
Australian Secrets Feared by MI5 and the CIA for Decades

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Neil Landers

In 2019 I published on the internet a book, How a Web of Australian Secrets Worried US and British Spy Chiefs for Decades. It contained some mistakes and I later discovered many details I thought should have been included. This book has new chapters at the start and finish. Those in between are much the same but have often been trimmed and improved.

In 1944, when I was a small child, my father, a teenage survivor of a shell at the Somme in 1916, began getting drunk every night for a few years. The reason, I learned as I got older, was two weeks of serious allegations in the Australian Parliament about one of his accountancy clients. An extraordinary veil of official secrecy, still not completely lifted, was later drawn over some matters behind those allegations. Personal difficulties I faced while trying to find details included lies about my private life and official attempts to prove I was working for Moscow. But I was able to penetrate parts of the veil concerning that accountancy client.

I now understand the reasons for the secrecy. I think they would have astonished my father even more than they did me.

Neil Landers   
landersnr@gmail.com

The author retired in 2013 after 57 years mostly spent working on newspapers in Australia, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London. They included a decade as a sub-editor at the Australian Financial Review and then more than three decades in the same work at the country's only other national daily, The Australian.

The people on the front cover are Evdokia Petrov, the talented but tragic wife of, just below, Moscow's incompetent spy chief in Australia during the mid-1950s. The other men are Australia's deputy head of national security as the Japanese headed towards Australia in 1942, a businessman who became very rich during that war and later had many friends in high places, and Moscow's surprisingly well-placed chief spy in Australia at the time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - Russian Spy Chief Defects

CHAPTER TWO - Airport Violence

CHAPTER THREE - Mysterious Explosion

CHAPTER FOUR - Routes to Riches

CHAPTER FIVE - Lurid Newspaper Stories

CHAPTER SIX - Scourge of Politicians

CHAPTER SEVEN - Browne Starts Punching

CHAPTER EIGHT - History of Troubles

CHAPTER NINE - Federal Police Act

CHAPTER TEN - Wartime Allegations and Parliamentary Privilege

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Drama in Parliament

CHAPTER TWELVE - Jailings Condemned

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Denials, Surprises and Vapour

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Clouds over Labor

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Jubilation at Jail Departures

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Menzies Breaks Promise

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Mixed Fortunes

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Parliament Releases Documents

CHAPTER NINETEEN - Justice Taylor's Evidence

CHAPTER TWENTY - A Russian Spy Codenamed Ben

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Extreme Venona Secrecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Dangers in an Open Court

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - The Good Name of Ben Chifley

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Wartime swings

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - A 'Brilliant Success of Espionage'

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Venona Victims

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Remaining Mysteries

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Different aftermaths

## CHAPTER ONE

### Russian Spy Chief Defects

On the morning of 3 April 1954 a stocky round-faced man, Vladimir Petrov, was driven to Sydney Airport, where he met Soviet officials, including a man who was about to replace him, and talked briefly. Ostensibly a junior diplomat, Petrov was a colonel in the Soviet security service and its secret spy chief in Australia. His main job had been to establish a spy ring in Australia, at which he had been a hopeless failure. For that and other reasons he was about to be sent back to Russia, where he faced possible execution.

In his hand was a satchel with many documents. The previous evening, helped by a promise of £5000, and possibly a lot more depending on what the documents contained, he had signed a formal request for political asylum in Australia. After leaving the airport he was driven to a hotel where he handed money to Soviet officials on their way to New Zealand. Still holding the satchel, he was then driven to a safe house on Sydney's north shore, where one of the men in the car, Ron Richards, director of operations at the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, handed him £5000. After checking the money Petrov gave Richards the documents in the satchel.

Petrov, born with another surname, had not told his wife Evdokia, being held at their embassy residence in Canberra, he was about to defect. Secretly a security service captain, she was a competent office manager and skilled codebreaker. Also about to be returned to Russia, she was facing terrible problems of her own at the embassy, according to historian Robert Manne in _The Petrov Affair_ , his definitive account of many matters involving Petrov, first published in 1987, from which nearly all the details in this chapter and many in the next come. She had discussed defection with her husband. But she did not share his low opinion of life in the Soviet Union and was worried about the fate of family members if she did not go back, said Manne.

They had never been too happily married. Both were of peasant background, something politically desirable in Stalin's Russia. Youthful work for a Communist Party tightening its grip over all aspects of Russian life led in the 1930s to both becoming small cogs in the Moscow state security service. That led to much better educational opportunities. Both learned English and Evdokia also learned Japanese. Both learned cipher skills and the more intelligent Evdokia basics of codebreaking. Vladimir managed to stay on the right sides during the terror and purges that began in the late 1930s and by the early 1940s was a major in the security service.

Evdokia was not so successful. In 1936 a de facto relationship with a senior cryptanalytic worker led the next year to a daughter. Of upper-class Balkan background, he had when young worked for the tsarist government and was an obvious target for Stalin's secret police. He was sent to a labour camp. Evdokia, working as a codebreaker of diplomatic cables to the Japanese embassy in Moscow, almost lost her job. In 1940 their daughter died, which hurt her deeply. Vladimir had ended a marriage in 1938, had no official black marks against him and was rising in the security service. To her he seemed a chance to salvage her career. That led to their marriage.

During the Nazi invasion in 1942, when the Germans had reached the outskirts of Moscow, Vladimir had helped hold the fort in his cipher department with almost no staff. And he spoke English, as did Evdokia. As the tide of war turned they were sent to Stockholm, in neutral Sweden, where his work included keeping an eye on embassy staff. His official surname was now Petrov, which was thought more suitable for diplomatic work. Evdokia became a multi-skilled office worker and also an intelligence officer who ran two female Swedish agents. In 1947 they returned to Russia and in 1951 were sent to Australia.

When they arrived by passenger liner in Sydney, along with several other Russians, they were greeted on the dock by the local Tass newsagency representative Pakhamov and the Soviet embassy second secretary Sadovnikov, who was the security service intelligence chief in Australia and was about to return to Moscow. A NSW Police Special Branch informant on the boat who had been keeping a discreet eye on the Russians had identified Vladimir as the person who seemed most important. ASIO, which knew Sadovnikov's main job, was informed.

After the war refugees had poured into Australia from Russia and former Soviet areas such as the Baltic States. Petrov had been instructed to make contact with such people, convince some it was safe to return home, and with the help of Pakhamov to establish a spy ring. He had however mainly been a desk worker, sending orders to other people. He had little experience of field work and mixing with foreigners. This soon became obvious to his chiefs at Moscow Centre, in charge of such overseas activities, who reprimanded him and Pakhamov for the low quality of their work. After acting as security service chief, Pakhamov in early 1952 was recalled to Russia.

But Moscow Centre kept Petrov in place and made him its chief in Australia. He was given special responsibility for cultural and consular work, which enabled frequent travel to Sydney and Melbourne, where there were consulates and also Australian-Soviet Friendship Societies. His most frequent destination however became the Russian Social Club in Sydney's George Street.

Alcohol became an increasing problem for him. In July 1952, while driving through Canberra under its influence, he almost ran down a police constable. The policeman chased him on a motorcycle but Petrov was able to reach the embassy and disappear into its diplomatic safety. An embassy official was sent out to placate the constable.

In March 1953 Stalin died and many people at Moscow Centre, as elsewhere at high places throughout the Soviet Union, soon had something much more important to think about than overseas espionage problems: their own survival. Stalin's ruthless and widely-hated security chief Lavrenti Beria tried to grab power but this was resisted by many with influence. At high levels there was chaos. In mid-1953 Beria was arrested and later that year he was executed, as were many Soviet security officers connected with him.

At the Soviet embassy in Canberra this had repercussions. New staff began to arrive who were not appointed by officials with Beria links. The chaos in Russia had distracted attention from Petrov's incompetence. But he and his wife had been sent out while Beria controlled security and were accused of trying to form a 'Beria cell' in the embassy. He had seen how well most Australians lived, in contrast to most in Russia, and began to think about defecting.

At ASIO there were people happy to help him do this. And they already had in place a man able to facilitate that: Michael Bialoguski, who first met Petrov at the Russian Social Club in July 1951. A Polish medical student fluent in English and Russian, Bialoguski in early 1941 had gone across Russia to Japan and from there had been able to reach Sydney five months before Pearl Harbor. After completing his medical training he opened a surgery at a small and mainly upmarket medical precinct near the Sydney Harbour end of Macquarie Street, not far past the NSW Parliament. There he performed illegal abortions. A talented violinist, he played for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He also offered his services to the Australian government as an anti-communist agent and was accepted.

Much was written about Bialoguski, often without much clarity. There was conjecture about his beliefs and motivations. He was said to have been an agent, double agent and possible triple agent. But what seem to have most interested him were money and sex. There is little doubt however that he was the person who most helped Petrov decide to defect.

Bialoguski's meetings with Petrov at the Russian Social Club increased during 1952 and early 1953. He had learned early that Vladimir, as he said, "liked the girls". After consumption of alcohol he began helping him pick up prostitutes, mainly at Sydney's Kings Cross red-light district. Later he began sometimes taking him to brothels. All that drinking and whoring in Sydney cost money. Petrov, with the help of Bialoguski, began defrauding the Soviet embassy with rackets involving false invoices for hotel accommodation and also large amounts of imported whisky, charged to the embassy and sold around Sydney drinking places.

Down in Canberra, Evdokia, who seems not to have been fully aware of how much of the proceeds were being used, was able, as the embassy's accountant among other jobs, to help cover this up. She had begun having problems of her own involving sex. The worst involved Ambassador Lifanov, who in 1952 wanted her to become his mistress. Evdokia was still fairly young and was better-looking than many of the other women at the embassy, particularly the wives of some of the senior men, including Ambassador Lifanov. When she rejected his advances, she claimed later, he became unpleasant.

Her great pleasure was shopping. She liked buying, and then wearing, stylish clothes. She also enjoyed listening to western music and watching western films. She was more competent than most of the staff, male or female, and not afraid to speak her mind about their shortcomings. Her work as the embassy's accountant caused special problems in a place with many petty fiddles involving money. Then, on top of the jealousies and other problems, came the death of Stalin and execution of Beria.

On 20 November 1953 a new ambassador announced the dismissal of Evdokia as embassy secretary and accountant. Staff shunned her and her fears increased, as did those of her husband. In Sydney Petrov told Bialoguski about this and about bitter hostility between his wife and the new ambassador.

That sacking changed everything, said Robert Manne in _The Petrov Affair_. Bialoguski, after earlier being himself sacked by ASIO during a dispute about money, had begun negotiations with the Sydney Morning Herald to write articles about his role as an undercover agent. On November 23 he phoned Ron Richards, told him about the sacking, and said Evdokia and her husband wished to defect. He said he would help if ASIO gave him back his old job. Otherwise he would go to newspapers.

At the highest levels of ASIO calls went back and forth. ASIO chief Charles Spry and others were suspicious of Bialoguski, whom they regarded as an unscrupulous mercenary. Some thought he might be a communist agent. 'Clearly,' said Manne, 'ASIO did decide that the potential costs of not dealing with Bialoguski outweighed the risks of dealing with him.' On November 27 Richards re-employed him on a higher weekly salary than before after he accepted a list of conditions.

For a while Petrov seemed to lose his enthusiasm for defection. Then he received official notice that both of them would have to leave by sea on April 5, when his replacement as local security service chief would arrive. Bialoguski was able to speak to Evdokia and said she did not seem to care much about what would happen to her father and brother if she did not go back but worried greatly about her mother and sister. He told Richards that Petrov thought Evdokia almost certainly would go back to Moscow.

Bialoguski shared his Macquarie Street medical premises with a Dr Beckett, an eye specialist who had begun treating Petrov for an eye problem and had been brought into ASIO's defection plan. Partly with his help, Bialoguski was able to arrange a meeting in his own Sydney apartment on February 27 between Petrov and Richards. At more meetings there during following weeks the two men discussed details, money and Evdokia.

Petrov wanted no publicity about his defection before she sailed on a passenger liner a few days after his replacement arrived. He was afraid she might be killed at the embassy or held there as a hostage to threaten him with the possibility of doing so if he did not return. Richards reassured him on no publicity and suggested a contact with her on the boat after it sailed by an ASIO agent with a note from him. Petrov thought she might possibly change her mind and defect when the boat reached Fremantle and agreed to that.

At the embassy tensions increased. On March 31, after a communist party meeting brought charges against him and his wife, Petrov found his desk and safe had been thoroughly searched. On April 1, now deeply afraid, he informed Richards he would return to Sydney and never go back to the embassy. On April 2 he signed the formal request for political asylum and the next day, after handing money to the Russians on their way to New Zealand, he left for the safe house with Ron Richards. With the money he gave to the NZ-bound Russians was a sealed note to the embassy saying he would commit suicide.

## CHAPTER TWO

### Airport Violence

In the Sydney safe house at 3pm on April 3, with the help of a Russian interpreter, Ron Richards began to debrief Petrov and prepare a series of documents later identified by letters of the alphabet. At noon on April 13, after talks involving Prime Minister Robert Menzies and other government officials, the Soviet ambassador was told Petrov had asked for political asylum in Australia. That evening Menzies told the Australian Parliament and said Petrov had supplied important information about Soviet espionage that would require investigation by a royal commission. Names in documents Petrov brought, he said, contained surprises for Australian counter-intelligence.

The next morning this was given a big coverage in Australian newspapers and other news media. Probably one of the last people in Australia to learn about it was Petrov. His wife was still at the embassy and was scheduled to leave on a passenger liner in a few days. Because of his insistence that nothing be revealed while she was still at the embassy, which Richards had promised would not happen, the fact that he had been given no indication he might have to appear before an open inquiry, and his unstable state of mind, Richards had worried about his reaction and had moved him to a more isolated safe house. After lunch an official led him up a hill behind that and showed him morning newspapers. He took it much better than Richards had expected. After reading the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, said Manne in _The Petrov Affair_ , he began a game of chess with the official.

On April 15 Australian newspapers reported that the Soviet ambassador had claimed its third secretary had been kidnapped.

When Petrov left their embassy residence in Canberra for the last time he did not tell Evdokia what he was about to do. For 13 days she was kept locked in an embassy room and told nothing. Perhaps, she thought, he had been captured or even killed by Australians. Her only contact was with kitchen staff who brought her meals. Not allowed to read newspapers or listen to a radio, she had no knowledge of anything happening anywhere else. But a window looked out onto the street and she knew something was happening. Each day increasing numbers of people were gathering outside the embassy fence, staring at the building and sometimes taking photos of it. Then whole busloads of them began to arrive. Sometimes they caught glimpses of her staring out a window back at them. Later she said that, deeply frightened, she attempted suicide.

Two burly couriers were sent to escort her back towards Russia by air on the night of April 19. News of this was given wide press coverage and aroused many feelings. The Australian Parliament's most outspoken anti-communist, W.C. Wentworth, a descendant of a leading Australian of the same name during Australia's early years, strongly maintained that Evdokia should be helped to stay if she wished. This was a view probably nearly all Australians supported. But Wentworth's party head, and Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was worried about legal and diplomatic protocols. Senior government officials supported Menzies. Only if she clearly indicated a desire to stay could officials intervene. ASIO was instructed not to initiate an approach to her.

ASIO ignored this, said Manne, and planned for Richards and a Department of External Affairs protocol officer to wait in a room through which she would have to pass on her way to the international tarmac. Hiding under the awning of a nearby utility truck would be her husband, in case Evdokia asked to see him. He had written a short note for someone to pass to her when she was led into the room.

After lunch on April 19 a big black Cadillac owned by the embassy left Canberra with her, the couriers and an embassy official on its way to Sydney Airport. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the car reached the parking area outside the overseas terminal at 9.22pm, eight minutes before their aircraft was scheduled to leave. 'Immediately the car stopped about 1,000 people tried to surround it and began struggling with officials,' the SMH said. Most of them were former refugees from Soviet territories who hated the communist rulers in Moscow and who had broken through police cordons intended to keep them away.

Protestors claimed they heard her shouting in Russian that she did not want to go back and began screaming at the couriers to let her go. During a melee she lost a shoe. But when she turned to pick it up the couriers kept forcing her forwards. In the confusion, said Robert Manne, she was led towards the domestic terminal instead of the international terminal, where the now delayed BOAC Constellation was waiting to take her to Darwin to refuel and then on to Singapore. As a result, she was not taken through the room where Richards and others were waiting with a note from her husband.

Weeping and dazed, Evdokia was dragged through crowds for 200 metres along the runway towards the plane. To facilitate her entrance to it, ground staff ran a gangway up to the pilots' cabin. When the mob surged around that she and the couriers were turned towards the main gangway, which they reached with difficulty. Police, security officers and airport officials fought to get her onto that. 'Every inch of the progress up the gangway was bitterly contested by the crowd,' the SMH said. 'Men and women jumped up and clung to the gangway on either side, using their free hands to drag Mrs. Petrov and officials down and swinging punches.' Other reports said that during her progress towards or up into the aircraft her belt was almost torn off and some buttons on her jacket were.

The plane left at 9.38.

According to Manne, Richards told ASIO chief Spry in Canberra that she had not called to anyone for help and had been terrified by actions of the crowd. At 10.30 Spry told Menzies this. Now worried about serious political implications, Menzies told him to arrange for contact on the aircraft with her to ascertain her condition and for Reginald Leydin, the Acting Administrator of the Northern Territory, to personally ask her in Darwin if she wished to seek political asylum. He also told Spry he had full operational control.

On the aircraft the couriers had fallen asleep. A hostess, Joyce Bull, had comforted Evdokia, said Manne, and a flight steward named Muir had managed to speak to her several times. Muir said she did not say she wanted to stay in Australia. But she did ask him for help and said she was frightened of the couriers, who were armed. She later confirmed this. At 3.15am Spry called Leydin and told him to have armed police ready on the tarmac to help protect Evdokia. Then he learned that carrying firearms on an aircraft flying over Australian territory was illegal. There was a legal basis to disarm the couriers without affecting diplomatic protocol.

When the plane stopped at the Darwin runway just after 5am officials and ten armed police approached the gangway. As soon as the couriers and Evdokia were on the runway Leydin drew her to one side. The most senior legal official asked a courier if he had been carrying firearms on the aircraft. The courier tried to brush him aside. Violence erupted between them with two police joining in. When one of the police shouted to the others that the courier was going for his gun two more police joined them. One put a headlock on him and he was disarmed. The other was disarmed with little resistance.

While that was going on Leydin asked Evdokia if she wished to seek political asylum in Australia. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I don't know.' After saying her family would be killed if she did not go back, she suggested Leydin solve her dilemma by kidnapping her. She also asked to see her husband, who she still believed might be dead.

The couriers and Soviet officials with her retired together to the international lounge. An official called Spry. He said Evdokia could not make up her mind and wished to be kidnapped, something both knew was the last thing Australia could pretend to do. He then said she wanted to see her husband and suggested a phone call from him. After that was arranged Evdokia refused to be separated from her guards and took the call from Vladimir in the Customs office surrounded by the couriers and Soviet officials. He told her he was being well look after and implored her to seek Australian protection. 'I know you are not my husband,' she said, 'I know he is dead,' and hung up.

As she emerged from the Customs office with the Soviet party, according to Robert Manne, she winked at Leydin and told everyone present the person she had spoken to was not her husband. Leydin suggested a private chat with her but she refused. Crestfallen, he told her goodbye and good luck. 'Perhaps,' Manne wrote, 'the wink drew him back for one last try.' (Many years later, after getting to know her, he decided it was probably just a nervous tic.) He again suggested a chat with her. This time she accepted. In his office she said she now wished to stay in Australia but would not sign any papers until she had seen her husband. Spry was contacted and said no paper work was essential, only two witnesses to her request for asylum.

Police and nearby air force men were formed into a group who blocked the view of the Soviet party as Leydin and Evdokia walked towards a waiting car, which drove them to Darwin's Government House. Calls began to go around Australia.

The defection of her husband had been big news not only in Australia but around the world. The dramatic events of her defection were bigger news. One shot of Evdokia, distressed and minus a shoe, being roughly helped by the couriers towards the aircraft in Sydney, became an iconic photo of the Cold War that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of that century.

## CHAPTER THREE

### Mysterious Explosion

On 17 May 1954 the espionage royal commission began its hearings and on May 29 Australia went to the polls. The election, which many had expected Evatt to win, was won by Menzies. Evatt and his supporters blamed the loss on a conspiracy involving Menzies and ASIO, intensifying a bitter war between the two leaders. The Labor Party began tearing apart over allegations of communist influence. And the royal commission turned from being an investigation of espionage into primarily an investigation of whether there had been an anti-Evatt conspiracy involving Menzies and ASIO. Debates and accusations about this seemed to go on interminably.

On 28 January 1955 the royal commission held a hearing so secret that almost nobody, even at the top of the Australian government or in ASIO, knew about it. Key parts at least of the evidence were sent to the headquarters of MI5 in Britain and the CIA in the United States.

On 11 April 1955 an event on the south-western outskirts of Sydney, apparently unconnected in any possible way with any of those matters, was to transform the background to them in unique ways and have repercussions not only in Australia but in Britain and the US.

When two newspaper delivery boys on their way home entered Fetherstone Street, just north of Bankstown railway station, the shopping centre was almost deserted. After a hot, sunny day the evening was pleasantly mild. 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 they had left, probably the only shop still open. But street lights everywhere were shining brightly.

In Fetherstone Street there were still old brick bungalows, built early in the century as part of a planned garden suburb, where people lived. From windows of some drifted aromas of steak or sausages grilling and vegetables steaming. There were sounds of radios. The early evening serials were ending as radio stations entered a lull with advertisements and station announcements before 7pm news broadcasts.

Half-way along the street, at the silent and dark premises of the Torch weekly newspaper, the boys noticed what one thought was smoke and the other fog. They also smelled what seemed like burning rubber. The building 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. Slightly ahead, on the left-hand other side, lights were on in the police station, a converted bungalow. Further down the street 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 ahead, turned a corner and began to talk with a woman. Suddenly there was an explosion in the Torch premises so loud it was heard in neighbouring suburbs. Nearby houses reportedly shook and windows blocks away rattled. Debris flew upwards and flames shot above the building.

The constable who had been in the van shouted to the sergeant emerging from the station to call the fire brigade. Then he ran diagonally across the road and pulled a motor cycle away from a loading ramp at the side of its office section. When he looked through an intact window he saw flames appearing to run along a passageway connecting the offices with the printing section behind, 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,' Sydney's 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 agricultural Royal Easter Show or sporting events. As many hurried towards the flames a man running from them 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.

Engisch drove there quickly. When he arrived the office section and much of the printing section were fully alight and the flames were spreading towards a section at the side that contained an expensive new rotary press, recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft. Desperately he asked firemen to direct their hoses towards that. Then he hurried off to make a phone call.

As the blaze lit up the evening sky the news spread quickly by telephones or across fences. People headed there in carloads from all over Bankstown. They included more than a few aldermen and officials of the former Bankstown Council, which had been sacked in March 1954 by the NSW Labor government for corruption and replaced with an administrator. Not long after Engisch, whose campaigning for years against local corruption had led to the sacking of the council, 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 firemen struggled without success to stop the fire 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 a well-known local businessman, Ray Fitzpatrick, who featured prominently in allegations that led to the sacking of the council. Alongside him was Blanche Barkl, the mayor then of the council.

The first woman to head any Australian government body with a constituency of more than 100,000 people, Barkl had to fight her way into local politics. Many of her strongest supporters were women raising children, something she was doing. Years later she told me how, standing in 1948 as an independent during a by-election in her local ward, she and women supporters followed her male opponents and their supporters around the ward, ripping down their posters or defacing them, while accusing them of doing that to her posters. Rumours about her were spread. Some were about her work helping servicemen during the war. But her only known vice was dancing, something she and her husband did with flair most Saturday nights.

A good public speaker, she won the seat. At the first regular council elections she increased her majority and stood successfully for deputy mayor. During periods in the chair her leadership skills impressed her opponents. In 1950 Barkl became, she believed, the third-ever female mayor in NSW. At first she was a strong opponent of Ray Fitzpatrick and even had talks about him with state government officials in the city. But she soon began to change. In 1952, after serious industrial unrest among council workers, she resigned as mayor because of resulting aggravation but remained on the council.

In 1953 Barkl became mayor again, now with the support of Fitzpatrick and of Labor Party aldermen who had earlier opposed her. Women who had crowded into the chamber cheered as she was declared elected. From some men who had previously supported her came shouts such as 'traitor'.

When she was 80 I mentioned this to her and asked what she thought about Fitzpatrick. 'Oh,' she said with a shrug, 'he was a crook.' She told me how, soon after that election, he gave her an envelope and told her to 'let me know if you want any more'. When she saw the envelope contained a fairly large sum of money, she claimed, she handed it back and told him he was never to dare do such a thing again. He protested that she was taking it the wrong way, she claimed, and the money was only for the Girl Guides, her special interest. Barkl then began talking about all the good things he did do for many people.

That showed a grey area Fitzpatrick obviously exploited. People in local public affairs were often officials of organisations that welcomed donations. Fitzpatrick's generosity, without fanfare or bias, extended beyond public social or charitable organisations. Barkl said it was years before she realised just how extensive it really was. Often, at a time of limited government health-care aid, he paid large hospital bills for people needing help. He was nominally Church of England. But the only god he worshiped was money. If local Catholic nuns wanted money for a school building or playing field, he was the first person they approached.

Many people Fitzpatrick aided financially had problems that began with service in the first and second world wars. One person affected by war service was his brother Jack. Just before the second war he was an opening batsman for NSW's cricket team. After serving with a radar unit in New Guinea and Borneo, sometimes on jungle mountain tops, he returned with a back problem and recurring malaria.

There were also more ways than money to win support and Fitzpatrick had good people skills. In Barkl's case he seems to have done it mainly, after offering her that bribe, by the simple trick of treating her thereafter with full respect. This was something many men – particularly some who had previously supported her and were far from being saints themselves, which she had realised – were still not doing. Barkl was an attractive and still youthful-looking woman in her mid-forties. Usually she dressed smartly in public. But she was a little untidy as she and Ray Fitzpatrick watched firemen pour water on the disappearing Torch premises. Among those with them was former alderman Cecil Pyers, one of their friends on the sacked council.

Torch editor Phil Engisch had been a strong supporter of Barkl until she had swung towards Fitzpatrick. He had then begun frequently attacking her in print. Later Engisch told a court inquiry into the fire 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 said he asked Barkl: 'What do you think about it, Blanche?' She had replied, he claimed: 'You brought it on yourself. You cannot expect to go on caning people like you do and get away with it.' Engisch said 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 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.'

Her recollection of everything 35 years later differed in some ways 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 walked across. Fitzpatrick suggested to her husband they go behind the building and 'piss on the flames to put them out'. It was at that point, Barkl said, 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 FOUR

### Routes to Riches

Bankstown, where I was born in 1938, was named after Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist who in 1770 sailed with Captain James Cook into Botany Bay and later recommended that bay to the British government as a good place for a penal colony. It was one of the first districts in Australia settled by Europeans, most of them convicts on the First Fleet, which arrived in 1788. To its south and west it was bounded by the Georges River, named after the long-reigning but later mad King George III, which flows into Botany Bay. For a while it became known as a haven for bushrangers. From a camp near the later site of Bankstown's shopping centre they were said to have ridden horses up a hill to rob travellers along a track from the growing settlement at Sydney Harbour to a farming settlement at Liverpool, on the headwaters of the Georges River. The track later became the start of the Hume Highway, linking Sydney and Melbourne.

When a railway line arrived from the city in 1909 Bankstown station became the centre of a planned English-style garden suburb where respectable middle-class citizens could breathe fresh country air, away from the smells, and sometimes depravity, of inner Sydney. In 1917, as ships kept arriving with wounded victims of the war to end all wars, a farming settlement was started near the river for men who had not been too badly disabled. But most did not have farming skills, the plots were too small, and the settlement quickly collapsed. Many became a frequent sight in Bankstown looking for work or hand-outs.

The Great Depression hit Bankstown hard and led to violence. In February 1932, at a park alongside the station, local supporters of Labor Party NSW Premier Jack Lang, including my then unemployed father, fiercely battled members of a right-wing semi-military organisation, the New Guard. Angered by Lang's controversial plans to combat unemployment, the New Guard members had entered Bankstown in a line of cars during a campaign to foment rebellion against him.

At the end of 1941, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans began landing at a rapidly expanding air base alongside the Georges River. So many arrived that for a while Bankstown became known as Yankstown. Most Bankstown people got on well with the Americans. Shopkeepers were happy to take their money. My father's best friend, born like him in Lancashire, owned a shoe shop near the station. He recalled that many were big men who were difficult to fit. Before long he was scouring warehouses throughout Sydney for size 10 and 11 shoes and boots for them. More than a few women later married one.

The top of a high hill between the shopping centre and the air base was sealed off and work began on a secret underground air control centre. Three stories deep, it was built to survive the largest bombs then known and was modelled on one which had controlled Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Some men said to have learned how to fly at Bankstown had during that helped the Royal Air Force defeat the Luftwaffe. Residents recalled moments as they pulled out of dives after heading towards red-tiled roofs of brick bungalows.

It later became an air command headquarters for a large region near Australia and the secrecy about it was partly lifted.

In local newspapers it was said to have been intended as a possible emergency Sydney headquarters for Far East commander General Douglas MacArthur, who had reached Australia in March 1942 after leaving the Philippines. If Japanese forces had landed nearby, as some people in authority had feared, and the battle for Sydney appeared lost, MacArthur and his officers could have descended the far side to the airfield and flown off to Melbourne. Gun positions at the top had sweeping views of routes from the city. Australian troops manning those would have held off approaching Japanese while Australian officers and officials followed the Americans in remaining transport aircraft. All this was officially denied.

In March 1944, after most US and Australian airmen had moved to air bases far to the north to combat retreating Japanese, Bankstown became known for two weeks of serious allegations in the Australian Parliament of corruption involving infrastructure for the air base, many war factories built nearby, and other wartime projects. The person named mainly in the allegations was Ray Fitzpatrick.

During the war Fitzpatrick became very rich. In 1943 a senior government investigator, at the behest of the parliament's Joint War Expenditure Committee, had begun examining his activities. On 28 June 1944, after a motion at a war expenditure committee meeting chaired by later prime minister Harold Holt, its investigator led raids by federal police and tax department officials on Fitzpatrick's offices and that of his city auditor. But they found little of use to them.

A key man at the start of events which led to Vladimir Petrov's defection had earlier led the wartime Fitzpatrick investigations. On 25 August 1944 the parliament's Joint War Expenditure Committee sent a report to Prime Minister John Curtin about his investigations. In a letter with the report the committee's chairman warned Curtin about a likely approach about to be made to him, on behalf of Fitzpatrick, complaining about its investigator. He praised the investigator, who he said had had no such complaints about him during 15 years with the Commonwealth Investigation Branch. At the end he said that, after the committee had prepared the report, the investigator had reported to it 'on a number of important developments which strengthen our suspicions and indicate the irregularities to be more extensive than we believed'.

Later the report was described often in parliament and newspapers, over many years, as the most secret document in Australia. The investigator apparently ceased for official purposes ever to have existed.

In late 1945, after being told by its legal advisers that criminal charges might not succeed because of the required high onus of proof, the Labor government of Prime Minister Ben Chifley prosecuted Fitzpatrick in the High Court of Australia on civil charges of conspiracy to defraud the government during the war. He fought the charges with top lawyers. Soon after Robert Menzies, the conservative prime minister at the start of the war, returned to power in late 1949 his government settled the matter out of court.

Fitzpatrick, born in 1909, was a big, heavily-built man who grew up on a dairy farm near the river. In 1917 his father, a Boer War veteran, began selling cows to disabled soldiers being settled on small farms nearby. That enabled him to devote more time to local politics. His mother was remembered for wandering around the countryside with a shotgun looking for escaped German prisoners from an internment camp not far across the river. In 1926, 1930 and 1931 his father was mayor of Bankstown. In 1933 the state government sacked the council for corruption and appointed an administrator for two years. Fitzpatrick senior allegedly was the main culprit but escaped without much censure.

At 13 Ray left school and began carting dirt from new railway cuttings with an old draught horse named Dolly. That led to business, such as sand-mining at the river and trucking, connected with government-funded road-building and other projects to reduce unemployment during the Depression, then to more types of work during the war.

Most of Sydney's land which was fairly flat and undeveloped, but had good rail links and was therefore suitable for rapid industrial development, lay to the south-west, beyond Bankstown station. After the war, women who had been helping to assemble tanks and bombers prepared to help assemble, at least for a while, refrigerators and washing machines. Returning soldiers joined them. Then migrants started to pour in from devastated Europe. Most at first were from Baltic countries that had suffered under occupation by Russians, then Germans and again by Russians. They were hardy and diligent workers.

Before long the district became for a while the largest centre of light and medium industry in Australia. The air force base became the largest commercial airport in the southern hemisphere for light aircraft. Street after street, filled with small timber-framed homes with sides of fibro, thin sheets of compressed cement and asbestos that could be mass-produced cheaply, stretched into the distance to house workers for the factories. Sometimes clouds of dust hung over Bankstown for days from all the trucks and other heavy vehicles moving along still often unpaved roads.

Fitzpatrick kept making lots of money from trucking, earthmoving, mining sand and blue metal (basalt, a hard volcanic rock), and other activities. As most Australians began experiencing an economic boom after years of hardship that began in 1929 almost everyone, even many who had lived in Bankstown during the war, seemed to forget about the wartime allegations.

A ruthless businessman, Fitzpatrick could be quick with his fists if anyone physically opposed him. His fights with an opposition sand contractor, Charles Skevington, were famous among long-time residents. After fights early in the war they began to co-operate, dividing contracts between them to keep prices high. That quickly ended. One fight in 1940 put Skevington into Liverpool Hospital, near Bankstown, for four weeks. Skevington claimed Fitzpatrick knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the head until he was unconscious. Fitzpatrick denied kicking him. Skevington was treated for skull fractures, a broken jaw and broken nose. Police who interviewed him in hospital took no action.

With his ready smile and open, boyish manner, Fitzpatrick usually got on well with most people he met and had many friends. They included many in local police stations. He also had some at their headquarters in the city.

After the war he began having Christmas parties each year in a large former aircraft hangar on the outskirts of Bankstown's shopping centre. It was claimed to be near where the bushrangers had earlier camped. At the parties police would mix with his many workers, local and state officials, state and sometimes federal politicians, and perhaps a few judges. Inside, or outside weather permitting, surrounded by trucks, bulldozers and earthmovers, all mingled with their drinks. Fitzpatrick was proud of his ability to mix with his workers. At lunchtime he would often buy bags of fish and chips and share those with any nearby. He boasted that he had never robbed a worker.

During the early 1950s the Torch, the district's leading newspaper, began printing allegations of corruption involving Fitzpatrick, his brother Jack, who was in charge of the council's electricity department, and other council officials. The allegations were supported by a minority on the Labor-dominated council.

Council meetings became boisterous as supporters and opponents of the Fitzpatrick brothers in public galleries sometimes shouted interjections and exchanged insults or even punches. Sometimes council members almost came to blows. The person most often in charge of the meetings was then deputy mayor Blanche Barkl. Near the end of the war she had run a local British Centre, a canteen and entertainment club for British naval air staff who replaced Americans at the airfield. So she doubtless did not lack experience at handling sometimes rowdy men. With her hair parted down the middle and brushed back tightly, however, she looked more like a schoolmistress trying to manage unruly children as she struggled to maintain control with impartiality.

After the anti-Labor Sydney Morning Herald began publicising the allegations the Labor state government ordered an investigation, which supported some with many details. The main allegation was that Ray Fitzpatrick often bought blue metal for local roads from other companies and sold it at a much higher price to the council, which could easily have bought it at a lower price from the actual supplier. (More details about this and many related matters in Bankstown are in chapter 21 of a book about my father, _From the Somme to 'Sydney's Little Chicago'_ , which I published on the internet in 2014.)

On 3 March 1954 the government sacked the council and appointed an administrator to run the municipality, by then briefly the most populous in Australia. Local government became honest. But despite plenty of evidence supporting allegations against Fitzpatrick, almost no legal action was taken against him. Sydney's daily newspapers, after brief headlines, again lost interest in the affairs of the municipality.

## CHAPTER FIVE

### Lurid Newspaper Stories

The day after the Torch fire 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 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.

On Wednesday 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, an SMH stablemate, 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.'

The story 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.'

Charles Albert Morgan was the Labor member for the federal electorate of Reid, which then covered most of Bankstown. A city lawyer, he became Fitzpatrick's legal adviser in 1937 on the recommendation of my father, who early in the Depression, happy for any work he could get, had become for a while Fitzpatrick's first full-time accountant. My father was still doing some accountancy work for Fitzpatrick, not to be seen by tax officials, and by then was involved in the city with Morgan in a new co-operative building societies movement.

In a general election in late 1940, Fitzpatrick's influence in local Labor branches, and also higher in the party, had helped Morgan enter the federal parliament. Soon after that, however, the two men had fallen out viciously, allegedly after a joint business venture went wrong, and Morgan had begun the two weeks of allegations in the parliament about Fitzpatrick. After the allegations in 1944 my father began getting drunk every night and continued drinking heavily until 1946.

Arthur Powell, the Labor state member for Bankstown, joined Morgan in calling for a royal commission into events in Bankstown. After that, any hesitation an editor might have felt about Morgan's claims vanished.

On Thursday that week Sydney's Daily 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 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, it 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 (shillings). 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. Sydney's 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 to eat their modern American cornflakes or old-fashioned hot oatmeal porridge, all of this must have made exciting – even scary – reading. Sydney had never been the safest of cities. Parts of its inner districts during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the razor gangs had roamed their streets, had probably been more dangerous for most ordinary people than any of Chicago's at the time.

But this was 1955. Most Sydney people knew there had been council problems and a lot of growth at Bankstown, fuelled by migrants. However, a government administrator was now running the place and it had become, or so many of them had probably 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 newspapers. Many others, probably who had lived there longer, dismissed at least the parts about a Chicago gang war as nonsense. Probably few residents doubted there had been corruption. Few people, even on Fitzpatrick's side, seem to have questioned any of the details in the state government report that caused the government to sack the council. And anyone who knew Ray Fitzpatrick knew he had a lot of influence elsewhere. He liked to impress people 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.

Nobody could ever say with complete certainty what horse would win a particular race, even if it was rigged, which many probably were. But, particularly if one of his horses was running, he was more likely than most people to know what horse had the best chance of winning. 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.

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 Frank Browne entered the fray.

## CHAPTER SIX

### Scourge of Politicians

Browne was born 39 years earlier in Sydney and was educated by the Christian Brothers at Waverley, near many of the city's best-known beaches. 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 at 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 at the Chicago Tribune. A short, stocky man who had been a promising amateur 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 then ever to be a world champion simultaneously in three weight divisions. Browne was loudly white supremacist while Armstrong was part African, part Native American and part Irish. 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 him 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, he 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 Herb Evatt. In 1944 he stood for the Democrats, an alias for the UAP, in the state seat of Bondi and almost won. 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. Just a few printed 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 often were unwilling or unable to touch the stories it contained. A criticism of Things I Hear years later in The Observer, a brief national weekly publication edited by well-known journalist and author Donald Horne, 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,' it 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 often compulsory powers in workplace disputes, and who had been led since 1943 by Justice Stan Taylor. But more than a few people in Bankstown would have known at least part of the background. Taylor, educated 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 Ray Fitzpatrick, mainly through a joint interest in trotting, and did some legal work for him as his earnings from government Depression work programs increased.

During that period Taylor and his older brother Bill, a solicitor, became strongly involved in Labor Party affairs, mainly through Ben Chifley.

Chifley was born at Bathurst in the NSW central west, not far from where the Taylor family lived. Largely self-educated during a lonely childhood at a grandfather's isolated farm, he returned to Bathurst, became a steam-train driver, trade union leader and then Labor representative of the district in the federal parliament. He was a friend of the Labor-supporting Taylor family and, until he lost his seat in 1931, their local MP. Chifley's wife continued to live at their modest cottage in Bathurst and he returned there whenever he could. In 1935 he became a member of a Royal Commission on Banking. On 21 September 1940 he regained his seat and on 13 July 1945 he became Australia's 16th Prime Minister.

After Taylor retired in November 1966 The Australian, a national newspaper recently started by Rupert Murdoch, ran an article about him headed 'The friendly judge'. 'Much of Mr Justice Taylor's success in handling explosive and difficult industrial issues,' it said, 'stemmed from his friendly and approachable manner, which he projected genuinely without any loss of judicial dignity.' It 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 easy manner, often on first-name terms, with staff and workers, and to his youthful left-wing reading habits.

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. Both were gregarious. Known for his use of working-class slang even in court, Taylor would have had no trouble talking with Fitzpatrick.

In 1942, through Chifley, Stan Taylor became the first Labor-appointed head of national security in NSW and the deputy head for Australia. At the start of 1943, six months after American planes sank Japan's four biggest aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway and ended the danger of invasion, he became Justice Taylor, 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 possible during an era of frequent industrial strife. His legal status was equivalent to that of a judge on the Supreme Court of NSW.

Chifley was about the same size as Stan Taylor. Eleven years older than Taylor, he was like him able to mix easily with ordinary people and, at least for most of his life, similarly pragmatic when necessary.

Although Taylor remained a good friend of Fitzpatrick he stopped doing legal work for him in 1937 and was replaced by Charles Morgan until the savage falling-out between Morgan and Fitzpatrick during the war. Taylor's older brother Bill, who became known as Fighting Billy and for much of the war was a vice-president of the Labor Party's NSW branch, then began doing some legal work for Fitzpatrick.

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 had 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, Chifley, now Prime Minister, 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 moved sometimes in the same circles as Fitzpatrick.

The third man in Browne's triumvirate was Reginald Downing, the NSW Minister of Justice. He was a protégé and close friend of McKell. Like him, Taylor and Ray Fitzpatrick, he was also 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 began in the media, Browne wrote in his newsletter 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 Sydney's Daily and Sunday 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 printing premises of the Bankstown Observer, a weekly pro-Labor paper, started in 1950 by my father and some of his friends, none of whom knew anything about how to run a newspaper. After it kept losing money Fitzpatrick had bought them out and begun using it to wage a war of words against the Torch. It had failed embarrassingly to refute allegations about Fitzpatrick at council meetings and in the Torch. When, for example, it published letters from residents to support some of its claims the Torch exposed the residents as fictitious.

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

Christopher Augustus Kelly was well known in 1955 for his influence in state politics, greater than that of the three men named earlier by Browne. Politicians in NSW came and went but Gus Kelly at the time seemed to go on forever. His work as Chief Secretary of NSW covered police matters, horseracing and gambling. Through those he knew Fitzpatrick.

A genial pipe-smoking man, he was also responsible for co-operative societies and a former housing minister. A stretcher bearer in World War I, he was active in returned servicemen's affairs. Through those three activities he knew my father, who for years was on a small board that represented co-operative housebuilding societies in talks with the government, and who as a teenager in late 1916 had been caught by a shell at the Somme that probably contained experimental mustard gas and had spent months in hospitals. Later, like Kelly and Fitzpatrick, he had done what he could to help survivors of both world wars. Just after dawn on the morning after the Torch fire he called my father, who was still in bed, to ask him what was going on in Bankstown. I answered the phone.

Kelly's most important job probably was to help keep the NSW Labor Party functioning reasonably well as a governing party and to make sure its staff kept getting paid. He was probably even less fussy about how the money was obtained than many politicians anywhere doing such work. And he cared little about what journalists and other people said about him. Perhaps the most frequently repeated story about him involved a brief boom in outdoor movie theatres in the early 1950s, during a surge in car ownership and before the introduction of television.

On suitable large fields in outer suburbs huge white screens were erected. As night fell many cars would arrive and for a cost be directed to parking spaces with sound attachments. When it was dark all lights in and on them would go off and on the screen a latest hit from Hollywood would begin. The theatres were popular with families and particularly unmarried young couples. In those dark cars more than a few of the next generation of Australians were believed to have started. Owners of suitable fields were eager to exploit this lucrative source of income. But first the fields had to be rezoned from agricultural to commercial. That was not easy. A reporter once allegedly asked Gus Kelly if he requested extra money to permit such rezoning. Kelly asked how much people said he was getting each time. Oh no, he allegedly said when the reporter mentioned a sum, it was more than that.

For many years Kelly 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, near the city centre.

'That night I received another phone call,' Browne continued in his Telegraph article. '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 SEVEN

### Browne Starts Punching

On Thursday 21 April 1955 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'.

It 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 SMH 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.

Follow-up stories in most newspapers confined themselves to saying 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 April 28 the Bankstown 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.' This was a reference to the worsening problems in the Labor Party after the Petrov defections.

'However, the anti-Evatt group in NSW are making charges that deeply concern the residents of this area,' the 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 long 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 just before the war to help German and Austrian Jews escaping the Nazis. Many of the names would have been familiar to a significant number of Observer readers in Bankstown, which had long had a Jewish minority.

The most powerful person in Bankstown's early years was a Jewish woman, born Esther Abrahams. Although described by the _Australian Dictionary of Biography_ as modest and self-effacing, she had more power than Ray Fitzpatrick. A London milliner, she sailed at age 20 on the First Fleet after being convicted, on little evidence, of stealing a length of silk lace. During the long voyage, with a daughter born in Newgate prison, she began a relationship with a young marine officer, George Johnston. When the fleet stopped at Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town he bought each time a live nanny-goat so she and her daughter Rosanna could have fresh milk.

They began building their main home on a land grant at what is now the inner-city suburb of Annandale, named after Johnston's birthplace in Scotland. At a large grant near the river they built a farmhouse after which the Bankstown district of Georges Hall is named. Other land grants followed. Johnston rose to head the NSW Corps, Australia's first military force, better known, for its control of the traffic in rum, which became a form of currency, as the Rum Corps. For reasons connected with that, and insubordination, he was sent back to England in 1800 for trial.

Esther moved to Georges Hall, where she began competently controlling their properties with the help of serving convicts and freed ones like herself. That year she began using a Judeo-Spanish surname Julian, believed to be that of the father of Rosanna, who was helping with younger children and later married an ex-convict who became Australia's first postmaster.

Because of the difficulty of obtaining evidence from far-off Australia, Johnston was not convicted of anything. In 1802 he returned to Sydney, where he soon resumed control of the NSW Corps. Esther rejoined him at Annandale, where she continued raising, and herself educating, an eventual six children by him. A seventh died while small.

In 1808 Johnston led troops who deposed Governor Bligh, who had tried to curb the power of, among others, him and his men. John Macarthur, the biggest landholder and pioneer of Australia's wool industry, had been feuding fiercely with Bligh. When Bligh committed Macarthur for trial during a legal dispute, and refused him bail, Johnston ordered Macarthur's release, arrested Bligh, and took over. Macarthur had the most money and was the real power. But Johnston was the army chief and for six months acted as the colony's Lieutenant-Governor. That made Esther Australia's unofficial First Lady. She kept living at Annandale however when he moved into the governor's official residence.

In early 1809 Johnston and Macarthur sailed off to London to explain their actions to the British government. Esther moved for a while back to Georges Hall, from where she again competently controlled their properties. One son by then was living there full-time. After a flood in 1809 carried off 490 of their sheep she was given a large grant of land nearby in her own name on higher ground. There she built a larger farmhouse. Governor Macquarie, who arrived that year to officially replace Bligh, and has often been called the Father of Australia, became a family friend.

Her benign dominance of the district helped attract Jewish settlers to what in 1895 became the Municipality of Bankstown. Near the later location of Bankstown railway station they built the first synagogue outside inner Sydney. The site is now parking space near the station outside what was said to briefly be the largest covered shopping centre in the southern hemisphere.

In 1811 Johnston was court-martialled and sacked as a commissioned officer, a mild sentence for illegally deposing with armed force the appointed governor of one of Britain's largest colonies. In 1813 he returned, now as an ordinary settler. In 1814 Esther, allegedly at the insistence of Governor Macquarie, married him and became Mrs Johnston. When Johnston died in 1823 he left her in charge of everything.

Her years after that were marred by a fight with one of her three sons over control of properties. She became eccentric and began sometimes to drink too much. When the son in 1829 tried to have her declared insane and unable to administer her estates the resulting court case attracted great interest in the colony. She vigorously defended her sanity. But the court arranged for trustees to control the family properties. She went to live with a son at Georges Hall, where she died in 1846. Her descendants farmed in the municipality until 1917. Some of their land was given to disabled soldiers.

Many of Bankstown's Jews became successful in business, trades or professions. They became fully integrated Australians who often married people of other or no religion. Probably many people connected at some stage with Ray Fitzpatrick had at least some Jewish blood. They included my father and his city building societies associate Charles Morgan.

The schemes mentioned by Frank Browne in the Bankstown Observer story were investigated at the start of the war 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 that context it was nonsense. It was also deliberately libellous. Fitzpatrick and Browne prepared for a writ from Morgan. But one never came.

Morgan would have seen the dangers. A libel writ would lead to giving evidence under oath and facing cross-examination in an open court. A barrister might ask questions about his time as Fitzpatrick's legal adviser before and early in the war, when some offences were said to have occurred. Fitzpatrick could afford Australia's best barristers and had used some effectively for years 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 to have strong views about parliamentary rights and privileges, and told him about a few matters during and just after the war. Menzies, who had many reasons to dislike Browne, listened with interest.

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 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 Bankstown 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.' He moved that the article be referred to the parliament's Standing Committee of Privilege.

## CHAPTER EIGHT

### History of Troubles

The privileges 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, who had been named as his associate in the Bankstown Observer article.

Clark's connection with the details in that article involved Ben Chifley, Ray Fitzpatrick and a man who hung like a dark cloud over Chifley, over some events in Bankstown, and at least slightly on the horizon over the whole Labor Party for much of that century: former NSW Labor premier Jack Lang. A large man with a savage tongue and dominating personality, Lang was a radical populist who combined a left-wing approach to social and employment issues with anti-communism, nationalism and an entrepreneurial streak. Of Scottish and Irish descent, with a childhood in slums surrounded by poverty, he had a fierce dislike of many people, particularly English, with inherited wealth and power, and was very divisive.

In 1946 Lang wrested the seat of Reid from Morgan for one term after a brutal election fight during which Fitzpatrick financed and helped manage Lang's campaign. Morgan's expensive campaign was financed secretly by the federal headquarters of the Labor Party, headed by Chifley, which wanted badly to keep Lang out of the federal parliament.

Soon after the new parliament met in November Lang moved that papers be tabled relating to the entry of 200 'alien immigrants' who had recently arrived from the Middle East on the liner Strathmore. He said Australia needed workers, and talked about people such as Australians stranded in Britain, or citizens of wartime allies in Europe wanting to come here, who were unable to get berths on ships.

Lang then said: 'But former German and Austrian residents are coming to Australia in hundreds. They are not workers, because we are told that they are wealthy people ... There is a document that shows the practice before the present minister took office. Copies had wide circulation here, I believe, and were circulated around my electorate during the recent campaign. It is a copy of the report of the detectives of the Commonwealth Security Service who investigated the business conducted by the former member for Reid.' He gave details of the scheme, in which applications were filled in by Morgan and other solicitors involved as they saw fit. If, for example, the government had begun letting in farmers they would put down the applicant's occupation as farmer although he might never have been on a farm in his life. He gave no indication they were Jews escaping Nazi persecution before the war.

At one point Lang mentioned Joe Clark and implied corruption. Clark, the parliament's respected Chairman of Committees and Deputy Speaker, jumped angrily to his feet, said he had helped people after requests from members of his electorate, and denied any wrongdoing. Senior Labor members supported him. Claims in Lang's speech were challenged by other members. During angry debates about the 200 'alien immigrants' on the Strathmore there were questions, which Lang avoided answering, about whether most were Jews. It became clear they were.

In an interesting speech, Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration, defended the right of Jews to come here. He then said the allegations by Lang about the security reports were 'almost identical with the foul references that were made in 1941'. This referred to an attack on Morgan at the start of June 20 that year in the federal parliament. During the night Morgan had been irritating Menzies government frontbenchers with questions about Australian companies trading with Japan, which had helped earn Menzies the nickname Pig-Iron Bob. Australia was not then at war with Japan and government members had tried to shrug it off.

Just after midnight, Tom Collins, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister (Menzies, who from February to May had been visiting London, hobnobbing with members of Britain's war cabinet, and places in between), rose and suggested that Morgan 'should be the last one in this house to refer to these matters'. Collins then in effect accused Morgan of running a racket bringing into Australia 'persons of enemy origin who, really, are not entitled to come here'. To support this, he gave a few details from the security reports about the schemes helping Jews before the war.

Morgan said there was nothing wrong with what he did and any money he charged was only to cover costs. That was not too important, and too late for newspapers to report. And on the other side of the world, while they had been speaking, three million troops had been moving into position for Hitler's invasion of Russian-occupied Poland and Russia, which was to transform the war in Europe and have appalling consequences for a great many more Jews. The invasion began early on June 22.

In his speech in 1946 Calwell said: 'If there is anything in the allegations made now the Menzies government had an opportunity to inquire into the matter when it was in office. However, after the first attack was made on the former honourable member for Reid, the file in the Security Department mysteriously disappeared and got into the hands of a crook in Sydney named Fitzpatrick.'

Calwell said Fitzpatrick, 'campaign director for the present honourable member for Reid ... was determined to destroy the political career of Mr Morgan. He publicly declared that he was determined to do this because Mr Morgan had attacked him in this parliament and accused him of doing a number of illegal things in connection with wartime contracts. Fitzpatrick said that Mr Morgan had turned the taxation people onto him, and that as a result he had had to disgorge £62,000, which shows how much some crooks were able to make out of war contracts.'

A week after Lang's Strathmore speech in 1946, after many more connected parliamentary speeches, the now Opposition Leader Menzies moved without success for the adjournment of the house to discuss the appointment of a royal commission to investigate allegations in speeches by Lang and Calwell, sparking more heat.

During a long speech, Herb Evatt, still the Attorney-General, said the security reports on 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 1942, after Japan entered the war, a document containing them went into the care of that. Later, after a 'bitter wartime controversy' involving Fitzpatrick and Morgan, a copy of the document 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,' Evatt said. '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.'

Joe Clark's problem with Jack Lang in the parliament in 1946 was nothing compared with those Ben Chifley had with him.

In 1931, as the Great Depression worsened, Premier Lang badly split the Labor Party in NSW and helped topple a federal Labor government headed by James Scullin, a friend and mentor of Chifley, a young minister in that government. The main cause was Lang's deferral of interest payments to British bondholders, which the Scullin government then paid. An unofficial Lang Labor party he started, which years later was officially named that, took over the party machinery in NSW. Later in 1931 a Lang Labor candidate helped Chifley lose his federal seat in NSW.

Early in 1932 Lang's measures to fight soaring unemployment helped bring NSW to a situation in which armed members of the New Guard were said to be marching towards Sydney to join like-minded men in an attempt to bring down Lang's government, by force if necessary. The battle in the park alongside Bankstown station was one of many incidents. In Sydney there were plans to open state armouries and distribute weapons to Lang-supporting trade unionists. On both sides were many men who had fought in World War I.

In May 1932 the NSW Governor, Sir Philip Game, officially representing the King of Britain, dismissed Lang and appointed an interim conservative government. That government won a following election in a landslide.

Lang never again held official power but he continued to dominate Labor politics in NSW. Chifley, who remained with the official federal party, became his most determined opponent. In May 1935, according to the _Australian Dictionary of Biography_ , 'he embarked on the most torrid and bitter campaign of his life, contesting Lang's regional fiefdom, the State seat of Auburn. Although beaten by 2400 votes, Chifley was in part responsible for the resurrection of the federal A.L.P. in the State – a prerequisite for government in both spheres.'

In 1939 Chifley's supporters won control of the NSW party machinery from Lang. In 1943 they expelled him from the party. Lang moved his power base to Bankstown, several kilometres south of Auburn, where he had many supporters. From there he kept hitting back at his party enemies. His misleading speech in 1946 about Jews who arrived on the Strathmore was just the start of problems he caused for the federal Labor Party, and Chifley in particular, during his one term in Canberra.

Chifley's strict economic controls during the war had left Australia with debt but helped it avoid the huge post-war debt that plagued Britain. Those, and social and economic reforms he launched in 1946, provided a framework for post-war economic prosperity. He continued to be liked widely as a person. However, he called himself a democratic socialist when, as the Russians tightened their control over Eastern Europe, 'socialism' was becoming a dirty word to many Australians who during the war had voted for Labor. A plan by him in 1947 to nationalise banks was seen by many as much too socialistic and hit strong opposition not just from the banks.

In a cruel and ironic way, a long and bitter coal strike in 1949, led by communist trade unionists, further damaged his re-election prospects. The strike made him strongly anti-communist. But Menzies and other opponents called him 'soft on communism'. Eventually Chifley sent in troops to mine coal, something deeply against his natural inclinations. That ended the strike but left trade union bitterness. The reintroduction of wartime petrol rationing added to wider unhappiness.

Jack Lang hit the final nail in his government's coffin. 'In a national radio broadcast on 6 December,' said the _Australian Dictionary of Biography_ , 'Lang accused Ben and Elizabeth Chifley of making mortgage advances at interest rates of up to 9 per cent. The allegation hurt Chifley deeply. He had gained little personal profit from the transactions, had usually acted as a trustee and had helped borrowers who lacked security. In hindsight, however, he was politically vulnerable on the issue. The Chifley government was destroyed on 10 December 1949.'

Lang meanwhile had remained a good friend of Ray Fitzpatrick. In Bankstown, in return for Fitzpatrick's help during his Reid election campaign, he had used his influence to help him get around problems he was having at local and state government levels involving allegations of corruption. And in the federal parliament he had continued doing what he could to help Fitzpatrick in his war with Morgan. In the 1949 elections, however, Lang tried unsuccessfully to win another seat. Morgan lived in the expensive harbourside suburb of Double Bay and was said to rarely come near Bankstown except during elections. But as the endorsed Labor candidate he was able to regain Reid.

On 3 May 1955, when Evatt, now the Leader of the Opposition, seconded Morgan's motion that the parliamentary privileges matter go to the 'highest tribunal' in Australia, he knew trouble involving Morgan and Fitzpatrick went back many years. Evatt said Morgan had raised it purely in his capacity as a member and 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 parliament's 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 NINE

### Federal Police Act

On 12 May 1955 the head of the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Ray Whitrod, discreetly visited Torch editor Phil Engisch in Bankstown. Whitrod was an Adelaide detective who late in 1948, during the formation of what became ASIO, was recruited to help set up an office there. Courtenay Young, the monocled representative in Australia of MI5, Britain's secretive national home security agency, guided him. Young was a rising official who from 1956 to 1960 would head MI5's Soviet counter-espionage section.

When, in April 1949, Young established ASIO's first national headquarters at Potts Point in Sydney, just behind the large Garden Island dockyards, he took Whitrod with him. Whitrod's office was alongside his. In a special safe in Young's office was part of the most secret collection of documents in the non-communist world.

In 1940, before the US entered the war, its army listening posts began intercepting messages to and from Moscow and its experts began trying to decipher some. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Japanese messages became an overwhelming priority for its experts and for US, Australian and British Far East listening posts. In late 1942, as Russian forces trapped a German army in the ruins of Stalingrad, the US army again began trying to read some Moscow messages. An intelligence chief had heard rumours that Stalin was planning a separate peace, leaving the Americans, British and other allies to fight on without Russia against Germany.

Russians normally used codes in which numbers replaced letters. Messages were encrypted using a one-time pad system, which should have protected them. The re-use of pads by Russian transmitters during the Nazi invasion in 1941 helped US encryption experts. The codebreakers and translators who then took over found no indications of feared Hitler-Stalin peace talks. But they did find increasing evidence of Russian spying on its allies. British experts, some of whom had worked at the later famous Bletchley Park, joined the Americans in what became known as the Venona project.

One focus became messages to and from Australia. Some showed that confidential US and British messages, or at least some information in them, to Australian authorities had been passed on somehow to Russians. In late 1944 Australia's commander in chief, General Tom Blamey, was furious when he learned about some, concerning General MacArthur's battle plans during fighting in the Philippines, and estimates of Japanese military strength the Americans were facing, which had gone from the Russian embassy in Canberra to Harbin in Russian Manchuria and from there to the Japanese high command in Tokyo. There was conjecture that these had been passed to Tokyo as part of a devious game by the Russians, who did not declare war on Japan until a few days before it surrendered.

Helped by primitive computers, American and British experts continued the Venona project after the war. Eventually they deciphered at least parts of an unknown percentage of about 3000 Russian messages, sent between 1940 and 1948. More than 200 were between Russia and Australia. In 1948, after learning about Venona from an American helping the project, the Russians changed their systems in a way that prevented interceptions. But experts kept plugging away at what they had. By far the biggest focus became anything from the US concerning atomic bombs. In the US this 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 high-level team in 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 nuclear weapons in Australia. Those concerns led to a US ban on sensitive information to Australia and to British pressure on Prime Minister Chifley to start a service similar to MI5.

In 1946 the wartime Commonwealth Security Service had been merged with the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, which handled police matters, to form the Commonwealth Investigation Service. Chifley thought that sufficient to handle national security matters. Early in 1948 the head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, and a senior deputy, Roger Hollis, went to Canberra to discuss a separate national security service with Chifley and other leaders. Later Hollis returned with Courtenay Young to help set up the service.

Hollis had an interesting background that later caused much conjecture. Rumours about him began after Moscow's British master spy, Kim Philby, under suspicion following the defection to Moscow of diplomatic spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, disappeared in 1963. Hollis, on all the available administrative evidence, was thought to have had to be the person at the top who alerted Philby, who later surfaced in Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life, about imminent arrest. In 1984 British investigative journalist Chapman Pincher claimed in a book, _Top Secret Too Long_ , that Hollis was recruited by Richard Sorge, a famous Soviet spy, while working in Shanghai in the early 1930s as a young executive of the British American Tobacco company.

Chifley in 1948 issued a directive for the formation of a separate national security service. But he and other Labor Party members did not like the idea of giving it secretive MI5-type powers, as the British wanted, and joked about Sir Percy's strange name.

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

Chifley was still not convinced of the need for an MI5-type service. But a few months later, after increasing US and British pressure, and also some from his defence leaders and a few senior Labor colleagues, he accepted British help to start what in 1949 became the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation. As ASIO got into full stride in the early 1950s Ray Whitrod helped lead its most important investigation and also with matters that led in 1954 to the Petrov defections. In 1953 Menzies moved him to Canberra to head the Commonwealth Investigation Service, where functions involving national security were still being transferred to ASIO.

When Whitrod that Thursday in 1955 entered the new premises of the Torch newspaper in Bankstown, after a flight from Canberra, he would have still been one of only a small number of Australians who knew about the Venona intercepts and particularly a matter involving Ben Chifley. Torch editor Phil Engisch would have had very different matters on his mind as he showed Whitrod into his private office and closed the door.

Whitrod had been briefed by Menzies in Canberra on what Morgan had told him at the start of the month. He asked about a request by Ray Fitzpatrick to Engisch in 1946 to print an election pamphlet using material from the security reports early in the war that mentioned Morgan. Engisch confirmed this. He said Fitzpatrick told him the source of the material was Justice Stan Taylor and he had declined the request.

The next day, May 13, 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 war expenditure committee on Fitzpatrick's behalf, and also asked Eddie Ward for his help. Ward, a wartime cabinet minister and a leader of the Labor Party's left wing, was seen by many Australians in 1955 as a possible future prime minister.

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 mentioning Morgan, the ostensible reason for Whitrod's visit, Taylor was evasive. Whitrod was mainly interested, however, in a friend of Taylor in the wartime security service, a Constable Hughes, who had been mentioned during their talk.

In 1924, aged 24, Alfred Thompson Hughes had 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 he moved to what became the Commonwealth Security Service and became the head of counter-espionage in NSW. The only espionage that year which would have concerned Australians was any to benefit Japan, then fighting our limited forces just to our north. Later in the war Alfred Hughes became Australia's chief investigator responsible for monitoring 'subversive associations and the operations of the Communist Party'.

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. When Whitrod asked about the security reports he said he would not say anything more without a lawyer being present. Taylor undoubtedly would have called and told him to say this. Whitrod and Fitzpatrick arranged a meeting.

On Tuesday May 17, behind closed doors 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 would 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 almost none. In the 1930s a Sydney newspaper had referred to federal politicians behaving 'like thieves in the night' over their salaries. When the parliament called on the editor to apologise for breach of privilege he had done so, requiring no further action.

Under parliamentary privilege members speaking in parliament can say what they wish without fear. That in modern times has usually meant fear of being sued in court. It also gives the parliament the power to take what action it sees 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 had relied on custom rather than statutes for its powers and since the time of Oliver Cromwell had jealously insisted on its right to interpret what its privileges were.

For two hours the privileges committee questioned Morgan, who said his professional conduct had never been questioned during 35 years as a solicitor. On the subject of the immigration schemes before the war to help Jews he said he charged less than most other solicitors involved and after expenses made very little compared with his normal legal earnings. Importantly, he gave the committee details Engisch had confirmed to Whitrod five days earlier. 'I have sent that information on to the Prime Minister and the matter is being investigated,' he said.

Members asked Morgan about allegations he made in the parliament on 7 March 1944 concerning a building he claimed to be an aircraft hangar taken illegally in 1943 from the Bankstown air force base, and which by then housed Fitzpatrick's vehicles on the edge of the Bankstown shopping centre. The building, which any of the police, politicians or anyone else at Fitzpatrick's Christmas parties after the war would have been able to see if they wanted, was identical to some wartime aircraft hangars then still at the airport. Morgan valued the building in parliament in 1944 at up to £4,000. But he alleged it was passed off as one worth £100 by the local council and the Department for War Organisation of Industry.

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".'

Morgan said he interviewed Taylor 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'.

Fitzpatrick, he said, sent a letter to the government '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.' Fitzpatrick sent the letter to Prime Minister Curtin, Attorney-General Evatt and Dedman. 'He sent it to everywhere where it could do me harm.'

William 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 he 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 his 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 at the office of his city solicitor. On Wednesday winter had arrived prematurely and snow lay on high ground in 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 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 10.45 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 10.50 one of Fitzpatrick's managers was able to get through to him at the solicitor's office and tell him what was happening.

Fitzpatrick hurried angrily 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. They looked without success 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.' The Mirror and its Sydney afternoon rival, the Sun, did not learn about the raids until it was too late for their final editions. But they and most of Australia's daily newspapers gave them a big coverage the next day.

Internal documents and memos concerning the raids, released this century, show the main concern of those in charge of them 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.

## CHAPTER TEN

### Wartime Allegations and Parliamentary Privilege

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 on Thursday morning, 19 May 1955, rose during Question Time. He then raised at last allegations he first made in the parliament on 7 March 1944 about the building he valued then at up to £4,000, and which he alleged was passed off as one worth £100 by the local council and the Department for War Organisation of Industry. (Later he lowered his estimate to £2,000.) Morgan said then it was up to 160ft long, 40ft wide, of steel girder construction, had a concrete floor and 24 glass windows in the roof, He implied it was an aircraft hangar stolen from the Bankstown air force base. The council, he said, classified it as a shed, something found in many residents' backyards.

John Dedman, the Minister for War Organisation of Industry, told the house the matter was under investigation by his department but some of the points did not come within his jurisdiction. 'It is not easy to get all the information,' he said.

Morgan: 'But these facts are patent.'

Dedman: 'The honourable member says so but my investigator says they are not.'

Morgan: 'Then he must be blind.'

Dedman said he expected a report on the matter within a week and that if necessary he would consult the Attorney-General. Other members began making allegations. On 15 March 1944 Opposition member Eric Harrison, supporting claims by Morgan, said Sydney 'was seething with rumours which, if founded on fact, would appear to reflect grave discredit on the government'. Harrison, known for his closeness to Menzies, said ministers and their departments were involved and named the departments. They included that of Dedman.

The next day was Grievance Day, the day traditionally set aside for such matters. Before long Morgan was making more allegations about the building which housed Fitzpatrick's vehicles. 'I am eager to have a short account of what the honourable gentleman desires to bring before the house,' said Prime Minister Curtin, who had missed earlier debates. 'Is there some scandal in connection with the matter?' After giving a few details about the building, Morgan held up large photos of it and a road alongside. Curtin asked who built the road.

Morgan: 'The Bankstown municipal council.'

Curtin: 'Is the council "in the cart" with the minister?'

Newspapers the next day reported Morgan as saying 'of course they are' and 'up to the neck'. But Hansard, the parliament's official account of its proceedings, which seems to have left out many other words said then, and on other occasions, about matters involving Fitzpatrick, only has him saying: 'The peculiar part is that the contractor [Fitzpatrick] supplied the sand and metal.' To this it has Curtin replying: 'This is all very confusing to me.'

Debates on the matter continued. Morgan said in one 'the dogs are barking' the building was made from materials sent to the air force base. A crane from the base was even used in its construction, he said. They ended on March 22 when Curtin said a prosecution was pending.

On 18 December 1944, after being told by its legal advisers that criminal charges against Fitzpatrick might be too difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt, the federal government 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, Morgan's questions on Thursday morning, 19 May 1955, 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 [on war expenditure] 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.

In the afternoon Morgan rose during a debate on a 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.'

Morgan said Fitzpatrick '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.' He said '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 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.'

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.'

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

'The setting up of the privileges committee was not taken very seriously,' Browne wrote years later. But he 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.'

The answer, he 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.

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

Mason, who in 1987 was to become the Chief Justice of Australia, 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.' Dealing with one of Mason's main 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 Bankstown 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.

A Victorian Liberal, Percy Joske, 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.'

The committee saw that 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 later 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 he 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 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'.

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, June 9, 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 many people in the Australian Parliament who might have liked to see something at least a bit along those lines 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 he 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, Herb 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. 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 met him on the tarmac and they 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 they arrived.

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.'

The two men headed for Browne's home in the expensive ocean cliff suburb of Dover Heights. When they arrived Browne was not at home. Agents of the Commonwealth Investigation Service tried to find him.

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 it was worse than that: he could face heavy damages if what he said was regarded as defamatory in any way.

Just before 11pm he returned home. More camera bulbs flashed as he read a summons 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 ELEVEN

### 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 lawyers 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 except sporting events such as the Melbourne Cup, other Australians joined the broadcast.

Several members, mainly on the Labor side, had already left Canberra. But the lower 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 sat and read the prayers. Then he turned to the Sergeant-at-Arms. 'Inform Raymond Edward Fitzpatrick that the house will now hear him,' he said loudly.

As Fitzpatrick arrived from the side room attendants pulled down the brass bar and fixed it into position at waist height. Pale and nervous, he 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 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 Evatt jumped to his feet calling 'Mr Speaker...' but then sat.

During their morning flight Mason had advised Fitzpatrick to, in such a situation, apologise, and what to say. His voice faltering, he 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 1967 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 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 a coat pocket, he consulted notes prepared for him on the plane by Shand. '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 and 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. 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 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 involving Dame Elizabeth Fairfax, wife of the head of the family that controlled the Sydney Morning Herald.

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, 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,' he 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 this was not out of any sympathy for the two accused. He had even more reasons than Menzies to dislike Browne, who usually called him Awful Arthur in his newsletter. 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 him 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, '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 a little 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 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.

Robert Joshua, leader of an Anti-Communist Labor Party (later Democratic Labor Party) which had emerged from the Labor turmoil, and whose mostly Victorian Catholic 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.'

Sounds 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 a man 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. Browne 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.

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 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... He says that his is an obscure suburban newspaper... 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, Beazley said he had 'obviously hit and hurt many members of parliament'. But for both men, he 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 downed more than one or two drinks, and this was showing. Surly interjections increased against any calls for restraint, and noises of agreement any new attack on the two men.

William Bourke of the Anti-Communist Labor Party was applauded 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 Bourke he had run out of time.

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 – newsletter, 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, Charles 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 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. None of Labor's other 50 members remained in the chamber.

The most surprising Labor vote was by Gough Whitlam. Only an hour or so 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 he 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 many members on both sides, seems not to have doubted the broad thrust at least of allegations made by Morgan in parliament in 1955 against Fitzpatrick. I did not believe he 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 the nearby seat of 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 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, his later rival for the party's 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 probably important, reason. In 1944 his father Harry (usually called Fred after his second name, Frederick) was the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, the government's top legal adviser. As such he 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. At family reunions between 1944 and 1955, perhaps over a few late-night drinks, he quite likely 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 Fitzpatrick became the first person to be jailed by the Australian Parliament. Some newspapers claimed he was the first for a few hundred years to be jailed for a period longer than a sitting by the national parliament of any country following British traditions. The official reason was contempt of parliament. But many members appeared to think someone, for other reasons, should have jailed him long ago. 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. In his case the main real reason was undoubtedly what he had written over the years about many of them. 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 stride became jaunty.

## CHAPTER TWELVE

### Jailings Condemned

As Fitzpatrick, flanked by police, emerged into the fading light of a wintry Canberra sunset and a waiting crowd, he managed another smile. Browne also was able to smile. 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 news 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 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 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 they be sent to Darwin or Alice Springs, where there were jails under Commonwealth control.

The next 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.

Sydney's 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?' It called the proceedings a '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 contained exaggerations and wrongly ignored the speeches of some Labor members against the jailings. But it reflected the disapproval of many other newspapers. Even some in Britain joined the condemnation. It also obviously, from letters to editors and comments on radio, reflected the views of many Australians.

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, and correctly, Evatt said the privileges committee had withheld or suppressed vital evidence. A claim also emerged 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 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 _Afternoon Light_ he wrote a lengthy justification 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.

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. (Such courts inquire normally into deaths but can do so into situations that might potentially have caused them.)

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 June 15 the ACT Supreme Court heard the application for an order of habeas corpus. Government lawyers 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 June 22 in Melbourne.

The hearing lasted less than three days. Lawyers for the two men told the seven judges of the full court the parliament had misinterpreted the Constitution and had overstepped its power by acting as both prosecutor and judge. 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 bother asking for a government 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. Their solicitors said outside the court they would appeal to the Privy Council in London.

Morgan meanwhile continued to call 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 about sensational evidence he would give at the forthcoming Torch inquiry. He also 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 newspapers had begun calling the Bankstown Affair. Alan Reid in Sydney's 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.'

Fitzpatrick and Browne remained at the police cells until their application to appeal to the Privy Council was heard in London on July 14. 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 a lead editorial in The Times.) He then put a case 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 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 a wing with 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.'

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. 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. 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, which he praised. 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 July 11, 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 state parliament member for Bankstown, and Morgan. Just before, they had been called in separately for talks with NSW Attorney-General Billy Sheahan. Whatever was said then those present never publicly revealed. But the results were incredible. 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 Sydney's Telegraph headed 'Bankstown's Parliamentary Representative Calls for Inquiry'. To the incredulity of many 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. His evidence continued in similar vein, with Powell reportedly denying claims about gangsters terrorising Bankstown that had been published in many newspapers.

Morgan also denied statements attributed to him in newspapers around the nation, and which he had never previously denied. Journalists he had told to expect front page 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 the secretary of the Federated Clerks Union but said he 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, words used sometimes in large newspaper headlines about what he said, 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 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 notorious detective. For decades, in other squads, he had been known for his toughness and ability to put criminals out of action, often without legal niceties, and sometimes with gunfire. On the morning after the fire he had headed a team of 20 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, which 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 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. During the fire he heard Phil Engisch ask firemen to concentrate on the section where the new rotary press was located. 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 driving Nurthen to her nearby home 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 asked 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, he 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 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 23-year-old'. Nurthen said she began work at the Torch as an office assistant when she was 15 and left in 1952. After confirming the account of the 37-year-old Engisch 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. (The road, part of a long way to get to Bankstown, was through then undeveloped and heavily forested hills. As many in the court would have known, it was then often used, because of tracks into the forests, as a lover's lane). To test her veracity, Shand handed her a packet of tobacco and some cigarette papers. 'I prefer ready rubbed,' she said, 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 very 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 an SMH 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. She drove her sister-in-law to the court nearly every day of the hearing, she said. 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 her up on the court bench with her shoulder until she recovered.

During this period, Jean Engisch, a friend of my mother, was still living with her husband up the street from our family home. Her home was alongside one with other family members. 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. (To appreciate that head it needs to be known that newspapers then sometimes ran stories about young women who lured men, probably drunk, somewhere out of sight and would then 'roll' them by perhaps bashing them before running off with their money.) '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 (detailed in chapter 3) and had not 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.'

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

Phil's father Les told the court that on the night of the fire he was at The Entrance, a lakeside retirement area north of Sydney where he owned a home, but returned when told the news by a fishing inspector. He 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,' Les 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, 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 mainly 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, a former SMH journalist, 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 SMH 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, the company's business manager, 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 at 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: '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.' Sydney's Telegraph thought Shand's continuing 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, who returned to the witness box and waved a ring with keys attached to show he had found his missing keys. (Dudley Engisch was well-meaning and widely liked in Bankstown. According to his niece Lilian, he was the person who smoothed feathers ruffled by her less-liked brother or father. But he seems to have been a born blunderer.) Coroner Smythe thanked him and stood him down.

Smythe said to Shand 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 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. He also denied other claims by Engisch of threats and was questioned about alleged incidents such as one during a cricket match. According to Phil Engisch, Jack threw him against a wall, told him to 'keep my name out of your dirty rag' and tried to get him to fight. There were no known witnesses. Asked if he liked to settle disputes with his fists, Jack 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 number one suspect but had considered the fact that Engisch was the last known person on the premises before the fire.

The court was adjourned until July 25 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 August 8, when everyone had assembled again, the Parramatta Coroner's Court was packed and silent. 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 FOURTEEN

### Clouds over Labor

The Bankstown Affair was not over yet. On the morning after the coroner's finding the Melbourne Age said there was still cause for disquiet. It called for publication of a report in 1944 by the war expenditure committee and full transcripts of the evidence at the 1955 hearings of the privileges committee. Other journals in the following weeks repeated these calls. The Bulletin, a national weekly news magazine, 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'.

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

Anti-Communist Labor Party members had been trying for months to link the official party they had left in March with Justice Stan Taylor and Ray 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 August 31 John Mullens of the breakaway party 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 emergence of the new party.

Mullens asked the ministerial Postmaster-General, Hubert Anthony, to inquire into a telephone number at the popular southern Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla. 'Doubtless,' he said, '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 matter but would look into it.

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 September 6, four days before the scheduled release of Fitzpatrick and Browne, Deputy Speaker Charles Adermann said at the end of Question Time 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 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.'

After saying it did go on 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, he 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 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 do not think I ever saw the war expenditure committee's report, but it did come to me and my department for consideration.'

During a long speech interrupted by interjections, 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 which 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,' he 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.' He 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.' He then said he would table it a week later. 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 said: '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 city, Bankstown and Leichhardt were the 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 Charles 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.

## CHAPTER FIFTEEN

### 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 (starting price) 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.'

Both men were visited frequently by their wives and had other visitors. 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 during the previous year had begun killing himself with whisky and 'needed all a woman's support he could get'.

Both men claimed afterwards that during their stay they made many acquaintances among the inmates. In the case of Fitzpatrick, many 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. He appears to have been in an early stage of Type 2 diabetes, for which the effective medication widely available not long afterwards then existed. By then, despite all the conjecture about 1944 reports of the war expenditure committee, he had turned from being Public Enemy No.1 to some people into, in many eyes, a national folk hero.

As midnight neared on September 9, 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. A car driven by Ormston and carrying 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.

Police cars arrived to help control the crowd, which continued to grow outside a picket fence near the gate. At any sign of official movement they began cheering. At 11.50pm sections of the crowd began to sing a popular song, _Let Me Go, Lover_ , with the word 'warden' replacing 'lover'. When they learned Browne had turned 40 that day many broke into a rousing rendition of _Happy Birthday_. People began to shout 'Where are they?' At midnight the crowd surged 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 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. 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 their sounds increased and his grin widened. 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, apparently in exuberance. Reporters had to drag them to one side before they could get through to Browne and fire more questions. It was possibly the most remarkable legal departure ever 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 continuing to seriously affect the Labor Party.

Fitzpatrick, after a short sleep, also began answering telephone calls. He was photographed watering his gardens, took Jackie, his daughter by a second marriage, after behavioural problems with his first daughter helped end that marriage, 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 SIXTEEN

### Menzies Breaks Promise

On 13 September 1955 the parliament was packed to hear Menzies table a report on 25 August 1944 to Prime Minister Curtin. 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.'

Surprise 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... 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 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. Commonwealth investigation officers in a long report said that in their opinion no criminal proceedings could be brought against Fitzpatrick. A civil case however was brought against him. The purpose of the action was to determine whether under-deliveries, if there were under-deliveries, were recoverable. 'Delay occurred in the proceedings, but ... 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.'

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.'

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 all newspapers gave it less prominent treatment than before. Some made no mention of it on their front page. Still fresh in the minds of their editors would have been those incredible scenes when Fitzpatrick and Browne left Goulburn Jail.

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 SEVENTEEN

### Mixed Fortunes

After his memorable departure from Goulburn Jail Ray Fitzpatrick began taking life more easy. 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. 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. Her birthday was celebrated with a party that made page 1 of some Sydney newspapers. It was held at Sydney's expensive Wentworth Hotel, where 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 her father 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 his 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 newspapers were mostly brief and all were respectful. There was no mention of Garden Island dockyards or an aircraft hangar allegedly stolen in 1943 from the Bankstown air force base. 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 sent Ray Fitzpatrick to jail. Many newspapers, however, mentioned his racehorses and properties he had bought.

A line of cars preceded by police on motorcycles, and estimated by some newspapers to stretch for three miles, followed him on his final journey. Many people in those cars undoubtedly would have been survivors of two world wars, or their relatives, grateful for financial help Fitzpatrick had provided, without any fanfare, when it was really needed.

Just one week earlier his arch-enemy, Charles 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 to more than a few the biggest villain.

After the fire at the Torch Morgan gave some details inside and outside parliament about Fitzpatrick that were important. Many of those details were the same as he gave to the parliament in 1944, when the nation was at war and they were more important, and when his own party was in power in Canberra. During two weeks of angry debates in 1944 some were at least broadly supported by many members. The truth of some of his 1944 allegations is also supported by documents now in the National Archives. For those and later details he should be given credit. It took courage, although some might call it foolhardiness, to criticise people in federal and state governments run by his own party the way he did.

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.

But his day of greatest triumph, when he saw the parliament sentence Fitzpatrick to jail, marked for him the beginning of the end. The jailing caused widespread sympathy for Fitzpatrick. Soon afterwards, Morgan entered the witness box under oath at the Torch fire inquiry and inexplicably denied ever making widely-reported allegations he had been making about Fitzpatrick. He even denied ever having referred to Fitzpatrick as Mr Big, despite using those words in parliament, which then appeared in large newspaper headlines. After that his reputation was probably almost zero among most people interested in events in this book.

Morgan faced other criticisms but they were relatively unimportant. There was a qualification about what he said in parliament in both years. This was his failure to spell out his professional and 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 their long and bitter feud.

There were also in 1955 his widely-reported allegations about Chicago-style gangsters, which he never gave any real evidence to support. New York's Tammany Hall – the Irish-dominated organisation which for many years controlled that city – yes. Blanche Barkl used that description often, even in newspaper advertisements, when she first entered local politics. But not Chicago gangsters. They 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 Les Engisch, the father of Phil Engisch, Morgan's main ally. It was true though, as some people liked to say, that in the US the federal tax people ended the career of Al Capone. And here, only our federal tax people acted conclusively against Fitzpatrick before the parliament did in 1955.

Morgan didn't give up. As the still-endorsed Labor candidate for the rock-solid Labor electorate of Reid he was returned at elections in December 1955. He even slightly increased his majority.

In 1957 Morgan lost pre-selection in Reid, to Tom Uren, a popular man 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.

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 went so far to the right as to become ridiculous. Ahead of the December elections he 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 savage physical battle with opponents.

Much of that offended Labor supporters who heard about it. It also doubtless offended many voters in Bankstown with not-too-distant memories of life in Europe under the Nazis. That helped explain Morgan's surprising increased majority in December.

Browne went back to what was for him common sense and his party died a natural death in 1957. He had previously been doing public relations work for companies that included some of Australia's most venerable. As later US President Lyndon Johnson gave as his reason for not sacking J. Edgar Hoover, whose erratic FBI seems to have been deliberately kept clear of matters in Australia, it was better to have someone 'inside a tent pissing out' than the other way around. Browne was able to return to work for such companies. He also returned to paid writing in the press, notably for a rising young newspaper 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.

Browne separated from his wife and moved into an inner-city apartment. Ormston stayed at their 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 media, 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.

He began drinking increasingly heavily 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 also about his drinking: 'I've outlived a lot of teetotallers.'

Many of the obituaries soon afterwards were long and reflected, with nostalgia now that he was safely dead, his remarkable life. 'There will never be another muckraker like him,' lamented Sydney's 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 deserved 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, briefly his opposing editor in a battle of two newspapers, died in 1986. Until the end, at least in public, he continued to maintain that the explosion which caused the Torch premises to go up in flames was the result of a deliberate action caused by Ray or Jack Fitzpatrick, or someone connected with them. But evidence at the court inquiry, particularly by the government explosives expert, Stanley Parsons, when he was recalled on the last day, pointed overwhelmingly to Engisch, the last known person on the premises. In previous books, because of the coroner's puzzling 'very strong suspicion' of a deliberate action before returning an open finding, I dealt at length with conjecture about who he might have had in mind. Phil Engisch, as many people in Bankstown believed? But he and his family had lost heavily because of that fire.

Who else? There were possibilities, stemming from all the problems in Bankstown, and also from Phil's German surname and returned soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, or mentally damaged migrants from war-torn Europe. But most evidence pointed to an accident by him. He liked, as he admitted, to have a smoke when under pressure. He was under pressure. Before he left his office to go home for dinner and face his wife he seems to have lit a cigarette to steady his nerves. After several long drags he probably stubbed it out in an ashtray and left.

Perhaps he did not stub out that cigarette completely. Possibly it began smouldering away at the rear of his office in an ashtray on a typically-cluttered editor's desk covered with paper – paper perhaps that scattered a bit when he opened the door to leave. 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 his office, in a small foreman's office at the side of the printing section, something else crucial had happened. A stream of Shellite, an oil-based volatile liquid, from a four-gallon open can on its side, had drained across the floor mainly into the foreman's office. The can was missing two gallons. Parsons said only one or two gallons would have been sufficient for the explosion.

Probably it was knocked over by Engisch, after taking Yvonne Nurthen home, as he went in near-darkness to place tennis notes on a Linotype machine. He was probably deep in worried thought about all the problems his affair with Nurthen was causing with his wife and other family members. The can had immediately spilled half its contents and there was nothing he could have done about that then except perhaps push the can to one side. Someone would clean the floor in the morning.

The roof and most of the outside walls were of sheet metal. Inside, at the end of a hot 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 then used in printing, it was still warm. In those conditions, liquid that drained across the floor, and mainly under the door into the foreman's office, the known centre of the explosion, could have turned soon into vapour. Before long a cloud of this could have filled the foreman's office, in a way similar to what happens in a car engine cylinder when the engine is hot and volatile petrol in injected.

At the back of Phil's office a flame, like a car spark plug building up its charge in slow motion, gathered strength from paper on his desk. Separating the two offices, as was usual then in many Australian buildings, were thin sheets of fibro. 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 a 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. In the foreman's office, with that added heat on the wall, the cloud of vapour thickened. Some of it possibly forced its way out through ventilation into the street. Constable Herd and the two newsboys said they saw fog or smoke near the premises just before the explosion. That could have been vapour, smoke from a fire, or both. That they did not see an indication of fire could be partly explained by closed window covers in Phil's office blocking any glow. They were in a brightly lit street and the fire was still fairly small.

Suddenly part of the wall shattered. Flames shot through, igniting the vapour on the other side. In a fiery and very loud explosion, up into the sky went the roof over the foreman's office. Some vapour was in the printing section. It would also have instantly ignited, and flames began to take over the whole building.

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 of that explosion, no matter what caused it, was a chain of events that took Engisch, Morgan, and also Browne and Fitzpatrick, out of their depth and led to mysteries.

## CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

### Parliament Releases Documents

On 24 November 1999 a Liberal member of the Australian Parliament's privileges committee, Alex Somlyay, presented to the lower house a report of the committee concerning a proposal to release in-camera (behind closed doors) 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 after a year was a motion late 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, as recorded in Hansard. After referring to the 1955 inquiry, and giving background to it, he concluded that 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 the documents'. He said Barlin had a safe in the corner of his office in which he kept the documents and nobody except him was allowed to see them. 'Lyn cared so passionately about these matters not being revealed that I deferred to his decision.'

'Some time later, when I became a member of the privileges committee, I pursued this matter,' McLeay said. 'It is to the government's credit that this has come about after some considerable to-ing and fro-ing to the Leader of the House who, because of his lawyerly background, was interested in one of the ramifications of this matter, which is that there are some reflections made on a judge in the evidence.' However, he said, he had misgivings about the motion allowing for exceptions in cases of 'unreasonable intrusion' into the affairs of people dead or alive. 'That was always the reason that was given why you could not release the Browne-Fitzpatrick papers: because they reflected on this poor dead judge.'

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

Material released to the National Archives as a result did not include the report sent to Prime Minister John Curtin by the Joint War Expenditure Committee on 25 August 1944, the so-called most secret document in Australia. But it did include a 16-page attached memorandum, a record for future use, which gave a good idea of its contents. There was also a letter to Curtin from Victor Johnson, the committee's then chairman. On 16 November Johnson wrote to Frank Forde, the Acting Prime Minister while Curtin was ill, saying almost three months had passed since he had sent the report to Curtin and no action appeared yet to have been taken against Fitzpatrick. He asked why.

Attorney-General Evatt's office sent to Forde a copy of a report by the Acting Solicitor-General to Evatt and said Evatt would advise Forde later on the situation. The report said that since August 25 an investigator named Jack Magnusson had supplied nine separate reports 'on various aspects of the alleged conspiracy'. One contained 26 pages of single-spaced typing, together with 190 pages of transcripts of shorthand notes during interviews with numerous persons. 'The matter is one of difficulty and complexity, but the investigation is now approaching completion,' the report to Forde said.

On 6 December 1944 the office of Crown Solicitor Harry Whitlam sent to Evatt a report concerning an opinion by two of its counsel, Mr A.R.J. Watt, KC, and Mr J.D. Holmes, on what charges, if any, could be brought against Fitzpatrick and his associates. Details accompanying the advice were complicated and hinged mainly on the difference between a cubic yard and a ton, in either of which truckload sizes were stated, and both of which could be difficult for an inexperienced person to estimate. Watt and Holmes said their estimates of quantities put into trucks were hopelessly inaccurate.

That day, the report to Evatt said, the Acting Solicitor-General, the Crown Solicitor, the Deputy Crown Solicitor, Sydney, and the Director of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch had conferred with Watt and Holmes. 'The matter was discussed exhaustively and it appears to be inescapable that the view expressed by Counsel that the available evidence is not sufficient to warrant the institution of criminal proceedings against Fitzpatrick, or his Manager, Park, must be accepted as correct,' it said.

Charles Park, who lived about five doors up the street when I was young, replaced my father as Fitzpatrick's full-time accountant in the mid-1930s. In another document he was called his office manager.

In 1991 I interviewed him at his South Coast retirement home, not far from the Berry home of Lilian Swane, sister of Phil Engisch, who helped arrange our meeting. He was willing to talk about Bankstown matters generally at the time and a little about my father's relationship with Fitzpatrick. But when I pressed him gently about the truth of allegations about Fitzpatrick he said only that 'Ray Fitzpatrick did a lot of good things and he did some bad things'. Soon after the war, I knew, he had a blazing row with Fitzpatrick and went to work for his main local trucking rival, Stan Fox, for whom my father also did accountancy work. Fox later became a much more successful racehorse owner than Fitzpatrick but never had anything like his background influence.

Material released to the National Archives also included edited minutes of war expenditure committee meetings in 1944, a transcript of evidence given to the privileges committee in 1955, 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. The number of pages ran into many hundreds.

On the evidence in the memorandum, the August 1944 report to Curtin concerned mainly concreting at the air force base. There were many indications of corruption in the delivery and pricing of sand and blue metal, but nothing specific about the most serious allegations, those involving the Garden Island dockyards.

There is no doubt that more than one report involving the activities of Fitzpatrick was sent by the war expenditure committee to the top 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 memorandum.

On 18 December 1944 a writ of summons was issued out of the NSW Registry of the High Court of Australia claiming money from Ray Fitzpatrick and two other men. 'The action arose out of an investigation into certain constructional work carried out at the Bankstown Aerodrome by the Allied Works Council,' a court document said. 'The investigation disclosed that Fitzpatrick was defrauding the Commonwealth in that he was falsifying receipts for the hire of lorries, and the delivery of material (sand, gravel and blue metal), delivering underweight, delivering blue metal dust as ¾ inch blue metal and obtained petrol by false statements.'

Charles Morgan in 1944 in parliament said a 'highly competent officer used to be attached to the war expenditure committee to investigate cases of this kind', but his services had 'for some reason been withdrawn'. That officer was Jack Magnusson.

Initial inquiries by Magnusson in 1943 had led to Fitzpatrick being prosecuted in a magistrate's court for two breaches of national security regulations in connection with the building that housed Fitzpatrick's vehicles. 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. Morgan's most serious allegations concerned the graving dock, later almost always called dry dock, at the Garden Island dockyards.

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 most of the harbour between Garden Island, which had long had a small 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. The project became urgent after Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and even more urgent at first after the fall of Singapore in February 1942.

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 city centre, which like everywhere else was blacked out because of air-raid fears. Ray Fitzpatrick owned many of the trucks that rolled in carrying building materials, sand, blue metal, quarry waste and gravel, and helped supply the contents of many. 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.

The first vessel to berth inside the dock, on 2 May 1945, 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 because facilities in Asia, closer to main shipping lanes, soon became available with skilled people willing to work for much less than Australians.

Minutes of war expenditure committee meetings indicated allegations concerning the dockyards were the main focus of Magnusson's inquiries. They said a meeting chaired by Harold Holt at Martin Place in Sydney on 1 May 1944 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 that official accompanied members of the committee on an inspection of the site.

The minutes of a meeting on 22 June 1944, again chaired by Holt, contained 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 from river sites near Bankstown, had given details in a call to Holt about supplying 10,000 tons of coarse sand for Fitzpatrick, but on a yardage basis. The price details were confusing and hinged mainly on the difference between a yard and a ton.

The minutes for the next day's meeting began by saying Holt had asked for more details from Skevington to amplify 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.'

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 August 1944 report memorandum to Curtin and also some in a detailed report a senior state 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.

After saying Magnusson had been recalled and examined, minutes of the war expenditure committee recorded 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'. That led on 28 June 1944 to raids on the offices of Fitzpatrick and his city auditor, where nothing of much use to the committee was found. (The documents were in fact out of sight in folders on a high shelf in a photographic darkroom in our backyard shed. The folders had Fitzpatrick's name on the front and dates ranging from the mid-1930s to 1944. I accidently found them there a few years later during explorations in the shed after I began going to school.)

Federal tax officials, however, accompanied the federal police after Magnusson suggested this to the committee, as he believed Fitzpatrick was avoiding tax. That led to the tax office collecting £62,000 in back taxes from Fitzpatrick, a very large amount at a time when many homes, even in expensive suburbs, could be bought for well under £1000.

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. But many parts of the war expenditure committee minutes were blacked out and pages appeared to be missing. Whatever blacked-out or missing parts, or any other reports, did say, there were enough indications in papers sent to the archives of the ostensible main reason given for the lack of legal action on allegations about Ray Fitzpatrick: 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. 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 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 during the war involving matters such as the Garden Island dockyards and that building which housed Fitzpatrick's vehicles. After the war there seem to have been more cover-ups of matters involving Fitzpatrick. But most, as time passed, would probably not have been thought too important. Possibly many involved nothing more than suspicions of guilt through association involving the many powerful acquaintances Fitzpatrick had in government and politics through horseracing.

Slightly less than a year before the fire at the Torch, however, an already complex situation had been extraordinarily complicated further by the defections of Vladimir Petrov and his wife.

One of the documents Petrov brought when he defected had a note mentioning Justice Taylor. His predecessor Sadovnikov said Taylor was an Industrial Commission judge and Labor supporter who up to 1943 was the Sydney head of the national security service. While in that job, it said, according to the official translation: 'Taylor handed to the Communist Party a document which made possible the exposure of an agent provocateur in a region of the Communist Party.' (Actually, as Petrov later made clear, 'agent or agent provocateur' would have been much more accurate.)

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 then by Evatt.

On 23 August 1955, just before the release to parliament of the espionage 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 a brief mention of evidence in which Justice Taylor denied any communist link and explained how his mention in that note might have occurred.

Two weeks later Menzies promised in parliament to release the so-called most secret document in Australia. A week after that he broke his promise. Behind that were more reasons than he gave to the parliament that day. Some of those reasons surfaced in Taylor's secret evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage.

## CHAPTER NINETEEN

### Justice Taylor's Evidence

Australia Day, January 26, in 1955 was on a Wednesday. It had the usual ceremonies and speeches about the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour in 1788 and the declaration of British sovereignty. But otherwise it was a normal working day.

On Thursday the royal commission questioned a government scientist about how he came to be named in a Sadovnikov note. It then officially closed for the Australia Day long weekend until the following Tuesday, when everyone would return to work after a Monday official holiday given for not having had one on Wednesday. It was not alone in taking an extra day off. On Friday morning cars were soon crowding roads out of Sydney as people headed for camping sites or country resorts.

Just before 10am Justice Taylor entered the commission chamber through a door that had been unlocked by a skeleton staff member. Correspondence and words had already been exchanged at a meeting between Justice Taylor 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 (usually known as Victor, the third of three first names) Windeyer QC, the senior counsel assisting the commission, began his questions.

Taylor said he was appointed to head the security service in NSW in May 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 he said he was not personally concerned with matters such as subversion. '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 Taylor 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 he gave details about other matters, notably some involving Warwick Fairfax, head of the Sydney Morning Herald company, 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 important 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.'

The best of my knowledge I am the first, and still only, person to publish the most important parts of that evidence and particularly the very important part at the end which showed how close Stan Taylor and his brother were to Ben Chifley during the war.

## CHAPTER TWENTY

### A Russian Spy Codenamed Ben

Menzies knew about Taylor's evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage but not possibly everything he said. Those at the hearing were sworn to secrecy. A pointer to reasons behind that secrecy surrounding Taylor's evidence was in a problem, mentioned in the memorandum sent with the report to Curtin in August 1944, which faced Jack Magnusson, the war expenditure committee's investigator.

In June 1944 Magnusson investigated alleged serious discrepancies between quantities of blue metal delivered to the Bankstown air force base and those for which the government paid. His investigations pointed to false reports by people such as weighbridge operators and false receipts for underweight or non-existent loads. To find out more about Fitzpatrick's operations, Magnusson and a few colleagues on June 22 followed at a distance a truckload of blue metal from Fitzpatrick's quarry at Prospect, west of Sydney.

Although three or four deliveries were normally made each day, it became the only one that day. Along the way the driver, John Benson, stopped at a disused quarry where there was a dump of about 100 tons of blue metal and, with co-workers, topped it up heavily. Benson when questioned said this was normal practice and helped lighten loads on the journey to the air force base. He said the dump was owned by a person named O'Mara. But there was no record in Fitzpatrick's books of any purchase from such a person. Benson was a key Fitzpatrick aide who later controlled much of the legwork during his campaign to get Jack Lang elected to represent Reid in 1946. He also accompanied Fitzpatrick when he visited Phil Engisch at the time and tried to get him to print pamphlets with details in the security service reports about Morgan's role in the pre-war moves to help Jews fleeing the Nazis.

The parliament's war expenditure committee agreed with Magnusson's view that it would be 'most uneconomical' to top up every load at a disused quarry. And it said the explanation 'must be discredited because of a deficiency of 5,700 tons of blue metal at the air base for the period under review'.

Knowledge that a 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: Alfred Hughes, the NSW police detective-constable, being overlooked for promotion, who transferred in 1940 to the military police and in 1942 moved to the Commonwealth Security Service as head of counter-espionage in NSW, obviously at that stage anyone spying for Japan, Germany or Italy.

Senior counsel Windeyer had casually asked Justice Taylor at the espionage royal commission about someone in the wartime security service connected with subversive activities. As if he had been searching his memory, he said 'I think the man's name was Hughes'. Windeyer, a former wartime brigade commander who had been the government's first choice to head what became ASIO, but had turned down the offer to pursue a legal career, knew very well the man's name was Hughes. Alfred Hughes.

He was the Constable Hughes in Chapter 9 who Taylor at his judicial chambers on 13 May 1955 had mentioned to Ray Whitrod, head of the Commonwealth Investigation Service. Taylor admitted that in 1944 he had sent Hughes, by then Australia's chief investigator of communist party and Russian subversion, to see Charles Morgan on Fitzpatrick's behalf. Morgan four days after that said in his suppressed evidence to the parliament's privileges committee that in January 1944 a 'gentleman from Security' was sent 'on behalf of Stan Taylor' to his office. 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. That also was Hughes.

Windeyer had a more important reason than the building where Fitzpatrick held his Christmas parties to be interested in Alfred Hughes. The reason was in the locked safe in the Sydney office behind the Garden Island dockyards of the MI5 resident agent Courtenay Young. The Venona material during the war had begun to point to Australians, most with Moscow code names, who had spied, and in some cases appeared still to be spying, for the Russians. One person, apparently with high connections, was codenamed Ben. By 1948 Venona material had pointed to Alfred 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 their Moscow code names in English. Alongside most was brief identification in Cyrillic. Number five on the list was Ben and a name that was translated as Hughes. A book, _Australia's Spies and Their Secrets_ , written by 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 more middle-of-the-road author and academic. His book was published 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 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 Venona project. Nor even did some fairly senior people in Britain's MI5. However, Chifley was told about its existence in 1949, they said. So, in 1950, was Menzies, who replaced Chifley as Prime Minister in December 1949.

Professor Ball was a highly regarded expert overseas on Cold War nuclear, intelligence and security matters. In a book of essays about him, _Insurgent Intellectual_ , published in 2012, four years before he died after a long fight with cancer, former US President Jimmy Carter claimed his advice in the US in the 1970s concerning Russian nuclear capability helped 'save the world' from a nuclear catastrophe.

Ball and Horner wrote that, in a bid to prevent the Russians learning more about the project 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 Alfred Hughes was a constant adviser of Taylor, spent much of his spare time with him, and 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, presumably the 'poor dead judge' cited to parliamentarians as the reason for not releasing Browne-Fitzpatrick papers until this century, as important for their story about codebreaking and its results.

Hughes they appeared to think the most important in Australia. They concluded chapters concerning investigations of people thrown up by the Venona material 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, until his death in May 1994, maintained a forlorn hope that Hughes's membership of [the espionage group headed by Walter Clayton] would not be publicised.'

Ball and Horner also said, however, that the wartime intercepts provided few details about information Hughes handed to Clayton from 1943 to 1945. The known details were mainly about how the Commonwealth Security Service operated, a subject of Moscow congratulations to Clayton. They said Hughes was investigated by ASIO from 1949 to 1952 but not questioned because of secrecy about the Venona project. He was finally questioned in 1957, altogether about six times. But knowledge from long police, legal and security service work enabled him to bluff his way through and he gave away nothing of importance, they said.

McKnight said Hughes was nervous during the first interview, held at a café in George Street in Sydney's commercial centre after an informal approach, but seemed interested in trying to find out how much ASIO knew about him. A later official history of ASIO quoted an interviewer as calling him a frightened man during one of the interviews. All three books mentioned that he applied to join ASIO in 1951 but after a job interview withdrew his application. He was later asked why he tried to join and said he had been 'unsettled' in his work for the Sydney Vice Squad.

Apart from a brief 1980 public mention, the Venona secrecy was maintained until 1985, when 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 in Australia but failed. Wright's government legal battles helped create an international reputation for Australian lawyer, and later prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. British officials then tried to stop its sale elsewhere. They were able to do so for a while in England, but not in Scotland, which had different laws, or other countries.

In 1986 a former American FBI liaison officer with the Venona project published a book, _The FBI-KGB War_ , with many details.

In Australia, at the behest of the American and British governments, secrecy about any Venona material was maintained by successive governments. One threat to that secrecy, revealed in the second volume of ASIO's official history, emerged in 1983 after the new Hawke government passed an Archives Act allowing access to much previously inaccessible material. When a senior official realised journalists might 'pick up the trail' of the 'special intelligence' about Venona he sent a telex to particular staff. It concerned 'access to be taken to identify and protect a privileged class of intelligence relating to events which led to the creation of ASIO'. With prime ministerial approval, ASIO began identifying any such material in the National Archives and offices of government departments.

The US government did not officially reveal the existence of the project, and release some material, until 1995, five years after the Cold War ended. 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 were given access to a lot of confidential government material, did extensive research and knew about Hughes's Moscow code name. They also knew about Justice Taylor and how close he was to Hughes.

But their books gave no indication they knew about Taylor's full secret evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage, which showed how close he was during the war to Ben Chifley. Or about how close Taylor was also to Ray Fitzpatrick, and how he and Hughes during the war had gone out of their way to help Fitzpatrick avoid prosecution by the government for defrauding it during the war.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

### Extreme Venona Secrecy

ASIO's history was mainly about staffing and organisational matters, which was to be expected in a large official history of an organisation. Volume one, _The Spy Catchers_ , published at the end of 2014, emphasised how worried people high in the security establishments of the US and Britain were about protecting the Venona secrecy, particularly during the Royal Commission on Espionage, which began hearings in May 1954. 'The concern to protect Venona became even more acute after the royal commission began its hearings,' the history said. MI5 knew all the main suspects had been identified by Venona and that the commission had been empowered to investigate the whole field of ASIO's knowledge.

John Burton, Evatt's former private secretary, was a problem. In 1947 Evatt had made him Secretary of his Department of External Affairs, at 32 the youngest civil servant ever to head a federal government department. Burton had resigned in 1950. In 1948 MI5 had informed him of its suspicions about two Venona suspects interrogated in London. They had given him a cover story about a Soviet defector. But MI5 officials in 1954 feared the left-wing Burton, who by then was starting a career as a writer, might have 'deduced the nature of the source'.

MI5 officials argued that commission chairman Justice William Owen and senior counsel Windeyer 'should be indoctrinated into the Venona program. If necessary the source of Venona information should be described as an "informant of proven reliability",' ASIO's history said. At London's request, ASIO head Charles Spry arranged with Justice Owen for Burton's evidence to be in camera in order to protect Venona.

In November 1954 the royal commissioners asked ASIO if the Venona source would be prejudiced by questions about another interrogation in London. ASIO said yes and gave MI5 reasons. 'MI5 was adamant that there should be no public statement about the source of information, because even if such a comment was not obvious to the public it would be recognised by "experts, and especially by American and Russian experts",' the history said, quoting the words of MI5. 'If the Americans were alerted "the whole American attitude towards Australian and British security, including atomic energy liaison, would be prejudiced".'

MI5 officials knew the biggest problem would be Evatt. Still suspecting a conspiracy by Menzies and ASIO in the defection of Petrov, he was becoming increasingly bitter. 'MI5 spent several days trying to work out whether Evatt had been indoctrinated into Venona when he was Attorney-General and eventually concluded, correctly, that while Chifley had been given permission to brief Evatt, he had not done so,' ASIO's history said. As widely detailed elsewhere, Evatt justified some MI5 and ASIO fears. For a while he appeared as a lawyer for members of his staff called before the commission, behaviour almost unheard of for a national party leader anywhere. He made progress cross-examining ASIO witnesses. But after angry outbursts by him, the commissioners, aware of concerns in high places overseas, on 7 September 1954 withdrew his permission to appear at hearings.

In a few offices in Australia, the US and Britain there were presumably sighs of relief. Evatt did though continue attacks on the royal commission in parliament and the press. He appeared increasingly to lose his mind. On 19 October 1955, during a speech in parliament soon after the release of the commission's report, he stunned some members when he said he had written to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov asking if Russian documents given by Petrov to ASIO were false. When he then said Molotov had told him they were, many on both sides of the chamber burst into laughter.

The royal commission's two star witnesses also caused worries. Petrov was in the witness box for 37 days and Evdokia for 21. There were serious concerns about their safety and also the mental health particularly of Vladimir, an often unstable drunkard. In light of experiences of other communist defectors, he feared Russian agents might try to kill him during the hearings. Care was taken in getting him to and from them each day, and in protecting him there and while sleeping at a secret location each night. Evdokia was less of a problem but worried a lot about her mother and sister back in Russia.

Although the contribution of both Petrovs to the royal commission was limited by the Venona secrecy, they provided great help to the security services of many Western countries. Vladimir, to British consternation, revealed that Burgess and Maclean, as was believed, had defected to the Soviet Union, and also their location. Evdokia, a signals intelligence expert, was more valuable than her husband. According to the _Australian Dictionary of Biography_ they identified 600 Soviet intelligence officers, detailed spying in Britain, Sweden and the US, provided new insights on Soviet systems and helped experts decipher more Venona messages. Robert Manne in _The Petrov Affair_ and other writers said much the same.

After the last royal commission hearing, on 31 March 1955, the commissioners began preparing their report. 'Earlier they had sought advice from ASIO about what they could publish while still protecting the Venona source,' the official history said. All three commissioners by then had been briefed on Venona. In May they conferred with the MI5 liaison officer in Sydney and were shown copies of particular intercepts. On July 7, after they prepared their draft report, ASIO and MI5 checked for anything 'that might be damaging to the Venona secret' and requested changes. On July 27 MI5 requested more changes.

Having finally satisfied anti-espionage officials of Britain and Australia, the royal commission on 22 August 1955 completed its report and on September 14 publicly released it. The report contained many details about Soviet spying and activities of Australians suspected of helping them. But it did not contain substantial details about any Australian spy ring and did not recommend any prosecutions, saying its rules of evidence were different from those in a court of law. 'Critics of the Royal Commission would later emphasise that the lack of prosecutions "proved" there was no evidence of espionage,' the history said. 'In fact, the commissioners knew that much of the damning evidence had come from Venona and that this source was too sensitive and could never be revealed in court.'

Early in World War II British experts at Bletchley Park managed to decipher messages sent on Germany's supposedly unbreakable Enigma cipher machines. This enabled them to read high-level German radio communications. It was a major breakthrough that helped lead to Germany's defeat. Information obtained that way was classified as Ultra Top Secret and became known just as Ultra. Venona material was classified as even more secret than that, the history claimed. After the Russians learned about Venona in 1948 'American, British and Australian security agencies would work with almost fanatical diligence to preserve the Venona secret', it said.

Since the Russians knew about it, and had changed their systems to rule out further interceptions, secrecy so extreme in the West about even the existence of the project appeared strange. One factor behind the secrecy, according to _Venona_ , a lengthy history of the project in 1999 by two Yale University academics, helped by people there and elsewhere, was rapidly accelerating advances in Western computer technology. _Venona_ said Kim Philby, in a decoded message from London to Moscow in February 1950 about the project, told the KGB 'the Americans and British had constructed a deciphering machine which in one day does "the work of a thousand people in a thousand years".'

_Venona_ said the US 'did not want Soviet intelligence to find out which messages had been read and which remained opaque. American interests, at least in the short run, were served by Moscow's uncertainty over how much the United States had really learned. That uncertainty enhanced the ability of American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies to use Venona as a standard for evaluating other sources of intelligence information.' The book , citing the Chifley government's founding of ASIO in 1947, described Australia as a 'striking example' of the power of the project's deciphered messages to convince otherwise sceptical politicians to take action.

ASIO's history said that behind the secrecy were fears about knowledge Russians and their allies might have gleaned, even from seemingly unimportant things said in a court or elsewhere in public, about Western advances in deciphering and about particular persons and matters mentioned in the interceptions up to 1948.

The Venona secret was not endangered by the Royal Commission on Espionage. But by the time the commission ended many Australians obviously thought it had all been a waste of money and had lost interest. After it released its report the biggest press headlines went to its brief mention about Justice Taylor denying he had helped communists.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

### Dangers in an Open Court

Behind the secrecy surrounding Justice Taylor's appearance in the espionage royal commission was obviously the Moscow code name of Alfred Hughes and Taylor's known friendships during the war with Hughes and Chifley. There was also that close friendship of Ray Fitzpatrick with Taylor, and the way Taylor and Hughes during the war had gone out of their way to help Ray Fitzpatrick avoid legal charges.

In Fitzpatrick's wartime friendship with Taylor, when Taylor was also a close friend of Chifley, was already a potential for newspaper headlines. Add in Alfred Hughes, that Moscow code name and paranoia about communism, and they might have been more eye-catching than some involving Fitzpatrick after the fire at the Torch. Over more than a decade there were many calls in the federal and NSW parliaments for a public inquiry, or even royal commission, into matters involving Fitzpatrick. Even Menzies in 1946 had called for such a royal commission. After the fire at the Torch some speakers began to mention Stan Taylor.

Labor members, and Evatt in particular after many front page headlines about him and people connected with him during the espionage royal commission and elsewhere, were most in the firing line in 1955 and had the greatest cause of those in the federal parliament to fear even more, and more damaging, possible headlines.

But Menzies also had cause to fear them. He had been in charge at the federal level when many matters had begun before or early in the war, and had been again since late 1949. He had come out of the jailing of Fitzpatrick and Browne badly. And he was in a difficult situation concerning national security. Many Australians would have remembered the real fears for a while in 1942 of possible Japanese invasion. Most had 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 from his own side, in 1941. This was an area where he had to step carefully.

His situation was ironic. The Petrovs had at first seemed like a godsend for him, as had ASIO's enthusiasm for fighting communism. But Menzies was the most senior of the few Australians who knew about Venona, and was under heavy US and British pressure to safeguard secrecy about even its existence. It must have been frustrating for him to know that in an Australian safe was a lot of material which might have done much more during the royal commission hearings to support claims of espionage.

Fitzpatrick, in any open court hearing into matters involving himself, would have been questioned and cross-examined. That could have been interesting for all sorts of reasons. They included not only Stan Taylor and Alfred Hughes but the many influential friends, or at least acquaintances, he had through horseracing, any of whom might also have been called and cross-examined after being mentioned in evidence.

Taylor presumably would have been called and possibly asked about his connections with Ben Chifley and Alfred Hughes. Apart from that, as Australia's deputy head of national security in 1942, he must have known more than most people about where early wartime political bodies were buried.

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

Menzies and Evatt at government, parliamentary or party levels had power in the background of both 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 and cross-examined about some matters. So could Arthur Calwell, Eddie Ward, Gough Whitlam and his father, Jack Lang and former 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 and officials who might have been called.

The possible witnesses however who might, because of the Venona secrecy, most have worried people in Soviet counter-espionage headquarters in the US and Britain, and by extension ASIO and Menzies, were in national security and law enforcement.

Jack Magnusson during the war was in the Commonwealth Investigation Branch. Alfred Hughes was in the Commonwealth Security Service, the other main federal body with investigators. The activities of those bodies appear to have overlapped. Staff moved between them. Probably both had access to at least much of each other's classified material. While Magnusson was investigating Fitzpatrick in 1944 for the parliament's war expenditure committee someone was obviously spying on Magnusson for the purpose of helping Fitzpatrick avoid a criminal prosecution for defrauding the federal government.

Magnusson must soon have known the culprit had to be Hughes. And Fitzpatrick, with the help of Taylor, was brazenly going over Magnusson's head to the top of the government.

The letter war expenditure chairman Victor Johnson sent to Curtin in August 1944 with the committee's first report and attached memorandum made this clear. 'My dear Prime Minister,' he began. 'I am forwarding with this letter the Report of the War Expenditure Committee's investigations into certain contracts relating to Allied Works Council projects in New South Wales. The Committee felt that you should have an early opportunity of considering this Report as we have been told that an approach is likely to be made to you in Canberra on Monday on behalf of the R. Fitzpatrick who features so prominently in our Report. It is possible that in the course of any interview you might grant in this connexion, complaints will be made of the conduct of the Commonwealth Inquiry Officer, Mr. J.R. Magnusson.

'We strongly suggest that you treat any complaints of this kind with reserve. Mr. Magnusson has impressed the Committee most favourably throughout its association with him. He has pursued his inquiries energetically and efficiently. He has told us that complaints made by Fitzpatrick against the manner in which he has carried out his investigations are groundless. The Committee would find it difficult to believe that this curteous (sic) officer, who has had no similar complaints against him in his fifteen years with the Investigation Branch, has executed his duties in an objectionable manner. After the preparation of our Report,' it ended, 'Mr Magnusson reported verbally to us on a number of important developments which strengthen our suspicions and indicate the irregularities to be more extensive than we believed.'

Magnusson, who probably knew more than anyone about Fitzpatrick and people friendly with him, including Hughes, posed other dangers.

In _Australian Spies and Their Secrets_ , David McKnight connected him with Michael Bialoguski, the man who got Petrov to defect. '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 wrote. Magnusson therefore at that stage probably also would have known more than almost anyone about Bialoguski, a person in 1955 of much speculation in the media and among political opponents of Menzies.

Bialoguski's fondness for prostitutes appeared similar to that of Petrov. Therein was a potential for tabloid interest separate from espionage. That fondness might also help explain how Magnusson became Bialoguski's Commonwealth Investigation Service contact after he had successfully offered his services to the government, and why Magnusson, along with Bialoguski, was then transferred to ASIO.

Magnusson had long been finding out anything he could about Detective-Sergeant Hughes of the Sydney Vice Squad, whose work included keeping tabs on people in, or frequently patronising, Sydney's sex industry. Magnusson would have learned something about such matters. He, and people above him, would probably have realised possibilities in Bialoguski helping Petrov find sex after drinks at the club in Sydney where they began meeting.

In November 1954, according to ASIO's history, MI5 had been 'adamant' about a warning to ASIO, and by extension the espionage royal commissioners, about the danger to the Venona source of comments in public with meaning that would not be obvious to the public but would be recognised by experts. In an open court with such experts Magnusson might have been a big worry.

So might Whitrod, possibly Australia's most highly regarded police officer ever, at home and abroad. Whitrod helped start ASIO. His office then had been next to that of MI5 liaison officer Courtenay Young, who had the Venona transcripts. According to McKnight, Young supplied Whitrod and two other founding chiefs with material concerning Australians, including their Russian code names. Whitrod helped lead long investigations into those and had special reasons of his own for unhappiness.

In 1953 Menzies sent him to head the Commonwealth Investigation Service, where he had to oversee the transfer of remaining work involving national security to ASIO. According to ASIO's official history, Whitrod at the CIS began feuding with ASIO chief Spry over lines of responsibility and accused Spry of taking his best staff. In 1950 Menzies had made Spry, a wartime brigadier who was then the army's director of military intelligence, the second head of ASIO, tasked with taking it out of its difficult gestation. When Spry complained to Menzies about Whitrod, the history said, Menzies supported Spry.

Then, of course, there was Alfred Hughes, who was not among the 119 witnesses called before the Royal Commission on Espionage. In his case there were not only questions involving that Moscow code name and help he provided to Fitzpatrick. As a detective-sergeant in the Sydney Vice Squad from 1945 to 1960 he probably knew about matters of another nature that some important people might not have liked to become public.

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

They might also have conveyed meaning to any of the 'experts, and especially American and Russian experts' in the court who were feared by MI5 officials, apparently worried as much about American zealotry, or perhaps even something devious involving FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, the big wild card in the US, as they were about the Russians.

That extraordinary raid by carloads of federal police on Fitzpatrick's home and offices on 18 May 1955, the day after Charles Morgan's worrying evidence behind closed doors to the parliament's privileges committee, seems to have been partly intended as a distraction, ordered perhaps by Menzies, to help stop people in the news media and elsewhere getting a sniff of what people in high national security positions at home and overseas feared. Newspapers the next day had a good story to put on their front pages and write editorials about. They were happy. So probably were many voters who liked to see a government 'do something' about possible crookedness.

Ray Fitzpatrick, who Whitrod was still questioning in his city solicitor's office while federal police had begun ransacking his offices, was definitely not happy. A person, however, who appeared to realise everything was probably not quite what it seemed was Clare Fitzpatrick, wife of Ray, who told a Daily Mirror reporter that federal police officers who searched their home for hours without finding anything were 'absolute gentlemen'. 'I made them a cup of tea,' she said, 'and sent them away very happy.'

The Royal Commission on Espionage had become to many Australians a bore long before it ended. The less important Torch inquiry, held in July 1955, while the royal commission was preparing its findings, had at times been fascinating. It had provided none of the expected evidence of corruption in high places. But it had developed in ways nobody could have foreseen. Those proved very damaging for Phil Engisch and Charles 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. So probably did many of their readers, lured into reading the stories underneath by headlines like that. There were many possible dangers if a wide inquiry about matters involving Fitzpatrick ever went into an open court.

In the parliament on 6 September 1955, when Menzies promised to table that 1944 report to Curtin, he knew a lot. But not apparently about the full situation involving Alfred Hughes. It seems that when he received the report he just skimmed through it. Perhaps he did not get the memorandum and personal letter from the chairman to Prime Minister Curtin.

On September 13 Menzies told a packed parliament he would not 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 Fitzpatrick had not been able to defend himself before it. So was Evatt, when he agreed with that and the reasons Menzies had given. In understanding what they said that day, however, 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 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. Probably ASIO chief Spry, the MI5 resident agent and a CIA representative in Australia had contacted Menzies immediately after learning of the promise and warned him of a danger to Venona secrecy. There might even have been calls from London and Washington. Menzies, sworn to secrecy about Venona, probably discussed his decision to release the report with advisers and mentioned national security without mentioning Venona.

Evatt had not been briefed about Venona. But he seems to have had fairly knowledgeable advisers about many matters, including national security, who did not have his strange views about the Soviet Union. Calls would have gone 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 supported them.

Back into locked safes in Canberra went a lot of material about Ray Fitzpatrick, Justice Taylor and Alfred Hughes.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

### The Good Name of Ben Chifley

In a history of Australia's prime ministers, _The Good, the Bad & the Unlikely_, updated in 2016, journalist and historian Mungo MacCallum said Chifley 'was almost certainly its best loved. The humble, plain-spoken engine driver from Bathurst had an affinity with ordinary men and women that has seldom been approached and never been bettered.' Many other people over the years have said much the same.

Instead of staying at the official prime ministerial residence, Chifley when in Canberra always stayed at the more modest Hotel Kurrajong, from which he could walk to the parliament. That helped cut taxpayer costs. It also helped with a relationship he had with his long-time private secretary, Phyllis Donnelly, which went beyond typing. According to MacCallum and other writers, he was a caring husband. He visited his wife Elizabeth in Bathurst whenever he could and phoned her frequently. But Elizabeth had been barren since a miscarriage early in their marriage and for most of her life since had been a semi-invalid.

Donnelly was with Chifley at his hotel suite when, on the evening of 13 June 1951, he had a serious heart attack. He died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.

At King's Hall in the parliament most of its members and their partners were at a grand ball celebrating the 50th jubilee of Australia's Federation. Chifley, in poor health, had been invited to attend but declined. When Menzies was told of his death he ordered the orchestra to stop playing and with obvious deep feeling announced it. The festivities ended and became a wake. MacCallum said Menzies and Evatt 'wept unashamedly'.

Over the years Menzies fought many battles in parliament with Chifley. Despite those battles he seems to have had a high regard for Chifley as a person and to have considered him as being, outside of parliament, a friend. Among the reasons why he decided in 1955 that documents concerning matters involving Ray Fitzpatrick should go back into locked safes was probably the protection of Chifley's reputation from possible unfair newspaper headlines.

That, at the time, was understandable.

Probably that was also partly behind some strange omissions in ASIO's official history. The first volume said an ASIO wartime Commonwealth Security Service colleague of Alfred Hughes recalled seeing Hughes on a number of occasions in Evatt's office. Later, some former colleagues stated that Hughes and Evatt were personal friends. 'Even more intriguing,' the history said, 'was Hughes's relationship with Justice Taylor.' Taylor told the Royal Commission on Espionage he had little recollection of Hughes, it said. But the head of Hughes's section stated that, while Taylor was Australia's deputy director of security, Hughes 'appeared to be his constant adviser and personal friend'.

Taylor did not say he had little recollection of Hughes. But he carefully gave that impression.

After more mentions about them and Evatt the history said: 'It is clear that Hughes and/or Taylor were involved in at least one important leakage of information from the CSS to the Communist Party.' It referred to the Sadovnikov note brought by Petrov when he defected and said: 'On 28 January 1955 the royal commission asked Taylor to explain the report from Moscow Centre. He said that he had never handed any document to the party, although it was possible that in his dealings with trade union officials (who might also be party members) concerning industrial security matters he might have been indiscreet and quoted from CSS reports. His fellow judges did not press him further.'

That was a summary of a small part of Taylor's long evidence. It was the only reference I could find anywhere in the history to his appearance before the royal commission. Omitted was the part about Hughes and the important evidence at the end, which showed how close Taylor and his brother were during the war to Chifley.

Also omitted was any mention of Jack Magnusson. An important paragraph, concerning Michael Bialoguski, the man who most got Petrov to defect, the overwhelmingly main event in the history, said: 'Under the direction of a CIS officer, William Barnwell, he [Bialoguski] joined the Russian Social Club in Sydney, and made contact with Mark Younger, a pro-Soviet member of the Australian Polish community, as well as the TASS representative, Fedor Nosov. Towards the end of 1946 Barnwell was posted to Europe and for a while Bialoguski reported to Brigadier Frederick Galleghan, head of the CIS in Sydney, and to another CIS officer, who later joined ASIO.'

Many of the more than 500 pages in the 21 chapters of the first volume were littered with names, as were many in the later volumes. Even minor people in unimportant events were often named. I did not read every chapter thoroughly but at the end I did not recall seeing anyone else mentioned as just 'another' officer.

That officer who later joined ASIO was Jack Magnusson, according to David McKnight in _Australia's Spies and Their Secrets_ , who described Magnusson as Bialoguski's 'CIS contact'. McKnight was mentioned and sometimes quoted in the history and in the 1998 book about code-breaking. First volume principal editor David Horner, who also co-authored _Breaking the Codes_ , obviously regarded McKnight's 1994 book as a serious and well-researched study of Russian spying in Australia. So also did Robert Manne, who at the end of his revised edition of _The Petrov Affair_ in 2002 recommended it for further reading.

I did not see one mention of Magnusson in the history. He was the man praised by the war expenditure committee chairman in his letter to Curtin with the first report about Fitzpatrick. In 1944 he had 15 years of service behind him in the Commonwealth Investigation Branch and had spent much of the last few years investigating Fitzpatrick for the committee. That investigation had been frustrated by Alfred Hughes spying on him to help Fitzpatrick avoid prosecution by the government.

Undoubtedly Magnusson would have tried to find out anything he could about Hughes. Probably, when he was transferred to ASIO, he knew more than anyone there about matters involving him. They included his important links through Taylor with Ben Chifley and also through Taylor with Ray Fitzpatrick. That would have been why he was transferred to ASIO. On top of all that, he was then the agent in charge of Michael Bialoguski, the man who later most got Petrov to defect. Probably at first he also knew more than anyone in the new organisation about him.

Jack Magnusson and his investigations were mentioned several times in a book about Ray Fitzpatrick that gave many details about Fitzpatrick's friendship with Justice Taylor. The book, _Mr Big of Bankstown_ , sub-titled The Scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne Affair, was written by Andrew Moore, an associate professor of history at the University of Western Sydney, and published in 2011. But unlike Taylor, Hughes and every other key person I looked up later on the internet and elsewhere, I could find no mention of Magnusson anywhere else. Apparently he had ceased officially ever to have existed.

As the man who, against much opposition in the Labor Party, started what became ASIO, Ben Chifley appeared often in the official history. But I saw only one non-organisational mention. It said ASIO was able to identify more than a hundred Australians by their actual name in the Venona intercepts. 'These included many respectable, prominent and completely innocent Australians such as Chifley (an intercept mentions when he became prime minister in 1945).'

That strengthened an impression about attempts to preserve the good name of Chifley, who when he died had probably, like nearly everyone else mentioned in this book, never heard about a man codenamed Ben in Moscow. It seems however to have also provided a convenient excuse for leaving out details of allegations involving Fitzpatrick over many years, for leaving out details of investigations by Magnusson, ordered by the war expenditure committee, which added weight to those allegations, and probably also for keeping details about many people in high places under wraps.

Probably Chifley never heard anything about Ray Fitzpatrick until the allegations in parliament in March 1944. A trusted senior minister, John Dedman, with whom Charles Morgan had problems, handled details about war production. I could find no indication Chifley ever knew about the close friendship of Fitzpatrick with his own close friend Justice Taylor. From what I could find in the archives, anything about Fitzpatrick and Taylor seems to have gone to Gough Whitlam's father, the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, and from him only to Prime Minister Curtin, a good friend of Chifley.

Chifley during those years had innumerable matters to occupy his attention. As Treasurer he had to keep a wartime economy functioning as well as possible. He was also from 1942 the Minister for Postwar Reconstruction. As Prime Minister after Curtin's death, when he turned his attention more fully to that equally difficult task, he continued to act also as Treasurer, the last man in Australia to combine the two most important and difficult jobs in any national government.

In 1955 there were good reasons – the dangers in the circumstances then of misleading media coverage, and the strong high-level American and British pressure to safeguard the Venona secrecy – to suppress knowledge about how close Chifley was to Taylor, and thus indirectly to Alfred Hughes. But in later years that evidence of Taylor to the royal commission could not have harmed Chifley's reputation. If anything, it would have helped strengthen it. In no way did it throw a bad light on Chifley.

Ben Chifley died in June 1951, the year when, to judge from Frank Browne's writing, rumours about the Taylor-Fitzpatrick friendship began to circulate in political circles. Possibly by then Chifley had still not heard about that friendship. If he had, and about Alfred Hughes, Taylor's friendship also with him, and about a spy codenamed Ben in Moscow, he undoubtedly would have been more upset than he was about the political orientation of Bruce Milliss, mentioned by Taylor in his evidence to the espionage royal commission.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

### Wartime swings

Something Chifley definitely never heard anything about was a situation in Tokyo, of great importance for him and all Australians, which had remarkable similarities to that involving Alfred Hughes and Stan Taylor. It involved Richard Sorge, the man who allegedly recruited Roger Hollis as a Russian spy in Shanghai, and who has often been called the greatest spy in modern history. What Chifley would have made of Sorge and his spy ring in Japan, had he lived long enough, is anybody's guess. On 21 September 1940, the day he regained his old seat in the Australian Parliament, Japanese troops were landing on the coast of Vichy French Indochina. That was not good news for anyone in Australia, where fears were increasing about Japan's growing military forces and its intentions in the Pacific.

By then Australia was deeply involved in World War II. At first life had gone on much as it always had. But after the fall of northern France to Hitler's Germany in June 1940 there had been a surge of enlistments for the Second Australian Imperial Force. Its 6th Division, following on numerically from the five Australian divisions in World War I, was training in North Africa and more divisions were being formed. Soon after Italy had entered the war in June Australian warships, with the Royal Navy, had been in action successfully against its warships. The cruiser HMAS Sydney had sunk an Italian cruiser with gunfire in the first such action of the war. Australian pilots were helping the Royal Air Force to combat waves of German aircraft bombing London and other British cities. Many more were being trained.

Fears were increasing about Japan, which had many troops bogged down in China but was rapidly increasing its military strength. In Washington Japan and the US were holding peace talks but making little progress. The US had been helping the Chinese in their war with Japan since 1937, when the Japanese bombed an American vessel at the Chinese capital Nanking, on the Yangtze River, as it evacuated US residents escaping atrocities by Japanese troops after they captured the city. It was also helping Britain in its war with Germany. But it was refusing to officially enter the war.

For Sorge, an intense and complex man, the attack on Indochina was however good news. He was facing increasing problems in Japan and wanted to go back to Moscow and his wife Katya there. He wanted Japan to attack South-East Asia and not the large waiting Soviet forces in the Far East, as was widely expected. This was of great importance to his chiefs in Moscow. Finding out exactly what the Japanese did plan to do was the sole reason he had been sent to Tokyo. He had more than one source of information and in September he had been keeping his chiefs informed on important developments.

In Tokyo Germany, Italy and Japan had been secretly discussing a tripartite pact on their spheres of influence in a planned new world order. Japan's sphere covered Asia and Australasia. Japan had not even waited for the official signing on September 21, when Chifley re-entered the parliament, to begin its invasion of Indochina.

Also that month, frustrated by the Luftwaffe's failure to defeat the RAF, and the Royal Navy's continued ocean dominance, Hitler abandoned his plan to invade Britain and turned his eyes east. In December 1940 detailed planning began for an invasion of Russian-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, with which it had signed a non-aggression pact. Richard Sorge, who also had excellent sources of information about events in Berlin, was one of the first outsiders to learn about this and informed his chiefs in Moscow. He even told them well in advance, almost to the exact day, when it was expected to start.

That was not something Stalin wanted to hear. After jailing or killing anyone in his way during his rise to power, he was paranoid about plots against him. In 1936 he had purged nearly all his generals in Europe and many senior officers under them. In the past two years he had been doing the same to his spy chiefs. None who survived wanted to tell him anything he did not want to hear because that had often proved fatal. Evidence began to pour in from agents all over Germany and German-occupied Poland of a large movement eastwards of troops and military vehicles. But any details of those that managed to get through to Stalin he ignored. Apparently he just did not want to believe them and didn't.

When the invasion began on 22 June 1941 that was not good news for Sorge, who had also been sending messages about how badly positioned Soviet troops were to fight an invasion, and who did not know Stalin had been ignoring them. But it was good news for everyone in Australia, Britain and their allies. Germany was now fighting on two fronts.

In early 1941 Prime Minister Menzies had gone off to London for four months and had returned in May. By then the 6th Division, the first to leave Australia and see action, had suffered a serious setback. At the start of 1941, with the British 7th Armoured Division, it had captured the Italian fortress of Bardia in North Africa. In heavily-bombed Britain newsreel theatre audiences reportedly rose and cheered at the sight of British and Australian commanders riding into Bardia on a tank after more than 40,000 Italians had surrendered to a much smaller force. On 21 January 1941 the 6th Division helped capture Tobruk, where 25,000 Italians surrendered. On 21 February it entered Benghazi.

In March it had been moved to Greece, where the government was collapsing. There its members did not face Italians in no hurry to possibly die for Mussolini but the Waffen-SS, Hitler's murderous shock troops. With well-piloted dive bombers hitting their defensive positions ahead of land attacks they were in a hopeless situation. Before long, most of those who survived were heading through Athens towards boats at the Piraeus docks with the Germans in full pursuit.

The disaster in Greece had serious repercussions for Menzies. Many members of his United Australia Party thought the 6th Division should never have been sent there. And during his long stay in London, when they thought he should have been back in Canberra running the country, he had failed to win from Churchill any guarantee of more forces to defend Singapore, his excuse for going there. They decided Menzies was not fit to lead and on August 23 he resigned. On August 26 John Fadden, leader of the UAP's coalition partner, the Country Party, took control, with the support of two independents. When they withdrew that support the government lost its majority. John Curtin became Prime Minister and Ben Chifley Treasurer, in charge of financial and economic matters and the home front.

In Tokyo Richard Sorge was becoming desperate as Japanese police closed in on his ring. On 25 September 1941 one member, Edith Vukelic, had managed to board a boat with her young son Paul and sail for Perth in Australia, where her sister lived. The Danish wife of a Yugoslav journalist in the ring, who had left her for a Japanese woman, she was a minor member of little interest to the police. But between wooden boards in the attic of her house was a radio antenna being used to send messages to Vladivostok. The police had known for years about the messages, from different locations, but pinpointing the locations had been almost impossible in the radio clutter of huge and densely populated Tokyo. In recent weeks their experts had been getting much better and police had been questioning suspects. She was the only member of the ring to get out.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

### A 'Brilliant Success of Espionage'

Sorge was born in 1895 in Baku, an oil boomtown on the shore of the Caspian Sea, said Owen Matthews at the start of _An Impeccable Spy_ , a comprehensive biography published in 2019, from which most details in this book about him come. A British writer and former Moscow bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, married to a Russian woman, Matthews said Sorge's father was a German drilling engineer and his mother Russian. A rebellious paternal great-uncle, Friedrich Adolf Sorge, had earlier migrated to the US, where he became a passionate communist. In New York in the 1870s he became secretary-general of an international communist organisation and corresponded frequently with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London.

When Sorge was small his father moved his family to a prosperous part of Berlin, where Richard became by his own account a brilliant and widely-read, but difficult, student. In 1914 he joined the German army and was injured three times fighting Russians. The third time his legs were shattered by shrapnel. In 1916, when he was able to walk fairly well again, he enrolled in the economics faculty at Berlin University and became strongly attracted to communism.

In February 1917 a revolution began in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and quickly spread. Soldiers began to mutiny and head home as the army collapsed. When they arrived they began to form soviets, local ruling committees, with striking workers. In March Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin overthrew a moderate provisional government and established a Soviet Socialist Republic with Moscow as its capital. When Lenin died in 1924 Joseph Stalin became leader of the Russian Communist Party and, following a power struggle, leader of the government.

Sorge was formally discharged from the Kaiser's army in early 1918 and went to Kiel, headquarters of the German Imperial Navy and a centre of growing mutiny by sailors and opposition to the German government. Violence there spread to other German cities. Despite its victory in the east the war was starting to go badly for Germany. On November 9 Kaiser Nicholas II abdicated and on November 11 Germany capitulated to Allied forces. Violence worsened in Germany but a moderate government prevented what happened in Russia.

In Kiel Sorge became a student of a communist professor of political science. Under him he became a committed communist who angrily addressed rebellious sailors on the evils of capitalism. Sorge's war injuries caused a pronounced limp and frequent pain for the rest of his life. He was however tall, good-looking and charming, and those injuries increased his attractiveness to women, He began an affair with the professor's wife Christiane who, like many later women, found him irresistible. In 1921, after her divorce, he married her.

In Germany, Holland and Belgium he continued revolutionary activities with workers. In 1924 he moved to the headquarters in Moscow of the Comintern, the controlling body of international communism. Christiane joined him but didn't like Moscow and they later separated. Soon he began secretly working for Russia in a Comintern spy network, at first in Germany and then Scandinavia. Back for a while in Moscow he began learning Russian from Katya, an aspiring actress whom he later married.

In June 1929 he was sent on assignment to Britain. Christiane, who still had a good relationship with him despite being separated and finalising a divorce, joined him in London. Stalin, who was consolidating his power in Moscow, had expressed hopes for a revolution by British workers. Sorge knew that was unlikely and that he faced problems there. Whitehall had ended diplomatic relations with Moscow after police raids in 1927 had revealed an extensive espionage network. His controllers in Moscow had told him to avoid contact with the British Communist Party. Known sympathisers were being watched and the party in Britain was believed to be heavily infiltrated with government agents.

Owen Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ conjectured that Sorge was sent there to collect sensitive information from a top Soviet spy. In 1964 Christiane told an MI5 interviewer the trip was to meet a 'very important person'. She walked with Sorge to a London street corner, she claimed, and while he talked with another man she kept her distance and watched for signs of danger. 'Who Sorge's contact may have been was a mystery that worried British spycatchers for decades to come,' Matthews wrote. He said _Spycatcher_ author Peter Wright, an Australian-born head of MI5 counter-intelligence, believed the person Sorge met was Charles Ellis, an Australian who in 1922 began working for British military intelligence in Constantinople.

Matthews said Ellis in 1923, while serving as British vice-consul in Berlin, was recruited by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. After working for SIS in Vienna, Geneva, Australia and New Zealand, under cover as a journalist for a British newspaper, he later worked at SIS with Kim Philby. Ellis came under suspicion by maintaining contact with Philby after the latter disappeared following the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951.

'Wright', Matthews continued, 'came to believe that Ellis, like Philby, was a Soviet spy, and that he had also passed secrets to the Germans. In 1964 Christiane – by then living in retirement, improbably enough, in a convent in New York – was questioned by a colleague of Wright's and shown photographs of possible suspects. Christiane tentatively identified Ellis as the man she had seen in London – 'this man looks familiar', she told her MI5 interviewer – but could not say with certainty.' Matthews said however it seemed odd that Sorge at such an early stage in his career would be given such a sensitive task as contacting a top Soviet spy inside the British establishment.

Soon after that, just ahead of a major purge of Comintern staff in Moscow, Sorge was moved to the payroll of the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army General Staff, which had administrative control of foreign espionage. He had shown exceptional promise at the Comintern and could speak German, English and French. He was establishing an international reputation as a journalist and academic, ideal covers for a spy. Importantly also, he was not Russian. The Far East was becoming an increasing priority for the Kremlin and the Red Army needed better intelligence on China. Late in 1929 he was moved to the world's busiest centre of espionage, the International Settlement in Shanghai.

During three years there he met Agnes Smedley, a crusading left-wing American journalist and by then a well-known author after an autobiographical novel, _Daughter of Earth_. Smedley, an early advocate of women's rights, was disgusted by all the vice she saw in Shanghai, something Sorge had begun to enjoy. That did not stop her however soon afterwards becoming his mistress. At a meeting of a Comintern committee where she and Sorge were both members she introduced him to Hotzumi Ozaki, a correspondent for Japan's leading newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. Like Sorge, Ozaki was a womaniser and enjoyed more than a few drinks. They got along well.

From Shanghai, Moscow Centre moved Sorge to the city where they most needed someone with his skills – Tokyo. Japan was becoming an industrial powerhouse and militarising rapidly. In 1931 its powerful Kwangtung Army, acting against the express orders of the political and military leadership in Tokyo, had invaded Manchuria and established a puppet state, Manchukuo, bordering Siberia. After Japan defeated the Russian Empire in a 1905 war the Kwangtung Army had been formed as a security force to protect Japanese interests in that region. Its military victories in 1931 had silenced critics in Japan but added to government problems being caused by the world's growing Great Depression. Japanese intentions had become an urgent concern in the Kremlin.

Sorge had been fairly well known in Shanghai. That might have led to problems with inquisitive authorities in Japan if he went there on one of the ships that sailed frequently from the large Japanese concession in that spy and crime-infested city. Japanese were suspicious of all foreigners and kept any who lived there under informal surveillance. So he was sent via a boat to Vladivostok, by land to briefing stops in Moscow and Germany, a boat to the US, and another boat across the Pacific. In September 1933 he disembarked at Yokohama.

The ring he formed during the next several years, and its results, were described later to the US government by General MacArthur, who ruled Japan from 1945 to 1951, as 'a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage'. Some members were sent by Moscow Central, which had overall control of Red Army intelligence. Others he or colleagues recruited in Japan. To varying degrees, all were idealistic and opposed to Japan's increasing militarism. Most believed they were working for the Comintern.

Sorge controlled the ring tightly and was a brilliant spy in his own right. He was now an excellent academic in a few fields and a top journalist who wrote for Germany's leading newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung. His war injuries had helped increase his attractiveness to women. They also helped with men, who often had like him fought in World War 1. Soon after he arrived his best friend became Eugen Ott, a now senior military officer who had fought in the same division as him on Germany's eastern front. Ott soon afterwards became Nazi Germany's ambassador to Japan and spoke regularly to Hitler. Ott's wife Helma by then was Sorge's latest lover, which helped increase his access to secret communications between Germany and Japan.

To improve his credentials, Sorge joined the Nazi Party and began writing for a Nazi publication read by most of the party's leaders.

He also soon had an even better source than Eugen and Helma Ott to high-level decisions being made in Japan: Hotzumi Ozaki, who Agnes Smedley had introduced to him in Shanghai. Ozaki, who had been shocked by the actions of Japanese soldiers he had seen during troubles in Shanghai, had returned to Tokyo in 1934. A top journalist on Japan's leading newspaper, he was well-informed on many matters. He was now respectably married with a daughter. And as an upper-class descendent of a samurai family, Japan's ancient warrior ruling class, he was able to mix easily with people at high levels. In 1937 he joined a government think tank and in 1938 was made an assistant to the prime minister's office. He resigned from the Asahi Shimbun and moved into a basement office in the prime minister's official residence, where he became a friend of the Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe.

According to Owen Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ , Ozaki had access to all government papers that crossed the desks of the prime minister's colleagues in the cabinet office. He began attending an unofficial breakfast kitchen cabinet of ministers, experts and advisers that became known as the Breakfast Group and each week advised Prince Konoe on foreign affairs.

Japan's armed forces had become more powerful than the civilian government. They were however badly split. The army, making little progress in China, wanted to invade Siberia, with its vast open spaces and many undeveloped resources. But Japan's oil reserves were running low. Without oil its whole war machine would grind to a halt. The navy had its eyes on operating oilfields in the Dutch East Indies and wanted to strike south towards those, and also mines, rice fields and other developed resources in South-East Asia. Britain's so-called impregnable fortress of Singapore was not a serious problem. The navy knew Churchill could not send more troops, planes or warships. Its heavy guns were all pointing out to sea, and scouts had established that it could be attacked easily across the narrow water separating it from Malaya.

But the big US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was. The navy was getting the upper hand in disputes and already its commander, Admiral Yamamoto, was planning a naval and air attack on Pearl Harbor. Pilots were training for this and vessels being prepared. Japan had been getting some oil from the US. The navy's position had been strengthened further when the US banned oil exports after Japan invaded Indochina. It also banned exports of materials such as scrap metal that could be used in making military hardware.

In Washington Japan was still holding peace talks with the US. Prince Konoe did not want war with the US and kept hoping they would succeed.

In Tokyo during 1941 Japanese police began closing in on Sorge's spy ring. Some members were losing their faith in communism or no longer got on well with Sorge, who had begun drinking very heavily and was becoming increasingly erratic. A key member, Max Clausen, now despised Sorge. An exceptionally talented German radio operator who could make radio sets with all sorts of components, Clausen had been sent by the Fourth Directorate to Shanghai, where he had got on well with Sorge, and then joined him in Tokyo.

On August 22 Sorge handed Clausen a message for Moscow saying the Japanese army and government had decided definitely not to attack Russia until at least spring in 1942. But Clausen, who resented the amount of work Sorge kept giving him and feared capture, did not send it until September 14, which Sorge never knew. With that he sent a new message saying 'The sailors no longer believe in the possibility of success of talks between Konoe and Roosevelt ...That means war with America.'

Matthews did not support many claims over the years that a single message from Sorge caused Stalin to start moving a huge number of troops from Siberia towards Moscow. Rather, he said, Sorge sent many messages to Moscow Centre informing his chiefs about a fluid situation. Some of those chiefs, like Stalin, who detested Sorge, suspected he was a double agent. But even they began to give his reports the credence they deserved.

Near the end of September Stalin began moving many divisions in Siberia towards Moscow as well as many tanks and aircraft. Russian historians still hotly debate the exact role of Sorge's information in Stalin's decision, according to Matthews. However, that combined message sent on September 14, he said, was of historic importance. 'Sorge did not, as would later be claimed, explicitly warn Stalin of the Pearl Harbor attack. But he signalled the inevitability of war between America and Japan three months before it happened.'

German troops on the outskirts of Moscow, many shivering in summer clothes as winter set in, never knew what hit them when, on 5 December 1941, the Siberian divisions spearheaded a huge counter-offensive, the start of the end for Nazi Germany. In Washington peace talks were officially still continuing two days later when bombs began to fall on Pearl Harbor, bringing into the war the US, with all its skilled people and industrial might.

Troops from Indochina helped the Japanese Army quickly over-run Thailand. Parts of Australia's 8th Division were already in Malaya awaiting a possible attack. They were soon in action against units that began landing along the coast of Malaya. The Japanese had air superiority as well as superior tanks and tactics. Before long, members of the 8th Division who survived the fighting were in Singapore. When the city fell on 15 February 1942 they, along with other Allied troops, became prisoners of war. Many never saw Australia again.

Australia had always looked to Britain for protection. In an historic speech that angered Churchill, Prime Minister Curtin turned to the US for help. On February 19 the war came to Australia when 242 Japanese aircraft heavily bombed Darwin.

In early March Japanese troops landed on the north coast of Papua-New Guinea to establish strongholds. They planned to capture Port Moresby, the capital in the south, and strengthen their position in the South Pacific, but not, as was feared, use it as a base from which to attack Australia. This was frustrated in early May by the US, with Australian help, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first ever fought anywhere with aircraft carriers on both sides.

The Japanese then decided to attack Port Moresby by going overland across the rugged jungle-covered Owen Stanley Range. Between July and November 1942 they were stopped, with American support, in terrible fighting along the Kokoda Track, initially by units with inexperienced and poorly equipped Australian conscripts and volunteers, and later trained soldiers brought back from the Middle East. The worst enemy for men on both sides was often malaria or other diseases.

Meanwhile, in early June, far out in the Pacific, American planes had sunk Japan's four biggest aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. The US now ruled the waves in the Pacific. By 1943 the tide of war had turned against Japan. But it still had troops on Pacific islands and large armies in Asia.

By then Richard Sorge and his spy ring were history. The first important member to be arrested, on 10 October 1941, was Yotoku Miyagi, who was born in Okinawa and brought up in California. There he became a commercial paint artist with a cheerful demeanour, good covers for a spy, and a communist. He was also fluent in Japanese. A Fourth Directorate agent, pretending to work for the Comintern, recruited him in California and sent him to Sorge in Tokyo. There he obtained lots of useful information by simply going to a specialist bookshop and buying magazines and other publications with articles written by Japanese military officers.

During questioning at a police station Miyagi suddenly jumped up and dived head first out a second floor window towards an approaching tram. He survived the suicide attempt by landing in shrubbery but later in custody began to talk about his work. In following days other members began to talk also after being arrested, trying to save their lives. Ozaki was arrested on October 15. The next day Prince Konoe resigned and the warmongering General Hideki Tojo became prime minister, ensuring the attack on Pearl Harbor would proceed.

Sorge did not lack female company in Tokyo. Japanese and US police estimated that during his years in the city he had about 30 mistresses. Some helped him obtain useful information for his paymasters in Moscow. There were also visits to some of Tokyo's many brothels or to hotels with women from its more numerous hostess bars, often while drinking with senior Japanese or German military officers in the course of obtaining more information for his paymasters.

He could deceive those men as well as he could women. When Nazi security chiefs began to suspect Sorge of working for the Russians they sent Gestapo Colonel Joseph Meisinger, known as the Butcher of Warsaw, the most feared man in their whole security apparatus, to Tokyo to check him out. Sorge was soon taking him to favourite drinking places and convincing him what a great Nazi he was.

By far his most enduring companion was Hanako Miyake, a bashful young waitress he met at Das Rheingold, a Ginza district restaurant popular with the German community. The waitresses dressed in Bavarian clothes and all could speak at least some German. As customers downed their German beer and sausages they were happy to chat with them in booths between fetching orders. His relationship with her was different to all his others in Tokyo. Both loved music and began meeting during the day, often going to music shops, where they would listen to records and he would buy her some.

In the evening customers would usually leave a tip for the waitress who served them. If a tip was generous, and a waitress had liked a customer, it could lead to something more after she finished work. It was months before he made a sexual advance. She accepted and he became the one great love of her life. Generous waitress tips remained OK but she always refused to accept money from him in the morning. She did not like his involvements with other women but was always waiting for him. When he was under stress it was always to her he turned.

Hanako first served Sorge on the evening of 4 October 1935 as he celebrated turning 40. On 4 October 1941, as he tried to enjoy what he knew would probably be his last birthday dinner with her, he remarked about how many police now seemed to be following him. Outside on the pavement after dinner he told her not to go home with him because of police surveillance and suggested she go and stay with her mother.

On October 19 Sorge was arrested and tried at first to convince his interrogators that although he had been spying it was only for German military intelligence. That did not work and he struck a deal with the government's chief prosecutor Mitsusada Yoshikawa. He would cooperate fully on condition that Hanako not be harmed. Yoshikawa, who later described Sorge as 'the greatest man I have ever met', promised that she would not and made sure the promise was kept.

Sorge was not the person who most concerned the government. That honour went to Ozaki. He said he was working for the cause of international peace and trying to avoid a war between Japan and Russia. Revelations however that a man close to the prime minister and who had access to confidential documents at the highest levels was a Soviet spy was, said Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ , 'so shocking that they verged on the unbelievable'. On 7 November 1943, in Sugamo prison, he was hanged.

Until the last day Sorge had hoped that the Soviet government, after all he had done for it, would save him in a prisoner swap deal, something which occasionally happened. But Stalin wanted nothing to do with him. A few minutes after Ozaki he mounted the gallows calmly. As his arms and legs were bound, and the noose was put around his neck, he stood militarily to attention and in Japanese loudly proclaimed his allegiance to the Red Army and to the international and Soviet communist parties. He had no living relatives in Japan and was buried in a nearby cemetery in a grave marked only by a wooden plank.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

### Venona Victims

In and near Bankstown after 1955 many people soon forgot about allegations involving Ray Fitzpatrick, if not about him as a person, or his jailing by parliament. In the rest of Australia probably nearly everyone did. But there were apparently a few places in the US and Britain where he would not have been quickly forgotten: the offices of those people still trying to enforce with 'almost fanatical diligence' that secrecy about even the existence of the Venona project. Uneducated, uncouth and probably uninterested about Russian penetration anywhere, Fitzpatrick had helped to weave a tangled web that threatened their efforts.

When Arthur Powell, the Labor state member for Bankstown, became the first person to enter the witness box at the Torch fire inquiry he probably astonished most of those present by denying statements he had made after the fire about gangsters terrorising Bankstown. 'So the statements attributed to you are a complete fabrication, without any foundation?' said Jack Shand, representing Fitzpatrick. Powell agreed with that and denied other widely-publicised claims he had not previously denied.

In 1950 Powell had replaced NSW Labor Premier Jim McGirr as the member for Bankstown. McGirr had represented Bankstown since 1927 and in 1947 had replaced McKell as premier after Chifley made McKell our governor-general. In 1950, worried about how all the developments in Bankstown involving Fitzpatrick were reflecting on him as the state premier, McGirr had resigned as the local member and become the member for nearby Liverpool.

Powell had seemed a reasonably competent and popular member who was not a subject of rumours and not part of the clique connected with Fitzpatrick. His claims about gangsters terrorising Bankstown were ridiculous. But there had appeared no reason at the time why he would harm his reputation further by denying ever saying statements attributed to him, something any normal person would have done if falsely reported, and the claims were attracting national, and even some international, attention. In the case of Charles Morgan, who had followed him into the witness box and begun denying serious claims he had made about Fitzpatrick over many years in the federal parliament, many of which were undoubtedly true, there were problems concerning his previous work as Fitzpatrick's legal adviser when some offences were said to have been committed. But they were nowhere near sufficient to explain his even more extraordinary denials.

There appeared no reason to me until I looked again at those parts in volume three of ASIO's official history about the moves to protect secrecy about even the existence of the Venona project. Surely, I had thought, they couldn't be that extreme. The Russians, the people who mattered, had known about Venona's existence, and probably a lot more than that, since 1948. Those details seemed to me exaggerated, intended possibly to help undoubted cover-ups in the history of matters involving important people. After reading more about the Venona project I realised they probably were not exaggerated.

The jailing of Fitzpatrick in June 1955 probably surprised people in those US and British offices. The continuing publicity in Australia after it, as city newspapers went deeper into matters involving him, would have worried them. When they learned that on July 11 a court was to start inquiring into the fire at that suburban newspaper which started the whole mess, a mess that might never have become so dangerous and complicated if my father had not in 1937 successfully suggested Charles Morgan to Ray Fitzpatrick as a legal adviser to replace Stan Taylor, they probably would have become more worried. Heaven only knew what might come out when lawyers started cross-examining witnesses during that, particularly if one of those witnesses was Fitzpatrick, as appeared likely.

Three days after the start of that inquiry the Privy Council in London was scheduled to begin hearing an appeal against the jailing of Fitzpatrick. That might have put an international focus on matters involving him.

The people in those secretive high-level offices in Britain and the US had made clear to senior ASIO officials how important it was to stop anything being said in public that might endanger Venona secrecy. Those officials during the Royal Commission on Espionage had had great success at stopping details coming out there. Elsewhere, such as with matters involving Jack Magnusson and his work for the Joint Parliamentary War Expenditure Committee, they seem to have been even more remarkably successful.

It must have required serious talking with people such as Magnusson, and Bankstown's representatives in the state and federal parliament just before they fronted the Torch fire inquiry. It seems NSW Attorney-General Billy Sheahan might not have been alone when Powell and then Morgan were called in separately for a talk with him. Sheahan might even have left the room while federal government persons did the talking. Perhaps there were threats, attractive offers they could not refuse, or even appeals to patriotism. And possibly many lies. But, one way or another, people in Australia made sure Fitzpatrick never again caused any problem for the people in those offices in the US and Britain, even after his death.

It probably helped that more than a few Australians in high places had personal reasons to be happy about that.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

### Remaining Mysteries

There were other Bankstown connections with all that and with wider Cold War mysteries. The politician with the longest involvement in district affairs was Jack Lang. In 1962 he took under his wing Paul Keating, the friend of Michael Gavan, the boy who had remained near the Torch building as the flames spread after the explosion. Lang helped ensure that Bankstown did not disappear from the national political consciousness by passing on to Keating his knowledge of how to really get ahead in Australian politics.

Although he had left school at 14, 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, died on 27 September 1975. Forty-five days later Whitlam's government became the only other in Australia to end 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 a hundred or so 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 made Keating, who had sometimes in Bankstown speeches appeared to indicate a lack of knowledge about that explosion and resulting matters, one of the closest people to it.

Among 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.'

In 1991 Keating became not only the Labor leader but, soon afterwards, the 24th Prime Minister of Australia. Just before and after that I sent him a few pages mentioning him and his father in a book I was working on and asked for comments. I said his father helped clean up the political mess in Bankstown, and there was nothing in it that should have offended any reasonable person. Unlike Gough Whitlam and some other people to whom I sent such pages, he never replied. In late 2015 I published on the internet a book, _Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace_ , which contained at the end details of definite or possible connections of myself and family with him and his family.

In 1992 Keating commissioned Michael Cook, a former director of the Office of National Assessments and ambassador to Washington, to inquire into Soviet penetration of ASIO during the Cold War and how national counter-intelligence could be improved. Cook's report was never published. ASIO's history's said it was kept to a very limited distribution and its contents remained top secret.

'The continued cloak of secrecy surrounding Cook's findings has generated speculation about treason from within,' the history said. It questioned the need for the continuation of that secrecy. 'ASIO's experience echoed, on a smaller scale, the Americans' experience with trusted intelligence officials such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen who compromised American intelligence operations and whose actions led to the deaths of scores of Soviet agents who were prepared to risk their lives collaborating with Western intelligence agencies,' it also said. 'The question remains: how extensive was the betrayal and how extensive was the damage?'

At the launch in October 2016 of the history's third volume, its main author, Australian National University history academic John Blaxland, said he would have walked away from the project if ASIO had refused to acknowledge it was infiltrated by Soviet spies in the 1970s and 1980s, the period covered in that volume. As reported by the Australian edition of The Guardian of Britain, he described that as the most contentious and embarrassing part of the history.

'This is a demoralising story,' the Australian Guardian quoted Professor Blaxland as saying. 'It is a story of failure to recognise that and admit to grapple with it is deeply disturbing and also deeply cathartic for the organisation.' After saying the volume contained the first public acknowledgement of Soviet penetration of ASIO the newspaper gave some details from an ABC _Four Corners_ program in 2004 that interviewed intelligence officers about an alleged Soviet mole passing secrets to the KGB.

ASIO's history gave more details than the Australian Guardian about the ABC program, which must have disturbed ASIO officials. It referred particularly to Oleg Kalugin, a former chief of the KGB's foreign counter-intelligence directorate, who appeared on the program and had claimed in an autobiography the KGB had excellent sources in Australia including 'productive moles in Australian intelligence who passed us documents from the CIA and British intelligence'.

Kalugin told the ABC an ASIO official offered his services to the KGB, which feared a ruse. But when Kim Philby in Moscow confirmed the authenticity of documents he provided it employed him. He was paid thousands of dollars every time he passed on documents. The history quoted Kalugin as telling the ABC the mole 'had good access. Everything about Australia, the United States, mutual cooperation, political plans, agents planted in the Soviet Embassy, surveillance squads, I mean everything.'

Other media outlets have called for the release of the Cook report. A story in The Australian in May 2014 said it was believed to say there had been four Soviet moles inside ASIO when the Cold War ended in 1989. In November 2014 that newspaper said the report had been 'all but airbrushed from history' and was never spoken about in official circles. After the final volume was released in 2016 it said 'secrecy for secrecy's sake can on occasions prove counter-productive'.

A book published in 2015, _More Cloak than Dagger_ , by Molly Sasson, aged 92, who worked for ASIO for more than 30 years, supported the media reports, and parts of the official history, with personal details. An English woman fluent in Dutch and German, she worked in The Hague with Dutch experts helping to identify possible communist spies among thousands of people, often from East Germany and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, applying to leave for a new life in Australia.

As a young woman during World War II who had hoped to become an opera singer, she found herself instead just behind front-line British units in the final months as they battled through northern Germany towards Hamburg. She was with a unit establishing reasonable law and order in towns and villages as they were captured. Leaders of those places were usually only too happy to cooperate with the British. They had had enough of the Nazis and had probably heard about terrible events as the Russians advanced through eastern Germany. There was however a problem with groups of fanatic SS troops who were refusing to surrender and sometimes killing fellow Germans trying to do so, or else ambushing British troops. One of Sasson's jobs was to try to help the British find those SS troops. Sometimes she had to hold dying men in her arms during their final minutes as she talked to them in German.

Spry was worried about the quality of his staff in Canberra, she wrote. When he offered her a job as the first female head of the Soviet counter-espionage desk there she accepted. On the day she arrived in 1969 Spry suffered a serious heart attack from which he never fully recovered. She thought highly of Spry. His successor, Peter Barbour, she described as incompetent and a 'creepy' womaniser. The official history referred in parts to low opinions held by British and particularly American officials of ASIO. Sasson described the Canberra office as 'a den of misogyny' and many of the men as lazy and incompetent.

As Soviet anti-espionage operations constantly failed she increasingly realised the Russians seemed to have someone working for them near the top. When she expressed her fears to her immediate superior he told her not to open a can of worms. She moved to ASIO's Melbourne headquarters, which she thought not much better. Competent people often became discouraged and left, she claimed, while incompetent ones were promoted.

ASIO's problems with the KGB possibly began even before it emerged from its 1948 British and Australian womb.

Peter Wright in _Spycatcher_ claimed Roger Hollis, the head of MI5 from 1956 until he retired in 1965, who in 1948 helped start ASIO, was working for the Russians. During a second visit that year he returned with Courtenay Young, who became the resident MI5 agent, to help oversee its formation. The official history said Hollis and Young however 'merely helped interview potential staff who had already been identified by Australians'.

Chapman Pincher claimed in _Top Secret Too Long_ that Hollis was recruited by Richard Sorge while working in Shanghai with British American Tobacco. But Owen Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ said that, while Hollis moved in leftist circles in Shanghai and may have met Sorge there, Sorge did not mention him in his dispatches to Moscow Centre.

MI5 on its website denied the allegations about Hollis. MI5 pointed to a claim on a British ITV program in 2009 by Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB defector who had written books about the KGB and appeared on the _Four Corners_ program in 2004. Gordievsky on the ITV program said the British head of the KGB expressed surprise to him after reading in a British newspaper about Hollis being a KGB agent. He quoted the British head as saying: 'Why are they speaking about Roger Hollis such nonsense, can't understand it, must be some special British trick directed against us.'

Molly Sasson in her 2015 book, however, claimed increasing evidence was emerging that Hollis was working for the Russians. Possibly that, and many other matters stemming from the Cold War, will always remain mysteries.

An intriguing remaining mystery in Australia concerns those documents Lyn Barlin, the former Clerk of the House and privileges committee secretary, so passionately wanted nobody ever to see. Did they concern Alfred Hughes and the Moscow code name? If not, what? Many small mysteries remain about Ray Fitzpatrick and prominent Australians, many of them politicians and public servants, in the background of what newspapers in 1955 called the Bankstown Affair. They are no longer important.

## CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

### Different aftermaths

Whether Sorge did or did not recruit Hollis in Shanghai, it was there in 1930, according to Owen Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ , that he met by far the most important member of his spy ring, Hotzumi Ozaki, who had been sent there in 1928 as a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. In 1938 he left the newspaper and became an assistant of Prime Minister Prince Konoe. Ozaki moved into a basement office inside the prime minister's official residence, where he had access to all government papers that crossed the desks of his colleagues in the cabinet office. He became a friend of the prime minister and in a similar situation to that of Justice Taylor in Australia.

That put Richard Sorge, to whom Ozaki was reporting, into a similar situation to that of Alfred Hughes in Australia, who appears to have been passing on to communists some information he had learned from Taylor, and which Taylor, who may not have been aware of this, had probably learned from then or future Prime Minister Chifley.

But there the similarities ended. Information Sorge sent to Moscow helped change world history. Information Hughes sent to Moscow probably changed nothing. No hangman's noose awaited Taylor or Hughes. And the aftermaths of those two situations could not have been more different.

The brief mention of Taylor's evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage was the last of a few about him until the end of the first volume of ASIO's history. There were however many references to Hughes, a major focus of that volume. He and Taylor turned up together among only three Australians named in the third last paragraph of its final chapter. The paragraph concerned a report ordered by Spry on attempts to identify communist agents going back to the war years. The second last paragraph concerned such attempts overseas. It mentioned Kim Philby and a few other top spies in Europe. The last mentioned "gnawing doubts" about the success of attempts to stop the Soviet penetration of counter-intelligence organisations up to 1963, the end of the period covered in the first volume.

Those final paragraphs obliquely put Hughes and Taylor into frightening company in the history of modern espionage. The actions of Philby and the other foreign spies mentioned undoubtedly contributed to the deaths during the Cold War of many anti-communist agents and people in communist countries who helped them. Hughes or Taylor, with their security service power only during World War II, could never have been anywhere near the importance of such people to Moscow, and probably would not have helped cause the spilling of one person's blood.

On the evidence in ASIO's history, the only Australian security leaks that could possibly have done that during the war were those about MacArthur's battle plans during the invasion of the Philippines. They must have come originally from some military source, and at that stage the possibility surely would never have occurred to that source that the Russians, then fighting on our side, might pass them to the Japanese. According to the history, the source has remained a mystery.

The doubts about Soviet penetration continued after Spry retired. The history's third volume, _The Secret Cold War_ , said that, after investigating allegations, ASIO tasked a covert team with conducting a secret investigation. Soon afterwards, however, ASIO decided it should not be in the position of being accused of investigating itself. The investigation was handed to the federal police. That led to the arrest in 1993, after the Cold War had ended, of a Russian translator, George Sadil, who had worked for ASIO since 1968. The police found classified documents at his home but no direct evidence of espionage and he was charged only with removing classified documents without authority. 'With the passage of time, the gradual revelation of titbits of information [about Soviet penetration], when aggregated, confused rather than informed,' the history said.

There were never any doubts about the Soviet penetration at the top in Japan during World War II. In October 1945, two months after Japan surrendered, occupation authorities published details about Sorge and his ring in local newspapers. Many Japanese saw Ozaki as a hero and patriot who had resisted militarism. Increasing fears in Washington about Soviet spying led to a request to Japan's temporary ruler, General MacArthur, for a detailed report about Sorge and his spy ring. It was in that he called the ring devastatingly successful.

The only member of the ring who did not cooperate with the authorities and implicate other members after being arrested was Teikichi Kawai, a Japanese journalist recruited by Ozaki in Shanghai to help Agnes Smedley, Sorge's most important mistress in Shanghai, and Sorge in their Comintern espionage work there. Despite frequent torture he never talked. In 1948 Kawai and a half-brother of Ozaki encouraged Hanako Miyake to write a memoir.

With proceeds from that she was able, with expert help, to identify Sorge's remains in the bombed cemetery from shrapnel leg wounds and gold bridgework in his skull. Those she cremated and buried, in a cemetery with graves of Japanese notables, under a granite stone with the inscription in Japanese: 'Here lies a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace.' Her memoir helped increase interest among ordinary Japanese in Sorge and Japanese members of the ring. Eventually, according to Matthews in _An Impeccable Spy_ , more than a hundred books were written in Japanese about ring members.

When the Berlin Wall went up in 1948 the Russians still had an image problem with all Germans. A great many on the communist side, and a lot on the other, had terrible memories of much that happened in 1945 as Russian troops advanced towards, and then captured, Berlin. But West Germans were becoming interested in Sorge. And East Germany's communist leaders saw his special value for them: he was a 'good' wartime German who fought for peace and was also a communist working for Moscow. Books, often no doubt at least at least partly fictional, as were probably many of those in Japan, began to be written about him in German, then in other languages. There were also movies.

His fame spread to many countries, although not much to Australia. He was claimed to have helped inspire the lucrative fictional James Bond. The real-life Sorge was however much more interesting than Bond. Ian Fleming, author of the first James Bond books, who had been a wartime intelligence chief, described Sorge as the most formidable spy in history. Kim Philby in Moscow described his work as impeccable, giving Matthews the title of his later book.

Stalin had hated Sorge and when he was jailed had sent his Moscow wife Katya, with whom Sorge had frequently corresponded, to starve and freeze to death in Siberia. But in 1953 Stalin died. In 1964 a Franco-German film about Sorge, seen by his then successor Nikita Khruschev and other top people, helped change minds in Moscow. Security files were opened that showed all the useful information he had sent, and which Stalin had ignored or refused to believe, even when much of his information had proved to be correct. Sorge was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union. A headstone proclaiming this, much larger than Hanako's, was placed behind the site of his ashes in Tokyo.

This is not a story with clearly defined good people and bad people, popular in fiction. As often in real life, many of those involved were, to varying degrees, mixtures of both. Even Frank Browne had praiseworthy qualities. All had human foibles.

The first of the key people in Australia to die was Ray Fitzpatrick, who helped weave a web with extraordinary consequences. He had the good luck to be in right work at a right place at an exceptionally right time, for him, of a nation unprepared for a war on its doorsteps with a powerful aggressor. He then exploited that with unnecessary ruthlessness and illegality. He was also lucky to have such a good friend as Stan Taylor. And finally, it appears, to have worried powerful people in places far beyond Australia.

Historically, he was just one of a long line of successful, at least for a while, Australian crooks, albeit one probably a lot more generous than most to people in real need. Probably many, like him, had friends in politics and other high places. But none of them was ever jailed by the Australian Parliament. And I think it most unlikely that any might have helped cause fears at Russian counter-espionage headquarters in the US and Britain.

At the centre of the web Fitzpatrick helped weave was Stan Taylor, a close friend during World War II of him and Ben Chifley. The first friendship began while Taylor was courting a woman who lived and worked in Bankstown, and whom he married in 1934. Fitzpatrick was starting his rise to wealth and needed a lawyer with his expertise. A shared interest in harness racing, in a district with a track for this, helped bring them together. The second went back to his early years, when Chifley was a friend of the Taylor family and their local member of the federal parliament. All that was understandable.

Much less so was the continuing closeness of Taylor's friendship with Fitzpatrick after he became a Justice in 1943, and allegations about Fitzpatrick, even in the federal parliament, became serious. That clearly was inappropriate for a man in his judicial position. And the way he used his wartime security service influence to help Fitzpatrick avoid prosecution many might think criminal. There are laws about obstructing justice.

Then there was Taylor's friendship with Alfred Hughes, and the way he got him to use his security service position to also help Fitzpatrick avoid prosecution. Taylor during his evidence to the Royal Commission on Espionage did not lie but gave a wrong impression about how well he knew Hughes, who in 1942 had allegedly even taught him how to drive. Possibly Taylor never knew about that Moscow code name. He was known however to have often expressed views well to the left. His relationship with Hughes remains an enigma.

Taylor's judicial career was marked by disagreements with judges under him who were more legally qualified and more conservative. But he was popular 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, with relative success compared with situations in some other states, until his retirement in 1966. He played a key role in restoring peace at NSW's great producer of wealth, Broken Hill, and other places. Elsewhere he helped to maintain peace.

His gift for surprising friendships was greater even than that of Fitzpatrick. Andrew Moore's 2011 book lacked many important details, including any of that Torch fire inquiry evidence. But he obviously was given access to a lot of confidential material about Taylor. In _Mr Big of Bankstown_ he wrote: 'Taylor and his wife endured years of public ostracism. As late as 1968 Taylor was concerned that his status as a referee for a candidate seeking to join the Department of External Affairs had caused the application to be rejected. He sought advice from Charles Spry, Director-General of ASIO. Over lunch, Spry put the retired judge's mind at rest. Evidently Taylor had not lost his agreeable demeanour. Spry clearly found Taylor a charming lunch companion, and agreed that they should lunch again when Spry was next in Sydney.'

Like Fitzpatrick in his later years, Taylor seems to have had a good family life. Both had two daughters, the same as the still shadowy Alfred Hughes, who undoubtedly helped the KGB but probably never in any real sense posed a threat to Australia's security. Hughes retired honourably from the Sydney Vice Squad in 1960 as a detective-sergeant, first class. After working as a department store detective he retired permanently.

At Tokyo in 2000 Hanako Miyake, the most devoted but long-suffering mistress of Richard Sorge, died at the age of 89. In December that year, as it closed down for a long summer holiday, the Australian Parliament voted to release evidence behind closed doors to its privileges committee in 1955, plus documents, concerning matters mainly in effect involving Ray Fitzpatrick. In 2000, as they were in 1955, they were called in parliament its last great secret. Some but not all documents were released.

Hanako was cremated. In a grave with headstones proclaiming not only a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace, but a Hero of the Soviet Union, her ashes now lie alongside those of Sorge. The site had become venerated by Japanese and sometimes visited by tourists from around the world.

If Fitzpatrick had what he might have liked to think of as a memorial to himself, it was Sydney's inner-city Harold Park racetrack. He was instrumental in the decision to rebuild it after World War II and his men were said to have done much of the work. But its horse stables and grandstands were later torn down and replaced with apartment blocks. Nobody however is ever going to tear down what could be called a partial memorial to Stan Taylor: the Snowy Mountains Scheme, where his widespread contacts at levels high and low, and workplace relations savvy, helped keep men on the job, summer and winter, for year after year, drilling tunnels through mountains and building dams to turn around a river and water inland plains. After he retired in 1966 the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority, in charge of construction, kept him on as an adviser.

Still without legal action of any sort taken against him, Hughes died in 1978. Taylor died in 1982. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Russia became a great place for capitalist thieves. For a while it ceased to worry Western military planners. And no newspapers ever wrote headlines about an Australian chief investigator of Russian espionage during World War II who had a close, although indirect, link to later ASIO founder Ben Chifley – and who was codenamed Ben in Moscow.

By then all the main politicians in the background had died. The last significant person in all this to die, in July 2002 at the age of 87, was Petrov's wife Evdokia, the centrepiece of probably the most famous and widely-viewed news photograph ever taken in Australia, one that helped make human for people around the world all the fears, ambiguities, secrecy and unseen suffering behind the Cold War.

In 1960, through the International Red Cross, Evdokia was able to start corresponding with her mother. She learned her father had been sacked after her defection and had died three years later. Her mother died in 1965. In 1990 her sister was able to join her in Australia, where Evdokia, now Maria Allyson, a likeable but inconspicuous Australian former typist at a tractor company, was living comfortably on a pension in a modest outer suburban house in Melbourne, bought a few decades before with £5000 from ASIO. There she remained until she died, 11 years after the death of her husband, who was bed-stricken in a hospital during his final years after a stroke. Their years together had been marred by frequent fights and his drunkenness.

A Japanese speaker and skilled codebreaker, Evdokia had an interesting probable link with Richard Sorge and his spy ring in Tokyo. For years until 1942, according to Robert Manne in _The Petrov Affair_ , she helped decode Japanese diplomatic messages to its embassy in Moscow. Probably she knew more about some matters connected with the end of Sorge and his extremely successful spy ring before almost anyone in Russia or Japan, let alone anywhere else in the world.

After meeting her in old age Manne described her as 'sprightly, intelligent but also, just below the surface, somewhat sad'. He ended a postscript in his 2002 edition of _The Petrov Affair_ by saying that two days after her death, 'to my considerable surprise, an ASIO officer came to my home to inform me of her death. Even her funeral was arranged with the greatest secrecy.'

Evdokia was cremated and no tourists will ever visit the site of her ashes, wherever that might be.
