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.