How Did The Cold War Affect Australia During The 1950's

During the 1950’s, Australia had experienced its very own cold war drama, which came to be known as the Petrov affair. An event shrouded in a veil of secrecy along with a convoluted romanticism that painted a picture of democracy being triumphant over the evils of communism. This affair provides a platform to examine Australia’s cold War Psyche, revealing a level of existing paranoia that was further intensified by these revelations of spy rings infiltrating the annals of the Australian political system. However, the extent of Soviet espionage activities within Australia during this period becomes arguable, when considering that the communist hysteria was being driven by the Menzies government, fervently pushing the ‘Red’s Under the Bed’ wheelbarrow

During this time there existed two opposing ideologies, one being Capitalism employed by the West, the other being Communism that was nurtured by the Soviets, both at loggerheads as to who had the solution to achieve modernity. Australia had placed itself firmly in the Western quarter, along with its newly found post World War two ally America. Military historian David Horner, reinforces the necessity to understand the political as well the social attitudes intertwined within the psyche of Cold War Australia, since the public genuinely believed invasion was a probable reality. It was a war that moved beyond the realms of battlefield, instead festering into psychological and diplomatic warfare, which was shrouded by a cloak and dagger persona through espionage and counterespionage tactics. Whitlam and Stubbs suggest that Australia had experienced its own version of McCarthyism in the 1950s, accompanied by the fear and hatreds towards persons accused of being communist sympathisers. In the 50s the advent of the Korean war was firmly implanted in minds of Australia’s, coinciding with the idea that communism had to be contained, on the presumption of US President Eisenhower’s Domino Theory. With China becoming a communist state, the spread of the communist ideology was an ever more imposing

During the mid to late 1940s, it was only on the information provided by American and British intelligence groups that the Australian government had become aware that key documents were being leaked out of Canberra to the Soviet Union. The joint code breaking operations by the US and British secret services between 1943-1949, named project Venona was kept secret by authorities until the realise of these documents in 1996, which confirmed the existence of a small Soviet spy ring operating within Canberra. Australia was part of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence alliance, known as the Five Eyes, but was perceived as the weak link because of these discovered breaches of national security. Thus, forcing British and American intelligence organisations to be reluctant in the sharing of information with Australia until it could prove that sensitive information was secure. It was in this light that prompted Labor Prime minister Ben Chiefly to set up a new security service, known as ASIO, with the purpose of acting as a counter espionage agency. Kyle Wilson echoes that Australia’s espionage battles in the 1940s and 1950s was to be a silent war that rocked Australian politics and image of agent Petrov stepping into an ASIO vehicle had fundamentally changed both the political and social