Taking Liberties

James Waghorne and Stuart Macintyre, Liberty: A History of Civil Liberties in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, 2011, 240 pages, $59.95.

I found this book strangely encouraging, not because it was so good, but because it was so bad; plainly, the barrel from which the ideological left-wing academic historians have been siphoning their insipid brew is now down to the dregs.

The very title is impudent, promising three times as much content as it produces. If it really were a “history of civil liberties in Australia”, a reader might expect it to begin with that earliest immigrant to Sydney who was able to sue the captain of his migrant ship for the loss of his luggage on the voyage. But the story does not open until well over a century later, in the decade of the outbreak of the Second World War. This indeed was an exciting time for Australian civil libertarians, with at least three heavily publicised cases, all of them hinging on the exercise (or abuse) of arbitrary ministerial discretion by the Commonwealth.

I recall (I think accurately) the case of Mrs Freer, wife of an Indian Army officer, who was forbidden to land in this country; innuendo touched her private morals. (The misfortune of a misprint, ever-lurking, introduced a note of inappropriate levity: one journal called her the wife of any Indian Army officer.)

The Minister for Customs banned the importation of copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses— too steamy for delicate Australian tastes.

Egon Kisch, a Czech communist writer, was banned from landing in Australia in 1934, but when his ship reached Melbourne he jumped from the deck to the wharf below, landing with a broken leg among his assembled supporters. An application in Sydney to High Court Justice H.V. Evatt gained him a respite; further High Court proceedings followed; laws were hastily amended. In the end, Kisch left Australia voluntarily, but he had been front-page news for months, perhaps the most celebrated civil liberties case in our history. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (volume 12) contains a good succinct account, but see if you can find so much as a mention in Waghorne and Macintyre’s index for any of the three cases above.

This book’s flawed story opens in Melbourne in 1935-36. A group of citizens, concerned by what they saw as the frailty of our taken-for-granted democratic freedoms (such as free speech and freedom from arrest) met to establish the Victorian Council of Civil Liberties. They comprised—or were progressively joined by—some of the most distinguished and public-spirited men and women in Victoria. Nor were their concerns wholly misplaced.

The fatal tides of totalitarian communism and fascism were both surging overseas, and were bound at least to lap Australian shores. Our own general political temper seemed easy-going enough, but there was certainly no guarantee that our freedoms would remain intact unless they were shrewdly defended. The Council for Civil Liberties was intended as a democratic precaution.

With the notable exception of one Liberal maverick (Senator Alan Missen), my recollection is that all members of the VCCL—office-bearers, rank-and-file subscribers, general supporters—leant Left of centre. Few seemed seriously to see threats to liberty lurking on the Left.

Yet the second volume of the civilian series of Australia’s Official History of the Second World War actually identifies “the grossest infringement of individual liberties made during the war”. It was committed by Labor’s left-wing civil rights super-stalwart, Foreign Minister and Attorney-General Bert Evatt: without a shadow of a reasonable case against him, Evatt kept “Inky” Stephensen—man-of-letters and “Australia First” nutter—in internment, “because he didn’t like him”. Never mind about Left and Right: where lies power, there lies danger to liberty.

Perhaps I should briefly explain the nature of my own acquaintance with this topic. In 1944-45 I was an officer in Colonel Alf Conlon’s even-today mysterious Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, at Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks, and in Canberra. (Conlon was very close to the Commander-in-Chief, General Blamey.) Largely through that posting I met many—probably nearly all—the really active and influential people in the Council. With some of its outstanding figures—for example J.V. Barry, QC, later Supreme Court Justice and author, whose publisher I became, and VCCL Secretary and stormy petrel, Brian Fitzpatrick—I remained on intimate terms until their deaths many years later. I read assiduously the Council’s steady stream of pamphlets, newsletters and manifestos, most of which remain collected in my library.

Most Council supporters were drawn from the law, from academe, from other professions and the public service; from artists and from cultural figures generally. Quite a number of Left-Labor MPs joined, and leaders of individual trade unions. It was significant that the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, Victoria’s representative union body, stood aloof. 

From the VCCL’s foundation, recognised Australian communists were numerous among its office-bearers and general supporters, some of them people of significant professional standing. Other communists joined, carefully concealing their membership by lying about it. I do not think that Waghorne and Macintyre even mention the fundamentally oxymoronic quality in expectations that a Marxist sect, Stalinist-ruled and partly funded from Moscow, could feel any prime devotion to the liberties of Australians.

Nor did they. In fear of the inescapably tightening grip of Australian authority as the Second World War grew closer, communists wished to preserve the Party’s own civil liberties, to be used to support Soviet policies, and quite often they openly and defiantly did so, against Australian national strategic interests.

The crucial anti-fascist war soon being fought abroad by the British Commonwealth, with gallant and effective campaigning by Australian naval, army and air forces was, for communists, merely an irrelevant “imperialist war”, of no possible concern to any honest Australian worker. Remember, Hitler and Stalin were then in full alliance.

The Civil Liberties Council’s communist taint cost it the support of most of the organised workers’ movement, as well as that of numberless citizens throughout the community at large. “Civil Liberties? They’re a Red show, aren’t they?” one was asked all around town at the time.

This was by no means wholly true or fair. J.V. Barry, for example, one of the VCCL’s outstanding spokesmen and respected lobbyists, remained a firm left-winger, but he also remained a resolute anti-communist. Nevertheless, the Party held the Council in a cleft: could a body dedicated expressly to democratic political freedom possibly insert into its charter furtively, unprinted, a secret new sub-clause saying: “… all except for communists, that is”?

Reduction, if not full removal of this embarrassment was obligingly supplied by Hitler, whose armies suddenly attacked his Russian ally in mid-1941. Overnight, a sordid imperialist squabble became, for communists, the “Great Patriotic War”. Well, what’s in a name?

Given its high ideals and weighty civic responsibility, the Council’s whole three-quarter-century history is a long disappointment. It built no mass support—never more than a few hundred enthusiasts; it raised only exiguous funding; it was more than once reduced to insolvency by the fees of its hired lawyers—not a good look! The hierarchy of its organisation and office-bearers was cloudy and disputed; it extended itself into several interstate branches or affiliates, contracted to a federal structure, split, recreated itself in some states.

The successive formally appointed secretaries were often shouting stridently at public variance with their supposed governing organisation. Brian Fitzpatrick was the longest-lasting and most interesting of them. A sometime journalist on our old “Ocker-Aussie” Smith’s Weekly, he had authentic qualities; Geoffrey Blainey has praised his two early scholarly books on Australian economic history. He had a clear forceful style as a pamphleteer; his dedication to civil liberties was passionate; for a pittance (or less) he carried a heavy workload for the VCCL. But he intrigued with its factions, and determinedly made himself the uncontrolled tail that wagged the Council dog.

Worst, he was an out-of-control alcoholic. The pink skin on the back of his skull and his neck, where he wore his hair very close-cropped, displayed a fascinating criss-cross of fine scars. These—he told me himself—were the tally of old rewards from backward falls in liquor, or in defeats in fights with other drunks. At a formal Labor function, he rose abruptly from the top table, wobbled over to a pot-plant standing against a pillar, and relieved himself. Then, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, he “adjusted his dress”, and impassively resumed his place at table. Fitzpatrick’s unreliability directly caused the withdrawal of some of the very supporters the Council could least afford to lose, including the lawyer Geoffrey Sawer, and the diplomat and political scientist Macmahon Ball.

The Council never achieved for itself even the standing of a pressure group like, say, the Liquor Trades Defence League, which could summon most politicians obediently enough to its discreet office on Collins Street. 

This book suggests that John Howard’s opinion was that civil liberties were of no vast political importance, because Australians are not interested in them. If that is true (I hope it is not) they would miss them if they lost them. But if it is the case, a share of the blame goes to the Council of Civil Liberties and its longtime servant Brian Fitzpatrick. One shrinks from indelicacy in a grave journal like Quadrant, but the old-time Australian vernacular offers a phrase ready-made and too apt to be passed by: the Council spent almost the whole of its life of seventy-five years in the hands of people who “couldn’t organise a f— in a brothel”.

Waghorne seems to have done the hard, detailed slog on the text faithfully; I noticed few factual errors. A small one relates to the Left’s enduring bogeyman, Charles Spry, long-serving Director General of Security. I don’t suppose that the ghost of that competent and courageous staff officer—decorated on the Kokoda Track—will mind too much being demoted to colonel, though his rank was brigadier. (Look in Who’s Who.) The book has been produced to very high professional standards by University of New South Wales Press, but was it all really worth while? Some readers may see the name of Stuart Macintyre, Laureate Professor of History, as adding to the project’s scholarly lustre.