‘Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.’ With a formula of words resembling a telegram announcing a death to the next of kin, Prime Minister Menzies announced the advent of war to Australia. Many listeners shared Menzies’ spiritlessness. Most elements of Australian political life had supported appeasement. Lyons hailed the Munich agreement, and had even sought to claim some personal credit for it. John Curtin, as Opposition Leader, congratulated Lyons on his stance. Highly contrary hues in the Australian ideological kaleidoscope concurred on the merit of appeasement, including Eggleston, The Bulletin, and the Catholic hierarchy.^[3]

In sympathy with this outlook, Giblin shared the widespread disquiet about any policy that increased, rather than reduced, the probability of war. Giblin believed, with Copland and many others, that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust and inexpedient, and any war for the treaty would be unjust and inexpedient.^[4]

On 16 April 1937, Giblin, Copland and four other members of the University of Melbourne, issued a manifesto: Australia’s policy – peace or war. It was effectively addressed to Lyons:

Prominent ‘steps’ the Empire should take included reducing trade preference and a stricter internationalisation of League of Nations mandates. ‘Both of these offers would be contingent upon fascist countries coming back into the League, and supporting collective security’.^[5] This was the standard Chamberlain outlook, and in hindsight seems hopelessly thin.

With the advent of the Munich agreement of 1938, Giblin’s position diverged from that of both appeasers and anti-appeasers. His key judgement was that Germany was strong and Britain was weak. And because of this strength, a war of any kind with Hitler would be ‘madness’.^[6] And because of this strength, German domination of the European continent was unstoppable – war or no. Giblin suggested that the most rational course of conduct for Britain was to ‘cease to be a European power’, and ‘play for an American alliance to keep freedom of the seas’. Such a withdrawal to the Channel would constitute an equilibrium: ‘an armed peace for a generation or so, which would give time for reason to be born again in Central Europe, with help perhaps by cautious and indirect evangelisation from the outside’ (UMA LFG 24 October 1938). Giblin, therefore, was putting his hopes in a cold war: an Anglo-American alliance that would withstand a continental menace, but with fascism rather than communism as the adversary, and with the Channel rather than the Elbe as the frontier. Europe’s ultimate salvation would rest on a slow ideological conversion (‘evangelisation’).

Unlike the Munich signatories, no part of Giblin’s analysis assumed the orderly conduct of Hitler. Giblin did not believe that Hitler had been cajoled, however reluctantly, into concert with other European ‘great powers’. Hitler’s letter of 28 September 1938, Giblin remarked, ‘takes the mask off too completely’. It was ‘seething with scarcely concealed contempt’. Did Chamberlain ‘really think that in a year – or 18 months – England will be in a position to call the tune?’ Thus both Giblin and the anti-appeasers agreed that Hitler would use his power just as he pleased. But their analyses drew different inferences. The necessity of war was inferred by Churchill’s analysis, and the necessity of avoiding war by Giblin’s. Churchill’s policy was the nobler. In the upshot, it was also more expedient. Yet that expedience turned upon the totally unexpected collapse of the Western Front in 1940, and the consequent avoidance of the ‘years of attrition’ upon which Giblin premised his argument. Giblin had been tripped up by being insufficiently pessimistic about British inferiority. The calculus of events had proved inscrutable, even to that subtle reader of wind-scattered leaves.