Stephen Wilks review of Lyndon Megarrity, Rex Patterson: A Voice for the North

(Redland Bay: Connor Court Publishing, 2024), 90 pp., PB $19.95, ISBN 9781922815972

Rex Alan Patterson (1927–2016) was a stalwart advocate of that most recurrent of Australian dreams—realising national prosperity and even greatness by developing the forbidding far north of this vast continent.

Harnessing the north, an ill-defined area stretching roughly from the Pilbara to Rockhampton, is related to two other persistent themes in the history of Australian public policy: faith in the power of large-scale government intervention to spark sustained economic development, and an often-related resentment that too much public money was being spent on projects in the big cities. Your reviewer often muses that the foremost divide in Australian society is that between, on the one hand, the two great metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne, and, on the other, the rest of the country.

Readers will not be surprised to hear that Patterson was assertively a Queenslander, a proud origin he shares with Lyndon Megarrity, author of this short biography. Hailing from Bundaberg, like so many of his compatriots Patterson went south and then abroad to build a career. Armed with degrees from the universities of Queensland and Illinois, he rose to the senior ranks of the Commonwealth Government’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) and became the first head of the Northern Division of the Department of National Development.

Patterson’s greatest practical role in developing the north arose during his time as a public servant. He led BAE research that influenced the Menzies government’s funding in 1961 of the beef roads scheme across Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, which, incidentally, impressed the deputy leader of the Opposition, Gough Whitlam, as a fine example of using tied Commonwealth grants under section 96 of the constitution to implement a national policy. But the government subsequently seemed to lose interest in the north, and Northern Division’s further investigation of roads and ports fell foul of Treasury scepticism and reluctance to further impose section 96 on the states.

By 1965, Paterson was decidedly disgruntled. He discreetly contacted Whitlam to offer himself as a candidate for the federal seat of Dawson, a typically huge Queensland electorate that stretched across that state’s indistinct central–north divide. His unexpected victory at a by-election the following year made him one of the first Whitlam babies, those well-educated talents drawn to politics by the great man’s promise of a more enlightened Australia. Patterson’s career culminated in service under Whitlam as minister in the portfolios of northern development, the Northern Territory, northern Australia (does one detect a theme here?) and, fleetingly, agriculture.

The Dawson by-election became Patterson’s main claim to fame among political historians, but with the twist that this is mainly for how such a demonstration of Whitlam’s campaigning skills saved the deputy leader from a looming threat of expulsion from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on grounds of disloyalty. As Megarrity rightly reminds us, this disregards local party organisers, not to mention Patterson’s strong reputation as a fighter for the north. Also of interest is that Patterson was initially slated to lead the 1971 ALP delegation to China, only to be usurped by Whitlam and relegated to being a lesser delegation member.

Whitlam in his 1972 election policy speech promised to create a Ministry of Northern Development, where ‘Australians face the greatest challenge to retain the ownership of the nation’s resources, and to base new industries on those resources’. His standing as a northern development enthusiast did not last for long after he came to power. Patterson was corralled in the largely nominal northern development portfolio, responsible for little beyond the sugar industry. Even his major role when minister for the Northern Territory in helping lead the response to Cyclone Tracy’s devastation of Darwin was overshadowed. Nor do many recall Patterson’s efforts to pave a way towards self-government for the Northern Territory. Reputationally, he sits in the ruck of Whitlam-era figures, a seeming outlier amid the great ambitions that others held for social and foreign policy.

Megarrity attributes the fall in interest in northern development to challenges within Patterson’s party from urban-based and economically rationalist members of parliament. As early as the 1971 ALP Federal Conference, Bill Haydon described agricultural subsidies as collectively reminiscent of ‘a madman in charge of a counterfeit press’ (p. 40). Your reviewer notices that Peter Walsh expressed amazement in his memoirs that Patterson, as a BAE economist, defended the Ord River Scheme. In office, Patterson was a frustrated gadfly, with Minister for Minerals and Energy Rex Connor having far more effective say about the north. Lacking Connor’s political oomph, he was unable to resist the imposition of price controls on mineral exports that removed Queensland’s competitive advantage over New South Wales in coal exports.

Patterson broke with party solidarity when he criticised his own government in the wake of the ALP’s massive defeat at the 1974 Queensland state election. Megarrity’s book shines some northern light on Whitlam’s penchant for enthusiasms, and how readily these could shift. In this case, it was to his political cost, for not only was Patterson defeated in Dawson at the election of 1975, but Labor lost all but one of its House of Representatives seats in Queensland.

This biography is the twenty-second addition to the Australian Biographical Monographs series published by Connor Court and edited by Scott Prasser, which has the stated aim of countering ‘distorted views of some of Australia’s leading historical figures who deserve to be remembered [and] better understood’ (p. 7). The series works particularly well when introducing us to denizens of the second or third tiers of public life who stood for much, only to be overshadowed in the public mind by prime ministers, premiers and suchlike top dogs. In other words, individuals like Patterson.

What are the inherent virtues of such brief lives? This fine little book packs in a potted postwar history of the entire north of the continent, and its brevity helps to highlight the significance of its subject. It is certainly snappier than the author’s worthy biography of another Queensland developmentalist, Premier Robert Philp, and builds on his 2018 Northern Dreams: The Politics of Northern Development in Australia. Like the north itself, it is more sturdy than stylish, succinctly challenging the Whitlamisation of ALP history. It is not, however, recommended for readers who dislike books that incorporate long quotes.

Megarrity ends with a plea for the need for people like Patterson who ‘fight for regional concerns to be heard and acted upon by the city-based MPs who dominate Australian political culture’ (p. 75). We get a strong sense of how distance fuels resentments and rivalries across the nation, affirming that it is too big to be effectively governed from any one centre. How different the Australian nation looks from such an unapologetically northern perspective, especially to your reviewer who grew up in Melbourne’s south-east, viewing the inner northern suburbs of Brunswick and Coburg as forbiddingly remote!

To Megarrity, Patterson is no mere dreamer but a torchbearer for a just cause, a view evident in the anger that surfaces repeatedly even in such a short work. A near polemical tone is evident in declaring his book to be ‘a celebration and commemoration of a great Voice for the North’ (p. 14). Currently, he is one of our few historians of development policy, and the foremost authority on the development of the continent’s north. He fulfils these roles with skill, and in this little work plays to the strengths of short biography.