...Somerton Man Timeline...
1947-1954
People, events and issues...
Michael has spent a great deal of time pulling together this detailed timeline for us to compare with that of the Somerton Man case. I know that Michael has more to post on this subject and that some of it will include details that thus far have been overlooked. There's a link to Michael;s latest book at the base of this page:
Uranium - Mount Painter Project.1944-1947
As early as 1944 [See Wohltmann 2022 1 ], beginning with Britain and then the US urgently require Australian uranium for the development of atomic weapons, and later to fuel their nuclear power stations.
The Chifley government’s wholehearted endorsement of the Anglo-Australian Joint Project needs to be understood not only in terms of Australia’s defence requirements but also in terms of national
development plans in areas including housing, mining, and welfare, which was to be supported by the ambitious post-war immigration program to draw Britons and other “suitable” Europeans to Australia
The United States Congress passed the McMahon Act in 1946, which restricted the sharing of atomic information with Britain if this information was to be shared with third countries, such as Australia and other British Dominions. The British response to the McMahon Act was to ‘go it alone’ and embark on its own atomic weapons program.
August-September 1946, the Australian government sent two observers to the testing of atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll.
November 1946 the Australian Government, following a visit by British rocket experts, announced proposals for the establishment, jointly with Britain, of an experimental rocket and guided missile range at Woomera, South Australia. The ‘Anglo-Australia Joint-Project and also known as the Long-Range Weapons Project, was born.
Role of Dr Alan Nunn May
Nunn May, a figure who pops up in many NAA Files [And his wife].I believe that there's a connection with him. Feel this is worthy of more research and the Melbourne connection.
In May 1946, the UK Department of Supply sent its Senior Military Advisor, Lieutenant-General J.F. Evetts, to Australia to select a testing site for long-range rocket development. The connection between missile research, radar research, in which Kaiser was engaged during the war, and radio physics,
By 1947 Britain and Australia had established the Long-Range Weapons Establishment at Salisbury, South Australia, and a rocket range at Woomera.
In February 1947 the government formed a new body, the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) out of the CIB.
On 7th March 1947 a Country Party member, Joe Abbott, spoke of the need to ensure ‘that there shall be no leakage of information concerning these experiments, and urged the government to ascertain whether there was evidence of a spy ring operating in Australia.
The Venona operation revealed in 1947 that the Soviet Union had obtained a copy of a top-secret British post-war defence document.
In February 1948 Sir Percy Sillitoe, director general of Britain’s security service, MI5, visited Australia to warn Chifley, about Australia’s lack of security and that the JP was under threat of being cancelled. [ Roger Hollis, a senior MI5 officer accompanying him]
The role of ASIO to use a long line of embittered Czech refugees in Australia that stretched back to the Prague coup d’état of February 1948 who became active anti-Stalinists.
Melbourne had very strong migrant European migrants who worked for ASIO. For Example, a migrant called Demetrios ‘Jimmy’ Anastassiou, a Greek Cypriot arrived in 1949.
The Kaiser Affair: A young Australian scientist in London protested against the Chifley government’s strikebreaking during the coal strike that year. Thomas R Kaiser had just completed his doctorate at Oxford University under the aegis of the CSIRO. His life was changed, utterly and irrevocably, by the ineffectual protest on the Strand that July afternoon. Normally, such an insignificant demonstration would not have created a ripple: it was small in scale, none of the six young demonstrators was well known, there was no violence or obstruction, the police were not involved and it was all over by five o’clock. Archival files have revealed that MI5 and ASIO exchanged information about Kaiser. 14 Before he left Australia in 1947, Kaiser was already the subject of a security file, and MI5 would have learnt, for example, that he was ‘adversely recorded’ because of his attendance at an Australian Association of Scientific Workers[(AASW] conference on ‘Atomic Power and the International Co-operation of Scientists’; his participation in a protest meeting against the sentence imposed upon the British physicist Alan Nunn May; and his contribution to an AASW symposium on the Woomera rocket range.
The most important surveillance from the Australian Government agreement, came in in 1948, to set up a Joint Intelligence Bureau [JIB] in Melbourne, as part of a network of JIBs which also included London, Ottawa, and Wellington. Originally set up to repair previous general deficiencies in the available information base, the Melbourne JIB became the basis for Australia's strategic intelligence efforts in later years, and the forerunner of the Joint Intelligence Organisation [JIO].
The formation of ASIO in March 1949. Please note: The foundations for the establishment of ASIO were laid at a secret meeting in Canberra on 7 February 1949 attended by Chifley, three key ministers, and several officials, including three MI5 officers. They agreed that an Australian security intelligence service should be set up along the lines of MI5, and that it should come under the Attorney-General, but the service’s director-general should have the right of direct access to the prime minister. In March 1949 Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, established the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation [ASIO] to protect the Australian Commonwealth against espionage, sabotage, and subversion. ASIO was tasked with ‘the defence of Commonwealth from external and internal dangers. As with MI5, ASIO would be ‘absolutely free from any political bias or influence’ and, in keeping with the bipartisan nature of the new organisation.
A key figure in surveillance of the left was Maximilian Wechsler, who worked for ASIO, Australia’s domestic counterintelligence service established in 1949.
In March 1949, Chifley directed the CIS to investigate whether a statement by the secretary of the ACP, Lance Sharkey, was treasonable or seditious. Sharkey allegedly had said that if Soviet forces entered Australia in pursuit of aggressors 2 in 3, Australian workers would welcome them.13 In July 1949, Sharkey was sentenced to three years jail, later reduced to 18 months.
April 1949: Geoffrey Reed from the Supreme Court of South Australia accepted the appointment as the first head of the security service, which he later named the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
Please note: Reed’s charter stated that the security service was part of the Attorney-General’s Department, but it was also: part of the Defence Forces of the Commonwealth, and save as herein expressed has no concern with the enforcement of criminal law. Its task is the defence of the Commonwealth from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the Commonwealth.
As the new Director-General of Security, Geoffrey Reed had three important tasks: to build his new organisation; to identify the spies as revealed in the Venona intercepts [known as ‘the case’]; and to deal with communist subversion, within Australia.
In August 1949 American codebreakers on the VENONA programme managed to identify Fuchs as a source of information for Soviet intelligence codenamed Charles in decrypted diplomatic cables.
December 1949, saw the election of the Liberal-County Party Coalition, led by Robert Menzies, with a new emphasis on the countersubversion role. The government came to power with a different worldview to its predecessor. It was more inclined to see the Cold War as a coordinated communist assault on the West, in which the ACP was playing its part.
On 9 January 1950, ASIO circulated an 11-page secret report on the ACP, which covered
membership, finances, trade union activity, the party’s connections with overseas communist organisations, the role of the Australian Peace Council as a communist ‘front’ organisation, the organisations controlled by the ACP, and its preparations for ‘illegal work’.
On 22 February, Governor-General Sir William McKell foreshadowed that the government would be introducing legislation to ban the Communist Party.
Anglo-American atomic exchanges were undermined by the discovery of another spy, Klaus Fuchs, a naturalised German scientist sentenced for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets in March 1950.
On 23 March 1950, the government invoked the Crimes Act 1941 (Cth), which meant that striking watersiders could be liable for jail for up to 12 months.
Around April 1950, proposing the formation of what was to become the Australian Secret
Intelligence Service [ASIS]. Both ASIO and ASIS were formed with advice and help from British and US agencies, notably MIS and 6 and the new Central Intelligence Agency.
On 17 July 1950 Colonel Charles Spry took over from Geoffrey Reed as Director-General of Security.
On 27 September, Menzies reintroduced the Communist Party Dissolution Bill and unexpectedly it was passed by the Labor-dominated Senate on 19 October 1950.
ANZUS Treaty, the final version, now confined to Australia, New Zealand and the United States [ANZUS], was signed on 1.9.51.
The Liberal-Country Party [ LCP] Coalition government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies
demonstrated its ongoing loyalty to the declining post-war British Empire, by offering to host the United Kingdom’s atomic weapons testing program. The first atmospheric test took place at the
Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia [WA] in 1952 and further open-air tests were conducted in WA and at Maralinga in SA, until October 1957.
1 Wohltmann. M. [2022] Looking Back to See the Future. A revisionist history of Woomera 1947-1980.Digital
Press Australia. Adelaide. p
2 NAA See JE Cummins to WI Clunies Ross, 15 August 1949, NAA A8526/21, item PH/KAI/2.
3 Sharkey statement to be examined’, Mercury, 9 March 1949, 7
4 NAA Prime Minister’s memorandum to the Director-General of Security, 16 March 1949, NAA: A7452, A48
A note for those interested in the issue of Lion Brand toothpaste in Australia. There were quite a few ways in which the Japanese toothpaste would have arrived in Australia. Notably by sea and in the possession of crewmen of merchant ships. But there were other ways. Murchision Camp in Tatura held 400 Japanese POWS, mostly those who had been moved from Cowra. Not sure about how and if Red Cross parcels with good from Japan would have been distributed but its worth consideration. There were also a number of Japanese families who lived in Australia who were also interned in Tatura or so I understand.
ReplyDeleteThen there are those Japanese POWs who resided at Loveday in South Australia, a location reserved for the hard cases according to some.
My inclination to put the Murchison Japanese POWs and their goods as a likely source alongside the Merchant seamen.
Do you know the provenance of the suitcase contents photo and where people could access a clear copy that could be properly magnified for more definitive identification? It seems strange that a foreign toothpaste brand, not generally for sale in Australia in 1948, was not noted by the police.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.geni.com/people/Dr-Alan-May/6000000164023394731
ReplyDeletehttps://www.geni.com/people/Hildegarde-Pauline-Ruth-Nunn-May/6000000164025359845
I have a quite large MI5 file downloaded from the UK National Archives.
Interesting and detailed work Michael Wohltman! Nuclear politics set against a background of negotiating an independent Australian identity and building national institutions whilst weaving between the influences of the UK and US… Look forward to reading Looking Back to See the Future!
ReplyDelete