Persons of Less Interest Than They Think

In 1966, Arthur Augustus Calwell, leader of the federal Labor Party, was slightly injured in a failed assassination attempt as he was leaving an anti-conscription rally at the Mosman Town Hall. One of those who restrained the would-be assassin was left-wing activist and bookseller Bob Gould. Two years later, students from Monash University stoned the Melbourne offices of the US Consulate. Later, the Attorney-General’s offices in Sydney were occupied by protesting students, as were administrative buildings at Monash University.

Some of these incidents are covered in the second program of Haydn Keenan’s Persons of Interest series, shown first at the Melbourne International Film Festival and later, nationally, on SBS television. A short time after all these events, Calwell stated:

I haven’t taken part in a demonstration in recent times because an anarchist crowd of students have taken over and it’s no use appealing for peaceful demonstrations … most of them who are performing badly in their teens will finish up as petty bourgeoisie and highly respectable lawyers, and maybe judges!

A number of those whose youthful misbehaviour was lauded in the four-part series on SBS have indeed arrived at positions of some respectability. Student anarchist Michael Hyde, lieutenant to Albert Langer (now calling himself Arthur Dent after Douglas Adams’s hapless galactic rambler) in the Monash Labor Club, was a schoolteacher for years and now lectures in Professional Writing and Children’s Literature at Victoria University. His Victoria University PhD apparently is a memoir of the activist 1960s, helped perhaps by his thirteen Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) files covering 1967 to 1974, which he first saw in 2005. Another activist from the period who now is also an academic, Gary Foley, cheekily acknowledges ASIO’s research assistance towards his Melbourne University PhD, completed in 2013.  Foley was a co-conceiver of the Persons of Interest series.

Each of the four episodes of Persons of Interest begins with this announcement:

There are two kinds of history: official history, the kind that is taught in school, then there is secret history, a scandalous kind of history which explains how things really happened. This is the story of Australia’s secret history. ASIO is Australia’s secret intelligence agency set up to identify spies and subversives who threaten the state from within. Recently opened files on hundreds and thousands of Australian citizens are dark biographies in which all suspects are guilty. We tell a few.

This sets the anti-intellectual tone of the series, or is a case of whirling intellectual wheels with no traction at all: pure spin. Apart from reading like a melodramatic piece of advertising copy, this promotion contains false dichotomies for the credulous and insupportable claims: “Have we got the secret history right for you!” as the Dodgy brothers might have exclaimed.

The series, apparently nominated for a Walkley Award, is a mixture of uncritical apologia for three unremarkable and somewhat daggy lives, plus Foley’s; almost incessant bashing of ASIO; and no analysis of the reality of the communist threat to Australia as seen in the Malayan emergency, with Mao in China, and Indonesia’s “Guided Democracy” directed by the unstable Sukarno, who, for political survival, became close to the PKI, Indonesia’s communist party.

Nor is any consideration given to Soviet spies such as Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs, or to all those boys from Winchester School and Cambridge University who turned traitor, many defecting to the Soviet Union. The program repeats criticism that ASIO was too concerned with communists and not enough with the right-wing terrorist groups originating from Croatia and Serbia that operated in Australia in the 1960s. It does not mention that at the 1971 ALP national convention, a vote binding the party to abolish ASIO was tied.

Brief mention only is made of the many dual memberships of the ALP and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). When Bruce Milliss, ALP Prime Minister Chifley’s electorate campaign organiser, was removed from the ALP because of his communist sympathies, he had been a secret dual member for about a decade.

There were other links between the two groups, especially those concerning communist spies associated with Dr H.V. Evatt when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs (then called External Affairs; it had four overseas missions in 1940). A number of people in Foreign Affairs were active communists and sources of secret information for the Soviet Union, as the US code-breaking Venona Project (1943–1980) had discovered. This was a key reason for the Attlee Labour government in England putting pressure on a reluctant Ben Chifley, leading somewhat laggardly to the formation of ASIO in August 1949. Since 2013, ASIO has been housed in Canberra’s Ben Chifley Building.

Another ALP Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy, also did his best to harm ASIO. Like Evatt, Murphy would also be appointed to the High Court, but unlike Evatt, after his dismal political career had expired. Murphy organised a spectacular raid on ASIO’s offices in 1973. Evatt’s calling Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov during the Petrov Affair to seek Soviet assurance that it had no spies in Australia was the superior gaffe.

Persons of Interest emanated from the Melbourne film production company Smart Street Films, formed in 1969. The programs also attracted substantial public funding from Film Australia and SBS. The company, operated by Haydn Keenan and Gai Steele, has a deliberate focus. According to Keenan, “We work the left field … the middle of the road is highly oversupplied.”

There are four “dark biographies” in the series, each subject—or, in the case of Frank Hardy, the subject’s son—speaking for himself. There is a supporting cast: announcers and a handful of sympathetic guest expert (or otherwise) commentators, including David McKnight (journalism academic, former communist and one-time editor of the CPA’s paper, Tribune), Des Ball, Jack Mundey, two anonymous former ASIO personnel, and Michael Kirby. This small cast of witnesses and opinionators provides an unreliable basis for any conclusions. All it can offer are highly subjective, untested impressions and some moral posturing, all of which amount to little more than amusement, or annoyance, value. Moreover, the abilities of all four main characters were limited. They were able to organise protests but could not manage to keep the small communist movement united.

The first episode, “The Serpent’s Tooth”, features Roger Milliss speaking about himself and his father Bruce, both communists but bitterly divided. The split developed from the party’s annual conference of 1958, attended by 200 people. Following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation, Laurie Aarons was taking the CPA away from Leninist centralism and violence and in search of a peaceful path to socialism. Ted Hill was one of those clinging to the goal of violent revolution, as were Bill and Freda Brown, parents of current Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon. In 1963 Hill and others were expelled from the CPA, which was aligned with Moscow, and in 1964 they formed a China-aligned Marxist-Leninist group. (More romantic communists developed affection for and cults of Trotsky or Che Guevara.)

Roger Milliss, raised as a devout communist, followed the Aarons camp; Bruce went with Hill. Hill and his younger brother James, also a communist, had partnerships at the Melbourne law firm Slater and Gordon. Ted advised Frank Hardy in his libel trial over his rambling, scandalous novel Power Without Glory. James, who worked briefly in Evatt’s Foreign Affairs Department, was under heavy surveillance, strongly suspected of being a Soviet spy, which he was. Bruce had developed trade ties with Communist China, especially wool exports, and had been bringing finances from China for the CPA. He wrote to his son at the time of the split, quoting Chairman Mao to the effect that one must despise the enemy and seize victory. Roger expressed dismay at seeing his father’s “profound beliefs reduced to the Little Red Book and the absolute simplistics of Maoism”.

The main point of the uninteresting Milliss stories appears to have been to allow the program to besmirch ASIO with stories of Roger’s former wife Suse (sic) being denied work at the ABC, apparently following advice from ASIO; of Roger’s brother David’s similar difficulty in finding work; and a shock-horror story of ASIO engaging in phone taps from which personal details were recorded.

The program also casts a little light on the internal communist hates and their impossible dreams. Bruce Milliss provided the finance for Ted Hill to open a bookshop to compete with Bob Gould’s Third World Bookshop whilst Roger linked up with the communist New Theatre in Sydney and, following trips to Moscow, began displaying Soviet films locally in a forlorn effort to counteract the influence of Hollywood movies.

There is a glimpse of another Foreign Affairs communist spy, New Zealand-born Ian Milner, who had connections with other Melbourne University communists such as Dorothy Jordan, who married Ric Throssell, another Foreign Affairs communist spy who had been encouraged to join the department by Paul Hasluck.

Milner was one of a number of communist academics and sympathisers who developed an interest in Prague, including Ian Turner, Bernard Smith and Stephen Murray-Smith. Whilst in Foreign Affairs, Milner had passed information on to the USSR via Wally Clayton. Clayton ran the spies in Foreign Affairs and sent their information via coded post-office telegrams. He features in the epilogue to the series, where he confesses to his traitorous activities. In July 1950, three weeks after James Hill had been interrogated on suspicion of spying, Milner and his wife departed for—or escaped to—Prague, where Milner died in 1991. Milner was thus unavailable to give evidence before the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954.

Michael Hyde’s fondly uncritical, unreflective reliving of his student days is titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”. Hyde, compared with the man whose lieutenant he was, Albert Langer, was not really a key actor, or agitator, in the imitative student politics of the late 1960s. Even Dave Nadel might have been a more interesting choice of subject. Most interesting of all might have been Alan Ashbolt’s ABC journalism protégé, John Michael “Darce” Cassidy. Whilst Hyde thought violence was possible and that ASIO probably had a hit list, Cassidy thought violence against ASIO and the establishment would be necessary if his side did gain power. Cassidy had a speckled career as a minor protester, the 1965 Freedom Rides as a part-time ABC journalist, as a spokesman for the Friends of the ABC, and an appellant for freedom of speech in computing. As with Milliss, a full discussion of Hyde’s positive and lasting achievements would be brief indeed.

The episode dealing with Aboriginal activist Gary Foley has a title from a slogan probably first used by Chicka Dixon, “Native Title is Not Land Rights. Reconciliation is Not Justice”. The energetic, self-promoting Foley is the most interesting of the gang of four. And his work with Aboriginal people, like Hardy’s work for Aboriginal rights, did something to build a better Australia.

Foley was prominent in the protests against apartheid and the Springbok rugby tour of Australia in 1971. With fellow Aborigines he was photographed wearing Springbok strip outside the tourists’ motel. The rumpus at the Sydney Cricket Ground, smoke bombs and pitch invasion, provided a wonderful photo-opportunity for ambitious and attractive leftist student activist and former head girl of Abbotsleigh, Meredith Burgmann. It also revealed another bungle in ASIO records: ophthalmologist Fred Hollows was arrested carrying a bag in which, it was claimed, a hand grenade had been found. It appears there was no subsequent prosecution, nor any suggestion of deregistration as a medical practitioner: possibly an excited ASIO operative embellished the account. Fred had been working with the Gurindji people at Wave Hill, especially to combat trachoma. At the time of the Cricket Ground protests, was working with others to help set up the Redfern Medical Service, with which Foley was also connected.

Frank Hardy, the final subject, was a KGB-financed communist. According to Mark Aarons’s book The Family File, US$508,000 of “Moscow Gold” reached the CPA in the 1960s, a lot of money at the time. An eager gambler and an inveterate borrower of other people’s money, Hardy was a well-known pub boozer, probably a womaniser, and a professional yarner in the guises of “Truthful Jones” and “Billy Borker”. He remained stubbornly Stalinist until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and a communist until he died in 1994. He is spoken for mainly by his son, Alan, in a program named from one of Hardy’s books, “But the Dead Are Many”.

The program opens with Hardy’s modest memorial plaque inscription, “The Most Australian Australian”. Near the end the viewer may enjoy glimpses of E.G. Whitlam delivering Hardy’s eulogy. Hardy, “never a slouch when it came to self-congratulation”, spoke of But the Dead are Many (1975) as “the quintessential literary work of the communist movement”. A reported 120 people turned up for its launch. It is based on the life and suicide of his communist mate, Paul Mortier. Hardy had supported Mortier when his communist faith was flagging. But Khrushchev’s thaw and his associated revision of the Stalinist system, particularly with his not-so-secret Secret Speech to the 1956 Congress of the Communist Party, the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), the 1961 Sino-Soviet split (and later the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) led many to leave the CPA where, as some said, every member hated all the others. It was prone to split over personality, Marxist orthodoxy, and to which brand of imported communism allegiance was owed. Mortier was depressed and, apparently, unable to reconcile the continuing revelations of brutal realities of communist totalitarianism with his former passionate, uncritical following of that system and its oracles. He took an overdose of barbiturates in 1965. Hardy sought the help of his widow, Dulcie, to work on the novel, in which Mortier was fictionalised as Morel. To quote from Dulcie Mortier’s obituary:

For nearly a decade Dulcie worked closely with Hardy on the book. Responding to his frequent calls, she met him for talks, made letters available, wrote insightful comments, read his several drafts, critiqued them and even polished some of his lamer passages. However, when But the Dead Are Many appeared in 1975, she was deeply hurt that Hardy had built up his own persona while weakening that of Morel. Nor did Hardy publicly acknowledge her contribution. [She] saw it as a “betrayal” and later told her story to a Hardy biographer, Pauline Armstrong …

The series might have explored the powerful theme of disillusionment and of admitting one’s serious mistakes and seeking reconciliation with self and others. Milliss confesses to being still a believer, as Hardy was, of sorts. What revisions have taken place with Hyde and Foley? They were all, to some degree, passionate and perhaps deluded followers of a violent, totalitarian system determined to destroy Australia’s Commonwealth. There is little about their works that is admirable.

The series could have done a much better job of examining ASIO’s mistakes and failures, operational as well as structural. It mentions a few mistakes, but one that it reports concerning Keith Windschuttle is not noticed as a mistake. In a lecture in February 1971, he purportedly advocated “violent revolution by students” but he assures me he never said, or wrote, or even thought that at the time, and there was no such place as the alleged site of the lecture, the Sydney “Anti-War Centre”. But what of ASIO’s failure to identify and catch the many communist spies in Evatt’s Foreign Affairs Department? Why is the series so hostile to senior ASIO figures, especially its second director, Charles Spry?

In 1974, ALP Prime Minister Whitlam appointed Justice Robert Hope, a prominent civil libertarian and cousin of Manning Clark, as Royal Commissioner to investigate Australia’s security services. (The series does not mention the second Hope Commission of 1983, appointed by ALP Prime Minister Bob Hawke to, amongst other matters, examine the links between ALP National Secretary David Combe and Soviet spy-diplomat Valery Ivanov.) The overall results of the first investigation were positive, despite views popularised by communist sympathisers such as McKnight that ASIO had become a political research service for conservative governments. Hope and his public servant assistant, George Brownbill, were critical of aspects of the leadership and governance of ASIO; Peter Barbour, who succeeded Spry in 1970, left as Director General of ASIO in 1975, to be succeeded by Justice Edward Woodward.

Was this the source of the unfair assessment of ASIO’s second head, “Silent Charles”? Spry had been appointed by Liberal Prime Minister Menzies. Like many early senior officers in ASIO he had a military background, being a colonel (later brigadier) in Australia’s Sixth Division. Was it the conservative-military link which also inspired the anti-Spry sprays in what seems to have been a prequel to Persons of Interest, an ABC television program in November 2010 titled I Spry: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy, co-produced by Anna Grieve? A number of former ASIO officers thought so.

What might the program have gained from Mark Aarons’s The Family File (2010)? Aarons has a brief cameo in the program on how ASIO operated. But there is nothing on his indications of the number of comrades in the “ramshackle party of Evatt and Calwell”, to use Bob Carr’s words. What might it have gained from an examination of the factors involved in the rise and strength of the ALP Right in New South Wales? As one prominent member of the Labor Right, Paul Keating, is reputed to have held, the left were all a bunch of “comms”.

Carr’s review of Aarons’s book in the Australian raised warnings as well as eyebrows. A Whitlam minister, and one who was popular with the protest set, Tom Uren, a survivor of Japanese prison-torture camps, apparently became litigiously inclined when anyone said he was a closet communist. Another Whitlam minister, Arthur Gietzelt, whose brother Ray was a communist trade union leader, suggested a good one-liner to a clever newspaper letter-writer: “The commies weren’t under the beds but in the cabinet!”

Along with former communist historian Stuart Macintyre, Persons of Interest too easily plays the red-scare card instead of relying on witness- and document-based argument and analysis. It relies on a popular dynamic derived from a fiction, the assumed existence of an evil Australian McCarthyist conspiracy maintained by successive conservative governments to retain power and control by the use of fear of communism, as if communism were not evil, or wrong, but holy communion pure. And it steadfastly ignores the reality of the communist threat and of actual communist and union damage in Australia. Hal Colebatch’s explosive Australia’s Secret War appeared too late to be taken into consideration, but some professional historical moderation of Keenan and Foley’s unbridled hobby-horse might have made something of it more than a bluster, Foley’s recent Melbourne History PhD notwithstanding.

The epilogue and the ending show how out- of-balance the whole series is, how it turns gossip and rumour into the suggestion of fact. Apart from Clayton’s confession, Jack Mundey emotes to the effect that ASIO is a reactionary blight on the democratic country of Eureka. Professor Des Ball, who was apparently a little uncommitted in the I Spry program, is facetious in his final remarks. He prognosticates on what he describes as ASIO’s “bright future”, what with its new ironically-named Chifley Building, high fences, barbed wire and multiple antennae, a sad “symbol” of Australia. Smiling ex-High Court Judge, famous for dissent, Michael Kirby, in what he might think of as Socratic tones, calls for abiding scepticism about ASIO to maintain Australia’s free society.

The SBS series finishes with these words, “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. He knew he’d done nothing wrong but one morning he was arrested …” This misquotation from the beginning of Franz Kafka’s The Trial gratuitously and fallaciously implies that ASIO and by extension, the whole Australian Commonwealth, are nothing but a Stalinist state. Persons of Interest is not history, secret or otherwise, but self-admiring propaganda.