From the Archive

Robert Menzies is on our minds yet again. In this issue, David Horner reviews a collection of essays from the new Menzies Institute at Melbourne University. And it seems whenever the Liberal Party loses an election or endures a leadership tussle, the word ‘Menzies’ becomes both a touchstone and a sword. In her June 1988 review of R.G. Menzies: A portrait, by John Bunting, historian Judith Brett searches for the true Menzies – wit and ambition, shyness and ease, inner and outer. Brett would go on to write Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia (2005), articulating the enduring appeal of ‘Menziesism’.

John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long postwar reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement in 1966 and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience, he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

Bunting knew the mature Menzies, after the sharper edges of his personality had been blunted by the humiliation of his first period as prime minister (1939–41) when he lost the confidence of his party and resigned, virtually handing the government to Labor. Very little of the Menzies of the 1930s and 1940s with his biting wit and impatient ambition survives in Bunting’s portrait of Menzies in power. Instead, he draws a genial, confident, avuncular Menzies.

One of the criticisms often made of Menzies was his lack of interest in younger politicians, evidenced most notably in the leadership gap after his retirement. Here, Bunting shows him as remarkably considerate of his senior public service staff and attentive to their morale. True, they were not in the direct line of succession and so no immediate competition, but it does suggest that Menzies did have the capacity to foster the careers and talents of younger men.

Alexander Downing, also writing of Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s, says of his relationship with John Bunting, ‘I am sure of all the people in Menzies’s life he regards Bunting as one of his closest friends.’ This is how their relationship appeared to one outsider; but Bunting does not seem to have regarded himself as one of Menzies’ closest friends. The friendship between them was warm and affectionate, though both were men of propriety and thus stayed within the conventions proper to relations between politicians and public servants. Significantly, though, Bunting does not feel he knew the inner Menzies. Nor does anyone else who has written about Menzies. Bunting says that Menzies’ friends were in compartments and that he had no ‘universal friendship’, though he does see something special about the friendships Menzies formed in the 1920s and 1930s, before the great smoothing out of his public personality after 1941.

Bunting explains this apparent lack of intimate friends by Menzies’ shyness. Paul Hasluck, describing Menzies very controlled public self, also refers to his shyness. In his Mannix lecture on Menzies, he suggests that behind the façade of Menzies’s public self was ‘a very shy man, a man who was slow to expose himself and slow to give away even to those close to him his inmost feelings’. I’m unconvinced by the explanation of shyness; shyness seems hardly an appropriate description of someone so at ease in company as Menzies was. I am convinced, however, that both Bunting and Hasluck felt there was something missing from Menzies’s friendships, some withholding of the self that was unusual even amongst such restrained and controlled men as themselves. Just how this is to be explained is another matter.

Bunting was Secretary to the Cabinet in the last part of Menzies’ prime ministership, as well as during those of Holt, Gorton, McMahon, and Whitlam. He obviously regards Menzies’ time as the golden age and has an interesting discussion of the way Menzies ran Cabinet. Under Menzies, Cabinet had a much less powerful role to play in government than it does today. Menzies regarded its role as secondary to that of the ministers. Cabinet was there to be used by the ministers when they wanted to discuss an issue with their colleagues, but it did not have authority over them. Bunting thinks that since Menzies’ time ministers have surrendered too much of their authority to Cabinet.

The book is a mixture of anecdote and reflection. Bunting has worked hard at trying to understand Menzies and to reconcile the man he knew with the many trenchant criticisms made of him both during his lifetime and since. He concedes a little to Menzies’ critics, but not much – that Menzies was vain, that he could have been a little more attentive to backbenchers. He is left puzzled by Menzies’ hostility to the press. Generally, though, Bunting accepts Menzies as he presents himself to him in the 1950s and 1960s. Refracted through Bunting’s book is Menzies as he wanted to be seen, and as in many ways he saw himself, now that the grandiose, ideal self of his earlier life coincided with the circumstances of his real life as much as anyone can expect. g