As for any Communist influence, even the Communist Party newspaper in Brisbane, the Worker, declared, ‘Crimes by Negros, particularly sex offences against white women, are causing considerable concern in those Australian areas where Negros are located.’ In fact, there seems to have been little statistical evidence of sex offences. But the Worker continued, ‘Women who frequent the Domain [in Sydney] draw them in their hundreds—an ugly sight in a white man’s country.’
In late April 1942, when half the 96th was ready to be shipped to New Guinea, Captain Samuelson had already left. The remaining companies were to perform tedious and exhausting labour on remote roads and airfields. Under the command of a Major Yoder and a Captain Behrens, the men of the 96th became rebellious. Locals would say there was a rumour that a white officer had struck a black American GI. In any case, between eight and nine o’clock that May evening, a rebellion began. The rumour spread in town and amongst the garrison that the blacks had shot some of their officers and that other officers were firing back with Thompson machine guns. Further rumours said that the blacks were drunk and victorious, and heading for town in trucks. Captain Duddington thus found himself defending Australian society against people who were strongly perceived not as Allies but as aliens.
While Duddington’s unit held their position, a white American officer appeared and offered to go into the 96th’s camp, talk to the men and help them see reason. He asked that Duddington and the others give him an hour. ‘And then he walked up the road, all by himself. I’ll never forget that image.’ Somehow this single man was able, through force of character and reason, to reassure and pacify the mutineers. The night quietened. The ferocity was absorbed by the Australian bush through the sanity and eloquence of a man whose name we do not know.
The details of the mutiny were suppressed, as was the question of whether an amnesty was offered that night to the black soldiers.
Post-war, in 1948, the US army would become desegregated.
REMAKING THE WORLD
There were meetings in mid-April 1945 in London to do with the Commonwealth countries’ stance at a world-renewing meeting to occur in San Francisco later that month. The party that set out from Australia included Chifley, who would not continue to San Francisco after discussions in London but would return via Asia to Australia. Frank Forde and Herbert Vere Evatt were to be Australia’s delegates in San Francisco.
The party had originally flown across the Pacific and a mourning United States to Washington for the funeral service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had died in offfice, on 14 April, Curtin himself being too ill to make the journey. Then, on a record-breaking trans-Atlantic flight during which they needed to wear oxygen masks, which heightened Evatt’s fear of flying, they had continued over to London to discuss the coming San Francisco event.
In London, Evatt forthrightly told the British that he found the Dumbarton Oaks draft drawn up earlier a suitable basis for discussion. The first serious drafting of the United Nations organisation had occurred at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the United States in August 1944, Dumbarton Oaks being a grand house associated with Harvard University and capable of accommodating many delegates. Australia had not, however, been party to the great powers conference there, and so the Australian government’s response to the drafts arising from these meetings would take on great importance when they were presented at San Francisco. During 1944, Curtin and Evatt had worked on their coming participation at San Francisco, setting out their own hopes for the United Nations, and also their visions for Australia’s role in its region and in the post-war Commonwealth. They were inhibited by two factors—attachment to White Australia and to the British Empire, the latter being the sort of institution which, according to Dumbarton Oaks, should pass. In London, Evatt told the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden that he intended to ask for amendments to the proposals of the Big Five (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China), and that Australia would oppose above all the veto power demanded by the Soviet Union, a device by which it could negate resolutions of the envisaged United Nations. This was the message as, white-knuckled, he took a plane back to New York and then went by train to San Francisco.
The great meeting of the world powers and states, attracting amongst others forty-four Foreign ministers, occurred on Anzac Day 1945. By then Berlin was encircled, the position of Germany and of its people grievous, and Japan was not yet defeated but its fast-won, fast-lost empire was dwindling before massive enemy forces. The most alluring prospects for humanity glimmered in San Francisco, where the attendees included Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign minister, and Andrei Gromyko, Russian Ambassador to the United States; Cordell Hull of the United States, and Edward Stettinius, who had succeeded him as Secretary of State; Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax and the Labour leader Clement Attlee of Britain; Mackenzie King of Canada; Field Marshal Jan Smuts of South Africa; the representatives of Nationalist China; and the Australian delegates, Forde and Evatt.
Field Marshal Smuts had the highly visible matter of anti-black discrimination to deal with, and Evatt too sought universal dignity and fraternity but not domestically in Australia, which—it was taken for granted—would remain unapologetically white. The British were embarrassed by both these issues, but had the unresolved question of having reclaimed Asian colonies, of still holding India, and of resistance to African desires for independence to hamper them in their utterances about the ideal coming world—though they never felt as hampered or repentant as the Americans wanted them to feel.
Evatt had travelled to San Francisco with his wife Mary Alice, and depended on her calmness in the face of flying. He had smarted when Curtin appointed Forde the head of the Australian legation, but it did not seem to matter as much when the drafting of the World Organization charter began there, in that bay city on Anzac Day of what would be the last year of the war, and in the shadow of Roosevelt’s death. It was dizzying company to be in, and goodwill seemed at first to be the pervasive characteristic, with a little grandiosity—to which Evatt was no more averse than Menzies—thrown in. For example, Henry J. Kaiser, the US former paving contractor who had become king of shipbuilding, had already organised for each of the two Australian delegates to be invited to launch a battleship in his San Francisco yards, the twin events occurring in quick order, first with Forde and then with Evatt, the choir scampering from one dock to the other to sing the same civic hymns. The Australians on Evatt’s staff maliciously spread a story about Forde, that in naïveté or self-regard over ship-launching, he had called room service in the delegates’ hotel and declared, ‘This is the Honourable Francis Michael Forde speaking, Deputy Prime Minister of the Australian Government and Leader of the Australian Delegation to the Conference on the United Nations. Send me up a hamburger.’
Evatt had great visions to deploy. If Billy Hughes had gone to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I as the profound cynic, Evatt went to San Francisco as an ardent visionary. The Soviet delegation was shut up in their hotel suites and said little, and the delegates of other nations were wary too. It was Evatt, representing a small nation and thus with everything to gain, who was willing to speak to press conferences, not least about the balance of decision-making between the Big Five, who he suspected would want to own the game totally.
At this stage Evatt was admired by pressmen of every country for his conviction concerning the new organisation. At the first press conference, on a sweltering spring day, patriotically wearing a suit of Australian wool, he drove home his arguments by smacking his fist against his palm. He advocated a system of international law, a permanent Court of International Justice, a connection between world peace and economic justice, and an assertion that the dominions would speak in their own, not Britain’s, interest. ‘So we are on the eve of San Francisco,’ he declared on radio. ‘The nations must not fumble this second chance to create a system of international cooperation within which they can live together as friends.’ A French jour
nalist asked him whether Philadelphia could be the future capital of the United Nations, and in reply he asked how they could dare fix the capital of the world in a town whose two baseball clubs were so far behind the champions.
Perhaps Evatt tried too hard with his baseball metaphors, especially when he applied them to the troubles in Palestine. But some questions he answered so forcefully that he received rounds of applause. About the power of veto Russia sought, he said, ‘There is no reason why one great power should be able to veto an attempt to settle a dispute through negotiation and arbitration, particularly when that dispute might be in an area outside the power’s sphere of influence.’
An American journalist wrote of him, ‘Virtually everything about Evatt is big . . . he has a big head, heavily matted with crisp, iron-grey hair. He has a big voice that seems to spring not from his throat, but from his boots. His neck appears too full for his collar, and he gives the occasional intimation that he wears his altruism, both personal and national, on his sleeve.’
For ten weeks Evatt pounded away at the idea that Australia and other smaller nations should be able to decide international issues with the same vigour and rights as the larger powers. He attacked the proposition of those who thought that Australia was a southern county of the United Kingdom. ‘General MacArthur told correspondents in Manila the other day that by winning the first land victories of the war over the Japanese, Australian troops turned the tide of Japanese aggression and made possible the Allied triumphs in the Philippines.’ (This was an echo of the past World War I Billy Hughes argument.)
But then Evatt stated on behalf of Australia a new principle that many Australians had not thought of or countenanced: ‘We in Australia believe that the social conditions of the millions of people living in South-east Asia and the neighbouring islands should be such that they can have the benefit of the goods they need but in their present economic condition cannot buy . . . Depression or reduced purchasing power in any area is felt everywhere.’ He celebrated the fact that the smaller nations—not the empires or those who, though empires, tried to deny that they were—were now emerging as the spokespersons for social and economic progress. ‘Australia is raising the question of full employment from which the big nations are shuddering away.’
At the closed sessions on the United Nations Charter, particularly the trusteeship chapters, he proposed that the charter be amended ‘to lay down the principle that the purpose of administration of all dependent territories is the welfare and development of native people’ and that this involved a duty on the part of trustee nations to report to the United Nations on their own behaviour. To traditional diplomats, this sounded either presumptuous or naïve. It also made Australia’s mandate over New Guinea look justifiable. But above all, his reason for arguing that there should be a reporting and justifying process was that he knew the Dutch would take over Indonesia again—even MacArthur had as good as promised that. He supported his argument by his oratory. ‘For more than three years the peoples of South-East Asia and Indonesia have been under Japanese military overlordship . . . they will need help and guidance for their material and moral rehabilitation . . . their goodwill must be fostered, not only because their cooperation is essential to good administration and their own interests, but because they inhabit a vital strategic area.’
But the truth was that the great powers had come to trade the earth with each other to create some kind of liveable balance, not to make the new world Evatt envisaged. Lord Cranborne of Britain scorned the idea of formal international oversight of territories, particularly in territories of the British Empire. Evatt argued in return that those with mandatory powers (Australia, Britain, but especially Japan) had done pretty much as they pleased with the peoples under their control since the mandates and dependencies had been confirmed or handed out at the Peace Treaty in Paris in 1920, and now they should be accountable.
The European war ended at midnight on 8 May 1945, which was 9 May in Australia. Curtin had had a wretched time with his health over past months. The previous September, he had written to his friend Yatala Ovenden (one of the Bruce sisters of Melbourne) that he was ‘feeling flat and sad and overburdened . . . very tired after a few hours’ concentration’. He told Ovenden that one thing must never happen and that was that she should fail to forgive him his transgressions.
Shocks rattled him profoundly. When in October 1944 HMAS Australia became what was said to be the first warship to be hit by a kamikaze, killing the captain and others and wounding Vice-Admiral Collins, a Labor member of parliament found Curtin in his Perth office weeping. A heart attack followed. He was delayed in Melbourne by ill health for nearly two months and was not released from Melbourne’s Mercy Hospital until 27 December 1944.
In January 1945, Elsie was at the Lodge in time for them both to greet the new Governor-General, the Duke of Gloucester. The argument was beginning about the government becoming the biggest manufacturer in Australia, its continued involvement in the economy through its aircraft, shipbuilding and ammunition factories. It was obvious that after the war, Curtin intended to retain a dominant place for government in manufacturing. The attempted nationalisation of civil aviation increased the nervousness of Australian businessmen, and the idea of endowing the Commonwealth Bank with some of the attributes of a civilian bank was also much criticised.
In March, Curtin was kept at home in the Lodge by a throat infection. His heart condition was declining. Roosevelt died on 12 April, a few weeks before the war in Europe ended. Parliament reopened on 18 April, and Curtin made a speech of condolence to the American people, having written personally to Eleanor Roosevelt. On 21 April, he was forced into hospital with congestion of the lungs. He was thus still in hospital when Chifley announced the end of the war in Europe. People were beginning to comment on his long absence, and a public servant complained to Labor PR man and Curtin’s friend Lloyd Ross in the bar of the Canberra Hotel, ‘Almost—almost—one could be glad he’s dead so we can do things.’
Curtin returned to the Lodge on 22 May. He read the horse-racing pages of newspapers to fill in the time and gave tips to his driver, Ray, with whom he’d once gone to the Canberra dog show to see how Ray’s own hound went in the contest. In late June it became apparent Curtin might not recover, and Elsie asked Reverend Hector Harrison whether he would conduct the funeral when the time came. Curtin wanted no intervening church service, just a burial in Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth.
Harrison was uncertain about Curtin’s religious orientation and sought advice from Fred McLaughlin, the aide who had prayed with Curtin while the Australian convoys were on the high seas at the mercy of the Japanese submarines. The Reverend Harrison knew that Curtin was too ill to be approached at the moment but that he had made many surmises upon the existence of God, including a reference to that twenty-four-hour flight across the Atlantic to Ireland in April 1944, of which he had told Harrison that survival had been ‘dependent upon these four engines, those men and the Almighty’. Elsie was by origin a Presbyterian and so she was favourable to Harrison. But Curtin’s siblings, who had arrived at the Lodge, urged him to see a priest. Scullin, former prime minister and devout Catholic, also tried to lead Curtin back to the church. A Catholic priest came to the Lodge during those final days and was turned away.
Given his bad health prospects, should he resign? Chifley for one was against it. In any case, Curtin’s deputy, Forde, was in San Francisco now, at the United Nations Charter meetings with Evatt. As he lay dying, there was no guarantee that the Pacific War would end in 1945. Japan still held Malaya, Indochina, much of China, and the Japanese mainland. Yet visitors assured Curtin that his work was done. Harrison held his hand on the night of 4 July, then went home to his wife and said, ‘He’ll die tonight . . . his hand was ice cold.’ Before Curtin was given his sedative for the night he told Elsie, ‘I’m ready now.’ Four hours later, on 5 July, she was called back to the room for his final moments.
His memorial service at Parliament Hous
e on 16 July saw Chifley, his successor, his former Treasurer weeping above the coffin. Harrison conducted the service, which was broadcast by ABC radio, and the casket was taken by gun carriage to Canberra airport where it was loaded onto a Dakota for the flight to Perth. In Cottesloe it proceeded through streets where twenty thousand people wept for its passing. Chifley declared, ‘I simply couldn’t go,’ and so stayed away.
EVATT FIGHTS ON
In San Francisco, Evatt worked frantically on the charter, scuttling from office to office, attending committees until 10.30 at night, then working with his aides till 2 a.m., before retiring and rising again at eight o’clock.
Gromyko, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was difficult to talk to, until that skilful conversationalist Mrs Evatt, sitting beside him at a banquet, found out that he was fascinated by concrete and by the proposed Snowy River scheme and wanted to know how Australia’s preferential voting worked.
If the British wanted no interference from the United Nations in their colonies and territories, it was all the more true of the Americans. The Americans wanted to include in the charter a special reference to the recently signed Act of Chapultepec by which mutual assistance amongst the nations of the western hemisphere was to be provided by the US against ‘local’ aggression—a heavily opposed clause allowing massed military opposition against any rising by the population against a government approved of by the United States, or useful to them. Evatt was one delegate of many who disliked the proposed enshrining. A compromise was reached that the western hemisphere nations were to inform the United Nations Security Council of any intention to enforce Chapultepec. In return for its support, the Latin-American countries voted, however, in line with the United States, that the Security Council be limited to six non-permanent members together with the Big Five.