It
was Humphrey who opened the lid for me into the seething
underworld of Australia's far-right.
I keep a diary of my research, and so, to give a flavour
of that "seething underworld", I will quote
the entry recording my first meeting with Humphrey:
21/8/76
Victoria Street: Humphrey McQueen [lefty historian]
to lunch. Fascinating. Told him all. His info: secret
armies from 1917 onwards. Much secret army activity
in Brisbane (in 1919?). Red Flag riots. Trevor Botham
thesis on this. And in Perth too. Suggested DHL could
have learned about Digger clashes there. Said a WA
general organising a secret army post-1919. Told me
about Bill Richards "the Mad Psychiatrist".
Brisbane Line [a WW2 "defensive" line across
Australia] a Vichy line, according to Richards. 1939
split in the army. Alf Conlon and The Directorate.
McCauley, Kerr, Pansy Wright. Fairbairn air crash,
secret army heads wiped out (Brudenell White, Fairbairn,
Gullett). Maybe secret armies into the 1970s. The
"Guardians". Brisbane 1921 riots organised
by Herbert Brookes. Heavy, heavy conspiracy stuff. |
According
to Humphrey, Herbert Brookes was the key figure in all
this. A Melbourne-based businessman, who had been personal
secretary to Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (and had married
his daughter), Brookes became obsessed with what he saw
as the growing threat to Australia from militant socialism
and Irish-Catholic "disloyalty".
He was especially incensed by the wartime activities of
anti-conscription elements led by the Catholic Archbishop
of Melbourne, Dr Daniel Mannix, and supported by the rump
of the then-radical Labor Party, which had split over
the conscription issue, and shifted to the left.
After
witnessing a St Patrick's Day march through Melbourne
in 1917 - at which Mannix doffed his biretta to a banner
hailing "the martyrs" of the 1916 Easter uprising
in Dublin, but kept it on as the Union Jack passed - Brookes
recorded in his diary that he would devote what remained
of his life to combating "the disloyalty in our midst".
His papers in the National Library in Canberra reveal
that his was the organising mind behind what became an
Australia-wide anti-Irish, anti-socialist organisation
called the Australian Protective League, formed initially
under the aegis of the then-conservative federal Nationalist
Government (see letter to Brookes above and his diary-note
below).
The purpose of the APL, Brookes recorded in his diary,
would be to, "when necessary", generate State-based
public "loyalty" organisations, behind whose
patriotic façade local para-military forces would
be secretly marshalled, ostensibly to "protect essential
services" if civil disturbance were to break out.
