Robert Menzies was a passionate advocate of higher learning, who increased access to tertiary education for thousands. Photo: R.L. Stewart
ELENA DOUGLAS
Paul Keating’s depiction of Robert Menzies as reactionary and stultifying coloured the opinions of a generation. Photo: Peter Morris
An encounter with history books, rather than political rhetoric, leaves one shocked at the jaundiced portrait of Sir Robert Menzies in the public imagination.
I speak from experience. The Menzies of my childhood and adolescence was a faintly ridiculous figure. Throughout my education in the 1970s and ’80s, anyone holding cultural authority – teachers, parents, writers, filmmakers, all vastly different people with myriad perspectives on the world – shared one thing: they had seen the enemy and it was Robert Gordon Menzies.
Menzies, in my mind’s eye, was a pompous, anachronistic, forelock-tugging Establishment figure, who held back the tide of Australia’s potential and denied the country its independent greatness. In his reverence for the British Empire, his enchantment with the Queen of England, even his plummy voice, he lacked Australian authenticity and patriotism.
More unforgivable was his failure to expand educational horizons for Australians. Heavens, had it not been for that white knight, Gough Whitlam, I wouldn’t have gone to school, let alone university.
By the time I heard prime minister Paul Keating’s parliamentary tour de force against conservatism on February 27, 1992, it resonated with everything I’d ever been told about Menzies. Keating, under pressure from the deteriorating economy, sought to shift the debate to the more fertile and creative ground of Australian identity. He framed his opponents, Liberal leader John Hewson and shadow treasurer John Howard, as throwbacks to that “awful cultural cringe under Menzies” which “held us back for nearly a generation”. Dripping with sarcasm, Keating’s words were laced with his signature bitter humour: “That was the golden age when Australia was injected with a near lethal dose of old-fogeyism by the conservative parties opposite, when they put the country into neutral and where we gently ground to a halt in the nowhere land of the early 1980s.” It was among his most memorable parliamentary performances.
This rendition of Menzies was as familiar to me as Ned Kelly’s heroism.
If you’re under 50, unless you spent your youth inside the bubble of Liberal Party lore, chances are you heard little that was positive about Menzies.
KEATING’S MYTH
Raised in an Italian-Irish Labor family, anti-British to the bootstraps, my discovery that Menzies and the Poms could be blamed for most ills in the world, let alone Australia, was a defining cultural insight.
Returning to outer-suburban Perth in 1978, after a year in Tuscany (in the town of Pietrasanta, where artists from Michelangelo to Henry Moore had worked with the local marble artisans), I grew certain Robert Menzies was the reason Australia was so boring, monocultural and unimaginative. Coming of age in Keating’s Australia, where we looked to Asia, watched Japan’s stunning rise turn the heads of our teachers at university and mentors in business, it was axiomatic that the lack of international engagement and cultural depth, not to mention that national stain, the White Australia policy, were all Menzies’ fault.
Paul Keating was the best economics teacher I, or this country, ever had. Enrolments in high-school economics in Australian peaked while Keating was treasurer. But he was unreliable as a history teacher. The portrait of Menzies, signed by Keating, is in the romantic and mythological style beloved by Labor. Menzies plays the recalcitrant villain in this script written in the argot of the anti-British nationalists, such as Manning Clark, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. The Menzies era was the “tragedy writ large”. Australia was saved by “enlargers” – Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Keating – knights who redeemed us from the Menzian darkness. This drama has élan, colour, movement and narrative rhythm. It’s a shame the facts paint a different picture.
If Keating’s theatre was stunning, it came at a dangerous price: the swindle of a great Australian political figure from the national gallery. History is often the plaything of politics. Menzies had his flaws, his misjudgments, his obsessions, certainly his blind-spots. But he was one of the most creative and interesting figures in Australian history who, for 31 years, embodied the Australian Parliament. Not to know him and his deeds is to lose an important character in Australia’s story.
To claim a swindle took place, I do not need to prove that Menzies was without flaw; just that, by any measure, Menzies was an extraordinary Australian.
Robert Menzies (1894-1978) was the son of country-town shopkeepers, in Jeparit, Victoria. His mother and father (a state MP and the son of Scottish migrants), raised him to believe the duty of public service rested with the gifted. He was awarded numerous prizes at university; aside from Alfred Deakin and Gough Whitlam, no other prime minister has been as erudite. He excelled at the bar, and then the local politics that occupied the talented young men of the day.
METEORIC RISE
His career ascent was spectacular: by 34 he was a Victorian MP; by 40, federal member for Kooyong; and within five years prime minister representing the United Australia Party. Early in the Second World War, he became a member of the Imperial War Cabinet – co-ordinating the Allied response from London. It’s a period in Australia over which controversy rages regarding the degree of preparedness for war.
While visiting England in 1941, Menzies lost the faith of his United Australia Party colleagues in Canberra. The Labor leader, John Curtin, declined to support him in the formation of a bipartisan war cabinet. Lacking a workable parliamentary majority, Menzies resigned as leader.
Reflecting on these painful events he later wrote, “on balance . . . my humiliation in 1941 turned out to be a good thing for the country”. It taught him how to get along with people. And that “the state of mind in which to be logical is to be right, and to be right is its own justification” doesn’t get you far. He acquired “the common touch” and learned “that human beings are delightfully illogical but mostly honest, and to realise that all-black and all-white are not the only hues in the spectrum.” Chastened, Menzies led a collegial wartime opposition.
He wrote a series of nationally syndicated radio broadcasts, “The Forgotten People”, which was aired between May and November, 1942. The product of deep reflection, the series became a turning point both for ideas and his public profile. The broadcasts reveal Menzies’ political instincts and frame the most successful political strategy in Australia’s history: a focus on the “great and sober and dynamic” middle class, “the salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers”.
On these philosophical foundations, and alert to the lack of cohesion on the non-Labor side of politics in Australia (compared with Britain and the US), Menzies built a new political party. The Liberal Party was born on August 31, 1945. Menzies took it to power in December 1949 and led the country for a record-breaking 17 years.
Some people remember the Menzies era as a golden age, highlighting the postwar prosperity and Australia’s emergence as a top 10 trading nation. Industrial, manufacturing and minerals development soared as the world rebuilt. The vast sales of iron ore to Japan commenced. Purchasing power increased dramatically and with it a sharp rise in living standards: home ownership rose from half to three-quarters of the population; 1 million migrants were settled in 10 years; massive infrastructure projects, such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, came on-stream. A new social safety-net was woven: pensioner medical services, child endowment, private medical insurance, the homes savings grants and state aid for non-government schools were all kicked into life.
CONTROVERSIES PERSIST
The great controversies surrounding Menzies rumble still. National wealth grew rapidly but was Australia in relative decline? (Compared with other settler societies, Australia slipped; compared with industry-nationalising Labor Britain the country thrived.) Strong protectionist measures prevailed. Foreign policy analysts debate whether Menzies was paranoid or prescient about the threat of communism.
Our question here, however, is whether his contribution is significant enough to make a fair historical treatment important to the nation’s self-understanding.
No other figure before or since has dominated Australian politics as did Menzies. Both Paul Kelly in his book, The March of Patriots, and Don Watson, in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, interpret Menzies’ long reign as a powerful force in the development of Keating’s political personality. The long spell of seven election victories, undefeated for 17 years, was to become a torment for Labor warriors such as Keating. What better proof of Menzies’ political brilliance than the fuel he provided for Keating’s 1992 tirade, the venom palpable in his denunciations.
Part of Menzies’ political success was undoubtedly due to the turmoil in Labor at the time: the splintering off of an anti-communist Democratic Labor Party from the radical industrial wing. But no honest political analyst can deny Menzies’ raw political genius and unerring instincts.
When asked what he considered his most enduring accomplishment, Menzies cited education: expanding access to education for Australia’s great wealth of bright young people. Surprised? This is where the plot thickens. This is where the great swindle of Menzies’ legacy is most acute. It is rarely grasped that the first major wave of expansion of Australian higher education was driven by Menzies’ government.
REVERENCE FOR UNIVERSITIES
In a nuanced Menzies Oration last year, Janice Reid, vice-chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, slew several national myths. Reid acknowledged Menzies’ deep reverence for universities as “homes of pure culture and learning” and “training schools for the professions”, “homes of research”, “custodians of mental liberty, and the unfettered search for truth” and a “rugged honesty of mind”. That’s the rhetoric.
Turning to the facts: expenditure on universities under Menzies increased tenfold between 1955 and 1966. Enrolments expanded eightfold from 12,000 in 1938 to 96,000 by his retirement. The Commonwealth Scholarship scheme, envisaged by Labor’s Ben Chifley, was implemented by Menzies in 1951. By 1963, some 37 per cent of Australia’s full-time students had all their university fees paid and a means-tested living allowance. The 1965 Martin Report noted an additional 39 per cent of students received bursaries and cadetships. That means three-quarters of all university students had their education paid for by the Menzies government.
The era also saw massive institutional expansion, with numerous state universities funded into existence, including Monash, Macquarie, La Trobe, Newcastle, Flinders, James Cook, Griffith and Murdoch.
Menzies was not always the initiator of reform but, once convinced, he used his powers of persuasion to drive it home. Announcing a fourfold increase in education spending to the Parliament in 1957, he said, “if I may confess it, this is rather a special night in my political life . . . it is not yet adequately understood that a university education is not, and certainly should not be, the perquisite of a privileged few”. The bright and ambitious from less privileged families would attend university on scholarships. We must “become a more and more educated democracy if we are to raise our spiritual, intellectual, and material living standards” and “open many doors and to give opportunity and advantage to many students”. His speeches, especially Freedom in Modern Society (1958), illuminate a humanism that once guided university education (and a Scottish focus on education, part of the Menzies heritage). He said: “Are the universities mere technical schools, or have they as one of their functions the preservation of pure learning, bringing in its train not merely riches for the imagination but a comparative sense for the mind, and leading to what we need so badly – the recognition of values which are other than pecuniary?”
There is a spectacular opportunity for the Liberal Party to re-engage with Menzies’ understanding of the role of education in a modern democracy. It may prove its salvation. “If it wasn’t for Gough Whitlam, I wouldn’t have gone to university” is an Australian catchcry. As Reid claimed, Menzies-as-underwriter-of-university-access is unknown today. You’ll note no equivalent gratitude to Menzies from the baby-boomer generation. Cultural guardians such as David Williamson, Robert Manne, Germaine Greer and David Marr all attended universities under the Menzies expansion.
The writers and producers of the ABC documentary, Whitlam: The Power and the Passion, didn’t get the memo either. They fuelled the myth of Whitlam Labor’s single-handed expansion of educational opportunity. While Whitlam has the distinction of having made higher education free, Hawke and Keating reversed this, correctly identifying its effect: the working class was funding the dreams of the middle and upper classes for their children.
ON THE WORLD STAGE
I remember being utterly shocked to discover that Menzies, so demeaned and despised in my youth, spoke at British prime minister Winston Churchill’s memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral as statesman and friend. “In this crucial moment,” he said, “the battle had to be won not only in the air and on the sea and in the field, but in the hearts and minds of ordinary people with a deep capacity for heroism”. This was “in the whole of recorded modern history . . . the one occasion when one man, with one soaring imagination, with one fire burning in him, and with one unrivalled capacity for conveying it to others, won a crucial victory not only for the forces (for there were many heroes in those days) but for the very spirit of human freedom”. This moving moment in Australia’s modern history is all but lost, collateral damage of our politics.
To judge if this demonstrates bias in our national story-telling, ask this question: what if John Curtin had delivered a eulogy to Roosevelt? You’d know about it.
Richard Nixon wrote of Menzies, in 1982: “If I were to rate one postwar leader . . . it would not be one of the legendary European or American figures. It would be Robert Menzies.” Nixon believed had Menzies been born in Britain, he would have been that country’s prime minister. Had this been the case, opined Nixon, “Menzies would have ranked with Gladstone and Disraeli”.
We now forget it was Menzies who signed the ANZUS treaty in 1951 – our first military alliance beyond Britain – and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation in 1954, and that his government introduced the Colombo Plan, extending Australian university education to students across our region. Churchill asked Menzies to be minister of state in South-east Asia after his 1941 defeat. Menzies was honoured with the ceremonial post, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports – a title bestowed on Churchill himself, as well as William Pitt the Younger and Viscount Palmerston in retirement. These are but a few fragments in the total portrait of the man. Yet for most Australians, Menzies lives only in caricature.
Partly this is due to the lionisation of Whitlam as Australia’s pre-eminent postwar cultural saviour. Interestingly, Whitlam didn’t see himself eclipsing Menzies. In a letter to Menzies, Whitlam illuminates his high regard: “No Australian is more conscious than I how much the lustre, honour and authority of that office owe to the manner in which you held it with such distinction for so long . . . you would, I think, be surprised to know how much I feel indebted to your example, despite the great differences in our philosophies.”
Keating, in full flight as radical-nationalist warrior, delivered the decisive blow to Menzies’ legacy. Yet this is not the whole story. The balance can be laid at the feet of Menzies’ parliamentary successors. His reputation was trashed between his unbidden departure and Whitlam’s election. The haphazard, largely ineffectual prime ministerships of Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon ended in mockery and ignominy, and trashed the Coalition’ reputation. So the 23-year Coalition rule, from 1949 to 1972, was remembered as it ended: stumbling and out of touch. The Menzies legacy was a casualty. This false mythology suited Labor which took the activist mantle and ran with it, and has done so since.
MANTLE READY TO BE RECLAIMED
Wise to the vagaries of the “verdict of history”, Menzies said to Churchill in 1948: “Five years after your death, clever young men from Oxford and Cambridge and other seats of learning will be writing books explaining that you were never right about anything!” While the Liberals still use Menzies’ imagery, they rarely do him justice either. In his acceptance speech, Prime Minister Tony Abbott evoked the “lifters not the leaners” from “The Forgotten People”. Howard tried hard to resurrect the Menzies achievement. He is trying still, his next book is a study of the Menzies era. But to date, he has not got traction with these efforts.
In fact, it’s an Australian political conundrum why the Liberals have failed to take the mantle of “lighting the lamps of higher learning” post-Menzies. This may be the “tragedy writ large” in Australian politics: Labor’s unjust ownership of the expansion of educational opportunities in the public imagination might be the reason the Liberals fail to resource the task with passion, conviction and their best people. Witness the recent carelessness over schools funding. It’s several generations since the Liberals did major constructive work in the life of Australian higher learning and institutions of culture. Today’s Liberals often fail Menzies’ deepest purpose: the cultural and moral enlightenment for which “homes material, homes human and homes spiritual” exist. In the Gospel of Menzies, education – “the lamp of learning” – and enlightenment are the purpose and prize of increasing wealth.
The lesson of this essay is this: to paraphrase Clausewitz, history is politics by other means. So you’ve got to keep the bastards honest. Otherwise the great men and women will be swindled from the pages of your history. Those who strode the global stage will be removed from the pantheon, their nation-building deeds erased.
To Menzies’ contemporaries, he was a giant. It was a commonplace in 1967 that no living statesman had been more intimately concerned with world events. In the verdict of history, just as the judgment of the time must be corrected by posterity, so too the judgment of posterity must be corrected by the judgment of the time.
Every Australian has a right to know the great Australian figures from the national gallery of the past. Understanding this country’s evolution requires a decent knowledge of Menzies. To have a new vision of the future it has always first been necessary to have a new vision of the past. Reclaim what is yours. Take a fresh look at Robert Gordon Menzies.
Elena Pasquini Douglas is a social and economic commentator and convener of the Centre for Social Impact at the Business School of the University of Western Australia.
