🎧 Podcast Deep Dive
[00:00] Male Host: Okay, so I want you to picture this for a second. It's 1931. You're standing on a street corner in Sydney, Australia.
[00:10] Female Host: Mm-hmm.
[00:12] Male Host: And usually, when we think about this time, it's what, it's the Great Depression, right? It's all very quiet. You picture these grim, silent men in breadlines.
[00:20] Female Host: Yeah, maybe the Harbour Bridge opening, that's about it. A nation just sort of on pause.
[00:27] Male Host: Exactly. Quiet desperation. That's the story we get told.
[00:31] Female Host: Yeah, but that's just not the whole story. If you actually start digging into the intelligence files we've got here—and we're talking specifically about the service records of an operative named RFB Wake and just stacks of surveillance reports—that quiet picture gets, uh, very loud. And very dangerous.
[00:53] Male Host: The suburbs weren't sleeping.
[00:55] Female Host: No, the suburbs of Sydney were hiding a secret army.
[00:58] Male Host: And let's be super clear for everyone listening: when we say army, we don't mean a few angry guys in a pub shouting about the government.
[01:05] Female Host: No, no, not at all. We are talking about an organized, uniformed paramilitary force that claimed to have nearly 80,000 members. Armed, and actively preparing for what they saw as an inevitable civil war. They called themselves the New Guard.
[01:25] Male Host: 80,000. That number is just... it's staggering for Australia in the '30s. The population wasn't that big. That's not a fringe movement.
[01:35] Female Host: It's not. It's a huge chunk of the adult male population. And the most unsettling part—and this is really the core of what we're getting into today—is who these guys were.
[01:46] Male Host: Right.
[01:47] Female Host: They weren't hiding out in the bush. These were, and I'm quoting the files, "the leading men of society." We're talking doctors, lawyers, bank managers... all organizing in town halls right out in the open.
[02:00] Male Host: So the mission for this deep dive is to really unpack these Wake files. We're going to look at how a democracy even reacts when its own, you know, upstanding citizens decide to form a private militia.
[02:13] Female Host: And we're going to look at the actual intelligence officers who had the, frankly, terrifying job of figuring out if these so-called patriots were actually about to launch a coup.
[02:22] Male Host: It's just a wild case study in that line between, I guess, political dissent and actual treason.
[02:29] Female Host: It is. Because if you think the 1930s were just about breadlines, these files show a moment where Australia was, and I'm not exaggerating, teetering on the edge of a violent coup.
[02:41] Male Host: So let's start with the big context question, because I think a lot of people will be asking: Why Australia? I mean, we know fascism was blowing up in Europe—Mussolini, Hitler—but a huge fascist-style movement in Sydney? Why?
[02:57] Female Host: This is where the research, particularly in a paper we have here called "The Pivot of Empire," gets really fascinating. It looks at the direct links between these Australian groups and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists—the BUF.
[03:12] Male Host: Okay.
[03:13] Female Host: Now, normally we think of fascists as being hyper-nationalist, you know, only caring about their own country. But the British Fascists were also imperialists. They saw the entire British Empire as like... one single organism.
[03:26] Male Host: And Australia was what, just a limb of that organism? Or a colony?
[03:30] Female Host: Oh, much more than that. To them, Australia was the Pivot of Empire. In their worldview, Australia was kind of the perfect state before fascism even really became a thing. It had all the agricultural resources to feed the empire, so it was the stomach.
[03:45] Male Host: Okay.
[03:46] Female Host: But more importantly for the British Fascists, Australia was a kind of racial paradise.
[03:52] Male Host: You're talking about the White Australia Policy, I assume?
[03:55] Female Host: Exactly. The BUF's whole thing was preserving British stock. And they looked at Australia and thought, "Hang on, you guys are already doing it." They didn't feel like they needed to conquer Australia or force a revolution because the Australian democracy was already enforcing the exact racial policies they were dreaming of.
[04:14] Male Host: That is deeply disturbing. So the British Fascists were basically just fans of Australian policy.
[04:20] Female Host: Huge fans. They kept in close contact. The files show the New Guard's leader, Eric Campbell, actually went over to meet with Oswald Mosley in '33. They were swapping notes. Campbell even wrote Mosley a letter—which got intercepted, of course—talking about building a new Empire Union.
[04:39] Male Host: So you have this... this international validation from the "cool kids" of fascism in Europe. Let's turn to the New Guard itself though. If I'm walking down a Sydney street in 1931, what am I seeing?
[04:52] Female Host: Well, during the day you're seeing men in suits. But behind that was a strictly military organization. The intelligence reports were incredibly detailed on this. Sydney was literally carved up into Zones: A, B, C, and D. And then those were broken down into divisions. It was a perfect copy of the actual army structure.
[05:11] Male Host: And it wasn't just a list of names, was it? I was reading about their classification system. It's so methodical.
[05:17] Female Host: Yes, and this is where you really see the intent. They didn't just want members, they wanted soldiers. They had Class A members—these were called the Mobile Battalions.
[05:28] Male Host: Which sounds a lot like shock troops.
[05:30] Female Host: That's precisely what they were. The documents describe Class A as physically fit, active, and ready for street fighting. Then you had Class B for technical services guys—who could run trains or keep the power on. Class C was for older men, local defense.
[05:46] Male Host: The logistics of it all are just mind-blowing. I'm looking at a report on their uniforms. They had specific armbands.
[05:54] Female Host: Right. This wasn't a mob. They had manufacturing standards. Four inches wide, strong woollen material. And the colors were a code. Scarlet meant Headquarters. Khaki meant a Mobile Battalion—the guys who'd be coming to break up a strike. Blue was for the Harbor Guard.
[06:11] Male Host: Wait, wait. The Harbor Guard? They had a Navy?
[06:14] Female Host: Navy is probably a strong word, but yeah. They had a maritime section with the Australian Motor Yacht Squadron. They were organized on land and sea.
[06:23] Male Host: Okay, that 80,000 number... it sounds a bit inflated maybe? Did intelligence believe that?
[06:30] Female Host: That's a healthy skepticism to have. The New Guard claimed almost 80,000. The intelligence reports we have from the time, they put the effective number... so the guys who would actually fight... closer to 40 or 50,000.
[06:45] Male Host: Even 40,000 is... imagine 40,000 trained, uniformed men in one city today. That's an occupying army.
[06:53] Female Host: It's an occupation. Yeah.
[06:55] Male Host: So this is the question that just screams out from these files. If you have 50,000 men drilling in shock troops, wearing uniforms, meeting in town halls... why didn't the government just shut it down on day one?
[07:09] Female Host: And that gets us to this idea of an intelligence blind spot. And honestly, this is one of the biggest lessons from this whole story. To get it, you have to understand who the police saw as the real enemy back in 1932.
[07:23] Male Host: It had to be the Communists.
[07:25] Female Host: Exactly. The Great Depression had radicalized everyone. There was massive unemployment, hunger marches. Military Intelligence, the Police... they were terrified of a Red uprising. They looked at the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, and his populist policies, and they saw the beginning of Bolshevism.
[07:44] Male Host: Okay, but even so, this is a private army. So here's my question: Why would most Intelligence Officers back then not see a right-wing paramilitary group as a threat? They're challenging the State itself.
[07:58] Female Host: It's because of who was in the ranks. We have a "Most Secret" report here from Newcastle in late 1931. The investigator says the members aren't thugs... they are "the leading men of the district, men of unassailable character and financial position."
[08:14] Male Host: Ah. I see. So you're not investigating criminals. You're investigating your neighbor. Your boss. The guy who runs the bank.
[08:22] Female Host: Precisely. It's a massive affinity bias. They were invisible as a threat because they were the establishment. For a long time, the official attitude was: "Well, they hate the Communists, we hate the Communists, they seem like good chaps." There are actual reports from early '32 that talk about the "greatest harmony" between the Police Chiefs and the New Guard.
[08:43] Male Host: "Harmony." That word is terrifying in this context.
[08:46] Female Host:
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