Yet theirs was a generation that set itself great tasks.‘It is up to us’, wrote
Balzac,‘children of the century and of liberty, to speed the dawning of
happiness among nations, to make the security of thrones coincide with the
freedom of peoples’(Balzac 1936, p. 18): to reconcile, in other words, progress
and order. Imbued with a conviction in their own abilities—a conviction
underpinned by having succeeded in Restoration France’s rigorous‘concours’
(competitive examinations which served to reward the highest-achieving
students and select among applicants for the professions and for literary and
scientific honours)—the generation’s leading intellectuals grappled with what
the post-revolutionary, post-imperial society was to be, and how it was to
operate. It was not a mere recipe for good government that they sought; it was
to replace the shattered remains they had inherited with an entirely new
synthesis, as is evident in the efforts of Henri de Saint-Simon, Victor Cousin,
and Auguste Comte to formulate a general doctrine that could serve as the
ideological cement of a new social order.
If the ambitions of the‘lost generation’of 1914 were more limited, the
trauma it experienced was not. The loss of life during the First World War
touched deep, reaching Hancock, too, in 1918 with the news that his older
brother, Jim, had been‘obliterated at Pozieres’. He was, Neville Meaney tells
us,‘haunted at night by dreams of his brother’and‘humiliated and guilt-
ridden when his parents refused to allow him to enlist’(Meaney 1985, p. 12).
The global turmoil of 1917–20 and the widespread criticism of the peace treaty
signed at Versailles in 1919 bred disappointment and frustration; it was
difficult not to believe that‘the apocalypse had only been postponed and
that any restoration of the post-war era would only be temporary’(Wohl 1979,
pp. 225–6).
For Hancock, the sense of fragility would have been made especially acute
by hisfirst encounter with Italy in 1922–23. As he wrote three decades later:
I was an assiduous reader of Mussolini’s speeches. They were forceful vivid
speeches and they outraged my deepest political convictions. I believed that this
man with his words, this man’s thugs with their revolvers and clubs and castor oil
were befouling and destroying values which I had cared for ever since my Mel-
bourne days. (Hancock 1954, p. 92)But all that was aggravated by the materialism, complacency, and parochial-
ism he found on his return to Australia. From 1919 to 1925 the country had
experienced an economic boom, reflected in the rhetoric of‘Australia Unlim-
ited’; but, taken as a whole, thefirst post-war decade did little more than
restore average incomes to their level in 1913 (Schedvin 1970, pp. 48–9).
Some of Hancock’s older colleagues, such as Frederic Eggleston and Edward
Shann, viewed the slowing of growth as symptomatic of the structurally
flawed policies—including the entrenchment of industrial arbitration and
Henry Ergas