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Zoe Tunnicliff, Tunnicliff Genealogy (1965)

While Robert Menzies’s parliamentary clashes with John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Bert Evatt and Arthur Calwell are the stuff of Australian political legend, few now remember that the first Labor leader he ever faced across the dispatch box was the Member for Collingwood Tom Tunnecliffe. Tunnecliffe was the leader of the ALP in Victorian Parliament from July 1932 until October 1937, which happened to correspond with the three months Menzies spent as Acting Premier of Victoria while Stanley Argyle was ill in 1934.

There were many issues on which the views of this bootmaker turned socialist varied from Robert Menzies, but perhaps the most notable was that Tunnecliffe was one of a group of early-20th century Labor politicians who decried universities as institutions through which the state wasted money on the privileged and lazy. When in 1917 Tunnecliffe gave a speech in which he suggested that university students were the complete opposite of an ‘intellectual elite’ because members of the law school could not even pass their exams without wasting seven years in relative idleness, a young Menzies felt compelled to respond by writing a full article in the Melbourne University Magazine:

‘Mr. Tunnecliffe, M.L.A., as the Registrar had no difficulty in showing, was woefully astray in his statistics at Bendigo. Students are not below the average in ability, and the Law School in particular is not a sort of refuge for the half-witted. Indeed, it is a proposition of a proveable nature at the Law School —but let it pass at that! There is one great mistake that Mr. Tunnecliffe made, and one great truth that Mr. Tunnecliffe unwittingly stumbled upon, that may not be unworthy of mention.

The great mistake is this. The honourable member was anxious to make his point; speaking, no doubt, to an audience of radical character, he sought to establish the undoubted quality of his own democracy by a cheap sneer at the University. He, and a great number of his fellow-politicians, while professing to be the leaders of political thought and the exponents of an enlightened political faith, are really still involved in the mental mists and superstitions of the Middle Ages. Somebody told them ten, twenty, thirty years ago that the University was a resting place for the sons of the idle rich. They accepted the statement; it is always safe to abuse the rich, and it is brilliantly epigrammatic to refer to the University as a “hotbed of conservatism.” But how unfortunate it is that the place where, above all other places, young men and women are brought into contact with the best of the world’s thought, where they are trained, however slightly, in those things which democracy must have if it is to succeed, should have fallen under the stupid ban of “the people.” If there is one thing that the Australian democracy lacks (in particular); it is clearness of political thought. Our system of State education, though comparatively good, is meagre; it scarcely takes the growing man past the point at which he has memorised Burns’s “a man’s a man for a’ that,” and has accumulated sufficient of the three R’s to read and implicitly believe all the irresponsible rubbish that may be served up by the political journalists of the day. Save in the realm of personal abuse, our critical faculty as a nation is not developed. Criticism as a constructive art is not one of our native products. Therefore, when I say that Mr. Tunnecliffe committed a great mistake, I mean that in deliberately widening the gap which separates the University from the practical world of affairs, and in, perhaps, unintentionally, misrepresenting the character of the University student (who is as often as not a rabid socialist of the vaguely theoretical type), he did a great injury to his democratic aims.

The great truth which stands behind it all, however, is the indubitable fact of a chasm separating the University from its political functions. If we are to exercise the influence which we ought to on the democratic thought of the day, we must get right away from any possibility of aloofness. Politics are the supreme profession of public life. Good government is of the essence of social well-being, and we are not going to ensure good government by adopting the popular political cynicism. If the average politician strikes us as ignorant, then there is only one cure, and that is to see that the next generation of politicians will be a little better. In short, when students think of politics, they must be prepared to drop many of their doctrinaire notions, and come right down to a serious study of current political problems. We must wake from our dreams of a Utopia somewhere in the distant future, and cultivate a closer acquaintance with the wheat marketing scheme, and the Repatriation question. We must not leave our political economy behind us as something that Mr. Kelly will lecture about to another class next year; we must endeavour to utilise its guidance in obtaining a clearer view of political truth. Only in this way are we going to make the best use of our advantages—advantages which in many ways are the gift of the State, and which, therefore, ought to inure to the benefit of the State. Democracy is not mob rule—it postulates a people ready to govern itself, and capable of governing itself; it will, therefore, demand of its future leaders something more than a mouthing of platitudes and a catering to class passions. If democracy is to succeed, we, the students of to-day and the public men of to-morrow, must learn to think and not to dream.’

If anything, Tunnecliffe can be said to have done Menzies a favour, in that he helped him clarify from an early age his views as to the importance of universities to Australian democracy, and of serving in politics as an act of public service. Although, the precocious student’s lofty ideals and pretence of educating the masses did expose him to ridicule in the subsequent edition of MUM:

‘Aren’t they crowding round the portals, R. G. M.

Melbourne’s poor, benighted mortals, R. G. M.

Don’t they, stamping, struggling, swaying,

Hungry for the latest news,

Lift their arms in anguish, praying,

“Give us Robert’s saving views.”

Is our shop unequal to it?

Can we not instruct the mob?

If we don’t how they will rue it!

Won’t they, Bob?’

Menzies’s copy of the Tunnicliff Genealogy was in a way an embodiment of the university ethos that one must be diligent in the pursuit of truth, because its American author appears to have mistaken Tunnecliffe’s commendable record in Victorian politics for exploits on the national stage. Describing him as the ‘Acting Premier of Australia’ for 1928-32 and the ‘leader of the Labor Party in Australia for over thirty years’ (neither of which were even accurate in the Victorian context). It was because Zoe thought that her cousin was clearly someone of national renown, that she decided to send the serving prime minister a copy of her genealogy in 1965. No doubt being blissfully unaware of the real relationship between the two men.