[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Chrissy Mack from Radio Northern Beaches and you've just tuned in to the Listen and Chat with Chrissy Mack podcast. This is the space where we pull no punches, sometimes a little controversial, sometimes downright outrageous and sometimes just packed full of information that is interesting to know. So you and your friends don't miss any episodes, don't forget to follow and share. Now here's our latest podcast.
[00:00:26] Welcome to Radio Northern Beaches, I'm Michael Lester and my guest today listeners is the eminent Australian political academic and author Professor Judith Brett, the Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. I'm delighted that she's been able to join us to talk about her much awarded and celebrated biography of the Father of Federation and of our Constitution, Alfred Deakin.
[00:00:51] And her book is The Enigmatic Mr Deakin. So welcome to Radio Northern Beaches, Judith. Why the enigmatic Mr Deakin? Oh, look, I think because Deakin is a very complicated man and he himself often referred to, you know, would refer to himself as enigmatic sometimes.
[00:01:11] So I took that title from something he wrote when he was, he was Prime Minister, but he was writing anonymously a letter for the conservative London daily newspaper called The Morning Post. And it was at around the time when his party, the Liberal Party was thinking about joining with the conservatives to form a new party. There was a huge amount of speculation going on. And he wrote in his letter, Mr Deakin pursues his enigmatic methods as usual.
[00:01:39] Nobody knows what he's planning to do. So in a way, that's what gave me the title. I mean, it was an extraordinary thing. He's the Prime Minister. It's actually, he's the party leader. Everybody's hanging out to find out what he's doing. And yet he's writing anonymously. It's for the English press. So that's where it came from. But it also fitted because he is a complicated man. He was, in fact, the second Prime Minister of Australia, wasn't he? And he was Prime Minister three times in the decade.
[00:02:07] I think Robert Menzies has always referred to him in retrospect as the greatest Australian Prime Minister, as well as being the leader of the movement of federation or architect of constitution, which is just an amazing set of achievements in the founding of a nation. If you say of your book, I think that it's not a life and it's not a life and times. It seems to be that your biographical perspective is very much to try to uncover, as it were,
[00:02:33] or present the inner life of this man who was a very public figure but also very private. What is the idea of approaching such an important figure in Australian history through his personal psychology, if you like, or philosophy rather than through the turn of events themselves? Well, it was, I guess, to try to reveal the sort of deeper motivations that drove him. What I tried to do in the book was to essentially deal with the public life,
[00:03:02] because it's only because of that that we're interested in him, to deal with his domestic and family life and relationships, and to deal with his very rich inner spiritual life, and to interweave these through the narrative. And I guess when I said that about it not being a life and times, I suppose what I meant, I mean, I wish I hadn't said it now, actually, because I think it's a bit misleading. I think what I was trying to highlight was that I didn't want to write a biography like
[00:03:33] John Linose had written, which really very much focused on just the public life set in the context of the political debates of the time. I wanted to go a bit deeper. Does this perhaps suggest sort of conflicting inner selves, different selves that, on the one hand, I think in your book you tell us that he kind of saw life and politics as a bit of a drama with various actors and himself an actor on the stage, and this invokes ideas of masks,
[00:04:02] and the figure you see publicly is not the figure inwardly. Is there this sort of tension and, in a sense, some sort of conflict within his own personality that somehow is a source of his will to succeed and achieve politically? Well, look, I think it certainly is. He does have a sense of an inner self and a public self, as you said, and he uses the metaphor of the stage a lot. And I think talking about that point where we started, those letters he wrote,
[00:04:30] I think one of the reasons he did that was he liked detached viewpoint of being able to stand back from what he's doing and look at it. I don't think there was so much an inner conflict, but sometimes he felt that he wearied of politics. He felt that politics wasn't spiritually and intellectually nourishing for him and that perhaps he should have pursued a literary life. I mean, when he was a young man,
[00:04:56] he toyed with the idea of becoming a poet or an essayist of some sort. But, you know, he was pretty addicted to politics as well. You know, it's just that it wasn't all he was addicted to, if you like. He's addicted to reading and he's addicted to politics because he's a great, Deacon is a great orator. And one of the ideas I had about that when I would read what he said about his oratory, oratory is not something we really experience anymore.
[00:05:22] They were extemporary performances with a live audience and he would be very much, he'd have notes, but it wouldn't be a written speech and he would be in the moment. You know, he would be like a great actor in a way. So there was something theatrical about it, but I think he got a real adrenaline rush out of this. You know, this was a point where he wasn't detached from his action. He was very much there. He was, in many ways, a political wunderkind, I think, wasn't he? He seemed to fall into politics despite this great interest in literature
[00:05:51] and in a life. He was quite intellectual in that sense, I guess you could say, in his youth. I think he was elected to the Victorian legislature in his early 20s and was there for about 10 years, including ministerial positions, wasn't he? Yes, that's right. He first wins a parliamentary seat in 1879 when I think he's 22 and he wasn't expected to win the seat. It was a by-election. He does win and the reason he wins is because what's revealed
[00:06:20] is this great gift for oratory that he's got. He can work a room. He can whip up enthusiasm. He can win the votes. And he's also a hard worker and he's bright and he's enormously energetic. He's in Victorian politics really for 20 years before he goes into federal politics, but in the 1890s, he's not in the government. He enters the government very early. You know, he's only been in Parliament a couple of years.
[00:06:46] And he's very young because most of the men in the 1880s who were in the Victorian Parliament are the gold rush generation. You know, they came as young men in the 1850s and they're now into their much more mature years. So he was quite successful early on. And, of course, Victoria was so prosperous with the gold rush. And he shared in some of that prosperity, I believe, with his family. They had certainly a good, very solid middle class life for him and his family.
[00:07:15] But then, of course, the hard years came of drought and depression, didn't they? And there were great property collapses. And I believe he lost all his money. And it must have been a bit of a setback. Well, he doesn't actually lose all of his money quite. I mean, look, they were never that. His father was sort of solid lower middle class, really. He was a bookkeeper. Deacon and his sister, he only had one sister, was very well educated.
[00:07:40] And the reason, I think, was that the family were literate and, I guess, aspirational for their children. But they had a very small family by colonial standards. Remember, often there was 10, you know, or a dozen children. So it was possible they could spend their money on educating their children, which they did. But yes, he does lose a bit of money, you know, in the Depression.
[00:08:04] But I think more significantly, he was on the board of some of the building societies that went bust. And so he lost other – he was implicated in losing other people's money. And this weighed on him heavily. I mean, he'd encouraged his father to invest. He'd encouraged other people to invest. And he'd encouraged, you know, mums and dads investors to put their trust in institutions that he was on the board of. And I think that weighed pretty heavily on him.
[00:08:28] So this was a bit of a setback to what must have been a pretty successful and fairly comfortable sort of life as a politician and barrister that he trained as. The 1890s, that period, were particularly turbulent in Australian history. It was the growth of Australian nationalism, feelings of independence. We had the Bulletin. We had Banjo-Patterson. The whole rhetoric. There was a lot of ferment in the air, wasn't there? Strikes, the formation of unions.
[00:08:55] How is all this impacting, if at all, on this young, successful politician? Well, I think the 1880s, as you said, Deakin sort of starts as a young member of parliament. And he has this rapid ascent. And in a way, his success and the colony's success and prosperity seem to sort of build together. When everything starts to really go pretty belly up in the early 1890s, Deakin thinks to himself, is politics really, for me, I mean, he goes back to the law.
[00:09:23] At that stage, many parliamentarians had other jobs. It was quite legal. Parliament didn't start sitting until four o'clock in the afternoon. So they could be in court. A lot of them were lawyers and were maintaining a practice. So Deakin goes back to a law practice because he's lost his ministerial salary. And he thinks, should I leave politics? You know, he's pretty depressed. He can't see the way forward.
[00:09:47] And what holds him there is the prospect of federation, which, as you say, is starting to gain momentum in that decade, you know, finishing like in 1901 when the Commonwealth is inaugurated. And so he throws his energies into that. You described this, I believe, I recall, perhaps his act, an act of redemption.
[00:10:06] Now, this invoked ideas of inner spirituality driving him, perhaps out and picking him up out of this relative state of quiescence that he was in at the time and setbacks. So in what sense did he see, do you think, the federation project that he took so much to himself and on which he was such a leader? How did he see that in spiritual terms? OK, well, Deakin has he's a deeply religious or spiritual person.
[00:10:36] And quite notoriously, you know, he was involved in spiritualism when he's in his in his late youth, sort of as a teenager before he goes into politics. And he has a sense of destiny. He's an extremely gifted young man. And he does have this sense of destiny. And he has a sense of progress. The spirit is working through history in a progressive way.
[00:10:58] Now, when the colony of Victoria, in a sense, collapses, both financially but also morally, because what's revealed is that behind this financial collapse was a lot of politicians and leading businessmen had actually behaved. They'd been fraudulent. You know, they'd behaved dishonestly. They'd been fraud. So there's a sense of moral collapse as well.
[00:11:22] So he's really he can't see where the spirit is going forward, you know, historically. And it's federation when once federation comes onto the horizon and after the Coral Conference in 1893, there's a sort of a real plan. He sees that as being part of the forward movement of history and that he will dedicate himself to this as having as a sort of a cause.
[00:11:48] But politically, I mean, he's a sort of quite a pragmatic politician in many ways, but as something which is a cause, I guess. And for him has a sense of spiritual conviction that this is him aiding destiny in the forward movement of history. And somehow it must feel his own sense of fulfilment to be on this mission on behalf of someone on a greater cause than presumably day politics.
[00:12:13] So if we move into the federation activities and movement over those 10 years or so before 1901 when the legislation was passed, there was a lot of activity and campaigning. And as you say, he was a great orator and he travelled around and there were referendums. And he campaigned in all of that constitutional conventions to draft the constitution in which he was quite important. He had an early brush, did he not, with this over in London? Wasn't there some sort of intercolonial conference?
[00:12:42] And weren't there some issues there that bore ultimately on the position on federation vis-a-vis the imperial government of the day, the Britons? If you're thinking about his sort of motivation, and you're referring there to the Imperial Conference 1887. Now, at that point, a lot, sorry, one of the, particularly in Victoria, one of the sort of driving motivations behind the federation movement
[00:13:07] was the sense that if the colonies of Australia were federated, they would be able to present a united front to the imperial masters, the imperial centre, to the British government and to the British Crown to defend Australia's interests or to advance Australia's interests. And at that point, during the 1880s, particularly in Victoria, there was a real push, a desire to be able to annex islands in the Pacific.
[00:13:34] Papua New Guinea, the New Hebrides in particular. In the early 1880s, Germany and France were circling around there. It's the time when there's a sort of, the European empires are carving up the globe amongst themselves. And Australia wanted Britain to annex the New Hebrides. And they wanted it to annex the eastern half of New Guinea, the Dutch having the other half. And Britain basically didn't want to. Britain felt it had enough colonies to deal with.
[00:14:02] And Deakin and other Victorians felt that somehow if all of the colonies were joined together in a federated government, that they would have more clout. They were even encouraged in that, I suppose, I believe, by some of the senior British officials and ministers who basically too told them that unless they could become united, they couldn't even really speak with much of a voice in London. But the Queensland people were pretty upset about all this too. And didn't they annex New Guinea themselves? And wasn't that then struck down?
[00:14:31] Yes, that's right. I mean, they were very impatient and they did an annexation, but the British government wouldn't support it. And it was only after the German government annexed the top half of New Guinea that the British government moved and established a protectorate in the area that we know as Papua. Essentially, the British government was not interested. And it was almost, I felt like a stalling device. They said, well, come back when you're federated and then maybe we'll talk about it.
[00:15:00] So that's pushing it. But so that's a sort of a, I guess, a sort of foreign policy type motivation. But there's also, I think, Deacon is also driven by a very idealized notion of the nation. He sees and talks often about people being in the colonies. If you like, look, they're little communities. They're parochial. And if they join together, that it being in a bigger political unity would necessarily have a higher purpose.
[00:15:30] Sort of Hegelian. It is, isn't it? Because isn't the epigram of your book something to the effect that the reality is what the eye sees, but the ideal is what the soul sees? Yes, and there is an ideal there of a nation, something which unifies disparate groups of people. And in this case, it's the different colonies. Talking with Professor Judith Brett about her wonderful political biography of Alfred Deakin, the enigmatic Mr. Deacon,
[00:15:57] one of the founding fathers of the Australian Constitution and of Federation. All the negotiations over many conferences and things over that 10-year period, almost leading up to the drafting of the bill and then the passing in Parliament, there were many issues on the table, of course, between the states that need to be resolved. And Deacon was very much involved in them. But looking back on it, it seems like the package of deals and compromises that they came to has been labelled, I think, more recently as the Australian settlement or the Deakinite settlement.
[00:16:26] And it had a number of elements, didn't it, in it, that really stuck with Australia for a long time, even into perhaps the 60s and 70s. So I wonder if we might spend a moment on the nature of that settlement and the issues and how Deacon was approaching these issues. OK. Well, look, I guess the first of them was the trade-off around trade.
[00:16:48] The Victorians, since the gold rush, had been supporters of protection in order to build infant industries, to build manufacturing, which would employ the gold miners. You know, the surge of population which came with the gold rushes. And the New South Wales people were free traders. So that had to be resolved. And it was resolved in favour of protection. So I guess that's the first. And Deacon was always a strong protectionist.
[00:17:17] And the Deacon liberals supported protection. Secondly, there was the immigration restriction. They were building an Australia, a white Australia. Now, that had two aspects. One was in terms of migration, that migration of people, particularly from Asia, would be forbidden, you know, would be stopped. And there was a workforce of Pacific Island labourers in Queensland.
[00:17:44] And Queensland had wanted, was against the white Australia policy, not for particularly high-minded reasons of being, you know, against racism, as we now understand it, but because it wanted access to Pacific Island labourers to work on the sugar cane plantations. And so this was seen by other Australians as being, like introducing slavery into Australia. And so it was fiercely opposed on those grounds.
[00:18:10] And then the other face of white Australia was how to deal with the Indigenous population that was here. These are sort of, they're sort of connected and they're sort of different. I mean, Deacon and his, I guess, his liberal colleagues like Edmund Barton and Richard O'Connor were fiercely, were completely supportive of the white Australia policy in terms of immigration restriction.
[00:18:32] But they weren't as hard-lined as people, as some of the parliamentarians from Western Australia and Queensland in terms of Indigenous people. You know, for example, they wanted Indigenous Australians to be able to have the vote. It's just they couldn't get it through Parliament. So in that sense, the idea of a nation inherent as that one component of the Australian settlement has a very particular view, doesn't it, of what constitutes a nation, how the nation is imagined and by whom.
[00:19:01] But the thing is that that's what everybody thought a nation was at that point. A nation, in a sense, a nation state, the ideal of the nation state was that people who shared a history, an ethnicity, a race, a religion, who saw themselves as the same sort of people should be governed by themselves. You know, they should be self-governing.
[00:19:27] So it comes out of the breakup of the old dynastic empires where the Habsburgs could be governing people who didn't speak the German language. You know, you had these multi-ethnic empires. Now, we now have a sort of slightly different view of the importance of ethnicity and race in the make – or very different, really, in terms of the make-up of political communities.
[00:19:51] But that was the ideal, that a political community bound together by shared history and language and race, ethnicity should be self-governing. So, of course, that component of the Econite Australian settlement stayed with Australia for a very long time, didn't it? It stayed right through to whenever, the 60s or the 70s in any number of respects and beyond.
[00:20:16] So that was clearly a very important component of what was negotiated into the constitutional framework. Well, it's not in the Constitution. Right. It's quite important. There's nothing about this in the Constitution, really. It's to do with the early Acts of Parliament once the Constitution sits. So the Immigration Restriction Act, the Franchise Act, the Pacific Island Laborers Acts. These are what make the white Australia real.
[00:20:45] It's not actually in the Constitution. Now, one of the other intriguing elements of the settlement relates to the attitude of the country, the nation, being a part of the British Empire. Because Deacon himself was an Australian-born native son. He was a member, wasn't he, of the Australian – very active Australian Natives Association. I think he called himself an Australian Briton. But within the Constitution and the fact that we had a commonwealth rather than a republic, if you like – No, we had an empire. Yes. We were in an empire at that point.
[00:21:14] So that was part of the settlement process in getting the Constitution and the federation together, was it? Well, the act that made Australia a federation had to be an act of the British Parliament. So at that stage, we are part of the empire. And, look, right, in the 1890s, there was a small republican movement. But it essentially was – and people like Henry Lawson would be an example of that.
[00:21:41] But it essentially sort of ran out of puff by the end of the century, partly because of the Boer War, which was an imperial war. And some Australians went to fight there. There was a sense that if Australia – like Australia was – the distances were pretty great then. For Australia to have been independent, to not have had its own – didn't have the capacity really to defend itself at that point. It didn't have a navy.
[00:22:08] It was very dependent on the British Navy to protect the shipping lines because it was – we were a trading nation. We depended on the seas being open so we could get our boats full of wool to England to sell. It was pretty widely accepted that Australia was part of the British Empire and that this was a good thing, that this made Australia stronger rather than weaker because we were part of something bigger.
[00:22:35] Another dimension that's interesting, part of the settlement and Deakin's contribution and philosophy is there were things like the conciliation and arbitration processes and a very proactive role for the state in improving the lives of people on a day-to-day basis, which seemed to form part of Deakin's – I suppose you could call it liberal democratic philosophy, couldn't you? Yes. Now, Deakin would have seen himself not as a conservative. He was a humanitarian, really.
[00:23:04] He believed – and here his religion is, I guess, relevant – he believed that everybody should have the opportunity to flourish, to develop their God-given gifts, to be the person that, if you like, potentially God had given them the capacity to be. And he was very aware of the way poverty and lack of education cramped people and made them lead miserable and warped lives.
[00:23:32] So, in that sense, I guess he was a social liberal and he saw the state or the government as having the capacity to make for a more equal society in which more people would be able to flourish. And so, in that sense, he's sympathetic, but he's a middle-class man. And one of the things that happens in the first century – first decade of the 20th century is the Labor Party becomes a much stronger party.
[00:24:01] The political system, you know, or the first election, there's three parties. There's Deakin's Liberals, there's the Conservatives based in New South Wales, and there's this new kid on the block, the Labor Party. Now, previously, working-class people had voted for Deakinite Liberals, but once working-class men started standing, many working-class people started voting for them.
[00:24:25] And so, Deakin and his Deakinite Liberals were like sort of friends of the working class, but they weren't of the working class. Deakin didn't have a visceral sense of the grievances and humiliation of working-class life in the way somebody like Billy Hughes did. Keep focus on the Australian settlement. In that first decade – so, Deakin supports trade unions.
[00:24:46] He supports a system of conciliation and arbitration whereby there's a system of courts get established in order to resolve conflicts between workers and employers. And, yes, so – and that, again, that's, again, not in the Constitution. It's something that happens both at the state level and the federal level, but particularly, remember, at the state level because that's where a lot of industrial law was being made. But yet Deakin supports that.
[00:25:15] Well, thank you very much, Judith Breath, for sharing with us your such interesting perspectives on such a wide range of issues in such a short space of time. Thank you very much for joining us here on Radio Northern Beaches and with your wonderful book, The Enigmatic, Mr Deakin. Thank you very much. Don't forget to follow, like and share. Stay safe and I'll catch you next time. Don't forget to follow, like and share. Stay safe and I'll catch you next time.