In April 2024, the Library had the opportunity to host tours of the Curtin family home in Cottesloe, Western Australia, over two days as part of the 2024 Australian Heritage Festival. John Curtin (1885-1945) and his wife Elsie Curtin had the house built in 1923 and it remained in the family until 1998. The modest Californian bungalow shows the simple lifestyle of a respected prime minister who led Australia during the second world war and is often ranked as Australia’s greatest prime minister. The house is now managed by the National Trust of Western Australia and is usually available for booking as short-stay accommodation.
Fifty people attended over the two days to learn more about John and Elsie Curtin and their life in Cottesloe—our oldest participant was 90 years-old and could remember the years of Curtin’s prime ministership, whilst our youngest was aged six. Curtin University Library staff members Sally Laming, Coordinator, Library Special Collections and Nathan Hobby, Special Collections Librarian/Archivist, assisted by Peter Wang, Librarian and Natalie Woolaston, Library Technician, spoke of the lives lived by the Curtins in the house and the evolution of the house itself.
John Curtin gained some office space in the 1930s when the family extended the lounge room by filling in the verandah. We placed a typewriter in this spot, along with a replica of the letter he typed one Sunday evening in 1935 to Professor Robert Cameron, whom he had just finished listening to on the radio. Curtin wrote, ‘‘the University … has its barnacles, true, but it also has its men of rare courage and rich insight who go on doing what they believe is right in scorn of consequence. And the Perth University is foremost in this, I do most firmly believe.” On 28 January 1942, seven years later, Curtin made a radio broadcast as prime minister from the same room at a critical moment in the Battle for Australia. The Westralian Worker reported, “Mr. Curtin recalled that in the room from which he was speaking he had written many articles and prepared many speeches calling upon the workers to stand together. He now asked them to stand together with all their fellow Australians against a foe that thunders at the doors of their homes and seeks forcibly to enter as a ruler.”
The tour also highlighted Elsie Curtin’s steadying influence in Curtin’s life, managing the household, fielding phone calls and visitors, taking a leading role in Labor women’s groups, and becoming the face of austerity campaigns during the war.
When tour groups reached the dining room, they were shown three of the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library’s collection treasures – a silver cigarette box presented to John Curtin by his colleagues at the Westralian Worker when he was first elected to parliament in 1928; Elsie’s score of Handel’s Messiah, with the dates of her choral performances through the 1910s and 1920s in Tasmania, South Africa, and Perth; and one of Curtin’s cutthroat razors. We also had original issues of the broadsheet West Australian from 1941 and 1942 for participants to browse.
One participant commented, “It makes the history come alive when you can immerse yourself in the very place where history was made.” Another told us, “What a lovely, gentle, thoughtful exploration of Curtin’s home and home life. I’d definitely go again!”
We are grateful to the National Trust of Western Australia for giving us the opportunity and plan to offer further tours in the future.
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Written by Nathan Hobby, Special Collections Librarian/Archivist
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