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Bridget Brooklyn, ‘A Tendency to See This As Monolithic’ Unpacking the 1954 Election

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Western Sydney University Lecturer Dr Bridget Brooklyn about the intricacies of the pivotal 1954 election.

The 1954 election is one of the most important in Australian political history. With the Great Labor Split, Robert Menzies would ultimately be able to transform a narrow victory at the polls into the political hegemony that saw him hold government for almost another twelve years and his party even longer. There is an inevitable tendency to anachronistically apply this hindsight to the election result, and to assume that the Petrov Defection and Cold War fears which fed into the split also determined the outcome. However, in Elections Matter: Ten Federal Elections that Shaped Australia, our guest this week argues that 1954 was actually fought over the timeless issues of economic prosperity and political stability, demonstrating Australians’ preference to take the middle road and avoid unnecessary risks.

Dr Bridget Brooklyn is a lecturer at Western Sydney University. She is an expert on late nineteenth and twentieth century Australian political, social and legal history, with a specialist interest in feminism. She has been published in peer reviewed journals and has produced several book chapters, many of which focus on the career of women’s rights campaigner and pro-conscriptionist Mary Booth. Brooklyn received a Doctorate from the University of Adelaide, with a thesis covering South Australian divorce law 1859-1918.