As John Curtin embarked on a career in federal politics in the early 1930s, he faced not only serious international instability but also a fractious labour movement that wanted to ignore the world. In the worsening economic and strategic climate, the tensions that had surfaced in party ranks in the aftermath of the First World War came under even greater strain. Although in the early years of the decade the severity of the worldwide depression inevitably focussed Curtin's attention on the domestic misery associated with high unemployment and the rapid collapse in Australia's export trade, neither he nor his party – however much they might have wanted to – could turn a blind eye to the troubles besetting Europe and East Asia. As imperial Japan flexed its muscles in Manchuria, Nazi Germany violated the resolutions of the Paris Peace Conference and Fascist Italy defied the League of Nations, Australians began to see once again the gathering clouds of another world war and with it the dreaded prospect of Britain being engaged in a simultaneous war in Europe and the Pacific. On the cusp of becoming Labor leader in 1935, Curtin said that he could see only a ‘deranged world’ where ‘all of the visible portents are of evil’.