Father of the House

By Kim Beazley

Get the inside story of one of Australia's longest serving and most influential Ministers in Federal Parliament.     Kim E Beazley threw off the shackles of a poor childhood to become a teacher, a Union Leader and the Member for Fremantle in the Federal Parliament between 1945 and 1977.     During his time in Parliament he led the reform of Australian education and played a central role in the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petition against bauxite mining on Yolngu land— a major step forward in the struggle for Indigenous land rights.     In his own words, Beazley gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the corridors of power displaying the quiet determination and drive that led to his rise to Minister for Education under Whitlam. Beazley died in October 2007 and his son, Kim Beazley Junior, provides the books introduction with special insight into the man as father and Parliamentarian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fremantle Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781921696282

Book preview

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Introduction

Before he died, my father said to me he wanted only two matters raised at his funeral—these, he believed, constituted his contribution to national life. One was his commitment to enhance the lives of Australia’s Indigenous people. The other was his determination to end the sectarian divide which disfigured the Australian education debate virtually until his appointment as education minister in Gough Whitlam’s government. Those three years in Whitlam’s government, he believed, gave his long parliamentary career significance and purpose.

He was too modest in this. In fact his political career, which extended from the final months of the Second World War to the end of the first term of the Fraser government, covered an era of massive social and political change in Australia. There was scarcely a domestic or foreign issue in that time which did not draw comment from him, nor any aspect of the turbulent history of his party in which he was not involved. These memoirs reflect that fact. They also reveal his moral and religious commitments as well as his politics and his capacity to reason every stand he took. He was proud of some of those stances and believed others a mistake. Both kinds are covered here.

At Dad’s state funeral my sister, Merrilyn Wasson, fulfilled one of the tasks he hoped would be addressed. She herself has been, along with her husband, deeply engaged in aspects of Indigenous issues; in recent times, for instance, promoting Indigenous community-based enterprises in coastal communities, in particular in the context of the impact of climate change.

As she reviewed the written record of my father’s engagement with Indigenous issues, she was struck by how contemporary his analysis was of Indigenous affairs. He was, all his life, free of a patronising approach and deeply committed to listening to the stories he was told rather than telling Aboriginal Australians what they should think.

Merrilyn cited his remarks proposing a Select Committee in response to the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petition made by the Yolngu people against the bauxite mine proceeding on their land. ‘We do not regard this as a party question ... It is not a question of the Liberal – Country Party Coalition being on trial. The moment the Bark Petition was presented to parliament, this parliament was put on trial. In fact, I think the Australian nation is on trial ... I think we need to make a certain decision in our hearts before we discuss this question. Are Aboriginal Australians members of the community of the Australian Commonwealth ... or are they a conquered people? If they are members of the Australian Commonwealth, they cannot be dispossessed of land that they occupy without consent or consultation or compensation or without alternatives being offered to them.’ This was nearly thirty years before the Mabo judgement.

Professor Peter Tannock, who as a young academic was appointed to head the new Schools Commission, spoke at the funeral on the other matter he wanted addressed. He described my father’s eventful three years as education minister, which resulted in free university, the expansion of technical education, distance learning, assistance to ‘at-risk’ students, and bilingual education for Aboriginal students. It was, however, as Prime Minister Rudd said in the parliamentary Condolence Resolution, his responsibility ‘for introducing needs-based funding for all schools, both private and public, ending the bitter sectarian debate about state aid’ that he identified as his most important contribution.

As my father said at the time, ‘The constitution doesn’t say that the Commonwealth may give benefits to the states but nothing to Catholics. What we must do is look at all Australian children as Commonwealth citizens and meet their needs.’

These seemingly disparate commitments—to Aboriginal Australians and to needs-based education—emanate really from one source in my father’s thinking. He believed every human being was entitled to their individual spiritual capacity: to have it nurtured, respected and heeded. It had nothing to do with their background or capability; everything to do with their dignity. As he said of underprivileged children, ‘We love the brilliant child and the scholar, but what about children who are physically, socially or geographically handicapped, children who go to school without the precognitive use of speech because they were without books or intelligent conversation? These are my priorities.’ He went to school barefoot himself, but his teachers cared enough to make him literate in the best writing in our language.

My father’s was, in many ways, a conventional political career and his ideology had a conventional mainstream Labor Party orientation. What was different about him was his spiritual dimension. As Minister Jenny Macklin said, quoting him, ‘If you do not accept the importance of conscience, you accept only the importance of power.’ In his obituary, Les Findlay took that idea further, to say, ‘The thoughts of God, given primacy in the life of a man, bring to the innermost motives the virtue of mercy and with it the cure for hatred that can turn the tide of history. That is the essence of intelligent statesmanship.’

Nevertheless, he did not live in a cloister. He was absorbed by the toughest political game in Australia—federal politics, in the toughest party—the Australian Labor Party, in arguably its toughest era—the Cold War and the 1954 split, and its longest political drought—twenty-three years out of office.

These memoirs represent something of a subliminal survival kit. He buried his frustrations in causes and intellectual endeavour: in foreign affairs, in Papua New Guinea; on behalf of social security recipients; in reforming the constitution; in challenging rorted political boundaries, particularly in WA state politics. He pursued academic studies too, and there was always his electorate.

He grew up in a large family in Fremantle. He loved the city’s character and its characteristics. I remember as a small boy going to the waterfront pick-up. Dad would stand around with a notebook, taking constituency cases from the waterside workers. I would throw a ball around and then discuss with him the social issues he had raised. In those days watersiders were so poorly paid that access to State Housing Commission homes was a big concern.

The Cold War infused every aspect of political life. At election time his Catholic organisers would tell him the theme of the sermons the Sunday before polling day. He used to say, ‘If it was a social justice Sunday I would win by ten thousand votes; if it was an anti-communist Sunday some votes would swing to the conservatives, and I would win by five thousand.’

This era is unimaginable to a contemporary generation. Not only unimaginable philosophically, but also in the simplicity of its political communication. His latest successor as Member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke, tells the story of her cousin growing up in Bicton in the 1950s. At election time a notice would appear on the road near Bicton Primary School in ‘large, neat block letters at least two metres long and two metres wide, printed on the road in chalk ... Vote Labor Kim Beazley.’ On that note, he was a schoolteacher when he was first elected in 1945, and his students wandered around the school with badges which said, ‘Don’t vote Kim, we want him.’

Cold War politics were harsh. During the 1940s when Dad entered parliament, whatever disagreements one had with the other side, no member would challenge another’s patriotism. His predecessor in Fremantle, John Curtin, and his opponent, Bob Menzies, held each other in mutual respect. It struck me as a boy staying at the Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra that members of different political persuasions basically got along. Yet by the time of the Whitlam government, partisan disagreement was savage, reaching a peak with Whitlam’s dismissal. I once asked my father when the ‘cross the aisle’ friendships in politics ended. My father’s view was that it was essentially a product of disagreement over the Vietnam War, percolated through the Cold War disputes of the 1950s. The willingness even to accuse others of treason changed the atmosphere.

He had less partisanship than most, as parliamentarians on both sides of politics acknowledged, but he still carried a hard-nosed Labor commitment. In 1951 he wrote the major statement of Labor ideology, the preamble to the national platform, which stood for the best part of forty years. He did not believe right always rested on one side but he believed it resided basically with those on the side of the underprivileged. He was capable of the partisan barb: ‘The Country Party exists for the socialisation of the farmers’ losses and the capitalisation of their gains.’ He was capable of it too in internal party bickering: the Victorian ALP executive possessed ‘the midas touch of failure’. He did not use his spirituality to stand aloof from the fight. Nor did he believe it gave him any rights on the pre-eminence of his conscience. What it did do for him, as these pages show, was free him from bitterness and frustration.

Missing from these pages is family. This does not reflect indifference but his generation’s view of privacy. The family for him was refuge. The Commonwealth car driver counting the number of times the dog leapt into his arms on his return from Canberra; the struggles to get the skyrockets lit on Guy Fawkes night; Rottnest holidays when boats were powered by oars; the stream of Aborigines, Colombo Plan students and naval recruits from Leeuwin Barracks through the house; the Sunday roast and the dinner table political debates; my sister running like the wind across the sand as he called her twinkle toes; my brother miles from home at six years old watching trains from the Claremont railway bridge. David, with his intimate knowledge of cranes and railways, and his faithful following of the East Perth, Eagles and Dockers football teams brought another happy dimension to Dad’s life. Those are family stories of joy and the joys were private. The family stories here tell of his very tough upbringing in Beaconsfield.

What made the home a safe haven and retreat was his wife of nearly sixty years, Betty Judge. My mother was a great athlete—holder of the Australian 880 record and president of the Australian Women’s Amateur Athletic Association. She was also one of the first Western Australians to obtain a Physical Education Diploma from Melbourne University. When they became engaged she was a young sports mistress at Perth Modern School. She was totally my father’s supporter and for us, often effectively a single parent. It was easier for him to take risks with his opinions and his career, knowing he would not be undermined by a crisis at home.

In his last week, he asked me what I thought of the British battle cruiser, the HMS Hood. I pointed out it had been sunk before I was born. He remembered it in Fremantle Harbour as he remembered more and more the city of his childhood: his grandfather, a ship’s captain promenading the North Mole in white duck, a telescope under his arm; going down the street to borrow magazines from the Mechanics’ Institute for his father; his mother calling the names of all nine children every time a train passed their unprotected South Fremantle home. These times are gone but they reflect community even as they lend veracity to that saying ‘the past is a foreign country’. They live again in these pages.

I can’t do better than the Prime Minister in summing him up: ‘He was a highly principled man, a man of great and deep intellect, a man of great and deep faith. He was a man who sought to bring his faith to bear on both the public policy debates of his time and his approach to politics itself.’ I could only add: he was a lot of fun.

The family owes one of my father’s friends, John Bond OAM, a great debt of gratitude for his part in this work. John, who has been honoured for his own commitment to the work of reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous community, worked with my father on these memoirs. He understood my father well, and loved what he knew of his commitments and foibles. John crosschecked and supplemented Dad’s powerful memory, drawing on interviews conducted by John Ferrell of the National Library, as well as his ministerial papers and letters in the National Archives, speeches from Hansard and decades of newspaper articles. This publication would not have been possible without him. My grateful thanks also to the marvellously patient Fremantle Press editor, Janet Blagg.

KIM C. BEAZLEY

Fremantle boyhood

The cataclysmic event of my childhood happened in 1919 when I was two years old, but I was a decade older before my mother spoke to me of it. Once or twice I heard her mutter that the Shamrock Hotel had been Dad’s ruin, but that was as far as she went. Never did any of her children hear her throw the disaster in his face.

The disaster was the collapse of my father’s real estate business in the West Australian town of Northam. Dad had been secretary of the Church of Christ. But the racetrack proved more appealing and, to my mother’s horror, he left the church and became secretary of the Northam Race Club. Soon he was gambling heavily and drowning his losses at the Shamrock. Financial ruin followed. At that time I was the youngest of my parents’ seven surviving children; two had died in infancy.

We moved to Fremantle and rented a small house on the ocean front. Dad was unemployed and ill. Nine of us lived in four rooms with verandahs back and front. In wild weather, waves would hurl seaweed onto our front windows. Our back yard was so tiny that, unlike our neighbours, we could not keep hens. For the first two years we had no electricity. Our meals were the cheapest available, with dumplings to stretch them further. We often had rabbit—‘poor man’s chicken’—and there was the occasional pigeon pie. Sometimes an older brother’s fishing produced results.

Because of the congestion, my sister Jessie went to live with my Aunt Edie, who was married to a Fremantle dentist. From then on Jessie was virtually their daughter.

It was a nightmare for my mother, Mary Margaret Wright. She had been born in Jersey in the Channel Islands, the daughter of a ship’s captain who moved with his family to South Australia when she was eight. They were comfortably off, and she had an adventurous streak. As a teenager, she was an enthusiast for the cycling craze of the 1890s, and cycled far and wide. As she passed, men would shout, ‘The new woman! The new woman!’—a term of abuse at the time.

They moved to Western Australia when her father was offered command of a barque, The Rose, which took West Australian sandalwood to China. I remember him in retirement, walking along Marine Terrace in South Fremantle, immaculately clad in white duck, a telescope under his arm.

Mother became a teacher. As was common then, she taught without teaching qualifications, but hoped to go to Claremont Teachers College. Then she met my father, Alfred Beazley, and decided to marry instead.

Alfred was the son of a Northam carpenter. He had been a farmhand, but then came the Kalgoorlie – Boulder gold rush. Prospectors poured through Northam on their way to the goldfields and in ten years the state’s white population rose from 50,000 to 200,000. When the rush settled down, there was plenty of demand for farms and residential properties around Northam, and my father saw his chance in real estate.

After the bankruptcy and our move to Fremantle he eventually found a job as a storeman and packer for Elders Smith, and stayed with them for the rest of his life. Sometimes they would put him on half-time, or lay him off entirely. At those times the family staple was bread and dripping—which I loved, but most of the family endured.

A portion of my father’s wages would end up in the Seaview Hotel in South Fremantle, and he would occasionally arrive home drunk and morose. I dreaded those times. Once he came in threatening to cut our throats. I was eight at the time, and so scared that for some time afterwards I would go round our home hiding the cutthroat razors.

When sober, however, he was quietly good-humoured, and would sing cheerfully as he brought me a cup of cocoa in the morning. A favourite song was:

Oh listen you Dukes and you Duchesses

Oh listen to what I’ve to say,

Take care of your Irish prisoners

Or the Yankees will steal them away.

That was a song about the daring escape of six Fenian prisoners from Fremantle jail, which took place when my father was four years old. The Fenians were Irish rebels against British rule. In 1875 Fenians in America decided to free them. They bought a whaling ship, the Catalpa, and set out for Western Australia.

Some weeks before they arrived, a distinguished looking gentleman, seemingly wealthy and calling himself Captain Collins, landed in Fremantle. Keen to attract a potential settler, the authorities treated him cordially. They took him to the jail and showed him prisoners whom they could assign to work for him. No one noticed his clandestine conversations.

Only when six of the Fenian prisoners disappeared, and were seen putting out to sea in a longboat with ‘Captain Collins’, did the authorities realise they had been tricked. By the time they managed to send an armed steamer to intercept the Catalpa, it was outside territorial waters, proudly flying the Stars and Stripes. Captain Collins, they learned later, was John J. Breslin, an Irish Fenian who had helped many of his compatriots escape from British prisons.

Most Fremantle citizens regarded the Irish as political prisoners, unjustly transported to Australia. As the Fremantle Herald wrote, ‘The general feeling was clearly one of pleasure’ that the police had failed to recapture the convicts.

My father accepted his role as breadwinner. But apart from bringing home a portion of his pay packet, he abdicated all responsibility to my mother—a typical working-class attitude. Mother held our family together.

There was, in that community, a solidarity of poverty. Families struggled to make enough to keep food on the table and the rent paid. A barrow brought fruit and vegetables to the street. A ‘bottle-oh’—so called from his cry—purchased empty bottles. Rabbit would be sold at the door by the ‘rabbit-oh’. An Aborigine known as Jimmy Four Eyes sharpened knives and scissors with a pedal operated grinder. Milk was delivered at night by horse and cart. (Image 1)

Image 1: The house in Fremantle where Kim spent his childhood.

Much of the transport was horse-drawn. Fine Clydesdale horses rattled past our home early each morning pulling drays; they belonged to breweries and wool firms like Elder Smiths or Goldsborough Mort. On Labour Day processions the horses were beribboned and the drays converted into floats. Trade unionists would follow them, carrying their large silken banners, emblematic of working class unity or the skills of their trade, and often highly artistic.

Our entertainment was the weekly cinema and until my early teens the films were silent. They were sometimes accompanied by a piano player, who would stop playing at dramatic moments. In one such moment in a First World War spy film, the execution of the brave Allied women spies was signified by a rifle shot, then a splash of blood on the wall behind each blindfolded woman. In the tense silence my sister, aged five, brought merriment to the audience by saying matter-of-factly, ‘That lady made a bigger splash than the last one.’

The government provided little safety net for families in poverty. But there was a net, of a kind. The engine drivers got to know people in need and, as they drove past their homes, would push coal from the tenders. We were among the grateful recipients. William Watson, who started the Watsonia dairy products business, would arrange for food hampers to be left quietly at the doors of Fremantle’s needy. When he stood for Fremantle as an Independent in the 1931 federal election, he defeated John Curtin.

The Friendly Societies were an important source of help. A number of Fremantle men had formed one which, self-deprecatingly, they called the Ugly Men’s Association. They ran a fun fair called Ugly Land opposite Fremantle Railway Station, and raised large sums of money for widows and needy families.

The Fremantle of my early childhood had glaringly white limestone roads. Later these were covered with tar. In hot weather the tar produced bubbles, which when broken produced a satisfying ‘pop’. Still later, the roads were macadamised.

Trams were the city’s main public transport, and the tram drivers and conductors quickly became local identities. One driver, ‘Curly’ Molyneux, was famous for his charitable work at Fremantle Hospital. The City Council controlled the Fremantle Municipal Tramways, and in the council rooms was a photograph of the mayor, Lionel Samson, starting the first tram. Some years later another photograph was added, of Samson’s son Fred, also mayor, driving the last tram. (Image 2)

Image 2: Kim E. Beazley aged five or six, Fremantle, in the only remaining childhood photo.

Gas for households was produced by a local company and held in a large spherical tank on which the continents of the world were painted. Households paid for gas by putting money in a meter. My Aunt Edie had a shilling-in-the-slot meter. Ours was a penny-in-the-slot, and I was forever changing threepences, sixpences and shillings into pennies at nearby shops.

At first I attended South Terrace Primary School. However, I lived outside that school’s catchment area, and in third grade I had to move to Beaconsfield Primary, which catered for some of the poorest areas of the city.

Our teachers were not highly educated, but many were excellent classroom technicians who treated literacy as a battle to be waged throughout primary school. We used the Temple Literary Readers and the Oxford Readers. A pupil would read aloud, with the rest of us following the text in our books. The teacher might suddenly say, ‘Go on, Beazley.’ Fighting down nervousness, I would stand up and read. I was in trouble if I had not ‘followed the place’. Our sixth-grade teacher, Clem Jones, was outstanding, inspiring us to seek quality in our writing and encouraging our attempts at poetry.

My parents loved reading. By the time I was ten I would go to the Fremantle Literary Institute to borrow the Saturday Evening Post and the Delineator for Mother, and the Strand Magazine and Wide World Magazine for Dad. I would read these magazines too, with their stories of diplomacy, of espionage, and of detectives, by writers such as Conan Doyle and E. Phillips Oppenheim.

But my delight was The Magnet, with its stories of Billy Bunter at Greyfriars School. Access to the magical world of Greyfriars compensated for a sometimes drab existence. The stories were told in a surprisingly high standard of English, and I often used phrases from them in my essays. Later I graduated to the Boy’s Own Paper, with its adventures set in British India, Canada, Africa—the Empire.

It was a Tory world and an Imperial world. In school our religion was Britain. One teacher, a dynamic little Scot, gave us dramatised lessons on Wellington’s victory at Waterloo and Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, and would come back to a kind of refrain: ‘Britain is only little, but she’s powerful, she’s powerful!’

We learned to recite:

Be it written that all I wrought

Was for Britain in deed and thought.

Be it written that when I die,

‘Glory to Britain’ was my last cry.

In 1927 the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) visited Western Australia. Perth’s buildings were illuminated with crowns, slogans of loyalty and royal portraits. We lined the streets to cheer the procession. Those like me, whose families could not afford shoes, were placed in the back line. Our teacher had explained that it would never do to let our royal visitors see us barefoot. ‘In England barefootedness would mean that you were poor,’ she informed us. ‘If the Duke and Duchess see that, it will make them sad.’ So bare feet were firmly out of sight, and presumably their Royal Highnesses were not saddened.

We played cricket on Marine Parade, with kerosene tins as stumps that resounded loudly when a batsman was bowled. We carved boats out of rulers and sailed them in puddles on the road. We played tops and marbles. We swam in the sea. We stayed clear of the bullies, particularly the street gangs in South Fremantle whose rivalry sometimes turned violent, though never lethal.

Gradually we became aware of the tensions in the wider community. In 1928 there was a series of industrial clashes, and the Seaman’s Union fought the police in Fremantle. One day a girl arrived at school white-faced and dazed with shock. Her father, a policeman, had been injured when the seamen hurled railway bolts.

At that time Australia was governed by the Bruce – Page Ministry, which was hated by many waterside workers—then known as ‘lumpers’. In my class, a teacher asked the son of a lumper to name the prime minister. He replied ‘Bruce’, and none of the teacher’s threats would induce him to say ‘Mr Bruce’. When called forward for the cane, he fled through the door. We admired his defiance.

Although my father had left the Church of Christ, my mother remained