Out of the Dreaming
(See Cover)
Amidst the dry, gum-tree scrub of Rum Jungle, 60 miles inland from the Timor Sea, miners clad only in boots and shorts drilled uranium out of soft slate. At Woomera, where the waterless South Australian plain stretches endlessly off to the horizon, romantically named drones and missiles--Jindiviks, Blue Streaks and Black Knights--soared over the free world's largest land rocket range. In beach-girt Sydney, schoolteachers and tram conductors exchanged stock market tips, and in stately Adelaide, where Australia's first major Festival of the Arts was in full swing, T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral played to capacity.
These--and the industrious bustle of a hundred once-sleepy towns with names like Toowoomba, Yeerongpilly and Cool-angatta--were tangible evidence last week of the biggest news to come out of the South Pacific vastness since the end of the war. The news: Australia, rawest and least favored by nature of the English-speaking countries, is savoring a real prosperity and discovering a national maturity.
The speed with which Australia is coming of age astonishes Australians themselves and bemuses even the ruddy, self-assured man who has presided over the process. "When I was a boy," says Prime Minister the Right Honorable Robert Menzies, "there was a distinctly colonial flavor to Australia. Now we are developing an outlook peculiar to Australia. We are becoming more significant."
As any of the hundreds of thousands of G.I.s who passed through Australia can testify, it was not always like that. The outbreak of World War II still found
Australia a British dependency emotionally and economically. Australians whose families had left Britain generations before still referred to England as "home," still looked to London for their literary, social and international opinions, and if they sometimes rejected this guidance were still marked by it. Remote and provincial, a kind of British fly in Antipodean amber, Australia was a complacent mixture of Victorian respectability at the upper levels and a rough-and-ready bush socialism below.
Today, after a decade of unabashed wooing of free enterprise by Menzies and his government, Australia (pop. 10.2 million) is the biggest industrial nation in the southern hemisphere, boasts an industrial output three times as great as Brazil's (pop. 64 million). Australia's gross national product has rocketed from $5 billion in 1949 to $13.8 billion. Aided by a bold immigration scheme that has brought 1,500,000 Europeans into the country since 1947, Australia is no longer a backwater, but confident of its dynamism and independence. "Nowadays," says a senior Australian diplomat, "we can talk to anybody in the world without any sense of innate inferiority."
Ming the Merciless. The man most responsible for this change is one of the least typical of Australians. In a nation where distrust of "the bosses" is an article of faith, Robert Gordon Menzies, 65, avows his concern for assuring "the rights of the top dog." Where nobody wants to appear to "have tickets on himself," i.e., seem superior, Menzies once coldly rebuffed a parliamentary complaint that he suffered from a superiority complex: "Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising." And where ordinary Australians flavor the
Queen's English with racy Australian slang and delight in plain speaking, Menzies cherishes his reputation for classic eloquence. (Years ago, after delivering a speech in London with a fever of 103DEG, he turned to the Duke of Gloucester to ask: "Sir, what did I say?" Replied His Royal Highness: "My dear boy, I don't know, but it was damned good.")
In tribute to Menzies' occasional superciliousness and permanent political cunning, Australians nicknamed him "Ming" --partly a play on the Scottish pronunciation of Menzies as "Mingis,"-but partly after a singularly repulsive comic-strip character called Ming the Merciless. In moments of passion, rival politicians have variously described him as "a back-stabber," "a stubborn mule," "a tool of the interests" and "unfit to lead a flock of homing pigeons." But the noisiest of opponents would concede that Menzies is far and away the most able man in Australian politics. Thanks to talent and talent alone, he has been Prime Minister for 12% years all told--the longest tenure of office since the six Australian states united in a single nation in 1901.
Consulting the Interests. Born Dec. 20, 1894 in the weather-beaten township of Jeparit in western Victoria, Menzies likes to call himself "a reasonably bigoted descendant of the Scottish race." In fact, he is Cornish on his mother's side and counts as one of his greatest political assets his Cornish-born grandfather, John Sampson, who was blacklisted by Australian employers for helping to found Australia's Amalgamated Miners' Association. But from the start, young Bob Menzies took his political philosophy not from Grandfather Sampson but from Father James Menzies, a' would-be artist who became a country storekeeper and lived by a simple rule: "Fear God and honor the King, and whatever you do, do it with all your might."
Diligently earning scholarships to get the education his father couldn't afford to. give him, Bob Menzies made his own way through Wesley, one of Australia's top "public" (i.e., private) schools, and Melbourne University. Graduating in law with first class honors and five major prizes, he soon made a name as one of Melbourne's most brilliant and aggressive young lawyers, by 1920 was well enough established to marry Pattie Maie Leckie, daughter of an Australian senator. By 1929 he was a king's counsel--the youngest in Australian history--and earning a princely $50,000 a year.
Content with his life, and the company of two sons and a daughter, Menzies was strongly inclined to refuse when, in 1934, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons urged him to run for Parliament, promised him a Cabinet job as Attorney General. It was Pattie Menzies who urged him to accept. Five years later, on Lyons' death, Menzies succeeded to the party leadership (the United Australia Party) and the prime ministership. At his first press conference, a left-wing newsman needled him: "I suppose you will consult the powerful interests who control you before you choose your Cabinet." Answered Menzies: "Naturally. But please, young man, keep my wife's name out of this."
Menzies had not even formally taken office when his government began to fall apart. A cry was raised against him in Parliament that has often been heard before and since: that he was unfit to lead the nation because he had stayed out of World War I, in which 60,000 Diggers gave their lives. (Menzies' rebuttal: with both his older brothers overseas, he was chosen by a family conclave to stay home and keep the family going.)
World War II was soon to break out. Menzies often sat in on war Cabinets in London and became a favorite of Winston Churchill, with whom he shared a love of oratory, wine, cigars and imperial splendor. But at home, feeling ran high over his agreeing to commit Australian troops to the disastrous campaigns in Crete and Greece. In August 1941, disillusioned, despairing, Menzies resigned as Prime Minister. The Labor Party, under earnest, colorless John Curtin (who was jailed in World War I for fighting conscription), began an eight-year reign. For the first time in his life, Robert Menzies knew defeat. Many thought he was finished politically.
Christmas in the Sun. Superficially, the prediction seemed safe. For of all the English-speaking nations, Australia seemed least cut out to be led by an ambitious, thrusting conservative.
On the warm January day in 1788 when he sailed into Sydney Harbor with a cargo of 736 British convicts,-Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy enthusiastically concluded that Australia would one day prove "the most valuable acquisition Britain has ever made." But a plain-spoken British naval officer, writing home from Australia in 1790, flatly declared: "The country is past all dispute a wretched one . . . There is no likelihood that the colony will be able to support itself in grain or animal food for many years to come."
Agriculturally, Australia is in fact a string of cultivatable oases spotted along a huge crescent running from Rockhampton on the northeast coast to Perth in the southwest. The rest of the continent--nearly two-thirds of it--is either desert or semidesert, country so inhospitable that the Asian voyagers who in millennia past presumably reached Australia in dhows and junks never attempted to settle it, leaving it peacefully to Stone Age aborigines, some 70,000 of whom still survive. Geologically, Australia predates Asia, Africa and the Americas: it is said to have no history, only a prehistory.
The sturdy men who arrived in square-rigged sailing ships sought to make of this timeless, sun-drenched land a replica of the green "home" they had left half a world behind. To a surprising extent they succeeded. Because there was no local culture, not even the convenience of slaves, these blue-eyed Scots, Irish and English established a middle-class British society, mercantile, predominantly Protestant. The speech of Australia became a nasal offshoot of cockney, and at Christmastime Australians dutifully ate plum pudding in 100DEG heat. For England's "county" aristocracy, Australia substituted its own "squattocracy"--men who had carved out for themselves sheep or cattle stations the size of Maryland and sent their sons to Cambridge or Oxford. To its critics, it seemed a perfectly preserved specimen of 19th century British culture, like a sailing ship in a sealed bottle--even to the Union Jack at the mizzen top.
The Simple Life. But along with Australia's imitation of things British went a nagging resentment that showed up in the contemptuous word "pommy"--the Australian equivalent of the American word "limey." Aside from the overflow of British jails, Australia's original immigrants often migrated out of poverty, and many were members of Britain's minority races --the Scots, Irish and Welsh. Making a hard living, Australians developed into a tough, contumacious, raffish people, inveterately hostile to authority, and looking at the world with a fresh, irreverent eye.
They (with their New Zealand neighbors) bloodily proved their loyalty at Gallipoli. But their suspicion of authority was frequently uninhibited: in 1896, John Norton, editor of the Sydney Truth, toasted Queen Victoria's good health and long life, "if only to keep her rascal of a turf-swindling, cardsharping, wife-debauching, boozing, rowdy of a son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, off the throne."
Out of this vigorous atmosphere came an array of exceptional people--Classicist Gilbert Murray, Singer Nellie Melba, Novelist Henry Handel Richardson, Actress Judith Anderson, Dancer Robert Help-mann, Composer Arthur Benjamin and Actor Cyril Ritchard. But it was symptomatic that most Australian artists and intellectuals found their careers abroad (and it is symptomatic of a changed Australia that this is no longer so true).
Thinking every man as good as the next, the prewar Australian worker was a passionate believer in class warfare and working-class solidarity. Australia got its first Labor Prime Minister in 1904, 20 years before Britain. Labor unions acquired a major voice in government and a death grip on the economy. The worst sin in the Australian calendar was scabbing, and the prevailing work pace was one that G.I.s came to call "the Australian crawl."
Devoted to the outdoor life--and to every known form of gambling from horse racing to two-up--white Australians seemed to have taken over the philosophy of the aborigines, who lived entirely in the present, referred to both past and future as "the dreaming." In an area almost the size of the U.S., Australia in the 19303 had less than the population of London--and a falling birth rate. It had no machine-tool industry, had never built an aircraft or auto engine, and because of varying track gauges, did not even have a transcontinental railroad.
Voting for Freedom. Pearl Harbor surprised the U.S.; it awakened Australia. As the Japanese overran Singapore and invaded New Guinea,- and even bombed Darwin in Australia's own Northern Territory, Australians abruptly lost their sense of secure remoteness. Britain, fighting for its life, was in no position to help --and was reluctant to lose the battle-hardened Australian troops in the Middle East. "Without any inhibitions of any kind," wrote Prime Minister Curtin in January 1941, "I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom."
In wartime, the first stirrings of a new Australia became visible. Cut off from traditional suppliers, Australians set out to develop their own electrical, chemical and engineering industries. And at war's end, warning that against the weight of Asia, Australians had "perhaps 25 years in which to justify our exclusive possession of this continent," Laborite Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell revived the slogan, "Populate or Perish." He won support for a costly immigration program that has brought in an average of more than 100,000 "New Australians" a year. In the process, Australia deliberately modified its old boast of being "more purely
British than Britain": though 47% of the immigrants have come from Britain, the rest (including 15,000 Americans and many refugees from Iron Curtain countries) have come from virtually every white nation in the world.
But it really took Labor's downfall to launch the new Australia. Long after the war ended, the Labor government clung to irksome wartime economic controls and rationing. In 1949, Labor even introduced a bill to nationalize the country's banks.
It was the opportunity Menzies had been awaiting. In his eight years out of power, he had given his party not only a new name--the Liberal Party--but a tight new grass-roots organization. In December 1949, responding to Menzies' cry that "a vote for Labor is a vote for the ultimate bereavement of freedom," Australians brought the Liberals into power in coalition with the Australian farm bloc's Country Party. Four times since, Menzies and his government have been confirmed in office.
Riding the Escalator. Menzies dramatically abolished rationing, then set out to make Australia an attractive place for private enterprise. To overseas capital, the new government offered such lures as no capital-gains tax, guarantees that both profits and capital itself could be easily repatriated. And when inflation threatened to get out of hand in 1950, Menzies responded with a "horror budget" that increased the income tax by 10%, increased the sales tax, cut imports by 50%, and raised the price of tobacco and liquor.
Attracted by the opportunities, foreign capital has come pouring into Australia. British investment in Australia--still the largest--has increased from $484 million to $1.7 billion since Menzies took office; U.S. investment, growing more than twice as fast as Britain's, is expected to reach $1 billion by the end of this year. Australians themselves are reinvesting 25% of their national income.
Today, Australia produces not only planes, ships and diesel locomotives, but such sophisticated products of modern technology as guided missiles, transistor radios and radioactive isotopes. General Motors' Australian subsidiary turns out all-Australian trucks and cars (the compact-sized Holden) at the rate of 115,000 a year. With a new $22 million blast furnace at Port Kembla, Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd. has become the third biggest steel producer in the British Commonwealth (annual output: 3,000,000 tons). In barely a decade, Australia's electricity production has soared from 9 billion to 21 billion kwh, and factory pro duction has trebled since 1948. Australia's mining industry--which began with the gold rush of 1851--is now enriched by Rio Tinto's $90 million uranium field in Queensland, and what is believed to be the world's largest (400 million tons) bauxite deposit at Cape York.
"Investing in Australia," says one government official, "is like stepping on an Escalator--you can't help but go up." A British tobacco firm, Rothmans Ltd., has seen its shares rocket 320% in value within five years after invading the Australian market. Many Aussies, looking at the $34 million profit racked up in 1958 by G.M.-Holden (which refuses to sell its common stock in Australia), grumbled that the foreigners got too good a break. But nobody has ridden the Escalator higher than the Australians themselves.
The Australian standard of living, long higher than Britain's, is now approaching that of the U.S. Today, one Australian in four has a car, three-quarters of all Australian city kitchens have refrigerators. Australians eat more meat (nearly 300 Ibs. apiece per year) than anybody else in the world, have higher per capita incomes ($1,120) than almost anybody else outside the U.S. and Canada. In the past decade, they have built themselves 750,000 new homes and apartments.
Shooting at the Crows. The workers' own share in this prosperity has brought industrial peace to Australia. Last year the nation lost only one-shth as many work days in strikes as it had in the same period three years earlier. In the old Australia, coal miners once stopped work because a pit pony had halitosis. Now, with cars, TV sets and suburban houses to pay "on tick" (on the installment plan), workers are in no striking mood.
The change has been disastrous for the powerful Labor Party, whose restrictive economic policies were a classic example of doctrinally denying working people the benefits socialism has always held out for them. In addition. Labor's brilliant but erratic leader, Herbert V. Evatt--onetime (1948) president of the U.N. General Assembly--also got himself mixed up in seeming sympathy with the Reds, during the defection of MVD Agent Vladimir Petrov from the Soviet embassy in Canberra (TIME, Sept. 27, 1954)-When Evatt insisted that only the "vilest liars'" could link him with Communists, a Menzies aide retorted: "Those who fly with the crows must expect to be shot at."
Australia's Labor Party is further rent by a Catholic Action group led by a secretive Melbourne lawyer named Bartholomew Santamaria. who is dedicated to fighting Communism in the labor unions. In a land where half the union membership is Catholic, Santamaria's activities have stirred up cries of "clerical intervention." and Australia's Catholic hierarchy no longer actively supports him. But the result has been to split the Catholic vote to Menzies' benefit. Six weeks ago Evatt at last stepped down from party leadership, to be replaced by the more moderate former Immigration Minister Calwell.
The Breakthrough. Australian workers not only do not strike as often, but they are, by common consent, working harder than ever before, and in the past five years productivity has increased 5% annually. In part, this reflects the impact of the New Australians, who now make up 20% of the labor force, and who, in their anxiety to build new lives, have flocked to the tough jobs in the steel, automotive and transport industries. But the Old Australian hustles more, too, and sees his own stake in prosperity.
Along with new hustle, a new diversity has entered Australian life. Staid Melbourne still languishes under the blue laws that turn it into "a Sunday necropolis," and in most of Australia strict drinking hours still produce a custom known as "the 6 o'clock swill"--which contributes mightily to an annual beer consumption of 23 gallons per man, woman and child. But it is now possible, in the big cities, to find a gas station open before 9 a.m. and a stationery store after 5 p.m. In Sydney or Melbourne, a man who doesn't feel like Australia's traditional diet--steak and eggs, with tomato sauce poured over it--can dine on sukiyaki, entrecote a la bordelaise, or Koenigs-berger Klops. And at his new $500,000 pasta factory in Brisbane, Sicilian-born Frank de Pasquale complacently estimates that where only 5% of Australians ate spaghetti ten years ago, some 65% do now. There are other signs that "culture." though a suspect word, is a spreading fact. Since 1939, the number of college students has risen from 14,000 to 47,000, the number of universities and colleges from eight to twelve. Performances of Australia's six symphony orchestras (three of them led by foreign-born conductors) are regularly sold out. The most tangible testimony to Australia's new attitude toward the arts was the readiness of the Labor government of New South Wales to put up most of the anticipated $9,000.000 cost of an audaciously designed new Sydney Opera House. "Not long ago," says one Australian, "no Labor government would have contributed a shilling for an opera house designed by God himself."
Well-to-do Australians who used to import their art now decorate their homes with Sidney Nolan's poetic visions of Australia's "outback," William Dobell's savagely realistic portraits, or the landscapes of the late Aborigine Albert Na-matjira. And with Ray Lawler's play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll--which got raves in London--Aussie audiences for the first time accorded box-office success to a play by an Australian about Australians in the Australian language.
The Near North. Internationally, too, Australia speaks these days with its own distinctive voice. Menzies is British in heart, soul and mind, and in the Suez crisis, after failing to persuade Nasser to accept international control of the canal, Menzies lined Australia behind Sir Anthony Eden's invasion. He did so against the will of former Australian Foreign Minister Richard Casey,-and only New Zealand in the rest of the Commonwealth sided with Britain.
But though he still calls himself "an unrepentant supporter of Anthony Eden" and insists that Australians "remain the Queen's men." Menzies has not let sentimental allegiance to Britain blind him to the fact that "empire defense" is a thing of the past. In 1952, despite Britain's unconcealed irritation at being excluded. Menzies led Australia into the ANZUS pact with the U.S. And he makes no bones about expecting ever closer relations with the U.S. Says he: "We don't expect America to pull our chestnuts out of the fire ... But the U.S. has developed responsibility marching along with power. We will be the beneficiary."
No less important, Menzies and Casey between them have impressed upon Australia's diplomats and upon Australia's people the awareness that Australia's future is inextricably Asia's. "To you Americans," says Menzies, "it's the Far East. To us, it's the Near North." Courageously defying his fellow countrymen's deep-rooted fear and dislike of Japan, Menzies three years ago began a campaign of rapprochement that culminated in a visit to Australia by Japanese Premier Nobusuke Kishi. Today, Tokyo, New Delhi and Djakarta are regarded by Australian diplomats as more important posts than Paris or Rome. And through the Colombo Plan. Australia has given technical and university training to 10.000 Asian students.
Doing the Dishes. Part of Australia's new international visibility comes from Menzies' fondness for the role of traveling statesman. He never fails to attend Commonwealth Prime Ministers' meetings ("I make a few statesmanlike remarks . . . The eminent gentlemen of the Civil Service, who have already written the ultimate communique', say, 'Yes, that was a good point''")-And in the past five years he has made three voyages to the U.S., two swings into Asia, and side excursions into Canada and Europe. But at home, despite the prestige he has won for Australia abroad, he remains respected rather than loved.
Among the Australians who love Menzies least are the newsmen assigned to cover him, whom he treats as contemptuously as if they were members of Parliament. When Australia's rough-and-tumble House is in session, Menzies sits alone at a center table, smiling gently at a remark that pleases him, casting a dark, withering glance at backbenchers who step out of line. So deadly are his ripostes ("The conducted tour of the Honorable Member's mind would have been more instructive if it had not taken place in gathering darkness") that Laborite backbenchers were once cautioned not to needle him.
In an assemblage where the Speaker of the House has been obliged to rule out of bounds such phrases as "blood drinker," and "garroter," Menzies appears pained by the rude vigor around him. In fact, Menzies thrives on conflict, loves nothing more than mastering a hostile crowd. In 1954, at a campaign meeting in Sydney, he was reeling off an impressive list of soaring industrial statistics when a heckler shouted, "What about pig iron, Bob?" The pro-Labor crowd roared with delight at this reference to the nickname, "Pig-Iron Bob," fastened on Menzies when he permitted pig-iron shipments to Japan before World War II. "Glad you mentioned it," shot back Menzies. "Pig iron is up 50%, and judging from some of the people in this hall, production of gas must be up more than that."
At Canberra's modest, stucco Lodge, official residence of Australia's Prime Ministers, Menzies rises late (about 8), does not set off for his office till 9 or 9:30. Once there, he plows rapidly through correspondence, with the aid of an occasional Grosvenor Club cigar. After dinner, which is normally preceded by two Men-zies-mixed martinis, he goes back to the office until midnight or i a.m.
Keeping up this pace seven days a week leaves Menzies no time for cricket, golf and tennis, which he used to play, though he is such a cricket fan that he will stay up all night to listen to the Test Matches on short wave, or adjourn a Cabinet meeting to see them. He could easily earn $100.000 a year at law, but as Prime Minister his pay and allowances come to only $30,000. In near-servantless Australia, it is not uncommon for Pattie Menzies--who became a Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire in 1954--to play hostess at Sunday lunch to a returned Australian diplomat, then head out to the kitchen to wash the dishes with the visitor's wife.
The Qualitative Influence. For all its progress--and Menzies' confidence--Australia is not without growing pains. Wages and prices have risen so sharply that, a month ago, Menzies felt obliged to relax import quotas sharply, hoping thereby to make Australia's marginal businesses more efficiently competitive. Politically, Australians worry about the chaotic state of their nearest Asian neighbor, Indonesia. And there is the perennial problem of the "White Australia Policy"--which is not a policy but a practice whereby immigration officers class all colored people as "undesirable immigrants." Most Australians want the country to remain essentially white, but if Australia hopes to play any role in Asia, it will undoubtedly have to take in at least token numbers of Asian immigrants.
Menzies himself continues to proclaim: "If I were a young man, with all the world in front of me, I would want to be in Australia at the beginning of what will be its most wonderful period of development." And he insists that Australia can one day exert "great qualitative if not quantitative" influence in Asia. Says he: "We can offer intelligent resistance to Communism. We can, after generating our own capital requirements, be in a position to invest in Asia. There is certainly the possibility of Asian leadership before us. But we are not going to become leaders merely by proclaiming ourselves leaders."
This is the kind of Menzian rhetoric which many countrymen find high-falutin and which a few years ago prompted a
Sydney newspaper cartoonist to quote, under the caption "What Bob Menzies Really Meant," four lines from Australia's dialect poet, C. J. Dennis:
Fellers of Austrailer,
Blokes an' coves an' coots,
Shift yer bloody carcasses,
Move yer bloody boots!
In 1960 this is a fair summary of what Robert Menzies has asked of Australians --and of what its blokes, coves and coots are doing.
*Menzies himself pronounces it as spelled. -First of 160,000 convicts "transported" during the next 80 years. -Which is half Australian, half Dutch. Australia's 183,000 sq. mi. of tropical New Guinea is inhabited by 1,800,000 Papuans, Melanesians and Negritos. The southern half of this territory was taken over from Britain in 1901; the northern half, formerly German, became an Australian mandate after World War I. -Who resigned office last January, after being raised to Britain's House of Lords.
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