For those unfamiliar with the history of Soviet activity in Australia the rough the 1940s, actually a little earlier than that, this video is of a gentleman by the name of Wally Clayton, a leading light in the Communist Party of Australia but who tended to keep that light hidden. This video was taken by ASIO in the late 1940s.
Wally arrived in Australia around 1930 from New Zealand and quickly established himself in the CPA such such that by 1933, he was becoming a fixture. Wally, given the code name Klod by his Soviet handlers, was the Mr.Fixit for the organisation and amongst his many skills was the production of propaganda materials and newsletters to meet the needs of the Party and the various and numerous satellite organisations. To that end he purchased a number of ‘letterpress’ machines and installed them at secret locations across Australia. Ever the inventive, when the CPA was banned, the said printing presses were promptly buried to be disinterred at a later date. There’s a lot more to Wally’s story but a quick search of the various Wiki sites will get you up to speed.
What has this to do with the Somerton Man case you might ask? If you look at the various posts over the past year or two, the aim has been to build a picture of just what was happening in Australia in the years leading up to the finding of the Somerton Man’s body on December 1st 1948 with a focus on the activities of both the CPA and Australia’s Intelligence services. For example, recently we looked at how organisations were infiltrated and the steps taken by intelligence operatives to ensure they blended in to the social background as part of their cover. This post is more about the other side of the coin.
There’s another post coming shortly on another aspect of intelligence work that adds more to this quite fascinating tapestry.
David Morgan. The photo of Itlain migrants arriving at Adelaide railway station: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/129889434
ReplyDeleteIs actually a composite made up of two photographs. The family group at the front is superimposed on the crowd scene behind them. I used the iPad photo tools to ‘enhance the image and it removed the ‘background’ element leaving only the family pic. Thus you have to photos combined. It suggests that they were taken at different times but hard to tell whether they were different locations. The text describes a ‘batch’ of immigrants arriving so it may be that the ‘crowd’ background was for effect. What it demonstrates is that Trove photographs from that period at least should be carefully checked.