Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Six

From the days of the International Workers of the World onwards, Communists in Australia were relatively well organised, trade union based, most of them, and thus, well, yes, a clique. They were also very careful. When I was working on the Waterside Workers Federation archives in Canberra, I had to crack two substitution codes to read some of the documents – mostly lists of names and contributors to strike funds. The codes weren’t difficult. I suspect they were just meant to discourage the idle passer by, although I wouldn’t have had the nerve to read those documents over Big Jim Healey’s shoulder. When I was interviewing the old wharfies for my legal history thesis on the 1928 waterfront strike – the research that gave me Phryne Fisher – they used to call me comrade. I was honoured. It was the first non-gender specific title I had ever had, apart from ‘mate’, and only my father called me ‘mate’.

Nineteen forty-eight wasn’t only the year of the Tamam Shud murder. It was also the year that a frightful scandal struck the diplomatic service in Australia, causing both the English and the Americans to cut us off from all their secrets. Canberra was leaking like a sieve. (Although I don’t know why that is considered bad; after all, sieves are supposed to leak.) Information sent in conditions of utter secrecy had been disclosed to the Russians, otherwise known as The Enemy.

It is hard to recreate the fear in which Communists were held in that era. They were known as the Red Menace. Stalin had been exposed as a mass murderer of his own people, a totalitarian who gave a new and frightful meaning to the term. The Russians desperately wanted to duplicate the American success with the atom bomb but America had been faster at grabbing nuclear scientists when Germany fell and was ahead on points.

I remember the feeling of almost enjoyable dread in the seventies, knowing that some clown, either in the White House or the Kremlin, had his thumb on The Button and could wipe us all out. (Of the two, I was more afraid of the White House.) Tom Lehrer sang a merry ditty called We Will All Go Together When We Go and the arms race ticked on to three minutes to midnight.

Nineteen forty-eight was close to the beginning of that story, the story of the Cold War. The only difference between a Cold War and a Hot War, as far as I can see, is the number of people getting killed at the same time and in the same place. The Cold War produced plenty of hot spots where a lot of people were becoming dead quite quickly – for instance, Korea and Vietnam. It also produced the spy dramas like The Rat Catchers and Callan, which I loved to watch with my dad. We read John Le Carre and Frederick Forsyth as well but it was all set in Britain or America or Prague, not here in sun-drenched Australia. While our Russian neighbours might very properly flinch at the thought of a visit from the KGB, no one seemed worried about ASIO kicking the doors in at 3 am. I am still not sure why. Possibly because there is something fundamentally anti-Australian about spying. Possibly because, until 1951, peacetime espionage was not illegal.

In an extremely thorough and very heavy tome called The Defence of the Realm, Christopher Andrew says that in 1947 some Russian telegrams were broken by a decryption process called VENONA because agents were re-using one-time pads. The decryption revealed that the Russians had received top secret British documents on post-war strategy from their mates in the Australian Department of External Affairs, thereby demonstrating that Canberra was insecure. Promptly, the United States and England turned off the top-secret tap. It just wasn’t safe to tell those Aussies anything.

Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Director General of MI5, was sent to improve Australian security, without telling anyone in that notoriously chatty place how England knew something was wrong. (They had a cover story.) This attempt came up against HV Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs, a man with many faults but a fine and razor-sharp legal mind. When informed that a ‘Soviet defector had told us that Australia was insecure’, Evatt slashed the feeble cover story to bits. The British bit the bullet and let the Australians know about the decryptions.

Thereafter, the old system was abandoned and a shiny new one, modelled on MI5 and called ASIO (or Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), came into being on 16 March 1949. ASIO was required to consult the Security Liason Officer, an Englishman called Hambly, before they did anything but happily, Hambly reported that everyone was behaving like good little colonials and doing their best to trace and stop the leak.

ASIO had three main suspects, identified from the VENONA decrypts. One was a Tass journalist called Andreyevitch Nosov (Tass is an international news agency based in Russia). His code name was TEKHNIK and VENONA said he was the main point of contact for all Russian spies in Australia. Mr Andrew’s account of ASIO attempting to bug Nosov’s flat would have made good material for the Keystone Kops. Apparently they drilled a hole in the floor of the flat above to insert a microphone, only to find the Nosov carpet covered in plaster dust. If the spy had looked up, wondering about the source of the dust, he would have seen a really visible microphone in his ceiling. Subtle.

ASIO managed to get in and clean up Nosov’s flat but it wasn’t an encouraging beginning. The next person identified by VENONA was Jim Hill, who was appointed first secretary to the Australian High Commission in London early in 1950 so that the experts at MI5 could keep an eye on him. Hill was interrogated by Jim Skardon, MI5’s lead interrogator and the man who had coaxed a confession out of Klaus Fuchs (a German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy). All he got out of Hill was complete denial and protestations of innocence but the discovery that Hill had been questioned led to the defection of the third person of interest, Ian Milner, whose codename was BUR.

Milner was an Australian diplomat, who had become a Communist at Oxford in 1934. He had been seconded to the United Nations in New York in 1946. After he heard about Hill, although possibly for other and unrelated reasons, he packed up and left for Prague, where he spent the rest of his life peacefully teaching English Literature at the university. Meanwhile, Hill returned to Australia, resigned from the External Affairs Department in 1950 and vanished out of history

The weird thing – to me, at least – is that everyone who was anyone knew that the main Communist agent in Australia was Wally ‘Pop’ Clayton, codename KLOD. That sounds far too much like Tintin to me. KLOD, indeed. Clayton had a circle of like-minded friends and was described as ‘shadowy’ and ‘furtive’ but also ‘not unlikeable’. Because the source of the intelligence was far too secret to disclose, Wally was never prosecuted.

Andrews says that arrangements were made by the Russians to fly him to Moscow but his passport was revoked before that could happen. In any case, he ended up as a snapper fisherman in Nelson Bay.

That never happened in Callan.

Wally Clayton was missing between 1947 and 1952, presumably in Russia, so he probably didn’t know Somerton Man. But this Communist scandal was to provide Robert Gordon Menzies with fuel for scare campaigns for the rest of his seemingly endless career. It is hard to sort out what actually was happening, due to the difference of opinion among historians. The Left have insisted all along that there was no Communist spy scandal, that it was all a beat-up. The Right insisted that it was real and serious. Now that a large number of documents have been released, clear analysis has been obscured by the Right saying ‘nyah nyah na na-na, we told you so’. None of which is helpful. It was real; it wasn’t just a beat-up. Surely we can agree on that?

Having agreed, what we got was an attempt to outlaw the Communist Party, known as The Communist Party Dissolution Act, which passed into law in 1950. It was promptly challenged by the Waterside Workers Federation (of which my dad was a member), and they managed to attract the formidable Doc Evatt as their spokesman. The High Court struck down the Act by a majority of six to one, largely because it had a reverse onus – that is, you had to prove you weren’t a Communist. The court also stated that the penalties were too heavy – five years’ jail – and that the act precluded an appeal to a higher court. (Courts absolutely hate being precluded.) So Menzies decided to put it to a referendum, even though referenda have a truly sorry history in Australia.

One of the most quoted speeches in Australian legal history was made by Evatt. I was required to read it as a law student.

It was a version of the speech attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller:

As my Welsh ancestors might have admiringly said, ‘There’s words’.

Evatt’s speech had its effect. The referendum in September 1951 failed and the Communist Party was allowed to continue to exist. And presumably Australia got better at spying.

Where atomic secrets were concerned, the places to be were Maralinga and Woomera. At Woomera they probably were testing rockets. Deserts are useful for that sort of thing. No chance of a wayward rocket wiping out anything other than the occasional kangaroo or the inconvenient and unimportant native. Or, indeed, Australian soldiers who didn’t matter, either. As for Maralinga, it was relatively near to Adelaide (in Australian terms, 300 kilometres to the west) and the British were planning on exploding something there with more bang than any given rocket, so there one could expect Russian spies to be positively swarming, like the serpents.

The main port for both Maralinga and Woomera was Port Augusta, which would have been full of unionists. On the wharf itself there were Painters and Dockers, Carters and Drovers, Waterside Workers Federation, Seamen’s Union and Railway members, a lot of whom were Communists and all of whom knew how to keep a secret. If there were spies trying to winkle out atomic secrets, you would have expected to find them in Port Augusta, not Adelaide. But the train does take you from Port Augusta to the city and various commentators have thought that Somerton Man got off a train on 30 November. Was it a train from Melbourne or, perhaps, from the other direction? Was Somerton Man coming into Adelaide with a dangerous secret for which someone killed him?

It is quite possible.

Consider the links between Somerton Man and my father. Alfred Greenwood, a signaller, had just been demobbed and spent some time stringing innumerable wires across the Woomera Rocket Range. I have a black-and-white photograph of a tall pole with a signaller sitting on the cross piece and nothing at all in any direction. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ My dad reported that the desert was hot during the day, cold at night, and had more venomous ‘Joe Blakes’ than he considered really respectable.

Soldiers from Woomera were allowed to go on leave into Adelaide. My father said that his beautiful tan – they all seemed to be clad only in shorts and boots – washed off in the harshly chlorinated brackish waters of the City Baths. They were the same baths where Somerton Man shaved his face and washed his body on his last day. He and my father may have passed each other in the locker room, noticed that each other was stylishly dressed (‘sharp’) and perhaps stopped to exchange a ritual ‘g’day’.

By 1948, governments all over were reluctantly releasing the reins of the economy that they had gripped so tightly during the war. Rationing – which had managed to equitably feed Britain, probably for the first time ever and had actually nourished previously unimportant creatures like pregnant women and children – was increasingly exasperating to the people in general. In Australia, some things were still rationed, notably petrol, but rationing in Australia had always been looser, possibly because this is a big country and someone usually knows someone who can lay their hands on a bit of beef or a pound of butter. For a consideration. Or a favour. Australians do not react well to regimentation.

Rationing was one of the reasons why the American soldiers had been so envied and loathed during the war. ‘Over paid, over sexed and over here.’ Not only were they better fed by their canteens, which had unheard of delights like ice-cream, but they had luxuries like perfume and stockings, dear to the female heart. They also wore very spiffy uniforms, tailored and smart, while the battle dress of the Australians was, in my father’s phrase, censored for my delicate ears, like ‘a wet sack full of spaghetti tied up ugly’. My dad used to do tailoring and alterations for his mates. He taught me to sew on a sewing machine, then gratefully handed over the worst job, replacing zippers, to me. He was good like that. No wonder I have problems with gender roles. He also taught me to skip. Boxers train by skipping. He was very adept, although he didn’t know the skipping rhyme ‘Old Mother Moore’ so I had to learn it in the school yard.

I heard a riposte when I was a child that I have just understood now, as I am typing. A Yank says to an Aussie, ‘We got all the girls’ and the Aussie replies, ‘Nah, mate, you just sorted them out for us’. Ouch. However, the Americans also had glamour, money, Big Bands and Swing. My father loved their music. He loved their tailoring. He liked their accents and he never had any trouble competing for female attention. If he had seen Somerton Man in the baths and decided, on the basis of his tailoring, that he was an American, he would still have said ‘g’day’. Then Somerton Man would have gone on to his date with destiny, while my father went on to the Central Market for a cup of coffee with his old mate Killer.

It is still difficult to find out exactly what everyone was doing at Woomera Rocket Range but it certainly needed a lot of wires. My father, otherwise known as Sig. Greenwood A 2nd/1st Aust Line Construction Sqn, took home with him the battery’s copy of Underground Cable Notes and Aerial Line Notes. (Both of them were issued by the Postmaster General’s (PMG) Department and property of the Australian Signaller Training Battalion Bonegilla. If they are still around, I may have to mortgage my house to pay the overdue fines.) The booklets tell signallers why they are important.

What did my father tell me about Woomera?

That it was bloody hot during the day, then bloody cold at night. That the stars in the night sky were as close as lanterns. That it was top secret. That the food was lousy but that was standard. There has been no army in the history of the world where the soldiers have appreciated the food. Caesar’s legions bitched about Roman army food, though that does seem to have been un cuisine horreur. At least modern armies actually feed their soldiers, unlike those unlucky enough to follow Napoleon, who had to rob peasants or starve. But the unvarying army food does explain why my father never ate apricot jam again. He would leave the house when we were making it, too. He told me that any concoction, however dreadful, could be improved by adding vegemite, because then it tasted of vegemite. My partner David employed this theory at a particularly frightful choral camp, apparently catered by lunatics and famous for its fish-flavoured chocolate mousse. He possessed himself of a large bottle of chilli sauce and put it on everything, so that it at least tasted of something identifiable, like my father’s vegemite.

My father told me that the baccarat school he started in an idle moment had been very successful, until he had offended one of his fellow soldiers, who then stranded him out in the middle of nowhere all day. The sun was unrelenting and my father had only boots, shorts and a hat. No water or food, no firearm. He stood next to the pole he had erected and moved around it with the sun, either repenting his bad deeds or meditating revenge – guess which? – as he revolved slowly with the shadow. He said he ignored the passing snakes and they ignored him. He played word games in his head. And then the jeep came and got him and he was given water. I do not know what he did to his assailants because he would not tell me.

He told me that the best way of avoiding official notice was to carry a clipboard and look busy. He did this for days before anyone questioned him. He said that the persons in any organisation with whom you absolutely must make friends are the cooks. And he volunteered to build a tennis court in order not to go back on the wires. He had never even considered doing so before and he could not play tennis. But he built it and it was still there when he left. He often worked terribly hard to avoid doing what he was told. A trait I have, regrettably, inherited.

My father told me that every couple of months jeeps full of Important People would arrive in conditions of greatest secrecy, including radio shutdown and darkness, and poke their noses into the arrangements. They would be flown over the rocket range and then everyone would be told to say nothing whatsoever about anything and they would go away again. He also said that if you wanted to know anything about Woomera, you just had to go to the pub, buy a certain person a beer and listen. So much for security. The closest big city to all of these places was – you guessed it – Adelaide, an excellent place for a nest of spies, because, as I may have mentioned before, there is something odd about Adelaide.

So am I prepared to claim that Somerton Man was working for the Russians? It is, at least, a possibility. As part of the ABC’s attempt to solve the case of Somerton Man, in 1978, there was an interview with a spook, which deserves consideration, perhaps for what was not said rather than what was said. The interviewee, John Ruffels, is a researcher working on the theory that Somerton Man was a spy. He comes to an interesting conclusion about the manner of his death.

I shall speak later about the use of sodium pentothal and I don’t think that the murderers cleansed the body of labels because the suitcase was label-less as well. I think Somerton Man rendered himself unidentifiable. If the Tamam Shud case is an example of the Funny People at work, they were very inefficient.

But then, we knew that.