Police involvement in Adelaide political surveillance – on unions or speakers' corner – starts in World War I
The crowd for a patriotic meeting at Speakers' Corner in the Botanic Park, near Frome Road, Adelaide, in 1917.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
South Australian police involvement in political surveillance dates from World War I. Three officers were seconded to military intelligence to infiltrate the German immigrant community of Melbourne. In the immediate postwar years, detectives were assigned to monitor trade union activity in mining communities and to report on political speakers in Adelaide's Botanic Garden.
In 1939, after discussions with other state police forces and the federal defence department, the South Australian police department set up an “intelligence branch”. The new branch was to identify persons of “potential enemy nationality” or “members of hostile associations who might obstruct the national war effort.”
The intelligence branch ceased in 1945 when the war ended and registering of alien registration was taken over by the Australian immigration department.
With the start of the Cold War in 1947, the South Australian commissioner of police established a “subversive section” to collect and record information on persons engaged in or suspected of “subversive” activities. The primary attentions of the section were devoted to members of the Communist Party of Australia.
Similar sections existed in the police departments of other states and, at a 1949 conference of police commissioners, it was agreed that each be known as the special branch.
The South Australian police special branch’s work dramatically widened after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was locked into the climate of growing Cold War paranoia from 1949. The special branch was a prime point of liaison between South Australian police and the federal government’s ASIO, primarily concerned with communist and related groups regarded as extremist or subversiveA crowd at a Speakers Corder
