Who hated Robert Menzies enough to take a knife to his official portrait? | jacquelinemaley goodweekendmag
It was mid-morning on March 5, 1954, in Robert Menzies’ Australia, and a group of tourists was being led along the highly polished floors of the King’s Hall in Parliament House, Canberra. The dark-toned paintings of parliamentary speakers and prime ministers gazed down upon them, proof of the solidity and seriousness of Australia’s democracy. But this morning, something was wrong.
Even Heather Henderson, Menzies’ surviving daughter, now 94, recalls little about the incident. “I knew the painting was damaged, but I don’t know anything about it,” she tellsthat the portrait of the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies, which was hanging in the King’s Hall, was discovered this morning to be rather badly mutilated,” wrote Walter Emerton, the acting secretary of the joint house department, on March 5.
The Museum of Australian Democracy’s Kate Armstrong, next to Ivor Hele’s 1954 replacement portrait of Menzies.Kate Armstrong is manager of interpretation and content development at the Museum of Australian Democracy – the Old Parliament House scene of the portrait-slashing crime, which is now home to the museum, its halls and chambers preserved for posterity.
In 1954, Parliament House was an important tourism icon for the fledgling city of Canberra. “It didn’t open until 1927,” Armstrong says, “but from 1925 people would literally come and have their photos taken in front of the building site because it was so extraordinary and it was in the middle of a sheep paddock.” The King’s Hall was the hub of the elegant building, the room overseen by a statue of King George V.
Police would interview 11 witnesses, including six parliamentary attendants, two night watchmen, two cleaners and a mail office staffer. None had seen anything untoward. However, in the course of inquiries it emerged that one attendant, Leslie James Colquhoun, had been seen in the vicinity of the King’s Hall at about 4.45pm on March 4, and that he “appeared to be under the influence of liquor”.
Frank McKenna consulted the Vaucluse-based Douglas Pratt of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, the body which guided the Historic Memorials Committee on the commissioning of artists to paint official portraits. Pratt, a well-known landscape painter in his own right, advised that the painting would be difficult to restore. Even if it was done well, he said, “I feel that this portrait would gain notoriety as the one which was mutilated, and I think a feature like that is undesirable.
Menzies used to attend the salon dinners of James McGregor, a famous wool-broker and art collector who was a long-time trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW. “Jim McGregor used to have dinners with artistic people in Sydney and Dad knew a lot of them in a casual way – as people, not just as artists. They all seemed to get on terribly well.”
In 1937, when he was attorney-general, Menzies decided that Australia needed an institution modelled on the British Royal Academy of Art, to act as an “expert body on artistic matters, and to host exhibitions”. He established the Australian Academy of Art to organise yearly exhibitions and for expert opinion on artistic matters.
But it seems that, while eschewing innovation in art, Menzies and his advisers were early practitioners of the modern art of image management. In a letter dated March 19, 1954, Historic Memorials Committee secretary Frank McKenna wrote to Commonwealth Art Advisory Board chair, painter Will Ashton, saying he was “quite convinced” that “it would be a much better thing for us to have the Prime Minister portrayed as he is at the present time”.
Kmit was a member of the famous Sydney Charm School, a fluctuating group of artists who lived at and around the Merioola mansion in Sydney’s Woollahra. The group, which included Russell Drysdale, William Dobell and Donald Friend, “had a bloody marvellous time” according to Friend, “drinking plonk and eating crusts of bread”, as quoted in the 1986 book by Geoffrey Dutton,. The mansion was also known as the “Buggery Barn” because many of its denizens were gay. Not Menzies’ type at all.
On winning the prime ministership for the second time, in 1950 Menzies promptly passed the Communist Party Dissolution Act, which outlawed and dissolved the Australian Communist Party. When the High Court struck down the legislation as unconstitutional in 1951, he called a referendum to empower federal parliament to make laws in reference to communism. It was defeated, but Menzies’ anti-communist passion remained.
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