Politics burns spy moves

Not happy: Australian Prime Minister William Morris Hughes dismantled Australia's first civilian intelligence branch focused on Asia and the Pacific. This is the fourth in a new series on Australia's early intelligence activities

The story of Australia’s first spies is a fascinating if sometimes ramshackle story in which progress was finally destroyed by political disputes. 

During the First World War, Japan was part of the Entente fighting the German led Central Powers. Japanese warships guarded the Australian troopships on the way to Europe. But it was clear from the beginning that Japan’s core objective was the establishment of its own Empire in China and the Pacific.

As War continued, British Naval intelligence began looking at ways of improving their Japanese intelligence gathering activities. Australian Naval Intelligence under Captain Walter Thring was also looking at ways of better collecting and interpreting Japanese intelligence. 

Both navies suffered from a similar problem. They did not have the Japanese language speakers to translate public material, let along the growing volume of radio and cable intercepts. 

In 1916, Edmund Piesse as head of Australia Military Intelligence and Thring agreed that something needed to be done. 

"Hughes was deeply resentful of Acting Prime Minister William Watt and was determined to re-assert his authority"

The subsequent process was complicated because of political tensions as well as the White Australia Policy which created certain recruitment difficulties. Nevertheless, in July 1916 James Murdoch was offered a three year contract to teach Japanese at the princely sum of £600 plus first class steamer tickets.

Murdoch, a friend of Piesse’s, was an interesting man. Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Aberdeen and Oxford, he had come to Australia as headmaster of the new Maryborough Grammar School in Queensland. There he fell under the influence of William Lane, later joining Lane's 'New Australia' commune in Paraguay.

Following Paraguay, Murdoch had moved to Japan where he had been living and teaching in for many years. He arrived in Sydney in February 1917, teaching Japanese at the University of Sydney and at the Duntroon Military College. From this position he recruited a cadre of Japanese teachers to build the language training effort.  

In May 1919, the Australian Cabinet agreed to the creation of a Pacific Branch in the Prime Minister’s Department headed by Piesse to oversight the collection of intelligence and information on the nations and relationships within the Far East. 

Australia now had both a developing Japanese language program and the first dedicated civilian unit focused on intelligence and analysis in the Asian region. From this point, things unravelled.

The Pacific Branch had been created while Prime Minister William Morris Hughes was overseas. Hughes was deeply resentful of Acting Prime Minister William Watt and was determined to re-assert his authority.

This might not have mattered if Edmund Piesse had played to Hughes’ deep distrust of the Japanese, but Piesse had formed the view that Australian policy towards Japan was wrong. Hughes promptly got rid of both Piesse and the Pacific Branch.

It would be almost two decades before Australia again took action to really study Japan and Japanese. But in the meantime, our New England spy had entered the scene.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 6 February 2019. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018, here 2019