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It is said that the White Army is purely protective and would not be used without constitutional authority, but there is every reason to believe that if it did not approve of constituted authority it might act in
opposition to it - a position which might well lead to Civil war.
To put it bluntly it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the White Army might be mobilised against the Labor government. And once again, Browne went on to insist that government ought to be told:
It is because I believe this to be a possibility arising out of a grave dissemination of false or misleading propaganda in the future that I mention it as a matter of duty to the Government in office ... I would like to see a pronouncement by the leaders of all opposition parties in association with the Government to denounce what may become a national peril.
But Browne now doubted that Jones was going to inform his Minister. For his own security, Browne ended with a request which was quite outside the normal style of his letters to Canberra:
I shall be glad if you will acknowledge the safe receipt of this report, and would like your comment as to whether the information is along the lines desired.^
Browne was ri^it to be cautious. Jones did not see it as his responsibility to tell his Minister. There is nothing in Brennan’s behaviour at this time to indicate that he had ever heard of the League of National Security. Like Tunnecliffe and Hogan, Brennan seems to have known no more than he had been told by a troubled
resident of the Mallee-Wimmera. It would seem that he too was led to believe
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p
that the Wimmera incident had been an isolated outburst. If that were not so, then the White Army would surely have entered Labour folklore. I f the federal government had known, if Brennan had seen the White Army file , then it is inconceivable that Labor politicians would not have raised the matter in Parliament, that they would not, at very least, have attempted to make political capital out of the fact that two Nationalist politicians were named in the report as having White Army ties.
Jones did not te ll his Labor minister, because he saw the White Army as part of the legitim ate machinery of the State. Its purpose: to undermine any attempt
Q
by Labor to put its socialisation objective into practice. In fact Jones entitled his own report of the secret m ilitia throughout Australia, The formation of secret bodies in the Commonwealth for the protection of the State against BOLSHEVISM'.^ Bolshevism was exactly what the conservatives accused the Labor Party of endorsing. Langism and Sovietism were interchan gable items of abuse, while Theodore's inflationary economics were deemed to be 'Soviet' in their in te n tio n .^ -
8. Jones did what he could to be low-key about the organisation. An internal Branch memo, attached to the front of one White Army file , dealt with claims that right-wingers in Melbourne had stolen machine guns. On it, Jones pencilled: 'Inform Mr. Brennan that matter investigated and the whole story appears to be the result of hysteria on the part of certain people aided no doubt by certain individuals who are endeavouring to seek thelim elight. J.' (CRS A395). Its very vagueness suggests that the term 'White Army' did not arise, yet Jones' file is entitled 'Papers relating to the White Army'. 9. Moore describes Jones' involvement in plans to swear in members of the NSW
Old Guard as 'Peace Officers' under the Peace Officers Act (1932), only days before Governor Game forestalled the imminent mobilisation of the Old Guard by sacking Lang. Moore, 'Send Lawyers, Guns and money?' Ph.D. Thesis, La Trobe University, 1982, p. 346ff.
10. CRS A369.
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The 1931 split between Lang Labor and the ALP, the expulsion of communists from the ALP, the communist charge that the ALP were ’social fascists' - none of these characteristically socialist divisions convinced the conservatives that ALP was not part of a giant socialist plot, orchestrated from Moscow. The White Army's secret Intelligence Summary actually charged that these divisions were a 'false impression which is deliberately created to mislead the public'. The Labour movement was merely pretending to be divided!
Of course, Lang was the target of most of these accusations. But for his abrasive demagogy, it is doubtful whether the secret armies would have attracted so many middle-of-the-road supporters. But inevitably, the public image of the entire ALP was tainted. There was nothing peculiarly Australian about this. Dem ocratic socialist governmentsthroughout the West were being met with similar charges and similar modes of resistance.
As far as Jones was concerned, it was not his job to tell a Labor attorney general what the militiamen were planning. The fact that the attorney general was a member of a popularly elected government made no difference. Jones was part of that elite which believed - and continues to believe - that it is their job to defend the national interest from the wayward fantasies and the seditious thoughts of Labor governments and the popular majorities which elect them to
power.