Well, be all that as it may, John Hilvert’s Blue Pencil Warriors, a chronicle and weighing of ‘censorship and propaganda in World War II’, strongly suggests that even in time of actual war, secrecy is far more of a mechanism of self-defeat than an enhancement of national security.

Hilvert, now a Commonwealth civil servant engaged in implementing the Freedom of Information Act, gathered his material for this book in the course of preparing an M.A. thesis, and it is a pleasure to record how much the end result is exemplary both of academic research and documentation and of responsibility in the exercise of the right to freedom of information.

Even Hilvert’s title has a touch of genius to it. For he makes it amply clear that Australia’s World War II official censors and propagandists were all ‘battling’ to prove things, not the least of which was that the blue pencils were as crucial to military victory as swords.

Overall agency for carrying out Commonwealth wartime censorship and propaganda functions was the Department of Information, set up the day after war broke out with Germany. Hilvert relates its various bureaucratic transmogrifications, but his most searching illumination is of the men who principally exercised the Department’s functions. And, of these, three would seem to carry the main weight of Hilvert’s explication and assessment: Sir Keith Murdoch, Edmund Bonney and Arthur Calwell.

Murdoch, of course, was Australia’s then preeminent media baron and an Establishment pillar. Presented (by his friend Prime Minister Robert Menzies) with “a new kind of position: Director–General of Information”, ranking just below cabinet minister, Murdoch saw this as a golden opportunity both to bestride a war and achieve that newspaperman’s perennial goal, “the most complete truth telling”. To this end, Murdoch determined to turn his Department from an organ of censorship and “suppression” into, as he put it to War Cabinet, “a department of expression”. This aim he embodied in a regulation vesting in himself the power to order the media to “correct adequately” what he, Murdoch saw as “persistent misstatement”.

Which the Sydney Morning Herald immediately took as giving a Director–General who might “become sufficiently intoxicated by his excess of authority, or sufficiently piqued by criticism of himself or the Government" the power to “order the whole issue of a newspaper ‘to be occupied by “material supplied” by his Department’, and which the Sydney Sun summed up as “a crime against the very ideals of freedom for which Australia entered the war…” Menzies ordered the regulation watered-down, and Murdoch shortly afterwards resigned.

Edmund Bonney became Chief Publicity Censor in April 1941, remaining so until war’s end and, in 1943, adding to it the overall role of Director-General of Information. A vigorous-spirited and fair-minded man, Bonney nevertheless became the quintessential ‘censor’ right from the start and, succeeding where Murdoch had failed, turned his blue pencil to expression as well as suppression. Hilvert shows how Bonney ruthlessly converted the censor’s role from protecting military security to propagating what he saw as the “morale of Australians and our allies”. This led, in October 1943, to a culminating and, as Hilvert judges it, “exemplary” clash between the Bonney view of censorship and the media’s view of their rights and responsibilities. A government decision to redeploy Australian troops into essential industry drew U.S. senatorial criticism. “This”, Hilvert writes, “was precisely the kind of incident Bonney feared.” Backed up and egged on by Information Minister Calwell, Bonney set going a process that quickly resulted in the seizure of an edition of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, followed by a High Court action that brought the confrontation to an end not with a bang but a compounding of confusion that left both sides believing they had more or less won. The real reason here, of course, is that Bonney achieved precisely that self-intoxication first mooted by the Sydney Morning Herald in regard to Murdoch.

Now, Labor’s Information Minister Arthur Calwell. And here we drive even deeper into contrariness. Before becoming minister, Calwell had been a virulent critic of the Department of Information; but, as Hilvert writes, “If Calwell hated hard, he also worked hard...” “grabb(ing)” every piece of administrative action to nurture his new “department”. It could be said, in truth, that the “expression” rather than “suppression” Calwell now in his turn was bent on – that is, a vigorously positive exposition of Labor’s “New Australia” – was something in advance of Murdoch and Bonney; but this did not save Calwell from from ranging himself wholeheartedly with Bonney in the blind negativity of the Sunday Telegraph suppression.

Secrecy, suppression, propaganda – in war or peace – they are all Procrustean deformations not so much of the freedom to inform as of the necessity for a perceivable public responsibility in the act of informing. Hilvert has made a lasting and rich illumination, both in subject-matter and presentation, of this whole forever-crucial issue.