The Unknowable Stanley Melbourne Bruce

David Lee’s well-researched biography, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Australian Internationalist, provides reminders that building a nice place for yourself in history is not just a matter of hard work and civic virtue, it’s having luck in your calculations, for no one knows the future, and “good judgment” is half the time good luck. Bruce worked hard, as Prime Minister through the 1920s, as Australian High Commissioner in London through the 1930s and 1940s, and for the League of Nations through the fraught 1930s, but miscalculated at crucial points and compromised his place in history.

Though this biography makes a good show of defending Bruce’s achievements as an Australian internationalist, in Australia he will forever be regarded (by the few who know anything about him) as an aloof Anglophile who spent most of his life in England, wore spats, spoke with an upper-class English accent, underestimated the power of the unionism he tried to curb, and lost his own seat in the 1929 election that brought the Scullin Labor government to power. Within the international arena, in which he became a significant player through the 1930s, he spoiled his reputation-after-the-event by aligning himself with the appeasers—not for want of character, morality or courage, for Bruce’s valour had won him the Military Cross, but because he miscalculated the effect on Germany of the policy of appeasement, unlike a failed First Lord of the Admiralty who, half-drunk on the backbenches of the Commons through the 1930s, couldn’t conceive that his greatest days still lay ahead, but did happen to be right about the future of appeasement. Between Bruce and Churchill the mutual dislike was palpable. Following the outbreak of war Bruce continued to miscalculate the future, for he believed, at least until 1941, that Germany would win overwhelmingly. Perhaps most people did, but Bruce left a copious record of such thoughts. The scenarios he envisaged in the mid-1940 for the future of Britain and the world make interesting reading.

Bad luck and pessimism ran in the family—and suicide. In 1899 Bruce was sixteen and still at Melbourne Grammar when his second-oldest brother William, twenty-three, troubled and tired of it, walked down the platform at Sydney’s Rockdale station and threw himself under a passing train. A couple of years later Bruce was captain of Melbourne Grammar when, on May 4, 1901, his father John Bruce, staying at the elegant six-storey Hotel Regina in Paris, under pressure from the London office over his botched takeover of a competing Sydney company, walked out through the windows of his room-with-a-view and plunged to the courtyard below. The police report concluded that he had been suffering from depression. On April 17, 1919, Bruce’s much-loved oldest brother Ernest, a Boer War and Western Front veteran (Military Cross) who had been a second father to Stanley since their father’s suicide, reached for his revolver and shot himself dead in an English convalescent home.

Bruce studied Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at twenty-three, just two years after graduating, became chairman of the family firm’s London office. He chaired meetings with the finesse he later showed as a chairman of committees with the League of Nations in Geneva. He was also successful at the bar—in his first year as a barrister he made £600, and in addition to his increasing income from that source, by 1911 he was drawing £5000 a year from the company as its chairman, a company that by then had accumulated reserves of £100,000. David Lee points out:

In his years of expatriation Bruce had been moulded by upper middle class English society to such a degree that, as the Australian journalist Warren Denning put it, he acquired “that quality of aloofness from the Australian man in the street which forever separated him from the heart of his own country; it left him even in his political heyday a foreigner in his own land, a man out of touch with the people he was leading”.

Bruce rose to the rank of captain during the Gallipoli campaign, where he served with the 2nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers. He was twice wounded and won the Military Cross there, as well as the Croix de Guerre avec palme. Classically educated, he was fascinated by the geography of the place. Subsequently he developed an admiration for Kemal Ataturk as strong as his dislike of Churchill, whose brainchild this disaster was. As David Lee observes:

Bruce’s war experiences underpinned what later became his liberal internationalist principles in the 1930s and 1940s, conditioned his supportive attitude towards appeasement of fascism in the 1930s and influenced his strategic criticisms of Churchill as Prime Minister of Britain in the Second World War.

Following his return to Australia in 1916 Bruce soon decided for a life in politics. The key figures in his early political career were Nationalist Party Prime Minister William Morris (Billy) Hughes and Country Party backbencher Earle Page. Bruce entered federal parliament at a by-election in May 1918, winning the seat of Flinders by a huge margin over the Labor candidate. His ideas from the first were more pro-market than the Prime Minister’s—Hughes’s socialist views had to an extent survived his move to the right, and he was interventionist on economic matters. In addition to representing the electors of Flinders, Bruce represented Australia at the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva in October 1921, marking the real beginning of his political ascent in Australia and of the strong international role he would develop. He saw the League’s role as twofold: arbitration in place of war, and humanitarian objectives for the benefit of mankind. He was a strong believer in disarmament, and his speech in support of it was well reported back home.

When he returned he was offered the portfolio of Minister for Trade and Customs, but for Bruce it was the Treasury portfolio or nothing, and Hughes gave it to him as a means of conciliating big-business critics and the free-traders within the government. At the general election of December 1922 the Nationalist Party lost ten seats while the Country Party and Labor picked up seats. There was no coalition agreement between the Nationalists and the Country Party at this time, so Hughes was faced with the task of forming a minority government and getting the Country Party to support it. The Country Party and Labor, however, were in favour of a no-confidence motion if Hughes remained Prime Minister. In the complicated upshot, Hughes resigned and pushed Bruce into the job as someone who had more chance of forming a composite government, probably hoping it would quickly fall apart and give himself a way back into power. That expectation was belied in the event, with Hughes increasingly resenting Bruce for his success in forming the first of a string of successful coalition arrangements with the Country Party (now led by Page) that would continue, in general successfully, to the present. Bruce was only thirty-nine, and Prime Minister after just four years in parliament.

This biography covers the Bruce–Page governments, their failures and successes, succinctly and fairly. Lee rates their performance across the period 1923–29 as more successful than the unstable and divisive governments of Hughes, Scullin and Lyons, considerably less significant than the Menzies postwar governments, less significant too, and less inspiring, than Curtin’s wartime government, less visionary than Deakin’s. 

What vitiated Bruce’s prime ministership, which deserves high praise for its general heightening of public respect for the institutions of government, was his miscalculation, during his final period of government, of the power of Australian unionism to resist his draconian anti-union legislation. The legislation, prompted by crippling strikes and the government’s fear of communist influence within the union movement, proved a bridge too far. Lee points out:

Although Bruce had shown himself willing to negotiate to achieve outcomes, his general disposition when dealing with militant unions was to fight with every weapon of the law at his disposal … He saw union militancy as a perverse preference for conflict over cooperation and as a threat to the kind of peaceful, prosperous, scientific and rational domestic and international order he wanted. As a result, from 1925 onward he became a polarizing and deeply unpopular figure, embarking on inflexible and ruthless industrial policies.

Consequences included the violence on the Melbourne docks in November 1928, with police at first firing warning shots, then shooting directly at unionists and killing one (a war veteran). In the end Bruce wanted to pass the whole issue of industrial relations over to the states, but by then he was losing control of his own party room. An early election soon followed, and loss of government. 

Major achievements under Bruce included the establishment of Canberra as the seat of government, the Commonwealth–State Financial Agreement of 1927, and the creation of the Australian Loan Council. The nation’s economy was competently if conservatively managed. Polling day, October 12, 1929, was well-timed for losing an election, with Wall Street about to crash a couple of weeks later. Unfortunately it can’t be put down to Bruce’s foresight.

The Scullin government lasted just two years and at the end of 1931 Bruce won back the seat of Flinders (in absentia—he was in London at the time). On his return to Australia he was appointed assistant to Prime Minister Joe Lyons in his United Australia Party government, and the following year he led the Australian delegation to the Imperial Economic Conference at Ottawa, where his negotiating skills on tariffs and other issues were highly effective. He then went on to London where he had equal success in negotiating a favourable conversion of Australia’s overseas loans. Lee gives him high credit on both counts: 

He played a significant part in helping Australia to stave off default both by negotiating the Ottawa Agreement, which facilitated larger British markets for Australian agricultural exports, and by arranging for lower annual interest payments on the national debt. 

Then in 1933, at the World Economic and Monetary Conference in London, he made a landmark speech that ran in the face of the beggar-my-neighbour, nationalist and protectionist policies increasingly favoured by the great powers, arguing for the stimulation of production and freeing-up of trade. From now on his whole endeavour was to promote and secure international co-operation, concerted through the League and other international forums.

Vacating his Flinders seat and taking up the post of Australian High Commissioner to Britain in 1933, Bruce transformed an office that had until then been largely commercial rather than diplomatic in focus, creating for himself what the journalist Trevor Smith (quoted by Lee) described as “the unique status and prestige of an ambassador-at-large par excellence. He has risen (and remains) far above his official post.” In this he anticipated the independent foreign policy Australia developed from 1937 with the creation of a Department of External Affairs and a diplomatic corps. In addition, he now came to play a significant role in the League of Nations. Those who, with 20/20 hindsight, think there was only one morally-correct line on international affairs through the 1930s will find the rest of the story unedifying.

Bruce believed that the League lacked the ability to provide for collective security, and shouldn’t bark beyond its ability to bite. In this he was correct. The League lacked teeth because of its divisions and its constitution. He thought its role should be restricted to mediation. For example, on December 8, 1932, in Geneva, he made a powerful speech, as Australian delegate to the League of Nations, on the Manchurian dispute. Japan, in his view, was an “honourable and faithful ally”, and of course in making this speech he was mindful of its growing importance to Australia’s wool and wheat exports. He warned against any precipitate condemnation of Japan’s moves in Manchuria, criticising the application of what he called “dogmatic and theoretical principles” to the dispute. Later he would adopt a similar attitude to the Italo-Abyssinian dispute. Mediation, he believed, was always possible, and the Soviet Union and United States, non-members, should be invited to assist in this. When the League, pursuing its “theoretical principles”, refused to recognise the new state of Manchukuo, Japan left the League.

Bruce was at one with the Lyons government in his desire to conciliate Japan over Manchuria and keep it in the League. John Latham, whose brief under Lyons was foreign affairs and defence, was an ardent admirer (and collector) of Japanese culture, a close friend, until Pearl Harbor, of successive Japanese ministers to Australia, and president of the Japan–Australia Society. He led the first Australian government delegation to Japan after Japan left the League, and invited the Japanese training flotilla to visit Australian ports. Before and during his period as Australian Minister to Japan (1940–41) Latham introduced senior Australian figures including Sir Owen Dixon to his Japanese diplomatic friends, among them Dixon’s neighbour Ambassador Tatsuo Kawai. Bruce’s stated position on Japan, in Australian terms, was perfectly regular. It was Bruce’s private position too.

For the period 1933–36 Australia was elected a temporary member of the League Council (similar to the UN’s Security Council). The permanent members were Britain, France and Italy. Japan had left and Germany soon followed, as Bruce warned it would. The Soviet Union joined in 1934. The Council promptly appointed Bruce its rapporteur on financial matters, but social and economic affairs took a back seat to the growing political tensions in Europe. Germany was determined to revise its imposed postwar eastern borders and incorporate areas outside Germany that were predominantly German, including those within Czechoslovakia, which it saw as an unnatural amalgam-state pointed (by the Versailles Treaty) like a dagger at Germany’s heart. There was widespread acceptance in Britain and elsewhere that the Treaty of Versailles was riddled with injustice (the Trianon accords on Hungary are a striking example).

From 1933 it was clear that Mussolini had designs on Abyssinia (Ethiopia), one of the few remaining independent African states following the relatively recent annexations of almost all of that continent by Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal, and (with the least valuable bits) Italy. British and other European proponents of collective security wanted no further colonisation in Africa, though they were not minded, for a couple more decades, to offer independence to those they had themselves recently colonised. Clashes on the border of Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland in late 1934 looked about to trigger an Italian invasion of the former, and Abyssinia’s Emperor Haile Selassie (putative descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba) called on the League to safeguard his country’s independence. 

Here was a problem, for by then the big worry on most minds at the League was the new Germany. Italy, an ally of Britain and France in the First World War, was a natural opponent of any future German expansion, particularly south into Austria. Mussolini, admired for his domestic achievements by many in Britain including Churchill, detested the Austrian National Socialists, was determined to see Austria retain its independence, and was worried about the loyalty of his own Germans in the Trentino–Alto Adige (South Tyrol). And as Lee points out in this biography, “others viewed Abyssinia as backward and likely to benefit from Italian tutelage”—one of the first acts of the Italian government there would be to abolish slavery, an institution Selassie had tolerated. In any case, Britain and France decided to reinforce their friendship with Italy via the Anglo-French-Italian “Stresa Front”, accords signed on Lake Maggiore in April 1935 and designed to prevent any unilateral repudiation of treaties within Europe. That same month an Anglo-French-Italian resolution in the League Council condemned German rearmament for unilaterally contravening the Versailles Treaty. Bruce supported the resolution but was unconvinced about the advisability of sanctions against Germany.

Stanley Baldwin now replaced Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister in Britain’s National Government (a Conservative–Labor–Liberal coalition that would last up to and through the coming war: “Whoever you vote for, it’s the same thing!”—Oswald Mosley). The appeasers were now dominant, and Bruce’s sympathies were entirely with them. Anthony Eden, Sir John Simon and other hawks for an elusive “collective security” were sidelined. Bruce was critical of the application of sanctions to Italy, though in favour of a resolution condemning Italian aggression, and in favour too of a program of rearmament for Britain and France. As Lee points out, 

Bruce’s suggested course of action was a reasoned one in view of the contradictory policy which Britain eventually adopted of urging the application of limited sanctions publicly in Geneva while at the same time concluding a secret agreement with France and Italy, the so-called “Hoare–Laval” pact. 

This pact was dead as soon as it was leaked, because it largely supported Italy’s war aims. In the upshot, the Italian victory in May 1936 was followed by the withdrawal of sanctions the following month, which made a mockery of them.

In 1936 Bruce chaired the League of Nations Council at the time of the Rhineland crisis. J.P. Walters, a League historian quoted here, describes him as “the best, perhaps, of the many first-rate chairmen who presided over the Council, Conferences, or Committees of the League”. Bruce knew that the League lacked the capacity to intervene anywhere much at all. The divisions among its members on crucial issues meant it was impotent to act, but Lee mis-states the facts somewhat in saying that “Britain and the Dominions had reached consensus that Germany’s occupation of an area which patently had a history as German territory” was not worth going to war over. In fact the Rhineland was a recognised part of post-Versailles Germany; it was just that it was supposed to stay demilitarised, on account of its strategic location vis-à-vis France. When in 1936 the Wehrmacht marched in they were marching into a part of Germany.

Kemal Ataturk, highly admired by Bruce, wished to re-militarise the Turkish Straits (the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara and Bosphorus), demilitarised since 1922, but unlike Hitler, Ataturk decided to go through the appropriate League channels. The Montreux conference set up to deal with the matter was presided over by Bruce, who had impressed the League by his chairing of the Council through the Rhineland crisis. Ataturk got his way as a result of Bruce’s skilful orchestration of the arguments and, no doubt, his work behind the scenes. An Australian observer, quoted here, noted how 

The Turks shied away from [the British] fearing craft, but they would follow Bruce like a wise old sheep. The Russians gained nothing by the revision, a wedge was driven between Turkey and Russia, and the Turks were really drawn closer to the British side. It was a major achievement.” In gratitude Ataturk sent Bruce a silver cigarette case which Bruce used for the rest of his life.

From 1937 through 1939 the British government’s policy of appeasement of Germany drew strong support from the Australian government—“Australian politicians and senior officials were overwhelmingly supportive of the policy,” Lee reminds us. Lyons had met with Mussolini in 1935 and come away as impressed as Churchill had been in 1927 by the economic and social achievements of a highly popular government. Robert Menzies had visited Germany in 1938 and been struck by the general efficiency he found there. Unlike them, Bruce was persuaded of the value of appeasement not by direct contact but by his war experience and belief in the power of negotiation to resolve peacefully what might at first seem insoluble problems, as at Montreux.

He had little sympathy with Czecho-Slovakia, whose name when hyphenated betrays its problem—Slovakia is not Czech. Though it would predictably split in two following the collapse of communism, and no longer exists as a state, in 1938 it had one of the most powerful armies in Europe, backed by its own excellent armaments factories. It was a creation of Versailles, and Bruce reminded Lyons that it had “formed part of the plan of the French for the encirclement of Germany which has been one, if not the greatest of the factors, which has kept Europe in a ferment for many years past and which led Germany to rearmament”. Following Hitler’s speech of September 12, 1938, insisting that the German-populated Sudetenland within western Czechoslovakia should be part of the Reich, a speech that resulted in big demonstrations in the Sudetenland in favour of the transference of the German regions to Germany, Bruce told Lyons that “if Czecho-Slovakia was not to remain a festering sore threatening the peace of Europe, the issue of the transference of the Sudeten area to Germany, either by plebiscite or some other means, would have to be faced”.

Following Chamberlain’s first meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Bruce wanted Britain and the Dominions to insist on a guarantee of borders for what would be left of Czechoslovakia after its loss of its German lands, whereas Lyons was against any such guarantee. During Chamberlain’s second visit to Hitler, at Bad Godesberg, Hitler demanded the immediate incorporation of the Sudetenland, and Chamberlain and his cabinet had now to consider how to react to this blunt threat of force. Chamberlain invited the Dominion high commissioners to put their views on the matter to the inner cabinet, where Bruce argued against making Hitler’s Bad Godesberg memorandum a casus belli. On September 27 Bruce went again before the inner cabinet, this time alone, urging avoidance of war at all costs. That afternoon the British government told the Czechs that the game was up. Moreover, “At the same time,” Lee points out, 

proposals for the token German occupation of the Sudetenland on 1 October and a definite timetable for the rest of the occupation, along lines adumbrated by Bruce, were sent to Berlin. On his own initiative, Lyons then sent Chamberlain a message suggesting that he seek Mussolini’s assistance in brokering a compromise and that, if necessary, Bruce should fly to Rome as Chamberlain’s emissary to secure the Italian dictator’s good offices. On Bruce’s account, Lyons’s cable “kindled” in Chamberlain’s mind the idea of telegraphing Mussolini for his assistance, with the “added inspiration” of sending a simultaneous telegram to Hitler.

Chamberlain flew to Munich on September 28 and the Munich Agreements between Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier followed in short order.

At the same time, Bruce was concerned about the growing number of Jewish refugees from Germany, recommending that Australia take 30,000 of them, too high a figure for the Australian government, which agreed to take 15,000 over three years, still more impressive than the performance of the United States in the matter.

At the end of 1938 Bruce made a visit to Australia via the United States where he met with Roosevelt and others in Washington, discussing the establishment of an Australian diplomatic mission there. Back in Australia he defended Chamberlain’s policies, at the same time praising the rearmament effort of Australia and other British empire nations to meet the possible eventuality of war. Lyons, tired from his office and the continual sniping of Menzies, asked Bruce to join his government. Bruce told Lyons he should see the Governor-General, recommend him to commission Bruce to form a government, agree to serve under Bruce, and give Bruce three months to find a seat. Lyons initially agreed, then backed off. The more Bruce thought about it, the more he thought any government formed by himself should be a government of national unity including Labor members. Following Lyons’s death on April 7, 1939, Bruce was pressed to return to politics by Country Party leader Earle Page, anything to prevent Menzies becoming Prime Minister—Page even offered Bruce his own seat of Cowper. A national government, however, was something the United Australia Party was not prepared to contemplate.

Following his return to Britain by way of Washington, Bruce had to consider his position on the latest events in Europe. Having lost the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia was increasingly at odds with itself, the separatist elements in Slovakia keen to split the rump state. In March, Germany exacerbated these divisions, precipitated the secession of Slovakia, then occupied the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), making these a Reich “protectorate”. Slovakia hived off on its own with Germany’s blessing, and Britain prepared for a war that now seemed inevitable.

Britain’s response to the disintegration of Czechoslovakia was to give a guarantee to Poland that any attack upon it would bring Britain into war on its side. This was not a guarantee of Poland’s 1919 borders, as Lee points out, nor was Chamberlain jettisoning his appeasement policy; there was still “some prospect of further territorial negotiation with Hitler”.

On August 22, 1939, the day before the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Bruce saw Chamberlain and endeavoured to dissuade him from sending any warning to Hitler that Britain would honour its guarantee to Poland. In the event, Poland would be invaded by not one but two of the great powers. Britain would declare war only on the invader who went in from the west. The logic of an additional declaration of war on the Soviet Union would be banished from the mind, consigned to oblivion. But had it been foreseeable on August 22 that two great powers would invade Poland, Bruce’s argument to Chamberlain that day could have been put with greater force.

With war declared and Poland defeated in three weeks, Menzies and Bruce hoped Hitler would make an overture for peace. Bruce cabled Menzies on March 14, 1940, that he had told Sumner Welles, representing Roosevelt in Europe, that “the only possibility of stopping the impending catastrophe might be by revolutionary proposals for what would amount to a new world order politically and economically”. It’s fascinating to speculate upon the details Bruce had in play in his imagination on the nature of the new world order he thought inevitable. And of course we need to remind ourselves that it was only in 1943, with the war turning against Germany in Russia and the Mediterranean, that unconditional surrender would become allied policy.

On May 22, 1940, with German victory over France close to certain, Bruce told Menzies that a German air offensive against Britain would be next. The British should approach Roosevelt, alert him to the imminent fall of France, and say frankly that Britain might need to move its seat of government and fleet outside the British Isles, even ask Germany for terms. Bruce, in his own words, thought Germany would “demand as the basis of any agreement the surrender of the British Fleet and the handing over of the West Indian Islands”, “possibilities which we would be unwise to ignore”. Bruce wanted Roosevelt to step in and mediate an end to hostilities. A few days later he was suggesting that Roosevelt and Mussolini be approached for (in Bruce’s words) “proposals down the lines that further bloodshed is useless and that an immediate conference should be held to formulate proposals as a basis for the cessation of hostilities”. At the end of May 1940 Bruce told Churchill’s War Cabinet that he thought Britain could not continue the war, but Churchill disagreed, rejecting Halifax’s demand that Mussolini be approached to mediate a deal with Hitler. As Lee points out,  

Churchill’s decision to fight on was based on the flawed premises that the Americans would quickly enter the war once British cities were bombed and that the German economy was highly vulnerable to aerial bombardment. Neither assumption was sound. 

From 1942 Bruce was sitting as Australia’s representative in the British War Cabinet, but his effectiveness as a contributor there was vitiated by his record as an appeaser and Churchill’s visceral dislike of him. Bruce, like Owen Dixon in Washington, backed the Allied “Beat Hitler first” policy, resisted by Australia’s External Affairs Minister Evatt, but a logical and correct policy. In any case the policy could hardly be said to endanger Australia, into which tens of thousands of American conscripts were already pouring through the first half of 1942; Australia, on the other hand, would not allow its own conscripts to serve outside Australian territorial waters at that stage, a policy understandably despised in the corridors of Washington, as the Dixon Papers reveal.

Churchill’s high-handed conduct of the war in what was effectively a state without an opposition dismayed Bruce, who on January 13, 1943, made a note of his complaint to Attlee that there had been no meeting of the War Cabinet prior to the Casablanca summit. Bruce proudly recorded his added comment to Attlee: “Hitler has nothing on the Prime Minister of this country as a Dictator.”

Lee’s final chapter details Bruce’s connections with the postwar Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), his Chancellorship of the new Australian National University, and other activities. Through these years he continued to reside in England. Perhaps partly through his acquaintance during the 1930s with Soviet officials at the highest level, particularly Stalin’s Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (whom Owen Dixon also knew and liked when Litvinov was Soviet Ambassador to the United States during the Second World War), Bruce tried to see other points of view. 

Rather like Malcolm Fraser, who has enjoyed first-name relations with two Chinese premiers, Bruce came to believe that ideology is mostly dressing for other imperatives, foremost among them national survival and the balance of power. Bruce did not believe that the Soviet Union wished to dominate the world or invade Western Europe. The Central and Eastern European states it controlled were its buffer against any future revanchist Germany, for it had no faith in collective security, given its experience with the League of Nations and the trauma of the Great Patriotic War. The worst aspects of Soviet behaviour were a response to “reactionary elements in the capitalistic countries and the Roman Catholic Church” (Bruce to Casey, September 23, 1946). That does sound odd, the Catholic Church bit. What was he thinking?

In his final years Bruce could enjoy the friendship of old foes. Guido Baracchi, former communist and classmate, addressed a poem to Bruce after reading Cecil Edwards’s 1965 biography of him. Baracchi now admired Bruce and had adopted his motto, with which the poem ends:

Lordly Australian become English Lord,
Statesman of ideas—albeit Tory—,
Surpassing far that empty, cheapskate sham,
Menzies, our destinies could ill afford,
Your bold device, devoid of claims to glory,
Challenges still: “I don’t give a damn!”

There are numerous ways of not giving a damn, and it need not imply a state of contentment—coolly throw yourself under a train, walk out through the French windows of your fifth-storey hotel room and drop to the courtyard below, or try the power of your sidearm. Did Bruce care passionately about losing government (and his own seat of Flinders) in 1929? Of course not—men like Bruce despise “passionately”. They are far closer to “don’t give a damn”. He gave his best to the work at hand, but if it turned out not to be good enough, if he’d miscalculated, as he often did, if he’d invested all and come up short, well, to hell with that. He appears to have been stoical by nature but, unlike his brothers and father, never found himself in that lonely place where leave-taking is demanded. It can be said confidently, and in admiration, that he was the coolest, most self-contained, autonomous, unknowable person to have been prime minister of Australia.

David Lee’s biography shows us Bruce acting within and thinking about the public world, but the private man eludes us. At this distance it’s impossible to write an interiorised biography on a subject like this. There’s no family to interview—Bruce had no children. There are no private diaries with reflective entries, only correspondence, most of it official. For these reasons one wishes there were more photographs of an informal kind in this book, and more research into the private world, to whatever extent that is now possible. When one reads of an operation undergone by Bruce’s wife, one wants to know the purpose. When one reads that the Bruces were childless, one wants to know why—and whether they minded. If we are going to spend a few hours reading a biography, we want to see inside and understand. But Bruce is closed to us—and really, it’s none of our business. 

Philip Ayres has written biographies of Owen Dixon, Douglas Mawson and Malcolm Fraser.