Justin Hilary O’Byrne - Course 14 - Senator for Tasmania, 1947–81 (Australian Labor Party)

Justin Hilary O’Byrne was a World War II fighter pilot and prisoner of war, and President of the Senate during the 1975 constitutional crisis. He was born on 1 June 1912 in Launceston, Tasmania, the seventh of ten children. His father, Patrick Augustus O’Byrne, a wine and spirit merchant in Launceston, was the son of Irish migrants who had settled at Westbury. His mother, Mary Elizabeth née Madden, probably attended the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music. The couple were devout Catholics. Justin’s early years were spent at Trevallyn on the Tamar River, where he developed a lifelong interest in aquatic sports. At the age of nine, he was a cox at the Tamar Rowing Club. Educated at Trevallyn Primary School and at St Patrick’s College, Launceston, O’Byrne was a prominent athlete and swimmer. He continued to cox rowing teams, and played handball and Australian Rules football. O’Byrne’s schooling ended at the age of fifteen. He worked at the Kelsall & Kemp textile factory, and then as an assistant in the chemistry laboratory of the Rapson Tyre & Rubber Company during 1929, studying rubber chemistry and accountancy on a part-time basis at Launceston Technical College. O’Byrne left Launceston that year after the company experienced a series of catastrophes that eventually bankrupted it. In 1930 he walked, in stages, over 1000 kilometres from Melbourne in Victoria to Cunnamulla in south-west Queensland, where, as ‘a jack of all trades’, he sheared sheep, drove bullocks, bored drains, mended fences, taught himself to play the mouth organ, and acquired bushcraft skills from Aboriginals. He became a station overseer and bookkeeper, and learnt to fly light aircraft. In his spare time, he read widely in economics and political science. In 1935 he joined the Australian Workers’ Union. Outraged by the conduct of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Ethiopia, O’Byrne was persuaded by the writings of G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski and George Bernard Shaw that capitalism must give way to socialism. [1] On 20 June 1940 O’Byrne enlisted in the RAAF at Hobart. In November, he embarked for training in Ottawa, Canada. Commissioned as a pilot officer, O’Byrne travelled to Kirton-in-Lindsey in Lincolnshire, serving as a founding member of 452 Squadron, RAAF. In July 1941 the squadron was transferred to Kenley in Surrey and, with the arrival of Squadron Leader Robert Bungey, 452 Squadron was now predominantly Australian. O’Byrne participated in offensive operations across the Channel, opposing the waves of German bombers preparing for Hitler’s projected invasion of Britain, thus helping to ensure the enemy’s ultimate defeat. A Spitfire flown on occasion by O’Byrne is on display at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. In August 1941, accompanying British bombers, O’Byrne’s Spitfire was shot down over France by a German fighter. Although wounded, O’Byrne bailed out—it was his first parachute jump. He was captured by Germans, and spent some time in hospital at Saint-Omer, France. A fellow casualty was the legendary Douglas Bader. O’Byrne later related that before the RAF parachuted artificial limbs for Bader into Germany, he carried the ace pilot on his back. Bader never forgot him, and sent O’Byrne a telegram on his retirement from the Senate. After leaving the hospital, O’Byrne began nearly four years of incarceration in eight prisoner of war camps. Conditions, even for officers, were bad. Food was so meagre that without Red Cross parcels many would have starved to death. Life in the huts was monotonous. Only the hope of escape kept up morale. O’Byrne continued his studies, leading seminars in politics, economics and languages in preparation for the better world to come. At Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, O’Byrne took part in celebrated break outs, which subsequently inspired the popular books and films, The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape. During the latter, teams of prisoners created escape tunnels while others distracted the guards. O’Byrne, who later described himself as ‘the administrative officer’, did not draw a place in the lotteries for the relatively small number who would try to escape through the tunnels. He was fortunate, as fifty of the prisoners who broke out were executed following recapture. To O’Byrne, the effort, despite its results, was worthwhile. As the Russians moved west in the closing stages of the war, the Germans forced O’Byrne and other prisoners to walk 150 kilometres through the snow from Scubin to Luckenwalde, south of Berlin. After the Russians finally liberated this camp, O’Byrne had to make his own way to the American forces on the Elbe, over 100 kilometres away. In light of this experience, and his earlier wanderings across Australia, he later described himself as a ‘Roads Scholar’. By May 1945 he was back in the United Kingdom, having been promoted to flight lieutenant in February 1943 while still a POW.[2] After rehabilitation in England, O’Byrne returned to Sydney in May 1945 and was discharged on 1 February 1946. Back in Tasmania, he worked for a short time as the Launceston district officer in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. With his gallant war background and well-honed socialist philosophy, in March 1946 O’Byrne obtained nomination for the Senate for the September federal election. The ALP, under Ben Chifley, was returned to power, and Labor won all three Senate seats in Tasmania with O’Byrne elected third. From the first, O’Byrne proved an active senator, speaking, questioning and interjecting. In polemical outbursts, he developed a flair for striking metaphors and witty analogies, sometimes using satirical verse. Despite vigorous criticism of opponents, O’Byrne bore them no malice and was often happy to fraternise outside the chamber, where he became a celebrated raconteur. His enthusiasm for the brave new world to be inaugurated by Labor was palpable. Wartime experiences added depth to O’Byrne’s reading of socialist writers. In 1948 he lambasted the capitalist system, which, he said, during the war had forced the RAF to pay royalties for its fuel to Standard Oil of New Jersey, these royalties eventually going to the German corporation of I. G. Farben. In later years, he complained that ‘Australia was involved in every war that was on’, adding, ‘What did we get out of it? Nothing’. Nevertheless, referring to his POW experience, he declared: ‘I lost my freedom. I gave it up in a cause’. Urging the importance of understanding Australia’s Asian neighbours, he reiterated Franklin Roosevelt’s view that ‘if civilization is to survive we must cultivate the science of human relationships’. O’Byrne insisted that the socialism of the ALP did not require the nationalisation of private enterprises, provided that these were managed without exploitation and in a socially useful manner.[3] In 1949 Labor lost office and began twenty-three years in opposition. As his chances of high office dwindled, O’Byrne identified with the radical left of the party in its contest against the apparently immovable regime of Robert Menzies. He opposed the Communist Party Dissolution Bill as a threat to national liberties and welcomed its rejection in a referendum. A staunch supporter of Evatt, O’Byrne had no sympathy with the Labor dissidents who broke away in 1955 to form the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). Personally denounced by Archbishop Guilford Young of Hobart for supporting divorce legislation, O’Byrne became a constant antagonist of the DLP until its disappearance from the Senate in 1974. Chifley remained his hero. After Chifley’s death in 1951, O’Byrne said that ‘by his personal example he has permanently influenced my conception of the duties of public life’. On 11 February 1961, at Holy Cross Church, Woollahra, New South Wales, O’Byrne married Gisele Anne Crossle, like himself an ALP stalwart and keen social reformer of Irish background. Justin and Anne had three children. O’Byrne took an active part in the protest against the Vietnam War, presenting a petition against the harshness of conscription that led Senator Rae on 27 March 1969 to accuse O’Byrne of being a tool of fraud. O’Byrne in turn accused Rae of acting as an informer, using the word ‘pimp’, for which ‘unparliamentary language’ he was suspended from the sitting of the Senate. He was less virulent, but equally fervent, in his opposition to the flooding of Lake Pedder and the damming of the Franklin River. He proudly advertised his membership of the Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park Board and the Tasmanian Scenery Preservation Board, and spoke vigorously in the Senate on the dangers of uranium mining. He warned that a ‘society based on the lust for private profit must inevitably render the earth incapable of supporting human life’. O’Byrne served on a wide range of parliamentary committees throughout his Senate career. He was also a member of the parliamentary delegation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and a parliamentary adviser to the Australian delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in New York from 1971 to 1972. In 1980 he attended the 67th Inter-Parliamentary Union Conference in East Berlin, during which, so the story goes, the Russian delegation awarded him a medal, causing O’Byrne to refer to ‘our glorious Russian allies’, memories of his release by the Russians in 1945 overshadowing the more recent events of the Cold War. O’Byrne left the Senate at the completion of his term on 30 June 1981. Under party rules, being over the retiring age of sixty-five, he could not be re-endorsed. His reputation in the Senate reflected the fact that, unlike so many others, he had not been embittered by the events of 1975. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1984. In later years, he regretted the change that had come over Australian politics when the idealism of the Chifley period gave way to pragmatic politics in both of the main parties. Although he was careful not to embarrass the party in public, O’Byrne had little sympathy for the new Labor philosophy of Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating, which he saw as insufficiently distinguishable from that of the Liberal Party. O’Byrne died on 10 November 1993 in Sydney. Anne, Justin, Hilary and Helene survived him. Many of the prominent politicians who attended his state funeral in the Church of the Apostles, Launceston, had turned away from his strong critique of contemporary capitalism, and they regarded his respect for Parliament as a forum for genuine debate and social reconstruction as old-fashioned. His example, however, remains an ideal for subsequent generations. (The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate)