Curtin John - John Curtin: a life

In the midst of the scattered suburbs of the Australian bush capital of Canberra, the soft light of the winters morning revealed the blacked-out windows of the modest Prime Ministers Lodge, which stood on a rise above the temporary Parliament House. The lights were already burning as family and staff came to terms with the death during the night of its weary occupant, John Curtin. On 5 July 1945, as a storm swept across the surrounding sheep paddocks, the socialist revolutionary and passionate antiwar activist turned Labor Party reformist and inspirational war leader passed away. Now, with the slow coming of the dawn, the nation would share in the grief, and in some cases relief, that Curtins long illness was finally over.

Far off Australias northern shores, the long drawn-out Pacific War was approaching its culmination which would soon unleash a catastrophic force upon the cities of Japan. But Curtin would not live to see the sudden end of the conflict. Neither would he witness the postwar years of national reconstruction, based on his wartime policies, when national development would be joined with principles of social justice to produce a more prosperous and fairer society. His poignant death on the eve of victory, after exhausting himself in defence of the nation, would ensure him an almost saintly place in the nations political pantheon. Yet the story of his life and of his struggles remains little known. In many ways, Curtins story is Australias story. It is a story of struggle against adversity and the overcoming of weaknesses in pursuit of ultimate greatness. And it is a story that had begun just over sixty years before in the small Victorian gold-mining town of Creswick.

The road to Creswick rises almost imperceptibly from the coastal plain that extends westward from Melbourne before traversing a line of gently folding hills and ending amid the eroded remnants of long-dead volcanoes. Together, these undulations in the landscape provide a tail to the Great Dividing Range that stretches for thousands of miles along the east coast of Australia, separating the fertile coastal plain from the broad expanses of the drought-prone interior. Around Creswick, as in much of Australia, centuries of Aboriginal fire-stick farming had produced sparsely treed grasslands that suited Aboriginal purposes and which also, in the 1830s, attracted British squatters to the area with their immense flocks of sheep. The squatters followed the footsteps of explorer Major Thomas Mitchell, who on climbing one of the forested hills to the west of what would soon be Creswick enjoyed such a charming view eastward from the summit as can but seldom fall to the lot of explorers of new countries. But it was the discovery of gold thereabouts, beginning in 1851, that drew multitudes from across the world, like ants to a picnic, to search for their material salvation in the Australian bush.

Some of the richest gold finds in the early rushes were found in the creek beds of the ranges northern slopes around Creswick and nearby at Ballarat. When news reached Europe and America of the fortunes to be made in Australia, fast clipper ships began bringing hopeful gold diggers from afar, disgorging them onto the wharves of Melbourne and Geelong from where they made their laborious way to the distant hills. Thousands tried their luck around Creswick, with some thirty thousand gathered in the gullies thereabouts by January 1855.

While the failed rebellion at Eureka changed the political landscape of the colonies for the better, the frenzied digging of the miners changed the physical landscape for the worse, pock-marking the face of the country and leaving dangerous mine shafts in the shadows of the trees as silent graves waiting for the unwary. Once the shafts had given up their gold, or news of richer finds came from further afield, many of the miners packed up their tents and deserted the Creswick diggings, leaving only a thousand there by the end of 1855. The circus seemed to have moved on for good. However, the foundations for a more permanent settlement were laid with the discovery at Creswick in 1872 of gold deposits more than eighty feet below the surface. A new rush developed as mining companies were formed to exploit the deeper lodes that individuals could not hope to reach without expensive machinery. The shrunken town of Creswick soon began to grow with the new-found wealth, with more substantial houses joining the timber cottages of the miners along broad, surveyed streets named after the battles and British heroes of the Crimean War. Grand public buildings of brick and stone were built on the golden foundations while the railway line reached out from Ballarat in 1874 to link Creswick to Melbourne. It was along this line in September 1880 that police constable John Curtin, father of the future prime minister, travelled to take up his new appointment in Creswick.

Like Creswick, Curtins father had his own past that shaped the contours of his character. An Irish Catholic from County Cork, he came from a family with strong Fenian convictions. But like many of his fellow countrymen, he sought to build a better life in the Australian colonies. In October 1873, at the age of 19, Curtin had sailed from London on board the Earl Dalhousie with his two older brothers, Dennis and Michael, to the convict-free colony of South Australia. They were among nearly four hundred assisted immigrants, more than a hundred of them single men, who crammed aboard the vessel in London and Plymouth for a voyage to a new world and a new life. While his two brothers found employment in Adelaide with the police, young John, for reasons that are not clear, left for Victoria. It may have been due to a shortage of positions within the South Australian police.

Gold-rich Victoria may have seemed to offer more opportunities to a young and restless Irishman. Even so, as an Irish Catholic with Fenian leanings, Curtin was restricted in the employment that was available to him in a British colony where sectarianism was rife. Paradoxically, it was the service of the British Crown, rather than a life on the land, that particularly attracted Irish Catholic immigrants at this time. The staunch Presbyterian and virulent anti-papist John Dunmore Lang complained in 1867 that many of the Irish immigrants sought employment in the police, or as warders, or turnkeys of gaols, and other subordinate or menial occupations, instead of going to cultivate the waste lands of the territory. It was later said that the ambition of Irish Australian parents was for their boys to become either priest, publican or policeman.

Perhaps it was the legacy of the Irish famine reminding the Irish that salvation did not necessarily reside in the soil. If it was economic security they were after, the prospect of a comfortable berth in the service of the colonial governments held out more promise than a life on the land with all the uncertainties that entailed in an unfamiliar environment. The Irish preference for the public service was not because it was free of sectarianism, though in theory it was meant to be, but because certain sections of the public service were effectively captured by Catholics who made it their business to appoint their own brethren. The police force was one such section, with a massive 81.7 per cent of the Victorian police in 1874 being Irish-born at a time when only 12 per cent of the Victorian male population was Irish-born.

Curtins first few years with the police were spent on the beat operating from the headquarters in Russell Street and later at West Melbourne. It was probably during this time that he first met a fellow constable from County Cork, John Bourke, who had been stationed at the northern Victorian town of Charlton, but who spent part of 1879 at the Police Depot in Melbourne. Bourkes sister, Kate, who would marry Curtin four years later, may well have made his acquaintance at this time. But first Curtin had to endure the ignominy and shame of personal disgrace. It occurred in Sandridge (now Port Melbourne), the landing place of many an early migrant, where Curtin had been transferred in May 1880. Within a month of his transfer, he made an apparently impulsive advance to a woman that would result in him being sent into self-imposed exile in Creswick.