A SECRET AUSTRALIA: Revealed by the WikiLeaks exposés, Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau (eds); Monash University Publishing, 2020

Perhaps we ought not judge a book by its cover, but we are entitled to expect a book’s title to be broadly indicative of what this book [Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau (eds), A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks exposés, Monash University Publishing, 2020] is about. Turning to the unattributed explanatory text on the back should give us a fair idea of what to expect, allowing some latitude for marketing. In this instance, both the title and back cover are misleading, a touch ironic for a book that is ostensibly concerned with transparency. The ‘eighteen independent and prominent Australians’ do not, as promised, ‘discuss what Australia has learned about itself from the Wiki-Leaks revelations’. The promotional back cover blurbs (‘commanding breadth’, ‘superb collection’) significantly oversell the book.

The brief that editors Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau gave contributors was quite broad: ‘consider how WikiLeaks revelations had affected Australia, what they had taught Australia about our place in the world, and about the powerful actors that impact Australian society’. The contributors have, to varying degrees, delivered on the brief, but the promise of the book’s title – a secret Australia revealed by WikiLeaks – is largely unfulfilled. The book is much more a collection of essays on Julian Assange than ‘what Australia has learned about itself’. Just three essays are on topic – ‘a secret Australia’ – those by Richard Tanter, Clinton Fernandes and Antony Loewenstein. Tanter and Fernandes both have an impressive history in international relations and academic research, and Loewenstein is an experienced international political journalist.

Tanter’s is a long, scholarly essay that thoughtfully and thoroughly analyses ‘the salience of WikiLeaks to Australia and Australian responses to WikiLeaks’. Tanter does as the book promises, giving an account of what WikiLeaks documents tell us about Australia that we didn’t know, such as: Australia/US defence arrangements; Australia/China relations; Australian intelligence gathering; Australia and its weaponry; and Australia and its alliances. Similarly, Fernandes offers us insights into what WikiLeaks has told us about Australia. For example, the low priority the US seems to give Australia generally, the extent to which Australia falls into line with US foreign policy objectives, and the extent of Australia’s economic dependence on US policy.

Loewenstein’s contribution, too, tells us what we wouldn’t know about Australia if it were not for WikiLeaks, across issues such as ‘insights into the machinations of the Australian state’; Australia’s compliance with US foreign and military policy; senior Australians’ collaboration with the US; Australia’s compromised international relations; and corruption in Australia’s foreign aid activity. A consistent theme in these three essays is that WikiLeaks documents what many in Australia feel – in Loewenstein’s words, that ‘Washington often views Canberra as little more than a pliant sheep’.

Most chapters reflect on what Assange and WikiLeaks stand for or have achieved. Gerard Goggin analyses WikiLeaks as a ‘wrecking ball for business-as-usual media’, and an ‘enabling genius’ that is an important response to increasingly authoritarian government. Suelette Dreyfus writes of Assange as a ‘digital pioneer’, what WikiLeaks told us about the threat that state surveillance poses to individual privacy, and the positive effect that WikiLeaks has had on journalism. Quentin Dempster writes briefly on a similar theme, tending to the rhetorical (‘National security is not achieved on the ramparts alone’).

Benedetta Brevini gives an account of the global political responses to WikiLeaks, and Assange personally, and condemns Australia – its leaders and news media – for abandoning Assange to his fate. On the same theme, Andrew Fowler comments on Australia’s abandoning of Assange, but touches on a ‘secret Australia’ when he says that Julia Gillard had ‘a score to settle’ after a WikiLeaks release ‘embarrassed her and unmasked the ALP plotters’ in the coup against Kevin Rudd. Lissa Johnson’s is a considered essay as to what the treatment of Assange tells us about Australia’s willingness to accept – or unwillingness to recognise – torture, and Helen Razer offers a gonzo inspired riff on a post-modernist take on WikiLeaks’ truth-revealing work, concluding with a reflection on what WikiLeaks is not.

A couple of chapters provide context to think about or assess what it is that Assange/WikiLeaks represent. Paul Barratt examines policy issues such as state secrets, whistle-blowers, and the public’s ‘right to know’. Guy Rundle recalls the ASIO and CIA shenanigans in Australia of the 1970s and 80s – a struggle for Australian political and economic independence that was ‘unfinished business’ for WikiLeaks to take up.

A couple of chapters give us Assange’s views, straight from the horse’s mouth. John Keane interviewed Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, and reports what Assange has to say on a wide range of related issues: capitalism, corporatism, accountability and the quite different powers of the state, AI and algorithms, and people. At much the same time, Assange participated by video link in a panel at a ‘democracy’ conference in Sydney, and a chapter – credited jointly to Scott Ludlam and Assange – transcribes the conference Q&As, conveying Assange’s views on empire, data, national security, and global power and markets.

Scott Ludlam’s own short piece is another rhetorical call to ‘free Julian Assange’, belonging to those chapters that are largely or all about the person Julian Assange. At the more nuanced end of the spectrum Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, writes an account of his treatment and predicament, and illustrates the threat that countries see in Assange’s activity with comments showing what Wikileaks has exposed about Australia and the war in Afghanistan,

Australia’s Pacific diplomacy, and Australia and West Papua. Australia’s eminent war artist, George Gittoes, is ‘proud to call Julian a friend’. He reflects on what he has seen and knows of recent wars, and the importance of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing atrocities and challenging the state’s narrative. Consistently with his articulate public advocacy, Julian Burnside writes a brief rhetorical piece on the important contribution that Assange has made to exposing ‘the truth’, and the high price he has paid in doing so.

Stepping back from the contributions, it is apparent that the editors in their introduction state as clearly as any of the contributors what we know of Australia from ‘the unprecedented WikiLeaks publishing venture’, pointing out ‘the ways Australia has subsumed its own national interests to those of other powers’. They describe WikiLeaks’ revelations of: ‘Australia’s strident efforts to protect the reputations of several allegedly corrupt leaders of major South-East Asian countries’; ‘Australia’s collaboration with the US on missile defence [moving] from research and exercises to war-gaming the next war in Asia’; how the Australian military ‘works to influence public opinion’; and US evaluations of Australia’s political leaders.

The editors credit WikiLeaks with ‘remarkable stories about Australia and the forces and pressures that come to bear on the nation’, regretting that those stories ‘have been published, but languish in news media files or are scattered online’. Their aim is to bring those scattered stories together, but this collection does so only incidentally. It is still the case that one has to search across disparate sources to find the stories, such as those which revealed the drafts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Green Left Weekly, 2015), the sales of Australian uranium to India (Green Left Weekly, 2014), and US reactions to the proposed Asia Pacific Community (Sydney Morning Herald, 2010).

On what the chapters in the book are mostly about – Julian Assange and the phenomenon of WikiLeaks – there is no shortage of available articles and books. The current story about Assange is the continuing saga of his detention in the UK, and a book such as this would make more sense at this time if it were openly about what concerns many of the contributors: the continuing mistreatment of Assange, and Australia’s continuing apparent lack of interest in the fate of one of its citizens.

This book makes only small inroads towards achieving the editors’ aim to recover the scattered and languishing stories ‘by looking at what has been unearthed about Australia’. Fortunately, there’s an index, so readers and researchers can get past the book cover and chapter titles to search the diverse and insightful views of commentators on Assange.

Published in (2022) 47(1) Alternative Law Journal 83