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| Rupert Lockwood orating, the Domain, Sydney, early 1960s. Photo: Lou Horton. |
Abstract
This thesis explores aspects of the life, times, and career of Australian journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997). During the Cold War, Lockwood was one of the best known members of the Communist Party of
By contextualising the communist period of Lockwood’s life
in his overall life and times, the portrait of a significant Australian
journalist emerges, one who chose to leave the capitalist press for the
adversarial and counter sphere of labour movement journalism, the latter the
site of his work from 1940 until retirement in 1985. The thesis also explores
Lockwood’s considerable intellectual activity, and mounts a case for
recognition of the originality and sophistication of his largely unacknowledged
research and writings in the areas of Australian history, politics, and
political economy.
Overall, this thesis contributes empirical knowledge and
understandings to a number of aspects of Australian history: to labour movement
history generally, and specifically to communist and labour biography; to
journalism history; and to intellectual history. In so doing, it also
contributes to the understanding of Australia
Introduction (extract)
During 1969 via Communist Party of Australia (CPA) Tribune
journalist Harry Stein, I met the left journalist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997).
He was on the verge of leaving the CPA. Recently returned from assignment in
the USSR ,
Lockwood was looking for a place to rent. Harry asked me if I knew of accommodation;
the next-door flat was empty in the block where my wife and I rented in
Balmain, so Lockwood and his wife moved in. Subsequently Rupert and I became
friends, and remained so for the rest of his life. I delivered the eulogy at
his funeral in 1997, and composed his gravestone epitaph. From Rupert I learned
much about the less scrutinised by-ways of Australian political history;
listening to him, a gifted raconteur, was like listening to a visitor from a
parallel universe-Australia; the same Australia
I lived in, with the same chronology and characters as mainstream history, yet
in many ways so very, very different.
During the early 1980s I resolved to write Rupert’s
biography; I made some inroads, and wrote on aspects of his life. This was facilitated in part by a small
deposit of his papers he left in my care in 1984. However, my own
life-circumstances and the necessity of earning a living did not enable the
pursuit of this task. Historically too,
it was difficult, since an understanding of his life required access to
documentary materials not then in the public domain, including data in his
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) files, but more
particularly his extensive personal papers which were gathered and made
publicly available for the first time after his death. Also, as I explain
later, for a full account of his life, Australian Cold War historiography had
to dramatically change, which is what happened following the public release of
the Venona transcripts by US
authorities beginning in 1995. There came a time too in the early 1990s,
especially as his health declined, when I ceased to regard him as a
biographical subject, and regarded him instead as a human being and friend, to
be supported and helped, not quarried.
It also took his death and time to put critical distance between him,
me, and hagiography.
Following the death of Rupert in 1997, responsibility for the
care of his personal records passed into the care of his eldest daughter,
Penny. They did not come in one unified bulk collection, but had to be
assembled from a number of locations. Overall, this assemblage comprised a
substantial mass of materials, the bulk of which was created after the
mid-1950s. Much of Rupert’s early records were destroyed, along with the family
residence, in bushfires that ravaged the Sutherland Shire of southern Sydney
during the fire seasons of 1956-1957. Scrapbooks of Lockwood’s journalism also
perished at this time, apparently only one, containing some of his very early
journalism, surviving. Lockwood was a prolific writer, and tracking down his
work in a diversity of outlets, much of it uncatalogued and not the subject of
bibliographic attention, was one of the basic tasks of this study. Between 1997
and 2011, Penny passed her father’s records into the care of the National
Library of Australia (NLA). As MS 10121, they comprise fifteen metres of shelf
in ninety-seven manuscript boxes, though this may change, as it is my
understanding at the time of writing, there will be further, though small
overall, record deposits in due course. Examination of this material was, and
is, facilitated by the NLA Guide to the Papers of Rupert Lockwood
prepared by Donna Vaughan in 2012.
Having thus
introduced Rupert Lockwood, it is reasonable to ask, of all the Australian
journalists who have been, and of all the Australian communists who have been,
why does he warrant the special attention accorded to him in the following
study? I respond thus: during the period from late 1939, when he joined the
CPA, through to 1968/1969 when he left it, journalist Rupert Lockwood became one
of the Australia ’s best known
communists. A journalist by training and profession, he was “highly
intelligent, articulate and gutsy”; he was also a powerful orator, pamphleteer,
broadcaster, and historian. When Lockwood left the CPA, there was a great deal
of publicity nationally; his death in 1997 warranted national and international
attention. Amongst rank and file Australian communists during the time of his party
membership, Lockwood was highly regarded. During 1945 when future ASIO counter-intelligence operative Dr Michael
Bialoguski was a fourth year medical student at Sydney University, and began
his penetration of the CPA on behalf of the Commonwealth Investigation Service
(CIS), he came to the following understanding of Lockwood:
….Rupert Lockwood occupied a position of
great authority (within the CPA). It actually reminded me of the scholasticism
of the Middle Ages when any theological dispute was won merely by proving one’s
argument to be identical with a quotation from Aristotle.
In Sydney
communist circles…..it was sufficient to state “but Rupert Lockwood said so”—in
order to settle an argument beyond doubt.
Indeed, according
to the way Bialoguski saw it, “Communism was a religion and Rupert Lockwood a
high priest”.
Lockwood’s name is
inextricably linked to the Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), more
generally known as the Petrov Royal Commission, as a high profile, variously
recalcitrant and hostile, witness, author of Exhibit (Document) J. It was his
involvement in this event that propelled him to national notoriety.
Historically and politically, Document J, and therefore Lockwood, figure in the
politically traumatic ALP Split Waterford Split
But, as this study
demonstrates, there was more to Lockwood than all of this. From 1952 until
retirement in 1985, he was primarily either associate editor or editor of the Maritime
Worker, national journal of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF), part
of a communist team with “impressive talents” that headed up the federal office
of that union on the frontline of the Cold War in Australia
Lockwood was a member of the
CPA for about thirty years; his career as a reporter, journalist and writer
spanned over sixty years, more when his childhood experiences/training are
included, which is when he was introduced to the world of newspapers and
journalism. An active member of the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA),
he was one of three journalists responsible for drafting the AJA’s Code of
Ethics in 1942 (adopted nationally in 1944). Further, the bulk of Lockwood’s
career as a journalist was either with non-communist publications, including
the Melbourne
Lockwood tends to enter the
Australian historical record, described as/referred to as “the communist
journalist”. This term was generally used by the media in reporting the
proceedings of the Petrov Royal Commission, and continued thereafter. In a
sense there is an appropriate logic to this description, as Lockwood was, at
the time, a member of the CPA, and a journalist, hence the term has a certain
legitimacy. However, this was not the
intent of the original use, as the term was coined at the height of the Cold
War in Australia, and with regard to Lockwood at the same time the press was referring
to him as a spy, and to Document J, the cause of his notoriety, as a
‘scurrilous’ and ‘filthy’ piece of writing. Apart from its appropriateness,
therefore, the term “communist journalist” was, and is, a pejorative.
Non-communist journalists at the same time, or subsequently, were not
described/identified as such, while the term ‘communist’ is a fluid term,
having many political and propagandist uses, its meaning and understanding
often depending on historical/political contexts and user intent. Further, the
description is a limiting term with regard to Lockwood, since it ignores at
least half of his professional life, and makes no attempt to identify or
acknowledge the talents and experiences he brought to the service of the
Australian Left and to the labour movement, and what he did in the service of
both.
Also with regard to Lockwood, the
term ‘communist journalist’ serves to both prescribe and proscribe understanding
of the journalist and his work, the word ‘communist’ carrying considerable emotional
and political connotations with the aim/effect of undermining the veracity of
the word ‘journalist’. The term connotes a sense of ‘otherness’, of being
ideological in a way that journalists working for capitalist media outlets
were/are not, and therefore somehow limited, inferior, tainted, less credible,
not a real journalist. Continued
use of this term pigeonholes Lockwood, metaphorically chains him to a single
event in Australian history, works to frustrate acknowledgement of his
significant contributions to Australian journalism, and effectively closes the
door on the life and times of a significant Australian journalist and the way
he worked at and interpreted his profession. The following study does not aim
at a total biography of Lockwood, but will focus on three main aspects of his
life and career—as journalist, communist, and intellectual, roles that at times
meshed and intersected. (End of extract)
The entire thesis is available
with open access, online at http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3942
