Mitchell Toy on how a plan was hatched to make Sir John Monash dictator of Australia

MUSSOLINI. Hitler. Monash? For a mad moment Aussie citizens plotted to make the man on our $100 note dictator of Australia.

A group of dissatisfied citizens thought revered Victorian military commander Sir John Monash was the man to be dictator of Australia.

HIS name is immortalised in a university, a freeway, a hospital and a local council area. His face peers out from the $100 note. But for a time in the early 1930s, a group of dissatisfied citizens thought revered Victorian military commander Sir John Monash was the man to be dictator of Australia.

Feeling burdened by an inept government and parliament, languishing from the effects of the great depression and seeking to galvanise the Australian identity to pull the nation from its plight, the idea of having an Australian dictator began to gain traction.

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Major cities were experiencing a drop in population as workers turned to rural areas to find income from farm labour.

Labor Prime Minister James Scullin, who came to power two days before the enormous 1929 Wall St crash that plunged the world into economic chaos, was struggling to get a grip on lengthy industrial disputes and falling commodity prices.

To make matters worse for Scullin, the newly elected Labor Premier of NSW Jack Lang was forming rival policies and winning over a lot of his federal colleagues.

In 1931, a year before the depression reached its worst point with almost a third of the population out of work, there seemed almost no idea that would go unheard if it meant making things better for the Australian people.

Monash as depicted on the $100 note, left.

A citizens’ plot was hatched to make Sir John Monash, right, dictator of Australia in the style of budding European fascist Benito Mussolini and national socialist Adolf Hitler, left.

And there were a lot of unorthodox ideas in Europe which seemed to be all right at the time; Australians yet had no idea how dangerous budding national socialism could be in Germany or the shadow of fascism in Italy.

To a country on the brink of economic ruin, appointing a dictator to seize Canberra seemed no worse than the status quo and Sir John Monash seemed an obvious choice.

A civil engineer with a sharp intellect before the war, Monash went on to command forces in Egypt and in the Gallipoli campaign, eventually becoming the commander of the Australian Corps in 1918.

He was considered by fellow allied commanders to be one of the finest generals in the war and his creativity and intellect were widely praised.

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At a meeting of the Flying Corps Association in Perth in early 1931, the suggestion was made for Monash to take control.

The plan was simple: gather 5000 specially selected army veterans, urge them to move on Canberra and seize the young capital.

If the thousands of professional soldiers couldn’t be mustered, then a “khaki shirts” movement could have been an option.

That might have mirrored the brown-shirted Nazis that were terrorising the Weimar Republic of Germany as a precursor to Hitler’s rule and the black-shirted thugs that helped Italian dictator Benito Mussolini gain power.

Once the capital, parliament and bureaucracies had been seized, the organised revolutionaries would then hand power to Sir John Monash, who they simply hoped would be cooperative enough to take it on.

But what would happen after that remained blurry.

Some thought Monash himself would be the best person to run the country, since his military service was so distinguished.

But others thought that the capital could only be seized in the name of the king and that word would have to inevitably be sent to London to tell the British to send somebody over who could effectively rule Australia in the king’s name.

In the meantime, it would be Monash’s job to make sure business as usual ran smoothly.

Despite wide coverage and discussion of the idea, it never got off the ground.

A 1931 newspaper article detailing the suggestion to make Monash dictator of Australia.

A depression-era cartoon about inflation, lampooning the Australian government under James Scullin.

An article in the Charleville Times newspaper of Queensland in April 1931, one of many reports around the country about the notorious meeting, stated it was unlikely the plan would ever be successfully hatched, but noted: “That the suggestion should have been made is, however, significant of the trend of popular feeling.

“The idea appears to be in the air, and, given time, may take concrete shape. An efficient government would be a novelty in Australia.”

But Monash himself was perhaps the most important reason the suggestion never came to fruition — he seemed to have no appetite at all for absolute rule and said he would never be a part of an overthrow of constitutional government in Australia.

And it was in October 1931, months after the suggestion of dictatorship had been publicised, that Monash died of a heart attack in Melbourne, burying with him any possibility that the overthrow was possible.

It would take a decade for Australia to recover from the depression, by which time WWII had started and the democratic powers of Europe were fighting against the very dictators who helped inspire the Monash plot.

James Scullin, who remained Prime Minister until 1935, was later said to have almost been broken by the task of leading Australia through the depression.