‘In my file, I am two different people’: Max Gluckman and A.L. Epstein, the Australian National University, and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 1958–60

ABSTRACT

Security services in the Cold War introduced an ethos of secrecy, where state persecution of academics without due process could be justified by the imputation of communism. Australian security services viewed the work of social anthropologists as providing a perfect cover for subversive activities among undeveloped peoples. This applied especially to anthropologists seeking to conduct research in the Australian colony of Papua New Guinea. Australian security services surveillance of suspected subversives was assisted by information from MI5 and security services in the African colonies.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic freedom
• subversion
• surveillance
• persecution
• colonial rule
• Papua New Guinea
• anthropologists

Acknowledgements

The author expresses appreciation for the helpful comments of two anonymous referees on an earlier version of this article. He also thanks Christine Winter, Rob Gordon, Valerie Munt, and Kevin Yelvington for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Christopher Andrew, “The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community and the Anglo-American Connection,” Intelligence and National Security 4, no. 2 (1989): 226–30; Frank Cain, “Venona in Australia and its Long-Term Ramifications,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 234. See also Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes. Australia’s KGB Spy Network, 1944–50 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998).

² Peter Morton, Fire Across the Desert: Woomera and The Anglo-Australian Joint Project, 1946–80 (Canberra: AGPS, 1989).

³ The Argus (Melbourne), 11 November 1949.

⁴ For detailed discussion regarding the foundation of ASIO see Laurence W. Maher, “The Lapstone Experiment and the Beginnings of ASIO,” Labour History, no. 64 (1993): 103–18; Andrew, “The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community,” 223–56; David Horner, The Spy Catchers. The Official History of ASIO 1949–63 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014), 33–121; Robert Manne, The Petrov Affair (Melbourne: Text, 2004). For relations, especially intelligence sharing with MI5, ASIO, and American intelligence agencies, see Horner, Spy Catchers, passim; and Andrew, “The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community.”

⁵ After 23 years of Conservative government, a Labour government under Gough Whitlam was elected in December 1972.

⁶ Laurence W. Maher, “Downunder McCarthyism: The Struggle Against Australian Communism 1945–60: Part One,” Anglo-American Law Review 27 (1998): 343.

⁷ Robert Manne, “ASIO’s Hunt for Spies and Communists Shows Flawed Intelligence,” The Monthly, 17 January 2015. The Australian population in 1960 was 10.3 million.

⁸ Giora Goldman, “The British Government and the Challenge of McCarthyism in the Early Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 1 (2010): 62. See also Phillip Deery, “‘Running with the Hounds’: Academic McCarthyism and New York University, 1952–53,” Cold War History 10, no. 4 (2010): 469–92; David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Anthropological Intelligence (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus. The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–55 (New York: OUP, 1992); and Dustin M. Wax, ed., Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

⁹ Maher, “Downunder McCarthyism,” 341–89, 438–71; Manne, ”ASIO’s Hunt for Spies and Communists.”

¹⁰ Brian Martin, Intellectual Suppression: Australian Case Histories – Analysis and Responses (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1986); Phillip Deery, “Scientific Freedom and Postwar Politics: Australia,1945–55,” Historical Records of Australian Science 13, no. 1 (2000): 1–18; Phillip Deery, “Remembering ASIO,” Overland no. 203 (2011): 51–8; Hannah Forsyth, “The Russel Ward Case: Academic Freedom in Australia During the Cold War,” History Australia 11, no. 3 (2014): 31–52; David McKnight, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 145–55; Fiona Capp, Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals 1920–60 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1993); Fay Anderson, “Into the Night,” Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 125 (2005): 60–80; Geoffrey Gray, ”‘A Great Deal of Mischief can be Done’: Peter Worsley, the Australian National University, the Cold War and Academic Freedom, 1952–54,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 100, no. 1 (2015): 25–44; Lachlan Clohesy, “Australian Cold Warrior: The Anti-Communism of W.C. Wentworth” (PhD thesis, Victoria University, Melbourne, 2010); Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, Red Professor. The Cold War Life of Fred Rose (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2015); Valerie Munt, “Australian Anthropology, Ideology and Political Repression: The Cold War Experience of Frederick G. G. Rose,” Anthropological Forum 21, no. 2 (2011): 109–29; Geoffrey Gray, “He has Prostituted his Position as an Anthropologist: FGG Rose and Academic Freedom,” in Histories of Anthropology Annual, vol. 11, ed. Frederic Gleach and Regna Darnell (forthcoming, 2019).

¹¹ Price, Threatening Anthropology, xii.

¹² Henrika Kuklick, “Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology,” Isis 15 (2011): 15.

¹³ ASIO officer (unknown), A6119, 1231, vols. 1 and 2 (Max Herman Gluckman), National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra, ACT.

¹⁴ Gray, ”‘A Great Deal of Mischief can be Done.’”

¹⁵ The most notable example is FGG Rose who, between 1968 and 1972, failed to obtain a permit to enter an Aboriginal reserve. Monteath and Munt, Red Professor; Munt, “Australian Anthropology,” 109–29; Gray, ”He has Prostituted his Position as an Anthropologist.”

¹⁶ J.A. Barnes to Raymond Firth, 12 October 1975, Archive of Sir Raymond Firth (FIRTH, followed by Series, Box and File numbers), FIRTH8/5/5, British Archive of Political and Economic Science (BAPES), London School of Economics, London (LSE) . See also Interview of John Barnes, by Jack Goody, Cambridge, 19 December 1983. Filmed and edited by Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison. Barnes and Gluckman were nominated guardians of each other’s children.

¹⁷ Barnes to Firth, 12 October 1975, FIRTH8/5/5, BAPES LSE.

¹⁸ From Raymond Firth, “Max Gluckman 1911–75,” Proceedings of the British Academy 61 (1976): 479–96.

¹⁹ Robert Gordon, “Remembering Agnes Winifred Hoernle,” Social Dynamics 13, no. 1 (1987): 68–72.

²⁰ David Mills, Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008): 99–108.

²¹ Elizabeth Colson, “Defining ‘the Manchester School of Anthropology’. Review: The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology by T.M.S. Elvers and Don Handelman,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 2 (2008): 335–7.

²² Michael W. Young, “A.L. (‘Bill’) Epstein,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2000): 119–29.

²³ T. Scarlett Epstein, Swimming Upstream: A Jewish Refugee from Vienna (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005).

²⁴ This information from http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Writers&WriterID=3741 (accessed 8 June 2018); see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1hqt1ApHeg (accessed 8 June 2018).

²⁵ Kevin A. Yelvington, “An Interview with A.L. Epstein,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 2 (1997): 299.

²⁶ Charles Spry to (Prime Minister) Robert Menzies, 9 April 1952, A6119, 431, NAA.

²⁷ Douglas Copland to Robert Menzies, 18 August 1952, A1209, 23 1957/4264, NAA.

²⁸ David McKnight, Australia’s Spies, 145–55; Gray, ”‘A Great Deal of Mischief can be Done,’” 25–44; Anderson, “Into the Night,” 60; Jude Van Konkelenberg, “Australia’s Cold War University: The Relationship between the Australian National University’s School of Pacific Studies and the Federal Government, 1946–75” (PhD, University of Adelaide, 2009). Cf. Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese, The Australian National University, 1946–96 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996): 113–43.

²⁹ The Australian government and its security agencies placed the onus of proof on the suspect that they were not communist, supported implicitly by ANU vice-chancellors, Copland and Sir Leslie Melville. Copland was anti-communist, pointing out in an address to an Anglican Men’s Movement Dinner that communism ‘constitutes a challenge to capitalism as both an economic and moral order’: 21 November 1952, 2000/05, Australian National University Archives (ANUA), Canberra (ANU Archives, are in the Menzies Library) . Melville, no less anti-communist, was more circumspect.

³⁰ Copland was supplying information to ASIO on historian Robin Gollan and other members of the ANU staff. Spry to Menzies, 18 August 1952, A6119/78 788 (file Michael Francis Lindsay), NAA.

³¹ Spate described himself, in an interview, as having been ‘very red and left [at Cambridge] … I’m a good deal milder, but not a Tory’. 15 May 1990, 2001/20, item 104,ANUA.

³² Peter Worsley, Skating on Thin Ice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).

³³ Jeremy Beckett, “Against the Grain: Fragmentary Memories of Anthropology in Australia, 1956–70,” in Before It’s Too Late, ed. Geoffrey Gray (Oceania Monograph, no. 51, 2001), 90.

³⁴ Foster and Varghese, The Australian National University, 123.

³⁵ Spry to Menzies, 9 April 1953, A1209/23, item 57/264, NAA. Soon after Spry wrote to all ASIO regional directors: ‘In view of the present and future of importance of the ANU, advice would be appreciated from the addresses as to whether any of the following applicants are adversely recorded in their respective states.’ Memo to Regional Offices, 28 April 1953, A6119/XR1, item 271, NAA; Spry to Menzies, 6 October 1953, A6119/XRI, item 278, NAA.

³⁶ Cf. Horner, The Spy Catchers, 244–5. On ASIO vetting see 226–49.

³⁷ Grahame Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity: British Anthropology and the End of Empire,” (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 90.

³⁸ See Mills, Difficult Folk, 105–6, 122.

³⁹ ‘Mitchell told Gluckman he was in no doubt that even if Epstein had been appointed he would not have been given an entry permit’ (Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity,” 90). For Epstein’s relations with the colonial government and mining companies see Foreman, 87–9. See also Yelvington, “An Interview,” 294–5.

⁴⁰ Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity,” 91.

⁴¹ Ibid., 90.

⁴² Ibid, 94.

⁴³ Gluckman to Barnes, nd. Papers of Max Gluckman (MG), Royal Anthropological Institute, London (RAI).

⁴⁴ AL Epstein to Clyde Mitchell, 17 May 1958 (Cited in Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity,” 95).

⁴⁵ Yelvington, “An Interview,” 294.

⁴⁶ A6119/1231, vol. 2, NAA, Cf. Scarlett Epstein, Swimming Upstream, 76, 82, 85.

⁴⁷ In the Gluckman ASIO file there is a summary of “alleged” communist anthropologists that has information on Worsley, Bill and Scarlett Epstein, and Gluckman. There are large sections redacted which most likely refer to MI5 reports. A6119/1230, NAA.

⁴⁸ Barnes to J.W. Davidson, 15 April 1959, 2001/29, box 2, ANUA.

⁴⁹ Barnes to Davidson, 26 March 1959, 2001/39, box 2, ANUA.

⁵⁰ Geoffrey Bolton, “The Gluckman Affair 1960: A Bystander’s View,” Cold War Dossier (23), states that Scarlett, who he calls “Trudi” Epstein, was “in the eyes of ASIO … the more suspect of the pair.” He provides no evidence for this assertion.

⁵¹ Barnes to Davidson, 15 April 1959, 2001/39, box 2, ANUA.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Extracts in A6119, 1231, vol. 2, NAA.

⁵⁴ A6119/1231, NAA. This suggests ASIO could request further information without compromising their source. Cf. Horner, Spy Catchers, 505.

⁵⁵ J.A. Barnes, Humping My Drum: A Memoir (2007), 284 [available by print-on-demand and each copy is dated by the year it was printed.]

⁵⁶ Epstein, Swimming Upstream, 150.

⁵⁷ Epstein to Gluckman, 23 July 1959, MG RAI.

⁵⁸ A.L. Epstein to Mitchell, 20 August 1959. (cited in Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity,” 90).

⁵⁹ A6119/1231, vol. 2, NAA.

⁶⁰ Gluckman to Barnes, n.d., MG RAI. He proposed writing for The Spectator, but Rob Gordon, who has recently completed a biography on Max Gluckman, The Enigma of Max Gluckman (Nebraska Press, 2018), assures me that he did not write such an article. Personal communication 7 November 2017.

⁶¹ Barnes to Gluckman, 22 July 1959; Epstein to Gluckman, 23 July 1959; Barnes to Gluckman, 10 August 1959, MG RAI.

⁶² Barnes to Gluckman, 22 July 1959, MG RAI.

⁶³ Epstein, Swimming Upstream, 150–2.

⁶⁴ This sense of a conspiracy is underscored in Gluckman’s ASIO file, suggesting there was a conspiracy hatched in Manchester.

⁶⁵ Regional director to Headquarters, 16 July 1957, A6119/1231, vol. 1, NAA.

⁶⁶ See Geoffrey Gray and Doug Munro, “The Department was in Some Disarray,” in Histories of Anthropology Annual, ed. Regna Darnell and F.W. Gleach (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2014), 141–71.

⁶⁷ Horner, The Spy Catchers, 501, fn. 55.

⁶⁸ Richard Brown, “Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist: Max Gluckman in Northern Rhodesia,” The Journal of African History 20, no. 4 (1979): 529.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 529–30.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 535.

⁷¹ The “Red-Jew” is from Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 42–57; also, Geoffrey Gray, “Kirchhoff’s Quest for a Safe Haven, 1931–41,” in Histories of Anthropology Annual, vol. 5, ed. Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

⁷² Brown, “Passages in the Life of a White Anthropologist,” 531 suggests that during the war the German invasion of Russia made his pro-Soviet statements more acceptable.

⁷³ Gluckman had debated the Governor of Kenya in the pages of the Guardian, and on BBC radio to argue that Mau Mau was a modern, rather than atavistic, phenomenon, and a product of colonialism.

⁷⁴ Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity,” 95–6.

⁷⁵ She left the Party in 1956.

⁷⁶ Regional Director ACT to Headquarters, 14 June 1960; 11 July 1960, A6119/1231, vol. 1 NAA. See also M331/42 (Gluckman’s personal file held by the Department of Territories), NAA.

⁷⁷ 20 July 1960, A6119/1231, vol. 1, NAA.

⁷⁸ Notes from a conversation between unknown parties; their names are redacted, 15 July 1960, A6119/1231, vol. 1, NAA.

⁷⁹ Director-General ASIO to Regional Director ACT (W.M. Phillips), 20 July 1960, A6119/1231, NAA.

⁸⁰ Summary of events, M331/42, NAA.

⁸¹ Prime Minister to Thorp, 1 September 1960, M331/42, NAA.

⁸² See n. 80.

⁸³ Memo, 1 September 1960, M331/42, NAA.

⁸⁴ ANU Staff Association to Minister, 25 August 1960, M331/ 42, NAA. Of course with matters such this there are rumours. Historian Robin Gollan had provided some support for Gluckman, recalled in an interview for the fiftieth anniversary of the ANU, that there was a rumour Gluckman was homosexual and this was the reason he was denied entry to PNG. Interview, Robin Allenby Gollan, 18 and 21 May 1993, 200/20, item 32 ANUA.

⁸⁵ Bolton, “The Gluckman Affair.” Geoffrey Bolton was one of the authors; he neatly sidesteps academic and political freedom in his account of events.

⁸⁶ Minister for Territories to ANU Staff Association, draft, n.d. M331/42, NAA.

⁸⁷ Hasluck, Hansard (House of Representatives) 31 August 1960, 654.

⁸⁸ Paul Hasluck, A Time for Building (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 405–6. Horner refers to a memo from ASIO’s ACT regional director in which it was stated that the argument based on ASIO information amounted ‘to a weak case if it came to a test’. Horner, The Spy Catchers, 502.

⁸⁹ Horner, The Spy Catchers, 502–3.

⁹⁰ A6119/1231, NAA.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ “Virulent Campaign by Communists,” Unattributed newspaper clipping, 26 September, 1960, MG RAI. There is a considerable number of press clippings in Gluckman’s papers as well as in his ASIO file, A6119/1231.

⁹⁴ A6119/1231, vol. 2, NAA.

⁹⁵ Cited in Francis J. West, “Papua-New Guinea, 1961–65,” in Australia in World Affairs: 1961–65, ed. Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1968), 445.

⁹⁶ United Nations Visiting Mission to the Trust Territories of Nauru and New Guinea, Report on New Guinea (New York: United Nations, 1962), 87–8.

⁹⁷ ASIO Regional Director (Port Moresby) to Headquarters, 4 August 1960, A6119/3196, vol. 1, NAA.

⁹⁸ Michael Head, “The Political Uses and Abuses of Sedition: The Trial of Brian Cooper,” Legal History 11, no. 63 (2007): 61–78; Anthony Yeates, ”‘A Foolish Young Man, Who can Perhaps, be Straightened Out in his Thinking’: The Brian Cooper Sedition Case,” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 71–87. Likewise, Hasluck (1976) leaves Cooper out of his memoir, A Time for Building.

⁹⁹ In 1961 there was mutiny of New Guinean soldiers in Port Moresby “who assaulted their officers after six soldiers had been jailed for leading demands for higher pay”. There were riots in Port Moresby, Madang, Lae and Bulolo. See A6119/3196, vol. 1, NAA,

¹⁰⁰ Bolton, “The Gluckman Affair,” 3.

¹⁰¹ Bulletin, 28 September 1960, 40.

¹⁰² Gluckman to Vice-Chancellor, Manchester University, 24 August 1960, MG RAI.

¹⁰³ Gluckman, Statement, 5 September 1960, M331/42, NAA.

¹⁰⁴ Bolton, “The Gluckman Affair,” 5.

¹⁰⁵ Gluckman to Vice-Chancellor, Manchester University, 24 August 1960, MG RAI.

¹⁰⁶ Geoffrey Gray, A Cautious Silence (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 21–7, 81–92, 102–8; for example.

¹⁰⁷ Worsley, Skating on Thin Ice, 126.

¹⁰⁸ “‘Witch Hunts’ in Varsities,” Sun (Sydney), 28 September 1961.

¹⁰⁹ This alludes to Herta Mueller’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in which states that in her security ‘file, I am two different people. One is called “Cristina”, who is being fought as an enemy of the state. Wherever I went, I had to live with this doppelganger. It was not only sent after me wherever I went, it also hurried ahead.’ Cited in Nicolas Rothwell, “Out of the Rubble,” The Australian Literary Review, 3 February 2010, 15.

¹¹⁰ See Barnes, Humping my Drum, 283–95.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Gray

Geoffrey Gray, is Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies; University of Queensland. He is the author of A Cautious Silence. The politics of Australian Anthropology  and Scholars at War: Australasian Social Scientists, 1939–1945.