Our Cultural Heritage: Remembering Sir Walker Crocker

Sir Walter Russell Crocker (1902-2002), belonged to a kind of Australian public life that has almost disappeared. He was scholar, soldier, diplomat, university professor, colonial administrator, author and Lieutenant-Governor. He knew prime ministers and presidents, served Australia across several continents and lived long enough to watch the institutions his generation had built become almost unrecognisable.

He also lived to age 100 years, which gave him something few public intellectuals possess: enough time to change his mind about the world more than once.

Crocker was born at Broken Hill on 25 March 1902, although his roots were firmly South Australian. He grew up in a pioneering farming family in the state's mid-north and attended Peterborough State School before going on to the University of Adelaide, Oxford and Stanford. It was an extraordinary educational trajectory for a boy from rural Australia in the early twentieth century.

Yet Crocker was never entirely comfortable as a cloistered academic. After years at universities he wanted what his obituary later described as a life of action. He joined the British colonial service and worked as a political officer in Nigeria before moving to the International Labour Organisation in Geneva in 1934. When the Second World War came he joined the British Army, served in intelligence in West Africa and rose to lieutenant-colonel. His wartime service brought him the French Croix de Guerre and Belgium's Ordre du Lion.

After the war came India and then the newly created United Nations. Crocker assisted R. G. Casey with famine relief in Bengal and in 1946 became the first head of the African section of the UN Secretariat in New York. Three years later he returned to Australia for a role that would acquire an interesting significance in light of his later views: he became the foundation Professor of International Relations at the new Australian National University. He served as acting vice-chancellor in 1951.

Crocker was therefore not some outsider who spent his life throwing stones at Australian institutions. He was present near the beginning of one of the most important of them, and at that time was a globalist, but of the old school type that believed that these organisations were helping humanity avoid war. I know from personal conversations with him at his East Terrace unit, Adelaide, before his death, that he was sceptical of globalism in his final years.

In 1952 he left Canberra to become Australian High Commissioner to India, beginning an 18-year diplomatic career. His postings read like a map of post-war Australian foreign policy: India, Indonesia, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and finally Italy. He served twice in India and developed an unusually close appreciation of Jawaharlal Nehru. Historians continue to use Crocker's diaries and writings because he was more than a diplomatic functionary. He watched personalities, cultures and political systems and then tried to understand what lay underneath them.

He could also be magnificently independent. Crocker later complained that despite 18 years as an ambassador or high commissioner he had exercised essentially no influence over Australian foreign policy. He had imagined that a thoughtful diplomat might shape policy and discovered that governments frequently wanted diplomats to implement decisions rather than reconsider them.

His own positions make today's political labels particularly inadequate. He supported a rapprochement with communist China before that became Australian policy. He criticised what he regarded as Australia's excessive subservience to American foreign policy. He opposed Australian involvement in Vietnam. He worried about foreign control of Australian mineral resources. In 1972 he joined prominent Australians calling for Labor to be given an opportunity to govern. That hardly sounds like the curriculum vitae of a conventional reactionary.

But neither was Crocker a conventional progressive. He was a royalist who saw no advantage in Australia becoming a republic. He admired Robert Menzies and, even more strongly, South Australian premier Sir Thomas Playford, whose biography he eventually wrote. He possessed an attachment to inherited institutions, manners and civilisational continuity that became increasingly unfashionable as the twentieth century progressed. His obituary described him as committed to traditional values, but also noted the difficulty of attaching any simple political label to him. That independence is probably the key to understanding the man.

Crocker had spent too much time in too many countries to believe that history could be reduced to slogans. He had seen colonialism, nationalism, communism, war, decolonisation, the birth of the United Nations and the Cold War at first hand. He could admire Nehru without becoming an Indian nationalist, criticise Washington without becoming a communist, support Labor without becoming a lifelong man of the Left, and defend the monarchy without believing every conservative government was wise.

After his diplomatic career ended in 1970, Crocker returned increasingly to South Australian public life. He became Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia in 1973 and remained in the position until 1982, including a period as acting Governor in 1977. He continued writing. Among his books were Australian Ambassador: International Relations at First Hand (1971), Travelling Back (1981) and his 1982 biography of Sir Thomas Playford. In all he published ten books.

But the later Crocker was also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of Australian intellectual and political culture.

This is where my own memory of him enters the story. I knew Crocker in his final years and discussed these matters with him, travelling to Adelaide from Melbourne. Sometimes I would visit him with Mrs. Betty Luks of ALOR. We had afternoon tea which Sir Walter made, which included delicious cakes. The man I encountered was strongly Australian nationalist in sentiment and deeply hostile to what would later become routinely described as political correctness. What particularly troubled him was the transformation of the universities.

There was an irony in this that was impossible to miss. Crocker had been there near the beginning of the Australian National University. He had been its foundation Professor of International Relations and had even acted as vice-chancellor. He belonged to the generation that had helped establish the post-war Australian university as an institution devoted, at least in aspiration, to serious scholarship conducted with intellectual independence.

By the end of his life, he believed something had gone badly wrong.

In our discussions he expressed deep concern about what he saw as the capture of the universities by the ideological Left. This was not the complaint of someone who had spent his life outside universities or regarded intellectual life with suspicion. Crocker had studied at Adelaide, Oxford and Stanford. He had worked at the United Nations and ANU, written books and moved among scholars and statesmen for most of his adult life.

His criticism therefore had a peculiar poignancy. He was looking at an institution whose creation he had assisted and wondering what had become of it. I will return to this point in closing.

Crocker's later nationalism should also be understood in that context. It was not simply flag-waving. Throughout his career he had worried about whether Australia possessed sufficient independence of mind. Earlier that had led him to criticise Australian obedience to American foreign policy and foreign control of Australian resources. Later it increasingly meant defending Australian historical identity against intellectual fashions which he believed encouraged Australians to regard their own inheritance primarily as something shameful.

There is a continuity here which the conventional Left-Right spectrum obscures. The young and middle-aged Crocker was prepared to challenge conservative orthodoxy when he thought Australia was merely following Washington. The old Crocker was prepared to challenge progressive orthodoxy when he thought Australia was surrendering its intellectual and cultural independence in another direction. The object of loyalty was not a political party. It was Australia.

His independence sometimes carried him into controversy. In 1991, aged almost 90, he publicly protested against Australia's first Nazi war-crimes prosecution, arguing that the case was driven by revenge and was an improper expenditure of Australian public money. His position attracted strong criticism. Whatever one thinks of that episode, it demonstrated something that had characterised Crocker for decades: advancing age had done nothing to make him more willing to keep an unfashionable opinion to himself.

He lived for another decade. Crocker died in Adelaide on 14 November 2002, aged 100. He had been born while the Australian Commonwealth itself was barely a year old. His lifespan therefore almost perfectly encompassed Australia's twentieth century.

Near the end of his life I had one conversation with him that has remained with me.

We were discussing the universities once more, and the ideological changes that worried him. Crocker was by then close to death. He had done what he was going to do. He had fought a war, worked for the United Nations, helped establish the ANU, represented Australia around the world, served as Lieutenant-Governor and written his books. The future belonged to somebody else. He said to me:

"This is your problem now." I have remembered those words.

There was no grand speech and, as I remember it, no melodrama. It was simply the judgment of a very old man handing an unfinished argument to a younger one. Crocker had watched Australian universities develop from institutions governed by an older scholarly culture into institutions that, in his view, were becoming increasingly ideological. He would not live to see where that process went next.

More than two decades after his death, arguments about political conformity, academic freedom, identity politics, decolonisation, ideological diversity and the purpose of the university have hardly disappeared. If anything, they have become more intense, and the universities with their role of immigration recruiters, even more corrupt.

There is something remarkable about the symmetry of Crocker's life. As a younger man he helped build the Australian National University. As an old man he worried about what Australian universities were becoming. And near the end of a century-long life, he passed the problem on.

"This is your problem now." It was. It is still.

Sources

https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/crocker-sir-walter-russell-261

https://adelaideaz.com/articles/walter-crocker--urbane-internationalist-with-devotion-to-south-australia-taking-him-to-lieutenant-governor-1973-82

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crocker

https://www.amazon.com/Travelling-Back-Memoirs-Walter-Crocker/dp/0333337212?ref_=ast_author_mpb