Voices of the forgotten people
The thoughts and words of the common people as revealed in the thousands of letters sent to Robert Menzies during his prime ministership provide an intimate portrait of the Australia he led. By David Furse-Roberts.
Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians” may be the contemporary heirs to Menzies’ “Forgotten People”, but as Martyn Lyons’ new book reveals, the “forgotten people were not always silent”. As Menzies himself once remarked, “I receive thousands of letters in the course of the year – some favourable, some unfavourable and some indifferent”. In Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies 1949-1966, Lyons delves into the archives to reveal the candid thoughts, feelings, frustrations, grievances, griefs, hopes, dreams, joys and fears of the people Australia’s longest serving prime minister represented in his second term from December 1949 to January 1966.
In this insightful and engaging volume, Lyons brings to light fascinating vignettes from the 22 000 letters penned to Menzies during his sixteen years in the Lodge. Menzies received letters from widows and war veterans, school students, political leaders, homespun philosophers, clairvoyants and prophets. They confided with Menzies on an infinite range of topics and taking up their fountain pens, biros, pencils or typewriters, they wrote on air letters, telegrams, greeting cards and even paper bags.
Dear Prime Minister examines the purpose and function of people’s letters to Menzies. It examines why they wrote, what they hoped to achieve, and the fundamental assumptions that governed their written thoughts. Remarkably, the vast majority received a reply from the PM’s secretariat, presided over by such personalities as Hazel Craig and William Heseltine. Compared to that of more contemporary world leaders, the secretariat of Menzies was decidedly more simplified, personal and less bureaucratised.
Before delving further into the kinds of letters people wrote to Menzies, Lyons provides some fascinating facts and figures of the Prime Minister’s 22 000 letter mailbag. Menzies received about 21.3% of letters from overseas correspondents, whilst 76.9% bore an Australian postmark. Just under a third of letters came from official bodies such as government departments, embassies, businesses, churches and other non-government organisations. The remaining 70% from private individuals. With men more inclined to write to the Prime Minister, 71.7% were written by men, compared to 28.8% by women. Children, youth and seniors were also no exception, with letter writers ranging in age from nine to 90.
Surveying this sheer range of correspondence, Lyons and his readers can appreciate that the archive is a great “leveller”. The letter penned by a former bus conductor on a piece of brown paper sits beside a gilt-inscribed telegram from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. While all of Menzies’ correspondents partook in what Lyon’s describes as the art of “writing upwards”, their mode of addressing the Australian Prime Minister varied enormously. As well as the common “Dear Prime Minister” or “Dear Mr Menzies”, the salutations of writers ranged from the familiar “Dear Bob” to the obsequious “Your Majesty”.
With all these stylistic features, what was it that people actually wrote to Menzies about? Surveying myriad topics, Lyons categorised five distinctive, yet often overlapping, types of letters. These included the congratulatory, the letter of protest or anger, the supplicatory, the political, and the paranoid letter.
According to Lyons, the “congratulatory letter” to Menzies was most common. Correspondents typically offered congratulations to Menzies for both political and personal achievements, such as an election victory or milestone birthday. Including a lot of ‘fan mail’, correspondence of this kind often requested autographs and photographs of Menzies. Letter writers also sent greeting cards and presents to the Prime Minister, with a pair of elephant tusks and a piece of 100th birthday cake representing just some of the gift offerings.
These letters contrasted with those of anger or protest from disgruntled citizens. Letters of this kind typically addressed highly charged issues - with correspondents railing against communists, Catholics, Doc Evatt’s speeches or the government’s failure to abolish the pensions means-test. Such letters, however, could also be about more personal grievances such as finding maggots in a tin of Australian peaches, or an increase in dog license fees. Demonstrating that some issues never change, increases in MPs’ salaries also evoked the ire of correspondents. Angry letters frequently threatened to withhold their vote or tear up their Liberal Party membership. This suggests they came largely from correspondents otherwise loyal to Menzies and the Liberal Party.
Letters of supplication, or personal request, were another category where people would defer to the prime minister for special favours. Whatever their request, supplicants assumed Menzies could help with a range of problems, some political or administrative, and others more personal. In response to a request from some holidaying Australians, Menzies got them some tickets to a London cricket test. Requests to attend royal events were also commonplace. On weightier matters, people contacted Menzies asking for help with welfare, employment and even a family law dispute. On most of these occasions, Menzies and his secretariat would direct these people to the relevant agency or government department for direct assistance.
Keen to remind Menzies of who had put him in power, the voting public also wrote letters to Menzies with political advice, urging him to reconsider key policy positions or legislation on matters as diverse as banning the Communist Party or reintroducing conscription. Writers thought letters were their best chance of bringing public opinion to his notice and of influencing government policy. In an age before popular forums such as talk-back radio, letters were the primary means by which a prime minister could read the public mood.
Appreciating the historical reality that the Menzies years were attended by profound public angst over the Cold War, Lyons observed that a sizeable number of letters to Menzies fell into the “paranoid” category. With such letters written in the grip of the nuclear age, the worst fears of the pubic were often laid bare. As well as communism and the threat of nuclear war, Lyons noted that letter writers exhibited paranoia over Catholicism, non-European immigration and freemasonry, as well as occasional anti-Semitism. Many of these letters were homiletic in tone and some resorted to quoting apocalyptic texts from the Bible, warning of the perceived Armageddon to come.
In addition to its broad and instructive analysis of written correspondence to Menzies, the great strength of Lyons’ book is its appreciation of the historical context. Rather than judging the 1950s against the values of the present in what he calls the “sin of historical anachronism”, Lyons appreciates that the letters were products of their time. Accordingly, they mirrored popular attitudes towards such issues as post-war immigration, the British connection and the Royal Visit of 1954, the preservation of ‘white Australia’, sectarianism, cold-war communism, the Petro Affair, rapprochement with Japan, apartheid in South Africa and the transition from Empire to Commonwealth.
According to Lyons, the letters revealed the heart of Australia’s Liberal-voting middle class and the priorities that shaped their worldview. Most were informed by a Protestant Christianity, the notion of a dual Australian-British nationality, an attachment to white Australia, the commitment to a robust work ethic and belief in traditional gender roles.
As well as shedding vital light on the outlook and attitudes of the Australian electorate during 1950s and 60s, Dear Prime Minister also reveals more about Menzies himself. Lyons notes how the letters underscored the interconnected threads of Menzies’ networks amongst the Scots, the Presbyterians, the Liberal Party, the constituents of Kooyong, the cricketing world, the legal fraternity, the gentleman’s clubs and the British commonwealth.
As much as it adds to our understanding of Menzies himself, a weakness of this book is that it does not always give due attention to Menzies’ replies to many of these letters. To be sure, Menzies’ responses were frequently mediated through his secretariat while other letters went unanswered. Nevertheless, the many replies that Menzies did pen would prove instructive for readers in showing how the Prime Minister both listened to his correspondents and engaged firsthand with the matters and issues they had raised.
Adding to the growing corpus of works on Menzies, this latest contribution by Lyons is singularly original by producing what he calls a ‘New History from Below’. In contrast to the old “Great Man” theory of history, Lyons’ book is where the voices of the common people, through their letters, shape the historical narrative of Menzies’ Australia. In his words, “their cries of pain, their anxieties, prejudices and unspoken assumptions form the subject of this book”.
From Allan Martin to Troy Bramston, the life and achievements of Menzies have been chronicled by biographies and other studies, but Dear Prime Minister breaks new ground by unveiling the thoughts and words of Menzies’ “forgotten people”. With this focus on the grassroots, Lyons shows how these letter writers reminded Menzies of the values they shared, and called him to account when he appeared to forget them. As such, Dear Prime Minister enriches not only our understanding of Menzies, but importantly, of the people who made his record term as Prime Minister possible through the ballot box.
Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies 1949-1966
Martyn Lyons
Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021