By: Paul Strangio
| ‘Farewell to conscience of the nation’, so proclaimed one headline announcing the death of the Labor Party giant, James Ford Cairns. Aged 89, Cairns passed away on 12 October 2003 at his Narre Warren East home on Melbourne’s outskirts. Fittingly, his last major public appearance occurred that February at the mass protest rally in Melbourne against the impending US-led invasion of Iraq. Wheelchair bound and sporting a placard, ‘Make Love Not War’, when his name was announced to the crowd by rally organisers there were loud cheers of acclamation. For the remainder of the rally, as he slowly made his way down Swanston Street, pushed by his granddaughter, Kristen, well-wishers stopped to shake his hand, while others cried, ‘Good on ya, Jim; you started all this’. | 1 |
| It had all started for Jim Cairns in the shadow of another war on 4 October 1914. Born in Carlton, he was the first and only child of newly arrived immigrants from the United Kingdom, who had met and fallen in love during the voyage to Australia. His father departed Australia with the AIF the following year, never to return. As a youngster Cairns was told his father had died in the war; in truth, he had deserted the family. In the absence of her husband, Jim’s mother, Letty, and her infant son joined her parents and sisters on a farm in Sunbury. To supplement the family income, Letty took paid work away from the farm and thereafter a physical distance developed between mother and son. Another cause of that remoteness was that Letty had contracted syphilis from her husband and feared passing it on. Compounded by the family’s Methodist puritanism, Cairns emerged emotionally straitened from his early life. | 2 |
Jim Cairns addressing a Moratorium meeting, 9 May 1970 Photo: Cairns family collection | |
| He performed well as a student, but even better as an athlete. Cairns left Northcote High with his Intermediate Certificate at the height of the Great Depression. He struggled to find steady or meaningful employment. Meanwhile, his grandparents, unable to maintain their loan repayments, lost the family farm. These experiences scarred the teenage Cairns, planting the seeds of hostility to the capitalist order; whereas others could imagine, and aspired to, a reformed capitalist system, his intuition was that it was morally irredeemable. | 3 |
| In the mid-1930s, through an athletics contact, Cairns got the opportunity to enter the Victoria Police — a job that offered a secure income to support his by then invalid mother. Physically courageous and diligent, he prospered as a member of the newly-created shadowing squad. His involvement in athletics again proved serendipitous when he met the vivacious Gwendolyne Robb at a competition at Olympic Park in 1938. They wed the following year, Cairns adopting Gwen’s two sons from an earlier marriage, Philip and Barry. The boys, who until their teenage years assumed he was their natural father, were devoted to him. | 4 |
| Intellectually outgrowing the police force, Cairns enrolled at the University of Melbourne in the early 1940s. His academic talent led to an invitation at the end of World War II to tutor in economic history. Despite a comparatively late start to his academic career, Cairns advanced steadily, reaching the position of Senior Lecturer. In 1951 he was awarded a Nuffield scholarship to study at Oxford University, where he embarked on a doctoral thesis. By the late 1940s Cairns had become politically active. He flirted with the Communist Party but his ex-‘cop’ status barred him from membership; instead, he joined the Australian Labour Party, despite his misgivings about its lack of radicalism. Many of the issues emblematic of his political career date from that time: his opposition to the White Australia Policy, his advocacy of international cooperation, especially engagement with Asia, and his defence of civil liberties. These attitudes were sufficiently heretical for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to open a file on him — a file that steadily expanded over the next three decades. | 5 |
| Cairns’ growing political activism culminated in his election to the federal parliament at the Labor Split election of 1955, winning a bitter contest for the Richmond-centred electorate of Yarra. Whereas others despaired at Labor’s consignment to the political wilderness during the Menzies ascendancy, Cairns excelled in the oppositional role. Through dint of his unorthodox, but compellingly argued views on international relations, his prodigious work capacity, his charisma and telegenic good looks, he emerged by the early 1960s as the only serious contender to Gough Whitlam as pretender to the Labor leadership. Theirs was a rivalry that went to the heart of the party’s ethos and ideology. To Whitlam’s admonishment that only ‘the impotent are pure’, Cairns retorted that in politics, ‘unlike football, winning is not all’; against Whitlam’s social democratic revisionism, Cairns defended traditional democratic socialism. When Whitlam became leader in 1967, and then resigned that leadership in a fit of pique in early 1968 over the issue of resistance to his attempts to reform the Victorian ALP, Cairns went within six votes of defeating him. | 6 |
| His leadership of anti-Vietnam War movement catapulted Cairns to national prominence; he was the movement’s chief theoretician and public face. With time, most Australians came to accept his argument, expounded in books and at hundreds of meetings across the country, that intervention was misguided. His status as a political folk hero peaked during the Moratorium campaigns of 1970–71. In the face of shrill warnings from conservative politicians and editorial writers that mass public demonstrations were tantamount to mob rule, Cairns calmly held the line, injecting notions of civil disobedience into Australia’s immature political culture. When he led 100,000 marchers down Bourke Street on 8 May 1970, he struck a mighty blow for the legitimisation of protest in this country, enlarging the space for democratic action. | 7 |
| Cairns’ role in the Whitlam Government has been largely appraised through the prism of the disasters of 1975, obscuring the fact that for the first two years he proved one of its most capable ministers. He enjoyed particular success in the Overseas Trade portfolio, leading a pioneering trade mission to China in May 1973. His achievements were recognised by his colleagues when he was elected Deputy Prime Minister in June 1974, an elevation also prompted by the belief that he would be a counterweight to Whitlam’s autocratic tendencies. It is no exaggeration to suggest that these were unparalleled heights for an Australian politician of radical persuasion. In the second half of 1974 he outshone Whitlam as the government’s chief electoral asset, winning plaudits for his compassionate handling of the Cyclone Tracey crisis. Various forces precipitated the dramatic unravelling of his political career in 1975. He became Treasurer — a job he rightly suspected he was temperamentally unsuited to — at a time when the post-war Keynesian economic management consensus was fracturing, and governments across the western world were struggling to adapt. He fought a rearguard defence of the full employment ideal and against the encroachment of the new market economic orthodoxy. And then there was the impact of Junie Morosi, who disturbed the ethic of self-denial that was at the core of his complex psychological mix. | 8 |
| For a time following 1975, Cairns communed with the counter culture. When that involvement faltered, he focussed on his writings as his last and unlikely means of changing the world. He churned out several self-published works elaborating his post-1975 social theory. Braving public indifference and occasional derision, he hawked the books at markets and university campuses across Melbourne. Easily dismissed as new age eccentricism, his later writings, when boiled down, were an appeal for the privileging of human rather than material growth. | 9 |
| Cairns was special for many reasons. Throughout an extraordinarily varied life in which he displayed a remarkable capacity for reinvention, he was also constant. For some 60 years, guided by a clear moral compass, he fought to right wrongs created by racism, colonialism, authoritarianism and militarism, and to expose the iniquities and acquisitiveness of the capitalist market place. His was a crusade rooted in an indomitable belief that the world could be made a better place and an incurable optimism about the human condition. | 10 |
| He was also a risk-taker — what Manning Clark called an enlarger of public life. Cairns understood the critical importance and positive value of dissent from mainstream values and opinions. Moreover, he imagined Labor’s ethos in that light — anti-establishment — as a party that stood for a different order, one which put cooperation before competition and self-interest, compassion before efficiency. In holding that faith, probably more so than any other Laborite of the second half of the twentieth century, Cairns personified the party’s radical-oppositional tendency. This was never its dominant tendency — far from it — but in Cairns and others it kept flickering at least, providing a crucial balancing ingredient in the party’s overall mix. He deserved better than the grudging rehabilitation extended to him by the ALP during his final years. Only upon his death did the party seem to belatedly appreciate his worth, with soon to be elected federal parliamentary leader Mark Latham describing him as ‘the most significant Labor person to pass away since Dr Evatt’. | 11 |
| For the very reason he dared move to the beat of a different drum, Cairns was routinely ahead of his time: on opposing the White Australia Policy; on engagement with Asia, in exposing the folly of the Vietnam War; in asking questions about the limitations and hollowness of what so often passes for democratic participation in this country; and in suggesting that the next frontier of social progress depends on how as a society we nurture our young. | 12 |
| Finally, there is the example of how Cairns conducted his public life. While he presented as emotionally remote, forbidding even, and despite the extraordinary demand and pace of his life, he was renowned for the inordinate lengths he would go to assist those he considered victims of an uncaring social order or arbitrary authority. Legion are the stories of his acts of personal kindness, some aired over talkback radio in the days following his death and others swapped at his funeral service. I regret that I did not capture more of this side of Cairns in my biography of him. Nor did Cairns suspend this decency in the political theatre. Regularly the target of calumny because of his unconventional attitudes, he maintained a stoic civility in political debate as disarming as it was unusual. Bill Hayden, who displaced him as Treasurer in mid-1975, later observed of Cairns: ‘Few people managed to stand for so much that was good and to do so as decently as he did’; while Whitlam has referred to the unsurpassed nobility he brought to the Labor cause. | 13 |
| The Anglo-American political philosopher and radical democrat, Thomas Paine, wrote: ‘Moderation in temper is always a virtue but moderation in principle is always a vice’. In this injunction we find distilled the formula by which Cairns enriched the Labor Party and Australian public life: the combination of grace with which he practised politics, and steadfastly held convictions. | 14 |
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