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.

One of the visitors looked up at the official portrait of Robert Menzies – then presiding in his second stint as prime minister – by Charles Wheeler, a well-known traditionalist painter, who, like his subject, disdained modernism. The painting had been slashed – there was a 38-centimetre rent across Menzies’ upper torso, reaching from his right shoulder to the chair behind him.

The parliamentary attendant hurriedly called the acting secretary of the joint house department of Parliament House, Walter Emerton, who whisked the damaged canvas off to his office. The police were summoned to investigate the act of vandalism, but the culprit was never found.

The small and law-abiding hamlet of Canberra, only 20 years past being a sheep paddock, was shaken by this “disgraceful” act of violence. Seventy years on, however, it has fallen into obscurity, a mostly forgotten part of Menzies’ legacy, unknown to even his biographers.

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Recently, however, the first step was taken to change that, with the repaired painting put temporarily on display at the new Parliament House, accompanied by a small note explaining its history, in a since-closed exhibition. And now, with access to the National Archives of Australia, Good Weekend can reveal the untold story – of the police investigation and the flurried reactions of bureaucrats during one of the most volatile and divisive periods in Australia’s political history.

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 tells Good Weekend.

“I desire to report that 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.

Emerton, who had joined the public service in 1917 at the age of 16, was lauded before his retirement in 1966 as “one of the early pioneers of Canberra and the parliamentary service”. At the time of the portrait-slashing, he was responsible for “the maintenance and operation of all services in the building and the handling of the increasing numbers of visitors” in Parliament. Which is to say, the violation happened on his watch.

It fell to Emerton to inform the prime minister through the correct channels. “As far as I can ascertain, the mutilation was first noticed by one of the visitors being shown through the House at approximately 10.45am,” he wrote to Frank McKenna (“Esq, O.B.E”), the secretary of the Commonwealth Historic Memorials Committee in the prime minister’s department.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported the news the next day. “Attendants … discovered a slash two feet long made with a knife made across a portrait of the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, in King’s Hall, Parliament House. Commonwealth police have been called in to investigate.” McKenna said the slashing was a disgraceful act of vandalism. “These portraits are priceless, and some of them will form the nucleus of a National Gallery in Canberra,” he told the Herald. “It is to be deplored that this should happen to any item of our national collection.”

Years later, Reginald Ernest Kennedy would rise to become commissioner of the ACT Police and deputy commissioner of the Australian Federal Police. He would be decorated with an imperial honour. But when he arrived at Parliament House that morning, about an hour after the discovery of the crime, he was just a 32-year-old senior constable, and still relatively green.

Kennedy met with Emerton and McKenna, and made a thorough examination of the portrait. “The slash extended outside and above the right shoulder across the body to the left side,” the policeman wrote in his report, dated March 12, 1954. “The cut was about 15 inches in length and has cut through the canvas for most of that distance.”

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. Armstrong discovered the story of the damaged portrait in March 2021, when she went looking for notes on a different portrait of Menzies, that one by Ivor Hele, which had been sold to the museum by Menzies’ daughter, Heather Henderson. “I saw a note referring to the fact that this was a portrait that had been painted to replace a slashed portrait, which was just enormously interesting,” she explains. “And that was really the beginning.”

Once she saw the words “replaced” and “slashed” on the museum database, “all my antennae were up and swaying”. Armstrong headed to the national archives to uncover the story, where she discovered a rich cache of documents and correspondence which told the story of the damaged Wheeler portrait.

“It was a classic object-sleuthing exercise, which happens when objects have a mysterious background,” she says. “I knew the Hele portrait had been in the family and was acquired from Heather Henderson. But it was a real surprise to me to learn the history about the slashing.”

In the 1970s, particularly following the Sydney Hilton bombing of 1978, the building’s security was improved. But in the 1950s, it was almost non-existent.

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.” (A perhaps-related fact is that in 1910, the minister for home affairs, King O’Malley, banned the issuing of liquor licences in the ACT. The ban was in place until 1927, and sources of entertainment were scarce.)

The King’s Hall was the hub of the elegant building, the room overseen by a statue of King George V. It was a testament to Australia’s open democracy; the place where public ceremonies and balls were held, and where members of Parliament mingled with journalists and members of the public. When the then prime minister John Curtin died in 1945, while still in office, that’s where he lay in state.

“King’s Hall was like a museum and gallery, with bronze plaques of political leaders on columns, the official portraits of prime ministers, governors-general and presiding officers, a post office and gift shop, and even a glass case with a 1297 edition of the Magna Carta,” says Troy Bramston, author of the 2019 biography, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics.

In the 1970s, particularly following the Sydney Hilton bombing of 1978, the building’s security was improved. But in the 1950s, it was almost non-existent. “You could walk up the polished wooden stairs into King’s Hall, a bustling hive of activity, and bump into politicians, public servants and journalists criss-crossing the parquet floor to get to the chambers, offices, party rooms, dining rooms and library,” says Bramston.

Kennedy’s police report notes the damaged portrait was hung high. The slash in the canvas was more than two metres from the floor, meaning that whoever did the deed would have needed a stepladder or chair to elevate him or her, a detail which suggested some level of premeditation.

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”.

According to Senior Constable Kennedy, Colquhoun was “under the influence” when he went to interview him at his home in the leafy northern suburb of Ainslie. An apparently intoxicated Colquhoun told Kennedy that on March 4, he’d enjoyed some lunchtime beers at his local, the Hotel Ainslie Rex, before moving onto the Hotel Canberra for five or six pre-work middies. He clocked on at 3.30pm and was on duty until about 11pm, but admitted he abandoned his post three times – to go to the bathroom, to duck to the Parliament House post office, and once, intriguingly, “at the request of the Housekeeper’s wife”.

Meanwhile, another suspect had caught Kennedy’s eye. On March 1, members of the plain-clothes branch of the NSW Police had interviewed “one Edward Pazdziora, a Pole, aged 34 and residing at No. 7 Boundary Street, Parramatta”. Pazdziora “appeared to be mental”, the report noted. He had come to the authorities’ attention prior to the portrait-slashing because of the obsessive interest he’d shown in Menzies.

Pazdziora told police that “he was seeking an interview with the Prime Minister with the view to recovering £2000, which he claimed the Prime Minister owed him”. Following that interview, on March 1, two doctors had examined the Polish man, “but they were not prepared to certify him as insane” and police released him.

The portrait was slashed a few days later.

In his report of March 12, Kennedy said that “every endeavour” was being made to locate and interview Pazdziora. Wrapping up his inconclusive report, Senior Constable Kennedy wrote: “it is felt that Edward Pazdziora will be located in the near future”. The Pole was never found, and from then on, Kennedy falls silent in the archival correspondence.

Next, the bureaucrats turned their attention to the important matter of what to do about the portrait – should it be repaired, or replaced altogether?

It is a part of the Menzies legacy that has been mostly forgotten: that the great monarchist, anti-communist and traditionalist, really loved art.

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.”

The matter took on some urgency. In September 1954, the Speaker Archie Cameron, a famously autocratic Liberal MP who had been gassed on the Western Front and was known for his irascible manner, said a picture of Menzies should be hung in Parliament House as he was approaching a record length of service for any Australian prime minister.

In October, the Historic Memorials Committee met and agreed on a course of action. “In view of the fact that the mutilated portrait would always be ‘notorious’ as ‘the portrait that was slashed’, the Board unanimously recommends that another portrait of the Prime Minister be painted,” read the meeting’s minutes.

This time, it was decided that the artist Ivor Hele of Aldinga, South Australia, would be asked to paint two portraits – one for the public, and one for Menzies himself, for his family to keep. Both would be paid for by the taxpayer.

It is a part of the Menzies legacy that has been mostly forgotten: that the great monarchist, anti-communist and traditionalist, really loved art.

Heather Henderson, his 94-year-old daughter, lives in a Canberra house walled with art that her father collected, which was passed down to her. “He had a lot of friends who were artists, and was particularly close to Lionel Lindsay [artist and brother of Norman Lindsay] and Harold Herbert,” she says. “Lionel used to stay at the Lodge, I remember him well.”

Menzies used to attend the salon dinners of James McGregor, a famous wool-broker and art collector who was a long-time trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW. “Jim McGregor used to have dinners with artistic people in Sydney and Dad knew a lot of them in a casual way – as people, not just as artists. They all seemed to get on terribly well.”

Henderson also remembers Ivor Hele coming to the Lodge to paint Menzies’ replacement portraits. “He got along very well with my parents.” On the wall of her Canberra home hangs a framed charcoal sketch of herself that Hele made for her father, also in 1954.

Henderson talks me through her father’s paintings as she moves around her house. “They’re mostly landscapes,” she says. “A couple of Ray Crookes. Will Ashton, Harold Herbert, Lionel Lindsay, and an Ainslie Roberts painting about the Dreamtime stories of the kangaroo.”

According to Troy Bramston, Menzies was a strong personal supporter of the arts, although his government did little to promote Australian culture. “His father was an artist who had his own coach-painting business. Menzies wrote poetry, read widely and had paintings by Arthur Streeton hanging in his prime ministerial office,” he says. “He cherished a painting gifted to him by Winston Churchill.”

“[Menzies] didn’t go for modern art at all. He liked to be able to recognise what he saw.”

But Menzies was less enthusiastic about the modernist influences on Australian art that were creeping in from Europe. Says Henderson: “He didn’t go for modern art at all. He liked to be able to recognise what he saw.”

In 1937, when he was attorney-general, Menzies decided that Australia needed an institution modelled on the British Royal Academy of Art, to act as an “expert body on artistic matters, and to host exhibitions”. He established the Australian Academy of Art to organise yearly exhibitions and for expert opinion on artistic matters. “Menzies thought that whatever they did in England, we should be doing here,” says The Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald.

But efforts to obtain a royal charter for the academy were opposed by the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), founded in 1938 to promote experimental, abstract and unconventional art. This new band of European-influenced modernist and abstract artists objected to what they saw as an attempt by the political establishment to gatekeep the boundaries of art. Norman Lindsay said academies were “stamping grounds for mediocrity”. The Age editorialised on the subject, asking, “Do we want to foster in art circles in Australia a spirit of subserviency toward those in a position to dispense patronage?”

“The modernists saw [the academy] as a throwback to the past,” says McDonald. “It turned art into an official patronage, a thing patronised by royalty, which they rejected. “The Australian Academy was ultimately shut down – it never obtained its coveted royal charter, and hosted its last exhibition in 1947.

There were still plenty of Australian artists who shunned modernism and abstraction. One such man was Charles Wheeler. Born in 1880, he studied under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery schools in Melbourne. Following his service in World War I, Wheeler kicked around Europe for a while, exhibiting some paintings at the Royal Academy in London before returning to Australia, where he established a reputation as a fine painter of nudes, portraits and landscapes.

A member of the Melbourne Savage Club, he won the Archibald in 1933 with a portrait of writer Ambrose Pratt. In 1946, he painted Menzies’ official portrait. The Commonwealth paid him £200 for the job. Wheeler was “the absolute classic Menzies artist”, says McDonald. “He was clubbable, a fellow traditionalist and a man about town. You couldn’t have designed him on a computer to be more suitable to paint Menzies.” Perhaps most importantly, Wheeler was, like his prime ministerial subject, an outspoken opponent of modernism. “He saw modern art as a blight.”

But it seems that, while eschewing innovation in art, Menzies and his advisers were early practitioners of the modern art of image management. In a letter dated March 19, 1954, Historic Memorials Committee secretary Frank McKenna wrote to Commonwealth Art Advisory Board chair, painter Will Ashton, saying he was “quite convinced” that “it would be a much better thing for us to have the Prime Minister portrayed as he is at the present time”.

McKenna said it had been suggested (the record does not show by whom) that Menzies sit for the artist in full evening dress and wearing his “decorations”, but in his view this would be “entirely inappropriate”: he needed to be shown as “a dignified leader of this country”.

As for selecting a new painter, Ivor Hele was one of the “go-to men for portraits” in the 1950s, according to John McDonald. Hele, ever so slightly looser in style than Wheeler, completed the public portrait quickly – it won the Archibald Prize in 1954.

But the modernists had their revenge. The CAS, the same group of artists that had ruined Menzies’ dream for a Royal Academy in Australia, disagreed with the decision made by the Art Gallery of NSW trustees. They awarded their own “rebel” Archibald to a self-portrait by Michael Kmit, a Ukrainian-born painter who had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków before emigrating to Australia as part of the post-war influx of European artists.

Kmit was a member of the famous Sydney Charm School, a fluctuating group of artists who lived at and around the Merioola mansion in Sydney’s Woollahra. The group, which included Russell Drysdale, William Dobell and Donald Friend, “had a bloody marvellous time” according to Friend, “drinking plonk and eating crusts of bread”, as quoted in the 1986 book by Geoffrey Dutton, The Innovators. The mansion was also known as the “Buggery Barn” because many of its denizens were gay. Not Menzies’ type at all.

All these years later, the question remains: who felt such strong antipathy for the revered prime minister that they were moved to desecrate his portrait? Noah Charney is an adjunct professor of art history at the American University of Rome, and the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. He answers this question by drawing a distinction between vandalism and iconoclasm.

“Vandalism is the destruction of an object for no particular symbolic reason, it’s just an act of aggression, and it is random, making it hard to defend against,” he says. “But iconoclasm is very specific. It involves choosing an object because of what it represents.”

There are famous historical examples of iconoclasm – such as the 1906 slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery of London by
suffragette Mary Richardson. She was protesting against the arrest of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst for her activism, and chose the undulating curves of the Velázquez nude’s bottom as the target for her meat-chopper (Richardson objected to the way men gaped at Venus all day long).

In 1974, Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi was defaced in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, the 60-centimetre initials “IRA” scratched into the canvas, probably with a coin. Also in 1974, artist Tony Shafrazi sprayed the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Shafrazi, now a notable New York art dealer and artist, later said that he “wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life”. In May this year, a man posing as a wheelchair-bound woman smeared cake on the glass case covering the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, to protest climate change. He was placed in psychiatric care.

Mental instability has played a part in the destruction of many artworks. Religious artworks in particular tend to have a triggering effect on people – in 1972, a Hungarian man named Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo’s Pièta with a hammer, screaming, “I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead!” (Laszlo was committed to a psychiatric institution before being deported to Australia.) In 1991, a “deranged” man later identified as 47-year-old Piero Cannata attacked Michelangelo’s David with a hammer. Six years later, the work Piss Christ by American artist Andres Serrano was attacked twice while on show at the National Gallery of Victoria. And in 2017, a man “of no fixed abode” drove a screwdriver through Thomas Gainsborough’s The Morning Walk in London’s National Gallery.

Charney says that although such violence is not directed at a living person, it is an extreme act. “There are levels of mental instability that would hold someone back from hurting a human, but not hold them back from hurting an inanimate object,” Charney says. “It’s a redirection, a symbolic version of what you would like to do to the person if you could, or do to their policy.”

Robert Menzies shaped the history of 20th-century Australia like no other, famously enjoying two terms as prime minister – the first from 1939 to 1941, the second from 1949 to 1966. At the time his image was violated, he was at the “height of his authority and relevance” says Stephen Chavura, a senior lecturer in history at Campion College in Sydney and co-author of The Forgotten Menzies.

The year 1954 was a momentous one, punctuated by an election in May, which Menzies won, and helped along by two events in particular. In February, the 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived for a royal tour, the first time a reigning monarch had visited Australia. The visit was immense in scale, wildly popular and logistically diabolical – the couple travelled to 57 towns and cities in 58 days. As PM, Menzies drew great political capital from his strong association with the visit. “Menzies was formal but friendly with the Queen, and revelled in the royal spotlight,” says Troy Bramston.

But a dark shadow lay over the “young” Commonwealth nation, at least as far as its prime minister was concerned: communism. The 1950s were mired in the Cold War and Menzies regarded communists (party membership peaked at about 20,000) as traitors and threats to national security. He was convinced communists had infiltrated the Labor Party and he won the 1949 election against Labor prime minister Ben Chifley on this platform. “A Labor vote is for the socialist objective” was the Liberals’ slogan.

On winning the prime ministership for the second time, in 1950 Menzies promptly passed the Communist Party Dissolution Act, which outlawed and dissolved the Australian Communist Party. When the High Court struck down the legislation as unconstitutional in 1951, he called a referendum to empower federal parliament to make laws in reference to communism. It was defeated, but Menzies’ anti-communist passion remained.

“In the whole of the 1950s, the issue of communism was incredibly politically heated,” Chavura explains. “He used the issue for political leverage in a way the Labor Party wasn’t able to do.”

Then, in April 1954, as the nation came down from the ecstasy of the royal visit, Menzies was delivered a victory in his ideological crusade, when the Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov defected to Australia. He was followed by his wife Evdokia, but not before she was publicly manhandled by Soviet agents on the tarmac at Sydney airport as they attempted to repatriate her.

The Petrov Affair vindicated Menzies’ anti-communist stance, particularly in an era when memories of World War II and fascism were still fresh. Menzies benefited politically. “Menzies had accused Labor and the trade unions of being infiltrated with the ‘red menace’, so the Petrov defections served to underscore these fears,” says Troy Bramston. “[Labor opposition leader Herbert Vere] Evatt was portrayed as soft on communism, or even a supporter of it, when his prime motivation was to defend civil liberties.”

“You don’t stay prime minister for 16 years because you’re not going to politicise things that can be politicised. You would have had a lot of pro-communists who would have despised Menzies.”

After the 1954 election, hearings began for a royal commission into Soviet espionage in Australia. Evatt claimed it was a conspiracy to destroy him and the Labor Party. Says Chavura: “[Menzies] really used the Petrov Affair to make mincemeat of the Labor Party and he did it very, very well. You don’t stay prime minister for 16 years because you’re not going to politicise things that can be politicised. You would have had a lot of pro-communists who would have despised Robert Menzies.”

The political atmosphere was febrile, and Menzies and Evatt loathed each other. Their bitter rivalry had begun before they entered Parliament, when they were both leading barristers. “Menzies got on very well with Labor leaders John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and Arthur Calwell, but despised Evatt,” says Bramston. “There were no private drinks, no lighter moments, no bipartisanship. Evatt could be rude and insulting. Menzies sneered at Evatt. There was no mutual respect. Their debates in Parliament were often bitter. Menzies, with reason, thought Evatt was also going mad.”

Menzies was a trusted and reassuring leader to many Australians, “but for others, he was aloof and arrogant, with a wicked and cutting wit, a stuffy Edwardian from a bygone age who seemed snap-frozen in time,” says Bramston. He was mocked as “Ming the Merciless” and “Pig Iron Bob” and his public speeches were often met with protests. “He revered the royal family, was conservative in style and dress, and a master political manipulator who exploited the divisions within Labor,” says Bramston. “He often aroused strong emotions.”

Kate Armstrong from the Museum of Australian Democracy won’t speculate on who she thinks slashed the Menzies portrait, citing the necessity of objectivity in her role as a historian. But she notes that “in a parliamentary setting, emotions could get quite high” and that there were many people a parliamentarian could be in conflict with. “So if you’re feeling powerless, maybe that’s a way of gaining power. Politicians sometimes annoy members of the public, and nothing has changed there.”

The culprit was never identified, but the nasty business of the portrait-slashing was soon smoothed over. Ivor Hele’s replacement became the official Menzies portrait, and as part of the Historic Memorials Collection, it now hangs in the gallery of official prime ministerial portraits in (the new) Parliament House. The other, smaller Hele portrait stayed in the Menzies family until 2007, when it was sold to the Museum of Australian Democracy by Heather Henderson. It is currently on display there.

Armstrong says the Hele portraits are much more recognisable as Menzies. “They have that pure regard, and more settled and solid look that cut through his later prime ministerial years,” she says. “And I just love the fact that his eyebrows got more wild.”

The slashed Wheeler portrait, depicting a younger, more fresh-faced Menzies, was restored some time between 1954 and 1956 by a Harley Griffiths of Melbourne, who did the repairs so well they were “almost indecipherable”, according to a W.R. Cummings, of the prime minister’s department, in a 1956 note.

Menzies had attended primary school in Ballarat, and in 1956, Cummings wrote to the director of the Ballarat Art Gallery, advising him that Menzies had “graciously suggested” the gallery might appreciate the portrait as a gift from the Commonwealth government. It would, Menzies believed, perhaps serve as a “valuable addition to the fine works of art already in the Gallery”. The Ballarat Art Gallery accepted the patched-up Wheeler painting with “grateful thanks”, and it was sent down by train in 1956. The portrait is there now, returned from its Canberra trip, though not on display.

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