The Robert Menzies Institute is proud to announce that University of Wollongong Professor Greg Melleuish is joining us as a Visiting Professorial Fellow. Greg will be working closely alongside our Academic Coordinator Dr Zachary Gorman for a research project The Context of The Forgotten People: Responding to a time of Crisis.

While the title speech of The Forgotten People is justifiably famous, many of the 105 broadcasts given by Menzies between January 1942 and April 1944 have received little attention from historians, particularly those outside of the 37 broadcasts that were published as a book in 1943. Greg and Zac will undertake a thorough examination of these ‘lost broadcasts’, unearthed in Menzies’s Papers in the National Library of Australia.

There is a need to understand Menzies’s Forgotten People in context and the sort of enterprise that it was. Menzies was the primary political liberal figure of the time, a time at which liberalism and democracy were on the defensive all around the world. The Fall of France was a huge shock, especially as it crumbled so easily. It appeared as if liberalism and democracy were weak and ineffective in comparison with Nazism, Fascism and Communism.

There was no ‘liberal party’ in Australia, and there had not been one since World War I. There was a good chance that, outside of North America, liberal democracy might face extinction. Non-Labor politics in Australia were in disarray. Australia faced a genuine existential threat.

Was liberalism potentially dead in 1941 in Australia? If so, how was it to be resurrected? How could it be reformulated for the coming years?

Hence, the focus of the project will be on the Forgotten People as a work that responds to a very real crisis and provides an answer to that crisis.

By reinterpreting the Forgotten People as a response to a major crisis in Australian and global democracy, the authors hope to unearth lessons for our modern democracy which is once again facing challenges. Menzies’s aim with the Forgotten People broadcasts was not just to produce a vision for post war Australia, but also to draw on fundamental values to re-establish the equilibrium and ballast necessary for democracy’s survival. The authors maintain that this ballast and stability has been a fundamental characteristic and strength of Australian democracy since Federation.

The aim of the project is to produce a book on The Forgotten People that will provide a rich and contextualised analysis of the surviving broadcasts.