Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

Chapter 1

War’s after-shadows

From the secret armies to the Reds

SECRET ARMIES TO SAVE AUSTRALIA

In the midst of all the arguments of artists, novelists and playwrights, ‘the unacknowledged legislators’ (to quote Shelley) of Australia, the world of mercantile and pastoral power reacted against Red and anarchist threats. The Irish nationalist party, Sinn Féin, the Irish uprising in 1916, and Australian–Irish resistance to conscription seemed also dangerous forces to be opposed. In the early 1920s, the forces of right continued to take a variety of forms, self-defined by their leaders. Most of these the Nationalist government of William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes was willing to support or at least tolerate. They were a necessary manifestation of patriotic impulse in these new days of Bolshevik threat.

For example, at the Sydney Town Hall in August 1920, the King and Empire Alliance was launched by an enthusiastic crowd and quickly became a leading organisation to do with promoting loyalty to the Empire against Irish republican erosions on the one hand, and communistic elements on the other. Such was the alarm that the fabric of Australia might not hold that the Alliance had nearly ten thousand members by June 1922. It had a strong following in rural New South Wales and affiliations in other states. In March 1921, Prime Minister Hughes despatched a cache of arms and ammunition to Sydney from Melbourne, still the seat of the Federal government, with the intention that such paramilitary forces as the King and Empire Alliance would store them in disused railway tunnels.

Fear about the future had derived from a May Day 1921 march and demonstration by trade unionists. The crowd, listening to Jack Kilburn of the Bricklayers’ Union speaking in the Sydney Domain, was attacked by returned soldiers. With the Union Jack in hand, the soldiers had tried to make their way to the speaker’s platform and pull down the unionists’ red flag. Their own Union Jack was seized, torn up and shredded by the angry audience. This was seen by many as representing the depths to which unionists would sink in civic sacrilege. As a result, a ‘Monster Loyalty Meeting’ at the Sydney Town Hall in 1921 was followed by a march to the Domain of between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand from all parts of the city, suburbs and country. The broad mateship of the trenches had vanished in the great ideological conflict of the age.

The Domain was a place, like London’s Hyde Park Corner, for orators of all stripes, and what they said was more than mere entertainment. The platforms of the Socialist Labor Party, the Communist Party of Australia and even the Returned Soldiers’ section of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) were rushed by loyalists. Ernie Judd of the Socialist Labor Party—who incidentally abhorred the then newly formed Communist Party—drew a revolver at the first charge by loyal citizens, then put it away and was pulled from the platform, punched and kicked. Attempts were made, he later said, to ‘tear out his lower organs’. The police arrived, Judd was charged with assault, and the crowd persuaded to disperse.

Tubercular novelist D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda arrived in Australia late in the autumn of 1922, describing it as a land that looked ‘as if no man had ever loved it’ and made it a ‘mother country’, before travelling east towards Mexico and their intended final destination of Taos, New Mexico. At a boarding house she ran in Darlington in Western Australia, he met the writer Mollie Skinner and encouraged her in the writing of her successful novel The Boy in the Bush. When the Lawrences reached Sydney, it was the issue of secret armies that attracted their attention. They rented a cottage at Thirroul on the New South Wales south coast, where Lawrence began to write his 140,000-word manuscript Kangaroo. In its pages, not always easy reading, the journeying English couple, the Somers, encounter a secret army named the Maggies. It has been argued that Lawrence may have come in contact with a group of former officers associated with the King and Empire Alliance.

In Lawrence’s novel, Jack Callcott, an Australian officer of the Great War, explains to Somers, ‘There’s quite a number of us in Sydney—and in the other towns as well—we’re mostly diggers back from the war—we’ve joined up into a kind of club … and we’re sworn to OBEY the leaders, no matter what the command, when the time is ready.’ Elsewhere Somers recalls that he had been told by Jack that ‘in New South Wales the Maggies … numbered already about fourteen hundred, all perfectly trained and equipped. They had a distinctive badge of their own: a white, broad-brimmed felt hat, like the ordinary khaki military hat, but white, and with a tuft of white feathers.’ After finding Australia a place of incipient strife, the Lawrences moved on to be feted in Mexico City and then to live harshly for a time on a New Mexico ranch.

Another group, the Farmers’ Army, formed as early as 1917 and favoured with the patronage of Billy Hughes, was in the process of blending into the post-war bush army called the Old Guard, in which returned soldiers were enlisted. Edward Sherwood, for example, mayor of Scone in New South Wales, would later be head of the Old Guard in that town. The novelist Patrick White’s family at their property at Belltrees near Scone were involved in the Old Guard, as were the relatives of the poet Judith Wright in New England. These bodies, led by the most distinguished pastoral and professional men in the bush, were more than tolerated. One of the leaders was Sir Samuel Hordern, the famous Sydney emporium owner whose catalogue was called ‘the bush bible’. He was a grandee of Bowral, a man of spacious political, nation-building and even sporting dreams—his horses won the Melbourne Cup thrice. Known as ‘H’ in Australian intelligence reports, he attracted the following note from an agent of the Federal Investigation Branch: ‘H has more than once been dissuaded—gently and firmly—from excursion into matters he is not constituted to touch.’ The extent of these matters remains a mystery but no doubt dealt with the necessity of his class’s taking over or forcing emergency powers on the federal authorities.

In the midst of the campaign to halt the manifestations of Red rebellion, Australia was still faced with the results of the war waged on the Empire’s behalf by young Australian men.

THOSE IRISH AGAIN

World War I, instead of repelling Australians from the arms of the Empire, drove them more firmly into it. Apart from the undeniable convictions of the great majority, this was also for the sake of a White Australia. The prospect of an ever-ascendant Japan frightened the Commonwealth to various degrees throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and Australians believed their security was dependent on the Imperial connection. There was also a psychological drive in Imperial patriotism—if Australia had sacrificed its sons on behalf of the Empire, that fact consecrated the connection even more. If not, it was hard to justify the war and console the families of the fallen. The Empire gave meaning to the immolations of Gallipoli and France.

Irish Catholics were identified as dissenters from this holy nexus, though they had given plenty of sons to the war also. Their attitudes were more a matter of emphasis—their Australian self-definition had less of Britain in it. Elsie Coyle, a woman from Kempsey, New South Wales, remembered that when her convent school class was marched to Kempsey Showground for Empire Day in 1919, the Irish Catholics like her marched under an Australian ensign and the public-school children under the Union Jack. She had, like many of her peers, been given a Ned Kelly-style version of the history of Empire, a dark tale of bloodshed and hunger in the Land of Saints and Scholars. Yet an uncle and a number of cousins had just got back from serving in France and entertained her by showing how to wrap up a puttee, and one of her cousins died in the port of Melbourne of Spanish influenza on a returning troopship. Her father was an engine driver who, on the Bathurst-Sydney run, had enjoyed the company of future treasurer and prime minister Ben Chifley as his fireman (Chifley having been demoted for his part in the 1919 railway strike), and who characteristically chafed at having his Australianness questioned by mainstream fellow workers in the railway barracks of Bathurst and Grafton.

Immediately post-war, the Irish were still believers in Irish Home Rule, in the whole of Ireland becoming a dominion, a resolution Britain had implicitly promised in 1914 in return for Irish involvement in the war. But at the higher levels of society and in Australia’s Orange Lodges, Home Rule was abominated as if it were a bomb thrown at Empire. Home Rule would put the considerable Protestant, loyalist minority in Ireland under the power of the priest-ridden majority. These different views, even over such a modest proposal as that Ireland become a dominion like New Zealand or Australia, created a society-wide rift. Indeed, the loyal majority in Australia believed that Australian Irish, despite their willingness to sing ‘God Save the King’ on Australia Day, secretly wanted a full-fledged Irish republic. Home Rule would be achieved for twenty-six counties (the Free State) in 1922, after half a century or more of activism and bloodshed, but six counties in Ulster remained British. Both sections remained under the Crown. (For the South of Ireland, the republic would come later.)

The majority of Irish Australians were happy with the new arrangement. Living in a Crown dominion had been no intrusion on them, and economic and trade union issues were closer to their hearts. It was true that some Irish republicans—those who would accept nothing but a republic for the whole of the island of Ireland—came to Australia escaping the new Irish Free State government. Some worked in gangs on the New South Wales and Victorian railways. But despite suspicions to the contrary, republicanism would never be the majority position of Irish Catholics. And when a civil war broke out in Ireland in 1922 between the Free State majority who were willing to abide by the treaty Michael Collins had forged with the British, and those who refused to accept it, and there was mutual bloodshed worthy of that committed by the British army and Black and Tan auxiliaries previously, most of the Irish in Australia lost interest in Irish politics. Instead they chose to see their background as a heritage of Irish history (frequently inaccurately rendered by Irish grandparents, religious brothers and nuns) and culture, expressed in song, the oratory of Robert Emmet, and the uprising not of 1916 but of 1798.

Sectarianism rolled on, fuelled by Australia’s Orange Lodges on one side, and on the other by Catholic absolutism and the determination of the Knights of the Southern Cross, the Hibernians and other Irish organisations. These men not only wanted Irish validity to be recognised, but also wanted to demonstrate that their sense of Australianness was as good as anyone’s.

The divide remained. The sentiment, ‘He’s a Catholic but he’s a good bloke’, was echoed on the other side by ‘He’s a Protestant but …’ There were, even before World War I, places Catholics could not get jobs. Sanitarium Health Foods had an overt no-Catholics policy. But in other places it was a matter of unspoken practice. The situation was not helped by the fact that the Catholic clergy, who wanted their flock to be accepted into the community, nonetheless came down hard on Catholic-Protestant ‘mixed’ marriage, requiring the Protestant partner to abandon the Protestant tradition for the children of the marriage, and allowing the ceremony to be performed only behind the church altar.

The old furies had a considerable time to burn yet, and the clergy, generally, were not helping.

THE FEARFUL AFTER-SHADOW

In late March 1921, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) ceased to exist and the responsibility for the treatment of the war’s mental patients was taken up by the Department of Repatriation. This department, not always generous in its attitudes to former Diggers, was to deal with the after-shadow of the war, the plaints of soldiers’ women, the symptoms of the men. Government help was needed because civilian friends were not always understanding of the shell-shocked or men suffering from war neurosis. Civilians could not understand why soldiers did not want to forget the trenches and dedicate themselves utterly either to the urgent politics of the day or to the atmosphere of prosperity and hedonism of the early 1920s.

But psychiatric symptoms had not vanished with the onset of peace. At the time of the outbreak of the war there were in Australia no specialist clinics or psychoanalytic institutes such as existed in Britain and on the continent. It was common at the start of the conflict for physicians to respond to symptoms of the shock of war by blaming the patient for moral inferiority in the face of modern battle. Even when war ended, some physicians on the home front still held the same views. Yet, as historian C.E.W. Bean said of young men coming out of the lines of Pozières, ‘They were like men recovering from a long illness.’ They were not what people called ‘mad’ but many confess in their journals how close they came to it. Some of those faces Bean saw might carry the disease latently, only to explode years later, a bomb at the kitchen table.

Returned soldiers’ groups and regimental associations exerted pressure to see that there would be no military stain attached to those Diggers who had become mental patients under the shock of battle. They did not want their former comrades either stuck with the labels of civic mental disease or certified and written off into the civilian mental health system.

Colonel Eric St Clair, a leading Australian psychiatrist, wrote to Major-General Richard Fetherstone, Senior Military Medical Officer in Australia, a man short in stature but decisive in action, a gynaecologist not a psychiatrist, but a doctor who had seen the mayhem of both Gallipoli and the Western Front. Fetherstone declared that former soldiers sent to military hospitals appropriate for shell-shock treatments should be admitted ‘by the usual transfer without certificate of any kind’. The certificate was a record that might be used against a mental patient in later life.

At least the mental health problems of Australian ex-servicemen were not treated with the same contempt as they were in the United Kingdom. A post-war medical assembly held in Brisbane in 1920 and involving many psychological specialists, led by the remarkable, wiry Melburnian Dr Springthorpe, made sure of that. Springthorpe was, by this time, in his early vigorous sixties, a husky little physician who had had a fashionable practice in Collins Street. When he returned home in 1919 from his service in France, Belgium and the United Kingdom it was to continue his work with the shell-shocked, and he resumed his post of visitor to metropolitan asylums as well as recommencing private practice. (One of the panel’s secondary aims was to get psychiatric instruction incorporated in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Thus psychiatry became a profession in Australia.) Dr Springthorpe complained that many medical boards appointed to look into the claims of returned soldiers for help had had no experience of the Front, and had refused to grant some of the shell-shocked and disabled a pension, under suspicion that they were malingering. Springthorpe, by contrast, remained a potent voice for men whose wounds were not always visible.

A War Pension Act had been passed as early as 21 December 1919, and by 1924 there were nearly eighty thousand war pensioners in Australia, but only 4 per cent were ‘mental cases’. In 1926, Smith’s Weekly, a populist magazine founded by Sir James Joynton Smith in 1919, and considered to be the voice of the Digger, claimed that eight thousand veterans were dying each year, at an average age of forty-five, some as a result of mental illness. It nicknamed the Repatriation Commission the ‘Cyanide Gang’, since its rulings were strict, and rejection of disability claims led some former Diggers to suicide. The Australian Worker contrasted the praise for the Digger by public officials at their departure for war with the niggardly treatment afterwards.

An example of ‘disability shell shock’ was Private H, who had served in France in 1917 and 1918, been wounded twice and burned by gas. He kept asking ‘foolish questions’ and had shown some violence. His father said his son had been ‘queer’ since his return from the war. Another characteristic case was that of B.H. Wright, a law student who turned suddenly violent in late 1919 and received twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour in Grafton Gaol in New South Wales. He had been wounded in 1917, took four months to recuperate, returned to the Front, been blown up and buried alive, and, in March 1918, gassed. On his return to Australia in April 1919 he complained of loss of memory and started drinking. His family used the same phrase so many others did—he was ‘not the same man’.

The mental state of returned soldiers was a crisis for their wives and families. In one case, a soldier, Charlie Clifton, broke a bottle over his wife’s head. She then killed him by slitting his throat with a razor. She gave evidence of persistent attacks upon her, and her situation and that of her victim were so well understood by the court that she was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. There were many reports of impotence and marriage breakdown, and also of crises arising from war experience but surfacing years after the war ended. ‘James’ was a thirty-five-year-old former soldier who was admitted to Broughton Hall psychiatric clinic in Sydney as late as April 1930 suffering from delusional melancholia. He had been beside an explosive blast in France in 1918 and was now obsessed with the memory and ‘depressed, burst into tears easily’. ‘Joseph’, a wagon builder admitted to Broughton Hall in December 1925, had been working on a vehicle in France when a bomb from a German plane fell near him. His immediate response at the time was to become very frightened and to run about crying. Yet he survived the war without being treated. Seven years after, he still could not sleep properly, and when he did sleep, he always woke startled. ‘Dennis’ was thirty-two and had been earning a living as a plasterer when admitted to Broughton Hall for seven months in 1927. He had been complaining of headaches for the previous eight years and his mother wrote, ‘I can only say that my son has complained of his head ever since he returned from France … he was under arms from 11 August 1914 … since his return he has been irritable and argumentative.’ Dennis had seen four doctors and three specialists and been to a sanatorium three times but without improvement.

‘Fred’ was a former officer who had been wounded and concussed in a raid in France in 1916. He was unable to sleep, he had fits of rage, pains throughout his body, regular lapses of memory and terrifying nightmares, and by 1923 was so depressed he could not work. A gunner, ‘Jack’, a former deep-sea diver, was admitted to Broughton Hall at the end of the war after being wounded at Passchendaele by fifty pieces of shell, with two wounds to the back of his head and the loss of both eyes, one of them knocked out by the explosion. By 1922, though blind, his rages were difficult to control. ‘H’ of the 7th Field Engineers, a thirty-two-year-old carpenter repatriated to Australia in March 1917, was the sole survivor of a group of ten men blown up during an artillery barrage. At Broughton Hall he told his doctor, Major Campbell, that he had no memory of France except when he dreamed. They were, reported his doctor, ‘very distressing dreams’.

As with some of the cases above, not all soldiers manifested their psychic damage immediately. In June 1920, a young returned officer named Eli Bugby hanged himself from the rafters of his home in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Double Bay. Bugby’s wife told the coroner that her husband was ‘gassed and sustained shell shock at the war and had been distressed because his employers would not reinstate him’. He was on a partial pension of two pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, barely more than half the average wage. Mrs Bugby was now left to raise their child without any pension at all, since the Repatriation Commission decided that her husband’s suicide was not related to his war service.

As late as August 1929, Mrs Elizabeth Moffatt wrote to Victoria’s Inspector-General of the Insane about placing her father, Peter Henty, a veteran of both the Boer War and World War I, in a mental hospital. In battle he had suffered head and side wounds. Throughout the 1920s, his mental health declined, and his daughter was certain his alcoholism was due to the impact not only of the physical wounds of battle but also of the mental ones. He was admitted to the Royal Park Mental Hospital in a depressed and lost state and the doctors declared it very difficult to get ‘anything intelligible’ out of him. Again, like other relatives of soldiers, though Moffatt had written in desperation to the Inspector-General, she did not want her father in a civil insane asylum, but instead in the Mont Park Military Block in Melbourne, which dealt with former soldiers displaying similar symptoms.

Fred Jacoby, an entrepreneur in Perth after whom a famous city park is named, was a notable advocate for his soldier son, Fred junior, who lived through the 1920s in the military ward of Perth’s Claremont Hospital for the Insane. Jacoby was the leader of the Mental Soldiers’ Parents of Western Australia. He campaigned against the mixing of military patients with civilian asylum patients and advocated having a parent of a shell-shocked young man on the Board of Visitors, the body that assessed psychiatric hospitals. He was not intimidated by the public distaste for, and prejudices against, mental trauma.

In these and sundry other ways then, the Western and Eastern fronts resonated in the suburban kitchens and living rooms of Australia, and the Repatriation Board made the 1920s bitter for many heroes. The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (RSL) founded a Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers in Sydney in 1921, the only one in the country, supervised by a single doctor, a formidable organiser and chain smoker, Katie Ardill Brice, daughter of an energetic Baptist social reformer. After graduating in medicine from Sydney University in 1913, she had been a one-woman volunteer medical corps in military hospitals in the Middle East, France and England during the war. As well, the Red Cross created in 1919 a holiday centre at Narrabeen, in northern Sydney, as a means of relieving the extreme stress on families.

As the children squealed in the Narrabeen surf, medical boards decided their families’ futures. One of the saddest cases was that of Gordon Floyd, a father of a family, who had been initially reluctant to enlist because he had had rheumatic fever as a child, and its effects were lingering. He had finally enlisted, however, after being presented with a white feather, an accusation of cowardice often handed out by young women in the streets and even in the dance halls of Australian towns and cities, or else sent through the post. In 1919 he received a small disability pension for damage to his leg, his arthritis and heart problems. But he was denied a fuller pension because of a letter his brother had written to the Department of Defence during the war in an attempt to prevent Floyd’s acceptance by the recruiting board. A letter written out of love was now used to prove that he had pre-existing health problems. Floyd’s family was never able to regain the level of prosperity they had known before the war.

Under the Soldier Settler Schemes, run with the best of intentions by the various states—South Australia passing its legislation as early as 1915—about forty thousand returned men throughout Australia were given soldier settler blocks. The project was meant as a blessing and an act of beneficence since, despite the ambiguous results of land reform laws in the nineteenth century, most Australians still attached a redemptive glow to the idea of the independent small farmer. As well as providing income, the land would offer the soldier a bracing therapy for the events he had been through and any wounds he bore, and was therefore welcomed as an appropriate reward by the soldiers themselves.

In Victoria, according to the files of the Closer Settlement Board, which ran the scheme in that state, 40 per cent of all soldier settlers were disabled in some way, and this figure should have given the authorities pause. By 1922, John Watson, who farmed 55 acres (22 hectares) at Dandenong under the Victorian scheme, was admitted to repatriation hospitals in Melbourne and Bendigo suffering after-effects of battle wounds. His wife Mary had now to support eight children aged between five and eighteen years, and reported that she could not carry on the farm on her own, but leaving it would mean that she would be saddled with the farm debt of £550. Mrs Watson was relieved of her debt but had to walk off the farm with her eight children, broke, and bewildered as to where to go.

The wives of soldier settlers, especially those soldiers on marginal land or those who were partly disabled in war, often had to become the true farmers when their menfolk were stricken, and they often laboured with a clear sense of the ultimate futility of their struggle. In 1927, a Mrs McMahon suffered a nervous breakdown after struggling to maintain her sick husband’s block in Korumburra in Victoria. Because of her collapse and his incapacity to work, the lease was cancelled and the couple moved back to Melbourne.

Even apart from the suspicions of the Repatriation Board, men of that war generation had a spiky pride and found it difficult to take help from charities such as the Red Cross. In the trenches and rest areas, the Red Cross parcels had been welcome, but post-war charity was different. When in 1926 George Goodwin applied to the Tubercular Soldiers’ Aid Society asking for help, he wrote, ‘God how the word charity stinks in my nostrils.’ Like Goodwin, many soldiers had been invalided home with tuberculosis. In 1915, Patrick Rouan was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis while fighting in Gallipoli. He was nursed in England, where he married an English girl named Dora, and was invalided home in 1917, Dora and their child following him on. In 1920, Patrick’s boot-repair business failed because of his ill-health, but he was fortunately granted a full pension. By 1923, his four young children had all been infected with the disease. Patrick took to sleeping in a tent outside the home to give himself maximum exposure to fresh air and to try to quarantine himself. Pitching a tent in the backyard was a frequent option for tubercular soldiers who believed that fresh air would help them. The tent was particularly favoured by men whose houses lacked back verandas.

Mrs Iris Mead, whose husband had been put into a sanatorium for tuberculosis, spoke for an entire class of impoverished Diggers’ families in writing to the Tubercular Soldiers’ Aid Society: ‘We are not having proper food—I have dispensed with the weekend joint for weeks now trying in all ways to lessen expenses—but it is all too big an undertaking … the children are needing warmer clothes.’

KISS ME, YOU FOOL

For girls unburdened by the care of a damaged husband, the 1920s flickered with the promise of a new freedom. Until the Great War, schoolboys had frequently been expelled for walking on the same side of the street with a girl on the way to or from school. A training guide, Australian Etiquette: All the Rules and Usages of the Best Societies in the Australasian Colonies of 1888, was still read in the early twentieth century and told young women that they should not be ‘demonstrative of affection’ even after a proposal of marriage: ‘Over-demonstrations of love are not pleasant to be remembered by a young lady, if the man to whom they are given by any chance fails to become her husband.’ For girls in 1914, late adolescence was supposed to be a period of meek near-invisibility.

Such strictures came under challenge in the early 1900s, but particularly after the war, and there arose in Australia as elsewhere a new anxiety about young white women’s moral fitness to be the mothers of the future. Polite people were alarmed by the increasingly less formal and more ‘forward’ behaviour even of girls from good families. The anxiety was also created by the greater number of working-class girls taking jobs in factories, and the way these industrial girls spent their free time, often in the company of larrikins, irreverent loutish young men, runners for bookmakers, thugs, or unwilling labourers. The term ‘larrikin’ possessed then none of the approving colouration it would take on gradually, in part due to C.J. Dennis’s 1916 verses—supposedly the utterances of an engaging Melbourne larrikin named Ginger Mick.

After the war there were complaints about a new stridency and boldness in young women, all under the influence of new entertainments, including the ‘flicks’ and the rise of public dancing. Even during the war, older folk and the press were appalled by the open way young women and soldiers met and talked in city streets. Soldiers were warned that there were Australian factory girls in the streets of the Australian cities, and around Australian military headquarters in Horseferry Road, London, who were not professional prostitutes but ‘amateurs’, and who would infect soldiers with venereal diseases (VD) picked up from earlier transactions. Many authorities were sure that the spread of VD in Australian society was a result of factory girls and other girl employees being on the streets after work. One commentator declared that too many girls absorbed ‘the moral tone of the man of the world and regarded sexual satisfaction as a right’.

And it was not only working-class girls. After the war, the middle-class single girl, who might have got ideas from working in voluntary bodies or in offices, and who had got used to the freedom of not being chaperoned, was now possibly that latest of creatures, ‘a flapper’. The ‘flapper’, characterised by the arm-flapping motion of the dance named the Charleston, was an American creation, growing out of a background of prep schools and university where educated girls chose to consider themselves men’s equals, to drink like them, to smoke like them, to listen to jazz, and to display a blatant interest in flirtation and ‘petting’ (so asserting their own right to sexual pleasure). The flappers’ inchoate declaration of liberty was reflected in their fashions. They often went bare-headed and wore their hair bobbed, their foreheads circled by Red Indian-style headbands, their dresses above the knee and their stockings rolled down, the tops visible on their thighs as they danced. They even drove cars.

Factory girls adopted the style of the flapper to the extent that they could afford it. The manifestation was seen as decadent by feminists such as the remarkable Edith Cowan, the first woman member of any Australian Parliament, in her case in Western Australia in 1921. She had been fighting for society to take women seriously since the 1890s. The ‘flapper’ vulgarised women and was undermining what had been achieved, Edith Cowan believed.

Some could see benefits in the new woman, however, whoever she was. In Melbourne, the president of the Young Women’s Christian Association, Nell Martyn, a therapeutic masseuse who had worked on soldiers’ damaged limbs, had taken over her father’s Melbourne steelworks and run them with great success. She reported in 1924 that girls were no longer ‘fettered by traditions nor bound by conventionalities’. Martyn was a devout Methodist but knew women could not be brow-beaten out of what they were becoming: ‘How can we hope to give an abundant life [to young women] by a process of restriction and prohibition … our girls have a right to the opportunities for meeting, knowing and understanding men … a Christian Association will fail in its purpose if it does not provide for this side of a girl’s nature.’ Martyn was willing to condone dancing, generally condemned by non-conformists and by members of the Scottish Free Church.

Since the flapper reached Australia by way of the flicks, there was no country town that was not affected by the phenomenon. Not all young women were flappers anyhow, but they were in one way or another influenced by the expression of freedom for which flappers stood. A girl from the bush trying to imitate the worldliness of the flapper might lack the sophistication to carry it off. Many ordinary girls felt confused about where the boundaries of behaviour lay. Sometimes there were tragedies, and young women found the official world did not accept the new freedoms.

Molly Meadows, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who worked at the Bunbury Rose Hotel in Western Australia, was one who had seen the change in the behaviour of girls in Australian and American movies, and who clumsily tried to imitate the glib smartness of the new woman. In April 1922, Molly was sexually assaulted in the sand hills of the back beach of Bunbury. The young man accused of assaulting her was twenty-year-old circus employee Joseph McAuliffe from Perry Brothers’ Circus, then performing in Bunbury. As the press report said, ‘Her protests were unavailing’, and she ‘was treated in a most brutal fashion, a branch or root of tree being pressed across her neck’. A doctor later confirmed that she had been ‘outraged’. McAuliffe was a large young man and it had taken two policemen to hold him once bystanders heard Molly’s protests and calls for help. The matter of Molly Meadows would raise in Australia the new post-war, Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties question of whether a woman could behave with the new freedoms and still consider herself immune from assault.

Bunbury was a characteristic Australian coastal town, remote in terms of the day. It was five hours’ rail journey south of Perth and had a population of about four thousand. It supported, as did many towns that size then, two newspapers, as well as its own brewery, timber yards, butter factory, fish company, brickyard and tannery. The cinema was—like hundreds of others across the nation—named the Lyric.

One hundred and twenty-three Bunbury men had died during the Great War conflict, and many others had come home disabled. But on 11 November 1918, the day the Armistice was signed, as in so many other towns in Australia, the municipal band played from the balcony of the Rose Hotel and led a thousand people in the street in the singing of ‘Rule Britannia’, while children blew tin whistles and beat kerosene tins.

Despite the remoteness of Bunbury in the scheme of the world, since coming to town from her parents’ farm, Molly, like other girls at the time, must have seen the movies of Theda Bara, daughter of a Jewish immigrant to America from Poland. Bara was the original ‘vamp’ of the silver screen and her silent films have to this day an extraordinary voiceless eroticism. They were of great concern to civic leaders and clergymen when they appeared; even in Hollywood there was a feeling that she should be excluded to allow more virtuous-seeming female characters onto the screen. In her 1915 film A Fool There Was, Bara whispered the famed line ‘Kiss me, you fool!’, easily lip-read in the cinema dark by millions of young women. It was an utterance that lodged in the imaginations of women and men across the world. Bara’s other films to which the young flocked were the 1919 Siren’s Song and When Men Desire, robust titles in themselves. Besides Bara’s influence, through the newsreels, Molly had seen real-life flappers dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom at the Palais de Danse in St Kilda.

Molly had been away from home for only three months when she first began working at the Rose Hotel. The circus arrived in mid-April 1922 and set up at Queen’s Gardens. Molly went to the circus with her friend and fellow waitress, Sybil Wickender. Wickender had met Mr Perry, the circus owner, and introduced him to Molly when the show ended. They met up with Joseph McAuliffe and the group of four left the circus tent. In the backyard of the hotel, Molly listened to McAuliffe’s tales of the circus and permitted mutual caresses. After circus rehearsal the next day, by previous arrangement, Perry and McAuliffe took the two girls strolling to the beach. McAuliffe and Molly dawdled behind and she suggested that they should sit down. That was when the assault was believed to have taken place.

Here was a situation in which a naïve country girl wanted to know what the much-touted process named ‘dating’ meant. It meant something more glamorous than ‘courting’. It was something new, something that broke away from bush greyness. She admitted that she had allowed McAuliffe to kiss her and—as she innocently confessed—had ‘playfully’ threatened that she would bite him. McAuliffe’s argument was the classic sexual assault defence that she had led him on. He said, ‘I thought this arrangement was as good as a promise.’ As he rolled her onto her stomach and pulled down her drawers, she screamed, and even when a surfer and two fishermen came running to intervene, McAuliffe was so certain of his right to conquest that, when he was dragged off her, he called out, ‘I’ll meet you on the corner tonight, Molly.’ The question was whether the judges would, in a new age, recognise Molly’s ‘modern’ right to flirt, and then still say no.

Just one week after the attack, the trial of Joseph McAuliffe opened in the Bunbury Court of Quarter Sessions before three police magistrates. First was the question of whether carnal knowledge occurred; next, that of Molly’s consent. Molly gave her evidence. She said he had penetrated her twice: ‘My head was down and covered with weeds … I was half unconscious from struggling and fright.’

McAuliffe said it was Molly who’d suggested they sit down on the sand hills. She had opened her legs freely. ‘She was a consenting party up to the time I penetrated her.’ He had told the police, ‘I tried but whilst I was trying I shot my mutton … I could not stop, no man could then.’ Howard S. Bath, McAuliffe’s lawyer, must have hoped that McAuliffe’s statement about how he was unable to stop in mid-passion would mean something to male judges and jurors. Bath wanted to portray Molly—however unfairly—as a teasing, promiscuous young woman who went out at night unchaperoned. The Crown Prosecutor argued, however, that everything about the girl and her clothing indicated that she had fought to prove to McAuliffe that she had not given consent.

So were young women like ‘modern’ Molly Meadows entitled to set limits to their sexual adventures? It seemed as if a crucial issue of women’s rights depended on what the Bunbury magistrates decided. In previous similar cases, the girl’s flirtatiousness could be relied on to acquit a man. But Magistrate Wood said the jury was to make a legal distinction between ‘flirtation’ and ‘encouragement’. If Molly’s spooning in the shadows of the hotel backyard the night before the rape constituted the former, then McAuliffe was a rapist, but if there were encouragement, then McAuliffe was a man ‘legally’ entitled to sexual release.

The twelve men of the jury retired at 8 p.m. and came back after only seventeen minutes with a verdict of guilty. Magistrate Wood sentenced the prisoner to five years’ hard labour. McAuliffe, whose lawyer was astonished by this revolutionary verdict, spent the next months inside Western Australia’s notorious maximum security gaol, a surviving institution of the convict system in Fremantle.

But there was a great deal of male sympathy for McAuliffe. A fund was set up to finance his appeal, which was heard on 1 September 1922 before three judges of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. The Crown Prosecutor argued what the magistrates’ bench had decided: that women were entitled to call off an encounter when they wished. The defence pursued again the traditional line: women were either chaste, and hence any assault on them came without encouragement, or they were ‘tough girls who were open territory’, as Howard Bath the lawyer put it.

Chief Justice MacMillan opted without further legal analysis for the position of the defence. Justice Thomas Draper, a scholar, bird watcher and former attorney-general of Western Australia, who had lost his seat in 1921 to Edith Cowan, was also on the bench. He agreed with MacMillan. The third justice was Robert Bruce Burnside, son of the former chief justice of Ceylon and devout Swan River yachtsman, known to have a ‘rousing and sometimes earthy sense of humour’. Nonetheless, he too seemed shocked by the easy intimacies that Molly permitted soon after meeting McAuliffe, and by the fact that she had agreed to meet him the next day.

So a new trial was awarded McAuliffe. The case came up before a jury and the yachtsman bon vivant Justice Burnside in October 1922. It went swiftly—the witness testimony took up the first day, and the lawyers’ addresses and judge’s charge the next morning. Justice Burnside told the jury that if Joseph McAuliffe had extracted consent from Molly Meadows ‘by intimidation, by force, or by fraud’ there would be no justification for the sexual act. But there had been no necessity for McAuliffe to resort to such tactics. Burnside went to the length of saying he was deeply shocked by Molly’s ‘libidinous behaviour’ and suggested that such women had no right to claim a lack of consent: ‘For a young woman to be sitting in a backyard at midnight with a man whom she has met only a short time before, and kissing him; if that is innocence, then the word has changed its meaning.’

The jury came back two hours later to declare McAuliffe not guilty. What Burnside had decided was that the would-be flapper could not cry wolf without deserving to be devoured, and that the war had not changed the common law definition of rape. It was not yet safe to experiment, however tentatively, at being a new kind of woman and at the same time expect immunity from sexual assault.

MORE BUSINESS WITH ‘AVIATING’

To many, Billy Hughes’ post-war political career would seem erratic, with the meetings of Cabinet seeming strange, volatile affairs, and with the Country Party refusing to join him in government because of his apparent socialism in having his government buy into a Commonwealth Shipping Line, the Commonwealth Oil Refineries and Amalgamated Wireless. He would fall from office after the 1922 elections, the Country Party agreeing to give their weight to the Nationals only if the Melbourne businessman and Gallipoli hero (fighting with the Royal Fusiliers) Sir Stanley Melbourne Bruce took over the leadership.

But the volatile little Welshman had many flashes of prophetism and declared himself ‘a fanatic on aviating’. He saw—as would be proven to the cost of young Australians then a-growing and likely to reach maturity by the end of the Depression and in the following war—that ‘the air, that new element which man has now conquered, is but the sea in another form, and it is on the sea and in the air that we shall have to look for our defence’. But he saw too, accurately, that ‘no country afforded better scope for commercial purposes’ than Australia.

In 1924, two military flyers, Wing Commander Stanley Goble and Flying Officer Ivor McIntyre, made the first aerial circumnavigation of Australia, and civil aviators such as Charles Kingsford Smith were beginning to emerge. Kingsford Smith had embarked for Gallipoli in February 1915 as a member of a signal company, served during that doomed campaign, and then became a despatch rider in England and France before transferring to the Australian Flying Corps. Shot down and wounded in August 1917, he was awarded the Military Cross. He had been barred from participating in the 1919 England-to-Australia air race, won by his namesakes Keith and Ross Smith, because it was believed he lacked navigational experience, but after piloting joy flights in England, he went to the United States to attract sponsors for a trans-Pacific flight, and was briefly a stunt and joy-ride flyer in California. Back in Australia in January 1921, he made a living with another joy-riding organisation, the Diggers’ Aviation Company—a sign that, despite the missions he and others had flown in the Great War, society did not know whether flying was an enlargement of the world or merely a circus attraction.

Kingsford Smith acquired or leased Bristol Tourers and carried freight from Carnarvon in Western Australia to other remote towns. In 1927, with Charles Ulm, ardent and sportive flyer and fellow Gallipoli survivor, he founded the Interstate Flying Services, which tendered unsuccessfully for an Adelaide-Perth mail run. Even so, at least in Kingsford Smith’s case, he performed long-distance flights for their inherent excitement. The first Kingsford Smith and Ulm demonstration flight occurred in June 1927 when they circuited Australia in ten days and five hours. For a trans-Pacific flight they planned, the New South Wales government subscribed £9000, and Sidney Myer, the Melbourne emporium owner, and a Californian oil magnate named G. Allan Hancock matched it.

In a three-engine Fokker plane, the Southern Cross, with Ulm and two American crewmen, Harry Line and Jim Warner, Kingsford Smith took off from Oakland, California, on 31 May 1928, and flew via Hawaii and Suva to Brisbane in eighty-three and a half hours. Next they took on a non-stop flight from Point Cook in Melbourne to Perth, and then from Sydney to New Zealand to show the feasibility of passenger and mail services across the Tasman. Like Melbourne’s Smith brothers, he was knighted. But his repute was not unchallenged.

During a flight to England with Ulm in 1929 to place orders for planes, he made an emergency landing at the Glenelg River estuary in the Kimberley. Two aviators searching for him, Keith Anderson and Robert Hitchcock, crash-landed in Central Australia and died of thirst and exposure before they were found. The rumour circulated that Kingsford Smith and Ulm had engineered the event so they could claim that while waiting for rescue they had drunk and been buoyed by Coffee Royal, a brand of coffee and brandy that had sponsored the flight.

But Kingsford Smith, above all other Australians, seemed the risky harbinger of a potential future for civil aviation. His airline, Australian National Airways, began operations in January 1930. The standard, scheduled flight did not satisfy his needs, however. The age of exploration had ended elsewhere on earth and at sea, but not in the air. Even so, it offered a narrow window of glory. The more accustomed air services became, then the less derring-do remained in aviation. In June that year, he piloted the Southern Cross on an east–west crossing of the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland, and received an enthusiastic welcome in New York. He had many an entrepreneur’s fear of socialism, and had by now joined a not-so-secret, near-Fascist unofficial army, the New Guard. But the Depression drastically reduced the demand for air travel, and his airline came close to bankruptcy. One of its planes, the Southern Cloud, disappeared over the Australian Alps and would not be found until the 1950s.

In any case, Kingsford Smith was only partially an entrepreneur, since the entrepreneurial spirit is not always congenial to risk-taking. He was chronically restless and yearned for new challenges. It was the very nature of the aircraft that it covered very swiftly distances that would have taken classic ground-breakers like Lewis and Clark, Dr Livingston, and Burke and Wills years of peril and struggle. The risk of undertaking endeavours in the sky took place over days or even hours, and the available exploits to be entitled ‘the first man to’ were being grasped by a growing world of flyers. Glory, which had once lasted a lifetime, now lasted months. A fury to excel and be recognised drove Kingsford Smith, and all challenges were welcome, even as the Depression struck Australia. When in 1931 one of his planes had problems and was grounded in Malaya with a load of Christmas mail for Britain, he flew a replacement plane, and collected and delivered the mail in time. In October 1933, he flew solo in just over seven days from London to Wyndham, Western Australia, in a Percival Gull aircraft named Miss Southern Cross; the Commonwealth government awarded him £3000 for the achievement. In 1935, a trans-Tasman airmail service began, and on the first flight, aboard the Lady Southern Cross, one of the crewmen Bill Taylor had to climb out of the cockpit and transfer oil from the sump of a dead motor into the other. (This would be reproduced superbly in Ken Hall’s classic 1946 film, Smithy.) Most of the cargo was jettisoned and Kingsford Smith brought the Lady Southern Cross back to Sydney.

He now had the Lady Southern Cross flown to England, and followed it by ship, since doctors had ordered that he must rest from his frenetic schedule. From England he took off in November 1935 to make one more record-breaking flight to Australia. Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot J.T. Pethybridge disappeared on that flight. It is believed that they crashed into the sea somewhere off the coast of Burma while flying at night towards Singapore.

Kingsford Smith had an extraordinarily obsessive approach to aviation and to the urgency of its development. It would be an irony that four years after his death, when war began, Australia would be left with only the less advanced or obsolete aircraft, such as Ansons, and the Australian training fighter the Wirraway, to put into the sky. Aircraft would prove to be so scarce that the 7th Australian Squadron waited eighteen months from 1940 to 1941 to be equipped with them. And this despite the patient and continuous work throughout the 1920s and 1930s of the underfunded Sir Lawrence Wackett, former pilot and engineering innovator on the Western Front, head of the underfunded Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Experimental Section, and the officer who gave his name to the Wackett training aircraft, to provide something better.

MANAGING THE NEW WOMAN

To part-manage and part-exploit the new freedoms of women, Charity Queen events, to honour girls who combined beauty and charitable endeavour, came into being. So did the beauty contest, which was less based on traditional feminine virtues and less tolerable both to feminist organisations and to the establishment. During 1922, while Molly Meadows endured her lashing at the hands of judges, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmanian newspapers held photographic competitions to find the most beautiful girl in their respective states. In September 1925, Sydney’s Smith’s Newspapers, of which Robert Clyde Packer was chief executive and managing editor, decided to initiate a swimsuit parade. Packer announced a Miss Australia contest, to be held in various picture theatres, the winner of which would be taken to the United States to compete in the Miss America quest, which had commenced in Atlantic City in 1921.

At the end of June 1926, Miss Beryl Mills of Western Australia was chosen as the first Miss Australia. The contest had provoked great resistance. Edith Jones of the Women Citizens’ Movement in Melbourne implied the competitions came from a suspect and racier source, New South Wales: ‘This is the first year they have been held in Victoria, and next year, if no action is taken, they will be held in twice as many theatres.’ There was pressure for politicians to intervene. But in fact the selection events were well run, and so popular with such a range of women that the legislatures could see little reason for interfering. In both 1926 and 1927, the contestants who reached the finals in the Miss Australia quest were chaperoned by their mothers or another older woman, and the chaperone was paid to travel with the winner to the United States and, in later years, to Britain and Europe. Women doctors were present at the judges’ interviews of finalists, and inspected the girls for healthy weight and general well-being. Contestants were not allowed to wear cosmetics, there were strict rules about the bathing costumes to be worn, and the judges were claimed to be artists, sculptors and doctors. The organisers liked to point to the ‘good stock’ that made up their finalists. The idea of ‘stock’ and ‘good blood’, taken up manically by an as yet small German party called the Nazis, was a common concept of the period. These finalists were the daughters of solid folk, and in 1927 Miss Victoria was a physical culture teacher, Miss Queensland a telephonist, Miss South Australia a dancing teacher, Miss Western Australia a nurse, Miss Tasmania a secretary (to her own father) and Miss New South Wales an art student.

In 1926, Beryl Mills, the first girl-triumphant, was a nineteen-year-old final-year art student at the University of Western Australia. She came from ‘good pastoral stock’, had won scholarships to Perth Modern School and the university, and was an accomplished pianist, swimmer, diver and hockey player. Miss Australia 1927 was similarly laudable: Phyllis van Alwyn, of Launceston in Tasmania, also of ‘good pastoral stock’, descended from the Scottish Highland Black family of Victoria’s Western District. Her father managed McRobertson’s Confectionary in Tasmania. She had qualifications in shorthand and typing, and asserted her super-modernity by driving her own car. Such girls, though still condemned in some quarters for entering the contests, actually bespoke competence and confidence rather than degeneracy.

The skills of dressmaking and cooking that both Beryl Mills and Phyllis van Alwyn possessed allowed them to be depicted as future mothers, as solid subscribers to women’s biological duty. This national duty of the beauty queen was confirmed during Phyllis’s American trip when the Mayor of San Francisco told a large audience that they had with them that day a sister of the Anzacs of imperishable fame, and a future mother of men of that ilk.

ART, DOCTRINE AND MAKING A LIVING

Beauty queens might occupy the popular imagination, but the cusp of the 1920s was still a struggle for Australian artists. Paintings that embraced the Australian landscape and milieu were still of interest only to a minority. It had been so since the nineteenth century.

For a considerable number of notable artists, including Julian Ashton (who came to Australia in hopes of curing his asthma) and Max Meldrum, who had emigrated to Australia as a Scots-born adolescent travelling with parents, art was a crucial arena and—as elsewhere in the world—there was a hope that within that stadium the issues of ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is Australian art?’ would be settled. As always, there was no one finally to settle it, but there were plenty of contenders.

Australians, like the two Victorian-born gold rush artists, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, were forced overseas, in part by curiosity but also by poor pickings in Australia. Charles Conder, the tall, personable English surveyor who had come to Australia to work in the Lands Department of New South Wales, and then shared a Melbourne studio with Tom Roberts, left for Europe after ten years in Australia, but did not observe French artistic society as a visitor. He would instead quickly find his place in it. Conder had a gift for acquiring patrons, and in the early 1900s the hard-working young Australian Will Longstaff, living close to the bone in squalid accommodation, saw him in the ‘congenial society of young Frenchmen at Montmartre who speedily learned to idolise him’. Conder had been a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, who included his form in paintings of the Moulin Rouge.

This inside running evaded other artists in exile. Roberts was away from 1903 to 1923, part of that time spent working as a facial-restoration orderly at Wandsworth Hospital in London. He had taken his big unfinished painting of the opening of Federal Parliament to England with him. Lacking a patron during his long English years, Roberts made his living from portrait painting. Streeton, considered a quintessentially Australian artist, was absent from 1898 to 1924, George Lambert from 1900 to 1921, E. Phillips Fox from 1901 to 1915. John Russell, friend of the sculptor Rodin, and of Matisse and van Gogh, and Rupert Bunny, spent just on forty and fifty years respectively overseas before returning in their old age—Bunny returning in 1933, after the death of his French wife, to find that Russell had already died in Sydney in 1930.

Australian painters, like writers and others then and later, looked to the northern hemisphere to anoint them, and it rarely did. According to the art historian Bernard Smith, ‘perhaps the European venture ceased too quickly from being part of a lifelong process of self-discovery and became, for most of them, a step on the road to success and public acclaim’. That is, like many travelling Australian artists and writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were looking for European success to underpin success in Australia. But such judgements by scholars often take little account of the force of economics upon hard-up artists such as Tom Roberts, and in any case, success and public acclaim evaded so many of the gifted, the British having their own talented artists to celebrate and the French theirs. But the pattern of the Australian artist having to go overseas for nurture and instruction and a key to success had become established, and would continue throughout the twentieth century.

Even if Australian public response to its artists was limited, in Australia in the 1920s, schools of art and competing dogmas about how to paint flourished with the same passionate abomination of each other that characterised Europe and the United States. The result would be significant in national myth-making, the way Australians saw themselves. Meldrum was one of the principal sources of argument. He had come to Melbourne as a fourteen-year-old with his mother and father, the latter a chemist. At seventeen he was enrolled in the National Gallery School in Melbourne and was one of the artists of the exclusive—at least in its own eyes—Prehistoric Order of Cannibals club. In 1899 he won the National Gallery of Victoria’s travelling scholarship and went to France to study at the Académie Julian and Colarossi. He married there the sister of the painter Charles Nitsch, Jeanne Eugenie, a singer at the Opéra Comique, and while living in Rennes exhibited at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1904 and 1908, and received a commission to paint murals in the local chateau. He seems to have been more successful in France than his Australian contemporaries, who went to Europe half-timidly to peek at the masters.

Meldrum returned to Melbourne in 1912 after an absence of thirteen years and acquired a studio. In 1919 he published his argumentative, assertive book, Max Meldrum: His Art and Views, which included the essay ‘The Invariable Truths of Depictive Art’. He argued that painting was a pure science of optical analysis or what he called ‘photometry’, by means of which the artist could carefully see and analyse tone and tonal relationships, to produce an exact reproduction of the thing seen. ‘The superficial area occupied by one tone’ was the basis of art, he dictated,