How the AFP was hatched from an egg
An assault on the PM, a ‘violent breach of the laws’ and an urgent telegram. This is how the Australian Federal Police was formed.
A century ago, a whistlestop tour was just that — when a visit to a town was defined by the whistle of the train coming in, then taking on passengers and hosing down the steam locomotive, then a whistle being blown to signal the train moving out again.
The arriving whistle for the train carrying Australia’s prime minister Billy Hughes to the Darling Downs town of Warwick in southern Queensland on November 29, 1917, blew at 2.59pm. The train was scheduled to leave 10 minutes later, after Hughes had addressed an audience from a temporary lectern at the station.
But the departing whistle blew at 3.12pm, 13 minutes later, and what happened in those 13 minutes led to the formation of the organisation that was the forerunner to what is today the Australian Federal Police.
The Sydney-based Hughes was in Queensland to drum up support for the plebiscite for conscription in World War I, a previous plebiscite having failed narrowly in 1916.
Anyone who thought the recent same-sex marriage postal survey in Australia was bruising should have a look at the conscription referendum of a century ago.
Late 1917 in Australia was a time not only of war but of high sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants.
In Easter 1916, Britain had sent 16,000 troops to Ireland to put down the so-called Easter Rising, then in 1917 it was calling on Australia to send extra troops to fight on the Western Front in World War I.
Many Irish-Catholic Australians were uneasy at Britain’s call for more Australian troops to fight in the war when Britain’s own soldiers were occupying Ireland.
There were other tensions within Australia, exacerbated by the fact the country was at war.
Hughes exemplified these tensions, as his pro-conscription stance had already split the Labor Party in 1916 and brought on his expulsion from the party. Hughes had visited the troops on the Western Front and was a strong supporter of the British effort, putting him at odds with the Irish-Catholic influence of the Labor Party.
The main opposition to conscription came in Queensland, led by its premier, Thomas Joseph Ryan, another Irish Catholic. Ryan opened the anti-conscription campaign in Brisbane on November 19, 1917, but media reports of Ryan’s speech had been changed by the Queensland censor (a position administered through the Australian Army but ultimately responsible to MI5 in Britain) so that it appeared he was supporting conscription.
Ryan issued a statement correcting this, but the censor again refused to allow it to be published. Ryan then went into the Queensland parliament to put his case unfiltered, and 10,000 copies of a special edition of Hansard were to be mailed out to Queenslanders.
Hughes arrived in Brisbane for a pro-conscription rally on November 26. After addressing the meeting, Hughes, accompanied by a military officer, soldiers and the Queensland censor, raided the government printer and seized 3300 copies of the Hansard.
The next day, Hughes said at his rally, “I am inviting Mr Ryan to say outside the parliament what he said in Hansard and if he does so within 48 hours, I will have him.” With the prime minister and the premier at loggerheads and in the same city, things were on edge.
According to historian Denis Murphy, “Ryan’s political associates suggested, seriously, that Ryan should have Hughes arrested on suspicion of being of unsound mind and held for specialist medical examination.” Ryan rejected the idea.
On November 28, Hughes set off from Brisbane for Sydney by mail train, going west to Ipswich and Toowoomba, where he addressed public meetings.
While Hughes was speaking in Toowoomba, Ryan was addressing a crowd in Albert Square in central Brisbane, where he repeated the claims he’d made in Hansard.
The next day, November 29, Hughes set out by mail train from Toowoomba for Warwick, a trip of about 85km. Warwick was a place where many Irish people settled when they arrived in Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries. As recently as last month, Ireland’s President, Michael Higgins, took time out from his official visit to Australia and New Zealand to visit Warwick, where he caught up with various family descendants and visited the graves of his great-uncle and great-aunt.
The district abounds with old Irish families such as the Brosnans. Brisbane Broncos rugby league coach Wayne Bennett is a direct descendant of this clan, his mother being born Patsy Brosnan. Warwick is now quite conservative politically, but a century ago it contained a strong Irish-Catholic element that was not taken at all with the idea of conscription to fight in defence of a country that was attacking their countrymen.
Possibly Hughes reflected on this potential explosion as his train chugged through the lush fields of the Darling Downs before the whistle blew to signal the train’s arrival in Warwick at 2.59pm.
According to The Brisbane Courier of Friday, November 30, 1917, “the moment he stepped from his carriage he was surrounded by a howling mob. The moment they saw the prime minister they commenced hooting and groaning, and hurling vile epithets at him. He had not gone more than a yard or two before a struggling, jostling crowd was wedged around him.”
The Brisbane Courier reported that one woman declared of the prime minister that she would “willingly do a fortnight to have a crack at him”, while a man described as big and hulking declared that he “was not afraid either, and that he would have a crack at the … if he did time for it”.
Then, in addition to the vile epithets, Hughes had an egg thrown at him. The first one missed but a second egg dislodged his hat. The eggs were thrown by the Brosnan brothers, Paddy and Bart, and a fight ensued between the supporters of Hughes and the Brosnans.
When hostilities died down Hughes, enraged, asked the policeman in charge on the station, senior sergeant Henry Kenny, to arrest Paddy Brosnan.
According to the report in The Brisbane Courier, “Although Mr Hughes demanded in his capacity as attorney-general of the commonwealth that they should take action against his assailant, senior sergeant Kenny declined to do so, declaring that he recognised the laws of Queensland only, and would act under no other.”
Hughes then started his address, but Paddy Brosnan interjected, and according to Murphy, Hughes jumped down from the platform and yelled “arrest that man”, then said to Kenny, a Catholic of Irish descent, “if you don’t, I’ll have you reduced”. Brosnan was escorted off the platform and Hughes continued his speech, telling the crowd to “put Australia first, and if you do that, you will be for the empire”.
After finishing his speech, Hughes then went back to the train where, according to The Brisbane Courier report, he again instructed Kenny to “proceed against the prime mover at the court the following morning, but he (Senior Sergeant Kenny) again informed Mr Hughes that he was only prepared to recognise the laws of the state”.
The second whistle sounded and Hughes, stewing on the local policeman not carrying out his instructions, started drafting a telegram that appointed William Anderson, an inspector with the NSW Police, as head of the commonwealth police force.
Hughes sent the telegram from the border town of Wallangarra, then continued on his whistlestop tour of New England and down to Sydney, telling crowds at Stanthorpe, Glen Innes and Tamworth of the horrors of Warwick.
Back in Sydney, Hughes saw political advantage in being roughed up. A letter he wrote to governor-general Ronald Munro Ferguson, an ally in his fight for conscription, read, “The Warwick incident has done much good; everywhere I have had splendid meetings; there’s going to be a great fight!”
In the event, there wasn’t. The 1917 referendum lost by a bigger margin than the first one in 1916.
The incident had little effect on Kenny’s career, as he went on to serve as senior sergeant in various other Queensland towns.
He was later commissioned and held the rank of sub-inspector. The Queensland Police backed him in the 1917 incident. In the official report of the incident, commissioner Frederic Urquhart, wrote: “I find no evidence that there was ever any refusal to arrest any person who had committed an offence, nor that Senior Sergeant Kenny gave any such orders, nor that in consequence of any such orders any person who ought to have been arrested was not so dealt with.”
The two accounts of the incident mainly used here are quite different in tone.
The Brisbane Courier was a strong supporter of conscription, and its report reflected this bias. Murphy, on the other hand, was not only a lecturer in history at the University of Queensland but also a strong Labor man, being Queensland president of the ALP in the early 1980s when Peter Beattie was state secretary. Indeed, Beattie named his son Denis, with the distinctive one “n”, in memory of his close friend who, aged 47, died of cancer in 1984.
Murphy, educated at Nudgee College, was unlikely to be anything but deeply sympathetic to Irish Catholics.
The Warwick egg-throwing incident was hardly an isolated incident, but for Hughes it was the last straw. Hughes immediately signalled his intention to set up a commonwealth police force so that such incidents did not occur again, and within days of returning to Sydney he appointed a commissioner to recruit personnel.
The new force started operations weeks after the egg-throwing incident in mid-December 1917 and at its height numbered about 50 men, almost all based in Queensland.
The Commonwealth Police Force lasted really only until the end of the war, but the idea of a national police force was established, and when the CPF was formally disbanded most of its personnel joined the Commonwealth Investigations Branch, administered by the federal attorney-general’s department. After this, various agencies such as ASIO, came along, and in 1979 the Australian Federal Police was formed.
But in 1917 the Commonwealth Police Force was known colloquially as “Henzacs”, a sort of Anzacs who had been hatched from an egg. The egg became a part of Warwick folklore — for years, the champion golfer at Warwick Golf Club received a trophy of a mounted silver egg.
And now, a century after the egg was thrown, the Billy Hughes name will return to Warwick, with the official opening over the weekend of Billy Hughes Park, directly in front of the Warwick railway station. The park is ringed by a semicircular street, Brosnan Crescent, named after an established Warwick family, but also the family of the egg-throwers of a century ago.
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