Below is the paper that Robert Menzies Institute Historian Dr Zachary Gorman delivered at the 2025 Australian Historical Association Conference, held at James Cook University in Townsville:

Australia is not a nation known for its rich tradition of political philosophy. Our politics has often been described as utilitarian, practical and above all pragmatic, with ideas frequently taking a backseat to the more pressing needs of political circumstance.

But it is precisely because of this comparative dearth of ideology and imagination, that the few inspirational texts which have caught the public’s sustained attention and entered into the Australian political lexicon really stand out. Notably, they all tend to be speeches or broadcasts, which in itself might be interpreted as finding a more restrained, practical and direct use for philosophical prognostication.

In this category, the two that most people would recognise are Ben Chifley’s Light on the Hill  speech and Robert Menzies’s The Forgotten People broadcast, and the fact that they were both products of the 1940s suggests that the war and its aftermath created a new impetus for explaining with a bit of extra clarity and detail what kind of society it was that Australians had sacrificed so much to defend.

Although I have not gone to the effort of proving this empirically, I’d suggest that the Forgotten People in particular has become one of the most quoted texts in Australian political history, and certainly something that your average Liberal politician would now be expected to play lip service towards, regardless of whether they actually live up to the sentiment that it embodies. However, it’s worth noting that this notoriety is something of a modern phenomenon. When Menzies was a living person with a very direct and complex political legacy, his writings were never venerated in the manner that they have been subsequently by party partisans.

Because of the Forgotten People’s prominence and influence it has been subject to detailed academic analysis. Most notably Judith Brett’s book Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, which focuses on the titled broadcast delivered on 22 May 1942, and in David Kemp’s A Liberal State which delves further into the 37 broadcasts published as the book The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy in 1943.

But despite this attention, there remains some confusion about the context in which the broadcasts were delivered and what this reveals about their intended purpose. With the common assumption being that they were meant to ape off of Franklin Roosevelt’s seminal fireside chats, and give Menzies a chance to re-establish his political reputation after the humiliation of being forced to resign as prime minister in August 1941. Allan Martin puts this position most clearly in his biography of Menzies, when he links the inspiration for the series to a letter that Menzies received from H.W. Horsefield, executive officer of the New South Wales United Australia Party, who pointed out how Roosevelt had used the radio format to circumvent his unpopularity with the press and instead appeal directly to the people.

Reading Menzies’s published book of broadcasts, it is easy to see how one would jump to that conclusion. Since chapters 2-7 all involve dissecting each of Roosevelt’s famous ‘four freedoms’ which would inform the Atlantic Charter, and with it much of the stated war aims of the Allied Forces.

However, as Troy Bramston noted in his more recent biography, Menzies’s papers in the National Library reveal that there were actually 105 broadcasts, as opposed to the 37 that made it into the book. And while The Forgotten People was obviously listed first in that publication and also released as a standalone booklet in the latter half of 1942, it was actually the 20th broadcast that Menzies delivered in the series.

So the purpose of this paper will be to unpack some of the content of and reactions towards those first 19. To reveal three key points: firstly that the war precipitated a near instantaneous transnational conversation, of the kind we might assume has only become possible in more recent years of technological advance and globalisation. Secondly, that Australia was at least for a time a leading voice in that conversation, whose opinions mattered to the other English-speaking Allies. And thirdly, that far from being a premeditated step towards a political comeback, the Forgotten People was actually a spontaneous outburst that may well have marked the moment when Menzies decided that he was not yet done with Australian domestic politics.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of his resignation as PM when Menzies had famously told his private secretary that he needed to ‘lay down and bleed a while’, there was widespread speculation that he might be given a British posting as Commissioner-General for the Far East or perhaps enter British politics to re-join Churchill’s War Cabinet. When on the penultimate day of 1941, a three-sentence advertisement appeared in Sydney’s The Sun newspaper, declaring:

‘Mr. R. G. Menzies, former Prime Minister, will be heard as a news commentator from Radio 2UE every Friday at 9.15 p.m. Mr. Menzies will give his personal views on all local and overseas news. First broadcast will be on Friday week, January 9.’

This modest announcement of late December would be followed by a more vigorous advertising campaign conducted throughout January in The Wireless Weekly, an innovative newstand magazine which served as the TV Week of its day. As shown, the first ad had a bold image of Menzies speaking into a microphone, with the title ‘WHAT DOES MR. MENZIES THINK’:

‘The Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies, K.C., M.P., known and respected throughout the English-speaking world, in view of his close association with Australia’s war effort and visits to Libya, England and the U.S.A., must view the world stage with an understanding exceeding that of the average man. You and your next-door neighbours may think so-and-so, but what does Mr. Menzies think?’

The gimmick was that this was a recently removed war leader, who had ‘confidentially discussed war matters with both Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt’, and was going to speak as candidly as censorship and propriety would allow on the state of the war. It was perhaps a unique and certainly a rare situation across all of the Allied nations, and it quickly proved to be a great hook.

In the first broadcast Menzies explained that he had no intent on using them as a platform for ‘Party propaganda’, but felt that:

‘two years’ experience of war-time Prime Ministership in Australia, together with a good deal of personal contact with leaders of this war, both in Great Britain and America, inevitably must create a certain fund of knowledge which should, as far as opportunities permit, be placed at the service of the Australian people.

As never before in our history, we need to have busy hands and stout hearts and cool heads. We must constantly try to see the picture of the war as a whole, both near and distant. If this is done, we will avoid a great deal of extravagance and not a little hysteria, and will, as a result, be much more competent to perform the herculean labours that will be demanded of us’.

Menzies was framing his talks as an act of public service, which would steel the resolve of the nation, not through the commonplace moral boosting propaganda, but through balanced honesty. It was a conservative approach, intended to respect the intelligence of the Australian people, based on a belief that they would step up to their task if they were taken into the confidence of their leaders.

There followed a warning that ‘Australia is nearer direct physical attack than she ever has been before, and will almost certainly suffer it’, balanced with the optimistic view that ‘the British Empire as a whole is much nearer to victory than seemed possible a year ago’. A position he justified based on the stalling of operation Barbarossa, Allied successes in Libya and the battle of the Atlantic, and above all the scale of America’s entry into the war. For someone who had dealt with the frustration of America’s isolationism firsthand as PM, the latter fact was a miracle which practically outweighed the terror of the Japanese, who he admitted would likely take the Philippines, invade Singapore, and threaten the Dutch East Indies.

The only brief injection of political philosophy was Menzies’s Liberal insistence that:

‘[S]o many millions of free citizens must, when they wake up and take to the job, be more effective than the same number of millions of citizens who have long since pawned their individual freedom and have sought their strength and security in mass thinking and unimaginative discipline’.

This was a notable echo of Menzies’s uncle and political mentor Sydney Sampson MP, who had argued during World War I that the ‘best soldier was not machine made [like in Germany], but was the one who breathed the air of freedom, and who was built up on self-reliance, initiative, and independence’.

Menzies’s first talk made an immediate splash. Not only was its content reported within the first three pages of major Australian newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald, Age, Daily Telegraph, and the Argus, but Menzies’s words made their way rapidly across the English-speaking world. They were reported in London in The Times editorial on the defence of Singapore, and were directly relayed via the Columbia Broadcasting System in the United States, receiving a short mention on page 2 of the New York Times.

This global attention would only build, as in his second broadcast Menzies weighed in on a significant Allied controversy. Menzies himself appears to have been reading the New York Times, or at least had gotten wind of an article published on 11 January by esteemed journalist Arthur Krock (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes), which took aim at both Menzies and British Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham for the vulnerability of Singapore. The article had some factual errors, including stating that Menzies had been appointed as Australia’s new High Commissioner in London. Menzies responded within hours, telling the Monday 12 January edition of Melbourne’s Herald that Krock was wrong, and that he would give a full response in Friday’s broadcast.

There was thus considerable anticipation for Menzies to explain ‘Why aren’t there more aeroplanes in the Far-East?’. A broadcast in which Menzies defended Brooke-Popham, who he insisted was no ‘light-hearted optimist’, but instead someone who had warned of the weakness of Singapore, which was precisely why Menzies had gone to Britain to lobby Churchill over the issue. It was the Service Chiefs in London who had taken ‘a more modest view of the requirements for Singapore and Malaya than those on the spot’, but the real blame was collective, to be shared across the democratic world. While Germany and Japan had been preparing for war for years, in Britain and Australia in 1935 any significant increase in defence spending ‘would have been regarded as a piece of war-mongering hysteria’. In essence almost everyone had been an ‘appeaser’ and not taken the threat of conflict seriously enough, and Menzies asked his listeners ‘why on earth shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves about such matters?’

Menzies was not just defending himself and Brooke-Popham, he was weighing in on a global conversation that was happening with remarkable rapidity and candidness across the democratic west. Not only was much of his broadcast printed as articles in both the London and New York Times, but several members of Britain’s House of Lords are on the record of Hansard as citing his views. It was not enough to save Popham, who has since been the subject of a biography entitled “The man who took the wrap”, but it is nevertheless a startling example of the impact and reach of these early broadcasts.

The Wireless Weekly was quick to seize upon it, updating its ads to include the fact that Menzies was broadcasting not just on 2UE but to a ‘chain of stations throughout the Commonwealth’ and that ‘Press reports and B.B.C. comments on his talks indicate forcibly that what Mr. Menzies says, is NEWS!’.

After having spent a week arguing with an American journalist, Menzies would use his third broadcast to explain to his audience how America was not ‘an Anglo-Saxon country, full of our cousins’, and that despite the cultural dominance of Hollywood the American people remained somewhat foreign to Australians – just as their troops started arriving on mass to Australian shores. Menzies was overall complimentary, dispelling the myth that the United States was ruled by the almighty dollar with a he who is without sin argument which pointed out that Australia had its own ‘absurd aristocracies of money’. He also suggested that Americans were at the forefront of advances in legal thinking, architecture, and surgery, and that while it may be true that they were more idealistic than the British, he ‘would be the last to condemn idealism, because it is the ultimate motive force in human development’.

This broadcast inevitably garnered more notice in the American press, and Menzies continued to court international attention by writing an article for the London Times calling for an ‘Empire Cabinet’ in which Australia would have representation, a premise which then served as the basis of broadcast number four in which he argued that ‘British character will be best maintained by giving all the adult members of the family an effective voice in family policy’. The idea got the backing of a Times editorial, and prompted Liberal MP Geoffrey Mander to suggest in the House of Commons that Menzies be invited to come and contest a by-election ‘for whatever party it may be’. Even Churchill said that he had been saddened to lose Menzies’s ‘exceptional abilities’.

So while Krock was wrong about the High Commissionership, the early broadcasts corroborate the view that Menzies was jockeying for an overseas posting. But even were he to be given such a posting, his ability to travel would have been severely curtailed by the rapid advancement of the Japanese. And the broadcasts serve as a fascinating record of Australian reactions during the dark days of early 1942 in which we felt like we were in direct peril. Including Menzies’s immediate response to the bombing of Darwin, which he insisted must not be allowed to put Australia on the defensive.

A couple of weeks later in the aftermath of the capitulation of the Dutch East Indies, Menzies had the audacity to suggest that he did not think that an invasion of the Australian mainland was imminent. Not only on the jingoistic grounds that it was silly to think that ‘Japan, with at least three fronts to fight on, with her resources stretched out almost to the crack of doom, can invade and conquer a country inhabited by seven million people, the fame of whose fighting sons is known wherever men meet and speak together.’ But also because he believed that ‘the Axis represents a genuine and well-knit strategic cooperation’ and that therefore Japan would likely focus on heading north-west to assist Germany, while leaving Australia immobilised and isolated. Menzies speculated that while ‘Newcastle and such places will be sporadically and severely bombed’, a western thrust would leave ‘Perth nearer to danger than Melbourne’.

Telling Australians that they were not likely to be attacked was a highly provocative statement given the circumstances, and it was once again picked up by international media. The New York Times put ‘Menzies Doubts Invasion’ on page 3. Meanwhile in London The Economist was almost hysterical in shouting down Menzies’s speculation, insisting that it would be ‘dangerous madness for either Mr Curtin or President Roosevelt to act in the slightest degree’ on his assumptions and that ‘it is very hard to see what possible purpose Mr Menzies thought he was serving by announcing his belief publicly last week-end.’

For reasons of space I’ll have to leave that as the last example, but I just want to conclude by discussing why the focus of the broadcast series shifted from episode 20 onwards. One factor is likely that the rapidly changing nature of the conflict made Menzies’s insider knowledge of circumstances, men and events ever more distant as the weeks went by. Another is that as the ‘Blitzkrieg’ nature of the early Japanese advance finally started to slow down, the international community was less interested in what was being said in Australia because it gradually became clear that it was not going to be the frontline of the conflict.

But I think what’s most important is that the exclusive war-focus of all these early broadcasts suggest that when it came to The Forgotten People, Menzies was just genuinely triggered by what prominent left-leaning Anglican Bishop Ernest Burgmann had written in a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, such that he spontaneously decided to use his weekly radio show to comment on it.

The Forgotten People was not premeditated, nor was it designed to lay the philosophical foundation for a political party that had yet to be envisaged as of May 1942. It was a sudden and evocative distillation of Menzies’s world view, which has had enduring resonance precisely because it was not directly connected to any political campaign or immediate personal ambition.

The following week, Menzies would return to war matters with a broadcast discussing the intricacies of the Lend Lease program. It was only in late June, after the Allies had won the decisive Battle of Midway and General MacArthur had personally told Curtin that Australia was safe, that a permanent shift towards political philosophy would set in with the 6-part mini-series on Roosevelt’s four freedoms.

By that point, Menzies had ‘bled’ sufficiently and was more purposefully laying the foundations for an extended political career. Something that the process of freely and thoughtfully outlining his views via the Forgotten People may well have inspired him to pursue.

Without first-hand testimony, such a conclusion can only ever be speculative. But what is more demonstrable is that there is far more to the Forgotten People series than has hitherto been realised by historians. And that by deliberately engaging in international debates and cultivating overseas media attention, Menzies was able to grow his radio audience so that when he did make a decisive shift back towards politics, there were plenty of people who were already listening to him.