‘You’re a fanatic.’ ‘You’re not a Labor man.’ ‘Rat!’ So the interjections rang out with intensifying ferocity late on the evening of 19 April 1955 as F.R. (Frank) Scully, MLA for Richmond and until three weeks earlier a member of John Cain’s Labor ministry, addressed the Victorian Legislative Assembly in support of a no-confidence motion in the Cain Government. At 4.30am the following morning, Scully and his fellow Labor renegades voted with the Opposition parties to seal the Cain Government’s fate. Thus the Labor split of 1955 reached its point of no return; federally, it would be 17 years before the ALP regained office, while in Victoria, the eye of the storm, the penance lasted a generation.
Last month, on the 50th anniversary of that momentous debate, Scully, a sprightly 85-year-old, returned to its scene to launch the Great Labor Split: Fifty Years Later conference. This time there were no insults, but a hushed silence from the hundred-plus registrants who were acutely aware of a moment rich in historical resonance. To add piquancy to the occasion, sharing the launch duties was another octogenarian and Split survivor, Robert Corcoran. In the 1950s, Corcoran had been one of the earliest whistleblowers on B.A. Santamaria’s clandestine anti-communist organisation, the Catholic Social Studies Movement (‘the Movement’). This culminated in a decisive appearance by Corcoran before the federal executive inquiry into the Victorian ALP that followed Labor leader Doc Evatt’s ‘hydrogen bomb’ statement of 5 October 1954 outing the Movement.
Old warriors, neither man flinched in asserting that his cause had been true. Scully’s shorthand version of the Split fingered Evatt as the chief wrecker. (So much for Gerard Henderson’s precipitant judgment in the Fairfax press that the conference was to be an exercise in ‘denial’ about Evatt’s ‘predominant role in this Labor disaster’.) If Evatt had been the culprit, then, according to Scully, the ALP had been the victim. Labor, he lamented, had ‘never recovered’—the sloughing off of its Catholic right wing left it susceptible to hijacking by middle-class progressives. Corcoran, on the other hand, was adamant that the blame rested with Santamaria and his disciples, who had deployed the Catholic faithful as a Trojan horse in a sinister attempt to capture the ALP. They had to be confronted.
While the chasm between Scully and Corcoran could not be straddled, the following two days of the conference brought a genuine dialogue on the causes