Journey Into the World

(See Cover) Off the wet rocks where the seals bark and the tides rip, a rendezvous with a new land this week awaited a big grey ship, a plain man in an austere suit, and a motherly woman with friendly eyes. Under the high, tense arc of Golden Gate Bridge, John Curtin, Labor Leader and Prime Minister of Australia, and his wife Elsie would be getting their first view of the U.S. where it looks the most like home. It had been late summer three weeks ago as their ship passed under Sydney's great bridge and between the dun-colored cliffs of The Heads to the open sea. This week the pale green of early spring was on the hills that hem in San Francisco Bay.

All his life Jack Curtin, 59, had never felt the need to see the non-Australian world. Years ago, Vance Marshall, an Australian laborite now living in London, visited Jack in Perth. "I'm on my way to England," Marshall said. Curtin looked out the window, at the endless, cloudless western sky. "Isn't there room enough in Australia?" he finally asked. "Not for me," 'retorted Marshall. "Australia's in the back wash. It's back of beyond of even the fringe of things that matter. I want to be where history is written."

Jack reached for his well-worn hat, suggested a "walk-about." They walked all afternoon, coming to the Esplanade beside the leisurely, looping Swan River at sunset. Said thoughtful Jack Curtin: "Vance, you should have said where past history is written. This is where history is going to be written. Why don't you stay and help write it? Australia's big, Vance, not England. There's room to breathe here, to grow, to live."

Marshall and Curtin were both right. This week Jack Curtin, representative of an Australia newly conscious, was on his way to London to help write the future history of Commonwealth & Empire.

In London, awaiting the first wartime meeting of Dominion Prime Ministers with almost as much interest as the invasion, there was much speculation as to how "Honest Jack" would stack against the plain & fancy pressures he would find in Britain. Well did the men of politics recall the strange coincidence that Australian First Ministers who visit London while in office usually soon find themselves out of a job. Australians, they knew, liked their politicians plain, were quick to toss a man bemused by pomp & circumstance.

Australia Is Big. Bumptious suspicion of life in the Great World is not merely an aspect of the "immaturity" of a colonial people. There is another side to it: Australians, like Americans before them, have felt no need of any pattern larger than their own.

Australia is almost as big as the U.S.; it has almost the population of New York City (the sheep population almost equals the U.S. human population). From Canberra (pronounced Can-bra), near Sydney on the east coast, to Perth out west is 2,400 miles. Just the fringes of Australia are inhabited; the southeast, particularly, and a little around Perth on the west coast (big-timber country) and at Darwin up north in the tropics, then down the east coast to Brisbane where urban living starts again.

The dead heart of Australia, the "untapped, uninhabited, unexploited Great Australian Loneliness," extends over most of the land. A scattering of aborigines haunt it and the lakes are dry beds most of the year. Strange animals, found nowhere else in the world, attest the age-old isolation of Australia. Until the fall of Singapore and the sudden, chilling fear of Japs, White Australia remained almost as out of touch with the rest of the world as the platypus.

It was a land--a world of its own--where most Aussies' thoughts began and ended with betting, beer, bickering, and such labor as was necessary to support these activities.* Racetracks operated six days a week, the dogs ran three nights a week. In between the restless could play two-up, the favorite gambling game. Sport absorbed a fat slice of the easygoing Australian's week: football (Australian rules), cricket (Australia's national hero, Don Bradman, was a cricketer) and sailboat racing were only the beginning. Australians used to live for the weekend. In the language Aussies knew and liked, John Curtin used to say: "The average Australian thinks he can collect just because his horse pokes his neck in front while coming up the straight."

But it was also a land where there was plenty to do. Jack Curtin was an Aussie who had to do things--and to have a cause for doing them. His cause was Socialism.

Man with a Voice. He started out in staid and proper Melbourne--in the Melbourne Club, smoking in the dining room is still prohibited--but he started as a lowly printer's devil. In no time at all he was holding office in a union. Soon he was haunting Socialist Hall (smoking permitted) in Exhibition Street, watching the great orators sway their audiences, learning their tricks. Oldtimers say that his voice once had the "haunting timbre of measured strokes on a Chinese gong." Today, it is much harsher, but no less effective.

Jack worked hard at revolutionary Socialism. At times he got it mixed with atheism. He read the masters and practiced against the smoothest talkers of the day: Percy ("Not a drop of blood for war purposes") Brookfield; Adela Pankhurst, daughter of the indomitable suffragette; Bob ("Yours for the Revolution") Ross, the man who more than anyone shaped Jack Curtin's point of view. Labor became Jack's religion; he still has an almost mystic faith in the Labor Party.

Jack married Elsie Needham in Perth in 1917. She bore him two children: John, now a sergeant-pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force; and Elsie, newly married, who used to serve as a secretary for the State Railway Department. Elsie Curtin is a proper Laborite's wife. Never one for too much official society, Mrs. Curtin spends most of her time in the plain, brick house at Cottesloe on the Indian Ocean, near Perth. A homebody (it's "Dad" and "Mum" between them), she darns socks, works for the Red Cross and takes a fearsome pleasure in "dropping bricks" concerning Jack's earlier days.

Jack himself dropped one at the swearing-in of members after the general elections of 1937. Curtin held the Bible high while his old friend, Chief Justice Sir John Latham prepared to intone the oath. Dignified Sir John was startled when Curtin leaned forward to inquire softly: "Do you remember the old days, John, when we both used to give Christ hell?"

Government Man. Curtin's office in Parliament House at Canberra looks out on a quiet street, lined with poplars, evergreens and plums. Canberra is a self-conscious little community, carved out of nothing and slow to grow. Public buildings, the cathedral, the shopping centers are spaced wide apart. In between, enterprising Diggers run their sheep.

From that vantage, Jack Curtin runs Australia's Labor Government along strictly Australian lines and stoutly maintains the high-wage, high-profit economy which grew out of Aussie Socialism. Happily for Curtin and Australia, he has the energy and endurance for the job: some years ago, he gave up his heavy drinking, went on the wagon, and has been there ever since.

In the Prime Minister's office, a cool room with blue leather and a blue rug, a couple of etchings and a map, Jack Curtin affects a huge uncluttered desk. A reserved man, shunning formal gatherings, he nevertheless likes to cock one foot on the desk and talk at length. He smokes incessantly--through a bamboo holder--and drinks tea without pause. He has good relations with the press (still sports his Australian Journalists Association emblem on his watch chain) and is a master at handling irate delegations. Recently a party went up from Sydney, determined to have a showdown on a union matter. When they got back, their fellows demanded a report. Lamely, the leader replied: "We never quite got to the matter you mean. Old Jack kept talking about the war--but he was bloody impressive, he was."

Man of the World. Curtin had not been in that office long when the world moved in on him and on Australia. First it was the Japs, a bitter disillusionment with the British at Singapore, a gripping fear. Then it was the Americans--and America.

Even before the Americans arrived, Curtin had looked to the U.S. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, and three months after he became P.M., he made the first of a series of pronouncements which frightened Britons stiff: "Australia looks to America. . . . We shall exert our energies toward shaping a plan with the U.S. as its keystone."

A real factor in Curtin's feeling for the U.S. has been his friendship with Douglas MacArthur. Just before he left for London, Curtin toasted MacArthur at a formal dinner. MacArthur's rush of oratory in response left Curtin slumped in his chair, apparently too moved to move.

John Curtin has a vision of the Australia he intends to see emerge from war into the new Pacific world: industrialized, socialized, galvanized into growth to at least twice its present population. He wants to see a grown-up daughter country, bound to the mother Empire in innumerable ways, but undisputed mistress of her own abode, and free to choose her friends as she thinks best. A continuing council of Pacific nations means more to Curtin than a resurrection of the Singapore naval base.

Three months ago Curtin and his good friend Peter Fraser, Prime Minister of New Zealand, took a first step toward this dual goal of Pacific regionalism and stronger Empire ties. Their Canberra Agreement asserted ANZAC rights to be consulted on all Pacific dispositions. They must have moved too fast to suit President Roosevelt or old Cordell Hull; the reception in Washington was cold and silent. Though Whitehall kept very quiet, the scheme's reception in London was probably not much better.

Peter Fraser preceded Curtin to Washington last week. In a way, both were already known there--Fraser through his able, popular Minister Walter Nash, who has been recalled to home duty in Auckland; Curtin through his aggressive, ambitious External Affairs Minister, Dr. Herbert Evatt, who has twice visited and often spoken in the U.S.

After Washington comes London, and after London the Prime Minister will probably pass through Washington once again. When next John Curtin cocks a foot on his big bare desk in Canberra he should have a shrewd idea of how to guide Australia into its new world.

* Quickest way to make an Aussie boil was and is to tell him unjustly that his bloody island lacks culture. Without "bloody," Australians could not talk. An Aussie poem (circa 1904) made the point: The sunburnt bloody stockman stood And, in a dismal bloody mood, Apostrophised his bloody cuddy; The bloody nag's no bloody good, He couldn't earn his bloody food! A regular bloody brumby. Bloody!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.