However scrutinised by elements within the LNU, Watt was not alone in his aspirations. The union became a prominent organisation at a time when the pursuit of social and political causes through publicity, discussion and the distribution of information had an importance unimaginable to us in an age of mass electronic communication. Such activities in themselves, however, imposed a considerable burden. The Victorian Bureau of Social and International Affairs, which provided a joint secretariat for the Victorian LNU and the rather more restricted membership of the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Melbourne Round Table group and Royal Institute of International Affairs branch, reported in 1930 that ‘by far the most claims on [our] time and attention’ were made by the LNU, with its growing membership and many activities.^[39] Between 800 and 1000 full adult members had initially joined the NSW branch (‘war memories turned people into crusaders’), but by 1925 membership had fallen to 200. Numbers quickly recovered, however, when Watt became a full-time officer (1417 members by 1929, 1555 by 1930, 3560 by 1938). While membership fluctuated, it was assumed, in response to international events and perceptions about the league’s relevance (declining to 1036 in 1934, amid the Sino–Japanese crisis, up to 3138 in 1935 after Italy’s attacks on Abyssinia), even lean years saw intense activity (more than 200 lectures were given in metropolitan Sydney in 1934).^[40] ‘The first answer to every citizen who wishes to help the League is “Join the League of Nations Union”’—this appeal from Sir Edward Grey, heading Australian application forms, was not merely gratuitous but expressed a meaningful connection between the union’s programs and the League of Nations. How was Watt to represent or enable that connection?

As a voluntary body, the LNU thrived on sociability—on acts of meeting, modes of discussion, codes of commitment. Its leading, or most prominent, members formed a solid core and a distinct social stratum: overwhelmingly Protestant (Anglicans by far the dominant group, followed by Presbyterians), academically educated (law being the largest disciplinary background) and frequently academics by profession.^[41] About 40 per cent of members were women—an association encouraged perhaps by the league’s constitutional commitment to non-discrimination. Association with the union was often one affiliation among many others, including with the English Speaking Union, the Student Christian Movement, the Victoria League, the United Service League, the Town Planning Association, the Racial Hygiene Association—the list was extensive. The international, in these contexts, was in part defined through networks and ways of ‘performing’ concern in meetings, speech and action. If prominent members led such activities, they were joined, watched and listened to by many others who contributed their labour, time and money.

One of the heights of the union’s calendar, for example, was an international ball. Watt claimed to have conceived this function, held first at the Palais Royal in 1926, then at the new Trocadero, which usually attracted more than 1200 people. Other branches, even those in the United Kingdom, soon adopted the ball.^[42] Complete with vice-regal patronage, these were national-costume or themed affairs, including a pageant in which bonds of art, science, industry and friendship were personified. The Adelaide pageant was especially famous for its elaborate staging: in 1929, actors represented characters including ‘Peace’, ‘Public Opinion’, ‘Self-Interest’, ‘Goodwill’, ‘Time’, ‘Necessity’, Experience’ and ‘Humanity’. The Sydney branch was more modest in performance, but equally earnest: 250 people in 1930 represented a spectrum from ‘Music’ and ‘Architecture’ to ‘Law’, ‘Agriculture’ and ‘Commerce’.^[43]

Very effective in raising money, these pageants were the lighter end of a continuum of activities that defined the LNU’s claim to speak for the advancement of people across the world. George Rich, a justice of the High Court since 1913 and an initially cynical delegate to the 1922 league conference, returned from Geneva as if from a ‘revivalist meeting’. He was struck by the behaviour of ‘shrewd, practical, able and conciliatory men of the world, meeting together to solve in a commonsense way problems that baffled nations’.^[44] This face-to-face emphasis indicated a desire to establish credentials, to secure accountability, to ground the abstraction of issues in the display of virtues and to enable an exchange between people accorded the status of delegates of their societies, representing interests rather than states. In this sense, there seemed to be a thread running from sociability at the lunchtime talk or the evening lecture to the promise of the international in a high diplomacy not confined to officials. Douglas Copland, then a young and enthusiastic professor of commerce at the University of Melbourne, recorded in his notebook that the importance of the league lay in tracing the ‘growth of government’, adding the aphorism that ‘the history of the evolution of civilisation is the history of the evolution of social groups’.^[45]

Figure 5.1: An earnest group: Ray Watt is second from the right in the front row among the delegates at the League of Nations Union Annual Meeting and Conference in Canberra, 28-31 January 1938.

The others are: front row, right to left, W.A. Woods (Tas.), RGW, R.J.F. Boyer (Qld), Sir Robert Garran (president), M.M. Rischbieth (WA), Professor F. Alexander (WA); back row, right to left, O. Smith (Tas.), Eileen Watt (NSW), Constance Duncan (Vic.), E.M. Boyer, W. Macmahon Ball (Vic), Rev Norman Lade (SA), L. Littlejohn (NSW), F.E. Barraclough (NSW), Captain F. O'Sullivan (Qld) and Ruby Rich (NSW).

Raymond Watt Papers, National Library of Australia, courtesy Gabrielle Watt.

Modelling ‘regulation by consent’, Watt was indefatigable in facilitating such social groups, always present, sometimes a speaker—although at the most prominent occasions a higher dignitary would preside (Watt, after all, was not quite of the right stratum). When Watt did get such roles, however, there was an almost palpable sense that he could push too hard at suitable codes of conduct. So, for example, when Watt attended the 1936 league conference as an Australian delegate, S. M. Bruce, as official government representative, would allow him only to ‘submit in writing any brain waves that might occur to me’; otherwise ‘I’m to be put in cold storage in case my enthusiasm should raise the temperature in Europe’.^[46] Watt’s busy-ness could irritate office holders who had jobs elsewhere (‘Frankly, Raymond,’ Fred Alexander wrote from the University of Western Australia regarding a conference on postwar reconstruction that Watt was keen to organise in 1945, ‘I am extremely pressed’), just as his need to raise funds by selling his services beyond the LNU was a matter of sensitivity for those who gave their time for nothing.^[47]

Watt’s work extended beyond organisation. His extensive papers are sorted into hundreds of folders of press clippings organised by theme, country, issue or organisation, drawn from the local and international press (prominently the Christian Science Monitor, Manchester Guardian and London Times and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Listener), pamphlets, journals, reports and Hansard. There are index cards of quotations culled from wide reading and pocket books of speaking notes regularly revisited and revised. Meticulously selected, marked or transcribed, these materials testify to a sustained program of largely autodidactic synthesis, usually soon turned into some form of speech, radio address or press commentary.

In this commentary, Watt was also exploring new forms of authority. The international as ‘news’, as a defined category of information, was deeply formed by its media and associated assumptions of audience—ever since Jeremy Bentham first noted the term taking ‘root in the language’ of ‘reviews and newspapers’.^[48] By the inter-war years, these media were undergoing rapid change. The Melbourne Herald borrowed the promise to ‘put a girdle round the earth’ in the rapid transmission of international reporting, conveyed in headlines, wireless communication, picture-grams and frequent editions. Radio, in particular, began making an even more direct appeal, bringing a world of voice and sound into the informal spaces of the home. In 1933, on one of his overseas trips, Watt sought particularly to build connections with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He brought back a report on the power of broadcasting to evoke familiarity over distance that noted, by way of illustration, the impact ‘for Australian listeners [when] the first broadcast of an English nightingale seemed to bring them nearer home’.^[49] He also brought back an enthusiasm for organising ‘listening groups’: small collections of interested people who would gather round a radio to listen to a program and then, perhaps with guidance from materials provided, discuss their views.

The League of Nations itself was astutely aware of, and partly a product of, such potentialities in the flow of information. Any interested person, as Watt reminded readers and listeners, could receive the league’s ‘Radio Nations’. The league’s engagement with new media was, however, guarded. Responding to the growth of cinema, the British LNU was prepared to name Charlie Chaplin as Foreign Ambassador to the World in 1925, but argued more generally that it was ill-advised ‘to deliberately misrepresent Western culture’ by providing through most of the film that was available to people beyond the West ‘a succession of facile peeps at the frothy sides of life, and so stir up racial animosity and antagonism’. The league’s 1937 convention on broadcasting required nations to ‘stop without delay…any transmission which is detrimental to good international understanding’—a policy readily adopted by governments keen to minimise discussion of fascism.^[50]

Less cautiously, Watt embraced radio with an almost Wellsian mission of ‘world education’ through a cultivated persona fastidiously searching through ‘the cables’ while imaginatively engaged by the material covered. A 1935 talk for nine–twelve year olds began: ‘I want to draw a picture for you. Will you close your eyes? Let’s imagine Geneva.’ A 2GB broadcast on 27 September 1937 began (as the script has it):

Such a presentation would usually end with an appeal for the listener to think about the issue: why did they feel about it as they did? Without the ‘oracle’ status of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘Watchman’, Watt was discursive rather than opinionated.^[52] If not offering the professionalised analysis Macmahon Ball called for in 1938, when lamenting the quality of information Australians received about international developments (there was ‘plenty of spot news’, but ‘no serious attempt to weave the spots into an intelligible pattern’),^[53] Watt sought to bring significance to the ‘facts’ he accumulated. In this, he insisted, expertise was no solution in itself—particularly given the propensity of ABC programmers to be ‘half-mesmerised by [academics’] show of learning’ rather than exploring more flexible ways of generating interest.^[54]

There was evidence that some officials in government regarded the league and the LNU as pacifist or dangerously left wing (as evident in attempts in 1938 to terminate Constance Duncan’s talks on international affairs on ABC women’s sessions, and to insist that she not speak as a representative of the union).^[55] Watt, however, secured undoubted and enduring popularity. By 1941, engaged by the Commonwealth Department of Information, he could confidently adopt a highly personalised appeal. Prompting listeners to recall him as a delegate to league assemblies, he prepared scripts to be read with a colleague, Arthur Moorhead, in which he played an over-eager aficionado to Moorhead’s world-weariness. One broadcast began:

So the exchange developed, outlining the contribution Winant might make as a former director of the ILO with a keen interest in social security, and effectively positioning the international as a field of interest somewhere between the figures of Watt and Moorhead, both seeking a point of access to a rapidly changing world.^[56]

These changing modes of sociability and communication reveal some of the ways in which the world as an object of interest was made accessible in the inter-war years. It is easy to dismiss them as mannered, and of a piece with the ‘failure’ of the league to prevent the return of world war. Perhaps, however—following Stuart Macintrye—it is more rewarding to see them as ‘negotiating a transition’. Before this point, the international was either a social movement or a field defined by roles allocated in a strict social and political hierarchy, often those of ‘empire’. Soon it would, under pressure of World War II and then the Cold War, become increasingly compartmentalised into credentialled practice on the one hand and, on the other, a public discourse attuned not so much to the ‘morality’ of abstract principles (‘Peace’, ‘Goodwill’, ‘Humanity’, as they might be acted out in a pageant) but to the ‘moralism’ of positions taken in the name of ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’.^[57] Watt was a product of this transition and would himself experience the changes it wrought.

World events in the late 1930s scarcely favoured support for the league. Continuing to search for ways of raising the LNU’s profile, Watt led moves to associate it with assistance to Chinese and European refugees, including through the foundation of the Refugees Emergency Council of New South Wales in 1938. In this, the union joined a new diversity of organisations that sought to represent specific cultural and religious affiliations, including the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, the German Emergency Fellowship Committee and the Continental Catholic Migrants Welfare Society. Despite deepening uncertainty among LNU leaders as to whether their mission should be advising government or acting as the ‘conscience of the community’, Watt hoped to formalise a state-sponsored role for the union in actively leading and assisting resettlement.^[58] While he continued to broadcast on the topic—even prompting one listener to offer a portion of his farm in Tumbarumba to the league, if only for the resettlement of ‘the peasant type’^[59] —the refugee issue itself indicated ways in which the modes of the international were changing. World government was becoming international management, supporting the victimised and persecuted populations of brutal nations and seeking to strengthen and unify others.^[60]

With the outbreak of World War II, Watt was restless. Union membership was declining: ‘weakest in churches, strongest in schools’. By 1946, it stood at 406 in New South Wales.^[61] Older patterns of sociability were difficult to sustain in a fully mobilised society, and international relations resolutely became matters of states. ‘Information’ itself assumed a new character. In 1940, Watt was one of ‘the carefully selected people in key positions in the community’ who received a regular bulletin from the Lord Mayor’s Committee for Civil Morale, providing talking points to use in conversation, speeches, for publication, ‘whenever you can help to inform or inspire’—including statistics on bomb and submarine construction, rationing schedules and the supply of petrol and rubber.^[62] Taking leave from the league that year, Watt contested the federal Sydney seat of Martin for the Australian Labor Party; his publicity featured a fulsome endorsement from Dr H. V. Evatt: ‘[I]n the world of international movements, Raymond Watt has rendered magnificent service in the cause of Labour and Humanity.’ He lost but reduced the sitting member’s majority from 7000 to 139.^[63]

By 1941, Watt was himself mobilised into the short-wave radio division of the Department of Information. In 1942, he moved to a publicity unit established in the Department of War Organisation and Industry, where he drafted lectures and speeches on the necessity of restraint, ‘preparing the public mind’ for regulation and developing extensive contacts with fellow journalists. Watt had, so the unit’s assistant director Creighton Burns allowed, a real challenge: Sydney was judged to be deeply hedonistic and anarchic, and ‘clearly the most difficult [city]…in the Commonwealth…to persuade’ to comply with sacrifice in the name of victory.^[64] Even with this allowance, Watt was less effective in exerting restraint on the press than he had been as a publicist. After losing preselection for Martin in 1943, in 1945, he was placed in charge of the war department’s Civilian Requirements Section, overseeing the allocation of resources to toy production. There was no lapse in his association with the league. He continued as national secretary of the LNU and in 1943 became vice-president of the NSW branch. Numbers in his WEA classes on international affairs continued to be rivalled only by those in psychology. Even in the WEA, however, it was clear that a more academic caste was defining the syllabus. Among the tutors listed in New South Wales, only Watt and those taking ‘child study’ now had no university qualifications.

In an executive meeting on 10 July 1945, the union agreed to support the new United Nations Organisation, effectively acknowledging the end and failure of the League of Nations. Three weeks later, the LNU became the United Nations Association of Australia (UNAA). Watt was confirmed as president of its NSW branch and elected to the national executive. It was soon clear, however, that more than a name change was anticipated. A federal organiser was appointed to assist with the revival of the cause. In rebuilding membership and visibility, stockbroker R. P. Greenish advocated a shift in activities from public meetings and lunch or evening lectures to the screening of films in suburban halls on Sunday evenings, followed by discussion led by ‘outstanding people’. The UNAA should, Greenish advised, develop its own film unit, staffed by ‘experienced people, preferably ex-servicemen with [the] latest knowledge of 16mm films’, who would exhibit documentaries on ‘agriculture, public health, industry’ and so on, perhaps prefaced by a cartoon ‘thrown in for entertainment value’ as part of an ‘essentially democratic people’s program’.^[65] Older devotees of the LNU, such as Mildred Muscio—a feminist whose networks spanned the National Council of Women and the Racial Hygiene Association—complained to Watt that she was uncertain whether the new federal organiser was to be ‘servant or master’.^[66] Clearly, however, a new direction was set. ‘Face-to-face’ fellowship, the talk or address interspersed with recitation or song, was to be replaced with an ‘educative’ process, seeking to heighten, as Greenish put it, ‘the international exchange of knowledge, skills and the arts’.^[67]

In March 1947, Greenish became national secretary of the UNAA; R. J. F. Boyer, recently appointed chairman of the ABC, had already been elected to succeed Watt as NSW president. Establishing ‘standing committees’ on human rights (canvassing the ‘happy assimilation’ of Aboriginal Australians) and the status of women (dealing with equal pay), the UNAA moved away from the normative, empirical, social engineering cast of the league—Watt’s emphasis on ‘regulation by consent’—to a mode more attuned to the universalism of rights proclaimed by the United Nations.^[68] ‘The UN Story’ and ‘UN Specialists Talk to You’ replaced Watt’s radio talks. ‘UN Science Magazines’ were screened in venues organised in association with Rotary and church clubs.^[69] The valiancy of the international began shifting from standards whose basis lay in political economy to values to be upheld in the application of expertise and the pursuit of ‘democracy’.^[70] No doubt this latter language seems more familiar to us now, more pragmatic if not more credible, but it is worth pausing to consider what was lost as well as gained in this rapid transition in modes and authority.^[71]