Manhood and the Millions Club, 1918-1932

‘What concerns Australia as a nation in the making is the character of the ingredients from which she must draw her human material’, wrote Millions Magazine, the periodical of the all-male voluntary association, the ‘Millions Club’, in 1920. Formed in Sydney in 1912, the Millions Club came to occupy a prominent if contested place in the political life of New South Wales in the 1920s. Its name was an allegory for national development and its corollary for liberals and the federal Nationalist Party – white immigration, which it promoted through civic events and in juvenile migration schemes. Members saw their club as much a space of informal conviviality as they understood it as an important tool of national development. This was a site where the Australian nation and national development was imagined in liberal, middle-class terms, and the club hoped to engender that vision in other Australian men. Millions Magazine has suggested that certain kinds of men and women were both the agents and embodiments of that particular vision.

This thesis examines the ideas of four liberal men who shaped political and intellectual life at the Millions Club between 1918-1932. In so doing, it explores how ideas about manhood were imagined in conjunction with the liberal nation-building project by the physical culturalist, Harald Bjelke-Petersen (1880-1936); the realtor and president of the club, Sir Arthur Rickard (1868-1948); the Protestant minister, Thomas Elias Ruth (1875-1956); and the radio engineer, Sir Ernest Fisk (1886-1965). If 1918-1932 was a period in which national development was understood in different ways by different political ideologies, liberals among them, this thesis examines how that project was imagined in gendered terms and how particular ideas about manhood were developed in response to a number of historical and political conditions. This thesis is not just a study of manhood, then, it is a study of how ideals of manhood were also responses to dilemmas for the project of liberal nation-building such as the trauma of war, class conflict, and the spectre of revolution. Moreover, while ideals of middle-class manhood were often presented as stable and uncontested as the foundation of a liberal political and social order, the case studies in thesis reveal how they emerged with different inflections and modulations to both resolve particular dilemmas and in response to other ideals of manhood linked to different ideological configurations of nation-building, such as working-class, radical nationalist manhood. Building on existing histories that explore questions of gender and masculinity after the First World War and into the 1920s, this thesis reveals some of the ways ideals of middle-class manhood were shaped in this turbulent political and cultural context, and which carried particular implications given the liberal nation-building project underway at this time.