Internal security, 1915-1922

Component identifier:

Series 21

Content Summary:

This is a small but important group of papers covering what Hughes regarded as the three main sources of anti-conscription and anti-Empire activity in Australia during his term as Prime Minister: the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinn Fein, and Russian communism. Two organisations established to counter them were the Commonwealth Police and the Counter Espionage Bureau (CEB). The latter, part of an Empire-wide organisation, was absorbed into the Attorney-General's Department in the early 1920s.

The series consists in the main of letters, reports and memoranda sent to Hughes, Pearce and Garran from both Major G. Steward (Munro-Ferguson's Official Secretary and the first Director of the CEB) and Colonel H. Jones (Steward's successor as Director, and later head of the Investigation Branch of the Attorney-General's Department). They include Steward's first six monthly report to Pearce on the CEB (August 1916), Jones' 1922 annual intelligence report to the Solicitor-General, reports and intelligence summaries by Jones on communism in Australia (1921), letters from Steward and Munro-Ferguson on the need for a Federal Police Force (1917-1918), and a letter from Steward to Pearce which refers to a Special Intelligence Bureau (January 1917).

Other items have extracts of letters by unionists, priests and others passed to Hughes by the censors; intelligence information from W. G. Spence; an Australian Military Forces intelligence report (March 1918), an unsigned paper headed 'Unlawful Associations Act - intelligence report', a report by Captain Thomas W. White on the Bolshevik movement in Russia (n.d.), British Government Command Papers on Sinn Fein and its connection with Bolshevism, examples of Industrial Workers of the World stickers, and an intelligence report on a speech by Archbishop Mannix.

Immediate source of acquisition:

The W. M. Hughes Papers were presented to the National Library of Australia by Dame Mary Hughes in 1953. The collection was received in two consignments. One consisted of papers taken from the Perpetual Trustee Company comprising material from Hughes' Lindfield home and from his office rooms at the Commonwealth Offices, Sydney; the other came directly from Lindfield. Lists of the contents of both consignments are held in the Library's Manuscript Branch. With the agreement of the executors and the Library, much of the collection, was for a time, held at the Australian National University by Fitzhardinge. He was permitted sole access to the collection while writing the biography Hughes commissioned in 1951. Fitzhardinge's own papers documenting the writing of the biography are also held by the Library (MS 5400). The papers transferred to the Library in 1953 are by no means the total collection of Hughes' personal papers, although it is impossible to say what proportion has survived. (see Fitzhardinge, p.936).

Names:

Hughes, W. M. (1862-1952)

Contents

Access and use