IN MID JUNE 1955, Australia’s external affairs minister, Richard Casey, wrote to Britain’s defence minister, Selwyn Lloyd, seeking background information about a certain colonel he had run across during the second world war. The man Casey was checking on was Dudley Wrangel Clarke, a theatrical, charismatic and unconventional officer, whom Malcolm Muggeridge would describe as “a sharp little man with bright, quick eyes.”
Clarke’s exotic early military career had included a spell as a pilot during the first world war, which have him an opportunity to annoy the War Office by affecting Royal Flying Corps wings on his army tunic. He claimed (with some validity) to have suggested the names of both the commandos and the Special Air Service to the British Army. In the desert under Wavell, Clarke’s ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and double agents helped confuse the enemy about British plans, influencing operational policy for the balance of the war. He was chiefly responsible for misleading the Germans about where Montgomery’s main thrust would come at Alamein.
Clarke had also developed three Principles of Deception: induce the enemy to do something, not just to think something; never conduct a deception without any clear objective; and be aware that any proper deception plan must have time to work.
As was the way in such matters, Lloyd asked around Whitehall. One of his interlocutors had a high opinion of Clarke, and had found him “easy to work with.” Another, who had seen “a fair amount” of him during the war, betrayed perhaps a hint of damnation in his praise. Confirming Clarke’s “excellence,” he felt, nonetheless, that he was not the kind of man to “conceive a policy himself” but where “a general line of policy having been laid down” he was a “first class executant [sic].”
Having retired from the army in 1947 as a brigadier, Clarke worked at the Conservative Central Office as head of public opinion research until 1952. By 1955, at the age of fifty-six, he was an executive with the British company Keir and Cawder (Engineering) Ltd. Perhaps Lloyd had asked the wrong people, or perhaps they (and he) were simply being discreet, but there is no available evidence to suggest that Casey knew that, in 1941, in an incident that Clarke never fully explained, he had been arrested wearing women’s clothing after a meeting with the head of the MI6 station in Madrid. Clarke first told the Spanish police, who photographed him, that he was a novelist studying men’s reactions. He then said that he “was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on for a prank.” Clarke’s indiscretion seemed not to have queered his pitch with the spooks. Casey noted in his diary at the time that a senior officer, Colonel Richard Ellis, also “knew” him.
Casey had developed an enthusiasm for what he called “the ‘dirt’ boys stuff” while serving as the British resident minister in Cairo in 1942–43. He recorded precisely what he meant by that colourful phrase: “bribery, deception, whispering and underground methods generally.” This was the kind of cloak and dagger work performed by Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, and by the various military intelligence units based in the Middle East, of which Clarke had been a member, and of whose operations Casey had inevitably gleaned some knowledge.
A decade after his stint in Cairo, at a London party, Casey, now minister for external affairs in the government of R.G. Menzies, met a British diplomat, John Peck, who worked for the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, or IRD. Established in 1948, the innocuously named IRD was Britain’s covert propaganda network; by the mid-fifties, it was the fastest growing part of the Foreign Office. Its task was to counter the Soviet Union’s political warfare campaign against the “free world,” to spread awareness of the threat of communism, and to make known the conditions of life under communist regimes. To this end, the IRD sought to supply right-wing writers, academics and other opinion-formers with unattributable background information on parts of the world that the British believed were exposed to Soviet or Chinese penetration. The department also targeted those with left-wing political views, since it felt that they were more likely to be deceived by communist propaganda. In some cases, IRD documents did not bear any kind of printer’s mark, which made them illegal in many countries (including Australia). Since their free distribution was tantamount to publication, the Foreign Office insisted that IRD material could only be handed over where there was a confidential relationship between the distributor (the British government) and the recipient.
The three principal papers issued by the IRD were the Interpreter, a monthly analysis (also in French Spanish and Italian) of all agencies of Soviet policy. According to the IRD, it was “designed primarily for intelligent people,” who, though aware of the communist threat, “may not always realise” what methods they used or which organisations they had penetrated. The Asian Analyst (also produced in French) interpreted trends of internal Chinese policy, Chinese and Soviet policy in Asia and the role of and tactics of the Asian communist parties. There were three regional editions of International Organisations, a monthly survey in English of the activities of Soviet front organisations in the Middle East and Africa, Latin America and Western Europe. This was produced for use by ministries of foreign affairs and the interior, security officers, trade unionists, political leaders and editors.
AUSTRALIA’s membership of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation, or SEATO, committed the government to devising joint means of countering communist subversion. External Affairs had established an “Information Branch” for this purpose. It struck Casey that Clarke’s war experience might build on the branch’s work, indeed, dovetail neatly with it. Casey wanted Clarke to visit Australia for six weeks or so to, as he had put it coyly to Lloyd, “see if we can work out some ideas together on the cold war in South-East Asia.” Casey was seeking suggestions and ideas for “less obvious methods of countering subversion, consistent with our capabilities” – in other words, “dirt boys’ stuff.”
Although Casey had been careful to clear his lines beforehand with Menzies, he also needed to win over the man formally responsible for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, defence minister Philip McBride, and his powerful permanent head, Fred Shedden, who both had reservations about the mooted visit from the outset. Casey put his case to the two at a meeting in early August 1955. Defence worried that the government would be unable to keep Clarke’s visit a secret from the United States. The former British officer’s presence “would become known to the Pentagon in a flash,” McBride and Shedden thought, thereby arousing suspicions “as to what was going on.” Defence believed that if the Americans thought that the British were “‘in on’ something they [the Americans] would begin to draw in their horns at once.” Casey could not understand this attitude himself but believed that “their unreasoning antipathy to the UK” would be enough for the Americans to put the kybosh on the idea.
Casey placated McBride and Shedden with the assurance that Clarke’s contacts in Australia would be confined to the “External Affairs portfolio.” To the extent that it was necessary for Clarke to be made aware of information held by Defence on Southeast Asia, External Affairs would tell him the “broad lines” of anything he needed to know. Clarke himself doubted that his experience was entirely relevant to Casey’s needs and said as much to the External Affairs liaison officer in London, Laurence “Jim” McIntyre. But, doubtless savouring an all-expenses paid escape from the northern winter, Clarke said that he would like to help in any way he could. If, “after investigation,” he found little scope for original ideas for countering subversion, he proposed to tell Casey so “without reservation.”
Casey’s own senior officials shared Defence’s lack of enthusiasm for the plan. Writing to his boss, Arthur Tange, McIntyre said, “Whatever doubts I may have about the usefulness of this operation (doubts that you may or may not share yourself – I am not certain), I do not have any fears that Clarke will throw up ideas that might be seized on and put into execution impulsively.”
It may perhaps have said rather more about McIntyre than Clarke when the diplomat continued: “He [Clarke] strikes me as being a pretty sober and cautious character, who will not recommend anything unless he is satisfied that it is practicable and free from dangerous consequences if should it go wrong.”
And there was plenty to go wrong. Clarke appears, for example, to have received no formal terms of reference. In the absence of anything else, he fell back on the language in a letter received from Casey in late August. In it, the minister had sought short- and long-term suggestions to “counter Communist subversion in South-East Asia in its various forms, by propaganda, by infiltration of agents by pressure tactics and the like; and better enable the presentation as from Australia of democratic policies and ways of thinking.” In effect, Casey had given Clarke carte blanche. Indicating that he wanted “suggestions and ideas for the less obvious methods of countering subversion” which might be consistent with “Australian capabilities and resources,” Casey had asked Clarke “not to lay aside any idea because it might seem far- fetched.”
Casey secured Clarke’s agreement to the mission during a visit to London in late September 1955. Clarke would travel under business cover, and en route, call on the Australian diplomatic representatives in Bangkok, Singapore and Jakarta, with a view to making himself “generally acquainted” with the situation in the region.
In Canberra, opinion was divided on how External Affairs should give effect to Casey’s wish that distribution of “grey” material, as the IRD publications were known, could be widened. The first thing was to create an Information Branch with responsibility for distributing it. One Information Branch officer, Tom Kelly, thought distribution were best done “unobtrusively, although it by no means followed that that it should be done secretly.” Secret activities usually generated an “unhealthy ethos” if they remained secret, he wrote in January 1955. “All, it appears to me, that we are bound to do is to safeguard the source of the material, not to ensure the secrecy of the means of its distribution.” Kelly thought that EA lacked the resources to mount a major propaganda operation. “Perhaps we need to call into being an Institute of Eurasian Affairs, or some such body, to make translations, to prepare, basic appreciations and perhaps to undertake distribution,” he concluded, neatly anticipating what would be one of Clarke’s key recommendations.
Kelly’s boss, the head of the Information Branch, Malcolm Booker, thought they should hasten slowly. There may be some merit in extending the distribution of the Asian Analyst to include the universities, he wrote to a senior colleague, Jim Plimsoll, but there was a danger that some academics – he named an ANU professor – might use the grey material “in ways of which we would not approve,” or worse, attempt to discover its source. Already, he noted, certain newspapers, such as the Melbourne Argus, did not always use grey material in an “acceptable manner.” One thing Booker seemed sure of: there was “little real danger that the source of the material could be revealed through any fault of ours.” Of course, less than months later, that is precisely what happened. A junior officer, unaware of the strict protocols governing the handling of grey material, mentioned its source in an unclassified communication to an “indoctrinated” colleague, earning himself a polite “please explain.”
External Affairs decided, for the time being, not to burden academics with IRD reading – with three exceptions, all at the University of Melbourne. Booker sent copies of the Interpreter and the Asian Analyst for October 1955 to the commentator and trusted friend of External Affairs, historian Norman Harper. Other favoured recipients were thirty-year-old political scientist and journalist Creighton Burns (who later became editor of the Melbourne Age) and the dean of the law school, Professor Zelman Cowen. Harper was the only one to acknowledge Booker’s communication. Offering “many thanks” for the two magazines, he thought that at a “quick glance” they appeared to contain very useful background material, but noted “they would be more valuable if one knew their source.”
This issue was also occupying the mind of Tange, who at the end of 1955 asked his subordinates whether an “anonymous service” to distribute material could not be established “as part of our plan to make enlarged ‘cultural’ contact with the Soviet Union.” Booker doubted whether External Affairs or any other Australian organisation had the resources to duplicate the IRD. He thought the department should devote its efforts to “pushing through projects already begun” such as an “Asian students magazine,” and “making better use of media already available to us (radio, films, press releases etc.).” If Tange insisted on producing Australian grey material, it should be aimed at schools and university students, where here was less likelihood of duplicating British efforts, Booker wrote. Responding to a British request for an assessment of its efficacy, Booker indicated that while it was difficult to be precise, the department’s impression was that in general the material had proved useful in “press, parliamentary and religious circles.”
CASEY was intensely interested in the outcome of Clarke’s deliberations. In late December 1955, he held a series of working lunches and dinners in Melbourne and at his country home in Berwick, at which he, Clarke and the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Alfred Brookes, went through Clarke’s draft report line by line. Casey then devoted part of New Year’s Eve to penning his own commentary on the document.
Clarke began with a tour d’horizon. The most immediate threat of “complete communist domination” was in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia “(in that order).” There was no immediate threat to Thailand, but should any part of Indochina “fall,” the situation in the kingdom would be “most dangerous.” An immediate concern for Australia was the need for closer ties of friendship with Indonesia, and to halt the expansion of its communist party. It was no surprise that according to Clarke, those countries least threatened by communism were the former British and American colonies of Borneo, Ceylon and the Philippines. The two former British colonies at greatest risk were Malaya and Burma.
In all of these countries, Peking’s exploitation of the links between overseas Chinese and the mainland was of serious concern. Clarke put to one side the problem of Indochina as being one, the solution of which, he said somewhat insouciantly, would in all probability require an “element of physical military strength.” Otherwise, over the long term, the greatest threat to the “whole area” would be any further drift by India to the left – “a tide which would inevitably produce a powerful influence over Burma and Pakistan and also a serious effect on Indonesia and Malaya.” Action concerning the other countries required the application of “measures to influence the national mind.”
Clarke made a number of recommendations for “early action and short-term results.” The first of these was that Australia should adopt a basic theme for all propaganda that could be reduced to a “single slogan” and capable of translation. The Department of External Affairs should maintain an official list of priority nationals (or races) requiring “the greatest propaganda effort at any one time.”
It occurred to Clarke that if the West might be more successful than the communists in propaganda efforts targeting Southeast Asian women. Clarke was positively amazed to discover the “vast difference” that existed in the region – even in Islamic Indonesia – in attitudes towards women, as compared with “the traditional attitude” adopted in the Middle East and Africa. Given this, there might be value, he thought, in sending a “suitable Australian lady,” on a tour of the region to report on and recommend how links might be established with Southeast Asian womens’ organisations. The information could be used for a special propaganda campaign on a “peace” theme. The lady in question should course, travel under the apparent auspices of some voluntary organisation and on no account as an agent of the government, Clarke counselled. It was the unofficial status of the women – on both sides – that made this field of propaganda so attractive. “I will resist the temptation to enlarge on these attractions, except to mention the importance of the woman’s influence in reaching the youth of any country,” he concluded, primly.
Clarke recommended strongly that Radio Australia make a detailed study of techniques of radio rediffusion, in which radio programs were sent by telephone line into a subscriber’s home. In this Orwellian form of broadcasting, which Clarke described as a “powerful… weapon,” a subscriber had “only a loudspeaker and a switch.” The propaganda value lay in the fact that the subscriber could not listen to any other program than those chosen by the rediffusion company. Confessing that he had no knowledge of the financial structure of the system, invented by a British firm, Clarke warned that there was a grave danger of a “Communist broadcasting concern” making covert purchases of rediffusion time in Jakarta or Singapore, where the system was well established.
Conceding that television in most of Southeast Asia was still “distant by many years,” Clarke could nevertheless felt that it was not too early for Australia to take account of its implications as a propaganda tool. Noting that the “rediffusion interests contemplate early extension into vision,” he said it may be “vital” to ensure that control of the medium got into the “right” hands from the start, “even if only to deny it to the wrong ones.” Describing television as “immensely valuable,” Clarke suggested that some form of government subsidy to politically correct broadcasters and wondered if “perhaps Colombo Plan money could be made to help?”
The value of cinema as a propaganda tool was well-established, Clarke noted, and it was still open to the government to depict Australia in a positive light using newsreels and feature film, but the “theatre war” was always likely to be won by the Americans, via Hollywood. Perhaps the best contribution Australia could make was to deny “Red producing [sic] companies’ exhibition facilities by keeping continual vigilance on the theatre property market, although he also suggested consideration be given to establishing a lending organisation along the same lines as the British Film Finance Corporation.
Clarke was briefed on plans to produce a monthly magazine for Asians who had studied in Australia and, further ahead, to set up special shops and libraries to compete with existing left-wing bookshops. All of these were commendable and a “worthy call” on Colombo Plan funds, he said. But he believed that Australia was not gaining appropriate public credit for its gifts. This was partly because of Australians’ “over-modest and diffident” way of presenting themselves to “the Asiatic neighbours.” He recognised this reflected a reluctance to arouse envy among races whose immigrants were banned by the White Australia policy, but felt that “with Orientals of all people,” this diffidence resulted in a poor appreciation of the practical worth of closer friendship. In the same vein, Australia was insufficiently differentiated from the United States and the United Kingdom, and thus failed to obtain the recognition her special geographical position deserved.
With Soviet technology now beginning to compete with that of the West (Egypt’s recent decision to acquire weaponry from the USSR was a case in point), it would not be long, Clarke warned, before there was a Soviet aid program. It was therefore necessary for Australia to take “a new conception” of its propaganda needs, to employ the methods of commercial advertising to convince the region that “she too can ‘deliver the goods.’” To help achieve recognition of the Australian brand in a region where illiteracy was rife, Clarke recommended a competition to determine the adoption of a simple Australian symbol that would eventually be branded together with a slogan like “Trust Australia” on all donations made under the Colombo Plan. Similarly, exporters would be encouraged to display the symbol on their goods, especially consumer durables. Here, Clarke saw the flying kangaroo of Qantas, a recognisably Australian company that already had an entrée in Southeast Asia, as an exemplar.
Clarke was reluctant to leave the issue of advertising without drawing attention to the part played by diplomatic display in influencing the minds of “the important middle and upper crust” in the countries of the region. In Jakarta, for example, an “Australia House,” which replicated all of the functions found in the eponymous London building, seemed to him, inevitable. Hoping that he did not appear frivolous, Clarke also thought there would be value “out of proportion to all expense” if the Australian ambassador were provided with a Rolls Royce (albeit the “smaller 21 h.p. model”). As the only such vehicle in the city, it would be “constantly drawing respectful attention” and would reflect dignity without ostentation.
From what Clarke had seen of Australians, they seemed in “some way behindhand” in their knowledge of Southeast Asians; moreover, “the Asians themselves are aware of it.” Of course, the people-to-people exchanges under the Colombo Plan went some way to alleviating this, but it appeared that some sort of clarion call from the government was needed to bring home the “stern realities” of the situation. To further a better knowledge of the region’s peoples, Clarke had in mind a “Good Neighbour” campaign, launched at ministerial level but carried forward subsequently by local committees, “with all the panoply of literature and posters, talks to schools, lectures and so on.” Whatever type of private organisation was chosen to direct this campaign, it would need three essential features, said Clarke:
• Its executive would need to be selected and briefed before the ministerial call was made.
• It must be given time to formulate privately an active program before the call to action.
• It must bear every sign of being a spontaneous unofficial movement inspired by the ministerial appeal. Beyond that – save, perhaps, for accepting a little public seed money – it must appear at arm’s length from government.
Clarke saw three key outcomes of a good neighbour campaign:
• Some form of league or institute for Asian relations. Such a body should be empowered to make awards and honours of “sufficient standing to be well prized by Asian intellectuals.”
• The endowment of chairs at Australian universities to facilitate the more intensive academic study of the region’s two major religions, Buddhism and Islam
• Improvement of the facilities for studying Asian languages in Australia.
Part four of Clarke’s report was devoted to “Covert Measures.” He began by acknowledging that since Australia’s covert activities were largely (although not totally) confined to joint operations with Britain’s MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency, two organisations from which he was not entitled to receive information. As a consequence, about the best he could do was recommend “a few headings of reasonably fruitful lines of thought.” Clarke wrote that influential Australians would need to be kept well briefed with anti-communist talking points. (We do not know if Clarke was aware of the use in Australia of the grey material.) It would be highly undesirable for any of this material to be capable of being identified as being from a government source. “A suitable ‘front’ should therefore be devised… possibly some established newsletter proprietor might be induced to collaborate by acting as the necessary go-between.”
Clarke saw the “organised whispering campaign” as a tool for bolstering “healthy” (presumably, non-communist) foreign regimes. Countries such as Thailand “with small intriguing inner circles of wide influence” would be fertile ground, as would the wealthy overseas Chinese communities, which were obsessed with obtaining inside information to help their business interests. In countries such as Indo-China and Thailand a whisper might increase the morale of “an anxious regime by hinting at western military support waiting in the wings,” which could never be revealed in a public statement. Another kind of covert operation was the provision of financial assistance to healthy organisations such as newspapers or magazines, whose influence was waning. Letter-writing campaigns, in which “willing stooges” wrote letters to the press “to ventilate some matter of credit to oneself,” were also valuable.
At the top of Clarke’s list of covert offensive measures was “Fighting Communism through Religion.” He did not, however, attempt to explore “this vast subject” beyond noting that a study of any religion would reveal ways in which its force could be harnessed to fight the cold war and that collaboration from bodies such as the Freemasons, Rotary and Moral Rearmament was possible. The forthcoming Melbourne Olympic Games afforded Australia an opportunity to replicate everything the Soviets did in Helsinki in 1952, when they targeted foreign students at an “peace camp” ran by the International Union of Students. “There seems no reason at all why Australians should not equally claim the cause o f peace to induce sportsmen to resist the warmongering of Communism,” wrote Clarke.
CASEY was impressed with Clarke’s analysis, which, while it contained no “magic panacea” was, for all that, “quite penetrating.” He agreed with the need for a coherent propaganda theme and a message that could be reduced to a slogan, but was unsure as to whether it should be based on Australia’s “helpfulness,” or the danger that communism represented. Flagging this for further discussion, he leaned towards the former, however, saying in a note to Tange that there was “some merit in ignoring your potential enemy and building yourself up in the minds of uncommitted people.”
Clarke’s recommendations on women appear to have caught Casey by surprise. Suggesting that “we might give it some thought,” he did not rule out funding under the Colombo Plan. Casey also wondered if Radio Australia was making sufficient use of the “considerable ‘entertainment’ talent” among the 3000 Asians then studying in Australia. “There may, for all we know, be Asian Frank Sinatras among them – for those who like Frank Sinatra,” he wrote. Casey and Clarke were at one on the propaganda value of radio rediffusion, which the two men had discussed at their first meeting in London and again in Australia. Casey favoured inserting Radio Australia talks and commentaries into the existing Singapore-based programming, rather than establishing an Australian rediffusion service, saying he’d asked Clarke to discuss this with the chairman of Radio Rediffusion in London.
External Affairs should discover the extent to which Australian movie newsreels were being shown in “free Asia,” Casey wrote. Noting that they had a good reputation, “strangely enough,” he suggested that Australia’s proximity to the region meant that “our” newsreels could be shown before those from Britain or the United States.
Casey agreed with Clarke that on the Colombo Plan, Australia was hiding its light under a bushel: “We can and should place more emphasis on the public relations content,” he wrote. “We should drag our feet on the economic aid side, and speed up the technical assistance side… that has inherently vastly more publicity potential,” he told Tange. Casey realised that positive people-to-people contacts were the best form of publicity for the plan. Noting that steps had already been taken to increase the number of Asian students in Australia, and that “we should expand our ideas about correspondence courses,” he also called for “new forms of initiative.” It was Casey’s impression that arrangements for Asian students were better in Melbourne than in Sydney and he asked to be informed if “things in Sydney needed improving.” The contentment of Asian students in Australia seemed dependent on there being some sympathetic person to “look after” them, Casey thought, before asking Tange whether such persons were “keeping adequate contact with ASIO to ensure that the Communists are not getting hold of them?”
Casey thought Clarke’s proposed good neighbour campaign was “important.” Here, he had “put his finger on something that is lacking in our set up.” Existing bilateral associations with India and Pakistan were rudimentary and did not amount to anything. External Affairs should take the initiative in the creation of an Australian–Asian Association. An association of the kind Casey had in mind with someone of “real consequence” as Chair, supported by good staff would have offices in Sydney and Melbourne only; Australia’s size would work against an all-Australian association, he believed. The Asian students in each capital (there would be state branches in the other cities) should be made honorary members of each. Such bodies would be able to do much that the government could not do or say, provided they were fed with “material privately.”
Concluding his note to Tange, Casey wrote:
We should keep in mind that the Colombo Plan can help SEATO. This means no more than realising that the Colombo Plan is a weapon in the Cold War, as well as an instrument to improve the standard of living in free Asia.I have become convinced that we should bring more Asian leaders to Australia, under the Colombo Plan or otherwise. The few that we have brought here have paid big dividends.
CASEY had some preliminary discussions about the formation of an Australia–Asia Association in February 1956, and spoke to Tange, Plimsoll and another senior External Affairs officer, Pat Shaw, about the Clarke report, including the “Colombo Plan side” of it. But there was no “Australia House” or ambassadorial Roller in Jakarta, nor a Southeast Asian tour by an Australian woman.
Over the coming years, however, External Affairs gradually expanded and refined its distribution of Foreign Office grey material. Some attempt was made to systematise distribution, with vast matrixes being drawn up showing which opinion leaders were supplied with which piece of propaganda. There was however little follow-up in terms of analysis of how, or even if, the grey material was used. In addition to its overseas posts, it targeted trade unionists, the intelligence community, federal cabinet, ministries, the press, the ABC and Radio Australia, the churches (with a magazine called Religious Digest), other members of parliament, including the indefatigable anti-communist, W.C. Wentworth, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell and his colleague, Kim Beazley, and federal parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Labor’s leader, H.V. Evatt, was not on the distribution list.
In August 1958, the Foreign Affairs Committee agreed unanimously that the communists were achieving considerable propaganda success in Australia. Views differed markedly, however, on whether the committee should take an active role in combating this “or whether it should urge the government to undertake additional activity in this field.” It was finally agreed that the committee’s chair, Sir Wilfrid Kent Hughes, should ascertain from Tange, “what was being done at present and … what additional activities might usefully be considered.” The combative Tange saw no reason why he should report to a parliamentary committee what was being done “by way of executive action or ministerial responsibility,” but told Hughes that if the committee wished to suggest an expanded distribution list his department could furnish extra material.
Despite several reminders by External Affairs, the Foreign Affairs Committee did nothing to produce a larger list, and after twelve months Tange considered a departmental submission canvassing alternative options. In what Tange thought was a “not very impressive list,” these included direct mailing, and bulk distribution to booksellers, Commonwealth and state institutions such as the Australian News and Information Bureau (see below), the service departments and the state education departments. Non-government organisations such as the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the CIA’s cultural front organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which since 1956 had been funding Quadrant magazine in Australia), were also named as possible distributors. Tange agreed that the department institute immediately a policy of cultivating editors, writers, radio commentators and trade union leaders “more fully than it does at present.” The Information Branch was prepared to do what it could to cultivate closer relations in order to plant “ideas and pieces of information,” but Booker’s successor, John McMillan thought it would be useful if it had a directive to serve as the basis for “developing mutual confidence with selected members of the press.”
A number of Clarke’s less contentious recommendations were also adopted. Today, they form the core of Australia’s public diplomacy effort, such as it exists. With a couple of notable exceptions, virtually every Southeast Asian political leader and many journalists have visited Australia courtesy of the government. Similar schemes exist for performing artists. Ironically, since Clarke thought that Hollywood was so dominant in the “theatre wars,” his recommendations concerning film financing and production appear to have been followed. The government had been funding documentaries through the Australian National Film Board, established by the Curtin government in 1945. A year after Clarke’s report, in 1956, Menzies replaced the board with the Commonwealth Film Unit, which, in 1973, with Labor again in power, was replaced by Film Australia.
There was a similar, albeit slower, course of events on the finance side. In 1970, the Gorton government established the Australian Film Development Corporation, which Gough Whitlam replaced with the Australian Film Commission in 1975. Both bodies had the same aim: to promote the creation and distribution of films in Australia as well as to preserve the country’s film history. They were funded in part by the national government and in part from its return on investments in film production as well as interest on film development loans. In 1998–99, Film Finance Corporation Australia was set up as a Howard government-owned corporation and took over the role of financing feature film and television production, with the Australian Film Commission concentrating on the funding of development, marketing and research work for the media. Film Australia became a separate entity.
Then, in 2008, the Rudd Government created a new agency, Screen Australia, which merged the major government film bodies Film Finance Corporation Australia, Film Australia, and the Australian Film Commission back into a single body, albeit with slightly different functions, roles and financing methods.
Other Clarke policy recommendations adopted by Australian governments include various “buy Australian” campaigns (with a ubiquitous Qantas-style kangaroo logo), the branding of Australian aid, and the establishment of at least a dozen regional and bilateral cultural foundations and business forums.
By 1976, back in London, the IRD was no longer secure. Following an internal Foreign Office investigation, Labour’s foreign minister, David Owen, disbanded the department in May 1977. Although an overt Australian overseas information capacity existed in one form or another from 1947, the government never developed an organisation to match the IRD. Chifley created the Department of Information to promote the Australian lifestyle internationally, particularly to intending post-war migrants. Like the film bodies, the propagandists were renamed according to which side of politics was in power. In 1950, Menzies turned the department into the Australian News and Information Bureau. In 1973, under Whitlam, the Bureau was rebranded as the Australian Information Service, which became Promotion Australia in 1986. In 1987, as the Australian Overseas Information Service, it was subsumed into the new Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as its Overseas Information Branch, or OIB.
The diplomats, preoccupied with amalgamating with the “tradies,” left OIB to wither on the vine until 1994, when the department finally abolished the branch and sacked or redeployed its remaining handful of journalists. Clarke had written a thriller, Golden Arrow, in 1955 and a history of the 11th Hussars. He approached the British authorities to do a book on the wartime deceptions, but got nowhere. In fact, books on the topic did not appear until the twenty-first century. He never married and died at the age of seventy-five. •
Alan Fewster is a former officer of the Overseas Information Branch of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
