The Snub: Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club

Bart Ziino’s scholarship illuminated some of the complex reasons behind thousands of Australian men’s failure to enlist for military service in the First World War. This article explores the corresponding complexity of the establishment’s response to non-enlistment. It focuses on the case of the barrister and politician Robert Menzies and the Melbourne Club, to investigate how elite gentlemen’s clubs used the concept of ‘fitness for membership’ to punish young, able-bodied non-enlistees by excluding and/or publicly criticising them. It shows that clubs’ treatment of such cases was inconsistent and internally contested, and argues that the apparently honourable discourse of loyalty that was such a fixture of elite groups in the 1920s and 1930s often masked arcane, less honourable agendas. It suggests that the establishment was more likely to punish men like Menzies who had offended doubly: not only by failing to enlist, but also by directly challenging establishment values and power.