Review
Reviewed Work(s): Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of
World War II by Christopher Waters
Review by: Allan Patience
Source: Labour History , No. 103 (November 2012), pp. 272-274
Published by: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Inc.
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272 Labour History • Number 103 • November 2012
Scates has a gift for the revealing anecdote. The British colonel who rebukes the
Australian nurses for weeping in public, and sends them back to base in his staff
car, epitomises the attitude of the British to the colonials, to the lower classes, and to
natives. The general who chairs the meetings in Canberra demonstrates the masterly
use of timing to control a meeting, only to be thwarted by the public servant who
invokes a higher authority at the crucial moment.
But Scates’ novel is more than another account of Gallipoli, albeit enriched with
multiple perspectives and reflections on the nature of history. The frame within
which he presents it gives a clue to how we may read it. The fictional narrative is
followed by ‘Reflections’, an annotated bibliography, and acknowledgements of
those, in Australia and Turkey, who have helped the author. These supplements
place the work as the serious contribution to scholarly history and historiography
that it is. The author also acknowledges the support he has received from friends
and family, and notes that the ‘story of a family stands at the centre of the book’. By
implication, this remark summons up all those family stories broken by war that
neither fiction nor history will ever recover. The story of Lieutenant Irving and Sister
Elsie stands for all of them.
The dedication of the book makes further connections. ‘To the memory of my
Grandfather, Pte. Thomas Charles Scates, Quinn’s Post, 1915, and for Ken Inglis, who
taught me how to remember Anzac.’ The first part of this dedication links the book
not only to all the other broken families, but particularly to the heart of the author’s
own family, and thus with the question that arises from its framework of how we
can grieve for those we never knew. The second part shows where we may look for
an answer. Inglis’ work on the First AIF and on memorials shows how private and
public grief may come together, but at the same time his accounts are grounded in
the facts that check sentimentality. The last words of Scates’ novel take us to the same
point. Mark Troy, now a Professor, steps forward to address the crowds assembled
to commemorate the centenary of the landings:
‘Sweat broke out across his brow, his hands shook, a fear that so became Lone
Pine sat at the pit of his stomach. “Ladies and gentlemen, the ground on which you
stand today…”’
Although the bulldozers may have destroyed much of Gallipoli’s past, the work
of the historians has ensured that the truths buried in its sacred ground remain alive.
Victoria University, Melbourne JOHN MCLAREN
Christopher Waters, Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and
the Origins of World War II, I.B. Tauris, London, 2012. pp. vii + 320. $39.95 cloth.
After World War I the UK began hinting to Australia and to the other Dominions
in the British Empire that it was time to shoulder greater responsibility for their
own sovereignty. They were being nudged out of the imperial nest, but Australia’s
leaders at the time didn’t seem to understand (or didn’t want to understand) what
was happening. The 1926 Imperial Conference in London declared that the white-
settler colonial Dominions (Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand)
should think of themselves as autonomous political entities (in effect sovereign states)
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Book Reviews 273
within the British Empire. Five years later the British parliament passed the Statute
of Westminster removing the British parliament’s power to legislate on behalf of the
Dominions except at their request and by their consent. Australia resisted ratifying
the Statute until 1942 when anyone with any prescience could see that the idea of
the Empire as Australia’s security blanket was on its last legs – especially after the
fall of Singapore in January of that year. Before Singapore, leaders in Australia like
R.G. Menzies persisted in what amounted a blind faith that the Empire must remain
steadfast and united behind Great Britain in that country’s response – blinkered,
mealy-mouthed, counterproductive, partly sympathetic – to the looming fascism in
Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and in Hirohito’s Japan.
In Britain Winston Churchill was a lonely figure who understood better than most
of his contemporaries the kind of threat German Nazism posed to Europe and the
world. Few, it appears, were listening to Churchill among Australia’s conservative
political leadership in the 1930s. British race patriotism dictated the craven sentiments
of these ideologically purblind men, leading them to follow what they thought was
sound British pragmatism in letting fascism have its head in Europe and naively
believing that this approach would persuade Hitler to leave Britain and its Empire
alone. In fact, within Britain’s political elite there were figures like Lord Halifax who
were sympathetic to many of Hitler’s views. Joseph Lyons, Billy Hughes, Robert
Menzies and Richard Casey all at first followed Chamberlain’s lead (and even
displayed some of Halifax’s sentiments), urged on by Stanley Bruce in London. Soon
they were out in front of Chamberlain and the British appeasers, ignoring Churchill
and demonstrating how little they understood foreign policy, the fragility of the
British Empire in which they had invested so much politically and psychologically,
and the true nature of fascism and the evil it entailed. Waters notes Stanley Bruce’s
inept description of Chamberlain as ‘the Peace Maker of Europe’ (p. 170).
Christopher Waters’ excellent book shows how undeveloped and unsophisticated
Australian foreign and defence policy was in the 1930s. Australia’s conservative
politicians resisted British attempts to persuade Australia to become more
independent. They slavishly persisted in their wild dreams of an eternal British
Empire bringing civilisation and order to the world and along the way guaranteeing
Australia’s security in what seemed to be an increasingly threatening Asian
environment. Meanwhile the Empire was cracking up – its coup de grâce was to
occur in the wake of the decolonisation movement after World War II. Realists in
Britain were preparing for the worst while Australia’s leaders remained in a cloud
cuckoo land of patriotism and imperial glory, assuming that appeasement would
ensure order in Europe amid the pomp and circumstance of the Empire that thrilled
conservatives in the antipodes. In foreign and defence policy terms Australia still
saw itself, in effect, as a colony in need of protection and the reflected glory of the
mother-land.
When Hitler marched into Poland and Chamberlain was forced at last to stop
his appeasement dithering and go to war, Australia believed it had no choice but to
follow suit. In consequence, on 3 September 1939 Prime Minister Menzies declared
that it was his ‘melancholy duty’ to officially inform the Australian people that
because Great Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany, ‘Australia is also at war’.
Waters’ lucid, superbly researched, and marvellously fresh view of these events
from an Australian perspective is a major contribution to the history of Australian
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274 Labour History • Number 103 • November 2012
foreign policy and the development, more recently, of its imagining of itself as a
middle power. The kind of middle power that Australia tries to project to the world
has deep roots in the foreign and defence thinking of the appeasement era. That
thinking still persists and still clouds much of our foreign and defence thinking
today. Waters’ timely and intelligent book will certainly help clarify how Australia
can re-imagine itself regionally and globally.
Asian Institute, University of Melbourne ALLAN PATIENCE
James Curran, Curtin’s Empire, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2011.
pp. 159. $34.95 paper.
‘Bless my soul if it isn’t John Curtin and Bert Evatt’, a seated statue of Queen Victoria
is made to say to a couple of suited male figures doffing their hats, in a memorable
Bulletin cartoon of 31 May 1944, and which forms the evocative frontispiece of
James Curran’s incisive and revisionist essay concerning the politics of empire and
nationalism in Australian external affairs.
Curtin’s Empire expertly unravels the popular mythology surrounding John
Curtin’s contested views about the British connection within the Labor tradition. It
also meticulously explains how it was that Curtin gave Labor credibility as a party
of responsibility at a time of critical international challenges involving defence
security and war. On both counts, Curtin’s achievement was enormous, and one
that has often been misunderstood. Curran sets the record right in a compellingly
scholarly fashion.
John Curtin began his career in federal politics during Labor’s troubled years
between the wars. Elected for the federal seat of Fremantle in 1928, he came to
Canberra with impeccable Labor credentials, having been editor of the Westralian
Worker since February 1917, and having originally made his name in the anti-
conscription campaigns during the Great War. The party needed all the talent it could
summon. Passionate about social justice issues and the rights of the working man,
protectionist national tariffs and wage award regulations, Labor was potentially
much less well equipped to deal with the harsh external realities of the post-Versailles
world of foreign politics, colonial mandates, collective security and the challenges
of both national socialism in Europe and Japanese aggression in the East. A proud
isolationist sentiment even coloured Labor ideology. The conservative forces in
federal politics appeared increasingly to have cornered the political market on
empire loyalism and defence strategies at a time of global fears over another major
war. Labor also behaved like a family internally at war with itself. As Curran sharply
puts it (p. 59):
For a party that counted among its ranks liberal internationalists who
supported the League of Nations, international socialists who saw in
the Soviet Union a model of world leadership, Catholics who hated
communism as the enemy of religion and many isolationists who wished
to turn their backs on these great external problems, the course of world
events threatened to open old wounds and render it unelectable in the
eyes of the Australian people.
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