Speech notes from Anne Henderson’s Paul Hasluck Monograph Launch
11 November 2025
E&OE
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This slim but immensely readable and sharply drawn life of Sir Paul Hasluck is Anne Henderson’s latest luminous contribution to our understanding of Australia’s public life, following earlier works such as her biographies of Dame Enid and Joe Lyons (perhaps our most underrated prime minister) and her recent magisterial study of the great political and legal rivalry between Sir Robert Menzies and Dr HV Evatt.
Along with Peter Costello, Hasluck is probably the foremost Liberal MP never to have become prime minister. Had he succeeded in John Gorton’s stead, after Harold Holt’s disappearance in the surf, we would have had a much more measured and less turbulent prime ministership. On the other hand, would his colleagues sufficiently have warmed to him to provide the party room support a successful PM needs? He never sought their votes for the leadership contest he narrowly lost; and years later justified his disdain for counting numbers on the basis that “I didn’t like them” and “they didn’t like me”.
Hasluck could be austere, aloof, even difficult. Henderson quotes his wife Alix’s memoir: “I had discovered almost immediately after the wedding that Paul had a very bad temper…It took me many years to find that though his anger seemed to be directed at me, it often had nothing to do with me but related to some incident several days before on which he had been brooding…And he suffered from severe migraines…All this made for some very dark times when Paul would savagely fling off on his own, leaving me in as strange city not only alone, for I did not mind that much, but unknowing what had become of him”.
That must have made uncomfortable reading for her husband, by that stage, a highly regarded former governor-general. As his acclaimed two volumes on the Second World War home front, plus his critically-regarded poetry attest, Hasluck was a deep, even a soulful thinker. But as he himself ruefully confessed: “an introspective man is not disqualified from action but sometimes he may be handicapped”.
As the child of Salvation Army parents, Hasluck grew up with a strong sense of faith and duty and invariably impressed those he came into contact with professionally. One of those was John Curtin, the future Labor prime minister, who recommended Hasluck for the then-fledgling Australian diplomatic service. As an aide to the mercurial Doc Evatt, Hasluck had an uneasy relationship with his boss, whom he regarded as an “effective player in world affairs but also as a chaotic manager weakened by an overly suspicious mind”. On leaving diplomacy, Hasluck briefly became reader in history at the University of Western Australia before accepting the Liberal Party’s invitation to run for what was regarded as a likely Labor seat; on the basis, he said, of his belief in parliamentary democracy as “a way in which one can best serve…to maintain…the Australian way of life”.
Earlier, starting his working life as a journalist, Hasluck had made indigenous affairs his specialty. His parents had run hostels, including for indigenous children, and his second name, Meerna, is Aboriginal for “joyful spring of fresh water”. In parliament, one of his early contributions was a motion exhorting the Commonwealth and the states to work together “in measures for the social advancement as well as the protection of people of the Aboriginal race”. Within hardly a year of entering parliament, Hasluck became Minister for Territories, responsible among much else for the well-being of the indigenous people of the Northern Territory. Early on, he had come to the conclusion that assimilation was the best outcome, not because he wanted to see the disappearance of distinct peoples but because he thought their traditional way of life was in irreversible decline.
Henderson quotes one of his early ministerial speeches to parliament: “Assimilation means…that, in the course of time, all persons of Aboriginal blood or of mixed blood in Australia will live as do white Australians”. The alternative, he went on, “is segregation (that)…could take place in settlements and
missions solely occupied by natives”. But, he said, “the objection to this policy is that if it succeeds we shall build up in Australia an ever increasing body of people who belong to a separate caste and who live in Australia but are not members for the Australian community…”
As minister, Hasluck accepted that mineral developments on Aboriginal land should benefit Aboriginal people, leading Kim Beazley senior to observe that “Hasluck was that rare politician who can genuinely be called a statesman”. Another Labor opponent, Gordon Bryant, said that “in spite of his conservatism”, Hasluck “had done probably one of the best jobs for Aboriginal people than anyone in Australia”. In later life, Hasluck maintained his scepticism towards anything that smacked of separatism while appreciating how Aboriginal people had gained “an expectation of better times ahead”.
As territories minister, Hasluck was also responsible for pre-independence PNG. By extending the administration’s remit, and thus the rule of law, through the work of the highly competent (and still fondly regarded) “kiaps”, Hasluck gave “freedom to half a million people who had not known it before”. In the words of Sir William Slim, the general-turned-governor-general, “your young chaps in New Guinea have gone out where I would never have gone without a battalion and they have done on their own by sheer force of character what I could only do with troops. I don’t think there has been anything like it in the modern world”.
It says something about the more senior portfolio that Hasluck had less impact in his years as Minister for External Affairs; in the nature of things, with less executive authority than as territories minister. That didn’t stop Menzies writing privately, at the time of the leadership contest, that Hasluck was “possessed of the best brain of the whole lot but…is now the victim of subtle propaganda designed to attach to the Gorton banner whatever sympathisers there are in NSW with Willy McMahon”.
Whatever bad blood the failed leadership bid engendered, it didn’t stop Hasluck working effectively as governor-general with both Gorton and subsequently McMahon. Likewise the infamous parliamentary incident, where Gough Whitlam threw a glass of water over Hasluck, and may have called him something rhyming with “runt”, didn’t stop a warm and respectful relationship with Labor’s first PM in 23 years. “It was my own happy experience” he wrote, “to have enjoyed a relationship of trust and confidence” with each of them.
Would he have handled differently the events leading up to the dismissal? Perhaps there’s clue in his subsequent work, The Office of the Governor-General, where he describes the vice-regal role as ensuring “that those who conduct the affairs of the nation do so strictly in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth…with due regard to the public interest”. In extreme situations, he said, the governor-general could “check” elected representatives by “forcing a crisis”.
Anne Henderson has beautifully brought to life this now regrettably neglected figure. When he became only the second serving politician to be appointed governor-general, one commentator observed: “he has shown such monarchical indifference to the skirmishing and jockeying of politics that it seems almost insulting to call him a politician at all”. Henderson quotes Hasluck on Menzies: “the sort of tribute he would have appreciated most would not have been praise of his great talents but rather a statement that he was a man of character, honourable in conduct and decent in behaviour”, before concluding that this rather sums up Hasluck himself.
Our country was blessed to have such a servant and is blessed again to have this fragrant reminder of his life.
