In 1934, Czech writer and communist, Egon Erwin Kisch, sailed to Australia for what should have been a rather low-key event. He was the guest speaker of the Melbourne branch of the Movement Against War and Fascism. But the United Australia Party, (forerunner of the Liberal Party), had recently been re-elected, and one of their platforms was to eradicate the threat of communism. So they took it as an expression of their mandate to block Kisch’s attempts to land in Australia. The charge was led in the courts by the newly appointed Attorney General, Robert Menzies. His office had received information from the Special Branch in London, from an agent known only as ‘Snuffbox’, regarding a secret file about Kisch and his subversive activities.
The only problem was that the Australian government shouldn’t have had access to this file, even though they used it as the basis of their case against Kisch.
Kisch in Australia details the knots the Australian government tied themselves into in trying to keep Kisch out, and the loopholes Kisch leapt through in order to remain briefly in Australia. ‘This, then’, says the author, Heidi Zogbaum, ‘is the so-far untold story of how Kisch and Menzies, the great antagonists, came to be puppets dangling from invisible strings stretching all the way from London to Melbourne’.
Egon Kisch knew first hand what Hitler was capable of, and the direction in which he was leading Germany. Kisch himself was imprisoned by the Nazis in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire of February 1933, and later deported to Prague. Hitler used this national disaster as an excuse to weaken the liberties of his own citizens, and to target communists, socialists and Jewish intellectuals as dangerous dissidents.
As early as June 1933, Kisch was in England already speaking out against Hitler’s government. There he came to the attention of the Special Branch, a subsidiary of MI5. In September of that year he was prohibited from re-entering England. It was this ban that ‘Snuffbox’ referred to in his cablegrams to Australia the following year. So with little else to go on, other than loyalty to Britain and a fear of communism, the Australian government took steps to ensure Kisch did not repeat his message of peace, or his un-Australian criticisms of Hitler, on our shores.
When Kisch arrived in Fremantle on November 6 1934, his passport was confiscated and he was kept