Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Edith felt buffeted by the changes of mood and tone and identity in Janice. ‘Janice, you must appreciate that I am on a different track in life to you. We may share some values, but I see my talents being used differently.’ Edith felt she had to be self-deprecating as well. ‘Although, of course, all I am doing is organising a town-planning conference. From world planning to town planning.’

  ‘I’ve told you that Marx did not want a separation between cities and country. Workers living in slums; bosses and rulers living in mansions. City folk and country folk.’

  ‘Sounds like he believed the garden-city philosophy.’

  ‘But town planners are servants of the owners of industrial production. They are still putting workers in their place, and managers in their place. Nothing can change until everything changes.’

  After Janice had gone off to work, Edith saw how adrift she was from the committed life. She feared losing her status as a sagacious lady with Important International Experience. In a way, the League had spoiled her. It had accustomed her to the ways and company of the influential and the decorous in centuries-old cities and palaces. Her idea of changing the world came from discussion papers, memoranda, resolutions.

  If she were to go into deep political waters with Janice, she would become like this Jessie Street woman who was in the newspapers, lampooned as a turbulent, unreliable woman. She read about Jessie Street and admired her, while feeling cowardly because she, herself, could never use that public style of self. And, unlike Jessie Street, she honestly did not know what to do about war and peace. Or, as Menzies kept saying, this cold war. Was what existed now not really peace? Was it a ‘cold peace’? It was not enough to be for peace; you had to know how to be for peace. And was armed revolution war? And what of inescapable war – say the Second World War – which was brought down on you, like it or not? Did she still believe in peace as a norm, or was she now resigned to the warring nature of the species for the foreseeable future? And what followed then from that belief? Could we do no more at this point in evolution than to make war less barbarous? The Geneva Conventions. Did we have to accept war as inherent in the nature of things and devote our energies to the protection of civilian victims of armed conflicts, the protection of the sick and wounded in wars; the proper treatment of prisoners of war, and so on. Was it too soon, historically, to be against war? How would we know when the time was right? The time had not been right in 1932 at the World Disarmament Conference. That had been a profound and tragic failure.

  And what about atomic warfare? Was this an abyss, which the civilised world had finally reached? And if it occurred, would it result in devastation from which the world could never recover?

  On the night the bill to ban the Communist Party was introduced in parliament, Edith had an argument with herself and with Ambrose about how to dress. He wanted her to dress as the diplomat’s wife.

  ‘It’s not an opera,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes it is.’

  ‘You always want me to dress how you would dress.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  So hard to know how to dress in Australia. The rules were so erratically insecure. Women preferred to overdress for fear of being indecorous.

  On this occasion, she wanted to dress down as a sort of private protest against the government, but Ambrose felt that would be letting down the side. ‘We must not displease the Crown.’

  So she put on her pearls.

  When the High Commission car dropped them at Parliament House, there were many hundreds of police in a ring around the building, hands behind their backs, but the protestors with their placards were not strong in numbers. She estimated a couple of hundred.

  The HC car dropped them at the front entrance without any fuss. The protesting people were kept well back and she did not see Janice or Frederick, but nor did she search for them, keeping her head down. She guessed that they would have seen her. She heard a woman protestor – whom she considered to be well-dressed, if not over-dressed – cry out, ‘Damn the police, let’s walk into Parliament House.’

  Someone who seemed to be a marshal of sorts – not Frederick – shouted, ‘We don’t want anything like that. That’s just what they want us to do.’

  And then Ambrose and she were led into parliament by the parliament ushers.

  ‘Your brother is no doubt out there with the masses,’ Ambrose said, keeping his voice down. ‘How many does it make to form a mass?’

  ‘And so should I be.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think so, Edith.’

  She looked about her at the parliamentary furnishings and portraits in polished King’s Hall. She was at home in hallowed halls.

  ‘You are right. I belong in this conversation.’

  For now. Just.

  Or she was in two conversations at the same time.

  They were guided through King’s Hall to the diplomatic gallery at the back of the chamber, which was already filling. They had to squeeze up. There were sober nods of acknowledgement among the legation heads and representatives – high commissioners, chargés d’affaires and ministers. The American ambassador was there. Edith realised she was the only woman. The HC had had to get a special approval from the Speaker for a woman to be present in the diplomatic gallery.

  They all nodded politely to her, half-rising from their seats.

  They were seated beside Ambrose’s equivalent from the Canadian High Commission and shook hands. The Canadian made an uncomplimentary remark about Australian politics, which Ambrose appeared to find amusing. There were still tensions between Canada and Australia left over from the failure of Canada to help Australia during the war with Japan. Nor was Canada supporting Australia’s efforts at the UN.

  She also knew about the Canadians leaving the Poles in the lurch after Normandy at Mont Ormel – the scandal of Major-General George Kitching.

  Too many scandals. Behind all the so-called glory of war, there was a mess of greasy scandals and profiteering.

  It was all being forgotten as the sea washed away the markings on sand. She glanced past Ambrose at the young Canadian and thought that he was rather a dish. But she decided she would no longer join in the diplomatic set’s jokes about Australian life.

  Ambrose whispered, ‘Ivanov is absent. If I were an Australian communist I’d be disappointed that my Russian leader hadn’t had the courage to face Menzies.’

  She had loved the film nights at the Russian resident minister’s home, but they had stopped going because of the diplomatic temperature. She loved the pickles, the raw fish, the black bread, the caviar – oh, the caviar – and, of course, the vodka. Real vodka. Something you couldn’t buy in Australia. You paid for the touch of gastronomic exotica by having to sit through Soviet films on hydroelectricity, the grain harvest and the Moscow circus.

  They watched the members of parliament file in.

  She had been in many assemblies and councils and commissions in the days of the League – ‘the parliament of the world’, as some had called it back then – but it was the first time she had been in her own national parliament.

  The Speaker brought the parliament to order.

  He told the House that a minister of the New Zealand government was in the house and, as custom required, he had been invited to sit next to the speaker.

  She liked the use of custom.

  The Prime Minister then rose and moved to the dispatch box. ‘This is a bill to outlaw and dissolve the Australian Communist Party, to pursue it into any new or associate forms, and to deal with the employment of communists in certain offices. The bill is admittedly novel and it is far-reaching . . .’ He paused and looked up to the public gallery.

  She felt he cut a fine, if spreading, figure, and had a commanding voice, perhaps needing a little more bass. He glanced over at the crowded diplomatic gallery and looked at her, the only woman present. He didn’t indicate that he recognised her, but raised an eyebrow, maybe from seeing a woman in the diplomatic gallery.

  ‘It is desi
gned to give the government power to deal with the King’s enemies in this country . . .’

  Ambrose leaned to her and whispered, ‘Ah, the royalist. He quite rightly tips his hat to the King . . . He knows who the boss is.’

  ‘Let me say at the outset that it will be without avail for any honourable member to point out, as can be done quite readily, that for some years I and other persons resisted the idea of a communist ban on the grounds that, in a time of peace, doubts ought to be resolved in favour of free speech. But events have moved. We are not at peace today, except in a technical sense. The Soviet Union has made perfect the technique of the “cold war”. It has accompanied it by the organisation of peace demonstrations – peace demonstrations, save the mark!’

  She looked to Ambrose for elucidation. He made a derisive face and, lowering his head, whispered, ‘Dear God – an oratorical cliché – from archery. Every hack uses it. He disappoints me.’

  Menzies went on, ‘Designed not to promote true peace, but to prevent or impair defence preparations in the democracies. All the threatening events in Eastern Europe, in Germany, in East Asia and in South-East Asia – if we have learned nothing from all these things, then, in the famous phrase, there is no health in us . . .’

  She again looked to Ambrose, who was shaking his head with amusement, as was the Canadian. ‘Of course,’ he whispered to her, ‘he throws in something ecclesiastical, the Book of Evening Prayer. Debating standard of the upper fifth.’

  The Prime Minister thundered on, ‘The real and active communists in Australia present us with our immediate problem – not the woolly-headed dupes, not the people who are pushed to the front in order to present a respectable appearance . . .’

  Edith looked at the floor and recalled the efforts of her brother and Janice to induce her to speak at the Peace Congress.

  Didn’t she do it in the old days to win supporters for the League? Weren’t those supporting the peace movement also as worldly and as canny as Mr Menzies’ new little Liberal Party in a little country at the bottom of the world? She sounded like Ambrose. It could be said that the League had been part of the ‘peace movement’. Menzies had been something of an appeaser of Hitler before the war. Who, then, was the dupe? One of the facts of life, she was coming to realise, was that no one is ‘fully informed’. That everyone filters information to suit their own neurotic inclinations and therefore dooms themselves to be misinformed. Except her, of course. Ha, ha. She was accustomed to being surrounded by people who claimed to know how things really were. She had seen the Second World War and the Holocaust, as it was now being called, created by those who knew how things were. Not only the religious people. To catch oneself at self-deception, that was the art. And to have the talent of imagining correctly how others see us. She was not sure she had this talent.

  ‘Can we recognise and deal with the enemies of liberty only when they actually take up arms? What liberty should there be for the enemies of liberty? The second argument is that “you cannot suppress ideas”, but if ideas give rise to overt action and that action is against the safety and a defence of the realm, we are not only entitled, but also bound, to suppress it. The third argument is that you must not touch a communist if he is a union official. This argument seeks to put the trade unions above the law. But if communism is an international conspiracy against the democracies, organised as a prelude to war and operating as a fifth column in advance of hostilities, and if it is a subversive movement challenging law, self-government and domestic peace, then the alleged immunity of the official of a union is utter fantasy. The fact that he occupies a key industrial position with power to hold up work is the best reason in the world for removing him from that position. At the last general election, 87,958 persons – a small fraction of the total number of electors – voted for communist candidates. I now propose to refer to a list of communists in high union office . . .’

  Ambrose whispered to the Canadian, ‘That could mean that there are many more secret members than we know about. We put the official Party at six thousand.’

  The Canadian said, ‘Dupes.’

  The Prime Minister said he would read out a list of what he said were about fifty names of communists, and their elected positions in their unions. Edith thought that Frederick would be named. This could be the end of Frederick. Menzies read the names: iron workers, seamen, waterside workers, sheet-metal workers, clerks, engineers, miners, painters, blacksmiths, boilermakers, building workers, railway workers, transport workers, agricultural-implement and stove makers, shipwrights, tramway and motor-omnibus workers, coastal, docks, rivers and harbour workers.

  ‘We can’t let a traitorous minority destroy us, as they most assuredly intend to do. I turn now to the argument that by banning the communists we shall merely drive them underground. Some of the deeds of the communists see the daylight, but their planning is done by stealth and in secrecy. In short, they are underground already. If ever there was a fraudulent document, it is the constitution of the Australian Communist Party. It piously claims that the Party is a firm supporter of the United Nations, that it believes in world peace, and that it does not aim at establishing a totalitarian state. It even professes to adopt the democratic method, because it talks about the necessity of winning a majority of the Australian people: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it . . .” ’

  The Canadian turned to Ambrose and shook his head with a contemptuous grin.

  Ambrose quietly laughed, and turned to her and muttered, ‘ “Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here . . .” ’ And then to her said, ‘Macbeth. He’s done it all: a sporting metaphor, something theological and Shakespeare. The debater’s box of clichéd quotations. I am truly disappointed with the oratorical level of Mr Menzies.’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Do not, however, dear, unsex me here.’

  She had sensed that it was stale oratory, which aimed falsely to present the speaker as learned, but she had not recognised the references at all. She felt unlearned.

  She again felt, as she did occasionally, that she shouldn’t have done a bachelor of science; should have had a classical education. She did not consider her scientific learning a waste, but perhaps she should have done two degrees. If we had world enough and time. There – that was a piece of verse she could haul up.

  The Prime Minister went on, quoting from the Foundations of Leninism by Stalin. ‘ “The task of the victorious revolution is to do the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and stirring up of the revolution in all countries . . .” ’

  Ah, she had a copy of Foundations of Leninism, lent to her by Janice. At least she was up on that reference.

  Menzies paused for effect and then continued, ‘We are dealing here not with the mild exercises of the debating society . . .’

  ‘Oh yes we are,’ the Canadian said to Ambrose, without including her.

  The Prime Minister went on. ‘. . . But with a programme deliberately considered and explained to us by Stalin, the man who, perhaps, at this moment exercises more power over more people than does any other human being in the world . . .’

  He slapped the table with both hands to emphasise each word. Edith had a liking for him, the source of which she could not find. Perhaps he had a form of masculinity she admired. She was not sure. He gave off something from the animal kingdom.

  ‘The Labor Party has themselves categorically admitted that the communists are disloyal; that they are wreckers; that they are directed from outside Australia; that they are engineering to create economic chaos and social disorder; that they are bent on destroying democratic institutions; that they are aiming at a revolutionary seizure of state power; that they are enemies of civil liberty; that they are conspirators; and that their weapons are falsehood, chicanery and sabotage . . .’

  Edith kept trying to see her brother and Janice in this light, to imagine them in secret rooms making dangerous plans to overthrow the government by force. />
  She could see how Menzies and his followers would see them that way, and maybe they were zealots. She remembered Frederick regretting that he did not have the temperament of a true revolutionary. And yes, they wanted a radically different system of economics and government to the one Australia already had. At what point did that become a crime? She answered herself: When those who wanted radical change committed crimes.

  The recent Victorian Royal Commission into the Communist Party had found no criminal activity.

  The Prime Minister outlined how, under the new legislation, the communists and their associated organisations and members could be ‘declared’, and have their property seized and face gaol or other penalties. ‘The bill provides that officers and members of unlawful associations are under penalty of imprisonment to cease their activities as such . . . Anybody so declared, other than the Communist Party – that party is being disposed of with no right of appeal and no humbug – may appeal to the High Court. The onus is placed upon that body to satisfy the court it is not a body to which this legislation applied. It will be suggested by some people of liberal mind – and I appreciate this attitude – that to reverse the onus of proof is wrong . . .’

  He went on to say that he felt that this reversal was necessary in such times, and argued that members of the Communist Party would bogusly ‘resign’ from the Communist Party to avoid arrest, hence the need for retrospective legislation.

  At least, she noted, he was aware that the legislation breached two foundations of British justice: that there should be no retrospectivity and that the onus of proof should not fall on the accused. Rather huge principles to disregard. Required great haughtiness to shrug off such venerable and hard-won legal wisdom, Edith thought. Even bumptiousness. Yes, bumptiousness.

  She did not want him to be bumptious.

  Thankfully, the protestors were gone when the reading of the bill finished and the diplomatic corps and public gallery all filed out of the chamber. She did not have to face the disapproving glares of Janice and Frederick – or, worse, their sarky, sardonic waves.