Bean harboured his time’s prejudices but changed his mind
I would urge the Australian Electoral Commission to name the new ACT electorate after Ningali Cullen. We have enough named after dead white men.
But let us make the decision against honouring Charles Bean without the ludicrous, offensive and groundless objections made by Mike Kelly (“Opposition to using name of ‘racist’ for area”, May 8, p3) that Bean was “stridently” racist. He certainly harboured prejudices against Jews, like most Anglo-Australians of his generation. Unlike them, he repudiated racist ideas and showed a notable willingness to change his mind.
If we are to deny recognition to those whose ideas we now decry, the AEC should erase the names of electorates honouring all politicians who supported the White Australia policy. Common sense would lead us to object that their contributions amounted to more than the support of that discredited policy.
Likewise with Bean. Do not name the electorate after him, by all means, but do not distort his life and achievements by exaggerating the significance of a view from which he later resiled.
Professor Peter Stanley, UNSW Canberra
Deserving of memory
The naming of Bean as a new electorate for Canberra has attracted needless trauma because the author had been anti-Semitic. This was very commonplace in Australia until well into the 1950s. Religious bigotry has now been supplanted essentially by racism, yet it was the latter which dominated the lead-up to Federation.
Many suburbs in the nation’s capital are named in honour of men who, in “less enlightened” times, feared the “yellow peril”.
Moreover, you need nearly two hands to count PMs who resorted to uniquely private practices and kept Catholic aspirations for employment and preferment very much in check.
So Bean had warts. Monash did too, and he has been adequately honoured. He openly sported a mistress in England during his years as a standout military leader. The men had a rapprochement, by the way, in the late 1920s.
The same cannot be said for Billy Hughes, for example, who openly hated everyone who dared to disagree with him. President Wilson described him as a “pestilence”. Reconciliation was never part of his modus operandi. As the great conceptualiser of Australia’s memory of war Bean deserves to be remembered.
Patrick Jones, Griffith
The man was a Nugget
Anti-Semitism, like any racial hatred, such as hatred of the Rohingya in their homeland, can’t be tolerated or ignored.
Rather than call an ACT electorate after Charles Bean, reportedly an active anti-Semite, we should name it after a great and kind Australian, Nugget Coombs.
I don’t think it’s understood by many how deep anti-Semitism is even today; while we’ve probably all thoughtlessly without intended cruelty told the odd Jewish and racial joke over years past in less understanding times.
There are people that carry on hatred from their families, brainwashed from birth. I recall talking to some fellow, an educated character who liked to present as a gentleman, whose family came out of Nazi Germany, and I thought he was just being playfully irreverent and provocative with his anti-Semitic remarks, but when I pulled him up after he went too far, he replied to my astonishment, “Do you know anyone who likes them?”
No, Bean is unacceptable; pick a man with human compassion for everyone like Nugget Coombs.
John Dobinson, Herston, Qld
Letters were published in The Canberra Times.