based on the "Red Dusk" trilogy by the same author

Part 1

Come September of 2008, six decades will have passed since Lance Sharkey’s dream of a Communist Australia died in a torrent of gunfire outside Parliament House. The failed September Revolt, and the harsh internal security laws enacted in its aftermath, have left an enduring scar on the Australian national soul; that scar deepened with the 1965 assassination of Australian prime minister Robert G. Menzies. The era of the September Revolt is a required study subject in Australian school history classes, and Australian SF authors have produced reams of alternate history novels and short stories asking how Australia’s history might have changed if certain events of that era had happened differently-- if, say, the CPA guerrillas had succeeded in taking over Parliament House or Harold Holt had stayed in Australian politics long enough to become prime minister after Menzies’ assassination.

In this series you’ll read interviews with a number of Australians about their views on the September Revolt and its consequences. You’ll also see the reminiscences of two foreign diplomats who were posted to Australia at the time of the uprising, plus the transcript of a 2003 round-table discussion between political scholars from Australia’s top universities on the question of whether such a rebellion could happen again in the foreseeable future.

******

Name any mini-series, weekly series, or made-for-TV movie that’s appeared on Australian television in the last twenty-five year and chances are fairly good that Janine Parker has at least one scene in it-- often more than one. Breaking into acting at the age of 19 with a stint as an extra in a Sydney University production of Macbeth, Parker has since gone on to build up a resumé of over 80 credits in TV, film, and theater; perhaps her best-known role to date is as Stephen Burke’s wife Miranda in the 1998 television adaptation of the classic what-if book Just A Few More Questions, Mr. Holt.

At the time this interview was taped, Ms. Parker had just finished rehearsals for her new one-woman stage show Centennial Sadie, a play about a 100-year-old Sydney woman offering her take on some of the most important events of 20^th century Australian history. Not surprisingly, much of the play’s dialogue is devoted to the September Revolt and the Menzies assassination.

Born just over a year after Lance Sharkey’s execution, Colonel Edward Staples is a specialist in anti-terrorism tactics. He often uses the September Revolt as a case study in putting down nascent insurgencies; on at least one occasion he’s had his cadets re-enact the skirmish between CPA partisans and government troops on the road to Duntroon to give the cadets a first-hand glimpse of what it might have been like on both sides during the Communists’ ill-fated bid to capture Royal Military College. He is the author of a new book, First Shot, which recounts hour by hour both the Duntroon firefight and the CPA attack on Parliament House in downtown Canberra.

We spoke to Staples in his office on the Royal Military College campus; the colonel, himself a cadet at Duntroon back in the 1960s, is well-acquainted with the terrain where the Duntroon engagement took place and the battle plan under which the CPA made its abortive assault on the college. In his estimation, the CPA insurgency was one of the most ill-starred combat operations in human history.

Lance Sharkey’s most serious mistake was in underestimating the number of men he would need to make his insurrection work. As astute a political leader as he might have been, he left something to be desired as a military commander. Frankly, it’s astonishing that the man didn’t get himself killed  in the first minutes of the Revolt-- and it might have been better for the CPA’s cause if he had. As anyone who studies such things can tell you, heroic martyrs can do wonders for a revolutionary movement.

His second gravest error was trying to seize three different objectives spread over a wide area in a short amount of time. In the initial part of his uprising at least, he would have done better to concentrate on securing Parliament House first; once that was accomplished, he could have occupied the ABC studios in Sydney at his leisure.

If nothing else, the September Revolt made the Royal Australian Army more sensitive to anti-terrorism concerns. Since 9/11 courses on the September Revolt have been a mandatory part of the curriculum for all incoming cadets here at Royal Military College; all RAA personnel assigned to duty in the Middle East or Afghanistan are given similar instruction. While the difficulties one faces in fighting Islamofascist terrorism are naturally different in some aspects from those which the West had to confront when opposing Communism fifty years earlier, there are also a great many similarities-- and studying the 1948 Communist uprising makes it possible to identify those similarities.

Because of her surname, most people assume at first that Samantha Burke is related to Stephen Burke in one way or another. She does have a family connection with the era of the September Revolt and its aftermath, but not the one you might expect-- her grandfather was a Canberra police officer wounded in the attack on Parliament House. Not surprisingly, that connection has given her motivation to study the politics and cultural conflicts of the Menzies years; Ms. Burke is currently majoring in political history with a minor in political science.

At the time of her interview, Ms. Burke was at Melbourne University’s main library doing research for a term paper on the relationship between the September Revolt and the decline in influence that non-Marxist left wing parties suffered in the wake of the uprising.

Charlie Hudson has a unique perspective on the September Revolt era: he’s one of the dwindling group of men who worked at Fremantle Prison during the 1953 hunger strike staged by Stephen Burke and seven of his fellow inmates to protest what they felt (rightly, as it turned out) was unjust incarceration based solely on the fact that were speaking out against the stringent internal security measures enacted by the Menzies government after the Revolt.² Unlike many of his fellow staffers, who were certain the Fremantle Eight deserved without question to be in jail, Hudson was rather sympathetic to the strikers’ cause and even bonded with Stephen Burke; when Burke eventually died of starvation in mid-March of 1953, it was Hudson who broke the news to Stephen’s father Edward.

Because of declining health, Hudson seldom leaves his apartment these days; nonetheless he agreed to talk to us for this article because he wanted to get his story on the record one last time before he passes away. We met with him at a pub in the heart of Fremantle which he used to visit every day as an employee of Fremantle Prison and still patronizes a few times a year whenever circumstances permit.

Alan Matthews III hails from a long line of Canberra police officers whose origins date back to the days of his great-grandpa Ian, who patrolled the streets around Parliament House back in the mid-1900s. Alan himself decided to join the force at the age of 22 after two failed attempts at breaking into the ranks of the Australian Rules football world. As has been standard procedure for all Australian police officers since the September Revolt, Sgt. Matthews has received basic instruction in counterinsurgency techniques at the Royal Military College in Duntroon; in fact, it was Matthews who first put us in contact with one of our other interview subjects, Colonel Edward Staples.

Sergeant Matthews was just finishing a patrol shift in the Civic district of Canberra when we interviewed him. As one might expect, the September Revolt is a topic of personal interest to him; he boasts of having read just about every book ever written about the Revolt and in his off hours happens to be drafting one of his own about the role that his grandfather, a Federal Capital Capital Territory Police³ superintendent, played in thwarting the CPA uprising.

My grand-dad was sitting in the cafeteria just finishing his lunch when he got the word that the CPA was about to attack Parliament House...soon as he heard that he didn’t waste a second getting his men into action and sending them to put the MPs out of harm’s way. Bullets were flying every which way, but he wouldn’t flinch at all, not even when one of those CPA bastards tried to blast his head off. Once the MPs were gone, he joined about six or seven other cops and started to return fire against the guerrillas.⁴

It was like something from one of the Wild West movies you get from the States. Bullets flyings, fellas’ hats getting knocked off their heads, fellas ducking behind buildings and overturned carts, you name it....(Laughs)Grand-dad was picking wood splinters and bits of pavement out of his uniform for two days, if you can believe that. Still, he hung in there until the last of those CPA maggots who tried to break into Parliament House was either dead or in prison...if they didn’t scare him, nothing ever would. I think about him every time I go on patrol.

Quite honestly, I think those CPA boys must have been daft to think they could even get into Parliament House, let alone take over the government. They had their heads so far up their bums it’s a wonder they didn’t all wind up in prison five minutes after the police found out what they were up to.

Susan Woods’ father holds a quite rare place in Australian history; he was one of the few Aboriginal citizens of Australia ever to have an ASIO file kept on him during the Menzies era. The memory of her father’s humiliation over this fact, combined with her own impatience at the excruciatingly slow pace of progress on aboriginal rights in Australia, would drive her in her late 20s to join the country’s largest aboriginal rights advocacy group; within a few years she would be a widely recognized spokeswoman for the cause in her own right.

In fact, on the very day we interviewed her, Woods was just coming back from a rally in the Tasmanian state capital Hobart calling for tougher prison sentences for those convicted of hate crimes against Australian citizens of Aboriginal descent. Some of her interview had to be censored for reasons of vocabulary; just the same, the transcript of that interview makes it crystal-clear she has no affection whatsoever for the late Lance Sharkey.

If I had the chance, I’d cut Lance Sharkey’s cock off and make him swallow the bloody thing. His (deleted) September Revolt set the Aboriginal rights movement back at least twenty years, if not more...after that, Aboriginal rights became tied up with the CPA and Sharkey and all that nonsense. Anytime you tried to say that it was wrong to discriminate against Australia’s Aboriginal citizens, the damn Menzies government said that you were a Communist. Only the CPA was pretty much gone after 1949....

My dad suffered a lot because of those CPA bastards. The ASIO was basically an overreaction to the September Revolt; if the Revolt had never happened, his life and mine would have been a lot happier. The ASIO drove him first to drink, and then to suicide-- as soon as he wrote that first letter to The Australian to complain about what they were doing, they were on him like a pack of mad dogs. It was a lot like what happened with Stephen Burke and his dad, the biggest difference being that I never went to prison like he did. My mother went mad after Dad died...

I hate Sharkey. Absolutely (deleted) hate him. People are always talking about how the ASIO ignored Aboriginals, but they certainly didn’t ignore my dad now, did they? No, they hunted him like he was a wild and rabid dog. They might as well have shot him....(Much as was the case with our Charlie Hudson interview, our interview with Ms. Woods had to be terminated ahead of schedule. In her case, however, it was more for legal reasons than emotional ones; she had to bail one of her aides out of prison after he was arrested on assault charges for getting in a fistfight with an anti-Aboriginal heckler at the Hobart protest.)

As a child, Jenny Shore once aspired to be a great Olympic swimmer; even today she’s fond of taking frequent trips to the pool, to the point where her friends have jokingly dubbed her "Shorpedo"⁵. However, since the age of twelve her interests have been steadily shifting towards a career in writing and Ms. Shore has traded her onetime Olympic aspirations for a dream of being known as one of Australia’s greatest authors. In fact, she’s got two published short stories to her credit already and at the time we interviewed her had just started the first draft of a novel about a girl growing up during the Whitlam crisis of the 1970s. We caught up with her as she was returning from an afternoon trip to Brisbane’s main library to do research for her book.

As I’m working on my book, I’m learning a lot about how the September Revolt played a part in how this country was changed back when Mr. Whitlam was the prime minister. Not everybody remember this, but he was always getting into trouble with Mr. Menzies because he didn’t agree with what Mr. Menzies was doing with the Special Council and ASIO. When Mr. Whitlam became the prime minister himself, he didn’t trust ASIO or the police very much...and when you think about what happened with the people who got thrown in jail after those anti-subversion laws were passed, it’s hard to blame him.

I think the September Revolt was one of the worst things that ever happened to this country. It caused so much misery it’s a wonder everybody’s not walking around depressed. If I could go back to 1948, I’d do everything that I possibly could to talk Mr. Sharkey out of starting his revolution; he might have thought he was doing something great for the working people of Australia, but all he really did was get a lot of people killed and a lot of other people upset because he wanted to make us Communists. There never would have been a Special Council if Sharkey hadn’t tried to get rid of Mr. Chifley.⁶

Someday, when I’m in university, I’m going to major in history and study more about the Revolt and what caused it. That way, I reckon maybe I can help the leaders of the political parties in Australia avoid making the same mistakes Mr. Menzies and Mr. Sharkey made; the last thing we need ‘round here is another  mess like what happened in ’48. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t what killed Mr. Chifley...⁷

While popular sentiment in Australia today criticizes Robert Menzies for going too far on internal security matters during his tenure as Australian prime minister, Michael Simmons faults him  for just the opposite reason-- Simmons feels that, if anything, Menzies didn’t go far enough. Even by Queensland standards the highly controversial political commentator’s views tend to come off as quite reactionary, to the point where one of our other interview subjects, Susan Woods, blasted those views as being a mere hair’s breadth away from outright fascism.⁸

It would be tempting to say the more outlandish comments in his twice-weekly columns for Queensland’s Courier-Mail newspaper are only a stunt to boost his public profile, except that (A)he was already a well-known figure in Australia long before he got into newspaper writing and (B)even his most provocative written barbs often pale in comparison to his spoken commentary, which at least once has landed Simmons in court on libel charges. The day we interviewed him, he was finishing the first draft of a book in which he argues that ASIO should have been granted a much freer hand in dealing with potential subversives.

I have absolutely no bloody patience whatsoever with these idiots who keep whingeing on about how harsh ASIO was. If anything, ASIO was fighting the goddamn Bolshies with one hand tied behind their back, just like the Americans were over in Vietnam in the ‘60s...If bloody Parliament had let ASIO have half the tools and authority they really needed, they could have cleaned Australia up good and proper, I’ll tell you that.

And another thing--those Fremantle Eight bastards should all have been lined up against a wall and shot right after they were arrested. I don’t care what the lefties or their media lapdogs say, every one of them was a Communist, and Stephen bloody Burke was the worst of the lot. If he’d had the chance in ’48, you know as goddamn well as I do he would have sided with Lance Sharkey and the CPA when they tried to take over the government....

Mark my words, if we don’t do something soon to put a stop to all the goddamn subversives trying to tear this great country down, sooner or later some lefty (deleted) will succeed where Lance Sharkey failed and take over this country, and then we’ll all be in a hell of a lot of trouble. There’s only one way to deal with subversives...(Slams his fist on his writing desk) Squash ‘em like they were bloody cockroaches!

An alternate version of O Tempora, O Mores continues at Today in Alternate History.