In 1938, Wells was seventy-two, hale, spruce, famous, and still combative. Like other readers through the Empire, Australians knew and probably identified with his aspiring lower middleclass heroes: Kipps, Mr Polly, and George Ponderevo. They probably had also dipped into his bestselling Outline of History (1920). The Congress Committee might also have been reassured by Wells’s training in biology, a background which makes him unique, I guess, among the British literary intelligentsia of the twentieth century. More daringly for the Committee, Wells was an acknowledged republican and atheist. His novels and tracts from the 1890s had helped radicalise English-speakers’ comprehension of their lives. After Charles Darwin, Wells is arguably the most internationally influential person ever to visit Australia.

Self-proclaimed anti-monarchist though he was, Wells was also a fairly safe invitee: he was elderly, he had never been a communist or fellow-traveller, nor had he succumbed to papist absolutism. His public resistance to BBC and press censorship and his denunciations of Catholic intellectual and social repression in Eire, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary had won him admirers among Australian free-thinkers. He was also known as an opponent of Zionism and Jewish separatism while being a vehement opponent of Nazi anti-Semitism. Thinking Australians were ready to lionise him.

In late December, Wells arrived at Fremantle – out of sorts. He had sailed on the British Comorin, a vessel he called ‘a late Victorian “Pukka Sahib”’. It had sailed late from Marseilles and had got further behind throughout the voyage. Wells, who had never been East of Suez, found the heat trying. Receptions he had arranged for himself in Bombay, Colombo, and Perth were scrapped or truncated. The ship’s telephone worked only intermittently. The agents had no directories available. The Comorin was not equipped to show films. Airmail letters from London dispatched to meet his itinerary finally caught up with him in Melbourne and Canberra. Worst of all, he found insufferable his confinement in first class among Raj hee-haws and young ‘nice, under-educated’ colonials playing games, doing the Lambeth Walk, and giving facetious Nazi and Fascist salutes, yet ready to stand rigid on hearing the national anthem. He passed the days sitting alone on deck, his back to the bonhomie, speaking to no one. He had never before been so out of his milieu.

His Parsee hosts in Bombay had disappointed him. They spoke English and, Wells had hoped, would have proved a powerful component of his projected English-speaking liberal world order. But they turned out to be simulacra of their masters, ‘narrow … paralysed … under the strangling … influence of the British ruling class’.

One source of Wells’s frustration with imperial shipping, airmail, and telephone shortcomings was probably his contract to write about his travels for the London News Chronicle and New York Cosmopolitan. One of his early reports contained his shipboard thoughts about Hitler and the Germans: ‘an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people … [who seemed] to feel at their best when singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders … now obeying the orders of a triumvirate of certifiable lunatics.’

Wells’s advent at Perth on 27 December 1938 during the dead post-Christmas season was a windfall for journalists. Smarting from his let-downs in Bombay and Colombo, Wells told his new audience that the English language was ‘a greater bond than Empire’ in a dangerous world. The USA had to be incorporated in it. His assessment remains astute, sixty years on. Wells announced that he intended to ‘find out … what Australia was thinking’ and wanted ‘to see how far Australian thought is turning towards America’. By the end of his tour, he had decided that the answer to each question was ‘not very much’.

The old stirrer also declared that he would ‘read a very provocative paper to the joint history and educational section called “Poison Called History” [which] would annoy many people, especially the old-fashioned teachers of history. Teachers were usually a very self-satisfied class.’ Wells did not add, and the journalists apparently did not know, that this paper had already been delivered in England at a League of Nations union teachers’ summer school, where it had fallen flat. Moreover, the paper had been six months in print and been criticised in the Nineteenth Century and After. His offering remained unrevised. Wells was travelling light – without a secretary.

He was also contracted to the Australian Broadcasting Commission to give four talks. The first, delivered in Adelaide, rehearsed his old argument that ‘Fiction about the Future’ must be ‘based on history’ to bring verisimilitude and give substance to moral issues. Intriguingly, The Age reviewer found his voice ‘pleasurable’ and ‘resonant’. Wells’s English Leftish acquaintances thought his voice squeaky and betraying his servant class origins. Possibly, his tone was more akin to the then higher-pitched Australian pattern.

During his conversations with the Perth journalists, Wells remarked that ‘in view of Hitler’s racial hallucinations and treatment of the Jews his … sentimentalised sadistic behaviour justified me in regarding him as a “certifiable lunatic”’. Wells was repeating passages he had dispatched to the News Chronicle. He had already been denounced in Goebbels’s Der Angriff for earlier attacks on Nazism. He was later to hang on his wall his listing for a concentration camp after the German occupation of Britain. The reactionary Bulletin, copying from the staid John O’London’s, alleged that Wells had plagiarised the ‘lunatic’ attribution from Bertrand Russell’s Power, published in November 1938 and quoted in John O’London’s. I have compared Power with Wells’s remarks: the ideas are alike but the expression is distinct. Wells might have come out with an unconscious recollection, but his words are not plagiarisms. Wells faced some implacable enemies in Australia, not least because he also characterised Mussolini as a ‘fantastic vain renegade from Socialism’.

These rude truths upset the United Australia Party Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons. From his home in Tasmania, he issued a public rebuke: ‘it is to be regretted … that while in Australia Mr Wells has so far indulged his well-known political sympathies as to make disparaging remarks about the leaders of other nations … As British people we would not appreciate foreigners offering insults to the Royal Family, or to any of our national leaders.’ Lyons’s New Year’s Eve ‘Message to the Nation’ had included a panegyric to Chamberlain at Munich: ‘a magnificent gesture that stirred my pulse as I am sure it stirred yours.’ The Berlin Diplomatisch-Politisches Korrespondence promptly commended Lyons for ‘his pleasing adherence to the good traditions of civilised nations’, compared with ‘Wells’s degenerate manner’. The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Argus also backed Lyons; but T.C. Shakespeare, in the Canberra Times, declared that Lyons had bowed ‘to people who have insulted every canon of decency in public life’. Wells was entitled to expose those who used ‘international bad faith and violence … to accomplish the downfall of our civilisation’. Lyons’s rebuke coincided with Roosevelt’s speech promising to amend the Neutrality Act to help the Allies.

Wells trailed his coat: ‘Mr Lyons has a perfect right to say that my remarks were in the worst possible taste and … he had just as much right, although a Prime Minister, to express his opinion about freedom of thought … After all, he has done nothing officially against me, and so far I have not been hampered.’ Then he called a press conference to repeat his denunciations and to wonder why Australians were not allowed to drink after six p.m.

Wells was getting to know Australia. There was controversy about the drastic banning record of T.W. White as Minister for Customs, censorship of a play in Sydney, the Chief Film Censor’s finding On Our Selection ‘prejudicial to the reputation of the Commonwealth’, and the continuing attempt to stop the landing of Mrs Freer, a British subject, but also an alleged marriage-breaker. Jokers asked how Mrs Simpson, who was not a British subject, would get on if the rumoured Windsor retreat to Australia proceeded.

Two days later, Lyons tried to mend his statement: ‘Modern war … is not a matter for neat controversy. It is a question of life or death to millions … Any … statement which brings the possibility of war nearer must come under the most careful scrutiny … the giving of needless offence … [does] not serve the cause of peace.’

This second shot followed the inaugural dinner in Melbourne of the Australian branch of PEN international, dedicated to freedom of thought and publication, which Wells attended as an honoured founder and former president. In his speech, Wells lambasted British censorship, preoccupied with ‘improper books by foreign authors – provided they were still alive’, possibly an allusion to a local row over the banning of novels by Dumas father and son. The dinner was chaired by the novelist Leonard Mann and most of Melbourne’s generally Leftish literary coterie were there. Wells casually informed the gathering that he had read no Australian writing. The only Australian book he appears to have encountered on his tour was Daisy Bates’s The Passing of the Aborigines (1938). Presciently, he remarked that Aborigines would survive. Mann and other speakers mocked Lyons’s tut-tut, but Wells shrewdly repeated that Lyons had the right to his opinion. R.G. Menzies, Lyons’s attorney-general and waiting rival, seated near Wells, seized his chance with a brilliant intervention celebrating civilised exchange of views in a British society, to relieved applause.

The Melbourne Catholic Advocate was less forgiving. Its editorial was headed ‘Wells Farrago’. The Bulletin also attacked Wells for his ‘low opinion of Musso and Hitler … Australians dislike dictators … but … “freaks” and “certified lunatics” couldn’t command the devotion of millions [attained through] … an extraordinary genius for leadership.’ Mary Gilmore thanked Lyons ‘from the bottom of [her] heart’.

‘William Hazlitt Junior’, in Melbourne’s Table Talk, an upper-crust gossip magazine, told his readership that Lyons had made a fool of himself and Australians. His rebuke was unprecedented in the British Dominions and ‘WHJ’ doubted whether it represented majority opinion in Australia. ‘Surely by now, with the Freer and other incidents [probably the Kisch fiasco of 1936], the Commonwealth Government must realise that … such a censorious attitude will make it, and … every Australian, ridiculous in the eyes of the world.’ This row was the most successful of Wells’s provocations. He failed to set the abstract cause of civil liberty at the centre of Australian discussion, but, by fixing the petty local bans in an international context and shaming thinking Australians, he enriched Australian life. Few visitors have achieved as much. His novelist’s sense of evil, alone among the radical intelligentsia of his generation, helped him get Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, and the rest absolutely right. Lyons, he wrote later, exemplified ‘all that is … indecisive, disingenuous and dangerous in the present leadership of the British Dominions … Lyons lives in a world where states appear to have heads without brains or bodies … like Chamberlain … Lyons … manifestly suffers from delusions of sagacity.’

Wells proceeded to upset the ABC Board by ignoring their rule that three copies of any proposed address be lodged before the broadcast. He arrived at 3AR Melbourne with a single script and gave his talk. He had long fought the BBC and he hated Reith. The ABC, he decided, went in for the ‘same petty bullying’. His defiance of ABC ‘good taste’ continued throughout his broadcasts. In Sydney, he eulogised the unsavoury Dr Freud and canvassed normally unmentionable psychological causes of war.

While in Melbourne in early January, Wells held court for journalists from the women’s pages and magazines. They came ready to deplore his infidelities and male conceit, but the ‘stoutish, brown-faced man with intensely blue eyes’ charmed them all. He graciously conceded nothing to his inquisitors: the only great female writers were Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, neither as popular then as now; living women writers he refused to discuss. ‘Female emancipation’ had brought women ‘glories galore’, but ‘no very great emancipation … their leaders seem[ed] … unable to conceive of any purpose in the world except emancipation. It [was] … not a question of ability, but of a different … will.’ Women in the House of Commons had been only ‘a nuisance’. ‘Normal’ women were not interested in ‘matters outside the natural functions of being … [and] baby-bearing’. Above all, they ignored money. The existence of the Chamberlain Government proved their limitations – placed and kept in power ‘by millions of young women whose interests [were] … weddings … abdications and Royal love affairs … women’s suffrage [was] an unmixed disaster.’ Women voters ignored the immediate desiderata for better lives: legally enforceable salaries for housekeeping and childrearing payable by the husband, and divorce by mutual consent and for ‘simple cruelty’.

The weather in Melbourne had been very hot. Bushfires had started at Mt Macedon. Wells delayed his special flight to equally hot Canberra. He finally landed in a dusty, skeletal capital boasting 11,500 citizens clustered in six or so villages, loosely articulated across seven or so kilometres. ANZAAS had enrolled about 1250 delegates to the Jubilee Congress, the largest gathering in the capital’s history. There were four hotels and two guesthouses. The enthusiastic locals welcomed visitors into their small, poorly insulated houses, while young people volunteered to ferry the delegates in the family car to the two Congress venues – Telopea Park school and the Albert Hall – a couple of kilometres apart. The Congress week was to be the hottest recorded in the capital’s history; each day was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Wells and other distinguished British guests stayed at Government House. Male delegates took some time to shed their jackets, women to remove their gloves. Wells, a true Britisher in the colonies, blossomed in white trousers, open-necked shirt, and white shoes. Through the insufferable sleepless nights, he consoled himself by whispering: ‘I am losing weight. I am losing weight.’

He delivered his much-touted lecture on the ‘Poison Called History’ to an overflow audience at the Albert Hall. It was a fizzer. Some of it would, I think, be better received now. Wells argued that history in schools in the brutal twentieth century, amidst portents of another terrible war, needed fresh content and argumentation. Silly anecdotes and out-of-context incidents had to go, to be replaced by detail that would exemplify and explore ‘operating causes’. These, Wells asserted, were to be found via the emerging universal sciences of human ecology and social biology. Old ethnically fenced histories – English, French, German – closed the imagination. International history that traced events involving all humanity must replace it, much as Wells had sought to do in his Outline of History. Two current movements needed special attention. The first was the gradual rapprochement between the USA, Great Britain, and the Dominions, a shift of huge significance for the defence of liberty against the dictators. The second vital element in the new history teaching was the abandonment of misleading, separatist, untested single-cause explanations of events: Aryanism, Marxism, national destinies, Zionism. The ‘spirit of the East’, ‘the spirit of the Greeks’, ‘Nordic virtues’, ‘Golden Ages’, ‘Holy Russia’, all must be uprooted. Each welded communities under falsehoods and produced ‘squirming … discordant patriotisms’, which stifled the emergence of a World Peace Ideology. Historians must somehow, like artists, get outside history to see themselves and their pupils truly and to think beyond their petty, ignorant, national allegiances. Historians should study the biological bases of national character and social elements, the origins of speech and writing, and the evolution and communication of social ideas, and thus free ourselves of the ‘sentimental charms’ of beliefs held in isolation. This scientific history would be ‘absolutely impartial’. It had to start with archaeology, which had to be studied together with history; not to prove exclusive ethnic origins but to trace social evolution among human groups.

Despite his intentions, Wells’s standpoint, the key difficulty in writing world history, remained southern English, not even British, or British and Irish. His hopes were moral, but his biological determinism emptied his historical vision of the moral authority deriving from tradition and hence the opportunity to illuminate the gaps between promise and performance in the past. He confessed that he could not see his historical project of international peace eventuating. Meanwhile, old ideas reinforced by modern weapons would continue to ‘tear the world to pieces’. Historians, moreover, were rotten agents of change; they were either ‘sycophants’ or ‘helpless men’. Ernest Scott, recently retired Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, who chaired Wells’s lecture, confessed to being ‘surprised’. Scott had earlier delivered an excellent address, possibly the first ever, on the history of science in Australia.

A special session had been allocated for discussion of Wells’s paper, but the twenty or so historians who attended – the educationists had hastily arranged a separate session – were subdued. The heat could not have helped. R.M. Crawford, Scott’s recent successor, who earlier had delivered a prissy rejection of overmastering theories of history which oddly prefigured Wells, remarked enigmatically that ‘Mr Wells had been treating effects as causes’. He also dismissed the universal history project, which ‘would in practice result in enormous misconceptions and blurrings of vitally important lines of thought’. He did not, it appears, descend to details. Old Sir Francis Anderson, the philosopher from Sydney University, impishly ventured that children would only enjoy history if they were given ‘the personal and picturesque’ anecdotes – Alfred and the cakes, for instance – which told of human endurance and courage and man’s inhumanity to man. Otherwise, in Anderson’s experience, children were bored by history. Nobody is reported as backing Wells. Only the Catholic Freeman’s Journal welcomed Wells’s speech: the new history would cleanse the subject of Henry VIII, misnamed ‘Bloody’ Mary and Charles Kingsley, and ‘lift France and Spain in English eyes’.

The most pertinent comment I have come across is that of a fifteen-year-old student, who became an eminent physicist, Noel Hush. He pointed out in the Canberra Times that school history emphasised the wrong personal elements. It glorified the Battle of Plassey and Clive’s triumph but never mentioned the ‘blood and agony’ inherent in it. There was too much on the art of war, ‘murder in uniform’, too little on the arts of music and science. Wells replied waspishly. Anderson and his anecdotes he ‘scorned’. Boys would be interested in ‘the useful histories of building of ships and railways’. Maybe Anderson preferred Henry VIII and his wives because the tale was ‘invigorating’ and ‘juicy’? He objected to Crawford’s implication that he was advocating history as ‘propaganda’ for peace; rather, he wanted history to shed light on human problems, for example a determinist factual approach would trace the use of iron in war and peace. I recall just such a course of lectures at Melbourne University in the 1950s, among the most enlightening I have ever heard, by Austin Edwards, a geologist who had been a delegate to the 1939 Congress. Finally, a dry-as-dust legal historian from Sydney observed that Mr Wells had ‘gone too far’. Wells replied that he merely had been providing ‘food for thought’.

The years 1938 and 1939 were El Niño years. The dry Victorian forests burnt uncontrollably in the scorching first weeks of 1939, culminating in the terrible deaths on Black Thursday, 5 January. ANZAAS opened on 11 January when the temperature was 106 degrees. The next day it was 108, with a searing north wind. A sudden windstorm wrecked the marquee and scattered the viceregal garden party on the Parliament House lawns. The trees around Parliament House were shrivelling. On Friday the thirteenth, Canberra was enveloped in smoke from fires on a 100-kilometre front from Uriarra and Mt Franklin, rapidly spreading down the Murrumbidgee corridor. An evacuation of Government House and its distinguished guests was discussed. Around the ANZAAS venues, bicycles were dumped when the patches on the tubes melted. Motorists, halted by boiling radiators, lay in their singlets under trees on the verges.

On the Saturday, medical practitioners among the delegates volunteered to man First Aid posts for firefighters. Wells joined the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, in his Rolls-Royce moving along the fire perimeters encouraging the firefighters. They distributed over 3000 cigarettes subscribed by ANZAAS guests at the Hotel Canberra. Wells was exhilarated by the communal effort; it was ‘a phase of Australian life … he had never thought to see … blackened, sweaty men with a curious tough Cockney cheerfulness and brotherliness’. ANZAAS delegates had formed fire-fighting teams captained by Douglas Mawson, James Darling (the Geelong Grammar School Headmaster), Douglas Copland (the economist), and G.S. Browne (the educationalist). Before the month was out, Wells had written a brief evocation of the fires that joins Judge Stretton’s Report as the most vivid in our literature.

Wells’s delight in Australian voluntarism was completed by his observation of a lifesaving parade at North Steyne. This ‘marvellous, extraordinary’ display devoted to preservation rather than destruction confirmed his faith in English-speaking social inventiveness, strength, and organisation, whether pitted against nature or dictators. He was to invoke this experience several times in his last writings in London during the war, especially in A Hymn of Hate (1944).

On the final day of the Congress, the temperature fell dramatically. Wells subsequently told varying stories that the sudden change had induced viral pneumonia and other illnesses. But he was apparently in good health during his last Australian week in Sydney.

His last public lecture, entitled ‘The Human Outlook’, in the Sydney Town Hall – seats at six and nine shillings – was largely an attack on censorship in Australia, possibly provoked by an inane attempt by George Gollan, a New South Wales junior minister, to censor a new play. Wells was astounded at the conclusion of his call for free thought to have his chairman Billy Hughes announce the singing of the national anthem and then mutter ‘God save us all’. Wells’s concluding ABC talk boldly celebrated Freud as a discoverer of our inner human nature. He also attacked Nazi book-burning and the expulsion of that other great discoverer, Albert Einstein. After his Australian month, Wells had decided that Australians were ‘reliable, decent people … very much Americanised, but intensely British, and not yet a nation’. They were stupidly uninterested in East Asia, given that Asia was an ‘aggressive reality’, another prescient observation.

Even Wells’s mode of leaving at the end of January 1939 offended right-thinking Australians. He ostentatiously chose to fly KLM because the Dutch, he declared, provided a more punctual and comfortable service than the imperial airline. After Wells’s departure, R.B. Orchard, a standard Queensland politician and member of the ABC Board, publicly explained that Wells had been a ‘rather quarrelsome, bad-tempered old gentleman … showing a spirit of license … his version of a world torn by ideologies, ruthlessness and brutality, defended by courageous individuals, left a fearful legacy’.

Wells had brought succour to embattled civil libertarians, but stolid imperialist Australia held the fort. Few Australians know that he ever came here. His Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (1939) was published in difficult times and remains a rare book, not least in Australia. Readers experiencing déjà vu might care to seek it out.