Phillip Deery

One of the great merits of Phillip Deery’s presentation is the way in which he shows the immediacy of the coal strike: its great significance in changing the lives of the miners and in transforming the political situation in New South Wales. It was a time of great bitterness, in which those who expected the interests of the Labor movement and the Labor Party to converge, considered themselves betrayed. Nor did the swiftness of the Chifley government in moving to crush the miners’ strike garner them any favour in the public’s eyes. The public considered the hardships brought about by the coal strike to be merely the latest in a series of events that seem destined to threaten their comfort and standard of living. The communists were blamed for the strike, probably unjustly, for although there were communists among the miners, the vast majority were non-communists with legitimate grievances against the mining companies.

In the interests of national security, my luggage was recently searched at Los Angeles airport. The culprit: Spy Catchers. The uncorrected proof copy was so bulky that it triggered an alert. I declined to tell the Customs and Border Protection officer (in no mood for irony) that one chapter in the offending item was entitled ‘Keeping out Undesirables’. David Horner’s first volume in the history of ASIO is a big book – big on detail, broad in scope, and, overall, impressive in achievement.

This book is about a moral panic resulting in the deployment of huge police and bureaucratic resources to ruin the lives of some unlucky individuals who were, or seemed to be, Communist Party members or sympathisers. None of Deery’s cases seems to have been doing anything that posed an actual threat to the US government or population; that, at least, is how it looks in retrospect. But at the time the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI judged otherwise and saw them as dangerous anti-democratic conspirators pledged to undermine, if not overthrow, the state. (Does any of this sound familiar?)