
How a Web of Australian Secrets Worried US and British Spy Chiefs for Decades

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Neil Landers

My interest in some matters in this book went back to 1944. After turning five I was learning to read well. Each afternoon on the kitchen floor, while my mother prepared food for dinner, I would read stories to her in the afternoon Sun newspaper about Russian armies passing obstacle after obstacle on their way to Germany. After going to bed I would hear music from my father's large collection of 78rpm records in the living room as he began his night's drinking. Old British music hall tunes or Gilbert and Sullivan would give way to Viennese waltzes. Then would come stirring music from Russia: Tchaikovsky, Borodin or Mussorgsky. As rum or Scotch whisky continued to go down the music volume would go up. Finally would come World War I marching and concert songs, and he would join in loudly. His favourite was Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

During worried daytime conversations of my mother with visiting relatives I often heard two names, Ray Fitzpatrick and Charles Morgan, which occur frequently in this book. As I got older I learned that in late 1916 my teenage father, born near Manchester of English and German-Jewish descent, had been scarred for life over much of his body after being caught at the Somme by a German shell that was believed to contain experimental mustard gas, which was not used widely until 1917.

My father's drunken night-time singing did at least distract me for a while from problems caused by sleeping each night in a room where in 1929 a man named Hess killed himself after almost decapitating his wife, whose ghost was claimed by neighbours to haunt our house. Other childhood problems involved a mentally retarded older brother who hated me and sometimes dangerously attacked me. At about age 10, if left at night alone in that house, or worse, alone only with my brother, I began raiding my father's well-stocked drinks cabinet to calm fears.

In 1956, aged 17, I began studying English and Philosophy part-time at Sydney University. I also began working at the Daily Mirror as a cadet journalist. In early 1959, while working as a graded journalist at the Bendigo Daily Advertiser, I was almost killed in a car accident. My worst injuries, to the bottom of my stomach, caused life-long bowel and bladder problems. After recovering fairly well I began working as a casual at the Mirror's rival, the Sun. My boss there was Richie Benaud, Australia's cricket captain, who was between tours. Its stablemate, the Sydney Morning Herald, was about to open an office at Parramatta, not too far from my home in Bankstown. On Benaud's recommendation it sent me there as its first regular western suburbs court and police roundsman, work I had done at the Mirror.

In late 1960 I left Australia, worked on newspapers in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a racehorse guide in London, and travelled widely, usually alone and sometimes through countries thought too dangerous for tourists. I could always calm fears with alcohol. And it helped make me happy.

By the time I was 30 I was fighting an addiction to alcohol. I had by then begun working as a sub-editor at the Australian Financial Review, which had staffing problems. It needed a sub-editor with layout, production and copy-selection skills, and was happy for anyone it could get with them. Even me with a drinking problem. During my early years there I sometimes went straight back to work from an alcohol rehab hospital to one of its most difficult and responsible jobs: producing its early edition pages while the editor was out all afternoon with a company credit card. Later I joined our other national daily, The Australian, which then had even worse staffing problems, and where I spent most of the rest of my working life.

To help me overcome my alcohol problem while at the Financial Review I began researching matters in my father's life. My early attempts at writing a book about such matters were amateurish and needed much more research. Eventually they led in 2014 to an internet book, From the Somme to 'Sydney's Little Chicago', about him and his long relationship with my mainly Scottish mother. It had a wider range of problems than most relationships. He being strongly pro-Labor most of his life and she strongly anti-Labor was one. In the final chapter I put details, involving a man codenamed 'Ben' in Moscow, which had connections with my father that would have astounded him even more than they astounded me.

In 2014 I published on the internet another book, Australia's Most Embarrassing Spy Secret, with details about 'Ben', and many others, behind the founding of Australia's Security Intelligence Organisation. Many are in this book. I did not know ASIO was about to start publishing a taxpayer-funded three-volume official history. The first volume involved a blatant cover-up of the real reasons behind the founding of that organisation. Some of those reasons were not only in my book but in a few published earlier, from which I had got much information and acknowledged. I also had important details from the National Archives that no other book to my knowledge has still ever mentioned.

But my book and those others raised more questions than they answered. The third volume of ASIO's history, which commendably tackled secrecy about the extent of possible Russian penetration of ASIO, and related problems, helped answer them.

In 2016 I published on the internet Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace. It concerned problems of war survivors during my father's life and some during my life and research. Mine included a prime minister who, for reasons beyond me, appeared upset about facts I wrote about him and widely-publicised events in the place where both of us were born and grew up, events with which both our fathers had connections, his praiseworthy and mine possibly less so. They also included ASIO. After I began researching matters involving my father that I did not even know then had connections with Russian spying, and were embarrassing for ASIO, it apparently targeted me as a possible threat to national security who was spying for Russians.

Other problems involved nonsense about me and an imagined sex life which began after that car accident when I was 20. When I returned to work I still had to walk slowly and slightly doubled over as everything healed. Apparently the accident never happened and, I learned years later, I was at the time allegedly 30-something. Some journalists would imitate my walk near me and imply in remarks it was being caused by sodomy. The nonsense was later used by ASIO in Sydney's large Centennial Park, where I often on Sunday stopped for lunch while driving to work, in a way that no writer of ridiculous comedy could ever have imagined. It involved a pink Cadillac! The most preposterous problems it caused stemmed from the simple fact that like anyone, let alone someone with the bottom of his stomach externally and internally scarred, and later also a developing prostate problem, I sometimes had to enter toilets to empty my bladder.

But that book was also about many people with problems often much worse than mine.

Partly because of matters in my childhood I had social difficulties with women and never married. I did though have one lengthy and other brief relationships with some. I loved travel and for most of my time at The Australian was able to do so on paid leave for more than five weeks each year. The day before I left I would leave belongings in storage or with relatives. The next morning I would vacate my residence. Since retiring I have settled down in a relationship.

Neil Landers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - Mysterious Explosion

CHAPTER TWO - Lurid Newspaper Stories

CHAPTER THREE - Scourge of Politicians

CHAPTER FOUR - Browne Starts Punching

CHAPTER FIVE - History of Troubles

CHAPTER SIX - Federal Police Act

CHAPTER SEVEN - Wartime Allegations and Parliamentary Privilege

CHAPTER EIGHT - Drama in Parliament

CHAPTER NINE - Jailings Condemned

CHAPTER TEN - Rum and Law Lords

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Denials, Surprises and Vapour

CHAPTER TWELVE - Clouds over Labor

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Jubilation at Jail Departures

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Menzies Breaks Promise

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Mixed Fortunes

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Explosion Theories

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - What Probably Happened

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 - Remaining Mysteries

CHAPTER ONE

Mysterious Explosion

On Easter Monday 1955 an explosion in the closed premises of a weekly newspaper in south-west Sydney blew part of its roof into the sky. Later that year, through an incredible chain of partly-related consequences, its reverberations reached the top of Russian counter-espionage headquarters in the US and Britain.

The first consequence included misleading headlines in city newspapers about 'Sydney's Little Chicago'. On June 10 that year they included the only-ever jailings by the Australian Parliament or indeed, some newspapers claimed, the only in modern times beyond the sitting of a parliament by the national parliament of any nation following British traditions. That event went to a preliminary hearing of the Privy Council in London.

Other consequences included problems for many important Australians. Allegations or suggestions ranged from illicit sex and corruption to treason. Associated matters led to mysterious veils of secrecy concerning some people in Australia that were not lifted until this century and then only partly. In a murky international background were other mysteries.

At least one veil was kept tightly closed. It involved a long and close friendship of a businessman with a high-ranking legal person who during World II was also a close friend of Ben Chifley, one of Australia's most esteemed leaders. Chifley as Treasurer was in charge of the home front for most of the war and in 1945 became Prime Minister. In 1942, as Japanese troops neared Australia, he made the businessman's legal friend the nation's deputy head of national security. It also involved a top secret American program of intercepting radio messages to and from Moscow that began in 1940. Some interesting messages successfully deciphered were from Australia.

The explosion in 1955 occurred at the edge of the shopping centre of Bankstown, 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.

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 even harder than most parts of Australia 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 and 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.

Later in the war it 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 allegations in the Australian Parliament of corruption involving infrastructure for the air base, many war factories built nearby, and other wartime projects. The businessman named mainly in the allegations, Ray Fitzpatrick, during the war became very rich.

In 1943 a senior government investigator, at the behest of the parliament's Joint War Expenditure Committee, had begun examining Fitzpatrick's 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.

In late 1945, after being told by its legal advisers that criminal charges might not succeed because of the required high onus of proof, Chifley's Labor government 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 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 that 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 which 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, sand and blue metal (basalt) mining, and other activities. As most Australians began experiencing an economic boom, after years of hardship which 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. At those the 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 particularly 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 district's leading newspaper, the Torch, 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 an independent, deputy mayor and later mayor Blanche Barkl. With her hair parted down the middle and brushed back tightly, she looked 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.

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.

There, as in the rest of Australia, the biggest story continued to be divisions in the Labor Party over allegations of communist influence in the party and trade unions that supported it. The main target of the allegations was the party's federal leader, Dr H.V. (Herb) Evatt, a former Australian High Court judge and president of the United Nations General Assembly. The rest of the world, like Australia, was still in the grip of a Cold War that had reached a nadir just before the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.

On 3 April 1954, Vladimir Petrov, the Soviet Union's spy chief in Australia, defected to officials of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. With him he brought many documents. One mentioned Fitzpatrick's high-ranking legal friend. Nine days later Menzies announced the defection in parliament and the establishment of a Royal Commission on Espionage.

A key man at the start of events which led to that 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, whom he said had had no similar complaints about him during 15 years with the Commonwealth Investigation Branch.

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

Petrov had not told his wife Evdokia, being held at their embassy residence in Canberra, he had planned to defect. She later said that, deeply frightened, she attempted suicide. Two burly couriers were sent to escort her back to Russia. Amid violent protests on 19 April 1954 they escorted her to a plane at Sydney airport. There was more violence after the plane landed at Darwin to refuel.

Phone calls went between Menzies, ASIO staff and the Petrovs. Officials disarmed the couriers and asked Evdokia if she wanted to stay in Australia. She hesitated, fearful about what would happen to her if she went back and what might happen to members of her family if she did not. Just before the plane was scheduled to take off she decided to stay.

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. A shot of Evdokia, distressed and minus a shoe, being roughly helped by the couriers towards the aircraft in Sydney, was an iconic photo of the Cold War that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of that century.

On 17 May 1954 the espionage royal commission began its hearings. On 29 May 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.

On 28 January 1955, at a closed sitting of the royal commission that almost nobody in Australia, even at the top of the government, knew about, Ray Fitzpatrick's legal friend was questioned at length. His evidence was sent to the heads of ASIO and the resident agent of Britain's MI5. The agent no doubt would have sent at least parts of interest to his headquarters in London. ASIO would have sent at least those parts to the headquarters in the US of the CIA, which in 1952 had begun taking over related foreign investigations from the FBI, headed by the manipulative, deceitful and fanatically anti-communist J. Edgar Hoover. But otherwise it was kept secret.

On 11 April 1955, 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 solid old brick bungalows, built early in the century as part of the 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, 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. 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 sacked aldermen and officials of the former Bankstown Council.

Not long after Engisch returned to the scene the roof of the main section of the building collapsed in a shower of sparks. By now the street was crowded with hundreds of people being kept at a distance by police. As 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 Ray Fitzpatrick. Alongside him was Blanche Barkl, the mayor of the council when it was sacked.

The first woman to head any Australian government body with a constituency of more than 100,000 people, Barkl 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.

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, Barkl resigned as mayor because of resulting aggravation but remained on the council.

In 1953 she 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. That took the edge locally off the wartime corruption allegations against him. 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.

At the time of the Torch fire 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 TWO

Lurid Newspaper Stories

The next day 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 had become for a while Fitzpatrick's first full-time accountant. My father was still doing some accountancy work for him 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.

In 1955 the Labor state member for Bankstown, Arthur Powell, joined Morgan in calling for a royal commission into events in Bankstown. After this, 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 some undoubtedly 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.

Later he was sometimes likened to John Wren, the corrupt subject of Frank Hardy's famous 1950 novel Power Without Glory. Only in Bankstown did Ray Fitzpatrick have the kind of power approaching that of Wren in parts of Melbourne, particularly Collingwood. Fitzpatrick's influence at state government level never matched that allegedly of Wren's. Nor had he anything like Wren's business empire. But they had similar working-class Irish backgrounds and influence through horseracing. And Fitzpatrick did for a while appear to have, mainly through one person, the ability to influence decisions near the top of Australian politics. That was something Wren never had.

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

CHAPTER THREE

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 featherweight boxer as a teenager, he also became a professional boxer. Fighting as Buzz Brown, the Illinois Tiger, he was said by newspapers to have fought 20 times for 19 wins. His twentieth opponent was Henry Armstrong, the only man ever to 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 were often unwilling or unable to touch the stories it contained.

A criticism of Things I Hear years later in The Observer, a brief national 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 at Ryde and Burwood in Sydney's west, was a former solicitor and barrister who had specialised in industrial matters. In 1934 he married a woman who lived and worked in Bankstown. He also became a good friend of 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. In 1941, after regaining his seat, he became Australia's Treasurer.

He was about the same size as Stan Taylor, 11 years older, like him was 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 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.

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', it said: 'Much of Mr Justice Taylor's success in handling explosive and difficult industrial issues stemmed from his friendly and approachable manner, which he projected genuinely without any loss of judicial dignity.'

The article described him as 'a big, powerful-looking man with a heavy thatch of steel-grey hair. He looks tough, and certainly he was as a youngster. He was born in the bush – at Rylstone, central NSW – and still loves it, although he rarely is able to spend much time away from his Lindfield garden.' It referred to his youthful left-wing reading habits and to his easy manner, often on first-name terms, with staff and workers.

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

In Who's Who in Australia Taylor gave his clubs as Tattersalls and the Journalists (NSW), and his recreations as wrestling and bushwalking. In legal circles he was famous for stripping down in his court office during lunch breaks and engaging in noisy wrestling contests with opponents who sometimes included professionals. Taylor was 12 years older than Fitzpatrick. He was also much better educated. But in many ways they had similar personalities. 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, 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.

He 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 the Daily Telegraph, his telephone rang and a voice at the other end said: 'It's Ray Fitzpatrick from Bankstown. Will you come and see me.' Browne knew Fitzpatrick slightly through the NSW Trotting Club. After providing a brief background to events up to then, he wrote: 'Ah, yes. Mr Ray Fitzpatrick was very much in need of expert public relations advice in April, 1955.'

They met at the 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 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.

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 state 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. Perhaps the most frequently repeated story about him was that a reporter once asked him if he charged extra money to permit a particular business anywhere. Kelly allegedly asked how much people said he was getting each time. Oh no, he allegedly said when the reporter mentioned a sum, it was much 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 FOUR

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'.

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

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

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

On Saturday the 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 28 April 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 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 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.

Esther 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 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.'

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

CHAPTER FIVE

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. In 1946 Lang wrested the seat of Reid from Morgan for one term after a savage election fight during which Fitzpatrick financed and helped manage Lang's campaign. 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 among the worst 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 state 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 helped Australia avoid the huge post-war debt that plagued Britain. That, 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 SIX

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 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 of 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 and were encrypted using a one-time pad system, which should have protected the messages. 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 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. Chifley issued a directive for the formation of such a 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 also at first treated the Russian threat lightly. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948 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 17 May, 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 normally 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 has relied on custom rather than statutes for its powers and since the time of Oliver Cromwell has jealously insisted on its right to interpret what its privileges are.

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 in 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. Valued in parliament in 1944 at up to £4,000, it was allegedly passed off as one worth £100 by the local council and the Department for War Organisation of Industry.

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

After answering a few questions about Taylor's professional history, Morgan said: 'I did not know then the serious nature of the breach, because I had not inspected the building... However, I did say, "I will see Stan" – that is Mr Justice Taylor – "see what he has to say and explain my point of view to him," which I did. I interviewed him in his chambers in Sydney. He explained to me his friendship for Fitzpatrick, which extended over a number of years. He said he thought he was a good fellow and so on. I explained my point of view, told him what I knew about Fitzpatrick, and said that I felt I could not do anything to help him in the matter.' Morgan said Taylor then 'went on to say that he thought it might be detrimental to me politically, because of the influence of this man [Fitzpatrick], if I crossed him'.

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

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

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

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

Bourke: 'A decent attempt at intimidation.'

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

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

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

That same Tuesday a telephone rang in Bankstown. It was Ray Whitrod ringing to confirm their 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 10.45am the federal police halted outside the office of the Bankstown Observer and the nearby office of Ray Fitzpatrick and Co. Flourishing search warrants issued under the Crimes Act and signed by Whitrod, they entered and began ransacking the offices. Safes and drawers were opened, baskets upended and files emptied.

At 10.50am one of Fitzpatrick's managers, Joe Griffin, was able to get through to him at the solicitor's office and tell him what was happening. Fitzpatrick hurried 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 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 SEVEN

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, which he valued in parliament then at up to £4,000, and was allegedly passed off as one worth £100 by the local council and the Department for War Organisation of Industry. (Later Morgan lowered his estimate to £2,000.)

Morgan said 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.

At one point during an ensuing debate Morgan rose and complained to the Speaker about something Dedman, who was sitting just behind, had said to him. 'I will not take this from any man,' Morgan said. The Speaker asked what Dedman had said. As all sorts of words and noises came from around the benches Morgan hesitated. 'He called me a bloody bastard.' The Speaker called upon Dedman, widely regarded as one of the best and hardest-working men in the government, to apologise if he had said such a thing.

Dedman rose and said that what the honourable member had claimed he said was not what he actually said. He then apologised for 'whatever I did say' to him. The laughter was heard in the corridors outside.

Other members began making allegations and it ceased to be a laughing matter. On March 15 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 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 that 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 7 June, two days before parliament was scheduled to rise for the annual exodus from wintry Canberra.

'The setting up of the privileges committee was not taken very seriously,' Browne wrote years later. 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 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, 9 June, which should have been the final day of the sittings, there was much activity in Canberra. Because the statute books provided no guidance there was still much doubt over just what action the parliament could take.

The rights of the British Parliament had once been drastic. In 1621 a man named Floyde, convicted of breach of privilege, had been sentenced by the House of Commons to pay a fine of £1,000 and stand in the pillory after riding to it backwards on a horse with its tail in his hands. When he appealed against this to the House of Lords they increased the fine to £5,000 and ruled that he should stand twice instead of once in the pillory, again after riding there backwards on a horse with its tail in his hands. They also ruled that he be whipped at the cart's rear, be branded on his forehead, surrender all his wealth and be jailed for life in Newgate prison.

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

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

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

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

Soon after 5pm Menzies entered the parliament. Following a speech in which he savagely attacked the two men he moved that it accept the findings of the privileges committee. The Leader of the Opposition, 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. At the Sydney office of the Commonwealth Investigation Service there was a flurry of activity. At least one agent was sent out to try to locate Browne. Calls went between senior officials in Sydney and Canberra.

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

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

Davis and St John headed for Browne's home at Lancaster Road in the expensive ocean cliff suburb of Dover Heights. Earlier that day Browne had completed his latest edition of Things I Hear and had posted it to subscribers.

'Up to this week, most people, and that included myself,' he wrote, 'thought that the position between politician and citizen was that the politician could rise in parliament and say exactly what he liked about a citizen, without regard to truth, or the laws of libel and slander, and that he enjoyed complete immunity in saying so. At the same time, a citizen who wished to attack a politician had to make his statements without benefit of any privilege whatsoever.' Browne said it was worse than that: he could face heavy damages if what he said was regarded as defamatory in any way.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER EIGHT

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

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

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

As some members muttered angrily the Speaker called for order.

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

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

Cameron: 'Have you concluded?'

Browne: 'Yes sir.'

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

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

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

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

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

The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, seconded the amendment. But 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, 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 also 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most members, however, were in no mood to try to overcome their prejudices, or to show mercy, particularly towards Browne. During the lunch break many had drunk well, and this was showing. Surly interjections increased against any calls for restraint, and noises of agreement anynew 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 house divided, ayes to one side, those saying no to the other. When the numbers had been counted the amendment was declared lost 52 to 16. Menzies' motion to jail Fitzpatrick was then passed 55 to 12. After confusion on whether the first vote had covered both men it was put again to cover Browne and was lost by the same margin. That to jail Browne was passed 55 to 11.

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

The Labor Party, which allowed its members a conscience vote, was more divided. Four voted twice to jail and 12, in the case of Fitzpatrick, against. Calwell voted to fine both but walked out of the chamber each time during the motions to jail. Another member, Arthur Greenup, voted against jailing Fitzpatrick but walked out during the vote to jail Browne. Kim Beazley, whose son of the same name was later to briefly become Australia's deputy prime minister, voted against fining and jailing. 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 NINE

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.

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

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

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

'Privilege gave Justice a crippling blow in Canberra yesterday,' the editorial began. 'Whatever your politics, Liberal or Labor, you can't dispute that... Did they deserve a sentence? It could be – we're not defending them. But we, old-fashioned as it might seem, believe that if men are to be punished, then it must be after a fair trial... It certainly does not mean yesterday's Roman holiday – a bench of 120 unskilled judges, all interested parties and all yowling for the blood of the two accused... Yesterday was a shameful day – not only for the Government, but for the Opposition, who merely bayed for blood in a different key.'

That editorial contained exaggerations and wrongly ignored the speeches of some Labor members against the jailings. But it otherwise 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 normally have been possible in a proper court.

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

CHAPTER TEN

Rum and Law Lords

Fitzpatrick adjusted less easily than Browne to their enforced absence from society. The Speaker had ordered that their accommodation be made as comfortable as possible. As a result they were provided with beds, and their meals continued to be supplied from the Civic Hotel across the road. 'We settled in quickly to a routine of rising at 6am as the night shift went off, having early morning coffee with the incoming shift, then shaving and showering,' Browne wrote. 'We spent a good deal of time in the police common room in the first week. I found things a great deal more congenial than Fitzpatrick. He found the sedentary life very, very hard to take.'

They had many visitors and, according to Browne, a fan mail of film star proportions.

Apart from stories about the jailing, there were stories in some newspapers hinting at sensational allegations of corruption in high places that would soon make the events of that Friday unimportant in comparison. Morgan added fuel to this by privately naming Justice Taylor and several high-ranking NSW government people to journalists. Government ministers tried to quell the speculation. NSW Premier Cahill announced that the result of police investigations into allegations of corruption in Bankstown would soon be given at a Coroner's Court inquiry into the fire that destroyed the Torch building. (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 15 June 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 22 June 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.

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

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

'Superficially,' wrote Reid, 'this statement is a possibly snide, but otherwise quite innocent, side remark designed purely to discredit Fitzpatrick in the eyes of anti-Lang parliamentarians who were that day sitting in judgment on him. But behind it lies a fascinating story of secret negotiations involving big names and begun years ago. And a story of feuds and vendettas that only over recent years has come to the surface of Australian public life.

'In the year 1946 the Federal Elections were taking place. The late Ben Chifley was Labor Prime Minister. And Chifley's lifetime enemy, John Thomas Lang, Depression-era Premier of NSW, still a legendary figure, was attempting a political comeback. He was contesting the seat of Reid against sitting member Charles Morgan. Chifley, always a realist, probably worked out that Lang, long expelled from the official Labor Party, but still possessed of a genius for probing mercilessly Labor's sore spots, represented a real threat to the Labor Government if he secured the forum of a seat in the House of Representatives.'

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

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

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

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

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

Fitzpatrick was considerably larger than Browne. A 'thoroughly alarmed' male police officer would presumably have helped carry the former. Browne often at least tended to exaggerate anything he did. The best guess if all this is largely accurate is that their police escort was a slightly built woman station assistant who needed her hands free to open doors or gates. This would be consistent with a known police attitude by then that they had better uses for their manpower than the squabbles of politicians. And Old Kedge, it is worth adding, was 75 per cent alcohol by volume, or about 150 proof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Denials, Surprises and Vapour

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

The first witnesses were Arthur Powell, the 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 Joe Riordan, secretary of the Federated Clerks Union, but added that Riordan told him another trade union official had given him this information. Morgan did not name the other official. He also began modifying or skating around his evidence that day. In answer to a question from Shand, after references to a 'gang', he said: 'I attributed the fire to the gang and I classify Ray Fitzpatrick as the leader of the gangster regime.' When Shand said later that Morgan had made a statement that Ray Fitzpatrick was guilty of starting the fire, Morgan said: 'No, I never suggested his name.' Then, after another Shand question, he said 'he might have suggested that he had a hand in it'.

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

Morgan: 'Not in connection with the fire, only as the ringleader of the gang in Bankstown.' Despite even sometimes having referred in the federal parliament to Fitzpatrick as 'Mr Big', 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 that would have enabled a person to get safely away.

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

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

Kelly: 'Yes.'

Kelly was questioned at length about this. Did you know at the time there would be nationwide interest in the case, asked Mr R. Watson, for Morgan and Phil Engisch. 'I don't know about nationwide,' Kelly replied. 'I knew it would be a political dogfight.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not long after he reached home he heard a loud explosion 'which sounded like gunfire from Holsworthy military camp'. At about 7.05 a boy had arrived and told him about the fire, whereupon he had jumped in his car and hurried to the premises. There he had joined firemen fighting the blaze and had 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, Engisch denied he was a chain smoker but admitted he did tend to smoke when under pressure. He said he did not have a smoke between a stop during a drive from the races along Heathcote Road to the Torch office and when he returned home. Pressed on this point, he said he remembered his last smoke because Miss Nurthen, after they stopped on Heathcote Road, had rolled him a cigarette in the car.

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

Asked about insurance on the property and stock of the Torch, which had been for a total of £21,000, but of which the company had only received £14,136 after the fire, Engisch estimated the replacement costs at £25,000. He said the company had been making good profits, £7,399 in 1954, but had no insurance against loss of profits.
The company's accountant, Robert Poulter, later confirmed his evidence about its finances and said the book value of assets was far below replacement value because of depreciation in the balance sheets for taxation purposes.

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

Nurthen said she began work at the Torch as an office assistant when she was 15 and left in 1952. After confirming Engisch's account of the events of Easter Monday afternoon she said she was in the bath when he rang at about 7.30pm and told her mother about the fire. At about 11pm he had gone to her home and told her the building was a dead loss.

Questioned about Engisch's smoking habits, Nurthen said he did not smoke a great deal. But she had rolled him one after they left a parking spot during the drive back to Bankstown along Heathcote Road. To test her veracity, Shand handed her a packet of tobacco and some cigarette papers. 'I prefer ready rubbed,' she 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 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. Swane 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. '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 1) 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 18 July the Sydney newspaper strike was over and the press gallery was more crowded. But the story had been relegated to inside pages. In the 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 not far north of Sydney where he owned a home, but returned when told the news by a fishing inspector. (According to his daughter Lilian, his first action after reaching Bankstown was to distribute a catch of mud crabs to firemen who had been fighting the blaze.) Les Engisch said no-one had threatened him that they would burn down the premises. On the day after the fire Ray Fitzpatrick had offered to print the Torch at the Observer plant. At the time he was very upset and did not accept or reject the offer.

Goran: 'Was his manner friendly?'

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

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

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

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

Engisch: 'Did I?'

Coroner: 'Don't ask a question.'

Engisch: 'Did I? I don't know.' He then said, in answer to Shand, that he knew very well a Bankstown garage owner named Renny Maxwell Campbell. (Max Campbell was one of my childhood neighbours. A garage behind his Rickard Road home, used 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 also gave evidence on Monday. On the day of the fire, he said, he had called at the Torch premises at 1pm and had set an electric time clock on the Linotype machines so they would automatically switch on at 6am the next day. That would heat their pots of type metal ready for when the operators arrived later. He was only in the building five minutes and when he left everything appeared normal. Dudley caused excitement after Shand asked him what type of lock was on the door at the Torch and he pulled out his key-ring. 'It's a Yale lock,' he said, holding up the keys. Then he said: 'Oh, I can't show you my key. It got burned in the fire.'

Shand: 'How did your key to the door get burned in the fire?'

Engisch: 'It didn't get burned.'

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

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

When Shand pushed this point Dudley exploded. 'Don't try to put on me that I set fire to the building.' The Sydney Telegraph thought 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. 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. Jack Fitzpatrick also denied other claims by Engisch of threats and was questioned about incidents such as one during a cricket match at Wolli Oval, near Mascot airport. During the incident he allegedly threw Engisch against a wall, told him to 'keep my name out of your dirty rag' and tried to get him to fight. There were no known witnesses. Asked if he liked to settle disputes with his fists, he said 'isn't that the usual way?'

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

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

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

Cross-examined by Watson, for Phil Engisch, Bradstreet said he did not agree with Ray Kelly's theory that a deliberately lit petrol vapour explosion had caused the fire. In his view it might have been caused accidentally by an electrical fault. He also considered a low-intensity petrol vapour explosion a possibility. Asked why he had not interviewed Ray or Jack Fitzpatrick until 23 days after the fire, he agreed this had given them a chance to prepare an alibi. Bradstreet claimed he had never said Phil Engisch was the number one suspect but had considered the fact that Engisch was the last known person on the premises before the fire. He also said it would have been possible for someone to have approached the Torch office at the time from a vacant lot at the back of the building without being seen.

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

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

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

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

On 8 August, when everyone had assembled again, the Parramatta Coroner's Court was packed and silent. 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 TWELVE

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 raise those two men and their friendship. He was able to do it without naming either Fitzpatrick or Taylor. And he brought in at the same time the Petrov defection, the event that had led to the emergence of the new party.

Mullens began by asking: 'Is the Postmaster-General aware that there are many irregularities and ambiguities in the telephone directory, especially in New South Wales? Of course, this is understandable in view of undercover activities, such as starting price betting and other minor forms of skulduggery.' He then asked the ministerial Postmaster-General, Hubert Anthony, to inquire into a telephone number at the popular southern Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla.

'Doubtless,' Mullens continued, 'inquiries will lead him to the proposition that this is the telephone number of a judge of the Industrial Commission of New South Wales whose name has been mentioned freely both with regard to the Bankstown Affair and the Petrov matter.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menzies dropped his smile. 'The difficulty that I have with this matter is this: The war expenditure committee made a report in August 1944 – more than 11 years ago. The events into which it inquired are therefore events which are cold. The tracks are no longer as visible as they might have been at that time.' 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 rose again.

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jubilation at Jail Departures

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

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

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

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

Both men claimed afterwards that during their stay they made many acquaintances among the inmates. In the case of Fitzpatrick, many 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 many years later then existed. This agrees with a claim by Barkl that for much of his time there he was ill. 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 a few other women including Barkl, was able to get through the crowd and enter the jail. Another, a late model American sedan with Jack Fitzpatrick and Ray's older brother, Bill, who had remained out of the limelight, got through to the main gate, where it stopped. 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 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 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 FOURTEEN

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. After Deputy Speaker Adermann had taken the chair and read prayers Menzies said Fitzpatrick and Browne had been released from custody 'pursuant to the resolution of the house of the 10th June'. First though there was a question from Evatt to Menzies on possible changes to the Constitution they had discussed. Menzies apologised and said other matters had been occupying his mind.

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

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

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. I am putting that in lay terms.'

Evatt: 'Portion of it did not.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 FIFTEEN

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

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

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

A little more than a month later Ray Fitzpatrick died. The obituaries in the Sydney newspapers were mostly brief and all were respectful. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

A line of cars preceded by police, and estimated by some newspapers to stretch for three miles, followed him on his final journey. When probate of his will was granted it was found that he had left to his family an estate worth $732,785, a much smaller sum than many people had expected. That reflected tax-avoiding trust funds set up for family members, many big legal fees over the years and the very large amount he had given away during his life.

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 many of his allegations in 1944 were also supported by documents now in the National Archives. Nobody to whom I mentioned this appeared to doubt many details he gave in both years, with their implications of at least some government – local, state or federal – corruption. 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 even 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, allegations he at no time 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.

Chicago gangsters were best known for their use of guns. During the Bankstown Affair only one man involved was alleged to have ever used a firearm in any way against anyone. That was in the past and just involved threatening someone, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist trying to start a newspaper in Bankstown. The man who allegedly threated him with a gun was 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 Browne wrote in his newsletter that he was 'marked down for extinction in the next pre-selection, not so much for anything he had done, but on the somewhat unflattering proposition that he was no use to the Party, either in Parliament or out of it'. Morgan did lose pre-selection in Reid, to Tom Uren, a popular figure on the left of the party. Uren was a former prisoner of the Japanese who had been working as a slave labourer near Nagasaki when the atomic bomb there helped end the war. When Australia again went to the polls, in November 1958, Morgan stood for Reid as an independent but polled far behind Uren and also behind the Liberal candidate.

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 increased majority in the December election.

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, and then at least slightly left-wing, Adelaide proprietor named Rupert Murdoch. To keep money coming from sources such as that he had to show some care in whom he attacked and how. Never again did he have a moment of glory to equal his defiant speech to the parliament in 1955. But he approached it in a small way during a fight for the premises of The Anglican newspaper, a semi-official organ of the Anglican Church.

A little war had developed between Murdoch and Sydney press baron Sir Frank Packer for the suburban newspaper market in Sydney. The Anglican had never made money and was then in receivership. But it had a large press at inner-city Chippendale ideal for printing a number of newspapers. A legal situation developed in which possession was nine-tenths of the law. On 7 June 1960 Sir Frank's sons Clyde and Kerry, with helpers, were able by trickery to occupy the press building in Chippendale and change the locks. Clyde Packer forcibly ejected from the building John Willis, the one-legged manager of The Anglican's publishing company.

Murdoch called in Frank Browne, by then the sporting editor of his recently acquired Sydney Sunday Mirror. At midnight, on the steps of Sydney Town Hall, Murdoch handed money to cover expenses to ally Francis James, the well-known eccentric and free-thinking editor of The Anglican. A former SMH journalist, he was famous there for writing editorials and articles in a 1928 Rolls-Royce parked outside.

In 1940, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Tasmanian–born James, after learning to fly in Australia, had sailed to England and joined the RAF. Seriously wounded in 1942 when his Spitfire was shot down over France, he was able to convince Germans he was a person of high importance. After surgeons in a French hospital helped save his life he escaped from captivity, was recaptured and in 1943, because of his injuries, released to the British in Cairo. Later he famously spent three years in a Chinese jail as an alleged spy and was released in 1973 only after a personal plea to Premier Chou En-lai by Gough Whitlam, a long-time friend of James.

A small party including James, Browne and a few photographers from Murdoch's also recently acquired Daily Mirror, one of them in contact with Murdoch on a walkie-talkie, set off down George Street towards Chippendale. On the way they stopped off at a club where Browne hired two former heavyweight boxers for £20 each.

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

'He collapsed with a soft grunt,' James wrote. 'I was terrified I had killed him, but one of our bruisers turned him over with his foot and said he'd live. In a short time we'd managed to drive them out.' Meanwhile, out in the street, David McNicoll, managing editor of the Daily Telegraph, was in a Telegraph car in radio contact with Sir Frank Packer, who was getting a ball by ball description while in a hospital bed. James claimed some Chippendale citizens, loyal to The Anglican, deflated the tyres of the car.

'But the most incredible sight of the night,' James continued, 'was Frank Browne's encounter with Kerry Packer. Frank was very good at name-calling and he followed Packer outside and baited him. Kerry advanced and Browne just went whack and hit him in the solar plexus with the most devastating punch I have ever seen. Packer was knocked cold and was picked up and dragged off to one of the Telegraph cars.'

'Knight's Sons in City Brawl' read the front-page headline the next day in the first edition of the Daily Mirror, printed early for country readers. It had a large photograph of a person being ejected from the building. That morning Murdoch and Packer lawyers headed into the Supreme Court of NSW seeking injunctions.

The final edition of the Mirror led the front page with a different story. Along side it was a story about the previous night's events. Carefully written for legal reasons, it had details, including some about Kerry Packer, which did not rule out the veracity of those in the later version by Francis James. The heading was the same as that in the first edition but now in large capital letters. Probably it had been at the top of the usual second and third editions. The important difference was in the large photograph with it.

The previous day a Mirror photographer had been outside the building, taking photos and keeping Murdoch informed of developments. The last edition photo, probably snapped hastily, and used after the first edition, was not too good. But it was great for Murdoch's legal purposes. It showed Clyde Packer ejecting the one-legged Willis. The first edition photo, for which the photographer no doubt had been eagerly awaiting, was much better. It showed Clyde Packer later being similarly ejected.

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 at the time, Browne said she had been in the habit of throwing rubbish into the ocean near their home. He conjectured that she had gone too close to the edge of the cliff.

For a while he went to Rhodesia to fight for Ian Smith's illegal government. But he returned to Sydney complaining that the whites weren't fighting for. 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 warm nostalgia now that he was safely dead, his remarkable life. 'There will never be another muckraker like him,' lamented the Daily Telegraph. The Bulletin, after describing him as 'the last of the wild men', identified the one achievement for which, at least among journalists, he 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. Engisch learned his job in a hard school. He knew about local politics and power, and also about newspaper gutter fighting. In Bankstown he was able to look after himself. But when it came to the sometimes shadowy world of real power that lay beyond Bankstown he was not in the same league as Browne. Or Ray Fitzpatrick. The result was an incredible chain of events that took Engisch, Morgan, and also Browne and Fitzpatrick, out of their depth. What began as fiery drama ended up, as the Sydney Morning Herald said, in an intensified 'odour of musty scandal'.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Explosion Theories

In Bankstown the most talked-about mystery was who had caused the fire and explosion that triggered that chain of events.

Coroner Smythe in his concluding summary said the fact that Phil Engisch, as a minor shareholder and director of the Torch company, might gain some ultimate benefit from the fire, even though suffering some immediate loss, did not justify him in arriving at any definite conclusion that he would carry out the destruction of his company's premises. After saying he had a 'very strong' suspicion of a deliberate action by some person or persons unknown, he returned an open finding, a verdict in effect requested by the lawyer for the insurance companies involved, and probably welcomed by many people.

That word 'definite', after remarks by Smythe about faults in Phil's evidence, seemed to hint at a fairly high probability of his guilt. Many people in Bankstown and beyond appeared to see in that and other words an oblique finger pointed at Engisch for insurance gain and also, by some, other possible reasons, such as even perhaps an incredible way to draw attention to the already metaphorically explosive situation in Bankstown.

Phil Engisch was thought by people who knew him to be a bit strange, even sometimes perhaps a bit mad. They also thought the same of his father Les. Both almost certainly were to some extent affected, like many other people of German background in Australia and elsewhere that century, by that background. Some of their relatives were said to have changed their name to English. But Les, a man not easily swayed by the views of others, had stuck doggedly to the German spelling.

According to a family history in the Torch decades before, when Les had been editor, his father had left Germany for London to become Queen Victoria's Royal Baker. Les, born at inner-city Newtown in Sydney soon after his parents migrated here, seemed to be proud of his German scientific and cultural heritage. But he also considered himself a loyal Australian and before World War I had been a part-time member of the Royal NSW Lancers.

During that war he remained in Australia. In 1920 he moved to Bankstown and began the Torch. He was one of the first people in Bankstown to own a car, a Model T Ford. Bankstown's police were then equipped only with bicycles, so whenever something requiring their presence happened they would hitch a ride to the scene on the Model T. That helped the Torch to quickly become the leading newspaper in the surrounding district.

It also helped him with problems stemming from his German surname, his short temper and the failure of the settlement scheme for wounded war veterans near the river. Some veterans appear to have caused him sufficient difficulties for the police to let him have a personal handgun licence after regulations covering those were much strengthened in 1927.

Then came World War II, with even more horrors than the first, and much more German culpability. Phil joined up near the start of that war and became a warrant officer in an ammunition unit. After the war he became editor of the Torch and his father became managing editor. In no details of the family's background after that did I see any mention of Germany.

Members of his family were known for their love of classical music. A relative, not too close, was said to have been a composer of minor importance of that type of music. It was tempting to see in the fire at the Torch a personal act of almost apocalyptic destruction, a sort of Wagnerian Gotterdammerung. Perhaps that red glow seen widely just after dusk in south-west Sydney was an antipodean reflection of that as the great German composer's Valhalla, with its Nordic gods and heroes, was engulfed in an ocean of leaping flames – the Twilight of the Gods. What a homage in Phil's tortured mind that might possibly have been to his cultural background. Or more likely, in light of what had emerged when the gates of concentration camps had been opened in 1945, catharsis from that background.

But any such speculation about his deliberate involvement ignored his obvious distress as he saw the section with the new rotary press go up also in flames.

Because of his wartime service he must have known something about explosives. He was the last person known to be on the premises. And because of their location, in the shopping centre and across the road from the police station, it would have been difficult, although not impossible, for anyone without a key to gain entry unobserved. He was also the only person to come out badly from the coroner's summary. There was a strong case against him.

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

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

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

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

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

As the government explosives expert Stanley Parsons told the court hearing, it would have been 'extremely hazardous' and 'more or less a fluke' to arrange the Torch explosion deliberately. But Parsons said it could have been done using a lighted cigarette arranged in such a way that it burned down slowly and ignited heads in a box of matches. Detective-Sergeant Ray Kelly said much the same. Both mentioned a possible elapsed time of half an hour before the explosion. That could have been pointing a finger either at Engisch or someone who entered after he left.

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

The court hearing dealt seriously with evidence against only two men, Phil Engisch and Jack Fitzpatrick. Almost certainly correctly, the coroner dismissed the possibility that Jack Fitzpatrick was responsible.

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

Ray Fitzpatrick was usually a shrewd judge of people and knew how to manipulate them. He appeared most of his life to have a sixth sense as to who, from his point of view, was probably the best person available for any job. He then if necessary paid whatever it took to get that person. Often, as with Blanche Barkl, there was more than money involved, and sometimes no direct money at all. There were combinations that might have included, for example, employment, hot tips on races at Harold Park or just ordinary friendship.

His first lawyer, Stan Taylor, was to prove as perfect a friend for the rest of his life as any man could ever wish for.

My father, his first accountant, did not seem to think of himself as one of his friends, and was nowhere near as helpful as Taylor. But he was grateful for work Fitzpatrick gave him early in the Depression, when he had a wife and three children to support, and badly needed any he could get. When Charles Morgan began making those serious allegations about Fitzpatrick in the federal parliament in 1944 there was not only what Morgan was saying but the fact that in 1937 my father had recommended him to Fitzpatrick as a legal replacement for Stan Taylor, After those allegations began, with leading politicians joining in, and large media coverage, he began getting drunk every night. His heavy nightly drinking only stopped after the war, when he was able to immerse himself again in starting and controlling building societies, mainly at first special ones for returning soldiers.

Most importantly, however, he strongly liked help Ray gave to men whose recovery from war problems had been less fortunate than his own. He therefore continued for years to do some unofficial accountancy work for him, not to be seen by tax officials, and was part of that process. He seemed not to benefit financially from that. He worked long hours most of his life, rarely had holidays, and when he died in 1960 left little more than the house we lived in, which was developing serious problems.

After those wartime allegations, the still influential Jack Lang, a good friend of Fitzpatrick, helped him fight resulting problems, for a while in the federal parliament, and at state government, where he still had many supporters, and a local level in Bankstown. When the spotlight of the nation's press turned on him after the fire at the Torch, Fitzpatrick's hiring of Frank Browne appeared at first to be almost an act of genius. And when Browne's attacks, successful as they were from his point of view, led them towards the judicial bar of the Australian Parliament, he hired a young lawyer, Anthony Mason, who 32 years later became Chief Justice of Australia.

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

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

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

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

As for Engisch, few people who knew him appeared to think him dishonest in a financial sense. But he was not widely liked. He had been born into a successful family, been educated at two expensive schools, albeit with scholarship help, often had a clever expression that annoyed people, and had a cutting tongue. Many, in short, saw him as a privileged smart aleck.

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

Phil was anti-Labor and Church of England, although not stridently either, in a district that was strongly pro-Labor and had many Irish and other Catholics. Finally, although his father was born in Australia and his mother was British, he was in some people's eyes, because of his surname, German as well.

Apart from people who don't like newspaper editors who ask too many questions, any large community will have people with deep grievances. Sometimes, back in those days when newspapers were much more important, such people could make the local newspaper a focus for their feelings. Some former residents who returned to Bankstown after the war, or men who went there after it looking for work, had fought against the Germans, or possibly even been captured by them. Some of those might have had what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. After World War I a similar situation, worsened by the failure of the soldier-settlement scheme, had apparently been serious enough for the police to let Les Engisch keep a handgun.

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

Another possibility was sexual jealousy. Phil Engisch, the day-to-day boss of a by then fair-sized enterprise, and aged 37, was having an affair with an attractive 23-year-old former member of his staff. Did Yvonne Nurthen have someone else longing for her? If he had been on the staff of the Torch he could have known how to approach the building from the rear without being seen, and where to find suitable liquid in the printing section. He might even have had a key with which to let himself into the building.

The biggest trouble with such speculation is the problem of what happened then. Presumably he would have poured the liquid on the floor. If he had just lit something leading to it there would have been a fire but there would not have been that explosion. The liquid needed time to vaporise, and in a confined space. Assuming the police were truthful when they said no trace was found of a timing device, how did he cause that explosion? To do that deliberately, and get out safely, without being seen, would have taken knowledge and nerve few people would have had.

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

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

What Probably Happened

On Easter Monday 1955 Engisch and Nurthen drove to Randwick races. Before the races were over they set out for home via Heathcote Road. This was a long way to get to Bankstown. It involved going to the south of Sydney along the Princes Highway and west through hills then almost completely undeveloped – except at Lucas Heights, where work began that year on Australia's only nuclear reactor – with thick forests.

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

By the time he opened the front door it was almost dark inside. He turned on a light and picked up material dropped into a letter box at its front office, where the public ordered advertisements or job-printing work and paid money. After glancing through the material and leaving some on a desk for staff who worked there, he went along a narrow passageway to his office, behind the front one, where he put church notes onto a typewriter. Then he continued along the passageway to the gloomy printing section at the rear and crossed to a Linotype machine, where he left tennis notes for the operator when he came in the next morning.

Phil Engisch was preoccupied. He had a lot of work to catch up on, but that probably was not what he was thinking about. More likely was the affair with Nurthen and the problems this was causing with his wife and other family members. In the background there were also all those continuing problems involving the Fitzpatricks and other people. His eyes adjusting to the gloom, he began his return to his office.

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

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

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

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

He was under pressure. After his visit to the races with Nurthen, and whatever had happened along Heathcote Road, he was about to go home to face his wife and have dinner. If he had decided he needed a cigarette to calm his nerves it would not have been surprising. Perhaps he had rolled his own. Or perhaps there was a packet of ready-mades in his desk. After lighting up he had possibly had several drags, then decided it was time to go. Before doing so he would have stubbed out the cigarette. Or so he thought.

Perhaps he did not stub out that cigarette completely. Possibly it began smouldering away at the rear of his office in an ashtray on a typically-cluttered editor's desk that was piled 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 the printing section, something else crucial had happened. A stream of Shellite or some other volatile liquid had drained across the floor.

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

Parsons remained adamant in his view that the fire followed a low-intensity vapour explosion, and there was one possibility he did not rule out. At the side of the printing section, behind Phil Engisch's office, was a small foreman's office. There was also a raised floor that could have sloped slightly towards that. Anything draining across the floor could have done so mainly into that foreman's office, where according to evidence the destruction was most complete.

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, it was still warm. In those conditions, liquid that drained across the floor, and mainly under the door into the foreman's office, could have turned soon into vapour. Before long a cloud of this could have filled the foreman's office.

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 the sheet. There were also wooden frameworks and, as was normal for a newspaper office, wooden shelves piled with paper.

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

In the foreman's office, with that added heat on the wall, the cloud of vapour continued to thicken. Some of it possibly forced its way out through ventilation into the street. Three witnesses, Constable Herd and the two newsboys, gave evidence of seeing fog or smoke near the premises just before the explosion. This could have been vapour, smoke from a fire, or both. 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 a sheet of fibro shattered and a flame burst through, just the fluke that was needed to turn the foreman's office into a bomb, more than three decades before military technologists learned how to do this with at least some control. The vapour inside ignited. In a fiery and very loud explosion, up into the sky went the roof over the foreman's office.

In Phil's and the front office were probably heavy stuffed filing cabinets against most walls. The remaining force from the blast would have entered the printing section, where there was already some vapour, which would instantly also have ignited, and left that through the weakest points. This could explain why windows blocks away reportedly rattled while those in the printing section, protected by all the heavy equipment then used in printing, and shelves stacked with all sorts of stuff, remained intact.

At first the other flames would have mainly followed the flow line of the spilled liquid, both to the original receptacle further back and along a thin stream in the passage past Phil's office towards the front entrance. This would account for the way they seemed to be running along the passage when Constable Herd looked through a window alongside a motorcycle in a loading bay for delivery trucks between the office section and that to the left. Then, helped by the damage done by the explosion, they began to take over the whole building.

The scene that greeted Engisch as he drove towards the premises, after being told by one of the newsboys about the fire, would have shocked him. Although the sun's last light had gone the flames had brought back the reds of its descent. In Fetherstone Street they had turned night almost into day. Leaping high into the air, they were causing a glow that was seen widely over surrounding suburbs.

After leaving his car Engisch took dumbfounded stock. He was also company secretary and understood the financial situation better than anyone. The company had fairly high insurance on its equipment. But not enough to cover the high cost of replacing it with new equipment. And because of the accounting practice of depreciating equipment for tax purposes, most of it was on the company's books at much below value. Desperately he told the firemen to concentrate on saving the untouched section to the left, which contained the company's pride and joy, the new rotary press, recently installed with the help of a large bank overdraft.

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

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

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

That father and son did not see their interests as necessarily identical during the court hearing can be deduced from the fact that they were represented by different lawyers.

While going through Torch files I noticed something interesting. A feature of the Torch was usually a large masthead, changed sometimes, with the word 'Torch' in very large type flanked by flaming torches. For many years before the fire, and some time afterwards, three names always sat prominently under those mastheads: Managing Director L.A. Engisch (Les), Business Manager D.T. Engisch (Dudley) and Editor P.C.L. Engisch (Phil). In 1964 two of those names disappeared. Until the old man's death, although he was then well into retirement, only his name remained. Was this the ultimate punishment of the founder of the Torch?

In his confusion, as flames continued to take over the building, Phil Engisch hurried to a nearby phone and called Yvonne Nurthen. Told by her mother she was in the bath, he told her mother the news and hurried back.

As everything sank in further he looked around. Already a large crowd had gathered across the road and more were arriving every minute. Then the roof of the main section collapsed. The two Linotype machines at the rear and other valuable equipment were beyond hope and the flames were taking hold of the section that contained the rotary press. Again Engisch asked firemen to concentrate on that. According to some witnesses, he was very agitated. Meanwhile Blanche Barkl, the last of the key players that night, had arrived.

Near the centre of the fire-fighting action Engisch again looked around. By now the street was packed with bystanders. The flames were still fierce and reflecting on their faces as they watched the spectacle in fascination. Many of those faces he recognised. It was amazing how quickly people he considered his enemies had gathered to watch the Torch burn down.

In one group he saw Ray Fitzpatrick, Mr Big himself. Alongside him was Barkl, sacked as mayor, and in his view altogether too close in the last few years to Fitzpatrick. Alongside them was Cecil Pyers, an ally of them on the sacked council. All of them were laughing, or so he imagined. Did Engisch, either before or after exchanging words with them, suddenly see a way out of his predicament, and one that would help him get back at enemies at the same time?

After leaving them, he returned to the centre of the firefighting. Seeing Constable Herd, he walked over to him. 'It is just what I expected,' he said. 'They promised to do this to me. I know who they are.' When Herd asked who he meant, Engisch used a phrase like something out of a B-grade gangster movie, one inappropriate for a man who had known both Fitzpatricks well for many years and had once been friendly with them. 'The boys,' he said. 'I know who they are.'

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

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

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Parliament Releases Documents

On 24 November 1999 a Liberal member of the privileges committee, Alex Somlyay, presented to the lower house a report of the committee concerning a proposal to release in-camera (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. 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,' McLeay said.

'Some time later, when I became a member of the privileges committee, I pursued this matter,' he 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, McLeay 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 surprising letter to Curtin from Victor Johnson, the committee's then chairman.

On 16 November 1944 Johnson wrote to Frank Forde, the Acting Prime Minister while Curtin was ill, saying that 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 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 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 a 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 NSW government official, Mr G.W. Hunt, sent in December 1953 to the state 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. 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.

When Petrov on 3 April 1954 climbed into an ASIO car outside Sydney Airport he had with him many papers. Among them were notes by a predecessor named Sadovnikov, who left Australia in 1951. One of those notes concerned Justice Taylor. Sadovnikov said Taylor was an Industrial Commission judge and Labor supporter who up to 1943 was the Sydney head of the national security service. While in that job, it said, 'Taylor handed to the Communist Party a document which made possible the exposure of an agent provocateur in a region of the Communist Party'. 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 brought by Petrov 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 the city 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 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 Taylor 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.'

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 the 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 6 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 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 of all 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 [Charles, the head of ASIO], 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 a former assistant director of MI5, Peter Wright, living in retirement in Tasmania, tried to publish an autobiography, Spycatcher, which gave some details about this among other matters. The British government tried to stop its publication 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 Canberra on 17 May 1954 and then moved to Sydney.

'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 William 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 himself. 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.

For different reasons, 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. They had been sent to Australia by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's hated security chief, who had been executed after Stalin's death, and partly because of that connection were already under serious pressure before the defections.

Vladimir was 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 relatives 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. Evdokia, a signals intelligence expert, was as valuable as 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.

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 lived comfortably until her death in 2002, 11 years after the death of her husband, who was bed-stricken during his final years after a stroke.

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 7 July, after they prepared their draft report, ASIO and MI5 checked for anything 'that might be damaging to the Venona secret' and requested changes. On 27 July 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 14 September 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. Behind that were claimed to be 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 the Communist Party.

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, McKnight connected him with the man who got Petrov to defect, Polish-born Michael Bialoguski, who had befriended Petrov and gone often with him to Sydney drinking places and brothels Petrov liked to frequent. 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. There he offered his services as an agent to the Commonwealth Investigation Service and was accepted. '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 seems to have had an even greater fondness for brothels than Petrov. Therein was a potential for tabloid interest unconnected with espionage. That fondness might also help explain how Magnusson became Bialoguski's Commonwealth Investigation Service contact after he had successfully offered his services to that organisation, and why Magnusson, along with Bialoguski, was then transferred to ASIO.

Magnusson had long been finding out anything he could about Detective-Sergeant Alfred Hughes of the Sydney Vice Squad, whose work would have included keeping tabs on people working in, and frequenting, brothels. Magnusson himself would have learned a bit about such places and would have realised the possibilities in Bialoguski going to the same establishments as Petrov after a few drinks at a 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 could have been a big worry.

So could Ray 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 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 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 however ASIO chief Spry and/or the MI5 resident agent had contacted Menzies after learning of the promise and warned him of a danger to Venona secrecy. There might even have been calls from Washington and London. 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 well-informed 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 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 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.

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 Alfred Hughes. Probably, when he transferred after the war to ASIO, he knew more than anyone 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 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. It seemed as if 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 allegations, and probably also for keeping details about other 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.

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.

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 the very important 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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Remaining Mysteries

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. But there were many references to Hughes, a major focus of the 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, Russia's master spy in Britain, and a few other top spies in Europe. The last mentioned "gnawing doubts" that remained 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 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.

In and near Bankstown after 1955 many people soon forgot about allegations involving 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, Ray Fitzpatrick had helped to weave a tangled web of Shakespearean dimensions 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 even saying them, something any normal person would have done if falsely reported, and the claims were attracting national 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 even over many years in the federal parliament, and many of which were undoubtedly true, there were problems concerning his previous work as Fitzpatrick's legal adviser. 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 of 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. After reading more about the Venona project I realised they probably were not exaggerated.

The jailing of Fitzpatrick in June 1955 must have surprised the 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, 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 there at stopping details coming out. Elsewhere, such as with matters involving Jack Magnusson, 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. Possibly Sheahan might even have left the room while federal government persons did the talking. Perhaps there were threats, attractive offers they couldn't 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.

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 13, the same age as Fitzpatrick, 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 Prime Minister and in 1992 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 third volume 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 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.

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 helped start ASIO, was working for the Russians. In early 1948 Hollis travelled to Australia with then MI5 head Sir Percy Sillitoe to convince still-doubting Prime Minister Chifley of the need for such an organisation. Later he returned with Courtenay Young, who became the resident MI5 agent, to help oversee its formation. The official history said Hollis and Young 'merely helped interview potential staff who had already been identified by Australians'.

Rumours about Hollis began after Philby, long under suspicion, disappeared in 1963 and later surfaced in Moscow. Hollis, on all the available administrative evidence, was thought to have had to be the person at the top who alerted Philby about imminent arrest. In 1984 British investigative journalist Chapman Pincher claimed in a book, Top Secret Too Long, that Hollis was recruited by Russian master spy Richard Sorge while working in Shanghai in the early 1930s.

That linked Hollis with the two most important spies during World War II and probably modern history. In late 1941, as German forces neared Moscow, Philby informed the Russians of British intelligence pointing to Japanese attacks on South-East Asia rather than Manchuria, where most of Russia's best troops were awaiting an expected Japanese invasion. Stalin didn't believe this.

Sorge, a hard-drinking and charming womaniser who helped inspire the fictional James Bond, had moved to Tokyo. There he had an agent close to a personal friend and adviser of the Japanese prime minister, a situation remarkably similar to that later in the war in Australia. When he sent messages similar to Philby's Stalin ignored them. But when Sorge sent a message that Japan was going to attack not only South-East Asia, but US forces in the Pacific, Stalin did believe that.

In long, packed trains, Stalin moved most of his best Siberian divisions towards Moscow. These were men trained and equipped to fight in the coldest conditions on Earth. German troops on the outskirts of Moscow, many freezing in summer clothes as winter set in, never knew what hit them when, on 5 December 1941, the Siberian divisions attacked, starting a slow retreat that ended in 1945 in the ruins of Berlin.

More writers than Pincher and Wright supported the allegations about Hollis. But other writers, and also MI5 on its website, denied them.

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.'

Possibly that, and many other matters stemming from the Cold War, will always remain mysteries.

One of the remaining mysteries 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? Were any in the second and final war expenditure committee report about matters involving Fitzpatrick, allegedly submitted to the war cabinet, which seems almost never to have been mentioned anywhere?

The mystery that had interested me since my last year at school – who caused the Torch building to disappear in flames? – had a solution to which most professional evidence pointed. 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.

Fitzpatrick 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 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.

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.

At the centre of that tangled 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 Taylor's family friend and 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.

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 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 the 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.

