Recently I was writing the conclusion to a paper about John Curtin’s electioneering for his marginal seat from 1925 to 1934. I was jumping forward to 1940, when he nearly lost the seat of Fremantle despite being the opposition leader. He famously said, ‘I shall not chase my destiny. If Fremantle, which sent me to Federal Parliament, rejects me from the Federal Parliament, that will be the end of politics for me.’ It was ‘just’ a conclusion and the 1940 election was outside the main scope of my paper, so I thought for once I’d take a shortcut and not check the original quotation but instead reference one of the biographies which uses it. I looked up John Edwards’ comprehensive John Curtin’s War Volume 1 (2017), which uses the quote on page 193. But Edwards references an article from the following year, 1941 and I began to grow uneasy. Maybe I shouldn’t be taking a shortcut.

I went back to the sources, as a historian always should. What did Trove, Australia’s digitised newspaper database, have to say? The referenced 1941 article in Smith’s Weekly written when Curtin became prime minister does indeed claim he said this in reaction to nearly losing the 1940 election. But I could find no newspapers reporting him saying it at the time of the 1940 election. Instead, the quote was extensively reported as his reaction to a question when he was elected opposition leader in 1935. It seems some thought Labor’s pro-tariff position would lose Curtin votes in his own seat now that he had to own the policy completely as leader. He responded with the ‘chase the destiny’ words in that quite different context. (See appendix below.) The idea of his stubborn, principled loyalty to his seat persists, but the meaning is different. His response in 1940 as he faced losing the seat was more ambiguous, as Edwards himself acknowledges and briefly tries to resolve. Curtin said at a Labor event in WA, that if ‘he had lost the Fremantle seat he would not have been lost to the Labor Movement regardless of whether another seat would be found for him. There were many other spheres of usefulness open to those who desired to assist the Labor Movement.’ (Westralian Worker, 4 October 1940, p.1.)

Mistakes get written into history. A journalist for Smith’s Weekly in October 1941 took the quote and misdated it in a profile on Curtin which was probably clipped and saved by many as a good summary of Curtin’s career. In the first ever biography of Curtin, something of a hagiography written in time for the 1943 election, journalist Alan Chester opens his chapter about the 1940 election with the quote and later fabricates its origin: ‘When they clamoured at him for a statement he gave them one – the quiet words that silenced his questioners: “I shall not chase my destiny…”‘ (p.88) Irene Dowsing repeats the mistake in her 1969 biography (p.64). The first serious Curtin biography, Lloyd Ross’s (1977), also uses the quote but gets the context correct, discussing it in terms of his elevation to the leadership in 1935. In his 1999 biography, David Day returns to misdating the quote to 1940; he uncritically references Chester as his source. Then, as I’ve mentioned, John Edwards 2017 book relies, more credibly, on the 1941 Smith’s Weekly profile.

Lessons? It’s been reinforced to me, reluctantly, that I can’t trust secondary sources and I can’t take shortcuts. Related to that, I think there is a tendency to reward quantity over quality in Australian political biography. There aren’t many incentives to do the careful, slow work of getting things right. I’ve always been in a hurry but perhaps slow writing needs to be embraced. If there are too many biographies in the world, I’m don’t think there’s too many carefully researched ones. Of course, I don’t want to throw stones in glass houses – I will be getting things wrong myself no matter how careful I am. What we should actually hope for is that now and into the future there is an engaged scholarly community with the time and attention to notice mistakes.

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Appendix

The Labor Daily, 3 October 1935, p.6 reported the 1935 situation as follows.

Speculation aroused as to the embarrassment which the protection and the sugar embargo issues will cause the newly-elected leader of the Opposition, Mr Curtin, in his electorate of Fremantle, was heightened by a statement issued by Mr. Curtin to-day. “I do not know what the effect my election to the leadership will be on my representation of Fremantle, but I shall not chase my destiny,” he said. “If Fremantle rejects me that will be the end of politics for me,” he declared. The inference has been drawn that as leader of a high protection party Mr. Curtin will be unacceptable to a large body of low tariff electors in West Australia.