Makers of Oz: Wartime PM John Curtin left legacy of peace

Like the biographies of so many other great Australians, John Curtin’s life was one of improbabilities made good. SUBSCRIBE TO READ MORE.

John Curtin with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of US President Franklin D Roosevelt, at her arrival in Canberra in 1943.

Like the biographies of so many other great Australians, John Curtin’s life was one of improbabilities made good.

Born in 1885 in Victoria to impoverished Irish-born immigrants, the young Curtin had a youth that could only be described as erratic: A bit of school here, some work as a copyboy at a newspaper there, and finally a somewhat steady gig as an estimates clerk at a local factory.

John Curtain’s early work experiences were erratic. Picture: John Curtin’s War: Volume One by John Edwards, published by Penguin Random House

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Hardly the sort of stuff to suggest a future leading Australia through some of its darkest moments.

Curtin would eventually find his first real career in journalism, borne from a love of the written word developed spending nights reading classics at the local public library.

Involvement with the union movement would bring him to politics, and eventually parliament, taking the West Australian seat of Fremantle in 1934.

John Curtin arriving with High Commissioner Stanley Bruce at the Imperial Conference at 10 Downing Street in London during World War II.

Global affairs were front and centre in his mind, and the newly minted MP fretted in 1936 about the ability of Britain to defend Australia against a rising Japan. The coming of war, first in Europe and then in the Pacific, confirmed his worst fears.

Robert Menzies’ resignation in 1941 opened the way for Labor to take government, and for Curtin (right) to move into the Lodge, at a parlous time. Later that year Japan would attack Pearl Harbor; and not long after Singapore would fall, in what UK PM Winston Churchill would refer to as “the worst disaster and the greatest capitulation in British history”.

Curtin’s tricky balancing act pivoted Australia away from Britain towards the United States — eventually putting Australia’s troops in the Pacific under the command of General Douglas Macarthur — even as he worried about Washington’s later economic and military designs on the Pacific.

John Curtin served Australia until his death in office in 1945.

At home, he managed the tricky issue of conscription, which tore the nation apart in World War I, while putting the nation on a war footing to produce aircraft, weapons and ammunition. Some of his greatest frustrations stem­med from unionists, and on at least one occasion he had to threaten military intervention to prevent strikes.

Sadly, Curtin would not live to see the end of the war he shepherded Australia through. The heavy smoker died on July 5, after his lungs became congested, having given his all to the nation he helped save.

Originally published as Makers of Oz: Wartime PM John Curtin left legacy of peace