Alex McDermott is curator of the Robert Menzies Institute’s forthcoming exhibition, “Robert Menzies: The Man Who Made Modern Australia”, opening in 2026.

Funny the crosswise conversation between past and present. A fortnight ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping sought to overawe the world with a grand military parade through Tiananmen Square. The festival of autocrats and their subservient agents energetically distorted the reality of the Second World War, which ended 80 years ago.

By contrast, last week marked ninety years since Robert Menzies’ return from his first trip to Britain, taken as a young government minister in 1935. In the diary he kept of the journey, a tone of euphoria frequently recurs, particularly when he recounts a visit to Runnymede, the site where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

“What a day! I have literally been in the presence of the Great Charter among the barons assembled at Runnymede” he marvelled. Having visited sites pertinent to the memory of the revolutionary heroes of the English Civil War (Cromwell, John Hampden) and having “sat awhile in the invisible presence of the greatest poet of liberty,” (John Milton,) Menzies concluded “The survival of a free Parliament in this land is not to be marvelled at. One realises that a Parliament for England is no mere result or adoption of a political theory… but something growing from the very roots of the English life.”

Critics, of course, would say he savoured overmuch – that he was neither the first nor last “cultural tourist” to succumb to England’s deeply historicised landscape. But this is to miss the real cause of the deep euphoric thrill. Menzies viewed these events, and these historical traditions, not as some foreign exotic, but as part of his own heritage. Moreover, they constituted the first chapters of Australia’s own story as a modern liberal democracy.

Menzies grew up in remote Jeparit, in the Mallee Country of western Victoria. Among his treasure trove of books and learning were narratives of history arguing that the freedoms people enjoyed in Australian democracy had an ancient lineage and could be traced back to Magna Carta. In the Robert Menzies Collection, alongside the books of history, literature, and civics which Menzies won as a schoolboy sits his personal copy of Boyd Barrington’s 1900 book The Magna Carta and other great charters of England: with an historical treatise and copious explanatory notes.

Then as now, in 1935 the question of democracy’s survival was a live topic. Contemporary events were making clear that institutional machinery wasn’t enough to safeguard the freedoms of liberal society. This was the decade, after all, where dictators and authoritarianism took over countries which had only recently acquired shiny new democratic constitutions. ‘Is Democracy Doomed?’ was the theme of one radio broadcast Menzies gave in the same period as his visit to Runnymede. Exactly why liberal values and democratic practices survive in some places whilst dying in others required urgent answers.

Menzies made clear his answer – history, and the imagination, and the “spirit” of the people themselves. His lifelong championing of originally British institutions such as the Rule of Law and representative government never dwelt purely on the formal procedures and their literal clauses. Menzies understood on a visceral level the degree to which democracy’s survival depends not simply on the procedure, rules and protocols of the institutions themselves. More than that, it has to be embedded in the cultural life of ordinary people. Without this animating ‘spirit,’ as Menzies termed it, the machinery of democratic government avails nothing.

When subsequently Prime Minister he engineered Australia’s purchase of one of the few surviving copies of the 1297 versions of Magna Carta – one of only two copies outside of Britain – Menzies made this clear. Yes, he told Parliament, the event of Magna Carta itself, taken purely on its own terms – aggressive barons preoccupied with their own privileges – may not seem to amount to much. After all, the Barons ‘knew nothing about democracy, and it is not supposed that they thought that they were establishing some form of democracy, because they did not think so at all.’

The real reason, Menzies reckoned, why Magna Carta is celebrated is the subsequent use it was put to by champions of law and fair government, such as jurist Edward Coke against attempts to establish an Absolute Monarch in the 17th century. The principle of the Rule of Law it came to embody took on a semi-mythical significance thanks to the storied events which accumulated around it in the telling and retelling. As a story it ‘seized the imagination of men of intelligence’ Menzies said, which meant it ‘gave rise to later developments what we now call civil rights or civil liberties.’ Thanks to this ‘what they did that day has had a good deal to do with the true foundations of democracy, as it developed in later centuries.’

In other words, it’s not, or not solely, the great charter itself, but rather the political culture around it which makes it such a potent document. The common political language which was later developed and connected to Magna Carta formed what political theorist Jurgen Habermas has called the “cultural boundary conditions” – the historically rooted, non-formal, shared understandings and values which democratic life required to survive. In the British and subsequently Australian context, the great charter became part of the bundle of powerful stories which sustained themselves across generations and centuries in the minds and lives of people.

This spirit of the people in a democracy, Menzies was always quite clear, was the difference between open society living or dying. This view was echoed a few years later, in strikingly similar terms, when in 1944 the American jurist Judge Learned Hand delivered an address, “The Spirit of Liberty,” in wartime New York’s Central Park. Liberty, he said, “lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

‘Now,” Menzies asked in his ‘Is Democracy Doomed?’ broadcast around the same time as he returned from his 1935 “pilgrimage” (as he called it), “if this spirit is of the essence of democracy, can we rightly say that we have understood or practised it?” The question was a pointed one, for both himself and his audience. In the mid-1930s democracy seemed in terminal decline. Australia’s own political debate seemed to consist of warring groups clamouring for increased government protection and subsidy.

The spirit of democratic life, Menzies says, requires us all to consider our obligations and duties even more than our rights: “if man is to be adjusted to man, if we are to be dignified without being proud or overbearing, we must be givers rather than receivers; we must be quick to discharge our duties and modest about our rights.” For, as he put it nearly two decades later, after acquiring Australia’s own copy of Magna Carta, “if we were all tired democrats, eager beneficiaries but reluctant contributors, democracy would collapse under its own weight.”

The only way this spirit became real was when it was embedded in the cultural furniture of our national and civilisational stories. Without this there is no enduring normative freight. Without those buttresses, we are lightweights doomed to shortly perish off the face of the earth.

The lesson of history, then, was that the institutions of democracy could never survive unless it held true dominion in the imagination – in people’s hearts and minds. And it was history itself which gave the garments and fabric of powerful stories by which this could happen. It’s not difficult to envisage Menzies asserting the imperative need for today, when our own batch of totalitarian autocrats busy themselves weaponizing historical memory for the very opposite purpose – to douse, deaden and intimidate – and when the domestic scene shows every sign of fracturing commonality and shared purpose.

The catastrophic decline in Civics knowledge amongst Australian students —with only 43% of Year 6 students and a mere 28% of Year 10 students achieving proficiency in basic democratic concepts— suggests that we’ve not been breathing the required amount of democratic “spirit” into the system. Menzies would doubtless urge us to set to work resuscitating the genuinely democratic spirit, by reconnecting with the authentic history which provides the only groundwork on which our kind of political order can rest.

Disembarking in Australia on Friday 6th September 1935, Menzies told reporters that he returned from England “with a renewed faith in democracy.” His journey to Runnymede, along with other experiences on his journey, proved to be an act of deep and powerful affirmation.

As we prepare for a new, revitalized exhibition about him at the Institute, we’ll be embarking on our own historical “pilgrimage” to Jeparit in the coming weeks. Our goal is not only to examine potential objects for the exhibition but also to breathe the air, and connect ourselves to a place which, thanks to Menzies’ own origins, ranks as one of the most significant sites in the story of Australia’s emergence as a great and stable democracy.