The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

from competitive athletics, at which he excelled. In fact, it was his love of athletics that led to his big break. One evening, while being treated by his physiotherapist, he complained that his job did not give him the time he needed to do his passion for athletics justice. His physiotherapist said he had a friend who might be able to help him. The next night, Cairns was introduced to Sir Thomas Blamey, chief commissioner of the Victorian Police Force. Blamey was impressed enough with the young man to invite him to join the force, an opportunity that thousands of men of Cairns’ age would no doubt have loved. But although Cairns received help in joining the force, his subsequent considerable success as a policeman—he would receive several commendations and achieved the rank of detective quite quickly6—was due to his intelligence and hard work.

In 1938 Cairns met Gwen Ross. Two days later, he proposed and she accepted. (Cairns was her second husband. Her first marriage, to the magnificently named James Tallis Froggett-Tyldesley, was annulled when she learnt that he was a deceitful bigamist.) Cairns’ family did not approve of the union, however, and refused to attend the ceremony. The pair did not have children, but Cairns showed love and affection for Gwen’s two children and took them on as his own.

While Cairns made the most of his break in getting into the police, he did not find it completely fulfilling and used his spare time to read widely in economics. This reading led him to enrol in a Diploma of Commerce at the University of Melbourne. He did well, receiving first-class honours in Economic History 1 and second-class honours in Money and Banking.7

His study led, indirectly, to his departure from the police force. In 1944, an allegation of wrongdoing was made against him. There followed a patently biased investigation, which, while it could not uphold the allegation, found against Cairns for keeping an inaccurate police diary—he had forgotten to record an absence from duty to attend a university lecture. Because of this minor oversight, he was demoted from detective back to uniform. Cairns understandably refused to accept this and he resigned from the force in protest.

Cairns’ resignation enabled him to enlist in the Army. This was towards the end of World War II, so while he trained for overseas deployment, he did not leave Australia. While serving he received, quite out of the blue, a letter from one of his University of Melbourne professors asking him to apply for the position of tutor in economic history. Cairns made the most of his opportunity, embarking on further formal study while teaching, and embracing the vibrant and radical left-wing, postwar, extracurricular life that abounded at the university. Despite the reformist ethos of the Chifley government, Cairns expressed his disappointment with it in his first ever published piece, in the journal Meanjin: ‘The Labor Party is now what the old Socialist Party told us it would be—a party of apologists.’8 It seems that no matter how radical and reforming the Labor Party is in office, it will still disappoint some university activists.

There is no doubt that during this period, Cairns embraced the Marxist diagnosis of the ills of the world. However, he did not adopt a Marxist solution, preferring a gradualist approach to more government control within the auspices of the existing system. There is no evidence that he applied for membership of the Communist Party, although there is evidence that someone else nominated him. As it happened, he was rejected by party authorities because his status as a former policeman made him extremely suspect as a security risk.

The year 1947 was an important one for Cairns. He received his Bachelor of Commerce with first-class honours, was promoted to temporary lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and joined the Australian Labor Party. Cairns had become an admirer of Ben Chifley. He was one of the last people to see the Labor legend before his death, having met him just a fortnight beforehand to seek a letter of introduction to the British Labor Party, to help in his research for a proposed DPhil on the relationship between the Australian and British parties. After their meeting, he was effusive in his comments about Chifley’s leadership abilities.

Chifley did write a letter of introduction for Cairns, which Cairns used to work on his DPhil at Oxford, having won a Nuffield Dominion Travelling Scholarship in 1950. However, Cairns found a dearth of source material for his preferred subject at Oxford, and decided instead to write about the development of the Australian welfare system. His doctoral supervisor was GDH Cole, who had authored the magisterial seven-volume work A History of Socialist Thought. While studying, Cairns also accepted a request from a British publishing house to write a secondary textbook on the history of Australia, which he completed with his wife Gwen.

When Cairns returned to Australia, he walked straight into the ALP Split, brought about by the dispute between the virulently anti-communist and pro-Catholic ‘movement’ led by BA Santamaria and the rest of the party. During his absence, the Toorak branch, of which he was an office holder, had been suspended by the pro-movement Victorian executive. The grouper-controlled executive (groupers belonged to a right-wing faction organised to fight communist influence in the ALP) was then itself suspended through a process of federal intervention, and the member for Yarra, Stan Keon, was expelled from the ALP, together with the equally prominent Jack Mullins and Bill Bourke. Following Keon’s expulsion, the ALP needed a new candidate for this safe Labor seat, which was based on Richmond in Melbourne’s inner suburbs and had once been held by former Labor leaders Frank Tudor and James Scullin. The Victorian ALP executive endorsed Jim Cairns as the candidate over ten others.

Despite Yarra being a safe seat, however, Cairns’ election was far from guaranteed. Keon was elected deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), the Victorian forerunner of the DLP, and many local branch members followed