It’s a mysterious organisation that used to hold huge influence but is now shedding its membership having declined to the status of a quaint curio — but enough about the Victorian Liberal Party. The Age reports that former opposition leader Matthew Guy did not declare his years-long Freemasons Victoria membership, which is particularly significant given he was planning minister “at a time when the secretive order pursued significant property developments around the state”. Guy called The Age‘s inquiries a “fishing expedition” and told them to stop “harassing” him.
Grand master Anthony Bucca, confirming Guy had one time been a member, dismissed any thought there might be a conflict of interest in an amusingly equivocal way: “What a minister chooses to do and doesn’t is a matter for the minister. What’s it got to do with us? Did we deal with Matthew Guy personally? Did we approach him on a one-to-one? I very much doubt it.”
It is a magnificently Vic Lib sort of mini-scandal — the idea that, on his way to leading his party to consecutive defeats via two non-consecutive leadership stints, Guy might have spent his weekends dressing like a futuristic butler, maybe alongside the heirs to Vegemite and Freddo Frog fortunes, in a secretive men-only club that’s influence peaked when Australians could buy a loaf of bread for two shillings and get sixpence in change (to be spent, presumably, on a nerve tonic if they had a case of the vapours).
But it turns out the Freemasons do have a long history in Australia, right back to the esteemed botanist Joseph Banks, who visited Australia alongside James Cook in the HMS Endeavour.
Indeed, for much of the 20th century, it was very common for Freemasons to hold some of the highest offices in the country — pretty much every conservative prime minister from Edmund Barton up to and including Robert Menzies is known to have been initiated into the masonic lodge; including George Reid, John Gorton, John McEwan, William McMahon, Joseph Cook, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Page and Arthur Fadden.
Pioneering female MP Edith Cowan was sort of a Freemason (Co-mason lodges, which allow women to join, are not recognised by most men-only Masonic lodges). Added to this are a raft of politicians, governors, and, weirdly, high-profile cricketers like Sir Don Bradman and Bill Lawry.
Naturally, as a secret society full of powerful men, Freemasons were subject to all manner of conspiracy theories around the world — that Freemasons are occultists who form part of the New World Order, that they are a communist front bent on world domination, that they are lizard people, and, our personal favourite, that they are part of the conspiracy to cover up the fact that the earth is flat. “John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons. Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception,” argued prominent flat earther and daredevil Mike Hughes when preparing for the homemade rocket launch that would eventually kill him.
Not so much in Australia, it seems. Even during Australia’s COVID-19 lockdowns, that most conspiracy-addled of times, the Freemasons got the odd mention, but nothing like, say, the World Health Organization.
But at the height of their influence, in the first decades of Federation, you’d expect at least the occasional accusation aimed at prime ministers or other luminaries of impropriety on behalf of shadowy internationalists. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem like it. As Gerard Henderson pointed out 20 years ago, despite the proliferation of Freemasons in the highest elected office, almost no one had broached the subject:
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. Likewise, Ian Hancock’s recently released John Gorton: He Did It His Way does not mention that Sir John attended a Lodge meeting when prime minister.
Likewise, to scan a handful of Australian political histories, there is no mention of Freemasonry in Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers, Mungo MacCallum’s precis on Australian PMs, The good, the bad and the unlikely, or Chris Wallace’s account of prime minister’s and their biographers, Political Lives.
I’d like to see far less chat about the ridiculous end of the conspiracy theory spectrum, and quite a lot more of the calibre that academics might be inclined to participate in.
To suggest that actual, hugely damaging conspiracies aren’t a thing, just because you can point to dozens and dozens of ridiculous theories, is to fall into a trap so obvious it’s painful to witness.
How is it, that our governments, more or less everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent, are obviously in thrall to corporations and billionaires, and how is it that we meekly tolerate this state of affairs?
Agreed, with the caveat of Hanlon’s razor. As for your last question, check out the theory of authoritarianism at theauthoritarians dot org. How to resist?
20th century Freemasonry in rural Qld and NSW is largely about the leading citizens of each town helping each other and helping the community. That they were almost all also members of the LNP is a happy coincidence.
Also worth mentioning that Santos acquired the rights to coal seam gas in the Pilliga region (Narrabri) by buying out Eastern Star Gas. So who was Eastern Star Gas?
Eastern Star Gas was an investment consortium of those leading citizens and National Party members, who would have voted John Anderson to the board of Eastern Star after he retired from the Deputy PMship and the Parliament.
I don’t know why they named the company Eastern Star, but I do know that if ever you bother to visit those small towns and look at the door of the Masonic Lodge, you’ll see that they are all members of the Masonic Order of the Eastern Star.
So, Fremasonry has been bastardised. Why is it that the love of and greed for money and power ruin every good thing?
I understand the Order of the Eastern Star was the female equivalent or branch of the Freemasons, just as (I think, but could be corrected) the Catholic Women’s League was the equivalent of the Knights of the Southern Cross.
There is almost no equivalence between the Catholic Women’s League and the Knights of the Southern Cross, other than that they are both Catholic organisations.
I recall members of the women’s Order of the Evening Star meeting a local church hall on the Sydney North Shore in the 1970s – we called them the White Ghosts.
Freemasonry in Australian Liberal politics has been a longstanding aspect. In the time of Sir Charles Court only one member of his cabinet was not a Freemason. When Robert Menzies came to WA he took time off to visit the head Freemason who was convalescing at home, so it would appear that Freemasonry is woven into the political system for better or worse.
and Freemasons were historically against the Catholic Church, by unionising into self-sustaining guilds to deal with unreliable church and regal patronage. Never openly atheist, back when that would be politically problematic, right up to Whitlam’s time, but a definite thread in Scottish Freemasonry out of the Enlightenment, to Scottish free settlers in WA who joined the Freemasons to distinguish themselves from Catholics, with similar business connectivity and men’s shed social interactions
the historical confusion about Freemasonry is nicely illustrated in Howard’s version of the Da Vinci Code, where he was obliged to make two endings under pressure from the Catholic Church, the pre-ending at the Scottish Rosslyn Chapel owned by the Sinclair family, Freemason grand-masters, to the other ending where Langdon drops to his knee over the Catholic rose line in Paris
According to urban legend, there was an ongoing battle for control of the Queensland police force between the Catholics and the Freemasons. Apparently not myth, and still ongoing…..
Membership by invitation only. All swear to assist each other when asked, no questions. Men only. Think about it.
OMCG.
Membership is by application and the emphasis is on science.
OMG, its a men’s club…….