The Re-election of the Chifley Labor Government in 1949

[Magniac]

The Re-election of the Chifley Labor Government in 1949:
Perspectives in History

PART 1: ‘Lenin was right’,
An excerpt from an online memoir​

It was only in the latter years of the twentieth century that I started to try and make sense of the events I’d found myself in as a postgraduate student. Only then that I began to reach out to old friends, to find out what had driven us apart in the first place.
I’d always suspected that that dividing moment in our lives was based on simple misunderstanding. Was I right?

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During the summer of '56/'57 I started work as an unpaid editorial assistant at the Journal of Australian Progressive, Labour & Economic History. While I saw this job as the first rung on the ladder for my aspiring career, the board of men and women I worked for were not so confident about the prospects for their academic flagship. I should have paid more attention, but I had made the youthful mistake of thinking that because I might live forever then any enterprise associated with myself likewise couldn’t fail. I was wrong. For at JAPLEH there was much anxiety over the coming expiration date of the Commonwealth grant that had been made in nineteen fifty-two by the then Evatt Government to found our publication. Everybody (excepting myself) assumed that the Liberal/Country party coalition of Prime Minister Dick Casey would not renew funding for a project that several of his backbenchers had condemned as ‘communistic propaganda’, and that the chances of the then relatively small Australian university sector coughing up money for a specialist journal in our little field of history didn’t seem great.

I only half-realised that every one of the three editions we were to bring out that year might be the last, but nevertheless I wanted to make an impression with the board while I could.

“Why don’t we get Palmer to write a follow-up piece to his 'Legend of the Nineties'?” This was my submission to the worthy men and women before me. (I don’t want to go into detail about these people, as you probably know of the bitter divisions that would later erupt between them. After all, battles in academia are so fierce precisely because the stakes are so small. But that aphorism didn’t apply in early nineteen fifty-seven, not yet, not at the publication we all mucked in together to publish at Sydney University.)

I didn’t know how seriously I’d be taken. Vance Palmer was no longer teaching at that time, he was semi-retired, and anyway, despite the esteem that most people in the field of labour history held him in for his great work of the late forties, his career had been mostly concerned with the promotion of Australian literature. This scholar normally wouldn’t be asked for such an open-ended submission. But…

The money was soon to dry up for our little journal (or so the board thought). Why not publish a non-peer-reviewed article from a man whose books would continue to be read by university students long after our own bundled editions had been moved into storage?

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My God, what a piece the old man gave us. To use vulgar newspaper parlance, we had exciting copy from the elder of Australian letters.

Lenin Was Right?: The three eras of conflict within the Australian labour movement

…It is now obvious that the last sixty years within labourism in this country can be divided into three eras. The first era, partly covered in my book of several years ago, must be considered to have been born in the dying years of Queen Victoria, and to have lasted until the carnage of the Great War. In those years there was some tension, but not as much as I had previously thought and written of. For even though the MPs and senior union leaders of the movement had settled into the rut of bourgeois politics, the vast number of the workers accepted this as a necessary trade off for incremental reform… This bourgeois order in the Labor caucuses and the craft-union dominated trades halls was underwritten by respectable Protestant & Redmondite values, in that particular rank… The conscription debate and Hughes’ apostasy was the great opportunity for the workers to rebirth the revolutionary dream some had once dreamt… But it was an opportunity lost… The Labor bourgeoisie had merely reformed, and had decided upwardly mobile Catholicism would supplant middling Protestantism as their dominant article of faith…

The next great opportunity for the workers of city and bush to achieve a democratic breakthrough was in the Great Depression… And it looked as if victory was at hand. For once the party was responsive to that great mass of workers who made flesh Australian labourism! State premiers who had attempted to implement the inhuman dictates of the Niemeyer Plan were expelled, and the bourgeois caucus in the Federal parliament was brought to heel… But the attempt to give power to the workers came undone… This is where the second era of conflict within the movement ends, and the third, and arguably the most brutally cynical, era begins…

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The fifties was not a great era for Australian intellectuals and scholars to have their ideas circulate. The country’s small commercial book publishing industry was still the best way to disseminate anything resembling abstract thought. But very quickly the Palmer essay would cause a sensation, and would become as famous, if not more famous, than anything the seventy-two year old had hitherto written.

We soon had an intellectual cause célèbre, one unlike anything Australia had seen since the Ern Malley affair.

First off, we were all but forced to print a rebuttal of Palmer’s thesis by Manning Clark. It would be the main piece in our second edition of the year (once again, not a peer-reviewed article, just pure opinion).

I am concerned that the distinguished popular author Mr Palmer has seen fit to state that the last quarter of a century has seen a decline in Australian political culture… He finishes his thesis of 'The Three Eras of Conflict' by providing several ‘examples’ of recent history that do nothing but confirm he has a very shaky grasp of contemporary Australia… The notion that Jack Lang betrayed his socialist allies after losing office in NSW in nineteen thirty-two is not unfounded, however Mr Palmer’s claim that Lang, “Was one of the principle architects of the immoral post-ethical-Protestant, post-Cardinal Moran bourgeois party elite,” that he, “Paved the way for the McCarthyite redbaiting policies of the Chifley and Evatt ministries,” is nonsense… Mr Palmer does not understand the subtlety of men like the last two ALP prime ministers, that just because they would not position themselves as Mr Lang’s enemies it doesn’t therefore follow that they were somehow in ‘cahoots’ with the former premier… I’m personally dismayed by the actions of the Chifley government at the minefields in nineteen forty-nine, however I cannot believe that that mistake was a symptom of a “win at all costs amoralism” that the popular author says has gripped political Labor since the years of the Great Slump… It must be remembered that Mr Lang’s feud with the Hughes/Evans group was not a genuine example of McCarthyism, as the novelist would have us believe, but largely a result of the non-ideological power plays that have characterised NSW Laborism for more than half a century… Lastly, Mr Palmer must realise that the quote of V.I. Lenin he relies on for the title of his essay may just as easily apply to his own version of Antipodean utopian politics as much as it supposedly explains this imaginary Lang/Chifley/Evatt/Calwell faction he says has “thwarted” the Australian workers since 1930.

We had accepted this essay and prepared the galleys for it within weeks of the Palmer edition being distributed to university libraries around the country. In the world of academic papers this kind of speed was, and indeed is, unheard of.

Palmer insisted that he be allowed to view Clark’s retort as soon as possible--in fact he suggested that he and the Canberra-based professor be allowed to take the material they had given us and submit it to the non-scholarly media of their choosing. We were soon to receive word that the Australian Broadcasting Commission were interested in both men recording radio talks.

More drama was to come. With his new found enthusiasm for attacking the beliefs of the author of The Legend of the Nineties, Clark debated a friend of Palmer’s at the University of Melbourne’s student union. The subject of the debate was, “That the modern Labor Party has failed to keep the faith”; Clark spoke against the motion, while his opponent, one Frank Hardy, spoke for it.

We were now assured mainstream news coverage. For Hardy was notorious as the writer of 'Power Without Glory', the roman à clef of the life of John Wren, a scurrilous work for which he had been charged with libel by the shadowy yet influential Victorian business man. And now, liberated by Wren’s recent death, this controversial man had found in this feud we had helped create an opportunity to promote his novel as a serious work of historiography.

Even the egalitarian men and women engaged in the study of Australian history would soon come to admit that when you lie down with dogs, you wake up with flees…


[OOC, author’s note: This is just a fragment, future episodes of this TL won’t be written from the perspective of this ‘narrator’. I just wanted to throw this out there, to make some points about how historiography can change dramatically, depending on who are the political winners writing history and who are the losers reacting to it.

In this TL Clark is actually pretty much still the man he was in our history, but Palmer has been radicalised (or re-radicalised) by Chifley and Evatt’s leadership of Australia during the Korean War.

Evatt has briefly been PM after Chifley’s death, and his sponsorship of the arts and humanities has left an impact on the intelligentsia. Richard Casey has led a federal Coalition government since the defeat of Evatt Labor.

Lang is not quite the subject of admiration of Australian Left history that he would be in OTL. All these elements are either depicted here, or are at least not far removed from this portion of narrative.]