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It’s a mysterious organisation that frail to maintain stout influence nonetheless is now shedding its membership having declined to the station of a quaint curio — nonetheless ample concerning the Victorian Liberal Social gathering. The Age reviews that old opposition leader Matthew Guy did no longer explain his years-long Freemasons Victoria membership, which is amazingly important given he used to be planning minister “at a time when the secretive show pursued important property traits spherical the boom”. Guy known as The Age‘s inquiries a “fishing expedition” and informed them to discontinue “harassing” him.
Grand master Anthony Bucca, confirming Guy had one time been a member, brushed off any thought there would possibly maybe presumably perchance very successfully be a warfare of interest in an amusingly equivocal plot: “What a minister chooses to attain and doesn’t is a topic for the minister. What’s it acquired to attain with us? Did we take care of Matthew Guy in my opinion? Did we plot him on a one-to-one? I very worthy doubt it.”
It’s a magnificently Vic Lib kind of mini-scandal — the premise that, on his plot to leading his social gathering to consecutive defeats by the exercise of two non-consecutive leadership stints, Guy would possibly maybe presumably perchance have confidence spent his weekends dressing appreciate a futuristic butler, maybe alongside the heirs to Vegemite and Freddo Frog fortunes, in a secretive males-only club that’s influence peaked when Australians would possibly maybe presumably perchance aquire a loaf of bread for two shillings and fetch sixpence in swap (to be spent, presumably, on a nerve tonic if they’d a case of the vapours).
Nonetheless it seems the Freemasons attain have confidence a protracted history in Australia, real support to the esteemed botanist Joseph Banks, who visited Australia alongside James Put together dinner in the HMS Endeavour.
Indeed, for worthy of the 20th century, it used to be very standard for Freemasons to maintain some of the top likely offices in the nation — moderately worthy each and every conservative top minister from Edmund Barton as much as and including Robert Menzies is famous to were initiated into the masonic resort; including George Reid, John Gorton, John McEwan, William McMahon, Joseph Put together dinner, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Page and Arthur Fadden.
Pioneering feminine MP Edith Cowan used to be kind of a Freemason (Co-mason accommodations, which allow girls folk to join, are no longer recognised by most males-only Masonic accommodations). Added to this are a raft of politicians, governors, and, weirdly, high-profile cricketers appreciate Sir Don Bradman and Invoice Lawry.
Naturally, as a secret society plump of extremely effective males, Freemasons had been subject to all plot of conspiracy theories spherical the realm — that Freemasons are occultists who create allotment of the Original World Instruct, that they are a communist entrance curved on world domination, that they are lizard of us, and, our private favourite, that they are allotment of the conspiracy to quilt up the incontrovertible truth that the earth is flat. “John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons. Whenever you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception,” argued prominent flat earther and daredevil Mike Hughes when preparing for the dwelling made rocket originate that will finally abolish him.
Not so worthy in Australia, it seems. Even during Australia’s COVID-19 lockdowns, that just about all conspiracy-addled of occasions, the Freemasons acquired the irregular point out, nonetheless nothing appreciate, boom, the World Neatly being Organization.
Nonetheless on the tip of their influence, in the first decades of Federation, you’d question no longer no longer as much as the occasional accusation geared toward top ministers or other luminaries of impropriety on behalf of shadowy internationalists. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem appreciate it. As Gerard Henderson pointed out twenty years ago, despite the proliferation of Freemasons in the top likely elected office, almost no one had broached the subject:
The slack Allan Martin wrote a fine two-volume biography, Robert Menzies: A Lifestyles (MUP). It contains no reference to Menzies as a Mason. Sir Robert did no longer test with the complications in his autobiographical Afternoon Gentle. Likewise, Ian Hancock’s no longer too long ago launched John Gorton: He Did It His Means would not point out that Sir John attended a Lodge meeting when top minister.
Likewise, to scan a handful of Australian political histories, there isn’t the kind of thing as a point out of Freemasonry in Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers, Mungo MacCallum’s precis on Australian PMs, The true, the adverse and the unlikely, or Chris Wallace’s account of top minister’s and their biographers, Political Lives.
