Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997) was one of Australia's best known Cold War communists; 'highly intelligent, articulate and gutsy'^[1] as a journalist, he was also an orator, pamphleteer, lecturer, broadcaster, commentator, and highly regarded amongst rank and file Australian communists. According to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation agent Dr. Michael Bialoguski, in Sydney communist circles it was sufficient to say "'but Rupert Lockwood said so' (to) settle an argument beyond doubt".^[2] Lockwood's name is inextricably linked to the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia (1954-55) as a high profile witness, author of Exhibit (Document) J. Historically this document, and therefore Lockwood, figures in the ALP Split of 1954-57 because it resulted in drawing Labor Party leader, Dr. H. V. Evatt, before the Commission as legal counsel for members of his staff referred to in the document. Evatt's Commission appearance was 'one of the last straws that finally broke Labor unity'.^[3] From 1952 until retirement in 1985 Lockwood was primarily either associate editor or editor of the Maritime Worker, the national journal of the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF), and part of a communist team with 'impressive talents' that headed up the federal office of that union on the frontline of the Cold War in Australia, the waterfront.^[4] However, it should be noted that Lockwood's employment with the WWF was such that it allowed time for other journalistic and authorial work, including Communist Party of Australia (CPA) assignments.^[5]

     In the context of Australian Cold War history, Lockwood is more than a footnote, and warrants biographical exploration. As a 'communist journalist', the way he is often described in Cold War related literature,^[6] it is instructive to look at what this description does not convey in his case, what it overlooks or dismisses, arguably carrying with it the suggestion of 'otherness', of being ideological in a way that journalists working for capitalist media outlets were/are not, and therefore perhaps somehow limited, inferior, tainted, less credible, not a real journalist.

     Lockwood was a member of the CPA for about thirty years; his career as a reporter, journalist and writer spanned over sixty years, more if you count his childhood experiences, which is when he was introduced to the world of newspapers and journalism. An active member of the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA), he was one of three journalists responsible for drafting the AJA's Code of Ethics in 1942 (adopted nationally in 1944).^[7] Further, the bulk of Lockwood's career as a journalist was either with non-communist publications, including the Melbourne Herald and the ABC Weekly, or the labour movement press, primarily the journal of the Waterside Workers' Federation, the Maritime Worker. Lockwood's close journalistic link with the CPA newspaper Tribune, which he was associated with when he wrote Document J (1953), amounted to a period of about twenty, not continuous, years. In a sense, to simply pigeonhole Lockwood as a 'communist journalist', whatever that is intended to convey, misrepresents Lockwood by ignoring at least half of his professional life, and glosses over the talents and experiences he brought to the service of the Australian Left and to the labour movement, and what he did in the service of both.

American writer, and former member of the American Communist Party, Howard Fast, observed in his 1988 novel about the McCarthy era, The Pledge: 'No one is constructed instantly—in terms of mind and outlook—any more than one is changed instantly. The making and the changing are part of a process.'^[8] So it was with Lockwood, who joined the CPA in late 1939, during his early thirties. But there was a decisive period before this, between 1935 and 1938, which led to Lockwood's commitment to the Left. By looking at this period in his life, the nature of his journalistic skills and talents are evident, giving an idea of the experiences and talents the term 'communist journalist' does not convey. Before that, some understanding of Lockwood's life and career prior to 1935 is relevant because it was the building block of his future career in journalism.

     Rupert Ernest Lockwood was born on 10 March 1908 in Natimuk, a small town in Western Victoria's Wimmera region. His father, Alfred Wright Lockwood (1867-1956), was proprietor of the personal, cantankerous, combative, West Wimmera Mail (525 subscribers)^[9]; his mother Alice, nee Francis (born 1873), was a product of Melbourne's Presbyterian Ladies College - musician, temperance campaigner, and former school teacher. The family cottage was named Caxton; the 4 page weekly West Wimmera Mail was produced on a hand operated press until 1937. Childhood for the Lockwood children (4 children to Alfred and Alice; 3 children to Alfred and Ida Lockwood – nee Klowss, following the death of Alice from cancer in 1913) took place in the context of the newspaper, where they functioned as unpaid printing labourers. By the age of 10 they could set type and operate the foot-pedal job-printing machine; by the age of 14 Rupert was reporting local news. The newspaper environment of the household formed a potent training ground; four of the Lockwood children forged adult careers in Australian journalism and letters.^[10]

     Rupert's education variously took place at the Natimuk State School, informally in the town's Mechanics' Institute where he read widely, and from February 1924 to May 1926 at Melbourne's elite Wesley College, a school with the tradition and expectation that its graduates would take prominent and leading roles in society in adult life^[11]. Following Wesley it was back to Natimuk, and the Mail, reporting small-town life. Eventually, Depression strains on family finances, Rupert's own restlessness for broader horizons aroused by his Melbourne school experiences, and the social contacts of his elder brother Lionel (later Surgeon Rear-Admiral Lockwood, Medical Director-General, Royal Australian Navy, 1955-64), helped him secure a cadet journalist's job on Keith Murdoch's Melbourne Herald in 1930.

     The Melbourne Herald of the 1930s was, as Don Watson has described, 'a hotchpotch of almost incredible banality, and intelligent, often liberal, social and political comment'. Its young journalists were among 'the best of their generation'. Murdoch had assembled 'virtually the cream of Australia's journalists'; in spite of the owner, the culture of personal discourse was 'a general left-of-centre liberal consensus'.^[12] By the outbreak of war in 1939, there was a 'very, very strong Communist Party Branch in the Herald Office'.^[13]

     Starting as a second-year cadet, because of his Natimuk journalistic background, Lockwood accelerated through the four-year cadet system. By 1933 he had bargained his way from a D grade reporter to a B plus grading and was serving his first term as a Canberra galleryman.^[14] Close friendships developed at the Herald with John Fisher^[15] (son of former Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher: later worked abroad with Egon Kisch; became prominently active in the Spanish Republican cause; covered World War 2 from Moscow) and with Douglas Wilkie (son of theatre pioneers Allan Wilkie and Frediswyde Hunter-Watts; during World War 2, Wilkie distinguished himself as a principled war correspondent on the India-Burma battlefronts)^[16]. Melbourne's bohemian intelligentsia's hotel, restaurant and cafe life became part of Lockwood's environment and he associated with rationalist Bill Cooke, and leftists like Brian Fitzpatrick, Guido Baracchi, Noel Counihan, and Judah Waten.

     A stint as the Herald's 'unemployment roundsman' helped radicalise his political sensitivities, as did the dramatic 1934 lecture tour by Egon Kisch, the anti-fascist journalist and author. The tour and attendant political controversy made lasting impressions on many who were, or who became, part of the anti-fascist cause of the 1930s. Not only the tour had impact, but on some, Kisch's approach to journalism, which went beyond observing and reporting; the journalist was a citizen of the world, was present in the story, engaged with the topic being written about, and in a sense helped make history. While journalism was a craft, it was also exciting, about purpose, commitment, and engagement; this was an approach to journalism that would variously be taken up by Lockwood, Fisher, and by a young door-to-door seller of household appliances, future journalist Wilfred Burchett, who was influenced by Kisch when he heard him speak in Sydney's Domain. Lockwood and Fisher provided Kisch with some of the Australian historical detail that later appeared in his book Australian Landfall. ^[17]

     Amongst Melbourne's younger journalists there was an adventurous restlessness, heightened by news of the exploits from those who 'got away',^[18] confident in the knowledge their Australian training stood them in good stead abroad. A number of them would leave Australia during the mid-to-late thirties. The tumult of the outside world beckoned, along with the allure of international acclaim.^[19] As Hugh Thomas has noted, the 1930s 'were the great age of the foreign correspondent'.^[20] Lockwood sailed from Australia in March 1935, bound for Singapore. His restlessness was in part due to the unsettling, exciting impact of meeting with Kisch, the departure of Fisher who left for Europe with Kisch earlier in 1935 (later helping translate the 1937 English edition of Australian Landfall from German), and reports from Wilkie who had preceded them in 1934 when he headed for Europe via Asia.

     In Asia Lockwood worked a variety of jobs, often simultaneously - for the Singapore Free Press, the Straits Times, Reuters, the Australian Newspaper Service, Australian Associated Press, and contributed by-lined feature articles to the Thursday and Saturday magazine sections of the Melbourne Herald. He visited the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), Siam, French Indo China, and Japan. His report on the Tokyo military mutiny (February 1936) for Reuters was a world scoop, and he was rewarded with a flattering tribute in the Reuters' in-house bulletin and a five-guinea bonus. He believed the report brought him to the notice of the Kempeitai (Japan's secret police), and that whilst in Japan his room was searched; he felt under threat. In July 1940 his Reuters host in Tokyo, James Melville Cox, was arrested as a spy and died during a Tokyo police interrogation; suicide was alleged.^[21] During the 1930s Reuters' work was often an uneasy tightrope walk between securing news and trying to avoid giving offence.^[22] But it was not all work: Lockwood enjoyed himself in Asia; he enjoyed his travel opportunities, and social aspects of colonial life in Singapore, what he termed in later life 'the sweet colonial life'.^[23]

     His time in Asia had a twofold effect on Lockwood. First, his Reuters' scoop sparked an 'acute interest in the tangle and treachery of Japanese Imperial politics and the violence of military ambition';^[24] in Singapore he became aware of the way British military strategy in the Far East was underpinned by a racist underestimation of Japan's military prowess.^[25] This interest and awareness are evident in two of his articles published during 1939 in The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin (a two-monthly review published by the Australian Institute of International Affairs) about Japanese militarism and expansion in Asia. According to Lockwood, Japan's expansion was rooted in its quest for natural resources and markets, which was helped by what he regarded as Australia's policy 'of appeasement, based on supposed commercial needs rather than morality". Critical of the "Atlantic outlook' of the Australian press, geo-politically aware of the military vulnerability of Singapore, Lockwood considered war with Japan a future possibility, in the event of which no one could depend on Britain for security. Rather, hope lay with the Chinese communists, their resistance to Japan, bolstered by increased aid from Russia, and with the slim possibility of some form of social revolution developing in Japan.^[26]

     Indeed Japanese militarism, its relationship with Japan's industrial economy, the certainty that war between Australia and Japan was inevitable, became major concerns of Lockwood from 1939 onwards as a journalist and activist. Information he gathered as a journalist during the early years of World War 2, convinced him of the reality of the Brisbane Line strategy, and that an invasion of Australia by Japan would be accommodated by sections of the Australian ruling class. These convictions, arguably overtime becoming obsessive, ultimately formed a significant part of Document J.^[27]

     A critical anti-colonial awareness, implicit in his analysis of Singapore, was the second legacy of Lockwood's stint in Asia. Travelling in the NEI, Indo-China, Siam, China, he saw 'the sufferings of the people' which 'helped to mould one's views'.^[28] Articles he published in 1939 in the ABC Weekly demonstrate political awareness of independence movements in both the NEI and India, forecast the eventual success of the independence movement in India and associate with that the decline of Britain as a world power, and assert that the war will actually advance Asian independence movements.^[29] Fascism and Japanese militarism aside, there is a basic underlying tension in the world and threat to peace with a significant part of the world's peoples 'only able to win bread by making the weapons for their own destruction'.^[30] Supporting the liberation of colonial peoples became an important theme in Lockwood's future political life.

     Lockwood headed for London, arriving in time for the Wallis Simpson scandal. To reach there, he made his way to the China-Soviet border, witnessed and was alarmed by Japanese militarism in action, and was harassed by Japanese soldiery. Travelling through Russia he was impressed by what he saw, like many idealists of his generation; the sense of progress, the lack of destitution and degradation. But it was not enough to blind him to the prison trains he saw, the treatment of dissidents, Soviet censorship, and he told his Herald readers that the methods of Stalinist repression were similar to 'the methods of the Czars and the Grand Dukes'.^[31]

     Reaching London via Moscow and Berlin, Lockwood joined the Australian Newspaper Service, a feature agency servicing the Herald, amongst other Australian newspapers. He also contributed anonymously to Claud Cockburn's left news sheet The Week and to the communist Daily Worker. The major feature of his London stay, however, was being credentialed to report on the Spanish Civil War. For Herald readers the realities of the war from the Republican side during 1937 were mainly provided by three by-lines-- those of Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, and Rupert Lockwood.

     For Lockwood, the Spanish Civil War marked what in retrospect he saw as his point of commitment. He experienced being under fire, and under aerial and naval bombardment; he was deeply disturbed by rows of 'mangled, gutted' child corpses in the morgue during the siege of Madrid, an experience which aroused within him intense anti-fascist feeling^[32]; he was impressed by the Spanish communists who 'have shown more intelligence and reason than any other political party'.^[33] Thought and action moved closer together: in Madrid he broadcast over the Republican short-wave radio station EAQ,^[34] and he rated this involvement as his 'first important commitment to Leftwing causes'.^[35]

     A meeting of significance in Madrid was with Austrian socialist Ilsa Kulcsar, assistant to, and later wife of, writer, broadcaster, Arturo Barea, head of the Republic's censorship office. It was Ilsa who involved Lockwood in the propagandist work of EAQ, and interested him personally in the plight of Europe's refugees fleeing fascism, an interest he actively followed up when he eventually returned to Melbourne.^[36] The political impact of the war in Spain, and of besieged Madrid, on Lockwood, was not unique, but common to many journalists who reported from the Republican side. According to Antony Beevor,

Many became resolute, and often uncritical, champions of the Republic after experiencing the siege of Madrid…. .The ideals of the anti-fascist cause anaesthetized many of them to aspects of the war that proved uncomfortable. It was a difficult atmosphere in which to retain objectivity.^[37]

What made the experience significant in Lockwood's case was it marked the acceleration and intensification of a leftist political trajectory. Recalled by Murdoch in 1938 Lockwood returned to Melbourne, believing he had been earmarked for career advancement. He came home via North America, giving pro-Republican interviews in Canada; about 1,000 Canadians volunteers fought for the Spanish Republic.^[38] The Lockwood who returned had changed, and was not the same person who had left Australia in 1935. He had travelled around the world through 34 countries; professionally he had emerged from the anonymity of Herald journalism with a by-line; he had engaged successfully internationally as a journalist; he had developed a preference for journalism that blended observation/recording with comment. All reasons for feeling very much self-assured, more confident than he had been in 1935. And he had changed politically.

     When he had left Melbourne, Lockwood's politics were 'already a little bit on the way' to being a committed leftist;^[39] according to friends he had been 'politically liberal minded' and 'socialist inclined'.^[40] The description fits others of his generation and work environment. Fellow Herald journalist Alan Moorehead, who left for London during 1936 (almost aged twenty-six), generally described his colleagues: 'Nearly all of us were left wing, and glowed with hate for Mussolini and the up and coming Hitler'.^[41] According to Moorehead, the attitude of these young Melbourne journalists to being 'a journalist' was:

they opt out of normal life because they choose to write about it, and so they regard themselves as an esoteric group set apart from the rest of society. Among themselves they talk almost entirely about news and newspapers in much the same way as actors talk only of the theatre and of themselves.^[42]

Commenting about himself in 1936, in London, finding it difficult to remain neutral about the war in Spain and to sideline his Republican sympathies, Moorehead describes a chrysalis of spirit associated with his journalism, but having a general relevance, the journalist only as 'observer' and 'recorder':

Like most nomads I hovered in the half-world of only partial commitment to religion, to causes, to women and to places, and thus, by definition, to life itself. This is not the stuff out of which you can make either traitors or heroes; it simply leaves you with sensations of frustration and of shallow guilt, which to avoid, you keep moving on.^[43]

For Lockwood, Kisch and his tour had challenged this view of journalism, and its practice. Abroad, politics and journalism meshed in Lockwood's life, and the sort of journalistic chrysalis Moorehead described was shed. As for Moorehead, he got to Spain in 1937 as a correspondent based in Gibraltar for the London Daily Express; 'flying visits' is the way he described his various assignments, Spain and its war remaining a 'forbidden exhilaration'. In these words Moorehead captured his sense of regret, of being outside, apart from, what seemed to him at the time to be an intense, profoundly important, historical moment.^[44] Lockwood, on the other hand, made the connection.

     Back with the Herald, Lockwood reported from the federal parliamentary press gallery. His personal life reflected his new commitment. He joined the Australian Labor Party, had pre-selection aspirations,^[45] involved himself in the work of the Victorian International Refugee Emergency Council,^[46] formed in 1938 to assist the migration of European refugees to Australia and their process of adaptation, and the Australian Council for Civil Liberties (ACCL) where he served on the Executive Committee. In Australia it was a time of rising and organized anti-semitism, of increasing tensions and conflict between police and anti-fascist demonstrators, and concern amongst civil libertarians that in the event of war with Germany, civil liberties would be curtailed in the name of national security. The ACCL, guided by historian and former Herald journalist Brian Fitzpatrick, supported by Lockwood, directed its attentions to these matters.^[47]

     There were well publicized court appearances by Lockwood, identified in print as a Herald journalist,^[48] acting as a civil liberties observer/witness on behalf of people arrested at anti-fascist demonstrations. At the end of 1938, with the Port Kembla (NSW) 'Pig-Iron Dispute' dramatically centre stage nationally, Lockwood toasted guest Attorney General Robert Menzies at a Canberra press gallery dinner. Menzies was responsible for invoking the anti-strike Transport Workers' Act in an attempt to break the ban by Port Kembla workers on a shipment of pig iron to Japan; the wharfies argued that loading the material was tantamount to sending war supplies to Japan and its undeclared war on China, which they resolutely opposed. Lockwood infuriated Menzies and some of the journalists present by criticising his role in the dispute, proposing that Menzies 'had long realised the Chinese suffered a shortage of iron in their diet'. Arguments broke out between journalists, Lockwood was struck, there were scuffles, and some blood was spilt.^[49]

     This toast, together with what Lockwood believed was a complaint from Menzies to Herald management, and fallout from Lockwood's civil liberties work, resulted in him being assigned during 1939 to lesser journalistic tasks not commensurate with his status and experience. At the Herald this was known as 'the treatment', a demeaning process of reining in and cutting down journalists who strayed too far and independently from management's vision of political-professional journalistic behaviour. In 1936 journalist Noel Monks, for example, fresh from reporting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, had been assigned junior tasks; he responded by booking a return passage to Fleet Street.^[50]

     Despite 'the treatment' Lockwood continued his civil liberties work, contributed to public debate about Japanese militarism and expansion in Asia, and sought employment elsewhere. A lifeline came in the form of an offer from former Herald editor Sid Deamer to join him in Sydney as foreign editor and feature writer on the ABC Weekly, a new publication headed up by Deamer (the first issue, 2 December 1939). Lockwood accepted the job. But before he quit Melbourne, the day Australia declared war on Germany, he joined the Australian Communist Party (CPA). Two Herald colleagues signed his nomination form. He kept his membership secret during the time the party was illegal and underground, 1940-1942, and took a high profile role in the left-wing State Labor Party in New South Wales which the banned CPA 'made considerable use of'.^[51]

     So far as Australia's security authorities were concerned, Lockwood was not perceived as a threat until after 1939. When he acted as guarantor for a family of refugees from Nazism, a July 1939 security review noted his assets (including a small parcel of Herald shares), employment and wage, and declared him 'a first class type of guarantor'.^[52] By June 1940, however, he was a 'suspected communist' and under Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) surveillance; in February 1941, Military Intelligence (MI) became interested and established what it termed 'a special watch on him'.^[53]

     Lockwood's decision to join the CPA, he explained in later life, was no spur of the moment decision. It climaxed an evolutionary process in which his experiences overseas, particularly in Spain, and the anti-fascist role of the CPA during the 1930s, were key factors.^[54] To this Euro-centred view of his path to communism, his Asian experiences and their legacies must be added, and his belief that resistance by communists was what stood between Japanese militarism and the future. In his 1942 book Guerilla Paths to Freedom, Lockwood brought Europe and Asia together, detailing ways Australians could conduct guerilla warfare against 'Powerful Axis forces (that) may soon invade Australia". He drew upon his experiences in Spain, and from what he understood about contemporaneous guerilla struggles in Russia, Yugoslavia, and China.^[55]

     Australia's intelligence instrumentalities eventually homed in on Lockwood's overseas sojourn. According to a 1941 CIB report, it was Lockwood's travel experiences and his journalistic reputation that elevated him above 'the usual labour enthusiast' and made him someone 'to be reckoned with', even if 'some of his oratory is over the heads of the audience'.^[56] In April 1940 an anonymous informant provided background material on Lockwood to MI, according to which Lockwood had been in Asia in 1931 and had 'got into trouble with either Navy or Army--not certain which'.^[57] A false report, since in 1931 Lockwood was a cadet journalist in Melbourne, pretty well fresh from the Wimmera. But it helped set a sinister dimension to the 'Rupert Lockwood' character his watchers were developing in their dossiers, the 'communist journalist' of the 1950s, and sheeted what was 'troubling' about him to his 1935-1938 experiences and activities.^[58]

     The intelligence gatherers were correct. Lockwood was a person 'to be reckoned with', and his experiences overseas during 1935-1938 were significant. The period had changed him personally, professionally and politically; his engagement with it, illustrates what is missing from the term 'communist journalist' when applied to him – a resourceful journalist of considerable talent and nous, educated, intelligent, arguably amongst the best of his generation, well travelled; a person significantly affected politically by what he had witnessed during the period, and who was no longer willing to watch from the sidelines.