life in a quiet, safe suburb. The desire for security replaced curiosity; pursuit of a career (for the male of the household), accumulation of assets, raising of children, and the keeping of an English-style garden were the matters of importance for most Australian families. There was, however, trouble in paradise.
The Atomic Age had arrived, bringing with it not only the promise of cheap power, fuelling a new industrial revolution, but also the possibility of annihilation. The Soviets had the bomb, so did America: it was a fight that could potentially kill us all.
Conservative state and federal governments and the right-wing press spread panic, fear and Cold War hysteria. The Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey fuelled anti-communist Cold War paranoia by bringing to the nation’s attention a ‘Nest of traitors in the public service.’23 Reds were everywhere, apparently: in trade unions, the teaching profession and universities. Nowhere was safe.
Additionally, as wool price plummeted and inflation rose, the economy slid into a recession. A horror deflationary federal budget followed, leading to a surge in unemployment, with wages stagnating and black smoke rising over the Bonegilla migrant camp near Albury as inmates rioted.
It’s all the fault of those wogs, we collectively screamed, and the Government agreed. Menzies responded to the economic crisis by severely cutting Australia’s migration program from Britain and Europe, much to the relief of many Australians, including members of Her Majesty’s Opposition. In the nation’s capital, the Honorable Queensland Labor Senator Archie Benn compared immigrants to cane toads, complaining they never should have been introduced in the first place.
This economic and political uncertainty resulted in many Australians turning on the Government. For a while it seemed the Menzies regime would come to an end — but they still had a trick, in the form of a communist threat, up their sleeve. Then on the eve of the 1954 election, they were handed a gift from the security-intelligence gods in the form of the Petrov Affair.
Vladimir Petrov was a minor Soviet diplomat who had been courted by ASIO for many years; they managed to convince Petrov to defect in the caretaker period before the election (fancy that?). When Petrov’s wife was being flown back to Moscow by Soviet officials it stopped in Darwin for refuelling giving an opportunity for our brave boys in blue to swoop; she was spectacularly escorted off her plane in the full view of the waiting Australian media (I wonder how they found out about it? Separation of powers; No?) by a couple of burly Federal Police officers and reunited with her husband in Sydney. The nation cheered and in the days leading up to the election, citizens devoured related stories of Soviet espionage on our shores — and then, wouldn’t you believe it, the Menzies Government was returned, with a thumping majority!
Anti-communist hysteria also led to a split within the Labor movement. It was led by arch-Catholic Bob Santamaria, the leader of a grouping of conservative, ALP affiliated trade unions known as the Grouper faction. Santamaria justified splitting from the ALP on the grounds that communists had infiltrated many of the trade unions associated with the party, and consequently wielded too much power. The split resulted in the formation of the ultra-conservative Catholic-dominated Democratic Labour Party that subsequently formed a close political alliance with Menzies’ Liberals, an alliance that kept the ALP out of government both federally and in Victoria for well over two decades.
These were indeed desperate times, and Melbourne’s progressive artistic scene was not unaffected. Albert Tucker was just one of the many artists to flee Australia at this time, stating:
‘The realisation that art has its own forms, structures and principles; and for me a far greater validity than politics … the artist his own specialised form of energy which will assert its self regardless of any opposition.’24
Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd followed Tucker’s lead. The aim of these artists was not to walk a collective path to modernism, but rather undertake their own solitary artistic journey, one that moved them away from our shores and resulted in their becoming what Albert Tucker described as ‘refugees from Australian culture’.25 John Reed reported that the postwar years had seen ‘some organic change … in the community, a lessening of sensitive awareness, or perhaps a mere dissipation of energies into numerous channels, irrelevant to creative talent.’26
This ‘dissipation of energies’ led directly to the collapse of what had been one of Reed’s greatest achievements: the dynamic Contemporary Art Society.
This new social and artistic conservatism was felt most keenly in Melbourne; as Richard Haese wrote, ‘the Melbourne scene had been the liveliest, and the change of cultural climate was felt most intensely there.’27 And with Melbourne’s cultural landscape fast resembling a pile of indurated clay, what was the impact felt within the jazz scene?
It firstly had the effect of breaking the nexus between the modernist art movement and jazz: they no longer could be described as a cohesive whole. With the collapse of CAS, and with many of its key practitioners living in exile overseas, there was no-one left on the visual arts scene to fight the good (left-wing, artistic) fight. This probably had a real impact on Bell, and on the jazz scene in general.
Let’s go back a little to the time when the Graeme Bell Australian Jazz Band — they had been renamed again — returned home from their triumphant European tour in August 1948. By then, the band’s international career had been launched and the Bell boys were household names throughout the country. Bell explained, ‘By the time we reached Melbourne, the publicity was quite overwhelming and we wondered what we had started. All capital dailies were running stories with photos … we were also filmed by Cinesound Newsreel …’28
Even the conservative Australian Broadcasting Commission wanted a piece of the action and dangled a lucrative contract in front of the band. But there was a catch; in order to sign the ABC contract the band had to satisfy ‘Aunty’. Bell had to agree that ‘I [Bell] was not going to place a bomb in the middle of Collins Street or paint a hammer and sickle over the door of St Paul’s Cathedral or do anything a communist was supposed to do …’29
Bell managed to do this by agreeing that he and the band would sever all connection with communist fronts like Eureka Youth League, including the Australian tour organised by the EYL to ‘pay back’ their sponsorship of the band to Prague.
The band was broke on their return from Europe and as Bell explained in his autobiography; being on the road is expensive, and despite six months of packed houses there was little to show for it. The ABC contract would not only wipe out any outstanding debts, it would secure the band’s immediate future. It was no contest; the EYL lost their poster boys for recruitment to the cause.
The decision meant that things got decidedly hostile between the band and their former comrades. Audrey Blake from the EYL shot both barrels in an article published in the EYL’s Youth Voice:
‘When Graeme Bell’s Band left Australia all were members of the Eureka Youth League. We gladly accept their resignation. People with such lack of principle have no place in our ranks … Without the League, the Bell Band’s European tour would have been impossible. The Bell Band, who are now interested only in money, have placed themselves beyond the pale of all progressive elements in the Australian labour and democratic movement …’30
This proved to be a turning point in the relationship between left wing politics
