Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

  Many believed that Menzies won the election of 1954 on the backs of the Petrovs and the extent to which they enhanced the fears of the electorate. No one was given to believe that as an operative Petrov had been cack-handed. Until he had seen the light, he had been just one integer in the great sum of Soviet infiltration. His defection proved the depth of the problem. In Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage, the author claims that Petrov’s defection was no Liberal conspiracy and that Menzies did not make use of the defection for election purposes in 1954, although Country Party leader Arthur Fadden did. But Catholic Weekly and Tribune considered that the royal commission that followed the Petrov affair provided the chance to expose Communist activities in Australia. The Petrov affair reinforced Catholic concern about Communist persecution overseas. During the crusade of prayer for the persecuted church in April 1954, eight to ten thousand people crowded into St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney to hear the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Romolo Carboni, speak on the issue of Communism and the Church.

  ASSIMILATION AND ITS REWARDS

  The Minister for Territories from 1951, Paul Hasluck, who at that stage of history had management over Aboriginal affairs in the federal territories but not over those living in states, was an advocate of the assimilation of Aborigines, which he saw as a new regime of equality, distinguished from the paternalism of ‘protection’ that had existed up until then. Hasluck hoped that Aborigines would be moved off the old reserves by Territory officials and encouraged to participate in the wider society. Yet many Aborigines experienced the destruction of the reserves as loss and displacement, and when they moved to town, ran into the hostility of some who refused them all but the most marginal of places.

  As with the emergence of the Good Neighbour Movement, an organisation whose aim was to welcome but also to achieve the rapid assimilation of immigrants, there were in the mid to late 1950s substantial groups of both white and black activists who argued for an end to discriminatory practices. That many of these also believed in assimilation was one of the ironies. Many Australians thought in terms of a new beginning, forgetting the land wars, the poisoned flour, the punitive expeditions and the ‘dispersal’ of Aborigines. For many Aborigines, assimilation did not seem as new a beginning as it did a continuation of old bullying.

  Hasluck’s vision had a charm nonetheless: ‘Full assimilation will mean that the Aboriginal shares the hopes, the fears, the ambitions and the loyalties of all other Australians and draws from the Australian community all his social needs, spiritual as well as material.’ This equality of citizenship was based on the loss of Aboriginal identity. Hasluck believed that Aboriginal society could not hope to be preserved or left unchanged: ‘If a person of Aboriginal descent is to be accepted as a full member of the Australian society, he has to cease to be a primitive Aboriginal and change in outlook and habit.’ Hasluck created a Welfare Ordinance for the Northern Territory which was not, he insisted, to be defined in terms of race. Instead, those who were deemed to need ‘special assistance’ were now to be classified as ‘wards’, as were abandoned children and persons of unsound mind, and placed under the control of the director of the Welfare Branch. He called it the Welfare Branch because he sincerely wanted to avoid the appearance of racial discrimination. When the ordinance was passed, however, its effect was legally to separate people of full Aboriginal descent from those of mixed descent, and to split families in two by making some members into wards.

  Assimilation took for granted that there was a single Australian society that was utterly homogenous. Those on the fringes were to surrender their culture to the mainstream culture. A very large majority of Australians, 90 per cent, had given up the concept that the Aborigine was subhuman and agreed that if ‘an Aborigine had the same kind of upbringing as you . . . he could have learnt to do your work’.

  The effects of assimilation could be punitive, however. Of Moola Bulla mission in northern Western Australia, closed in the name of assimilation in 1955, one Aboriginal wrote, ‘they just came and told us to go. There was no explanation, we don’t know what happened. We were stunned. There were four kids and no money to feed them. A transport contractor took all the people into Hall’s Creek. We camped around the racecourse for a few days, while asking for jobs on other stations.’ Similarly, from the late 1940s onwards, the Tasmanian Aborigines on Cape Barren Island were being encouraged to leave by the closure of the reserve and by offers of housing or threats of withholding welfare benefits.

  In New South Wales, four out of five Aborigines were already living outside the reserves by the end of the 1940s, a rather astonishing figure. There were frequently considerable protests from white householders who feared having Aboriginal neighbours. But in the Victorian town of Drouin in 1958, Mrs Pen Buchanan and her husband sold a block of land for half its value to the Welfare Board for the building of a house for an Aboriginal family, Margaret and Syd Austin and (as Woman’s Day said), ‘their dusky young brood’. Some white residents objected, citing a decline in property values. One said, ‘Most families would pay big money for land and houses which would not be worth a “cracker” if Aboriginals moved into the street.’ Mrs Buchanan then organised a residents’ meeting with the local Aborigines’ Advancement League, which had some effect on the neighbours’ objections and brought about a small victory.

  Even so, the ‘assimilated’ could feel adrift. Ruby Langford Ginibi, writing of living as a member of a community in rural New South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s, said, ‘I felt like I was living tribal but with no tribe around me, no close-knit family—the food gathering, the laws and songs were broken up, and my generation at this time wandered around as if we were tribal but in fact living worse than the poorest of poor whites, and in the case of women living hard because it seemed like the men loved you for a while, and then more kids came along and the men drank and gambled and disappeared.’ Though Ginibi did endure, she could reflect on her father’s pronouncement, ‘All the protection they’ve done so far is to take people from their land and split up families.’

  Some commentators raised the fact that the traditional Aborigines were too hard to classify because of their proliferation of names. As well as personal names there were secret names, nicknames, totemic or Dreaming names, section or sub-section names, local group names, tribal or language-group names, and European names. R.K. McCaffery, Acting Director of Native Affairs in the early 1950s, pointed out that Aboriginal naming systems were incompatible with the demands of a bureaucratic state. McCaffery argued that one name from the ensemble of names an Aboriginal person already possessed should be selected as a surname. His personal preference was for a local group or horde name to become the equivalent of a Western surname. The selection of the surname should be acceptable to the entire group who would bear it. Two examples given by McCaffery were Namatjira and Pareroulja.

  Although citizenship for Aborigines was a principal aspiration of Hasluck’s legislation, the Welfare Ordinance did not act as an instrument conferring citizenship upon Aborigines. Its central premise was that citizens had to be made before citizenship was granted. By his own choice of the word ‘ward’, which bespoke incompetence and a need for regulatory help, Hasluck undermined his ambition to inaugurate a new era of Aboriginal citizenship.

  OLD CULTURE, NEW WEAPONS

  Amongst the Aborigines in remote Australia, such as the Walpiri of the Northern Territory, anthropologists found that in the 1950s, kinship, totemism, burial customs and belief in sorcery were all still intact amongst cattle workers. Aboriginal women came to depend on European food, however, because it relieved them of the consuming daily task of finding and grinding seeds to make native damper. Polygamy declined in the cattle camps, and the tasks of being a stockman intruded upon traditional ceremonial activity. Rituals were shortened to take account of this. Elders expressed themselves shocked by the extent to which Aboriginal youths were attracted by new technology—torches, gramophones and any magazines and comic books that reac
hed the far cattle camps. The number of initiations dwindled but did not stop. Fewer children were being born, and some thought that this was explained by spiritual loss and ill-health.

  During World War II, a thousand Aborigines in the Northern Territory worked in construction and motor maintenance shops as part of the army and air force labour corps. They received ten pence a day, and their dependants were maintained on full army rations. The army found their work very satisfactory and they mixed well with the regular troops. Given their success and achievements, in January 1947 the Northern Territory administration held a conference with the pastoralists on Aboriginal wages. This recommended a wage scale between twelve and a half and twenty shillings (one pound) per week, far below the rate of European wages. A planned strike by the Aborigines in the Pilbara region of Western Australia would open the long struggle of Aborigines for equal wages. The strike had been mooted as early as 1945 at Skull Spring, where the elders of the region had gathered to discuss how their traditional life could be protected and their living conditions on the cattle stations improved. The spark may have come from a man the elders invited to these discussions, Don McLeod, a forty-year-old white Australian born in the area and who had been fighting for Aboriginal rights in Port Hedland. McLeod, who had participated in radical strikes in the early 1940s, suggested a strike for better wages. Sacred boards, traditionally inscribed by the elders, were sent to all the Aboriginal communities in the area to inform them of the plan. Dooley Bin Bin and Clancy McKenna were to be McLeod’s Aboriginal co-organisers. These three talked secretly to Aboriginal communities on stations throughout the following year. They stressed that the strikers and their communities could live off the land or by running cattle and prospecting for minerals. So the vision of ‘Naraweda’, a land of promise for the Aborigines, was born. By 5 May 1946, twenty of twenty-two Pilbara station properties had strikes, stockmen demanding thirty shillings a week plus keep, and better conditions.

  The Perth press declared that Aborigines were being used by Communist agitators. Dooley was arrested at Marble Bar in the Pilbara, where he had been ‘yandying’ for minerals. The Aboriginal child-carrying device was a yandi, and Aborigines used a similarly shaped cradle for soil washing for metals. Dooley’s charge was that he had been enticing other Aborigines away from their work, and he was taken away in neck chains to Port Hedland, calling, ‘It was in the yandi that our mothers carried us. Now the yandi carries us again—keep working!’

  McKenna and McLeod were also arrested, and McLeod was placed on a bail of £300, a year’s wage in 1946. Dooley and McLeod were sentenced to three months’ gaol. In Perth a campaign in support of the black strikers was waged by ministers of religion, women’s groups, trade unions and Communists. Despite police harassment, the strikers held out; soon the gaols were full, and the police began to tire of the whole business, and of the task they had been set.

  After three years of industrial action, the pastoralists gave ground, and in the Mount Edgar Agreement of 1949 they offered the Aboriginal workers three pounds a week plus keep. However, many did not return to work, since during the strike they had formed a mining company in which six hundred of them grossed £50,000 in 1951 alone. The company then paid a deposit on three pastoral properties in the Pilbara. Sadly, a fall in metal prices, a lawsuit by another mining company, and bad management forced the community into bankruptcy. The Western Australian government hoped that they would now return to the stations, but the Aborigines reacted by forming in 1955 another mineral company, the Pindan Company (pindan being the name for the red earth of the Pilbara). All the company’s leaders were Aborigines, and the six hundred members drew on traditional yandying skills again. In 1959, the group would split, one of the sections purchasing Yandeyarra Station in the Pilbara and operating it successfully for many years. The other section, led by McLeod, purchased Strelley and Warralong stations, and other leases as well, which they tried to operate as an independent cooperative community. They were not a great economic success, but in cultural terms they showed all Aborigines that it was possible to be your own man in the white world.

  Meanwhile, both factions of the Pindan mob adopted many aspects of European law, favouring traditional marriage and trying to suppress fighting and traditional revenge ceremonies. The tradition on the part of males of avoiding contact with mothers-in-law, as a matter of tribal necessity, was modified so that mixed work parties could travel in the one truck. Part of the Pindan mob would continue to live on Strelley Station with considerable dignity and the liberty to pursue their traditional life.

  In the late 1950s, the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (later the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) began to campaign for equal pay, lobbying the ACTU congresses in 1959, 1961 and again in 1963. The application for an award wage for Aborigines in the pastoral industry was presented to the Arbitration Court in 1965. John Kerr, the Sydney barrister who would later be Governor-General, presented a carefully prepared case on behalf of the pastoralists which argued that the Aboriginal workers were less efficient than the white. The Arbitration Commission ruling seemed to favour equal pay by declaring, ‘There must be one industrial law, similarly applied to all Australians, Aboriginal or not.’ But due to Kerr’s work, a Slow Workers’ Clause was inserted into the award. Workers considered inefficient by a committee were to be paid less. The Commission did not consult any Aborigines on this issue. It also accepted the pastoralists’ application to have the implementation of the equal wage delayed for three years. The Aborigines were enraged. One of them said, ‘We bin starvin’ since we first learned to ride a horse.’ He did not intend to wait three years. ‘I bin want them legal wages now—this year.’

  Stockmen at Newcastle Waters in the Northern Territory walked off the job in June 1966, and soon after, two hundred Gurindji people left the Vesteys’ Wave Hill Station, also in the Territory, and squatted on traditional land at Wattie Creek. The Wave Hill walk-off now escalated into a land claim, and a petition was drawn up and sent to Governor-General Lord Richard Casey.

  Tribal leader and former head stockman Vincent Lingiari, a wiry little man who seemed to have been carved by desert wind, declared, ‘The issue on which we are protesting is neither purely economic nor political but moral . . . on August 22 1966, the Gurindji tribe decided to cease to live like dogs.’

  In the short term, the Gurindji lost their jobs. But ultimately their wages were raised to the same level as white Australians’. It was an ambiguous victory in many ways, in that pastoralists tended to employ white stockmen or began to use fencing and helicopters to replace drovers. But this battle endured through the 1960s, in parallel to the one being fought in Vietnam.

  THE WOMAN LABOURS

  On the weather page of the Sydney Morning Herald throughout the 1940s and 1950s there ran a series of columns for women, and in 1941 the cry was, ‘As Housewives, We Are Worms’. The column went on: ‘we women have been worms for too long. All those pretty phrases about the hand that carries the string bag being the hand that rules the world or something, are as empty as the butchers’ shop.’ The woman contributing to the page further declared she was sick of water and food shortages, electricity and gas rationing, tram and bus strikes. She proposed a sit-down strike of her own.

  These sentiments grew stronger throughout World War II and into the post-war era. In 1947, the town clerk for the council of Ryde, an outer northwestern area of Sydney, until then a region of market gardens, suggested the creation of high-quality living environments for young families, including—to lessen the monotony and strain on the housewife—British-style Civic Restaurants: ‘a central kitchen where food will be cooked for . . . sale and distribution to private homes by means of hot boxes.’ The drudgery of the housewife became a frequent point of discussion in the late 1940s and 1950s, not least amongst women themselves. Housework was still unmechanised drudgery, trying to keep food fresh by means of the ventilated meat safe and the ice chest, and then t
he intense labour of the weekly laundry—the lighting of the copper, the stirring of the clothes in boiling water, the mangling and wringing, the transfer of it all to clothes lines provided by the clothes-prop man, who went through the suburbs selling the tall sturdy saplings he had harvested in the bush and now provided to keep the clothes of Australia aloft in drying air, usually on Mondays. Women meanwhile discussed whether it was a ‘good drying day’ with all the energy and nervousness of cricketers discussing a Test pitch. Only the rich had vacuum cleaners. In 1944, Mrs Mary Quirk, member for Balmain in the New South Wales Parliament, made a speech which remained for the rest of the decade a valid image of the way many working-class women and soldiers’ wives lived. She talks about women ‘going from shop to shop to make the money spin out, being exploited at every turn and sometimes being compelled to buy on the black market . . . she sees to it that the children have sufficient to eat even though she may have none. She needs light, space and playing areas for her children, modern equipment to save her poor tired limbs, and above all a kitchen where work will be a pleasure rather than drudgery’. Drudgery and war between them (combined with a growing knowledge of how to prevent pregnancy) might have helped explain the decline in the birth rate.

  The truth was that many working people lived with dampness, amidst inadequate drainage. Sewerage in inner-city houses was faulty, and in outer suburbs non-existent. Many young working-class housewives and their husbands couldn’t get accommodation at all, given the shortage of three hundred thousand houses at the end of World War II. Billy McKell, then the leader of the New South Wales Labor government, announced in 1946 that there was a shortage of ninety thousand homes in Sydney and its suburbs. The gap was still not fully addressed by 1950. Many young couples needed to live in one bedroom of their parents’ house, and the chances of multiple tensions and dramas abounded. Single women often slept on sleep-out verandas. At the same time, ideas of perfect houses pervaded the air and the minds of Australian women, who often lived in squalor, in a shed on a suburban block or even in a tent, waiting for a house (that would probably be less than ideal) to be built. They saw plenty of examples of what they desired depicted in the women’s magazines. Those who sought to rent a house or flat had to pay the agent ‘key money’, a bribe to outbid other contenders. Menzies both enlisted and sought to reshape the desires of women in his political crusade of the 1940s and 1950s. In his famous 1942 speech ‘The Forgotten People’, he claimed the family house to be the central and defining commitment of the middle class. ‘The real life of the nation is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised and who . . . see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of the race.’ Menzies appealed to women as housewives, knowing that was a middle-class idyll, and, by intuition rather than cunning, he made it a form of identification for women of every class. On the other hand, he depicted home ownership as a marker of manhood and citizenship. In the face of atheistic Communism, there stood this independent sturdiness of the family on its quarter-acre block, indomitably held.