An ASIO report, parts of which were blanked out , stated that a man said to have travelled the world and had “ an intense hatred for Communism ” had made contact . This man had stated he thought “ Communism was rather thick in the Territory”. He had met several Communists and would like to contact the Security Service . Three men had been named by the man-James Frederick Bowditch ; a reporter, commonly called “ Bluey ” and a travelling optometrist and optician. Apparently nothing was known about Bluey.
Bowditch, of course ,was the subject of expanding files. In the case of the optician , formerly of Melbourne , he allegedly praised Communism and stated that he had travelled through Sibera(sic) and by what he had seen there , “ Communism wasn’t too bad.” This led to the stake out of a Melbourne block of flats trying to track him down . It turned out he was the brother of a Melbourne skin specialist.
While actively trying to enrol new members in the clerks’ union, Bowditch had spoken to a young girl , Betty Hodgson, working in Loutit’s store. She is pictured above standing between Jim and her father at the Alice Springs railway station,in the l950s, the occasion possibly the first time the Ghan train arrived pulled by a diesel electric loco.
Betty was the daughter of a fullblood Aborigine, Myra Hull , and Englishman Charles Deans “ Geordie ” Hodgson. Betty’s father, a strict man , came to Australia at the age of 17 and worked as a fettler on the railway. He had married her mother,a member of the Arabanna Tribe, when she was l6. Betty , one of 13 children , was born at Oodnadatta , outback South Australia, in l932. To make ends meet, her father ran an SP betting business and Betty remembered him burying money in tins when they lived at Marree. Marree was a town divided into three distinct areas: one for Afghans, another for railway workers and the third the commercial area . Her father could not take her mother into the pub with him because of the law. However, Betty worked in the Marree Pub as a house maid .
BRIGHT BETTY
Believing Betty to be bright, her father sent her to a Catholic boarding school , St. Dominic’s Priory School , North Adelaide. During four years there she was taught shorthand , typing, French, English and geography . She also learned how to play the piano ; her brother Douglas , who became a jockey and railway worker, described Betty as the family’s “only silvertail.”
Her father was transferred to Alice Springs as a clerk in the office and they lived in a railway house . A regular drinker at Underdown’s pub , there was a spot at the bar known as “ Geordie’s Corner. ” When Betty’s parents split up, she came home from Adelaide to look after the family . At home, she often heard her father talk abut a man called Jim Bowditch.
She found it hard to get work in Alice ; for a time she was employed as a shorthand typist in the Animal Industry Branch. Later on , she worked in the office of a transport company. Bowditch frequently spoke to her in Loutit’s shop and began to take her out on his ex- Army BSA motorbike. That the editor of the paper was riding around town with an attractive young half-caste on the pillion seat did not go unnoticed; tongues wagged.
And ASIO noted in June l952 that Bowditch was “currently associating with a half-caste woman called Hodgson ”. One day, Jim ,with Betty on the back of the motorcycle , was involved in a collision with a car. Henceforth they travelled in a car for safety .
At times, Jim and Betty went to the residence of his former boss at Works and Housing, D. D. Smith, and were always made feel welcome. Betty was athletic and played basketball , hockey and tennis . In 1948 she had been a member of a team which beat Darwin in basketball. After she met Jim, Betty regularly watched him play cricket each Sunday. Jim also played tennis.
Betty recalled that they often went to the Memorial Club where he gathered social notes for the paper. While he exchanged small talk in the process , he was ever ready to discuss politics with anybody . Many people converged on the club at weekends and some cattlemen came in with their wives. Claims were made that Bowditch deliberately took Betty to the club to confront the “ colour bar”. Betty said this was not so, as far as she knew . Jim said he liked Betty , whom he described as most attractive -“ some doll ”- and just took her with him wherever he went. However, in one recorded interview, Bowditch said he did take Betty to the Memorial Club to confront the colour bar.
While there was no written rule against taking “ coloureds ” to the club, it was frowned upon . It must be said in fairness that some prominent members of the club said they would walk out if “coloured ”members of a Darwin football team on a visit to Alice were not allowed into the club. The footballeres were subsequently allowed in and there was no trouble as a result.
Apart from some club members frowning on the entry of “coloureds ”, there was also an anti- “ foreigner ” attitude . Italians, in particular, had a difficult time . Some Italians who did eventually gain membership found that they were ignored and left to sit in a group on their own. The attitude to foreigners irked Bowditch’s journalist friend, Alan Wauchope , so much that he wrote a letter to the paper on the subject. In it , he said he was concerned to learn that the Memorial Club, like another club in town, had decided not to admit foreigners as members unless they first produced naturalization papers. He considered this action a typical insular attitude calculated to do untold harm to the government’s policy of friendly assimilation of “ screened foreigners. ”
Just to make it abundantly clear what he felt , Wauchope said it was an instance of “ tinpot snobbery , lack of vision , and a Pooh-Bah outlook engendered possibly by a brief residence abroad and membership of some decadent club where rigid lines of demarcation left a knot of befuddled Colonel Blimps in splendid isolation . ” Furthermore, he went on to say that with the speed of modern travel and the shrinking of distances foreigners were now our neighbours.
He continued : “ I have no doubt that if a distinguished ‘ foreigner’ were to visit Alice, whether he be the inkiest of Rajah Bong , or whitest of Russian, the leaders of the Memorial Club would fall over themselves to push and to bask in his reflected glory . ” Obviously, his letter caused anger at the Memorial Club ; there may even have been a threat of legal action because Wauchope subsequently wrote that he had not been referring to the club’s current committee –one member being lawyer Phil Rice – which was doing a good job . NEXT : The religious horn blower.
