Robert Menzies and the Visual Arts

Australia’s Commonwealth government has been involved in the arts virtually from federation. The visual arts especially attracted government involvement with the 1912 Fisher Government appointment of a Commonwealth Art Advisory Board which grew from strength to strength in the post-war Menzies era.  Contrary to what many historians have assumed, Australia’s long serving Prime Minister Robert Menzies did much to bring Australia’s art appreciation into the modern era. In her thesis on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, art historian and dealer Judith Pugh uncovered a very different Robert Menzies where the visual arts mattered. Judith Pugh’s best known work is Art, Politics and Living With Clifton Pugh. On Tuesday 18 October 2016, Judith Pugh addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss Robert Menzies’ role in modernising Australia’s collection of visual arts.

ROBERT MENZIES AND THE VISUAL ARTS

JUDITH PUGH

General, Art, and Cultural Histories, and Robert Menzies’ his meticulous biographer, Alan Martin, begin a discussion of the Prime Minister’s involvement in the visual arts with his initiative for an Australian Academy of the Arts. Martin does not follow the trend, but most historians conflate Menzies’ embrace of British culture with a rejection of the value of Australian modern painting and any European or American influence, some very unfortunate remarks he made in private correspondence, Australia’s entries into the Venice Biennale and exhibition at the Tate Gallery while he was prime minister, to dismiss Menzies’ interest in the visual arts.

I want to begin by painting a picture. It is early morning in the small country town, Jeparit, in Victoria. The air is cool, but already the sun is warming the buildings, the trees, the fences: warming both in temperature and in colour, that slow gild that touches each element of a place before the brightness of the day.

The year is 1899, and James Menzies is sorting deliveries to his general store; and his youngest son, five-year-old Robert, comes into the shop from the residence. There are colourful printed posters on the walls, advertising brands of food and household goods and the shelves are an exhibition of commercial art: far fewer packages than fill today’s supermarkets, big tins and bags of produce are elaborately decorated with hand painted images. James takes up a tin of biscuits, Swallow and Ariel, perhaps: “Look at that! See how the artist has captured the bird in flight, but managed to detail its feathers!” This is an enthusiasm of James, because he is a trained coach painter. Such painting required meticulous attention to detail, and a capacity to produce an advertisement, written or drawn, that conveyed a message in an instant. James was brilliant at this; a friend of the entrepreneur Hugh MacKay, James Menzies had christened, and then painted, the Sunshine Harvester, in one of the most memorable images of that era.

Alan Martin explains that the Menzies family moved to Jeparit because James was an obsessive man who worked all hours; his wife was concerned for his health in the cold of Ballarat, and they took on the general store in a building where an uncle produced the paper. The dry Wimmera climate suited James, the family prospered, and James was elected to the Victorian Parliament. I’m not keen on speculation in history, but I am willing to bet on my little image of James Menzies training his alert and intelligent little boy because one can see the effect of Robert Menzies’ visual formation. We know Menzies loved the work of Arthur Streeton; the cool Wimmera mornings developing into high blue skies above golden grasses, the haze of summer heat turning the morning detail into impressionism. We know that Menzies complained of distortion in modernism, not its subject matter and, while uninterested in abstraction (he failed to see the point) he looked for accurate representation in non-abstract painting.

He became a lawyer, where recall and evidence are rigorously tested, and he became a parliamentarian, at a time when wit and repartee were crucial for success.  He was born a citizen of Britain, and just as he turned seven, the British colony in which he lived became part of the Australian nation. I am dwelling on this because much of the criticism directed at Menzies’ taste in art suggests that his embrace of British heritage, together with his enthusiasm for Australian impressionism, especially Streeton, implies a commitment to un-Australian eighteenth century colonial values.  This is more than the occasional remark, it is an embedded view of the man; it is not just a general attitude that his views were conservative. When one of my friends posted a note about this talk on Facebook, a response remarked on his promotion of Aryan ideas, and his ideas about art, as fascist.

A widely-held position is that Menzies actively campaigned to prevent the acceptance of modern art in Australia, and that when Prime Minister he acted against modern Australian artists.

Another widely held view is that the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was a devotee of the arts in general and visual art in particular, and that his enthusiasm led to an increase in spending on the arts, especially visual art, and that without his initiative we would have no National Gallery of Australia.

As so often in history, these ideas don’t bear scrutiny. Menzies was an enthusiast for visual art, his close friends were artists, he collected, he visited exhibitions and galleries at every opportunity, as a parliamentarian and prime minister he promoted Australian art, he learned from his artist friends, his government pumped money into the visual arts through a variety of means, he shrewdly appointed trained professionals as advisors and acted on their advice and, without his initiative, we still might have no National Gallery.

Gough Whitlam did not hang around with artists, his intellectual interests before he became Prime Minister were in the classics and in literature. He was reluctantly persuaded to take an interest in the arts, and he appointed non-artists to the Australia Council, resulting in the continuation of systems and policies that his own party’s strategy had sought to end.

In the last analysis, these impressions are the result of extremely successful public politics. By this I mean that in the case of Menzies, he and his advisors, accepting that they would be forever characterised as conservative men in suits, did nothing to dispel that illusion. While expanding visual arts funding in the most imaginative ways they accepted the characterisation of dull retrograde officials, because this protected the program.

The campaign to show artists supporting Whitlam’s election was developed in order to turn a negative image of the ALP from an incompetent pack of institutionalised warring bullies into a lively, engaged and modern political party. Whitlam did not ever understand the policy that underlay the campaign. He at first refused to adopt the campaign and then, having accepted its efficacy, ignored its basis in structure, and took to the adulation of openings and opening nights. I know this because I designed the campaign.

The historical narrative mainly focuses on the latter part of the twentieth century.  I’ve remarked that Robert Menzies spent much of his leisure in the art world, with his artist friends.  Another Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, also hung around with artists, and it was the structure established by Fisher that allowed Menzies to expand funding for the Visual Arts and to plan the national gallery.

An account of the Australian State and the visual arts begins with the artist Tom Roberts, and with a painting. The Commonwealth parliament met for the first time in the temporary national capital, Melbourne. Tom Roberts painted the opening ceremony in the Exhibition Building. His triumphant painting of formal, British Australia is known as The Big Picture. It is perhaps the best-known twentieth Century picture in Australia. He wrote:

I was able to see that immense gathering of people from all over Australia, and from many parts of the world. It was very solemn and great. The heads on the floor looked like a landscape stretching away.

The grandeur of the picture conveys Roberts’ emotional commitment to the occasion:

A document? yes? and something more. The royalty and its suite of governors, of states and the members, democracy — with the people – That’s the Empire, and all this meets under the one roof. And that’s what I’m painting.

He was also painting the lobbying opportunity of all time.

Roberts’ commission (by a group of businessmen, not the government) was a happy coincidence of self and public interest. The agreement eventually provided for Roberts to include 250 recognisable individuals. Thus it offered the opportunity to introduce his idea that the Commonwealth begin a program to “memorialise” eminent Australians.  The Speaker of the House made Roberts “an honorary member of the mess” in the Victorian Parliament House, where the Commonwealth Parliament sat during the search for a location for, and establishment of, the National Capital.  He judiciously included newspaper proprietors and representatives of each religious denomination to fill his gallery of miniatures; their sittings, too, normalised the idea to people who formed public opinion. His subjects could imagine themselves memorialised; this alone rendered opposition to the idea unlikely, and when the Memorials proposal was brought to the parliament it was familiar to everyone of influence in the country.

Roberts also lobbied directly. In March 1910, he wrote from London to Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, who had become a close friend as he was painting the Big Picture. Roberts argued:

Now this is important, and must appeal to you, and it is the duty of the present for the future. I don’t need to press this on you or say more than – what would America give for authentic records of its founders? And, that there is no time to lose. …

He went on:

After a lot of thinking I make this appeal to you to act in the matter without any delay.

Deakin lost an election on 13 April 1910 to the Australian Labor Party, led by Andrew Fisher. Roberts wrote to Deakin commiserating with him and going on to say:

About my last letter to you and the portraits… Still, I am glad to have made the offer, and hope still that you will have the idea carried out if in some other way – you owe it to those that come after.

Deakin took the matter further. On 2 December that year Roberts wrote in reply to a letter from Deakin. It is clear the proposal was not simply to get work for himself:

Many thanks for the copy of Mr Fisher’s note. Longstaff seems to be about to return to see his Father; this would be a great chance for the scheme to be commenced at once. I do feel so strongly that the next few years must in the ordinary course of things leave gaps, with a want of proper records, that it is I submit, the duty of you all to provide for. I haven’t written to Mr Fisher, as I could not do so more strongly than I did to you, and if you can be of one mind on this matter, it will be good.

Another relationship in the small social field that was the Melbourne art world carried the idea forward. Andrew Fisher, now prime minister, discussed the suggestion not only with Deakin, but probably with other artists now well known, including his close friend, the painter Hugh Paterson. Fisher’s office was next door to the Grosvenor Chambers at 9 Collins Street, built as artists’ studios by Paterson’s brother Charles, and which housed many artists over time.

So a bi-partisan policy was adopted when, on 22 December 1911, the Executive Council of the just ten-year-old Commonwealth of Australia resolved to form a “Committee to consult and provide advice in reference to the expenditure of votes for the Historic Memorials of Representative Men”. The advice was to be provided to the parliament.The members of the committee were (and indeed still are) the Prime Minister, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Vice President of the Federal Executive Council, the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate.

The program of memorials was the trigger, as we’ll see, for extensive engagement of the Australian State with the Visual Arts; and the decision taken in its first meeting, to commission portraits of every Speaker, the Senate President, the Prime Minister, and the Governor General is still in force today. Australia has a history, I think unique, of funding of the visual arts: a direct engagement between the State and art.

At its second meeting the Historic Memorials Committee (HMC) decided to appoint a Board of professionally trained artists to give them advice. It was this structure; a powerful bi-partisan parliamentary committee being advised by a group of artists, trained to look at art but also familiar with what we would now call industry practice, the business of art, that began the national collection, and, crucially, enabled Robert Menzies to use his enthusiasm for visual art to expand that industry.

Almost as soon as he was appointed the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board member Gother Mann shared a Sydney ferry ride with Fisher and pointed out that while the Memorials project helped portrait painters, landscape painters were not being assisted. A competition to paint the Canberra site was promptly announced, with a prize of about $30,000 in today’s money. The Board actually had no power to advise, or the HMC to act, on matters beyond memorials, but from the time of their appointment the Board accepted gifts, bought pictures and sculptures, commissioned presentations, and lobbied for a National Gallery.

Martin describes Menzies’ first visit to Britain, and quotes his very experiential discovery of the place and culture, through his visually-oriented diary. Commentators have taken this to mean his connection, his sense of enthusiasm, was inappropriate for a twentieth century Australian. Another Australian with an interest in history, art and politics, a Communist Party member during the war years, an intellectual, having recorded his explorations of various ports en route to London (none of which stimulated illegal or even flamboyant behaviour) recounts that when his ship docked at Tilbury in 1948:

I felt something had to be done to mark our arrival, so I went up to A deck and waited for a moment when none of the ship’s officers was in sight and clambered up the ladder of the main mast to the crow’s nest to see the Thames estuary spread out before me on all sides and the City of London smokily in the distance.

This was more than ten years after Menzies’ first visit, and after the abandonment of our troops in Singapore and in Greece during the Second World War had contributed to cynicism about our British connections. This account was written by Bernard Smith, the most sophisticated Australian analyst of history and culture in the twentieth century. If Bernard Smith is affected in this way by the idea of Britain, acts to make it real and happily reports his exaltation, there must have been something in this sense of connection. That it gripped Menzies’ imagination, and shaped his political opinions, is undeniable, but that it was an aberration or that it was somehow wrong, seems obtuse, and distracts from an analysis of his role in the arts during his prime ministership.

On his return to Melbourne, Menzies opened an exhibition where he described his visits to galleries in the United Kingdom and Europe. He referred to “singularly ill-drawn” pictures he’d seen. This was to be his theme for many years. On returning from a further London trip he established an Academy of Australian Art, to promote standards in art. I’m not going to detail that debate, because it involves the helices in crucible of the Melbourne art world of left-right twined about modern-traditional paintings, and amateur-professional authority.

The dominant narrative of the art world in this period is about the Heide bohemians, about the struggle for acceptance of the “modern” artists associated with Heide, in particular Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. For this reason, the broader church and the Britishness of the art world in Australia is underestimated, and Menzies’ promotion of the idea of an academy is weighted with pompousness and rigidity. But the story is not as simple.

The idea of what is “modern” becomes crucial here. What Menzies saw in paintings that used the ideas from Les Demoiselles D’Avignon and its cubist developments was a challenge to the very idea of representation. This is because that painting does challenge representation, modernism, as Bernard Smith points out, is a critique of modernity. I would point out here that Menzies, even in the controversial speech he made when launching the Victorian Artists Society annual exhibition, in which he complained of “much” modern art, was opening a show. As Martin pointed out, his “much” came to be interpreted as all: but Menzies, the witty parliamentarian and lawyer, expected (it seems) to be debating and to have a robust but not angry debate. His responses to his critics in the letters columns shows this, and that he was on familiar terms with the correspondents, and what is more, that he feels the criticism.  I think the response backed him into a corner, from which he emerged much later when tactful artists who supported modernism had spent time with him. His romantic view of art, albeit old-fashioned, did not prevent him from realising that times and art had changed, and to appoint modern art supporters to the CAAB, once the elderly members still active on it had died.

The Academy debate coincided with the re-instatement of the CAAB/HMC program of commissions, which had been suspended in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Art, after all, is a luxury.

On the 26 April 1939, following the death of Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies was elected leader of the UAP and became Prime Minister, and the next meeting of the HMC took place on 6 June 1939.  The Committee agreed to recommend £1000 be provided to acquire outstanding examples of work the Board saw in galleries, “in accordance with the policy of encouraging Australian art”.

Funding for a National Gallery was suggested by the CAAB, and “The Prime Minister, Colonel Bell, Mr Curtin and Senator Collings expressed views supporting the idea of a national gallery of Australian art at Canberra.” An insouciant notion, given the country was about to go to war: but the Board and the Committee were looking to the Peace. Menzies told the meeting that the question would be brought up at the Budget meetings.

By the time arrangements were in place for a meeting in September 1941, Menzies had resigned the prime ministership. Arthur Fadden was prime minister and in the chair, and the Committee, considering the matter of the gallery, felt “in the present circumstances it was desirable to defer action”.  In 1941, Curtin was present at the meeting and was still leader of the Opposition; it seems that while he and Menzies shared an idea of the importance of art, Fadden did not. In a few weeks, Curtin would become prime minister.

The HMC next met on Thursday 17 February 1944 – Curtin, in the chair, Menzies Opposition leader. At the end of the meeting, Ashton made a case for a government architect to go abroad to study lighting and wall colours for a gallery. Both Curtin and Menzies commented that such a building should have “distinctive architectural features” and the Committee again decided to draw the attention of the government to the necessity for early planning for a National Art gallery for Canberra. Item six was so remarkable that it is headlined in the minutes: Suggested portraits of two original lady members of the federal parliament.

The Executive Council minute announcing the establishment of the HMC in 1911 had declared that the memorials were to be “of Representative Men”. In August 1943, Dorothy Tangney, an ALP candidate, was elected to the Senate from Western Australia. At the same election, Enid Lyons, who had been widowed when her husband Joseph Lyons died in office in 1939, was elected to the House of Representatives as member for Darwin, in Tasmania. Like her husband, Lyons represented the UAP, which was to become the Liberal Party.

Opposition Leader in the Upper House Senator McLeay, while not opposing the proposal to record “the historical significance of the election of the first women Members of Parliament”, thought their painting could reasonably be postponed.  This was not necessarily a device to delay the portraits: it was February 1944 and Australia was still engaged in World War II. The Prime Minister responded by reminding the group that the “Commonwealth already possessed a number of portraits which were part of the history of the Commonwealth” and he considered it appropriate for the Committee to secure portraits of the original lady members. Mr Menzies (leader of the Opposition) agreed it was an historic event and added that he would prefer the item not be deferred. The Speaker thought that as an historic event was being commemorated the portraits should be secured as close as possible to the occasion…as practicable.” The decision was made: not only to paint the lady (sic) parliamentarians but to have them painted by lady portrait painters. It is clear that Menzies’ (and Curtin’s) priorities are with artists and art.

The records of the Committee and Board during the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrate the disjuncture between the modernists and their supporters, who began to demand institutional attention, and the advisors to the politicians who had brought the country through the Depression and the War. G.V.F. Mann, appointed in 1912, and Will Ashton, appointed in 1917, can be argued to have remained too long on the CAAB. I suggest that their interest in Australian impressionism and in history allowed the politicians, and the society with which they were dealing, time to catch up with modern ideas.

This lack of interest in the more contemporary art world, of itself, has raised questions about the Board’s engagement with the art world. Once J.S. MacDonald was appointed to the Board, its reputation was bound to be affected.  I emphasise this because the notion of the Board’s conservatism re-enforces inaccurate ideas about Robert Menzies, and his Board. My argument is that the Board’s first personnel were acceptably in tune with their times, but two members, although gradually broadening their attitudes, rather outlived those times. J.S. Macdonald, who happened to be a great friend of Menzies, but who was quite mad and an outdated aberration, was appointed Chair by Chifley, in 1948: appointed it should be noted.  However, the advantage of the Board’s conservativism, in a time of social change, allowed it to persuade politicians and the public to build a national collection; that the nation needed a national gallery, and should be planning for it even in wartime; and also normalised the remarkable notion that the State had a role in stimulating the local art market.

It should be remembered that elsewhere, national collections came to the modern state from royal collections after revolutions, or by donation: either from monarchs, aristocrats, merchants or industrialists. These collections were ordinarily put into the hands of external curators. In Australia, the State paid, and the State managed the collection directly, until the National Gallery was established. The conservatism of the purchases and commissions in the late 1940s assisted in rendering unremarkable what was in fact an unusual, if not radical, arrangement.

Oddly, condescension and hostility to the Board is, in general, to the Board as constituted in the period after the death of Mann and MacDonald, which renders even more complex the task of untangling the motive for these attitudes.

When Gother Mann, appointed in 1912 but still a member in 1948, died within a month of the member Louis McCubbin dying, Menzies appointed his friend MacDonald chair, but added two modern supporters, Daryl Lindsay and Robert Campbell.  It was not until MacDonald died that he also appointed two apparently dull practising artists, William Dargie and Douglas Pratt, who also supported modernism. Cleverly, he left the loveable old Will Ashton, a painter of seascapes, the last pre-war survivor, as Chair. This effectively masked the attitudes of the rest of the Board members.

Robert Campbell, at this point, had been putting together a touring exhibition. He had chosen from among the best-known contemporary Australian names: William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Lloyd Rees, Sidney Nolan, Donald Friend, Justin O’Brien, Jean Bellette, Constance Stokes, Arthur Boyd, Godfrey Miller, Frank Hinder and Ralph Balson – the last three were abstract painters. Menzies made no comment about this. As part of the Coronation celebrations in London, the show was to tour major provincial galleries in the UK. The work of Nolan, Dobell and Drysdale was then to be sent to Venice to represent Australia (through the portal of the British entry) in the 1954 Biennale.

The new members were anxious about this: I think not at the names, but at the response of the traditional societies, of which they were both members: and they were right. This was a time of change, and the conservatives were unaware their time was almost over: they could make a fuss, and did. Not amused, they held protest meetings and wrote to the press:

The president of the R.A.S., Mr. Eric Langker, said last night that the twelve artists selected all exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society or the Society of Artists. Speakers at the Royal Art Society’s meeting called the paintings “the worst ever gathered in one place” and a “deification of horror”.

No response is recorded from Menzies or the Board; Lindsay and Campbell, as well as Dargie, were used to controversy.

I won’t go into details, but this led to an unfortunate display at the 1958 biennale, which has been seized upon by his critics to paint Menzies and the Board as fascists promoting Aryan ideals parallel of those of Hitler. The same was said of the Tate show in 1963 and the murals installed in Australia House. At this point, post-war, the Americans and Soviet Union were at ideological war in the arts – the USA Arts establishment and the government using market forces to promote action painting and abstract expressionism as the sole form of acceptable art; for the Soviets it was socialist realism.  This new ideology affects analysis of Menzies’ contribution, particularly by younger academics and writers.

I am not going to dwell on the details, but now simply outline Menzies’ engagement and initiatives in the visual arts from the early 1960s.

On 31 May 1955, a full meeting of the HMC with the full Board considered the first re-design of the Coat of Arms, conducted the usual review of commissions and purchases, and again returned to the question of the gallery. Everyone agreed it should be established as soon as possible. Evatt, present as leader of the Opposition, also pointing out that the collection should be catalogued. The Board meeting the previous day had considered all these matters and also met with the Secretary of the Department of Immigration to discuss the design of a stamp to commemorate the arrival of the one-millionth post-war migrant, and of the naturalisation certificate.

The stamp design had to “symbolise the contribution of the new citizens to Industry and Culture and that the motif of the assistance of New Australians in the defence of Australia should be brought out”.

Ten years earlier, in letters to Lionel Lindsay, Menzies had made very unpleasant remarks about migrants. In 1955, he brought the expertise of the Board to the stamp design and to the design of the naturalisation certificate. The design of the naturalisation certificate was required to:

• (a) be of the greatest possible significance to the new citizen
• (b) have artistic merit
• (c) be dignified and
• (d) its official character should be apparent

This confirms Menzies’ understanding of his own culture had altered.

The Board from this time was given responsibility, by Menzies, for art and design questions in all areas of Commonwealth responsibility, including, for example, the National Library and the Australian National University. On 17 October 1956, the HMC considered a re-design of the Coat of Arms by the artist Daphne Mayo. On this occasion, and when arranging commissions for Australia House, the Board can be seen actively to look for women artists and to be considering their work. They also began to purchase work to decorate official residences and embassies and to commission murals in Australia House.

A short story provides an insight into the careful politics of the Board and prime minister. In an oral history interview in 1978 with fellow Australian National Gallery Board member James Gleeson, Dargie relates the story of Dobell’s Gilmore and the HMC. Having encouraged Dame Mary Gilmore to donate her picture, on the way to the meeting with the Committee, Dargie asked Robert Campbell if he thought Menzies, who was no fan of Dobell, would reject the painting. Campbell replied, “Of course not, everyone knows it’s Dobell’s best portrait.”

When they arrived in the Prime Minister’s room for the meeting Evatt, leader of the Opposition, asked why the portrait was there. Told it was recommended for the National collection, Evatt said, “Everyone knows it’s the worst portrait Dobell ever painted.” Menzies then said that if the leader of the Opposition opposed its acquisition he had to concur. Thus Evatt, in his one intervention in the acquisition of Australian art for the national collection, contradicted the mythology of his reputation as a great supporter of Australian art.

Dargie goes on to remark to Gleeson that, having lost the opportunity to have the painting accepted, for months he then had to put up with artists abusing him at openings for refusing it. This story emphasises that the feelings or dignity of Board members or the politicians were irrelevant to the long term success of the project; that although the politicians had made a very regrettable decision in refusing their advice, the interests of Australian art were served by accepting the blame and bearing the label of reactionary, rigid and conservative. This understanding and acceptance of political reality allowed the process of expanding the collection to proceed without attention being drawn to the resources it consumed, at a time when public funds were still paying for the Olympics, infrastructure such as interstate highways and the Snowy River irrigation scheme were mounting, and when public attention was focused on Royal visits, the Davis Cup, and Test cricket.

The question arises as to why the critics and the Academy did not at the time, and do not now, observe that from this point on the CAAB was supporting a fast growing art economy.  Menzies’ biographers, too, do not discuss the extensive program of exhibitions of Australian art travelling the world or that he sought, through the Board, to promote a high standard of execution of imagery by using its expertise to advise Commonwealth departments. These included the Post Master General’s Department, the Departments of Primary Industry, of Immigration, of Education, and the Department of Works, through which it installed murals in aircraft terminals in Sydney and Melbourne and the National Capital Development Commission through which it installed sculpture and murals throughout the ACT. It placed work in Commonwealth Offices across Australia and actively acquired and accepted gifts for the National collection.

Menzies, like Andrew Fisher and Curtin, allowed the Board to work in a grey constitutional area. While by the 1960s there was a budget allocation for promoting art, the courts had not entirely resolved questions as to the delegation of ministerial powers. Menzies, a constitutional lawyer, was well aware of this.

The clearest indication that Menzies was prepared to accept modern art is that he delegated to the Board his own ministerial authority to make contracts. This is demonstrated in the minutes of the Board’s meeting on 23 June 1961. In January that year, the Board had raised not only the question of its members’ expenses, but also of a realistic budget for purchase and an efficient system for such purposes. The Secretary reported that Menzies had agreed an expanded budget, and:

… the Prime Minister had a agreed new principles which would have the effect of conferring on the Board certain executive powers.  These included powers to purchase paintings which might form part of the National Collection or to hang in Government establishments as well as for overseas posts, and to assist exhibitions going abroad or coming from overseas for circulation in Australia. Under this item, selection did not necessarily need to be made by the Board. The Board could consider each request and decide whether assistance should be made available and the extent of any such assistance.

This delegation by Menzies of “certain executive powers” was remarkable.  Firstly, he had the confidence that his delegation would not be a legal or political problem; that is, as a constitutional lawyer he knew there was a risk in delegating his power to purchase, but stood by his political judgement.  Second, he delegated this power, despite having on occasion not accepted Board recommendations for purchase: he had decided to suspend his own judgment as to artistic style, and to defer to the Board’s expertise.

Menzies may not have wanted to collect avant-garde work, but he came to accept that all forms of contemporary art had validity, and that his experts would choose, on technical grounds, the best work for the national collection. Enquiries to his daughter have revealed that he owned a Ray Crooke, who was undeniably a modern artist.

Third, he delegated his purchasing power in a system that functioned on oral contracts; that is, the purchaser indicated the desire to buy a work, the seller agreed, the work was sold. The Commonwealth government, indeed any government, now requires, if not tenders for particular work, or for the appointment of a particular supplier, at the very least a work order or a requisition in writing. In the 1960s, such purchase systems were on paper in at least triplicate and, simply because they were on paper which required delivery of documents from one place to another, were often protracted. The new arrangements avoided delay.

Tom Roberts suggested the Memorials, and lobbied for the idea while he painted what he called The Big Picture. I look at that picture of politicians and think of lobbying, of careful politics, aiming for an outcome achieving that outcome.

I want to end with a story, the story of a file.

There is a small file in Sir William Dargie’s papers in the Australian National Library. The date is 1971. There is a letter from the Commonwealth Department of Works to the young (and not at all conservative) artist John Firth Smith, requiring him to remove his murals at Tullamarine and Mascot airports, and to return the fee he has been paid for them. The murals are not only “not in accordance with the sketches approved by the architect and the committee”, but “images of a dismembered aeroplane are considered quite unsuitable for the departure lounges”.

The second letter is to Dargie. The letter to Firth Smith is withdrawn. The Commonwealth will remove and store the murals at its own cost and they understand that to paint them over would “not be in the interest of the Commonwealth”.  Dargie had communicated with the Department and the interest of the artist is made to seem consonant with the interest of the Commonwealth (with which it manifestly was not).

This is the result of Menzies delegating his authority and letting his appointed artists use their expertise. It shows his capacity to judge people and to act on principle and allow the visual arts to expand. Paradoxically, the evidence of the success of his work is that it remains hidden. Menzies and his advisors managed to work behind the scenes to subsidise the visual arts: by allowing their image to appear reactionary they were able to engage with up-to-the-minute arts practice. Of course, Menzies and his advisors got on: close personal connection, sharing the same social field, were then crucial to successful lobbying; constant good manners, no public disagreement, and taking the long term view. For the visual arts, the politics were crucial. Roberts’ painting is known as The Big Picture.  When planning a campaign, it is as well to keep The Big Picture in mind.