Recently I was interviewed on the ABC 7.30 ACT television program about my Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) file. It was a human interest story to accompany an item about the current exhibition called 'Persons of Interest: The ASIO Files', in Sydney at the Justice and Police Museum. I had first learned in passing of the existence of this file from a Canberra Times journalist, Philip Dorling, sometime in 2008. It took me more than a year until February 2010 to eventually obtain my file after applying to the National Archives of Australia.
In March 2010, after reading my file and noting the gaps, I applied for internal reconsideration of the exempted information not released, but to no avail. I haven't appealed further.
The documents
It is a story that begins when I was a PhD student at the Flinders University of South Australia in the early 1970s, working on communism and anti-communism in Australian politics from 1949–1966, the Menzies years.
Some documents from the South Australian branch of the Catholic Social Studies Movement came into my hands. The story of these documents, now lodged in the Butlin Archives at the Australian National University as the Edward F. Farrell Collection, is an intriguing tale in itself and has recently been examined by Dr Malcolm Saunders in the academic journal Labour History, November 2010.
I was given the documents in a somewhat battered, brown suitcase when I was tutoring in political science by one of my students, Fr John Hepworth, now the Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion in Australia, who told me that he had come across them in the garage ceiling of a nearby Catholic presbytery where he was then based as a young Catholic priest.
They include some correspondence between the Adelaide and Sydney branches of the Movement in the 1940s and 1950s at a time of high drama within the Movement and the Labor Party surrounding the Labor Split and the creation of the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party. Farrell was the senior Movement officer in Adelaide at that time, and sided with his Archbishop, Matthew Beovich, who opposed the Movement's role in the Labor Split.
I brought them with me in the suitcase when I first came to Canberra to work at the ANU in 1978. Before then I had delved into some of these documents to write an article for the May 1976 issue of Labour History called 'United States Government Assistance