It was mid-morning on March 5, 1954, in Robert Menzies’ Australia, and a group of tourists was being led along the highly polished floors of the King’s Hall in Parliament House, Canberra. The dark-toned paintings of parliamentary speakers and prime ministers gazed down upon them, proof of the solidity and seriousness of Australia’s democracy. But this morning, something was wrong.
Even Heather Henderson, Menzies’ surviving daughter, now 94, recalls little about the incident. “I knew the painting was damaged, but I don’t know anything about it,” she tellsthat the portrait of the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. R. G. Menzies, which was hanging in the King’s Hall, was discovered this morning to be rather badly mutilated,” wrote Walter Emerton, the acting secretary of the joint house department, on March 5.
The Museum of Australian Democracy’s Kate Armstrong, next to Ivor Hele’s 1954 replacement portrait of Menzies.Kate Armstrong is manager of interpretation and content development at the Museum of Australian Democracy – the Old Parliament House scene of the portrait-slashing crime, which is now home to the museum, its halls and chambers preserved for posterity.
In 1954, Parliament House was an important tourism icon for the fledgling city of Canberra. “It didn’t open until 1927,” Armstrong says, “but from 1925 people would literally come and have their photos taken in front of the building site because it was so extraordinary and it was in the middle of a sheep paddock.” The King’s Hall was the hub of the elegant building, the room overseen by a statue of King George V.
Police would interview 11 witnesses, including six parliamentary attendants, two night watchmen, two cleaners and a mail office staffer. None had seen anything untoward. However, in the course of inquiries it emerged that one attendant, Leslie James Colquhoun, had been seen in the vicinity of the King’s Hall at about 4.45pm on March 4, and that he “appeared to be under the influence of liquor”.
Frank McKenna consulted the Vaucluse-based Douglas Pratt of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, the body which guided the Historic Memorials Committee on the commissioning of artists to paint official portraits. Pratt, a well-known landscape painter in his own right, advised that the painting would be difficult to restore. Even if it was done well, he said, “I feel that this portrait would gain notoriety as the one which was mutilated, and I think a feature like that is undesirable.
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