The Lost Papers of George Reid

In August 1977 the 121st edition of Quadrant was published. The magazine’s illustrative cover proudly displayed an old, worn picture of Sir George Houstoun Reid placed on a cluttered, dusty desk. Below the picture the headline bellowed, “The Reid Papers: An extraordinary insight into Australia’s involvement in World War I, the secret papers of Australian statesman Sir George Reid”. Historians across the country took notice; now at last there would be a collection of papers through which they could gain an insight into the enigmatic premier and prime minister who had played such a prominent role in the shaping of our country.

Over the next three issues, in one of the longest articles ever published in Quadrant, Reid’s granddaughter Anne Fairbairn would reveal the secret documents that the family had been hoarding for years. Fairbairn began her article with a quote from her late father: “Few people in Australia ever knew how much Father tried to do to help Australia and the Empire during those last years of his life. Try and write something, Anne, so that it is known. He deserves that.” Although she acknowledged that she was no historian, Fairbairn fulfilled her father’s wishes as she related the story of Reid’s time in England.

It certainly was a story worth the telling. In 1910 George Reid had been appointed Australia’s first High Commissioner in London. At the time, when Australia’s British connections were strong, the appointment was considered a great honour. The position was given to Reid as a sort of consolation prize, after, knowing that Alfred Deakin’s personal animosity towards him was preventing liberals from presenting a united front against the “socialist tiger”, he had magnanimously stepped aside to allow the fusion of the Anti-Socialist and Protectionist parties.

After arriving in England he quickly set to work representing Australian interests in the heart of the empire. Reid was invited to stay with the King in Balmoral, and was later knighted as a member of the Order of St Michael and St George. Not content with talking with British royalty, he travelled to Germany where he was summoned to a special audience with the Kaiser. Reid ventured to remark to Wilhelm II, “What a horrible thing it would be if the German bulldog and the British bulldog got their teeth into one another, allowing some inferior animal to climb over their mutilated remains!” The Kaiser’s response, Reid maintained, was, “Never! Never!” This was 1912; Reid would still be High Commissioner two years later when the war broke out.

As the representative of Australia, Reid was heavily involved in military matters concerning the Commonwealth. In 1911 Lady Reid had launched the first battle cruiser built for the new Australian navy, HMAS Australia, and when the war broke out Reid visited Australian troops in Egypt. He kept a careful eye on the Gallipoli campaign, as he was keen to do whatever he could to improve the conditions of Australian soldiers. Because of the important connections Reid had made with the British cabinet, his time as High Commissioner was extended twice, first by the Cook government and then, a sure sign of his value given the animosity that surely survived Reid’s famed anti-socialist campaign, by the Fisher government. Despite this and an offer to continue to serve without pay, on January 21, 1916, Reid’s term of office expired.

In England without an official position, Reid was still determined to do whatever he could to help the war effort. He stood for a seat in the House of Commons as a “Unionist” candidate. His opponents withdrew their candidacy and Reid, now in his seventies, was given one last chance to fight for his principles. He travelled around Britain giving patriotic speeches and lectures to raise public morale. He even journeyed to America to utilise his gift for public speaking in an effort to galvanise the hearts of the newest entrant to the war. Reid arrived back in England on March 29, 1918. On September 12 he died. He did not live to see victory in the war that he had exhausted his seventy-three-year-old body to support.

Even today, Fairbairn’s article makes a fascinating read. Nevertheless, Quadrant’s bold cover proclaiming “The Reid Papers” seems disappointingly misleading. The article was written mainly from the information available in Reid’s hastily written memoirs, My Reminiscences. This book was published in 1917 and while it gives an important insight into Reid’s time in England and his mindset in the midst of the war, it is short on detailed information about Reid’s early and more historically significant career as a politician in colonial and federal parliaments. In writing her article, Fairbairn only occasionally referenced from the personal papers of Reid, and the hope of a great cache of documents was extinguished.

Writing a decade later, Reid’s biographer W.G. McMinn was left to lament that nothing had come of the rumoured Reid papers. Since then Fairbairn has generously donated the papers which she referred to in her article to the National Library, but they are almost all from Reid’s time in England. Nor are the rest likely to turn up, as Reid did “not keep copies of letters”. As McMinn noted, such was Reid’s lack of papers that he had to ask acquaintances for information in order to write his memoirs. Perhaps his not keeping his papers is a sign of modesty, unlike some of his colleagues who have left us vast collections in order to shape historical inquiry after their deaths. Whatever the reason, the loss of Reid’s papers is a great historical misfortune. Not only have we been denied access to the man behind the public persona, but for decades our image of Reid has been shaped by his opponents.

For years historians have viewed Reid through the eyes of Alfred Deakin. Deakin left not only a vast collection of papers but also an account of Federation and numerous articles as a correspondent for the Morning Post. Through this wealth of sources he has dominated the discourse on the early years of federal politics. Deakin had a deep-seated personal animosity to Reid that even his biographer J.A. La Nauze found difficult to explain. It traced back to the campaign for federation, where Reid had fought hard for a constitution more in line with his principles and the interests of New South Wales. His famous Yes-No attitude towards the first federal referendum directly influenced its failure. The amendments he fought for based on his own experience as premier in fighting the Legislative Council largely concerned the important provisions that deal with a deadlock between the two houses. In the end even the committed federalist Edmund Barton was inclined to support most of them, but this did not save Reid from earning the enmity of many federalists, including Deakin.

Deakin’s antagonism flowed through to the federal parliament. Initially the two were ideological enemies, as Reid fought for the Free Trade policies that had been his crowning achievement as premier. When a distrust of the caucus system and the support of a large section of the Labor Party for the “socialist objective” brought the two men philosophically closer together, the effects of this personal animosity became more acute. When, despite voicing his opposition to Labor, Deakin excluded himself from the Free Trade and Protectionist coalition, the Reid–McLean government was left in an almost untenable position. In the end Deakin never trusted Reid and after he convinced himself that the anti-socialist coalition was a deliberate obstacle to the Protectionist cause, he wrecked the Reid government. It was only Reid’s selfless retirement that allowed the fusion of the two parties to take place.

Deakin’s views of Reid are prevalent throughout the historiography that discusses this period. In her article Fairbairn cited a passage from Manning Clark’s Short History of Australia that labels Reid as “vulgar”. This personal judgment is no doubt influenced by Deakin’s papers. Naturally our views of historical figures are influenced by our political beliefs, so many people will approach the topic of early federal politics with a predetermined view of Reid or Deakin, but the bias of our sources means that even an objective inquirer is likely to come away with a negative picture of Reid. On top of this, Reid’s lack of papers makes it difficult for a historian to mount a defence of his character.

Another element of Deakin’s view of Reid that pervades the historiography is that Reid was inherently untrustworthy. Thanks in part to the fact that Reid’s motivations are somewhat obscured because we lack his papers, the Yes-No label has been hung around his neck in an effort to prove that he was a man of no political principles. This is in spite of the fact that the direct result of Reid’s Yes-No speech was the carrying of a number of amendments to the constitution that are generally recognised as an improvement. Joseph Carruthers, who was Reid’s right-hand man during the federation campaign, maintained that Reid felt a sense of duty to explain the flaws in the proposed constitution to the electorate that ultimately cost him the chance to be Australia’s first prime minister. This sense of duty antagonised inter-colonial federalists as well as creating domestic political problems that contributed to his losing the premiership. At the time it was widely assumed that the New South Wales premier would be the first prime minister, and the reason that this did not eventuate was that William Lyne, who succeeded Reid, was opposed to federation. Thus the Yes-No speech was a principled action that was perhaps the greatest sacrifice of Reid’s career.

This idea of Reid as a political schemer also pervades the historical image of him as a federal politician. Deakin did not buy into Reid’s anti-socialist vision, not because Deakin did not have a problem with the Labor Party but because he saw anti-socialism as a sinister threat to protectionism. Following Deakin’s lead, historians have been all too ready to dismiss the anti-socialist campaign as political opportunism, citing the fact that Reid had been perfectly happy to work with Labor in the New South Wales parliament when he needed them. Such a proposition is contradictory however, as by pushing anti-socialism Reid was surrendering any hope of governing Australia with the help of Labor support, so in the context of the “three elevens” parliament he was sacrificing a political opportunity in order to stand up for a liberal principle that rejected the socialism being pushed by large sections of the Labor Party.

Our limited sources for Reid have clouded not only our image of him as a person but also our understanding of his political philosophy. Reid is frequently considered in introductory chapters in books on the Liberal Party, where “New South Wales” and “Victorian” traditions of liberalism are contrasted. Hence he is often seen as the anti-Deakin, a lens seen through which everything Deakin believes in, Reid must believe the opposite. As such Reid is labelled as “reactionary” or as a supporter of class-based politics, despite the fact that he fought the Legislative Council in New South Wales and that his anti-socialist campaign was a rejection of class-based divisions in Australian politics. The classic example of this anti-Deakin idea is the image we have of Reid’s economic beliefs. Reid is generally portrayed as “laissez-faire” to contrast him with the “social liberalism” of Deakin. Such a one-dimensional view is simply wrong. While Reid opposed the very high levels of government intervention that “social liberalism” could represent, this did not make him laissez-faire by default. For better or worse, Reid was not Bruce Smith. He did believe in a role for the state, though importantly that role was to be limited and his main political focus became the dangers of an ever-intrusive socialist state.

The exception to this one-dimensional view of Reid is W.G. McMinn’s masterful biography, George Reid (1989). It stands as a monument to a dedication to historical research, as despite the lack of Reid’s papers McMinn was able to garner enough evidence to create a fully-fleshed-out image of Reid. The achievement is even more remarkable as it predated the internet, which has made the locating of even the most obscure source so much easier. Still, McMinn’s book is now a quarter of a century old and has some notable gaps, particularly surrounding Reid’s all-important anti-socialist campaign. Hence new research is required—which will again be hampered by a lack of sources.

More recently there has been increased interest for Reid, as neo-liberals have rediscovered a classical liberal icon. Despite the positive image this recent work has of Reid, in its rejection of the Australian settlement and the Deakinite tradition it is prone to perpetuating the anti-Deakin tradition of earlier works. An example of this was the Institute of Public Affairs’ nomination of the fall of the Reid–McLean government as the worst mistake in Australian history because it was “the last chance that Australia had to avoid the full imposition of the Australian settlement”. Such assertions are problematic, as much of the Australian settlement was already in place and the Reid–McLean government included a number of Protectionists who would go on to support the rest of its imposition. Notably the Victorian Protectionist Allan McLean would not be one of them, as he remained aloof from Deakin who had destroyed his government and greatly damaged the anti-socialist cause.

Still, the Institute of Public Affairs’ nomination certainly sparked interest in Reid. The fall of the Reid–McLean government is one of the big “what ifs” of Australian history, and it is easy to imagine that had it survived the ideology of the early federal Liberal Party might have ended up closer to that of Joseph Carruthers’s Liberal and Reform Association, with a reduced level of influence for so-called “social liberalism” (though the extent of Deakinite social liberalism’s influence over the early Liberal Party has been exaggerated, as Joseph Cook’s ideology closely mirrored that of Reid).

The nomination sparked a heated response, with Frank Bongiorno attacking it as “new-right” myth-making in line with writings by Keith Windschuttle and Gregory Melleuish. Bongiorno made his critique in Confusion: The Making of the Australian Two-Party System, a book in which, tellingly, the chapter on the legacy of free-trade liberalism was given to a Labor historian.

The rest of Bongiorno’s chapter is largely an attack on a neo-liberal interpretation of Reid’s historical significance. He dismisses the idea that Reid had a concept of free-trade liberalism that was cannibalised by Deakinites and then re-emerged in the 1980s as “an alluring fairy-tale”. Bongiorno criticises the anti-Deakin image of Reid but he does so in order to tear him down from his position as a neo-liberal icon. He does present Reid as a figure whose beliefs may have resonated with Menzies, a valuable acknowledgment that Reid had an important legacy for the Liberal Party even before the rise of neo-liberalism. This legacy however does not invalidate the connection that can be drawn between Reid’s beliefs and neo-liberalism. Large elements of Reid’s pragmatic ideology were absorbed into the early Liberal Party, while other elements were left to be rediscovered, and admittedly occasionally distorted, by neo-liberals. This connection is only anachronistic, as it is in Bongiorno’s view, if Reid’s free-trade liberalism is seen as essentially the same as neo-liberalism, rather than being an antecedent of Australian neo-liberalism that it has much in common with. In essence Bongiorno is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in dismissing this connection, having complicated the issue by bringing up interventionist politicians who supported free trade, whose beliefs were nowhere nearly as influential as Reid’s.

The main problem with Bongiorno’s account is that he appears to be intent on present-day political point-scoring. The “fairy-tale” image of Reid, while problematic and prone to exaggeration, is based on large elements of historical truth and is essential in keeping the memory of Reid alive. Reid believed in a pragmatic concept of liberalism that, while not dogmatic and not directly transferable to the present day, has much in common with neo-liberalism. Though Reid did not reject the “Australian settlement” outright—which he could hardly be expected to have done, given that it was a later formulation that connected disparate pieces of legislation—he did attack several of its pillars.

New historiography surrounding Reid should be written with the intention of creating a more accurate memory of him, not of berating his modern admirers for maintaining a somewhat stereotyped image of someone who, except by McMinn, has generally been stereotyped even by historians. Bongiorno attacks the “new right” for perpetuating an idealised image of a real historical figure—something that the more historically inclined Labor Party has been doing for decades.

It is unfortunate that this more recent debate could not be informed by a collection of Reid’s papers. He lives on in the sources that have survived, though the Deakin collection is probably not the place you will find what is left of the real Reid. It survives in the personal papers of his friends and political allies, a notable example being Joseph Carruthers, whose anecdote about Reid’s propensity to fall asleep at the most inopportune times provides us with one of the most endearing images we have of the man. More importantly Reid lives on in his speeches, which thanks to the then liberal-minded Sydney Morning Herald’s propensity to print them largely verbatim we are lucky enough to have almost unlimited access to. These were the days of the great speaking tour, where at halls throughout the country politicians would pronounce their grand vision for the nation. No one went on more of these tours or was better able to woo a live audience than Reid, and through his speeches we are able to access his ideology, philosophy and perhaps gain a glimpse of the man himself.

Still it is a great historical misfortune that the papers of this influential and intriguing politician did not survive. The cover of the August 1977 Quadrant sits mocking the historian who is researching early-twentieth-century Australian politics. Perhaps Reid is just one of many important people who we will be denied historical access to. In studying the digital age of e-mails and phone messages, what will there be for the historian to delve through? The more we become saturated with information about politics, the less we know about our politicians as people. A biography of Tony Abbott based largely on media sources would be worthless. The grand old collections of letters and diaries are dying, the visionary speeches are arguably already dead. What will the future historian have left with which to resurrect the ghosts of our political past?