The Menzies Era

By John Howard

An assessment of Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, by John Howard, Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister, this is a significant, unique and fascinating history of the Menzies era - a time that laid the foundations for modern Australia.

'Engaging and revealing ... like a torchlight shone from an unexpected angle' Geoffrey Blainey, Weekend Australian

Fresh from the success of his phenomenal bestselling memoir, LAZARUS RISING, which has sold over 100,000 copies, John Howard now turns his attention to one of the most extraordinary periods in Australian history, the Menzies era, canvassing the longest unbroken period of government for one side of politics in Australia's history. The monumental Sir Robert Menzies held power for a total of over 18 years, making him the longest-serving Australian Prime Minister. During his second term as Prime Minister, a term of over sixteen years - by far the longest unbroken tenure in that office - Menzies dominated Australian politics like no one else has ever done before or since, and these years laid the foundations for modern Australia.

The Menzies era saw huge economic growth, social change and considerable political turmoil. Covering the impact of the great Labor split of 1955 as well as the recovery of the Labor Party under Whitlam's leadership in the late 1960s and the impact of the Vietnam War on Australian politics, this magisterial book offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of the Menzies era in Australian life, history and politics. John Howard, only ten when Menzies rose to power, and in young adulthood when the Menzies era came to an end, saw Menzies as an inspiration and a role model. His unique insights and thoughtful analysis into Menzies the man, the politician, and his legacy make this a fascinating, highly significant book.

'This important book' Clive James, Times Literary Supplement

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781743097977

John Howard

John Howard is an internationally recognized therapist, wellness expert, and educator who uses the latest science to help couples have stronger relationships. He is the host of The John Howard Show, a wellness podcast, and the creator of the Ready Set Love® series of online programs for couples. John is a Cuban American whose first language is Spanish and thus prioritizes diversity and inclusion, drawing on multicultural influences from years of traveling and studying indigenous traditions. He has presented on the neuroscience of couples therapy at leading conferences and developed a couples and family therapy curriculum for the Dell Medical School in Austin. In 2019, he developed Presence Therapy®, an integrative mind-body approach to couples therapy taught to psychotherapists worldwide. John is also the CEO of PRESENCE, a wellness center in Austin dedicated to helping you achieve optimal physical, mental, and relationship health.

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CHAPTER 1

AT THE PICTURES IN EARLWOOD

I clearly remember election day 10 December 1949. My parents voted in the early evening – polling booths stayed open until 8pm then – at Earlwood Public School, where I had just completed fourth class. After voting, Mum and Dad, with one of my older brothers, Bob, and me in tow, went to the local picture theatre, the Mayfair. As was the custom, we saw two full-length feature films, this time Command Decision, an American World War II movie starring Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon, and Strange Bargain, a tale of a suicide made to look (rather clumsily) like a murder for insurance purposes. American war films proliferated at that time. They had been produced for the massive home market, and they naturally created the impression that the United States had won the war almost single-handedly. During the screening of the second film, a slide appeared on the screen, saying simply, ‘L–CP takes early poll lead.’

When we arrived home, we found my eldest brother, Wal, who had cast his first federal election vote that day, sitting on the floor beside our large radio in the dining room. He said, ‘Menzies is in. The biggest swing has been in Queensland.’

The Menzies to whom he referred was Robert Gordon Menzies, Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia. He would serve as Prime Minister of Australia from December 1949 until January 1966, holding that post longer than anyone else. My family was very happy with the outcome.

Few of those who voted that day would have given much consideration to how long the victorious party leader might remain in office. The thoughts of most of them, especially those who had just shifted their support to the Coalition, would have turned to what his opponent, outgoing Labor Prime Minister Joseph Benedict Chifley, once famously identified as the most sensitive part of the political anatomy, ‘the hip-pocket nerve’ – a wonderful metaphor for living standards. The election took place four years clear of World War II. The Australian people were increasingly focused on the employment, growth and family opportunities that might come their way after the suffering, drudgery and restrictions of wartime. There was a growing feeling that the ruling Labor Government had maintained wartime controls, such as petrol rationing, too long after the war ended. This was certainly the view of my parents, Lyall and Mona Howard. But then, they were unreliable witnesses: my father owned a service station, and he and my mother were both rusted-on Liberals. Lyall was more of a Menzies man than was Mona, however – on occasions she thought the soon-to-be PM was too ‘full of himself’ and could become ‘a bit of a dictator if he got the chance’. She would ignore his plea for a ‘Yes’ vote in a referendum to ban the Communist Party two years later.

I can best describe the Australian nation that chose Menzies as its prime minister by recording some of my own recollections of life in a suburb of Sydney at that time. Australia in 1949 was still smothered by wartime controls. People accepted that regulations and rationing were necessary during the war, and for a brief period afterwards. But that period had ceased to be brief. The perception that Australia was taking too long to shake off wartime austerity was reinforced whenever people went to the pictures, as the cinema was habitually referred to. Most of the movies shown were American, and they revealed an American way of life that was more modern and comfortable than that enjoyed by most Australians. In a subconscious way this irked many Australians. The Americans had been our allies in the war. That war was now over. Why should Americans appear so much better off than Australians? There were reasons for this, but they didn’t alter the attitude.

The mass consumption of household electrical and other appliances by ordinary Americans had started earlier in that country than it did in Australia; to some extent in the late 1930s. America, moreover, did not enter the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than two years after Australia joined Britain in declaring war on Germany in September 1939. Even at the height of US mobilisation between 1942 and 1945, the extent of rationing and wartime constraints in the United States was not as severe as in Australia. And in neither country did the home front experience anything approaching the privations suffered by the British.

As a consequence, the portrayal of ordinary American life in Hollywood movies made many Australians impatient for the time when such day-to-day comforts would also be available to them. For example, most American homes depicted on the movie screen in 1949 had a TV set. Television did not come to Australia until 1956. That post-war period was the only time in my life, I believe, when some Australians envied the lifestyle enjoyed by Americans. As the decades passed, not only would disparities in material comforts disappear, but Australians would also develop reservations about the quality of American life, fuelled by concerns over crime and racial tensions. This would have them content in the belief that life in their country was at least the equal of that enjoyed in the US.

This was before the era of licensed clubs in Australia; these did not come to New South Wales until the late 1950s, following the introduction of poker machines in that state in 1956. Hotels still closed at 6pm. For Australians of many ages, a typical Saturday night out in the suburbs involved going to the pictures, and in the case of younger people calling in at an adjacent milk bar both before and after seeing the two movies. Saturday matinees were also very popular, but they were not an experience that came my way. My parents were staunchly of the opinion that Saturday afternoons should be spent playing sport, organised or otherwise. Taking in a newsreel – an hour-long film presentation comprising recent Australian, British and American news segments, with a short Laurel and Hardy film thrown in for light relief – was a popular treat when in the city during school holidays.

For home entertainment, the radio stations offered a variety of what were called ‘serials’. The most famous of these was the ABC’s Blue Hills, written by Gwen Meredith. Set in rural Australia, it commenced in February 1949 and ran for more than 5700 episodes, only terminating in 1976. Its enduring popularity testified to the special place country-town life has always occupied in the affections of Australians.

Then, as now, most Australians lived in the suburbs of big cities. To the extent that such descriptions meant anything, Earlwood, the inner south-western suburb of Sydney where we lived, could then have been described as lower middle class. Apart from accepting that there were some people in Australia who were wealthy – in Sydney most of them lived in the Eastern Suburbs – Australians in the late 1940s, in my experience, did not talk much about class. They were probably more conscious of religious or sectarian divisions, meaning those between Protestants and Catholics. Such feelings remained strong until the early 1960s. In those days people identified more readily as either Catholic or Protestant. Within government departments and other large organisations any rivalry tended to manifest itself as one between Catholics and Freemasons (or Masons). The rituals and broad beliefs of this all-male, rather secretive but frequently charitable organisation was seen by the Catholic Church as a rival to Christianity, and Catholics were forbidden from joining it. As a result most Masons were Protestant.

Local churches in the suburb where I lived were active and provided a focal point of activity, both sporting and social, for their adherents. The Earlwood Methodist Church, which the Howards attended, fielded teams that participated in both the cricket and soccer competitions organised among Protestant churches in Sydney. In the case of each sport the competitions at that time boasted several hundred teams.

The population of Earlwood grew rapidly after World War I, with street names such as Hamilton, Flers, Gueudecourt, Kitchener and Vimy attesting to that. It was replete with California bungalows, an architectural style popular in the 1920s. My family lived in one. In 1949 Australia had a population of 7.9 million, and Earlwood, like most of the country, was still predominantly Anglo-Celtic. There were a few Greek boys at the public school I attended, and some Italian boys at the local Catholic school. In time Earlwood would become heavily populated by Greek migrants, so much so that years later, when addressing a Greek community gathering as PM, I earned a hearty laugh from the audience when I said that, unlike many in the audience, I was not born in Athens, but rather in Earlwood, the next best thing.

As far as I can remember, probably half of the boys in my class at Earlwood Public School in 1949 had fathers who were skilled tradesmen. The bulk of the rest had fathers who worked in banks, insurance companies, or gas or electricity utilities. There was a very small number who, like my father, ran a small business.

After school, I would often play in the backyard of a school friend for an hour or two. Very few of my friends’ mothers were in paid work, so there was never any concern about supervision or safety. This was long before women with children began entering the paid workforce in large numbers. While it certainly wasn’t the only reason for such a lifestyle change, servicing a housing loan out of the average wage of a single breadwinner was easier in 1949 than it is today, or has been for a generation.

Australia in 1949 was a nation in which a large proportion of homes still had ice chests, not refrigerators; were without telephones; had daily milk deliveries; received bread deliveries from horse-drawn carts; and enjoyed little variety in the choice of consumer goods. Queues outside red Dr Who type telephone boxes were common. The first Holden had come off the assembly line with great fanfare in 1948, but it would take a year or two more before the car market really gathered pace, which among other things influenced people’s ability to travel for holidays. It wasn’t until well into the fifties that Australians in any numbers began to venture far from home for their annual family holidays, if they took them at all. The standard holiday period was then two weeks. Our family would usually go to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, then about a three-hour drive. Many others from Sydney took beach holidays to Central Coast resorts such as Woy Woy, The Entrance and Terrigal. As car ownership burgeoned, families travelled further and numerous motels sprang up to accommodate motorists. Going overseas for holidays was virtually unheard of; that was the preserve of the very well off.

There were two mail deliveries each working day, and one on Saturday morning. Banks opened on Saturday mornings until 1953. This change was a typical example of how our industrial relations system was often out of step with the evolving needs of Australian society. It was decades before automatic teller machines were even thought of, let alone widely available.

The strongest negative recollection I have of life in 1949 is the frequency of power blackouts. They seemed to happen just about every night during winter. Many relatively small businesses were driven to purchase diesel generators to keep their operations going. The Mayfair picture theatre was one of them. The owner proudly guaranteed uninterrupted Saturday night screenings. The following Saturday night saw a full house, but there was generator trouble, and the only illumination was a tiny light bulb. After an hour, an announcement was made that the screening would soon commence; it was met with a huge cheer. The travails of Labor’s PM Ben Chifley with the mining unions will be dealt with later in context, but those blackouts contributed to a feeling that the government of the day had lost control, and change was needed to lift the country out of the torpor in which it had been since the war ended.

Newspapers were the main source of political news, with associated commentary that was less frequent and assertive than it would later become. This was a time when, as well as the morning papers, there were also several editions of afternoon papers. In Sydney that meant, in addition to the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, there were various editions of the Daily Mirror and The Sun. The Australian Broadcasting Commission and commercial radio, such as the Macquarie Network, which owned Radio 2GB, provided regular news bulletins.

The radio stations naturally covered political affairs, including election campaigns. Both in 1949 and in later campaigns, I remember listening with my parents to broadcasts of the policy speeches of Menzies and Chifley (and later Evatt), as well as addresses by Menzies at other rallies. The latter were always good entertainment. They were noisy, and Bob Menzies’ exchanges with hecklers were often amusing.

This was a good twenty years before talkback radio, which – along with opinionated radio commentaries, both ABC and commercial – is such a prominent vehicle for political debate today. The first such radio commentary I recall listening to was from the late Eric Baume, uncle of my close friend Michael Baume (an MP, then senator and later Australia’s Consul-General in New York, who was himself a gifted journalist). Eric was also an uncle of Senator Peter Baume, another erstwhile colleague of mine, who was a minister in the Fraser Government. Eric Baume had spent a lifetime in journalism, including a long stint as a war correspondent during World War II. Starting in the 1950s he had a regular segment, appropriately entitled This I Believe, broadcast on Radio 2GB in Sydney. Eric Baume was a colourful person who attracted both listeners and controversy, which suited him fine.

No discussion of Australian media of this time would be complete without reference to women’s magazines. The Australian Women’s Weekly, owned by Frank Packer, and Woman’s Day, owned by John Fairfax & Sons, were powerful competitors for the hearts and minds of women in the soon-to-expand Australian middle class. Even then Packer’s magazine had a circulation of close to 900,000, and its rival about half that. They were remarkably high figures. The two magazines’ influence and reach would continue for decades; only in the digital age would it begin to wane. On New Year’s Eve 1949, the Australian Women’s Weekly speculated about the decade that lay ahead. ‘This year brings in the fifties – the second half of the too noisy, too speedy, troublesome twentieth century. What will they be known as, these fifties? The lucky fifties would be nice to live in.’ In fact, more Australians would find the fifties nicer to live in than any previous decade of the twentieth century.

Politics was very tribal in those years. Labor was for the working man. More than sixty per cent of the employed workforce belonged to a union. Professional people and small business owners were seen as natural Liberal voters. Although parental voting habits still exert a significant influence on how the newly enrolled cast their first vote, it was even more the case in the late 1940s.

The 1950s would be a decade in which people liked marriage. They married younger than in later decades, and for the first time since the 1880s the birth rate began to climb. Both the divorce rate and the proportion of the population that did not marry remained low.

So many of the things of which I’ve just written describe an Australian way of life very different from the one we now enjoy. To recognise this difference is to understand the contribution of the Menzies years to the building of modern Australia. Some features of Australia in 1949 would, however, find a ready echo in the Australia of 2014. Our national sport was then, and still is, cricket. Don Bradman retired at the beginning of that year; my father had taken me to see his farewell appearance at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the Kippax–Oldfield Testimonial. When it came to testimonials, the top-flight cricketers of 1949 were a world away from their counterparts of today. Of all current participants in team sports in Australia, cricketers are probably the best remunerated. They don’t need testimonials.

The passion for Australian Rules Football in the southern states was as intense then as it is now. Essendon won the VFL (now AFL) flag in 1949; St George won the equivalent in the New South Wales Rugby Football League (now the NRL). The Melbourne Cup, won by Foxzami, had stopped the nation on the first Tuesday in November, as it still does. At a grass-roots level, soccer was more widely played than is now commonly believed. The flood of European migrants, which had started in the late 1940s and would gather momentum in the 1950s, gave a huge additional boost to the popularity of that particular code.

Although I was only ten years old in 1949, I was well aware that an election was about to be held. For as long as I could remember, politics was discussed around the dinner table. It was a subject that interested my parents and that interest couldn’t help but rub off on me and my brothers. I had followed the local campaign for the 1949 election, partly because the ALP candidate had a campaign shed in a vacant paddock across the road from our house, and I would watch the men (there never seemed to be any women) come and go from the shed, usually carrying small cardboard boxes, which presumably contained leaflets. I also listened to the Liberal candidate speak via a loudspeaker at the Earlwood Terminus – so called because trams terminated there, until of course that efficient mode of public transport was itself terminated, in the late 1950s. (Our Melbourne brethren were not so inept as to follow such a foolish example.)

The newspapers were full of stories about the campaign, with frequent references to strikes that had occurred in the previous twelve months. My parents talked about the election a great deal; they really wanted Menzies to win. As a small businessman, and particularly because he despised the petrol rationing reimposed by Ben Chifley, which affected his petrol service station, my father was anxious to see the back of the Labor Government. (Actually, service stations were then called ‘garages’. Not only did my father, a qualified motor mechanic, serve petrol and otherwise service cars, but he also carried out repairs in his large workshop. Oddly enough, a few years later there was a plethora of new one-brand petrol outlets that called themselves ‘service stations’, although the services they offered were fewer than those of the older ‘garage’ variety. Such are the vagaries of language.)

I learned from an early age that owning and running a small business was a very different existence from working for someone else, be it the government or a private company, big or small. It was an all-consuming activity that required dedication and long hours. It was talked about over the dinner table. My father had owned and operated his garage/service station since 1928; like all such businesses it had experienced fluctuations. My three older brothers and I were conscious of how important it was to our family’s security, and we all worked at the garage during weekends and sometimes after school.

Though I did not know so at the time, this family experience bred in me a presumption of self-reliance. No government had helped my father with his business. He was on his own. There was nothing wrong with that, but it meant that as I grew older I did not believe that the automatic solution to every problem that society or families encountered lay in government intervention. Moreover, towards the end of his working life, my father was dealt a crippling blow when the local council directed him to remove the petrol bowsers located on the kerbside of his garage, to allow for the installation of traffic lights. This came after several years during which my father’s enterprise had been affected by the proliferation of new service stations, which traded for much longer hours, something my father found hard to match at that stage of his life. Now he faced the prospect of running his service station without petrol pumps.

The spread of large numbers of new service stations was one of those changes in market conditions that happen all the time. It wasn’t the fault of the Government. By contrast, being told to remove his petrol bowsers, without any suggestion of compensation, was a deliberate government act. Thus, my father’s experience showed that a government could be the problem, not the solution.

There was a sense of anticipation, even excitement, in the Howard household in the days that followed the election. My parents felt that something new had come and that our country’s future would be better. No one – including, I am sure, Bob Menzies himself – imagined that he would remain Prime Minister for sixteen years and in the process reshape our nation.

CHAPTER 2

PRELUDE TO AN ERA

The fact that Bob Menzies, on the evening of 10 December 1949, stood on the brink of a record-breaking term as Prime Minister was a tribute to his intelligence and energy, but above all else to his resilience. It also owed much to his capacity to learn from past mistakes — a quality that some of his critics failed to appreciate, wrongly thinking that his perceived arrogance precluded such introspection.

Bob Menzies was born in the small Victorian town of Jeparit on 20 December 1894, the fourth child and third son of James and Kate Menzies. His older siblings were brothers Les (1890) and Frank (1892), and sister Isabel, or Belle (1893). Another brother, Syd, was born ten years after Bob. His parents lived frugally, relying on the sometimes intermittent takings of a local store they owned; like so many small rural businesses of the time, it suffered heavily from the economic slump of the 1890s. Menzies’ father was a lay preacher in the local Methodist church and was active in community life, serving twice as the president of the local shire council and then being elected to the Victorian Parliament in 1911. The older Menzies was an active member of the Kyabram Reform Movement, composed mainly of small business people in rural areas who were often opposed to manifestations of government support for rural interests, such as orderly marketing arrangements. Some of this would rub off on young Bob.

James Menzies did not shine as a conventional politician. According to Robert Menzies’ biographer A.W. Martin, the older Menzies was given to high emotion, both as a preacher and a politician, which bred in young Robert a calm deliberation in his speechmaking and advocacy. In his memoirs Menzies wrote: ‘In effect, in my own later public and political life – I distrusted emotion, and I aimed at a cold, and as I hoped, logical exposition. It was years before I ever exhibited emotion either in the House or on the platform.’

Menzies certainly grew up in a highly political environment. His maternal grandfather, John Sampson, and his uncle, Sydney Sampson – the federal MP for Wimmera from 1906 to 1919 – saw much of young Bob while he was a schoolboy at Ballarat. In addition to the influence of his father’s local government and parliamentary career, he derived a priceless political education from numerous discussions with these two men.

Robert was a gifted, indeed brilliant student, winning several scholarships, including one to Melbourne’s Wesley College, where he excelled. He would become the senior exhibitioner of his year for the whole of Victoria; this took him to Melbourne University, where he commenced his study of law.

Four days after Andrew Fisher’s memorable utterance that Australia was with Britain ‘to the last man and the last shilling’, Australia entered the Great War, on 4 August 1914. Joseph Cook was then PM, but he lost the September 1914 election to Fisher, who led Labor back into office. The shadow of the Great War fell upon the Menzies family, as it did on all with sons of military age. Bob’s two older brothers, Les and Frank, enlisted, but a family conference decided that this was sacrifice enough for this fiercely patriotic family. Bob was to stay at home to care for his parents and his ten-year-old brother Syd, and to complete his studies.

Menzies would periodically be reminded of this decision throughout his public life. It would be used against him, spitefully and unfairly, by his political detractors as evidence of his unfitness for high office or, worse still, his cowardice. Menzies’ non-service in the Great War even drew flak from the Returned Services League (then called the Returned Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia) when he was one of three Australian ministers present at the dedication by King George VI of the giant war memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in France in 1938. The RSL acidly noted how inappropriate it was that one of the official representatives at the ceremony had not seen war service; the other two, Sir Earle Page and Thomas White, had.

Allegations of cowardice in cases such as Menzies’ were contemptible. Australia’s volunteer response to World War I was both heroic and extraordinary: 38.7 per cent of military-age men volunteered for active service. Of those who served abroad, 64.8 per cent were either killed or wounded – more than 60,000 dead from a male population of barely 2.5 million was a terrible depletion of a young nation’s manhood. For a family with three military-age sons, to have sent two of them to endure the terrible trenches of the Western Front was a huge sacrifice. To suggest that in order to prove their patriotic honour it had to be three was surely unreasonable. It was the lottery of birth and family circumstances that meant that Bob was the son who stayed at home.

In 1901 the broad Liberal–Labor political division as we now know it did not exist. It took the first decade of Federation for the two-party system to take shape in Australian politics. The first parliament had in the House of Representatives members of three parties – thirty-one Protectionists, twenty-eight Free Traders, fourteen Labor – along with two independents. Labor inclined more to the Protectionists than the Free Traders, and supported the Protectionist Alfred Deakin as PM on two occasions, in 1903 and 1905. Each of the three parties held government for a time, the Protectionists for longer than the others. The two non-Labor parties embraced people with a range of beliefs from radical to conservative. Deakin claimed a liberal pedigree.

In 1909 the Free Traders and the Protectionists merged, to become briefly the Fusion Party and then the Commonwealth Liberal Party. Not only did this development mark the eclipse of the free-trade cause in Australia for decades, but it also established the basic dividing line in Australian politics, which has endured to this day. That is between a centre-left ALP, and a centre-right non-Labor party, albeit under a variety of names – first the Liberal Party, then the Nationalist Party, then the United Australia Party and finally, from 1944, the Liberal Party of Australia. At certain points, as I will relate in this chapter, some Labor MPs – including on one occasion a PM – would join their non-Labor opponents to form a new non-Labor party, but the essential fault-line that emerged in 1909 remained.

The first of those points came within a few years, late in 1916, when William Morris (Billy) Hughes, who had replaced Fisher as wartime Labor PM in 1915, led a number of Labor MPs and senators out of their party over the divisive issue of conscription for military service in World War I.

Born in Pimlico, London, in 1862, Hughes spent his early years in London, where he became a school teacher. He migrated to Australia in 1884. The ultimate political chameleon, Billy Hughes has been easily the longest serving MP since Federation. After a decade as a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly, he entered the first federal parliament as a Labour member in 1901 and remained there until his death fifty-one years later, by which time he was the MP for Bradfield on Sydney’s North Shore, then the safest Liberal electorate in Australia – some testament to his political flexibility. It is said that when confronted with the comment that he had belonged to every political party in his time except the Country Party, he responded, ‘Brother, you have to draw the line somewhere.’

Hughes would become affectionately known as the ‘little digger’ due in part to his fierce and open loyalty to Australian forces in World War I, and the concessions he won for Australia at the Paris Peace Conference. His determination to put a plebiscite to the Australian people on conscription during the war effectively split the Labor Party. The bitter caucus debate authorising the enabling Bill for a first plebiscite produced a vote of only 23 to 21 in favour. Likewise, conscription was fiercely opposed by large sections of the non-parliamentary Labor Party, including three future Labor PMs, James Scullin, John Curtin and Ben Chifley, as well as many in the union movement. The issue also deeply divided the Australian public.

Hughes campaigned passionately for a ‘Yes’ vote, and a distinctly sectarian tone entered the debate, particularly as it occurred against the background of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rebellion protesting British Rule in Ireland, which thrust the Anglo-Irish dispute into public consciousness. The Labor Party had a heavy Irish-Catholic component, and many of its members, while supporting the war effort, lacked the intense pro-British sentiment of their leader, with his Welsh roots. In any event, they and others felt that the flood of volunteers who had joined the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was contribution enough to the British Empire war effort, although by late 1916 the enlistment rate had slowed markedly.

The conscription proposal was twice submitted to the Australian people. It was narrowly defeated on the first occasion, on 28 October 1916, and more clearly when it was again put forward in December 1917. In the process it wreaked havoc upon the Labor Party, but not upon Billy Hughes. Despite his expulsion, on 4 September 1916, from the NSW Branch of the party because of his stance on conscription, he continued to lead the Labor Government until it effectively disintegrated on 14 November 1916. On that day an acrimonious caucus meeting resulted in Hughes leading thirteen other Labor MPs and eleven Labor senators out of the parliamentary party.

Ever resilient, Hughes remained as PM, first as leader of a National Labor government, between November 1916 and February 1917, and then as leader of a new parliamentary party, the majority of whose members were his erstwhile political opponents. The new party – called the Nationalist Party – comprised the then Opposition Liberal Party and the MPs and senators who supported Hughes in his pro-conscription stance and had followed him out of the Labor Party. In the elections of May 1917, the Nationalists had a sweeping victory.

This was the first of three splits in the Labor Party. Most of those who followed Hughes out of the party were, like him, Protestant. As a consequence the Labor Party was even more Catholic than it had been before. The Catholic influence in the Labor Party had little to do with religion. Irish Catholics in Australia at the time were largely to be found in the working class, and the ALP was naturally the party of choice for most of them.

While Hughes was causing ructions in established political groupings, Robert Menzies was enjoying a stellar academic career at Melbourne University, collecting special prizes and awards along the way to a bachelor’s degree with first-class honours, and then a master’s degree in law. He presaged his future public career by holding the position of President of the Students’ Representative Council and editing the university magazine.

Admitted to the Victorian Bar in 1918, he became a pupil to Owen Dixon, who would become a King’s Counsel and in time Chief Justice of Australia, and be acclaimed as Australia’s greatest ever jurist. That Menzies was an exceptional barrister from a very early age was demonstrated in 1920 when, aged only twenty-five, he successfully argued before the High Court of Australia in the Engineers’ Case for the overturning of a constitutional approach that had held sway for almost twenty years, and that granted immunity for state agencies against the reach of Commonwealth laws. This case would lay the foundation for the expansion of Commonwealth power in later decades and, although somewhat modified in its impact by later High Court cases, remains a landmark decision in the demarcation of the respective powers of the federal and state governments, strongly in favour of the former. The Engineers’ Case was not without irony for both Dixon and Menzies, as I will discuss in a later chapter.

To leave such a mark on the constitutional law of Australia at such a young age was no mean feat. It elated Menzies at the time, and he recalled years later, ‘I was the sole counsel for the successful party. I was very young, twenty-five years old, and a success meant a great deal to me. In fact I got married on the strength of it.’ Pattie Leckie and Bob Menzies had met some years earlier when they and their families both attended the Camberwell Presbyterian Church, in suburban Melbourne. They met up again later when both were members of the congregation of the nearby Kew Presbyterian Church. A romance ensued, and they married at that same Kew church on 27 September 1920. It would be a long and happy marriage, which lasted until Bob’s death nearly fifty-eight years later. They would have three children: Kenneth, born in 1922, Ian, born in 1923, and Heather, born in 1928.

It was a marriage of two political families. Pattie’s father, John Leckie, who had been rejected for war service on medical grounds, served in the Victorian Parliament for several years from 1913, then for two years as the federal MP for Indi in north-eastern Victoria. He was elected as a ‘win the war’ Nationalist, but lost in 1919 to another conservative. He remained heavily involved in non-Labor politics, and would become a United Australia Party (UAP) senator for Victoria in 1935, and retire from that chamber as a Liberal in 1947. He served as a minister in the Menzies UAP Government from 1939 to 1941. Pattie Leckie was very close to her father, and accompanied him on many campaigns and to meetings. She was not to know it at the time, but it was an activity that would occupy much of her future life.

By his early thirties Menzies had built up a large legal practice, and acquired an excellent reputation. If he had not felt the pull of public life, a long and prosperous, if hardworking, life at the bar would have lain ahead, almost certainly culminating in appointment to the bench. Menzies’ early work at the bar had given him a good understanding of the complexities of Australia’s unique system of conciliation and arbitration and he had appeared on both sides of the record: for the union in the Engineers’ Case, but with Owen Dixon for the Commonwealth in an action to deregister the Seamen’s Union. In 1926 he used that experience to take his first step towards public life and service.

The government at the time was the Bruce–Page Coalition, composed of the Nationalist Party and the conservative Country Party. The latter had been formed in February 1920, bringing together the ten MPs representing farmers’ groups who had been elected to parliament in the 1919 election; at a federal level it has only ever governed in coalition with the major non-Labor party of the time. In 1926, with the support of the Opposition Labor Party, the Coalition sought through a referendum to win constitutional control of all industrial matters, wherever they might arise. This referendum proposal was a massive assault on the powers of the states, very radical for its time and indeed for any time, and contrary to the professed federalist principles of the Nationalist Party. It would have gone well beyond the national system established by my government under WorkChoices, and retained by the Rudd and Gillard Governments, which was based on the corporations power. On the face of it the Commonwealth’s industrial relations power was limited by the Australian Constitution to ‘Conciliation and Arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State’.

Menzies campaigned vigorously against the referendum proposal, as did many key business figures, largely on the grounds of states’ rights. In the process he gained much public attention. According to A.W. Martin, his biographer, Menzies often asserted that this campaign was the real start of his political career; if so it was a successful start, because the referendum failed in all but two states.

Inevitably, Menzies was drawn deeper into the political orbit. He joined an active group of younger members of the Nationalist Party, together forming a distinct Young Nationalists entity within the party. Meanwhile, due to his skilful campaigning in the referendum of 1926, as well as his burgeoning reputation at the Melbourne bar, Menzies had caught the eye of several businessmen and professionals who wielded much influence in conservative politics in Melbourne in the mid to late 1920s. They were Staniforth Ricketson, a well-known stockbroker; C.A. Norris of the National Mutual; Sir John Higgins, former Chairman of the British Australian Wool Realisation Association; Kingsley Henderson, a leading architect; and Ambrose Pratt, a novelist and journalist. To them, Menzies was the ideal rising star of the future: he spoke well, had presence, espoused the orthodox middle-class values of that time, supported free enterprise and the sanctity of contracts, and was an eloquent advocate of the British character of Australia. Moreover they had supported his position on the referendum. Later, he and Ricketson, Norris, Higgins, Henderson and Pratt would become known as ‘the group of six’.

It was only a matter of time before Menzies sought parliamentary office. His first tilt was at the Legislative Council of Victoria; membership of the Upper House would still allow him to spend plenty of time at the bar. He won on his second attempt. Unlike today, when such a course is frowned upon, many MPs in the 1930s endeavoured, where possible, to continue their pre-parliamentary careers. Menzies became a minister within weeks, but soon resigned his ministry in protest at the Nationalist Government’s decision – at the behest of the Country Party – to provide a bank guarantee to keep a rural co-operative afloat. He had struck a blow for free enterprise against vested interests.

This was the first of many occasions in the early part of his political career on which Bob Menzies would rail against various forms of government intervention or ‘spoon feeding’ to support rural industries; the less charitable called it ‘agrarian socialism’. Years later, as head of a Coalition government, he would mellow and compromise some of his earlier non-interventionist attitudes, as the price of maintaining a highly successful and durable partnership with the Country Party.

At the 1929 Victorian election Menzies entered the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) as the Nationalist member for the safe seat of Nunawading, but found his party in Opposition. National political issues were, however, to preoccupy him, and over the next three years he would play a key role in reshaping the major non-Labor force in Australia.

At the federal level, James Scullin led Labor back into power in October 1929, just as the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, heralding the Great Depression. Born at Trawalla in Victoria on 18 September 1876, Scullin had been a grocer before entering federal parliament in 1910. He lost his seat of Corangamite in 1913, but reentered federal parliament in 1921 for the seat of Yarra. During his eight years out of parliament, Scullin edited a Labor daily published in Ballarat, and campaigned strongly against conscription. Scullin was Australia’s first Catholic PM.

Coping with the Depression was difficult enough, but Scullin’s task was made that much harder by the debt repudiation policies of many in the Labor caucus and of the Labor Premier of New South Wales, John Thomas (Jack) Lang. Scullin thought that Lang and his caucus critics were wrong, and supported the so-called Premiers’ Plan, which involved an orthodox commitment to debt repayment and deficit reduction as a way of dealing with the Depression. This approach had been recommended by Sir Otto Niemeyer of the Bank of England, who had been commissioned by the Scullin Government to examine and report on Australia’s financial situation.

During his first six months in government, Scullin’s Treasurer was E.G. (‘Red’ Ted) Theodore, a colourful and intelligent former Labor Premier of Queensland (1919–25) who had a commanding presence, was a powerful figure in the union movement, and mixed easily with entrepreneurs; he was something of one himself, though prone to corner cutting. As Federal Treasurer he demonstrated foresight on the issue of a central bank, a subject I will discuss in a later chapter. After leaving politics, he would form what some saw as an improbable business association with Frank Packer (father of Kerry), becoming Chairman of Packer’s company Consolidated Press, and holding that position until 1949. Amongst other things, he and Packer would found the Australian Women’s Weekly, the most successful magazine Australia has produced.

In June 1930 Theodore was forced to stand aside as Treasurer over the Mungana Mines Affair. The allegation of wrongdoing against him was that he had a financial interest in an asset which had been sold to the Queensland Government while he was Premier and Treasurer in that government. Following Theodore’s resignation, Scullin took on the Treasury responsibilities himself.

In August 1930 Scullin went to London for an Imperial Conference (where he would press upon King George V the appointment of the Australian-born Sir Isaac Isaacs as the next Governor-General of Australia). Welcome to centre stage one Joseph Aloysius Lyons, father of twelve, former school teacher, and one-time Labor Premier of Tasmania (1923–28), who had been enticed by Scullin to enter federal parliament in 1929.

During Scullin’s almost six-month absence, Lyons acted in his place as Treasurer. He was an ardent supporter of cost cutting, deficit reduction and the honouring of debts as the right response to the financial crisis. When a major Commonwealth loan was due for conversion (repayment), many in the federal Labor caucus, following the nostrums of Lang, wanted the conversion deferred, which, to Lyons and many others, was nothing short of repudiation. Lyons led a huge public campaign to raise the money needed to convert the loan; it was highly successful, with subscriptions being £2 million over what was required.

Significantly, the conversion campaign brought Lyons into contact with many in the Melbourne business community, and, in turn, their emerging political favourite, Robert Menzies, who along with many of his young Nationalist colleagues had enthusiastically backed Lyons’ conversion push, notwithstanding Lyons’ Labor identity. This was a crucial building block in an association that was to have fateful consequences for Australian politics.

In his six months as Acting Treasurer, Lyons steadfastly adhered to Scullin’s views on how the economic crisis should be handled. Yet after Scullin’s return to Australia, under pressure from the Labor caucus and increasingly intimidated by the Lang forces, the PM changed tack; he did not embrace the full Lang approach, but went a considerable distance towards it. This was understandably frustrating to Lyons. He had, after all, loyally backed the Scullin line, only to have the rug pulled from under his feet because Scullin now felt unable to resist caucus pressure.

Lyons was further aggrieved by Theodore’s reinstatement to Cabinet by caucus, particularly because there was still a possibility that criminal charges arising from the findings of a Royal Commission into the Mungana Mines Affair might be laid against him. (In fact, criminal charges were never laid against Theodore; he was found not guilty in civil proceedings.) Rubbing salt into Lyons’ wounds was the fact that Scullin himself had moved the motion in caucus for the return of Theodore. To make matters even worse, Theodore was not only reinstated as Treasurer, he was also elected deputy leader of the party. Like Scullin, Theodore now largely supported Lang’s debt-repudiation approach to the Depression.

On 29 January 1931, just three days after that caucus meeting, Lyons resigned from Cabinet. He was on his way out of the Labor Party.

The Scullin Government was disintegrating under the intense pressure of the Depression, the bullying tactics of Lang towards his federal colleagues, and Scullin’s vacillating leadership. He was rapidly losing authority. There had been an earlier sign of this late in 1930 when, despite Scullin’s strongly stated reservations from abroad, the Cabinet, effectively under instruction from caucus, had appointed Dr H.V. Evatt and Mr E.J. McTiernan to fill two vacancies on the High Court. Evatt had been state Labor member for Balmain, and McTiernan federal Labor MP for Parkes, having previously served in a NSW Labor government as Attorney-General and Minister for Justice.

According to the Constitution at the time those appointments were for life. Evatt left the court almost ten years later to enter federal politics; McTiernan took his security of tenure seriously. Visibly unwell, he was present when I attended the ceremonial opening of the parliament to which I had been elected for the first time, forty-three years later, in July 1974. He finally retired in 1976, aged eighty-four. Partly as a consequence of McTiernan’s long tenure, the Fraser Government successfully sponsored a referendum in 1977 to alter the Constitution so that in future all judges appointed to federal courts including the High Court must retire at the age of seventy.

The ALP was stumbling towards the second split in its more than 100-year history. In March 1931 seven NSW Labor members withdrew from the caucus to form a separate Lang Labor Group. Lang, as Premier of New South Wales, had presented a radical plan to a Premiers’ Conference the previous month, which went much further than even the newly expansionary (less concerned about balancing the budget) Theodore would contemplate in his second iteration as Federal Treasurer.

Although it was contrary to federal ALP policy, Lang’s plan had been promoted by MPs in New South Wales in a by-election that saw Eddie Ward, a left-wing socialist of the no-nonsense variety, enter federal parliament as the MP for East Sydney. When the caucus subsequently adopted a resolution put forward by Scullin requiring its members to toe the federal line on economic policy rather than follow Lang’s plan, the seven NSW members elected to go to the crossbenches, in the curve between the two sides of the parliamentary chamber. The cleavage was officially recognised on 28 March, when a special federal conference of the ALP expelled its Lang-dominated NSW Branch and established a separate federal party in that state.

The first quarter of 1931 was proving to be momentous for Australian politics. Early in February, the month of the Premiers’ Conference, Lyons met Menzies and other members of the group of six in the Melbourne offices of J.B. Were & Son, Stockbrokers, where Menzies, as spokesman, invited Lyons to leave the Labor Party and join the Nationalist Opposition. If he could bring enough Labor MPs with him, Menzies suggested, they could even form a new temporary government. Crucially, Menzies told Lyons that they would do all they could to persuade the Nationalists to accept Lyons as Leader, and therefore potentially Prime Minister. Lyons had accumulated considerable public esteem for the consistency of his approach to economic issues, and his stance in relation to Theodore’s return to Cabinet. Menzies and his Melbourne colleagues were seizing the opportunity to enlist him to their political cause. The authority they were asserting was amazing: the offer to Lyons was made without prior consultation with the Leader of the Nationalist Party, John Latham, with the Nationalist Party organisation, or with its fundraising arm. In many ways, this seminal meeting was the birth of the United Australia Party.

Early in March Lyons informed the group of six that he intended leaving the ALP. This was publicly announced immediately, and several days later Lyons and several of his colleagues voted with the Opposition in a no-confidence motion against the Government. The Scullin Government survived because the Lang Labor Group stayed with it.

Inevitably, however, what Menzies had put to Lyons in February came to pass. In May 1931 Lyons did join the Nationalist Opposition to form the United Australia Party, with Lyons as its leader. This was facilitated by the willingness of Nationalist Leader John Latham to stand aside, a decision urged upon him by the group of six and others of like mind. Thus, for the second time in less than twenty years, the major non-Labor party in Australian politics was willing to accept the leadership of a former Labor MP, as well as a name change, as the price of securing political advantage over its Labor opponents. Of course, in each case a national crisis – a war, then a depression – had been highly influential in producing the new political alignments.

Lyons’ popularity with the Australian public had been demonstrated by the enthusiastic reception he and his wife Enid received as they toured the southern states in April 1931, addressing thousands of people in the process. He would lead the UAP to victory in the 1931 election, thus inflicting on Scullin and his colleagues the rarity of becoming a one-term government (to which Julia Gillard came perilously close in 2010).

For the first time, the 1931 election pitted two Irish-Catholic Australians, Scullin and Lyons, against each other for the nation’s top job. Until Tony Abbott’s victory in September 2013, Lyons would be the only Catholic to lead a non-Labor government of Australia. Latham served several years as Attorney-General and as Minister for External Affairs in the Lyons Government. He retired before the 1934 election, and was appointed Chief Justice of the High Court in 1935.

By 1934, Menzies was not only Deputy Premier of Victoria, but also Attorney-General and Minister for Railways. Notwithstanding his seniority in the state government, his heart was set on a national political career. So the neat consequence of Latham’s decision to retire on the eve of the 1934 federal election was that Menzies became the UAP candidate, with general acceptance, for Latham’s safe federal seat of Kooyong. He was elected to federal parliament at the general election on 15 September 1934. He would hold the seat of Kooyong for more than thirty years, until his retirement in January 1966. Menzies’ biographer A.W. Martin has suggested that he agreed to enter federal parliament on the understanding that he would succeed Lyons as PM when the latter stepped down. It is quite possible that Lyons and others dangled this prospect before him and were genuine in doing so but, given that the leadership of the UAP was a gift of the entire party room, such an understanding meant little more than the shared aspiration of those who were part of it.

Lyons immediately appointed Menzies as Attorney-General and Minister for Industry. It was a rapid progression for a person clearly seen by many as having the ability to go to the very top. Professor Kenneth Bailey, Dean of the Melbourne University Law School, in a congratulatory letter, would tell Menzies: ‘It really has been a triumphant political career. I think that one would probably have to go back to Palmerston or Pitt or Peel for parallels.’ Bob Menzies did not want for admirers.

At this point it is worth recording an observation about Menzies, made retrospectively in 1978 by Percy Joske, a fellow student of his from Melbourne University. ‘He had an incredible degree of charm and good looks’, wrote Joske in his informal biography of Menzies.

His personality was forceful and determined and like many another Scot he would ride roughshod over his opponents. He employed his cutting tongue without hesitation. As he always spoke with great authority and was readily quoted, his talk could and did cause harm to the unfortunate at whom it was aimed. [He had] a fierce determination to succeed, which made him cause offence to others, often thereby doing himself harm.

A lawyer of considerable note himself, Joske had a lifelong respect for Menzies, and served in the federal parliament with him for nine years until he was appointed to the Commonwealth Industrial Court.

In 1935 the Anglophile Menzies had his first encounter with England, on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of George V and also an appearance before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He was not disappointed. Being part of a ministerial party, led by Lyons, allowed Menzies to have what A.W. Martin described as an ‘experiential discovery of institutions, a culture and a people which, at the age of 41, he already knew and in the profoundest sense assumed to be his own’. Martin continued: ‘What is remarkable, given his age, his forensic sophistication and the practicality of his political experience, is the intensity of the emotion . . . which this discovery of England was to arouse in Menzies.’

After his return from the United Kingdom, election as Deputy Leader of the United Australia Party, in December 1935, was another conspicuous achievement in Menzies’ rapid political advance – too rapid for some, who began to resent his almost effortless progress. Their grievance was not ameliorated by the manner in which Menzies seemed to take for granted every elevation that came his way. Humility was not his strong suit. Significantly, in the ballot for deputy he defeated Richard Casey and Thomas White, neither of whom liked him. Casey had been elected to federal parliament for the seat of Corio in Victoria in 1931 and was Treasurer at the time of the ballot. White also held a Victorian seat, Balaclava, and was Minister for Trade and Customs. Both were veterans of World War I. They both saw themselves as foreman material, but would never become serious rivals to Menzies, not even in some of the darker days that lay ahead of him.

Menzies was back in England in 1936 as Attorney-General, appearing for both the Commonwealth and Victoria, before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in a case involving the much-litigated section 92 of the Constitution, which purports to guarantee the complete freedom of trade and commerce between the states. This time he lost. A mark of how much attitudes have changed is that he was paid a fee for his appearance by the Victorian Government. Appeals to the Privy Council from Australian courts are no longer available, but by the time they finally ended, in 1986, not only would such a joint appearance for two parties by the Attorney-General have been most unlikely, but the payment of a fee unthinkable.

Even in 1936 it raised hackles. The Labor Opposition claimed that Menzies had put himself in breach of the Constitution and might forfeit his seat. Lyons and some of his colleagues felt uneasy about Menzies taking more than a nominal fee from the Victorians, as Lyons told Menzies in a private letter dated 26 April 1936. The more remarkable contents of that letter were Lyons’ statement that he expected Menzies to succeed him in the leadership of the UAP: ‘for some time I have felt that the time [has] come for you to step into my shoes both because you should be given the opportunity to use your talents . . . and because I feel I have done a pretty good job . . . and am entitled to a rest’. Menzies’ response to the letter is not known, but neither did an early leadership transition occur, nor was the Victorian fee reduced to a nominal level.

Lyons was popular, seen by UAP strategists as a vote winner. Yet he faced a sharper Labor Opposition, now led by John Curtin and largely reunited after the intense divisions over economic policy that had propelled Lyons’ departure in 1931. At the 1937 election his government was comfortably returned, despite a marked swing to the Labor Party. In his final speech of the campaign Lyons had declared: ‘I am going to continue as leader for a long time yet.’

Menzies would travel to Britain again in 1938, along with Earle Page (Minister for Commerce) and Thomas White (Customs and Trade), for extensive trade negotiations with the British Government. This visit would be notable both for Menzies’ intense irritation with what he saw as Britain taking Australia for granted on trade issues, and for the extent to which he identified with the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain Government. On the first point, privately, and somewhat less so in public, he derided many British business leaders for speaking ‘humbug’ on imperial sentiment. In a letter to his brother Frank, he opined that ‘while Imperial sentiment is regarded as an admirable digestive after dinner, it does not count for very much when you get down to the actual brass tacks of an international business deal’.

His hard-headed assessment of Britain’s stance on trade issues was in stark contrast to his somewhat benign view of the way London had responded to the growing menace of Hitler and Mussolini. He had given a sample of the latter in 1935 when he said, ‘While men of the calibre of Mr Stanley Baldwin, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Mr Anthony Eden controlled British foreign policy there was no cause for alarm.’ Britain had initially supported sanctions by the League of Nations against Italy because of its invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), but Hoare, then Foreign Secretary, wilted and concocted with his French counterpart Pierre Laval the ‘Hoare–Laval Pact’ – an effective carve-up of Abyssinia so as to placate Rome. When news of this leaked there was outrage, and Hoare was forced to quit. But the damage had been done; the League had been undermined and an emboldened Hitler saw Allied weakness. His militarisation of the Rhineland, so pivotal in the history of that era, quickly followed. Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany was prohibited from stationing troops in the Rhineland; in 1936 they moved back in.

The three Australian ministers arrived in London during the unfolding crisis over the fate of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which ended in the shameful capitulation at Munich whereby the fate of the Czechs was consigned to the adjudication of Adolf Hitler. Menzies thought British policy towards Czechoslovakia was moving in the right direction, and praised Chamberlain as ‘a man of clear-headedness and determination’.

After a side visit of almost three weeks to Germany, Menzies had no doubts about the authoritarian nature of the country, but retained his instinctive support for appeasement, telling Lord Halifax, by then Foreign Secretary, that more pressure should be put on Prague, and that the English press should be discouraged from talking ‘dangerous nonsense’ about ‘firm stands’ and ‘successful threats’ towards Berlin. Menzies was impressed after meeting Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin, a strident advocate of appeasement, and someone who had an almost mesmeric effect on some British Cabinet ministers of the time. Menzies’ approach to appeasement reflected the prevailing mood of the Australian and British public; just twenty years had passed since the Great War, and the memory and consequences of its slaughter were still vivid.

Yet the appeasement policy had its dissenters too. Anthony Eden, Lord Halifax’s predecessor as Foreign Secretary, had quit in protest over Chamberlain’s appeasement of Italy.

Reviews for The Menzies Era

[philipjhunt · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

John Howard writes competently and authoritatively about his favourite PM. His own politics intrude less often than one might expect, and that's creditable. But it's still a textbook. The sort of book you keep on your shelf and read a chapter a month, or dip into for references. In hardback version, it's also a 707-page tome that made my hands ache at each sitting.