CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CENSORSHIP AND THE PEOPLE
The greatest tragedy that could overcome a country would be for it to fight a successful war in defence of liberty and lose its own liberty in the process.”
Robert Gordon Menzies,
Former Prime Minister of Australia (1939-1941 and 1949-1966).
The first newspaper stories of the Japanese attack did not appear in Sydney until the late editions on 1 June 1942. According to Daily Telegraph journalist, John , two articles were filed immediately after the attack, including his own, but neither article ran for censorship reasons.
The duty censor officer in Sydney on Sunday 31 May was 35-year-old Tulla Brown who remembers the Navy imposed an embargo on press cover for several hours, thus, news of the attack did not make the morning editions.
By fortuitous circumstances, Tulla Brown was the only press censor working when most of the harbour action was on and for some hours afterwards. The press censorship operated on overlapping rosters, usually four or five censors on duty at any one time. The shift of which she was part worked from 6:00 pm to 2:00 am on every night except Sunday. Because Sundays were quiet, the shift was from mid-afternoon until 11:00 pm.
In a letter published in the Bulletin in 1982, Tulla Brown wrote that Sundays from 11:00 pm were not only unusually quiet nights for submissions, they were also notable for lack of late night or all-night transport. Because her transport was the all-night Watsons Bay tram, she was scheduled on alone until 2:00 am. She said that had she been one of a team instead of alone on duty, she would not have had such vivid recollections of that dramatic night.
Tulla Brown recalled that one of the censors who had signed off at 11:00 pm had rang her from Circular Quay before 11:30 pm, telling her that “things are popping down here” with some sort of naval action and warning her to be ready for a very busy night.
I then promptly telephoned and awakened the chief censor in Canberra, believing, rightly, that he in turn would need to ring the Prime Minister, asleep or awake, as press submissions on a subject so much involved with security would certainly be flowing in.
She recalls their talk led to a mutual feeling that if people near the Quay, or living where they had harbour-side views and were hearing and seeing gunfire, as well as hectic searchlight activity and explosions, that it was important to quickly formulate censorship directions to allow for speedy publication. She wrote the concern was that delays would heighten public alarm.
The chief censor made very subtle private “soundings” of his own by telephone to confirm what he had heard from me, and I from my home-going colleague, before disturbing Mr Curtin. He took the same view as my chief and I had reached.
Of course, the service view had to be determined. I was directed to try to reach Rear-Admiral Muirhead-Gould on the telephone. This was a fruitless exercise. I tried many times but never got past a junior RAN officer at Garden Island, telling me with increasing embarrassment that the Rear-Admiral was not yet available and was, in fact, “patrolling” around the harbour. At some later stage came the rumour, probably from the press, which was then ringing me incessantly, that the Rear-Admiral was “tootling” around vantage points on his motor-scooter, then a novelty in this country. That was perhaps the only laugh of the night.
Tulla Brown wrote that she was directed by the chief censor not to make any reference about harbour events, and that she had to keep in touch with the censorship offices in Brisbane and Melbourne, with the latter obliged to keep in contact with points west and south.
One of my outstanding memories of the night is the harrying I was subjected to from the Daily Telegraph once it was realised that there was “only a woman” on call at our office. I guessed it was hoped that I might panic under the stress of repeated telephone calls and blurt out some information they did not have. First a sub-editor on what was probably a reasonable inquiry. But then, relentlessly at short intervals, the chief sub-editor, the news editor, an unremembered executive, and finally the formidable Brian Penton, then at the top of that paper’s hierarchy.
Daily Telegraph journalist John Hector recounted to the author that some eight weeks earlier, Penton had been told “by the highest authority in Australia” that a Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour was expected. This prediction resulted in a 20 pound wager between Penton and Hector. Hector quite emphatically recalls attempting to file this information sometime before the attack, but censorship prevented the story being published. If true, Hector’s strong recollections point to a national government that knew more than it was letting on.
Sir Paul Hasluck in his book, The Government and the People, describes nine newspapers that were banned by the government by means of censorship power; and the daily newspapers complained of continuous and needless delays of publication because of censorship.
Hasluck goes on to say that “censorship probably went furthest beyond the normal practices of Australian democracy”. He further records that: “Censorship acted as the handmaiden of all government departments with their wartime activities.”
When Curtin became Prime Minister in October 1941, censorship was intensified. Such was the power of censors at that time that it caused Robert Menzies to comment:
The greatest tragedy that could overcome a country would be for it to fight a successful war in defence of liberty and lose its own liberty in the process.
Menzies and Curtin themselves were censored on several occasions after issuing press statements, by what Hasluck calls blundering and over-zealous individual censors.
Tulla Brown recalls that the big expansion of the censorship apparatus started almost immediately after General MacArthur’s arrival in Australia in early 1942 until mid-November.
This was the period of very big events, of which, of course, we were aware, as we were aware of their crucial significance. These included the battles of the Coral Sea and of Midway, the New Guinea and island campaigns… We were required to follow the MacArthur communiqués on non-local military actions and work in tandem with his military censors. I must confess that these pro-American “boys”, who ignored specific credit to the Australian forces, were often as unpalatable to the Australian censors as they were to our war correspondents who were restricted by them. They sourly called General MacArthur “God”.
In the weeks following the Sydney Harbour raid, there were demands from some sections of the press for an official inquiry; but none came. The Curtin Labor War Cabinet was deeply concerned about the defeatism of the population and could ill-afford another Royal Commission into the handling of defences so soon after the Darwin attack.