Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals 1920-1960
By Fiona Capp
McPhee Gribble, 1993. 239 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/5118
Intelligence organisations are in the business of "security", which, as Noam Chomsky has observed, is really about the security of business — the pursuit of profits unhampered by any questioning of the commercial and political values which prop up the status quo.
Since their creation, ASIO and the other "security" outfits in Australia have made writers and intellectuals an important focus of their efforts to "control dissident thought", as Fiona Capp observes in Writers Defiled.
"Security", as she collectively names the spy outfits, has been particularly alarmed by left-wing writers because they have "wide public respect as writers while being politically radical". The "literary witch-hunt" has seen writers' and academics' "freedom to travel affected, career advancement stymied, funding terminated, literature confiscated, or privacy invaded".
Russel Ward, Manning Clark and Stephen Murray-Smith have all felt the impact of the security file on their academic career. Menzies' order in 1952 that all Commonwealth Literary Fund applicants be vetted for political conformity gave ASIO "a real power to penalise left wing writers".
Labelling any progressive or radical nationalist as Communist enabled Security to monitor all who engaged in "free thought and intellectual dissent" which Security regarded as "the thin edge of the Communist wedge".
Whether Communist or liberal, all the talented and politically radical women novelists of the '30s, '40s and '50s — Katherine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and others — were spied on.
The "elastic, sweeping classification of Communist", however, could result in some strange catches from the intellectual sea. Professor of law (and later governor-general) Zelman Cowen briefly earned a dossier but was later thrown back as an undersized radical and thinker.
Nevertheless, the haul was sizeable. As well as any writer with an ounce of social compassion, academics were targeted. In the late '40s and early '50s, Sydney Uni had 17 academics on file, the ANU 16 and Melbourne Uni 63. By the time of ASIO's creation in 1949 there were on file some 200,000 individuals of all occupations or none.
There were, however, limits to Security's power — its "actual influence failed to match its ambitions". The number of dossiers gave "an indication of what Security might have done had it had the chance", as during the banning of the CPA in 1940-1942 and 1951, and during the 1954-55 Royal Commission on Espionage (Australia's McCarthy trials), when to appear was to be guilty in a Cold War "climate of fear and suspicion".
But in "normal" times, Security was, says Capp, something of a paradox — "both influential and impotent, awesome and ludicrous". It could intimidate (shining car headlights into Dorothy Hewett's house at night) or perform low farce (the fixation on the historian and "freelance subversive" Brian Fiztpatrick's mysteriously disappearing brown zipper case).
Capp wisely chooses neither "to minimalise nor to exaggerate" the influence of Security. We can laugh with her at "file envy" — the depression of activists at not having a file. We can also avoid what might be termed file fetishism — looking in the wrong place for the major mechanisms of social control and repression. But she doesn't downplay the "real and disturbing effects" the Security file did have on many individuals' lives.
Capp's approach is somewhat oblique, treating surveillance as a "literary genre" and bureaucratic dossiers as "a form of biography", analysing the "short-story form of the Memorandum". This may not be the most relevant way of understanding the political police, but it does confirm their mentality. They suffer from a total inability to understand the material roots of radical protest, looking for a conspiratorial mastermind. They assume that broad coalitions are merely "a cynical and deceptive recruitment exercise". Their snooping subverts the democracy they claim to be defending.
Pitt-Rivers, one of Australia's earliest spies, regarded radicals as "lunatics", since only lunatics would want to "challenge the class structure". Watch out ASIO, because, Mama, we're all crazy now.