Great days in Sydney

I strongly agree with what Mervyn Bendle has written in Anzac and Its Enemies and David Flint in his review—with one important exception. There was biased reporting in much of the media at the time (the main record to which historians turn) and considerable focus in the media then on indigenous protests (none of which I encountered, though later in the day I heard of them elsewhere). However, I think those who were actually there have very different recollections. The celebration I saw was neither “marred” nor reduced “to farce” nor a “debacle”.

There have been other great days in our city, including the 1932 celebration of the Bridge’s opening which my parents witnessed, and the days that marked the endings of the two world wars, and three that I have experienced: in 1954 the first visit of our Queen, this year’s centenary Anzac Day with its wonderful spirit, but equal in its own way to all of those, the happy and glorious Bicentennial.

John Bunyan
Campbelltown, NSW

Lawrence and fascism

SIR: Does reading D.H. Lawrence need a trigger warning? Do those who open one of his books need to be alerted that dangerous ideas and themes may be found within its pages? Because Lawrence was possibly the most politically-incorrect author who ever put pen to paper.

He was (according to Kate Millett) a misogynist. He was, judging by his novel Kangaroo, anti-Semitic. He was—as his poem “Elephant” indicates—an arch-imperialist. He was also, among other things, a xenophobe, a racist, a snob, a pornographer, a plagiarist, and he betrayed his working-class roots. And he beat his wife and his dog. Worst of all, he believed in eugenic cleansing on a scale that even the Nazis might have baulked at. In 1908, in one of the most terrible things he ever wrote, he urged the construction of a gas chamber to exterminate the weaker members of society.

How could a man holding such views be regarded as one of the greatest writers in the entire canon of English literature, one of the brightest stars in the firmament of F.R. Leavis’s Great Tradition?

Lawrence had many redeeming features, and times have changed since he wrote. He also, as he learnt more about life and the world around him, amended his views. (One of his closest friends in later life was a Jew.)

So I have come, not to bury him, but to praise him for his insight over his instincts. For I want to talk about Lawrence and fascism, and his great anti-fascist novel, Kangaroo.

The time Lawrence spent in Australia, and the novel he wrote in Thirroul in June and July 1922, represented in fact a watershed in his life and his writing. He came to Australia with some rather naive, if not dangerous views and opinions, and left far wiser and better-informed—as well as terrified. For in Australia he encountered some real, live fascists, and experienced—to his horror and dismay—their authoritarian ways, a realisation that inspired the famous “Nightmare” chapter in Kangaroo, and also evoked one of the most powerful sentences he ever wrote: “It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of a reptile, and the horrible paws.” Those “horrible paws” were the paws of Australian fascism.

On the day after he arrived in Sydney—Saturday, May 26, 1922—Lawrence and his wife Frieda caught a ferry to Manly, then a tram up to Narrabeen, where they had been invited to afternoon tea by an Australian they had met on the boat coming to Australia. There they met a man called Jack Scott, who happened to be the second-in-command of a secret army in New South Wales.

Scott was very much taken with Lawrence, and in the following week they had several more meetings, during which Scott tried to find out what Lawrence’s politics were, for he wanted to recruit him to his secret army, possibly as a propagandist, or editorialist for their magazine. At their next meeting a few days later at Mosman Bay he tried to draw him out, asking questions about his views on “the Irish question” and the empire. (Scott’s “cover” organisation, The King & Empire Alliance, was anti-Catholic and pro-British.) Lawrence fended off the questions, saying such things bored him.

Then Scott asked him about socialism and communism. Lawrence said he didn’t really care about politics: “Politics is no more than your country’s housekeeping.” Yet Scott must have been impressed, for he invited Lawrence to stay with him for two nights before they both travelled down to Thirroul for the King’s Birthday holiday weekend.

There Scott continued his probing. He wanted to tell Lawrence about their secret army, and if he got the right responses, to ask him to join it. In Kangaroo Lawrence records what happened.

Scott (portrayed in the novel as Jack Callcott) opened the conversation. “I say,” he said, “I shan’t be making a mistake if I tell you a few things in confidence, shall I?’” Somers (the Lawrence figure in the novel) reassures him: “I hope not. But judge for yourself.” Scott goes on: “Now, look here. This is absolutely between ourselves, now, isn’t it?” When Lawrence replies, “Yes,” he gets to the point:

Well now, there’s quite a number of us in Sydney—and in the other towns as well—we’re mostly diggers back from the war—we’ve joined up into a kind of club—and we’re sworn in—and we’re sworn to OBEY the leaders, no matter what the command, when the time is ready—and we’re sworn to keep silent till then. We don’t let out much, nothing of any consequence, to the general run of the members.

Lawrence was aware of what fascism was. Until recently he had been living in Italy, where Mussolini was much in the news. As with a lot of middle-class Englishmen of his time—and after—the concept of authoritarianism and dictators had a siren attraction. He shared the general postwar disenchantment with parliamentary democracy, a disillusionment that later led on to appeasement, Mosley and Munich.

So Lawrence was initially attracted by what Scott was telling him. “Somers at once felt the idea was a good one,” he wrote. Yet, to give him credit, he had his reservations. “The only thing he mistrusted was the dryness in Jack’s voice: a sort of that’s-how-it’s-got-to-be dryness, sharp and authoritative.”

The following exchange in Kangaroo gets as close to classical fascism as is possible without the customary salute and click of the heels. In chapter 5 Callcott/Scott says to Somers/Lawrence (in the published version): “we jolly well know you can’t keep a country going on the vote-catching system”. Somers/Lawrence agrees, adding: “ideal democratic liberty is an exploded ideal … You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.”

Callcott/Scott asks what would happen if the people wanted to keep democracy. Somers/Lawrence replies: “Then, as in war-time, as in cases since the world began, you’ve got to substitute absolute one-man rule, quick, a sort of military rule and martial law, you’ve got to have military rule at the back of you. Then you can carry through change.”

Somers/Lawrence agrees to go up to Sydney and meet the head of the secret army, called in the novel Benjamin Cooley, based on Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal. Over lunch in his architect’s chambers in Castlereagh Street, Cooley/Rosenthal explains their authoritarian ideology: “I want to keep ORDER … And that you can only do by exerting strong, just POWER from above. Man needs to be relieved of this terrible responsibility of governing himself.”

Lawrence had no intention of joining Scott and Rosenthal’s fascist secret army. His sole interest in them was to extract information for the novel he had started to write about them and their organisation. Yet in leading them on to get material he was playing a dangerous game. And when their material proved insufficient to carry his narrative forward, he decided to undertake some research of his own, and went to see the bête rouge of the union movement in New South Wales, the IWW supporter Jock Garden (Willie Struthers in Kangaroo).

When Scott and Rosenthal discovered this “treachery”, they made some serious threats, up to and including murder. (“I could have you killed,” Rosenthal told him.) For Lawrence, Australia’s “silvery freedom” had indeed turned, and showed “the scaly back of the reptile, and the horrible paws”.

At their final meeting in Thirroul, a now very sinister Callcott/Scott again threatened Somers/Lawrence: “We want some sort of security that you’ll keep quiet, before we let you leave Australia.”

Somers/Lawrence replied (according to the text of Kangaroo):

“You need not be afraid.  You’ve made it all too repulsive to me now, for me ever to want to open my mouth about it all.”

Jack looked up with a faint, sneering smile. “And you think we shall be satisfied with your bare word?” he said uglily.

Lawrence only escaped their claws—for things might have been very different had they realised he was putting them and their secret army into his new novel of Australia (which they didn’t know he was writing, but whose almost-completed manuscript was in the next room)—by promising to leave Sydney by the next available boat, and never to reveal what he had learned about them and their fascist organisation.

“You can be quite assured,” Somers/Lawrence told Callcott/Scott. “Nothing will ever come out through me.” Which must surely be the most spectacularly broken promise in literary history.

Robert Darroch
(President of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia)
via e-mail

The New Guard

SIR: Matters concerning D.H. Lawrence in Australia and the New Guard have come to my attention which may be of interest.

In late November 1923, about 600 Melbourne police went on strike. This immediately triggered violent rioting. Thousands of rioters swarmed into the central business district, looting businesses, burning shops, and attacking and beating up—so they needed to be hospitalised—a small group of uniformed Navy sailors who tried to restore order.

At least three people, one an ex-serviceman, were murdered. Many others were seriously injured, businesses were destroyed and the damage to property was incalculable. Volunteer special constables were hastily enrolled, and armed guards were placed on Army buildings. The rioters had no “cause” whatsoever, but robbed, murdered, looted and destroyed businesses simply because, in the absence of police, they could.

Contrary to some press reports at the time, they were not professional criminals but citizens who found they could easily shrug off the veneer of civilised and decent behaviour. No doubt some did see it as an opportunity for “propaganda of the deed” and hoped it might be a trigger for revolution.

The history books have been notably reticent about this event, but it may go a long way towards explaining the formation of the New Guard. If law and order could break down so massively once, it could have done so again. In the light of these riots, as well as other violent and lawless riots on various wharves round Australia a few years before, the motives for establishing the New Guard look rather reasonable and understandable.

Hal G.P. Colebatch
Nedlands, WA

The benefits of monarchy

SIR: When not denigrating our constitutional monarchy, many fervent republicans, such as Peter FitzSimons and Ray Martin, also spend time denigrating our capitalist system, a system that enabled them to be mega-rich one-percenters. (We might want to be wary of people who advocate one thing, but benefit from the opposite.)

Republicans expect us to believe that the republican cause is progressive, when round the world countless thousands of residents of disintegrating republics are desperate to move to the stable constitutional monarchies of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. The USA is often cited as a stable, democratic republic where people want to move and live. But, within its first 100 years, that republic was torn apart by a bitter civil war that left close to one million Americans dead. Do we really want to risk a similar outcome in Australia?

In times of political upheaval, republics are never far from tyranny, for a very simple reason: if the president and the parliament disagree, there is no clear way forward. Each strives to get rid of the other first. There is no principled way to resolve the deadlock.

No wonder republicans argue incessantly over which “model” of republic works best. Evidence round the world is that almost every republican model may prove unstable. Either an elected president becomes dictatorial, or a divided parliament left undissolved descends into chaos. How often have we seen television news pictures of fist fights in diverse republican parliaments?

In contrast, if severe division occurs in a constitutional monarchy, that is the one and only time that its citizens expect their monarch to step in, to make a decision on leadership. Then all the citizens know they must follow that lead, for the peace and unity of the nation.

Sir John Kerr showed that this very outcome can happen in Australia. And Gough Whitlam knew that, because of our overarching monarchy, he could not overturn Sir John’s decision. Under a republican model, he probably would have tried to overturn his sacking—creating a bigger crisis. Instead, in the 1975 federal election, the people of Australia were able to solve the crisis decisively and peacefully.

Already in Australia we have a nonsensical oath of allegiance sworn by new citizens to the country itself. When you think about it, an oath to support a country—a piece of land—is meaningless. If civil war is about to break out, of course both sides will claim that they are the legitimate defenders and leaders of the so-called country. Both sides will claim allegiance on that very basis.

An oath of allegiance only makes sense if pledged to one person. But even such an oath only leads to national stability if the person to whom it is pledged is not a participant in the political scene—and when the death of that person (by whatever means) automatically elevates another to the role.

In other words, an oath of allegiance is only valuable to a country if that oath is pledged to its constitutional monarch, and the monarch’s heirs and successors according to law. So, when the chips are really down, each citizen knows they must follow their monarch’s lead—but only then. That is the recipe for peace and stability which all the quick minds in the republic movement are missing.

The US republic, we should not forget, remains a violent place, with widespread gun crime and the world’s highest incarceration rates. Conversely, modern constitutional monarchies—like Denmark and post-war Japan—tend to be law-abiding and peaceful.

In most constitutional monarchies, average citizens lead more comfortable and less troubled lives. That comfort may not be directly due to the monarchy, but it is due to steady, stable government allied with the peaceful aspirations of its citizens. These characteristics are more likely to evolve under the intergenerationally-stable system that only a constitutional monarchy provides.

Peculiarly, the so-called US republic has recently become almost dynastic. The Clinton and Bush families look likely to share the presidency among themselves for most of three decades. So a republican constitution is no barrier to the imposition of dynastic ambitions. Yet these are often what Australian republicans deride.

So what if the heir to the throne has English, Scottish or Greek ancestors? So do most Australians! The current heir to the throne happens to be an eco-Greenie, with a penchant for alternative medicine and a dislike of modern architecture. As Charles’s passions show, the future constitutional monarch can reflect all humanity’s causes—and especially those of the poor and marginal in our society. The problem with an elected president is that he or she feels at least some obligation to reflect the narrower views of the voting majority.

At a practical level, it is economical for us not to pay for the day-to-day upkeep of our royal family. No doubt a president, once they have a palace in each state, and a presidential retreat at the beach and in the mountains, and a bodyguard and armour-plated limousines, and so on, would cost more.

Yet all generations of our international royal family remain ready to visit and celebrate our most important occasions with us. How much more memorable is it for people working in hospitals, schools and defence forces to meet a royal in person, instead of shaking the hand of a short-term, often divisive president! After all, that president may well have been a politician they voted against, or an ageing celebrity who was famous before they were born.

Now is not the time to consider another republican round table, summit, plebiscite or referendum. There are pressing and important issues to keep our country competitive, our population in work and our nation a secure home for current and new Australians. A republic will achieve none of these—but might well make us more of a target for eventual conquest, as a newly isolated nation.

Michael Copeman
Northbridge, NSW