the trip, and now Channon’s diaries, that something had broken in him, as regards politics. It was not that he did not want to be a politician anymore; he did not want to be a politician in Australia. His mind and his heart were in London long before the long journey by plane got him there. 

For any average Australian of Anglo-Saxon (but not Celts) origin, Britain was in no sense a separate country. We were still a branch of the imperial project, and most people gained a sense of strength and secure identity from that. Nor was it self-indulgent for an Australian prime minister to be in London at a time when the strategy for the next phase of the war was being worked out, and the Japanese were widely expected to try and steal the Asian colonies that the Europeans had already stolen fair and square. 

What has fascinated numerous historians has been not that he went but that he stayed, or how he did, and why. Having a place in the imperial war cabinet as Australian prime minister allowed him to have a say in the disposition of troops and sundry other matters, a power which he did not exercise to maximise the defence of our actual continent. But after a couple of months there, the points were made, his presence was no longer required and everyone was wondering why he didn’t go back and see to the defence of the least densely populated nation on earth. By the third month, Menzies was more or less intriguing against Churchill. 

By the end, he is openly campaigning to be the “dominion” representative in the war cabinet, a move that Churchill and others were determined to block. Much of his diaries of the trip record somewhat empty days, lunching at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand or walking around Berkeley Square, taking a visit from the powerless Free Polish representative and the like. Not wanted there, he did not really want to go home, returning via Washington and Hawaii (where he surfed) to a hero’s welcome, a round of public speaking — and a few months later, a resignation from the prime ministership that he didn’t need to make. 

Famously, he then, after some months off, gave his “forgotten people” speech and reorganised Australia’s non-labour, non-rural political forces into the modern Liberal Party.

Even without the fresh information coming from Channon’s diaries, it is clear that this life passage — failure, disavowal and renunciation, followed by a Promethean recreation of his own conditions of possibility — is of a piece.

Had the UAP collapsed without Robert Menzies doing so, he would not have rebuilt what became the Liberal Party. He would not have rebuilt himself. He would have drifted back into the law, as his Melbourne establishment friends were urging him to do, perhaps becoming, or trying to become, the writer he claimed he had always really wanted to be, while he golfed, Portsea’d and expired around the time that Toorak Rd saw the opening of the Flight Deck — a coffee lounge done out like a 747, where the serving staff dressed as stewardesses.

The Menzies type — which the ancient sketch show The Comedy Company, in a David Attenborough-style parody of birdwatching applied to Australian society, labelled “Presbyterian silvertails” — can still be seen outside the gelato shop in the clinker-brick, half-timbered, Tudor-revival fantasia of Toorak village; a retired QC/KC (“none of that SC nonsense!”) eating a single vanilla cone, a light-blue jumper tied around the neck over a light-pink shirt, an ancient, slender, perfumed, high-cheekboned wife, the 1961 Venus of Lauriston, dabbing icecream from his mouth with a David Jones handkerchief. 

With the exception of this strange passage of self-exile, political felo de se, and revival through a manifesto to the nation, his political career is a record of sure-footed rationality and relatively clear self-perception. He is as a person, a subject, a self, uninteresting, and this suddenly made him one. 

Alas, it does not tempt the contributors to Young Menzies, the first of four volumes of conference proceedings from the Robert Menzies Institute, which editor of this volume Zachary Gorman describes as:

… dedicated to promoting discussion, critical analysis, and reflection on Menzies, the era he defined, and his enduring legacy.

It’s a bit that. It’s also a political knocking-shop dressed up as a university institute and plonked in the middle of the stone-faced Old Quad at Melbourne University, where the world campaign for the eight-hour day began in 1856. The name has been chosen for its august air, and because calling it the “Find a Job For Georgie Downer Institute” would be unseemly and not fit on the letterhead. It is the work of either current vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell, the salmonella man, or past VC Glyn Davis, the Milo Minderbinder of the Group of Eight, or both working tag team. 

The plain fact is that Robert Menzies can’t really bear the weight of a whole institute devoted to him, even if it claims to be extending its remit to the wider question of liberalism in Australia. Menzies was focused, highly intelligent, well-read, and drew principles and policies from multiple political strands. His career before and during his long tenure as prime minister is worthy of substantial revisiting and re-examination. The left view of him, as a complacent bumpkin dunce, which obtained from the 1960s to the 1990s, is clearly wrong. 

But so too is the recent attempt at culture reverse engineering that attempts to give Menzies a pharaonic presence in our history, a leader who combined spirit, intellect and action, an Australian essence emerging from his planet-sized brain. This is nothing other than an attempt to build a “strong” tradition of Australian liberalism from a political movement notable for its improvisation, fissiparousness, anti-intellectualism and emphasis on practicality.

The cornerstone of this is David Kemp’s five-volume history of liberalism in Australia, a work that combines solid interpretation with a delusional reading-in of a classical liberal strand that has never really existed here, an act of filial piety and submission (his father, CD Kemp, founded the IPA; David, though he has never got out from his pyramidic shadow, is doing better than his brother Rod, who is a set of spare parts for David). 

As Kemp’s volumes have come out one by one, finding the Lockean tradition in the method of shack-building round Tank stream in 1797 (a joke, but not by much), the mummification of Ming was continued from the Menzies Research Centre, directed by Nick Cater, a man with a truly Wagnerian sense of political drama. Now, the Menzies push appears to have decided that the taxpayer should house its activities. 

This volume of papers-become-chapters is thus a mix of respectable academic work and “political work”, the best of it scrupulous and dutiful, no one taking the opportunity to focus on Menzies’s mid-life crisis, which falls within the book’s remit.

Judith Brett, David Furse-Roberts and Frank Bongiorno deal usefully with Menzies’s relationship with Deakin, his ecumenical Presbyterianism, and his views of Curtin. Scott Prasser writes about Menzies’ post-war education policy and has an epigram — the OED definition of “learn” like a padded-out yearbook report. Troy Bramston’s account of Menzies childhood in Jeparit is incurious and devoid of interpretation, less interesting than its subject’s own account in his memoir Afternoon Light, a book so dull one nods off reading the title. Nestled within these respectable chapters are the two killers: Nick Cater’s chapter on “the forgotten people” speech, and Anne Henderson’s, titled “Peace and War”. 

The latter is little more than an attempt to mitigate the unquestionable truth that Menzies was, to the outbreak of World War II and right up to 1941, an appeaser, and soft on Nazism. This is done by some complex whataboutery about the shifting positions of the Labor opposition during 1938-39, which it is reasonable to examine.

What’s not reasonable, nor up to academic standard, is to write an entire chapter on Menzies’ views on World War II without mentioning once his oft and repeated enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler. This is a matter of public record, yet not once does Henderson mention it. Menzies condemned Nazi anti-Semitism in 1936; he also praised Hitler and aspects of Nazi Germany throughout 1938, and in 1939, a year after Kristallnacht, said that Hitler would be remembered as a great man.

This has always been the Achille’s heel of those who want to construct Menzies as a consistent liberal, for much of what Menzies admired about Hitler, aside from obvious anti-bolshevism, was the corporatism of the Nazi economy, its direction of economic power. While being anti-socialist by the standards of the time — socialism still being the doctrine of taking about three-quarters of the private economy into public ownership — it was clearly illiberal.

Indeed, in his diaries of the UK visit he notes a conversation with UK Labour MPs in which he outlines his philosophy — in contrast to their full socialism — which involves the state direction and planning of large private corporations, nationalisation of implicit monopolies, and the unsupervised private sector to be confined to small business. But what is truly egregious about this chapter is that it quotes various remarks Curtin made, in 1939, about understanding why many desperate Germans supported the Nazis, without mentioning Menzies’s unprompted and direct enthusiasm for Hitler. Henderson knows this history: she’s in the collection because she wrote a book called Menzies at War. Her selective reading can fairly be called intellectually dishonest, in my opinion.

Nick Cater is not dishonest, simply a man capable of great self-delusion. He performs the same operation on the “forgotten people” speech that other contributors to Mingophilia have performed: take the very limited notion of “individualism” that occurred in the 1940s and construct it as the atomised neoliberal individualism of the post-Thatcher period, in which one must make one’s whole life, and accumulation is the supreme virtue.

But the speech makes clear — as Judith Brett emphasises in the earlier volume Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, which this volume stands in the shadow of and is reactant to — that Menzies clearly thinks in class, virtually in caste terms.

He is not encouraging the “forgotten people” of the jumbled lower- and middle-middle classes to represent themselves; he offers himself as their representative. The orders will be preserved; the meaning of our lives as representatives of our race (British, rather than generic white in this case) persists. Cater, in trying to construct this improvised moment in Menzies’ path back to power as an intellectual powerhouse, gets basic things wrong. Hymning Menzies’ creation of a private housing post-war order, he seems unaware of how strong that tradition already was in Australia, deriving from working-class mutualism, buttressed by state-owned banks.

Comparing it positively to the UK’s policy of building huge public housing blocks, he has made the elementary error of disregarding the federal system, within which public housing was a state responsibility and in which Liberal governments compulsorily bought up whole suburbs of privately owned houses to throw up towers that gave British brutalism a run for its money.

The inner city was saved, for heritage and for unaffordable private ownership, by the left, who created the campaigns against the mass demolitions, and against whom Henry Bolte and Robert Askin sent in the police and the horses to enforce the destruction. The North Melbourne Association, which saved that suburb, was run by the Communist Party of Australia. Cater, a transplanted Brit, shows once again that he really has no ideas about the complex reality of Australia, and simply uses it as a blank canvas to project onto it an “un-Britain”.

Indeed, the most important thing about the “forgotten people” speech is how weird it is, how disjunctive, if judged as a political manifesto. It reads like a dream-recitative done over the radio of a man yearning for home without knowing what home is (which is why, as Brett notes, home appears so often in the speech). Menzies fantasised about returning to London, not as PM but as a floating representative, or by being elected to the House of Commons. Yet, the paradox is obvious: the one place he wasn’t British was in Britain, where his qualities — his bodily ease, his size, confident casual manner and gusto — marked him as Australian in his very essence.

In London, he is Jeparit man, the Drysdalesque figure against the landscape. Only in exile from London can he be “British to the bootstraps”. To add to the mix, the “forgotten people” had already been used as a book title by Rex Ingamells, founder of the Jindyworobak cultural nationalists, and published in 1936. In Ingamells’ book of very average poems the “forgotten people” are the Indigenous peoples, and the book appears to be the first to actually talk about First Nations peoples as such, without condescension, and with the notion that the continent has a dual being (and places should have dual names).

I have no idea whether this has been registered in the Menzies scholarship. Given how few books were published in Australia, and Menzies’ enthusiasm for poetry, it seems unlikely he did not know about it. Did this first literary haunting of settled colonialism add to what is clearly occurring in “the forgotten people” — an assuagement of the anxiety brought about by a sense of homelessness?

Cater’s use of Australia as a means to an end is rather like Menzies himself. Coming back from London to the stalled city of Canberra — a public service village done, bizarrely, in Spanish mission-style throughout, a place that must have been both tedious and surreal in the 1930s — there is little question that he took a dive, and quit without needing to.

In London, in his last month, he was becoming a nuisance and decidedly erratic to everyone. Channon and the Tory right’s loathing of Churchill and Eden looked for their fall and sought a way to make a deal with Hitler — a strategy which, it must be said, looked a lot more reasonable at the time than it does in retrospect. Menzies appears to have taken their view, or shared it enough to be part of their “set”. 

So what are we to make of Channon’s record that he suggested Menzies should replace Churchill as prime minister? Is it Channon saying that things are so bad that the impossible step of having a dominions leader as PM should be contemplated? Is he saying that Menzies is the best man for the job, but without seriously meaning it as a possibility? Had Menzies ruminated on the possibility with Channon, or did Channon spark a fantasy in Menzies? Whatever the case, it surely adds weight to the argument, advanced most insistently by David Day, that Menzies actively fantasised about taking the leadership of the empire.

I take that more as a sign that in this British interregnum, begun in politics and wandering into the personal, Menzies came apart not wholly — part of the reason why he is not of sufficient interest to sustain a whole institute is that this is the closest thing to a crisis he gets in his smooth, utterly competent, temperate life — but enough to make possible the rethinking of politics that would make the Liberal Party possible.

He created a party that had a far more “corporatist” structure, with intersecting civic institutions laced into it, rather than being a collection of individuals. And with that party, he ruled over a corporatist Australia, with the state running an agricultural monopsony, protection creating de facto state industries (try and find, in any 1950s suburban photo, a car that isn’t a Holden — ain’t many) in which labour courts decided wages from Broome to Zeehan, and which ran the most oppressive censorship regime in the anglosphere. Liberal? It was an electoral version of Salazar’s Portugal. 

The Mingophiles are engaged in a vast enterprise of misrecognising their hero, of which several papers in this volume are an example. Long may they continue. Because in the decade since Mingocentrism became the right’s official ideology, they have lost power in every state except NSW (likely to go in a fortnight) and Tasmania, which lives and dies by quasi-independents in its Hare-Clark-Potrzebie voting system, as well as federally.

Better still, this is not the end of a Labor cycle. Five states will have two more Labor terms in them after March 25 (if Labor succeeds), and only Queensland is a prospect, and that’s really just the National Party, with the establishment of the LNP being a bit of a political pity root.

They have tried to abstract “the forgotten people” from its context. On the deliciously melancholic Sky coverage of the Victorian election, someone (was it Kroger?) asked why the Libs weren’t looking for the forgotten people in Box Hill. Box Hill? You mean Shenzhen on Dandenong creek? No one’s forgotten there. The CCP knows where they all are. The right has no idea of the changed country they are contesting to run. 

Study Menzies by all means, advocate for his reputation. But as I hope I’ve shown, he’s a more interesting case than his ideological boosters want him to be, and the institute needs to have a higher standard of scholarship than at least four of the papers in this volume.

It’s something that MUP should demand too if it is going to be asked to publish them. Of our Sir Robert, we need a clear-eyed assessment of a figure now very far from us, more Ming distantly than dynasty.