This is a tweaked version of an editorial I wrote in Overland in 1999. I am inspired to revive this 15-year-old piece by Coleman's bizarre appearance on Q&A last night.
The calls to examine the Australian-Soviet documents in the Moscow Literary archives have grown in volume over the past year.
Frank Devine has (via an article in The Australian, 19 April) added his name to the list of those arguing that the documents should be photocopied and housed in the National Library of Australia. I couldn't agree more. The whole truth must be revealed for us to understand our history properly. The whole truth, however, means revealing the perfidy of the right as well as that of the left.
Readers are already aware of my thwarted attempts to get into the (laughably named) Cultural Freedom archives. I have previously discussed the phone call I made to Peter Coleman, one of the trustees, during which he declined my request (Editorial, 153). I didn't describe the way he became increasingly annoyed throughout the conversation. He referred to "your sort of people" and made disparaging comments about the quality of overland's editing after the death of Stephen Murray-Smith. He said that he had to discuss my request with another trustee. I asked why, given my very clear request, it was so difficult to make a decision. Just what was he afraid of? Coleman then became very agitated and said loudly words to the effect that he didn't want people like me throwing mud at his friends. Before hanging up he told me to "Fuck off!"
More recently, in a radio interview with Julie Rigg on Radio National, Coleman gave a different reason: my letter was too brief.
In his Australian opinion piece, Devine gave yet another interpretation of this phone call. Coleman apparently refused me access simply because "he dislikes [me] intensely". Perhaps Coleman is by nature quick to form intense opinions of people he has never met, on the strength of a brief, polite letter and a tense, five-minute phone conversation.
Whether the is-he-a-good-bloke? test is a good criterion for preventing a researcher from seeing archival documents is another matter. Devine does Coleman a big disservice in interpreting his actions in this way. The excuse he offers for him makes him look a hypocrite. However, I suspect Coleman's reasons were more than personal and were, to use Devine's words, a case of "fleeing to ideology for comfort".
My interpretation is that there is information in the Cultural Freedom archives that Coleman does not want me to see.
The upshot of all this is that during my recent research trip to Canberra, I never did get to see the documents I was looking for. But I have more than Peter Coleman to blame for that. ASIO, the organization that broke into people's homes and offices to steal copies of their writings and other records and then copy them for the CIA, prevented me from seeing the true extent of a national disgrace. Document after document in the ASIO Archives has crucial names, dates and times expunged. Who did the dobbing, who was transferring the information, who received it: all left blank, covered over, crossed out and made illegible, or cut out. Some pages have been so censored that all that is left is a narrow frame: a window through which you can see nothing but a sheepish, embarrassed librarian.
Yet the scissors, pen and paste people are only human and some names do get through the censoring process. As Les Louis's Cold War Dossier has already revealed and Stuart Macintyre reiterates in this issue, ASIO records indicate that Peter Ryan supplied ASIO with information on Melbourne academic, Max Crawford. Ryan was the one-time publisher of Manning Clark at MUP and the critic who arguably set the ball rolling in Clark's posthumous harassment (aided by Robert Manne's Quadrant, Chris Mitchell's Courier Mail, Les Murray and several others). On the same theme, Lucy Sussex discusses the strange case of deliberate and apparently self-confessed ASIO-dobber, J.K. Moir. And Cassandra Pybus delves deeply into Quadrant and James McAuley's CIA connections. We plan a series of such exposés over the next few years.
There is a need for Australians to come clean about the espionage work and dirty deeds of all our intellectual forebears. Some Australian communist writers were active Stalinists or unwilling dupes of the Soviet Union. This fact clouds overland's history and we are perfectly happy for the truth to come out. So I for one echo Devine's call for the photocopying of the documents which apply to Australian writing in the State Literary Archive in Moscow and their housing in the National Library of Australia. It would be an immensely valuable archive and one which should be funded by the Australian Research Council.
But why should we end there? We could then move on to the Australian Archives and get all of the ASIO collection out in the open. Let's 1) acquire the Moscow archives and 2) open up the ASIO collection and 3) remove the restrictions from the Cultural Freedom papers. (To digress only slightly, I'd also like to see a push for access to files, probably held at the Vatican, which illuminated the extent to which B.A. Santamaria, for example, was 'doing the bidding of a foreign power', a criticism so often hurled at Australian communists.)
Historians of every stamp and flavour could then get into these collections and perform their proper role of telling Australians their history whole. Until Devine and Coleman begin to call for such a broad history, and not just the ideologically blinkered story of the 'shame of the left', we can't even begin to take their calls seriously.
Devine believes a movement is afoot to prevent the photocopying of the Moscow archives: what he calls, in a disgracefully facile analogy, "an almost Kosovan attempt to strip us of our identity". (And, is he suggesting that the Kosovars are engaged in ethnic cleansing?) But who is trying to stop this process? No-one I know. All serious scholars of Australian-Soviet literary relations will be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of seeing and reporting on these records. The "underground rumble" is a Courier-Mail-Coleman-Devine beat-up which justifies their own ideologically myopic politics. Unlike the records in the ASIO archives, there are no real names to be excised from this totally imagined history.
In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (29 April 1999), P.P. McGuinness complained that contemporary left-wing commentators were being too hard on the anti-communists: "One does not expect the former communists to go around apologizing for all their sins and errors of the past, and will judge them on their present behaviour. Why not extend the same charity to the anti-communists?"
Just what are their past sins that McGuinness mentions? He certainly seems to know more about these sins than those without access to the Quadrant, ASIO and Cultural Freedom archives. However, this whole issue is not about blame, it is about archival freedom and openness.
McGuinness laments the passing of a culture of decency where people on both sides could treat each other with respect: "Stephen Murray-Smith, the first editor of overland, was a good and large-spirited man who was well-liked by many who did not agree with him politically. The same was true of James McAuley, the first editor of Quadrant."
From all accounts this is largely true. But in McGuinness's curiously evenhanded and temperate article, one vital difference remains archivally buried. Murray-Smith was kept under ASIO surveillance for most of his adult life. McAuley was part of the team doing the surveillance. This is the kind of truth we all need to know and to remember.
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