by Brian Toohey
domestic policies 153–4
foreign policy 153, 158
loans affair 159–60, 168–9
policy on foreign bases in Australia 166, 171
relations with US 154–9
and US base at NWC 85–90, 96, 157
WikiLeaks 16, 33, 40, 143, 239
Wilde, David 258–9
Wilkie, Andrew 27
Willesee, Don 317
Willheim, Ernst 260
Williams, Darryl 17, 26, 231
Williams, Geoff 72
Wilson, Edwin 163, 171, 177
Wilson, Harold 158
Wilton, John 280
Wonus, Milton 176, 177
Wood, Greg 196
Woodard, Garry 145
Woodside 26–7
Woodside Petroleum 188
Woodward, Garry 273, 280
Woolcott, Dick 212
Woolner, Derek 101
Woomera Rocket Range 7
World War I 251–5
World War II 45–7, 123, 228, 256–60
Wrigley, Alan 36
Xi Jinping 317, 318–19
Yeltsin, Boris 304–5
Yom Kippur War 87, 157
Yonas, Bill 62
Yudohoyono, Susilo Bambang 32
Yugoslavia 163
Death of General Gordon at Khartoum, Jean Leon Gerome, print, 1895, © Wm Finley & Co.
The New South Wales colonial government sent an expeditionary force to the Sudan war in 1885. While prime minister, Julia Gillard praised the military campaign in Sudan as one of the colonial wars that was ‘not only a test of wartime courage, but a test of character that has helped define our nation and create a sense of who we are’. However, the Australian contingent didn’t show any courage on the battlefield in Sudan, as the battle was over before they arrived. A former British governor general of Sudan, General Charles Gordon, had already been killed during a popular uprising against British colonial rule. Although a minor farce, the expedition was a prelude to Australian participation in much deadlier wars, many as equally unnecessary.
General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
‘Australia—not Empire—is the string we must harp on. We must encourage them to do what they will do willingly and lavishly, namely pay up for safeguarding a White Australia from the cursed Jap’, General Hamilton wrote the above to the British Prime Minister, HH Asquith, in February 1914 after he’d faced strong opposition to his attempt to earmark a section of the Australian Army for imperial expeditionary service. By the time World War I broke out later in the year, however, Australians were willing to fight in the Middle East and Europe. As commander of operations at Gallipoli, Hamilton led Australian, New Zealand, British and other forces to a traumatic defeat.
John Burton, photograph supplied by Pamela Burton.
John Burton, head of the External Affairs department between 1947 and 1950, was a deep strategic thinker who wanted Australia to seek its security in Asia after the Pacific war to a greater extent than did most subsequent governments. He was an early supporter of independence for Indonesia and other colonies to counter communism, and saw India as being more important to Australia’s future than Britain. Unusually for an Australian diplomat at that time, he had a PhD in economics, and developed a keen interest in conflict resolution.
General Curtis LeMay, United States Air Force, 1950s.
‘We went over there, fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea [largely by napalm bombing]’, stated General Curtis LeMay, Commander, US Strategic Air Command, 1948–1957. When asked at a congressional hearing in June 1951 if North Korea had been virtually destroyed, the Far East Air Force Bomber Commander General Emmett O’Donnell replied, ‘Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name.’ As the reliance on missiles increased, LeMay was renowned for supporting a continuing role for bombers as ‘manned perpetrators’.
Plutonium blowin’ in the wind. Staff Sergeant Frank Smith of the Australian Health Physics Team, February 1957.
After a secret report showing that the British nuclear tests had scattered highly dangerous plutonium around parts of South Australia was leaked on 4 May 1984, the Hawke government began remedial action neglected by the Menzies government.
G.R. Richards (Deputy of ASIO) and Brigadier Charles Spry (ASIO Head), National Archives of Australia, 1954.
Urged on by US authorities, ASIO spent almost twenty years trying to identify Australians who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s. This effort was sparked by a US–UK codebreaking program, which revealed that the Soviets had local agents in several countries. The US never told ASIO head, Sir Charles Spry, that US citizen William Weisband was the most important Soviet agent. Weisband had told Moscow in 1948 that the US had broken its codes—the Soviets switched to more secure versions.
General Lloyd Fellenz (left), US Army, Professor Sydney Sunderland (right) photo courtesy Media and Publications Unit Photographs Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. Photographer Norman Wodetski, BWP22197.
While Dean of Medicine at Melbourne University from 1953 to 1971, Sydney Sunderland was a secret advisor to the Defence Department on chemical and biological warfare. In the early 1960s, he produced top secret reports strongly supporting tests of nerve agents in Australia as requested by the United States. As a neurologist, Sunderland had an acute understanding of the extreme toxicity of VX, the main nerve agent to be tested in Australia for potential use in the Vietnam War. Sunderland attended a top-secret meeting with the head of the US chemical and biological weapons testing program, General Lloyd Fellenz, who arrived in Australia in early 1963 to discuss the proposed trials. Fellenz candidly acknowledged, ‘The scale and type of trials now necessary are such that these cannot be conducted inside the US due to the dangers involved’. Rigid secrecy ensured that the public was given no inkling of the proposal for the United States to test VX in tropical North Queensland. After much delay, the Menzies government refused in June 1965 to let the trials go ahead. The proposed tests were not revealed until they were leaked in May 1988. Sunderland received many honours during his life for his contributions to science, government and society. This book is the first public acknowledgement that he actively supported using nerve agents to kill people.
Illustration by Michael Fitzjames published in the National Times.
After the National Times reported in February 1985 that the Hawke government had agreed to help the US test the splashdown of new missile warheads in the Tasman Sea, the Labor Party revolted. The decision, taken in secret by only three ministers, was overturned.
Harry S Truman, Frank Gatteri, United States Signal Corps, c. November 1945, Harry S Truman Library & Museum.
Although the Soviet Union had not fought in the Korean War, the benign looking President Truman seriously contemplated its nuclear destruction in an extract from a note he wrote in 1952: ‘This means that Moscow, St Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostok, Peking, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Dairen, Odessa, Stalingrad and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union will be eliminated. This is the final chance for the Soviet government to decide whether it desires to survive or not.’
The bombs used in 1952 would have been much more devastating than the one that Truman ordered to be dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Contrasting approaches to the rule of law involving the encryption legislation. Michael Pezzullo, Fairfax Media/Alex Ellinghausen.
Michael Pezzullo, Secretary, Home Affairs Department told a parliamentary committee on 19 October 2018, ‘If we were to say to you a notice is a warrant, and through an incantation and the sprinkling of some magic dust on it, all of a sudden greater oversight is achieved—it’s the same person. It’s the attorney general of the Commonwealth rigorously discharging their ministerial responsibilities.’
Margaret Stone, Auspic Collection. Photographer: David Foote. Copyright © 2015 Commonwealth of Australia.
Margaret Stone, In
spector General of Intelligence and Security, told the same committee on 16 November 2018, ‘[The authorisation of notices] is not abracadabra. It’s not an incantation. It has to be real.’
