Herbert Brookes, British-Australian:

a biographical sketch

A Harold White Fellowship Essay

by

Peter Cochrane

How are the Egyptians behaving? Are they still striking at the friend that rescued them from chaos and lifted them on to a plane of undreamed of material well-being? Some recent cables seem to indicate that they are almost as wickedly vicious and disloyal as that barbarian de Valera and his band of repudiators. I can't help feeling that behind him there lurks the spectre of the Irish-Roman hierarchy. [1]

Prelude

Over a four month period, during my Harold White Fellowship at the National Library in 1996 I focussed on the papers of Herbert and Ivy Brookes. There were numerous aspects of these two lives that interested me greatly: the connection with the Deakin family through Ivy, daughter of Alfred; the mentor relationship of Alfred to Herbert and the latter's work as a leader of the Liberal movement in the 1900's; the imperial network in which both Herbert and Ivy moved comfortably; their role as leading patrons of high culture in Melbourne. However, if there is to be a reading strategy and a productive outcome, a short research stint must quickly settle on a particular theme with a problem to solve and a hypothesis which attempts to solve it.

Consequently I have focussed on two things: firstly the place and motivating power of protestant faith in Herbert Brookes' world outlook, and secondly the weighting of nation and empire in his politics. I have been especially interested in the way he constructed his British-Australian identity and in particular in the internal logic that led from his colonial liberalism onto his twentieth century protestant sectarianism. The result is a biographical sketch which attempts to explain the experience of Brookes' passionate loyalism in both phases. The research emphasis is on his formative adulthood, from the 1890’s through to the time of the Great War. As an exercise in what Erikson has called ‘life history’ this work fits into my wider study of the rise and fall of Britishness in Australia. [2]

Some parts of the 143 boxes in the vast Brookes' collection have been more heavily used than others. In four months it was not possible to read everything. I have not, for example, spent much time on the business side of the collection, on how Brookes made his money and the details of his business career. I have tended to focus on correspondence, both personal and political, on his philosophical writings and his journalism, on his social gospel activity and his political career. The result is no more than a sketch marking out the 'geography' of some parts of the Brookes Papers, indicating key themes in Herbert Brookes' world outlook and, hopefully, a suggestive analysis of how his allegiances were constructed over time. Biography will always inform and reflect group practices and discourse. While this is a biographical sketch it is also an excursion into the politics and culture of British Australia.

Introduction

Herbert Brookes was a wealthy businessman, a distinguished patron of high culture in Melbourne Society, an anti-Labor eminence who moved comfortably in the highest of imperial circles. The richness of his papers in the National Library provides the opportunity for a life history of a leading British-Australian, a way into the dynamics of liberalism before the Great War and of loyalism after it.

There is a strong temptation to describe Brookes as a liberal christian who became a reactionary protestant. The transition is attractive in its simplicity. But the simple play of opposites catches nothing of the entanglements of a life, the contradictions at work, the multiplicity of shaping forces that bore down on Brookes. And ultimately it catches nothing of his consistency. Rohan Rivett's biography of Brookes casts his militant protestantism as an aberration. Of Brookes' obsessive hostility to Archbishop Mannix he says Mannix 'was the one foe of his life.'[3] Brookes actually had many foes. From early adulthood there was a passion to rid the world of evil as he understood it. There was a logic in his earlier thinking that led on to his later concerns. His dear friend Walter Murdoch once wrote, perhaps with Brookes in mind, that a man without enemies had to be shirking his duty. He reminded his readers of christianity's 'unquenchable pugnacity'.[4]

The question that Brookes posed in 1932 - 'How are the Egyptians behaving?' - was a rhetorical one. Brookes already had strong views on the matter - the Egyptians were behaving badly as were other wreckers, elsewhere in the empire. He wrote these lines when he was sixty-five. They concentrate a good bit about him - there are the puritanical overtones of 'wickedly vicious'; the supremacism of the reference to 'barbarians'; the conservatism, perhaps even the fanaticism implicit in 'disloyal' and 'repudiators'; the preoccupation with empire and the Roman Catholic threat to it. And lastly there is the ethic of protestant stewardship or rather his response to its rejection in various parts of the empire: 'Are they still striking at the friend that rescued them from chaos and lifted them onto a plane of undreamed of material well-being,' he asks. The ethic of protestant stewardship was the guiding principle of his life. It was embodied in his definition of a democrat: 'By democrat I mean the perfect gentleman and friend of man and son and God.'[5]

One of the paradoxes here is that his allegiances do shift, his identity does change, yet there is a consistency that runs through his public life. The consistent impulse was the practise of protestant stewardship.[6] In the 1890's his social gospel christianity combined with a creative evolutionism adapted from Herbert Spencer whom he idealised. This was his youthful response to social needs as he saw them at the time. His Deakinite liberalism in the 1900's was in keeping with the optimism of the following period but was also tied into his disciple-ship under Deakin who had brought him back from the brink after the death of his first wife, Jessie - a huge psychological debt that was evident in the fact that he called him 'Master' in turn of the century correspondence. This tie was deepened further by his subsequent marriage to Ivy (1905), Deakin's second daughter. His militant protestantism was his later response to the decline of empire and the Catholic challenge to British identity as he understood it. In each case the passionate temper of his activism was evident and the impulse was the same. The necessity for an informed, pious elite to lead, whether to extend or to defend progress, depending on the circumstances.

Brookes was a Progressive in the sense that Michael Roe has defined that late nineteenth century movement. Progressivism was a body of ideas which guided 'expert and elite groups' of educated and 'more or less successful Anglo-Saxon protestants' whose concern was to save capitalist society from its excesses. The progressives' fear was that if they did not redeem society then extremists would take over. The paradox was that their anxieties could take them, unwittingly, to the brink of extremism. Theirs was a complicated political positioning, as Christopher Lasch has pointed out, in which the progressives were 'torn between their wish to liberate the unused energies of the submerged portions of society and their enthusiasm for social planning, which led in practice to new and subtler forms of repression.' This could apply to no-one better than it does to Brookes, a man who starts out as a social reformer and much later organises the first national intelligence network in Australia.[7]

Thus progressivism was both radical and conservative; it sought both to liberate and to constrain. It had elements of the liberal and moralist traditions but shared some things in common with the far right - joy in order and work, supranationalism, heroic morality, propaganda, elitism, the leader principle.

Roe argued that this liberal-authoritarian duality made them more real and stronger. 'It was part of Progressivism's appeal, not any denial to legitimacy, that simultaneously it invoked liberation and order, democracy and elitism, change and continuity, welfare and asceticism, worship of both Technology and Nature.'

These dualities were Herbert Brookes. His shift from christian social reformer to militant protestant was a change in political orientation but it was also the logic of his progressivism at work under different circumstances; it was the protestant steward learning lessons, losing idealism, fearing for his empire and his god. Progressivism was a crusading syndrome. It might be gracious or hysterical; it might bestow good works; it might set to annihilate an enemy out of its own fear of annihilation. Like British heritage itself, there was a liberal-authoritarian duality at its core.

His Spiritual Cosmos

Brookes' attachment to empire is partly explained by his economic interests which began accumulating around the turn of the century. His pastoral and manufacturing interests were increasingly tied into the circuits of imperial capital. But the outlook of the older Brookes was by no means typical of his social class at that time. He became, in fact, something of an extremist, as his language might suggest. Certainly he subscribed to the conventions of the British-Australian gentleman, putting a premium on reserve, unflappability and urbanity. But he was a driven personality, given to passionate soul searching and preoccupied with the spiritual realm of things. In the most conservative Melbourne circles his language must have startled some of his associates: in 1923 he wrote to his friend W.A. Watt after the federal election:

May you be endowed by Him who meditates patiently upon the infirmities of His creation with a spirit that can suffer and withstand the steam of loquacity which at times is at flood, and not always translucent in that place where 75 men good and true shape our political destinies.[8]

Translation: I hope you do well in Parliament. What Mr. Watt thought of that blessing we do not know.

And it was a blessing. Brookes wrote like a New England minister to the gentry. He had found a religious faith in 1890, the same year that he graduated with honours in engineering from Melbourne University. Much of the belief system that guided the rest of his life was put into place while the Queen-Empress was still on the throne, during which time he was a journalist and poet, a political activist (for the parliamentary aspirations of H.H. Champion), a social gospeller and, towards the end of the century, a reforming mine manager. He was also immersed in the big theological issues of the day, particularly the question of creation and the existence of God.

His attachment to the empire was a carefully theorised part of his spiritual cosmos, which explains his fierce resentment towards those who threatened it, whether wickedly vicious Egyptians, or Irish repudiators or 'disloyal' Australians. Brookes was thirty-three in 1900. He was a late Victorian, and it is important to clarify just what that means here.

The late Victorians brought to social problems 'a moral imagination that was remarkable in its intensity and "earnestness" (that very Victorian word).'[9] Beatrice Webb described the spirit of the time as consisting of a trust in science and a commitment to mankind. Josephine Butler referred to an 'awful abundance of compassion'.

It has been argued that this 'compassion' was a compensation for the loss of religious faith; that humanitarianism had become a surrogate religion. 'Social questions', Webb wrote in her diary, 'are the vital Questions today; they take the place of religion.' The suggestion is that we have a new, secular morality, charged with guilt at having forsaken god, and fuelling the zealousness of the late Victorians.[10] As Leslie Stephen put it after failing to derive an ethic from Darwinism: 'I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.... I mean to live and die like a gentleman.'[11]

But for many late Victorians, many Victorians in fact, it was simply too hard to let go of God altogether. They were tenacious in their pursuit of a way to reconcile the idea of God with the findings of science. Some rather interesting compromises are the result: Matthew Arnold will not believe in miracles or the resurrection but sees the crucifixion as a symbol of moral salvation. The agnostic Herbert Spencer insists that we cannot know the Absolute but concedes there is one.[12]

Brookes negotiated his own way through all this. He was a passionate believer in science and a great fan of Darwin and Spencer. He was filled with the desire to do good. But against the background of an Ulster protestant mother and a solid Wesleyan schooling, he was living with the torment of doubt about god and his own salvation - how exactly this torment was nurtured is difficult to say because his papers reveal little about his childhood and his parents. Weber talks about him, inadvertently of course, when he discusses the anxiety about salvation among Protestant faiths: 'The Methodist ethic appears to rest on a foundation of uncertainty,' he argued.[13]

The Young Radical

Brookes' radical ideas estranged him from his family for a number of years. His father almost cut him off without a shilling. He may have been disowning his father. His land tax advocacy hit directly at William's vast pastoral holdings in Queensland. His ascetism was a rejection of 'the Dad's' avowed pursuit of a leisured upper-class existence for the entire family. The other brothers were keen to make their father's imagined future a reality, but not Herbert. Herbert's denunciation of the leisured existence was part of a wider critique, a political economy of capitalism, which he developed in the 1880's and early 1890's. It was eclectic and unoriginal, but it was comprehensive and based on wide reading.

The seed was planted when he was very young. As an eleven and twelve year old he was just old enough to work as time-keeper and storekeeper to his father who was building a rail-road north of Port Augusta, in partnership with (Sir) Simon Fraser described in the ADB as 'stockrider, whipmaker, bagpiper' and fiddle repairer.[14] As time-keeper and storekeeper Herbert mixed with the men, took in the spirit of the new bush unionism, and acquired sympathies that would influence him for many years. He was at Wesley college from 1881-85 where sport satisfied some of his worries about 'manhood' and his mother's active methodism was reinforced.[15]

In the second half of the decade he did his civil engineering degree at Melbourne University. He was in Queensland, on his father's properties, during the big strikes of 1891 and saw a good bit of the suffering among working people that led to those strikes. This is the high point of his ambition to be a Bulletin poet and short story writer, but his class and his ethics, (his stewardish protestant core), was as much a barrier to merging with the Bulletin as was his literary talent. Like William Lane, with whom Brookes would come to identify quite strongly, he is too 'moral' , too high-minded, to be one of the mates. But Lane had social class and solid atheism to take him into the worker's camp and on these scores Brookes was an altogether different man. He was way too reverential, too sentimental, and way too spiritual - always searching for the sacred or the exalted in the world around him - to be a Bulletin man. Brookes was given to what LaNauze has described as the 'self-induced mood of abasement appropriate to prayer.'[16] The Bulletin men, skeptical and scandalous, liked to thumb their noses at that kind of 'bogus piety'.

In a series of poems and articles written in the early and mid 1890's Herbert elaborated a sentimental liberalism which identified with the sufferings of the working class in town and country and criticised the exploiting classes. He wrote rambling verse on the cruelty of the labour market and the pitiable state of so many working men and women. He wrote short stories that celebrated mateship and, between 1894 and 1896, had a series of essays published, though not in the Bulletin, which set out his views on political economy, social morality, the theatre and poetry. Other themes were the wicked employers, 'Chinkies', celestials covetting pastoralists' daughters, mateship, scabs and tramping and convicts.[17]

For Brookes the system was a social treadmill, a 'mighty whirling wheel of stress and strife which must be stemmed.' So much labour was a waste of time, 'misapplied and sent circulating in unmanly channels.' The problem was the leisure class, men and women who dwelled in luxuriously appointed houses, overdressed, entertained to excess, kept dressmakers and tailors and gardeners on hand, employed grooms to 'gloss' the horses and 'titivate the brougham', abused with their philistine preferences the skills of master-painters and master musicians and, in 'a legion of ways', put labour to purposes without use or beauty. The proximity of his anonymous leisure class to the life-style in his father's palatial Melbourne household can hardly be avoided.

One long unpublished lamentation was written under a quote from Isaiah: 'The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are on edge':

Oh! Lords of the Earth! Lords of Society - how exhaustively painstaking you are to store up for yourselves treasures on earth so that you may hand down to your children a monetary dowry which will assure them against the tooth and claw of competition.
At what cost! Why many of you have in so doing dwarfed and compressed and killed your higher qualities those attributes of sympathy pity love justice and mercy as well as high mental qualities in your blind chase after that golden alchemy of commerce. You have discovered too late that the ideal position for which you struggled is a 'will-o-the-whispia.'[18]

Nor can his language be disassociated from his own rejection of that lifestyle:

If it ministered to the truly beautiful this toil would then have its raison d'etre. But it does not. It has neither use nor beauty to commend it, but only its dehumanising and brutish tendencies. Under all the quilt and silk and frummery, under its bleary and sensual eye, its vanity, vain-glory and hypocrisy, the satyr's claw is to be seen.[19]

Brutishness and sensuality are a common worry in Brookes' thought. The satyr is never far away. Emasculation is a persistent concern. Fat plutocrats threaten the ruination of society through the 'useless' labour their life-style generates:

But that work would be better unmade; for it is such work as hinders the growth of healthy, open, liberal manhood and womanhood, and breeds a nation of valets and snobs. Thus manhood is degraded, and a posse of lickspittles, time-servers, shams and swashbucklers reign in its stead. Yea! verily the kingdom of this world is a kingdom of valets.[20]

Brookes cares deeply about sweating in factories and out-work and other kinds of exploitation in the productive sector, but he summons up the fat plutocrat of the leisure class rather than the productive capitalist when it is time to point the finger. His enemy is the rentier, the landlord, Carlyle's 'perfumed seigneur' and the 'treadmillism' their life-style generates. Brookes was an active supporter of the anti-sweating movement and of tighter factory legislation, but the sweated seamstress in the outwork sector is the victim, not of her employer but of the consumer: she is sweated 'that my lady may make a good bargain at the emporium'. Even the sweater, the exploiting employer, is ultimately the victim of the extravagant, un-beautiful consumer choices of the leisure class. Again and again he resorts to a few lines from Carlyle:

The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner. A perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the "Oeil-de-Boeuf" hath an alchemy whereby he will extract the third nettle and call it rent.[21]

One of his solutions is a vague one - to employ 'the regiments' in 'useful and beautiful man-elevating work,' work which might perhaps have been found on his father's properties but not in his father's Melbourne mansion. But father's properties are hardly safe from the errant son's policy statements, for Herbert has other ways out of 'treadmillism'. One of these is via a Henry George land tax, an idea he was to remain committed to until at least 1910 when Deakin told him there would never be a legislature to pass it, and when, incidentally, his father died.

In 1894, again quoting Carlyle on nettles and rent, and extremely unhappy with the persistence of class war in Queensland, he recommended the abolition of the private ownership of land and the redistribution of this wealth to its 'rightful owners, together with more besides.'[22] His broadside on the Queensland government, at the height of the trouble in that year could not be more in line with the outlook of the organised working class. He rails against 'rank injustice', 'class legislation', and the 'reckless bartering of the people's heritage.' It has no equal in any other colony:

The Cabinet is nothing but a pure double-distilled class Cabinet, and commands a majority of time-servers and log-rollers. The chief burden of their legislation is in the direct interest of the pastoralists, banks, and large mortgage companies.

He cites the 'great slave Act' and the great 'land-grab Act' as evidence. But worse is to come. 'Queensland's cup of bitterness will be about full up, we think, when the Amended Land Act, now before the House in Brisbane, has been unscrupulously filched through.' Griffith's progressive land act in 1884 had brought hope, 'before his pride was wounded by the action of the Labour Party, and when he saw justice and equity more clearly'. But the pastoralists had obstructed justice and equity at every turn. Amendment followed amendment. Now they had their nobbled Act and will be victorious. They will buy their leaseholds for a song; the selectors will be hoodwinked and robbed. 'In this way is the heritage of the disinherited Queenslander... to be given away for a song.'... Such reckless and unjust sowing can only bring a harvest of evil.[23]

Brookes has also become an under-consumptionist, a critic of the 'Fetich of Thrift'. He responds to the depression of the 1890's with an essay blaming the mal-distribution of spending power - the thrifty are storing up wealth at the expense of the unthrifty and never spending enough to keep the economy going; disaster banks up and breaks through:

Our community, like nearly all others at the present time, is suffering seriously. Everywhere trade is sluggish, commerce is stagnant, manufactories and industries are idle, or at half pressure. The trail of the serpent of under-consumption is over them all. Under-consumption brought about by our worship of the graven image of 'Thrift'.[24]

At first glance a critique of thrift is a curious position for an ascetic but it makes sense to Brookes because he is imagining a more egalitarian spread of consuming power for the purchase of 'useful and beautiful', necessary things, in place of the extravagant consuming passions of the 'perfumed seigneurs'. In a line that anticipates Joan Robinson's 'Fallacy of Composition' theory, he argues, quoting someone else, that 'an individual may be a rich miser; but a community cannot', that is, a community cannot hoard and at the same time be prosperous.

The depression and class war in several colonies occurred when Brookes was moving into his mid twenties, he was an ardent member of the Australian Church, a liberal christian more concerned with calvinist presbyterians than catholics; he was briefly a mine manager and briefly a political campaigner for the parliamentary ambitions of H.H. Champion; he had experience of class relations on the Central Downs in Queensland and he was intellectually active, devouring any book which might be a guide to the working of society or an aid to him in the pursuit of the spiritual, the 'mystic soul state', for these were the two wings of his intellectual flight.

A good bit of this energy, in the early and mid 1890's was focussed on the problem of class conflict. His social darwinism combined with empire triumphalism to anticipate better times out of an unlikely analysis. Inter-social warfare, he argued, was in the process of supplanting international warfare: 'The forces on both sides are being dimly organised for struggle. Among the Anglo-Saxons at least it will, we hope, be a bloodless struggle.' How might it be bloodless? Firstly he believed the big unions of both labour and capital would turn to 'civilising and humanising weapons - weapons of the inner man', rather than to 'life-maiming and death-dealing weaponry:

The high function of unionism is this: that it fosters the solidarity of both armies. It humanises and civilises the individual units in their own groups. It educates them. It curbs their egoistic and anti-social tendencies, and fosters the altruistic on which alone the advance of society depends. As the friction increases and the regiments on either side swell, it will, we hope become apparent to the controlling class that their opponents are their brothers, and have claims which they have heretofore refused to recognise, while on the labour ranks it will dawn, we trust, that their true salvation lies in just representation.[25]

Herbert Brookes did trust. His trust in this sort of outcome stemmed from his profound belief in the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things. All this terrible strife - 'strikes and unionist intimidations' and a brick-headed 'controlling class' - could yet metamorphose into a new harmony because there is a 'golden alchemy' in the English heritage 'which has never failed to solve the class difficulties as they have reared their heads' - it is the alchemy of ever extending representation.

In a one paragraph sweep from 1215 to the present, readers of Dr. Strong's church paper the Australian-Herald were treated to a history of the 'golden alchemy which has never failed'.

The great charter symbolised the realisation of the claims of the greater barons in 1215. The provisions of Oxford in 1258 signified a still wider claim for representation, including lesser barons, nobles and knights. The growth in importance and population of the towns led to a further broadening of representation. In 1295 the King called to Parliament two burgesses from every city, borough, and leading town, within his realm, to sit side by side with the knights, nobles and barons of the Great Council. And we can see with our eye of fancy the dignified sneer on the faces of the aristocratic worthies as they sit cheek-by-jowl with ye olde English burgesse. Aye! even as the representatives of Mammon and of stagnant blue-blood to-day look away from the common garb of a latter day labour member.[26]

Brookes' sympathies at this time are clear - he is on Labour's side. There must be room in the system for the just claims of labour. Labour must have representation. Capital must soften. Even in the thirteenth century he finds the equivalent of Carlyle's 'perfumed seigneurs' and the 'stagnant blue-bloods of to-day' - they are the 'aristrocratic worthies' with their 'dignified sneers'. But these worthies did make room, however reluctantly, and their equivalents in Anglo-Saxondom have continued to make room from one age to another. The strife of the 1890's in an outpost of Anglo-Saxondom might be no different. Capital will see the light. Men of good-will will talk around the brick-headed men and the men with dignified sneers. The 'perfumed seigneurs' will be cast aside. The practical men of good will will get on with making a better world.

This kind of optimism might seem odd, written as it was, when the unions were defeated and the recession still there to hold them down. But the wellsprings of Brookes' cheeriness were not simply his reliance on whiggish triumphs from deep history. Life in the Australian Church had given him focus and purpose; the miseries of the depression had galvanised at least some protestants into activism among the downtrodden, allowing them to confuse their new sense of mission with new hope for mankind. Brookes was one of these. But he was more. He was a believer in the vitalist creed that effectively put the future in the hands of men like himself. He had taken lines from Browning to heart:

Think as if man never thought before!
Act as if all creation hung attent
On the acting of such faculty as his.[27]

In 1890 Brookes had met Herbert Drummond while the world renowned evangelist was appearing in Melbourne. Drummond was only one of a series of father figures in Herbert's life, but his impact was perhaps as great as Deakin's a decade later.[28] Drummond's persona, so far as Brookes was concerned, was christ-like - he was christ on earth for an earnest student in search of just that. What is more he was a great synthesiser and a persuasive writer. His works were a revelation to Herbert because they tackled and resolved some of the major theological squabbles of the time in a way that he could accept. They allowed him to reconcile his commitment to science and material progress with his romantic and spiritual yearnings. They gave his vitalism, with its ambiguous dualism of rationalism and mysticism, an intellectual backing. They gave him further reason to believe in a creative rather than a determined evolution in which good men - mostly protestant, all humanitarian - could affect the social course of things, and thus the course of humanity. As Michael Roe has indicated, the vitalists or progressives

generally loathed the idea of determined evolution - that belittled man, reduced him to a passive pawn in destiny's grasp. But creative evolution was altogether different - it came from the flux of things, shaped by the efforts of men, willing themselves to higher things. This notion was central to vitalism.[29]

In his Ascent of Man, Drummond had drawn on Spencer to reconcile science with religion, but he had also pointed to the missing element in Spencer's outline of the evolutionary principle and that was 'altruism'. Spencer felt miffed. Confidentially he asked Mrs. Lynn Linton to reply as his proxy in The Fortnightly Review, using her 'vigorous style and picturesque way of presenting things' to flatten this pretender who wanted 'to teach him how to box the compass.' He wanted to tweak Drummond's nose. But on the other side of the world Brookes thought Drummond had got it in one, for he was imagining a world in which his own altruism, and that of like-minded men, would make all the difference, a world in which even the warring unions of capital and labour might turn to 'civilising and humanising weapons - [the] weapons of the inner man' . Drummond facilitated the melding of Brookes' fascination for the mystical side of human experience with his practical side, his belief in science and his commitment to worldly affairs with his search for the 'mystic soul state.'

Yet it has to be said that it was not the travelling preacher's writing that won Brookes over in the first place. It was his person. In a later letter to J.Y. Simpson who had introduced them in 1890, Herbert told the story of the impact of that meeting. He had heard Drummond speak on 'The Kingdom of God' at the Athenaeum Hall. Drummond told his audience he had crossed the globe for them and would speak with any one of them, anytime, anywhere. Brookes felt as though Drummond was speaking directly to him. His words answered what seemed like a burning need. 'Verily,' he wrote, 'something beautiful had come our way, and to me at least he seemed a new species of humanity. To have seen him, I have felt ever since, was to have a vision of his Master Christ.[30]

Drummond fixed the time and place and they met. 'It was a moonlight night, [at] the Toorak manse where one of Drummond's friends lay dying. 'I protested against dragging him away, but he insisted and we walked for three hours around these secluded and half country roads beyond and about Toorak.' Brookes knew exactly what he wanted to ask and it was a revealing question:

Is it possible, Professor, bearing in mind your address on the Kingdom of God, for one to become a member and yet doubt or disbelieve the divinity of Christ? At once his quiet, eager, intense, sweet voice replied, 'Did the first disciples believe in it when they were first called?' How Scotch to answer by asking another question. 'No! How could they?' and at once the vision flashed on me. 'Quite right, it grew on them by degrees.'[31]

It seems this was the perfect answer, a prediction, an allegory perhaps for the coming of his own full faith. Brookes doubts were considerable. He says elsewhere that his agnosticism did not list and sink until much later in the decade, suggesting that his christian activism was as much a struggle with doubt as it was an act of faith. His response to that evening was ecstatic. Drummond was a 'spiritual meteor' - 'he had buttonholed my soul'.[32] His thoughts jumped to Robert Browning's 'Bishop Brougham':

No, when the fight begins within himself
A man's worth something.
Prolong that battle through his life!
Never leave growing till the life to come.[33]

He saw in Drummond a 'broad band of altruism' where in so many others it was a 'mere thread'. What captured him was Drummond's seemingly boundless sympathy, his way of making people comfortable, of making them feel they could tell him anything, revealing even their most monstrous doubts. His worries about making it into heaven were assuaged by Drummond's thought. Drummond told him

the most exciting situation in the universe is an unsaved soul. Picture it on the brink of Eternity. Tomorrow you may stand there for the last time, - then Eternity. That future hangs upon the present; do not refuse today's decision upon the chance of tomorrow's reformation.[34]

In religion he would find peace, for 'religion is a calming thing. Its greatest watchwords are Peace and Rest. Be still, trustful, not afraid, - that is what it ever whispers into the agitated, sinful, perplexed mind.'

Drummond's god was the god Herbert wanted; a loving god. Some of Brookes' most savage writing in the formative nineties is reserved for the Calvinists and the Westminster Confession of Faith. In fierceness it matches his later vitriol directed at the Catholic church. George Higinbotham, in a sensational affair in the previous decade, had moved from Anglicanism to an undogmatic Unitarianism, rejected the doctrine of original sin and claimed 'the dogma of hereditary guilt was not so much as mentioned once by the founder of Christianity.'[35] Brookes was that way inclined too. He regarded unitarianism as a sane outlook, and believed that God was both the highest reason and the supremest love. He would bow to the awful mysteries that surrounded life but he would not believe that the darkness was full of terrors and fiendish shapes. (The fiendish shapes were within men). He chose instead to imagine a darkness through which shafts of light would reveal concealed beauties and glories which the 'eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the mind to conceive'. He chose to reject the cruel mythologies of religion which have deepened, not relieved, the darkness, and made the Supreme an object of terror, instead of a Father of infinite pity and love.[36]

After Drummond, Brookes knew he could have his doubts yet still be saved, still be an unexcited soul standing on the brink of Eternity, still make it into the kingdom of heaven. It seemed his path conformed to that which the apostles took to salvation. That was very good news. Now, thanks to the 'spiritual meteor' he had a beginning and a probable end, subject to performance. It was up to him, in life, to fill in the middle, to do good works, keep up the scorecard, and ensure the gates to heaven would be open to him. His creative evolutionism even embraced his spiritual journey. By the end of the century Drummond had superceded Spencer in the Brookes scheme of things.

Herbert Brookes, mining engineer, was deeply ambivalent about industrialism. He believed in its progressive benefits, he celebrated and strived to understand and propagate the science that underpinned it. But he was always a bit more of a romantic than a rationalist. He was content, for example, to be branded an 'emotional liberal', would not accept that emotion was inferior to intellect, and believed the emotional side and the intellectual side of 'man' complemented each other. His instinct for 'emotion' and his caution about 'intellect' without it, underscored his worries about industrialism.[37] The industrial age, he argued in February 1895, had stamped out the poetic sensibility that understood all Nature is a revelation of the mystical and the divine. Herbert could feel this sensibility surging back, but it was in spite of industrialism. The surge that he felt was his own preferences, his attraction to what Deakin called the 'literature of faith', and to a tradition and literature close by - that of poetry.[38]

Now, the present age, which is beyond all else the age of Industrialism, has held too realistically to the materialistic view. It has resolved most all things into matter in motion. What matter and motion really are, or what part mind plays in their conception, this age has seldom stopped to consider....Matter to the individual in the Industrial age has been 'brute' and 'crass inanimate nature', something to be torn, battered and beaten into shape and use. Latterly a change has been stealing on the scene. Though Herakles has perished forever on his blazing funeral pyre, Triton blown the last blast on his horn, and Demeter and Proserpine vanished never to return; still the modern view of Nature is tending to become intensely spiritualistic. The transformation of matter is taking place. Our poets have ever clung to the more primitive view of Nature. To them matter never was 'crass' and 'brute', but quick with life. Obedient to their Muse, the mountains break forth into singing, and the trees of the fields clap their hands; they have invoked the heavenly bodies, the powers of the air, perennial springs, ever-flowing rivers, majestic mountains; they, in their subtle frenzies, have given to airy nothings, form, content, and life....May it not be that he [the Poet] has kept alight the sacred fire which the industrial age might have quenched? At all events it seems certain the modern tide of thought is set in this direction. Matter is fast casting off the old garment of the mineral and the animal, and is being dressed in spiritual garments.[39]

Brookes, following Herbert Spencer, wanted not to 'debase mind to the level of matter' but to 'elevate matter to the level of mind.' If that could happen then the meaning of it all - what it has all been for - might be answered. His was a curious addition to Spencer whose agnosticism troubled him, wedged itself in the cracks of his doubt, before he threw it off. Spencer had argued that 'evolution is a kind of progress from homogeneity to an organized heterogeneity, the whole being dependent on an unknowable force which sets the system in motion.'[40] Brookes believed with increasing conviction that a benevolent god was this progressive force and that men would come to know him and grasp his purpose, through poetry, perhaps mostly because poetry should be about Nature and all Nature is a revelation of the divine. Caught in that circular assurance, his essay concluded hopefully with these lines from Tennyson’s ‘The Play’:

Act first, this earth, a stage so gloom'd with woe,
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes,
And yet, be patient. Our playwright may show,
In some fifth act what this wild drama means.

With the end of the Great Strikes, Brookes’ writing took a turn. In a series which probably began in the Australian-Herald in 1895, he began to write about his great poets. There were no more short stories eulogising bushmen, lamenting the state of class relations or exploring his worries about unionism. Over a period of about three years he wrote essays on his favourite poets, punctuated with pieces on the 'new photography', theosophy and his political concerns. The poetry series came under the umbrella title of 'The Poet's Scrap Book'. British and American poets figured, though his Americans were more numerous. Poetry was one of the emotional strings that made America an important allegiance all through his life. No Australians made his list. He had written elsewhere of Banjo Paterson, praised him for his aesthetic Australianness, then lectured him on the art of high-mindedness and told him to get with it.

The series began with Robert Browning. It seems he found in Browning the poetic summation of his beliefs matched by the intensity which he felt for them. Browning's poetry expressed or confirmed so much of his outlook. Reading him left Brookes ecstatic. 'To uplift to higher heights the point of view of one's fellow men is the greatest service man can render man,' he wrote. This is what Browning did. He was 'the Prophet of Spiritual Evolution. He spoke before the Material Evolutionist cast his dark shadow of crass mechanical matter upon the life of this age.' Browning stood for 'Progress!', 'Onward!', 'Upward!', 'More Life and Fuller!'. He was the mouthpiece and expression of western civilisation, the sign that the tide was turning, that 'emotion' was on the come-back trail. He was 'vigorous, healthy, masculine, militant, progressive.'[41] He was 'pre-eminently the God-intoxicated man', and the god who filled him was Brookes' god.

Not an external god 'set at a distance' his throne and judgement seat in some unknown place, but an 'immanent Deity', one the people can know and love. And this thanks to science which has made this immanence clearer (a reference to Spencer's version of evolution) and poetry which can open hearts and bring on the intoxication.[42] 'Science created the light, poets interpreted it, God was immanent in it.'[43] Wordsworth also sang of this immanent Deity, whose dwelling was 'in the light of the setting suns', in the ocean and the air and in the mind of man, impelling 'all thinking things'. So did Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier and Lowell. But Browning was the most 'intoxicated' of them all. Brookes loved his Paracelsus which was Browning's first important publication, the work that had brought him friendship with Landor, Dickens and other literary lights. In Paracelsus Brookes found words to match his intoxication. 'God is...one everlasting bliss.' Words to match, or perhaps to fortify, his commitment: 'God thou art Love. I build my faith on that!' And words to match his questing, since purpose resided in the un-finishedness of it all.[44]

In Browning he found much of himself - sentimentality, the romantic sensibility, piety, the yearning to know God, to be a disciple, intensity of purpose, the irresistible sweep of emotions, empathy, fallibility, high-mindedness , the obsession with love, fear of the beast within us; life as God's proving ground - the idea of salvation from good works. 'I go to prove my soul,' wrote Browning in Paracelcus,

I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! what time, what circuits first,
I ask not: but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!

Brookes could carry this idea of a testing future with the innocence of the rooky, unaware that God would hit him with a giant fire-ball in the not-too-far off. In the meantime he was free to plunge into a bout of crusading journalism that would be the busiest writing time in his life. In the space of three years he published nearly seventy articles, reviews and essays in fringe journals and church papers. Some were a mere paragraph or two, but others including the 'Poets' series, were essays based on considerable reading. As the fears of class war fell away he turned his attention to the banks, theatre, ethics, crime, the responsibilities of the state, monopolies, history (chartism, Eureka), protestant in-fighting (the Westminster confession), the Anglicans, science, profit and power-sharing, factory legislation, lotteries, pensions, god and the federal convention, Spencer, Drummond, theosophy, capital punishment, the Aborigines, the Queen's jubilee, and, of course, the poets. But 'The Poet's Scrap Book' was possibly his main concern; for these other issues were the secular punctuations in his spiritual searchings.

There was more of the rooky about him when he quoted from Browning's 'Fra Lippo Lippi': 'The world's no blot for us,/
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good'. And in Browning and other poets he was repeatedly drawn to words about salvation for, like Luther himself, he backed away from the idea that the 'Elect' were predestined and that 'Election' was irrevocable:

I also will that man become aware
Life has worth incalculable, every moment that he spends
So much gain or loss for that next life which on this life depends.[45]

But like most devout protestants he was stuck with the fact that you could never be sure who was on God's list and how you were scoring in the 'good works' stakes. He had the old medieval idea of a book-keeping God. It was Brookes' emotional disposition, his romantic, poetic sensibility that led him to a more generous book-keeper than the God his mother had taught him. The fury he reserved for the latter day Calvinists about him, the men of the harsh God, the God of 'extreme inhumanity and magnificient consistency', whose 'Elect' were fixed and whose grace irrevocable, was possibly a measure of his own struggle against uncertainty, the final unknowability, whether acknowledged or not, of 'Election'.[46] Brookes had a soft spot for the Puritans that came from much reading in English history, but his ascetism was less severe and way too egalitarian to equate with their latter day equivalents in predestination and their rejection of all the sensuous and emotional elements in culture and spiritual life.

He admired the 'cool reserve' of the Puritan martyrs. He saw the linking line between their reserve and the 'quiet, self-control which still distinguishes the best type of English or American gentlemen to-day.'[47] But he could not share the deep distrust of human emotions that went with this coolness and he was, he believed, the better British gentleman for it.

On matters such as friendship, romance, love, sex in marriage, dancing, and perhaps most important of all, trust in other human beings, he was no puritan. To put it in a nutshell, he was an ascetic but not a fanatic; he approved of dancing, but doubted whether a parson should dance. His Father in heaven was the Father of the New Testament, 'so human and understanding, who rejoices over the repentance of a sinner as a woman over the lost piece of silver she has found.' This was a Father for whom 'grace is revocable but can be won again by penitent humility and faithful trust in the word of God and in the sacraments.'[48] There was no magical means of attaining grace and election, such as the catholics liked to believe, there was just good works and more good works, all the way to heaven. That is what Brookes believed. Or put it another way for we can never be sure: that is what Brookes reasoned and stuck with, insistently.

High-mindedness

Brookes' essay on a book of Paterson's verse praised him as better than Lindsay and truly Australian. The Banjo's 'verisimilitude' won him over. He evoked what Brookes already felt about the land. But he was no true bard: 'These extracts show THE BANJO as the singer of the present and the past - the scarcely elevating present and the brief, not over-inspiring past of Australia. Is this all that is in him?' Brookes then set about telling Paterson what the poet must do:

he must dip into the future and smite for us a pathway to the ideal after which we dimly grope. He must inspire us with faith in this ideal, though it must for ever keep beyond our reach....Mr. Paterson should now leave for ever the topics of the bush balladist, and make for us songs of higher hopes, deeper aspirations, and profounder joys. The human heart by which we live needs its interpreter. He can do better work yet...[49]

Herbert wanted other 'stewards' to pick up their game, to be like him - serious, 'called', driven. His high-mindedness was evident in so much of his writing - it ran through just about everything. It marked him out, in a contentious, assertive, 'roaring' colonial culture, as something of a moralist and wowser.

In mid 1895, under the pseudonym 'A Voice from the Pit', Herbert reviewed a play by C. Haddon Spurgeon Chambers called 'John-a-Dreams'. Chambers had once had connections with the Bulletin, his 1888 bushranger play Captain Swift had been successfully staged in London and was memorable for the phrase 'the long arm of coincidence has reached after me.' After Captain Swift he was duchessed by club life in London, earned a reputation for indolence and wit, and was much in demand with society hostesses over there. If Brookes knew any of this in 1895, he might have regarded Chambers as a 'perfumed seigneur' of the literary world and brought to his review prejudgements of the kind he revealed when he got onto Oscar Wilde a little later.[50]

The play, as he saw it, hinged on the friendship between a 'brutal materialist sensualist' and a 'refined spiritualistic idealist.' In that one sentence he had phrased two categories that spectacled him for life, a dichotomy which marked his every reading of the world about him, as ingrained as his pantheism or his belief in science. 'As well the dove might mate with the raven,' he tells his readers. Brookes world was simultaneously full of merry flocks, soaring larks, sleeping fish-full oceans, nestled limpets, whispering trees and sweet, human voices, but it was also a sink of immorality filled with the immorality of the Bulletin and the sludge of playwrights and poets. He wanted these people to be responsible. He wanted them to reform, to write plays and poems that were 'songs of higher hopes, deeper aspirations, and profounder joys.'

John-A-Dreams was part of the wider problem facing theatre in general, and wider still a societal obsession with the sexual:

Some of us think that the undue, unscientific, and untruthful prominence which a certain minority give to the sexual element is vicious; and is either a manifestation of aborted sex development into which the sexual element obtrudes as an obsession, or a passing phase of thought in certain enthusiastic young women, which will with the return of their normal state pass away like an unpleasant nightmare.[51]

The entire English theatre was suffering from too much freedom and was a sad instance of that very obsession. The 'restraints of tradition, custom and convention and every common decency and morality' had been waived. Dramatists were running riot thanks to this licence and producing 'grotesque and repulsive scenes'. Brookes cited one to make his point:

A beautiful wife and child are staked on the cut of the cards. A ruined husband makes the atrocious suggestion to his wife, that she shall sell herself to a man who loves her.
A beautiful young maid of eighteen fires off brutal and polished cynicisms , which could only fall from the lips of a 'man of the world', the flesh and the devil.

The stage was overloaded with 'women with pasts' or 'unhappily wedded females whose whole stage life is occupied in a protest against the ring of marriage,' women who want to have their own life and 'develop' themselves first and, maybe, a mother second![52] Brookes blamed Ibsen and Zola for leading the way. Among moral conservatives in the colonies these two had become symbols of foreignness defined in part by sex obsessions and other forms of degeneracy. This 'fleshly school' was taking over the theatre and threatening poetry as well.[53] 'Burlesques of all we hold good and sacred', that's what Brookes saw around him; 'polished cynicisms'; 'degeneracy'. The English stage had slipped so far that even Wilde's disgusting play was 'a bright stroke of originality' by current theatre standards, but that was all Brookes would concede in his review entitled 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

The spelling said it all. Brookes ruined the play for his readers. He quoted all the 'good' lines and all the 'bad' lines. The bad lines were the 'burlesques of all we hold good and sacred', lines such as 'Divorces are made in heaven' and 'Style, not sincerity, should be our object', were typical of Wilde's inversions, these were 'travesties' and 'brutal cynicisms'. They are of course clever, funny lines and contemporary audiences laughed at them. That was his worry - his contemporaries were susceptible to this slush. He could not laugh about matters such as marriage and sincerity. His earnestness compelled him to be a moral policeman. He wanted humour gutted of all transgressions, jokes to be tame, inoffensive to his sensibilities. His 'good' lines included 'Unmarried men are public temptations' and 'I am opposed to long engagements'. When Brookes called a line 'good' he did not mean funny; he meant 'wholesome'.

Brookes cited Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in January 1895 just a few months before he saw the play, to confirm Wilde's degeneracy. Nordau had theorised the connection between 'mere sound' and emotional response as a distinguishing characteristic of the degenerate personality. 'Wilde has never yet drawn the portrait of a real woman in any of his plays', he wrote, and 'none but a degenerate author could make so much hang on a mere sound [the sound of the name Ernest] even if it was allowed that the name Ernest was more musical than other names'. In his own earnestness he was becoming funnier than Wilde:

To the uninitiated it comes as a shock to learn that the author deals with the importance of being christened Ernest. It comes as a still greater shock to see two young women falling in love with two young men because they believe their Christian names to be Ernest. The mere sound of the name inspires these two young women with love....None but a degenerate author could make so much hang on a mere sound....But enough of such degenerates... They hold the mirror not up to Nature, but to the Unnatural.[54]

It does not occur to Brookes that the sound of 'Ernest' had an emotional power in the late Victorian era precisely because of people like him - that Herbert Brookes was a captive of the alternative spelling, if not the sound.

The Bulletin and William Lane

Like William Lane, Brookes was radical in economic matters, a social democrat in polity and a moral conservative on culture. Like Lane he could rant about monopolies, rank injustice, class legislation, the reckless bartering of the people's heritage, hoodwinkery and robbery, but he could never merge with the larrikin streak in bush unionism. Lane would go to Paraguay to get away from bosses and from that very un-earnest, irreverent streak among the labour men. Brookes tackled the problem of irreverence sometime earlier, in 1891, when he wrote the Bulletin a letter, signed 'District-Vicar'. It is worth quoting in full:

It has been so ordained that I have been called upon to tend a flock, as an itinerant parson, in a region far out in the Central provinces of Queensland. It is with some reticence, yet with anxious desire, that I write you this note, calling your attention before it is too late to the somewhat harsh, immoral and irreligious sentiments that many of your articles abound with. Let me tell you that in my little district your paper has for some time had the greatest call. During the last four years I have noticed with very much concern, when endeavouring to perform my duty faithfully and humbly among the younger generation more markedly, an apparent irreligious bent, a boastful, self-satisfied spirit, and an outrageous manifestation of disloyalty to the throne of our motherland, together with all its noblest institutions; and this I attribute principally to many of the articles in your paper. It seems to me that with a little more care in the wording of the articles your very "(marmalade omitted)" paper might become a great power for good. I am respectfully yours - (District-Vicar).[55]

The Bulletin's reply was ten times longer than the letter. It went to town on the 'District-Vicar', called him the 'Ghostly Comforter', raved in paroxysms of irreverence at the throne and the 'motherland' and roared with approval for its part in creating 'the boastful, self-satisfied spirit of the coming generation of this continent.' Whoever wrote the reply thought he had a real vicar, a naive do-gooder on a hook. He may have had the latter but we cannot be sure. It is 1891. Brookes will get more earnest with every year in that decade. We can hardly doubt his worries about the power and position of the Bulletin, but he does enter into the spirit of the paper. It is a trick worthy of the wicked J.F. Archibald himself. And in the end Brookes thinks he has won. He notes, in his clippings book next to his pasted, published letter, that he wrote it 'as a joke from Muttaburra Queensland to provoke a strong reply in the Bulletin's Correspondence Column. They went better than I anticipated.' He seems untroubled, satisfied. He could hardly have expected that the solution to the Bulletin's sometimes chortling, sometimes vicious, often electrifying irreverence was 'a little more care in the wording'. Yet that is what the 'District-Vicar' humbly asked for. He might have been naive and literal but he was not a fool. This was 1891. He had just graduated from university in engineering; he was on his father's station in Queensland, a free man, riding, writing, wondering what he would do with his life, and reading the Bulletin. That is the context. Much would change between the time of his letter and the evening of his encounter with Oscar Wilde. There was no sign of such playfulness by 1895.

The parallel with William Lane might seem a little far-fetched but perhaps not. Brookes saw Lane on the Central Downs in Queensland in 1894, when the little, bespectacled, club-footed tub thumper was barn-storming from one shearing shed to another, speechifying, organising and making a lot of trouble for ‘the Dad’ and other cockies. The utopian expedition to Paraguay followed in 1893 and Brookes followed the news. Thereafter Lane was a figure of some importance to his own positioning in relation to socialism - a relation that was quite complex and would grow more troubled. Lane would become a sort of parable in Brookes' moral critique of 'Laborism' or 'Illiberalism' as he later called it - the good man caught in the unrestrained system; the limits of the individual will in the authoritarian (Labor Party) context.

But Lane also had relevance to Brookes' moral earnestness in the mid nineties because Lane's 'goodness' was evident in this sphere too. Much later Brookes wrote of Lane's morality: he was a man of high principle with a lofty conception of motherhood, marriage and 'household decencies'. That meant he was pretty lonely among the Socialists. He was 'a protagonist of a solitary school of Socialism which clung to the sacredness of the marriage tie.' He was 'a pure, clean soul' who wanted a state of 'social purity' and would not countenance the illicit mingling of men and women any more than he would approve illicit relations between black and white. In the mid 1890's Brookes saw these things in himself. He was a 'pure, clean soul', committed to the marriage tie, one of the 'solitary School' who stood apart from the 'harsh, immoral and irreligious sentiments' of the Bulletin tribe and the obsessions of fashionable playwrights. As much as he hoped to identify with the struggling downtrodden, reflected in his pseudonym 'A Voice from the Pit', he was never going to bridge the gap. For that other pseudonym was 'District Vicar' and that was a truer sign.[56] In his opposition to Wilde, Haddon and others he was fighting the good fight against 'polished cynicisms' and 'travesties of all we hold good and sacred'. Lane becomes important to him later because he is a kind of mirror. Brookes sees parallels that are irresistible. In their own ways they each took the fight to the 'brutal materialist sensualists'.

Brookes always had to fight. To cast him as a taciturn man who, late in life, 1916 is supposed to be the year, began to see enemies under the bed, panicked and became a sort of protestant cold warrior, is to overlook the tenor of his politics from early adulthood. His sectarian anxieties did take time to brew, anti-popery did engulf him quite late in life - in the Great War - but from early adulthood there had always been enemies of reason and light. When he spotted them he took up the cudgel - against capitalists, sensualists, socialists, 'illiberal liberals', and finally, against a conspiracy of communists, Sinn-Feiners and 'Papists', disloyalists all.

Perhaps it was constitutional but he had theorised his responsibilities in terms of 'stewardship'. The world needed guidance. He had that to give. The future was up for grabs. The urgency was always there: 'Think as if man never thought before! Act as if all creation hung attent'. If anything changed, steadily, with the years, culminating in cold-warriordom, it was his sense of how the fight was going; it was the shift to a more defensive stewardship, from remaking the world anew - though his optimism was never doubt-free - to holding things together. In this he was part of wider flows of disenchantment in response to economic uncertainty, modernity and war. His course was his own, but it was part of something bigger. 'We protest that we were placed here by God to beat out for ourselves what is right, and not fold our arms and wait for it to come to us,' he wrote in a defence of legislation for old age pensions in 1898. His weird poetic idiom when he wrote of the 'poorest citizens in their lean and slippered pantaloons' rendered them almost theatrical characters in another play, Brookes the reviewer, charged with scoring it out of ten for moral instruction, though in those days he was more critical of the legislators than the lean poor in their 'pantaloons'.[57]

He once referred to his peers as the 'heroes of old', another borrowing from Browning.[58] Their legacy was the 'golden alchemy' in the English heritage - the progressive uplifting of the masses over the centuries, the alchemy of Anglo-Saxondom, of blood. He took this quite explicitly. From his lineage came his duty. His earlier politics and civic sensibility were no less 'British' than the later conservative commitments, though they lacked their touch of hysteria. He always fought for freedom, always saw himself as the enemy of prejudice and rigid tradition and of those 'stuck in the mud of legend and superstition.' This was central to his sense of Britishness and in particular his attachment to American civilisation, to his own spin on that particular, colonial branch of the British tradition. A pamphlet he wrote in 1932 for the bicentenary of the birth of George Washington, reveals quite a bit in the title alone: A Fine Colonial Englishman - George Washington.

By 1932 Brookes had a comprehensive sense of history in which the American revolution was explained by an idea which W.K. Hancock had elaborated for the Australian colonies - the idea was 'imperial devolution' and the thesis which Hancock and Brookes arrived at, no doubt independently, was that the British were great at progressive ideas but the colonies, in their own varying ways, were quicker to put them into practice. Thus 'imperial devolution' was an idea that had been working itself out at the centre for more than a century before 1776, but not fast enough. Washington, it happened, was the embodiment of forward-looking colonial principles: 'This exquisite Puritan and grave cavalier'. And in this he was more English than the English.[59]

England had its own history of rolling back absolutism. The American revolution was merely a continuation of that history in another place. It was made by Englishmen who had a 'pure genius' for political and religious freedom. He quoted the American historian Butler on ethnic mix in eighteenth century America. Quite a mix it was. Germans, Italians, 'Irish-Scotch', English and so on. 'Nevertheless it was from those of English stock that the chief impulses to revolution came. It was by them that the fires of discontent were fed....Read the signatures to the Declaration of Independence and marvel when you find other than an English name.'[60]

If Brookes had brought the studied detail of this triumphal tail together later in life, he nevertheless had its rudiments worked out by 1895. Not long after he called on Banjo Paterson to lift his game he wrote a small essay on the Eureka Stockade. He compared that tiny scuffle with Runnymede and Bunker's Hill and reckoned the lesson learned by Britain in 1776 - how not to govern - was forgotten in 1854 in Victoria. The gold miners rebelled and the lesson 'was re-learnt, never to be forgotten, on golden soil, midst gumtrees and wattle, at this side of the globe, on the Eureka knoll.'[61]

In 1897 the Australian-Herald got a letter from an old Chartist, a Mr. Dell, then living in Tasmania, who had been punished for his political activitism half a century before. He had 'lived to see the realisation of the Chartist dream,' wrote Brookes:

Without a doubt, such progress, political and social, as has been achieved during the reign of Queen Victoria, has had its source deep down in the hearts of these upward battling Chartists.

He went on to outline something of the repression the chartists had faced - mass meetings on the commons outlawed, the Duke of Wellington's cannon at Westminster Bridge; orders to shoot the people down if they attempted to march to Parliament House with their petitions. But again free Englishmen had prevailed:

To young Australians the platform of the Chartist will appeal as anything but revolutionary....Time has shown which were the fanatics:- the men who caused the cannons to be dragged out and the parks to be railed in; or those who dreamed those dreams now realised, and suffered much.[62]

Many of the dreamers and sufferers, those at Peterloo included, had employed the language and the paraphernalia of British patriots. Brookes shared their definition of the British nation - a capacious social order with room for their rights too.

Even his attitude to the now venerated Queen Victoria was hedged with ascetic caution and the politics of the radical liberal. Brookes viewed the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 as a celebration of immense significance. He thought it was 'the greatest event that has ever happened in the history of the world's empires' and the first step towards the federation of the world:

Such an expression of friendship and unity on the part of Greater Britain on the one hand , and such a recognition of equal and united freedom on the part of the 'little mother isle' on the other hand, has never yet been witnessed throughout all the empires of the past....
What a spectacle was witnessed in London on June 23! and indeed, through the Empire! How spontaneus! how generous (even wastefully so) was the response of the Empire to celebrate the Queen's jubilee![63]

'Wastefully so'! The form of the celebrations offended him. He thought they were not as British as they could be, meaning there was too much pomp and ceremony and not enough liberal substance. He spelt out his objections to the jubilee in an article condemning capital punishment, specifically a hanging at Dubbo jail:

Instead of our wasting so much gas and electric energy to demonstrate our loyalty to the Queen, we would have made this Victorian era more justly honoured and blessed by posterity had we given to our feelings a more permanent and just outlet. To introduce more justice and more humanity into our social system would be more in keeping with a good Queen's diamond jubilee than the discharge of myriads of rockets. The illumination of her subject's minds would be dearer to her than the illumination of her empire's cities. Should the Queen read of the judicial murder perpetrated at Dubbo during the week of her jubilee she would tell her loyal subjects of the South to alter their appeal from 'God Save the Queen' to 'God save us from ourselves'.[64]

Brookes' confidence in his Queen was unrealistic if not rhetorical but as an ideal the monarch was a personification of standards that he could appeal to - a common ploy among Britons of all political persuasions. Yet he was no slavish monarchist. There was a dash of cynicism in his question 'What has Her Majesty the Queen done on her part? He was looking for Jubilee gestures of real substance. He saw none, though surely this was the time for a 'good Queen' to be seen to make them.

Her majesty's salary alone during the past sixty years has amounted to over twenty three millions of pounds. Doubtless, we suppose, her private and secret benefactions have been great - not so her public. We trust the Queen will round off this period of celebration in such a manner that her subject will exclaim, "Every inch a Queen".[65]

The high point of the Jubilee was the celebrations around the Queen's date of accession in May. In October the same year Brookes married Jessie, daughter of the Reverend Charles Strong who headed the Australian Church which he attended regularly. It was a time of intense activity for him, as well as romance.

Once married, Brookes took Jessie back to his workplace, the Madame Berry West Mine at Creswick near Ballarat, where they seem to have been intensely happy, living out their idea of christian service in a simple cottage. It was small and unpretentious and its amenities were few. The cottage came to wider attention when Beatrice and Sydney Webb visited Brookes and Jessie in 1898. Mrs. Webb recorded in her diary that the young couple spent £1 a week on food for the two of them not counting poultry, eggs and milk, kept no servants and were 'full of the notion of the simplicity of life.' Photographs of the cottage interior reveal that 'they were not quite on level pegging with miners living in two roomed shanties.' Home-made lambrequins, wicker chairs and a piano signal a middle class household but the ‘middle’ was minimal, the kitchen spartan.[66]

Brookes was intrigued to discover that Mrs. Webb had been a private secretary to Herbert Spencer who sacked her when he learned she had socialist leanings and was marrying a socialist beneath her class. 'This interested me deeply because at that time I had only begun to grow away from the Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer.' Brookes took her hundreds of feet down the no. 2 Shaft at the Old Madame Berry mine. She checked everything he told her about wages and conditions against the word of the men.[67]

From the cottage on this old minefield, Brookes kept his journalism going. The Poet's Scrap Book series was unfinished. Elizabeth Barret Browning and two more entries on the all important Emerson were still to come. After that his journalism gave out. When it renewed, some years into the new century, it would be different - narrower, more defensive, fixated with the evil doings of the Labor Party, the radical concerns less in evidence or more heavily circumscribed by his moral conservatism and his imperial anxieties. Indeed, the empire was now becoming a cause in itself. Sometime in 1898 Field-Marshal Lord Wolseley, Commander in Chief of the British army had delivered a recruiting speech with an unusual pitch - the British army was not like continental armies. It was the smallest in Europe and it was always at war. Brookes was infuriated by this kind of militarism. 'Hurrah! for that glorious empire on which the sun never set, and on which the blood never ceases to flow in war, glorious war!', he wrote. He went on:

It is an inducement, a great inducement My Lord W, to go into your army when we know that we are always certain of sport, good sport. You have always on hand the best stock of maxims, gatlings, and other machine guns...When you have done mowing down the Matabeles, and the niggers of the Congo, you have only to go and riddle the independent Afridis, or the india-rubber Fuzzy-Wuzzies of the Soudan. My Lord, the common armed burglar, the cowardly garroter, and the ordinary murderer, can offer equally with yourself the same exciting inducements....

Brookes believed that an empire built on appeals such as Wolseley's - 'to the lowest and bloodiest instinct in the heart of man' - must inevitably fall, as wicked or warped empires in the past had fallen. The British empire was neither wicked nor warped. He was proud to say that his empire had 'made for righteousness more than any other empire the world has yet seen.' It was men such as Wolseley who would muck it up if they got their way.[68]

There is a void in Brookes' life - in the year after Jessie's sudden death, in childbirth, on 6 April 1899. No child survived either. All Herbert's conviction and commitment drained away. His sadness was immense and his entire faith seemed to be in question. Browning's Paracelsus came back to haunt him: 'but unless God sends his hail/ Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,/ In some time, his good time, I shall arrive.' Rivett reports that 'he tried desparately to lose himself in organising educational and social activities for the miners who were among the few people with whom he had any inclination to associate.' He became even more estranged from his family 'who had long felt little sympathy towards what they regarded as his radical, or at least quixotically liberal ideas.'[69] But at the same time he found a new spiritual guide.

It is in this bad time - the time of his 'soul paralysis' - that his acquaintance with Alfred Deakin, through the Australian church, becomes much more - first a correspondence, then a dependence, then a discipleship marked by letters which begin, 'Dear Master'. Just what happens to his faith in this bad time can be set aside for now . Though there may be some connection between his ordeal and the loss of his liberalism, I will not explore that here. It would be a subtle connection anyway because, once recovered, Brookes seems to take up in the new century where he left off in the old. In the interim Deakin took on his burden; in fact the entire Deakin family seems to have played some therapeutic part. For a time the relationship with the 'Master' was entirely one of private counsel. The two men exchanged many letters. Deakin told him that his temperament erred too much on the British side - 'too much self-imprisonment'. He described his role as throwing stones at Herbert's shutters.[70]

Brookes would occasionally stay with them at 'Llanarth' when in Melbourne. He felt he could unburden himself to Deakin, speak frankly of his misery, his loss of faith: 'How is it that in your presence I don't try to consume my own smoke as I do with everyone else,' he wrote from the mine office at Madame Berry West. 'I have neither energy nor health nor heart to do anything and feel that even though you might pump a little energy of your own into me for a time you'll soon get tired of seeing me turn up like a confirmed beggar with the same old yarn and the same long face.' He said his 'spiritual thermometer was below zero' and signed off as 'your parasite, your faith sucker'. But his apologetics were excessive and surely unecessary given Deakin's pastoral inclinations, his own sense of a true calling in the cure of souls - Deakin liked nothing better than to minister.[71]

But they were no odd couple sharing just the complementary needs of therapy and ministry. There was common ground in the social gospel, an interest in spiritualism and, their liberal politics. And perhaps too, in the recognition of a kindred spirit, there was Deakin's eye for a good lieutenant. In their correspondence in 1899 and 1900 - before Deakin took him off on a grand tour of Europe - they discussed consciousness, communing with spirits and life in heaven 'where spirits are all poised in unclouded space.' Brookes did not like the idea. There was not so much 'as a tiny atom to interpose to hide one soul or two souls (he and Jessie?) from the host of saints and angels and the blessed dead.' Better to be left alone in the grave than ascend to that he told Deakin.[72]

On earthly matters, Brookes sought his advice on setting up a Workingman's Club in Clementston.[73] Deakin gave advice and a donation. But Brookes was dispirited: 'Like all other little attempts I have made to try and get behind a little section of humanity and give a push I am somewhat discouraged.' He feared the club would not draw the crowd it was meant for - the pub and brothel and street corner frequenters. And he felt he must now back out because the working man's suspicion of 'goody goody persons' was insurmountable. He had given them a start. 'They must be allowed to work out their own salvation', these 'horny-handed working men.'[74]

Literature drew them together too. They differed on Balzac. 'He is not good for me,' wrote Brookes, a curious dismissal. They agreed on Matthew Arnold's poem 'The Buried Life'.[75] Early in 1900 Brookes went to Europe with the Deakins, Alfred to sort out the difficult clauses of the new federal constitution in London, Herbert to hive off and travel alone on the continent, but the two of them always in touch by letter. From Florence in July he wrote to 'Dear Mr. Deakin'; from Dublin in August he began to use 'Dear Master',[76] and he began to report his spirits lifting. 'Things are a little clearer with me as you prophesied they would be, given good physical conditions - and faith is a little stronger. May it grow from more to more!'[77] Deakin had got him to skip of a morning, before breakfast before they had gone abroad. The men at Madame Berry West thought it a bit of a laugh. Now he was skipping in Dublin. On the homeward voyage he wrote, as usual to speak of himself and to apologise for it, but also to say he had had enough of this self-centredness. He was sick of worrying about what he might do. 'I am ready for something or nothing', he told Deakin.[78]

On his return, at the end of 1900, he went back to the Madame Berry West mine and in 1901 moved to Hollybush as assistant manager of the Glenfine South mine. There he became a forthright advocate for the miners in the struggle to reform conditions underground, particularly to prevent phthisis. He was equally concerned about miserable housing conditions and other amenities for miners, and to find more wholesome, uplifting things for miners to do in their leisure time. In Hollybush he helped set up football and cricket clubs and adult education classes. He read to miners' children. He was generous to men on the wallaby. Deakin wrote to him late in 1902:

You are endlessly doing much good work among the people... I admit a mining settlement in decadence is one of the most melancholy residences on God's earth and that it is hard to resist the depression begotten by its condition. But it is in just such places tht the rays of light shed by sympathy, wise counsel and generous example are most precious.[79]

Brookes' social gospel work did not exclude wider concerns of the British empire. He helped establish a Hollybush branch of the Australian Natives Association and took part in the ANA campaign against the use of cheap coloured labour in the mines of the Transvaal. Brookes and his ANA colleagues - miners, managers and other townspeople - believed they had a right to deliberate on matters anywhere in their empire.[80] A sense of inclusiveness was an important element in their allegiance. They believed the objectives for which Australian soldiers had fought and died in the Boer War were being violated. Their commitment to a White Australia underpinned their worries about the encroachments of 'cheap labour' anywhere in the empire where good white labour was available.[81]

Brookes' handwritten, twelve page address to the Hollybush Branch puts the case for Australians' right to a say in Empire policy, for such decisions where ever they are made, to be considered matters relevant to all white members of the empire. What is the ideal that holds the empire together?

It is freedom. The freedom for each part and each individual unit to be and to do the best that it is possible for it to be and to do. Very imperfectly achieved so far you will say. Most true. Still better achieved by any other power the world has yet seen.

This does not mean freedom to violate the ideal of freedom. If that happens then other members of the empire must act, first with the power of persuasion and then, if that fails, with the power of physical force. Indentured labour is a form of 'veiled slavery'. Brookes insists on the rights and duties of his reading of Imperial Freedom:

If we do not take action here we are surely blunderers, blunderers in a great art - the art of being free.We are not worthy of our freedom if we let this pass without a protest. In this great Empire sacred with the accumulated traditions of generations of free men it behoves us who are the direct inheritors, us into whose hands the fiery torch of freedom has been thrust, to pass that treasure on, that torch still glowing with an ever deepening radiance to the generations still unborn....[lest] that sublime sceptre of freedom which it has been the glory of Britain to wield will pass to other and worthier hands and Britain will become a memory, a dream, and not an inspiration.

Then follows a long disertation on indentured labour in which he argues that if social conditions in Australia were based on 'clearer conceptions of justice and freedom there would be no need to impose any restrictions whatever on inferior races, seeing that under the freer and juster conditions the superior would more than hold their own otherwise there is no meaning to be attached in this case to the terms superior race and inferior race.' And if the assumption of superiority turns out to be wrong then they did not deserve to be on top anyway. But Brookes insists that 'Such fears are unworthy of us who were born to bring freedom to the world.'[82]

The Return to Melbourne

The closer he felt to Deakin the more he visited Melbourne and the more Deakin's family became his own. In 1904 he proposed to Deakin's second eldest daughter, Ivy; in July 1905 they were married and soon moved into 'Winwick' next door to 'Llanarth' which was the Deakin household in South Yarra. 'Winwick' was their base for the rest of their lives. Holiday homes at 'Penola' at Mt. Macedon and 'Arilpa' at Point Lonsdale were the other two points of their domestic triangle. When Brookes came home to Melbourne he returned, in the fullest sense, to his social class.

With the move back to Melbourne Brookes began a working life centred in engineering firms, the peak councils of manufacturing and, after the first world war, tariff board business. The roles multiplied. Soon he was father to Wilfred (1906), and later to Jessie (1914) and Alfred (1920). Along with Ivy who was a talented musician in her own right, he also shared the role of urbane, wealthy patron whose home was a kind of 'International House' to big names from federal politics, South Yarra Society, imperial high circles and the world of music and literature. Bernard Heinz (a Catholic) and Percy Grainger too, were regular guests and friends. The T.E. Brown Society held its meetings at 'Winwick' for more than a decade. Brown’s poetry captured Brookes because it was vibrant with the sobs and tragedies of life, full of sentimentalism and yearnings to rescue the innocent and hard-done-by. It also appealed to Brookes’ belief in the importance of the Celtic (creative, emotional, spiritual) side of British culture, but notably the Brown Society barely survived the hardening and polarising of the Great War. It folded in 1921.[83]

Along with poetry, paid work and family life, there was a growing 'absorption in politics as Deakin's devoted follower.'[84] Brookes began to act as a kind of 'shield and prop to the statesman.' But Deakin's experience over the next five year does not end happily. The events that overtake his political career - age, illness and an increasingly assertive Labor Party - all have a profound effect on Brookes and so require a short summary: from mid 1903 to the April 1910 general election Alfred Deakin was 3 times prime minister for a total of about 5 years, approximately three quarters of the period. In that time he never had a clear cut majority and more than once found himself heading a minority group with the coalition which kept him in power. Herbert became increasingly involved in holding things together, first as a party worker and occasional platform speaker, then as a financial backer and organiser for Victoria, and then as federal Treasurer of the new Liberal Party and finally as its chairman. Deakin would describe himself to Brookes in 1909 as 'ever your debtor'. But his political career was coming to an end. The third ministry was doomed. The 1910 election was a Labor landslide.

The bitterness of Brookes and Deakin is not hard to see. Their resentment was directed at a Labour movement which had gone its own way and succeeded; which had rejected the guidance and leadership the Liberals offered. After his defeat in 1910 Deakin walked the streets of Melbourne looking at the people who had voted him out. He returned home and wrote of the masses at 'a level of taste and capacity in which we can take no pride'; of 'the gross, thoughtless, animal, careless and shiftless crowd.' And he compared this crowd with 'the minority of obviously cultured or cleanly and sensitive, or healthy masculine or feminine, or even physically attractive persons' - but these were a small minority. As La Nauze put it, this world 'struck him as if he had just awakened from a dream....its men and women were not the creatures of a brave new world.'[85] Deakin wrote on, of a people who matched their environment of ‘evil smelling liquor shops’ and ‘gaudy drapery shops’ and ‘silly and grotesque picture or bookshops’ full of unwholesome things, of a people dissipated and extravagant.

Brookes was in a similar frame of mind. The masses had sunk in his estimation too. 'The soul of the people is stiffening. It is suffering from dry rot.' He wrote of the greed and mediocrity of 'the pack'. 'A dull, dead level' was being reached in a political system where the 'incompetent and the waster' thrives. He was particularly embittered by Labor's attacks on the christ-like Deakin - 'the greatest mass of flatulent incapacity ever crammed into a politician's carcase' is one example - and by Labor's claims that it was the great reforming force in Australian society. There is a nostalgia in Brookes' later correspondence for 'the empire that Alfred Deakin made', as though reformers thereafter were tampering with perfection.[86]

These polemics were also a battle over who had led the way and how the past would be remembered.[87] The Liberals were infuriated at the line that all was lost in political darkness until Labor came along. Their newspaper, the Liberal (1909-) insisted that they made Australia free, curbed Sweating, provided welfare legislation, minimum wages, tariffs, native industry, kept Australia white, and so on. But as Labor progressed - won power, lost it and fought to regain it - it also claimed a triumphal history. The liberals felt that they had a purchase on those triumphals and Labor had gazumped them.

The sense of a stewardship violated by lesser beings becomes part of Brookes’ discourse, as evident here as it will be in 1932 when he damns the Egyptians. In his 1914 speech 'Where Socialism Fails and Must Fail', he says of Lane's fate in Paraguay: 'They turned on him as the same crowd have turned on their saviours in old Australia.'

'Saviours' is an interesting term. Rejected saviours is a theme that begins to appear regularly in Brookes writing and in their paper, the Liberal. The Liberal is as rich with righteousness and resentment as Brookes' post-war, protestant journal, the Vigilant will be. Class relations had not been resolved as the Liberals had hoped, with social peace, and their leadership intact. Labor has refused to follow:

Anyone, even the most honourable, dignified and worthy men and institutions that appear obstacles or seem so to be, to their [Labor's] onward march will be scandalously and brutally abused and attacked. Already THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL has experienced their vicious spleen and venom.[88]

In Brookes' mind the battle between the lower and higher instincts of mankind were now institutionalised or symbolised in the Labor Party and the Liberal Party respectively. This was simply reinforced by Archbishop Mannix and the Catholic association with the anti-conscription cause in the Great War. Certainly the conscription controversy was not the turning point for Brookes. His political shift to militant protestantism and the politics of the right has its origins in the idea of stewardship which goes back, at least, to early adulthood.

Conscription is significant in Brookes' trajectory because it makes the Labor Party even more awful and ungrateful. With Mannix’s anti conscription alignment with the Labor Party, Labor is now seen as an instrument of Rome. The emotive, symbolic importance of conscription heightens Brookes’ paranoia and his conspiratorial inclinations; and it launches him on a third phase in his public life - a protestant loyalist extremism in which he is responding to his sense of an empire threatened from within. The crisis of empire loads up his righteousness. From here he seems more and convinced that he is the instrument of god. As he put it after speaking at a 'Monster Loyalist Rally' in March 1918:

I seemed to be lifted up by some Unseen Power and became for the time being the living voice of that united and passionate demonstration.... I would utter one brief and pungent statement and then would come a thunderous response that seemed to lift the roof off the building... It was a glorious experience to feel yourself not yourself, but an instrument in the hands of that Power that works for righteousness.[89]

Rivett called him the 'armourer and financier of anti-Catholic Protestantism'.[90] That was accurate. He played a part in setting up the first Commonwealth intelligence organisation; he set up loyalty leagues around Australia, organised the Victorian Protestant Federation, extended this into other States and published the Vigilant newspaper which monitored the Catholic press around the world and made history a soap opera of narrow escapes from Papal tyranny. In 1919 he wanted citizens to wear a loyalty badge - the absence would brand a disloyalist; he also wanted priests to be licensed annually; he wanted all public servants to be loyal British subjects though he said nothing about how this would be policed; and he wanted catholic schools' curricula to be overseen by State authorities.[91]

That last policy - the policing of curricula - points to deeper concerns. It would be a mistake to focus on his anti-catholicism alone. What Brookes was contending for was the supremacy of British history and culture, and Catholic curricula was a challenge to that supremacy. It told a different story. In Australia, Catholicism was inseparable from the colonial Irish culture which had contested national identity from early colonial times. Mannix was the chief sign of this from 1916. His mass meetings in the Great War had sung 'God Save Ireland' and carried banners glorifying the heroes of the Easter Uprising. As Ernest Scott put it:

The Archbishop's undisguised sympathy with his countrymen in their efforts to smash the existing system of government in Ireland, struck in the hearts of the Irish-Catholic population of Australia chords which harmonized with the ping of bullets in the streets of Dublin rather than the roar of artillery in France.[92]

By the end of the war Mannix embodied, for Brookes, everything that was anti-British, as did de Valera in Ireland. His version of Ireland's story, and Australia's too, was a hostile one. Here religion was a piece in complex cultural alignments. Sectarianism was a contending for national identity. Brookes was fighting for his story, his anglophile version of that identity.[93]

To Stroll Across Egypt

There were many fronts in this fight. Mannix was only one of numerous foes because British stewardship was being challenged elsewhere in the empire. Major wars commonly disturb the colonial status quo. The Great War was no exception. In 1923 Brookes wrote to S.M. Bruce with advice for the Imperial Conference in London. He reminded him about the Indians: 'Like the Irish they don't appear to be manifesting much gratitude for favours bestowed by the Sovereign power.' There was that idea of bestowal again. He also repeated Milner's warning about Egypt: that twenty years ago an English official could stroll from one end of the colony to the other with nothing but a walking stick. Now he could not show himself in a Cairo street without an armed guard.[94]

The war had been won but at immense cost to the harmony that Brookes' visualised when he thought of empire. That dovetailed in with failure in his own country:

We of the old brigade [he wrote to Donald Mackinnon in 1931] have failed to convert it [Australia] into a paradise which I daresay you in the days of your youth as well as myself and a host of others fondly imagined was destined to materialize.[95]

But Herbert Brookes, ever on the brink of Eternity, did not give up. His mood ebbed and flowed with wins and losses at home and abroad. His aim was to reassert something of the stewardship that had been lost. His time in America as Commissioner-General for Australia (1929-30) had lifted his hopes.[96] Again the American example affirmed the British future. In an address to the Malvern Traders Association he drew on American history for a way forward:

From one side of the Empire to the other it is sudenly discovered that owing to the disintegrating effect of hostile elements within - enemies within the gate - we are all in danger of losing our British citizenship. Rather than lose this we would willingly part with De Valera and his band of repudiators. Some of us think the Empire would be better without this discordant and unworthy element. We are in a somewhat similar position to that in which the US found herself just before the Civil War in which the American people "suddenly realised that deep in their hearts an abstraction and a symbol - union and the flag - possessed a moving power of which they had not dreamed" - just as the British people now realise that power.[97]

Scullin's defeat had lifted his hopes too. Only the 'lunatic' and 'traitor' Lang now stood in the way of 'sanity'. In 1932 he published a little pamphlet called The Empire and the Imperial Issue. It conveyed his despair and his hope for a reasserted stewardship. It was quite explicit about what was at issue: in India 'the wise leadership of Great Britain' was confronted by Gandhi who thought 'untrained Indians' could operate a modern democracy. It was the same story in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Malta and elsewhere. What distinguished the Empire was an uneven enthusiasm for

the historical background and spiritual traditions of the dominant stock that evolved and determined the fundamental principles that made possible the development of the Empire.

The 'gorgeous dynasties' of Egypt and India 'could not be expected to share with us, the children of the United Kingdom, the same thrill that we experience when we read the moving epic of our Island story.' Here he is quite explicit - it is his imperial story that is at issue.

As for Ireland, which had turned for centuries towards Rome, she 'does not and cannot share our delight and our zeal for the long line of those we reverence as political and religious emancipators.' These Egyptians and Indians and Irish Australians were the bearers of a hostile story. Brookes was in no doubt about their position: 'They have a right to be heard but after all their contribution is subordinate to the onward sweep of Empire.' They have too much 'undue freedom to injure' and must be overcome by the 'will of Loyalty':

Their claim to equal status... in which their soul seems to find delight, is prompted in great measure by dangerous conceit or cherished bitterness unworthy of civilised beings and [this] has blinded them to the supreme privileges which membership in the empire has bestowed on them.[98]

Lionel Trilling once observed how some 'paradox of nature' could turn the exercise of compassion into acts of coercion.[99] Herbert Brookes' shift from christian idealism in the 1890's to the defensive stewardship of the post-war years was no 'paradox of nature'. His idealism was premised on a hierarchical and grateful world. It was driven by powerful spiritual yearnings; most of all by worries about salvation. Events moved against him. 'Conceited' and 'bitter' opponents who could not appreciate the heritage he believed in. Uncivilised beings forced him into a sectarianism marked by his own sense of hurt. His ethic 'acquired the urgency of a desperate counter-measure.'[100] His liberalism was underpinned and ultimately undermined by a Puritan sense of the base passions beneath the human surface and by the drive to show the way. He had a responsibility to his race and class but that was understood as the earthly expression of his relationship to God, an understanding which made him a most formidable protestant steward.

Endnotes

1. Herbert Brookes to Sir Archibald Carpenter Boyd, 23 May 1932. Herbert and Ivy Brookes Papers, National Library of Australia, ms1924/1/10044-48. While the preponderance of this collection concerns Herbert Brookes' life, there is also a great deal of material on the life of Ivy Brookes.

2. E. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment, Norton, New York, 1975.

3. Rohan Rivett, Australian Citizen. Herbert Brookes, 1867-1963, Melbourne University Press, 1965, p.76.

4. Walter Murdoch, 'On Having Enemies', Selections From Walter Murdoch, Angus&Robertson, Sydney 1941, p.98.

5. Brookes to Mrs. MacDonald, 13 May 1932. Brookes Papers, ms1924/1/10013-17.

6. The idea of stewardship in the Bible is most commonly associated with the management of households or of household possessions, but Paul and Peter use the term figuratively of the Christian ministry: Paul in 1 Cor. 4i: 'This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.' And Peter in 1 Peter 4x: 'As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace.' Brookes' stewardship was the figurative one of Paul and Peter.

7. Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives. Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890-1960, University of Queensland Press, 1984, pp.1-21. For Lasch see Roe, p.13.

8. Brookes to W.A. Watt, 6 March 1923. NLA, ms1924/1/6222.

9. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion. The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians, Knopf, New York, 1991, p.17.

10. They were the inheritors of the astonishing insights associated with Darwinism and its challenge to established faith and understandings. And they had to find ways to live with that.

11. G. Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1968, p.290. George Eliot is also reported to have said that God was 'inconceivable' and immortality 'unbelievable', but duty was nonetheless 'peremptory and absolute' (p.291).

12. See Victorian Minds, op.cit., chs.11-12.

13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), Unwin University Books, 1965, ch.4, especially pp.139-43 on Methodism.

14. Fraser's other claim to fame was that he once challenged any man in the world to compete against him in a triple event - playing the pipes, buckjumping and whip plaiting - a fairly safe challenge I would have thought. Very few triathletes of that sort around.

15. Brookes did write a memoir, much later, perhaps for Rivett, about his childhood. It is remarkably superficial, containing very little about his parents and his relations with them and no curiosity that we can call 'modern' - nothing about his make-up, formative infuences, psychology &c. There are however a couple of interesting references with respect to his concerns about 'manhood': his first school was a girl's school; one of his earliest memories is of girls pinning him down and kissing him; and thirdly, the memoir is notable for the pains he takes to paint himself, despite the obvious limitations of his class, as a bit of a larrikin. But not much can be made of this. It is safer to say that one of the underlying anxieties of vitalism is an evident concern about virility and manhood and that Brookes later writing suggests he shared this concern.

16. J.A. LaNauze, Alfred Deakin, vol.1, Melbourne University Press, 1965, p.77

17. Many of his published articles in the 1890's, and some unpublished, are to be found pasted into a Notebook, ms1924/7/1. Where the published location of any of these items is clear I have cited it; otherwise the Notebook is cited. The principal outlets for his journalism were the Champion, Charles Strong's Australian-Herald, and the Beacon.

18. The quotation turns to the state of the country, allegedly: 'A land of Desire stacked with purest pleasures and unadulterated greatest happiness apparently to the wanderer - But in reality a country hollow as a Vaccuum [sic] flimsy as a windbag - a country of the earth earthy where the moth and rust have eaten of the firm substance - Left nought but the Sumulacrum. A land of ghosts and phantoms. A Hall of Eblis wherein the dwellers wander with a glowing ash instead of a kindly sympathetic heart.' (Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1).

19. Australian-Herald, December 1893, in Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1

20. Ibid.

21. Fatness in the Bulletin had, by 1890, 'been aggrandised in cartoon and leader, into the 'Fat Man' who stood like a grostesque and looming evil in the path of all reform; the money-maker, the master, capital in its role of oppressor; close relative of the corpulent, unchristian princes of the church, the hanging judges, and indeed, of the 'poignant proprietor' in newspapers.' From Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox, Penguin, 1987, pp.124-5.

22. 'A Poor Law', The Beacon, March 1894. Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1.

23. 'Australia's Black Spot', The Beacon, January 1984. Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1

24. 'The Fetich of Thrift', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1

25. 'Inter-Social Warfare', Australian-Herald, June 1894, Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms.1924/7/1, p.69.

26. Ibid.

27. From Browning's 'Prince Hohenstiel Schwangan'. Quoted in Brookes, 'Browning's View of Life', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, p98&opp.

28. See also Brookes' extensive Drummond lecture in ms1924/7/3752-3823; and his notes on Drummond in ms1924/7/5372ff (file called 'Notes on Mysticism in box 54).

29. Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives. Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890-1960, University of Queensland Press, 1984, p.2.

30. J.Y.Simpson, 'Henry Drummond', The Expositor, May 1902, p.350. Brookes Papers, ms1924/4/647.

31. Ibid, p.351.

32. Drummond that night gave him a signed copy of The Greatest Thing in the World, 'diagnosed him' and told him to read John Fiske. 'I did and found his spiritual diagnosis correct.' They met again at an Australian Rules football match in a great crowd, perhaps thirty thousand roaring fans, where Drummond looked around him and said 'These are the men I want to get hold of. Do introduce me to some of your wild beasts!'

33. Excerpt from Browning's 'Bishop Brougham', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1

34. J.Y. Simpson, op.cit, p.347.

35. Geoffrey Partington, The Australian Nation. Its British and Irish Roots, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1994, p.123. Higinbotham, however, was a fierce opponent of all sectarianism, while Brookes would go on to be the most fierce sectarian.

36. Brookes in Argus, undated press clipping, c.1923.

37. 'Emotional Economics', nd , Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, p.26

38. LaNauze, op.cit., vol.1, p.69.

39. 'The Evolution of Evolution', Australian-Herald, February 1895.

40. Barry Jones, Macmillan Dictionary of Biography. Third Edition, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1981, p.798.

41. 'Browning's View of Life', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, p98&opp.

42. 'Browning's Idea of God', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms 1924/7/1.

43. 'Swinburne', Australian-Herald,August 1896. Brookes Papers, Notebook ms1924/7/1

44. 'Browning's Idea of God', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1

45. Browning 'La Saisiaz', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1.

46. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), Unwin University Books, 1965, p.104.

47. Weber, ibid, p.119.

48. Weber, ibid, pp.103-4.

49. Brookes' review did not name the volume but did reveal that Boldrewood wrote the Preface. The volume was The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses, with a Preface by Rolf Boldrewood, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1895. This appears to be the first Paterson volume to be published. For the review see 'An Australian Poet', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, p.92.

50. See Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 7, p.603. The ADB entry claims Chambers (1860-1921) became a 'striking example of the "cultural cringe"'. His much earlier connections with the Bulletin were in the 1880's when he wrote London letters for that paper and helped W.H. Traill to secure the services of the cartoonist Phil May.

51. 'The Daughters of Danaus', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, p.80

52. 'The Drama' by HB, Australian-Herald, nd, c.Sept 1895. (Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1, 84)

53. In 1892 R[ichard] Buchanan published The Fleshly School of Poetry in London.

54. 'The Importance of Being Earnest', by 'A Voice from the Pit', 17 August 1895. Unreferenced. Probably The Champion. (Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms 1924/7/1, p.79) Brookes' own copy of Nordau is signed and dated by him, January 1895. Copy in the possession of Dr. Robert Darby, Canberra.

55. Letter to the Bulletin and editorial reply, c.1891, Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1.

56. Herbert Brookes, Where Socialism Fails and Must Fail, Melbourne 1914. This was the published version of Herbert Brookes' Presidential address, 'At Home', to People's Liberal Party, 21 July 1914, before the 5 September election. ms1924/18/2236. Lane is mentioned in Brookes' Autobiographical Memoir, ms1924/7/3554. And The Liberal, newspaper of the Liberal Party (1911-16), covered literature on the Paraguayan experiment, eg 1 March 1913, p.220, 222.

57. 'Old Age Pensions', Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1.

58. 'Ho! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers, | The heroes of old.' Cited in Brookes Papers, Notebook, ms1924/7/1.

59. A Fine Colonial Englishman. A Bicentennial Celebration under the auspices of the Bureau of Social and International Affairs, Victorian Protestant Federation, Melbourne, 1932. NLA. MS1924/20/168. The Hancock essay is 'England and Australia', in his Politics in Pitcairn and other essays, London, 1947.

60. He also quotes Van Tyne: 'The British Empire was doomed to be broken asunder, but it was brought to that disaster by the insistent demand of Englishmen in America for th