The Australian Century – The One Just Gone And The One To Come

In his most recent publication, Australia – 1901-2001, former NSW MP turned author and historian Andrew Tink has brought together many of the stories that made Australia in the twentieth century, from Federation to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. It was a century marked by the trauma of war and the despair of the Depression, balanced by extraordinary achievements in sport, science and the arts. And it witnessed the emergence of a mainly harmonious society, underpinned by a political system that worked most of the time. But is it a guide to the future? On Wednesday 25 February 2015, Andrew Tink joined Asher Judah, author of The Australian Century, to discuss both the past and future Down Under.

THE AUSTRALIAN CENTURY – THE ONE JUST GONE AND THE ONE TO COME

ANDREW TINK

The best way to approach this topic is to consider certain events between 1901 and 2001 which, looking back now, might point to whether or not we can predict the future. Some of these were logical and quite predictable. But others were asymmetrical and only make sense with the benefit of hindsight. If I try to put myself in the shoes of somebody living in July 1913, would I have been able to predict what was to happen just over a year later? I think not. So how can we predict with any great certainty, in February 2015, what will happen in 2100?

At one level, you might say that the campaign slogan for Australian federation has been and continues to be fulfilled in its entirety. Edmund Barton’s great catch-cry was: “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation.” That is manifestly still the case and long may it continue.

But it wasn’t always accepted by all. There were a couple of occasions in the twentieth century when the West Australians actually voted to secede. What stopped that happening, ultimately, was the Australian constitution. It was not possible to secede without carrying the vote of other states and other majorities. The proposition was always going to be still born. But it wasn’t for want of trying in the west.

In other ways, however, Australia at the end of the twentieth century is a foreign country to what it was at the beginning. As with most other countries, much of this change has been driven by quantum leaps in technological development. However the change to Australia’s ethnic makeup has marked it out especially when for 65 years the White Australia Policy was accepted by all major political parties.

Indeed when I asked myself which twentieth century Australian prime minister made the most far reaching decision, my answer was Malcolm Fraser – for admitting 70,000 Indo-Chinese refugees into Australia after the fall of Saigon and the Communist take-over of South Vietnam.

Although the Holt government had begun to dismantle the White Australia Policy in the mid-1960s, this was not reflected in our immigration intakes until 1976. And it was Malcolm Fraser’s decision to admit the 70,000 Indo-Chinese refugees that changed the face of Australia forever. If you ask the question: ‘what is the most fundamental thing anyone can do to change a country?’, it is to change the face of its people – literally.

The first Vietnamese refugees to Australia, who triggered this seismic shift, were led by Lam Binh. And they left Vietnam using a map torn out of a school Atlas to navigate. Their original intention was to go to Guam. But along the way, in Borneo, they tied up alongside an Australian timber ship. And what followed must have been one of the most significant conversations in Australian history.

When Lam Binh explained to the timber ship’s captain that they were making for the island of Guam, the captain replied that they would probably drown during the long voyage over the open ocean. Instead, he suggested that they head for Australia. And then he said, “Under Commonwealth law, when any ship lands, the country has to accept the boat people.” This was, to say the least, a momentous discussion in terms of what followed. But what did follow would have been impossible for the captain or anyone else to comprehend at the beginning of 1976.

So it had been too with World War One – a fight no Australian could have envisaged, or its outcome. Even a year into the war, it would still have been very difficult to predict what it would eventually mean: 60,000 Australians killed – and they were all volunteers remember, self-selecting volunteers – and 150,000 injured, many of them grievously.

In leadership terms, how many potential prime ministers had been killed? As it turned out, not one of the three future prime ministers who eventually joined up had been a front line digger. Although Australian born, S M Bruce had served in the British army, while Earle Page had worked as a doctor at a casualty clearing station. The third, John McEwen, who had enlisted when he turned 18 in 1918, didn’t make the cut to go overseas. Likewise, in many other fields we can only guess at the number of potential leaders lost to that great conflagration. It’s the absence of knowing who, but for the war, would have come forward – in medicine, in sport, in music, in literature, in law – that makes it difficult to predict alternative histories of 20^th century Australia.

Equally, it is difficult to predict when a leader’s foresight and intuition will go against the flow to trigger an outcome different to the one which might otherwise have occurred. So it was with Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Although much maligned in many ways, he was very prescient about Japan. During World War I, Japanese battleships had escorted the first troop transports on their voyage to Egypt. And Japan was an important ally of the British Empire throughout the Great War. Notwithstanding all that, Hughes went to Versailles and banged the table – ranted and raved – until people like President Woodrow Wilson and the British Prime Minister gave in to his concerns about the threat a post war Japan posed to Australia. And the Versailles peace treaty acknowledged Australia’s claim over German New Guinea in the face of Japanese claims to the same. Now that’s not something which, when you look at it from a 1919 perspective, you’d say was a logical thing to do. But Hughes had nailed it, he had absolutely nailed it. And our history might have turned out very differently in World War II if German New Guinea had become a Japanese mandate under the League of Nations, rather than an Australian one.

There are some perennials in Australian history, however, which remain predictable, and which I believe will remain predictable for the rest of this century too. One such is the lethal impact industrial relations can have on prime ministers. In 1904, there were three of them in twelve months – Deakin, Watson and Reid – and that churn was caused by heated disputes about industrial relations policy. If there’s one truism in Australian politics, it’s that industrial relations can undo a prime minister very quickly. S M Bruce and John Howard are two prime examples. But they’re not the only ones. To some extent, even Ben Chifley was brought undone in a roundabout way by very serious industrial disputation on the coal fields in the late 1940s. While bank nationalisation was the key to the 1949 election, industrial relations was also a big driver.

That said, Australians have generally shown great resilience and the ability to give and take, so that at the end of our first century as a nation and the beginning of the next, we’re in a pretty good space as a body politic. And that’s despite the fact that we’ve had some huge pressures put on us between 1901 and 2001.

The new nation’s first big tests were the acrimonious conscription debates of 1916-17. But using the ultimate safety valve, these disputes were decided by the people at referendums. And we weathered the Great Depression, where at the end of the day, and notwithstanding totalitarian organisations like the new guard, the old guard and various other manifestations, the Australian body politic stuck together reasonably well. Then there was the Japanese invasion threat, during which we got a little bit ragged around the edges at times, particularly over the bombing of Darwin. But again, the country ultimately pulled together. The Whitlam Government’s dismissal was another crisis, which as with the conscription debates, was ultimately resolved by the people, in this case at a general election. And I could go on. These examples demonstrate Australians’ great resilience that holds us in good stead like few other nations in the world; long may that continue.

Then there are unpredictable, in some ways asymmetrical events, which change the course of Australia’s history. One example is the East Timor intervention in 1999, the consequences of which may yet take years to play out. If anybody in the 1970s or 1980s had said that Australian troops would occupy Indonesian soil in 1999, people would have nodded their heads disbelievingly. So it was also with the Hudson air crash of August 1940 – an example of how just a single unforseen catastrophe can lead to significant consequences. John Curtin became Prime Minister as a delayed outcome of that crash, which killed three cabinet ministers and the chief of the general staff. Indeed but for that crash, Curtin would never have been prime minister.

God forbid a possible terrorist attack against an Australian cabinet of Parliament. But such a catastrophe could change things very quickly. What’s got to be remembered about the Hudson crash is that when it happened, Prime Minister Menzies had a parliamentary majority. But the outcome of the general election, which had been triggered by the crash, was a hung parliament. And within a year, the government was brought down by two independents crossing the floor. That’s a warning, in the dangerous days we now live in, that the makeup of a government can change dramatically and with very little warning.

Science also provides vivid examples of asymmetrical events such as the key role Australia ended up playing by transmitting TV images of the first Moon landing. Unfortunately it was a role egregiously misrepresented in the film The Dish. As Neil Armstrong prepared to step onto the Moon, deep space tracking stations at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek, just outside Canberra, were both transmitting live TV images back to Mission Control in Houston Texas. The main feed was coming from Goldstone with Honeysuckle Creek as backup. But with seconds to go, it became clear that Goldstone had mucked things up. And so the live feed was switched to Honeysuckle. So the world saw Armstrong step onto the Moon via an Australian tracking station. As if to underscore the serendipity of this, Honeysuckle’s director, Tom Reid, later said “it hadn’t been planned that way. But that’s the way it was. And God damn it, we were ready.” Even so there was not a word of this in The Dish, which sent everybody up. A wonderful asymmetrical Australian story was mocked by an Australian film.

Another example of a scientific event that would have been difficult to predict was the unintended breakthrough of a CSIRO team, headed by John O’Sullivan. While searching for black holes in deep space, this team devised a way of squashing out all the radio signals and noise that prevent the faint sound of a collapsing black hole from otherwise being heard. Did they ever find a black hole? No. What they did, though, was discover that their method of squashing out other noise was the basis for Wi Fi. When you think of the billions of hand held computing devices in use and wonder how any two of them identify each other over the signals of all the others, well it was O’Sullivan’s team who found a way. It was another asymmetrical moment. While looking for something else, these scientists changed the face of the planet in terms of the interconnectivity of people.

Finally, let’s talk about social change. This was the summary of a mid-twentieth century writer, imagining what mid-twentieth century migrants to Australia might encounter:

The men drank large quantities of beer during the day but stopped promptly at 6pm. Many of them were then sick in the gutter. At parties and dances men stood at one end of the room and drank beer out of the barrel, the only time they were allowed to do so after 6pm, and talked about sport. The women stood or sat at the other end of the room, talked about babies and mainly spoke to the men to tell them it was time to go home. A woman who joined the men’s group was considered to have loose morals and a man who joined the woman’s group was considered to be effeminate, probably homosexual.

So this is a question for you, how much of that remains true? I’d hope not much.

When we look back over the history of twentieth century Australia, everything appears to run in a neat, chronological, progression. And much, like industrial disputes, is predictable. But as I discovered when researching and writing Australia 1901-2001, and hope I have demonstrated with the examples I have just referred to, there are many unpredictable surprises which can change the course of events. So when we look forward, attempting to imagine what Australia will be like in the year 2100, we run the risk of thinking in linear, chronological terms, unable to imagine the asymmetrical events, yet to unfold, which in 85 years’ time will deliver us a very different Australia to the one we now imagine.