Dr Jenny Hocking
ARC QEII Research Fellow, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University

 When a society shows an attitude of intolerance and malice towards part of the organic process of its cultural development, it is acting malevolently towards the whole culture as well as towards the part of the organism…it does not merit a living culture.¹

Few periods have so clearly tested the fragile dynamic between Australian politics and cultural production as the cold- war. Whilst the Menzies government’s determined anti-communism was centred on its several attempts to legislatively proscribe acceptable political association, in so doing it generated the requisite climate for widespread cultural timidity.

During this time, the revival of the arcane and seldom-used offences of sedition, obscene libel and criminal libel,² served to censure not only the communist polemicists and left-wing artists against whom they were laid, but censured also the creativity and dynamism essential to cultural development. Clem Christesen despaired in 1951; “the collapse has grown progressively worse, until today I believe the social climate is no longer one in which serious writers can work with enthusiasm”.³

The best known of these cases remains the prosecution of Frank Hardy for criminal libel over his volcanic first novel Power without glory in August 1950. Through this epic study of his central character John West, Hardy created a powerful portrayal of inner-Melbourne Carringbush, a suburb in which the possibilities for change were limited to football, gambling and, in Hardy’s view, the largely futile and heavily compromised aspirations afforded by the Australian Labor Party. Hardy’s novel also provided one of the earliest depictions of the developing role of the Catholic-based Movement in labour politics, in the context of the broader fractious relationship between the Communist Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party. Hardy achieved this political critique through literary technique, through the use of what he termed the “composite-fictional” character, in particular in John West who drew clearly, and at times precisely, upon the Melbourne financier and Victorian Labor party identity John Wren. It was this use of a documentary form which both marked Power without glory as a political novel and pushed it into what Hardy later described as “this limbo-world” between fact and fiction. The ready identification of Hardy’s fictional characters with real counterparts, names frequently sharing the same initials and rhythm, certainly propelled the subsequent legal action, Hardy, however, was charged with criminal libel not by John Wren, but by his wife Ellen, apparently at the insistence of her sons Joe and John junior.⁴

Criminal libel is one of a family of crimes including blasphemous, seditious and obscene libel, which effectively criminalises words, spoken or written. These crimes have their roots in the Star Chamber of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were used not infrequently for the express purpose of oppressing rebellious thought, whether directed against the established state, religious institutions or their officials.⁵ After a lull of several decades, during which this group of thought crimes had been prematurely considered extinct, criminal libel and subsequently seditious libel were revived from their Star Chamber antecedents, and for much the same purpose, during the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century.⁶ Defamatory libel had been used once before in Victoria during this time, in the successful prosecution of the author Robert Close for obscene libel in 1946 over his novel Love me sailor. That case had centred on the meaning of the word “rutting” and, therefore, on just what was meant by Close’s reference in the book to a “rutting gesture”. As Close was found guilty of this criminal obscenity, sentenced to 3 months’ imprisonment and lead from the court in handcuffs (the sentencing Judge, Martin, proclaiming that an author would be treated no differently from any other prisoner) a group of writers and artists, including Alan Marshall and Frank Hardy, watched from the public gallery.⁷ Six years later, Judge Martin presided over Hardy’s trial for criminal libel.

The decision to charge Hardy with criminal rather than civil libel was critical to the perception of this as a political trial rather than a means of settling a purely private dispute. Whereas blasphemous, seditious and obscene libel can be seen as offences against the state in both its specific and broader sense of offending notions of religious, political and moral standards, criminal libel differs in that it is an offence against an individual of such magnitude that it could arguably also endanger the state. Whilst it has been claimed, in the British instance, that “there was always the clearest of distinctions between government prosecutions of dangerous critics of the established order on the one hand, and prosecutions by or on behalf of private persons who have been defamed on the other” (distinguished then as “political libels” and “private libels”),⁸ the complexities of Hardy’s case belied such easy distinctions. For here was a case which began as a private prosecution, initiated on the basis of informations privately laid by Ellen Wren, yet which was taken over by the Crown (at its discretion) and run throughout the court proceedings very much in terms of Hardy’s communism and the perceived potential of Power without glory to damage the standing of government, the state and its institutions.⁹ Whilst at their core criminal and civil libel are at one—an individual is alleged to have been libelled—the key differences between criminal libel and civil libel would appear therefore to be interrelated aspects of degree: first that criminal libel has a potential to incur a breach of the peace by its publication; secondly criminal libel is considered “the grossest libel” (such that a breach of the peace might ensue from its publication). Finally, as a criminal offence, criminal libel allows for a sentence of imprisonment, unlike civil libel which allows only for damages as financial recompense; Hardy therefore faced the possibility of a maximum of 20 years imprisonment. Nevertheless, in Hardy’s case Judge Martin ruled that “a likely breach of the peace” was not a necessary component of the criminal libel charge, leaving Hardy’s lawyers with little possible bases for his defence.

As a well-known “communist author”, Hardy’s charge fits neatly into our understanding of the cultural impact of the cold-war, in particular of the political use of legal sanction against communists. Its antecedents however, lay in a more generalised cultural illiberalism of the previous decade without which the more overtly political censure of Hardy’s literature could not have occurred. The Ern Malley episode of 1944, in which the poet and editor of the hyper-modernist Angry Penguins (and then member of the Communist Party) Max Harris was critically assailed for his publication of poems purportedly written by Ern Malley which in fact had been written by the Sydney anti-modernists poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley, needs to be considered in this light. These poems, written by Stewart and McAuley from the safety of their employ in an Army unit established to protect domestic moral standards and for which John Kerr supplied legal advice,¹⁰ were no mere concoction of nonsense as McAuley and Stewart subsequently claimed.¹¹ They were written by established poets who were not only familiar with the form they now set out to debase but also cognisant of Harris’ editorial policy of publishing works by new authors. The poems of Ern Malley were constructed therefore not by hazard but according to a pre-determined form and style and with the express purpose of ensuring their publication. The consequent trial and conviction of Max Harris for indecency would further suggest that this was no school-boy “jape”.¹² The unsuccessful litigation that same year over the awarding of the 1943 Archibald Prize to William Dobell for his portrait of the fellow artist (and runner-up) Joshua Smith, in which it was claimed that Dobell’s portrait was not portraiture but caricature, has similarly been described as “the decisive battle…between ancients and moderns”.¹³

Both these episodes revealed an institutional desire born of the experience of war-time dislocation for artistic limitation, for cultural as well as political security, for the establishment of safe boundaries for creative expression according to which aesthetic and formal judgments could be made. These flailings of traditionalists against the ineluctability of modernism were show-trials whose intended effects were beyond their immediate subject of litigation; for each of these devastated not only individual creative spirits but through them a movement at large. “The target was nothing less than the entirety of Modernism, both as a cultural form and as a social condition. ‘Ern Malley’ was intended to signal the end of Modernity”,¹⁴ just as Hardy’s trial for criminal libel was intended to spell the end of socialist realism. Hardy’s trial confirms Turner’s belief in the “necessary communion, between what is innovatory and exciting in the arts and in politics”.¹⁵ Menzies himself similarly recognised that this struggle for the arts was not only an immediate one against modernism but one which mirrored the political struggle against the dangerous mass possibilities of a genuine liberal democracy; “Consider the case of literature and art… Is the state to decree surrealism because surrealism gets a heavy vote?”¹⁶

Menzies’ disastrous attempt, as Attorney-General, to establish a Royal Australian Academy of Art in 1937 reveals the ready transference of his black-letter approach to the law, an approach which privileged the safety of precedent and the sanctity of the contract, to art. Menzies believed that, like the law, art could and should exhibit a cultural unity, form part of the unifying institutions and establish aesthetic standards upon which people of taste could rely; “certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. These modernists talk a different language”.¹⁷ The concern expressed at that time, that implicit in Menzies’ proposal for a Royal Australian Academy of Art was a desire to target government funding towards “great art”, was realised with his decision as Prime Minister in 1952 to veto any grants to Communist authors by the Commonwealth Literary Fund.¹⁸ Although ultimately the Royal Australian Academy of Art foundered and the charges against both Dobell and later Frank Hardy were defeated, artists and writers left Australia during this period in such numbers that they formed what Haese has termed a “radical diaspora”.

The charge of criminal libel against Frank Hardy was therefore intensely political on several levels; primarily because it occurred in this atmosphere of cold-war tension in which writers (and in particular Communist writers) were not only viewed with deep suspicion, but were accorded in key quarters a political influence and a cultural primacy beyond any realistic measure. “For security, the writer was a dangerous cultural icon whose sphere of influence radiated far beyond an immediate social or political circle”.¹⁹ Hardy’s case, moreover, was laid in the midst of Menzies’ several attempts to ban the Communist Party, through the passage of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950. This Act outlawed the Communist Party of Australia, prevented Communist Party members and their alleged affiliates from employment in the union movement or in the public service, allowing evidence of such purported membership to be by means of an executive “declaration” based on secret information provided by the security service Asio.²⁰ The Act institutionalised the popular condemnatory notion of “fellow-traveller” through its use of a broad categorisation of affiliated bodies whose members could also come within its strictures. Such affiliated bodies were described as those for which “a majority of the members of the committee of management, or other governing body” were at one time members of the Communist Party; the entire membership could, therefore, be “declared” by this route although they had never themselves been communists. Such a fundamental denial of freedom of political association was unprecedented in Australia during peace-time and had parallels with both the United States’ Smith Act of 1946 and the South African apartheid regime’s Suppression of Communism Act of 1950.²¹

As Hardy’s lengthy trial was in process, the constitutional validity of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 was under challenge before the High Court of Australia. The federal leader of the Australian Labor Party, Dr HV Evatt was a key participant, having been briefed to appear on behalf of one of several unions successfully claiming the Act’s unconstitutionality. In this fascinating and ultimately destructive battle that has long since symbolised the match between the legal brilliance of Evatt and the political brilliance of Menzies, Menzies then proceeded to a third round, a national referendum to give the government the power which the High Court had deemed it not to have under the Constitution, to outlaw unwanted political parties and associations. As Hardy later described, the campaign to defend him against the criminal libel charge “merged with a wider struggle in the defence of democratic liberties which began in opposition to the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950 and ended in the great fight for the NO victory in the Referendum of 1951”.²²

In this context, that Hardy was a well-known “Communist author” was critical to the prosecution’s case of criminal rather than civil libel. The ubiquitous appellation “Communist author”, served to undermine both Hardy as a writer and his work as literature; a device which continues in some quarters unabated.²³ That the author was a well-known, “self- confessed” Communist, was referred to repeatedly by the prosecution during the trial in the manner of denunciation rather than evidence. Counsel for Ellen Wren, John Galbally, argued before the magistrate that the book was “part of a communist conspiracy against our system of government. It defamed, among other things, Parliament, the Church, the judiciary, the police force and the Army. It imputed that Mr Justice Gavan Duffy had been bribed in the Royal Commission on Milk. It said of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey that he ran a racket in houses of ill-repute”.²⁴ At the preliminary proceedings John Wren jnr similarly proclaimed Power without glory to be “part of a communist plot”.²⁵ Hardy’s barrister Donald Campbell KC claimed that in allowing these comments the prosecution had followed a carefully designed plan; “It is an illicit attempt to gaol Hardy because of his Communist political views.… From the outset his political beliefs were ruled irrelevant. Despite that we find each of these witnesses went out of his way to make a charge about Communist propaganda in respect of this book”.²⁶

Despite these obvious attempts to present the case in terms of the polarised imagery of the cold-war, the trial nevertheless came to rest on the central dilemma of the relationship between its real and fictional characters, and in particular between Nellie West and Ellen Wren. The primacy for the prosecution in this charge was the necessary identification of the character Nellie West in Hardy’s novel with the real person Ellen Wren. Although Hardy argued to his legal team that his case should rest on a general notion of truth as a defence, this provides no such defence in cases of criminal libel: “As a public order offence, and since true stories were more likely to result in breaches of the peace, it spawned the aphorism ‘The greater the truth, the greater the libel’”.²⁷ Hardy’s lawyers therefore persuaded him otherwise, in essence their case was to rest not on truth but on fiction, on an argued dissonance between Wren and West. Through a close examination of the key fictional character of John West, Campbell succeeded in establishing that, whatever else the real John Wren might be, he was not John West. In a skilful cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, Campbell ensured that Wren would never be acknowledged as at one with the character West who had murdered, bribed and lied his way to power in the pages of Hardy’s novel. Wren’s wife Ellen therefore, identified through marriage rather than in herself, could not be recognised as West’s wife Nellie, and so the book was no libel. “John West is a fictional character and so is his wife, Nellie. John Wren and Ellen Wren cannot identify themselves with either of them. And we agree with that because the book is entirely a work of fiction and there is no basis for any allegation of libel”.²⁸

Although the case against Frank Hardy was brought by Ellen Wren, it was her husband John Wren who was always the central character throughout the trial. It was stated during the case that John Wren had not even read the book, although both he and his wife had received copies of it. Whereas John Wren had simply thrown his copy in the bin, Ellen Wren, who had been sent a copy anonymously prior to its publication had read it, after which, “like a good Catholic lady, she burnt it”.²⁹ Although neither John Wren snr nor Ellen Wren gave evidence at the trial, the evidence of John jnr was to become a compelling and determining feature of it. The jury and packed gallery listened in rising disbelief as John jnr denied that the murders, bribery, race fixing, jury tampering and corruption of John West might constitute a greater libel than the adultery of a woman depicted in the book as a victim, a loving mother trapped in a loveless marriage. John Wren’s response to his wife’s dilemma suggests that Hardy had his character’s measure; “Nellie must be punished, punished. This was how she repaid him for all he had done for her. He had married a sinful adulteress. The mother of his children running around with a bricklayer. This was a shocking affront to his sense of power. It was worse than if someone had crossed him in business or refused to be bribed, or if one who had long done his bidding had suddenly defied him”.³⁰ So too, to the Wrens, the fictional adultery was “the grossest libel” of any contained in Power without glory. Yet by John Wren’s absence, the defence was able successfully to depict him as a coward, a man who was prepared even to hide behind his suffering wife in order to challenge Hardy without adversely focusing on himself, nor appearing before the court. Wren’s craven inaction appeared an easy means of carrying out a private vendetta.

The public gallery was packed during John Wren jnr’s interminable hours of cross-examination by Campbell in which the unending questions of any apparent similarity between his father and John West were invariably answered with, “not fiction—lies!”. Again and again Campbell asked Wren jnr whether he considered conversations, incidents, individuals described in the book as fiction, to which Wren replied “No, lies”.

Mr Campbell: Not as fiction?
Wren: No, lies.
Campbell: Lies, lies, lies! Do you know any other word, Mr. Wren?
Wren: In this case, no.
Campbell: I don’t suppose you have ever told one yourself?
Wren: Yes.
Campbell: Plenty of them, have you not?
Wren: Yes.³¹

Hardy’s case was won with this devastating exchange and he was acquitted on 18 June 1951, the jury needing little more than their lunch-hour to find against the Crown.³² Yet as Hardy was cleared of criminal libel and Power without glory became the first and probably the only Australian book to be legally considered a work of fiction, so John Wren was paradoxically condemned. In the popular sentiment at least, the success of Hardy’s defence which cast Wren as not-West, at least in the eyes of the jury, Wren was seen to have lost a fight to clear his name; thereby perversely cementing the fictional Power without glory as an unofficial biography of John Wren.

In its cultural effects the Power without glory case mirrored the litigation against Dobell’s Archibald Prize winning portrait of Joshua Smith 5 years earlier. The key aesthetic question addressed legally in both cases was how to categorise these works: was Power without glory fact or fiction, was Dobell’s Joshua Smith portrait or caricature? That Hardy’s prosecution served as a critical censure as well as a legal one is clear, affecting the perception of its literary value in Australia for decades. Heseltine, for instance, considered that the fact of Hardy’s prosecution “alone indicates the powerful muckraking motive which underlay Hardy’s approach to writing”.³³ Hardy’s acquittal not withstanding. The brief encapsulations of Hardy’s work in literary bibliographies in the aftermath of the Power without glory case, were similarly largely dismissive, Hardy’s Power without glory was declared written “to a formula”, and its characters not characters at all, but “factors in an equation”.³⁴ Some twenty years later an equally stinging denunciation was made of Power without glory’s “documentary study” as “altogether too programmatic”, and of Hardy himself as, “In some respects…hardly a novelist at all”.³⁵ By 1999 however, Power without glory was acknowledged as an international classic with its consideration as one of the 200 best novels in English since 1950.³⁶

The effect of the legal intervention on Hardy was, as it must be for any artist, catastrophic; in its aftermath “he was, as a creative writer, temporarily exhausted, struggling in a slough of mental inertia. The events associated with that novel’s publication, coming on top of years of painstaking and tedious research, imposed a heavy and prolonged physical and nervous strain on him.”.³⁷ The supreme self-confidence of creativity, in which the every-day doubt, uncertainty and awkwardness dissolves, had been lost. For Robert Close, that moment was destroyed forever. After serving his prison sentence he left Australia and did not return again for 25 years. In his autobiography, released at the time of his return to Australia, the bitterness and dissolution of his court case remained as if it had only just occurred.³⁸ William Dobell retired to the country after his devastation before the court, to be cared for by his sister as he lost first the sight in one eye and then the use of one leg and his body became plunged in a skin disorder for a year, at which point he suffered a nervous break-down. “Dobell sat on trial to hear the following testimony of opinions on his portrait, each one verbally ripping into the portrait, tearing at his self-esteem, clawing at his new-found vision, baring the very essence of his creative core”.³⁹ Although Frank Hardy strode from the court room confidently predicting that his next book, dealing with “the disintegration of social and human relations in a country town”, would soon be completed, it was 10 years before he wrote his second major piece of creative writing, the reflective The Hard Way.

Unlike so many others who had been through this process of seeing their work dissected, misunderstood and ridiculed through court proceedings, emerging with their creative possibilities stripped or at best diminished, Hardy ultimately survived, but only just; “The bitter campaign just ended had made it impossible to become again the happy-go-lucky writer, Ross Franklyn. I was torn with struggles between the Ross Franklyn of old and the new Frank Hardy which, swirling now out of the mist of the years, take the form of arguments between the two men”.⁴⁰ Yet unlike Dobell, Harris and Close, the particulars of Hardy’s situation—his determined membership of the CPA and the nature of his aesthetic concerns—provided him with a degree of protection in the face of legal challenge. In The hard way, a decade later, Hardy contemplated this with his authorial alter ego; “Ross Franklyn said. ‘The only book you could write at the moment would be a book about yourself, a book about us… I mean a book about Power without glory. Until you write that book you’ll never write another’”.⁴¹ Frank Hardy resumed writing in precisely this way, by incorporating into his continuing formal preoccupations the potentially devastating experience of legal intervention. Nevertheless, the repercussions of his political commitments remained, and in 1969 the Gorton government vetoed a unanimously awarded Commonwealth Literary Fund grant to Frank Hardy, acting on Menzies’ censure of 15 years earlier.⁴²

Yet to some, writing with the peculiar teleology of hindsight, these disturbing realities of criminalisation and aesthetic restraint which were the cultural aspects of the cold-war remain hidden, its targets now rapidly becoming its forgotten victims. This approach is typified by the assessment that “[o]ver the issue of communism, as commonsense and history have shown, it was Quadrant and not its enemies who were right”.⁴³ Yet this reassuring statement of right and wrong obscures more than it reveals in its conflation of two aspects of the anti-communism of cold-war politics: that directed against international communism and that directed against a relatively powerless domestic political party. For what Quadrant was right about and what its enemies were wrong about were not the same thing. Since it is acknowledged that “[i]n the advanced capitalist countries no communist revolution in 1945-48—not even in France or Italy—seriously threatened”, its implications ought also to be addressed, that it was this very absence of a serious communist threat in Australia that led the brush of anti-communism to be necessarily broadly tarred. This breadth, institutionalised in the strictures of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 and popularised in the notion of “fellow-traveller”, in turn allowed domestic anti-communism to merge with a more generalised illiberalism in the arts and in particular to encompass writers, many of whom, it is still claimed, suffered from a delusional magnetic attraction to communism.⁴⁴ A suggestion which is at once breath-taking in its scope and chilling in its implications.

In this benign view, anti-communist excesses may be gilded, even lauded as mere political necessity, certainly vested with a post-hoc validity by the course of international events 40 years later. Once again this focus avoids the central issue in the Australian experience of the cold-war, the narrowly defeated attempts to legislate repressive governance by disallowing political association through executive decree. This is the significance in Macintyre’s description of the eventual defeat of the Communist Party Dissolution Act as HV Evatt’s “finest hour”.⁴⁵ In this, nothing less than the continuation of Australian liberal democratic practice was at stake, certainly in the Act itself and also in the cluster of cultural criminal charges that sprung up in its wake. Frank Hardy’s trial for criminal libel and his ability to survive it, can only be understood in the context of the full implications of that Act and of the culturally straitened times that gave rise to it. Hardy survived creatively because his trial for criminal libel generated a surreal legalistic consideration of the very issues he sought to address in this and subsequent works—considerations of the nature of historical and biographical truth. He survived politically because he recognised in the particulars of his own experience, the universal of a repressive domestic anti-communism.

Endnotes

¹ Harris, M. 1944 in Haese, R. Rebels and precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art Allen Lane/Mary Martin Books. Adelaide. 1981 :283
² See Maher, L. “Dissent, disloyalty and disaffection: Australia’s last cold-war sedition case” Adelaide Law Review 16 1994 :1-77
³ in Haese, ibid. :288
⁴ Pursuant to Section 10 of the Wrongs Act (Vic). In particular, it was alleged that words contained in Power without glory could be taken to mean: that Ellen Wren, wife of John Wren, had seduced a married man to be unfaithful to his wife and to commit adultery with her; that Ellen Wren had given birth to a child named Xavier who died in his infancy, of whom the husband was not the father; and that Ellen Wren had committed adultery.
⁵ Spencer, J.R. “Criminal libel—a skeleton in the cupboard” Criminal Law Review 1977 :383-394
⁶ See Maher, L. “Dissent, disloyalty and disaffection: Australia’s last cold-war sedition case” Adelaide Law Review 16 1994 :1-77
⁷ Close, R. Of salt and earth: an autobiography Nelson. Melbourne. 1977 :230
⁸ Spencer, J.R. op. cit. :384
⁹ Fricke, G. Libels, lampoons and litigations: Famous Australian libel cases Hutchinson. Melbourne. 1984 :145
¹⁰ Pybus, C. The devil and James McAuley University of Queensland Press. 1999
¹¹ Serle, G. From deserts the prophets come: the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972 Heinemann. Melbourne 1973 :175
¹² Stewart, H. in Heyward, M. The Ern Malley affair University of Queensland Press. 1993 :118
¹³ Serle, G. From deserts the prophets come: the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972 Heinemann. Melbourne 1973 :175 :166.
¹⁴ See the discussions in McQueen, H. The black swan of trespass: the emergence of Modernist painting in Australia to 1944 Alternative Publishing Cooperative. Sydney. 1979; Haese, R. Rebels and Precursors; Dutton, G.The innovators: the Sydney alternatives in the rise of modern art, literature and ideas Macmillan. Melbourne. 1986
¹⁵ Turner, I. “My long march” Overland 59 Spring 1974 :23-40; :25
¹⁶ McQueen, H. The black swan of trespass: the emergence of Modernist painting in Australia to 1944 Alternative Publishing Cooperative. Sydney. 1979 :89
¹⁷ Menzies, R.G. The forgotten people Angus & Robertson. Sydney. 1943 :6
¹⁸ Capp, F. Writers defiled: security surveillance of Australian authors and intellectuals 1920-1960 McPhee Gribble. Melbourne. 1993 :45
¹⁹: Capp, F. 37
²⁰ Hocking, J. Beyond terrorism: the development of the Australian security state Allen & Unwin. Sydney. 1993
²¹ Kirby, M. “H.V. Evatt, the anti-Communist referendum and liberty in Australia” Australian Bar Review vol.7 1991 :93-120 :98
²² Hardy, F. The Hard Way (1961) Mandarin Australia. Melbourne. 1992 :10
²³ See Armstrong, P. Frank Hardy and the making of Power without glory Melbourne University Press. Melbourne. 2000
²⁴ Herald 26 October 1950 Once the case had been taken over by the state of Victoria (led by the country party Premier, McDonald), the prosecution was led by John Winneke, K.C.
²⁵ Brennan, C. “Perfect case that had to fail” Law Institute Journal May 1994 :344-345; :345
²⁶ Sun 26 January 1951
²⁷ Robertson, G. “The Law Commission on criminal libel” Public Law :208-213
²⁸ Campbell, D. in Brennan, C. :345
 ²⁹ Brennan, C. :345
³⁰ Hardy, F. Power without glory Realist Printing and Publishing Company. Melbourne. 1950
³¹ Herald 14 June 1951
³² Pollack, M. Sense and censorship; Commentaries on censorship violence in Australia Reed. Sydney. 1990 :235
³³ Heseltine, H. “Australian fiction since 1920” in Dutton, G. (ed) The Literature of Australia Penguin. Ringwood. 1964. (1976 ed). :232
³⁴ Green, H.M. A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied Vol.ii 1923-1950 Angus & Robertson. Sydney. 1961 :1130
³⁵ Mitchell, A. “Fiction” in Kramer, L. (ed) The Oxford History of Australian Literature Oxford University Press. Melbourne. 1981 :27-172; :130
³⁶ Callil, C. & Toibin, C. The modern library: the two hundred best novels in English since 1950 Picador. London. 1999
³⁷ Hetherington, J. “Frank Hardy: His Power without glory startled Australians” Age 27 August 1960
³⁸ Close, R. ibid.
³⁹ Freeman, V. Dobell on Dobell Ure Smith. Sydney. 1970 :32
⁴⁰ Hardy, F. The hard way. Hardy’s early work appeared under the name “Ross Franklyn”, an amalgam of his own name with that of his wife, Rosslyn.
⁴¹ Hardy, F. ibid. :255
⁴² McLaren, J. Writing in hope and fear: literature as politics in postwar Australia Cambridge University Press. 1996 :126
⁴³ Manne, R. “Misapprehending McAuley” in Craven, P. (ed) The Best Australian Essays1999 Bookman. :386-399; :388
⁴⁴ Manne, R. The shadow of 1917 :238
⁴⁵ MacIntyre, S. A short history of Australia Cambridge University Press. Melbourne. 1999