Sir Robert Menzies was busy.
So, when the Australian portrait artist William Dargie came to Canberra to paint Australia’s longest-serving prime minister in 1963, Menzies asked his close friend and confidant Alf Stafford to sit in for him.
Stafford, a Gamilaroi and Darug man from New South Wales, donned the elaborate green robes and heavy medallion of the Most Noble Order of the Thistle that the Queen had conferred on Menzies in 1963, substituting himself for the prime minister so that eight-time Archibald prize winner Dargie could begin the painting.
Stafford worked for 11 Australian prime ministers from Joseph Lyons to Gough Whitlam, first as a driver and later as a cabinet officer and personal assistant.
So close was he to Menzies that the then prime minister and his wife, Pattie, invited Stafford and two of his three children to live periodically at The Lodge after the death of his first wife Edith in 1954.
Stafford later married Heather Nesbitt, the Menzies’ Lodge housekeeper.
The story of Stafford’s life, little known to those outside his proud family, has come to light through a collection of documents, photographs and ephemera that his granddaughter, Michelle Flynn, last year donated to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
The collection – including Stafford family genealogy that incorporates convict settlers – is testimony to a strong Indigenous presence, unacknowledged and unrecognised until late last year, at the centre of Australian government through a significant period of the 20th century.
In that sense the painting by Dargie, in which Stafford sat in for Menzies, is something of a metaphor: the Indigenous life, all too often overlooked, that beats at the heart of true national identity. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not recognised as citizens until 1967.
In a series of Canberra community radio interviews late in his long life, Stafford talked about his experiences with Menzies and the other prime ministers with whom he’d worked.
Of ringing-in for Menzies for a portrait by Dargie – who did four paintings of the prime minister, he said: “I stood in for Sir Robert when William Dargie did his painting ... of his, his Order of the Thistle. And ... Dargie painted the thing (medallion) around my chest ... And I sat there for a couple of hours because he (Menzies) was so busy he couldn’t make it so he made me do it, which I enjoyed – it was quite interesting. He painted in the face later.”
Stafford’s daughter Diana Griffithssaid: “Sir Robert Menzies was a lot taller and a lot bigger than my dad. But they were both stout men and so you know the robes fitted on Dad very nicely.”
Dargie twice painted Menzies in his Order of the Thistle, the last time during 1963 and 1964, on commission from the London-based Clothworkers Company where the painting still hangs. Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966.
Stafford was a keen sportsman and a talented cricketer, who opened batting for Sydney club St George in the 1920s, when another young Australian, Donald Bradman, was No3.
“I was an opening batsman and my boys, when they were about eight or 10, they reckoned I must’ve been better than Bradman because I went in before him,” Stafford recalled.
Born one of 12 children to Aboriginal parents in Binnaway in 1906, Stafford was discharged from the army on medical grounds in 1929 (incidentally, three of his brothers served as light horsemen in – and returned from – the first world war at a time when Indigenous Australians were not permitted to join up; another served in the second world war). After arriving in Canberra in 1930, he opened the new capital’s first billiard hall (where he entertained and played future Australian and world champion Horace Lindrum) before becoming a government driver in 1937.
Over 35 years he drove countless politicians, among them opposition leaders and 11 prime ministers including Joseph Lyons, Earle Page, Arthur Fadden, John Curtin, Francis Forde, Billy Hughes, Arthur Calwell, Ben Chifley, Menzies (during two stints as PM), Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton, Billy McMahon and Gough Whitlam.
When he retired after working briefly for Whitlam in 1972, the Labor prime minister gave Stafford as a farewell gift the black Homburg hat that had belonged to Australia’s eighth prime minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Stafford later donated the hat to a charity auction.
As a driver, and later as cabinet officer, Stafford was the ultimate government insider. He was discreet, however, and spoke nothing publicly of his work until his retirement. Even then he waited until his later years to do so.
In an interview he recounted driving the then-Labor federal information minister, Arthur Calwell, through central west New South Wales on a freezing night in August 1944 when, unknown to either 1,100 Japanese prisoners of war had escaped from a prison in nearby Cowra. Four Australian soldiers and 231 Japanese died in the breakout.
“We were pulled up by a military convoy ... they asked us if we saw any Japs on the road and we said, ‘no’ and of course we didn’t know what was going on. Just after that there was six little Japs walked down the road just behind us. I dare say if they’d wanted the car they could’ve knocked us off pretty easily,” he said.
“Arthur Calwell then got out of the car – it was the middle of June ... freezing ... and he went up on the hill and it was just like a miniature war really, there was machine guns going and searchlights all around. And I had a good look at them and there was Japanese who’d hung themselves in trees with fencing wire and that sort of thing, others had knives and forks through their chests – they’d stabbed themselves in the heart...
“By accident we were there in the middle of it. I must say that Calwell did a mighty job. He got on the phone and got through to the papers in Sydney and asked them not to print anything on the show because we had prisoners of war in Japan.”
Billy Hughes (who changed parties five times during a long political career), Stafford described as “a funny old character”.
“Menzies really was one of the greatest gentlemen I’ve ever met. And also Chifley was a grand man. And Curtin. They were outstanding prime ministers,” he said.
He became Menzies’ permanent driver during his second stint as prime minister in 1949. A year later, Stafford’s wife Edith was diagnosed with cancer.
“And Menzies then appointed me to the prime minister’s department and they made me cabinet officer so I didn’t have to go away so I could stay home and look after my wife and family ... it was very good of him to do that because I was home all the time and I could look after my wife ... I had a wonderful personal relationship with Sir Robert and Dame Pattie.”
Stafford’s granddaughter Michelle Flynn said her grandfather had always privately, proudly, told his grandchildren about his Indigenous heritage, with which she continues to strongly identify.
“Grandpa always told us about our aboriginality. But I became more interested not long before he died (in 1996) and since then I have traced the family’s genealogical history. When he died I received all of his papers which made it much easier to piece it all together,” she says.
Of the Robert and Pattie Menzies, she says: “They were very kind to him, especially when his wife, my grandmother became sick. And he did spend quite a bit of time living in The Lodge with my mum and his youngest son. As the cabinet officer he was making tea for the ministers and pouring drinks after the meetings – so I actually wished I’d asked him a lot more questions before he died. But I’ve had to rely on his scrapbooks and letters and also my mum and her brother.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Alf Stafford was instrumental in the selection of the first Prime Minister’s XI team (and all that followed while Menzies was in The Lodge) to play at Manuka oval in 1951. Stafford personally faced the first ever ball bowled at the PM’s XI match venue, Manuka Oval, in April 1934, and he captained the Australian Capital Territory shield team.
He was honoured as an MBE in the Queen’s 1972 birthday honours list.
The Stafford archive includes correspondence with several prime ministers and other leading political and sporting figures.
It illustrates what became a lifelong friendship with Menzies.
In October 1974 the ageing, increasingly frail Menzies wrote to his old confidant: “I think we saw the best times, both in cricket and politics and living. Everything seems in turmoil at present and the cricketers even seem to be ordinary run of the mill, without any spark in them.
“I trust you and your wife are well. You may have heard that I am unable to go far from home these days. My legs are letting me down. My wife is as spry as ever ... We often think of you both, and the days in Canberra.”
