Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO files - Softcover

Burgmann, Meredith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742231403 ISBN 13: 9781742231402

Verlag: UNSW Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In this moving, funny and sometimes chilling book, leading Australians open their ASIO files and read what the state's security apparatus said about them. Writers from across the political spectrum including Mark Aarons, Phillip Adams, Nadia Wheatley, Michael Kirby and Anne Summers confront - and in some cases reclaim - their pasts.

Reflecting on the interpretations, observations and proclamations that anonymous officials make about your personal life is not easy - at least for some. Yet we see outrage mixed with humour and writers reflect on the way their political views have - or haven’t - changed.

Surrounded by influential Australians and piles of paper from our recent past, activist, politician and writer Meredith Burgmann has produced a book where those being watched look right back.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Meredith Burgmann was radicalised at Sydney University by the Vietnam War and was one of the leaders of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, infamously receiving a two month gaol sentence fro disrupting a Springbok match in 1971. She taught industrial relations at Macquarie University for twenty years and was later a Labor Member and President of the Legislative Council of NSW, retiring in 2007. She is currently President of the Australian Council for International Development - the peak body for Australia's NGO aid agencies.

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Dirty Secrets

Our Asio Files

By Meredith Burgmann

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Meredith Burgmann
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-140-2

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Meredith Burgmann, 
HOW TO READ YOUR ASIO FILE by David McKnight, 
THE FILES, 
Michael Kirby THE COMMOS AND ME, 
Anne Summers NUMBER C/57/61: WHAT ASIO KNEW, 
Gary Foley ASIO, THE ABORIGINAL MOVEMENT AND ME, 
David Stratton THE MAN IN THE RED TIE (IN CONVERSATION WITH MEREDITH BURGMANN), 
Joan Bielski FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE FIFTIES, 
Dennis Altman WHY ME?, 
Rowan Cahill JOINING THE DOTS: C/58/63, 
Phillip Adams I WAS A TEENAGE BOLSHEVIK, 
Jean McLean MY LIFE IN A DISTORTING MIRROR, 
Jack Waterford SMASHING THE STATE, 
Frank Hardy THE HARDY WAY (BY ALAN HARDY), 
Alan Hardy VERY INTERESTED IN THEATRICS, 
Lex Watson MY OWN 'PINK FILE', 
Wendy and Jim Bacon A BACON FAMILY AFFAIR (BY WENDY BACON), 
Mark Aarons STATE AFFAIRS AND LOVE AFFAIRS, 
Kevin Cook THEY JUST DIDN'T CARE (WITH HEATHER GOODALL), 
Colin Cooper ASIO AND THE POSTMASTER-GENERAL, 
Clive Evatt CLIVE RALEIGH EVATT AND ASIO (BY ELIZABETH EVATT), 
Frances Letters TWO CHEERS FOR ASIO!, 
Verity Burgmann I WAS A TEENAGE TROTSKYIST (IN CONVERSATION WITH MEREDITH BURGMANN), 
Peter Murphy THE NOT-SO-SECRET LIVES OF OTHERS, 
Tony Reeves MY LACKLUSTRE LIFE ACCORDING TO ASIO, 
Tim Anderson POSTCARDS FROM THE SECRET POLICE, 
Penny Lockwood LACK OF EVIDENCE PROVES NOTHING, 
Peter Cundall THE RED WITH THE GREEN THUMB (BY HELEN RANDERSON), 
Meredith Burgmann THE SECRET LIFE OF B/77/26 (AND FRIENDS), 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO READ YOUR ASIO FILE

David McKnight

For more than twenty years the files of Australia's internal security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), have slowly been coming to light. Individuals who have been under ASIO surveillance have been able to read what was said about them and historians have been able to piece together ASIO's secret operations during the Cold War. Nearly 10 000 ASIO files are now publicly available at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) in Canberra.

Reading an ASIO file is an unusual experience, as I can personally affirm. The file can evoke anger or amusement. A personal file can reawaken old memories, long forgotten. Most people who were the subject of ASIO's attentions are bemused by the extraordinary effort and expense that led to tiny details being recorded and now revealed in the files. They are often shocked by the intrusiveness of the surveillance, which included placing informers within political groups or the use of telephone taps, as well as more prosaic methods such as copying birth certificates, immigration files or newspaper clippings.

An ASIO file is a window into a previous era, into the passions and prejudices of the Cold War. But the window is invariably narrow, offering a distorted glimpse and depicting twisted images. In this chapter I want to put some of the contributions to this book into context by talking about the nature of ASIO's files, its information gathering methods, structure and ethos.

When it was founded in 1949, ASIO took possession of the files of several older organisations that had conducted political surveillance up to that point. The most significant of these wasthe Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS), formed in 1946 and the forerunner of the Commonwealth Police (now known as the Australian Federal Police). The CIS had, in turn, inherited records from the wartime Security Service, which collected information on threats from pro-Japanese and pro-German groups. Another set of files handed over to ASIO in 1949 was from the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which unofficially collected information on a very wide circle of people deemed to be sympathetic to socialism and communism.

So some ASIO files pre-date the organisation's formation in 1949 and are a treasure trove for historians of the twentieth century. The early files of novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, a well-known radical and feminist who joined the Communist Party in 1920, derive from early police 'special branches' and military intelligence. They contain, for example, a 1912 report kept by the WA Police Special Branch detailing how, in London, 'she busied herself with various reform movements such as Communal Kitchens and Co-operative Housekeeping'. The consequence of these radical activities was that 'she has become notorious for her extreme, almost revolutionary, socialism and communism'.

The files also cover the other end of the twentieth century, notably the rise of the student movement and the New Left in the 1960s and the beginnings of feminist and anti-racist movements and social movements for cultural and political change. These movements posed a problem for ASIO. Its central target was communism and the Communist Party of Australia. This increased scope did not prevent ASIO from spying on a variety of non-party organisations and individuals, but the justification for this was always that these people and groups were 'front organisations' of the CPA, or in some way under the CPA's influence. The movement against the use of the atom bomb in the 1950s and 1960s, even though led by religious figures, was a case in point. Other supposed 'fronts' were the earliest groups fighting for justice for Indigenous Australians. Such movements, in which many CPA members played an active part, were deemed legitimate targets under the ASIO doctrine, which regarded anyone who co-operated with communists as a 'dupe' or worse, a fellow traveller.

Seeing the hand of the CPA in many places was not entirely a misperception. The CPA dominated the organised left in Australia from the 1930s until the late 1960s at least. For a considerable period it was difficult to be active in the Australian left and not have some connection with the CPA. The influence of Marxist ideas went well beyond the organisational boundaries of the CPA and the party had a strategy of working broadly with all kinds of people around short-term goals. But the new movements for social change were clearly not front organisations and this posed something of a dilemma for ASIO. It resolved the problem by stretching the definition of subversion (which it was legally tasked to oppose) to include movements such as the Vietnam moratoriums, which were largely against the longstanding Liberal–Country Party government, rather than having any revolutionary potential.

In spite of the CPA's genuine influence in some areas, a study of ASIO's files reveals that it had an exaggerated idea of the political influence the CPA had on people and events. ASIO assumed radical ideas were a contagion that infected anyone who worked with communists. Some historians speak of the 'disease model' used by internal security agencies like ASIO. Other assumptions smacked of the doctrine of Original Sin. Once tainted by contact with the CPA, an otherwise independent individual was considered to have 'fallen', and became a legitimate target worthy of a file and of ongoing attention. Even the most sensible reforms, such as a global ban on nuclear bomb testing, became suspect if the CPA supported them. Most non-communists who co-operated with the CPA did so with their eyes open, even if ASIO tended to assume that non-communists had no minds of their own and were mere putty in the hands of the party.

ASIO files are also windows into the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNSW Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1742231403
• ISBN 13: 9781742231402
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 466
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande