Born 20 December Jeparit, Victoria. Died 15 May Melbourne, Victoria. Partner Dame Pattie Menzies. Party Liberal. Milestones Communist referendum defeated A referendum was held on 22 September on the issue of banning the Communist Party of Australia. Image 1 Dec Display as: List Grid. Article 27 Mar Article 16 Dec Audio 18 Sep Article 14 Jul Article 13 Jul Article 12 Jul Article 11 Jul Article 29 Jun Article 25 Jun Article 19 Jun Article 26 Apr Article 18 Apr Entry to federal politics.
The Menzies agenda. Snowy Mountains Hydro live-sketch animation. Economic prosperity. International presence. Beyond politics Menzies travelled widely in Australia and overseas on government business.
Later years Robert Menzies devoted himself to authorship in retirement. Menzies died in Melbourne on 15 May and was given a state funeral. This legislation included: The Supply and Development Act to set up the Department of Supply to organise purchase and manufacture of arms and munitions.
This law could be extended to cover almost any activity, but was sometimes successfully challenged in the courts. The Aliens Registration Act to control the movement of foreigners in Australia. The National Registration Act to set up a registry of men liable for military service and to help mobilisation. The Trading with the Enemy Act to prohibit trade with countries at war with Australia. The Conciliation and Arbitration Act provided for the use of secret ballots in trade union elections.
The National Health Act consolidated medical, hospital, pharmaceutical and pensioner medical services. The Broadcasting and Television Act gave the ABC the same powers in television as it already had in radio, and made other arrangements for the introduction of television. A separate industrial court was established under an amendment to the Conciliation and Arbitration Act.
Various banking acts, including the Reserve Bank Act , which separated central banking from other functions, had been blocked in the Senate during the twenty-second parliament but became Acts of the twenty-third parliament when the Menzies government obtained a majority in the Senate at the election. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1 9 59 provided for uniform divorce laws rather than the ten codes then existing.
The Telephonic Communications Interception Act since replaced established the procedures by which ASIO could tap telephones in order to protect the Commonwealth from acts of espionage or subversion, and the Crimes Act redefined the offences of treason, sabotage and espionage.
Following the emergence of the D. For all that, Menzies enjoyed formidable support in his own right. In a series of celebrated broadcasts, beginning after his fall in , he had appealed effectively to the 'Forgotten People'—the broad middle class and especially its women —rendered powerless, he said, by its lack of wealth on the one hand, and of organization on the other. The period of Menzies' dominance was also marked by extraordinary economic growth.
This 'long boom' was experienced in most advanced economies, but the Menzies governments' stability, their declared policies of 'development' and their continuance of the ambitious immigration programme initiated by Labor were factors in a transformation of Australian material life, as indicated by markers as various as growth in population and home ownership, the ubiquity of whitegoods, and a great jump in motor-vehicle ownership. In the years after , when the minister for trade and industry Sir John McEwen was leader of the Country Party and deputy prime minister, promotion of Australian production and export through protection, tariff manipulation and aggressive international trade negotiations became characteristics of the Menzies era.
McEwen's department was sometimes at odds with the Treasury, occasionally to Menzies' displeasure. This was the case in , for example, when Menzies rejected—on Treasury's advice—the report by Sir James Vernon's committee of economic inquiry, a document understood to embody the views of McEwen's public service lieutenants, in particular his former departmental secretary Sir John Crawford. Nevertheless, though temperamentally different, Menzies and McEwen saw eye to eye on most matters.
On the eve of one Federal election in the s Menzies could write to McEwen: 'There never has been such a partnership as this in the political history of Australia'. Preservation of the Liberal-Country Party coalition was in fact one of the three achievements on which, near the end of his parliamentary career, Menzies looked back with most pride.
Given the natural tensions that had always existed between the two parties, this accomplishment reflected the great political acumen and prestige of the mature Menzies. The other two feats he nominated as memorable were the extension of Federal involvement in education and the physical development of Canberra as the national capital.
The highlight of the first was the appointment in of Sir Keith Murray's committee to inquire into the financial plight of Australian universities, and Menzies' insistence that the committee's recommendations be fully implemented for the provision of life-giving funds by government under conditions which preserved university autonomy.
The highlight of the second was his insistence in that money be appropriated for the construction of the long-delayed lake that Walter Burley Griffin had originally made the centre-piece of his design for Canberra. Menzies belonged to a generation for whom to be Australian was automatically to be British. That outlook involved veneration for inherited institutions like parliament and the courts because they were the creation of time and history, and respect for the Crown as the focus of loyalty to hold a family of disparate British societies together.
Irreverent anachronists lampoon these beliefs and highlight passages of Menzies' career in which his almost sentimental Britishness had regrettable overtones. The prime example was his support of the Eden government's actions in the Suez crisis of In the s and s Menzies became at Commonwealth prime ministers' conferences something of the 'Grand Old Man' of the 'Empire' a description of the Commonwealth into which he often instinctively slipped , but he was unhappy with a situation in which hitherto subject peoples increasingly became the equals of the old 'White' self-governing dominions.
Although his good friend Harold Macmillan Earl of Stockton tried gently to lead him to accept 'the winds of change', Menzies, at least privately, never quite did so. Yet in his prime he had a shrewd understanding of the way in which superiority was routinely assumed at the metropolitan centre. Occasional diaries and personal letters make it clear that Menzies meant it when he told family and other intimates: 'You've got to be firm with the English. If you allow yourself to be used as a doormat they will trample all over you'.
He had been appointed a privy counsellor in and C. Among many additional awards and distinctions, he was appointed to the U. Legion of Merit in Having retired from politics at the peak of his power, Menzies delivered by invitation at the University of Virginia a series of lectures later published as Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth London, , and periodically visited old friends in England.
In Menzies suffered a severe stroke which incapacitated him physically and put limits on his remaining public appearances.
He died on 15 May in his home at Malvern, Melbourne; he was accorded a state funeral and was privately cremated. Dame Pattie survived him, as did their son Kenneth and daughter Heather; their younger son Ian had died in In June his ashes were buried with those of his wife in the newly established Prime Ministers' Memorial Garden in Melbourne general cemetery.
Busts include two by V. Large framed and handsome, Menzies had a ready wit and superb command of language. His outward imperiousness did not simply betoken a sense of intellectual and political superiority. It also covered a certain shyness.
Intimates knew a man of great good humour and kindness. Life for him was a gift to be enjoyed with gusto: he took pleasure in food and drink, revelled in letting his hair down at his favourite Savage and West Brighton clubs in Melbourne, and indulged himself in spectator sports, being a connoisseur of the art of cricket. After Alfred Deakin and before Gough Whitlam, Menzies was probably the most well-read prime minister Australia has had, though he was not given to parading his erudition.
He enjoyed the classical nineteenth-century English novels, could quote hundreds of lines of Shakespeare, and on boring train and aeroplane trips loved to fill in the time with 'whodunits'. An intensely private man, he strictly separated personal matters, like his family life, from public affairs.
Sir Paul Hasluck, who knew Menzies well, wrote of him: 'I think the sort of tribute he would have appreciated most would not have been praise of his great talents or a recital of what he had accomplished but rather a statement that he was a man of character, honourable in conduct and decent in behaviour. He was that and I offer the tribute'. View the front pages for Volume Martin This article was published: in the Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 15 , online in Select Bibliography C.
Hazlehurst, Menzies Observed Syd, C. Hazlehurst ed , Australian Conservatism Canb, P. Bunting, R. Menzies, a Portrait Syd, G. Souter, Acts of Parliament Melb, J. Edwards with G. Pemberton, Crises and Commitments Syd, A.
Martin, Robert Menzies , vol 1 Melb, S. Additional Resources Trove search. Related Thematic Essays J. A Jewish Settlement Proposal in the Kimberley. Citation details A. In Menzies was elected to the Victorian parliament. In he became Prime Minister. Less then six months later World War II broke out. As an inexperienced leader Menzies struggled to manage the UAP, which was divided over its war policies.
In Menzies resigned and was replaced as prime minister by Arthur Fadden, leader of the Country Party.
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