The Premier Nobody Remembers

On 17 May 2012, eight weeks after winning the largest majority in the history of the Queensland Parliament, the new Premier rose to deliver his first speech to the House. He spent a paragraph on Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as any Premier of his party would. Then he did something no Premier had done in living memory. He spent four paragraphs explaining to the Parliament of Queensland who Sir Francis Nicklin was.

"Another long-serving but often overlooked Premier should also be acknowledged," Campbell Newman said. Sir George Francis Reuben Nicklin, the former member for Murrumba, "will probably be recalled by only a small number of members as it is now more than 40 years since he left office and more than 30 years since his passing." The speech went on to lay out the career — the Military Medal, the sixteen years as Opposition Leader, the four elections won with increasing majorities, the record for the longest period as Premier that Nicklin held on the day he retired — as one would for an audience that had never heard it.¹

That is an extraordinary thing for a Premier to have to do about a predecessor who governed for a decade within the lifetime of most of the chamber. It is also, I want to argue, the most Queensland thing imaginable. This book is about what the state forgets, and it has so far concerned itself with buildings. This chapter is about a government. The mechanism is the same.

I. The gap

Between 1915 and 1957, broken only by the three years of the Moore Government during the Depression, the Australian Labor Party governed Queensland. Between 1968 and 1987, Joh Bjelke-Petersen did. Both periods are exhaustively written about. The one is the longest continuous Labor administration in Australian history; the other produced a Royal Commission, a Premier in the dock, and a literature that is still growing.

Wedged between them are the eleven years of the Nicklin Coalition Government. When I began the research for my Masters thesis on that government in 2012, the only substantial published account of it was a single chapter by Brian Stevenson in the University of Queensland Press's The Premiers of Queensland, and Stevenson, so far as I have been able to discover, remained the only historian to have shown any sustained interest in the subject.² Everything else was a paragraph in a general history, or a page in the biography of one of Nicklin's ministers, or a line in the memoirs of the man who succeeded him. My thesis was completed at the University of New England in 2014, and an abridged version appeared in the Queensland History Journal the same year.³ It remains, as far as I know, the only monograph-length treatment of the Nicklin Government that exists.

I do not say that to claim too much for it. I say it because it is the fact this chapter has to explain. A government that transformed the state — and I will set out in what follows why I think that description is the accurate one rather than the generous one — left so little trace in the state's memory of itself that, forty-four years after it ended, a Premier had to introduce it to Parliament.

II. 1957

The circumstances in which Frank Nicklin came to office were among the most unusual in Queensland's history, and they bear on what followed, because the new government was in a real sense an accident.

The Labor split of 1955 had divided the party in Victoria, New South Wales and federally along the line of Catholic anti-communism, and had produced the Democratic Labor Party. Queensland's turn came two years later. In 1956 the Australian Workers' Union, the state's largest, withdrew its support from the largely Catholic Labor government of Vince Gair and endorsed the federal Opposition Leader, H.V. Evatt, and the party's Left. A dispute between the Gair Government and the union-dominated State Executive ended in 1957 with the Premier expelled from the ALP. All but one member of his Cabinet went with him into a new anti-communist party, the Queensland Labor Party, and the Transport Minister, Jack Duggan, was left leading what remained.⁴

Gair no longer commanded a majority in the state's single-chamber Parliament, and Nicklin's instinct — this is the detail that tells you most about the man — was to prop him up. The biographers of both Nicklin and Gordon Chalk, writing three decades later, record that the Country Party leader's first thought was to support the Queensland Labor Party in coalition, in exchange for an electoral redistribution. It took the federal Country Party leader and former Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Fadden, flying to Brisbane to persuade him that this was his chance to be Premier. Nicklin allowed the Gair Government to be defeated on the floor of the Assembly on a vote for supply, and an election was called for 3 August 1957.⁵

After sixteen years as Opposition Leader and five election defeats, Nicklin led the Country-Liberal Coalition to 42 of the 75 seats — a net gain of eighteen, with the two Labor parties reduced to 31 between them and Duggan losing Toowoomba East.⁶ The new Premier was sixty-two: born at Murwillumbah, awarded the Military Medal at Dernancourt in April 1918 for taking command of his platoon after its commander was killed, settled after the war on a twenty-acre pineapple farm at Palmwoods under the soldier-settlement scheme, and elected for Murrumba on the same day in 1932 that the Moore Government fell.⁷ He was known — and not ironically — as "Honest Frank", and at least one Country Party backbencher thought the 1957 split had come just in time for a leader who was too nice to his opponents.⁸ Without Fadden, it is fair to say, he might well have remained in the familiar office of Opposition Leader for the rest of his career.

III. What the government did

The Queensland the Coalition inherited was, on its own Treasury's account, close to broke. Leo Hielscher, who had joined Treasury from the Audit Office in 1954 and would go on to serve fifteen Treasurers over a career that ended in 2010, recalled that one of his first tasks had been to negotiate a temporary Commonwealth loan to pay the wages of the state's own employees, because the state was "virtually broke". The economy, he said, was "moribund".⁹ Half a century later, delivering the Queensland Parliament's inaugural parliamentary oration, he was blunter still: in the early 1960s, "our economy was still really Third World."¹⁰ Mount Isa was the only substantial non-agricultural industry in the state. The railway linking it to the coast was, in Hielscher's word, "clapped out".¹¹

The Nicklin Government's answer had three parts, and they were connected. Industry needed transport, power and water; those needed capital the state did not have; and all of it needed a population educated past the age of thirteen.

The first move was the railway. Refused permission by the federal Loan Council to raise the money on private markets, the government applied — successfully, and this was novel for an Australian state — to the World Bank. The Mount Isa-Townsville line was rebuilt, repaid within ten years, and has returned freight revenue and royalties to the Treasury ever since.¹² It was the first of a series of projects that put Queensland in a position to meet the demand for minerals that arrived with world industrialisation in the late 1960s and 1970s: new towns, harbours, power stations, refineries and smelters, built with the mining companies rather than against them.¹³ Gladstone, a sleepy rural town of six thousand in 1962, became the terminus of the line from the Moura coalfield, an exporting port with a power station and an alumina refinery, and a city of twenty-five thousand by 1982. Townsville's population doubled between 1957 and 1974. At Weipa the government extracted from Comalco enough to build the town's schools and facilities out of the proceeds of the world's largest bauxite deposit.¹⁴ Treasury raised coal royalties by degrees, and used them to subsidise the headworks costs of new housing estates, which kept the cost of living in the south-east below that of the southern states and drew the interstate migrants who brought their skills and capital with them.¹⁵

Agriculture was not abandoned for any of this. In 1957 only six per cent of rural land in Queensland was held freehold, against sixty per cent in Victoria and a third in New South Wales; over the following twenty years thirty-four million hectares were converted, and the Brigalow Scheme cleared four and a half million hectares of scrub for grazing on what a later assessor called "reasonably sound rural economic principles, if not environmentally sustainable ones".¹⁶ The Beef Roads scheme, in partnership with the Commonwealth, gave the north-west road trains and a route to market. Thirteen thousand additional hectares came under irrigation.¹⁷

Raymond Evans's summary of the decade in his History of Queensland is worth quoting because it is a hostile witness's:

It was done, moreover, by a Cabinet of farmers and small businessmen with a horror of spending money on themselves. The Executive Building in George Street, where Cabinet met, dated from the age of the horse and buggy; its doors were designed to catch the breeze, so that traffic noise and the heels of the women typists on the floor above interrupted proceedings. The Public Works Minister brought a submission to double-glaze the windows, install air-conditioning, lower the ceiling and move the bathroom. Cabinet baulked at the cost — £4,570, out of an annual state budget of £115 million — and voted to buy a new table instead.¹⁹ The same Cabinet discovered on taking office that in ninety-eight years of responsible government Queensland had never kept a formal record of its Cabinet's decisions, sent a man to Canberra to study the Commonwealth's secretariat, and in October 1957 became the first state to establish one.²⁰ Nicklin, interviewed after his retirement, put his government's achievement as "lifting Queensland from a rather backward state to the leading state of the Commonwealth".²¹ Allowing for the pride of an old man, the record supports the direction of travel, if not yet the destination.

None of this is what I think the government's most lasting contribution was. That lies elsewhere, and it is the part of the record that was least welcome when I wrote it.

IV. The unwritten agreement

The educationalist Rupert Goodman described the Queenslanders schooled between the two world wars as a "lost generation", because of the poverty of the secondary education available to them, and the description can fairly be extended to the twelve years after the Second World War.²² At the change of government in 1957 there were forty state high schools in Queensland, serving seventeen thousand students across the most decentralised state in the Commonwealth. A great many more children had simply stopped at Year 8, because the nearest high school was too far away or the nearest private one cost too much.²³

The pattern of what had been built is the argument. The first six state high schools were opened in 1912, all of them in small rural towns that had no private Grammar school — none in Brisbane, none within a hundred kilometres of it. The cities that had Grammar schools, Brisbane and Toowoomba and Townsville and Rockhampton, waited for a second building phase between 1917 and 1924. Then it stopped. Between 1924 and 1939, while primary enrolments rose by seven thousand, not one new state high school was built.²⁴ Laying the foundation stone of a new Catholic secondary college in 1953, the Labor Premier, Vince Gair, said in terms what the figures imply: "if it were not for the Church, the state government would be unable to cope with the public's demand for education."²⁵

That sentence is the nearest thing to a written version of the agreement this chapter is about, and it is worth being precise about what the agreement was, because it was never a document. Sir James Duhig was Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane from 1917 to 1965, which is very nearly the span of Labor's rule. He was careful never to be party political; he did not need to be, because a majority of Labor's members of Parliament were in his flock, and he was close to Ned Hanlon, Premier from 1946 to 1952.²⁶ The Church had two interests in keeping the state out of secondary education, one financial and one ideological, and the thesis I wrote set both out from the sources.

The financial interest was in the mechanism of the Scholarship. From 1900, entry to any secondary school, public or Catholic, meant passing an examination at the end of Year 8, and the money a child won in that examination was paid directly to the secondary college the child then attended. Catholic secondary colleges were funded by it. Any move to make schooling past Year 8 compulsory, or to open free secondary places to every child rather than to the ones who had passed the Scholarship, threatened the way the Church's schools were paid for. The ideological interest was the one Humphrey McQueen described in 1979 and I found no reason to dispute: the Church favoured a state of yeoman farmers with a basic education as the surest bulwark against industrialisation, intellectualism, the organisation of workers, and the communism it feared would follow from all three. Proposals to raise the leaving age or to open secondary education to everyone were opposed on that ground as well.²⁷ A Labor government that was itself relieved of the cost of building high schools, and whose caucus shared the Church's anxiety about communism after 1949, had every reason to leave the arrangement alone. It did, for forty-two years.

The consequences were measurable. In 1952 Queensland spent nine shillings and eightpence a year on the maintenance of each secondary student — up from four and tenpence five years earlier — while the other states spent between twenty-four and thirty shillings. The education budget was the lowest of any state as a share of the whole. Goodman's judgement was that "Labor Party thinking restricted secondary education in quantity and quality", and his assessment of the forty years of Ministers for Public Instruction who preceded 1957 was that only one of them had a secondary education himself, and that change "could not come from this succession of Labor Ministers".²⁸ In 1951, of the 13,511 secondary students in the state, 5,928 were in public schools.²⁹ The Church had the rest.

What Nicklin did was break the arrangement without ever naming it. He gave the portfolio to his deputy, Jack Pizzey — a former teacher with a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education, the first Education Minister in the state's history to hold a degree — and raised it from eleventh in Cabinet precedence, where Gair had kept it under the name of Public Instruction, to third.³⁰ Elected on a promise of an "education revolution", the government lifted education's share of the budget from eight per cent to 9.2 in its first year and to 11.7 by the time Nicklin retired, and Nicklin said afterwards that other departments deliberately "went short" to allow it.³¹ The Scholarship was abolished in 1962 and completion of the Junior Certificate made compulsory.³² And the schools were built: sixty-one new state high schools in eleven years, two and a half times the number built in the forty-five years before, with secondary departments added to more than forty primary schools, distributed across Brisbane, the provincial cities, the rural districts and the remote Aboriginal settlements without any evidence of favour.³³ By 1961 the state's secondary enrolment had quadrupled to 53,093, and 35,695 of them — sixty-seven per cent — were in state high schools. By 1968 ninety per cent of school-aged children lived within daily travelling distance of one.³⁴ Above the schools, the University of Queensland's enrolment more than doubled between 1954 and 1960; a University College opened in Townsville in 1961; institutes of technology followed at Toowoomba and Rockhampton with a view to their becoming universities, which both did in 1992; and Pizzey, who held the portfolio until he succeeded Nicklin as Premier, began the planning for Griffith.³⁵

The Catholic system was not legislated against and nothing was taken from it. It simply ceased to be the only road to a school certificate for a working family in Queensland. That is what the end of an unwritten agreement looks like: nothing is repealed, because nothing was ever enacted.

V. Why nobody wrote it

There are two explanations for the gap in the literature, and I think both are true.

The first is structural, and it is the explanation I would give for most of what this book describes. The Nicklin years fall in a dead zone for Queensland historians. They are too late for the colonial and Federation scholars, whose story closes around 1901. They are too early, and far too quiet, for the scholars of the Bjelke-Petersen era, who arrive in 1968 with the street marches and the State of Emergency and the Fitzgerald Inquiry already visible on the horizon. Nicklin retired peacefully on 17 January 1968; Pizzey succeeded him and died within the year; and then came Joh. The drama sits on either side. The substance sits in the middle, and substance does not generate a literature. The serious academic work on twentieth-century Queensland was done by a generation whose research agendas were set in the 1970s and 1980s, when the story that demanded telling was the government then in office, and by the time that story had been told, the profession had moved on.

The second explanation is narrower, and I have direct experience of it.

The thesis was awarded 96 per cent. Some years later a Queensland publisher offered to bring it out as a book. The condition was that I remove the section on the Catholic Church and the schools. I declined, and the book did not appear.³⁶ I will not speculate in print about the publisher's reasons. I will only observe that of everything in the thesis — the police corruption the National Hotel Inquiry failed to find, the cover-ups of two ministerial resignations, the State of Emergency at Mount Isa — the passage a publisher could not live with was the one about who built the high schools, and who had agreed for forty years not to.

That passage does not rest on my reading alone, which is worth saying, since the natural objection to a single thesis is that it is a single thesis. Evan Whitton, whose Hillbilly Dictator is the standard journalistic account of the police state, set the Catholic influence on the Labor Party at the head of his explanation of how Queensland came to be governed as it was.³⁷ Humphrey McQueen, writing in Meanjin a decade before him, described "a governing stratum of Labor party politicians, Australian Workers Union officials, state public servants and Catholic clergy" who between them "built a political culture", and set out the Church's preference for farming over industry as a bulwark against everything from "race suicide" to communism.³⁸ Ross Fitzgerald's history of the period says the same in more measured terms. And Peter Charlton, in State of Mind, his attempt to explain why Queensland is different, put the point in the form this book has been circling since its first page: Queensland's politics, he wrote, drawing on Colin Hughes, are the politics of development, concerned with things and places rather than with people and ideas, and its politicians are uncomfortable with abstract discussion.³⁹ A state that had been kept, by agreement, from secondary education for the first half of the century was not going to produce a political culture troubled by ideas in the second. The lost generation grew up and voted.

I should add, because it belongs to the honesty of the record, that the Nicklin Government was not a golden age. Its handling of the Mount Isa strike of 1964-65 was condemned in every newspaper in the country and by every later analyst, and the Deputy Premier himself called it a "blue duck".⁴⁰ Its National Hotel Inquiry of 1963-64, hemmed in by its terms of reference and starved of witnesses, missed a system of police corruption that would run for another twenty-five years.⁴¹ Nicklin misled the public about the reasons two of his ministers left the Cabinet, to protect, in his own words, "an old friend and an old cobber".⁴² None of that is in dispute and none of it is why the government is forgotten. It is forgotten because its achievements were of the kind that do not photograph.

VI. What the record keeps

The argument of this collection has been that Queensland remembers resistance and forgets consent; that the Belle Vue and Cloudland survive in the state's memory because they were fought over, and the far greater losses since have vanished because nobody fought. A government is subject to the same rule. The Bjelke-Petersen years are remembered because they were contested — in the streets, in the courts, at a Royal Commission. The Nicklin years produced sixty-one high schools, a rebuilt railway, an industrial port and a Cabinet secretariat, and they produced almost no conflict at all, and so they produced almost no memory. Brian Stevenson's judgement, in the only biographical entry the man has, is that Nicklin "presided over the most tranquil ten years in Queensland politics in the twentieth century".⁴³ Tranquillity is not an archive.

There is a further consequence, and it is the one that has done the most damage to the way the state understands itself. Because nobody wrote the Nicklin decade, the industrialisation it began has been attributed, almost without exception, to the government that followed it. Bjelke-Petersen inherited a state with a World Bank railway, a coal export economy, an alumina industry at Gladstone, a bauxite town at Weipa, a royalty regime, and a secondary school system that had more than doubled — and he inherited a public that had never been told any of it was there, because it had arrived without a fight. The received story of Queensland's boom therefore begins in 1968, and the received story of Queensland's backwardness before it therefore has no explanation but climate and distance. Both stories are wrong in the same way. What was built quietly was credited to the man who made noise; what was withheld quietly, for forty years, was never credited to anyone.

I do not want to claim too much for one thesis, or for one Premier. The Queensland of the 1970s had many fathers. But if you do not know what was built between 1957 and 1968, you cannot accurately describe what was inherited in 1968, or what the long conservative era was actually for, or why a state that was "really Third World" in 1960 was the destination of a generation of interstate migrants by 1980. And if you do not know why there were no high schools before 1957, you cannot explain the political culture that has followed. The pineapple farmer from Palmwoods did more for this state than the textbook says, and he did it in a way the state is constitutionally incapable of noticing. He did it without a scandal.