Romola Millicent Morrow (b.1953), Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck (detail), 1978, Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection. View full image
Governor-General, 30 April 1969 to 11 July 1974
Paul Hasluck (1905-1993) became Governor-General after a distinguished career as a journalist, academic, diplomat, and politician.1 Kim Beazley Sr praised him as a ‘rare politician who can genuinely be called a statesman’, while his biographer Geoffrey Bolton commended him as a ‘first-class historian’.2
Fremantle-born, Hasluck joined the West Australian in 1922 as a cadet. A founding member of the WA Historical Society, he studied and later taught history at the University of WA. In 1932, he married author and historian Alexandra Darker and they had two sons.3
A member of the Australian Aborigines’ Amelioration Association,4 he joined the Moseley Royal Commission inquiring into the conditions of WA’s Indigenous population5 before writing his thesis on ‘Australian Native Policy’.6 Hasluck entered the Department of External Affairs in 1941, later becoming counsellor-in-charge of Australia’s mission to the UN. Returning to the UWA in 1947, he was commissioned to write an official history of Australia in World War II.7
Hasluck entered federal Parliament in 1949 as the Liberal member for Curtin. He held this seat for almost two decades, the vast majority as a government minister. Energetic and meticulous, as Minister for Territories (1951-63) Hasluck helped coordinate Papua and New Guinea’s transition to self-government. He served as Minister for Defence (1963-64) and External Affairs (1964-69) during a critical period in the Asia–Pacific with the emergence of the Malaysian republic and Australia’s growing involvement in Vietnam. Following Prime Minister Harold Holt’s disappearance and presumed death in 1967, he stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the parliamentary Liberal Party.
Hasluck retired from Parliament in 1969 having been offered the position of Governor-General by Prime Minister John Gorton. He served through the Gorton, McMahon and Whitlam governments maintaining good relations with all. In 1972, having sworn in the two-member Whitlam Cabinet, Hasluck signed executive orders which reversed his own enacted policies with ‘perfect constitutional impartiality’.8 Earlier that year he delivered an influential oration outlining the Governor-General’s duties and responsibilities.9
In 1974, Hasluck agreed to Whitlam’s request for a double dissolution, only the third since Federation. Opening the subsequent Parliament was to be his final act as Governor-General, as family circumstances led him to decline Whitlam’s offer of an extended term. In retirement, the Haslucks returned to Perth and together published numerous historical works. In 1979, he was appointed a KG. Hasluck died on 9 January 1993, at 87 years of age and received a state funeral at St George’s Cathedral, Perth.10
Romola Millicent Morrow
Perth-born painter and medical artist Romola Morrow (b.1935) (née Clifton, later Templeman) attended St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls before moving to London in 1953 to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. Returning to Perth in 1955, she studied medical illustration at UWA. In 1959, while working as a medical artist, she held her first solo exhibition of watercolours at the Skinner Galleries in Perth. The following year, Morrow established herself as a fulltime artist, winning the Helena Rubinstein Portrait Prize. She returned to Europe on a study tour and continued to exhibit regularly in Perth, Sydney and in England throughout the 1960s and 1980s. Morrow also undertook major portrait commissions and won various art awards. After moving to Canberra in 1990 with her husband Ian Templeman, an assistant director of the National Library of Australia, she became director and art consultant of Molonglo Press, her illustrations printed in various publications. Morrow’s work is represented in private and public collections, including those of the Art Gallery of WA, the Parliament of WA collection, the WA Institute of Technology, and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Perth.11
Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck
by Romola Millicent Morrow
1978
Oil on canvas
110 x 90.3 cm
Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection
References
1. Information in this biography has been taken from: B Carroll, Australia’s Governors-General: From Hopetoun to Jeffery, Rosenberg Publishing Pty Ltd, Kenthurst, NSW, 2004; G Bolton, Paul Hasluck: A Life, UWA Publishing, Crawley, WA, 2014; P Hasluck, The Office of Governor-General, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1979; M Allbrook, ‘Hasluck, Sir Paul Meernaa (1905–1993)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2021, accessed May 2021.
2. Bolton, op. cit., pp. 265, 465.
3. AP Hunter, ‘Hasluck, Dame Alexandra Margaret (Alix) (1908– 1993)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2021, accessed 8 June 2021.
4. ‘Care of Aborigines’, The West Australian, 2 November 1932, p. 11, accessed 8 June 2021.
5. Western Australia, ‘Royal Commission Appointed to Investigate, Report and Advise Upon Matters in Relation to the Condition and Treatment of Aborigines’, Report of the Royal Commissioner, Perth, 1935.
6. P Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western Australia, 1829–1897, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1942.
7. Later published as The Government and the People 1939–1941, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1952, and The Government and the People 1941–1945, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1970. Websites accessed 12 October 2021.
8. C Cunneen, ‘A Question of Colour’, in CT Stannage, KEB Saunders and R Nile, eds, Paul Hasluck in Australian History: Civic Personality and Public Life, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998, p. 211.
9. Hasluck, The Office of Governor-General, op. cit.
10. Information in this biography has been taken from: ‘Morrow, Romola (née Clifton)’, A McCulloch, S McCulloch and E McCulloch Childs, eds, The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press, 2006, p. 703; D Erickson, ‘Romola Clifton’, Design & Art Australia Online, 2011; ‘Templeman, Romola (1935–)’, The Australian Women’s Register, University of Melbourne/National Foundation for Australian Women. Websites accessed 24 May 2021.