Remembering Alfred Deakin

Professor Judith Brett has produced a new biography of Alfred Deakin – The Enigmatic Mr Deakin – Australia’s second prime minister, to shine fresh light on one of the nation’s most significant figures. It brings out from behind the image of a worthy, bearded father of federation the gifted, passionate and intriguing man whose contributions continue to shape the contours of Australian politics. To discuss her work on Deakin and what she uncovered that was new, Judith Brett addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 5 September 2017.

 

REMEMBERING ALFRED DEAKIN

 JUDITH BRETT

 

Alfred Deakin was born in 1856, two years after Ned Kelly, both native sons of the newly proclaimed British colony of Victoria. Kelly’s parents were an Irish ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land and his spirited young Irish wife. Deakin was the only son of respectable gold rush immigrants, one of the thousands of young couples leaving England in the late 1840s for a better life abroad. By 1888 when the centenary of the First Fleet’s arrival was celebrated, Victoria was far and away the leading Australian colony and Marvellous Melbourne a world-class metropolis.

Thirty-two year old Alfred Deakin was Chief Secretary, a political wunderkind who had been a member of parliament for a decade. Since his audacious debating of the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, at the 1887 Imperial conference, and his refusal of a knighthood, he had become Victoria’s most celebrated native son.

Ned Kelly was already dead, hanged on 11 November 1880 for murdering a policeman. Deakin saw the hanging, most likely as a reporter for the Age, one of the fifty men allowed inside the Melbourne Goal to witness the drop. He was already an MP.

The differing fates of these two native sons exemplify the profound shifts that had taken place in Victoria since their births in the mid-1850s. Kelly was born into rural poverty, his extended family supplementing their meagre incomes with horse and cattle duffing.  The lawless, frontier daredevilry of the Kelly gang had no place in the respectable society the gold rush immigrants were building for themselves and their children. But it is the outlaw who has survived more vividly in popular memory and his crazy bravery has become a symbol of the defiance of authority so many Australians like to believe is part of our character.

Deakin is remembered too, but not so vividly. And although he was Australia’s most important prime minister until World War II, he sits uneasily as a representative Australian figure. He is too urbane and intellectual,

 too respectable and middle-class, for the larrikin masculinity of the Australian legend. Deakin was never a mate. He didn’t swear and barely drank. He didn’t play organised sport nor fight in the Great War, was unfailingly courteous and he always held himself a little aloof. He was also enormously well read, in philosophy, theology, comparative religion and the world’s literature, including poetry, his first love. In short, he was middle class, well-educated, urbane and supremely self-confident, like the city and the colony in which he grew to manhood.

By 2001, when the centenary of federation was celebrated, Deakin had faded to a face on an information board, one of the bearded worthies who had made the Constitution and after whom things are named: a suburb, an electorate, a university, a lecture series. He no longer lived in the contemporary national imagination. Amongst the political cognoscenti too he had become more of a cypher than a man, as both parties had turned away from the protective policies of the early twentieth century towards racially non-discriminatory immigration and neoliberalism’s faith in open markets. Deakin came to represent the now discarded policies of tariff protection, state paternalism, centralised arbitration, imperial nationalism and the racism of White Australia.

These policies which were shaped in the early decades of the twentieth century had all but gone by its closing. In 1992 Paul Kelly in The End of Certainty called this constellation of policies both the Australian Settlement and the Deakinite Settlement.

The turn against Deakin was most evident in the Liberal Party which, under John Howard, remade itself as the joint bearer of the Liberal and Conservative traditions in Australian politics, reclaiming the free trade heritage of George Reid and adopting a reactive social conservatism. With material economic issues now dominating the political agenda, Deakin, Reid and Henry Bourne Higgins became counters in ideological arguments which had little to do with the historical context of their actions and decisions.

Yes, Deakin did support protection, White Australia, an active state, centralised industrial relations and imperial nationalism; so to varying degrees did most of his fellow Australians. And if they were not whole-hearted supporters of all these policies, they were prepared to live with them. That is why they became Australia’s shared policy assumptions for three-quarters of a century. Successful politicians in liberal democracies are not original thinkers: their coin is the currency of the age and society in which they compete for support.

So it was with Deakin. It is not to the policies he supported that we should look for his achievements and his relevance to today, but to his statecraft and the urgent energy he brought to his political work.

I wrote a new biography of Deakin to re-enliven him in the national political – and cultural – imagination. John La Nauze’s magisterial, two volume biography which I’m sure many here will have read, was published more than 60 years ago. For all its many merits it is daunting for most contemporary readers, its meticulous historical detail often swamping the sense of the man. And practical economic historian that he was, La Nauze was bemused by Deakin’s complex and eccentric religious life with his political endeavours, piling it all into one chapter early in the book and leaving it there. I’ll return to this.

So why do I think Deakin’s memory should be re-enlivened? What were the achievements and characteristics of his statecraft?

His first achievement was the federation. Of course, he did not achieve this alone, but his contribution was crucial. Deakin was a minister in the Victorian government from 1883 and Chief Secretary from 1886 until 1890 when he resigned from ministerial office and went to the back bench. Financial disaster was overtaking Marvellous Melbourne, as a speculative land and building boom crashed, along with most of the colony’s financial institutions.

An economic depression caused by a fall in the price of wool worsened the colony’s woes. Deakin was implicated in some of this. Unlike some of his fellow parliamentarians he had not engaged in fraud to keep insolvent companies afloat, but his and the government’s optimism and its big spending schemes were shown to have been delusionary. The pressing task was financial repair, something for which he had no appetite, and he contemplated leaving politics altogether. What held him was the prospect of federation and the birth of a new nation. Federation became a redemption project for him and he devoted himself to the cause, bringing to it his organisational skills, his oratory and his sense of dramatic urgency.

Reflecting on the achievement of federation he wrote that, looking back, history can often appear inevitable.  But for those who pursued the cause of federation, it was far from inevitable as time and again its fortunes “visibly trembled in the balance”. Deakin had a sharp sense of the transience of moments of political opportunity – of how fleeting they were and how easily they could be lost

– as they were for the Australian republicans. He brought a sense of drama to his political work which at times seemed melodramatic but which focussed the minds of the political class – and his own – on what was at stake if courage failed.

Achieving federation required compromise. The Victorian delegates to the Conventions of the late 1890s that drafted the new constitution were unhappy about its undemocratic aspects, especially the makeup of the Senate, with the small states having the same representation as well-populated NSW and Victoria. But Deakin knew that without this federation would not happen, and he worked hard to broker a compromise.

Achieving federation also required inspiration. Deakin led the movement in Victoria, where his oratory lifted it from the haggling over border duties to a test of men’s souls. Deakin’s speech in Bendigo to the Australian Natives Association in March 1898 was a turning point in a campaign heading for defeat. “Let us recognise that we live in an unstable era, and that if we fail in the hour of crisis, we may never be able to recall our lost national opportunities,”

he told the listening men. His words filled them with zeal and sent them back to their branches to mobilise the campaign for a new nation.

With federation achieved, the next challenge Deakin took up was to lay the foundations of the new Commonwealth. When the Constitution was finally law and the Commonwealth inaugurated, Deakin saw it as the duty of those who had argued for federation to make it work. As well as being a virtuosic orator, Deakin was a first rate administrator and an able and dedicated legislator. The Constitution provided a framework for the government of the nation – but that was all – it was only a framework. Federal institutions had to be built and federal laws passed for areas of federal responsibility. And federal sentiment and a wide federal perspective had to be nurtured. Support for the federal union slumped in the early years, once voters confronted the expense and the states realised how much they had given up.

There was a real danger that if these early Commonwealth governments failed the new federation itself would fail, foundering on partisan differences, parochial jealousies and personal animosities. Western Australia after all was only just in, and thirty years later it would try to secede; and North Queenslanders had not entirely given up their desire for a separate state above the 22^nd parallel. Federal sentiment and a wide federal perspective had to be nurtured. Again and again in his speeches after federation, Deakin conjured up the map of Australia, reminding his audience that they were no longer just Victorians or South Australians or Tasmanians, they were now also Australians. This was Deakin’s great mission in the federal parliament – to make real the promise of a nation carried in the Constitution

– and he brought all his gifts, his courtesy and his capacity for unstinting work to the task.

It was not easy. We have become so used to stable majority governments in Australia, that minority governments are treated as disastrous aberrations and sure signs of political dysfunction, but for the Commonwealth’s first decade they were the norm. There were seven changes of Prime Minister after Edmund Barton was sworn in as the first Prime Minster, and only the last of these was the result of the government losing an election – in 1910 when Labor, led by Andrew Fisher, won an absolute majority and a clean sweep in the Senate.

Deakin was Attorney General in Barton’s cabinet and Prime Minister three times during this first decade, twice with the support of the Labor Party and once as leader of the fusion government, which did have a majority, but also suffered from a great deal of internal tension.

These governments did not achieve all their legislation, but they did achieve a good deal. Here are some examples: establishing the federal franchise, immigration restriction and the protective tariff; determining the site for the new capital, Canberra, after a great deal of political jockeying;  establishing a Commonwealth Literary fund and beginning Australian support for Antarctic exploration; establishing the High Court and expanding it from three to five judges despite strong opposition to the expense of the new institution; regulating contract immigrant labour, beginning the transcontinental railway, and passing the Surplus Revenue Act which made possible the first Commonwealth welfare measure – the Old Age and Invalid pension.

Deakin’s governments laid the foundation of Australia’s system of naval defence;

assumed Commonwealth control of the former British New Guinea, began the transfer of the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth and established a pro rata system for the dispersal of Commonwealth funds to the states. And much more – The detail is not the main message here – rather it is that although leading minority governments, he was able to achieve a great deal.

Not all of this legislation was finalised when his government lost office to Labor in 1910, but Labor did not repudiate it and start again as so often happens today. Labor had supported much of it in its initial stages and completed it within the already established broad outlines.

The party system was looser than today – and parliamentary votes more fluid. Deakin Liberal protectionist party was the centre party –  between the new, Labor Party that was rapidly increasing its electoral strength, and the Free traders/ anti-socialists led by ex-NSW premier George Reid. Deakin shared ideas and values with both left and right, and he worked to create a political centre for the new federation – practical policies in the national interest which had wide support.

To get his legislation through, Deakin took support from wherever he could get it and he compromised to achieve outcomes he believed were in the long-term national interest.

With almost unfailing civility and determined optimism, Deakin turned what others might have regarded as a handicap into an opportunity, arguing that his dependence on Labor to pass legislation, and sometimes on members of the Opposition or on independents, had strengthened rather than weakened his achievements. He claimed that it made his government’s legislation not just the achievement of one party, but “organic Australian policy” and the fruit of wide Australian experience. Deakin assumed the existence of a consensual centre which it was the job of politicians to realise in institutions and legislation.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, cooperation between Deakin’s Liberals, Labor, and even at times the Conservatives, created a set of policies and policy assumptions which lasted for three quarters of a century. Let us not think that this achievement was easy nor that it was inevitable. Parliament spent a good deal of its time brawling and stone-walling; there were mischievous amendments and plenty of personal invective.

Deakin was sometimes called Affable Alfred. With bright eyes, a ready smile and a friendly quip, he was charming and courteous to men from all parties, and he used his charm and his skills to try to keep parliament civil.

He got on well with many Labor men, especially with Labor’s first parliamentary leader Chris Watson whom he liked a great deal. He did have some personal antipathies, most notably towards the NSW Free Trader George Reid, but he hid them well, as he did much of his private thoughts and feelings.

If Deakin were insulted he pretended not to notice, if he had to compromise to achieve his ends, he acted as if this is what he had intended all along, if tempers were rising, he relieved the tension with a joke or self-deprecating remark, trying to prevent the escalation of conflict so as to keep open possibilities of cooperation and agreement. Faced with relentless personal attacks after Fusion, he adopted what he described as “Fabian tactics” after the Roman Commander Fabius Maximus, who avoided pitch battles with the invading armies of Hannibal in favour of a war of attrition.  “By studied moderation of tone, refusal to resent insult and by the strict suppression of my own speech and that of my friends so far as I could influence them,” he wrote, “I let the storm beat upon us until it died of inanition while we meekly and patiently waited until their wrath melted away.”

The last of his achievements, which I will mention only briefly, is his strategic vision. In the early parliaments, the Prime Minister was also the Minister for External Affairs.  As Australian foreign policy was contained within imperial foreign policy, this role was mainly confined to dealings with the British government through the Colonial Office. On two occasions, however, Deakin dealt directly with a foreign power, without either the British foreign or colonial office as an intermediary.

The first was when Deakin negotiated directly with the Japanese consul-general over the administration of the immigration act in relation to Japanese nationals. They would be exempted from the dictation test and instead the Japanese government would issue them with a visa which prevented permanent settlement.

To the Colonial Office’s predictable expression of displeasure, Deakin replied that he reserved the right to conduct preliminary and unofficial discussions with foreign diplomats. He used the same defence in 1908 when he “unofficially” invited the American Great White fleet to visit Australia as part of its round the world trip. He made sure that the American government received his unofficial invitation before the British government heard of it, and after he unofficially announced a likely visit from the fleet, the furious British government had little choice but to accede. In these diplomatic dealings Deakin was establishing the first outlines of Australia’s international personality.

And significantly they were in matters relating to the pacific. Deakin early recognised the strategic importance of the Pacific to Australia, and the possibility that Australia’s defence needs may not always be the same as Britain’s or the empire’s.

In my concluding remarks, I want to shift focus from Deakin’s achievements to his character and the nature of the man. Deakin had a deep, though eccentric, religious life. He was generally hostile to organised religion, seeing it as a vehicle for superstition and dogma, yet he kept a prayer diary for thirty years. He was an active spiritualist in his late teens and twenties, attending séances to probe his destiny, writing a book dictated by the spirit of John Bunyan, and becoming an office bearer in the organisation of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists. He met his future wife, Pattie Browne, who was herself a gifted medium, at the Spiritualist Sunday School. Although he was later sceptical about much spiritualist phenomena he retained spiritualism’s core belief in the immortality of the soul and the possibility of communication from the dead.

By 1884, when he began a prayer diary he was no longer actively involved with spiritualism. As he grew older, his religious beliefs deepened and took on greater ethical content, particularly during the 1890s when he was a member of Charles Strong’s Australian Church

and active in the anti-sweating campaigns to reform the Factory Acts.

The prayer diaries, which Deakin maintained, on and off for 30 years, were never intended for other eyes and he would likely have destroyed them had he not been overtaken by dementia at the end of his life. They allow rare access to the inner man and show the depth of his religious sensibility.  All Deakin’s actions were done under the eyes of his loving God. This God could be let down and disappointed, but he was not a wrathful God and in his presence Deakin felt no fear. In his occasional low moments Deakin would reflect that without the belief in a divine purpose for the universe and without faith in the soul’s immortality, it would be easy to live selfishly and in the moment. Deakin did not presume to know what the divine purpose was, only to believe that it existed. It gave him an imagined still point from which to view the small struggles and personal vanities of the political world and the detachment to contemplate the long view of Australia’s historic opportunities and strategic challenges.

Finally, an explanation of the title and the cover. The title, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, was based on one of Deakin’s anonymous letters about Australian politics in the London daily, The Morning Post. Deakin began writing these letters in 1900, signing himself the Australian Correspondent, and he continued them until 1913. It was not uncommon for politicians to write anonymously for the press, but it was uncommon for Prime Ministers to do so, commenting on their own actions, and wondering about their own motivations.

In 1909, as negotiations with Joseph Cook were proceeding over the fusing of the two non-labour parties, he wrote: “For reasons known only to himself, which are a perpetual subject of controversy in our press, Mr Deakin pursues his enigmatic methods of action… in spite of his persistent elusiveness the pressure brought to bear upon him … appears so strong that some unexpected development must be near at hand.”  I must admit that I don’t quite understand the reasons for this playful double life, but it gave me the title.

The cover photo is of Deakin in 1910 on the front beach at Point Lonsdale where he and Pattie had been having their family summer holidays since the 1890s, and where they built a house which is still in the family’s hands. I chose this photo for many reasons. It unsettles the image of Deakin as a bearded worthy – unlike today, it is not usual to see our early politicians togged out for swimming. It shows what a strong, handsome man Deakin was, and his belief in the virtue of exercise. Politics is physically arduous, and he was built for it. And it puts him on the edge of the sea, just inside the heads to Port Philip Bay. Deakin was a romantic. For him nature held religious meaning – the infinity of sea and sky were intimations of the divinity of the universe. Standing on the edge of eternity, he looks back over his shoulder at us.

Deakin is a complicated and sometimes contradictory man. Thinking and writing about him over the past four years, I have come to admire him a great deal, and I have done my best to understand him. I still find him fascinating. I hope you will too.