Battling the Reds in Adelaide

How many of us were in my Willagee branch of the Communist Party in Perth around 1960? Maybe six or eight. We bonded well but we weren’t powerhouses of the intellect. We’d gloat about the impending world revolution, nut out ways to get it started, and then pivot to the contentious stuff – whose turn was it to letterbox Garling Street?

I can now assume one of our tight-knit band was an ASIO informer. From 1956 ASIO’s Operation Sparrow aimed to put an agent into every Communist Party branch. The best-known informer is Phil Geri, who kept reporting on the Ballarat branch while its membership declined to four (or maybe five, Geri included).

My mother and stepfather, who did high-level CPA work, were confident that Party vigilance screened out would-be informers. “I can spot one a mile off,” my stepfather would say, with a sardonic grin. In reality ASIO riddled the Party with spies, probably to Central Committee level. Once in, they were seldom outed because the Party…