Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 November 2024

The Library – Old Quad – North Wing- Parkville, VIC, 3052

To fulfil our mission to foster research into academic discussion on Menzies, the Robert Menzies Institute is hosting a series of four annual conferences bringing together historians and other thinkers to develop a collection of papers which will make a major contribution to the existing historiography on Menzies and the Menzies era. Once published in four volumes by Melbourne University Press, these will become a comprehensive reference on Menzies.

The Robert Menzies Institute is pleased to announce its fourth annual conference will be held on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 November 2024 in the Old Quad at The University of Melbourne.

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘The Final Chapter: Purpose, Endurance, and Legacy 1961-66 and Beyond’.

The period from 1961-66 was the final phase of the Menzies era, yet in some respects it was the most remarkable. After a near defeat at the 1961 election, Menzies held a razor thin majority and many assumed that he would ride off into the political sunset. However, if anything the near miss reinvigorated him, spurring a new wave of policy innovation in the introduction of State Aid for independent schools, major investments in science education and the space race, and laying the groundwork for the decimal currency. On the geopolitical front, it was a time of heightened danger in which a full-scale war with Indonesia loomed as a very real possibility, prompting a major overhaul of the Australian Defence Force and a controversial commitment to Vietnam.

As an unprecedented term in office reached its sixteenth year, it was also a time when Menzies’s long-term policy investments were starting to bear fruit. Homeownership and university enrolments were ballooning, while Australian exports expanded and diversified – in the process a new and remarkably modern Australia was emerging. When Menzies finally retired of his own choosing in January 1966, the full effects of his legacy were still playing out. It is only now, with the benefit of nearly 60 years of perspective, that we can appreciate their magnitude.

Papers to be presented at the conference:

Saturday 23 November

David Lee, ‘Menzies and the Dual Economy, 1961-66’

Selwyn Cornish, ‘RG Menzies and the Introduction of Decimal Currency’

Jim Walter, ‘Robert Menzies and Allen Brown: The odd couple?’

John Hawkins, ‘Menzies and Vernon’

Nicholas Brown, ‘A risky enterprise’: Menzies, Sir John Crawford and the Vernon Committee’

Anne Henderson, ‘The Menzies Government, B A Santamaria and the Beginning of State Aid’

Jennifer Clark, Science and science education

James Waghorne & Gwilym Croucher, University unlimited: Commonwealth Scholarships in Australian universities, 1951-1974

Lyndon Megarrity, Menzies and Liberal Education

Damien Freeman & Dean Smith, Recommending an Appointment to the Sovereign

Josh Woodward, ‘A cure for prejudice’: Robert Menzies, Travel and Nationalism in the 1960s

Sunday 23 November

Michael de Percy, From the bottom of the sea to the moon: Menzies and Australia’s communications golden age

Lucas McLennan, Australian anti-Communist organisations in the Vietnam War debate

Andrew Carr & Peter Dean, The ADF Menzies Built

Tom Lewis, The Menzies defence legacy: wise, brave, and enduring

Will Stoltz, Managed Decolonisation

Sean Jacobs, Relaxed and Comfortable: Menzies and the fall of Empire (1961-66)

David Furse-Roberts, Homes Material, Homes Human and Homes Spiritual: The Menzies Government and Housing Policy

Christopher Beer, The frontier of property-owning democracy: Housing, the reform of Australian liberal urbanism, and electoral politics in Western Sydney, 1961-1966

Charles Richardson, Menzies’s Philosophical Legacy to his party

Stephen Loosely, A Horse With No Name: Federal Labor, 1954-1966

Frank Bongiorno, ‘one of the world’s masterpieces’? Australian reaction to Menzies’s retirement, January 1966

Zachary Gorman, Closing Remarks