Remembering B.A. Santamaria (1915-1998): Ten Myths Demolished

Much has been written about BA (Bob) Santamaria – and much has been both exaggerated and misunderstood. Political commentator and executive director of The Sydney Institute Gerard Henderson – author of the just released Santamaria – A Most Unusual Man – sees ten myths that need to be demolished about this pervasive figure of Australian politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. To reveal what these myths have been, Gerard Henderson addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 12 August 2015.

REMEMBERING B.A. SANTAMARIA (1915-1998): TEN MYTHS DEMOLISHED

 GERARD HENDERSON

Many thanks to my chairman Nick Johnson for his comments.  Many people helped with this biography – and they are citied in the in the Acknowledgements.  Here I should record, in particular:

Anne Henderson – for her support and advice. And for her work published on the former United Australia Party prime minister Joseph Lyons and the first government led by Robert Menzies between 1939 and 1941 which influenced the early chapters.

Lalita Mathias – my executive assistant for many years, who typed and re-typed the manuscript along with nearly all of the transcripts.The Sydney Institute’s young casuals Paige Halley and Anusha Rutnam who did great work on the photographs and the videos (which will be shown later).

Introduction

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria – or Bob Santamaria or BAS – was born in Melbourne on 14 August 1915, a century ago this coming Friday.  He was the first born of Joseph Santamaria and Maria Santamaria (nee Costa). They were raised on Salina – part of the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily.  Salina has been the setting for a number of films – including the 1995 film Il Postino (The Postman), which BAS enjoyed in his final years.

In August 1915, Santamaria’s parents ran – and lived above – a fruit shop on Sydney Road, Brunswick. A century ago Brunswick – located between Carlton and Coburg – was a Melbourne working class suburb.  It was badly affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s.

BAS lived his entire life in an area around inner north and east Melbourne.  He went to school in Brunswick, West Brunswick and East Melbourne and then to Melbourne University in Parkville. He lived in Brunswick, Balwyn, Kew and finally Balwyn.  He worked in the Melbourne CBD, Fitzroy, Hawthorn and North Melbourne.  His secular church was the Carlton Football Ground – on Sydney Road, Parkville.  And he visited his hero and mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix (1864-1963), at St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne and at his residence, Raheen in Kew.

Santamaria, whose parents spoke the Aeolian dialect of Italian at home, commenced school in 1920 at age 5^1/2. There is evidence that he was involved in the public debate in his final two years at St Kevin’s – 1930 and 1931. There are records of his contribution to the public debate during his time as a student at the University of Melbourne between 1932 and 1937.  He was still involved in commentary in October 1997, when struck down with a terminal illness.  Bob Santamaria died on 25 February (Ash Wednesday) 1998.

So, BAS was involved in political discussion for almost seven decades.  In a sense, this book is a study of Australian history from the beginning of the First World War until just after the end of the Cold War.

In a comment for this biography, Professor Geoffrey Blainey wrote “Mr Santamaria did not sit in an Australian parliament; he had no need for one”. Bob Santamaria maintained – correctly – that his influence was exaggerated by supporters and opponents alike.  Yet he was influential.

At this Sydney launch of Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man, I have decided to examine critically the ten most popular myths about Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria.

Myth 1 – Santamaria was a peasant

I was close to BAS between 1965 and 1975 and I worked part-time at Santamaria’s National Civic Council in 1970 and 1971. Obviously my interpretation of BAS is based on my personal assessment of his character as well as my reading along with the interviews I conducted for the book.

Robin Hughes is the only person to whom Santamaria ever opened up in public – around the eighth hour of a twelve hour interview which ran over three days.  The occasion was a 1997 interview for Film Australia – part of which was shown on SBS in its Australian Biography series the following year.  I made considerable use of the Hughes/Santamaria interview in the book.

Mr Santamaria told Ms Hughes: “I’m a peasant. I have those values.  And I think central to those values is the family and the land.”

Santamaria – the father of eight children by his first wife Helen Santamaria (nee Power) – was a good family man. But he never owned or worked on a farm – however, he did own a house near the beach at Mornington on Port Philip Bay.

BAS graduated with degrees in Arts Honours and Law. As an adult, he lived in well-off suburbs in Melbourne’s east and sent his children to Catholic private schools – although at least some fees were waived or reduced by the FCJ nuns and the Jesuit priests and such schools were less expensive than they are today.  BAS was never rich but was never poor.  He lived a middle-class life in the second half of the Twentieth Century in an essentially middle-class nation. Santamaria was no peasant.

Myth 2 – Santamaria was a fascist as a young man

The only image of Bob Santamaria as a boy which I could find is the Intermediate Class (i.e. Year 10) photograph of St Joseph’s College, North Melbourne in 1928.  Of the class of 36, all but two had Anglo-Celtic names. The exceptions were W. Gillespie (second from left, back row) and B. Santamaria (second from right, front row).

As a boy growing up in an Italian speaking home to two Italian-born parents, it is not surprising that Santamaria had some regard for Benito Mussolini – who had established power in Italy not long after the 1922 March on Rome.  But BAS never embraced the fascist ideology – as is evident from reading his 1934 M.A. thesis Italy Changes Its Shirts: The Origins of Italian Fascism.

In the first half of the 1930s, BAS neither supported nor opposed Mussolini.  However, he abandoned Il Duce following Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Mussolini’s subsequent alliance with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany.

Like most of his fellow Australians in 1938 and early 1939, Santamaria was into appeasement.  So were the United Australia Party leaders – Joseph Lyons and Robert Menzies.  So were the Labor leaders – John Curtin and Ben Chifley.  The only prominent person to oppose appeasement at the time was the former prime minister Billy Hughes – who left the ALP when prime minister in 1916 and joined the political conservatives.

On Sunday 28 May 1939, Santamaria was the principal speaker at the Central Catholic Peace Rally at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building which tens of thousands attended.  At age 23, BAS shared a platform with Prime Minister Menzies and Bert Cremean, the deputy leader of the Victorian Labor Party.  Just over three months later, Robert Menzies declared that it was his melancholy duty to announce that Australia was again at war. Santamaria supported the war effort – unlike the pro-communist left which backed the Nazi-Soviet (or Hitler-Stalin) Pact and attempted to sabotage the Second Australian Imperial Force during the first two years of the Second World War.

Myth 3 – Santamaria was a profound thinker

Bob Santamaria was born a Catholic – and he died a Catholic.  His State Funeral, at St Patrick’s Cathedral East Melbourne, was a Mass of Christian Burial – with (then) Archbishop George Pell as the principal celebrant and preacher and with Cardinal Edward Clancy of Sydney as a concelebrant.  He commenced work in 1938 in Catholic Action and when he died in 1998 he was in charge of an essentially Catholic organisation.

Shortly before his death, BAS declared that he could still recite – and still believe in – the Apostles’ Creed.  But he understood that religious belief was an act of faith and – like Cardinal Pell – acknowledged the attraction of agnosticism.

From his days as the first editor of the Catholic Worker in 1936 – until his death some years after the fall of the Berlin Wall – Santamaria opposed communism.

He created The Movement in the late 1930s/early 1940s to oppose the Communist Party in the trade unions and the Australian Labor Party.  BAS was asked to undertake this task by ALP operatives like Bert Cremean and such non-Catholic union officials as Dinny Lovegrove.  He was right on communism, and its impact on the labour movement, when so many were wrong.

As a social conservative, Santamaria had much to say that was thoughtful about the importance of the family – and religious belief – in the maintenance of modern democratic societies.  Also, Santamaria was an early opponent of the White Australia Policy – a position he took well before such a policy was embraced by the Liberal Party or the Australian Labor Party.

Yet it is an unpalatable truth to his supporters that Santamaria remained a respected – if controversial – commentator because no government ever attempted to implement his economic agenda.

From the mid-1930s until the late-1950s, Santamaria opposed commercial farming. This despite the evidence of the failure of small soldier-settlement blocks after both the First World War and the Second World War.  Then – in the 1980s and 1990s – BAS opposed the economic reform agenda undertaken by the Labor leaders Bob Hawke and Paul Keating as well as by John Howard and his Treasurer Peter Costello.

BAS never visited Ireland.  But the kind of economic model he favoured was that presided over by Eamon de Valera in the 1940s and 1950s – when the Irish economy was heavily protected, regulated and inward looking.  Ireland at the time was not a prosperous nation.

Bob Santamaria – was an accomplished polemicist – but not a deep thinker.

Myth 4 – Santamaria split the Labor Party

In October 1954, following Labor’s defeat in the May 1954 election, Opposition leader Bert Evatt turned on the Victorian branch of the ALP – which he (falsely) blamed for his defeat by the Robert Menzies led Coalition some five months previously.  Within a short time – Dr Evatt had broadened his attack to include Archbishop Daniel Mannix and Bob Santamaria. Some years earlier, Evatt had been on friendly terms with Mannix and Santamaria – sharing a platform at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne in April 1953.

Without question, Evatt used the tactics of anti-Catholic sectarianism against the Catholic Irish-born archbishop and a Catholic layman with an Italian name.  As I document in the book, many of those who loved, admired and worked with Evatt came to acknowledge that he was suffering a mental illness from the 1940s until his collapse in the early 1960s. At the time of the Labor Split, the ALP was not led by a rational man.

In October 1954, Santamaria was 39 years of age and was not a member of the Labor Party. He was not in a position to split the Labor Party.  Moreover, many of the Labor MPs who were expelled by/split from the ALP in the mid-1950s did not have a close association with BAS.  Some had never even met him – some never did.

Certainly Santamaria – due to the influence of The Movement within the trade unions and the ALP – was involved in developing tactics in response to Evatt’s attack.  The response of the anti-communist Labor MPs led to the creation of the breakaway Anti-Communist Labor Party in Victoria in 1955.  This became the Democratic Labor Party which had a presence in all states and was strong in Victoria and Queensland.

Democratic Labor Party voters – most of whom had previously voted ALP – gave their preferences to the Liberal Party ahead of Labor.  Labor was led by poorly performing leaders in the 1955, 1958 (Evatt) and 1961, 1963 and 1966 (Arthur Calwell) elections. Even so, Calwell went very close to victory in 1961.  It is clear that the DLP preferences saved Robert Menzies in 1961.  They were later to save John Gorton in 1969.  Labor’s victory, under Gough Whitlam, in 1972 was followed within a few years by the demise of the DLP.

True, in 1954/1955, many ALP operatives were spoiling for a fight as the party was divided between the pro-communist left and anti-communists.  But as the labour historian Paul Strangio has conceded, it was Bert Evatt who lit the match which started the fire.   Santamaria criticised Labor from 1955 until his final years – as is evident in this extract from Point of View which aired on 4 September 1966.

Myth 5 – Santamaria involved the Church in politics

Santamaria was accused by many of his critics in the Catholic Church of involving the church in politics. This is the obsessive thesis of Fr Bruce Duncan’s otherwise valuable Crusade or Conspiracy? Catholics and the Anti-Communist Struggle in Australia.

It’s true that, with the support of Dr Mannix, Santamaria involved the Catholic Church in the anti-communist struggle in the labour movement.  He was not the first Catholic to do so. The Catholic Church – under the direction of Pope Pius XII – was deeply involved in fighting the Italian Communist Party in the lead-up to the 1949 election in Italy.

What Dr Mannix did with respect to his flock in Melbourne in 1955 was no different from what Pius XII had done with respect to his flock in Rome six years earlier. It’s just that Santamaria’s Catholic critics (who included Mannix’s deputy – Archbishop Justin Simonds) condemned his actions while ignoring the history of the Church’s involvement in politics.

During this period 1954 to 1957, the Catholic Church in Australia effectively split in half.  Half the bishops supported the Mannix/Santamaria position.  And half the bishops supported the line taken by Cardinal Norm Gilroy and Bishop James Carroll in Sydney – and Archbishop Matthew Beovich in Adelaide – that Catholics should remain in the ALP and not join the break-away Democratic Labor Party.

The unfashionable fact is that Mannix interfered less in politics than did Gilroy, Carroll and Beovich.  Mannix supported Santamaria – but never told him what to do.  As I document in the book, Bishop Carroll – dressed in complete bishop regalia – turned up at meetings of The Movement and instructed anti-communist Catholics in New South Wales to remain in the ALP. That’s involving the Church in politics.

This upset the Sydney based poet and academic James McAuley. McAuley, a convert to Catholicism, had become friendly with Bob Santamaria around the time of the Labor Split.  An independent type, McAuley objected being told what to do in politics by the likes of James Carroll.

As Edmund Campion reported in A Place in the City, Jim McAuley was asked whether the hard time he was receiving from Bishop Carroll would diminish his recently acquired faith.  He responded: “Why do you think that, because my bishop is a liar and a schemer, this somehow disproves the fact that Christ rose from the dead?”

In the event, the Hierarchy split went to Rome – and the Vatican effectively ruled against the Mannix/Santamaria position.  Santamaria – with the support of his archbishop – rationalised the Vatican’s decision to suit his ends. BAS simply changed the name of the Catholic Social Studies Movement to the National Civic Council and continued as before until his final days.

Myth 6 – Santamaria was a closet Liberal Party supporter

Bob Santamaria always claimed that he never voted for the Liberal Party. Up to the Labor Split, BAS voted ALP.  After the Split, he voted Democratic Labor Party and directed his first preference to the Liberal Party.  The DLP was formally wound up in Victoria in 1978.  From then until his death in 1998, BAS claims to have voted informal.  This is probably correct.

In later life, Santamaria got on extremely well with Robert Menzies. Indeed Sir Robert endorsed the National Civic Council and its newspaper News Weekly in the early 1970s. However, in one of their discussions over a bottle of scotch, Menzies asked Santamaria to describe his government’s three greatest errors.

Reluctantly, Santamaria listed them as (i) consolidating Canberra as the national capital with the consequent relative isolation of the Commonwealth Public Service, (ii) accepting the recommendations of the Martin Report to substantially increase funding for tertiary education which led to a significant growth in the number of universities and (iii) the creation of the Liberal Party itself. Whereupon Menzies is said to have responded: “But they’re the only things I ever did.”

In the early 1990s, Santamaria attempted to set up a protectionist party led by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser – with the support of La Trobe University academics Professor Robert Manne and Dr John Carroll. This was a ridiculous idea.  In the mid-1990s, BAS even contemplated taking his remaining foot soldiers back into the Labor Party.  Another unworkable solution to his long-term opposition to the Liberal Party and its predecessors.

Santamaria criticised the Liberal Party at the height of its popularity – for example, on Point of View which aired on 9 October 1966, shortly after the retirement of Robert Menzies and at a time when his successor Harold Holt was a popular prime minister.  In this program, BAS praised some of the anti-communist non-Catholic intellectuals who supported him – like Melbourne University academic Frank Knopfelmacher.

Myth 7 – Santamaria wanted to create a Catholic Australia

At times Bob Santamaria privately indicated that he saw The Movement as capable of implementing a “Christian social program” in Australia – the first time such an outcome would be possible in “the Anglo-Saxon world since the advent of Protestantism”. BAS wrote this in a “personal and confidential” letter to Archbishop Mannix on 11 December 1952 – which was cited, for the first time, in my 1982 book Mr Santamaria and the Bishops.

BAS had a tendency to hyperbole.  Moreover, in late 1952, he was seeking to extend the life of The Movement beyond its focus on anti-communist activity.  By the early 1950s, the power of communism in the labour movement had been substantially reduced due to the actions of The Movement in co-operation with the Industrial Groups and Santamaria was looking to renew and extend his activities.

Sure, The Movement had political aims. However, even at the height of BAS’s influence, they were moderate and essentially secular.

In Santamaria’s letter to Dr Mannix, there was no reference to morality – and such issues as contraception, abortion and divorce were not mentioned.  At a meeting held with Labor politicians in Kew on 9 December 1952, the two policies discussed turned on such essentially secular matters are education and health.

Despite the hype, Bob Santamaria and The Movement never set about dismantling the consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

Myth 8 – Santamaria told Tony Abbott to become a Liberal Party MP

In his monograph on Cardinal George Pell, David Marr wrote that, following the collapse of the DLP in the late 1970s, Santamaria “directed his followers to cross the bridge to the Liberals”. If this had been the case, it would have been expected that Tony Abbott – who was influenced as a university student by Santamaria – would have joined the Liberal Party at the time. He did not.

Following the publication of the revised edition of his Tony Abbott monograph, David Marr was interviewed on ABC 1’s The Drum. In this interview, Marr claimed that in the late 1980s Santamaria told Abbott: “It’s the Liberal Party now, Tony.”

David Marr’s view that a person like Abbott – possessed of the drive to become prime minister – needed to be told what to do by a man four decades his senior whom he rarely saw does not stand up to scrutiny.

The fact is that if Tony Abbott had followed Bob Santamaria’s advice he would not be prime minister today. When Mr Abbott sought Liberal Party pre-selection for Warringah in 1994 he asked BAS for a reference.  Santamaria not only declined to provide the reference.  He also said that it was not worth becoming a Liberal MP and that, in any event, a traditional Catholic (like Abbott) would never win pre-selection for a safe Liberal Party seat. Tony Abbott rejected his mentor’s advice.

As the Prime Minister said at the Melbourne launch of Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man, Santamaria was an influence on him. An influence – but no more than that.

Myth 9 – Santamaria was a saint

As I mention in the epilogue, Brian Peachey, a long-time supporter of The Movement in Western Australia, wrote to Denis Hart – the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne – in an attempt to commence the process by which Santamaria might become a saint of the Catholic Church.  The move was politely rejected – since no other member of the Catholic faithful had made such a request. And there the matter rests.  For the time being, at least.

As Geraldine Doogue is quoted as saying in the book, Santamaria was unfailingly charming when she interviewed him in 1994.  Santamaria was also courteous to his contemporary critics such as the left-wing Jim Cairns and to one-time opponents with whom he was in contact in later life – like ALP operative Clyde Cameron and one-time Communist Party functionary Bernie Taft.

It’s just that Santamaria was not easy to work with if you were broadly in support but disagreed at the margin.  As I mentioned in my Weekend Australian column on 1 August, BAS once said of the late Ray Evans: “You can’t really trust Ray, he’s only 95 per cent on side.”

The fact is that every organisation with which BAS was associated with experienced a split – the Catholic Worker, the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action, the Catholic Social Studies Movement (The Movement) and even the National Civic Council itself. The latter – NCC – dispute went on for four years between 1978 and 1982 and ended up in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Santamaria could be extraordinarily generous with his time with people – staff, friends and strangers alike – who sought his help.  But he could be extraordinarily difficult with those whom he regarded as friends who had become critics.  In the mid-1980s, Santamaria vehemently objected to my comment that Jim McAuley had scaled down his political activities when he went to Tasmania in 1961.  I later discovered that Santamaria had made the very same point in a private letter to Malcolm Fraser which he wrote in 1976.

Like many political operatives, Santamaria could be fast and loose with the truth.

Myth 10 – Santamaria was a failure

Towards the end of his life, BAS declared that he was a failure.  Yet B.A. Santamaria was a spell binding orator, a brilliant broadcaster (on Point of View), a compelling writer (as a weekly columnist in The Australian) and a man of invincible intellectual courage.

BAS never achieved what he wanted to achieve in public life. Yet, he influenced the public debate.  And he was constantly right on communism – including the role of communists in the labour movement – when so many were wrong.

Santamaria’s most significant impact on public life took place when he used the negotiating power of the DLP preferences to obtain state aid for non-government schools.  This occurred at the Commonwealth level just before the December 1963 election – when the Menzies government introduced Commonwealth funding for school science blocks.  And it occurred at the State level in 1967 – when Victorian Liberal Party premier Henry Bolte introduced per capita funding for children and teenagers attending non-government schools.  These were the two policy break-throughs that led to government assistance for non-government schools.  This legacy survived and prospers half a century later.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I quote from the final paragraph of Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man:

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria was—and will remain—a controversial figure in Australian history. He saw himself as a peasant, born in (then) working-class Brunswick, who spent his life swimming against the tide. Yet BAS’s death was followed by a State funeral and a posthumous offer of Australia’s highest honour. Subsequently, there was also a resurrection of sorts when, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, Santamaria achieved the status of a media legend. An unexpected recognition for a most unusual man.