Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin by Liam Byrne

Author:Liam Byrne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Chapter Six

Global War: 1914–1915

The war seemed far from over in April 1918. So much had changed in Australia since its outbreak in August 1914. Four years on and fierce and bloody battles still raged in Europe, and lists of the dead grew longer. In Australia, the country’s political leaders gathered at the governor-general’s mansion on the banks of the Yarra River to discuss how to replenish the country’s depleted battalions. Two groups glared across the table at one another. On one side sat representatives of the Nationalist Party, the new party of government formed in 1917 from the alliance between the former Labor hero Billy Hughes and his fellow party ‘rats’, and their erstwhile conservative opponents—it was a new ‘Fusion’, and it impressed Labor loyalists even less than the last.

Frank Tudor, now the leader of the federal parliamentary ALP, sat across from them. For years he had worked alongside these men. He had called them friends and comrades. Meeting in these circumstances was a bitter experience. But it was not one he had to suffer alone. James Scullin was by Tudor’s side. He was there as a man of influence, not just the editor of the Evening Echo, but also the president of the Victorian Labor Party. Scullin bemoaned the inability of those in attendance to ‘bring about harmony between all the different sections of the community’ as had existed ‘when the people of Australia were rushing to the colours in large numbers’ in August 1914.1 Scullin accused Hughes and his supporters of having destroyed what unanimity had existed by twice proposing referendums on compulsory military service, first in 1916 and again in 1917.

Such had Australian politics become by 1918. Accusations of disloyalty flew easily, with their implications unrestrained. Politics was locked in a fierce partisan deadlock, with neither side willing to give ground to achieve resolution. On the other side of the world, Australian soldiers waited for their next order into battle. The contrast with the state of the country in 1914 was stark. Then, Labor had been united, poised to win back government in the imminent federal election. The country was wealthy, confident and assured of its status as a ‘social laboratory’ experimenting in democracy and egalitarianism. By 1918 this all seemed to belong to the distant past.

How had this happened? Why had a united Labor Party torn itself apart? And why, for that matter, was the editor of a provincial labour newspaper now sitting in the residence of the governor-general, talking on equal terms with the prime minister of Australia?

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