Arthur Tange, Last of the Mandarins, by Peter Edwards

Arthur Tange, the redoubtable and to many intimidating figure who sat at the top level of the Commonwealth Public Service from 1954 to 1979, has been fortunate in his biographer. Peter Edwards has done a fine job on Tange, but his book is also an illuminating contribution to the history of an important period in the Australian story. It deserves a wide readership.

Tange was a principal architect of two major departments of state, the departments of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs and Trade) and of Defence. While he was in the former (from 1946 to 1965, becoming its Secretary from 1954) he had a role in establishing the Colombo Plan, in the negotiation of the ANZUS (1951) and Antarctic (1961) treaties, and in the enlightened policy adopted towards Indonesia under Sukarno in the early 1960s. His strong management of the Department built it into a respected source of policy advice and an influential player in Canberra.

It is Tange’s time as Secretary of the Department of Defence (1970 to 1979) after a spell as Australian High Commissioner in India, on which he is often judged. His far-reaching administrative reforms remain controversial to this day in some circles of the uniformed services. Tange’s approach, says Edwards, was motivated by “the need to develop distinctively Australian solutions to Australian defence problems, the need to coordinate civilian and military inputs into the policy process, and the need to ensure that senior military officers had the capacity to make useful contributions”. It is the last point here with its implication that military officers were often not well equipped to give the best advice, that rankled with the services. Tange certainly believed senior officers needed to be equipped with a broad and liberal tertiary education and the Defence Force Academy, finally established some years after Tange retired, is perhaps his most lasting legacy.

There is plenty of meat here for a serious biography. Tange, however, was not widely known outside the circle of those involved in the making or analysing of foreign and defence policy in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and one imagines that the project could not have had an automatic appeal to publishers. There are in fact some unusual circumstances in the birth of the book. Edwards, the respected historian of Australia’s military involvement in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam, became interested in doing a biography of Tange and won the support of the Department of Defence for the project (surely an uncharacteristically adventurous decision) and then of Tange himself in his retirement years. The author is satisfied he gained full access to Tange’s substantial collection of private and official papers, which he has now organised and lodged with the National Library.

Edwards comes to grips with Tange’s distinctive modus operandi, the subject of many tales in Canberra’s corridors. “Swift to chide and slow to bless” is Edwards’ twist on the words of the hymn sung at Tange’s memorial service. He is well remembered for the roughness with which he treated subordinates who failed to perform to the high standards he expected. Numerous stories attest to his reputation as a thrower of documents at the feet of offenders, making them scramble to collect them up. To what extent his outbursts of temper were spontaneous or manufactured may be debated and some might justify Tange’s behaviour as an effective spur to performance, which it seems to have been in many cases. In today’s workplace one suspects it would be more likely to be called bullying, with calls for the counselling of the perpetrator rather than the poor performer.

My very brief acquaintance with the Tanges occurred in Hong Kong in late 1969 where I had been newly posted as a fairly junior officer of the Department of External Affairs working out of the Australian Trade Commission. The job was essentially China-watching but I was often out at Hong Kong airport meeting and seeing off senior External Affairs people who regularly passed through. The Tanges were on their way back from India where Sir Arthur had been Australian High Commissioner, and were to spend a few days in Hong Kong, where their son was then working, before Sir Arthur assumed the position of Secretary of the Department of Defence. This turned out to be a double reception task as I found it was then the Tanges’ practice not to travel on the same plane, to reduce the risk of simultaneous death in an accident and the consequences this would have for their children.

Sir Arthur came first and, with not a little apprehension, I collected him from the airport and took him to the appropriately named Hotel Mandarin, where they were to stay. Arriving at the reception desk we found the attendant with his back to us busy placing some papers into pigeon holes. He continued in this task for some time until Tange suddenly brought his fist hard down on the counter with a thumping crash. The attendant spun through 180 degrees in a flash and Tange had his full attention. Another incident during his stay showed another aspect of the man. Tange noticed that I had paid the customary tip to the porter bringing luggage to the room. He insisted on reimbursing me, adding a little lecture about the importance of not dipping into one’s own pocket to pay for the expenses of others. Both these Tange tales will come as no surprise to readers of Edwards’ biography.

The great strength of the book is the authority and clarity with which Edwards presents the policy and administrative issues with which Tange was involved over his long career. Here we have insight into the Petrov affair, the Suez crisis, the West New Guinea issue, Indonesia’s confrontation of Malaysia, the Vietnam commitment, the 1972 Defence Review and the crises of spring 1975—Pine Gap, the Dismissal and the Balibo Five.

We also learn quite a lot about rivalry between public service departments and the tendency of each to develop consensual views which are not always shared by their ministers, the natural state of the bureaucracy according to Edwards. He develops a view that policy development and execution are most successful when ministers and their public service advisers act in close collaboration, and are least successful, instancing the Suez affair, when embarked upon without public service advice. And the author reminds us that the Canberra in which Tange operated was a very different place than today’s Canberra. Those were days when permanent heads of government departments could not be moved unwillingly, days before the rise of the think-tanks of different stripes to contest policy with the public service, and days which saw only the beginning of the rise of powerful ministerial minders.

The book’s appendix is a stand-alone essay, wisely separated from the body of the book, to allow close examination of a critical period—spring 1975, covering the dismissal of Whitlam and suggestions that Tange played a role in it, the connected rumpus over Pine Gap, and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor. Edwards is persuasive defending Tange’s reputation from slurs that have been made against him in relation to these events. In particular, John Pilger’s conspiracy theory that Tange had a role in Whitlam’s dismissal is shown to be baseless.

Tange’s relationships with his many ministers over the years was a very mixed bag. He had a close, almost filial, relationship with Casey, his first Minister of External Affairs, though was frustrated by Casey’s naivety and weakness in cabinet. Tange’s relationship with Menzies, who was Minister for External Affairs as well as Prime Minister for a period after Casey’s retirement in 1960, deteriorated in later years. Tange and his department had reservations over a number of Menzies’ policies, most notably in the lead-up to the Suez fiasco, reservations which Menzies did not welcome, but there also seems to have been an absence of personal rapport between them. At bottom Menzies appears to have found Tange a dull fellow. For years he gave Tange strong hints, ignored for a surprisingly long time, to take an overseas posting.

With Barwick, Menzies’ successor as Minister for External Affairs, Tange forged a strong relationship founded largely on their shared views on Indonesia and West New Guinea. They oversaw a shift to a policy of supporting moves through the United Nations that would transfer control of West New Guinea to Indonesia and the development of a nuanced policy towards Indonesia during its “confrontation” of Malaysia.

With Hasluck, who succeeded Barwick in 1964, Tange reached rock-bottom. He later described the eight months he served under Hasluck as “the most frustrating and unproductive” of his thirty-seven years serving seventeen ministers. Hasluck had a view that policy was the business of ministers and made a practice of sidelining his senior public servants. External Affairs advice was not sought, for instance, on the matter of sending troops to Vietnam.

After Tange came back from India to take the position of Secretary of Defence in 1969 he served under Fraser as minister and the two came to form a close and powerful partnership. After Fraser’s resignation and Gorton’s loss of the prime ministership, Tange found himself with the unconventional Gorton as his new Minister of Defence, an uneasy relationship cut short by Gorton’s dismissal. Fairbairn followed as minister and with his own service background had little sympathy for Tange’s desire to unify the services into a better co-ordinated defence force. It was under Fairbairn, however, that Tange was able to produce his seminal departmental Australian Defence Review of 1972, with self-reliance as its central message and a reduction of the former emphasis on alliance commitments.

When Labor came to power in the 1972 election it came with a policy of merging the service departments into Defence, which was very much in line with Tange’s thinking. His new minister, Barnard, gave high priority to this, and though some in the Labor Party came to see Tange as a conservative opponent of Labor’s policies, he proved an important instrument in this Labor reform. Tange’s 1973 report on Australian defence organisation led to the abolition of the service departments. Later he played an important role in resolving tensions between American demands for secrecy regarding the “joint facilities” and the Labor government’s concern for Australian sovereignty. After 1975 there followed a fairly happy association with Killen as minister, under Fraser as Prime Minister, until Tange’s retirement in 1979.

As is probably inevitably the case where the subject of the biography is not long dead and with family and former colleagues still living, the focus of the book is rather more on the times of rather than the life of the subject. While Edwards has followed Tange’s curriculum vitae with meticulous attention I am not sure that a fully rounded picture of the man emerges. Edwards touches only very lightly on Tange’s personal life. One recurring theme in the book is of Tange as an “aloof loner”, two words that recur often but without deep analysis. Against this assessment it emerges that Tange was early assiduous in maintaining strong relationships with a number of figures that were important in his quick rise to the top. Later his relationships with some of his ministers were particularly close.

Most surprisingly, Tange’s wife of sixty years, Marjorie, daughter of Edward Shann, only infrequently comes into the story and then often as a shadow in the background. We hear a little more of the two children, who appear to have been happy to collaborate with Edwards. There is nothing about Tange’s intellectual and cultural interests (did he have any?) and only a little about his hobbies and other interests outside work. More importantly, some will feel that Edwards became too close to and too influenced by Tange and his views and that in the end he has given us a more sympathetic portrait than the man deserved.

Edwards writing is clear, accurate and unadorned and he leads the reader along at a good pace. We might note a superfluous detail here and there and the occasional excess (Tange’s “Mona Lisa smile” in one of his portraits?) but on the whole the book is admirably crafted and intelligently organised. Moreover, it has been carefully proofread, with only one exception I noted on page 80.

It is probably more the fault of costs and convention than of Edwards, but the endnotes are the usual nuisance in making it necessary to check the back of the book several times on an open page in case one misses some further amplification of the text. O for the days when footnotes appeared at the foot of the reader’s page.