Professor Glyn Davis delivered this speech at the Institute’s museum on the 20th of May, 2026.

It is an honour to launch the fourth volume in this landmark history of Robert Menzies and his world. And a pleasure to do so in one of the six prime ministerial libraries now operating across Australia, here at the Robert Menzies Institute.

This book series does something entirely familiar in the setting of a great research university – namely, it interrogates in a scholarly, respectful but intellectually combative spirit, significant moments in our history, culture and politics.

The historic figure of Robert Menzies provides a welcome focus for this continuous conversation about who we are, and what we value. By presenting different perspectives on the Menzies era, this book follows and celebrates the scholarly tradition.

In this spirit of debate we might approach this new book from two different starting points.

The first is the poster that adorns the wall outside that proclaims in large type: ROBERT MENZIES – The Man Who Made Modern Australia. A great headline for an exhibition, by the way.

This title suggests a view of Menzies as actor, instigator, dynamic driving force who did not just lend colour and personification to a major period of Australian history, but created that period in some meaningful way.
The opposed idea is one expressed by the author of The Lucky Country (and my undergraduate Honours supervisor) Donald Horne. In his words, penned in the last days of Sir Robert’s Prime Ministership, and quoted in the book more than once – It is a feature of Menzies’ long rule that little of what he does seems to matter much. His great talent is to preside over events and look as if he knows what they are all about.’

In this volume, Frank Bongiorno and Matilda Hatcher call the Horne quote the ‘most famous contemporary treatment of Menzies as an anachronism.’

For them Menzies acts as a symbol ‘for an elite riding on its luck and out of touch with the modern world.’
Such a judgment may be the expected fate of any politician who so completely dominates his (or her) national era as did Menzies. As one-time University of Melbourne political scientist (and Labor man) James Jupp put it, grudgingly, Robert Menzies ‘spoiled the game [of national politics] by winning so often that no one takes the sport seriously any more. If only he had let the Christians beat the lions once or twice.’

But from a different angle, many Australians plainly saw Menzies as their prime minister and a beneficent figure in the world. Bongiorno and Hatcher illustrates this from contemporary testimonies. These include a woman writing to Menzies. She describes herself as ‘an ordinary housewife and mother’ who says that ‘you have given us everything’, including ‘happiness’, ‘employment and good wages’.

Did he ‘give’ those things? Or did he sit benignly at the top and ride his luck? The question plays through the many chapters in this book about Australia’s longest-serving prime minister.

After all, sheer success cast Menzies as the embodiment of everything, good and bad, about a generation and a country.

Yet it would be a mistake to view RG Menzies as simply a large personality – someone who (as Geoffrey Blainey recalls) could be ‘outrageous’, ‘witty’ and ‘wounding’ in his early prime ministerial career but later became ‘very human’ and ‘extremely generous’ in his relationships.

This volume shows there is much policy substance behind the Menzies persona, including in the way he shaped the prime ministership itself.

The excellent introduction from editor Zac Gorman traverses these policy domains, giving coherence and shape to the book’s many disparate contributions.

Take for example home ownership. During the Menzies era home ownership in Australia rose from 53 per cent to 70 per cent. This shifted the political landscape, making home ownership the iconic aspiration it remains today, a required goal for any party contesting a national election. No other prime ministerial term can boast a comparable rise in such a core feature of Australian identity.

Turning to the world, Menzies was the first Australian Prime Minister to become an international figure – ‘arguably our first travelling PM in the modern sense’ argues one contributor. This involved state visits to many Asian destinations and active encouragement of Australians to travel.

In this way Menzies really did ‘make modern Australia.’

The internationalism of the Menzies era is a theme through the book. In relation to the Asia-Pacific, Willian Stolz argues there was a paradigm shift as Australia realised that the era of European imperial ascendancy was over. ‘Managed decolonisation’ became a policy focus for Canberra. Zac calls this ‘an epiphany of relative humility’ for Australia and perhaps for the pro-British to the bootstraps Menzies.

This shift in world view influenced the thinking of both Right and the Left alike. Even the divisive engagement in the Vietnam War – as Lucas McLennan argues – saw conservatives such as BA Santamaria defend Australian participation as necessary so the region could develop a non-communist nationalism. There could be no more looking back to empire for Australian security.

The Menzies response to turmoil in Indonesia is noteworthy. Andrew Carr and Peter Dean’s chapter addresses ‘Forward Defence’ by examining an episode little-remembered today, namely ‘Konfrontasi’ as tension between Indonesia and Malaysia threatened to draw Australia into a full-blown war. Because the crisis was handled well and downplayed by the Menzies government, they conclude, the episode is ‘virtually absent from the popular memory of the decade.’

One better-remembered incident of the late Menzies era is the famous ‘36 Faceless Men’ episode in 1963 when then-Opposition Leader Arthur Calwell and Deputy Gough Whitlam were caught waiting outside a meeting of the Labor Party National Executive while Labor policy was decided without them. The incident was a major contributor to Menzies’ electoral victory in ’63, suggests Stephen Loosley. The Labor policy in question was whether the party would support an American signals base proposed for the north west of Australia. Coming hard on the heels of the Cuban crisis of 1962 and the Kennedy assassination of 1963, this was a time international questions played out strongly in Australian domestic politics.

As historian David Lowe proposed in Menzies and ‘the Great World Struggle’, Menzies understood the post-war world as a global contest between the liberalism he believed in and ‘autocratic forces’ that threatened to destroy it. This view determined many aspects of government policy, including of course national defence policy.
Given their epiphany about the end of western engagement in the region, the Prime Minister and his policy planners understood that despite a strong US alliance, Australia might ‘have to defend ourselves on our own.’

This triggered a major reformation of the Australian Defence Force. Menzies and his colleagues were determined Australian defence resources should never again be as depleted as they were in 1939.

Accordingly by the mid-1960s Australian defence spending rose to ‘the highest levels it ha[d] ever ever reached since the war.’

Channelling the contributors, Zac affirms the Menzies era reformation of defence policy had ‘positive effects’ with us still. Certainly questions about present and future Australian defence remain – complete with echoes of the challenges faced by Menzies and his cabinet.

Inevitably – and happily – the volume also addresses higher education, a policy domain in which Robert Menzies made a significant and lasting difference.

For it was under Prime Minister Menzies that Australia began the opening of access to higher learning, creating new universities and widening participation.

The Commonwealth Scholarship scheme which provided access to campus for many non-privileged Australians is the subject of a welcome chapter by Gwil Croucher and James Waghorne. Commonwealth Scholarships extended a wartime initiative but broadened the focus enormously, by supporting  ‘… the strongest students, by allocating scholarships on academic merit based on matriculation results’, and by leaving scholarship holders ‘free to choose their path without interference and [able to] undertake any university degree.’

Gwil and James use interview-based evidence to show how the ‘public benefits’ of the Scholarship scheme were experienced by students, in what became a life-changing opportunity for many.

As one famous Commonwealth Scholarship recipient – Clive James – said: ‘Menzies educated the whole generation that would later on vilify his memory.’

There are many other intriguing threads in the book, often addressing the political dominance of Menzies. Some note the difficulty Liberal successors experienced in emulating his success.

One notable absence is discussion of the 1967 Referendum on recognition of Aboriginal people. Of course, the Referendum took place soon after Menzies officially passed the baton to Harold Holt, but the legislation making it possible was introduced under his leadership and he vocally advocated for removing Section 127 of the Constitution. And though he was by then Chancellor of this University not PM, it may be counted as one of the achievements of his time that more than 90 percent of Australians voted Yes vote for this long overdue constitutional change.

Which brings us to a final point Zac raises at the very start of the book – Menzies the conservative versus a progressive side to the Prime Minister. Zac argues that to see Menzies simply as a conservative resisting all change is to ‘misunderstand how his Burkean sense of gradual political and social evolution intersected with a deeply ingrained Whig view of history as progress.’ Zac quotes Menzies’ words when laying of the foundation stone of the National Library in Canberra:  ‘we are part of a great procession’ through history. We ‘… draw strength from the past and .. may transmit some strength to the future.’

Our longest serving Prime Minister was a memorable part of that great procession, and this book helps us see his march through many different eyes. It is a credit to editor Zac Gorman, to the contributors and to the Robert Menzies Institute. So it a pleasure to launch – The Menzies Legacy: Ideals, Change, Procession, 1960s and Beyond.