Professor Greg Melleuish and Dr Zachary Gorman are conducting a research project contextualising the full series of over 100 radio broadcasts which make up the ‘Forgotten People’ series.

Introduction:

The Forgotten People is a foundational text for the Liberal Party of Australia. The essays in it were originally radio broadcasts made by Menzies, a selection of which were published as a book in 1943.   Although the essays cover a wide range of topics there is a tendency to focus on the ‘Forgotten People’ essay and a relatively small number of other essays.

The only real precedent for The Forgotten People is W M Hughes’ The Case for Labor which is a selection of essays published originally by Hughes in the Sydney Telegraph during the first decade of the twentieth century, a work to which Menzies wrote an introduction when it was republished in 1970. In this, Menzies explained that he had read Hughes’ work as a ‘lad’, and that he believed that a political party ‘needed to have its views, or if possible its philosophy, formulated and expressed with clarity’.

The motivation behind this project is that The Forgotten People deserves to be understood and appreciated in much more detailed fashion as a complete text and to be placed in the context of the circumstances and the cultural and political milieu in which it was written.  This will enable a much better, and richer, understanding of the work and bring out its features in a much clearer fashion.  David Kemp provides an excellent exposition of the book in his A Liberal State but it is as part of a longer narrative about Menzies and the development of liberalism.  Judith Brett’s older work, although titled Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People doesn’t really deal with the work in any great detail.

It is our belief that there is a place for a detailed study of The Forgotten People, examining the text closely and explicating the background to what is written in the articles and providing a wider context that enables us to understand the intellectual and cultural framework within which Menzies came to say what he said.

Aim:

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.  Hopefully, we shall be able to place the book with Melbourne University Press, though if this were not possible the Jeparit Press would also be a viable option.  The project may well lead to the production of some other articles/essays that do not fit into the book. Through their research the authors will also produce a bibliography of Menzies’ significant writings through this time period that other academics will be able to utilise.

Project:

There is a need to understand Menzies’ 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?  David Kemp establishes the centrality of Menzies in the circumstances of the 1930s and the reestablishment of liberalism in the 1940s.

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.  There are two dimensions to the project:

·       The nature of the crisis facing Australia in the early years of the war in all of its dimensions, including political, social, cultural and religious/spiritual.  This was a time for real soul searching by both Menzies and Australia.

·       Menzies’ response which was to reach back to fundamental values and to make them the foundation of a response to the crisis and the basis on which a liberal vision of Australia could proceed.

There are a number of things that can be established to illuminate the nature and significance of the Forgotten People:

·       The development of Menzies’ ideas during the 1930s, particularly his response to the great world crisis of the time.

·       The state of liberal thought in Australia in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  This would include Eggleston and other figures, perhaps F A Bland.

·       The ‘mood’ of the period between 1939 and 1942.  This can be done through the sampling of newspaper editorials through Trove.

·       The intellectual response to the crisis of the early years of the war.  Here, there is a richness of material ranging from A P Elkin to A R Chisholm to Stephen Roberts to Samuel Angus to B A Santamaria and the early Catholic Social Justice statements.  How was this crisis understood?

·       A close examination of the whole of the Forgotten People and the issues raised by Menzies.  This will allow a deeper understanding of the values that Menzies sought to establish as the basis for a liberal version of Australian ‘reconstruction.’

·       An appraisal of the sort of text that the Forgotten People is.  This could be related to the argument that Geoff Stokes and GM have run that political theory in Australia is not ‘theoretical’ but attuned to practice and political reality.  Here, it is the practical that matters.

A key point is that the Forgotten People was not a programmatic work.  It did not attempt to provide a framework for a new and changed Australia.  Rather, it attempted to set out the fundamental values for which Menzies stood as a civilised human being.  It did not seek to overthrow the past but sought to take what was best from what existed and distil them as a foundation on which the country could move forward.  It stated what matters in a ‘normal’ society, such as would return when wartime came to an end.

Scholars such as Stuart Macintyre and James Walter have focused heavily on the ‘Reconstruction’ undertaken by the Labor government during and after the war.  The problem is that the Australian people were reluctant to give the Commonwealth extra powers except in the area of social benefits in the two referenda held in 1943 and 1946.  This matches the failure of Labor and W M Hughes to gain additional powers in 1911, 1913 and 1919.

This project cannot explore the reasons for the failure of these referenda.  It seeks to provide a rigorous analysis and understanding of the key expression of another set of ideas, values and practices, one that would have enormous implications for the subsequent development of Australia.

The project seeks to do three things:

1.       Explain the nature of the crisis of the early years of World War II in a wide and general sense.  This would include other responses to the crisis ranging from Eggleston to A R Chisholm to the Catholic bishops.

2.       Explore the response to that crisis given by Menzies in The Forgotten People, by providing an in-depth analysis of the text and the crucial background to Menzies’ response by placing it in the context of what he had said and written in the 1930s and early 1940s.

3.       Consider the significance of Menzies’ reformulation of liberalism in Australia against the background of the crisis thereby providing a better understanding of why liberalism has been such a successful set of political ideas in Australia.

Contemporary Relevance:

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’ 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.