His country was his pride: The 80th anniversary of John Curtin's death

Acknowledgements omitted
 

"His country was his pride
His brother man his cause."

These simple words from John Curtin’s tombstone explain why we gather to pay thanks to his leadership. Recognised locally and globally, granted freedom of the City of London, honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge, Member of the Privy Council. But it was Australia that was his cause. Serving as Australia’s Prime Minister his greatest honour. And here at 24 Jarrad Street, Cottesloe he built the path for himself and for Australia.

As his daughter Elsie Macleod recalled: 

“… there would be quite a lot of callers to the house, or non-stop telephone calls”.

Come 1942 barbed wire would stretch along Cottesloe Beach. Families were blacking out their windows at night. And soon after, the Curtin home was surviving on rations. The visiting US service personnel lobbied the Cottesloe Council for more swimming trunks than rations allowed. The Council in turn lobbied their local Prime Minister who was able to secure them from the Superior Knitting Mills of Perth. 

 
HOSTILITY

These were small challenges compared to the world Curtin faced. 

Hostility to Australia from Winston Churchill. “I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily,” he would remark to his wife Elsie. 

Dame Enid Lyons was in her first term in opposition calling for Curtin’s resignation. His health challenges were extensive: “Pneumonia, gastritis, high blood pressure, neuritis, a heart attack.”

The Department of War Organisation he inherited from the Menzies and Fadden Governments was no more than “a typist and a bare room”.

He had inherited what Gough Whitlam later would call "a broken Party."

On top of that, Curtin, the Western Australian, was afraid of flying.


INDEPENDENCE

It was from here at Jarrad Street that Curtin took Australia into our third, and present, era of foreign policy. 

The first being the Indigenous leadership, culture and heritage of 2500 generations caring for their nations. Then the British colonisation that defined our policies, systems of government and commerce. And finally, the independent nation of Australia that approached the world on our own thanks to John Curtin.

Curtin had a simple expectation to the Parliament and the nation:

See Australia as we are. 

A persuasive orator who conveyed the harsh reality of Australia’s strategic challenges. Not to have our independent future defined by parts of our British past. 

He had already used his leadership to rebuild the Labor Party, in a time of great division. Gough Whitlam, speaking in Perth in 1975 described the power of Curtin’s leadership and ability to bring people together:

"John Curtin not only re-built a broken Party, he not only restored the Party's confidence in itself, he restored its confidence in the idea of leadership. 
He gave it confidence to lead the Nation by giving it confidence in him as its Leader."

Curtin’s leadership brought his Party together, and it brought a nation together, too. Australia today stands in the national identity that Curtin built. Independent, supporting a path away from explicit racial discrimination and ahead of his peers in support for Indigenous land rights.

The tenets of Curtin’s foreign policy ring true to this day. He signed the ANZAC Treaty. Recognised the centrality of regional cooperation. He urged his ministers to build the multilateral systems that emerged out of World War II. 

From this vast export state of Western Australia you can’t deny that the wealth of the state and the nation would not have been possible without John Curtin and the Labor Government. 


LOVE

Finally, Prime Minister Curtin is remembered as a wartime Prime Minister and a man who fought for the rights of working people. But his story - at its heart - is that of a lover, not just a fighter.

He loved the Labor Party and the labour movement. He loved this country. And his most loved citizen was his wife Elsie. She had run what we now know as an electorate office from this house, and she was with John Curtin at the Lodge on 5 July 1945. 

As the Canberra Times reported: 
 
“Mrs. Curtin retired to the adjoining room but did not sleep and was awake when the last moments of her husband came.
 
She was with him as he passed on peacefully.”

Telegrams and cablegrams flooded into the late Prime Minister’s Office the following day. His mortal remains lie in King’s Hall of Parliament for a day of national mourning. 

“No ceremony in the history of Canberra had more dignity or was more touching than the memorial service which preceded the tense moments in which the late John Curtin was taken slowly through the bronze doors out into the gentle sunlight of a Canberra winter's day.”

Three days later 20,000 attend Karrakatta cemetery for his burial. And 80 years later we gather to pay our respects. 

His country was his pride
His brother man his cause.

Thank you.