They called him old smoothie: John Joseph Cahill.
Just over 50 years ago, on October 23 1959, the body of the premier of New South Wales lay in state in this cathedral. Beside his coffin were members of his Cabinet, some Catholic like himself, some of other faiths and some with none, kneeling together on the hard floor, as throughout the day tens of thousands of ordinary people queued to walk quietly by to pay their last respects, many brushing tears from their eyes. It was an extraordinary spectacle. If you had been there you might have noticed the lone figure of Norman Thomas, Cardinal Gilroy, the archbishop of Sydney, deep in prayer in a secluded pew. He and Joe Cahill had been friends for a long time and had fought a few battles together especially during the great Labor Party split in the 1950s.A couple of days before at about 2.25 in the afternoon--on Tuesday October 21--there was commotion down Macquarie Street in Parliament House. That, of course, isn't all that unusual as you would know but this time it was different. Joe Cahill, who had been premier for a record seven years had had a heart attack in the Legislative Assembly while fiercely defending his government against a no confidence motion over allegations concerning the Rural Bank's lending practices.
The next morning while chairing a party meeting he had had another attack, and the day after that, on October 22 1959, he died in the Sydney Hospital next door from a third.
On Saturday morning October 24 1959 there was a spectacle that was even more extraordinary when mourners packed the cathedral to join Cardinal Gilroy as he celebrated Joe Cahill's Requiem Mass, and hundreds who couldn't find a seat spilled over into Hyde Park, and more than 300,000 people lined Sydney streets two and three deep from the cathedral all the way to Rookwood cemetery to catch a final glimpse of the casket in which lay a man who was essentially an ordinary man like themselves. Many knelt on the damp footpath, clasping Rosary beads in their hands. The police said it was the biggest crowd ever to witness a funeral procession in Sydney.
My purpose in being here today is to tell you a little about this extraordinary ordinary man Joe Cahill.
People ask me why I chose to write Cahill's biography. My first career was as a journalist, starting at the very bottom of the pile as a message boy and eventually writing politics and then a daily column. When my newspaper closed in 1957 I moved into other fields in which I did some writing but not enough to satisfy the ink that is in my veins.
When I retired in 1990 I decided to start another career writing biographies, especially about politicians whose biographies had never been written and, in my view, deserved to be written. One was Black Jack McEwen and another was John Joseph Cahill. I published McEwen in 1996, Cahill last November.
McEwen of course was a federal politician; Cahill was a state politician. McEwen was a dedicated Country party man, Cahill was a dedicated Labor party man. McEwen was prime minister of Australia but for only 23 days, Cahill was premier of New South Wales for 2758 days. McEwen was in the Commonwealth parliament for 44 years and retired undefeated, Cahill was in the state parliament for 31 years but was out of the House for three years when he and several others lost their seats in the Lang debacle in 1932. McEwen was educated by the light of a kerosene lamp in a lean-to on a soldier settler's block. Cahill left school at 13 and educated himself at night in Workers' Educational Association classes. McEwen's father was a migrant from Armagh in Northern Ireland. His stock was Presbyterian. Cahilrs father was a migrant from County Limerick in Ireland. He was a Catholic. Both were very very astute politicians and great fighters.
You could say that McEwen and Cahill had a lot in common. Certainly they were alike in one respect. Both must have had a real distaste for biographers because, as I found to my discomfort, they left behind very few personal records. As a consequence in each case the research was long, challenging and frequently frustrating.
I started work on the Cahill biography in April 2004 with, you might say, a total ignorance of the man. He had died three months before I moved from Melbourne to Sydney in 1960 and I had never met him. If you had asked me then to write down what I knew about Joe Cahill I would have been battling to cover the back of an envelope and a small one at that. The same could be said of my knowledge of New South Wales politics. So it was an intriguing learning experience. Today I think I know Joe Cahill very well indeed and what I see I like. He was a good premier and a good man. Some people might argue that he was the state's best premier.
The book is the product of four years of research during which I interviewed as many people as I could find who knew him or were around in his time. About 60 people, most of them of course quite old. Some of them too old because four or five had died before they could read it, as I discovered when I tried to invite them to the launch.
I also discovered that some I had spoken to had memory problems. One old workmate of Joe's wasn't sure who I was when I rang him. He didn't seem to hear my mentioning the book or Joe Cahill because suddenly he broke in to ask how I came to know him. "Did I know you at Silverwater?" he asked. No, I said, I had never been there. He was obviously puzzled. It must have been in Long Bay then, he decided. I assured him, and I assure you, that it wasn't in either penitentiary.
It is a nice day so I thought it would be a novel idea for me to take you on a tour around Sydney. We will start in Redfern because that was where Joe Cahill's father Thomas first lived when he migrated from Ireland in 1882 and where Joe was born in 1891 and finished his schooling with the Patrician Brothers, aged 13. We will drive passed the old Eveleigh railway workshops where Joe got his first job sweeping floors and then as an apprentice fitter. A dozen or so fellows who worked at Eveleigh ended up in politics. They included two more who became premiers, James McGowen in 1910 and Bill McKell in 1941. McKell, of course, also became a governor-general. He also accepted a knighthood for which some of his Labor party colleagues never forgave him.
We are now on our way to Marrickville where every day the Good Samaritan nuns walked to and from their house on the site of Central Railway station to teach Joe and the other Catholic kids how to read and write. Obviously, the nuns were hardy folk. We are going to pause for a moment outside the big white church on the corner of Marrickville and Livingstone roads. That's St Brigid's where Joe and his wife Esmey Kelly were married in 1922 and his five children were baptised. It is close to the Shrubland Hall where Joe attended WEA night classes to learn debating and public speaking and he and Esmey went dancing on Saturday nights. So, incidentally, did Fred Daly and his wife, Teresa. Much later on as a kid, their son Lawrie used to walk his dog passed the Cahill's place every day. He told me that when Joe died all the school children in the area were given a holiday. "I remember:" he said, "that some of us wished a premier would die more often."
In those days Marrickville was very Irish-Catholic and very Labor, some said it was an Irish-Catholic-Labor ghetto of which St Brigid's was the epicentre. The 9 o'clock Mass every Sunday was the politicians' Mass. Afterwards, local members and hopefuls and union bosses would gather near the steps to be seen and to trade gossip and caucus and maybe assassinate a few reputations.
It is relevant for me to recall here the story told of a little old lady who, arriving late for a Marrickville Labor branch meeting, genuflected as she entered the hall, causing the meeting to erupt into a gale of laughter. "They're all the same faces," the poor flustered women protested. And it was true. Most of the people attending branch meetings could be seen also at St Brigid's on Sundays, often taking up the plate or with the Holy Name sodality. Joe Cahill was always among them.
Our next stop is not far from the church on the corner of Warren Road and Roach Street. Joe's parents bought a house there in 1912 when he was 21 and he lived there for 47 years right up till his death in 1959. It was a small two-bedroom cottage with a living room which was called a parlour and an enclosed back veranda for a sleep-out and a pocket handkerchief garden. A simple house that suited a simple family man with simple pleasures, who stood in line to be served in the local shops or to get a haircut and whose fellow shoppers and neighbours never called him anything except Joe. Why should they? He called them by their first names. If anyone wanted to contact him they just looked up J J Cahill in the phone book.
It is a wonder that Cahill ever got to be anything in life let alone a premier. He must have been a real handful when he was a young fellow. He was a rebel activist who had to join the job queues when he was sacked from the railways in the great strike of 1917 with his file marked "agitator" which meant that he was never to be re-employed. Then he had a dispute with his union, the Amalgamated Engineers, which barred him from holding office for five years. But he was never lacking in confidence. In 1917 he made his first bid for a seat in parliament, in Dulwich Hill. It was an unwinable seat and he did badly. In fact he took a serious thrashing.
It was eight years before he had another chance; in 1925 in St George a multi-member seat. His prospects of winning didn't look all that great this time either because he was one of 19 candidates, four of whom were assured of election with the other 15 having to scramble for their second preferences to be elected to the fifth seat. The poll was topped by a member named Thomas Ley who was later convicted of murder and who hated Catholics with a passion. Eventually Cahill won the fifth seat after 17 ballots. Ley conceded him a miserly two second preferences, no doubt in error.
So let's follow Joe Cahill MP into Macquarie Street. He was on his feet in the House a lot from the start, asking questions, involving himself in debates, prodding Lang to act on election promises, and giving a maiden speech that caused "the honourable members on the other side to shift uneasily in their seats." Apart from ministers his name was the most mentioned in Hansard and by the end of the session there was no one in the House who did not know it. People could see that here was a smart recruit to politics. His leader Jack Lang thought so too. When he was re-elected in 1927 he made Cahill party whip. Then in 1929 came the Wall Street crash and with it the Depression and Lang's bitter fight with the Commonwealth over finance which eventually, in 1932, cost him government and Cahill his seat and another spell of unemployment.
After a while Cahill got a job selling shoes but he was determined to win back his seat and for three years he door-knocked or spruiked on street corners or on the back of a truck for votes after work and at weekends. Not surprisingly, in 1935 he was back in parliament and that's where he stayed for another 24 years.
It was not until 1941 that Labor, under McKell who had displaced Lang, won back government and Cahill was given his first portfolio--as minister for Public Works. Later he would also be given Local Government.
Within weeks of becoming a minister he was tramping around the long-closed derelict Newcastle state dockyards which within a year under his direction had been restored and would be repairing tens of thousands of tons of war-damaged ships, and he would be touring the state arranging the construction of landing strips and military camps and bomb shelters and air raid trenches. His job also was to build schools and hospitals, houses and all other government buildings. Later he took on the task of reorganising the state's electricity supply at a time when Sydney was plagued by blackouts and power rationing. He restructured municipal government in NSW, amalgamating councils and introducing compulsory voting. He was responsible for the County of Cumberland scheme which gave Sydney its first town plan and provided for its green belt and freeways and foreshore protection. And, as the man in the advertisement says, there was more. Cahill also initiated a string of water storage projects, including the Warragamba Dam, officially opened just weeks after he died, perhaps still the largest in New South Wales and he was an advocate of and signatory to the Snowy River Hydro-electric Scheme.
These are some of Cahill's achievements. There is another which political historians, and certainly the Labor party, would view as his most significant. This was his seminal role in confronting Bob Santamaria and Doc Evatt et al to insulate the party in New South Wales in the 1950s from the worst and most destructive split in its history. That was of course after he had succeeded Jim MeGirr as premier in 1952. But that is one of the many Cahill stories that are too big to be told today.
I must however find the time to tell you about Joe Cahill's election as premier because it has particular resonance for an audience such as this. For many years Cardinal Gilroy's dream was to have a Catholic university in Sydney because, as he explained, "The lack of a Catholic university leaves our education system without a head, undoes much of the good achieved in the primary and secondary schools, and deprives us of the elite Catholic laity that is the glory of the church in America. I earnestly desire to remedy this defect if that is at all possible."
The cardinal also had another reason for wanting a Catholic university. He was deeply concerned that young Catholic students were being lost to the church in the free-wheeling--some were saying "pagan"---environment in the Sydney University, then the only one in New South Wales.
During World War II Cardinal Gilroy's interest in establishing a degree-awarding Catholic institution was stimulated by a chance meeting with an American Holy Cross priest, a Father Duffy, who was stationed in Sydney as a chaplain with the United States Navy, and whose congregation had founded the Notre Dame university. Duffy put the archbishop in touch with his principals in Indiana and when the war ended Notre Dame sent people out here to look at the feasibility of establishing a campus in Sydney. In the meantime, Cardinal Gilroy made representations to the New South Wales government to bring down legislation to approve a Catholic university and, very optimistically, proceeded to purchase a tract of land for the purpose.
As you can imagine, the issue was very controversial and there was substantial opposition, especially from the Protestant churches but also from within the church itself. Despite this, state cabinet under James McGirr decided to go ahead. The Education minister who was handed what proved to be a poisoned chalice was Bob Heffron who, despite being a radical left wing Presbyterian, promised Cardinal Gilroy that he would support him.
The two stand-out candidates to succeed Jim McGirr as premier when, with some encouragement, he retired in 1952 were Heffron and Joe Cahill, and a count of heads on the eve of the Caucus election suggested that Heffron had a comfortable majority. But, as we know, he did not win.
When Heffron arrived at his office the next morning, the day of the election, five Labor members, led by the maverick Clive Evatt, were waiting for him. They told him that unless he resiled from his promise to approve the university they would vote as a bloc against him in the leadership ballot. He refused because he had given his word and later that morning, knowing he could not win, he withdrew from the contest and presented Cahill with certain victory. I am sure the irony of the situation does not escape you.
In the little time left, let us get back into the car and drive down Macquarie Street, passed Joe's office in what is now the Intercontinental Hotel on the corner of Bridge Street, and then on to Circular Quay where we will see the overhead expressway and railway. Yes, Joe Cahill was responsible for that too--and for removing the trams from the bridge. I'm not sure he was all that chuffed that they named the freeway after him and I will refrain from dwelling on the fact that he was responsible for legalising poker machines.
Finally, we are arriving at the Sydney Opera House which most people would regard as Joe Cahill's greatest achievement and indeed, monument. It is of course nothing short of a miracle.
Joe Cahill who had never been to a symphony concert or a ballet or an opera in his life became so obsessed with Joern Utzon's concept of an opera house protruding out into Sydney Harbour on Bennelong Point that he put his reputation and career on the line against enormous opposition to achieve it. And this despite widespread belief in the community that its huge cost could not be justified and that the money should be spent on housing, schools and hospitals all of which at the time were desperately needed.
People still shake their heads over the paradox of an ordinary working man blessed with little education and without pretence to culture being responsible for what surely must be the most beautiful opera house in the world.
Having lived with Joe Cahill for the last six years, I, on the other hand, now see this as entirely understandable.
The opera house is really a tangible expression of Joe Cahill's conviction that ordinary people have a God-given right to a fair share of the good things of life. He said this in his maiden speech in parliament in 1925 and it became his article of faith throughout his life.
I would like to think that Joe Cahill's story proves that regardless of background and education anyone living in Australia who has ambition and determination and is prepared to work hard is capable of scaling the peak of his vocation but sometimes I wonder. So I leave you with a question on which to ponder: If Joe Cahill--or Chifley or McKell--had tried to get into parliament in 2010 what chance do you think they would have had to make it? My guess is that they wouldn't have got passed the first pre-selection ballot. I do hope I am wrong.
by Peter Golding *
* Peter Golding is the author of They Called Him Old Smoothie: John Joseph Cahill (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009) and Black Jack McEwen: Political Gladiator (Mebourne University Publishing, 1996). This is the text of his talk delivered to the Australian Catholic Historical Society at St Mary's Cathedral College on 20 June 2010.
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| Author: | Golding, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society |
| Article Type: | Speech |
| Geographic Code: | 8AUST |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2010 |
| Words: | 3321 |
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