Homebush Boy Read Free Page B

about had come face to face. We were never told that the Republicans had been a democratically elected government of Spain. We were told, however, that they were nun-slayers and priest-killers, and that in Madrid at the Alcazar, trusting in the Virgin Mary, the garrison had held out for an astounding time and been delivered at last by faith.
    The other fellow who would take me aside and talk to me as if I had a mission in the cosmic battle was wiry little Mr Frawley, father of the Frawley kids, the two older girls Rose and Denise, and two smaller boys about my brother’s age. Frawley was one of the industrial groupers Crespi abominated. The groupers believed something like this: Dr H. V. Evatt, leader of the Labor Party, a scholar, a lawyer, first Secretary of the United Nations and a former Cabinet Minister of the governments of Curtin and of Chifley, was either too soft on Communism of perhaps even a fellow traveller. The nexus between the Labor Party – saviour of the working class and guarantor of equities – and the Communist-controlled unions was a scandal to men like Frawley. Look in Doc Evatt’s speeches and correspondence now, and you will not find much to justify their broad fears. Poor old Doc, who competed with the Conservative Prime Minister Menzies to express fealty to the dying King of England and the coming Queen! But to Mr Frawley, either a dupe or a co-conspirator.
    My father harboured the same suspicions and would often utter them over the Sydney evening paper, the Mirror . He did not become a grouper, however, an activist. The war seemed to have given him a certain cynicism about joining things. Frank Frawley had been deprived of his war and was fighting it here on the Western Line.
    Frawley was a little wiry man like Crespi. He had a cowlick and worked as a purchasing officer in the New South Wales Government Railways, the crowd who with their brute locomotives ran their steel rail right through my sleep. He was a reader, and he too liked to believe in this struggle of dogmas at the end of time, and felt that 1952 was getting pretty late in the century and in history in general.
    Mr Frawley’s war was territorial, too. ‘The Catholics founded the Labor Party,’ he pronounced, ‘and now we’re being forced out of it by Reds.’
    And he would say such things as, ‘At least one classic Marxist objective is part of the platform of the Australian Labor Party. It’s right there – The Nationalization of all means of production, exchange and communication . It lies there like a serpent at the heart of the party. And all of us told ourselves it didn’t really matter. Mr Chifley said it didn’t matter, Mr McGirr, Mr Cahill.’
    Joe Cahill, the premier of the state, a good friend of Cardinal Gilroy’s and a Papal Knight, escaped too much vilification from Mr Frawley though. No one believed he was Marxism’s running dog. Besides, he was only a power at the state level. The Federal level, and above that the world and the universal level, were what interested Mr Frawley and me.
    Some of the Brothers at St Pat’s told us a lot about brave work undertaken by industrial groupers. The Communists intimidated union members and always insisted on an open ballot to intimidate them better. If that didn’t work, we were told, the Reds then stole the ballot boxes for counting, and opened them in their own headquarters. The security of ballot boxes was one of the things the groupers fought for. There was a young man in Lewisham, a grouper who – Brother Markwell swore – had his arm broken with a cricket bat in a fight over a ballot box.
    Mr Frawley couldn’t take on Communism directly though. His office was not a Marxist breeding-ground, but was in fact full of members of the Knights of the Southern Cross, an Hibernian society, reliable men. There was little call for him to break his arm in his workplace defending ballot boxes. Instead, the