Matthew Guy, Menzies and Barton: A history of Freemasonry in Australian politics

It’s a mysterious organisation that used to hold huge influence but is now shedding its membership having declined to the status of a quaint curio — but enough about the Victorian Liberal Party. The Age reports that former opposition leader Matthew Guy did not declare his years-long Freemasons Victoria membership, which is particularly significant given he was planning minister “at a time when the secretive order pursued significant property developments around the state”. Guy called The Age‘s inquiries a “fishing expedition” and told them to stop “harassing” him.

Grand master Anthony Bucca, confirming Guy had one time been a member, dismissed any thought there might be a conflict of interest in an amusingly equivocal way: “What a minister chooses to do and doesn’t is a matter for the minister. What’s it got to do with us? Did we deal with Matthew Guy personally? Did we approach him on a one-to-one? I very much doubt it.”

It is a magnificently Vic Lib sort of mini-scandal — the idea that, on his way to leading his party to consecutive defeats via two non-consecutive leadership stints, Guy might have spent his weekends dressing like a futuristic butler, maybe alongside the heirs to Vegemite and Freddo Frog fortunes, in a secretive men-only club that’s influence peaked when Australians could buy a loaf of bread for two shillings and get sixpence in change (to be spent, presumably, on a nerve tonic if they had a case of the vapours).

But it turns out the Freemasons do have a long history in Australia, right back to the esteemed botanist Joseph Banks, who visited Australia alongside James Cook in the HMS Endeavour.

Indeed, for much of the 20th century, it was very common for Freemasons to hold some of the highest offices in the country — pretty much every conservative prime minister from Edmund Barton up to and including Robert Menzies is known to have been initiated into the masonic lodge; including George Reid, John Gorton, John McEwan, William McMahon, Joseph Cook, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Page and Arthur Fadden.

Pioneering female MP Edith Cowan was sort of a Freemason (Co-mason lodges, which allow women to join, are not 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 Bill Lawry.

Naturally, as a secret society full of powerful men, Freemasons were subject to all manner of conspiracy theories around the world — that Freemasons are occultists who form part of the New World Order, that they are a communist front bent on world domination, that they are lizard people, and, our personal favourite, that they are part of the conspiracy to cover up the fact that the earth is flat. “John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons. Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception,” argued prominent flat earther and daredevil Mike Hughes when preparing for the homemade rocket launch that would eventually kill him.

Not so much in Australia, it seems. Even during Australia’s COVID-19 lockdowns, that most conspiracy-addled of times, the Freemasons got the odd mention, but nothing like, say, the World Health Organization.

But at the height of their influence, in the first decades of Federation, you’d expect at least the occasional accusation aimed at prime ministers or other luminaries of impropriety on behalf of shadowy internationalists. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem like it. As Gerard Henderson pointed out 20 years ago, despite the proliferation of Freemasons in the highest elected office, almost no one had broached the subject:

The late Allan Martin wrote a fine two-volume biography, Robert Menzies: A Life (MUP). It contains no reference to Menzies as a Mason. Sir Robert did not refer to the issues in his autobiographical Afternoon Light. Likewise, Ian Hancock’s recently released John Gorton: He Did It His Way does not mention that Sir John attended a Lodge meeting when prime minister.

Likewise, to scan a handful of Australian political histories, there is no mention of Freemasonry in Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers, Mungo MacCallum’s precis on Australian PMs, The good, the bad and the unlikely, or Chris Wallace’s account of prime minister’s and their biographers, Political Lives.