The Little Aussie Cunctator

J.A. Lyons—The Tame Tasmanian: Appeasement and Rearmament in Australia 1932–39,

by David S. Bird;

Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, $44.

Cunctation is a word best said aloud only in the privacy of your own home. In fashionable company, it can cause wine glasses to be dropped, the odd devilled prawn to stick in a throat or the slow moving away of both friends and enemies. Like fructify it can be cunningly released with devastating effect. A quick explanation of its meaning is usually vital to restore some sense of calm.

According to Webster’s 1945 edition (smaller, modern dictionaries tend to avoid the word) the first cunctator was Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (280–203 BC), five times Roman consul and the general sent to defeat Hannibal. His dithering and lack of engagement with the Carthaginian invader saw him branded Cunctator (Delayer).

More than 2000 years later the Foreign Office in Whitehall coined the noun cunctation to explain a British policy, best described as “modest engagement with a foreign power in the hope that an opportunity may thus arise for improved relations”. By 1939, cunctation had morphed into appeasement.

In Australia, cunctation was the policy adopted by the newly elected United Australia Party government of Joseph Lyons—particularly in regards to the September 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. As a result, Joseph Lyons has been branded with a stinging legacy, by many historians and commentators, as to his being both a cunctator (regarding Japan in 1931) and an appeaser (regarding fascist Italy and Germany in 1939). Though all, apparently, is not what it seems.

In a smashing new history of the thirties, David S. Bird re-examines the “devil’s decade” in his book J.A. Lyons—The Tame Tasmanian. What we learn from Bird’s book is, first, that Joe Lyons may have been misjudged, and second, quite a bit about the period when Australia began to take itself seriously in foreign affairs—particularly in the Pacific region.

It may come as a surprise that before the Second World War Australia had no diplomatic service other than a High Commissioner in London. All our international contacts and relations with foreign governments were handled by London through the Colonial Office or the British Foreign Office.

Australia’s first major diplomatic engagement was an invitation to provide a delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, headed by Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Versailles was the first political treaty negotiated with direct participation by Australian government delegates and independent of British oversight. It led, amongst other things, to the founding of the League of Nations—the great hope for world peace. But Australian leaders at Versailles were demanding more than “a piece of the peace”.

According to Bird’s book, Australia had identified the Pacific region as its centre of influence and concern, and wanted its voice to be respected in London. In a Senate hearing in 1929 it was stated that “No parliament which is responsible for its own foreign policy has less discussion on foreign affairs than does the Australian Parliament”. Elected as prime minister in 1932, Joe Lyons seems to have shared this view.

Tetchiness by Australian ministers had led to the establishment in 1925 of a Dominions Office in London whose British secretary, Leo Amery, recognised the need to concede to dominion opinion—“on occasion”. Amery thought that the new office eliminated “the legend of Colonial Office officials writing to a nigger one minute and then turning around and writing in the same strain to Dominion Prime Ministers”. The dominions included Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand; we never learn who the “niggers” were.

Joseph Lyons started his first term as prime minister amid the turmoil of the Great Depression. His reputation was based on his ability as a financial manager, and his skills as a consensus-builder in cabinet. Lyons had deserted the Australian Labor Party to become a founding member of a new conservative grouping, the United Australia Party, which was elected to office in 1932.

Much of Lyons’ electoral success was due to his mastery of the then new electronic medium, radio. He also had by his side his politically astute wife Enid—a key behind-the-scenes player. Enid was an ardent pacifist, a leaning shared by her husband—to some degree.

As David Bird points out:

“[Lyons] had a political reputation for placing conscience above party, the national interest above partisan politics, consensus above factional division and economic probity above repudiation (although to many in Labor he would always remain simply a ‘Judas’ and a ‘traitor’).”

But, Bird goes on to say, “friend and foe alike generally agreed—‘Honest Joe’ was accepted as being a modest, gentle, uxorious, family man”.

When Lyons was installed as Australian prime minister, one elephant in the room was Billy Hughes. Hughes had been centre of the conscription debate of the First World War and head of Australia’s delegation to Versailles. There, Hughes had demanded Germany pay £24 million reparations, of which he insisted Australia get its share—because of its 60,000 war dead and massive war debts. President Wilson called him a “pestiferous varmint”.

Lingering in Lyons’ later cabinets were old issues and unforgotten grudge-holders. World-stage performer Billy Hughes was one. As David Bird notes, “in Hughes’ opinion ‘Lyons never had any Labor convictions’ and Lyons, for his part, could not determine whether Hughes was a ‘greater menace’ inside cabinet or without”. Hughes was one to talk—he changed political parties five times.

Bird suggests Lyons and Hughes may have played a good guy–bad guy game with the British. In the years to come Hughes would come out and say things that Lyons couldn’t—but wished he had.

David Bird suggests that Lyons also saw advantage for Australia in Japan being preoccupied in westward expansion (Manchuria), rather than heading south towards Australia and its mandated territories. In August 1933 Japan had suggested at an international conference in Banff, Canada, the “peaceful re-adjustment of Pacific borders”.

Bird states, “These were attractive propositions to most in Canberra, if not London.” He goes on to say:

“at some time in the last months of 1933, some Australian ministers took the opportunity to abandon eastern cunctation and instead chose to seize the right moment themselves by allowing Australia to take the role of ‘honest broker’ between Japan and the West …”

The last thing Australia needed was for Britain to impose an arms embargo against Japan in retaliation for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. While cunctating with one hand, Joe Lyons was playing rearmament with the other. Like our present prime minister, Lyons was undertaking to stash away a portion of the Commonwealth budget surplus into a special trust account. The idea was, when the account was sufficiently fat, to modernise the Royal Australian Navy into a flotilla of four cruisers and five destroyers, a spick new “Blue Water” fleet, designed to protect the sea-lanes for Australian trade.

A second preoccupation of the Lyons government was the failure of the British to get cracking on the building of Singapore as a strong East Asian naval base and defence hub. British dithering, due to budget cuts, had caused the Australian government to develop a lack of confidence in the Admiralty, and to suspect the planned Singapore base was largely a mere “blueprint”.

The third aspect of the Lyons rearmament plans was the RAAF. David Bird says the RAAF barely survived through the 1920s; “There was now to be an initial restoration of pre-Depression squadron numbers in 1933 and a gradual increase in strength over the following four years.”

From contemplating the abolition of the air arm in May 1932, Lyons moved to preside over the reconstruction of the RAAF in September 1933. It was said that Australian authorities were stunned to learn of Britain’s poor ranking—fifth—among the world’s air powers.

On the December 2, 1933, Prime Minister Lyons made an official statement:

“The conditions of the world today are very different from those which obtained even a few years ago, and profoundly different from the state of affairs before the war … International relations generally are more important than they ever have been before. It is a strange thing to reflect that no official visit has ever been paid by Australia to the countries of any of our near neighbours.”

Davis Bird points out, “This statement was both the death-notice of Australian cunctation and the birth certificate of Australian appeasement.”

Lyons was planning an “Australian Eastern Mission”, a three-month tour by an Australian delegation which was to visit the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, Japan, China and the Philippines. It was described by its leader, the Foreign Affairs Minister, John Latham, as the “first mission of a diplomatic character”. One can only wonder what the Foreign Affairs Minister actually did before this initiative.

The Australian Eastern Mission had three diplomatic challenges that were unattainable through cunctation. As Bird points out, “The most explicit goal was the least controversial, although characteristic of appeasement: the expression of ‘friendship and goodwill towards regional neighbours, in particular towards a ruffled Japan’.”

The second, more concealed goal, was to persuade Japan not to sever her membership of the League of Nations. Japan was miffed at the League’s criticism of her Manchurian caper of 1931 and was on the verge of leaving the League. The third and most sensitive task was to “discern first hand the Japanese, as well as the Chinese, criteria for any settlement in Manchuria”.

Keith Murdoch in his Herald newspaper cautiously endorsed the Lyons diplomatic goal of “regional goodwill” as long as it was not at the expense of “British goodwill”. Murdoch had divined the problem quickly, and he was right—the British were well and truly “sniffy”. London had received no warning of Australia’s moves. The unexpected announcement of a diplomatic expedition by Lyons caused turmoil in the Foreign Office in London—it garnered more information about the Australian plans from reading an article in the Times than it had received through normal dominion channels. There had been no Canberra– London consultation.

Days before the Australian Eastern Mission’s departure, Lyons received an official request from Japan for Australia’s recognition of its Manchurian conquest. It was “welcome to the real world” for Australia’s budding diplomats and its optimistic, pacifist, prime minister.

David Bird reveals:

“At this gathering, Lyons gave the first indications that he desired the transition from cunctation to appeasement in London’s European policy—a policy already completed in his regional policy—and also aired his proposal for a ‘pact’ …”

The pact was obviously intended to be between the British empire and Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Lyons also stated at the summit that he did not believe Germany to be “as belligerently inclined as she was sometimes regarded”. Two years before this, in 1933, Hitler had begun burning books and was considering the future “welfare” of European Jews.

In Rome, Lyons met Mussolini. Their meeting had been preceded by an escort of planes from the Royal Italian Air Force as the Australian Prime Minister and his wife approached the Italian coast. Mussolini at this time was planning the invasion of Abyssinia. (It is interesting to speculate whether these aircraft were involved in the bombing of the defenceless Abyssinians a few months later.)

In the preface of his book, David Bird recalls his archival research work and captures a particular moment—“the joy of the unexpected”:

“It was my great pleasure, for example, to find the original ‘peace in our time’ paper of September 1939 amongst the miscellaneous correspondence and journals of Neville Chamberlain at the University of Birmingham. This single document, with its steady signatures of Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler, distilled everything about appeasement policy, both British and Australian, into several telling sentences.”

David Bird’s book gives a riveting account of the activities of Joseph Lyons’ (and Enid’s) adventures into the world of “Amateur Diplomacy” from his election as prime minister in 1932 until his death on Good Friday 1939. Lyons, the cunctator and appeaser one minute, rearmament enthusiast the next. In untangling the character, motives and actions of this extremely complex man, David Bird does Australian history a great service.

It is refreshing to read such a scholarly work. The lack of postmodernist, politically correct mumbo-jumbo in this book is a reminder of how history can be written. Bird teaches Latin at Camberwell Grammar School and is currently working on a book about right-wing politics between the wars.