Adam Carr

Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne 
Events leading to the formation of the 
Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 
1914-37

7. Perspectives and conclusions

The ACCL was product of a particular place and time: Melbourne in 
the later 1930s. Australia at this time was emerging from nearly 20 
years of disillusionment and isolationism, and starting to face up 
to the realities of the world. Melbourne intellectuals saw 
themselves, to some extent rightly, as the natural leaders of this 
process. Australia in the 1920s and early '30s had been a country in 
adolescence: too big to be at home with mother, but not quite ready 
to face the world alone. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 had in 
theory made Australia a sovereign state, but Australian governments, 
which had not sought this rather alarming freedom, chose not to 
notice - the statute was not ratified by the Australian Parliament 
until 1942. The bitter experience of World War I had produced a 
national state of mind characterised by isolationism, pacifism and a 
studied indifference to the rest of the world.

Domestically, the postwar years saw the disillusionment of the 
returned soldiers, economic difficulties and the rise of militant 
unionism and a socialist movement full of revolutionary rhetoric. 
This in turn led to a middle-class backlash that sustained very 
conservative governments in office at the Commonwealth from 1917 to 
1941, with the one brief interlude of the Scullin government in 
1929-32. The result was a period of retreat from the prewar 
Australian ideals of progress, democracy and liberalism, a period of 
class polarisation and bitter industrial conflict, a period of 
unproductive introspection and self-doubt. The conservatives fell 
back on an increasingly hollow rhetoric of Empire loyalism, while 
the ALP wallowed in pacifism, anti-intellectualism and the chimaera 
of the Socialist Objective. Illiberal and repressive legislation was 
passed with little analysis and little opposition, although its bark 
was usually worse than its bite, and governments' worst excesses 
were curbed by the courts. 

Australian intellectuals provided little leadership in this period. 
The universities did not encourage their staff or students to engage 
themselves in public affairs, and there was no press forum for 
liberal opposition to the behaviour of government or the trends of 
society. All these trends were also visible in the other English-
speaking democracies in the interwar years, but in Australia they 
were made worse by the country's isolation from world affairs and by 
the weakness, timidity and dependency on British leadership of its 
intellectual class. It was not until the chain of events which led 
to World War II began that this situation changed. From the time 
Hitler came to power at the beginning of 1933, Australians who 
followed world affairs became increasingly restive. "The government 
was unable to stifle revulsion against the methods of right-wing 
dictatorships and their military aggression,"[108] and the leftward 
trend of Australian intellectual life gained pace after the CPA's 
change of strategy in 1935. But the left remained caught between its 
desire to fight fascism in the abstract and its refusal to 
contemplate the prospect of Australians ever again fighting anyone 
in practice, a conflict which was shown at the time of the debate 
about sanctions against Italy in 1935.

In the atmosphere it was inevitable that the repressive domestic 
policies of Australian governments since 1918 should be increasingly 
challenged. All through the 1920s and early '30, middle-class 
opinion, including the great majority of opinion leaders in the 
universities and the press, had supported these policies as 
regrettable necessities in the face of the threat of the IWW, the 
Bolshevists, the CPA and/or Jack Lang: "the middle class were more 
afraid of Lang than Hitler," Dorothy Fitzpatrick recalls. But after 
1933, this began to change. Some people began to be more afraid of 
Hitler than Lang, and to suspect that the political clauses of the 
Crimes Act and the misuse of the Immigration Act in the Kisch case 
were no longer serving to protect Australia's way of life against 
any real threat. Hence the forging of an alliance between the newly 
emboldened progressive intellectuals and the labour movement, still 
suspicious of socialists from Kew but now willing to take help from 
where it could be obtained. A figure like Brian Fitzpatrick, with a 
Labor background but with no affiliations in the labour movement, 
with university connections but no formal place in the intellectual 
establishment, friendly with communists and ALP members without 
being committed to either, was a natural intermediary to bring this 
alliance into existence. The ACCL was a concrete manifestation of 
this new alliance, which was to bear fruit under the leadership of 
John Curtin and H V Evatt in the national crisis of the 1940s.

Footnotes

[108] Macintyre, 310