First was to outline the genesis and development of ASIO from its inception in to the end of the s. The second was to describe ASIO's activities in its heyday of the late 60s and early 70s, and to provide a sense of its intrusion into the everyday lives of people who did not know when or how they were being watched. The third was to raise questions about the role of secret police in a democracy and thereby warn about its dangers. The first two rooms contain Persons of Interest , while further back in the building are other permanent exhibitions, a series of mug shots and manacles from the convict era to recent times.
The storyline begins with the founding of ASIO in Prime Minister Ben Chifley, convinced by the United States government that there were people in Australia who were part of a spy network supplying information to the Soviet Union, established the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to identify and deal with spies. ASIO embarked on the 'Venona Project', conducted in conjunction with the Americans, and it did find two Australians who were sending information to the Russians.
Perhaps this historical moment highlights the eternal conundrum of security organisations: a kind of impotence that leaves nowhere to go except down more secret alleyways, building bigger and bigger files. The rest of the first room moves on to describe the full flowering of ASIO and its obsession with leftist opinion of any kind.
It contains samples of the surveillance applied to particular families or individuals in the form of text panels, photos, film footage and diagrams. There is also a stand with photocopies of pages from an actual file, which visitors can handle. Seeing and touching a page like this attests more tellingly to the banality of much of the information that was gathered, than all the claims or descriptions.
It might have raised questions such as who was authorised to spend so much money on spooks, cameras, typists and multiple copies? The result, perhaps unintended, of individualising the stories in this way is to highlight particular families or 'names' and thereby reinforce the impression of 'dangerous individuals', rather than the out-of-control network-sleuthing that ASIO activities became in this period.
More could have been made of the sheer scale of the undertaking. My own file, for example, reports a phone call with a friend in Women's Liberation during which I asked her how her thesis on George Eliot was going. The compiler of that file has bracketed 'Who is George Eliot?
Where does he live? His story is presented by his son, Alan Hardy, also a person of interest, and granddaughter Marieke Hardy. Persons of Interest Haydn Keenan Series Part 1 — Roger Milliss. Part 2 — Michael Hyde. Part 3 — Gary Foley. Evatt pursued his claims of a conspiracy in the House of Representatives but his reliance on a letter from Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, which stated that the Soviet Union did not have spies in Australia, was met with howls of derision or laughter from both sides of Parliament.
Claims of a conspiracy would nevertheless become commonly accepted by the left for years. He came up empty-handed. Instead, it should be acknowledged that ASIO did its job. In cases such as Petrov it was very successful. It has become clear that members of the Coalition used ASIO in a partisan way to gain information on their political opponents.
In addition, countless careers were stalled by systematic ASIO security checks. Along with historians and other academics who give insightful and worthy commentary. The film it is hostile to the intrusion of ASIO into the personal life of the various political opponents of the government of the day. Since making Persons Of Interest for in , Smart Street Films have struggled to secure funding for a second season, largely due to the perennial budget cuts to Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the semi-privatisation of SBS, both a component of the ongoing austerity and the slashing of social spending.
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