ROBERT MENZIES AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Clifton Pugh painted Gough Whitlam’s official portrait hanging in Parliament House. Married to Clifton at the time, Judith Pugh was part of the vibe that Whitlam was the great mover and shaker in the Australian Arts world. Since then, Pugh has discovered that in fact Robert Menzies was ahead of Whitlam in his contribution to the Arts. In fact, Dr Pugh’s doctoral research led her to conclude that Menzies, in building on a foundation laid by Andrew Fisher, made the greatest contribution to the visual arts of any Australian Prime Minister. Judith Pugh addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 13 September 2023 to explain what she discovered.

ROBERT MENZIES AND THE VISUAL ARTS

JUDITH PUGH

The focus on Robert Menzies’ involvement with, and attitude to, the Visual Arts, almost always focuses on debates in 1936. This is especially because, as Commonwealth Attorney-General, Menzies promoted the establishment of an Australian Academy of Art, and – opening a show at the Victorian Artists Society – criticised “some modern art”. Menzies’ critics overlook the fact that the politics of the art scene were so complex that his Academy was joined not only by traditional or conservative artists but by modern artists such as Margaret Preston. The impression of Menzies provided by these critics, indeed by writers when considering his attitude to art, is not only that he intended to control the production of works of visual art by imposing traditional forms and restricting innovation, but that he did so as an outsider to the artworld.

Consider this anecdote. The Scottish artist William Frater, known as “Jock”, a lively confident figure in the Melbourne artworld, claimed that when he came to live in Australia in 1914 he had “introduced” modern art to the country. Easy acquaintance among people in the artworld was inevitable in mid-20th century Australia; the small group of artists, critics, buyers, art teachers and students would meet at shows in the few venues then exhibiting work. Younger artists, poets and writers met in cafes and pubs, (which then closed at 6.00pm) but bohemia met respectability at art world openings, and at parties such as one given by Melbourne architect John Scarborough in 1949. Menzies was then Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Commonwealth Parliament and apologised for arriving late, explaining that he had been delayed by important business – arrangements for his son Ken’s marriage.  Jock Frater, also a guest at the party, remarked: “What! Do you call marriage arrangements important business?” Menzies replied: “Maybe not for you, Jock. I doubt whether there’s been a marriage in the Frater family for 100 years. But the Menzies are fussy.”

Frater was a liked and respected artist; if Menzies’ remark had been controversial, it might well have had wider circulation, in the artworld if not the political sphere. Frater’s comment, and Menzies’ response, imply an affectionate familiarity between host and guests. Launching Anne Henderson’s book Menzies versus Evatt here at the Sydney Institute last month, John Howard remarked that while both men were lawyers, Menzies was the more successful politician. Political success requires reading the room; the lawyer in Menzies would be aware that the response could be taken not only as an insult but defamatory but, of course, Menzies knew he was making an amusing response in a friendly context: he was very comfortable in the artworld, after all, his father was an artist.

James Menzies, Robert’s father, was a coach painter. The label “coach painter” is Victorian in the sense of the century, not the place: this label meant, effectively, illustrator; a trained artist. James was great friends with Hugh McKay, the entrepreneurial manufacturer of farm machinery, and James produced advertising images for McKay’s company; among others, the image advertising the Sunshine Harvester. Audience members of a certain age will recall the Ad – others should should Google the phrase. James was an enthusiastic generous man who constantly helped people. Kate Menzies, Robert’s mother, became worried that James’ health was at risk from the harsh Ballarat climate. The family moved to Jeparit, a town in the dry, hot Wimmera, where Kate’s journalist uncle ran the local paper. Robert was born there in in 1894.

Robert Menzies’ early childhood was thus under the intense Australian sun, where miles of golden wheat ripened against high blue Australian Impressionist skies. Furthermore, the culture was replete in those days with artist-designed imagery. In a general store, in a country town, the decorated tins and packets arrived in equally picturesque vans. Commercial illustration was minute, precise, decorative, and illusion was everything. One imagines the obsessive father pointing out the intricacies, the flaws, the accuracy of the images. I suggest that James’ expertise in illustration focussed his son’s formation in art, and this explains Robert Menzies’ view that excellence in art involved eloquent, accurate representation of recognisable forms.

When James was elected to the State Parliament to represent the rural district, the family moved to South Yarra in Melbourne. Robert chose Wesley instead of Scotch for his secondary education, studied law at Melbourne University, and practised at the Melbourne Bar before his election to the Commonwealth Parliament. The extraordinary bounty of the Victorian Goldrush had provided cities with gilded glorious buildings and a boulevard of elegant houses along St Kilda Rd and ebullient celebrations of commercial official and domestic architectural styles along the route to Melbourne University from South Yarra. The University itself and the surrounding suburbs re-enforced the coherence of graceful traditional forms which surrounded the visually alert and thoughtful young politician.  In 1920, Menzies married Pattie Leckie, whose father had been a member of both the State and Commonwealth Parliaments. He joined the Savage Club, with many artist members. When defeated in the 1919 election, John Leckie had set up Leckie and Gray, lithographic printers and canister makers. The visual arts were part of the culture of the Menzies family.

At the time of his exchange with Jock Frater, Menzies was a member of the Historic Memorials Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament. This powerful bi-partisan committee, consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, and the Leaders of the Opposition in the Senate and the House, had been established in 1911 – when Andrew Fisher was Prime Minister and Alfred Deakin Leader of the Opposition – to advise the Commonwealth Parliament on “Memorials of Representative Men”. In 1912, the Committee had appointed a Board of trained artists, to provide it with advice on the project. The Board was known as the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. Fisher’s best friend was Hugh Paterson, one of a family of artist brothers who’d migrated from Scotland: the best-known being John Ford Paterson. Hugh Paterson (who designed the Australian Coat of Arms) was appointed the first Chair of the Board.

The initiative for the Committee came from Tom Roberts, who was known to every member of the first Commonwealth parliament as he was commissioned to paint the opening ceremony; during the long toil he was given privileged access to the facilities of the Victorian Parliamentary building in which the Commonwealth parliament sat: the commission included a requirement for recognisable images of each parliamentarian. Opposite the Parliament, at the top of Collins St, was a building of artist studios. MPs mixed easily with artists, the economy of the visual arts was part of the taken-for-granted of the precinct. Malcolm Shepherd, Secretary to Deakin, Watson, Reid and Fisher — and whose appointment as secretary of the newly-formed Prime Minister’s Department was announced in the same 1911 Government Gazette as the formation of the Historic Memorials Committee — remarks in his memoir that the decision to form the Committee was taken to assist artists. The initiative was the first Commonwealth funding for the arts, providing the country with a painted record of the “eminent men” who founded the Commonwealth.  The appointment of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board in 1912 established a precedent that prevailed until 1973; that trained artists advised the government on matters relating to the Visual Arts.

By 1949, Menzies had already made a “non-traditional” intervention in the work of the Historic Memorials Committee. Apart from an early competition to paint the Canberra Valley before the city was built (and which assisted landscape artists) only portraits of Governors-General, Senate Presidents, Speakers of the House and Prime Ministers were commissioned. The committee had embarked on a program of buying portraits of or commissioning paintings of other historic figures, but in this program no female images had been suggested. Then, 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, Prime Minister 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.

Prime Minister John Curtin suggested to the Historic Memorials Committee that the two women should be painted. The 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, for Australia, the war could rightly be seen as a priority. However, Curtin responded by reminding the group, as the minutes record:

… the Commonwealth already possessed a number of portraits which were part of the history of the Commonwealth. Although since 1902 women had been eligible to vote and to stand for the Federal parliament, in forty-one years none had been elected to either House, let alone held office 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 parliamentarians but to have them painted by lady portrait painters.

Following Curtin’s death, Ben Chifley became Prime Minister, and it was Chifley, a Labor Prime Minister, whose appointment to the Board of J.S. MacDonald encouraged an image of its deep conservatism. As Geoffrey Serle explains in his Australian Dictionary of Biography article, MacDonald was blindly hostile to nearly all twentieth-century painting and much before.

There was however some advantage to the Board’s apparent conservatism, and I suggest Menzies understood this. The advantage, in a time of war and social change, was that it enabled it to persuade politicians and the public to build a national collection; that the nation needed a national gallery, indeed should be planning for it even in wartime; and also normalised the notion that the Commonwealth had a role in collecting for that gallery by directly subsidising the local art market.

On 19 December 1949, as post-war austerity gradually gave way to optimism, Robert Menzies, now 55 years of age, took office as Prime Minister for the second time. The modern artworld did not celebrate. Menzies’ mid-1930s proposal for an Australian Academy of Art, coupled with contemporary interpretations of the remarks he made about modern art, had played into the complex politics of the Australian artworld and had established an idea of him as an inflexible traditionalist.

Menzies certainly came to the Melbourne artworld with a distinct idea of excellence in art, and he argued publicly for that view. However, the records reveal his actions on the Historic Memorials Committee and interaction with the Board show him recognising and supporting change, establishing the Board as central to the visual arts and the image of the Commonwealth, and underpinning his commitment with remarkable powers and funding.

I want now to turn from Menzies and the Committee and the Board, and to consider the 1972 election of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister.

In 1970, I had been teaching in the poverty-stricken state school system in Victoria and wanted it to change. I decided to join the Australian Labor Party. On the morning of my attending my first meeting, Clyde Cameron had supported the intervention by the Federal ALP in the affairs of the Victorian branch of the party. He (who would be the most sophisticated and efficient member of the Whitlam Cabinet) had decided that the principle of a decent education for all children was more important than the principle of not allowing government funds for religious schools. Within the settler Australian population at that time, there was a deep religious divide, affecting every facet of daily life. Cameron’s choice delivered the death blow to that division. In the early 21st century the issue of our living together in Australia is about what multiculturalism means, about fundamentalism of all kinds, about political correctness, about dealing with racism and religious intolerance. One forgets the religious attitudes that shaped generations of Australians. Left-wing in Victoria was an ideological position that implied rigidity, bureaucratic control and utter dullness.  The population in a prosperous country for which the conscription for the Vietnam war was in fact the source of ideological division ¾ where the grey conservatism of the depression and World War was receding with the incorporation not only of European lifestyles of migrants but also fashions and attitudes from America ¾ wanted a change.

It appeared at first that John Gorton, Prime Minister after Menzies’ successor Harold Hold disappeared, would steer that change. Gorton seemed pleased to take the advice of the CAAB, and under his Prime Ministership the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School were set up. His strategic mistake, from the point of view of the Coalition’s alliance with the arts, was to set up the Australian Council for the Arts under the ownership of Herbert “Nugget” Coombes, that archetypal controlling public servant, and hand to it all arts but the visual, and also the crafts. Coombes, with Charles Moses from the ABC and newspaperman John Pringle, had set up the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, in 1954. A colonial Keynes without Keynes’ deep connections to the arts, Coombes saw himself as more capable at managing or distributing funds than anyone actually working in the arts. The Trust was the only way in which a tax-deductible donation could be made at the time to the performing arts, and a donor could not even specify that the donation be for a specific project or theatre company.

Nugget was a centralist, whose idea of the role of government patronage was to bring culture to the masses, to “educate” the population rather than develop local voice. Coombes constituted himself patron and made funding decisions based on an outdated ideology that valorised high culture and meant traditional. In general, apart from The One Day of the Year and The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the theatres subsidised by the Trust reproduced British and, on rare occasion, European or American drama. This situation was intolerable for professionals who had struggled for years to develop an Australian voice, especially in the theatre. There is a curious resonance now, as our actors leave for Los Angeles and our television ads are made in America, with the issues that were so important to artists in Australia in the 1970s. The concept of subsidising high culture, as opposed to Australian culture, affected playwrights, composers, and film makers who wanted to produce an original Australian voice, about Australian ideas on local subjects.

When Gorton was dumped by his party in 1971, the Coalition lost the populist edge that went with his larrikin image. Despite its record on arts funding, under Billy McMahon the Coalition seemed mired in the past. But, in 1970, the film initiatives and indeed Gorton himself, made the Coalition look relevant, as though it were loosening up in the right direction.

My then partner Clifton Pugh had agreed to chair an Arts Policy Committee for the Victorian branch of the party.  The committee was established as an initiative of Actor’s Equity by Clyde Holding, then Leader of the ALP Opposition in the State Parliament. The plan was to have a policy to take power from Coombes. The model adopted was for an Australia Council made up of the chairs of boards of professionally trained people across the arts, funding to be provided on the advice of professionals.

The challenge to have the ALP elected, so that Australia could disentangle from the Vietnam war, engage with the new world order, offer education to everyone and support medical treatment and other progressive initiatives, especially in the arts, was to get the public to identify the ALP and Whitlam with the lively colourful future. But how?

The deadly bureaucratic dullness of the Victorian ALP was a public relations challenge. Then, on the 10 February 1972, a journalist from Sydney rang. Clif’s portrait of the retiring Deputy Prime Minister, Black Jack McEwen, had won the Archibald Prize. Clif understood what would happen next.

Journalists will come, television and from the papers. They’ll want a drink; I’ll get some beer and some champagne. When they’ve finished with me they’ll want to talk to you. Now listen. Don’t be shy and don’t be indignant, whatever they ask you. Think about an interview as if you are paying for advertising. Especially on television, but on radio or with a magazine or newspaper reporter. Stop before you answer, and think “How do I use this question to say what I want?” They just want a story, something to film or record or write about. Just keep thinking “What would it cost to buy this much time or space?” Think about issues. Always remember, you may not like what the interviewer asks or says, but you are not talking to the interviewer. You are talking to the audience. Use the question to say what you want.

When he came back from the pub with beer and champagne I suggested something else, saying: “If you want to use this for the ALP, you should link McEwen, whom everyone respects, with Whitlam. McEwen’s resigning anyway, and you can remind them of this and say you’re going to paint the next Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. You can link him with environment and the war.”

Our local ALP candidate was Race Mathews, Whitlam’s principal private secretary. I rang him, and Whitlam agreed to sit for his portrait. While I handed out drinks, Clif spoke to camera in his studio about art and the Vietnam War, and then walked into the bush to talk about the environment. He was filmed, recorded and photographed repeating the mantra over and over “Next Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam; Next Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam.”

I needed a consistent story to change the image of the party. We went to Adelaide to paint Don Dunstan, and he agreed to support the arts policy at the Federal conference, but added we needed the Treasurer or the Prime Minister to be Minister for the Arts, adding: “In pre-budget meetings a weak Minister, an outer-Cabinet Minister, or one whose area isn’t strategic, will lose in the share-out of the cake. But no-one will fight either the Prime Minister or the Treasurer for money, so you tuck the Arts under their wings and you’re okay.”

Maybe I could kill two birds with one stone. If I could add the glamour of the arts, particularly the entertainment industry, to the substance of ALP policies, that just might give the party a new image, while persuading them that the arts were the way to attract the attention of the swinging voter. Whitlam, fast on his feet, a barrister, educated, was the obvious choice. So, I told him, when he was sitting for his portrait the first time, that we wanted him to be Minister for the Arts. He replied: “No, I can’t. I’ll be Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and I might have to be Treasurer. I can’t do it.”

I thought in terms of popularity. How could I make the party popular? And get Whitlam to agree…And it came to me. I had access to the grass roots of popular culture. It was the people in the arts.

The concept of the grass roots helps to focus one’s attention. The plan was simple and strategic but, if I could execute it, would have effect in a number of pleasingly intersected ways. It would connect the ALP with popular culture, thus making it hip. It would connect it with dance bands and musicals, making it seem something you might enjoy after a game of golf. It would connect the party with high culture, making it possible to get together with it over a glass of wine. It would confirm the policies and structure so carefully crafted by Clif’s committee. It would put arts funding on the agenda. And it would make Whitlam agree to be Minister for the Arts.

It only required a little co-ordination. Whitlam would announce just one small element of the arts policy. Across the nation, figures from the arts would be asked by a journalist who just happened to be standing next to him or her at the time what they thought of the idea. They would say, “I think it’s great! I’m going to vote for the ALP!” Then another announcement, and more enthusiasm.

Before trying it on Whitlam I began to contact people in the arts to see if they planned to vote for the ALP and if they would agree to make their intentions public as part of the campaign. The initial response provided an insight into how things worked. For example, Mary Hardy, whose brother Frank wrote Power without Glory about the years in which John Wren exercised his questionable influence in Melbourne, was a broadcaster. Her reply was, “Darl I’d love to but I couldn’t. I’d lose my job.” So, I began with the self-employed, dance band leaders and visual artists, and it expanded and changed public perception of the ALP. I have written elsewhere how I managed to persuade Whitlam to take on the Arts portfolio: suffice to say the strategy worked; in fact, worked too well that it appeared that it was his passion and commitment. It was a tool, and so successful it is not understood as a marketing strategy.

To the chagrin of the Union and the members of Clif’s Committee, Whitlam, the son of a public servant and essentially unconnected from the arts, not only appointed Coombes as Chair of the new Australia Council but allowed him to translate his “first-nighters” onto the Council instead of appointing professionals and, for example, to refuse to establish a Community Arts Board. This meant years of dispute, and a flawed history incorrectly valorising Coombes and Whitlam.

To return to Menzies.

As I remarked earlier, Menzies used the apparent conservatism of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board to manage the turbulent arts politics of the time.  He moved early on in this way, even while Chifley was Chair when, amusingly, he was assisted in this at times by the supporters of modernism.  John Reed, who with his wife Sunday collected and, through the Contemporary Art Society, exhibited modern artists, wrote a letter to the Committee and Board deriding its members and its attitudes, and demanding they purchase a particular Nolan picture. The Committee minutes record:

Having decided … to take no action on Reed’s request, the Committee heard from Mr Ashton that he had been intending to resign from the Board. Menzies and others paid tribute to his work, and after discussion he was asked “to continue to give the Commonwealth the benefit of his wide knowledge and experience in art and cultural matters”.

Reed’s attack had just the opposite effect from that he intended, as it highlighted Ashton’s long service and elicited a defence of his contribution.

In May 1952, Prime Minister and Chair of the Committee, Menzies appointed to the Board Daryl Lindsay, 62 (Director of the NGV), and Robert Campbell, 49, (Director of the South Australian Gallery). Each of these men had managed to bring various institutions into the 20th century by liberalising practices, developing community engagement, improving physical infrastructure and broadening collection policies. Lindsay had enlivened the NGV. In 1941, (offering a very clear illustration of the long road travelled by Australian society from the time) Campbell had brought the Launceston Technical College into the 20th century, inter-alia by removing swimsuits from life models. He had improved the Western Australian and Queensland Galleries and in 1952 was updating the South Australian Gallery.

Menzies was very enthusiastic when London’s Tate Gallery agreed to stage a survey of Australian painting in 1962. This event has attracted inaccurate and unscholarly critical attention, but at the time was a coup for the Australian government.  London was still then the centre of Western art, and acknowledgement by the Tate would ensure Australian painting would be taken seriously.  The planned exhibition was shown first in Adelaide and drama ensued. Scholars and commentators do not remark that before the show opened in Adelaide, Menzies added Russell ‘Tas’ Drysdale to the Board. Drysdale’s impeccable modern credentials should have pacified any critic, but the announcement was drowned out by the controversy.

The excitement meant that Hans Heysen was dropped from the show, which gesture itself emphasises the changing fashion of acceptance in the arts, — Heysen has undeniably returned to the pantheon — and the selection was extended to include younger artists.  There are very full notes of a meeting between Menzies, Tate Director John Rothenstein and the Chair, Colin Anderson, about the Tate exhibition. Menzies very clearly states that the Board wants to emphasise the 20th century. He asks if the Tate wants a spread of “contemporary men of competence” or “a number of works by first class painters”. Rothenstein advises the second. They discuss ending the show with a “flourish” – but not a large flourish – of young contemporary artists. The notes show no evidence at all that Menzies, having agreed with Anderson the show would be a survey of Australian art with an emphasis on recent painting, made any effort to influence the selection.

Both Rothenstein and Colin Anderson did exert influence. Files in the Tate archives show that Anderson and Rothenstein wanted only oil paintings, not sculpture or watercolours. In addition, in two internal communications, Anderson confirms to Rothenstein he has rejected the idea of Aboriginal work being included. Anderson and Rothenstein were dismissive of Daryl

Lindsay’s initiative in this regard.  Writing to the Australian High Commissioner on 26 August 1960, Rothenstein explained that interest in Aboriginal paintings was only partly aesthetic and for the most part anthropological. The records show that the Board subsequently sent an exhibition of indigenous bark paintings to the Sao Paulo Biennale. Menzies was then Prime Minister and overseeing the work of the Board.

I want here to provide an example of the attitude to Menzies still prevailing in the artworld, and to finish with reality. Describing Menzies’ opening speech, where he proudly confirmed his involvement in the Tate show, Sarah Scott, a stringent critic, states:

The influence of Menzies’ artistic preferences and conception of a national aesthetic had a profound effect upon the construction of nation within overseas exhibitions of Australian art as well as limiting the opportunities available for contemporary Australian artists to exhibit abroad.

It is unclear what Scott means by limited opportunities for contemporary artists to show abroad – an extensive program exhibited Australian art abroad, there was no embargo on artists exhibiting anywhere. An alternative interpretation for Menzies’ commitment to the Tate show is that he was enthusiastic about it. Here, both his affection for Britain and his delight in Australia, and in Australian art, were brought together in a very grand celebration. Loving history and a certain form of painting, he wanted to show the history of Australian painting. Admiring Australian Impressionism, he wanted to show the best of these works, but at no time did he demand any control over the “modern” end of the show, and there is no indication that the Board contacted him for an opinion.

Menzies’ government energetically sent broad selections of work to Asia and South America and Europe. In common with other commentators, Sarah Scott fails to understand the formal relationship between the Board and the Prime Minister. Believing that Board members were public servants, subject to line management, she sees Menzies’ involvement at all as Ministerial interference in public service process. In fact, the reverse was true. Menzies (like Andrew Fisher and Curtin) allowed the Board to spend public money in a grey constitutional area. Menzies, however, went even further than any other prime minister.

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 made an astonishing decision, in 1961, to delegate his own Ministerial authority to make contracts to Board members. This was remarkable. This decision is outlined in the minutes of the Board meeting on 23rd 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 public servant supporting the Board, McCusker, reported that Menzies had made certain decisions in response to their requests:

• Each member would have a personal budget of 300 pounds (inflation calculator approximately 20,000 but one should take into account the inflation in the price of art) they could combine their budgets.
• By 1971 they were spending a million dollars and were the world’s biggest spenders in the art market. If the Board wanted to spend beyond the allocated budget they could approach the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister had agreed new principles which would have the effect of conferring on the Board certain executive powers. These were:

• Purchase of paintings for the National Collection: Where the Board is unanimous about the acquisition of a painting for the National Collection, it may be acquired without reference to the Prime Minister. However, from time to time, the Prime Minister would wish to inspect the acquisitions the Board had made.
• Purchases by individual members: Each member with his individual allocation of was now able to purchase work which might form part of the National Collection or hang in government establishments as well as for overseas posts.
• Exhibitions: The amount allocated for exhibitions may be used at the discretion of the Board to assist exhibitions going abroad or coming from overseas for circulation in Australia. Under this item, selection need not necessarily 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.

Menzies, who must have taken into account a decision by Evatt in the Bardolph case limiting delegation, risked that his delegation of power could become a legal or political problem; that is, as a constitutional lawyer, he knew there was a question as to whether he could delegate his power to purchase in this ambiguous area, but stood by his political judgement and his confidence in his advisors. He delegated this power, despite having on frequent occasions 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. For Whitlam, engagement with the arts was a political strategy: Menzies came to politics already deeply engaged and saw Commonwealth subsidy to the visual arts expand and develop throughout his prime ministership.