Celia Hamilton: An Early Student of the Labor Split

Towards the end of 1954 a bright young woman from Orange County in California found herself close to a political wildfire that had just broken out in Australia. The young Californian was Celia Louise Hamilton. Her bracing Cold War Australian encounter deserves to be better known.

Born in Anaheim in 1931, Celia Hamilton graduated from Pomona College in 1953. Politics was her preferred field of study. She wrote a final-year dissertation at Pomona in which she compared the two presidential elections—1932 and 1952—that bookended the recently concluded twenty-year unbroken stint in the White House by the Democrats.

After leaving Pomona, Hamilton began postgraduate studies, initially enrolling for a PhD at the University of California. But then she applied for and won a Fulbright Scholarship which, in 1954, allowed her to undertake postgraduate work in an overseas country. She chose to go to Canberra.

After sailing across the Pacific, she was one of a party of Fulbright scholars who touched down at Canberra airport on November 4, 1954. Her broad area of study, press coverage of the arriving Fulbright scholars noted, was the history of the Australian Labor Party. She had enrolled for a research degree at the Canberra University College and was attached to its Department of History, headed by Professor Manning Clark.

Hamilton arrived in Australia just as the Labor Party was in the midst of a historic crisis. Things had begun unravelling on October 5 when Dr H.V. Evatt, Labor’s federal leader, issued a press statement in which, when his words were decoded, he alleged that disciples of the Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria had come to exercise a malign influence over the Victorian state branch of the ALP. As the months passed, the crisis in Labor’s ranks worsened. It culminated in a bitter split. Organised resistance, which later became formalised as the Democratic Labour Party, emerged in Victoria in 1955.

Having chosen to study the ALP, Hamilton could not shy away from touchy issues. For the purposes of her research topic she planned, in general terms, to examine the deep sectarian background to the split. Her focus was on the once noticeable alignment in Australia between the Labor Party and Catholic voters, many if not most of whom were of Irish descent.

Manning Clark turned out to be a thoughtful supervisor, as indicated by a formal appraisal of Hamilton’s progress that he prepared and forwarded in October 1955 to the staff responsible for Fulbright scholars back in the United States. Hamilton, he told them, had seemed “bewildered” at first by her topic. To her as an outsider the Australian Labor Party, with its distinctive customs and taboos, must have seemed on first encounter to be an exotic entity. Her early lack of a steady focus was exacerbated by her initial desire to cover the entire period from 1890 when Laborism emerged as a political force down to the very latest developments under Evatt and Santamaria.

Clark advised her to make a choice between covering the years 1890 and 1923 or instead opting for the period between the first anti-conscription campaign in 1916 down to 1955 and the current Evatt era. Hamilton, wisely from the point of drilling into accessible and reliable documentation, opted for the first, more historical, option.

Once she had a clearer target, she began the intensive research work expected of a postgraduate student. She ploughed through letters and newspapers and other original source material held at the National Library in Canberra and in various academic, public and parliamentary libraries in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

This search for information was thoroughgoing. Hamilton consulted earlier relevant postgraduate dissertations and tracked down unpublished memoirs of early party figures. She read old minute books of the Victorian state branch of the Labor Party in the Trades Hall in Melbourne and got access to the early correspondence of the Catholic Federation, a pre-1914 pressure group.

Hamilton also conducted interviews, including with the Catholic archbishop and historian Dr Eris O’Brien. One interview in particular stood out. A beleaguered B.A. Santamaria arranged for Hamilton to have a private audience with the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix. The aged Irishman proved to be immensely charming. It was a memorable occasion.

Almost forty years before their interview, during the Great War and the divisive conscription controversy of 1916-17, Mannix had been the bane of conservative politicians in Australia; in the 1950s though, with the Cold War and anti-communism having set in, he had morphed into their informal yet potent ally. He was history incarnate.

Mannix’s friend Santamaria helped Hamilton in other interesting ways as well. He lent her notes summarising the state of organised Catholic political activity in Melbourne at the very start of the Mannix era. These notes had been compiled at Santamaria’s behest by Mannix’s future biographer Brenda Niall.

Hamilton’s dedication and diligence were impressive. Manning Clark became confident that she would make a serious contribution to the study of an important aspect of Australia’s modern history. He told Fulbright scheme officials that she “has worked very hard here, and that she has won the respect and goodwill of everyone with whom she associates”.

Hamilton drew a key finding from her research. It seemed to her that the level of Catholic support for Labor politics in the formative years beginning around Federation and culminating in the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917 was ever conditional on Labor being fundamentally moderate and devoid of Marxist (that is, atheistic) tendencies.

Labor for its part upheld this informal covenant. It was not infected by anticlericalism or hostile secularism, as was often the situation with working-class politics in Europe at the time. At the very least the Catholic clergy in Australia looked kindly on participation by the laity in Labor Party affairs even during the fervid years after 1917 when the labour movement, with anti-war sentiment growing, was zealously targeted by radical and militant agitators. The association was upheld.

But developments in the mid-1950s were disrupting a once mutually convenient arrangement. Hamilton could already sense the impact of mass post-war European migration. It was having the effect of pushing Irish-Australians up the social scale and away from old-style Laborism. Cold War divisions had produced more starkly polarised attitudes in the broader labour movement, making it harder to uphold a centrist or uncomplicatedly moderate Labor position.

Hamilton’s thesis dealt with an Irish-Catholic–Labor alignment that had flourished in the past. This association was now, under Dr Evatt, fraying. Evatt had recently tried to cosy up to Santamaria. But this moment had already passed. A violent reaction had kicked in. Having chosen to repudiate Santamaria, the Labor leader was starting to come across as a naive Cold War conspiracy theorist. The result was electoral disaster.

By focusing on Catholic–Labor relations in Australia Hamilton was traversing fraught territory but she was undaunted. When completing her thesis she added some introductory comments in which she noted that “her position as an American visitor in Australia” must surely have helped her in gaining “a degree of disinterested perspective on a difficult and perhaps controversial topic”.

Hamilton’s life here as a Fulbright scholar was not always a matter of intensive research and thought. She took time out to visit Central Australia, Tasmania and the Great Barrier Reef. There were also sociable moments. When residing at University House in Canberra she met the future Prime Minister Bob Hawke, then a young postgraduate student. Hamilton never forgot his boisterous high spirits. She also made the acquaintance of someone who later became a Liberal Party parliamentary leader. Family lore later held that this acquaintance may have been Malcolm Fraser, but in all likelihood it was Peter Coleman. He and Hamilton shared a keen interest in the ideas of the Cold War era.

Hamilton worked on her thesis throughout 1956. She was on top of her subject. She needed to be because her departmental head, Manning Clark, was overseas on sabbatical leave for the entire academic year. His colleague, Fin Crisp, the CUC’s Professor of Political Science, took over as her supervisor.

Clark returned to Canberra early in 1957, just as Hamilton was about to submit her thesis. The disruption was not fatal. Hamilton’s thesis, dated February 1, 1957, was approved. The University of Melbourne, which at this time ran the CUC, awarded her the degree of Master of Arts.

Over the next three years Hamilton published two articles drawn from her research in the leading Australian academic journal Historical Studies. She left Australia for good in 1957. There was talk in letters from her to Manning Clark of her possibly conducting further work on Irish-Australian political history but nothing happened.

Clark remained a friend. In the early months of 1958 he supported an attempt to get Hamilton’s MA thesis published as a book. He sought to utilise his contacts with Oxford University Press which in 1957 had published his Sources of Australian History.

The result was disappointing. Nothing eventuated. There is a letter from the Australian branch of Oxford University Press in Clark’s papers which indicates the reason for non-publication. OUP, it seems, was convinced that the book would simply not sell. At most 500 copies would be sold. A 1952 OUP book on the Australian party system by Hamilton’s fellow Californian Louise Overacker had not sold well. Political topics at the moment were very “unpopular”, OUP concluded: “Australians simply don’t buy this sort of political book.”

So Hamilton’s thesis was never published in its entirety, but it did not go unread. Copies were deposited in university libraries in Canberra and Melbourne. The future leading academic historian Patrick O’Farrell consulted her thesis and prepared a conscientious summary which is included in his personal papers in the National Library of Australia. Unpublished material in the Mitchell Library in Sydney indicates that Tony Cahill, another later leading scholar of Australian history, also read her thesis with great care.

In the late 1950s Paddy O’Farrell and Tony Cahill had years of high academic activity ahead of them. Their near contemporary Celia Hamilton had no such future. Her fruitful association with the scholarly study of Australian history ended forever once her spell as a Fulbright scholar was completed.

A few surviving letters to Manning Clark flesh out what Hamilton did in the years immediately after leaving Australia. Since 1953 she had been engaged to an American research biologist, Charles Conkle. They married when she returned to California, where she initially worked for a while as an untenured teacher of American history. The couple moved to Alaska in 1960. After she was widowed at an early age, she returned to California and remarried. In 1962 and 1964, as Celia L. Conkle, she was listed as a registered Republican voter in California. After her second marriage in 1965 she was Celia Louise Woodworth.

Celia Woodworth became a qualified secondary school teacher and later was an antiques dealer in California and Maine. She also worked as a freelance journalist specialising in US naval history. She lived until 2011.

Celia Woodworth née Hamilton retained fond and vivid memories of her time as a Fulbright scholar in Cold War Australia long after the experience was over. Australian researchers in turn can readily document the reciprocal high regard in which, as a careful scholar, she was held in Australia. Paddy O’Farrell’s and Tony Cahill’s attentiveness to her thesis is a testimony to the inspired nature of her decision to delve into the old-style interaction between Labor politics and the Catholic community in Australia at the exact moment when, thanks to the unwisdom of Dr Evatt, this association came to grief.

Had Evatt been blessed with exceptional foresight in 1954 he would have been attuned to what became the inescapable message of Hamilton’s thesis. In effect she came to the irrefutable conclusion that any entrenched Cold War divergence from a centrist position was sure to be fatal for the ALP and its connection with many of its traditional voters. Evatt’s decline and fall after 1955 amply confirmed that he lacked the foresight to realise that this was bound to be the case.

Stephen Holt is a Canberra writer. His most recent contribution to Quadrant on twentieth-century Australian political history, on James Burnham and Billy Hughes, appeared in the June issue.