Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014 ISBN 9781742233796
It's always interesting how a country's history is portrayed and handed down, and the history of Australia in the 1940s is a good example of how certain things get forgotten, and others are given more importance than perhaps they deserve.
The received version of these years is that Australia, under the wonderful leadership of John Curtin, was united and determined to fight and defeat not only the Fascists in Europe, but also Japan. The reality is somewhat different: Curtin didn't even become Prime Minister until late 1941, after a period of his repudiating the need for Australia to support Britain with troops. Australia was a divided country, with the Labor Party repeatedly refusing to join a Government of National Unity, and with organised labour in unrest, with strikes and other industrial troubles a common occurrence.
All was not well on the conservative benches either. After the death of Joseph Lyons in 1939, the United Australia Party was left divided, and its leader and Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was left to try and hold together a party that had, in some respects, lost its reason for existence and was at war with itself, and its leader. The conservative vote itself was split, with the Country Party being a strong force, and containing some strong personalities.
Menzies at War is an account of those times, from when Menzies became Prime Minister, through to the time he became PM again in 1949, this time as head of the Liberal Party. Henderson's account is of Menzies' efforts to try and bring his party, Labor and the country together in the prosecution of the War. She is particularly keen to dispel some of the stranger ideas that have been put about in the past, such as that Menzies was trying to ensconce himself in England and take over from Churchill. She shows that this was never going to happen, that Menzies wasn't seeking it, and that the whole theory seems to have sprung from what was some idle chatter at the time.
Menzies trip to Britain - which is the subject of a great portion of this book - was undertaken mainly because he wanted to impress on the British Government the importance of improving the defences at Singapore. Henderson writes that Menzies naively believed that, by the power of his rhetoric and capacity to argue a case, he could change British policy. Naive he was, as he was no match for Churchill, and could not sway Cabinet and in fact reluctantly agreed to sending Australian troops to Greece, which turned into a disaster. While in England Menzies' eyes were opened not only to the dangers of war - seeing bombed cities at first-hand - but also to the haphazard way that the British were running their War. He realised that Australia and the Far East were very low down the priority list. It would have been very interesting to see, if Menzies was still Prime Minister after Pearl Harbour, whether he too would have turned to the United States, as Curtin famously did.
But of course that wasn't to be: what has been forgotten, obscured by the sixteen post-war years of Menzies' rule, is that in his first stint as Prime Minister he had not developed the political skills to successfully hold together a fractious group of politicians. While he was desperately trying to get the Australian public to appreciate the seriousness of the war situation, his own party members were assiduously working against him, some annoyed at his high-handedness, others against his policy direction.
When this discontent came to a head, Menzies resigned, aware that he didn't have the numbers, and that stable government was required for Australia to successfully prosecute the War. As he pointed out himself, what he had managed to do in the time that he was Prime Minister was to put in place many of the planks of the platform on which Labor went on to build Australia's war-fighting ability.
Menzies spent the rest of the war years thinking on his failures, and determining a comeback based around a combined conservative force: the Liberal Party. This new sense of cohesiveness - combined with a more formal coalition relationship with the Country Party - did not immediately bear fruit, but when Labor made the disastrous political mis-step of attempting to nationalise the banks against a background of Communist agitation in the labour force, the conservative side of politics was ready to jump, and claim power; power they held on to for the next 23 years, helped by the internal frictions in Labor becoming a bona-fide split.
Henderson has written a book that sets the record straight on a few historical furphies that have emerged over time about what was a tumultuous part of Australia's political history.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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