Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997): Journalist, Communist, Intellectual

RUPERT LOCKWOOD (1908-1997): JOURNALIST, COMMUNIST, INTELLECTUAL A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY from the UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by ROWAN CAHILL B. A. (Hons.) (Sydney), M.Ed. (Hons.) (UNE), Dip.Ed. (SydTeachColl) SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND POLITICS July 2013 CERTIFICATION I, Rowan Cahill, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution. Rowan Cahill, / / 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS .............................................................................................................. III ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... VI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. VII INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................................ 13 CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................... 57 CHAPTER THREE ............................................................................................................. 89 CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................................ 123 CHAPTER FIVE .............................................................................................................. 155 CHAPTER SIX ................................................................................................................ 225 CHAPTER SEVEN ........................................................................................................... 255 CHAPTER EIGHT ............................................................................................................ 311 CHAPTER NINE ............................................................................................................. 344 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................ 381 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 393 ABBREVIATIONS AAES Australian Army Education Service AAP Australian Associated Press ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission ABS Australian Book Society ACCL Australian Council for Civil Liberties ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions AAES Australian Army Education Service AFM Australia First Movement AIIA Australian Institute of International Affairs AIS Australian Iron and Steel AJA Australian Journalists Association ALP Australian Labor Party ASIO Australian Intelligence Security Organisation ASSLH Australian Society for the Study of Labour History BHP Broken Hill Proprietary Limited CIA Central Intelligence Agency CIB Commonwealth Investigation Branch CIS Commonwealth Investigation Service Cominform Communist Information Bureau iii Comintern Communist International CPA Communist Party of Australia CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain FOSU Friends of the Soviet Union GDR German Democratic Republic IR Industrial Relations KGB Soviet intelligence (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) MHR Member of the House of Representatives MI Military Intelligence MUA Maritime Union of Australia MUP Melbourne University Press MWLU Melbourne Wharf Labourers’ Union NAA National Archives of Australia NEI Netherlands East Indies NLA National Library of Australia NSA National Security Act NSW New South Wales P&C Permanent and Casual Wharf Labourers’ Union P&O Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company PLC Presbyterian Ladies’ College PPSA Port Phillip Stevedores’ Association iv RAAF Royal Australian Air Force RRCE Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage, 22nd August 1955 SMH Sydney Morning Herald SLP State Labor Party of New South Wales SUA Seamen’s Union of Australia TASS Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (Telegranfnoie Agentstvo Sovietskavo Soiuza) TWA Transport Workers’ Act UAP United Australia Party UK United Kingdom US/USA United States of America USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VDC Volunteer Defence Corps VIREC Victorian International Refugee Emergency Council WW2 World War 2 WWF Waterside Workers’ Federation v ABSTRACT This thesis explores aspects of the life, times, and career of Australian journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997). During the Cold War, Lockwood was one of the best known members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), variously journalist, commentator, author, editor, orator, pamphleteer, broadcaster. His name is inextricably linked to the Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), as an unwilling, recalcitrant and hostile witness. In histories and commentaries Lockwood is generally referred to, often in a pejorative way, as “the communist journalist”. This thesis is an exploration of the life and the sixty-year career of Lockwood as a journalist and writer, in which membership of the CPA was but part (1939-1969). A general chronological framework is adopted, and the account developed with regard to three aspects of his life and career– as a journalist, as a communist, and as an intellectual. By contextualising the communist period of Lockwood’s life in his overall life and times, the portrait of a significant Australian journalist emerges, one who chose to leave the capitalist press for the adversarial and counter sphere of labour movement journalism, the latter the site of his work from 1940 until retirement in 1985. The thesis also explores Lockwood’s considerable intellectual activity, and mounts a case for recognition of the originality and sophistication of his largely unacknowledged research and writings in the areas of Australian history, politics, and political economy. Overall, this thesis contributes empirical knowledge and understandings to a number of aspects of Australian history: to labour movement history generally, and specifically to communist and labour biography; to journalism history; and to intellectual history. In so doing, it also contributes to the understanding of Australia between the two World Wars, and during the Cold War. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This doctoral project owes much to a number of people. I am grateful for the support, encouragement, guidance, and friendship of my supervisors, Anthony Ashbolt and Di Kelly. To my adult children Damien, Erin and Tim, thank you for your interest, support, and encouragement. To my wife and partner, Pam, thank you for being there from the beginning, for your mindfulness, support and encouragement, for your insistence that I see the project through, and for creating the structures and circumstances that made this possible. I am grateful also to those academics at the University of Wollongong (UOW) and from other universities who made various interventions on my behalf with UOW authorities during the course of my post-graduate work, thereby greatly assisting my progress: Matt Allen, Phillip Deery, Sarah Ferber, Charles Hawksley, John Shields. In Canberra, thanks are due to the staff I had dealings with at the National Archives of Australia, and the National Library of Australia, for your courtesy, pleasantness, and assistance. Thank you too to Penny Lockwood for sharing your father with me. To Drew Cottle and Andrew Moore, my scholarly companions over the years on roads “less travelled”, thank you for being part of the journey and adventures. A partnership in the early years of this century in association with the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, was crucial in my life, and I thank Julie Kimber in this regard. My friendship with Terry Irving since the 1960s, has been an important part of my intellectual life generally, and I acknowledge this with gratitude and appreciation in relation to this project. vii The completion of this project would never have happened had I not been given the opportunity to become a part-time teaching academic in the School of History and Politics at the UOW, both on the main campus and at the Moss Vale campus. My thanks here to the people I met in this context, whose lives variously intertwined with mine. To Leonie Clement, thank you for your counsel at a crucial stage. Important too was the now deconstructed Post-Graduate corridor on the main campus in Building 19, in its time a genuine and generous community of scholarship, friendship, and support. In this context, special thanks to Nichole Georgeou, whom I met in that corridor, and whose friendship and encouragement have meant a great deal. Finally, another thank you to son Tim, and to daughter-in-law Eugenia Demuro, for arranging a month of accommodation for me in Canberra at a crucial stage of this project, and for the companionship of their cat Lulu. viii INTRODUCTION During 1969 via Communist Party of Australia (CPA) Tribune journalist Harry Stein, I met the left journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997). 1 He was on the verge of leaving the CPA. Recently returned from assignment in the USSR, Lockwood was looking for a place to rent. Harry asked me if I knew of accommodation; the next-door flat was empty in the block where my wife and I rented in Balmain, so Lockwood and his wife moved in. Subsequently Rupert and I became friends, and remained so for the rest of his life. I delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1997, and composed his gravestone epitaph. From Rupert I learned much about the less scrutinised by-ways of Australian political history: listening to him, a gifted raconteur, was like listening to a visitor from a parallel universe-Australia; the same Australia I lived in, with the same chronology and characters as mainstream history, yet in many ways so very, very different. During the early 1980s I resolved to write Rupert’s biography; I made some inroads, and wrote on aspects of his life. 2 This was facilitated in part by a 1 The Communist Party of Australia was formed in Sydney by twenty-six men and women in October 1920. In January 1944 it changed its name to the Australian Communist Party in what was intended as an attempt to better reflect its Australian identity. Then in 1951, it reverted to its original name. This study will use the abbreviation CPA when referring to the party, except when directly quoting from sources. For the various name changes, see Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 1969, pp. 3, 98, 112. For Stein, see Harry Stein, A Glance Over an Old Left Shoulder, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1994. 2 My contributions towards the biographical understanding of Rupert Lockwood are: an obituary, Rowan Cahill, “Geo-politics of a Soul: Rupert Lockwood, 1908-1997”, Labour History, Number 72, May 1997, pp. 248-251; discussion of why Lockwood became a communist, R. Cahill, “The Making of a Communist Journalist: Rupert Lockwood, 19081940”, Australian Communication Lives Conference, University of Canberra, 15 February 2001 (an amended version of this paper was published online as “The Making of a Communist Journalist: Rupert Lockwood, 1908-1940”, Working Lives, www.econ.usyd.edu.au/wos/workinglives/cahill.html, Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney, 2003); on Lockwood’s role as a foreign correspondent, Rowan Cahill, “Rupert Lockwood abroad, 1935-1938: Genesis of a Cold War Journalist”, in Julie 1 small deposit of his papers he left in my care in 1984. However, my own life-circumstances and the necessity of earning a living did not enable the pursuit of this task. Historically too, it was difficult, since an understanding of his life required access to documentary materials not then in the public domain, including data in his Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) files, but more particularly his extensive personal papers which were gathered and made publicly available for the first time after his death. Also, as I explain later, for a full account of his life, Australian Cold War historiography had to dramatically change, which is what happened following the public release of the Venona transcripts by US authorities beginning in 1995. There came a time too in the early 1990s, especially as his health declined, when I ceased to regard him as a biographical subject, and regarded him instead as a human being and friend, to be supported and helped, not quarried. It also took his death and time to put critical distance between him, me, and hagiography. Following the death of Rupert in 1997, responsibility for the care of his personal records passed into the care of his eldest daughter, Penny. They did not come in one unified bulk collection, but had to be assembled from a number of locations. Overall, this assemblage comprised a substantial mass of materials, the bulk of which was created after the mid-1950s. Much of Rupert’s early records were destroyed, along with the family residence, in bushfires that ravaged the Sutherland Shire of southern Sydney during the fire seasons of 1956-1957. 3 Scrapbooks of Lockwood’s journalism also perished at this time, apparently only one, containing some of his very early Kimber, Peter Love and Phillip Deery, editors, Labour Traditions. Proceedings of the Tenth National Labour History Conference, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 44-49; the surveillance of Rupert Lockwood and his family by Australian security authorities c.1939-1960, Rowan Cahill, “Rupert Lockwood and the Spooks”, unpublished paper presented to Espionage and Counter-Espionage in Australian History Conference, University of Western Sydney, 12 October 1996; on aspects of Lockwood’s working-class journalism, Rowan Cahill, “On the Technique of WorkingClass Journalism”, Labour History, Number 94, May 2008, pp. 157-165. 3 Cahill, “Lockwood and the Spooks”, p. 11. 2 journalism, surviving. Lockwood was a prolific writer, and tracking down his work in a diversity of outlets, much of it uncatalogued and not the subject of bibliographic attention, was one of the basic tasks of this study. Between 1997 and 2011, Penny passed her father’s records into the care of the National Library of Australia (NLA). As MS 10121, they comprise fifteen metres of shelf in ninety-seven manuscript boxes, though this may change, as it is my understanding at the time of writing, there will be further, though small overall, record deposits in due course. 4 Examination of this material was, and is, facilitated by the NLA Guide to the papers of Rupert Lockwood prepared by Donna Vaughan in 2012. 5 Having thus introduced Rupert Lockwood, it is reasonable to ask, of all the Australian journalists who have been, and of all the Australian communists who have been, why does he warrant the special attention accorded to him in the following study? I respond thus: during the period from late 1939, when he joined the CPA, through to 1968/1969 when he left it, journalist Rupert Lockwood became one of the Australia’s best known communists. A journalist by training and profession, he was “highly intelligent, articulate and gutsy”; 6 he was also a powerful orator, pamphleteer, broadcaster, and historian. When Lockwood left the CPA, there was a great deal of publicity nationally; his death in 1997 warranted national and international attention. 7 4 Interview with Penny Lockwood, Canberra, 17 December 2012. 5 Papers of Rupert Lockwood, 1851-1998 (bulk 1940-1993), National Library of Australia, MS 10121, hereafter NLA: MS 10121; Donna Vaughan, “Guide to the Papers of Rupert Lockwood MS 10121, National Library of Australia, Canberra, July 2012. The single scrapbook is designated ‘Clippings Book c. 1929-40’, NLA: MS 10121, Box 55, Bag 362. 6 David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1994, p. 66. 7 The story of Lockwood leaving the CPA was broken by Sydney Morning Herald industrial roundsman Fred Wells, “Rupert Lockwood Leaves Communist Party”, 24 September 1969. Wells was a former communist militant maritime worker (a seaman) who made a career during the 1960s as a journalist covering militant trade union politics. According to David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and Their Secrets, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1994, pp. 187-189, journalist Wells was also an ASIO informant. For Lockwood 3 Amongst rank and file Australian communists during the time of his party membership, Lockwood was highly regarded. During 1945 when future ASIO counter-intelligence operative Dr Michael Bialoguski was a fourth year medical student at Sydney University, and began his penetration of the CPA on behalf of the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), he came to the following understanding of Lockwood: ….Rupert Lockwood occupied a position of great authority (within the CPA). It actually reminded me of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages when any theological dispute was won merely by proving one’s argument to be identical with a quotation from Aristotle. In Sydney communist circles…..it was sufficient to state “but Rupert Lockwood said so”—in order to settle an argument beyond doubt.8 Indeed, according to the way Bialoguski saw it, “Communism was a religion and Rupert Lockwood a high priest”. 9 Lockwood’s name is inextricably linked to the Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), more generally known as the Petrov Royal Commission, as a high profile, variously recalcitrant and hostile, witness, obituaries see Norman Abjorensen, “Star Petrov Witness Was, Foremost, A Fine Reporter”, Canberra Times, 16 March 1997; Tim Bowden, “Writer was a gifted Leftist orator”, The Australian, 12 March 1997, p. 14; Cahill, “Geo-politics of a Soul”; Keith Lockwood, “Rupert Lockwood dies at Natimuk”, The Mail-Times, 10 March 1997, p. 4; David McKnight, “Rupert Lockwood: Key to an Australian Drama”, The Guardian (London), 3 April 1997; Zoe Reynolds and Harry Black, “Medal of Honour for Union Journalist”, Maritime Workers’ Journal, March/April 1997, pp. 30-31; “Rupert Lockwood: Red Badge of Courage”, Herald Sun, 12 March 1997, p. 58; “Rupert Lockwood: 1908-1997”, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 1997, p. 33. Right-wing commentator Gerard Henderson caustically wrote of Lockwood’s life and death in an opinion piece, “Fame and pulp(ed) fiction”, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 1997. 8 Michael Bialoguski, The Petrov Story, William Heineman, Melbourne, 1955, p. 32. 9 Ibid., p. 33. 4 author of Exhibit (Document) J.10 It was his involvement in this event that propelled him to national notoriety. Historically and politically, Document J, and therefore Lockwood, figure in the politically traumatic ALP Split of 1955, because the document resulted in drawing Labor Party leader and lawyer Dr. H. V. Evatt before the Commission, as legal counsel for members of his staff who were referred to in it. 11 As historian Robert Murray noted, it was Evatt’s Commission appearance that was “one of the last straws that finally broke Labor unity”, and this as Waterford observed, ultimately led to the destruction of Evatt’s public credibility. 12 The Split was an ideological and sectarian splintering that, in tandem with the prevailing system of preferential voting, kept Labor on the Federal Opposition benches until 1972.13 For his inadvertent contribution of a significant ‘straw’ to this process, if for nothing else, Lockwood warrants a footnote in Australian history. But, as this study will demonstrate, there was more to Lockwood than all of this. From 1952 until retirement in 1985, he was primarily either associate editor or editor of the Maritime Worker, national journal of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF), part of a communist team with “impressive talents” that headed up the federal office of that union on the frontline of the Cold War in Australia, the waterfront. 14 While employed by the WWF, in 10 Hereafter in this study, the Royal Commission on Espionage, the Petrov Royal Commission, the Petrov Commission, will be used interchangeably, depending on context. Document J is found at NAA: A6202, J, and hereafter cited as Document J. 11 Jack Waterford, “A Labor Myth?”, in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (editors), Better Dead Than Red. Australia’s First Cold War: 1945-1959, Volume 2, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, p. 102. 12 Robert Murray, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984, p. 158; Jack Waterford, op. cit., p. 103. 13 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 216. 14 Tom Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War: The Waterfront Under Menzies, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2006, p. 100. Sheridan lists this team, including Lockwood, as 5 effect permanent part-time employment, Lockwood had time for special CPA assignments, and other journalistic and authorial work. 15 As this study will show, the latter included original and significant work in the realms of Australian history and political economy. Lockwood was a member of the CPA for about thirty years; his career as a reporter, journalist and writer spanned over sixty years, more when his childhood experiences/training are included, which is when he was introduced to the world of newspapers and journalism. An active member of the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA), he was one of three journalists responsible for drafting the AJA’s Code of Ethics in 1942 (adopted nationally in 1944). Further, the bulk of Lockwood’s career as a journalist was either with non-communist publications, including the Melbourne Herald and the ABC Weekly, or the labour movement press, primarily the Maritime Worker. Lockwood’s close journalistic link with the CPA newspaper Tribune, amounted to a period of about twenty, not continuous, years. Lockwood tends to enter the Australian historical record, described as/referred to as “the communist journalist”. This term was generally used by the media in reporting the proceedings of the Petrov Royal Commission, and continued thereafter. In a sense there is an appropriate logic to this description, as Lockwood was, at the time, a member of the CPA, and a journalist, hence the term has a certain legitimacy. However, this was not the intent of the original use, as the term was coined at the height of the Cold War in Australia, and with regard to Lockwood at the same time the press was referring to him as a spy, and to Document J, the cause of his Jim Healy (General Secretary), Ted Roach (Assistant General Secretary), Norm Docker (Industrial Officer). 15 Transcript of interview by Hazel de Berg with Rupert Lockwood, 1981, National Library of Australia, NLA tape/transcript Number 1245, p. 17,453. The copy of this interview cited here, and following, is the original typescript version, given by the NLA to Lockwood for the purpose of correction. In all but minor details, it is the same as the one now held by the NLA, and cited hereafter as De Berg. 6 notoriety, as a ‘scurrilous’ and ‘filthy’ piece of writing. Apart from its appropriateness, therefore, the term “communist journalist” was, and is, a pejorative. Non-communist journalists at the same time, or subsequently, were not described/identified as such, while the term ‘communist’ is a fluid term, having many political and propagandist uses, its meaning and understanding often depending on historical/political contexts and user intent. Further, the description is a limiting term with regard to Lockwood, since it ignores at least half of his professional life, and makes no attempt to identify or acknowledge the talents and experiences he brought to the service of the Australian Left and to the labour movement, and what he did in the service of both. 16 Also with regard to Lockwood, the term ‘communist journalist’ serves to both prescribe and proscribe understanding of the journalist and his work, the word ‘communist’ carrying considerable emotional and political connotations with the aim/effect of undermining the veracity of the word ‘journalist’. The term connotes a sense of ‘otherness’, of being ideological in a way that journalists working for capitalist media outlets were/are not, and therefore somehow limited, inferior, tainted, less credible, not a real journalist. Continued use of this term pigeonholes Lockwood, metaphorically chains him to a single event in Australian history, works to frustrate acknowledgement of his significant contributions to Australian journalism, and effectively closes the door on the life and times of a significant Australian journalist and the way he worked at and interpreted his profession. The following study does not aim at a total biography of Lockwood, but will focus on three main aspects of his life and career—as journalist, communist, and intellectual, roles that at times meshed and intersected. 16 A search of the Australian newspapers on the National Library of Australia’s TROVE digitised newspaper archive,17 December 2012, using “Rupert Lockwood” as the search term, showed common use of the term “Communist journalist” with regard to Lockwood, by the major newspapers, and in the regional press, particularly during 1954. 7 This study comprises nine chapters and a Conclusion. Chapter 1 contextualises the thesis in related literature and historiographies. Chapters 2 to 7 proceed in a broad chronological/biographical manner, the intention to discern and discuss the themes of journalism, communism, intellectual, and historian as they apply/applied to Lockwood. Chapters 8 and 9 are devoted to the books Lockwood published after leaving the CPA in 1969. In Chapter 1, four aspects of Australian history scholarship related to the thesis are discussed, the thesis overall contributing to each: Australian labour biography; Australian journalism history; Australian communism; and the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’. With regard to Australian labour biography, the intent of the discussion is to understand why Lockwood has not previously been the subject of scholarly biographical attention. It is argued the answer lies in the nature of labour biography as it has developed in Australia, where prominent identities in trade unions, and political parties, a pantheon of people and a related canon of institutions, have tended to receive attention, rather than rank-and-file people and those not defined by office or title. The discussion of journalism history draws attention to two types of journalism relevant to the career of Lockwood -- rural journalism, and labour movement journalism. Literature related to both of these areas is discussed, and in the process the scholarly neglect of the latter in Australia is noted. The discussion of Australian communism broadly surveys the state of scholarship regarding the CPA, drawing particular attention to the changes in Australian communist historiography following the public release of the Venona decrypts, 1995 ff. As this thesis will show, this historiographical change is crucial to understanding aspects of the life and work of Lockwood. The final discussion in Chapter 1 concerns the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’, and ways of discussing and identifying the presence and role of intellectuals in the labour movement. Chapter 2 begins the process of liberating Lockwood from the “communist journalist” Cold War pejorative, with an account of his rural childhood and youth, locating in this the origins of his journalism. The argument is that the 8 success of the pejorative is because it exists in isolation from the whole life and career of Lockwood as a journalist. One of the tasks of this study to end this isolation and replace it with a journalistic totality. This chapter also contributes to the understanding of, and knowledge about, the rural press in Australia, a media realm long treated by historians as inconsequential, its importance only relatively recently recognised. The biographical account of Lockwood is continued in Chapters 3 and 4, adding to the understanding of his totality as a journalist. Together the chapters examine the period of Lockwood’s employment with the Melbourne Herald, 1930 to 1939, following his leaving the rural site of his initiation into journalism. While contributing to the general history of Australian journalism, these chapters also describe Lockwood’s development as a leftist, an evolutionary process in his case, rather than a sudden Pauline ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion. The chapters show this evolution was completed by 1939, when Lockwood joined the CPA. Together, the chapters demonstrate the crucial role in this political development of Lockwood’s experiences as a foreign correspondent in Asia and Europe (1935-1938), especially his front line experiences during the Spanish Civil War. In detailing Lockwood’s experiences abroad, Chapter 3 shows how unique and uncommon these were so far as Australians generally, including journalists, were concerned. The general biographical chronological approach continues in Chapter 5, with the focus on Lockwood’s activities and experiences as a journalist and as a communist on the World War 2 Australian homefront. The merging of the two roles, and the development of a labour movement journalist as opposed to a capitalist journalist is traced. Apart from adding new dimensions, understandings and nuances to World War 2 labour history, this chapter breaks ground in explaining the origins and nature of the controversial material that formed part of Document J during the Cold War. The alleged roots of this, and its connection with Australian Naval Intelligence, are established. Important too is the detailing of Lockwood’s 9 relationships with Soviet personnel stationed in Australia from 1943 onwards. It is argued that both the wartime roots of Document J, and the wartime Soviet relationship, have to be understood in order to explain Lockwood’s later behaviour during the Cold War, construed by many as suspicious, if not treasonable, behaviour. Chapter 6 deals with Lockwood and the Cold War. The chapter has a twofold focus: Lockwood’s journalism, and his scholarly activities. It discusses the labour movement journalism of Lockwood from 1945 through to 1985. It examines his editorial work with the CPA newspaper Tribune to the early 1950s; and from 1952 to 1985, his editorial work with the trade union journal the Maritime Worker, ‘organ’ of the WWF. It is suggested in the latter editorial assignment, Lockwood drew on aspects of the rural newspaper tradition he was trained and raised in. In both labour movement editorial jurisdictions, it is seen that Lockwood explored the idea that workers on the job could also be worker-correspondents, contributing copy, significantly in regard to the Maritime Worker. Lockwood’s final assignment as a CPA journalist, as Tribune special correspondent in Moscow, 1965-1968, is also discussed. This assignment is seen to be historically problematic. On one hand, the journalism he produced during this period can be read as unabashed support for the USSR and for Soviet communism. Yet, as is seen, in Lockwood’s personal/political life it was a crucial period that led to him ending his membership of the CPA and becoming a public critic of Soviet communism. The chapter argues that the published journalism did not in fact reflect the nature and direction of his political thinking at the time, and that whilst in the USSR he was increasingly critical of the Soviet system. Chapter 6 also details and examines Lockwood’s independent scholarship to c.1969, published and unpublished, little of which was/has been cited or otherwise acknowledged by scholarship. The extent to which this substantial body of work was pioneering and a significant contribution to the understanding of Australian history and political economy is argued. 10 Chapter 7 concerns Lockwood’s intense and high level work for the CPA through to 1969, other than the journalism previously discussed. Lockwood’s CPA assignments abroad during 1948-1949, 1950, 1965-1968, his roles in the Petrov Affair and the creation of Document J, are detailed. Regarding Document J, the case is made for it being regarded as a genre of ‘raw’ journalism, its contents warranting serious consideration. This chapter also examines ASIO’s investigation of Lockwood post-war and onwards. Overall, the chapter demonstrates that Lockwood cannot be seen as a Cold War victim, as one strand of Cold War historiography portrays him, but as a significant, deliberate, combatant. Lockwood’s disenchantment with the CPA is also a concern of this chapter. This is shown to be a long, slow process, beginning before Khrushchev’s “secret” speech (1956), culminating in Lockwood leaving the party in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The reasons why Lockwood remained in the CPA despite disenchantment, are explored, as are the reasons he finally left. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of Lockwood’s life after 1969, and the way in which his leaving the party ushered in a period of creative historical research and writing. In Chapters 8 and 9, the chronological/biographical approach of the study is no longer required, having served its purpose. These chapters examine and discuss the four books Lockwood published between 1975 and 1990. It is explained how these were based on his status as an industry insider in relation to the subject matter, and built around the WWF and the maritime and waterfront industries. In Chapter 8, the discussion centres on Humour Is Their Weapon, and Ship to Shore. 17 These books focus on the WWF, its history, culture, and traditions. It is shown how they contribute insights and understandings to Australian labour, maritime, and industrial relations, 17 Rupert Lockwood, Humour Is Their Weapon: Laugh With the Australian Wharfies, Ellsyd Press, Chippendale, 1985; Rupert Lockwood, Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne’s Waterfront and Its Union Struggles, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1990. 11 histories. Chapter 9 examines Black Armada and War on the Waterfront. 18 While the WWF is also the focus of these, it is shown that Lockwood used this focus to discuss wider historical, social, economic, and political matters. The case is made in these two chapters for these books being regarded as works of considerable originality, and as significant contributions to Australian history. When considered in relation to the account of Lockwood’s research and writing on economic and historical matters during the 1950s and 1960s detailed in Chapter 6, the discussion in Chapters 8 and 9 supports recognition of Lockwood as a significant radical scholar, one who operated outside the academy, warranting inclusion in academic discussions of Australian history and political economy. Overall, this thesis contributes empirical knowledge and understandings to a number of aspects of Australian history: to labour movement history generally, and specifically to communist and labour biography; to journalism history; and to intellectual history. By taking aspects of Lockwood’s life, as a journalist, as a communist, and as an intellectual, and proceeding with these in a largely chronological way, it unpacks and explores these and their interrelations and interactions, providing a fuller, more complex and nuanced study of Lockwood and his times than currently available. In so doing, it also contributes to understanding Australia between the two World Wars, and during the Cold War. 18 Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1975; Rupert Lockwood, War on the Waterfront: Menzies, Japan and the Pig-Iron Dispute, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1987. 12 CHAPTER ONE THE PROBLEM OF “THE COMMUNIST JOURNALIST” In this chapter, literature and historiographies relevant to the thesis topic are discussed in four sections: Australian labour biography; Australian journalism history; Australian communism; and the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’. This thesis will, overall, contribute to each of these. With regard to Australian labour biography, the discussion aims to understand why Lockwood has not previously been the subject of scholarly biographical attention. It is argued the answer lies in the nature of labour biography as it has developed in Australia, where prominent identities in trade unions, and political parties, a pantheon of people and a related canon of institutions, have tended to receive attention, rather than people like Lockwood, distinguished neither by title nor position, people with agency no doubt, yet agency difficult to pin down. The discussion of journalism history draws attention to two types of journalism relevant to the career of Lockwood -- rural journalism, and labour movement journalism. Literature related to both of these areas is discussed, and in the process the scholarly neglect of the latter in Australia, noted. The discussion of Australian communism broadly surveys the state of scholarship regarding the CPA, drawing particular attention to the changes in Australian communist historiography following the public release of the Venona decrypts, beginning in 1995. As this thesis will show, this historiographical shift is crucial to understanding aspects of the life and work of Lockwood. The final discussion in the chapter concerns the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’, and ways of discussing and identifying the presence and role of intellectuals in the labour movement. AUSTRALIAN LABOUR BIOGRAPHY. This study of Lockwood is a contribution to Australian labour history, and to the history of Australian journalism. Within these two broad areas, it is in part a biographical contribution. Writing history necessarily involves reference to and the use of individuals, whether it be extensive discussion of 13 a particular individual, or a few lines about a person. Even a reference as simple as a name mentioned/referred to in a text, assumes the writer has assumed reader knowledge about that person, or that an interested reader will, where possible, do further independent reading/research. In this sense then, the act of writing and reading history has a biographical dimension. As Richard Broome put it, “we all people our histories with individuals albeit in mere fragments, as we use people to support and colour our generalisations”. 19 Biography generally, has a long history which historian/biographer Nigel Hamilton traced over more than 17,000 years from the Lascaux cave figures onwards. 20 Since the 1960s biography has flourished, diversifying greatly in recent decades, along with historical methodology. Amongst the many categories of biography is labour biography, an initial mapping of its Australian contours done by historians Hearn and Knowles. They described the category generally as being centred on “the lives of the people of labour history ˗ workers and their parliamentary representatives, radicals and trade unionists”, a process of rescuing “the study of the individual” from adjunct status in the study of institutions and social processes. In 2004, so far as Australian labour biography was concerned, Hearn and Knowles saw the area as developing, with much to be done, “even at the basic level of empirical research”. 21 Two major strands have developed in the study of Australian labour biography. Most published research has focused on organised labour, the trade unions, the political parties, and associated “long-time union officials, 19 Richard Broome (editor), Tracing Past Lives: the Writing of Historical Biography, The History Institute, Victoria Inc., Melbourne, 1995, Introduction, p. ix. 20 Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2007. 21 Mark Hearn, and Harry Knowles, “Struggling for Recognition: Reading the Individual in Labour History”, Labour History, Number 87, November 2004, pp. 1-10. 14 parliamentarians, prime ministers”. 22 The prominent identity and institution focus has a great deal to do with the origins of the research in doctoral theses, and the requirements of supervisors for students to have safe topics with clearly defined beginnings and endings, clear themes, and “easily contrived conclusions”, to suit finite research time lines and the thesis genre. 23 It also has a great deal to do with the availability of research materials. Political parties and trade unions have created extensive records over time, and many of these are available for study and research in publicly accessible Australian archival holdings. Further, significant labour personalities have tended to act with a view to their place in history and generated significant personal paper trails, variously in the form of personal papers, published writings, and by giving assistance to researchers. The presentation of history in biographical terms has also been popular within the Australian Labor Party. 24 By 2011, some 330 biographies of labour movement people, eight per cent of entries, had been included in the six volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) covering the period 1891-1939, the “formative years of the modern labour movement”. The emphasis was heavily in favour of “the institutional pantheon of organised labour”. 25 22 John Shields, and Andrew Moore, “The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement: A Progress Report”, Working Lives at : http://workinglives.econ.usyd.edu.au/register.html, accessed 24 August 2012; for an extensive bibliographic overview of labour history see Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 211-232. See also the discussion of Australian labour biography in Harry Knowles, “Voyeurs or Scholars? Biography’s role in labour history”, Journal of Australian Studies, Volume 25, Issue 69, 2001, pp. 71-72. 23 Patmore, Australian Labour History, p. 8. 24 Geoffrey Robinson, “Biography and the Project of Labour History: Marxist Anticipations and Australian Examples”, Eras, Edition Five, November 2003, http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras/edition_5/robinsonarticle.htm, accessed 24 July 2009. 25 Andrew Moore, Yasmin Rittau, John Shields, “Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-1975”, in Melanie Nolan (editor), Labour History and its People: The 15 The second strand is the road less taken, what has colourfully been described as the individuals who were often at the centre of deep conflict within the organised working class (who) may contribute to a better understanding of the diversity and division which has so often characterised the history of Australian labour. (The) rebels, rank-and-filists, stump orators, and strike stalwarts and fearless class warriors (and) the respectable moderates, glorious failures, spies, union turncoats, party rats, union fund embezzlers, and the like. 26 This strand has not attracted the scholarship the prominent person/institution strand has, arguably for reasons opposite to those that have promoted/encouraged the latter. The academic impetus has been absent, the degree of risk is greater in terms of scholarship, and the documentation is not present to the same, often well organised, degree. 27 Perhaps too, as Geoffrey Robinson argued, labour historians are theoretically uncertain when it comes to biography: is history about class, rather than individuals and individuality? Is the individual to be seen as a symbol, and agency, of class, or can the individual make an independent difference on history. 28 Confronting this sort of hesitancy and doubt, Knowles for example, advocated the use of biography as an IR tool, to understand “the way institutions or organisations function”. 29 He demonstrated the possibilities of this approach in a study of socialist Arthur Rae (1860-1943), prominent leader of the Australian Workers Union and labour politician. In this study, 12th Biennial National Labour History Conference, 15-17 September 2011, ASSLH Canberra Branch, in association with the National Centre of Biography, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, 2011, p. 74. 26 Moore and Shields, “Biographical Register”. 27 Hearn and Knowles, “Struggling for Recognition”, p. 3. 28 Robinson, “Project of Labour History”; see also the discussion on the ‘suspicious’ nature of biography in Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, “Representative lives? Biography and Labour History”, Labour History, Number 100, May 2011, pp. 127-128. 29 Knowles, “Voyeurs or Scholars?”, pp. 72-75. 16 Knowles was particularly interested in exploring issues relating to union leadership, and how political (socialist) principles were pursued within trade union and political party contexts, with Rae as the biographical focus. 30 A notable contribution to the road not taken, the ‘less known/unknown’ biographical dimension, was All Our Labours in 1992, a collection of studies based on the recollections of Australian working people about their working lives. The studies were of workers in Sydney in cotton mills, on trams and buses, in domestic service, in nursing, in prostitution, in policing, and young workers training as apprentices. Covering much of the twentieth century, the essays demonstrated how biographies could be constructed in the absence of the organised files and paperwork associated with institutions and prominent lives, with oral history of key importance. The studies also demonstrated the ways in which work, the factor occupying much of the lives of the people studied, was not something extraneous to living, an activity undertaken during the course of life, but a complex biographical factor, shaping and influencing lives in a multiplicity of ways. 31 Beginning in 1989/90, academic labour historians John Shields and Andrew Moore spent more than two decades addressing the ‘less-studied’ strand. With seed funding from the University of Western Sydney and later the Australian Research Council, they worked on The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement. Initially envisaging a print-based publication, by the time the project was ready for public use in late 2011, it was an online publication, able to be continuously updated. From an initial data-base of 4000 people, and the planned selection of 2000 individuals (1725 males, 275 females), the average entry limited to 400 words, the project grew with available technology to include 2050 individuals and entries between 300-700 words. The cut-off point for inclusion was 30 Harry Knowles, “Arthur Rae: A ‘Napoleon’ in Exile”, Labour History, Number 87, November 2004, pp. 103-121. 31 John Shields, editor, All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1992. 17 determined as 1975 which, in the view of the compilers, marked “the end of the long period of Australian union growth and development which began around 1900/1910”. 32 The general criteria for Register inclusion was “active involvement in a trade union or other workplace, community or political organisation, as either a union official or as a prominent rank-and-file union member”; individuals already part of the ADB project were not the focus of attention.33 This principle of exclusion/inclusion focused the Register team on people below the radar of the obvious, people who contributed significantly to the labour movement but not at the highest of levels. Moreover, in their selection process, the team cast its net across divides of race, gender, States, capital cities and regions, aiming at an inclusiveness lacking in the traditional high-profile, masculine-based canon of labour worthies. In international terms, the Australian Register was/is a catch-up. Significant dictionaries of labour biography were an established part of the cultural/intellectual landscapes of Britain, which had an ongoing multivolume dictionary since the early 1970s, France (a 30 volume dictionary since 1964), and the USA, with a single volume dictionary since 1974 (updated 1983). 34 During their time on the Register project, Moore and Shields worked at fulltime academic employment, the project not able to receive their full attention. As the result, the project was not officially available for scrutiny and use until late in 2011, when it began to be put online. By that time, their work had been academised to some extent, the style of project they began now known as “collective biography”. In the years between start and going online, the idea of labour biography had matured, and gained in status and confidence. As part of this confidence, an issue of the scholarly journal Labour History (Number 87, November 2004) was devoted to labour 32 Shields and Moore, “Biographical Register”. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 18 biography, and the 2011 Biennial National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH) held in Canberra, devoted to the theme. However, it was still felt necessary in 2011 for the Biographical Register team to assert the value of its “collective biography” project. It was explained the project confronted an Australian form of cultural amnesia fostered during the Cold War and subsequently, where labour movement personnel had variously been excised, or their contributions downplayed, in the contexts of Australian political, social, economic histories; that the “distinction between the individual and society is a fiction” and that individual lives are windows onto the social. Stridently, the team made the point that individuals are human beings, and that knowing about them biographically can be enriching in personal and historical ways, “enriching our understanding of historical processes, agency and experience”, that from a humanist perspective, the Register project highlights the understanding that “the central subjects of history are, after all, human beings--people acting alone, in concert, in conflict, in confidence and certainly, in fear and confusion”. 35 Two earlier departures from the prominent-individual strand, published within a year of each other, are worthy of note: an edited collection by Eric Fry, Rebels & Radicals, comprising biographical depictions of the lives of twelve Australian radical “Aborigines and convicts, democrats and republicans, women who demanded equal rights for their sex, socialists and 35 The announcement the Biographical Register project would be released beginning late in 2011, was made at the 12th Biennial National Labour History Conference, Australian National University, 15-17 September 2011. See Moore, Rittau, Shields, “Activists in Aggregate”, pp. 68-67. The Register biographies are published online by the National Centre of Biography at ‘Labour Australia’, http://labouraustralia.anu.edu.au/, accessed September 2012. 19 revolutionaries”; the other, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy, by Stuart Macintyre. 36 Rebels & Radicals was/is important for two reasons. First, because of the status of editor Fry as a labour history pioneer, and his insistence on including within that speciality the biographies of the sorts of ‘rebels and radicals’ he gathered. Second, because the subjects of these biographies at the time of his compilation, existed in historical records as fragments, not having lived the sorts of lives that generated consistent/voluminous/ordered paper trails, or who, having led public and documented lives, variously had their radicalism played down, “denying them their place as critics of society”. 37 Collectively, the contributors to Rebels & Radicals demonstrated biographical possibilities and the potential richness of the less developed labour biographical strand. In his study of militant West Australian Shipwrights’ leader Paddy Troy (1908-1978), Stuart Macintyre deliberately departed from the labour biography emphasis on what he termed figures of “major importance”. Troy was selected because he was not important “by conventional standards”. By using him biographically, Macintyre also set out to demonstrate and explore “a distinctive strand in the Australian labour movement, that of the militant”. While Troy did, during his lifetime, mix with “the leading figures of his time”, his own union was on the periphery of the national labour movement”, while the CPA, of which he was a member, was also, mostly, on the margin of national politics. In an extended metaphorical explanation, the importance of Troy, according to Macintyre, was this sort of peripheral status, a life spent being “tossed and buffeted on one of the streams that are 36 Eric Fry (editor), Rebels & Radicals, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983, p. x; Stuart Macintyre, Militant. The Life and Times of Paddy Troy, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1984. 37 Fry, Rebels & Radicals, p. x. For an account of Fry and his scholarship, Verity Burgmann, “‘A Greater Concentration of Purpose’: The Intellectual Legacy of Eric Fry and Robin Gollan”, Labour History, Number 94, May 2008, pp. 25-41. 20 the real forces of change”. As Macintyre explained labour movement politics, labour leaders of the sort who head up peak organisations, and politicians, are essentially followers rather than leaders. No matter how charismatic such a person is, that person is constrained by “the politics of accommodation, guided by the calculus of the lowest common denominator, and only within these narrow limits can he impose his will on events. He progresses by riding the mainstream”. According to Macintyre in this study, it is people like Troy who form and make the “vigorous turbulences and turbulent eddies” that collectively shape and impel the movement of the political mainstream. 38 Australian labour biography has been tardy in relation to researching individuals who have identified with the labour movement and contributed significantly to the world of ideas, discussion, debate, to the formulation of world views and opinion, but who have not been part of the cut and thrust of power broking and hands on industrial/political conflict, even though they may have been members of labour movement organisations. Guido Baracchi (1887-1975) for example, Left intellectual gadfly and activist, one of the founders of the CPA, and twice expelled from it, haunted the pages of Australian political and cultural histories as a name or a few words for many years, “the knight errant of Australian radicalism” according to Stuart Macintyre; he waited until 2007 for a biographer. And when one came along, it was a political/cultural biographer, not specifically a labour historian. 39 So too with Dymphna Cusack (1902-1981), a significant Australian writer whose life, politics and writings were very much entwined with and nourished by the labour movement. It was not until 2001 that Marilla North 38 This paragraph, and the source of the quotes, is found in the explanation of Troy’s selection for biographical treatment given by Macintyre, Militant, pp. 220-221. 39 Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia From Origins to Illegality, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1998, p. 19; Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2007. 21 untwined and demonstrated the significance of these in her biographical “Story in Letters”, Yarn Spinners, dealing with Cusack and her friends/colleagues/confidantes Florence James and Miles Franklin. In this instance North did not attempt a biography, but biographically portrayed the three women via a chronological ordering of their correspondence, linked by commentary and notes. North’s academic background was psychology, media studies, drama, and post-colonial literature. 40 Similarly the largely expatriate author Christina Stead (1902-1983), who saw life as inherently political. Her entire adult and creative life was part of, and nourished by, socialism and Marxist understandings. Even though Stead spent most of her writing life abroad, her socialist roots were in Australia, and Australia was a major concern of her fictional writings. It took two biographers, Hazel Rowley, and Margaret Harris, from outside the labour history genre and academic specialisation to detail these political links and their significance. Stead’s leftism was most dramatically evident in her correspondence edited by Harris. 41 Relevant to my study of Lockwood, is a problem Terry Irving identified facing labour historians writing labour biography. Locating the enterprise mainly with academy based intellectuals, he noted how their likely focus was/is “the kind of knowledge” they deal with, that is “theoretical knowledge”. They are he argued “prone to forget that their subjects are sensuous men and women, grounded in spatial and social relationships, and affected by experience”, treating their subjects “as if a body of theoretical knowledge alone constructed their world.” He stressed the importance of reconstructing the experiential knowledge of biographical subjects, arguing 40 Marilla North (editor), Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters Between Dymphna Cusack, Florence James and Miles Franklin, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 2001. 41 Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead: A Biography, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2007; Margaret Harris (editor), Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William Blake, Miegunyah, Carlton, 2005. For pioneering discussion of the centrality of Stead’s leftism, see Michael Ackland, “Realigning Christina Stead”, Overland, No. 192, Spring 2008, pp. 49-53. 22 that taking “experience seriously as a source of knowledge means that contextualisation cannot be disposed of by a few token references to historical events and processes; it is necessary to show the subjects actually gaining knowledge as a result of their experiences, preferably expressed in their own words. Inevitably this pushes the analysis on to a biographical level.” 42 This study of Lockwood is mindful of Irving’s argument. AUSTRALIAN, AND LABOUR MOVEMENT, JOURNALISM HISTORY. When Henry Mayer published his bibliographic overview of literature about Australia’s “Press, Radio and Television” in 1987, he observed “the literature on our media is scanty”; he had pioneered media studies, the press in particular, during the 1960s at Sydney University. His study The Press in Australia, first published in 1964, remains a work of encyclopaedic extent, and useful insight. 43 In 1999 Ann Curthoys commented Australian journalism history “has been a rather under-studied field, and there is still a lot we haven’t even begun to investigate”. 44 That noted, since 1987 literature relating to Australia’s media history burgeoned, in part due, as 42 Terry Irving, “Modernity’s Discontents: Esmonde Higgins and James Rawling as Labour Intellectuals”, Illawarra Unity, Volume 11, Number 1, 2011-2012, p. 21. 43 Henry Mayer, “Press, Radio and Television”, in D.H. Borchardt and Victor Crittenden (editors), Australians: A Guide to Sources, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, pp. 446-451; Henry Mayer, The Press in Australia, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1964, 1968. Useful bibliographies following Mayer, are John Henningham, “Two Hundred Years of Australian Journalism: A History Waiting to be Written”, Australian Cultural Studies, No. 7, 1988, pp. 49-64; Victor Isaacs, Rod Kirkpatrick and John Russell (compilers), Australian Newspaper History: A Bibliography, Australian Newspaper Group, Middle Park Queensland, 2004; Bridget Griffen-Foley, “Australian Press, Radio and Television Historiography: An Update”, Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, Number 119, May 2006, pp. 21-37. For acknowledgement of the pioneering role of Mayer, see Ann Curthoys, “Histories of Journalism”, in Ann Curthoys and Julianne Schultz (editors), Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1999, p. 4. The notes to this essay (pp. 277-280) are of considerable bibliographic assistance to historians working in the field. Mayer’ 44 Curthoys, “Histories of Journalism”, p. 7. 23 Bridget Griffen-Foley explained, “to the proliferation of media and communications courses in Australian universities”, with a great deal of scholarship in the field done by scholars from a diversity of backgrounds and disciplines. 45 The career of Rupert Lockwood as a journalist spanned rural, metropolitan capitalist, and communist/labour movement journalism. He always described himself as a Journalist, no matter the incarnations. The profession of journalism is the subject of a 1985 study by Clem Lloyd, which remains the only ‘bottom up’ study of its subject. 46 Written to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the AJA, it is more than a trade union institutional history. Lloyd detailed the struggle by journalists to rise beyond their 1890s status as a “spineless, downtrodden crew,” training, regularised entry 47 towards professional status, formal standards, professional standards, and organisational power to contest paternalistic editors and proprietors. He also detailed the ways journalism variously intersected and meshed with Australian political and social history. Significantly, as will be seen later in this study, during the 1940s Lockwood was a major player in this process of ‘professionalisation’, one of three journalists who drafted the AJA’s Code of Ethics, the formal acceptance of which was one of the two main planks of the AJA, the other having to do with the education and training of journalists. 48 Regarding the importance of the journalistic workplace/worksite, American journalism historian Bonnie Brennen stressed the importance of developing a labour perspective in the study of journalism history. She argued that traditionally, journalism historians have approached history from the top down, with interest focused on media elites. She advocated instead focus on 45 Griffen-Foley, “Australian Press, Radio, and Television”, p. 22. 46 Clem Lloyd, Profession: Journalist. A History of the Australian Journalists’ Association, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985. 47 Ibid., p. 29 48 Ibid., p. 227. 24 the working journalist, to see this worker within his/her specific worksite, with its specific traditions, culture, in the context of the specific time of employment, and the effect of these upon the conventions and concepts of journalism. 49 While Lloyd pioneered this approach with regard the Australia, it is still one largely neglected by scholars. 50 With regard to the career of Lockwood as a journalist, I discern two major historiographical problems. These relate partially to labour history, but specifically to journalism history. As stated earlier, when Lockwood is described as a ‘communist journalist’, only part of his working life as a journalist is emphasised, effectively isolating him from his full career as a journalist, the part becoming the whole. My study attempts a full account of the working life of Lockwood, journalist. It will establish the origins and beginnings of this career in rural journalism, under the tutelage and instruction of his father. It will detail his subsequent employment with the Melbourne Herald, and following this, his thirty years’ association with the labour movement press. In terms of historiography, there is little problem with the Herald stage of his career. Detailing this is a relatively simple process of historical research and recovery. The metropolitan press has been the focus of most Australian journalism press history, and the area is well traversed by historians. Not so the rural press; and not so the labour movement press. While the former has relatively recently come in for scholarly attention, the latter largely remains an area of neglect, a matter the Biographical Register project in part addresses biographically. 51 Therefore, in detailing Lockwood’s full career as a journalist, two of the three arenas of his career are not paths well-trodden by historians. As for the first, the rural arena, it was arguably a major source 49 Bonnie Brennen, “Towards a History of Labor and News Work: The Use of Oral Sources in Journalism History”, The Journal of American History, Vol. 83, No. 2. (September 1996), pp. 578-579. 50 Curthoys, “Histories of Journalism”, p. 5. 51 Moore, Rittau, Shields, “Activists in Aggregate”, pp. 83-84. 25 of his confidence as a journalist, a ‘bottom up’ grounding, via his father, in the craft of printing and the ‘tramp printer’ tradition. This grounding was probably a factor that helped Lockwood secure ‘hard to get’ employment with the Herald during the Depression era. As Paula Hamilton observed in her study of journalists, gender and workplace culture, the Herald’s Chief of Staff at the time had a preference for trainee journalists with ‘bottom up’ trade experience. 52 To empathise with historically, and to imaginatively enter, the rural aspect of Lockwood’s career, a crucial training ground as will be argued later, it is necessary to have a general understanding of rural journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a type of journalism, according to Kirkpatrick, this was centred on small circulation publications, based on and serving specific geographical rural areas/regions, often produced under great difficulties, and serving as agencies of culture. In terms of style, it was at times an idiosyncratic, gossipy medium, often engaging in a partisan way in local politics and wider political issues, and serving as the “launching pads for political careers”. In retrospect for historians, it provides a unique record of rural life through its creation of “a distinctive country mindedness”. 53 This is in contradiction to earlier views by historians like Margaret Kiddle (1961) and Geoffrey Blainey (1984) who tended to minimise or downplay the role and power of the rural press with depictions of its quaintness, parochialism, and lack of political power. 54 Recent studies have challenged the dismissive/ marginalised view of the rural press. The pioneering work of journalism historian Rod Kirkpatrick warrants mention, for his early role in variously demonstrating and 52 Paula Hamilton, “Journalists, Gender and Workplace Culture 1900-1940”, in Curthoys and Schultz, Journalism: Print, Politics, pp. 99-100. 53 Rod Kirkpatrick, “House of Unelected Representatives: The Provincial Press 1825- 1900”, in Curthoys and Schultz, Journalism, Print, Politics, pp. 21, 34-35. 54 Geoffrey Blainey, Our Side of the Country: The Story of Victoria, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, 1984, p. 91; Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria, 1834-1890, Melbourne University Press, 1961, p. 456. 26 explaining the importance and role of the rural press and rural journalism.55 The watershed study was Elizabeth Morrison’s Engines of Influence in 2005, based on her doctoral work (Monash University, 1991), dealing with the period 1840-1890 in rural Victoria. According to her account, by late 1889, there were 166 newspapers in 122 rural Victorian towns, some 430,000 copies circulating per issue, a not inconsiderable audience in a colony of over 1 million people; which says nothing about the considerable flow on readership of these, for example via family readers, and copies in Mechanics’ Institutes and other communal reading rooms. Morrison argued these publications were significant agents of political change, in effect ‘engines of influence’. In her exhaustively researched and rigorous study, she demonstrated the ways rural newspapers functioned as cultural agencies, filtered ideas from outside their communities and circulated them within, helped create senses of localism, had influence on local politics, and through this local, national politics. After Morrison, depictions of the rural press in Australian history as inconsequential, irrelevant to the shaping of the nation, not able to be seriously regarded as a press in the sense city-based newspapers were a press, were no longer tenable. 56 This brings me to the second historiographical problem. The Australian labour movement press, and the CPA press, have yet to meet their Kirkpatrick, their Morrison. Awaiting visitation, these press sectors are effectively quarantined from inclusion in Australian media studies. The pattern was set by the pioneering and descriptive study of metropolitan newspapers, Australia Goes To Press (1961), by visiting Fulbright American scholar of journalism W. Sprague Holden. Noting with reference to the latest figures available to him (1958), that Australia was “one of the 55 See for example Rod Kirkpatrick, Sworn to No Master: A History of the Provincial Press in Queensland to 1930, Darling Downs Institute Press, Toowomba, 1984; Country Conscience: A History of the New South Wales Provincial Press, 1841-1995, Infinite Harvest Publishing, Canberra, 2000. 56 Elizabeth Morrison, Engines of Influence: Newspapers of Country Victoria, 1840-1890, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005; for the figures I have cited, p. 13. 27 most unionized nations in the world”, Holden proceeded to discuss the way the (capitalist) metropolitan press reported industrial news. The labour movement in Holden’s account was the generator of news, and the object of reporting by “industrial roundsmen”. That the labour movement was the creator of its own credible reporting, recording, and press activity, and this on a substantial scale, rated no mention. 57 This was not the case with Mayer, a few years later. His account of Australian press history from colonial times to the 1960s, combined historical method with political and sociological analyses. Mayer included the labour movement press in his discussion, and indentified a genre of journalism in the 1890s associated with this which he termed “Labour journalism”. This was a form of writing by the self-trained seeking and struggling for self-expression, a characteristic he saw in the 1960s as lingering on. In Mayer’s conception of the ideal democracy, the existence of “Labour papers” were favoured, giving voice to alternative news, ideas and opinion, functioning as part of what he termed “counterweights” to the mass circulation press. 58 Earlier, in 1961, literature historian H. M. Green included the labour movement press in his classic study of Australian literature. In a chapter on “Newspapers” he singled out two labour movement publications, the Boomerang (Sydney, 1887-92) and the Australian Worker (Sydney, 1891- ) for comment, noting the talent of their editorial staff and contributors, and pointing to the contributions of these publications to literary and cultural development of Australia. 59 Later, R. B. Walker wrote on the tumultuous sixteen-year life of the labour newspaper Labor Daily/Daily News (1933-1940), the absorption of which into 57 W. Sprague Holden, Australia Goes To Press, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1961, pp. 113-118. 58 Mayer, The Press in Australia, pp. 60, 85, 147, 174, 189, 192, 199-200, 253, 265; for the identification of the genre “Labour journalism”, p. 192; for labour newspapers and democracy, pp. 264-265, 270. 59 H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature, Volume 1, 1789-1923, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp. 841-842. 28 Consolidated Press in 1940 assisted the fortunes and aspirations of future press magnate Frank Packer. 60 Nick Dyrenfurth wrote on the ‘forgotten’ and ‘lost’ world of Australian labour movement press cartooning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting the scholarly neglect of the area, bibliographically listing the scant existing literature. 61 Ian Syson analysed the life and writings of prolific labour movement journalist and literary figure Henry Ernest Boote (1865-1949), noting the limited critical literature on this seminal labour movement identity, the crude nature of much that did exist at the time of writing, and mounting a powerful scholarly case for the inclusion of Boote in discussions of Australian literature. 62 Diane Kirkby broke significant ground with a study of three women journalists, all with Australian connections, two considerably so, between the years 1857 and 2011 (Alice Henry, Jennie Scott Griffiths, Della Elliott), and their work in progressive political movements and the socialist/labour press. 63 Exceptions noted, generally the labour movement press has been neglected by scholarship, the sector variously misunderstood, trivialised, dismissed, and the people who worked within them, largely trivialized, forgotten, ignored. However, the extent of the labour movement press was indicated in 60 R. B. Walker, Yesterday’s News: A History of the Newspaper Press in New South Wales from 1920-1945, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1980, pp. 62-70, 95-103; R. B. Walker, “The Fall of the Labor Daily”, Labour History, Number 38, May 1980, pp. 67-75; Bridget Griffen-Foley, The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire, Allen & Unwin, , St. Leonards, 1999, pp. 90-91. 61 Nick Dyrenfurth, “‘Truth and Time Against the World’s Wrongs’: Montagu Scott, Jim Case and the Lost World of the Brisbane Worker Cartoonists”, Labour History, Number 99, November 2010, pp. 115-148; for Dyrenfurth’s listing of the literature relating to the labour and radical press, see his Endnote 12, p. 145. 62 Ian Syson, “Henry Ernest Boote: Putting the Boote into the Australian Literary Archive”, Labour History, Number 70, May 1996, pp. 71-91. 63 Diane Kirkby, “‘Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil’: Women Journalists and Cultural Leadership of Women’s Movement in Australia and the United States”, Labour History, Number 104, May 2013, pp. 81-100. 29 1975 by Gibbney in a stand alone, pioneering, bibliography of this overall press sector. Titled Labor in Print: A Guide to the People Who Created a Labor Press in Australia Between 1850 and 1939, this was a by-product of Gibbney’s (then) nine-year association with the ADB project. Gibbney began with 1850, acknowledging the lack of “the necessary specialised knowledge to cope with the complexities of early Australia”, and ended with 1939 “because my own experience suggests that World War II practically ended any widespread faith in socialist solutions for this country.” 64 The labour movement press was defined by Gibbney as variously being owned by trade unions, owned by elements of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), owned by the CPA or other socialist or syndicalist groups associated with trade unions, or clearly “owned or influenced by individual enthusiasts in any” of these categories. 65 Gibbney’s work was based on card-files, and was done before computerization, obviously a laborious and intensive research achievement. It was intended by its author as an introductory ‘research guide’, and its lack of comprehensiveness was acknowledged. 66 A complicating factor noted by Gibbney was that extant copies of “many papers” could no longer be found; they “have not survived and their existence can be traced only through accidental references in other papers”. 67 Despite these limitations, Gibbney listed 488 papers, and some 712 participant names, a considerable literary corpus of managers, owners, and staff. Publications ranged from those that only made it to one issue, to long running titles like the Brisbane-based Worker newspaper (William Lane its first editor), which began publication in 1890 and was still in being published in 1974 when Gibbney was completing the guide. 64 H. J. Gibbney (compiler), Labor in Print: A Guide to the People Who Created a Labor Press in Australia Between 1850 and 1939, Australian National University, Canberra, 1975, p. 1. 65 Ibid., p. 2. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 30 The communist component of the labour movement press was extensive. During the late 1930s and through the Cold War, the CPA published a national weekly newspaper, (Tribune, 1939-1991); between 1932 and 1976, it also variously published nine major weekly newspapers, in Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, and Victoria, not all of them lasting the distance. In West Australia the Workers’ Star was published from 1936-1951; when the CPA was proscribed in 1940, editor Arthur Rudkin was imprisoned. As well as newspapers, the CPA regularly published many factory/industry/job/locality/regional bulletins, the extent of which has yet to be fully documented. 68 Militant trade unions, led by communists, and with communists amongst their memberships, published newspapers or journals. A significant part of the culture of the CPA was based on the printed word. Helping produce and generate this material were leftist journalists; “communist journalists” in Cold War terminology which has tended to cross over into post-Cold War discussion and analysis. Lockwood was a major figure in this work pool. Others who variously earned respect and/or notoriety, and this is a list taken from the autobiography of a former Cold War CPA leader, John Sendy, included Rex Chiplin, Ken Miller, Paul Mortier, Rex Mortimer, Alec Robertson, Edgar Ross, Nat Seeligsen, Pete Thomas, Eric Thornton, W. A. Wood.69 This list reflects the masculinist culture of journalism during most of the period in the labour/communist, and the capitalist, press sectors. It was a masculinity that did not necessarily reflect actuality. Women who acted in journalistic capacities for the CPA press in all its manifestations await their 68 For the CPA tradition of factory/job/industry/locality bulletins and their extent, see Beverley Symons, Andrew Wells, and Stuart Macintyre (compilers), Communism in Australia: A Resource Bibliography, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1994, pp. 115-128. 69 John Sendy, Comrades Come Rally! Recollections of an Australian Communist, Nelson, West Melbourne, p. 110. 31 historians. 70 Included in the Sendy list are journalists trained professionally by the capitalist press (Chiplin, Robertson, Thomas), who, had they maintained continuity in that sector, most likely would have forged financially rewarding and prominent careers; a former Rhodes Scholar (Wood); a future internationally recognised academic expert on Indonesia (Mortimer); a prominent labour movement historian (Edgar Ross). Former seminarian Mortier was the controversial model for the character John Morel in the Frank Hardy novel But the Dead are Many. 71 The industrial relations writings and accounts of working life by Pete Thomas (19141988), a journalist trained by The West Australian, were collected by Queensland scholar Greg Mallory in 2007; these demonstrate a perceptive, insightful, industrial journalist and historian. 72 The point is the CPA press was staffed by journalists the equal, at least, of those employed in the capitalist sphere. Scholarly discussion of this is part of what Curthoys in 1991 described as the “lot” yet to be investigated. 73 To an extent, the scholarly neglect of the labour movement press, including the CPA press, and associated journalists, reflects the ‘newness’ of Australian media studies and the amount of work to be done. But it can be hypothesised there is another factor, the perception these do not warrant serious scholarly examination because it all amounted to propaganda vehicles and propaganda, not a press and not journalism; not part of a complex and legitimate process of writers and readers, of reading and living, 70 For the difference between perception and reality regarding the presence of women in Australian journalism, 1900-1940, and later persisting as an ‘unresolved tension’ in the industry, see Hamilton, “Journalists, Gender”, especially pp. 103-105. 71 Pauline Armstrong, Frank Hardy and the Making of Power Without Glory, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2000, pp. 174-182. 72 Greg Mallory (editor), The Coalminers of Queensland: A Narrative History of the Queensland Colliery Employees Union. Volume 2: The Pete Thomas Essays, CFMEU Mining and Energy Division (Queensland), Brisbane, 2007. A brief account of Pete Thomas, by Mallory, introduces this volume, pp.1-9; it is one of the few published accounts of a labour movement journalist’s life and work. 73 Curthoys, “Histories of Journalism”, p. 7. 32 of the publications/journalists helping the reader make sense of reality, of helping develop “a mode of understanding”. 74 Regarding the CPA and its press, it is instructive to note what happened in Australian literary studies during the Cold War, where links between Australian leftist literary production and the detrimental cultural dictates of Stalin’s cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov on leftist literary production were posited, the argument being that Australian leftist ‘cultural’ production was damaged in the process, producing work that was propagandist, political rather than creative/cultural. 75 More recently, this view has been contested by scholars like Michelle Arrow, David Carter, Carole Ferrier, Susan McKernan, Ian Syson, who have pointed to the significant positive and enriching role the CPA played in Australian literary/cultural life. 76 Lockwood is often described in Cold War related literature as a ‘communist journalist’, the way he was described during the Cold War in the context of anti-communism. 77 My study will establish what this description does not 74 My thinking here has been influenced by Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, Chapter Two, ‘The Politics of Reading: Belief, Ideology and the Transmission of Knowledge’, pp. 38-73. 75 See for example Patrick O’Brien, The Saviours: An Intellectual History of the Left in Australia, Drummond, Richmond, 1977, pp. 35-63. 76 Michelle Arrow, Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last, Pluto Press in conjunction with Currency Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 131-190; David Carter, “Reviewing Communism: Communist Review (Sydney), 1934-1966: A Checklist of Literary Material”, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1985, pp. 93-105; Carole Ferrier, “Sugar Heaven and Reception of Working Class Texts”, Hecate, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1985, pp. 19-25; Susan McKernan, A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years After the War, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989; Ian Syson, “Out of the Shadows: The Realist Writers’ Movement, 1944-1970, and Communist Cultural Discourse”, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1992, pp. 333-351. 77 For examples of the continued use of this term see Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair: Politics and Espionage, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 68; Murray, The Split, p. 165; Nicholas Whitlam and John Stubbs, Nest of Traitors: The Petrov Affair, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1974, p. 108. 33 convey in his case, what it overlooks or dismisses, carrying as it does the suggestion of ‘otherness’, of being ideological in a way that journalists working for capitalist media outlets were/are not, and therefore somehow limited, inferior, tainted, less credible, not a real journalist. Historically, and historiographically, Lockwood has been on the receiving end of an imposed definition of self, something usually done to the ill, the disabled, and to social minorities, an image constructed in social and political contexts, often in matters relating to gender and race. The act of writing about Lockwood in this study becomes, in this sense of biography, the telling of a ‘counterstory’ and an act of ‘resistance’ against an imposed definition of self. For Lockwood, it is a form of liberation. 78 AUSTRALIAN COMMUNISM As has been noted, the CPA was founded in Sydney during October 1920 by twenty-six people. Membership peaked in 1944 at about 23,000. At the end of World War 2, the party “had the support of 25 to 40 percent of Australian unionists….it had one member of Parliament in Queensland and elsewhere its electoral support sometimes reached 40 percent of votes cast; and it had municipal councils under its control”. 79 Thereafter, membership declined due to sectarian struggles, Cold War persecution within Australia, dramatic policy shifts within communism internationally, like the 1956 CPSU Twentieth Congress ‘Secret Speech’ by Khrushchev denouncing Stalin and Stalinism, and the 1961 split between Moscow and Beijing. On the heels of the 1956 ‘Secret Speech’, a major factor in the decline was the 1956 Russian invasion of Hungary, which saw large numbers of intellectual leave the party either by choice, or by expulsion.80 Post-war, economic conditions 78 For discussion of this process see John Paul Eakin (editor), The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, New York, 2004, ‘Introduction’, especially the section subheaded ‘Acts of Resistance: Telling Counterstories’, pp. 11-15. The essay in this collection by Marianne Gullestad, “Tales of Consent and Descent: Life Writing as a Fight against an Imposed Self-Image”, pp. 216-243, is also relevant. 79 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 93. 80 Ibid., p. 119. 34 in Australia largely took away the sense of economic doom and the physical hardship which had helped garner support for the party during the 1930s onwards. By 1965 there were 5300 members, and the decline continued. 81 Despite all this, the CPA had considerable impact upon the life of the nation. As Andrew Wells and Stuart Macintyre explained: Judged by normal political criteria, including its lack of electoral support, the Party was a failure. However, viewed in terms of its effect on public policy, it had some impact, often indirectly. At the same time it provoked from its opponents a vigorous campaign to control and eradicate its influence on Australian society. Its capacity to bring organisational discipline and theoretical coherence to many political campaigns was the basis of much of the Party’s influence and the reactions it provoked. The history of Australian trade unionism cannot be understood unless adequate appreciation is given to the impressive union leaders and organisers who were Party members or who were strongly influenced by Party methods and ideas. The peace movement in the 1930s and the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the struggle against conscription and military involvement in the Vietnam War, was largely shaped by the Party. All the social movements for change in the 1970s and 1980s had strong links to the Party. The Party’s ideology, especially its identification with Marxism, has left a powerful imprint on Australian intellectual life.82 Researchers interested in the CPA have a vast amount of material available to them. Two bibliographies by Beverley Symons and colleagues detail 4189 sources, ranging from the substantial records of the party (200 boxes) in the Mitchell Library (Sydney) to books, chapters, academic articles, and theses. 83 The bibliographies clearly show a bowerbird attitude on the part of 81 Ibid., p. 171. 82 Andrew Wells and Stuart Macintyre, “Introduction”, in Symons, Wells, and Macintyre, Resource Bibliography, p. x. 83 Beverley Symons, Andrew Wells, and Stuart Macintyre (compilers), op. cit.; Beverley Symons, (compiler), Communism in Australia: A Supplementary Resource Bibliography, c.1994-2001, Sydney Branch ASSLH, Newtown, 2002. 35 many former party members, judging from the personal records of individuals that have been deposited in archives and libraries across the nation. When all these resources are added to others related to the CPA, for example “the thousands of files on individual Communists created by ASIO and its predecessors”, there is, as Stuart Macintyre put it, a “wealth of material…a historian’s dream—and nightmare”, one which compels the historian either to abstract, overview, or specialise and focus on the micro. 84 The two previously mentioned bibliographies are indispensable research tools. There are also several substantial scholarly studies of the CPA. The first scholarly account of the party was published in 1969; The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History by Alastair Davidson, based on his PhD thesis, submitted in 1965. The work was assisted by the party’s leadership of the time, and charted the history of the CPA as a political party with an industrial agenda, the focus being the twists and turns of its policies over the years and the ways these either aided or inhibited its political/industrial agendas. Davidson portrayed an organisation that grew out of the Australian socialist movement of the late nineteenth, and early twentieth, centuries, in response to Australian conditions. 85 He outlined the successes and failures of the CPA as it variously struggled over time to deal with and contain the tensions this indigenous origin and tradition, and the organisation’s adherence and interactions with Comintern/Soviet policies, engendered. Davidson contended the party prior to 1950 “can be understood better as a move away from Australian traditions into an alien tradition”. After 1950, however, there were major ideological changes, and the party moved “back to Australian traditions”. This move back was neither smooth, linear, nor problem free, and Davidson characterised it from his mid-to-late 1960s perspective, as a work in progress, the party “stumbling, groping, 84 Stuart Macintyre, “Communist Party History”, in David Clune and Ken Turner (editors), Writing Party History: Papers from a Seminar held at Parliament House, Sydney, 20 May 2006, NSW Parliament, Sydney, 2007, p. 70. 85 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, pp. 3-20. 36 limping…with the weight of past errors” on its shoulders. 86 For Davidson, the party was most successful when it expressed itself in, and implemented, “the Australian way of doing things”. 87 As for the CPA and a revolutionary agenda, this was essentially an alien notion, an imported Comintern policy/idea, inappropriate for, and out of kilter with, Australian conditions. Davidson’s work lacked access to the extensive sources and documentation now available, and the deluge of scholarly research that followed in his wake. Published at a time when the Cold War was still breathing, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and anti-communism was still a powerful political force in Australia, Davidson’s book was a courageous venture for a young academic. Historiographically it was important for its insistence the CPA was a genuine political party warranting scholarly consideration, not some peripheral wrecking organisation and therefore unrelated to Australian history. Davidson’s pioneering venture in what was arguably a risky career move at the time, was no doubt enhanced by the imprint of his American publisher, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Press. Twenty-nine years later another substantive history, this aiming at comprehensiveness, was published: The Reds: the Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, by Stuart Macintyre. It was assisted in terms of research and publication, at a remove, by the CPA. The party, having disbanded in 1991, invested its significant funds to support the work of the Search Foundation, which in turn supported Macintyre’s project. The first of a proposed two-volume history, The Reds took the history of the CPA from its foundation in 1920 through to 1941. The cut off point was crucial, the year Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and made war against the Soviet Union. Germany’s invasion of the USSR helped deliver, for a time, the Australian party’s highest ever membership levels. By the time World War 2 ended, the CPA was a significant political and industrial organisation. 86 Ibid., p. xi. 87 Ibid., p. 182. 37 Macintyre had access to the wealth of materials Davidson did not, and to abundant post-Davidson scholarship. Writing in the 1990s, Macintyre also had significant academic specialists to consult, and former communists willing to remember and share. Moreover, the subject of his work no longer existed. He could deal with the party not as an ongoing political organisation, but forensically as an institution no longer extant. Amongst sources Macintyre drew from for his account were the many autobiographies and memoirs published by party members either while they were party members, or as ex-communists after leaving the party, a genre of writing by “former communists looking back on a lost political cause”. 88 It is a genre of writing that has been noted as being “of particular interest” in Australian autobiographical writing. 89 Commenting on this genre, Macintyre pointed to the subjectivity of this genre, its use of humour, irony, and its “elegiac poignancy”. He also noted that this “genre of communist remembrance is far more noticeable in Australia than in Britain, the United States or elsewhere”. 90 The latter observation suggests the importance of the communist experience in twentieth century Australian political and cultural history. Macintyre was able to take CPA history further than Davidson could have. In the 1960s, Davidson was limited by space, and claimed he had to omit a book length amount of material. 91 In the 1990s, Macintyre was not thus encumbered; he was able to proceed with a two-volume vision. What he produced was not only a history of the party as a radical political/industrial organisation, but one that exercised considerable social and cultural 88 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 7. 89 Laurie Hergenhan, (editor), New Literary History of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988, p. 566. 90 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 7; for Macintyre’s brief bibliographic overview of this genre of literature, see his Endnote 5, p. 421. Ian Syson commented on the spate of Australian autobiographical writing about the communist experience by women since the late 1970s, in ‘“It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want to’: Recent Autobiographical Writings by Australian Women Communists”, Hecate, Volume 22, Number 2, 1996, pp. 144-153. 91 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. ix. 38 influence as well. Social history rather than institutional history, peopled with characters fleshed our beyond naming them, unlike in Davidson’s account, The Reds placed the CPA well and truly in twentieth century Australian social and cultural history. Volume Two at the time of writing, is a work in progress. 92 In both Davidson’s and Macintyre’s histories, the authors emphasised Stalinism, the adherence to Comintern/Soviet determined policies and attendant authoritarian practices associated with this, as the distorting factors on what was otherwise meritorious idealism. My reading of both these histories leaves me with the awareness of the CPA as a political organisation, working within the democratic framework and institutions of Australian society, at times forced to go on the defensive in order to maintain its legal status. 93 Admittedly, Macintyre in particular deals with aspects of the covert, subversive, insurrectionary as they related to the CPA, but essentially both accounts portray a party and an institution playing by the rules. That the party was in essence an anti-capitalist political formation intent on preparing for, and/or fomenting, the ultimate demise of capitalism, with the word/term/concept revolution an active part of its programme and activity, does not significantly cast its shadow over these studies, or if there, is lost in the welter of detail. Absent by and large is clear expression of the sort of resolve and politics former high ranking CPA member and intellectual Eric Aarons admitted to hosting during the 1940s and through the early years of the Cold War. Describing himself in those times as a “professional revolutionary”, and the CPA as an organisation with elements, at least, of the leadership having “a strategy for revolution in Australia” in 1949, Aarons asserted that had the CPA been in power during the 1940s and 1950s, it “could have executed people we considered to be 92 For insight into the writing of The Reds, see Macintyre, “Communist Party History”, pp. 65-73. 93 The classic study of the CPA acting in a democratic way to protect its democratic right to be a legal political party, in the process fully utilising the mechanisms available, is Leicester Webb, Communism and Democracy in Australia: A Survey of the 1951 Referendum, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954. 39 objectively, even if not subjectively (that is, by intention), helping our enemies”. 94 Sure, this can be regarded as political nonsense, as an alien and ‘un-Australian’ way of seeing and doing things, but that does not mean it was not translated into, or caused, political behaviour, political cause and effect. And historically it does matter when words are intended as more than metaphorical bullets, and/or are interpreted as such. Historiographically, if the CPA is regarded as a legal political organisation, as having transparently operated as a legal party, then efforts to variously proscribe and curtail/limit its functioning, can be regarded as matters that go to the core of democratic theory, democratic processes, and constitutional government, raising serious issues about democratic freedoms, liberties, and rights. In terms of domestic intelligence and security services, the resolute pursuit of the party, as happened in Australia, also becomes a questionable, if not objectionable, matter. 95 However, if the CPA is regarded historically, in part at least, as a revolutionary organisation that had capitalism and the state apparatus supporting this in its sites, then regardless of whether or not the party threat was real or imagined, it must be expected the state would have variously worked to protect itself and sought to neutralise the threat.96 94 Eric Aarons, What’s Left? Memoirs of an Australian Communist, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1993, pp. 53, 66, 118. Eric Aarons (1919- ) joined the CPA during the late 1930s, became joint National Secretary from 1976-1984, and was a key person involved in winding up the party in 1991. See also the recollection by Bob Carr of an interview he had with Rupert Lockwood in which this matter of violent resolve was broached, Bob Carr, “Sleeping With the Enemy”, The Spectator Australia, 17 July 2010, p. ix. 95 For a scholarly historical account of political surveillance in Australia to c.1949, see Frank Cain, The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1983. For post-1949 surveillance, David McKnight, Australia’s Spies; for an insightful discussion of the aspects of this surveillance from the viewpoint it was essentially unwarranted and intrusive, see Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals, 1920-1960, McPhee Gribble, South Yarra, 1993. 96 For an examination of the perception of a communist threat, its plausible and rational roots, and the the increasing Cold War anti-communism of the Australian Chifley Labor government (1945-1949), anti-communism usually attributed to political paranoia, see 40 By the same token, the revolutionary party, regardless of the wisdom or otherwise of its enterprise, should be expected in this scenario to have variously worked in whatever ways were deemed necessary, to utilise whatever was available, and to take advantage of whatever circumstances were presented, to advance the demise of capitalism and work towards an imagined socialist future. If this involved the covert and illegal, so be it; indeed, why would it not act thus? None of which involves the historian automatically preferencing either the capitalist state or the revolutionary formation; that decision remains in the domain of the individual historian. But in imagining and conceptualising the past in relation to communism in Australia, the historian needs recognise the power relationships, the political realities, and the imagined involved, for it is within, and out of, these, that history was made. Two scholarly histories of the CPA have taken account of the revolutionary aspects of the party. In Revolutionaries and Reformists, academic and pioneer labour historian Robin Gollan examined the period 1920-1955, stopping the year before the massive membership loss due to the traumatic events of 1956. 97 Gollan focused on the relations between the party, the revolutionaries of his title, and the Australian labour movement, the reformists. He traced the rise of the CPA from its origins in the fragmented socialist movement of the early twentieth century, through to its growth and increasing influence from the 1930s onwards, and on to its decline after 1945. Throughout his account, Gollan was attune to the irony that while the party advocated “the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism”, the general effect of its labour movement practice was “towards Phillip Deery, “Communism, Security and the Cold War”, Journal of Australian Studies, Volume 21, Issue 54-55, 1997, pp. 162-175. 97 Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement, 1920-1955, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975; for a scholarly account of Gollan and his scholarship, Burgmann, ‘“A Greater Concentration of Purpose”’, pp. 25-41. 41 making capitalism work more efficiently”. 98 In a subtle and ironic way, the opposites of revolution and reform were also embedded in the CPA. Himself a former member of the party, Gollan was forthright in his critique of Stalinism on the CPA, adherence to which he attributed its post-1945 decline. Tom O’Lincoln’s Into the Mainstream in 1985, was a political critique and historical account of the CPA from its inception. Written when the party was struggling to reconstitute itself, and on the cusp of its self-organised extinction, O’Lincoln wrote as a Trotskyist. He critiqued the party’s failures and lost opportunities, and prioritised the destructive influence of Stalinism. A political tract in respects, it was the work of an informed and skilful independent scholar, and remains useful and insightful. Importantly, his account proceeded on the basis the CPA was a revolutionary organisation, and that a revolutionary agenda in Australia was neither alien nor unrealistic, understandable since Lincoln wrote as a part of a rival and alternative revolutionary perspective. 99 In Australian communist historiography, O’Lincoln was/is a reminder that when examining the CPA, no matter what idealism or political understandings variously brought individuals into its membership, that coursing though its ideology and function was profound anti-capitalism, and commitment to seeing this enacted. Simply, there were other ways for critics/opponents of capitalism to deal with it, outside the CPA ˗ by reforming and civilising capitalism, by attempting to evolve it away, working through the left of the ALP for example, or through the trade union movement. As will be seen later in this study, Lockwood, had the opportunity during the late 1930s, to build a career within the ALP; but he 98 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 288. 99 Tom O’Lincoln. Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, Stained Wattle Press, Sydney, 1985. References to this publication subsequently are to the online version at http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/into-mainstream/index.htm, accessed 17 January 2011. 42 chose the CPA instead. The existential-political question is Why? Why opt for a life-course that eventually brought hardship, struggle, personal stress, ill-health, financial strains, and numerous possibilities of imprisonment/internment, when another was on the table with almost the certainties of material rewards and security? Of course, when he joined the CPA in 1939, he did not know what the future would bring, but he stayed with the CPA until 1969. Simply, one does not go through this sort of life in the cause of being a member of a cultural/political ginger group, or an organisation of ‘red-liberals’. Writing in 2001, Cold War historian Phillip Deery observed that “the history of communism and anti-communism is being written as we speak”. He was referring to this “history” in both its global and local (Australia) contexts. 100 He was a contributor to what McKnight later described as “a major shift in interpretation” in the “field of Cold War history in Australia”. 101 A significant contribution to this rewriting of history was Deery’s 1995 essay in Labour History, “Chifley, the Army and the 1949 Coal Strike”. A major and traumatic event in Australian labour movement history, the strike and its defeat saw the first peacetime deployment of military forces as strike breakers. And this on the orders of a Labor government. Subsequently, the event generated the general historical understanding that Prime Minister Chifley had resorted to the use of military forces as a reluctant last resort, and that an element of paranoia was involved in the decision making. Drawing on “previously inaccessible sources”, Deery demonstrated how Chifley’s response to the communist led strike was decisive, resolute, and part of a well developed plan formulated during the strike’s infancy. Deery also demonstrated how reasonable and rational Chifley’s decision was at the time, that it was evidentially based, 100 Phillip Deery, “Decoding the Cold War: Venona, Espionage and ‘The Communist Threat’”, in Peter Love and Paul Strangio (editors), Arguing the Cold War, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, 2001, p. 115. 101 David McKnight, “Rethinking Cold War History”, Labour History, Number 95, November 2008, pp. 185-196. 43 and that some leaders of the CPA believed the 1949 strike would “detonate” revolution in Australia. 102 Publication in 1998 of Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944-1950 by Desmond Ball and David Horner, cited earlier in this study, was a watershed in Australian communist historiography. It was the first scholarly Australian study to draw on Venona material relating to Australia. During the Second World War through to 1948, British, American, and Australian intelligence listening-posts successfully monitored cables between Moscow and its embassies and consulates, including those in the US, Britain, and Australia. The US-based decoding and examination of this material was code-named VENONA, and ran from February 1943 until it ended in October 1980. The materials examined also included items collected since 1939. Australian intercepts ran from 1943-1948. Breaking the Soviet encryption was a slow process, taking some two years; 2,900 items harvested and subsequently translated were publicly released in stages beginning in 1995 by the US National Security Agency. The decoding operation revealed the existence and extent of Soviet intelligence and espionage activities in the West, including in Australia. Before their public release the materials were variously used in a closely guarded way by intelligence organisations, governments, security identities like Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover, and were responsible in part at least for the identification of Soviet spies and informants globally and were used, for example in the prosecution of the case against American atomic scientist Julius Rosenberg. 103 102 Phillip Deery, “Chifley, the Army and the 1949 Coal Strike”, Labour History, Number 68, May 1995, pp. 80-97. 103 The Venona materials can be found online via the US National Security Agency ‘Venona’ page at http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/index.shtml.venona/, accessed 24 August 2011. For a detailed account of the Venona operation, see Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 177-202. 44 Ball and Horner detailed the nature and extent of Soviet espionage in Australia between 1944 and 1950, concluding that the “full story can never be told” because of significant gaps in Australian archival records, and the “deaths and dissemblings” of people associated with those espionage activities. 104 Despite this, their book ended the capacity for scholars to legitimately argue that there was no case to answer regarding Soviet intelligence/espionage activities in Australia from 1943 onwards, that claims to this effect during the Cold War were political beat ups and manifestations of anti-communist hysteria. This line of argument is evident, for example, in discussion and analysis of the Petrov Affair (1954-1955), the best example being the 1974 study Nest of Traitors, where authors Nicholas Whitlam and John Stubbs maintained the defection in Australia of Soviet diplomat/spy Vladimir Petrov and subsequent Royal Commission into Espionage constituted a modified Australian version of the McCarthy era. The Royal Commission criticised political nonconformity, sought out and publicised Communists, and, equating communism with disloyalty to Australia, destroyed their reputations….And at the root there remains the definite possibility that a local conspiracy lay behind the Petrov defection and the Petrov papers. 105 As Waterford observed, this sort of analysis failed to acknowledge the “genuine fire in the Petrov smoke”. 106 Prior to 1998, two studies anticipated the historiographical watershed. In 1991 journalist and espionage specialist Richard Hall published The Rhodes Scholar Spy, a biography of scholar and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs officer Ian Milner. A New Zealand born Rhodes Scholar and Oxford graduate, Milner in Hall’s account was convincingly shown to be a Soviet informant during the 1940s. Milner went to live permanently in 104 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 352-353. 105 Whitlam and Stubbs, Nest of Traitors, pp. 167-168. 106 Waterford, “A Labour Myth?”, p. 118. 45 Czechoslovakia in 1950, spending the rest of his life as an academic. 107 In 1994, journalist turned academic David McKnight published Australia’s Spies and their Secret. Benefiting from positive working relationships with the leadership of the disbanded CPA, as well as with former ASIO personnel, McKnight accessed records and recollections previously inaccessible. While he did not have access to Venona documentation, McKnight did introduce new material to the understanding of the Cold War in Australia, establishing, from a ‘security’ point of view the legitimacy of the intense Cold War operation against the CPA, and pointing to the significant links between domestic communist personnel and Soviet intelligence. 108 In 2002 McKnight significantly added to this developing strand of historiography. In Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War he argued that western communist parties generally, despite their public faces, policies and agendas, also had clandestine dimensions of an organisational and cultural kind. This was adopted from, based on, a conspiracy heritage developed by Russian Bolshevism, which in turn drew from a conspiratorial/clandestine tradition that developed in Tsarist times. In McKnight’s account, the conspiratorial aspect was not widely known amongst party rank-and-files, only to selected elements, giving rise to members in the know, and those not. However, this did mean their organisations were, in part at least, subversive, and this facilitated the recruitment of western communists to Soviet intelligence. Aside from using Venona materials, McKnight accessed archival sources in the Australia, Britain, and the US, including substantial sources previously unavailable. His study specifically focused on clandestine communist activity in Britain, the US, Asia, and Australia, the latter detailing for the first time the extent, in many ways sophisticated, clandestine apparatus developed by the CPA during the late 1930s, through 107 Richard Hall, The Rhodes Scholar Spy, Random House Australia, Milson’s Point, 1991. 108 McKnight explained his debt to ASIO in his ‘Acknowledgements’, Australia’s Spies, p. vii. 46 the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. 109 With this account, any depiction of the CPA during the Cold War as a victimised legal party acting in a legal manner, with no clandestine/covert dimension of any consequence, could really no longer be legitimately made, or certainly not without considerable qualification. Post-Venona, scholarship in the US relating to domestic communism and the Cold War has polarised. On one hand there is ‘triumphalist history’, working on the premise that the collapse of communism internationally validates the tactics used to oppose communism internationally and domestically during the Cold War; communism was a force that had to be confronted and defeated. On the other hand are historians who argue this approach is simplistic, that while it is based on new documentary sources, these are selective sources, that triumphalism is a critical perspective in name only and is very much attuned to neo-conservative political agendas. 110 The post-Venona polarisation of scholarship relates to this present study of Lockwood. Rupert Lockwood was involved in clandestine CPA affairs, and prominently in the Petrov Affair. The task is to establish the nature of, and reasons for, this involvement. For historians, Australian scholar Phillip Deery has explained the post-Venona challenge thus: Although countless communists were inspired by noble causes to which they displayed a courageous and selfless commitment, their understandable devotion to the Soviet Union twisted a good fight into the service of a degenerate ideal. Communism was not the diabolical conspiracy of 109 David McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War: the Conspiratorial Heritage, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 2002. For the Australian material, see pp. 140171, 180-197. 110 For an exposition of the triumphalist position, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999. For critiques of triumphalism, Ellen Schrecker (editor), Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, The New Press, New York, 2004. 47 Moscow stooges engaged in systematic subversion, as portrayed by cold warriors. But nor was it the unblemished expression of indigenous revolutionary tradition, in which connections to Moscow were merely perfunctory, as portrayed by successive generations on the left. Thus, in response to new archival evidence, historians may draw (harsh) conclusions about the communist party..….In pursuing such a controversial issue, historians must confront cold war communism without sentiment, neither glorifying the communist project nor dancing on its grave. 111 LABOUR INTELLECTUALS. The Australian labour movement, understood as an umbrella term, refers to the ALP, the trade unions, and their various peak organisations, and includes the many other political parties, organisations, groupings, irrespective of size or influence, as well as individuals, who variously claim to represent/advance the interests of working people, and who place issues of social justice and equity high on their political agendas. This movement has, since the roots of its development in the 1850s, contributed significantly to the shaping of, and to the cultural and political histories of, the nation. 112 As was seen earlier in this chapter, one part of this movement, the CPA, had considerable impact on the life of the nation. Despite its lack of electoral appeal, and its mostly small numerical membership, the CPA affected, often indirectly, public policy, influenced and affected the trade union movement, and “left a powerful imprint on Australian intellectual life”. 113 Earlier in this chapter we also saw that, historically, a significant literary corpus of journals and newspapers was part of this movement. I mention the CPA and 111 Deery, “Communism, Security and the Cold War”, pp. 170-171. 112 For a useful introductory discussion of this large and complex entity, see R. A. Gollan, “The Historical Perspective”, in P. W. D. Matthews and G. W. Ford, editors, Australian Trade Unions: Their Development, Structure, and Horizons, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 24-40. 113 Wells and Macintyre, “Introduction”, in Symons et. al., Resource Bibliography, p. x. 48 the labour movement press here because these references introduce elements of the intellectual to the discussion: a general “powerful imprint” on intellectual life; journals, newspapers, mean the existence of literary producers and target audiences--writers and readers…..in short, intellectual activity was part of the labour movement, and such activity requires the presence of intellectuals, no matter how conceived or defined. There is an established scholarly interest in the presence and role of intellectuals in the Australian labour movement. So, for example, there are significant published studies of the professional revolutionary and intellectual Guido Baracchi (1887-1975), mentioned earlier in this chapter; politician and socialist economist Jim Cairns (1914-2003); anthropologist and activist Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957); historian and civil libertarian Brian Fitzpatrick (1905-1965); adult educator, journalist and trade union official Lloyd Ross (1901-1987). 114 Such expansive biographies are not common. There are also a number of overviews. Academic Patrick O’Brien published a collection of essays titled The Saviours: An Intellectual History of the Left in Australia. In wide-ranging discussions he explored aspects of the relationships between left intellectuals and the ALP, and the CPA. A former labour movement activist himself, O’Brien was stridently antiStalinist in his accounts, the word ‘Saviours’ in his title intended cynically. Lockwood briefly rated mention by O’Brien, described as “the excommunist and Tribune’s former Moscow correspondent”. 115 Much of the discussion in O’Brien’s study involved academics, and debates that while being involved with and related to the labour movement, essentially took 114 Sparrow, A Love Story; Paul Strangio, Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2002; Peter Gathercole, T. H. Irving, Gregory Melluish, (editors), Childe and Australia: Archaeology, Politics and Ideas, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1995; Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Life, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979; Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labour, 1901-1987, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1996. 115 Patrick O’Brien, The Saviours: An Intellectual History of the Left in Australia, Drummond, Richmond, 1977, p. 58. 49 place within the academy or related sites. Similarly, historian Andrew Wells in his survey of the Australian left intelligentsia 1930–1960, an intelligentsia dealing with matters closely related to the concerns and interest of the Australian labour movement, in sentiment and intent if not in terms of practice and activism, focused almost entirely on university trained intellectuals for whom universities were the main sites for their intellectual activities. In Wells’ study, historian Brian Fitzpatrick was the standout inclusion, a prolific intellectual who never secured a tenured university position. 116 Literature academic John McLaren in Writing in Hope and Fear, a study of post-war literary debates involving left and right cultural politics, located the origins of much of the leftist literary/cultural debate of the period in internal CPA debates and conflicts. His study tended to focus on major literary works, key journals, and writers and intellectuals generally well known, all part of established Australian literary/intellectual cultural discourse. 117 A detailed account by Greg Patmore of the ways in which the historical specialisation ‘labour history’, a genre of historical research and writing closely associated with the labour movement, has been written in Australia, focused primarily on university-based scholars/intellectuals. 118 Clearly, the weight of discussion and analysis indicates the significant historical presence of intellectuals, sympathetic to, if not also participants in, the Australian labour movement, in universities and related cultural sites like major literary journals. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the producers of the cited studies were academics, and targeted/discussed the sort of intellectual activity and modus operandi they were familiar with. Obviously, historically, there were intellectuals elsewhere in the labour movement. The substantial number of journals and newspapers associated 116 Andrew Wells, “The Old Left Intelligentsia 1930-1960”, in Brian Head and James Walter, (editors), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 214- 234. 117 John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/Melbourne, 1996. 118 Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History, pp. 1-20. 50 with the movement between 1850 and 1939, largely virgin territory so far as scholarly research is concerned, indicates writers and readers and considerable intellectual activity. Macintyre has described the role of the CPA as “a major publisher, distributor and educator” from 1920 onwards, and drawn attention to the emphasis major communist trade unions placed on “research, education and publicity” and to well produced trade union newspapers during the 1930s. 119 Scates has detailed the extraordinary rich world of cultural and political ferment of which the labour movement was part during the 1890s in Australia, with special attention paid to the radical reading, the bookshops, the meeting places, and the ideas of the period.120 Laffan, in a micro-study of Newcastle (NSW), 1884-1893, detailed the rich and diverse intellectual life of rank-and-file Newcastle labour movement activists. Central to this were visiting lecturers/orators, and the secular Hall of Science venue. 121 Love explained the “restless curiosity”, the diverse reading, and the pattern of writing, of Frank Anstey (1865-1940), a major, self-educated radical Australian labour movement publicist and politician.122 Taksa explained the role in working-class culture during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth centuries of pamphlet literature, the labour movement press, public oratory, venues like the Domain in Sydney, and “private avenues for literary exchange”. Taksa established the existence of a rich and independent social and political working-class 119 Stuart Macintyre, “Case-Study: The Communist Party of Australia”, in Martyn Lyons and John Arnold (editors), A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945:A National Culture in a Colonised Market, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 2001, pp. 51-54; Macintyre, The Reds, p. 339. 120 Scates, A New Australia – literature, publications generally, and the reading experience, infuse Scates’ discussion, but in particular see his Chapter Two, pp. 38-73. 121 Tony Laffan, The Freethinker’s Picnic: Newcastle’s Secular Hall of Science, 1884- 1893, Toiler Editions, Singleton, 1998. 122 Peter Love, “Case-study: Frank Anstey as Reader”, in Lyons and Arnold, A History of the Book in Australia, pp. 354-355. 51 culture, one that traversed an intellectual terrain not conducive to the shaping of a compliant workforce sought by employers. 123 There has been interest in the study and recognition of this wider intellectual domain. The collection of biographies edited by Fry, referred to earlier in this chapter, included discussion relevant to radical intellectual practice. For Fry, being radical and radicalism were interpreted in a counter-hegemonic way, the radicals included in the collection being variously opposed to the prevailing hegemonies of their times. 124 In 2004-06, the online Australian Research Council funded Reason in Revolt project hosted by Melbourne and Monash universities, and led by Verity Burgmann, Stuart Macintyre, and Andrew Milner, set out to chart the role and influence of Australian radical intellectuals in a context wider than just the labour movement. Indebted especially to the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu regarding “the role and social position of intellectuals”, the project conceived the intellectual not as a type of person, but as a social role, including “writers and journalists, actors and painters, priests and teachers, no matter what their own particular abilities and disabilities. This social role can variously be reflection, analysis, commentary on, and critical engagement with, the institutions and practices that constitute the social order”. 125 The project defined radicalism as the process/intention of seeking “to make society more equal and to emancipate the exploited or oppressed”, 126 a project in which the labour movement was significant, but inclusive of other sites of radicalism not 123 Lucy Taksa, “Spreading the Word: The Literature of Labour and Working-Class Culture”, in Shields, All Our Labours, pp. 64-85. 124 Fry, Rebels & Radicals, pp. x-xv. 125 Simon Booth, Verity Burgmann, Stuart Macintyre, Andrew Milner, and Matthew Ryan, “Vanguards and Avant-Gardes: The ‘Reason in Revolt’ Online Project on Political and Cultural Radicalism”, The Past is Before Us: Proceedings of the Ninth National Labour History Conference, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 2005, p. 29; for the indebtedness to Bourdieu, see Endnote 1, p. 36. The Reason in Revolt site is at www.reasoninrevolt.net.au. 126 Booth et. al., “Vanguards and Avant-Gardes”, p. 29. 52 necessarily linked to or part of the labour movement. 127 At the time of writing, the Reason in Revolt project is an ongoing concern. Drawing inspiration from sociologists Jürgen Habermas and Ron Eyerman, and focusing on the labour movement, Irving and Scalmer argued for the conceptualisation of “Australian labour intellectuals”, where the labour intellectual is seen as engaging intellectually in the context of class and politics on behalf of the working class. The concept is inclusive, embracing people from “various class backgrounds, in various political parties, producing both literary and political ideas, both revolutionary and labourist in nature”. 128 The concept of the ‘public sphere’ is important: “the historical space in which private individuals join together as a ‘public’ to rationally debate social arrangements and state activities”. Irving and Scalmer note also that within the ‘public sphere’ in which the labour intellectual operates, it is possible to also identify other, multiple ‘publics’, for example a feminist public sphere, a black public sphere. 129 Irving and Scalmer conceptualised the labour intellectual as a knowledge-producer and symbol-manipulator working within a labour public. Labour intellectuals are distinguishable from other members of the labour movement because they produce knowledge and manipulate symbols. They are distinguishable from other intellectuals because they work within a labour public, and because this shapes the selfunderstanding, practice, direction and form of their intellectual work……….we trace intellectuals back to the sites at which they produce ideas and discourse…….we emphasise that these sites are multiple rather than singular. 130 127 Ibid., p. 30. 128 Irving, Terry, and Sean Scalmer, “Australian Labour Intellectuals: an Introduction”, Labour History, Number 77, November 1999, p. 3. 129 Ibid., pp. 4-5. 130 Ibid., p. 7. 53 Labour intellectuals differ from other intellectuals because of their employment and work sites, which in turn contribute to the shaping of them as intellectuals. They work within labour movement institutions, edit the journals; speak at the stumps; form the arguments; frame the legislation; plan the strategies……They are employed in trade unions, labour councils, socialist parties, radical bookstores, labour parties, newspapers, and working-class educational institutions. Together, these organisations form a specific arena of talk and argument -- a “labour public”. The labour public is a space of withdrawal from wider society and organisation to change it. It is where members of the (labour) movement discuss what they share in common, how to comprehend their collective situation, and how it might be changed. It is also a space where activists plan agitational activities that address, challenge, and convert members of outside groups and alternative networks. The “labour public” is a space with its own, highly particular opportunities and tensions. It constitutes a milieu in which a distinctive kind of intellectual emerges. 131 The expansive conceptions of the labour intellectual advanced by the Reason in Revolt project and by Irving and Scalmer, offer theoretical tools for regarding Lockwood as an intellectual, a social role history and commentary has persistently denied him. Not university trained, and a journalist, the chief site of his intellectual activity was the Australian labour movement. Lockwood worked within a national culture which has been described generally as anti-intellectual, and specifically in a part, the labour movement, which has similarly been described. 132 Further, for thirty years he was part of a formation within the labour movement, the CPA, which both “actively courted intellectuals” while retaining “a ‘lingering suspicion’ 131 Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer, “Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations”, International Review of Social History, Volume 50, Issue 1, April 2005, pp. 2-3. 132 Ibid., p. 1. 54 of them”. 133 The ‘fugitive history’ of Rupert Lockwood the intellectual is therefore clouded by three powerful layers of obfuscation--the wider Australian cultural anti-intellectualism, the specific labour movement antiintellectuality, and the uneasy regard for intellectuals within the CPA. It is not a situation conducive to the easy recognition of an intellectual, or to intellectual activity. 134 CONCLUSION In this chapter, literature and historiographies relevant to the thesis topic were discussed, the chapter laying the groundwork for the eight chapters that follow. Discussion was in four sections: Australian labour biography; Australian journalism history; Australian communism; and the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’. With regard to Australian labour biography, the discussion sought to understand why Lockwood has not been the subject of previous scholarly biographical attention. It was argued the answer lies in the nature of labour biography as it has developed in Australia, where prominent identities in trade unions, and political parties, a pantheon of people and a related canon of institutions, have tended to receive attention, rather than people like Lockwood, distinguished neither by title nor position, people with agency no doubt, yet agency difficult to pin down. The discussion of journalism history drew attention to two types of journalism relevant to the career of Lockwood -- rural journalism, and labour movement journalism. Literature related to both of these areas was 133 Roger D. Marwick, “Activist Academic: Lloyd Churchward as a Labour Intellectual”, Labour History, Number 77, November 1999, p. 29. For discussion of this tense relationship during the second half of the 1930s, when Lockwood joined the CPA, see Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 319-328. 134 The term ‘fugitive history’ has been appropriated from Albert Moran, “Media Intellectuals”, in Brian Head and James Walter, (editors), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 111. He used the term in reference to what he described as the unwritten history of significant liberal left journalistintellectuals employed in various Australian media sites during the post-WW2 period and early 1950s. 55 discussed, and scholarly neglect of the latter in Australia, noted. This discussion was important on two counts: if Lockwood is to be regarded as more than a ‘communist journalist’, then his other areas of journalistic activity require attention, and added to his role as journalist. In Australia, however, both these areas of journalism are relatively under, if not un, explored. The discussion of Australian communism broadly surveyed the state of scholarship regarding the CPA, drawing particular attention to the changes in Australian communist historiography following the public release of the Venona decrypts, beginning in 1995. This historiographical shift is crucial to understanding aspects of the life and work of Lockwood, particularly during the Cold War. The concept of ‘labour intellectuals’ was also discussed, as a way of identifying the presence and role of intellectuals in the labour movement. This will be useful in describing and portraying Lockwood as an intellectual, a role he is seldom credited with. 56 CHAPTER TWO THE GROUNDING: NATIMUK, 1908-1930 In order to liberate Lockwood from the “communist journalist” Cold War pejorative, it is necessary to link that part of his life and work with the rest of his life and career as a journalist. Therefore, this study begins with an account of his rural childhood and youth. The reason for this is not to follow the traditional chronological account of a life from birth to death simply because that is what ‘biography’ does, but to explain the origins of Lockwood’s journalism. As the chapter will demonstrate, Lockwood began his career in journalism as a child, working as an unpaid helper producing his father’s small circulation rural newspaper. Further, to understand this aspect of Lockwood’s life and his unofficial apprenticeship in journalism, and also in printing and publishing, it is necessary to contexualise this aspect of his life in Australian rural journalism. As explained in Chapter 1, this is a realm of journalism that has long been treated by historians as inconsequential, and only recently embraced historiographically as a significant aspect of Australian press and social history. PATERNAL BACKGROUND AND CONTEXTS Rupert Ernest Lockwood was born on 10 March 1908 in his parents’ house in Natimuk, a small town 204 miles (328km) northwest of Melbourne, in the Wimmera region of Western Victoria. The town mainly serviced the surrounding grain and sheep farming community. Rupert was the third of four children, and the second son, for Alfred Wright Lockwood (1867-1956) and his wife Alice, neé Francis (1873-1913). Attending the birth were the local doctor, Dr. ‘Dicky’ Bird, and the district midwife, Mrs. Willie Duncan. The rambling weatherboard house was named Caxton, in tribute to William Caxton (c.1422-1491), the influential, and reputedly the first, English printer. 135 135 The main biographical sources drawn upon for the following accounts of the lives of Alfred and Alice Lockwood are Allan Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, Allan Lockwood, 57 Recalling his upbringing in 1973 for ABC radio interviewer Tim Bowden, Lockwood encapsulated the mannered and religious dimensions of his childhood thus: I came from the kind of home where one learned to use the right forks and spoons, where we sat down at the table in a body, and grace was said. On Sunday morning we went off to Sunday School. That indoctrination didn’t stop we little boys in country towns from robbing our neighbour’s orchard or committing a lot of other sins. 136 Caxton was not only a domestic residence. A door in the parental bedroom led to the adjoining printery and newspaper office, the financial lifeblood of the Lockwood family. There, the account forms for local butcher, baker, grocer and saddler and handbills for dances and concerts were produced on a foot-pedal job printing machine; the tumbler press that printed the four-pages of the West Wimmera Mail one page at a time required one to feed the paper into grippers, another to “fly” it off the tumbling cylinder and another to turn the handle of the propulsive wheel — tasks none of the Lockwood children escaped from about the age of nine. 137 Horsham, 1985; A. W. Lockwood and R. Lockwood, “Alfred Wright Lockwood”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10: 1891-1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1986, p.129; Douglas Lockwood, Alfred Wright Lockwood: A memoir, compiled in connection with a family reunion held at Natimuk on December 26-27, 1976, (no publisher detail), Horsham, 1976; Rupert Lockwood, “Wimmera Boyhood”, Overland, Number 82, December 1980, pp. 8-12. In these sources there is considerable commonality and agreement in relation to narrative and detail. The most detailed and sustained of these accounts is Ink in His Veins, authored by one of Alfred Lockwood’s journalist sons; it has been accepted as a reliable historical source and drawn upon by scholars Rod Kirkpatrick (2002) and Elizabeth Morrison (2005) in their studies of the rural press in Australia. 136 “The Making of an Australian Communist”, Transcript of interview with Rupert Lockwood by Tim Bowden, broadcast on Radio Two (ABC), 16 September 1973, p. 2. 137 Lockwood, “Wimmera Boyhood”, p. 10. 58 Alfred and Alice Lockwood were, as A.W. Martin pointed out in relation to the parents of another Wimmera region child, Robert Gordon Menzies, who would become a significant part of Rupert’s future, “among the first-born of that generation of gold-rush migrants (who) in their youth, literacy and skills (were) the most remarkable wave of newcomers to Australia in the history of European settlement”. 138 Rupert’s paternal great-grandfather was a civil servant from Sheffield, and a Chartist supporter. With his family of eleven, including grandfather Matthew Lockwood, he emigrated to Australia during the Gold Rush, leaving behind the mass social movement for democratic rights which was then simultaneously under sustained attack by state authorities, and declining as it fractured internally due to internal conflicts and pressures.139 En route, Matthew’s brother Wright drowned when he was swept overboard during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. The name ‘Wright’ became part of the name of Matthew’s son, Alfred Wright Lockwood, born in December 1867. In Victoria, Matthew married Ellen Kelly, formerly of Glasgow; they established a small farm near Lancefield (Victoria), produced root crops and fruit for sale, and eventually owned one store and three houses. Matthew died three years after the birth of Alfred, leaving behind considerable debts. Ellen took up dressmaking; Alfred left school at the age of thirteen, and began training as a typesetter/compositor in 1881. He was about to enter a working world and craft that indenture documents of the time, and through to the twentieth century, described as an “art and mystery”. 140 138 A. W.Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, Volume 1, 1894-1943, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1993, p. 1. In making this point, Martin was citing the historian of colonial Victoria, Geoffrey Serle. 139 For discussion of this period of the history of Chartism, see Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007, pp. 313-340. 140 Jim Hagan, Printers and Politics; A History of the Printing Unions, 1850-1950, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1966, pp. 1, 5. 59 The print industry Alfred entered during the last decades of the nineteenth century was shaped by the old attitudes of a craft tradition imported to the Australian colonies by British printer migrants in the decades following the gold rushes. It was a tradition which valued self-reliance, pride in one’s work, “craftsmanship, moral living, and self-improvement”. Accompanying these was a belief in the dignity and social worth of the work of a printer, warranting a “privileged position in a capitalist society”. 141 These attitudes would variously be reflected in the future life and career of Alfred, and dynastically in the lives and careers of his future children, most of whom engaged in the world of printing, newspapers, publishing, during the following century. It was an industry that was expanding, dominated by the newspaper industry, with book printing “a commercial sideline”. 142 As the Australian colonies headed for nationhood, there was growing metropolitan and rural demand for daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies. This demand was fuelled by population growth, immigration, economic expansion, increasing literacy rates, and assisted by technological improvements like “the overseas telegraph…cheap pulp-based paper, and rapid, regular transport”. 143 Despite technological changes in England and in the United States which mechanized typesetting, in Australia reliance remained on the manual handsetting of type. The increasing demand for the printed word, swelled not only by the increasing number of printed commodities available on the market, but also by rising circulations and increased sizes of newspapers, was met by increasing the numbers of employees, both trained, and apprenticed, and engaging cheap labour in the form of non-apprenticed boys. 144 As Hagan commented, the Australian printing industry during the 141 For detailed discussion of this craft tradition, Ibid., pp. 1-22. 142 Ibid., p. 55. 143 Macintyre, A Concise History, p. 119; Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 53-54. 144 Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 39-40, 55, 59. 60 second half of the nineteenth century was “the trade of Caxton pushed to its final and exhausted limit”. 145 In rural Victoria, newspapers proliferated. As Blainey colourfully wrote, there was “a brigade of country newspapers (which) boasted that they circulated extensively in countless one-horse towns”, variously claiming large and influential readerships. 146 The country press in Victoria by the 1880s was beginning to develop a separate identity from the metropolitan press, and expanding in the process. In 1880 there were 74 press sites in Victoria, producing 103 newspapers; by the end of 1889 this had increased to 116 sites. Further, while rural towns could lose population numbers, they retained their newspapers. According to Elizabeth Morrison, in late 1889 the weekly circulation of newspapers in Melbourne was about 1,134,000 for a population of 459,360, while the rural newspaper circulation was about 430,000 copies in a population of 645,578. This latter represented the circulations of 159 papers “coming out simultaneously”. The trend during the 1880s was to the publication of biweekly and triweekly newspapers, and for their cost to drop slightly. Most rural press sites, about eighty per cent, were connected to Melbourne by rail, a factor aiding their circulation and the development of a readership and influence beyond the local. 147 Two factors contributed to the creation of this rural print “brigade”. The amount of work involved in producing a small run publication could be met with a small amount of capital and use of the relatively cheap manually operated printing equipment available at the time, which in turn required little in the way of labour to operate—“a smart lad” was all that was required according to one contemporary advertisement. As publishing regimens other than daily publication (weeklies, biweeklies, triweeklies) were the preferred option in rural areas, the typesetting and printing could 145 Ibid., p. 58. 146 Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Victoria, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 89. 147 Morrison, Engines of Influence, pp. 259, 260-261, 263-264, 267, 270, 306-307, 308-311. 61 be done by “a man and a boy”, or as Alfred Lockwood later managed when he became a newspaper owner, with the “gratuitous work” of family members. 148 Also contributing to the burgeoning of the rural press was a transplanted British print tradition, the existence of a pool of casual nomadic compositors. In the words of Hagan, this was “a drifting army” of tradesmen who, by choice or need, quit metropolitan centres where increasing mechanization and economic depression during the 1880s and 1890s took away their jobs. Known as “tramp printers”, they sought work in rural areas, plying their skills from town to town where there were newspapers, “tramping”, walking the distances in between. This form of transient casual labour, sometimes able to establish routines of casual employment, helped the owners of small rural newspapers to operate with little more than a skeleton workforce. Alfred Lockwood was influenced by the “tramp printers” he met during his period of training, and, as we will see, temporarily became part of this itinerant labour pool following completion of his apprenticeship. 149 Another dimension of the nineteenth century print world of the second half of the century, so far as a youngster like Alfred was concerned, was that the future of a trained typesetter/printer need not be confined to the printing craft. Since the days of Caxton, there were printers who had also been publishers, initiators and creators of the printed word, not only the setters and printers of the word. Typesetter/printers could also become owners of newspapers, and take the roles of editor and journalist, courtesy of the factors explained previously regarding the sorts of labour that could be drawn on, and the availability of relatively simple manually operated 148 Hagan, Printers and Politics, p. 59; Rod Kirkpatrick, “Shooting Folly as it Flies: Greatness and Country Editors”, Australian Journalism Review, Volume 24, Number 1, July 2002, p. 108. 149 Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 18-19, 104; A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 16, 22- 24. 62 printing equipment. It was a world in which a person, aspiring as Alfred did to become a newspaper owner, could train as a compositor, and work towards the goal of becoming newspaper owner, editor, and journalist. 150 As Elizabeth Morrison noted, by 1889 there was in rural Victoria “an occupational group of hundreds of newspaper men, combining some or all of the skills of compositor, printer, journalist and business manger”. 151 Alfred did a six-year apprenticeship with the small circulation weekly rural newspaper the Lancefield Mercury, working sixty-four hours a week during his first year, eighteen hours on publication day. The newspaper was owned and edited by John Little, the local clerk of works and a supporter of the Sydney radical literary weekly, The Bulletin, subscriptions to which he promoted. Little regarded his newspaper as having a leading role in the community; he did not refrain from editorialising uncompromisingly on any matter, issue, or personage, big or small. His journalism could be “vitriolic” and “blistering”. He also used his pages to campaign against rival publications; in this he was not alone, Henry Mayer regarding the propensity for early rural editors to engage in mutual antagonisms and name calling, a factor leading to them generally being regarded with low repute. 152 Overall, the spirited, personal, community leadership role modeled by Little was an approach to newspapers and journalism Alfred imbibed; he was influenced by this type of journalism, which allowed and even encouraged editorial comment on ‘hard’ or ‘straight news items. He followed the style throughout his life, to the delight of most of his readers but the dismay of some of his family. 153 150 Hagan, Printers and Politics, pp. 28, 58-59. For Alfred Lockwood’s aspirations to be a newspaperman and journalist at the outset of his career, see Ink in His Veins, p. 9. 151 Morrison, Engines of Influence, pp. 267-268. 152 Mayer, The Press in Australia, p. 190. 153 This paragraph is based on the account of the journalism of John Little by A. Lockwood, Ink in his Veins, pp. 17-21; for the quotes respectively, pp. 18, 17. 63 During his time with the Lancefield Mercury Alfred engaged in the full life of the newspaper, reporting, setting type, reading galley proofs, making up and locking up pages, printing, wrapping papers, addressing mailing labels, delivering the end result to the post office. He left the paper in 1887 in search of better pay and to broaden his experience by working as a ‘tramp printer’. For two years he worked the newspapers/printeries of north-eastern Victoria, and on both sides of the Murray River, travelling mainly by foot between towns and work, covering up to twenty-six miles a day. He returned to Lancefield, an experienced typesetter-printer-journalist, and was again offered work on the Mercury, now under new ownership/management. He became part-owner of this paper in 1893, selling his interest in 1899 to purchase the West Wimmera Mail, a four-page weekly, in Natimuk. MATERNAL BACKGROUND AND CONTEXTS On the maternal side of Rupert’s family, grandfather Henry Francis came from petty gentry from the Tavistock region of Devon. He disappointed his family by not entering a profession, embarking instead for the Californian goldfields in 1849. Successful in finding gold there, he moved to the goldfields of Victoria in 1851, where he was also successful. But he was unable to keep his wealth together, and in the words of family historian Allan Lockwood, “squandered the fortune early”. 154 Henry married a fellow British immigrant, also with the same surname, Julia Francis; their daughter Alice was born in the gold-mining town of Whroo in 1873. Alice was educated at Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Melbourne (PLC), on a scholarship; she won prizes for music, art, and botany. She attended PLC during the time one of the school’s historians, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, termed the “halcyon days”, the period 1879-1889. 155 She was a contemporary of 154 Ibid., p. 26. 155 The period thus termed is discussed in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, PLC Melbourne: The First Century, 1875-1975, The Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Burwood, 1975, Chapter 4, pp. 7998. 64 Ethel Florence Richardson, later the distinguished novelist ‘Henry Handel Richardson’, whose novel The Getting of Wisdom (1910) is based on her PLC schooldays (1883-1887). 156 PLC aimed to provide girls with a serious education in which hard work was demanded, and high academic results anticipated and expected. 157 Contrary to prevailing attitudes of the time, the school regarded women as “part of the human constituency of the human race” and it was considered “unjust to deprive them of one of the greatest boons of civilization, education, and to shut them out from occupations to which education was the key”. 158 The school based its character training on the development of responsibility, self-discipline, and intellectual integrity. 159 During the “halcyon days”, mathematics in particular was emphasised, a curriculum area the school’s authorities identified as particularly lacking in the education of girls, and the teaching and performance of music flourished. New subjects became part of the curriculum, including Greek to enable girls to qualify for admission to Arts at Melbourne University, and Botany. 160 In due course, and following the example of her older brother Ernest to whom she was close, Alice became a rural schoolteacher. She had had ambitions, encouraged by her PLC schooling, to become a doctor, but due to her health, finances, and contemporary obstructions to women entering medicine, she became a teacher instead. Teaching was a profession which, for women at the time, combined respectability with a short time of independence prior to marriage, or a career and security in lieu. At the age of seventeen Alice began a decade of teaching in rural Victoria, her first posting to the one-teacher school at Toombullup, in north-east Victoria; she 156 Novelist Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson neé Richardson (1870-1946) wrote under the pseudonym ‘Henry Handel Richardson’. She boarded at PLC between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. In 1932 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. 157 K. Fitzpatrick, PLC Melbourne, pp. 54-55. 158 Ibid., pp. 59-60. 159 Ibid., p. 76. 160 Ibid., pp. 82, 87-88. 65 subsequently taught in Goldie, and Lake Elingmite. Her brother, Ernest, sent her a rifle for her protection; she reputedly laughed, and used it to supplement her food by shooting rabbits. Alice was a person of intellect, courage, tenacity, qualities nurtured by her PLC schooling, the latter two qualities required in good measure to survive a decade as a single woman teacher in rural Victorian Victoria. 161 It was at one of her rural postings that she met Alfred Lockwood. By 1900, when they married, she was a “schoolteacher, musician, and temperance campaigner”, and a convert to the Church of Christ. 162 Her married life was short; the mother of four children, she succumbed to breast cancer in April 1913, at the age of forty. The grit, strength, and faith of Alice is evident in last fragile entry in her Diary, the pen slipping offline from the neatness of previous entries, the handwriting large and looped when it used to be neat and disciplined: The great Finis comes for me I’m slipping into the Valley & must bid my diary a lone farewell. God bless & guide my dear ones safely so that they may all be gathered to the better home later when I trust He will let me meet them. 163 161 On teaching as a career for women, Gwyneth Dow and Lesley Scholes, “Christina Montgomery”, in R.J. W. Selleck and Martin Sullivan, editors, Not So Eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984, p. 172; for some of the difficulties and problems facing female teachers in rural Victoria at this time, see Judith Biddington, “The Weekes Family”, Ibid., pp. 132-148. For the working conditions of female teachers in rural New South Wales during the late nineteenth century, conditions similar to those in rural Victoria, see Noeline Williamson, “The Employment of Female Teachers in the Small Bush Schools of New South Wales, 1880-1890: A Case of Stay Bushed or Stay Home”, Labour History, Number 43, November 1982, pp. 1-12. 162 A. and R. Lockwood, “Alfred Wright Lockwood”, p.129. 163 Diary of Alice Ellen Francis/Lockwood, 1898-1913, entry dated 11 March 1913. For a photocopy of her Diary, 1898-1913, NLA: MS 10121, Box 1, Folder 2. 66 The person she was, and became, is evident in the obituary published at the time in the West Wimmera Mail : The relationship existing between her and the school children was something more than that of mere teacher and scholars, the children becoming very endeared to her, so much so, that some of them kept in touch by correspondence up till the time of her death. Needless to say they all deplore the death of one whose association with them did not end at the call of “dismiss!”, for Mrs. Lockwood was an educationalist in human sympathy, far beyond the teaching inside the four walls of a school. Though her strength was hardly enough to stand it, she philanthropically commenced a night school in Natimuk for the benefit of young people, who wished to improve their education, which continued till failing health commanded its discontinuance…. ….Mrs. Lockwood held very strong convictions on the temperance, social and political questions. She was always outspoken, and one always knew exactly where she stood on any question whether her views met with popular favour or not. She was exceptionally gifted as a linguist, and her conversation at all times quaint, humorous, and interesting. She took a deep interest in local public affairs.164 THE WEST WIMMERA MAIL From 1899 until he retired in 1950 at the age of 83, Alfred Lockwood was the proprietor and editor of the West Wimmera Mail (525 subscribers). His retirement came with the last issue of the paper for 1950, which meant that in his working life he produced more than 3000 weekly issues of his newspaper. 165 The West Wimmera Mail had started in 1887, and by the time of its purchase by Lockwood, had had three owners. Lockwood financed the purchase using his own capital and a loan from his uncle, a successful 164 “Death of Mrs. Lockwood”, West Wimmera Mail, 11 April 1913, http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/th/read/AUS-VICNORTHWEST/2002-05/1022495290, accessed 8 November 2011. 165 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 225. 67 Lancfield entrepreneur. 166 The newspaper was a handset four-page weekly, published on Thursdays, and printed on a manually operated press; this later involved three separate functions requiring the work of three people. The printery was not mechanised until late 1937; the first mechanised (linotype) set issue was published 7 January 1938, followed towards the end of that year by the first issue of the paper printed on a electric powered press. 167 The West Wimmera Mail was a newspaper in search of an audience beyond the local, and with a mission. When under the ownership of editor Little, it had announced in the issue for 27 April 1887, a potential future readership numbering “thousands”, to be attained through the distribution of a copy of the paper “to every mechanics’ institute in the colony”. 168 In the first issue of the paper under new ownership in 1899, Lockwood editorialised: Every effort will be put forth to make this journal as far-reaching in its influence as possible. With this end in view, we contemplate making arrangements by which our readers will be brought more up-to-date, through the medium of telegraphy, on commercial, political and other important maters. In making our bow to the people of the West Wimmera, we are fully cognisant of the responsibility of our position, and of the possibilities before us. 169 As a newspaper editor and reporter, Alfred Lockwood was diligent; he travelled extensively throughout the region by horse and gig, later by car, staying away from home for up to three days at a stretch, gathering material for stories -- reporting meetings of Shire Councils, and those of a multitude of local organisations—as well as selling subscriptions and advertising space. 170 He was personally involved in numerous local organizations; he regarded people who did not involve themselves, but could, as “parasites”. 166 Ibid., pp. 10-11, 32. 167 Ibid., pp. 186-189. 168 Morrison, Engines of Influence, p. 258. 169 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 33. 170 Ibid., p.131. 68 His closeness to the community, and the intimacy of that community, did not deter him from making his viewpoint known in print, on anything, even church sermons; he editorialised and commented freely, despite the risk, and reality, of causing offence with attendant loss of subscriptions and advertising. 171 For Alfred, there was a catalogue of wrongdoers against which he variously, sometimes scathingly, railed—“town larrikins, ‘flappers’, ‘shirkers’, and socialists.” 172 He also successfully used the paper to campaign for improvements to the local area, and to champion the well-being of its residents. 173 A feature of each issue of the paper was his popular column “The Man in the Corner”, in which he observed and commented on moments in the lives of the local citizenry, often embarrassing moments, conveyed in a corny, humorous, gossipy, sometimes pointed, style, the information often coming via callers to the printery’s office or by telephone. 174 Alfred was ardently Royalist, and his newspaper was politically conservative. It was intensely anti-Boer during the Boer War; the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 was written up with “bold black rules between” the columns; it was enthusiastic in its support of World War 1. 175 But Alfred and his newspaper could not be taken for granted. In 1916 the Australian government sought to introduce conscription and submitted this to two referendums; during the first of these, the 1916 Conscription Referendum, when rural newspapers in the Federal electorate of Wannon (which included Natimuk) were refusing to report the ‘No Case’ and refusing to take ‘No Case’ advertising, the West Wimmera Mail was one of the few newspapers 171 Ibid., pp. 134,140, 236; A. and R. Lockwood, “Alfred Wright Lockwood”, p. 129; Kirkpatrick, “Shooting Folly”, p. 108. 172 A. and R. Lockwood, “Alfred Wright Lockwood”, p. 129. 173 Ibid. 174 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 137, 141. 175 Ibid., pp. 36, 38, 81-85, 103-107. 69 in the region to break ranks and report the ‘No Case’. The independence shown by its editor is palpable; the majority of Wannon voters were in favour of conscription in 1916, and while the verdict reversed in the 1917 referendum, the majority of Natimuk voters still voted ‘Yes’. 176 How then to judge Alfred Lockwood: as a cantankerous small-town scribe with his own small circulation newspaper, one that survived by the skin of its teeth; or this, and something more? As discussed in Chapter 1, Elizabeth Morrison, examined the nature and influence of rural newspapers in Victoria during the period 1840 to 1890, amongst these the West Wimmera Mail. Appropriating an image from Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), where “The Press” was described as “a mighty engine”, Morrison demonstrated how the rural press in this period helped shape “the attitudes of their readers and gave them a sense of themselves”. According to Morrison’s analysis, this was a multi-layered process in which the press helped develop and articulate senses of the local, the rural as distinct from the metropolitan, all in the context of helping shape an emerging “modern British state of Victoria”. 177 Given this, and despite Alfred Lockwood’s editorship being just outside the scope of Morrison’s study, it can be argued Alfred Lockwood was part of a not inconsequential social process. Further, a conclusion made by Rod Kikpatrick in his study of the “greatness” of rural editors, based on a sample of Australian rural newspaper editors selected from different eras, communities and regions, including Alfred Lockwood, was that Alfred Lockwood warrants being regarded as a “great” editor. This, “for his forthrightness despite overbearing economic circumstances”, and for demonstrating “the 176 Ina Bertrand, “The Victorian Country Vote in the Conscription Referendum of 1916 and1917: The Case of the Wannon Electorate”, Labour History, Number 26, May 1974, pp. 23, 25, 26. 177 Morrison, Engines of Influence, pp. 1, 317, 329-331; see also Rod Kirkpatrick, “Survival and Persistence: A Case Study of Four Provincial Press Sites”, Australian Studies in Journalism, Issue No. 5, 1996, p. 159. 70 importance of articulating a community’s concerns so that its voice is heard in the halls where state and national issues are debated”. 178 Regarding the journalisitic style of the West Wimmera Mail, which not only conveyed information, but could also seamlessly fuse reporting with comment and opinion, it harked back to a tradition of journalism with roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the press was partisan, before the development of the contemporary convention of Western journalism, with its emphasis on “objectivity and balance”, and journalists positioned “as bystanders whose primary role is to act as conduits for information”. This modern approach to journalism, Bowd argued, reflects in part the growth of mass commercial media, and the twentieth century objective to create a ‘scientific’ model of journalism producing journalism that would not alienate potential mass readerships. 179 Australian rural newspaper editors have, as Kirkpatrick noted, mostly been male, a situation that remained unchanged until the 1990s. 180 So far as the West Wimmera Mail is concerned, scholarship has rightly focused on Alfred Lockwood. However Alice Lockwood, during the thirteen years of her marriage to Alfred, which were the last years of her life, was a key instrumentality in the survival and success of the paper. She brought her own capital to the enterprise, a pool of casual typesetting labour that was drawn on in the form of her brother, two sisters, a nephew and a niece, and she performed functions we would now term ‘customer relations’, accountant, and debt collection. Between 1903 and 1908, the West Wimmera Mail embarked on an ambitious expansion programme. Using Alice’s capital, interests were brought in newspapers in Kaniva and in Bordertown, and another newspaper was established in Edenhope, using the West Wimmera Mail but with a change of masthead. Between 1905 and 1908, 178 Kirkpatrick, “Shooting Folly”, pp. 111-112. 179 Kathryn Bowd, “A Voice for the Community: Local Newspaper as Local Campaigner”, Australian Journalism Review, Volume 29, Issue 2, December 2007, pp. 78-79. 180 Kirkpatrick, “Shooting Folly”, p. 100. 71 Alice was the owner of this newspaper, The Edenhope Chronicle; it was set up independent of its Natimuk parent, with its own Edenhope office, printing press, copy, and advertisements, and leased by an editor trained by Alfred. The lease agreement was for three-years. The expansion project was wound back in 1908; The Chronicle was closed, other interests sold off, and energies concentrated on the Natimuk enterprise. The Edenhope editor, Leslie Duncan, went on to work on rural newspapers in Victoria and South Australia, established one with the assistance of capital from Alice, and ended his days as the Labor member for the South Australian State seat of Galwer (1938-1952). 181 The West Wimmera Mail was a family newspaper, in the sense that it was produced by a family. The survival of the paper was due, in part, as Kirkpatrick has pointed out, to “gratuitous work done by members of the Lockwood family”. 182 As Rupert recalled in 1980, from about the age of nine, the Lockwood children helped work the manually operated tumbler press that printed the newspaper. 183 Following the death of Alice, and Alfred’s remarriage, the children of that relationship also became ‘gratuitous’ workers on the newspaper. To a great extent, Lockwood family life centred around the newspaper, and it is almost impossible to come away from encounters with the writings and recollections of family members understanding otherwise---that for the Natimuk Lockwoods, the world of printing, publishing, producing a newspaper, was what life was about. One of Alfred’s sons, Allan, titled his biography of his father Ink in His Veins (1985), a way of portraying a person so immersed in the world of print that ink metaphorically coursed through him. The same could be said for the majority of Alfred’s children. 181 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 44-49, 57. 182 Kirkpatrick, “Shooting Folly”, p. 108. 183 Lockwood, “Wimmera Boyhood”, p. 10. 72 Moreover, it was a print and newspaper environment where the emphasis was on making do, on working with what was available, of not being limited by limited resources; improvisation was essential. This attitude is exemplified by how Alfred and the family handled potentially daunting big production jobs, like hand-setting local Council electoral rolls, and local show catalogues. In an area where there were many German names, resulting in an enormous drain on the letters ‘e’, ‘s’, ‘d’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘w’ in particular, and not being able to afford adequate supply of type, the problem was solved thus: the u’s were turned upside down to make n’s, q’s became b’s, p’s upside down made d’s, at a pinch an inverted w could be made to read as an m and an m as a w, and the l could double as a figure 1 and vice-versa. 184 It was a world in which the Lockwood children were exposed at an early age to improvisation, a confident can-do attitude in which there were no barriers that could not be surmounted, and an insider approach to printing and the making of newspapers that took from the processes any mystery it might hold for outsiders; attitudes and strengths that would be variously manifested in the adult professional lives of most of the children. There is a poignant section in the obituary for Alice Lockwood, referred to earlier, which suggests the centrality of the newspaper to life with the Lockwoods. Towards the end of a two-year battle with beast cancer, she had to give up what the obituary writer termed “as being a great help to her husband in the literary work connected with the newspaper”: Ten weeks ago, however, failing strength compelled her to give in, and it was then evident to those that attended her that her days on this earth were numbered. Despite all that medical skill and careful nursing could do, she became gradually weaker, and on Saturday it was plain to her medical advisor, Dr. Bird, that the call for her to relinquish her hold on things on earth and ascend to her heavenly rest would come ere Sunday morning’s 184 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 63-64. 73 sun. Nearing midnight she asked for a newspaper, but soon afterwards her head drooped, there was a sigh, and her soul had gone peacefully to it’s (sic) Maker. 185 What paper she asked for is not specified. Suffice to say it was a newspaper that was requested, and not any other of the literature present in the house: Alice liked the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and had delivered a talk on the poet to a meeting of the Natimuk Mutual Improvement Society, a literary and debating society, in 1901; the Melbourne newspaper preferred was the Argus, rather than the Age, the latter “suspected of being slightly Labor”. 186 Journals regularly in the house were the Sydney literary journal, the Bulletin, the illustrated literary journal Table Talk from Melbourne, and from England, the weekly newspaper the Illustrated London News, and the society journal Tatler. These latter were procured on the basis of a contractual arrangement with the local Mechanics’ Institute, the Lockwood family collecting them after they had been used by the Institute for a fortnight. As Allan Lockwood recalled, “the Lockwood dining room-cum lounge never lacked reading matter”. 187 Real or imagined, the contrivance of an obituary writer or otherwise, the image of a dying person requesting a newspaper, that request ‘a last request’, and that person a Lockwood, is indicative of an outsider’s perception, or an insider’s understanding, of the centrality of this medium for that person, and for the family. The newspaper environment of the Lockwood household was a potent training ground; four of the seven Lockwood children, three of these from the second marriage, forged adult careers in Australian journalism and letters. Aside from Rupert, Douglas (1918-1980) was, like Rupert, introduced in childhood to printing and journalism through work on the West Wimmera Mail, followed by five years with the paper after leaving school at the age of 12. He subsequently served another five years on other 185 “Death of Mrs. Lockwood”, West Wimmera Mail, 11 April 1913. 186 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 3. 187 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 39, 166; Lockwood, “Wimmera Boyhood”, p. 12. 74 rural papers before being employed by the Melbourne Herald; he was posted to Darwin in 1941, reported the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942, did a stint as a war correspondent, went on to become a national award winning journalist, distinguished author of thirteen books on northern Australia and its people, and finally a newspaper executive. Unlike Rupert and Douglas, the younger Frank (1919-1997) and Allan (1922-) did not leave the fold of the West Wimmera Mail. Like their brothers, they too were inducted during childhood to Natimuk printing/journalism, but stayed on in Natimuk and were retained on the paper. Following the retirement of their father, they respectively assumed the roles of business manager and editor. Under their planning they expanded the paper to the neighbouring large rural centre of Horsham, merging in 1959 with the Horsham Times (established in 1873), to form the Horsham-based triweekly the Wimmera Mail-Times. This new publication rose to become the biggest circulating triweekly newspaper in Australia, and a part of what was then the infant media empire of Rupert Murdoch. 188 Arguably, the Natimuk legacy of Alfred Lockwood and his newspaper did not end there, but continued dynastically. Kim Lockwood, son of Douglas, spent his working lifetime as a journalist with the Murdoch organisation; Allan’s youngest son Keith was, at the time of writing, chief sub-editor of the Wimmera Mail-Times. Writing in 2006, Kim Lockwood observed that Keith was “the last of seven Lockwoods who have served newspapers in Australia for 126 years”. 189 None of this is surprising; as Morrison has pointed out, a characterisic of rural Victorian rural newspapers was its tendency to create newspaper dynasties, and this was discernable by 188 Mickey Dewer and Kim Lockwood, “Lockwood, Douglas Wright (1918-1980)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 15:1940-1980, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2000, pp. 111-112; A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 233; Kim Lockwood, “Last of the Lockwood’s - Almost”, Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter, Number 39, October 2006, pp. 16-17. 189 K. Lockwood, “Last of the Lockwoods”, p. 17. 75 1889. 190 Secondly, data collected by Crikey during the period 2001-2005 indicates that nepotism, or dynasties, have long been part of the Australian media, Crikey listing 217 journalists, and other media workers, with family backgrounds in which journalism or other media has been the main site of employment. In numerous cases, as with the Lockwoods, this was an employment common to generations within the same family. 191 A GERMAN DIMENSION Understanding she was dying, Alice made efforts to ensure she continued as a force in the life of her four children. In her will she stipulated they were to each get the best education possible. She left each a letter in the care of her sister, to be given to them when they reached the age of 12; in these she exhorted them to do good in the world, and warned of the dangers of swearing, smoking, and alcohol. 192 Arguably it was a life trajectory beyond Natimuk she envisaged for her children, and in due course they would leave the town and variously engage with the wider world, Rupert returning in late life to die. He is buried in the Natimuk cemetery next to Alice. According to Rupert’s recollections, the death of Alice cast a pall over childhood. Alfred’s reaction was to immerse himself in his newspaper work and his printery, to the virtual neglect of his family, while without Alice the financial side of business deteriorated chaotically. For a time the town chipped in, providing and cooking food, doing housework, looking after the children. Pastoral leadership on the homefront devolved on to the eldest, Lionel and Freda. Ultimately Freda took over the responsibility, following Lionel’s departure for Ballarat High School after winning a scholarship. 193 190 Morrison, Engines of Influence, p. 268. 191 “Australia’s many media dynasties”, Crikey, 21 March 2005 http://www.crikey.com.au/2005/03/21/australias-many-media-dynasties/, accessed 8 November 2011. 192 De Berg p. 17, 496; A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 78. 193 De Berg, pp. 17,490-91; 17,493; A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 79-80, 86, 93. 76 Alfred unsatisfactorily employed a succession of part-time housekeepers, and Rupert recalled sleeping at times on three chairs in the dining room; head lice were a problem, and he recalled being teased at school for being lousy. Christmas 1913 was overlooked by Alfred, and it was Lionel who made last minute arrangements to observe the tradition. 194 However in March 1916 this domestic situation came to an end when, following a year of formal courtship, Alfred married Ida Dorothea Klowss (1886-1944). She was the locally born daughter of two of the numerous pioneer German immigrants who had helped settle the Wimmera; regionally the descendents of these settlers comprised a “significant minority”. 195 Ida conversed in both English and German, was a Lutheran, and a noted musician in church circles; according to son Allan, she had a natural charm and modesty which “added up to an inner beauty”. Her one stipulation in entering marriage with forty-nine year old Alfred was that if there were children from their union, they would be raised as Lutherans; he agreed. 196 With the outbreak of war in 1914, the Natimuk German-Australian community responded patriotically, significantly donating cash and livestock to the local patriotic fund, engaging in other related fund-raising activities, while some of their sons went off to the front lines, one of them amongst the early casualties. 197 As McQuilton noted, a “striking feature of the (Australian) regional war effort was the simple fact that ethnicity was no bar to participation”. 198 However, in Natimuk this did not prevent community suspicion of, and hostility towards, the local ethnic community, in the forms, for example, of verbal and psychological pressures, causing 194 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 80. 195 Bertrand, “Victorian Country Vote”, p. 29. 196 On Ida Dorothea Klowss see, A. Lockwood, Ink in his Veins, pp. 86-89; De Berg, pp.17493-17,494. 197 A. Lockwood, Ink in his Veins, p. 82; on local patriotic funds, see John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2001, pp. 21-23. 198 McQuilton, Rural Australia, p. 168. 77 some families to leave the Lutheran Church. 199 As Fischer argued and detailed, racist hostility and restrictive measures, including internment, directed towards the German-Australian community during World War 1 by the Australian government and people, was characterized by “unrestrained vehemence and violent fanaticism”. According to Fischer, the aim of the Australian government was to destroy the German–Australian community “as an autonomous, socio-cultural entity within Australian society”. 200 In the Wimmera region, it may have been the case that anti-Germanism influenced the ethnic community to strive to be, and to be seen, as patriotic and loyal; a breakdown of voting in support of the two conscription referendums shows strong “Yes” voting in electoral subdivisions where German-born and their descendents were most numerous. 201 On the night of their marriage, Alfred and Ida Lockwood left Natimuk and the Lockwood children, for a brief honeymoon in Ballarat, and later in Warnambool. The children woke the next morning to find the German flag fluttering from the roof of Caxton. When the honeymooners returned, there was another German flag draped across their front door; subsequently the West Wimmera Mail office was the recipient of anonymously sent homemade ‘iron crosses’, iconic German military symbols, fashioned out of sheet iron. At school Rupert became an outsider, and was taunted with jeers of “Your father married a German”. Alfred’s reaction was to fume, “How could they?” as he and his family became the object of anti – German sentiment, but he did not change his pro-war stance. 202 These anti-German incidents feature prominently in Rupert’s recollections of childhood in interview and memoir; whether this prominence is a case of 199 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp.84-86. 200 Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914-1920, University of Queensland Press, S. Lucia, 1989, pp. 8, 100. 201 Bertrand, “Victorian Country Vote”, p. 30. 202 De Berg, pp. 17,494-17,496; Lockwood, “Wimmera Boyhood”, p. 8; A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 91. 78 a journalist recasting childhood for dramatic effect, or the person recalling childhood as remembered and felt, could be debated. 203 However, it is worthwhile noting that a significant part of Rupert’s adult life as an activist and historian was spent variously countering and analysing aspects of racism, whether in the forms of anti-semitism, colonialism, or ‘White Australia’. These matters are dealt with later in this thesis, and an exception noted. Ida set about organising family life. Household routines were established, German foods were introduced to the menu, and she took over the newspaper/printery roles of Alice had performed. Financial and accounting matters Alfred had let chaotically slip since 1913 were attended to; overdue accounts were pursued; a circulation drive was initiated. Ida has been described post-mortem as a “good manager”. 204 And there were new Lockwood children; Matthew (stillborn, 1917); Douglas Wright (1918); Frank Wright (1919); Allan Wright (1922). FORMAL EDUCATION Rupert left Natimuk State School at the age of 14, with a prize for being dux of the school, and in later life crediting his primary education for interesting him in history, albeit British and Empire history. 205 He immediately went to work on the family paper to earn his keep; he was assigned to typesetting and reporting local news. 206 Later Alice’s stipulation regarding education was acceded to, and from February 1924 to May 1926 he attended Melbourne's elite Wesley College as a boarder, a school with a tradition of 203 For the prominence of these accounts in Rupert Lockwood’s recollections, see the references in the preceding footnote. 204 The use of the adjective ‘chaos’ to describe the financial situation of the West Wimmera Mail at the time is taken from A. and R. Lockwood, “Alfred Wright Lockwood”, p. 129, as is the “good manager” description. For the restoration of domestic order, A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 93. 205 De Berg, pp. 17,489; 17,492. 206 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 63. 79 substantially drawing on the Wimmera region for its boarding clientele.207 His fees were met by the collective contributions of his family—by his father, sister Freda, brother Lionel, and from what he had earned working on he family newspaper since leaving primary school. 208 Established in 1866, Wesley was a Methodist Church College, but a significant part of its clientele was Anglican, and it also attracted a large number of Jewish students. Under the leadership of the Anglican L.A. Adamson, affectionately known as ‘The Chief” and headmaster from 19021932, the school stressed academic success, while the roles of acting, debating, and sport were regarded as essential elements in preparation for adult life. There was the expectation that its graduates would take prominent and leading future roles in society. 209 Future Prime Minister Robert Menzies was a celebrated former Wesley pupil; future Prime Minister Harold Holt and R. J. D. “Spot” Turnbull, a future Tasmanian member of labor cabinets, and later Senate member, were contemporaries when Lockwood, one of about 500 students, enrolled in 1926. 210 In their history of the school, Blainey, Morrissey and Hulme drew attention to the significant contribution the school made to twentieth century Australia, helping educate and nourish much of the leadership of the nation’s social, cultural, economic, and cultural life. As they explained, so many former students “made a name for themselves that one hesitates to make a list; the list is either too long, or it arbitrarily and unjustly excludes names if made too short.” As it was, these historians did provide over a three-page list of names, including prominent and influential politicians, judges, businessmen, doctors, academics, public service leaders, religious 207 G. Blainey, J. Morrissey, and S.E. K. Hulme, Wesley College. The First Hundred Years, Wesley College in association with Robertson and Mullens, Melbourne 1967, p. 178. 208 De Berg, p. 17496. 209 G. Blainey et. al., Wesley College, pp. 155-158. 210 Ibid., pp. 151, 155. 80 leaders. The school developed a significant and proprietorial network of ‘Old Boys’. 211 A search of the school’s records in 1992 revealed little in the way of a paper trail regarding Lockwood’s time at the school. What there was, showed he was Register Number 6154, claimed the Church of England as his religious affiliation, gained the Intermediate Certificate in 1925, and stayed on at the school for a short time afterwards in order to take his place in the May 1926 Head of the River rowing team, where he was Number 4 in the flagship ‘rowing eight’. Adamson encouraged student “elders” to stay on at Wesley beyond the necessary scholastic time in order to bring sporting glory and success to the school in inter-school competition. Participation in sport at the elite level, as in representing the school in the Head of the River competition, meant being regarded as amongst “the bloods of the school”. 212 Lockwood did not make it to the race start in 1926, and the rowing team had no success; as the Wesley College Chronicle explained, On Monday before the race Lockwood developed influenza, and was replaced by Girdwood, stroke of the second crew. Girdwood did not have an opportunity to row a full course. Moreover, being 26lbs. lighter than Lockwood, the trim of the boat was consequently altered. 213 Lockwood left school soon after this event. Generally, Lockwood’s recollections of his time at Wesley are whimsically disparaging. He was chosen for a female role in a school play, but was rejected when his voice broke, subsequently leading to a private talk in the 211 Ibid., pp. 155-158. 212 A copy of the Wesley College record card for Rupert Lockwood was provided by B. R. Gregory, Wesley College, 22 July 1992. For sporting glory, Blainey et. al., Wesley College, pp. 79, 152, 155; for “the bloods” quote, Ibid., p. 76. 213 “Head Of The River Races, 1926”, Wesley College Chronicle, 1926, p. 68 (my thanks to B. R. Gregory, Wesley College, 22 July 1992, for drawing this to my attention and for providing a copy). 81 headmaster’s office “on the evils of masturbation”; he was “very rebellious” and the recipient of a lot of corporal punishment. He recalled his peer, Harold Holt, as one of the boys chosen as a favourite by Adamson for special rewards, for example outings in the headmaster’s chauffeur driven car, and Holt being nicknamed “Puss” by his peers because it was claimed “that he used to purr every time the headmaster appeared”. Despite this, however, Lockwood must have found College life convivial in some way, or at least preferable to being back in Natimuk, since he delayed his return to the Wimmera beyond what was academically necessary. He also regarded his term at Wesley as having been “of great help” in eventually securing a job on the Melbourne Herald. 214 And there was one other legacy; as the result of inter-school functions involving Wesley College and Melbourne’s prestigious Scotch College, Lockwood became fleetingly acquainted with a younger student, Ken Cook (1913-1987), from a prosperous Melbourne footwear industry family. In later years Cook would seek Lockwood out and have a dramatic impact on his life. 215 BACK TO NATIMUK: RURAL JOURNALIST Following Wesley it was back to Natimuk, and the West Wimmera Mail, reporting small-town life. As Lockwood recalled for oral historian Hazel de Berg in 1981, this was “three frustrating years” as he variously reported Shire Council meetings, football matches, school concerts, how they stopped the bolting breadcart horse in Main Street, who won the prizes for cream puffs and lamingtons at the Natimuk show, the Goroke Show or the Edenhope Show, report(ed) the race meetings at Harrow, the oldest inland town in Victoria, or the race meetings at remote places like 214 This paragraph is based on De Berg, pp. 17496-17499; for Adamson and his favorites, see Blainey et. al., Wesley College, p. 154, and for Holt in particlar, p. 156. 215 Lockwood, interview with author, Sydney, 27 June 1985; Tim Bowden, transcript of interview with Rupert Lockwood, “Security and I”, ABC Radio, broadcast 13 July 1975, p. 11; De Berg, p. 17456. For biographical details of the life of Ken Cook, see Drew Cottle, The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal, Upfront Publishing, Leicestershire, 2002, pp. 186-211. 82 Salt Lakes or Miga Lake, or some place like that …..we also had a very occasional murder or crime but generally there was little crime to report.216 There was respite. While by no means not enjoying socialising and sport, Lockwood spent a lot of time, both sides of his Wesley term, in the Natimuk Mechanics’ Institute; “too much of my youth” as he once put it. As Joan Beddoe noted, the libraries of these institutes and of Schools of Arts in rural Australia, provided important links with the world beyond rural isolation, and a source of reading material in the absence of accessible lending libraries. Just what Lockwood read in terms of titles is not specified in his recollections; suffice to say, as we have already seen above, we know the titles of some of the magazine/journal material that came into the Lockwood household via the Institute. In an interview with the author in 1992 he generally mentioned reading on historical and geographical matters; and there is published reference to an early encounter with Tolstoy, where “Anna Karenina’s end” created “pulse beats in my boyhood”. If he was not exaggerating or misremembering here, the presence of cultural materials of this caliber in the Institute library could have a lot to do with his mother, who was/had been active in promoting significant cultural and literary matters within the community. Apart from reading, one of the things he did pursue in the privacy of the Institute, he told this author, was to begin to teach himself shorthand. 217 216 De Berg pp. 17499-17500; Rupert Lockwood, “One Night in the Life of Frank Hardy”, Nation Review, October 17-23, 1975, p. 24. 217 This paragraph draws on an interview the author conducted with Rupert Lockwood, 24 June 1992; for the reference to Tolstoy, and the “too much” quote, Lockwood, “One Night in the Life of Frank Hardy”, p. 24; for the Joan Beddoe reference, “Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Arts in Australia”, Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2003, p. 127; on Australian Mechanics’ Institutes generally and their importance in Adult Education, see Derek Whitelock, The Great Tradition: A History of Adult Education in Australia, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1974, pp.116127; on Mechanics’ Institute libraries, Anette Bremer and Martyn Lyons, “Mechanics’ Institute Libraries—The Readers Demand Fiction”, in Lyons and Arnold, A History of the Book in Australia, pp. 209-225. 83 “ESCAPE” FROM NATIMUK For a mix of reasons, Rupert and younger brother Raymond sought what Rupert later termed “escape” from Natimuk. 218 Rupert’s Melbourne schooling had shown him broader horizons than those offered by rural life of Natimuk, and its population of 500; and there was the desire for more money than was on offer at the West Wimmera Mail. Of the four children to Alfred and Alice, only Rupert and Raymond remained in Natimuk. Older sister Freda had left to train as a nurse; she married in 1930. The eldest sibbling, Lionel, had studied medicine at Melbourne University (19191923), and was now making his way in the wider world via the Royal Australian Navy, enjoying considerable social life as a Surgeon Lieutenant, stationed at HMAS Cerebus, in Westernport, Victoria. 219 Family considerations were also involved; Rupert keenly felt the family situation of Alfred and step-mother Ida--they had a young family to support, and their newspaper/printing derived finances, based on limited circulation and advertising horizons, were being affected by falling prices for rural produce well before the arbitrary ‘official’ start of the Depression with the October 1929 Wall Street crash. 220 By mid-1929, unemployed men were walking the district’s roads in search of work, food, money. In Natimuk the Lockwood household became known as a place where labour in the family garden/orchard could be exchanged for a feed. 221 As the Depression deepened, the West Wimmera Mail instituted a 218 “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 2, p. 1, in possession of the author. This is one of two typescripts of biographical notes, prepared by Lockwood, created sometime in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when he was contemplating writing an extended memoir. 219 Lionel was promoted to Surgeon Lieutenant Commander in May 1930 following completion of a doctorate in medicine (pathology). He ultimately became Surgeon Rear Admiral, the medical director-general of the Royal Australian Navy, and retired in 1964. For an account of his life and career, see Neil Westphalen, “Surgeon Rear Admiral Lionel Lockwood (1902-1987)”, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, Volume 16, Number 1, October 2007, pp. 35-46. 220 For the family reasons involved, see A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, pp. 63-64. 221 Ibid., p. 149. 84 barter system. When cash was not available for the payment of a subscription, goods were accepted in lieu: A struggling, conscientious farmer paid for his paper with a bag of wheat which kept the family’s fowls alive to provide eggs. Another supplied a load of wood or mallee roots from country being cleared on the edge of the Little Desert scrub, providing fuel for cooking in the kitchen’s Lux stove and heating in the dining room open fireplace. Another farmer killed a sheep and brought enough meat for several weeks, and orchardists from the nearby settlement of Quantong brought cases of peaches, pears, apples and tomatoes, which (were) preserved so that there would be food for winter. 222 Rupert looked for a way out. He secured a letter to Melbourne Herald chief Keith Murdoch from a prominent Melbourne lawyer who knew Murdoch, seeking a job on the paper. Murdoch gave him an interview and, in the light of his Wesley education and country journalistic experience, promised him a job on the reporting staff at the first vacancy. But the expected offer did not eventuate. Instead, when a job offer was presented, it came unexpectedly and circuitously in 1929: The start in metropolitan journalism was to come through the accident of a golf match. In the annual match, Navy v. Press, Rupert Lockwood’s elder brother, then Surgeon Lieutenant Lionel Lockwood…..was by chance drawn to play against the editor of the Herald, George Taylor…….(Lionel) Lockwood seized the opportunity to put the word on Taylor for a job for younger brother Rupert. 223 It may have helped too, that the Herald’s Chief of Staff at the time had a preference for trainee journalists with ‘bottom up’ trade experience. 224 Alfred tried to convince Rupert to stay on in town, offering him half-share in the West Wimmera Mail, keen not to lose a low-paid family 222 Ibid., p.156. 223 Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 2, p. 2. 224 Hamilton, “Journalists, Gender”, pp. 99-100. 85 member/employee with considerable reporting and typesetting skills. 225 To no avail; Rupert began work on the Herald in January 1930. Younger brother Raymond also ‘escaped’ from Natimuk in 1930, and headed for Queensland in search of work. 226 The Rupert Lockwood who left Natimuk for employment with the Herald was, by 1930, nearly 22 years of age, and no raw recruit to the industry of his new employer. Since the age of nine he had been dipped, then immersed, in the worlds of typesetting, printing, journalism, publishing, and distributing/posting the finished product. No apprenticeships had been involved, the exposure and training coming from hands-on involvement, and possibly helping determine his being offered metropolitan employment. Moreover, the training and the work had been done under the supervision of what Kirkpatrick argued was a “great’ newspaper editor. Overall, it was an inconsequential print/newspaper background only so far as the rural press of the time can legitimately be regarded as inconsequential, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, is the way in which the rural press tended to be portrayed in early scholarship. However this inconsequentiality, as also discussed, is at odds with modern scholarship and can no longer be sustained. In retrospect, looking back to this time, Lockwood saw himself as “probably the only journalist in Australia who (could) set type, as Caxton set it”.227 But there was more to it than this. Lockwood left Natimuk endowed with practical training in a wide range of skills across a number of print-related trades/crafts, and in a profession, if journalism is conceived of as a profession. It was a training and an experience of work that eliminated from his perspective any sense of the “mystery” Hagan referred to. It was a multiskilling, dictated by the needs of his family’s newspaper, empowering him in a way that training in a specific set of skills could not. Further, he had 225 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 150. 226 Ibid., pp. 73-74. 227 De Berg, p. 17,450. 86 been raised in a journalistic environment where comment and opinion fused seamlessly with reporting, a tradition of journalism with roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the press was partisan, and “objectivity” and “balance” were not part of the agenda. He came too from a newspaper environment in which the newspaper was regarded as part of the community, reflecting, articulating, advancing the concerns and interests of that community. And if in doing this it meant being outspoken, then so be it. Overall, this was an approach to journalism and the press that would remain part of Lockwood’s future life in all of its manifestations, and later that decade, find resonance with the reportage genre of Egon Kisch. It should be noted here too, given what he would become, that the skills Lockwood had mastered in rural Victoria, of “writing, typesetting, printing, posting”, were the catalogue of skills the mediologist Régis Debray itemised as constituting, in an historical sense, the bedrock of socialist agitation and organization, the term ‘socialism’, in his analysis, invented by French philosopher and political economist, typographer, Pierre Leroux (17971871). 228 CONCLUSION In this chapter Lockwood’s childhood and birth were contextualised within Australian rural printing, publishing and journalism during the late nineteenth century and through the 1920s. The chapter discussed the backgrounds of Lockwood’s father, mother, and step-mother, his formal education, and indicated their respective influences upon his life. The long and unofficial apprenticeship Lockwood served from childhood and onwards through youth, in printing, publishing, and rural journalism was examined. The chapter established that Lockwood was a journalist before he left his hometown of Natimuk to work on the Melbourne Herald in 1930. For his time, he was well educated; he had experience via his schooling of 228 Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle”, New Left Review, Number 46, July-August, 2007, pp. 6, 16-18. 87 metropolitan life; and benefit of an elite schooling that sought to instill in its charges preparation for leadership roles in later life. Whatever the future held for Lockwood, it might reasonably be expected to be more than quiet anonymity. With regard to his rural journalism background, the chapter demonstrated it was more than this. It was a grounding in printing and publication too, and an induction into an old trade/craft tradition via his father. Rupert Lockwood in 1930, on the verge of a metropolitan press career, was no rural new chum. He had a sense of identity in, and understanding of, printing, publishing, journalism, of being part of the complete newspaper process, that was not going to be content with pedestrian hack work. It was a training that stood him in good stead, and as will be argued later, was variously evident in his labour movement journalism. 88 CHAPTER THREE FROM CADET TO BY-LINE: 1930-1938 The focus of this chapter is the period 1930 to 1938. Biographically it begins with Lockwood joining the Melbourne Herald, and ends with his returning to the Herald after variously working abroad as a journalist in Asia and in Europe (1935-1938). Lockwood’s continuing development as a journalist 1930-1935 is examined, including his assignment to the Canberra press gallery. By 1935, Lockwood was a full fledged journalist and became one of the many Australians of the time who left to experience the wider world abroad. While most of those who did so headed for London, Lockwood was one of a minority who went instead into Asia. His experiences here will be examined. Later, as the chapter explains, he made his way out of Asia, across through Russia to London, and then to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. All the while he engaged independently abroad in his profession as a journalist, as well as contributing feature articles to the Herald. The chapter ends with his recall to Melbourne by employer (Sir) Keith Murdoch. In tandem with Lockwood’s development and experiences as a journalist, this chapter will also examine Lockwood’s political development as a leftist. In the next chapter, it will be seen that Lockwood joined the CPA in 1939. Overall, Chapters 3 and 4 will demonstrate this was not a Pauline ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion/decision, but the result of an evolutionary process. Chapter 3 traces the beginning of this process in Melbourne, on the Herald, and will explain the significant contributions to the process by the subjects experiences abroad, particularly his experience of the Spanish Civil War. MELBOURNE: ON THE HERALD With a publication lineage that went back to 1840, and as an evening paper since 1869, the Melbourne Herald was, in 1930, one of Australia’s oldest 89 daily newspapers. Without competition it had become a “stodgy publication” by 1920, when it came under the increasing control of Keith Murdoch. He was knighted in 1933, 229 and earned the soubriquet ‘Lord Southcliffe’ for his emulation of the journalistic practices of British newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe. “KM”, as he was known in-house, transformed the Herald into a popular publication, what Humphrey McQueen described as “Australia’s first modern newspaper, combining sensational reporting, serious intent and mass advertising”. 230 In turn, Murdoch used the paper as the building block of Australia’s first national media chain, which emerged during the 1930s. From the 1940s through to the 1970s, the Murdoch organisation published some 40 per cent of all newspapers sold in Australia. 231 Murdoch regarded the Herald as his ‘personal journal’, and personally hired young journalists. During the 1930s, the Herald “came down heavily” on what Geoffrey Serle termed “the ultra-conservative side” of politics. Murdoch enjoyed a close relationship with Prime Minister Joseph Lyons; he had been a key figure in the machinations that in 1931 saw the defection of former deputy Labor prime minister Lyons from the ALP and his installation to the leadership of a new anti-Labor coalition, and subsequent conservative political leadership of the nation. 232 Murdoch promoted Lyons 229 Geoffrey Serle, “Murdoch, Sir Keith (1885-1952)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1986, p. 624. 230 Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944, Alternative Publishing Cooperative Limited, Sydney, 1979, p. 32. 231 Trevor Barr, newmedia.com.au: the changing face of Australia’s media and communications, Allen & Unwin, Crow’s Nest, 2000, p. 2. 232 The machinations involved a small group of Melbourne conservatives, self-styled ‘the Group’. Principal members of the Group were future conservative prime minister R.G.Menzies, then a Victorian backbench MLA, and financier Staniforth Ricketson, from the firm of leading stockbrokers J.B. Were & Son. Two crucial contacts between the Group and the big end of town were (Sir) Robert Knox, chairman of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, and a multiple company board member; and Murdoch. See P.R. Hart and C. J. 90 as “Honest Joe”, the “saviour of Australia’s finances and integrity”, and generally helped him electorally by curbing press criticism. In return Lyons paved the way for increased levels of Australian media ownership, from which the Murdoch organisation benefited. 233 By the late 1930s the relationship had soured, and Murdoch used his media power to undermine Lyons in 1938–1939 and work to manoeuvre Robert Menzies into the Prime Ministership. 234 During the 1930s, amongst Melbourne-based businessmen, financiers, political power brokers and political aspirants, Murdoch was recognised as aspiring “to continue in the role of his erstwhile leader--Lord Northcliffe--and adopt the role of King-maker”. 235 Despite this, the Herald of the 1930s was, as Don Watson has described, “a hotchpotch of almost incredible banality, and intelligent, often liberal, social and political comment”. Its young journalists were among “the best of their generation”. Murdoch assembled “virtually the cream of Australia's journalists”; in spite of the owner, the culture of personal discourse was “a general left-of-centre liberal consensus.” 236 As Watson pointed out, pressure at the Herald to produce lightweight and sensational material for a popular newspaper catering to, and for, an audience encouraged to be servile while seeking “release from the reality of their everyday lives”, could produce Lloyd, “Lyons, Joseph Aloysius (Joe) (1879-1939)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, MUP, Carlton, 1986, p. 186; P. R. Hart, “Lyons: Labor Minister-Leader of the U. A. P.”, in Robert Cooksey (editor), The Great Depression in Australia, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 1970, pp. 44-45. 233 Hart, “Lyons”, p. 45; Barr, newmedia.com.au, p. 10; Geoffrey Serle, “Murdoch”, pp. 624-625. 234 Clem Lloyd, Parliament and the Press: The Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery 1901- 1988, MUP, Carlton, 1988, pp. 109-111. 235 Anne Henderson, Joseph Lyons: The People’s Prime Minister, New South Publishing, Sydney 2011, p. 242; the quote is from a 1965 letter written by Staniforth Ricketson, a key Melbourne-based player in conservative politics during the 1930s, leader of the influential conservative Group of Six, a Robert Menzies intimate, and a key person in the formation of the United Australia Party in 1931. 236 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 46. 91 feelings of unease amongst journalists with radical outlooks and sensitivities. 237 By the outbreak of War in 1939, there was a “very, very strong Communist Party Branch in the Herald Office.” 238 Due to his Natimuk journalistic background, Lockwood was able to start at the Herald as a second-year cadet and accelerated through the paper’s fouryear cadet system. It was a “thorough training”, Lockwood recalled in maturity, covering shipping movements, prices of potatoes and onions, on to suburban police courts, the morgue, Saturday football matches, country race meetings, flower shows, church fetes---the cover of news by a broadsheet daily was far wider in the 1930s. And (Murdoch) had a simple recipe for newspaper success in Melbourne: “Give them parish pump.” So we gave them parish pump. 239 According to Lockwood, the Herald Chief of Staff, Frank Murphy, offered us the only possible ethics code for journalists: “We’re all up to our necks in shit but you don’t have to blow bubbles in it”. 240 By 1933 Lockwood had worked his way from a D grade reporter to a B plus grading and was serving his first term as a Canberra galleryman—one of five journalists representing the Herald and its Murdoch stablemate the SunNews Pictorial; the Canberra Gallery comprised about twenty-three journalists in 1933.241 His rise through the ranks was aided by an attempt to lure him from the Herald when the Argus launched the short-lived Herald competitor, the afternoon newspaper the Star (1933-1936). Senior Murdoch journalists started defecting to the new paper, and Murdoch retaliated with a 237 Ibid., pp. 46-47. 238 Bowden, “The Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 12. 239 Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 2, p. 2. 240 Lockwood, “One Night in the Life of Frank Hardy”, p. 24. 241 Rupert Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 1, p. 4; Lloyd, Parliament and the Press, p. 83; for a photograph of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, Canberra, November 1993, including Lockwood, Ibid., facing p. 88. 92 vigorous campaign against the Star, damaging its fragile finances. 242 In the process, Lockwood was a beneficiary: When the Argus launched the ill-fated Star in 1933 I had pressing offers to join the new paper at enhanced salary. I was considered a very good newsgatherer in the various fields covered---city politics, Returned Servicemen’s League, unemployment, shipping, courts, State and Federal Parliament---and the Herald, anxious to keep me, lifted my salary from that of a junior reporter to senior reporter. In Canberra in 1933 I became senior press galleryman for the Herald combine. 243 He gained senior gallery status when the Herald’s incumbent senior journalist defected to the Star. While assignment to Canberra as head of service had kudos, stability, a top salary, and good accommodation, for young journalists like Lockwood, who were there sessionally, transients compelled to shuttle between Canberra and the metropoles, assignment during the 1930s could engender a sense of exile, of being isolated from the career opportunities and real action in Sydney or Melbourne, to which it was linked by long, slow journeys by rail and road. The Herald made considerable use of the overnight train service to Melbourne for the conveyance of copy, which meant highly pressured production of reports based on the day’s work ready for dispatch with the 9pm train departure. 244 Canberra was still a city in the making, an architectural vision taking shape; Federal Parliament had only transferred to the site from Melbourne in 1927. Future war correspondent and author Ronald McKie, close to Lockwood’s 242 Bridget Griffen-Foley, “The battle of Melbourne: The rise and fall of the Star”, Journal of Australian Studies, Volume 25, Issue 69, 2001, pp. 89-102. 243 Rupert Lockwood to author, letter, 13 February 1989. 244 Lloyd, Parliament and the Press, p. 86. The 1930s, the period of Lockwood’s Herald- Canberra postings, are the subject of Chapters 2 and 3 of Lloyd’s study, pp. 70-124; for Lloyd’s account of the differences between Gallery journalists regarding status and ‘perks’of office, see p. 85. 93 age when he was posted to the remoteness of Canberra in the mid-1930s, recalled his posting with loathing. For him “Canberra was the dreariest place on earth”, with “a farm and a farmhouse opposite Parliament House in the middle of the area now covered by Lake Burley Griffin”. 245 For other journalists, the Canberra posting provided a sense of pioneering, and enabled behaviour that was “expansive, mildly raffish” and parties that were “rowdy and protracted”. 246 Overall, the Canberra experience for Lockwood was both frustrating and instructive. It was also the site, in 1938, of what we will later see, was for him a life-changing incident. Lockwood recalled, Press gallery reporting and commentaries were restricted--by unofficial proprietorial censorship or, better put, the appreciation by journalists of what the proprietors wanted them to say or not to say. In this frustrating atmosphere the bar that was open to the Press in Parliament house was well patronised. 247 McKie recorded the case of journalist Massey Stanley, “a near-genius journalist”: Massey (was) a legend in the Canberra of the 1930s. He is the only man to have fallen from the press gallery, paralytic, landing unhurt beside the Speaker’s chair. He is the only man to have borrowed the hammer thrower’s kilt at the Highland Games, and an elephant from Wirth’s Circus and, mounted on that elephant, to have ridden up the steps of Parliament 245 For McKie’s account of his brief Canberra gallery sojourn see Ronald McKie, We Have No Dreaming, William Collins, Sydney, 1988, pp. 46-50. 246 Lloyd, Parliament and the Press, p. 82. 247 Rupert Lockwood to author, letter, 29 September 1987. Alcohol was prohibited in the ACT until prohibition was repealed following a referendum in 1928; the first supplies of beer reached retail outlets in December 1928. Until then alcohol was plentifully available in neighbouring Queanbeyan in NSW; see Lloyd, Parliament and the Press, p. 82. 94 House where he had his photograph taken. Later that day, still wearing the borrowed kilt, he interviewed the Prime Minister.248 For Lockwood, the small Canberra journalistic community and the confinement of Parliament provided significant professional learning experiences, and unique glimpses of how political decisions were shaped. He gained insights into how decisions affecting the nation were shaped beyond public scrutiny by great wealth and power. Lockwood’s superior in Canberra was Herald bureau head Joseph Aloysius (Joe) Alexander (appointed in 1929). According to journalism historian Clem Lloyd, Alexander “established a supremacy and an influence unrivalled in Australian political journalism”, and quoted journalist Alan Reid to the effect that Alexander was “a powerful and feared figure around Parliament House”. 249 Alexander was a close and trusted friend of Murdoch’s, and actively worked to advance the media and political interests of his employer and friend. He had access to high level ‘leaks’; he was skilled at placing stories the Herald wanted in the public arena, but not sourced to the Herald, in other media outlets. 250 Lockwood witnessed Alexander in action. As he recalled, “Joe Alexander acted as a courier for Murdoch, carrying messages, advice, or more accurately, instructions to U(nited) A(ustralia) P(arty) Ministers.” 251 In 1939 Lockwood was privy to an account by Prime Minister Lyons of the machinations by Murdoch to have him removed from the 248 McKie, No Dreaming, p. 49. 249 Lloyd, Parliament and the Press, p. 95. 250 For discussion of the ways in which Alexander worked to advance his employer’s interests, see Lloyd, Ibid., pp. 95-104, 109-110. Alexander maintained a daily diary from 1932 to 1947; handwritten in scribbled haste after a day’s work, they provide a record of his work as a journalistic insider and the techniques used by his employer to influence government policy. The diaries were deposited in the National Library of Australia and their use is restricted. For the first apparent use of them by a scholar see Caryn Coatney, “‘Curtin is Doing a Splendid Job’: How a Wartime Labour Leader Won Press Support, 1941-45”, in Bobbie Oliver (editor), Labour History in the New Century, Black Swan Press, Perth, 2009, pp. 91-92. 251 Rupert Lockwood to author, letter, 29 September 1987. 95 Prime Ministership, an account in which Lyons told of his sense of humiliation at being asked to step down from office. 252 For a young journalist learning about an industry and a profession, Alexander modelled a type of journalism and a role as journalist which cast both as part of the process of shaping the politics of the nation, and of helping make history, irrespective of whether it was expressed as such; in effect this is what Alexander attempted. It was a sense of political-historical engagement that would impress Lockwood amongst others when the Czech anti-fascist journalist Egon Kisch visited Australia in 1934. As part of Murdoch’s empire building aspirations, he had recruited young journalists with significant social, business, banking, law, and political connections, what was disparagingly referred to in-house as “the sons of the famous fathers’ Department”. 253 Amongst these Lockwood developed a close friendship with John Fisher, 254 son of former Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. Recalling the young John Fisher in the 1981 for Hazel de Berg, Lockwood judged him a successful journalist, knowledgeable, with an attractive writing style, but also “a great funster and wisecracker”; elsewhere he commented that Fisher was “never able to conform to Herald rules and niceties”. 255 According to A. F. Howells (1983), a leading antifascist activist during the 1930s, Fisher “was a brilliant, if rather eccentric journalist”, who was “a tower of strength on the publicity side” in helping defeat the attempt by the Federal government to ban the Australian speaking tour of Egon Kisch in 1934. 256 252 Ibid. For an account of Murdoch’s interest in the Lyons/Menzies leadership machinations, see Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 247-248. 253 De Berg, p. 17,500; Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 2, p. 2. 254 Amirah Inglis, “Fisher, John”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14: 1940- 1980, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, p. 172. 255 Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 2, p. 3. 256 A. F. Howells, Against the Stream: The Memories of a Philosophical Anarchist, 1927- 1939, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1983, p. 92. 96 Another close friendship was with Douglas Wilkie, son of Australian theatre pioneers Allan Wilkie and Frediswyde Hunter-Watts. 257 In later life Douglas Wilkie distinguished himself in the annals of journalism reporting from the India-Burma theatre, resigning as a war correspondent in 1943 in protest against heavy handed military censorship which trivialised his reports, a protest Knightley argued “other correspondents should have joined”. 258 Wilkie recalled the Natimuk import as “raw but whimsical” with a “downto-earth confidence in himself”. Wilkie took credit for smoothing “his rough edges”. 259 If there were ‘rough edges’, they evidently were not long disappearing; writing in 1985, Rupert’s half-brother Allan remembered childhood, and how impressed he was by Rupert when the cadet journalist returned to Natimuk on holidays, a salary-earner and wearing “finely cutsuits”. 260 During the 1930s, Melbourne's bohemian intelligentsia's hotel, restaurant and cafe life became part of Lockwood's life. Along with Fisher and Wilkie, his associates here included journalist Ian Aird; radical communist intellectual and activist Guido Baracchi; rationalist Bill Cook; artist Noel Counihan; violinmaker Bill Dolphin; Brian Fitzpatrick, journalist, historian, civil libertarian; poet and journalist Alwyn Lee; journalist Forbes Miller; writer Judah Waten. Close personal relationships developed between Lockwood, and Counihan, Fitzpatrick, and Waten. 261 It was a vibrant and radicalising intellectual milieu where leftism and the avant-garde mixed, and where seriousness about life did not mean life without fun. 262 A stint as 257 John Rickard, “Wilkie, Allan (1878-1970)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12: 1891-1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1990, pp. 486-487. 258 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, Pan Books, London, 1989, p. 291. 259 Douglas Wilkie to author, letter, 2 July 1985. 260 A. Lockwood, Ink In His Veins, p. 64. 261 Rupert Lockwood to author, letter, 13 February 1989. 262 For accounts of Melbourne’s bohemian-leftist culture during the 1930s see Brian Beasley, “‘Death Charged Missives’: Australian Literary Responses to the Spanish Civil War”, PhD thesis, University of Southern Queensland, 2006, pp. 244-248; Bridget Griffen- 97 the Herald's “unemployment roundsman” also helped radicalise his political sensitivities, as did the dramatic 1934 lecture tour by Egon Kisch, the prominent anti-fascist Czech journalist and author. While the Australian press, generally, gave little attention to the human suffering caused by the Depression, the Herald was “a notable exception”, and rural journalist Lockwood was, during his cadetship, assigned its “unemployment roundsman”. 263 This was Lockwood’s first close encounter with the Australian working class, with the inequalities and sufferings possible under capitalism, and with the hollowness behind patriotic rhetorics. As he recalled years later, he went round the government and Salvation Army shelters for the homeless and jobless. At the Jolimont shelter next to the city the ex-diggers complained that the cocoa served up was weaker than on the Western Front. At Broadmeadows army camp, where they were allowed to huddle in unwanted hutments, the unemployed ex-soldiers were issued Great War khaki uniforms dyed blue, perhaps so they would not be reminded of the colours they donned to make the world safe for democracy and Australia a land fit for heroes. In the Salvation Army hostel, yesterday’s pies and saveloys donated by restaurants and shops were served up to the homeless, who, when they were ready for a despairing flop on to iron beds set in rows, lifted up iron bed posts to place into their boots, or tied the boots round their necks. A pair of boots had the equivalent value of today’s Foley, “A ‘Civilised Amateur’: Edgar Holt and His Life in Letters and Politics”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 49, Number 1, 2003, p. 35; Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 97-113, 127-139; Sparrow, A Love Story, pp. 168-180; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 31-32, 50-52. For an account of the intellectual and cultural ferment of Melbourne during the period, with particular reference to the city’s young artists and their followers, also variously linked to and part of this bohmian-leftist culture, see Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Allen Lane, Ringwood, 1981, pp. 15-35. 263 Jacqui Murray, Watching the Sun Rise: Australian Reporting of Japan, 1931 to the Fall of Singapore, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2004, p. 50. 98 motor-car; it was the only means of transport – and the unemployed were constantly being shunted on to the next dole town by police.264 In particular, Lockwood was “impressed by the desire for dignity” of the working people he found in these straits: …even though they were practically starving (if) an unemployed man had a daughter who was being married, or else there was funeral in the family, they’d go to enormous sacrifices to buy a shilling white tie for the daughter’s wedding or to get a blue twill suit on for the funeral. That was all part of their struggle against the absolute degradation of the dole… 265 It was during his unemployment rounds that Lockwood first became aware of the lengths to which conservative interests were prepared to go to protect and maintain the status quo. He was invited by a senior Herald journalist, later, according to Lockwood, to work in Military Intelligence during World War 2, to socialise playing bridge with some officers at the Hawthorn Militia drill hall. On a second visit a sergeant in uniform, veteran of the 1914-18 war, produced a Lewis machine-gun…(and) set it up on the table…pulled off the revolving drum and explained how the Lewis gun worked. An officer then led a debate on the danger of an unemployed uprising led by Communists….The journalist who invited me owned a Lancia car with fittings in the back seat to take a Lewis gun. I didn’t like the idea of mowing down the unemployed in Collins Street from the back seat of a Lancia. So there were no more visits to Hawthorn drill hall… 266 Recalling the incident in later years, Lockwood believed he had come in contact with the secret White Army, led by Victorian Police Commissioner 264 Rupert Lockwood “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 1, pp. 2-3; see also Rupert Lockwood, “I’ll be Home for Christmas”, Education, 19 November 1984, p. 20. 265 Bowden , “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 5. 266 Rupert Lockwood, “Lewis Gun on the Bridge Table”, unused extract from the manuscript draft of Appendix 1 of War on the Waterfront, pp. 18-19 (in possession of the author); Rupert Lockwood, “Secret Armies”, Overland, No. 118, Autumn 1990, p. 73. 99 General Thomas Blamey. The White Army was one of a number of secret right-wing armies that developed in Australia between the wars, aimed at confronting the threat of social upheaval and/or revolution led by Bolsheviks/Communists, some extolling the virtues of fascism. All up, these armies recruited an estimated 130,000 men out of a male population of some two million, to combat an organisation that numbed a couple of thousand.267 The White Army had access to Defence Department equipment, and sympathisers within the regular army and the Citizens’ Militia (later the CMF). Lockwood believed he must have seemed a likely prospective recruit, given the outward suggestions of conservatism, to wit his rural upbringing and his schooling. 268 The 1934 Australian speaking tour (November 1934-March 1935) of prominent Czech anti-fascist journalist and author Egon Kisch, and its attendant political/legal controversy, made lasting impressions on many who were, or who became, part of the anti-fascist cause of the 1930s; Lockwood included. The conservative Australian government, acting on British security advice, tried to prevent Kisch entering Australia, and denied him permission to disembark in Fremantle from the ship he was on. In Port Melbourne, Kisch dramatically leapt from the quarterdeck of his ship, and broke his leg landing on the wharf. Herald journalist John Fisher was on hand to witness the event and record it for history. 269 267 Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, Cassell Australia, Stanmore, 1978, p. 22. 268 For a detailed account of the White Army, see Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1988. 269 For a detailed account of the Kisch tour see Heidi Zogbaum, Kisch in Australia: the untold story, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004; see also Ken Slater, “Egon Kisch: A Biographical Outline”, Labour History, Number 36, May 1979, pp. 94-103; Daniela Ihl, Egon Erwin Kischs Reportagebuch Landung in Australien: Eine historisch-literarische Studie, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2010. For John Fisher as an eyewitness, Zogbaum, Kisch , p. 116. 100 Having landed in Australia, Kisch was sentenced to imprisonment. His supporters, led by the Melbourne Branch of the Movement Against War and Fascism which had invited Kisch to Australia, fought back against a determined government effort, led by the new Commonwealth AttorneyGeneral Robert Menzies, to keep Kisch out of Australia and stop his tour. The government resorted to using the ‘dictation test’ against Kisch, a failsafe device allowed by the Immigration Act, originally designed to assist the maintenance of White Australia. The Act enabled the government to exclude ‘undesirables’ by administering a fifty-word dictation test in any European language. As Kisch had a wide command of European languages, including English, Gaelic was chosen for his test. Predictably, he failed. A subsequent High Court decision determined that Gaelic was not a European language, and Kisch’s speaking tour went ahead. The attempted ban and related legal manoeuvrings generated a great deal of publicity, ensuring huge audiences for Kisch. In 1935 John Fisher left Australia with Kisch, with whom he became a close friend, worked briefly in Moscow as a journalist, before becoming prominently active variously promoting the cause of the Spanish Republic in Europe and in Australia; in London he acted as unofficial Australian Representative on the Committee of Spanish Relief. 270 During World War 2, Fisher variously worked in Moscow broadcasting for the Australian Broadcasing Commission (ABC) and as an Australian legation press attaché. 271 For Australian writers, a legacy of the Kisch visit was that it “crystallised perceptions of how their interests could be linked with those of the left”. In particular, it had an impact on Australian journalism, since Kisch popularised and was an exponent of the literary genre of ‘reportage’. 272 270 Judith Keene, The Last Mile to Huesca: An Australian Nurse in the Spanish Civil War, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1988, p. 87. 271 Inglis, “Fisher, John”, p. 172. 272 Julie Wells, “The Writers’ League: A Study in Literary and Working Class Politics”, Meanjin, No. 4, 1987, pp. 530-531. 101 ‘Reportage’ conceived journalism as both art and as a weapon. The journalist not only observed and reported, but was present in the story, engaged with the topic being written about, provided social insights, challenged ruling class power, recognised contemporary times as providing ‘the sensational’, and in a sense helped make history. Imagination was involved as well; using ‘dancing’ as a metaphor, Kisch explained that facts were the constraints that established “the narrow paths” in which the imagination (dancing) took place, the movement of dance/imagination harmonising with the facts. Overall, journalism was about excitement, purpose, commitment, and engagement. 273 The anti-fascist Writers’ League formed in Sydney and Melbourne in 1935 in response to the tour, drawing together established writers, artists and critics and, as David Carter put it, “those on the fringes of literature: journalists, commercial artists, students, communists”. Catering for young and would-be writers the League aimed to provide a cultural space in which literature and politics intersected, and where the theory and practice of writing at this intersection were explored and encouraged. The Melbourne Branch included a number of young Melbourne Herald journalists, and Lockwood associates. 274 The League gave particular emphasis to ‘reportage’ and its first publication was based on a ‘how to’ lecture, authored by a Sydney journalist under the pseudonym Julian Smith, setting out how newspaper journalists could modernise their technique via “modern reportage’, the works of Egon Kisch providing examples. According to ‘Smith’, reportage was “a report plus atmosphere, description, comment and deduction -- all with the thread of 273 For a discussion of Kisch’s approach to journalism see the article included by Markus Patka, “The writer behind the reporter’s mask”, in Zogbaum, Kisch, pp. 139-157. 274 For an account of the Writers’ League see Wells, “Writers’ League”; David Carter, A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career, 1997, Chapter 2, pp.23-28 http://www.nla.gov.au/ducuments/carter_combined.pdf (accessed 12 April 2011); Howells, Against the Stream, pp. 118-120. 102 accurate fact running through it”. The best reportage was “propagandistic”, more than the “mechanical recording of dry facts”, and “more than photographic”. Reportage was a weapon which seeks in the facts of industrial slavery and economic vicissitude, the lessons for further human progress — which fearlessly draws the moral from the situation before it and indicates with subtle finger or trumpet blast the newest stage of the long white road to human peace and social justice. 275 The Kisch approach to journalism, the audacious and nomadic example of his life, influenced a generation of Australian journalists, including Lockwood, Fisher, and a young door-to-door seller of household appliances, future journalist and Lockwood acquaintance Wilfred Burchett, who was influenced by Kisch when he heard him speak in Sydney’s Domain. Whilst Kisch was in Australia, Lockwood and Fisher provided him with some of the background material that later appeared in his book Australian Landfall, a role Fisher continued to fulfil in Europe, helping translate the English version of the book from German in 1937. 276 Amongst Melbourne’s younger journalists there was an adventurous restlessness, heightened by news of their exploits from those who ‘got away’, confident in the knowledge their Australian training stood them in 275 The ‘Smith’ account of ‘reportage’ is discussed and cited by Wells, “The Writers’ League”, pp. 531-532; Carter, “A Career in Writing”, p. 26. 276 The influence of Kisch on Burchett is referred to by George Burchett and Nicholas Shimmin, editors, Memoirs of a rebel journalist: the autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005, pp. 68-91; Tom Heenan, From traveller to traitor: the life of Wilfred Burchett, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2006, pp. 23-24. On the contributions of Fisher and Lockwood to Kisch’s account of Australia, A. Yarwood, “Foreword” to Egon Erwin Kisch, Australian Landfall, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1969, pp. xx-xxi, and Hogbaum, Kisch, pp. 116-117. 103 good stead abroad. 277 A number of them would leave Australia during the mid-to-late thirties. The tumult of the outside world beckoned, along with the allure of international acclaim. 278 As Hugh Thomas has noted, the 1930s “were the great age of the foreign correspondent”, a role in which editorial independence, and the personalised reporting of eye-witnessed events were key, and attractive, elements. 279 Lockwood sailed from Australia in March 1935, with a bank draft for 50 pounds sterling, bound for Singapore. 280 To help smoothe his way, he carried a letter from Prime Minister Lyons, probably organised by Murdoch, stating he was “on a mission of importance to his country”. 281 His restlessness was in part due to the unsettling, exciting impact of meeting with Kisch, the departure of Fisher who left for Europe with Kisch earlier in 1935, and reports from Wilkie who had preceded them in 1934 when he headed for Europe via Asia. 282 Indeed Wilkie’s sense of adventure and bravura captured the essence of the period; recalling this in 1985 he explained, he went abroad with an introduction from the Australian (Communist) Party in one pocket, and in the other pocket a recommendation from Prime Minister Lyons (which was far more useful because of its official letterhead!), plus introductions to Borodin in Moscow and Tom Wintringham in London. 283 277 The term ‘got away’ is used by Alan Moorehead, A Late Education: Episodes in a Life, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1970, p. 31. Moorehead was a young Herald journalist during the early 1930s. 278 For a discussion of this restlessness amongst Melbourne journalists, see Tom Pockock, Alan Moorehead, The Bodley Head, London, 1990, pp. 18-20. 279 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1984, p. 369; Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, pp. 3-4. 280 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 6. 281 A. Lockwood, Ink in His Veins, p. 64. 282 Douglas Wilke, letter to author, 15 July 1985. 283 Ibid. 104 The introductions to Borodin and Wintringham indicate the closeness of some Herald journalists to leftist politics. At the time Mikhail Borodin was editor-in-chief of the English language Moscow Daily News; Tom Wintringham was a founder of the British communist newspaper Daily Worker (in 1930), and the British Marxist literary journal Left Review (in 1934). During the Spanish Civil War he became commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades. ABROAD: IN ASIA Most Australian journalists who exited Australia during the 1930s headed for London. As Stephen Alomes pointed out, expatriation to London by Australian creative artists generally was a “custom”, the first big exodus taking place between the 1890s and 1914. Between the two world wars the journey became less common, but resurged after 1945. 284 Bridget GriffenFoley has examined the development between 1900 and 1939 of the “tradition” of Australian journalists travelling to Fleet Street, and in the process establishing a significant Australian presence there. While working in Fleet Street was not easy, the destination was “a powerful lure” for Australian journalists. They travelled there for many reasons, including furthering their journalistic experiences and education, with career enhancement in mind; seeking wider publication opportunities; and to prove themselves in what they regarded as the “home” of journalism and of their profession. 285 Some journalists however showed “interest in the Far East”, what was, in the words of Jacqui Murray, “an exotic destination for male reporters 284 Stephen Alomes, When London Calls The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 12; Richard Trembath, ““Wherever There Was A Battle”: Australian War Correspondents and the British Press” http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/australian-studies/article/view/1763 (accessed 14 October 2011), p. 3. 285 Bridget Griffen-Foley, “‘The Crumbs Are Better Than a Feast Elsewhere’: Australian Journalists on Fleet Street”, Journalism History, Volume 28, Issue 1, Spring 2002, pp. 2637. 105 seeking adventure, excitement, and a job”. As Murray pointed out, the English-language press in Singapore and Malaya in particular, during the 1930s, came to be regarded by Australian journalists as “their own backyard”, one in which they “established a fine reputation”. 286 Lockwood became part of, and helped create, this backyard. He worked for the Singapore Free Press as Associate Editor and then as Chief of Staff of the Straits Times. The latter position, by custom, also involved being a correspondent for Reuters; at the time the newsagency, because of significant organisational/internal problems, was compelled to rely on stringers in many locations, including Singapore, usually British, or English speaking, journalists employed by local newspapers. Lockwood also had access to the echelons of the Singapore defence system, “accredited to enter Fort Canning military headquarters and the Seletar naval and air bases”, an accreditation only he had. He also regularly contributed by-lined feature articles to the Thursday and Saturday magazine sections of the Melbourne Herald based on his experiences abroad. 287 Lockwood did not take long to establish himself as a public figure. On 27 November 1935, for example, he addressed a large, well attended, weeklyluncheon meeting of the Rotary Club of Singapore. Described by The Singapore Free Press as “Mr. Rupert Lockwood, the Australian political journalist who is now on the staff of The Singapore Free Press”, he addressed criticism of Australia as “the naughty child of the (British) Imperial family”. Supporting his case with statistical data and a firm grasp of Australian history, Lockwood described and explained Australia’s role as “a British nation”, variously helping and working with Britain, independent of it, yet linked historically by culture, trade, investment and defence. Lockwood’s version of ‘Australia’ in this relationship was as a full-partner, rather than junior-partner, servant or menial, with responsibilities in the Pacific and Asian regions, particularly with regard to defence. Australia too, 286 Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, p. 99. 287 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 12; for the problems of Reuters and its reliance on stringers, see Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, p. 88. 106 had great potential for growth, a matter that could be addressed with a more confident approach to migration, one that overcome the current approach which Lockwood saw characterised by “delicacy” and “hesitancy”. The close to verbatim published account of this talk had, and has, the hallmarks of a career-minded young Australian showcasing his talents, reasonably expecting/aiming for, a future in public life. 288 Before ending his Asian sojourn, Lockwood visited the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Siam, French Indo-China, China, and Japan. In February 1936, his Reuters cables reporting the right-wing military mutiny in Tokyo in which former Prime Minister Saito Makoto, Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo, and Inspector-General of Army Education General Watanabe were assassinated, and other leading statesmen, including Prime Minister Okada Keisuke narrowly escaped assassination, constituted a world scoop. He was rewarded with a flattering tribute in the Reuters’ in-house bulletin and a five-guinea bonus. What Lockwood termed “my first and only world scoop” was based on confidential consular documents supplied to him by a Japanese consular source in Singapore. 289 Lockwood believed this report brought him to the notice of the Kempeitai (Japan’s secret police), and later, whilst in Japan his room was searched; he felt under threat. It was a sense of threat exacerbated by cautionary advice in Tokyo from the Australian trade commissioner and veteran intelligence officer E. E. Longfield Lloyd. 290 A few years later, in July 1940, Lockwood’s Reuters’ host in Tokyo, veteran Far East correspondent James Melville Cox, was arrested as a spy and died during a Tokyo police interrogation; suicide was alleged. Cox was found on the pavement outside Tokyo’s Police headquarters, battered, bloodied, with 288 For a detailed report of this address, see “Australia’s Vital Role in Singapore Defence Scheme”, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 28 November 1935, p. 3. 289 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 13; Murray, Watching the Rising Sun, p. 70. 290 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 19. On the role of Longfield Lloyd in Tokyo, see Murray, Watching the Rising Sun, pp. 172-173. Lloyd’s career started in Military Intelligence during World War 1 and went through to the early days of the Cold War and the establishment of ASIO in 1949. 107 “36 hypodermic punctures on his body”. 291 During the 1930s, Reuters’ work was often an uneasy tightrope walk between securing news and trying to avoid giving offence. 292 By November 1936, Lockwood was alert to Japanese imperial interests strategically probing, testing, exploring in areas of traditional European hegemony, in Siam for example. He believed the political future of Asia would be shaped by the rival imperial interests of Britain and Japan, and that Japan clearly identified Singapore as the key, and blockage, to its aspirations. He reported, Japanese statesmen say plainly that they regard Singapore as a threat to Japan’s position in the Far East. 293 Simply, if Japan was to have a position in the Far East, then future conflict between Britain and Japan was inevitable. And as he had told the Singapore Rotarians in November 1935, if there was a future war involving Britain, then “there was every indication that Australia” would become involved, in the same way and to the same extent as it had during World War 1. 294 Asia, for Lockwood, was not all about work. He enjoyed his travel opportunities, the social aspects of colonial life in Singapore, and generally what he later termed “the sweet colonial life”: 295 Income from his journalistic endeavours 291 “Blast All of You”, Time, 16 September 1940; Norman Macswan, The Man Who Read the East Wind. A Biography of Richard Hughes, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, 1982, pp. 3233, 35, 58. 292 D. Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p. 207. 293 Rupert Lockwood, “A New ‘Panama’ in Siam”, Herald, 26 November 1936, p. 41. 294 “Australia’s Vital Role in Singapore Defence Scheme”, p. 3. 295 Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 1, p. 4. 108 was enough to run a car, pay an Indonesian chauffeur and Chinese house servants, join the right clubs, have many a good dinner at Raffles or dance in sight of the ocean at the Seaview Hotel.296 As Jacqui Murray pointed out, Lockwood was more than just a journalist in this situation. Rather, he was “a colonial newspaper executive”, at one stage directing a reporting staff of eight, and a skilled press photographer, who, it later turned out, was a Japanese Intelligence operative. Lockwood’s employment situation gave him considerable prestige and social entree; his weekly earnings variously amounted to between almost three and six times the weekly earnings of the average journalist in Australia. 297 Whilst in Asia Lockwood undertook two significant journeys, before heading for London and undertaking a third. He toured through Northern Siam to the British Shann States, to the Eastern frontier with Cambodia, and to Bangkok. He reported in a travelogue style on the scenery and aspects of the indigenous culture, alert to the political situation, on the lookout for evidence of “consciousness of the world class struggle” amongst the Siamese peasantry. In China he made a 1600 mile journey from Shanghai up the Yangtse River, and wrote about Chinese history, commenting on China as a future site of international conflict as rising nationalism conflicted with European imperialism, and as the republican government struggled with war-lords and communist forces for control of all of China. 298 Late in 1936, Lockwood headed for London, sending articles based on his travels as he went. To its readers, the Herald described Lockwood as a 296 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 12. 297 Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, p. 100; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 12. 298 Rupert Lockwood, “Through Siam in Search of Communists”, Herald, 2 January 1937, p. 35; “Lotus Eating Bandits and Unemployed Elephants”, Herald, 7 January 1937, p. 33; “Into China’s ‘Western Heaven’”, Herald, 9 January 1937, p. 32; “Mongolia-Asia’s New Empire”, Herald, May 1937, p. 39. 109 member of its literary staff. 299 He made his way to the China-Soviet border via Japanese controlled Manchuria. In Shanghai and Peking he saw evidence of intensifying Japanese military activity (in preparation for the full-scale invasion of China the following year). In Harbin, amongst the Russian émigré population there, he met White Russian fascist leaders, heard of their insurgent aspirations against the Soviet state and noted their close relationship with Japanese military authorities. On the South Manchuria Railway Company’s express he was harassed by Japanese soldiery, and by the Kempeitai. 300 Earlier, in Shanghai, trying to return to his hotel in the International Settlement, he had been harassed by Japanese soldiers, and poked in the stomach with bayonets. 301 For Lockwood, as it was amongst some of his fellow travelling companions, including two British army officers from the Tientsin garrison who were personally humiliated in transit by Japanese soldiers who forced them to remove their trousers in public, the reaction on reaching Soviet territory was one of immense relief, a personal sense of safety having left behind the threat of Japanese militarism/imperialism. It was a reaction Lockwood recalled in 1973 with interviewer Tim Bowden, and reported in his journalism at the time. To Bowden he judged it an experience that helped “mould me”. 302 ABROAD: OUT OF ASIA, INTO EUROPE During the 1930s, the Soviet Union was an exotic tourist destination, ‘the road less traveled’. The few Australians who “found their way there”, as Sheila Fitzpatrick put it, did so for a variety of reasons. According to Fitzpatrick’s analysis of sixty-four Australian visitors to the Soviet Union 299 See the Herald’s introduction to Lockwood’s article “From Peking to the Russian Border”, Herald, 13 February 1937, p. 34. 300 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 18-20. 301 Ibid., p. 18. 302 Lockwood, “From Peking to the Russian Border”, p. 34. Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 8. 110 between 1929-1938, most went as visitors interested in/curious about a different political system, as in the way one “might go to Italy to look at art”. A good number of these visitors were ‘experts’, people professionally interested in politics. Adventure was another reason for visits, and in cases this was linked to subsequent literary endeavours; publishers at the time were interested in the Soviet Union. ‘Political pilgrims’ were also part of the mix, people determined to see and report on the Soviet Union positively, no matter what. And there were sympathisers, visitors who found aspects of Soviet society attractive, for example female visitors who liked womens’ equality in the Soviet Union. 303 Lockwood was only a visitor briefly in transit, en route for London via the Soviet Union and Germany. But he was a journalist and was on the lookout for material to turn into articles. He was impressed by what he saw of the Soviet Union, the senses of progress and promise, the lack of destitution and degradation; people were at work, factories were producing: I was impressed by construction projects ‘in full swing’, factories smoking and freight cars fully loaded, in an age when outside the Soviet Union so many chimneys were smokeless and the dole queues remained long. 304 He recognised the Soviet Union had territorial/strategic aspirations in Asia, and eventually in the Pacific. 305 He drew a distinction between between the Russian people, and their system of governance. From Kirov in the Ural Mountains, he wrote: 303 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Australian visitors to the Soviet Union: the view from the Soviet side”, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen (editors), Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1940s, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2008, pp. 1-39. 304 Lockwood, “Biographical Notes”, Typescript 1, p. 5; Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 9. 305 Lockwood, “Mongolia-Asia’s New Empire”, p. 39; Rupert Lockwood, “Travelling ‘Soft’ Across Siberia”, Herald, 22 May 1937, p. 35. 111 I have yet to meet a foreigner who has lived in Russia and did not come away loving the Russian character, even when judgement on Russian politics was particularly hostile.306 Lockwood recognised too the dark side of Soviet life, symbolised for him by the prison trains he saw from the comfort of the Trans-Siberian express. The treatment of dissidents and non-coperators, and the methodology of Stalinist repression, he told Herald readers, were similar to “the methods of the Czars and the Grand Dukes”: No Westerner can escape a feeling of sadness and sympathy for the strugglng Russians when the prison trains rumble past the Trans-Siberian express. Lines of closed trucks, a wood or oil stove in the centre, and guard with fixed bayonet at the platform of each truck, these prison trains carry the ‘saboteurs’ and ‘Trotskyist plotters’ (usually workers not as competent or enthusiastic as Stalinist demands) to the concentration camps of Siberia. 307 As for censorship of the press in Stalin’s Soviet Union, that was similar to the system operating in Hitler’ Germany. 308 In Germany Lockwood was struck by the efficiency and thoroughness of the Nazi state in exercising control over the German people; he saw the German officer class in particular as doing well under the regime; and he recognised a nation well prepared for war. Despite this, however, he saw that clandestine opposition existed, strong enough, he believed, to nurture the possibility for regime change. As he wrote in early 1940: I was among those who, on having anti Nazi pamphlets thrust in my hands in Kiel and Munich, or on picking up tourist folders in a Berlin bureau and finding …..manifestos of the illegal Communist Party of Germany, felt 306 Lockwood, “Travelling ‘Soft’ Across Siberia”, p. 35. 307 Ibid. 308 Ibid. 112 sure that Hiltler would not last six months if he embarked on a major war. 309 On reaching London, Lockwood joined Australian Associated Press (AAP), a newsagency servicing the Australian press, and in essence controlled by Murdoch. The work was essentially an exercise in gathering and harvesting the work of others. According to Lockwood, We milked Reuters, United Press and Exchange Telegraph and proofs from The Times, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and other British papers to provide an ‘Australian’ cable service. 310 He also contributed anonymously to Claud Cockburn’s anti-fascist newssheet The Week, a publication which specialised in the use of undercover sources, 311 and to the Daily Worker, the newspaper published by the Communist Party of Great Britain. He warned of the futility of appeasing Japan, and forecast the fall of Singapore. 312 The major feature of his London stay, however, was being credentialed to report on the Spanish Civil War. For Herald readers the realities of the war from the Republican side during 1937 were mainly provided by three by-lines-- those of American author Ernest Hemingway, British intellectual Arthur Koestler, and Rupert Lockwood. 313 For Lockwood, the Spanish Civil War marked what in retrospect he saw as his point of commitment. 309 Rupert Lockwood, “World Affairs: On the Nazi Home Front”, ABC Weekly, 27 January 1940, p. 18. 310 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 22; Murray, Watching the Rising Sun, p. 6 311 The Week was a cyclostlyled six-sided/three-sheet publication founded by journalist Claud Cockburn in 1933. Available by subscription and delivered by mail, it achieved a readership, influence and reputation well beyond its modest means. It ceased publication when it was banned by the British government in 1941. For an account of the publication and extracts from its journalism, see Patricia Cockburn, The Years of The Week, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971. 312 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 16. 313 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). American writer, novelist, and a literary supporter of the Spanish Republic. He made numerous trips to Spain during 1937 and 1938, and took an 113 THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR EXPERIENCE The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 when elements of the Spanish Army and some Generals, led by General Franco, revolted against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government. The ensuing three-year bloody and bitter civil war was rooted in the complex and fractured history and society of Spain, ridden as these were with regional, religious and economic divisions. Germany and Italy came to the military assistance of the insurgents in force; the Soviet Union with less zeal and commitment to the Republican cause. Internationally, the civil war was seen by many on the left as a portent of the future, the war that would come if the forces of Germany and Italy were not defeated in Spain. Over 30,000 volunteers from some sixty countries rallied to the side of the Republic and fought in International Brigades. A small number of Australians volunteered for service in Spain in support of the Republic, men with the International Brigades, and women as nurses; and at least one Australian served with Franco’s forces. For the Australian public generally, however, the war in Spain was the case of another people’s war, an attitude of “indifference and the desire not to be involved”. 314 active part in the war. According to Hugh Thomas, his activities exceeded “the duties of a mere correspondent” (see Thomas, op. cit., p. 603). Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) drew on his experiences of the Spanish War. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). Hungarian-born British writer, intellectual, Spanish Republic sympathiser. In 1937 he was imprisoned by Spanish Nationalist forces as a spy while reporting for the British left-wing News Chronicle, and sentenced to death. He was saved from execution and released, following pressure from the British and American press, and British government intervention. 314 For Australians fighting in Spain in defence of the Republic, see Amirah Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War; for the Franco supporter, see Judith Keene, “An Antipodean Bridegroom of Death. An Australian Volunteer in Franco’s Forces”, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 70, 4 (April 1985), pp. 251-270. For the attitude of the Australian public to the war, see Christopher Waters, Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II, I.B. Tauris, London, 2012, pp. 15-17; for the “indifference” quote, E. M. 114 So far as accounts of Australian’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War are concerned, Lockwood tends to be missing in action, this despite a paper-trail comprising, at least, Lockwood’s 1987 biographical account in War on the Waterfront, his by-lined Herald feature articles written from Spanish front lines, and a lengthy ABC radio interview conducted by Tim Bowden. 315 In the major account of Australians who went to Spain in support of the Spanish Republic, by Amirah Inglis, Lockwood warranted no mention whatsoever. Other journalists were mentioned: briefly, Warren McIlwraith, a 19 year old student based in Paris who was accredited as a correspondent by Smith’s Weekly; Australians working for the British press in Spain, Alan Moorehead and Noel Monks, received two and three mentions respectively, and John Fisher, with one piece of by-lined Herald journalism from Spain to his credit, two mentions. 316 Judith Keene described Fisher as a journalist who “travelled widely in Republican Spain reporting on the war” in a footnote to the Diary (1936-1937) of Australian nurse Agnes Hodgson who nursed on the Aragon front. 317 In the Hodgson Diary, Fisher appears Andrews, Isolationism and Appeasement in Australia: Reactions to the European Crises, 1935-1939, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970, p. 95. 315 Lockwood’s by-lined journalism from Spain comprises: “An Australian Looks in on Spain’s War” (filed from the Aragon Front, dated July 6), Herald, 24 July 1937, p. 35; “They Die For Ideals but not for Spain” (filed from Barcelona, dated July 4), Herald, 5 August 1937, p. 35; “A Nightmare Journey to Madrid” (filed from Madrid, dated July 16), Herald, 7 August 1937, p. 31. The Herald also published reports by-lined “from our Special Representative” corresponding with the time Lockwood was in Spain, most of which evince characteristics of his journalistic style: “Madrid Smiles on as Death Whistles By” (filed from Madrid, dated August 14), Herald, 4 September 1937, p. 33; “An Afternoon Walk to the Front” (filed from Madrid, dated August 17), Herald, 13 September 1937, p. 6; “Education Threatens the Siesta” (filed from Valencia, August 14), Herald, 14 September 1937, p. 6; “Life-and lunch-on a Spanish Farm” (filed from Valencia, dated August 14), Herald, 15 September 1937, p. 6; “Sidelights on Spain’s War” (filed from Valencia, dated August 21), Herald, 16 September 1937, p. 37. 316 Amirah Inglis, Australians in the Spanish Civil War, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1987, pp. 14, 22-23, 72, 105-106, 133, 212; John Fisher, “Under Fire in Spain”, Herald, 30 January 1937, p. 12. 317 Keene, The Last Mile, p. 87. 115 frequently in a social way, often in the company of fellow journalists; a person with contacts and connections. 318 According to the examination of newspaper by-lines, however, who Fisher actually wrote for is unclear; by his own account he mentioned AAP and the Australian News Service, both outlets not associated with by-lines. 319 Gollan mentioned Fisher as an important London-based source of information, helping firm-up Spanish Republican and anti-fascist support in Australia, a point made years earlier by the Australian author and Spanish Republic supporter Nettie Palmer. 320 Fisher was charming, self-promotional, an adept networker; being the son of former Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, gave him a prominence and a propaganda value others lacked. 321 Arguably what happened is that over time the work and presences of Fisher and Lockwood in Spain have been conflated in the memories of contemporaries, and given substance by the failure of historians to check by-lines. The consequence is that for a long time, journalist Fisher (with little in the way of by-lines) has been present historically in Spain as a journalist, while Lockwood, with a substantial body of by-lined material to his credit, has been all but invisible. Stuart Macintyre and Brian Beasley went some way to rectifying the situation of the ‘missing Lockwood’, placing him on Republican front lines, acknowledging original research by Rowan Cahill; Beasley also placed Sydney journalist Leslie White, who died in 1936 from shrapnel wounds 318 Ibid., pp. 6, 87, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 151, 155. 319 Warwick Powell, “The Fisher Heritage”, p. 36 (draft of an uncompleted BA (Hons) Thesis, Sydney University, undated, but during the 1980s, provided to the author by Dr. Drew Cottle in 1992. Powell conducted interviews with Fisher’s widow. 320 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 64; Nettie Palmer, Australians in Spain, The Forward Press, Sydney, n.d. (1938), p. 16. 321 Nettie Palmer, for example, refers to him as “a son of Australia’s Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher”, Australians in Spain, p. 16. 116 “whilst reporting from Valdimoro”, on Republican front lines; White was buried in the British cemetery in Madrid. 322 A key source for accounts of Australian journalists in the Spanish Civil War seems to have been the 1938 pamphlet Australians in Spain by activist/author Nettie Palmer, published by the Australian Spanish Relief Committee; she began a section headed “Newspaper Correspondents” by acknowledging her ignorance of all the Australian journalists who possibly went to Spain, then singling out three for attention---Lockwood did not rate mention: Many Australians must have been to Spain as newspaper correspondents. We think it important to mention three of them—John Fisher, Noel Monks and Leslie White. 323 Scholarship generally regarding Australian journalists in the Spanish Civil War tends to continue to ignore the presence of Lockwood. 324 Credentialed by Thomas Dunbabbin, London manager of the Australian Newspapers Cable Service (1936-1938), Lockwood went to Spain in 1937, becoming what he termed “the only direct Australian correspondent of Australian newspapers in the Spanish Civil War”. 325 Writing in 1987, he described how 322 Stuart Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 301, 454; Brian Beasley, “‘Death Charged Missives’: Australian Literary Responses to the Spanish Civil War”, PhD thesis, University of Southern Queensland, 2006, pp. 265, 355. Nettie Palmer, Australians in Spain, first drew attention to the presence of Lesley White in Spain, drawing her account from reports in the Sydney Sun, 3 November 1936, and the Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 4 November 1936. 323 Palmer, Australians in Spain, p. 16. 324 See for example Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath’s account of Spanish War reporting by Australian journalists in their study, Witnesses to War: The History of Australian Conflict Reporting, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2011, pp. 99-104. 325 Rupert Lockwood, “Spain”, typescript notes for planned memoir, undated but early 1980s, p. 3 (in possession of author). 117 (he) crossed the Pyrenees into Spanish Catalonia, groped my way through a Barcelona blackout to the Hotel Oriente in the Ramblas—and slept through an Italian air raid from the Balearic Islands that blew the building next door to dust and rubble. On the Aragon Front I shared trench cover with Republican soldiers as the Nazis blew up a bridge said to have been built by Hannibal. On the Catalan coast, now free of tourists I looked on the terror-stricken faces of little war orphans as the Franco cruiser Cañarias threw shells in their direction. On the Guadalajara front, I ate in the International Brigade mess with an English officer from the Indian Army (and) with Belgians, French, Poles, Canadians, Austrians, Garibaldian Italians. The Germans were bombarding Madrid when I sneaked in on a munitions truck at night. Refuge was found in a cellar.326 Lockwood’s experiences in Madrid especially, were personally and politically transformative. The day following his arrival in Madrid, Republican authorities took him to the Madrid morgue. There he saw the “bodies of children mangled, gutted, some still beautiful with pale cheeks and closed eyes”. It was an experience that made him feel “ashamed of having done so little to oppose Fascism and war.” 327 A meeting of significance was with Austrian socialist Ilsa Kulcsar, assistant to, and later wife of, writer, broadcaster, Arturo Barea, head of the Republic’s censorship office; they issued safe-conduct passes to correspondents, and helped with travel arrangements. 328 Ilsa involved Lockwood in the propagandist work of the Republican short-wave station EAQ, and interested him personally in the plight of Europe’s refugees fleeing fascism, an interest he actively followed up when he eventually returned to Melbourne. 329 326 Lockwood, War on Waterfront pp. 21-22. See footnote Number 87 above for Lockwood’s journalism from Spain, published in 1937, supporting this paragraph account. 327 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 22. 328 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1993, p. 497. 329 For Lockwood and Ilsa Kulcsar (Barea) see Bowden, “The Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 10; Tim Bowden, “To Lockwood with Love”, interview with Lockwood, broadcast 13 July 1975, p. 9; author interview with Lockwood, 27 June 1985. For the 118 Lockwood rated his Madrid broadcasts his “first important commitment to Leftwing causes”. Recalling his 1937 broadcasts, he told interviewer Tim Bowden in 1973 that he tried to warn people abroad that, if the Spanish Republic were defeated, this would make certain a second world war. That Fascism, victorious in Spain would be able to then turn upon all democratic countries, because fascism in Spain would certainly make the situation in France and other countries a lot weaker, more vulnerable to fascism. 330 What the journalist, editor, historian (Sir) Harold Evans has pointed out about limited wars, like the Spanish Civil War, is relevant here. According to Evans, limited wars, historically, create conditions and circumstances that can personally challenge the journalistic imperative of ‘reporting’ as ‘neutrality’, forcing the choice between professional detachment and humanitarian impulses. According to Evans, faced with this choice in the context of limited wars, many journalists “have responded to their humanitarian instincts” and in doing so become participants in the conflict. 331 Spain’s communists impressed Lockwood. From Barcelona in August 1937, he filed an article on the conduct of the war by communist and anarchist forces, an ideological difference which turned the left against itself, a bloody military/political war within a civil war. Lockwood regarded Spanish anarchist politics as “strange” because, as he saw it, they put the idea/ideal of anarchism ahead of the interests of Spain. Further, Lockwood argued, they made major mistakes, alienating potential international support, by attacking the Catholic church and destroying church property. The church was attacked, according to Hugh Thomas, besieged environment of radio station EAQ see Arturo Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, Walker & Company, New York, 2001, pp. 672-681. 330 Bowden “The Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 10. 331 Harold Evans, “Propaganda versus Professionalism”, British Journalism Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2004, pp. 38-42. 119 because of the way that religion had become the critical question of politics (in Spain) since 1931, because of the widespread subordination of priests to the upper classes, and because of the provocative wealth of many churches and the old suspicion about the secretiveness of orders and nunneries. 332 Further, General Franco and his forces needed the support of the church in order to build their future Spain, and Franco spoke “of God and the church in the same reverent tone he had (previously) reserved for regiments and barracks”. 333 While noting that anti-clericism had not been confined to anarchist interests, Lockwood reported the destruction of church property by communist forces had ceased, and concluded: The Communists in Spain have assumed a cloak of respectability, and they have certainly shown more intelligence and reason than any other political party. 334 During his time in Spain, Lockwood experienced one incident of censorship by his Melbourne employer. An article he wrote about the role of the Catholic Church in Spain, in which he attempted to explain anti-clericalism within the context of Spanish history, the “the searing resentments many Spaniards felt for the Church” as he put it, was not published, apparently 332 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Third, revised and enlarged edition, Penguin Books, Hamondsworth, 1984, p. 269 333 Ibid., p. 286. 334 The preceding discussion of Lockwood’s attitude towards anarchism and communism in the Spanish Civil War is based on his accounts in “They Die for Ideals but Not for Spain”, Herald, 5 August 1937, p. 35, and “Another View of the Spanish Civil War”, Annals Australia, Volume 104, Number 8, October 1993 pp. 18-23. The latter, a retrospective article, represents Lockwood’s mature understanding of the Spanish Civil War, and is partially autobiographical. On the complexities of anti-clericalism and related atrocities and violence during the Civil War see Thomas, pp. 268-281; Julio de la Cueva, ‘Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 3, July 1998, pp. 355-369. 120 because of the offence editorial decision makers felt it would cause the Herald’s Catholic readers. 335 While some Catholics as individuals supported the Republic, the Catholic Church as an institution in Australia “condemned the secular politics of the Republic”, and variously linked the five-year old Republic with anti-clericism-- atrocities against nuns, and priests, the destruction of church property--and supported the military uprising against the Republic. 336 The political impact of the war in Spain, and of besieged Madrid, on Lockwood, was not unique, but common to many journalists who reported from the Republican side. According to Antony Beevor: Many became resolute, and often uncritical, champions of the Republic after experiencing the siege of Madrid…. .The ideals of the anti-fascist cause anaesthetized many of them to aspects of the war that proved uncomfortable. It was a difficult atmosphere in which to retain objectivity. 337 What made the experience significant in Lockwood’s case was it marked the acceleration and intensification of a leftist political trajectory. When he later returned to Australia, he thought his experience of the Spanish Civil War 335 Rupert Lockwood, “Return”, undated typed biographical manuscript (created during the early 1980s, and in possession of the author), p. 5. 336 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 302; for an overview of Australian Catholicism’s response to the Spanish Civil War see Keene, The Last Mile, pp. 56-61. In a move to reach individual Australian Catholics, many of them in the labour movement, and to counter Church support of the Nationalists, Republican supporters in Australia published a collection of statements by European Catholics in support of the Spanish Republic-- Lloyd Ross (editor), Catholics Speak on Spain, Victorian Council of the World Movement Against War and Fascism, Melbourne, n.d. (1937?). Despite appeals from the pulpit, “the Australian Church community raised little money” to aid the Nationalist cause-see Keene, The Last Mile, p. 61. 337 Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2006, p. 244. 121 would be regarded as of some value, which was the case, but it also came with a cost: Many people were interested, but many others regarded contact with the Spanish Republic as a stain on my character. 338 CONCLUSION This chapter continued the biographical account of Lockwood. Dealing with the period 1930 to 1938, it covered Lockwood’s training and employment with the Melbourne Herald, and his subsequent experiences abroad as a journalist in Asia and in Europe, 1935 to 1938. In tandem with his development and experiences as a journalist, Lockwood’s political development as a leftist was also examined, this seen as an evolutionary process, rather than a sudden political transformation. Like other journalists of his generation, Lockwood went abroad seeking work and adventure. He was different in that he worked in Asia before heading to the traditional destination of London’s Fleet Street. The chapter showed the effect of this upon his understandings of national independence movements and the decline of European empires in Asia, and of the aggressive expansionist ambitions of Japan. Later, in Europe, Lockwood reported the Spanish Civil War, and the chapter demonstrated the political effect this had upon him. The journalist who would return to Australia in 1938 to resume domestic journalism was a burgeoning radical. 338 Lockwood, “Return”, p. 1. 122 CHAPTER FOUR “THE TREATMENT”: 1938-1939 This chapter continues the biographical approach of the preceding chapters, and deals with the period 1938-1939. During this time, Lockwood returned to Melbourne and the Herald, and increasingly became politically and publicly active in civil libertarian, humanitarian, and anti-fascist causes and activities. As will be seen, this brought him in conflict with his employer, and had career altering effects. It was also during this time that Lockwood’s politics evolved to the stage he joined the CPA. The reasons for this will be discussed. As part of his radical politicisation, Lockwood’s enmity towards conservative politician Robert Menzies will be examined, an enmity that became a constant in his future life. MELBOURNE: NO LONGER AN OBSERVER Recalled by Murdoch in 1938, Lockwood returned to Melbourne, believing he had been earmarked for career advancement. Financed by a Murdoch advance, he came home via North America, rallying pro-Republican support in Canada; about 1000 Canadian volunteers fought for the Spanish Republic. 339 The Lockwood who returned to Australia had changed, and was not the same person who had left in 1935. He had travelled around the world through thirty-four countries; professionally he had emerged from the anonymity of Herald journalism with a by-line; he had engaged successfully internationally as a journalist; he had developed a preference for journalism that blended observation/recording with comment. All reasons for feeling very much self-assured, more confident than he had been in 1935. And he had changed politically. According to friends who had known him at the time, when Lockwood left Melbourne his politics were “already a little bit on the way” to being a 339 Thomas, Spanish Civil War, p. 983. There are clippings from the Canadian press of the time, giving accounts of Lockwood’s Republican propagandist activities, in his “Clippings Book c. 1929-40”, p. 193, NLA: MS 10121, Box 55, Bag 362. 123 committed leftist; 340 they described him as having been “politically liberal minded” and “socialist inclined”. 341 The description fits others of his generation and work environment. Fellow Herald journalist Alan Moorehead, who left for London during 1936 (almost aged twenty-six), generally described his colleagues: Nearly all of us were left wing, and we glowed with hate for Mussolini and the up and coming Hitler. We read such books as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (though I personally preferred Ernest Hemingway), and some of us joined the Writers’ League which had affiliations with the communist party. 342 According to Moorehead, the attitude of these young Melbourne journalists to being ‘a journalist’ was: they opt out of normal life because they choose to write about it, and so they regard themselves as an esoteric group set apart from the rest of society. Among themselves they talk almost entirely about news and newspapers in much the same way as actors talk only of the theatre and of themselves. 343 Commenting about himself in 1936, in London, finding it difficult to remain neutral about the war in Spain and to ignore his Republican sympathies, Moorehead described a chrysalis of spirit associated with his life and journalism: Like most nomads I hovered in the half-world of only partial commitment to religion, to causes, to women and to places, and thus, by definition, to life itself. This is not the stuff out of which you can make either traitors or 340 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 6. 341 Ronald McKie, “What is Rupert Lockwood Like?” A.M., 20 July 1954, p. 16. 342 Moorehead, Late Education, p. 30. 343 Ibid. 124 heroes; it simply leaves you with sensations of frustration and of shallow guilt, which to avoid, you keep moving on. 344 For Lockwood, Kisch had challenged this view of life and the notion of uncommitted journalism. Abroad, politics and journalism meshed in Lockwood’s life, and the sort of chrysalis Moorehead described was shed. As for Moorehead, he got to Spain in 1937 as a correspondent based in Gibraltar for the London Daily Express; “flying visits” is the way he described his various assignments, Spain and its war remaining a “forbidden exhilaration”. In these words Moorehead captured his sense of regret, of being outside, apart from, what seemed to him at the time to be an intense, profoundly important, historical moment. 345 Lockwood, on the other hand, made the connection. Like Morehead, war correspondent and novelist George Johnston was a young Melbourne journalist during the 1930s, beginning his working life with the Argus in 1933. In his semi-autobiographical novel My Brother Jack, he gave a detailed look at Melbourne between the wars as experienced by the novel’s narrator and alter ego, journalist David Meredith. Through Meredith, Johnston provided a glimpse of middle-class leftism in Melbourne during the period, intellectually shaped by “lobster-pink editions of the Left Book Club”, writings by Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, and the young journalist’s growing awareness of “the strange terrible forces” of fascism and Nazism shaping Europe. This awareness was primarily due to encounters with refugee/immigrantpassengers Meredith correspondent. 346 met in his newspaper role as shipping Meredith experienced a profound inner turmoil as a result, 344 Ibid., p. 54. 345 Ibid., pp. 95-98. 346 George Johnston, My Brother Jack, Fontana Books edition, 1983: see Chapter 10 for this fleeting glimpse of leftist Melbourne, in particular p. 171; for the contribution of the shipping rounds to Meredith’s political development, pp. 178-181. George Johnston (19121970) was accredited as No. 1 Australian war correspondent, and covered campaigns in Asia and Europe, 1941-1945. In 1954 he resigned from newspaper work and became a full- 125 on one hand wanting to go to Europe, Spain in particular, to personally oppose these forces, on the other to remain at home, to try to understand what was happening abroad, but “not necessarily do anything about it”, and here Meredith placed the emphasis on ‘do’. Meredith chose this latter option. 347 Looking back from the vantage points of time passed and maturity, Meredith considered the era, claiming singularity for the period and its generation, and its powerful, clear sense of causes needing addressing and commitment; senses too, perhaps, of self deprecation, nostalgia, and regret amongst those who did not commit: It certainly created a particular generation. They belong to me even though I defected on them, and I can pick them now with my eyes closed, just by the way they talk—they are all well into their forties now, or older—and although I don’t know one among them who is an idealist any longer, and in fact most of them seem to be rabid cynics about most things, there is still a sort of soft patch of belief in them somewhere, and they have all a little weakness in their hard-shelled armour about that time of the ‘thirties when the world had causes. 348 A NEW SENSE OF COMMITMENT Upon returning to Melbourne, Lockwood was invited to a lunch with Murdoch in a private dining room in the Herald building. Murdoch indicated he knew about Lockwood’s Madrid broadcasts, and that he had a clear idea as to the political direction Lockwood was journeying, citing the articles he had sent from abroad, and Herald scuttlebut. Murdoch confided that so far as he was concerned, Spanish feudalism was crying out for change, but he did not want communists to be the driving force. So far as time author. My Brother Jack was the first of a semi-autobiographical trilogy. See Garry Kinnane, “Johnston, George Henry (1912-1970)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, pp. 573-575. 347 Johnston, My Brother Jack, pp. 182-183. 348 Ibid., pp. 181-182. 126 Lockwood was concerned, Murdoch advised, if he wanted a future with the Herald organisation, moderation was necessary. 349 Lockwood returned to the Canberra press gallery for the Herald. His personal life reflected his new sense of commitment. He joined the ALP, and was encouraged to have pre-selection aspirations. He agreed to a request by John Cain, Leader of the Labor opposition in Victoria (since 1937), to stand for pre-selection for the Federal rural seat of Wannon in South-Western Victoria, eventually held by the ALP from 1940-1949, a region Lockwood could identify with personally and represent given its proximity to his own family origins and roots. Lockwood thought the matter was a fait accompli, but was knocked back, for what he understood was his Spanish War reporting and support for the Republic. 350 Writing in 1993 about the Spanish Civil War, Lockwood recalled how the “labour movement was divided, and powerful sections did not want to hear about” the War. Within the ALP there was little “understanding of the historical issues or historical background”. He recalled a conversation he had with the Secretary of the Spanish Relief Committee, leftist Phil Thorne, who told him that while politicians on the conservative side of Australian politics like William Morris Hughes, even Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, would reply to Committee correspondence regarding the War, prominent ALP politicians like John Curtin (ALP leader after 1935), “never answered”. 351 The Spanish Relief Committee had been established in Sydney in August 1936 to help develop moral and material support for the Spanish Republic. Branches and local support groups were subsequently established around Australia. Most of those involved in the organisation tended to come from communist and left-wing trade unions, and from Christian organisations. Author Nettie Palmer, whose eldest daughter Aileen went to Spain as a nurse with the British Medical Aid Unit in August 1936, was probably the 349 Lockwood interview with the author, Gosford, 24 June 1992. 350 Lockwood, “Return”, p. 1; Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 12. 351 Lockwood, “Another View of the Spanish Civil War”, pp. 18-23. 127 most prominent Committee activist. 352 For a complexity of reasons, including the tactic of fostering internal party unity by eschewing divisive issues wherever possible, the ALP as a national organisation endeavoured to remain silent on Spain, and advocated non-intervention. At the local level, however, most state Labor parties eventually came to overtly support the Republic. Trade union support depended on the degree to which individual unions had left or right-wing political allegiances; as Judith Keeene summarised, “the Australian labour movement as a whole never was never united in defence of the Spanish Republic”. 353 Overall, as Nettie Palmer later commented, Australian supporters of the Republic “were few and not powerful” and “we seemed often to be shouting against the wind”. 354 If Lockwood hoped to secure a role for himself within mainstream Australian politics, he would have to tailor himself and his views accordingly. Which is not the course of action he chose, nor where circumstances led. Instead, Lockwood involved himself in the work of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties (ACCL) where he served on the Executive Committee, and the Victorian International Refugee Emergency Council (VIREC). 355 In Australia it was a time of increasing tensions and conflict between police and anti-fascist demonstrators, and concern amongst civil libertarians that in the event of war with Germany, civil liberties would be curtailed in the name of national security. Recent changes to Commonwealth legislation, particularly the Crimes Act, were perceived as threatening traditionally 352 For a useful overall account of the Australian Spanish Aid movement and the importance of Nettie Palmer, see Keene, The Last Mile, pp. 65-71. 353 Ibid., p. 61. My account of labour movement responses to the Spanish Civil War is substantially based on Keene’s overview, pp. 61-65; Carl Bridge, “Appeasement and After: Towards a Re-assessment of the Lyons and Menzies Governments’ Defence and Foreign Policies, 1931-41”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 51, Number 3, 2005, p. 375. 354 Nettie Palmer and Len Fox, Australians in Spain, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1948, p. 3. 355 Tim Bowden, “Security and I”, p. 9. 128 accepted democratic rights and freedoms, while the CPA was seen to be increasingly harassed both nationally and locally by state authorities. 356 The ACCL was also concerned about anti-semitism in Australia, “real or apparent”, and took up the welfare of refugees as part of its agenda. 357 Between 1933 and 1940, Australia was a sought after destination for refugees fleeing European politics and anti-semitism. Some 7000 refugees entered Australia during this period; government policy restricting the entry of Jewish refugees was explained to an ACCL deputation as being necessary to “prevent the growth of anti-semitism in Australia. 358 The anti-semitic violence and bloodshed in Germany of the Kristallnacht (November 1938) pogroms in particular, generated outrage across Australia, but the Lyons government failed to respond, and took the public position instead that “no good purpose would be served by a formal protest” to the German government. 359 While Jewish refugee entry quotas were increased during the period 1936-1939 in response to humanitarian concerns and interest group pressures, the attitude of the Australian public “was, on the whole cold, aloof and, in some cases, even hostile”. 360 The ACCL, guided by historian and former Herald journalist Brian Fitzpatrick, was officially launched in Melbourne in May 1936. Its general aims, resolved at its first general meeting, were: 356 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 81-82. 357 Ibid., pp. 86-88. 358 Ibid., p. 87. 359 Christopher Waters, Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II, I. B. Tauris, London, 2012, pp. 136-137. 360 Suzanne D. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, (Second revised edition), Holmes & Meier, New York, 2001, pp. 174; for discussion of Australian attitudes to refugees, Jewish in particular, during the 1930s, pp. 174-201; see also Paul R. Batrop, Australia and the Holocaust, 1933-45, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 94-130. For an historical overview of antisemitism in Australia, see Hilary l. Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, Volume 1, 1788-1945, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 471-528. 129 To assist in the maintenance of the rights of citizens—especially freedom of speech, press and assembly—and to aid in advancing measures for the recovery and enlargement of these liberties, and for the reform of existing relevant legislation.361 In a political environment where the ACCL found it increasingly difficult to get press and radio coverage for its aims, objectives, and campaigns, 362 Lockwood was welcomed as a new member of the ACCL Executive Committee in June 1938, recruited to the organisation by his friend Fitzpatrick. 363 Fitzpatrick had been a feature-writer on the Herald 19331935, subsequently leaving and pursuing his researches into Australian economic history, and campaigning for civil liberties. 364 He briefly returned to the Herald in 1937. Lockwood remained with the Council some sixteen months until his departure for Sydney in late 1939. Along with another recruit, the young writer and communist activist Judah Waten, Lockwood became part of the Council’s publications committee. Here his skills as a journalist were utilised, along with his media contacts, in promoting the organisation. According to Lockwood, Fitzpatrick also drew him into the organisation in a bid to help him enlist the ACCL in the defence of left-wing causes and issues. This was something other key ACCL members sought to avoid; they counselled that the ACCT should endeavour to quarantine itself as an organisation so it did not become “associated in peoples minds with political movements and policies”. 365 In September 1939, Lockwood and Fitzpatrick were leading voices and key tactical players within the ACCL, urging the 361 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p.81. 362 Ibid., p. 85. 363 Ibid., p. 89. 364 Ibid., pp. 45-49. 365 Lockwood interview with author, 14 August 1985; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 82. 130 organisation to prepare for imminent attacks on civil liberties within the context of looming war and in the name of national security. 366 The other organisation Lockwood became involved with was VIREC. It was a small, dynamic organisation established in Melbourne in December 1938 by various interests including Anglican and non-conformist church organisations, internationalists associated with the League of Nations, womens’ organisations and civil libertarians. It began operations in February 1939, with the aim of assisting the migration of European refugees to Australia and help with the process of their adaptation. VIREC activities included representatives meeting ships with refugees on them, helping refugees find employment, extending hospitality, supplying government authorities with the names of refugees whose passage/entry to Australia it was willing to guarantee and/or finance. The VIREC worked closely with the German Emergency Council of the Society of Friends in London. Apart from honorary officers, VIREC had a Director who supervised a staff of seven part-time and voluntary workers. 367 Lockwood saw the world entering a new stage of history, what he termed the ‘the age of refugees’. Australians had a responsibility here, he told readers of the ABC Weekly in 1939, and must not close its doors to victims of Nazi persecution and the politics of racism. After all, reminding readers here of their own history, refugees from European political and religious persecution were amongst those who pioneered and helped build the Australian nation. 368 Personally, Lockwood “tried to bring Jews into Australia”, initially, and unsuccessfully, seeking “an entry permit for a Jewish woman doctor”, at the request of Ilse Barea (whom he had met in 366 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 92-93. 367 Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933-1948, Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1985, p. 118; Charlotte Carr-Gregg, “The work of the German Emergency Fellowship Committee, 1938-1941”, in W.D. Rubenstein (editor), Jews in the Sixth Continent, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987, p. 196. 368 Rupert Lockwood, “Refugee!”, ABC Weekly, 30 December 1939, p. 27. 131 Madrid during his Herald assignment and subsequently stayed in contact with). 369 While Lockwood’s advocacy on behalf of refugees, and his stance against racism, can be understood variously as a reflection of liberal, humanitarian, social justice, even political concerns, arguably also it was personal. As we have seen, Lockwood had experienced racist abuse and harassment as a child during World War 1 in rural Victoria, because of the German background of his stepmother. ANTI-FASCIST ACTIVISM In July 1938 German goodwill missioner, and suspected spy, Count Felix von Luckner visited Melbourne as part of an Australian propaganda tour on behalf of the Nazi regime. The controversial tour was met with large antifascist protests, the Melbourne protests in particular dispersed by police with significant violence. Some ACCL members attended the Melbourne protests as observers, and later defended those arrested in court. 370 Lockwood was one observer; his court appearance on behalf of one of the arrested was the subject of press reports in which he was identified as a Herald journalist. 371 Murdoch was greatly displeased and subsequently angrily confronted Lockwood in the Herald sub-editors’ room; he demanded it was about time Lockwood “started to repay the money I lent you”, reference to the advance that had financed his return from Europe. 372 369 Rupert Lockwood, “Steinberg”, biographical notes created during the early 1980s in preparation for proposed memoir (in possession of the author), p. 3. 370 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 84-85. For a comprehensive account of von Luckner’s Australian tour, see Carl Rühen, The Sea Devil: The Controversial Cruise of the Nazi Emissary von Luckner to Australia and New Zealand in 1938, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, 1988; the Melbourne section of the tour is dealt with on pp.108-112. For the Melbourne demonstrations also see Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 137-138. 371 See for example, Herald, 8 July 1938. 372 Lockwood interview with author, 14 August 1985. 132 Then, in December 1938, Lockwood and his future intersected with a political ban by waterside workers (wharfies) on the south coast of NSW, an intersection which altered his career trajectory. In November 1938, wharfies in Port Kembla on the south coast of NSW refused to load an Australian export cargo of pig-iron on the British steamer Dalfram, bound for Japan. Their ban, they explained, was in protest against the Sino-Japanese war, in progress since July 1937, and they did not want to assist the Japanese war effort. Further, they argued, war between Japan and Australia was a distinct future possibility, in which case Australia could well be on the receiving end of strategic materials it exported to Japan. The conservative Lyons government, in accord with its policy of appeasement towards Japan, denounced the ban, arguing the wharfies were trying to dictate foreign policy, the preserve of the government. Attorney General Robert Menzies vigorously sought to end the ban, eventually deploying the harsh provisions of the Transport Workers Act (TWA) against the wharfies. The Port Kembla dispute was the focus of national attention until its resolution in January 1939. 373 Lockwood was in the press gallery of the House of Representatives when, on the eve of the 1938 parliamentary Christmas break, quixotic Labor MP Maurice Blackburn made an eloquent and stirring speech in support of the Port Kembla wharfies and their ban. Blackburn was a politician Lockwood admired and respected, and a fellow civil liberties’ activist; “one of the few parliamentarians to go in for democratic practice as well as theory” in the estimation of civil libertarian and Lockwood colleague Brian Fitzpatrick. 373 The Dalfram dispute is discussed in detail in Chapter 9 of this present study. For a brief overview, see Margo Beasley, Wharfies: A History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, Halstead Press in association with the Australian Maritime Museum, Sydney, 1996, pp. 106-108; Lockwood’s account of the dispute is the subject of his book, War on the Waterfront. 133 For both Lockwood and Fitzpatrick, Blackburn was one of the ‘honest men’ in politics, a person who remained true to his principles, no matter what. 374 Blackburn told the House, the action taken by the wharfies will have the sympathy, silent support, and as far as possible, active support of the people of this country, and not only the working class. I believe that the Government is making a gigantic mistake in attacking these men. 375 Subsequently, at the Canberra press gallery’s annual break-up dinner, Lockwood, as a senior galleryman, was called upon to toast the guest, Attorney General Menzies. In his toast Lockwood caustically congratulated Menzies for his humanitarianism in recognising the lack of iron in the diet of the Chinese people and his efforts to rectify this deficiency via the bomb racks of Japanese aircraft. Scuffles between journalists erupted as a consequence of the toast, Lockwood was assaulted by doyen political journalist Stanley Massey, and blood was shed; Menzies was livid. 376 In the new year, Lockwood supported Brian Fitzpatrick’s production of the forthright pamphlet published by the ACCL in association with the WWF and other unions, The Case Against the Transport Workers Act. Written after the Commonwealth’s three-day silencing during the Christmas-New Year period of the NSW Labor radio station 2KY, for broadcasting in 374 Cahill, “Lockwood and the Spooks”, p. 4; Brian Fitzpatrick quoted in Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 138-139; for Blackburn see Susan Blackburn Abeyasekere, “Blackburn, Maurice McCrae (1880-1944)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7: 18911939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1979, pp. 310-312. A detailed account of Fitzpatrick’s view of Blackburn, is Carolyn Rasmussen, “Brian Fitzpatrick, Maurice Blackburn and the Quest for the ‘Honest Man’ in Politics”, in Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick, editors, Against The Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2007, pp. 141-162. 375 For the speech see Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Official Hansard, Number 49, 1938, Thursday 8 December 1938, pp. 2995-2996. 376 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 25; McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 66. 134 support of the Port Kembla workers, the pamphlet bluntly pointed out that the TWA deprived workers of the right to strike and in effect treated them “like so many dogs”; as such it was an “indefensible piece of class legislation”. 377 MAKING A CHOICE Given the insights earlier of Lloyd regarding the Canberra press gallery of the 1930s and ‘raffish behaviour’, and those of Lockwood and McKie regarding alcohol, both may well have had a role in the ‘toast’ incident. That aside, it was not an epiphany moment for Lockwood, as Japan, China, and Menzies were already parts of his political understanding. The ‘toast’ was a reflection of this, and neither a cause nor a beginning. Politically, the Port Kembla dispute struck a chord with Lockwood, the wharfies’ rationale for their stand in line with his understanding of Japan’s geo-political ambitions in Asia, and the dangers of appeasement. In 1938 Lockwood was one of the few Australian journalists, and amongst “a tiny minority of Australians” to have observed and experienced Japanese militarism at first-hand. Simply, Australian journalists did not base themselves either in Japan or in its Empire; before 1940, when (Sir) John Latham became Australia’s first ambassador to Japan, only four Australian staff journalists had visited Japan. 378 For Lockwood, his 1936 Reuters’ scoop had sparked an “acute interest in the tangle and treachery of Japanese Imperial politics and the violence of military ambition”; 379 the Japan Lockwood was aware of was militarised, aggressive, expansionist, an understanding at variance with the understanding of Japan prevailing in Australia. 380 377 James Waghorne, and Stuart Macintyre, Liberty: A History of Civil Liberties in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2011, pp. 25-26. 378 Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, pp. 100-101. 379 Ibid., p. 14. 380 Ibid., p. 101 135 While in Singapore, Lockwood had not confined himself to the orderliness of expatriate Singapore, and thus had not succumbed to the mythologies of colonial order and British superiority prevailing there, and in Australian news-rooms. 381 Instead he had developed a critical anti-colonial awareness. Travelling in the NEI, Indo-China, Siam, China, he saw “the sufferings of the people” which “helped to mould one’s views”. 382 He became critical of the Australian press for cultivating what he termed “an Atlantic outlook” amongst “Pacific dwelling Australians”. 383 By 1938 he had come to regard Singapore as a vulnerable fortress positioned for a fall. As he understood Asian geopolitics, Japan had spread, and was spreading, its economic influence throughout the Far East, in cases monopolising industries and resources. In his understanding, the economic and the strategic, understood in both military and political terms, were inextricably linked. Singapore, “the Gibraltar of the East, the impregnable island fortress”, was in fact a military geography surrounded, and riddled within, by Japanese economic interests. Ultimately Singapore was reliant on food from vulnerable external sources—Burma, Siam, Indo-China the Malay rice staple, and Australia for the colonialists’ food. As for British military strategy, it was underpinned by a racist underestimation of Japan’s military strength and prowess, accepting as given “the superiority of European over Asiatic troops”. 384 Lockwood had been in China on the eve of the Sino-Japan War, and had experienced harassment by Japanese soldiery. In Asia he had seen manifestations of focussed, determined Japanese expansionism, and believed that conflict between Japan, Britain, Australia was the future 381 Ibid. 382 Bowden, “The Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 8. 383 Rupert Lockwood, “Not Cricket”, The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin, August-September 1939, p. 9. 384 Rupert Lockwood, “There are still weak spots at Singapore”, The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin, April-May 1939, pp.16-17; Lockwood, “Not Cricket”, pp. 9-10. 136 consequence of Japan’s ambitions. The military strategy relying on Singapore as first line of defence was flawed and vulnerable. As for appeasement, those Australians who built their relationship with Japan “on supposed commercial needs rather than morality”, were out of step with history. 385 In the long run, Lockwood envisaged that Japan would not have its own way unchallenged. Given the strains of the war on Japan’s economy, over extended supply lines, and increasingly aggressive and effective guerrilla resistance, the Sino-Japan War would not go on forever, and Japan’s ambitions in China were ultimately doomed. The Chinese Communist party was a well organised mass revolutionary party, the Eighth Route Army was a significant and serious military force, while the Chinese peasantry, defying a narrow Marxist interpretation which emphasised the revolutionary role of city proletariats, would be the agency of future revolutionary social change. Australians, he argued, should not follow the thinking of the old imperialists. When it came to China, he wrote, there is no reason why we, in a neighbouring country, should try to convince ourselves that the future of a nation of 430,000,000 is to remain one of heroin, Japanese shoddies and British loans. 386 While by no means constituting mainstream thinking at the time, Lockwood was not alone in these sorts of ruminations during the 1930s about Singapore, Japan, and Pacific mindedness. Prominent liberal public intellectual (Sir) Frederic Eggleston, for example, in the Melbourne Herald (1935) and in the Australian Quarterly (1936), had variously questioned Britain’s East Asian policy, its strategic reliance on Singapore as a deterrence to Japan’s imperial ambitions, and argued that Australia should 385 Lockwood, “Not Cricket”, p. 9. 386 Lockwood, “Not Cricket’, pp. 9-10. 137 be Pacific-minded, as its future “will be mainly in the Pacific and her relations with Pacific nations”. 387 Robin Gerster has argued Australian journalists reporting on Asia from the 1890s to modern times, have regarded Asia as “a space upon which the Western sensibility is imposed”, in a sense ‘inventing’ Asia, doing “their country’s political bidding”, peddling “racist misconceptions” and mixing “fact with fiction”. If this is true, then Lockwood, in foreseeing the consequences of Japanese militarism, and in recognizing the future power of insurgent Asian nationalism, must be regarded as an exception. 388 LOCKWOOD AND MENZIES Menzies too was of considerable personal and political interest to Lockwood. The Menzies family was known to the Lockwood family. The Attorney General’s father, James Menzies, storekeeper, community leader, fiery Methodist lay-preacher, had been a welcome guest in the Natimuk office of Rupert’s father’s newspaper, the West Wimmera Mail, when James had been the member for Lowan in the Victorian Legislative Assembly (1911-1920). 389 Robert Menzies was a celebrated and successful Wesley College former student when Rupert was coming through the same school. 390 By late 1938, Lockwood was amongst many Australians who regarded Menzies with suspicion for his alignment with the appeasers of Mussolini and Hitler, and maybe more than simple appeasement, sympathisers no 387 Neville Meaney, “Frederic Eggleston on International Relations and Australia’s Role in the World”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 51, Number 3, 2005, pp. 368-369. 388 Robin Gerster, “Covering Australia: Foreign Correspondents in Asia”, in Wenche Ommundsen and Hazel Rowley (editors), From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1996, pp. 118, 126. 389 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 62. 390 Ibid., pp. 237- 238. 138 less. 391 The Communist Party worried about Menzies’ authoritarianism, warning he would use the threat of war “to suppress the labour movement”, even use the army against the people. 392 From Melbourne and Canberra, Lockwood had monitored reports of Menzies’ lengthy visit to Europe earlier that year (Menzies landed in Plymouth at the end of April, and departed for Australia, 9 August), particularly his visit to Germany where Menzies had a senior German Foreign Office official at his disposal. Menzies met leading Reich identities, including the polite and genial Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, the “economic wizard” who, as Shirer pointed out, was significantly responsible for the coming of the Third Reich, helping forge vital links between Hitler and German banking and industrial interests. As Lockwood understood the triumph of Nazism in Germany, German capital played an important part, leading industrialists bankrolling Hitler because of his, and their, mutual anti-communism. 393 Back home, in an address to a luncheon gathering of the Old Melbournians on 14 November 1938, Menzies had expressed sympathy for the territorial aspirations of Germany; he told of how impressed he was by Germany’s industrial efficiency, and saw as a positive “the exalted and almost spiritual worship of the State by many Germans”. He looked forward, he told his audience, to a system of democracy where “(we) can have real discipline 391 For a critique of the view of Menzies and other leading conservative politicians during the 1930s as ultra-appeasers, what Carl Bridge has termed the Australian version of “the guilty men of Munich myth”, see Bridge, “Appeasement and After”, pp. 372-379. 392 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 382. 393 The Menzies tour of England and Europe is treated in detail in Chapter 10 of Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 219-239; Waters, Australia and Appeasement, pp. 53-69. For Lockwood’s view, see War on the Waterfront, p. 237; for Shirer’s view of Schacht, see William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; A History of Nazi Germany, Book Club Associates, London, 1970, pp. 183-184. For evidence of Lockwood’s understanding around this time regarding the role of German capital in the rise of Nazism, see Rupert Lockwood, “The Man Who Lost a Kingdom”, ABC Weekly, 17 February 1940, pp. 7-8; see also his later pamphlet, Rupert Lockwood, Bankers Backed Hitler, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1948. 139 and real efficiency and real cooperation”. In private, Menzies regarded Hitler as “a dreamer, a man of ideas, many of them good ones”. 394 As he left England in August, Menzies had issued a press statement in which he argued the survival of democracy required the sort of spirituality he had witnessed in Germany: There is a good deal of a real spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State. If our democracy is to survive and flourish…we will have to realise that a willingness to serve the community either in a political or social or industrial way, should come to be regarded as a normal state of mind and not as a mild eccentricity”.395 In similar vein, and at the same time, he wrote to his sister: Nevertheless, it must be said that this modern abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty and of the easy and pleasant things of life has something rather magnificent about it. The Germans may be pulling down the Churches, but they have erected the State, with Hitler as its head, into the sort of religion which produces a spiritual exaltation that one cannot but admire and some small portion of which would do no harm among out own somewhat irresponsible population.396 According to Christopher Waters, Menzies’ ideological position was that of “liberal conservatism”; he believed “a measured, ordered and hierarchical society was required for liberalism to flourish”. As summarised by Waters, Menzies feared “that class conflict might bring down” Australian democracy. During the Great Depression, “many young people” had turned “to communism and other radical ideologies”, which, along with direct 394 For a report of the luncheon address, see the Argus, 15 November 1938, p. 2. For the private view of Hitler, see Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 235. 395 Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 235-236. 396 Menzies to his sister, Belle, 6 August 1938, quoted by Waters, Australia and Appeasement, p. 66. 140 action, had become “part of Australian political life” and threatened “the existing parliamentary order”. In these circumstances the loyalty of the young Germans to the state had some appeal for a politician who had been a target of many such attacks. The absence of strikes, the suppression of communism, the loyalty to the nation, and the sense of duty of young Germans to the cause all had some attraction for Menzies. The suppression of conflict between classes and of industrial strikes appealed to Menzies’ conservative bent.397 The relationship between Menzies and big-business also intrigued and concerned Lockwood; he saw ‘conflict of interest’ an ongoing aspect of Menzies’ political career. During 1938 Lockwood had met James Menzies a number of times in Parliament House (Canberra), the patriarch, “grey-suited and benign”, candidly telling the journalist of his activities as a lobbyist for mining and steel giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (BHP), a subsidiary of which, Australian Iron and Steel (AIS), would soon be embroiled in the Dalfram boycott which his son, Attorney-General Menzies, would resolutely seek to break. It was a situation Lockwood saw as not worrying his fellow Australians “very much”. 398 In October 1935, when Lang Labour MHR J. A. Beasley (West Sydney) had sought the formation of a select parliamentary committee to investigate the potential of BHP developing as a “steel trust antagonistic to the economic interests of Australia”, following its proposed absorption of AIS, he had read out a list of BHP shareholders during the course of a long and well informed political, economic and historical analysis of the company. Attorney-General Menzies had responded with mocking contempt: 397 Ibid., pp. 67-68. 398 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 64, 66, 140; De Berg, p. 17,503. 141 Beasley’s speech was “a great entertainment, because I hear so many names of my friends read out”. 399 During the Royal Commission on Mineral Oils and Petrol and Other Products of Mineral Oils (1933-1935), Menzies K.C. had appeared in a private capacity as counsel for Shell Oil, while serving as the AttorneyGeneral of Victoria (1932-1934). The Commission was set up to inquire into the operation of overseas oil interests in Australia, with particular attention to the pricing of petrol and related products. In Melbourne, Lockwood had covered the opening session of the Royal Commission for the Herald. For Lockwood, the appearance of Menzies on behalf of Shell Oil was questionable, since “a servant of the Crown should not have appeared to oppose the Crown at a Royal Commission”. 400 Using the law as it stood at the time, Menzies had vigorously defended the right of the company to not answer certain questions and to deny the Commission access to documents and papers it sought. 401 Lockwood’s 1938 press-gallery toast was more than a witty expression of solidarity with the Port Kembla wharfies, possibly fuelled by alcohol, and certainly inspired by Blackburn; it was also a manifestation of Lockwood’s concern about the future darkness of looming war, and an individual railing 399 For the Beasley speech, House of Representatives, Official Hansard, No. 40, 1935, Wednesday, 2 October 1935, pp. 417-424; for Menzies’ reply, p. 428. Lockwood refers to this incident, War on the Waterfront, p. 66. 400 Rupert Lockwood, “Menzies”, typescript of notes for proposed memoir, created in early 1980s (in possession of the author), p. 28 401 On 26 August 1954, with the Petrov Royal Commission (May 1954-March 1955) in mind, ALP politician E. J. Ward (East Sydney, NSW) questioned Prime Minister Menzies about his role as counsel for Shell Oil during the 1933-1935 Royal Commission. Ward wanted to know if Menzies still supported the right of people called before Royal Commissions to refuse to cooperate, or whether that was just a “special privilege” enjoyed by “wealthy and powerful business interests”. Menzies replied, pointing out that while he had advised non-cooperation at the time, since then the law relating to Royal Commissions had changed to compel compliance. House Hansard, House of Representatives, hansard80/hansard80/1954-08-26/0068; hansard80/hansard80/1954-08-26/0069. 142 against the power and morality of capitalism. Also, for Lockwood, the Port Kembla boycott clarified leftist politics. As he wrote early the following year, commenting on the boycott: It is true that some Labour men have sought what is known in Left circles as the “Trotskyist” excuse—“Who would help Chiang Kai-shek, the man who did his best to annihilate the Chinese working-class parties?” It is also true that the Opposition Leader (Mr. Curtin), influenced by isolationist and reactionary influences within his own party, has adopted a policy toward the Far Eastern war that is much weaker than that of the Labour leaders of other countries, and that the Lang section has preached a nothing-to-dowith-us foreign policy, which is a brand of inverted fascism. But the true political and financial basis of Australian Labour is trade unionism, and its determined attitude has forced most Labour parliamentarians to take the true democratic line on China. 402 Reading behind these lines, the catalyst for this attitudinal change was not Australian trade unionism generally, but, as Lockwood fully understood, its militant and communist section, specifically the wharfies and the communist activists who had spearheaded the boycott. In the not too distant future he would throw his lot in with the communists, and a little over a decade after that, with the wharfies. ‘THE TREATMENT’ The end of year press-gallery dinner toast in 1938, together with what Lockwood understood was a telephoned complaint from Menzies to Herald management, along with fallout from his civil liberties work, resulted in him being assigned during 1939 to lesser journalistic tasks not commensurate with Lockwood’s status and experience. 403 At the time Murdoch was on close terms with Menzies and regarded him as a possible future conservative prime minister. 404 Relegation to lesser duties in the Murdoch organisation 402 Lockwood, “Not Cricket’, p. 9. 403 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 25-26. 404 Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 247-248. 143 was known as “the treatment”, a demeaning process of reining in and cutting down journalists who strayed too far and independently from management’s vision of political-professional journalistic behaviour. In 1936 journalist Noel Monks, for example, fresh from reporting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, had been assigned junior tasks, specifically reporting Women’s Christian Temperance Union activities; he responded by booking a return passage to Fleet Street. 405 From the perspective of an employer with a “patriarchal attitude to his staff” and keen to keep rein on his charges, Lockwood’s wings needed clipping. Murdoch was no stranger in the Herald reporters’ room, according to Lockwood, and was prepared to help staff “for trips overseas or housing loans”. 406 But the politically evolving Lockwood had arguably gone too far; he had leadership qualities, and admirers within the Herald organisation. For example, from the perspective of Herald copy boy James Aldridge, taking his first steps towards a distinguished international career in journalism and literature, soon to win fame and respect as a war correspondent in Finland, Egypt, Greece, Italy and the Middle East for European and North American newspapers, Lockwood was regarded as “a good journalist and a man of considerable conscience”; amongst the copy boys Lockwood “was highly respected”. 407 Personally, Lockwood was affronted by his treatment; as he recalled in 1981, I found myself back on cadet jobs, reporting the morgue, and some body (which) had been dragged out of the Yarra, and reporting suburban courts and jobs like that, and sometimes not getting a job at all, but being left, 405 Pocock, Alan Moorehead, p. 20. See also the obituary for Charles Wedd Henderson, a former Melbourne Herald journalist who received “the treatment” in 1950, in The Journalist, April 1987, p. 9. 406 Lockwood to author, letter, 29 September 1987. 407 James Aldridge to author, letter, 26 March 1986. On the career of James Aldridge (1918- ) see Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, pp. 94-95; William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p. 21. 144 sent to Coventry, left sitting around doing nothing, and feeling like a goat.. 408 Despite “the treatment”, however, Lockwood continued his civil liberties work and contributed to public debate about Japanese militarism and expansion in Asia. He found an outlet for his views regarding the latter in The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin, a bi-monthly review inspired by the London New Statesman and Nation, published by the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), an organisation in which (Sir) Frederic William Eggleston was a key figure. The AIIA and its Bulletin attracted some of the most prominent Australian intellectuals of the time who were engaged in policy debates. They were major forums during the inter-war years for the discussion of Asia-Pacific affairs, and important in the intellectual bridging of the cultural gap between White Australian attitudes and unfamiliarity with Asia. 409 At the same time Lockwood sought employment elsewhere. A lifeline came in the form of an offer from former Herald editor Syd Deamer to join him in Sydney as foreign editor and feature writer on the ABC Weekly, a new publication headed up by Deamer, the first issue of which was published 2 December 1939. Lockwood accepted the job and as he later put it, “cleared out and went to the ABC”. 410 But before he quit Melbourne, the day Australia declared war on Germany, he joined the CPA. Two Herald colleagues signed his nomination form. There was what Lockwood described as “a very, very strong Communist Party Branch” in the Herald, 408 De Berg, p. 17,462 409 Warren Osmond, “Eggleston, Sir Frederick William (1875-1954)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1981, p. 422; David Walker, “Cultural Change and the Response to Asia: 1945 to the Present”, in Mark McGillivray and Gary Smith (editors), Australia and Asia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 18-19. 410 De Berg, p. 17,462. 145 having a common literary/political bond through membership of the antifascist Writers’ League. Lockwood kept his party membership secret. 411 Lockwood was drawn to, and joined, the CPA at a time when the small beleagured party, in keeping with the decision of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August 1935, was working to build a “united fighting front of the working class”. While retaining its mission as an anti-capitalist revolutionary formation, the Australian party began for the first time to signal its interest in building a broader class of alliances ‘between the workers, farmers, civil servants, middle classes, intellectuals’ who would rally around the campaign against fascism and war. 412 At the end of 1935 the party numbered 2873 members, of whom only 1674 were financial; by early 1936 membership stood at 3000, and increased to 4124 members by early 1937, a number which held through to early 1939. In mid-1939, with war with Germany imminent, the party issued 4421 membership cards. 413 Part of the 1935-strategy involved Australian communists variously working with the ALP, from outside the organisation, and from inside as members. The CPA began its recruitment of ALP members from 1935 onwards and instead of having them leave the ALP, had them adopt 411 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 12; Rupert Lockwood to author, letter, 13 February 1989. On the Writers’ League see Carter, A Career in Writing, Chapter 2, pp. 23-28, http://www.nla.gov.au/documents/carter_combined.pdf , accessed 12 April 2011. The presence of communists on the Herald staff apparently continued; according to the recollections of former Melbourne journalist Tim Hewat, he was astonished when he started on The Age in 1946 “to learn that nearly all senior reporters on Keith Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald were Communists!” See Tim Hewat, “The Century of Brawn”, http://www.hrnicholls.com.au/archives/vol19/vol19-4.php, p. 4, (accessed 8 September 2010). 412 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 249- 250. 413 Ibid., pp. 280, 351. 146 clandestine dual-memberships and work to advance CPA interests from within the ALP. A further clandestine element applied to middle-class members of the CPA; as McKnight has explained, for people “such as doctors, lawyers, journalists and scientists whose careers and social standing would be badly damaged by open (CPA) activity”, the practice was they too would be secretive about membership of the CPA. Most journalists who were communists employed on the major Australian newspapers maintained this secretive profile. On the eve of war then, Lockwood began a clandestine twofold communist role, as a journalist, and as an ALP member. 414 So far as Australia’s security authorities were concerned, Lockwood was not perceived as a threat until after 1939. When he acted as guarantor for a family of Jewish refugees from Nazism, comprising a husband--a dentist by profession, and wife, and their two teenaged sons aged 17 years and 15 years, a July 1939 Australian security review noted the state of Lockwood’s assets and earnings; according to this he had a parcel of 50 Herald shares worth some ₤150 pounds, a weekly wage of ₤13/15/0, which he topped up with an estimated ₤1 pound per week from freelance work. Security authorities described him as "a first class type of guarantor”. In the six Australian capital cities at the time, the basic wage for a week stood at an average of ₤3/13/0. 415 NO SPUR OF THE MOMENT American writer, and former member of the American Communist Party, Howard Fast, observed in his novel about the politicisation of 414 McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, pp. 155-156, 189, 196; Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 12. 415 Regarding Lockwood’s status as a guarantor, NAA: A6119, 40, folios 1-2; Lockwood confirmed the nature of his assets as they stood in 1939 in a letter to the author, 20 October 1987, noting that he did not provide the details recorded, and that “Sir Keith Murdoch’s Herald must have supplied” the information. For details of the basic wage for the period 1937-1940, see Jim Hagan, The History of the A.C.T.U., Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 140-143. 147 newspaperman Bruce Bacon and his experiences during the McCarthy era, The Pledge: No one is constructed instantly—in terms of mind and outlook—any more than one is changed instantly. The making and the changing are part of a process. 416 So it was with Lockwood and his decision to join the CPA. As he explained in later life, it was no spur of the moment decision. Rather, it climaxed an evolutionary process in which his experiences overseas, particularly in Spain, and the anti-fascist role of the CPA during the 1930s, were key factors. 417 To this Euro-centred view of his path to communism, Lockwood’s Asian experiences and their legacies must be added, and his belief that resistance by communists was what stood between Japanese militarism and the future. Asked in maturity why he had joined the CPA, Lockwood explained that during the Depression the ALP had, either through “the forfeit or the default of the right wing and centre leaders of the trade unions”, alienated “quite a lot of workers” from Labor, creating a political and leadership vacuum filled by the CPA. 418 Explaining the way he had seen the situation at the time, the ALP was absolutely bankrupt, they had supported cuts in old age pensions and other attacks on the poor, in the interests of the people of wealth, there was no organisation which seemed to be doing much, about the conditions of the unemployed and the poor, except the Communist Party, and of course I was under illusions, very widely shared by intellectuals, that the Soviet Union offered a society that was a glorious alternative to the evils of capitalism. 416 Howard Fast, The Pledge, Coronet edition, 1990, p. 3. 417 Rupert Lockwood, “The making and unmaking of a communist propagandist”, The Australian, 24 January 1970, p. 15; Bowden, “The Making of an Australian Communist”, pp. 9-12. 418 Bowden “The Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 13. 148 Given the state of my knowledge and experience in that period, and given the terrible threats of extermination in major wars, due to the terrible conflict of empires and nations, and given the frightful sufferings of the majority of people in this world, I do not know what else I could have done, if I wanted to live in peace with my own conscience.419 Lockwood was on safe ground here, referring to the phenomenon during the 1930s of many intellectuals, communist and non-communist alike, becoming enthusiastic proselytisers for the Soviet Union. There is considerable literature on the reasons why they failed to see, or chose to ignore, the repressive realities, and extent, of Stalinism. 420 However for Lockwood to claim in his case he was under an ‘illusion’ is not historically correct. We know (see Chapter 3) as he passed through Russia in 1937, Lockwood was too good an observer, too good a journalist, not to recognise, as he did, that the Stalinist system involved harsh repression and political spin to justify the silencing of dissent. As we saw, he used the phrase “concentration camps in Siberia” to characterise the destinations of Soviet non-compliers. Further, he had demonstrated some understanding of Russian history, pointing out that the repressive methods of Stalinist social/political control were similar to those employed by the old Czarist system. 421 Consistently in post-1969 interviews and recollections, after he had left the CPA, Lockwood either forgot, overlooked, or ignored his 1937 understandings. Post-1969 he could, arguably, claim he did not understand the full extent of the evils of Stalinism in the late 1930s, but he could not 419 De Berg, p. 17,506. 420 For detailed discussion of intellectuals, generally, becoming proselytisers for the Soviet Union, see David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, revised and updated edition, Yale University Press, New Haven and London , 1988 (originally published 1972); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba 1928-1978, Harper & Row, New York, 1983 (originally published 1981). For detailed discussion of the phenomenon in relation to Australia, specifically during the period Lockwood became a communist, see Fitzpatrick and Rasmussen, Political Tourists; see also Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 363-380. 421 Lockwood, “Travelling ‘Soft’ Across Siberia”, p. 35. 149 legitimately claim the blanket ignorance implicit in his use of the word “illusions”. To explain Lockwood’s decision to join the CPA in 1939, therefore, one has to begin by acknowledging it involved accommodation with his 1937 understanding of Stalinism, then take into consideration his understanding and experience of communism generally, remembering also that since he had joined the Herald in Melbourne he had mixed in a left intellectual and social milieu where being ‘a communist’ was part of the culture. As we have seen, for Lockwood by 1939, communism was the ‘ism’ of action and resistance to the capitalist variants of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese militarism, a trio of ‘isms’ which, despite appeasement, was taking the world inevitably to war. In Spain he had seen communism in action in defence of the Republic, and had been impressed; in Nazi Germany he had found evidence of communist underground activity, and had held hopes for the effectiveness of its resistance; his understanding of Chinese politics indicated that the future of that nation was very much in the hands of the Chinese communists. Further, the future of Asia not only involved conflict with Japan, but it was also a future of anti-colonial struggles. In these latter, communists would have significant roles. For Australia, this was a new Asia, and the nation and its people needed to come to terms with this new geo-politics; instead of thinking of itself as an outpost and offshoot of Europe, the nation needed to define itself as part of the Asian-Pacific region. Domestically, so far as the Labor Party was concerned, Lockwood thought it morally and politically bankrupt. As for Australian capital, he did not trust it. Nor did he trust the conservative political leadership of the nation, symbolised by the rising star of Robert Menzies. The Dalfram dispute had demonstrated for Lockwood the dynamics of the nation: big business and the politics of conservatism, hand in hand with appeasement and the willingness to cooperate and support Japanese militarism and its expansion in Asia; earlier, the Von Luckner tour had shown the cosiness between the Nazi envoy and leading members of Australian business and conservative 150 politics. As Lockwood read the 1930s, the Australian establishment was using the institutions of democracy, parliament, and the state, to advance and buttress not only appeasement but what Andrew Moore has termed an “enthusiasm for fascism and for Nazi Germany”, using parliamentary processes and the law to shift the political centre to the right, and instituting compromises “with the fascist spirit”. 422 On the other hand, effective resistance/opposition to this, and what Lockwood saw as morality, had found expression in Australia through working class mobilisation and in the leadership of communists. Moreover, throughout 1939 the CPA stressed the need for proper defence preparation, in particular air raid protection, deep bomb-proof shelters and gas masks for all, combined with improving working conditions and extending democratic rights. 423 War had commenced, and was well underway; as the party’s Sydney newspaper Workers’ Weekly explained in early February 1939, it started with the aggressions against Spain, China and Abyssinia, with the conquests of the Austrians and Czechs. It is directed against Britain, the United States and France. Its aim is to re-divide the world in the interests of the fascist triangle. Its driving force lies deep in the contradictions of monopoly capitalism, ‘decaying capitalism’; of imperialism, and no policy 422 This sort of historiographical reading of the 1930s is the subject of Andrew Moore, “Discredited Fascism: the New Guard after 1932”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 57, Issue 2, June 2011, pp. 188-206. Moore points out the idea that sections of the Australian establishment “maintained an affinity for the vulgar excesses of fascism is anathema” to many Australians. Rather, Australians generally prefer to think of their country’s history as firmly centred on social democracy and the ballot box, a history in which “extremism of either left or right is eschewed.” Moore robustly challenges this view of Australian history, and examines the historiography of fascism in Australia during the interwar years, critiquing conservative commentators who argue the absence of fascist influence in the shaping of interwar Australian politics. 423 Craig Johnston, “The ‘Leading War Party’: Communists and World War Two”, Labour History, Number 39, November 1980, p. 63. 151 of appeasement can hinder its coming. The only way to avert it is by collective security, by confronting the aggressor with a potential overwhelming force. 424 For Lockwood, the CPA understanding of the world matched his first-hand experiences of the international situation, and expressed policies and attitudes he agreed with. Becoming a communist was, for him, about national resistance, with the CPA demonstrably suited to the role of war leadership, and it was about becoming part of the future. But there was also a catch. Lockwood joined the CPA at virtually the same time the German-Soviet non-aggression pact came into being, binding the signatories to neutrality if either party was at war. Soon after, the GermanSoviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation was signed. Collectively these diplomatic-political manoeuvres shocked communist parties internationally as the Soviet Union, the torch bearer of anti-fascism during the 1930s, stood back to enable Nazi Germany realise its aggressive European agenda. Confusion and dismay characterised reaction amongst communists outside the Soviet Union; in Australia, news of the GermanSoviet pact came as “a terrible surprise”, and created bewilderment amongst the rank and file. Prominent members, especially intellectuals, left the party, and leadership identities variously contradicted one another regarding the way forward. For the CPA, the war officially became “an unjust, reactionary imperialist war”, the leadership claiming the Party “had been led astray by its anti-fascist fervour”. Critics of the CPA gloated at what they saw as communist duplicity; party premises were attacked, and open-air meetings disrupted by stoning and brawling; uniformed service personnel were prominent in the escalating anti-communist violence. 425 424 Workers’ Weekly, 10 February 1939, quoted by Johnston, “The ‘Leading War Party’”, pp. 63-64. 425 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, pp. 78-79; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 84-86; Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 384-391. 152 Arguably there were sound strategic reasons for the German-Soviet Union pact. Internationally the Soviet Union had stood alone, clearly the future target of the Nazi war machine. Alliance with Germany offered respite, while Hitler pursued his European agenda, giving the Soviet Union time to prepare for the inevitable. Further, secret clauses in the alliance with Germany enabled the Soviet Union to regain territories lost during World War 1. 426 For Lockwood, coming as he did to the CPA with geopolitical understandings, and having been politicised abroad in Asia and in Europe, the pact was a strategic measure before the inevitable, and communism represented the future. CONCLUSION As explained during the course of Chapters 3 and 4, Lockwood changed personally, professionally and politically during the period 1930-1939. Dealing with the period 1938-1939, Chapter 4 showed the political activism and leftist thinking that increasingly found overt expression in Lockwood’s life. The political decisions taken by Lockwood during this brief time span leading up to the outbreak of World War 2, were shown to have put him in conflict with his employer, one Lockwood was seen not to shrink from. Importantly, the chapter also explained the antagonism and enmity Lockwood harboured towards the conservative political rising star, Robert Menzies. In future chapters, this hostile relationship will be seen as an important and continuing aspect of Lockwood’s life. Thus far, this study has brought Lockwood to the verge of being the “communist journalist” he is so often referred to as in journalism and in history, in reality and in the pejorative sense. However this term is construed, regardless of whether it is used as a form of abuse or as a legitimate attempt to categorise him, what cannot be doubted at this point, on the eve of war, is that Lockwood was a resourceful journalist of considerable talent, and nous; gutsy, intelligent, well travelled, arguably 426 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 81; Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 384-385. 153 amongst the best of his generation. Significantly affected politically by what he had witnessed at home and abroad during the 1930s, no longer content to variously watch from the sidelines and act on the margins, Lockwood felt compelled to become much more part of the action than he had previously been. As will be seen, in so doing he became part of the future. 154 CHAPTER FIVE LOCKWOOD AT WAR, 1939-1945. For the best part of the next thirty years, Lockwood was at war, variously engaged with the 1939-1945 World War, and the ensuing Cold War. His direct war engagement symbolically ended with his leaving the CPA in 1969. During this time Lockwood’s life entered the realms of clandestine organization, underground activity, and what the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Chief of Counterintelligence (1954-1974), James Jesus Angleton, described as “a wilderness of mirrors” --- the distrust, confusion, intrigues and ambiguities of the worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering. 427 Lockwood’s life was either touched by, or he entered, three secret and clandestine worlds—those of the underground work of the CPA; the periphery of Australian Naval Intelligence; and the world of Soviet intelligence and espionage. Throughout this long engagement, Lockwood followed his profession as a journalist, and the dogged pursuit of a political story, which if true, would have arguably been one of Australia’s greatest political stories. Indeed, Lockwood’s pursuit of this story came to dominate his life, becoming in the end something of a metaphorical Albatross, and endowing him with a pariah like eccentric status. For the story, which eventually was responsible for his appearance as a key witness before the Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage in Australia, was in the realm of “What If?”, counterfactual/conjectural history; history as it might have been. 428 It was a story stemming from what Lockwood understood to be leaks from 427 This phrase is generally attributed to Angleton; in turn it references a line in the 1920 poem by T. S. Eliot, Gerontion. See Arthur Redding, “‘A Wilderness of Mirrors’: Writing and Reading the Cold War”, Contemporary Literature, Volume 51, No. 4, Winter 2010, p. 868. 428 For an Australian discussion of conjectural/counterfactual history, see Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer, “Introduction”, in their edited collection of counterfactual imaginings, What If? Australian History as it Might Have Been, MUP, Carlton, 2006, pp. 1-11. 155 Australian Naval Intelligence on what might have happened, rather than what did. This chapter will deal with the homefront career and activities of Lockwood during World War 2 (WW2). It will examine his journalism, his communism, and their interactions. In doing so, attention will be paid to the origins and nature during the war of the controversial material that later formed part of the Cold War Document J. Important too are Lockwood’s relationships with Soviet personnel stationed in Australia from 1943 onwards, as these will be the source of later controversy during the Cold War. PROFESSION: JOURNALIST The Sydney world of journalism Lockwood joined in 1939 was vibrant, very competitive, and evolving. There were three daily newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily News, formerly the Labor Daily, organ of the Labour movement in NSW; an afternoon tabloid, the Sun, to be challenged in May 1941 by competitor the Daily Mirror; two Sunday papers, the Sunday Sun, and the Truth. The competition threatened by the Commonwealth financed ABC Weekly, was, as we will see, not welcomed by Sydney capitalist media interests. Apart from the capitalist press, there was also a trade union, communist, and fraternal organisations’ press of varying quality, the weekly Tribune newspaper (proscribed by the Commonwealth in 1940) the flagship of the CPA. 429 And throughout the journalistic profession in Sydney, there was a significant and growing communist presence. According to Lockwood, during the War this 429 For a useful overview of Sydney’s press history, see Victor Isaacs and Rod Kirkpatrick, Two Hundred Years of Sydney Newspapers: A Short History, Rural Press Ltd., North Richmond, 2003. 156 came to amount to what he later variously described as some 50 journalists, and as four discrete branches of the party. 430 For Lockwood, as he recalled in 1981, the Sydney journalism environment was “ecumenical”, in the sense that between 1939-1943 he was able to work in both the capitalist and labour movement press sectors with considerable ease, at times simultaneously. 431 As will be seen, Lockwood’s career with the ABC was variously curtailed by factors unforeseen at the time of his engagement, and he had to seek employment elsewhere. He briefly found work with the Daily News, formerly the Labor Daily, a debt-ridden daily newspaper with an unprofitable circulation of 40,000, published since 1922 by sections of the labour movement in NSW. It was surviving on a generous overdraft from the Bank of New South Wales. A new editor, writer and orator A. (Alec) E. Pratt, was appointed at the end of April 1940, but he had little in the way of newspaper management and production skills. To colleague Edgar Ross, he was a “mysterious figure from Victoria’s academia”. The actual work of bringing the paper out went to Lockwood, and a group of communist journalists in leading positions on the paper. Lockwood fulfilled this role until receivers were called in and the paper was sold relatively cheaply to Frank Packer’s Consolidated Press in July 1940, the honey in the deal the Daily News’ useful printery, a circulation that might transfer loyalties, and the killing of a newspaper that had once been intimately associated with the powerful labour politician Jack Lang, a vituperative critic of the Packer family. Packer subsequently used the former labour printery to produce his popular money spinner, the Australian Women’s Weekly. Some features of the paper transferred to the paper’s new home at the Daily Telegraph, along with some staff, but not Lockwood. Looking back on his experience with the paper, Lockwood recalled a conflict riven newspaper environment: 430 Lloyd, Profession: Journalist, p. 224; De Berg, p. 17,473. 431 De Berg, p. 17,473. 157 We had all kinds of forces there, we had Langites, we had what were described as Catholic Action, we had moderate labour men, left labour men, right-wing labour men, we had communists, and we even had a couple of homosexuals, but, I remember the kind of thing that went on, the whole Saturday edition was stolen once, by someone who didn’t like what was in it, and I wrote something once that someone didn’t approve of, and the type was bashed… 432 It is in the context of the Daily News there is a memoir glimpse of Lockwood, the leftist journalist. Not only a glimpse, but an indication also of his personal influence and power. Future academic and historian Russel Ward, then a young teacher at the elite private school Sydney Grammar, was impressed by Lockwood’s revelatory commentaries on politics and international affairs. Ward was in the process of being radicalised and would soon join the CPA; as part of his radicalisation, he recalled, he introduced himself to Lockwood, thus beginning what would become a long-time personal relationship: His signed articles (in the Daily News) impressed me so much that one afternoon after school I sought him out in the newspaper office across the corner of Hyde Park in Liverpool Street. He was a fantastically goodlooking young man who must have been embarrassed by my direct approach but he abandoned work forthwith and took me into a nearby pub for a drink. 433 432 For “We had all kinds of forces….”, De Berg, p. 17,471; much of the detail in this paragraph is drawn from R. B. Walker, “The Fall of the Labor Daily”, Labour History, Number 38, May 1980, pp. 67-75. On the closing of the Labor Daily/Daily News, see also Bridget Griffen-Foley, The House of Packer: The Making of an Empire, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1999, pp. 90-91. For the “mysterious” nature of Pratt, Edgar Ross, “ Premier Lang, Sacked by the Right, Destroyed by the Left, Hummer, No. 31/2, March/August 1991, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/no-31-32/premier-lang/, accessed 24 July 2011. For the reference to the Australian Women’s Weekly, Walker, Yesterday’s News, p. 70. 433 Russel Ward, A Radical Life: The Autobiography of Russel Ward, Macmillan Australia, South Melbourne, 1988, p. 134. On Lockwood’s influence on Ward, see also Graeme 158 During the war, the Commonwealth government, irrespective of conservative or Labor ilk, attempted to control news and comment with a raft of measures including the proscription of selected publications; ongoing censorship involving the prior submission of items to authorities; and the rationing and licensing of the use of newsprint. These were measures the media generally, railed against. In 1944 tensions came to a dramatic head when Sydney media interests courageously defied censorship authorities, resulting in the police seizure of issues of newspapers, thousands of protestors taking to the streets opposing censorship, and an ensuing High Court challenge which ameliorated the censorship regime. 434 During the early war years, a critical leftist media presence was publicly maintained, despite attempts at proscription, by the astute use of legal media outlets. Lockwood was involved in these. Following the Daily News stint, he edited the Ironworker during 1941, journal of the Federated Ironworkers Association of Australia, the paper becoming “something of a popular cause among left-wing intellectuals”. 435 Legal, and not threatened with proscription because of its restraint regarding criticism of government policies, the Ironworker was an outlet for journalists in the mainstream press with material their editors would not otherwise publish. 436 At the same time, Lockwood was closely associated with Progress, official organ of the State Labor Party of New South Wales (SLP), as a contributor and advisor. This organisation is the subject of further discussion below. Originally a small free newspaper published by the North Sydney Davison, “Rethinking the Australian Legend’, Australian Historical Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, 2012, pp. 433-434. 434 For an overview of the censorship system in place during the War, see Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939-1941, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1952, pp. 179-186; for accounts of the 1944 challenge, Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945, Australian War Memorial, 1970, pp. 410-414; Griffen-Foley, The House of Packer, pp. 126-131. 435 Robert Murray and Kate White, The Ironworkers: A History of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia , Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, p. 117. 436 Lockwood interview with author, Sydney, 7 November 1985. 159 Unemployed organisation with a communist editor, Progress was reborn as an alternative left-newspaper following the proscription of the communist press in 1940. Progress assembled a team of journalists, and a cartoonist, in a “friendly, easy-going, and in many ways imaginative” relationship. Assisted by legal advice from civil libertarian lawyer and future judge in the Australian Industrial and Federal Courts, Jack Sweeney, and dodging censorship with the use of humour and subtlety, the result was a four-page tabloid political weekly, each issue containing some fifty items of foreign and local news, comment, verse, and illustration. Progress achieved a circulation of around 20,000. As well as the targeted working class, the paper was taken up by white–collar and professional audiences; its last issue was in July 1946. 437 Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lockwood was offered, and accepted, work on the capitalist Sunday Sun and associated publication of an innovative international affairs supplement, Fact, to which he contributed and did some sub-editing. Lockwood recalled Fact as becoming “almost the leading left-wing organ in Sydney at the time, very pro-Soviet and in popular demand among the Left”. All the while, no matter what journalistic activity he was engaged with, Lockwood contributed to, and otherwise assisted, the proscribed Tribune. When this publication was legalised in late 1942, he was required by the party to quit the Sun, and become assistant editor of Tribune (a role he continued in until 1948). He did, however, continue to contribute to the Sun. Lockwood’s name was first acknowledged officially in association with CPA activities in the 17 February 1943 issue of Tribune. 438 437 For accounts of this world of leftist journalism, see George Farwell, Rejoice in Freedom, Nelson, Melbourne, 1976, pp. 207-210; Len Fox, Broad Left, Narrow Left, Len Fox, Chippendale, 1982, pp. 85-107. See also Len Fox, Progress Against Fascism, Len Fox, Potts Point, 1998. For a biography of Jack Sweeney, civil libertarian (died 1981), see Stand Up For Our Rights: Biographies, New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, http://www.nswccl.org.au/about/biographies.php, accessed 24 October 2012. 438 De Berg, pp. 17,472-17,473; Tribune, 17 February 1943, p. 2. 160 Aside from his role as a working journalist, Lockwood was also involved in increasing the industrial strength of journalists and professionalising their status. He did this by prominently involving himself in the work of the AJA in NSW. During 1942-1943 he was a key person in the decision by the NSW district of the AJA to affiliate with the Sydney Trades and Labour Council, ending more than a quarter of a century of what journalism historian Clem Lloyd (1985) described as “craft isolation”, and the successful campaign flowing from this to secure press proprietor assurance that “no newspaper employee be victimised for political activity”, which was threatened at the time. Lockwood also was one of three journalists primarily responsible for drafting the AJA Code of Ethics (1942), approved in 1944 as applying to all Australian journalists and incorporated into the AJA’s constitution. As will be seen in the next Chapter, it was a Code that arguably in some respects, Lockwood himself failed to live up to, to the letter. The eight points of the Code were: • To report and interpret news with scrupulous accuracy; • Not to suppress essential facts nor distort the truth by omissions or wrong and improper emphasis; • To respect all confidences received by him in the course of his calling; • To observe at all times the fraternal obligations arising from his membership of the Association and not on any occasion to take unfair advantage or improper advantage of a fellow member of the Association; • Not to allow his personal interests to influence him in the discharge of his duties, nor to accept or to offer any present, gift or other consideration, or benefit or advantage of whatsoever kind that may have the effect of so benefiting him; • To use only fair and honest means to obtain news, pictures and documents; 161 • Always to reveal his identity as a representative of the press before obtaining any personal interview for the purpose of using it for publication; and • To do his utmost to maintain full confidence in the integrity and dignity of the calling of a journalist. Lockwood’s involvement in the work of the AJA brought with it critical internal and external references to the role of communists in AJA politics, especially the role of “Melbourne Reds”, possibly a pointed reference to Lockwood, and with respect to the Code, uniform alarm and hostility on the part of press proprietors and managements. This hostility was arguably a contributing factor played out during the Cold War in the vituperative press treatment of Lockwood during the Royal Commission into Espionage 19541955. 439 THE ABC WEEKLY SOJOURN. In the preceding chapter it was explained that the offer of a job by Sydney (Syd) Deamer on a new publication in Sydney, enabled Lockwood to part company with the Melbourne Herald, and thus remove himself from the reduced circumstances and humiliation he was experiencing in Sir Keith Murdoch’s employment. A detailed look at Lockwood’s association with this new publication, the ABC Weekly, is useful because it provides glimpses of Lockwood’s view of the world, and his thinking, in the opening stages of the war, in an environment relatively free from censorship, and before he was deeply enmeshed in communist party activities. It also establishes the point that initially what alarmed conservative authorities about Lockwood, was not that he was a communist, because that was by not part of the understanding at the time, but the nature of his thinking, and the nature of his ideas. 439 See Lloyd, Profession: Journalist for Lockwood and the AJA, pp. 221-222, 228; for the Code of Ethics, p. 228; for the ‘Melbourne Reds’, p. 224; for proprietor hostility and alarm regarding the increasing politicisation of the AJA, p. 229; also Griffen-Foley, The House of Packer, pp. 124-125. 162 Syd Deamer had been editor of the Herald during Lockwood’s formative years on paper, and in 1935 had gone to London where he briefly worked with Australian Associated Press Pty. Ltd, the new cable service which Lockwood joined the following year. Newspapermen admired Deamer; in maturity, both in conversation with this author and in the form of autobiographical notes, Lockwood consistently recalled Deamer with affection and respect. 440 Not only was the Sydney job the chance to work again with a journalist he respected, but also, arguably, it was a career move. Deamer was well connected in the world of journalism, and, as will be shown, Lockwood saw himself, at least until 1942, as officially participating in the war effort in a capacity more than as a civilian journalist. Deamer (1891-1962) was an Australian World War 1 veteran; he had soldiered at Gallipoli, and later trained as a pilot with the Australian Flying Corps, in which he had been wounded in action over France. He finished the war with the rank lieutenant. After the war Deamer built a varied career as a journalist and editor, and worked closely with the developing Australian media barons Sir Keith Murdoch and the young (Sir) Frank Packer. His career variously included stints with Smith’s Weekly, the Sydney Sun, Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial, the Adelaide Register, the Melbourne Herald, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the ABC Weekly. As well as editing the ABC Weekly, from 1943-1944 Deamer was in charge of the ABC’s Public Relations Division which included News. 441 He ended his career in the employ of the Sydney Morning Herald where he founded and edited the popular front page ‘Column 8’ miscellany. In the words of journalism historian Gavin Souter, Deamer was A small, assertive man with limited formal education but considerable intellect and pungent wit. Deamer became one of Australia’s most 440 K. S. Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2006, p. 93; Rupert Lockwood, “Syd Deamer”, typescript notes created in the early 1980s, in possession of the author. 441 Inglis, This is the ABC, pp. 111, 121 163 prominent and mobile journalists, equally at home in the reporters’ room, board room and bar-room. 442 In many ways there was much of Lockwood in Deamer, or vice versa. It is hard not to attribute to Deamer a role in shaping him, or maybe of Deamer being a model for Lockwood of what it was to be a journalist: mobility; intellect; pungent, even biting wit; an ease, and the ability to mix, with people; and a liking for the bar-room. As well, Deamer was a former elected general president of the AJA from 1926 until lured to Adelaide in 1929 by Murdoch to help realise his media ambitions; as has been seen, the AJA was a site of Lockwood’s activities. And like Deamer, who retired in 1961, a year before he died, aged seventy, Lockwood would find it difficult to call an end to his vocation as a working journalist. In the editorial hands of Deamer, the new ABC Weekly set out to be a popular magazine, an eighty-page quarto cross between the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio Times, and the Listener. Along with details of ABC programming, there was some coverage of commercial radio, along with feature articles, commentaries, and advertising. From the outset, newspaper interests, fearful for their own circulations that included two radio weeklies, pressured the government not to approve or finance the publication. 443 Deamer’s plans were ambitious, envisaging an audience demographic well beyond the Broadcaster’s listening audience. To this end he gathered a stellar pool of writers and intellectual talent, and for the first issue ordered a print run of 335,000 copies, aiming for weekly sales of 200,000. But this did 442 Gavin Souter, “Deamer, Sydney Harold (1891-1962)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/deamer-sydney-harold-9932/text17591, accessed 7 May 2012; Gavin Souter, Company of Heralds. A Century and a Half of Australian Publishing by John Fairfax Limited and its Predecessors, 1831-1981, MUP, Carlton, 1981, pp. 280281. 443 Inglis, This is the ABC, p. 92. 164 not eventuate, and the first issue chalked up sales to the tune of 170,000, the largest sales’ figure it achieved. Thereafter sales fell, until by mid-1941 the weekly circulation stood at about 40,000, and the publication faced closure. 444 Newspaper interests dogged the infancy of the ABC Weekly; advertisers were pressured not to advertise in it, and newsagents not to give the publication any display prominence. As the ABC’s historian K. S. Inglis observed, “Deamer had underestimated the ill-will of newspaper proprietors”. 445 The twenty-five items published with Lockwood’s by-line in the ABC Weekly between December 1939 and March 1940 comprised feature articles, and a two-page commentary each issue headed “World Affairs, conducted by Rupert Lockwood”. Collectively they reflect opinions and ideas that were, for their time, prescient; they indicate the world as Lockwood saw it at the time, and the future world he believed was shaping. Collectively also, the articles represent the last flourishing of Lockwood before he became subject to the needs of war and the immediacies of communist party work, and before he became tagged ‘a communist journalist’. Moreover, the views he expressed in this journalism were ones that drew him to the attention of security authorities and earned him the enmity of conservatives. Arguably it was his thinking and writing that made him an enemy of the state at the time, not his membership, then a secret and not public knowledge, of a suspect political organization. As such, Lockwood’s ABC Weekly journalism warrants attention here. Lockwood saw the future independence of India, and with it the end of Great Britain as a world power, the war providing the conditions and circumstances that would strengthen the independence movement. 446 He 444 The Government announced the closure of the ABC Weekly on 20 June 1941, then four days later gave it a reprieve. The publication limped on until the 1950s, and was finally shut down in 1959. 445 Inglis, This is the ABC, p. 93. 446 Rupert Lockwood, “Danger Spots in India”, ABC Weekly, 9 December 1939, pp. 7-8. 165 saw an uncertain future world, ripe for “social upheaval”, replete with contradictions of “tribalism, feudalism, capitalism and communism, and even survivals of slavery”, unrest heightened by the demands and allegiances of opposing religious loyalties. He identified the places to watch: Persia, the giant that has been so asleep; Arabia, where mischief is hatched behind the swirling desert sands, the races of Syria and Iraq--their political passions are as inflammable as the lakes of oil beneath their miserable homes. 447 He argued that the Middle East, because of its strategic resources, would assume future centrality in global politics and become the bloody site of great power rivalries. 448 Having flown between Singapore and Bangkok whilst in Asia, and having seen air-war in Spain, he was considerably impressed by aircraft and aviation; air warfare would be a significant part of warfare; aircraft technology would increasingly become complex, leading to the development of what he termed “rocket planes”; the aviation industry would in turn lead to the creation of an international travel industry based on air travel. 449 So far as Japan was concerned, for Lockwood war was inevitable; Japan’s economy was driven by the need for rubber, tin, oil, bauxite, nickel, iron, and food; the resources of the Dutch East Indies were in its sights, and ultimately the security of Australia was threatened. 450 During an overnight sitting of Commonwealth Parliament, 7-8 December 1939, Lockwood was criticised by the Hon. Thomas Walter White, the UAP member for Balaclava, Victoria. According to White, Lockwood’s critique 447 “Soldiers of Destiny in Eurasia”, ABC Weekly, 9 March 1940, p. 6. 448 Rupert Lockwood, “World Affairs: Waistline of the Empire”, ABC Weekly, 20 January 1940, pp. 12-13. 449 Rupert Lockwood, “Men Who Pioneered the Long Flight”, ABC Weekly, 6 January 1940, pp. 7-8; “Human Limits in Air War”, ABC Weekly, 10 February 1940, pp. 7-8. 450 Rupert Lockwood, “World Affairs: War’s Background”, ABC Weekly, 2 December 1938, pp. 16-17; “Lure of the Indies”, ABC Weekly, 16 December 1939, pp. 10-11. 166 of the British Empire in his article “Danger Spots in India” in the second, and current, issue of the ABC Weekly, was not the sort of matter which should appear in a journal published under the aegis of the Government concerning a dominion of the British Empire. 451 Knighted in 1952, numbered amongst the founders of the Liberal Party during the 1940s, White was a well connected and pugnacious conservative. He was a decorated WW1 fighter pilot; a lieutenant colonel in the Citizen Military Forces; he supported universal military service; he had travelled to England and Germany with Menzies in 1938; profoundly anti-communist, during the Depression he regarded the New Guard and “other loyal organisations” highly; he was a British Empire loyalist; he was opposed to what he regarded as the importation of racial problems to Australia via “large-scale foreign migration”; and he strongly supported film and book censorship. 452 By February 1941, Lockwood’s “anti-British sentiments” were causing concern to Sir Frederick H. Stewart, Minister for External Affairs, and the following month the Intelligence Section of Eastern Command established a special watch on Lockwood, assigning his case to a sub-section referred to as “the Communist Squad”. 453 LOCKWOOD AND THE KIMBERLEY SCHEME Lockwood used his position with the ABC Weekly to continue his pre-war concern for refugees, championing the Kimberley scheme, a plan to settle Jewish refugees in the East Kimberley region of north-west Australia. This plan was the dream of The Freeland League for Jewish Territorial 451 CPD, Vol. 162, p. 2408. Cited previously, Lockwood’s article was published in the ABC Weekly issue dated 9 December 1939, pp. 7-8. 452 Rickard, John, “White, Sir Thomas (1888-1957)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/white-sir-thomas-walter-12013/text21545>, accessed 8 September 2012. 453 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 8, 14-16 167 Colonization, founded in London in 1935 with the help of Latvia born Jewish lawyer Dr. Isaac Nachman Steinberg (1888-1957) to assist German Jewish refugees establish self-supporting agricultural communities in democratic countries. In 1938 and subsequently, the League received support from Australian agricultural interests and pastoralists who claimed the region could be cultivated and were prepared to make the necessary land available to Jewish refugee settlers. The project was to be financed by the Freeland League and Jewish contributors. The scheme envisaged both prewar, and post-war, settlement, with some seven million acres (2,832,830 hectares) and between 50,000-75,000 settlers involved. Culturally Jewish, the Kimberley settlement would be administered under, and ruled by, Australian law, with English the official language. After much official prevarication, and its “mixed reception by the Australian Jewish and nonJewish public”, the scheme was finally rejected by the Curtin government in July 1944 on the grounds that exclusive settlement as envisaged was a departure from established policy and therefore could not be entertained. 454 Steinberg arrived in Australia in May 1939, to lobby for and promote the Kimberley Scheme, and stayed until June 1943. Anxious for publicity, in Sydney he sought out ABC Weekly Foreign Editor Lockwood. The two men had numerous lengthy meetings and discussions. Lockwood was impressed by Steinberg, and years later recalled a man of considerable intellectual capacity, well read, a good conversationalist and extremely well informed on world political events. He spoke excellent English. He was shortish, bespectacled, sharp featured, bearded. 455 Lockwood conducted interviews with Steinberg and used this material in an article enthusiastically promoting/supporting the Scheme published in the ABC Weekly. He also assisted Steinberg with publicity generally for the 454 The scheme is discussed in detail by Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia, pp. 180-190. 455 Lockwood, “Steinberg’, p. 2. 168 Scheme, and was thanked for this in a book Steinberg later wrote about his experiences in Australia. 456 A Doctor of Laws from the University of Heidelberg (1910), Germany, Steinberg had briefly been a commissar of justice under Lenin’s government in the months following the Russian Revolution, falling out with the Bolsheviks over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and campaigning against them. Since 1923 he and his family had lived in exile in Europe. 457 In Sydney the relationship between Steinberg an Lockwood was such that both clearly understood the political views of the other; in their conversations, Steinberg needled Lockwood by using words like “cynical”, “repressive’, “opportunist” when discussing Soviet Russia and Stalin. For both men, however, the plight of Jewish refugees and the success of Kimberley project were the overwhelming matters of import. 458 The Steinberg-Lockwood encounter and relationship is useful as a correction to later accounts of Lockwood by historians. In her account of Jews in Australia, historian Hilary Rubinstein discusses the 1939 meeting between Steinberg and Lockwood, with no biographical context regarding the latter. Her primary focus is Steinberg and the Kimberley Scheme, and the reception, ranging from hostile to supportive, both received from Jews in Australia. Lockwood appears in her account simply as a “left-wing journalist” and “one of Steinberg’s supporters”. Rubinstein selectively quotes from Lockwood’s ABC Weekly Steinberg article and argues that Lockwood’s support was based, not on humanitarian concerns, but on an “implied” concern about northern Australia’s vulnerability “to invasion 456 Rupert Lockwood, “Unpromised Land”, ABC Weekly, 3 February 1940, pp. 16-17; I. N. Steinberg, Australia – The Unpromised Land: In Search of a Home, Victor Gollancz, London, 1948. 457 Hooper, Beverley, “Steinberg, Isaac Nachman (1888-1957)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/steinberg-isaac-nachman-11757/text21027, accessed 14 May 2012. 458 Lockwood, “Steinberg”, p. 1. 169 from overpopulated Asia”, which she then uses to claim that many of Steinberg’s Australian supporters were motivated “not only from a humanitarian standpoint but out of consideration for Australia’s defence requirements”. 459 Granted, the size of Australia’s population was a concern of Lockwood’s at the time, and in a 1940 Australia Day article he wrote hopefully about Australia’s future, a nation and people that had pioneered significant social reform. In the immediate future, he argued, the homefront should not be neglected, and spending on social services and education needed to be maintained, and wages increased. Post-war, the size of the population must be increased, with increased migration a factor. 460 These latter were postwar directions future Australian governments would variously embrace. Taking into consideration Lockwood’s advocacy and support for Jewish refugees prior to 1939, and his concern about the plight of refugees generally since his return from the Spanish Civil War, none of which is mentioned by Rubinstein, is to present a simplistic version of Lockwood, “the left-wing journalist”, and deny him his humanity. Similarly, Left historian Tom O’Lincoln’s discussion of Lockwood and his 1943 pamphlet Japan’s Heart of Wood, is an account which leaves the reader in no doubt about Lockwood’s lack of humanity and his racist inclinations. 461 In O’Lincoln’s account, Lockwood’s pamphlet was one of the worst expressions of the patriotic anti-Japanese racism that characterised the CPA after the start of the Pacific War during the World War 11. To an earlier historian, Phil Griffiths, possibly the first historian to pay attention to the pamphlet, it was “perhaps the most vile piece of (Australian) 459 Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia, p. 182. 460 Rupert Lockwood, “Nor Do I Doubt….”, ABC Weekly, 27 January 1940, pp. 12-13. 461 Tom O’Lincoln, “Fatal Compromises: The Australian Communists and World War 11”, http://redsites.alphalink.com.au/cpaww2.htm, accessed 28 January 2012; Rupert Lockwood, Japan’s Heart of Wood, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1943. 170 propaganda produced during the war”. 462 As O’Lincoln comments, this pamphlet is a paen to incendiary bombing. Japanese buildings were made mostly of wood and paper, Lockwood said, so they were perfect for fire-bombing. Here was a Communist demanding a hellish death for Japanese workers. Lockwood did try to cover himself slightly. ‘No one in democratic lands is bloodthirsty enough to wish upon the people of any country a man-made holocaust the like of which the world has never seen’. Yet his next sentence called for just such a holocaust, because ‘behind the wood-andpaper walls of Japan are the aircraft factories, the tank plants and the gun forges that cause the deaths of millions of innocent people….’ Presumably the millions of Japanese workers were guilty rather than innocent, so their deaths wouldn’t matter.463 O’Lincoln is correct. The pamphlet is exactly as described; it is a piece of racist wartime propaganda. However, it suits O’Lincoln’s argument to portray Lockwood thus, and to leave it at that. His larger purpose is to document the various compromises “for some cheap popularity” the CPA made during the war, and argue politically the ways in which the CPA betrayed the Australian working class, abrogating its claim to being a revolutionary organisation capable of leading the working class post-war. 464 However, as Lockwood’s relationship with Steinberg, and his Jewish and refugee advocacy before that, and his later and early support of the Indonesian nationalist movement, indicate, Lockwood is done no justice in terms of history and humanity by simply rendering him as ‘a racist’. 462 Phil Griffiths, “The Roots and Consequences of Australia’s Fear of Japan”, World Historia, http://archive.worldhistoria.com/the-rootsconsquences-of-australias-fear-ofjapan_topic11970_post220772.html, accessed 22 May 2012. 463 O’Lincoln, “Fatal Compromises”. 464 Ibid. 171 FALLOUT Lockwood’s job with the ABC Weekly as foreign editor and feature writer was short lived. The disappointing circulation figures resulted in the downgrading of his role, and he became a contributor. His official association with the ABC ended in May 1941 with the end of his contract, and following the intervention of Military Intelligence (MI) and its recently developed close relationship with the ABC. MI had established “a special watch” on Lockwood and regarded his association with the Weekly “undesirable”. 465 A phone conversation in March 1941 between two influential and powerful military personnel, Majors Blamey and Prentice, decided his future. While admitting they had no hard evidence that Lockwood was a communist, Blamey and Prentice noted he was seen to be associating with known communists and “spreading communist ideas”. They decided it was time to end to his association with the ABC. 466 Blamey would eventually become Major General Sir Thomas Blamey, Commander in Chief of Australian military forces during WW2, and Prentice, with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, head of MI, Eastern Command. Post-war, between 1947-c.1952, both men were in the leadership of The Association, a secret anti-communist army with possibly a 100,000 strong membership. This outfit had access to arms, in readiness to counter communist insurgency. According to historian Andrew Moore, it had “fascist potential”, possibly envisaging at one stage a coup against the Chifley Labor government. The Association folded once ASIO was seen to be on an anti-communist offensive under the leadership of Colonel Spry. As Cain has explained, between the wars the leadership of the Australian Army hosted men with significant right-wing agendas and membership of secret 465 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 15, 23, 29-30. 466 Report, “Rupert Lockwood. Telephone conversation: Major Blamey with Major Prentice”, 19 March 1941, NAA: A6119, 40, folio 23. 172 conservative section. paramilitary organisations, especially its intelligence 467 In Document J there are to paragraphs devoted to Prentice, Lockwood’s information alleging that during WW2, “British Intelligence” warned Australian authorities to keep a “close watch” on Prentice because of his “Axis affiliations” in the years leading up to the war. These allegations, involving Prentice’s role as a journalist and popular broadcaster between the wars, have been examined by historian Drew Cottle who claimed he was important in these roles as “an advocate of anti-communism and appeasement”, and for “his gravitation towards Japan”. 468 Since the contractual appointment of Lockwood to the ABC in 1940, the Intelligence Section, Eastern Command, had developed a close relationship with the ABC under the War Precautions Act, and all ABC appointments now had to have Eastern Command Intelligence approval. 469 By September 1941, Lockwood had come to the special interest and attention of MI officer Captain Blood who, at the same time, was vigorously pursuing, eventually successfully, the ‘restriction’ (internment) of members of the right-wing Australia-First Movement (AFM). 470 “DEFINITELY A POTENTIAL DANGER” The Australian government declared war against Germany on 3 September 1939, and five days later passed a National Security Act (NSA). The NSA gave the government power “to govern by administrative rather than by 467 Cain, Political Surveillance, pp. 281-286; Andrew Moore, The Right Road: A History of Right-Wing Politics in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 62-64. 468 Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, p. 10. For Cottle’s discussion of Prentice, see his Brisbane Line, pp. 149-162. 469 Report, “Rupert Lockwood. Telephone conversation: Major Blamey with Major Prentice”; see also Cottle, Brisbane Line, p. 150. 470 NAA: A6119, 40, folio 65; on Blood’s campaign against the AFM, see Barbara Winter, The Australia-First Movement and the Publicist, 1936-1942, Glass House Books, Brisbane, 2005, pp. 60, 113, 150, 182, 195. 173 legislative procedures (and) could introduce new regulations whenever it saw fit”. Civil libertarian Brian Fitzpatrick described the NSA powers as being “comparable to Hitler’s”. The battery of government control over domestic dissent and opposition was rounded off with the subsequent gazetting of National Security (Subversive Association) Regulations, which would be used to ban the CPA, and regulations giving unrestricted powers over the press to a Director-General of Information, press magnate Sir Keith Murdoch. These press powers were described by leftists as akin to those enjoyed in Germany by Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels. 471 The Subversive Associations Regulations were comprehensive, and not unlike regulations in place during World War 1 which were used to target the militant anti-war Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1916. 472 The declaration of war was initially welcomed by the CPA, which pledged to fight fascist aggression. However, following the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation at the end of September 1939, the party withdrew its enthusiasm and support. The war was now regarded as an imperialist conflict, an unjust war, and one Australia must have nothing to do with. 473 This put the party on a collision course with a conservative government variously unsympathetic, if not hostile, to organised labour and to communism. In April 1940 the government banned nine papers, including the communist Tribune, and ordered the removal of communists from editorial positions on five trade union publications. That month also, the broadcast by Sydney station 2KY of a play by Lockwood titled No Conscription was banned by the government. 474 On 15 June, the CPA was declared illegal. It remained an illegal political organisation until the conservative government lost the 471 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, pp. 103-107. 472 Cain, Political Surveillance, p. 268-269. For an account of the vendetta against the IWW, see Ian Turner, Sydney’s Burning, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1977. 473 Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 385-386. 474 Ibid., p. 395. 174 support of the two Independents upon whose support it relied, and the CPA was legalised in December 1942 by the new ALP government of John Curtin, which harnessed communist energy and influence to bolster the national war effort. 475 The status of the CPA had long been a major concern of Military Intelligence (MI), which had an institutional history in this regard going back to October 1917, before the formation of the CPA, when it created its ‘Bolshevik file’. According to Frank Cain the Army perceived itself as early as 1919, as being “in the forefront of any drive to stem revolutionary action in Australia”. 476 Since 1937 it had been monitoring the activities of communists, and since 1939 advising the War Cabinet to declare the party illegal as a subversive organisation. 477 This is mentioned because, as we will see below, MI took a special and personal interest in Lockwood, regarding him by April 1941 as “very definitely a potential danger”. My use of ‘personal interest’ here is deliberate, because MI had acted before in a vendetta-like way against perceived radicals/radicalism--during World War 1, where the personal and political became one. 478 Despite its illegal status, however, the CPA grew, at the rate of about 1,500 recruits a month, beginning the illegal period with about 4000 members. By the end of 1942 it had some 15,000 members, maybe as high as 16,000, and 475 For a detailed ‘official’ account of the banning of the CPA, see Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939-1941, pp. 583-592; on the role of the CPA in contributing to the war effort post-legalisation, especially its role in the trade union movement, see Beverley Symons, “All-Out for the People’s War: ‘Red Diggers’ in the Armed Forces and the Communist Party of Australia’s Policies in the Second World War”, BA (Honours) thesis, University of Wollongong, 1993, pp. 38-41; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 130-132. 476 Frank Cain, Political Surveillance, pp. 228, 237. 477 Ibid., p. 252. 478 Cain uses “vendetta” to describe the zeal with which MI pursued the surveillance of prominent anti-conscriptionist ALP politicians during World War 1, Political Surveillance, p. 63 175 its illegal press reached some 50,000 people weekly. 479 This was due to the party having anticipated illegality and developed in advance an extensive underground organisation, planning beginning in March 1940. In charge of the development of this apparatus was Wally Clayton (1906-1997); he had significant organisational skills, and experience as national sales director of Tribune. Clayton did not have to ‘invent the wheel’; he was able to draw upon guidelines on underground organisation issued by the Comintern (Communist International), that had been discussed in the CPA during the 1930s, what McKnight (2002) described as a “taste of outlawry” within the party, and was assisted by a close knit group of trusted activists. 480 Clayton was a singularly driven, aloof, focussed and combative person, comfortable with secrecy and impenetrable when it came to keeping secrets; he was also extraordinarily suspicious. Self-motivated and self-directed, he gave the impression of being a ‘loner’. Lockwood became what McKnight termed an “associate” of Clayton’s, though the nature of that association is not yet clear to historians, and may never be. 481 Nationally a chain of ‘underground’ printeries was set up to enable party publications to continue publication, illegally; the railway system was variously utilised to enable the distribution of these; safe-houses and saferural properties were established to hide party members when necessary, and to stockpile supplies of paper and petrol; a compartmentalised chain of command was developed to minimise arrests and exposure should part/s of the organisation be uncovered by authorities; cadres were recruited, prepared and able to virtually eliminate their identities and disappear underground, cut off from friends and family to work for the party. In this apparatus, the printeries had both priority, and the utmost secrecy. Lockwood’s background in journalism, particularly his grass-roots 479 For CPA statistics here, see Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 82; R. Dixon, “The Party Building Campaign”, Communist Review, February 1943, p. 3. 480 On the CPA “taste of outlawry’, McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, pp. 140-150. 481 Ibid., p. 196. 176 grounding in small-scale rural printing with its emphasis on making do, improvisation, and informal distribution networks, was useful. 482 It was a dangerous and difficult time to be a communist, and some people left the party. The declaration of illegality brought with it raids by police and military personnel, some conducted classically under the cover of darkness, on party premises and on the homes of known and suspected communists. Assets were seized and forfeited. “Subversive” materials were seized; there are reports of zealous authorities gathering a literary feast of works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Shelley, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Henry Lawson, along with works by Mark, Lenin, Stalin, while in one incident Brian Fitzpatrick’s Short History of the Australian Labor Movement was taken. 483 Nationwide, prominent and rank-and-file communists were arrested, with the generally cited number of 50 convictions following. Macintyre (1998), however, has demonstrated this figure was much higher. 484 The most dramatic arrest/punishment involved two underground communists, Gallipoli veteran Horace Ratliff and printing industry worker Max Thomas in December 1940. They were successfully prosecuted and imprisoned for being in possession of a typewriter, copying equipment, and for preparing communist propaganda for distribution. They served six-months with hard 482 For the underground CPA apparatus and its operation, see Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 399- 411; McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, pp. 184-186. Wally Clayton was a resolute keeper of secrets, a private person when it came to details of his own life, a privacy he maintained until his death. While historians and security interests do/have accorded him considerable agency in Australian history, little is known about him, and he appears on the historical record in glimpses; see, for example, Mark Aarons, The Family File, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2010, pp. 153-171; Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 220-231, 328-332; Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 400-401; McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, pp. 184, 187-189. 483 On the seizure of “subversive” literature, Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 396-398; Sendy, Comrades Come Rally!, p. 9; Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 107. 484 Macintyre, The Reds, p. 401. 177 labour. Having served their sentence they were released, then with little delay interned without charge or trial by military authorities. The prisoners responded with a seventeen day hunger strike, became the focus of national attention, and were later released, in October 1941, by the new Curtin Labor government. 485 LOCKWOOD AND THE STATE LABOR PARTY Until the restoration of CPA legality late in 1942, a significant part of Lockwood’s wartime communist activity was illegal and conducted clandestinely. It was a mode of operation at which he became adept. In some ways he continued to conduct himself in this manner post-war through the 1950s. Since 1935, it had been CPA policy to ask selected members to remain inside the ALP as undercover members; it was on this dualmembership basis Lockwood conducted himself politically upon his journalistic transfer to Sydney. 486 Later he became prominently associated with the SLP, also known after its founders as the Hughes-Evans Labor Party. This was a breakaway party closely linked to the CPA, formed in 1940 as the result of bitter internal faction struggles between State and Federal ALP authorities over policy and control of the ALP in NSW. Eventually, in January 1944, State Labor merged with the CPA. Along with founder Jack Hughes, a secret communist and during the illegal phase of the CPA, one of its leading ‘legal’ voices, Lockwood became a public figure prominently associated with the SLP in public debates, lectures and street addresses, and often in the company of Hughes. 487 In the September 1940 485 The case of Ratliff and Thomas was significant. Official war historian Paul Hasluck emphasised the legality of their treatment, making it the subject of Appendix 7 of his The Government and the People, 1939-1941, pp. 609-612. See also Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 403-404. In accounts of this case, the spelling of Ratliff varies incorrectly, with ‘Ratcliff’ and ‘Ratcliffe’ used; Watson’s study of Brian Fitzpatrick, for example, uses ‘Ratcliff’. 486 McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, p. 155. 487 State Labor Party founders John (Jack) Hughes and Walter (Wally) Evans were secret communists, and politically significant personalities and office holders within trade union and ALP structures in NSW. On Hughes and the links between the SLP and the CPA, see 178 Federal election, Lockwood stood as the SLP candidate in the Sydney inner suburban seat of Martin, receiving 14.9 per cent of the vote, in contest with Raymond Watt for the ALP (35 per cent of vote), and William McCall for the UAP (50.1 per cent of the vote). As the Daily Telegraph commented (15 September 1940), Lockwood would be “an asset to Parliament” if only he could find an electorate where the odds were in his favour. The following year, Lockwood stood as SLP candidate for the State suburban seat of Concord, gaining 13.6 per cent of the vote. Career-wise, according to historian David McKnight, had not the split occurred within the NSW ALP, and had not Lockwood gone with the SLP, it is possible Lockwood could well have ended up as an ALP, and undercover communist, parliamentarian. Prior to the split, Lockwood was the endorsed ALP candidate for the seat of Martin. 488 PARTY ACTIVIST Behind the scenes. Lockwood immersed himself in party activities. Behind the scenes, he helped communist trade union officials prepare and write speeches, a significant and unacknowledged contribution that continued into the Cold War. During the war, communist trade union officials came to hold significant senior positions with in the trade union movement. As Davidson pointed out, by 1945 “at the height of its success, the CPA controlled McKnight, Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War, Chapter 6, pp. 153-171, which was the first account/analysis to clearly explain and document the extent and nature of this clandestine relationship, and remains to date the fullest account. Prior to McKnight’s account, historians tended to be cautious in regard to communist penetration of the ALP and their influence; McKnight’s ‘Endnote 9’ discussion of this historiography, p. 170, is pertinent. On Hughes as a leading ‘legal’ voice of the CPA, Symons, “All-Out”, p. 35. See also Michael Hogan and David Clune, editors, The Peoples’s Choice: Electoral Politics in Twentieth Century New South Wales, Volume Two, 1930-1965, Parliament of New South Wales and University of Sydney, Sydney, 2001, pp. 173-174. 488 David McKnight to author, letter, undated (received 30 October 1996); on Lockwood’s 1940 electoral performance, Macintyre, The Reds, p. 406. 179 275,000 out of 1,200,000 unionists”, with some 300 communist trade union officials still in top level jobs in 1948 when CPA influence in the trade union movement was under challenge and decreasing. 489 Public Speaker. Lockwood became a public speaker of note, a role and function he was associated with well into the 1960s. By various estimations he was one of the ‘master’ CPA orators, or one of the Australian labour movements greatest orators ever. His oratory, particularly during the 1940s, has been described as ‘masterly’; he was able “to entrance huge audiences with eloquence, fact and wit”. 490 He was a regular oral presence in open air venues in Sydney, particularly in the Domain, memoirists/autobiographers, a memorable recollection. 491 and for During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lockwood maintained a hectic and exhausting speaking schedule. He also became one of the main broadcasting voices of the CPA once it was legalised, a role he continued post-war. Much to the chagrin and alarm of intelligence authorities, the CPA experimented with the purchase of radio-time in the late 1930s, and made this a feature of its legalised activities post-1943. Lockwood could be heard regularly discussing/commenting on public affairs on Sydney and regional radio. For example, the Tribune for 7 April 1943 listed a regular Monday evening broadcast by Lockwood on Sydney station 2UE, followed by a Wednesday evening broadcast on Sydney’s 2GB; on Wednesday evenings, he could be heard on regional stations 2WL (Wollongong), 2HR (Hunter River), 2GZ (Orange), 2KA (Katoomba), 2KM (Kempsey), 2KO (Newcastle). The willingness of radio station managements to sell air-time to the party, 489 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 92. 490 Sendy, Comrades Come Rally!, p. 54. 491 See, for example, Bob Carr, Thoughtlines: Reflections of a Public Man, Penguin/Viking, Camberwell, 2002, p. 382; Alex Mitchell, Come the Revolution: A Memoir, New South Press, Sydney, 2011, p. 63; see also the brief memoir “Gloria Garton, 1919- ”, in Joyce Stevens, editor, Taking the Revolution Home. Work Among Women in the Communist Party of Australia: 1920-1945, Sybylla Co-Operative Press, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 225-226. 180 Lockwood recalled, decreased towards the end of the war and subsequently. 492 Lockwood’s speaking activities became of concern to Australian intelligence authorities when he was a left-ALP, then SLP, member, his CPA membership secret until 1943. He was variously followed, his activities monitored, and attempts made to record him. A Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) agent reported on a Sydney street corner meeting Lockwood addressed in Kings Cross, 17 January 1942, that Lockwood was a speaker with a background and abilities that “are to be reckoned with”, and that he possessed “qualities above the usual labour enthusiast”. In June 1941, another CIB report expressed frustration regarding Lockwood: “At all his meetings, he keeps a close look out for shorthand reporters and if one is present, he couches his language accordingly”. Particularly galling was the way Lockwood could, at short notice, change from the advertised topic, and the way note takers, once spotted, would become the target of “caustic comment” and the accusation of being “a stool pigeon”. In CIB correspondence the following month, matters got personal: “Lockwood is well educated and of good appearance. It has been said that his weaknesses are wine and women”. 493 One probes for weaknesses to defeat a enemy. In later life Lockwood recalled what he regarded as a ‘Security’ attempt to use a woman and intimacy to spy on him. 494 By February 1941, Lockwood’s oratory had come to the attention of the Minister for External Affairs, the Attorney-General, and the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor. His “anti-British sentiments” in particular were of concern as was his advocacy of socialism like that “established in 492 De Berg, p. 17,473. On the CPA and its use of radio, see Bridget Griffen-Foley, Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, p. 364-365. 493 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 6-7 (“labour enthusiast”), folio 38 (Lockwood’s use of language), folio 55 (changes topics), folio 92 (“stool pigeon”), folios 60-61 (“weaknesses”). 494 Bowden, “Security and I”, p. 12-13. 181 the Soviet Union”; his statements were examined for possible prosecution but no action was taken. 495 As the CIB officer above observed, Lockwood was aware he was under surveillance, and took relevant actions to ensure his safety from prosecution. During his employment with the ABC Weekly, Lockwood was tipped off by his friend and editor Syd Deamer about a possible imminent search of Lockwood’s accommodation by security authorities. Deamer had discerned possible security interest following pointed inquires directed to him concerning the whereabouts of Lockwood’s residential address. Lockwood took immediate steps to ensure his Sydney accommodation was clear of anything likely to indicate his communist affiliation, and he took scrupulous care with his public utterances to avoid breaking laws. 496 The wartime threat to Lockwood during the illegal phase of the CPA, was tangible. Interviewed in 1981 by oral historian Hazel de Berg, Lockwood recounted how, before the ousting of the conservative Commonwealth government when it lost its majority in 1941, he was invited to the Sydney office of ALP politician Dr. H. Evatt, recently elected to the Federal seat of Barton (1940), and a member of the Advisory War Council. Lockwood had a cordial relationship with Evatt, based on their mutual pre-war interest in civil liberties, and associations with Brian Fitzpatrick. Information, leaks in journalistic parlance, from Evatt began before Evatt was a Federal MHR; Lockwood received information while Evatt was a High Court judge. It was a relationship with Evatt personally, or with members of his office, that would continue into the Cold War and beyond, intriguing future legal inquisitors and historians. It was a source he protected, variously covering it up until interviewed by oral historian Hazel de Berg and being forthright in 1981. Evatt showed Lockwood a document, purporting to be a list of communists the Commonwealth planned to intern. Lockwood’s name was amongst the first thirteen. Around the same time, from a source he described 495 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 8-11. 496 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 15. 182 as “a very, very high public servant in Canberra”, he learned of plans to mass intern communists in a camp especially prepared on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait following a “massive crackdown” on communists. 497 The point should be made here that Lockwood was, when he became a member of the CPA, a well-connected journalist, one arguably destined to become a leading capitalist journalist had he stayed with Murdoch and not made the political choices he did. When he became a communist he took with him his skills, his contacts, and in many cases the loyalties he had forged with people during the 1930s; Evatt was a Lockwood source. When people wondered later about his sources, as happened in relation with the Petrov Royal Commission, they tended to think in terms of the furtive, the clandestine, the underhanded --- when they could have thought of it in terms of the day-to-day-journalism of a seasoned professional, and well connected, journalist. As much as security authorities recognised the potential of Lockwood as a threat, so did the CPA regard him as an asset. Until February 1942, journalists were listed amongst reserved occupations under wartime manpower planning regulations, their work considered essential for the maintenance of morale and to the war effort generally. Thereafter they were removed from the list, the government considering their production able to fall off without prejudicing the war effort, and they became eligible for national service. This was a change that upset, for example, the interests of future media giant Frank Packer and his nascent Consolidated Press; Packer took actions to try to protect key employees from the change. On the other side of the ledger, the CPA sought to quarantine Lockwood, and 497 For a concise overview of Evatt’s life and career, see G. C. Bolton, “Evatt, Herbert Vere (Bert) (1894–1965)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/evatt-herbert-vere-bert10131/text17885, accessed 24 September 2012. On Lockwood’s contacts with Evatt, De Berg, pp.17,455-17,457; on the list of communists to be interned, Bowden, “Making of an Australia Communist, p. 16; on the Flinders Island leak, De Berg, p. 17,457. Lockwood explained his association with Evatt to me in an interview, Bowral, 26-27 September 1984. 183 successfully enlisted the aid of Jock Garden. Garden was a veteran and legendary labour movement identity, variously clergyman, trade union leader, politician, and in 1920, one of the founders of the CPA; beginning in 1942, he was the liason officer between the ALP Federal Minister for Labour and Trade, Eddie Ward, the minister in charge of national service, and the trade union movement. 498 Pamphleteer. A significant part of Lockwood’s work for the CPA from 1941 to the end of the 1950s involved the writing of pamphlets, a literary activity largely ignored by commentators. As George Orwell commented in 1943, pamphlets ought to be regarded as “the literary form of an age” in which avenues for “free expression are dwindling” and “organised lying” exists on a large scale. According to Orwell, pamphlets were a “flexible” literary form, capable of delivering passionate, lively opinion in an easily read manner and in vast quantities. So far as Orwell was concerned, the pamphlet literature he had encountered was “practically all trash”. But it was a literature form ideally suited to “plugging holes in history”. 499 Brian Beasley, in his account of Australian literary responses to the Spanish Civil War, explained that during the 1930s, pamphlet literature in Britain and in Australia became a literary phenomenon, and for pro-Republic supporters enlisting aid and support, pamphlets were an “indispensable weapon”. Pamphlets generally were a distinctive literary phenomenon, and Walter Benjamin argued that the pamphlet became legitimate literature in its own right. Pamphlets, 498 On the wartime status of journalists, and Packer, see Griffen-Foley, The House of Packer, pp. 106-107. For the involvement of Garden on Lockwood’s behalf, interview with Lockwood by the author, 7 November 1985, Sydney; on Garden, see Bede Nairn, “Garden, John Smith (Jock) (1882-1968)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/garden-johnsmith-jock-6274/text10811, accessed 20 August 2012. 499 George Orwell, “Pamphlet Literature”, New Statesman and Nation, 9 January 1943, http://orwell.ru/library/articles/pamphlet/english/e_pl, accessed 20 August 2012. 184 Benjamin concluded, were more capable than the book of responding to the emergency, crises and tragedies of the age… 500 Turning his attention to the conspicuous role of communist pamphleteering presented by Australian author Jean Devanny in her contemporary novel Paradise Flow (1937), Beasley noted, the pamphlet was emblematic of the ties and currents of classconsciousness: circulating within the community, passed from hand to hand, reappearing at key moments of conflict to beat back the sophism of employers and the capitalist press.501 Writing of nineteenth century Australian radicalism, Bruce Scates alerted historians to the importance of pamphlet literature. Pamphlets, he argued, were cheaper than books, were easier to store and distribute and placed fewer demands on the time and concentration of the reader. They also oblige the historian to re-evaluate the intellectual origins of nineteenthcentury radicalism. A generation of readers may well have learnt their socialism from a score of twopenny pamphlets rather than the single author novels and monographs endlessly reproduced and analysed. 502 As in the nineteenth century, so too in the twentieth. As Stuart Macintyre pointed out, the CPA was a major publisher, and had a “strong emphasis on education”, a mix that that came together in the printed word. The party was “an extraordinarily avid user of print”, wrote Macintyre, and its “faith in the (printed) word verged on logorrhoea”, with pamphlets part of its “astonishing body of ephemeral material”. 503 In Lockwood’s activism, the pamphleteering and the oral met; the publication of a new Lockwood title was launched in conjunction with 500 B. Beasley, “‘Death Charged Missives’”, p. 54. 501 Ibid., p. 55. 502 Scates, A New Australia, p. 52. 503 Stuart Macintyre, “Case-study: The Communist Party of Australia”, in Lyons and Arnold, A History of the Book in Australia, pp. 51-54. 185 related talks and speeches by the author. One went to listen to Lockwood, then purchased the related pamphlet. The pamphlets were produced in runs of between 5,000-20,000 copies, in booklet form of about 4,000 words in length. Variously interviewed by broadcaster Tim Bowden, and by Rowan Cahill, Lockwood could not recall how many titles he produced overall, but claimed huge productivity, for example turning out pamphlets “almost by the dozen” in support of the Soviet Union during the war. There is no reason to doubt this productivity, as Lockwood did a lot of uncredited work for the party. My researches have located eighteen titles directly attributable to Lockwood; if collected, these would comprise a book-length manuscript. But they were/are literary ephemera, produced cheaply on cheap paperstock, and as Devanny/Beasley noted above about pamphlets generally, were passed around and communally shared. Literary survival and matters relating to posterity were not what concerned either Lockwood or his publisher. 504 The important thing was communication, and as Taksa demonstrated, for many working people in Australia during the late 504 This paragraph draws on an interview I conducted with Lockwood, Sydney, 7 November 1985; Bowden, “The Making of an Australian Communist”, pp. 17-18. I briefly draw attention to Lockwood’s pamphleteering in Rowan Cahill, “On the Technique of WorkingClass Journalism”, Labour History, Number 94, May 2008, pp.157-165. The eighteen pamphlet titles located are: Scorched Earth!, NSW Aid Russia Committee, Sydney, 1941; Timoshenko, NSW Aid Russia Committee, Sydney, n.d.; Guerilla, NSW Aid Russia Committee, Sydney, n.d. (1942?); Why the Red Army is Winning, NSW Aid Russia Committee, Sydney, n.d.; Japan’s Heart of Wood, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1943; Invade Europe, NSW Aid Russia Committee, Sydney, n.d.; Wall Street Attacks Australia, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, n.d. (1947?); Bankers Backed Hitler, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1948; Macarthur, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1950; China: Our Neighbour, Current Book Distributors, Sydney 1951; The Story of Jim Healy, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1951; Malaya Must Cost No More Australian Blood, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1951; Persian Oil, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1951; Unconquerable Korea, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1951; Crisis in Egypt, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1952; What is in Document J?, Freedom Press, Canberra, 1954; No War For Oil Monopolies! Hands Off Middle East, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1958; Answers to Common Market, Boilermakers’ Society of Australia, Sydney, n.d. (1963?). 186 nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth, pamphlets, booklets, the working class press, oratory, were all important founts for their intellectual development and their understanding of the world. 505 Lockwood’s pamphlet titles range from the racist war propaganda of Japan’s Heart of Wood, mentioned earlier, to the well researched and useful The Story of Jim Healy (1951), still cited and drawn upon by scholarly researchers. 506 His pamphlets mostly had educational purpose and intent, tended to be lively, entertaining, the language accessible, and the text broken by sub-headings. Lockwood’s approach to pamphleteering tended to reject the common communist practice of quoting and referencing communist stalwarts like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and instead referenced a diversity of other sources, for example the Bible, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Lord Byron. Indeed, a characteristic of Lockwood’s pamphlet work was his apparent assumption that readers were, wanted to be, or should be, familiar with a wide, general background of history and culture, readers whose lives and educations had been disrupted by Depression and War. While this study has, in order to discuss the diversity, skills, abilities of Lockwood, reduced him to component parts, it is worthwhile pulling back and realising that to his supporters and opponents, he was regarded wholistically, not as parts. This can be seen, for example, in this memory of Lockwood during the 1940s by Bernard Smith (1916-2011), respected and highly regarded Australian art historian, art critic, academic intellectual, and a former member of the CPA: I could not say that Rupert had a formative influence on my thinking during the 1940s when I was active in the Teachers’ Branch of the CPA, but at that time his booklets, his many speeches in the Domain and at Party 505 Lucy Taksa, “Spreading the Word: The Literature of Labour and Working-Class Culture”, in Shields, All Our Labours, pp. 64-85. 506 See for example Ray Markey and Stuart Svensen, “Healy, James (Jim) (1898-1961)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, MUP, Carlton, 1996, pp. 421-423; Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, pp. 85, 376. 187 meetings, were most certainly an inspiration. I greatly admired not only Rupert’s consistent and courageous honesty, but the thrust, conviction and power that went into everything he did-though I must admit somewhat at a distance, as I was a shy little fellow really, and I always felt that Rupert was so much more at the centre of things than I was. 507 LOCKWOOD AND COOK In March 1940, Ken Cook and Lockwood met at a Journalists’ Club social function in Sydney. They were introduced by Alec Pratt, Lockwood’s editor on the Daily News. 508 Pratt and Cook were both Scotch old-boys. For Lockwood this meeting with Cook was a re-acquaintance, since, as seen (Chapter 2), they had previously met while schoolboys during interschool functions. Cook and Lockwood had much in common; both hailed originally from Melbourne; they had attended elite private schools; both had worked as journalists in Asia at roughly the same time; both were intrigued and alarmed by Japanese militarism and expansion. Cook could read, write and speak the Japanese language, had for a time lived in Japan, and was a contributor of articles about Japanese culture to the Age and Smiths’ Weekly. Otherwise, he was a business entrepreneur. To Cottle he claimed he had been given elementary training in spycraft by a British intelligence operative whilst working in Asia. 509 507 Letter, Bernard Smith to the author, 18 August 1985. On Smith’s time in the CPA and his Teachers’ Branch membership, see Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard, Allen Lane, Ringwood, 1984, pp. 277-301. 508 On the meeting between Lockwood and Cook, Cottle, Brisbane Line, p. 196. 509 For biographical details of Ken Cook, see Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp. 186-211. See also Drew Cottle and Shane Cahill, “Ken Cook and the Japanese Collabrators”, in Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill, editors, Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010, pp. 231-243. This section of the study benefited from access to the interview materials resulting from Drew Cottle’s interviews with Ken Cook, Condobolin, NSW, in 1985, 1986. Copies of these are in the possession of the author. My thanks to Drew Cottle for making them accessible to me. 188 The meeting led to friendship. Cook introduced Lockwood to Japanese press and diplomatic personnel working in Australia; Cook seemed to have their confidence. During the course of their friendship Cook supplied Lockwood with information he said he had gathered whilst working as a civilian agent for Australian army and naval intelligence. By his account, as a person familiar with the Japanese language and culture, Cook had been tasked to develop close links with Japanese diplomatic and consular personnel, and to ingratiate himself with pro-Japanese sympathizers. This he did, using the name Ken Easton-Cook, initially posing as an independent businessman of means seeking advice about patents. He became a regular visitor to the Point Piper, Sydney, Japanese consular residence, ‘Craig-y-mor’, his usefulness as an undercover operative ceasing in 1941 when Japanese authorities became aware of his activities. 510 The information Cook supplied to Lockwood related to the extent and nature of Japanese espionage and intelligence gathering in Australia during the 1930s, early 1940s, and the extent of Japan’s careful cultivation of proJapan sympathies amongst leading Australian politicians, journalists, intellectuals, academics, business leaders, even within the ranks of Australia’s military and intelligence communities. Cook also told of the fears and concerns held by some in the intelligence community that in the event of war with Japan, and subsequent invasion, there was the strong possibility of collaboration amongst highly placed and influential proJapanese sympathizers, and the formation of a collaborationist administration. 511 The potential collaborationist epicenter, according to Cook, was the JapanAustralia Society. Formed in Sydney in 1929, and disbanded in the Pearl Harbour year of 1941, the Society’s membership was “restricted to those of substance and social prominence”, and its object to ‘promote mutual understanding and friendship between Japanese and Australian people’. In 510 Cottle, Brisbane Line p. 195-196; Cottle and S. Cahill, “Ken Cook”, p. 236. 511 For an account of Cook’s intelligence activities, Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp. 186-211. 189 1939, its office bearers included five members of either Japanese military or naval intelligence. 512 A list of members found its way to Lockwood during the war. 513 As he later described: Many of the highest in Australian industry, commerce, the professions and public life were organised in the Japan-Australia Society….They rubbed shoulders in the Society till Pearl Harbour year with Japanese diplomats, representatives of Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Yokohama Specie Bank, woolbuyers and shipping firms. The Society was an important lobby not only for trade and cultural exchanges but for appeasement of Japan.514 Cook also told of the role of the Japan-minded Percival Claude Spender, later Sir Percival Spender, a future Australian ambassador to Washington, and his close contacts with Japan. Lockwood was amongst those Australian journalists curious and concerned about a controversial Singapore radio broadcast made by Spender, then Minister for the Army (1940-1941), in January 1941 in which he had expressed his hope that “the cordial and friendly relationships which exist between Japan and ourselves” would continue to grow. 515 As a journalist, Lockwood was not alone when his interest and curiosity regarding Spender had been piqued by the revelation in June 1941 that Spender’s brother-in-law, Phillip Hentze, had been arrested by military police at the outbreak of war in September 1940, and immediately released following Spender’s personal intervention. Hentze was a naturalised Australian, born in Germany, and employed in Sydney by German wool companies with known Nazi connections; his sister was a 512 For an account of the Japan-Australia Society, Ibid., pp. 103-116. 513 Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, p. 15. 514 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 78. 515 David Lowe, Australia Between Empires: The Life of Percy Spender, Pickering & Chatto, London, 2010, p. 66. 190 Belgian national, and an academic with reported Italian fascist sympathies. 516 What was new for Lockwood, was Cook’s allegation that Spender had assisted the illegal dispersal of Japanese consular funds in 1941, some £6000 finding its way into the coffers of the conservative UAP, forerunner of the modern day Liberal Party. This dispersal of funds took place not long before the Australian government, in which Spender was Treasurer, froze all Japanese funds in Australia in 1941, consular authorities allegedly tipped off beforehand by Spender. From Cook too, came his understanding that the defections of Independent MHRs Coles and Wilson that led to the formation of the Curtin Labor government in October 1941, was in part due to Naval Intelligence machinations and its concerns regarding the resolve of the conservative coalition to deal with imminent danger from Japan. 517 Lockwood accepted Cook’s account of himself as factual, later describing him as a “Counter-Espionage Agent”. 518 The information related to Lockwood later formed a substantive part of ‘Document J’, the document that resulted in Lockwood appearing before the Petrov Royal Commission. Whether or not Cook was who he said he was, and the veracity or otherwise of his material, and whether it had been gained via intelligence activity or not, is beside the point. What matters here is that Lockwood believed he was dealing with a person who had been an intelligence operative, and information sourced from intelligence activity. Cook’s information matched with Lockwood’s understanding of how Japan worked, based on his observations whilst working in Asia. It meshed too with his understanding of the extent of highly placed pro-fascist and proJapan sentiment in Australia, which he had become aware of following his 516 For the Hentze arrest and release, Ibid., p. 70; Lockwood made mention of the matter in Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, p. 2; for a contemporary report, see “Release Of Alien”, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1941, p. 9. 517 De Berg, pp. 17,456-17,457. 518 Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, p. 15. 191 return from Europe to the Herald. As for potential collaborators, why not? To date, highly placed collaborators had come forward in all countries variously invaded by Axis forces and those of Japan—if in these, then why not Australia? Indeed, Cook’s revelations landed on fertile ground so far as Lockwood was concerned. As he later explained, both in Document J and much later in War on the Waterfront, he had seen first hand evidence of the work of Japanese propaganda at work in Sydney when he was editing the debt laden, and soon to fold, Daily News: The ultimate humiliation for this very last of Australia’s Labor papers came during my editorship: the Japanese, learning of its terminal debts to the Bank of New South Wales through contacts on the bank’s board, seriously considered purchasing the paper to convert it to a Japanese propaganda organ. 519 Instead of becoming a Japanese propaganda vehicle, the paper was closed down in 1940 and absorbed into the Packer’s growing Consolidated Press empire. Lockwood’s claim about Japanese interest in the paper have tended to be ignored by Australian press historians, with Jacqui Murray a notable exception. Her study of the Australian press during the 1930s and its perception of East Asia, Watching the Sun Rise, demonstrated and documented the considerable and significant extent of Japanese patronage and influence in the Australian media during the period. According to Murray, Lockwood’s account of Japanese interest in the Daily News tallies with “the general pattern of (Japan’s) propaganda activities elsewhere (which) included the purchase of local newspapers”. 520 Cook’s story arguably increased Lockwood’s political resolve. Material probably sourced from Cook began to appear anonymously in issues of the 519 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 26-27 520 Murray, Watching the Sun Rise, p. 189. 192 illegal underground Tribune, most likely the work of Lockwood. 521 From a journalist’s point of view, Cook was a leak with inside information which, if the story could be followed up, would be a scoop of immense significance, and one of the all-time great Australian political stories. Multi-award winning Australian investigative journalist Evan Whitton recognised the significance of the story. Commenting on the Petrov documents after their public release in 1984, he drew specific attention to the Spender allegations made by Lockwood in Document J, and argued they raised serious national matters and warranted serious investigation—which at the time they did not get, nor subsequently, because as Whitton noted, the Menzies government sought to conceal them forever. 522 For Lockwood, Cook’s disclosures became a story he would never let go of, in some respects his albatross, and also the proverbial bone the dog never lets go of. Throughout the rest of his life, Lockwood would variously mull over the story, talk about it in interviews, write and rewrite it, and work it in to one of his major histories, War on the Waterfront in 1987. And during the Cold War, it would be a factor contributing to his appearance before a Royal Commission when Cook’s allegations appeared as part of Document J. According to Spender’s sympathtetic biographer David Lowe, Spender was aware of the pro-Japanese allegations made against him, and was furious. He sought at the highest levels to discover their source. In this he was unsuccessful. According to Lowe, aspects of Spender’s pre-war relationship with Japan can be construed as unwise, but there was/is nothing in them to suggest treachery, nor is there any archival support for the allegations. As for the repetition of these claims during the Cold War in Document J, this was “sensational nonsense”. Further, Lowe chastised historians who continue/d to air them, specifically mentioning Drew Cottle and his The 521 See for example “Guilty Men”, Tribune, 11 February 1942, p. 2. 522 Evan Whitton, Trial by Voodoo: Why the Law Defeats Justice and Democracy, Random House Australia, Milsons Point, 1994, pp. 245-248. 193 Brisbane Line-A Reappraisal, and David McKnight and his Australia’s Spies and their Secrets. 523 As for Ken Cook, only one historian has interrogated the man and his story. Australian scholar Drew Cottle subjected both to examination in his PhD thesis “The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal” (Macquarie University, 1991), and later, as we have seen, in a book similarly titled The Brisbane Line—A Reappraisal (2002). While sympathetic to both Cook and Lockwood, Cottle’s exhaustive research demonstrates there is little on the public record to substantiate Cook’s intelligence service, or his claims. What is there, is slight. Post-war, Cook kept quiet about his intelligence service and his knowledge of pro-Japan sympathizers and their collaborationist potential. He was identified in Document J by Lockwood as a source of information, but none of the document’s disclosures regarding Japan and collaboration were ever aired or tested by the Petrov Royal Commission, and Cook was not called up by the commissioners. Document J passed into the protection and quietude of secrecy provisions where it remained until publicly released in 1984. Upon release, Document J was read for the first time by the general public, and Ken Cook became a person of interest. Cottle traced him, locating him in retirement in the NSW country town of Condobolin, and subsequently, in 1985 and 1986, interviewed him extensively. These interviews provided Cottle with significant data for his thesis and later book. Cook’s personal archive was destroyed in 1972 when fire gutted his business premise. When Cook died in 1987, one of his mourners was lifelong friend Major General Sir William Refshauge (1913-2009), prominent Australian military medical officer and public health administrator. Cook’s headstone bears the insignia of the special operations Z Force. 524 523 Lowe, Australia Between Empires, p. 198, Endnote 44. 524 Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp. 186-187, 210-211. I have also benefited from access to Cottle’s notes of his interviews with Ken Cook (1985, 1986), a copy of which is in my 194 So far as Australian Naval Intelligence is concerned, Cook has been accepted as a Naval Intelligence operative by Barbara Winter, biographer of Commander Rupert Long, Australia’s Director of Naval Intelligence during WW2. 525 Cook does fit the profile of people recruited during the 1930s to gather intelligence about Japan by Long. During the 1930s, Long ran between 150 and 160 undercover agents in Australia and abroad. He tried his utmost not to leave a paper trail with regard to these. Long endeavoured to communicate personally with these agents, or in brief coded messages, and kept his organisation of them in his head as much as possible. 526 What paperwork did exist, he seems to have personally destroyed post-war. As Ian Pfennigwerth, himself a former Director of Naval Intelligence, has explained: Urbane, erudite and well connected through family and marriage ties with the top echelons of Australian society…Long exercised influence well outside the range of the normal navy officer, and he was able to persuade people of all walks of life to become involved in the intelligence empire he (constructed). From his Sydney office he established links with the kinds of agencies that would be useful in the collection of intelligence---ships’ masters, airline pilots, customs agents and businessmen who travelled into areas of intelligence interest. He ran most of these agents personally: it is said that after the end of the war he destroyed hundreds of files on them, as they did not appear, or need to appear, in official records. 527 Circumstantially, there is enough evidence to believe Cook was what he claimed to be. As for any collaborationist potential amongst Australian possession. For an account of Z Force and the labyrinthine structures of Australian clandestine military organisations and operations during WW2, see Neil C. Smith, They Came Unseen. The Men and Women of Z Special Unit, Mostly Unsung Military History Research and Publications, Melbourne, 2010, pp. 1-64. 525 Winter, The Australia-First Movement, pp. 57, 161. 526 Barbara Winter, The Intrigue Master: Commander Long and Naval Intelligence in Australia, 1913-1945, Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 1995, p. 26. 527 Ian Pfennigwerth, A Man of Intelligence: The Life of Captain Eric Nave, Australian Codebreaker Extraordinary, Rosenberg Publishing, Dural, 2006, pp. 157-158. 195 elites, as historian Andrew Moore has noted, with the passing of the threat of Japanese invasion by the end of 1942, such potential never had to be tested. 528 For Lockwood, the journalist, this big story would always be a matter of chasing something with little evidential base. So far as this scoop cum story was concerned he would remain in the historical quandary Macintyre and Scalmer have described: Evidence is the historian’s best friend. Sometimes, though, the archives are empty and the actors have fallen silent; evidence is scarce, and the historian is friendless. Imaginary history appeals in this situation too. Counterfactuals can substitute for direct empirical analysis. 529 The presence of a pro-Japanese Fifth Column in Australia was not new to Lockwood. He had been, and was, in the vanguard of those who campaigned vigorously against the Australia First Movement (AFM), in his case via his journalism outlets and his SLP activities. 530 The AFM was a small organisation expounding a mix of anti-Semitic, nationalist, pro-fascist, and pro-Japanese sentiments from its public formation in October 1941, until its demise in early 1942 following the selective arrest and internment of 16 of is 65 known members. Scholars who have written about the organization, Bruce Muirden and Craig Munro, argue the organisation was not the stuff of a Fifth Column, as maintained at the time, but was the victim of an MI frame-up. 531 Lockwood welcomed the internments, but so far as he was concerned, Cook’s information raised the bar. At the time of the AFM internments he claimed, and maintained throughout his life, the focus on the AFM was a side show, conducted by authorities to distract attention from the main game. Writing in 1987 he argued that had a proper and thorough 528 Moore, The Right Road, p. 49. 529 Macintyre and Scalmer, What If?, p. 4. 530 For details of Lockwood’s pursuit of the Australia First Movement, real and alleged, see Barbara Winter, The Australia-First Movement, pp. 94, 112, 160-161, 200. 531 Bruce Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1968; Craig Munro, Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P. R. Stephensen, MUP, Carlton, 1984. 196 investigation of pro-fascist and pro-Japanese sympathisers been conducted in 1942, it would have reached into ministerial offices, editorial suites, the boardrooms of leading corporations, banks, shipping companies, wool brokers and department stores. 532 In 1942, following the AFM arrests, Lockwood opined similarly. Anonymously, in the illegal Tribune, he argued the selective arrests were a distraction; the Fifth Column enemies of Australia were extensive and still at large, found for example in the ranks of the UAP; “Jap spies”, he wrote had connections “with ‘high’ society”. 533 GUERRILLA WARFARE, PEOPLE’S WAR. On 8 December 1941, Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour, simultaneously attacking Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Wake, Midway and Ocean Islands. The Curtin government consequently took Australia to war against Japan. On 15 February 1942, Singapore, the impregnable fortress and bastion of British power in the East fell, its vulnerabilities evident to Lockwood in the late 1930s. For Australia, the capture of Singapore by Japanese forces was demoralising, with some 1789 Australian soldiers killed, 1306 wounded, and 15,395 surrendering. Four days later, Japanese aircraft began bombing Darwin, heralding a series of air attacks through to 1943 against the Australian mainland, ranging across northern Australia and as far southeast as Sydney. 534 As Japanese forces moved southwards, and into New Guinea, the invasion of Australia 532 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 71. For a detailed scholarly account of the support within Australia for Hitler’s Germany and Nazism, which does locate this support amongst well placed academics, intellectuals, politicians, businessmen, publishers, see David S. Bird, Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2012. 533 The anonymous article is identified and quoted by Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp.141-142. 534 For the reference to Sydney, Pam Oliver, Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan’s Plans for Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2010, p. 2. 197 seemed a distinct possibility, especially with the sinking of the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse on 10 December 1941 of the coast of Malaya, which left the Japanese advance via the waters of East Asia uncontested. 535 The Australian government responded to the threat of Japan by variously increasing the nation’s military capacity, and by working to motivate an allin home front war effort. Federal and State authorities variously organised protective measures including blackouts, brownouts, sand-bagging of buildings, trench-digging, fire fighting drills, and made plans for the evacuation of women and children from strategic population centres. Within the civilian population, panic was manifest, and some who could began evacuating to safe rural locations, “bomb dodging” as it was termed. The Federal Department of Home Security issued a booklet, advising civilians to assist Australian armed forces in the event of invasion, deny assistance to invading forces, create confusion where possible, but not to engage in battle with the enemy. 536 However, this was not the mood of all. Across the nation citizens took the initiative, formed citizen-military groups, and began training and drilling, even if they only had rifle-length rods instead of weaponry. Significant numbers of people became involved, some with 1914-1918 military experience. On Sydney’s respectable North Shore alone, a reported 1000 men and women mobilised. Towards the end of January 1942, sections of the Returned Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmens Imperial League of Australia and the trade union movement formed a committee with the aim of coordinating civilian resistance. 537 The idea of a People’s Army took hold. During January-February, the Sydney Daily Telegraph encouraged the idea, 535 Michael McKernan, All In! Australia During the Second World War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1983, p. 99. 536 For a useful account of the official reactions and the civilian panic that followed the Japanese attacks on the mainland, Ibid., pp. 96-131. 537 Ibid., pp. 120-124, for discussion of the People’s Army movement. 198 including publication of articles and messages by English Left military specialist Tom Wintringham. Wintringham was a best-selling People’s Army advocate, blooded in World War 1, and during the Spanish Civil War where he had commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade. 538 Lockwood was particularly enthusiastic about Wintringham, reviewing his new Ways of War (Penguin, 1940), and Armies of Freemen (Routledge, 1940). 539 The SLP newspaper Progress published articles based on Wintringham’s work in the Picture Post (UK), adapted for Australian conditions and rewritten by Lockwood colleague Len Fox; the Commonwealth censor refused permission to include material on how to construct explosive devices from water-piping and fittings. 540 The established and major Australian publisher Angus and Robertson issued a 538 Thomas Henry (Tom) Wintringham (1898-1949). Served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War 1. Studied history at Oxford post-war and later studied for the Bar. He was a foundation member of the British Communist Party in 1920, and later variously assistant editor/editor of the party newspaper Workers’ Weekly. During the Spanish Civil war he commanded the British Batallion of the International Brigade. During World War 2 he founded the private and unofficial Training Centre for the Home Guard, Osterley Park. Wintringham articulated his vision of ‘peoples’ war’ in two best-selling books, New Ways of War (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1940), and Peoples’ War (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1942). In these he advocated civilian resistance to invading forces via civilian training in a blend of traditional military and guerrilla skills, organised and conducted on democratic principles. For accounts of Wintringham, all but forgotten after his death, but literally a writer/activist who influenced millions of people, see Hugh Purcell, The Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham, 1898-1949, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2004; David Fernbach, “Tom Wintringham and Socialist Defense Strategy”, History Workshop Journal, Volume 14, Issue 1, 1982, pp. 63-91. McKernan, All In!, draws attention to the articles by Wintringham in the Daily Telegraph, p. 122. 539 Rupert Lockwood, “Iron in Our Souls”, Ironworker, undated clipping in Lockwood’s “Clippings Book c.1929-1940”, p. 82, NLA: MS 10121, Box 55, Bag 362: “Military Writer Understands the Australian Tradition”, Northern Standard, (Darwin, N. T.), 24 June 1941, p. 5. The Northern Standard was published by the North Australian Workers’ Union, 19281955. This newspaper continued to publish Lockwood’s work until its closure. 540 Len Fox, Broad Left, Narrow Left, Len Fox, Sydney, 1982, p. 106. On the close link between the Picture Post and Wintringham’s civilian Home Defence/People’s Army plans, see Purcell, The Last English Revolutionary, pp. 189-190. 199 series of books promoting civilian guerrilla resistance and martial bushcraft. Prolific author Ion Idriess (1889-1979) was part of this series, and he formed a People’s Defence Auxiliary. 541 The illegal CPA became part of this civilian resistance impetus, working through the SLP to promote and organise a People’s Army. In its propaganda it linked the spirit of Eureka and Australian bushmen to the experiences and example of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Some training took place, with whatever weaponry was at hand or could be collected. 542 According to Gollan, the significance of the CPA’s propaganda and involvement around the idea of a People’s Army, was “it was an incident in the growing claim of communists to express the genuine interests of the Australian nation”. 543 Wally Clayton and his underground CPA cadres prepared for invasion and resistance. Secure bases were established in the Southern Highlands, around Bargo, Mittagong, and Moss Vale, then relatively close to but remote from the Sydney metropolis, Canberra, and the South Coast industrial and mining centres. It was a region surrounded by vast tracts of rugged bushland that still, in the early 21st century, frustrate search and rescue teams and firefighters, and was linked to major population centres by infrastructures susceptible to ambush and sabotage. The area was replete with isolated bushland farms. Overall, it was a strategic site for the launching of the sort of guerrilla resistance campaign envisaged, as we will see, by Lockwood. In preparation, stores of fuel and food were stockpiled. The underground organisation also had mobile shortwave radio transmitter capacity, drawing upon the skills of contacts in Amalgamated Wireless Australasia with expertise in radio communications and aviation systems. 544 541 McKernan, All In!, p. 120. 542 Eric Aarons, What’s Left?, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1993, pp. 49-50; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 126-128. 543 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 127. 544 For the bases in the Southern Highlands, see Mark Aarons, The Family File, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2010, p. 159. 200 During this time of civilian resistance enthusiasm and preparation, the literary team known as M. Barnard Eldershaw, authors Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897-1956), was writing its futuristic novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. These authors came to their task from backgrounds of anti-fascism, and deep hostility to materialism and capitalism. Their novel was set in a counterfactual World War 2, ending with Australia asserting its independence of foreign powers internationally and seeking at home to build a socialist society. In response Australia is invaded by a right-wing international police-force representing “Britain, the Americas, Japan”. This invasion is met by civilian guerrilla resistance and scorched earth tactics, led by a leftist underground movement. Sydney is destroyed in the process. The underground organisation described by Eldershaw is similar in respects to the CPA illegal organisation, and the resistance tactics deployed, similar to those parlayed by People’s Army advocates. The novel was submitted to the Commonwealth censor in 1944, and published in a severely edited form in 1947; the full version was not published until 1983. 545 Opponents of civilian resistance and a People’s Army were forthright. The Sydney Bulletin mocked misogynously: the idea women might fight in a civilian resistance movement was un-Australian; women’s work in time of war was to knit socks, make camouflage netting, and work in munitions’ factories. 546 The Catholic Worker (February 1942) expressed alarm; the idea of a People’s Army was a communist ploy to create a force with the capability of carrying out a revolution at the end of the war. 547 Which was a reasonable claim to make. In England, Tom Wintringham, favoured by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, had been explaining the links between war and revolution since 1935, and arguing that the working class had the power to 545 M. Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Virago Press, London, 1983. For the composition of the ‘International Police’ force, p. 371; for the civil war, pp. 375ff. 546 Bulletin cited by McKernan, All In!, p. 124. 547 Catholic Worker cited by Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 126-127. 201 wage war, and that the best hope of the English people for a revolution lay in the opportunities the looming war presented. 548 Author George Orwell pondered privately in his Diary (24 June 1940) on what he would do personally in the event of Germany invading England; the invaders would face resistance by the people, which, if successful, would lead to revolution, since the “capitalist class” would do a deal with Hitler. He went on to criticise a recent announcement by British authorities ordering the civilian population to hand in all revolvers in their possession, for use by the British military. Orwell saw this as an underhanded attempt by the government to disarm and emasculate the civilian population. 549 As for Australia, Gollan claimed there “may have been some communists who nurtured the hope that if invasion happened, in the succeeding chaos and the war of resistance to follow, a people’s army in which they would achieve leadership might finally emerge as a powerful political force”. 550 Lockwood was one of these communists. The Australian government regarded the People’s Army impetus with alarm. The Army Minister argued (14 February 1942) there was “no justification for private armies in this country”, and with the backing of Prime Minister Curtin, banned them. The government was adamant that it should be in control of martial power; the proper focus of civilian homedefence, it argued, was the official Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC). In what some saw as a manoeuvre to counteract the People’s Army impetus, the VDC was expanded, and its organisation and training modified to include what Hasluck termed “more unorthodox and original methods” of warfare. 551 548 Hugh Purcell, The Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham, 1898-1949, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2004, pp. 169-188, 207-208. 549 Peter Davidson (editor), The Orwell Diaries, Penguin Books, London, 2009, pp. 259- 261. 550 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 127. 551 Hasluck, Government and the People, 1942-1945, p. 62. 202 Lockwood acknowledged, in retrospect, the threat the People’s Army posed. As he told Bowden in 1973, I think in the back of their (the government’s) minds was the fear that if a guerrilla army had been founded and had fought the Japanese it would have grown in strength and also in political power. Guerrilla armies after victory are terribly hard to disband.552 Literature relating to guerrilla warfare has long recognised that it “is a highly political form of warfare”, and the motivation for engaging in it, partly political/ideological. While not exclusively the preserve of communist forces, the politics of guerrilla warfare were systematically expounded by Mao Tse-tung, with his concept of ‘revolutionary war’ appearing as early as 1936 in his Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War. 553 As will be seen below, Lockwood was familiar with aspects of Mao Tse-tung’s thinking on guerrilla warfare in the late 1930s, early 1940s. Early in 1942, Lockwood went by train to Melbourne and met with Alf Conlon, then gathering non-conforming intellectual talent for a largely independent research unit within the Army that would later officially become the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. The tasks of the Directorate would include giving non-orthodox advice on internal and external military problems, and planning alternative administration measures in the event of Japanese invasion. The meeting was arranged by Lockwood’s ABC editor, Syd Deamer, who was part of Prime Minister Curtin’s Committee of National Morale, chaired by Conlon. 554 552 Bowden “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 19. 553 Alun Gwynne Jones, “Forms of Military Attack”, in Adam Roberts (editor), Civilian Resistance as a National Defence: Non-violent Action Against Aggression, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 29. 554 Alfred Conlon (1908-1961), intellectual, intelligence officer, medical practitioner. See Peter Ryan, “Conlon, Alfred Austin Joseph (Alf) (1908-1961)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 203 There are two versions of what transpired at this meeting, both sourced to Lockwood. According to Cottle, Lockwood was offered a place in Conlon’s outfit, his experiences abroad and talents regarded as useable assets. Lockwood declined, preferring instead to stay close to the proscribed CPA. To me Lockwood described a cordial meeting with Conlon who appreciated Lockwood’s skills and abilities, but regarded the intense security Lockwood was under as a hindrance. Lockwood told me of his profound disappointment at being rejected. 555 Rupert Lockwood was part of the People’s Army impetus, and the resistance project. In 1942 he published Guerrilla Paths to Freedom (Angus and Robertson), an 83-page book of some 14,000 words, organised in nine chapters. It went through two editions and sold 5824 copies. 556 Guerrilla Paths was written with the possibility in mind that: Powerful Axis forces may soon invade Australia, and all men and women who are anything but clay will want to fight to defend their homes and their land, their freedom and their social achievements.557 Interviewed by broadcaster Tim Bowden for an ABC radio programme in 1973, Lockwood downplayed the book, explaining he “rushed” it out in a four day writing effort, adding “and it rather looks as if it was written in four days, when you read it”, with no reference to its content apart from http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/conlon-alfred-austin-joseph-alf-9804/text17331, accessed 7 October 2012; for Conlon and the Directorate, Richard Hall, The Real John Kerr: His Brilliant Career, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1978, pp. 36-47; for the members of the Committee of National Morale, see Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945, p. 398; for the involvement of Deamer in arranging the meeting, Lockwood interview with author, Sydney, 7 November 1985. 555 Cottle, Brisbane Line, p. 137; Lockwood interview with author, Sydney, 7 November 1985. 556 Richard Walsh, Publisher, Angus and Roberston, letter to author, 26 January 1985. 557 Rupert Lockwood, Guerrilla Paths to Freedom, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1942, p. vii. Around the same time, Lockwood published a pamphlet titled Guerilla (sic), via the N.S.W. Aid Russia Committee, Sydney. 204 whatever the book’s title suggested to ABC listeners. 558 Had his interviewer pressed him about its contents, Lockwood would arguably have had some explaining to do. Guerrilla Paths was a general introduction, aimed at a popular audience that either did not know anything about guerrilla warfare, or could not envisage the possibilities of ordinary civilians successfully engaging in resistance against well-armed professional armies. As Lockwood explained to his readers, guerrilla warfare was “scrappily dealt with in the newspapers”, and rated little attention in “military textbooks”. 559 In what amounted to a series of sketches, Guerrilla Paths dealt with the history, nature and basics of guerrilla warfare. Lockwood gave immediacy and authority to his account explaining at the outset he had personally glimpsed guerrilla warfare in action in his role as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. 560 Noting in his Introduction that guerrilla warfare was currently being waged “in the mountains and river valleys of China, from Russia’s Arctic Circle to the warm shores of the Black Sea, in the Spanish Asturias, and in the Balkans” 561 , Lockwood devoted his first chapter to dispelling any idea guerrilla warfare was a foreign, alien form of struggle by titling his first chapter “British Guerrilla Tradition”. 562 In this he described a “British” guerrilla tradition that stretched from the struggles of Boadecia against the “might of Rome” to Colonel T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) “and his spectacular actions against the Turks and Germans” during World War 1. He included in this tradition the mobilisation of civilians and civilian vessels during the evacuation of the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, which he 558 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, pp.18-19. 559 Lockwood, Guerrilla Paths, p. vii 560 Ibid., p. ix 561 Ibid., p. vii 562 Ibid., pp. I-15. 205 described as a fine illustration of “civilian action for the defence of hearth and home”. 563 Broadening his brushstrokes, Lockwood embraced the peasant rebellions against serfdom through to those who variously campaigned for social justice and trade unionism in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they constituted a tradition of “guerrilla potentialities” in the British people. Some of the activists in these later campaigns, he noted, all part of various “guerrilla bands of reformers” (and Lockwood specifically mentioned here Chartists, Owenites, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs), became convicts, sent to the Australian colonies for their political crimes. This potted connected history provided Lockwood with a segue, and he moved attention to colonial Australia; included in this tradition were those rebel miners who took up arms against the colonial state of Victoria at Eureka Stockade in 1854. This bloody uprising, Lockwood explained, was “a guerrilla skirmish in democracy’s battle”. 564 The Eureka spirit was also a theme of related supportive material published in Progress, one of the newspapers Lockwood was connected with. 565 This sort of radical conception of history had roots on the radical Australian left. Outside of universities, expatriate Australian writer Jack Lindsay in Britain, for example, was directing his literary energies to establishing the sort of interconnectedness Lockwood sketched; during the early 1930s and onwards, communist intellectual James Rawling published articles and book instalments on colonial popular resistance in colonial Australia, and in 1934 tried unsuccessfully to interest the CPA in the significance of Eureka in Australian history. That same year, with limited success, Lloyd Ross tried to interest the labour movement generally, in commemorating the “centenary of the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs”. In 1936, the CPA finally did accept that the Eureka rebellion was an important moment in Australian 563 Ibid., p. 9. 564 Ibid., pp. 8-9. 565 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 125-126. 206 radical history. 566 In 1940, Lockwood’s civil libertarian colleague Brian Fitzpatrick published his Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, with its significant account of the Eureka rebellion and its relationship with the eventual liberalisation of colonial political institutions.567 Lockwood ended his first chapter with an account of the guerrilla campaigns of the Kelly bushranging gang during late-nineteenth century colonial Australia, describing them in a way reminiscent of the ‘social bandits’ of E. J. Hobsbawm’s 1969 study Bandits, 568 noting their actions against “the rich and the banks”, and the ways they operated in successfully combating superior police and military forces until the final and fatal showdown in 1880. In his account of the Kelly Gang, Lockwood emphasised its mobility and adaptiveness, its ability to understand and use the local geography and terrain to advantage. Crucial too was the importance of having up-to-date information and intelligence about the enemy, and of not alienating the local population. Lockwood noted that vast tracts of “trackless bush and mountains” still existed in Australia, and were well suited to contemporary guerrilla struggle. 569 The second chapter tackled the perception of guerrilla warfare as some sort of wild inconsequentiality, and militarily useless. It was titled “Guerrillas are Wild Beasts”, reference to the Northern American Civil War General Sheridan who disparagingly described Southern guerrillas as beasts and not soldiers, their actions and presences “unknown to the usages of war”. 570 Lockwood argued to the contrary; while some guerrillas could be described as bandits, 566 Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 315-317. 567 On Lindsay, Rawling, and Ross, see Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 316-317; Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Macmillan Australia edition, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 84-87. 568 E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969. Hobsbawm briefly mentioned Ned Kelly, pp. 112-113. 569 Lockwood, Guerrilla Paths, pp. 13-15. 570 Ibid., pp. 16-17. 207 in the main guerrillas are to be found fighting for the progressive causes in history--for the liberation of the their nation from a foreign oppressor, for an ideal of social improvement.571 His linkage here of struggling for freedom from foreign oppression with the struggle for “an ideal of social improvement” is a theme he returned to at the end of his book, asserting the best sort of Australian guerrillas would be those who believe(ed) more in the future than in the material present (and) will fight even more bravely for the better, safer Australia that we know lies ahead. 572 Arguably Lockwood envisaged guerrilla struggle in Australia as not only one for the liberation of the people from an invading force, but also as having an ideological/political dimension, one that envisaged a better, future, Australian society. The rest of the book was largely devoted to accounts of, and lessons to be learned from, current guerrilla campaigning in Yugoslavia, China and the Soviet Union. The fourth chapter, “Chinese Partisans”, drew significantly on the sympathetic writings of American journalist Edgar Snow about Mao Tse-tung and Chinese guerrilla warfare. 573 Lockwood included large quotes from Snow, and gave prominence to Mao’s summarisation of basic guerrilla tactics: 1. When the enemy advances, retreat! 571 Ibid., p. 16. 572 Ibid., p. 83. 573 Edgar Snow (1905-1972), American journalist credited with being the first Western journalist to interview Mao Tse-tung: his sympathetic account of the birth of the Chinese Communist movement, Red Star Over China, Gollancz, London 1937, a source drawn upon significantly by Lockwood in Guerrilla Paths, remains an important source/eye-witness account. Lockwood also drew on Snow’s later book, Scorched Earth, Gollancz, London, 1941. 208 2. When the enemy halts and camps, trouble them! 3. When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, attack! 4. When the enemy retreats, pursue!574 Lockwood’s last two chapters brought the guerrilla struggle back to Australia. So far as who could be a guerrilla leader, that could be anyone, he explained: The man who delivers the milk or sells groceries in the corner store, the bank manager or the farmer’s daughter, the ironworker or the artist, may possess genius as a guerrilla leader that will only appear in the heat and stress of combat. 575 In the Soviet Union, for example, even “a twelve-year-old boy has made himself famous…as a guerrilla leader”, Lockwood claimed. 576 Indeed, no “Australian should shrink from guerrilla resistance on the grounds he has no experience of warfare and is unfitted for military campaigning”; guerrilla warfare is very much about learning on the job, through practice. 577 This was a point later made, for example, by Cuban guerrilla expert Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967), and most strongly expressed in his Bolivian Diary. 578 As for Australia, Lockwood argued the continent offered guerrillas great possibilities and opportunities. Its “geography and physical features” should be regarded as weapons and part of the guerrilla arsenal. 579 Bushcraft, the 574 Lockwood, Guerrilla Paths, p. 35 575 Ibid., p. 67. 576 Ibid., p. 68. 577 Ibid., p. 71 578 Donald C. Hodges, “Philosophy in the Cuban Revolution”, in Howard L. Parsons and John Somerville, editors, Marxism, Revolution, and Peace, B. R. Grüner, Amsterdam, 1977, p. 20. It is also a key point argued by Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?:Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 19-25. 579 Lockwood, Guerrilla Paths, p. 75. 209 art of living off the land, finding water in inhospitable environments, learning survival techniques with knowledge of edible native plants, hunting/trapping and foraging skills, should be part of guerrilla awareness. 580 Fire-break and fire-fighting skills should be mastered, as the use of bush fire against invading forces would be “far more terrifying than a hail of shells or bullets”. 581 And he ended the book on an upbeat note: Those secret, untrodden guerrilla paths through the Australian bush and mountains, over suburban fences and city roof-tops, may be Australia’s Paths to Freedom. 582 Throughout the book, Lockwood explained the basic tactics and nature of guerrilla struggle, variously contextualised in the examples and sites of guerrilla resistance discussed. As well as MaoTse-tung’s summarisation of tactics, the cover-to-cover reader learned that guerrillas needed to be mobile, resourceful and adaptive; that a guerrilla band could be big or small in number--size did not matter; that the best guerrillas were those passionate about their cause, with a vision of the future; that the gathering of intelligence about the enemy was essential; that the geography and terrain of the guerrilla’s operational area/region had to be understood and harnessed to the struggle; that it was essential to keep onside with local populations; that fighting the enemy did not necessarily require sophisticated military technology—‘weapons’ could be improvised, as simple as a domestic knife, simple acts of sabotage, or the targeted use of arson. Collectively these were the basics authoritative and classical writers on guerrilla warfare have stressed, for example by Mao Zedong in Chapter 1 (“What is Guerrilla Warfare?”) of his On Guerrilla Warfare, and Che Guevara in Chapter 1 (“General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare”) of Guerrilla Warfare. 583 It was 580 Ibid., p. 80. 581 Ibid., p. 75. 582 Ibid., p. 83. 583 Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume IX, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/, accessed 15 210 Lockwood’s understanding that his book was recommended for reading in some Australian military circles as a primer on guerrilla warfare. 584 Guerrilla Paths to Freedom was, as McKernan commented, the work of an author who meant business. 585 The way Lockwood organised and constructed his book, in small easily read chapters of interesting information illustrating strategical lessons, suited adult education and discussion group activities. This may have reflected Lockwood’s experiences as a lecturer used by the Australian Army Education Service (AAES), a role he had until late in 1942. As Beverley Symons has demonstrated, the AAES was an important site of communist activity during the war and many communists found employment in it as lecturers and were involved in the production of its topical/currentaffairs/literary journal Salt. Lockwood’s services were terminated by October 1942 following the intervention of MI, concerned about his “communistic tendencies”. 586 LOCKWOOD AND THE RUSSIANS From their surveillance of Lockwood, it appeared to Australian security authorities that by June 1941 he was “at the beck and call of all radical organisations”. 587 That was the month Germany invaded the Soviet Union; thereafter during the war, Lockwood “specialised in work in (the) field of September 2012; Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, pp. 13-41. 584 Tim Bowden, “Security and I”, transcript of ABC radio interview with Rupert Lockwood, broadcast 13 July 1975, p. 17. 585 McKernan, All In!, p. 121. 586 For the AES, Beveley Symons, “All-out”, pp. 65-67; “All-out for the People’s War: Communist Soldiers in the Australian Army in the Second World War”, Australian Historical Studies, Volume 26, Issue 105, 1995, pp. 604-605, 610-611; for Lockwood and the AES, NAA: A6119, 40, folios 70-73. 587 NAA: A6119, 40, folio 38. 211 Australian friendship with the Soviet Union”. 588 In August the CIB clipped an article from Progress (8 August 1941) reporting Lockwood had been appointed national chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU). Since the 1930s, the FOSU had been “an important party (CPA) auxiliary”, its leadership “entrusted to leading comrades”. It remained a legitimate organisation during the period the party was proscribed. 589 The Progress clipping reported that under Lockwood’s chairmanship, the FOSU would seek to broaden its activities “and enlist the aid of all progressive elements in the community, to assist the cause of closer cultural, diplomatic, and trade relations with the Soviet Union. Many new branches are being set up, and Aid to Soviet meetings in suburbs are packed out”. 590 The FOSU was part of the organisation of a very large Sydney Town Hall public meeting on 21 August 1941, presided over by the Lord Mayor, attended by a crowd measured in thousands inside and outside the venue in support of the Soviet Union. This meeting led to the creation of a permanent Medical Aid and Comforts Fund Committee to raise funds for the purchase of medical equipment and supplies for the Soviet Union. Lockwood had a leadership role in this organisation, and in the related NSW Aid Russia Committee. This friendship work brought Lockwood in association with an array of prominent Australians from diverse backgrounds, similarly engaged: people like Sir Isaac Isaacs, author Frank Dalby Davidson, academic Professor Ian Clunies Ross (Sydney University), Justice Sir Percival Halse-Rogers, (Lady) Jessie Street, clergymen Canon Arthur Garnsey, G. Stuart Watts, Bishop Ernest Burgmann of Goulburn, the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr. Howard Mowll, NSW Labor Premier William McKell, politicians E. J. Ward and Arthur Griffiths, Graziers’ Association president E. L. Killen, popular Sydney radio personality John Dease, along with “trade union 588 Tim Bowden, “Petrov Twenty Years On - Rupert Lockwood’s Personal View”, transcript of ABC radio interview with Rupert Lockwood, broadcast 26 May 1974, p. 19. 589 Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 366-368, 405. 590 NAA: A6119, 40, folio 62. 212 leaders of different persuasions, noted sportsmen and sportswomen, and leaders of immigrant communities”. 591 Diplomatic relations between Australia and the USSR were established in October 1942; earlier, in September, an RAAF Squadron was deployed near Murmansk on convoy protection duties. Australia was one of the last countries to extend diplomatic recognition to the USSR, the Curtin government’s recognition following initial steps taken by the previous conservative government. 592 As a journalist and as an office holder in Soviet-friendly organisations, Lockwood was, during the war, the CPA person most in contact with incoming diplomatic and other Russian personnel, variously meeting, greeting and fraternizing with them. 593 He developed personal relationships with TASS (Telegranfnoie Agentstvo Sovietskavo Soiuza -- Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union) representatives in particular, beginning with Vladimir Mikeyev, who, like his successors, often came to Lockwood for advice “on personal and journalistic matters”. Lockwood arranged introductions, contacts, and helped familiarise them with their host society and culture. He also 591 For the ways in which the various Russia-friendship/support organisations related to each and operated, see Robert Bozinovski, “The Communist Party of Australia and Proletarian Internationalism, 1928-1945”, PhD Thesis, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development, Victoria University, April 2008, pp. 232-233, http://vuir.vu.edu.au/1961/1/bozinovski.pdf, accessed 21 October 2012; for the Sydney Town Hall meeting, Heather Radi, editor, Jessie Street. Documents and Essays, Women’s Redress Press Inc., Broadway, NSW, 1990, pp. 226-227; for the array of people involved, see Radi, Ibid., and Peter Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, 1993, p. 225, from which the quote at the end of this paragraph is taken. 592 For background to diplomatic recognition, see 96 War Cabinet Submission by Dr H.V. Evatt, Minister for External Affairs, Agendum 36711941, 4 November 1941, http://www.info.dfat.gov.au/info/historical/HistDocs.nsf/vVolume/A98C274382721BA1C A256B7E0013888D, accessed 10 October 2012. For an account of the operations of the RAAF Squadron in Russia, see Geoffrey W. Raebel, The RAAF in Russia: 455 RAAF Squadron-1942, Australian Military History Publications, Loftus, NSW, 1997. 593 Bowden, “Petrov Twenty Years On”, p. 19. 213 developed a close relationship with the first press attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. 594 Lockwood regarded his relationships with these Russians as friendly, and essentially journalistic. 595 Mikeyev, for example, was a war correspondent accredited by both the US and Australian militaries, traveled widely throughout Australia, and fraternized with numerous Australian journalists and literary identities. 596 Lockwood conducted his relationships with the Russians in an open manner, as is attested to by Australian surveillance records which document his meetings, his comings, and goings. As we will see in the next Chapter, however, the openness of the relationship took on a clandestine nature during the Cold War, instigated according to Lockwood by the Russians. 597 The dual and schizophrenic roles of TASS as a journalistic news agency and as an espionage/intelligence organization during WW2 and the Cold War, have been known to scholarship at least since 1962 through the work of international journalism scholar Theodore E. Kruglak, who also gave an account, in his broad study of TASS, of the Australian sector of its operation. 598 Since the release of the Venona documents during 1995-1996 (see Chapter 1), and Australian scholarship by McKnight, and by Ball/Horner, the establishment of Soviet intelligence apparatuses in Australia since 1943 has been well documented. So too the use by Soviet intelligence of TASS news agency personnel as key intelligence scouts and cadre workers. Mikeyev, the first TASS representative Lockwood met, was, according to Ball/Horner, a forward scout for Soviet intelligence who 594 Ibid., p. 20. 595 Ibid. 596 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 127. 597 Bowden, “Petrov Twenty Years On”, pp. 20-21. 598 Theodore E. Kruglak, The Two Faces of TASS, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1962. See pp. 187-196 for Kruglak’s account of TASS involvement in Australia, 1943-1954; Kruglak drew primarily on material available as the result of the 1954-1955 Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia. 214 prepared the ground for future Soviet intelligence activity in Australia.599 The role of Walter (Wally) Clayton, a Lockwood associate, the cadre responsible for the building of the underground CPA organization, later the cadre responsible for security within the CPA, long suspected by Australian security authorities as a key Australian working with Soviet intelligence, has been confirmed by scholarship, and by Clayton himself towards the end of his life. Since Lockwood had, by his own admission, close associations with TASS personnel in particular, who are now also known to have been Soviet intelligence operatives, and was an associate of Clayton, his knowledge of the operation of Soviet intelligence in Australia, and/or his complicity with this, has to be addressed. Clearly, Lockwood either wittingly or unwittingly assisted the interests of Soviet intelligence. This matter has long intrigued Australian security authorities, legal inquisitors, and historians. The ongoing fascination with these issues is exemplified by the action of researcher Desmond Ball in 1995. Ball interviewed a very ill Lockwood who “knew he was not going to live much longer”, in relation to these. 600 If Lockwood was the sort of journalist I have depicted, variously astute, intelligent, witness to the cut-and-thrust of national politics, worldly, widely travelled, significantly experienced, and having seen first-hand the ruthlessness of real politics internationally, then he must have had at least some inkling that the Russians he was mixing with from 1943 onwards may have also have been espionage/intelligence operatives. During the war, he was well aware some of his Australian colleagues were variously engaging in intelligence tasks for Australian authorities. It is almost implausible for Lockwood not to have considered that if this was the case in Australia, why 599 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 126-127. 600 Desmond Ball, “I believe Lockwood lied to Petrov commission to save his family’s honour”, The Australian, 23 April 2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationalaffairs/opinion/i-believe-lockwood-lied-to-petrov-commission-to-save-his-familyshonour/story-e6frgd0x-1226043239226, accessed 2 October 2012. 215 was this not also the case with Soviet journalists and their security organizations? 601 Having said that, during the period Lockwood was closely associating with Soviet personnel, from 1943 through to the early 1950s, in particular with TASS journalists, the Soviet Union had full diplomatic and trade relations with Australia, and during the war was one of its major Allied powers. In some respects Lockwood saw himself and the Soviets as having much in common. As a CIB officer recorded at one of Lockwood’s speeches when the party was illegal, he declared, “I make no apologies for the fact that I advocate Socialism that has been established in the Soviet Union”. 602 While his relationships with the Soviets may have been unwise in some respects, they were conducted openly and were never illegal. This matter was crucial in the Petrov Royal Commission, the legal point being that for an indictable offence to have occurred under Australian law at the time, an action had to be done on behalf of a “public enemy”. At no stage was the Soviet Union ever in that category, despite the severing of diplomatic relations between 1954 and 1959. Consistently throughout the rest of his life, Lockwood discussed the relationships he had with his TASS ‘colleagues’ in terms of journalism; he was, he explained/rationalised, a prominent ‘host’ journalist associating with fraternal foreign journalists. 603 In 1993 an extraordinary interview took place between a former leader of the CPA, Laurie Aarons, and the reclusive Clayton. The interview’s content, and the interview itself, were not made public until 2010, after the deaths of both Aarons and Clayton. The interview was conducted in Clayton’s home near Port Stephens (NSW), on a trusting basis, for historical research purposes. All of the interview was tape-recorded, but only part with 601 Bowden, “Security and I”, p. 14. 602 NAA: A6119, 40, folio 11. 603 For the intricacies involved in a complex point of Australian law regarding espionage, see the Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage (RRCE), Commonwealth of Australia, Sydney, 1955, pp. 286-293. 216 Clayton’s permission. Aarons apparently broke trust and let the tape secretly run; Clayton thought it was turned off and he was speaking ‘off the record’. Aarons asked a leading question regarding Lockwood, seeking to establish the closeness of the journalist to the Soviet espionage apparatus in Australia. In response, Clayton was dismissive and contemptuous of Lockwood, distancing himself from Lockwood and apparently mocking the idea of his involvement, while cheerfully confirming his own involvements with Soviet intelligence. 604 MARRIAGE As previously noted, the CIB took a personal interest in Lockwood’s relationships with women during the war. In July 1942, Sydney CIB reported to colleagues in Melbourne that Lockwood’s reputed “weaknesses are wine and women”. Earlier, Sydney CIB had apparently intervened in a relationship, warning one of Lockwood’s female companions about the dangerous nature of his politics and their possible impact upon her employment at the Garden Island naval facility. Earlier still, in January 1941, a Sydney CIB report noted Lockwood was keeping company with a Betty Wilson, “from the North Shore line” who “detests the rich”. 605 By the end of the War, Betty and Rupert were married, and they had a daughter, joined by twin girls in 1948. While it is not within the ambit of this study to examine the nature of this marriage, some attention here is warranted, for as will be seen later, during the Cold War, Betty and the three 604 The circumstances of the interview and its contents are detailed in M. Aarons, Family File, pp. 154-155, 158-167. Journalist, historian, broadcaster Mark Aarons found the taperecording by accident in 2009 in the process of attending to his deceased father’s estate. He oversaw its professional digital restoration. For the transcript of this interview, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/doc/Laurie_Wally_interview.pdf>, accessed 15 October 2010. A subsequent check on 14 October 2012, indicated the interview had since been taken down from the site. A copy of the transcript is in the possession of the author. 605 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 6-7 (reference to Betty Wilson), folio 35 (reference to Garden Island), folios 60-61 (reference to Lockwood’s weaknesses). 217 Lockwood children became the object of invasive security attention and harassment as the result of the political activities of the husband/father. Aged three, Betty migrated to Australia from England with her family in 1919. Her mother was a suffragette activist, and Betty was raised in a family political culture reflecting this, and Fabianism. She left school at the age of fifteen and worked in the circulating libraries maintained by the booksellers Dymocks, and Swain’s. She joined the CPA in 1935, and became involved in New Theatre activities. She was also active as a writer and editor, and close to Jessie Street, in the Russian Medical Aid and Comforts Fund, and was active in the forceful equal pay advocate organization, United Associations of Women. She met Lockwood through the SLP, in which both were members. According to Betty, their marriage “was great for the first few years”, but personal and political tensions developed, exacerbated during the Cold War by Lockwood’s many, often long, absences from the family due to party commitments. Eventually, during the early 1970s, the couple separated. Betty assumed the surname Searle, was an early activist and propagandist in the women’s liberation movement, successfully undertook tertiary studies (Bachelor of Arts, followed by a Master of Letters in 1983), and published a well-received historical work, Silk & Calico: Class, Gender & the Vote. Publication of this led to her tutoring at Sydney University in Women’s Studies. Later she was an active campaigner for the improvement of the welfare and status of older women. She died in Canberra in 2003, suddenly, at the age of 87. Betty had remained a member of the CPA until it wound up its affairs and dissolved in 1991. 606 606 For a biography of Betty Searle, see Honouring Our Local Women: Recipients of the ACT International Women’s Day Awards 2002-2004, ACT Office for Women, Canberra, 2004, p. 6; the Jesse Street National Women’s Library farewelled her, following her death, in its Newsletter with “A Farewell To Betty Searle (1916-2003)”, Volume 14, Number 3, August 2003, p. 9; for Betty Searle’s own account of her life, which is particularly moving when discussing the Petrov Royal Commission period of 1954-55, see the 1995 interview 218 ON THE VERGE OF THE FUTURE At the end of the war, Lockwood was on the verge of the future he had written about in his ABC Weekly articles at the outset of war. It was a dynamic and contested future, in which an insurgent Asia would be prominent as colonised peoples variously rejected colonialism and struggled to create their national futures. As a journalist in Asia during the 1930s he had seen the stirrings of these struggles; on the home-front, as a left journalist during the war, he had been privy to meetings with exiled Indonesian nationalists in Australia preparing to take their struggles back home (see Chapter 9). Generally, the world would be one of geopolitical contestation, with oil a key strategic element. His understanding of WW2 had deepened his attachment to the Soviet Union, its Army suffering the most losses amongst Allied forces at the hands of Germany; its infrastructures and industries almost destroyed in areas invaded by Germany; and some 25 million of its people dead as the result of war. In Lockwood’s understanding, the Soviet Union had contributed significantly to the Allied victory, played a critical role in the defeat of fascism, and warranted an honoured role in the post-war settlement process. Lockwood saw himself having an active role in this future. He was a key member of a political party that had contributed significantly to the war effort, and therefore warranted a role in the shaping of post-war Australia. Having enthusiastically supported the wartime Curtin government during the war, the CPA now gave the Chifley government conciliatory, and qualified support, a position that would last until 1947. However, freed from wartime policy constraints, this support would involve more aggressive approaches in the political and industrial arenas than had been the hallmark of wartime policy. Postwar, the party was committed to the building and creation of a Socialist Australia, the struggle against monopoly capitalism, conducted with her by Ann Turner for the National Library of Australia, NLA Tape/Transcript Number 3359; Betty Searle, Silk & Calico: Class, Gender & the Vote, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1988. 219 nationalisation of key industries, strict control of prices with regard to raw materials, and essential services and utilities, all to be achieved through the building of a strong, independent communist party and “a united labor movement and a genuine national unity of workers, soldiers, middle class and the toiling farmers”. 607 This was not fanciful politics. Party membership had swelled during the war, and had drawn into its ranks writers, artists, intellectuals, people from the working and middle classes. Indeed, after the party was legalised at the end of 1942, about half the membership surge that followed comprised middle class members. 608 It had, at the end of 1945, as Davidson itemised, “the support of 25 to 40 percent of Australian unionists; it had 23,000 party members; it had one member of parliament in Queensland and elsewhere its electoral support sometimes reached 40 percent of the votes cast; and it had municipal councils under its control”. 609 Moreover, as Gollan pointed out, while this membership size was small in comparison to the size of the total population, what has to be understood is that communist party members “were much more active in political matters than is usual for members of political parties”, and that “a high proportion of members occupied key positions, or were influential in organisations, in particular trade unions”. 610 607 My discussion in this, and the previous, paragraph has drawn from Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, pp. 98-100; Phillip Deery, “Communism, Security and the Cold War”, Journal of Australian Studies, No. 54-55, 1997, p. 163; Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, pp. 163-169; Douglas Jordan, “Conflict in the Unions: The Communist Party of Australia, Politics and the Trade Union Movement, 1945-1960”, PhD Thesis, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development, Victoria University, 2011, pp. 24-27, http://vuir.vu.edu.au/16065/1/Douglas_Jordan_PhD.pdf, accessed 3 November 2012; Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream, Chapter 2, p. 23, http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalininsm/into-mainstream/ch02.htm, accessed 17 January 2011. 608 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 83 609 Ibid., p. 93. 610 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 130. 220 As 1946 dawned, two articles by respected Australian war correspondent Denis Warner were published in the Melbourne Herald, on 1 January and 22 February respectively. Titled “Jap Invasion Plan for Australia”, and “Sato, Jap ‘Ruler’ Of Australia, Faces Arrest”, they were based on a lengthy interview conducted by Warner in Osaka, late in December 1945, with Kennosuke (Ken) Sato. In 1935, Sato had come to Australia for an eightmonth stay as part of a Japanese goodwill mission. An English speaking journalist/editor, Sato had mixed in Australia with business and political elites. He told Warner of his rank as an honorary Lieutenant-General in the Japanese Army, his close links with Japanese Naval authorities, and his role, if Japan had invaded Australia, as the chief administrator, ruling Australia with the willing assistance of “a good many Australians’. Asked for names, Sato provided those of “many leading Australians”; Warner did not use these in his articles, nor share them later when variously requested, including a request from MI. Sato was interviewed subsequently, ‘interrogated’ by American intelligence authorities with an Australian officer in attendance, and a report went to Prime Minister Chifley. But there the matter apparently ended. According to Cottle, the only historian who has closely examined the Sato claims, the evidence regarding these is inconclusive. But that is not the point here; what matters is that Lockwood accepted the content of the Warner/Sato articles. They confirmed part of the material relayed to him early during the war by Ken Cook, and further illustrated what he had come to regard as the treachery of Australian business and conservative political elites, those who had navigated and profited from maneuvering Australia in the waters of appeasement towards Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s. They would remain in his line of fire during the Cold War. 611 611 Denis Warner, “Jap Invasion Plan For Australia”, Herald, 1 January 1946, p. 1; “Sato, Jap ‘Ruler’ Of Australia, Faces Arrest”, Herald, 22 February 1946, p. 7. For the discussion and analysis of the Warner articles and the Sato claims by Drew Cottle, see Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp. 163-185; for an overview of the life and career of Warner, especially 221 A few months after the publication of Warner’s articles, Major R.F.B. Wake of the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), later briefly (1949 to mid-1950) Deputy Director of the Labor government’s newly created ASIO, wrote up the findings of his preliminary examination of Japanese consular documents seized by authorities at the outset of war with Japan in 1941. Despite the full documentary body being variously sanitised and parts destroyed before seizure, Wake was intrigued, and presented a preliminary four-page report in May 1946 to Attorney-General and Foreign Affairs Minister Dr. H. V. Evatt. Wake had a close relationship with Evatt; he believed in socialist principles. Some in the intelligence community referred to him as “Evatt’s stooge”. After acrimoniously leaving the infant ASIO during 1950, Wake remained close to Evatt and advised him on intelligence matters. According to Wake’s 1946 report, the material he examined indicated that pre-war, Japanese influence in Australia, including with people in sensitive strategic positions, had run deep, at times possibly compromisingly so. He recommended ongoing and extensive investigation, cross referenced with whatever documentation was turned up subsequently by US intelligence authorities in Japan. 612 with regard to his reputation and credibility, see Anthony McAdam, “Denis Warner, 19172012”, Quadrant, Volume LVI, Number 11, 2012, pp. 18-23. 612 The Wake report titled “Examination of Japanese Material” is discussed and its provenance documented by Cottle, Brisbane Line, pp. 204-205; a copy of the report is in the possession of the author. For discussion of Wake’s concerns about Japan’s pre-war activities in Australia, see Cottle, Ibid., pp. 203-205. Major Robert (Bob) Frederick Bird Wake (1900-1974), known to some colleagues as “Hereward”, is an intriguing character. He was a very experienced intelligence officer, sympathetic to the ALP, and close to Dr. H. V. Evatt. During his career he made powerful enemies in both the defence and intelligence communities. Between the wars he was resolutely anti-fascist, unlike many of his colleagues who were profoundly anti-communist. For a partisan but interesting and revealing biography of Wake, see Valdemar Robert Wake, No Ribbons or Medals: The Story of ‘Hereward’, an Australian Counter Espionage Officer, Jacobyte Books, Mitcham (S.A.), 2004. See also McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 20-24, 42. For the reference to Wake’s socialist principles, friendship with Evatt, and the ‘stooge’ quote, Val Wake, “The 222 However, this report was not in keeping with America’s strategic vision of the Asia and the Pacific regions, and a policy of rapprochement followed. According to Cottle: The report proved stillborn despite the prevailing deep hostility in Australia towards Japanese militarism. Evatt’s desire to track down Japanese war criminals and expose the appeasers was abandoned when the Americans demanded rapprochement with a defeated Japan to stabilise its influence throughout the Pacific in the emerging Cold War.613 Wake’s report was in line with the concerns of Cook and his leaks to Lockwood, and to the Warner/Sato story. They were concerns that Lockwood would not abandon, and would later resurface in Document J. CONCLUSION This chapter detailed the homefront career and activities of Lockwood during WW2. It dealt with his journalism, his communism, and with their interactions. The research detailed and added new dimensions, understandings and nuances to WW2 labour history, especially with regard to the covert activities of Lockwood, and in the detailing and examining of his journalism, and in his roles as orator and pamphleteer. The interest of Australian security services in Lockwood, at times verging on the personal, was detailed, an interest that increased post-war (see Chapter 7). Important here was the chapter’s demonstration that Lockwood had significant covert skills, and political agency, contesting historiography which depicts Lockwood as a naïve, idealistic, political innocent. Beyond this, the chapter broke ground in detailing and explaining the origins and nature of the controversial material that formed part of Document J during the Cold War. The alleged roots of this, and its connection with Australian Naval Intelligence, were explained. Important too was the detailing of Lockwood’s relationships with Soviet personnel stationed in Australia from 1943 Intelligence Community at War”, AQ: Australian Quarterly, Volume 76, Number 3, MayJune 2004, pp. 31, 33. 613 Cottle, Brisbane Line, p. 205. 223 onwards, as these were the source of controversy during the Cold War, this latter the subject of the next two chapters. 224 CHAPTER SIX COLD WAR I: JOURNALISM AND “SPARE TIME” By the end of World War II, Lockwood had ended his association with the capitalist press. By choice, he put his journalistic, newspaper skills and experience to the use of the Australian labour movement, initially in the employ of the CPA and its newspaper Tribune, subsequently with the WWF. As was seen in the previous chapter, the CPA was in a robust and confident shape when the war ended and the post-war period began. Its newspaper reflected this confidence, and expansion was planned. For the Australian trade union movement, it was a time when trade union density was at its height, peaking in 1948 at 64.9 per cent, maintaining a high level to 1960 of 58 per cent, before dramatically declining thereafter, reflecting a complexity of factors including historical forces, structural changes in the economy and workforce, over which the union movement had little control. 614 Associated with the high trade union density, the Australian labour movement press was a significant media presence, as was argued in Chapter One. Lockwood’s longest stint as a journalist/editor took place between 1952 and 1985, when he was employed to produce the Maritime Worker for the WWF. This task did not require full-time employment, which meant Lockwood had access to significant spare time. This he utilised in original, independent, scholarly research and writing, the significance of which is yet to be adequately recognised/acknowledged. In Chapter 6, the Cold War journalism of Lockwood will be examined, as will the independent research and writing he did during the 1950s and 1960s. The extent to which this latter constitutes original and important scholarship will be explored. JOURNALISM. 614 Bradley Bowden, “The Organising Model in Australia: A Reassessment”, pp. 3-4, http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/30539/59685_1.pdf?sequence =1, accessed 26 January 2013. 225 As seen in the previous Chapter, following the legalisation of the CPA at the end of 1942, Lockwood became the Assistant Editor of Tribune. The energy and freedoms associated with legality are exemplified in the format of the publication, changing from a four-page quarto sized publication to fourpage broadsheet newspaper. The 3 June 1943 issue reflected the burgeoning growth of party membership, then at some 20,000 members, peaking in 1944 at 23,000 members. Tribune was no longer styled as the “organ” of the CPA, but as “The People’s Paper”, priced at threepence a copy instead of the previous “What you can afford” donation, and eight pages in size. Lockwood understood sales of Tribune sales reached 42,000 post-war in the period to the end of the decade. The figure is deceptive, because readers were encouraged to pass their copies on to others, and the actual readership could be well in excess of this. 615 The paper’s masthead stated the Editor was L(lewellyn) Harry Gould; there was no mention of Lockwood. But he was the experienced newspaperman, and carried the paper. Indeed, so far as I am aware, there was no mention of Lockwood and his responsibility in print until 1948. Gould was a Jewish Irishman, Dublin born, who had lived in the U.S. for a time, and since the early 1930s had been a full-time CPA worker with “special responsibility for theoretical work”. He was the party’s major ideologue during the 1930s and 1940s, author of the doctrinaire party text and authority, Glossary of Marxist Terms (1943). Gould took his Marxism seriously, regarded intellectuals with suspicion, and held the view that the party was strengthened by the removal of “incorrigible” members. From Lockwood’s perspective Gould was “a sort of political commissar for the Tribune”. The relationship between the CPA and the paper was not harmonious, and in the early years of legality and into the early 1950s at least, there were tensions and conflicts concerning its direction, style, content. Lockwood would find 615 CPA membership figures, Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 130; Tribune sales figure, Rod Wise, “Reflections on a communist life”, Financial Review, 2 July 1982, p. 32. 226 himself “pushed off” as Assistant Editor during 1950, without explanation. 616 During March 1945, Tribune became a bi-weekly, published Tuesday and Thursday; later Wednesday and Saturday. This expansion was due to the greater availability of newsprint as the war drew to an end, and subsequently, and as the confidence of the party grew. 617 Ambitious plans for the paper to become a daily were announced, which would make Tribune “the first Communist daily in the Southern Hemisphere”. While some capital was raised for the venture, this never eventuated. During Lockwood’s Assistant Editorship, Tribune presented a left view of national and international industrial matters and politics, and was not primarily an organising/propaganda tool of the CPA leadership. Following the resolution of matters relating to the amalgamation of the SLP and the CPA in 1944, former Progress staff became part of the Tribune talent pool, bringing to its pages the significant skills/work of Len Fox (1905-2004), George Farwell (1911-1976), writers who both later gained inclusion in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, and Oxford graduate W. A. Wood (1911-1976), former Rhodes Scholar, his writing abilities rated highly by Lockwood, and still a largely overlooked left literary figure. 618 616 For mention of Lockwood as Assistant Editor, Tribune, 9 October 1948, p. 1; on L. Harry Gould, see Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 304, 311, 349, 350; L. H. Gould, Glossary of Marxist Terms, Worker Print, Sydney, 1943; for the “political commissar” reference, De Berg, p. 17,473; for a glimpse of the tensions associated with Tribune, see Fox, Broad Left, pp. 95-96; for the “pushed off” reference, De Berg, p. 17,474. 617 O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream, argued that contrary to traditional accounts of CPA history where the party is depicted as declining in strength and influence between 1945 and 1956, the actuality was more complex, and the party held “its position both in numbers and in influence among rank and file workers”, its central strength. O’Lincoln depicted a confident and strong post-war CPA to 1949. See his Chapter 3, pp. 9-10, http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/into-mainstrwam/ch03.htm, accessed 17 January 2011. 618 William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 249 (Farwell); pp. 278-279 227 Tribune under Lockwood introduced a Sports backpage, mainly covering horse racing, football, and boxing. Columns were introduced, including a humorous one, and a regular half-page of comment by Lockwood, later shared with W. A. Wood, along the lines of the section on international affairs Lockwood had contributed to the ABC Weekly. A regular section devoted to scientific issues also became part of the content, discussants including distinguished British scientist and communist J. D. Bernal. Throughout the rest of the forties, the long running campaign of Australian trade union support for the fledgling Indonesian Republic received significant attention, Lockwood producing much of this copy anonymously, the experience reflected decades later in his historical writing, dealt with in Chapter 9. The ACTU campaign for legislation of the 40-hour week for all Australian workers (which came into operation in January 1948), was championed, as was the Chifley government’s ill-fated Bank Nationalisation. Aboriginal rights were consistently discussed, reported on, and supported. Post-war politics and diplomacy tended to be interpreted in terms of imperialism, with the strategic and economic motivations discussed and examined. Lockwood’s signed articles on these latter were contextualised in significant historical backgrounds. Awareness of the international power of American monopolies was also a matter of import. Cartoons were a key part of Lockwood’s editorial recipe, with Left artists George Finey and Herbert McClintock providing artwork. 619 As Raymond Williams noted regarding British press history since the late 18th century, the “pauper press”, that is the press of political and social opinion which challenged established hegemonies, as distinct from the (Fox); the papers of W(illiam) A(rnold) Whitfield (Bill) Wood, are in the Butlin Archives Centre (Canberra) at AU NBAC Z557. 619 On Finey and McClintock, see Len Fox, Australians on the Left, Len Fox, Potts Point, 1996, pp. 130-131, and pp. 133-135 respectively; see also Peter Spearritt, “Finey, George Edmond (1895-1987)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/finey-george-edmond12490/text22469, accessed 28 January 2013. 228 mainstream highly capitalised press, had ongoing historical problems: How to survive with little in the way of capitalisation and assets, conducted by voluntary and/or illpaid labour, serving a cause and not commercial enterprise, against competition from highly capitalised publications, and often in the face of repressive measures initiated by the State. 620 So too in Australia. In 1945, Lockwood weighed up the assets of Tribune, and compared the position with that of the capitalist media. He noted Tribune only had two trained journalists with senior experience in the mainstream press, the rest of those who produced the paper either volunteers or people who had developed their skills on the job in labour movement publications; the capitalist media had vast capital, and legions of qualified staff. Tribune was hard pressed presenting a left view of the world with such a paucity of resources. But Lockwood saw the availability of human capital in the form of working “men and women on the job”, the eyes and ears in workplaces and on the land; everyone could become a Tribune correspondent. His idea was that working people would contribute news and story items to Tribune; these would be sub-edited, and published, and contributors would learn how to generate good copy by comparing the versions. The process as envisaged was obviously going to be a slow, ongoing, learning process. 621 The idea of ‘worker-correspondents’ was by no means a new idea. It had been put into practice successfully by British communist leader Palme Dutt during the 1920s in the production of the then British Communist Party’s publication Workers Weekly. Having worked in Britain, and contributed to the radical press there, Lockwood was probably aware of this initiative. Dutt had “conspicuous success” in utilising non-journalists, “worker- correspondents” as they were called, in the production of the paper, 620 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Penguin Books, Harmonsdworth, 1965, pp. 209-210. 621 Tribune, 1 February 1945, p. 4. 229 publishing materials as close as possible to the original contributions. 622 However, following Lockwood’s call for contributions, the Tribune office received a spate of contributions, mainly poems and other literary and language experiments. Lockwood had to expand on his idea, telling potential contributors Tribune did not want poetry and literature, but workplace reporting, using “the active voice of concrete things”, and avoiding the abstract. Resorting to metaphor he said that “good writers change the water of abstraction into the wine of life”. 623 There were some successes, but Lockwood was not long enough in the job to see this sort of programme through. But he did not let it go. In 1960 he addressed a meeting of the Realist Writers meeting of people interested in writing for the working class press and for the many factory and job bulletins that existed. According to Lockwood, writing does not take a “good education”; the starting point is interest, followed by the conviction that what is written is of use both to the writer, and to others. He referred people to an old stand-by from his own early training, Sir Arthur QuillerCouch, On The Art of Writing: Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1916), and specifically Chapter 5 titled “Interlude: On Jargon”. Lockwood was not unique in recognizing the worth of Quiller-Couch. The oft anthologised essay by George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), which similarly railed against use of jargon and the abstract, owed a significant debt with regard to content and method to the Quiller-Couch ‘Jargon’ chapter, a debt that deserved, but did not receive, acknowledgement. 624 622 Kevin Morgan, “The Communist Party and the Daily Worker 1930-56”, in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (editors), Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism, Pluto Press, London, 1995, p. 144. 623 Rupert Lockwood, “They Didn’t Print This”, Tribune, 6 March 1945, p. 3. 624 For discussion of Orwell’s debt to Quiller-Couch, see W.F. Bolton, The Language of 1984, Basil Blackwell in association with André Deutsch, Oxford, 1984, pp. 191-193, 198199. Bolton argues that much in the Quiller-Couch chapter “recalls” Orwell’s ‘Politics’ essay, specifically the virtue of use of the active verb and the concrete noun; censure of 230 During 1948, Lockwood went to Europe for the CPA, leaving behind his family. His wife was soon to give birth to twin girls, and he would not see/hold the twins until they were over a year-old. Based in London, Lockwood represented the Party, there and in Europe; he reported on European affairs for Tribune, and addressed the World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949. Along with reporting, he contributed a regular column of serious and light political commentary and observation titled “Notes From a B29 Base”, reference to the American Cold War presence in the UK. Following a brief return to Australia, he again went to Europe, attending the Stockholm Peace Conference in 1950 where he was one of the original signatories to the Stockholm Appeal calling for the outlawing of the atomic bomb. He followed this with a speaking tour of New Zealand, and upon his return to Australia, found he was no longer Assistant Editor of Tribune; there was, according to Lockwood, no explanation, and in 1981 told interviewer De Berg that it was “part of a power struggle, but it was also because I was suspected of being small-l liberal”. 625 As was seen in Chapter One, Lockwood had a high profile within the party, a large personal following, and was held in high esteem by many rank and file party members; my own understanding, based on my long association with Lockwood, suggests personal factors like jealousy and envy were also in play as contributing factors in Lockwood’s editorial demise. Thereafter, Lockwood continued to contribute to Tribune, and found editorial work briefly with the Seamen’s Union of Australia (SUA) producing the monthly Seamen’s Journal, before securing the job of editing the monthly Maritime Worker for the WWF on a part-time permanent basis, which provided enough money to live on, supplemented by assistance from unnecessary foreign words, double negatives, circumlocutions; the use of “horrible examples”; the rendering of a classic passage into Jargon; the similarity of sources; the similarity of endings. 625 De Berg, 17,474. 231 the CPA with relation to rent, education costs associated with the children, and the like. 626 The first issue of the Maritime Worker had been published in April 1938; both the ‘organ’ and the printed word regarded as key union organising tools by the communist and newly elected General Secretary of the WWF, Jim Healy. Lockwood was assistant editor/editor of the publication from 1952 until retirement in 1985, his job to produce it under the supervision of the union’s leadership. This was a challenging brief, and as Lockwood came to understand, involved restraints and parameters “even more embracing than the restrictions that are placed on a journalist working for the capitalist press”. 627 During Lockwood’s incumbency the ‘organ’ evolved from an 8page letterpress fortnightly newspaper, to a 32-page offset monthly journal on cheap paper stock. Always carrying advertising, advertisers changed from local suppliers of household foodstuffs, wares, and temporary accommodations, to large companies--advertisers like shipping companies and cruise lines. The evolving format reflected technological changes in the printing industry, and the declining size of the waterfront workforce due to technological changes and related waterfront reforms, escalating from 1967 onwards. By 1984 the WWF had 6,500 members, drastically down from the 24000 members it had as the 1950s began. 628 The advertising too reflected industry changes—factors like the end of waterfront communities in the wake of technological changes; successful union reforms which to a great 626 Lockwood’s brief association with the SUA tends to be overlooked. He referred to it in conversations with the author, and it was also confirmed in a telephone interview with Della Elliott, 21 April 2006; Della was responsible for the production of the Seamen’s Journal following Lockwood’s brief editorial spell, officially becoming editor in 1955. She came to the SUA from the WWF, where she had been secretary to Jim Healy. Della edited the Seamen’s Journal until retirement in May 1988. On Della Elliott as a labour movement journalist, see Kirkby, “Women Journalists”, pp. 95-99. 627 De Berg, p. 17,475. 628 M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. 261; Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 60-61. For a detailed account of the changes and their effects in the waterfront industry from 1967 onwards, see M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 225-282. 232 extent regularized work and incomes; the attendant increased spending power of waterfront workers; and an Accord-era willingness on the parts of major advertisers to both cash in on the spending power of a targeted workforce, and not to be seen as anti-union. Lockwood’s Maritime Worker reflected two aspects of his past: his concept of the ‘worker correspondent’ and the local newspaper tradition in which he was raised. He recognised, and tried to reflect and draw upon, the specific community, and families, his publication served. As has been seen, by 1950 this stood at 24,000 members, rising eventually to around 27,000 before a dramatic decline during the 1960s, and at its height organised in 52 branches. The largest of these branches supported a range of sporting, cultural, and women’s organisations, along with family-based local communities. During the incumbency of Jim Healy, the Maritime Worker reflected the richness, diversity, and characters of this national network, with attention paid to membership social and cultural activities, their sporting activities and interests. This mix was enlivened with cartoons and humorous pieces Lockwood regarded as part of a popular newspaper. According to Lockwood, the ideal he aimed for was to have at least ten per cent of the publication written by the rank-and-file membership, and not for it to become a leadership preserve or a blatant political platform. Lockwood recognised what collective and organisation research has established: that organisation loyalty and collective behaviour, are very much dependent on the extent to which individuals regard themselves as members of an organisation, and that organization is seen to represent/reflect what its individual members perceive as their own self-concepts, their uniqueness. 629 629 See, for example, Steven L. Blader, “What Leads Organizational Members to Collectivize? Injustice and Identification as Precursors of Union Certification”, Organization Science, Volume 18, Number 1, January-February 2007, p. 111; Jane Dutton, Janet Dukerich, and Celia Harquail, “Organizational Images and Member Identification”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 39, Issue 2, June 1994, p.242. 233 When Lockwood took over the newspaper, worker- correspondent/contributors were available in the large, diverse WWF membership. There was a significant rank-and-file presence of creative people drawn by the periodic/casual nature of waterfront employment to support their creative endeavours, thus facilitating worker correspondents. So much so, Lockwood claimed he could have “just about fill(ed) the paper with contributions written by wharfies on the job”. 630 Healy appears to have allowed Lockwood considerable press freedom; there was a close and loyal relationship between them, and Lockwood’s role as journalist/editor was a factor contributing to Healy’s long and successful term in office. During the Petrov Affair when, as will be seen, there was a great deal of political and media hysteria directed towards Lockwood and his associates/associations, Lockwood offered to end his association with the WWF; Healy declined.631 Indeed, as Industrial Relations’ historian Tom Sheridan noted, during the Cold War on the Australian waterfront, the Federal leadership of the WWF comprised three key people, the collective influence/power of which contributed significantly to keeping right-wing influence and aspirations at bay while keeping alive a militant politics and culture within the union. Sheridan identified the three as the “quite brilliant tactician”, General Secretary Jim Healy; Industrial Officer Norm Docker; and journalist/editor Rupert Lockwood. 632 Lockwood’s efforts to maintain a popular format and rank-and-file emphasis was variously frustrated following the death of Healy in 1961, and the 630 On creative people in the ranks of the WWF during this period, see Lisa Milner, Fighting Films: A History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit, Pluto Press, North Melbourne, 2003, pp. 19-34, but also generally; for Lockwood’s views on the role of the Maritime Worker, and in particular the role of contributions by the rank-and-file membership, see “Submission from R. Lockwood”, undated submission to leadership of WWF about the future of the Maritme Worker, which I have dated from internal evidence to sometime during the mid 1980s (NLA: MS 10121, Box 72, Folder 461); see also De Berg, p. 17,478. 631 Lockwood interview with author, Bowral, 26-27 September 1984. 632 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 80. 234 accession to power of ALP member Charlie Fitzgibbon as General Secretary (1961-1983); cartoons and humorous items were dropped from the publication against Lockwood’s advice, and the community content and worker contributions decreased. In part this reflected industry and membership changes, but also a non-communist political thinking that did not, historically, give emphasis to the use of the printed word or to the media generally as organisational and promotional tools. Post-1983, he was still lobbying for his ten-per-cent formula to an apparently unconvinced union leadership. 633 Lockwood’s last journalistic assignment as a communist, was his 1965-1968 posting to Moscow as Tribune special correspondent. Initially a two-year appointment, Lockwood stayed on at the request of the CPA which had problems organising his replacement. 634 Lockwood took leave from the WWF, and was accompanied by his family; Betty secured some work with the English language publishing apparatus in Moscow, their eldest daughter travelled independently and furthered her tertiary studies, and the teenage daughters continued their schooling. For Lockwood the assignment was due recognition for his loyalty to the CPA; he believed he had been bypassed during the 1950s and 1960s for placement on overseas delegations due to internal personal/political tensions, a matter dealt with in the following chapter. 635 Arguably, for the CPA, the dispatch of a high profile, credible journalist was a conciliatory gesture, evidence for Moscow that the CPA was not in the process of abandoning the USSR in its local divisive struggle to articulate and build an Australian style of national communism, while providing evidence on the homefront for powerful internal critics of the same. 636 633 Lockwood, “Submission from R. Lockwood”. 634 There is an ASIO report noting the reason for the extension of Lockwood’s Moscow assignment, based on intercepted CPA discussion, in NAA: A6119, 1717, folio 26. 635 Bowden, “Making of an Australian Communist”, p. 24. 636 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, pp. 163-174. 235 In the USSR, Lockwood travelled extensively. Shepherded by authorities, he visited thirteen of the fifteen Republics, and some of the autonomous regions. His reports as published in Tribune during this assignment, tended to be little more than rewrites of Soviet handouts, and reporting based on his monitoring of the English-language Soviet press. Judged as journalism, it is undistinguished, pedestrian, unworthy of a journalist of his calibre and experience. Charitably it suggests the work of a tired journalist going through the motions. Certainly it can be read as the work of an unabashed supporter of the USSR and its leadership. Which presents a problem for the historian, since, as will be seen in the next chapter, it was this experience in the USSR which he claimed contributed significantly to him ending his membership of the CPA, and his break with communism, in 1969. What has to be explained, then, is an apparent contradiction, dissembling even. How could Lockwood appear to be pro-Soviet, then claim to be anti-Soviet, all within the space of little more than a year, yet expect to retain credibility, and integrity? As will be seen in the next chapter, Lockwood had long had issues with the USSR and with the CPA, but still, there is a significant credibility gap with this time frame. What the public record does not show, other records do: Lockwood’s time in the USSR was far from harmonious, far from uncritical. Amongst Lockwood’s papers is a memoir manuscript, incomplete, undated, most likely written during the 1980s when he began to draft memoir materials. Tilted “Misreporting the USSR”, the manuscript gives an account of being a special correspondent in Moscow, along with international colleagues similarly representing communist parties, of being kept-journalists, of use to the Soviet Union but regarded as parasites by Soviet handlers. He describes the process of having one’s output monitored, of being watched, of being guided and shepherded, of being pressured to produce and be obedient or having the home party pressured to recall you. Lockwood also records other ‘unofficial’ experiences, of accidentally glimpsing massed convict forced labour at a remote worksite, due to a guiding error; of meeting and mixing with dissenting intellectuals; and of press conferences of fraternal journalists 236 where questions implicitly critical of Soviet affairs were asked, including by him, and boundaries pushed. Lockwood claimed to an interviewer in 1981, that by the time he left Moscow, he was not popular with his hosts, and “was alleged to have been mixing with the wrong people”. Clearly these recollections do not substantiate Lockwood’s unease and rebellion during the period 1965-1968 when on assignment; they could well be the ‘constructions’ of a person intent on creating doctored support for a preferred biography. 637 Except there is supportive evidence. In January 1968, Ambassador Rowland of the Australian Embassy, Moscow, wrote confidentially to The Secretary, Department of External Affairs, Canberra, reporting Lockwood’s dissatisfaction with the way Soviet authorities frustrated and prevented journalistic attempts by foreign journalists to report on recent trials of dissident intellectuals; the following month, before Lockwood left the USSR, the Third Secretary of the Australian Embassy similarly reported to Canberra, detailing matters that had come to attention regarding Lockwood’s highly critical opinions, unease, and dissatisfaction with the USSR, commenting it was clear Lockwood “will be glad to leave Moscow”. In May, Lockwood having departed from Moscow, ASIO Headquarters in Melbourne wondered, that given Lockwood’s obvious dissatisfaction, and quoting him describing Moscow life as “vulgar, barbarous and fascist-like’, whether “he might be open to an approach”. 638 Lockwood in the USSR has to be thought of as having led a sort of double life, appearing publicly in his writings in one way, while personally/privately believing and thinking in another, the latter discernable to some extent by his Soviet hosts and by Australian diplomatic/intelligence authorities, but not to his readers in Australia. As has been seen, 637 Rupert Lockwood, “Misreporting the USSR”, NLA: MS 10121, Box 65, Folder 412; Sue Johnson, “The God that failed lives for some”, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September 1981, p. 41. 638 NAA: A6119, 2334, folios 22, 85-86, 112-113, 167. 237 Lockwood’s capacity to create and live an appearance, and be an ‘other’ with another agenda, was not an alien experience. From late in 1939, through the years of illegality until the CPA was able to legally emerge from the underground late in 1942, Lockwood had conducted himself publicly as a member of the either the ALP or the SLP, all the while, secretly, a member of the CPA. “A GREAT DEAL OF SPARE TIME”. A result of Lockwood’s employment arrangement with the WWF was, as he told De Berg, it gave him “a great deal of spare time for other writing”; he did not elaborate further. 639 What in fact occupied much of his time was the research and writing of original contributions to Australian history and to what is now termed political economy. Some of this was published, much of it was not. Evidence of this research and writing is found, for example, in his pamphlets, in issues of the CPA journal of “theory and practice” Communist Review, in Australian Left Review, which replaced the former in 1966, in the Australian scholarly journal Labour History, and in the journal International Affairs (Moscow). As well, there were two books, America Invades Australia (n.d., 1955) and Der Kontinent des Känguruhs (1961), a short comprehensive account of Australian history published in the German Democratic Republic. Beginning in 1975, there were four more books, the subject of the Chapters 8 and 9 of this study. 640 However, it is in his Papers held by the NLA (MS 10121) that evidence of Lockwood’s intellectual concerns and productivity are most evident, as are insights into how he worked as an independent scholar. The bulk of this material was created during his time with the WWF, and housed in his WWF office in Sydney until his retirement in 1985. Lockwood’s office in Philip Street, and later in Sussex Street, was a stroll across the city to the State Library of NSW where he was a regular reader. Lockwood read and researched widely and copiously, making detailed notes and recording their 639 De Berg, p. 17,453. 640 Rupert Lockwood, Der Kontinent des Känguruhs, Rűtten and Loening, Berlin, 1961. 238 source of origin. He read Sydney newspapers closely, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, paying particular attention to reporting of company, financial, and industrial matters. An extensive range of manila folders of topic files was compiled of newspaper clippings, copies of articles. The Commonwealth Hansard and The Commonwealth Year Book, were regularly consulted; journals like the New York Review of Books, New Statesman, The Economist, the Bulletin (Sydney), the Current Affairs Bulletin, contemporary Australian historical scholarly journals, were all part of his purview; the Historical Records of Australia series (Commonwealth of Australia, 1914 ff) was combed for detail. Generally, he read whatever books were available relating to Australian history, politics, and economic analysis. Biographical and autobiographical material relating to politics and public affairs was also scoured. It was a diversity of reading/study possible before the expansion in Australian publishing in these areas post-1960s. These notes in turn were typed up into book length, topic specific manuscripts, organised internally in chapter-like sections which provided the basis of future articles, or books. This intellectual activity did not occur in isolation. Lockwood was not cut off from society; his scholarship was related to ongoing political/industrial campaigning in many ways, and his surviving papers indicate a rich and wide correspondence with Australian leftist/former leftist writers, political figures, researchers, intellectuals, journalists. The following table gives an idea of his industry; other materials may come to light in the future: 239 Rupert Lockwood: unpublished substantial manuscripts, c.1945-1981 (listed alphabetically) 641 TITLE NOTES LOCATION in NLA: MS 10121 America in the Pacific Book manuscript, dated 1963, ready for Box 65, Bag 415 publication. Historical account of American imperial interests in the Pacific, and Australia’s responses. Australia’s Ruling Book length manuscript, dated 1962. Monopolies: Collins Box 20, Bag 122 House. Australia’s Struggle for Historical account of the Australian shipping Box National Shipping 20, Bag industry and the ways in which overseas 123. monopolies variously worked to thwart and prevent the development of a viable national shipping industry. In existence at least by 1962. Brisbane Line: Research Dated August 1963. Historical study of the Box 67, Bag 425 Notes. The Documented ‘Brisbane Line’ controversy, with attention Story of Menzies’ to Australia, Japan, US relations during the Betrayal of Australia, period. Some of this material was later used 1939-1963. in Lockwood’s War on the Waterfront (1987). British Influences Imperial 100 page manuscript, in existence before Box 12, Folder in the July 1964. This was used in a scholarly 79 Formation of the White presentation, and subsequent publication Australia Policy. 641 (Labour History, November 1964). The creation of this Table was greatly assisted by Donna Vaughan’s work on Lockwood’s NLA Papers, “Guide to the Papers of Rupert Lockwood”, the importance of which has been referred to in my Introduction to this present study. 240 Book on Australia’s Book length roneod manuscript; historical Box 72, Bag 459 Shipping Problems. overview, produced before 1961 in multiple copies and used to support maritime trade union campaigns. Colonisation and development the A compilation of rough notes and drafts, this Box 13, Folder of manuscript accompanied Lockwood to 83 responsible government. Moscow, 1965-1968, for use in projected writing. It was not used. Control Through Historical Patents account of US economic Box 95, Folder penetration of Britain and Australia, with 613 focus on American economic interests in Australia, the Pacific, and Asia from colonial times onwards to c.1950s. Broader in scope than Lockwood’s America Invades Australia (1955). Convicts, bastion, India, Research notes focusing on early colonial Box 12, Folders military. Australian history with particular interest on 74 and 75; also the strategic and imperialist motives behind Box 13, Folder colonisation. The notes were compiled 83 before 1965, when they accompanied Lockwood to Moscow (1965-1968). Some of the research material is evident in his Communist Review articles in the 1950s. CSR-Colonial Sugar Pamphlet length history of Colonial Sugar Box 95, Bag 609 from colonial times to c.1954. This manuscript was amongst those examined by the Royal Commission on Espionage, 19541955. 241 Indian connection, Compilation of materials gathered between Box 26, Bag 165 China connection, 1954-1964. This manuscript accompanied military; Kembla, White Lockwood to Moscow, 1965-1968, with a Australia Policy, view to being used in writing he planned. Japanese in New But it was not used. Guinea. Marie Antoinette Let Book length manuscript, dated October Box 11, Bag 64 Me Eat Cake 1981. A mix of autobiography, local, and national history, with the focus on German immigration to Australia, and its impact. Monopoly in Australia: Book length manuscript on the history of Box 65, Bag 414 BHP Circle BHP, and its influence on Australian political and economic life. Dated 1961. Not So Golden Fleece Manuscript history of the Australian wool Box 14, Folder industry with particular focus on the 90 Australia/Japan trade relationship. The manuscript accompanied Lockwood to the USSR in 1965, but was not used. Still being updated in the early 1980s. Rulers of Australia: The A Adelaide Group history of nineteen leading South Box 85, Bag 543 Australian capitalist families, and their political and economic influence on Australia from colonial times through to the early 1950s. The Angry Heart Book length draft history of the 1949 Coal Box 15, Folder Strike. The Holden General Australia 98 Story: Draft of book, completed 1964. According Box 95, Bag 619 Motors in to an attached note by Lockwood, it was prepared for the CPA but no interest was subsequently shown in its publication. By 1954, Lockwood had produced a significant body of research. We know this because on 20 August 1954, during the Petrov Commission, Lockwood 242 was ordered to produce his manuscripts from the Maritime Worker office and hand them over to the Commission; either that or face a subpoena. The Commissioners wanted to use the manuscripts to see if their content, literary style, the individuality of the typing style, could help prove Lockwood was the author of Document J. The manuscripts centred on economic matters, specifically Australian company and monopoly structures, and American economic penetration of Australia. The manuscripts were preparatory drafts of a book, or a number of books, Lockwood planned. 642 Wide ranging, the manuscripts included studies of the industrial empires of Australian Consolidated Industries Limited; steel monopoly BHP; the Collins House Group, which took its name from its offices in Collins Street, Melbourne, a financial group that had a great effect upon Australian mining, metallurgy, and secondary industry; Imperial Chemical Industries. The tobacco and oil industries were also represented in the material, but the largest and nearest to complete manuscript was one titled “Eight Columns of Invaders”. This dealt with the economic penetration of the Australian economy by American capital and interests, and the way this acted to establish a colonial dependence relationship with the US economy. It was a process which cruelled and diminished Australian economic potential and independence, and brought with it American “cultural, military and political domination”. 643 Such was the interest in this manuscript, and its association in media reports with disloyalty, subversion, and espionage, the CPA hurried it into print during the life of the Commission under the title America Invades Australia. 644 It became a best-seller, and the print run sold out. At the time, 642 For an account of the Royal Commission demand for Lockwood’s manuscripts, their use, and an itemisation of the documents presented, see W. J. Brown (editor), The Petrov Conspiracy Unmasked, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1957, pp. 275-276. 643 Rupert Lockwood, America Invades Australia, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1955, p. 93. 644 For an explanation of the circumstances regarding publication of this book, see the ‘Foreword’, Ibid., p. 6. 243 the book represented a minority view. Post-war criticism and/or alarm about the extent of American investment in the war ravaged Australian economy was confined to a few militant trade unions and left ALP politicians. As North American historian Bruce C. Daniels commented, In the two decades after World War Two, American capital, management, decision-making, and industrial goods flowed into Australia; raw materials, foodstuffs, and profits flowed out. The balance of trade always favored the United States. Australian prosperity depended on the whims of distant elites who often were either unmindful or uncaring about the overseas effects of their decisions. Not surprisingly, some Australians reacted angrily to the erosion of their economic autonomy. 645 According to Daniels, America Invades Australia was a “prophetic” book, ahead of its time, and Lockwood like “most prophets…seemed an alarmist doomsdayer to his contemporaries”. 646 But a decade later, Daniels observed, there were similar expressions of alarm and concern from both left and conservative political interests, and a “chorus of books” on this theme. Daniels cited a chronological sample of these political economy writings, from what he described as an “outpouring” of titles: Brian Fitzpatrick and E. L. Wheelwright, The Highest Bidder: A Citizen’s Guide to the Problem of Foreign Investment in Australia (Lansdowne: Melbourne, 1965), Donald T. Brash, American Investment in Australian Industry (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1966), J. H. Kelly’s account of American landholding and mining in the Northern Territory, Struggle for the North (Australasian Book Society: Sydney, 1966), Bruce McFarlane, Economic Policy in Australia: The Case for Reform (F. W. Cheshire: Melbourne, 1968), Len Fox, Australia Taken Over (L.P. Fox: Potts Point, 1974). 647 645 Bruce C. Daniels, “Younger British sibblings: Canada and Australia grow up in the shadow of the United States”, American Studies International, Volume 36, Issue 3, October 1998, p. 29. 646 Ibid. 647 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 244 Lockwood prefaced America Invades Australia with a slightly misquoted quote from George Bernard Shaw’s play Heartbreak House (1919), “Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light”. 648 These words encapsulate the approach and style and focus of much of Lockwood’s writings and research on economic matters. In Lockwood’s view, capitalist wealth and its generation, relied on secrecy, privacy, on activities not being seen or widely understood, the lack of ‘transparency’ in modern terminology, which if made public, might well be regarded variously as questionable, immoral, criminal, unsavoury, subterfuge. His work was intended as a form of revelation, of bringing light to where it was not wanted. Between 1945 and its last issue in May 1966, Communist Review published 41 articles authored by Lockwood. While some of these reflected material that appeared in “Eight Columns of Invaders”/America Invades Australia, there was a diversity of other interests and concerns, including articles based on material in the other manuscripts examined by the Royal Commission into Espionage. Two major themes can be discerned: the nature and behaviour of monopolies in Australia; and Australian history. Within the latter, there was/is a significant sub-theme concerned with the nature and development of the White Australia attitudes and policy. Overall, it was a body of work which led political scientist John Playford to comment in 1970 that Australian scholars “could have learnt a good deal from Rupert Lockwood’s articles in the Communist Review”. 649 This should not be taken to suggest all the articles were of equal merit; they were not, the last one in particular (May 1966) little more than a cut-and-paste piece based on official Soviet sources. 650 The latter reflected a person and an intellect at a 648 The full quote is: “Shall I turn up the light for you?” “No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light”. 649 John Playford, “Myth of the Sixty Families”, Arena, Number 23, 1970, p. 40. 650 Rupert Lockwood, “Social Research into Soviet Society”, Communist Review, No. 291, May 1966, pp. 140-142. 245 low ebb, experiencing, as will be seen, personal and political crises. Substantively, however, Playford was correct. Regarding monopolies, Lockwood challenged simplistic notions that lumped all monopolies together under the term “monopolies” as though they were all the same: yes, monopolies were monopolies, and often acted in concert, but they were not the same. He argued they had to be understood as unique capitalist formations, and that in Australia their allegiances nationally and internationally, and their behaviours, had to be understood with regard to factors like their histories, the origins of their capital, their investments, and their leadership composition. So far as this later was concerned, it helped too if one understood the “economic biographies” of the key people involved. In the Lockwood analysis, the individual histories of capitalist formations had to be understood, for often their current behaviours were variously rooted in, shaped by, their pasts. It was a level of intellectual complexity that would lead to conflict between Lockwood and the leadership of the CPA during the 1960s. 651 A cluster of articles in 1955-1956 was devoted to aspects of the Australian shipping industry. Lockwood explored reasons why Australian shipowners had failed to create a national/international shipping presence commensurate with the nation’s volume of imports/exports. According to Lockwood, reasons were to be found in the ways British shipping interests had worked, historically, to hinder/prevent the development of Australian shipping. In the Lockwood analysis, the roots of this were in colonial history, and colonial attitudes prevailing post-Federation. These articles linked with an ongoing campaign by the Seamen’s Union of Australia to extend and ‘grow’ the Australian shipping fleet; they demonstrate the utilitarian way 651 Playford, “Sixty Families”, pp. 31-32. 246 Lockwood saw at least part of his role as an historian--as contributing to ongoing industrial/political campaigning and struggles. 652 Australian economic history and monopoly behaviour continued to interest Lockwood into the 1960s, and he published a number of articles in the Moscow based English language journal International Affairs. These drew on the research that had enabled the production of his Communist Review pieces, and subsequent research. Amongst matters dealt with were Japanese investments in Australia and in the Pacific; the exploitation of Melanesia generally, with particular attention to Australia’s participation; the relationship between the USA and Japan, and their joint activities in South East Asia; foreign investment in the Australian mining industry and the effects, both realised and potential, of this upon Australia’s independence and development. Playford regarded this work as worthy of citation. 653 Lockwood’s second Communist Review theme was Australian history. Generally, Australian history was the increasing focus of his writing and research from the mid-1950s onwards. The Communist Review research and writing served as the base for a full account of Australian history published as Der Kontinent des Känguruhs (Berlin, 1961). This was submitted to the publisher with a less garish title as “Australia: Europe’s Asian Outpost”, its placement with the publisher possibly due to Lockwood’s friendship with GDR resident Frederick Rose, of which more in the next chapter. 654 There was to be another history of Australia; by 1981 this had the cumbersome 652 The relevant Lockwood Communist Review articles are “Trade Without the Flag”, September 1955, pp. 272-275; “The Shipping Cartel”, October 1955, pp. 296-299; “Licensed Pirates”, January 1956, pp. 19-23; “Shipowners as Employers”, March 1956, pp. 75-78. 653 Rupert Lockwood, “Japan Thrusts South”, International Affairs, January 1962, pp. 53- 57; “Dark Islands”, International Affairs, April 1963, pp. 70-75; “New Conspiracies Against Asia”, International Affairs, July 1966, pp. 58-62; “The Grip of Foreign Monopolies on Australia”, International Affairs, October 1968, pp. 45-48; Playford, “Sixty Families”, p. 40. 654 De Berg, p. 17,451 247 title, “Marie Antoinette Let Me Eat Cake”, and ran to some 60,000 words. Lockwood was assisted by a small grant from the Literature Board of Australia in the production of this. The manuscript was submitted to, and rejected by, Penguin. An ambitious project, it drew on his German (step) family background and was a mix of autobiography, local and national history, focused on German migration to Australia, and the German experience in/of Australia. Considerable original research was undertaken for this project by Lockwood, including in Lutheran Church records in Western Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland. But it was/is a rambling text, needing significant editorial intervention. Lockwood sent the manuscript to historian and friend, Russel Ward who replied with a lengthy critique, the essence of which was that it was “fascinating in parts, boring in others, and so bitsy overall”. The project was shelved, and as will be seen in following chapters, other historical projects were completed. 655 In his Communist Review history articles, all of which included an ‘endnote’ regarding the sources used, Lockwood ranged across Australian history; the collapse of the land boom during the 1890s, the development of political labour, US and Australia relations, all rated attention. Regarding the latter, Lockwood looked at the relationship between Australia and the USA during the early twentieth century, and the development in Australia of a sense of “Pacific regional security”, in which the U.S. came to be seen as a necessary partner. Regarding political labour, Lockwood argued that colonial labour parties in Australia drew significant energy and support from nineteenth century radical liberalism such that by the early twentieth century, the ALP which developed from these, had become “the principal political organisation of Australian national capital”. This was a historical 655 Rupert Lockwood, “Marie Antoinette Let Me Eat Cake” manuscript, and Russel Ward’s letter, dated 28 October 1981, NLA: MS 10121, Box 11, Bag 64. 248 proposition close to critiques primarily associated later with radical New Left historians of the late 1960s, and the 1970s. 656 Another Lockwood interest was the history and development of White Australia policies and attitudes. There is a mass of related files, notes, drafts on these in his papers, and four significant articles in Communist Review between 1952 and 1964. The dates here are important because historiographer Rob Pascoe claimed the Old Left, of which Lockwood was part, avoided discussing the White Australia Policy. According to Pascoe, “odd remarks occasionally show their disquiet about the racism of the Australian people, but overall they regarded it as a touchy subject which was better left alone”. In the Pascoe analysis, robust discussion and criticism of racism and the White Australia Policy were later contributions to Australian historical studies. 657 That may be, but Lockwood made more than “odd remarks”, and he was not included in Pascoe’s historiographical study. 658 656 See, for example, the following Lockwood articles in Communist Review: “America Invades North Australia”, October 1952, pp. 308-312; “Dollar Signs Over Collins House”, December 1952, pp. 365-370; “Minerals for Hell Bombs or Progress”, February 1953, pp. 60-64; “Dollar Investment Without Dollars”, September 1953, pp. 287-288; “Morgan’s Australian Bridgehead”, December 1954, pp. 362-364; “S.E.A.T.O.’s Labour Spies”, May 1960, pp. 192-195; “Land Boom”, September 1960, pp. 373-376; “Land Boom Sequels”, October 1960, pp. 438-441; “ALP and the U.S. Alliance”, July 1963, pp. 234-238; “50th Anniversary of Lenin Thesis on ALP”, November 1963, pp. 363-366; “Capitalist Affiliations of Two Class ALP”, January 1964, pp. 12-15; “Capitalist Affiliations of ALP in NSW”, February 1964, pp. 48-51. 657 Rob Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1979, p. 69. 658 Ibid. For the relevant Lockwood articles on White Australia, “Australia’s First Enemy”, Communist Review, No. 175, July 1956, pp. 231-234; “Monopolist Birthstains”, Communist Review, No. 183, March 1957, pp. 88-92; “White Australia’s Evolution to U.S. Nuclear Base Area”, Communist Review, No. 257, May 1963, pp. 167-169; “Partnership in Apartheid”, Communist Review, No. 274, October 1964, pp. 305-309. 249 Lockwood recognised that European settlement of Australia came at the expense of the indigenous people, “almost exterminated” by violence, and imported diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. He located the origins of White Australia racism in early colonial history, a significant shaping force the relationship between the infant colony and the East India Company. Another shaping contribution was the relationship between Australia and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racist policies from the latter contributing to the racist policies in Australia. By 1964, Lockwood’s interest in the subject of racism and White Australia had resulted in the production of a 100-page (quarto) treatise titled “British Imperial Influences in the Foundation of the White Australia Policy”. A talk based on his research was given by Lockwood to the Sydney Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH) in July 1964, and an abridged version published in the ASSLH journal later that year.659 Commenting on the argument in this published paper, and historiographically contextualising it, historian Terry Irving noted that it is a good example of the strengths of the materialist method in the hands of a radical historian. At a time when historians were conducting sterile debates about whether the nineteenth-century working class was racist or protecting its economic interest by opposing Asian immigration, Lockwood focused on the economic conditions of early nineteenth-century Britain following the industrial revolution. He showed that the British imperial state, in order to make Australia a junior imperial partner that would offer a safe ‘white’ home for surplus British population and a secure market for British goods and investments, imposed a ‘white Australia’ immigration policy on the colonies before 1856, justified by a belief in British racial superiority. Unlike idealists who paddle around in the representational shallows, materialists look deeper for the origins of racism. They say that people become racist by living in a society based on 659 For the manuscript, Rupert Lockwood, “British Imperial Influences in the Foundation of the White Australia Policy”, NLA: MS 10121, Box 12, Folder 79; for the abridged version, Rupert Lockwood, “British Imperial Influences in the Foundation of the White Australia Policy”, Labour History, No. 7, November 1964, pp. 23-33. 250 racist practices. Lockwood showed that immigration to Australia was, from the first, a racist practice. (He might have also said that when the immigrants purchased land they were engaging in another racist practice, as this was land stolen from Aborigines. He did say in the article, that as soon as the first colonisers arrived these ‘new masters’ knew they were dispossessing the ‘old masters’ of their ancestral lands. He wrote this a generation before post-colonialism supposedly made us use the term ‘invasion’ for the first British settlements.) Of course Australians are racist; what needs explaining is why some are anti-racist. This is another part of the terrain opened up by radical history. What an intellectual waste that Lockwood’s argument is not better known among historians. 660 The last history article Lockwood published in a CPA outlet, and while he was still a member of the CPA, was in Australian Left Review in December 1968. In this he surveyed Australia’s overseas military involvements, beginning with colonial involvement in the Maori Wars in New Zealand during the 1840s. According to Lockwood, Australia’s military engagements had to be seen as manifestations of a deep seated racism, and were an integral part of the White Australia Policy. In this he included the then current Vietnam War. In Lockwood’s account the Maori Wars were crucial, as they “ushered Australia into the world as a base for colonial military expeditions”. In the process, Australia was established as a suitable source of manpower for future conflicts, a role Australia fulfilled during the rest of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. Referring to this article in 2009, in respect to Lockwood’s significant discussion of the 1840s conflict, historian Jeff Hopkins-Weise observed that despite being a Communist publicist and “an amateur labour historian”, Lockwood 660 Terry Irving, “Rediscovering Radical History”, The Hummer, Volume 6, Number 2, 2010, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/vol-6-no-2/, accessed 18 December 2012. 251 “touched upon the depth of Australian involvement in New Zealand’s internal conflicts, largely missed by other historians”. 661 Historically, Lockwood was not the only scholar/historian to be overlooked historiographically. Irving pointed to an Australian historical tradition of historians “embedded in labour movement institutions”, neglected by Australian historiography and “academic labour history” because they did not publish in ways that conformed “to the publishing conventions of the ruling culture”. Instead of producing books, and articles in scholarly journals, they published in movement newspapers, journal, pamphlets, and lectured outside of academia. Some of these historians are well known, because they did produce books, people like V.G. Childe, H. V. Evatt, Brian Fitzpatrick, Lloyd Ross, and did follow accepted cultural norms when it came to the propagation of their works. However, as Irving pointed out, many are not known, and their significant work variously challenging imperial, white dominated, ruling class accounts of Australian history are “scarcely recognised”, their contributions often anticipating/pre-dating, themes and issues that are regarded as originating later in the academy. 662 Observing that “thoughtful and imaginative”, reasoned and useful analysis published in Communist Review during the late 1950s had been ignored by academic scholars, Connell (1969), and Playford (1970) advanced reasons: Connell presumed it was “because social scientists thought the Communist Review not worth reading”; Playford agreed, adding that for academics who were socialists, the decision to ‘ignore’ also demonstrated their lack of fibre and their reluctance “to work in politically sensitive areas”. 663 661 Rupert Lockwood, “Racism and Militarism”, Australian Left Review, December 1968, pp. 53-61; Jeff Hopkins-Weise, Blood Brothers: The Anzac Genesis, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, 2009, p. 231. 662 Irving, “Rediscovering Radical History”. 663 Mary Ancich, R. W. Connell, J. A. Fisher, and Maureen Kolff, “A Descriptive Bibliography of Published Research and Writing on Social Stratification in Australia, 1946- 252 CONCLUSION This chapter discussed the labour movement journalism of Lockwood from 1945 through to 1985, beginning with his editorial work with the CPA newspaper Tribune to the early 1950s; and from 1952 to 1985, his editorial work with the trade union publication, the Maritime Worker, organ of the WWF. In the case of Tribune, Lockwood endeavoured to produce a readable and entertaining Left perspective on political and social issues, combining news, analysis and commentary with cartoons, humour, and Sports coverage. With the Maritime Worker, Lockwood sought to produce a publication for a distinct community of workers which reflected and strengthened that community. In both editorial jurisdictions, Lockwood explored the idea that workers on the job could also be workercorrespondents, contributing copy. It was demonstrated this was a significant part of his work with the Maritime Worker. Lockwood’s final communist assignment as a journalist, as Tribune special correspondent in Moscow, 1965-1968, was also discussed. As was explained, this assignment is historically problematic. The journalism Lockwood produced during this period can be read as unabashed support for the USSR and for Soviet communism. Yet, in Lockwood’s personal/political life, it was a crucial period that led to him ending his membership of the CPA, and becoming a public critic of Soviet communism. It was argued in this chapter that the published journalism did not in fact reflect the nature and direction of his political thinking at the time, that whilst in the USSR he was increasingly critical of the Soviet system. Supportive evidence of his critical thinking and feelings at the time was introduced from Lockwood’s personal records, and from formerly Confidential Australian Embassy (Moscow), and ASIO sources. The chapter also demonstrated how, due to Lockwood’s editorial responsibility from 1952 not involving full-time work, he utilised his spare 1967”, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, Volume 5, April 1969, Number 1, pp. 50-51; Playford, “Sixty Families”, pp. 30, 37-38, 40. 253 time and energies in independent scholarship. A considerable body of work was shown to have been generated as the result, some of it published, much of it not. While there were exceptions, most of what Lockwood published of this, tended to be in labour movement publications, little of which was/has been cited or otherwise acknowledged by academic scholarship. It was shown, however, that academic scholars who have referred to Lockwood’s independent scholarship have variously recognised its pioneering nature and significance in contributing to the understanding of Australian history and political economy. Indeed, it was demonstrated Lockwood was often years ahead of academe in his scholarly concerns and interests. 254 CHAPTER SEVEN COLD WAR II: “COMMUNIST WORK” To oral historian Hazel De Berg, Lockwood gave a simplified account of his post-war years in the CPA: that he was Assistant Editor of Tribune until the job was taken from him; how he found journalistic work with the WWF; how, in between these markers, he was “a sort of representative in London and Europe” for the CPA; how, upon his return, he continued through the 1950s and subsequently “with Communist work, I might say, rather raggedly”. Then came the three-year Tribune correspondent’s posting in Moscow from 1965 to 1968, which led to him leaving the party, what he termed “the final departure”. As an overview of a political life, this account had integrity, but also left out a great deal. Granted, Lockwood did discuss with De Berg a major aspect of the 1950s, his involvement in the Royal Commission on Espionage, 19541955. While that is most commonly regarded as the salient point in accounts of Lockwood’s life, as will be shown in this chapter, it was only part of a more complex and full communist life. What is of interest in the passage quoted above, is Lockwood’s use of the word “raggedly”. Lockwood loved words. They were his metier, and he surely chose that word deliberately. “Raggedly” variously conveys senses of ‘lack of uniformity’, ‘lack of smoothness’, ‘irregular’, ‘stress’, ‘exhaustion’, all present, as will be explained, in his “Communist work” as the 1950s and 1960s unrolled. 664 COMMUNIST WORK Lockwood’s life as a member of the CPA during the Cold War continued to be varied and exhaustively full, as it had been during World War 2. The mainstay of his work revolved around journalism, linked to prolific research, writing, and publication, much of it original, as discussed in the previous chapter. His public speaking, one of the most remembered aspects of Lockwood in memoirs and commentaries (see Chapter 5), continued 664 De Berg, pp. 17,451-17,454; 17,474. 255 unabated until he went left to Moscow in 1965. He was a regular crowd pulling Sunday speaker at the CPA stump in the Domain in Sydney, drew crowds to the Yarra Bank in Melbourne. At large meetings, the Lockwood style was declamatory but not dogmatic He could speak for an hour or more with only a few notes, if that, blending anecdotes, humour, satire, ridicule, facts, statistics, scandal, as he exposed the “foibles, fiddles and foulness of the rich and powerful”. In the post-war years and into the fifties, the many suburban branches of the CPA organised “cottage lectures”, gatherings of between 12-30 people in private homes with a guest speaker, followed by a supper, sale of publications, perhaps some recruiting. Lockwood was popular as a ‘guest lecturer’ and much in demand. He impressed small audiences with charm, wit, intellect, and his willingness to respond to questions. He has been recalled as having “the rare ability to touch a moral nerve in audiences, large or small”. 665 There were special tasks too, for example preparing the major propaganda literature putting the CPA case in the successful campaign against the Menzies government’s 1951 Referendum on whether or not to ban the CPA, a publication of which 1.25 million copies were distributed nationally. 666 Behind the scenes, his special skills as a researcher were called upon, as in the preparation of research/background notes for use by the CPA propagandists. 667 He was also required to engage in party activity that was 665 References in this paragraph to the quality and style of Lockwood’s public speaking are drawn from R. D. Walshe, letter to author, 22 November 1984. Walshe was a significant CPA intellectual, until expelled during the mid-1950s. He went on to become an author, publisher, educationist, pioneer environmentalist and community activist. On CPA oratory as an ‘event’ and as ‘performance’, see Stan Moran, Reminiscences of a Rebel, Alternative Publishing Co-Op., Chippendale: NSW, 1979, pp. 39-48. 666 Rupert Lockwood, “Seeing Red…and Darker Colours”, p. 13, NLA: MS 1012I, Box 17, Bag 111. 667 See for example the background briefing paper “Notes on American stockpiling for war, the American blockade attempts against People’s China, the USSR and the People’s Democracies, the American attacks on Australian and British economy and independence 256 personally disruptive--albeit challenging, interesting, and attractive to a person of Lockwood’s measure; during 1948-1949, he was called upon by the party to leave his family for the best part of thirteen months, and become involved in an attempt by the CPA to assert itself in the world communist movement beyond its national borders. Lockwood was dispatched to London where he based himself, working as an agent for the CPA in Europe. There he was the paper’s foreign correspondent, dispatching photographs and copy via air-mail. Another of his tasks was to establish a European news service to serve the Australian communist press, and its proposed expansion. 668 During this time, he was part of an intervention by the CPA in the internal affairs of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), what O’Lincoln has described as a remarkable “heated exchange of polemics” between the CPA and the CPGB, a manifestation of the CPA’s post-war confidence and radicalism. The CPA trenchantly criticised the domestic politics of the CPGB: its relationship with, and attitudes towards, the British Labour Party; a perceived confusing stance taken by the CPGB with regard to the British Empire; and generally lectured the British comrades on matters relating to class struggle and militancy. The CPA made its criticisms known to the leadership of the CPGB in heated correspondence, and challenged the leadership to publicise the criticisms. When this did not eventuate, the full correspondence was published in the September 1948 issue of Communist Review, and Lockwood was charged with its distribution in the UK and abroad. Which he did. It was an unwelcome intervention. 669 and the general crisis affecting Australian economy”, 1951, NLA: MS 10121, Box 40, Folder 269. 668 NAA: A6119, 40, folio 115. 669 For an account of the CPA intervention, see O’Lincoln, Into The Mainstream, Chapter 3, http://www.marxists.org/stalinism/into-mainstream/ch03.htm, pp. 7-9, accessed 17 January 2011. The intervention and Lockwood’s role is mentioned in a self-published pamphlet by Bob Gould, “The Communist Party in Australian Life”, 21 October 2000, 257 During his European assignment, Lockwood travelled widely in Europe and visited the USSR. Two things in particular had a profound effect upon him: the war devastation evident in the USSR, a devastation and projected rebuilding which convinced him that the USSR was thus rendered incapable of acting as an aggressor in Europe, even if it wanted to; in Poland, the experience of seeing the Auschwitz concentration camp filled him with revulsion, heightening his animosity towards Australia’s pre-war appeasers, in particular the two men he despised most, Menzies and Spender. It was a moral revulsion that helped fuel the future Document J.670 For Lockwood, the posting highlight was his participation in the World Peace Congress in Paris, April 1949. With tensions in Europe intensifying, especially since the Berlin Blockade in 1948, a third world war seemed imminent. Globally, peace interests mobilised to thwart the possibility, their efforts focussed on the Paris Congress. Since the inaugural meeting of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in September 1947, where Soviet delegate A. Zhdanov put forward the “two-camp” thesis of a world divided by the forces of peace and those of warmongering, represented respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States, many communist parties globally had made Peace part of their programs. 671 Lockwood was credentialed as a delegate of the WWF, the SUA, and the Australian Federated Ironworkers’ Association. With money tight, the http://www.marxists.org/archive/gould/2000/cpainaustralianlife.htm, accessed 20 December 2012. For the correspondence and criticisms, see Communist Review, September 1948, pp. 270-283. The Australian intervention, the circulation of the September 1948 issue of Communist Review in the CPGB, and its effects, are fictionalised in Edward Upward, The Spiral Ascent: A Trilogy of Novels, Heinemann, London, 1977, pp. 374-401. 670 For a personal and contemporary account of Lockwood’s travels in Europe, 1948-1949, including his encounter with Auschwitz, see “Visit to Europe: Memoirs”, NLA: MS 10121, Box 41, Bag 277. 671 Phillip Deery, “The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950s World Peace Conference”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 48, Number 4, 2002, p. 450. 258 Australian peace movement could not afford to send a delegation, so Lockwood was assigned the task of organising and leading the Australian delegation. He put this together from Australian leftists resident in London at the time. Included were his Melbourne artist friend from the 1930s, Noel Counihan, and younger party intellectuals Daphne Gollan, Stephen MurraySmith, and Nita Murray-Smith. All up, some 1700 delegates assembled in Paris, representing seventy-two countries, their decisions mapping peace movement plans for the following decade. It was an exhilarating experience for Lockwood and his colleagues, mixing with delegates like American singer Paul Robeson; American novelist Howard Fast; Congress chairman Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Nobel Prize winning physicist and a former leader of the French resistance; celebrated artist, Pablo Picasso, whose lithograph “La Colombe” (The Dove) featured on the Congress poster; negro historian William Du Bois; Tribune contributor and British physicist J. D. Bernal; and many distinguished others, while also seeing themselves as part of a global movement representing some 600 million people. 672 Lockwood addressed the Congress on April 23, speaking powerfully and well. His talk was enthusiastically received by a packed audience. It was published in the Congress daily bulletin in five languages, resulting in numerous invitations to address smaller European audiences. The typescript of the talk is now in Lockwood’s papers in the National Archives of Australia. It is a radical account of Australian history, beginning with British colonisation and what Lockwood described as the forceful dispossession of the indigenous people by the “extermination policies of the imperialists”. Over time, this dispossession morphed into a “White” racism that was currently preparing for “chauvinistic attacks on Asian peoples” at the behest of American economic and military/strategic interests. But this was not the whole story. Lockwood also sketched the development in Australia of a counter radical democratic tradition, made collectively by 672 On the Australian delegation in Paris and the Congress, see Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 229-239. 259 both men and women. This tradition was evident in the struggles to create a non-convict Australia, in the armed revolt of the Eureka miners in 1854, in the internationalism of the trade union movement since the 1870s, and more recently in Australian trade union support for the Indonesian independence movement. While “the war plans of the imperial nations may be warlike and hostile”, Lockwood stated these should not to be taken as representing all Australians, assuring delegates from Asia and the Pacific that the hands of the Australian people “will one day clasp yours in the name of peace, brotherhood and a fuller freedom”. 673 As a piece of carefully structured oratory, Lockwood’s talk was clever, and successful. Read as history, it demonstrates a radical understanding of Australian history, notable in 1949 for its recognition of the political agency of women, and for its recognition of indigenous dispossession and “extermination”, inclusions and understandings associated with post-1960s Australian historiography. This latter, indeed Lockwood’s general awareness of indigenous issues, probably owed much to at least two sources: his half-brother, Darwin-based journalist Douglas, whose 1962 empathetic account of Aboriginal life I, the Aboriginal demonstrated considerable understanding of indigenous issues; and his association with Frederick G. G. Rose (1915-1991), Cambridge trained British-Australian Marxist anthropologist whose original research on Groote Eylandt in 1938 and 1941 was suppressed by conservative Australian academic gatekeepers and by Cold War politics. Rose variously supported himself in Australia until 1956 as a meteorologist, public servant, and finally as a wharfie. Rose’s research was eventually published in 1960, by which time he had established himself as an academic at Humboldt University in the GDR, where he became Professor and Head of the Social Anthropology 673 For an account of Lockwood’s Congress speech as a performance, see Smith, Noel Counihan, p. 233; a typed copy of the speech is in “Paris Peace Conference” folder, NLA: MS 10121, Box 41, Bag 277. 260 Department. 674 ASIO took note of Lockwood’s representation of indigenous history. It reported (18 October 1949) Lockwood had published an article in a Czech communist newspaper referring to the ongoing “oppression” of Australian Aborigines and a history of trying “to exterminate them”. A handwritten note at the bottom of this ASIO report asked “Do we record this on the Abo file (if any)”. 675 Lockwood’s talk was also an early expression of a Lockwood theme, constant in his future historical writing, and manifested finally in the books he published from the 1970s onwards—that the Australian trade union movement carried within it a spirit of generosity, democratic impetus, and internationalism, and what was best about the Australian national character. Disappointing for Lockwood was the relative lack of publicity and coverage of the delegation given by the CPA back home, and its failure to use the significant reports and materials sent back by himself and Counihan. It behoved a party deeply involved in struggling to protect itself as the Cold War developed domestically, and a fracture in the relationship between Lockwood and the party. 676 Lockwood briefly returned to Australia, met his new twin daughters for the first time, and in March 1950 was back in Europe for a meeting of the World Peace Council in Stockholm, where he was an original signatory of 674 Douglas Lockwood, I, the Aboriginal, Rigby, Adelaide, 1962. For Rose, see P. D. Monteath, “The Anthropologist as Cold Warrior: The Interesting Times of Frederick Rose”, in Evan Smith, editor, Europe’s Expansions and Contractions: Proceedings of the XV11th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians, Australasian Association of European Historians, 2010, pp. 259-279; Valerie Munt, “Australian Anthropology, Ideology and Political Repression: The Cold War Experience of Frederick G. G. Rose”, Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2, July 2011, pp. 109-129; for a succinct account of the relationship of the CPA to the struggle for Aboriginal human rights from the mid-1920s onwards, see Jordan, “Conflict in the Unions”, pp. 17-19. 675 NAA: A6119, 41, folio 36. 676 On the disappointment of Australian delegates to the coverage of the Congress in the Australian left-wing press, see Smith, Noel Counihan, p. 241. 261 the Stockholm Appeal. This was a globally circulated petition calling for the “outlawry of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples”. It eventually collected 473 million signatures. 677 Back in the London, the visit took an unexpected turn, and Lockwood shortened his stay, flying home on 19 July. He borrowed the substantial fare of £585 from the CPGB. The cause was a surprise ‘ambush’ interview between London-based Australian External Affairs career officer James Hill, and legendary British MI5 interrogator William James (Jim) Skardon on 6 June. Hill was a brother of Victorian communist leader Ted Hill. A law graduate, he had been a member of the CPA from about 1937-1941, had done Army service during the war, and joined the Department of External Affairs in Canberra in 1945. British and American decoding operations on intercepted Soviet cables between Canberra-Moscow were believed to have established that Hill, through association with Wally Clayton, had provided copies of secret/classified cables and report materials that had become available to Moscow. 678 Cold War Australian historiography has clearly established the communication of information, including leaks of classified/secret materials, from Canberra to Moscow during the 1940s. However, the existence of a spy ring, understood as a tightly organised group of conscious agents, the Cold War ‘espionage’ model unsuccessfully hunted for in Australia by ASIO and MI5, is by no means established. 679 The Venona material used to support the thesis is problematic. As historians McKnight and Deery variously cautioned, it is a body of internal working papers comprising “fragmentary, raw and ‘one-way’ intelligence data”, and there 677 Deery, “The Dove Flies East”, p. 451. 678 The ASIO investigation of Hill, acting on Venona decrypts, is discussed by Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 306-312. 679 Les Louis, Menzies’ Cold War: A Reinterpretation, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, 2001, p. 40. 262 are problems related to its interpretation and meaning. 680 Rather than the ‘exaggerated’ thesis of a spy-ring, along the lines of the ring associated in the UK with Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, or in the elaborate set up in the US “established to convey information on the atomic bomb from Los Alamos”, I support the thesis advanced by McKnight, of a simpler network of contacts. According to this, materials were made available to CPA contacts, and while this found its way to Soviet intelligence officers, its provision was done on the basis of personal, local, domestic purposes, not espionage. 681 Indeed, as Ball/Horner concede, informants did not necessarily know the purposes their information served, or that they were being “exploited” by espionage/intelligence personnel. 682 The secretly recorded interview between Clayton, the Australian ‘spymaster’ codenamed KLOD, and Laurie Aarons (see Chapter 5), goes a long way, in my view, to supporting McKnight’s model. As will be seen later in this chapter, it is this model of information supply I contend that Lockwood became part of with Document J. But all this, along with the complicity or otherwise of Hill in espionage activity, is academic; as Ball/Horner pointed out, no-one in Australia associated with ‘spymaster’ KLOD/Clayton “was ever charged with espionage or any other related activity”. 683 So far as MI5 and ASIO were concerned, there was an Australian spy-ring. Historical analysis to date suggests the following: by 1950 a list of twelve suspected spies had been compiled; “tens of thousands of work hours” had gone into investigating these, and detailed political-biographical files 680 Phillip Deery, “Remembering ASIO”, Overland, Number 203, Winter 2011, p. 52; David McKnight, “The Moscow-Canberra Cables: How Soviet Intelligence Obtained British Secrets through the Back Door”, Intelligence and National Security, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 1998, pp. 167-168. 681 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 93; McKnight, “The Moscow-Canberra Cables”, pp. 159-170; David McKnight, “Rethinking Cold War History”, Labour History, Number 95, November 2008, pp. 191-192. 682 Ball and Horner Breaking the Codes, pp. 348-349 683 Ibid., pp. 348-349. 263 compiled on each. 684 The Venona decrypts ‘established’ the existence of a spy ring; at its centre was the person codenamed KLOD by Soviet authorities, believed to be Clayton, and closely associated, the others, variously codenamed PROFESSOR, MASTER, SESTRA, BUR, TOURIST, BEN, PODRUGA, FERRO, and ACADEMICIAN, the identities of whom were either suspected or as yet unknown. The puzzle and challenge for MI5 and ASIO was to match the two sets of data. While scholarship has assigned indentities to these, it is not my role to continue the work of security interests here. 685 However, for the purposes of this study it needs be said that Lockwood was not part of this close grouping, but amongst the large number of other Australians assigned codenames by Soviet authorities; and that by March 1949, Hill had been identified as TOURIST by MI5. 686 For supporters of the spy-ring thesis, KLOD and the close associates can be represented diagrammatically as something close to a circle, with KLOD at the centre, and the others on its periphery (circumference); hence the spyring. Proving the existence of this spy-ring, identifying its members, working out the nature, extent, methodologies of Soviet espionage in Australia, identifying what information had been passed on to Soviet authorities during the 1940s, and dealing with what all this revealed, became known in British and Australian security jargon as “The Case”. 687 Whether or not material Hill had shared with Clayton was intended for the CPA only, or for it and Soviet authorities, is a matter of surmise and interpretation. What matters here is in 1950, MI5, with Australian Government agreement and assistance, decided to try to crack “The Case”, by targeting Hill. His career appointment to London was apparently arranged by MI5 in late 1949, so he could be ambushed and interviewed by 684 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 51. 685 For the most detailed discussion to date of the identities and characters of ‘members’ of the so called ‘KLOD Group’, see Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 212, 232-273. 686 Ibid., p. 297. 687 For an approximation of this diagrammatic representation, Ibid., p. 212. For the jargon term, McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 4. 264 Skardon. 688 But Hill failed to break, confess or otherwise provide helpful information. For the historian, this could suggest he had nothing to ‘confess’, or that he was a hard nut to crack and a skilled clandestine operator. Understandably unnerved, Hill reported the ambush to CPGB veteran Rajani Palme Dutt, responsible for the CPGB’s relationships with the Commonwealth. This resulted in a meeting with Lockwood, and the decision made for him to fly home to warn the CPA of developments, and possible fallout, including the arrest of Clayton. Lockwood duly warned Clayton, and the CPA leadership. Hill was transferred home by sea by External Affairs, his career all but dead; he went into private legal practice in Melbourne after leaving the public service in 1953. 689 What is of interest to me here, is Lockwood’s reaction to, and his involvement in, this incident. It is another example of Lockwood’s “communist work”, demonstrating the level at which he could, and was prepared to operate, and is useful in ascertaining his approach to communism at the time. So far as Lockwood was concerned, it seems ethical considerations were not involved regarding the activities of Hill, real or imagined, that the priority was the protection of the CPA and comrades. At the time, the vengeful and ideologically anti-communist Menzies Government had just come to power (December 1949), intent on suppressing the CPA by force of law; the Korean War was beginning; the Cold War was intensifying on the homefront, fuelled by fearful popular culture speculations and political manipulation; the difficult but extant relationship between the CPA and the ALP had unwound, and during its last year in office the Labor Government had deployed the Army to the Northern and Western coalfields of NSW to break the paralysing, 688 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 307. 689 For the ‘ambush’ interview, the meeting with Palme Dutt and Lockwood, and the ensuing action, Ibid., pp. 309-311. The Palme Dutt/Lockwood meeting and resulting action, was first mentioned publicly in print in Richard Hall, The Rhodes Scholar Spy, Random House Australia, Milsons Point, 1991, p. 172. For Hill, after the Skardon interview, Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, pp. 325-326. 265 communist led, 1949 general Coal Strike. Also under the Labor Government, the jailing of communists had commenced, including six union leaders during the Coal Strike; earlier in 1949, newly appointed CPA General Secretary Lance Sharkey had been found guilty of uttering seditious words and sentenced to three years imprisonment. Following the reduction of this term, he served thirteen months. 690 Lockwood arguably had no problem with Hill and Clayton, and their sharing of information, since he would later share material freely with Soviet personnel. It is useful here to recall how Lockwood became a communist. He did not become one, as many did, because of domestic issues and WW2, but in an evolutionary way during the 1930s: through his journalism where he was privileged to see politics and policy formation up close and personal; through his witnessing of Empires in decline in Asia, and his recognition of the role of communist led nationalist movements in making the future of Asia; and crucially through witnessing fascism in action during the Spanish Civil War. His was a communism significantly forged abroad, a crucible of experience that made a difference in the sort of communism one held, that saw “the Janus face of capitalism” and had a stronger attachment to the Soviet Union than ones formed domestically, and later. 691 690 For discussion of Menzies and the ideological use of the Law to suppress the CPA, see George Williams, “The Suppression of Communism by Force of Law: Australia in the Early 1950s”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 42, Issue 2, April 1996, pp. 220-240. 691 Ball and Horner make the point in Breaking the Codes, p. 348, about different types of communists and communism in the CPA -- those who formed prior to the war during the 1930s, and those who became communists as the direct result of the war; from them I have also borrowed the “Janus” quote, Ibid. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, explaining the longevity of his membership of the CPGB and his support of the USSR, also noted the strength of communist faith/belief of those who, like him, were politically formed during the 1930s and “the era of anti-fascist unity”; see Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A TwentiethCentury Life, Abacus, London, 2003, pp. 217-218. 266 Back home, Lockwood threw himself into promoting the Stockholm Appeal, and the cause of international peace. As was seen in the previous chapter, he lost his editorial job with Tribune, and moved sideways into the trade union press. While I believe, as stated earlier, factors of personal animus were involved, jealousy, envy, animosity regarding his significant talents, it also made tactical sense from the point of view of the CPA. As the party struggled for its legal existence, Lockwood was arguably a liability: he was linked with Clayton through his underground party work during the war; since 1943, he was a party member prominently involved in relationships locally with Soviet personnel; his work abroad since 1948 had no doubt exposed him to the attentions of intelligence agencies in a way domestic based communists were not; his work abroad since 1948, and the 1950 flight from London, suggested he was part of communist affairs internationally in a way few other Australian communists were. With the party facing increased attacks from the Menzies Government, Lockwood was a liability, of considerable use in terms of his skills and abilities, but a prime target all the same, and best quarantined. Also, so far as his rights as a party journalist were concerned, he had been absent from Australia for over two-years between 1948 and 1950, during which time other journalists and publicists had fought the increasingly tense political/ideological battles on behalf of the CPA. Simply, others had earned their stripes, and Lockwood had lost his place in the pecking order. Beyond these were political issues. A close study by Phillip Deery of the political demise of a Lockwood colleague, J. D. Blake, removed from the powerful four-man CPA Secretariat (1953) and the CPA Central Committee (1956), demonstrated the interactions of personal animus and politics within the CPA, and the way in which issues relating to Peace and its associated internationalism were not regarded highly by the political decision makers framing CPA policy. Peace was a dead end issue, and not regarded as revolutionary. Deery reported one significant CPA cadre as commenting in 1956, “If you’re a cadre given responsibility for peace work, you’re treated like a mangy dog who has been shoved off into a blind alley as far as the 267 Party is concerned, without hope of help”. In the personal and labyrinthine politics of the CPA, Lockwood was on the wrong side of history. 692 “INCRIMINATING BIOGRAPHY” For Australia’s intelligence/security community, Lockwood’s post-war activities intensified interest in him. For the historian, this concern is understandable. He was involved in activity regarded rightly by those whose task it was to protect a capitalist-based state and its allies, as an enemy; he was perceived as threatening, effective, perhaps even treasonous. He was therefore a legitimate target of concern. Fiona Capp used the terms “bureaucratic profile” and “incriminating biography” to describe security surveillance files as a literary genre. “In the case of Australian Security files on Communists and nonconformists”, she wrote, “the existence of a dossier automatically implied that a person under surveillance was guilty of a crime or transgression. Everything included in the report was framed by this suspicion”. The file “conjured up the diabolic rather than the saintly”. 693 The material in Lockwood’s files does act in the ways Capp described. In 1984 I asked Lockwood how he had coped and handled knowing he was living a surveilled life; he replied that he had tried to carry on as best as possible, and as openly as possible. 694 While this may be the way he saw his past, the record also suggests he acted in ways that would variously pique the interest of security authorities, and add to the understanding he was a covert operative of considerable magnitude. Lockwood was not a guileless player, and did contribute to his ‘diabolism’. As was seen in the previous chapter, Australian security services had taken a special interest in Lockwood from 1940 onwards, especially MI. He had 692 Phillip Deery, “The Sickle and the Scythe: Jack Blake and Communist Party ‘Consolidation’, 1949-56”, Labour History, Number 80, May 2001, pp. 215-223. 693 Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals, 1920-1960, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, 1993, pp. 4-5. 694 Lockwood interview with author, Bowral, 26-27 September, 1984. 268 been identified as a “potential danger”, and his abilities reckoned to be above and beyond those of “the usual labour enthusiast”. Security authorities also noted his abilities to variously thwart and frustrate surveillance operations targeting him. ASIO was created in 1949 by the Chifley Labor government, under the supervision of British intelligence, to protect joint defence secrets; it was placed under civilian control. In 1950, following the election of the conservative Menzies government, ASIO came under the influence and control of former MI personnel. In what McKnight metaphorically terms a “military coup”, institutionally civilian control and police methodologies were replaced by a military culture and a ‘war’ approach to combating communism, accompanied by 17 resignations, and 63 recruitments. 695 The surveillance of Lockwood intensified, and material from previous monitoring operations became part of his ASIO file. The surveillance and monitoring of Lockwood continued long after he left the CPA in 1969. 696 During the war, and subsequently, Lockwood’s writings were of great interest to security authorities. These were collected, initially sporadically, then assiduously following the creation of ASIO. His prolific output, some 44 items in Tribune in 1949 alone, eventually necessitated the dossier inclusion of selected items, and the bibliographic listing of the rest. Indeed, post-war, surveillance of Lockwood intensified generally. For example, in June 1947, at a small-town meeting he addressed in Tatura, in rural Victoria, as part of a speaking tour, over a third of the audience comprised various security interests. 697 It was during this rural speaking tour that Lockwood was established in the eyes of security authorities as a direct tool of Moscow. Lockwood’s theme 695 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 38-42; Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 315. 696 During research for this study, I examined ASIO files to the end of 1981; by then well into his second decade as an ex-communist, the ageing Lockwood was still the object of security interest. 697 NAA: A6119, 40, folios 6-7. 269 in this instance was the need to oppose post-war dismantling of Empire Preference for Australian industry, particularly primary produce, something he, the CPA, and sections of the trade union movement, argued threatened Australian producers to the benefit of America. The CIS deputy director, referencing an article from the anti-communist Movement newspaper News Weekly (25 June 1947), which claimed Moscow was about to launch a “Hate America Campaign”, stated that Lockwood’s anti-American comments during this tour heralded the implementation of this Soviet policy. 698 This sort of intelligence analysis and imputation of motive linking Lockwood directly to Moscow, continued under ASIO. The use of rumour and gossip to ‘understand’ Lockwood, had been established earlier by MI. In April 1941, an anonymous informant provided biographical data: Lockwood was in Asia in 1931 with “Douglas Wilker (sic)”, and in Singapore “got into trouble with either Navy or Army-not certain which”. “Wilker” was Lockwood’s Herald journalist compatriot Douglas Wilkie; in 1931 the two had just met, Lockwood learning the ropes on the Herald in Melbourne, and not long out of his Natimuk home-town. Lockwood came to be critical, as we have seen, of Singapore’s defences and imperial attitudes when he was in Asia from 1935 onwards, and variously made these known in regular journalistic and intellectual outlets. As for “trouble”, that is a slippery term. Regardless, the MI false ‘biographical’ background became part of Lockwood’s ASIO dossier. 699 Right-wing journalist Frank Browne’s insider newsletter Things I Hear provided security authorities with grist. Browne and Lockwood were journalistic antagonists; they had dramatically clashed on matters within the AJA, and Browne was the subject of scathing personal and political material in Document J. Prior to the departure of Lockwood for Europe in 1948, to represent the CPA abroad, Browne’s newsletter told readers Lockwood was going to the Cominform to “load up with orders for the Comms out here, 698 Ibid., folio 92. 699 Ibid., folio 28. 270 including a detailed sabotage plan”. This item eventually found its way into Lockwood’s ASIO dossier. A later, and false, report (July 1950), had Lockwood accepting a position with TASS in London. Later, another Frank Browne extract, dated 31 July 1952, but placed as the lead item for the ASIO dossier opening 1954, the Petrov year, described Lockwood as a “Communist propagandist and traitor”. When the anti-communist MHR W. C. Wentworth, also the subject of scathing and possibly legally actionable material in Document J, wrote to Prime Minister Menzies in 1953, claiming that an article by Lockwood in the February 1953 issue of Communist Review presaged a communist plan to sabotage “vital mineral developments”, his letter ended up in Lockwood’s dossier. The article was an informative and detailed account of Australia’s deposits of rare minerals, and their strategic importance for American weapons development. There was not a hint of sabotage in it. 700 A variety of techniques were employed during the Cold War surveillance of Lockwood: photographic surveillance, still and cine; telegraphic intercepts; physical surveillance. Of particular interest after December 1949, when Canberra was added to Lockwood’s beat as a journalist, were his Canberra comings and goings, his places of residence, his Canberra associates, and generally his activities and habits in the national capital. 701 The general sense of crowding this surveillance programme engendered in Lockwood, led to him taking counter-surveillance tactics. In these we see his professionalism as a clandestine operator at work. In one revealing episode in November 1954, during the Petrov inquiry, Lockwood was under surveillance at Sydney airport. According to a security report, wise after the 700 This paragraph has drawn on NAA: A6119, 40, folio 107; NAA: A6119, 41, folio 86; NAA: A6119, 1711, folios 92-95; NAA: A6119, 1712, folio 2. On Frank Browne as an ‘insider’ commentator and journalist, see Andrew Moore, Mr. Big of Bankstown: The Scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne Affair, UWA Publishing, Crawley, WA, 2011. For Lockwood’s ‘sabotage’ article, Rupert Lockwood, “Minerals for Hell Bombs or Progress?”, Communist Review, Number 134, February 1953, pp. 60-64. 701 NAA: A6119, 41, folios 47-48. 271 event, he went into an airport toilet while security officers had him staked out, and changed clothes with a prearranged other person, a prominent trade unionist, emerging disguised and undetected, travelling to Melbourne using the unionist’s ticket. 702 As was seen in Chapter 5, Lockwood was an experienced underground operator. Conceivably, this sort of countersurveillance action could only have confirmed for security authorities, the dangerous nature of Lockwood, and perhaps indicated to them that somewhere along the line he had had professional clandestine training. Certainly, this sort of action demonstrates too that Lockwood was not a simple victim, without agency, in the world of the clandestine. As was the case during the war, Lockwood’s speeches and talks during the Cold War were of considerable security interest. What he said was consistently added to his ASIO dossier. A bonus here were the audiences he attracted, and ASIO monitored these, taking note of who attended, the known communists, and the sympathisers. Of particular interest, were the ‘unfamiliar’ faces, people who listened intently or who stayed behind to chat or purchase a Lockwood pamphlet. The main method used to identify people was by tracing car and motorbike numberplates details. Lockwood’s attendance at ‘cottage’ meetings, though involving small audiences, also produced data for ASIO, the comprehensiveness of reports suggesting the significant presence of ASIO informants at these, which is understandable, since they were also used as recruiting meetings and not everyone present was necessarily a paid up CPA member. 703 During 1954 and 1955, the surveillance of Lockwood intensified. His family background was traced to its Natimuk roots; step-brother, journalist Douglas Lockwood, who covered the dramatic defection of Evdokia Petrov in Darwin for the Murdoch and world press, was briefly under surveillance due to his close relationship with his brother. For a nineteen day period during June-July 1954, terminating a few before Lockwood made his first 702 NAA: A6119, 1715, folio 64. 703 Cahill, “Spooks”, p. 8. 272 appearance before the Royal Commission, a standing phone tap was placed on the Sydney office of the WWF, Lockwood’s place of employment. Old CIB/MI materials regarding Lockwood’s ‘disloyalties’ were resurrected. When the Cold War and the earlier materials became one, an image of habitual disloyalty, and of having Soviet connections, was constructed. 704 Post-Petrov, surveillance continued. ASIO became aware, correctly as will be explained later, that Lockwood was critical of the CPA and part of the opposition within the party. It noted Frank Browne’s forecast (Things I Hear, 21 June 1956) that Lockwood “would defect and sell the Herald his story”, and the suggestion that party comrades were trying to arrange “an accident for him”. 705 The following year ASIO acted upon information indicating Lockwood was numbered amongst CPA dissenters, and initiated what seems to have been an attempt to recruit him--as Lockwood believed, to turn him into an informer. On 2 April 1957, two officers approached Lockwood in a Sydney street and tried to fan flames of discontent; they said the CPA was “withholding information from him”, that his position in the party “was now particularly shaky (and) that he appeared to be ‘on the way out’”. Lockwood refused to bite, responding “Well gentlemen, I must go”, and doffing his hat in mock salute, hopped on a passing bus. 706 By 9 February 1959, Lockwood’s young teenage daughters had become the subject of ASIO surveillance. The state of their political awareness was in question. As members of a local community youth-club, ASIO wanted to know if the children were promoting communist politics. ASIO followed and monitored them, reporting the club had a picture of the Queen on the wall, that the girls were free of politics, and that Lockwood picked them up after club meetings. 707 704 Ibid., p. 9. 705 NAA: A6119, 1715, folios 172, 175. 706 NAA: A6119, 1716, folios 35-37. 707 Ibid., folio 150. 273 And so the surveillance of Lockwood continued, his file active long after he ceased to be a member of the CPA. The last ASIO file consulted during the course of this study of Lockwood, under the provisos of the 30-year Rule, was Volume 14, covering the period 1971-1981. During this time Lockwood was a non-communist, but still a socialist. He was working as he always had, as a journalist, editing the Maritime Worker. He was variously engaged in literary activities, and freely granting researchers and journalists the benefits of his lifetime experiences. 708 Overall, the collective efforts of the CIB, CIS, MI, and ASIO created an “incriminating biography” of Lockwood. Via a reductionist process, Rupert Lockwood emerged from this as a “communist journalist”, world traveller, a trouble maker at large. He was well-educated, above the ordinary run of the mill leftist, a prolific publicist and speaker of note. Variously clever, cunning, hostile, he was not an easy quarry. Since 1947 at least, he had been at the bidding of Moscow, and of traitorous potential/actuality before the Petrov business, probably closely linked to some Soviet agency, the Cominform, TASS, and all that went with this. He was “very definitely” the “potential danger” MI had described him as in 1941. As such, he arguably, and understandably, had to be neutralised. The actions of Lockwood under surveillance also need to be seen from his perspective. He was a prominent member of a political party that had been variously banned and threatened with banning. At times, fellow members had been imprisoned. It was a political party that was the subject of hysterical and inflammatory media coverage and government statements. Commonwealth and State laws had, over time, been creatively used against it in lieu of banning it. According to his sources, Lockwood understood the Menzies government had plans to intern communists and suspected communists given the opportunity. Lockwood under surveillance was a journalist earning his living, an activist working for a cause, and a person very much aware of the dangers that threatened. He acted accordingly. 708 “Lockwood, Rupert Ernest, Volume 14, 1971-1981”, NAA: A6119, 3579. 274 While there were arguably victims---his wife, but more so his children---in many ways he was not; rather, he was a participant player with a measure of agency. DOCUMENT J. With the failure of the Skandon ambush, and Clayton and the CPA alerted, ASIO conducted a long running counter-intelligence operation in its bid to crack ‘The Case’. This operation was highly successful, engineering a defection and the theft of confidential Soviet papers. However, instead of treating the results of the operation in a covert way, keeping Soviet authorities in doubt, and broadening counter-intelligence possibilities nationally, perhaps internationally, the decision was made to turn the operation into domestic political theatre. Historians still debate the reasons why. 709 On the evening of 13 April 1954, Prime Minister Menzies, having called a new Federal election earlier that month, told a stunned House of Representatives that the Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, Vladimir Petrov, had defected to Australia. The Government had delayed announcing the election, arguably manipulating its timing to coincide with news of the defection. 710 Seven days after Petrov defected, his wife, Evdokia, dramatically joined him in an emotional and highly publicised defection in Darwin. According to Menzies, proof of the existence of a Soviet spy-ring operating in Australia would ensue. Parliament approved the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Australia. The Petrovs were Soviet intelligence officers. Vladimir Petrov was soon due back home, his Australian posting at an end. During his Australia posting, he had had a troublesome relationship with his Moscow superiors. 709 The point about the ASIO and the Government not chosing to keep the Soviet Union in doubt and in the dark, is made by Whitton, Trial by Voodoo, p. 246. 710 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 60. 275 The whole world of Soviet intelligence was in turmoil following the deposing and execution of Soviet spy chief Beria in 1953. While in Australia, Petrov had enjoyed a heady life style, and formed attachments that were difficult to leave behind. Defection must have seemed an attractive option with money, housing and security in the offing, as opposed to the uncertainties and insecurities probably awaiting his return. 711 In defecting, Petrov brought with him confidential intelligence related documents, including the English-language materials that became known during the Royal Commission On Espionage, 1954-1955, as Exhibit J, more popularly known as Document J. The politics, timing, and the context of the Petrov defection in the Australian Cold War surveillance of Soviet activity in Australia, have all been subjects of much scholarly analysis. 712 These aspects do not concern me here; what does, is Lockwood’s association, and involvement, with Document J. Post-war, Lockwood continued his fraternal role with TASS journalists (see Chapter 5), including with the third TASS representative to have served in Sydney, Viktor Antonov. This ongoing relationship earned him the codename VORON in Soviet communications between Canberra and Moscow, and vice-versa, along with more than 40 other Australian residents who had been similarly allocated Soviet code-names. As the Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage, 22nd August 1955, (RRCE) noted, the allocation of a code-name was often done without the knowledge of the ‘coded’ 711 For the impact of the Beria purge on the Soviet intelligence world, and on the Petrovs in particular, see Manne, The Petrov Affair, pp. 27-36. 712 The three critical ‘recent’ studies in chronological order are Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair (1987), David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and Their Secrets (1994), and Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes (1998). These studies had access to archival materials and sources not previously available to researchers. The Ball/Horner study was able to draw on the Venona decrypts released by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1995 onwards which included decrypts of Soviet intelligence cables between Moscow and Canberra, 1943 and subsequently. 276 person, and could not necessarily be taken as indicating that person was “a recruited agent”. 713 It was at the behest of Antonov that Lockwood provided the material which later became ‘Exhibit J’ in the Royal Commission on Espionage, 1954-55, the item popularly known as ‘Document J’. 714 According to Robert Manne, Antonov was a career intelligence officer. 715 That may be, but he was also considerably inept. He had poor command of English, was afraid of driving in Australia, was variously shy, timid, and unhappy in his posting, and apparently required detailed instructions from Moscow as to how to conduct himself in his Australia posting. Which led Kruglak to pose the question, “were the TASS correspondents in Australia MVD men impersonating reporters or were they legitimate newsmen drawn into the web of espionage?” 716 Consistently, through to the end of his life, Lockwood explained he had acceded to Antonov’s request for information about Australia, out of pity. As he told De Berg, …I helped this little mouse of a man, Antonov, he is one of the most timid journalists I’ve ever known, poor little Antonov. 717 Lockwood was not the only one to see Antonov this way. Well-connected political journalist and former war correspondent Massey Stanley, who had also fraternised with TASS personnel and had been assigned a coded-name, was also mentioned in the documentation provided by Petrov. Unlike Lockwood, Stanley was treated by the Royal Commission with kid gloves; he described Antonov similarly to Lockwood’s portrayal, saying that he felt 713 RRCE, pp. 38, 116. 714 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 66. 715 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 71. 716 On the ineptness of Antonov, and for the question posed by Kruglak, Two Faces of TASS, pp. 194-196. 717 De Berg, p. 17,464. 277 sorry for Antonov. He was a timid man, and seemed lost. He was a foreigner, a member of my own trade, who seemed to be a timid, rather lost, soul, and I felt a bit sorry for him. 718 Document J was composed by Lockwood in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, over a period of three days in May 1953. References in the text to “clippings available”, “more later”, “quotations will be supplied” and similar notations, suggest parts of the document were written without research materials on hand, and largely from memory. 719 Physically in a state of disrepair, varied use indicated by a variety of markings and underlinings in different coloured pencils and ballpoint pens, the document was a carbon copy, the original sent by the Petrovs to their intelligence masters in Moscow. The document comprised 37 closely-typed pages, running to some 23,000 words. Nearly 250 people were mentioned in the document, either as subjects of comment or as sources of its information. Few of these names were made public by the Royal Commission, but of those that were, three were members of the staff of Dr. Evatt, two of whom were identified as sources of its information. 720 In particular, Antonov was interested in research Lockwood had been doing on American investment in, and economic penetration of, Australia, and suggested the Canberra Embassy as the venue. According to Lockwood, this suited him, as he also wanted to conduct further research in Canberra. Nothing furtive was involved regarding Lockwood’s movements. Beginning in 1949, and on and off during the 1950s, Lockwood was a Tribune correspondent covering Canberra, and was often in the nation’s capital.721 718 RRCE, p. 235. See also “‘No Discredit’ On Journalist Named by Soviet”, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1954, p. 2. 719 Cottle, Brisbane Line, agrees on this, p. 216. The creation of the Document J material is given a fictional treatment in the novel by Andrew Croome, Document Z, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2009, pp. 30-32. 720 The document is found at, and designated, Australian Archives: CA1882, Royal Commission on Espionage; CRS A6202, Exhibits, single letter series, 1954; Exhibit “J”. 721 Cahill, “Spooks”, p. 8. 278 During May1953, he booked into the Kingston Hotel opposite the Embassy, registered under his own name and gave his home address, and used the Embassy’s front door, the latter surely under ASIO surveillance. He left behind a paper-trail Commission investigators later followed with ease.722 According to Lockwood, of the three TASS people he had mixed with, Antonov was the only edgy, nervous one. 723 Document J bears no attribution of authorship; it comprises two large sections, headed in order, JAPANESE INTEREST IN AUSTRALIA, AMERICAN ESPIONAGE IN AUSTRALIA, and one-page headed DR. EVATT. The two lengthy sections are broken by sub-headings. The Royal Commission treated the document as a single Exhibit, its pages numbered consecutively from J-1 to J-37 by one of Windeyer’s juniors; they were not stapled together when received from Petrov. 724 Internal evidence indicates the document was created in sections and lacked the sort of unity indicated by use of the single terms ‘exhibit’/‘document’. There were and are enough inconsistencies/eccentricities in the Document regarding its unity, the original numbering of pages, the use of different typewriters, placement of materials, spelling, and other features, to enable and facilitate claims of forgery. 725 The ‘Japanese Interest’ section opened with the explanation: Resurgence of People’s China means that future Japanese imperialist expansion is likely to be directed toward weaker areas to the south, including New Guinea and Australia. Japanese interest in Australia before the war, from a military point of view, was considerable, and the Japanese had intended to occupy the country. Before the war the Japanese established a considerable espionage network, 722 RRCE, p. 421. 723 p. 262-263 BROWN, de Berg 17465 BOWDEN? P20 ‘TPETROV 20 yrs on’]. 724 Whitlam and Stubbs, Nest of Traitors, pp. 115, 152-153. 725 Ibid., pp. 150-153 for discussion of the inconsistencies. 279 a collaborationist “Japan-Australia Association”, and a quisling “Australia First” Movement. 726 What followed were ten pages of information relating to this theme, a mix of material intelligence operative Ken Cook had passed on to Lockwood, including the allegations relating to Spender (see Chapter 5), and information Lockwood had himself variously gathered as a journalist. There are similarities with some of the material and emphases in this section of Document J, with the 1946 report to Dr. Evatt by intelligence officer Major R. F. B. Wake (see Chapter 5), raising the possibility it too was an unacknowledged source. On page 11 (J-11) the document jumped from the pre-war period to the post-war, and a new subsection headed “Japanese Penetration of Australia Since the Peace Treaty” dealt with what Lockwood saw as a developing economic and strategic relationship between Japan and America following the signing of the treaty of Peace with Japan in 1951. Now an ally of the US, Japan was variously seeking to expand economically in South East Asia and the Pacific, including Australia. On page 12 (J-12), another sub-section “American Activity in North West Australia” began, the link being the presence of Japanese pearling vessels illegally working in Australian waters during the early 1950s, and American familiarity with the areas of West and North-West Australia courtesy of its military operations in the area during WW2, and post-war US monitoring of British atomic bomb tests in the Monte Bello Islands. This sub-section was the remainder of the ‘Japanese’ material, and dealt with American mining and oil searches in the area, and the possibility that some of the American activity in the region was preparatory work of a military kind. The document explained the geo-political suitability of northern Australia as a secure base for American military operations against South East Asia. 726 Document J, p. 1 (J-1). 280 Three pages of carefully listed sources for all of the information contained in the “Japanese interest” section overall followed, numbered consecutively by its author, 1-3 (J-15 to J-17). These included the names of the people who provided information when a person was the source, and not a print source. As McKnight commented, this naming of was a “curious” thing for a journalist to do, since the protection/confidentiality of sources was/is a key tenet of journalism. 727 More so in the case of Lockwood since, as one of the authors of the AJA Code of Ethics, he was one of those primarily responsible for writing the protection and confidentiality of sources into the Code. Even though Document J was created with the intention of confidentially, not publication or public scrutiny, by thus revealing his sources Lockwood arguably breached a key tenet of the ethics and professionalism he had drafted and championed. Overall, the Japanese section was vitriolic, particularly when dealing with the pre-war period and pro-Japan sympathisers/potential collaborators. Of course politics were involved here, and Lockwood was dealing with leaders of the ruling class. But also in play, I believe, was a journalistic sense of frustration and anger. Japan had not invaded Australia; the would-be collaborators never had to show their colours. In the post-war years and into the 1950s, Lockwood, the journalist, saw people he regarded as fifthcolumnists prosper, receive honours, in cases become leaders of the anticommunist cause, insulated by Australia’s complex libel and defamation laws, Cold War politics, and the silence of archives. For a journalist it was a story that could not be told, and a history that had not happened. In part, it was from this anger and frustration, at once journalistic and political, that Document J was born. The second section of Document J, headed “American Espionage in Australia”, was consecutively numbered pages 1-16 by its author (officially J-18 to J-34), and opened with the statements: 727 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 67. 281 All U. S. Government agencies in Australia are, of course, espionage agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency operates extensively in Australia.728 What followed in a gossipy, rambling way, and with an accumulation of detail, was an account of US intelligence gathering activities the author believed he had observed/become aware of as a journalist during, and post, WW2. Particular attention was paid to the venerable American advertising firm J. Walter Thompson in Australia, which, it was claimed, routinely gathered intelligence data regarding Australian economic matters and on the media, as prelude to future U.S. penetration of the Australian economy, and for use in shaping pro-American public opinion in Australia. Australian individuals, public figures, and organisations, including sections of the trade union movement, variously assisting/prepared to assist American interests in Australia, were identified. Beginning at the bottom of page 15 (J-33) of this Section, and taking up the remaining pages of American material, was a sub-section headed “Extra Notes on Various Matters”, in which it was noted: In the Security dossier of Allan Dalziel, one of Dr. Evatt’s Secretaries, is a photograph of Dalziel coming out of the block of flats in which the Tass office is situated in Sydney. 729 Later in the document, this item was sourced to Fergan O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan had been a Sydney Morning Herald journalist, an accredited Canberra press gallery member, and between April 1953 and May 1954, 728 Document J, “American Espionage in Australia”, p.1 (J-18). 729 Allan John Dalziel had joined Evatt’s secretariat in 1940, and since 1945 had been Evatt’s private secretary. In 1947 he was an Australian delegate to the drafting commission of the UN Human Rights Committee. For his account of the Petrov Royal Commission, before which he was called, see Allan Dalziel, Evatt the Enigma, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1967, especially Chapters 9 and 10. Dalziel’s account of Evatt and the Petrov Affair encourage the idea of frame up, forgery, and conspiracy by enemies of Evatt. 282 Evatt’s press secretary. 730 According to McKnight, this item “rocked ASIO”, since it was true, ASIO having bugged the Tass flat/office in 194950. 731 For ASIO, this information indicated the author of Document J had knowledge of security matters that were meant to be confidential and secret, and had in turn passed this on to Soviet authorities. In short, there seemed to be lines of communication from Dr. Evatt’s office to both the CPA and the Soviets. The ‘American’ section completed, there followed the page headed ‘Dr. Evatt’, referenced as J-35 by the Commission. In this it was claimed that Dr. Evatt had been concerned regarding difficulties he had experienced in obtaining a visa to visit the US on his way back from attending the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth ll in 1953, and that it was believed it had taken the personal intervention of Prime Minister Menzies to avoid “an insult to Evatt”. This visa concern had been expressed privately by Evatt in 1953, in a conversation in George Street, Sydney, outside a radio station, with staff members O’Sullivan and Dalziel. 732 J-35 then detailed substantial financial donations to the ALP from prominent business sources: W. S. Robinson of the Broken Hill-Collins House monopoly; refrigerator manufacturer Sir Edward Hallstrom; W. J. Smith, head of the Australian Consolidated Industries group; and newspaper publisher Ezra Norton. Collectively the detail contained in this page, together with the note relating to Dalziel on the previous page, was of an ‘insider’ nature, clearly indicating the author of Document J had close and personal links with Dr. Evatt and/or his office, and inside information had in turn been shared with both the CPA and Soviet authorities. The two final pages of Document J, were numbered 4 and 5 by their author, and J-36 and J-37 by the Commission. In these pages the sources of the 730 Ball and Horner, Breaking the Codes, p. 138. 731 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 67 732 Whitlam and Stubbs, Nest of Traitors, p. 115. 283 ‘American’ and ‘Dr. Evatt’ materials were identified; it was here that Evatt staffers Fergan O’Sullivan and assistant secretary Albert Grundeman were identified as the sources of much of J-35. According to McKnight, Evatt had been cautioned by ASIO Director General Colonel Charles Spry in August 1953 about these staff members, and their indiscrete remarks while “socialising with communists”. 733 In Australian history, Document J has been understood, and/or portrayed, in a number of ways. For security authorities it was a Soviet talent scouting exercise, confirmation/proof that Soviet authorities were actively gathering information about, and leads to, people who might serve as contacts and/or agents for espionage purposes. 734 As has been seen, material in the document indicated the CPA had a line of communication between it and the office of Opposition Leader Dr. Evatt, which in the case of Document J, resulted in confidential information ending up in the possession of Soviet authorities. Because very little of Document J was publicly released at the time, arguably an attempt to protect the reputations of Establishment figures and conservative political figures named and discussed therein, and to avoid any examination of matters raised regarding the Spender and Japan, Spender serving as Australia’s Ambassador to the US when the Petrov Commission was running, the official characterisation of Document J tended to prevail. Counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia 19541955, Victor Windeyer QC, described the document as a “farrago of fact, falsity and filth”. According to the RRCE, this description was ‘apt’. 735 When the Labor Government released the Petrov Papers ahead of the scheduled thirty-year period of secrecy/confidentiality in 1984, Prime Minister Hawke adopted a similar stance, describing Document J as “a very 733 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 58. 734 Ibid., pp. 68-69. 735 RRCE, p. 39. 284 shabby document”. 736 The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised that with the document now in the public domain, it is seen for what it is, “a ludicrous and fantastic concoction of gossip, innuendo, half-truths and untruths”. The shadow Attorney-General at the time was concerned: John Spender, son of Sir Percy Spender, let it be known that if any of the ‘scurrilous’ material in Document J regarding his now ailing father, was repeated, he would sue. 737 Contrary to this reading is one long held by ALP and CPA supporters, and argued in two influential books on the Petrov Affair, The Petrov Conspiracy Unmasked (1957) compiled and edited by W. J. Brown, and Nest of Traitors: The Petrov Affair (1974) by Nicholas Whitlam and John Stubbs. According to this view, Document J was either in part, or in full, a fabrication by Australian intelligence/security interests, a conspiracy intent on variously damaging/destroying the CPA, the ALP, Dr. Evatt. Along with Evatt, Lockwood too was an innocent victim. This conspiracy view originated in arguments advanced by Lockwood and his legal team during the Petrov Royal Commission, Lockwood admitting to the authorship of much of Document J, but emphatically denying authorship of the single page titled “Dr. Evatt” and designated as J-35. Evatt went further, in the process losing his right to appear as counsel for members of his staff who appeared before the Commission, when he issued a press release (12 August 1954) referring to Document J and another, Document H, authored by Evatt staffer and journalist Fergan O’Sullivan, as the Australian equivalent of “the notorious Zinovieff letter or the burning of the Reichstag which ushered in the Hitler regime in 1933”. 738 736 The Age, 25 September 1984, p. 1. 737 “Petrov: A nest of documents”, Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September 1984. For the threat by shadow Attorney-Gerneral Spender to sue, see Cottle, ibid., p. 209. 738 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 69. Evatt, here, was likening the creation of these documents to the well-known processes behind two of modern history’s most notorious fabrications. 285 As an understanding of history, the view that Document J was some sort of forgery, the creation of a conspiracy, has become untenable. In 1994 journalist and historian David McKnight claimed he had “established beyond the shadow of a doubt that Document J was wholly Lockwood’s work”, an assertion based on a confidential unnamed source. While McKnight could be challenged on this, vulnerable due to a lot riding on one unnamed source, the matter was laid to rest when Desmond Ball interviewed Lockwood in 1995 and Lockwood admitted full authorship of Document J. 739 For historians, the question is why did Lockwood variously lie, dissemble, prevaricate regarding his authorship of Document J? This is a question I will later address. In 2002, historian Drew Cottle demonstrated a third way of understanding Document J in his book The Brisbane Line-A Reappraisal. In this he interrogated the first part of Document J relating to pro-Japanese interests in Australia prior to World War 2, with the view of establishing whether or not there was any substance to the allegations and claims made. Before any analysis of the document can take place, he argued, it had to be contextualised. It was written, Cottle explained, at a critical juncture in the Cold War. The Australian Communist Party had avoided legal and political elimination by the slenderest margin in a 1951 referendum. Numerous communists had been expelled from the public service, private enterprise and the RSL by official decree or on the advice of ASIO. A right-wing union official had claimed that communists had attempted to drown him in Sydney Harbour. There had been an attempt by ASIO and Catholic Action to frame Ken Miller, a prominent Melbourne communist, on a charge of child molestation. The radio and press maintained a constant barrage of anti-communist propaganda. Hollywood horror films presented a displaced communism as the alien other. Australian troops had fought in the Korean War under a United Nations banner sponsored by the United States to prevent the ‘loss’ of Korea to 739 McKnight, Ibid., p. 68, and related Endnote 14, p. 308; Ball, “I believe Lockwood lied”. 286 communism. As the forward base area of the American forces in the Korean conflict, Japan was no longer the World War ll enemy. According to Cottle, Document J had to be seen as an expression of “the ideological intensity of the embattled and malignant fifties”. 740 In his study, Cottle established historical corroboration for some of Lockwood’s claims/allegations, albeit “scattered and scant”, and the lack of archival/documentary support for others, especially with regard to the Cook/Lockwood allegations regarding Spender. Overall, he concluded, Document J provided historians with “clues and starting points” for investigation and inquiry. For Cottle, behind the accusatory style of Document J and its accumulation of detail, was an attempt by its author to “present a particular truth”, the Japanese and American sections comprising a Cold War “indictment of imperialism’s Australian servants”. According to Cottle, Document J sought to demonstrate the argument that Australian compradors would seek to sell Australia off to America just as, in 1942, their counterparts may have been willing to be co-operators in a Japanese-occupied Australia. 741 I contend there is another way of regarding Document J; as a genre of journalism. Physically, the document shares characteristics with other literary materials in MS 10121, particularly its gossipy, personalised, note style, and crossings out by x’s in the text; this is the way Lockwood made notes to himself prior to the production of an extended piece of writing. McKnight, a journalist prior to entering academia, described Document J as a form of journalism, as a “gossipy and libellous ramble” and as “hot stuff”. 742 740 Cottle, Brisbane Line, p. 215. 741 Ibid., for the conclusions of Cottle, pp. 212-221; for the quote, p. 214. 742 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 66. 287 In an Appendix to his Trial by Voodoo, doyen Australian investigative journalist Evan Whitton discussed what he termed the “joke approach to journalism”, referring to the use of “anecdotes plus description, detail, a turn of phrase, dialogue, tone, rhythm, drollery, comment, analysis. Anything in short, that might interest and/or amuse readers while adding to the sum of their knowledge”. In Whitton’s account, the ‘joke approach’ is evident in its rawest form wherever journalists gather to relax and meet and drink, sharing stories and information, a process of exchange that liberates material more revealing, interesting and informative than that which actually makes it into print for public consumption. As Whitton lamented, journalists save, “or are obliged to save, their most illuminating anecdotes for the Saloon Bar”, which is “of little help to readers, historians or biographers”. In their work journalists variously encounter material that they cannot use, because it cannot be fully tested so far as its veracity is concerned, which they believe or know to be true, which cannot be published because it will threaten/expose a source, or because of their employer’s political sensitivities/allegiances, maybe because of the legalities involved. Arguably Document J, with its libel, its rambling, its gossip, was in the ‘joke approach’ genre; not a holding back of detail, but an outpouring, very much a “first rough draft of history”, as journalism has been described. 743 So far as espionage and Document J was/is concerned, the point McKnight made is relevant and apposite: neither then or now, did Document J constitute espionage, despite the hysteria of the 1950s which construed the document as such. But, as McKnight also pointed out, in creating the materials that became Document J, particularly in naming sources, 743 Whitton, Trial by Voodoo, pp. 332-335. Whitton uses the “first draft of history” description in his discussion, and the phrase is generally attributed to Philip L. Graham, publisher of the The Washington Post, 1946-1961. But as Jack Shafer has explained, the description has a longer history. See Jack Shafer, “Who Said It First?”, Slate, 30 August 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2010/08/who_said_it_first.html , accessed 3 November 2011. 288 Lockwood arguably engaged in an act of compromise, which may have been part of Soviet machinations to recruit him and/or others. 744 Soviet intelligence did target journalists. According to Haynes et al., writing in relation to American journalism, but applicable here, journalists were cultivated by Soviet intelligence/espionage interests, in part for their access to inside information and sources on politics and policy, insights into personalities, and confidential and non-public information that never made it into published stories. By profession journalists ask questions and probe: what might seem intrusive or suspect if done by anyone else is their normal modus operandi. Consequently, the KGB often used journalists as talent scouts for persons who did have access to sensitive information and found them useful in gathering background information for evaluating candidates for recruitment.745 If Lockwood was caught up in a Soviet intelligence grooming process, he never acknowledged it. He always maintained he was a journalist acting in a fraternal/supportive way. As pointed out in Chapter 5, at no stage in his dealings with Russians was an enemy power involved, and as will be seen, the Royal Commission on Espionage determined no crime had been committed. If Lockwood was in mind by the Soviets as a potential intelligence recruit, they were not alone. As we will see, ASIO too made a later bid for his services. As for Lockwood, he pondered the Petrov defection and its fallout throughout the rest of his life, in a gnawing sort of way, drafting and redrafting elaborate explanations regarding Petrov and associated events, coming to believe that the Soviet spy had betrayed the USSR long before he was posted to Australia and was actually in the service of British intelligence. The truth or otherwise of this is unimportant here; rather its indication of deep puzzlement, and lifelong preoccupation, is the 744 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 68-69. 745 John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009, pp. 145-146. 289 point. It might be noted, however, the Petrov affair continues to invite imaginative analysis. 746 LOCKWOOD AND THE ROYAL COMMISSION The Royal Commission on Espionage was partisan political theatre. Document J contained allegations of espionage conducted in Australia postwar by America, and pre-war by Japan. If Document J and some of its contents could be used to construe, as it was, espionage activity by Lockwood in the service of the USSR, so too could it construe espionage activity by Sir Stephen Spender in the service of pre-war Japan. Questioned by journalists in 1984 regarding this failure to investigate Spender, Michael Thwaites, who supervised the defection of Vladimir Petrov as head of counter-intelligence for ASIO, and later ghosted the Petrovs’ memoir, explained that line of investigation did not relate to counterespionage matters in the 1950s. According to Thwaites, the real job was seen as the hunting down of Soviet espionage; Japan’s enmity was regarded as a thing of the past, and the concern was “the enormous band of expanding communist power”. 747 The Commission was conceived by its reputed proposer, Solicitor-General Professor Kenneth Bailey, as a propaganda vehicle, “a fruitful means of propaganda”, and it became a major media event. 748 For communists and 746 Letter, Lockwood to the author, undated, received 25 October 1993; drafts of Lockwood’s Petrov musings in possession of the author. For an example of imaginative Petrov analysis from a reputable scholar, see Frank Cain, ASIO: An Unofficial History, Spectrum Publications, Richmond, 1994, pp. 132-134. 747 Michael Thwaites (1915-2005): Rhodes Scholar; poet; intellectual; adherent of the Protestant, conservative, and anti-communist, Moral Rearmament movement. For his account of the Petrov Affair, see Michael Thwaites, Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs, William Collins, Sydney, 1980. For the Petrovs’ memoir, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Empire of Fear, Andre Deutsch, London, 1956. For the 1984 response by Thwaites to journalists, Amanda Buckley, “Former ASIO chief says no apology needed in spy claim”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September 1984, p. 7. 748 Manne, The Petrov Affair, p. 47. 290 leftists of various hues amongst the 119 witnesses examined, the Commission was arguably a stacked deck. The Menzies Government went to considerable lengths to ensure a positive media response. Media interests competed for rights to Petrov’s life story, as did Ken G. Hall of the Cinesound newsreel organisation. Applications were dealt with by ASIO chief Colonel Spry. The Secretary to the Commission, Kenneth Herde, sought to keep the media onside, going to considerable lengths to ensure the provision of telephones and work spaces for the large entourage of national and international journalists and radio stations involved. 749 Counsel assisting the Commission, Victor Windeyer, QC, and Commissioner the Honourable Mr. Justice W. F. L. Owen, had both been members of the anticommunist Old Guard, one of the paramilitary organisations that had flirted with fascism during the 1930s. 750 As the examination by Hickman of private correspondence demonstrated, during the prosecution of his Commission counsel role Windeyer drew strength from confidante M. H. Ellis, a leading and influential anti-communist journalist and intellectual. Ellis was also one of the people critically discussed in Document J. Hickman’s examination also established Ellis had been informed confidentially by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. A. G. Cameron, four days before the Petrov defection was announced, that “a deal is done at last” and “certain civil servants, Bert’s (Dr. Evatt’s) staff” and “Uni people” and “trade union bosses” would be victims. 751 749 Miles Hickman, “The Press and Petrov. A Study of the Popular Press Coverage of the Petrov Affair, 1954-55’, BA (Honours) Thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1991, pp. 35-40. 750 Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1989, pp. 78, 204, 222. 751 Hickman, “The Press and Petrov”, pp. 46-55. For Ellis in Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, p. 3 (J-3). For Ellis, see B. H. Fletcher, “Ellis, Malcolm Henry (18901969)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ellis-malcolm-henry10116/text17855, accessed 26 November 2012. 291 At his first appearance during the Melbourne session of the Commission, Lockwood was warmly embraced by his colleague from the 1930s, doyen Melbourne Herald journalist Douglas Wilkie, a much appreciated and rare demonstration of collegial public support. Press and radio accounts and commentaries tended to portray Lockwood negatively, headlines referring to him as a “Soviet Agent”. Journalist Ronald McKie, described by Robert Manne as “the most perceptive journalist to report the Commission”, portrayed Lockwood as being like “an old woman”; his nose was big, his upper lip “too big”, his eyes “too close together”, his mouth “rather flabby”, his face “colourless” and “sick looking”. Manne did not record there was long standing personal and professional antagonism between the two journalists. 752 From the outset, Lockwood engaged with the Royal Commission into Espionage in a manner that combined combat with contempt, careful not to cross the line and act in a way that could be construed as ‘contempt’ in a legal sense. Throughout this engagement he had the assistance of a brilliant legal team of communist lawyers led by the head of the CPA in Victoria, barrister Ted Hill, and including lawyers Ted Laurie, Cedric Ralph, and future internationally recognised academic expert on Indonesian affairs, Rex Mortimer. Before he was called before the Commission, and before being publicly linked to the Document on 30 June 1954, Lockwood went on the offensive. Recognising his Antonov material in the opening comments by counsel assisting the Commission, Victor Windeyer Q.C., as reported in the press on 19 May 1954, Lockwood issued a twenty-two page roneod pamphlet, claiming to be printed and published from his home address. Windeyer had referred to a “Document J” and the circumstances of its creation, and argued it was so offensive, it should never be “published or disclosed”. While Lockwood was not mentioned by name, it was obvious he would be named 752 Lockwood interview with author, 26-27 September 1984. 292 in association with the Document. Windeyer accused the anonymous author of “beastly cowardice”, irrationality, slander, maliciousness. 753 Lockwood titled this pamphlet What Is In Document J, and issued it under his own name. The title was not a question, but an emphatic statement of challenge, minus a question-mark. The pamphlet was an edited version of the contents of Document J, close to the original, but rewritten, formal in style, and minus parts that could be legally actionable, and minus J-35. The Commission in turn banned this version. Whereupon a printed version appeared, anonymously, published from a fictitious Canberra address, publication claimed by a group of anonymous citizens, also claiming no links with Lockwood, but in reality the work of the CPA. In both forms the pamphlet became a best-seller, some copies reportedly changing hands at ten-pounds a copy. For some in the intelligence/security community the pamphlet was personally disturbing. Lockwood alleged intelligence activities prior to and during WW2 in which “secret police” had engaged the services of a “shady lady”, described by Lockwood as “beautiful, irresponsible, vicious and slanderous” to inform on labour movement activists. Sexual improprieties were imputed, and the officer in charge of the operation, named. This ‘outing’ raised security concerns regarding defamation, and the need to protect service integrity so far as the public record was concerned. The officer named in 1954, held a high position within ASIO. 754 Lockwood made no attempt to hide his politics in What Is In Document J, declaring, I am certainly not a “Soviet agent” or “spy”. I have known and admired Soviet citizens, as well as democratic citizens in other lands, and have 753 See for example, “Australian Prepared Slanderous Document in Petrov’s Papers”, The Canberra Times, 19 May 1954, p. 7. 754 For the “shady lady” story, What Is In Document J, print version, pp. 8-9; for the security community’s concern, NAA: BP242/1, Q51424, pp. 43-56, digital version (accessed 13 May 2013). 293 always been prepared to give what little help I can to the cause of international understanding. I do believe the Soviet Union is showing the way forward to mankind. I have seen life in the Soviet Union. I do not believe the Soviet Union intends to export its social system. “The export of revolution is nonsense”, Stalin said. But, on the other hand, I believe that the most patriotic cause for which an Australian can work is an Australia from which exploitation, want, tyranny and war have been abolished—the kind of society the Soviet Union is achieving. I make no apologies for these beliefs, with which many may disagree, as is their right. 755 Pre-empting future damage to people other than himself when Document J was subjected to Commission examination/interrogation, he apologised thus: When the document was stolen by Petrov, it was not merely for use against the author and against Petrov’s own country, but against people whose names were given as information sources. To those people I owe an apology for any possible embarrassment that may follow Petrov’s action in supplying their names to the Menzies Government’s Security Police. 756 This pamphlet was prepared by Lockwood, underground, where legal tactics were also planned. In the weeks before the first sessions of the Commission commenced in Melbourne in June 1954, Lockwood left his home and family, and went into hiding on CPA orders, protected by waterfront unionists.757 He just ‘disappeared’, his wife not told of his whereabouts or 755 Rupert Lockwood, What is In Document J, twenty-two page roneod pamphlet printed and published from Lockwood’s home of the time, 18 Fowler Road, Merrylands, N.S.W., and dated 19 June 1954. The title of both the roneod, and the printed, versions of this pamphlet does not have a question mark at the end of the title. Lockwood was not asking ‘What was in Document J’ as a question, but telling what was in it. Copies of both versions of the pamphlet are in the author’s possession. The quotes used here both appear on page 2 of the pamphlet, irrespective of pamphlet format. 756 Ibid., p. 2 757 The world of maritime work, whether seagoing or shore based, did include workers who knew how to handle themselves in physically violent situations. For a vivid glimpse of this 294 much at all, except he was in safe hands, this on the basis the less one knew, the less one could be made to reveal. The wartime underground apparatus Clayton had rebuilt beginning in 1948, in preparation for Cold War exigencies, was used. Lockwood’s three children in particular, fretted and were confused. 758 Loopholes in the legislation establishing the Commission failed to adequately protect proceedings from defamation action, or to provide punishment for subpoenaed witnesses who failed to answer questions. At the outset, Lockwood refused to answer Commission questions. Acting on his behalf, the CPA initiated defamation action against Windeyer for comments made in his opening address in Canberra, and challenged the validity of the Commission with the issue of a High Court writ. The Government retrospectively redrafted the Act. 759 Compelled to answer, Lockwood variously lied and dissembled in his unwilling Commission appearances. How else to describe responses to questioning that denied full authorship of Document J, which, as has been seen, he did in fact write; his various responses that he was author of parts, but not others; that Document J was only part of a larger amount of material he had provided Antonov; that specifically he did not write J-35; that he did not receive the information on that page from Evatt office personnel, when the likelihood that he did is almost a certainty. Regarding the latter, as we have seen, Lockwood had a relationship with Evatt that went back to before World War 2, and he had long been privy to leaks from Evatt. Lockwood’s skills were such that the formidable adversarial skills of Sir Garfield Barwick were enlisted by the Commission to break him under world in the 1940s and 1950s, see the autobiography of former Australian seaman George Stewart, The Leveller, Creative Research, North Perth, 1979. 758 For the reactivation of the underground for the Cold War, see McKnight, Australia’s Spies, pp. 33-34. On Rupert ‘disappearing underground’, Betty Searle NLA interview transcript, pp. 16-18. 759 Manne, The Petrov Affair, pp. 128-129. 295 cross-examination. But “Lockwood would concede nothing, assume nothing and volunteer very little information”. 760 Years later Barwick recalled his frustration at not succeeding in his task. 761 While it cannot be substantiated, only surmised, Barwick may have had a personal interest in Lockwood, beyond the legal challenge he posed. In 1951 Lockwood was widely believed to be the author of an anonymously authored 24-page pamphlet of what would now be termed ‘investigative journalism’. It exposed political, business, and police corruption in NSW, and incidentally raising the spectre of corruption in the ALP. Authored in fact by Lockwood colleague Rex Chiplin, with research contributed by Lockwood, the pamphlet was published on the underground press of the CPA, and became a best-seller. 762 The pamphlet also dealt with the liquor racketeering activities of Douglas Barwick, Garfield’s brother. Along with the 1951 Royal Commission into the liquor industry, the pamphlet dragged the Barwick name through the mud. Barwick biographer David Marr explained how upsetting this was for Garfield, how he regarded the Liquor Commission as an attack upon the family of which he was head, and how he subsequently took “subtle (legal) revenge” on the Commission. Did the pamphlet also put Lockwood in the lawyer’s sites, and the 1954-1955 Royal Commission provide another opportunity for “subtle revenge”? It is a tantalising, unanswerable, historical proposition. I put the question to Barwick’s biographer, Marr, in 1984, and 760 David Marr, Barwick, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1980, p. 117. 761 Ibid., p. 115; Garfield Barwick, A Radical Tory. Garfield Barwick’s Reflections and Recollections, The Federation Press, Sydney, 1955, p. 133. 762 “Peter” and “George”, Facts Behind the Liquor Commission, Dovey Publications, Sydney , 195(1); for Lockwood being the alleged author, Marr, Barwick, p. 101; Lockwood confirmed to me the authorship of the pamphlet, and his contributory role, in an interview, Gosford, 24 June 1992; on the place of the pamphlet in the history of investigative journalism in Australia, David McKnight, “The post war roots of the investigative tradition in Australian journalism”, (1999, 2005), Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and The Culture Wars, website, http://beyondrightandleft.com.au/archives/2005/08/, accessed 14 July 2012. 296 he conceded that Lockwood’s alleged association with the 1951 pamphlet “could not have been absent from his (Garfield’s) mind”. 763 In accounting for Lockwood’s Royal Commission behaviour, I am in accord with McKnight who explained Lockwood’s avoidance of the telling the truth before the Commission in terms of Lockwood’s need to protect Evatt. 764 Lockwood’s document and naming of sources had implicated Evatt; it was incumbent upon Lockwood to minimise the damage. Lockwood had a great deal of respect for Evatt as a civil libertarian, historian, and courageous politician, a respect that grew over time, most fully expressed in a stirring talk he gave in Sydney in 1991 to the Evatt Foundation where his admiration for the man was strikingly evident. 765 But I think there was more to it than this. Lockwood regarded the Commission as yet another repressive foray by the Menzies government against the CPA, what he described as “a very, very political affair”. 766 During the unsuccessful campaign by the Menzies government to ban the CPA in 1950/1951, Lockwood was informed by two senior contacts in the Canberra civil service of government plans to intern “declared” persons in the event of the ban becoming law. 767 In 1954, from Lockwood’s perspective, who knew what the government was intent upon? As a political entity and process, the Commission was to be approached and treated as 763 On Barwick being upset, and “subtle revenge”, Marr, Barwick, pp. 100-101; Letter, David Marr to the author, 12 June 1984. 764 McKnight, Australia’s Spies, p. 68. 765 Lockwood, “Seeing Read…and Darker Colours”, paper given at the Evatt Memorial Foundation Conference, Sydney University Law School, 31 August 1991, NLA: MS 10121, Box 17, Bag 110. 766 De Berg, p. 17,464. 767 Lockwood revealed this inside knowledge and his sources, without naming them, in his Evatt Foundation paper, “Seeing Red”, pp. 13, 17. For details of plans from at least July 1950 onwards, for the internment of people, and the confiscation and sale of CPA assets, see Frank Cain, A.S.I.O. An Unofficial History, Spectrum Publications, Richmond, 1994, p. 98; L. J. Louis, Menzies’ Cold War, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, 2001, pp. 51-52. 297 such. Historian Desmond Ball regarded the legal-ethical question regarding Lockwood’s Commission performance as “Why did Lockwood lie?” For me there is a different question, one of strategic-political import, in which ethics have little part: “Why would you not lie?” Compelled to appear before the Commission, and compelled to answer questions, Lockwood engaged in a combative rearguard action. His creation of the material that formed Document J had helped bring into jeopardy the CPA and comrades he respected, and who respected him. In front of the Commission, therefore, he worked to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Document. Beyond that, I believe there was something else, approaching shame. By naming his sources in Document J, he had acted in a way that violated his own sense of professional ethics; and this was something he arguably found difficult to acknowledge, or accept. Discrediting the authenticity of the Document was a way to deal with the situation. As to why Lockwood allowed the myth of the forged Document J to continue until he was close to death, there is no ready answer. Personally I believe it was a myth too hard to extricate oneself from. As a historian he would have understood the destructive ramifications of Document J on the political career of Dr. Evatt, and its contribution to the Federal ALP’s long wilderness years on the Opposition benches until 1972. As Jack Waterford observed, it is difficult not to see Evatt as “the prime victim of the Petrov affair”. 768 For Lockwood, a person of the Left, all this was difficult to publicly acknowledge. Further, to fully acknowledge and explain his role in the Petrov Affair, and in the creation of Document J, the document itself had to be fully in the public arena, contextualised, and its long gestation from 1930s onwards, understood. As it was, the Document did not become publicly available until 1984, and as we have seen, the old myths on both sides of the ledger, continued. If Lockwood did attempt an admission of truth, it would have to 768 Waterford, “A Labor Myth?”, p. 118. 298 involve more than a press release, more than an interview, more than a piece of journalism. An autobiography was an obvious way to go, and Lockwood did begin to assemble materials for a memoir/autobiography, and was encouraged by Russel Ward to do so. 769 But the project was not carried through; as we will see in Chapters 7 and 8, other books got in the way. Speaking tours Lockwood undertook two gruelling speaking tours during the Commission, despite ongoing press hysteria and fears for his personal safety; again, Clayton’s underground came into play, assisting his movements. 770 There were public meetings, but in the main he addressed what he described as “a few hundred” workplace audiences, industrial workers--seamen, waterside workers, railway workers, miners. The largest audiences were in Sydney at the Domain and in the Leichhardt Stadium where numbers were reckoned between 4000-5000 people. The first tour followed his Melbourne appearances, and focused on the East Coast, taking in Melbourne (where he was cheered by a crowd of 3000), Sydney, Brisbane, and the regional industrial centres in NSW of Newcastle, Wollongong, and Port Kembla. Following his Commission appearances in Sydney, he toured similarly, with the addition of Central Queensland and South Australia. Overall, reception was largely sympathetic as Lockwood explained case intricacies, the politics involved, and peddled the forgery scenario. The exception was in Queensland where there was discord: in Townsville, meatworkers went on strike when Lockwood was not allowed to address them at their works; in Mackay, speaking from the tray of a truck, he was heckled and pelted with eggs and fruit; at a Rockhampton meeting, tipped to be lively and requiring a large police presence, he failed to appear, claiming a “sore throat”, the local press reporting a case of “diplomatic influenza”. From Lockwood’s 769 Russel Ward to Rupert Lockwood, letter, 28 October 1981, NLA: MS 10121, Box 11, Bag 64. 770 Lockwood interview with author, 26-27 September 1984. 299 perspective, the incidents of opposition and violence were suspected as resulting from the involvement of anti-communist organisations. 771 Damage The cumulative human cost on the Lockwoods was considerable. Recalling the time in 1995, Betty Lockwood said that Rupert became stressed, and given to “very bad moods”; the three daughters also became stressed, and the eldest, aged nine, had to have time off from school due to harassment by fellow students, and she became ill. There was no telephone in the house, as the Lockwoods could not afford one. Following the stoning of the house one night, and a broken front window, a live-in waterfront unionist was stationed in the family home until no longer required. Before this precaution, one morning before school, at breakfast, Betty and the girls were confronted in the kitchen by two men, security personnel of some sort in Betty’s estimation, who just walked in. When she demanded they leave, one replied “Don’t talk to us like that, love”. They exited when Betty began to yell and shout, and neighbours came. The CPA insisted she be present during the Sydney sitting of the Commission when Lockwood was being questioned. Press photographs and newsreel footage of the time portray them in company. To play the role of loyal/supportive wife as required by the party, she borrowed a range of modern apparel from female comrades so she could look stylish. At the same time, the pressures of the Commission added to the tensions and fractures in their personal relationship. 772 Health wise it affected Lockwood more than the moods and stress Betty spoke of. Rupert began to drink heavily; there were days when he either 771 For the tours generally, see Brown, The Petrov Conspiracy, pp. 281-282; for the Queensland phase of the second speaking tour, see “The Visit of Rupert Lockwood”, The Central Queensland Herald, 4 November 1954, p. 3. Lockwood also discussed the tours with me, 26-27 September, 1984. 772 Betty Searle NLA interview, pp. 16-19. See also Betty Searle, “An Open Letter to Mrs. Combe”, National Times, 27 May to 2 June 1983, pp. 19-20; “Invisible Victims of McCarthyism in Australia”, Social Alternatives, Volume 7, Issue 3, September 1988, pp. 61-63. 300 could not, or would not get out of bed. During 1956, when Lockwood was involved, as will be seen, in supporting the Khrushchev “secret speech” within the party, the pressures caught up with him, and he had a nervous collapse/breakdown. His appointments were cancelled immediately, and the matter handled quietly within the party, with Lockwood apparently not always a co-operative patient. His health was tracked by ASIO, and according to its records, the problem lasted for much of the second half of 1956; it correctly identified the problem, noting “nervous exhaustion” was involved. The subsequent recovery of Lockwood from this health crisis led to the scaling back of his public activism, and the increase of his independent scholarly work. 773 A LONG TIME GOING According to Lockwood, disenchantment with the party, and the party with him, was a long term process. There were obviously tensions as the 1940s ended and the new decade began, hence the loss of the Tribune job. To journalist Rod Wise he recalled that during Stalin’s last years in power, “doubts were entering my mind, both about the conduct of the Soviet Union and the quality of party leadership in Australia. But doubts about the historical necessity of the party?--I had none”. 774 He was no more specific than that. Bob Walshe, one of the key young intellectuals responsible for the ‘illegal’ distribution of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” within the CPA, the speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 which denounced and critiqued Stalin and his methods, 773 Rupert Lockwood did not refer to this health issue in any interview I had with him, nor in any private conversation to which I was privy. Betty Lockwood refers to it in her NLA interview (1995), but only in part. ASIO’s monitoring of Lockwood’s health is in NAA: A6119, 1715, folios 185-188. I cross-checked and confirmed this matter with Penny Lockwood, eldest Lockwood daughter, in three emails, Penny Lockwood to author, 28 September 2012, 7 February 2013, 11 February 2013. Frank Moorhouse describes the similar ‘collapse’ of a CPA organiser at this time following his expulsion from the party, in his novel Cold Light, Vintage Books, North Sydney, 2011, pp. 516-531. 774 Wise, “Reflections”, p. 38. 301 recalled Lockwood as an internal critic of the party. According to Walshe, who was subsequently expelled for his ‘illegal’ action, Lockwood advised him to try to stay within the party and change it from within. Research by Calkin supports Walshe’s claim; she found evidence of Lockwood discussing the issues surrounding the 1956 ‘secret speech’, of him attempting to facilitate open discussion of it within the party, when others sought to variously close down, prevent, control discussion, and counselling a member in a similar way as that recalled by Walshe. 775 Certainly by 1956/1957, as was seen above, both ASIO and right-wing journalist Frank Browne believed Lockwood was not happy in the CPA, and either possibly, or on, the way out. However, Lockwood stayed on. In 1964 there was a clear indication of his dissatisfaction with the CPA; intellectual issues were involved. Over two weeks in Tribune in June he critiqued the party leadership over its support for, endorsement and publication of, the book by E. W. Campbell, The 60 Rich Families Who Own Australia. This lengthy study (287-pages) discussed and analysed Australian capitalism in terms of the sixty families who provided the directors of 230 Australian companies, including banks, industrial enterprises, and retail chains. Campbell was a member of the Central Committee of the CPA. Lockwood took exception in Tribune to the simplicity of Campbell’s analysis, arguing Australian capitalism was more complex than this, that it failed as both economic analysis and as Marxism. 775 R. D. Walshe, letter to author, 22 November 1984. On Walshe see Alan Barcan, Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2002, pp. 192-194, 303-304; Rachael Calkin, “‘Cracking the Stalinist Crust’- The Impact of 1956 on the Communist Party of Australia”, MA Thesis, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Education, & Human Development, Victoria University, 2006, pp. 134, 136. On the CPA and the Secret Speech, see Phillip Deery and Rachael Calkin, “‘We All Make Mistakes’: The Communist Party of Australia and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, 1956”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 54, Number 1, 2008, pp.76-77. For the recollections and reflections of R. D. Walshe on 1956, see Bob Walshe, “1956, that ‘Secret Speech’, and Reverberations in Sydney”, The Hummer, Volume 3, Number 10, Winter 2003, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/vol-3-no-10/secret-speech/, accessed 20 August 2012. 302 Lockwood took issue with the methodology involved in compiling the list, and questioned the interpretation of “rich”. In terms of analysis, Lockwood argued Campbell did not pay sufficient attention to the role of foreign capital in Australia, to takeovers, to investments in oil, shipping, chemicals, the automobile industry, strategic minerals, shipping. In short, by focusing on local ‘ownership’, it stood to blind people and CPA policy/tactics to the ways in which external capital and foreign monopolies worked against Australia’s nationalist interests, the limited analysis offered by Campbell actually serving to distract and immobilise the left. Having done a great deal of research and writing in this area, Lockwood was detailed, pointed, savage, and overall, personal. While openly done, it was not a performance that would have endeared him to the CPA leadership. 776 Following his return from the USSR posting, Lockwood had had enough. The destruction by Soviet intervention in 1968 of the Czech attempt to peacefully build a new model of socialism, was the last straw. His Soviet experiences since 1965 were also major contributing factors. While he had enjoyed his time in the USSR, hosted as a foreign journalist, he had also seen the downside of Soviet life up close and personal. The bureaucracy, censorship, constraints, all railed, and he had witnessed and experienced the realities of Soviet life in a way guest-delegates on a fleeting visit could not. 777 As has been seen, he had also mixed with Soviet citizens critical of the state. Rather than make a dramatic break, he let his membership lapse. But it was noted, and was a story nationally reported. There were media approaches seeking his account for publication, one in which he recanted and denounced, along the lines of prized CPA defector Cecil Sharpley’s 776 E. W. Campbell, The 60 Rich Families Who Own Australia, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1963. Lockwood’s critique is detailed and examined by Playford, “Sixty Families”, pp. 31-32. See also Lockwood’s personal file on the May 1970 Socialist Scholar’s Conference, NLA: MS 10121, Box 82, folder 521. 777 Rupert Lockwood, “The view’s better through a vodka glass”, The Australian, 26 January 1970, p. 7; “Bureaucracy rampant”, The Australian, 29 January 1970, p. 11. 303 articles in the Melbourne Herald in 1949. 778 Instead, he chose the national exposure offered by Rupert Murdoch’s comparative newcomer (1964) The Australian, and in January 1970 told his story his way, in a series of critical articles that avoided personal recriminations and apologetic recant. 779 The legacy of this desertion from the party was bitter, personal, and lasting. The Soviet Novosti Press Agency responded to Lockwood’s articles with a patronising ‘Open Letter’ critique of Lockwood’s Moscow sojourn, portraying a two-faced person who had abused privileges, and whose judgement was perhaps clouded by alcohol. 780 On 4 February 1970, the Maritime Branch of the CPA (comprising party members variously engaged in the maritime industry, but mainly members of the WWF and the SUA) sent a letter to Lockwood, expressing its “contempt” for him and “his current writings in the anti-communist press”, adding that he now had “his 30 pieces of silver” and had become an enemy of socialism. So far as it was concerned, Lockwood leaving the party was “good riddance to bad rubbish”. 781 In 1975, following a devastating Lockwood review of the Frank Hardy novel about communists in Australia, But The Dead Are Many: A Novel In Fugue Form (1975), Mark Aarons, a son of CPA leader Laurie Aarons, attacked Lockwood in print. It was a no-holds barred assault. He recalled Lockwood’s Tribune posting in Moscow, how copy filed by Lockwood had basically been re-writes of Soviet handouts, and how 778 Lockwood, interview, Bowral, 26-27 September 1984; for Cecil Sharpley, see Phillip Deery, “Sharpley, Cecil Herbert (1908-1985)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sharpley-cecil-herbert-14879/text26069, accessed 4 February 2013. 779 Rupert Lockwood, “The making and unmaking of a communist propagandist’, The Australian, 24 January 1970, p. 15; “The view’s better through a vodka glass”; “Blundering in the communist fold”, The Australian, 27 January 1970, p. 11; “The marshal’s lobby, The Australian, 28 January 1970, p. 11; “Bureaucracy rampant”. 780 Peter Avanesov, “Here’s vodka in your eye”, The Australian, 18 March 1970, p. 13. 781 Letter, Maritime Branch of the CPA to Lockwood, 4 February 1970, NLA: MS 10121, Box 1, Folder 8. 304 Lockwood had “to be practically dragged, kicking and complaining, from his well-provisioned flat back to his desertion from the party in Australia”. True in respect to his journalism, but way out of line otherwise. 782 The question is, why did Lockwood, with a long history of unrest and unease concerning the CPA, remain a member? Part of the answer is as historian Ian Turner noted of his own case. Turner was expelled from the CPA in 1958: “Losing communism”, he wrote, “is like losing any other total commitment and faith. It is a shattering experience”. 783 So too with Lockwood; leaving was not going to be easy, or lightly done. Calkin’s research indicates people stayed within the party after 1956, despite misgivings, for a number of reasons, amongst these the feeling the party was a kind of family, and because the CPA was regarded as the nation’s hope of progressing towards socialism. I think these applied to Lockwood. 784 But in his case, there were other contributing factors. He was a high profile communist, and if he exited, it would be news. One major problem was employment; would his job prospects in the left of the trade union movement remain secure? If not, what then? A job in the capitalist media, commensurate with his experience, was unlikely given his communist record and the context of the Cold War. There was the problem of what would be expected of him by the world outside the party. ASIO showed its hand in 1957, suggesting a turncoat’s role, and again mooted the opportunity in 1968. When he did finally leave the CPA in 1969, there was media pressure to turn on the CPA and recant. And always there was the haunting spectre of the Petrov Affair. When Document J was released to the public in 1984, Lockwood pre-recorded a 782 Rupert Lockwood, “One Night in the Life of Frank Hardy”, Nation Review, 17-23 October 1975, p. 24; Mark Aarons, “When Comrades Fall Out”, Nation Review, 31 October-6 November 1975, p. 54. 783 Leonie Sandercock and Stephen Murray-Smith, editors and selectors, Room for Manoeuvre: Writings on History, Politics, Ideas and Play/Ian Turner, Drummond Publishing, 1982, p. 139. 784 For Calkin’s extensive discussion, see “‘Cracking the Stalinist Crust’”, pp. 115-139. 305 few interviews, then lay low in a couple of rural locations with people he trusted. Simply, in many ways, it was easier to remain in the party until he had reached the point where staying was no longer tenable, and other factors no longer mattered as much as they once did, or no longer applied. From his point of view, the CPA had to have exhausted its potential to help deliver socialism; which, by 1969, he reckoned it had. 785 Also, for Lockwood, the Soviet Union had to have totally lost its capacity/desire to create a socialist future. The destruction of the peaceful transition to socialism embodied in the Soviet invasion, and the destruction of the Prague Spring, represented, so far as he was concerned, the irrevocable step towards the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union and its post-Stalin legacy. 786 POST-1969. As Turner noted in his own case, so too with Lockwood; leaving the CPA was not simple, and it took him a number of years to adjust to his new circumstances, which included the end of a marriage that had been under stress a long time. Amongst some members of the CPA, there was hostility and enmity, but he also found welcome amongst those who had variously left the party, many since 1956, a large number of people he jokingly described as “the most numerous and influential political party in Australia”, the party of ex-Communists. 787 Over ensuing years there was occasional journalism in mainstream and small journal outlets. The latter included a substantial series of reflective articles on politics and history, based on his past researches and unpublished/published writings, in the Catholic cultural journal Annals Australia, the editor of which Lockwood was introduced to by the Sydney priest and intellectual Edmund Campion, the common link their various antipathies towards the anti-communist Catholic activist B. A. Santamaria. According to veteran left autodidact Bob 785 Wise, “Reflections”, p. 38. 786 Rupert Lockwood, “So Long as the Heirs of Stalin Remain….”, Outlook, October 1968, pp. 15-17. 787 Ward, A Radical Life, p. 177. 306 Gould, these were “interesting articles” by a “disillusioned Stalinist” in “a slightly cranky small-circulation journal” edited by “a rather energetic tridentine Catholic apologist, Father Paul Stenhouse”. 788 Demonstrating his ability to be at the right place at the right time, Lockwood’s last piece of journalism, in 1989, at the age of 81, was from Tiananmen Square. In this he expressed his sympathies with the Chinese protestors and his belief that protest and dissidence would continue to dog the corrupt elites of China. At the time, he was in China as guest of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship, on the strength of his book War on the Waterfront (1987), discussed in the next chapter. 789 788 Chronologically the Annals Australia articles by Lockwood are “1848 Revolution: Catholic Rhinelanders Flee to Australia”, Volume 102, Number 7, August 1991, pp. 12-13; “The French Canadian Catholics of the Concord Stockade, April 1992, http://jloughnan.tripod.com/concordcf.htm (accessed 19 December 2012); “Can ‘Robespierre Fever’ Strike Again”, Volume 104, Number 3, April/May 1993, pp. 29-31; “Another View of the Spanish Civil War”, Volume 104, Number 8, October 1993, pp. 1823; “ The Communist ‘New’ Man’s Old Problems”, Volume 104, Number 9/10, November/December 1993, pp. 39-41; “No Redress for Hardy’s Victims”, Volume 105, Number 3, April/May 1994, pp. 18-19; “Remember the Dead of Anzac Cove”, Volume 105, Number 5, July 1994, pp. 36-39; “Dangle Me a Spy, Male or Female”, Volume 106, Number 3, April/May 1995, pp. 24-26; “The Fenian Brotherhood”, Volume 106, Number 4, June 1995, p. 230; “Royal Visits, Mythical ‘Fenians’ and Rabid Anti-Catholicism in Colonial NSW”, Volume 106, Number 4, June 1995, pp. 24-25. For the Campion, Stenhouse, Lockwood connection, Penny Lockwood, email to author, 7 February 2013. For the Gould reference, Bob Gould, “A Left Eye at the Funeral of Paddy McGuiness: The Send-off as a Political and Social Event”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/gould/2008/20080204a.htm (accessed 12 December 2012). For biographical data on Father Paul Stenhouse, John F. McMahon, “About the Editor”, Annals Australia, June 1988, http://jloughnan.tripod.com/author.htm (accessed 19 December 2012). 789 Rupert Lockwood, “They Can’t Stop the Second Long March”, The Australian, 6 June 1989, p. 8. For the letter from the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Australia, to Lockwood, inviting him to China and offering to cover all internal costs, dated 17 August 1988, see NLA: MS 10121, Box 71, Folder 452. 307 Lockwood continued to edit the Maritime Worker until retirement in 1985. During the 1970s, and subsequently, he was sought out by journalists, scholarly researchers, documentary and film makers, interviewers, with requests for recollections, historical data, advice, requests to which he usually acceded. Late in life, he regarded as a high point an invitation to deliver the prestigious annual Paton-Wilkie-Deamer Newspaper Address in 1982, conducted by the Journalists’ Club, Sydney, and the NSW Branch of the AJA. His talk was a free wheeling account, at times autobiographical, of Australian press history, the origins of the wealth of the nation’s media monopolies, unflattering biographical accounts of media owners, rounded off with his suggestions as to how a more democratic, community based media could be encouraged and developed. The presentation was variously hilarious, informative, and legally contentious. Another valued highpoint was his award in 1995 of the Gold Honour Badge by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (incorporating his old union, the AJA), “for services to journalism and the Australian Journalists Association”, an award, at the time, received previously by 150 journalists since the inauguration of the AJA in 1912. 790 The major achievement and feature of his life post1969, was the creation of the four books that are the subject of the next two chapters. In what was apparently a late surge of energy and productivity, he created them from the mass of research he had undertaken post-1945. Neither in his slow disenchantment with the CPA and eventual leaving, nor in the creative period that followed, was Lockwood unique in Australian communist history. A close study by Terry Irving of communist intellectual Esmonde Higgins (1897-1960) traced a similar CPA trajectory. Irving 790 A transcript of the Paton-Wilkie-Deamer Address, 1982, actually given by Lockwood is in the author’s possession. A tamer version subsequently prepared for publication, titled “Media Liberation”, is in NLA: MS 10121, Box 30, Folder 212. Lockwood’s account of his joy and pride in having been selected to give the Address is in a letter from Lockwood to the author, undated, received 25 September 1989. For the 18 September 1995 letter from the Joint Federal Secretary of the Media Alliance, informing Lockwood of his Gold Honour Badge award, NLA: MS 10121, Box 1, Folder 9. 308 described a ten-year period of disengagement by Higgins, culminating in him leaving the party in 1944. Drawing on E. P. Thompson’s essay “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon” (1997), Irving broadly delineated two sorts of breaks with Communism: a “catastrophic and often public break”, which led to “apostasy”, involving elements of selfdestruction, vengefulness, rancour; and “a slow, often zig-zagging process of disengagement”, eventually resulting in creativity and personal growth. In Irving’s analysis, Higgins’ break with the CPA led to growing selfunderstanding, creativity, and his reconstruction as a dissenting socialist intellectual. As with Higgins, so too with Lockwood. 791 CONCLUSION This chapter examined Lockwood’s work for the CPA, other than the journalism discussed in the previous chapter. The period discussed was from 1945 until 1969, the latter the year he left the party. Lockwood’s “communist work” as he later referred to it, was seen to be high level and intense, including representing the CPA abroad during 1948-1950. The highpoint of this assignment, Lockwood’s role in the World Peace Congress (Paris, 1949) was explained, and its subsequent contribution to his marginalisation within the CPA argued. Lockwood’s involvement in what is generally referred to as the Petrov Affair was detailed. The circumstances of his creation of what is known as Document J was explained. A case was made for it being regarded as a genre of ‘raw’ journalism, and for its contents, particularly those relating to prominent conservative politician (Sir) Stephen Spender, warranting serious consideration. Lockwood’s behaviour before the Royal Commission on Espionage, 1954-1955, associated with this document, generally regarded by historians as victimisation or sinister, was contextualised within the Cold 791 T.H. Irving, “Defecting: Esmonde Higgins Leaves the Communist Party”, Labour History, Number 87, November 2004, pp. 87, 98-99; E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon”, in E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, The New Press, New York, 1997, pp. 33-74. 309 War and interpreted as combative, defensive, strategic, behaviour by a targeted person who regarded the Commission and its hearings as a political process, not a legal process. The chapter examined ASIO’s investigation of Lockwood post-war and onwards. Accepting that ASIO surveillance and investigation of Lockwood was warranted, since he was a declared opponent of the capitalist-state ASIO was established to protect, the personal and intrusive nature of this surveillance was demonstrated, particularly in regard to his children. Glimpses of the ways in which Lockwood responded to surveillance were discussed, demonstrating he had significant covert/clandestine skills. Overall, the chapter demonstrated that Lockwood cannot be seen as a Cold War victim, as one strand of Cold War historiography portrays him, but as a significant, deliberate, combatant. Lockwood’s disenchantment with the CPA was discussed and documented. This was shown to be a long, slow process, beginning before Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech (1956), when many members, particularly intellectuals, left the party, culminating in his leaving in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the socialist liberalisation of the Prague Spring (1968). The reasons why Lockwood remained in the CPA despite disenchantment, were explored, as were the reasons he finally left. Along with personal factors, it was concluded that Lockwood remained in the CPA, until both it and the USSR were perceived by him to have lost their socialist vision and capacities/willingness to deliver/create a socialist future. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of Lockwood’s life after 1969, and the way in which his leaving the party, while initially traumatic, triggered the release of creative energies, ushering a period of creative historical research and writing. 310 CHAPTER EIGHT “HISTORY THAT CANNOT WAIT” In this and the following chapter, the four books Lockwood published in the years following his leaving the CPA in 1969, all concerned with aspects of Australian history, are discussed. Chapter 8 examines Humour is Their Weapon (1985), and Ship to Shore (1990), chronologically the second and last book he published during the time span. Chapter 9 is devoted to the period’s first and third books, Black Armada (1975), and War on the Waterfront (1987). The division of the discussions of these texts in this way is somewhat arbitrary. However some division was deemed necessary. As will be demonstrated, the books are significant creations, warranting examination, and not simply passed over. Chapter 8 deals with the two books that primarily focus on the WWF, on aspects of its history, culture and traditions, variously contributing understandings to Australian labour history, industrial relations, and to maritime history. The two books discussed in Chapter 9 also focus on the WWF, but in these Lockwood tended to use the WWF as a device to facilitate wider historical, social, and political discussion and analysis. Chapter 8 begins with the bedding of the four books in Australia maritime history, in the radical nationalist historical tradition, and opens by recognising that Australian journalists have a long tradition of writing Australian history. The chapter title is drawn from a Lockwood reference to the threat of oblivion and disappearance posed to working class life styles, communities, cultures, and history posed by techonological changes within the maritime/waterfront industries. THE JOURNALIST AS HISTORIAN Journalists and the writing of Australian history have a long tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. During the period from 1819 to the mid1890s, journalists comprised the main occupational group producing historical writing, the press of the time the main vehicle for publishing 311 literature. 792 These journalist-historians tended to be active in the politics of their time, and their writings part of the politics shaping their society. For most of these practitioners, objectivity was not an issue. 793 The connection between journalism and historical writing has continued, with “the writing of contemporary history, particularly by foreign and war correspondents” post-1945, and since the 1960s, the writing of political histories by journalists. 794 It is a tradition that has thrived despite increasing disciplinary boundaries that developed since WW2 as historical discourse both professionalised and academised. This process was not necessarily totally divisive or exclusionist; as Jackie Dickenson pointed out: A number of academic historians…. trained as journalists before embracing university life, and such training in investigative research, reporting and writing to deadlines informed their academic research and writing. 795 Not included in overviews and discussions of Australian historical writing produced by journalists, 796 but none the less writing Australian history based on substantial original research since the 1950s and publishing since the 1960s, was Rupert Lockwood. Between 1975 and 1990 he published four books and a 32-page booklet, all histories, or having historical themes: Black Armada (1975), Humour Is Their Weapon: Laugh with the Australian Wharfies (1985), The Miraculous Union: A Hundred Years of Waterfront Unionism (1985), War on the Waterfront: Menzies, Japan and the Pig-Iron 792 Prue Torney-Parlicki, “The Australian Journalist as Historian”, in Curthoys and Schultz, Journalism: Print, Politics, p. 245. 793 Ibid., p. 247. 794 Ibid., p. 246; Jackie Dickenson, “Journalists Writing Australian Political History’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Volume 56, Number 1, 2010, p. 106. 795 Dickenson, Ibid., p. 106. 796 Little has been written on this aspect of Australian historical writing. For what there is see the accounts by Torney-Parlicki, “Journalist as Historian”, pp. 245-258, and by Dickenson, “Journalists Writing History”, pp. 105-119; also Mark Hutchinson, “A Note on Nineteenth Century Historians and Their Histories: 1819-1896”, Australian Cultural History, Volume 8, 1989, pp. 114-124. 312 Dispute (1987), Ship to Shore: A History of Melbourne’s Waterfront and its Union Struggles (1990). These books were written from, and informed by, the author’s status as an insider/participant in relation to his subject matter. Further, Lockwood sought to distinguish his books from works produced by academics, “quite a few” of whom, “voyeurs” he called them, had written on waterfront matters, in the process producing “arid” accounts which remained aloof from the human realities of life and work on the waterfront. Generally, for Lockwood, “stodginess (characterised) much academic writing”. 797 Lockwood was assisted in his historical endeavours by oral history; he drew upon the memories of maritime workers in his historical understanding and writing. As Canadian maritime historian Eric W. Sager noted, particularly with regard to class conflict and maritime labour, memories can be more than a record: “oral testimony also contains reflections on the conditions of that conflict. In other words, memory becomes history itself, an explanation of change over time with meaning for the present.” 798 It was this sort of understanding and use of sources, that Lockwood profited from in his historical work. The first of these books was published the year Lockwood turned 67 years old; the last, the year he turned 82. It was a period of sustained and focused creativity which dovetailed with Lockwood’s working life; like many of the wharfies he had known who, as we will see, continued to labour long after the usual national retirement age of 65 years of age, Lockwood continued working on the Maritime Worker until 1985, when he retired at the age of seventy-seven. Fittingly, these books reflected his career as a journalist 797 Lockwood, Humour Is Their Weapon, p. 90; Rupert Lockwood, “Secret Armies”, Overland, Number 118, Autumn 1990, p. 75. 798 Eric W. Sager, “Memory, Oral History and Seafaring Labour in Canada’s Age of Steam”, in Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey, editors, Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, Acadiensis Press, Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1991, p. 241. 313 employed by the WWF, editing the union’s journal Maritime Worker since 1952, and his interest in Australian capital history. Moreover, as we have seen, Lockwood’s involvement with the union was more than that associated with the term ‘journalist’; he was a key appointment to the formidable communist leadership team in the union, a team that during the Cold War enjoyed popular support amongst the vast majority of wharfies who were otherwise ALP supporters and voters. As Tom Sheridan pointed out, the majority of wharfies regarded their communist union leaders as “the sharpest sword with which to hack their way to gain”. 799 For Lockwood, the wharfies and their union were more than just his employers; they were very much part of his political life. This was an involvement and a relationship that could be expected to, and did, provide an intimacy and engagement with the workers and their union beyond that of a hired outsider. The books had as common themes aspects of WWF history, which Lockwood used to variously write about, and reflect upon, Australian political and social history. In writing the books, Lockwood drew upon research he had done, and manuscripts written, during the 1950s and 1960s when he was a member of the CPA, a number of which had been sequestered by Commonwealth authorities in their trawl for evidence preparatory to the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia, 1954-55 (see Chapter 6). He had unsuccessfully sought party interest during the 1960s, when he was a member, in the project that resulted in Black Armada. 800 Humour is Their Weapon and War on the Waterfront variously touched upon issues and themes Lockwood had first raised or mentioned in ‘Document J’. LOCKWOOD AND MARITIME HISTORY In weaving wharfies and their union into the fabric of Australian history, Lockwood was going where few historians had gone. A great deal of Australia’s historical, economic and cultural development has been 799 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 77. 800 Lockwood interview with author, 30 November 1985. 314 dependent on what happened in its port cities, along its coastline, and upon its seas. Yet this was seldom recognised until comparatively recently by historians. As late as 1987, in an essay in The Australian History Teacher discussing the process of exclusion of the sea, and maritime workers, from Australian history, Frank Broeze found it necessary to point out that along with the bush/land and cities, the sea constituted a third essential, integral, yet largely unexplored, element of Australia’s history. 801 This, despite, as he later acknowledged, a growing body “of academic and more popular nonfiction works that paid increasing attention to both present and past aspects of Australia’s maritime history”, one that included significant contributions like Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and John Bach’s A Maritime History of Australia (1976). Elsewhere there was growing interest in maritime history; the Australasian Association for Maritime History had formed and published the first issue of its journal The Great Circle in 1979. 802 Much earlier, during the late 1950s, the Seamen’s Union of Australia had commissioned historian Brian Fitzpatrick to write a history of the union, but his manuscript was not published; in 1970 it commissioned Rowan Cahill to complete the story to its centenary year (1972), the plan being to publish it in 1972. While this joint-authored history was not published until 1981, a serialised version by Cahill was published during 1972 in the Seamen’s Journal from February to December. 803 801 Frank Broeze, ‘Maritime Australia: Maritime History and its Cultural Connections’ , The Australian History Teacher, Number 14, 1987, pp. 23-33. 802 Frank Broeze, Island Nation: A History of Australians and the Sea, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1998, p. 239; see his Chapter 8 for discussion of the extent to which Australian culture was, and has been, influenced by the experience of the sea and related themes, pp. 223-255.Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1966; John Bach, A Maritime History of Australia, Nelson, Melbourne, 1976. 803 Brian Fitzpatrick and Rowan J. Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia 1872-1972: A History, Seamen’s Union of Australia, Sydney, 1981; for an account of the factors which thwarted publication of the book before 1981 see Rowan Cahill, “Reflections”, Seamen’s Journal, July/August 1983, p. 183. 315 Broeze addressed this perceived neglect in 1998 with his book Island Nation, tracing “the profound, diverse and all-embracing influence of the sea upon Australian society”. 804 According to Broeze, Australian culture and historiography were dominated by the idea of the nation and its history as being about a landmass/continent. However, he argued, Australian history and Australian society were “shaped by the dynamic interaction of land, cities and the sea”. 805 The sea and a host of maritime elements, including, port cities, small ports, harbours, lighthouses, breakwaters, beaches, swimming, lifesaving, merchant shipping, ocean space, naval forces, yachting, all helped shape Australian life and were as much part of it as sheep and the land, railways and goldmines, bushrangers and bankers. Yet their presence has remained hidden in much of Australia’s historiography and apparently also in the artistic record of our history that is deposited in the visual arts and literature. 806 Broeze devoted a chapter to maritime workers and their unions, 807 and pointed out that Australian maritime workers have often been repressed in Australia’s historiography, not least because the militant wharfies and seamen were living roof that Australia was not the country of conflict-free consensus that conservative orthodoxy preached for so long. 808 Lockwood too had a sense of this historiographical neglect, and addressed it in the books he published between 1975 and 1990. In his final book, Ship to Shore, an account of industrial struggle on the Melbourne waterfront, he noted that since the early days of colonial settlement, when convicts 804 Broeze, Island Nation, p. 3. 805 Ibid., p. 1. 806 Ibid., p. 223. 807 Ibid., pp. 197-221. 808 Ibid., p. 6. 316 unloaded cargoes, the Melbourne waterfront had “known events unique in the records of the world’s great maritime centres”, yet (the) saga of romance and tragedy, the dragging agonies of defeat and recovery, of sacrifice and humanity have largely been bypassed by historians. 809 His use here of “unique”, “great”, “saga” is significant, indicating that for Lockwood the Melbourne waterfront (and port-cities generally) was, historically, more than just an industrial work-site, and what had transpired there more than just work done by an industrial workforce warranting invisibility in history. “REAL FORCES OF CHANGE” Broadly speaking, Lockwood’s histories might be seen as a manifestation and continuation, albeit late, of the Cold War radical nationalist cultural and intellectual movement associated with the CPA and amongst its sympathisers, a broad cultural struggle on many fronts against Australian capitalist society and its cultural manifestations, a creative struggle which sought to create “an alternative culture that would be both democratic and socialist”. 810 Cottle has characterised this movement, and its relationship with the past thus: As the Cold War descended, the cultural left turned to the Australian ‘folk’ and its past for inspiration, and for reassurance that there was something more to Australia than Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’, the respectable middle classes of the affluent society. They found an authentic tradition of collectivism and anti-authoritarianism in the popular culture of the common people; an alternative to the individualism, 809 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, 1990, p. 14 810 John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 13. 317 consumerism and conformity that they saw when they cast their eyes over Australia’s sprawling suburbs”. 811 For Lockwood, the Australian wharf labourers provided the vehicle for his intervention, contribution, and activism as an historian. During the Cold War, as Lisa Milner has explained, wharfies had been perceived as marginal and threatening to a socially cohesive Australia. They could hold the country to ransom by striking and tying up ports. They were often the target of attacks from the government and the mainstream press: in 1951, the SMH asserted that ‘Moscow has long concentrated on the wharves of the world as the most convenient and effective points from which to strike at the economic lifelines of democracy’. Such narratives attributed discord to an outside influence and not originating in Australia. According to Milner, in this narrative wharfies and their union were depicted as un-Australian, and as a threat to the Australian way of life. 812 While the height of the Cold War had passed when Lockwood wrote the books under discussion, the propensity of waterside workers to strike, and/or the machinations of communists in leadership roles, as explanations for the industrial and political behaviour of wharfies, still had currency in the 1970s. 813 Public hostility towards wharfies lingered, in spite of postHealy WWF leaderships by non-communists. Senior journalists Trinca and Davies in their account of the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute noted that, as late as the last decade of the twentieth century, wharfies had “long polarised (public) opinion” because of their capacity to bring the nation to 811 Drew Cottle, “A Bowyang Historian in the Cold War Antipodes: Russel Ward and the making of The Australian Legend”, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 178-179. 812 Milner, Fighting Films, p. 15. 813 Len Richardson, “Dole Queue Patriots’, in John Iremonger, John Merritt, and Graeme Osborne, editors, Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, Angus and Robertson in association with The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 1973, p. 144. 318 “a halt”, and that they were “hated for their politics and their history”.814 Also, as we have seen, maritime workers and the sea were still metaphorically invisible when it came to narrating the story of the Australian nation. Lockwood’s books post-1969 contested simplistic perceptions of wharfies and their union, and the historical invisibility of maritime workers; he aimed to humanise wharfies, to place them firmly in Australian history, and demonstrate their agency as what he termed “conscious instruments of history”. 815 In terms of Australian historiography and politics, Lockwood’s books addressed an issue Stuart Macintyre argued in 1984 in his biography of Paddy Troy (1908-1978), West Australian militant and leader of the small Coastal Dock Rivers and Harbour Works Union. While recognising that Troy could be judged “by conventional standards”, as a communist in West Australia who had led a very small trade union and therefore a person who had “operated on the margin of national politics” and accordingly “not a figure of major importance”, Macintyre argued otherwise when it came to understanding the significance of his life: But this is to slip too easily into the conventional vocabulary of the big battalions. We assume—such is the force of institutionalised consensus in our public life—that change proceeds from the centre, that the politicians of the major parties, the captains of industry and leaders of peak union organisations are those who control the course of events. In the case of the labour movement this is an illusion. A parliamentary leader of the Labor Party or the president of the ACTU, however charismatic, is more a follower than a leader. He achieves his success through the politics of accommodation, guided by the calculus of the lowest common denominator, and only within these narrow limits can he impose his will on events. He progresses by riding the mainstream. But if the mainstream leads anywhere, if Labor does not lie stationary on its placid surface, it is 814 Helen Trinca and Anne Davies, Waterfront:The Battle that Changed Australia, Doubleday/Random House, Milson’s Point, 2000, pp. xiv, 2. 815 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 12. 319 because of the vigorous tributaries and turbulent eddies that feed it and impel it onwards. Paddy chose to be tossed and buffeted on one of the streams that are the real forces of change. 816 As with Troy, so too with Lockwood’s marginalised wharfies, with Lockwood as historian taking up the challenge of writing them and their union into history as part of the “real forces of change”. I: HUMOUR IS THEIR WEAPON (1985) Historian Margo Beasley observed that few “unions are as much the subject of anecdote and myth, or as replete with extraordinary characters, as the (Waterside Workers’) Federation”, and deemed these aspects of maritime culture worthy of historical research and writing. This was a task she did not, at the time, address in her 1996 book The Wharfies: The History of the Waterside Workers’ Federation since it was a narrative history intended “for the use of current and future members and officials”. As she noted, the sort of cultural study she envisaged required “a volume of its own”. 817 Lockwood’s Humour Is Their Weapon: Laugh With the Australian Wharfies (1985) was earlier recognition of this, and a contribution towards placing the characters, stories, and anecdotes on the public record. His book joined pioneer works variously documenting and rendering Australian waterside worker culture and life by oral historians Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills, and by short-story writer and former waterside worker John Morrison, works which collectively demonstrated that wharfies constituted a community, which, while not imaginary, was imagined, with anecdote, nicknames, stories, characters, lore, passed around and across generations, providing the building blocks of that sense of community. 818 816 Macintyre, Militant, pp. 220-221. 817 M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. ix 818 Wendy Lowenstein and Tom Hills, Under the Hook. Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember: 1900-1980, Melbourne Bookworkers in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Prahan, 1982; John Morrison, Black Cargo and Other Stories, Australasian Book Society, Melbourne, 1955, Sailors Belong Ships, Dolphin 320 At first glance Humour Is Their Weapon appears a lightweight publication, a ninety-six page time-filler. The title is prominent, set in red against a lightblue sky; the juxtaposition of ‘Humour’ and ‘Weapon’ captures attention. The wrap-around cover is a mix of photograph and cartoon illustration dominated by a photograph of a modern cargo-ship in the process of either loading or unloading at a container terminal. The front cover shows the forward part of the ship, its deck stacked with cargo containers. The austerity of this industrial scene is relieved by three cartoon characters superimposed over the bottom half of the cover, playing out a moment in one of the stories in the book-- two singleted wharfies, one laughing, the other fleeing apparently aghast/shocked, and a cargo-supervisor in the process of having his trousers ripped off by a dog. The back-cover blurb describes the book as a collection of “witticisms, anecdotes and nicknames from the waterfront”, comprising “an important contribution to Australian folk humour”; with its “incisive, merciless, sometimes brilliant” humour, it is a book “to make you laugh”. With a Foreword by the then Federal Minister for Transport and Aviation, Peter Morris, drawing attention to the humour and wit of the contents, 819 Humour Is Their Weapon was aimed at the popular market. It was distributed by Gordon & Gotch Ltd., Australia’s largest independent distributor of print media, including books and magazines, which meant it was placed in newsagency outlets as well as in bookshops. 820 Following the title pages, on a stand-alone page headed ‘About the Author’, the author’s qualifications for writing the book were explained; whether or Publications, Melbourne, 1947, Twenty-three Stories, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1962. For the point about wharfies constituting an imagined community see Humphrey McQueen, “Improvising Nomads”, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 223-250, who makes the point (p. 235) in relation to Australia’s building labourers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a point he attributes to his reading of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1983. 819 Lockwood, Humour is Their Weapon, p. 8. 820 The Distributor is identified on the Title page verso. 321 not this was the author or the publisher writing was not stated. Having sketched the author’s journalistic credentials from his Melbourne Herald days onwards, and with a brief mention of his involvement in the Petrov Affair, the writer placed Lockwood within the culture and life of Australian waterside workers. Thus the reader was invited to conclude that Lockwood knew what he was writing about; so far as this book was concerned he was an insider, not an outsider. For 30 years, explained the writer, Lockwood edited the Maritime Worker and has addressed hundreds of waterfront meetings in ports from Cairns to Port Adelaide and knows the wits and the wags, the men of muscle and the men of intelligence and humanity who have lumped the crates and bales and driven the winches, tow-motors and cranes better than any other journalist. 821 Then the serious aim of the book was explained, one that belied the lightness described in the back-cover blurb: His (Lockwood’s) hope is that this chronicle on the rugged philosophies, the wit and seldom-rivalled humour of that controversial group of Australians, the wharfies, will provide one stone for their memorial before one person sitting behind computer buttons to load container ships will make ‘wharfie’ and ‘docker’ archaic words. 822 More than a collection of jokes? Humour Is Their Weapon delivered as the blurb promised. It was a collection of jokes, and amusing anecdotes about waterfront incidents, events, and waterfront characters. While not all the material was complimentary, neither was it critical; senses of sympathy and empathy prevailed. This is especially evident in Chapter Two titled ‘Lots in a Name’, devoted to the alphabetical listing of waterfront nicknames with notes about their origin and meaning, neither necessarily complimentary. Commenting 821 Ibid., p. 6. 822 Ibid. 322 on the nicknames, Lockwood explained their use tended to be a phenomenon of the past, a feature of the period prior to the “devastation of the stevedoring workforce” by the “vaulting momentum of maritime technology”. 823 Typical of the examples listed by Lockwood was the entry on the wharfie and would-be-cargo-pilferer known as “Daylight Saving”: He put the clock back. (A Melbourne wharfie took the clock out of an imported Japanese car, became conscience-stricken and put it back).824 Subsequent industrial relations and sociology scholarship has recognised the use of nicknames as an aspect of waterfronts internationally and a means by which waterfront workers developed a group consciousness and group pride shaping a belief that they were unique as a workforce and “superior to other workers”. 825 Lockwood’s text was supported by the profuse use of black and white cartoons by illustrator Mark Knight based on the text, and with photographs of wharfies and their worksites. The latter engendered a sense of immediacy and reality; the reader might be amused, but was also conscious that what was being read was rooted in real people and real life. This sense remains for this reader decades later; the world of work captured in the photographs no longer exists on Australian waterfronts, having been erased by technological changes, and by industrial changes secured by the WWF. An amusing yet poignant example of this vanished maritime world was Lockwood’s story about veteran wharfie Matt ‘Old Matt’ Meloury, who was still working in the late 1960s on the Corio Bay (Victoria) waterfront aged 823 Ibid., p. 44. 824 Ibid., p. 54. 825 Tom Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies 1943-1967: Casual Attitudes, Militant Leadership and Workplace Change”, The Journal of Industrial Relations, Volume 36, Number 2, June 1994, p. 268; see also Anna Green, “The Double-Edged Sword: Nicknames on the New Zealand Waterfront, 1915-1951”, Oral History, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1991, pp. 53-55. 323 in his early 90s. One day he did not report for work, and his workmates were asked why: “Why?” enquired the foreman stevedore. “It’s a sad day for old Matt”, he was told by a wharfie. “He’s putting his son in an old Men’s Home”. 826 It was not uncommon for Australian wharfies and seamen to keep working until they died, prior to their respective unions successfully negotiating the creation of contributory retirement/pension schemes with employers. Agreements on such schemes were not reached until the late 1960s for waterside workers, and the early 1970s for seamen. 827 Commenting on the age of wharfies working during this period, Sheridan noted two Boer War (1899-1902) veterans reputedly working on the Port Adelaide wharves in 1968. 828 The role of humour as a political weapon amongst waterside workers was also explained in this chapter. Lockwood waited until the reader had worked through the book, had read the jokes, stories, anecdotes, before putting these into an industrial/political context. He explained the ways humour could function as a morale builder, a way of making tedious working conditions bearable, how it was a means of escaping psychologically “the wounding indignities from employers”, how it had agency in helping create a sense of unity and collective identity. Lockwood here anticipated later recognition by social historians of the relationship between humour and social protest. 829 826 Lockwood, Humour is Their Weapon, p. 31. 827 M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. 224; Diane Kirkby, Voices From the Ships: Australia’s Seafarers and Their Union, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, pp. 222-227. 828 See Endnote 15, Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 84. 829 Lockwood, Humour is Their Weapon, p. 90. On the role of humour and social protest see Marjolein ’t Hart and Dennis Bos (editors), Humour and Social Protest, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007, particularly Marjolein ’t Hart, “Humour and Social Protest: An Introduction”, pp. 1-20. 324 Lockwood concluded his chapter, and the book, with a brief account of the boycotts and political strikes the WWF/wharfies had engaged in to assist “subject peoples, to defeat racism and tyranny”. He gave six examples, beginning with the 1938 ban on the shipment of supplies to Japan’s undeclared war on China, the subject of his next book, War on the Waterfront (1987). The concluding chapter also referred to the senses of mission and urgency mentioned at the outset in ‘About the Author’, Lockwood writing of an ongoing process: The container revolution and the greater technological wrath to come decimate the stevedoring force that contributed so much to Australian folklore. Gentrification of harbour and riverside suburbs scatters to widely distanced addresses the families who for more than a century watched for sail or smoke on the horizon to promise their bread and butter. The old waterfront communities are becoming part of a history almost forgotten. 830 A disappearing world of work Humour is their Weapon records aspects of a world that had largely disappeared at the time Lockwood was writing. His subject was a pre-1970s, markedly masculine, maritime world, where work was labour intensive, and variously seasonal, sporadic, casual; it required workers to live near their places of work, hence the “old waterfront communities” Lockwood referred to, and what Sondra Silverman saw as their geographical and “social isolation from the general community”. 831 Working conditions were 830 Lockwood, Humour Is Their Weapon, p. 91 831 Sondra Silverman, “Australian Political Strikes”, Labour History, Number 11, November 1966, p. 29. A useful introductory historiographical discussion of Sydney and other Australian waterfronts as worksites and as communities is in Margot Beasley, “Sarah Dawes and the Coal Lumpers: Absence and Presence on the Sydney Waterfront, 19001917”, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 2004, pp. 12-18, in particular the related footnotes. The classic pioneering study of the waterfront as a working class community is Winifred Mitchell, “Home life at the Hungry Mile: Sydney wharf labourers and their families, 1900-1914”, Labour History, Number 33, November 1977, pp. 86-97. 325 primitive, the work often harsh, dirty, unhygienic, and physically demanding. Large numbers of workers were required to load and unload ships, work that often stressed bodies to extremes; exhaustion, deaths, injuries (at times crippling) and bodily breakdowns (e.g. respiratory diseases, arthritis, hernias) were not uncommon. 832 Underpinning this world was a “heritage of hatred” between employees and employers, an attitude of them and us. 833 As Miller summarised with regard to dockworkers world-wide, these sorts of conditions and circumstances created a distinct subculture (see Table), the subject of Humour is their Weapon: Table: Major conditions producing dockworker subculture 1. The casual nature of employment; 2. The exceptional arduousness, danger and variability of work; 3. The lack of an occupationally stratified hierarchy and mobility outlets; 4. Lack of regular association with one employer; 5. The necessity of living near docks; and 6. The belief shared by longshoremen that others in society consider them a low-status group. Major characteristics of subculture 1. Extraordinary solidarity and undiffused loyalty to fellow dockerworkers; 2. Suspicion of management and outsiders; Militant unionism; 3. Appearance of charismatic leaders from the ranks; 832 For a brief overview of this aspect of the occupational health of Australian waterfront workers see Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies”, pp. 264-265. 833 Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook, p. 6; see also Silverman, “Political Strikes”, p. 29. 326 4. Liberal political philosophy but conservative view of changes in work practices; and 5. ‘Casual frame of mind’ (free men or irresponsible opportunists). 834 Over time on Australian waterfronts a sense of fraternity and group solidarity developed amongst wharfies, a sense of group pride which celebrated colourful/eccentric characters within the group while at the same time fostering and strengthening the sense of the individuality of each group member. Wharfies also had the ability to laugh at themselves publicly, which coexisted with a sense of their singularity as workers—superior and unique in comparison to others, doing work which they regarded as skilled, skills learned on-the-job and not necessarily apparent to the casual observer from outside the industry. 835 As Lowenstein and Hills explained, wharfies prided themselves on their skill, because it was only this which stood between them and sudden death, and ensured that the ships, cargoes securely stowed, rode out storms instead of turning over at sea. 836 Post-1945 in Australia, mechanisation transformed the handling of cargoes, the nature of waterfront work, and reduced the number of working ports. Technologies like fork-lift trucks, roll-on roll-off vessels, the bulk loading of raw materials and associated bulk handling terminals, containerisation, created new jobs and eliminated others. During the period from the late1940s through to the mid-1980s the national stevedoring workforce reduced from over 30000 wharfies to around 6000, a decimating process in the words of Broeze. 837 By the late 1960s permanency of employment had replaced the traditional system of casual labour and an industry 834 The Table is sourced from Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 60, who sourced the Table from R. C. Miller, “The Dock Worker Subculture and Problems in Cross-Cultural and Cross-Time Generalizations”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume11, Number 3, June 1969, pp. 305, 308. 835 Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies”, p. 266. 836 Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook, p. 8. 837 Broeze, Island Nation, p. 216; Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies”, pp. 275-277. 327 superannuation scheme had been established. During the early 1990s ‘multiskilling’ and clearly defined career paths were introduced, along with redundancy packages for those variously parting company with the new system. Multiskilling facilitated the entry of women to the industry, traditionally a masculinist industry and work-culture. In 1993 the WWF merged with the SUA and ancilliary maritime unions to form the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). The extent to which these changes either removes or distances new generations of waterfront workers from the old culture remains to be seen. 838 Return to Document J For Lockwood, Humour Is Their Weapon was, in part at least, an exercise in the rescue and preservation of a maritime world and culture that was dramatically changing, and to a great extent had all but disappeared. But it also saw him briefly return to an old theme, one that had marked his life, that of the pro-Japan Australian sympathisers in the period leading up to Pearl Harbour and the war with Japan, a major theme of ‘Document J’, and of his book War on the Waterfront in 1987. Chapter Five titled ‘Wit was Never a Stadium Casualty’ was devoted to boxers who had been present in the ranks of Sydney wharfies. As Sheridan has explained, prior to waterfront modernisation, up to the late 1960s, the availability of casual work on the waterfront attracted “professional athletes such as boxers, cyclists, weight-lifters and footballers and aspiring writers and poets” who preferred irregular work as the means of earning a living while training and variously developing their sporting/artistic careers. It is 838 Support for the “remains to be seen” statement is implied by the conclusions of Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies”, p. 282, and in regard to seagoing maritime workers and the former Seamen’s Union of Australia, by Kirkby, Voices From the Ships, pp. 411-415. 328 an aspect of waterfront life that has attracted the attention of other scholars. 839 Six pugilists featured in Lockwood’s account, including world-champion bantamweight Jimmy Carruthers (1929-1990) and middleweight champion Jack Haines (1907- 1973). In 1980 Peter Corris gave significant recognition to the “extraordinary” boxing career of Carruthers in his history of Australian prize-fighting and also to Haines who “set a standard of boxing technique that was to influence fighters, especially middleweights, through the 1930’s”. 840 Biographers have noted the close relationship between Carruthers and the WWF, how the union variously supported and encouraged him, facilitated his training, and how Carruthers, a proud trade unionist, probably suffered professionally during the Cold War by commenting publicly on political matters – a southpaw (a left-handed boxer) in terms of his boxing style, and in his politics. 841 These were significant stories, and Lockwood gave them passing attention; however he gave greater attention to Charles Hugh Cousens (1903-1964), Sandhurst trained army officer, radio broadcaster, later television newsreader, whose career as both a waterfront casual worker and as a pugilist were fleeting, prior to his finding employment in advertising and in the mass media. As his biographer explained, Cousens, having worked his way to Sydney and the Depression after resigning his commission with the Sherwood Forresters in India in 1927, 839 Sheridan, “Australian Wharfies”, p. 262. For accounts of this aspect of cultural production see Lisa Milner, Fighting Films; Andrew Reeves, A Tapestry of Australia: The Sydney Wharfies Mural, Waterside Workers’ Federation Sydney Port, Sydney, 1992. 840 Peter Corris, Lords of The Ring: A History of Prize-fighting in Australia, Cassell Australia, North Ryde, 1980, pp. 122-124, 167-169. 841 R. I. Cashman, “Carruthers, James William (Jimmy) (1929-1990)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 17, Melbourne University Press, 2007, pp. 192-193; Robert Drane, Fighters by Trade: Highlights of Australian Boxing, ABC Books, Sydney, 2008, pp. 161-162. 329 took employment as a wharf labourer and picked up a few pounds as a boxer in preliminary bouts at a suburban stadium. 842 Lockwood had previously written about Charles Cousens, an Australian Army officer who became a broadcaster of pro-Japanese propaganda during WW2 while a prisoner-of-war, in Document J. 843 Lockwood’s account of the wharfie-pugilist in Humour is Their Weapon reprises some of this material, not in the terse notational form of the Cold War document but in a breezy, raconteurish, acidic manner. 844 Lockwood’s opening lines of his discussion of Cousens sets the tone: Charles Hugh Cousens was just another of those toffs who for reasons never asked on the waterfront had fallen from high estate.845 As in Document J, the wartime radio activities of Cousens on behalf of Japanese authorities are part of the story, but only as the tip of the proverbial iceberg; of greater import is that these capped a record of service to Japan beginning in Australia during the mid-1930s. Of special interest, as in Document J, was the relationship between Cousens and the enigmatic and mysterious Japanese journalist and pre-war goodwill missioner, Kennosuke (Ken) Sato, described here as “a leading Japanese Intelligence man” (see Chapter 5). Lockwood ended his account of Cousens with a barbed paragraph: Wharfies pay high honour to their boxer members and ex-members… Cousens, who graduated from the casual labour pool on (sic) Sydney waterfront and the stadium preliminary bouts to a microphone in the studio of Tokio Radio is not included….One of his delinquencies was that he had 842 Ivan Chapman, “Cousens, Charles Hughes (1903-1964)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, Melbourne University Press, 1993, pp. 514-515. 843 Document J, “Japanese Interest in Australia”, pp. 4-5 (J4-J5). 844 Lockwood, Humour is Their Weapon, pp. 76-78. 845 Ibid., p. 76. 330 no sense of humour, made no contribution to waterside wit and didn’t even merit a nickname. 846 Lockwood returned to Document J themes in his next book, War on the Waterfront (1987). II: SHIP TO SHORE (1990) In Island Nation Frank Broeze observed that regionalisation characterised Australian maritime literature, as it did the nation, with Sydney the mostpopular image of Australia’s “maritime heart”, and Melbourne its second.847 Published in 1990, Lockwood’s Ship to Shore was a contribution to this maritime literary regionalism, and a study of its ‘second-port’; it was the result of a commission by the Melbourne Branch of the WWF to coincide with, and celebrate, the first hundred years of the branch’s life. 848 Lockwood planned his account in two parts: the first would cover the period from early colonial times to 1945; the second, from 1945 through to what was then the present, via the Cold War. The second part of the project never eventuated, age and illness cruelling the project. As it was, the commemoration of the century of waterfront unionism in Victoria took place in May 1985. Lockwood authored a booklet for the occasion that was launched by Federal Minister for Transport Peter Morris, the press noting its author as “Rupert Lockwood—of Petrov Affair fame”. 849 Titled The Miraculous Union: A Hundred Years of Waterfront Unionism, the booklet comprised a brief historical outline of stevedoring on the Melbourne waterfront, the advent of unionism in the 1880s, and through the twentieth century to 1937 and the election of Jim Healy to the national leadership of the WWF. There it ended. Despite its title, the booklet did not deliver a century of unionism. 850 846 Ibid., p. 78. 847 Boeze, Island Nation, pp. 153, 241. 848 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 19, 383. 849 “Good times, bad times on waterfront”, The Weekend Australian, May 25-26, 1985, p. 3. 850 Rupert Lockwood, The Miraculous Union: A Hundred Years of Waterfront Unionism, Melbourne Branch WWF, May 1985. 331 Lockwood conceived his task in Ship to Shore as writing a ‘warts-and-all’ history with no evasions “of realities, of errors, excesses and leadership delinquencies”. 851 He also aimed to produce a readable account in the process, as distinct from other, unspecified, union histories he regarded as “some of the most unreadable products of the printing presses”. 852 Lockwood also made clear that he wrote from the perspective of a person with a deep “personal involvement” with the WWF, through his thirty-year connection with the Maritime Worker; he thought it important to thus declare and indentify himself, the writer, as an insider, as distinct from an outsider engaged to fulfil a commission. This latter he regarded as a form of “literary parasitism”. 853 Also in mind as he wrote was the sense of ‘mission and urgency’ which had underpinned Humour is their Weapon, the need to rescue a disappearing, if not disappeared, aspect of Australian maritime worker history, culture and life. Ship to Shore was intended not only as a celebratory record of the travails and accomplishments of a workforce, but of a workforce not present in Australian historical narratives, a workforce history that stood the chance of being forgotten. Those who remembered it were dying out, its paper-trail and record base very thin, and the conditions which produced it were, or had, disappeared through union gains and technological change. As Lockwood wrote: It is a history that cannot wait. The men who swarmed to the wharves for the daily treadmill of labor pick-ups and marked our story with worthy social achievements — and sometimes with the wreckage of failed struggles — are mostly dead. Few were left to convey their experiences to the writer. The dwindling stevedoring force in the portainer crane cabins and the container depots has to think of silicon chips and integrated circuits rather than cargo hooks and the sweat of brows — and of the days ahead when ships may be loaded by one man at the computer control panel. 854 851 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 19. 852 Ibid. 853 Ibid. 854 Ibid., pp. 19-20. 332 Lockwood sandwiched his account between two invasions, beginning during the early colonial days of the nineteenth century when the first convicts were landed on the shores of Port Phillip Bay-- not convicts according to Lockwood but stevedores who toiled under the lash, the “first waterside workers….without wages and without rights, under overseers bereft of compassion and competence”; 855 as Lockwood depicted this colonial invasion it involved the ‘displacement’ of Aboriginal people and “thefts of tribal lands and massacres”. 856 The second invasion was the “American ‘invasion’ of (the) Melbourne waterfront” during WW2, which brought to the waterfront in 1942 “the first heavy fork-lifts and giant lifting gear needed to handle their implements of war”. The significance of this latter event, Lockwood explained, was that it foreshadowed “the onrush of technological revolution that was to change the character of the maritime industry and the work forces”. 857 Ship to Shore ended with the establishment by the wartime Curtin government of the Stevedoring Industry Commission in 1942, under pressure from US military authorities angered by shipping delays, the way the Australian waterfront generally was controlled, and the backward methods, unhygienic conditions, corruption, which characterised it, a situation which hampered their war effort. 858 This was a turning point in WWF history. While not removing shipowner influence over the stevedoring industry, the Commission did, by taking over the control and regulation of stevedoring operations and enabling the WWF to have influence in their determination, represent an historic break with “shipowner domination of stevedoring”. 859 This brought long sought improvements to the working conditions of wharfies, including the abolition of the demoralising scrum of the ‘bull’ system and its replacement with a gang 855 Ibid., p. 23. 856 Ibid., p. 25. 857 Ibid., p. 372. 858 Ibid., p. 364-365; Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 63. 859 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 366-368. 333 rotary system. The gang system, while not universally welcomed within the ranks of the WWF nationally, especially in Melbourne with a history of waterfront divisions and a tradition of prickly independence within the national organisation, involved rostered work by small, regular gangs of workers, many of which became extended families. The gang system was a key factor in fostering and strengthening fostering intense union loyalty in the WWF as it shaped up to the Cold War. 860 The way in which Lockwood concluded Ship to Shore was unsatisfactory, evincing senses of incompleteness, rush, loss of focus; it was a narrative which petered out. Arguably this was understandable, given he was 82 at the time of publication, and his death, preceded by Altzheimer’s disease, was seven years in the future. By ending in 1942, seminal though that year was, Lockwood left three crowded and vital years of WWF history untouched before the 1945 start of the projected sequel. In the eight-pages which comprised the penultimate chapter, Chapter 46, Lockwood fast-forwarded through the remainder of WW2, on through the Cold War, to the then present, ending on a future note with the Melbourne Branch declaring: “We are working not only for the good of the Waterside Workers’ Federation members, but for the benefit of the community as a whole”. 861 The unsatisfactory nature of the book’s ending, however, does not detract from what Lockwood attempted, and achieved, in the other 45 chapters and 372 pages of his account. Social history Ship to Shore was not the history of a single industrial organisation, but, as indicated in its subtitle, about the plurality of ‘unionism’ on the Melbourne waterfront; as such it was both a social history and an institutional history. As with War on the Waterfront, Lockwood did not footnote Ship to Shore; the book was aimed at a general readership, rather than a specialist scholarly audience. He did, however, identify sources in the body of his text, and 860 M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 115-118. 861 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 381. 334 conclude with a ‘Select Bibliography’ and bibliographic discussion. 862 Over forty secondary sources were listed, including relevant, and latest-to-date, scholarly labour history materials; primary sources included newspapers, trade union and socialist publications, Parliamentary Debates, and extant records of the various Melbourne waterfront unions. Regarding the latter, Lockwood reported that important relevant documents were missing, variously consigned “to the rubbish tip or flames” or otherwise destroyed during union ructions when the anti-communist ALP Industrial Groups held sway over the politics of the Melbourne waterfront between 1947 and 1954. 863 During his research, Lockwood interviewed “ageing union veterans”, some of whose memories of the waterfront and unionism went back to the early years of the twentieth century. 864 Melbourne waterside workers had previous experience of recalling the past for historical purposes, having been interviewed for the oral history project supported by the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History conducted by veteran former wharfie and union official Tom Hills and pioneer oral historian Wendy Lowenstein, published as Under the Hook in 1982. This book also assisted Lockwood’s research. 865 Lockwood framed his account of wharfies seeking to improve their wages and conditions, in the contexts of the development and nature of the stevedoring industry on the Melbourne waterfront. In turn, he positioned these within Australian history generally, and within the developing Australian labour movement, so that national and international events and changes were shown to have constantly shaped, effected, and influenced the 862 Ibid., pp. 385-388. 863 Ibid., p. 385; Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 78. 864 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 385. 865 Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook; Lockwood referred to this book as one of his sources in his text, p. 174, but did not list it in his ‘ Select Bibliography’. On the importance of Under the Hook, see Lucy Taksa, “Toil, Struggle and Repose: Oral History and the Exploration of Labour Culture in Australia”, Labour History, Number 67, November 1994, pp. 115-116. 335 stevedoring industry and the lives of those who worked in it. The net effect of this was the casting of Melbourne’s wharfies in Australian history as a key workforce, and the waterfront as a strategic industrial/political site, making them part of the Australian story in a way that negated the various senses of their marginalisation discussed earlier. Ship to Shore was as much about Australia as it was about a local workforce and a regional worksite. The overall effect of Lockwood’s telling, was to leave the reader with the sense of the Australian past as one in which turbulence, dispute and conflict were not strangers. Variously opposing the union endeavours of the wharfies was an array of forces, ultimate power residing with the shipowners, people with impeccable Anglo-Celt names and upholstered lifestyles, issuing orders from boardrooms in Melbourne, Sydney and London, aided by Federal and State politicians, judicial and police auxiliaries and the snarling allies of the press… 866 Throughout Ship to Shore was tacit recognition of what Sheridan argued, as prelude to his majesterial study of the Cold War on the waterfront, was the key to understanding Australian waterfront Industrial Relations (IR). According to Sheridan this key was that “virtually all major stevedoring firms were owned and controlled by shipping lines”, with British interests and their agents the majority presence, interests that were “hide-bound in their attitudes”. As late as the 1950s, of the stevedoring companies handling overseas vessels, “the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) group and the Port Line held by far the greatest interest”. So far as stevedoring workers were concerned, Sheridan explained, drawing on the views of shipowner representatives expressed in 1954, stevedoring workers owed their primary loyalty to the shipowners, while the critical involvement of union officials in the industry was regarded as improper since such officials were held to be generally ignorant of the complexities of the 866 Lockwood, Ship to Shore , pp. 278. 336 shipping industry in which “stevedoring is only a hand maiden”. 867 According to Lockwood, British shipping interests regarded Australia in a ‘colonial’ way well into the twentieth century. 868 Unlike Sydney, which developed a relatively contained maritime precinct and waterfront on a shore of a good natural harbour, stretching from Woolloomooloo around Circular Quay to Darling Harbour, 869 the Melbourne waterfront comprised a number of waterfronts. It stretched from the seafront piers at Port Melbourne and Williamstown, and inland up the winding Yarra River into the heart of Melbourne. The latter required canal construction, dredging, and drainage in the late nineteenth century to make it operable and commercially viable, enabling the berthing of coastal vessels right up close the city. 870 Different types of stevedoring specialisations developed at sites along this port/waterway. As with other waterfronts, distinct communities and cultures formed as workers and their families lived near the place of work, what Winnifred Mitchell described generically as “colonies of people of the same occupation.” 871 Different stevedoring unions also developed with these worksites; after a number of short-lived, early attempts at unionism, 872 the Port Phillip Stevedores’ Association (PPSA) formed in 1882; the Melbourne Wharf Labourers’ Union (MWLU) in 1885. The PPSA comprised the “bottomenders”, the elite of the stevedoring industry, the workers who handled the deep-waters vessels; onboard cargo stowage was their speciality. Lockwood captured their elitism and respectability in his caption to a studio portrait of PPSA leader Dick Cranny during the 1920s, seen wearing “coat and waistcoat, gold watch and chain, starched collar and bow tie”; according to 867 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, pp. 11-12. 868 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 200. 869 Mitchell, “Home Life”, p. 88. 870 Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Victoria, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 73. 871 Mitchell, “Home Life”, p. 88; Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook, pp. 7-8. 872 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 60. 337 Lockwood this dress style typified these deep-water stevedores. Closer to the city, and lower on the social scale, the MWLU organised the “topenders’, also known as the “river-rats”, the stevedores who worked the Yarra wharves. 873 In 1902 these two unions became branches of the WWF, formed that year under the leadership of future Prime Minister William Morris Hughes as a platform for his political aspirations, an “opportunist patron” in Lockwood’s account. As Lockwood pointed out, the Federal leadership of this new union included only one person who had ever worked on the wharves; the rest were ALP parliamentarians, “a brand of leadership without parallel in trade unionism”. 874 Later, these unions were joined by the Permanent and Casual Wharf Labourers’ Union (P&C), a ‘scab’ union formed in Sydney when wharfies struck in solidarity with NSW railway workers in 1917. By 1925 in Sydney, members of the P&C had joined the WWF, but a few members remained resolute on the outside; their union gained Federal registration in 1927, and during the 1928 strike on the Melbourne waterfront, established a branch there. The Melbourne P&C remained a divisive and contentious feature of the Melbourne waterfront until the mid-1950s. 875 Collectively this plurality of unions was the ‘unionism’ of Lockwood’s title. Ship to Shore detailed the formation and characteristics of these unions, their often fractious interactions, their aims, successes, failures, and shortcomings. With regard to the latter, Lockwood was attune, for example, to the presence of racism in the ranks of the Melbourne WWF, where there was some early acceptance of aboriginal workers, but hostility towards workers of German and Scandinavian origins during World War 1, and 873 Ibid., pp. 75-79; for the Dick Cranny photograph and caption, Ibid., p. 217. For discussion of the status differences amongst Melborne’s wharfies, see also Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook, pp. 7-8. 874 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 97, 102-105. 875 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, pp. 62, 72; Lowenstein and Hills, Under the Hook, pp. 57, 63. 338 towards Italians and Yugoslav workers in the 1920s. 876 In a sense, then, Ship to Shore was an institutional history of waterfront unions; but Lockwood cast his net wider, and created a social history as well: he depicted the work done by wharfies; provided glimpses of what they were like as human beings beyond their job descriptions, with biographies of individual workers and their leaders. 877 He also looked at aspects of family life, and devoted two chapters to the effects on families of the bitter and violent 1928 strike, with attention to the experiences and roles of “wives, mothers and daughters”. 878 Referencing the social life of wharfies to the late 1920s, Lockwood recorded the existence of a vibrant and cross-generic reading culture amongst wharfies; he wrote-up the PPSA Club in Bay Street, Melbourne, complete with its liquor licence, and recreational and cultural facilities, the later including a library, which according to Lockwood was one of the finest union libraries in Australia, containing full, leather-bound sets of Dickens and Shakspeare, the best of Thackeray, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Henry Handel Richardson and Dostoevsky, along with those dangerous thinkers, Jack London, Eugene Debs, Edward Bellamy, Tom Mann, Keir Hardie, William Morris and Henry George. 879 During its foundation years, the PPSA included in its union objectives the provision of musical and other entertainments, as well as discussion opportunities for its members. Culturally, in Lockwood’s estimation, the “PPSA debates on Australian and world affairs and reading habits were on a higher level than in many land-boomers’ drawing rooms in Toorak.” 880 876 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 127-133, 276-281. 877 Ibid., pp. 234-235, 267-269, 272-273, 278-280, 292, 305-308, 318-321, 333-335. 878 Ibid., pp. 177-178, 312-330. 879 Ibid., p. 310; 75-76. On the working-class culture of reading during the period 1890- 1930, see Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading, 1890-1930, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 109, 151. 880 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 76. 339 Militancy Lockwood’s chronological account of the struggles by wharfies in pursuit of better wages and conditions, with frequent strikes and solidarity actions from 1890 onwards, recognised the ‘key’ understanding of waterfront IR indicated by Sheridan. Ultimately wharfies found themselves pitted against the power of overseas shipowners and their anti-union attitudes, attitudes which in Lockwood’s account were shown to be ruthless, malevolent, rooted in a colonial mindset, and variously buttressed, enacted, enforced, by Australian parliaments, laws, courts, police forces, with the assistance when required of organised strike-breakers and private armies. Just over twentyeight per cent of Ship to Shore was devoted to the national strike by wharfies in 1928 against a new industry Award by Justice Beeby. According to Sheridan this was “the most bitter and violent” of all Australian waterfront strikes. 881 Lockwood’s emphasis on this strike was warranted since it was as Sheridan said; further, its collapse weakened and divided the WWF nationally until the late 1930s, establishing the conditions which helped communist militants come to union office during that decade, in particular paving the way for the crucial future leadership of Jim Healy. In Melbourne the strike left a bitter local legacy of division and antagonism that lasted into the 1950s. That said, if Lockwood had truncated his account of the strike, it would arguably have been possible to produce a one-volume and complete history of the Melbourne branch. But Lockwood chose otherwise, and instead detailed waterfront IR at work in a crisis situation. Violent it was, as Lockwood demonstrated. During the 1928 strike in Melbourne, employer authorities, assisted by the state, organised volunteers to act as strike breakers. Lockwood showed a police force, politicised in the wake of the 1923 victoria police strike, at work, headed by Police Commissioner Major General Thomas Balmey. As Lockwood noted, Blamey had “the right anti-union credentials”; during the 1920s, and later, 881 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 62. 340 he was clandestinely involved in right-wing paramilitary organising. 882 Blamey’s police force protected strike-breakers with baton charges, violently broke up anti-volunteer demonstrations, and on one occasion fired upon protesters, wounding two, maybe three (the records are not exact), and killing another--Gallipoli veteran Allan Whittaker; his name is still honoured on the Melbourne waterfront. 883 As Lockwood noted, shipowners complimented the police for their “great assiduity, diligence and tact”. 884 The violence was not one-sided, and Lockwood detailed assaults on strikebreakers, including an unknown number killed; shots were fired into vehicles associated with strikebreaking, and there were eight bombings at sites linked with strikebreaking, including the home of a shipping company director. 885 Three suspects, arguably framed by police, served time for the bombings, but only one, wharfie activist Alexander (Sandy) McIver, served a long prison sentence of eleven-and-a-half years. He never confessed, went on to become a Treasurer of the Melbourne WWF after his release from prison, and remained silent on his alleged involvement in the bombing through to his death in 1980. 886 Lockwood gave prominence to Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Australia’s Prime Minister, 1923-1929, and his role representing and advancing shipowner interests, especially during the 1928 strike when he introduced the despised Transport Workers’ (Dog Collar) Act (TWA). Bruce had an intense hatred 882 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, pp. 287-288. On Blamey’s right-wing paramilitary credentials see D. M. Horner, “Blamey, Sir Thomas Albert (1884-1951)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1993, p. 197; Andrew Moore, The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales, 1930-32, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, 1989, pp. 135, 241, 245; Hall, Secret State, pp. 20-23. 883 Peter Love, “Alan Whitaker Commemorative Walking Tour”, Recorder, Official organ of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Issue Number 264, December 2009, pp.1-2. 884 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 291. 885 Ibid., pp. 263-266. 886 Ibid., pp. 267-269. 341 of watersider workers, one which future Scullin Government Treasurer Theodore reckoned in 1928 was close to “insanity”. 887 Lockwood portrayed Bruce biographically as wealthy by birth, a graduate of Cambridge University, lawyer by training, prominent businessman/importer by trade, politician with the assistance of influential business/political contacts, virulently anti-socialist, opposed to trade union use of strikes, an opportunistic pioneer of the political use of anti-Bolshevism (anticommunism), and a stake holder in the shipping industry via shareholdings and business interests. A “bunyip aristocrat”, according to Lockwood, “the only Australian politician to wear spats to set off his formal morning dress”. 888 In later life, as Viscount Bruce, he became a director of P&O. As Lockwood commented: “He lived and died an agent of the ruthless shipping cartels”. 889 In terms of biographical content, Lockwood used material on the public record already available to biographers generally; what was different was his emphasis and interpretation of Bruce’s life, which, when contextualised within waterfront history, and the role in this industry of shipowner interests, made clear the historical agency of Bruce, not as statesman but as the representative and agent of vested interests. 890 The struggles depicted by Lockwood were not couched in populist Marxist terminology, but in terms of power and control. He showed how wharfies took their productive power and politically mobilised it through the collectivity of unionism; in turn he grounded this in their working lives, their experiences, and rendered it as part of their social and cultural life. Opposing them were the shipping interests, powerful monopolies and cartels, formations of great power and wealth, antipathetic towards unionism, their expectation being that stevedoring workers should be 887 Ibid., p. 202. 888 Ibid., pp. 202-203. 889 Ibid., p. 323. 890 Ibid., pp. 202-209. Lockwood based his account of Bruce on his own research of parliamentary papers, contemporary press reports, and related secondary sources, including Cecil Edwards, Bruce of Melbourne: A Man of Two Worlds, Heinemann, London, 1965. 342 subservient labourers who accepted their demeaned status in a master/servant relationship. In ensuing conflicts over time, Lockwood was not only interested in the challenges from below, but also in how shipowner power was exercised, and expressed, from boardrooms overseas to the Australian waterfront, through Australian agents, institutions and state agencies. Since the 1950s, Lockwood had been critical of analyses of Australian capitalism and control of the means of production which paid insufficient attention to monopoly power and foreign investment, and the influence of these on Australian political and economic independence. Ship to Shore was not only Lockwood’s account of localised unionism, but an expression also of his understanding of Australian capitalism. 891 CONCLUSION Discussion of Lockwood’s Humour is Their Weapon (1985), and Ship to Shore (1990), provided the focus of this chapter. Overall, the chapter established grounds for regarding Lockwood as a serious and original historian. Discussion of the two books examined Lockwood’s contributions to a range of areas of Australian History specialisation: to labour history, maritime history, political history, and to social history. Further, Ship to Shore, it was argued, was not only an account of localised unionism, but an expression also of Lockwood’s understanding of Australian capitalism. Throughout the discussion, the relationship between Lockwood’s experience of the maritime/waterfront industry via his role as a trade union journalist was noted. That a journalist can/could write history was, at the outset, shown to be a long Australian journalistic/historical tradition. In Chapter 9, the discussion of Lockwood’s post-1969 books continues, again with the intent of demonstrating Lockwood’s claim to be judged a serious historian. 891 Playford, “Sixty Families’, pp. 31-32. 343 CHAPTER NINE THE “GROSSLY UNDER-REPORTED” TRADITION The subjects of this chapter are Lockwood’s War on the Waterfront (1987), and Black Armada (1975). Discrete sections are devoted to each of these books, in this order. The reverse order of publication has been adopted because of the chronological order of events treated in the books, the 1987 text dealing with the 1930s, the 1975 text with the late 1940s. Historically this chronology matters, the former events having variously influenced the latter. Further, as these two books dealt with aspects of the understanding, and practice, of internationalism by the WWF, the chapter begins with a discussion historically contextualising this. As the chapter will demonstrate, Lockwood regarded the internationalist history of the WWF and sections of the Australian trade union movement, which at times dramatically cut across the lines of traditional White Australia policy and associated attitudes, as the “grossly under-reported” Australian tradition. He took it upon himself to try to insert this tradition into the telling of Australian history. INTERNATIONALISM AND THE WWF A theme common to three of Lockwood’s books examined in this and the previous chapter, central in two and touched upon in the other, is the long tradition in the WWF of internationalism. During the Cold War, when the WWF applied work bans against successive Dutch, British, and American interventions in South East Asia, critics of the union, much of the mass media, and conservative politicians, claimed these were the cause/effect product of communist influence in the union and Kremlin sourced machinations. However, as industrial relations scholar Tom Sheridan argued, this was “a simple explanation”; internationalism in the WWF predated communist influence in the union. 892 892 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 70. For accounts of this internationalist tradition see M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 94, 104-108, 166, 208, 212, 216-220, 226, 235-236; Lockwood, Jim Healy, pp. 11-16. 344 Scholarship regarding communist influence in the WWF takes 1937 as the key date for the ‘beginning’ of this influence, the year communist wharfie Jim Healy was elected as the union’s general secretary and began rebuilding a deeply divided workforce and union. 893 In pre-dating this internationalism, both Sheridan and Lockwood went back to the early 1870s when Melbourne waterside workers variously sympathised with and supported prisoners from the Paris Commune, en route to the French penal system in New Caledonia. France used Port Melbourne as a re-provisioning stop-off until local expressions of republican sympathy forced an end to the practise. 894 Sheridan included in his pre-communist era examples of wharfie internationalism, large donations to the 1890 London dock strike which gave a “disproportionate psychological boost to the strike campaign”, support in 1913 to the Dublin general strike, and bans in 1938 and 1941 on wool shipments to Japan. 895 Lockwood extended the origins of waterfront internationalism to January/February 1865, when the American Confederate raider Shenandoah entered Port Phillip for repairs, provisioning, and to secure extra crew members. While many of Melbourne’s elite welcomed the raider and entertained its officers and crew, pro-Northern and anti-slavery sympathisers in Melbourne and on the waterfront campaigned against the raider’s presence and there was a threat to blow it up in port. 896 893 Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia, p. 88; Macintyre, The Reds, pp. 334-335 894 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 70; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 225- 226. For a brief account of Australian sympathy for the exiled communards see Ann Stephen, “Exile in the Pacific” in Ann Stephen (editor), Visions of a Republic: The Work of Lucien Henry-Paris-Noumea-Sydney, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 2001, pp. 34-35. 895 Sheridan, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 70. 896 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 223-224. The Shenandoah eventually circumnavigated the world, sinking more enemy ships than any other Confederate warship. After leaving Melbourne, the raider ranged through the South and North Pacific sinking Northern whalers, even after the surrender of the Confederacy in April 1865. In those preradio days, Shenandoah’s commander refused to believe verbal reports of the surrender. Eventually, in August 1865, he was convinced by newspaper reports carried on a British vessel the raider stopped at sea. Shenandoah surrendered to British authorities in Liverpool 345 With 1865 and the early 1870s providing his foundation, Lockwood argued that a tradition of a “social conscience above the law” developed on Australian waterfronts, and that this became embedded in the culture of the WWF, a ‘social conscience’ manifest in a multitude of actions in support of internationalist and humanitarian causes. As he also pointed out, this was a tradition “grossly under-reported by historians”. 897 It was a theme Lockwood had identified and discussed as early as 1951 in a 16-page pamphlet on the life of Jim Healy, a source regarded in later scholarship as credible and useful. 898 Explaining this internationalist aspect of Australian maritime culture, historians have focussed on the internationalising agencies of the sea, and the nature of maritime work, in creating milieux (e.g. ships, wharves, docks, waterfronts) and opportunities where it was, and still is, possible for people of many nationalities to mix and meet, to work together, to learn from and about each other in relation to working conditions and political situations elsewhere, to develop an affinity with these others based on the common essential nature of maritime work either as seafarers or as stevedores, and through this, recognition of their common humanity. In their study of the surge of radical democratic thought and practice on both sides of the Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Peter Linebaugh in November 1865; its crew had to defend themselves against the charge of piracy. There are numerous accounts of the voyage of the Shenandoah; see for example John Baldwin and Ron Powers, Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship, Random House, New York, 2007, and Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray: The Around- the- World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah, Hill and Wang, New York, 2006. The Australian leg of the voyage is detailed in Cyril Pearl, Rebel Down Under: When the ‘Shenandoah’ Shook Melbourne, 1865, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1970. 897 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 222-236. Also on the WWF and ‘social conscience’ see Greg Mallory, Uncharted Waters: Social Responsibility in Australian Trade Unions, Greg Mallory, Brisbane, 2005, p. 33 898 Lockwood, Jim Healy, pp. 11-16. On the credibility and usefulness of this pamphlet, see Sheridan’s use of the pamphlet, Australia’s Own Cold War, p. 70, and the related Endnote, Number 52, p. 85. 346 and Marcus Rediker (2000) gave centrality to the maritime sector of the economy, to the workers who sailed, built, repaired, loaded and unloaded ships, and to waterfronts, portrayed by the authors as multiracial, multicultural, multinational social orders, a sector which over time developed a tradition of resistance to capitalist modes of organisation and a sense of its ‘otherness’; according to Linebaugh and Rediker, there was a “volatile, serpentine tradition of maritime radicalism” which continually raised its head in history. 899 In the case of Australia the roles of the SUA and the WWF in variously promoting a sense of internationalism amongst their memberships has also been recognised, a matter of interest given that from the 1860s to the 1960s, the Australian trade union movement generally supported the restrictive and racist White Australia policy which was regarded as key to the protection of Australian working-class interests. 900 As to why maritime workers, especially seamen and waterside workers should take the initiative regarding internationalism, arguably it was due, as Robin Gollan observed, to their strategic position in “the chain of production”, one which gave them the opportunity and power to attempt to influence government policy, particularly foreign policy, in a direct, hands-on way, whereas other unions and peak organisations like the ACTU, could only adopt resolutions. 901 899 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the H idden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Beacon Press, Boston, 2000. See Chapters 5 and 6 especially; “serpentine” quote p. 173. For an interesting account of a specific example of the internationalising political agency of the Sydney waterfront, specifically its impact on Australian Aboriginal political activism during the early twentieth century, see John Maynard, “‘In the interests of our people’: the influence of Garveyism on the rise of Australian Aboriginal political activism”, Aboriginal History, Volume 29, 2005, pp. 1-22. 900 Bradley Bowden, “The Rise and Decline of Australian Unionism: A History of Industrial Labour from the 1820s to 2010”, Labour History, Number 100, May 2011, pp. 51-82, especially pp. 58, 61, 68; Patmore, Australian Labour History, Chapter 8. 901 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 77. 347 I: WAR ON THE WATERFRONT: MENZIES, JAPAN AND THE PIGIRON DISPUTE (1987). Port Kembla wharfies and their 1938/39 political action In Australia during the 1930s the view developed on the Left that Japanese expansionist ambitions and aggression in Asia were aided and abetted by Australian business and conservative political interests. 902 On 17 November 1938 this perception became dramatically manifest in the decision by Port Kembla wharfies on the South Coast of NSW, to refuse to load a cargo of pig-iron on the British tramp steamer Dalfram bound for Japan. Their decision, they made clear, was not industrial, but political; as Port Kembla WWF Secretary Edward (Ted) Roach explained to the Sydney Morning Herald (November 18), they were unwilling to load the pig-iron because “success to the Japanese Fascist militarists in China will according to their own statements inspire them to further attacks on peaceful people which will include Australia”. 903 The Sino-Japanese War had been in progress since July 1937; the conservative government of Prime Minister Lyons (UAP) basically followed an appeasement policy towards Japan, concern about Australia’s export trade with Japan, particularly with regard to wheat, wool, iron-ore and related products, overcoming the sorts of moral issues and concerns about the supply of strategic materials the wharfies were raising. While not condoning the actions of Japan in China, the government opposed embargoes and boycotts out of concern “not to antagonise 902 Ray Markey and Andrew Wells, “The Labour Movement in Wollongong”, in Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells, editors, A History of Wollongong, The University of Wollongong Press, Wollongong, 1997, p. 91. 903 Cited by Len Richardson, “Dole Queue Patriots’, in John Iremonger, John Merritt, and Graeme Osborne, editors, Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, Angus and Robertson in association with The Australian Society For The Study Of Labour History, Sydney, 1973, p. 143. 348 Japan”. 904 For the duration of the 65-day strike, Port Kembla became the focus of national political and largely hostile media attention. The Port Kembla ban was in line with the general policy of the WWF; in October 1937 the union’s policy-making Federal Conference authorised the union to work in conjunction with the ACTU in organising “an embargo or boycott of Japanese imports and exports”. 905 Wharfies in Sydney, Port Adelaide, Hobart, Brisbane, variously refused to works ships and cargoes involved in trade with Japan. These were short bans involving small numbers of workers, but they tested the patience of the Lyons government, adamant that foreign policy was the preserve of the Commonwealth, and not trade unions. Further, as its Attorney-General, Robert Menzies, explained to readers of the Melbourne Argus (22 December 1938), the “essence of democracy is that obedience should be rendered to government founded upon a popular vote”. Accordingly, use of the TWA was threatened against workers who refused directions to work. Introduced in 1928, the TWA was ingenious anti-union legislation that took advantage of the large pool of unemployed created during the Depression, and targeted individuals. 906 Through a colour-coded process of licencing individual workers, pink licences for unionists, brown for non-unionists, employers were able to create a pool of non-unionised workers, with preference of employment, effectively excluding ‘undesirables’ from employment. Employers were further empowered to easily cancel licences, which, once revoked, kept individuals involved out of that particular employment for six months. The uptake of a licence also removed the right to strike. The TWA targeted selected ports and greatly weakened the WWF 904 Derek McDougall, “The Australian Labour Movement and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1939”, Labour History, Number 33, November 1977, p. 41. 905 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 109. 906 Ibid., p. 138; on the ingenuity of the TWA see Andrew D. Frazer, “Parliament and the Industrial Power’, 2001, <http://ro.ouw.edu.au/lawpapers 6>, p. 23 (accessed 24 February 2011). 349 following its use against the union in 1928; at the time of the Dalfram dispute, nine of Australia’s forty-six registered ports were affected by TWA provisions, and in most ports throughout the 1930s there were sources of waterfront labour independent of the WWF. 907 By 1938 the union had regained industrial strength, but was still rebuilding under the leadership of communist Jim Healy, who had been elected the union’s General Secretary in 1937. To militants, the TWA was a powerful, intimidating, divisive and despised piece of political-industrial legislation, referred to as the ‘Dog Collar Act’; the one-shilling cost of a TWA licence equalled the then cost of a dog licence. 908 Repeal of the Act was high on the agenda of the WWF; it was suspended by the Menzies government in 1941 and repealed in 1942 by the Curtin government under the exigencies of war. The resistance of the Port Kembla wharfies to the TWA was instrumental in the legislation’s final demise. 909 Despite pressures from within their own union and from the wider trade union movement, Port Kembla wharfies maintained their ban, defying a government ultimatum that it would invoke the TWA against them if the ban continued. 910 The wharfies were buoyed by expressions of moral support from across the nation, from trade unions, some left-ALP politicians, ALP branches, intellectuals, church groups, citizen organisations, but mostly by donations of supplies from storekeepers and small-business people, and by the weekly pay-levies of industrial workers, from within the South Coast community. 911 On 7 December 1938 AttorneyGeneral Menzies applied the TWA; his personal, hands-on determination to 907 M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. 109; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 139. 908 Lockwood, Ship to Shore, p. 244. 909 M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 109-111. 910 See McDougall, “Australian Labour Movement and the Sino-Japanese War” for a detailed examination of the differing political and strategic positions in the Australian labour movement regarding the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1939. 911 For the nature and extent of this support see Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 42, 189-203. 350 break the ban earned him the odious nickname that dogged the rest of his political career and life -- “Pig-Iron Bob”. Only one volunteer came forward to take out a labouring licence. Ten days later, on 17 December, all the while profiting from its iron-ore and pig-iron trade with Japan, BHP laid off some 4000 local steelworkers, arguing that with the port at a standstill, it was unprofitable to continue production. BHP Managing Director Essington Lewis’ solution to the moral and strategic issues raised by the boycott was to argue that profits from the pig-iron trade with Japan could be invested in the defence of Australia. 912 The pre-Christmas lay-off targeted the major South Coast labour force and its financial support of the wharfies; like a virus it ensured hardship spread from the 180 or so wharfies involved to the South Coast community generally, stressing its economy, community relations, and family life, offering a bleak Christmas and an even bleaker future. On 21 January 1939, wharfies returned to work and loaded the Dalfram under protest, having first secured government undertakings to review future shipments of pig-iron to Japan, and to withdraw the TWA licencing provisions from the port. Lockwood’s account of the Dalfram dispute As Erik Eklund noted, the Dalfram dispute has been “well-covered by labour historians”. 912 913 Lockwood’s account, War on the Waterfront: Geoffrey Blainey, The Steelmaster: A Life of Essington Lewis, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1971, p. 139. 913 Erik Eklund, Steel Town: The Making and Breaking of Port Kembla , Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2002, p. 147. For coverage of the dispute apart from Lockwood’s account, see Garry Giffith, “The Growing Militancy of the South Coast Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation”, BA Honours thesis, University of Wollongong, 1980, Chapter 5; Greg Mallory, “The 1938 Dalfram Pig-iron Dispute and Wharfies Leader, Ted Roach”, The Hummer, Volume 3, Number 2, Winter 1999, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/vol3-no-2/dalfram-pig-iron, accessed 25 February 2011; Greg Mallory, Uncharted Waters, pp. 39-48; Richardson, “Dole Queue Patriots” pp. 143-158; Edward C. Roach, “Menzies and Pig Iron for Japan”, The Hummer, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1994, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/vol-2-no-2/pig-iron/ , accessed 17 February 2011; J. White, “Port Kembla Pig-iron Dispute”, Labour History, Number 37, November 1979, pp. 63-77. 351 Menzies, Japan and the Pig-Iron Dispute, has been judged the most comprehensive. 914 It is also, as Bridge commented, “far more wide-ranging than its title implies.” 915 It should be noted here that Bridge, a hostile academic critic of this study, described the author as “the Communist journalist Rupert Lockwood”, even though Lockwood had, in 1987 when the book was published, not been a member of the CPA, or of any other communist organisation, for close to 18 years, and that this was also the case during the writing of the book. For Bridge, the historical and politically inaccurate description of Lockwood is a means of marginalising and demeaning the author and his work; other applicable descriptions that would lend credibility to the author are studiously avoided: for example, “the maritime industry journalist Rupert Lockwood’; “the labour historian Rupert Lockwood”. 916 Lockwood took part of his book’s title from the play War on the Waterfront by Australian playwright Betty Roland, a short agitprop sketch written quickly in response to the pig-iron dispute. 917 Its first performance, in Sydney’s Domain before an audience of 2000, was closed down by police; subsequent Domain performances were banned by the conservative government of NSW Premier Sir Bertram Stevens. A later Domain performance challenging this ban, before an audience of 3000, resulted in scuffles with police, and the arrest and fining of the actors involved. The play was written for performance without the need for props, and was subsequently performed guerrilla style in picnic grounds, on the backs of trucks, at pit-tops, on wharves. The play, its title, its reception by state 914 M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. 305. 915 Bridge, “Appeasement and After”, p. 372. 916 Ibid. Bridge was, in 2005 when his comments on Lockwood were published, associated with the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College, London. 917 For the agitprop political theatre style during the 1930s see Arrow, Upstaged, pp. 135- 136. 352 authorities, capture the tenor of the times, and the tenor of Lockwood’s book. 918 Lockwood’s War on the Waterfront was a detailed, chronological and vivid account of the Dalfram dispute. As Lockwood explained to his readers in an autobiographical “Writer to Reader” prelude 919, the book was written from the perspective of a person whose life had been significantly touched, and changed, by the event, matters I have detailed in Chapter 4 of this study. Unlike Black Armada, discussed later in this chapter, the Dalfram account was not footnoted. However, sources were identified in the text, and a “Select Bibliography” was provided. 920 In a one-page bibliographic note Lockwood explained that Port Kembla WWF records of the dispute were largely absent, having been thrown out by “uncaring right wing officials who held office some years after the dispute”, 921 while key records once held by the South Coast Trades and Labour Council (Wollongong) had been stolen during the dispute in January 1938. 922 During his research Lockwood interviewed surviving participants of the dispute, and conducted a lengthy interview with dispute leader Ted Roach in March 1980. 923 Lockwood also acknowledged access to original archival research, unpublished at the time, by Rowan Cahill, and by Drew Cottle. 924 From a labour history viewpoint, the basic issue implicitly addressed in War on the Waterfront was that framed by Len Richardson in 1973, whose work Lockwood acknowledged; how it was that a small local union branch had the temerity and ability to initiate a major ban, maintain it for over two 918 Betty Roland, “War on the Waterfront: A Banned Play”, Communist Review, February 1939, pp. 110-114; Arrow, Upstaged, pp. 169-170; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 179-182. 919 Lockwood, Ibid., pp. 11-28 920 Ibid., pp. 249-251. 921 Ibid., p. 249. 922 Ibid., pp. 185, 249. 923 Ibid., pp. 163, 249. 924 Ibid., p. 249. 353 months, in the process becoming the storm centre of national politics. 925 For Lockwood, and Richardson, the answer, in part, lay in the nature of the Port Kembla wharfies’ power at the time, rooted in the ways in which they were an integral part of the local South Coast/Illawarra community, and the support that community provided throughout the dispute. Crucial also were changes within the Port Kembla branch of the WWF during the 1930s, changes which saw it transform from being a weak industrial organisation to a militant one, a transformation due, as Lockwood explained, to the political and social experiences of the Depression, and the arrival in the port community of workers from other ports, men variously with militant union backgrounds and involvement in Left political organising and organisations. The role of local kinship networks within the Port Kembla WWF prior to the growth of militancy, their political moderation which undermined and compromised the effectiveness of the Branch as an industrial organisation, was not referred to, although arguably available at the time in research by Garry Griffith. 926 ….and Ted Roach While the national leadership of WWF General Secretary Jim Healy was part of Lockwood’s account, the focus of attention was the local leadership of Port Kembla Branch Secretary, Edward (Ted) Roach (1909-1997), wharfie, communist activist, born on the South Coast of NSW, raised on the Newcastle coalfields, who had “experienced swag-carrying, train-jumping, sleeping under bridges and dole rations”. Roach was elected to head the Port Kembla WWF branch in February 1938. Lockwood’s account of Roach’s leadership represented an historical corrective to accounts of Healey’s life 925 Richardson, “Dole Queue Patriots”, p. 145; for acknowledgement of Richardson, Lockwood, War on the Waterfront,p. 251. 926 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 133-136. The Garry Griffith research referred to was his study “The Growing Militancy of the South Coast Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation”, BA Honours Thesis, University of Wollongong, 1980, pp. 37-39; on local kinship and wharfie politics see also Erik Eklund, “‘We Are of Age’: Class, Locality and Region at Port Kembla, 1900-1940”, Labour History, Number 66, May 1994, p. 82. 354 and his leadership of the WWF (1937-1961), which tended to either erase or minimise the contributions of others. This is arguably evident in Markey and Svensen’s Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Healy, 927 where there is no concession to him being part of a leadership team, while reference to the pig-iron dispute implies the leadership of Healy, with no mention of Roach; and it is clearly evident in the Healy biography by communist writer Victor Williams, The Years of Big Jim (1975), 928 where Healy was portrayed virtually as a lone hand who made all WWF gains during his career--in short, a communist saint. 929 In Lockwood’s War on the Waterfront contribution to correcting this myth, there was an element of irony, since Lockwood had, during his career on the Maritime Worker and in his pamphlet on Healy (1951), 930 contributed to the myth making process. As later scholars attested, the relationship between Roach, subsequently WWF Assistant Secretary (1942-1967), and Healy was sometimes tense, Greg Mallory commenting in an obituary tribute that Roach “clashed with Healy on a number of occasions and felt Healy was given accolades that others in the organisation should have received”. 931 927 Ray Markey, Stuart Svensen, “Healy, James (Jim) (1898-1961)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, Melbourne University Press, 1996, pp. 421-423. 928 Victor Williams, The Years of Big Jim, Lone Hand Press, Sydney, 1975. 929 Mallory, Uncharted Waters, p. 178. 930 Lockwood, Jim Healy. 931 Greg Mallory, “Ted Roach (1907-1997): Militant Wharfies Leader of the ‘Pig Iron Bob’ Dispute”, The Hummer, Volume 2, Number 8, Winter 1997, http://asslh.org.au/hummer/vol-2-no-8/ted-roach, accessed 9 February 2011, p. 2. For accounts of Ted Roach independent of the Dalfram dispute, see Garry Griffith, “Ted Roach (1909-1997)”, Illawarra Unity-Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 1, Issue 2, pp. 30-34; Edward C. Roach, “The Ted Roach Papers: Highlights Connected With the Trade Union Activities of E. C. Roach”, Illawarra Unity-Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History , Volume 1, Number 2, 1997, pp. 16-29. The measure of the man and his politics were captured in L. J. Louis, “The Cold/Class War, and the Jailing of Ted Roach”, Labour History, Number 86, May 2004, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/86/louis.html, accessed 7 February 2011. 355 Capital History Lockwood structured his account of the Dalfram dispute in two parts. Part 2 was traditional labour history, a detailed account of a labour dispute, emphasising working class mobilisation, organisation, personalities, and conflict with employers and the state. Part 1 and related Appendixes, more than a third of the text, comprised capital history, and examined aspects of Australian capitalism. Andrew Moore, drawing on earlier work by Humphrey McQueen, described capital history as a response to traditional labour history’s concentration on the institutions and individuals of the working class, a political intervention to turn the preoccupation with labour biography and trade union history into a critical historical analysis of the Australian ruling class and the institutions and structures which has sustained its dominance.932 For Lockwood the dispute was a response to conditions and circumstances created by fractions of Australian capital; the issue the Port Kembla wharfies addressed was rooted in Australian capital. The response to the dispute by authorities demonstrated the relationship between business interests and the state, and its ideological underpinning. The militancy and solidarity of workers and their supporters during the dispute, while variously shaped by the social and political circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s, also rose out of the parlous working conditions prevailing in BHP enterprises in those times. There was a sense for Lockwood in which Port Kembla was a crucible in which BHP not only worked with ores and metals, but also helped create the militants who opposed it and resisted the coercion of the state. The events of Part 2 of War on the Waterfront were dependent on, and existed because of, the capital history detailed in Part 1. So far as 932 Andrew Moore, “The Montagues and the Capulets? Labour history, capital history and a case study of ruling class mobilisation during the 1930s Depression”, Teaching History, Volume 23, Number 3, October 1989, p. 4. 356 the conceptualisation and writing of Australian history was concerned, for its time War on the Waterfront represented ‘the road less travelled’. 933 At the outset of Part 1, Lockwood established the strategic importance of iron in the expansionist/militarist economy of Japan between the two world wars, and Australia’s role in helping meet its requirements; according to Lockwood, Japan’s iron supplies, if threatened, could “become the Achilles’ heel of the Japanese war economy”. 934 He then proceeded to examine aspects of Australian capital between the wars: the trade relationship between Australia and Japan, particularly with regard to Australian mining, steel manufacturing, and wool interests; the history of BHP in Australia both as a mining/manufacturing organisation and as an employer; the attitude of Australian business leaders and conservative politicians towards Japan; and the nature and extent of what he referred to as the “congeries of pro-Japanese lobbies in Australia” between the wars: A tangled web of potential fifth columnists, paid Japanese agents, bankers, importers, exporters, the ‘Pure Merino’ rural aristocracy, Fascists linked with the military and with big business, anti-Semites, Douglas Crediters, some prominent newspaper executives, journalists, writers and radio commentators, paranoids who saw Russians advancing over the brow of the hill with snow on their boots, and sad princes of this outpost of Empire who feared that in the age of imperial decline Australia would be blown off the British-charted course into unknown seas, left naked to the Pacific storms--unless Japan filled the vacancy as friend and Ally…..There was, too, a breed of academic experts and foreign affairs savants who would never see the light until they felt the fire, and accepted Japan’s pledges of peaceful relations with Australia.935 933 Moore’s “The Montagues and the Capulets?” is a detailed discussion of Australian capital history, its relationship with labour history, and its applications. At the time Moore was writing (1989), Australian capital history was not a well furrowed field of historical research and writing. 934 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 30. 935 Ibid., p. 67. 357 These were the people, lobbies, and networks that helped generate and manipulate opinion against the Dalfram boycotters. Returning to matters he had first raised in Document J, which later found some historical support in the works of Drew Cottle, Humphrey McQueen, and Andrew Moore, Lockwood also argued that had Australia been invaded by Japan during the war, collaborators would have emerged from this tangled web to help administer a subject Australia. 936 For Lockwood, when it came to patriotism, capital had no patriotism; the Port Kembla wharfies and their supporters during the Dalfram dispute represented genuine Australian national interest and were the true patriots. Menzies again As the subtitle, Menzies, Japan and the Pig Iron Dispute, of War on the Waterfront made clear, Robert Menzies was a key part of Lockwood’s account. At the time Lockwood was writing, as Andrew Moore has pointed out, the “prevailing image of Menzies” was as “a kindly, mellifluous-voiced patriarch who steered the country through the ‘long boom’ of the 1950s”, an image “bolstered by an emerging hagiographic literature” about his career. The left-wing Cold War portrait of Menzies as ‘Ming the Merciless’ was “largely forgotten”. 937 Lockwood’s account of Menzies constituted counterhagiography. Rather than a Commonwealth Attorney General simply doing his job during the Dalfram dispute, the account preferred, for example, by Liberal Party historian Gerard Henderson, 938 Lockwood depicted a politicised Attorney General, who used his office to enforce a particular view of Democracy, pursue an anti-union bias, act in accord with an appeasement policy towards Japan, and advance sectional Australian business interests, in particular those of BHP with whom he was linked via 936 Ibid., pp. 242-245. 937 Moore, The Right Road, p. 57. 938 Gerard Henderson, Menzies’ Child: The Liberal Party of Australia, Harper Collins Publishers, Sydney, 1998, p. 323. 358 friendships with key shareholders and his father James Menzies, a paid BHP lobbyist. 939 It will be recalled that Menzies was livid following Lockwood’s 1938 pressgallery toast, and “never forgave insult”; he was, in Lockwood’s understanding of his own biography, instrumental in Lockwood’s life thereafter. 940 Respected Australian political journalist Peter Hastings observed in 1987, that Menzies was a politician who held grudges and “did not readily forgive those who trespassed against him, as his private correspondence frequently reveals”, to the extent, according to Hastings, to affecting his political judgements and behaviour on the international stage. 941 Equally, Lockwood never forgave, and in War on the Waterfront the personal and the historical mixed. In particular he did not forgive the way in which his family had been targeted during the Cold War; especially distressing was the way in which his “innocent young daughters” had been persecuted during the Prime Ministership of Menzies (1949-1966). 942 Accordingly, Lockwood’s portrait of the Attorney General and later Prime Minister was, while reasoned and evidentially supported, underpinned by personal animosity, at times scarifyingly so, bringing to mind “inveterate Menzies-hater” Humphrey McQueen’s 1978 essay on Menzies, and dissident journalist John Pilger’s portrayal of the same in 1992. 943 To Lockwood, Menzies was the fellow Wimmera lad whose father knew his father, Alfred Lockwood; Menzies, fellow Wesley College student, but not a 939 Lockwood devoted Chapter 3 of War on the Waterfront to the father, James Menzies, pp. 60-66. 940 Ibid., pp. 25-26. 941 Peter Hastings, “Menzies never forgave or forgot”, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1987, p. 13. 942 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 28. 943 Henderson, Menzies’ Child, p. 323, referred to McQueen as an “inveterate Menzies- hater”; McQueen’s essay “Menzies” was published during 1978 in the Australian Marxist journal Arena, and republished in Humphrey McQueen, Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 167-175; John Pilger, A Secret Country, Vintage, London, 1992, pp. 154-155, 161-167. 359 contemporary; Lieutenant Menzies of the Melbourne University Rifles, who did not to volunteer for service overseas during World War 1 but chose instead the career advancement of civilian life on the homefront. During his subsequent long political career, Menzies voiced “support for (the) militarist regimes of Japan and Italy”, praised the Nazis, appeased Japan, and later, as Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, embroiled Australia in a series of wars — Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, threatened the invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis, and called for the use of atomic bombs against Russia and China. As Lockwood contemptuously termed him, he was the “unblooded warrior”. 944 The Menzies family was sensitive to the ‘shirker’ charge sometimes made against Menzies, that he had selfishly chosen to advance his own civilian career on the homefront during World War 1 instead of following his two brothers into the trenches of the frontline; rather, the family argued, his decision was the result of family pressure, and should not be used to blight his character. According to Menzies’ biographer A. W. Martin, it was a sensitivity Menzies probably also shared. 945 Significance of the Dalfram dispute For Lockwood, the significance of the Dalfram dispute was not simply its success or otherwise in terms of the settlement reached, and he challenged the claim made by Roach that the ban ended the pig-iron trade with Japan, noting the loading of two post-Dalfram shipments, a challenge supported by other scholarship. 946 However, his broad understanding of the significance of the dispute was in accord with that of Roach who put it thus in a talk in 1994: 944 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 24-26, 237-240. 945 Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 27-30, 274-276. 946 Roach, “Menzies and Pig Iron for Japan”; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 212; Mallory, Uncharted Waters, pp. 45-46; M. Beasley, Wharfies, p. 108; C. SutherwoodClaridge, “The Sussex Street Men: A Study of the Influence of the Communist Party of Australia on the Sydney Branch of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, 1931-1948”, PhD Thesis, History Department, University of Queensland, 1994, pp. 181-182. 360 The essence of the struggle was not so much as whether we loaded the Dalfram or not (sic) intrinsically the cargo itself made little difference to the war on China. The real issue was that the Dalfram was the vehicle to focus national and international attention on the reactionary policy of the Lyons/Menzies Government; to alert the Australian people to dangers inherent in the Japanese policy, and to force alteration in Government foreign policy. 947 Beyond that, however, Lockwood saw greater significance: the value of the dispute was that it took place; the ban by the Port Kembla wharfies was its validation. Unlike Menzies, who as we have seen, argued in 1938 that the essence of democracy entailed citizen compliance and obedience to government after the decision of the ballot box had been declared, Lockwood argued that this compliance did not apply equally to all. Despite the decision of the ballot box, “multi-national and strategic-heights national corporations”, powerful people in boardrooms, their advisors, lobbyists, collectively formed an ‘invisible government’, “unmandated operators of the levers of power, not beholden to men and women obliged to drop ballot papers into boxes on election days”. Forces “not dependent for their authority on declaration of parliamentary poll” exercised political influence and political power, and helped shape and influence government decisions, remaining in the political field when the obliging citizen had obediently retired. Under this system, citizens were entitled to exert pressure on governments, and here Lockwood cited statements by Dr. H.V. Evatt in 1947, via the “open expression of opinion”, but not to forcefully insist or push a viewpoint using boycotts, bans, strikes. 948 However, as Lockwood pointed out, such “open expression” was not guaranteed. In practice this “open expression” was tenuous, as governments retained the right to censor literature and place limits on the mass media. As example of this, Lockwood cited the case of 947 Roach, “Menzies and Pig Iron for Japan” p. 5; Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, pp. 27-28. 948 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 41. 361 Australia during the 1930s where a heavily repressive regime of censorship, particularly political, prevailed. As Peter Coleman demonstrated, excessive political censorship in Australia between the wars was “a standard practice”, escalating from 1929 onwards, with about 5000 books banned by Commonwealth authorities from distribution in Australia by 1936. The proscribed list included the Communist Manifesto, and works by major (past, current, or future) literary figures like Richard Aldington, Daniel Defoe, Jean Devanny, Radclyffe Hall, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, John O’Hara, George Orwell, John Dos Passos. As Coleman explained, the Federal government “tried to preserve Australia from all books which in any way--cleverly or stupidly, wittily or pompously-questioned, betrayed or attacked what they took to be the values of the patriotic family man and woman”. 949 As early as December 1933, some sixty-six political works were prohibited, to be joined during the following year by another ninety, the listing including writings by Lenin, and Stalin, and significant international left wing journals. 950 In practice then, the citizen was left with and expected to accept, as Lockwood put it in an experientially redolent passage, limited and fragile avenues of expression: A street corner soapbox (police permit required) with voice drowned by traffic noise, a Sydney Domain or Melbourne Yarra Bank platform with security police shorthand writers present, or union journals of fractional circulations, subject to legal sanctions….951 For Lockwood, the significance of the Dalfram dispute was its demonstration that citizens, in this case unionised workers, could participate in the political process beyond the decision of the ballot box, and successfully have power beyond the “open expression of opinion”, power 949 Ibid, pp. 40-41.; Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: The Rise and Fall of Literary Censorship in Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1962, 2000, pp. 19, 134141; Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia, 1788-1972, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973, p 217. 950 Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, p. 68. 951 Lockwood, War on the Waterfront, p. 41. 362 which had the potential to counter that of government and the “unmandated operators of the levers of power”. Trade unions, he argued, had the right to use their industrial power via political strikes to engage in moral issues relating to social and political matters. Drawing on an argument advanced by eminent jurist Sir Isaac Isaacs writing in support of the Port Kembla boycott in 1939, 952 Lockwood pointed out that the law could be used to bind people to immoralities, compelling them to act against their consciences, in which case it was a matter of “conscience above law”, and people had the right to act accordingly. Claiming this right, and acting upon it, was, according to Lockwood’s reading of history, particularly strong amongst Australian waterside workers, what he described as “an under-reported Australian tradition”. 953 For Lockwood the Dalfram dispute was an inspiration, and an example for other unions to emulate. 954 So far as history is concerned, after the Dalfram sailed for Japan from Port Kembla with its cargo of pig-iron in 1939, such inspiration and emulation was not long in the waiting; the Federal Council of the WWF gave Ted Roach the responsibility for handling its role in the anti-Dutch shipping boycott of 1945-1949. 955 In explaining the importance of the Dalfram dispute, Lockwood provided a clear insight into his politics post-1969, and the thinking he had come to after all his years of activism and observance. In doing so, he entered the realms of democratic theory and practice, and ‘social movement unionism’. Regarding the former, he argued the right of citizens and trade union organisations to have active and ongoing roles in the democratic process, participatory roles that did not end at the ballot box, the sort of process and 952 Isaac Isaacs, Australian Democracy and our Constitutional System, Horticultural Press, Melbourne, 1939. 953 The preceding account of Lockwood’s view of the political/democratic significance of the Dalfram dispute is based on his related discussions in War on the Waterfront, pp. 38-41, 222-236. 954 Mallory, Uncharted Waters, p. 175. 955 Griffith, “Ted Roach (1909-1997)”, p. 33; Roach, “The Ted Roach Papers”, p. 18. 363 role akin to what Keane later advocated and termed ‘monitory democracy’: “extra-parliamentary power-monitoring” and citizen-institution interventions which challenge the political monopoly power of party-led representative government, thereby asserting and taking a role in “the shaping and determining” of government policies and agendas. 956 In supporting the right of trade unions to actively engage in moral issues relating to social and political matters, Lockwood in 1987 was expressing key tenets of what social theorists in the 1990s would term ‘social movement unionism’, the determination by unions to use their power to pursue and engage in matters, issues, and causes beyond work-related economic and industrial issues, to seek social change, to conceptualise the trade union brief as also embracing those less able to effect change, the field of action involving society in general, a social role not confined or limited to the specific sector/s of work they were originally organised to represent. 957 II: BLACK ARMADA (1975) Black Armada was published in 1975 by the Australasian Book Society (ABS), Sydney. A second edition was issued in 1982 by Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, and an Indonesian language edition in 1983. 958 Lockwood had unsuccessfully sought CPA interest in the project that became Black Armada when he was still a party member. Prior to ABS publication, Lockwood submitted his manuscript to four publishers, unsuccessfully; an 956 John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster, London, 2009, pp. xxii-xxix. 957 Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1998, pp. 4-5, 121-122. 958 Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1975; Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada: Australia and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 194249, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982; Rupert Lockwood, Armada Hitam, Gunung Agung, Jakarta, 1983. 364 academic reader’s report on the manuscript for the publisher Rigby’s deemed it “banal”. 959 In 1970, Lockwood published an essay “The Indonesian Exiles in Australia, 1942-47” in the Cornell University scholarly journal Indonesia edited by Benedict Anderson and Elizabeth Graves 960 In gaining entre to Indonesia, Lockwood had the support and assistance of then Sydney-based Indonesia specialist scholar Rex Mortimer (1926-1979). 961 Like Lockwood, Mortimer originally hailed from Victoria, and had been a leading member of the CPA. After 26 years’ membership he too had left the party in 1969. Having personally observed and experienced the May 1968 events in Paris and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, Mortimer was no longer able to support “the communist movement in the West on any basis”. 962 Lockwood’s and Mortimer’s lives had intersected many times. Variously a solicitor and journalist, Mortimer had been part of the legal defence of the CPA during the 1949-1950 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Communist Party in Victoria, in the 1951 High Court challenge to the Communist Party Dissolution Act, and during the (Petrov) Royal Commission on Espionage in 1954. During the mid-1960s he had been editor of the Guardian weekly newspaper published by the Victorian branch of the CPA. In 1965 he began full-time post-graduate studies at Monash University, resulting in a Ph.D. for a dissertation on the Indonesian Communist Party; in 1970 he was appointed as a lecturer in Government at the University of Sydney. Like Lockwood, Mortimer was reconstructing his political life as a socialist post-1969 and was part of the loose community of 959 Lockwood to author, letter, 25 November 1988. 960 Rupert Lockwood, “The Indonesian Exiles in Australia, 1942-47”, Indonesia, Volume 10, October 1970, pp. 37-56. 961 Lockwood interview with author, 30 November 1985. For a biographical overview of Mortimer see T. H. Irving, “Mortimer, Rex Alfred (1926-1979)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 15, Melbourne University Press, 2000, pp. 425-426. 962 Herbert Feith and Rodney Tiffen (editors), Stubborn Survivors: Dissenting Essays on Peasants and Third World Development/Rex Mortimer, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1984, pp. 173-174. 365 dissident ex-communist intellectuals that grouped around Helen Palmer’s broad-socialist journal Outlook. 963 Benedict Anderson contributed a significant Introduction on Mortimer’s scholarship and politics to a posthumous collection of Mortimer’s writings in 1984. 964 The article published in Indonesia was, excluding the thirty-nine footnotes, an account of some 8000 words on the subject matter that became the book Black Armada; in effect the article was a précis of the book, and was no doubt useful in helping Lockwood find a publisher. For this thesis the importance of the article is that it was published in a scholarly journal of growing international repute, edited by scholars of international repute, and for the way in which Lockwood was described to the journal’s readers: The author, Rupert Lockwood, was one of the very few Australian journalists ever to report directly on the Netherlands Indies. He was Reuter’s news-agency correspondent for Singapore-Malaya in 1936-37 and an editorial executive of two Singapore dailies. From Singapore he visited the N. E. I. to write for a Melbourne newspaper group. He personally knew and interviewed Indonesian leaders in Australia, assisted their campaigns, propagandized (sic) for the Republic and for the dramatic actions against the Dutch in Australia that impeded their return to the Indies. 965 This note recognised the credentials of Lockwood as witness-participantinsider to the events he wrote about, credentials that, so far as the editors of Indonesia were concerned, gave a unique perspective and authority to his essay. Writing about the NEI in 1939, which he had visited as a journalist when based in based in Singapore during the 1930s, Lockwood had commented on the economic riches of the Dutch colony, the attraction of these to Japan, the weakness of the Dutch administration, the challenge 963 For the significance of the journal Outlook see the “Introduction” by Robin Gollan in Doreen Bridges (editor), Helen Palmer’s Outlook, Helen Palmer Memorial Committee, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 11-17. For Mortimer’s association with Outlook, see for example Rex Mortimer and Jack Blake, Some Problems of the Australian Left, Outlook, Sydney, 1968. 964 Benedict Anderson, “Introduction”, in Feith and Tiffen, Stubborn Survivors, pp. vii-xvii. 965 Lockwood, “The Indonesian Exiles in Australia, 1942-47”, p. 37. 366 posed by insurgent Indonesian nationalism, and the fact that all this would have a future impact upon Australia. 966 Internationalism in action Back Armada was Lockwood’s detailed account of an example of the philosophy of internationalism, the factor he saw as a major and special tenet of Australian wharfie culture, in action. While the events he detailed in his study were not the sole preserve of the WWF, wharfies and their union, along with seamen and the SUA, were key players. Black Armada is a chronological account of the 1945-1949 Australian trade union boycott of Dutch shipping in Australian waters in solidarity with the formation of the Indonesian Republic. In Lockwood’s estimation The Black Armada represents greatest boycott demonstration of its kind in Australian history. It is difficult to recall a boycott anywhere in the world comparable in character and scope. 967 The racy term and title ‘Black Armada’ was a Lockwood invention, reminiscent of his pamphlet titles of the 1940s and 1950s: ‘Black’ as in black-ban/boycott; ‘Armada’ as in the number of vessels involved. In 1942 in the face of Japanese invasion, much of the Dutch administration of the NEI and its military forces withdrew to Australia. With the support of the Australian government, a policy of support that lasted until 1948, the Dutch set up the administrative, military and logistical infrastructures required for the eventual restoration of Dutch colonial rule, and were granted extra-territoriality over hostels, offices, workplaces, military camps, barracks, and a prison camp near Casino. Between 1942 and 1945 close relations were forged between Indonesian republicans, who came to Australia either willingly or by force as part of the Dutch colonial diaspora, and militant Australian trade unions, in particular the SUA and the WWF. According to Lockwood, a figure used in later scholarship, the exact figure 966 Lockwood, “Lure of the Indies”, pp. 10-11. 967 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 5. 367 difficult to determine given the nature of record keeping at the time, 968 some 10,000 Indonesians came to Australia during the period, 969 a complex mix that included leading Indonesian nationalist prisoners, clerical workers, armed forces personnel, domestic servants, hospital staffs, civilian refugees, and merchant seamen. This latter group was crucial. Numbering an estimated 5000, 970 Indonesian merchant seamen in Australian ports were controlled by Dutch colonial authorities who expected them to do the same job as their Australian counterparts but under greatly inferior wages and conditions. Trade union links were forged when these seamen successfully sought Australian trade union assistance in addressing their industrial relations grievances, in particular the assistance of the SUA and the WWF. This was the beginning of a significant empathetic political relationship with the exiled Indonesians, many of them with nationalist aspirations, a large number of Australian trade unions, and the CPA. Following the proclamation of the Indonesian Republic in August 1945, this relationship resulted in the Black Armada boycotts, which, along with mutinies by Indonesian troops expected to assist with colonial restitution, “struck like a thunderclap in September” as Lockwood colourfully put it. 971 The boycott campaign continued until the sovereignty of the Indonesian Republic was satisfactorily assured in late 1949. Lockwood described the 1945-1949 campaign in Australia against Dutch colonialism, and its impact thus: Indonesian troops mutinied, refusing orders from Dutch officers to prepare to fight the Indonesian Republic. Indonesian seamen walked off ships, refusing to carry troops, munitions, archives, currency and other paraphernalia of colonial rule. Indian, Chinese and Malayan seamen joined 968 Jan Lingard, Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2008, p. 10. 969 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 60. 970 Ibid. 971 Ibid., p. 3. 368 the Indonesians’ boycott. Waterside workers, first at Brisbane then at other ports around the coast, refused to load Dutch cargoes, tug-crews would not provide tow-ropes, shipyard unions denied repairs to Dutch ships, Royal Netherlands Indies Air Force aircraft and Navy craft were sometimes kept out of the Java battle zones by bans. The boycott extended to Dutch transport, stores and depots ashore. Some 31 Australian trade unions and four unions of Asian seamen temporarily organised in Sydney imposed boycotts on any Dutch activity likely to aid the war on the Indonesian Republic. 972 According to Lockwood, variously subjected to boycotts in Australia were 36 Dutch merchant ships, passenger-liners and troopships, two tankers and 35 other oil industry craft, 450 power and dumb barges, lighters and surf-landing craft -- essential to landing troops and stevedoring in shallow Indies waters -- and aircraft and a vast land transport fleet. Nine corvettes, two submarines….and seven submarine-chasers of the Royal Netherlands Navy, two British troopships under Admiralty orders and three Royal Australian Navy vessels were also listed as black. ….The identifiable total of ships of war and war-supply and medium and smaller craft in the black armada reached 559.973 Strategically, argued Lockwood, The boycott in Australia not only temporarily incapacitated a Dutch war machine slim in resources; the Australian example influenced bans on Dutch war services in several other key countries.974 Black Armada, however, was more than an account of a great boycott, in effect a long-running campaign with a number of stages involving strikes, mutinies, and solidarity actions, in many Australian ports, at sea on ships in Australian waters, and abroad. While this was the focus of the book and provided its chronological structure, Lockwood provided much more. He 972 Ibid., p. 4. 973 Ibid. 974 Ibid., pp. 4 -5. 369 grounded the campaign in context, venturing accounts of Indonesian republicanism from the 1926-27 Indonesian rebellion onwards, and the nature of Dutch colonialism in the Indies. Post-1942 Lockwood was attune to the ways in which many Australians, and not only those connected with the labour movement, variously became sympathetic to the Indonesian republican cause, despite being raised in a society with a history of antiAsian sentiment, and at a time when the White Australia policy still held sway. Part of the support discussed by Lockwood were the actions of sympathetic members of Australia’s Armed Forces stationed in East Indonesia in late 1945, and their active and clandestine support of the Indonesian nationalist cause, including the supply of arms and ammunition to nationalist activists. 975 With regard to the Australian Labor government, Lockwood was interested in the way in which it moved from its position of initially supporting the restitution of Dutch colonialism, to promoting the cause of the Indonesian Republic at the United Nations in 1947, a complex process of foreign policy re-shaping in which Australia’s political leaders struggled with the reality of post-war Australia in close proximity to an Asia of colonial crises and nationalist revolutions.976 As part of this shift Lockwood also discussed the concomitant mini-imperialist ambitions of Australia in the Indies, and in the southwest Pacific, anticipating future academic interest. 977 The longevity and success of the boycott campaign depended, to a great extent, on the Chifley Labor government not intervening with the use of the Australian armed forces, something it did do when it used troops to break the 1949 Coal Strike. This is a strategic issue other sympathetic accounts of the dispute tend to give scant consideration to, even though, as L. F. Crisp argued, the boycott challenged “the authority of the government over 975 Ibid., pp. 232-245; see also Symons, “All-Out”, p. 63, especially her lengthy Footnote Number 59 on this page detailing discussions of this topic after the publication of Lockwood’s book. 976 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 275. 977 Ibid., pp. 246-252. 370 Australian foreign policy”, 978 a point argued at the time by critics led by Menzies who “beat the drum of imperial legitimacy”. 979 Like Gollan, who argued there is reason to believe Prime Minister Chifley and External Affairs Minster Evatt “saw some advantage in the stand of the WWF, although they were not prepared to admit it publicly”, 980 Lockwood argued that Prime Minister Chifley “always respected” WWF General Secretary Healy, “despite serious political differences”, 981 and that Chifley unofficially endorsed this trade union usurpation in the hazardous arena of relations with old and new orders in Asia, where he himself had to tread much more warily. 982 According to Crisp, Chifley neither condemned nor approved the anti-Dutch boycott campaign, but held “most critical views of Dutch Eastern policy”. 983 The agency of working people While the mobilising influence and activities of the CPA in the boycott campaign featured prominently in Lockwood’s account, as did the roles of the Australian unions in which the party had influence and power (i.e. primarily the maritime/waterfront and land transport unions), he gave significant acknowledgement to the political and industrial agency of Indonesian, Indian and Chinese workers in Australia at the time, the temporary unions they formed, and their initiating roles in the boycott campaign. Later scholarship has credited the pioneering role of Lockwood 978 L. F. Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Biography, Longmans, London, 1961, p. 293. 979 Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 238. 980 Ibid., p. 239. 981 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 225. 982 Ibid., p. 12. For accounts that barely consider the question of the lack of military intervention in the boycott, see M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 127-130; W. J.Brown, The Communist Movement and Australia: An Historical Outline--1890s to 1980s, Australian Labour Movement Publications, Haymarket, 1986, pp. 164-166; Ralph Gibson, The Fight Goes On: A Picture of Australia and the World in Two Post-War Decades, Red Rooster Press, Maryborough, 1987, pp. 65-67. 983 Crisp, Ben Chifley, p. 293. 371 in recording and acknowledging the agency of Indian seamen in the boycott. 984 Further, while organisations feature in the book, Lockwood understood and detailed, how, away from the organisational centres - the meeting rooms, the offices of organisations, matters of principle and the pursuit of causes often came down to the actions of individual working people in their workplaces. Black Armada detailed many of the individuals who supported the boycott by engaging in boycott actions, not only Indonesian seamen, but Chinese, Malayan, Indian, and British seamen also, their actions variously incurring retribution---imprisonment, deportation, significant loss of pay, in cases the deprivation of livelihood. 985 Lockwood’s agenda in writing the book was not only to portray a significant political boycott, but to place marginalized maritime workers at the centre of a major historical event, characterised by Rex Mortimer as “one of the more interesting and significant eddies in the anticolonial current”, 986 and gain recognition of their historical agency. As Lockwood put it, the trade unions, presenting themselves as conscious instruments of history, reached the zenith of their capacity to intervene in Australian foreign policy. 987 According to Lockwood, the WWF and the SUA were the 984 Heather Goodall, “Tracing Southern Cosmopolitanisms: The Intersecting Networks of Islam, Trade Unions, Gender & Communism, 1945-1965”, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Volume 3, Number 3, 2011, p. 114. 985 See for example Lockwood’s account of the mutiny by 145 British seamen in Sydney on the Royal Navy auxiliary ship Moreton Bay, ten of whom basically deserted despite harsh British Navy regulations, in support of the boycott, Black Armada, pp. 176-178. 986 Rex Mortimer, “Australian Support for Indonesian Independence: A Review”, Indonesia, Number 22, October, 1976, p. 175. 987 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 12. 372 first among trade unions acting to strike off the shackles of the old semicolonial vassalage and to swivel foreign policy around from European “umbrella” and rising-tide-of-colour obsessions… 988 Along with establishing the historical agency of Australian wharfies and contesting the marginalised way in which they tended to be viewed, Lockwood also used Black Armada to signal he wanted something else for his favoured workforce so far as the telling of Australian history was concerned. The signal came at the end of Chapter 25 (titled “Trade Union Influence on Foreign Policy”), a chapter in which he argued and documented the proposition that, during the anti-Dutch boycott “Waterside workers were officially conceded a role in international diplomacy” by the Australian, Dutch and British governments, 989 a role evidenced, for example, by the visit to Sydney in January 1946 of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Far East, to convince, unsuccessfully as it turned out, the WWF and the SUA to end the boycott.990 Lockwood concluded the chapter by noting later examples of the WWF and the SUA taking industrial action in pursuit of foreign policy and international issues from the 1950s onwards, in defiance of Liberal-Country Party government pressures and legislation, his list comprising wars in Korea, Malaya, French Indo-China, Vietnam, and during the 1970s actions against apartheid in South Africa and the military junta in Greece. 991 Based on this discussion, Lockwood noted and concluded that future historians 988 Ibid., p. 230. 989 Ibid., p. 225. 990 Ibid., pp. 198-208. 991 For discussions of this maritime internationalism from the 1950s onwards, see M. Beasley, Wharfies, pp. 166, 212, 216-220, 226, 235-236; Fitzpatrick and Cahill, The Seamen’s Union of Australia, pp. 168-221; Kirkby, Voices From the Ships, pp. 79-87, 89109. 373 may resolve that in this era the conscience of the Australian people found expression more often on the waterfront than in the nation’s legislatures.992 Lockwood later returned, as we have seen, to this theme of wharfies as the conscience of the nation in War on the Waterfront. Boycott and book Lockwood claimed he was prompted to write Black Armada following receipt of a letter in 1963 from leading Indonesian writer and left intellectual Pramoedya Ananta Toer suggesting the need for a book on the subject of the boycott campaign. 993 He approached the task as a participant-observer, having worked for the boycott campaign and the cause of the Indonesian Republic as a journalist and speaker; his first contact with Indonesian nationalists took place late in the summer of 1945 when he was Associate Editor of the communist weekly newspaper Tribune. 994 It should be noted here that the claim by Lockwood to have been motivated by the Toer letter needs qualification, and may relate to the final published version of Black Armada and Lockwood’s resolve in finding a publisher, because by 1964 a book-length Lockwood manuscript titled Black Armada: The Story of Boycotts, Mutinies and other actions against Dutch colonialism in Australia, 1945-49 and 1960 existed; he generously gave access to this to 992 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 230. 993 Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925- 2006), Indonesian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and a leading intellectual of the Indonesian left. Imprisoned for his political activities by the Dutch (1947–1949), and by the Suharto regime (1965-1979). Released following international pressure, but under house arrest until 1992. For an account of his life and significance, see Tariq Ali, “On the Death of Pramoedya Ananta Toer”, Counterpunch, 2 May 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq05022006.html (accessed 27 January 2011). The letter from Toer was mentioned on the inside flap of the dust jacket of the 1975 edition of Lockwood’s Black Armada. 994 Lockwood, Black Armada, p. 68. 374 young researcher Beverley Male (Australian National University), who substantially drew upon it for her post-graduate work in 1965. 995 Analysis of the 419 footnotes, grouped at the end of Black Armada as “References’, reveals the nature and extent of Lockwood’s research. Aside from his insider knowledge and experience, Lockwood drew on a small number of books available at the time, including scholarly works, memoir/diary material, and two Australian post-graduate theses, by Beverley Male (1965), and by Margaret George (1973); the Male thesis had, as we have seen, benefited from prior original work by Lockwood. The majority of his research was done using primary sources: newspapers of the day; trade union publications; pamphlet literature; the Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates; transcripts of proceedings of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration; trade union, and peak trade union organisation, files. Doubtless his status as a left journalist assisted his access to trade union material, Lockwood researching at a time when trade unions, especially militant trade unions, tended to protect their records from scrutiny by outsiders, a legacy of many decades of bitter industrial dispute, and political conflict with State authorities. The value of the book as a record of events was enhanced by interviews and correspondence with 37 participants in, and witnesses to, events, including interviews conducted with Indonesian nationalist activists, the earliest in October and November 1945. 996 Black Armada was not without fault. A critical review of the book in 1976 by Rex Mortimer pointed to these. According to Mortimer, while Lockwood was aware of the contradictions involved in “the extraordinary efflorescence 995 Beverley M. Male, “Australia and the Indonesian Nationalist Movement 1942-1945”, M. A. (Preliminary) Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1965; for Male’s use of Lockwood, see Chapter III, footnote 3, p. 86; Chapter IV, footnotes 8, 13, 14, 15, p. 87, and footnotes 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33, p. 88; Chapter V, footnote 33, p. 90; Chapter VI, footnote 37, pp. 92-93. Scholar, teacher, writer Beverley Male (1942-1983) went on to become, amongst other things, one of Australia’s few experts on Afghanistan; see her study Revolutionary Afghanistan, Croom Helm, London, 1982. 996 Lockwood, Black Armada, pp. 320-337. 375 of popular support for the Indonesians….arising in a community with a history of anti-Asian sentiment….(he) makes no serious attempt to resolve it”. 997 As well, Lockwood’s understanding of the complexities of Indonesian Republican politics was “rather weak’, while his portrayal of the boycott campaign failed to adequately take in to consideration events taking place at the same time in Indonesia. Further the book tended to have a Sydneycentric bias regarding sources and actions, while the prose was marred by “some patches of purple prose”. 998 The “purple prose” comment applies generally to a lot of Lockwood’s post1969 writings; it is as though he was unable to divorce himself from his background as the writer of mass-selling pamphlets and from the cut and thrust of public oratory. Further, at times Lockwood’s prose cried out for editorial intervention, where long paragraphs and sentences created a sense of the author trying to say too much at once, even of knowing too much. Perhaps this crowding was due Lockwood’s sense of exuberance associated with book publication; so much of his early and original historical researches and writings had been, and were, frustratingly pent-up in unpublished manuscripts (see Chapter 6). Despite his criticisms, Mortimer welcomed Lockwood’s “long overdue” account of the boycott campaign, judging it “colorful (sic) and basically reliable”, and an “eminently readable and a valuable supplement to other accounts of the birthpangs of the Republic”. 999 Lord Louis Mountbatten wrote to Lockwood (8 July 1976), complimenting him on his “remarkable” book, correcting a few minor points, and stating that it helped him understand “a lot that happened to us in South East Asia Command 997 Mortimer, “Australian Support for Indonesian Independence”, p. 174. 998 Ibid., p.175. 999 Ibid., pp. 172, 175. 376 Headquarters”. 1000 By 1994 Black Armada had achieved recognition as a “classic”. 1001 Lockwood’s book remained the sole detailed account of the boycott campaign until the publication in 2008 of Refugees and Rebels by University of Sydney academic Jan Lingard. Her account focussed on the Indonesian exiles in wartime Australia, chronicling their daily lives and social encounters, with the boycott serving as a background to Indonesian republican politics and the human experiences of exile in Australia. It was a rich and poignant book, the text interspersed with mini-biographies of exiles and of boycott participants. Lingard’s research benefited from some thirty years of scholarship regarding Indonesia and the mass of archival material in the public domain since Lockwood wrote, as well as access to Dutch sources and research on the ground in Indonesia. Lockwood was mentioned four times in Lingard’s text, initially as the “journalist Rupert Lockwood”, subsequently simply by name. 1002 The reader was required to check the ‘Endnotes’ to discover the source of the references was Black Armada. Otherwise, apart from a bibliographic listing, there was no reference to the existence of Black Armada, arguably leaving the impression that Lingard’s study was the first in its field, filling a gap in the historical record; as she declared in the opening lines of her ‘Introduction’: “This book (her book) relates a unique chapter of Australia’s social and political wartime history…” 1003 It was an omission or oversight that some academic reviewers of Rebels and Refugees subsequently compounded, the net effect being to either render Lockwood’s work invisible, or to diminish its worth. One reviewer represented Lingard’s book as filling “a gaping lacuna in Australian and 1000 Mountbatten to Lockwood, letter, NLA MS 10121, Box 85, Folder 544. 1001 Geoffrey C. Gunn with Jefferson Lee, A Critical View of Western Journalism and Scholarship on East Timor, Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers, Manila, 1994, p. 70. 1002 Lingard, Refugees and Rebels, pp. 10, 185, 212, 229. 1003 Ibid., p. 1. 377 Indonesian historical scholarship”, 1004 as though Lockwood’s contribution did not exist, or was valueless. Another referred to Black Armada, but trivialised Lockwood’s research, characterising it as based on “the materials that he had on hand in the port unions and at the offices of the Tribune newspaper”, a representation vastly out of kilter with the research Lockwood had done. Going someway to correct this sort of diminuation or oversight, Sean Brawley (2012) acknowledged Lockwood’s work as the first major historical study of the Indonesians in Australia. 1005 Regarding the significance of Black Armada, Lingard’s judgement of the worth of Joris Ivens’ 1946 documentary on the boycott Indonesia Calling, a film the importance of which has been recognised by contemporary film scholars, 1006 is apposite: Whatever else it did, Indonesia Calling provided a source for later generations of Indonesians and Australians to learn of the shipping bans and related actions of Australian, Indian and Chinese supporters of Indonesian independence, and is a lasting historical record of the AustraliaIndonesia bond of those years. 1007 1004 Ron Witton, “Review of Refugees and Rebels”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Volume 42, Number 2, 2008, p. 187. 1005 Max Lane, “Review: Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, by Jan Lingard”, Max Lane, http;//maxlaneonline.com/2009/11/12/review-refugees-and-rebelsindonesian-exiles-in-wartime-australia-by-jan-lingard, accessed 9 February 2011; Sean Brawley, “The ‘Spirit of Berrington House’: The Future of Indonesia in Wartime Australia, 1943-1945”, Indonesia and the Malay World, Volume 40, Issue 117, 2012, p. 176. 1006 Lingard, Refugees and Rebels, p. 228. 1007 Ibid., p. 230. Joris Ivens (1898- 1989), Dutch film director/writer, best known for documentaries. Previous work included a film in support of the Spanish Republic, and one on Chinese resistance to Japanese invasion. Ivens visited Australia in 1945 to work on a propaganda commission for the NEI government-in-exile. On a matter of principle he resigned, and instead made the film Indonesia Calling about the early stage of the boycott. It was made on a shoestring budget in Sydney, and sponsored by 15 trade unions including the WWF and the SUA. Released in 1946, the 22 minutes long black and white film was banned by Dutch authorities, and an export ban was issued against it by Australian 378 As with Indonesia Calling, arguably so too with Lockwood’s Black Armada, a pioneering, ground-breaking, useful account of what more recent historiography has depicted as an example of transnationalism and “southern cosmopolitanism”, relationships across the Indian Ocean and “across racial and imperial lines” working towards the hope of “a new world in which relationships between working people would mean more than the borders which separated them”. 1008 CONCLUSION The two books discussed in this chapter, War on the Waterfront and Black Armada, placed a traditionally marginalised workforce, the wharfies, at the centre of two major struggles involving Australian foreign policy with regard to Asia. Lockwood’s accounts of these struggles asserted the right of trade unions to engage in issues wider than the narrow economism and industrial purview traditionally associated with trade unions. In both books, but particularly in Black Armada, the wharfies were seen to be notable and prescient examples of Australians at odds with their own society, steeped as it was in anti-Asia sentiments and White Australia attitudes. The discussions and analyses in this, and the preceding, show that post1969, Lockwood created a substantial and serious body of historical work authorities. While this ban was later retracted, the film was smuggled out of Australia by the WWF and successfully screened in the infant Indonesian Republic. The film blended real-life footage with recreations; the commentary was spoken by the British born Australian radio actor Peter Finch (1916-1977), many years later a renowned film actor and Oscar winner (1976). For accounts of the film and its filming see Lockwood, Black Armada, pp. 287-288; Drew Cottle and Angela Keys, “From Colonial Film Commissioner to Political Pariah: Joris Ivens and the Making of Indonesia Calling”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, 2006 <http://www.sensesof cinema.com/2006/41/ivens-indonesia-calling (accessed 6 February 2011); Bert Hogenkamp, “Indonesia Calling: A film on the crossroads of four continents. Amended version of a paper given at the Labour and Empire Conference (1996: Amsterdam)”, Labour History, Number 73, November 1997, pp. 226-231. 1008 Goodall, “Tracing Southern Cosmopolitanisms”, p. 108. 379 comprising four books running to some 1110 pages. While he prided himself in a craft/professional sense as a journalist, which is how he conceived of himself throughout his life, he was also by inclination and track record, an historian. Chapters 8 and 9 have demonstrated that the books Lockwood published during the period between his leaving the CPA, and his death, warrant an extension of the description by which he is generally characterised in the public record. More than a “communist journalist”, and certainly more than its pejorative sense, Lockwood was also an historian, one of considerable originality, industry, and in many ways pioneering. 380 CONCLUSION This thesis examined three aspects of the life of Rupert Lockwood (19081997): as a journalist, a communist, and as an intellectual. Lockwood, it was argued, warranted study for a number of reasons. From late 1939, when he joined the CPA, through to 1968/1969 when he left it, he became one of the Australia’s best known communists, variously journalist, commentator, author, editor, orator, pamphleteer, broadcaster. Within the party, he was highly regarded by rank-and-file members. When he left the CPA, there was a great deal of publicity nationally; his death in 1997 warranted national and media international attention. As a communist, and as one of the passing parade whose life stood out enough to warrant media attention and obituary notice, his life was of note. The thesis established the reasons for this interest in him. A major reason for studying Lockwood was because his name is inextricably linked to the Australian Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), as a high profile, variously recalcitrant and hostile, witness, author of the notorious Document J. It was his involvement in this event that propelled him to national notoriety. Historically and politically, it was shown, Document J, and therefore Lockwood, contributed to the politically traumatic ALP Split of 1955, an ideological and sectarian splintering that was a significant factor in keeping Labor on the Federal Opposition benches until 1972. For his inadvertent role in this process, if for nothing else, it was argued Lockwood was a footnote in Australian history, warranting study. But, as this study demonstrated, there was more to Lockwood than all of this. From 1952 until retirement in 1985, he was primarily either associate editor or editor of the Maritime Worker, national journal of the WWF. This was a journalistic assignment that resulted in him having time for independent research and scholarship. The study demonstrated the significance of this work in the realms of Australian history and political economy, a dimension of his life that has received scant treatment elsewhere. 381 A major concern of the thesis was Lockwood’s total career as a journalist. He was a member of the CPA for about thirty years, but his career as a reporter, journalist and writer spanned over sixty years, more when his childhood experiences/training are included, which is when he was introduced to the world of newspapers and journalism. An active member of the AJA, he was one of three journalists responsible for drafting its Code of Ethics in 1942. Further, the bulk of Lockwood’s career as a journalist was either with non-communist publications, including the Melbourne Herald and the ABC Weekly, or the labour movement press, primarily the journal of the WWF, the Maritime Worker. Lockwood’s close journalistic link with the CPA newspaper Tribune, amounted to a period of about twenty, not continuous, years. Despite this long career as a journalist, Lockwood tends to enter the Australian historical record, described as/referred to as “the communist journalist”. This term was generally used by the media in reporting the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Espionage, and continued thereafter. The study argued that while there is an appropriate logic to this description, the term is also a pejorative. “Non-communist” journalists at the same time, or subsequently, were not described/identified as such, while the term ‘communist’ is a fluid term, having many political and propagandist uses, its meaning and understanding often depending on historical/political contexts and user intent. It also argued that the description is a limiting term with regard to Lockwood, since it ignores at least half of his professional life, and makes no attempt to identify or acknowledge the talents and experiences he brought to the service of the Australian Left and to the labour movement, and what he did in the service of both. The study contextualised Lockwood’s Cold War career as a journalist within his broader career as a journalist. It thus extended and enriched the notion of what “communist journalist” meant in his case, arguably adding authority where the original use of the term aimed at being reductionist, 382 intent on undermining his veracity as a journalist. Further, it was argued, continued use of this term pigeonholes Lockwood, metaphorically chaining him to a single event in Australian history. This works to frustrate acknowledgement of his significant contributions to Australian journalism, effectively closing the door on the life and times of a significant Australian journalist and the way he worked at and interpreted his profession. The study contributes empirical knowledge and understandings to a number of aspects of Australian history: to labour movement history generally, and communist and labour biography specifically; to journalism history; and to intellectual history. By taking aspects of Lockwood’s life, as a journalist, as a communist, and as an intellectual, and proceeding with these in a largely chronological way, it has unpacked and explored these and their interrelations and interactions, providing a fuller, more complex and nuanced study of Lockwood and his times than currently available. In so doing, it also contributes to understanding Australia between the two World Wars, and during the Cold War. The thesis began by contextualising the topic in related literature and historiographies in Chapter 1. Four aspects of related Australian history scholarship were discussed: Australian labour biography; Australian journalism history; Australian communism; and the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’. With regard to Australian labour biography, the intent of the discussion in this chapter was to understand why Lockwood had not previously been the subject of scholarly biographical attention. The answer, it was argued, lay in the nature of labour biography as it had developed in Australia, where prominent identities in trade unions, and political parties, a pantheon of people and a related canon of institutions, tended to receive attention, rather than rank-and-file people and those not defined by office or title. The discussion of journalism history drew attention to two types of journalism relevant to the career of Lockwood -- rural journalism, and labour movement journalism. Literature related to both of these areas was discussed, and in the process the scholarly neglect of the latter in Australia 383 was noted. This discussion of journalism was necessary in order establish these areas as ones of significant import, not to be ignored or slighted; it was in these spheres of journalism that most of Lockwood’s journalism was conducted. The discussion of Australian communism broadly surveyed the state of scholarship regarding the CPA, drawing particular attention to the changes in Australian communist historiography post-1995, following the public release of the Venona decrypts. As this thesis demonstrated, this historiographical shift was/is crucial to understanding aspects of the life and work of Lockwood. The final discussion in Chapter 1 concerned the concept of ‘labour intellectuals’ and ways of discussing and identifying the presence and role of intellectuals in the labour movement. Part of the longevity of the pejorative ‘communist journalist’ in regard to Lockwood is due to him being isolated by the term from the rest of his career in journalism. Beginning in Chapter 2, this study linked him to that fuller career, beginning with an account of his rural childhood and youth. The reason for this was not to follow the traditional chronological account of a life from birth to death, but to explain the origins of Lockwood’s journalism. As the chapter demonstrated, Lockwood began his career as a journalist as a child, working as an unpaid helper producing his father’s small circulation rural newspaper. As was shown, Lockwood became a rural newspaper journalist and remained thus, until leaving to work on the Melbourne Herald in 1930. Beyond its contribution to understanding Lockwood, Chapter 2 was a contribution to the understanding of, and knowledge about, the rural press in Australia. As was shown in Chapter 1, this realm of journalism has long been treated by historians as inconsequential, its importance only relatively recently recognised. The biographical account of Lockwood continued in Chapters 3 and 4, covering the period 1930 to 1939, the period of Lockwood’s Herald employment. While contributing to the general history of Australian journalism, the chapters also described Lockwood’s development as a leftist, an evolutionary the process in his case, rather than a sudden Pauline 384 ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion. The process was completed by 1939, when Lockwood joined the CPA. The chapters demonstrated that crucial in this political development were Lockwood’s experiences as a foreign correspondent in Asia and Europe, especially his front line experiences during the Spanish Civil War. The study later argued (in Chapter 7) that his experiences in Asia and in Spain were the factors that gave Lockwood’s communism the lasting quality that kept him in the CPA long after others had variously left. Regarding Lockwood’s experiences as a journalist in Asia, 1935-1938, and on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Chapter 3 showed how unique and uncommon these were so far as Australians of the time were concerned. The homefront career and activities of Lockwood during World War 2 formed the subject of Chapter 5. It dealt with his journalism, his communism, and with their interactions. The research detailed, added new dimensions, understandings and nuances to World War 2 labour history. Beyond this, the chapter broke new ground in detailing and explaining the origins and nature of the controversial material that formed part of Document J during the Cold War. The alleged roots of this, and its connection with Australian Naval Intelligence was established. Important too was the detailing of Lockwood’s relationships with Soviet personnel stationed in Australia from 1943 onwards. It was the argument of this study that this relationship had to be understood in order to explain Lockwood’s behaviour during the Cold War, construed by many as suspicious, treasonable, traitorous, behaviour. Chapter 6 discussed the labour movement journalism of Lockwood from 1945 through to 1985. It dealt with his editorial work with the CPA newspaper Tribune to the early 1950s; and from 1952 to 1985, his editorial work with the trade union journal the Maritime Worker, ‘organ’ of the WWF. In the case of Tribune, it was shown that Lockwood sought to produce a readable and entertaining Left perspective on political and social issues, combining news, analysis and commentary with cartoons, humour, 385 and Sports coverage. With the Maritime Worker, Lockwood aimed at producing a publication for a distinct community of workers, waterside labourers, which reflected and strengthened that community. It was argued that in this editorial assignment, Lockwood drew on aspects of the rural newspaper tradition he was trained and raised in. In both labour movement editorial jurisdictions, Lockwood explored the idea that workers on the job could also be worker-correspondents, contributing copy. It was demonstrated this was a significant part of his work with the Maritime Worker. Lockwood’s final assignment as a communist journalist, serving as Tribune special correspondent in Moscow, 1965-1968, was also discussed. This assignment was seen to be historically problematic. On one hand, the journalism he produced during this period can be read as unabashed support for the USSR and for Soviet communism. Yet, in Lockwood’s personal/political life, it was a crucial period that led to him ending his membership of the CPA soon after, and becoming a public critic of Soviet communism. I argued that the published journalism did not in fact reflect the nature and direction of his political thinking at the time, and that whilst in the USSR he was increasingly critical of the Soviet system. Supportive evidence of his critical thinking and feelings at the time was introduced from Lockwood’s personal records, from formerly Confidential Australian Embassy (Moscow), and from ASIO sources. This chapter also demonstrated how, due to Lockwood’s editorial responsibility from 1952 not involving full-time work, he utilised the resulting spare time and his energies in independent scholarship. A considerable body of work was shown to have been generated as the result, some of it published, much of it not. While there were exceptions, most of what Lockwood published of this, tended to be in labour movement publications, little of which was/has been cited or otherwise acknowledged by scholarship. I demonstrated, however, that academic scholars who have referred to Lockwood’s independent scholarship have variously recognised 386 its pioneering nature and significance in contributing to the understanding of Australian history and political economy. Indeed, the chapter demonstrated that Lockwood was often years ahead of the academy in his scholarly concerns and interests. Overall, the import of this chapter is that in discussions of Australian historiography and in Australian intellectual history, place should, if not must, be found for Lockwood. Lockwood’s work for the CPA, other than the journalism previously discussed, formed the subject of Chapter 7. His “communist work” as he later referred to it, was seen to be high level and intense, including twice representing the CPA abroad during 1948-1950. The highpoint of this assignment, Lockwood’s role in the World Peace Conference (Paris, 1949), was explained. The subsequent contribution of this to his marginalisation within the CPA was argued. Lockwood’s involvement in what is generally referred to as the Petrov Affair was detailed. The circumstances of his creation of what is known as Document J, was explained. A case was made for it being regarded as a genre of ‘raw’ journalism, and for its contents, particularly those relating to prominent conservative politician (Sir) Stephen Spender, warranting serious consideration. Lockwood’s appearance and behaviour before the Petrov Royal Commission (1954-1955) in association with this Document, generally rendered by historians in terms of either ‘victimisation’ or ‘sinister’, were contextualised within the Cold War and interpreted as combative, defensive, strategic behaviour by a targeted person who regarded the Commission as a political process, not a legal process. The chapter also examined ASIO’s investigation of Lockwood post-war an onwards. Accepting that ASIO surveillance and investigation of Lockwood was warranted, since he was a declared opponent of the capitalist-state ASIO was established to protect, the personal and intrusive nature of this surveillance was demonstrated, particularly in regard to his children. Glimpses of the ways in which Lockwood responded to surveillance were discussed, demonstrating he had significant covert/clandestine skills. Overall, the chapter demonstrated that Lockwood cannot be seen as a Cold 387 War victim, as one strand of Cold War historiography portrays him, but as a significant, deliberate, combatant. Lockwood’s disenchantment with the CPA was discussed and documented. This was shown to be a long, slow process, beginning before Khrushchev’s ‘secret” speech (1956), when many members, particularly intellectuals, left the party, culminating in his leaving in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the socialist liberalisation of the Prague Spring (1968). The reasons why Lockwood remained in the CPA despite disenchantment, were explored, as were the reasons he finally left. Along with personal factors, it was explained that Lockwood remained in the CPA until both it and the USSR were perceived by him to have lost their socialist vision and capacities/willingness to deliver/create a socialist future. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of Lockwood’s life after 1969, and the way in which his leaving the party, while initially traumatic, triggered the release of creative energies, ushering in a period of creative historical research and writing. When this chapter is taken in consideration with Chapter 6, and with the material relating to Lockwood’s undercover and covert work for the CPA during World War 2 in Chapter 5, any notion of Lockwood being the victim of powerful forces beyond his awareness, or of being an innocent of some kind, rather than a deliberate and conscious historical player with agency in a complex, at times covert, world, is not sustainable. Certainly, he got hurt and damaged during the Cold War, but this was the result of his conscious and deliberate engagement with a historical situation and process, an engagement in which naivety, innocence, or the role of victim, have no part. Overall, the research and exegesis in these chapters constitute a contribution to the ‘warts and all’ Cold War history called for by McKnight (2008). 1009 Chapters 8 and 9 examined and discussed the four books Lockwood published between 1975 and 1990. It was explained how these were based 1009 McKnight, “Rethinking”, pp. 194-195. 388 on his status as an industry insider in relation to the subject matter, and built around the WWF and the maritime and waterfront industries. The chapters demonstrated how Lockwood used this narrow general book-focus to write and discuss widely on Australian social, political, and economic history. The case was made for these works having considerable originality, and being significant contributions to Australian labour history. When considered in relation to the account of Lockwood’s research and writing on economic and historical matters during the 1950s and 1960s detailed in Chapter 6, the discussion warrants both Lockwood being recognised as a significant radical scholar who operated outside the academy, and for his inclusion in academic discussions of Australian history and political economy. Finally, in the light of discussion in this and previous chapters, it is relevant to ask the question: What was Lockwood’s impact as a communist orator, journalist, commentator, writer, cottage speaker/teacher, given his prolific writing and publications, his persona, his audiences, which up to 1956 included a significant phalanx of the future Australian intelligentsia, academia, and commentariat? Were Lockwood an academic, and was his work published in scholarly journals, there would be footnotes to count, and citations indexes to consider by way of discussing influence/impact. But in his case this was not, is not, the case, since his output appeared in communist publications, during the Cold War, when being a communist was fraught with peril, and scholarly reference to his work, as was demonstrated, was undeservedly but understandably absent. Can his influence be known, apart from brief memoir and biographical references? Probably not. But overall, this study indicates that nor can he not be considered an influence, and possibly even considerably so. ********** From 1992 onwards Lockwood’s health declined, considerably so after a leg amputation. He died in 1997 in the care of family in his home town of Natimuk. His health problems were tobacco related. He had been a heavy 389 smoker, like many of his generation of journalists, until he managed to give up when he was 48. Lockwood understood the connection and was angry with himself for having succumbed to the what he called the “death drug” of the tobacco industry. In 1947 he had explained to his Tribune readers the dangers of smoking, of the false advertising of the tobacco industry, and how smoking damages the “nose, throat, heart and other organs”, and that smokers had a higher and earlier death rate than non-smokers. He also admitted, at the time, that he had tried to stop smoking, but was addicted. 1010 His eldest daughter, Penny, phoned me not long before his funeral and asked for some epitaph words for her father’s headstone. She found the task beyond her at the time, and as I was due to say some words by way of eulogy, turned to me. Such were the funeral arrangements, these were needed as soon as possible that day. I asked her to give me an hour and I’d phone back. But the words did not come easily; the idea of summarising a life in headstone ‘permanency’, almost stumped me. But in the end I worked something out. The day before the funeral, I stopped for petrol at one of those small Australian rural towns that, if you blink, you miss and drive through; one of those towns Alfred Lockwood had covered on his beat as a newspaper owner/editor, and used to teach his second son Rupert how to find stories in the ordinary and in the day-to-day. The garage owner came out and helped me refuel, asking laconically, “Where are you headed?”, and I replied, “A funeral in Natimuk”. He looked at me and responded “Ah, the Lockwood funeral”; it was a question or statement, not sure which, and I replied “Yes”, to which he commented respectfully, “The Lockwoods; a great family”, and I nodded agreement. I still had a long drive ahead of me. At the funeral service the next day, the Lutheran Pastor who conducted the simple ceremony told the small gathering of townspeople and family in St. Pauls Lutheran Church, that he had spent considerable time with Rupert 1010 Rupert Lockwood, “What the Others Don’t Print”, Tribune, 18 March 1947, p. 5. 390 since he’d come back to town. According to the Pastor, not long before dying Lockwood had said to him, “I’ve come home”. The Pastor left it to the gathering to interpret what that meant, and gave no direction. I saw heads nodding in agreement; a possible meaning was that in his endtimes, the former communist and atheist had found his way to the Lutheran faith his stepmother Ida had introduced to the Lockwood family in 1916. Equally, it could have been Rupert being Rupert, simply stating a geographical and autobiographical fact. Full circle. He was back at the beginning. As the funeral cortege drove slowly through the main street of town, headed for the cemetery on the outskirt of town, people paused, turned to line the street, hats were removed, and many heads were lowered. The sun was shining brightly, enhancing the greenery of the pepper trees, the branches of which seemed to deferentially droop. Rupert was buried in the plot next to his mother, Alice, as he had requested. His headstone bears the three concluding words I contributed: RUPERT LOCKWOOD 10.3.1908 8.3.1997 BELOVED FATHER OF PENNY. ANDRIA. ALTHEA JOURNALIST, ORATOR, INTELLECTUAL Perhaps the best words about his life are his own, his concluding thoughts as he and De Berg wound up their NLA interview in 1981. The reader will recall some of them, as they were quoted in part in Chapter 4, but here they are quoted again, at greater length. At the conclusion of this study, I believe they have increased power and significance: I’ve had a life which has been filled with mistakes and disappointments and frustrations, but I feel that if one doesn’t make mistakes, then no one takes much notice. If I had lived a thoroughly respectable life I would have 391 been buried with sorrowing relatives and friends there, and promptly forgotten, but as I’ve made these mistakes, I probably have some very small place in history, and I might say that the mistakes were all made in attempts to better the conditions of my fellow human beings. When I joined the Communist Party the Labor Party was absolutely bankrupt, they had supported cuts in old age pensions and other attacks on the poor, in the interests of the people of wealth, there was no organisation which seemed to be doing much about the conditions of the unemployed and the poor, except the Communist Party, and of course I was under illusions, very widely shared by intellectuals, that the Soviet Union offered a society that was a glorious alternative to the evils of capitalism. The alternative is now terribly tarnished. Given the state of my knowledge and experience in that period, and given the terrible threats of extermination in major wars, due to the terrible conflict of empires and nations, and given the frightful sufferings of the majority of the people in this world, I do not know what else I could have done, if I wanted to live in peace with my own conscience.1011 The following year, journalist Rod Wise interviewed Lockwood. Wise sought from Lockwood a wind-up summation of his life. The question and answer reportedly went thus: “Looking back Rupert”, I ask, “with your background, your intellect, and your potential, do you believe you squandered your life to see yourself smeared all over Australia by the Petrov affair, and now loathed by former friends for your post-Leninist apostasy?” There is the faintest flicker of a smile. “Well you wouldn’t be here interviewing me if it had been”.1012 1011 De Berg, p. 17,506. 1012 Wise, “Reflections”, p. 39. 392 BIBLIOGRAPHY A Note on Primary Sources. The sources on which this study is based are identified in the footnotes, including references to newspaper items not otherwise listed in the Bibliography. Other materials were also drawn upon, but do not necessarily get footnote citation because they helped form understandings beyond the purview of this study, or otherwise helped establish contexts. 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OTHER SOURCES ASIO Files, held in the National Archives of Australia, Canberra: Lockwood, Rupert, Volume 1, 1939-1949, NAA: A6119, 40; Volume 2, 1949-1950, NAA: A6119, 41; Volume 3, 1940-1955, NAA: A6119, 1711; Volume 4, 1952-1954, NAA: A6119, 1712; Volume 5, 19541954, NAA: A6119, 1713; Volume 6, 1954-1955, NAA: A6119, 1714; Volume 7, 1954-1956, NAA: A6119, 1715; Volume 8, 19561959, NAA: A6119, 1716; Volume 9, 1959-1964, NAA: A6119, 1717; Volume 10, 1964-1966, NAA: A6119, 1718; Volume 11, 1966-1968, NAA: A6119, 2334. Rupert Ernest Lockwood - ASIO file - miscellaneous papers, 1953-1957, NAA: A6119, 2335. Lockwood, Rupert Ernest, Volume 12, 1968-1969, NAA: A6119, 3577; Volume 13, 1969-1970, NAA: A6119, 3578; Volume 14, 1971-1981, NAA: A6119, 3579. Note: I took notes on the early files beginning in July 1996, and concluded consulting the listed files in December 2012. During 2012 I became aware that some of the material I noted in 1996, was no longer present in the files. 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