On 13 February 1932, seven hundred New Guardsmen drilled at Sydney’s Belmore, then performed a transport exercise at Lansdowne Bridge and, in northern New South Wales, at Coffs Harbour. At a Sydney Town Hall New Guard Monster Rally on 18 February, all the thousands present raised their right arm in a fascist salute, while taking a solemn oath of allegiance to the New Guard and its determination to crush Communism. Game refused to accept a petition to Jack Lang signed by thousands of New Guardsmen, though the rejection, it was feared by some, might have caused Campbell to plan and execute a putsch, an attempt at a takeover of New South Wales. At Chatswood in Sydney, Campbell told his guardsmen, ‘It is anticipated your services will be required before the end of the month [May 1932].’ Plans were finalised to arrest the state Cabinet and imprison them in Berrima Gaol, or else in disused hulks moored off Ku-ring-gai Chase. An alternate plan, designed for 19 March, the Harbour Bridge opening day, was to kidnap Lang, strip him naked and escort him to the Bridge opening ceremony dressed as a beggar. The plan was all blather.
Nonetheless, on 19 March, a north shore antiques dealer, Dublin-born Captain Francis de Groot, attended on horseback the opening of the Harbour Bridge, spurred his horse through the crowd, and cut the ribbon (which was to have been cut by Lang) with his sword. Ken Hall of Cinesound News had heard that some such stunt was to occur and had cameras in place to catch the action. Cinesound Newsreel people also had a camera crew outside Lang’s house in Auburn, in case the New Guard tried to besiege him there. When de Groot’s trial was held at Central Police Court on 1 April 1932, there was a violent encounter between the police and members of the New Guard’s mobile unit. Campbell was sure that the New Guard’s numerical superiority to the police would enable them to shoulder the police away. But on the morning of the trial, Police Commissioner Mackay urged his policemen to ‘go out and belt their bloody heads off ’. In fact that was what happened. On 21 April, there was further New Guard drilling at Killara, and on 6 May, Jock Garden was bashed at his home in Maroubra by eight members of the Fascist Legion, an elite group within the New Guard who wore Ku Klux Klan-like hoods and gowns. A more respectable member of Campbell’s group, who blamed Campbell for the unnecessary violence, declared to businessman and notable figure of the Old Guard, Philip Goldfinch, the next day, ‘No more **** New Guard for me.’
The new prime minister, Joe Lyons, was aware of how close to civil catastrophe New South Wales was. On 5 May 1932, naval personnel were armed and placed outside various federal establishments such as the GPO, the 2BL studios and the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place. Were they guarding uprisings by the New Guard or by the Lang’s forces made up of his police force and supporters? It seemed that Lang loomed in Lyons’ mind as the greater peril. Wing Commander W.D. Bostock at Richmond air base told his men that the prime minister had concerns ‘about how the New South Wales Police Force might act in the event of an eyeball to eyeball confrontation between Commonwealth and State’. Improbably, tanks began to roll through the backstreets of Randwick. Earlier, in April, a direct military telephone link had been installed between Victoria Barracks, Garden Island and Customs House in Circular Quay to aid with troop deployments to sites of unrest. Now troops of the 7th Light Horse stationed in Bungendore and Canberra were detailed to exercise near Parliament House, Canberra, and, by implication, defend it. The plan was that when the Old Guard was mobilised to protect society, its members would become peace officers under the Peace Officers Act of 1925. There were plans too that members of the Light Horse and of the Old Guard were to proceed to Sydney to take the money due to the Federal government that Lang was retaining.
Had Game received in time the advice drafted for him in London, he would have seen that the Secretary of State for the Dominions expected him to let the matter of Lang’s alleged crimes be tested in the courts by the Federal government. He might have waited. He was certainly conscious of working-class, and particularly Irish–Catholic, support for Lang and did not want to alienate an entire segment of the population. He later referred to ‘my assassin’s stroke’ and was uncomfortable with the pats on the back that resulted from what he had done when he sacked Lang.
Game warned Lang by letter on 13 May 1932 that Lang would have to resign if he could not carry out essential services without taking illegal measures, such as refusing to pay debts. But Lang gave no undertaking to change his policy, and that evening Game met with him, then dismissed him, and called on the leader of the Opposition, Bertram Stevens, to form government. ‘You probably hardly realise what relief it has given to the whole of Australia,’ wrote a supporter, ‘and, if the election goes all right you will have definitely saved the country of Australia.’
The state election that followed saw a swing to the United Australia and United Country parties. But around the humbler kitchen tables of New South Wales, there was an assumption that Game acted on behalf of the banks, the bondholders and their economic and political tyranny, and it is obvious that he had other options. J.T. Tully, Lang’s recent Minister for Lands, told an audience in Queanbeyan that the dismissal was unconstitutional and that the party had not been defeated on the floor of the House on any question. He said that Game’s action was a challenge against democratic government.
In January 1935, Game left Sydney, probably with relief, and in the same year took over the commissionership of the London Metropolitan Police. In that office he encountered and needed to deal with the British equivalent of Eric Campbell in the person of the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
With Lang sacked, Campbell’s New Guard members began to suspect the intentions of the Fascist Legion, located mainly in the eastern suburbs, which saw part of its duty as being to spy on possibly disloyal members of the New Guard organisation itself. This helped bring about many aggrieved resignations. It also became increasingly obvious that only a very small, radical proportion of the New Guardsmen would actually follow Campbell if he took on the police. Many of the membership wanted reunion with the Old Guard.
When, on 7 May, Campbell delivered a short speech to the ‘other ranks’ of the 36th Field Battery, and said he could see that the old AIF spirit still prevailed, there were raspberries and cries of ‘Get fucked!’ By May 1932, the New Guard was largely a spent force. Campbell’s chief hope remained that when a clash came between state and federal forces he might be able to use the confusion to his advantage. It would prove inadequate. Campbell’s army would diminish. He would write a pro-fascist tract, survive an attempt to take away his licence to practise law, and resume work as a solicitor in Young, surviving accusations of fraud and going on to practise law until 1971.
OUR ICE
By 1933, far across the Southern Ocean, lay the ‘Australian claim’, consisting of two vast wedges of Antarctica, the sole continent indifferent to the Depression. The two great Australian claim areas were separated from each other by the thin French slice of the Antarctic pie named Adelie Land. The Australian sectors added up to just under six million square kilometres of the Antarctic continent. It was (and remains) the biggest claim to that continent of any nation in the world, and yet, oddly—given Australians’ taste for being ‘first’ in anything—its existence made no impact on Australian popular perception.
The scale of the claim was largely the work of a Yorkshire-born geologist named Douglas Mawson, whose parents emigrated and settled at Rooty Hill outside Sydney when he was still an infant. As a student at Sydney University he would come under the influence of another remarkable geologist who would become associated with Antarctica, Welsh-born Edgeworth David, a man whose painful politeness was at odds with his exploratory toughness. It was said that David could not enter a door without first standing back to usher all others through, and when on a journey as part of Shackleton’s first expedition to locate the Magnetic South Pole, before asking Mawson to pull him out of a crevasse he had fallen into, he cried first, ‘Are you busy at the moment, Mawson?’
David’s work on the geological surveys of New South Wales coalfiel
ds had earned him in 1890 the Chair of Geology and Palaeontology at the University of Sydney. He was a world expert, particularly on the impact of ancient ice ages upon geology, and he visited the alpine regions of New South Wales for research purposes and learned to ski for the pure joy of it. Soon, however, this purely recreational ability would become a more essential tool for survival. Ernest Shackleton, the Irish explorer, invited David to go to Antarctica with his expedition for the summer of 1907–08 in Shackleton’s famous ship, Nimrod. David took with him two former students, Douglas Mawson (now a lecturer at the University of Adelaide) and Leo Cotton. The excitement of the task overcame them all and they decided they would stay in Antarctica longer than the summer if they could.
In McMurdo Sound, on Ross Island, cemented to the mainland by ice, stands the magnificent volcano Mount Erebus, a serious mountain of 3800 metres. In March 1908, David, Mawson and a few others first climbed it, a journey that looks easy in Antarctica’s strangely foreshortening atmosphere but which involved serious mountaineering of some days. Beneath the volcano, David turned fifty, and winter struck and the Australian contingent settled down with the rest of the expedition in the prefabricated house Shackleton had built on volcanic earth and ice on Ross Island. Over the winter, Shackleton decided that come the spring, David would be sent out with Mawson and a young Scots physician named Forbes Mackay to locate the Magnetic—as distinct from the Geographic—South Pole. The geographic pole was the ultimate prize but was in fact arguably of less significance than the magnetic pole, the place where the earth’s electro-magnetic fields all coalesced, somewhere across McMurdo Sound.
When day returned and the time came, the party had to man-haul sledges from the sea level of the sound up crevassed ice to a height of over 2000 metres. They located the magnetic pole by using the latest electromagnetic equipment, but on their way back towards McMurdo Sound and the ship Nimrod, David, exhausted and sick from man-hauling, had to hand over command to the twenty-six-year-old Mawson. The party was malnourished too, surviving on hardtack biscuits and the compacted meat and lard called pemmican. A shortage of even this food delayed their return, and hearing the rocket distress signal from Nimrod, the party wrongly interpreted it as the ship’s need to leave before it was iced in. According to his account, Mawson rushed ahead to delay it, fell into a crevasse, and had to be rescued by some of the Nimrod crew. By the time the magnetic pole party were all back to base, they had dragged their sledges over 2000 kilometres.
Though Shackleton’s team failed to reach the South Geographic Pole, David returned to Sydney in March 1909 a hero. In World War I, despite his age, he would enlist and achieve the rank of major in the mining battalion. His work on the Western Front involved advising on groundwater and the siting and design of trenches and tunnels. He was seriously injured when he fell 24 metres down a well near Vimy Ridge in northern France. He never fully recovered from the injuries he sustained there, though he lived until 1934. Mawson took up the Antarctic momentum David had created.
In 1909, the young academic Mawson returned to Adelaide and his university work. Robert Falcon Scott, British naval officer and doomed to perish returning from the Pole was planning his second expedition. Scott was approached by Mawson, who wanted to join the expedition as leader of a second team to work on the coast west of Cape Adare, which crowns the western side of the Ross Sea. There is now argument over all this, however. Some say Scott invited Mawson to join his South Pole sledging party, others that Mawson was chagrined not to be offered leadership of the scientific team. Mawson at least saw that to an extent reaching the South Pole was a stunt that validated the input of sponsors’ money into the expedition. He stated he wanted to attend to some serious science along the coastline beyond Adare. Out of politeness he waited until Scott had finished his fundraising in Australia and New Zealand before launching an appeal for his own Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE).
The Mawson expedition sailed in December 1911, and in the spirit of its scientific purpose it established three bases, one of them on Macquarie Island. This base was, amongst other things, to be a radio relay station—Mawson wanted to broadcast from mainland Antarctica. He also brought with him an aircraft, though it would prove hard if not impossible to deploy in that climate. The main base, on that enormous coast of what would become Australian Antarctica, was at a place Mawson named Commonwealth Bay. Mawson would later admit that this was a terrible place because of the katabatic winds that blew at 250 kilometres an hour down off the Antarctic Peninsula. The other party was put on the Shackleton Ice Shelf to the east. Mawson’s expeditionary ship, the Aurora, was captained by the eccentric but experienced John King Davis, who approached Commonwealth Bay through ferocious seas and one of the densest ice packs he had ever seen, having made a number of Antarctic journeys. In all Mawson’s parties there were meteorologists, geologists, cartographers, students of the aurora and geomagnetism, and biologists, and Captain Davis himself conducted much marine-science exploration from Aurora’s decks. This expedition was certainly a matter of serious inquiry rather than an Antarctic dog-and-pony act.
After the winter at Commonwealth Bay, Mawson took off to the west with a young British officer, Belgrave Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers, and the Swiss Doctor of Law, mountaineer and dog handler Xavier Mertz. Only Ninnis had skis. Five hundred kilometres to the south-east of the hut at Commonwealth Bay, Ninnis with his entire sledge and dog team plunged through the ice lid of a crevasse and could not be seen or heard, let alone retrieved. With the provisions they had left, Mawson and Mertz began their return but had to shoot their dogs and use them for food. Professor J.B. Cleland would later suggest, the dogs’ livers, however, were so overloaded with vitamin A that they were potentially not life-saving but toxic. Mertz died after twenty-five days. According to the latest Mawson biographer, the deaths of Ninnis and Mertz were partly due to Mawson’s ambition and lack of experience.
Mawson now discarded all his geological specimens and records—for him, a gesture that betrayed the severest danger of imminent death. After cutting his sledge in two he dragged it the last 160 kilometres, over rough and dangerous ice, at an average of about five and a half kilometres a day. As he neared Commonwealth Bay he saw the Aurora departing through the ice, but a small party had stayed on to search for him, and they nursed him through the non-stop winds and blizzards of a further winter and, as Mawson recuperated, through an early summer, until the ice melted sufficiently for Captain Davis to return. Scientific work continued through that winter, and Mawson was able to broadcast an account of the previous summer’s scientific work and begin writing The Home of the Blizzard, an Antarctic classic, published in 1915. The various parties of Mawson’s expedition had done extraordinary work, having explored some 6500 kilometres in Adelie Land, George V Land and Queen Mary Land. They defined the geology of the country traversed and mapped the coast. They identified the contour of the Antarctic Continental Shelf. They were able to send weather information from Macquarie Island and Commonwealth Bay by radio.
The survivors of various Antarctic expeditions, Australian (Mawson) and British (Shackleton), returned to their homes either just in time for war or in the midst of it. For various reasons, including his debilitating experience in Antarctica, Mawson did not serve in World War I. He had been knighted in 1914, despite criticism that he and Mertz should have taken skis with them to help them haul the heavy sledges, and during the war worked for the British Ministry of Munitions in London, becoming embarkation officer for shipments of high explosives and poison gas from Britain to Russia. His hope was to create production of high explosives in Russia itself, but the Russian Revolution of October 1917 put paid to that idea.
Post-war, he continued his work on pre-Cambrian rocks in the Flinders Ranges, travelling by horseback, truck or camel, taking fortunate students out there, who found him amiable company. At the 1926 Imperial Conference it was decided that Mawson be invited to lead a British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZA
RE) over the summers of 1929–30 and 1930–31. The expedition did not intend to create home bases as occurred in expeditions before World War I, but to make researches at a number of sub-Antarctic islands and along 2500 kilometres of coastline between 43 and 179 degrees east longitude. For that purpose and for mapping, the expedition also made use of a light aircraft. The little biplane was assembled at Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean, the engine lubricants were treated with heat, and Flying Officer Stuart Campbell took off and saw, from a height of 2000 metres, land to the south that Mawson named MacRobertson Land in honour of his sponsor, the chocolate maker Macpherson Robertson.
The mapping of the coast showed that it was continuous from the Ross Sea at Cape Adare around to Enderby Land and beyond. This work gave accurate geographic data for the creation of the full Australian Antarctic Territory, a region from just west of Cape Adare, the massive prong of land at the entrance to the Ross Sea, around to a point in line with the Horn of Africa. This huge sweep of desolation was legislated in Canberra by the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act 1933, which came into force in 1936, and would later be given a dormant legitimacy by the International Antarctic Treaty in 1959.
FOR FEAR OF JAPAN
As the Depression approached the end of its second year, a resurgent Japan invaded Manchuria, a gesture of expansion that, given the times, people wanted to ignore. But there was, under all the want and sense of emergency, an awareness of Japanese peril.
Soon after World War I the British had appointed Lord Jellicoe to write a report on Australia’s naval defence. When presented, it warned clearly that Australia could not depend on a British fleet for protection from a threat in the Pacific if there was war in Europe at the same time. Jellicoe’s recommendation was that a Far Eastern fleet be jointly financed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and that it be permanently based at Singapore. Despite the reality that disarmament was all the fashion at that time, and given that the priority was to scuttle ships rather than build them, Jellicoe’s recommendation that Singapore be turned into a naval base to look after Britain’s interests in the Far East and to provide protection for Australia was accepted. Work began on the fortress and naval base at Singapore in 1923, but the pace was not hectic. The question of whether Australia could be protected from Singapore, even if the base could impede a feared Japanese incursion into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, was unsettled. Many Australian men and women, most of them children in 1923, would pay for Singapore, for the fact that in the Australian mind, Singapore became the golden guarantee of security, even though the base would not be in full operation until the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and even though it would be notable for its lack of ships.