Unlike Edith Campbell Berry, Raymond Watt (1889–1967) lived his transnational life largely at home, in Sydney. He shared, however, much with her in testing himself through the forms of activism he adopted as an advocate for international causes from the 1920s to the 1940s. His was not the transnationalism of travel but of conscience, of an intellectual and personal investment in understanding issues defined as being of significance beyond the nation, and in that new space for international engagement caught ambivalently between social movements and the functions of states.^[8] Watt’s outlook was formed not through encountering differing societies and cultures; it was a product of working to establish standards against which such differences might be judged. His outlook was shaped in part by a creative engagement with the changing media available to bring the world, in authoritative ways, to popular attention. His apparent altruism was in itself a cultural artefact of his time, the brittleness of which was evident in his experience, even his personality. For these reasons, his is a useful life to reclaim from obscurity, not necessarily to place in the ranks of ‘significant figures’ alongside, say, Jessie Street, but to understand as a symptom of how contingent are the ways in which we care for our world.

Born in Gosford, New South Wales, in 1889, Watt was the fourth of nine children in a strict Congregationalist family. Five of eight sons served in World War I. Ray, however, stayed at home, abandoning study at Camden Theological College and the University of Sydney (where his courses were English, Greek, economics, philosophy and psychology) to help his father’s business as a manufacturer’s agent. Watt was ambiguous in his stance towards conscription in a poem written in 1917, but clear in espousing the glory of military sacrifice. A manifesto of 1918 declares his commitment to ensure there would be no return to the carnage of World War I, and ‘to work so that others will not have died in vain’. His sense of the war was thus tinged with an awareness of opportunities denied, of honour in service and of advancement in education. Perhaps by way of compensation, his manifesto saw in the war an emblem of what could be achieved through other forms of dedication, and in the synergy of technology, the State and social mobilisation. The war had, he observed, ‘heightened the emotional tone of the community’; its effect should be to ‘force everyone nearer to those verities which are fundamental’.^[9]

Accordingly, in 1921, Watt became a foundation member of the NSW branch of the League of Nations Union (LNU) and was elected its general secretary in 1926. He saw in the new sphere of the international, as represented by the League of Nations, the prospect of idealised order or calamitous disorder. It was a sphere that carried all the potentialities of modernity, redeemed from the mires of nationalism but shadowed by unprecedented economic instability and military destruction, now with the capacity to engulf the globe.^[10] He was not an ‘internationalist’ in the sense of envisaging a universality of culture—a view that might be associated with one of his Sydney LNU colleagues David Stead. Stead’s daughter, Christina, conveyed elements of her father’s philosophy in her portrait of Sam Pollitt in The Man Who Loved Children: Pollitt advocated the ‘monoman’, embodying ‘world peace, world love, world understanding, based on science and the fit education of even the meanest, most wretched’ person.^[11] Watt was more attuned to another prominent LNU leader and parliamentarian Littleton Groom, who characterised the league as an experiment in a new ‘technique of government’: deliberative and representative.^[12] In Watt’s own words, the league offered a mechanism to achieve ‘regulation’ across nations ‘on the basis of consent’.^[13]

In 1930, Watt was a founder of the Federal Australian League of Nations Union, and served as its national secretary until 1945. He was therefore organiser and publicist for the union at a state and national level while also assuming a number of closely related responsibilities, including as honorary correspondent for the International Labour Organisation (ILO). His work had many dimensions, as did the union itself. As one among a network of associations that characterised inter-war intellectual engagement, centring mostly on precepts of social improvement through enlightened fellowship, the union depended on commitments sustained through regular meetings, addresses, subscription drives and public events, the circulation of information and the crafting of forms of concern and activity that were appropriate to pre- or proto-professional engagement with international issues. If the league itself represented the quest for ‘world government’, the union was a lobby group for this cause and an embodiment of the forms of citizenship appropriate to that ideal.

The most prominent issues on the league’s agenda spanned from the objectives of disarmament, the arbitration of international conflict and the collective enforcement of peace to the oversight of colonial mandates, the setting of standards and conditions for labour, health and migration, and the equitable distribution of economic progress and access to justice. Bold ‘political’ causes, such as disarmament, might have been the first appeal of the league, and those that fell most quickly into disillusion, but it was the latter causes—‘non-political’ matters of ‘technique’ and ‘regulation’ focused on social and economic reform—that more enduringly held the interest of those who looked to the league as a way of comprehending the foundations of insecurity and articulating principles of international justice. In this guise, the league’s challenge was one of political imagination, and often seemed to supersede the conventional political divisions of the period. So, for example, Sir Otto Niemeyer, stern emissary from the Bank of England, agreed with Watt to give an address for the union during the mission in which he famously condemned Australians for the financial recklessness evident in their exposure to the Great Depression. Humanitarian responsibility, Niemeyer insisted in Sydney in 1930, was integral to international economic interdependence. A member of the league’s finance committee since 1922, he had been associated with the resettlement of refugees in Greece and Bulgaria. As Niemeyer informed his Sydney audience, these were ‘severely practical’ questions that ‘touch even distant Australia’ and perhaps placed local over-indulgence in a new light.^[14]

Watt’s work demonstrated that the relationship between the forms of civic action that sustained the union and the causes associated with the league were often unsteady.^[15] This relationship was, however, (as Frank Moorhouse’s novels attest) integral to the power of the inter-war international community as a field of commitment.^[16] Although a less colourful character than Edith Campbell Berry, Watt nonetheless sought to ‘enact’ the international in ways that extended the boundaries of intellectual and moral engagement. In this sense, he ‘lived’ the international through one phase of its troubled emergence, at a time when few other sources of informed opinion and political influence were available, and in relation to the sphere of largely voluntary organisations that figured so centrally in transnationalism.^[17] It was his ‘idealism, energy and persistence’ that was most admired by Peter Heydon, for example, who as one of Australia’s early career diplomats later recalled the open, critical engagement Watt had fostered—an engagement Heydon thought became rare in more polarised debates after World War II, and hard to sustain amid the pressures of official work that he knew so well.^[18]