Rupert Lockwood

Rupert Ernest Lockwood (10 March 1908 – 8 March 1997) was an Australian journalist and communist activist.

Lockwood was born in Natimuk to newspaper proprietor Alfred Wright Lockwood and Alice Francis. He became a journalist in 1930, working for the Melbourne Herald until 1935, when he went overseas. He worked in Singapore, Japan, China and the United Kingdom before observing the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain. He returned to Australia in 1938 and joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA member, 1939 - 1969),[1] on the day Australia declared war.[2] After finding work in the minor labour press he became associate editor and then editor of the Waterside Workers' Federation's Maritime Worker. He played a significant part in the Royal Commission into Espionage (1954–55), in which the government alleged that he was a Russian spy. In 1969 he left the Communist Party, disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He later wrote several books including Black Armada (1975), Humour Is Their Weapon (1985), Ship to Shore (1990) and War on the Waterfront (1987). Lockwood died in 1997.[3][2]

Black Armada[4]

Black Armada is an account of an Australian contribution to the making of the Indonesian Republic. Many forces contrived to make this happen: the Australian Government was a Labor government (from late 1941 to December 1949)[5]; the Australian shipping unions of the time were largely communist led; a substantial group of Indonesian political prisoners (the Digul|Tanah-Merah prisoners)[6] had been interned in prison camps in Australian; and the Netherlands East Indies government in exile had been installed in Australia, at Wacol, Queensland.

The book details how these forces came together to create mutinies of Indonesian seamen and Australian boycotts at vital Australian ports, starting in September 1945 (with some shipping/waterfront strikes being broken in 1946) but continuing until 1949, affecting Dutch shipping to the Indies, and thus ensuring vital time for Indonesian nationalists to frustrate Dutch plans for post-war reimposition of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.[4]

gollark: That is highly unsafe.
gollark: OH BEE you're interacting with UBQVIAN METASPACE?
gollark: The immune system converts time to disease prevention.
gollark: The underlying fabric of reality. Transistors in the CPU.
gollark: Thus, ban time.

See also

References
  1. Cahill, R. (2013) Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997): Journalist, Communist, Intellectual, Ph.D thesis, University of Wollongong. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  2. Cahill, Rowan (2003). "The making of a communist journalist: Rupert Lockwood, 1908–1940" (PDF). Working Lives. University of Sydney.
  3. "Papers of Rupert Lockwood". National Library of Australia.
  4. Lockwood, R. (1975) Black Armada & the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1942-49. Australasian Book Society Ltd., Sydney, Australia. ISBN 9 09916 68 3
  5. See: Labor Prime Ministers: Curtin (7/10/1941 - 5/07/1945), Forde (6/07/1945 - 13/07/1945), Chifley (13/07/1945 - 19/12/1949)
  6. Indonesian Independence Committee (1946), Dutch imperialism exposed : the green hell of Tanah Merrah, Indonesian Independence Committee, retrieved 21 September 2018 Melbourne, Victoria
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