Robert Menzies' Forgotten People by Judith Brett

Author:Judith Brett [Brett, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, History
ISBN: 9780522853919
Google: dmEoGQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 7764389
Publisher: Melbourne University
Published: 2007-01-15T13:32:38+00:00

The anecdote displays, as well, a central characteristic of the young Menzies—the evasion of actual experience through comparison with some more intense, imagined reality.

His parents both worked hard, his mother frequently serving in the shop, but the new settlers often had little money and had to rely on credit. ‘Life for my parents was, in a financial sense, difficult and even grim.’17 Menzies’ parents occupied the classic position of the petit bourgeoisie—small shopkeepers juggling debtors and creditors, forced to practise selfdenial through thrift and hard work in order to survive. But the denials of their class position were increased by their geographical location. For a pioneer family on the edges of Empire and of settlement, the costs and renunciations of a settler’s life in the New World amplified the petit bourgeois ideology of the Old. Not only had these pioneering families to struggle for their financial security, they had to struggle for it in an alien and often hostile nature far from their world’s centre.

And who would witness their struggle? One obvious association to ‘forgotten’ in the Menzies family’s experience was the sense of being on the edges of Empire. The books the family read all referred to a land which none of them had experienced. Menzies’ parents were Australians not through choice but because of their parents’ decision to emigrate. Here, in this distant outpost, were they forgotten, despite their virtuous upholding of the moral and cultural traditions they ascribed to the centre and their careful learning of the King’s English? And would the centre recognise them if they ever got there? To address the Australian middle class as forgotten was to evoke fears of neglect that went beyond their apprehension at the growing power of socialism to the core of their unease and insecurity about their place on the globe.

In this hostile, distant, alien place, the home became both a refuge and the major source of cultural meaning. Menzies refers often to the closeness and security of this childhood home. His most frequent picture is of the family gathered around to listen to one of the members reading from the books he lists so carefully in his speech in 1950. These books appear, minus the Bible, in Afternoon Light, and in the biographies, for which Menzies, his brother Frank and sister Isabel were major sources.18 Speaking in 1967 at the unveiling of the spire built in Jeparit to commemorate his achievements, Menzies said of Jeparit, ‘It was a great place in which a family might grow up . . . we lived at home, we became fond of reading, and reading for each other, and discussing matters with each other. This produced a very well-knit family atmosphere and has encouraged me, in particular, to be a student’. Growing up in that circle ‘we got to learn something about the things that mattered in the world . . . we acquired some moral and spiritual standards’. Looking back on his life, Menzies liked to recall that:

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