What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy?: Personal Stories from a Troubled Time

Index

Introduction

Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi

Lives were broken, friendships torn, families divided, and sometimes unlikely alliances and friendships formed. The Cold War in Australia took politics into the most intimate of spaces – into relationships and domesticity – at a time when political commitments defined not only one’s politics, but also one’s identity, social circle and way of life. Feminists insist that the personal is political; in the Cold War era, in particular, the political was definitely personal.

This book is about the personal dimensions of politics during Australia’s Cold War. Our aim is to help readers understand what the Cold War felt like, whatever side of the political fence you lived on. We present here twelve personal accounts which singly and together help illuminate the emotional dimension of this especially turbulent period in Australian history.

The Cold War

The Cold War is generally said to have begun around 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and to have ended in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe around the same time. During these forty-five years or so, the Cold War dominated international relations and world politics. Our interest here is in how this worldwide conflict was experienced and felt by individuals living in Australia at the time.

From 1946, the USA and the USSR swiftly shifted from victorious allies to bitter ideological, military and economic enemies. Both nations became more powerful after the war than before it, despite extensive human losses from the wartime struggles against Germany, Italy and Japan. The US was now the wealthiest and most powerful economy in the post-war world, and sought to sustain a worldwide capitalist system, supporting, for example, financial agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the Soviet Union was seriously weakened, with the loss of over 20 million people, in the mid to late 1940s it extended its sphere of influence to include a number of countries in Eastern Europe; by 1955 this Soviet bloc was strengthened by the Warsaw Pact.

The stage was thus set for conflict between these two great powers with their supranational, competing economic and political systems. While the much-feared World War III did not eventuate, during the Cold War international relations were dominated by the high levels of political and military tension between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. This tension, impacting on nation states and felt by the ordinary people who lived in them, was greatly heightened by the development, first by the Americans and then the Soviets, of nuclear weapons. There were, however, many complexities, not only because some nations, such as India, remained unaligned, but also because the world was simultaneously undergoing another major revolution – the end of European colonial rule in large parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In Australia these global conflicts had several political consequences. One was continuing debate over relations with the USA, for reasons of defence and economic policy, with coalition governments from 1949 onwards standing strongly for the American alliance and the Labor Party in opposition internally divided. A second was widespread concern at the spread of communism in the region, notably in South-East Asia where communist parties had significant following in the post-war period, especially in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.¹ And a third, the one that concerns us most directly in this book, was a determination by the major parties and others to prevent the spread of communism at home.

One of the chief weapons against the Communist Party in Australia during the Cold War was to be the intelligence services, whose history is told in David McKnight’s book, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets. In the early Cold War years, the Chifley Labor government was pressed by Britain and the US to establish stronger intelligence bodies in order to prevent any recurrence of the leakage of sensitive information to the Soviet Union that had occurred through the Federal Department of External Affairs.² In response, the government established the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1949, a body which soon came to interpret its role as being not only to trace and prevent such security breaches in future but also more broadly to conduct surveillance on those demonstrating communist or other left-wing sympathies. This information could then be used to exclude communists from employment in politically or diplomatically sensitive areas and other public institutions.

Yet as ASIO’s ability to track such activity grew, the number of communists steadily declined. Despite strong international and especially Soviet connections, the Communist Party of Australia was falling on hard times. While the Party had flourished during the war-time alliance with the Soviet Union, reaching a peak of membership of 20 000 in 1943, it steadily lost members from then on, falling to around 5000 in the mid-1960s, and even fewer thereafter.³ Communist candidates were rarely able to get more than a minuscule vote in federal and state elections.

Nevertheless, the party was influential enough in the trade unions to be causing concern. Some of the most popular and influential leaders in certain major trade unions were communists, and this continued through the 1940s and 1950s. Through that period, there was a major struggle between the CPA and the Labor Party for control in key unions, a battle that was complicated by the creation in the late 1940s of Industrial Groups by the Movement, a secret Catholic political organisation founded in 1939.⁴ The groups sought to wrest control away not only from communists but also from those ALP unionists prepared to work with communists to advance union objectives. The struggles over communist influence in the unions have been described in some detail by historians such as Tom Sheridan and Douglas Jordan.⁵

The Cold War was probably at its height during the 1950s, and many of our contributors focus on these years. The decade opened with the failed attempt in 1950–51 by the Liberal and Country Party coalition government led by Robert Menzies to ban the Communist Party. Although Menzies was able to have legislation to this effect passed by both houses of parliament, a challenge to its constitutionality eventually succeeded in the High Court. When Menzies took the matter to a referendum, seeking to change the Australian Constitution to allow the banning to take place, he narrowly failed to gain the required majority. Lyndall Ryan explores her family’s dilemmas during this referendum. With the Communist Party continuing to exist as a legal entity, Menzies found a variety of other ways to weaken both its influence and the standing of his chief political opponents, the Labor Party. When Vladimir Petrov, third secretary in the Russian embassy in Canberra, defected in 1954, he brought with him documents which not only publicised the fact of Soviet espionage in Australia but also implied that Australian communists were working covertly with the USSR and against their own country. Menzies called a royal commission, which, though it led to no charges or arrests, heightened the sense of communist betrayal of Australian citizens.⁶ The conflicts within the ALP over the question of communism came to a head the following year, when the party split. In 1955, supporters of the Movement, many of them Catholic, left the party and formed a new one, the Democratic Labor Party.⁷ Mary Elizabeth Calwell’s essay in this collection focuses on these events, and suggests more broadly that without the activities of the Movement, the Cold War would have been insignificant in Australia.

The war of words against communism continued into the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, however, the structure of politics had shifted. On the one hand, the Communist Party was a declining force in the trade unions and in the society at large. On the other, there emerged a non-communist left, the New Left, which opposed both the Soviet Union (seen as a totalitarian and expansionist state) and the US (seen as the purveyor of ‘American imperialism’ – for example, in Vietnam), which challenged the old political dualities very significantly. Australian politics became less dominated than it had once been by the communist vs anti-communist conflict. Yet, for as long as the Soviet bloc remained a major power in world affairs, the question of communism would remain an important factor in Australian politics, especially affecting discussion of international and military alliances.

So, why this book? We already have some very good histories of Australia’s Cold War, some of them cited in our endnotes to this introduction. Many of these histories feature titanic personalities such as Prime Ministers Robert Gordon Menzies and Ben Chifley, and leaders of the ALP in opposition, Herbert Vere Evatt and Arthur Calwell.⁸ There is a good reason for this – politics was profoundly ideological and these figures embodied the politics of the era. And yet, do we really know what it was like to live through these events? What are the more intimate and personal dimensions of this story? These are the questions that prompt this book.

Cold War histories and memoirs so far

Whether you went to a political party branch meeting, attended your local church, joined a local club or society, went to the pictures (movies), listened to the wireless (radio) or watched that new form of mass media, television, your life was affected by the worldwide conflict between communism and anti-communism. Some people, of course, were affected more than others, according to the nature and depth of their political commitments. As the labour historian Peter Love eloquently and insightfully observes in Arguing the Cold War, an essay collection he edited with Paul Strangio, politics during this period involved not only loyalty and allegiance to a political system but also engaged your whole social existence. ‘The unforgiving political dynamics’ of the period, he reflects, ‘required a deep personal commitment to principles and values that went to the core of people’s individual and social identity’. The loyalty demanded of people ‘polarised relationships beyond the bounds of conventional political dissension’ so that the Cold War, ‘in its ferocity, degraded the common civic decencies and disfigured many lives’.⁹

Yet despite this intensely personal dimension of the Cold War, we have few books which explore how it felt to live through this era in Australia. Internationally, in contrast, especially in the US, there are increasing numbers of Cold War memoirs. These include memoirs by those whose parents were directly involved in political espionage, with titles such as My Father the Spy: An investigative memoir (John H Richardson, 2006): Born Under an Assumed Name: The memoir of a Cold War spy’s daughter (Sara Mansfield Taba, 2012), and The Wolf and the Watchman: A CIA childhood (Scott Johnson, 2012). On the other side of the political fence in the US, as Sheila Fitzpatrick describes in the concluding chapter to this collection, there is a growing number of Cold War memoirs written by children of the Old Left, many of them now distinguished historians.

There are, in fact, Australian Cold War memoirs by some of its leading figures, such as BA Santamaria, Eric Aarons, RG Menzies and Arthur Calwell, and there are further brief personal accounts in two edited collections published over a decade ago.¹⁰ There are, however, few memoirs from lesser known participants and fewer still from the children of Cold War political activists. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s own memoir, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian childhood, is one which explores the personal politics of the Cold War.¹¹

One particularly Australian dimension to this emerging memoir literature is the use of ASIO files, whose availability forms in itself an interesting aspect of recent Australian history. After a public inquiry in 1990 into the matter of public access to its files older than thirty years, ASIO has made access to these files relatively easy, though they are often heavily censored, in part to protect the names of informers and agents.¹²

As the vast number of files gathered by ASIO since the late 1940s have been partially opened and the extent of its operations made clear, historians, film makers, and individuals subject to ASIO surveillance have increasingly been using the files as historical sources to help us better understand the Cold War. The ASIO files themselves have also become the subject of memoirs, as Mark Aarons’s book, The Family File (2010), and Meredith Burgmann’s edited collection, Dirty Secrets (2014), illustrate, and there are surely more to come.

Choosing our contributors

The idea for this book came about gradually. In 2011, we jointly organised a conference at the University of Melbourne to mark the 60th anniversary of the referendum of 1951. Most of the papers were academic in nature, but one session was devoted to memoirs. The memoirists were also historians, using a combination of memory and historical research to evoke the emotional dimension of the Cold War – one might call their texts ‘memoir histories’, perhaps. We included a memoir session because as historians we believe that history and memoir can work together to help later generations understand historic events and experience. While history provides the results of detailed research, using archived documents, oral histories and cultural items like novels, photographs, songs and film, memoir adds to these histories an individual and sometimes highly emotional rendering of personal experience. As a form of life-writing, memoir brings history close, makes it immediate, connecting us in the present to those who preceded us in a particularly interesting way. While the two forms – history and memoir – are distinct, they interact and illuminate each other.

After the success and interest of the memoir session, a high point of the conference, we decided to edit a book of memoir histories, and seek further contributions.¹³ Given that the height of the Cold War, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, occurred over fifty years ago, it was clear to us from the outset that many of our contributors would be people with memories of experiences they had as children, teenagers and young adults. They would have memories of the political beliefs and actions of their parents and their circle and in most cases also of their own political formation. We wanted essays drawing on childhood, teenage, and young adult experience of the era from as many angles as possible – communist, anti-communist, and everything in between. We also wanted them to vary in terms of the contributors’ social, religious, national and ethnic background, as a way of exploring the changes happening in Australian society itself, leading to the multi-ethnic society we live in today.

Most of those we invited responded positively and enthusiastically. There were two exceptions, the first being people from Liberal Party backgrounds. When our scheduled contributor had to withdraw owing to other commitments, we could not find a replacement. We tried one person after another, but each time we received extremely polite but firm refusals, many on the grounds that they had not a lot to say. After the sixth or seventh rejection we abandoned the search. While we could interpret these refusals in various ways, for example, that we were not sufficiently (or sometimes at all) known to those we approached, or that we were interpreted as coming from too different a political perspective from theirs, one conclusion we might draw is that the conflicts of the Cold War did not affect Liberals as viscerally as it did those in other parts of the political spectrum. They were, after all, the victors, at least in the sense of maintaining and extending political power through the Cold War period, though perhaps many did not see it that way at the time. In any case, it is a source of regret that we were unable to have the Liberal Party experience substantially represented in the collection.

Another elusive group proved to be the children of Cold War intelligence agents; again, our approaches to likely contributors were unsuccessful. We could not find authors equivalent to those Americans who wrote books like My Father the Spy. There are interesting stories, still to be told, from this perspective in Australia. In a letter to the Melbourne Age in 2013, Robin Bowles provided a brief glimpse of her life growing up as the daughter of an intelligence agent. She wrote:

My father spied for England and Australia throughout his career. Although ‘officially’ an Army officer, in the 1940s he was attached as an ‘observer’ to the 6th US Army with MacArthur in the Solomons, keeping an eye on our allies’ movements. We were sent to London in the 1950s to spy for M16 on post-war activities in Europe.

Travel was a key part of his activities and he roamed the world, taking his family with him:

In the 1960s we went to Singapore, where my father was ‘seconded’ to the British Army for three years to supervise ‘jungle warfare training in south-east Asia’. This gave him many opportunities to visit Vietnam, well before Australia became involved … attend SEATO conferences and live in the thick of the ‘konfrontasi’ of Malaysia by Indonesia.

Yet if you had seen her father, Bowles observes, none of his spying activity would have been apparent. ‘If you had met my father during his career as a spy, he was the quintessential army officer, charming, urbane, good-looking, mild-mannered and decorated. Lovely family. The perfect cover’.¹⁴

Despite these absences, we are delighted with the twelve contributors who accepted our invitation and then delivered their essays. They do indeed come from a wide variety of backgrounds, in terms of parents’ origin, religion, political belief and political party membership. Five grew up in communist families – Mark Aarons, Patrick Brislan, Valerie Cooms, John Docker, and George Zangalis, and two in Labor Party families – Mary Calwell and Lyndall Ryan. Martin Krygier came from a strongly anti-communist family, and Sheila Fitzpatrick’s parents were non-communist Left. Of the others, Peter Manning’s father voted Liberal, Ron Witton’s parents voted Labor, while Rodney Cavalier’s father voted Liberal and his mother Labor. Our contributors were born between 1931 and 1956, with most being born during the 1940s. In terms of ancestry and national background, we have represented here people of Australian Indigenous (Nunukal), English, Polish, Greek, German, Italian, Scottish and Irish backgrounds. Readers will find more biographical detail about each contributor at the beginning of each essay.

In most of these essays, we see the experiences of a generation, those in full adulthood in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, through the eyes of their children. While our authors vary markedly in the degree to which they share or reject their parents’ political views, they all write about their parents with respect. They follow in the tradition of that model and much-loved inter-generational memoir, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A study of two temperaments, which explored Gosse’s attempt to explain and understand the views of his Ply-mouth Brethren father, views which he came himself to reject. It begins wonderfully:

This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption … There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence.¹⁵

Many of our contributors (though not all – George Zangalis, our oldest contributor, writes mainly of his own experiences arriving in Australia at the age of nineteen in 1950 from war-torn Greece) write about their fathers’ politics and personalities, and how these affected their childhood and family life. Sometimes mothers appear too, as in Ron Witton’s essay, or in Lyndall Ryan’s, which identifies the role of her mother, Edna, as a key and leading political figure, as indeed she was. The emphasis on fathers, though, led us to our title, What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy?. The question ‘What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?’ has a long history and diverse meanings. It seems to have started life in 1915 on a British recruitment poster in the First World War, in which a young girl asks her father ‘What did YOU do in the Great War, Daddy?’, the point being that young men must not shirk recruitment, and must be able to answer their future children’s question proudly. Since then it has acquired some quite different meanings, especially with the popular Hollywood film of 1966, What did you do in the War, Daddy?. A comedy depicting the antics of a fictional American platoon capturing an Italian village during World War II, it suggested that answers to the title question can sometimes be surprising, that there might be unknown and secret (and sometimes hilarious) histories running counter to conventional war narratives. Even the variation we use here, ‘What did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?’, is not new, as we found to our surprise when checking the internet – it has been deployed in different contexts and with a variety of political purposes. Most often, though, it is used now in the way we intend here, to suggest a Cold War memoir, a dialogue between generations that yields details about hitherto little known or understood information and experience.

Personal territory

While our interest in the Cold War and the possible contributions memoir can make to our understanding of the period’s more intimate dimensions comes from our concerns as academic historians, we have our own personal connections to this material as well.

Ann Curthoys

I grew up in a communist family in Newcastle, my father an academic scientist and my mother an active campaigner for women’s and Aboriginal rights. Unlike many communists, my parents were always open about their political beliefs, and as a child I was well aware that they belonged to an unpopular political party. I remember being told by my mother that if I were ever asked in the street if my parents were in the Communist Party, I was to say I didn’t know. I remember being told that their phone was probably being tapped by ‘security’, and always to be careful what you said on the phone. At primary school, I deeply feared ostracism, but only ever encountered it in severe form once, from my fifth-grade teacher, who criticised me constantly and made attendance at school each day something requiring new levels of courage and fortitude. Thankfully, halfway through that year, the teacher left the school and her replacement, Mrs Collins, was the friendly professional person my other teachers had always been and would subsequently prove to be. I am forever grateful to Mrs Collins for restoring my love of school and learning.

Later, in high school, I remember there appeared outside the school one day, on a telegraph pole, posters advertising the Communist Party candidate for parliament; the candidate was one of my parents (I’m not sure now which one, as they both stood, at different times). I hoped against forlorn hope that no one would notice, but in fact posters urging people to VOTE CURTHOYS FOR COMMUNIST were on telegraph poles all over Newcastle. Overall, though, the fear of ostracism was far greater than the reality, and I arrived at the University of Sydney in 1963 relatively unscathed. There, I became involved in communist youth activities, but over time I was profoundly influenced by the rise of the New Left, with its trenchant critique of the Soviet Union and its anarchistic opposition to the kind of hierarchical organisation that historically defined communist parties everywhere. I was involved in the Freedom Ride of February 1965, the movement opposing Australian involvement in the American war in Vietnam (becoming the first woman in April 1965 to be arrested in an anti-war demonstration), and from 1970 the women’s movement.

Over the years, I became interested in many kinds of history (narrative, political, cultural and transnational), in many different topics (race and colonialism, Aboriginal protest, women’s work, the introduction of television), and in the theory and method of historical writing itself. In the 1980s, my scholarly interests turned to the Cold War period, and I co-edited with John Merritt, then editor of Labour History, two volumes of essays on the subject – Australia’s First Cold War (1985), and Better Dead than Red (1986). After researching and publishing essays and books on many other topics in Australian history, I have in recent years returned to the Cold War period as a subject for study.

Joy Damousi

My path to this period of history differs from Ann’s as I am the child of post-war migrants from Florina, in northern Greece. I grew up listening to stories about the politics and devastation of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. The Greek Civil War took place between 1946 and 1949 and some scholars have argued that for Greeks it was in many respects more bloody, devastating and enduring than the Second World War. It brutally divided families and created such a schism in the country that it took several decades to recover from it. Like most Greeks who migrated after the post-war period, my parents endured its violence directly. Their decision to migrate was made on the basis of the need to escape from over a decade of war and its trauma, deprivation and destruction.

Growing up with these stories about such experiences and the politics that created them shaped my enduring interest in the history and politics of the post-war period and the aftermath of war that shaped much of Cold War politics. Political discussion was a central part of my own evolving Greek-Australian identity that was emerging through this awareness of past legacies. This interest very rapidly translated into an engagement with politics and a great passion for history from a young age. Memories and knowledge of the history of Greece are all my parents brought from their birthplace, and they were very keen to impart these to me and to my two sisters.

Over time, this early interest developed into what became a long-standing engagement with Australian political history, which continued through my years as an undergraduate and postgraduate student through the 1980s. As an academic it found expression through my first book published twenty years ago in 1994 on women in left-wing movements, Women Come Rally: Socialism, communism and gender in Australia 1890–1955. This political interest has informed many aspects of my work in the field of social and cultural history such as women’s history, history of sexuality, cultural responses to the two world wars, and the history of language, class and identity. More recently, I have published on various aspects of the politics and impact of war, migration and internationalism throughout the Cold War period. My most recent research has been centred on the enduring impact of Cold War politics on child refugees and their families who migrated to Australia as a result of the Greek Civil War. Australia was the first country to successfully reunite Greek children with their parents after they had entered into Eastern bloc countries; those responsible succeeded in transcending Cold War politics at the height of tensions between communist and anti-communist nations. The specific nature of Australian internationalism during the 1950s provides a complex backdrop for this study. This research has led me to consider the impact of the Cold War on families and relationships more broadly.

The essays

While as a reader you will draw your own conclusions from these essays, as editors we do see several themes emerging. It is clear that people on both sides lived with a sense of being outsiders. Richard Krygier, writes his son Martin, certainly felt an outsider, with a strong sense that Australians were insufficiently aware of or worried by the effects of communist successes internationally. Other contributors with immigrant backgrounds, such as Ron Witton and George Zangalis, also articulate a sense of exclusion, of being different. Yet those with Australian backgrounds could be outsiders too – Valerie Cooms tells of her own sense of exclusion, derived in different ways from her Aboriginal mother and white father. Other children of communists could feel excluded too, as Patrick Brislan reminds us.

From these essays we catch glimpses of how much Cold War politics could divide families. Patrick Brislan, whose father was a member of the Communist Party, recalls how his uncle, Roy, was on the opposite side of politics with resulting family tensions; on the other hand, Peter Manning recalls that disagreements between himself and his cousin’s fiancé over Australia’s role in Vietnam did not lead to the expected unpleasantness at a family occasion. John Docker tells of how his father, Ted Docker, was so enraged on political grounds by his nephew’s choice of orator at his (Ted’s) favourite brother’s funeral that he refused to attend. Friendships often arose from shared political experiences and ideological agreement. Martin Krygier recalls growing up in a household when the political and the social came together; the journal Quadrant, which his father founded, was part of his family’s life for over forty years. When Lyndall Ryan’s parents