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Hurstville Municipal Council, Jubilee History of the Municipality of Hurstville, 1887-1937 (1937)

If a political party is to succeed, it needs to have committed campaigners who are willing to put in the hard yards even in areas where the chances of victory seem slim. During the Menzies era, one such area was St George in southern Sydney, which was home to the federal electorate of Barton and its member Herbert Evatt.

Despite St George’s association with red and white, Barton was by no means a dead-red seat, as the United Australia Party had held it from 1931-1940, when Labor brought in Evatt as a star candidate directly from the High Court. While this was highly controversial for its potential to politicise the Court, it proved a successful tactic as Evatt won the seat with wide margins in 1940, 1943, and 1946. Nevertheless, the area remained home to a number of Liberal stalwarts (including the family of a young John Howard) and they were determined to do whatever they could to turn Barton blue.

This effort would be headed by one of the most prominent Liberal figures in St George, the Mayor of Hurstville Hedley Mallard. Born in 1899, Mallard had been raised in a patriotic family that inculcated him with a profound sense of public service. All three of the Mallard boys had enlisted in the AIF, Hedley while still 17, and they even had a niece born on 25 April 1915, ‘who landed in Australia on the same day as “our boys” did at Gallipoli’ – as the local newspaper put it.

In 1925, while still in his mid-20s, Mallard was elected as an alderman of Hurstville Council, a position he would maintain until the 1960s, barring a short hiatus to re-enlist in the army during World War II. As one might imagine, Mallard was a highly active community member, and never more so than at the annual ANZAC Day commemorations where he played the bugle. Another notable occasion was when Mallard unveiled a plaque at St George Hospital, commemorating a heartbreakingly loyal dog who had stayed in the hospital grounds for 12 years, waiting for their deceased owner to re-emerge.

In 1930, Mallard first attempted to seek a higher political posting, by standing for the state seat of George’s River. He won endorsement as the official candidate of the Australian Party, a short-lived entity founded by former-wartime Prime Minister Billy Hughes. There followed a couple of unsuccessful attempts to seek UAP preselection, which left Mallard undeterred.

A little over a week before the outbreak of World War II, Mallard and Hurstville’s Regent Hall played host to Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Menzies gave a speech where he said:

‘He had great respect for civic workers, and the fine accomplishments performed by them. They spent a lot of time in attending to local needs, and in most cases all they received in return were plenty of kicks and little praise. There was a fellow-feeling between aldermen and prime ministers, as all were concerned in conducting their country in the best possible way. The work of the councils all over Australia was widely appreciated.’

This was the occasion on which Mallard gifted Menzies his copy of the Council’s Jubilee History, and the evening seems to have made quite the impression on the mayor. After running unsuccessfully as the Democratic Party candidate for George’s River at the 1944 state election, Mallard became swept up in the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the subsequent founding of Menzies’s new Liberal Party. He became the movement’s leading proselytiser in southern Sydney, helping to found numerous branches around St George and the Cronulla-Sutherland area.

Then in 1946, Hedley resolved to help the Liberal cause even more directly, by running the campaign for Barton’s Liberal candidate George Hohnen. The result was not pretty, as Evatt trounced Hohnen with a 57-33 vote share (still an improvement on the 75.5-24.5 the UAP candidate had achieved in 1943).

A less committed man may have been put off, but Mallard had shown himself capable of brushing off such setbacks. He resolved to continue to run the Liberal campaigns for Barton, and the party even recruited its own star candidate in Nancy Wake for the 1949 election. Wake was a wartime hero, having conducted grand escapades for the French Resistance against the Nazis, which earned her the Croix de guerre (War Cross) and Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honour).

Mallard and Wake put in a marathon campaign performance, personally door-knocking over 7500 houses, and there were countless local newspaper advertisements spruiking the candidate as ‘The Voice for Freedom’. Menzies even returned to Hurstville for a campaign rally held at the Strand Hall just three days out from polling day – a clear indication that the Opposition Leader himself had high hopes for the seat. The work paid off, but not enough, with the result being a 53.25-46.75 split in the incumbent’s favour.

This was enough to convince both Wake and Mallard to double down on their efforts for the 1951 double-dissolution poll. This time Labor were so concerned that they were alleged to have resorted to dirty tactics, with Mallard claiming they had spread rumours of Wake selling items on the black-market while working for the French Resistance (to which he retorted that she had to resort to the black market when she had just two ration books to feed the 50 Allied airmen she was sheltering), and also falsely suggested that she had been kicked out of Legacy. In the end, Wake came agonisingly close, with the knife edge count carrying on for several days to ensure all the postal votes had arrived. Evatt held on, but all it would have taken was 122 voters going the other way for Wake to have gotten up.

Even this was not enough to deter Mallard from future election campaigns and clashes with Evatt, for in 1956 Mallard stood against Herbert’s brother Clive for the state seat of Hurstville. Despite Clive having been forced to resign from Cabinet the previous term, he still managed to win on first preferences. Though notably within a few months he would be expelled from the Labor Party for voting against government policy. This suggested tensions between Herbert and Premier Joe Cahill, as the latter tried (rather successfully) to insulate NSW from the Labor split the former had caused. Indeed, by the late 1950s, the state Labor government was openly appealing to conservatives to re-elect it as a counterbalance to the leftist federal leader within the ALP.

Considering the harm that Evatt ultimately did to his party, perhaps it was serendipitous – from a Liberal perspective – that Mallard had never quite achieved his aim.