Hal Colebatch — lawyer, historian, poet, novelist — tells the story that, when speaking a few years ago to a Rotary Club in Perth, he mentioned in passing the damage done to the war effort during the second world war by strikes in essential industries. None of his audience of businessmen and professionals had ever heard of it. ‘Australia had been fighting for an indefeasibly good cause, it had been in danger of invasion, and such sabotage would have been unthinkable.’ Colebatch decided to look into it further. There was no point in relying on academic historians who ignored the issue entirely. He advertised in several newspapers asking ex-servicemen and women with personal experience of wartime strikes to get in touch with him. Australia’s Secret War (Quadrant Books) is largely their work. It is based on contemporary letters and diaries, and later interviews with Colebatch supplemented with extracts from official sources and reports of civilian observers. It tells an extraordinary story of how leftist unions, through strikes and propaganda, sabotaged Australian troops from the first day of the war (opposing defence preparations) to the last (preventing surviving prisoners of war from disembarking in Sydney).

The book inevitably has its critics who are sceptical of its eye-witness accounts. You see what you want to see, the critics say, and you often get it wrong. (Someone has called this the Eye-witness Fallacy.) I’m sure they are right that some of Colebatch’s eye witnesses got some details wrong. It would be amazing if they did not. They are looking back several decades. But the cumulative case they make is so overwhelming that errors of detail seem trivial against the big picture. Colebatch does not suggest a conscious or orchestrated cover-up or conspiracy to control or rewrite history. His target is an attitude of mind which causes some historians and writers in cultural politics to shy away from anything hostile to leftist mythologies or supportive of conservative values. This bias is not limited to major histories of the war years. The Journal of Labour History, for example, has published thousands of pages on esoteric subjects and minor disputes of the 19th century but you will struggle to find a mention of wartime strikes. The theme also has obvious dramatic possibilities for the novelist or playwright, but however hard you search  you will not find it. ‘I do not call this conspiracy,’ writes Colebatch, ‘nor do I quite call it coincidence.’ Australia’s Secret War is a work of mental hygiene.

If there is a tragic hero in the book, it is John Curtin, the Labor leader who became Prime Minister in October 1941 not long before Pearl Harbour. Curtin believed heart and soul in trade unionism (‘It is the real thing at stake in this war’) and in the Labor party which gave him his very identity. But he also believed in his country and its defence. ‘His spirit,’ writes Colebatch, ‘was in its way no mean one — the unwavering decency of his life testifies to that — and he had a sense of duty that ennobled him. But enough pressure and his heart would break in the end.’ Where did that killing pressure come from? Leftist historians say it arose principally out of his cabled dispute with Winston Churchill early in 1942 over the disposition of Australian troops in the Middle East. Colebatch rejects this entirely. Curtin was well experienced in dealing with tough guys from the other side of politics, whether Prime Minister Churchill, General MacArthur, or the industrialist Essington Lewis and many more. Colebatch follows Curtin’s biographer, Lloyd Ross. What killed him were his enemies on his own side who purported to see his hostility to wartime strikers as prefiguring a ‘Labor rat’. But Curtin was helpless. He knew what should be done but could not do it, or dared not because of ‘the quasi-Fifth-Columnists’ of the Left especially on the coalfields and the wharves as well as in Caucus. The Labor movement was his creed and faith, his identity. But he had struck a limit. ‘Don’t they know the nation is fighting for its life? They don’t give a damn.’ When he died in July 1945 his successor, Prime Minister Chifley, could only say: ‘I greatly regret the trials that were imposed on Jack Curtin not only by the rank and file of the Labor Movement but by some of those closely associated with him.’ He was, says Colebatch, a King Lear who realised too late that he had trusted the wrong people.

There are two other heroes in Colebatch’s story. One is R.G. Menzies who as Prime Minister between April 1939 and August 1941 put Australia on a war footing, raised three divisions for the A.I.F., mobilised the militia, reorganised the defence industries, visited the troops in the Middle East and toured Britain under heavy bombardment when the British empire stood alone against Hitler. Colebatch asks why the Left still presents him as some sort of embryonic fascist and why there has never been a television series on his extraordinary career. The other hero is Colebatch’s father, Sir Hal Pateshall Colebatch (1872-1953), the West Australian MP, briefly Premier, and editor of the country newspaper the Northam Advertiser whose realistic editorials provide ‘a fascinating alternative history of Australia at war and of Australia’s “secret war” on the home and industrial fronts.’ He died when his son was five. ‘I can still hear his voice,’ the younger Colebatch once wrote. Australia’s Secret War is his tribute to his father.