The Monthly, August 2009, No. 48

On 1 December 1945, as British rule of India entered its tumultuous final phase, Mohandas Gandhi arrived in Calcutta. That night, he held the first of a series of meetings with the Raj’s local representative, Richard Casey, the governor of Bengal.

Dick Casey was an Australian, a Cambridge-educated scion of the Queensland squattocracy. Treasurer in the conservative Lyons government, he’d run against Menzies for party leadership. In one of his first acts as prime minister, Menzies made Casey ambassador to Washington, effectively removing him from domestic...