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(d) The Scullin Government and Military Intelligence
The final group of public servants who shielded the White Army from the ALP were senior officers of the Australian Army. In March 1931, the Military Board noted that it had known about the White Army ’for some considerable time’. However, it had become concerned that CMF and Army facilities were being used to equip the organisation, and that regular soldiers had joined its ranks.
The Board issued a high level memorandum on 4 March instructing all unit commanders to term inate the unofficial use of drill halls and equipment. Officers were told that they were to cease lending any kind of assistance to the White Army, and any regular soldier who had 'inadvertently' joined was ordered to rescind his membership."^
But these instructions were not successfully enforced. On 31 July, Browne reported that he had 'conclusive' proof th at many AMF officers were still 'actively
associated with the L.N.S.'. Nevertheless, whatever its reasons, the Military
Board did recognise that the LNS was not completely legitimate - and yet it did nothing to inform the Commonwealth government.
Meanwhile, Military Intelligence was engaged in the surveillance of Australian citizens - just why, is not altogether clear. Most of its reports dealt with left-wing groups, but it also kept tabs on the White Army. Unfortunately, all of this material has been purged from the Military Intelligence holdings in the
1. "Confidential circular memorandum to Members of the Staff Corps and
Australian Instructional Corps", Military Board, Melbourne, 4 March 1931, AA (Melb.), CRS A369, D383.
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Australian Archives. (Mis Victorian monthly intelligence summaries for this period have been reduced to a kind of practical joke. Manilla folders have been provided, seriously indexed, labelled and boxed. But most of the folders contain nothing more than a brief memo of the form: Dear X, please find attached the monthly intelligence summary for the month Y. A pin hole is all that remains.)^ However, one summary did survive elsewhere. After the fall of the Scullin government, Military Intelligence provided the new attorney general, John Latham, with the information it had withheld from Brennan: it sent him the monthly intelligence summary for June 1932. The relevant section is headed ’Summary No. 3 Information of Various Secret and Other Organisations'.^ It contains 150 words describing the decline of the League following the defeat of the Lang and Hogan governments. The summary was accompanied by a note telling Latham that this kind of material was regularly produced by Military Intelligence, and that if he was interested they would be only too pleased to send him further copies. Whereas the Labor attorney general had been treated to silence, his conservative replacement was welcomed as a valued client.
3. 4.
AA MP 95/3.
"Confidential Report by Defence Department on Communists and other Organisations", Attorney General, AA CRS A467, File 42, Bundle 89 (2).
PART TWO
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Introduction
So far we have seen how the White Army was organised and how its secrecy was preserved. We have also seen some of the factors which caused people to join
and the plans of those who ran it. We have seen that the movement was,
especially in the country-side, to a degree a spontaneous response to fears, prejudices and economic hardships of the historical moment. The White Army enabled men to given expression to an emotional undercurrent which like the
Grande Peur, was already surging through their community. Certainly local
groups were instigated by White Army emissaries, phoning or visiting from outside. But, like the organisers of the All for Australia League, men recruiting for the White Army filled a cultural need. Men joined, not because they were persuaded to, but because it seemed like the right, or loyal, or responsible, or only thing to do.
The question now is, what potential did the organisation have for violence, at whom was that violence likely to be directed, and under what provocation? We have seen that some conservatives were urging Monash to seize power and that Monash himself believed that such people were in effect arguing for the violent overthrow of representative democracy. We have also seen that the leadership of the LNS had the will and intention to install a fascist, one-party system of government. But what of the membership? Was there a world view which would enable ordinary members of the militia to belh/e that violence was justified?
Some members have claimed in interview that the White Army was ’a purely defensive organisation’ that it existed to deter communists from taking revolutionary action, and to 'keep the wheels of society turning' if 'essential
services' were paralysed by a general strike. Archie Macarthur, the militia
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the peace, simply because the reds knew that they would have a fight on their hands. But the question then is, why was it secret? An organisation whose existence is unknown cannot be a deterrent. And the White Army was not just a closed society like the masons. It was a para-military organisation, so obsessed with keeping its existen ce secret that its very name was never to be spoken.
Others, like Major Len Fell of Metung and Harold H ew ett, have claimed that the White Army represented a more offensive threat, that, in the White Army's mind, the ALP and the UWM had already mounted an attack against which 'Australia' had to be defended.
Although there may be many ex-members who resist the idea, my own conclusion is that the White Army, like such para-military movements as the Croix de Feu, was equipped with a world view which would have legitim ated a physical assault on government itself.^ Whether they realised it or not, the members of the White Army had committed them selves, not just to a secret society, but to a rhetoric - to a whole way of thinking, which was likely to make an attack on government a patriotic duty. This is the subject of this second section of the thesis.
1931 was an extrem ely volatile federal election year. Some observers considered that the election was not simply a struggle for power between Labor
1. The French Croix de Feu was founded in 1927 with the financial support of