Under the same moon

The recent 80th anniversary of the death of John Curtin caused me to reflect on his impact on the people of the story in my recently published book Under the Same Moon, and aspects of what he was confronted with, and the decisions he made, which should resonate today.

The book opens with an Australian battalion on a ship, the Orcades, on their way from the Middle East. It is early February 1942. Their ship is part of a large convoy carrying tens of thousands of troops, with their equipment, to belatedly bolster the defences in the Far East.

Their original destination was the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) but with the fall of Singapore it was rightly concluded that the East Indies was a lost cause. As we know, a tussle developed between Curtin and his counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States. Curtin insisted that the troops be redirected to Australia, the others wanted them sent to Burma. Increasingly angry cable exchanges ensued, which are described in the book, but in the end Curtin won.

It was the first time that an Australian government had the experience of being an ally in its own independent right with foreign nations large and small. He had confronted and resisted two giants of the world stage, unchallenged leaders of the two major Allied powers in the Far East accustomed to having things their way. One finding it hard to shake off the reality that the dominions of the Empire were no longer colonies, the other largely ignorant of and sometimes dismissive of the sparsely populated country at the bottom of the world.

Unfortunately for the men of the battalion on the Orcades, their ship was much faster than the rest and had reached Sumatra before the next ship had even reached Colombo. Would the decision to redirect the convoys apply to them? Steadfastness in dealing with Churchill and Roosevelt seemed to give way to muddled thinking when it came to the fate of the men and women on this ship. The actions of Curtin and his cabinet are central to the fate of the characters in the story.

Curtin also looms large for the characters on the home front in the story. In 1941, as the leader of the opposition and a member of the bipartisan Australian Advisory War Council, he was concerned about national complacency and sections of the community who he regarded as ‘irresponsibles’ – specifically, there was significant labour unrest which was badly affecting defence preparations and production.

Strikes were common, in the coal mines and shipyards in particular. It was not peacetime, he said. Coal production had to increase but there was a shortage because of union strikes. At one stage the country only had six weeks’ supply left.

Curtin led the Council in trying to stir the people of Australia to realise the danger the country faced; they issued a press statement which caused uproar.

Then in December 1941, the country now at war with Japan and Curtin now the prime minister, the usual long holiday that began on Christmas Eve was reduced to three days and no one could take annual leave; unions and many workers objected, and Curtin’s government was obliged to observe in public announcements that, after all, the country was at war and under threat of invasion by people who were not taking holidays.

The troops serving overseas found themselves the victims of union and dockside action, and perhaps ironically but understandably there was a tendency to direct their anger at Curtin.

In Under the Same Moon, one of the main protagonists writes from Palestine: ‘ … This morning we are to hand out a Comforts Fund issue of two ounces of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. Unfortunately for the men, those loyal Australians, the backbone of Australia as we are told by Messrs Evatt and Curtin, in other words the wharf labourers, have ratted the boxes which contained the tobacco and consequently hundreds of diggers have to go without …’

And then at this time Curtin issued his famous statement that in the Pacific war Australia must look to America. In turning from Britain to the United States after Japan’s entry into the war there are unavoidable parallels to the Australia of today. In the late 1930s Australia faced an increasingly belligerent and threatening Japan and needed big power friends.

It was a small country with a small industrial base and had little capacity to build ships and planes. It had manpower but any army it could raise would be dwarfed by the Japanese, and there were limits as to how many men could be recruited as they needed a core number to operate the factories and mines (as they were to discover in the early 1940s when they had to put a pause on recruitment).

In this period the country was virtually totally reliant on Britain the mother country, with Singapore as the impregnable fortress. The US was deep in isolationism. The fall of Singapore was a shock and signified that the British could no longer be relied on to support Australia going forward; however, this was offset by the entry of the Americans, who were now fully invested in the war and on Australia’s side because they had been attacked, thus forced out of their isolationism.

Today, who is to be feared? Who threatens Australia’s security? At present, people’s worldviews on that differ. A more pressing question is, what great power can Australia rely on if its security is threatened? Is America’s growing isolationism and unreliability today a mirror of Britain’s impotence and infirmity of 1942?

While Australia is much more industrialised now than it was in the 1930s, as then it does not have the capacity to build its own sizable navy and air force and these days the cost of building up these forces significantly through acquisition would be financially prohibitive.

So, similar to the 1930s, it would need big power friends to stave off an attack. Since the Second World War its guardian angel has been the US. But that country is reverting to its pre-FDR, its arguably traditionalist, character – protectionist and isolationist, me first, unreliable and unwilling to involve itself beyond its borders. Where does that leave Australia? What lessons are there from what Curtin did back then?