
Australia's Most Embarrassing Spy Secret

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Neil Landers

The author, above, retired in 2013 after 57 years in journalism. More than 30 of the last of those were spent as a sub-editor at a national daily, The Australian.

He has been intermittently researching details in this story for much of his life. Some matters in this are dealt with much more fully in From the Somme to 'Sydney's Little Chicago', a biography of his father, an accountant who had connections with some key people in this book. The biography is available for free on the internet.

On the front cover is Australia's Parliament House from 1927 to 1988, where much of the story took place, and where secrets were stored.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

The fact that this book is published online does not mean that any part of it can be reproduced without first obtaining written permission: copyright laws do still apply. Inquiries should be directed to the author.  
The author asserts his/her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE - Mysterious Explosion

CHAPTER TWO - Lurid Headlines

CHAPTER THREE - Scourge of Politicians

CHAPTER FOUR - Browne Starts Punching

CHAPTER FIVE - Federal Police Act

CHAPTER SIX - Wartime Allegations

CHAPTER SEVEN - Damaging Admissions

CHAPTER EIGHT - Wheels of Justice

CHAPTER NINE - Drama in Parliament

CHAPTER TEN - Thumbs Down for Browne

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Jailings Condemned

CHAPTER TWELVE - Rum and Law Lords

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Denials, Surprises and Vapour

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - More Court Surprises

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Clouds over Labor

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Jubilation at Jail Departures

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Menzies Breaks Promise

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Mixed Fortunes

CHAPTER NINETEEN - Explosion Theories

CHAPTER TWENTY - What Probably Happened

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Evidence Released

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Royal Commission Questions Taylor

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Friendship and International Secrecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - A Russian Spy Codenamed Ben

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Political Dangers

CHAPTER ONE

Mysterious Explosion

Just after nightfall on Easter Monday, 1955, two boys returning home from a Sydney newspaper delivery round reached the scene of an event that led to an extraordinary chain of only slightly connected events in the Australian Parliament. Those events included the only ever jailings by the parliament. They ended in September 1955 with a high-level veil of bipartisan secrecy, which was lifted partly at the start of this century.

Street lights were shining in Fetherstone Street, just north of Bankstown railway station, but commercial buildings were closed. At the silent and dark office of a local weekly newspaper, the Torch, the boys noticed what one thought was smoke and the other fog. They also smelled what seemed like burning rubber.

Reports in the Torch for several years had been alleging wrongdoing in the administration of the municipality, which had a troubled history going back much further. The claims had been attacked, but not always denied, in an opposition weekly newspaper, the Bankstown Observer. A year earlier the claims had led to the Labor state government sacking the Labor-dominated local council. However, despite a detailed government report that had supported the claims, very little legal action had followed them.

Sydney's daily newspapers, after brief headlines, had lost interest in the affairs of the fast-growing municipality on the city's south-west outskirts. In the rest of Australia there had been no interest. There, as in Sydney, the biggest story remained a savage war about espionage allegations between the conservative government led by Robert Menzies, who was in the sixth year of a reign that was to last a decade more, and supporters of opposition Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt.

The war had begun a year earlier when Russia's spy chief in Australia, Vladimir Petrov, had defected to officials of the national security organisation, ASIO. Concurrent with that war was an internal one about espionage allegations, even more savage, that was tearing apart the Labor Party. The rest of the world, like Australia, was still in the grip of a Cold War that had reached a nadir just before the death of Russian leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.

The shopping centre was almost deserted. Just south of the station an 11-year-old named Paul Keating, a school friend of one of the boys, was about to leave a newsagency, probably the only shop still open. But among the buildings on the edge of the shopping centre there were still bungalows where people lived. The evening was mild and windows of these were open. From some came sounds of people starting dinner. From others drifted aromas of cooking. From most came sounds of radios. The early evening serials were ending and the stations were entering a lull with advertisements before the 7pm news broadcasts.

The Torch premises had been closed since lunch-time on Thursday as workers hurried to get away ahead of Easter holiday traffic already starting to pour out of Sydney. In the police station across the road, a converted bungalow, there was desultory activity. Outside that a constable sat in a police van waiting for a sergeant to go with him on a job.

After discussing what they smelled, the two boys, the only pedestrians in the street, continued on and a short distance ahead turned a corner. Suddenly there was an explosion in the Torch premises so loud it was heard in neighbouring suburbs. Nearby houses reportedly shook and windows even blocks away rattled. Debris flew upwards and flames shot above the building.

The constable in the van shouted to the sergeant emerging from the station to call the fire brigade. Then he ran across the road and pulled a motor cycle away from a loading ramp at the side of the office. When he looked through an intact window he saw flames appearing to run along a passageway connecting the front office with the main printing section further back, where the fire was spreading. Other police ran up to join him as he tried to force open a door.

Mr A. Watson, who lived next to the police station, said he had been having his evening meal when the blast almost knocked him to the floor. 'Crockery flew off the table and the whole house shook under my feet,' the Sydney Daily Telegraph quoted him the next morning as saying. 'I thought a bomb had exploded under the house. I rushed into the street with my wife and we saw flames leaping 30 feet from the newspaper office. Debris was falling from the air back into the blazing building. I was showered with dust falling from the sky. The police were very brave because they rushed right up to the flames. Suddenly, a wall of flames shot through the front of the building and the police dived back, just in time.'

Paul Keating's friend remained near the building while the other boy rode his bicycle to the nearby home of Torch editor Phil Engisch, who lived in the same street as him. There he shouted out that the Torch was on fire.

Meanwhile, a train had arrived from the city and was disgorging passengers returning from the Royal Easter Show or sporting events. As many hurried towards the flames a man running from the street almost knocked some of them over as he shouted excitedly that the Torch had been bombed. Five minutes later the first of more than 50 firemen from four stations arrived. However it was already too late.

Engisch drove there quickly. But by the time he arrived the front office and much of the main printing section were fully alight. The flames were spreading to a section at the side that contained an expensive new rotary press that had been recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft. Desperately he told the firemen to direct their hoses towards that. A few minutes later he hurried off to make a phone call.

As the blaze lit up the evening sky the news spread quickly by telephone or across fences. People headed there in carloads from all over Bankstown. They included more than a few sacked aldermen and officials of the former Bankstown Council.

Not long after Engisch returned to the scene the roof of the main section of the building collapsed in a shower of sparks. By now the street was crowded with hundreds of people being kept at a distance by police. As the firemen struggled without success to stop the blaze taking over the section that contained the new press the flames were reflected in their faces. Engisch, clearly agitated, turned and looked at the crowd.

In one group stood Ray Fitzpatrick, a former accountancy client of my father. A local businessman and racehorse owner, Fitzpatrick owned the Bankstown Observer, which was engaged in a continuing war of words with the Torch. In 1944 Fitzpatrick had been the subject of serious corruption allegations in the federal parliament. The allegations, however, had resulted during the war only in Fitzpatrick paying £62,000 in back taxes.

From early 1945 the federal Labor government had conducted a civil action against Fitzpatrick in the High Court of Australia alleging a wartime conspiracy to defraud the government. That had been settled out of court by the Menzies government soon after it returned to power in late 1949. During and after those years Fitzpatrick had continued to go about his trucking, excavating and other business in much the same way as he always had.

Alongside Fitzpatrick was Blanche Barkl, a former strong opponent of him, who had been mayor of the council when it was sacked. The first woman to head any Australian government body with a constituency of more than 100,000 people, Barkl was an attractive and youthful-looking woman in her mid-forties. Usually she dressed smartly in public but was now a little untidy. With them was former alderman Cecil Pyers, one of their friends on the sacked council.

Engisch alleged they were laughing when, accompanied by two young men who worked in his printing section, he walked across the street to them.

As was to occur many times, there was more than one version of what was then said. Engisch later told a court inquiry into the fire that he asked Barkl: 'What do you think about it, Blanche?' She had replied: 'You brought it on yourself. You cannot expect to go on caning people like you do and get away with it.' Engisch told the inquiry he had replied: 'That is not a very sensible statement to make on such an occasion.'

Barkl told the inquiry she had arrived at the fire with her husband at about 7.30 after hearing fire engines. She was in a group that included Fitzpatrick and Pyers when Engisch, previously a strong supporter of her, had approached and said: 'They tell me it was a good fire, Blanche.' She said she had thought his remark had 'a little tang of sarcasm' and had replied: 'I do not know, Phil. I have just arrived.' When Engisch had said something about her laughing she had said: 'I am not laughing, I have nothing to laugh about. Look Phil, I don't know why you keep picking on me. I have never done anything to you. You can't keep whipping people across the legs all the time.' Engisch had replied, she said, 'oh, we haven't started yet.'

Thirty-five years later, at the age of 80, Barkl's recollection of everything differed in some respects from what she told the court. Actually, she told me, she was under the shower at home when Pyers rang and told her husband someone had just blown up the Torch. After saying 'you bloody beaut' when he passed on the message, she dressed quickly and hurried to the scene with him by car.

They had just arrived and were standing with Pyers when Fitzpatrick, a tall, heavily-built man who had long had a reputation for being quick with his fists, but also for being generous to charities and people down on their luck, walked across. Fitzpatrick suggested to her husband that they go behind the building and 'piss on the flames to put them out'. It was at that point, Barkl claimed, that Engisch walked across to her, coming through a crowd now so thick she did not see him until he was about two metres away, and making straight for her.

CHAPTER TWO

Lurid Headlines

Soon after dawn the next morning, April 12, a telephone in our living room rang with a call for my father George, who was still in bed. Then 16, I answered it. The caller, who I told to hang on, was Gus Kelly, the powerful Chief Secretary of NSW, whose miscellaneous duties covered police matters. Kelly was also the Minister for Co-operative Societies. George was then involved mainly in running a group of co-operative building societies. Both men were World War I veterans and knew each other also through their involvement in veterans' affairs. After the call, George told my mother Olive that Kelly was trying to find out 'what in the name of hell' was going on in Bankstown.

Pro-Labor George had stopped doing accountancy work for Fitzpatrick after the parliamentary allegations against him in 1944, but still had connections and a fairly good relationship with him. Anti-Labor Olive did not like Fitzpatrick. She did not like Phil Engisch either, who lived up the street from us. But she was a good friend of Phil's wife Jean, and also of Phil's father Les, who started the Torch in 1920 and who lived with other relatives next door to Phil and his wife.

A stream of calls followed. From what George said, nearly all for him were from people in the Labor Party, some in its federal branch. Most were also trying to find out what was going on in Bankstown. Some calls were for Olive.

During breakfast my parents between the calls discussed the fire and rumours about its cause, which appeared to be spreading almost as fast as the flames had done. One main rumour was that Phil Engisch started it for insurance money, something for which Bankstown residents had a reputation. George thought that was probably correct. Olive thought it far more likely that the other main rumour was correct and that Ray Fitzpatrick was behind the fire.

That Tuesday Bankstown became front page reading throughout Australia. Even in Europe it got some coverage. The Sydney Morning Herald's front page story quoted Engisch as saying: 'This looks like sabotage. Over the years this newspaper has made quite a few enemies. During the last 12 months I have received a number of threats. Only a few months ago I was threatened by an anonymous telephone caller. It appears that someone tried to blow us up − and succeeded.' The afternoon Daily Mirror quoted Engisch as saying that he had left the building 40 minutes before the explosion and that had he still been anywhere on the premises he almost certainly would have been killed.

The next day the staff of the Torch moved into temporary offices near the gutted building and hung out a sign saying 'Business as Usual'. In those days there were many independent newspaper publishers. Engisch, inundated by offers to print the Torch, announced it would appear that week printed by Cumberland Press at nearby Parramatta. 'Whoever has tried to silence us has failed,' he was quoted as saying. 'A thousand bombs will not silence me.'

In the afternoon the Sun came out with a story headed 'Terror reign by gang'. The editor, apparently uncertain what to make of it, buried it on page 13.

'In a startling charge today,' the story began, 'Mr C.A. Morgan, MHR, said gangsters had held Bankstown Municipality in their grip for many years.' It said Morgan had demanded a royal commission to investigate the gang, which he blamed for the explosion, and quoted him as saying: 'The gang's immunity has emboldened it to engage in excesses reminiscent of Chicago. Representatives of certain organisations have been held to ransom and blackmail, and the very channels of justice perverted and polluted. Only an open public inquiry, preferably a royal commission, will unravel the full ramifications of this gang and expose the corrupt Tammany clique behind it, irrespective of any persons involved.'

The Labor state member for Bankstown, Arthur Powell, weighed in with a similar call for a royal commission. After this, any hesitation an editor might have felt about Morgan's claims vanished.

On Thursday the Telegraph declared on its editorial page: 'This kind of crime is foreign to Australia, and must remain so. Yesterday's statements by Mr Morgan, MHR, and Mr Powell, MLA, will add to public alarm over the outrage.' On its front page the Telegraph ran a story headed 'Terror Gang Probe Demanded'. It quoted Powell as saying: 'By threats and bribery, this clique of so-called businessmen has controlled this entire area for years... Their influence extends to powerful people and their money talks in many places.'

Newspapers said detectives now believed an ingenious method involving petrol fumes had been used to blow up the Torch building. According to the theory, petrol had been spread and allowed to vaporise. This had been ignited with a timing device, causing a more effective explosion than gelignite. Police Commissioner Colin Delaney was quoted as saying that some of the best men in the force were working on the case and would report to him personally. Their inquiries, he said, had been widened to include allegations that police in Bankstown had not been doing their job properly. Premier Joe Cahill said he had ordered an inquiry but had still to receive an official request from anyone for a royal commission.

In the early hours of Friday, almost a day late, the Torch began rolling on Cumberland's rotary press at Parramatta. 'The Torch is Down − But Definitely Not Out' proclaimed its banner headline. Usually a broadsheet of 16 to 22 pages, the newspaper appeared as a 16-page tabloid. People queued for it at the temporary office in Bankstown. By early afternoon most of the 17,500 copies, the normal print run, had gone. The appearance of the Torch was itself an important news story; metropolitan newspapers ran large photos of Phil Engisch studying an early copy while the press rolled behind him.

On Saturday the Telegraph again devoted page 1 to Bankstown. The main story began: 'An elderly contractor last night said the leader of the Bankstown Gang had bashed and kicked him almost to death.' The contractor said he 'could give sensational evidence to a royal commission and would do anything to end the gang's reign of terror'.

The next day the Sunday Telegraph headlined its front page 'Shocking Bankstown terrorism charges'. 'Bankstown's gangster boss, Mr Big,' it began, 'has tentacles of corruption extending into a State Government department, the police force, and even the judiciary. Influential western suburbs citizens claim they can prove this at a Royal Commission. They allege that "Mr Big" has built up a business empire by corruption in high places. Contracts worth hundreds of thousands are involved in the allegations.'

On it went. High police officials and parliamentarians visited 'Mr Big' at his home. A former associate of Mr Big called him 'a Frankenstein'. The former associate said Mr Big had sometimes used dummy names to tender for jobs and had blown up the dredge of a rival contractor. Mr Big was quoted as saying: 'I fixed him. I got the job done for me − it cost me 30 bob. Every man can be bought. You can get some for 5/-, others £5, or £100 or more.'

The Sun-Herald in its early-printed country edition, in giant type by its standards then, covered most of page 1 with the headline 'SYDNEY'S LITTLE CHICAGO'. Later editions carried a different and smaller head under a large afternoon sports photo, but the story still covered the rest of page 1. Another story about Bankstown, sub-headed 'A malignant growth', almost covered page 3. The Sydney Truth, a weekly scandal sheet, headed a long story 'Bankstown a Little Chicago by Georges River'.

For Sydneysiders lying in bed that morning, or just starting their cornflakes, all of this must have made exciting − even scary − reading. Sydney had never been the saintliest of cities. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the razor gangs had roamed its streets, some of its inner districts had probably been more dangerous for most ordinary people than any of Chicago's at the time. But this was 1955 and Bankstown was, or so many people had thought, just a rather dull outer suburb, no less respectable than most such places.

The stories continued, with some now mentioning, even in headlines, a 'Mr Wig' as well as a 'Mr Big'. In Bankstown deep divisions appeared. Many residents believed much that appeared in the press. Many others dismissed at least the parts about a Chicago gang war as nonsense.

Probably few residents doubted there was some corruption there. Few people, even on Fitzpatrick's side, seem to have questioned any of the numerous details in the state government report that caused the government to sack the council. And anyone who knew Ray Fitzpatrick knew he had considerable influence beyond the district. In fact, as a man who was neither shy nor modest, he liked to impress as many people as possible with this.

Although no newspaper then or since to my knowledge ever went into this, one would not have had to look far into Fitzpatrick's background to discover the main source of that influence. For most of his adult life his hobby was harness racing. Since early in World War II he had been one of the most powerful men behind the scenes in that sport in NSW. For many years he was on the committee of the NSW Trotting Club. Known for his generosity to trainers and drivers, Fitzpatrick appears to have been genuinely popular in that sport. Particularly if one of his horses was running, he was more likely than most punters to know what horse was likely to win a particular race.

This was an age when politicians, senior police and senior public servants went to the trots frequently. They also sometimes bet heavily. Fitzpatrick was a useful person to know. Later, he was sometimes likened to John Wren, the corrupt subject of Frank Hardy's famous 1950 novel Power Without Glory.

Only in Bankstown did Ray Fitzpatrick have the kind of power approaching that of Wren in parts of Melbourne, particularly Collingwood. Fitzpatrick's influence at state government level never matched that allegedly of Wren's; nor had he anything like Wren's business empire. There were similarities, though, in their working-class Irish backgrounds and their influence through horseracing. And Fitzpatrick did for a while appear to have, mainly through one person, the ability to influence decisions near the top of Australian politics. That was something Wren never had.

There was still more than a year to go before that night when many of us in Sydney crowded in front of electrical goods stores and watched the flickering dawn of the Television Age in Australia. Out in suburbia the printed word in newspapers was still paramount. Clearly Ray Fitzpatrick was losing a war of words. This was where Francis Courtney Browne entered the fray.

CHAPTER THREE

Scourge of Politicians

Frank Browne was born 39 years earlier in Sydney and was educated by the Christian Brothers at Waverley. His ancestors, he liked to claim, had been prominent in some of the great Irish insurrections. After studying to be an army officer at the Royal Military College, then at Victoria Barracks in Sydney, he left under a cloud. Browne claimed it was because of an affair with a staff member's wife. But a report recommending his dismissal described him as 'temperamentally unsuited for the military profession'. He then became a cadet reporter on Smith's Weekly.

In 1936, when he was 20 years old, Browne worked his passage on a freighter to the US, where he became a part-time reporter on the Chicago Tribune. A short, stocky man who had been a promising amateur featherweight boxer as a teenager, he also became a professional boxer. Fighting as Buzz Brown, the Illinois Tiger, he was said by newspapers to have fought 20 times for 19 wins. His twentieth opponent was Henry Armstrong, the only man ever to simultaneously be a world champion in three weight divisions. Armstrong almost killed him. Browne finished up with nearly 40 stitches and never fought again in the ring.

By late 1937, according to some Australian newspapers, he was in Spain fighting against Franco in the civil war. Thanks to his military training, he claimed, he was hired as a captain of Spanish troops for $US400 a month after many of the officers had gone over to Franco. Back in Australia, he reportedly showed journalists a medal he said he was awarded by the Russians for saving five of their tanks from falling into the hands of the other side.

Some historians later cast doubts on Browne's service in that war. The war, he wrote later in his only known written reference to it, 'was won by one bunch of savages, who defeated another bunch of savages'. That seemed to be the opinion of a man who had been there and very much wished he hadn't. Like many, such as George Orwell, who undoubtedly did fight in that war on the same side as the communists, he was very anti-communist for the rest of his life. In 1946 the Returned Servicemen's League expelled Browne for throwing a Soviet flag at the stage during a state congress. In 1949 the Australian Journalists Association expelled him for complaining about communist bias in the industrial coverage of most newspapers.

Early in World War II the army rejected him four times on medical grounds before commissioning him as a gunnery instructor in an anti-tank unit. Then it transferred him to the North Australia Observer Unit.

Invalided out of the army in 1943, Browne stood unsuccessfully during that year's landslide to Labor as a United Australia Party candidate in the seat of Barton against the later federal Labor Party leader, Dr Evatt. In 1944 he stood for the Democrats, an alias for the UAP, in the state seat of Bondi against the well-known Abe Landa and went so close to victory that the result was in doubt for 14 days.

Not long after Menzies formed the Liberal Party from the demoralised remains of the UAP Browne tried to grab power in its NSW arm through branch-stacking with members of a Young Liberals League he organised. When Menzies and others realised what he was doing they disbanded the league and expelled him from the party.

During 1946 Browne began publishing a weekly newsletter called Things I Hear. Consisting of just a few roneoed sheets, it contained comments on matters of public interest, plus facts, rumours and innuendoes about people in public life, mainly politicians, and was posted to subscribers. It rapidly became required reading for the news editors of city newspapers, although their editors were often unwilling or unable to touch the stories it contained.

A criticism of Things I Hear years later in The Observer, a brief national publication that was merged into The Bulletin, a venerable national news magazine, said the newsletter was read mainly by politicians, government officials, businessmen, journalists and university lecturers. 'The very people who criticise Browne most are those who not only read Things I Hear but provide it with its information,' The Observer said.

Browne wrote with vituperation and exaggeration. But he also wrote with some elegance and often perception. From the start his most important target was Menzies. In December 1954, after Australia beat England in an Ashes Test, he wrote: 'In his desire to hog the limelight on all possible occasions, Prime Minister Menzies leaves himself open for a riposte. This week, trying to get a little reflected glory out of the Test match, he said that if he got to Valhalla he wanted to find a cricketer on either side of him. Tut, tut Bob. Your knowledge of Norse mythology can't be as bad as all that. Valhalla is a warrior's paradise. You tore up your admission way back in 1914.'

This was a reference to the fact that Menzies, despite expressed militarist sentiments and rising to the rank of captain in the Melbourne University Rifles just before World War I, did not enlist in that war.

Browne was famous for getting into fights. Those fights, verbal and physical, frequently landed him in court. By 1955, because of what he was writing about politicians across the political spectrum, and many other people in the public eye, he was probably at that level the most hated man in Australia. Politics, business and other public matters he claimed to take seriously. But all he ever really seemed to want in life was money and a good stoush. The one in Bankstown was right down his alley.

In February 1951 Browne had seen the possibility of serious trouble in Bankstown. In an item headed 'Hatchets Are Out' he wrote that efforts were being made in Labor back rooms to remove Morgan as the member for Reid and replace him with the Speaker of the NSW lower house.

'Morgan is still feeling the animosity of the McKell-Taylor-Downing triumvirate, which still exercises a powerful, although slowly declining, influence in State politics,' he wrote. 'Morgan has never been forgiven for his disclosures about some war contracts, made back in 1944-45. The real significance of the struggle in Reid is that there is dynamite in it that if touched off could have repercussions as far afield as Queens Square, where the Arbitration Judges don their wigs, and Yarralumla, where the G-G occasionally dons his short pants and reviews the Boy Scouts.'

It is doubtful if many of Browne's readers would have understood the reference to the NSW arbitration judges, who had been led since 1943 by Justice Stanley Cassin Taylor. But more than a few people in Bankstown would have known at least part of the background.

Justice Taylor, educated at Ryde and Burwood in Sydney's west, was a former solicitor and barrister who had specialised in industrial matters. In 1934 he married a woman who lived and worked in Bankstown. He also became a good friend of Fitzpatrick, mainly through a joint interest in trotting, and did some legal work for him. By then Fitzpatrick was doing well supplying sand and other materials for government Depression work programs, mainly road-building. As his work had expanded he had needed an accountant to do bookwork previously done by his mother. My father, with a wife and four children to support, and desperate for any work he could get, had accepted his job offer gladly.

During that period Stan Taylor and his brother, a solicitor, became strongly involved in Labor Party affairs. Although he remained a good friend of Fitzpatrick, Taylor stopped doing legal work for him in about 1937. That left Fitzpatrick in need of a legal adviser. Partly through the recommendation of my father, who was becoming involved with Morgan in a new co-operative building society movement, Morgan took over that role.

Early in the war, with the help of Fitzpatrick in local branches, and probably of the Taylor brothers higher up in the party, Morgan became the Labor member for the seat of Reid, which then covered most of Bankstown. But soon afterwards, allegedly after a joint business venture went bad, Fitzpatrick and Morgan fell out. A vicious feud between them led to Morgan in 1944 initiating the serious allegations in the federal parliament involving Fitzpatrick and the Labor government. During the war Taylor's brother Bill was a vice-president of the Labor Party's NSW branch and did some legal work for Fitzpatrick after he broke with Morgan.

An article headed 'The friendly judge' in November 1966, just after Justice Taylor retired, in The Australian, a national newspaper, said: 'Much of Mr Justice Taylor's success in handling explosive and difficult industrial issues stemmed from his friendly and approachable manner, which he projected genuinely without any loss of judicial dignity.' The article described him as 'a big, powerful-looking man with a heavy thatch of steel-grey hair. He looks tough, and certainly he was as a youngster. He was born in the bush – at Rylstone, central NSW – and still loves it, although he rarely is able to spend much time away from his Lindfield garden.' It referred to his youthful left-wing reading habits and to his easy manner, often on first-name terms, with staff and workers.

A Daily Telegraph story said Taylor 'created a judicial record by holding court 185 feet in the air'. It told how he travelled up in a dogman's box normally used to carry bricks to inspect work at the 11th and 13th floors of the AMP skyscraper rising at Circular Quay. Scaffolders were claiming the same pay as riggers. As a youth, a Telegraph column item said, he acted as a sparring partner for Les Darcy, regarded by some as Australia's greatest-ever boxer.

In Who's Who in Australia Taylor gave his clubs as Tattersalls and the Journalists (NSW), and his recreations as wrestling and bushwalking. In legal circles he was famous for stripping down in his court office during lunch breaks and engaging in noisy wrestling contests with opponents who sometimes included professionals.

Taylor was 12 years older than Fitzpatrick. He was also much better educated. But in many ways they had similar personalities. Known for his use of working-class slang even in court, Taylor would have had no trouble talking with Fitzpatrick. In 1942, as the Japanese headed towards Australia, Taylor became the first Labor-appointed head of national security in NSW. At the start of 1943, after the danger of invasion ended, he was appointed president of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission, with the now even more important job of trying to keep the nation's most industrialised state as free of strikes as was possible during the still difficult years to come.

Stan Taylor was the second man in a triumvirate that Browne claimed in 1951 exercised declining power in state politics. The first person in that, William McKell, was the NSW premier during World War II. Before the war McKell shared legal chambers in Sydney with Taylor.

In 1947, despite an outcry from the press and non-Labor parties, mainly because McKell was a serving politician, Prime Minister Ben Chifley made him Australia's second native-born governor-general. A boilermaker who became a trade union official, McKell owned and bred trotters and liked to bet on them – more so, it was believed, than most politicians. While he was never reputed to have been a friend of Fitzpatrick, he remained a friend of Taylor and sometimes moved in the same circles as Fitzpatrick.

The third man in Browne's triumvirate was Reginald Downing, the NSW Minister of Justice. A protege and close friend of McKell, Downing was probably, like McKell, Taylor and Ray Fitzpatrick, an at least occasional visitor to Tattersalls Club, the social centre for Sydney's horseracing fraternity.

A few days after the Torch fire, as calls for a royal commission arose, Browne wrote in Things I Hear that the government was not taking the charges by Morgan and Powell seriously. He said the police had the power to apprehend the gang without the state being put to the expense of a royal commission and continued: 'The second thing likely to influence the Government is that the proceedings at any such Royal Commission would wreck the Labor Party. One thing that people are asking is why Mr Powell, who represents Bankstown, has remained silent in the House while his electorate, according to himself, with his full knowledge, has been terrorised by gangsters. He could have exposed this under parliamentary privilege every bit as rigid as the protection that a Royal Commission would give him.'

Apart from writing Things I Hear, Browne also did some newspaper and other writing, mainly as a sporting columnist for Truth, and worked as a public relations consultant. According to a feature series he wrote 13 years later for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, his telephone rang and a voice at the other end said: 'It's Ray Fitzpatrick from Bankstown. Will you come and see me?'

Browne knew Fitzpatrick slightly through the NSW Trotting Club. After providing a brief background to events up to then, he wrote: 'Ah, yes. Mr Ray Fitzpatrick was very much in need of expert public relations advice in April, 1955.'

They met at the Observer's printing premises in Bankstown. Browne agreed to work a few hours each week for £30 to turn it into a 'fighting newspaper'. However, he wrote, he wanted full control, with no interference. 'There was another condition. I intended to try to force a Royal Commission into Bankstown. If the Royal Commission showed that the allegations being made against Fitzpatrick were without foundation, as he claimed, it would be very difficult for Morgan or anybody else to continue to make them. "Are you game to face a Royal Commission?" I asked.'

When Fitzpatrick replied that he was game, Browne told him he wanted £20,000 'if it goes well'. 'I remember Fitzpatrick grinning,' Browne wrote. 'He had one of the most likeable, boyish smiles I've ever seen. "Old Gus Kelly said you're hot," he said.'

Christopher Augustus Kelly, the first man to call my father on the morning after the fire, was well known in 1955 for his influence in state politics. Besides covering police matters, his work as Chief Secretary of NSW covered horseracing and gambling. Politicians in NSW came and went. But Gus Kelly at the time seemed to go on forever. For many years he hosted a lunch each Tuesday at Tattersalls Club that brought together politicians, senior police, public servants and people in other areas, particularly sport. Their common bond was gambling. There are no prizes for guessing who was sometimes present to give tips on the trots at Harold Park.

'That night I received another phone call,' Browne continued. 'It was Charlie Morgan. Morgan and I were on friendly terms. We had first met in 1943 when I was the United Australia Party candidate against Dr Evatt in Barton. Morgan had come into the electorate to speak against me, and after the meeting I drove him home. I lived at Dover Heights. He lived at Double Bay. We were both aliens as far as Bankstown was concerned. But back to the phone call. "I hear you're going to run the Observer for Fitz," he said. News apparently travelled fast in Bankstown.'

'That's right. It looks as though we're on opposite sides of the fence,' Browne claimed he said.

Morgan replied: 'Take my advice and stay out of it. It will turn into a dirty fight. You could be hurt.'

'I thanked him for the advice and hung up,' Browne concluded. 'I went to work on the Observer the next day.'

CHAPTER FOUR

Browne Starts Punching

On Thursday 21 April the Bankstown Observer appeared with a front page that surprised many of its readers. It had a bold new layout with a banner head reading 'Politicians Hysterical Outburst'. The missing apostrophe probably resulted from Browne's scribbled writing. 'Bankstown citizens are thunderstruck and angry at wild charges made by two politicians in recent days,' the main story began. 'The two men, Messrs C.A. Morgan, MHR, and Mr A. Powell, MLA, in company with others, have made claims that Bankstown is in the grip of gangsters who, they claim, are "terrorising" the area... "A little Chicago" was the term used.'

At the right-hand top was a double-column story headed 'When Bankstown was WILD' and sub-headed 'Editor Chased With Gun'.

This said a 'highly respected' journalist had resigned from the Sydney Morning Herald and tried to start a newspaper in Bankstown. 'But he only produced one edition,' it said. 'The editor of the rival paper, which had been going some time, came around to see him. He brought his gun with him. We don't know what was said, but we do know what happened. The owner of the new paper came out of Campbell's Garage as though a banshee was after him. It wasn't a banshee. It was the rival editor, and he chased him up Chapel Rd threatening to blow a hole in him if he ever came near Bankstown again. He never came back. He's in Melbourne today, and if he wanted, he would come back with pleasure and tell his story. Could it be this story that Messrs Morgan and Powell are thinking about when they talk about "gangsters"?'

An editorial was headed 'We Will Fight For Bankstown's Interests'. In the centre of the page, in large type, the Observer offered a £1,000 reward 'for information that will lead to the conviction of any person or persons in connection with the recent fire which destroyed the offices of the Torch newspaper'.

That front page worked. Some metropolitan newspapers on Friday published parts of it in stories that indicated second thoughts about everything.

On Saturday the Herald published a story, picked up by other newspapers, which quoted police as saying they now believed the explosion at the Torch was accidental. This story said the police had discounted their earlier theory about petrol vapour because they had failed to find any evidence of a timing device to detonate it. They also pointed out that an unauthorised person would have had difficulty leaving the building undetected because of its position in the shopping centre almost opposite the police station. At this stage, the police said, they had interviewed more than 100 people and hoped to complete their investigation soon.

I was attending a boarding school in Katoomba, where I was preparing for my Leaving Certificate exams at the end of the year. On the second morning after the fire at the Torch I had had to return there. But I was reading city newspapers when I could and my mother was keeping me updated with weekly letters. Follow-up stories in most newspapers confined themselves to saying that Phil Engisch was dissatisfied with the police investigation and was trying to see Premier Joe Cahill to demand further action. The Premier, however, seemed reluctant to see Engisch.

On 27 April, I learned soon afterwards in a letter, Ray Fitzpatrick went to our home just before dinner, showed my father a copy of the front page of the next day's Observer, and told him there might be legal consequences.

George had helped to found the newspaper in 1950 with some other Labor supporters as a pro-Labor counter to the anti-Labor Torch. But, like the others, he knew nothing about starting and running a newspaper. Before long it had been costing them much more than they had expected. When Fitzpatrick had offered them enough money to start it properly, in exchange for editorial control, they had accepted reluctantly. Most, including George, had resigned as directors after Fitzpatrick turned it into a blatant weapon in his personal wars. But they were locked in with minority shareholdings that were impossible to sell.

Fitzpatrick, according to Olive, offered to buy to buy George's share on the spot so he would not be involved in any legal consequences. She said he accepted gladly. I believe the other shareholders accepted similar offers that evening.

On 28 April the Observer's front page was headed 'MHR and Immigration Racket'. The story underneath began: 'In the present Labor faction fight, all sorts of charges are being bandied about. Some are no doubt true, and some are without foundation. Nobody expects politicians fighting for their political lives to be fair. However, the anti-Evatt group in NSW are making charges that deeply concern the residents of this area.'

The reference to an anti-Evatt group concerned long-running divisions in the Labor Party over allegations of communist influence, particularly influence in the trade unions. On the left were supporters of Evatt. On the right were conservative opponents of Evatt, many of them followers of a Victorian Catholic anti-communist activist, B.A. Santamaria.

The divisions had worsened seriously on 3 April 1954 after Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary at the Russian Embassy in Canberra, defected to officials of ASIO. That event helped transform the entire Australian political scene. On 13 May 1954 Menzies announced the defection of Petrov in parliament and the establishment of a Royal Commission on Espionage. On 29 May 1954 Australia went to the polls. The election, which many people had expected Evatt to win, was won by Menzies. During April 1955 many Labor politicians left the party and joined an Anti-Communist Labor Party. They included nine Victorian members of the federal parliament, two of them senators.

The Observer story continued: 'They claim that Mr C.A. Morgan, MHR, who is supporting Dr Evatt, is, or was, mixed up in what can only be described as an immigration racket. Unlike some of the charges made, these charges are detailed, and give names and dates upon which it is alleged certain happenings took place. Broadly, the charges are that Mr Morgan, in company with another MHR, Mr J.J. Clark, and a man named Walter Goldman, were procuring entry into Australia for aliens at a fee of £20 per person. It also charged that false particulars were placed in application forms sent to Canberra.'

The story proceeded to give more details, including a list of German or Jewish-sounding names, from two confidential security reports compiled early in World War II. They concerned schemes run by Morgan and other Australian solicitors before the war to help German and Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis. The schemes were investigated because of fears they might have been used to infiltrate enemy agents. The story was written as if the matters dealt with were recent. In the context of when it was written, the story was nonsense. It was also libellous.

I don't think either of my parents ever met Frank Browne or read Things I Hear. But George knew of his reputation in the Labor Party, which was said to range from fascination to loathing. Olive had heard that he wrote for 'that awful newspaper called Truth'. Nothing good could come, she thought, from someone who wrote for Truth.

Fitzpatrick and Browne settled back to await a writ from Morgan. But one never came.

Morgan would have seen dangers. A libel writ would involve giving evidence under oath and facing cross-examination in an open court. A barrister might ask questions about Morgan's time as Fitzpatrick's legal adviser before and early in the war, when some offences were said to have occurred. Fitzpatrick could afford a top barrister and had used some effectively in the High Court. He also had many supporters whom he might have called as witnesses and who might not have been too honest.

Seeing a way around the dangers, Morgan went to the Prime Minister, who was known for his exalted opinion of the outward, if not always internal, dignity of parliament. Menzies, who had excellent personal reasons to dislike Browne, provided a receptive ear.

On 3 May 1955, interrupting a debate on foreign affairs, Morgan rose in parliament and said he wished to raise a matter of privilege. He claimed that a 'vicious personal attack' had been made against him in the Bankstown Observer. 'That newspaper has impugned my personal honour as a member of this parliament and has also challenged my fitness to be a member of this parliament,' he said, and began reading the article. When he was about a quarter of the way through, some members began to laugh loudly at references to Morgan. One called 'hear, hear'.

The Speaker, Archie Cameron, called for order. 'I want to assure the house,' he said, 'that I have read this article, and any honourable member who thinks it is a laughing matter had better read it first before treating it as such.'

Morgan said the newspaper had flaunted the charges 'to the world and right throughout my electorate. It flaunts charges the truth of which it said it has no way of knowing. What sort of conduct is that for a so-called responsible newspaper?' He said the newspaper had challenged him to accept an inquiry. 'That is a challenge I accept.'

'Was it Mr Big?' called a member.

'It could be Mr Big,' Morgan said. 'This will give him an opportunity of proving just how big he really is.' He said a search of company records had shown that the sole director now of the Observer was 'one Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick'. And the article was 'merely a rehash of a scurrilous, illegal and anonymous pamphlet which was distributed clandestinely throughout my electorate a few days prior to the 1946 general election, of which this man Fitzpatrick at the time produced a printer's proof.'

Morgan said 'one might let such things go as part of the hurly-burly of public life, but I take a very serious view of this matter, not only because of my personal position, but also because every honourable member of this house finds it necessary from time to time to make representations on behalf of friends or relatives who want to enter this country.' After declaring his innocence of all charges against him he declared: 'I leave this matter with the highest tribunal in the land − this parliament.'

Morgan moved that the article be referred to the parliament's Standing Committee of Privilege. This committee had no power to force people to appear before it. But if they refused the parliament could, it was believed, order them to comply. The parliament also had, or so it was believed, the power to fine or to send them to jail.

The committee had six members, one of whom was Morgan and another Joe Clark, the parliament's respected Chairman of Committees, who had been named as his associate in the Observer article. When Jack Lang, a controversial NSW Labor premier who had seriously split the federal and state branches of the party during the Depression, had made deceitful use of parts of the reports in parliament in late 1946, Clark had jumped to his feet and angrily denied any wrongdoing. His denial had been supported by senior Labor members and there was never evidence of anything against him. Not long before that, Lang had wrested the seat of Reid from Morgan for one term after a savage election fight during which Fitzpatrick financed and helped manage Lang's campaign.

The Leader of the Opposition, Dr Evatt, seconded Morgan's motion. Evatt said Morgan had raised it purely in his capacity as a member and that it was in no sense a party matter. The Speaker said he had read the article and it was his firm opinion that it should go to the privileges committee.

The house voted unanimously in favour. In the highest corridors of the land, wheels began to grind with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy.

CHAPTER FIVE

Federal Police Act

On Thursday 12 May, the head of the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Ray Whitrod, visited Phil Engisch at his office in Bankstown. He asked Engisch about a request Ray Fitzpatrick had made to him in 1946 to print an election pamphlet using material from the confidential security reports early in the war that mentioned Morgan. Engisch said Fitzpatrick told him the source of the material was Justice Stan Taylor and that he had declined the request.

The next day Whitrod questioned Taylor at his judicial chambers. Taylor indicated his low opinion of Morgan and high opinion of Fitzpatrick. He was surprisingly open about the lengths to which he might go to help Fitzpatrick, whom he described as 'a big boy who has never grown up'. Whitrod asked Taylor whether he might during the war have lobbied members of the parliament's Joint War Expenditure Committee on Fitzpatrick's behalf, and also asked Eddie Ward, a wartime cabinet minister, for his help. Taylor said he believed in 'helping a man if I can' and might possibly have done those things. On the question of how Fitzpatrick might have obtained copies of the security reports on Morgan, the official reason for Whitrod's visit, Taylor was evasive.

Whitrod was particularly interested in a friend of Taylor in the wartime Security Service, a Constable Hughes, whom Taylor had mentioned. Hughes had transferred from the NSW police early in the war and in 1942 had become the head of counter-espionage in the state. Taylor admitted he had sent Hughes to see Morgan on Fitzpatrick's behalf in 1944. Whitrod asked if Hughes might have supplied the copies of the security reports to Fitzpatrick. Taylor was again evasive.

That evening, Whitrod questioned Fitzpatrick at his Bankstown home but he also was evasive.

On Tuesday 17 May, in a room in the basement of Parliament House, the seven members of the privileges committee began hearing evidence about the alleged breach of privilege. Three new members had been appointed, two to replace Morgan and Clark, who had stood down, and the other to replace a member who had died.

Although few people realised it at first, the committee was operating in a legal vacuum. Most states had passed laws to cover privilege. The federal government had not. Section 49 of the Constitution stated, however, that the rights and privileges of the British Parliament were to be those of the Australian Parliament. This was later used to justify actions of the parliament. There were precedents in the state parliaments but in the federal parliament there was almost none. In the 1930s a Sydney newspaper had referred to politicians behaving 'like thieves in the night' over their salaries. When the parliament called on the editor to apologise for breach of privilege he did so, requiring no further action.

Under parliamentary privilege, members speaking in parliament could say what they wished without fear. That in modern times normally meant fear of being sued in court. It also gave the parliament the power to take what action it saw fit to protect its dignity and that of its members. The concept was born in England in the 15th century. It drew legality from the custom of the House of Commons, dating from the days of Henry VIII, to lay claim by petition at the start of each parliament to the Crown's 'ancient rights and privileges'. The Commons relied on custom rather than statutes for its powers. Since the time of Oliver Cromwell it had jealously insisted on its right to interpret for itself just what its privileges were.

For two hours, behind closed doors, the committee questioned Morgan, who said his professional conduct had never been questioned during 35 years as a solicitor. On the subject of the immigration scheme before the war to help Jews he said he charged less than most other solicitors involved and that, after expenses, he made very little compared with his normal legal earnings.

Morgan said that just before the 1946 election Phil Engisch had told him that Fitzpatrick had brought him a copy of security reports about the scheme and asked him to print an article from it in pamphlet form. Morgan said Engisch told him he declined Fitzpatrick's request. Engisch said Fitzpatrick told him the security reports had come from Justice Taylor. 'I have sent that information on to the Prime Minister and the matter is being investigated,' Morgan told the committee.

Members asked him about his parliamentary allegations in 1944 concerning a building, said to be an aircraft hangar taken illegally in 1943 from Bankstown aerodrome, then a major base of the US and Australian air forces, which housed Fitzpatrick's trucks. Valued in parliament at up to £4,000, it was allegedly passed off as one worth £100 by the local council and the Department for War Organisation of Industry. They also asked about problems he had at the time with John Dedman, the minister of that department.

Morgan said he had received a complaint about the building in the middle of December 1943, soon after the federal election. 'In the middle of January a gentleman from Security came to my office in Sydney... He said he had come on behalf of Stan Taylor, that is, Mr Justice Taylor. He said: "Stan asked me to call and see you about Ray Fitzpatrick, who is in some bother about a building, and to ask you to do what you can to help him out of it".'

After answering a few questions about Taylor's professional history, Morgan said: 'I did not know then the serious nature of the breach, because I had not inspected the building... However, I did say, "I will see Stan" – that is Mr Justice Taylor – "see what he has to say and explain my point of view to him," which I did.

'I interviewed him in his chambers in Sydney. He explained to me his friendship for Fitzpatrick, which extended over a number of years. He said he thought he was a good fellow and so on. I explained my point of view, told him what I knew about Fitzpatrick, and said that I felt I could not do anything to help him in the matter.' Morgan said Taylor then 'went on to say that he thought it might be detrimental to me politically, because of the influence of this man (Fitzpatrick), if I crossed him'.

Morgan said he was 'really staggered when I saw the building and realised what a serious thing it was'. He made representations to Dedman 'until I felt there was something sticking about the matter and holding it up that would have to be brought up in the house, and I asked several questions about it... I found out soon afterwards that there was a letter on the file from Messrs Taylor and Scott, that is, the firm of the brother of Mr Justice Taylor, explaining...'

Committee member William Bourke interrupted. 'Were they solicitors?'

'Yes, Fitzpatrick's solicitors. They were not his regular solicitors but they were acting for him in a particular matter. Mr Taylor was then the vice-president of our party, so it was doubly embarrassing for me.' After making clear this was Stan's brother Bill, Morgan said the letter explained that Fitzpatrick 'did it all under a misapprehension and that sort of thing... Obviously the way was being paved to give him a caution instead of prosecuting him.'

Soon afterwards Morgan said: 'With regard to intimidation – this letter will also be on the file somewhere – a letter was written by Mr Fitzpatrick, but obviously drafted for him by someone with an educated mind, making an attack on me. It alleged, in effect, that I had only raised the building question because I wanted to help some interests in opposition to him.' Morgan said Fitzpatrick sent the letter to Prime Minister Curtin, Attorney-General Evatt and Dedman. 'He sent it to everywhere where it could do me harm.'

Bourke: 'A decent attempt at intimidation.'

Morgan: 'Yes. Mr Curtin said to me, "I see that Mr Fitzpatrick has been writing letters".'

Later in his evidence Morgan said cabinet minister Eddie Ward told him he was approached at about that time by Justice Taylor, 'who actually came down to his ministerial rooms and asked whether he, that is Mr Ward, could use his influence with me to pull me off, or make me desist from raising this matter of the building and the war expenditure committee investigations. Other members of the war expenditure committee have also told me that they were approached by the judge at that time. One senator was actually called down to the judge's chambers. Other members, trade unionists, have told me that they were called down there and asked to stand for parliament against me.'

Not one word of that evidence was made publicly available until this century, long after the 30-year limit that normally covers parliamentary material.

That same Tuesday a telephone rang in Bankstown. It was Ray Whitrod ringing to confirm an appointment at 10.30 the next morning with Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had earlier indicated he would not say anything about the copies of the security reports mentioning Morgan except in the presence of his city solicitor. So an appointment had been made tentatively for a meeting at the solicitor's office the following day.

On Wednesday 18 March winter had arrived prematurely and snow lay on higher ground in much of NSW. Just before 10.30am Fitzpatrick arrived at the office of the solicitor, Mr W.H. Reddy, at Margaret Street in Sydney's business district. Whitrod arrived on time with another federal police officer and they got down to business. Reddy suggested to Whitrod that he put all his questions in writing. After a little discussion Whitrod agreed to this.

A few minutes later the other police officer excused himself, saying he had other business. As he left, carloads of federal police were driving into Bankstown. In Reddy's office discussion continued.

At 10.45am the federal police halted outside the office of the Bankstown Observer and the nearby office of Ray Fitzpatrick and Co. Flourishing search warrants issued under the Crimes Act and signed by Whitrod, they entered and began ransacking the offices. Safes and drawers were opened, baskets upended and files emptied. At 10.50am one of Fitzpatrick's managers, Joe Griffin, was able to get through to him at the solicitor's office and tell him what was happening.

Fitzpatrick hurried more than 20 kilometres back to Bankstown and went first to the Observer office. There he found papers scattered everywhere and 10 plainclothes police still going through them. They showed him their search warrants and continued their business.

Meanwhile, three plainclothes men had arrived at 11am at Fitzpatrick's home in Chapel Road, where his wife Clare was alone at the time. They flashed search warrants at her, walked inside without further ado, and began going through drawers, wardrobes and pockets. When they asked about a safe she said there was none. But they looked everywhere for one, including behind pictures and under the house. Every cupboard was opened, and carpets and mattresses turned over.

The searches lasted until 1.30pm. The police failed to find any missing government file. But at the Observer office they found the original typed copy of the story on Morgan. That they took away, along with printed copies of that edition. Before leaving, they handed a receipt for those to Fitzpatrick, who was incensed.

It did not all end on an unpleasant note. Clare Fitzpatrick later described the three police at her home as 'absolute gentlemen' who showed the best of manners. 'They did not find what they seemed to be looking for,' she told a reporter from the Daily Mirror. 'I made them a cup of tea and sent them away very happy.'

Internal documents and memos concerning the raid, released this century by the Commonwealth Investigation Service, show the main concern of those in charge of it was a claim by Morgan that they had tipped off Fitzpatrick in advance. Reports of Fitzpatrick's anger were seized upon to show they had not tipped him off.

The Observer, still blasting away, was already set up for printing and could not be changed to report the raid. On Friday it appeared with a story saying a clique in the state and federal governments had been responsible for the sacking of the local council. 'It has been an open season for the liars and slanderers of Bankstown,' it read. 'The Observer is not going to sit idly by while these people sling mud with both hands at decent citizens who happen to get in their way.'

In its late editions on Thursday, the Mirror, the first newspaper to learn of the raids, covered its front page with the story. On Friday it again led page 1 with them. That story, headed 'Gestapo Charge in Raids', quoted Clive Evatt, MLA, younger brother of Dr Evatt, as calling the raids further evidence that Australia was 'rapidly degenerating into a police state'. Fitzpatrick said he was seeking top-level legal advice to challenge the legality of the raids.

By then, however, in another serious worsening, the main arena had switched back to Canberra.

CHAPTER SIX

Wartime Allegations

Emboldened by his success in surviving the cross-examination by the privileges committee on Tuesday, and perhaps also by the raid on Fitzpatrick's premises on Wednesday, Morgan rose during morning question time on Thursday March 19. He then raised at last allegations he made in the federal parliament in early 1944, and reports on those allegations that year by the parliament's war expenditure committee. On 18 December 1944 the federal government, after considering criminal charges against Fitzpatrick, began the High Court civil proceedings against him, claiming damages for a conspiracy to defraud the government, which remained before the court until 1950. None of this had yet been mentioned in any newspaper report since the Torch fire.

Although not recorded in Hansard, the parliament's official account of its proceedings, his questions, and the Prime Minister's reply, were mentioned in at least four city daily newspapers. As reported on page 2 of Friday's Sydney Telegraph, Morgan asked Menzies: 'Will you say what has become of two reports of this committee containing findings of extensive frauds involving huge sums committed by a Bankstown contractor by means of short measure of materials supplied to the Captain Cook graving dock, aerodromes and other vital defence undertakings during the war. As there are no grounds for secrecy in relation to such reports, will you lay them on the table to protect the public and government instrumentalities, state and federal, from further depredations of this nature, and for the guidance of state and local government departments in dealing with tenders for supplies of materials?'

Menzies asked him to put his questions on the notice paper so that he could give him a written reply later.

A few hours later, in the afternoon, Morgan rose during a debate on the Commonwealth-States Housing Agreement Bill. After a long preamble he got onto the subject of high road-building costs under housing commission contracts. Then, as reported by Hansard, he got to the point: 'Certain wartime profiteers, exploiters and racketeers are trying to get their sticky fingers into these large road-making contracts that are available through the housing commissions. One in particular is my old friend, Mr Big Fitzpatrick. I find that he is getting very substantial contracts in housing commission estates in and around my electorate. I wonder how he is doing it, particularly in view of the frauds he perpetrated during wartime. That is on record. It is unfortunate, not only for the people who will buy these homes, but also for the housing commission and authorities, that they do not know all the facts, and that the report of the war expenditure committee has not been tabled.'

'It is high time,' Morgan said, 'that that report was tabled for the benefit of the authorities which are dealing with individuals of that kind. I refer in particular to the persons who will be buying the houses, including ex-servicemen and others who made sacrifices for the community during wartime. This individual was exploiting them while they were away doing their duty for their country.'

Morgan said that naturally, when tenders were called, the person who submitted the lowest usually got the contract. 'On the other hand, if the successful tenderer happens to be a short-change merchant, the lowest tender can be the most costly in the long run. I might be unduly suspicious in that regard, but a leopard does not change its spots, and persons who robbed the nation on graving docks and other vital undertakings when the Japanese were knocking at our gate, who purloined government property, and even lifted an aeroplane hangar, are not likely to mend their ways. I know that the attitude of this individual is "the people be damned".'

After more claims, the opposition whip, Fred Daly, who had arrived during the speech, asked: 'Who was the individual concerned?'

Morgan: 'Mr Big.' He said 'the house is dealing with the problem of road construction and that is very relevant to the measure before the house... The housing commissions and other authorities might be entirely unaware of the matters to which I have referred. That is why I suggest that the report of the war expenditure committee, which, for some reason, has remained the most secret document in Australia, should be made public. No one seems to want to know anything about it. It appears that somebody regards it as a sacred relic and wants it to be left in the pigeon-holes where it has been resting for years.'

The Sydney Sun covered the front page of its final edition with the story under large headlines proclaiming that Mr Big had been named in the house. On Friday morning many newspapers also led page 1 with it. Some ran additional stories inside. An unusually large head for the Melbourne Argus read 'MR. BIG IS NAMED FITZPATRICK'.

In Bankstown Ray Fitzpatrick, guided by Browne, said in a statement: 'Morgan has been attacking people under privilege from the coward's castle at Canberra for the last 10 years. He is just running true to form. We, on the other hand, have attacked Morgan without privilege, and if he had an atom of courage he would go into court against us and let us show that our claim that he is totally unfitted to be a member of parliament is the full truth and nothing but the truth.'

In his next edition of Things I Hear Browne attacked the general reporting of the matters by the city newspapers: 'The Australian press gave the most biased and completely one-sided treatment of Bankstown I've seen anywhere outside the pages of Pravda. The newspapers lacked the men and the desire to do their own investigating.'

He showed no illusions about his popularity in the national capital: 'I'm fully aware of the mercy I can expect from Canberra and the fair go I'm likely to get from certain members on both sides of the House. If a motion was moved to hang, draw and quarter me on the steps of the House, it would be carried unanimously, and some of the alleged friends I've got down there would be in early doors (a phrase used for letting people in early at boxing matches) for a front seat at the do.'

The inquiry of the privileges committee was widened to cover articles in the three following editions of the Observer. On 2 June 1955 parliament's Sergeant-at-Arms, Jack Pettifer, telephoned Fitzpatrick and Browne and asked them to appear before the committee on the following Tuesday, 7 June, two days before parliament was scheduled to rise for the annual exodus from wintry Canberra.

'The setting up of the privileges committee was not taken very seriously,' Browne wrote years later. 'Nobody expected anything drastic to come of it, even when it was announced that Fitzpatrick and myself would be called to give evidence before it. Had I been disposed to regard it seriously, my doubts would have been resolved that Sunday. Dr Evatt came to see me at my Dover Heights home. We had become reasonably close friends from about 1948 onwards, probably due to a common interest in history and sport. On this Sunday afternoon he assured me that there was not the slightest cause for anxiety. The committee would take evidence, parliament would recess until August, and by that time the whole thing would be forgotten.'

But Browne did have some cause for concern and knew it. He sought legal advice on whether he should appear before the committee and issued a statement that said: 'If citizens are summoned to appear before a court or a royal commission, they can determine what their rights are in the matter. In the case of the Committee of Privilege, which, I understand, meets without the press being present, the rights of the citizen are obscure. I would like to know what rights I have in such a case.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

Damaging Admissions

The answer, Browne found when he reached Canberra, was almost none. Wanting to spend as little time as possible there, he flew down. Fitzpatrick motored down the day before with a young barrister, Anthony Mason. Not only were the press and all outsiders excluded from the room where the inquiry was being held but when Fitzpatrick was called his lawyer was barred at the entrance.

Told inside the room he would first be sworn, Fitzpatrick said he had been told by his lawyer they had no right to make him do so and that he wanted him present. 'I do not object to being sworn at all, because what I will tell you is the truth, but I must be guided by my advisers,' he said. 'It is all foreign to me; I am only a layman.' When he stuck to this line he was told to leave and the committee deliberated.

After a while Fitzpatrick was brought back in with his lawyer. Mason argued that his client was facing a serious charge, implied that on historical precedents he could be jailed, and said he had no right of appeal against any decision by the committee. 'Although this charge is preferred against him, and may have serious consequences, he is entirely left to his own resources and in ignorance of the case against him. I submit that, in these circumstances, common fairness demands that he be given the right to legal representation.'

'There is no charge against him as far as we are concerned,' John McLeay, the chairman, said.

Mason argued at length that there was. He also made other detailed legal points about the hearing. After he had finished he withdrew with Fitzpatrick and the committee deliberated again.

When Mason was called back in with Fitzpatrick, McLeay told him: 'There is no justification in hearing you any further but we suggest that you stay within the precincts of the house.' Dealing with one of Mason's main earlier concerns, he said: 'Expressing a layman's point of view, if we felt as a committee that he was likely to incriminate himself, then, in a spirit of justice, we would advise him accordingly.'

Mason left and Fitzpatrick was sworn in. At the start of his lengthy evidence he said he was the owner of the Observer and took responsibility for its contents. Assured he was not on trial, he showed candour not always encountered in courts of law. And, despite McLeay's assurance to Mason, he was allowed to incriminate himself. Soon after the hearing government officials gave journalists selected passages in which he did so.

Fitzpatrick's most frequent social contacts were probably at Bankstown hotels or at Harold Park paceway. In some ways, wrote Browne in a later newspaper account of the proceedings, he was not even speaking the same language as the seven parliamentarians, some of them trained lawyers, he now faced. A Victorian Liberal, Percy Joske (a 'foppish Divorce Court lawyer' according to Browne, and later Justice Joske of the ACT Supreme Court), quoted Morgan: 'I regard it as a brazen attempt to intimidate me in the course of my public duties on behalf of the people whom I represent.' Joske then asked: 'What do you say about that?'

Fitzpatrick: 'That was the idea in printing it.'

Joske: 'To prevent him saying things in parliament?'

Fitzpatrick: 'Yes.'

According to Browne, 'intimidate' to Fitzpatrick meant the same as 'attack' - that he saw himself matching charges made by Morgan with charges of his own in an attempt to have Morgan institute proceedings in an open court. But he had no counsel to correct the damage: the committee saw it only in terms of the − to them − grave charge of trying to prevent an elected member of parliament exercising his right to speak freely.

One member, Reginald Swartz, appeared to have trouble believing what he had just heard. 'You said that the idea in printing the original article in the Bankstown Observer of April 28 was to prevent Mr Morgan saying things in federal parliament?'

Fitzpatrick: 'Yes.'

Swartz: 'You still agree that it is a reasonable interpretation of what you said?'

Fitzpatrick: 'Yes, we had to hit back. We were taking it all the time.'

William Bourke: 'Did you know the way in which he (Browne) was going to "have a go" at Mr Morgan?'

Fitzpatrick: 'No, I told him to get stuck into him. That is what I employed him for.'

Most of Fitzpatrick's evidence, not released, like much other material, until this century, was less punchy, and certainly less incriminating, than that. As he left the room he winked at Browne, waiting his turn to go in. 'I told 'em, boy,' he said to him. 'Had I known what he "told 'em",' Browne wrote, 'I would have been considerably more worried than I was.'

After Browne was sworn in McLeay said: 'You will be more familiar with the functions and activities of the privileges committee than Mr Fitzpatrick.'

'I think you could say yes to that,' Browne replied. He also took responsibility for the contents of the articles under consideration. Early in his evidence he was told Fitzpatrick had made damaging admissions. But was not told what those admissions were, which placed him in a difficult situation. Awake to all the legal traps, he was much more evasive than Fitzpatrick.

Questioning him about the attack on Morgan he had discussed with Fitzpatrick, Joske said: 'Did you indicate to him, in a little more detail than you have so far told us, what you were proposing to do?'

Browne: 'I do not remember the actual conversation, but it might have gone along the lines, "I will attack Morgan on his connection with the refugee racket." It might have gone that far.'

Joske: 'Did you have any discussion with Mr Fitzpatrick about a pamphlet that had appeared some years before?'

Browne: 'I think I did mention that I had seen a pamphlet of that type?'

Joske: 'Would you agree that the pamphlet was in scurrilous terms?'

Browne: 'No more scurrilous than a great many others that I have seen in elections.' He said his purpose was to make Morgan issue a writ for defamation, which he said 'would lead to his eventual destruction and certainly it would shut the press up in Sydney for the time being'.

Joske: 'When you wrote on April 28 that Mr Morgan is, or was, mixed up in what can only be described as an immigration racket, did you mean to indicate that he might still, on April 28, be mixed up in it?'

Browne: 'I do not generally plead guilty to loose writing but that was a piece of particularly loose writing. Charges were being made currently by his political enemies.'

Joske at least was one of Browne's enemies in Canberra, and Browne's replies to him became more acrimonious. Later Joske said: 'Has he [Morgan] not the right not to be defamed?'

Browne: 'As much as anybody else.'

Joske: 'Answer that yes or no.'

Browne: 'I will not answer it yes or no and there is no reason why I should.'

But the damage had been done. On Thursday morning the headlines told the story: Fitzpatrick and Browne had been found guilty of a serious breach of parliamentary privilege and the committee had recommended that the parliament take 'appropriate action' against them.

The committee's finding, tabled late the previous evening in parliament, was that the two men had breached privilege by publishing articles intended to influence and intimidate Morgan in his conduct in the house, and had deliberately attempted to impute corrupt conduct against Morgan 'for the express purpose of discrediting and silencing him'. The committee also found that some later references to itself and the federal parliament in the three subsequent editions of the Observer constituted contempt of parliament. But in the case of these the committee considered the house 'would best consult its own dignity by taking no action'.

Against Morgan it found no evidence of improper conduct.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wheels of Justice

At that stage most newspapers thought the two men would be called upon to retract and apologise and that serious action was unlikely.

That Thursday, 9 June, which should have been the final day of the sittings, there was much activity in Canberra. Because the statute books provided no guidance there was still much doubt over just what action the parliament could take. The rights of the British Parliament had once been drastic. In 1621 a man named Floyde, convicted of breach of privilege, had been sentenced by the House of Commons to pay a fine of £1,000 and stand in the pillory after riding to it backwards on a horse with its tail in his hands. When he appealed against this to the House of Lords they increased the fine to £5,000 and ruled that he should stand twice instead of once in the pillory, again after riding there backwards on a horse with its tail in his hands. They also ruled that he be whipped at the cart's rear, be branded on his forehead, surrender all his wealth and be jailed for life in Newgate Prison.

There were quite a few people in the Australian Parliament who would not have been unhappy to see such a sentence for Browne. But British custom had changed over the centuries. It had not fined anyone since the 17th century. Most legal experts thought the Commons had lost its power to fine and had the power to jail only for short periods.

Among the last to be convicted of this offence had been the editor and publisher of the London Globe. Called to the judicial bar of the Commons in 1901, they had admitted breach of privilege and had apologised. The Commons had imposed no penalty. In 1908, however, the Victorian Parliament had sentenced a man named Glass to two years for this offence. In London the Privy Council had upheld this. The Victorian Parliament had given lighter sentences to five men on different occasions and the West Australian Parliament had jailed one man in 1905.

During the morning Prime Minister Menzies told an emergency meeting of the joint government parties of the doubts about what actions the parliament could legally take. The joint parties voted to support the findings of the privileges committee. Menzies resumed talks he had been having with the Solicitor-General and legal experts of the Attorney-General's Department. Mason had been joined by a leading QC, Jack Shand, hired by Truth owner Ezra Norton to represent Browne. During the legal talks Mason and Shand tried unsuccessfully to see Menzies.

After lunch Menzies met members of the cabinet and told them parliament appeared to have the power it needed under Section 49 to jail Fitzpatrick and Browne if it wished.

Soon after 5pm Menzies entered the parliament. Following a speech in which he savagely attacked the two men he moved that it accept the findings of the privileges committee. The Leader of the Opposition, Dr Evatt, said he would reserve comment until after the house had heard Fitzpatrick and Browne. Other speakers followed, supporting the Prime Minister. The house carried a motion calling for the two men to appear before it at 10am the next day.

As journalists hurried for their telephones Menzies strode from the house and the final wheels of parliamentary justice were set in motion.

At the Sydney office of the Commonwealth Investigation Service in Pitt Street there was a flurry of activity. At least one agent was sent out to try to locate Browne. Calls went between senior officials in Sydney and Canberra.

At 8.40pm the Assistant Director of the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Mr J.M. Davis, landed at Sydney Airport. A Sydney official of the service, Mr F. St John, met him on the tarmac. The two men drove to Fitzpatrick's home at Chapel Road in Bankstown. There, lights were blazing on the veranda and in most of the rooms, casting their glow on the lawns, the rose gardens and the tennis court outside. Reporters and photographers were assembled on the front lawn when the federal agents arrived.

Wearing a red sweater, and with shirt sleeves rolled up, Fitzpatrick met them at the entrance and motioned them inside. Flash bulbs blazed as they emerged ten minutes later and returned to their cars. Arms akimbo, Fitzpatrick watched them go defiantly from the veranda. 'I'll be on the 7am plane to Canberra tomorrow morning,' he told the reporters. When one asked if he would have something to say to parliament he said grimly: 'Yes, I'll have something to say.'

Davis and St John headed for Browne's home at Lancaster Road in the expensive ocean cliff suburb of Dover Heights. Earlier that day Browne had completed his latest edition of Things I Hear and had posted it to subscribers. 'Up to this week, most people, and that included myself,' he wrote, 'thought that the position between politician and citizen was that the politician could rise in parliament and say exactly what he liked about a citizen, without regard to truth, or the laws of libel and slander, and that he enjoyed complete immunity in saying so. At the same time, a citizen who wished to attack a politician had to make his statements without benefit of any privilege whatsoever.' Browne said he could face heavy damages if what he said was regarded as defamatory in any way.

'There have been some astounding examples of what politicians could do under privilege,' Browne continued. 'Back in 1943, a Labor Member named Mountjoy rose in the House and accused a highly respected citizen of operating a brothel, giving a name and address. The citizen so accused was the secretary of an anti-communist organisation, which evidently prompted the attack. There was not one tittle of truth in the accusation, but the citizen had no redress whatever, and there was no word of censure from Parliament. This week it has been revealed that, one-sided as the position had apparently been, it was a great deal more loaded in favour of the politicians against the citizen than anyone had realised. Unfortunately for me, I had to be the guinea pig.'

When Davis and St John arrived Browne was not at home. Just before 11pm he returned. More camera bulbs flashed as he read the summons they presented to him. He too was defiant, but more thoughtful than Fitzpatrick. When a reporter asked what he thought would happen the next day he said: 'I really don't know.'

While all that was going on parliamentary officials inspected the judicial bar of the House of Representatives. A relic of ancient British parliamentary practice, this was a heavy, round brass rail about a metre long. When lowered from a wall hinge behind heavy green curtains it barred entry to the house from King's Hall. It had never been used officially for this purpose and parliament staff said later they had never even seen it lowered unofficially.

Only one person was known to have stood before it. That had been before the federal parliament had moved to Canberra from Melbourne and in very different circumstances. At the end of World War I, Sir John Monash, commander in chief of the Australian forces, had been called before the bar to accept the thanks of the parliament for having successfully led those forces through that conflict.

The Speaker, Archie Cameron, wiped away a film of dust, inspected a heavy tarnish, and ordered a polish.

CHAPTER NINE

Drama in Parliament

June 10, 1955, a day that should be remembered with warning lights in the history of parliamentary democracy, dawned overcast in Sydney. Light drizzle covered the runway as Fitzpatrick took off for Canberra just after 7am on a commercial flight with Mason. Minutes later Browne left on the other main airline with Shand.

On the plane it became obvious that Fitzpatrick had not slept well. No longer did he have the bravado of the previous evening. According to Browne, he slipped and fell heavily against the edge of a seat while entering the aircraft, fracturing two ribs, and was in considerable pain. During the flight they had plenty to read − the news was on the front page of most newspapers and many inside pages as well. Editors now realised the two men could be jailed without even the right of appeal, and their editorial columns were filled with warnings and wrath.

'Parliament is properly jealous of its rights, dignity and privileges,' said the Sydney Morning Herald. 'It is essential to the working of our democratic system that members, in the performance of their duties, should be protected against improper influence or intimidation from outside. But Parliament, in exercising its rights, must be careful not to infringe those of ordinary citizens by procedures inconsistent with the normal processes of the law... Mr Fitzpatrick and Mr Browne were, in effect, on trial. It is unfortunate that the hearing, in its secrecy and the exclusion of counsel, partook of the nature of a star chamber.'

Less restrained and more typical was the Melbourne Argus: 'For the sake of future generations of Australians, we must remove from Canberra − for all time − any authority to try citizens in secret and send them to prison without right of appeal.'

Soon after 9am the two aircraft landed at Canberra. Already the public galleries were crowded and attendants were turning people away at the entrance. More than 20 plainclothes police mingled with people milling in the lobbies and gathering outside. Fitzpatrick and Browne drove to Parliament House with their counsel and presented themselves to the Sergeant-at-Arms, Jack Pettifer. He directed them to a side room usually occupied by the chief messenger.

At a few minutes to ten the ABC radio station 2BL began broadcasting direct from the house. Many people who had been turned away outside tuned in on small radios. Buses filled with people that had arrived too late tuned in also and turned up their speakers. Elsewhere, to an extent almost unprecedented for anything other than major sporting events, others joined the broadcast.

Several members, mainly on the Labor side, had already left Canberra. But the house was almost full. The press and public galleries, as well as the diplomatic boxes, were crowded. Wives or female staff, some in national costumes, of men representing emerging Asian or Pacific nations, added splashes of colour. The Senate was not sitting and senators had packed into their special enclosure to watch the event.

Everyone was silent as Speaker Cameron, large and impressively robed, entered at 10am, preceded by Pettifer with the gilded silver mace of parliament on his shoulder. Cameron read the prayers. Then he turned to the Sergeant-at-Arms. 'Inform Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick that the house will now hear him,' he intoned.

Attendants pulled down the brass bar and fixed it into position at waist height. Pale and nervous, Fitzpatrick stepped forward from King's Hall between the green curtains. The scene that greeted him was imposing. Facing him, high in his massive chair, was the Speaker, bewigged and craggy. Near him were staff and members waiting expectantly.

'The house has adjudged you guilty of a serious breach of privilege by publishing articles intended to influence and intimidate the honourable member for Reid in his conduct in the house, and in deliberately attempting to impute corrupt conduct as a member against the honourable member for Reid for the express purpose of silencing and discrediting him,' Cameron said in a sharp, commanding voice. 'Have you anything to say in extenuation of your offence before the house determines what action it will take? You may now speak.'

After all the stories about this fearsome Mr Big, many people probably expected to hear a defiant voice. What they heard was one asking meekly and almost inaudibly for permission for his counsel to speak on his behalf.

Cameron: 'The resolution has entitled you to speak personally, not your counsel.'

Opposition leader Dr Evatt jumped to his feet calling 'Mr Speaker...' but then sat.

His voice faltering, Fitzpatrick said: 'I would like to apologise to the house.' There was a pause and he started again. 'I would like to apologise to the house for what I did. I printed articles published in the newspaper. I had no idea that it was against parliamentary privilege. I humbly apologise.'

Cameron: 'Have you anything further to say?'

Fitzpatrick: 'No.'

Browne was a different matter. This was a moment for which he had lived. In a newspaper article a few months later he described vividly how he saw what happened then: 'He [Fitzpatrick] was back in under five minutes. He looked sick and shaken by proceedings. Mr Pettifer beckoned. I was "on". It was a bit like walking from the dressing room to slip between the ropes. Even to meeting the fallen gladiator coming out as I went in... The flash bulbs popped and the photographers walked on each other's feet to get better angles as we went... I stood in semi-darkness looking to the brightly lit chamber. I faced the Speaker. From the vastness of his full-bottomed wig, he glowered at me.'

Browne wrote that on one side of the central table sat Prime Minister Menzies. 'His eyes never left my face. On the other side, Dr Evatt, cold, judicial, very much the Justice. The ministerial bench appeared to be full. The front Labor bench was nearly empty, the most prominent object being Deputy Leader Calwell. Calwell's face indicated that he was having a good hate against somebody. I thought I could guess who... I also noticed Morgan, a sneer on his face, leaning forward in his seat on the second opposition bench.'

The silence that had greeted Fitzpatrick resumed as Browne stepped forward to the bar. Only a slight trembling of his hands betrayed nervousness as he began, speaking loudly and clearly: 'Mr Speaker and honourable members, I have something to say in extenuation and mitigation of my offences. But it must remain a slightly impersonal plea because I have been convicted of an offence which according to Australian justice has not been proved. I base that on this premise: it is considered that the right...'

At this point the Speaker ordered him sharply to remove his hands from the bar, the only time he was interrupted. (In his memoirs, Afternoon Light, in which he said Browne spoke 'at length and truculently', Menzies commented: 'This was harsh and unnecessary. It must be confessed that Cameron did, from time to time, act like a regimental sergeant-major. It could have grievously disturbed and confused anybody less self-confident than Browne turned out to be.')

In the chamber the only sound was a rustling of paper or a subdued cough as Browne began to attack the procedure by which he had been brought before the house: 'It is considered the right of every Australian citizen charged with an offence that he first must be charged, that secondly, he may have legal representation. That is denied to me, sir, even here.'

After fumbling in an inside coat pocket, Browne consulted notes. 'He must have the case against him proved and he need not answer incriminating questions. Then there is the fact that he must have the right to cross-examine his accuser. And lastly, he must have the right to appeal. There is also another inherent right, which is always observed in every court in this Commonwealth, and every court with any reasonable conception of justice, that he shall present his case in an atmosphere which may not have had the effect of prejudging him before his case is heard.'

His pace quickened. 'Now, Mr Speaker, let me ask you what has happened to me this week. Firstly, I have been convicted and never charged. Secondly, at no time have I had representation. Thirdly, a case against me has not been properly proved. Fourthly, I have never had a right to cross-examine my accuser. And fifthly, I have no right to appeal. As far as the last is concerned, it is a man's inherent right to have his case taken in an atmosphere that does not allow him to enter a courtroom with the hatred not only of spectators but of practically everyone in the courtroom, including the jury, stirred up against him to a point where, if this were a community of another type, I doubt very much whether he would get into the court at all. He would be lynched on the way in.'

Menzies remained expressionless but his heavy eyebrows arched slightly. Evatt, having relaxed his judicial mien, watched with more evident fascination.

Browne's voice rose. 'Last night the Prime Minister, the greatest orator in the history of this country − and you can put Alfred Deakin in − and, I suggest, one of the most vindictive men in the history of this country, rose and, in a way that only he can do, poured scorn on me. It has been done before, I know that, but never quite under these circumstances.' Fiercely he waved his notes. 'In effect, last night he acted as a stage manager, and the purpose of his stage management was one thing and one thing only − to bring one Browne in here to grovel for mercy, and if he does not grovel for mercy, put him away for life.'

As some members muttered angrily the Speaker called for order.

Sweating under the bright lights in the crowded chamber, Browne cooled down a little. But in similar vein he kept hitting at his accusers, his short, stocky frame erect, his balding, bespectacled head thrown back. 'I say that,' he almost shouted, 'if this parliament establishes a precedent and takes the right of punishment into its own hands, the rights that have been fought for since 1215 (the year the Magna Carta was signed), and even before, are seriously endangered. There will not be a journalist in the land, not a newspaper proprietor in the land, who will feel free, because once you establish a precedent you might say, "Oh yes, Browne did an awful thing." But you will not wait for someone else to do an awful thing. You will get a borderline case, and inevitably in a borderline case you get somebody who says, "Throw him to the lions, crucify him".'

The house listened patiently as he continued. Finally, after a ringing and mordant reference to politicians who invoke the French Revolution − 'liberty, equality and fraternity' − he stopped. For a few moments the silence was complete.

Cameron: 'Have you concluded?'

Browne: 'Yes sir.'

Cameron: 'You will withdraw while the house deliberates.'

For the next 70 minutes Fitzpatrick and Browne waited in an attendants' room off King's Hall. Fitzpatrick chain-smoked and every now and then muttered 'this has never happened before'. According to some newspaper reports, Fitzpatrick broke down and wept during this interim.

Browne posed willingly for photographers but dissuaded them from taking shots of Fitzpatrick. 'Fitz is pretty upset,' he told them. 'This is something right out of his ken. In other circumstances Fitz wouldn't be at all scared. But this is something he didn't expect and has never experienced before. When he fronted the privileges committee last week they were all nice and polite to him. He didn't think they would ever do anything to him. But now he knows differently. He's very upset, Fitz is.'

Meanwhile, Menzies met with the full cabinet. Then he called the joint government parties together to tell them of the cabinet's decision.

CHAPTER TEN

Thumbs Down for Browne

Soon after 11am the members filed back into the chamber. When everyone was seated, Menzies rose to silence 'almost physical in its intensity', to quote the Melbourne Argus, and said he would submit two motions.

This was a man whom Browne had accused of incompetence, intriguing against his friends and unnecessary ruthlessness. He once wrote that vulnerability in anyone had the same effect on Menzies as a new-born lamb had on a dingo. Browne had referred more than once to his failure to fight in World War I and had also alluded to rumoured matters in his private life.

But on Menzies' face there was little expression as he quoted Section 49 of the Constitution on the powers of the Australian Parliament being those of the British Parliament and said: 'Therefore, the right of this house to declare and protect its privileges is clear and is founded on the Constitution itself. The Commons House of Parliament at Westminster has for centuries exercised its powers to protect itself and its members on the very sound principle that, unless the parliament itself remains an institution in which members are free to speak, it ceases to perform one of the greatest functions of parliament, which is the free expression of opinion and the free debating of ideas concerning the public good.'

Menzies elaborated on this and referred at length to the failure of Browne or Fitzpatrick to substantiate the charges made in the Bankstown Observer. He said that 'here we have charges designed to close the mouth of a member of parliament. They were made, in the one case, with complete knowledge that he had no material to substantiate them, and in the case of the other, the hired pen of malice ... it was a job of work to be done for £30 each week.'

The Prime Minister turned towards the Speaker, high and still mostly silent on his carved wooden throne. 'Sir, I do not want to labour this matter... A fine is not within our power. The historic remedy adopted repeatedly over the course of the history of the House of Commons, and indeed by one or two parliaments at least in Australia, is the remedy of committing to prison.' He moved that both men be sentenced to three months in jail.

The Speaker called upon the Leader of the Opposition to respond.

Evatt, a former president of the United Nations General Assembly, later Chief Justice of NSW, and one of the few men in the parliament with a presence and legal mind to match those of Menzies, rose. After referring to the need to address the matter in a judicial manner, and to the job of the privileges committee, he said the parliament had the express power under the Constitution to declare what its powers were − and therefore could declare that it had the power to fine.

'But,' Evatt said, 'we get the constitutional power by referring to the musty precedents of another country, and looking up what is done in another country under circumstances that are quite out of keeping in many respects with what is demanded by basic democracy and basic justice in this country... I say that it is a serious thing that, when the first case of this kind comes before us, it is proposed to impose a sentence which seems to me to be out of all proportion to the circumstances of the case.' He said the appropriate course was a substantial fine and moved an amendment to that effect.

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, seconded the amendment. But quickly he made it obvious this was not out of any affection for the two accused. Calwell, whom Browne in Things I Hear usually called Awful Arthur, had as much reason as Menzies to dislike him. Browne had accused him of egotism, incompetence and of manoeuvring against Evatt behind his back. He had contrasted his socialist principles with his fondness for expensive living and the company of the nation's richest people. Browne had also suggested marital infidelity by Calwell despite his strong Catholicism, described him as a mass of seething hatreds, and cast doubts on his sanity.

Calwell was also probably the only person present that day apart from Morgan who had personal reasons to dislike Fitzpatrick. But this was little known before his speech.

Unlike Menzies, Calwell made no attempt to hide his feelings. After referring to the Prime Minister's motion and Fitzpatrick's abject apology, he focused on Browne. 'The second man for a long period has been maligning members of this parliament in the most scurrilous fashion,' he said, his voice rising with feeling, 'accusing them even of lecherous conduct, and making the foulest charges against them, stirring up the very cesspools of his disordered imagination in order to depict members of this house, and other persons in this community, all good Australians, as completely unworthy persons.'

His voice began to drip with venom. 'I felt a sort of human sympathy for the plight of Fitzpatrick. He seemed to me to be just an illiterate lout, just a stand-over bully who made his money by corruption, in the state of New South Wales principally, and had involved in his activities quite a number of persons, some of whom were false to the high offices that they had held over the years. In the case of Browne I saw an arrogant rat, just a character assassin.'

Calwell calmed down somewhat as he went into brief background. 'I think Fitzpatrick's offence was less heinous than that of the other man. He was the instigator of the offence, but he had engaged in long controversy with the honourable member for Reid. I assisted the honourable member for Reid in 1946 when Fitzpatrick financed (Jack) Lang's campaign to enter this parliament. The brawl, if I may so call it, had been going on for a long, long time, but Fitzpatrick's actions overstepped even all the bounds of decent brawling in this instance.' Their offences Calwell again called heinous. But, he said, parliament itself was at fault for its failure to legislate for such circumstances, and he considered a fine, albeit a very heavy one, appropriate for the offence.

That speech set the tone for what was to come. The near-silence during earlier speeches vanished as the floodgates of hostility against Browne gave way.

Indicating that feelings against Browne extended beyond the main parties, Robert Joshua, leader of the Anti-Communist Labor Party, some of whose members Browne had accused of being as undemocratic as the communists they were fighting, said: 'To talk about restraint at the present time is completely out of place. This man has shown no restraint at all... The proposal of the government to sentence him to three months' imprisonment is not unreasonable. In fact I believe that it is an extremely lenient punishment in the circumstances.'

Noises of agreement followed.

Speaking against the motion, Labor member Allan Fraser said the house was dealing with the rights of the two men and also the rights of each individual citizen of the Commonwealth. 'We have a duty to protect Frank Browne,' he said, 'not Frank Browne as a particular individual, but all the Frank Brownes and all the Raymond Fitzpatricks of this community.' After that, and other of Fraser's claims, comments such as 'rubbish' were heard on both sides of the house.

A senior government member, Harold Holt, later to succeed Menzies as prime minister, quoted Shakespeare in Othello:

Who steals my purse steals trash...

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

Holt had chaired meetings of the war expenditure committee in 1944 that had considered allegations against Fitzpatrick and which had led to the long government civil action in the High Court against him after the war. He was also a man whom Browne usually called Handsome Harold and whom he implied owed his career to sycophancy towards older men in the party and their wives, particularly Menzies and his wife Pattie. He once wrote that Holt had never done a day's real work in his life and had sat out World War II, just as Menzies had sat out World War I, as an eligible bachelor while other men of his generation were being killed.

Holt did not make a much greater attempt than Calwell, one of his frequent opponents in parliament, to show balance or moderation. 'Having regard to the attitude of these men to their offence, and to the arrogant, truculent, brazen manner in which it was pursued, I should have thought that the proposed term of imprisonment would be far too short,' he said.

Les Haylen of the Labor Party, a former journalist, described himself as 'deeply concerned about the sort of morass we are putting ourselves in as parliamentarians'. He also had little reason to like Browne, who had once likened his career in parliament to the plight of three old ladies of British music-hall ditty fame locked in a lavatory – 'nobody knew he was there'. But he put that behind him. Concluding a long speech in which he ran out of time, and which was interrupted by a 90-minute lunch break, Haylen said he was sure the public 'would sleep much better at night if they knew that this matter had been passed over to people more capable of making a judicial decision. No matter how much we kid ourselves upon this Constitution, we are not judges.'

Journalists on the afternoon newspapers pushed their way out to phone copy as edition times neared. Some members left to start delayed holidays. But most people in the chamber remained in their seats as more speeches followed.

The one who addressed most directly the central issue was Gough Whitlam, the young Labor member for the seat of Werriwa, not far from Bankstown. After making clear his opinion of the seriousness of the offence, Whitlam said the law was adequate to deal with all cases of defamation and asked if the case should be dealt with by the parliament at all. 'It is a matter where we say that imprisonment is inappropriate. It would revolt the general conscience in Australia. The courts are constantly fining people and fining them substantially in these matters... It is approaching this problem in a completely unjudicial manner to consider solely how best to punish the offender. The important thing is how best to preserve this institution of parliament.'

Like most speakers, Whitlam directed his fire at Browne. 'He adopted the attitude that, because he is a journalist, or claims to be a journalist − a lot of journalists would disown him − he is above the law and immune from criticism. It cannot be too strongly stressed that members of parliament are not immune from criticism and neither are journalists. Members of parliament are not above the law and neither are journalists... He says that his is an obscure suburban newspaper. He hopes to play on the feelings that people very naturally have, on this side of the house in particular, against the big metropolitan daily papers. But an obscure paper can do a great deal of harm to the member for the district in which that obscure suburban paper circulates.'

A West Australian, Kim Beazley, elaborated on a problem identified by Whitlam and some others: 'The point is that we are acting in a judicial capacity, and I admit that I have not the qualifications for that, because I have heard of at least one of these men over the last seven years in connection with all sorts of rumours about his conduct in relation to war expenditure and so on. Many of the allegations have been made by the honourable member whom he has counter-attacked in his journal. So I have in mind all sorts of feelings about this man, his political associations in New South Wales, and all sorts of things which might be regarded as prejudices.'

Trying to overcome those prejudices, Beazley said he believed that Fitzpatrick, 'a very crude individual, simply thought he was hitting back at a man who had been consistently hitting him, and that he did not see in his action anything more important than engaging in a personal dispute. I believe that he did not recognise in any way the fact that he was infringing the right of a member to speak freely.'

As for Browne, who had mocked Beazley in Things I Hear for his involvement in the politico-religious Moral Rearmament Movement, Beazley said he had 'obviously hit and hurt many members of parliament'. But for both men, Beazley said, jail in the circumstances would be 'very drastic indeed'.

Most members, however, were in no mood to try to overcome their prejudices, or to show mercy, particularly towards Browne. During the lunch break many had drunk well, and this was showing. Surly interjections increased against those calling for restraint, and noises of agreement greeted any new attack on the two men.

William Bourke of the Anti-Communist Labor Party was applauded during a long speech for his criticisms of both men. But he caused problems at the end when he tried four times to bring in allegations of corruption. Each time the Speaker called instantly for order and said he could not do that. After the fourth occasion Cameron told him he had run out of time.

One of the last speakers, Henry Gullett, a right-wing Victorian Liberal, said it was foolish to talk about taking Browne before the courts again. 'They have been ineffective in the past and they will be ineffective in the future. It seems to me that the only thing that is likely to impress him is to carry out the suggestion of the Prime Minister and shut him up for a while.'

The chamber sounded with a chorus of agreement. By now, to use the most memorable metaphor from subsequent press commentary, the atmosphere was beginning more to resemble that of the Roman Colosseum in the days of lions and gladiators, a setting to which Browne had alluded presciently that morning, than that of a civilised house of parliament. The legal niceties had been debated by some of the finest exponents of such matters in the house. Now the person who had attacked so many of them in his scurrilous - to them - publication, and elsewhere in his extensive writing, was in the dust at their mercy. In their cages below, wild beasts were waiting.

Metaphorically, they were voting with their thumbs. And most of the thumbs were going down, not up. They wanted blood − Frank Browne's blood.

The last speaker, Charlie Morgan, rose at 3.30pm. A worried-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses and wavy hair, he told the house he was not gloating. Professing that 'I am not vindictive towards my worst enemy, and I have no desire for revenge against anybody,' he said he would not vote on the matter, and wanted only to get on with the job to which he had been voted by the electors of Reid. Morgan praised Menzies for his 'deep sense of responsibility and deep sense of justice', praised the House of Representatives, and disclaimed any responsibility for the way events had developed.

'My main regret,' Morgan said, 'is that in the present instance the real culprits will not be punished... They are the ones who have been bolstering him [Fitzpatrick] in the past, and I think that if some of those who hold high positions in the community, and one of them holds a high judicial position, had been faithful to their duty and their oaths of office, this matter would not have continued as it has over the last ten years or so. Unfortunately, this house will not touch upon that matter, and the real villains will go unscathed.'

The house prepared to decide. As Evatt's amendment to fine instead of imprison was read Morgan left the chamber so he would not have to vote. So did many other members, from both sides of the house. The house divided, ayes to one side, nos to the other. When the numbers had been counted the amendment was declared lost 52 to 16. Menzies' motion to jail Fitzpatrick was then passed 55 to 12. After confusion on whether the first vote had covered both men it was put again to cover Browne and was lost by the same margin. That to jail Browne was passed 55 to 11.

The government parties voted in a bloc to jail both but 16 members had walked out or were otherwise not present.

The Labor Party, which allowed its members a conscience vote, was more divided. Four voted twice to jail and 12, in the case of Fitzpatrick, against. Calwell voted to fine both but walked out of the chamber each time during the motions to jail. Another member, Arthur Greenup, voted against jailing Fitzpatrick but walked out during the vote to jail Browne. Kim Beazley voted against fining and jailing, crossing the floor twice to vote with the government against his leader's amendment, then recrossing it to vote against the motions. None of Labor's other 50 members remained in the chamber.

The most surprising Labor vote was by Gough Whitlam. Only an hour earlier he had said 'we say that imprisonment ... would revolt the general conscience in Australia'. Later, while leading the party back to power after long years in opposition, he was to become a beacon for the nation's civil libertarians. But after the amendments for a fine failed, Whitlam voted to jail both men.

From then on, Whitlam was to be a Browne target. Typical descriptions included 'a big, curly-headed dumb-bell' and the 'blond bonehead from Werriwa'. In an item on what he called Whitlam's stupidity, Browne was almost certainly referring to that day when he wrote: 'His inability to follow debates led to certain unfortunate incidents, such as when, on one notable occasion, he spoke against a motion and then voted for it with the Government.'

Whitlam, like more than a few Labor members, seems not to have doubted the broad thrust at least of allegations made by Morgan in parliament in 1955 against Fitzpatrick. I refuse to believe he twice voted mistakenly. That 'we' referred to a view about jailing held by many in the party that he did not share. Possible factors were that Whitlam seems to have had an even lower opinion of Browne than many members, and that as the member for Werriwa he was closer to the situation in Bankstown involving Fitzpatrick than most of them.

In 1992 I sent Whitlam a draft copy of this chapter, including this conjecture, and asked for his comments. In his reply he said: 'Caucus members sat on the Committee (of Privileges) which unanimously convicted them. Caucus accepted the Committee's verdict of guilty. Caucus decided to allow a motion in the House that they be fined rather than imprisoned but, if the motion failed, to allow its members to vote for or against imprisonment. In Caucus I argued that, if we were not prepared to imprison them, we should never have sent them for trial, sat on the Committee or accepted its verdict. Most Caucus members squibbed the vote. At least Ward (Eddie, later his rival for the party's deputy leadership), an avid reader of Browne, had an excuse; he could not vote because he had been suspended.'

That did not really explain Whitlam's vote that day. Years after that letter, while going through papers released to the National Archives, I realised there was another, and possibly important, factor. In 1944, his father, as the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, was in charge of lawyers looking into the possibility of criminal charges against Fitzpatrick, and was advising Prime Minister Curtin about the matter. His father must have known many details in allegations involving Fitzpatrick that were never made public. It is possible that at family reunions between 1944 and 1955, perhaps over a few late-night drinks, he mentioned some of those details to his son.

The three members of the Anti-Communist Labor Party still present in the chamber also voted to jail Fitzpatrick and Browne.

When all the votes had been tallied, the Speaker turned. 'Sergeant-at-Arms,' he ordered, 'bring Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick to the bar of the house.' Pettifer, with the gleaming mace that symbolised parliamentary power on his shoulder, turned and called loudly: 'Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick.'

And so Ray Fitzpatrick became the first person to be jailed by the Australian Parliament. Some newspapers later claimed he was the first for a few hundred years to be jailed for a period of such length by the national parliament of any country following British tradition. As he turned to be led away from the chamber down King's Hall his eyes were downcast and he seemed unable to comprehend what had happened. A few parliamentary officials and federal police began to escort him away while press cameras blazed.

Then it was Browne's turn. He walked briskly to the bar, clicked his heels like a Prussian officer, and stood rigidly to attention as his sentence was delivered. His heels clicked again as he swung around to follow Fitzpatrick down King's Hall. On his face was what could best be called a thoughtful scowl. More officials and federal police stepped from near curtains and followed him. As he caught up with Fitzpatrick, who had managed to smile, Browne's head was back and his stride was jaunty.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jailings Condemned

As Fitzpatrick, flanked by the police, emerged into the fading light of a wintry Canberra sunset, he managed another smile at the crowd waiting outside. Browne also smiled. With a flotilla of media cars trailing in their wake, a police car drove them to the Canberra lock-up opposite the Civic Hotel. Press cameras flashed again as they dubiously inspected the entrance to their new quarters before being ushered inside. The officer in immediate charge of their incarceration, Station Sergeant Goodall, assured journalists they would be treated like any other prisoners.

Outside, it was now almost dark. According to Browne, Fitzpatrick was taken soon afterwards in the back of another police car to a hospital, without anyone in the media knowing, and had his ribs bandaged tightly. Later a police officer went across the road to fetch dinner for them at the Civic Hotel.

Browne's wife, radio pianist Marie Ormston, after listening to the morning proceedings on the radio at their Dover Heights home, booked an afternoon flight to Canberra and packed a bag with some pyjamas and whatever else for him. Before catching a cab to the airport she telephoned Clare Fitzpatrick at her home in Bankstown. There, all blinds and curtains were drawn, and the doors were shut. Inquiring journalists had been told by relatives that Mrs Fitzpatrick was too upset to talk to anyone. When Ormston asked if she would like to accompany her on the flight she declined.

At Sydney Airport Ormston was besieged by reporters. 'Nobody can ever say after today that he hasn't got his share of courage,' she told them of her husband. Perhaps that one sentence said all that was necessary about Browne's life-long need to get into fights. At Canberra she caught a cab to the lock-up. Sergeant Goodall escorted Browne to an interview room and let him spend half an hour with her.

Even before the two men were put in their cells moves were under way to free them. Shand and Mason drove from parliament to the chamber of Justice Simpson of the ACT Supreme Court and applied for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that parliament did not have the power to jail them. Soon after 6pm the judge issued the writ, which called upon the Acting Commissioner of Police in the ACT to 'hand over the bodies' of the two men. This was a reference to the ancient legal right enshrined in habeas corpus, which developed out of the need to prevent medieval despots keeping people in dungeons without bringing them to trial. The case was set for the following Wednesday.

At the Attorney-General's Department lights burned into the night as experts again consulted their tomes.

The writ, which meant Fitzpatrick and Browne had to stay in Canberra until legal proceedings were out of the way, temporarily solved the problem of where they were to be incarcerated. This had been a question of some concern for the authorities. Canberra was still a sleepy little town, only partly built. The lock-up, part of a temporary wooden building transported years before from Melbourne, had only four cells. These were intended only for very short-term prisoners or those undergoing trial. Longer-term ACT prisoners were usually sent to nearby Goulburn Jail, under NSW control. But there had been suggestions that the two men be sent to Darwin or Alice Springs, where there were jails under Commonwealth control.

Their first night was not too uncomfortable. They had only coir mats to sleep on. But each had his own cell, which was centrally heated, and they were supplied with plenty of blankets to keep out the Canberra cold. They were allowed to smoke, a privilege not given to other prisoners. Officers came past frequently throughout the night to check how they were.

'The situation Ray Fitzpatrick and I awoke to on the morning of June 11 was not without its humorous side,' Browne wrote later. Among other things, they had 'provided Canberra's drunks with an unexpected Friday and Saturday night reprieve. There were only two cells available instead of four for those who imbibed not wisely but too well. When those were full, that was that.'

That morning, while a crowd of hundreds gathered outside the lock-up, they had more than enough to read. Some newspapers had given the day's events an enormous coverage. The Sydney Daily Telegraph devoted almost all of its first six pages to it and, very unusually, covered much of its front page with an editorial. A head said it all: '1955 or 1655?'

'Privilege gave Justice a crippling blow in Canberra yesterday,' the editorial began. 'Whatever your politics, Liberal or Labor, you can't dispute that. If you're a thinking Australian you will be burning with a slow rage this morning. Your blood will be pulsing, and underneath your immediate anger at yesterday's events in the House of Representatives will be a foreboding for the future... Did they deserve a sentence? It could be − we're not defending them. But we, old-fashioned as it might seem, believe that if men are to be punished, then it must be after a fair trial... It certainly does not mean yesterday's Roman holiday − a bench of 120 unskilled judges, all interested parties and all yowling for the blood of the two accused... Yesterday was a shameful day − not only for the Government, but for the Opposition, who merely bayed for blood in a different key.'

That editorial wrongly ignored Labor speeches against the jailings but otherwise reflected the disapproval of many others. Even some newspapers in Britain joined the condemnation. It also obviously, from letters to editors and comments on radio, reflected the views of many Australians.

I was still at boarding school but getting weekly updates from my mother. My father did not approve of the jailings. Olive, however, thought someone should have jailed Fitzpatrick long ago.

For the next few days the newspapers kept the stories coming. When the Speaker refused to allow the day's proceedings to be rebroadcast this became page 1 news. More seriously, Evatt claimed the privileges committee had withheld or suppressed vital evidence. A claim also surfaced that the Clerk of the House, Frank Green, whose views had considerable weight in such matters, and who was about to retire, had advised against the course the house had taken.

Newspapers conjectured, probably correctly, that Menzies had been able to ignore advice such as Green's because of Fitzpatrick's evidence to the privileges committee that he had hired Browne to 'get stuck into' Morgan because of what he had been saying in the house about him. This caused a renewed focus on that hearing behind closed doors, without charges being laid, in which Fitzpatrick had been allowed to convict himself in a manner that would not normally have been possible in a proper court.

Menzies, clearly embarrassed by the furore, announced that the parliament at its next session would review procedures for enforcing its privileges.

In 1967 Menzies wrote a lengthy justification in Afternoon Light of his actions preceding and during that day. He gave some background, including 'a somewhat mysterious fire which had occurred in the Bankstown district and about which great local controversy had occurred and about which some unpleasant suggestions, not against Morgan, had been made'. But mainly he devoted himself to quoting from his speeches, replying in a legalistic way to some legal criticisms. He made no mention of the obvious hostility of many members towards Browne in particular, and no mention of the criticisms of Green and many other people.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rum and Law Lords

Fitzpatrick adjusted less easily than Browne to their enforced absence from society. The Speaker had ordered that their accommodation be made as comfortable as possible. As a result they were provided with beds, and their meals continued to be supplied from the Civic Hotel across the road. 'We settled in quickly to a routine of rising at 6am as the night shift went off, having early morning coffee with the incoming shift, then shaving and showering,' Browne wrote.

'We spent a good deal of time in the police common room in the first week. I found things a great deal more congenial than Fitzpatrick. He found the sedentary life very, very hard to take.' They had many visitors and, according to Browne, a fan mail of film star proportions.

Apart from stories about the jailing, there were stories in some newspapers hinting at sensational allegations of corruption in high places that would soon make the events of that Friday unimportant in comparison. Morgan added fuel to this by privately naming Justice Taylor and several high-ranking NSW government people to journalists. Government ministers tried to quell the speculation. NSW Premier Cahill announced that the result of police investigations into allegations of corruption in Bankstown would soon be given at a Coroner's Court inquiry into the fire that destroyed the Torch building.

Many newspapers continued to attack the parliamentary proceedings that had sent the two men to jail. Cracks widened between the politicians involved. Evatt attacked Menzies for having insisted on his 'pound of flesh'. Morgan, previously a strong supporter of his party leader, sprang to the Prime Minister's defence.

On 15 June the ACT Supreme Court heard the application for an order of habeas corpus. Government counsel asked that the case be transferred to the High Court of Australia because of its importance. The next morning five judges of the court, headed by the Chief Justice, Sir Owen Dixon, met briefly and set a hearing for 22 June in Melbourne.

The hearing lasted less than three days. Counsel for the two men told the seven judges of the full court that the parliament had misinterpreted the Constitution and had overstepped its power by acting as both prosecutor and judge. They were headed by Mr P. Phillips QC, brought in because he was regarded as an expert in this area of the law. Some legal experts believed they should have argued that the parliament had the necessary power but had abused it.

At the end of their submissions the court adjourned for only 10 minutes. The Chief Justice did not even bother asking government counsel to reply to the arguments put. He then ruled that, under Section 49, the parliament had acted constitutionally in jailing the men, and refused to order their release. Solicitors for the two said outside the court they would appeal to the Privy Council in London.

Morgan meanwhile continued to make more calls for a royal commission into what he still called 'gangster rule' in Bankstown. When he made an unusual offer to address the NSW cabinet on the matter Premier Cahill rejected this in writing. Releasing news of this to the press, Morgan hinted he would give sensational evidence at the forthcoming Torch inquiry.

Then Morgan turned again to the Prime Minister. Menzies said he would consider a royal commission into Bankstown affairs if conditions were met. These were that someone make specific charges, that credible witnesses be prepared to give evidence, that persons charged be identifiable and that matters charged relate to the federal administration. Morgan said these conditions were reasonable and he believed they could be met.

By now some journalists were starting to understand the complexities of what some newspapers had begun calling the Bankstown Affair. Alan Reid in the Sydney Telegraph quoted a police investigator as saying: 'I've scarcely talked to a man without something to hide, or an axe to grind.' Reid continued: 'The political content of the Bankstown Affair is almost unbelievably high. Behind what seemingly are the most innocent of words lies often a wealth of incident.' He gave an example involving Calwell, who during his attack on Fitzpatrick and Browne in parliament had said: 'I assisted Mr Morgan in 1946 when Fitzpatrick financed Lang's campaign to enter this parliament.'

'Superficially,' wrote Reid, 'this statement is a possibly snide, but otherwise quite innocent, side remark designed purely to discredit Fitzpatrick in the eyes of anti-Lang parliamentarians who were that day sitting in judgment on him. But behind it lies a fascinating story of secret negotiations involving big names and begun years ago. And a story of feuds and vendettas that only over recent years has come to the surface of Australian public life. In the year 1946 the Federal Elections were taking place. The late Ben Chifley was Labor Prime Minister. And Chifley's lifetime enemy, John Thomas Lang, Depression-era Premier of NSW, still a legendary figure, was attempting a political comeback. He was contesting the seat of Reid against sitting member Charles Morgan. Chifley, always a realist, probably worked out that Lang, long expelled from the official Labor Party, but still possessed of a genius for probing mercilessly Labor's sore spots, represented a real threat to the Labor Government if he secured the forum of a seat in the House of Representatives.'

So, said Reid, Chifley sent Calwell to Bankstown to assist Morgan against Lang. Calwell soon identified the main danger in Bankstown and visited Ray Fitzpatrick. Complicated negotiations followed between Fitzpatrick and Lang on one side, and Calwell and Morgan on the other, with treachery on both sides. 'In as politically involved a matter as the Bankstown Affair,' Reid concluded, 'no policeman's lot can be a happy one.'

At the Canberra police station Fitzpatrick and Browne continued making the best of the situation. 'Fitzpatrick, after a couple of weeks, told me that he wasn't sleeping well at all,' Browne wrote in his feature series in the Sydney Telegraph 13 years later, 'and would there be any chance of getting a drink, as he always liked a nightcap. By ways and means that I need not specify, I discovered that there was. I asked him what he would like. "A bottle of Old Kedge," he said.'

The Speaker 'had decreed that we should spend our days after breakfast and our nights until 10pm in the empty police barracks. This was a relic of some past grandiose plan to add a large number of unmarried policemen to the ACT force. It was a long, low fibro building containing some 30 single, well-furnished rooms, together with all amenities, including a kitchen, recreation room and even a billiard room. It was not attached to the station, but was reached from a back entrance, thence across an open space which was public domain. The Speaker also made another order concerning exercise which could have provided headlines under the circumstances. Under escort, we walked around the outskirts of Canberra for about three hours or even more every night.' After returning, they had a nightcap each evening in the barracks.

'On one evening,' Browne continued, 'the rum, which usually had no more effect on Fitzpatrick than water, made him boisterous. I was well alive to the dangers of any hint at all of our having access to drink. The consequences would have been frightening for the Police Commissioner, although he had no knowledge whatever of what was happening. I tried to remonstrate with my rumbustious fellow prisoner, but he was beyond remonstration. Then I issued him with a solemn warning that I would have to take other steps. This too was ignored. I measured him carefully and threw a left hook of commendable accuracy and force in view of the fact that the ring was long behind me. He dropped and lay snoring.

'The awful plight I was in then dawned on me. I had to get him back to the cell from the police barracks across that open ground! Finally, with the aid of the thoroughly alarmed escort, I got him on to the kitchen table. I bent down level with the table and eventually, with much pushing and shoving, he was levered across my shoulders. I managed to get him back. It was one of the most fearful and painful journeys of my life. After that, there was no more Old Kedge.'

Fitzpatrick was considerably larger than Browne. A 'thoroughly alarmed' male police officer would presumably have helped carry the former. Browne did often at least tend to exaggerate anything he did. The best guess if all this is accurate is that their police escort was a slightly built woman station assistant who needed her hands free to open doors or gates. This would be consistent with a known police attitude by then that they had better uses for their manpower than the squabbles of politicians. And Old Kedge, it is worth adding, was 75 per cent alcohol by volume.

Fitzpatrick and Browne remained at the police cells until their application to appeal to the Privy Council was heard in London on 14 July. The case was put by Sir Hartley Shawcross, an attorney-general in the early post-war Attlee government, and chief British prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trial. The council's chamber at Downing Street, the heart of British imperial power, was crowded as he began. Facing him from behind a half-moon-shaped desk were five Lords of Appeal.

Shawcross said there were serious complaints that the proceedings in the parliament's privileges committee were contrary to the principles of natural justice but he had advised his clients that these were matters that could not properly be canvassed before the Privy Council. He said the case had aroused immense public interest in Australia and his main point was whether committal by the House of Representatives for punishment involved exercise of judicial powers not vested in the house under the Australian Constitution. (The case also aroused much interest in Britain, at least in legal and parliamentary circles, according to a letter in the National Archives concerning it from an official there to one in Australia. It even rated an editorial in The Times.)

The case Shawcross put was similar to that put to the High Court in Australia. As in Australia, the judges were not asked to decide if the powers of the federal parliament had been abused.

The law lords conferred in private for five minutes. When they returned, their spokesman, Viscount Simonds, said he would not call upon the Australian Attorney-General, Senator John Spicer, to reply. He said the case satisfied the condition that it was a matter of great public importance but that he and his colleagues considered the judgment of the High Court unimpeachable. They considered that under Section 49 of the Constitution the powers of the Australian Parliament were the same as those of the British Parliament and that a full appeal therefore was not warranted.

After that the two men were moved to Goulburn Jail, where they spent the last seven weeks of their imprisonment. Although they were classified as unconvicted prisoners they were put in B Wing with the hardened criminals, many serving life sentences. At 4.45pm, along with everyone else, they were locked into their cells for the night.

'I won't forget that first night in Goulburn,' Browne wrote. 'It was bitterly cold in the cell, which seemed to be full of draughts from all directions... Gradually my feet turned into what appeared to be blocks of ice, and I was in bed well before lights out. But I didn't sleep much. I couldn't get warm, and the hard bed, however healthy it might be, conspired with the cold to keep me awake.'

At 6.45am their cells were opened and they took their slop buckets downstairs. Then they had their first jail breakfast of hominy − coarse-ground dried corn that was standard morning prison fare. 'Everything you've heard about hominy is true and probably an understatement,' Browne wrote. 'Cooked without salt and eaten without milk, it has to be eaten to be believed. Nearly as thin as soup, tart tasting, with the black heads of weevils dotted through it, its sole virtue is that it is hot.'

Although they had the right to bring food in from outside they had elected to eat the prison food, even though they had to pay for it. That morning they changed their minds and decided to have their meals brought from a local hotel, as had happened at the Canberra lock-up.

The remainder of their period in prison was not too unpleasant. They had the right to wear their own clothes and receive visitors twice a week, and did not have to work. They had individual cells and considerable privileges, but were subject to the normal constraints of prison life. According to Browne, he had five blankets on his bed and the right to a typewriter. He also had access to the prison library, of which he was full of praise.

The Comptroller-General of Prisons, replying at the time to complaints in the press about their easy treatment, said there were no irregularities.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Denials, Surprises and Vapour

Meanwhile, on Monday 11 July, the Parramatta Coroner's Court had begun inquiring, in a blaze of publicity despite a newspaper strike that slashed most news coverage in Sydney, into the cause of the Torch fire. Sydney's four metropolitan dailies had amalgamated into one strike paper, with all four mastheads at the top, and the hearing led page 1 of this. Every seat in the court was occupied. Reporters, primed by Morgan to expect sensational revelations of high-level corruption, waited expectantly.

The first witnesses were Arthur Powell, the MLA for Bankstown, and Morgan. Just before, they had been called in separately for talks with NSW Attorney-General Billy Sheahan. Whatever was said at these meetings those present never publicly revealed. But the result soon became obvious. An added factor was that questions and evidence were limited by the narrow terms of the inquiry.

Alfred Goran, a QC assisting the coroner, Edmund Smythe, began by drawing Powell's attention to an article in the Daily Telegraph headed 'Bankstown's Parliamentary Representative Calls for Inquiry'. To the incredulity of some people present, Powell denied he had ever made such a statement. He said all he had done was telephone Phil Engisch after the fire and tell him that if he had any trouble in relation to publication he would be pleased to assist him.

Goran: 'Did you say, "I know who blew up the Torch"?'

Powell: 'No.'

Goran: 'Have you in fact any information of your own knowledge about who caused the fire?'

Powell: 'No.'

Jack Shand, representing Ray Fitzpatrick and his younger brother Jack, who had been named in many allegations involving Bankstown Council: 'So the statements attributed to you are a complete fabrication, without any foundation?'

Powell agreed with this and denied that he and Morgan were seeking an inquiry into a group at Bankstown following the fire. The evidence continued in similar vein, with Powell reportedly denying statements attributed to him in newspapers.

Morgan was little more forthcoming now that he was standing under oath and without privilege in an open court. Like Powell, he denied statements attributed to him in newspapers around the nation, and which he had never previously denied. Journalists told by Morgan to expect headline details involving Stan Taylor were disappointed when Morgan mentioned him.

Goran asked: 'Did you say you had an informant who told you the police were going to "fit" Phil Engisch as originator of the Torch fire?'

Morgan: 'Yes, I said Mr Justice Taylor was alleged to have said that. I had an informant who told me that. He also said I could not name him without his authority.'

Goran: 'Could you name your informant?'

Morgan named Joe Riordan, secretary of the Federated Clerks Union, but added that Riordan told him another trade union official had given him this information. Morgan did not name the other official. He also began modifying or skating around his evidence that day. In answer to a question from Shand, after references to a 'gang', he said: 'I attributed the fire to the gang and I classify Ray Fitzpatrick as the leader of the gangster regime.'

When Shand said later that Morgan had made a statement that Ray Fitzpatrick was guilty of starting the fire, Morgan said, 'No, I never suggested his name'. Then, after another Shand question, he said 'he might have suggested that he had a hand in it'.

Shand: 'You also made a statement that Mr Fitzpatrick was the leader of the gang.'

Morgan: 'Not in connection with the fire, only as the ringleader of the gang in Bankstown.'

Despite even sometimes having referred in the federal parliament to Fitzpatrick as 'Mr Big', Morgan also told Shand he had never used those words in relation to him.

Senior Detective-Constable Norm Merchant of the CIB Scientific Bureau, who followed, said he had found no evidence of an explosion. A gas pipe at the side of the building was unbroken, the gas was turned off and there was no sign of a leak. There was also no debris on the roof of the premises alongside, as he would have expected after an explosion. He had found no signs that anyone had broken into the building.

However, witnesses on that and later days testified that there was an explosion. Some said they heard it even miles from the scene.

Paul Keating's friend Michael Gavan, aged 12, was returning home from his newspaper delivery round when he heard it. His head barely rising above the top of the witness box, Gavan said he and his companion on the round had just turned a corner and had stopped to talk to a woman. 'It was just like a bomb.' When he had passed the Torch office minutes before that he smelled what seemed like burning rubber and saw what he thought was fog. His companion, Terry Price, said to him 'it's smoke'. 'But I still thought it was fog,' Gavan said. 'It was all over Fetherstone Street.' He had remained near the fire while police and firemen did what they could.

On Tuesday, Price, 11, said he saw smoke or fog near the building and soon afterwards heard an explosion 'like a big bang'. When he turned back into the street with Gavan he saw flames coming from the middle of the building. He rode his bicycle to Phil Engisch's home in nearby Sir Joseph Banks Street, where he 'yelled out that the Torch office was on fire'. 'Mr Engisch came out with his coat on, hopped into his car, and I went to my home nearby,' he said.

The next witness was Detective-Sergeant Ray Kelly of the Arson Squad. Kelly at the time was Sydney's most famous detective. For decades he had been known for his toughness and ability to put criminals out of action, sometimes with gunfire or without too many other legal niceties. On the morning after the fire he had headed a team of twenty detectives and police combing through the charred remains of the Torch building. But he had soon been taken off the case. The packed courtroom was all ears during his evidence.

Kelly said, as he had from the start, that he believed the fire had been caused by a petrol vapour explosion. Among the reasons he gave were the absence of any other explanation and the fact that the fire and explosion had occurred simultaneously. He said this was consistent with 'deepish grey' smoke seen at the time. When Shand asked him about the possibility of a bomb, Kelly said: 'It was not a bomb. There is no such thing as a petrol vapour bomb.' He thought, however, that the explosion was deliberate. No timing device remains had been found, he said, but there were ways the vapour could have been ignited using phosphorus and a lead with a half-hour delay that would have enabled a person to get safely away.

Goran asked about a failure to question the Fitzpatricks immediately after the fire. Kelly said he had asked a Detective-Sergeant Forward at Bankstown station if he knew where they could be found. 'Detective-Sergeant Forward said he did. I then said we ought to bring them in that afternoon for questioning.' Kelly had a talk with Forward about the relationship between Engisch and the Fitzpatricks in which he learned that bad blood existed between them.

Shand: 'Once you learnt of the hostility between the parties you thought it better to leave the case and hand it over to some other party?'

Kelly: 'Yes.'

Kelly was questioned at length about this. Did you know at the time there would be nationwide interest in the case, asked Mr R. Watson, for Morgan and Phil Engisch.

'I don't know about nationwide,' Kelly replied. 'I knew it would be a political dogfight.'

Senior Constable George Herd of Bankstown station said a 'loud and violent explosion' rocked a truck in which he was sitting 60 yards from the Torch office. He saw smoke, sparks and debris thrown into the air. 'I ran to the Torch office and could see a fire was burning in the printing section. It was burning fiercely and spreading.' The flames appeared to be running along the floor down a passageway. Windows were intact and there was no sign of forced entrance. Seeing a motor cycle alongside the building, he wheeled that to safety.

After Phil Engisch arrived the constable heard him ask the fire officer to concentrate on the section where the new rotary press was located. By then, however, there was nothing else to concentrate on. Engisch came over and said to him: 'It is just what I expected. They promised to do this to me. I know who they are.' When Herd asked who he meant he replied: 'The boys. I know who they are.'

Shand: 'When Mr Engisch mentioned the boys, did you know who they were?'

Herd: 'No. I had only recently been transferred to Bankstown and knew nothing of their local politics.'

On Wednesday an explosives expert, Stanley Parsons of the Department of Mines, said he inspected the building soon after the fire and believed it was caused by the ignition of an explosive mixture of inflammable vapour and air. But he could not say how it was ignited. The explosion was of low intensity because glass windows in the building had not been blown out. Unless a person had knowledge of explosives it would be 'extremely hazardous' and 'more or less a fluke' to arrange for a fire to go off at a certain time when using petrol vapour. It would need a lot of thought to do it, he said.

For the Torch fire, Parsons believed, one or two gallons of Shellite, petrol or similar liquid would have been needed for the effect achieved. Asked about possible methods, he said someone could have spread Shellite (a highly refined and volatile oil-derived liquid sold mainly for cleaning stoves), some of which had been found in the building. They could have arranged a lighted cigarette in a match box in such a way that it burnt down slowly until it reached the level of the match heads and ignited them, providing enough heat to ignite a room full of vapour. This would probably have taken about 30 minutes. He also suggested sparks from the leads of a car battery as a possibility.

When Phil Engisch entered the witness box there was standing room only in the court. Members of the public and court staff overflowed into passageways outside, waiting to hear about his evidence.

Engisch said that during the day he had gone to Randwick races with a friend, Miss Nurthen. Expanding on statements to the police, he said that after leaving Nurthen he had entered the Torch office at 6.10 or a little later and collected three pieces of contributed copy dropped through the front door letter box. He had placed tennis notes on a Linotype machine near the rear of the premises, church notes on his typewriter, and had gone home and begun having a meal. He would not have been in the building more than five minutes, he said.

Not long after he reached home he heard a loud explosion 'which sounded like gunfire from Holsworthy military camp'. At about 7.05 a boy had arrived and told him about the fire, whereupon he had jumped in his car and hurried to the premises. There he had joined firemen fighting the blaze and had told them to direct their hoses at the portion of the building where the new press was located.

During a 'machinegun-like' (to quote the Melbourne Age) cross-examination by Shand, which gave him no time to stop and think, Engisch admitted he had had experience with explosives as a warrant officer in an ammunition unit during World War II. But he said most of his duties with the unit had been desk work. After referring to a suspicion that he might have started the fire, Shand said: 'Could you not possibly tell the police of your experience with explosives?'

Engisch: 'There are plenty of police officers in Bankstown who would know of my experience with explosives.'

Shand asked Engisch if he knew he might be suspected of starting the fire.

'Yes, I did,' he replied. 'I knew someone might...' He paused.

Shand: 'You were going to say that an effort might be made to throw suspicion on you. Who by?'

Engisch: 'By your client.'

Shand: 'You mean Mr Jack Fitzpatrick. You quickly hasten to get in with the accusation that the fire was caused by Mr Jack Fitzpatrick when you knew yourself that you had set fire to the building.'

Up to then, for a man of his well-known short temper, Phil Engisch had withstood the cross-examination by Shand, one of Australia's best courtroom performers, surprisingly well. But as Shand flung this at him he bristled. Again to quote the Melbourne Age, 'Engisch turned pallid beneath his sun tan, gasped momentarily for breath, then hotly denied that he had anything to do with the fire'.

Questioned at length by Goran about his smoking habits, Engisch denied he was a chain smoker but admitted he did tend to smoke when under pressure. He said he did not have a smoke between a stop during a drive from the races along Heathcote Road to the Torch office and when he returned home. Pressed on this point, he said he remembered his last smoke because Miss Nurthen, after they stopped on Heathcote Road, had rolled him a cigarette in the car.

When Phil Engisch returned to the witness box on Thursday morning he was questioned at length about his relationship with the Fitzpatricks, which he said had been deteriorating since 1946. He agreed that some of the evidence he had given the previous day, particularly about whether Ray Fitzpatrick might have been involved in the fire, was wrong. Asked if he thought the sacked mayor Blanche Barkl was a member of a gang that controlled affairs in Bankstown, he said he did.

Asked about insurance on the property and stock of the Torch, which had been for a total of £21,000, but of which the company had only received £14,136 after the fire, Engisch estimated the replacement costs at £25,000. He said the company had been making good profits (£7,399 in 1954) but had no insurance against loss of profits.

The company's accountant, Robert Poulter, later confirmed his evidence about its finances and said the book value of assets was far below replacement value because of depreciation in the balance sheets for taxation purposes.

Just before the court was scheduled to adjourn for the night a police car pulled up at the side. According to the Melbourne Argus, detectives and a policewoman whisked in through a back entrance a smartly dressed Yvonne Nurthen. The Argus, the only newspaper I could find to give her age, described her as a 'pretty (which she was, in a slightly chubby way) 23-year-old'.

Nurthen said she had begun work at the Torch as an office assistant when she was 15 and had left in 1952. After confirming Engisch's account of the events of Easter Monday afternoon she said she was in the bath when he rang at about 7.30pm and told her mother about the fire. At about 11pm he had gone to her home and told her the building was a dead loss. Questioned about Engisch's smoking habits, Nurthen said he did not smoke a great deal. But she had rolled him one after they left a parking spot during the drive back to Bankstown along Heathcote Road. To test her veracity, Shand handed her a packet of tobacco and some cigarette papers. 'I prefer ready rubbed,' she commented, before demonstrating her skill in that activity.

Nurthen's existence in the case came as a surprise to many people in Bankstown who knew Phil Engisch and his wife. According to their only son John many years later, she also came as a surprise to the rest of his family. But it became obvious that John Engisch was partly trying to protect his mother, then still alive, from further raising of what had been for her a hurtful matter.

When I later mentioned this claim of the son to the older of Phil Engisch's two sisters then still alive, Lilian Swane, she laughed in disbelief. 'He said that!' The family had known of the affair for years, Swane said. As far as she was concerned, her brother's problems were summed up in two words: Yvonne Nurthen.

Swane married a member of a Bankstown pioneer family and moved with him to a mountain-top farm overlooking the town of Berry on the NSW south coast. As she drove me up to the farm in 1991, with the Pacific glinting behind and sunlight filtering through rainforest beside the road, her lingering bitterness about the affair was obvious.

Until it began, she said, she had been close to her brother. She blamed his male arrogance, and also to some extent the attitude of their father, in whose eyes his only son could not − at least at the time − do any wrong. Her brother, she claimed, manipulated their father by threatening to resign and go to work for the Sydney Morning Herald whenever anything was said about the matter. He had long been a Herald contributor.

Swane said Phil's wife Jean had been desperate, mainly for her children's sake, to save her marriage, and wanted her husband back. Swane drove her sister-in-law to the court nearly every day of the hearing, she said, and during the evidence of Nurthen the strain for Jean Engisch became so great she fainted near the back of the court. Swane said she had to prop up Jean Engisch on the court bench with her shoulder until she recovered.

During this period Jean Engisch was still living with her husband up the street from us. Not long after this she got her husband back in a way she wanted. As far as is known, he never strayed again from marital fidelity, and they lived together in reasonable harmony until his death.

Nurthen's evidence helped relieve tension after an afternoon marked by clashes between counsel over the admissibility of evidence involving Justice Taylor and other people, which the coroner ruled against. She also enabled people inside the court and outside, including those back in media offices, to start treating the case more lightly. 'Girl Proves To Q.C. She Can Roll A Cigarette' said the head on Friday morning in the four-masthead strike newspaper. 'GIRL SNEAKED TO FIRE PROBE' dominated the centre of the Argus front page. In some newspapers, however, Nurthen's evidence was overshadowed by late news from London that the Privy Council had refused to hear a full appeal against the jailing of Browne and Fitzpatrick.

That Friday Barkl entered the witness box and denied she was a member of any gang. There was laughter after she said: 'I don't think any gang would have me.' Elaborating on this, she said she was too outspoken to be in any gang. She was neither a friend nor an enemy of either Jack or Ray Fitzpatrick and had not represented any party on Bankstown Council. Asked about her relationship with Phil Engisch, she said he was 'not partial to me'. She disagreed with evidence Engisch had earlier given the court about words exchanged between them at the height of the fire and had told him he could not 'expect to go on caning people like you do and get away with it'.

Another witness before the court adjourned until Monday was Cecil Pyers, the former alderman of the sacked council who was standing with Barkl and Ray Fitzpatrick when Barkl and Engisch exchanged words at the fire. Pyers, like Barkl, denied he was laughing when Engisch approached them. Asked by Goran if Engisch appeared annoyed at the time, Pyers said: 'No, but he was excited and I think he had every reason to be.'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

More Court Surprises

On 18 July the Sydney newspaper strike was over and the press gallery was more crowded. But the story had been relegated to inside pages. In the Sydney Morning Herald, the vehicle for the strike editions, although it received a bigger coverage now that more space was available, it was back to page 6.

Les Engisch, founder of the Torch, told the court that on the night of the fire he was outside Sydney at The Entrance, a lakeside retirement area not far north of Sydney where he owned a home, but returned when told the news by a fishing inspector. (According to his daughter Lilian, his first action after reaching Bankstown was to distribute a catch of mud crabs to firemen who had been fighting the blaze.) Engisch said no-one had threatened him that they would burn down the premises. On the day after the fire Ray Fitzpatrick had offered to print the Torch at the Observer plant. At the time he was very upset and did not accept or reject the offer.

Goran: 'Was his manner friendly?'

Engisch: 'Well, I didn't think so, not when he was accompanied by a solicitor.'

When the laughter stopped, Goran asked: 'Did he sound friendly?'

'He always does,' Engisch said. Asked about inflammable materials on the premises, he said that from time to time the printing department bought kerosene, Shellite and engine oil. The Shellite was used for cleaning linotype matrices. After the fire he showed police a four-gallon Shellite tin lying on its side in the printing section with the screw cap missing and at least two gallons of Shellite still in the tin. The cap could not be found. He also showed them a tin of methylated spirit used for cleaning. The tin was full and still in its normal position but the cap had melted off.

Now 67, Les Engisch soon became tetchy. When cross-examined by Shand he began to clash with him. He also appeared to become confused. At some points the coroner warned him to give evidence properly. Shand asked him about a man named Allan Panton. 'You took out a revolver and pointed it at him,' he said.

Engisch: 'Did I?'

Coroner: 'Don't ask a question.'

Engisch: 'Did I? I don't know.' He then said, in answer to Shand, that he knew very well a Bankstown garage owner named Renny Maxwell Campbell.(Max Campbell was one of my childhood neighbours – a garage behind his Rickard Road home, used by taxis, was only a few metres from our dining room window. Les Engisch was a motoring enthusiast all his life and for many years was a close friend of Campbell. Sometimes during the 1920s and 1930s they made pioneering trips together into the outback. They once even, when this was a real feat, went right around Australia. Despite the following question and answer, neither Campbell nor Panton were called to testify.)

Shand: 'Will you deny that at his garage in front of him you took out a revolver and levelled it at Panton?' (That was Campbell's main garage a few blocks away in Chapel Road.)

Engisch: 'Ridiculous, ridiculous.'

Later, Engisch said he had not discussed with his son the movements of Phil on the night of the fire. When Shand suggested the reason he did not was that he knew his son had burnt down the building himself, Engisch dismissed that also as ridiculous.

The Herald's head the next morning read 'Story of Gun Threat Denied'. But probably the most important evidence that Monday, ignored by most newspapers, was given by Walter Purss, a printing industry assessor. Purss said he valued the plant at the time of the fire at £15,912 but said this was far below the cost of replacing the fire-damaged equipment with new equipment.

Les's brother Dudley also gave evidence on Monday. On the day of the fire, he said, he had called at the Torch premises at 1pm and had set an electric time clock on the Linotype machines so they would automatically switch on at 6am the next day. That would heat their pots of type metal ready for when the operators arrived later. He was only in the building five minutes and when he left everything appeared normal. Dudley caused excitement after Shand asked him what type of lock was on the door at the Torch and he pulled out his key-ring. 'It's a Yale lock,' he said, holding up the keys. Then he said: 'Oh, I can't show you my key. It got burned in the fire.'

Shand (apparently almost unable to believe this apparent stroke of cross-examination good fortune): 'How did your key to the door get burned in the fire?'

Engisch: 'It didn't get burned.'

Shand: 'You just swore that it got burned in the fire.'

Engisch: 'I didn't swear it. I just made a little error.'

When Shand pushed this point Dudley exploded. 'Don't try to put on me that I set fire to the building.' The Sydney Telegraph thought his cross-examination so important, more important even than the cross-examination of Les Engisch, that it devoted much of a page to it.

On Tuesday the hearing was briefly enlivened again by Dudley Engisch. He returned to the witness box and waved a ring with keys attached to show he had found his missing keys. The coroner thanked him and stood him down.

Apart from Phil and Dudley, one other person was on the Torch premises on the day of the fire. George Begg, the company's works manager, was there from 9am to 11.30am engaged in costing work. When he left he had noticed nothing unusual. He had first become aware of the fire that evening when his wife had noticed a glare through the windows of their home. Asked by Goran if he had heard the explosion, Begg said he appeared to be the only man in Bankstown who hadn't.

On Tuesday the coroner said he did not know if Ray Fitzpatrick, who had just been moved to Goulburn Jail from the lock-up in Canberra, 'could throw any appreciable light' on the proceedings. 'Should I deem it advisable to call him,' he said, 'I would like to know whether he would be available for call.'

Shand said Fitzpatrick was under the federal parliament Speaker's warrant. 'I presume it would need the consent of the Speaker to bring him here.' He said that naturally Fitzpatrick would like to appear in the witness box to say 'I didn't do it' but he had nothing to answer.

Goran said no evidence against Ray Fitzpatrick had been given in connection with the fire. 'I do not think he should be brought here merely to provide some people with a Roman holiday.' He also said he did not at that stage propose to call newspaper reporters, some of whom had volunteered to give evidence about statements made to them, or other possible witnesses, as the inquiry could get out of bounds. He then called Jack Fitzpatrick.

Jack said he spent the Easter holiday weekend with his family at Dee Why, a northern Sydney beach suburb, and returned to Bankstown on Monday afternoon. He visited a sports and electrical goods store he owned in Chapel Road, found a refrigerator in which he kept prawn bait was not working, and went home to get a replacement part. He returned to the store at about 6.30 and first heard of the fire at the Torch between 7.05 and 7.10.

Under cross-examination, during which he said he had a close relationship with his brother Ray, he denied he telephoned Phil Engisch at his home and threatened to burn or blow up the Torch. Jack Fitzpatrick also denied other claims by Engisch of threats and was questioned about incidents such as one during a cricket match at Wolli Oval, near Mascot airport. During the incident he allegedly threw Engisch against a wall, told him to 'keep my name out of your dirty rag' and tried to get him to fight. Asked if he liked to settle disputes with his fists, he said: 'Isn't that the usual way?'

The cross-examination continued on Wednesday. Throughout it, Jack Fitzpatrick maintained he had nothing to do with the fire and was telling the truth. He agreed however he had admitted to the Industrial Commission that reports he had made to Bankstown Council about work he had done for its electricity department contained untruths.

The explosives expert Stanley Parsons was recalled and asked by some barristers to elaborate on his previous evidence.

The last witness, Detective-Sergeant F.A. Bradstreet, who had taken control of inquiries after Detective-Sergeant Kelly left the case, said the police had conducted two simultaneous inquiries in the Bankstown area, one into the fire and the other into wider matters. Over three months they had interviewed about 250 people and had taken statements from about 170. Bradstreet said Phil Engisch, apart from saying he suspected Jack Fitzpatrick of involvement in the fire, had given him the names of 15 people friendly to the Fitzpatricks who might have been able to help their inquiries. These had included people well known in business, political and sporting circles.

Cross-examined by Watson, for Phil Engisch, Bradstreet said he did not agree with Ray Kelly's theory that a deliberately lit petrol vapour explosion had caused the fire. In his view it might have been caused accidentally by an electrical fault. He also considered a low-intensity petrol vapour explosion a possibility. Asked why he had not interviewed Ray or Jack Fitzpatrick until 23 days after the fire, he agreed this had given them a chance to prepare an alibi. Bradstreet claimed he had never said Phil Engisch was the No.1 suspect but had considered the fact that Engisch was the last known person on the premises before the fire. He also said it would have been possible for someone to have approached the Torch office at the time from a vacant lot at the back of the building without being seen.

The court was adjourned until 25 July to enable legal counsel to prepare their final submissions.

The submissions were predictable, in light of the evidence and their clients' interests, and only two are worth mentioning here. One was by Goran, the QC assisting the coroner. After referring to suggestions of a gangster regime in Bankstown, which he said 'bordered on the fantastic', Goran said that, assuming the fire had been deliberately caused, the evidence involved only two people, Jack Fitzpatrick and Phil Engisch. So far as Fitzpatrick was concerned, there was evidence of motive and threats he was alleged to have made. But there was no evidence that there was an opportunity to set the fire himself. As for Engisch, there was evidence of possible motive, opportunity and means to set the fire. There was no evidence, however, that he had set it.

The other interesting submission was by Mr H.R. Hunt, who appeared for the insurance companies involved. Hunt said his clients would welcome a finding that nobody was responsible for the fire. He said there was no evidence that either of the Fitzpatricks had anything to do with the fire. And his clients agreed with the Engisch family that they had lost substantially as a result of it.

The coroner reserved his finding while he considered a transcript of the evidence.

On 8 August, when everyone had assembled again, the Parramatta Coroner's Court was packed and silent. Mr Smythe said he 'did not think all witnesses appreciated the sanctity of the oath' and he was not satisfied he had heard the truth. Jack and Ray Fitzpatrick he cleared completely, saying there was no evidence that either was directly or indirectly involved.

Phil Engisch came out of the summary with his reputation for truthfulness less intact. On his evidence about bombing threats the coroner said: 'I feel I must reject his evidence of these alleged threats... This witness cannot be regarded as a trustworthy witness unless his evidence is amply corroborated.' Also on Phil Engisch, he said: 'The fact that the company in which he was a minor shareholder and director might gain some ultimate benefit from the fire, even though suffering some immediate loss, does not justify me in arriving at any definite conclusion that he would carry out the destruction of his company's premises.'

Smythe said he could find no evidence that someone had broken into and entered the premises to destroy them. The evidence had failed to establish the initial cause of the fire and whether a fire had been burning before the explosion. Evidence about inflammable materials on the premises suggested they were more or less intact after the fire. And despite expert suggestions about a vapour explosion he could reach no definite decision on this. 'But in my mind,' he concluded, 'there is a very strong suspicion that the fire was the result of some deliberate action on the part of some person or persons unknown.'

After commending the police for the way they had conducted their inquiries he returned an open finding.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Clouds over Labor

The Bankstown Affair was not over yet. On the morning of 9 August, after the coroner's finding, the Melbourne Age said there was still cause for disquiet. It called for publication of a report produced in 1944 by the war expenditure committee and also full transcripts of the evidence at the 1955 hearings of the privileges committee. Other journals in the following weeks repeated these calls. The national news magazine The Bulletin claimed 'the Bankstown scandal hangs like an atomic cloud over the whole of the Labor Party, and the words "war expenditure committee report", when uttered in the presence of the heads of the party, produce a visible shudder'.

The split in the Labor Party over the jailing of Fitzpatrick and Browne widened. When its caucus next met, the leader, Dr Evatt, sought to have the party move for their release. Deputy leader Calwell bitterly opposed the move, which failed.

Anti-Communist Labor Party members had been trying for months at an official level to link the official party they had left in March with Taylor and Fitzpatrick. The coroner at the Torch fire inquiry had ruled against allowing evidence concerning Taylor. And attempts to raise this during debates in parliament had been frustrated by points of order. During question time on 31 August John Mullens of the breakaway party was able to raise those two men and their friendship. He was able to do it without naming either Fitzpatrick or Taylor. And he brought in at the same time the Petrov defection, the event that had led to the splitting of the Labor Party.

Mullens began by asking: 'Is the Postmaster-General aware that there are many irregularities and ambiguities in the telephone directory, especially in New South Wales? Of course, this is understandable in view of undercover activities, such as starting price betting and other minor forms of skulduggery.' He then asked the ministerial Postmaster-General, Hubert Anthony, to inquire into a telephone number at the popular southern Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla. 'Doubtless,' Mullens continued, 'inquiries will lead him to the proposition that this is the telephone number of a judge of the Industrial Commission of New South Wales whose name has been mentioned freely both with regard to the Bankstown Affair and the Petrov matter.'

Anthony said he was unaware of the matters raised but would look into them.

The next morning the Daily Mirror sent a reporter to the address of the number given. It was an apartment, owned officially by Fitzpatrick's mother, which looked over the ocean at Cronulla. The tenant said that to her knowledge Justice Taylor had never lived there permanently, or in a holiday apartment alongside also in the name of Fitzpatrick's mother. She did not know how the phone had come to be listed in his name. 'It doesn't make any difference to me,' she said. 'The only people who ring me are my family and friends, so there is no need for my name to be in the phone book. I have had less than a dozen calls for the judge and I always tell them his number at Lindfield, which is listed in the book.'

On 6 September, four days before the scheduled release of Fitzpatrick and Browne, Deputy Speaker Charles Adermann said at the end of question time that he had received from William Bourke of the Anti-Communist Labor Party 'an intimation that he desires to submit a definite matter of urgent public importance to the house for discussion, namely: "The need for making public without further delay the reports of the Joint Parliamentary War Expenditure Committee and other material in the Government's possession disclosing fraudulent practices in connection with Commonwealth defence undertakings during the war years." Is the proposal supported?'

After other lower house members of the breakaway party had risen to indicate their support, Bourke, a member of the privileges committee that had recommended action against Fitzpatrick and Browne, began a speech in which he rambled on about two types of graft and corruption before saying: 'A third type of corruption which we can experience, and which could gravely damage our democratic way of life, concerns people who are of sufficient importance to be able to break the law with impunity and not have to pay the penalties of their acts... Those matters which I wish to bring before the house suggest this type of privileged treatment, which permits individuals who are powerful enough and who know the right people to escape the consequences of their wrongful acts, has been going on in this community, and that it did go on within the sphere of the Commonwealth administration during the war years.'

Bourke turned to the 1944 reports. 'I do not know the whole story regarding those reports because the entire matter has been shrouded in mystery.' He said the war expenditure committee's findings 'were, as I understand them, that there had been fraud on a considerable scale and that action should be taken in respect of that fraud'. After the allegations, legal proceedings against Fitzpatrick in the High Court had dragged on 'for years and years'. Bourke suggested this was so questions asked in parliament or elsewhere 'could be frustrated' because the matter was still before the court. Apart from the first committee report, he understood there was another, following an investigation, which was made direct to the war cabinet.

The leader of the opposition, Bourke said, was attorney-general at the time and responsible for prosecutions, but 'it seems there must have been a cabinet decision which prevented the law following its normal course'.

Evatt angrily called Bourke's formal proposal 'a sham' and said: 'If he suggests that Fitzpatrick got any favouritism or protection from the Curtin government or the Chifley government he is telling a deliberate lie. As a matter of fact, as far as Fitzpatrick is concerned, I never saw the man or heard of him except in a remote way. That case was considered exclusively on its merits... I think the procedure was that the war expenditure committee reported to the war cabinet and the prime minister. I think the reports were confidential, but that can be checked with the Prime Minister. I do not think I ever saw the war expenditure committee's report, but it did come to me and my department for consideration.'

Proceedings, Evatt said, were brought against Fitzpatrick in the High Court. 'As the honourable member said, they were prolonged. Proceedings of that kind often are. Some of the alleged parties to the agreement reckoned there was not sufficient evidence against them, and I believe the matter was finalised under the auspices of the present government. But that is only information that has come to me by hearsay.'

During a long speech interrupted by interjections, he said after another interjection: 'Let them look through the documents. Do I care whether they are produced? Of course I do not. Let the Prime Minister say whether they should be produced, remembering always that, if there is material in the government's possession merely alleging fraudulent practices during wartime, dozens, and even hundreds, of people may be defamed and slandered under cover of privilege without any right or justice.'

Later, Evatt said: 'The width of the general question is enormous. We had hundreds, indeed thousands, of cases during the war in which fraud was alleged. As to those in which fraud was proved, it is another matter. Think of the enormous range of black-marketing prosecutions, the canteen frauds and the Defence frauds.' After a final challenge to anyone 'to cast any slur on the record of the Curtin and Chifley governments during those difficult war years,' Evatt sat.

Menzies rose with the sardonic smile that had helped earn him the nickname Ming − sometimes expanded to Ming the Merciless, a comic strip character at the time.

'Some of the difficulties that I have felt over this matter have been diminished by the speech of the right honourable member for Barton,' Menzies began. 'So far as I was able to follow what he said, he conveyed the impression that the report which has been referred to was one with which he was not familiar. It was apparently investigated by officers of his department when he was attorney-general, but not particularly by him, and it has been revived, so he said, because of the investigations of the privileges committee. That committee sat this year, in 1955. I hope that the right honourable gentleman will not mind me reminding him that, for some reason or another, on 3rd April, 1952, he sought a copy of the report from my department, received it, and had it in his possession for ten months.'

Menzies dropped his smile. 'The difficulty that I have with this matter is this: The war expenditure committee made a report in August 1944 − more than 11 years ago. The events into which it inquired are therefore events which are cold. The tracks are no longer as visible as they might have been at that time.' Menzies said the committee was all-party, with members 'I think of repute'.

Then came the most important surprise. 'I do not propose to table the report to the committee at this moment. I had at one stage intended not to table it at all because I felt there were in it references to people which might or might not be just, and therefore might or might not be unfair. But if there is any suggestion that either I or my government have something to hide I will table the report without further reluctance.'

Menzies said it was 'not a report to be read in a sensational fashion, but as it has been referred to, as half the press in Australia has been talking about it, and as the usual suggestions that someone has something to hide have been made, I will answer them.'

Still a little red-faced after Menzies' remarks about his having had the report for ten months, Evatt rose again. 'I should like to make a short explanation,' he said. 'I am glad that the Prime Minister is doing this. It will reveal the facts. His reference to my seeing the report more recently has nothing to do with the point that I was making, that it was recently that this very report was referred to in the debate arising out of the activities of the privileges committee. My purpose in seeing, some time ago, the report and other documents connected with the war had nothing whatever to do with the merits of the case. It was connected with certain writings in which I was engaged dealing with the whole war effort of the Curtin-Chifley government, and the Prime Minister knows that that was my purpose.'

A sometimes angry debate followed, at first over whether Evatt had deceived the house about seeing the report, then over corruption in general during the war, and later in Sydney councils. Sydney, Bankstown and Leichhardt were the three councils named.

Stan Keon, the deputy leader of the Anti-Communist Labor Party, almost gloatingly brought in Justice Taylor, 'a gentleman whose name appears in the telephone directory under an address which is not his own, but which is owned by one of the Fitzpatricks.' Keon said Morgan told him that during a break in his 1955 evidence to the privileges committee Justice Taylor had 'approached him and told him that Mr Fitzpatrick was a good friend of the Australian Labor Party and that the honourable member should call off the dogs and let the thing go'. Keon also said Morgan had told him the judge had been responsible for the security reports ending up with Fitzpatrick.

Later, outside the house, Morgan refused to comment on this. Nor, when contacted, would Fitzpatrick or Justice Taylor.

Calwell, in a sarcastic speech that touched on the wider problems during the war, said: 'If anything is to be published, let us publish the lot, not just the document that our erstwhile friends want to dredge out and say, "Oh, this is the one we want to see." Let us have the whole lot. I am sure there will be allegations in every report which will reflect − which did reflect − very seriously upon quite a number of businessmen in this community who took advantage of a nation at war to grow rich very quickly. Probably the cost-plus system helped them, but there were all sorts and types of persons who battened on the war effort.'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jubilation at Jail Departures

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick and Browne's three months were almost up. The stay in Goulburn Jail had not been without consolations. One of Australia's best-known trotting reinsmen, Perc Hall, was asked in his retirement years later about the most memorable win of his career. He nominated a minor race long since forgotten.

Ray Fitzpatrick, dejected and worried, had written to him from jail, Hall confided, asking if he could pick a winner at the Harold Park trots. 'I got word to Ray that Lulin was ready to win,' he said. 'The horse had not raced for six months, but I knew from his trackwork that he was fit. Ray owned Lulin and, after I sent him the message, I concentrated on preparing the horse for a first-up win. It was at Harold Park on 30 July 1955, and Lulin came from 24 yards behind to win at 25/1. Ray tipped the horse to everyone in the jail, including the warders. The SP bookies in the jail offloaded the money to Goulburn bookmakers and Ray told me later that they just about sent them broke. It was just the tonic that Ray Fitz needed, and for my part I don't think I ever got more satisfaction from a win at Harold Park.'

There had been other consolations. Both men were visited frequently by their wives and had other visitors as well. The most frequent was Blanche Barkl, who travelled up from Sydney almost every week with Clare Fitzpatrick or Marie Ormston.

When I asked Barkl at 80 why she did this she said Fitzpatrick 'needed all a woman's support he could get'. She claimed elements in the Labor Party were trying to destroy him and named the former NSW minister for local government affairs, Jack Renshaw, as the main culprit. But Renshaw, who in 1954 sacked her as mayor in the normal course of his duties, obviously had been her nemesis. Barkl also said that during the previous year Fitzpatrick had begun 'killing himself with whisky'.

Both men claimed afterwards that during their stay they made many acquaintances among the inmates. In the case of Fitzpatrick, many of them took the opportunity to sound him out about the possibility of a job once they got back outside. Browne was able to finish a book about, he said, 'the decay of the Australian Labor Party' and start another. Later he described the stay as his first holiday for years.

Fitzpatrick enjoyed his stay less and according to Browne spent much of it in the prison hospital. This agrees with a claim by Barkl that for much of his time there he was ill. He appears to have been in the early stage of type-2 diabetes at a time when there was none of the drugs now available to control this. But when Fitzpatrick left he was looking better than most people had seen him for a few years.

By now, despite all the conjecture about the 1944 reports of the war expenditure committee, Fitzpatrick had turned from being Public Enemy No.1 to some people into a national folk hero in many eyes.

As midnight neared on 9 September, the last day of his imprisonment, hundreds of local residents headed for Goulburn Jail. Ignoring the winter cold of the southern highlands, they gathered at the gates in a gala mood. They ranged across all ages and included people in dressing gowns and pyjamas. Some people even drove up from Sydney for the event. Also present were almost 30 reporters and photographers from Sydney, country and interstate newspapers or radio stations. Two warders were placed on guard at the main gate. Police cars arrived to help control the crowd, which continued to grow outside a picket fence near the gate.

At 11.50pm sections of the crowd began to sing 'Let me go, warden' to the tune of a popular song, Let Me Go, Lover. Others began singing another popular song entitled Open the Door, Richard. When they learned Browne had turned 40 that day they broke into a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday. People began to shout 'Where are they?' At any sign of official movement they broke into cheering. When a few reporters with a portable radio started out along the base of the wall in case they left by another exit the crowd cheered that also.

A car driven by Ormston, and carrying a few other women including Barkl, was able to get through the crowd and enter the jail. Another, a late model American sedan with Jack Fitzpatrick and Ray's older brother, Bill, who had remained out of the limelight, got through to the main gate, where it stopped.

At midnight the crowd began to surge past police and warders trying to hold them back. Press photographers fought for the best vantage point to capture the two men emerging. A minute later the main gate opened a little and Ray Fitzpatrick walked out. As he jumped into the car with his brothers flashlights blazed and the crowd broke into clapping, singing and cheering. For three minutes the car had to stop while police and warders cleared a path. Hands reached out everywhere and some photographers threw themselves onto the bonnet to get pictures through the windscreen. Reporters fired questions at Fitzpatrick about how he had enjoyed his stay in jail and whether he intended to stand in the next election against Morgan.

The main gate opened further and out came the car driven by Ormston. Alongside her now was her husband. This had just as much trouble getting away from the jail. Youths near the car pounded their hands against its side in exuberance. Reporters had to drag them to one side before they could get through to Browne and fire more questions.

Browne was not impressed by all this. 'The crowd would have been just as festive had we been in the process of being hung from the jail walls,' he wrote later.

Fitzpatrick's reaction was much more normal. Press photos showed him looking out half-startled, half-delighted at the reaching hands. When a brother turned on a light inside the car so the crowd could see him better the roar increased and his grin widened. It was possibly the most remarkable legal departure ever made from any Australian jail. Both men were driven to Sydney, where hundreds of telegrams, cards and letters, all congratulatory, greeted them. Also waiting for Browne was a large birthday cake with light blue icing.

The next morning, after a short sleep and a walk along the cliff top near his home, Browne began answering a stream of telephone calls from well-wishers. He also began working on the next edition of Things I Hear. 'Back Again,' he headed the first item. 'Well, I suppose you've heard enough about the Privileges Case to do you for the rest of your lives,' he typed. 'I don't intend to belabour it further. All that remains for us is to leave no stone unturned to see that what happened on June 10 doesn't happen to somebody else.'

It hasn't, and probably never will, except in extreme circumstances. In 1987, the Hawke parliament passed a bill covering privilege that allowed for a fine of $5,000 for an individual or $25,000 for a corporation, or for a prison term of up to six months. But it made these subject to judicial review.

Browne then proceeded to an update of what remained the biggest public affairs topic of conversation that year: the Petrov Affair, and the resulting problems stemming from allegations of communist influence that were increasingly tearing apart the Labor Party.

Fitzpatrick, after a short sleep, also began answering telephone calls. He was photographed watering his gardens, took his daughter Jackie to a tennis match and had lunch with his mother at Milperra. Then he went to a trotting gymkhana near Bankstown, where he received a hero's welcome.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Menzies Breaks Promise

On 13 September 1955 the parliament was packed to hear Menzies table the report of 25 August 1944 to Curtin. After Adermann had taken the chair and read prayers Menzies said Fitzpatrick and Browne had been released from custody 'pursuant to the resolution of the house of the 10th June'. First though there was a question from Evatt to Menzies on possible changes to the Constitution they had discussed. Menzies apologised and said other matters had been occupying his mind.

Anti-Communist Labor Party leader Robert Joshua got the nod from the Deputy Speaker and asked Menzies if he still intended to table the report. Menzies said he would make a statement at the conclusion of questions and sat. Questions to ministers came and went, but finally there were no more and Menzies rose. Silence fell and reporters raised their pens.

Menzies was sombre as he began. 'Last week I told the house, in consequence of a certain debate that occurred, that I proposed to table today a report made in 1944 by the all-party committee which examined war expenditure during the war years. Towards last weekend I received a communication from solicitors for Raymond Fitzpatrick directing my attention to the fact that the war expenditure committee had not heard Fitzpatrick in the course of its investigations, had received no evidence from him and had heard no submission by him or on his behalf. I am not at all sure that I myself am not to blame for having failed to observe or infer that fact from the report itself.'

Astonishment appeared on some faces as people realised what he was about to announce.

Menzies said this had caused him to re-examine his position. He came to the conclusion, which he said investigation supported, that the committee 'was not intending to make a definite finding of facts, as if it were sitting in judgment, but was determining whether there was some prima facie case that required investigation, and in that sense its report was made. I had not previously appreciated that aspect of it. The committee made its report. It was not a report of positive findings. It recommended that there should be further investigation and that Crown Law authorities should go into the matter further to find out whether further proceedings might properly be taken.'

He said legal counsel had advised that a criminal prosecution was unlikely to succeed, and civil proceedings were begun against three defendants. 'Those proceedings went on to the interlocutory (conducting a dialogue) stages, as the lawyers say, from the end of 1944 onwards. Two of the defendants demurred in the High Court on the ground that no case had been made against them that merited investigation. I am putting that in lay terms.'

Evatt: 'Portion of it did not.'

Menzies: 'In one case the demurrer completely succeeded and in the other it succeeded subject to a right in plaintiff to re-plead. In the upshot, one defendant was left. That was Raymond Fitzpatrick, and in February 1950, on the advice of counsel who had been in charge of these proceedings for some years, the Crown Law authorities accepted the view that the case − this civil action − was not at all likely to succeed. In consequence it was settled and struck out. That in brief is the position.' Menzies said he had given the matter earnest thought and had no feeling of reluctance in changing his mind about tabling the report.

Angry exchanges followed with Labor members Eddie Ward and Allan Fraser. Menzies referred to the 'panic and anguish' of Fraser, a public rights supporter who had spoken most strongly in parliament against the jailing of Fitzpatrick and Browne, and wished he would 'pull himself together'. He then said: 'After an interval of 11 years it would be quite unjust to table it, and I do not propose to do so.'

Evatt said he also had received a letter from Fitzpatrick's solicitor. 'What the Prime Minister said about it is correct. The war expenditure committee not only did not hear Mr Fitzpatrick but refused an application that he should be heard.' That refusal was clearly on the ground that the committee was dealing with the matter only provisionally, Evatt said. 'It actually recommended to the then Prime Minister, Mr Curtin, that the Crown Law Department should make a full investigation of the subject matter. The committee felt that there should be an examination to ascertain whether criminal proceedings should be instituted against Mr Fitzpatrick.'

Commonwealth investigation officers in a long report said that in their opinion no criminal proceedings could be brought against him, Evatt said. A civil case however was brought against Fitzpatrick. 'He was the sub-contractor to a man who was a sub-contractor to the main contractor to the Commonwealth. The purpose of the action was to determine whether under-deliveries − if there were under-deliveries − were recoverable.

'Delay occurred in the proceedings, but in the circumstances it is quite clear how that happened. Two of the parties took legal objection to the actions under a procedure known as a demurrer (according to the big Oxford dictionary, a pleading which, admitting for the moment the facts as stated in the opponent's pleading, denies that he is entitled to relief, and thus stops the action until this point is determined by the court). I assure the house, from my inquiries, that every effort was made by the Crown Law Department, and by all those who were acting in ministerial posts during those years, to bring the matter forward.'

Menzies: 'It might remove any cause for argument if I remind the right honourable gentleman that I made the files on this matter available to him at the weekend.'

Evatt: 'That is so. I asked the Prime Minister for the files and a perusal of them revived my recollection of the matter, and it confirms the general view I stated last week. When we examine the matter, and find that during that period of five years there were something like 30,000 matters of litigation in the department, no blame whatever can be attached to the department or Crown Law Office or to any person concerned with it. I could not say less than that but I felt that I should say it.'

As Evatt sat for the last time on the matter, Stan Keon of the Anti-Communist Labor Party returned to the fray. 'The attitude of the Prime Minister constitutes one of the most amazing somersaults that has been witnessed in this house for many years,' he said. 'Whatever material was available to the Prime Minister on which to base his statement to the house today was available to him before he made his statement last week and promised to lay the report of the committee on the table of the house. Far from the right honourable gentleman's statement solving or settling the Bankstown Affair − or the alleged scandal, or whatever it may be called − the somersault of the Prime Minister will leave an even greater question mark in the minds of the general public concerning this matter than previously existed.'

Keon said that 'if I were in Mr Fitzpatrick's position, in order to clear my name, I should be demanding the fullest of publicity for the report of the committee'. He also accused Menzies of failing to honour his 'solemn undertaking' to table the report.

Menzies: 'The honourable gentleman may save his breath. I gave the undertaking. I have failed to perform it. I have given convincing reasons for my changed attitude.'

Keon: 'The only reason that I heard the Prime Minister give was that, after having given the undertaking, he had decided to read the relevant papers.'

Menzies: 'That is cheap and inaccurate.'

The story made page 1 headlines in afternoon editions of the Sydney Sun and Mirror, with both newspapers using the word 'bombshell' in their heads. But the next morning the Sydney and interstate newspapers gave it less prominent treatment than previous stories. Some made no mention of it on their front page.

The Sydney Morning Herald had the last word in an editorial: 'Obviously, only the strongest of reasons could warrant the sudden release of a wartime relic. In deeming those reasons, whatever they were, sufficient and then revoking his promise, Mr Menzies has provided ammunition for his critics, including Mr Ward, who had alleged that there were other war expenditure reports which it might be inconvenient to resurrect. So, far from being dissipated, the odour of musty scandal has been intensified by the reversion from intended publicity to continued secrecy.'

Years later, Browne concluded an account of how he had seen the events as follows:

The Bankstown Affair ranged in its gamut from high drama at some times to something pretty close to slapstick comedy at others. It ended much as it had begun. Some weeks after our release I was sitting in the office writing an editorial. Ray Fitzpatrick came in. "Frank," he said, "how do you think things will go from here?"

I replied: "Ray, the whole show is over. Morgan can never revive his charges against you, and I think you would be unwise to revive your feud with him. You've got nothing to worry about. Hop in and make another million."

He looked at me keenly. "You really think I'm out of trouble?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well then, I won't need you?" he asked.

"No, I don't think you will," I said.

He pulled out a roll of notes. "There's three months' salary," he said, "less the 75 pounds for your half of the meals while we were in Goulburn. OK?"

"OK," I said.

I finished the editorial, put the paper away for the last time, and left Bankstown. I never saw him again.

The last ghost was laid six months later. I came face to face with Charlie Morgan outside the Commonwealth Offices in Martin Place. "Hello Frank," said Charlie. "No hard feelings?"

"No hard feelings," I said. We shook hands.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mixed Fortunes

After his memorable departure from Goulburn Jail Ray Fitzpatrick began taking life more easily. He dropped out of the public eye until 1960, when the sale of 75 per cent of his blue metal quarry west of Sydney to a subsidiary of the international Rio Tinto group left him even richer. With the proceeds he bought some country properties he began to develop. He seems to have long been attracted to farming, and those last years, despite declining health, appear to have been happy ones for him.

On 1 November 1967 his daughter Jackie turned 21 and celebrated with a party that made page 1 of some Sydney newspapers. Presents from her father included a cheque for $90,000 (by then Australia was decimal) from a trust fund he had set up for her and another for 'five figures'. There was also an E-type Jaguar sports car and a mink stole. The total value was said to be about $1 million, a sum then of rare wealth. The E-type Jag was not her first − her father had given her one when she had turned 17. And when she had finished school at 18 she had gone on a nine-month chaperoned world tour.

Later, at Sydney's expensive Wentworth Hotel, 130 of the brightest young things in Sydney society danced to a four-piece pop band, drank pink champagne and nibbled caviar until it was almost dawn.

But Ray Fitzpatrick was not there. A few days earlier he had collapsed at his Bankstown home, and he was then in a coma at St Vincent's Hospital. After two hours' sleep Jackie was back at her $40-a-week job as a clerk in the office of her father's local solicitor. 'I knew daddy would have wanted us to have a good time,' she told reporters when they rang.

A little more than a month later Ray Fitzpatrick died. The obituaries in the Sydney newspapers were mostly brief and all were respectful in tone. There was no mention of Garden Island or an aircraft hangar allegedly stolen in 1943 from Bankstown aerodrome. There was no mention of 1944 reports of the Joint Parliamentary War Expenditure Committee. There was no mention of 'Sydney's Little Chicago' or of allegations of corruption involving Bankstown Council, or the NSW and federal governments. A few newspapers did mention, in a few bare words, that incredible day when the Australian Parliament had sent Ray Fitzpatrick to jail. Most newspapers, however, mentioned his racehorses and properties he had bought.

'When Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick, 57, died last Wednesday,' wrote the Sunday Mirror a few days later, in the most effusive of the obituaries, 'thousands knew they had lost a mate. Fitzpatrick was a familiar figure around Bankstown, often seen yarning quietly in the pubs. See a man step out of a new car wearing a hat, working gear and riding boots, with a farm dog at his heels. That was Ray Fitzpatrick.'

There were many people, referred to in only one newspaper to my knowledge, who did not remember Fitzpatrick quite so affectionately. The only obituary I saw that did any real justice to his life appeared in the Torch. It was unusual then for newspapers to put by-lines on obituaries, particularly when they were by the editor. In this instance, because of the special circumstances, Phil Engisch was right to put his name at the end.

Under a head 'Fitzpatrick − a Legend' he began by describing him as 'one of Bankstown's most colourful identities'. After giving details of his death and early life, he wrote: 'When war broke out in 1939 Ray Fitzpatrick was comparatively unknown in Sydney's business community. When the war ended in 1945 Ray Fitzpatrick was the principal of several companies which owned enormous assets.'

This was Phil Engisch at his best. After referring to Fitzpatrick's frequent attendance at the front of the public gallery during council meetings, he said, with understatement rare in journalism: 'In the immediate post-war years there were many who considered Mr Fitzpatrick wielded some sort of influence over sections of the council.' He continued: 'The Torch has an open mind on the subject, but earned the displeasure of Mr Fitzpatrick − a friend of long standing − by publishing a cartoon which depicted each alderman as an animal puppet and bore the caption "Who's running this circus?"'

After dealing with the jailing of Fitzpatrick and Browne in a roundabout way the obituary said: 'Although the breach that developed between Ray Fitzpatrick and the Torch in post-war years was never properly healed, this newspaper regrets the untimely passing of a man who knew what he wanted and was prepared to go after it. He was a tough man, but there was another side to his make-up. Only his accountant would really know the extent of his generosity.'

The funeral was probably the biggest ever seen in Bankstown. At its conclusion a line of cars that was preceded by police, and was estimated by some newspapers to stretch for three miles, followed him to his final resting place at the Pine Grove Memorial Park.

When probate of his will was granted it was found that he had left to his family an estate worth $732,785, a much smaller sum than many people had expected. That reflected tax-avoiding trust funds set up for family members as well as the very large amount he had undoubtedly given away during his life.

Just one week earlier, his arch-enemy, Charlie Morgan, had also died. In a story in which the biggest villain to many had changed into the biggest hero, Morgan, previously a hero, became the biggest villain to more than a few.

After the fire at the Torch, Morgan gave some details inside and outside parliament about Fitzpatrick that were important. Many of the details were the same as he gave to the parliament in 1944, when his own party was in power in Canberra and when they were even more important. No one I mentioned this to appeared to doubt some of the details he gave in both years, with their implications of at least some government – local, state or federal − corruption. And they were mostly Labor supporters who did not like Morgan.

For those details Morgan should be given credit. It took courage, although some might call it foolhardiness, to criticise federal and state governments run by his own party the way he did. The lack of overt action against him from within the party, despite obvious anger, was interesting. Only once, it appears, did a senior Labor member really get tough with him. That was when Billy Sheahan called him in for a talk just before he gave evidence at the Torch fire inquiry. Morgan should also be given credit for his part just before the war in the schemes to help German and Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis.

There was, however, a qualification about what he said in parliament in 1944 and 1955. This was his failure to spell out his professional and, according to people in Bankstown who knew him, business relationship with Fitzpatrick when some earlier offences were said to have occurred. There may have been nothing improper on Morgan's side in that relationship. But he should have been more open about it, and about the start of the long and bitter feud between them.

There were also in 1955 his widely-reported allegations about Chicago-style gangsters, allegations he at no time gave any real evidence to support. New York's Tammany Hall, the Irish-dominated organisation that for many years controlled that city, might for a while have been a good description, but not Chicago gangsters.

Chicago gangsters were best known for their use of guns. During the Bankstown Affair only one man involved was alleged to have ever used a firearm in any way against anyone. That was in the past and just involved threatening someone, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist trying to start a newspaper in Bankstown. The man who allegedly threated him with a gun was the father of Phil Engisch, Morgan's main ally.

Morgan's day of greatest triumph, when he saw the federal parliament sentence Fitzpatrick to jail, marked for him the beginning of the end. The jailing caused widespread sympathy for Fitzpatrick. Soon afterwards, Morgan entered a witness box under oath at the Torch fire hearing and denied widely-reported allegations he had been making for months about Fitzpatrick. He also failed to give any evidence of corruption, or any other wrongdoing involving Fitzpatrick.

After that his reputation was probably almost zero among people on all sides interested in these events. As the still-endorsed Labor candidate for the rock-solid Labor electorate of Reid, however, he was returned at elections in December that year. He even increased his majority.

In 1957 Browne wrote in Things I Hear that Morgan was 'marked down for extinction in the next pre-selection, not so much for anything he had done, but on the somewhat unflattering proposition that he was no use to the Party, either in Parliament or out of it'. Morgan did lose pre-selection in Reid, to Tom Uren. A popular figure on the left of the party, Uren was a former prisoner of the Japanese who had been working as a slave labourer near Nagasaki when the atomic bomb there helped end the war. When Australia again went to the polls, in November 1958, Morgan stood for Reid as an independent but polled far behind Uren and also behind the Liberal candidate.

In a review of his career in Things I Hear after the election Browne was forgiving and ended with an interesting piece of bone-pointing: 'There seems to be some feeling that I should derive some satisfaction out of Morgan's defeat. I have no animosity against Morgan, who was merely defending himself, or against anybody from the Prime Minister down, who saw a golden opportunity to square a few accounts, even at the expense of using the currency of tyranny. It was a battle fought on their arena and under their rules, which meant I couldn't win, and didn't win. But there's no animosity there. The only animosity that has survived three years is towards a couple of treacherous animals named Fitzpatrick.'

This turn against the Fitzpatricks accords with what Phil Engisch's son John in 1991 told me while recalling matters from his childhood. John Engisch said Browne appeared to have had some contact with his father a few years after the jailing and appeared to have swung to his father's viewpoint about them. Browne later blamed the split on Ray Fitzpatrick's ruthless approach to business deals. That was probably at least partly also behind Fitzpatrick's split with Morgan.

Of the many other politicians, the one with the longest involvement, dating back to the Depression, and deepest personal interest in events in Bankstown was Jack Lang. In 1962 Lang took under his wing Paul Keating, the friend of Michael Gavan, the boy who had remained near the Torch building after an explosion blew its roof into the air. Lang helped ensure that Bankstown did not disappear from the national political consciousness by passing on to Keating his knowledge of how to get ahead in Australian politics.

Although he had left school early, the ambitious young Paul proved a good learner. In 1969, at only 25, he became one of the youngest members ever of the federal lower house. He represented the seat of Blaxland, which by then, after boundary changes, covered much of Bankstown. In 1971 Keating managed to get Lang, at 95, readmitted to the Labor Party. Keating's rapid rise continued and he served briefly in the Whitlam government.

Lang, whose NSW government in 1932 had been dismissed by a representative of British royalty using questionable legal powers, died on 27 September 1975. Forty-five days later Whitlam's government became the only other in Australia to end in the same way as Lang's.

In the 90th anniversary edition of the Torch, in June 2010, Keating told readers he remembered the explosion at the newspaper's premises. 'I was in the newsagents around the corner in South Terrace and you could hear the thing go off,' he said. 'There was a lot of smoke and fire engines.' South Terrace is immediately south of the station and the Torch office was less than a hundred metres north of it. Possibly every other shop was closed at the time, and the area near the station was said to have been almost deserted until a train arrived a few minutes later. That would have put Keating among the closest people to the explosion.

One of those who early saw Keating's leadership potential was Frank Browne. In an item after Whitlam's dismissal on who might succeed him Browne wrote: 'The contender on the Left is NSW's Mr Keating, who has the dubious distinction of being one of the most efficient, dedicated and obnoxious socialist young gentlemen that I have met. A good quinella (type of horseracing bet) for Labor leadership in the not too distant future.'

Browne's career after the Bankstown Affair was not as peaceful as Fitzpatrick's. His politics had long been nationalistic, racist and very anti-communist. Not long after leaving jail in 1955 he seemed to lose his mind. Ahead of the December elections he gravitated so far to the right as to become ridiculous.

Browne formed his own party, the Australian Party, with fascist trappings that included supporters who were little more than thugs, and a flag with a big circled letter A instead of a swastika. This he launched in the Hurstville-based Barton electorate of Evatt, south-east of Bankstown. At poorly attended meetings rarely reported by news media, he savagely attacked the Labor Party. His worst barbs were aimed at Evatt, whom he had claimed earlier that year to be a friend. He implied Evatt had helped send him to jail, something only four of Labor's 50 members, with Evatt not among them, voted for.

At least one meeting degenerated into a battle in which Browne and his supporters slugged out differences of opinion with their left-wing opponents. Much of that offended Labor supporters who heard about it. It also doubtless offended a considerable number of voters in Reid with not-too-distant personal memories of life in Europe under the Nazis. That helped explain Morgan's increased majority in the December election.

It also caused brief press enchantment with Browne after his jailing to disappear. Browne responded to press criticism with words even less flattering than he used against politicians.

'It was time,' he wrote in his newsletter, 'that some public man put these swine, these ink-slinging mongrels not game to sign their names to the stuff they write in most cases, in their place, and showed them up for what they are, literary harlots, courtesans of the typewriter, arm-chair Communists, parlour-pinks, without guts, without principles. If you boiled down the entire membership of the Australian Journalists Association (NSW Branch) you wouldn't get enough real men to fill a taxi-cab. All you need is money and they can be bought, and have been bought and sold over the years.'

That paragraph, in a publication said to be read assiduously by many city newspaper editors, partly because they or rivals might appear in it, possibly gave impetus to an important change in Australian journalism. Up to then reporters' names on stories had been rare. Soon afterwards they became more common. Eventually, at many newspapers, they were put on almost every story, even on those rewritten, as was often the case, from press releases.

Browne went back to what was for him relative common sense and his party died a natural death in 1957. He had for a long time been doing public relations work for companies that included some of Australia's most venerable. As US President Lyndon Johnson once said, it was better to have someone 'inside a tent pissing out' than the other way around. Browne was able to return to that work. He also returned to paid writing in the press, notably for a rising young, and then at least slightly left-wing, Adelaide proprietor named Rupert Murdoch. To keep money coming from sources such as that he had to show some care in whom he attacked and how.

Never again did he have a moment of glory to equal his defiant speech to the parliament in 1955. But he approached it in a small way during a fight in 1960 for The Anglican newspaper, a semi-official organ of the Anglican Church.

A little war had developed between Murdoch and Sydney press baron Sir Frank Packer for the suburban newspaper market in Sydney. The Anglican had never made money and was then in receivership. But it had a large press at inner-city Chippendale ideal for printing a number of newspapers. A legal situation developed in which possession was nine-tenths of the law. Sir Frank's sons Clyde and Kerry, with helpers, were able by trickery to occupy the press building in Chippendale and change the locks. Murdoch called in Frank Browne, by then the sporting editor of his recently acquired Sydney Sunday Mirror.

At midnight Murdoch handed ally Francis James, editor of The Anglican, a large sum in notes on the steps of Sydney Town Hall to cover any immediate expenses. A small party including James, Browne and a few photographers from Murdoch's also recently acquired Daily Mirror, one of them in contact with Murdoch on a walkie-talkie, set off down George Street towards Chippendale. On the way Browne stopped off at a club and hired two battered former heavyweight boxers for £20 each.

According to Francis James in a later newspaper article, they created a diversion at the premises by pounding on a rear door with a piece of timber. When the Packer forces rushed to the rear, Browne, James and the two former boxers squeezed through a small front window. The opposing forces met in the printing section. There, the editor of The Anglican claimed, he felled a Packer man with a rubber-headed mallet.

'He collapsed with a soft grunt,' James wrote. 'I was terrified I had killed him, but one of our bruisers turned him over with his foot and said he'd live. In a short time we'd managed to drive them out. Meanwhile, out in the street, David McNicoll (managing editor of the Daily Telegraph) was in a Telegraph car in radio contact with Sir Frank Packer, who was getting a ball by ball description while in a hospital bed. Some of the Chippendale citizenry, loyal to The Anglican, deflated the tyres of the car. But the most incredible sight of the night was Frank Browne's encounter with Kerry Packer. Frank was very good at name-calling and he followed Packer outside and baited him. Kerry advanced and Browne just went whack and hit him in the solar plexus with the most devastating punch I have ever seen. Packer was knocked cold and was picked up and dragged off to one of the Telegraph cars.'

'Knight's Sons in City Brawl' read the Daily Mirror front-page headline the next day, together with a memorable photo of Clyde Packer being helped to an undignified exit from the building.

Browne separated from his wife and moved into an inner-city apartment. Ormston stayed at the Dover Heights home. In 1963 she was found floating near the entrance to Sydney Harbour with a high level of alcohol. At an inquest, kept secret from the press at the time, Browne said she had been in the habit of throwing rubbish into the ocean near their home. He conjectured that she had gone too close to the edge of the cliff.

Browne began drinking heavily himself and was 66 when he entered hospital in 1981 with meningitis and cirrhosis of the liver. 'That's old when you've lived my life,' he said. He tried to be philosophic about his drinking: 'I've outlived a lot of teetotallers.'

Many of the obituaries soon afterwards were long and reflected, with a warm nostalgia they could afford now that he was dead, his remarkable life. 'There will never be another muckraker like him,' lamented the Daily Telegraph. The Bulletin, after describing him as 'the last of the wild men', identified the one achievement for which, at least among journalists, he deserves to be remembered: 'His attitude before the Bar of the House, his insistence on his rights, arguably has protected all journalists since from the excesses of self-esteem which can overtake the most modest of human beings when they are elected to Parliament.'

Phil Engisch, his opposing editor in a battle of two newspapers, died in 1986. Engisch learned his job in a hard school. He knew about local politics and power, and also about newspaper gutter fighting. In Bankstown he was able to look after himself. But when it came to the sometimes shadowy world of real power that lay beyond Bankstown he was not in the same league as Browne. Or Ray Fitzpatrick.

The result was an incredible chain of events that took Engisch and Fitzpatrick out of their depth. What began as fiery drama ended up, as the Sydney Morning Herald said, in an intensified 'odour of musty scandal'.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Explosion Theories

In Bankstown the greatest unsolved mystery was who had caused the explosion that triggered that chain of events. Coroner Smythe returned an open finding, a verdict in effect requested by the lawyer for the insurance companies involved, and probably welcomed by many people. But Smythe said he had 'a very strong suspicion' of a deliberate action by 'some person or persons unknown'. Some residents saw in that an oblique finger pointed at Engisch.

As a former warrant officer in a wartime ammunition unit Engisch had the knowledge, or so it appeared. He was the last person known to be on the premises. And because of their location, in the shopping centre and across the road from the police station, it would have been difficult, although not impossible, for anyone without a key to gain entry unobserved. Engisch was also the only person to come out badly from the coroner's summary.

After the Torch fire Fitzpatrick supporters quickly helped spread a rumour that Engisch started it for insurance money. In the press, or at the court hearing, it was never said that Bankstown had long had a reputation for insurance fires. When businessmen elsewhere wanted money for expansion they usually went to a bank. In Bankstown, or so it was said, they often just fetched a can of petrol and a box of matches. Every time a fire broke out in business premises in the district many people jumped to a cynical conclusion.

Despite court evidence of his family company's losses because of the fire, some people years later still believed Phil Engisch started it deliberately for insurance money. Engisch, however, would have known about that Bankstown reputation better than almost anyone. He would have known what many residents would have instantly suspected, and he was not a fool.

Engisch's son John gave me access to files and records at the Torch. They included a surprising amount that, tightly bound near the base of the flames, had survived the fire, burned on the outside but readable inside. I began going through those charred remains on 25 February 1991. That day allied forces were sweeping through Saddam's army during the massive 100-hour ground offensive to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Every hour or so the latest news, very audible after the Torch had replaced the clatter of Linotype machines with the silence of computer terminals, drifted over a partition that separated me from where the next edition of the Torch was being produced.

One of the tools in that offensive was what the media called the latest horror weapon of warfare, a giant bomb, dropped from a plane or helicopter, which spread vaporised fuel in the atmosphere. This mixed with the air and when ignited created a terrifying blast. This was the same method someone was said to have used at the Torch premises 36 years before.

It sounds simple, and the same principle had already been powering most motor cars for many years. But it's tricky. This is why it had not been used in warfare up to then, and hasn't since, except, according to some reports, briefly by the Russians in Chechnya. Heat has to be introduced suddenly to the air-vapour mixture in the right circumstances. If anything goes wrong either nothing will happen – or the result can possibly be disastrous for unintended targets.

As the government explosives expert Stanley Parsons told the court hearing, it would have been 'extremely hazardous' and 'more or less a fluke' to arrange the Torch explosion deliberately. Parsons said that although no remains of a timing device had been found it could have been done using a lighted cigarette arranged in such a way that it burned down slowly and ignited heads in a box of matches. Detective-Sergeant Kelly said much the same. Both mentioned a possible elapsed time of half an hour before the explosion, which could have been pointing a finger either at Engisch or someone who entered after he left.

Kelly was then known mainly for his ability to get results, one way or another, as a detective. But he also had a reputation for corruption that later became more widespread. One important possibility, apparently not considered, was that Kelly or someone under him did find evidence of a timing device but did not reveal this. But nothing later emerged to support this.

The court hearing dealt seriously with evidence against only two men, Phil Engisch and Jack Fitzpatrick. Probably correctly, the coroner dismissed the possibility that Jack Fitzpatrick was responsible. The Fitzpatrick the coroner should have looked at closely was Jack's often ruthless older brother Ray. But public sympathy for Ray after his jailing by parliament, the failure of Morgan or anyone else at the hearing to give any substantial evidence against him, and the refusal by the Privy Council in London to hear a full appeal against his jailing, was then at its peak. That would have looked like victimisation.

Ray Fitzpatrick was a man of low education. But he had high people skills and was usually a shrewd judge of them. He appeared most of his life to have a sixth sense as to who, from his point of view, was probably the best person available for any job. He then paid whatever it took to get that person. His first lawyer, Stan Taylor, was to prove as perfect a mate for the rest of his life as any man could ever wish for. My father, as his first accountant, was nowhere near that good. But he was part of that process. When Fitzpatrick's second lawyer, Charlie Morgan, became his one disaster, the notorious former state premier, Jack Lang, proved a valuable help in getting him for a while out of that problem.

Fitzpatrick's sixth sense showed through in the way he was able to conduct his business affairs in World War II in a manner that helped make government lawyers claim afterwards that getting successful criminal convictions in court would have been too difficult because of the required onus of proof. When the spotlight of the national press turned on him after the fire at the Torch, his hiring of Frank Browne appeared at first to be almost an act of genius. And when Browne's attacks, successful as they were from Fitzpatrick's point of view, led them towards the judicial bar of the Australian Parliament, he hired a young lawyer, Anthony Mason, who 32 years later became Chief Justice of Australia.

If the explosion at the Torch was started deliberately, as Engisch and many other people maintained, it was a very professional job. That sounded like the work of someone hired by Ray Fitzpatrick.

But why would Fitzpatrick pay someone to do such a thing? He was by then a very rich man. The sacking of Bankstown Council affected one source of income. But he was still winning substantial contracts from other local councils, as well as state government departments, and becoming richer every day. He did not want something that might have turned the spotlight of the nation's press on his past or present business affairs. Only a fool would have done that. And, like Engisch, he never seems to have been a fool. In the event, the spotlight of the nation's press, for a while almost blindingly bright, quickly dimmed.

Fitzpatrick could be a savage man, as he showed in a fight in 1940 in which he left Charles Skevington, his main district rival for sand contracts, almost for dead. He wanted to hit back at Morgan. But for him to have done something obviously likely to play into the hands of people such as Morgan and Engisch, as did happen, did not make sense. Without bringing him into the court, the coroner in his summing up also dismissed any possibility that Ray Fitzpatrick was involved. In this he was also probably correct.

There were other possibilities the court never looked at, and which Smythe may have had in mind in his conclusion. All newspaper editors can make enemies, sometimes ones they don't even know about. In Bankstown's early post-war boom there were many people who, after the Depression and war, were keen to exploit opportunities to become rich. Doubtless most of the money made in Bankstown during that period, including much of that by the Fitzpatrick brothers, was made honestly by hard work. But there were more people than the Fitzpatricks who, if asked to swear that every penny of their earnings had been made honestly, might have had trouble keeping a straight face. Some of those might not have liked a newspaper questioning particular matters. They probably included people on the side of Phil Engisch.

As for Engisch, few people who knew him appeared to think him dishonest in a financial sense. But that he was not universally loved was beyond doubt. He had been born into a successful family, had gone to two city schools regarded by many in Bankstown as being for snobs, often had a clever expression that annoyed some people, and had a cutting tongue. Many saw him a privileged smart aleck.

His sister Lilian said she was close to him until he began his affair with Yvonne Nurthen and never forgave him for that. According to her, he was selfish, sometimes a bully, particularly after he began the affair, and at times during that affair was very cruel to his wife. Her brother was often also, she claimed, insensitive to other people's personal problems. As an example she mentioned her own problems in caring for a polio-stricken child.

Phil was Church of England and anti-Labor, although not stridently either, in a district that was strongly Irish Catholic and even more strongly Labor. Finally, in some people's eyes, he was German as well.

Apart from people who don't like newspaper editors who ask too many questions, any large community will have people with deep grievances. Sometimes such people can make the local newspaper a focus for their feelings. Some former residents who returned to Bankstown after the war, or men who went there after it looking for work, had fought against the Germans, or possibly even been captured by them. Some of those might have had what later would be called post-traumatic stress disorder.

After World War I a similar situation had been worsened by the failure of a local soldier-settlement scheme for wounded men. Disgruntled war veterans had probably caused sufficient difficulties for Phil's father for the police to let him have a personal handgun licence after regulations covering these were much strengthened in 1927. An added possible factor here was that more than a few of those victims of both world wars had been among the beneficiaries of Fitzpatrick's generosity to people in need.

Then, after 1948, tens of thousands of people poured into Bankstown from shattered Europe. Quite a few of them had probably seen terrible events involving a German army that had occupied much of Europe. For those or other reasons, it was not beyond possibility that there were other people in Bankstown who might have wanted to damage the Torch. Some people attached significance to the man, apparently never identified, who, as he ran away from the fire shouting that the Torch had been bombed, almost knocked over people hurrying from the station towards the flames.

Another possibility never looked at by the court was sexual jealousy. Phil Engisch, the boss of a by then fair-sized enterprise, and aged 37, was having an affair with an attractive 23-year-old former member of his staff. Did Yvonne Nurthen have another admirer? If that admirer had been on the staff of the Torch he could have known how to approach the building from the rear without being seen, and where to find inflammable liquid in the printing section. He might even have had a key with which to let himself into the building.

The trouble with such speculation is the problem of what happened then. Presumably he would have poured inflammable material in the printing section. Assuming the police were truthful when they said no trace was found of a timing device, he would then have thrown down a lighted match and ran. Or, more sensibly, lit something leading to the spilled liquid. Either way there would have been a fire but there would not have been that explosion. To cause that deliberately and get out safely, without being seen, would have taken knowledge and nerve that few people would have had.

What all this leads to is one other possibility. From questions they asked witnesses, particularly the explosives expert Stanley Parsons when he was recalled on the last day of evidence, it was obviously in the minds of some lawyers in the court. Considerable evidence indicated that the explosion and fire did not result from a deliberate action.

CHAPTER TWENTY

What Probably Happened

On Easter Monday 1955 Engisch and Nurthen drove to Randwick races. Before the races were over they set out for home via Heathcote Road. This was a long way to get to Bankstown. It involved going to the south of Sydney along the Princes Highway and west through undeveloped bushland with thick forests.

Because of those forests, and tracks that went off into them, Heathcote Road had long been used by many people in Sydney's south-west as a lover's lane. At least once along the way they stopped, and Nurthen rolled him a cigarette. When they drove into Bankstown the sun was setting. First he dropped her off at her home in Gardenia Avenue, about a kilometre east of the shopping centre. Traffic and other lights were coming on as he drove to the Torch premises.

By the time he opened the office door it was almost dark inside. He turned on a light and picked up contributed copy dropped into a letter box. After glancing through that he put church notes onto a typewriter. Then he entered the gloomy printing section behind the office and crossed to a Linotype machine, where he left tennis notes for the operator when he came in the next morning. Phil Engisch was preoccupied. He had a lot of work to catch up on, but that probably was not what he was thinking about. More likely was the affair with Nurthen and the problems this was causing with his wife and other family members. In the background there were also all those continuing problems involving the Fitzpatricks.

His eyes adjusting to the gloom, he began his return to the front office, which had a partly separated section at its front where the public ordered advertisements or job-printing work and paid money.

During the morning the works foreman George Begg had been on the premises doing costing. A professional printer aware of the danger of fire, Begg was unlikely to have done anything that might have helped create a risk of this. Later, however, Phil's uncle Dudley briefly visited the building. Dudley turned on an electric clock that the next morning would start the process of heating the metal pots of the Linotype machines ready for when their operators resumed work.

Dudley Engisch was a well-meaning man, widely liked in Bankstown. According to his niece Lilian, he was the person who smoothed feathers ruffled by her brother or father. But he seems to have been a born blunderer. It is not at all certain he would never have done anything − say, move a can or bucket of something − that might have created dangers if someone later had walked too carelessly in near-darkness through the printing section.

Apart from this possibility, on Thursday many of the workers would have been anxious to get away ahead of the Easter holiday traffic already starting to pour out of Sydney. In their hurry they might have left something in a dangerous position. That something might have been the four-gallon Shellite can found on its side after the fire with about two gallons missing, approximately the amount, according to Parsons, needed to create the explosive effect at the premises.

Back across the printing section came Phil Engisch. If by any chance he did knock over the Shellite, or a container of some other such liquid, he may have decided there was nothing more he could do about that just then. Perhaps he just moved the container to one side and continued ahead to the front office. According to Engisch in his evidence, he did not have a smoke at the office. Nor was he, he maintained, a chain smoker. But he was, he admitted, a man who liked to have a smoke when under pressure.

Probably he was under pressure. After his visit to the races with Nurthen, and whatever had happened along Heathcote Road, he was about to go home to face his wife and have dinner. If he had decided that he needed a cigarette to calm his nerves it would not have been surprising.

Perhaps he had rolled his own. Or perhaps there was a packet of ready-mades in his desk. After lighting up, he had possibly had several drags, then decided it was time to go. Before doing so he would have stubbed out the cigarette. Or so he thought.

Perhaps he did not stub out that cigarette securely. Possibly it began smouldering away at the rear of the front office in an ashtray on a desk that was piled with paper − paper perhaps that scattered a bit when he opened the door to leave. Although printers tended to be careful about the possibility of fire, he was then wearing one of his other hats as journalist and editor. As someone who spent 57 years in the industry, I can personally attest that these were often among the most careless people in existence. As the cigarette smouldered, a piece of paper alongside began to do the same. A small flame moved from that to another piece of paper. Behind the office in the printing section something else crucial had happened. A stream of Shellite or some other volatile liquid had drained across the floor.

On the last day of the hearing, Parsons ruled out any chance that the noise heard even beyond Bankstown was an explosive shattering of a fibro wall. The noise was too loud for that. He ruled out the possibility of the top being left off something, such as the can of Shellite, and producing a sufficient evaporation of vapour out of the container to cause what happened. He also ruled out the possibility that spilled liquid such as Shellite had turned the entire printing section into a huge vapour bomb. For that, he estimated, assuming no vapour had escaped through the ventilation, 15 or 16 gallons of Shellite would have been needed. That much vapour would have caused 'a really good explosion' and would not have been consistent with the fact that windows in the building were still intact afterwards.

Parsons remained adamant in his view that the fire followed a low-intensity vapour explosion, and there was one possibility he did not rule out. If he did I could find no evidence of this, and I could not obtain a court transcript. After telling me that records showed a copy existed in the court's archives, and had been marked 'Never to be destroyed', an official of Parramatta Court wrote back a week later to say no trace of it could be found. And John Engisch said the company no longer had a copy given to it after the hearing.

At the side of the printing section was a small foreman's office. This was just behind, and partly abutting, the front office. There was also a raised floor that could have sloped slightly towards that. It is possible that anything draining across the floor would have done so mainly into that foreman's office, where according to evidence the destruction was most complete. Some of it could also have branched off in a thin stream into a passage going alongside the front office towards the street.

The roof and most of the outside walls were of galvanised sheet metal. Inside, at the end of an early autumn day, during most of which the sun had shone down brightly on the roof and walls, and the heat had been retained in all the metal equipment, it was still warm. In those conditions, liquid that drained across the floor and under a door into the foreman's office could have turned soon into vapour that would have mixed easily with the warm air. Before long a cloud of this could have filled the foreman's office.

At the back of the office partly abutting this, like a car spark plug building up its charge in slow motion, a flame gathered strength from paper on a desk. Separating the two offices, as was usual then in many Australian buildings, were thin sheets of fibro (cement-bound asbestos). As anyone knows who has ever thrown it into a fire, as people often did then on bonfire nights, fibro may soon shatter if heat is applied. This is because of tension caused by variations in expansion across the sheet. There were also wooden frameworks and, as was normal for a newspaper office, wooden shelves piled with paper.

The fire continued to grow. Soon the flames would have been licking at a shelf and the wall behind it.

Next door in the foreman's office, with that added heat on the wall, the cloud of vapour continued to thicken. Some of it possibly forced its way out through ventilation into the street. Three witnesses, Constable Herd and the two newsboys, gave evidence of seeing fog or smoke near the premises just before the explosion. This could have been vapour, smoke from a fire, or both. At least one of the boys also smelled what seemed like burning rubber, which could have been any of many substances on fire.

That they did not see the glow of a fire could be accounted for by closed window covers, shelves and filing cabinets in the front office, and a partition, all helping to block any glow. There were also the facts that the fire was still relatively small and they were in a brightly lit street.

Suddenly a sheet of fibro shattered and a flame burst through, just the fluke that was needed to turn the foreman's office into a bomb, more than three decades before military technologists learned how to do this with at least some control. The vapour trapped inside ignited. In a fiery and not too strong, but very loud, explosion, up into the sky went the tin roof over the foreman's office.

Force from the blast inside the building would probably have mainly followed a line of least resistance down the printing section, hemmed in by high shelves stacked with old newspapers or production materials along the walls, as well as all the heavy equipment then used in printing. Then it would have left through the weakest points. This could explain why windows blocks away reportedly rattled while those in the building, most in a front office with heavy, stuffed filing cabinets, remained intact. There was evidence that at the start the flames were highest behind the front office, which would be consistent with this scenario.

At first the other flames would have mainly followed the flow line of the spilled liquid, both to the original receptacle further back and along a thin stream towards the street. This would account for the way they seemed to be running along the floor of a passageway alongside the front office when Constable Herd looked through a window. Then, helped by the damage done by the explosion, they began to take over the whole building.

The scene that greeted Engisch when he stepped from his car, after being told by one of the newsboys about the fire, would have quelled his heart. Although the sun's last light had long gone the flames had brought back the reds of its descent. In Fetherstone Street they had turned night almost into day. Leaping high into the air, they were causing a glow that was seen widely over south-west Sydney.

Engisch told the firemen in desperation to direct their hoses at a section to the left, still largely untouched. There was located the company's pride and joy, its new rotary press, recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft. Then he took dumbfounded stock. He was also company secretary and understood the financial situation better than anyone. The company had fairly high insurance on its equipment. But far from enough to cover the high cost of replacing it at the time with new equipment. And because of the accounting practice of depreciating equipment for tax purposes, most of it was on the company's books at far below value.

As editor he had heard all the stories about insurance fires in Bankstown, and he realised what many people would suspect. To people who did not understand such matters as accounting practices and the high cost of new printing equipment, and in light of his wartime service in an ammunition unit, it would not look good.

As all of this ran through his head, did he suddenly remember that cigarette he thought he had stubbed out, and perhaps also a can he had knocked over, and realise in horror it might have been his own carelessness that had caused everything? But could he prove it had been only an accident? Perhaps the insurance companies might think otherwise and refuse to pay anything. Apart from this, the company had no insurance against loss of profits, on which the family depended for its ordinary living expenses.

A short time before, he had worried about facing his wife. Now he faced the wrath of a person more important in this situation than her, the one person of whom, some thought, he had ever been deeply afraid. That person was not Ray or Jack Fitzpatrick, or any other 'gangster' in Bankstown. He was the man who had spent his life building up that company, who in the background still held the real power on important matters, and from whom he had got his own temper: his father.

That father and son did not see their interests as necessarily identical during the court hearing can be deduced from the fact that they were represented by different lawyers. While going through Torch files I noticed something interesting. One of the features of the Torch was its large masthead, with the name flanked by flaming torches. For many years before the fire, and some time afterwards, three names always sat prominently under that masthead: Managing Director L.A. Engisch (Les), Business Manager D.T. Engisch (Dudley) and Editor P.C.L. Engisch (Phil).

In 1964 two of those names disappeared. Until the old man's death, although he was then well into retirement, only his name remained. There was no change in the size of the advertisements, known in the trade as ears (and which carried a fat premium), alongside the masthead. The names of Dudley and Phil could still have been fitted in easily. Was this the ultimate punishment of the founder of the Torch?

In his confusion, as flames continued to take over the building, Phil Engisch hurried to a nearby phone and called Yvonne Nurthen. Told by her mother she was in the bath, he told her mother the news and hurried back. As everything sank in further he looked around. A few minutes after the explosion a train had arrived from the city. Already a large crowd had gathered across the road and more were arriving every minute.

Then the roof of the main section collapsed. The two Linotype machines at the rear and other valuable equipment were beyond hope and the flames were taking hold of the section that contained the new press. According to some witnesses, Engisch was very agitated. Meanwhile Blanche Barkl, the last of the key players that night, had arrived.

Near the centre of the fire-fighting action Engisch again looked around. By now the street was packed with bystanders. The flames were still fierce and reflected on their faces as they watched the spectacle in fascination. Many of those faces he recognised. It was amazing how quickly people he considered his enemies had gathered to watch the Torch burn down. In one group he saw Ray Fitzpatrick, Mr Big himself. Alongside him was Barkl, recently sacked as mayor, and in his view altogether too close in the last few years to Fitzpatrick. Alongside them was Cecil Pyers, an ally of them on the sacked council. All of them were laughing, or so he imagined.

Did Engisch at that moment see a way out of his predicament, and one that would help him get back at enemies at the same time?

A short distance away was Constable Herd. Engisch walked over to him. 'It is just what I expected,' he said. 'They promised to do this to me. I know who they are.' When Herd asked who he meant, Engisch used a phrase like something out of a B-grade gangster movie, one inappropriate for a man who had known both Fitzpatricks well for many years and had once been friendly with them. It is also interesting that the Torch, in its first report of Constable Herd's evidence, cut off immediately before this point and switched to much less important evidence. 'The boys,' he said. 'I know who they are.'

Engisch had been exposing wrong, as any good newspaper editor should do. And he did not appear to have had anything important to hide except perhaps his affair with Yvonne Nurthen, which his family certainly knew about. Did he then embark upon a campaign of deceit, a campaign that briefly inflamed the nation's press into an orgy of lurid prose and led to a chain of events no-one could ever have imagined? And, as each link in that chain led to the next, did Phil Engisch strengthen his commitment to a false version of events to which, at least in public, he was to stick until the day he died?

However, this scenario, whether right or wrong, still leaves unexplained the veil of government secrecy pulled over the important events in Canberra that followed the fire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Evidence Released

On 24 November 1999 a Liberal member of the privileges committee, Alex Somlyay, presented to the lower house a report of the committee concerning a proposal to release in-camera evidence to its inquiry in 1955. The inquiry, the 'most controversial' in the committee's history, Somlyay said, concerned articles in the Bankstown Observer that 'reflected on the then member for Reid, Mr C.A. Morgan'.

The result was a motion on 7 December 2000 as the parliament cleared up year-end business before its summer holiday. The Liberal leader of the lower house, Peter Reith, moved that it authorise the publication and transfer to the National Archives 'of all evidence or documents taken in camera or submitted on a confidential or restricted basis to the Committee of Privileges and that have been in the custody of the Committee for at least 30 years'. 'This is quite a significant matter,' Reith said. After referring to the 1955 inquiry, and giving a brief background to it, he said the release of material concerning it 'will be a matter of historic interest to all members of the house and members of the general community'.

Supporting the motion, Leo McLeay, the Labor member for the seat of Watson in south-west Sydney, said: 'This is the last great secret of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia – the only piece of deliberation of any real significance that has gone before this parliament since 1901 which is not known. In the part of Sydney where I live the Browne-Fitzpatrick case has always been something that people talk about.'

McLeay said that when he was Speaker he wanted to release the documents. But he did not try because of the Clerk of the House, Lyn Barlin, who was then also secretary of the privileges committee and 'the only person who was alive at the time who had read these documents'. 'He had a safe in the corner of his office in which he used to keep these documents,' McLeay said. 'Nobody except Lyn Barlin was allowed in those days to see them. Lyn cared so passionately about these matters not being revealed that I deferred to his decision.'

The motion, not reported to my knowledge in any newspaper, was passed unanimously.

Material released to the National Archives as a result included the full report sent by the Joint Parliamentary War Expenditure Committee on 25 August 1944 to Prime Minister Curtin, edited minutes of that committee's meetings in 1944, and a transcript of evidence given to the privileges committee in 1955. There were also High Court papers, reports by government legal officers, transcripts of interviews by officers of the Commonwealth Investigation Service, memos from ministers to underlings and their replies, and personal papers of some key people involved. Altogether they ran into many hundreds of pages.

The August 1944 report to Curtin detailed some investigating by Jack Magnusson. He was the 'highly competent officer' who, Morgan told parliament on 7 March 1944, 'used to be attached to the war expenditure committee to investigate cases of this kind', but whose services had 'for some reason been withdrawn'.

Magnusson's initial inquiries in 1943 led to Fitzpatrick being prosecuted in a magistrate's court for two breaches of national security regulations in connection with the building that appeared to be an aircraft hangar. The magistrate fined Fitzpatrick a total of £75, pocket money for him. After the allegations in parliament by Morgan in March 1944 Magnusson was put back on investigating allegations involving Fitzpatrick.

The evidence in the August 1944 report, however, concerned only concreting for hangars at the Bankstown air base. It did not deal with the alleged disappearance of one of those hangars. And it did not deal with other allegations involving Ray Fitzpatrick, including the most serious, those involving Garden Island.

There is no doubt that more than one report involving the activities of Fitzpatrick was sent by the war expenditure committee to the highest echelons of the Australian government. Morgan, who told the privileges committee he had been a member of that committee for a while, said there were two. He claimed they concerned 'vital defence undertakings such as the graving dock, aerodromes and the like' and that amounts varying from £100,000 to £250,000 were mentioned in them. No figures anywhere near that large are mentioned in the August 1944 report, which obviously was only preliminary.

The minutes of the war expenditure committee meetings made clear the committee was investigating allegations about the graving dock – later almost always called dry dock – near Garden Island.

The need for such a dock to help keep open Australia's sea lanes had been seen since the late 1930s. When he announced the project in May 1940 Prime Minister Menzies said it would be able to hold the largest warships then afloat and would eliminate the need for large vessels to travel to Singapore for repairs. He estimated the work, which included filling in the harbour between Garden Island, which had long had a dockyard, and the shore, would take three years. Work on the project, bigger in some ways than the nearby Sydney Harbour Bridge, began in December 1940.

After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the fall of Singapore, the project became urgent. Before long the work was around the clock and involved more than 4,000 people. By utilising their best workforce and administrative skills, the Americans were able to get Pearl Harbor back into full action faster than expected. In Sydney, however, the glow from lights at the site lit up the sky throughout the night near the otherwise blacked-out city centre as the work continued. Fitzpatrick owned many of the trucks that rolled in carrying sand, blue metal, gravel, quarry waste and building materials.

Despite all that activity, the dry dock, with its surrounding roads, cranes, buildings and other docks, was not finished until May 1945. By then the Americans were raining bombs on Japan. Newspapers said the cause of the delay was parts that had to be knocked down and rebuilt because of sub-standard materials used. A pointer to this was in a High Court writ of summons by the Commonwealth Government against Fitzpatrick on 18 December 1944. The writ accused him, among other things, of supplying blue metal dust instead of ¾-inch metal.

The first vessel to berth inside the dock, on May 2, ten days before its official opening, was a British aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious. Damaged below the waterline during a kamikaze attack while supporting the American invasion of Okinawa, it was allowed in for emergency work before returning to Britain for a refit. With peace, the dock became uneconomic for its planned purpose as a dry dock since facilities in Asia soon became available with skilled people willing to work for much less than Australians.

Minutes in the National Archives of war expenditure committee meetings in 1944 indicate allegations concerning the dockyards were, understandably, the main focus of Magnusson's inquiries. A meeting chaired by Harold Holt in Sydney on 1 May was told the Deputy Director-General of the Allied Works Council had forwarded to the committee seven copies of a report about the work. Three days later the deputy director-general accompanied members of the committee on an inspection of the site.

The minutes of a meeting on 22 June 1944, again chaired by Holt, contain a report by Holt about a telephone call to him from Mr G.S. Cook, the AWC's NSW Works Director, concerning a Fitzpatrick contract to supply 40,000 tons of coarse sand, which was later increased to 70,000 tons. The previous day contractor Charles Skevington, still Fitzpatrick's main rival in supplying this near Bankstown, had given details about supplying 10,000 tons of coarse sand for Fitzpatrick, but on a yardage basis. The price details, given in the call to Holt, were confusing and hinged mainly, as did some others mentioned in archival material, on the difference between a yard and a ton.

The minutes for the next day's meeting begin by saying Holt had asked for more details from Skevington to amplify the information supplied by Cook. 'The first question Mr Skevington was asked was whether or not he had actually delivered sand to the Sydney Graving Dock site; to which he replied that he had − about 50% of the sand which he had delivered had been delivered to the dump at Moore Park, about three miles from the dock. His price was 7/6 a ton, not a yard, and that price included the cartage cost.'

After saying that Magnusson had been recalled and examined, the minutes record the moving and seconding of a motion 'That Mr Magnusson be instructed to request from Mr R. Fitzpatrick his business books and that in the event of any objection or obstruction Mr Magnusson be prepared with the necessary authority to seize the documents required'.

In the hundreds of pages released to the archives, those were the only details I could find concerning the dockyards. The details above are similar to some in the 25 August report to Curtin in 1944 and also some in a long, detailed report that a senior government official, Mr G.W. Hunt, sent in December 1953 to the NSW Labor government. That report led soon afterwards to that government replacing Bankstown Council with an administrator. The big difference is the size of the quantities. On the aircraft hangar allegations I could not find a word in any archival material apart from those in Morgan's suppressed evidence to the privileges committee. However, many parts of the war expenditure committee minutes are blacked out and pages appear to be missing.

Whatever blacked-out or missing parts, or any other reports, did say, there are enough indications in papers now in the archives of the main reason given for the lack of legal action on allegations about Ray Fitzpatrick. The reason was mentioned by Evatt in parliament on 6 September and 13 September in 1955: the difficulty of proving something beyond reasonable doubt in court.

The details were complex, requiring specialised knowledge. People might have denied words and actions, as obviously had already happened. And Fitzpatrick seemed to do everything cleverly. The nation was at war, a time when corners were sometimes cut and blind eyes turned to get things done. Many professional people in most fields, including the law and its enforcement, were away helping to fight that war. Meanwhile, as Evatt made clear in figures he gave the parliament in 1946 and 1955, those who remained on the home front had more than enough work to keep them occupied.

There is little doubt there were cover-ups, important during the war, involving matters such as the Garden Island dockyards and that building which housed Fitzpatrick's trucks. After the war there seem to have been more cover-ups of matters involving Ray Fitzpatrick. Possibly there were many secrets behind events involving him. But most, as time passed, would probably not have been thought too important. Possibly many concerned nothing more than suspicions of guilt through association involving the many acquaintances Fitzpatrick had on both sides of politics through horseracing.

A year before the fire at the Torch, however, an event of international importance had weirdly complicated an already complex situation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Royal Commission Questions Taylor

When Vladimir Petrov on 3 April 1954 defected outside Sydney Airport to officials of ASIO, he had with him many papers. Among them were notes by a predecessor named Sadovnikov, who left Australia in 1951. One of those notes concerned Justice Taylor. Sadovnikov said Taylor was an Industrial Commission judge and Labor supporter who up to 1943 was the Sydney head of the Security Service. While in that job, the note said, Taylor handed to the Communist Party a document that made possible the exposure of a communist agent or agent provocateur. It ended: 'K describes him favourably.'

K was believed to be Walter Clayton, a member of an underground network in the Communist Party of Australia with links to the Department of External Affairs, headed by Evatt.

The resulting Royal Commission on Espionage sat from May 1954 to March 1955. During that time 119 witnesses were called and the testimony of many got large coverage in the press. Some were allowed to testify in private. Two of those in October 1955 were the subject of special legal advice for Menzies by the Commonwealth Solicitor-General, Professor Ken Bailey, on whether their full evidence could ever be published, which the commission had ruled against. One of those was the most important target of the inquiry, Dr John Burton, a former secretary of Evatt who from 1947 to 1949 was secretary of the Department of External Affairs.

The other was Stan Taylor. Professor Bailey wrote that there were strong security objections to ever publishing the full evidence of Burton but not that of Taylor. His evidence, with a large 'TOP SECRET' stamped top and bottom of every page, was later sent to the National Archives.

At 10am on 28 January 1955 Justice Taylor appeared before a closed sitting of the commission. Correspondence and words at a meeting had already passed between him and the chairman, Justice William Owen. Taylor had given anything he said he could recall that might explain the contents of the note, and had volunteered to appear rather than be subpoenaed. After reading a translation of Sadovnikov's note, William Windeyer QC, the counsel assisting the commission, began his questions.

Taylor said he was appointed to head the Security Service in NSW early in 1942, the first non-military person to do so. On Christmas Eve that year he was appointed president of the Industrial Commission and his security duties ended on Boxing Day. He agreed with Windeyer that he was a Labor supporter who played 'quite an active part' in Labor politics.

During lengthy questioning about his work Taylor said he was not personally concerned with counter-espionage. 'We dealt with things like internees and paroles and that sort of thing mainly, and a great deal of checking over industrial personnel, for example at aircraft establishments. Then we had a very big population of unnaturalised enemy aliens and they had to report, and we had to exercise surveillance over them. We had 290 on the staff when I was there.'

After asking about people in different positions, Windeyer said: 'In connection with the watch over subversive persons and industrial security, who was in charge of that particular aspect?'

'I am not sure of that. When I first went there, there was some difficulty... There were a lot of army personnel and they did not take too kindly to a civil head.'

'You mentioned, I think the man's name was Hughes, in the police force as being concerned with that aspect?'

'Yes, there was a Hughes.'

'I rather understood from you that he was concerned with that subversive activities aspect.'

'Well, he is a sergeant in the vice squad. I could ask him about that. There were over 80 police personnel, we called them investigators. No doubt a number of them would be connected with the subversive activities.'

'Was Hughes on your staff then?'

'Yes.'

After more questions, Windeyer said: 'It would hardly be necessary to ask you, but did you hand to the Communist Party any document?'

'No, I certainly did not.'

Justice Roslyn Philp: 'Did you ever have any meetings in the course of your duties with any members of the Communist Party?'

'Yes, quite a number.' Taylor gave as an example a seaman who his staff thought should not be allowed to sail on a ship. 'That would come around to me and would go down to the Allied Works Council as to whether he would get other work, perhaps on a coastal ship or something else, and there would be a report on it. Finally it would come to me as to whether he was to sail or not to sail. Then I had to call in the Seamen's Union officials, who were pronounceably communist, and discuss this man with them and what to do with him. Well, I had quite a number of meetings of that type.'

Justice Philp: 'You were endeavouring, I suppose, to preserve industrial peace?'

'Yes.'

'Still with an eye on security?'

'Yes.' Taylor gave details of a case in which a man who worked at an aircraft factory talked one night in a cafe about aircraft production and a woman who heard him went to the Security Service, who said he was not to work there.

After details about other matters, notably some involving Warwick Fairfax, head of the family that controlled the Sydney Morning Herald, Justice Philp said: 'I was wondering whether, in the course of some discussions with some communist people, you might not have shown them a document which, to you, would be quite innocent, but from which they might have thought they got some information.'

'Well, first of all, they would not be handed a document. It is possible I would read from a document.' Taylor said he 'grew up with many of those union officials'.

Windeyer asked if he ever knew a man named Clayton.

'No, that name is not familiar to me.' Nor did he know anyone with aliases Windeyer said Clayton had used. Shown a photo of him, Taylor said he had never seen him.

His most interesting evidence was at the end. A person who obviously interested the commissioners was a businessman named Bruce Milliss mentioned in some of his evidence. Milliss, a constituent and friend of Chifley, was prominent in Labor Party affairs in the 1930s and 1940s. Later he openly joined the Communist Party.

Windeyer: 'Did you know anything of Milliss's political affiliations at the time you were concerned with him?'

'Yes, I did.'

'At that time, according to such information as you had, was he a communist?'

'Well, I have always regarded him as being a member. I could not put my finger on it but I thought he was and I discussed that with Mr Chifley several times. I was very interested because my brother, who is a Sydney solicitor, was a leading official of the Labor Party and a very close friend of Mr Chifley's, and we used to talk these things over a great deal, and I always had the view that that was the position.'

'Although you may not be aware of it,' Windeyer said, 'in the documents which their honours have investigated, Mr Milliss is described as an undercover member of the Communist Party.'

'I see. Well, I could not say yes or no to that, but I have always had my own views about that.'

Justice Owen: 'He formerly enjoyed the confidence of Mr Chifley?

'Oh, he did,' Taylor said. 'He was a close friend. Mr Chifley and I, and Mr Gordon Wood, who was a Clerk of Petty Sessions at Katoomba, an old digger, used to have long discussions about these points... Mr Chifley was very upset about it.'

Windeyer: 'Mr Chifley and you may have discussed the fact that he may have been a member of the Communist Party, but you do not suggest for one moment that he enjoyed Mr Chifley's confidence if he was a member of the Communist Party?'

'He was a businessman in Katoomba and in every respect a good citizen. I lived at Blackheath for some time and knew about his movements. Chif, as we called the old man, was very fond of him and thought a lot of him. We had discussions and talks and Chif used to get quite worked up about it. We could not say "he is" or "he is not" but we could say that he followed the line, whatever that may mean.'

'I suppose you had similar discussions about a lot of people?'

'Oh, quite a lot, Mr Windeyer − too many probably.'

Justice Owen: 'Thank you.'

Taylor rose to leave. When he had gone Justice Owen said: 'Quite unwittingly he might have made a statement which would have indicated to one of his listeners something which could have caused them to think, "We know where he got that from, and therefore we know this particular source".'

Windeyer: 'I would think that is almost certainly so.'

On 23 August 1955, just before the release to parliament of the royal commission's findings, the commission released extracts from evidence of some people that had been kept secret. Newspapers reported the suspected leakage in 1950 to the Communist Party of security agents' names and security car numbers, and allegations by Petrov of Russian military spying in Australia. But most prominence went to the small part of the evidence in which Justice Taylor, whose appearance before it until then almost nobody knew about, denied any communist link and explained how the mention in the Russian note might have occurred.

Taylor's judicial career was marked by disagreements with judges under him who were more conservative. But he had a good public image, particularly with workers, whom he tended to favour in his judgments. Since the start of 1943, during an era in which strikes were frequent in Australia, his job had been one of the most important and difficult in NSW: leading official attempts to prevent or end those strikes. It was a job he was to continue doing until his retirement in 1966. He played a key role in maintaining industrial peace during the building of our greatest infrastructure project, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, in restoring it at NSW's great producer of wealth, Broken Hill, and elsewhere.

Despite the brief and favourable extract released to the media, his appearance before the royal commission was said to have damaged that image. His full evidence however, had it been published at the time, would probably in most eyes have improved it. Probably it would also have improved further the excellent image of Chifley among most Labor supporters, and many people who were not, who at least thought him honest.

Taylor never tried to hide his friendship with Fitzpatrick, whose image after he left jail, considering all the questions that remained about him, was incredibly good. He liked to have a drink or two sometimes with Fitzpatrick at a Bankstown hotel, or lunch somewhere, and attended Christmas parties for his workers at the allegedly stolen aircraft hangar. Taylor went on hunting trips with him and sometimes spent weekends or holidays at one of two apartments Fitzpatrick owned at Cronulla. He was even listed in the Sydney telephone directory under the number at one of the apartments. Despite all the allegations of corruption involving Fitzpatrick there appeared never to have been any spelled out in public at any official level about Taylor.

In 1955, however, opponents of the official Labor Party were fuelling paranoia about communism. Inside the party the war over claims of communist influence among its members and leadership was worsening. In March that year many members broke away and formed the Anti-Communist Labor Party, later the Democratic Labor Party. That paranoia and other problems involving allegations of communism affected Australian politics for years to come.

Taylor's evidence to the royal commission showed that he, like his brother, had been close in 1942 to a man who in 1945 became prime minister and in later decades became revered in the Labor Party. Chifley was treasurer for most of the war and Curtin relied on him to oversee the home front while he concentrated on the war. Probably Chifley never heard anything about Ray Fitzpatrick until the allegations in parliament in March 1944.

During a long speech in parliament on 3 December 1946, Evatt, still the Attorney-General, got onto the subject of the security reports about the pre-war schemes to help Jews fleeing the Nazis that mentioned Morgan. Jack Lang had used the reports deceitfully, while making allegations about post-war immigration, as part of his help for Fitzpatrick, who shortly before had financed his successful campaign to replace Morgan temporarily in the seat of Reid.

After angry debates sparked by Lang's speech, Evatt said the reports mentioning Morgan were compiled in August 1940 and February 1941 by the government's MPI (Military Police Intelligence) Section, which had personnel from the police forces and military intelligence. When the Commonwealth Security Service was formed in early 1942 a file containing them went into the care of that.

Evatt said that after the 'bitter wartime controversy' involving Fitzpatrick and Morgan, a copy of the file fell into Fitzpatrick's hands and was used by him. 'It was obvious to officers who investigated the matter that he must have had a copy, and when they confronted him he did not deny it. The investigators have been trying to find the person who supplied the copy but it is not easy. Every person in the Security Service and in allied services has been examined. Documents have been studied and typewriters have been examined. But these skilled investigators have had to report that they are unable to find who is responsible. The Crown Law officers say that it is not possible to proceed against Fitzpatrick on the facts as known.'

That indicates Evatt had no knowledge at the time of Taylor's friendship with Fitzpatrick. Anything confidential about matters involving Fitzpatrick during the war seems to have gone direct to Prime Minister Curtin, who died in July 1945, and was replaced by Chifley. As also the minister for external affairs throughout that period, Evatt no doubt had innumerable matters to occupy his attention. He did however have overall responsibility for legal affairs. During the war his department was involved in the war expenditure committee's investigation of Fitzpatrick and talks involving Crown Law staff about possible criminal charges against him.

Chifley also had a big workload as he tried to keep a wartime economy functioning as well as possible. As Prime Minister he later oversaw the equally difficult task of transforming that back to a peacetime economy. If Evatt in late 1946 did not know about Taylor's already long friendship with Fitzpatrick then Chifley could not have been expected to either.

Ben Chifley died in June 1951, the year, to judge from Browne's writing, when rumours about the Taylor-Fitzpatrick friendship began to circulate in political circles. Possibly by then Chifley still had not heard anything about it. If he had, and also about matters in government reports during 1944 involving Fitzpatrick, it is reasonable to assume he would have been more upset about those connections than he was about the suggestions concerning the political orientation of Milliss.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Friendship and International Secrecy

Stan Taylor's 1942 position as head of the Commonwealth Security Service in NSW obviously helped explain how the security reports mentioning Morgan probably reached Fitzpatrick. Taylor's Security Service contacts also helped explain a surprising problem of Magnusson mentioned in the August 1944 report to Curtin.

In June 1944 he investigated alleged serious discrepancies between quantities of blue metal delivered to the Bankstown air force base and those for which the government paid. To find out more about Fitzpatrick's operations, Magnusson on June 22 followed at a distance a truckload of blue metal from a Fitzpatrick quarry at Prospect, west of Sydney.

Although four deliveries were normally made each day, it became the only one that day. Along the way the driver stopped at a disused quarry and topped it up heavily. The driver, when questioned, said this was normal practice. The committee agreed with Magnusson that that was nonsense and that the driver appeared to have advance knowledge he would be followed. But that driver's charade helped complicate an already difficult investigation.

Knowledge that the driver would be followed that day probably needed help from someone with access to confidential federal investigation files and skills such as phone-tapping. After Stan Taylor left the Security Service at the start of 1943 he continued a friendship with an investigator there who had such access and skills. His name was Alfred Thompson Hughes.

In 1924, aged 24, Hughes joined the NSW police after family financial problems while studying medicine. A skilful detective-constable being overlooked for promotion, he transferred in 1940 to the military police. In 1942 Hughes moved to the Security Service and became the head of counter-espionage in NSW. The only espionage anyone would have been thinking about in 1942 was espionage for Japan.

He was the Constable Hughes in chapter five whom Taylor mentioned on 13 May 1955 to Ray Whitrod, the head of the Commonwealth Investigation Service. Whitrod was questioning Taylor at his judicial chambers about copies of the Security Service reports on Morgan obtained by Fitzpatrick during the war. Taylor was evasive about whether Hughes might have supplied the reports to Fitzpatrick.

On 17 May 1955, Morgan said in his suppressed parliamentary committee evidence that a 'gentleman from Security' was sent 'on behalf of Stan Taylor' to his office in 1944. That was Hughes. His purpose, said Morgan, was to ask him what he could do to help Fitzpatrick out of 'some bother' about the building said to be an aircraft hangar. After the war Alfred Hughes became a detective-sergeant in the Sydney Vice Squad.

One main reason for such tight secrecy being maintained over the Bankstown Affair for so many years afterwards appears to have been Stan Taylor's co-existing close friendships with Fitzpatrick and Hughes. The other reason involved Hughes and extreme secrecy over a US espionage program.

In late 1942, as Soviet forces trapped a German army in the ruins of Stalingrad, an American army security chief ordered the interception of Soviet intelligence messages to and from Moscow. He had heard of rumours that Stalin was planning a separate peace, leaving the Americans, British and other allies to fight on without Russia against Germany. In early 1943 US codebreakers began working with difficulty on messages intercepted by US, British and Australian listening posts. Soon they were joined by British experts, some of whom had worked at the later famous Bletchley Park, in what became known as the Venona Project.

Russians usually used codes in which numerals replaced letters and were encrypted in a way that should have protected the messages. An encryption blunder helped the codebreakers. They found no indications of feared Hitler-Stalin peace talks. But they did find increasing evidence of Russian spying on its allies.

One focus became messages from Australia. Some made clear that confidential US or British messages to Australian authorities had been passed on by somebody to Moscow. In late 1944 Australia's commander in chief, General Tom Blamey, was furious when he learned about some, concerning General MacArthur's plans to invade the Philippines and estimates of Japanese military strength there, which apparently had gone with Russian help from Australia to the Japanese high command. There was conjecture that these had been passed to Tokyo as part of a devious game by Moscow, which did not declare war on Japan until a few days before it surrendered.

The Russians made changes after learning in 1945 about Venona from an American spy. But teams in the US and Britain, helped soon by primitive computers, continued after the war to decipher the wartime messages as well as anything possible after it. By far the biggest focus became anything from the US concerning atomic bombs. In the US the intercepts led to convictions of atomic spies and the controversial executions in 1953 of two, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The wartime messages from Australia, however, remained a focus. A top-level team in Britain's anti-espionage agency, MI5, began directing this. As a result of what they found, American and British leaders became concerned about security in matters such as the testing of missiles and possible nuclear weapons in Australia. Those concerns led to an American ban on sensitive information to Australia and to British pressure on Prime Minister Chifley to start a service similar to MI5.

There was strong resistance to such a service in the Labor Party and at first Chifley treated the Russian threat lightly. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948 helped to change his mind. In July, just after the blockade began, he went to London on a visit previously arranged to discuss economic matters. British Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee was more interested in strategic and security issues. The British, who had already asked for Australian aircraft and crews to help break the blockade, arranged for Chifley to visit Berlin briefly and watch the airlift.

In September 1948, after gaining some cabinet support, Chifley accepted British help to start a security service that in 1949 became known as ASIO.

Before he died in 1951, Ben Chifley already had good reason to be upset about the relationship between Ray Fitzpatrick and Stan Taylor. He would have been even more upset if he had known about a connection through Taylor with Alfred Hughes and the Venona Project.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A Russian Spy Codenamed Ben

The Venona material soon began to point to Australians, most with Moscow code names, who had spied, and in some cases appeared still to be spying, for the Russians. Their spymaster was codenamed Klod. Material brought by Petrov when he defected helped point to Clayton as Klod.

Windeyer probably would have had some knowledge of that background when he asked Taylor casually about Hughes during his secret evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage. Something Windeyer possibly did not know at the time was that messages from Australia to Moscow during the war mentioned a Soviet agent, apparently with high connections, codenamed Ben in Moscow. By 1948 Venona material had pointed to Hughes as Ben. So also soon afterwards did ASIO investigations as the new agency got into stride.

In 1954 that code name turned up in a list of 11 people headed 'Contacts K' in Sadovnikov's handwriting brought by Petrov when he defected. Down one side was how they were known in Moscow. Alongside most was brief identification. Number five on the list was Ben and a name in Russian that was translated as Hughes. In a book, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, David McKnight described the list as 'full of the possibilities and high hopes of a low ranking intelligence officer, rather than a spy ring'. McKnight was a former left-wing journalist who became a middle-of-the-road author and academic. His book was published in Sydney by Allen and Unwin in 1994.

Another book, Breaking the Codes, by Australian National University academics Desmond Ball and David Horner, dealt with the Venona material. Their book was published in Sydney by Allen and Unwin in 1998. Professors Ball and Horner wrote that, because of concerns about security in the White House, presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman never knew about the project. Nor did some fairly senior people in Britain's MI5. However, Chifley was told about it in 1949, they said. So, in 1950, was Menzies, who replaced Chifley as Prime Minister in December 1949.

Ball and Horner wrote that, in a bid to prevent the Russians learning more about the scale and scope of the project, techniques involved and particular findings, the Venona secrecy was maintained for decades. Anyone who asked embarrassing questions about the source of particular knowledge was usually given hints of a top-level 'mole' in Moscow whose secrecy had to be protected.

They cited evidence from Security Service personnel who knew them during 1942 that Hughes was a 'constant' adviser of Taylor, spent much of this spare time with him, and even taught him how to drive. They referred to 'unexplored questions' concerning their relationship, and also to the Sadovnikov note. But Ball and Horner did not otherwise treat Taylor as important for their story about codebreaking and its results.

Hughes they appeared to think possibly the most important of all in Australia. But they said the wartime intercepts provided few details about information Hughes handed to Clayton from 1943 to 1945, mainly about how the Security Service operated. This was a subject of Moscow congratulations to Clayton. Ball and Horner said Hughes was investigated by ASIO from 1949 to 1952 but not questioned because of the secrecy. In 1957 he was interrogated at last, altogether about six times. But he gave away nothing of importance. He was nervous during the interrogations, Ball and Horner said. Knowledge from long police, legal and Security Service work, however, enabled him to bluff his way through them.

McKnight wrote that Hughes was nervous during the first interview, held at a George Street cafe in Sydney's centre after an informal approach, but seemed interested in trying to find out how much ASIO knew about him. McKnight also said that earlier, in 1951, Hughes had tried to join ASIO. He was questioned about this and claimed he was 'unsettled' in his work at the time.

The ASIO investigations of Hughes 'exposed a myriad of contradictions that cannot be resolved', Ball and Horner said. They concluded their chapters concerning investigations of people thrown up by the Venona material, most with Department of Foreign Affairs links, by saying: 'The investigation of Hughes was a painful affair for ASIO. It was in some respects the successor organisation to the wartime Security Service, and the notion that a security officer responsible for monitoring the espionage and subversive activities of the Communist Party was himself a secret member of the party and working for the KGB was not easy to entertain. Spry (Charles, the high-profile head of ASIO from 1950 to 1969), until his death in May 1994, maintained a forlorn hope that Hughes's membership of the Klod group would not be publicised.'

Apart from a brief 1980 public mention, the Venona secrecy was maintained until 1985, when a former assistant director of MI5, Peter Wright, living in retirement in Tasmania, tried to publish an autobiography, Spycatcher, which gave some details about this among other matters. The British government tried to stop its publication. They were able to do so for a while in England, but not in Scotland, which had different laws, or other countries. Wright's government legal battles helped create an international reputation for Australian lawyer Malcolm Turnbull. Then, in 1986, Robert Lamphere, a former American FBI liaison officer with the Venona project, published a book, The FBI-KGB War, with many details.

The US government did not officially reveal the existence of the project, and release some material, until 1995. The first Australian material was released in 1996, too late for McKnight's book, but in time for that of Ball and Horner.

The writers of both books obviously did very extensive research and knew about Hughes's Moscow code name. But they did not appear to have known about Taylor's full secret evidence to the royal commission, which showed how close he was during the war also to Chifley.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Political Dangers

Over more than a decade there were many calls in the federal and NSW parliaments for a public inquiry, or even a royal commission, into matters involving Ray Fitzpatrick. In 1955 some speakers also mentioned Stan Taylor. In Fitzpatrick's wartime friendship with Taylor, when Taylor was also a good friend of Ben Chifley, was already a potential for headlines. Add in Alfred Hughes, that Moscow code name and the paranoia about communism, and they might have been even more lurid in some newspapers than some about a 'reign of terror' after the fire at the Torch.

Labor members, Evatt in particular, were in the firing line in 1955 and had the greatest cause of those in the federal parliament to fear possible headlines involving the communism angle.

Evatt, suspecting a conspiracy by Menzies and ASIO in the defection of Petrov, was becoming bitter and mentally unbalanced. For a while he appeared as a lawyer for members of his staff called before the royal commission, behaviour almost unheard of for a national party leader anywhere. Helped apparently by information from people in the intelligence community, he made progress cross-examining ASIO witnesses. But after angry outbursts by him the commissioners withdrew his permission to appear.

On 19 October 1955, during a speech in parliament soon after the release of the commission's report, Evatt stunned members on both sides when he said he had written to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov asking if Russian documents given by Petrov to ASIO were false. When he said Molotov told him they were, many burst into laughter.

Menzies also had cause to fear possible headlines. He had been in charge at the federal level when everything had begun early in the war, and had been again since late 1949. He had come out of the jailing of Fitzpatrick and Browne badly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Menzies was in a sensitive situation concerning national security. Petrov had been a godsend for him, as was ASIO's enthusiasm for fighting communism. ASIO by then was obviously far more right-wing at the top than the 1942 federal Security Service in NSW under Stan Taylor.

Most Australians would have regarded the nation in 1942, when the Japanese swept south, as being in extremely more real danger than it was from far-away communist armies in 1955. Most had also indicated, in their wartime voting, that they thought Labor was doing a better job of leading Australia during that war than Menzies before he lost power, through lack of support, in 1941. Probably nearly everyone by 1955 was at least a bit anti-communist. But that didn't make them anti-socialist. Many still had strong memories of suffering they had seen or experienced during the Depression. This was an area where Menzies and his party had to step carefully.

Menzies also had to step carefully in connection with Venona. He was still one of only a small number of Australians who knew about that, and was sworn to secrecy. Petrov and the material he brought proved much less use to the royal commission than Menzies had hoped. So did most witnesses called. It must have been frustrating to know that in an ASIO safe was a lot of material that might have done more to support all the allegations of espionage. As a lawyer, though, Menzies would also have realised that the Venona material might have been regarded as hearsay and would thus be inadmissible in a court.

It appears that the only messages passed to Moscow that might have been harmful for any Australians were those the Russians seem to have passed on in 1944 to the Japanese high command about American plans to invade the Philippines. They would not have come from Hughes, and could have helped cause casualties among Australian airmen and naval personnel who took part in the invasion. That surely would have appalled Taylor and Hughes.

In another inquiry, Fitzpatrick would have been questioned and cross-examined. That could have been interesting. He was always connected with the Labor Party. But that was mainly because Labor controlled Bankstown and the surrounding districts. Fitzpatrick probably could not have cared less about political ideology, and through horseracing he had influential friends, or at least acquaintances, on both sides of politics.

Taylor presumably would have been called as a witness. He must have known more than most people about where wartime political bodies were buried and could also have been interesting.

Menzies and Evatt at government, parliamentary or party levels both had power in the background of the Bankstown and Petrov affairs during the mid-1950s, and also the background of both affairs during the war. Conceivably they could have been called to give evidence and been cross-examined.

Evatt's 1955 deputy leader, Arthur Calwell, might have been called. So might Eddie Ward, who in 1960, when Calwell became party leader, narrowly lost a fight with Whitlam to replace him as deputy. Taylor allegedly approached Ward on Fitzpatrick's behalf in 1944. Ward seems to have delved more than anyone on the Labor side into the background of everything. In copies of dozens of internal government letters and memos concerning Fitzpatrick released this century to the National Archives I only once saw the words 'national security'. In 1951 Ward asked for a 1944 report not named by Menzies in his reply. Menzies gave national security as his reason for refusing the request.

Calwell and Ward were both on the left of the party and known for their fierce opinions. Newspapers sometimes called them 'Labor's terrible twins'. Sometimes they caused almost as much fear among Labor's opponents as they did in their own party.

Later prime minister Harold Holt, who chaired the war expenditure committee meetings concerning Fitzpatrick in 1944, was an obvious person to call.

Still lurking in the background was Jack Lang, a man with 'a genius for probing mercilessly Labor's sore spots', as Alan Reid wrote in 1955. There were still 17 years to go before, thanks to Keating, Lang was readmitted to a party he had controlled in NSW from 1925 to 1939. An often great hater, Lang in 1955 might have welcomed a chance to again get back at some old enemies, even after their death. One of the two most important of his lifetime was Chifley.

Other big names could have could have been dragged in. Browne in his newsletter in 1951 had connected the 'dynamite' in Bankstown not only with Justice Taylor but with Lang's other most important lifetime enemy. That was a man who in 1939 had won Labor party control in NSW and who, along with Chifley, had helped to expel Lang from the party in 1943. During the war he had been the premier of NSW and from 1947 to 1953 he had been our second native-born governor-general, Sir William McKell.

In the morass of inter-party and Labor intra-party fighting in 1955 there were many other present or former politicians who might have been called. The possible witnesses who would most have worried Evatt and Menzies, however, and their advisers, were in national security and law enforcement.

Jack Magnusson probably knew more than anyone about allegations against Fitzpatrick and people friendly with him. Magnusson posed other dangers. In his book, McKnight made an interesting claim about the man who got Petrov to defect, Polish-born Dr Michael Bialoguski, who had befriended him. Petrov had recruited Bialoguski as a Russian spy but he was in fact working for ASIO. 'Bialoguski (dubbed "Liar-Boguski" by his opponents) found his way to ASIO's employ when his CIS contact, Jack Magnusson, transferred to the new security service,' McKnight said. If that were so, Magnusson probably also would have known more than almost anyone about Bialoguski, a person then of much speculation in the media and among political opponents of Menzies.

Magnusson was a highly regarded federal agent. During the war he was in the Commonwealth Investigation Branch. Alfred Hughes was in the Security Service, the other main federal body with investigators. The activities of those two bodies appear to have overlapped. Staff moved between them. Probably both had access to much of each other's classified material. While Magnusson was investigating Fitzpatrick in 1944 someone appeared to have been spying on Magnusson for the purpose of helping Fitzpatrick avoid a criminal prosecution for defrauding the federal government. Long before 1955, Magnusson must have known the culprit had to be Hughes, the head of anti-espionage in NSW. Magnusson was probably not too happy about that.

By 1955 Magnusson had been in ASIO for several years. Because of his special background he probably knew by then the main reasons ASIO was interested in Hughes. In an open court Magnusson could have been a very interesting witness.

So could Ray Whitrod, who was much more publicly known than Magnusson and even more highly regarded. In 1947 Whitrod was recruited from Adelaide police to become a senior ASIO official. McKnight said his office at ASIO's first Sydney headquarters, just behind the Garden Island dockyards, was next to that of MI5's liaison officer, Courtney Young. According to McKnight, Young supplied Whitrod and two other founding chiefs with material concerning Australians, including their Russian code names. Whitrod then helped lead long investigations into those. By 1955, when he interviewed Fitzpatrick and Taylor, Whitrod was head of the Commonwealth Investigation Service. Because of that and his former ASIO position, however, he would almost certainly have been careful in anything he said in an open court.

Then, of course, there was Alfred Hughes. Like Magnusson and Whitrod, he might have been interesting in an open court for more than one reason. From 1945 to 1960 he was a detective-sergeant in the Sydney Vice Squad. Possibly he knew about matters of another nature that some people might not have liked to become public. Hughes was not among the 119 witnesses called before the Royal Commission on Espionage. A fair guess is that a way would have been found to prevent him appearing at any inquiry concerning the activities of Fitzpatrick.

All of this is conjecture. If any of those men, and possibly others, had gone into an open court, where witnesses could have been cross-examined under oath by lawyers for different parties, no one can say what they might have said. Even if people denied questions put to them, the questions themselves might have provided fodder for newspaper headlines, as had happened during the Torch fire inquiry.

Petrov and his wife, a cyber expert who decided to remain in Australia after an angry crowd overpowered two burly Russians dragging her towards an aircraft at Darwin Airport, were the Soviet Union's two most senior diplomatic espionage officers to defect during those decades. They were Australia's most notable contribution to the Cold War that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of the twentieth century. McKnight claimed they helped identify more than 500 KGB officers to the security services of the US and Britain. But they provided little evidence of any major spy ring here that would support a prosecution, and there was none. As a result, the royal commission became to many a bore.

The less important Torch inquiry, held in July 1955, while the royal commission was still preparing its findings, had however at times been fascinating. It had provided none of the expected evidence of corruption in high places. But it had developed in ways few people could have foreseen. Those proved damaging for Phil Engisch and Morgan among others, but highly beneficial for Ray Fitzpatrick. 'GIRL SNEAKED TO FIRE PROBE.' 'Story of Gun Threat Denied.' Newspaper headline writers loved that inquiry.

Another hearing would not have not have had the restricted focus of the Torch inquiry. There were many possible dangers if a wide inquiry about matters involving Ray Fitzpatrick had gone into an open court.

In parliament on 6 September 1955, when Menzies promised to table that 1944 report to Curtin, he probably knew ASIO was investigating a wartime anti-espionage chief named Alfred Hughes but was being hindered by the Venona secrecy. Possibly, however, Menzies at that stage had not been told about that Moscow code name. He would have known about the friendship of Taylor and Fitzpatrick. But he also might not have known about their connection with Hughes or about Taylor's closeness to Chifley. Evatt probably knew less than Menzies.

When Menzies went back on his promise a week later, and refused to table the report, he was right when he said the war expenditure committee had not been intending to make a definite finding on facts and that Fitzpatrick had not been able to defend himself before it. So was Evatt when he agreed with Menzies' decision and the reasons he had given. But in understanding what they said that day it helps to know the background.

Behind that decision were serious causes for embarrassment on both sides of politics and in the national security establishment.

The main focus of Menzies and Evatt would no doubt still have been the effects of the Petrov Affair on the Labor Party. Both as party leaders would have been busy men with many other matters also to think about. When, almost a week before, they had received those letters from Fitzpatrick's city solicitor, they had probably shown them to people with a more detailed knowledge of the situation and asked for advice.

Relevant documents would have been obtained and glanced through. Presumably they would have included those that Clerk of the House Lyn Barlin later thought no-one should ever be allowed to see. On the government side, ASIO chief Charles Spry would have been called in. Labor seems to have had some good advisers in the intelligence community. Important details in Taylor's top secret evidence to the espionage royal commission in January 1955, and Morgan's suppressed evidence in May to the privileges committee, would have been read.

At least on the government side, all the dots involving Hughes would have been joined. Other matters never made public might also have been discussed. Possible dangers stemming from the tabling of that 1944 report to Curtin concerning Ray Fitzpatrick would have been discussed. The most important of those dangers was to the US and British secrecy about the Venona project. Calls would have gone between the two sides.

Between Menzies and Evatt, at the time two of the most savagely opposed national party leaders in our history, an at least tacit agreement seems to have been reached on concerns beyond those in the letters to them from Fitzpatrick's city solicitor. You don't talk about some things and I won't either. Their advisers on both sides supported them. Much of the material went into safes in Canberra.

Alfred Hughes retired honourably in 1960 as a detective-sergeant, first class. After working as a department store detective he retired permanently and died in 1978. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Russia became a great place for capitalist thieves. And no newspapers ever wrote headlines about a wartime anti-espionage chief, with a close link to later ASIO founder Ben Chifley, who was codenamed Ben in Moscow.
