https://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/02/1030953434455.htmlThe secret we should all be let in on
September 3 2002
Freemasonry has a long - and far too shadowy - history in Australian politics, wrties Gerard Henderson.
It was a resignation speech of the look-back-in-wonderment genre. Last Tuesday John Herron formally announced his intention to step down from the Senate. The former Howard Government minister declared: "I pay tribute also to the wonderful democracy we have in Australia; we have no secrets."
Certainly Dr Herron's wish to quit the Senate to take up a diplomatic posting came as no surprise - he is expected to become Australia's ambassador to Ireland and the Vatican next year. However, despite the obvious bonhomie of the occasion, the Queensland Liberal's claim that Australian democracy has "no secrets" is anything but a truism. What about the Masons?
In effect, the Masonic Lodge arrived in Australia around the time of the First Fleet. Freemasonry was a secret secular society that evolved in the Middle Ages and was opposed by most organised religions, especially the Catholic Church. Its influence was spread by colonisation, particularly in what became known as the British Empire.
In this increasingly transparent age, there are few secrets. Much is known about business, churches, the trade union movement, politics, the professions and more besides. However, we know all but nothing about the Masons. Moreover, it is only in recent years that Freemasonry has released information about itself. In Australia, this has been most evident in New South Wales due to media statements by the organisation and publications by the Masonic Historical Society of NSW (see uglnsw.freemasonry.org.au).
Without question, Freemasonry is not the organisation it once was in the 1950s, when membership peaked at close to 400,000. Yet, without doubt, the Lodge was once very influential indeed.
According to Grahame Cumming's Freemasonry: Australia's Prime Ministers (Masonic Historical Society, 1994), most of Australia's politically conservative prime ministers up to the early 1970s were members of the Masonic Lodge. Namely Edmund Barton, George Reid, Joseph Cook, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Page, Robert Menzies, Arthur Fadden, John McEwen, John Gorton and William McMahon.
Now, for the most part, this lot was both able and busy. So the question to be asked is: what were they doing in the Masonic Lodge? Especially in view of the fact that Freemasonry membership involved participation in a number of unusual rituals: the rolled-up trouser leg on initiation, the secret handshake whereby (apparently) the thumb of one Lodge member makes contact with the second knuckle of another, the wearing of ceremonial aprons at meetings and so on.
Presumably Messrs Barton, Reid, Bruce, Menzies and Gorton did not endure - at one time or another - such rituals for the fun of it. It can only be assumed that they were active Freemasons, for a time at least, because they believed in the cause of the Lodge. Which was precisely what? Well, alas, we do not really know. Sure, Freemasonry supports various charitable causes. But so do such secular service groups as Rotary and Lions. So there must have been more to Lodge membership than good works. But what?
In Australia, no former Freemason has written a "tell-all" of the once-a-communist or once-a-Catholic kind. What's more, there has been very little written about the Lodge by outsiders. The most notable exception is the Sydney-based mathematician/philosopher James Franklin. See, for example, his article "Catholics Versus Masons" in the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 1999.
The late Allan Martin wrote a fine two-volume biography, Robert Menzies: A Life (MUP). It contains no reference to Menzies as a Mason. Sir Robert did not refer to the issues in his autobiographical Afternoon Light (Cassell, 1967). Likewise, Ian Hancock's recently released John Gorton: He Did It His Way (Hodder, 2002) does not mention that Sir John attended a Lodge meeting when prime minister.
Certainly, more is known about Freemasonry now than ever before. In 1999 Prince Michael of Kent presided over a ceremony in Melbourne to mark the centenary of the Victorian Grand Lodge. Last month former NSW police commissioner Tony Lauer got dressed up in his full Masonic kit for a photo shoot to mark the occasion of his appointment as Grand Master of the NSW and ACT Freemasons.
It is also known, officially, that prominent Australian Masons included aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, film producer Ken Hall, author Frank Clune, cyclist/politician Hubert Opperman and Test cricketers aplenty - Don Bradman, Wally Grout, Bill Oldfield and Bill Ponsford among others. It is also understood that Freemasonry was particularly strong in sections of the business and trade union communities, as well as in the police and fire services, defence forces and the legal profession.
There are numerous conspiracy theories about Freemasonry, often promulgated by the lunar right. All should be discussed. The Masons do not control the world and they are not responsible for communism, Nazism or whatever. If the Lodge had, or has, influence in democratic societies it is as a place for making contacts. You know, where a chap helps out another chap whom he has met at the Lodge, after a friendly (Masonic) handshake. It is only in the past few years that women have joined the Lodge.
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