The Loyalist Response in 1918
The expanded WPA regulations in response to the events of St Patrick’s Day in Melbourne meant that 1918 came to be seen as the year of most acute alarm about Irish-Australian disloyalty. Rohan Rivett, biographer of the Melbourne businessman Herbert Brookes, who was a close associate of the Prime Minister and active in garnering Hughes’ support for extending the WPA after the St Patrick’s Day procession, linked the intensified atmosphere to Mannix’s role in the defeat of the second conscription plebiscite in December 1917.69 Rivett argued that Brookes and his fellow loyalists “identified the Archbishop with everything that was anti-British, damaging to Australia and disloyal to the servicemen at the front.”70 In May 1918, Brookes was invited to attend a high-level government meeting to “consider a proposal to form an ‘Australian Protective League’ on the lines of a war body operating in ...America.”71 This organisation was intended to spearhead a more sophisticated federal surveillance organisation, but America’s more powerful anti-communist and patriotic overtones meant their model presented some challenges to the Australians, and the war ended before these were resolved.72 However, Brookes’ inclusion in the meeting attests to his importance in relation to Australian security monitoring. His papers reflect a prioritising of the Catholic threat, his vituperative hostility towards Irish-Australians, and his steely resolve to render them impotent:
It will be our next task after the Hun is settled to deal once and for all the death-blow to the pretensions of a tyrannous priestly bureaucracy. Unless this is done our freedom will be crowned with a fool’s cap ...73
By 1918 Irish-Catholic-Australians were synonymous with disloyalty for those, like Brookes, whose identification with the superiority of all things British was complete.
The pages of the All British Sentinel provide another example of “champion[ing] the British cause.” First published in Adelaide during the second conscription campaign, it was closely allied to the All-British League—an organisation established in 1915 whose members boasted of its expansion to twenty branches by 1918.74 Their wartime enemies comprised “Aliens, including those of enemy birth, I.W.W.’s [and] Sinn Feiners.”75 The publication’s increasingly hysterical tone about Mannix and his flock during 1918 reflected alarm about malevolent Irish- Australians, and anxiety that authorities insufficiently recognised their threat to British Australia.76 While neither League membership details nor newspaper circulation figures are available, prominent public figures identified as members and lent respectability to its alarmist platform.77 Respected politicians and public servants, such as Senators Josiah Symons (Attorney General in 1904-5) and John Newland, South Australian MPs John Verran (Premier from 1910-12) and William David Ponder, and senior bureaucrat C.E.O. Smyth, were among those who either wrote for the paper or held executive League positions, and their imperial commitment ensured their definition of Irish-Australians as real or potential threats to British Australia (Fig. 8.1).
Fig. 8.1 Masthead of the All British Sentinel, December 1917. The imagery of the Union Jack, together with the British lion and cubs, demonstrate explicit British-Australian ties. (Image courtesy of the SLSA.)
