The Redoubtable Mr. Wake..... Includes Podcast

🎧 Podcast: Australia's Secret Army

[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: Yeah. The New Guard sold themselves as an auxiliary force. "Hey, if things go bad, we're here to help you." And for a while, the police believed them.

[08:55] Male Host: But obviously that harmony didn't last. Someone, somewhere, realized what was happening. And that brings us to the actual tradecraft. Who infiltrates a group of powerful men like this?

[09:07] Female Host: We have to talk about RFB Wake. Officially, he's just a clerk. An Inspector in the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, the CIB. A paper pusher.

[09:17] Male Host: But his widow's testimony paints a very different picture.

[09:20] Female Host: Totally different. She talks about his "phenomenal memory," all this secret work he did. She says the stress of his intelligence operations—which continued into World War II—gave him a nervous breakdown. This was not a clerk. This was a serious operative.

[09:37] Male Host: So what kind of person volunteers to go and infiltrate an armed paramilitary group? I mean, he was out there on his own.

[09:44] Female Host: You'd have to be someone who can just... compartmentalize everything. Imagine sitting in a room, nodding along as men plan actual treason, buying them a drink, memorizing names... and knowing that if you slip up, you just disappear. It's a very specific, quiet kind of courage.

[10:04] Male Host: And what did that tradecraft look like? You know, you always picture the movies, the classic lunch distraction where you spill coffee and grab the documents. Is there a lesson in that here?

[10:14] Female Host: The lesson is that real tradecraft is almost never that exciting. The sources don't mention any cinematic distractions. The real lesson comes from the Newcastle investigation, run by a Commander Fernley. His method was the "Quiet Investigation."

[10:29] Male Host: Meaning what?

[10:30] Female Host: Meaning, you don't make a scene. The New Guard was a secret, word-of-mouth network for the elite. You couldn't just pick up a pamphlet. Fernley had to penetrate their social circles. He had to build trust with these powerful, high-status men.

[10:46] Male Host: That sounds way harder than the movie version.

[10:48] Female Host: It is. It is so much harder to gather intelligence on the rich and powerful than on the poor. The elite are protected by their private clubs, their money, their reputations. So the tradecraft lesson isn't about some clever trick. It's about social engineering.

[11:05] Male Host: And eventually, that quiet work starts to pay off. The harmony starts to break down.

[11:10] Female Host: It really does. By March 1932, the police—especially a Superintendent MacKay—they have this dawning realization. The New Guard isn't a backup for them. It's a rival power structure. It answers only to Eric Campbell. Not the government. Not the Police Commissioner.

[11:28] Male Host: And that's when you start looking for the hardware. The smoking gun.

[11:32] Female Host: And they found it. In May 1932, the authorities raid their offices and seize documents that change everything.

[11:40] Male Host: The Street Fighting Manual.

[11:41] Female Host: Yes. And the language in this thing is just chilling. It's not about self-defense. It's got instructions on how to clear streets, how to occupy buildings, and how to use grenades and lachrymatory gas.

[11:55] Male Host: Lachrymatory gas. That's tear gas.

[11:57] Female Host: Correct. So you have to ask yourself: Do volunteer police auxiliaries normally have their own private supply of tear gas?

[12:05] Male Host: No. That is offensive weaponry.

[12:08] Female Host: And the manual specifically says "Operations must not become individual combats." They were drilling coordinated military tactics to suppress a population.

[12:18] Male Host: But there was something even worse than that, wasn't there?

[12:21] Female Host: The Field Engineer Units. This is the detail that proves it was a coup in the making. In April 1932, an order goes out. The New Guard starts actively recruiting mining engineers, quarry men, or others with knowledge of explosives.

[12:38] Male Host: Okay, so let's stop there. How does finding an "Explosives Training Manual" completely change the government's assessment of the threat?

[12:47] Female Host: It changes it from a public order problem to a national survival problem. You don't need mining engineers for crowd control. You need them if you're planning to blow up infrastructure. Bridges, railways, power stations.

[13:01] Male Host: They were targeting the very logistics of the State.

[13:03] Female Host: That's it. This document was the proof. They weren't just training to fight protesters. They were preparing to seize the State's logistical arteries. That's the textbook definition of a coup d'état. You cut the power, you cut the transport, you take the city.

[13:20] Male Host: So that's the moment. You can ignore marching, but you can't ignore guys learning how to use dynamite on a railway bridge.

[13:27] Female Host: Exactly. It moves them from political movement to insurrection. The government finally realized they had a loaded gun pointed right at their head.

[13:35] Male Host: And yet. In what has to be the biggest anticlimax ever...

[13:39] Female Host: Yeah.

[13:40] Female Host: The gun is never fired. The New Guard just kind of... collapses.

[13:44] Female Host: It was so sudden. In May 1932, the Governor of New South Wales dismisses Premier Jack Lang. Who was a huge constitutional crisis, really controversial. But Lang was out. And almost overnight, New Guard membership just plummets. Drops by half.

[14:02] Male Host: But why? If they were that organized, that committed, why just quit because a politician gets fired?

[14:09] Female Host: Because for most of them—the respectable members—the threat was gone. They truly believed Lang was a socialist revolutionary about to destroy their way of life. Once he was removed by, you know, legal-ish means, their job was done. They didn't want a civil war for its own sake. They wanted to protect their status and their money. The system fixed itself for them, so they took off the armbands and went back to the bank.

[14:36] Male Host: It's incredible how close it was. It suggests that if the Governor hadn't fired Lang, those field engineers might have actually gotten the call.

[14:45] Female Host: It's highly probable. The infrastructure was in place. The explosives experts were on standby. The plans were drawn up. We were one political decision away from a very different kind of Australian history.

[14:58] Male Host: And before we finish up, I really want to mention where a lot of these amazing specific details come from. We're looking at the raw files, but they are a mess to get through. A lot of credit has to go to the research of Gordon Cramer and his work on the Tamam Shud research blog.

[15:15] Female Host: Absolutely. The level of archival digging it takes to find things like the exact 4-inch measurement of an armband, or the specific call-out for quarry men... that is serious work. It makes the history real, you know? It gives it texture.

[15:31] Male Host: So, to bring it all together. You have a secret army. A government that looks the other way. And this massive intelligence effort that finally uncovers the threat just as it evaporates. What's the big takeaway for you?

[15:46] Female Host: For me, it's a story about how fragile democracy can be. The New Guard vanished, but for a solid year or two, the complete machinery for a right-wing coup was assembled and waiting in Sydney. And it wasn't a foreign threat. It was homegrown.

[16:03] Male Host: It really makes you think about the words we use, like "Patriot" or "Terrorist."

[16:08] Female Host: That's the provocative thought I'm left with. These documents show that the definition of a terrorist versus a patriot in 1932 just depended on who was in the Premier's office. They were patriots when they were having drinks with the Police Chief. They only became terrorists when they started recruiting explosives experts. But the men never changed. Only the context did.

[16:30] Male Host: And if that context hadn't changed in May 1932, we could be talking about the Australian Civil War.

[16:37] Female Host: A very sobering thought.

[16:39] Male Host: So next time you see...

The Redoubtable Mr. Wake:
Australia's Rare Bird of Intelligence

The podcast above tells the narrative story of the Secret Army. The article below presents the forensic proof—the service records, surveillance reports, and tradecraft that reveal just how close Sydney came to a coup.

In the shadow world of Australian intelligence, where files remain classified decades after events, one name absolutely deserves to emerge from the darkness: Robert Frederick Bird Wake. His story is not fiction. Neither is it a romanticized spy story crafted for entertainment. This is the reconstructed career of a real man who took real and extraordinary risks during some of the most dangerous years of the 20th century, and whose courage later came at a profound personal cost.

The Story Begins..

Between 1918 and 1934, R.F.B. Wake served in Naval Intelligence, building the tradecraft and security clearances that would define his career. When he transitioned to the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, the precursor to ASIO, he brought sixteen years of experience in handling "Most Secret" internal security matters. By 1935, he had risen to Deputy Director of Commonwealth Investigation in Queensland. But what made Wake exceptional wasn't his rank or tenure. It was his ideology.

Historical analysis describes Wake as a 'rara avis', a rare bird, within the Australian intelligence community of the 1930s. While many of his contemporaries viewed right-wing paramilitary groups as potential loyalists and allies, Wake pursued what historians call an "unusual anti-fascist career." He didn't see these organizations as patriots preparing to defend Australia. He saw them as threats to the constitutional order. This stance required both moral courage and professional nerve. Wake was surveilling his own countrymen, many of whom were decorated veterans and prominent citizens. His contemporaries described him as "redoubtable," a man with a "phenomenal memory" and the steel required to conduct operations that could easily turn violent.

The 1930s Crisis

In the early 1930s, Australia faced an internal security crisis that has largely faded from popular memory. The New Guard, a paramilitary organization led by Eric Campbell, was not a political pressure group or a veterans' social club. It was an armed force preparing for civil conflict. The numbers were staggering: approximately 50,000 members organized into military units across New South Wales. They had divided their membership into "Shock Troops," mobile and ready for deployment, and "Essential Service Troops." They possessed wireless telegraphy systems. They were recruiting men with knowledge of explosives, mining, and demolition. And they were planning a coup d'état.

The government needed proof, not rumors or speculation, but documentary evidence that would justify action.

On September 3, 1931, a "Most Secret" memorandum crossed the desk of the District Intelligence Officer in Sydney. It proposed that Wake infiltrate the New Guard, noting that "a favourable opportunity has presented itself" for him to join the organization. The objective was clear: obtain "authentic information" regarding their strength, aims, and operational plans. The Director of Naval Intelligence initially hesitated to approve this specific proposal on September 7, 1931. The risk was obvious. Wake would be entering an organization of armed men who viewed government agents as enemies of Australia. Discovery wouldn't mean embarrassment, it could mean violence.

The Art Of Infiltration..

But Wake and other agents successfully penetrated the New Guard's inner circle. Intelligence history records that Wake executed a brazen theft to secure the organization's internal files. The tradecraft was elegant in its simplicity: he invited the New Guard's office secretary to lunch at a cafeteria on the ground floor of their headquarters building. Once she was safely distracted over the meal, Wake excused himself, stole up a back entrance, and rifled through the filing cabinets in the unattended office above. This wasn't a desk analyst reviewing intercepted communications. This was a man physically entering hostile territory, surrounded by potential enemies, gambling that he had enough time to locate, extract, and secure documents before discovery. One person returning early from lunch, one colleague wondering where the secretary had gone, one locked cabinet he couldn't open, any of these could have exposed him.

What Wake extracted transformed the government's understanding of the threat. These weren't vague organizational charts or membership rosters. The "Mobile Training" manuals detailed military drill, formation tactics, and discipline, proof the Guard was training as a regimented army, not a political movement. The "Street Fighting" protocols dated May 2, 1932, provided instructions on "cleaning up" areas, the deployment of "lachrymatory gas and grenades," and how to storm barricades. The document explicitly stated that "rifles will normally be carried at the TRAIL," ready for immediate action. "Field Engineer" establishment orders created units specialized in explosives, mining, and demolition, technical capabilities that went far beyond self-defense. The "Service Regulations" mapped a parallel military command structure dividing New South Wales into "Zones" and "Divisions," mimicking official Australian military organization. Wake's intelligence provided the irrefutable proof necessary for the government to act.

Fascism On An International Scale..

As domestic fascism gave way to global war, Wake's operational theatre shifted from Sydney office buildings to combat zones. In 1941, he was deployed to Singapore and Hong Kong on intelligence work. His official "Officer's Record of Service" sanitizes this history, listing his overseas service as "Nil." But the reality, preserved in his widow's statutory declaration and related official documents, was far more dangerous. Wake was told to travel under civilian cover, in "mufti," carrying passports for the Netherlands East Indies and Thailand. This wasn't an administrative convenience. Under the Geneva Convention, a uniformed soldier captured by enemy forces becomes a prisoner of war. A civilian conducting intelligence work becomes a spy, subject to execution. Wake stripped himself of military protection to do his job.

His widow's account records that he was present in Hong Kong during "heavy bombing," forced to take shelter while his personal batman was killed nearby. He undertook reconnaissance flights with an American Intelligence Captain, reportedly sighting Japanese Zero fighters during the final days before the fall of Singapore. These weren't desk briefings. This was operational intelligence work conducted under fire, at the very edge of the Japanese advance, by a man who knew that capture would likely mean torture and death.

R.F.B. Wake survived the infiltration of the New Guard. He survived the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong. He returned to Australia and continued his intelligence work through the Cold War, eventually becoming a central figure in the 1954 Petrov Affair, the Soviet espionage scandal that rocked Australian politics. But survival is not the same as emerging unscathed.

Undeniable Truths

Wake's story matters because it's true. In an era when espionage has been romanticized by fiction, his documented career provides a corrective. Real intelligence work requires real courage, the kind that sends a man up a back staircase to rifle through enemy files, or boards a plane into a war zone under civilian cover, or continues serving even after the mind begins to fracture under accumulated stress. Wake was the rare bird who saw threats others wanted to ignore, who gathered evidence others were afraid to collect, and who paid the price others never had to contemplate.

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The Tamam Shud blog is dedicated to uncovering the forensic realities of the Somerton Man case. Our mission is not to speculate, but to reconstruct the events of 1948 using primary documents, scientific modelling, and expert analysis. While the man's true identity may remain a mystery, our focus is on the evidence that reveals how he died and the networks involved. To ensure the integrity of this research, we rely solely on verifiable sources and citations, strictly excluding anonymous blog comments and forum speculation from our data.