Ben Wilkie: ‘A Scottish Chauvinist’ The Scots Influence on Robert Menzies’s Worldview

This week on Afternoon Light Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer is joined by Dr Ben Wilkie to discuss Sir Robert Menzies’s Scottish influences.

While Menzies is often derided for being ‘British to the bootstraps’, there was a distinctively Scottish identity that was vitally important within his broader ‘Britishness’. Menzies was an admirer of Robert Burns, and celebrated Burns Night with a quasi-religious devotion. He was heavily involved in Scottish associations, including the Melbourne Scots and the Royal Caledonian Society of Melbourne. Notably Menzies was the only Australian ever knighted in the ‘Order of the Thistle’, an order of chivalry that was founded in 1687 by King James VII of Scotland. A Scots perspective underpinned Menzies’s love of education, and informed his liberalism based on a Presbyterian understanding of the importance of moral independence.

Dr Ben Wilkie is a historian and an Honorary Associate in La Trobe University's Centre for the Study of the Inland. He is the author of The Scots in Australia, 1788-1938 (Boydell Press 2017) and Gariwerd: An Environmental History of the Grampians (CSIRO Publishing 2020), which won the Local History Small Publication Award in the 2020 Victorian Community History Awards.