It’s a mysterious organisation that used to carry big affect however is now shedding its membership having declined to the standing of a quaint curio — however sufficient concerning the Victorian Liberal Celebration. The Age reviews that former opposition chief Matthew Man didn’t declare his years-long Freemasons Victoria membership, which is especially vital given he was planning minister “at a time when the secretive order pursued vital property developments across the state”. Man referred to as The Age‘s inquiries a “fishing expedition” and informed them to cease “harassing” him.
Grand grasp Anthony Bucca, confirming Man had one time been a member, dismissed any thought there is likely to be a battle of curiosity in an amusingly equivocal manner: “What a minister chooses to do and doesn’t is a matter for the minister. What’s it obtained to do with us? Did we cope with Matthew Man personally? Did we strategy him on a one-to-one? I very a lot doubt it.”
It’s a magnificently Vic Lib type of mini-scandal — the concept, on his approach to main his celebration to consecutive defeats through two non-consecutive management stints, Man might need spent his weekends dressing like a futuristic butler, possibly alongside the heirs to Vegemite and Freddo Frog fortunes, in a secretive men-only membership that’s affect peaked when Australians might purchase a loaf of bread for 2 shillings and get sixpence in change (to be spent, presumably, on a nerve tonic if they’d a case of the vapours).
Nevertheless it seems the Freemasons do have a protracted historical past in Australia, proper again to the esteemed botanist Joseph Banks, who visited Australia alongside James Cook dinner within the HMS Endeavour.
Certainly, for a lot of the twentieth century, it was quite common for Freemasons to carry a number of the highest places of work within the nation — just about each conservative prime minister from Edmund Barton as much as and together with Robert Menzies is understood to have been initiated into the masonic lodge; together with George Reid, John Gorton, John McEwan, William McMahon, Joseph Cook dinner, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Web page and Arthur Fadden.
Pioneering feminine MP Edith Cowan was type of a Freemason (Co-mason lodges, which permit ladies to affix, aren’t 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 Invoice Lawry.
Naturally, as a secret society stuffed with highly effective males, Freemasons had been topic to all method of conspiracy theories all over the world — that Freemasons are occultists who kind a part of the New World Order, that they’re a communist entrance bent on world domination, that they’re lizard folks, and, our private favorite, that they’re a part of the conspiracy to cowl up the truth that the earth is flat. “John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons. When you perceive that, you perceive the roots of the deception,” argued distinguished flat earther and daredevil Mike Hughes when getting ready for the do-it-yourself rocket launch that would ultimately kill him.
Not a lot in Australia, it appears. Even throughout Australia’s COVID-19 lockdowns, that almost all conspiracy-addled of instances, the Freemasons obtained the odd point out, however nothing like, say, the World Well being Group.
However on the peak of their affect, within the first many years of Federation, you’d anticipate at the least the occasional accusation geared toward prime ministers or different luminaries of impropriety on behalf of shadowy internationalists. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem to be it. As Gerard Henderson identified 20 years in the past, regardless of the proliferation of Freemasons within the highest elected workplace, virtually nobody had broached the topic:
The late Allan Martin wrote a tremendous two-volume biography, Robert Menzies: A Life (MUP). It accommodates no reference to Menzies as a Mason. Sir Robert didn’t confer with the problems in his autobiographical Afternoon Mild. Likewise, Ian Hancock’s lately launched John Gorton: He Did It His Approach doesn’t point out that Sir John attended a Lodge assembly when prime minister.
Likewise, to scan a handful of Australian political histories, there isn’t any point out of Freemasonry in Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers, Mungo MacCallum’s summary on Australian PMs, The great, the dangerous and the unlikely, or Chris Wallace’s account of prime minister’s and their biographers, Political Lives.