Cold Light (93 page)

A
mbrose was in Australia not only as Edith’s husband, perhaps not because of her at all, but as a placement by the British SIS.

Between 1945 and 1948 there was a serious situation in the Australian Department of External Affairs, which was both a cause of concern in the UK and the US and a significant breakthrough in their intelligence-gathering. The Soviet Union’s code system had been broken because of sloppy procedures in the USSR’s Canberra embassy, which in turn had revealed that the USSR had established a spy network in Australia using members of the Australian Communist Party.

Because of these leaks, the British SIS helped to establish ASIO in Australia in 1949 under the Chifley Labor government.

It seems that the Communist Party had five members working in the Department of External Affairs who had been recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. They gave their information to a key Party official, Wally Clayton, who then gave the documents to a Soviet intelligence officer in the Canberra embassy, Semën Ivanovich Makarov. The leaked documents concerned secret American and English postwar foreign-policy planning, to which the Australian government was privy.

Ambrose had supplied material for British intelligence during the League period before the Second World War. After the war, the SIS asked the British Foreign Office to place Ambrose in Canberra at the High Commission to gain additional access to communist spy activities there.

Fortunately for the SIS, Edith had already formed a desire to return to Australia to find work there, preferably in the Department of External Affairs. This did not come about.

Ambrose’s work in this area was limited – described as SIS’s ‘ear to the ground’ – but it was something of a serendipitous coup when two members of the Party, Frederick and Janice, turned up in Edith’s life. Although not much of value was imparted, either informally or unintentionally, through this relationship, it was encouraged and condoned by the SIS and the High Commission.

Little of this context could be revealed to Edith by Ambrose at the time, and nor did it really need to be revealed.

By the time Ambrose was recalled, Western security services had sealed off the leaks to the USSR embassy and the CPA membership was dwindling, as was its influence in the trade- union movement and its financial strength, which came mainly from the USSR. The Party was also infiltrated by ASIO.

No Australian members of the Communist Party were charged with espionage after the Petrov Royal Commission, either because of insufficient evidence or because legal action would have required the revelation of how they had been detected, and hence would have revealed to the Soviet Union that their codes had been breached.

Ambrose had, quite early in their relationship, established that neither Janice nor Frederick were involved in the spying and that they had no knowledge of it. Edith thought he had enjoyed their company because they were outcasts and he himself was another sort of secret, covert, inner outcast.

These notes, and the Who Is Who in the Book that follows them, were compiled by the author from standard sources or other sources that the author considered reliable.

The League of Nations (1920–1946) was the world’s first effort at permanent, organised, worldwide international cooperation to prevent war and promote human wellbeing. Its headquarters were in Geneva and from 1936 housed in the
Palais des Nations
, the first building built and owned by the world.

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is responsible for supplying the British government with foreign intelligence. Together with the internal security service (MI5), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). It is frequently referred to by the name MI6, first used during World War II. The existence of MI6 was not officially acknowledged until 1994.

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is an original signatory.

Australia has also ratified the mechanisms that give individuals the right to complain to United Nations bodies about violations of their rights.

In 1945, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) set up Industrial Groups within the trade union movement to oppose communists in union elections. Around the same time ‘The Movement’, a largely Catholic, secret, anti-communist organisation led by Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, came to dominate many of these Industrial Groups and built up increasing influence within the Labor Party itself.

Between 1954 and 1957, supporters of The Movement were expelled from the ALP, which led to the formation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). This left the ALP in a weakened position electorally and it was out of government for twenty-three years after the defeat of the Chifley Government in 1949.

Historically, the London district of Bloomsbury is associated with the arts, education, economics, feminism, pacifism and social theory through the Bloomsbury group, a collective of friends and relatives who lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury and who met there in private homes through the early twentieth century. It was also influentially active in the early days of the BBC.

The Bloomsbury group opposed repressive practices of sexual inequality, and attempted to establish a social order based upon liberation from conventions and prevailing morality.

Several of its members had more than one sexual relationship simultaneously and practised experimental parenting and education theories.

Among its best known members were Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, and Mary (Molly) MacCarthy.

They were a bohemian elite who were advocates of much social change. Most of them lived well but led unconventional lives.

Shortly after her death, Edith’s major investment in Firestone Tyres became next to worthless because of a massive blunder with their faulty radial tyre 500, which caused at least thirty deaths and many other car accident injuries. Four million tyres had to be recalled. Firestone was heavily fined and its reputation seriously damaged, however it did eventually recover.

Edith and her mentor John Latham were both members of the Rationalists’ Association of Australia, which grew out of the parent organisation in the UK formed at the end of the nineteenth century.

Rationalist Associations were formed in Melbourne in 1906, in Brisbane in 1909, Sydney in 1912, and Perth and Adelaide in 1918. Rationalists stated their position as the adoption of ‘those mental attitudes which unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason’ and aimed at establishing ‘a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority’. They saw religion as their main opponent.

There were no doctrinal tests for membership and members included Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Georges Clemenceau, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, J. B. S. Haldane, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Professor L. Susan Stebbing, Havelock Ellis and Professor V. Gordon Childe.

The British Rationalist Press Association was responsible for the creation of the Thinker’s Library, a series of 140 books published between 1929 and 1951.

In the 1960s, the association dwindled and many of its members moved to the Humanist Society, which continued to espouse many of its values and causes.

Between 1952 and 1963, Britain conducted twelve atomic weapons tests and numerous nuclear weapons trials in Australia, which spread plutonium and other radioactive material over the test sites, particularly the Maralinga range in South Australia.

During the trials, many of the participants and, inadvertently, local Indigenous people were exposed to radioactivity.

In the 1990s, as a result of the McClelland Royal Commission, the Australian government received $45 million from the British to rehabilitate the sites, and paid $13.5 million in reparations to the Indigenous people affected by the tests.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is the centrepiece of the nuclear non-proliferation regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The NPT came into force in 1970 and Australia ratified the treaty in 1973.