The following book review was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of
the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, July 16th, 2003.
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NEST OF TRAITORS
The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal
Book Review by Rowan Cahill
Late in December 1945 in Osaka, Melbourne Herald journalist Denis Warner
interviewed Japanese journalist Kennosuke (Ken) Sato. Warner believed he
was interviewing a soon to be apprehended war criminal.
by Rowan Cahill
Sato was more than a wordsmith. During recent hostilities he had been
seconded by both the Japanese army and navy for special duties,
including the interrogation of Australian POWs, and arranging for a
willing few to engage in pro-Japanese radio propaganda broadcasts.
Prior to World War II Sato had toured Australia as part of a high level
Japanese goodwill mission. During an eight-month stay the charming,
English speaking, American trained journalist reconnoitered Australian
commercial life and established contacts and friendships amongst
politicians and business figures interested in establishing and
extending trade links with Japan.
Sato told Warner that when Japan conquered Australia, he would have been
Chief Civil Administrator, heading up a specially groomed team recruited
from Japanese business personnel well known in pre-war Australia,
supported by a good many highly placed, willing, Australian collaborators.
Unbeknown to either Warner or his employer, a large cache of documents
in Australia suggested that Sato was not spinning a yarn. These
documents were in the care of the Attorney General and Minister for
External Affairs Dr H V Evatt; they had been seized by Australian
authorities from the Japanese consulate in Sydney on the eve of war with
Japan.
Japanese officials had tried to destroy the consular documents, but
enough material remained to show the way Japan cultivated pro-Japanese
sympathies in Australia prior to 1941, variously courting opinion and
policy makers, disseminating propaganda, gathering intelligence: bulk
loads of propaganda material were distributed through pro-Japanese
cultural and business organisations; there were gifts to politicians,
generous entertainment accorded to diplomats, politicians, business and
media heavyweights, and cash payments to some journalists.
In 1946, anti-fascist Commonwealth Security Service operative Major R F
B Wake (later, and briefly, deputy to the first Director General of
ASIO, Mr. Justice Reed) examined the documents. In a preliminary report
to Dr Evatt he hinted there maybe was substance to Sato's claims, and
strongly urged a long-term rigorous analysis of the material in
conjunction with representatives from the Departments of External
Affairs, Commerce, Trade and Customs; he wanted the decoding of coded
material, and access to material ferreted out of Tokyo Archives by US
Counter Intelligence.
The Melbourne Herald gave Warner's story prominence, but the notion of
wartime collaborators slipped under the carpet of post-war Australia.
Sato never faced war crime charges for what had been brutal
interrogations of Australian POWs. And Cold War politics took care of
the rest. The ALP was increasingly alarmed by the power of militant
trade unions, and battled against itself.
The Country Party and the emerging new force of the Liberal Party
successfully focused the nation on anti-communism, and in government
placed Australia on a national security footing with scare mongering
about the imminence of World War III. Ferreting out potential wartime
quislings amongst Australia's conservative and business elites never had
a snowball's chance in hell.
Until now. Historian Dr Drew Cottle (University of Western Sydney)
examines Sato's collaboration claim in his recent book THE BRISBANE
LINE: A REAPPRAISAL (Upfront Publishing, Leicestershire). He begins by
revisiting the Brisbane Line controversy; were there plans during the
early war years under the Governments of Menzies and Fadden to respond
to a Japanese invasion of Australia by abandoning the area North of
Brisbane, and then defending the rest, or, as some believed, coming to
an administrative arrangement with Japan?
Conservative historians and politicians have tried to bury the
controversy ever since its cover was blown in 1942 by Labor MHR Eddie
Ward. Official documentary evidence for the strategic plan does not seem
to exist, although Ward was adamant it once did. Nonetheless a rich
diversity of non-official sources, memoirs, letters, private papers,
physical evidence, military and civilian strategies, attest to the
existence of the Brisbane Line, as a military, if not collaborationist,
strategy.
So far as Cottle is concerned, the collaboration notion has legs. Logic
suggests that if collaborators did exist, then they would have been
amongst Japan's pre-war Australian friends. According to his research
many Australians, the majority of them rich, powerful, and influential,
developed deep relationships with Japan between the wars, steadfastly so
at least until bombs rained down on Pearl Harbour.
Cottle trots out a who's who of people in business and industry,
pastoral industries, politics, and opinion formation. Some were awed by
the military power of Japan, hence the need to snuggle up close; others
saw Japan as a civilising source of 'law and order' in an otherwise
chaotic, turbulent Asia; others saw Japan as an economic opportunity and
trade partner, Japanese imperialism suiting their class interests; for
some it was all of these.
Whatever; Japan had to be accomodated, appeased, helped, joined,
supported, even through its worst atrocities in China during the 1930s.
And if the Australian Left or the Port Kembla wharfies got in the way of
the relationship, then they had to be dealt with; Japanese money
bankrolled some spoiling operations against the Australian Left. Overall
it was a relationship akin to that John Howard and his mates have
developed with the US.
An extensive Japanese intelligence network in Australia saw to it that
pro-Japanese sentiment was cultivated and groomed; this provided
opportunities for collecting data, particularly economic intelligence,
influencing public opinion, and who knows what else; in 1939 the office
bearers of the Japan-Australia Society included five members of Japanese
military and naval intelligence rubbing shoulders with leaders of
Sydney's legal and business worlds.
A leading pro-Japanese politician was Percival Spender (later Knighted
for his services to the Australian nation), Minister for the Army in the
Menzies Government; typical of his closeness to Japan is the two months
of unrestricted access he gave Major Sie Hashida, a senior Japanese
intelligence officer, to Australian strategic installations in early
1941, including east coast military installations, the Lithgow armaments
factory, and the Newcastle BHP steelworks.
A couple of months later Spender broadcast from Singapore, assuring
listeners that Australia had no "quarrel with Japan" and that "Australia
and Singapore are far removed from the theatre of war". Japan's plans
for the conquest of South East Asia and Australia were well in hand.
Japan's activities in pre-war Australia did not escape the attention of
Australian security services; nor did the activities of the pro-Japanese
sympathisers. Naval intelligence in particular was increasingly
concerned, and may have had a role in engineering the collapse of the
Fadden Coalition Government in October 1941.
In the end, however, Cottle cannot prove that Sato's Australian
collaborators existed. Japan did not invade Australia, and Japan's
friends never had to decide where they stood once it came to the crunch.
Nor do potential traitors tend to leave paper trails indicting
themselves, and during his research Cottle turned up tantalisingly
empty, and missing, files, as did Major Wake in 1946.
In the end we will probably never know whether or not Percy Spender was
earmarked for a major role in a Vichy type Australia, as some believed;
nor the truth about Japanese funds finding their way into the coffers of
the United Australia Party, the forerunner of the Liberal Party, on the
eve of war with Japan. These and other questions are canvassed by
Cottle, and he is to be congratulated for bringing them out of the
shadows of history and into the light of day.
Cottle's book is the result of patient historical detective work. Apart
from drawing on a huge body of secondary material, he has deeply
immersed himself in the murky world of Australian security and
intelligence records, interviewed key players, trawled private papers
where available, along with the records of business and private
organisations; the documentation is detailed.
The political and economic tour of pre-World War II Australia that
Cottle takes the reader on, casts light on some dark places in the
national soul, and rattles skeletons in the closet of the ruling class;
it is almost like taking a trip through a parallel universe.
Australian political and business heavyweights who were lauded and
honoured as fine, upstanding citizens during the 1950s and 1960s, are
revealed as players in a pre-war shadow world of economic imperatives,
shifting allegiances, and possibly headed for collaboration and
betrayal. Some of the leading pro-Japanese shifted their allegiance
post-war to the US, and got in on the ground floor in that department.
THE BRISBANE LINE: A REAPPRAISAL is only available through www.amazon.co.uk
, at ?9.99 per copy. But it is well worth the effort in tracking down.
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