Adam Carr

Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne 
Events leading to the formation of the 
Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 
1914-37

6. Establishing the Council for Civil Liberties

The Book Censorship Abolition League

The civil liberties issue which aroused the ire of intellectuals 
more than any other in the early 1930s was the censorship of books, 
and it was this issue which first brought together many of the 
people who were later to become founding members of the ACCL. The 
regulation of the importation of books at this time was the 
responsibility of the Customs Department, and thus ultimately in the 
hands of the Minister for Trade and Customs. "The Minister for 
Customs. . . in practice. . . enjoys the powers of a dictator, to 
determine what the people of Australia may read," wrote Mac Ball, 
one of the leading critics of book censorship. "In other countries 
the post-war dictators are busy putting out the lights of liberty. 
If the Australian people care at all for their liberty of thought 
they cannot continue to tolerate a censorship so secret, so 
intellectually disreputable, and so politically irresponsible."[78]

From January 1933 the minister was Tommy White, an irascible former 
wartime pilot and (despite being Alfred Deakin's son-in-law) an 
extreme conservative even by the standards of the time. "It was in 
1934 that the banning of books by the Commonwealth Government became 
a really serious obstacle to cultural and political education," 
wrote Ball. "Early in 1935 an examination of the Customs list showed 
that, while in December 1933, there were 66 political works on the 
banned list, 91 more political works were banned in the thirteen 
months between then and the end of January 1935. . . In 1934 the 
Communist Manifesto, Lenin's State and Revolution and Stalin's 
Leninism, as well as his Results of the First Five Year Plan were 
prohibited imports. Such works are of pivotal importance for any one 
who want to understand communism as a political theory, or Russia as 
a huge economic experiment."[79]

This state of affairs led Ball and a number of other concerned 
people, many of them connected with Melbourne University, to form 
the Book Censorship Abolition League (BCAL) in November 1934. The 
objective of the BCAL was "the abolition of all forms of 
censorship," but pending the abolition of censorship, the League 
asked that "the censorship be immediately modified to admit freely 
to Australia all books and publications circulating in England." 
Ball became the BCAL's chairman and the League's committee included 
Roy Rawson and Theo Lucas. The League's supporters included Dr James 
Duhig, the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Percy Clarey of the 
Victorian Trades Hall Council, the former Nationalist minister and 
author Frederic Eggleston, the lawyer John Spicer (later Attorney-
General in postwar Liberal governments) and Gavin Greenlees of the 
Australian Journalists' Association.[80]

Despite what Ball calls White's "attitude of frivolous 
indifference," such a high-powered body was able to force its 
attentions on even such a reluctant minister. "The increasing 
pressure of public opinion, with powerful support from almost the 
whole of the Australian press, gradually impelled him to adopt a 
more serious attitude, but the replies he made to criticism clearly 
showed his personal determination not to relax the blockade," wrote 
Ball. At a meeting with a BCAL delegation led by Ball, White 
insisted that the government "could not allow Communist propaganda 
to be imported without restriction."[81] The League took its 
campaign to the public, with the support of the short-lived evening 
paper the Star, which organised a public meeting on censorship at 
the Melbourne Town Hall, attended by 3,000 people.

In August 1935 the BCAL went over White's head. The real power in 
the UAP government was Robert Menzies, and it was to him that Ball 
now turned. Ball had met Menzies at the University in the 1920s, and 
they were neighbours in Kew. "They often took together the long walk 
along Victoria Parade into town, to their respective places of 
work."[82] Menzies was no admirer of White's, and held the view that 
he as Attorney-General should be in charge of censorship. Ball later 
recalled making a personal approach to Menzies about a number of 
banned books. "Neither of us has time to waste," Menzies replied, 
"The banned books to which you refer will be unbanned in the 
morning."[83] In September 1935 responsibility for censorship was 
transferred to Menzies, and the censorship regime relating to 
political books was immediately relaxed. The BCAL became inactive by 
the end of the year, when the ACCL took over its functions.

The need for a civil liberties organisation

Menzies, curious as it may now seem, was the Great White Hope of 
Australian progressives when he became Attorney-General in 1934. He 
certainly had no sympathies with the left, as he showed in the Kisch 
case, but he was by the standards of the time an intellectual and a 
liberal, a brilliant student and lawyer, well-read and with 
pretensions to literary and artistic tastes, and without the rigid 
legalistic authoritarianism that had marked Latham's tenure of the 
office. Having persuaded Menzies of the merits of liberalising the 
censorship of books, the Melbourne liberals, many of whom knew 
Menzies personally (it is always important to remember how small the 
Australian intellectual and legal worlds were at this time), hoped 
to persuade him to shift the government's policy on other matters, 
such as the use of the Immigration Act for political purposes and 
the threats to freedom of speech in the Crimes Act. 

But Menzies proved a disappointment. In 1935 the political clauses 
of the Crimes Act were invoked: the CPA and the Friends of the 
Soviet Union were asked to show cause why they should not be 
declared illegal. Eugene Gorman wrote in the Melbourne Truth: 
"Surely the government has gone mad! Mad with vanity, with power 
lust, with hate of the people it purports to represent."[84] The 
case dragged on for two years and was eventually thrown out by 
Justice H V Evatt of the High Court, the same judge who had released 
Kisch the previous year (these cases were the beginning of a 
lifelong and momentous mutual antipathy between Menzies and Evatt). 
In 1936, Menzies became embroiled a further controversy, an 
immigration case involving one Mrs Mabel Freer, whom the Country 
Party Interior Minister, Tom Paterson, wished to exclude from 
Australia by use of the dictation test, on the grounds (not stated 
publicly) that she was having an affair with a married man. Menzies 
as Attorney-General had to defend the government's decision not to 
review the case, although privately he disapproved of Paterson's 
action. The issue ran for months in the press and did great damage 
to Menzies's reputation as a liberal force in the government.[85]

The frustration of liberal hopes that the departure of Latham and 
his replacement by Menzies would lead to a relaxation of government 
policy, particularly in relation to the Crimes Act, was an important 
immediate stimulus for the founding of a civil liberties 
organisation. So did the ominous trend of world affairs after 1933, 
with the coming to power of Hitler and the evident breakdown of the 
postwar settlement represented by the League of Nations, which 
failed its first big test in the Abyssinia crisis of 1935.[86] The 
issues of political and intellectual freedom "tended to crystallise 
in the midst of heightening tension in Europe and government 
ineptitude, parochialism and philistinism at home," writes Watson. 
"Australia could be seen as betraying the democratic heritage 
bestowed on her by British common law and her own great liberals of 
the turn of the century." This last point was particularly important 
to radicals of an older generation like the writers Vance and Nettie 
Palmer, who had known the Victorian liberals George Higinbotham and 
H B Higgins (Nettie Palmer's father), and who became early ACCL 
supporters. "The initially small group who formed the ACCL shared, 
not so much agreement on the specific purpose implied by the name, 
but a common attitude of resistance to whole canvass of reaction 
since the war years."[87]

The ACCL established

In his opening address at the first organising meeting for the ACCL 
(referred to in the Prologue), Geoffrey Leeper remarked on "the need 
for such a body as the English National Council for Civil Liberties. 
He pointed out that a number of people had become disturbed at 
phenomena in recent Australian history which might be described as 
attacks on the liberties of the people. He said that a similar 
feeling in England had led to the formation of the National C for C 
L, and compared the Incitement to Disaffection Act, the provisions 
of which are opposed by that body, with the political portion of the 
Commonwealth Crimes Act. He considered that the putting into 
operation of this Act could not be in the best interests of the 
community. He commented on the fact that the expression of certain 
opinions made one liable to heavy penalties, while other types of 
propaganda went unchecked. He remarked that the works of Hitler 
'which were perhaps sufficient condemnation in themselves' were 
allowed to circulate freely here, while the works of Stalin, surely 
an equally important figure, were forbidden."[88]

A motion to establish a council for civil liberties was then moved 
by Atkinson and seconded by Davies. "A short resumé of the objects 
and scope of action of the English body, which had been circulated 
among those present, was accepted as an expression of the aims of 
the new body."[89] An Executive Committee of Leeper, Fitzpatrick, 
Lucas and Davies was chosen, with Fitzpatrick assuming the role of 
secretary - a position he would hold for nearly 30 years. Leeper 
was in effect acting president, although this was intended only as 
an interim arrangement, and the committee soon set about finding a 
permanent president. It was decided that the council would be 
launched at a public meeting in the new year. But first the 
imprimatur of the British National Council for Civil Liberties was 
apparently required. "It was decided that further information about 
the English organisation should be sought by the committee. The 
committee was given power to . . . secure co-operation and, if 
possible, affiliation, with the English NCCL. The committee was 
instructed by the meeting to call a general meeting of the 
organisation when progress had been made along the lines laid down 
in these motions."

There are several interesting aspects to this initial meeting, which 
set the pattern for the ACCL's activities in its early years. Those 
present were drawn largely from Melbourne's intellectual and 
artistic circles: lawyers, artists, journalists and academics, 
mostly affiliated with or graduates of Melbourne University. Despite 
the emphasis on issues of importance to the labour movement (the 
anti-union sections of the Crimes Act, the use of the deportation 
power against unionists), no representatives of the labour movement 
were present, despite invitations to the THC. "The early members of 
the Executive Committee, almost without exception, inhabited the 
more fashionable eastern suburbs of Melbourne."[90] This 
contradiction, between the ACCL's middle class and intellectual 
personnel and its desire (especially Brian Fitzpatrick's desire) to 
become in effect an auxiliary of the labour movement, and more 
particularly its radical wing, was to become a continuing source of 
conflict.

The range of civil liberties issues set out in the ACCL's initial 
resumé is also notable. They deal mainly with the defence of 
political activism: of political speeches and journalism against 
censorship, of unions' and radical groups' rights to hold 
processions and public meetings, of foreign-born union militants 
against deportation, of workers against dismissal for political 
reasons. These concerns all arose directly from the industrial and 
political conflicts which had racked Australia almost continuously 
since World War I, and which had reached new heights during the 
Depression. It was largely an agenda of the labour movement and the 
left. There was no mention of censorship of a non-political 
character, such as the banning of books or films for sexual content 
- indeed the expression "such censorship as interferes with civil 
liberties" seems designed specifically to exclude artistic 
censorship from the council's agenda. There was no mention of the 
rights of women (despite the prominent role played by women in 
forming the ACCL). There was no mention of Aboriginal people or of 
the White Australia Policy (though 'Victimisation for racial. . . 
reasons' was mentioned). As Dorothy Fitzpatrick observes, "We were 
not a human rights organisation in the modern sense."[91]

Finding a role

Having formally established itself, the ACCL then did nothing public 
for five months, while Vance and Nettie Palmer (as the only ACCL 
founders with international reputations) corresponded with Ronald 
Kidd of the NCCL in London seeking affiliation, which was felt to be 
necessary before a public launch for the council could be 
contemplated (Kidd was actually nominated as a Vice-President of the 
ACCL, though nothing came of this). The imperial link having been 
secured through a letter from the NCCL in April 1936, a public 
meeting was organised, to be held at Centenary Hall on 6 May. The 
other important step taken during this hiatus was the recruitment of 
Herbert "Joe" Burton as the ACCL's first President. Burton was in 
many ways emblematic of the organisation he was to lead for four 
years. A middle-class intellectual, a member of the Melbourne 
University faculty, a "christian socialist," a Queensland Rhodes 
Scholar who had studied at Oxford under R H Tawney. Dorothy 
Fitzpatrick remembers his as "quite unlike the other university 
lecturers, brilliant but retiring, with a crewcut and a slightly 
teddy-bearish look. People never gave him credit for being as good 
as he was because of his diffident manner. He was not an extremist, 
although he had communist friends." He took a keen interest in 
foreign affairs, writing and speaking at the university in defence 
of the League of Nations and against militarism.[92] Although he and 
Brian Fitzpatrick were later to fall out, Dorothy Fitzpatrick 
remembers them being close at this time, and in fact Brian 
Fitzpatrick asked Burton to be the council's first president.[93]

At the public meeting, with Eugene Gorman in the chair, Burton 
delivered the main speech and moved the adoption of the draft 
constitution prepared by the interim executive over the summer. He 
spoke of "the Fascist tendency observable in many countries today 
and the need for opposing it."[94] Jack Barry, seconding the motion, 
pointed out that the constitution proposed was "such that persons of 
various shades of opinion but united in a desire for freedom would 
be able to give the Council their support." Gorman then "proposed 
Mr Herbert Burton as the first President of the Council. Mr Barry 
seconded the motion, which was carried unanimously. . . Mr Burton 
took the chair and called for nominations of Vice-Presidents. . ." 
The Vice-Presidents included Gorman, Barry, Professor Sandy Gibson, 
James Hill, Max Meldrum, Bill Slater MLA[95], Professor Harold 
Woodruff,[96] J G Atkinson of the Henry George League, and Vance and 
Nettie Palmer. The Executive Committee would include Theo Lucas 
(Secretary),[97] Leeper, Mollie Bayne (Treasurer), Dorothy Davies 
and Brian Fitzpatrick. "Mr Burton then asked Mr Fitzpatrick to 
explain something of the work the Council could undertake, and the 
requirements for its success. Mr Fitzpatrick suggested that it would 
be desirable in the future for the Council to have a publication of 
its own, or, at least, to issue a news-sheet to its members as the 
English Council does. A central office would also be desirable. The 
Council should embark on an educational campaign. For these projects 
money would be necessary. At any time it might be necessary, too, to 
call a large public meeting."

Once established, the ACCL had to decide which issues to tackle with 
the limited resources available. Although Fitzpatrick and Barry saw 
the repeal of the "political" sections of the Crimes Act and an end 
to the political misuse of the Immigration Act as the council's 
principal tasks (because these were the most important issues to the 
trade unions and the left), clearly there were forces in the council 
who wanted it to adopt a wider agenda. The ACCL's second public 
meeting, in June 1936 ("on (probably) the most inclement evening of 
the year"[98]), coincided with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil 
War, and the themes were "the Fascist countries, the threats to 
democracy in other parts of the world, and. . . dangerous Australian 
legislation, including the political portion of the Commonwealth 
Crimes Act."[99] With Burton in the chair, Fitzpatrick spoke on 
"International Politics and the Liberty of the Subject," and Barry 
on "Threats to Australian Democracy." The next public meeting, in 
August, went even further afield, being on "Freedom and the Slum 
Problem," with Dr John Dale, the City of Melbourne's health officer, 
speaking on "Health, Housing and Liberty," and Gorman asking "Are 
Rich and Poor Equal Before the Law?"[100]

It seems curious that the ACCL's second public meeting should have 
been on social questions only tangentially relevant to the central 
issues it was founded to deal with. Discussion of the "slum 
problem," with its social hygienist overtones, was a common middle-
class preoccupation in Australia at this time, and its appearance on 
the ACCL's agenda is an indication of the strongly middle-class 
character of the organisation. The ACCL's papers show that virtually 
everyone taking part in its correspondence lived in the eastern 
suburbs, with Toorak, South Yarra, Armadale, Kew and Hawthorn well 
represented. Virtually the only exceptions to this were the ALP 
politicians Bill Slater and Maurice Blackburn. The labour movement 
remained suspicious. "I had a talk to Comrade Percy Clarey 
yesterday," wrote Leeper in November 1936. "Nothing terribly 
definite to report, he agrees it would be more tactful for us to 
wait until ACTU had made a decision before doing anything. . . the 
Trades Hall would probably sniff very loudly if we approached them 
as a new-formed body (all mushrooms are suspect)."[101]

At its next meeting in October, the council ventured, perhaps 
inevitably, into international affairs, with "Mrs Vance Palmer" 
speaking on "Spain in Ferment: Impressions of the Civil War by an 
eye-witness who is also a trained observer" and the Rev R Wilson 
Macauley in the chair.[102] In November it was "Political Censorship 
Again," with Professor L F Giblin (Ritchie Professor of Economics) 
and Ball protesting against the banning of the Eisenstein film Ten 
Days that Shook the World and the Clifford Odets's anti-Nazi play 
Till the Day I Die, which had been banned by the Victorian Chief 
Secretary at the behest of Prime Minister Lyons, who was in turn 
acting on a request from the German Consul-General.[103] This was 
followed by an ACCL delegation to the Chief Secretary to ask him to 
lift the ban on the Odets play, and, when that was refused, "the 
Council considered it necessary to organise, at short notice, a 
meeting of public protest against the Chief Secretary's action in 
refusing to the Workers' Theatre Group permission to present the 
play."[104]

So it was not until 1937 that the council was able to embark on what 
Fitzpatrick and Barry, at least, saw as its real mission, the 
campaign to secure the repeal of the "political" sections of the 
Crimes Act. This began with the launch of the ACCL's first 
publication, The Case Against the Crimes Act, written by Barry [105] 
Seven thousand copies of the pamphlet were distributed, mainly 
through left-wing trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering Union 
reprinted it in its journal. The pamphlet described the Act as 
"Australia's most retrogressive enactment. . . a product of hysteria 
and fear. It disfigures our democracy as Australia's contribution to 
the postwar reactionary movement."[106] Watson describes it as "a 
forceful polemic, backed by a broad frame of reference, apparently 
thorough research, and a manifest understanding of the law." It 
certainly seems to have been effective, because an ACCL deputation 
was able to persuade Menzies that the objectionable sections of the 
Act should be reformed. In September Menzies announced that the 
prosecutions of the CPA and the Friends of the Soviet Union would be 
abandoned, and that the Act would be "reviewed" after the 1937 
elections. The ACCL thus proved for the first time that, despite its 
genteel accents, it could be a useful ally for the labour movement 
and the left.[107]

Footnotes

[78] Ball, "The Australian censorship," 9
[79] Ball papers, NLA 7851, box 18, dealing with BCAL. Individual 
items within this box are not numbered.
[80] List in Ball papers
[81] Quoted by Ball, Ball papers
[82] Martin, 201
[83] Martin, 202
[84] Quoted by Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 64
[85] Martin, 204
[86] Andrews, Isolationism and Appeasement in Australia, 194, 
discusses the impact of the Abyssinia crisis in Australia.
[87] Watson, "Anti-Communism in the thirties,"  47
[88] As noted above, direct quotes are from the ACCL Minute Book, in 
Leeper's handwriting, in the Fitzpatrick papers,  NLA 4965/1/19894.
[89] See Appendix 2
[90] Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 79
[91] Dorothy Fitzpatrick interview
[92] "Do Sanctions Mean War?" Farrago, 20 May 1936. "The 
Chancellor and Anzac Day," Farrago,  16 June 1936
[93] Fitzpatrick's letter to Burton on the latter's resignation as 
president in 1940 makes this clear. "You were originally nominated 
on my suggestion, made more than four years ago. Perhaps you will 
accept, as made in good faith, my assurance that I think I did well 
for the Council in that particular." Brian Fitzpatrick to Herbert 
Burton, 3 April 1940, letter in Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/572. 
[94] Direct quotes are from the ACCL Minute Book, Fitzpatrick papers, 
NLA 4965/1/19894
[95] Slater was an ALP MLA 1917-47 and MLC 1949-60, Attorney-General 
in six ALP state governments between 1924 and 1955. He had great 
prestige in the ALP and the unions and his recruitment was the 
result of Fitzpatrick's determination to link the ACCL to the labour 
movement. He was the first Australian Minister to the USSR in 1942. 
Browne, Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament 1900-84, 
193
[96] Professor of Bacteriology at Melbourne University.
[97] Lucas remained officially Secretary of the ACCL until she moved 
to Sydney in 1939, when she was succeeded by Fitzpatrick. But it is 
clear that Fitzpatrick dominated the Executive from the start, and 
that Lucas's role was to carry out the everyday secretarial work.
[98] Theo Lucas to D Gillison [of the Argus], 26 June 1936, 
Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/104
[99] Theo Lucas to Dr Omero Schiassi, 4 June 1936, Fitzpatrick 
papers, NLA 4965/1/84
[100] Theo Lucas to the ABC, 30 June 1936, Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 
4965/1/106
[101] Geoffrey Leeper to Theo Lucas, 23 November 1936, Fitzpatrick 
papers, NLA 4965/1/179)
[102] Theo Lucas to the Argus, 2 October 1936, Fitzpatrick papers, 
NLA 4965/1/142
[103] Theo Lucas to Iris Turnbull of radio station 3DB, 1 November 
1936, Fitzpatrick papers, NLA 4965/1/169
[104] Theo Lucas to "the Secretary," 5 November 1936, Fitzpatrick 
papers, NLA 4965/1/173)
[105] A complete draft of the pamphlet is in the Barry papers in 
Barry's handwriting. Barry papers, NLA 2505/9/10
[106] Quoted in Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 83
[107] Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick, 84