Robert Gordon Menzies

Prime minister of Australia (1939-1941, 1949-1966)

• Born: December 20, 1894
• Birthplace: Jeparit, Victoria, Australia
• Died: May 16, 1978
• Place of death: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

As the leading conservative politician of Australia for more than a third of a century, and as prime minister from 1939 to 1941 and from 1949 to 1966, Menzies forged critical, lasting international commitments and national policies.

Early Life

Robert Gordon Menzies (MEHN-zeez) was born to James Menzies and Kate Sampson Menzies, who ran a general store and served as agents for farm implement manufacturers. Their fourth child’s middle name came from the popular imperial martyr, General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. Robert Menzies began his education in public schools and later studied at private schools in Ballarat and in Melbourne after his father’s election to the Victorian parliament. At eighteen, Menzies entered Melbourne University to study law. With its small size and elite reputation, Melbourne University at the time offered talented, proper, and ambitious young men a stepping-stone to prominence within the city’s social and political establishments.

Menzies was graduated in 1916; although trained in the university officer program, Menzies declined service for personal and family reasons. Later attempts to discredit him on these grounds generally backfired, but they may have stung Menzies sufficiently to determine, by way of compensation, his subsequent approval of conscription, military alliance, and intervention: During his administrations, Australia committed troops to international forces in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Life’s Work

In 1918, Menzies began his law practice. In 1920, he married Pattie Maie Leckie, a politician’s daughter, who remained with him throughout his life. As his reputation in constitutional law grew, his political career began to develop. In 1928, he won a seat in the Victorian parliament. By 1932, he was deputy premier and attorney general of Victoria. In 1934, Prime MinisterJoseph Aloysius Lyons asked Menzies to run for the national Parliament as a candidate of the United Australian Party (UAP). Menzies won the seat for Kooyong, Melbourne, which he retained for thirty-two years. He served the Lyons government until March, 1939, when he resigned in a dispute over national insurance that split Lyons’s UPA-Country Party coalition. Lyons died a month later, and Menzies ascended to head the UAP on behalf of its liberal (that is centrist) faction. Supporting the National Insurance Act perhaps more for political placement than on principle, Menzies became prime minister of Australia on April 29, 1939, in a UAP government without coalition.

With World War II approaching, Menzies’ suspicion of Japanese intentions found little support in London but was not enough to force Menzies to seek an independent national agenda; his testimony also conflicted with his previous criticism of Australian union protests against shipping iron to Japan. He defended the Munich appeasement of Adolf Hitler even after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the point of crisis for most other observers. Nevertheless, Menzies reverted to imperial loyalties when the war began: Australia declared war on Germany as a result of Great Britain’s declaration. This postcolonial obligation left Australia in a dangerously straddled position: The bulk of Australian forces were committed to the British campaign in North Africa, while Australian forces in the Pacific were essentially confined to coastal defense and to the ill-fated garrisons of such British ports as Hong Kong and Singapore. His insistence that British motives coincided exactly with Australian interests reduced Menzies’ parliamentary majority after the 1940 elections, but he relied on personal visibility and external recognition to carry him through: In 1941, he departed for London and the Middle East. Menzies returned to a government in deep division, which eventually resulted in the disbanding of the UAP and eight years of power for the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

If Menzies gave the government to Labor in 1941, the ALP returned the gift in 1949, by failing to recognize the polarization of Cold War thought. Like other countries, Australia had long accommodated a large amount of socialist sentiment and a highly vocal, if small, Communist Party ; these elements historically overlapped the left wing of the ALP and were not renounced despite the swing of postwar public opinion. Menzies countered with a new Liberal Party organization, drawing in many of the former UAP and Country Party factions, including conservative veterans’ groups, and swept the elections of 1949 on an anti-Socialist platform: While Labor proposed to nationalize the banks, Menzies proposed to outlaw the Communist Party.

Although Menzies probably knew that his proposed restriction would be ruled unconstitutional, he caught the tone of the electorate. Tall and portly, with trademark bushy black eyebrows, an orator in a league with Sir Winston Churchill, Menzies looked the part of the statesman. His demeanor, matched with his ability to gauge the public and his quickness to profit from others’ missteps, may in fact help account for Menzies’ long tenure as prime minister. His attention to international affairs thrust Australia into the flattering appearance of global leadership: Menzies was a major voice in urging Commonwealth cooperation; he asserted Australia’s role in the United Nations; and he led the nation to war on behalf of alliances that he had fostered in accordance with his own vision of the domino theory. In an example of his public forcefulness, Menzies was able to turn the 1954 defection of a Soviet agent, Vladimir Petrov, into a further indictment of the Labor Left, rather than permitting it to signal lapses within his own intelligence staff. In 1956, he led a team that attempted to negotiate international jurisdiction of the Suez Canal. His mission failed, but he retained popularity at home by supporting the subsequent British and French invasion of Egypt.

In his domestic policies, similarly, Menzies succeeded largely through well-timed visibility and by taking fewer false steps than his opponents. He consistently supported Australian federalism (as opposed to centralization), both as a matter of states’ rights in principle and as a means of playing one state’s interests against those of another. Some of the institutions that he sustained or created, such as national insurance, free tertiary education, and the development of the national capital of Canberra, read almost like a Labor platform. That, in fact, is how many of his positions originated: Menzies consistently adopted liberal social policies just before or immediately after elections, alternately throwing Labor into confusion and appeasing restive elements within his own party. When he retired in 1966, after seventeen years in office, the extent to which Menzies had governed through personal insight and individual forcefulness was clear: No real heir had been groomed among the Liberals, and no cohesive ALP policy was prepared to fill the void.

Significance

Menzies’ style of government was both consistently motivated by tradition and curiously ad hoc. He aggressively sought international recognition and alliance at a time when Australia might have reverted to isolationism and restriction. Yet many of his policies might well be called reactionary or neocolonial: It is difficult to view Menzies’ Australia as more than a secondary partner in the relationships he forged, and difficult to ignore his commitments to the British monarchy, to American industry, and, at home, to large-scale edifices and performances. Those commitments represented ties, in short, to an unquestioned concept of a fundamentally metropolitan Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Menzies’ record on social welfare, aborigine rights, and immigration standards is mediocre at best and potentially self-defeating in the long run. Menzies abandoned to his successors any possible visions of a truly independent Australia in the world arena, as a political and cultural force in the Pacific and Indian basins, as a power having affinities with developing nations in black Africa and South America, and as a domestic realm demanding strong diversification and interstate cooperation.

Perhaps the most telling summary of Menzies’ tenure came in the virtual explosion of Australian culture in the early 1970’s, under the Labor government of Gough Whitlam. It was as if Australia had suddenly thrown off the blankets of English sentiment and American realpolitik. With strong state support and public encouragement, a vast amount of literature, film, social history, and commentary emerged, much of it directed at examining, perhaps for the first time in the postwar age, the possibilities of modern Australian identity and to asserting, at last, both the cultural autonomy and political self-direction of an independent Australia.

Bibliography

Barclay, Glen St. J. Friends in High Places: Australian-American Diplomatic Relations Since 1945. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985. Barclay portrays Menzies as consistently outmaneuvered by American leaders, Lyndon B. Johnson in particular. Traces the process of Australian involvement in Vietnam and the development of American communications bases in the Australian outback.

Crowley, F. K., ed. A New History of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974. G. C. Bolton’s chapter, “1939-1951,” deals with Menzies’ first term, including the Australian entry into World War II, and with the evolution of the postwar Liberal Party. W. J. Hudson’s chapter, “1951-1972,” covers Menzies’ domestic strategies.

Griffiths, Tony. Beautiful Lies: Australia from Menzies to Howard. Rev. ed. Kent Town, S. Aust.: Wakefield Press, 2005. Concise history of twentieth century Australia, chronicling how the country became a global power by the twenty-first century.

Hazlehurst, Cameron. Menzies Observed. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1979. Illustrated with official publicity shots Menzies with Churchill, Menzies with Gamal Abdel Nasser and laden with extensive quotation of Menzies’ papers and speeches; highly critical of policies and “accomplishments.”

Holt, Edgar. Politics Is People: The Men of the Menzies Era. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969. At the opposite pole from Hazlehurst: A highly sympathetic chronological appreciation, with personal anecdotes regarding major figures and events.

Lowe, David. Menzies and the “Great World Struggle”: Australia’s Cold War, 1948-1954. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999. The Cold War as viewed from the Australian perspective, focusing on Menzies’ response to the conflict.

Menzies, Robert Gordon. Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. One of two memoirs, this work contains quotations from Menzies’ speeches and anecdotal reminiscences of famous statesmen.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Measure of the Years. London: Cassell, 1970. The second memoir contains more quotations from speeches and reminiscences of famous politicians as well as elaborate, if not quite convincing, arguments in favor of monarchist sentiment and South African domestic policy.

Millar, T. B. Australia in Peace and War: External Relations 1788-1977. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Extensive and technical, presumes prior knowledge of the main contours of events. Heavily documented with charts of foreign aid appropriations, editorial cartoons, and quotations from documents. Particularly strong on Australian relations to nonaligned and developing world nations.

Perkins, Kevin. Menzies: Last of the Queen’s Men. Adelaide, S. Aust.: Rigby, 1968. A criticism of Menzies’ policies. Contains a series of complaints in short, jabbing paragraphs but lacks real development. Hazlehurst makes similar evaluations, but his strategy of damnation by quotation works better.