Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  The Melbourne Scientology centre was the focus of a number of allegations of rip-offs and rorts. Complaints came from both students and staff. Legal action was taken, and staff members were sacked or left in anger. Some of these disputes would have lasting consequences for the future of Scientology in Australia. Even John and Tucker Farrell, the founders of Scientology’s first association in Australia, were at the centre of allegations involving stolen money, unpaid bills and visa rorts.

  When the Farrells headed back to the US in 1957, they left a parting gift for their colleagues at the Melbourne office – an unpaid tax bill. Peter Crundall, one of the first staff members at Spring Street, was summoned by the tax department to deal with the money owed.50 Crundall, a company director and father of four, was not impressed and wrote to Scientology’s international headquarters asking that the debts be cleared.

  After delays in getting the tax bill settled, Crundall fired off a heated letter to L. Ron Hubbard. ‘I got quite upset, quite emotional,’ Crundall later testified. ‘Dr Hubbard said, “Well, now look, my fellow, you are temporarily suspended until you get yourself some retraining and some processing and let us see that you are handling things in a more rational manner.”’51 The retraining and processing costs would have been expensive for a father of four. Hubbard’s punishments were akin to a judge finding an individual guilty, and issuing community service orders that came with a fee, with the money to be paid into a bank account in the judge’s name.

  The Farrells’ visa for Australia was initially granted under guarantee that the local Scientologists would pay for their plane trip home.52 Pat Krenik, a friend of the Farrells’ who let them stay with her when they returned to the US, says the couple had to steal money from the Melbourne office to pay for their airfares home. ‘They were good folks forced into an impossible position,’ says Krenik. ‘Their pay was so low they could never save up to get out of there. Finally, they stole the money out of the till and came here to Seattle.’53

  The Farrells’ status in Australia was the subject of much toing and froing behind the scenes. In February 1956, Immigration Minister and future Prime Minister Harold Holt wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Immigration asking whether the Farrells could, ‘remain in Australia indefinitely’.54 Harold Holt followed up with a phone call to the department head and another letter in March asking for ‘a speedy decision to be reached’ as their visa was about to expire.55

  But Harold Holt and the Farrells did not get their wish. The department refused permanent residency, instead extending their visa by just 12 months.56 By the time it expired, it was decided their visas would not be renewed. A departmental file note says, ‘these people are clearly charlatans … we may be criticised for having allowed them to stay.’57

  The official explanation sent to the Australian embassy in Washington stated: ‘In view of the dubious nature and activities of the organisation with which they were associated the application was not approved.’58 The Department of Immigration was not impressed that the Farrells had entered Australia on a six-month visa and not declared the true reasons behind their visit: ‘The original intention of the Farrells when they came to Australia was to remain here to expand the activities of the Association. They were therefore not bona fide visitors.’59

  On 30 June 1957, John and Tucker Farrell and their two children left Australia aboard a Pan Am Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.60 Hubbard’s handpicked Scientology missionaries were being sent home in disgrace, owing money, labelled charlatans, accused of manipulating the conditions of their visa and rejected permanent residency at a time when Australia was undergoing a period of mass migration.

  Scientology’s early days in Sydney were not trouble-free either, with tales of stolen records, expulsions and a prominent tabloid exposé. In 1955, Marcus Tooley established a Scientology centre in the city’s busy Martin Place. After a couple of months, the operation moved to 71 East Circular Quay where a sign outside the college described it as a Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI) Scientology Centre.61 Tooley later denied under oath he ran a HASI, even though he advertised it as such.62 He was, however, accredited to train students who could then sit examinations through the Melbourne office in Spring Street.63

  Marcus Tooley had completed a ‘Doctorate’ in divinity from the Church of American Science in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1954.64 The course was only a few weeks long, rather than the three to five years required for a genuine university doctorate. Tooley’s claims of being a doctor got the full tabloid treatment in Sydney’s Truth in August 1955. ‘He’s the dux of the quacks,’ screamed the headline on page three. Describing him as ‘nothing but a phoney and a sham out for easy money’, Truth mocked Tooley’s qualifications, questioned the effectiveness of Scientology ‘cures’ and poured scorn on the price tag of £90 for an eight-week course.65

  In the same month of the Truth exposé, Tooley was ‘excommunicated’ by Hubbard.66 Apparently Scientology’s founder was unhappy with some of his writings and sent John Farrell to see him. ‘He came up to Sydney and sought to take over the Scientology centre and he (Farrell) was ordered off the premises,’ Tooley recalled. ‘That was my last contact with Scientology for quite some years.’67 Tooley had already trained up a number of people who would play significant roles inside and outside Scientology. Peter and Yvonne Gillham did their first auditors’ course under Tooley.68 Roger Boswarva and Doug Moon also did courses through the Sydney centre, as did Ken Dyers, who would go on to found the notorious cult Kenja.69

  After Tooley lost his Scientology training rights he renamed his practice ‘The American College’.70 The new business soon became a victim of corporate espionage. Moon, who was on staff with Tooley for around a week,71 stole a copy of his register of students and sent it to the Melbourne Scientology headquarters.72 The file was subsequently sent back to The American College, but not before Scientology executive Elizabeth Williams had written a letter to one of Hubbard’s executives in England, saying, ‘I am holding them [the files] until you or Ron tells me what to do with them.’73

  Tooley called the police, and Moon was arrested. The Melbourne office pushed Tooley to drop any prosecution for fear of bad publicity.74 Moon also leaked information to Scientology executives in Melbourne about the courses Tooley was teaching, the certificates he was giving out and how he went about his teachings.

  In Victoria, private Scientology colleges sprang up in competition with the Melbourne centre in Spring Street, including one run by the Gillhams in suburban Melbourne and another established by June and Eric Lake in Geelong. The Lakes ran a college of ‘personnel efficiency’, the Gillhams a college of ‘personal efficiency’. Both were recognised by the Melbourne headquarters as independent franchises,75 contributing money to Saint Hill.

  Not everyone was happy with the way the Melbourne office was operating. Roger Meadmore set up his own college after he was sacked from the mission he helped found. ‘I was really pissed off,’ says Meadmore. ‘I never got paid for the 68 people I signed up. I helped set the place up and Frank Turnbull came in and sacked me.’76 While Meadmore was not impressed with the way Spring Street was run, nothing undermined his belief in Hubbard. ‘He was fantastic,’ declares Meadmore. ‘One of the greatest human beings in the last five thousand years.’77

  Putting behind his disappointments with the local Scientology operation, Meadmore visited Washington, DC to study under Hubbard before briefly moving to England. There he funded further Scientology training by selling fold-up ladders and advertising for estate agent maps. In late 1959, he returned home on the same plane as his hero. ‘He was in first class, we were in economy,’ Meadmore recalls.78 Hubbard was returning to Australia in very different circumstances from his visit during World War II. This time he was in charge; he could be as garrulous as he liked, and no-one could send him home for insubordination.

  There was no hero’s welcome for Hubbard when his plane touched down at Melbourne’s Essendon Airport on 5 November. �
�He didn’t get a big reception or anything,’ says Meadmore. ‘He was just regarded as a guy teaching us. No-one realised then how famous he should be.’79

  Hubbard held his first lecture two days later in the Bamboo Room at Melbourne’s Chevron Hotel.80 Doug Moon, a man who appreciated good stagecraft, was impressed: ‘He wore makeup, the lights were right, he was carrying a mike, it was professionally done, it was beautiful.’81 Hubbard started with the obligatory ‘down-under’ joke, asking, ‘How do they do their work standing on their heads?’ before moving on to the importance of Scientology making money. ‘Once in a while you think, well, Scientology is basically – must be very mercenary, very mercenary – thinks about money. You bet it thinks about money!’82

  In his lecture, Hubbard criticised Russian communism and American capitalism, railed against the laziness of the British Labour Party, and took a swipe at the people who ran Melbourne’s Scientology headquarters in its early days. ‘It limped along and kept falling on its face,’ he said dismissively.

  But a large part of Hubbard’s first lecture on Australian soil was dedicated to peddling more lies about his war service in Brisbane. ‘Before the Yanks came,’ Hubbard fantasised, ‘I was Senior Officer Present of northern Australia, not because I had any rank, but because there wasn’t anybody else there.’ Hubbard claimed his service in Brisbane was the stuff of legend, and that after the war while ‘kicking around an officers’ club’ he was recognised as the man who sent orders for a heavy cruiser to leave Australia. ‘Good God, you’re that fellow from down in Australia!’ he said.83

  Hubbard used this tall tale to ingratiate himself with his audience. ‘So you see,’ he said, ‘I must be one of you.’ He bounced between self-praise, and praise for the country he had returned to. He described Australia as, ‘the country, perhaps, with the greatest and brightest future on the face of Earth today’.84 He claimed Scientology could make Australia more economically productive and speculated that, due to atomic weapons, the Southern Hemisphere could be the ‘only alive part of Earth within the next century’. Hubbard told local Scientologists that he believed Australia would be the world’s first ‘clear continent’.85

  Hubbard delivered six lectures across two days to the Melbourne Congress. The Church of Scientology describes the weekend as a ‘watershed in Scientology history’.86 Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, says the lectures ‘marked a turn in the path and a rise in the road, from which the whole panorama of human potential came into focus.’87 At the Melbourne Congress, Hubbard previewed his latest research that would allow ‘clears’ to become ‘Operating Thetans’. The lectures would have Scientology public relations still gushing over 50 years later. ‘He had now made the breakthrough to the accomplishment of an even higher state,’ reads the promotional guff, ‘a state long dreamed of in this universe but never, until now, able to be stably achieved – Operating Thetan.’88

  While Doug Moon found Hubbard’s Melbourne lectures too technical and difficult to understand,89 local Scientologists lapped them up. ‘Generally, they received him with hushed rapt attention,’ Moon remembered. ‘If he made a joke they would all laugh – almost obediently.’90 But not all Scientologists who attended the Congress were in the thrall of Hubbard. Phillip Wearne, the businessman who was in Scientology to make more money, sent Hubbard a note requesting a meeting to discuss his processing goals.91 When Hubbard couldn’t make the suggested time, Wearne went apoplectic.

  In a letter sent to Hubbard, Wearne fumed, ‘I regard your request to “put it in writing” as most impertinent and offensive. I am not a subordinate on your staff, I am a client of your peculiar organisation who has spent nearly £2000 on auditing and I refuse categorically to make a submission in the manner of a mendicant.’92

  Wearne called Hubbard ‘insular’ and ‘supercilious’ and threatened to stop paying for services until he received a ‘satisfactory audience’. In response, Elizabeth Williams from the Melbourne Scientology office told Wearne, ‘Ron will see you 3 pm Thursday – you will be sorry you came.’ For reasons unknown, Hubbard never met with Wearne. Scientology’s founder would soon be sorry he didn’t take the opportunity to placate the disgruntled businessman. Wearne’s anger at being ignored and ripped off would fester. His revenge was not swift, but it was brutal.

  Wearne’s payback eventually saw Scientology banned in three states in Australia and led to a chain of events that forced Hubbard to leave the UK and go into exile. Phillip Wearne was about to play a critical role in Scientology being discredited across the world; so too was another provocative Australian businessman.

  CHAPTER 6

  BUNKUMOLOGY

  WHAT WAS RUPERT MURDOCH thinking? The veteran media mogul launched an extraordinary attack on Scientology in July 2012, following the marriage breakdown of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, ‘Scientology back in news,’1 Murdoch tweeted. ‘Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either No. 2 or 3 in hierarchy.’ In case anyone thought he didn’t mean it, News Corp’s CEO published a second edition a few hours later. ‘Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop,’ he warned. ‘Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people.’2

  Those two tweets became big news. Murdoch was calling the world’s most litigious religion a weird, wealthy, creepy cult. In the US, Scientology had become a no-go zone for most media organisations. Murdoch’s arch rivals at TimeWarner became bogged down in a costly decade-long legal battle after TIME published Richard Behar’s searing exposé ‘The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power’ in 1991. Behar and TimeWarner were sued for libel for US$416 million.3 The case was dismissed in 1996, but the Church of Scientology took it all the way to the Supreme Court. Ten years after Behar published his ground-breaking cover story, the highest court in the US refused to consider reinstating the libel case.4

  So why would Rupert Murdoch tempt fate and brazenly bait Scientology and its golden boy Tom Cruise? Murdoch wasn’t just a media proprietor; he also ran a movie studio, which could financially benefit from keeping one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars onside. What wasn’t reported at the time was that Murdoch had a long history of going after Scientology. His views on what he called a ‘very weird cult’ were formed over 50 years previously, and can be found inside the fading pages of a muckraking Australian scandal sheet he published long before he became a global media player.

  AT THE TAIL END of the 1950s, Sydney was blessed with a boisterous newspaper culture run by a trio of feuding autocrats. Warwick Fairfax published The Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald. Frank Packer ran the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. Ezra Norton owned the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror. All three proprietors used their papers to belittle each other. One disagreement between Norton and Packer was sorted out inside the members’ enclosure at Randwick Racecourse. Smith’s Weekly described Packer emerging from the punch-up as ‘hatless, breathless and bleeding from a cut over one eye’.5

  The ballet-loving Warwick Fairfax may have been more urbane, but he was no less competitive. In 1958, his deputy Rupert ‘Rags’ Henderson heard that Norton wanted to sell up. Determined to sideline Packer and any carpetbaggers from Melbourne, Henderson set up a shelf company financed by one of Fairfax’s subsidiaries to purchase Truth and Sportsman Ltd. The deal was short lived. With Norton’s old newspapers underperforming and Fairfax expanding into television, Henderson offloaded the renamed Mirror newspapers to a young Rupert Murdoch on 21 May 1960 for £2 million.6

  Murdoch had finally cracked the Sydney market. Already he owned newspapers in Adelaide and Perth, now the Daily Mirror gave him a foothold in a big city for the first time. But as part of the deal he also acquired the Mirror’s wayward sibling. Truth was a newspaper shaped in the image of its most famous proprietor, John Norton. Like his son Ezra, John Norton was prone to acts of public drunkenness and violence. After Truth described local politician Richard Meagher as ‘the premier perjurer of our public life’,7 Norton got his comeuppance at the busy inter
section of Pitt and King streets. In front of a crowd of onlookers, the Honourable Member for Tweed flogged the startled newspaperman with a greenhide horse whip. In response, Norton drew his revolver and fired at the politician as he escaped in a cab.8

  Sixty years later, Truth was still getting by on a staple of scandal, crime and racing form. But by the time Rupert Murdoch acquired it in 1960, it had also built a reputation for exposing scam artists and charlatans. As Mark Day, who worked on the Adelaide edition in the 1960s, recalls: ‘It was an old-fashioned, muckraking, crusading paper. Truth had a long history of standing up for the battlers and it was forceful in its reporting of the underbelly of life.’9 Rupert Murdoch would later reflect that ‘Truth deals with the seamier side of life.’10 Describing it as a ‘a knock-about newspaper’, the proud newspaperman stated: ‘Authority and Officialdom rest easy when it is NOT campaigning.’11

  Owen McKenna was one of the journalists working on long form investigations for the Melbourne Truth in the 1960s. A relative latecomer to journalism, he was fortunate to gain a cadetship at the ripe old age of 27. McKenna was lucky to be alive. He’d spent five years in the Royal Australian Air Force, risking all as a dive bomber and fighter pilot. In 1943, McKenna survived a mid-air collision, bailing out of his stricken Wirraway. His wireless-airgunner Sergeant John Patrick was not so fortunate, perishing as he tried to parachute to safety.12

  In Truth’s smoke-filled reporters’ room on the first floor of 402 La Trobe Street, McKenna would take his turn at manning the phones. ‘Before talkback radio, anyone who had a complaint would ring Truth,’ McKenna remembers. ‘It was like the people’s ombudsman.’13 While other reporters were out drinking with contacts, McKenna was happy to be taking calls. One small complaint could lead to a big scoop. Working the phones gave McKenna his first insight into the secretive world of Scientology. He received a series of calls from distressed family members complaining about the cult, and pitched a story to the Editorial Director, Lyle ‘The Jockey’ Cousland. McKenna was given the green light and got cracking. He was given two weeks to pull together his exposé.